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South Africa: Anglo American Platinum donates land to benefit North West communities

Anglo American Platinum, one of the mine companies operating in the North West, on Friday handed over 466 hectares of land worth R116 million to the Rustenburg Local Municipality and Rustenburg Community Development Trust.

The donation of land will enable the Rustenburg Municipality to finalise housing and human resettlement projects and improve the livelihoods of the local communities.

Speaking at the land handover ceremony in Paardekraal, Rustenburg in the North West this afternoon, Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe said government welcomes the initiative taken by Anglo American to support the states socioeconomic transformation agenda.

Our people will be provided with decent housing and the necessary bulk infrastructure in line with our commitment as government, Mantashe said.

Mantashe said the land handover was a tangible result of the public and private sectors working together for the transformation and development of the economy.

May we continue to work in this spirit of cooperation and partnership in other areas where mining companies can extend this gesture to communities in the mining areas, the Minister said.

Anglo American Platinum Chief Executive Officer Chris Griffith said the land will be used to complete housing and resettlement projects for the people of Rustenburg.

Advancing sustainable land reform is an important issue for South Africas ongoing transformation journey. We will continue to play a role in catalysing the development of this community which has played an important role in the success of South Africas platinum mining industry, Griffith said.

In 2018, Anglo American Platinum invested over R600 million in mine communities - R467 million of this was spent on initiatives geared to make mine communities healthier, prosperous and empowered through the construction of health care facilities, housing, community facilities, facilitating education and training for young people and creating opportunities for entrepreneurs.

In July 2016, the Rustenburg Local Municipality approached Anglo American Platinum to donate property to the municipality for various purposes including housing and human resettlement projects and projects to improve the livelihoods of local communities.

The Rustenburg Community Development Trust, will receive 15 hectares of the land allocated and will construct a care centre for 155 people, which will provide care for the disabled, elderly and orphans.

Over 242 hectares of land, valued at almost R17 million, will be transferred to the Rustenburg Local Municipality for mainly housing and community resettlement projects.

The portions of the land handed over to the Rustenburg Local Municipality are:

- Portion 26 and Portion 109 of the Farm Paardekraal 279 JQ, which will be used to cater for the Popo Molefe and Mbeki Sun Informal Settlements.

- Portion 187 (a portion of Portion 50) of the Farm Paardekraal 279 JQ, which will be used to relocate the residents of the Chachalaca informal settlement.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) holds its closing meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 15, 2019. (Xinhua/Liu Bin)

China's national legislature on Friday passed the foreign investment law, a landmark legislation that will provide stronger protection and a better business environment for overseas investors.

At around 9 a.m. Friday, an overwhelming majority of the deputies voted in favor of it at the closing meeting of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC). The law will become effective on Jan. 1, 2020.

With unified provisions for the entry, promotion, protection, and management of foreign investment, it is a new and fundamental law for foreign investment in China.

It aims to improve the transparency of foreign investment policies and ensure that foreign-invested enterprises participate in market competition on an equal basis.

The state shall manage foreign investment according to the system of pre-establishment national treatment plus a negative list, the law stipulates.

Foreign-invested enterprises will equally enjoy government policies supporting enterprise development, and be able to participate in standard-setting on an equal footing and in government procurement through fair competition, according to the law.

The state shall protect the intellectual property rights of foreign investors and foreign-invested enterprises, it reads.

The law sends the signal of greater transparency, and will boost Chinese market's appeal to foreign capital, said Vivian Jiang, vice chair of Deloitte China.

With the new law, China will be able to better protect foreign investors' legitimate rights and interests, and create a law-based business environment that is internationalized and enabling.

After taking effect, the unified law will replace the three existing laws on Chinese-foreign equity joint ventures, wholly foreign-owned enterprises and Chinese-foreign contractual joint ventures.

The law on equity joint ventures was put into effect in 1979, soon after the country started to implement the reform and opening up policy. The latter two were enacted in the 1980s. Over the past decades, they have provided effective legal safeguards for foreign firms, but are no longer commensurate with the needs of reform and opening up in the new era.

By the end of 2018, about 960,000 foreign-invested enterprises had been set up in China, with the accumulated foreign direct investment exceeding 2.1 trillion U.S. dollars. Foreign direct investment into China has ranked first among developing countries for 27 consecutive years, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The new law shows China's will and determination to follow through with reform and opening up in a new historical context, said Wang Chen, vice chairman of the NPC Standing Committee. "It is a full testament to China's determination and confidence in opening wider to the outside world and promoting foreign investment in the new era."

"For foreign companies in China, I think everyone is waiting for the law to be passed, as it will create a level playing field," said Harley Seyedin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China.

According to a survey of 240 companies by the chamber, the respondents plan to increase their reinvestment budgets from profits in China this year to an estimated total of 19.4 billion U.S. dollars, up nearly 40 percent from 2018.

"The law will give more people confidence in China," said Adam Dunnett, secretary general of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China.
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Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Consumed by its own chilliness, The Aftermath is an emotionally constipated movie about emotional constipation. That may come off as a glib way to describe something that purports to explore the paralyzing nature of grief, but James Kents romantic historical drama falls so flat that any sense of tragedy is lost; its all surface, and stasis.

On paper, it should work  I havent read Rhidian Brooks acclaimed 2014 novel, but it sounds intriguing. Keira Knightley plays Rachael Morgan, who travels to bombed-out Hamburg in 1946 to join her husband Lewis (Jason Clarke), a British colonel helping oversee the de-Nazification and rebuilding of postwar Germany. They move into a sprawling, perfectly preserved mansion belonging to once-wealthy widower Stephen Lubert (Alexander Skarsgard) and his teenage daughter Freda (Flora Thiemann). The home has been requisitioned by the Allies, and the relations between the two families is initially tense. Nevertheless, Lewis suggests that the Luberts remain in the home, living in an annex.

Both families have suffered great loss during the war: Lewis and Rachaels young son Michael was killed in a London bombing raid, and Stephens wife was killed during the Allied firebombing of Hamburg. And theyre all having a tough time confronting their grief: Stephen barely mentions his wife, while we see only brief glimpses of little Michael, first in pictures that are hastily put away, then in fleeting flashbacks. Lewis shows no agony, while Rachael hides her grief until shes alone; in a nice touch, she has brought a little red sweater that once belonged to her boy, as a reminder of how he looked, felt, and smelled.

The characters psyches are reflected and expanded by the setting. The stately, undamaged mansion, with its Mies van der Rohe chairs, its Steinway piano, and splendid views of the Elbe, feels like a place out of time, while the broader chaos outside  the streets are covered in rubble, the buildings bombed-out, the people shell-shocked and bitter  is the opposite extreme. The only choice available in a mad world like this appears to be between total devastation or complete denial. Much of Lewiss time is spent chasing Nazi dead-enders attempting to resist the Allied occupation, and hes a kindred spirit with the people hes pursuing in one particular way; they all refuse to confront the horrific reality of their lives. In Lewiss case specifically, he cant see that Stephen and Rachael are growing closer together. But their union seems inevitable, not just because theyre played by the ravishing duo of Knightley and Skarsgard, but also because theyre conjoined in mourning: Though neither can quite express it, Stephen and Rachael both speak the halting language of loss, unsure of what to put away and what to hold onto.

If Im making this film sound secretly great, thats because Im slightly baffled by how cold it left me. As I said, it should work. But both Knightley and Skarsgard, who are ordinarily quite fine actors, fail to evoke any sense of complexity, or the kind of layers that allow us to recognize a feeling as genuine. They go through the motions of icy reserve and yearning curiosity and possibly doomed passion, but I kept waiting for the moment when one or the other would spring to life as a person  when we might be treated to some genuine vulnerability or a surprising insight that will add dimension to these characters. They dont have any chemistry either, but the problem goes beyond that. I didnt buy her as a grieving parent, and I didnt buy him as a conflicted, mournful widower  and consequently, I didnt buy the two of them as illicit lovers. Their whole journey is programmed, with each stilted step telegraphed way ahead of time.
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) - A man has been convicted in the 2015 beating death of an Alabama woman and a jury will now decide whether he should die for the crime.

The Tuscaloosa News reported a jury deliberated less than two hours Thursday before returning the guilty verdict against Michael Belcher.

The same jury meets Friday to consider whether Belcher should die for killing 29-year-old Samantha Payne of Maplesville. The jury could recommend life in prison without parole.

Tuscaloosa County Circuit Court Judge Brad Almond will consider the jury's recommendation and make the final decision.

Prosecutors say Payne had been beaten by a group of friends who were using drugs. Her body was found in the Talladega National Forest.

District Attorney Hays Webb said Belcher was the leader of the group in the attack.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on President Donald Trump's declaration of an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border (all times local):

4:45 p.m.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says President Donald Trump's veto of legislation blocking the national emergency he's declared at the Mexican border shows he's defying "the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people."

The California Democrat says the House will vote March 26 on overriding Trump's veto. The chamber seems certain to fall short of the two-thirds majority needed to succeed. That means his emergency declaration would survive, but it still faces several legal challenges.

Pelosi says GOP lawmakers must "choose between their partisan hypocrisy and their sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says Trump holds the Constitution "in minimal regard."

The emergency declaration allows Trump to divert $3.6 billion more than Congress approved to build border barriers. The Constitution gives Congress control over spending.

Trump vetoed the measure Friday.

___

4:25 p.m.

The American Civil Liberties Union says President Donald Trump's veto of a resolution terminating his national emergency declaration is meaningless.

Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director, says the courts will be the ultimate arbiter of the declaration's legality.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit last month challenging the declaration on behalf of the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition.

Public Citizen is another group that has taken legal action. Robert Weissman, the group's president, says "the autocratic Donald Trump shows his true colors yet again."

But Weissman says bipartisan rejection of the president's declaration will make it harder for him to declare "future fake emergencies for nefarious ends."

Trump wants to use the emergency order to divert billions of federal dollars earmarked for defense spending toward the southern border wall.

__

3:50 p.m.

President Donald Trump has issued the first veto of his presidency, overruling Congress to protect his emergency declaration for border wall funding.

Flanked by law enforcement officials as well as the parents of children killed by people in the country illegally, Trump says "our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point" and calls the congressional action "dangerous" and "reckless."

A dozen Republicans joined with Senate Democrats on Thursday to back the joint resolution disapproving of Trump's emergency declaration. The House had passed the same resolution last month largely along party lines.

It is unlikely that Congress will have the two-thirds majority required to override Trump's veto.

Trump wants to use the emergency order to redirect billions in federal dollars earmarked for defense spending toward the southern border wall. It still faces several legal challenges in federal court.

___

3:40 p.m.

President Donald Trump says the United States is facing an invasion and that our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point as he prepares to veto a resolution that blocked his declaration of a national emergency on the southern border.

Trump says the nation's immigration laws are dangerous for the country and have to change.

Trump is likely to prevail on his national emergency declaration. Overturning a veto requires a two-thirds majority vote in the House and Senate. But there doesn't appear to be enough votes to override it.

___

1:15 p.m.

President Donald Trump will sign the first veto of his presidency Friday, a day after Congress vote to terminate the national emergency Trump declared at the southern border. His declaration was an effort to circumvent Congress to secure more money for his proposed border wall.

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley says in an appearance on Fox News that the president will be signing the veto at 3:30 p.m. in the Oval Office. He says Trump will be joined with law enforcement as well as the parents of children killed by people in the country illegally.

Hogan is calling this "a sad moment and a very important moment" and says the vote against the president is also a vote "against the America people and their safety and security."

Republicans joined Senate Democrats in blocking the order but there do not appear to be enough votes for an override.

__

12:20 p.m.

President Donald Trump is poised to issue the first veto of his presidency after a dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats to block the national emergency he'd declared at the border. That declaration was an effort to circumvent Congress to secure more money for his southern border wall.

The bill was hand-delivered to the White House around 5:30 p.m. Thursday. And Trump made clear how he plans to respond, tweeting the word "VETO!" in all-caps moments after Thursday's vote.

White House spokeswoman Mercedes Schlapp would not say when the veto would happen, but told reporters Friday Trump is "doing what he believes is his constitutional duty, which is to protect the American people."

She also says the president "is incredibly disappointed" with Republicans who voted against him.

__

12:38 a.m.

A dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats to block the national emergency that President Donald Trump declared so he could build his border wall with Mexico. The rejection capped a week of confrontation with the White House as both parties in Congress strained to exert their power in new ways.

The 59-41 tally Thursday, following the Senate's vote a day earlier to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, promised to force Trump into the first vetoes of his presidency. Trump had warned against both actions. Moments after Thursday's vote, the president tweeted a single word of warning: "VETO!"

Two years into the Trump era, a defecting dozen Republicans, pushed along by Democrats, showed a willingness to take that political risk.
Wells Fargo chief executive Tim Sloan was scolded by lawmakers who said the bank had not done enough to rehabilitate itself after years of scandals about its practices toward customers. Some called for Sloan to be fired. The next day, the banks board of directors gave Sloan a 5 percent raise, increasing his total compensation to $18.4 million. Of that, $2 million is an annual incentive award  in other words, a bonus. Sloans pay is now 283 times the median pay of the banks more than 200,000 employees.
We know that appearance matters for women and people of color in being seen as competent and worthy of respect, said Wong, a professor of sociology at University of South Carolina. It becomes this difficult position: Do I want to dress down because I dont want to be seen as this kind of stiff and un-fun person, or do I want to continue dressing up because thats the only way people will treat me with respect? 
PwC agreed to pay $335 million to settle allegations by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. that the firm was negligent in its audits of Colonial BancGroup, an Alabama bank that collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis. The FDIC announced the agreement on Friday. In July, a federal judge ordered the accounting firm to pay $625 million after ruling that it had failed in its audits of the bank from 2003 to 2005, and for 2008. PwC didn't design the audits to detect fraud or gather enough evidence, according to U.S. District Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein.
Because theyre disembodied, the garments appear ghostly and ominous. Thats also intended. Black derived the image from a painting on the cover of a book about the experiences of a woman who identifies as Metis (descendants of First Nations people and European, mostly French, settlers). The artist uses red dresses to symbolize the estimated 1,200 missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. Now that a few of the hundreds of donated dresses flutter in Washington, the project can also be seen to represent violence against native women in the United States and the rest of the Americas.
To me, small Persian pastries are unique. Most are rich-tasting, filled with walnuts, pistachios and other ground nuts. They are sweetened with honey and often flavored with syrup that is scented with rosewater, that undeniably powerful and sometimes polarizing ingredient. I love to make my own pastries, because to me, as an immigrant cooking my native recipes, it is not just about the food butmore about home. So I am happy to share the recipes for my favorites.
If it makes you feel better to blame it on technology, then do it fully. Leave an outgoing voice-mail message (or text equivalent) that states your business hours and when you will be able to reasonably return calls. You may find that your devices end up talking to one another for a while, but at least your job security  and general sanity level  will be safe.
Survivors of the shooting channeled their grief last year into a formidable wave of activism that inspired students throughout the country to advocate for stricter gun control. That movement culminated on March 24 last year, when hundreds of thousands of people converged on Washington to attend the March for Our Lives, an event organized by survivors of the Florida shooting to raise awareness of gun violence.
Ripken previously granted two extensions of the deadline to explore the plea that asserts a person could not understand the criminality of his or her actions at the time of the crime.
The status of this matter has not changed substantially since the January report, as defendant Gates continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations, and accordingly the parties do not believe it is appropriate to commence the sentencing process at this time, they wrote in a one-page update for U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District. The investigations were not described.
Its at the very least the very definition of the appearance of impropriety, Carter said. You sit on the board, youre there as a volunteer to make good policy and good decisions for patients and for the community, and you are actually gaining millions of dollars just by the fact that you are there and you have the power to steer business your way.
Those who have been arrested in Chicass killing and charged with first-degree murder and other related counts are Jose Ordonez-Zometa, 29, of Varnum Street in Landover Hills; Jonathan Castillo-Rivera, 20, of Annandale, Va.; Kevin Rodriguez-Flores, 18, of no fixed address; and Jose Hernandez-Garcia, 25, of no fixed address. A 16-year-old, Christian Martinez-Ramirez, of Falls Church, was also charged as an adult. Ordonez-Zometa is in Prince Georges County jail, police said. The others are in custody in Virginia.
D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham, who responded to the shooting, said police reviewed surveillance video that shows a hooded gunman walking up to the victim and firing. The assailant then walked away. The fact that the shooting happened steps away from a playground and streets busy with vehicles and pedestrians added to the reckless and brazen nature of the incident, Newsham said.
If the reason for the arrest is that the government didnt like the message, then that would raise major First Amendment, free speech concerns, said Clay Calvert, a professor and director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. If the government has a content neutral reason for preventing images then that is more likely to be upheld. I think this is probably their message, that a government building is not a billboard for peoples speech.
I can take you out and show you stuff that will make you just grin from ear to ear, and stuff that will make you cry within 50 yards of each other, said Williams, 76. After seeing what Ive seen on these rivers over the last 35 years, Ill say this: I wont bet against anything. I wont bet against the Anacostia being swimmable again within this century. But its a long grind. And you have to keep supporting the programs and efforts that are actually helping to make that happen.
But the Amazon agreement also says that before the county releases anything in response to a public-information request, it will give Amazon not less than two days to allow Amazon to take such steps as it deems appropriate with regard to the requested disclosure of records. Virginias FOIA law indicates that exemptions should be used narrowly, and notes that governments are permitted, but not required, to keep certain information from the public.
In Oklahoma, officials said last year they would use nitrogen gas for all executions going forward, an unprecedented change that has not been used yet. A spokesman for the state Department of Corrections said this week that the state has not come up with a protocol for carrying out such executions, writing in an email that officials were still working on the method  finding the technology we would use to execute an inmate with inert gas.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington said the trial would be expected to last at least two weeks on the accusations that Stone lied about his efforts to gather information about hacked Democratic Party emails during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Criminal organizations in Mexico have mounted a lucrative new smuggling operation that uses express buses to deliver Guatemalan migrant families to the U.S. border in a matter of days, making the journey faster, easier and safer, according to U.S. law enforcement reports and U.S. and Guatemalan officials.

The smugglers entice families with promises their journey will be free of the perils usually associated with travel to the U.S. border, along with assurances that by turning themselves in to U.S. authorities they will be released into the country within days.

Paying up to $7,000 per adult with child, families are transported to staging areas at ranches and hotels in southern Mexico, where they are organized into bus groups and rushed north along Mexican highways, stopping only for food, fuel and bathroom breaks, according to the U.S. law enforcement documents.

The model particularly appeals to families by minimizing some of the more intimidating and unsavory aspects of traditional Mexican smuggling operations, known for cramming migrants into squalid stash houses, where Central Americans are regularly abused and extorted for additional payments. The busing system has skirted those dangers, generating few reports of violence or mistreatment, U.S. officials say.

Within 72 hours of leaving the staging areas, the buses arrive at predetermined drop-off points within walking distance of the U.S. border. Migrant families are clustered into groups that have at times exceeded 300 adults and children, and they walk directly across the border, in some cases stepping over barriers in long, orderly lines. They then surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents and initiate asylum claims.

Previously undisclosed details of the smuggling system are outlined in U.S. law enforcement reports reviewed by The Washington Post. The official who shared them did so on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal operations details. They depict an upstart, highly profitable entrepreneurial operation that is designed to exploit dysfunction in the American immigration system and U.S. court rulings that mandate families be released from custody while their asylum claims are processed.

The success of the operation is the most extreme example yet of smugglers ability to capitalize on the shift in unauthorized migration to the United States characterized by soaring numbers of adults traveling with children.

[Record number of families, a cold new reality at the border]

By using the direct-bus method, smugglers can eliminate the need for stash houses along the border where they would normally keep migrants under the watch of armed guards before sneaking them across the border. The express routes minimize overhead and maximize capacity, according to the U.S. documents, allowing smugglers to reduce operational costs to a minimum.

'Breaking point'

Since October, U.S. border agents have encountered at least 70 large groups of 100 or more migrants, up from 13 such groups during fiscal 2018. Approximately 12,000 parents and children have arrived in the groups, generating tens of millions of dollars in smuggling fees.

U.S. officials call the system The Conveyor Belt and have asked Mexican authorities to help stop it. But the conveyor pattern has continued for months, part of a record-breaking surge in crossings by families that the White House has declared a humanitarian and border security crisis. Last month, 40,325 arrived in family groups, up 67 percent from January.



Central American migrants wrap themselves in Mylar blankets, which were distributed by Border Patrol agents, to brace against near-freezing temperatures while they wait to be processed and transported to a holding facility in El Paso on Feb. 22. The group of 64 migrants walked across the Rio Grande and presented themselves to Border Patrol agents. Many of the migrants are families asking for asylum in the United States. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Border arrests peaked at 1.6 million in 2000 and began to decline, falling to 303,000 in 2017, the lowest point in half a century. But Homeland Security officials say they are on pace to encounter nearly 1 million unauthorized border crossers during the current fiscal year, as arrests reach their highest level in more than a decade.

The influx has left U.S. border security at a breaking point, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan told reporters this month.

Migrants continue to stream to the border in a variety of ways, with large numbers of Hondurans forming caravan groups, and other Central Americans making the trip in smaller clusters and by more conventional means. But describing the express buses to reporters, McAleenan said the shorter smuggling cycle offered by the smugglers had cut the length of the journey from several weeks to four to seven days.

The availability of these express-bus routes means that more young children are arriving at our border, and we are seeing migrants arrive with illness and medical conditions in unprecedented numbers, he said.

Tailored to the new, booming aspect of unauthorized U.S. migration  parents bringing children  the new express-bus systems success would not have been possible in previous eras, when the vast majority of migrants were single adults from Mexico whose goal was to avoid getting caught.





Instead, recruiters are selling clients in Guatemala on the journey with presentations akin to the benign pitch of a travel agency. They offer a range of price points at different levels of passenger comfort, according to U.S. and Guatemalan officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details about smuggling networks operations.

Customers paying as little as $2,500 are typically made to ride in trucks or stand in cattle cars, while others buying packages for $7,000 or more get premium bus service. Children generally travel free because those who arrive at the U.S. border with a minor need only to be guided to the edge, not smuggled across it.

The express journey is typically financed by migrants relatives already working in the United States or with microloans that leverage homes and property as collateral, in some cases with notarized documents that allow the smuggling organizations to collect unpaid debts. In an especially worrisome sign for U.S. officials, the price of the journey has been dropping in recent months as the rapid-bus routes allow smugglers to cut costs and boost volume.

With no change to U.S. policy or other factors, such as increasing smuggling fees, Central Americans will arrive at increasing rate, one report warns.



A large group of migrants, who arrived as part of the Conveyor Belt described in U.S. documents, waits near a point of entry in Hidalgo County, N.M. (Obtained by The Washington Post)



Border Patrol agent Ramiro Cordero uses an infrared system to look for migrants approaching the border in Antelope Wells, N.M., on Feb. 19. A grazing cow is pictured on the screen. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

This frame taken from U.S. surveillance video shows migrants disembarking from a bus. Border Patrol agents say migrants are dropped off within walking distance of the U.S. border. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

'It's unbelievable'

In most cases, upon crossing the border the migrants express a fear of persecution if deported back home, the first step in seeking U.S. asylum. Some arrive with detailed stories of gang threats, violence and police inaction, and documents to back their claims.

But many other Guatemalans appear to be heading north for jobs in a humming U.S. economy that is facing labor shortages. In November, Guatemala became the leading source of unauthorized migration to the United States, surpassing Mexico for the first time.

One Guatemalan father, reached by phone in Houston where he was reunited with his wife and two children last month, said he paid $5,500 to bring all three family members to the border. He spent $8,000 a year ago when he made the journey alone.

They traveled on a nice bus, with their own seats, said the father, who described his familys journey on the condition of anonymity because his wife now has a pending U.S. asylum claim.

A Guatemalan official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the express buses said the United States has been leaning on his government to crack down on the smuggling pipeline. But he said that the governments strategies rely mostly on social media messaging  such as one with the hashtag #NoMigracionIrregular  and that those approaches lack credibility alongside the personal testimonies of friends, relatives and neighbors who have completed the journey safely and with relative ease.

Critics of the Trump administrations border policies allege that U.S. efforts to limit the number of migrants permitted to seek asylum each day at official ports of entry have forced the families to cross the border through remote desert areas.

But the conveyor belt system depicted in the reports indicates decisions about where the groups arrive are not made by the migrants but by smugglers looking for the best places to quickly deliver large numbers of their clients to U.S. agents.



A large group of migrants wait near the border in Hidalgo County, N.M. (Obtained by The Washington Post)



A Border Patrol agent uses infrared binoculars to look for smugglers and groups of migrants in Antelope Wells, N.M., on Feb. 20. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

A large group of migrants waits near the Antelope Wells port of entry. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

The mass give-ups let migrants skip lines at official points of entry, and they can await processing on the U.S. side of the border, where its safer.

The pattern has become so routine that U.S. officials say some large groups form their own queues as they present their documents to agents, as if they were waiting in the arrival hall of an international airport.

They line up as if its some kind of regular immigration process, in single file, like theyre checking in, said one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the pattern. Its unbelievable.

With the swelling arrest numbers, calls for a border wall have intensified. But in recent weeks, large groups have crossed in areas near central El Paso, where tall, modern steel barriers are already in place. Wading through shallow stretches of the Rio Grande, the migrants reach U.S. soil and wait to be taken into custody on the narrow strip of no mans land between the river and the border fence.

The number of migrants taken into custody in the Border Patrols El Paso sector has soared 434 percent in the past five months compared with the same period last year, CBP statistics show.

Marta Sanchez Soler, a sociologist and migrant rights activist in Mexico City, said the rapid-bus operators are part of a broader divergence in the way Central American groups reach the United States.

While Hondurans and Salvadorans have been joining caravans and staying in church-run shelters, Guatemalan families are all trafficked, she said.

You wont find many Guatemalans in the shelters, said Sanchez Soler.

In December, two Guatemalan children died in CBPs El Paso sector after arriving with large groups. Their autopsy reports have not been released, but initial assessments indicate the children might have contracted the flu or another illness. In response to the deaths, CBP has expanded medical screenings for all minors in custody. Hospital referrals have nearly tripled during the past five months, the agency says.

The border security compromise reached between President Trump and House Democrats last month includes $415 million for improved migrant care and treatment, including funds to construct a new processing center in El Paso to alleviate dangerous overcrowding in holding cells there.

Agents took in 700 migrants in El Paso one night in early March, including groups of 252 and 112. Among them was an unaccompanied 2-year-old.



After walking across the Rio Grande on Feb. 22, a group of 64 Central American migrants arrived near El Paso and waited to be processed amid near-freezing temperatures. In a shift in immigration patterns, more unauthorized migrant adults are traveling with children. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Avoiding danger

The lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas has long been the main entry point for Central American migrants, opposite the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. But warring factions of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas criminal organization have left the area with a fearsome reputation for kidnapping, rape and abuse, one reason the caravans have conspicuously avoided those areas, despite a shorter distance to the U.S. border.

Gunmen stopped a bus traveling through Tamaulipas this month and abducted 19 migrants, loading them into pickup trucks, Mexican authorities said. Another 25 migrants went missing after a similar incident in late February.

Such incidents appear to be one reason the express-bus operators veer away from that part of northern Mexico, opting for longer routes to the El Paso area and points further west into New Mexico and Arizona.

U.S. officials say they have given Mexican authorities specific information on the location of ranches and compounds in the southern states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, as well as the names of individuals who appear to be coordinating the buses.

One staging location U.S. law enforcement officials have identified is a property ringed by a seven-foot concrete block wall close to the center of Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, where a fleet of gray buses loads up as many 150 migrants at a time, documents show. A cargo truck loaded with Guatemalan migrants crashed along a highway near the city this month, killing 25 and leaving more than 30 injured, authorities said.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office in December, has sought a contrast with his predecessors immigration policies, promising to be more welcoming to Central American migrants. More quietly, his administration has been cooperating with an experimental U.S. policy to make Central Americans wait in Mexico until their U.S. asylum cases are settled.



The border fence is seen from a ranch in Antelope Wells, N.M., on Feb. 21. Mexico is to the left, and the United States is to the right. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)



This image taken from a video shows a large group of migrants arriving at the U.S. border. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

Border Patrol agent Ramiro Cordero looks for groups of migrants approaching the border in Antelope Wells, N.M., on Feb. 19. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

Immigration enforcement at the Guatemala-Mexico border remains light, and the documents of Central Americans traveling on Mexican highways are not systematically checked, according to the U.S. reports.

The buses are routinely inspected by Mexican authorities for contraband, however, authorities do not conduct immigration checks, the documents state.

Mexico is seeking more details about the bus routes and operators, according to one senior government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe what has become a new source of tension with the Trump administration.

If they sent the information, they did it through the wrong channels, the official said.

Mexican Interior Minister Olga Sanchez Cordero, the countrys top immigration official, met with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in Washington last month to discuss the soaring border numbers.

Sanchez Cordero told The Post that her government wants a more intimate intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States to target traffickers more aggressively, affirming that Mexico has already arrested several smugglers, without providing further detail.

Weve only been in office for [three] months, she said. We want truly close collaboration with the United States.
Duterte links 46 government officials to illegal drugs: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte publicly named 46 government officials, including three congressmen and 33 mayors, who he said are involved in illegal drugs and added that investigations against them are underway. Many of the officials are running in midterm elections in May. Duterte said he decided to identify them after their involvement in the drug trade was validated by authorities.
19 bags containing human remains found in Mexico: Mexican prosecutors said Friday that they were investigating the discovery of 19 plastic bags containing human remains in Jalisco, a western state that has been battered by surging levels of gang violence. The attorney general's office of Jalisco said forensic experts were working to establish whether the bags contained complete bodies and whether the victims had been reported missing. Authorities found the bags Thursday in a wastewater river in the town of Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos, some 25 miles south of the state capital, Guadalajara.
Especially disappointing were the votes in favor of Mr. Trumps emergency by Republican Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.), Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.). All three style themselves guardians of conservative constitutionalism; Mr. Tillis had gone so far as to assert, in a Feb. 25 op-ed for The Post, that his conservative principles would not let him uphold Mr. Trumps emergency declaration. With the partys ultras talking about a primary challenge when he is up for reelection in 2020, however, Mr. Tillis flip-flopped, claiming that now there is a serious discussion of amending laws to prevent a repeat of this situation.
Shes right about that, of course. Still, I believe that a constitutional amendment eliminating the electoral college would be very difficult, if not impossible. While the Constitution has been amended a number of times, none of those amendments directly challenged its basic concepts or questioned the wisdom of the framers. So, how can we solve the inequity of the electoral college while not castigating those who conceived it? Quite easily, actually, by passing an amendment to its structure that sets the number of electors allocated to each state in proportion to that share of the nations population as determined by the latest census. This would achieve the reform we should all seek.
The administration is understandably anxious to avoid repeating previous deals in which North Korea has obtained sanctions relief for partial steps and then reneged. Yet there could be ways to make progress while avoiding past pitfalls. Before Hanoi, there were suggestions the United States could agree to noneconomic steps, such as a declaration ending the state of war between the two countries, in exchange for the shutdown of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. South Korea might be allowed to pursue limited economic initiatives with the North while broad sanctions remain in place. Rather than discuss such possibilities, Mr. Trump challenged Chairman Kim to go big, as Mr. Biegun put it. In light of Mr. Trumps failure, the logical course would be to send lower-level negotiators back to the table to work on smaller steps.
He claimed, for example, that he had been influenced by Candace Owens, the black conservative activist who is probably most notorious for saying that Adolf Hitler was OK before he tried to globalize. Her own views, he wrote, helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Maybe this is true. Or maybe, as the context seems to indicate, these comments were an elaborate game, designed to send journalists scurrying off to write about Owens. The same may have been true of his references to President Trump and others. Remember lads, he can be heard saying on the video he made of the massacre, subscribe to PewDiePie  meaning subscribe to the Swedish vlogger on YouTube.
Is it worth falsely accusing a few thousand people if the program saves one life? Maybe, but these cameras wont make the roads safer. Some drivers will use information from the Waze app and slow down well in advance of a trap. Others will be taken by surprise and slam on the brakes to avoid getting a ticket. This creates unnecessary conflict and the potential for a rear-end collision  a concern that is not theoretical.
One speech stood out for me more than all the others. Wasiullah Mohamed, the executive director of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, took the stage. He announced that the center had begun raising money to pay for funeral expenses for the victims. He had already raised thousands, and in the coming weeks, the number would skyrocket to hundreds of thousands. Mohamed also made a vow: He pledged that the Pittsburgh Muslim community would stand with the Pittsburgh Jewish community. He and members of his community offered to personally stand guard at the doors of local synagogues, if necessary, to allow Jews safe passage to our places of worship and to accompany us if we felt unsafe running our daily errands.
In light of all that, and given the clubs current composition, why are some folks getting all hot and bothered by the votes of club chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and eight of his fellow clubbies to shut out the public and media, and allow one of their number, Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), the subject of a federal investigation, to have a cozy chat with them about how he landed where he is and reportedly why hes not going to do anymore what he shouldnt have been doing in the first place?
There once was a burning political issue known as capital punishment. Others called it the death penalty. Entire political careers in the 1980s and 1990s were built on it or ruined by it. Democrat Michael Dukakis lost the presidency, many pundits said in 1988, by seeming mushy when asked what he would do if some guy murdered his wife. The 1992 nominee, Bill Clinton, learned the lesson. He jetted home to the Arkansas governors mansion in the middle of the campaign to preside over the execution of a mentally impaired prisoner.
Often, its the future that ends up without a chair when the music stops, said Brose. He now works for a start-up company called Anduril Industries that wants to be a disrupter. It has built a system that uses artificial intelligence to fuse sensors and drones to solve defense problems, such as perimeter security at military bases or along the border, more effectively and cheaply than conventional systems. The Pentagon seems interested, but Congress will have the final say.
Wealthy applicants benefit from the admissions process in myriad ways, from being able to afford to take SAT prep courses and access college counselors to having time for extracurricular activities. At Georgetown University, which I attend, nearly a third as many students come from the top 1 percent of the U.S. income distribution as the bottom 60 percent. Georgetown admits legacy students at twice the rate of other students. These students often leave Georgetown for high-paying finance and consulting jobs, multiplying the wealth that enabled them to attend Georgetown in the first place.
Nobody yet knows whether the Ethiopian Airlines crash had the same cause as Octobers similar Lion Air crash in the Java Sea near Indonesia. But, clearly, the procedural fix circulated by the FAA in November was inadequate, and a Boeing software update, which government officials planned for January, never came. The Wall Street Journal reported that the delay was caused, in part, by the government shutdown. The corporate FAA chief denies this, but the pilots union had warned that the shutdown suspended safety oversight.
The supply side attack on drugs is frustrated by, among other things, geography and the torrent of south-north commerce. The demand side is frustrated by declining prices (the supply-side failure) for increasingly potent products, such as fentanyl, which has passed prescription opioids and heroin in overdose deaths. Made from chemicals, not crops, and patented almost 60 years ago, it is mixed with heroin for an extra kick  and if doses are not carefully calibrated, a lethal kick. Says New York Universitys Mark A.R. Kleiman: In 1979, a milligram of pure heroin sold for about $9 in todays prices; today it costs less than 25 cents. Fifty grams of fentanyl  just over an ounce and a half  has the punch of a kilogram of heroin, and its way, way cheaper. Three hundred micrograms  roughly the weight of a grain of table salt  can kill. And dealers are not precise chemists.
Now comes todays puzzle. Unlike Schroeder, Merkel is no friend of Putins. In fact, she is a stalwart who upholds sanctions against Moscows power grab in Ukraine. And yet, strategic good sense seems to elude her in the contest over Nord Stream 2. She will not bend to Trump, who has told her, according to the Wall Street Journal: Angela, you got to stop buying gas from Putin. Trumps supposed affinity for Moscow apparently isnt strong enough to override his interest in promoting U.S. energy sales.
States, however, cannot make the change on their own; doing so requires approval from Congress. Thats why we urge our colleagues in Congress to pass our bipartisan legislation, the Sunshine Protection Act. Our bill would end the practice of having to change our clocks. It would not alter time zones, nor would it impact those states and territories that do not observe daylight saving time. This is truly not a partisan issue, but instead, an everyday American issue.
Though it cannot unilaterally downsize department and program budgets, the White House can reorder priorities within agencies, and it is doing so with a vengeance in its full-court press against refugees. A key agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is shuttering its international division, according to a report this week in the New York Times  a move likely to create obstacles for refugees applying to resettle in the United States, as well as refugees already in the United States intent on bringing family members to join them. Wait times for applicants, already onerous, are likely to get much worse.
Flooding is a particular threat. Because nuclear reactors require access to water for cooling, many sit in locations vulnerable to severe coastal storms or rising rivers. Hurricane Florence last fall threatened 16 reactors in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. The year before, Floridas two nuclear facilities, Turkey Point and St. Lucie, sat in the path of Hurricane Irma barreling toward the coast. Thirty-four reactors at 20 sites around the United States are downstream from large dams. Possible failure of the dams, and the tsunami of water unleashed after a collapse, was ignored or not adequately taken into consideration when the plants were designed. Nor was the threat of increasingly severe storms and resultant flooding.
NAIROBI, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Heads of State and Government on Thursday attended the high level segment of the fourth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi with renewed call for adoption of sustainable practices to revitalize war against climate change, pollution and habitats' depletion.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and his counterparts from France, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) joined delegates to endorse bold actions required to hasten progress towards a green and sustainable future.

"We must act fast to reverse environmental degradation that has been worsened by unsustainable practices," said Kenyatta, adding that habitats destruction is to blame for mounting poverty and food insecurity.

Kenyatta said that policy realignment combined with investments in clean technologies and innovations is key to halting depletion of vital ecosystems like forests and fresh water bodies.

The Kenyan leader had earlier co-hosted the One Planet Summit with French President Emmanuel Macron where a call for action to boost environmental sustainability was renewed.

Macron in his address said that a robust multilateral system is key to boost response to environmental challenges linked to human activities.

"There is need to act on plastic pollution, climate change and deforestation but a strong multilateral order is key to achieve success," said Macron.

He pledged support for a pan African initiative to promote reforestation and access to renewable energy as a means to enhance climate resilience in the continent.

Andry Rajoelina, President of Madagascar said that radical measures are required to halt depletion of habitats that sustain livelihoods.

"Both governments and businesses should focus on ways to reorient the way we produce and consume in order to cut down on pollution and destruction of habitats," said Rajoelina.

Delegates attending the five-day meeting have been discussing innovative strategies to boost the planet's health amid threats linked to rapid industrialization and population pressure.

Siim Kiisler, president of the fourth session of UNEA and environment minister for the Republic of Estonia said that political goodwill is required to boost uptake of sustainable practices among communities.

"The scientific evidence is there to spotlight what is required to create resilient economies and livelihoods. But political goodwill is key to boost resource use efficiency," said Kiisler.
The Chilean government is intending to nominate the island of Madre de Dios before the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a World Heritage Site.

The countrys longest cave, the unique limestone formations and the pristine Magellanic forests that cover a landscape eroded over the centuries are just some of the attractions on Madre de Dios and could be key elements in gaining the UN bodys approval.

Santiagos decision is based on the conclusions reached by a French-Chilean expedition that spent two months on the multiple islets comprising Madre de Dios.

The leader of that expedition, Bernard Tourte, emphasized that the territory is a marvel.

Madre de Dios island is a marvel on the surface. Its ... completely spectacular. For speleologists, whenever we explore, we do so in massifs of limestone, but a limestone area like Madre de Dios (is unique) in the world, Tourte, president of the Centre Terre international cave-explorers organization, said.

He said that the geographical and meteorological conditions of the site, located about 2,000 km (1,200 mi.) south of Santiago, are unique.

Rocky compositions in improbable shapes are formed by the influence of the weather (and) the amount of water that falls in that zone is very high. Ten meters (32.8 feet) of (precipitation) falls each year. Thats one of the highest ... levels in the world, Tourte said.

All these discoveries made by the expedition were presented earlier this month before Chiles Ministry of National Patrimony.

Minister Felipe Ward welcomed the Centre Terre explorers and confirmed that Chile would be nominating Madre de Dios to UNESCO.

Ward said that the expedition had discovered the longest cave in Chile - 3.5 km (about 2.2 miles) - and he confirmed that Santiago will renew its agreement with Centre Terre to mount a new expedition in two years.

It provides the opportunity to continue going deeper. There is scientific work, a natural archaeological wealth of cave paintings and limestone that exists nowhere else in the world and it has to be protected, cared for and shared, the minister said.
Some Muslim women cover their hair because they say the faith requires it. Others say its not required. Muslims can find support for both approaches. Some Muslim women cover some of the time; some not at all. One of us (Nadia) covers her hair in public all the time, while the other (Asifa) used to but now covers on and off, depending on the circumstances. We both consider ourselves  and each other  practicing Muslims. Some women wear it as symbol of cultural solidarity. Some wear it because it is the normal practice in their family or community. Some women find it an effective way to insulate themselves from the self-esteem challenges of the fashion industry. As Laila Alawa wrote for Mic in 2014, The belief that one can pinpoint the degree of religiosity a Muslim woman possesses by looking at what is upon her head is degrading, invasive and pretentious.
When we think about the philanthropy that supports the institutions we patronize, if we do at all, we assume that it legitimizes private wealth and burnishes the moral status of benefactors. But that doesnt necessarily have to be the case. If bad actors can sometimes hide behind their philanthropy, the institutions they fund can help call them out. They can, for instance, serve as sites of protest, becoming pressure points for benefactors who clearly care about their public stature  perhaps more vulnerable ones than private residences or business headquarters. The photographer Nan Goldin, herself in recovery from an OxyContin addiction, has led demonstrations at Sackler-funded institutions to compel them to stop accepting the familys donations and to persuade Purdue to direct half of its future profits to address the opioid crisis. In February, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, home of the Sackler Center for Arts Education, Goldin (whose work is in the museums collection) led a group of activists inside. They dropped a flurry of faux prescriptions from the museums spiral ramp, hung banners over its side proclaiming Shame on Sackler and staged a die-in on the lobby floor. As Goldin appreciates, when trying to push corporate leaders to do the right thing, its worth being able to take a shot at the solar plexus of their self-regard.
Sanders arrived at what was billed as a roundtable on health care in the early primary state of South Carolina with a large white bandage on the left side of his head, just above his glasses. He made no mention of what had happened as the event got underway, nor did any of the others taking part in the panel discussion.
They included Hunt and oil refining billionaire Paul Foster, who would become fundraisers and donors for Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his successor, Perry. Both continue to be major donors to Republicans. In the 2018 election cycle, Hunt gave more than $1 million to Republican efforts to keep control of the U.S. House and Senate. Foster gave more than $2.5 million. Sanders, who joined the effort later, has previously given money to Cruz and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
In an excerpt of a deposition with Steele in London also unsealed Thursday, Steele said he had not intended for the information to be published and had cautioned that it came from human sources. Asked why he offered such caveats, he said because human intelligence is not a science. It is a complicated set of principles and information which have to be analyzed in an equally complicated and thorough way.
But to have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative I think is important, he told host David Axelrod. And our country needs to have competing ideologies . . . that are dynamic, that focus on the world were in and the world were moving toward rather than revert back to a nostalgic time.
At a news conference in Hanoi, Trump said several times that Kim had promised him that he would maintain the testing freeze, which the president has cited as evidence that his negotiations have made progress even though North Korea went through longer moratoriums during past U.S. administrations. As recently as February, Trump suggested that he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts with North Korea and complained that the news media have not given him enough credit.
Im not defending all of the presidents language on this stuff. What I am saying, though, if you look at the Holocaust where six million Jews were killed and Hitler basically brought a bunch of people into evil thinking to do what they did, that was way before President Trump, Kinzinger said. This hate for people whether its religion or race has been since the beginning of humanity. This disgusting animal is evil. If President Trumps language triggered him, that wasnt President Trump triggering.
The timing of Trumps latest tweet was panned by many pundits on Twitter, who noted that it came in the wake of attacks that left 49 people dead and more than 20 seriously injured when a gunman clad in military-style gear opened fire during prayers at a mosque in the center of Christchurch, New Zealand.
Theyre doing what they have to do, and I put no pressure on anybody, Trump said. I actually said, I could have gotten some of them to come along. I said: I want for you to vote your heart. Do want you want to do. Im not putting any pressure. 
In numerous calls with Republican senators in recent days, the president spoke of the battle almost exclusively in personal terms  telling them they would be voting against him while brushing aside constitutional concerns over his attempt to reroute billions of federal dollars for a border wall. He argued that a vote against the emergency would be seen by GOP supporters as being against border security and the wall and would hurt their own political fortunes, according to a person with direct knowledge of some of the calls.
It points to one central link, Cox said. We need the data from the flight data recorders. We need it as quickly as possible. . . . The faster that we get that information, it will let everyone know what needs to be done. We dont know in fact if these accidents are related. There are some similarities.
Delury says there is no obvious next move for Trump and Kim, with neither wanting to lose face and both having to deal with hard-liners at home. In that sense, Moon might have the best hope of unlocking the impasse, perhaps by inviting Kim to visit Seoul, he argues.
Survivors are sharing harrowing stories of those who ran toward danger to save others. In the absence of information from officials, some have learned of their loved ones deaths from those who witnessed the mass shooting or saw its aftermath. Others, such as Haji Daoud Nabis family members, confirmed that their relatives or friends were dead by watching a video of the massacre, which was live-streamed by the shooter.
The European Chamber of Commerce said Friday that it objected on principle to the Chinese system still maintaining distinctions between foreign and Chinese companies. More than anything else, foreign companies want equal treatment and opportunities, said the chambers president, Mats Harborn. While not all of our concerns were addressed in this law, it is time to move forward. Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, they are all developing and attracting foreign investments, said Yao Xinchao, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. It's not about confidence in China becoming less attractive; its that every other country is catching up.


Mondon said such references were indicative of a new generation of the Australian far right. This kind of international alt-right, for want of a better term, are really Internet-based, he said, adding that they were much closer to what youve seen in the United States in recent years and more violent and less interested in the parliamentary game than previous Australian far-right movements.
Marinete Francisco and Antonio da Silva, the parents of late rights activist and Rio de Janeiro city councilor Marielle Franco, attend a Mass on March 14, 2019, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on the one-year anniversary of the politicians death in a drive-by shooting. EPA-EFE/Antonio Lacerda
Trump is not going out and carrying out these attacks, but he has had a drumbeat of demonizing Muslims and immigrants, saying that we should be feared and that were violent and that we dont belong, Khera said. In this administration we have not seen any indication that there is any kind of attention to the threat thats being posed by white nationalists. If anything, whats particularly disturbing is that the white nationalist threat has only gotten more brazen and more deadly.
The controversy shows the raw emotions still swirling around the rule of Congo by Belgium, a nation of 11 million where most white families have ancestors who were involved in the colonial project. Belgian King Leopold II took the entire territory as his personal fiefdom starting in 1885  an enterprise that historians say was violent even by the standards of the era. To the extent Leopold is remembered abroad, its for the bloodiness of his reign in Africa. In Belgium, however, his bearded visage still stares down from pedestals in parks and plazas.
The Cheollima group, which also goes by the name Free Joseon, drew attention in 2017 after it successfully evacuated the nephew of Kim Jong Un from Macau when potential threats to his life surfaced. The nephew was the son of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leaders exiled half brother who was assassinated in a nerve-gas attack in a Malaysian airport that same year. Kim Jong Nam was widely believed to have been killed by the regime, making his son a likely target.
The mailers sparked fear across the country when they were discovered in October  with liberals and conservatives both accusing the other side of increasing the political rancor to dangerous levels. The devices that were found seemed to represent a fraction of what authorities said Sayoc planned to send. Prosecutors alleged that the former DJ and strip club bouncer had a list of more than 100 possible targets and planned for months for what authorities deemed a domestic terrorist attack.
According to FBI figures shared with The Post, in the 2017 budget year there were about 110 people arrested in the United States after being investigated for actions inspired by foreign terror groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Of those, about 30 faced terrorism charges. The rest faced gun, drug, fraud or immigration charges.
The United States is not a member of the ICC, even though the Clinton administration signed a statue creating the body. Many in Congress believed it would infringe on U.S. sovereignty, and it was never submitted for the Senate to ratify. More than 100 countries recognize its jurisdiction, but another 23, including the United States, never ratified it.
I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger, she added. We have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation.
Hundreds of people gathered early Thursday to pay their respects to some of the victims of a school shooting in Suzano, a community of more than 285,000 people located some 60km (37mi) from Sao Paulo city in southeastern Brazil.

The massacre occurred Wednesday, when two former students opened fire inside Suzanos Raul Brasil high school, killing eight people and wounding a dozen others before taking their own lives.

Assailants Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17, and Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25, were carrying handguns, backpacks with explosive-like devices, machetes and a bow and arrow, police said.

Arena Suzano, a facility in Max Ferrer Park, just a few blocks from the crime scene, was the venue for the wake in memory of six of the dead: school employees Marilena Ferreira, 59, and Eliane Regina Oliveira, 38; and students Kaio Lucas da Costa, 17, Claiton Antonio Ribeiro, 17, Samuel Melquiades Silva de Oliveira, 16, and Caio Oliveira, 15.

The families of the other fatalities, student Douglas Murillo, 16, and 51-year-old Jorge Antonio de Moraes, the uncle of one of the shooters, preferred more intimate ceremonies, a school counselor told EFE.

Hundreds of people filed past the open caskets in absolute silence.

In solidarity with the deceased and their families, Suzano Mayor Rodrigo Ashiuchi and federal Education Minister Ricardo Velez joined the wake early in the morning.

The governor of Sao Paulo state, Joao Doria, was also expected to make an appearance.

The viewing was set to continue until 4.00 pm, when the bodies were to be transported to Sao Sebastiao cemetery for interment.

The Suzano municipal government announced Thursday the start of three days of official mourning and ordered all public schools closed for the rest of this week to honor the victims.

Classes will resume next Monday following a meeting of teachers, school administrators and psychologists to develop approaches for helping the roughly 26,000 students deal with the horrific events of this week.

That session will focus on ways of combating violence and bullying in pursuit of restoring a culture of peace, the Suzano administration said.
But even if Vazquez wanted to forget the history of the Mascogos or her connection to the group, it would be nearly impossible. Her dark brown skin and her hair are rare features in this part of Mexico. When she travels outside Nacimiento, people call her la negrita  the little black one. They look at her quizzically and ask: Where do you come from?
The City Council pass the new laws Tuesday night.

Pittsfield Council Ordains New Solar Regulations

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  The City Council unanimously backed an effort to reduce the number of commercial solar arrays being installed in residential neighborhoods.

The Zoning Board of Appeals petitioned the council to adopt new rules guiding where solar arrays can be installed . The new ordinance breaks photovoltaic arrays into three sizes and guides the medium and large scale ones to commercial and industrial land.

"Commercial arrays have different impacts and don't belong in residential areas," Director of Community Development Deanna Ruffer said.

The hope is to reverse a trend in which 11 out of 14 commercial solar facilities have been approved in the city were in residentially-zoned areas. The new rules allow for residents to put panels on rooftops and small ground-mounted arrays under certain conditions in residential areas if the array is not the primary use of the property.

Permitting Coordinator Nate Joyner said it has become "increasingly popular" for solar companies to seek out residential land for commercial arrays and the systems proposed have been growing larger. He said while there is a lot of developable commercial and industrial land available, the residential spaces come at a lower cost.

Michele Rivers Murphy had been part of an effort to oppose a solar array at the Pontoosuc Lake Country Club. The 6.5-megawatt proposal included some 18,000 panels in a densely packed residential area. That project was ultimately shelved because the company proposing it couldn't find a suitable access road that didn't infringe on wetlands. She said had that gone through, there would have been a tremendously negative impact on the area.

"You are changing the land us and essentially plopping a manufacturer in the middle," Rivers Murphy said of commercial arrays.

Resident Lewis Schiller, however, felt the ordinance went too far in restricting solar arrays. He feels there are places where the commercial arrays can go but the law shuts the door on that opportunity.

"I think this is just a NIMBY approach," Schiller said.

Schiller believes the restriction flies in the face of state guidelines and laws aimed to significantly increase the amount of renewable energy generated in the state.

Ward 3 Councilor Nicholas Caccamo, however, said that while the state Legislature encourages solar facilities, you wouldn't see commercial solar arrays in downtown Boston. He said Western Massachusetts ultimately has to "shoulder the most weight for the state's renewable energy goals." Ruffer and Joyner both added that the city is toward the top in the amount of renewable energy generated from solar, most of which is coming from residentially zoned properties.

Resident John Barry also opposes a "blanket prohibition" on such solar arrays because if it is appropriately screened, he thinks a property owner should have a chance to at least apply for a special permit.

The Zoning Board of Appeals had asked for a revamping of the laws because it felt it had been restricted in reasons to deny permits. The ZBA feels that some of the projects were approved despite potential negative impacts to the neighborhood because the reasons for denial were so limited.

"It is not a matter of trying to restrict solar but to deal with it in a way everybody can feel comfortable with where it ends up," said Community Development Board Chairwoman Sheila Irvin.

After a few questions about the laws, the City Council unanimously approved it.

In other business, the City Council again tabled a proposed ban on plastic grocery bags. The issue has been kicking around City Hall for close to six years and has not been tabled by the council on back to back meetings.
Overdependence on automation has been an issue for decades. A 1997 American Airlines pilot-training video warned that the problem was well-known among pilots. In 2013, a federal task force concluded in a 267-page report that pilots relied too often on automation and should be required to improve their manual flying skills. That same year, investigators found that the pilots over-relied on automation in the 2013 crash of an Asiana Airlines jet in San Francisco that left three dead. In recent years, the Federal Aviation Administration has advised airlines to encourage pilots to fly manually when appropriate, among other policies intended to improve manual skills. Loading "A specific focus of our efforts has been ensuring that our pilots have the manual handling skills and confidence to take control of the aircraft if the automation does not perform as expected," an FAA spokesman said in an email. Yet the agency moves slowly. This week, the FAA finally began enforcing a rule it announced about six years ago requiring pilots to practice in simulators how to handle stalls, a situation in which a plane loses lift. The rule was enacted in response to a 2009 crash.

In 2016, the Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General issued a report that found the FAA had not ensured that airlines adequately trained pilots in hands-on flying or on how to monitor a plane on autopilot. The report also found the agency did not track how often pilots flew manually. A decade ago, Chesley Sullenberger landed a US Airways jet with 155 people aboard in the Hudson River. That represents to many pilots the sort of manual intervention that is sometimes necessary. "Hopefully, we'll do something before we begin to have a litany of recent fatal accidents," Sullenberger said in a recent interview. "It could happen tomorrow. It could happen next year. I can't say. But I think it's inevitable if we continue down this path." Passengers escape US Airways flight 1549 after Captain Chesley Sullenberger was able to safely land it in the Hudson River. Credit:AP The issue has become more acute in recent years as aircraft have become more automated and a nicasglobal pilot shortage has forced carriers to fill their cockpits with less experienced pilots, particularly in emerging markets. At the same time, the stream of military aviators that the big carriers have long relied on is dwindling.

The most seasoned pilots are aging out of the profession  they are required to retire at age 65 in the United States  and many said their successors might not know how to handle the unexpected. Loading "There's nothing wrong with the millennials; they're really sharp and hungry for the information," said Shem Malmquist, a Boeing 777 captain and visiting professor at the Florida Institute of Technology's College of Aeronautics. "We're not exposing them  we're not giving them the chance to get the information." Karlene Petitt, an international airline pilot who wrote a Ph.D. dissertation about pilot training at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the new training regimen was producing less well-rounded pilots. "They can punch the buttons, but will they be able to fly that airplane when it breaks?" she asked.

Sullenberger noted that flight schools, where much of the manual training takes place, were limited because some insurers restricted how much flying students could do in poor visibility. "They may have never flown in a cloud before," he said. Loading Kit Darby, a former United Airlines captain and Boeing flight instructor who now trains pilots at another large carrier, said training for passenger pilots remained exhaustive and still focused on manual skills, including 1,500 hours of flight time and nearly 30 days in simulators. The bigger problem, he said, is the degradation of those skills once pilots get into the cockpit of an advanced passenger jet and begin to rely on autopilot. Many airlines encourage pilots to avoid automation when they can, he said, and annual reviews still test their manual skills. "When it's a beautiful day, we want you to turn the automation off," he said.

Darby and others said airlines in emerging markets were especially reliant on automation. Darby, who is also a career consultant for young pilots, said those markets had more acute pilot shortages, forcing carriers to rely on automation to cover up some of their aviators' lack of experience. In the Ethiopian Airlines crash this week, one of the pilots had just 200 hours of flight time, less than a seventh of the time the FAA generally requires to fly a passenger plane. Loading After the 2013 Asiana crash, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the carrier "emphasized the full use of all automation and did not encourage manual flight." If the airline allowed pilots to fly manually more often, the pilot most likely would have prevented the crash, the agency said. Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines captain and a spokesman for the airline's pilots union, said Boeing and Airbus had encouraged that sort of reliance on automation by pitching their planes to carriers as capable of being flown by lesser-trained pilots. "We've seen insidious marketing of aircraft to accommodate less experienced and perhaps a lower grade of pilot," he said.
Volkswagen's chief executive has apologised for using a phrase that echoed a Nazi-era slogan, "Arbeit macht frei," or "Work sets you free," that was emblazoned on the gates of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, saying the connection did not occur to him at the time.

The German carmaker's chief, Herbert Diess, repeatedly said, "Ebit macht frei" referring to profits within the company's divisions  when speaking on Tuesday to hundreds of managers at an internal company event after Volkswagen's annual earnings news conference, German news media reported. Ebit is an acronym for "earnings before interest and taxes."

"Ebit macht frei": Volkswagen CEO Herbert Dies has apologised for his "unfortunatel choice of words". Credit:Philipp von Ditfurth

The next day, Diess, who took over the company last year as part of efforts to move past its emissions scandal, posted an apology on his LinkedIn page.

"I did not in any way intend for this comment to be set in a false context," Diess said. "I did not think of such a possibility at the time I said it."
A day later, RFG issued a statement to the ASX saying that "regarding recommendation 4.2 of the report, RFG has an established history of cooperation with regulators and takes its compliance with all of its legal obligations seriously." It didn't explain in the statement that recommendation 4.2 was for the regulators to investigate serious allegations of insider trading, tax avoidance and so on. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age exposed RFGs business model, including churning, gouging and supplying franchisees with expensive substandard products in December 2017, creating a firestorm with the companys share price falling from $4.40 to just under 20 on Friday. Since the bipartisan report was released, it has fallen a few more cents. One franchisee described Georges note as "another empty pot" from the company. George was asked to comment on this, as well as whether he felt that the company's response was adequate in the circumstances. A company spokesperson referred me to the company's statement on its website.

The report comes as RFG battles rumours that it is a whisker away from being placed in administration; something it vigorously denies. Whatever the case, the parliamentary report wont make talks any easier with its lenders about a range of debt reduction strategies. In its ASX announcement the company said it had a new executive team and was driving initiatives to support franchisees and improve services to customers. In the meantime, franchisees continue to ponder their future as they watch the company bleed red ink and negotiate with the banks. There is little trace of the woe RFG is going through on its website. It prefers to highlight the testimonials of happy franchisees and its latest news items include the company's shallow response to the inquiry, along with stories of awards and a new-look pizza store in Sydneys beachside suburb Cronulla. I jumped into this RFG pit and I still cant see a way out. Wing Chan ex Michel's franchisee

Meanwhile, its franchisees and ex-franchisees continue to suffer. Wing Chan still has a lump in his throat when he talks about RFG. "The wound is so deep down," he says. "I jumped into this RFG pit and I still cant see a way out." Chan spent his retirement savings of $600,000 on two Michels Patisserie stores in Cessnock and Newcastle in 2011 after he couldnt find a job. Wing Chan owned two Michel's Patisserie stores, now he is being chased for debts. Credit:Graham Tidy

In his 60s, he saw it as a way to own his own business, build it up, and work towards his retirement. Instead, he worked for free for seven years, lost his investment and is now being chased by RFG, suppliers and the liquidators. "I have a lot of angry bullets in my stomach but I don't know where to shoot at," he says. Like many franchisees, Chan was squeezed by fees and rebates, leaving him struggling to pay the bills. He said the company didnt support the brand, and the cakes supplied were expensive and regularly turned up in poor condition or late. Now he is being chased by RFG, suppliers and liquidators. He said he sold one of his Michels Patisserie stores at a hefty loss for $50,000 just over a year ago, but the new owner couldnt make it work and went bankrupt. The new owner bought the business, not the store. RFG declined to comment.

The suppliers were still selling to the same stores and, according to their records, Chan is the one that owes them the money. He is unsure how much that is. Despite his hardship, he is thankful the parliamentary report into franchising "dug the dirt from underneath the carpet". Loading Chan hopes the regulators will now start doing their job and the government endorses the reports recommendations. As the industry digests the report, there is a mix of anger among the franchisors that have done the right thing and have been tainted by the wrongdoers.

The peak body for the franchise industry, the Franchise Council of Australia, has been quoted saying it welcomes the report. In a private meeting held for its members via a webcast on Thursday evening it described the past year as challenging and reinforced that they were only recommendations and that didnt mean they would all be followed through. The meeting discussed federal election complications and how that might delay things. Greg Nathan, who runs the Franchise Relationships Institute, sent out a message on Linkedin titled "Call for cool heads" after the release of the report. He said continually rehashing the bad behaviour of five large brands at the expense of hundreds of other good brands wasnt fair. "The franchising sector is not like the banking sector, which is dominated by a few large corporations," he wrote. "There are over 1000 franchisors out there. Adele Ferguson has enormous power and will be putting her views  but lets try and keep the discussions balanced." The point that Nathan is missing in his attempt to "keep the discussions balanced" is there are a lot more than five large brands that have been caught doing the wrong thing. Foodco, Jump! Crocs Playcentres, Ultra Tune, Oporto, Granite Transformations, Back in Motion Health, car dealerships, have all had stories written about them or appeared in the inquiry. It is why the inquiry was unanimous in its agreement that the sector needs to be fixed, and recommended sweeping changes to the franchising code, more powers and penalties for the regulator. This is not a few bad apples.
Dock workers have voted to take indefinite rolling industrial action from Friday, March 22 over a protracted dispute over a new wages agreement.

The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) said workers at container terminals run by Australias largest stevedore DP World voted for the rolling strikes and indefinite work bans.

Dock workers have voted to take rolling strike action at DP World Australia terminals in four states. Credit:Glenn Hunt

If no resolution is reached, strike action will take place nationally at four major container terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle in coming weeks.

The union said the strike was in response to DP World Australia's threat to strip workers of income protection insurance unless they accepted the companys demands for a new workplace agreement covering pay and conditions.
Danielle Villafana-Pore and her classmates are among tens of thousands of students who will be skipping half a day of school on Friday to demand more action on climate change, despite warnings that schools may take disciplinary action against absent pupils.

Students and staff from a number of universities are also expected to attend Friday's strike, to be held at Sydney Town Hall from midday.

Students Manit Anand, 14, Meg Raven, 15, and Danielle Villafana-Pore, 15, will strike on Friday for climate action. Credit:Jessica Hromas

The University of Sydney has confirmed it won't penalise anyone who misses class to support the action and has told staff not to hold assessments during the rally.

"I'm striking because I feel like I owe it to the generation after me, the earth is not single use, we only have one and we need to preserve it," said Danielle, 15, who is in year 10 at Fort Street High School.
Charles Kaminski's family was on hand to share stories and memories of the late college dean. For some two hours, friends and family had share stories and recollections. Kaminski's parents attend the memorial. His colleagues take turns recalling about how approachable, funny, and kind Kaminski was. PreviousNext

BCC Remembers Beloved Dean, Charlie Kaminski



The environmental science department staff pitched in to purchase a plaque to hang on the walls in memory of Charles Kaminski. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Thomas Tyning described his late friend Charles Kaminski as a "6-foot-2 Paddington bear," with "a cavernous voice that seemed to emanate from the depths of his heart and yet the kind of quality that put people at ease."

Kaminski  known as Chuck to some, Charlie to others  loved nature, cooking, and music. He never seemed stressed and was loved by many from across the state.

"It's not an exaggeration to say that Charlie's life truly mattered. He modeled consistency in issues that mattered most to him," Tyning said.

The Berkshire Community College dean of business, science, mathematics, and technology unexpectedly died in January at age 51. Kaminski had been vacationing in San Agustin in Colombia with his husband, Tom Connelly, whom he had been with for more than 30 years.

"In all of that time, I have never seen him helpless until he died in my arms," Connelly said on Friday when friends, family, and the higher education community joined together at the college to honor Kaminski.

And, "his strength is what I've drawn upon to get through this ordeal."

Connelly described the trip to Colombia as they toured cities and nature, drank coffee, and ate well. The couple went to the Andes and took tours. Kaminski was enjoying nature on an excursion but at one point Connelly had thought, "is he having a heart attack?" when Kaminski's breathing seemed irregular.

And suddenly, "he collapsed and we couldn't revive him." Kaminski loved the outdoors, nature and traveling, and Connelly takes solace knowing Kaminski died doing exactly what he'd want.

"His last days and moments were exactly what he'd want, traveling, experiencing another culture and geography," he said.

Friday, though, wasn't so much about that moment. Connelly and his sister Sheila discussed the village of friends and family that had come together to bring Kaminski home from deep in the hills of the Andes but Friday was focused on who Kaminski was and the impact he had made during his life.

"He was friendly. He was humorous. He was obviously very bright. He was also very engaged in everything we were doing. Charlie was tremendously gifted," said a colleague.

Not only was he an accomplished educator, Kaminski followed his passion for the environment in making the Green Team at the college nationally recognized.

"Charlie wore his love of the natural world like a comfortable sweater. It was just who he was," said Laura Saldarini, who worked with Kaminski on the Green Team at the college.

Another colleague told stories of birds Kaminski had helped rescue and the passion the two shared for birdwatching.

Kaminski's impact wasn't just on the BCC campus. His colleagues said it seemed he had friends on every campus in the state they visited. Friday's memorial was attended by friends from the Board of Higher Education, from Boston, from Greenfield and Holyoke, and from all corners of the state.



Tom Connelly, Kaminski's husband, reflects on his loss. He joined BCC 17 years ago after teaching at Middlesex Community College, decision that sent shockwaves throughout the community colleges in Massachusetts.

"When Charlie was recruited here and came here, I bet that made a pretty big impression on them. If Charlie saw something in this place, and I'm sure he spoke very well of the place afterward, that was something they noticed," his colleague said.

A childhood friend shared stories of their youth, others shared funny stories about him or just reflected on who Kaminski was. Another recalled Kaminski raving about seeing a band and the passion he shared with Kaminski about music.

BCC President Ellen Kennedy said Kaminski wouldn't have been one to want such a memorial. But it was something the college community needed.

"This might not have been what he wanted but it was something the rest of us wanted," Kennedy said.

She joked that the college did go out of the way to make some accommodations that would have appeased Kaminski  there was no program, little paper used, and everything was compostable.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison have both condemned the attack as terrorism. Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday. Credit:AP The attacks The attack began around 1.40pm local time. Tarrant allegedly entered the Masjid Al Noor mosque on Deans Avenue first, live streaming himself shooting dozen of worshipers. Forty-one of the 49 deaths were from this attack.

He then allegedly left and drove to Linwood Masjid mosque six kilometres away. Seven more people died on the scene and one in the hospital. The gunman was arrested 36 minutes after initial emergency calls were made. Video from the arrest appears to show two officers pointing guns at a man in army camouflage along Brougham Street in Christchurch. A police car appears to have rammed a silver vehicle. Armed police on Langdons Road, Papanui following the shootings. Credit:The Press

Gunman live-streamed massacre on internet Police asked social media users to not share a video showing one of the mass shootings in graphic detail. YouTube and Twitter have been active in removing the sickening videos from the web. Before he embarks on the shooting, Tarrant says: "Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie," referencing one of the world's biggest YouTube stars whose videos have attracted more than 20 billion views. PewDiePie is currently at risk of being overtaken as the number one Youtuber by an Indian channel.

PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, tweeted on Friday afternoon of his horror at being referenced by the killer. Brenton Tarrant, 28, posted a 37-page manifesto online before the attack declaring his intentions. In it, he says "it is a terrorist attack". The victims Officials are still working to confirm the identity of victims.

Several children are among those injured. It is understood a two-year-old boy is in a stable condition at Christchurch Hospital and a one-year-old boy is in a critical condition. Haji-Daoud Nabi was shot while trying to shield another person from the gunman, his son says. Credit:Stuff.co.nz Another young child is in a critical condition and has been flown to the Starship Children's Hospital in Auckland. There are unconfirmed reports that a five-year-old girl is among those who died.

Four patients died on their way to Christchurch Hospital on Friday, chief of surgery Greg Robertson has revealed. One of the 49 dead is now known to be Haji-Daoud Nabi. He was a 71-year-old man of Afghani origin and an active member of the mosque community. His son Omar Nabi believes that he died shielding others from gunfire. A crowdfunding campaign on the New Zealand site 'Givealittle' has now raised more than $1.3 million for victims and their families.

Tarrant told social media followers to tune in for massacre On Thursday night Tarrant posted to his online contacts that he would kill people the next day. "Well lads, it's time to stop shitposting and time to make a real-life effort post," he said. "I will carry out and attack against the invaders, and will even livestream the attack via Facebook. "The Facebook link is below. By the time you read this I should be going live.

"It's been a long ride and despite all your rampant faggotry, fecklessness and degeneracy, you are all top blokes and the best cobbers a man could ask for. "If I don't survive the attack, goodbye, godbless, and I will see you all in Valhalla!" One poster responded: "God speed." The manifesto A manifesto surfaced online written by Tarrant states that he had planned the attack for two years and had travelled to Christchurch to train for it before deciding that city would be his target.

Tarrant says his political inspiration comes from US conservative commentator Candace Owens***, who is pro-Trump and has criticised the Black Lives Matter movement. He describes himself as a fascist and a supporter of the views of Oswald Mosley, a British politician who became the leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. "Towards a new society we march ever forwards, he says. In it, he speaks of restoring birth rates and the "crisis of mass immigration". The alleged gunman also describes himself as a 28-year-old Australian-born man.

"Just a ordinary white man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to a working class, low income family. My parents are of Scottish, Irish and English stock. I had a regular childhood, without any great issues. I had little interest in education during my schooling, barely achieving a passing grade. I did not attend university as I had no great interest in anything offered in the universities to study.

I worked for a short time before making some money investing in Bitconnect, then used the money from the investment to travel. More recently I have been working part time as a kebab removalist. I am just a regular white man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people."

The scene A witness inside the Al Noor Mosque said crowds of people struggled to get out of its doors as the gunman attacked. The video shows the shooter walking from room to room in the mosque and opening fire with an automatic weapon at anyone he sees. The shooter also fires multiple rounds at the wounded lying on the ground. Worshipper Ahmad Al-Mahmoud said he saw the man coming through and shooting everyone in the mosque". PM Ardern responds New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Friday was one of New Zealands darkest days and described the attacks as an unprecedented act of violence.

On Saturday morning she confirmed that Tarrant had legally acquired a Category A gun licence in November 2017 which allowed him to buy the weapons used in the attack. He used two semi-automatic weapons, two shotguns and a lever-action firearm. Ms Ardern said she was committed to changing the laws which allowed this. At the time of the attack, the city was placed in lockdown for several hours, with schools and public buildings closed.

Nearby climate change protests were evacuated and council staff were looking after children separated from their relatives in the chaos. Three others arrested During the attack, two other people were arrested. They have not been charged and an investigation is continuing as to if they were directly involved in the terror attack. Another person was arrested in the aftermath of the attack, however, they have since been released. They were in possession of a firearm with the intention to assist police. It is believed that a single gunman carried out both attacks. The Mosques are a seven-minute drive apart.
A young Perth man who stalked his ex-girlfriend for two months after their break-up and attached a GPS tracker to her car has been jailed for a year.

The 25-year-old, who WAtoday has chosen not to name to protect the identity of his ex-girlfriend, admitted he became obsessed with his former partner of seven years after she ended their relationship in late 2018.

The man has been jailed for 12 months over the stalking. (File picture)

He began stalking her, attaching a GPS tracker to her car so he could monitor her movements after she blocked his phone number.

On one occasion, he confronted her as she arrived at a friend's house for dinner - bashing on her car windows and trying to open the doors, shouting, "What have I done wrong?"
A Scarborough man will appear in court on Friday to face allegations he attempted to smuggle more than a tonne of tobacco, 810,000 cigarettes and other prohibited products into WA last month.

Australian Border Force officers made the discovery after they examined a container which arrived from India on February 18.

The seized cigarettes. Credit:ABF

It will be alleged inside the container - behind a cover load of food and other household products - was 1104 kilograms of molasses tobacco, 810,000 cigarettes, 77.58 kilograms of chewing tobacco and 1200 Kamini pills which contained Opium Poppy, and chewing tobacco.

The ABF says the value of the evaded duty on the molasses tobacco and cigarettes is more than $1.84 million.
The Gang Crime Squad is investigating a drive-by shooting overnight in Perth's south-east.

The shooting happened in Plaistowe Boulevard, Byford about 10pm.

Police are seeking witnesses and more information to the shooting. Credit:File photo/Justin Rake

Police say a group of people were outside the home when a vehicle drove past them and a person inside the car fired a weapon several times.

A 19-year-old man was hit in the leg and was taken to hospital. His injuries are not life-threatening.
Scott Morrison has led a swift and strong repudiation of Queensland Senator Fraser Anning, who linked Muslim immigration to the terror attack carried out at two mosques in New Zealand by suspected far-right extremists.

The Prime Minister tweeted late on Friday night that Senator Anning's comments had no place in Australia and definitely not in the Parliament.

Fraser Anning. Credit:Kenji Wardenclyffe

"The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting," Mr Morrison said, just hours after addressing the media about the massacre which appears to have been carried out by Australian born Brenton Tarrant.

"Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament."
Scott Morrison has a favourite way to urge Australians to scoff at everything they hear from Labor, but his warning about his enemies now applies just as much to his friends.

Youve always got to look at what people do, not just what they say, the Prime Minister has said in the past.

Almost everything possible went wrong for Scott Morrison this week. Credit:AAP

Morrisons government has just had a horror week by that measure. Forget the assurances about being able to win the May election. Judged by their actions, not their words, many of the Liberals and Nationals have given up on victory and decided their only hope is to save their own skins.

The argument about coal pitted Nationals against Liberals over whether to put taxpayer money into building a coal-fired power station in Queensland, then Nationals against Nationals and Liberals against Liberals. It was a free-for-all.
Some of Sydney's most marginal seats are facing property price falls of up to 15 per cent, turning the housing market into a major election issue amid fears values will continue to tumble.

A Sydney Morning Herald analysis of house prices by electorate  derived from CoreLogic data  shows the Liberal-held seats of Bennelong and Banks have experienced the steepest falls of the city's electorates, tumbling by 14 per cent in the past 12 months.

Sydney house prices climbed by 75 per cent between 2011 and the middle of 2017 but have fallen by 11.5 per cent over the past year, with some parts of the city faring worse than others.

The housing market has become a political hurdle for Labor and the Coalition as both parties race to the May election grappling with how to handle falling prices and a slowing economy.
"The act is broken, the act is very, very dated and the act creates two evil monsters: one is a mandarin called the chief executive officer and the other one is an 'independent republic of administration' and they are both running amok in local government with elected representatives playing second fiddle," he said. "There's something wrong with that in a democracy." Local Government Minister David Templeman. Credit:Nathan Hondros Local Government Minister David Templeman ordered a review of the legislation governing the sector after winning office in 2017. He said he wanted local governments to become agile, smart and inclusive and released an options paper inviting public comments on some suggested reforms, such as compulsory voting in council elections, a loosening of some financial controls and the ability for councils to charge property owners who use the most services with higher rates.

But Mr Graham, who has watched closely as submissions to the review came in, said he was concerned vested interests would hijack the outcome. "What we have in this review, is we have the club reviewing the club," he said. "The three major players in the local government sector have hijacked this review and taken control of it and where they're taking it is not where the public wants it to go. "They're taking it towards less democratic input, they're taking it towards more authoritarian administration, and they're taking it towards more of the same for the next 30 years. "That's not what the public wants."

Mr Graham said he hoped the government would open the sector to a greater control by communities. "We live in a democracy, not a bureaucracy," he said. The problem with local government is that people stay away from it in their thousands, they just don't want to go near it. Larry Graham "There is a need for there to be better electoral systems, and more people voting. "There is a need for the power imbalance between the CEOs, administration and the elected council to be fixed and there's a big need for the government to work out what the heck it wants local government to be look like in 30 years and they're not sure yet."

Mr Templeman said he was confident the review process was rigorous and there had already been a wide range of submissions from people of different persuasions and circumstances. "We're getting some very good quality submissions from all sorts of people who are not directly related or not directly involved in local government," he said. "I want to hear from them. "But you see, underpinning this is local councils and local government in general is a very important part of our democracy." Mr Templeman said he had been careful not to pre-empt the outcome of the review.

"There are varying points of view based upon people's experience and their particular concern," he said. "I welcome that. "I want this to be a robust process, I think it is, but I am also encouraging people of all persuasions, backgrounds and experiences to have their say because we want to shape the best possible legislation going forward because the sector needs it and we need to have a strong local government sector going forward." Loading In a comprehensive submission to the review submitted this week, Mr Graham set out his proposals on making local government more democratic, which include giving councillors more say over non-elected office holders, making the WA Electoral Commission responsible for setting boundaries, and requiring real time reporting of donations and gifts.
New York: Donald Trump has issued the first veto of his presidency, rejecting a resolution that would have stopped him from funding a wall on the US-Mexico border without the approval of Congress.

On Thursday, local time, 12 Republican senators sided with Democrats to reject Trump's declaration of a national emergency on the southern border.

This came after the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the same resolution last month.

Speaking at the Oval Office on Friday, Trump said the congressional action was "dangerous" and "reckless".
The Queen has expressed her condolences to the Governor-General of New Zealand, saying in a statement she has been "deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch today.

"Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives.

"I also pay tribute to the emergency services and volunteers who are providing support to those who have been injured.

"At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders."

UK Prime Minister Theresa May has also tweeted her condolences to New Zealand, calling the terror attack a "sickening act of violence

Pakistan PM Imran Khan said the attacks reaffirm that "terrorism has no religion", and blamed them on post-9/11 Islamophobia.
Two Rockets Fired into Tel Aviv

The Fellowship | March 15, 2019 Two Rockets Fired into Tel Aviv

For the first time since 2014, terrorists from Gaza fired rockets into Tel Aviv on Thursday evening  long considered by Israel as the red line for rocket fire. The attack came just as a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas was nearing completion.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released information that they have uncovered another Hezbollah terror cell on Syrias border with Israel in the Golan Heights.

Meanwhile, new satellite images taken by an Israeli intelligence firm on Wednesday have caught Iran building yet another missile site in Syria, capable of targeting Israel.

International Womens Day was celebrated this month by Israelis and Palestinians who had radically different messages.

Israel celebrated the 140th anniversary of Albert Einsteins birthday on Thursday, remembering him as a devoted Jew and pioneer of modern science. He was also a founding member of Jerusalems Hebrew University.

This weeks Israel in the News Perspective features the Fellowships Ami Farkas on Israels upcoming elections.
Youll have to forgive me, these wont be my best words. The truth is, I dont want to be talking today. When I was asked if it was something I wanted to do, I resisted it all day until finally I had this overwhelming sense that it was something in my responsibility to do so and maybe thats misguided.

The clip has been shared tens of thousands of times and viewed more than two million times.

On Friday night, writer and television co-host Waleed Aly spoke on The Project about the mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand.

But of all the things I could say tonight, that Im gutted and Im scared and I feel overcome with utter hopelessness, the most dishonest thing, the most dishonest thing would be to say that Im shocked. Im simply not.

Theres nothing about what happened in Christchurch today that shocked me. I wasnt shocked when six people were shot to death at a mosque in Quebec City two years ago. I wasnt shocked when a man drove a van into Finsbury Park mosque in London about six months later and I wasnt shocked when 11 Jews were shot dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue late last year or when nine Christians were killed at a church in Charleston. If were honest, well know this has been coming.

Locals lay flowers at the Masjid Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch. Credit:Jason South

I went to the mosque today, I do that every Friday just like the people in those mosques in Christchurch today. I know exactly what those moments before the shooting began would have been like. I know how quiet, how still, how introspective those people would have been before they were suddenly gunned down, how separated from the world they were feeling until the world came in and tore their lives apart.

And I know the people who did this knew well enough how profoundly defenseless their victims were in that moment. This is a congregational prayer that happens every week like clockwork. This was slaughter by appointment. And its scary because, like millions of other Muslims, Im going to keep attending those appointments and it feels like fish in a barrel.
Months of fundraising efforts came to a close Thursday evening with the sounds and action of a razor.

20 people shaved their heads for the Saint Baldricks Foundation which raises money for childhood cancer research.

UF leadership council students, ROTC students, and more set monetary goals on social media months ago to raise money. The reward was having their heads get totally shaved.

So far this year, thousands of dollars have been raised.

"So now is a time to celebrate people reaching their goals and shaving their heads. And then celebrating the fact that we have worked hard all semester. It's supposed to be more of a relaxed sort of event rather than hardcore fundraising because we have already done all of that," said Jessie Cyr the Saint Baldrick's programming director.

The idea behind the head shaving is to show those with cancer that they aren't alone in their fight.

The donated money goes towards innovative cancer research.
More than 160 non-profits asked for support and the people of the Roanoke Valley responded.

The 24-hour fundraiser, "Roanoke Valley Gives," ended Wednesday night at 11:59. And organizers say they are ecstatic, the annual on-line campaign brought in more than $820,000.

Carly Oliver is the Chief Operating Officer of the Community Foundation Serving Western Virginia.

"We live in a generous community," Oliver told WDBJ7. "I mean $800,000 plus. It doesn't get any better than that."

Wednesday's outage on Facebook made it more difficult to spread the word, but organizers say the non-profits' hard work before this week kept the fundraiser on track.
The 611 steam passenger train will make its way to Pennsylvania's Amish Country this fall for "once-in-a-never" event!

Passengers will be able to take a ride in the famous locomotive, as well as operate the fire. Other family-centered events will include photo charters, classic car shows, and behind-the-scenes shop tours.

Since its restoration, the Virginia Museum of Transportation (VMT) has sought opportunities for the 611 to engage people from all walks of life, said Brian Barton, VMT board member. The partnership with the Strasburg Rail Road allows us to spark a fascination with steam locomotives and transportation, our history, steam technology, mechanical engineering, and design.

The 611 will be reuniting with the 475 in what Strasburg Rail Road station master, Steve Barrall calls an unprecedented event.

Reuniting 475 and 611 is a rare opportunity for railfans and heritage railroad tourists alike, said Steve Barrall. When the two locomotives are side-by-side, you will see, hear, and feel how the Norfolk & Western Railway revolutionized steam technology in under 50 years.

The special events at the Strasburg Rail Road include:

- September 28 through 29: A Norfolk & Western Railway Steam Reunion

- October 4 through 6: Railfan Photography Extravaganza

- October 12 through 14: Rail & Road: A Transportation Evolution

- October 19 through 20: At the Throttle of Norfolk & Western Steam

Tickets can be found at

.
Madhav Das Nalapat (Photo/People's Daily)

An Indian geopolitical expert said he hopes India and China can deepen their relations in all areas.

Madhav Das Nalapat, a geopolitics professor at Manipal University, told People's Daily in Beijing on Wednesday that "India and China are both great countries with long history and sophisticated traditional wisdom. The two economies both enjoy high growth.

Nalapat contends that the economic miracle of India and China is not accidental. "Both countries have historical and cultural heritage, and they have full confidence in themselves and firmly believe that they can succeed and dream big. That is one reason why they can always take efficient measures to drive the economy to a new level," he said.

He praised China's decision-making process. It is very efficient. The provincial and local government also enjoy some discretion to introduce new and proper policies. Take infrastructure for example. China impressed the world in the past decades.

He expressed confidence in India-China relations, and believes there is great potential for India-China economic cooperation and sees it as one cornerstone of positive and stable bilateral relations.

He said American companies such as Google and Facebook dominate the Indian market and take the majority of the profit. India welcomes Chinese companies like Baidu, Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo. More competition is in line with the national interests of India. Beyond the economy, Nalapat strongly suggests that there should be more people-to-people exchanges between the two countries.

He has confidence in the future of China-India ties. He said that "India and China are independent, elegant and smart nations."

Nalapat also holds important positions in mass media agencies, including Editorial Director of The Sunday Guardian and Itv network (India). He writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs for mainstream media in South Asia.

He first came to China in the 1990s. "I fell in love with China the first time I came to Beijing. When I wandered in the Forbidden City, I could feel the spirit of ancient China." As a scholar and senior international observer, Nalapat has a strong interest in China, and visits China frequently. He has a unique and in-depth perspective of China's evolving society.
State Legislature Approves Funding for New WSU Building

March 15, 2019

OGDEN, Utah  In the final days of the 2019 session, the Utah State Legislature appropriated $50 million for Weber State University to construct a new building for the College of Engineering, Applied Science & Technology (EAST).

The Noorda Building for Engineering, Applied Science & Technology will help accommodate the rapid growth in computer science and technology programs at Weber State. It will replace the outdated Technical Education Building, built in 1957.

The Noorda Building is one of two new WSU buildings, one in Layton and one in Ogden, that will provide exciting opportunities for students in EAST.

We appreciate the commitment of our legislators and donors to invest in modern education facilities as we prepare growing numbers of students in high tech careers, said Brad Mortensen, WSU president. Workforce demand for graduates in these fields is at an all-time high in northern Utah. The Noorda Building will better position Weber State to meet the challenge of supplying highly trained graduates for the aerospace, defense, manufacturing and technology sectors as they thrive in our region and beyond.

The Northern Utah Academy for Math, Engineering & Science (NUAMES-North) high school has guaranteed an additional $7.5 million to operate the charter school in the building. Several private donors have also contributed toward the $58 million project.

Keith Titus, chief executive officer of Ogden-based MarketStar and chair of the deans advisory board for EAST has helped advocate for the project.

Weber States ability to attract a world-class faculty and student body with a new, state-of-the-art building, paired with an innovative curriculum, is beyond exciting, Titus said. The Noorda Building is the catalyst and perfect setting for a new educational frontier in the College of Engineering, Applied Science & Technology at Weber State University.

The 143,000-square-foot building will be the home of electrical, mechanical and systems engineering, engineering technology, computer science and professional sales departments. Additionally, four centers will be housed in the building: The Concept Center, the Center for Technology Outreach, the National Center for Automotive Science & Technology and the Alan E. Hall Center for Sales Excellence.

VCBO Architecture is working on the design, and Big-D will begin construction in spring 2020 with completion expected in 2022.

We are excited for the new energy-efficient building that will bring modern technology to Weber State and EAST for years to come, said Travis Hogge, project manager. This new facility will reflect Weber States commitment to the STEM fields and provide a space dedicated to current and future technology education.

In 2016, the Ray and Tye Noorda Foundation pledged the largest single donation ever received by Weber State. Funds from the gift established an endowment to support scholarships, research and travel for students, faculty and staff. The remainder of the donation will help with the buildings construction.

Davis Computer and Automotive Engineering Building, WSU Davis

Weber State will break ground in spring 2019 on the Davis Computer and Automotive Engineering Building at WSU Davis in Layton. The building will be used for automotive, computer and software engineering courses to meet high-demand degrees in northern Utah.

The $20 million project also will include a new primary entrance to campus from State Route 193, which will relieve pressure on the existing entry and allow faster access.

State-of-the-art facilities will offer innovative and collaborate learning spaces to students in computer science, computer engineering and automotive technology, where we see high demand from industry, said David Ferro, EAST dean. Weber State leads state institutions in growth of engineering and computer science graduates, and these buildings will help match that growth.

Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University.
Netiquette

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Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil's prediction for an early spring was all wrong, inspiring Motel Kimball management to advise 3rd Street motorists during this week's blizzard to "never trust a groundhog." The city of Kimball declared a snow emergency.

The Blizzard of 2019 walloped the Kimball area with wicked sustained winds, freezing rain and heavy snow as forecast  forcing the closure of schools, businesses, government offices and highways across the Nebraska Panhandle.

The historic late-winter storm also postponed on-time delivery of the Thursday, March 14, print edition of the Western Nebraska Observer.

The shutdown of Interstate 80 and Highway 30 on March 13 and 14 due to hazardous conditions made it impossible for copies of the Observer to be brought in from Cheyenne, Wyo., where the paper is printed.

Every effort will be made to deliver papers to local businesses for single copy sales on Friday, March 15, and to the U.S. Postal Service for mail delivery to subscribers.

The Observer thanks all readers for understanding the situation  and for reading your hometown paper.
Two March 16 Performances Of 'The Irish Play: Kiss Of Death'

Just in time for Saint Patricks Day without a minute to spare, Friends of the Kimball Library will host their Fifth annual Murder Mystery event, The Irish Play: Kiss of Death, this Saturday, March 16, at the Eagles.

Because of high demand for tickets in past years, there will be two performances  a matinee from 2-4 p.m. and an evening show from 6-8.

The ghost of a dead king, a vain queen and a leprechaun walk into a bar. Actually, its not a bar but the Eagles Lodge in Kimball. Only three of the many characters that will be on hand this Saturday.

Bushnell local Deb Carpenter-Nolting, with the help of her sister Julie Watts of Chadron, are the proud writers of the play.

Julie has attended several mystery dinner theaters, so she had a lot of great ideas. Julie and her husband Mike will be preforming in the matinee as Queen Vanity and the ghost of King Jameson, Carpenter-Nolting said.

We wrote the script with audience participation in mind, she said. The audience will help provide alibis for various characters. The writing has been a little tricky because the ending is different in each performance!

Tickets to the matinee show will include a dessert, while tickets to the evening show will include a baked potato bar salad and a dessert.

For more information or tickets for The Irish Play: Kiss of Death, contact Kimball Public Library at 308-235-4523.
Kimball Police Officer Greg Taylor was dispatched to 607 East Third St. (formerly the Arabian Motel and now Kimball Extended Stay) on Saturday, March, 2 at approximately 2:45 p.m. with reports of possible methamphetamine discovered by cleaning staff in one of the occupied rooms.

According to the arrest affidavit, upon arrival Officer Taylor spoke to Teri Dryer, the owner of Kimball Extended Stay. Dryer stated that her staff had discovered several items in Room 4 that consisted of small ink pen tubes, aluminum foil with burn marks on it and a 9-volt battery. These item were found on the table located in Room 4 at Kimball Extended Stay.

The affidavit stated that Taylor asked Dryer if the occupant was still on the property, and Dryer replied yes. Taylor left the coffee shop area when a vehicle was starting to leave rooms number 4 and 5. Taylor ordered the driver to stop the vehicle.

The driver was then identified as 27-year-old Hugo G. Figueroa-Favela. He was removed from the vehicle and a check of his license show that his drivers license revealed his driving privileges were revoked in Kansas.

Figueroa-Favela was informed that he was being detained due to his driving status.

According to the affidavit, Deputy Dave Hottell of the Kimball County Sheriffs Office arrived and the second occupant of the vehicle was detained as well and placed in Deputy Hottells unit.

Office Taylor gave Figueroa-Favela a written Miranda rights advisement that was translated into Spanish. Taylor also obtained signed permission to search his room.

A NIK (Narcotics Identification Kit) test was preformed on residue found in the tubes, and the residue tested positive for methamphetamine. Figueroa-Favela stated that the tubes were trash. Officer Taylor asked why they werent just thrown away. Figueroa-Favela had no reply.

Figueroa-Favela was placed under arrest for the possession of methamphetamine and driving under suspension or revocation.
Dwayne Burton of Potter has been sentenced to prison in a case that involved a gun.

A 56-year-old Potter man has been sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison following his conviction for attempted first degree assault.

Court documents say that Dwayne Burton was sentenced on Friday in Cheyenne County District Court.

In May, Burton reportedly followed his wife outside with a gun. She allegedly grabbed the gun while the two struggled to get hold of it and the gun discharged, shattering the window on the door.

Investigators asked Burton what his plan was with the gun, and he replied, "The intention was that I was going to shoot her."

In January, Burton pleaded no contest to an amended charge of attempted first degree assault, and was sentenced on Friday.
STAMFORD  Hildene Capital Management recently cut ties with the owners of Purdue Pharma. But so far, the hedge funds decision has not sparked a trend.

As Purdue faces more than 1,000 lawsuits tied to its allegedly deceptive marketing of drugs such as OxyContin, organizations including the Stamford Downtown Special Services District, Mill River Park Collaborative and Palace theater have shown no signs of disavowing their support from the company or from the members of the Sackler family who own the firm. Their stance parallels other beneficiaries tepid responses to the widespread outrage against Purdue. It is also a position that risks alienating key supporters.

Ever since I learned the facts about the lawsuits, the numbers of (opioid) deaths and Purdues marketing tactics, I became very concerned about the boards inactivity, said Fernando Luis Alvarez, a Stamford art-gallery owner and DSSD board member, who was arrested last June for his role in a spoon protest outside Purdues headquarters in downtown Stamford.

Purdue did not make any officials available for an interview for this story. Instead, it issued a statement about its support of nonprofits.

For many years, Purdues proudly supported more than 125 different organizations and their important efforts to help make Connecticut a better place, the statement said, in part. The organizations we support range from education, disaster relief, feeding the hungry and numerous other critical initiatives for the state and our community.

Going separate ways

Hildene told investment entities of Sackler family members late last year that the firm was no longer comfortable managing their money.

Investment managers ties to clients who are linked to the opioid crisis have come under greater scrutiny in recent years  paralleling controversies, in the 1980s, about their connections to apartheid-era South Africa and, in the 1990s, their business with the tobacco industry.

This is yet another manifestation of an inclination among asset managers to say there are some people and organizations they dont want to be involved with, said Lawrence J. White, a professor of economics at New York University. This isnt the first time this sort of thing has happened, and it surely wont be the last.

Officials at Westport-based Bridgewater Associates, the worlds largest hedge fund by assets under management, were not available to comment on whether they have investments with the Sacklers. AQR Capital and Viking Global investors, the next two-largest hedge funds in the state that are both based in Greenwich, declined to comment.

Maintaining ties

Purdue ranks as one of the citys most-prominent corporate supporters of Stamford-based community organizations.

The company has given between $500,000 and $1 million to the Mill River Park Collaborative, the nonprofit that oversees the downtown park, according to the organizations website. A glade in the north end of the revitalized park is named after the firm, which is a lead sponsor of the MRPC.

Messages left this week for MRPC officials were not returned.

Diana Lenkowsky, vice president of facilities and administrative services for Purdue, is a vice chairwoman of the MRPCs board. She also serves on the boards of the DSSD and Palace theater.

Purdue declined to make Lenkowsky available for an interview.

In the DSSDs 2017-18 annual report, Purdue is listed as one of the property owners that gave donations and in-kind sponsorships, in addition to paying a tax assessment to help fund the organization.

The report does not specify how much Purdue gave to DSSD, whose community and economic-development programs include the Alive@Five summer-concert series.

It completely undermines the DSSDs mission, in my opinion, Alvarez said of Purdues support. Organizations that represent the public and community, who are taking money from corporations and governments, should bear the responsibility to play in the best interest and safety of the community rather than their own vested interest.

Some local elected officials have raised similar concerns. DSSDs and MRPCs funders include Stamfords local government.

I personally believe those public-private partnerships should no longer be taking any more money from Purdue  at least until we see the outcome of the Connecticut lawsuit against Purdue, said Nina Sherwood, a Democrat who represents the citys eighth district on the Board of Representatives. Once they take the money, then theyre advertising for the company. Theyre also potentially compromising the citys ability to hold those businesses such as Purdue accountable and protect the people from their bad acting.

Messages left for DSSD President Sandy Goldstein were not returned.

At 61 Atlantic St., the Palace theater has an art gallery that is named after Arthur Sackler, who died in 1987. He was a brother of the late Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, who bought Purdues predecessor company in 1952.

No living Sacklers have recently made donations to the Palace, according to the organizations executive director, Michael Moran Jr. He declined to comment further on the Palaces connections to the Sacklers and Purdue.

Stamford Mayor David Martin, who is a DSSD and Palace board member, was not available to comment.

In contrast with Connecticuts attorney general and many other Connecticut cities  including Bridgeport, Danbury, New Haven, Norwalk and Waterbury  Stamfords municipal government has not filed a lawsuit against Purdue. Martin has not ruled out litigation, but he has questioned the impact of Stamfords filing or joining a complaint.

The philanthropy of the Sacklers  whose combined net worth has been estimated at $13 billion  extends well beyond Stamford.

Other major Connecticut-based beneficiaries include the University of Connecticut, Yale University and Greenwich Hospital. Those organizations have not publicly criticized the Sacklers, either.

In contrast, Connecticuts Democratic Party recently denounced more than $100,000 in Sackler contributions that it has received in recent years.

Im glad that the Democratic Party, on the state level, is no longer interested in taking Purdue Pharma/Sackler money, said Megan Cottrell, a Democrat who represents the fourth district on the Board of Representatives. Other organizations, locally, should consider distancing themselves as well, but that is each individual organizations call to make.

pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; twitter: @paulschott
STAMFORD  High school students took to the runway for the annual Stamford High Fashion Show Thursday evening.

The students showed off spring wear, including prom dresses, at Stamford High School as a way to raise money for an after-prom party. The party provides an alcohol-free and safe environment for students until 3 a.m. following prom. At the annual post-prom event, there are giveaways, such as iPads and TVs.

The Stamford High Fashion Show also funds the Dare to Dream program, which provides scholarships to Stamford students.

On the morning of the fashion show, as the students prepped for the runway, $5,000 had already been secured but the goal was to bring in at least $8,000 by the time the fashion show concluded.
Blend the intrigue of a whodunit with the laughs of brilliant comedy and youve got a recipe for Staples Players next smash hit: Curtains.

Will Lieutenant Cioffi solve the murder mystery, fall for a starlet, be stage struck ... or maybe all three? Come see this enchanting show, which was the final project of John Kander and Fred Ebb  the songwriting team behind Cabaret and Chicago.

Staples High grads David Roth and Kerry Long co-direct the cast of 46 in six performances from March 15 to 23.

Roth says, Curtains is one of our favorites shows as it is contemporary but feels like a big, classic, old-fashioned musical. It is essentially a love letter to musical theatre. We have a large senior class this year and we chose the show, in part, because there are so many wonderful roles. It is a true ensemble show and we wanted to give each student an opportunity to shine.

Nick Rossi, known by Players fans as Emmett in Legally Blonde, Franklin Shepard in Merrily We Roll Along, and Jack in Newsies, plays Lieutenant Cioffi.

Lexi Levins plays brassy Broadway producer Carmen Bernstein.

To bring to life the old theater setting and Robbin Hood of the Old West scenes (the show within the show), Players recruited alumnus Michael Dodd as set designer. He worked as assistant stage manager and then stage manager during high school and is now an electrical and computer engineering major at Duke University.

Players has produced Curtains before, but those who saw it need to return for another look.

While we wanted to use the set from 2010 as inspiration, Dodd said, David and I agreed that we wanted to make the set grander and larger than the last time.

Performances will take place at the Staples High auditorium on March 15, 16, 22, and 23 at 7:30 p.m.; March 17 and 23 at 3 p.m.; with snow dates on March 21 at 7:30 p.m. and March 24 at 3 p.m.

Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for students, and $15 for seniors (matinee only).

Tickets may be purchased online at StaplesPlayers.com or in the lobby 30 minutes prior to performances, subject to availability.

Fourth-quarter taxes due April 1

Tax Collector Harry Whiteley reminds residents that fourth-quarter real estate taxes, personal property taxes, and sanitary sewer use and assessment charges are due April 1.

Taxpayers have until May 1 to pay taxes without penalty. Accounts will be subject to an 18 percent (1.5 percent/month) penalty charge if paid late. Minimum interest charge is $2.

Failure to receive a bill does not abate the charges or interest. Real estate taxes, personal property taxes, and sanitary use and assessment bills may be paid by credit card, debit card, or direct withdrawal from a checking account online at www.westportct.gov.

Checks should be made payable to Town of Westport and mailed to: Tax Collector - Westport, P.O. Box 350, Westport, CT 06881

In-person payments may be made at the Tax Collectors Office, Room 109 in Town Hall. Office hours are 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday.

CMS students compete in MathCounts

Nine Mathletes from Coleytown Middle School contested in the recent chapter round of the MathCounts Competition at Fairfield University: James Cao, Jenna Kornbluth, Rebecca Schussheim, Yash Hari, Asmi Rudra, Darren Weng, Nicholas Patafio, Michael Patafio and Gabriel Weng.

Two Coleytown students advanced to the state round with Asmi Rudra Securing 20th rank and James Cao securing 30th rank. Three of the nine Mathletes scored in top 25 percent of the Chapter Competition. Coleytown Middle Schools team ranked eighth and stood in the top 40 percent.

On March 9, two Mathletes from Coleytown Middle School contested in the state round of the MathCounts Competition at University of Hartford. James Cao secured 36th rank and Asmi Rudra secured 77th rank out of 143 students.
UNI

Paris, Mar 15 (IBNS): France on Saturday said it has decided to sanction Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code.

In a statement government, the French government said: "France has decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code. A joint decree of the Ministries of the Interior, and Economy and Finance was published today in the Official Gazette."

"We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree," it said.

France said it will always be by Indias side in the fight against terrorism.

India, meanwhile, welcomed the move taken by France.

We welcome the decision taken by France to sanction Masood Azhar, Chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based & UN proscribed terrorist organisation; and responsible for the Pulwama terrorist attack @Indian_Embassy https://t.co/qimxRid9Tl  Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) March 15, 2019

"We welcome the decision taken by France to sanction Masood Azhar, Chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based & UN proscribed terrorist organisation; and responsible for the Pulwama terrorist attack @Indian_Embassy," MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted.

France sanctions Masood Azhar:

Joint Press Release from The Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, The Ministry of Economy and Finance and The Ministry of the Interior.



Read the complete joint press release below aihttps://t.co/1izwMeCJlK  Alexandre Ziegler (@FranceinIndia) March 15, 2019

China on Wednesday again blocked a move to designate as global terrorist Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief and recent Pulwama attack mastermind Masood Azhar at the UN Security Council (UNSC) by placing the proposal on "technical hold", evoking strong disappointment by India which vowed to work to bring to book the perpetrators of terror attack to justice.

The proposal to blacklist Masood Azhar was moved by France, the UK and the US on Feb 27 on the heels of the Pulwama terror attack in Kashmir that killed about 40 Indian soldiers. Jaish has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Indianapolis-based Crossroads Education (CRE) announced March 13 it was awarded $750,000 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to expand its Learning Commons model at four Indianapolis schools: Matchbook Learning, Indianapolis Academy of Excellence, Paramount School of Excellence and Ignite Achievement Academy at Elder W. Diggs School  where CRE made its announcement.

The Learning Commons model, now in 11 Indianapolis schools, uses technology to teach core curriculum such as math. That technology includes Nexus, a virtual learning space that allows students to collaborate remotely. CRE has peer tutors as young as fourth grade who support teachers and students. The purpose is to promote a comfortable learning environment through technological innovations, as well as amenities such as whiteboard walls and touchscreens.

We see massive growth in things you dont often associate with school, Kevin Berkopes, founder and CEO of CRE, said of schools his organization has partnered with. You see things like joy. You see things like young people teaching each other. But we also see them learning more math and literacy because teaching is the best way to learn something.

Shy-Quon Ely, a co-founder of Ignite Achievement Academy, called the Learning Commons model a social learning project.

We like to say that when one person teaches, two people learn, he said. You bring that social element into school and it becomes less about work and more about collaboration and sharing ideas.

Ely and Berkopes, along with Brandon Brown, CEO of The Mind Trust, which advocates for charter and Innovation Network Schools, pointed to the various levels of leadership that they said make this work possible. Mayor Joe Hogsett, a Democrat, and former Mayor Greg Ballard, a Republican, were in attendance, as were state education officials and members of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity. Ignite Achievement Academy is significant to Kappa Alpha Psi as it is housed in the Elder W. Diggs School, named after a founding member of the fraternity.

This is a community effort, Ely said. It had to be this way. Its the only way.  Its our responsibility to fan and stoke those flames of curiosity [in students].

Hogsett said as the city creates more jobs and tries to nurture future entrepreneurs, it will need students like those who come from CRE programs.

Every day is a good day, he said. Some are better than others, and today is a very good day for the city of Indianapolis.

Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.

Shy-Quon Ely, a co-founder of Ignite Achievement Academy at Elder W. Diggs School, said his schools partnership with Crossroads Education will bring a social element to learning. (Photo/Tyler Fenwick)
Project Manager, Belgrade

Organization: UNDP - United Nations Development Programme

Country: Serbia

City: Belgrade, Serbia

Office: UNDP Belgrade

Closing date: Wednesday, 27 March 2019

Job ID: 21998

Practice Area - Job Family: Democratic GovernancePeace Building

Vacancy End Date: (Midnight New York, USA)

27/03/2019

Duty Station: Belgrade, Republic of Serbia

Education & Work Experience: G-Bachelors Level Degree - 9 year(s) experience, I-Masters Level Degree - 7 year(s) experience

Languages

Required:

Desired:

English

Grade: P4

Vacancy Type: FTA International

Posting Type: External

Bureau: Europe & the CIS

Contract Duration: 1 Year with possibility for extension

Qualified women and members of minorities are strongly encouraged to apply. UNDP is a non-smoking work environment.

Background

The South Eastern and Eastern Europe Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC) [1] is a joint initiative of the UNDP and the Regional Cooperation Council funded by the European Union, Norway, USA, the Governments of Germany and France and the Swedish Armed Forces. SEESAC is an integral part of UNDPs work in Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (ECIS) and has, since 2002, focused primarily to strengthen the capacities of national and regional stakeholders to control and reduce the proliferation and misuse of small arms and light weapons, and thus contributed to enhanced stability, security and development in South Eastern and Eastern Europe [2]. SEESAC also works closely with national Ministries to mainstream gender equality in the security sector. SEESAC operates throughout South Eastern Europe (SEE), managing activities in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo (UNSCR 1244), the Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Support has expanded beyond SEE to include Belarus and Ukraine and increasingly inter-regional support.

The overall objective of the project is to contribute to international peace and security by combatting the threat posed by the widespread accumulation and illicit trafficking in small arms and light weapons (SALW) and their ammunition in and from SEE. SEESAC follows a holistic approach to SALW control, focused on: facilitation of strategic and operational regional cooperation, supporting policy development and capacity enhancement of institutions, awareness-raising and SALW collection campaigns, stockpile management, surplus reduction and improved marking and tracing capabilities, as well as improved arms exports control.
Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Cloudy this morning with showers during the afternoon. High 62F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, with mostly cloudy skies after midnight. Low 61F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
When Ashley Brown was growing up, she would tell her mother she wanted to be the first Black something. She wasnt exactly sure what, but something. Now, at 37 years old, Brown is just that: She became Indianapolis first African-American female chief meteorologist when she joined WISH-TV in November 2018.

Brown said she didnt think about it at first, and it wasnt until people told her later that she realized the milestone she accomplished. Like many African-American firsts, Brown registered her feat after seeing there werent any African-American females in her position to look up to.

[Im] proud, she said. I hope that theres some little girls out there watching TV and see someone who looks like them.

Thats probably something Brown will have to get used to now: Minority girls looking for high achievers who made it through the obstacles, especially if theyre interested in broadcast news or meteorology, will almost have to come across Brown. Last month, Turning Point Schools invited Brown for a surprise award because eighth-grade students who visited WISH-TV in January wanted to acknowledge her as a trailblazer.

[I hope] she sees that its possible because its what I do for living, Brown said of girls who may be looking up to her now. Its a great feeling.

Browns love for the weather began when she was a child. She took Polaroid pictures of the clouds and would name the different types of cloud formations to her mother, Glynnus Carey. Carey remembered Brown getting exciting about the weather, and shed have to tell her daughter, Ashley, I have no idea what a cumulous cloud is. (For the record, cumulous clouds are those puffy clouds that look rounded at the top.)

Carey described her daughter as quiet and goal-oriented as a child. Brown went to get her first job at the McDonalds on 21st Street and Shadeland Avenue when she was 14 years old, and you would have thought she was running a corporate office, Carey said. Now, all these years later, Carey said Brown becoming the first African-American female chief meteorologist in Indianapolis has excited me to my soul.

Sometimes it doesnt hit me until they do something nice, she said of the acknowledgements Brown gets. Then I realize, oh my God, shes the first. Shes the first. I get excited.  I just saw something in her, a push. Part of me isnt surprised because Ashley was always a go-getter. Nothing stopped her.

Brown, who graduated from North Central High School and studied meteorology at Ball State University, has seen her career take her across the country. She got her first full-time weather job at KSEQ in Palm Springs, California, where she worked for about seven years. Her most recent job before WISH-TV was at WLWT in Cincinnati. In Indianapolis, Brown has worked as a DJ at Radio One and in the weather departments at WXIN and WRTV.

Despite not having an African-American female chief meteorologist to look up to when she was trying to make it in TV, Brown said she found mentors in Steve Jefferson, a reporter at WTHR, and Brian Wilkes, longtime chief meteorologist at FOX59.

Browns first TV internship was with Wilkes, who she said taught her more about meteorology and how to apply that knowledge to a broadcast. Wilkes remembered helping Brown make her first weather tapes and said then he knew she had it.

Thats the biggest part about being in this business, Wilkes said. In this job you have to earn it, and she worked really hard as an intern.

Brown, now home in Indianapolis with an official first next to her name, has earned it. But with success comes popularity, and Brown has felt the weight of being a weather authority. She said she gets calls every day from family and friends asking what the weather will be like. One of the most culprits: her mother.

Yes, Im guilty, Carey confirmed.

Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.

Ashley Brown of WISH-TV is Indianapolis first African-American female chief meteorologist. (Photo provided)
WARSAW, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Poland will continue advocating for a permanent U.S. military base for a further year, Foreign Affairs Minister Jacek Czaputowicz said on Thursday in a foreign policy address.

"Poland's aspiration to become the core of NATO and U.S. military presence in the region is realistic," Czaputowicz told the Sejm (lower house of parliament) on Thursday in the presence of the Polish president and the prime minister.

"Strengthening the NATO military presence on the eastern flank of the North Atlantic Alliance, especially including military cooperation between Poland and the U.S., remains our priority," Czaputowicz said.

Currently, Poland hosts up to 4,500 U.S. troops: a rotational U.S. brigade of about 3,500 men near the German border; and a U.S.-led multinational group of 1,000 soldiers from the UK, Croatia and Romania, based in the north-east.

Poland has been lobbying for a permanent U.S. military base on Polish soil, even offering to pay 2 billion U.S. dollars in costs.

On Wednesday, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy John Rood met with Polish defense officials in Warsaw to discuss the issue of the base and troop deployment. However, the talks were not likely to result in the deployment of a permanent U.S. military base this year, Pawel Soloch, head of the Polish National Security Bureau, told the Polish portal onet.pl on Wednesday.

"This is more of a longer-term commitment to the type of presence that's already in Poland, this is not a new U.S. base as some people think," a source close to the negotiations between the Pentagon and Poland told the U.S. portal Defense One.

In his speech in Parliament on Thursday, Czaputowicz said that the Ministry of Defense's work on establishing a permanent U.S. base of strategic importance will continue for a further year.

Curtis Scaparotti, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe, also said Wednesday that "a mix" of permanent and rotational forces would be ideal in Poland, according to Defense One.

"I am perfectly content with the large forces that are rotating today," Scaparrotti told the Armed Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday.

But Scaparotti also said there was a role for a permanent headquarters, which would manage the flow of rotational troops and be effective at establishing relationships with allies in the region.
New Zealand mosque attacks: Politicians and media have blood on their hands

By Siema Iqbal

March 15, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - We woke to news of at least 49 Muslims murdered in New Zealand by far-right fanatics.

We watched - or consciously avoided watching - in horror the live-streamed footage of Muslims being gunned down while praying. How depraved has society become when social media is used to lionise massacres?

I had to tell my children about the attack. I told them not to watch the videos or to be afraid of being who they are: Muslims.

Spreading hatred

Today, the media and politicians like American president Donald Trump and former British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, have condemned the attacks. The same media and the same politicians have helped spread hatred against Muslims and Islam. They have blood on their hands.

This terrible mass murder was committed on the other side of the world supposedly in the name of "Europe". There are lessons for us here in Britain, just as there are across the world.

This hatred is institutional. We knew Islamophobia was endemic in the Conservative party, but we turned a blind eye. Not anymore.

The perpetrator was Australian.



This senator is Australian.



He has blood on his hands .



Call out the bigotry and hold people responsible.



Enough is enough.#Christchurch pic.twitter.com/E1zK2VJ0G9  Siema Iqbal (@siemaiqbal) March 15, 2019

Do not dare say that Islamophobia does not exist. The media and politicians must be held to account.

If we allow fanatics to turn up outside mosques with their banners of hate, and give airtime and social media platforms to the likes of Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins, this is what happens.

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If we continue to allow think-tanks to provide ammunition to parliamentarians and far-right leaders under the guise of credible reports, this is what happens.

Worldwide bigotry

This type of hatred is not confined to any country, but is widespread across the world.

Muslims are imprisoned in China; there are attacks on Muslims by Hindu nationalists in India; Rohingya Muslims are being ethnically cleansed in Myanmar. All of this is done in the name of tackling extremism, while ignoring the bigotry all around us.

Politicians might speak of their concern for the victims and families, but on a daily basis, many people are targeted by the far-right, as politicians have enabled a destructive discourse.

Its time to admit that the UKs Prevent strategy is not working. The war on terror has only fuelled hatred of Muslims in the general population, and distrust of the state among Muslim communities.

In 2013, the UK nearly suffered a similar attack against multiple mosques. Mosque security should be a major priority going forward.

Standing strong

Although Facebook was quick to remove a graphic video of the Christchurch attack, why was no action taken in response to previous posts threatening violence against Muslims?

How many more innocent people have to die before governments take a long, hard look at their role in creating this mess?

While many far-right extremists are celebrating the New Zealand attack, as a Muslim, I can promise you this: The more you attack us, the stronger and more united Muslims will become.

Today, the mosques will be packed - more than ever before - as prayers are offered for those killed. Muslims will never be afraid of bowing down to Allah, and nothing will stop us from doing so.

Siema Iqbal is a mother, a doctor and a British Muslim opinion writer based in Manchester. She is currently a partner and trainer at a North Manchester GP practice. She enjoys writing and can often be found public speaking and raising money and awareness for charities both in the UK and abroad.

This article was originally published by " MEE " -
Theatregoers may need to brace themselves for the Theatre Projects Manitoba production Dragonfly.

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Theatregoers may need to brace themselves for the Theatre Projects Manitoba production Dragonfly.

Its a "gender autobiography" of Winnipeg artist Lara Rae, told in poetic dialogue by two actors  played by Eric Blais and Sarah Constible  identically dressed in austere, gender-neutral white and both playing aspects of the same character.

The possibility of artsy pretentiousness is a potential chasm into which the production threatens to topple early. But as directed by Ardith Boxall, the show instead proves to be funny, gritty, tragic and, crucially, relatable.

This is a brave new work. Mostly.

Dragonfly reflects the life of Rae, born Alan Rae in Glasgow, and by the age of two questioning the rightness of her gender. Her early penchant for indoor bookishness yielded the loaded observation that Al was "a boy on the outside, but not an outside boy."

Sarah Constible and Eric Blais play Lara Rae.

Indeed. Raes abundant childhood peccadilloes transformed into full-blown crises by the time she landed with her family in Toronto, including an arrest for dealing pot while in high school.

Comedy came calling, since Raes life supplied no end of raw material. But as her star rose in Torontos comedy scene in the 1980s, so too did her penchant for misadventure. In particular, Dragonfly recounts Raes rape at the hands of an unnamed Toronto celebrity referred to only as "my rapist." (The assailant employed the Bill Cosby tactic of drugging his victims into unconsciousness.) Raes attempt to report the crime to the Toronto police simply facilitated a different kind of attack by officials unwilling to believe a person they all-too-quickly pegged as a lowlife.

The assault occurred at the dawn of the AIDS crisis and that spawns added anxiety for Rae, culminating in a substance-abuse problem that lasted for years, but also paved the way for Rae to finally address the need for gender reassignment at the age of 50.

It aint Its a Wonderful Life. But it is an important slice of cultural history in its description of one persons triumphant battle with gender dysphoria. Its a work with the power to evoke empathy from the most straitlaced of straights.

A section in the second act is a bit confusing relating to the business of Rae marrying and fathering a child. It is the one significant moment in the piece when the warts-and-all confessional drifts into a narrative fog. One assumes the details were kept vague in deference to the privacy of Raes ex-wife and daughter, but it may also serve to let the playwright off the hook. Tangled with a story that may or may not be tangential about a womans suicide... its a problem area.

But its not the issue with the two-person cast. Given a mostly bare theatre stage and minimal set fixtures, the possibility exists for Sprockets-level affectation. But even with a script that calls on quicksilver changes in characters, Constible and Blais find and deliver the poignant humanity of it all.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing

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Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday.
HEJERE, Ethiopia - Analysis of the flight recorders of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane has begun, the airline said Friday, and The New York Times reported that the pilot requested permission "in a panicky voice" to return shortly after takeoff as the plane dipped up and down and appeared to gain startling speed.

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UPDATES to add Iran; graphic highlights countries that have grounded Boeing 737 Max class airplanes in response to fatal crash in Ethiopia; 3c x 3 1/2 inches; 146 mm x 88 mm;

HEJERE, Ethiopia - Analysis of the flight recorders of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane has begun, the airline said Friday, and The New York Times reported that the pilot requested permission "in a panicky voice" to return shortly after takeoff as the plane dipped up and down and appeared to gain startling speed.

President Donald Trump in a phone call with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed praised the state-owned airline "as a strong institution" and affirmed U.S. support after Sunday's plane crash killed 157 people, Abiy's office said. The two shared condolences in a rare public outreach by Trump to an African leader.

Forensic DNA work began in identifying remains, and Muslim families held prayers for the dead, anxious to have something to bury as soon as possible. The dead came from 35 countries.

The New York Times report cited "a person who reviewed air traffic communications" from the flight as saying controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by hundreds of feet.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return to the Addis Ababa airport. But the plane crashed minutes later.

French authorities now have the plane's flight data and voice recorders for analysis. They have said it was unclear whether data could be retrieved. An Ethiopian delegation led by its chief accident investigator was in Paris.

A photograph of a Chinese crash victim is placed next to incense and an offering of fruit, as relatives mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

The United States and many other countries have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 as the U.S.-based company faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said regulators had new data from satellite-based tracking that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610, which crashed off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

Both planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport.

Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step, while reiterating "full confidence" in their safety. Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jet's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether the software automatically pushed the plane's nose down repeatedly, and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem. Ethiopian Airlines says its pilots received special training on the software.

At the rural crash site outside Addis Ababa, searchers picked through the debris. Members of Israel's ZAKA emergency response team were granted access for forensic work.

"The next steps will take some time," Canada's ambassador to Ethiopia, Antione Chevrier, told The Associated Press, saying discussions on repatriating victims' remains would begin once the identification process begins to yield results. Canada lost 18 people.

One relative collected soil in a plastic bag, perhaps for lack of anything else .

After prayers for the dead at a mosque in Addis Ababa, impatience flashed over the lack of information.

"We need the remains of our children," said Ibrahim Mohammed from Kenya. "And they are saying that it can take six months or more."

"We came here for nothing," said Nejmedin Gazi, a Yemeni brother of a victim. "They told us the bodies were small pieces, more than 5,000 pieces, 5,000 to 10,000 pieces."

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Another Kenyan citizen, Pauline Gathu, lost a brother. Thirty-two Kenyans were killed in all.

"We were expecting that we will have our body well-kept but we are amazed to hear that there is nothing, totally nothing," she said. "And people are waiting for us to give them reports of what we have found but we don't have words, we don't know what to do."

___

Meseret reported from Addis Ababa. Associated Press writers Isabel DeBre in Jerusalem, Dave Koenig in Houston and Tom Krisher in Detroit and video journalists Josphat Kasire and Desmond Tiro contributed.

___

Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa
BRUSSELS - World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent Islamophobia.

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This article was published 15/3/2019 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Police attempt to move people away from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Many people were killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Friday, a witness said. Police have not yet described the scale of the shooting but urged people in central Christchurch to stay indoors. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

BRUSSELS - World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent Islamophobia.

In a tweet, U.S. President Donald Trump sent "warmest sympathy and best wishes" to the people of New Zealand.

He wrote that "49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the attacks the "latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia."

New Zealand police said at least 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city of Christchurch. More than 20 were seriously wounded in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a "terrorist attack."

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car. Two other people were being held in custody and police were trying to determine how they might be involved.

People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Many people were killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Friday, a witness said. Police have not yet described the scale of the shooting but urged people in central Christchurch to stay indoors. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister, Erdogan said the Islamophobia that motivated the attacks "has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer."

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed those sentiments.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9-11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim," he tweeted.

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement that the attack "served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia."

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealand's head of state, said in a message to the country she was "deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch" and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

"At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders," she said in her message.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack "with horror and profound sadness."

A demonstrator holds a banner from multi-faith group 'Turn to Love' during a vigil at New Zealand House in London, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called "one of New Zealand's darkest days," as authorities detained four people and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned attack. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

"The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life," he wrote.

In France, home to western Europe's largest Muslim community, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner ordered regional authorities to bolster security at mosques as a precaution.

London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the city's Metropolitan Police force would be visible outside mosques.

"London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack," he said. "London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy."

Mayor Bill de Blasio said New York City is providing extra security for Muslim community centres and mosques. He said he wants the city's Muslims to know that New Yorkers "truly embrace" them and "have their backs."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians are appalled by the attack and said they remember all too well the sorrow after a Canadian man shot dead six Muslim men in a Quebec mosque in 2017.

"Far too often, Muslims suffer unimaginable loss and pain in the places where they should feel safest," Trudeau said in a statement. "To move forward as a world, we need to recognize diversity as a source of strength, and not a threat."

Indonesia's President Joko Widodo condemned the attacks, in which an Indonesian father and son were among those wounded. Indonesian Muslim leaders expressed anger at the shooting rampage while urging Muslims to show restraint.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said bigotry in Western countries contributed to the attacks on Muslims in New Zealand. In a Friday tweet, he also criticized the West for "defending demonization of Muslims as 'freedom of expression.'"

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Afghanistan's Taliban movement  Islamic militants who carry out near-daily attacks on Afghan security forces  also condemned the shooting rampage, calling it an "unforgivable crime."

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yusuf called on the New Zealand government to investigate "the root cause of such terrorism and hand a hefty punishment to the attackers."

Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Western countries, condemned the "policy of hatred that the United States is feeding around the world instead of prevailing religious values that call for forgiveness."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks a "brazen act of terror." His office said on Twitter that Israel mourns the murder of innocent worshippers, condemns the assault and sends its condolences to bereaved families.

Jordan's King Abdullah II tweeted that "the heinous massacre against Muslims praying in peace in New Zealand is an appalling terrorist crime. It unites us against extremism, hatred and terrorism, which knows no religion." Jordan's Foreign Ministry confirmed that one Jordanian was killed and five wounded in the attack.

A telegram of condolences sent by the Vatican on behalf of Pope Francis said he was "deeply saddened to learn of the injury and loss of life" caused by the "senseless acts of violence" in Christchurch. He assured all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his "heartfelt solidarity."
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This article was published 14/3/2019 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

People were asked to bring roses.

More than 50 gathered Thursday night at Bonnycastle Dog Park on the bank of the Assiniboine River in remembrance of Danielle Moore, the 24-year-old Winnipeg resident killed in Sundays Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash.

FACEBOOK Danielle Moore, 24, died Sunday when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed on the way from Addis Ababa, Ethiopa's capital, to Nairobi, Kenya.

Some brought roses to the vigil; others chrysanthemums.

Moores former boyfriend, Colby Deighton, brought a bouquet of lilies and his guitar.

Many of Moores friends have spoken to media about their loss, but Thursday was the first time Deighton, 26, had made his grief public.

He was composed, a green bow tie Moore had given him peeking out from his natural-fibre hoodie. Deighton earns his living in construction, but he said, like Moore, he is an environmentalist at heart.

"I want her to be remembered in the actions people take, to make themselves better people, to grow and to take on issues that are important to them," he said.

The couple had been together for four years, and just called a hiatus in their relationship. Deighton was staying behind in Winnipeg while Moore planned to go to Ottawa for school, after her trip overseas.

He was sitting on his couch Sunday morning when a friend contacted him through Facebook with word of the crash.

He didnt believe it at first. Then he looked up Flight 302, saw the list of 35 countries linked to the passengers. The crash killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians.

"All those nationalities, I just knew it was her flight," he said.

A call to her parents confirmed his fears.

"You know you want your sons to meet girls who are kind. Danielle was like a daughter. She had that big beautiful smile," said Deightons mother, Lora Meseman, as mourners gathered in the park.

"She was like a daughter. She touched a lot of people. And you know, when she moved here, she said she thought it would be hard to meet people, but clearly it was not. She made friends so easily. Everybody instantly loved her."

Moore, from Toronto, was a grad from Dalhousie University in Halifax. She had worked for charities and non-governmental organizations in Winnipeg. Thursdays gathering was expected to be mirrored at the shores of rivers, oceans and lakes and backyards across Canada and around the world at dusk. A global call for a mega-vigil went out from Danielles friends on Facebook, to 25 locations in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, England and Mexico. All were locations connected to her through friends or travel.

"Danielle Moore was one the most incredible people many of us have ever met," the memorial post read.

Participants were asked to light candles, take photos if they could and sacred stones or special objects that reminded them of Moore.

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Media were asked to leave the Winnipeg gathering, but according to Facebook, the ritual was to begin with a minute of silence for Moore and her fellow crash victims at each location.

One person per gathering was asked to read Mary Olivers poem When Death Comes. Each gathering was asked to create a nature-based tribute to Moore and one by one to place a stone, or rose  white for grief, yellow for friendship  in whatever shape felt appropriate.

"The nature art should just be biodegradable items," the post read.

The gatherings were to conclude with songs, with the traditional Down to the River to Pray among the suggestions.

Moore was remembered as a devoted environmentalist and human rights activist, who had been en route to Nairobi to take part in the prestigious United Nations Environment Assembly at the time of the crash.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca
Provincial Education Minister Kelvin Goertzen is dismissing claims he inappropriately singled out Manitobas highest-paid superintendent over her salary, as the NDP seeks a committee investigation.

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Provincial Education Minister Kelvin Goertzen is dismissing claims he inappropriately singled out Manitobas highest-paid superintendent over her salary, as the NDP seeks a committee investigation.

The Winnipeg School Division is demanding an apology from Goertzen, who deflected a question about closing an educational resource library Thursday by saying in the legislature WSD teachers instead "should be concerned about" how much their top public servant makes.

Education Minister Kelvin Goertzen deflected a question about closing an educational resource library Thursday by saying in the legislature WSD teachers instead should be concerned about how much their top public servant makes. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Chief Superintendent Pauline Clarke made $266,040 in the 2016-17 school year.

Goertzen had falsely claimed that was she "almost makes as much as the prime minister," whose salary is $347,400.

The WSD demanded an apology Friday morning. Trustee Lisa Naylor, who chairs the personnel committee, said it was "unprecedented" to have a minister launch "a personal attack on a public servant" who did not seek public office.

"Its completely unacceptable," she said.

Goertzen told reporters Friday he was simply discussing school-division costs, and noted that media have also questioned whether superintendents are overpaid.

"I've raised issues around administrative costs around the board," he said.

WSD also claimed in a news release that the superintendent "cannot speak in their own defence," but later clarified it would be unconventional for Clarke to speak out.

The school board has asked Speaker Myrna Driedger to have Goertzen apologize. On Friday, NDP MLA Matt Wiebe also sought an apology in the legislature, because Clarke could not defend herself in the house.

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Goertzen dismissed that claim, instead accusing the NDP of "making a mockery of the legislature" with multiple points of privilege that stalled Friday proceedings.

Wiebe asked Driedger to have a committee study the issue; the Speaker will consider that request and report back to the Legislature, possibly next week.

Board chair Chris Broughton noted on Twitter that Clarke is the only female superintendent, though she is also the highest-paid one on the province.

Naylor would not say whether she believes Clarkes gender motivated Goertzen, and said Clarkes salary is commensurate to someone with her experience, in running a school board much larger than others in the city.

All six of Winnipegs school boards have raised their superintendents salaries over the past five years, most by roughly 10 per cent. In 2012, Clarkes salary was on-par with her colleague leading the Louis Riel School Division. Both divisions have raised their superintendents' salaries; Clarke's compensation is now $38,700 higher than her LRSD counterpart.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
A methamphetamine addict who attacked an unsuspecting teen in a downtown bus shelter before stealing two cars and leading police on a chase through the city is expected to be sentenced next month in Winnipegs provincial court.

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This article was published 14/3/2019 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A methamphetamine addict who attacked an unsuspecting teen in a downtown bus shelter before stealing two cars and leading police on a chase through the city is expected to be sentenced next month in Winnipegs provincial court.

Joshua Zachary Snakeskin (Facebook)

Joshua Zachary Snakeskin was intoxicated and paranoid on Jan. 23, 2018, when he suddenly unleashed violence on a University of Manitoba student who had recently arrived in Canada from India.

Snakeskin, 27, pleaded guilty in front of provincial court Judge Anne Krahn this week, and is awaiting his sentencing hearing, expected to be set near the end of April.

Snakeskin, who is from Alberta, had been released from federal prison just four days before the attack. Hed been kicked out of Portage Place shopping centre and went into a nearby bus shelter.

"Mr. Snakeskin waited until he and (the victim) were the only individuals present in that bus shelter, at which point, entirely without provocation, he assaulted (the victim) by punching him in the face," Crown attorney Bryton Moen said in court after Snakeskin pleaded guilty March 12 to several charges, including aggravated assault, robbery and theft of a motor vehicle.

Snakeskin admitted he caused severe facial injuries and fractures when he punched the 17-year-old student, knocked him to the ground, and continued to punch and kick him five or six times before stomping on his face.

Bystanders witnessed part of the attack, which was also captured on surveillance video. Snakeskin fled the scene.

The next day, Snakeskin was in the parking lot of Seven Oaks General Hospital when he zeroed in on a vehicle pulling into the lot. He opened the vehicle's drivers-side door, punched the man in the face, threw him to the ground and stole the car.

Snakeskin drove to Gimli, where he stole a womans unlocked truck and more than $100 in gas, then drove back to Winnipeg, where police caught up with him the night of Jan. 24.

The Winnipeg Police Services Air-1 helicopter tracked the stolen truck. Police on the ground put "stop stick" tire-deflation devices in Snakeskins path, but he kept driving despite his shredded tires, Moen told court.

The aftermath of the high-speed chase that ended between Sackville Street and Albany Street on Portage Avenue. (Danton Unger photo)

Snakeskin was speeding for more than 20 minutes and 15 kilometres, and hit another car at Selkirk Avenue and Salter Street. Eventually, he got stuck in traffic on Portage Avenue, and police cruisers boxed him in.

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Whether Snakeskin was high on meth at the time wasnt made clear in court as he pleaded guilty.

His parole records show he was addicted to the street drug and had been serving time for crimes he committed while coming off a five-day meth binge. He went on the run after police tried to question him about a robbery and was later convicted in 2016 for dangerous driving, thefts and weapons offences, for which he was sentenced to more than two years in prison.

A Parole Board of Canada report issued before his release noted Snakeskin committed crime to feed his meth addiction and cautioned he didnt have a strong release plan and would need to find ways to manage his stress and frustration.

"You were stealing to support yourself and your drug use; you were living out of a truck and couch surfing from time to time. Your impulsivity and recklessness put the lives of others at risk as you drove at high speeds to evade capture by the police," the parole board wrote of Snakeskins prior crimes.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay
The limit for actions in small claims court would rise to $15,000 and provincial court judges would be required to retire at age 75 under legislation introduced by the Progressive Conservative government Thursday.

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The limit for actions in small claims court would rise to $15,000 and provincial court judges would be required to retire at age 75 under legislation introduced by the Progressive Conservative government Thursday.

Justice Minister Cliff Cullen said the proposed Courts Modernization Act would also require the Court of Queen's Bench and Court of Appeal to file annual reports  as is now done by the Provincial Court of Manitoba.

The bill would also streamline the appointment process for provincial court judges, masters and judicial justices of the peace.

It would establish a judicial appointment committee to receive applications for those seeking to become provincial judges. The committee "must make efforts to ensure that the pool of candidates reflects the diversity of Manitoba," according to the bill.

Cullen said increasing the small claims limit would help courts focus on more serious matters, while allowing more Manitobans to deal with their small claims quickly and at less cost.

"Hopefully, they have quicker access to that particular system as opposed to waiting, going through another court," he said after introducing the bill.

The proposed change to small claims is based on the findings of the Manitoba Law Reform Commission's February 2017 report, which said Manitoba's monetary limit was among the lowest in the country.

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With the new mandatory retirement age, provincial judges will be bound by the same rule that applies to Court of Appeal and Queen's Bench justices, Cullen said. He said no Manitoba provincial judge is currently over the age of 75.

The new retirement age provision would also apply to masters of the Court of Queen's Bench.

The government said it consulted with the chief judge of Manitoba's provincial court and the chief justices of the province's superior courts before developing the proposed changes.

Another new measure would allow judges with both Court of Queen's Bench and the Court of Appeal to block a proceeding by a "vexatious litigant" without having the province's attorney general sign off on the decision.

"We have a number of people who keep coming back (to court) in a lot of cases for the same litigation, same court process," the minister said. "So this gives the opportunity for judges to actually decide if this is a vexatious litigation. They have the opportunity to basically throw that particular case out of court."

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca
The new government-appointed chairman of Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries once sued a casino the Crown corporation supervises for wrongful dismissal, saying he felt disrespected, humiliated and intimidated while working there.

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The new government-appointed chairman of Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries once sued a casino the Crown corporation supervises for wrongful dismissal, saying he felt "disrespected, humiliated and intimidated" while working there.

The appointment of Randy Williams, who succeeded Polly Craik as MLLs chair last month, raises questions about whether the new board chairmans history with the casino might be perceived as a conflict.

Randy Williams succeeded Polly Craik as MLLs chair last month.

Williams left a longtime career with Manitoba Lotteries Corp, a forerunner to MLL, to accept a senior management position with South Beach Casino in Scanterbury in September 2010.

According to an amended statement of claim filed in Court of Queens Bench in December, 2011, Williams said he accepted the position of vice-president at South Beach with the understanding that he would be employed a minimum of three years with a starting salary of $160,000.

He said he was recruited on the understanding he would succeed the companys chief executive officer, Faysal Tur, when Tur retired  a statement the casino denied in a statement of defence.

In his statement of claim, Williams said he was given to believe he would be in charge of all gaming and casino-related activities at South Beach, but the company changed its reporting structure when he got there so that South Beach employees no longer answered to him. He said the casino removed all duties and responsibilities from him except for the role of dealing with governmental agencies.

Williams said his employment was terminated in July 2011 "without just cause," an allegation denied by the company in its statement of defence. By then, the work environment at South Beach "had become poisonous," and Williams said he felt "disrespected, humiliated and intimidated." He said in his lawsuit that his professional reputation had been "compromised," which prevented him from finding a new job in the Manitoba gaming industry.

The lawsuit was settled out of court, according to a document filed with Court of Queens Bench in January 2014.

Williams was appointed to the MLL board in November and was elevated to chairman when the Pallister government terminated Craik from the position a few months before her term was set to expire.

In a lawsuit against South Beach Casino, Randy Williams said his employment was terminated in July 2011 without just cause and his reputation had been compromised. (Wayne Gloawacki / Winnipeg Free Press files)

According to MLLs 2017-18 annual report, the Crown corporation "maintains conduct and management authority over First Nations casinos" and supplies gaming equipment to South Beach.

The casino, which began operations in 2005, is located in Brokenhead Ojibway Nation and owned by Brokenhead and six other First Nations.

Repeated attempts to interview Crown Services Minister Colleen Mayer were turned down. In a statement, she said Williams brings "a wealth of experience" to his role as MLL chair.

"Given that this matter was resolved, we have no concerns regarding his continued place on the board going forward," Mayer said. "We expect all board members of our Crown corporations to recuse themselves on all matters where they may have a real or perceived conflict of interest."

Williams could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for Mayer said in an email, "Mr. Williams will not be commenting at this time on this matter."

South Beach Casino opened in 2005 in Brokenhead Ojibway Nation on Highway 59. (Joe Bryska / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Tur, who remains at the helm of South Beach Casino, could not be reached for comment.

A spokeswoman for South Beach said the casino deals with MLL management and "does not have any ongoing relationship" with board members. "South Beach will support whomever the government chooses to appoint to any of the board positions," she said.

Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said, regardless of Williams qualifications, "its a little odd" that he would have been appointed to the MLL board, given his history with South Beach.

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"I dont think its a reflection of his character in any way. But there are lots of people who could probably fill that position. And if youre going to find a chair of Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries, it probably should be somebody who hasnt sued a casino over employment issues in the past."

However, an expert in corporate and not-for-profit governance, said he doesnt believe Williams is in a conflict of interest.

Richard Powers, an associate professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, noted that the lawsuit occurred several years ago. And, as one member of a sizable board, Williams has limited power to use his position against the casino even if he wanted to.

"Hed have to corral nine or 10 other board members if he wanted to try to get back at them or do something to limit their mission. I just dont think its realistic," he said.

Powers, in town to moderate a U of M forum on business ethics, said Williams was likely chosen because of his experience and the skills he brings to the role.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca
An Apology for a Different Plane Crash, 30 Years Later

By Medea Benjamin

March 15, 2019 " Information Clearing House " The tragic Ethiopian Airline plane crash recalls another passenger plane crash some 30 years ago. The latter, however, was not due to a mechanical malfunction but to U.S. missiles. And while very few Americans remember this incident, it still weighs heavy on the hearts of many Iraniansas we discovered on our recent trip there.

The tragic downing of the commercial passenger airline, Iran Air Flight 655, happened on July 3, 1988. A U.S. Navy ship called the Vincennes was stationed in the Persian Gulf to protect oil trade routes. The plane had just taken off from nearby Bandar Abbas International Airport in southern Iran when U.S. personnel on the warship fired two surface-to-air missiles. The flight was still in Iranian airspace, climbing on its regularly scheduled flight to Dubai, when it was hit. The plane disintegrated immediately and crashed into the water, killing all 290 onboard274 passengers and 16 crew members.

According to the U.S. government, this was an accident: the crew thought the Iranian Airbus A300 was an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter jet.

Most Iranians, however, believe it was a deliberate war crime. Earlier that day, the same U.S. ship had sunk two Iranian gunboats in Iranian waters and damaged a third.

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The Iranian belief that the passenger plane was attacked on purpose was reinforced when the U.S. government made a series of inaccurate claims. One claim was that the plane was not on a normal flight path but was diving toward the ship; the truth is that the plane was climbing, and was on its correct path. Another was that the planes identification transponder was not working or had been altered; the truth is that the plane had actually been emitting, by radio, the standard commercial identifying data.

Months before the plane was shot down, air traffic controllers and the crews of other warships in the Persian Gulf had been warning that poorly trained U.S. crews, especially the gung-ho captain and crew of the Vincennes (or Robocruiser, as other crews had nicknamed it), were constantly misidentifying civilian aircraft over the Persian Gulf, making this horrific incident entirely predictable.

The U.S. Navy added insult to injury when, two years later, it awarded combat medals to the warships captain and crewnever even mentioning the downing of the plane. The town of Vincennes, Indiana, for which the ship was named, even launched a fundraising campaign for a monument to honor the ship and its crew.

Particularly callous was a statement by then Vice-President George H.W. Bush, who was campaigning for president at the time. I will never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, he insisted, I dont care what the facts are. Im not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.

While U.S. officials refused to accept culpability, in 1996 the Iranians took to the U.S. government to the International Court of Justice. With all the evidence against the Vincennes, the U.S. government agreed to a settlement, granting $213,000 per passenger to the victims families. But the government still refused to formally apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing.

While most Americans have no memory of this incident, in Iran the date of the deaths of 290 innocent people at the hands of the U.S. military is marked every year just as the 9/11 attack is remembered every year in the United States. To some Iranians, it is just one more example of the callousness of U.S. policy.

Thats why our peace delegation that visited Iran in early March decided to make a special gift to the Peace Museum in Tehran, a museum dedicated to ending war. It was a hand-crafted commemorative book crafted by one of our delegates, Barbara Briggs-Letson, who is an 85-year-old retired American nurse from San Francisco. It contained a letter of remorse, verses of poetry, the namesin Farsiof all those who lost their lives, and individual notes from the 28 members of our delegation.

The moving ceremony at the Peace Museum left all of us, Americans and Iranians, weeping. We made it clear that while our government wont apologize for its dirty deeds in Iranfrom overthrowing Irans democratically elected government in 1953 to shooting down a passenger plane in 1988 to unilaterally withdrawing from the nuclear agreement in 2017we, the people, will.

Medea Benjamin is an American political activist, best known for co-founding Code Pink.
Two new University of Manitoba policies make it crystal clear how employees should approach and disclose intimate relationships between themselves and students.

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Two new University of Manitoba policies make it crystal clear how employees should approach and disclose intimate relationships between themselves and students.

The policy changes come in the wake of multiple investigations, both internally and by police, that looked into allegations of inappropriate behaviour by faculty members.

The policies dont define repercussions for those who breach them.

U of M president David Barnard said in an interview Thursday anyone who breaches policies would be subject to different disciplinary measures depending on their roles at the school and their respective collective agreements.

"What happens in particular circumstances would depend on circumstances," Barnard said.

The university doesnt ban relationships, as other universities, such as Harvard, have done.

The policy states that intimate relationships between employees and students, or employees with power differentials, are "strongly discouraged and should be avoided."

Barnard said this model is in keeping with standards at other Canadian universities.

"We have some concerns that an outright ban could infringe on the legal rights of adults to enter into consensual relationships," he said.

"Our conversations are continuing and this will certainly be an ongoing area of focus as we address important questions with respect to these matters."

He said policies that guide intimate relationships between students and staff were always in place, but not written down.

"We received community feedback that there was need for more clarity. Not that the policies were new, just that we needed clarity regarding the rules around intimate relationships involving power differentials, particularly between employees and students," Barnard said.

JOHN WOODS / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Dr. David Barnard, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manitoba.

"So these guides were developed to provide practical information about boundaries and to eliminate confusion around intimate relationships."

Peter Eck, an associate professor in the department of food and human nutritional sciences, had complained about faculty members having romantic relationships with students while continuing to evaluate those students. He said his complaints, which started around 2011, fell on deaf ears.

Eck was pleased to see the new policies, titled "Relationships Between University Employees Involving Power Differentials" and "Relationships Between University Employees and Students," released this week. He called the documents have been "overdue for many, many years."

"When I sort of complained about the issue they were much more confused. So they could probably get away with doing nothing," Eck said of the U of M administration, who previously relied on conflict-of-interest policy to govern issues involving relationships.

"It was really written in a way where everything was open for interpretation. Now, nothing is open for interpretation."

Eck said he was fine with the policies not including entrenched penalties for employees who are found culpable of wrongdoing. He believes those incidents should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, not with blanket punishments.

The University of Manitoba Faculty Association said it was not able to comment on the new policies Thursday, because it had not reviewed them.

The U of M also launched an online course this week about sexual violence awareness. Barnard encouraged staff and students to complete the course, though it isnt mandatory. He finished the unit himself recently, and said it gave him valuable perspective.

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"I came away from it thinking one needs to be careful of old stereotypes and paradigms, and ways that we might have thought in the past. And to treat people carefully and with respect in all circumstances," Barnard said.

The new course and school policies come on the heels of high-profile departures from the university, including that of the director of the Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals.

In December, Peter Jones was placed on leave pending an internal investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and financial impropriety that date back a decade. So far, he has not returned.

Last year, Steve Kirby, a former U of M music professor, was charged with sexual assault, stemming from an alleged incident involving a former student.

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @_jessbu
Some wore black, and dozens carried placards  including one whose tiny frame seemed eclipsed by a metre-high sign cut and painted to look like a tombstone. It read: RIP to a dying planet.

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Some wore black, and dozens carried placards  including one whose tiny frame seemed eclipsed by a metre-high sign cut and painted to look like a tombstone. It read: RIP to a dying planet.

On Friday, a few hundred school-age students in Winnipeg to answer a call from 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg and join worldwide protests against government inaction on climate change.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Anna Milne-Karn, age seven, at the Manitoba Legislative Building.

Spread by social media accounts, Thunberg's call reverberated around the globe under a half-dozen hashtags, all related to climate change and global warming.

By the time the 1 p.m. rally got underway in Winnipeg, news reports estimated tens of thousands of students from 100 countries had rallied or marched in the streets.

In Winnipeg, where the rally took the form of a mock funeral for the planet, the Manitoba Legislative Building steps were crowded with youth.

Protesters' signs ranged from traditionally earnest slogans  People not Pipelines  to Miles Macdonell Collegiate student Courtney Tosh's riff on U.S. President Donald Trump's populist campaign slogan. Her stop sign-shaped placard read: Make the World Greta Again.

"I liked it, but I can't take credit for it," Tosh said modestly.

Youth lined the legislature's stone steps, using a microphone to read speeches, poems and rally the crowd with chants. A handful of MLAs followed the students to the mike to laud their efforts.

"We are motivated not just by the will to survive, but by the will to live a normal life," Miya Wastastout, 12, a Grade 7 student at Ecole River Heights, called out.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A few hundred school-age students in Winnipeg answered a call from 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg to join worldwide protests against government inaction on climate change.

"Our planet is dying, and I thought if I came here, it would make a difference," College Louis Riel Grade 10 student Nadia Bedard said "I read somewhere that if we keep on doing what were doing, well have more garbage in the oceans than fish."

The 15-year-old carried a handmade sign illustrated with a pair of feet standing firmly on green earth, reading: What I stand for is what I stand on.

Bedard and school pal Nastassja Loisselle, 15  who carried a sign with a bright yellow drawing of Big Bird and a slogan that read: I speak for the trees  said they're inspired by the Swedish teen.

Thunberg started protests at the Swedish parliament last August, and they picked up urgency in November following a dire report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It warned world leaders have just 11 years to come to grips with climate change if the world is to avoid a natural disaster.

The day before the latest student strike, the Swedish teen tweeted: "Tomorrow we strike school for the climate in 1,769 places in 112 countries around the world. And counting."

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MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Sophie Campbell, four, gets help with her sign from her mom, Lynn Campbell, while her little sister, Lucy Campbell, one, watches the action.

Students in Winnipeg who are among Thunberg's fans organized themselves into a loose online network months ago, to draw in more supporters for local events. The first Friday of each month, there are typically a dozen or so students protesting for action on climate change somewhere in Winnipeg.

But this Friday was exceptional.

Local environment groups, such as Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, joined in as community activists turned out to support the students.

The date also happened to coincide with a teachers' professional development day, which meant several schools were closed, drawing extra students to the legislature.

"It feels very different feeling to be part of something thats not just Winnipeg. Now were part of an actual global effort. It very empowering. Its a unifying feeling to know where are part of something that is going on around the world," said 17-year-old River East Collegiate student Lena Andres.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca
DURING the past decade, a plain language movement has gained traction in Canadian legal circles. Sundry law schools, bar associations and legislatures have promoted an overhaul of legal writing  everything from laws and regulations to judgments and contracts  to make it more comprehensible to the average Joe.

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This article was published 15/3/2019 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

DURING the past decade, a "plain language" movement has gained traction in Canadian legal circles. Sundry law schools, bar associations and legislatures have promoted an overhaul of legal writing  everything from laws and regulations to judgments and contracts  to make it more comprehensible to the average Joe.

The intention is commendable  help people make better-informed legal decisions and avoid misunderstandings that result in litigation or liability. But plain-language-law initiatives come with their own comprehension problems.

Sometimes theyre spearheaded by people who have limited understanding of legal issues, or who disregard legal distinctions of long-acknowledged importance. And sometimes theyre seized upon by opportunistic politicians more concerned with re-election than linguistic transparency.

New York state pioneered plain-language legislation in the 1980s. It experimented with jettisoning historically settled and accepted legal language in favour of a more minimalist approach to legal drafting. The state went so far as to hastily enact a law that required clear writing in consumer contracts, with offending companies or individuals subject to a fine if they failed to use simple language.

But what constituted a sufficiently obscure document to trigger the penalty wasnt clear in the ostensibly "plain language" statute. The inevitable result: confusion, and much messy litigation. So-called "plain language" is not without its ambiguity.

Manipulating the English language to convey precisely what you mean is fraught with difficulty at the best of times. Common words carry dual, multiple or shifting meanings. The placement of punctuation marks or prepositions can alter the meaning of a sentence. And misplaced modifiers can turn whats intended to be approved into whats not.

Moreover, some of what plain-language exponents deride as legalese is in fact indispensable. What, at first blush, seems redundant language is often used to achieve clarity of intention and avoid ambiguity, and thereby conflict. If a contract, statute or regulation isnt worded to unmistakably distinguish whats agreed upon or permitted from whats not agreed upon or permitted, people are apt to quarrel and litigate.

Bad legal writing is much like any other bad writing. Its roots lie in the same ineptitude and laziness that characterize baffling bureaucratic communications from the Canada Revenue Agency or the incomprehensible technical writing in manuals that accompany consumer-electronics purchases.

Its not technical terms, hair-splitting definitions or even repetitiveness of language that make for lousy legal prose. Rather, blame tortuous syntax, bad grammar, a surfeit of adverbs and sentences laden with so many subordinate clauses that you forget the beginning by the time you get to the end.

Truth be told, theres yet another reason for bad legal writing: few lawyers are trained to write properly.

Legal drafting is one of the most intellectually demanding skills required of a lawyer. At base, its expository writing  something once commonly taught in secondary schools and undergraduate programs, now less so  but of a highly specialized kind.

Yet its largely neglected in law schools. I graduated from law school without any training in it except for a first-year legal research and writing course. It was heavy on the research component, but notably light on the writing function (and even there, the emphasis was on the formatting of memoranda of law, not on writing them coherently).

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I recall, as a law student in the early 1980s, raising this omission with the then-librarian at Robson Hall, the University of Manitobas faculty of law. My thinking was that the law librarian, of all people, would be receptive to the idea of a course that focused on clean, clear and grammatical legal writing.

I was dead wrong. He was indifferent. Shrugging his shoulders, his blunt reply: "Law professors dont teach English."

Proper legal drafting necessarily takes place against a background of rules of interpretation and a history of judicial decisions. These rules and decisions have created language that has been tried, tested and ultimately sanctioned in the courts. They have, over time, created some certainty as to how a document or law is to be understood.

The plain-language movement has a lot to commend it. But as in politics, so with law, evolution is preferable to revolution.

It is at our peril that we would, in wholesale fashion, dump the rules that govern legal writing in favour of a brave new world of simplified linguistic terrain.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - A white supremacist suspected in shootings at two mosques that killed 49 people during midday Friday prayers posted an anti-immigrant manifesto online and apparently used a helmet-mounted camera to broadcast live video of the slaughter on Facebook.

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This article was published 14/3/2019 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MARK BAKER / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says many people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - A white supremacist suspected in shootings at two mosques that killed 49 people during midday Friday prayers posted an anti-immigrant manifesto online and apparently used a helmet-mounted camera to broadcast live video of the slaughter on Facebook.

Brenton Harrison Tarrant appeared in court Saturday morning amid strict security and showed no emotion when the judge read him one murder charge. The judge said "it was reasonable to assume" more such charges would follow.

Two other armed suspects were taken into custody while police tried to determine what role, if any, they played in the cold-blooded attack that stunned New Zealand, a country so peaceful that police officers rarely carry guns.

Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says many people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.(AP Photo/Mark Baker)

It was by far the deadliest shooting in modern New Zealand history.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, noting that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees.

She pronounced it "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

Tarrant, who police say carried out at least one of the shootings, posted a jumbled, 74-page manifesto on social media in which he identified himself as a 28-year-old Australian and white supremacist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.

Armed police patrol outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says many people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

The gunman also livestreamed in graphic detail 17 minutes of his rampage at Al Noor Mosque, where, armed with at least two assault rifles and a shotgun, he sprayed worshippers with bullets over and over, killing at least 41 people. Several more people were killed in an attack on a second mosque in the city a short time later.

At least 48 people were wounded, some critically. Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Police did not say whether the same person was responsible for both shootings. They gave no details about those taken into custody except to say that none had been on any watch list. During the Saturday morning hearing, a man who was not in court was charged with using writings to incite hatred against a race or ethnicity, but it was not clear if his case was related to the mosque attacks.

Tarrant's relatives in the Australian town of Grafton, in New South Wales, contacted police after learning of the shooting and were helping with the investigation, local authorities said. Tarrant has spent little time in Australia in the past four years and only had minor traffic infractions on his record.

A police officer attempts to move people away from across the road from a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says a number of people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. Police urge people to stay indoors.(AP Photo/Mark Baker)

On Saturday, outside one of the two mosques, 32-year-old Ash Mohammed pushed through police barricades in hopes of finding out what happened to his father and two brothers, whose cellphones rang unanswered. An officer stopped him.

"We just want to know if they are dead or alive," Mohammed told the officer.

In the aftermath, the country's threat level was raised from low to high, police warned Muslims against going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand, and the national airline cancelled several flights in and out of Christchurch, a city of nearly 400,000.

World leaders condemned the violence and offered condolences, with President Donald Trump tweeting, "We stand in solidarity with New Zealand." Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan and other Islamic leaders pointed to the bloodbath and other such attacks as evidence of rising hostility toward Muslims since 9-11.

A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved.(AP Photo/Mark Baker)

New Zealand, with a population of 5 million, has relatively loose gun laws and an estimated 1.5 million firearms, or roughly one for every three people. But it has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the world. In 2015, it had just eight gun homicides.

Before Friday's attack, New Zealand's deadliest shooting in modern history took place in 1990 in the small town of Aramoana, where a gunman killed 13 people following a dispute with a neighbour.

On Saturday, the prime minister said the "primary perpetrator" in the shootings was a licensed gun owner and legally acquired the five guns used. Ardern said the country's gun laws will change as a result of the carnage, but she did not specify how.

New Zealand is also generally considered to be welcoming to migrants and refugees. On Saturday, people across the country were reaching out to Muslims in their communities on social media to volunteer acts of kindness  offering rides to the grocery store or volunteering to walk with them if they felt unsafe. In other forums, people discussed Muslim food restrictions as they prepared to drop off meals for those affected.

A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

The prime minister said the attack reflected "extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand."

Immigrants "have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home," Ardern said. "They are us."

At the White House, Trump called the bloodshed "a terrible thing" but rejected any suggestion the white nationalist movement is a rising threat around the world, saying it is "a small group of people that have very, very serious problems."

Tarrant, in his rambling manifesto, deemed Trump "a symbol of renewed white identity."

Police talk to witnesses near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved.(AP Photo/Mark Baker)

At the Al Noor mosque, witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black and wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top enter the house of worship and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running out in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in his driveway and fled. Peneha then went into the mosque to help the victims.

"I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque," he said. "I don't understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. It's ridiculous."

Facebook, Twitter and Google scrambled to take down the gunman's video, which was widely available on social media for hours after the bloodbath.

In the video, the killer spends more than two minutes inside the mosque spraying terrified worshippers with gunfire. He then walks outside, where he shoots at people on the sidewalk. Children's screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get another rifle. He walks back into the mosque, where there are at least two dozen people lying on the ground.

After going back outside and shooting a woman there, he gets back in his car, where a song can be heard blasting. The singer bellows, "I am the god of hellfire!" and the gunman drives off before police even arrive.

The second attack took place at the Linwood mosque about 5 kilometres (3 miles) away. Mark Nichols told the New Zealand Herald that he heard about five gunshots and that a worshipper returned fire with a rifle or shotgun.

The footage showed the killer was carrying a shotgun and two fully automatic military assault rifles, with an extra magazine taped to one of the weapons so that he could reload quickly. He also had more assault weapons in the trunk of his car, along with what appeared to be explosives.

His manifesto was a welter of often politically contradictory views, touching on many of the most combustible issues of the day, among them the Second Amendment right to own guns, Muslim immigration, terrorist attacks and the wealthiest 1 per cent.

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He portrayed himself as a racist and a fascist and raged against non-Westerners, but said China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values.

The gunman said he was not a member of any organization, acted alone and chose New Zealand to show that even the most remote parts of the world are not free of "mass immigration."

Last year, New Zealand's prime minister announced that the country would boost its annual refugee quota from 1,000 to 1,500 in 2020. Ardern, whose party campaigned on a promise to take in more refugees, called it "the right thing to do."

Christchurch, sometimes called the Garden City, has been rebuilding since an earthquake in 2011 killed 185 people and destroyed many downtown buildings.

This story has been amended to delete incorrect reference to Tarrant identifying himself by name in his manifesto.

Perry reported from Wellington. Associated Press writers Juliet Williams in Christchurch; Kristen Gelineau in Sydney; Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia; and Chris Blake in Bangkok contributed to this report.
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Americas Puppet: Meet Juan Guaido

By David Rosen

March 15, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - Juan Guaido is a useful pawn for U.S. interests in Venezuela, but is he expendable?

On January 15th, the White House reported that VP Mike Pence spoke by phone today with Guaido, the president of Venezuelas National Assembly. It claimed the call was made to recognize his courageous leadership following his arrest and intimidation this weekend, and to express the United States resolute support for the National Assembly of Venezuela as the only legitimate democratic body in the country. On the 23rd, Guaido declared himself interim president of Venezuela.

In its brief statement about the call between Pence and Guaido, the White House failed to report that the VP pledged that the Trump administration would support him if he seized the reins of government from [elected President] Nicolas Maduro by invoking a clause in the South American countrys constitution.

This was revealed by The Wall Street Journal and sheds light on what actually was said during the conversation. That late-night call set in motion a plan that had been developed in secret over the preceding several weeks, accompanied by talks between U.S. officials, allies, lawmakers, and key Venezuelan opposition figures, including Mr. Guaido himself, it reported. Citing an anonymous administration official, it noted, Almost instantly, just as Mr. Pence had promised, President Trump issued a statement recognizing Mr. Guaido as the countrys rightful leader. On the 23rd, Trump twitted, President @realDonaldTrump has officially recognised the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the Interim President of Venezuela.

The Journal went further, pointing out, Other officials who met that day at the White House included [Sec. of State] Pompeo and [National Security Advisor] Bolton, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who presented Mr. Trump with options for recognizing Mr. Guaido. It added, Mr. Trump decided to do it. Mr. Pence, who wasnt at that meeting, placed his phone call to Mr. Guaido to tell him, If the National Assembly invoked Article 233 the following day, the president would back him.'

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On the 30th, as reported by Roll Call, Trump placed a follow-up call to Guaido. Press Sec. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement, the call was made to congratulate him [Guaido] on his historic assumption of the presidency and to reinforce President Trumps strong support for Venezuelas fight to regain its democracy. During the call, Guaido noted the importance of the large protests across Venezuela against former dictator Maduro, set to occur today and Saturday, she added.

Almost on cue, following Trumps call 11 European Union countries quickly recognized Guaido as Venezuelas president, including Austria, Britain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. By mid-February, 65 countries had recognized him as president. Quickly thereafter, Canada, Israel and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group recognized Guaido.

As if they were a Greek chorus cheering from the sidelines, the U.S. mainstream media joined it anointing Guaido as president. As summarized by GreyZone, The New York Times editorial board hailed Guaido as a credible rival to Maduro with a refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward. The Bloomberg News editorial board applauded him for seeking restoration of democracy and the Wall Street Journal declared him a new democratic leader.

The innumerable print and media reports about the on-going Venezuela crisis share a common portrait of Guaido, one in which he emerged, like an innocent new-born politician, from the social chaos to take leadership. More troubling, it presents him as a unifier of large spectrum of political groups in opposition to the Maduro regime. This portrait is not only mostly a fiction but serves to hide not only his history as a rightwing militant but the role the U.S. government has played for a decade-a-half in shaping Guaido for his current effort to orchestrate a coup detat.

In the highly informative expose, The Making of Juan Guaido, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal, report that as a student, Guaido strongly opposed Venezuelas former president Hugo Chavez and supported the 2002 coup attempt against him. He backed Radio Caracas Television (RCTV), the privately-owned rightwing radio station, that played a key role in fermenting the 2002 coup by helping mobilize anti-government demonstrations, blaming government supporters for attacks on anti-government forces and blocking pro-government reports about the coup.

Guaido graduated from Caracas Andres Bello Catholic University in engineering in 2007 and went on for a graduate degree in the governance and political management program at George Washington University. At GW, he studied under the Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, a leading Latin American neoliberal economist.

In 2007, the Maduro regime refused to grant RCTVs a license renewal and Guaido helped lead anti-government rallies protests against the decision. Guaido and some of his closest associates were part of a rightwing youth group, Generation 2007, that sought to overthrow the Chavez government. The group included Leopoldo Lopez, a Princeton-education man who came from one of Venezuelas richest families and was a descended from his countrys first president, who long worked with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and was elected mayor of a district in Caracas. Lopez founded the Popular Will (Voluntad Popular) party which Guaido eventually came to lead.

Two years earlier, in October 2005, some of those who would form the Generation 2007 group  but apparently not Guaido  went to Belgrade, Serbia, for rightwing insurrectionary training. The trip was sponsored by the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) and largely funded by the NED. Stratfor, the military-intelligence contractor, reported that [CANVAS] may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.

Stratfor outlined CANVASs training program in revealing terms: Success is by no means guaranteed, and student movements are only at the beginning of what could be a years-long effort to trigger a revolution in Venezuela, but the trainers themselves are the people who cut their teeth on the Butcher of the Balkans [i.e., Milosevic]. Theyve got mad skills. When you see students at five Venezuelan universities hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the training is over and the real work has begun.

In 2010, Statfor outlined what one analyst called a plan to drive a dagger through the heart of the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme involved upending countrys electrical system, thus leading to a 70 percent in service. This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system, a Stratfor internal memo declared. It went on to note, This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate. At that point in time, an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs. Nine years later, an idle scheme became a threating reality.

In 2010, Guaido and a handful of other student activists attended a secret five-day training retreat at Mexico Citys Fiesta Mexicana run by Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime-change trainers backed by the U.S. government, notably Otto Reich, an advisor to the Reagan and Bush administrations. Venezuelas Socialist Party legislator Robert Serra claimed, Behind this [retreat] are big interests and big finances, were talking about an international network which sought to destabilise our country.

One of Guaidos associates, Miami-based Maria Corina Machado, was identified as the key to a 2014 plot against Maduro. She claimed that the plot was OK-ed by U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. I have already made up my mind and this fight will continue until this regime is overthrown and we deliver to our friends in the world, Machado said. And insisted, If I went to San Cristobal and exposed myself before the OAS, I fear nothing. Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed his support and he pointed out the new steps. We have a checkbook stronger than the regimes to break the international security ring.

Most troubling, the Popular Will party, including Guaido, was actively involved in a 2014 campaign known asguarimbas, anti-Maduro street protesters. He tweeted a video featuring himself wearing a helmet and gas mask and surrounded by masked and armed associates. They blocked a highway and had violent clashes with the police. The demonstration also took place at universities where students wore T-shirts embossed Popular Will or Justice First. The 2014 guarimbas showdown ended with the killing of about 43 people and, in a 2017 incident, 126 people, including many Chavistas and police officers.

In 2015, Guaidowas elected a member of the National Assembly and, in 2018, he spearheaded the opposition coalition named the Democratic Unity Round Table (MUD). As a member of the Venezuelan parliament, Guaido headed an inspection commission investigating high-profile corruption cases, such as the Odebrecht construction company bribery case, involving officials of Maduros government. Odebrecht, the largest construction and development company in Latin America, admitted in 2016 to bribing government officials in a dozen South American countries.

As Cohen and Blumenthal report, Guaido is known as the president of the opposition-dominated National Assembly, but he was never elected to the position. They point out that Guaido was fourth in line among opposition-group leaders for the position but the first was under house arrest, another was hiding out in the Chilean embassy, the third mysterious did not assume the position and the fourth was Guaido. The Popular Will party represents only 14 percent of legislators.

In late 2018, Guaido visited Washington, Colombia and Brazil to help coordinate plans for mass opposition demonstrations during Maduros second inauguration in January 2019. Leading the anti-Maduro campaign, Bolton screeched, What were focusing on today is disconnecting the illegitimate Maduro regime from the source of its revenues. We think consistent with our recognition of Juan Guaido as the constitutional interim president of Venezuela that those revenues should go to the legitimate government. As reported in the Journal, another U.S. official said, We have been engaged with the same strategy: to build international pressure, help organize the internal opposition and push for a peaceful restoration of democracy. But that internal piece was missing. A U.S. official said, He [Guaido] was the piece we needed for our strategy to be coherent and complete.

The New York Times confirmed this assessment, quoting William Brownfield, the former American ambassador to Venezuela: For the first time, you have an opposition leader [Guaido] who is clearly signaling to the armed forces and to law enforcement that he wants to keep them on the side of the angels and with the good guys.

Like the tide, Americas political puppets come and go, some last longer while other serve for but an historical instant. Among the many whove served U.S. interests and were, in time, swept from the historical stage are Manuel Noriega (Panama), Augusto Pinochet (Chile), Rios Montt (Guatemala) and Anastasio Somosa (Nicaragua) along with the (Shah) Mohammad Reza (Iran) and Saddam Hussein (Iraq). Looking to Guaidos fate, Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist, notes, It doesnt matter if he crashes and burns after all these misadventures, to the Americans, he is expendable.

David Rosen

is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion: The Transformation of 1950s New Yorks Forbidden into Americas New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015). He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net ; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com

This article was originally published by " Counterpunch " -
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Rubios Gloating Betrays US Sabotage in Venezuela Power Blitz

By Finian Cunningham

March 15, 2019 " Information Clearing House " - US imperialists are so desperate in their regime-change predations over Venezuela, they seem to have a problem controlling their drooling mouths.

The latest orgy of American gloating was triggered by the massive power outages to have hit Venezuela. No sooner had the South American country been blacked out from its power grid collapsing, senior US officials were crowing with perverse relish.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio  who has become a point man for the Trump administration in its regime-change campaign in Venezuela  was a little too celebratory. Within minutes of the nationwide power outage last Thursday, Rubio was having verbal orgasms about the long-term economic damage in the blink of an eye. But it was his disclosure concerning the precise damage in the power grid that has led the Venezuelan government to accuse the US of carrying out a sabotage.

Information Minister Jorge Rodriguez noted how Rubio, in his tweeted comments three minutes after the power outage, mentioned failure of back-up generators in Venezuelas main hydroelectric plant, known as the Guri Dam, located in Bolivar State. The dam supplies some 80 per cent of the Venezuelan population of 31 million with its electricity consumption.

Rodriguez mockingly ascribed mystic skills to Rubio because the Florida Republican senator appeared to know the precise nature of the power failure even before the Venezuelan authorities had determined it.

The Venezuelan government has since claimed that the failure in the electric grid was caused by a cyber attack on the computer system controlling the Guri Dam turbines. Caracas said it will present proof of its claims to the United Nations.

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Apart from Rubios apparent insider information, there are several other indicators that Venezuelas latest turmoil from power blackout was indeed caused by US sabotage, and specifically a cyber attack.

The South American country has experienced recurring power cuts over recent years due to economic problems and Washingtons sanctions. But the latest outage was widespread  at least 70 per cent of the country  and sustained for more than four days, rather than being rectified within hours. That scale of disruption suggests an unprecedented event, way beyond intermittent problems of maintenance.

The duration of the blackout in the capital Caracas and other major cities also indicates that the nature of the problem was difficult to reverse, which would be consistent with a cyber attack on the power grid. It was a kill-shot, says American political analyst Randy Martin.

Furthermore, US officials like President Trumps national security advisor John Bolton as well as special envoy on Venezuelan affairs Elliot Abrams have been warning that Washington is seeking new ways to pile pressure on Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to stand down.

Abrams was caught out last week in a prank phone call made by two Russian entertainers posing as Swiss President Ueli Maurer in which Abrams openly advocated crushing the Venezuelan banking system in order to topple the government in Caracas. The American envoy, who was convicted over the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s for sponsoring terrorism to sabotage Nicaragua, appeared to balk at using overt US military power against Venezuela. That suggests Washington was persuaded on the efficacy of cyber warfare to inflict social chaos and incite popular anger against the Maduro government.

The immediate reaction by Washington officials and the US-backed political opposition in Venezuela was to blame the Maduro government for the power disorder. The failure was flagged up as a sign of incompetence and mismanagement of the oil-rich country by the socialist administration. Opposition leader Juan Guaido, who has declared himself the rightful president with Washingtons blessing, conveyed the logic of blackmail when he declared, the lights will come back on when usurper Maduro is gone.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also weighed in with repulsive gloating within hours of Venezuelas power crisis. Pompeo tweeted: No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.

The delight openly displayed by Washington officials in regard to aggression against Venezuela has broken new ground in terms of the brazenness of US imperialism.

Only a few weeks ago, Bolton announced that the objective for seeking regime change in Venezuela against the elected President Nicolas Maduro was for US corporations to seize the South American states vast oil wealth  reckoned to be the largest known reserves on the planet, far exceeding those of Saudi Arabia.

Such is Washingtons unbridled lust for Venezuelas natural resources that its imperialist advocates are falling over themselves with naked lies and crimes.

When a US Trojan Horse aid convoy was blocked from entering into Venezuela from Colombia last month, American politicians and media immediately blamed the Maduro government for sabotaging the effort. An aid truck was set alight on a border crossing on February 23. US Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Rubio, as well as CNN, condemned the Venezuelan authorities for callous destruction of vital aid delivery to its long-suffering people. It turns out, as even the New York Times has now admitted three weeks later, that the aid truck was torched by US-backed opposition supporters on the Colombian side of the border.

The obscenity of American imperialism is that it has inflicted huge social misery in Venezuela from years of sanctions and illegal confiscation (theft) of billions of dollars in assets belonging to the nation. Then it has the audacity to mount a charade seeming to deliver humanitarian aid.

The latest twist to this sadistic game played by Washington is turning the lights off across the entire nation, in homes, hospitals, airports and schools, among other essential services, and attempting to lay the blame on the Venezuelan government.

We may, however, be thankful for Washingtons overweening arrogance and criminality. Because, as Marco Rubios rash remarks concerning the latest power outage show, the American gangsterism towards Venezuela is being exposed for the naked aggression that it is.

US-based political analyst Randy Martin, in comments for this column, says that what Washington is doing to Venezuela is tantamount to the rape of democracy. American imperialism has no longer any shame, he said. It used to rape countries under the cover a seedy alleyway of false excuses and hollow claims of righteousness. Now it has its trousers around its ankles and trying to rape Venezuela right on the global Main Street.

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.
A former aide to ex president Goodluck Jonathan, Reno Omokri has urged the minister for transportation and former Rivers state governor, Rotimi Amaechi to learn from those politicians humbled in the 2019 general elections.

Omokri in a few posts via his Twitter handle on Friday afternoon said the former Rivers governor must learn from Imo state governor, Rochas Okorocha and former Akwa Ibom state governor, Godswill Akpabio. How they were rendered politically irrelevant, after wielding so much power and influence in their states in the just concluded election.

This statement follows widespread criticisms of military intervention in the elections in Rivers state, and Amaechis stance against his own people .

Omokri said that Amaechis political influence will soon go the way of Akpabio and Okorocha, for  its only a matter of time.

He wrote:

Look at Akpabio who once boasted that what money cannot do, more money can do. Today, where has his more money gotten him? A man cant be dancing shakushaku while his people are dancing azonto. As my South-south people will say, it is impossicant.

What possessed Akpabio to ally himself to a man and party that are considered political lepers by his people? A man that was once so loved after he TRANSFORMED Akwa-Ibom, ended up TRANSFORMING himself from a political MODEL to a political MONSTER.

And what would one say about Rotimi Amaechi? How can Amaechi defend what the military is doing in Rivers? Even the usually conservative European Union was forced to speak up in defence of Rivers people. Yet Amaechi hails their oppressors.

Amaechi, your time is coming. The god who failed Rochas and Akpabio will also fail you. If you like pray 10 times a day in the direction of Daura, it wont save you from reaping what you sowed. Your sin will find you and your potbelly soon. Very soon.
5 hours ago

3 Attractive Small Cap Dividend Raisers

From the rise of the retail investor to high-frequency algorithmic trading, there have been several powerful stock market developments the last couple of years. One thing, however, has stayed the samethe basic return components of an equity investment strategy, growth and income. Growth also referred to as capital appreciation, comes from higher security prices and is the main force that drives portfolio values higher.

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Investor LP LLC, LEN - Belle Meade LLC, LEN - OBS Windemere LLC, LEN - Palm Vista LLC, LEN BPT Investor LLC, LEN Mirada Investor LLC, LEN Notarize Investor LLC, LEN OT Holdings LLC, LEN Paradise Cable LLC, LEN Paradise Operating LLC, LEN-CG South LLC, LEN-Cypress Mill LLC, LEN-Ryan 1 LLC, LEN-Touchstone LLC, LENH I LLC, LENNAR HOMES OF TENNESSEE LLC, LFS Holding Company LLC, LH Eastwind LLC, LHI Renaissance LLC, LMC 10th & Acoma Holdings LP, LMC 144th and Grant Investor LLC, LMC 2401 Blake Street Holdings LLC, LMC 2401 Blake Street Investor LLC, LMC 360 Acoma Holdings LP, LMC 410 S Wabash Holdings LLC, LMC 808 Gateway Holdings LLC, LMC 808 Gateway Investor LLC, LMC 8th Avenue Apartment Investor LLC, LMC 990 Bannock Holdings LLC, LMC Axis Westminster Holdings LLC, LMC Axis Westminster Investor LLC, LMC Berry Hill Lofts Holdings LLC, LMC Berry Hill Lofts Investor LLC, LMC Block 42 Holdings LLC, LMC Build to Core III Investor LLC, LMC Build to Core III LLC, LMC Burnside Holdings LLC, LMC Burnside Investor LLC, LMC Chandler and McClintock Holdings LLC, LMC Charlestowne Holdings LLC, LMC Charlotte Ballpark Developer LLC, LMC Cityville Oak Park Holdings LLC, LMC Cityville Oak Park Investor LLC, LMC Cobalt Holdings LLC, LMC Costa Mesa Holdings LP, LMC Crest at Park West Holdings LP, LMC Denver Gateway I Investor LLC, LMC Denver Gateway II Holdings LLC, LMC Development LLC, LMC Downtown Doral South Holdings LLC, LMC Durham Gateway Holdings LP, LMC Evans School Holdings LLC, LMC Gateway Investor LLC, LMC Gateway Venture LLC, LMC Gilman Square Investor LLC, LMC Horton Street Holdings LLC, LMC Huntington Crossing Holdings LLC, LMC Inactive Companies LLC, LMC Lakeside Holdings LP, LMC Leya Holdings LLC, LMC Living Illinois LLC, LMC Living Inc., LMC Living LLC, LMC Living TRS LP, LMC Millenia Investor II LLC, LMC NE Minneapolis Lot 2 Holdings LLC, LMC New Bern Investor LLC, LMC North Park Holdings LP, LMC Parkfield Holdings LLC, LMC Parkfield Investor LLC, LMC Righters Ferry Holdings LLC, LMC River North Holdings LLC, LMC Spring Street Investor LLC, LMC Stonewall Station Investor LLC, LMC Triangle Square Investor LLC, LMC Venture Developer LLC, LMC Verbena Holdings LLC, LMC West Loop Investor LLC, LMCFX Investor LLC, LMCPNW Marymoor Holdings LLC, LMI - Jacksonville Investor LLC, LMI - South Kings Development Investor LLC, LMI - West Seattle Holdings LLC, LMI - West Seattle Investor LLC, LMI - West Seattle LLC, LMI Cell Tower Investors LLC, LMI City Walk Investor LLC, LMI Collegedale Investor LLC, LMI Collegedale LLC, LMI Contractors LLC, LMI Glencoe Dallas Investor LLC, LMI Lakes West Covina Investor LLC, LMI Largo Park Investor LLC, LMI Las Colinas Station LLC, LMI Naperville Investor LLC, LMI Pacific Tower LLC, LMI Park Central Two LLC, LMI Peachtree Corners Investor LLC, LMI Peachtree Corners LLC, LMI-JC Developer LLC, LMI-JC LLC, LMV 1640 Broadway REIT-DC LP, LMV 1701 Ballard REIT-DC LP, LMV 19H REIT-DC LP, LMV 2026 Madison REIT-DC LP, LMV 85 South Union REIT-DC LP, LMV ATown REIT-DC LP, LMV Annapolis REIT-DC LP, LMV Apache Terrace REIT-DC LP, LMV Block 42 REIT-DC LP, LMV Bloomington REIT-DC LP, LMV Bolingbrook REIT-DC LP (DE), LMV Central at McDowell REIT-DC LP, LMV East Village I REIT-DC LP, LMV Edina REIT-DC LP, LMV Fremont WS I REIT-DC LP, LMV Glisan REIT-DC LP, LMV Grand Bay REIT-DC LP, LMV II Grand Bay Pod V Holdings LP, LMV II Kierland Holdings LP, LMV II NoMo Holdings LP, LMV II Venture Developer LLC, LMV II Wynwood Holdings LP, LMV Kirkland REIT-DC LP, LMV Little Italy REIT-DC LP, LMV M Tower REIT-DC LP, LMV Millenia II REIT-DC LP, LMV Milpitas REIT-DC LP, LMV NE Minneapolis REIT-DC LP, LMV Oak Park REIT-DC LP, LMV One20Fourth REIT-DC LP, LMV QR Build to Core Manager LLC, LMV Rio Bravo REIT-DC LP, LMV Scottsdale Quarter REIT-DC LP, LMV Tysons REIT-DC LP, LMV Vallagio III REIT-DC LP, LMV Victory Block G REIT-DC LP, LMV Warren Street REIT-DC LP, LNC Communities II LLC, LNC Communities IV LLC, LNC Communities V LLC, LNC Communities VI LLC, LNC Communities VII LLC, LNC Communities VIII LLC, LNC Pennsylvania Realty Inc., LNC at Meadowbrook LLC, LNC at Ravenna LLC, LS College Park LLC, LS Terracina LLC, LV Opendoor Investor LLC, LV Opendoor JV LLC, LW D'Andrea LLC, Lagoon Valley Residential LLC, Lakelands at Easton L.L.C., Legends Club LLC, Legends Golf Club LLC, Len - Little Harbor LLC, Len FW Investor LLC, Len Paradise LLC, Len-Angeline LLC, Len-Hawks Point LLC, Len-Land LLC, Len-Land West LLC, Len-MN LLC, Len-Verandahs LLP, LenCom LLC, LenFive LLC, LenFive Opco GP LLC, LenFive Sub III LLC, LenFive Sub LLC, LenFive Sub Opco GP LLC, Lenalto CMBS LLC, Lencraft LLC, Lennar Aircraft I LLC, Lennar Arizona Construction Inc., Lennar Arizona Inc., Lennar Associates Management Holding Company, Lennar Associates Management LLC, Lennar Avenue One LLC, Lennar Berkeley LLC, Lennar Bevard LLC, Lennar Bridges LLC, Lennar Buffington Colorado Crossing L.P., Lennar Buffington Zachary Scott L.P., Lennar Carolinas LLC, Lennar Central Park LLC, Lennar Central Region Sweep Inc., Lennar Chicago Inc., Lennar Cobra LLC, Lennar Colgate Urban Renewal Development LLC, Lennar Colorado LLC, Lennar Colorado Minerals LLC, Lennar Commercial LLC, Lennar Communities Development Inc., Lennar Communities Inc., Lennar Communities Nevada LLC, Lennar Communities of Chicago L.L.C., Lennar Concord LLC, Lennar Construction Inc., Lennar Cory Road LLC, Lennar Courts LLC, Lennar Developers Inc., Lennar Ewing LLC, Lennar Financial Services LLC, Lennar Flamingo LLC, Lennar Fresno Inc., Lennar Gardens LLC, Lennar Georgia Inc., Lennar Greer Ranch Venture LLC, Lennar Heritage Fields LLC, Lennar Hingham Holdings LLC, Lennar Hingham JV LLC, Lennar Homes Holding LLC, Lennar Homes LLC, Lennar Homes NJ LLC, Lennar Homes of Arizona Inc., Lennar Homes of California Inc., Lennar Homes of Indiana Inc., Lennar Homes of Texas Land and Construction Ltd., Lennar Homes of Texas Sales and Marketing Ltd., Lennar Homes of Utah Inc., Lennar International Holding LLC, Lennar International LLC, Lennar Lakeside Investor LLC, Lennar Layton LLC, Lennar Living LLC, Lennar Lytle LLC, Lennar MF Holdings LLC, Lennar MPA LLC, Lennar MPA WIP LLC, Lennar Mare Island LLC, Lennar Marina A Funding LLC, Lennar Massachusetts Properties Inc., Lennar Middletown LLC, Lennar Monmouth Redevelopers LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture GP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture GP Subsidiary LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture GP Victory Block G Mezz LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II GP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II GP Subsidiary LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II LP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture II Manager LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture LP LLC, Lennar Multifamily BTC Venture Manager LLC, Lennar Multifamily Builders LLC, Lennar Multifamily Communities LLC, Lennar Multifamily Venture DC LP, Lennar New Jersey Holdings LLC, Lennar New Jersey Properties Inc., Lennar New York LLC, Lennar Northeast Properties LLC, Lennar Northwest Inc., Lennar OHB LLC, Lennar PI Acquisition LLC, Lennar PI Property Acquisition LLC, Lennar PIS Management Company LLC, Lennar Pacific Inc., Lennar Pacific Properties Inc., Lennar Pacific Properties Management Inc., Lennar Plumsted Urban Renewal LLC, Lennar Point LLC, Lennar QR Build to Core GP LLC, Lennar QR Build to Core LP LLC, Lennar Realty Inc., Lennar Reno LLC, Lennar Riverwalk LLC, Lennar Sacramento Inc., Lennar Sales Corp., Lennar Sierra Sunrise LLC, Lennar Spencer's Crossing LLC, Lennar Sun Ridge LLC, Lennar Texas Holding LLC, Lennar Ventures LLC, Lennar West Valley LLC, Lennar Winncrest LLC, Lennar at Franklin LLC, Lennar at Jackson LLC, Lennar at Marlboro 79 LLC, Lennar at Monroe LLC, Lennar.com Inc., Longleaf Acquisition LLC, Lori Gardens Associates II LLC, Lori Gardens Associates III LLC, Lori Gardens Associates L.L.C., Lorton Station LLC, Lyons Lennar Farms LLC, Madrona Ridge L.L.C., Madrona Village L.L.C., Madrona Village Mews L.L.C., Majestic Woods LLC, Maple and Broadway Holdings LLC, Menifee Development LLC, Mid-County Utilities Inc., Miralago West Lennar LLC, Mission Viejo 12S Venture LP, Mission Viejo Holdings Inc., Motomic Diagnostics LLC, Multibank 2009-1 CML-ADC Venture LLC, Multibank 2009-1 RES-ADC Venture LLC, NC Properties I LLC, NC Properties II LLC, North American Asset Development LLC, Northbridge L.L.C., OHC/Ascot Belle Meade LLC, One SR L.P., PD-Len Boca Raton LLC, PG Properties Holding LLC, POMAC LLC, PT Metro LLC, Pace Drive Holdings LLC, Palm Gardens At Doral Clubhouse LLC, Palm Gardens at Doral LLC, Palm Springs Classic LLC, Palm Vista Preserve LLC, Patuxent Infrastructure Inc., Pioneer Meadows Development LLC, Pioneer Meadows Investments LLC, Plaza Condominium Ventures LLC, Portside Marina Developers L.L.C., Portside SM Associates L.L.C., Portside SM Holdings L.L.C., Portside Shipyard Developers L.L.C., Prestonfield L.L.C., Quail Roost Lennar LLC, RCCF GP II LLC, RCCF GP III LLC, RCCF GP IV LLC, RCCF GP LLC, RES-FL EIGHT LLC, RES-FL SEVEN LLC, RES-FL VISION ONE LLC, RES-FL VISION TWO LLC, RES-GA CASCADE LLC, RES-GA DIAMOND MEADOWS LLC, RES-GA KAP LLC, RES-GA SOUTHERN PLANTATION LLC, RES-GA THIRTEEN LLC, RES-GA TWELVE LLC, RES-GA WEST LLC, RES-IL ONE LLC, RES-NC ONE LLC, RES-PA LSJ LLC, RES-PA POM LLC, RES-TX BOULEVARD LLC, RH Insurance Company Inc., RH MOA BBCMS 2017-C1 LLC, RH MOA CF 2017-C8 LLC, RH MOA LLC, RH MOA U 2017-C4 LLC, RH MOA U 2017-C6 LLC, RIAL 2014-LT5 CLASS B LLC, RIAL 2014-LT5 LLC, RL BB FINANCIAL LLC, RL BB INACTIVE LLC, RL BB-AL LLC, RL BB-FL ALHI LLC, RL BB-GA LLC, RL BB-GA RMH LLC, RL BB-IL LLC, RL BB-IN AA LLC, RL BB-IN KRE LLC, RL BB-IN KRE OP LLC, RL BB-IN KRE RE LLC, RL BB-MS LLC, RL BB-NC LLC, RL BB-OH LLC, RL BB-SC BROOKSA LLC, RL BB-SC CLR II LLC, RL BB-SC CLR III LLC, RL BB-SC CLR IV LLC, RL BB-SC CLR LLC, RL BB-SC CRRC LLC, RL BB-SC RACEDAY LLC, RL BB-TN BRISTOL LLC, RL BB-TN LLC, RL BB-TN RACEDAY TOWER LLC, RL BB-TX LLC, RL BB-WV LLC, RL CMBS Holdings LLC, RL CML 2009-1 Investments LLC, RL REGI ARKANSAS LLC, RL REGI Alabama LLC, RL REGI FINANCIAL LLC, RL REGI Florida LLC, RL REGI GEORGIA LLC, RL REGI INACTIVE LLC, RL REGI KANSAS LLC, RL REGI MISSISSIPPI LLC, RL REGI MISSOURI LLC, RL REGI NORTH CAROLINA LLC, RL REGI SOUTH CAROLINA LLC, RL REGI TENNESSEE LLC, RL REGI VIRGINIA LLC, RL REGI-AL HP LLC, RL REGI-AL VRC LLC, RL REGI-FL CRC LLC, RL REGI-FL ESH LLC, RL REGI-FL FT. PIERCE LLC, RL REGI-FL GDL LLC, RL REGI-FL ITALIA LLC, RL REGI-FL MRED LLC, RL REGI-FL RDI LLC, RL REGI-FL SARASOTA LLC, RL REGI-FL TPL LLC, RL REGI-FL VARC LLC, RL REGI-GA DRAD LLC, RL REGI-GA HAY DB LLC, RL REGI-GA MHU LLC, RL REGI-GA MPD LLC, RL REGI-GA RLR LLC, RL REGI-MO GMB LLC, RL REGI-MO MOSCOW MILLS LLC, RL REGI-MS Double H LLC, RL REGI-MS OCEAN SPRINGS LLC, RL REGI-NC CIL LLC, RL REGI-NC LITTLE WING LLC, RL REGI-NC MLD LLC, RL REGI-NC Mland LLC, RL REGI-NC RALEIGH LLC, RL REGI-NC SUGARM LLC, RL REGI-NM LLC, RL REGI-SC CTL LLC, RL REGI-SC LAKE E LLC, RL REGI-SC TDG LLC, RL REGI-SC TIG LLC, RL REGI-TN OAK LLC, RL REGI-TN SEVIERVILLE LLC, RL RES 2009-1 Investments LLC, RMF Alliance LLC, RMF Commercial LLC, RMF PR New York LLC, RMF Partner LLC, RMF SUB 1 LLC, RMF SUB 2 LLC, RMF SUB 3 LLC, RMF SUB 4 LLC, RMF SUB 5 LLC, RMV LLC, Raintree Village II L.L.C., Raintree Village L.L.C., Ral-Len BM LLC, Ral-Len LLC, Rannel Capital WeWork Series D LLC, Rannel Holdings LLC, Rannel Interests LLC, Rannel Investments LLC, Rannel Mortgage Investments LLC, Rannel Proprietary Investments LLC, Renaissance Joint Venture, Reserve @ Pleasant Grove II LLC, Reserve @ Pleasant Grove LLC, Reserve at River Park LLC, Reserve at South Harrison LLC, Rialto Commercial Mortgage Securities LLC, Rialto Credit Partnership GP LLC, Rialto Mezz Partners GP LLC, Rialto Mortgage Finance LLC, Rialto Partners GP II LLC, Rialto Partners GP III - Debt LLC, Rialto Partners GP III - Property LLC, Rialto Partners GP LLC, Rialto RSSF GP LLC, Riverwalk at Lago Mar LLC, Rocking Horse Minerals LLC, Rutenberg Homes Inc. (Florida), Rutenberg Homes of Texas Inc., Rye Hill Company LLC, Ryland Homes Nevada Holdings LLC, Ryland Homes Nevada LLC, Ryland Homes of California Inc., S. Florida Construction II LLC, S. Florida Construction III LLC, S. Florida Construction LLC, SC 521 Indian Land Reserve LLC, SC 521 Indian Land Reserve South LLC, SPIC CPCO Inc., SPIC CPDB Inc., SPIC CPRB Inc., SPIC Del Sur LLC, SPIC Dublin LLC, SPIC Mesa LLC, SPIC NC Fremont LLC, SPIC Otay LLC, SPIC Springs LLC, San Felipe Indemnity Co. Ltd., San Lucia LLC, San Simeon Lennar LLC, Schulz Ranch Developers LLC, Seminole/70th LLC, Siena at Old Orchard L.L.C., Sierra Vista Communities LLC, Silver Springs Lennar LLC, South Development LLC, Southbank Holding LLC, Spanish Springs Development LLC, St. Charles Active Adult Community LLC, St. Charles Community LLC, Standard Pacific 1 Inc., Standard Pacific Investment Corp., Standard Pacific of Colorado Inc., Standard Pacific of Florida, Standard Pacific of Florida GP Inc., Standard Pacific of Las Vegas Inc., Standard Pacific of Orange County Inc., Standard Pacific of Tampa GP, Standard Pacific of Tampa GP Inc., Standard Pacific of Tonner Hills LLC, Standard Pacific of Walnut Hills Inc., Standard Pacific of the Carolinas LLC, Stoney Holdings LLC, Storey Lake Club LLC, Storey Park Club LLC, Strategic Holdings Inc., Strategic Technologies LLC, Summerfield Venture L.L.C., SunStreet Energy Group LLC, SunStreet Manager LLC, TCO QVI LLC, TICD Hold Co. LLC, TIH Hold Co. LLC, Talega Associates LLC, Temecula Valley LLC, Terra Division LLC, Terra/Winding Creek LLC, The Baywinds Land Trust, The Bridges Club at Rancho Santa Fe Inc., The Bridges at Rancho Santa Fe Sales Company Inc., The LNC Northeast Group Inc., The Oasis Club at LEN-CG South LLC, The Preserve at Coconut Creek LLC, The Vistas Club at LEN-CG South LLC, Titlezoom Company, Treasure Island Holdings LLC, Treasure Island Member LLC, Treviso Holding LLC, Two Lakes Lennar LLC, U.S. Home Corporation, U.S. Home Realty Inc., U.S. Home of Arizona Construction Co., U.S. Insurors Inc., U.S.H. Realty Inc., UAMC Holding Company LLC, UB 2018C14 MOA LLC, USH - Flag LLC, USH Equity Corporation, USH LEE LLC, USH Leasing II LLC, USH Leasing LLC, UST Lennar HW Scala SF Joint Venture, VII Crown Farm Investor LLC, Venetian Lennar LLC, Vineyard Land LLC, Vineyard Point 2009 LLC, Vista Palms Clubhouse LLC, WCI Communities, WCI Communities Inc., WCI Communities LLC, WCI Towers Northeast USA Inc., WCI Westshore LLC, WCP LLC, WIP Lennar OHB LLC, Waterview at Hanover LLC, West Lake Village LLC, West Seattle Project X LLC, West Van Buren L.L.C., Westchase Inc., Westchase Ltd., Westfield Homes USA Inc., White Course Lennar LLC, Wild Plum JV LLC, Willowbrook Investors LLC, Winncrest Natomas LLC, Woodbridge Multifamily Developer I LLC, Wright Farm L.L.C., and YLRichards4Acres 2015 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.  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Lagos State Governor-elect, Babajide Sanwo-Olus aide, Olufunke Phillips,has been exposed by a Nigerian journalist, Ruona Meyer, as a fugitive evading justice after being charged for cocaine possession.

Philips who is Sanwo-Olus digital manager was exposed via the Facebook and Twitter pages of Meyer on Friday morning.

The post revealed that Phillips was charged in 2007 by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) for being in possession of 3.14 kilogrammes of cocaine.

She went on to be arraigned before the Lagos Division of the Federal High Court in 2007 but absconded after being granted bail by Justice P.I Ajoku, along with 25 others.

Phillips, who is being accused of intellectual property theft by the journalist, had her dark secret revealed after the fallout.

The fugitive story was brought to the knowledge of the journalist, when she had teamed with Philips to create The Beverage Space, years ago.

On creating the website which focuses on alcohol consumption in Nigeria, she needed a face and since she was based abroad, Philips conveniently was brought to be one.

However, the journalist reveals she hsf to let go of the project which she financed all alone because background check on her partner revealed she was a fugitive evading Justice.

The straw that crashed the Camels back was when Phillips set up her own website with the same idea as Meyers but with a different name The Beverage Room.

Philips website as a huge acceptance on social media with lots of followers.

Meyer said she had severed all ties with Philips from 2015 and 2016, asking Philips to take down the page or face a legal suit.

I terminated our business dealings in 2016 after I found out @FunkePhillips is facing cocaine smuggling charges (with a 2009 court case); and on 4 July 2011, @ndlea_nigeria listed her as skipping bail.

I handled the blog, edited written copy, tapped my contacts in Corporate Communications, PR & media in general, to boost our networks. Funke Phillips had no money, so I handled practically all costsincluding domain hosting, calls to contacts, sending proposals for sponsored events planning hangouts, generating content ideas and even doing interviews from Germany with my Nigerian contacts.

Soon, we were about to get into signing partnerships, when my manager in Germany reminded me to do a character check on Funke Phillips. I remembered Id heard some absurd rumours and went online to check.

The report stated that the information that Funke and other alleged drug barons were on the loose was corroborated by then @ndlea_nigeria spokesperson Mitchell Ofoyeju (@mitchelljnr) cc @dg_ndlea.

So I am not asking for money, or care what Nigeria does to her or not. After all, she has skipped bail for years and is not exactly hiding.

I care because I am held to a higher standard, personally, family-wise, and as a citizen of Germany. I would be a pariah, unworthy of any semblance of public life if I were ever associated with a drug-smuggling criminal, who also skipped bail. So I have to disclaim it. Publicly too.

Im making this PUBLIC disclaimer to FULLY dissociate myself from business dealings I had with Olufunke Phillips in 2015/2016, which I terminated in 2016, after I found out @FunkePhillips is facing COCAINE smuggling charges (with a 2009 court case); and on 4 July 2011, @ndlea_nigeria listed her as skipping bail. Link here, full screenshots in comments.

In 2015, I originated and conceptualised a blog and event portal on the business of drinking, from a female perspective. I needed a face for it, as I was not based in Nigeria. This is where Funke Phillips came in. I later called it The Beverage Space.

I set up all email, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook accounts, paid a designer to make a logo (seen here for August 2015  mail of her choosing logo), everything. All Funke Phillips had to do was go to events/bars, send in little notes, writings.

I handled the blog, edited written copy, tapped my contacts in Corporate Communications, PR & media in general, to boost our networks. Funke Phillips had no money, so I handled practically all costsincluding domain hosting, calls to contacts, sending proposals for sponsored events planning hangouts, generating content ideas and even doing interviews from Germany with my Nigerian contacts.

We started to make progress in a very short time; I flew into Nigeria, arranged meetings with my contacts, I will not mention them here, as they are private people and I may need their private testimony for court.

But each time I told them Id be working underground, as I was based outside, working on my day job anyway, and so Funke Phillips would be TBS face. She attended some meetings, and was aware.

Soon, we were about to get into signing partnerships, when my manager in Germany reminded me to do a character check on Funke Phillips. I remembered Id heard some absurd rumours, and went online to check

I discovered Funke Phillips was arrested in a Lagos airport with 3.14kgs of cocaine, and skipped bail, prompting then @ndlea_nigeria chairman Ahmadu to list her among wanted drug barons in July 2011. Pics attached as comments

The report states that the information that Funke Phillips and other drug barons were on the loose was corroborated by then @ndlea_nigeria spokesperson Mitchell Ofoyeju (@mitchelljnr) cc @dg_ndlea

I next used my contacts in the courts and prisons to legally crosscheck these facts, and presented the situation to @FunkePhillips, asking her to explain. See her case file number photo also in comments.

In private chats I will reserve for the court, Funke Phillips said she went through a lot to settle the case. I replied that the only way the case could be settled was if she was ACQUITTED, or SERVED TIME, but not so, according to @ndlea_nigeria

In comments are screenshots that show that weeks after @ndlea_nigeria noted her as a drug baron on the lam, Funke Phillips was online, on social media.

I, therefore, asked Funke Phillips for her documents of acquittal. She responded that this was the work of her enemies. With such answers, I told her I could NEVER work with her on any basis; we needed to cut all ties immediately.

Specifically, I told Funke Phillips I would pay off those I had contracted to work for us, handle all the bills, take down everything to do with TBS I wanted NOTHING more to do with a fugitiveeven if Nigeria is mediocre enough to allow people like Funke Phillips with a pending drug case walk the streets freely. This absurdity was not going to be my norm.

I told Funke Phillips that in fact, I did not care what happened in Nigeria. I cared about my career and life in Europe, where even the whiff of an association with criminality is just as bad as criminality.

Therefore, over subsequent communications, particularly through mutual friends, I asked her to make sure she never referred to me as someone she worked with, never referred to or made similarities to TBSto ensure she never used any similar idea or contacts made, so that people would not subconsciously associate me with her, as we had gone far. Funke Phillips agreed. I added she was a fraud and must do right by the law.

HOWEVER I thereafter had major surgery, job moves, and JUST discovered that in fact, shortly after this, Funke Phillips set up THE BEVERAGE ROOM (TBR), using many ideas, & in some instances, even same contacts.

Worse still, when I raised the issue 72 hours ago, contacts have since come to tell me they thought I was still a silent partner at TBR, and that is why they joined online groups, bought t-shirts, went to and had events, etc.

To be clear: I publicly (via social media) tagged Funke Phillips, asking her to pull down TBR, because it is a rip-off of TBS, and she knows why she has to: Intellectual property theft, and the matter of GROSS criminality.

Rather, Funke Phillips and her associate have since said I am doing it because I am jealous and I want to pull her down because I heard she is an aide to Lagos state governor-elect Jide Sanwoolu. FOR THE RECORD: I ALSO JUST HEARD ABOUT THIS LESS THAN 72 HOURS AGO.

So, Funke Phillips, to reiterate what I told you 3 years ago: I DO NOT CARE what Nigeria does to you, or whether this country ignores your criminality and rewards you  after all, you will not be the first fugitive to pop up in government circles in Nigeria.

Because unlike you, I operate under a far different code of integrity and ethics  filial-wise, professionally, and by virtue of being a German citizen.

Based on my dealings in Germany, I cannot be seen to have ever had any associations with someone linked to drugs, even more with someone like you, Funke Phillips, cited as skipping bail and being a fugitive.

THIS is the reason for this public disclaimer, Funke Phillips. This is not about money, so, when I head to court to force a pull-down of TBR, I am more concerned about DISSOCIATION and intellectual property theft.

Because Funke Phillips you simply cannot afford what I would term requisite compensation for my intellectual property. Even if you could, I would never prioritise collecting money from a fraudulent character like you.

Simply because again, I operate under a different set of personal and locational principles. On that note, Funke Phillips should you still refuse to do the needful, and pull down TBR, I will see you in court. Please, try to show up this time.
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.

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Utica, N.Y. - On this Friday in March, it was a tough day for Muslims around the world, as 49 people were shot and killed at two mosques in New Zealand.

Normal Friday prayer services were held in Utica at several mosques, including the West Bosnian Islamic Center on Bleecker Street.

West Bosnian Islamic Center President Bajar Smajic spoke to News Channel 2 after the afternoon service there. When asked if he was concerned that something like what happened in New Zealand could happen here, Smajic said, "I dont think so, I dont think so, no, no, no, no. You got to pray, you got to pray, thats it. Thank God it not happen over here."

Utica Police Lt. Bryan Coromato says the department beefed up patrols on Friday at the mosques around the city. A cruiser was parked outside the mosque on Bleecker Street during the entire one hour prayer service Friday afternoon.

Coromato says when a terrorist attack occurs anywhere in the world it is definitely is noticed by law enforcement all around the world, "Things like that put people on high alert. It's definitely something that we take note of and with our Muslim population in the city we have definitely taken note and beefed up some of our patrols in the area of the mosques."

Also holding prayer service Friday afternoon, was the Bosnian Islamic Association of Utica on Court Street. Officials there did not want to comment, but member Betty Mercer took time to talk to News Channel 2 before heading in to the prayer service.

Mercer said it may be time to have security at the prayer services, "Not just at our mosque, but even the churches and the temples. We all should have security. I really think we should have that because it's not safe. You can't even come and pray to your God, what you believe, and you can even do that anymore."

Members of the Bosnian Islamic Association of Utica on Court Street heading in to pray were greeted by a woman with a sign.

That woman was Jill Farnham-Us with the Interfaith Coalition of Greater Utica.

Farnham-Us held up a sign that read, "No matter where youre from, were glad you are our neighbor." It was written in English, Spanish, Bosnian and Arabic.

She says as soon as she heard what happened in New Zealand, she wanted to let the Muslims in our community know, they are not alone, "Ive had several hugs. Its a scary time but this is a community that welcomes people and we want to make sure they know this is still true here. Its a sad day, and its a day that we can come together and remind each other that were not alone."
BINGHAMTON  Less than three months into his first term in office, Rep. Anthony Brindisi already has a challenger for his 22nd Congressional District seat.

Thursday, Binghamton-area native George Phillips announced he will challenge Brindisi in 2020. According to the biography on his campaign website, Phillips has spent much of his career as an educator, both in high school and college. He also served as an aide to Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey.

I am running because I believe that we need bold national reforms to continue to unleash the full potential of the American people and lift up the people of Upstate New York who have suffered so much due to poor policies from Albany, said Phillips in an email statement. We need to keep going with bold reforms. Our campaign has a tremendous network in place, we are launching a vigorous campaign effort and are confident of victory.

Phillips previously ran for the seat in 2010 and 2016, losing both times.

Brindisi, a Democrat, defeated incumbent Claudia Tenney in a close race that required an extensive recount last November.
ONEONTA, N.Y. - Otsego Now started a series of town hall meetings in Otsego County to give updates on regional, countywide strategies for economic development.

Otsego Now is an economic development agency which includes the county's Industrial Development Agency (IDA).

At Thursday nights meeting at Oneonta Town Hall, Jody Zakrevsky, Otsego Now CEO, spoke to a room full of Oneonta residents who had a chance to ask questions and voice their concerns. Among many topics discussed, a few of the main topics were energy, jobs, housing, and the Oneonta Rail Yards.

"I think its important for us to get out and explain what we're actually working on and then to talk about what other projects or other types of clusters or other priority projects to get involve with," Zakrevsky said.

Zakrevsky says he started his series of town hall meetings in Oneonta because there have been some environmental concerns about projects being worked on, one of those projects being the Oneotna Rail Yards.

"There's been a number of concerns whether there's been enough environmental testing done on the site," Zakrevsky said. "There has been a series of engineering firms that did a detailed analysis that was approved by DEC on the water quality and soil conditions and once we finish that review, then we're actually going to sit down with residents and figure out what we want to do with the property."

Another environmental concern is energy.

"What they want to see is controlled and environmentally sensitive development," Zakrevsky said. "Its difficult sometimes to work on those projects but I think if we get support of the community to work with us we can make those things happen. Its difficult when you look at projects where you're going to be 10 to 15 to 20 years down the road, but we've got to start thinking about those and its very difficult to thing where energy is going to be in 50 or 20 years."

Housing is another topic that Zakrevsky touched on, saying that there hasn't been any new housing built in the Oneonta area in about 10 years.

"We need newer housing that we really don't have," Zakrevsky said.

Residents also asked questions about creating jobs and raising wages.

"A big issue that some of the residents raised is that they want quality of living, they want better wages for people and that's what we're trying to do," Zakrevsky said.

Zakrevsky briefly talked about the projects that are happening this year.

"Our biggest projects are to continue to work with Corning Enterprises on their $11 million expansion. We've also added this year a solar array project that is going to be built on their properties. We're in the process of working with custom electronics to see that their expansion goes through, they're doing a $2.2 million expansion. Their employment will go up to about 125 which is a significant number for our county, Corning's is at 175 so those are decent size employees."

Wednesday night, Zakrevsky talked with college students at Hartwick Colleges Shineman Chapel, and a lot of the suggestions given by the students there were about tourism and attracting more people into the community.

"The other area is, what type of programs, cultural and artistic programs that we're not promoting as much as we should that would make residents and people who visit the area enjoy their experience here more," Zakrevsky said.

Zakrevsky said more town hall meetings are to come and he plans on visiting Maryland, Cooperstown, and Richfield Springs next.
At least 49 people are dead and 20 injured following two separate terrorist attack shootings in New Zealand overnight. And because of the shootings, Governor Andrew Cuomo is calling for increased security around mosques and houses of worship in New York.

State police will increase patrols around New York, which Cuomo says appears to be rooted in Islamophobia.

Cuomo said that New York stands with the Muslim community as the state always has and will, in a statement. It reads:

"My heart breaks for the victims of the horrific attack in New Zealand. And we grieve with the rest of the world. In the wake of this disgusting act of bigoted violence, which appears to be rooted in Islamophobia, New York stands with the Muslim community as we always have and always will.

As a precaution, I have directed State Police to increase patrols around mosques and houses of worship across the state. At a time of great division, we will stand up to hate in all its forms and do everything in our power to protect the safety and wellbeing of all New Yorkers.

On behalf of all New Yorkers, I extend my deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand, to the families who have lost loved ones, and to all those grieving around the world."
A few days ago, Deji Adeyanju, a human rights activist tendered his resignation to the Our Mumu Don Do coalition, with claims that his partner media personality Charles Oputa, aka Charly Boy, had betrayed him.

Adeyanju added that the betrayal came during the time he was locked up for 78 days.

Charly Boy has now reacted to the allegations levelled against him via a statement released today.

The statement read thus;
INDIANAPOLIS (AP)  Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb has directed flags across Indiana to be flown at half-staff in honor of former U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh, who died Thursday at age 91.

Holcomb said in a statement that flags should be lowered to half-staff from now until sunset on the day of Bayh's funeral, which has not yet been announced.

The governor also asked Indiana businesses and residents to lower their flags to honor Bayh, calling him "a trailblazer who dedicated himself to improving the lives of all Hoosiers."

Bayh championed the federal law banning discrimination against women in college admissions and sports, and crafted the 25th Amendment on presidential succession.

Holcomb said Bayh's "remarkable legislative and personal legacy" had transformed the nation. He urged Hoosiers to keep Bayh's family in their thoughts and prayers.
CLINTON COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI)  State police are investigating a shooting on I-65 overnight. They say the victim was brought to the hospital by 20-year-old Darius Printup of Lafayette.

Around 2:30 Friday morning, troopers were called to IU Hospital in Frankfort for a woman with a gunshot wound to her back.

It happened somewhere north of the Frankfort exit.

Troopers believe a black 2010 Chevrolet Impala was following a black Honda Civic. They say shots were fired from the Impala and hit the Civic with the victim inside.

Eventually, the victim was transferred to an Indianapolis hospital and is stable.

This investigation is continuing and if you may have witnessed the shooting or can identify the cars please call the Indiana State Police and ask for Trooper Detective Josh Edwards or First Sergeant Jerry Holeman.

The number is 765-567-2125.
An Offa Robbery Suspect, Ayoade Akinnibosun has told the court that his statement implicating Senate president Bukola Saraki was given under duress.

The Friday trial of the robbery suspects in the Offa, Kwara state robbery in April 2018, at the State High Court sitting in Ilorin, saw suspects telling the judge that police tortured them into giving their statements.

Akinnibosun the first suspect told Justice Halimah Salman, that he was shot in two legs, adding that police allegedly shot five men dead in his presence, compelling him to make his statement implicating Saraki.

The suspect further alleged that police made him sleep on the spot where the men had been shot.

Akinnibosun also alleged that six huge stones were put on his back, his hands and feet tied, and he was denied food for about a week while being tortured.

According to the suspect, himself and other suspects were held in the generator room at Police Headquarters Abuja, Michael Adiukwu, a dismissed police officer was brought in to identify if they were among those who carried out the deadly robbery.

He, however told the judge that Adikwu was immediately shot dead on the spot, for denying that he knew them.

The suspect said his confession during the press conference, when they were arraigned was a pre-written statement they were forced to sign and memorise.

Akinnibosun said he could only thump print on the six-page already written statement, because his finger werent working after series of torture.

Cross-examination was done by the prosecution counsel.

Both the second accused, Ibikunle Ogunleye, and the third accused person Abraham Adeola corroborated the statement of the first accused person on torture and how Adikwu was killed.
The senator-elect of Kwara State, Dr Ibrahim Oloriegbe, has promised to surpass the records of the President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki.

Oloriegbe, who recorded victory over Saraki in the just-concluded National Assembly election, said his performance in the Senate within the next four years, would surpass whatever achievements that were being attributed to the former Kwara State governor in his last eight years in Senate.

The APC senator-elect stated this on Thursday in Abuja after collecting his certificate of return from the Independent National Electoral Commission.

He said;

Despite attaining the position of Senate President in his sojourn in the Senate, Saraki has not set any standard of performance for any successor to study or build on. The responsive representation I will put up for Kwara Central people within the next four years, coupled with the required legislative engagements to be made on both the floor and at committee levels for good governance in the country, will surpass whatever performance Saraki has rendered in the past. Saraki, by his brand of politics and inordinate political ambition, focuses more on national politics and not responsive and quality representation for Kwara Central people who are his constituents. It is God that gives and takes power from whosoever he wishes. I thank the Almighty Allah for granting me the grace of being overwhelmingly elected as Senator for Kwara Central in the coming ninth Senate. I have the pedigree of service to people and humanity as a trained medical doctor, who had spent decades working with the World Health Organisation and I also have years of experience on the political field rendering selfless service to people and humanity. I was the majority leader of Kwara State House of Assembly from 1999 to 2003 under the late Governor Muhammed Alabi Lawal . My focus in the Senate will squarely be on how to ensure legislative engineering, and provide quality and responsive representation.

Oloriegbe also promised to improve the lives of his constituents and also work with eight other federal lawmakers from the state to support the governor-elect, Abdulrahaman Abdulrasaq.
Vanguard

VICE President Yemi Osinbajo, yesterday, met behind closed doors with Governor Mohammed Abubakar of Bauchi State and his Adamawa State counterpart, Governor Jibrila Bindo, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Thisday

Stakeholders in the maritime sector of the nations economy have urged the federal government to embark on the development of the eastern ports and maxixmise their potential.

The Sun

Ex-presidential spokesman and one of the spokespersons of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Presidential Campaign Council, Sani Umar, speaks on the just concluded governorship election in Kaduna State and the resolve of the party and its candidate to approach the election petition tribunal to reclaim its allegedly stolen mandate.

Daily Times

The Imo State governor elect, Chief Emeka Ihedioha, has dedicated his victory to the people of state, saying that the mandate bestowed on him was sacred and promised to uphold the trust.

Leadership

The Senator-elect for Benue North Senatorial District, Honourable Orker Jev, in this interview with RUTH CHOJI, expresses support for the application of the federal character principles in the selection of the Senate president of the 9th National Assembly. He also speaks on other sundry matters.

The Nation

EXCEPT the court decides otherwise, Imo State Governor Rochas Okorocha will not represent the Imo West Senatorial District when the Ninth National Assembly is inaugurated on June 8.

Daily Trust

Governor Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo State has assured the new governor-elect, Mr Seyi Makinde, of his administrations full support towards a successful change of baton and smooth take off of the incoming administration.

Tribune

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has called on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to immediately declare the results of the election in states where the gubernatorial poll has been declared inconclusive with the party in taking the lead.
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The US state of Hawaii is located in Oceania, which makes it the only US state that is located in Oceania, the only one made up entirely of islands, and the only one outside North American boundaries. The state is the youngest state after its admission to the union on August 21, 1959. Nicknamed the Aloha State, the Islands of Aloha, and the Paradise of the Pacific, Hawaii has an area of about 10,931 square miles. When it comes to marine symbols, it is not a surprise that Hawaii has several of them considering that it is surrounded by the ocean. Aside from the official state fish, the state also has an official state mammal, state marine animal, and state gem.

State Fish: Humuhumunukunukuapua`a

The official Hawaii state fish is known as the Humuhumunukunukuapua`a, which is scientifically known as Rhinecanthus rectangulus. Other names for the fish include the reef triggerfish and the rectangular triggerfish. The fish was designated as the state fish on a five-year trial in 1985. The official and permanent designation happened recently in 2006. The small fish has blue teeth and a blue upper lip, which are all part of its chubby mouth. Their bodies can grow up to 30 centimeters in length. During feeding, they often sift through sand for food. As a defense mechanism, they emit a grunt that may be for scaring off predators or warning other triggerfish nearby.

State Marine Mammal: Humpback Whale

The official state marine mammal is the humpback whale, which is scientifically called Megaptera novaeangliae. The humpback whale was officially designated as Hawaii's state marine mammal in 1979. The humpback whale can grow to lengths of between 39 and 52 feet and weigh between 25 and 30 metric tons. The endangered whale migrates a distance of up to 16,000 miles in a year. Their bodies feature a lumpy head and long pectoral fins. In recent years, their populations have been recovering due to conservation efforts.

State Mammal: Hawaiian Monk Seal

In 2008, the state adopted another marine mammal, namely the endangered Hawaiian monk seal. Endemic to Hawaii, this endangered seal is one of the only two surviving species of monk seals. Presently, there are only 1,400 Hawaiian monk seals. Diseases and commercial hunting constantly threaten their numbers. Their bodies are gray and can grow to weights of up to 400 pounds for males and up to 600 pounds for females. On average, females have lengths of around 8 feet while males grow to lengths of about 7 feet.

State Gem: Black Coral

Black coral was designated as the Hawaii state gem back in 1987. Presently, there are more than 150 species of black coral. At least 10 of them are from Hawaii. Mostly, the corals live in clusters of up to 6 feet tall although they can also live individually.
Massachusetts is an American state located on the northeastern part of the country. During the pre-colonial period, several Native American communities lived where it is now the state of Massachusetts. Such communities included the Massachusett, after whom the state is named, the Mahican, and the Nipmuc among others. The arrival of the Europeans in the region greatly influenced the shape of the state's borders. The Pilgrims were the first group of Europeans to settle in Massachusetts, and their colony at Plymouth was the second successful attempt at establishing a permanent colony in the present-day United States. In the modern era, Massachusetts shares its borders with five states, and they are Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Connecticut.

States Bordering Massachusetts

Rhode Island

The border that separates Massachusetts from Rhode Island is located in the southern edge of Massachusetts. Most of the boundary between Massachusetts and Rhode Island is a relatively straight line except in its western edge where it meanders. Massachusetts and Rhode Island were involved in a border dispute since the colonial era. During the nineteenth century, the case was presented to the Supreme Court for deliberation. A section of Rhode Island's territory was given to Massachusetts in exchange for land that would later become Pawtucket City. Some of the major cities located on the Massachusetts side of the border include Franklin and Milford. Towns located on the Rhode Island side of the border include Pawtucket, Cumberland, and East Providence. Pawtucket is one of Rhode Island's largest cities and in 2010 it was home to about 71,148 people. Pawtucket is also considered one of the most historic towns in Rhode Island. During the 19th century, Pawtucket was made up of two cities, east and west Pawtucket, which were finally combined in 1886.

New Hampshire

Massachusetts and New Hampshire are separated by a border located on the northern part of Massachusetts. During the colonial period when both were provinces, Massachusetts and New Hampshire had a dispute over the position of their boundary. The leaders of the two provinces disagreed on the wording of an agreement that had set up the boundaries between the provinces. The leaders of Massachusetts believed that their territory extended into New Hampshire's territory. On the other hand, the leaders of New Hampshire believed that the boundary should be located three miles north of the mouth of the Merrimack River. The leaders of New Hampshire presented their case to King George who delivered a verdict in 1740. King George's verdict favored New Hampshire as it awarded the province more land than it had previously claimed. Presently, some of the towns located on the New Hampshire side of the border include Winchester, Greenville, and Hudson. Cities located on the Massachusetts side of the border include Athol, Lowell, and Lawrence.

New York

Massachusetts shares its entire western border with New York. There are several cities located on the Massachusetts side of the border such as Williamstown, Pittsfield, and Lenox. Some of the towns located on the New York side of the border include Hoosick Falls and Millerton. Hoosick Falls is a relatively small town in New York and it was home to 3,501 people in 2010. The highest population that the town has ever recorded during 1900 was 7,000 people. The town is considered one of the most historic places in the US. One of the most famous painters in the US, Grandma Moses, was buried in the town. Millerton is another famous town in New York and it was named after Sidney Miller, a famous railroad contractor in the area. The town was formed in 1851 and incorporated in 1875. Massachusetts and New York have a complicated relationship because they compete in the field of business. A report by Reason indicated that a large number of New Yorkers moved to Massachusetts to take advantage of the lower taxes. Several significant businesses have also moved from New York to Massachusetts. The state of New York has attempted to keep businesses in the state by introducing business-friendly policies.

Connecticut

Massachusetts shares most of its southern border with Connecticut. The border is a relatively straight line except for a small section that curves into Connecticut. The area that caused disagreements between Massachusetts and Connecticut was Southwick Jog and is one of the unique areas in the US. During the 17th century, the area was home to a farming community. The government of Massachusetts employed two men, Solomon Saffrey and Nathaniel Woodward, to determine the position of its southern border. The two men made a mistake in locating the position of the border, and the mistake caused a discrepancy of roughly 7 miles in some areas. The error caused a dispute between Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1702, the dispute between Connecticut and Massachusetts was presented to the government of England. The English government resolved the issue during the late 18th century. One of the significant towns located on the Massachusetts side of the border is Springfield. In 2017, Springfield was home to about 154,758 people. The town is the seat of Hampden County. One of the famous towns on the Connecticut side of the border is Canaan. In 2000, it was estimated that the town was home to 1,081 people.

Vermont

Massachusetts has the smallest section of its northern boundary with Vermont. The boundary between the two states follows a relatively straight line. One of the significant towns located on the Massachusetts side of the border is Greenfield. The city was first settled in the 17th century making it one of Massachusetts' oldest cities. In 1811, the city was chosen as the seat of Franklin County. Another major town on the Massachusetts side of the border is Webster. In 2010, the city was home to about 16,767 people. Some of the major cities in Vermont located close to the border include Bennington and Brattleboro.

The Importance of Massachusetts's Borders

The borders of Massachusetts are significant as they reflect a vital part of the state's history. The borders are also significant as they show the limits of the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts government.
Thanks to Chinas efforts in poverty alleviation, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southwest Chinas Sichuan province is gradually shaking off poverty and embracing a brighter future.

Deputy Ge Funeng shows a picture at a panel discussion of the second session of the 13th National Peoples Congress. (Photo by Li Ge/Peoples Daily)

Ge Funeng, deputy to the 13th National Peoples Congress (NPC) well elaborated on the improved livelihood of the people there by sharing a photo and the story behind it at a panel discussion of Sichuan province.

In the photo, residents of Huodeng village, Lean township, Butuo county of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture are counting money they have earned by planting herbal medicines.

I was born in an impoverished village of Daliang Mountain, and I know deeply the hardships my fellow villagers are going through, Ge said.

Thanks to the herbal medicine industry, Butuo county has lifted 1,216 impoverished households out of poverty, increasing the annual income of the villagers to over 8,000 yuan ($1,192) from hundreds of yuan, he introduced.

Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture is one of the 14 contiguous poverty-stricken areas of China, and also one of the major areas for the country to carry out poverty eradication campaigns.

The poverty-stricken region, as well as the 5.3 million people from all ethnic groups living there, are always a concern for Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

A Villager in Butuo county, Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest Chinas Sichuan province, counts money she earns from herbal medicine planting. (Photo/Peoples Daily)

He visited Liangshan before the Spring Festival in 2018 to inspect poverty alleviation work, and specifically mentioned two families from Sanhe village, Zhaojue county of Liangshan in his 2019 New Year speech.

The eyes of a deputy named Xu Ping brimmed with tears as Ge unfolded the story. Xu is a college graduate who survived the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. It was the governments favorable policies that enabled the post-95 girl to go to college.

Education is able to stop the intergenerational cycle of poverty, and it has played a vital role in Liangshans poverty elimination work.

The local government opened a kindergarten for each village, helping pre-school children learn mandarin to guarantee free communication. To date, the enrolment rates of primary and secondary schools in 11 impoverished counties of Liangshan have respectively reached 99.6 percent and 97 percent.

Over the past three years, the CPC Sichuan Provincial Committee made special policies to help Liangshan, investing over 20 billion yuan of fiscal revenue in poverty alleviation, and sending 11 work teams and over 5,700 cadres to the region.

The current incidence of poverty of Liangshan stands at 7.1 percent, down 12.7 percentage points from 19.8 percent in 2014, according to Suga Erbu, NPC deputy and governor of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture.

In the next two years, the prefecture would lift 317,000 people, 618 villages, and 11 counties out of poverty, Suga added.

All impoverished counties and people will be lifted out of poverty by 2020, said Lin Shucheng, vice chairman of Sichuan Committee of Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference and Party chief of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture.

It is introduced that the local government has rolled out multiple measures to support poverty alleviation, such as the incentive to encourage export of labor services, making sure that no one is left behind in poverty reduction.
The Independent National Electoral Commission will meet in Abuja today to review the suspended election of Rivers State.

INEC suspended the March 9 state elections in the Rivers as a result of widespread violence and snatching of ballot boxes across the state.

According to reports, there are four options before INEC.

The first option is whether or not to cancel the governorship and House of Assembly elections in Rivers State;

Second on the list is whether or not to restrict the conduct of elections only in units, wards or areas affected by violence.

Another option on the table is whether or not to continue with the announcement of collated or retrieved results if the security situation does not permit a fresh poll;

And lastly, declaring the results as it were and leaving the aggrieved to go to the tribunal.
Former porn actress Mia Khalifa got millions talking after she took to social media to announce her engagement to longtime boyfriend Chef Robert Sandberg.

Sandberg had shared the news on IG writing;

We went to Chicago this weekend and had a wonderful dinner at Smyth. I proposed to @miakhalifa and she said YES!

The ring was hidden in a bowl of dried ingredients and came out as a new serving. Mia was to curious and to eager to taste so she started to eat the inedible ingredients.

I told her not do it and then I put the ring on the finger. I love you so much

Social media users, of course, had a lot to say as many could not believe a porn star could find love.

Read some of the comments below;
A new disturbing report released by the Daily Beast has revealed an epidemic of 911 calls due to Amazon employees who were driven to the brink of suicide on the job. In the five-year period from October 2013 to 2018, 189 calls were made from 46 Amazon sites. The nature of the calls ranged from employees with suicidal ideations, suicide attempts, and other stress-related mental-health episodes.

The sheer geographic scale of the epidemic is staggering on its own. The 46 warehouses comprised an area of 17 statesone-fourth of Amazons sorting and fulfillment centers in the US. There are likely many incidents that have gone unreported as many Amazon warehouses either claimed to not keep logs concerning suicide reports or openly refused information requests from the Daily Beast.

Text transcripts of 911 calls obtained by the news source described grisly scenes such as an individual who had cut himself three or four times with Amazon warehouse issue box cutters. Another suicidal employee at a facility in Hebron, Kentucky, was described by police as pregnant and threatening [her] baby. Another employee in Joliet, Illinois, had expressed the desire to stab herself in the stomach. A young man in a warehouse center in Chester, Virginia, threatened to jump from the second floor of the building. Other workers attempted suicide by overdosing on opioids or other medications.

An older worker at a facility in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2017 had said she was going to go home and kill herself because she had just been fired, according to a sheriffs report. A supervisor found her crying and hitting her head against a wall after she had been told she had been dismissed. She told the supervisor that she did not have anything to live for. She told a sheriffs officer she planned to slit her wrists with a butter knife and had previous suicidal ideations.

A young worker at a warehouse in Etna, Ohio told emergency responders that With all the demands his employer has placed on him and things hes dealing with in life is [sic] becoming too much and [he is] considering hurting himself, according to the sheriffs report. He had been working at Amazon for over a year and is frustrated with his employment because he felt he was lied to by Amazon at his orientation. He keeps saying the company told him they valued his employment and would be treated as if he mattered and not just a number.

Its this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence, former Amazon employee Jace Crouch told the Daily Beast. Crouch had himself experienced an emotional breakdown on the job at a warehouse in Lakeland, Florida.

The staggering figures are no doubt an expression of the social crisis within the US as a whole. According to figures from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the US suicide death rate rose to the highest in 50 years in 2017. Since 2008, it has ranked as the 10th leading cause of death for all ages in the US. In 2016, suicide became the second leading cause of death for ages 1034 and the fourth leading cause for ages 3554.

The mental health crisis that has exploded within the corporate behemoth is the direct result of the brutal exploitation of its workforce. Amazon and its owners stand atop a mountain of broken bones, hernias, torn knee and back muscles, heat strokes, stress-induced asthma attacks, and countless other lifelong bodily injuries. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, now the richest man in the world, is complicit in this social tragedy.

Coverage by the International Amazon Workers Voice (IAWV) newsletter has cited reports by workers at multiple facilities who have seen coworkers sleeping in their cars. Inside the facilities, workers face a high-tech dystopia, characterized by long hours and an authoritarian industrial regime.

Amazon whistleblower Shannon Allen, who attracted worldwide attention when she began posting videos on YouTube documenting her descent into homelessness after being injured at Amazon, spoke with the IAWV on the epidemic.

She began by stating she believed the number of workplace suicide crises were likely much higher than those documented. I can clearly see that this number right here should be doubled, without a doubt, she said. Because of the strenuous work you do inside Amazon, I fully believe [the stories] one thousand percent. These arent lies and theyre not myths.

Allen described conditions in Amazon facilities as miserable and even panic-inducing. Youre almost in anxiety for 10 hours straight, she explained. For me personally, my chest would tighten up so much it would feel like I was having a heart attack when I was in there. If one of the robots stall out, or if your count is wrong, or the computer has a malfunction, or the battery on your scanner dies, that all plays a factor in if you have a job the next day.

Its mainly the job itself but there are other factors too, she continued. I mean, how you even get to and from work, having money to eat while youre working that 10-hour shift. Whether or not youre even able to go to the bathroom. People choose to not go to the bathroom because their rates will drop. And then you have to work double time just to be able to make rate. Thats why we hear stories like the one with that guy peeing in a bottle.

Allen described her own painful experiences of getting injured on the job and the severe financial, physical and emotional stress it caused in her life. I had to be put on anxiety and depression medication because of this whole ordeal of getting injured at Amazon and getting the runaround from them. I couldnt concentrate, I couldnt sleep. It messed with me really, really bad.

I fell into this deep, dark hole where I just didnt want to live, she continued. The struggle of going through this day in and day out. It f***** me up really bad. It hurt me so bad. The only thing that I can do is speak out for everybody else who doesnt have that voice. Because Im not scared. Im not gonna lose everything. Ive already lost it all. Now comes the fighting back.
Flight recorders from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which tragically crashed less than seven minutes after takeoff, were sent to France on Thursday. The aircraft, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, went down on Sunday, March 10, killing all 157 passengers and crew members on board.

The decision to send the recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the United States, whose Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is facing accusations of ignoring safety issues with the 737. The FAA took the late step of grounding the planes on Wednesday after repeatedly assuring the public that they were safe to fly. This in spite of the fact that Sundays crash was very similar to the crash of Lion Air Flight 610, also a Boeing 737 Max 8, in Indonesia last October.

Boeing stated that it fully supports grounding the planes as a precautionary step. However, the company reiterated its full confidence in the planes safety. In this, the company has the full support of the Trump administration, which went out of its way to praise the company after grounding all Max 8 flights on Wednesday. The US grounding followed announcements by Aviation authorities in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, Australia and nearly 40 countries in total that the plane could neither take off nor fly over their respective airspaces.

The FAA, for its part, continuously refused to raise any safety concerns over the aircraft. As recently as Tuesday, acting FAA administrator Daniel Elwell said that the agencys review of the Max 8, show[ed] no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft. Elwell said that the agency will take immediate and appropriate action in the event that any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified.

Bill McGee, aviation adviser for Consumer Reports, recently noted the increasingly cozy relationship between the agency, tasked with air travel safety for hundreds of millions flying over US airspace and the companies they are supposed to regulate. They [the airlines and the FAA] have not presented any evidence that the problems weve seen with these two crashes are not problems that could potentially exist here in the US, he told the Associated Press.

Increasingly, the FAA is relying more and more on what the industry calls electronic surveillance, McGee added. Not going out and kicking the tires, seeing the work being done, making sure its done properly.

Calls have been made on Capitol Hill to at least put some pressure on the FAA for its failure to acknowledge the safety defects of the Max 8. My fear is that the FAA is simply trying to save face and avoid acknowledging the safety defect that they failed to find when they certified the planes safety, said Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Both of the major US carriers flying the 737, Southwest and American Airlines, also expressed confidence in the Max 8 this week despite the Ethiopian and Indonesian crashes. Southwest, which flies 34 of the planes, stated, We remain confident in the safety and airworthiness of the Max 8. American, while saying that it would monitor the Ethiopian Airlines crash investigation, stated that it too had full confidence in the aircraft and our crew members.

The planes problems are thought to be linked to faulty software causing the planes nose to tilt suddenly. US pilots of the Max 8 have stated that their planes noses tilted downward suddenly after the autopilot feature was engaged. The pilots were then only able to wrest control of the aircraft after disconnecting the autopilot.

Issues have also been reported with an anti-stall feature on the plane that also adjusts the position of the planes nose if it believes the engines are stalling. This is believed to be the cause of the October Lion Air crash wherein the anti-stall feature operated erroneously, causing the plane to lose altitude and crash. The anti-stall feature, known as MCAS, only operates when auto-pilot is turned off, compounding the serious safety issues of the Max 8.

Many of the pilot reports regarding the Max 8 were compiled in a NASA database, which does not publicly reveal the pilots names, or the particular airlines involved.

One of these reports details the conversation between a panicked pilot and copilot who lost control of their Max 8 aircraft, which began descending after the auto-pilot feature was turned on. The captain in question wrote in his report, With the concerns with the Max 8 nose down stuff, we both [pilot and copilot] though it appropriate to bring it to your attention. Best guess from me is airspeed fluctuation. The pilot went on to relate that the fluctuations may have been due to an errant weather system overwhelming the planes automation.

Another pilot recorded in the NASA database stated that his MAX 8s nose pitched downward within seconds of engaging autopilot. The plan began descending at 1,200 to 1,500 feet per minute. After the planes low altitude warning system issued an audio warning, the auto pilot was disconnected, and the plane began to climb again.

The pilots in that case couldnt think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose down so aggressively.

Other pilots noted that Boeing has provided little to no training or information regarding the new features of the Max 8 and possible safety issues. I am left to wonder, one pilot noted, what else dont I know? The flight manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient.

The Airline Pilots Association union has been entirely dismissive of the pilots complaints and effectively issued a gag order on its members this week after the crash in Ethiopia. In a press statement, the union wrote, It is imperative that pilots refrain from interacting with the media and adding to the sensationalism surrounding these incidents.
In a demonstration of mounting crisis within the US political system, the Senate voted Thursday afternoon, by a margin of 59-41, for a resolution to overturn the declaration of national emergency issued by President Trump on February 15, in which he directed military resources to be used for the building of a wall along the US-Mexico border.

Twelve Republican senators broke with Trump on the issue, joining all 47 Democrats to approve the resolution adopted by the House of Representatives on February 26. Under the terms of the 1976 National Emergencies Act, the passage of a resolution by either house of Congress to overturn a presidential declaration of emergency forces the other house to vote on the issue within 18 days. No filibusters or other procedural delays are permitted, and the vote is by a simple majority.

Trump is expected to veto the resolution as soon as it is delivered to his desk. He tweeted the single word VETO! within minutes of the Senate vote. His twitter feed Thursday was filled with invective against the Democrats and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and he threatened political retaliation against any Republican senator who defied the White House.

That 12 Republicans defied such threats is significant. The previous day, seven Republicans broke with the White House to vote in favor of a resolution condemning US support for the military intervention by Saudi Arabia in the civil war in Yemen, enabling passage of the resolution by a 54-46 margin.

More important than these rebuffs, however, are 41 Senate Republicans who voted in support of the White House on the national emergency declaration. The vast majority of the Republican caucus thus sanctioned presidential actions that brazenly breach the separation of powers laid down in the US Constitution. They would not uphold the most important power of their own institution, the exclusive authority to appropriate funds, and thereby provide the resources to carry out federal action.

The Republicans who voted in favor of the resolution of disapproval made it clear that they actually support Trumps policy of savage repression of immigrants, including the building of a border wall. Their objection was to the unconstitutional methods employed: issuing an emergency declaration after Congress had refused to provide more than $1.375 billion for border security, with a specific prohibition on building more than 55 miles of new wall.

I believe the use of emergency powers in this circumstance violates the Constitution, said Senator Jerry Moran, a conservative Republican from Kansas, in a hand-written statement. This continues our country down the path of all-powerful executivesomething those who wrote the Constitution were fearful of.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who earlier warned Trump was provoking a constitutional crisis, observed, Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, described the resolution as a vote for the Constitution and for the balance of powers that is at its core. He added, I am seriously concerned that overreach by the Executive Branch is an invitation to further expansion and abuse by future presidents.

Many senators embraced this argument: that Trump was setting a precedent for a future Democratic chief executive who might claim climate change or gun violence constituted a national emergency and take unilateral action without congressional sanction.

Trumps response to this, delivered earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, is worth noting. He said the best way to prevent a Democratic president from declaring such emergencies was to win the 2020 election. And not only 2020: the only context in which his rejoinder makes sense is as part of a perspective of maintaining an ultra-right grip on the White House more or less indefinitely.

Throughout the confrontation between the White House and congressional Democrats, which has now extended for nearly three months, since Trump reneged on a bipartisan budget deal and forced a partial shutdown of the federal government in late December, Trump has operated outside the normal rules of American bourgeois politics.

 In December, Trump rejected the continuing resolution devised by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to provide time to negotiate a longer-term bipartisan budget deal.

 He allowed the shutdown to continue for 35 days, until faced with the danger of a mass refusal to work by federal workers who were going without pay.

 After accepting a short-term continuing resolution, and then a deal that limited border security funding to $1.375 billion, the same figure proposed in December, Trump issued his declaration of national emergency, proposing to shift funds from various Pentagon accounts to the Department of Homeland Security, in direct violation of decisions by the legislature.

 In the run-up to the Senate vote, Trump twice blocked efforts by Senate Republicans to find a legislative end-run around the constitutional conflict.

 Now, faced with the unprecedented action by both houses of Congress repudiating his declaration of a national emergency, Trump will veto the resolution and rely on an ultra-right minority in the House of Representatives to uphold his veto.

Throughout this period, Trump has sought to whip up his ultra-right base with open appeals to racism and anti-immigrant bigotry and fascistic attacks on socialism, as in his notorious declaration in the State of the Union address that he would never let America become a socialist country.

The Democratic Party leadership and its supporters in the corporate media are celebrating the Senate vote as a serious rebuke to Trump, and even as a turning point in American politics. Im thankful that Republican senators did the right thing, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. Lets hope that these votes this week are green shoots. Republicans, out of courage, out of principle and maybe out of exasperation, are beginning to constrain the president when he goes too far.

More significant than the Senate vote, however, is the declaration Monday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that impeachment of Trump is not on her political agenda.

Those Senate Republicans who voted against Trumps declaration of a national emergency emphasized that the president was violating the Constitution. Pelosi herself, in a letter sent out to the members of the House last month, declared, The Presidents decision to go outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process violates the Constitution and must be terminated.

But Pelosi rejects the constitutional mechanism for removal of a president who systematically violates the Constitution. In fact, neither Pelosi nor any other congressional Democratincluding those who claim to support impeachmenthave cited Trumps brazen violation of the Constitution through the emergency declaration as grounds for his removal from office.

Not one congressional Democrat is calling for demonstrations or mass protests against Trumps violation of the Constitution. On the contrary, the main concern of Pelosi & Co. is that the conflict within the ruling elite is weakening the authority of the capitalist state, under conditions of a rising movement of working class militancy and opposition to both corporate-controlled parties, expressed in strikes by teachers and industrial and service workers.
Less than four months after negotiating a new labor agreement ahead of the expiration of the previous contract, United Auto Workers Local 833, which claims to represent approximately 2,044 workers in Kohlers manufacturing facilities throughout southeast Wisconsin, will oversee the elimination of 325 jobs.

The Kohler Company, a privately held corporation, founded in Sheboygan, Wisconsin in 1873, will halt engine production in the Village of Kohler and shift the work to its Hattiesburg, Mississippi facility. Up to 250 people will be hired at this plant, at reduced wages, over the next two years, according to the company.

By shifting production to Mississippi, Kohler will have access to a more exploited section of the working class, as well as millions of dollars in tax incentives. According to Tammy Craft, spokeswoman of the Mississippi Development Authority, state and local governments are prepared to offer more than $18.5 million in tax breaks and subsidies. Kohler Co. according to Forbes is the 51st largest privately held company in the world and had over $7 billion in revenue in 2017.

Meanwhile, Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, with 20.8 percent of the population living in poverty, while almost 12 percent of Mississippians have no health insurance.

The elimination of the Sheboygan County engine production lines will take place in two phases, with one line expected to be shut down by September 2019 and the other to follow by the end of the year. In order to entice workers to stay on the job to the bitter end, paltry incentives are being offered. Production workers will be paid an additional $1-an-hour raise, while workers in the engine division who stay until the end of 2019 with be retroactively paid another $1.50 an hour according to Tim Tayloe, president of United Auto Workers Local 833.

Tayloe oversaw the newest labor contract that was negotiated ahead of schedule in December 2018. In order to head off any possibility of joint action with the 150,000 GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler autoworkers whose contract is set to expire in September 2019, the UAW worked with Kohler to push through a deal that ensured continuing profits at the expense of the workers.

The UAW is despised by large sections of its members and is currently mired in a long-running corruption scandal that is being investigated by the FBI. Top UAW officials have spent union funds lavishly on themselves, while accepting bribes from the auto companies. While workers are forced to toil in miserable working conditions, senior UAW officers such as Nancy Johnson, Norwood Jewell and General Holiefield sold out autoworkers in contract negotiations over $15,000 feasts with auto company executives.

This cozy relationship with management was on display in Sheboygan during the November 2015 strike and subsequent sellout of Kohler workers.

In the 2015 contract negotiations, the membership forced the UAW to call a strike which lasted for 32 days, as over 2,000 workers rejected a sellout agreement negotiated by the union. Workers staged marches and mass pickets in opposition to the contract which kept in the hated two-tier system while maintaining drastic cuts to pay and benefits forced on workers in the 2010 deal. After a court injunction was issued by a Sheboygan County circuit court judge, the union quickly forced through an agreement ignoring workers central demands.

As rumors began to swirl in September 2018 that Kohler would be shifting engine production to Mississippi, the UAW hurriedly worked with the company to ensure there would be no repeat of 2015. Before finalizing the 2018 agreement, the company and Local 833 reached an understanding that Kohler would be consolidating its engine manufacturing in Mississippi.

Instead of informing the membership and organizing them in opposition to the move, Tayloe and the UAW agreed to Kohlers plans and left the membership in the dark, stating we tried to see what we could do to keep them here, but they had their mind set.

Following the passing of the December 2018 agreement, Tayloe showered the plumbing fixture manufacturer with praise for their collaborative approach. The contract, which alleged to remove the hated two-tier system that was implemented in the 2010 agreement, under the auspices of the UAW, did not actually eliminate it. Instead the contract offered raises to the lowest tiered employees, between $1.25 to $3.25 an hour that over the life of the five-year agreement which Tayloe claimed would raise lower paid workers pretty much up to the pay of longer-tenured workers.

These two separate tiers will remain throughout the life of the contract, Tayloe acknowledged in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He asserted that wages for workers in comparable jobs will be within 5 percent of each other by the end of the agreement. This however doesnt apply if the jobs are no longer there, or are insourced to a new facility.

Of the 325 positions to be eliminated, 280 of them are production jobs within the engine division. These workers made on average $26 or $27 an hour according to Tayloe. This is contrasted with production workers at the Hattiesburg facility who make about $16 an hour. The enforcing of this wage-cutting operation is what the UAW bureaucracy offers to companies. The trade union acts as a labor contractor on behalf of the company, ensuring worker opposition is stifled.

Seeking to pull the wool over workers eyes, Kohler in conjunction with the UAW announced that employees whose jobs have been eliminated will have the opportunity to work at a separate facility located in Sheboygan or accept a severance package. These new jobs are not guaranteed and even if a worker is hired on, there is no mechanism in place to ensure the worker maintains previous wage levels. It is also possible that these jobs could be eliminated at a moments notice as well.
Written and directed by Emmanuel Mouret; based on a story by Denis Diderot

Lady J is the somewhat confusing English-language title of French filmmaker Emmanuel Mourets Mademoiselle de Joncquieres. It is currently available on Netflix.

The film is based on an episode from Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, a picaresque novel written by Denis Diderot (17131784), the great Enlightenment figure, in the years 1765 to 1780, but not published until after the French Revolutionand his death. The novel first became widely known because of its discovery in Germany by Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The latter translated it partially into German in 1785.

Jacques the Fatalist follows a valet and his employer as they travel about, somewhat aimlessly. The servant entertains his master by recounting, with endless interruptions, the stories of his loves. Other characters the pair encounter also tell various tales, including the one that forms the basis of Lady J (in this case, the landlady of an inn where Jacques and his master are spending the night.)

Emmanuel Mouret expands on Diderots story, adding characters and sequences. The story itself, set in the 1770s, is simple enough.

Madame de La Pommeraye (Cecile de France), in Diderots words, a widow of high moral character, high birth, good breeding, wealth, and haughtiness, lives more or less retired in the countryside. The Marquis des Arcis (Edouard Baer) relentlessly pursues her over the course of some months while a guest at her estate.

Edouard Baer and Cecile de France

At first, the lady laughingly puts him off. She is well aware of his reputation and even (a la Leporello in Mozarts Don Giovanni) reels off a catalogue of his previous female conquests. She has no intention of becoming his latest.

However, the Marquis acts in the most charming and persuasive manner, assuring her over and over again that he has never truly loved a woman before, that she has opened his eyes to what love could be and so forth. He never attempts the slightest physical contact. This is purely a spiritual and emotional seduction.

The landlady in Diderots work explains that the Marquis tireless efforts backed up by his personal qualities, his youth, good looks, what seemed to be the truest of passions, her solitude, her longing for affection, in a word everything that makes us women yield to the wishes of men  had its effect, and Mme de La Pommeraye, after having resisted both the Marquis and herself for several months and having exacted from him the most solemn of vows, as is customary, finally made him the happiest of men.

Unfortunately, after a few years, the Marquis begins to find rural life with the lady somewhat boring and grows restless.

One day, to test his affections, Madame de La Pommeraye informs him that she has become somewhat bored, that she no longer finds his company as exciting, that she, in fact, no longer loves him.

The Marquis is ecstatic! She has expressed, he explains, his exact sentiments: Ah, how vastly superior you are to me at this moment. How noble I find you and how mean I perceive myself. You have spoken first and yet it is I who was guilty first.  I admit that what you have said of your feelings applies word for word to mine. Every word that you have said to yourself I have said to myself, but I have kept quiet and suffered in silence.

Diderot, by Louis-Michel van Loo, 1767

Its a heart-breaking sequence. The Marquis feels a great burden lifted, while the lady now suffers atrociously in silence. After his departure, she begins to plan her revenge. (Diderots landlady observes, When her first furies had calmed and her mood turned to cold indignation her thoughts turned to avenging herself, and to avenging herself in a cruel way, in a way which would frighten all those who in future would be tempted to seduce and deceive honest women.)

Madame de La Pommerayes revenge involves making use of a mother and daughter, once long ago acquaintances of hers, who fell on hard economic times and have essentially been prostituting themselves for the previous decade.

The lady takes Madame (Natalia Dontcheva) and Mademoiselle de Joncquieres (Alice Isaaz)as they now call themselvesout of their misery and depravity, sets them up in a respectable dwelling, has them dress simply, modestly and generally turns them intoor has them performas reserved and pious women. The pair are all too happy to change their circumstances, although the entirety of the ladys plot is not clear to them.

While strolling with the Marquis, now merely a good friend, Madame de La Pommeraye accidentally encounters the woman and her daughter. The latter, needless to say, is very beautiful. The Marquis becomes infatuated (She has the face of a Raphael!) with the girl. I must have her. However, both mother and daughter, under Madame de La Pommerayes strict instructions, rebuff his slightest advance. The Marquis becomes more and more frantic. He finds irresistible those who resist him.

Madame de La Pommeraye pretends to be shocked by his interest in the religious-minded girl. A marvelous hypocrite, the lady exclaims (in Diderot), Ah! Marquis, we people of the world are a long way from understanding the delicate scruples of such timid souls.

The Marquis offers jewels, which Madame de La Pommeraye insists that Madame and Mademoiselle de Joncquieres refuse and return, much to the mothers dismay. Then, he offers half his estate. Again, Madame de La Pommeraye is resolute. She tells the other women, Do you imagine that I am doing what I do for you? Who are you? What do I owe you? Why should I not send the two of you back to your brothel? If what is being offered is too much for youit is not enough for me.

Alice Isaaz in Lady J (Mademoiselle de Joncquieres)

Eventually, the Marquis proposes marriage. He weds Mademoiselle de Joncquieres. The trap is sprung. To his overwhelming humiliation, Madame de La Pommeraye now reveals the sort of degraded woman he has married: Marquis, she said to him, learn to know me. If other women valued themselves enough to show the resentment I feel, men like you would be less common. You acquired an honest woman whom you could not keep. That woman was me. She has avenged herself on you by making you marry someone who is worthy of you.

However, that is not the end of the story, and the conclusion is the most important and moving moment of all.

Mourets version is very effective, and well worth seeing. The actors are convincing and the dramatic tension sustained throughout. This is a serious and intriguing work.

French filmmaker Robert Bresson directed a beautiful modern adaptation, co-written by Bresson and Jean Cocteau, of the same story in 1945, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne).

Jacques the Fatalist, although its form is relaxed and apparently casual (influenced by Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy among other novels), is an immensely complex work, concerned with many political, social and cultural problems.

Various contemporary critics have inevitably attempted to reduce Lady J to a profoundly feminist film. One interviewer suggested to Mouret, Theres also a bit of, to put it in 21st century terms, toxic masculinity?

Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)

Undoubtedly, both the novel and the film contain a criticism of the Marquis reckless philandering and the general condition of women in French society, but much more than that is going on. After all, one feels sympathy for Madame de La Pommeraye to begin with, but, as translator David Coward notes, that sentiment turns into horror when she shows her claws, and we are increasingly drawn to the Marquis des Arcis, the cruel seducer who becomes a victim. Mouret, to his credit, did not take the line of least resistance and transform his film, in accordance with present-day pressures, into a brief for gender politics.

Diderot understood that the very position of women forced them to carry out acts of emotional terrorism, but he does not condone the latter.

Moreover, the events take place within the aristocracy. Madame de La Pommerayes cruelty is also the cruelty of a highly privileged person, who makes use of poorer women as her instruments and disposes of them without a thought. Speaking of the ladys conduct toward the Marquis, one observer noted that if this is how the aristocrats treated each other, imagine how they must have acted toward the lower orders!

In Jacques the Fatalist, the telling of Madame de La Pommerayes tale is extended over a period of hours, as the landlady has to attend to her duties. She, Jacques and his master drink, delay, squabble. This story of altered circumstances and reversed sympathies itself takes place as change occurs, as the relations between the human beings speaking and listening deepen. The structure of the book reflects Diderots view that the idea we form of people and their conduct, as Coward suggests, is therefore dependent on our own shifting viewpoint.

The theme of psychological and social mutability and change is ever-present. (The subversiveness of having Jacques take precedence over His Master, the reversal of the usual social order implied in the title and the work itself, is only one of the many factors that no doubt discouraged Diderot from publishing the work during his lifetime.) Madame de La Pommerayes great mistake is not simply her belief that the Marquis affections (which are entirely sincere) will endure forever, but that somehow emotions can be fixed and made permanent.

Critic Martin Hall writes that among the great writers of the Enlightenment Diderot is distinctive by the importance which time and transformation play in his vision of the world, a world whose working can only be understood in terms of its perpetual change. Sexual inconstancy and infidelity have to be seen in this context, as regrettable and personally painful, but perhaps inevitable.

Indeed, immediately following the landladys recitation of her story, Jacques the Fatalist includes the following observation:

The first oath taken by two creatures of flesh and blood was at the foot of a rock that was turning into dust. They called upon the heavens (which are never the same from one instant to the next) to witness their fidelity. Despite that everything inside them and outside of them was changing, they believed their hearts to be immune to change. Oh children! You are still children 

Lady J is a valuable interpretation of a portion of a brilliant work.
Maldives Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahids recent US trip underscores the strategic importance of this small Indian Ocean archipelago to Washingtons foreign policy. Shahid, accompanied by senior government officials, was invited by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Last months trip came after Shahids earlier visit to IndiaWashingtons strategic partner in the regionto boost relations with that country. The new Maldivian government is distancing itself from China and strengthening its political and military connections with Washington.

As well as Pompeo, Shahid met with Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asia Alice Wells and Under Secretary for Political Affairs David Hale, as well as officials from the US National Security Council, USAID and the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. He also held talks with the State Departments Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Nathan Alexander Sales, about involvement in future programs.

Shahid declared that Washingtons Indo-Pacific strategy was good for his country and stability in the Indian Ocean. Contrary to this assertion, however, the US is the principal destabilising factor in the region.

President Ibrahim Mohamed Solihs government came to power in November 2018, following a Washington-orchestrated operation to remove President Abdulla Yameens administration, and to politically realign the island country away from China and toward the US.

Washingtons geo-political manoeuvres in the Indo-Pacific region are aimed at establishing a tight network of alliances to militarily encircle China.

Shahid endorsed Washingtons claims of commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific region. In fact, under the guise of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, Washington is provocatively violating the 12-nautical-mile territorial limits around islets claimed by China, including Mischief Reef in the Spratly islands group.

On February 21, Shahid signed a Memorandum of Agreement on Aviation Cooperation with Alina Romanowski at the US State Department. Romanowski is the State Departments principal deputy coordinator on counter-terrorism. Washingtons counter-terrorism posturing is a cynical lie. The US is responsible for the rise of Islamic fundamentalist forces, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, and the death of millions of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the Middle East and North Africa.

Maldivian security forces are being integrated into Washingtons military plans. The US will provide training to local law enforcement bodies and a new aviation security advisor at Male International Airport.

Shahids meeting with Pompeo also involved discussions on judicial sector reforms, efficient governance and rule of law, transparent public financial management and anti-corruption. No details were made available about these talks.

Washington reportedly agreed to assist in civil society development, including improvements in infrastructure and education. China remains the largest infrastructure investor in the Maldives but India is moving to displace Beijing.

The Solih government has accused the former Yameen administration of creating a debt crisis by borrowing heavily from China and has appealed for financial assistance. Beijing claims that the Maldives debt to China is only $1.5 billion, but Solih insists it is much larger.

While Washington wants to fully integrate the Maldives into its geo-strategic operations, it has offered only a financial pittanceapproximately $US9.5 millionin assistance. Shahid, however, responded enthusiastically, tweeting: Had productive meetings with senior officials @State Dept. Both sides agree that we are living through some of the best times in the relationship between the Maldives and USA...

Running parallel with the reorientation of Maldivian foreign policy, President Solih has launched an anti-corruption campaign against the pro-Chinese faction of the countrys ruling elite. Anti-China critics claim that previous government infrastructure projects were awarded to Chinese investors at inflated prices and that corruption was institutionalised.

Several leaders of the pro-Chinese opposition, including former President Yameen, have been arrested on corruption allegations. Yameen has been accused of receiving $US1 million in government money.

According to the reports, a private company operated by Yameens supporters deposited government money into the former presidents personal account at the Maldives Islamic Bank. The alleged money-laundering operation involved more than $79 million in tourism revenue.

Yameen has denied the allegations, telling reporters in January that the money was given to him by various parties as campaign funds. His lawyers have declared that the Anti-Corruption Commission has not proven that the money was state funds obtained through corruption.

Yameens five-year-administration was marked by escalating attacks on the media and democratic rights, with nearly all opposition leaders arrested or forced into exile. The current administrations so-called fight against corruption and for good governance, however, is a cover for its pro-US foreign policy.
The in-fighting tearing apart the city-based Liberal Party within Australias governing Liberal-National Coalition visibly spread to the regional-based National Party this week.

Despite the Coalition facing a serious defeat at the federal election due by May, factional warfare erupted publicly within the Nationals, laying bare conflicts that go far beyond the current governments electoral prospects.

Former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce, who was ousted early last year, effectively issued a broadside against the Liberals and the government, as well as his successor as Nationals leader, Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack.

In media interviews, Joyce raised the prospect of terminating the Coalition if he regained the National Party leadership. There was no law saying the Nationals and Liberals must be together, he declared, describing the Coalition as a business arrangement, not a marriage. Putting the interests of inner-city Liberals ahead of regional Nationals was just like political serfdom, we will look after ourselves, he told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

Joyce insisted he was the countrys elected deputy prime minister because he led the party at the last election in 2016, in which the Coalition barely survived with a one-seat majority in parliaments lower house. Later, Joyce pulled back from an immediate confrontation, claiming he would contest the leadership only if there were a party room spill against McCormack, who replaced him in February 2018.

Joyce is allied with the hard right or conservative wing of the Liberal Party that is waging an offensive to transform the Coalition, one of the two key mainstays of capitalist rule since World War II, into a Donald Trump-style right-wing populist and fascistic movement.

Driving this perspective are two interconnected factors that have immense political implications. One is the anxiety in the ruling class to divert the mounting discontent in the working classover ever-more glaring social inequality and declining living conditionsinto anti-immigrant, jingoistic, militarist and socially conservative Christian-based directions. These fears have been compounded by signs of economic slump and a global upsurge in working class struggle.

The other factor is the intensifying demands from Washington that whichever party heads the next government, it must continue Australias unconditional alignment with the US in its escalating economic war and military confrontation with China, Australian capitalisms largest export market and trading partner.

Joyce has a record of railing demagogically against globalisation and big banks, falsely claiming to represent the interests of small farmers and workers in regional areas, and of trying to whip up nationalist and anti-Chinese sentiment. He fully backs Washingtons strident stance against Beijing. Last year, he declared that China, not ISIS, was our security threat.

Joyce and his supporters, particularly members of parliament representing the merged Liberal National Party (LNP) in the northern state of Queensland, are aligned with ex-Liberal Party leader and prime minister Tony Abbott. They opposed Abbotts removal in 2015 by Malcolm Turnbull, the leading figure of the Liberal Partys moderate wing. Last August, LNP members helped organise Turnbulls ouster.

The US administration clearly backed Turnbulls removal after he had sought to mend relations with Beijing to try to protect lucrative markets for commodity exporters, universities and educational businesses. Turnbull also had refused to commit the government to joining aggressive US military operations against China in the South China Sea.

Joyce and his backers, who include four senior National Party cabinet ministers, triggered the latest crisis within the government by raising the demand that it subsidise a new coal-fired power station in north Queensland. But their intervention marks a divide that goes well beyond their support for the coal companies and denial of climate change.

In essence, they are stepping up a drive to refashion the National Party, like the Liberal Party, along far-right lines.

Since Scott Morrison, a member of the conservative wing, emerged as prime minister last August, the hard right layers around Abbott, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann have gone on the offensive. They have pushed out so-called moderates who they did not consider as sufficiently committed to transforming the Coalition.

As a result, just since January, six high-profile cabinet ministers or ex-cabinet ministers have announced their resignations from parliament at the upcoming election: Defence Minister Christopher Pyne, Defence Industry Minister Steven Ciobo, Industrial Affairs Minister Kelly ODwyer, Human Services Minister Michael Keenan, Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion and former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who had been the partys deputy leader since 2007.

The hard right blitz continued this week, with Bishop, once one of the Liberal Partys most prominent moderates, being replaced in her Western Australian electorate by the conservative factions nominee, Celia Hammond, a socially conservative former university vice chancellor.

Another moderate ex-minister, Craig Laundy, is expected to quit his Sydney seat this week. Morrison is reportedly seeking a prominent right-wing figure to replace him. Laundy last year publicly warned against the Liberal Party relying on a narrow conservative element as an electoral base.

At least one media commentator connected to the Liberal Party is pointing to an open split within the organisation. Australian columnist Peter van Onselen wrote on March 9: If Scott Morrison does lose the electionas the polls, betting odds and expectations suggest will happenthe battle over the partys heart and soul may see the reactionary right wing dominate the debate, he cautioned.

Within the establishment media, most commentators are also concluding that the fractured Coalition is headed for a serious defeat at the election. Behind the scenes, there is little doubt that the financial and corporate elite are preparing to rely on a Labor Party-led government to serve its interests and contain mounting working class unrestas Labor did from 1983 to 1996 under Hawke and Keating, and 2007 to 2013 under Rudd and Gillard.

A March 14 editorial in the Australian, Rupert Murdochs national flagship, assessed that the Liberal-National partnership is fraying. It stated: If it aspires to govern, the undeniable challenge for the Coalition is to reconcile its current differences, stick together and promote policies that are in the national interest. That task may be more difficult than it looks. The forces working against the Coalition are structural, economic, demographic, ideological, and relentless.

Labor Party leader Bill Shorten this week tried to depict the election as a referendum on wages, saying his government would consider asking the Fair Work Commission, the industrial tribunal established by the last Labor government, to institute a minimal living wage above the poverty line.

This proposal would seek to head off a rebellion in the working class and help the trade unions subordinate workers to the profit interests of employers, as they have done ever since the Accords struck between the unions and the Hawke-Keating government during the 1980s.

Since the 1980s, however, the gap between the obscene wealth of the corporate elite and the deteriorating conditions of working people has widened immensely. The growth of social inequality has only accelerated since the 20082009 global financial crisis. According to calculations by Guardian economics correspondent Greg Jericho, household incomes have fallen in real terms since March 2015. From mid-2016 alone, corporate profits have risen 43 percent, while wages have risen just 8 percent.

These figures understate the true social polarisation, because they are based on average wage statistics that provide no picture of the gulf between executive salaries and the low pay of increasingly casualised and contract workers.

This class chasm has created the objective conditions for the eruption of bitter class struggle in Australia, as is already taking place in numerous other countries around the world.
Volkswagen Group, the worlds second largest automaker, is eliminating up to 7,000 jobs as part of a brutal cost-cutting drive to boost profit margins and appease investors who have driven down the German automakers stock price 54 percent over the last half-year.

Nearly three years ago, VW set out to slash 30,000 jobs around the world, including 23,000 in Germany, under Future Pact 2016, a plan drawn up by the IG Metall union officials who sit on its corporate board under the countrys co-determination scheme.

The VW cuts are part of an ongoing jobs bloodbath in the global auto industry. With trade war tensions growing, signs of a new economic recession and falling sales, the global auto giants are engaged in a brutal competition to slash labor costs and beat out their rivals in the costly but still tenuous market for electric and self-driving cars.

On Wednesday, US-based Ford Motor Co. confirmed that it is continuing its worldwide restructuring to save $25.5 billion over the next few years and, according to Ford CEO Jim Hackett, double its profit margin from 2018. Analysts say the number of job cuts could be as high as 25,000, mostly in Europe.

The carmaker is closing its plant in Sao Paulo, Brazil, ending South American truck production, shutting a transmission factory in Bordeaux, France, cutting output in Saarlouis, Germany, consolidating its UK operations, preparing to exit Russia and slashing jobs in China.

Korean automakers Hyundai and Kia are downsizing in China, along with other foreign-based transnationals who flooded into the country to exploit cheap labor and the worlds largest car market. Kia is considering closing a plant in Yancheng, following the ending of production at Hyundais oldest plant in Beijing.

Last week, production ended at the General Motors Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant, which once employed 13,000 workers and was the site of militant autoworker struggles in the early 1970s. Last November, GM announced plans to close five plants in the US and Canada and slash more than 14,000 jobs. The company, which made $11.8 billion in 2018 profits, intends to save $4.5 billion through the job cuts, less than half the $10 billion it has squandered on stock buybacks for its richest investors over the last four years.

On Wednesday, Schaeffler Group, a German producer of engine and transmission components, announced it will slash 900 jobs, after missing profit targets and seeing investors drive down its stock value by 44 percent. Mass layoffs have also occurred in Matamoros, Mexico, largely in retribution for the courageous strikes by maquiladora workers, which led to a shortage of parts for US and Canadian auto plants. At least 4,000 workers have been fired and another 50,000 layoffs have been threatened by Mexicos main business organization.

The principal mechanism for carrying out this coordinated global assault on autoworkers has been the financial markets. By driving down share prices, powerful hedge funds and wealthy shareholders give their marching orders to corporations to escalate the attack on workers jobs, wages and conditions. This increases the returns on their investments, thereby funneling even more money to the financial oligarchy.

Low industry [share] valuations show investors want more changes with spending at a record, profits falling and new competitors vying to jump onto the autos bandwagon, Bloomberg News wrote in a March 6 article. The great auto-industry shakeout has started to arrive in force, the article continued, noting that Consolidation, while no silver bullet, would help eliminate the duplicate outlays on everything from expensive software ventures to battery technology.

Several major automakers are considering potential tie-ups, including VW and Ford, Daimler and BMW, and French automaker PSA with Fiat Chrysler or GM. Such a consolidation would be carried out at the expense of the jobs of hundreds of thousands of white-collar and production workers.

In his mid-19th century work, Wage Labor and Capital, Karl Marx identified the consequences of the industrial war of capitalists among themselves over markets and profits. This war has the peculiarity that the battles in it are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of workers. The generals (the capitalists) vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers.

Workers are beginning to fight back. After decades in which the class struggle was suppressed by the unions, there has been a resurgence of strike activity among workers around the world. In the first ten weeks of 2019, strikes by auto and auto parts workers have taken place in Hungary, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, China and other countries. The growth of resistance poses fundamental questions of perspective and strategy.

First, the global assault on jobs must be met with a global response by autoworkers. It is impossible for workers to fight transnational corporations on a nationalist basis. The answer to the fratricidal race to the bottom between workers is forging the closest links between workers in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa in a common fight to defend the jobs and living standards of all workers.

Second, the unions long ago abandoned any defense of workers and have been transformed into direct tools of corporate management and the state. This was the result not simply of the cowardice and corruption of the union bureaucrats, but the inability of these nationalist and pro-capitalist organizations to respond in any progressive way to the globalization of production.

The United Auto Workers and the Unifor union in Canada have responded to GMs plant closings by launching an anti-Mexican campaign, even as Mexican workers revolt against slave labor wages and sweatshop conditions. At its just concluded bargaining convention, the UAW made clear that it plans to impose even deeper concessions on 150,000 GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler workers, whose contracts expire this summer, by using the same lie it has for four decades: that concessions save jobs.

The same is true everywhere. The long-time IG Metall leader and chairman of the joint works council of the Volkswagen Group, Bernd Osterloh, who makes $848,000 (750,000) a year, has already signaled his support for VWs new cost-cutting plan.

In order to fight, autoworkers need new organizations: rank-and-file factory and workplace committees that are independent of the unions. These committees must oppose the corporate dictatorship in the factories and mobilize the broadest sections of the working class in mass protests, plant occupations and national and cross-border strikes to defend jobs and living standards.

Finally, the growing industrial movement of the working class must be developed into a powerful political movement against capitalism and the economic and political domination of the corporate and financial elite. The new wave of layoffs demonstrates that under capitalism, revolutionary advances in technology such as artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, machine-to-machine communication and self-driving cars are used not to improve life for the broad masses of the population, but to drive more workers into destitution.

The only answer to this is the fight for socialism. The vast fortunes of the super-rich must be expropriated and the giant banks and corporations converted into public enterprises democratically controlled by the working class, as part of the scientifically planned reorganization of the world economy.

This requires that the working class take political power on a world scale, reorganizing society to meet social needs. Only in this way can the immense potential of globally integrated production and labor-saving technologies be used for the common good of all of mankind.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an extraordinary speech this week to a conference attended by representatives of the major US energy conglomerates in which he appealed to Big Oil to play an increasingly direct role in the drive by US imperialism for global dominance and the preparation for war on every continent.

Speaking Tuesday at the annual CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas which brings together US oil and gas company executives, representatives of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and US government officials, Pompeo stressed that the steep growth in US energy production, driven by what industry insiders describe as the shale revolution, has provided Washington with a potent weapon to use against its global rivals.

The growth in energy production, with the US surpassing both Russia and Saudi Arabia as the largest crude oil producer late last year, and estimates that US exports will exceed those of Russia in the next three years and those of Saudi Arabia in the next five, is seen by the US ruling elite as a means of exerting its hegemony on a worldwide scale.

Pompeos speech provided a blunt description of US predatory aims across the planet that involve the interests of the American-based energy conglomerates.

His attempts to present this as some kind of moral crusade were laughable. Countries targeted by US imperialism, he claimed, were using their energy for malign ends, and not to promote prosperity in the way we do here in the West. They dont have the values of freedom and liberty, or the rule of law that we do, and theyre using their energy to destroy ours.

The prosperity promoted by Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and other US-based energy conglomerates is that of their CEOs and major capitalist investors. Their values of freedom and liberty and rule of law extend just as far as their freedom to exploit the planets energy reserves at will and to impose the rules dictated by the US government to protect their interests.

Pompeo went on to link the interests of Big Oil to the multiple geostrategic conflicts between US imperialism and its global and regional rivals.

He stressed that US energy production and export was crucial to countering a series of bad actors.

We dont want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the NordStream II project, any more than we ourselves want to be dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies, Pompeo said, referring to the expansion of a natural gas pipeline linking Russia to Central Europe. He stressed that US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports could make Europe free from that Russian intervention.

This pitch for promoting US energy dominance in Europe came as the Pentagon announced that it is preparing to develop and test new low-flying intermediate-range nuclear missiles beginning in August, after the formal expiration of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) between the US and Russia, torn up by the Trump administration last month. The Pentagon has also sent officials to Warsaw to discuss the establishment of a permanent US base in Poland, dubbed Fort Trump by Polish officials.

Pompeo also denounced China, claiming: Chinas illegal island-building in international waterways isnt simply a security matter. By blocking development in the South China Sea through coercive means, China prevents ASEAN members from accessing more than $2.5 trillion in recoverable energy reserves. Clearly, the main concern is that these reserves could be exploited by US-based conglomerates.

Beijing issued an angry rebuke to Pompeos charge, denouncing his remarks as irresponsible and insisting that Nations in the region are capable of resolving and managing the disputes in their own way. It added, Nations outside the region should refrain from stirring up trouble and disrupting the harmonious situation.

The day after Pompeos speech, two B-52H Stratofortress bombers flew from Guam over the disputed areas of the South China Sea, the second flight carried out in 10 days in the face of Chinese objections. The warplanes are capable of carrying nuclear payloads.

The US secretary of state also signaled the importance of US energy production in underpinning the economic blockades imposed by US imperialism on both Iran and Venezuela, measures that are tantamount to acts of war.

Pompeo vowed to tighten the stranglehold on Iran in the coming period. Were committed to bringing Iranian crude oil exports to zero as quickly as market conditions will permit, he said. He declined to answer a question as to whether Washington is preparing to revoke waivers granted to a number of countries dependent upon Iranian oil.

Pompeo told the energy executives that Washington is using all of the economic tools at our disposal to effect regime change in Venezuela, including the embargo on Venezuelan oil exports imposed in January. He denounced the Venezuelan government for shipping oil to Cuba at a subsidized price, contrasting this practice to the superior business model of the United States.

After delivering the speech, Pompeo, asked by CNBC whether Washington is considering military action in Venezuela, thuggishly repeated the mantra that every option is on the table.

Appearing together with Pompeo, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry was asked if the overthrow of Maduro would lead to the reassertion of control over Venezuelas oil reserves, the largest on the planet, by US-based energy giants. Absolutely, I think that is the real message, that the national companies want to see this regime outside so that we can return, he replied.

Pompeos pep talk to US Big Oil about supporting the predatory aims of US imperialism was hardly necessary. The two have been intertwined for well over a century. Pompeos predecessor as secretary of state, it should be recalled, was Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of Exxon, whose predecessor, Standard Oil, monopolized control of Venezuelas oil industry until its nationalization in 1976.

The oil corporations have been intimately involved in the US wars of the 21st century. The invasion of Afghanistan, directed at furthering US influence over the vast energy reserves of Central Asia, resulted in the installation of Hamid Karzai, a former consultant of Unocal, as president. The US ambassador to the country, Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as Karzais handler, also worked for the oil company in plotting the construction of strategic pipelines across its territory.

In advance of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of the oil service giant Halliburton, organized a task force on Iraqi oil comprised of major US oil executives. Detailed maps were drawn up for the parceling out of the spoils of the US war of aggression launched in 2003.

If the secretary of state is compelled to make a fresh appeal to the patriotic profit interests of the energy conglomerates it is because US imperialism is now preparing for a far greater conflict, a world war with catastrophic implications for humanity.
UK far-right leader Tommy Robinson has been banned from a growing list of social media outlets.

Last week, Amazon blocked the sale of Robinsons Islamophobic diatribe on the Quran, co-authored with another far-right figure, Peter McLoughlin. In February, he was permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram, following a Twitter ban in March 2018 and a PayPal ban in November 2018. YouTube suspended advertising on his account this January and is under pressure to bar his account.

There is a widespread feeling of disgust towards Robinson and what he represents and a wholly justified wish that his views are driven out of British politics. But it would be dangerously wrong to believe that this task can be entrusted to the multibillionaire CEOs of the worlds largest big-tech companies.

Where Robinsons actions are criminal, they should be tried in a court of law. To have him barred from public platforms is a further step towards a regime of political censorship that will always be aimed against the working class and the left.

The actions against Robinson also have little practical effect on his fascist campaigning. Whereas freedom of speech and political organisation are fundamental to the political development of the disenfranchised working class, the far-right can rely on super-rich sponsors and the de facto support of the state. The main impact of Robinsons various bans has therefore been to raise his already artificially inflated political profile.

Following his Facebook ban, Robinson announced on his remaining YouTube channel that he was expecting the move and was in the process of setting up a dedicated news channel that more than 100,000 people had already pledged to subscribe to. Facebooks ban on him saw his YouTube subscribers soar to over 370,000.

Since May 2018, he has been at the centre of a well-reported and financially lucrative court case over his attempts to prejudice a jury in a child sex grooming trial in Leeds. His original conviction was quashed on a technicality. At the retrial in October 2018, inexplicably, the judge recommended the case be referred to the Attorney General on receiving a statement from Robinson, leaving him free to go. Only now has the Attorney General set a new date for the retrial, on March 22.

At each stage of the proceedings, Robinson has been able to speak to a battery of media cameras and microphones.

Last summer, a series of Free Tommy marches through central London were attended by thousands of far-right supporters. Protesters climbed on the railings of Downing Street, hurled abuse at passersby and assaulted counter-demonstratorsacts that would have provoked a vicious response from the police if carried out during a left-wing protest.

These marches provided the backdrop to a huge fundraising and right-wing solidarity campaign.

Robinson said he received more than 350,000 in donations in just two weeks. At least 47,000 of this came from the right-wing Middle East Forum in the United States. This is only the tip of the financial iceberg of Robinsons global funding operation. Last Sunday, the Times revealed that the former English Defence League leader is now the best-funded politician in the UK. In 2016 and 2017, he received between 5,000 and 8,000 a month from the far-right Rebel Media website, which gave him 48,000 to set up a TV studio. Robinson boasts of a pot in excess of a few hundred thousand pounds. He lives in a 1 million gated, six-bedroom home and took three holidays last year.

Trumps fascistic former advisor Steve Bannon intervened to publicly champion Robinsons cause, and Republican lawmakers invited him to speak at the US Congress. Robinson is now a special advisor to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and has posed for pictures with recruits to the British Army.

A BBC Panorama documentary was recently commissioned into Robinson and was the basis for a 4,000-strong fascist protest organised outside the broadcasters northern office in Salford this February. Robinson was able to erect a huge screen outside the BBCs HQ on which he screened his own counter documentary. Due to the non-stop publicity afforded Robinson, his video has already been viewed by nearly 1.5 million people on YouTube.

This immense publicity and financial backing make a mockery of the despicable attempts to portray Robinson as a persecuted anti-establishment innocent. As ever, Spiked, Spectator and Telegraph writer Brendan ONeill led the way, publishing, Why Tommy Robinson should not be banned, in which he attacks the left for cheering the silencing of an awkward public voicea public figure, someone who commands an audience and enjoys political influence. This from the website that routinely attacks WikiLeaks founder and genuine free speech hero, Julian Assange.

Spiked s claimed concern for democratic rights invariably manifests itself when it is a question of ensuring the hated right wings ability to speak unchallenged. Other persecuted figures named in ONeills article include far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, far-right poster boy Milo Yiannopoulos and leading UKIP activists.

Robinson is no free-speech martyr. He has carried out multiple potentially criminal acts in the last year alone, including intimidating serious journalists. During the night of March 4, Robinson turned up at the house of Mike Stuchbury, the journalist and historian of the far right, and banged repeatedly on the windows and doors demanding to speak with him. Livestreaming these events to his supporters, Robinson revealed Stuchberys home address and threatened to do the same to other journalists. Im going to make a documentary that exposes every single one of you, every single detail about every one of you. Where you live, where you work, everything about you is going to be exposed.

Robinson left after the police were called, only to return at 5 oclock in the morning. Journalists across the political spectrum signed a letter of protest at how far-right organisations [are] trying to silence reports of their activities.

He is also facing possible libel charges for lying claims against a 15-year-old Syrian refugee attacked in his school last December. The boy was pushed to the ground by another pupil and had water poured over his face, mimicking the waterboarding method of torture. Just hours after the story began circulating, Robinson claimed that the Syrian boy had previously attacked three girls and a boy at the school.

Robinsons brief imprisonment and pending retrial for contempt of court are the result of his verbally attacking defendants of Asian appearance as they entered court, in view of jurors who had retired to consider their verdict.

While Robinson carries out these acts, the censorship measures deployed ineffectually against him are being prepared for use against the left. Facebook, along with Google, have been engaged in the blacklisting of left-wing websites since 2017, under the fraudulent pretext of combating fake news and extremism. The World Socialist Web Site suffered a particularly serious decline in hits following Googles introduction of new search algorithms and Facebooks employment of thousands of people, effectively as censors. These measures will only become more severe as the class struggle intensifies.

The ruling class is engaged in a ferocious campaign to outlaw all forms of left-wing sentiment. Hate speech, the legal basis on which Robinson has received his bans, is being redefined to criminalise principled opposition to right-wing politics. For questioning the anti-Jeremy Corbyn manoeuvres of former Labour MP Luciana Bergerwho has since joined a breakaway group with former Conservative MPsthe Wavertree Constituency Labour Party was accused of bullying, misogyny and anti-Semitism.

Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson, who has been at the forefront of witch-hunts in his party, is also leading the calls for YouTube to ban Robinson as a matter of utmost urgency. He considers this a shining example of how to proceed against the mass Labour party membership, now being talked about in the same terms as a former member of the British National Party and the English Defence League.

Robinson and his supporters must be decisively defeated. But the far-right cannot be fought by handing weapons to the same ruling elite that encourages its development. Historical and contemporary experience proves that it is only the working class, organised internationally in a struggle for socialism, that can confront the fascist threat. For this social force to develop its full strength, fundamental democratic rights must be defendednot through appeals to the ruling class but in a struggle against it and its far-right props.
Last Friday, March 8, 30,000 Sao Paulo teachers gathered in front of the City Hall saw the unions president, Claudio Fonseca, shut down their strike even after most of the teachers there had voted to continue the action.

The teachers of Sao Paulo carried out a 33-day strike against the reactionary pension reform introduced by the citys right-wing mayor Bruno Covas (PSDB) and approved at the end of last year by the City Council.

Its quite revolting, Marilia, a teacher at the rally, told WSWS reporters. She continued, Our expectation was different; we did not get anything we wanted. He [the mayor] only negotiated the issue of the non-payment of wages [for the days teachers were on strike], and we have left a 33-day strike the same way we began it.

Her friend, Juliana, also explained, the president of the union [Fonseca], who was elected to the city council in 2016 [by the right-wing party PPS], supported the party [Covas PSDB] that is now in power in the city of Sao Paulo ... We imagined that this would happen. The teachers decided to continue the strike, because we did not even get the 10 percent wage increase, another demand made by the teachers, in addition to the repeal of the pension reform.

Juliana wearing a Covas mask

Paula, a pedagogical coordinator, recalled, The same thing that happened today happened in 2012 with the same union [SINPEEM], when Fonseca also decided to end a seven-day strike against the will of teachers. That year, after the assembly, outraged teachers surrounded a sound truck from which Fonseca was speaking, holding him for two hours before he was able to flee with the aid of the police.

However, unlike the 2012 strike, in addition to being much longer, this years strike, which occurred under conditions of the countrys worst-ever economic crisis and greater attacks on all workers, also showed a greater determination of teachers to struggle.

In the last weeks, in addition to the strike committees organized by regions of the city of Sao Paulo, regional protests, and unified demonstrations that led up to 80,000 teachers and other public sector workers also on strike to take to the streets of Sao Paulo, there were signs of a much greater radicalization among teachers.

On February 27, a group of almost 100 teachers occupied the Regional Education Office in the district of Sao Miguel Paulista and interrupted a meeting between the union and the government on the mayors decision to deny pay to the teachers for every day they were on strike. And a day before the strike ended, on March 7, public sector workers also occupied the offices of the Sao Paulo health secretary. In addition, at the February 19 demonstration, the union president was able only at the last moment to prevent teachers from blocking the largest and busiest avenue in Sao Paulo, the Marginal Tiete, after a decision was taken at a mass assembly to carry out the blockade.

After the president of the union decided to end the strike, the teachers shouted,  Nao tem arrego!  (We will not give up!), Pelego! (Scab!) and Vendido! (Sellout!), and threw empty plastic bottles at him as he addressed the assembly from a sound truck. After the assembly, just as in 2012, the teachers surrounded the sound truck, and Fonseca was only able to leave it only hours later.

Thousand teachers gathered in front of Sao Paulo City Hall for the assembly

After the unions betrayal, on the Facebook group Professores do Municipio de Sao Paulo (Sao Paulo Municipal Teachers), with almost 20,000 teachers, posted videos denouncing the unions maneuver. One of them said, Against images, there is no maneuver! The membership was clear in its desire to continue the strike. Other Facebook posts demanded the impeachment of the union president, Fonseca, and a mass campaign was initiated for disaffiliation from the union. Comments on posts said: The moment we need the union most, it did not represent us and Im tired of giving money to this pack of thieves, bandits and bums of the SINPEEM.

Many teachers with whom the WSWS reporters spoke also drew attention to one of the unions opposition leader, Laura Cymbalista (of the Socialism and Liberty Party PSOL), who proposed the continuation of the strike, but did nothing to counter the union presidents decision to end it. A Facebook comment said, If the teacher who defended the continuity of the strike had stayed on the truck... but [she] ran away.

Another teacher with whom WSWS reporters spoke, Lurdes, said, There was a great lack of commitment from the union during the strike, which kept it isolated during its 33 days. When asked if APEOESP, the Sao Paulo state teachers union which is affiliated with the CUT union federation, could have joined the municipal teachers strike, she replied, Yes, of course, because the fight is together. If the teachers of the state and municipal schools do not join hands, then it is more difficult to fight.

However, she also recalled the long record of betrayal of APEOESP and its president, Maria Isabel Noronha, known as Bebel, who is affiliated with the Workers Party (PT) and was elected state deputy last year. According to her, Bebel, in 2005, when thousands of teachers took Avenida Paulista [one of Sao Paulos main thoroughfares], ended a strike without anyone raising their hands.

The same thing happened again years later, in 2013, when municipal and state teachers struck at the same time, but the two unions did everything to keep them separated. After a three-week strike, state teachers saw Bebel shut down the strike not in order not to politically undermine the Workers Party Mayor of Sao Paulo, Fernando Haddad, who by the end of 2016 would send his pension reform to the City Council three days before leaving office and opening the way for Covas to deepen his attacks.

Teachers protesting against union presidents decision to shut down the strike

Juliana also recalled, even though it is linked to the PT, APEOSP did not have the strength to stop the [PSDBs] government attacks on education, which made the quality of state public education worsen a lot. Marilia explained, The union have accepted the governments proposal, allowing the government to carry out its plan in return for very fragile guarantees for teachers.

We do not want the situation of municipal schools and our salaries to reach the levels of state schools [where workers are paid 30 percent less]. The state schools have no structure, and we see that the situation of the municipal school is moving in the same direction, Juliana added. Marilia agreed pointing out that, the PSDB [also the party of the governor of Sao Paulo, Joao Doria] has also created other types of contracts in which teachers cannot go on strike and have much fewer rights.

When WSWS reporters pointed out that teachers around the world have been facing the same type of betrayals at the hands of their unions, Lurdes said, We [she and the pedagogical coordinator Paula] were talking here and wondering: is this a global movement? There must be something wrong in the country, because [workers] rights are being lost, rights that were conquered with struggle and death, [and] you do not see in Brazil the unions mobilizing workers; sometimes they make one move or another, but its no use.

What happened at the March 8 assembly of the Sao Paulo teachers, just as it has been happening with teachers of the state of Sao Paulo and with all categories of workers around the world, is a vindication of the International Committee of the Fourth Internationals (ICFI) analysis that trade unions do not represent the workers interests, and that new organizations of struggle, rank-and-files committees independent of the unions, must be formed.

This analysis is in complete contrast with the position of the pseudo-left organizations in Brazil and internationally, which continue to sow illusions in the unions, as well as covering up their betrayals. After the end of the Sao Paulo teachers strike, no pseudo-left organization has denounced the union presidents betrayal.

The tendency of PSOL Resistencia, and its website EsquerdaOnline  which has published some articles from the US group ISOs Socialist Worker, just as it has published articles by Resistencia s members recently  has kept silent about both the end of the strike and the betrayal of the union.

With the title Despite the SINPEEM and the leadership, workers of Sao Paulo end strike overturning the non-payment of wages, the report of the Brazilian section of the Trotskyist Fraction (the tendency led by the Argentine Morenoites of the PTS), posted not a single line on its website Esquerda Diario about the union presidents decision to end the strike against the will of the teachers.

Already teachers linked to another tendency of PSOL, Liberdade Socialismo e Revolucao, the Brazilian section of the Committee for a Workers International, whose US affiliate is Socialist Alternative, took four days to write on its Facebook page, Luta Educadora, that teachers cannot conclude [that the answer to Fonsecas betrayal] is disaffiliation from the union. Trade unions are historical instruments of the working class and need to be defended, especially at a time when the ultra liberal Bolsonaro government declares war on the trade union movement saying it will not allow any kind of activism.

However, Bolsonaros war against Brazilian workers is being directly facilitated not only by these organizations, but also by the largest unions and union federations in Brazil. The complete accommodation of the pseudo-left organizations to the unions takes place at the same time that Brazils largest union federation, CUT, which is controlled by the Workers Party, has approached the Bolsonaro government through its vice-president, the right-wing general Hamilton Mourao.

Vagner de Freitas and Wagner Santana, the presidents of CUT and of the ABC metalworkers union respectively, held a meeting with Mourao while Bolsonaro was hospitalized at the end of January to build a channel for dialogue with the government and negotiate the interests of workers, according to Freitas. Santana met Mourao once again on March 1 to discuss Fords shutdown of its Sao Bernardo do Campo plant. In a Facebook post, Santana said Mourao was sensitive ... and committed to help.

The coverup that the pseudo-left is providing for the unions betrayal in ending the Sao Paulo teachers strike has a parallel in the approximation of CUT with Mourao. According to teacher Juliana, the Bolsonaro government is very disjointed, ... always discredited by what it says, and therefore for what it proposes. For this reason, she added, the esquerda cirandeira [a derogatory term for the petty bourgeois left] says that the Mourao is reasonable. But in fact he is not.

The Sao Paulo teachers strike, like similar struggles around the world, is an anticipation of the mass resistance that will develop in Brazil against the Bolsonaro government and its austerity measures. The CUT has already been forced to call strikes and demonstrations against Bolsonaros pension reform by Friday of next week, March 22.

However, the record of betrayals by SINPEEM, APEOESP and all unions linked to the CUT should serve as a critical warning for teachers and all workers entering into struggle against the Bolsonaro government.

The authors also recommend:

Sao Paulo teachers' strikes confront union betrayal

[18 May 2013]

Sao Paulo teachers, public workers strike against attack on pensions

[25 February 2019]
James Cogan, the national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) and writer for the World Socialist Web Site, will be participating in the 20th Unity4J online forum. The online discussions were initiated last year to develop the international campaign to win the freedom of persecuted WikiLeaks publisher and Australian citizen Julian Assange.

The co-hosts of Unity4J are principled publishers and journalists, independent of corporate and state control: Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, and Elizabeth Vos, the editor-in-chief of Disobedient Media.

James Cogan

The forum can be viewed at the websites of Unity4J and Consortium News, on YouTube and via Twitter. If readers know of other means to access the forum, please send a comment and we will update this information.

For North American readers, Unity4J will begin streaming this evening, at 4:00 p.m., March 15, US Eastern Time. In California and the West Coast, it starts at 1:00 p.m. In Britain, the forum commences at 8:00 p.m., in western European countries at 9:00 p.m., and in Moscow at 11:00 p.m.

In Australias eastern time zone (New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania), the forum will broadcast at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 16. In New Zealand, it begins at 9:00 a.m.

To get the time for your location, click here to access a time convertor.

Cogan will discuss with Lauria and Vos the implications of the re-imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, the courageous whistleblower who leaked the information that WikiLeaks published in 2010 exposing US war crimes and diplomatic intrigue and conspiracies.

Last Friday, Chelsea Manning was sent back to prison for refusing to give false testimony against Julian Assange to the grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia. By at least early 2011, the grand jury indicted the WikiLeaks publisher on unprecedented charges of espionage and/or conspiracy.

Well aware of the sweeping implications for centuries-old principles of freedom of speech, the presiding judge ordered that the laying of charges against Assange and WikiLeaks be sealed. The existence of such an indictment is now out in the open.

The vindictive re-imprisonment of Manning further underscores the urgency of the fight to end Julian Assanges arbitrary detention by the British government in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Mannings freedom is inextricably linked with the struggle to secure Assanges right to leave the London embassy unhindered, and return to Australia, if he chooses to do so, with a guarantee from all Australian political parties that any extradition request by US authorities will be rejected.

Cogan will review the ongoing campaign that the SEP Australia is waging to mobilise the working class behind the demand that the Australian government take immediate diplomatic and legal action to free Julian Assange from arbitrary detention by the government of Britain.

He will also, if time permits, speak on the initiatives underway by the SEP in the United States to fight for the freedom of Chelsea Manning. Initial meetings and rallies were rapidly organised by the SEP (US) and International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at a number of major campuses this week.

We urge all WSWS readers to participate in the Unity4J forum and promote it as widely as possible through social media and other means.

The author also recommends:

The political lessons of the March 3 Free Assange rally

[5 March 2019]



Watch the Sydney rally in defence of Julian Assange

Video of the Melbourne rally demanding freedom for Manning and Assange
Thousands of teachers strike in Morocco, car workers walkout in Hungary

The World Socialist Web Site invites workers and other readers to contribute to this regular feature.

Middle East

Moroccan teachers strike

On Tuesday, thousands of teachers went on strike and held demonstrations in Morocco. This was their second week of protests.

They are protesting their temporary work status and demanding to be made permanent. The Moroccan government brought in the concept of temporary contractual employment three years ago, beginning with teachers. Teachers in regular employment are employed directly by the government whereas contractual teachers are employed directly by the school. Although earning equivalent salaries, temporary teachers do not have pension or medical insurance cover.

Europe

Hungarian car workers strikes

Workers at the Korean-owned tyre company, Hankook, began an indefinite strike in Hungary on Tuesday. The VDSZ union members are demanding an 18 percent pay rise and an increase in bonuses.

The indefinite strike follows a two-hour warning strike held on March 6, after which the company offered a basic pay increase of 13.6 percent backdated to January.

Hankook employs around 3,000 workers in Hungary.

The same day a short strike for higher pay took place at the Chinese-owned Wescast car exhaust factory near Budapest. The plant employs around 1,000 workers. The Vasas union members returned to work later that day.

Strike by Greek energy workers

Workers employed by DEPA, the Greek public gas corporation, held a one-day strike on March 7. The strike was called by the SEFA-DEPA union and was supported by others. The strikers marched to the Greek parliament.

The strike and march coincided with the passage of a bill in parliament, put forward by the pseudo-left Syriza government, to split DEPA in two, one part overseeing infrastructure and the other dealing with trading issues. The split would facilitate the further privatization of the company.

Greek public hospital workers set to strike

Staff in Greek hospitals were due to walk out for 24-hours on Thursday. The POEDIN union members were protesting the lack of ambulance crew. They were also protesting Syriza government plans by the Interior Ministry to transfer around 500 former local authority school guards to understaffed hospitals.

Construction workers in Manchester, UK walk off job

Workers in Manchester employed by construction firm Dawnus walked off the job on Monday over non-payment of wages. They were working on a major road in the city and left machinery in the road, leading to traffic chaos. The strikers, many of whom are not unionised, appealed to workers at other construction sites, who walked out in sympathy.

The Manchester Evening News noted, Staff from Total Plant Hire Ltd, a Trafford Park-based firm which supplies machinery, downed tools at around 9.30am on Tuesday claiming they are owed around 300,000 by main contractor Dawnus with a second sub-contractor also alleging they are owed the same amount.

Labour Party-run Manchester City Council are responsible for the management of the work, with the job contracted to Dawnus. Labour Mayor of Greater Manchester, speaking from the prestigious global property developers fair in Cannes, France, attacked the workers action and asked the police to look into possible criminal charges against them.

Strike by workers at bearings factory in the Midlands, UK

Workers at the NSK bearings factory in Newark, Nottinghamshire began strike action on March 4. Due to run until March 26, the strike follows an overtime ban begun in January.

The 27 Unite union members are opposing changes in shift patterns, which are detrimental to their work-life balance. The changes include contractual weekend working across two weekends, extending Friday working by four hours and a banked hours system, which could extend the working week by 10 hours.

Protest by UK blacklisted construction workers

Blacklisted UK construction workers held a sit-in at the London offices of Swedish construction company Skanska on March 6. The sit-in was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the exposure of the blacklist of construction workers in the construction industry. Skanska was one of the most prolific users of the list.

Staff at school in Sussex, England may strike over privatization

UK teaching staff at Peacehaven Community School in East Sussex are considering strike action. The National Education Union members are protesting plans by East Sussex County Council to hand control to the Swale Academies Trust, which runs 16 schools in the area. The school would be privately run but financed by the local authority.

The school was built in 2001 under a private finance initiative and payments are ongoing until 2026.

Icelandic tourism workers vote for further strikes

Hotel workers and tour bus drivers in Reykjavik, Iceland and the surrounding area have voted by more than 90 percent for industrial action, up to and including strikes.

They held a 24-hour strike on March 8 to demand a pay increase. The union representing hotel and tourist industry workers has drawn up a series of strike days in March and April, as well as action including refusal by bus drivers to take tickets and hotel workers refusing to do laundry work.

Staff at Irish finance company set to strike

Staff at First Choice Credit Union in Ballyhaunis, Archill and Castlebar, in Ireland, are due to strike today. The Services, Industrial, Professional and Technical Union members are demanding increases in basic pay and travel expenses as well as pay equality.

The workers rejected a settlement package recommendation made by the Labour Court in September last year.

Latvian teachers plan protest

Latvian teachers are planning to protest outside the Latvian parliament March 20. The protest will coincide with the first reading of the draft budget in the Saeima (parliament). They are demanding a wage increase and additional spending on education.

Turkish cosmetic workers end near 300-day strike

Turkish workers at the cosmetic company, Flormar, a subsidiary of the French-owned Yves Rocher, have ended their near 300-day strike.

The strike began in May last year following the companys sacking of 132 women for joining the Petol-Is union. The company agreed to pay the sacked workers severance payments and compensation equivalent to 16 months salary.

Africa

Sudanese hospital workers hold strikes and demonstrations

Medical staff throughout Sudan protested on Tuesday in preparation for a civil disobedience demonstration on Wednesday.

The Sudanese Medical and Health Staff Group members carried out vigils at pharmaceutical companies and hospitals. The Wednesday demonstrations were supported by strikes throughout Sudans hospitals.

Workers have been protesting since December 19 against the government of President Omar al-Bashir, who came to power in a 1989 coup. The protests were triggered by the tripling of the price of bread and fuel shortages.

Workers at Krugersdorps hospital, South Africa, take wildcat action over conditions

A wildcat strike by medical and administration staff at Krugersdorps hospital in South Africa, begun last week, ended after three days following a labour court ruling.

Workers at the Dr Yusuf Dadoo Hospital were protesting staff shortages, the lack of cooking facilities, and demanded the canteen be reopened and management removed. National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union pickets prevented doctors from clocking into work.

Municipal workers in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, protest cheap labour scheme

Around 70 public sector workers protested at the council buildings in Port Elizabeth, South Africa on Tuesday morning.

The South Africa Municipal Workers Union and the Independent Municipal Allied Trade Union members are protesting the employment of casual labour. Twelve casuals on the cheap labour scheme, the Expanded Public Works Programme, are doing a survey of tenants in the dangerous, no-go areas of townships in Port Elizabeth. They are to gather information on home ownership, normally done by official employees and union members, to establish who qualifies for rebates.

Contractors are paid R5,000 a month whereas full-time employees are paid R19,000.

Namibian miners union sides with management against striking workers

A wildcat strike by Namibian mine blasting workers at Basil Read Mining Namibia ended after the intervention of the Miners Union of Namibia (NUM),

Several hundred workers struck on February 22 against discriminatory practices of sub-contracting company Skorpion Zinc mines.

Workers complain of racial discrimination and unfair practices over pay, housing and many other areas of work. The dispute erupted when pay slips were posted on the company notice board by a wages clerk, showing pay discrepancies for equal work favouring white workers. The clerk has been suspended.

An NUM spokesman said, As a union, we do not condone illegal industrial actions. The union agreed with the company that workers should face disciplinary action before being allowed back in the mine. The company has advertised the jobs of strikers.

Kenyas nurses threaten strike against casualization

Kenyas nurses are threatening strike action against government proposals to casualise their jobs. President Uhuru Kenyatta, and the Council of Governors want to introduce yearly contracts.

The Confederation of Trade Unions and the Kenyan National Union of Nurses (KNUN) members recently struck for three weeks from February 4, for the implementation of a 2017 collective bargaining agreement. The President intervened alongside the courts to threaten nurses with the sack if they did not return to work. The majority of nurses ignored KNUNs directive.

Kenyan airport workers strike continues in face of management strikebreaking

Kenyan airline workers, including cabin crew, ground staff, security, air traffic controllers and maintenance staff are continuing their strike begun March 6. They are opposing the takeover of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport by struggling Kenya Airways (KQ).

Services were restored on Thursday by using Kenyan Air force officers as scabs after the strike was deemed illegal and economic sabotage. Several members of the Kenya Aviation Workers Union were arrested and accused of striking illegally.

KQ is proposing to sack all employees and rehire selected workers through a contracting company on the basis of wage, benefits and pension cuts. Those who oppose the terms will be made redundant.
Dr. Erick Jones adresses a crowd in the Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium in Howe Hall on March 14. Dr. Jones is one of three finalist for the Dean of Engineering position. "...A history of diversity and inclusion weaves through Iowa and Iowa State," Dr. Jones said.
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Republic of Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania, Islamic Republic of Mauritius Mayotte Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco, Principality of Mongolia, Mongolian People's Republic Montserrat Morocco, Kingdom of Mozambique, People's Republic of Myanmar Namibia Nauru, Republic of Nepal, Kingdom of Netherlands Antilles Netherlands, Kingdom of the New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua, Republic of Niger, Republic of the Nigeria, Federal Republic of Niue, Republic of Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway, Kingdom of Oman, Sultanate of Pakistan, Islamic Republic of Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama, Republic of Papua New Guinea Paraguay, Republic of Peru, Republic of Philippines, Republic of the Pitcairn Island Poland, Polish People's Republic Portugal, Portuguese Republic Puerto Rico Qatar, State of Reunion Romania, Socialist Republic of Russian Federation Rwanda, Rwandese Republic Samoa, Independent State of San Marino, Republic of Sao Tome and 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United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
Apple today hit back at the claims made by Spotify which criticized it for its unfair business practices. The Cupertino company says that with the App Store, it is offering a safe and secure platform to users and developers alike with the same set of rules for all.

Apple says that after using the App Store to grow its business, Spotify is now demanding that it gets all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem while not having to make any contributions towards its maintenance and upkeep. Apple says that even apart from the App Store, Spotify is paying lesser and lesser contributions to artists, musicians and songwriters and even taking them to the court.

Spotify had accused Apple of rejecting its app updates on baseless grounds. Apple says that it has cleared nearly 200 Spotify app updates which resulted in over 300 million downloads. The only time Apple refused an update was when Spotify tried to sidetrack the App Store rules.

Apple adds that it reached out to Spotify multiple times over Siri and AirPlay 2 support and every time they were informed that it was being worked upon. Apple also found Spotifys accusations in regards to Apple Watch surprising since it approved its WatchOS app in September 2018 with the same speed and process as it approved any other app.

Apple even discloses that the majority of Spotify customers use its ad-supported plan which does not make any contribution to the App Store. Similarly, most Spotify customers join the platform via partnerships with mobile carriers which again does not help the App Store in any way.

Lets be clear about what that means. Apple connects Spotify to our users. We provide the platform by which users download and update their app. We share critical software development tools to support Spotifys app building. And we built a secure payment system  no small undertaking  which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions. Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue.

Apple even goes so far ahead to claim that Spotify is trying to make money off others hard work and this is something it is trying to do not just with the App Store but also with musicians. Spotify has sued music creators in the US after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board ordered it to increase its royalty payments.

We Want to Hear From You

What do you think about this battle between Spotify and Apple? Do you think Spotify is correct here? Or Apple is right to charge a certain fee for the uptake of the App Store?

[Via Apple
Done with Apple Notes and looking for a way out? You can try Googles excellent note-taking app, Google Keep. Its now a robust notetaking service available everywhere from the web, Chrome, Android to iOS. Heres how to transfer your notes from Apple Notes to Google Keep.

Apple Notes makes it extremely difficult to export notes. And Google hasnt created an automatic importer. This means youll have to manually import notes from Apple Notes to Google Keep. One by one.

How to Transfer Apple Notes to Google Keep Using The App

The official way to do this is by using the Google Keep app. Its a workaround, but basically, you use the share extension to transfer notes from Apple Notes to Google Keep.

Step 1: Open a note from the Notes app after installing the Google Keep app on your iPhone.

Step 2: Tap on the Share button. Here, swipe all the way to the end, tap on More and enable the Google Keep extension.

Step 3: Select the Google Keep extension. Youll see a popup. Here you can choose which account to add the note to. And then tap on Post. The note will now be added to your Google Keep account.

Follow the same process for all the notes you want to transfer from Apple Notes to Google Notes.

How to Sync Apple Notes to Gmail

Theres a setting that lets you use Google as the syncing engine for notes in Apple Notes. This doesnt mean all your notes show up in Google Keep automatically. They can merely be seen from Gmail app and you can then copy/paste to Google Keep manually.

There are a couple of caveats involved. Even after you enable Google as a source for Apple Notes app, it doesnt actually start syncing all the notes from your iCloud account. It will only sync notes that are in the Gmail folder. To make matters worse, I couldnt find a way to move notes from iCloud folder to Gmail folder.

So this is what the workflow would look like:

Manually copy text from a note in the iCloud folder. Create a new note in the Gmail folder and paste the text. Open the Gmail app or Gmail website and find the Notes label. Open the note in the label. Manually paste the text in a Google Note on the web.

This route is also manual. The bright side is that you can do some batch processing. And you can paste the text in Google Keep using your computer, which makes things faster.

To set this system up, follow the instructions:

Step 1: Open Settings on your iPhone and go to Accounts & Passwords.

Step 2: If you havent already, add your Gmail account.

Step 3: Then select your Google account and turn on the Notes syncing feature.

Step 4: You can make the Gmail your default account. To do that open Notes section in Settings and tap on Default Account. Now select Gmail.

Your Favorite Note Taking System?

Do you prefer Apple Notes or Google Keep? Or do you use Evernote? Share with us in the comments below.
LEGO Marvel Collection Coming This March With All Three Games and DLC
The Central European University (CEU) has welcomed efforts by Manfred Weber, the group leader of the European Peoples Party, to help the university, but wants legal assurances from the prime minister so that it can continue operating in Budapest.

CEU said in a statement that it thanked the Bavarian government for financial and technical support offered to facilitate long-term cooperation between the university and the Technical University of Munich (TUM).



Michael Ignatieff, President and Rector of CEU, discussed cooperation opportunities with Wolfgang A. Herrmann, the president of TUM.

While CEU welcomes these developments, and the possibility it opens of reversing CEUs ouster from Budapest, we must be absolutely clear that the parties to a possible collaboration can only proceed if the Hungarian Prime Minister provides an authoritative political commitment to his European partners that CEU will be allowed to remain in Budapest, as a free institution, offering American and European accredited degrees and that this political commitment is backed up by legislation that provides legally binding authorization for all of CEUs operations in Budapest, the university said in a statement.



MTI Photo: Mohai Balazs
Some 7,500 public employees have joined Thursdays nationwide strike organised by the union of public service workers (MKKSZ), the head of the union said in Budapest.

Launching the strike at a meeting of the local council of Budapests 15th district, Erzsebet Boros said it was important for society that the workers comprising the driving force of the country exercise their democratic rights.



Among the unions goals, she said, was to call the governments attention to the fact that the base salaries of civil servants have stagnated for 11 years.



Head of trade unions confederation MaSzSz Laszlo Kordas called for public and private sector unions to join forces so as to prevent workers falling victim to salami tactics.



He said it was the struggles of the unions that had led to prosperity in western Europe.



Unions and workers in Hungary have also had enough of always backing down, he added.



He said the emergence of the solidarity strike would bring about a new phase in the struggle to enforce the interests of workers.



MTI Photo: Bruzak Noemi
Before you head out on March 17th in head-to-toe green to guzzle a pint of Guinness, you should know that neither of those traditions have anything to do with the real Saint Patrick. Even more surprising? Saint Patrick isnt even his real name. Here are 8 St. Patricks Day fact thatll have you saying Irish I knew that sooner!



Saint Patrick was actually British.

Although hes one of Irelands most celebrated figures, Patrick was born around the year 390 in what is now England, Scotland or Wales. As the story goes, he was kidnapped into slavery at age 16 and brought over to Ireland. He then escaped to a monastery in Gaul (around present day France), where he converted to Christianity. Thats where he became a priest and then eventually a bishop. He returned to Ireland in 432 as a missionary, where he played a major role in converting the Irish to Christianity. After his death, he was named Irelands patron saint.

His real name was Maewyn Succat.

Yes, you read that correctly. Maewyn Succat was his name until he changed it to Patrick when he became a bishop.

March 17th is not Saint Patricks birthday.

St. Patricks Day observers who might have thought they were celebrating the saints birthday will be surprised to learn that March 17, 461 AD is actually the day he died.

RELATED: All of the Lucky Celebs Born on St. Patricks Day

The first St. Patricks Day parade happened in America, not Ireland.

The first parade took place in New York City in 1762. With an increase of Irish immigrants coming into the United States, St. Patricks Day quickly became a widespread holiday. According to Metro NY, approximately 150,000 people participate in the New York City parade each year and around two million people come out to watch.

It used to be a dry holiday.

St. Patricks Day was considered a religious holiday in Ireland for most of the 20th century so all pubs would close on March 17th. Once it became a national holiday in 1970, everything changed and pubs have become a go-to spot for many to celebrate.

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Everyone should be wearing blue, not green.

Blue was actually the color that was most associated with Patrick and green was considered unlucky. Blue is still considered symbolic of Ireland  so how did green become the go-to hue for those who dont want to get pinched?

Historically, green has been the color thats been linked to a series of Irish rebellions that took place in order to gain independence from the English crown. The color stuck once waves of Irish immigrants made their home in America and began wearing green and carrying the Irish flag to show their pride for their home country.

RELATED: The Best Outfits to Wear on St. Patricks Day for Any Possible Plans

The shamrock was NOT originally used as a teaching tool.

Many believe that St. Patrick used the three-leaf clover to teach others about the Christian Holy Trinity (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) but that hasnt been proven to be true. However, the number three was a sacred number in Irish mythology, so it does make sense for the shamrock to hold that connection to the Holy Trinity  just likely not in an instructive way.

There are no female leprechauns.

Ever wonder why youve never seen a lady leprechaun? The answer is: They dont exist! There has been no record of female leprechauns and whats even more interesting is that leprechauns are considered to be part of the fairy family. Some have even said that leprechauns are the rejected fairies who have been ousted by the fairy community, which explains why theyre usually described as grouchy creatures who are prone to mischief.
With The Overnight and both Creep entries, Patrick Brice has proven to be a master in turning homes into nightmares. He thrives on the kind of claustrophobic tension that makes you second-guess whether you should laugh, or cry, or scream. All of which is to say that his strengths as a filmmaker will come in handy for his next project.

As Deadline reports, Brice has signed on to direct an adaptation of Stephanie Perkins 2017 novel,Theres Someone Inside Your House for Netflix. The New York Times best-selling novel follows a string of high school murders in a small Nebraska town. Shazam! screenwriter Henry Gayden adapted the novel and Netflix will release the film.

Heres the books official synopsis:

Its been almost a year since Makani Young came to live with her grandmother in landlocked Nebraska, and shes still adjusting to her new life. And still haunted by her past in Hawaii. Then, one by one, the students of her small town high school begin to die in a series of gruesome murders, each with increasing and grotesque flair. As the terror grows closer and the hunt intensifies for the killer, Makani will be forced to confront her own dark secrets.

The book has quite a cult following, which makes this quite a coup for Brice. It also helps that he has some major Hollywood wattage in support, specifically Shawn Levys 21 Laps and James Wans Atomic Monster.

Back in January, Brice returned to Sundance Film Festival with his latest feature Corporate Animals, a horror-comedy starring Demi Moore and Ed Helms that involves caves. That film should hit theaters sometime later this year.

Revisit our past interview with Brice in which he talks about creeps and yuppies.
Judge Gonzalo Curiel of U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of California has in a preliminary ruling that Qualcomm owes Apple almost $1 billion in rebate payments. While the ruling is not going to be enough for Qualcomm to pay Apple, it is a major blow for the San Diego chipmaker in its ongoing dispute with Apple.

Judge Curiel ruled that Qualcomm needs to pay Apple the $1 billion for rebate payment as it was a part of the business agreement between the two companies. While it is Qualcomm which charges a licensing fee for using its technology in its devices, the chip maker had entered into an agreement with Apple where it promised a rebate of nearly $1 billion if the latter did not sue it in court or complained about it to regulators.

However, Qualcomm never made the royalty payment which led Apple to file a lawsuit against it almost two years ago. Qualcomm, on its part, alleges that Apple broke the agreement by urging other smartphone OEMs to complain about Qualcomm and making misleading statements about the chip makers business practices to the Korean Fair Trade Commission.

Don Rosenberg, executive vice president and general counsel of Qualcomm, told Reuters in a statement, Although the Court today did not view Apples conduct as a breach of Apples promises to Qualcomm in the 2013 Business Cooperation and Patent Agreement, the exposure of Apples role in these events is a welcome development.

Qualcomm will only be liable to pay Apple once the decision is final which will only happen next month once the trial starts. As for Apple, it has already adjusted the $1 billion rebate payment from Qualcomm by withholding patent royalties of nearly the same amount.

Apple has already offset the payment at issue under the agreement against royalties that were owed to Qualcomm, Qualcomms Rosenberg told Reuters.

Our Take

If Qualcomm ends up losing this trial against Apple, it would be a major blow to its business. Qualcomm has signed similar deals with other smartphone OEMs and a ruling against it would force it to change the way it conducts business.

[Via Reuters
Even a queen isnt immune to rush hour traffic.

Queen Letizia of Spain got caught in London traffic on her way to meet Prince Charles at the National Gallery on Wednesday evening, making her 20 minutes late to the opening night of the Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light exhibit. However, Queen Elizabeths son  who celebrated his 70th birthday in November  took advantage of that waiting time to catch of a glimpse of the art himself.

When Queen Letizia arrived, Prince Charles didnt seem to mind the delay at all. The two royals greeted each other warmly with a double kiss on the cheek before making their way into the art exhibition featuring the work of Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. It is the first major exhibition for the painter in the U.K. for over a century and includes portraits and scenes of Spanish life.

Queen Letizia and Prince Charles

Letizia, a former journalist, looked like a work of art herself in a custom Carolina Herrera dress featuring three-quarter length sleeves and a floral print featuring a combination of emerald, navy and red. She wore her hair in a ponytail and accessorized with aquamarine drop earrings.

RELATED: Queen Letizia of Spains 10 Most Gloriously Glamorous Looks

Queen Letizia and Prince Charles

Queen Letizia and Prince Charles

At a champagne reception, chairman of the gallery Hannah Rothschild praised the royals unity.

At time when it feels like Britain is turning its back on Europe, it is particularly pleasing to see you here, Your Majesty, she said. Art always has and always will transcend borders. British art owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Royal Family of Spain.

Prince Charles and Queen Letizia in 2017

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Prince Charles and Queen Letizia have developed a friendly rapport through their many meetings over the years, including when the Spanish royal came to Britain on a state visit with her husband King Felipe in July 2017.
Though his books were seldom issued by major publishing houses, recently deceased author Jack Ketchum has become one of the big screens more frequently adapted U.S. novelists. Darlin isnt based on a Ketchum tome, per se, but it does have a through line to his work: Its a sequel to Lucky McKees 2011 The Woman, which followed Andrew van den Houtens 2009 Offspring, whose print source was a sequel to Ketchams 1980 debut novel Off Season. Ketchum earned writing credits on both films, and Off Season was the start of a series about a cannibalistic clan in the woods of rural Maine. At the end of The Woman, the titular feral captive of a civilized family kills her keepers and returns to the wilderness, the familys children in tow.

While The Woman was a queasy psychological horror-thriller about abuse in many forms, the much less serious Darlin picks up some years later with the prior films youngest survivor making a rough transition to normal society at a Catholic charitable home. Though superficially polished, this first feature from Walking Dead thesp-turned-writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh (who played the feral captive in The Woman) proves an increasingly wobbly mix of comedy, horror and social critique, its heavy-handed indictment of stereotypical religious hypocrisy finally dragging the enterprise into caricature. While there was gallows humor in Ketchums cruel literary universe, this ultimately glib concoction doesnt do much credit to his legacy  even though the film is dedicated to him, and hes credited as a producer.

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Growing to adolescence in the great outdoors, her older siblings having died off over time, Darlin (Lauren Canny)  so named for the inscription on a charm bracelet thats her sole memento from domesticated life  is deposited at a hospital entrance by the ferocious Woman (McIntosh again). We soon see why: The girl has managed to get pregnant, from circumstances gradually revealed in flashback. But shes so unused to regular human contact that she has to be sedated upon arrival, acting like a panicked wild animal toward everyone save a sympathetic gay nurse (Cooper Andrews, another Walking Dead alum).

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Once slightly tamed, shes turned over to a Catholic boarding school for wayward girls. There, her new allies are staffer Sister Jennifer (Nora-Jane Noone) and rebellious fellow student Billy (Maddie Nichols). More dubious support comes from the Bishop (Bryan Batt of Mad Men), a smirking cleric who intends to leverage her presumed progress from hellcat to docile maiden for fundraising purposes.

Mute and illiterate to begin with, Darlin gradually adjusts to this new life, as the initially wary other girls accept her into their little community. But assimilation here also means absorbing the more rigid authority figures hellfire-and-damnation teachings, with Darlin taking all too literally the notion that she may have a devil inside her  i.e., the baby growing in her belly. Meanwhile, the Woman assumes Darlin has given birth already, and is prepared to reclaim both young mother and infant. Discovering them long gone from the hospital, she goes on a rampaging search, the body count of which seems to exist simply to lend the film sufficient marketable genre content.

The tone of the Louisiana-shot Darlin wanders somewhat arbitrarily from Nell-type drama to satire to horror and comedy-horror. The worst of it is its crude indictment of the Church, which has certainly earned skepticism with its response to myriad scandals in recent years, but still isnt very effectively lambasted by figures as cartoonish as the Bishop, or a late-arriving Cardinal (Thomas Francis Murphy). Batts performance adds the subtlety of an anvil-drop to a movie that exhibits an already hamfisted approach, so its inevitable his character should turn out to be a pedophile in addition to being a generally manipulative creep.

Even sillier is the plot development that eventually throws the Woman in with a group of homeless prostitutes and crazies led by Eugenie Bondurants scenery-chewing Mona. Stirred to action by their john-devouring newbie, they turn into a Magnificent Seven-like slow-mo horde of vengeance.

Replete with a sort of MeToo anthem over the closing credits, the films too-up-front politics are ostensibly admirable. Yet they emerge as laughable in this awkward goulash of lurid pulp fiction, gore and coming-of-age earnestness. A feminist, pro-gay message is like anything else in storytelling: To be successfully delivered, it must be sufficiently contextualized within general narrative logic and character psychology. The longer Darlin goes on, the more it loses sight of that basic authorial necessity. If the film had been framed as a fable, many of its contrivances might have worked. But Darlin isnt sophisticated enough to make that imaginative leap.

The younger actors here are instructed to play things naturalistically, and they come off fairly well. Those playing adult figures, though, are all over the map, as is McIntoshs film. Theres some cohesion provided by the competent tech/design collaborators, who lend the movie a professionally smooth surface. But its content grows so tonally awry that by the end, youre not sure to what extent McIntosh is serious or joking  nor is there much indication that she knows, either.

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0315_Teresa-Giudice

Teresa Giudice showed up to celebrate a monumental moment in her brothers life, despite the event going down right after her husband was released from prison into ICE custody.

The Real Housewives Of New Jersey star looked happy and put together while attending her brother Joe Gorgas book release party Thursday evening in New York.

Getty

Teresa sported a smile while walking up to the party arm-in-arm with her dad, Giacinto. Wearing black pants and a fitted blazer, the mom of four was spotted inside hanging with her RHONJ castmates including sister-in-law, Melissa, as well as Margaret Josephs and Dolores Catania.

Bravo cameras were rolling on the event, and even Real Housewives daddy, Andy Cohen was there to show support.

Instagram Photo

Teresas attendance comes hours after hubby Joe Giudice was released from prison and handed over to ICE.

As The Blast reported, Joe made his exit from FCI Allenwood after serving more than 3-years for fraud and failing to pay taxes. The Italian born TV star is currently facing deportation and will be detained in ICE custody until his case is heard in immigration court.

The post Teresa Giudice Puts on a Brave Face Hours After Joe is Released Into ICE Custody appeared first on The Blast.
By Andy Sullivan and Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's former adviser Roger Stone will go to trial on Nov. 5, a federal judge said on Thursday, making it likely that the legal fallout from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe will stretch through much of 2019. Stone, a self-proclaimed political "dirty trickster," pleaded not guilty on Jan. 29 to lying to Congress, obstructing an official proceeding and witness tampering. Those charges were brought by Mueller's team in its probe into whether the Trump campaign worked with Russia to win the 2016 election. Stone is a longtime Republican operative who had advised Trump intermittently for decades. According to the charges, Stone lied about his communications with WikiLeaks, the web site that released hacked emails from Democratic rival Hillary Clinton's campaign. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson also cautioned Republican political operative Stone that he must obey an order that prohibits him from criticizing his case. "I expect compliance," Jackson said. Jackson had previously tightened the gag order limiting Stone's public comments on the case after he posted a photo of her on his Instagram account next to an image resembling the crosshairs of a gun. She questioned why Stone released a book criticizing Mueller's investigation after the gag order was issued, but opted not to send Stone to jail for violating it. At the end the hearing, Stone raise his right hand and swore he would comply with the terms of his release. Stone is the 34th person to face charges as part of Mueller's investigation. Trump has denied any collusion with Russia occurred and has repeatedly called Mueller's probe a "witch hunt." Russia denies interfering in the election. Mueller is widely expected to wrap up the probe soon. One of his top attorneys, Andrew Weissmann, is wrapping up his work with the investigation, spokesman Peter Carr said on Thursday. Mueller is due to submit his findings to Attorney General William Barr, and Democrats have been pressing Barr to make those findings public as they pursue their own investigations into Trump's political and business operations. Lawyers on Mueller's team told Jackson they had already shared 9 terabytes of evidence with Stone's lawyers. That would amount to a stack of paper twice as high as the Washington Monument, defense lawyer Robert Buschel said. (Additional reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Doina Chiacu and Alistair Bell)
Girl Scouts fight to install menstrual hygiene locker in their school bathrooms originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com

Tuesday is Menstrual Hygiene Day, an annual day to raise global awareness of and break the silence around menstrual hygiene.

A group of Girl Scouts in western Ohio fought to put a locker for menstrual hygiene products in their school restrooms, and even used some of the money they made from selling cookies to fund it.

"We never really set out to really change the world with our project, but we knew that it could make a world of a difference to the girls in our school," Reagan, one of the girl scouts involved in the project, told "Good Morning America."

PHOTO: Girl Scouts of Western Ohio helped install a feminine hygiene locker in their school bathroom. (Courtesy Jen Strickler )

(MORE: 10-year-old Girl Scout's Cardi B rap boosts cookie sales)

Reagan said that they got the idea because they were not allowed to carry bags around during school and their uniforms didn't have pockets. If students needed feminine hygiene products, they'd have to get them from the school nurse.

The girls teamed up as a troop and wrote a letter to their school's parent-teacher organization, but their initial proposal of having individual lockers in the restrooms was shot down by the school. Eventually, their second proposal of one big locker with individual cubbies was greenlighted last December.

They were able to fund the project in part with proceeds from selling Girl Scout cookies. The girls even helped assemble and install the locker themselves.

PHOTO: Girl Scouts of Western Ohio helped install a feminine hygiene locker in their school bathroom. (Courtesy Shauna Martin )

(MORE: A documentary about menstruation won an Oscar. Here's what the director of 'Period. End of Sentence.' wants to happen next.)

Another girl scout, Alexis, said that the project was important to them because it was a way to support fellow girls.

"This project is important to us because it encourages girls more, and [makes] them feel comfortable at school and confident," she told "GMA." "And it's really fun to help out girls in our community."

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Reagan added that the response from other girls at their school has been overwhelmingly positive.

PHOTO: Girl Scouts of Western Ohio helped install a locker for feminine hygiene products at their school (Courtesy Jen Strickler )

"Last year, when we started the project, some of the older girls mentioned how much they were trying to sneak around their products, and when we mentioned we were going to put cabinets, the girls were really excited," she said.

The girl scouts, both fifth graders, wished to only be identified by their first names for privacy reasons. Their troop leader, Jen Strickler, said it was inspirational to see the group of young women "come together and really look to see how to make things better and how to make the world a little bit better in certain ways."

"For me personally, I remember 30 years ago experiencing something similar, so we kind of started talking through what made the most sense" for how these young women could access menstrual hygiene products at school more easily," Strickler said.

PHOTO: Girl Scouts from Western Ohio helped install a locker for feminine hygiene products at their school. (Courtesy Jen Strickler)

She said she hopes the locker will "really make that transition of going from a girl to a young woman that much easier for them."

Reagan said she hopes "other girls will hear our story and advocate for a change in their school."

"It would be amazing if this became the standard in all schools, and maybe baby steps of something even greater," she said.

"GMA" originally published this story March 15, 2019.
Jessica Nabongo expected to be 1st black woman to visit every country in the world originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com

Jessica Nabongo is on a mission to be the first black woman to visit every country in the world.

And she's getting close. So far, she's hit 157 countries. In the next seven weeks, she'll add another 11 to that list.

Nabongo spoke to "Good Morning America" from her home in Detroit as she was packing to head out on the next phase of her adventure. In the next two months, she'll visit, among others, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq and Oman.

Travel has always been a part of her life, she told "GMA."

"I'm looking at Canada right now," she said. She visited for the fist time when she was four. "We would always take family vacations. Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, London were on the list of places she visited before she was 18. Also on the list: Uganda, where her parents are from. In addition to her U.S. passport, Nabongo carries a Ugandan passport, which she said helps her gain access to nations that aren't amenable to American tourists.

(MORE: 9 incredible ideas for long weekend getaways)

(MORE: Swim with pigs when you book a villa at this Bahamas resort)

She first had the idea to travel to every country in the world, in February 2017. At that point, she had visited about 60 countries.

But Nabango didn't tell anyone her plan, at least not at first. "I didn't want anyone to beat me to it," she said.

Nabango did some research on who else may have conquered this feat, and came to the conclusion if she were to visit each country, she would be the first black woman to do so.

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She went public with her quest in March 2018.

Nabongo had been writing a travel blog since 2009, before social media was so prevalent. "It was a way to keep family and friends updated," she said. Today, she documents much of her travel on Instagram, where she has almost 90,000 followers.

She said she gets asked a lot how she got started. "People look at a photo of me in Bali and they say, 'That's cool, I want to go to Bali.' But everyone needs to ask themselves, 'What is your why?' Why do you want to do what it is you want to do? I hope people would be more reflective than reactive. Not just like, 'Oh Bali, that's a cute picture, I want to go.'"

What makes it to her Instagram, she said, is "a fraction of my life. There's a lot of really s***** things that go on behind the scenes."

Nabongo recounted a visit to the Eastern European nation of Moldova, a place she'll "never go back there in my life." It wasn't just the fact that she got ripped off on her money exchange, or that her cab driver charged her double. She's had things like that happen before. It was the general unfriendliness of the people she encountered.

"I'm [a] seasoned traveler, used to being a foreigner and people taking advantage of me," she said. "I dont speak the language, I get it, especially in poor countries. In poor countries I don't really even mind."

More often than not, though, people try to be helpful, especially, Nabongo said, when she tells them what she's trying to accomplish.

She plans to end her quest on Oct. 6 in the Seychelles with family and friends on hand to celebrate. Her mom will be there. The date is significant: it's her late father's birthday. Nabongo credits him for her journey.

"Had he not gotten a scholarship to Western Michigan," she said, "none of this would be happening."

And what will she do once she's reached her goal?

"I'll probably go to Uganda right after," she said.
'I was the last guy to come out of the mosque': Survivors describe horrific attack in New Zealand originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

Survivors scrambled for their lives, scaled fences and hid beneath benches as two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, came under terrorist attack from at least one heavily armed shooter Friday.

Ramzan Ali said he was in one of the two mosques when the shooting began. He told The Associated Press the sheikh had just begun Friday prayers when the shooting broke out. He hid under a bench and didn't move until the gunfire stopped.

"I was the last guy to come out of the mosque after the shooting stopped and on the doors there were a lot of bodies," Ali said.

PHOTO: People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP)

Once the shooting had stopped, at least 49 people were dead. Forty-one people were killed at the Deans Avenue mosque, Masjid Al Noor, while another seven were killed a few miles away at Linwood Masjid Mosque. Another person died at Christchurch Hospital.

Brenton Tarrant, 28, an Australian citizen, was charged with the attack Saturday.

"I'd never heard a gunshot, ever," Mulki Abdiwahab, 18, told TVNZ. She and her parents had gone to pray at the Deans Avenue mosque Friday afternoon. "I thought at first it must have been somebody banging on the window.

"My mum grabbed my hand and then we just we ran outside," she said. "Everyone was in chaos, just running for their lives."

(MORE: 49 killed in coordinated terrorist shootings at 2 mosques in New Zealand; 3 suspects in custody)

Police have not said whether the same shooter opened fire at both mosques. Three people were in custody, but only one -- an Australian national -- had been charged with murder as night fell in New Zealand.

The "very well-planned" attack was filmed on a Facebook livestream -- with it tracking the shooter's footsteps leading up to and including the gunfire at Deans Avenue.

"I heard what I thought was fireworks and I saw a bunch of fellas running down the street," a woman who was driving by the mosque told TVNZ. "Then all of a sudden it got violent, and they started falling. And one fell to left of my car and one fell to right."

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PHOTO: People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP)

Worshippers at the Deans Avenue mosque, including Ali, fled immediately after hearing the sound.

"After three, four minutes, we heard the firing and it was from the main entrance, the main entrance of the building, and then everybody just ran to the back doors just to save themselves," Mahmood Nassir told the AP. "And first we hide behind the cars and you know, under the cars. ... We tried to jump the fence."

(MORE: The US averaged at least 1 deadly mass shooting a month in 2018)

Nassir continued, "And when the firing stopped, I just have a look from over the fence, there was one guy changing the gun and taking the other one -- because he parked on this side driveway next to the mosque house -- and he just take the gun and then the firing started again, you know."

PHOTO: A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says many people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. (AP)

Christchurch Hospital said it had taken in 48 people injured by gunfire, including one who later died. The range of injuries were from minor to critical, a hospital spokesperson said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had said earlier in the evening that 20 of the injured had what were considered "serious."

"I saw some people had blood on their body and some people were limping," eyewitness Farid Ahmad told the AP. "At that moment I realized it was really serious."

ABC News' Matt Foster and Will Gretsky contributed to this report.
After 49 killed in mass shootings at 2 New Zealand mosques, prime minister vows, 'our gun laws will change' originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

After 49 people were gunned down in terrorist attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, the prime minister is vowing to change gun laws.

At least one gunman carried out what is now the deadliest shooting in New Zealand history.

Forty-two others were injured, including two critically, in what became "one of New Zealand's darkest days," New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.

Ardern said Saturday, "While the nation grapples with a form of grief and anger that we have not experienced before, we are seeking answers."

She vowed that while work is being done as to the chain of events that led to both the holding of this gun license and the possession of these weapons, I can tell you one thing right now: Our gun laws will change.

PHOTO: People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. (Mark Baker/AP)

(MORE: Survivors describe harrowing escape from attack on New Zealand mosques)

A gunman appeared to have livestreamed video of the shooting on social media, according to New Zealand police. He documented his trip from his car and into the worship center in central Christchurch, where he opened fire indiscriminately, police said.

While the man is currently facing only one charge, further charges will be laid. Details of those charges will be communicated at the earliest possible opportunity.  New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) March 15, 2019

Officials said they were working to remove "extremely distressing footage" taken at the scene and urged social media users not to share it.

Meanwhile, Sky Network Television -- New Zealands largest satellite television provider -- announced late Friday that it was removing Sky News Australia from its platform after the broadcaster apparently aired video of the attack.

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We stand in support of our fellow New Zealanders and have made the decision to remove Sky News Australia from our platform until we are confident that the distressing footage from yesterdays events will not be shared #KiaKahaChristchurch https://t.co/Srh5E9Oilm  SKY New Zealand (@SKYNZ) March 15, 2019

We stand in support of our fellow New Zealanders and have made the decision to remove Sky News Australia from our platform until we are confident that the distressing footage from yesterdays events will not be shared, Sky Network officials said in a tweet.

PHOTO: Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says many people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. (AP)

Three in custody

Three people are in custody, including one Australian citizen. Brenton Tarrant, 28, was charged with murder and appeared in court Saturday, officials said.

Authorities also said that the murder suspect will be facing more charges.

While the man is currently facing only one charge, further charges will be laid," New Zealand police officials tweeted from the department's verified account.

"Details of those charges will be communicated at the earliest possible opportunity.

Five guns were used by the main suspect, including two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns, the prime minister said at a news conference Saturday. The suspect had a gun license, she added.

(MORE: How New Zealand's gun laws changed after an earlier deadly shooting)

Police have not said if the same gunman shot at both mosques.

None of those apprehended had a criminal history either here or in Australia," and none were on any watch lists, Ardern said.

Late Friday night, New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush told reporters that authorities are still "working through" the accounts of two additional people who were arrested as part of the investigation.

As you know we apprehended four people ... one was released quite early, a member of the public who just wanted to get their kids home but decided to take a firearm," Bush said. "There was another couple arrested at a cordon and we are currently working through whether or not those persons had any involvement in that incident. So when we know, well be able to give you but I dont want to say anything until were sure.

PHOTO: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern exits after a press conference at Parliament, March 15, 2019, in Wellington, New Zealand. (Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

(MORE: What to know about the Muslim community in New Zealand targeted by deadly attack)

Bush said that local authorities responded "immediately" to the reports of gunfire, and that within 36 minutes of the first shot being fired, the primary suspect was taken into custody.

That person was not willing to be arrested, I think youve probably seen some of that live video, there was live audio coming back to my command center in Wellington, of that apprehension and I can tell you as I was listening to that - that person was non-compliant," Bush said.

"We also believe that there were IEDs in that vehicle so it was a very dangerous maneuver," he said, referring to improvised explosive devices. "There were also firearms in that vehicle, so our staff, who were well-equipped, did engage with that person, and again put themselves in real danger to keep the community safe.

Bush vowed that local authorities "will be highly vigilant [and] highly present, to ensure that if there is anyone out here wanting to commit harm we can intervene.

Earlier, Bush said that the island nation is dedicating all available resources to our response, not only in Christchurch but right across the country.

This attack has been an enormous shock for all New Zealanders, and I am aware that there is a real sense of fear and concern for personal safety, particularly among our Muslim communities, Bush said in a statement.

He said that there is a heightened police presence nationwide, particularly at mosques and community events, and urged residents to immediately report anything suspicious to local authorities.

Hospital overwhelmed

Four of the 49 people killed in the massacre died on the way to the hospital, said Greg Robertson, chief of surgery at Christchurch Hospital.

It's unusual for surgeons in this part of the world to deal with gunshot wounds, Robertson told reporters. We've had experience overseas dealing with trauma. We also get experience in our own environment for a limited number of these events. But clearly we don't face the extreme load this incident put on us.

The surgeon went on to tell reporters on Friday night that 36 patients remained hospitalized at the Christchurch facility  11 of them in the intensive care unit. He said the severity of injuries range from soft tissue injuries to head trauma. A 4-year-old girl wounded in the attack had to be transferred to another hospital in critical condition.

'Shattered innocence'

Witnesses said the attack occurred just before 1:40 p.m. local time as the Sheikh gave a sermon in Christchurch.

"He just came in and he was shooting ad hoc," Ramzan Ali told The Associated Press.

Ali said he survived by hiding beneath a bench.

"I haven't seen him because I just lied down under the bench, thinking that if I get out, I'll get shot," he said. "I'm just keeping my fingers crossed so I could be alive."

He added: "I was the last guy to come out of the mosque after the shooting stopped and on the doors there were a lot of bodies."

PHOTO: Police and ambulance staff help a wounded man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says many people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. (AP)

PHOTO: Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. A witness says many people have been killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. (AP)

(MORE: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter scrambling to contain video of New Zealand mosque shooting)

"It's something that we never expected to have happen here," Christchurch MP Gerry Brownlee told "Good Morning America." "We're a relatively small population, and while we are ethnically quite diverse, we live very peaceable lives. And this, as many have seen, has shattered our innocence."

Brownlee, who said he lives a short distance from one of the shooting sites, said, "Almost everyone will know someone or have a connection with the families of someone who has been either killed or seriously wounded today."

PHOTO: A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. (Mark Baker/AP)

Of the 49 people killed, New Zealand police said 41 victims died at the Deans Avenue Mosque, seven at the Linwood Avenue Mosque and one at a hospital.

Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel believes the city was targeted because we are a safe city and a safe country.

He is not from here, Dalziel said Saturday of the attacker. He came here. He came here with hate in his heart and intention to kill in his mind. So he did not develop his hatred here. He came here to perform this act of terrorism."

"His was the voice of hate, and the only way that communities can respond to the voice of hate is to come together and love, compassion and kindness," she said.

PHOTO: People stand across the road from a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. (Mark Baker/AP)

(MORE: After New Zealand massacre, US authorities search for copycats and links to America)

'Abhorrent' attacks

Queen Elizabeth in a statement said she's "deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch."

"Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives. I also pay tribute to the emergency services and volunteers who are providing support to those who have been injured," she said. "At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders."

Friday afternoon President Trump said he spoke with New Zealand's prime minister about the "monstrous terrorist attacks."

"These sacred places of worship were turned into scenes of evil killing," Trump said. "It's a horrible, horrible thing. I told the prime minister the United States is with them all the way, 10 percent, whatever they need, we will be there."

PHOTO: Police officers guard the area close to the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch, March 15, 2019. (Tessa Burrows/AFP/Getty Images)

The president went on to call New Zealand a great friend and asserted that "our relationship has never been better."

President Trump had also tweeted condolences Friday morning.

"My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured," he tweeted. "The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

U.S. Attorney General William Barr in a statement called the attack "a sobering reminder that the threat of political and religious violence is real and that we must remain vigilant against it."

"Violence on the basis of religion is evil," Barr said. "The Justice Department joins in mourning with the people of New Zealand.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement, "While we are not aware of any current, credible or active threat domestically, nor of any current information regarding obvious ties between the perpetrators in New Zealand and anyone in the US -- the Department is cognizant of the potential concerns members of Muslim-American communities may have as they gather at todays congregational prayers."

"Attacks on peaceful people in their place of worship are abhorrent and will not be tolerated," Nielsen stressed. "The Department strongly stands with those of all faiths as they seek to worship in peace and we will continue to work with stakeholders to protect the ability of all to worship freely and without fear."

ABC News' Ben Gittleson, Jordyn Phelps, J. Gabriel Ware, Matt Foster, Will Gretsky and Darren Reynolds contributed to this report.
Why watermelon-infused beauty products are everywhere originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com

Watermelon is becoming the trendy holy grail ingredient for beauty products.

The delicious summer favorite has made its way from the grocery store to the beauty aisle, appearing in face masks, lip balms, hair products, moisturizers, body oils and more. But why?

"Watermelon provides a wonderful sense of nostalgia with summertime," Amanda Cardiner, manager of global brand development for Bliss told "Good Morning America." "Using watermelon extract as a skin care ingredient provides a gentle, fun-to-use experience with the benefits of a more serious skin care ingredient."

Label Insight non-food product specialist Mariah Lightfoot told "GMA" that consumers generally get excited about watermelon during the summertime. "Besides enjoying it at a backyard BBQ, using products that contain watermelon can provide health benefits to hair and skin," she said.

Watermelon contains vitamin A, which is important for skin and eye health, according to the Mayo Clinic Health System. It's also made up of 92 percent water, which shows the immense amount of hydration it provides. These two facts alone show the value watermelon extract can bring -- and beauty product developers have taken note for items that can be used all year round.

For the co-founder and co-CEO of Korean skincare brand Glow Recipe, Sarah Lee said she saw watermelon as a beneficial ingredient in their products and a fruit that connected back to her childhood.

"In Korea, our grandmothers used to rub watermelon rind on our skin in the summer to calm heat rash and irritation - and it would work like magic," Lee said. "We were inspired by this childhood experience and wanted to harness the power of this incredible superfruit in an overnight treatment."

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(MORE: Micro-concealing 101: The makeup hack that will save you time)

Label Insight's product database revealed that there are currently more than 100 beauty products currently on the market that include watermelon. Clearly, people are loving a dose of watermelon not just on their plates but also on their skin.

Keep scrolling to see some standout watermelon-infused products that you will love adding to your daily routine.

These products were curated by the "GMA" editorial team. "Good Morning America" has affiliate partnerships, so we will get a small share of the revenue from your purchases through these links. All product prices are determined by the retailer and subject to change. By visiting these websites, you will leave GoodMorningAmerica.com and any information you share with the retailer will be governed by its website's terms and conditions and privacy policies.
Thousands of children and teenagers across the world went on strike Friday to demand adults take action against climate change. Organizers said that young people in 112 countries were planning to participate in the strike, including youth from Australia, South Korea, Kenya, Uganda, Finland, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Argentina. In the United States alone, the U.S. Youth Climate Strike organized 400 actions across all 50 states.

The strike is inspired by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who in August 2018 organized a school strike against climate change in front of the Swedish Parliament. The teen got nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize over her work against climate change on Thursday.

Climate change is considered the greatest threat against humanity. An United Nations report released last year found that by 2040 the planet would be in absolute crisis. Some of the consequences the globe would face in 21 years include food shortages, extreme poverty, wildfires, droughts, and the death of coral reefs. The only way to fight climate change, the UN panel in charge of the report said, is to transform the global economy at a scale and pace that has "no documented historic precedent."

The threat has led youth to mobilize across the globe. In the U.S., young people have been the driving force behind the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to address climate change and income inequality.

Todays youth understand the severity and urgency of the climate crisis. They understand that they will have to face the impacts of the action, or inaction, we take now," the Peoples Climate Movement (PCM) said in a statement provided to Refinery29. "And they understand that the status quo is not acceptable."

Ahead, scenes from the youth climate strike around the world.

France Demonstrators painted a Earth on their face during a demonstration against climate change in Nantes. Photo: SEBASTIEN SALOM-GOMIS/AFP/Getty Images.

United States A girl holds a sign reading 'YOLO' ("You Only Live Once") in front of the New York Headquarters of the United Nations. Photo: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images.

Kenya Some 100 students walked in a Nairobi forest shouting slogans to protest against the global climate change. Photo: DAI KUROKAWA/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock.

United Kingdom Students protest outside the National Assembly for Wales Senedd Building. Photo: Mark Hawkins/Barcroft Images/Getty Images.

Spain Students take part in a demonstration against climate change in Valencia. Photo: ANA ESCOBAR/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock.

Philippines A youth activist displays a placard as part of a global protest action to highlight climate change in Manila. Photo: MARK R CRISTINO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock.

Ukraine Ukrainians hold placards during the 'Global Climate Strike for future' protest, in front the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry building in Kiev. Photo: STEPAN FRANKO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock.

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

What Ivanka & Her Dad Have In Common: Stealing Other People's Ideas

This Mom Went To Prison For Enrolling Her Son In A School Outside Her District

Rep. Ilhan Omar's Daughter Is Leading The Youth Fight Against Climate Change
A judge asks Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski, a question many women may find familiar. Hey, whats the matter with you? I just ruled in your favor, dont I get a smile? A Chicago lawyer whos been at the top of her game since The Good Wife premiered in 2009, Lockhart looks up from the plaintiff table a bit dazed. You should smile more, he says. Diane wanly turns up the corners of her mouth in a brief attempt to obey the judges order. Then suddenly, shes in stitches  a gleeful, genuine laugh echoes through the courtroom and continues as she strides out to move on with the rest of her day.

Its a scene typical of The Good Fight, the wry, brilliant legal-political drama (and Good Wife spinoff) that returns to CBS All Access for a third season on March 14.

Diane Lockhart has always been a role model. A committed and successful career woman of clear ambition and strong moral fiber, she is a founding partner in the law firm that takes a chance on Julianna Marguiles character in The Good Wife. Over seven seasons that earned the actress six Emmy nominations, Baranski has created one of the most layered and palpably human portraits of a woman in charge in television history. If Margulies and her husband (played by SATCs Chris Noth) are The Good Wifes Hillary and Bill in the making, Diane is cut closer to the mold of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

RELATED: Scandal Star Bellamy Young Says Her Character Taught Her "Swagger"

But those were different times. On The Good Fight, which premiered in February 2017, Dianes plan to retire goes up in smoke when she loses all her savings in a ponzi scheme. She instead begins a new chapter in her career, facing both personal misfortune and the countrys political upheaval in the wake of President Trumps inauguration. The firm she joins is majority African-American and crusades more often on the side of social justice than her previous, more corporate outfit. The Good Fight reinvents a Diane who goes to battle for the values shes long embodied, even if shed rather be idling in the south of France.

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Creators Michelle and Robert King, who approach timely plotlines with a mordant and at times downright goofy sense of humor, have never been coy about their politics. (If the spinoffs title isnt hint enough, its glorious opening sequence explodes objects to smithereens  including TVs tuned to a white nationalist rally, Vladimir Putin, and Trump himself.) When the alleged tape of Trump cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel makes a cameo in season 2, laptops glow neon yellow in the lawyers faces as they watch the golden shower fetish it reportedly depicts. Other ripped-from-the-headlines episodes address racial profiling by Chicago police, and women coming forward with accusations of sexual misconduct.

As the series enters its third season, Dianes firm is in talks with the Democratic National Committee about pursuing President Trumps impeachment.

But Diane is more than simply a chic and determined avatar for liberal resistance. She has never been above contradictions, defending clients on the wrong side of her own convictions, and falling in love with her now husband (played by Gary Cole), a Republican ballistics expert and her on-again off-again romance dating back to early seasons of The Good Wife. She used to barb him with good humor over his support of Sarah Palin; now she carries a gun.

Diane also confronts challenges to her bonafides as a feminist from younger women. Though she supports aspiring female colleagues in her office, shes never been a fawning mentor. Shes the tough, polished boss youd be afraid to disappoint but never terrified to approach. When a client loses his job and future career prospects for being included in a database similar to the Shitty Media Men list, Diane successfully sues to have the site taken down. The founder accuses her of being a traitor, but Diane cuts her off. Women arent just one thing, she says with force. And you dont get to determine what we are.

RELATED: The Story Behind Lori Loughlin's High Drama Courtroom Sketch

Weve seen Diane be so many women over the years, but perhaps none as vulnerable as the one who appears to be coming apart at the seams in season 2. Diane is no longer a woman who always has it together, perhaps her most relatable turn to date. On the news, she sees that Trump has started keeping a pig (as in, an actual pig) in the White House. Next hes insisting on taking goats (as in, actual screaming goats) to a foreign summit. Its deliberately unclear whether Diane hallucinates these stories, because she briefly dabbles in micro-dosing on psychedelic mushrooms to cope with the surreality of everyday life. In either case, barnyard political headlines and Dianes slide into trippy self-medication are an accurate representation of how insane todays world can make anyone feel, and she navigates it with aplomb.

Its alright if the world is crazy, Diane tells her business partner, having achieved some level of personal peace amid the chaos around her. As long as I make my little corner of the world sane. Its the least any of us can hope to do.
For the past two decades, fashion director Tonne Goodman has traveled the world for Voguefrom the Great Wall of China to Lima, Peru, to Madrid and (her personal highlight) Kenyas Lake Victoria with Lupita Nyongo. Wherever she goes, she comes armed only with her singular eye for elegance, a Dries van Noten coat over her arm, and a carry-on wheelie carefully packed with three pairs of white Levis 511s, black and navy Organic by John Patrick sweaters, Brooks Brothers pajamas, Louboutins Chelsea boots, black suede Belgian loafers, her fathers leather belts, and a handful of Charvet foulard scarves, which recall the print of her favorite smocked dress that she wore as a little girl growing up on the Upper East Side.

Many of these odysseys are revealed in Point of View: Four Decades of Defining Style (Abrams), a lavish visual biography that reveals, among many other things, that Goodmans taste was nurtured from the earliest age through the influence of her stylish parents, the artist Marian Powers and the dashing doctor Edmund Goodmanwho no less than Alfred Eisenstaedt considered the handsomest couple in New York.

Photographed by David Sims, Vogue, 2009 / Courtesy of Abrams Books.

While being educated at Brearley, Goodman embraced the 1960s with genteel rebellion. She saw Ike and Tina Turner perform at Carnegie Halland the musical Hair (thirteen times). At eighteen, she ran away to sea with a Dutch sailor possessed of knee-trembling good looks. The swashbuckling romance didnt last longnor did her stint at the Philadelphia College of Artbut Vogues Diana Vreeland spotted her and her dead-straight fall of honeyed blonde hair in an elevator at Conde Nast on a modeling go-see and launched her career. (Vreelands memo, sent to all her editors, noted that though she is not prettyshe pulls together perfect bones and proportion in an aristocrative manner.)

Goodman enjoyed a brief career as an all-American Youthquake girl before going to work once more with Vreeland, who had left Vogue to energize the moribund Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a series of flamboyant exhibitions. Vreeland, as Goodman recalls, commanded, without words, that we understand the significance of excellence, commitment, and magicqualities that have informed Goodmans work ever since. Soon Carrie Donovan, the fashion editor of The New York Times Magazine, invited Tonne to come work with her as a fashion reporterher first assignment was a racy swimsuit story with Helmut Newton, and projects with the likes of Bruce Weber and Steven Meisel followed. In 1987, Tonne brought her all-American chic to Calvin Kleins legendary image-making operation, and five years later Liz Tilberis lured her to Harpers Bazaar.

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Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, 2011

Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, 2007

Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, 2013

Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, 2007

Photographed by Mario Testino, Vogue, 2016

In 1999, Tonne joined Vogue, where she began producing the modern woman portfolios and the sleek covers (186 and still counting) that would provide an elegant foil to Grace Coddingtons fantasies, Phyllis Posnicks eye-stoppers, and Camilla Nickersons more experimental shoots. The work from this era collected in Point of Viewfrom Annie Leibovitz, Steven Klein, Steven Meisel, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh, Mario Testino, and Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott to 23-year-old Tyler Mitchell (with whom she collaborated on the September 2018 Beyonce cover and portfolio)vividly highlights, as Tonne says, the notion of changethe one constant in the life of a fashion editor.

I asked Tonne how it felt when the book was finally assembledwhat it was like to view ones career between two covers. I burst into tears seeing that accumulation of so many events in a life, she says. These are great times.
amal george clooney

George Clooney is a defender of the Duke and the Duchess of Sussex. The actors appearance on Good Morning Britain Friday, March 15, included some new insight about his close friendship with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

Clooney, who recently spoke out in support of Markle, described the former Suits actress as a really kind and smart and intelligent young woman.

With Markle eight months into pregnancy as she expects her first child with Prince Harry, Georges wife Amal Clooney even helped throw the duchesss bridal shower last month in New York City.

NEW YORK, NY  FEBRUARY 20: Amal Clooney arrives to The Carlyle after attending Meghan, Duchess of Sussexs baby shower on February 20, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images)

As someone who spends quality time with the pair, George also noted the Sussexes as a really wonderful, loving couple. Against the level of scrutiny the pair constantly faces on a daily basis, George added: Most of it you can just shrug off and not pay attention to, but sometimes its unkind.

The Clooneys memorably attended the royal wedding last May, partying with the couple all the way through to the exclusive evening reception at Frogmore House. According to numerous reports, George personally bartended for guests at one point in the evening.

Secure your ideal wedding vision by starting with The Knots Style Quiz, here.

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Wellness Wins is an original Yahoo series that shares the inspiring stories of people who have shed pounds healthfully.

Johanna Halosz is 5 feet 6 inches tall and currently weighs 148 pounds. In 2014, after seeing her pictures from her dream vacation she was inspired to lose weight. This is the story of her weight-loss journey.

The turning point

I was always a chubby kid. I grew up in a large east coast Italian family with lots of cousins. My sister was a gymnast, and my earliest dancing school pictures show my thunder thighs! The first time I went to a Lean Line meeting with my aunts was in 1983. I was 9 years old. And my mom and aunts thought they would give us some tips on healthy eating, which at that point was rice cakes, skim milk and vegetables.

My turning point came when my husband and I saved for five years to go on an amazing 2-week Hawaiian adventure over the 2014 Christmas holiday. We took 1,200 photos and had the time of our lives. I had trouble making it through the 2-mile Waimea Canyon hike at sea level, and that was my first tip off. On the last day of the trip, 14 days in, we downloaded our pics into the iPad and started flipping through.

My husband, who loved me at any size, had taken an underwater wide-angle video of us snorkeling. And I was appalled. I remember crying when I saw the pictures. I couldnt find one that was truly ok for me. We upgraded our redeye flight home to have more legroom the next day. And that took us to the bulkhead seat. I remember wedging my hips in the seat and barely bucking the seatbelt, and sitting uncomfortable, overnight, crying because I couldnt budge the entire six-hour flight. The armrests and tray tables were fixed, and I could not even shift my weight to the side. It was my lowest point.

Johanna Halosz before and after losing 77 pounds. (Photo: Courtesy of Johanna Halosz)

The changes

I knew that day I had to do something so I defaulted to what I did at least six times before. I decided to head back to Weight Watchers, setting out to lose the same 25 pounds that I have lost all of those other times with them. I found my old WW leader, and registered online. I did not find a friend to go with, so I had to go in myself. My best friends from high school had recently lost a combined 140 pounds between the two of them on the plan, and they encouraged me to lean on them whenever I needed to. And so, I walked in alone. For the first time. For the last time. This was for me.

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Selfishly, I promised myself I would go back to Hawaii someday and retake all of those photos in a different body. Weight Watchers is about counting points, which is an algorithm that calculates different factors to encourage healthy food choices. I never miss a meeting. I was offered accountability partners, and as opposed to my last go rounds, a place to start to tackle the wellness side of weight loss. I started to have a healthy relationship with food. I did not reward myself with food. I held myself accountable to every single bite that I took and journaled it in the app.

As the weight fell off consistently at one to two pounds a week, and people started to notice, I started to stand a little taller. I made my journey public on my social media outlets. I posted pics of my progress, and soaked up the comments and compliments. I stuck to a reward system: Each five pound milestone, I gave myself a small gift  maybe it was a nail polish, or new workout shoes or clothes.

I started walking on week one. I made it about a mile, slowly. I was a size 20, XXL. It was winter so activities were limited. But I used the dogs as an excuse to get out each day. Two months later, a friend told me I was so lucky because a Club Pilates was moving in to my town. I had no clue what Club Pilates was, or what Pilates was for that matter, but she encouraged me to go take a class with her friend. And so I did.

Club Pilates changed my perspective on everything. I felt so good and so accomplished for doing something new, for me, alone. But Pilates was so great because there was no focus on anyone else. It was just about me. There was no judgement or comparison. I just wanted to get more of the magic in my life. Pilates was my morning touchstone. It became my daily routine, and set my tone for each day, five days a week.

Johanna Halosz went from a size 20 to a size 6 after going on Weight Watchers and starting Pilates. (Photo: Courtesy of Johanna Halosz)

The after

My lifestyle completely changed. I went from a size 20 to a 6, XXL to a small. I stood a 1/2 inch taller. I went from a 40DD to a 34C bra size. My blood pressure went from 130/110 to 118/78, consistently. My confidence soared because losing 77 pounds is not an easy feat, and it was relatively fast. It took 17 months to lose the entire amount. I noticed the world is not kind to fat people. But my husband pointed out that maybe I was not kind to the world before. Maybe I was the one who didnt look up, or invite them to hold a door for me, or accept that people noticed me because I just wanted to be invisible.

When I neared my goal weight and had been a poster child with Club Pilates during my weight loss journey, Allison, the founder and owner of Club Pilates, had encouraged me to take their teacher training program. I had a full-time job for 15 years in lending, but she encouraged me to share my love for Pilates with everyone. I took the program and was certified six months later and added teaching of the sunrise crew at 6 a.m. into my routine, so that I could still workout at 7 a.m. and not give up what was most important to my loss  my Pilates practice.

My confidence flourished as people loved my teaching and the feedback was positive. When Allison decided to sell her studios, she approached me, believing that I had the most amount of passion to take the torch. I used my business sense, along with my Pilates passion, to become a proud owner/operator of Club Pilates. I still teach each day, and workout each day, and run three businesses. The challenge of learning the art and the business keeps me on my toes each day.

Halosz, before and after, says that Pilates changed everything for her. (Photo: Courtesy of Johanna Halosz)

The maintenance

I do nothing different to maintain the loss that I didnt do to lose the weight. I eat a balanced diet of whole foods, lean protein, lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. I limit carbs, and watch the fat. I count points. I prepare food to bring to social functions. I fill up on healthy snacks. I keep my tools on hand. I stay away from fat-free and sugar-free foods. I stay away from boxed and prepared foods, too. I eat a ton of seafood and white meat. I enjoy food and have a healthy relationship with healthy food.

I shed all of my former wardrobes. My closet is filled with adorable size 6 clothes only. I am now employed in the fitness world, and wearing great clothes each day keeps me wanting to stay this size. Looking at my before and after photos definitely keeps me on track.

Halosz, pictured pre- and post-weight loss, says, Looking at my before and after photos definitely keeps me on track. (Photo: Courtesy of Johanna Halosz)

The struggles

Honestly, I enjoy adult beverages. Its hard for me to eliminate them completely, so I try to make a healthier choice of vodka and soda, and limit my intake. I know it would be so much better for me to eliminate this completely from my diet, but I do enjoy the social aspect of a cocktail!

Advice

There is no magic pill. Practice a balanced diet and exercise, remove excuses, find accountability partners, and work hard.

Need more inspiration? Read about our other wellness winners!

Wellness Wins is authored by Andie Mitchell, who underwent a transformative, 135-pound weight loss of her own.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.
This week in fashion: porcelain, Tom Ford, and red meat.

Is Supreme About to Create a Whole New Generation of Porcelain Freaks?

For its Spring/Summer 2019 collection, Supreme collaborated with prestigious porcelain manufacturers Meissen for a cupid figurine dressed in a Supreme T-shirt and piercing two hearts. The piece dropped this week, with a price tag of nearly $4,000. The figurine is based on another Meissen design, part of a pair that illustrate a story from a 17th century Belgian emblem book teaching the lessons of love. The Supreme cupid is uniting two hearts in love (aww). (You can see the original pair of cupids on 1dibs.com, which, though not wearing Supreme, are priced at a healthy $4,500.)

Supreme collabs have that mythical cocktail party plus-one effect: the collaborator gains some edgy credibility, and Supreme demonstrates how deep and refined its taste is. (Weve even got preferences in harmonicas and cough drops!) Often, the collaborators audience may not even be aware of Supreme. Now that the company is one of the most famous fashion brands in the world, that dynamic is getting harder and harder to create. But before Supreme dissolves into total information overload, the brand may have found the last remaining Supreme-free audience in the obscure and cosseted world of European porcelain.

I asked Christies Head of Ceramics Carleigh Queenth, who also runs @BreakingIsBad, Instagrams premiere porcelain influencer account,, whether this might be a grail, as it were, for Meissen collectors, not just Supreme stans. Its amusing how they put this traditional model into a new context, Queenth told me. I would think the figurine would appeal more to new audiences that love tongue-in-cheek contemporary art than to the traditional Meissen collectors who tend to focus on 18th- and 19th-century works.

In other words: ceramic fuckbois are simply too new to inspire lust on the Meissen scene. But porcelain offers the Supreme customer a whole new world of collectible items that combine bizarre humor with extreme craftsmanship. Dutch Delft cannabis jar, anyone? A Dresden Porcelain monkey from Scully & Scully, the legendary outfitter of imperious Upper East Side grandparent homes? Porcelain might be the most online ceramics of all!

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Could Tom Ford be the new king of New York fashion?

WWD is reporting that Diane Von Furstenberg may be stepping down from her post as the chairwoman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and hunk designer Tom Ford is being proposed as her replacement. The role involves serving as the public face of the CFDA, which promotes the interests of the American fashion industry and its designers, and inspiring intense sartorial patriotism, or at least school spirit, in the organizations members. WWD writes, Like von Furstenberg, he is one of fashions most glamorous personalities and a bona fide star. Its true: Ford is like Karl Lagerfeld merged with a cowboy, but with the skin and grooming regimen of an imperious Italian aristocrat. At the same time, the CFDA doesnt hold quite the same grip over the fashion industry Frances The Federation de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, which literally makes laws about what is and isnt Fashion. But France invented the idea of our earthly rags being extremely important tools of communication and power, and America is a place for outlaws. Like Tom Ford! Maybe Ford can help lasso us into something more meaningful. Yee haw!

A cosmetics company is making a greasy burger that you smear all over your face for beauty.

Or its a bunch of eyeshadows in ketchup and mustard colors? Idk, sounds horrible, but so does everything else.
In 2007, I celebrated my 14th birthday by going to the movies to see Emma Roberts in Nancy Drew. The movie was a weird favorite of mine at the time  I found myself captivated my Emma's Nancy, a meticulously neat, refined teenager whose love for mysteries was equaled by her love of precious little boxes for her spy tools and freshly-shined penny loafers. Now, twelve years later, there's a new Nancy Drew adaptation in town: Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase, starring IT and Sharp Objects actor Sophia Lillis as a totally fresh interpretation of the mystery-solving sleuth.

In the film, which hit theaters on Friday, March 15, Sophia plays a more timely version of Nancy. She speeds around town in ripped jeans on her longboard. She comments on YouTube and internet culture. She feels like a real 2019 teenager rather than a '40s or '50s teen planted in modern times. A large part of that vibe comes from Sophia herself, whose messy red hair and wild blue eyes make her seem bold, a little reckless, a little bit of a loose cannon.

"I put more of myself in the character. It's supposed to be for the audience to recognize themselves," Sophia tells Teen Vogue. "I act how I usually act when I talk to somebody. Some people [told me] it came off as kind of dorky. I was like, no that's just how I talk."

The movie's plot loosely pulls from the original book of the same name, by Carolyn Keene (it was also adapted into a movie in 1939.) In it, Nancy has recently moved back to the small town of River Heights from Chicago, following the death of her mother. Early on, Nancy comforts her best friend Bess Marvin (Mackenzie Graham), who has just become the victim of cyberbullying in the form of an embarrassing viral video. She, Bess, and their other BFF Georgia "George" Fayne (Zoe Renee) then exact revenge on the jock who filmed her. The stunt lands Nancy with community service trash pickup in front of the police precinct as punishment, which is where she stumbles upon the mystery of a haunted house filled with secrets. "She seems like kind of this real character," Sophia says. "Even though she's from a kid's book. She's genuinely going through a lot of things like her mother's death, but she's still doing what she loves doing. "

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Sophia says director Katt Shea gave her the freedom to improv and be herself. "Her main thing was kind of, 'Do your worst. Don't care if you're doing really good or not, just do whatever you think feels right,'" Sophia says. And she also got to do some of her own stunts, like a memorable scene that involves slamming into haunted kitchen drawers and cabinets and climbing them like stairs.

"That was my first time ever doing stunts like that," Sophia says. "We actually did a lot of takes on that, and [Katt] was like, just make it more emphasized [that you'e getting hurt.] Then the drawers hit you and you're like, 'oh that hurt.' And sometimes it does hurt, so you're not acting."

As part of Nancy's backstory, her dad is a pro bono legal aid lawyer, and her mom was a civil rights activist; Nancy herself is also concerned with equality and social issues, and stands up when her friends are bullied. Sophia found those parts of Nancy to be especially inspiring. "She inspired me, and I think she inspires the people watching it as well. She really just like taught me like, hey you gotta speak up."

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase is in theaters now. Check out an exclusive clip of the film below:

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Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: "It" Star Sophia Lillis on Cutting Her Hair and What Bill Skarsgard Was Really Like on Set
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP)  American Airlines is stopping flights to Venezuela because of safety concerns after the pilots' union told its members to refuse to work the flights.

American was the last major U.S. carrier to fly to the troubled country. It flew daily to Caracas and Maracaibo from Miami.

The airline said Friday that it temporarily stopped the flights as it evaluated conditions in Venezuela, where civil unrest has increased amid opposition to President Nicolas Maduro.

"American will not operate to countries we don't consider safe," said spokesman Ross Feinstein.

The airline's decision followed a union president's order Thursday night that American Airlines pilots refuse Venezuela assignments.

Daniel Carey of the Allied Pilots Association noted that the State Department issued a warning about crime and detention of American citizens in Venezuela. The U.S. pulled its last diplomats out of the country Thursday.

Carey closed his memo by writing, "To reiterate: Do not accept any trips to Venezuela."

United Airlines and Delta Air Lines stopped flying to Venezuela in 2017, and several foreign carriers have also pulled their flights in recent years.

Airlines started leaving because of disputes over billions the airlines said they were owed by Venezuela's government, and more recently they have responded to concern over the country's deteriorating economic and political situation.

The safety of employees became a greater concern after an Air Europa crew was attacked at gunpoint last weekend in Caracas.

Spanish pilots' union Sepla said two pilots and eight other crew members were going from the airport to their hotel when their van was surrounded by men on three motorbikes who fled after an exchange of gunfire with someone that the airline employees thought was a plainclothes police officer. None of the airline people were injured.

The union asked Air Europa to stop flying to Venezuela after the incident. It said Air Europa responded by telling crews not to stay in the country overnight.

American had for some time already arranged its schedule to avoid crews staying overnight in Venezuela, Feinstein said.
A rabidly anti-Muslim politician in Australia is facing widespread denunciation after immediately blaming a Friday mass shooting in New Zealand  which killed more than 40 people at two local mosques  on the Muslim faith and Muslim immigration.

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place, Senator Fraser Anning, who represents Australias Queensland, said in a statement to the media.

Australias prime minister, Scott Morrison, called Annings comments disgusting.

Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament, Morrison said.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was even more pointed, according to the Washington Post, calling Anning a disgrace to the Senate.

What is worse, by spreading hatred and turning Australians against each other, he is doing exactly what the terrorists want, Turnbull said.

RELATED: Survivor of New Zealand Mass Shooting Shares Horror of Escape  I Had to Run

Anning, who has a history of extremist Islamophobic politics, made sure to note in his initial statement that he is utterly opposed to any form of violence within our community, and I totally condemn the actions of the gunman.

But the remainder of his lengthy statement attacked Islam and Muslim immigrants in startling terms.

Let us be clear, while Muslims may have been the victims today, usually they are they are the perpetrators, he said, describing Islam as the religious equivalent of fascism.

Just because the followers of this savage belief were not the killers in this instance, does not make them blameless, he concluded.

He has been stridently unrepentant since those initial comments and the ensuing blow-back.

Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence? he tweeted later Friday. In another message, he wrote, Islam is NOT compatible with Australia and our politics.

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This is not the first time Anning  who took office in 2017 after the previous senator was removed over a technicality with his citizenship  has opposed Muslims.

Last year, in a Parliament speech, he reportedly called for a final solution to Muslim immigrants, recalling the term used by Holocaust-era Nazis to describe the extermination of Jews in Europe.

The final solution to the immigration problem, of course, is a popular vote, Anning said, according to the New York Times.

For somebody to use the privilege of Parliament, the privilege of this platform, to spew such hate is beyond comprehension, Anne Aly, the bodys first female Muslim member, told the Times then.

Its sad that things have got to get to a point where this white supremacists hate speech is said in our own Parliament, Aly said.

New Zealand authorities say some 49 people were killed and dozens more were injured in two shootings at mosques in Christchurch on Friday afternoon.

Several people have reportedly been taken into custody, including a man who has been charged with murder.

At least part of the shooting was live-streamed on social media.

An email sent to Sen. Annings office on Friday seeking further comment was not immediately returned.




Transportation Minister Marc Garneau announced on Wednesday that Canada will ground all of its Boeing 737 Max 8 jets days after other countries took the same measure in response to last Sundays deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash.

As a result of new data that we received this morning and had the chance to analyze, and on the advice of my experts and as a precautionary measure, I am issuing a safety notice that restricts commercial passenger flights of the Boeing 737 Max 8 or Max 9 variant aircraft, whether domestic or foreign, from arriving, departing or overflying Canadian airspace, said Garneau.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed all 157 people onboard  including 18 Canadians  has raised concerns in countries around the world over its similarity to a Lion Air crash involving the same Boeing 737 Max 8 jet in Indonesia less than five months before.

As fear spread among Canadians this week, Garneau faced mounting pressure to follow the example of other countries, like Ethiopia, China, Indonesia and many in Europe, and ground the jets.

And with the gap between those countries and Canada growing wider by the day, the Air Canada Pilots Association urged Transport Canada on Wednesday to to take proactive action to ensure the safety of the Canadian travelling public.

Air Canada Boeing 737 MAX 8 landing at London Heathrow International Airport LHR EGLL with nice blue sky weather. The Boeing 737 MAX8 aircraft has 2X LEAP engines and is the newest variant of the Boeing 737 series, Boeing 737-800. Air Canada AC is a Star Alliance member and connects London, England UK to the Canadian cities Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal Trudeau, Ottawa, St. Johns, Toronto Pearson, Vancouver. (Photo by Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Despite pressure on the ministry to ground the planes earlier, aviation expert Joseph Yeremian says he doesnt believe Transport Canadas reaction time was inappropriate.

Yeremian is CEO of Thermodyne Engineering Limited, a consulting company that serves the aerospace, military and nuclear industries. He is also a board member of the Ontario Aerospace Council.

Yeremian said that if Canada had grounded the aircraft earlier in the week without sufficient hard data to support the decision, it would likely have been an arbitrary choice at the time, made to soothe a worried public.

That, he believes, was the case in countries that grounded the planes as early as Monday.

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Some countries its their choice, but theyve just grounded without giving an actual reason at this stage, he said. Those countries information was based on the fear of the public.





During the announcement on Wednesday, Garneau explained how days of studying the crash with a panel of experts culminated in new information coming to light on Wednesday morning.

The panel has been reviewing the latest data in real time, he said, and I can assure you its been occupying our time 100 per cent for the past few days.

Garneau said the new information his department received gave non-conclusive evidence that an error involving the planes autopilot program and one of its sensors might link the two crashes. Data from the Lion Air crash in Indonesia suggest that the planes angle of attack sensor incorrectly measured the planes angle as it ascended following take-off, he said, which resulted in the planes autopilot system adjusting the angle of the planes nose based on false information.

What happened in the case of the Lion Air flight in Indonesia is that the pilot was fighting against the computer software which wanted to drop the nose of the aircraft, Garneau said. And eventually there was a loss of control of the aircraft.

Garneau explained that new satellite data his team received Wednesday morning suggested the doomed Ethiopian Airlines jet displayed the same flight profile after take-off that the Lion Air flight displayed moments before it crashed, offering new evidence that the plane might have suffered from the same malfunction.

He reiterated, though, that while the data was compelling enough to merit temporarily grounding the planes in Canada, it is not meant to be taken as conclusive evidence that both crashes had the same cause.

I would repeat once again this is not the proof that it is the same root problem, he said. It could be something else and we need to wait to see the data and hear the voices on the recorders in the black boxes.

A known issue

Garneau said that following the Lion Air crash, Canada became aware of the communication issue between the angle of attack sensor and the autopilot program, at which point Canadian pilots underwent additional training to learn how to work around the problem.

Following the Lion Air crashCanadian air operators were forced to establish new procedures and add mandatory training for our flight crews, he said.

Yeremian said he understands Transport Canadas hesitation to ground the planes over a known issue that Canadian pilots have been trained on.

I think that is one of the major things that prevented Canada and the United States from grounding the airplanes, he said. Because there is a procedure that was already in place.

FILE PHOTO: An Air Canada Boeing 737 MAX 8 from San Francisco approaches for landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport over a parked Air Canada Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Chris Helgren/File Photo

Although, ultimately, he said he felt the Transport Ministry had made the right decision by grounding the planes in light of the new data.

Shortly after Garneau announced the grounding of Canadas Max 8s and the closure of its airspace to all other Max 8s, U.S. officials announced they would take the same precautions.

As of March 13, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a special agency of the United Nations, had not made a recommendation one way or another.

Once the Final Report into this accident is available we will have verified and official causes and recommendations to consider, ICAO spokesperson Anthony Philbin said in an email to Yahoo Canada.

In the meantime ICAO recognizes the right of those national governments who may choose to act on the limited information currently available by taking immediate flight safety precautions regarding 737 Max 8 operations.

Three airlines in Canada use the jets.

Air Canada has 24 Max 8 aircraft on routes that include Calgary to Vancouver and Montreal to Los Angeles. WestJet Airlines Ltd. has 13, and Sunwing Airlines has four.

With files from The Canadian Press




Canadians scheduled to fly on Boeing 737 Max planes this week learned there was little they could do if they felt unsafe flying on an aircraft model that had two crashes in less than six months, including Sundays deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash that left no survivors.

While many countries grounded their fleet of Boeing 737 Max aircrafts, Canada and the U.S. were among the last nations to do so. In the stretch of days in which the planes were still in operation, many Canadians discovered that if they wanted to fly on a different aircraft, they had to pay for the changes themselves.

Gabor Lukacs is the founder and co-ordinator of Air Passenger Rights, an independent non-profit group of volunteers that advocates for air travel consumers. He told Yahoo Canada theres little Canadian travellers can do if they dont feel comfortable boarding a specific plane.

There is no legal right to cancel a flight based on subjective concerns, Lukacs said. If a passenger feels genuinely unsafe  I would suggest documenting the issue, and just not boarding. But it may be a tough battle to get a refund from the airline.

Air Canada has 24 Boeing 737 Max aircraft in its fleet, which means some routes are being affected by the federal governments decision to ground this plane model, such as the one seen here in Toronto. Photo from Getty Images.

Lukacs added that air travellers should be given the courtesy to choose flying with another route, especially when it comes to future incidents involving specific aircraft models.

Passengers should be allowed to cancel and rebook with other flights that dont operate such aircrafts, he said.

What concerned Lukacs about the initial response from Canadian airlines to concerns around the Boeing aircraft is that they didnt give concerned passengers any other options besides paying the cancellation fee. If someone wants to take a risk and fly on the aircraft, thats one thing but if theyre forced to take the risk, thats not acceptable, he said.

Whats most troubling is that airlines are robbing passengers of their choice, of that decisions they make, by refusing to refund their tickets, rebook them or charge them a fee if they want to rebook, he explained.

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Airlines left scrambling

Now that Sunwing, Westjet and Air Canada have been forced to ground their Boeing 737 Max planes, some passengers are being left in limbo. For example, WestJet operates approximately 35 flights daily on its Boeing 737 Max aircraft, and they have 13 of these jets in their fleet.

On Thursday, 11 Westjet flights between Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg and Toronto were cancelled, affecting 1,200 customers. The airline said more than three-quarter of those guests would be rebooked that day. The rest will be rebooked on Friday and Saturday.

In a Thursday statement, the airline said that its working through the resulting cancellations, which will continue to affect travellers. Passengers will be rescheduled onto other aircrafts in the airlines fleet. An updated schedule is expected to be made available on Monday, but until then, rebookings will take place on a day-to-day basis.





Air Canada has 24 of these now-grounded planes in their fleet, operating approximately 75 flights a day. The airline said adjustments are being made to flight schedules to minimize disruption by optimizing the deployment of the rest of our fleet and looking at alternative options, including accommodating customers on other airlines.

Air Canada said that while some routes will continue to operation with different aircraft, others are cancelled in the short term, including Halifax-London and St. Johns-London routes. are cancelled in the short term, with passengers re-routed through our Montreal and Toronto hubs.

Air Canada customers travelling soon are advised to contact the companys call centres or travel agents. Travellers will be given priority if they are travelling in the next 48 hours.

Sunwing, which has four 737 Max aircraft in its fleet, said aircraft assignments are finalized very close to departure, which makes it hard to give an exact number of times the aircraft is used from each airport. The airline said it is revising its schedule and will not be cancelling any flights as a result of the ban.
The official operation of Chinas 55km-long Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge (HZMB) in 2018 attracted worldwide attention, marking a major success of Chinas infrastructure construction, and introducing Chinese standards to the world.

The aeriel photo taken on July 11, 2018 shows a bird view of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge. (Photo by Liang Xu from Xinhua News Agency)

The HZMB, adopting Chinese standards in multiple fields, has set an example for high-quality infrastructure construction, said Su Quanke, a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) on the sidelines of the two sessions, Chinas top legislative and political advisory bodies.

Su, also the chief engineer of the HZMB Authority, introduced that 61 volumes of technical standards have been established during the construction of the mega-bridge to ensure world-class quality. These standard volumes, if piled up, are as high as over one meter, the chief engineer said.

A major achievement in the construction of the bridge is that China has exported many of its technologies and standards, Su said.For example, the constructor of an 18-km immersed tunnel connecting Denmark with Germany under the Fehmarn Belt has visited China four or five times for technical exchanges.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Authority of the US that built the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in the 1970s also expressed their intention to visit China as it is planning to build a new bridge beside the existing one, saying that their construction technologies are outdated in todays world.

Constructors of cross-sea steel bridges from Germany, Serbia and Norway have signed contracts with Chinese enterprises, hoping the latter to offer Chinese technologies and materials produced on the same production line of the HZMB, Su said. The production line has already started manufacturing for foreign constructors a couple of years ago, and the orders are still coming in till today.

What made Su proud is that he was contacted by the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association, and the latter expressed its hope to promote Chinese standards internationally.

Su said that more bridges would be built in accordance with Chinese standards around the world in the future.
Rio de Janeiro (AFP) - Spain's Aena snapped up six airports in Brazil on Friday, in an auction seen as the first major test of foreign investor confidence in President Jair Bolsonaro's market-friendly agenda.

The initial sale of concessions to 12 airports generated 2.3 billion reais ($620 million) -- more than 10 times the minimum fee required -- which Bolsonaro said signaled "confidence" in Latin America's biggest economy was returning.

"It's Brazil growing again!" the far-right leader tweeted, hailing a "great victory."

Rights to operate the airports for 30 years -- sold in three separate lots -- were also won by Flughafen Zurich of Switzerland and a Brazilian consortium, Aeroeste. Nine groups competed.

The administrators must invest 3.5 billion reais during the term of the concession.

Brazil is to complete the sale of concessions to 42 airports between 2020 and 2022, including Santos Dumont in Rio de Janeiro and Congonhas in Sao Paulo. The airports auctioned Friday represent 9.5 percent of the domestic market.

Six airports in northeastern Brazil were bought by Aena, two in the center-west went to Zurich, and four in the southeast to Aeroeste.

Aena's successful tender included the auction's most lucrative prize, tourist-magnet Recife airport, a destination seen as having the biggest potential because of its relative proximity to Europe.

Infrastructure minister Tarcisio Freitas said the auction was "a great demonstration of confidence in the country."

Bolsonaro's conservative predecessor Michel Temer initiated a program of privatizations and concessions.

But Bolsonaro, who came to power in January, has made privatizing state-owned companies and overhauling the costly pension system key planks of his policy to reduce soaring public debt and regain investor confidence.

The auction, organized by the National Agency for Civil Aviation and the Sao Paulo stock exchange, was also seen as a test of the market's support for Bolsonaro's economy minister Paulo Guedes, a US-trained free-marketeer.

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Guedes is spearheading the government's policy to inject pro-business vigor into an economy still bearing the scars of a record-breaking 2015-2016 recession.

Bolsonaro said previously that of the 138 companies run by the federal government, "100 could be privatized."

Brazil ranks among the countries with the highest number of public companies. But the lack of any detail or progress has disappointed investors.
Canada grounded the world's third largest fleet of Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliners, or 41 planes operated by three Canadian carriers, and banned the aircraft from its airspace Wednesday.

"As a result of new data that we received this morning, and had the chance to analyze, and on the advice of my experts and as a precautionary measure, I issued a safety notice," Transport Minister Marc Garneau told reporters.

"This safety notice restricts commercial passenger flights from any operator of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 or MAX 9 variant aircraft, whether domestic or foreign, from arriving, departing or overflying Canadian air space.

"This safety notice is effective immediately and will remain in place until further notice."

More than 370 of the 737 MAX 8s are in service around the world, including 41 in Canada operated by Air Canada, Westjet and charter tours firm Sunwing.

"There will be some disruptions," Garneau said. "For the moment, caution has to dominate."

His announcement comes after Australia, China, India, all European countries and others banned the medium-haul workhorse jet from their airspace in response to the Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday that killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians.

The Nairobi-bound plane was the same type as a Lion Air jet that crashed in October in Indonesia, killing 189 passengers and crew -- and some officials have detected similarities between the two accidents.

Garneau said he made his decision after reviewing "validated satellite tracking data suggesting a possible, although unproven, similarity in the flight profile of the Lion Air aircraft."

The minister explained how software intended to correct the aircraft's pitch during takeoff, forcing its nose up or down to avoid stalling, had overridden the Lion Air pilot's maneuvers.

"The software kicked in and tried to force (the nose) down and (the pilot) said no, no, I have to climb," he said, noting the scenario was similar to that experienced on the Ethiopian flight. "Unfortunately, the pilot lost that fight with this software."

"I caution that it is new information that is not conclusive and we must await further evidence, hopefully from the voice and data recorders," Garneau added.
Caracas (AFP) - Plastic bottles and containers at the ready, Keisy Perez ignores the stench from the brown river as it slips slowly through the grimy San Agustin district of Venezuela's capital.

The quest for drinkable water has rapidly become an obsession for millions like her in Caracas days after a crippling power blackout stalled the city's pumps.

In this part of Caracas, the Guaire river is effectively an open sewer.

The crisis has led many to seek water in places they would previously not dream of going. People here are undeterred.

A burst water main has brought a feverish crowd, equipped with every kind of plastic container they can find.

The water courses through an underground culvert to emerge as a stream. In their desperation, they are content to ignore its proximity to the murky river.

In their rush, some slipped down the bank and into the river.

For Perez, it's just another indignity of Venezuela's crisis.

"We came to get water and I fell in. And look, it didn't kill me," she said cheerily. But she can't hide her exasperation after days without electricity or running water following years of food and medicine shortages.

"Are they waiting for us to die?" she asks.

- 'Nothing to drink' -

"We have no water and nothing to drink," Marcel Galindez told AFP as he filled a 4.5-gallon (20-liter) container.

"We'll have to boil it," he said, looking doubtfully at the contents. Alongside him, a girl washed her hair.

"This has been going on for a long time," said Omar Feralines, a local resident. "But they discovered this, and we've come to get some for the bathroom, for the children.

"We can boil it, we can even drink it. What else are we going to do?"

To get at the stream means getting close to the fetid river. "But just thinking about getting into that river, you have to think about it like three times," said Eduardo Escalona.

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"It's crazy. People are desperate," sighed the 43-year-old, looking at the crowd around the canal.

Every day of the blackout has brought more people to take a chance on the water from the burst pipeline. But then soldiers deployed and ordered them to move on so workmen could fix the pipe.

An angry crowd of around 300 people blocked the road on Monday. "They're not letting us get water," said Carlos, a local resident.

"We are thirsty," the crowd yelled at security forces. "We need water for our kids."

- 'We're hungry here' -

At Los Caobos park in the center of Caracas, a woman arrived with a bag of laundry at one of the ornamental fountains, where hundreds of people had come to fill their containers and bottles.

"We're managing... tomorrow I'll come back to wash the sheets and towels in the fountain," said the woman, who declined to be identified.

Hundreds of people were trying their luck on the northern outskirts, at the foot of Mount Avila, which separates Caracas from the Caribbean.

There they wait every day in long lines to take turns to fill their containers from the trickles emerging from the wooded slopes.

All the scampering around for water is too much for Yulimar, who sinks down in despair. "I have nothing to feed my children," she says.

On Saturday, the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro announced an emergency plan to distribute food and water to the poorest neighborhoods and the distribution began on Monday.

Riot police uses shields to corral lines of people as they waited to fill up from tankers in several neighborhoods.

But Keisy, still waiting for a water delivery, said she had received nothing from the social government's subsidized food progamme for weeks.

"Maduro talks, but we don't see anything. We're hungry here, nobody gets anything, whether they are Chavists or opposition."
Washington (AFP) - Beto O'Rourke, the affable former congressman who rose to political stardom last year when he nearly ousted a Republican senator in traditionally conservative Texas, reportedly said Wednesday he is running for president.

The 46-year-old Democrat confirmed to local station KTSM that he is seeking his party's nomination for the 2020 presidential race, and will make the announcement Thursday morning, the television broadcaster in O'Rourke's home town of El Paso reported.

"I'm really proud of what El Paso did and what El Paso represents," O'Rourke said according to the station.

"It's a big part of why I'm running. This city is the best example of this country at its best."

O'Rourke has been discussed as a potential candidate ever since his unexpectedly tight race against Senator Ted Cruz, when his grassroots campaign of inclusion and getting people politically involved gained national attention.

Should he dive in on Thursday, he will be entering a crowded pool of Democrats seeking to oust Republican President Donald Trump.

They include several US senators: Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and the leader among the current candidates, liberal powerhouse Bernie Sanders.

And if O'Rourke declares his candidacy, the last main piece of the 2020 election puzzle will be former vice president Joe Biden, who has said he will reveal his political plans soon.

O'Rourke, a former punk musician who sometimes went skateboarding to blow off steam on the Texas campaign trail, may quickly achieve rockstar status if he runs.

But that will come with intensifying scrutiny from the media, Democratic power brokers and donors, as well as voters.
Baghouz (Syria) (AFP) - Their last Syrian bastion is levelled and burned, they are using rifles to battle warplanes and tanks, but the hardline jihadists holding out in Baghouz are still putting up a fight.

Defeat is guaranteed, but a few diehard Islamic State fighters defending the last tiny, smouldering vestige of their once-sprawling "caliphate" are refusing to surrender.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led outfit which has spearheaded the fight with backing from the US-led coalition against IS, say their assault is in its final hours.

IS fighters are now cornered on a palm-lined bend of the Euphrates near Syria's border with Iraq, but they are still on the offensive.

"They attacked on two axes, from the Euphrates river, and from the hill," an SDF commander who gave his name as Sheikh Al-Jabal says from the roof of a nearby villa used as a military position.

He points to the banks of the river behind the IS encampment, about a kilometre (half a mile) away, but the view is obscured by the thick black smoke billowing out of the ruins of Baghouz.

A wasteland strewn with the charred carcasses of vans, cars and water tankers lies beyond the SDF's positions, marking the edge of the handful of acres ruled by IS.

Nobody seems to know how many fighters are left inside the shrinking pocket.

Despite thousands of people surrendering in recent weeks, the tiny hamlet of Baghouz has released a seemingly never-ending flow of civilians and fighters.

On Wednesday, after the SDF announced that another 3,000 IS members had surrendered, another contingent launched at least two counter-attacks.

"They are using tunnels, they have experienced snipers," Sheikh Al-Jabal says, a walkie-talkie in one hand and another clipped to his belt.

Behind him, a huge black cloud caused by air strikes on IS ammunition depots darkens the sky and engulfs the little riverside village.

The fires still rage hours after the strikes, fanned by the dusty desert wind.

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- 'They just keep coming' -

"IS had conquered vast territories in Syria and Iraq," the commander explains, referring to the jihadist's lightning cross-border assault in the summer of 2014.

"They seized ammunition and weapons from the army and all of this ended up being transferred to their last bastion," he adds. "To this moment, they are refusing to let go of their dream of a state."

Baghouz is the last of a string of farming villages dotting the banks of the river. All lie in ruins, their streets made unusable by huge craters and unexploded ordnance.

"Chickens for sale", "Ice factory": a few wall inscriptions bear witness to daily life in what was once the very heart of the jihadists' proto-state.

The past few days have followed a set pattern: the SDF on the ground and its coalition allies in the sky unleash their superior firepower on the jihadist stronghold.

At dawn, guns go silent to allow for the exit of the latest batch of jihadist families, pummelled into submission by the night's deluge of fire.

"We're surprised every time. We say there aren't many jihadists left... and they just keep coming out of their holes," says an SDF fighter returning from the front.

At another SDF position, fighter Massino Kobane's eyes are red with exhaustion after a night of fighting.

"I'm determined not go home before IS has been eradicated," says the 21-year-old, who hasn't seen his family in three years.

The young Kurd took part in some of the largest battles against the jihadists, helping seize cities such as Kobane, Manbij and their main Syrian stronghold Raqa when IS was still a major force.

The battle to crush the last remnant of the caliphate in the Euphrates Valley was launched six months ago. But while the outcome was never in doubt, the fighting has dragged on.

Kobane hopes he will soon be able to return to his loved ones and find a job in his native city of Kobane.

"Our comrades are a bit tired after all these battles," he says.
ANKARA, Turkey (AP)  The latest quarrel between the leaders of Turkey and Israel continued for a second day Wednesday as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan labeled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "thief" and a "tyrant."

Speaking at an election campaign rally, Erdogan called Netanyahu "the thief who heads Israel" in a reference to corruption allegations against the long-seated Israeli prime minister.

Netanyahu fired back on Twitter, describing the Turkish president as a "dictator who sends tens of thousands of political opponents to prison, commits genocide against the Kurds, and occupies Northern Cyprus."

Israel and Turkey were once close allies, but diplomatic relations between the two countries have chilled in the past decade. Under Erdogan, Turkey has become a vocal critic of Israeli policies dealing with Palestinians, sparking frequent verbal feuds with Netanyahu.

At Wednesday's campaign rally, Erdogan criticized Israel's closure of a Jerusalem holy site Tuesday after Palestinian suspects hurled a firebomb at a police station.

There were no injuries in the incident, but police shuttered the site, which Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims the Noble Sanctuary. The site reopened Wednesday without incident.

"You are a tyrant," Erdogan said, addressing Netanyahu at the rally. "You are a tyrant who slaughters 7-year-old Palestinian kids."

The Israeli prime minister responded in his tweet.

"It's best that he doesn't get involved with Jerusalem, our capital for 3,000 years," Netanyahu quipped. "Erdogan can only learn from us how to respect every religion and protect human rights."

The last war of words started Tuesday when Erdogan's spokesman called Netanyahu a racist for saying Israel was the nation-state only of the Jewish people.

Netanyahu struck back, calling Erdogan a dictator and criticizing the Turkey for imprisoning journalists.
STRASBOURG (Reuters) - European Union lawmakers failed to offer a view on Thursday on whether to start negotiations with the United States on removing tariffs for industrial goods, a move designed to ease trade tensions between them.

In a confusing vote, the European Parliament passed by a narrow majority a series of amendments against beginning talks, but then voted down its own resolution on the topic, meaning in effect it took no view.

The resolution would not have been binding, but parliament will have to approve any deal agreed and EU governments said they wanted to hear the view of lawmakers before deciding.

The original text, broadly supported by centre-right parties but opposed by the left of centre, had set out conditions for negotiations: to include cars, exclude agriculture and be suspended if Washington imposes new punitive tariffs.

EU steel and aluminium are already subject to protective U.S. import duties.

The two sides ended a stand-off last July, when U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to hold off imposing tariffs on EU car imports while the two sides looked to improve trade ties.

Since then, U.S. soybean exports to the EU have more than doubled and the two sides have discussed how they might agree on product standards and boost U.S. energy exports to Europe.

The trickiest part, though, is the wish expressed in July to remove tariffs on "non-auto industrial goods". The EU has said cars should be discussed; the United States has set out a long wish list, including agricultural products -- a no-go area for Europe.

Critics say the EU should not be negotiating while it still faces metal tariffs and the threat of car import duties. They also complain that the EU's latest trade deals include provisions on climate change, which this would not.

In fact, there are two proposed negotiating mandates - one on tariffs, the other on making it easier for companies to have products tested and cleared for sale across the Atlantic.

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EU governments failed to agree at a meeting last month, with Germany keen to push ahead, but France reluctant.

The EU is aware that Trump's patience is not infinite and that he could impose steep tariffs on imported EU cars and auto parts in the coming months.

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop)
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Rahimi Ahmad was performing his Friday prayers at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch when deafening gunfire shattered the silence. As he tried to escape the 40-year-old Malaysian was shot, and fell to the floor, bleeding from his wounds. His 11-year-old son was playing outside. The boy took cover immediately, as a gunman fired many more rounds in the prayer hall. Rahimi was among dozens of Muslims targeted by the gunman who firing indiscriminately at worshippers performing their Friday prayers. Forty-nine people were killed and dozens more were wounded in New Zealand's worst ever mass shooting. Most of them were either migrants, like Rahimi, who came to New Zealand for work or studies, or they were refugees who wanted to get as far away as possible from violence and danger. As the world's media reported the slaughter in Christchurch, Rahimi's mother back home in Malaysia made frantic calls to check whether her son and his family were safe. "I saw it on TV...and I had a feeling that he could be there, the TV announcer said Christchurch, so I knew," Rokiah Mohammad, 65, told Reuters from her home in Penang. A Malaysian official in New Zealand told the family that Rahimi was among the wounded taken to hospital. They were first told that he had been hit in the hip, but his wife later telephoned to say Rahimi was in a critical condition, and doctors were trying to remove several bullets from his body. Police eventually tracked down and arrested the gunman. Footage posted online, apparently taken by a gunman and posted online live as the attack unfolded, showed a man driving a vehicle, while listening to what sounded like European folk music. After parking, he took two guns out of the trunk and walked a short distance to the mosque where he opened fire. The footage of the killing spree lasted around five minutes. During that time the gunman shot worshippers repeatedly, leaving more than a dozen bodies in one room alone. A member of large Malaysian community living in the area, Rahimi was a regular at the mosque. He worked as a technician at a milk factory while his wife Norazila Wahid, 39, studied medicine specializing in neurology. Aside from his son, he also has a daughter aged 9. The family have been living in New Zealand for four years. They were planning to return to Malaysia next year, once his wife finished her studies, Rokiah said. "Last I heard from Rahimi was the day before yesterday," Rokiah said. "He called often to check on us." (Writing by Praveen Menon; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
Berlin (AFP) - Lawmakers in Germany moved Friday to make bans on older diesel vehicles in city centres less likely, angering environmentalists by backing off strict EU-wide pollution thresholds.

The upper house confirmed a Bundestag (lower house) vote to henceforth deem "disproportionate" driving bans in cities that only slightly exceed air pollution limits.

In practice it will give cities above the European Union's upper limit of an annual average of 40 microgrammes of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) per cubic metre, but less than 50 microgrammes, flexibility to take other measures to reduce air pollution.

"Driving bans are a harsh medicine, and they are only proportionate if it is unlikely other measures will quickly mean the limits are respected," junior environment minister Florian Pronold said Thursday.

Local authorities in Hamburg and Stuttgart have in recent months bowed to court orders for exclusion zones on older cars using the fuel in a bid to reduce pollution, with other cities including capital Berlin set to follow suit.

Those rulings were based on the EU upper limit of 40 microgrammes of NO2.

Numerous German cities have NO2 levels above 50 microgrammes per cubic metre.

An environmentalist group that successfully sued for many of the diesel bans in heavily-polluted cities criticised the move.

"The EU... makes unmistakeably clear that the Europe-wide threshold is set at 40 microgrammes and must be met, with no ifs or buts," Juergen Resch, director of the Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH), said in a Thursday statement.

"Diesel bans are the last measure that is both possible and proportional to achieve clean air... however much the federal government may bristle at them," he added.

On top of the looser threshold, lawmakers also exempted the newest diesels conforming to the "Euro 6" standard, as well as refitted older vehicles and municipal services like rubbish collection and buses from possible bans.

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And they ordered that any exclusion zone should be enforced only with mobile spot checks, rather than dragnet-style data collection.

Nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants emitted by diesel vehicles have become a new headache for Germany's powerful car industry, which turned to the fuel to reduce output of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

Especially since car giant Volkswagen's 2015 admission to manipulating 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide to appear less polluting, the manufacturers have been scrambling to catch up to foreign competitors in the race to build emissions-free electric vehicles.

But Berlin has faced accusations it is going too easy on the firms, fearing voter backlash if car industry jobs vanish or drivers' access to cities is restricted.
Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) reversed himself Thursday after vowing, in a Washington Post op-ed and a speech on the Senate floor, to support a resolution condemning President Trumps national-emergency declaration.

Citing a vague promise from Vice President Mike Pence to work toward reforming the national-emergency statute, passed in 1976, to prevent future abuses, Tillis announced his reversal on the Senate floor just moments before voting against the resolution.

I come to the floor to say I do not intend to vote for the resolution of disapproval. And heres why: A lot has changed over the last three weeks, Tillis said. A discussion with the vice president, a number of senior administration officials, a lot of collaboration with my colleague from Utah [Senator Mike Lee] thats a serious discussion about changing the National Emergencies Act in a way that will have Congress speak on emergency actions in the future.

As late as today the president makes a statement that hes willing to work with us, Tillis added.

Tillis, in a February 25 op-ed, lamented Trumps decision to unilaterally appropriate funding for the construction of a border wall via a national-emergency declaration. After acknowledging that he shares Trumps concerns about illegal immigration, Tillis argued the declaration would harm the constitutional order and invite executive overreach by future Democratic administrations.

It is my responsibility to be a steward of the Article I branch, to preserve the separation of powers and to curb the kind of executive overreach that Congress has allowed to fester for the better part of the past century. I stood by that principle during the Obama administration, and I stand by it now, Tillis wrote.

The North Carolina lawmaker and former IBM executive went on to cast Republicans who immediately embraced the emergency declaration as hypocrites for abandoning the constitutional principles they trumpeted during President Obamas tenure.

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Some prominent Republicans went so far as to proclaim that Obama was acting more like an emperor or king than a president, he wrote. There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that theres an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach  that its acceptable for my party but not thy party.

These are the reasons I would vote in favor of the resolution disapproving of the presidents national-emergency declaration, if and when it comes before the Senate, he later concluded.

Tillis  who previously bucked the president by supporting legislation that constrained his ability to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller  split with twelve Senate Republicans, who followed the advice outlined in his op-ed and supported the resolution.

Trump has said repeatedly that he would veto the resolution if and when it passed Congress, though either way his emergency declaration still faces numerous legal challenges.

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By David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution on Thursday calling for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's upcoming report on his probe into Russia's role in the 2016 election to be released to Congress and the public. The 420-0 House vote, with four conservative Republican lawmakers voting "present," gave Democrats who control the chamber a political victory and put pressure on Attorney General William Barr to make the report public after Mueller submits it to him. But the resolution does not force Barr to do so. The measure faces an uncertain future in the Republican-led Senate. A bid by the Senate's top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, to have the resolution approved by voice vote after the House's action was thwarted by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Mueller has been investigating since May 2017 whether Trump's campaign conspired with Moscow and whether the president has unlawfully tried to obstruct the probe. Trump has denied collusion and obstruction. Russia has denied election interference. Mueller has not indicated when he will complete the report, though an announcement on Thursday about the coming departure of a senior prosecutor on his team stoked speculation that it could be soon. Justice Department regulations governing special counsels give Barr latitude in deciding how much of the report to make public. The rules require him to notify the top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate judiciary committees after Mueller completes his probe. They do not require release of the report but also do not prevent Barr from giving the entire document to Congress. The resolution, introduced last week by the heads of six House oversight committees that are investigating Trump, calls on Barr to make public everything in the Mueller report that is not expressly prohibited by law and to provide the entire document to Congress. The vote put the vast majority of House Republicans on record as supporting broad disclosure of the report on an investigation that Trump has called a "witch hunt" led by "thugs." Four members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, a group strongly allied with Trump, voted "present." The four were Representatives Justin Amash, Matt Gaetz, Thomas Massie and Paul Gosar. Seven lawmakers - four Democrats and three Republicans - did not vote. 'FULL TRANSPARENCY' Representative Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the resolution, said on the House floor: "It is important that Congress stand up for the principle of full transparency at a time when the president has publicly attacked the Russia investigation more than 1,100 times and counting." The House panel's top Republican, Representative Doug Collins, backed the resolution but described it as a restatement of the regulations that give Barr the option of releasing the full report. "During his confirmation, Attorney General Barr said he wants to be transparent with Congress and the public, consistent with the rules and the law. We have no reason to think Attorney General Barr would back away from those statements," Collins said. Barr, a Trump nominee who took over the Justice Department last month, replaced Jeff Sessions, who the president ousted in November after long complaining that the former senator had recused himself in 2017 from overseeing the Russia probe. As Schumer tried to get the Mueller resolution approved by voice vote, the senator said on the Senate floor: "The American people have an undeniable right to see the results of that investigation." Graham, a Trump ally, blocked the action unless Democrats backed a move they oppose: the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Democratic former President Barack Obama's administration's handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state and FBI surveillance of a Trump campaign official. Some Democrats have voiced concern that Barr could withhold evidence of possible misconduct by Trump, under Justice Department policies that oppose bringing criminal charges against a sitting president and discourage releasing explanations when a person has not been charged with a crime. House Democrats already have vowed to subpoena the report and go to court if necessary to win its full release. The Mueller investigation so far has resulted in criminal charges against 34 individuals and three companies, seven guilty pleas and one conviction following a jury trial. (Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Will Dunham)
MEXICO CITY (AP)  Nineteen corpses have been found in plastic bags in a western Mexico sewage canal, authorities said Friday.

Prosecutors in the state of Jalisco said the bags were found in a township just east of the city of Guadalajara on Thursday night.

The victims were killed by blows, strangulation or bullet wounds, and some bodies were more decomposed than others, suggesting they had been tossed into the canal at different times.

State prosecutor Gerardo Solis said one woman was among the dead. The total number of victims could also rise because divers were searching the canal to see if more corpses had sunk to the bottom.

Solis said nine of the bodies were too badly composed to yield fingerprints, but one identified man appeared to have a criminal record. Almost all seemed to have had their hands bound, he added.

Firefighters joined in the effort to retrieve the bags, which were tied shut with wire.

Mexican drug cartels frequently use such body dumping areas to get rid of the corpses of rivals.

Jalisco is home to the drug cartel of the same name.
A Japanese court on Friday sentenced the former high-flying boss of the MtGox bitcoin exchange to a suspended jail sentence of two and a half years after finding him guilty of data manipulation.

The Tokyo District Court convicted Mark Karpeles, a 33-year-old computer whizz from France, for tampering with computer data but acquitted him over charges of embezzling millions from client accounts.

The sentence was suspended for four years.

In a summary of the ruling, the court said Karpeles had "harmed the users' trust greatly" by manipulating data and "abused his expertise as an IT engineer and his position and authority".

Prosecutors had claimed that Karpeles had embezzled some 341 million yen ($3 million) of clients' money and splashed it on a lavish lifestyle. They called for him to serve 10 years behind bars.

However, in throwing out these embezzlement charges, the judge said there was no financial damage done to MtGox and ruled that Karpeles did not intend to cause any damage.

The judge cited an expert opinion that said owners of small and medium enterprises often borrow funds without proper accounting and ruled that the court assumed Karpeles intended to return the money.

Karpeles' lawyer, Nobuyasu Ogata, told AFP: "It became clear that he is innocent as far as the charge that Mark committed a wrongdoing for his personal benefit."

"He (Karpeles) says it was very significant" that the court recognised that point, added Ogata.

Karpeles entered the courtroom wearing a dark suit and black shoes and he bowed politely to the judge. He was motionless after the verdict was read out.

After the sentencing, the judge asked if Karpeles understood the sentence. Karpeles responded simply: "Yes, I did."

- 'Cold wallet' -

MtGox was shut down in 2014 after 850,000 bitcoins (worth half a billion dollars at that time) disappeared from its virtual vaults.

The scandal left a trail of angry investors, rocked the virtual currency community, and dented confidence in the security of bitcoin.

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At one point, MtGox claimed to be handling around 80 percent of all global bitcoin transactions.

During his trial, Karpeles apologised to customers for the company's bankruptcy but denied both data falsification and embezzlement.

"I swear to God that I am innocent," Karpeles, speaking in Japanese, told the three-judge panel hearing when his trial opened in 2017.

Karpeles always claimed the bitcoins were lost due to an external "hacking attack" and later claimed to have found some 200,000 coins in a "cold wallet" -- a storage device not connected to other computers.

"Most people will not believe what I say. The only solution I have is to actually find the real culprits," he told reporters his trial hearing in July 2017.

- Doubts about bitcoin -

The acquittal on embezzlement came as the vast majority of cases that come to trial in Japan end in a conviction.

Karpeles himself said in an interview with French business daily Les Echos on Wednesday that he had little chance of acquittal.

"All I can hope for is a light sentence which will mean I do not have to go back into detention and do forced work," he said.

The Frenchman was first arrested in August 2015 and, in an echo of another high-profile case against former Nissan chief and compatriot Carlos Ghosn, was re-arrested several times on different charges.

Karpeles eventually won bail in July 2016 -- nearly a year after his arrest -- paying 10 million yen to secure his freedom pending a trial, which began in July 2017.

During his time on bail, Karpeles has been active on social media -- notably voicing doubts about bitcoin and replying to some media questions about conditions in Japanese detention centres.

However, he has largely avoided commenting on his case in detail.

In many ways, the rollercoaster ride of Karpeles has mirrored that of the bitcoin cryptocurrency that made him rich.

At its height in December 2017, the value of a single bitcoin was around $20,000.

It has since slumped and is now worth just under $4,000.
Brenton Tarrant, the shootings suspect, is an Australian citizen. (AP)

The suspected gunman who killed dozens of people in New Zealand is an Australian racist eco-fascist who posted a 74-page manifesto online before the shootings and described Donald Trump as a symbol of white supremacy.

The man, who identified himself in a livestream of the massacre as Brenton Tarrant, said he was motivated by far-right extremism he saw in the United States to carry out the attack at Al Noor Mosque.

At least 49 people were gunned down dead in two mosques in New Zealand. At least 41 people were killed at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch while at least seven people died inside the suburban Linwood Masjid Mosque.

The suspect has been charged with murder while three other people have been held in custody.

Police have said a man in his late 20s has been charged with murder and will appear at the Christchurch court on Saturday morning.

Footage of the attack at the Al Noor mosque was posted under the username Brenton Tarrant 9 and shows the gunman firing 205 times on men, woman and children and stopping only to reload his weapons.

Tarrant also appears to have posted a link to a manifesto on a now-deleted Twitter account and the online forum 8chan where he spoke of his hatred for Muslim immigrants in Europe.

The gun Brenton Tarrant used to carry out the attack. (AP)

In it, he says he was inspired by mass killer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011. He also mentions Finsbury Park terrorist Darren Osborne as well as London mayor Sadiq Khan.

He also goes on to rail against mass immigration and said he views Donald Trump as a symbol of renewed white identity.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed the shooter was Australian and described him as an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.

The manifesto included various questions and answers, one of which asked: Who are you?

The reply said: Just a ordinary White man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to working class, low income family.

My parents are of Scottish, Irish and English stock. I had a regular childhood, without any great issues. I had little interest in education during my schooling, barely achieving a passing grade.

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Police stand outside a mosque after the shooting. (AP)

He added: I am just a regular White man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.

The manifesto said he carried out the attack to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homeland are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.

He said he was in New Zealand temporarily while he planned and trained the attack.

With regard to planning the attack, he wrote: I begun planning an attack roughly two years in advance and an attack at the location in Christchurch three months in advance.

Map of mosque shootings in Christchurch New Zealand. (PA)

Four suspects have been taken into custody following the shooting and the gunman has been charged with murder.

New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Arden said: This can only be described as a terrorist attack. While we do not have anything to believe at this stage that there were any other suspects, we are not assuming that at this stage.
MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP)  Nicaragua's government said Friday it has released 50 opposition prisoners and placed them under a form of house arrest.

The Interior Department said Friday the prisoners face charges of crimes against "the common security" or "public peace."

The release was an apparent bow to a demand by the opposition Civic Alliance for freeing inmates as a condition for resuming political talks which had been suspended. The opposition coalition had demanded the immediate and definitive release of about 770 people considered political prisoners.

Pablo Cuevas, a lawyer for the Permanent Human Rights Commission, said the government had promised to free "an appreciable number" of prisoners, but that the 50 released Friday "were not what we expected."

The government said it would not allow an opposition march planned for Saturday to demand the release of all the prisoners.

The current round of talks started Feb. 27, when the government released 112 prisoners.

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, at least 325 people were killed last year amid a crackdown on protests demanding President Daniel Ortega leave office.

The government has since largely banned opposition demonstrations and shuttered some independent media outlets and NGOs. It has also refused to concede early elections, a key opposition demand.
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP)  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon decide whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain his moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, a senior North Korean official said Friday, adding that the U.S. threw away a golden opportunity at the recent summit between their leaders.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, addressing a meeting of diplomats and foreign media, including The Associated Press, in Pyongyang said the North was deeply disappointed by the failure of the two sides to reach any agreements at the Hanoi summit between Kim and President Donald Trump.

She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States takes measures that are commensurate to the changes it has taken  such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests  and changes its "political calculation."

Choe, who attended the Feb. 27-28 talks in Hanoi, said Kim was puzzled by what she called the "eccentric" negotiation position of the U.S. She suggested that while Trump was more willing to talk, an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust was created by the uncompromising demands of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton. She said statements by senior Trump advisers since the summit have further worsened the climate.

Video: North Korea Evading US-Led Sanctions, UN Report Says

For more news videos visit Yahoo View.

In Washington, Pompeo and Bolton disputed the allegation. "They are wrong about that. I was there," Pompeo said Friday. Bolton said in any case Trump "is our decision-maker."

Pompeo said the U.S. expects Kim to live up to his promise to Trump to maintain the moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests.

"In Hanoi, on multiple occasions, he spoke directly to the president and made a commitment that he would not resume nuclear testing nor would he resume missile testing," Pompeo said. "So that's Chairman Kim's word. We have every expectation he will live up to that commitment."

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Despite the tensions, Choe said personal relations between the two leaders are still good "and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful."

She said it was entirely up to Kim whether to continue the launch and test moratorium, and said she expects he will "clarify his position" within a short period of time.

"On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission said. 'For what reason do we have to make this train trip again?'" she said. "I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger. We have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation."

Choe questioned the claim by Trump at a news conference after the talks in Hanoi broke down that the North was seeking the lifting of all sanctions against it, and said it was seeking only the ones that are directed at its civilian economy. After the summit had ended, State Department officials clarified that was indeed the North's position, but said the lifting of economic sanctions was such a big demand that it would essentially subsidize the North's continued nuclear activity.

Choe said it was the U.S. that was being too demanding and inflexible and called the demand that denuclearization come before sanctions are eased "an absurd sophism." She added that while South Korean President Moon Jae-in has tried to help bring the U.S. and North Korea together to talk, the South is "a player, not an arbiter" because it is an ally of Washington.

She said even though the people, military and officials of the munitions industry have sent Kim thousands of petitions to never give up the nuclear program, he went to Hanoi to build trust and carry out mutually agreed commitments "one by try and step by step."

"What is clear is that the U.S. has thrown away a golden opportunity this time," she said. "I'm not sure why the U.S. came out with this different description. We never asked for the removal of sanctions in their entirety."

"This time we understood very clearly that the United States has a very different calculation to ours," she added.

She refused to comment directly when asked by one of the ambassadors about news reports the North may be preparing for another missile launch or satellite launch.

"Whether to maintain this moratorium or not is the decision of our chairman of the state affairs commission," she said, using one of Kim's titles. "He will make his decision in a short period of time."

Journalists were not allowed to ask questions during the briefing, which lasted nearly an hour.

___

Associated Press writer Deb Riechmann in Washington contributed to this report.

___

Talmadge is the AP's Pyongyang bureau chief. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @EricTalmadge
Washington (AFP) - The United States voiced hope Friday that nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea would continue following reports that Pyongyang is considering suspending the talks.

Russian news agency TASS said the North's vice foreign minister Choe Son-Hui had rejected yielding to "US demands in any form," after the Hanoi summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump ended without agreement in February.

"We are hopeful that we can continue to hold this conversation," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters in Washington.

The report came amid concerns over the North's satellite rocket launch site, where some rebuilding activity has been observed in recent weeks, triggering international alarm that Pyongyang might be preparing a long-range missile or space launch.

Trump told a post-summit press conference in Hanoi that the North Korean leader had promised he would maintain his moratorium on missile and nuclear tests.

Kim was due soon to make an official statement on the actions his country would take, Choe told reporters and foreign diplomats in Pyongyang.

"In Hanoi on multiple occasions, (Kim) spoke directly to the president and made a commitment that he would not resume nuclear testing, nor would he resume missile testing," Pompeo said.

"We have every expectation that he will live up to that commitment."

Any launch would send the denuclearization talks into complete disarray, after they were left stuttering when the summit ended without agreement two weeks ago.

Choe -- who was present in Vietnam -- blamed the United States for the failure, saying Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton "created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust" and "obstructed" Kim and Trump's "constructive effort."

"As a result, the summit ended with no significant result," she added.

It is a change of tone from Pyongyang, after both sides expressed their willingness to carry on the discussion process in Hanoi.

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Ankit Panda, of the Federation of American Scientists, said Kim's unilateral declaration of the ICBM testing moratorium was "now in question."

It could mean a decision had already been made, he tweeted, but added that it did not mean a launch was imminent.

"One play is for Kim to reaffirm the moratorium. Kim looks big," he said. "That also keeps China happy for now.

"Another play is to renounce the moratorium, which would be risky," as it would upset China, be "disappointing" to Trump, and "squanders the inter-Korean process".

- 'Big deal' -

Seoul's presidential office sought to play down the vice-minister's comments, saying it was "premature to assess the current situation only with Choe's remarks."

South Korea will continue to work for the resumption of talks, it added.

Washington wants what administration officials have called a "big deal," with the complete elimination of weapons of mass destruction in return for the dropping of sanctions that have hit the isolated North's economy.

"Nobody in the administration advocates a step-by-step approach," a senior State Department official told reporters last week.

The North says it only called for the partial lifting of UN sanctions imposed in 2016-17 that affect people's livelihoods.

But Washington sees these measures as the bulk of economic sanctions that brought Kim to the table, and believes without them it would lose leverage in future talks.

Pyongyang favors a more incremental approach, with Kim proposing dismantling facilities at its Yongbyon nuclear complex in exchange for lifting the main sanctions -- an offer Trump refused in Hanoi despite the vaunted "chemistry" between the pair.

In his New Year's speech -- a key political event in the North -- Kim said he would be "compelled to find a new way for defending the sovereignty" of the state if Washington "persists in imposing sanctions and pressure."
Skopje (Republic of North Macedonia) (AFP) - A former North Macedonia interior minister was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Friday for his part in orchestrating a mob attack on parliament in 2017, one of 16 people given jail terms over the violence.

Scores were injured in the bloody rioting that erupted on April 27, 2017 when around 100 nationalist demonstrators, including masked men, stormed the Skopje assembly at the culmination of a post-election political crisis.

Several lawmakers were beaten, including Social Democrat leader Zoran Zaev, who went on to become prime minister and pass the historic name deal with Greece that added "North" to former Macedonia's name, ending a long-running dispute.

A court in Skopje on Friday sentenced the 16 defendants, including some police officers, giving them prison terms ranging from seven to 18 years for "terrorist endangerment of the constitutional order and security".

The longest sentence was given to former Interior Minister and then-public security bureau chief Mitko Chavkov.

"The events were broadcast live, and citizens watched those terrible images with bleeding heads of lawmakers and journalists who were under attack, which undoubtedly caused insecurity and fear," judge Dobrila Kacarska said.

Fifteen others who were initially accused were earlier pardoned by an amnesty law passed by Zaev's government. One defendant was also acquitted on Friday.

The pardoned include five MPs from the opposition VRMO-DPMNE party who were key to passing the contentious name deal, which came into force last month.

The attack on the parliament followed months of protests by nationalists opposed to a coalition deal between Zaev's Social Democrats and minority ethnic Albanian parties.

The alliance eventually ousted the party of former PM Nikola Gruevski, who had held power for nearly a decade.

In November 2018 Gruevski fled to Hungary to escape a two-year prison sentence.

Last month North Macedonia authorities said Gruevksi and several other former senior officials are also being probed for allegedly plotting the parliament attack.
By Nidhi Verma

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's Reliance Industries Ltd, operator of the world's biggest refining complex, said on Wednesday it had halted supply of diluents to Venezuela's national oil company PDVSA and will not resume such sales until sanctions are lifted.

Washington is preparing to impose "very significant" Venezuela-related sanctions against financial institutions in the coming days, U.S. special envoy Elliott Abrams said on Tuesday.

PDVSA was importing about 100,000 bpd of naphtha, mostly from the United states, to dilute up to 400,000 bpd of extra heavy oil and make it exportable.

Reliance's Houston-based subsidiary was supplying diluents to Venezuela.

Reliance, an Indian conglomerate controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has significant exposure to the financial system of the United States, where it operates some subsidiaries that are linked to its oil and telecom businesses among others.

Reliance has not increased oil purchases from Venezuela, the company said in response to a Reuters email seeking comment.

In 2012 Reliance, Venezuela's key oil client, signed a 15-year deal to buy between 300,000-400,000 barrels per day (bpd) of heavy oil from PDVSA.

Ship tracking data obtained by Reuters showed that Reliance averages purchase from Venezuela were below 300,000 bpd in 2018 and in January this year.

"Our U.S. subsidiary has completely stopped all business with Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and its global parent has not increased crude purchases," it said.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump imposed sweeping sanctions on PDVSA in January, aimed at severely curbing the OPEC member's crude exports to the United States to pressure socialist President Nicolas Maduro to step down.

"Since the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the government of Venezuela in late January 2019, Reliance Industries Ltd has been in close contact with representatives from the U.S. State Department to ensure full compliance," Reliance said.

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The Indian market is crucial for Venezuelas economy because it has historically been the second-largest cash-paying customer for the OPEC countrys crude, behind the United States.

"We will continue a constructive dialogue with the U.S. government to ensure Reliance remains in compliance," it said.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met India's Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale on Monday and discussed India's purchases of oil from the Maduro-led government.

"We are asking the same thing of India as we are of every country: do not be the economic lifeline for the Maduro regime," Pompeo said.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma; editing by David Evans and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
Science Applications International Corp. SAIC recently announced that it has been awarded a $57 million worth Seaport-e task order with a one year base period and four more optional years, by the U.S. Navy.



Per the contract, Science Applications will provide engineering services to the Polymers and Undersea Sensors Branch at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Crane Division.



Moreover, the company will offer R&D services, rapid prototype development and test and evaluation, among other services.



The services are based on the Product Support Center services model that Science Applications co-developed with NSWC Crane, with which it has a 30-year partnership. The model includes life cycle support to systems and platforms with solution analysis, system engineering and integration, and sustainment.



This task order announcement follows another Seaport-e task order worth $37 million, which was awarded to Science Applications a few days ago to provide its mission support services to the NSWC, Panama City.



Contract Wins Boost Growth



Science Applications is perennially benefiting from back-to-back contract wins. The governments inclination to adopt technologies is a positive for the company. In the third quarter of fiscal 2019 it recorded $10.4 billion total backlog.



Furthermore, having the government as a big client lends stability to the business and moderates fluctuation in revenues. Although the government generally has a lengthy approval process, the project earns money for a number of years after it is approved.



Moreover, government contracts improve the visibility of future revenue streams. Science Applications has been doing very well with a record level of awards, which reflects its disciplined business development actions, consistent operational excellence and high customer satisfaction.



The company continues to execute its strategy of winning high-value contracts, delivering excellence to customers and deploying capital for growth. Its robust business model is expected to help it grow further.



Prospects Bright Despite Competition



Competition from CACI International CACI in the federal marketplace remains steady. During its last reported quarter, awards bagged by CACI included a five-year, $73 million contract with the Naval Surface Warfare Center. Its acquisition of the Systems Engineering and Acquisition Support Services Business Unit led the company to secure this award.



Nonetheless, Science Applications recent buyout of government IT service provider Engility is expected to boost its growth in key markets and enhance its competitive position. This is because Engility provides skilled personnel to the U.S. departments of defense, homeland security and justice. Notably, Engility was the buyout target of five big companies in the past, including CACI, which was apparently the runner up to Science Applications. This makes us optimistic about the companys growth prospects.

Story continues

Science Applications International Corporation Revenue (TTM)

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Chicago (AFP) - A massive late-winter storm hit several central US states Thursday, forcing thousands to evacuate, snarling air traffic and leaving drivers stranded.

There were widespread road closures and more than 1,000 flights canceled at the worst affected airports.

The intense storm affected much of the nation's midsection with "heavy snows, blizzard conditions and widespread wind gusts over hurricane force," according to the National Weather Service.

"Travel will remain difficult and life threatening across these areas," the NWS said.

The deluge caused flooding in parts of Nebraska and Iowa.

Raging waters washed away a bridge in one part of Nebraska, while nearly toppling a levee near the small city of Norfolk -- requiring thousands of residents to evacuate.

"It's a very serious event, one of the most serious we've seen in our history," Norfolk Mayor Josh Moenning told a news briefing.

Law enforcement in the state launched rescues of stranded people in various communities due to flooded roads and buildings.

"Many rivers are now cresting, but others have yet to," the National Weather Service in Omaha said.

"As water works from tributaries to main arteries, additional crests can occur downstream."

Numerous tornado warnings were issued from the South in Alabama to the Midwest in Indiana.

One tornado touched down in a sparsely-populated area of Kentucky.

State police said it caused damage over a five-square-mile region but only one non-life-threatening injury.

"First responders are checking all residences in the area to ensure everyone's safety," the police said in a statement.

In Iowa, a small town of about 200 people was evacuated after a levee breach sent water flooding into the area, according to the Des Moines Register.

Nearly 800 flights were canceled at the Denver airport, a day after all runaways were closed by howling wind and snow in Colorado.

More than 300 flights also were canceled in Chicago.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in downtown Algiers on Friday in the biggest demonstration since unrest began last month in the North African country, Reuters witnesses said. Ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has decided not to run for a fifth term in office in the face of mass demonstrations, but the protesters are demanding urgent change. (Reporting By Algeria Newsroom; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Sixty years after the Dalai Lama fled into permanent Indian exile, the cause of Tibetan freedom that earned him a Nobel prize and a celebrity-studded international following has lost much of its momentum -- neutralised, analysts say, by the passage of time and China's rising global power.

Inside Tibet, Beijing has effectively wiped out any organised opposition to its iron-clad rule, while outside, the once-vocal support of sympathetic governments and world leaders has dwindled to near-silence in recent years despite the 14th Dalai Lama's enduring personal popularity.

"The fate of Tibet is in the hands of the Chinese state... Tibetans outside the region are not very relevant to the fate of Tibet, and this includes the Dalai Lama", said Nathan Hill, convener of Tibetan studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.

In 2007, the Buddhist spiritual leader said his homeland was facing its "darkest period in 2,000 years". The following year, with the world's eyes on China in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, protests unfurled across Tibet, sparking a furious response from Beijing.

"You don't see protests like that anymore," said Kate Saunders of the US-based International Campaign for Tibet, attributing the shift in part to Tibetans abiding by the Dalai Lama's message of non-violence and to massive Chinese state surveillance.

Although the Dalai Lama's campaign largely focused on autonomy rather than independence, negotiations with China stalled in 2010, amid suspicion that Beijing was intentionally dragging on pointless talks, hoping international pressure would ease with his eventual death.

The 83-year-old has sought to pre-empt any attempt by Beijing to name his reincarnated successor, even announcing in 2011 that he may be the last in the lineage.

The officially atheist Communist Party has already shown it will intervene in the reincarnation of important figures in Tibetan Buddhism, such as the Panchen Lama who traditionally plays a significant role in choosing the Dalai Lama's successor.

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The boy chosen by the Dalai Lama to serve as the Panchen Lama was detained by Chinese authorities at the age of six and has not been seen since, with Beijing appointing its own candidate in 1995.

Although the exiled leader remains a hugely popular speaker, he has cut back on his global engagements and has not met a world leader since 2016 -- while governments have been wary of extending invitations to him for fear of angering Beijing.

"The craze for Tibet among Westerners in the 1980s and the following decades has decreased significantly", said Katia Buffetrille, a Tibetologist at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

Even India, which offered asylum to the Dalai Lama in 1959 when he made a daring escape across the Himalayas dressed as a soldier, has turned its back, with the government reportedly warning officials against attending events featuring him, citing diplomatic sensitivities.

- Buying freedom -

As the exile-led movement loses momentum, Tibetans at home are struggling to keep their traditions alive.

"Tibetans live in a totalitarian police state -- if they challenge restrictions, they face the consequences," said Gray Tuttle, a professor of modern Tibetan studies at Columbia University.

"Previous protests from the 1980s on... have yielded no tangible benefits, rather they have generated a worse political outcome and further clampdown."

At least 150 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009 in protest against Beijing, most of whom have died from their injuries. But the frequency of self-immolations has lessened.

China's investment in the region includes a huge outlay on security to build a surveillance state that makes it harder to organise protests. Rights groups say that a government campaign targeting the family and friends of protesters has also helped suppress dissent.

Beijing insists that Tibetans enjoy extensive freedoms and argues it has brought economic growth to the mountainous region.

The oppression of Uighurs in Xinjiang has also overtaken Tibet as the focus of China's human rights critics.

When Germany's top human rights official Barbel Kofler asked to visit Xinjiang last year, she was taken instead to Tibet -- an indication of how much Beijing feels secure about the situation there, even though foreign journalists are still barred from reporting independently in the region.

Many locals accuse Beijing of repressing their religion and diluting their culture, but nonetheless the economic growth -- boosted by government subsidies -- has even seen Tibetan exiles return to the region.

Tibetologist Francoise Robin, who visits the region every year, told AFP that Beijing had effectively sidelined any talk of freedom by pumping money into Tibet.

"This is what is paradoxical in the case of Tibet, compared to other similar situations, because China is a country... that is on the rise. Often, in order for a rebellion, for a mass movement to rise, you need economic despair."

burs-amu/fox/fa
Ottawa (AFP) - Police stepped up security patrols at mosques across Canada following attacks in New Zealand on Friday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned as "absolutely appalling" -- and which evoked painful memories for Canadians only two years after a similar massacre.

The attacks on the two Christchurch mosques left at least 49 people dead, with the suspect -- 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant -- having live-streamed the assault and published a manifesto online.

"Attacking people during prayers is absolutely appalling, and Canada strongly condemns today's shootings in New Zealand," Trudeau said on Twitter.

"Our thoughts and hearts go out to the victims and their families, and we join New Zealanders and Muslim communities around the world in grieving."

The flag atop the Canadian parliament was lowered to half-staff in memory of the victims.

Police in Toronto and Montreal -- home to Canada's largest Muslim populations -- told AFP they have stepped up security around the more than 100 mosques in the two metropolitan regions.

"In response to the attacks in New Zealand, we will have a heightened police presence in the community, focusing on places of worship -- especially mosques," Toronto police Constable Allyson Douglas-Cook said.

Similar precautionary measures were taken by authorities in Montreal, Quebec City and elsewhere across the country.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale insisted that "there is no known nexus to Canada and Canada's threat level remains unchanged at 'medium.'"

However, pictures posted to a social media account of a semi-automatic weapon covered in the names of historical figures, many of whom were involved in the killing of Muslims, included Canadian Alexandre Bissonnette.

Prior to the New Zealand mosques shootings, Canada had seen the worst ever attack on Muslims in the West.

Bissonnette in January 2017 opened fire on worshipers at a Quebec City mosque after evening prayers, killing six men and wounding 35 others.

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Both the defense and prosecution are currently appealing the 29-year-old shooter's 40-year prison sentence in that case.

According to his lawyers, Bissonnette "has been very affected by (the New Zealand shooting) and is particularly troubled that his name is associated with this attack."

"Mr. Bissonnette deeply regrets the actions he has committed and wants everyone with problems or difficulties to talk about it and get help, something he had not been able to do adequately," Charles-Olivier Gosselin and Jean-Claude Gingras said in a statement on behalf of their client.
American citizen Paul Whelan, suspected of espionage on behalf of the United States, attends a hearing at the Moscow City Court. (Photo: Vladimir Gerdo/TASS via Getty Images)

Paul and David Whelan, twins born in Canada who grew up in the United States, spent their 49th birthdays earlier this month very differently.

David Whelan, a lawyer who specializes in information and technology, was diving into books about Russian negotiation tactics and using Google Translate to glean clues about how his brother got wrapped up in what he views as a fabricated spying scandal. Meanwhile, Paul Whelan turned a year older in Lefortovo Prison in Moscow.

As Paul Whelan enters his third month of detention in Russia, his case stands as a counterpoint to President Donald Trumps public boasting about his ability to get U.S. citizens detained abroad released. Trump, who in December announced his administration had freed 17 Americans, has hosted public events with returned Americans at the White House, most recently with Danny Burch, who recently returned from Yemen.

But now, scrutiny is building over Trumps handling of overseas hostages, particularly after he said that North Koreas leader didnt know about the treatment of Otto Warmbier, an American who was returned to the United States in a coma and died soon after. And Paul Whelan is becoming another sore spot on Trumps record of returning Americans.

David Whelan told Yahoo News that the family is pleased with the attention from the State Departments Moscow consular service, but has barely heard any new information from U.S. officials in Washington. Its mind-boggling, he said during an interview with Yahoo News.

He said he was told by government officials that sometimes the family doesnt hear anything, but he worries that the issue is slipping off the radar due to a lack of high-level public condemnation of Russian behavior.

Paul Whelan speaks with his lawyers before a court hearing in Moscow, Jan. 22, 2019. (Photo: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

David Whelan compared Paul Whelans case to those of the Ukrainian sailors who have been held by Russia since November 2018, and whose detention continues to be extended indefinitely. The Russians have learned  they can really jerk people around and no one will do anything, he said.

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Since Paul Whelan was arrested by the Russian FSB in Moscow on Dec. 28, 2018, and accused of espionage, the flurry of media and public attention has slowly faded. The FBI has questioned the groom at the wedding Paul was in town to attend, one source told Yahoo News, but little else is known about its investigation.

But the lack of public statements from the U.S. government may be strategic, according to John Sipher, a former officer in the CIAs Clandestine Service who served in Moscow. The Russians hate when we publicize things and spin them up, he said. They prefer to work on these things quietly.

The embassy and administration may be trying to appease and accommodate the Russians to see if it works, and may be holding off on escalation to see if it works, he said.

However, his family members not being provided information on Paul Whelans status and efforts to bring him home is odd, he said. We should either see quiet success  or we should be doing loud pressure.

So far, however, there appears to have been neither.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in January said that the United States would seek additional information on Paul Whelans case and if the detention is not appropriate, we will demand his immediate return.

However, there have been no public calls from the State Department or the White House demanding Whelans release, despite the lack of evidence presented by the Russian security services that he committed any sort of crime. A readout of Pompeos last call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Feb. 13 showed the two discussed the chemical weapon attack in Salisbury, England, the decaying International Monetary Fund treaty and Venezuela. But Whelan did not come up, according to the readout provided by State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (Photo: Andre Coelho/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A State Department spokesperson told Yahoo News that the State Department is following Mr. Whelans case closely and is pressuring the Russian government to ensure fair trial guarantees. However, due to privacy considerations for Mr. Whelan and his family, we have nothing further at this time, wrote the spokesperson.

Most recently, the Russian court system extended Whelans detention three more months to allow for further investigation.

Whelan carries passports from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland. Consular representatives from each of the four countries, as well as U.S. ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman, have managed to briefly visit him, despite obstacles presented by Russian security officials. There is some coordination between consular offices from the different countries to visit Whelan, according to one official familiar with the proceedings.

A spokesperson for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the department is continuing to provide consular assistance to an individual arrested in Moscow, but the embassies of Canada and the United Kingdom did not respond to requests for comment.

British Embassy officials are providing consular assistance to a British man detained in Moscow and are in touch with the local authorities. Our staff in London are providing support to his family, wrote a spokesperson for the British Embassy in Washington.

Additionally, the family has been in touch with congressional offices, which, after some pressure, have begun publishing more statements in support of Whelan. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., posted a tweet in honor of Paul Whelans birthday, advocating for his release, and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, put out a press release demanding Whelan have access to consular officials, an attorney of his choice, and his family.

Yesterday American citizen Paul Whelan spent his birthday detained in Russia. He should be released and allowed to reunite with his family.  Senator Rubio Press (@SenRubioPress) March 6, 2019

However, its still difficult for the representatives to get into detail. Multiple congressional offices the Whelan family has been in touch with declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the reasons for silence on the Whelan case is that he has been unable to sign a privacy waiver, which would allow the State Department to speak publicly about the specific details of his case, according to his family.

There has also been discussion, on the part of the Russian attorney representing Whelan, as well as other U.S. experts, speculating that Whelan could be traded for a prisoner Russia is interested in bringing back home. Russian officials have repeatedly called for the release of Maria Butina, who pled guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent, and, according to court records, is still assisting U.S. officials in ongoing cases.

Though former intelligence officials who served in Russia have been adamant that Whelan does not fit the profile of an undercover spy, its possible he had some formal or informal role advising or assisting a U.S. or foreign partner intelligence service. Given that he was convicted in a 2008 court martial case for charges related to larceny and discharged from the Marines, and the fact that he is active on Russian social media, it may be unlikely that he is a spy. However, those things could add to a cover identity or throw suspecting parties off the scent, or could make him a potentially useful asset, i.e., someone who provides information to professional intelligence officers.

Do I think hes an American spy breaking Russian laws? No, wrote Irvin McCullough, a national security analyst for the Government Accountability Project. But the United States Intelligence Community has long-standing relationships with business people like Paul Whelan.

The CIAs National Resources Division often speaks to business people and other professionals about their trips abroad to gather information, McCullough pointed out. Given Pauls military and security background, his personal interest in Russia and his employer's alleged connection to Russia, Id be surprised if the CIA didn't seek to debrief him once or twice, he wrote. That wouldn't make him a spy  and it certainly wouldn't give Russia cause to detain him like they have.

Paul Whelan after a ruling regarding extension of his detention. (Photo: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)

The Whelan family has secured the pro bono assistance from Ryan Fayhee, a former Department of Justice attorney from within the counterespionage division. Fayhee tells Yahoo he was led to work with the Whelans because they just frankly werent getting what they needed.

However, Chris Costa, the executive director of the International Spy Museum and a former counterterrorism adviser to Trump who worked directly on hostage recovery, says Whelans case falls squarely under the responsibilities of diplomats at the State Department.

When he handled hostage cases, Costa says, he was called upon when an international terrorist or criminal group took an American prisoner, or an adversarial government captured an American and refused to acknowledge it, like in the case of Robert Levinson, the retired FBI agent who went missing in Iran in 2007.

In a case with someone suspected of espionage, it would be mostly the State Department, he said.

When asked whether the diplomatic channels have been sufficient, Costa replied, I really do think it works. Its imperfect, but it works. He pointed to the Trump administrations record of bringing Americans home. On Whelans case in particular, he said, I do believe its being worked aggressively.

The White House, when asked about its assistance to Whelan including any assistance provided by those working on hostage cases, deferred comment to the State Department.

Meanwhile, Whelans friends and family are hoping for a resolution soon.

One friend of Whelans who served with him in the military, who asked not to be named due to the ongoing sensitivity of the case, recalled a time when a fellow serviceman was killed in action and he flew out to Michigan to attend the funeral. Whelan, who lived in Novi, a small city in Michigan west of Detroit, picked him up and drove him over five hours each way to the remote Michigan town where the funeral was held.

Photo: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters

Paul is a very caring person who has always gone far out of his way to look out for the welfare of others, particularly for U.S. military members, recalled the friend.

With Russias legal process moving forward, its unclear how long Whelan will be detained without an official U.S. government diplomatic response. And Fayhee, the attorney working pro bono for the Whelan family, says the safety of Americans overseas in the future is at risk if Russia is allowed to detain Whelan without consequence.

If the United States doesnt condemn Russian aggression, Fayhee argues that it sets a very, very dangerous precedent.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:
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A Los Angeles-bound flight from Washington, D.C. was diverted to Oklahoma City after a"combative passenger" assaulted a flight attendant and an air marshal aboard the plane Thursday evening, local police said.Why it matters: Airlines are dealing with a surge in unruly passengers, with the Federal Aviation Administration confirming over 5,500 cases this year. Most involved mask-related incidents.Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.Video from the scene shows
By Ellen Francis BAGHOUZ, Syria (Reuters) - Islamic State militants along with women and children surrendered in the hundreds to U.S.-backed forces in eastern Syria on Thursday as the jihadists lost ground in their last shred of territory. Many of the men were limping as they crossed out of the Baghouz enclave along a dirt path over a rocky hill, with weeping children and fully veiled women, dragging suitcases and backpacks behind them. Some men trudged along on crutches with bandages wrapped around their legs. Women hoisted children onto their shoulders to get them up the hill, leaving strollers and blankets behind in the dust. Adnan Afrin, a commander in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), said hundreds of people were emerging, adding to the many thousands who have streamed out of Baghouz in recent weeks. "They are coming out this way in case there are snipers or someone wants to attack." SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali said some 1,300 jihadists and their families came out on Thursday. SDF fighters said they included foreigners. The militants surrendered during a pause in the U.S.-backed assault to seize the final patch of populated Islamic State territory - a self-declared "caliphate" that once spanned a third of Iraq and Syria. In the morning, explosions rang out at the front line as artillery fire pounded Baghouz and warplanes buzzed overhead. The SDF, which the Kurdish YPG militia spearheads, said the jihadists had deployed more than 20 suicide bombers in counter-attacks in the last two days. It said at least 112 militants had been killed since it resumed the offensive at the weekend. No Islamic State commanders are believed to be in Baghouz village, a U.S. defense official has said. U.S. government experts strongly believe its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is alive and possibly hiding in Iraq. The jihadists are still assessed to be a potent security threat with a foothold in remote areas and widely expected to escalate a wave of guerrilla attacks. TWISTED METAL, FALLEN PALM TREES Islamic State redrew the map of the Middle East in 2014 when it declared its ultra-radical Sunni Islamist "caliphate" and established a rule known for mass killings, sexual enslavement and meting out punishments such as crucifixion. The militants suffered their major military defeats in 2017, when they lost the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. They were then forced down the Euphrates River to their last bastion at Baghouz, a cluster of hamlets on the eastern bank. In part of the Islamic State encampment which the SDF seized a few days ago, collapsed tents and fallen palm trees lay among a scattering of rubble and twisted metal. Dirty, ripped blankets, carpets, mattresses and abandoned motorcycles littered the ground. The SDF assault had been postponed repeatedly over the last few weeks to evacuate people from the enclave, many of them wives and children of fighters. Overall, tens of thousands have fled Islamic State's shrinking territory in recent months. The SDF has mostly transferred to a camp at al-Hol in the northeast. The United Nations says the camp now holds around 67,000 people, 90 percent of them women and children - well beyond its capacity. Camp workers say they do not have enough tents, food or medicine. They have warned of diseases spreading. Aid agencies say scores of people, mostly children, have died en route to the camp or shortly after arriving. (Additional reporting by Issam Abdallah; Writing by Lisa Barrington, Tom Perry and Ellen Francis; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
By Lee Van Der Voo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hundreds of youngsters skipped school to rally in Washington on Friday as part of what organizers called an international youth climate strike to seek action on climate change.

Chanting "climate action now!", some 1,500 students joined the event in front of the Capitol Building, where Congress sits, while similar rallies were held in 46 states.

The demonstrations, which demanded politicians take action to combat climate change, backed measures including the Green New Deal, an ambitious Democratic environmental proposal that has become a lightning rod for Republican criticism.

"This is the only Earth that we have. There is no Planet B. There is no other place we can go so we need to save it," said Elise Haverland, a 16-year-old from Silver Spring, Maryland.

Protesters carried colorful homemade placards bearing slogans such as "Our planet, our future," "Let us Live," and "Don't frack up our Earth."

The students also held an 11-minute silence, one for each of the years that a United Nations report said the world has remaining to get climate change under control.

School children across the world held demonstrations to demand action on climate change on Friday.

The protests are the offspring of youth strikes in Europe that were inspired by Greta Thunberg, a lone 15-year-old picketer at the Swedish Parliament. Organizers said they hope staging the event during the school day will signal the importance that students attach to fighting climate change.

"Adults come fight with us!" 12-year-old Haven Coleman of Denver, one of three youth organizers of the protest in the United States, said from the stage.

The two other leaders of the U.S. movement are Isra Hirsi, the 16-year-old daughter of newly-elected Democratic U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, of Minneapolis, and Alexandria Villasenor, 13, of New York.

The group is calling for a "national emergency" on climate change and for the United States to stop all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Story continues

The scientific community broadly agrees that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to net-zero by 2050 to halt the catastrophic effects of climate change.

Most of the declared Democratic candidates for the White House have already voiced support for the Green New Deal, a measure proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - a sweeping 10-year blueprint for combating climate change that involves reducing carbon emissions and retrofitting infrastructure.

Republicans have dismissed the proposals as unreasonably expensive and disruptive to the U.S. economy. They have tried to use some of the measures to sow discord within the Democratic party, painting their political rivals as shifting to the left and embracing extreme policies.

(Reporting by Lee Van Der Voo; Writing by Gabriella Borter; Editing by Scott Malone and Rosalba O'Brien)
A woman who says that asbestos in Johnson & Johnson products caused her incurable cancer was awarded $29 million by a California jury on Wednesday.

The California Superior Court in Oakland agreed that the companys baby powder was a substantial contributing factor to her mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive cancer caused by the inhalation of asbestos.

The woman, Terry Leavitt, told the jury that she used the baby powder and another, now discontinued product with talc, Shower to Shower, throughout the 60s and 70s, according to Reuters. She was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2017. After nine weeks of testimony from Leavitt and other medical experts, the jury sided with her.

This lawsuit is one of over 13,000 that Johnson & Johnson is currently facing over its talc baby powder. There are more than a dozen cases scheduled for 2019 alone.

The company said in a statement, shared with PEOPLE, that they plan to appeal the ruling.

We will pursue an appeal because Johnsons Baby Powder does not contain asbestos or cause cancer. We respect the legal process and reiterate that jury verdicts are not medical, scientific or regulatory conclusions about a product. Decades of tests by independent, non-litigation driven experts and institutions repeatedly confirm that Johnsons Baby Powder does not contain asbestos or cause cancer. We believe these issues will warrant a reversal on appeal.

Leavitts lawyer said that the jurys decision was further proof that the powder is unsafe.

Yet another jury has rejected J&Js misleading claims that its talc was free of asbestos, said Moshe Maimon, a lawyer for Leavitt, in a statement on Wednesday. The internal J&J documents that the jury saw, once more laid bare the shocking truth of decades of cover-up, deception and concealment by J&J.

In December, Reuters published an in-depth investigation that showed Johnson & Johnson knew its baby powder occasionally tested positive for small amounts of asbestos and covered up the findings.

Story continues

Reuters examined decades of internal company and court documents, and determined that Johnson & Johnson had been aware from 1971 to the early 2000s that its product occasionally contained small amounts of asbestos, but never shared that information outside of the company.

RELATED VIDEO: Woman Awarded $417 Million After Claiming Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder Gave Her Cancer

A Mount Sinai researcher wrote in a company letter in 1971 that he had detected a relatively small amount of asbestos in the baby powder. And in 1973, when the FDA considered a rule that required all cosmetics to contain no more than .01 percent asbestos, a scientist wrote in an internal note, we may have problems, the report alleged.

However, the Reuters report said that most testing found that there was no presence of asbestos in the companys products.

Johnson & Johnson vehemently denied these allegations and told PEOPLE that the report was an absurd conspiracy theory. They said their 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 worlds leading labs prove our baby powder has never contained asbestos, the statement said.

The cases against Johnson & Johnson over alleged asbestos traces have been divided so far  three cases went to the plaintiffs, three to the company and five ended with a split jury.
Washington (AFP) - The horrific death toll in the New Zealand mosque massacre has put the spotlight on the lethality of the semi-automatic weapons used by the Christchurch gunman and in numerous attacks in the United States.

At least 49 people were killed and dozens wounded when the gunman, identified as a 28-year-old Australian right-wing extremist, opened fire on worshippers in two mosques.

A video live-streamed by the assailant on Facebook showed him rapidly firing what appeared to be hundreds of bullets at his defenseless victims using various weapons.

The New Zealand police have not yet identified the exact makes and models of the various guns used by the assailant.

At least one was a shotgun but others appeared to be similar to the semi-automatic rifles used in a number of US mass shootings and equipped with large-capacity magazines.

Such weapons were used in the mass shooting at a movie theater in Colorado which left 12 people dead in 2012 and the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, that same year which left 26 people dead including 20 children.

The jihadist who attacked the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, killing 49 club-goers, used a semi-automatic weapon.

The deadliest mass shooting in recent US history was carried out in Las Vegas in 2017 by a man armed with 10 AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, some with 100-round magazines, and other guns.

Fifty-eight people died in that attack.

The troubled teenager behind the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2017 which left 17 people dead and led to a grass roots gun control movement was also armed with an AR-15.

- 'Ban on bump stocks' -

According to the Violence Policy Center, semi-automatic weapons differ from military versions in that the trigger of a semi-automatic must be pulled individually for each round fired.

Machine guns, which are banned in the United States, will fire continuously for as long as the trigger is depressed or until the magazine is exhausted.

Story continues

"The unique design features of semi-automatic assault weapons allow the shooter to efficiently kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time available," the Violence Policy Center said.

"Increased lethality is the exact purpose for which these weapons were designed."

The United States last year banned "bump stocks" -- devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns.

Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, had equipped a number of his semi-automatic rifles with bump stocks.

Bump stocks allowed him to fire at a rate of nine bullets a second, before he turned his weapons on himself, according to US authorities.

The United States banned semi-automatic assault weapons in 1994 but the ban expired in 2004 and was not renewed.

Democratic lawmakers have sought several times since then to renew the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines but have not been successful.
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The Central Elections Committees decision to disqualify the Israeli-Arab Raam-Balad party as well as Hadash candidate Ofer Kassif from running in Israels upcoming national vote is politically motivated and unlikely to be upheld by the Supreme Court, political analysts argue.

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The Central Elections Committee, a body staffed by Israeli lawmakers and chaired by a Supreme Court justice, this week voted 15-10 to ban Kassif and 17-10 to prohibit Raam-Balad, one of the two main Arab-Israeli parties, from taking part in the April 9 contest. The far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party along with the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu (Israel Is Our Home) party submitted petitions against Kassif, while the ruling Likud moved to disqualify Raam-Balad.

Ofer Kassif (Photo: Yoav Dudkowitz)

Raam (United Arab List) is led primarily by the southern faction of the Islamic Movement and supports the establishment of a Palestinian state. It is particularly popular among Israels Bedouin residents. Balad (National Democratic Assembly) is opposed to Zionism and supports the creation of a bi-national state in lieu of a Jewish one.

For his part, Kassif has in the past called Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked a neo-Nazi and referred to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as a mass murderer.

Netanyahu welcomed the committees decision, tweeting that those who support terror will not be in the Israeli parliament!

But the move is unlikely to be upheld given past precedent.

Elections committee (Photo: Ohad Z)

The Central Elections Committee has the right to disqualify either a candidate or a party from running but there has to be confirmation from the Supreme Court, said Dr. Amir Fuchs, a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute. The committee is a political body and not a court, and the reasons it puts forward do not really have a legal basis.

For me, the purpose here was very clear, he said. It was to show voters this was our strong stance against the Arabs. In the end, the outcome will be that no one will be disqualified.

Meanwhile, the committee struck down motions to bar the candidacy of Otzma Yehudits Michael Ben-Ari and Itamar Ben-Gvir. The left-wing Meretz party along with center-left Labor vowed to appeal the decision.

According to Israeli law, a political party can be prevented from participating in elections if it rejects Israels existence as a Jewish and democratic state; incites racism; or supports armed struggle against the nation.

Ben-Gvir and Ben-Ari (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg)

To date, the law has been applied only once.

The only time that someone was disqualified is (Rabbi Meir) Kahane, Dr. Fuchs said, referring to the former head of the extremist Kach party in the 1980s. At the time, the party called for expelling Israels Arab population and forbidding Jews from marrying outside the faith.

In 1988, the Israeli government banned Kach on grounds that it promoted racism. Kahane himself was later assassinated in 1990 by an Egyptian-born American gunman in New York.

Jonathan Rynhold, a professor of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University, agrees that while the committees actions are drawing a lot of attention, the Supreme Court is liable to overturn the decision as it did in 2009 by reinstating Balad.

Ultimately, it is up to the Supreme Court to interpret the lawand it tends to take a very liberal view, said Rynhold, adding that this approach was in line with most western-style democracies. It is very difficult to ban political parties. The reason that Kahane was banned, apart from being racist, was the open and direct incitement to violence.

I think this decision will make absolutely no difference, he said.
Mother, tell me again

How I got here (to Israel)

About the desert journey

How we left at night and left everything behind

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This verse, from the famous song "Mother, tell me," about the tumultuous journey from Ethiopia that Jews had to go through on their way to Israel, opened the third Yerusalem Forum convention  a yearly meeting devoted to the Ethiopian Women Trailblazers Forum, celebrating women who make important contributions to Israeli society.

The Ethiopian Women Trailblazers Forum (Photo: Yair Itzhar)

This years convention was dedicated to 11 inspiring women; young women, academics, mothers and artists, who all make a positive impact on society in their unique way. The stories of two of these women, who made the journey to Zion, risked their lives to help other Jews and suffered difficult circumstances, were the evenings center piece.

Herut Takala Legese, 71, was born in 1948 in Kwara, Ethiopia. At the age of 16 she moved to Gondar, a city in the countrys north, to get a higher education, and became a nurse. She was then sent to work in the capital Addis Ababa in a childrens hospital ward, got married and gave birth to eight children.

In 1977, Takala lost her husband in a car crash, and remained the sole caretaker of her big family. Despite the traditional attitudes to women, Takala pushed forward, using her personal and determination to become the chief midwife, family planning advisor and head of the newborn clinic in an American hospital in Addis Ababa. She also quickly became the chairperson of the local womens organization.

I helped my people, said Takala, meaning the Jews who were her neighbors. I let them sleep in my house; I took care of them and brought them food. I was the only one who spoke English, so I became the leader in our efforts (to get to Israel). It was very hard to travel to Israel back then.

In 1986, a group of Ethiopian Jews making their way to Israel was captured by authorities. After they endured harsh torture, they gave up Takalas name as the person who helped them on their journey. She was arrested and imprisoned in the Addis Ababa central prison.

I was put in a dark room. Five or six soldiers started beating me up and asking questions. They hit my arms, my legs, my head. I was injured and taken to the clinic, then my leg was patched up and they continued beating me in other places. I was in prison for two years, she said. I didnt see my children for two years.

Herut Takala Legese (Photo: Eyal Yitzhar)

During the entire time of her imprisonment, Takala was questioned, beat up, starved and tortured  but she never gave up her accomplices. After two years she was released and reunited with her children  and together the family made its way to Israel in 1990.

Takala was acknowledged as a Prisoner of Zion  a Jew imprisoned due to Zionist activity  upon her arrival in Israel. She lived in Holon, near Tel Aviv, and worked at a womens maternity facility in Tel Aviv. She then moved to the city of Hadera, where she was a teacher for new immigrants, and worked at a facility for the elderly.

Asked how she felt when she arrived in Israel, Takala says with a smile: thats what I always wanted.

Another unknown hero is Asrese Getu Sahalo Girmay, who was born in Gondar, Ethiopia in 1958, the youngest of 10 children.

Unlike other families and against local customs, Asreses father decided to send both his sons and daughters to school  and after four years of studying in her village, she convinced her parents to let her continue her studies instead of marrying. She finished 12 years of school and became a nurse.

In the early 80s, Ethiopian authorities decided to send Asrese to work as a nurse at the front line near Asmara, where deadly battles were taking place between Eritrean separatists and the Ethiopian army as part of the Ethiopian Civil War. Her family then advised her to journey to Israel with a group that was going to travel via Sudan  and all the way into Zion  on foot.

From refugee to nurse

We made it to Sudan safely, but a month later I got sick, Aserese says. I got to a Red Cross clinic to receive treatment, and was told that I didn't deserve to be treated, since I made the journey on foot. I looked around and saw all these Ethiopian Jews who werent getting treatment and were being pushed aside. I thought to myself  Im going to volunteer.

'A beautiful 2,500 year historic community' (Photo: Eyal Yitzhar)

After Aserese proved herself as a volunteer, the Red Cross hired her as a nurse. She took care of many refugees of all religions during her work there, but most of all, she took care of Jewish refugees who were rejected by the others because of their religion.

If the Red Cross people were not there, I would sneak into the pharmacy and take medicine for free, she says. If they were there and looking, I paid with my own money. I helped everybody, anyone who came by. Sometimes the Jews asked me why I help Eritreans, and I told them that its my duty.

Asrese was risking her life doing the work she did, but continued fearlessly and even started volunteering in distributing aid money to Jewish families in the camp. She had to stop when she started getting threats from refugees who werent eligible for aid, and was told she'd be reported to the Sudanese authorities.

In 1985, after all other Jews at the camp left for Israel as part of Operation Moses, Asrese decided she would also leave Sudan. But someone told the local government that Jews were heading to Israel, and the roads were blocked. With the help of Ethiopian Jews who worked for Israel's Mossad spy agency, the camp dwellers contacted the Canadian Embassy in Sudan, and shortly after Asrese found herself in Winnipeg, Canada, holding a month-old baby in her arms.

She started working night shifts as a nurse in a local hospital, and in her free time volunteered to raise donations for the Ethiopian Jewish community. Asrese raised her daughter by herself, and after a five-year ordeal, was finally able to get her mother to leave Ethiopia and enter Canada. Her mother then moved to Israel, where she united with two of Asreses brothers, who had been released from Ethiopian prison with the help of the Mossad, and were also acknowledged as Prisoners of Zion upon their arrival in Israel.

One year later, Asrese also moved to Israel with her daughter, and continued working as a nurse  a vocation she continues to pursue to this day.

Asrese Getu Sahalo Girmay (Photo: Eyal Yitzhar)

"I had more than 100 little children, I saved many children, she says, and adds that she thinks she did nothing special and that she did what she had to do.

One of the children she had saved was there, at the convention. He had looked for her ever since he heard she made it to Israel, and at the convention presented her with a reward for all the work she had done for Ethiopian Jews.

"Ethiopian Jewry is beautiful has a beautiful history of over 2,500 years. There are so many inspiring heroic stories that need to be told, said Shmuel Yalma, founder and manager of the Yerusalem Forum.

Israeli society doesnt know these stories, especially the heroic stories of women, and thats why the Yerusalem Forum works to commemorate these stories and make them a part of the Israeli tale.
Israeli war planes struck targets in the Gaza Strip in the early hours of Friday, in response to two rockets fired at the Tel Aviv region on Thursday night.

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The Gaza strikes, which began a little after 1am, came shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened senior security officials at the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv.

Israeli sources said after the security meeting that, decisions had been made.

IAF strikes in Gaza (Photo: Reuters)

The Israeli media reported ahead of the Gaza air strikes that the IDF would deliver a significant response to the rocket fire.

We have just started striking terror sites in Gaza, the IDF posted on Twitter minutes after the air strikes began. Details to follow.

Not long after the IDF began its assault, air raid sirens sounded in some Israeli communities bordering the Gaza Strip.

Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad - the two Gaza terror groups responsible for previous rocket fire on Israel - denied carrying out the strikes.

Netanyahu during meeting in Kirya (Photo: Defense Ministry)

According to some reports, Hamas was rounding up people it suspected had a role in the rocket fire.

Thursdays rocket strikes were the first on the Tel Aviv area since the end of the 2014 war in Gaza. Netanyahus main rival in the April 9 elections, Benny Gantz, was head of the IDF at the time. Gantz called Thursday night for Israel to act aggressively against violations of our sovereignty and against an attack on the security of the state of Israel.
A rocket fired at the Eshkol Regional Council from the Gaza Strip overnight Thursday landed in the coastal enclave, failing to reach Israeli territory.
The IDF asses that the launching of two missiles at Israels center Thursday evening was a mistake.

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The two missiles were launched from a Hamas installation at 21:07, while the Egyptian negotiating team was in the Gaza Strip discussing Hamas arrangement with Israel and Egypt.

IDF attacks in the Gaza Strip

One missile fell in an uninhabited area, while the other appears to have exploded mid air.

This was followed by an IAF attack on over 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight Friday.

Targets included an office complex in Gaza City, an underground complex that served as Hamas' main rocket-manufacturing site, and a center used for a Hamas drone program.

The rocket attack Thursday night caught the IDF off guard and marked the first time that Tel Aviv, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Gaza, has been targeted since a 2014 war. Though the attack caused no damage or injuries, it was a significant escalation and set the stage for a tough Israei reprisal.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting with his military chief and other top security officials. Shortly after, Israeli warplanes attacked targets in southern and central Gaza.

The blasts were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 25 kilometers (15 miles) away from some of the strikes. The IAF warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

The IDF said it was targeting terror sites in Gaza, but gave no further details. Palestinian media said naval bases belonging to the ruling Hamas group had been struck. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Minutes later, the IDF reported air raid sirens in southern Israel. It said it had identified a launch attempt out of Gaza, but the rocket misfired and landed inside Palestinian territory.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since Israel and Hamas fought their last war, in 2014.

The sudden outburst of fighting comes at a sensitive time for both sides. National elections are in less than a month. Netanyahu is locked in a tight fight for re-election and could face heavy criticism from his opponents if he is seen as ineffective against the militants.

Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett, a hardline rival of Netanyahu's, called on the prime minister to convene a gathering of his Security Cabinet and demand the army "present a plan to defeat Hamas."

IDF attacks in Gaza (Photo: AFP)

Likewise, Hamas has come under rare public criticism in Gaza for the harsh conditions in the territory. An Israel-Egyptian blockade, combined with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and mismanagement by the Hamas government, have fueled an economic crisis in the territory. Residents have little desire for another war with Israel.

Earlier Thursday, Hamas police violently broke up a small protest over the harsh living conditions.

Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, chief IDF spokesman, said the army had been caught off guard by Thursday night's rocket barrage. He said officials were still trying to determine who had fired the rocket.

Israel holds Hamas responsible for all fire coming out of the territory. Hamas possesses a large arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of striking deep inside Israel.

But with Gaza's economy in tatters, the group has been seeking to preserve calm.

Hamas denied responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, saying the rockets were launched when the group's military wing was meeting with Egyptian mediators to try to strengthen a cease-fire with Israel.

Security Cabinet meeting following the attack on Tel Aviv Thursday night (Photo: Defense Ministry)

In an unusual step that indicated Hamas was attempting to prevent further escalation, the Hamas Interior Ministry said the rocket fire went "against the national consensus" and promised to take action against the perpetrators.

But the IDF concluded that Hamas did fire two rockets toward Tel Aviv. In a statement early Friday, the army said "we can confirm" that Hamas carried out the rocket attack.

Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militant group that also has a large rocket arsenal, also denied firing the rockets. Smaller factions inspired by the Islamic State group also sometimes fire rockets, though it is unclear whether they possess projectiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border. Late Thursday, local media said that Egyptian mediators left the territory.

At the time, Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

"I suggest to Hamas, don't count on it," he told his Cabinet. "We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general."
The Islamic Jihad, a militant terror group that operates from the Gaza Strip, said they are committed to the ceasefire agreement with Israel and do not intend to create another round of fighting.

As long as Israel stops its attacks against the Palestinian people, we are also committed to stopping (any form of attack), in accordance to the ceasefire agreement. Israel alone bears responsibility to this serious aggravation of things, they said.
After Thursday night's lack of clarity in the wake over the origins of the two rockets fired from Gaza at the Tel Aviv area, the IDF on Friday morning stated that the Hamas terror organization was behind the attack. One of the rockets landed in an unpopulated area and the second apparently disintegrated in midair.

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The IDF also assessed that the rockets were fired by mistake. But given that this is not the first time that this has happened, we can allow ourselves to be a little skeptical.

Drivers in Tel Aviv's Ayalon highway run for cover during the sirens Thursday night (Photo: Ran Boker)

The skepticism stems from the fact that in October of last year - when rockets were fired from Gaza at Be'er Sheva (hitting a family home) and the central region (falling into the sea) - Hamas fired at Israeli population centers and then denied all responsibility.

In October, Israel accepted Hamas' curious claim that the rockets had been discharged accidentally because of the poor weather. This time, the IDF has accepted that this was an accident, due to the reliability of its sources.

Hamas denied firing the rockets, and on Thursday even released the unusual statement that it would punish those responsible. The claim is that the people who fired the rockets did so without permission from the leadership of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip.

It seems that Hamas wants the best of both worlds  enjoying the impact of rocket fire on Israel, without taking responsibility for it.

Trouble in Gaza

So why did Hamas fire the rockets (if it were deliberate)? For two major reasons.

Firstly, because of the serious and exceptional riots that took place Thursday in Gaza with the rallying cry of "let us live," in which the Hamas police force used considerable violence against Gaza residents. The organization's leadership felt threatened as it has not felt since it seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007.

Damages in the Gaza Strip, following the IAF strikes (Photo: Reuters)

Secondly, because of the talks with the Egyptians over a lull in the tensions along the Israel-Gaza border, which have been going on for some time. Hamas has a long list of demands, including $30 million a month (the payments from Qatar are supposed to end in April, and it is unclear whether they will continue), funding for UN-sponsored jobs, an increased electricity supply and an increased range for fishing.

Israel says that this is indeed possible, if Hamas puts an end to the "marches of return" along the security fence, the launching of the aerial incendiary and explosive devices that have become increasingly dangerous, and definitely the firing of rockets. The wheat in the south of Israel is about to ripen, and if the fields are burned, the damage will be considerable. Hamas is saying no, the marches will continue and we will keep them in check (although they were canceled for Friday, as apparently Hamas realized that a red line had been crossed).

So with talks apparently at a dead end, and in the face of a mass protest within Gaza over living conditions, Hamas realized it had to urgently channel the anger and frustration of the people under its rule at Israel.

A restrained message

The IDF's overnight response to the rocket fire included an exceptionally severe attack on the infrastructure and facilities belonging to the Hamas military wing (nor did Islamic Jihad emerge unscathed from the airstrikes).

But given that Israel has no desire to see an escalation that would require a ground invasion of Gaza during an election campaign, and so that residents of the south would not claim that only attacks on Tel Aviv elicit a harsh response, the reaction was overall relatively restrained.

Furthermore, Hamas ensured that its facilities were evacuated before the Israeli strikes began, and the IDF had no real possibility of harming senior officials, even if there had been any real desire to do so.

Both the Hamas rocket fire and the Israeli response fell within the same scale of proportionality, in which a major campaign was avoided as both sides sought to limit the incident to a short flare-up.

Even so, there are two things that could jeopardize the efforts for calm: the "marches of return" may have been canceled for Friday, but there could still be riots as Gazans mark the first anniversary of these protests at the end of the month. The second risk is of a random incident, such as a severe outcome during rocket fire at Israel or in one of the IDF attacks in Gaza. Either way, the Israeli army is ready for an escalation.
North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a ban on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, news reports from the North's capital on Friday quoted a senior diplomat as saying.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last month's summit in Hanoi between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Russia's TASS news agency and the Associated Press said.

"We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital.
Leaders around the world expressed disgust and sorrow at the killing of 49 people in New Zealand mosques on Friday, and some also expressed anger at what they described as the demonisation of Muslims that fuelled such attacks.

Western leaders from Donald Trump to Angela Merkel expressed solidarity with the people of New Zealand, deploring what the White House called a "vicious act of hate". The response from some Muslim countries went further, blaming politicians and the media for stoking that hatred.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 (where) 1.3 billion Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror," Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote on social media.
Hundreds of Palestinians protested against Hamas rule Friday in the city of Deir al-Balah, in the center of the Gaza Strip.

The crowd protested against the cost of living, burned tiers and blocked main junctions in the city. Protests started breaking out in Khan Younis, a city in the strips south, but crowds said that Hamas forces dispersed the rally, that they were severely beaten and that shots were fired.

This is the second day of protests against Hamas, the terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, organized by unknown leaders who expressed their wish to organize rallies across the strip.
Benny Gantz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's toughest rival in the upcoming parliamentary election, dismissed as "political gossip" on Friday media reports of allegations that his mobile phone had been hacked by Iranian intelligence.

The former armed forces chief was speaking near the border with Gaza following a day which saw the most serious escalation in months between Israel's military and Palestinians in the coastal enclave.

"We're in the middle of an ongoing security event...and someone's putting out a political gossip story," Gantz said. "I do not think Benny Gantz is the story here. There's no security issue there. No threat and no blackmail."

Channel 12 news reported on Thursday that the country's Shin Bet security services believed Iranian state intelligence had accessed the ex-general's personal information and correspondences and had informed him of the hack five weeks ago.

Gantz's centrist Blue and White party has outpaced Netanyahu's conservative Likud in polls in the run-up to the April 9 vote.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) announced on Thursday that it is delaying its demerger plans for its wealth management and mortgage broking businesses.

This decision stems from the intent to prioritise the implementation of the banking royal commissions recommendations, refunding of customers, and remediation of past issues.

CBA said, however, that it remains committed to its strategy to become a simpler, better bank, which includes the exit of its wealth management and mortgage broking businesses.

The bank disclosed the demerger in June 2018, noting that it needed to streamline its business model and focus on more traditional banking services by combining its Colonial First State brands and mortgage broking business, Aussie Home Loan, in a company called CFS Group.

However, in October, CBA announced that it would sell Colonial First State Global Asset Management to Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking Corporation for $4.13 billion while pushing through with the demerger of the remaining assets.

Experts speculated that CBA's initial plan to float the business this year, dubbed as "NewCo," could have faced challenges.

NewCo is also much smaller than what had been initially flagged in April last year, after an October deal to sell Colonial First State Global Asset Management to a Japanese banking giant for $4.1 billion, said The Sydney Morning Herald.
Seven suburbs from within the Perth region dominated the list of the top 10 most popular suburbs in West Australia among tenants over the past year. Those included in the roster logged lower vacancy rate and higher median rents, according to Real Estate Institute of Western Australias (REIWA) data.

The list is also quite varied in terms of population. While we would expect to see suburbs with larger numbers of properties in areas like Baldivis and Canning Vale return high search volumes, a number of the suburbs on the list that ranked well have fewer than 10,000 people residing in the area, REIWA President Damian Collins said.

The report showed, though, that areas like Mandurah, Geraldton, Bunbury, and Kalgoorlie represented a broader urban area, which has likely contributed to their popularity among WA tenants.

Mandurah, Rockingham, and Baldivis in the south of Perth are the most popular suburbs.

Geraldton and Bunbury in regional WA followed closely, completing the top five suburbs with the highest searches. Joondalup, Scarborough, Kalgoorlie, Ellenbrook and Canning Vale, meanwhile, sealed the list.

The report also found that nine of the 10 suburbs on the list recorded drops in the number of properties available for rent in their respective areas over 2018. Mandurah, Canning Vale, and Bunbury posted the most substantial declines.

When there is increased interest in a suburb and fewer rentals available, this leads to stronger competition between tenants. While overall rent prices in Perth have been stable for a while now, there are some pockets that are starting to see prices rise, Collins said.

Baldivis, Geraldton, Scarborough and Canning Vale also experienced increases in median rent over the last year, with their rent prices climbing by $10, $5, $18 and, $10 respectively.

Landlords also found it faster to find tenants in these areas, with reiwa.com data showing that nine of the 10 suburbs recorded a rise in their average leasing times during the last year.

Canning Vale (39 days) and Joondalup (45 days) had the most notable drop in leasing times both down by 11 days in 201. Baldivis (41 days), Geraldton (57 days) and Scarborough (39 days) followed closely,  each of them down by 10 days. Bunbury, meanwhile, was the only area on the list to not record an improvement in average leasing time.

These 10 areas clearly hold a lot of appeal for West Aussie tenants. If youre an investor looking to buy, Id recommend speaking to a real estate agent about how these local markets are performing and what investment opportunities are available, Collins said.
News

Abilene, Texas - The District Court for the Northern District of Texas entered a consent decree of permanent injunction against defendants JMA Partners Inc., a compounding pharmacy doing business as Guardian Pharmacy Services (Guardian), and Jack R. Munn, Guardians owner, the Department of Justice announced today.

The injunction permanently enjoins the defendants from distributing adulterated, misbranded, and unapproved new drugs in violation of the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA).

The Department filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on March 6, 2019, at the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), alleging, among other things, that the defendants failed to adequately address insanitary conditions at their drug-compounding facility. The complaint further alleges that defendants distributed misbranded and unapproved new drugs because, among other things, the drugs were distributed by the defendants without patient-specific prescriptions.

As part of the ordered permanent injunction, defendants cannot resume manufacturing, processing, or distributing sterile drugs until FDA determines that they have complied with specific remedial measures. Those measures seek to ensure that defendants manufacture and distribute drugs in conformity with applicable manufacturing standards.

Doctors and patients must be able to rely on the safety and quality of drugs produced by compounding pharmacies, said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt of the Justice Departments Civil Division. The Department of Justice will continue to work with FDA to enforce the provisions of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

According to the complaint, defendants drugs were adulterated because they were prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby they may have been contaminated or may have been rendered injurious to health. For example, the complaint alleges that during a 2018 FDA Inspection, defendants used non-sterile disinfectants that were labeled as sterile throughout the facility. The complaint further alleges that defendants failed to take adequate corrective actions after documenting repeated instances of high humidity levels in an area specially designed for aseptic processing of sterile drugs. High humidity levels in aseptic processing areas can lead to an increase in the proliferation of microorganisms present in those areas.

On July 28, 2017, FDA issued a Compounding Risk Alert to warn health professionals of adverse event reports concerning at least 43 patients who were administered intravitreal (eye) injections of a drug containing triamcinolone (a steroid) and moxifloxacin (an antibiotic) compounded by Guardian. According to the FDAs Compounding Risk Alert, these patients developed various symptoms, including vision impairment.

Guardian initiated voluntary recalls of drug products in 2016 and 2018. The 2016 recall involved certain unexpired sterile drug products, and was initiated due to a lack of sterility assurance. The 2018 recall, initiated after FDAs 2018 Inspection, involved products within expiry intended to be sterile. Guardian also temporarily ceased sterile production at that time.

The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act is designed to protect the public health, said U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox for the Northern District of Texas. Our district is a committed partner in enforcing the provisions of the Act in the interest of public safety.

When the FDA finds compounders that continue to violate the law by not adhering to manufacturing requirements, and put patients at risk, we are going to hold them accountable under the law, said FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D. Weve continued to see violative behavior among compounding pharmacies, and were committed to taking enforcement actions against drug compounders that threaten the public health.

The government is represented by Trial Attorney Raquel Toledo of the Civil Divisions Consumer Protection Branch and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary M. (Marti) Cherry of the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Texas, with the assistance of Associate Chief Counsel, Enforcement, Jennifer Argabright of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of General Counsel.
News

Washington, DC - Vice President Pence at a Breakfast with Prime Minister Varadkar of Ireland:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, top of the morning. (Laughter.) And welcome to the official residence of the Vice President of the United States. This is an extraordinary tradition, and it is a great, great honor, for our third time, as a family in this historic residence to welcome the Taoiseach of Ireland, Leo Varadkar back to Washington, D.C. (Applause.)

Theres a distinguished group of guests here, and, Mr. Taoiseach, I thank you for continuing whats become a tenured tradition of beginning your visit to our nations capital as St. Patricks Day approaches this coming Sunday here at the Vice Presidents Residence. And we are so honored to be able to extend the hospitality of this home to you.

But were also really honored to be joined by your partner, Dr. Matthew Barrett. He does great work at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. And, Matt, its an honor to have you here with us as well. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you.

If youre enjoying the hospitality this morning, the credit goes to the Second Lady of the United States, who unfortunately couldnt be with us today because shes representing our country at the International Special Olympics in Abu Dhabi. But she asked my Irish sister, Annie Poynter, to represent her here today. So, Annie, thank you so much for coming today and for representing our family. (Applause.)

But to the Taoiseach, I would say youve got a great group of Americans here, and we want to welcome them all. To Ambassador and Mrs. Mulhall, thank you for your presence. To Congressman Fitzpatrick, Congressman Byrne, great members of the Congress of the United States  where you will be a little bit later today for the annual luncheon  join me in thanking these distinguished members of Congress who are with us today. (Applause.)

These are great Irish Americans, and there is one more member of Congress who takes great pride in his Irish American heritage. Hes here with his wife, Denise. Congressman Greg Pence is with us as well. (Applause.)

But to Carl Anderson, to Tom Donohue, and to my friend of many years, Father Jenkins  who is President of the University of Notre Dame  thank you all for being here this morning. (Applause.)

This is a beautiful morning, and it put my mind to my very first trip to Ireland. Right after my grandfather  who emigrated from Ireland in 1923  right after he passed away, we had actually planned to go to Ireland together. And it was June, and we traveled all around to all the communities where my great-grandparents had grown up, where my grandfather had grown up in Tubercurry and in Doonbeg.

But I have to be honest with you: It was a little rainy that June  (laughter)  and I know thats rare in Ireland. (Laughter.) A little rainy. A little cold. And  but Ill never forget, one Sunday morning we were in Galway, the sun came out, the temperature rose to 70 degrees, and I went to a pub later that day and Ill never forget, a fellow behind the bar looked at me and he said, Its a glorious day. He said, Summer came on a Sunday this year. (Laughter.)

And I thank  I want to thank the Taoiseach for bringing this glorious weather with us today to begin this great St. Patricks Day weekend on this beautiful morning.

And I know President Trump is very much looking forward to welcoming you back to the White House today for what we know will be substantive conversations. I spoke to the President this morning and he wanted me to extend his warmest greetings to you. The President said on your last visit, Ireland is a great country and the relationship is outstanding. And with your leadership, his leadership, the relationship has only grown more strong.

And today is actually a perfect time to dwell on that relationship and everything that the Irish have done for America. Thirty-two million Americans trace their heritage back to the Emerald Island. Me included.

The Irish peoples contributions to the American story stretch all the way back to the Revolutionary War and long before. The contribution of Irish Americans to the life of this nation extends to our armed forces, to science, to sports, to business. And its incalculable to think of the incredible contribution that Irish Americans have made and continue to make to this great nation.

The Irish have given so much to America. And today, the partnership between our two countries, as the Taoiseach knows, has never been stronger. When it comes to prosperity, more than 700 U.S. companies employ 150,000 people in Ireland. And our two countries trade nearly $130 billion in goods and services every year. And I want to assure the Taoiseach that this administration is committed to growing these economic ties and making them stronger than ever before.

The United States also stands with the Irish Republic as the United Kingdom continues to work through the issues of Brexit. And we look forward to the day that we can even begin talks about expanded trade and a new trade agreement to grow our two economies and prosper both of our peoples.

So its an honor to be with you today. Thank you for coming here and honoring us with your presence. But thank you also for the invitation to make an official visit to Ireland. You did say the one condition was that I had to bring my mother. (Laughter.) And Im happy to report to Taoiseach Varadkar that I have spoken to Mom  (laughter)  first-generation Irish American mother of mine, and she has now confirmed that she will travel with us  (laughter)  to Ireland and we are making plans to return to my grandfathers homestead as we speak. So were looking very much forward. (Applause.)

You know, Ill close by way of introduction by saying it really is a joy to share this moment with you for the second year in a row.

And people often ask me what I thought about on Inauguration Day when I raised my right hand. And to be honest with you, I was surrounded by my family, and I felt a great sense of humility about the opportunity that wed been given to serve in this capacity in our nation. But as I looked out at that vast throng of Americans and took that oath, I thought about my grandfather. I thought about April 11, 1923, when a young man came through Ellis Island, traveled to Chicago, where Matt lives, and built a future.

And he was proud to be an American, and he was proud of his American family, but I can still hear that Irish brogue in my heart  the way my grandfather used to speak when he talked about the old country, when he talked about his life across the pond.

And to Taoiseach Varadkar, I would tell you that Ive inherited a lot from my grandfather and I hope all of his best qualities. But I want to assure you, his love for the Irish people, his love for his Irish heritage is bone-marrow deep for me and for my family. And so it is such a great honor to be able to begin this celebration in our nations capital with you here at the Vice Presidents Residence.

With that being said, would you all join me in welcoming the Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, Leo Varadkar, to the home of the Vice President of the United States.
Canada is offering its support to New Zealand after shootings at two mosques in Christchurch killed 49 people, said federal Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Ralph Goodale at a Kelowna event.

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Chicago, Illinois - The creator of a fraudulent Chicago-area pharmacy has been sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for his role in a $1.6 million health care fraud scheme.

Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Departments Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney John R. Lausch Jr. of the Northern District of Illinois, Special Agent in Charge Jeffrey S. Sallet of the FBIs Chicago Field Office and Special Agent in Charge Lamont Pugh III of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector Generals (HHS-OIG) Chicago Regional Office made the announcement.

James Calhoun, 74, of Des Plaines, Illinois, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee of the Northern District of Illinois. Judge Lee also ordered Calhoun to pay $1.6 million in restitution. Calhoun pleaded guilty in September 2018 to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud.

As part of his guilty plea, Calhoun admitted that he defrauded Medicare Part D of $1.6 million through an elaborate scheme in which he created a fictitious pharmacy on paper called Cals Pharmacy and used it to process hundreds of prescription claims for drugs that were never dispensed. For most of its existence, the pharmacy had no physical location or inventory, he admitted. Calhoun further admitted that he enrolled himself as a beneficiary in a Part D program and, from around January 2012 continuing through at least May 2015, Calhoun went to doctors appointments to try to obtain prescriptions for drugs that he would then pretend to fill at Cals Pharmacy, including and most often for the drug Arixtra, an expensive daily injection. Calhoun also admitted that acting as Cals Pharmacys owner, a fact that was concealed through the use of a straw owner, Calhoun collected all of the Part D reimbursement payments made to Cals Pharmacy. In addition to pretending to fill prescriptions for himself, Calhoun admitted that he fabricated prescription claims for three other people, including his codefendant and wife, Betty Calhoun. Calhoun also admitted that later on in the scheme, when Medicare started to deny the prescription claims, Calhoun appealed the denial and knowingly created and submitted to Medicare false and fabricated checks as part of his appeal, including to an administrative law judge, claiming they showed his payment for Arixtra prescriptions from Cals Pharmacy.

The total loss to Medicare was $1.6 million, Calhoun admitted.

Betty Calhoun pleaded guilty to one count of health care false statements in November 2018 and was sentenced to probation.

This case was investigated by the FBI and HHS-OIG. Trial Attorney Leslie S. Garthwaite of the Criminal Divisions Fraud Section prosecuted the case.

The Criminal Divisions Fraud Section leads the Medicare Fraud Strike Force. Since its inception in March 2007, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, now operating in 12 cities across the country, has charged nearly 4,000 defendants who have collectively billed the Medicare program for more than $14 billion. In addition, the HHS Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with the HHS-OIG, are taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers.
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As at 1600 GMT on March 15, 2019, checks on Google.com on how the Ghana cedi stands against the three major trading currencies show about 300 percentage point devaluation since the same time the previous day.

Now, the Ghanaian authorities responsible for the management of the economy have not yet issued a statement on the information carried by Google.

Social media, the platform for people to share concerns relating to matters of this nature, is abuzz with folks castigating either Google or the Ghana government.

The cedi, prior to the Armageddon-esque numbers given by Google, was already in a weak position as weighed against the British pound, Euro and the US dollar.

But the significant nosedive it has reportedly taken is quite dramatic over 24 hours.

READ ALSO: 6 most adorable ministers in Akufo-Addo's administration

It is not known if the numbers being given by Google is as a result of a technical glitch.

Whatever the case, a generation that finds most of its information on the internet may be believing what they are seeing.

If the Google numbers turn out to be false as it most likely will, the question remains as to whether the Ghana government will pursue legal action against the tech giants.

READ ALSO: 3 persons arrested for Defrauding Market Women of Ghc 220,000

YEN.com.gh's check with foreign exchange operators have actually shown that between March 14 and 15, 2019, the cedi appreciated against the major trading currencies.

This follows an announcement by the Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta that the central bank was pumping $800 million into the economy.

ATTENTION: 12 Times Celebs Flaunted Their Mindblowing Wealth on Instagram

The politics of the cedi's exchange rate has always been a fierce one in Ghana.

But in 2016, it became the focal point of the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) presidential running mate, Mahamadu Bawumia's attacks on the then John Mahama government.

Ghana News Today: Residents of Tuba are living on a time bomb | #Yencomgh:

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Hours after former minister and YSR Congress party leader YS Vivekananda Reddy was found dead at his residence in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh under suspicious circumstances, the party on Friday demanded a high-level Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the matter.

68-year-old Vivekananda Reddy was the brother of former chief minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy.

The party spokesperson Vasireddy Padma claimed that the circumstances leading to the death cause concern, adding that it can't be brushed aside by a regular inquiry, like SIT. She further asserted that there has been a methodical attack on the YSR family members.

Recalling the death of YS Rajasekhara Reddy, she said that he was a victim of a helicopter crash. She also claimed that recently there was an attack on the YS Jagan Mohan Reddy at the Vizag airport and it shows the conspiracy angle to the episode. She said that only a high-level probe can bring the truth out.

Vivekananda Reddy had returned from election campaign at Jammalamdugu on Thursday night and the local MLA who had defected to ruling TDP was given the Kadapa Lok Sabha ticket for the April 11 election.

Party spokesperson Vasireddy Padma said, "The death behind the suspicious death of YS Vivekananda Reddy should be probed by a high-level investigation agency as the circumstances leading to the death causes concern. They cannot be brushed aside by a regular inquiry like SIT as there has been a methodical attack on the YSR family members. While Dr. YS Rajasekhara Reddy was a victim of helicopter crash, recently there was an attack on the Leader of Opposition YS Jagan Mohan Reddy at the Vizag airport which shows the conspiracy angle to the episode. YS Vivekananda Reddy had returned from election campaign at Jammalamdugu last night and the local MLA who had defected to ruling TDP was given the Kadapa Lok Sabha ticket in the April 11 elections."

She said that only a high-level probe can bring the truth out.

This was the third unnatural death in the YS family that has a powerful political hold in Kadapa district. While YS Raja Reddy was murdered in 1998, the eldest son YS Rajasekhara Reddy was killed in a helicopter crash in 2009.

The police had initially registered a case under Section 174 CrPC (unnatural death) when the body of Reddy was found by his staff early in the morning but after a post-mortem, the case was altered to Section 302 IPC that relates to murder.

The Andhra Pradesh government has already constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the death.

Vivekananda Reddy was a two-time MLA, two-time MP, and a one-term MLC. He served as agriculture minister in the N Kiran Kumar Reddy government in united Andhra Pradesh. He is survived by his wife and a daughter. Police said injuries were found on the forehead, head, and its back, besides on the hand and thigh.
Kadapa: YSR Congress party leader YS Vivekananda Reddy was found dead at his residence under suspicious circumstances on Friday. He was 68 years old.

Vivekananda Reddy - a former Andhra Pradesh Minister  is believed to have suffered a massive cardiac arrest at his residence in Pulivendula town.

The former MP was alone at his house and his body was found in a pool of blood in the bathroom.

In view of suspicion over his death, a formal police complaint has been filed by his personal assistant Krishna Reddy in this regard.

#UPDATE YS Vivekananda Reddy's PA Krishna Reddy has filed a complaint with Police expressing suspicion over the death of Vivekananda Reddy. Police has sent the body for post mortem and begun investigation. #AndhraPradesh https://t.co/6powZohK8b  ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

A case of unnatural death under Section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure has been registered and the police have begun their investigations.

A former Lok Sabha member, Vivekananda was the younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy and uncle of YSR Congress party President YS Jaganmohan Reddy.

He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

According to his PA, the deceased YSRCP leader had injury marks on his forehead.

His body was taken for autopsy to a government hospital.

YSR Congress leaders have expressed concerns over his death and called for a probe.

They claimed he was fine till Thursday and had participated in the election campaigning.

MP Vijay Sai Reddy called for an impartial probe to find out if it was a natural death or accidental death or there was some other cause.

Vivekananda Reddy was elected from the Kadapa Lok Sabha constituency on Congress ticket in 1999 and 2004. He was twice elected to the Andhra Pradesh Assembly (1989, 1994) from Pulivendula, a family stronghold.

He was also elected to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council in 2009 and served as Agriculture Minister in Kiran Kumar Reddy`s cabinet.

He remained loyal to Congress when Jaganmohan Reddy raised a banner of revolt against the party for not picking him as the successor of his father and Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy following his death in a helicopter crash in 2009.

Jagan Reddy had alleged that Congress tried to engineer split in the family by making Vivekananda Reddy a Minister. The young leader subsequently floated YSR Congress party.

Vivekananda Reddy contested 2011 by-election from Pulivendula constituency against his sister-in-law and Jagan`s mother YS Vijayamma, who contested as YSR Congress candidate and won with a huge majority.

He later quit the Congress and joined YSR Congress.

(With IANS inputs)
New Delhi: Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad on Friday said that the Bhima-Koregaon violence can recur if the Constitution is tampered with. Azad was addressing a Hunkar rally in the national capital on Friday when he said,

"The Bhim Army was made to protect the Constitution. Before you got and vote remember the demise of Rohith Vemula. Do you remember Rohith Vemula? Do you remember Una violence? Do you remember Shabbirpur? Do you remember the Phagwara incident? Who pulled the trigger? Will you forget all these and vote?"

He added, "People are free to vote, but remember that the oppressor will always remain an oppressor. That's why I said, we will repeat Bhima Koregaon violence. But for now, we don't feel the need for it. But we will repeat Bhima Koregaon if the Constitution is tampered with."

Azad also announced his decision to contest the Lok Sabha election against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Varanasi seat and urged the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party alliance to support him. The Dalit leader also announced its support to SP-BSP on all 79 seats they are contesting in Uttar Pradesh general assembly elections.

"I will challenge Narendra Modi in Varanasi. To protect the Constitution and the rights of Dalits. I do not want to become an MP or MLA. Had that been the case, I would have chosen a reserved seat," he was quoted as saying by PTI.

Bhim Army's C. Azad:Vote dene se pehle Rohith ki shahadat yaad rakhna,Atyachari,atyachari hota hai,vo kabhi tumhara hiteshi nahi ho sakta...Isliye maine kaha Bhima-Koregaon dohra denge,abhi uski zarurat nahi ai hai,jis din desh ke samvidhan pe aanch ai,Bhima-Koregaon dohra denge pic.twitter.com/X92UgUX5Rx  ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

"After the prime minister came to know that we are going to challenge him in Varanasi, he started washing the feet of sanitation workers in Allahabad," he added.

"We will send out a message to workers of Bhim Army to work hard to defeat the BJP. I will contest against Prime Minister Modi and defeat him. The whole Bahujan community is with us. I will teach him a lesson," he added.

The Bhim Army also announced that it will field a candidate against Union Minister Smriti Irani.

On Wednesday, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi met the Bhim Army Chief at a hospital in Meerut, where he was hospitalised, thus, triggering all political curiosity. Azad was admitted to a hospital after he fell ill after police detained him for allegedly violating the poll code of conduct by taking out a 'Bahujan Hunkar' bike rally in Saharanpur, on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Kanshi Ram, the founder of BSP.
NEW DELHI: In the wake of reports that RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav is active on social media despite being lodged in jail following his conviction in the fodder scam cases, the Election Commission has ordered an inquiry into the alleged social media activities of former Bihar chief minister.

Lalu Yadav is currently lodged in Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi, Jharkhand.

According to Zee Media reports, Bihar Chief Electoral Officer HR Srinivasa had said that the poll panel will ascertain whether Lalu Prasad is handling his Twitter and Facebook accounts inside the jail or somebody from outside is handling them.

The Chief Electoral Officer said that action may be taken against him after the inquiry if allegations are found to be true.

Sanjay Singh, Returning Officer in Patna, too informed that the poll panel is keeping an eye on Lalu Yadav's Twitter account.

This comes at a time when the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear petitions filed by Lalu Yadav seeking bail in three cases related to the multi-crore fodder scam.

A bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi will take up Lalu Yadav's petition challenging the January 10 verdict of the Jharkhand High Court, rejecting bail to him in these cases.

The fodder scam related to fraudulent withdrawal of government funds from the treasuries of various districts of undivided Bihar in the 1990s when RJD was in power and Lalu Yadav was the chief minister.

The RJD chief was lodged in Ranchi jail in December 2017 in these cases. In the High Court, the RJD supremo had cited old age and poor health for grant of bail.

71-year-old Lalu Yadav is suffering from diabetes, blood pressure and other ailments.

In his petition seeking bail, he had argued that he had already obtained bail in one of the fodder scam cases.

Lalu was convicted for fraudulent withdrawal of money from Deoghar, Dumka and two Chaibasa treasuries. He later got bail in one of the two Chaibasa-treasury related cases.

He is currently facing a fifth case pertaining to Doranda treasury. The RJD chief has been undergoing treatment at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences in Ranchi.

The over Rs 900 crore fodder scam related to fraudulent withdrawal of money from treasuries in the Animal Husbandry department in the early 90s when Bihar and Jharkhand were one state.

(With PTI inputs)
The designation of Masood Azhar as a terrorist in the UNSCR 1267 list has been blocked yet again by China using its veto power. China has its own economic reasons for doing this.

The Chinese have penetrated into Pakistan on account of recent their CEPC and BRI initiatives. They have invested heavily in Pakistan. There are indeed geopolitical reasons for that. Paramount is the effort to counterbalance Pakistan. The quantum of investment is huge to extend their access to Gwadar Port in Pakistan almost running through the heart of Pakistan.

In addition, there are reportedly 60,000 Chinese workers in Pakistan, which is also a weakling and security of these personnel located in Pakistan is one of the reasons perhaps. This has to be seen in the context that there was a terrorist attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi in the recent past. This reaffirms that being a friend and benefactor is no guarantee in a terror-ridden state like Pakistan.

Having said that, even this terror attack on the Chinese consulate might have been a ploy employed by the Pakistani state to leverage China into offer quid pro quo support to their terror entities in exchange for the protection of Chinese works from terror attacks. We don't know. Anything is possible in Pakistan.

Indeed, they have been caught dressing up the Balakot post-attack footprints. If the attack was on a non-state actor's establishment, why should they dress up the scene? A million dollar question.

But as far as student of geopolitics of the South Asia region are concerned, they are well aware that there is little distinction between state and non-state actors in Pakistan, including its head of the state.

All are subservient to the mighty Army, which effectively rules by proxy. They decide who will be the chief of ISI, who will win the election, which terror organisation is to be formed, which ones are to be rechristened (reportedly Jaish-e-Mohammad or some other organisations are being rechristened as Al Madina), amalgamation and merger of these terror organisations, including recruitment policies of the terror organisations and their training modules.

The mighty Army also decides how much opium is to be harvested from their western frontiers, as betrayed by the repeated interjection of their defence personnel(read ISI) in bilateral discussions on subject relating to MOU between our Narcotics Control Bureau and Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force, if I recall from personal memory.

At the same time, I have observed one thing. There is a unity of command. Not just that. In matters anti-India, there is unity and convergence of opinion. This is very important for our politicians to learn.

Let me recall the case of Rehman Malik, who was Interior Minister in 2008 and oversaw the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, recently came out and issued a statement in consonance and echoing the statement of Pakistan government, although he is no longer in any position. This is lesson for our political parties.

Here, the leader of an opposition party is poking fun at the failure of the government to reign in China. Many of their leaders are celebrating this as a failure of the government. Let us get it right. I have already explained China has its own reasons to stand in support of Pakistan and Masood Azhar. It is better economics than politics for them.

In a tweet before China blocked Masood Azhar's designation as a terrorist, I had forecast what Beijing would do. I am not chest thumping. That is not my ilk. It is the ilk of some of the Congressmen. Yesterday, in one of the debates, one Congressman said he had proudly claimed success in enlisting of Hafiz Saeed as an entity in UNSCR 1276 list.

I was at the helm of affairs at that time. If Hafiz Saeed is on the UNSCR list, credit goes to one gentleman. His name is HS Puri. He was India's Permanent Representative to UN posted at New York. He steadfastedly chased with us all the documents and evidences that are required and requested by various nations in support of the proposal. The same officer in fact had also wanted such documents in support proposal of domestic designation by USA under UNSCR 1373, but I have detailed in my book how the same was not provided for a long time. Incidentally, the steadfast and excellent diplomat joined politics in 2014 and is a minister in the present government.

HS Puri's case is not isolated. Let us take the case of another officer. He was Commissioner of Police in Pune when the German Bakery blast occurred. I have explained again in my book as to how the state government was alerted through an advisory, but the same did not penetrate to the Commissioner. He was a celebrated and able officer and had he got the advisory in time he would have averted or pre-empted that attack. Also recall that he is the officer who had sent a report on the anti-national activities of Zakir Naik to the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The then government, which was friendly towards Naik, trivialised this report as a communal issue and not fraught with risk to the security of the country. Hence, they sent the report to Human Rights/National Integration Division (HR/NI Division), which concluded as per their policy and perspective that there is no danger to security and closed the matter. Ordinarily, this should have been dealt in the Internal Security Division or least in the FCRA Division as the report had contained certain inputs to place the IRF of Dr Naik, at least on probation.

After his tenure in Pune, he was posted as Commissioner of Police in Mumbai. The investigation into the 26/11 Mumbai attacks were on in full swing at that time. We all know that there were several interventions from the government in the investigation to ensure that local conspirators are not brought to book. This would have exposed many high and mighty and people dear to the establishment.

I am not speculating. I would like readers to also read the reply to Lok Sabha Starred Question no 78 answered on 2.3.2010, where the government has admitted that Kasab had confessed to involvement of locals. Incidentally, he is also a Minister in the present government. The name of the officer is Dr Satya Pal Singh.

Next on the list is a former Union Home Secretary. It is reported that in 2013, when my harassment by Satish Verma was taken up by Secretary of Urban Development with him, he had strongly taken up the case with establishment. Unfortunately, he superannuated in a few days and hence could not take it up further. There were several issues on which he had differences with the then dispensation. His name is RK Singh. He to is a minister in the present government

Next on the list is the former Chief of Army Staff. He was accused of planning to stage a coup against the government. Stupid it may sound, as we all know that there are more than 10,000 army personnel posted at any time in Delhi, and if an Army general wants a coup, it is just a matter of minutes to give shape to this evil design.

But the Indian Army or security personnel on the whole enjoy the trust of the nation more than the politicians. It is sacrilege and preposterous on the part of any political party to throw such allegations. In fact, the powers that be at the time should be prosecuted criminally for this false news and painting the Indian Army in bad light. The name of the Army Chief is General VK Singh, and he too is a minister in the Cabinet.

There are some more instances of people involved in public policy being humiliated and harassed by the previous dispensation. Let us get it right. HS Puri, Satya Pal Singh, RK Singh and General VK Singh are more nationalist than any of these politicians taking swipe at them.

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and do not reflect the views of ZMCL.)
New Delhi: Bollywood actor Sidharth Malhotra has finally finished shooting for his upcoming film Marjaavaan.

The 34-year-old actor shared pictures on his Instagram account with the entire cast and crew of the film, who got together to celebrate the wrap-up.Sidharth, through his post, thanked the entire crew for their hard work and sent love to the cast of the film including Riteish Deshmukh, Rakulpreet Singh, and Tara Sutaria.#Marjaavaan Done ! Finished all my scenes for the film, what an amazing experience with this fun warm team! Thanks to @milapzaveri .

A big thank you to the entire crew for all their hard work! And a big hug n love to my co-stars, my partner crime @riteishd, @tarasutaria__ @rakulpreet, @shaadrandhawa #nassar sir. P.S - still have a film song shoot, he captioned the post.The actor will be seen in a full-on mass avatar for the upcoming action-packed thriller. Earlier, the actor had shared photos from the sets of the film, sporting a rugged avatar.

The `Student of the Year` star looked intense and showed off tattoos of all religions inked on his knuckles- Hinduism`s Om, Islam`s Allah, Sikhism`s Khanda and Christianity`s Cross.The first look poster of the film was unveiled last year and its tagline "Ishq mein marenge bhi, maarenge bhi, hints at the film being a feisty love story.Rakul and Sidharth have earlier worked together in Aiyaary.

Directed by Milap Zaveri, the movie will also see Sidharth sharing screen space with Riteish for the second time after `Ek Villain` in 2014.Tara Sutaria, who is making her Bollywood debut alongside Tiger Shroff in `The Student of the Year 2` will also be a part of the movie.The flick will hit the big screens on October 2, 2019.(ANI)
Mumbai: Amidst increasing differences between Jet Airways and Etihad Airways, the only party that can bailout the beleaguered airline, over the equity cap that its founder chairman Naresh Goyal can hold after his forced exit,bankers Friday exuded confidence of reaching a resolution plan as early as next week.

After agreeing to cap his shareholding at 22 percent for perpetuity and completely exit the airline's management as a precondition for a bailout that Etihad and bankers demanded, Goyal had last Friday wrote to Etihad to remove the perpetuity clause from the resolution plan and also the Gulf carrier immediately offer a lifeline of Rs 750 crore failing which the airline may get grounded.

This, according to media reports, has put off the Gulf carrier which already owns 24 percent in the airline which has grounded 42 percent of its 119 aircraft, most of them due to non-payment lease rentals to the aircraft lessors.

According to the draft resolution plan submitted to the lenders led by the lead lender SBI, Etihad will bring in around Rs 1,800 crore as fresh equity and increases its stake to 24.9 percent, while Goyal will chip in with Rs 750 crore and the rest of the Rs 3,800 crore come from other investors.

Founder chairman Goyal and his family own 52 percent in the airline now which he had agreed to pare down to 22 percent to secure a financial bailout.

"It is a work in progress. Very soon, say by next week, we will have a solution plan in place," a senior SBI official said here Friday.

The official said the resolution plans had started on November 1 last. "Any resolution plan for a corporate is a very complex process. Things don't happen in a day or two or in even 15 days.

"There are various stakeholders, who have to be aligned; there are promoters and joint venture partners, so when the situation is so complex, it takes time," SBI explained the reason for the delay.

"We are making every effort and SBI is leading that effort. We are clear on one thing: to ensure that the airline runs and not get grounded and not to stave off our accounts becoming NPAs. That's the fundamental difference between any other NPA and Jet Airways," he added.

Jet has a debt of over Rs 8,200 crore and needs to make repayments of up to Rs 1,700 crore by the end of March. It has already defaulted on an ECB payment earlier this week but is servicing its domestic debt.

The acute liquidity crunch has forced it to ground aircraft, shut down stations and delay salary payments to its pilots and engineers along with other senior staff. Since last July the airline has been trying to raise funds as cash crunch mounted leading to salary delays since then.

On March 8, Goyal wrote to Etihad chief executive Tony Douglas seeking an urgent funding of Rs 750 crore under an agreement signed between various stakeholders.

On 14 February, Jet Airways board approved a bank-led resolution plan whereby lenders would become the largest shareholders in the airline. Following approval from the shareholders, part of debt would be converted into 11.4 crore shares at a consideration of Re 1 apiece as per the RBI norms.
Mumbai: IDBI Bank has been categorised as a private sector lender following acquisition of majority stake by Life Insurance Corporation, RBI said.

In January, LIC completed the process of picking up a controlling 51 per cent stake in the nearly crippled IDBI Bank.

"IDBI Bank has been categorised as a 'private sector bank' for regulatory purposes by Reserve Bank of India with effect from January 21, 2019 consequent upon LIC acquiring 51 per cent of the total paid-up equity share capital of the bank," RBI said in a statement.

IDBI Bank has been under the prompt corrective action framework of RBI that bans it from corporate lending and branch expansions, salary hikes and other regular activities.

However, the lender has charted out a revival strategy to bring banking and insurance under one roof, along with its new owner Life Insurance Corporation (LIC).

Last week, IDBI Bank informed about appointment of LIC as a corporate agent under bancassurance channel.

In the long term, the bank and LIC will have a common investment strategy, use each other's resources like real estate, commercial and residential space, bank branches, premises and ATMs and digital marketing, among others, the bank had said.

Both entities will also undertake rationalisation of the common subsidiaries in mutual funds and life insurance arms, as per the strategic plan.

For December quarter of this fiscal, IDBI Bank reported widening of loss to Rs 4,185.48 crore as bad loans surged.

The bank's gross non-performing assets (NPAs) shot up to 29.67 per cent of gross advances as at December 31, 2018 against 24.72 per cent in the year-ago period.
New Delhi: The CBI on Friday told the Supreme Court that former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar's plea challenging the life term awarded to him by the Delhi High Court in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case should be dismissed.

The probe agency in its reply on Sajjan Kumar's plea seeking bail said he has a "large political clout" and is capable of "influencing or terrorising" witnesses in the case pending against him.

It told the apex court said that fair trial in the pending case would not be possible if Kumar is granted bail.

The CBI said that Kumar's "political clout clouded fair and speedy investigation and derailed justice for the victims" of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

A bench of Justice S A Bobde and Justice S A Nazeer posted the matter for further hearing on March 25.

The case in which Kumar was convicted and sentenced relates to the killing of five Sikhs in Delhi Cantonment's Raj Nagar Part-I area of southwest Delhi on November 1 and 2, 1984, and burning down of a Gurudwara in Raj Nagar Part-II.

Anti-Sikh riots had broken out after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984 by her two Sikh bodyguards.

The top court had earlier admitted the appeal of Kumar for hearing and had also issued notice to the CBI on his bail plea seeking its response within four weeks.

It had also allowed the former Congress leader to file a "lengthy list of dates" and "additional facts and grounds" in favour of his appeal.

The 73-year-old Kumar had surrendered before a trial court here on December 31, 2018, to serve the sentence in pursuance of the high court's December 17 judgment awarding him life imprisonment for the "remainder of his natural life".

After his conviction in the case, Kumar had resigned from the Congress party.

The high court had convicted and sentenced Kumar to spend the remainder of his life in jail for the offences of criminal conspiracy and abetment in commission of crimes of murder, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of communal harmony and defiling and destruction of a Gurdwara.

It had also upheld the conviction and varying sentences awarded by a trial court to five others - former Congress councillor Balwan Khokhar, retired naval officer Captain Bhagmal, Girdhari Lal and ex-MLAs Mahender Yadav and Kishan Khokhar.

In its judgement, the high court had noted that over 2,700 Sikhs were killed in the national capital during the 1984 riots which was indeed a "carnage of unbelievable proportions".

It had said the riots were a "crime against humanity" perpetrated by those who enjoyed "political patronage" and aided by an "indifferent" law enforcement agency.

The high court had set aside the trial court's 2010 verdict which had acquitted Kumar in the case.
NEW DELHI: Delhi's Patiala House Court on Friday summoned Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and other Aam Aadmi Party leaders on April 30 in the defamation case filed by BJP leader Rajeev Babbar.

Babbar had sought proceeding against Kejriwal, AAP spokesperson Atishi, Rajya Sabha member Sushil Kumar Gupta and Delhi legislator Manoj Kumar for allegedly harming the reputation of Bharatiya Janata Party, accusing it of deleting the names of "voters" from the electoral rolls in Delhi. He further alleged that Kejriwal had used social media to incite people against BJP.

"The statement of the accused (Kejriwal) was made with ulterior motives to degrade the reputation of the BJP to gain cheap political mileage in the upcoming elections," Babbar said in his plea filed through advocate Neeraj, S. N. Verma and Pooja Suri, reported news agency IANS.

"All the accused made accusations against BJP in a calculated manner with the sole intention to portray a negative image of BJP in relation to the voters belonging to certain sections of society viz. Bania, Poorvanchalis, Muslims etc. The reputation of the complainant has been damaged beyond repair," he added.

The BJP once again slammed Kejriwal on Wednesday for allegedly using "foul" language against the party's Delhi unit head Manoj Tiwari, as the two parties sparred over the issues of full statehood for the national capital.

"Kejriwal once again shrieked and showed his madness. His words reflected his sanskar (values). He is crying over full statehood but did he call an all-party meeting over the issue? After reaching the heights of inaction, and sympathising with the tukde-tukde gang, now he has been reminded of the cause of full statehood," said Tiwari, reported news agency PTI.
New Delhi: India's exports grew 2.44 percent to USD 26.76 billion in February on account of growth in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, textiles, handloom, engineering goods and chemicals, according to data from the commerce ministry.

Imports, however, fell 5.41 percent USD 36.26 billion. The trade deficit for February was estimated at USD 9.60 billion as against the deficit of USD 12.30 billion in the same period last year.

During the April-February period of the current financial year, exports grew 8.85 percent to USD 298.47 billion. Imports rose by 9.75 percent to USD 464.00 billion.

Overall trade deficit for April-February 2018-19 is estimated at USD 93.32 billion as compared to USD 82.46 billion in April-February 2017-18, official data showed.

Non-petroleum and non Gems and Jewellery exports in February grew 5.14 percent to USD 19.87 billion. During the April-February period of the current financial year, Non-petroleum and non Gems and Jewellery exports increased of 7.66 percent to USD 217.43 billion.

Oil imports in February were 8.05 percent lower at USD 9.38 billion.
Mumbai: The Reserve Bank has said it will inject long-term liquidity worth USD 5 billion into the system through foreign exchange swap arrangement with banks for tenor of 3 years on March 26.

In order to meet the durable liquidity needs of the system, the Reserve Bank has decided to augment its liquidity management toolkit and inject Rupee liquidity for longer duration through long-term foreign exchange Buy/Sell swap in terms of its extant Liquidity Management Framework. The US Dollar amount mobilized through this auction would also reflect in RBIs foreign exchange reserves for the tenor of the swap while also reflecting in RBIs forward liabilities, RBI said in a release.

The swap will be in the nature of a simple buy/sell foreign exchange swap from the Reserve Bank side. A bank shall sell US Dollars to the Reserve Bank and simultaneously agree to buy the same amount of US Dollars at the end of the swap period, RBI said.

Under the swap auction, minimum bid size would be USD 25 million and in multiples of USD 1 million thereafter.

RBI said that the eligible participants are allowed to submit multiple bids. However, the aggregate amount of bids submitted by single eligible entity should not exceed the notified amount of auction.

The banks would be exempted from the ISDA requirements for the purpose of these swaps.
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras on Friday evening announced the result of the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) 2019.

Earlier the announcement was scheduled to take place on Saturday (March 16). The availability of the scorecard is scheduled to be held from March 20-May 31.

The candidates can access the result on the official website of IIT-M--gate.iitm.ac.in. The test was held across 200 cities in India and six cities outside the nation. The examination is held once a year and is conducted for 3 hours (180 minutes).

The exam was conducted by IIT-M on February 2, 3, 9 and 10 for 24 papers. The exam in India this year was held from 9.30 am to 12.30 pm. The test is conducted in English language.

An online examination, GATE is held at the national level and is conducted by IITs for admissions to post-graduate programmes--ME, MTech and direct PhD. The educational institutes include the IITs, NITs, GFTIs, IISc, and other universities in India.
New Delhi: Former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar has been using his "large political clout" to derail trial and influence witnesses in cases related to 1984 anti-Sikh riots, CBI told the Supreme Court Friday while seeking that life term given to him should be upheld.

73-year-old Kumar has challenged in the top court the Delhi High Court's December 17, 2018 verdict sentencing him to life term in a case related to killing of five Sikhs in Delhi Cantonment's Raj Nagar Part-I area of southwest Delhi on November 1 and 2, 1984, and burning down of a Gurudwara in Raj Nagar Part-II.

In response to Kumar's application seeking suspension of sentence and grant of bail, CBI has said that he is capable of "influencing/terrorising witnesses" and fair trial would not be possible in the case pending against him, if he is granted bail.

CBI has said brutal murders during the 1984 riots fall under the category of "crimes against humanity on parity with well known genocides worldwide like large scale killing of Armenians by Kurds and Turks, mass extermination of Jews by Nazis, mass killing of Bangladeshi citizens by the sympathisers of Pakistani Army and mass killing during various ethnic riots within India also".

Opposing Kumar's application, it said that in this case the minority community was targeted by "spearheaded attacks of dominant political actors like the applicant/convict (Kumar) and duly facilitated by law enforcement agencies".

In view of Kumar's conduct in "using his political clout to derail trial and influence witnesses", his sentence must be upheld and bail should not be granted, CBI said.

"It took 34 valuable years of legal battle and courage shown by fearless witnesses/victims, which has resulted in his conviction and no leniency, therefore, on the ground of age should be granted," it said.

The probe agency further said Kumar is a "political leader with a large political clout" and he has a "following in and around Delhi and is capable of influencing/terrorising witnesses".

The matter came up for hearing on Friday before a bench of Justices S A Bobde and S A Nazeer. It has fixed the case for further hearing on March 25.

CBI said that at the time of the incident, Kumar was a Member of Parliament of the then ruling party in India and killings in this case had taken place in pursuance to the provocative speeches made by him against the Sikh community.

"Considering the influence of the applicant/convict (Kumar) in the society, the fact that he belongs to one of the older political parties having substantial following, the gravity of the offence for which the trial is going on, the prosecution seriously apprehends that a fair trial in the aforementioned pending case would not be possible if the applicant/convict is enlarged on bail," the CBI said.

It said due to Kumar's powerful position and influence, several persons who had mustered courage to be witness against him have resiled from their earlier statements out of fear.

The CBI further said that in January this year, they have received a letter from three prime witnesses in the case who have apprehended that they "may be harmed" by Kumar.

"It is, therefore, most humbly prayed that in view of the above submissions (in the reply), the application filed by the applicant/convict seeking bail/suspension of sentence may kindly be dismissed in the interest of justice," it said.

Kumar, through his counsel Ajay Marwah, has approached the apex court against the high court's verdict convicting him in the case.

Anti-Sikh riots had broken out after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984 by her two Sikh bodyguards.

The top court earlier admitted Kumar's appeal for hearing and issued notice to the CBI on his bail plea.

Kumar surrendered before a trial court here on December 31, 2018, to serve the sentence in pursuance of the high court's judgment awarding him life imprisonment for the "remainder of his natural life".

After his conviction in the case, Kumar had resigned from the Congress party.

The high court had convicted and sentenced Kumar to spend the remainder of his life in jail for the offences of criminal conspiracy and abetment in commission of crimes of murder, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of communal harmony and defiling and destruction of a Gurdwara.

It had also upheld the conviction and varying sentences awarded by a trial court to five others - former Congress councillor Balwan Khokhar, retired naval officer Captain Bhagmal, Girdhari Lal and ex-MLAs Mahender Yadav and Kishan Khokhar.

In its judgment, the high court noted that over 2,700 Sikhs were killed in the national capital during the 1984 riots which was indeed a "carnage of unbelievable proportions".

It said the riots were a "crime against humanity" perpetrated by those who enjoyed "political patronage" and aided by an "indifferent" law enforcement agency.

The high court had set aside the trial court's 2010 verdict which had acquitted Kumar in the case.
NEW DELHI: BJP president Amit Shah has thanked former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit for her remarks that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was not tough on terrorism.

Shah hailed the three-time Delhi chief minister after she denied making those comments.

"Thank you Sheila Dikshit ji for reiterating what the nation already knows but the Congress party is never ready to admit," Amit Shah said in a tweet.

Thank you @SheilaDikshit ji for reiterating what the nation already knows but the Congress party is never ready to admit.https://t.co/k7xqIgOa4r  Amit Shah (@AmitShah) March 14, 2019

"Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit reportedly said, "Manmohan Singh, yes I agree with you, was not as strong and as determined as he (Modi) is," he added.

The three-time Delhi Chief Minister said this when asked to respond on the criticism that the UPA government did not do much after the Mumbai terror attacks in 2008.

She added, "but there is also a feeling that he is doing all this for politics."
NEW DELHI: Hyderabad man Ahmed Iqbal Jahangir is one of several injured in the deadly mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand' Christchurch which claimed 49 lives on Friday.

Jahangir, who ran a restaurant in Christchurch, is recovering in hospital. His family has requested to expedite the process visa access and the travel.

Read More: New Zealand mosque attacker's plan began and ended online

My brother was injured and is now recovering in a hospital. He is currently undergoing surgery. We have seen in the video he has been shot in the chest. We're trying to reach the Embassy, brother of the victim Ahmed Jahangir told ANI. "We haven't been able to get proper information yet. I request the government to help me to get a visa so I can travel to New Zealand to take care of my brother," he added.

A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad & would like to go to NZ for Ahmeds family. I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family, tweeted All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party chief Asaduddin Owaisi.

A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad & would like to go to NZ for Ahmeds family. I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family  Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) March 15, 2019

Another person of Indian origin who went to the same mosque is also currently missing, tweeted Owaisi.

The world watched in horror as a gunman, dressed in black, opened fire at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern condemned it as an act of terrorism Prime and called it "an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence." He also acknowledged that many of those affected may be migrants and refugees.

New Zealand Police has taken four persons  three men and a woman  into custody following the shootings. One of the suspects was later charged with murder.

A 28-year-old white male, reported to be an Australian, has claimed the responsibility for the shootings and left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto explaining the reasoning for the attack.

The gunman also broadcast livestream footage on Facebook of the attack on one mosque in the city of Christchurch, mirroring the carnage played out in video games, after publishing a "manifesto" in which he denounced immigrants, calling them "invaders", reported Reuters.
NEW DELHI: While the IAF airstrike in Pakistan's Balakot made headlines, the Indian Army quietly carried out a joint operation along with the Myanmar Army to thwart threats posed by an insurgent group along the Indo-Myanmar border.

According to reports, the planning for the joint operations started around two months back.

The joint operation was carried out between February 17 to March 2 to thwart a threat to a mega infrastructure project vital for the Northeast.

A Myanmar-based insurgent group - Arakan Army- had threatened the infrastructure project.

The two armies silently carried out the operation to eliminate the Arakan Army, which is an insurgent group linked to the Kachin Independence Army, which has been banned by Myanmar.

The joint operation was conducted following assessments regarding the threat posed by the Arakan Army to the mega Kaladan Project.

The Kaladan Project is a transit project that will connect Kolkata to Sitwe port in Myanmar.

The project, which will link Mizoram, will serve as a new gateway to the landlocked Northeast.

The project will reportedly reduce the travel time between Kolkata and Mizoram.

In view of the intelligence assessments, the Indian Army designed a mission to flush out insurgents that had set up bases in the south of Mizoram in Myanmar.

A full-scale joint operation was launched by the Indian and Myanmar armies after that.

In the first phase of the joint operation, the two armies targeted newly-constructed camps bordering Mizoram.

In the second phase, the deadly Naga group, NSCN (K) and their camps were destroyed.

The operations, which was the first of its kind went on for two weeks and ended on March 2.

The operation involved Special Forces of the Indian Army, Assam Rifles and other infantry units.

The Arakan Army, which is also well trained in setting up Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), has its headquarters in Laiza.

Several camps belonging to the Arakan Army were completely destroyed in the joint operation, the sources said.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Friday slammed the leaders who called China's move to block banning Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar at the UNSC a "diplomatic failure" of India, saying that they can witness that the nation was alone when the move was first made in 2009 under the UPA rule, while it has worldwide support in 2019.

She added that India has secured unprecedented support from the international community on this move.

Her comments come after Congress took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi terming him a "weak" leader and calling his foreign policy "a series of diplomatic disasters".

Taking to Twitter, Swaraj shared the details and listed the number of times that China has blocked India's move to ban Azhar in the UN Security Council as a global terrorist.

"In 2019, the proposal was moved by USA, France, and the UK and supported by 14 of the 15 UN Security Council Members and also co-sponsored by Australia, Bangladesh, Italy, and Japan - non-members of the Security Council. In 2017, USA, UK, and France moved the proposal. In 2016, India's proposal was co-sponsored by USA, France, and the UK. In 2009, India under the UPA Government was the lone proposer. I wish to apprise you of the facts regarding the listing of Masood Azhar under the United Nations Sanctions Committee. The proposal has been mooted four times," tweeted Swaraj.

"I have shared these facts with you so that leaders who describe this as our diplomatic failure may see for themselves that in 2009, India was alone. In 2019, India has worldwide support. Thus, we have secured unprecedented support from the international community for the listing of Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee," added Swaraj.

China on Wednesday for the fourth time blocked the bid in the UNSC to designate the chief of the Pakistan-based terror group as a "global terrorist" by putting a technical hold on the proposal. India termed the move of China as "disappointing".

Reacting to China's move, Congress president Rahul Gandhi took a jibe at PM Modi saying that the PM was "weak" and "scared" of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Party chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala retorted, "Sadly, Modiji's foreign policy has been a series of diplomatic disasters," the party spokesperson said.
New Delhi: At a time when tensions with Pakistan are heightened, the Defence Ministry is likely to consider a proposal to buy 10 lakh multi-mode hand grenades for the Indian Army under the 'Make in India' project in the military sector.

A proposal for buying 10 lakh hand grenades from an Indian firm would be considered by the Defence Ministry at a high-level meeting to be chaired by Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman this week, government sources told ANI.

The more than Rs 500 crore proposal is critical as the government has already taken care of the main personal weapon requirements of the Army soldiers by signing two contracts for modern rifles.

In the first case, a contract worth over Rs 700 crore for around 75,000 Sig Sauer assault rifles from an American firm has been signed while a joint venture has been formed with Russia to manufacture 7.5 lakh modern AK-203 assault rifles.

The project for acquiring new hand grenades is required for the replacement of the existing HE-36 grenades manufactured by the Ordnance Factory Board. The multi-mode grenades have been developed by the DRDO and a production agency has been selected to manufacture them in large numbers.

Hand grenades are among the few critical weapons that soldiers need in the time of war as they can be used to cause heavy damage to enemy positions or bunkers apart from taking out their soldiers.

Tensions between India and Pakistan have been heightened after the Pulwama attack on February 14 in which 40 CRPF personnel lost their lives. India made a preemptive attack by striking the Balakot terrorist training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.
New Delhi: As part of the ongoing crackdown on terror, the police on Friday arrested a suspected ISI agent from Jalandhar, accused of leaking sensitive Indian military intelligence information to Pakistan handler.

The accused has been identified as Ram Kumar and is a Fazalika resident. Two mobile phones and four SIM cards were recovered from his possession. He has admitted being in touch with ISI agents in Pakistan in lieu of money and was tasked of providing information of Indian Army located along Indo-Pak border. The accused was also keeping a track on movement of Army jawans along the area.

The State Special Operations Cell acted after receiving a tip-off about his activities from Jammu and Kashmir Military Intelligence Unit.

After a medical check-up, he was taken to Chandigarh for further interrogation.

Further details awaited.
Students from a primary school in Zhengzhou, capital of central Chinas Henan Province, recently teamed up with their parents to paint manhole covers and ELV cabinets in Gelin community with adorable cartoon characters, making the area more colorful and winning the admiration of passers-by.

A number of well-known cartoon characters including the Minions, Hello Kitty and characters from SpongeBob SquarePants were all painted on the manhole covers, outdoor ELV cabinets and other outdoor equipment. The artists? Students of Liuyi Primary School in Zhengzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone and their parents.

These paintings were the results of the teamwork between students and their parents, said Xiao Qi, an after-school activities counselor at Liuyi primary school, explaining that each of the manhole covers was claimed by an individual student-parent team, who then painted their own unique design.

The students often go and check if their cover is still in good condition or if it needs any repairs, said Xiao, adding that this activity has helped develop the students sense of responsibility and community.

My dad is usually busy with work and doesnt have much time to spend with me. I am delighted that we can take part in this activity together, said Yang Wanqing, a student at Liuyi primary school.

Yang told Peoples Daily that the experience of decorating the road with her schoolmates has also given her a sense of honor. She added that she will take good care of the manhole cover she and her dad painted together.

Zhengzhou implemented the road chief scheme in August 2018, with the aim of combating pollution and improving the environment, according to Zhu Yuxia, secretary of the Party branch at Gelin Committee.

Zhu, a third level road chief, came up with the idea of inviting students and parents to join hands in creatively decorating the community, with the intention of encouraging participation of those in the community to create a comfortable living environment. (Photo/People's Daily Online)
MUMBAI: A blame game has begun with the Opposition demanding the resignation of Union Rail Minister Piyush Goyal and pressing murder charges against guilty officials after a section of a foot overbridge (FoB) collapsed outside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) railway station in Mumbai on Thursday leaving at least six people dead and 33 injured.

The deadly incident took place around 7:30 PM when there was a lot of rush on the overbridge. The incident happened nearly 8 months after a portion of the foot overbridge collapsed on the railway tracks near Andheri station.

Full Coverage: Foot overbridge near Mumbai's CST station collapses killing 6, injuring 36; FIR filed

The bridge, which connected the area near the Times of India building with the iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus railway station, was commonly called 'Kasab bridge' as the 26/11 Mumbai attack terrorist passed through it during the strike.

While Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has announced a compensation of Rs 5 lakh each to the family of the deceased and ordered a high-level committee to probe the circumstances under which the 40-year-old overbridge collapsed, the opposition parties are not satisfied with the government action.

READ: Mumbai foot overbridge collapse: Maharashtra CM announces ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh to kin of deceased

The Opposition leaders have demanded the government to murder charges against the guilty officers and strictest possible action them.

''If the government wants to send a message to the common Mumbaikars that this won't happen again then they should immediately lodge an FIR under IPC Section 302 which amounts to murder, against the concerned officers and auditors,'' Milind Deora, Congress on Mumbai foot overbridge collapse.

Milind Deora, Congress on Mumbai foot over bridge collapse: If the govt wants to send a message to the common Mumbaikars that this won't happen again then they should immediately lodge an FIR under IPC Section 302 which amounts to murder, against the concerned officers & auditors pic.twitter.com/SEjINi4l8T  ANI (@ANI) March 14, 2019

"Mumbaikars feel very unsafe in the city, considering the frequent incidents of bridge collapses," the former MP said.

"I am not politicising the issue, but hollow promises are not going to serve the people anyway. This is a failure of the government and the system," he added.

Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam tweeted, ''FOB collapse tragedy at #CSTMumbai is nothing but negligence on the part of #BMC and Railways. Lack of coordination between these 2 agencies has put lot of bridges in danger in Mumbai which is costing the lives of Mumbaikars.''

FOB collapse tragedy at #CSTMumbai is nothing but negligence on the part of #BMC and Railways. Lack of coordination between these 2 agencies has put lot of bridges in danger in Mumbai which is costing the lives of Mumbaikars.#cstbridgecollapse  Sanjay Nirupam (@sanjaynirupam) March 14, 2019

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala too trained his guns at the Narendra Modi government.

Modi Govt & Mah. Govt are criminally culpable for inaction leading to repeat tragedies-: 29/9/2017-Elphistone Stampede. 3/7/2018-Andheri Bridge Collapse. Rly Mins tall claims of Audit have failed time and again. Rly Min, Piyush Goyal must resign or be sacked.

2/2  Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) March 14, 2019

Meanwhile, Akhilesh Yadav, Samajwadi Party chief and former UP chief minister, said that the CST foot overbridge collapse is yet another failure of the Narendra Modi government which talks of introducing bullet train in India.

           .           .        ,            .             .  Akhilesh Yadav (@yadavakhilesh) March 14, 2019

According to the BMC Disaster Control, The incident took place as the bridge was overloaded with commuters hurrying to their homes.

Photo Gallery: Mumbai's CST station foot overbridge collapses

The deceased were identified as Apoorva Prabhu (35), Anjana Tambe (40), Bhakti Shinde (40), Zahid Shiraj Khan (32), Tapendra Singh (28) and Mohan, the disaster management cell of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) said.

Prabhu and Tambe were employees of the GT Hospital, the officials said.

A case has been registered against officials of Central Railway and the BMC in connection with the incident, the police said.

"We have registered an offence under section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the IPC at the Azad Maidan Police Station," said Manjunath Singe, spokesperson of the Mumbai Police.

Civic authorities started dismantling the remaining portion of the overbridge late Thursday night.

Additional Municipal Commissioner of the BMC, Vijay Singhal, said the remaining portion of the damaged bridge is being dismantled manually. He said action will be taken against the firm that conducted the structural audit of the bridge.

Deven Bharti, Joint Commissioner (Law & Order), said that police "will, for sure, launch an inquiry into the incident".

Expressing his profound grief over the incident, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said, ''The injured persons will get Rs 50,000 each and the government will bear the cost of their treatment."

Fadnavis added that officials found responsible for the incident will be booked.

A 45-member team of the National Disaster Response Force was at the site. An eyewitness said the over-bridge was being used by pedestrians even as repair works were ongoing.

Several motorists were also under the bridge when it came down, which led to an increase in the number of injured, an official said. "We have appealed the motorists to avoid the D N Road to JJ Flyover section."

Another eyewitness said most of the victims were walking on the overbridge on their way to the CST station when it collapsed.

Lawmakers and local party leaders rushed to the spot as political blame-game ensued.

Mumbai foot overbridge was not considered 'risky', had 'minor defects': BJP Minister Vinod Tawde

Arvind Sawant, the local Shiv Sena MP, said, "This bridge was under minor-repairing after the audit of all bridges in the city. Action will be initiated against the responsible officials."

Local BJP MLA Raj Purohit also visited the spot and demanded immediate action against the engineer who had declared the bridge as 'safe'. "He should be arrested right now. He is responsible for the entire disaster."

Local Shiv Sena corporator Sujata Sanap said she had alerted officials about the structure, but they did not act in time. "I have been pursuing the issue of this unsafe bridge for long and also wrote so many letters to officials but they were ignored."

The collapse will be jointly probed by BMC and Central Railways, said Vinod Tawde, District Guardian Minister of Mumbai.

"I have discussed the issue with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis as well as with CR General Manager D K Sharma, BMC chief Ajoy Mehta and joint police commissioner (L&W) Deven Bharti.

The railways and the BMC will jointly inquire the accident," Tawde told reporters.

In July last year, a portion of a road over-bridge had collapsed in suburban Andheri. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal had then announced a joint safety audit of all 445 bridges in Mumbai.

Following the order, the railways, the BMC and IIT-Bombay had conducted a safety audit.

(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In a letter to Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, PM Modi stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies.

At least 49 people lost their lives in two mass shooting incident at two mosques, full of worshippers attending Friday prayers in New Zealand`s Christchurch. The attacks were carried out at Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb and is believed to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

According to High Commissioner Sanjiv Kohli, at least nine Indian are believed to be missing after the shooting incident. "As per updates received from multiple sources, there are 9 missing persons of Indian nationality. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families," Kohli tweeted.

As per updates received from multiple sources there are 9 missing persons of indian nationality/ origin. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families  sanjiv kohli (@kohli_sanjiv) March 15, 2019

"My deep gratitude to members of the community in Christchurch who are working through the night to get updates for us on the victims of today`s dastardly attack. Cant be a better example than this of dedication and solidarity."

My deep gratitude to members of the community in christchurch who are working thru the night to get updates for us on the victims of todays dastardly attack. Cant be a better example than this of dedication and solidarity  sanjiv kohli (@kohli_sanjiv) March 15, 2019

Gunmen said to be whites, opened indiscriminate fire at two mosques -- Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Avenue Mosque -- in Christchurch during prayers in what New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said was a terror attack. One gunman live-streamed the shooting at the Al Noor Mosque in a 17-minute video and wrote a manifesto declaring his intentions, saying "it is a terrorist attack".
NEW DELHI: Nine Indians or persons of Indian-origin are missing following Friday's terror attack on two mosques in New Zealand`s Christchurch which left 49 dead and more than 20 injured.

Hyderabad-based Ahmed Iqbal Jahangi, who runs a restaurant, is one of several injured in the deadly mass shooting. He's currently recovering in hospital. His family has requested the Centre to expedite the visa access process.

"As per updates received from multiple sources, there are 9 missing persons of indian nationality/origin. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families," High Commissioner Sanjiv Kohli said, as reported by news agency IANS.

"My deep gratitude to members of the community in Christchurch who are working through the night to get updates for us on the victims of today`s dastardly attack. Cant be a better example than this of dedication and solidarity."

Reaching out to the Indian community, The Indian High Commission in New Zealand tweeted, "We are shocked to hear about the shooting in Christchurch. Any Indians needing assistance should contact us at 021803899 or 021850033.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also expressed deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch today.

Nearly two lakh Indians and Indian-origin people live in New Zealand. There are over 30,000 Indian students in the country, according to the Indian High Commission's data on its website.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb. The incident has been termed as the worst-ever incident of shooting in New Zealand. Recalling the horrific incident, eyewitnesses say a man dressed in black opened fire on people praying inside the mosques.

A 28-year-old white Australian man claimed the responsibility for the shootings and left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto explaining the reasoning for the attack. The entire shooting was livestreamed online in a 17-minute video.

Calling the entire episode a terror attack, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the gunman as "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

New Zealand Police has taken four persons  three men and a woman  into custody following the shootings. One of the suspects was later charged with murder.
In a blow to India, Pakistan has sought to put a number of restrictions on the Indian pilgrims visiting the Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, Pakistan.

A day after both the countries held delegation-level talks on the corridor to discuss modalities, government sources told news agency ANI on Friday that Pakistan has said the capping of Indian pilgrims visiting the shrine per day should be at 700. This comes even after India has approved facilities wherein up to 5,000 pilgrims can be handled daily and over 15,000 pilgrims on special occasions.

The meeting was held at Attari in Gurdaspur district of Punjab on Thursday.

Pakistan while assuring visa-free corridor to the pilgrims has added a condition wherein the pilgrims will be required to furnish a special permit, defeating the basic purpose of having the dedicated corridor, the sources told ANI.

"India has approved state of the art passenger terminal building to handle 5,000 pilgrims daily, 15,000 on special occasions. Pakistan has sought to put a limit this to only 500 pilgrims per day. Pakistan assured visa-free access to Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib, however, now Pakistan has asked for the requirement of issue of a special permit to each pilgrim. Defeating purpose of the dedicated corridor," ANI reported quoting government sources.

Pakistan has also asked India to refused movement on foot by the pilgrims and the travel will comprise of only in groups of 15 people.

While India has made a serious effort to fulfill the long-standing aspiration of the devotees and pilgrims, Pakistan has shown an insufficient and highly inadequate effort by restrictive responses to the Indian requests. The requests were conveyed, in the form of a draft Agreement, to Pakistan a few days ago by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad, the sources said.

The Kartarpur corridor will link Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in the Pakistani town of Kartarpur with Gurdaspur district in Punjab. In November 2018, India and Pakistan agreed to set a corridor linking Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur - the final resting place of Sikh faith's founder Guru Nanak Dev--to Dera Baba Nanak shrine in India's Gurdaspur district. Kartarpur Sahib is located in Pakistan's Narowal district across the river Ravi, about four km from the Dera Baba Nanak shrine.

This comes amid escalating tension between the two countries following India's preemptive air strike on a terrorist training camp of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Pakistan's subsequent retaliation. The meeting comes exactly a month after the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.
At least three persons were arrested on Friday in Amritsar district of Punjab along with several documents and arms and ammunition.

Speaking to news agency ANI, the Punjab Police asserted that a man identified as Ram Kumar was arrested from the Beas town in the district on charges of spying.

Two pistols, three magazines, and 14 rounds were recovered, and also several documents said Amritsar Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), Harinder Singh.

"3 persons have been arrested in Amritsar, 2 pistols, 3 magazines, and 14 rounds recovered, documents recovered. A person named Ram Kumar was arrested from Beas on charges of spying and some documents were recovered from him," said DSP Singh.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian on Friday held a telephonic conversation, where the later informed her about the action taken by France to sanction Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar by freezing his assets.

Taking to Twitter, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar provided the details of the conversation.

"Telephonic conversation between EAM @SushmaSwaraj French Foreign Minister @JY_LeDrian on action taken by France to sanction Masood Azhar, Chief of the UN proscribed terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammad," tweeted Kumar.

Kumar said that France has sanctioned the JeM chief at the national level by freezing his assets. The step comes days after China blocked a move to designate Azhar as a global terrorist by the UNSC.

Azhar had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

The MEA said the French foreign minister also informed Swaraj that France has raised the issue with the European Union. "He reiterated that France has always been and will always be on India side in the fight against terrorism," said Kumar.

Swaraj, on her part, thanked Drian for France's "steadfast support" and said that India looked forward to continuing this cooperation on the anti-terrorism front.

The action on the part of France was an expression of partnership with India and was in consonance with the global intent by responsible nations committed to fight against terror, including cross-border terrorism anywhere in the world, the MEA said.

France, the US and the UK had moved a proposal at the UN to designate Azhar as a global terrorist after the February 14 Pulwama attack, in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.
New Delhi: The Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) - the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh`s economic wing  has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to withdraw the most favoured nation status from China for blocking the UN resolution to declare Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist.

"India should withdraw the most favoured nation (MFN) status from China, impose more restrictions on Chinese products and take immediate action to raise tariff duties on all Chinese imports," the SJM said in a letter to the Prime Minister citing that the government has already done so with Pakistan.

"It is the time to make use of all possible measures, diplomatic and economic, to make China conscious of the repercussions of its irresponsible action," the SJM said.

All India Co-convener of the SJM, Ashwini Mahajan said that that there is need to work harder to discourage Chinese imports as the group`s research reveals that the average tariff being applied on Chinese imports is much lower than bound tariff rates on various commodities.

"The government needs to take immediate action to raise tariff duties on all Chinese imports to discourage Chinese imports.

China, which is already under economic stress, thanks to the trade war initiated by the US and other trade partners of China, will definitely realize the implications of unjust action of protecting terrorists.

This action of India will help our and global fight against terrorism," Mahajan wrote.

Mahajan stressed that India has been importing more than $76 billion worth of goods from China and has been running a huge trade deficit, which is impacting Indian economy in general and manufacturing in particular.

"It is appreciable that in the past, the government has adopted various measures to curb Chinese imports by way of anti-dumping duties, countervailing duties, increase in tariffs, imposition of tariffs and invoking reciprocity clause to stop Chinese companies taking infrastructure projects in India," he added.

Meanwhile, the RSS also urged the Centre to boycott Chinese goods, adding that India should raise tariff duties on Chinese imports.

"Jawaharlal Nehru gave the slogan of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai, but China had betrayed Nehru ji. However, it was because of Nehru ji that China is a permanent member of the United Nations and India is out from P5 (Permanent members). Today, every Indian should boycott Chinese goods," the RSS said.

The call for boycotting Chinese goods comes after China once again blocked on Wednesday a proposal in the UN Security Council to enlist Masood Azhar as an international terrorist despite his outfit carrying out the ghastly Pulwama terror attack.

This was the fourth time when China used the technical hold to block the proposal, which is being pushed by other permanent members of the UNSC, particularly the US, Britain and France.

India expressed disappointment over the development but vowed to continue to pursue "all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens" are brought to justice.
Srinagar: An individual was shot dead by terrorists in Gulzarpora of Jammu and Kashmir's Awantipora. The incident took place on Thursday night.

The deceased was identified as Manzoor Ahmad Lone. He was a resident of Dogripora.

As per initial investigation, Lone was forcibly taken away by terrorists and shot dead.

Police have registered a case and the investigation is on.

"One individual was shot dead by terrorists in Gulzarpora, Awantipora last night. He has been identified as Manzoor Ahmad Lone, a resident of Dogripora. Initial investigation revealed that he was forcibly taken away by terrorists and shot dead. Case registered," Jammu and Kashmir Police said.
NEW DELHI: With less than a month to go for Lok Sabha elections 2019, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) on Friday issued fresh instructions to strengthen security measures across all airports to curb the movement of unauthorized arms, contraband goods, cash or bullion.

BCAS directions come after the Model Code of Conduct came into place for the forthcoming General Elections 2019.

Some of the important instructions are as follows:

1. Apart from measure to strengthen the security at the regular commercial airports, special measures have been introduced to check flights from Uncontrolled /Remote/unserved / airstrips /aerodromes /Helipads /private airstrips/Waterdromes.

2. Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and AAI/ATC shall inform State Police, BCAS and Income Tax Department about these flights in advance.

3. The Air Traffic Control (ATC) shall share records of not only Scheduled Commercial Flights but also private aircrafts or helicopters to the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of the State and the DEO of the district, in which the airport is located, about the travel plan of chartered aircrafts or helicopters as early as possible, preferably half an hour in advance.

4. DGsP of States shall deploy Police Units to check these flights during Code of Conduct as per direction of Election Commission and extant rules and regulations of BCAS in this regards.

5. The operators of all private aircrafts/Helicopters must declare the contents of the baggage, suitcases, etc, carried on these flights to CEO of the states, DEOs of the districts, state police and IT Department.

6. With an aim to keep strict vigil over movement of cash through all airports Income Tax Department and CISF will be extended all requisite cooperation for checking and surveillance activities. This will be over and above what CISF is otherwise doing. Officers of BCAS will be conducting surprise inspections of these airports to check the compliance of these instructions.

The Lok Sabha election will be held across the country in seven phases from April 11-May 19 and the counting of votes will take place on May 23.
MUMBAI: Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are set to jointly kick-start their election campaign for ensuing Lok Sabha elections with a joint rally in Kolhapur on March 24, a joint statement released by both parties confirmed.

The first joint rally of Shiv Sena-BJP will be held on March 24. There will be joint rally/ meetings of their party workers before that, the statement said.

The joint meetings with both parties workers are scheduled to take place on March 15, March 17 and March 18 at different locations. These meetings will be addressed by the Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, it said.

According to the information out, after the meetings with party workers, a big joint rally of senior leaders from both parties would be held in Kolhapur on March 24.

A joint manifesto will be released soon. Dates for grand joint meeting of Mumbai workers from both parties will be announced later, the statement further said.BJP-Shiv Sena had last month finalised a plan to contest the upcoming elections jointly. While BJP will contest on 25 seats, Shiv Sena will contest on 23 seats.

Although both the parties have been in alliance for past several decades, they broke up in 2014 for a brief time just before the legislative elections in Maharashtra.

BJP demanded a higher share of seats which Shiv Sena was not willing to concede.Out of 288 legislative seats, BJP won 122 while Shiv Sena managed to win only 63 seats.

Shiv Sena later joined the government headed by BJP Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. Even while being a part of the alliance, it repeatedly criticised the central and state government of which it was a part.

The two parties contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections jointly and won a landslide victory.

Out of 48 seats, the BJP-Shiv Sena combined managed to win 41 seats.

Swabhimani Shetkari Saghtana (then in NDA) headed by Raju Shetti also won one seat.

This year, Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra are slated to take place in four phases.

The results will be announced on May 23.
Lucknow: Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Jana Sena Party (JSP) will jointly fight the 2019 Lok Sabha election in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, confirmed BSP supremo Mayawati on Friday.

Making a strong pitch for the BSP president, Jana Sena chief Pawan Kalyan said that they would like to see Mayawati as the prime minister.

"We would like to see Behen ji Mayawati ji as the prime minister of our country, this is our wish and our ardent desire," Kalyan said.

On Thursday, JSP released its first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha and Andhra Pradesh Assembly polls. The party released names of four candidates for the national election and names of 32 candidates for the state poll.

Taking to Twitter, the Jana Sena president had said, "After a diligent process, the general body of our party has finalised the first list of candidates for 32 Assembly and 9 Parliamentary constituencies."

JSP will contest the poll in alliance with the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M).

Election to the 175-member Andhra Pradesh Assembly and all 25 Lok Sabha seats in Andhra Pradesh will be held in a single phase on April 11 while the results will be declared on May 23.
Since 1951-52 when the Congress won the first Lok Sabha election in Independent India, its powers had been fairly unchallenged. The party faced internal differences and had even faced a split but no other political party had been able to give a tough fight in any of the five elections. But the story of the 1977 Lok Sabha election was different. In 1971, Indira Gandhi had been confident of her victory and had called a mid-term election. She was proved right and she came back to win with a landslide majority to become the prime minister. She had thought that she would have the similar fate when she called a mid-term election in 1977 but she was proved entirely wrong when the results came out. She suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Janata Alliance - as part of which all opposition parties had come together with the sole objective to bring an end to the Congress regime.

Also Read: History of Lok Sabha elections

The fifth Lok Sabha, which was to be dissolved in March 1976, was extended twice since the Indira government had imposed Emergency in the country since January 1975. The state of Emergency ended after a period of 21 months when the extended session was dissolved on 18 January 1977, 15 months prior to the expiry of its extended term. The voting for the election was held between March 16 and 20, 1977.

Enraged by Indira's authoritarian rule during Emergency, four main non-Communist opposition parties - the Organization Congress (also known as the Opposition Congress), the Jan Sangh, the Bharatiya Lok Dal and the Socialist Party - decided to join hands and contest the election together as part of a single party. The combined party was to be called the Janata Party.

Full coverage: Lok Sabha election 2019

For the first time in India's electoral history since Independence, the Congress lost its majority in the Lok Sabha. The Janata Party emerged triumphant with a landslide victory winning 295 of the 405 seats it contested on with a vote percentage of 41.32. The Organisation Congress also bagged 3 seats taking their winning seat share to 298.

The Janata party, which had fought on the Bharatiya Lok Dal's symbol, trounced the Congress and formed the first non-Congress government of independent India with Morarji Desai as the prime minister. Desai, who was previously India's finance minister before Indira removed him in 1969, was one of the veteran leaders who had been imprisoned for nearly two months during the Emergency.

Other parties in the Janata Alliance included The Communist Party of India (Marxist) which won 22 seats, 3 less that it won in the previous election. The other parties which were part of the alliance were Shiromani Akali Dal which won 9 seats, 8 more than the last election; Peasants and Workers Party of India which won 5 seats, Revolutionary Socialist Party which won 3 seats, All India Forward Bloc with 3 seats, Republican Party of India (Khobragade) with 2 seats. Two Independents also gave its support to the Janata alliance. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam which sided with the Janata party suffered a major setback losing on 22 seats from the past election and winning just one.

HOW JANATA PARTY FARED IN 1977 ELECTION HOW CONGRESS FARED IN 1977 ELECTION ANDHRA PRADESH 1 ANDHRA PRADESH 41 ASSAM 3 ARUNACHAL PRADESH 1 BIHAR 52 ASSAM 10 GUJARAT 16 GOA DAMAN & DIU 1 HARYANA 10 GUJARAT 10 HIMACHAL PRADESH 4 JAMMU & KASHMIR 3 KARNATAKA 2 KARNATAKA 26 MADHYA PRADESH 37 KERALA 11 MAHARASHTRA 19 MADHYA PRADESH 1 ORISSA 15 MAHARASHTRA 20 PUNJAB 3 MANIPUR 2 RAJASTHAN 24 MEGHALAYA 1 TRIPURA 1 ORISSA 4 UTTAR PRADESH 85 RAJASTHAN 1 WEST BENGAL 15 SIKKIM 1 CHANDIGARH 1 TAMIL NADU 14 NATIONAL CAPITAL TERRITORY OFDELHI 7 TRIPURA 1 WEST BENGAL 3 ANDAMAN & NICOBAR ISLANDS 1 DADRA & NAGAR HAVELI 1 LAKSHADWEEP - 1 1 TOTAL 295 154

The Congress, on the other hand, faced its worst defeat in 30 years, managing to win 154 of the 492 seats it contested on with a vote percentage of 34.52. The result showcased a clear North vs South divide among those who voted in its favour and those against. In the North Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, the party could not even win a single seat. Uttar Pradesh which was the biggest state in terms of the Lok Sabha seats had been a Congress stronghold since the first election but Indira's calculation in the 1977 election turned out to be wrong and she could not even win one out of the 85 Lok Sabha seats.

However, in the south, the party did fairly well. Of the 154 seats that the party won in the country, 112 were from Andhra Pradesh (41), Maharashtra (20), Karnataka (26), Tamil Nadu (14) and Kerala (11). Its allies also won 9 seats in Kerala taking up the tally in these states to 121.

The pro-Congress Communist Party of India won 7 of the 91 seats it contested on, 16 less than its tally in the 1971 election.

Altogether 2,439 candidates had contested in the election for the 542-member House. The Lok Sabha seats had been increased from 518 in the previous election on the basis of the 1971 census.

The Janata party had fought the election on issues ranging from domestic problems to the civil liberties which had been curtailed during the Emergency and forced sterlisations which were done during the period. The Congress, with an aim to come back to power, focussed on the need for a strong central government.

After the Congress debacle, the Emergency was revoked on March 21 and Indira resigned as the PM to pave way for Desai, Indias first non-Congress Prime Minister, to take the oath of office on March 24.

Key points to note:

The reasons for Emergency may be aplenty but what triggered is widely believed to be a court verdict that ruled against Indira. On 12 June 1975, the Allahabad High Court convicted Indira of electoral malpractices and imposed a six-year ban on her holding any elected post. The case was filed by socialist leader Raj Narain, who challenged her victory in the 1971 Lok Sabha election from Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh. Narain who had been defeated by Indira had alleged electoral malpractices and violation of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. On June 18, the Congress appealed to Indira to remain in power stating that her leadership is indispensable for the nation. She filed an appeal in the Supreme Court against the HC judgement and on June 24, got a breather in the form of a conditional stay order. The apex court allowed her to remain in power and continue as the prime minister.

The very next day on 25 June 1977, Indira imposed Emergency. On the same night, almost all Opposition leaders were put behind bars under the controversial Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) which was passed by Parliament in 1971.

The Shah Commission report on the events during the Emergency, dealt with how the Press was silenced during the time, the police actions which were taken, the conditions of the prison, the torture that was meted out to people, the role of Indira's son Sanjay Gandhi, and family planning atrocities. The Commission, based on its findings, concluded that there was no economic crisis and no crisis of law and order prevailing in the country on the basis of which such an extreme measure was needed.

"The decision to arrest and release certain persons were entirely on political considerations which were intended to be favourable to the ruling party. Employing the police to the advantage of one party is a sure source of subverting the rule of law," a report by the Commission stated.

Defending her government's decision for taking the action, Indira in a television interview in 1978 said that there were internal as well as external challenges which made it imminent for her government to recommend Emergency. "Had it been only internal with no foreign interference one could have dealt with in a much easier way," she had said. She had also categorically dismissed the findings of the Shah Commission report calling it 'prejudiced' and 'completely one-sided' adding that Justice Shah had in the past also had expressed himself very strongly against her and her government policies.

Source: Nehru Memorial Museum & Library

Indira's son Sanjay, who was seen by many as Indira's advisor, faced much criticism for his role during Emergency. Though he did not hold an official post, he had quite a say in the government decisions. So much so that after Indira launched her 20 point programme, he launched his own 5-point programme as well which was later merged and changed into a 25-point programme. The forced sterilization program under the family planning initiative to limit population growth was highly condemned by many who called it 'authoritarianism'.

Owing to the excesses during Emergency, Indira and Sanjay received the biggest setback in the 1977 election when both lost from their Lok Sabha constituencies - Rae Barelli and Amethi respectively.

While many thought that the 1977 election was the end of Indira and the Congress, the 1980 election had something much different planned for her.
The National Peoples Party (NPP) on Friday declared the names of party candidates for the Lok Sabha election for Meghalaya's Tura seat and Outer Manipur constituency. Former union minister Agatha K Sangma will be the party candidate from the Tura constituency and former minister and NPP Manipur unit president T Kikkin will contest from the Outer Manipur.

The party also announced that Ferlene CA Sangma will be the candidate for the byelection of Selsella Assembly seat in West Garo Hills district of Meghalaya.

Meghalaya Chief Minister and paryt national chief Conrad K Sangma chaired the meeting of the central election committee of the party in the national capital which was attended by party leaders from various states in the northeast region.

Election to the Tura Lok Sabha seat and byelection to the Selsella Assembly constituency will be held on April 11.
Lucknow: In a unique initiative to connect with voters for the upcoming Lok Sabha election 2019, Congress party has planned a boat ride for its newly-appointed general secretary Priyanka Gandhi in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's parliamentary constituency Varanasi.

As per plans, Priyanka Gandhi will stay in Varanasi from March 18 to 20.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will arrive in Prayagraj on March 18 and from there take a boat ride to Varanasi.

The state unit of Congress has knocked at the doors of the Election Commission seeking its permission for Priyanka's boat ride.

The party has assured the poll panel that it will fully comply with the Model Code of Conduct, which has been enforced in the country following the announcement of the Lok Sabha election schedule.

Priyanka is expected to address people at several places during her three-day boat journey, the party said.

Since her appointment as the Congress General Secretary and in-charge for Uttar Pradesh (East) on January 23, the party workers have been pressing her to contest from Varanasi.

However, Priyanka's name does not feature in the two lists announced by the Congress party for 27 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP.

Through the boat ride, the Congress party wants to highlight the failures of the Narendra Modi government in cleaning the river Ganga in the last five years, and the pain of people residing along the river bank.

Priyanka is seen as a turn-around leader for the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, where the party has been out of power for the last 29 years.

The Congress party's boat-ride campaign designed for Priyanka is also being seen as the main opposition party's desperation bid to revive itself in eastern Uttar Pradesh which earlier remained its stronghold.

In 2014 elections, the Congress had won only two seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli, represented by Congress President Rahul Gandhi and UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, respectively, while the BJP had won 71 seats.
Lucknow: Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is expected to kick-off her campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from the political hotbed of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Prayagraj and Varanasi, taking the river route to establish a direct contact with people.

The Congress general secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh, who was earlier scheduled to arrive at the state capital on Friday, was now expected to launch her campaign on March 18, a senior party leader said here.

Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Raj Babbar had said Wednesday that Priyanka would be arriving here on Friday but hours later, he had informed that the programme was postponed.

According to a letter submitted to the Election Commission (EC), permission has been sought for the Congress leader's visit from Prayagraj to Varanasi from March 18 to March 20.

The letter also informs that Priyanka will use a motorboat, taking the river route to cover the distance of around 100 kms, and programmes to welcome her have been scheduled all along, for which permission was required in accordance with the Model Code of Conduct.

According to Congress leaders, the party will attempt to reach out to the people living in the riparian areas that are not easily accessible by road.

Priyanka is likely to arrive at the state capital on March 17 and proceed to Prayagraj to launch her campaign the next day.

A senior leader said she would launch her campaign from Prayagraj, the birth place of the first prime minister of independent India and her great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, from where she would take the river route till Varanasi.

When contacted, Congress spokesman Anshu Awasthi said permission from the EC for Priyanka's visit was awaited.

Meetings in preparation for the visit had started since Thursday and the details would be worked out soon, he added.

At Allahabad, Priyanka is expected to visit the historic Anand Bhawan, the erstwhile official residence of the Nehru family, now a museum housing the personal belongings of Nehru and his father Motilal Nehru.

Congress sources said Priyanka might offer prayers at the Vindhyavasini temple at Mirzapur and the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi -- the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Friday said that he had asked the BMC chief Ajoy Mehta to fix "primary responsibility" for Thursday's foot overbridge collapse by the evening.

The deck of a foot overbridge on DN Road connected to CSMT station collapsed Thursday evening, killing six persons and injuring 33.

Fadnavis was speaking to reporters after meeting the injured in St George's Hospital nearby.

"It is shocking that such an accident can take place even after a structural audit. Primary responsibility will be fixed by this evening. I have asked civic chief (Ajoy Mehta) to find out names of those responsible," Fadnavis said.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis after meeting those injured in footover bridge collapse in Mumbai: There are around 10 injured admitted in the ward, one in ICU; all out of danger now. High-level enquiry will be done to probe into the matter. FIR has been lodged. pic.twitter.com/gBgsukeKe2  ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

Mumbai foot overbridge collapse: 6 dead, 33 injured; Opposition demands Piyush Goyal's resignation, murder charges against guilty officers

"A high-level probe into this incident has already been ordered. Those responsible (for the collapse) will be punished," he said.

Earlier in the day, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official had said the FOB was found to be structurally safe when it was audited in August 2016, soon after a British-era bridge over Savitri River got washed away in monsoon downpour in Mahad in Raigad district.

"During that audit, 354 bridges were checked for their structural soundness. The FOB that collapsed on Thursday was marked C2B. This means it needed minor repairs only. Tenders were floated for the repair but it got held up," the official had said Friday morning.

Fadnavis also said he had ordered a re-visit of all earlier structural audits carried out on such structures.

The Maharashtra CM visited the mishap site post the visit to the hospital.
Mumbai: Actor Rajkummar Rao feels that every young actor of his generation has the potential to become a superstar of the Hindi film industry as all of them are doing some very good work.

Rajkummar spoke to the media on the sidelines of Economic Times Edge - Femina Maharashtra Achievers Awards 2019' here on Thursday.

Actors like Varun Dhawan, Ranbir Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, Ayushmann Khurrana, Tiger Shroff and Sushant Singh Rajput, apart from Rajkummar himself are doing some great work in the Hindi film industry.

Asked which actor has the potential to become a superstar, he said: "Every young actor has the potential to become a superstar. Who am I to say which actor has or does not have the potential to become a superstar? I am really happy to see that we are doing some good work as an industry and because of that, we are able to see good performances from every other actor.

"When I see a good performance on-screen, it inspires me to do better work."

What's the status of his film "Mental Hai Kya"?

"We are going to announce release date of that film very soon," he said.

On his experience of working with Kangana Ranaut in the film, Rajkummar said: "I had a really good experience working with her. I think she is one of finest actresses of this country. Earlier, we have worked together in Queen' and now I worked with her in Mental Hai Kya'. It is always fun to work with her."

"Mental Hai Kya" is a black comedy crime thriller, produced by Ekta Kapoor and directed by Prakash Kovelamudi.
Los Angeles: Hugh Jackman is bracing for his Broadway return in a 2020 revival of Meredith Willson's 1957 classic musical "The Music Man".

According to Variety, this marks the actor's first Broadway musical role in 16 years; his last one being "The Boy From Oz" which earned him a Best Actor Tony.

Jackman confirmed the news on Twitter on Wednesday.

He tweeted an image of a suitcase, a trombone and an ID tag with the name 'Professor Harold Hill'.

The suitcase had a sticker reading "Opening Night October 22, 2020."

Jackman will play conman Harold Hill, a role made famous on screen and stage by late actor Robert Preston. The show follows Hill's latest scheme, one that finds him posing as the head of boys' marching band called 76 Trombones.

Scott Rudin of "The Truman Show" and "Revolutionary Road" fame will produce the revival.

Jackman will also perform the tracks from his musical film "The Greatest Showman" on a worldwide arena tour of his one-man stage show this year.

Film's director Michael Gracey recently said the actor is reportedly developing a sequel of the 2017 movie.
New Delhi: State-owned Corporation Bank Thursday announced a cut in its benchmark lending rate by 0.05 percentage points, a move that would make home, auto and other loans cheaper.

The bank has reduced the lending rate by 5 basis points (0.05 percentage point) across all tenors up to one year.

The new rates are effective from March 15, Corporation Bank said in a regulatory filing.

The marginal cost of funds based lending rate (MCLR) for overnight and one-month tenors would be 8.05 per cent and 8.20 per cent, respectively, it said.

The MCLR for one-year tenor was slashed to 8.90 per cent from 8.95 per cent. Most of the retail loans are benchmarked against one-year MCLR.
Team of #RRR, the Rajamouli directorial is gearing up for the shoot of their upcoming and third schedule of the film. The team will head to Ahmedabad and Pune for a schedule of 30 days. The actors are gearing up for this schedule which is in the end of the month. In the scorching sun, and that too in a city like Ahmedabad, the team is going to have a very tough time while shooting. Producer DVV Danayya and team is making sure that the actors get to beat the heat. Safety measures are being taken by the production house.

High octane scenes have been shot in the first two schedules, with which more than 30 per cent of the film has been completed. With this Pune schedule, 50 per cent of the shoot will be over and by the end of January or March next year, the shoot of the film will be wrapped up.

Later, the team will head to post production work which comprises Computer Graphics and the film will be released on July 30, 2020.

Tamil actor Samuthirakhani is playing a key role in this film which has Alia Bhatt and Daisy Edgar Jones as the leading ladies. This is Rajamoulis first film after Baahubali franchise and all eyes are on

#RRR. This film is being made in pan India languages and movie buffs have a lot of expectations on the film. Rajamouli assured that there will not be any delay in the release of the film and revealed that it will be made as one part only.
2021 Republic Day: It is for the first time that the Rafale fighter jets will be part of the event. They will be part of two different formations and the name of the mixed formation in which the first Rafale will take part is Eklavya. An Indian Air Force spokesperson, Wing Commander Indranil Nandi PRO said, "There will be a mixed formation. Single rafale, flanked by two Jaguar and two MiG 29. And single Rafale will carry out vertical Charlie."
Chennai: Tamil Nadu government has ordered an enquiry on how a college here gave its nod for Congress President Rahul Gandhi to interact with its students when the Model Code of Conduct is in force.

The top Congress leader, in his interaction with students of the Stella Maris College here on March 13, promised 33 per cent reservation in government jobs for women and answered several of their questions.

The Director of Collegiate Education, R Sarumathi directed a subordinate official to enquire "immediately" on the matter and submit a report, official sources told PTI.

In a communique (dated March 14) to the Regional Joint Director, Chennai Zone, the director pointed out that in view of the Lok Sabha elections the MCC was in force and under such circumstances sought to know "how permission was granted" by the college for the event.

Sources said Stella Maris is one of the 10 government aided colleges in Chennai. Such institutions are not only bound by State norms, but are also expected to follow the MCC.

According to the MCC,displayed in the Election Commission website, "use of educational institutions, including their grounds (whether government aided, private or government) for political campaigns and rallies is not allowed."

When contacted, the college authorities declined to say if any enquiry was made by the collegiate department officials.

The Chief Electoral Officer also did not comment.

In his interaction with the students, Rahul had brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process.

To a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, he had said that the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively.

"I will be the first person to say it... Investigate Robert Vadra, but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.

Vadra is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district.

Gandhi also questioned whether the Prime Minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions.
New Delhi: Union Minister for Drinking Water and Sanitation Uma Bharti on Friday once again attacked the alliance of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party for upcoming Lok Sabha in Uttar Pradesh and said that she is sure BSP supremo will face an attack from SP people.

"When the 1995 guest house incident took place then Brahm Dutt Dwivedi had saved her. Now, since the BJP leader is no more, I am willing to help her out, if she faces attack again. She can save my mobile number as Samajwadi Party members will attack her again," she was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Bharti made the statement in reference to the infamous 1995 state guest house attack in Lucknow when the then BSP general secretary was allegedly attacked by Samajwadi Party supporters. The incident reportedly had taken place after BSP had pulled out of alliance from SP.

Union Min Uma Bharati on BSP Chief Mayawati, says "Jab Rest House mein un par hamla hua tha tab Brahm Dutt Dwivedi Ji the. Ab woh nahi hain toh main hun ab. Jaise hi unko sankat aaye toh mera mobile no. rakhein aur turant mujhe phone karein. SP ke log un par hamla karenge zaroor" pic.twitter.com/cdUBszv3Le  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) March 15, 2019

In 1993, Mulayam's SP and Kanshi Ram's BSP, who had won 109 and 67 seats respectively out of 425 seats in Uttar Pradesh, had formed an alliance to defeat BJP in the state.

On the evening of June 2, 1995, some SP MLAs and district-level readers reached the state guest house in Lucknow where Mayawati, then general secretary of the BSP, was meeting her MLAs to decided on next course of action to be taken. The SP MLAs and workers surrounded the guest house and detained several of her MLAs, claiming they had defected to the SP. Mayawati, who was present inside the guest house, was forced to lock herself inside a room.

At that time, senior BJP leader and Farrukhabad MLA Brahm Dutt Dwivedi had rushed to the guest house along with his party workers and had rescued Mayawati against all physical assault by Samajwadi Party leaders and workers. BJP had then extended its support to BSP to make government in the state, thus making Mayawati the first Dalit Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh.
The terrorist, who went on a shooting spree that killed 49 and injured 20 at two New Zealand mosques, live-streamed the entire incident on Facebook for 17 long minutes. As the footage of Friday`s horrific attacks did rounds on social media, the gunman is heard saying Remember lads, subscribe to Pewdiepie.

PewDiePie is a YouTube channel owned by 29-year-old Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg. It holds the distinction of being the most-followed channel on the video platform for six years, a feat now threatened by the rapid rise of Indian production company T-Series.

Kjellberg was clearly not pleased to be associated with the incident.

Distancing himself from the entire episode, the Swedish gamer expressed sympathy for the victims and their families while adding that he feels "absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person".

Taking to Twitter, Kjellberg wrote, Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch. I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person. My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy.

Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch.

I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.

My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy.   (@pewdiepie) March 15, 2019

Several top YouTubers and famous personalities came out in support of PewDiePie.

You had nothing to do with this. Full stop. The shooter, who should be forgotten to the ass-end of history, is only trying to create division. Anyone that believes or spreads the message that you were associated with this in any way is doing exactly what the shooter wants, American YouTuber Markiplier wrote back.

So sorry to see your name be attached to something so horrific, wrote Irish YouTuber Jacksepticeye.

Previously, Pewdiepie has been embroiled in several controversies for endorsing "anti-semitic", nazi propaganda and white supremacist views in his vlogs. Given PewDiePie's massive outreach (89 million followers) majority of whom are young viewers, the content was flagged by media and netizens across the world. Pewdiepie has since removed the controversial content and issued apologies for the same.

The live footage of Friday`s terror attacks, New Zealand`s worst-ever mass shooting, was first live-streamed on Facebook and has since been shared on Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp and Instagram.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube said they had taken steps to remove copies of the videos.
Paris: France on Friday decided to freeze assets belonging to Masood Azhar, chief of terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), the French government confirmed.

The announcement came following a joint statement issued by the French interior ministry, finance ministry and foreign ministry.

The official statement added that France would discuss putting Masood Azhar on a European Union list of people suspected of being involved in terrorism.

Pakistan has been under pressure from global powers to act against terror groups including JeM which are based out of its territory.

JeM had earlier claimed responsibility for the ghastly February 14 attack in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama that killed at least 40 CRPF personnel.

(With inputs from Reuters)
Islamabad: Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday said that increasing "Islamophobia" after the 9/11 terror attacks in the US was responsible for the attack on two mosques in New Zealand that killed at least 49 worshippers.

"Strongly condemning" the terror attack on the mosques in New Zealand, Prime Minister Khan tweeted: "This reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families."

At least 49 people were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Khan said that increasing Islamophobia after 9/11 was responsible for this act of terror and Muslims were demonised deliberately.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim. This has been done deliberately to also demonise legitimate Muslim political struggles," he tweeted.

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also condemned the terrorist attack in New Zealand in the strongest terms.

He "expressed condolences over loss of innocent lives in the heinous attack."

Foreign Office spokesperson Muhammad Faisal tweeted that Pakistan High Commission is in constant touch with the local authorities in New Zealand to ascertain further details on the attacks.
Christchurch: Brenton Tarrant- the main gunman who killed numerous worshippers in a New Zealand mosque on Friday - was a right-wing "terrorist" with Australian citizenship.

"We stand here and condemn, absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist Brenton Tarrant," said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

Morrison confirmed media reports that the gunman who mowed down worshippers in the main mosque in the southern New Zealand city of Christchurch was an Australian-born citizen.

He said Australian security authorities were investigating any links between the country and the attack but declined to provide further details about the Australian gunman.

An emotional Morrison offered his sympathies to Kiwis.

"We are not just allies, we are not just partners, we are family," he said. New Zealand police said they had detained three men and one woman after attacks on two Christchurch mosques, but they have not provided their identities.

"It is such a sad and devastating reminder of the evil that can be ever present about us," Morrison said of the attacks.

Brenton Tarrant is among four people - three men and a woman - taken into custody by the New Zeland Police in connection with Christchurch mosque shooting.

At least 40 were killed and 20 injured after shooters opened fire at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

The attack on worshippers involved a fleet of rifles and cars containing improvised explosive devices.

According to news.com.au, one of them even live streamed the attack on Facebook, which was later picked up by a YouTube channel.

The live video showed the attacker firing at worshippers with his semi-automatic weapon as they gathered for Friday prayers at the Masjid Al Noor mosque.

This gunman was confirmed to be 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant.

Ahead of executing his plan, Brenton wrote a 37-page manifesto declaring his evil intentions.

The manifesto was titled The Great Replacement and was posted on a message board website.

In his manifesto, Brenton described himself as Just an ordinary White man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to a working class, low-income family.

Explaining why he carried out the attacks, he said ''it was to avenge thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders.

The shooter stated that he had planned the attack for two years and had a location lined up three months before the attack today.

He then went on to describe himself as an eco-fascist. I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist, he wrote in the 37-page document.

While he also made a bizarre reference to Spyro the Dragon, a PlayStation game, which taught him ''ethno-nationalism, he also claimed to have had a brief contact with Anders Breivik, who was a far-right terrorist who killed 69 members of a youth league summer camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011.

Brenton also revealed how he supported US President Donald Trump as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose, but not as a policymaker.

In a chilling post on a social media forum posted last night, the ring leader stated, I will carry out an attack against the invaders and even live stream the attack via Facebook.

(With Agency inputs)
SEOUL/WASHINGTON: North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, a senior diplomat said on Friday, according to news reports from the North`s capital.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States wished to continue talks with North Korea and had "every expectation" that its leader, Kim Jong Un, would stick to pledges not to resume nuclear and missile testing. Pompeo gave no sign of U.S. willingness to soften its stance in demanding that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last month`s summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in Hanoi, Russia`s TASS news agency and the Associated Press reported."We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital.

The second Trump-Kim summit broke down over differences about U.S. demands for Pyongyang to denuclearize and North Korea`s demand for dramatic relief from international sanctions imposed for its nuclear and missile tests, which it pursued for years in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Choe said Pompeo and U.S. national security adviser John Bolton "created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States", TASS reported.

Kim would make an announcement soon on his position on the denuclearization talks and North Korea`s next steps, TASS quoted Choe as saying. She said Washington had thrown away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, AP reported.

"I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger," AP quoted Choe as saying.

However, she added: "Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful." Bolton told reporters outside the White House Choe`s statement was "inaccurate." He said he had spoken to his South Korean counterpart but wanted to consult with other U.S. officials before responding further.

Bolton later accompanied Trump to a pre-arranged meeting with top defense officials at the Pentagon.

US SEEKS MORE `CONVERSATIONS` WITH NORTH

Pompeo told reporters it was not the first time he had been called "gangster-like" by North Korea. "And following that we continued to have very professional conversations ... I have every expectation we will be able to continue to do that," he said. Pompeo said that in her remarks, Choe had left open the possibility that negotiations would continue.

"It`s the administration`s desire that we continue to have conversations around this," Pompeo said. "As the president said when he was in Hanoi, the offer that they made simply didn`t rise to the level that was acceptable, given what they were asking for in exchange."

Kim had committed multiple times to Trump in Hanoi that he would not to resume nuclear or missile testing, Pompeo said. "That`s Chairman Kim`s word. We have every expectation he will live up to that commitment."

Pompeo told Fox News he did not want to forecast "what we will do or what we might do" if Kim were to resume testing, but added: "That would be most unfortunate. I think Chairman Kim understands that."

Trump has pointed to North Korea`s freeze in nuclear and missile testing since 2017 as a positive outcome from nearly a year of diplomatic engagement with North Korea. He and Kim had previous exchanged fiery rhetoric that had raised fears of war.

Washington has said it is closely watching activity at a North Korean rocket site that U.S. think tanks have said could be preparations for a new launch. Trump has made much of his personal chemistry with Kim and has said he would be "very disappointed" in Kim if North Korea were to resume testing.

South Korea, which has an ambitious agenda of engagement with North Korea that is dependent on Pyongyang and Washington resolving at least some of their differences, said it was too early to tell what Choe`s comments might mean. "We cannot judge the current situation based solely on Vice Minister Choe Son Hui`s statements. We are watching the situation closely. In any situation, our government will endeavour for the restart of North Korea-U.S. negotiations," South Korea`s presidential Blue House said in a statement.

Choe`s comments echoed the North`s usual rhetoric at tense points in its dealings with Washington. North Korea expert Joshua Pollack said North Korea may be delivering an ultimatum.

"They`re putting down a marker, saying which way things are headed if nothing changes," Pollack, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said.

Joel Wit of the 38 North think tank said North Korea was likely toughening its negotiating position after the collapse of the Hanoi summit. "It is likely to gauge the U.S. reaction in the days ahead before making a decision to launch a rocket," he said.

Choe had said after the Hanoi talks that Kim might lose his commitment to pursue a deal with the United States after seeing it reject a request to lift some sanctions in return for the North destroying its main known nuclear complex. In Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang urged patience and further dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

Earlier on Friday, a spokeswoman for South Korea`s Ministry of Unification told a press briefing that the weekly inter-Korean meeting scheduled at a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, had been cancelled after the North Koreans said they would not be sending senior officials. The spokeswoman said the ministry had not confirmed why the North Korean officials decided not to attend.
WASHINGTON: The United States, the European Union (EU) and Canada imposed new sanctions on Russia over its continued aggression against Ukraine.

The sanctions were slapped on six Russian defense firms, two Russian energy and construction companies operating in Crimea and few officials.

Briefing the media, US State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said, Today, the United States, EU, and Canada took coordinated action in response to Russias continued aggression against Ukraine by imposing sanctions on individuals who orchestrated the unjustified November 25 attack on three Ukrainian naval vessels near the Kerch Strait. Additionally, the United States imposed sanctions on six Russian defense firms, including shipbuilding companies; two individuals involved in the November sham 'elections' in Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine; and two Russian energy and construction companies operating in Crimea.

In November 2018, the Russian navy captured 24 Ukrainian sailors and their vessels in the Kerch Strait. The United States, Canada and the European Union pressed to release the sailors.

In the five years since Russia started its campaign of aggression against Ukraine, we have stood firmly with our Transatlantic partners in opposition to Russias malign and illegal actions, including its attack near the Kerch Strait. Russias attack represented a dangerous escalation and a violation of international law. We call upon Russia to immediately return to Ukraine the seized vessels and detained crewmembers, and keep the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov open to ships transiting to and from Ukrainian ports. We also call on Russia to respect Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, including its territorial waters, he added.

The message to Russia is clear  the international community will not stand by while Russia continues to violate international norms and laws and the Transatlantic community stands united in our efforts to counter Russian aggression, said Palladino.
A white supremacist terrorist on Friday opened fire on Muslim worshippers at two mosques in New Zealand killing at least 49 and injuring 20 others. The terror attacks took place on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb.

The terrorist entered the mosque and started shooting indiscriminately and repeatedly at the worshippers, covering the entire mosque. The attack clearly shows that it was a terror strike where the aim of the man, carrying automatic assault rifles, was only to take innocent lives.

However, the western media chose to refrain from using the word -- terrorist and simply referred to him as a gunman.

We take a look at how the western media reported the terrorist attack as an attack by a gunman:

US media New York Times (NYT) says:

In New Zealand, Signs Point to a Gunman Steeped in Internet Trolling: A camera mounted to his head, the gunman who livestreamed part of his savage attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday began his video by casually making reference to a current internet meme. He appeared to be steeped in the culture of the extreme-right internet. And in the terrible minutes of video that followed, he proved to be a nonchalant, unrepentant killer.

# After calling it a gunman attack NYT changed it to a terrorist attack after several hours

UK media British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported:

Christchurch shootings: 49 dead in New Zealand mosque attacks-Forty-nine people have been killed and at least 20 wounded in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. A gunman identifying himself as an Australian live-streamed the rampage at Al Noor mosque to Facebook. He had espoused racist anti-immigrant views.

Reuters says:

Dozens killed as gunman livestreams New Zealand mosque shootings: A gunman shot dead 49 people and wounded more than 40 at two New Zealand mosques, some as they were kneeling at prayer, livestreaming online some of the killings that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern condemned as terrorism. The gunman broadcast footage of the attack on one mosque in the city of Christchurch on Facebook, mirroring the carnage played out in video games, after publishing a manifesto in which he denounced immigrants, calling them invaders.

Aljazeera reports:

The world reacts to New Zealand mosque attacks: Political and religious leaders from across the world have expressed their condemnation at the deadly shooting at two mosques in New Zealand city of Christchurch. Forty-nine people were killed and at least 20 suffered serious injuries in the shootings targeting the mosques during Friday prayers. Police said three men and a woman were in custody in connection with the attacks. The timing of the shootings and the posting on social media of what appeared to be live, point-of-view video footage of the assault by a gunman, added to the distress of many.

Telegraph reports:

New Zealand shooting: 49 killed in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch: Forty-nine people have been killed and more than 20 others have been seriously injured in shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch after at least one gunman opened fire on worshipers.

The man, who identified himself as 28-year-old Australian-born Brenton Tarrant, filmed the attack on social media. Dressed in a military-style, camouflage outfit, and carrying an automatic rifle he started randomly shooting people in the Al Noor mosque shortly after 1.40pm local time (12.40am GMT). Gunmen then opened fire at a second mosque in the suburb of Linwood, where police said there had also been multiple casualties.

Fox News reported:

49 killed and dozens, including young children, injured in New Zealand mass shootings targeting mosques: Three people are in custody -- one of whom was charged with murder -- after at least one heavily-armed shooter mowed down Muslim worshippers at Friday prayer, massacring 49 people in two New Zealand mosques while broadcasting a horrific live stream of the terror attack.

However, some media groups called it a terrorist group

The Guardian repoted:

New Zealand shooting: 49 dead in terrorist attack at two mosques  live updates: Lecturer Dr Zurinawati Mohi was near the Malaysian-Korea border en route to Hatyai for work when she was alerted to the attack by a friend, she told the New Straits Times. Her husband, Mohd Nazri Hisham Omar, 46, has lived in Christchurch with three of their children, aged 17, 13 and 9, since January.

To get confirmation, I immediately called my husband and three children but my calls went unanswered. Not long after that, one of my kids sent me a WhatsApp message telling me their father was injured, she said. Zurinawati, 48, said her husband was badly injured in the attack, though she did not know what his condition was in the hospital. Our three children are safe but traumatised following what happened. She intends to travel to New Zealand with their eldest son, 19, as soon as possible.

The coverage of the attack in the western media including those in Europe and the United States of America is in stark contrast to their reporting on similar strikes where the targets have been white nationals. On such occasions, the western media has been quick to call the attacker a terrorist and label the strike as a terror attack.

The dual-face of the western media has come to the fore even after New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed the Christchurch Mosques carnage as terrorist attack. Still, major news portals continued to refer the attacker as a gunman.
China's outbound tourism ranks first in the world

Chinese tourists visiting the ruins of Ephesus in Turkey. (Photo/China.com.cn)

Chinese people made about 150 million overseas trips last year, up 14.7 percent compared with the previous year, according to a report jointly released by the China Tourism Academy and online travel agency Ctrip, Chinanews.com reported recently.

In 2018, China became the source of the largest number of outbound tourists in the world.

Thailand, Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, the US, Russia, Australia, Italy, the UK, France, Germany and Spain were among the top 20 most visited countries among Chinese travelers, the report indicated.

Last year, 10 countries emerged as new destinations favored by Chinese people, including Myanmar, Serbia, Laos, Argentina, Spain and Cambodia.

In 2018, Chinese mainland tourists spent $120 billion overseas, with the average consumption per person per trip hitting 5,400 yuan.

The report revealed the top 10 shopping destinations for Chinese mainland tourists were Hong Kong, Dubai, Osaka, Macao, Tokyo, Paris, London, Singapore and Kyoto.

An expert with Ctrips outbound travel studies said that due to consumption upgrading, Chinese people are now more willing to spend money on high-quality overseas travel experiences.

Dai Bin, president of CTA, said Chinas overseas travel market has maintained a growth rate of above 20 percent over the past 10 years, and this double-digit growth is expected to continue in the future.
Seungri on his way out of the police agency after hours of questioning. Yonhap



By Lee Min-young



The state military recruitment agency says K-pop star Seungri will likely have to start serving in the military regardless of the ongoing investigation over his alleged involvement in sex crimes, according to a local media report.



Newsis reported on Friday that Military Manpower Administration (MMA) chief Ki Chan-soo said there was no legal ground for the agency to defer Seungri's conscription and he would likely be investigated in the military.



But he added that if Seungri formally requested deferment, the agency would closely examine whether he had a relevant reason for postponement, and decide according to the conscription law.






Citibank Korea CEO Park Jin-hei, right, holds a banner with Han Young-soo, president of Korea YMCA, during a signing ceremony for Think Money, a financial education program for teenagers, at the Korea YMCA headquarters in central Seoul, Friday. The bank donated 341 million won for the program on the day. / Courtesy of Citibank Korea




South Korea plans to provide US$12 million in humanitarian assistance to a conflict-laden Syria and its neighboring countries this year, Seoul's foreign ministry said Friday.







Led by Deputy Foreign Minister for Multilateral and Global Affairs Kang Jeong-sik, the South Korean delegation unveiled the plan during the Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region in Brussels on Thursday.







The Seoul government has so far provided more than US$63 million to Syria and the countries that have embraced Syrian refugees, such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.







"Our firm position is to join efforts to address the international humanitarian situation as a responsible member of the international community," the ministry said.







"The government plans to continue its support to help address humanitarian crises in other Middle East countries, such as Yemen and Iraq as well." (Yonhap)


A virtual fitting service utilizing 3D printing technology. The Ministry of National Defense if pushing forward the 'smart' defense innovation plan, part of the "Defense Reform 2.0" declared in last July. Courtesy of Ministry of National Defense



By Jung Da-min



The Ministry of National Defense is pushing forward its expansive initiative to restructure and modernize the Republic of Korea Armed Forces to counter the demographic cliff the country faces.



One of the main pillars of the "Defense Reform 2.0," first announced in last July by the incumbent President Moon Jae-in administration, is to actively utilize science and technology in the era of the fourth industrial revolution.



Defense Minister Jeong Kyung-doo on Friday held a plenary meeting for the "4th Industrial Revolution Smart Defense Innovation," part of the Defense Reform 2.0.



The introduction of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies to supplement lack of training facilities, and artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to better allocate defense budgets while creating a better living environment for soldiers were among the agenda.



The 3D printing technology for better fitting combat uniforms and drones for transportation of munitions will also be introduced.



"The defense operation reform focuses on applying the concept of 'total life cycle' management to the soldiers and defense resources to enhance the education and training of soldiers while promoting safety and welfare and to maximize the efficiency of defense resource management," the defense ministry said.



The ministry is also planning to establish a hyper-connected intranet network for defense resources and facilities that will enable mobile device-based work environment.



The "smart" reform plan by the ministry aims to create a smaller but smarter military based on cutting-edge technologies such as AR/VR, AI and 3D printing, reducing troop numbers to 500,000 by 2022.



All able-bodied South Korean men are obliged to serve in the military for nearly two years to defend the country from a possible North Korean invasion, but the ministry estimates that military resources will be reduced by 20,000 to 30,000 people in 2023, around the time when those born in 2002 will join the military.



Downsizing the military forces, however, requires a substantial budget.



According to the defense ministry, 270.7 trillion won will be spent for five years from 2019 to 2023  176.6 trillion won for military forces operation and 94.1 trillion won for improving the overall defense abilities.



The ministry said that it will increase the share of the defense budget to 36.5 percent by 2023, from 32.9 percent this year. The average increase will be 7.5 percent a year, if it is implemented as planned.



The number of general-grade officers will also be reduced to 360 by 2022, down 76 from 436 in 2018, meaning the removal of 66 general-level positions for the Army and five each for the Navy and Air Force.



The defense ministry's reform plan comes amid a broader shift of policy priorities by the South Korean military in response to ongoing efforts to create peace on the Korean Peninsula.



Earlier in March, the defense ministry suspended all major South Korea-U.S. joint exercises including their springtime Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises as well as the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) joint drill usually held in August.



The downsized joint exercise named "19-1 Dong Maeng" had been practiced as a replacement for the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises while a new civilian-military exercise named "Ulchi Taeguek" is expected to be held in May and a renamed U.S.-South Korea joint command-post exercise (CPX) "19-2 Dong Maeng" in August or September, to replace the UFG.


The Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 on Sunday has triggered some pessimistic comments on Africas leading airline company and even the modernization process of the continent. Some even said that they would never risk their lives going to Africa.

It is undeniable that Boeing Company should bear the main responsibility. The captain of plane had over 8,000 flight hours, making it unlikely that it was the pilots fault. Boeings 737 MAX, which aims to dominate the international narrow-body aircraft market, was released in 2017 and delivered to Ethiopian Airlines last November. Only five months ago, in October 2018, the Indonesias Lion Air flight 610 crashed 10 minutes after takeoff, leading to 189 casualties. Just as Mary Schiavo, the former Inspector General of the US Department of Transportation said, the brand-new aircraft crashed twice in a year, a cause for concern that should prompt steps to prevent such tragedy from happening again.

Some 48 countries, including China, the US, Canada, and Australia have successively grounded the plane this week. It is therefore alarming to see that currently 350 of the aircrafts have been delivered and another 4,611 ones have been ordered worldwide.

It is the promotion of high-tech imperialism by developed countries that is the root cause of these tragedies. Specifically, these high-tech companies have absolute control over technology, which weakens bargaining power and even the use of products by developing countries. Although the aircraft involved in the tragedy have undergone maintenance a month ago, it is an indisputable fact that some developing countries are not fully aware of the importance of transportation infrastructure maintenance and personnel maintenance training. High-tech companies such as Boeing are therefore not fully prepared to serve developing countries. China, on the other hand, understands the market better, given its own companies characteristics. In the past years, Chinas aircraft models, such as Modern Ark 60 (MA 60) and Y-12, have not only helped connect African countries across the continent, but China has also offered training services to facilitate operation. Furthermore, developed countries have the right to make final decisions. For example, according to unwritten rules, the decision to ground a plane should be led by the regulatory body of the country that certified the aircraft for operation. Despite this, Chinas decision to ground the 737 MAX one day after the air crash has triggered controversies in some Western countries.

To impede such fatal accidents, developing countries should work together and improve themselves to break the monopoly of discourse power of developed countries. Only South-South cooperation will help the rise of developing countries, and only through this type of cooperation can they finally make their voices heard and advocate their own demands in political and economic governance.

(Opinion by Song Wei, associate researcher with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation)


By Kang Seung-woo



The Seoul Metropolitan Government said, Friday, it will enhance its monitoring on taxi drivers who overcharge foreign tourists amid an increasing number of such incidences.





The Seoul Metropolitan Government is cracking down on taxi drivers who rip off foreign tourists. / Courtesy of Seoul Metropolitan Government
In this Feb. 28 file photo, U.S President Donald Trump, right, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un take a walk after their first meeting at the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi hotel, in Hanoi, Vietnam. AP-Yonhap



Cheong Wa Dae says will continue efforts to resume dialogue



By Kim Yoo-chul



North Korea is considering dropping nuclear negotiations with the United States, the country's deputy foreign minister Choe Son-hui told a press conference in Pyongyang, Friday morning.



"The United States lost the golden chance. North Korea has no intention to yield to U.S. demands in any types for concessions," Choe said. Only a small number of foreign journalists and ambassadors were invited to the press conference.



"North Korea will soon decide whether or not to keep talking with the U.S. or maintaining the continued halts on missile launches and nuclear tests," the senior North Korean official said. She added the North's leader Kim Jong-un will soon announce the country's detailed action plans possibly to be taken by the regime after the summit.



Regarding Choe's comments, Cheong Wa Dae said the presidential office is "closely monitoring" the situation and will continue to make efforts toward resuming dialogue.



This is the first official response by North Korea after the Hanoi summit failed to produce any results with Washington refusing to accept North Korea's preferred "step-by-step" approach to the nuclear issue by demanding Pyongyang report undeclared nuclear facilities and dismantle its nuclear program, verifiably and completely.



Choe's remarks appear to be dissipating Seoul's hope to keep the momentum for nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea alive by moving forward with frozen inter-Korean economic and business projects.









President Moon Jae-in has acted as a "mediator" on the talks since the very beginning, making the first U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore possible and smoothing out bumps along the way toward the second summit in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.



Given the country's contribution for the talks, South Korea appears eager to help put Washington and Pyongyang back on the diplomacy track with Moon vowing to play a "facilitator" role rather than just act as a "mediator."



Despite repeated requests by South Korea for a partial easing of economic sanctions on North Korea and an early resumption of the operations of Gaeseong Industrial Complex and Mount Geumgang tourism projects, the U.S. was stressing the importance of ensuring that United Nations sanctions are maintained and implemented fully.





North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui, center, speaks at a gathering for diplomats in Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, March 15, 2019. AP-Yonhap
Hwang Kyo-ahn, chairman of the main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP), speaks during a party meeting in South Gyeongsang Province, Monday. / Yonhap



By Park Ji-won



Hwang Kyo-ahn, chairman of the largest opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP), showed positive signs on having nuclear weapons in South Korea, reversing his stance on denuclearization while calling for a debate to discuss preparing for the worst case scenario.



In a written congratulatory message for the LKP's Shim Jae-cheol's parliamentary seminar on nuclear armament, Hwang said Thursday, "Considering our country's reality in which the worst circumstances cannot be eliminated, having independent nuclear armament can no longer be overlooked."



He added "South Korea's own nuclear armament would not be an easy job but it should be discussed nationally and internationally."



He also criticized the government's cooperative stance on North Korea saying it puts national security at risk, and weakens the South Korea-U.S. alliance.



His remarks came after the breakdown of the summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Donald Trump without a certain agreement on denuclearization of the North amid concerns Pyongyang may not give up its nuclear arsenal.



Hwang claimed earlier he agrees with the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons, but it would not be acceptable in international society to talk about having new nuclear weapons as the world is moving toward denuclearization.



Critics say his move is likely to attract right-wing figures before general elections next year. Far-right figures in the party and right-wing organizations have been claiming having nuclear weapons in the South would protect national security against the North.



Recently, the LKP has been stepping up criticism against President Moon Jae-in's North Korea policy. On Wednesday, its floor leader Rep. Na Kyung-won was caught in controversy over her remarks during an Assembly speech where she called Moon a "top spokesman" for North Korea.



A recent poll shows that the party's approval rate continues to rise posting some 32.3 percent this week thanks to the criticism against the administration, after the recent fruitless summit between the leaders of North Korea and the U.S., fueling concerns about the government's North Korea policy.



Meanwhile, the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) criticized Hwang for preventing the Korean Peninsula from continuing the peace momentum.



"Chairman Hwang is currying favor with the conservatives with an impossible claim," Lee Hae-shik, a spokesman of the DPK, said in a statement.



"Having nuclear weapons to stop the North's nuclear power is not helping anyone to make peace on the Korean Peninsula."



Lee also said Hwang should be ashamed that he changed his stance on the matter.






By Oh Young-jin







The biggest loser in the no-deal Hanoi summit between North Korea's Kim Jong-un and U.S.'s Donald Trump was neither of the two but South Korean President Moon Jae-in.







It means his reconciliatory North Korea policy is in trouble and may be doomed with no second chances as Trump appears to be leaning to the usual insider Washington regimen with his presidency to be boxed in by a looming partisan tussle over his impeachment for colluding with Russia.







If Moon's policy fails, it will not be an isolated case  Korea's recent history shows Moon is part of the rule as most of his predecessors had fared as badly, if not worse.







Despite accusations of being a remote-controlled puppet president, Park Geun-hye, now impeached and tried while in prison for corruption, among other charges, had her own reciprocity-based "Trustpolitik," but this North Korea policy faltered as soon as it started.







Lee Myung-bak, now out on bail while being tried for corruption, did not even have anything worthy of a North Korea policy. His conservative presidency came on the heels of the latter half of 10-year liberal rule, led by the late President Roh Moo-hyun.







Therefore, Lee opted for the reflective "anything but" approach. During Lee's rule, inter-Korean relations plunged to a low, a bellicose North Korea being confrontational as well.







Roh by and large inherited much of his predecessor Kim Dae-jung's "sunshine" policy of promoting rapport with the North, but one difference was that Roh adopted Prof. Moon Chung-in's suggestion of making Korea an honest broker to help mediate between the U.S. China and Japan and achieve a regional peace.







Prof. Moon is now special adviser to President Moon, who worked as Roh's chief of staff.







Roh's dream foundered and did not materialize because the U.S., Korea's key ally, took offense at Seoul's attempt to get out of its orbit, and China had yet to grow big enough to cope with the U.S. and emerge as an alternative. China has not yet filled the bigger shoes.







Roh and Kim worked with Kim Jong-il, who crowned his son and current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as his successor during his dying days.







The North then looked like a basket case following its leader's death.







Kim and Roh could afford to draw a broader picture, thinking of absorbing the North when it collapsed under its own weight.







President Moon depends on Prof. Moon for his North Korea policy, but his version is more realistic than Roh's from the realization that the South is not big or clever enough to become an effective mediator among the big guns.







It is also different from Kim Dae-jung's seminal idea for a reconciliatory formula primarily because of the emergence of its vibrant new leader, Kim Jong-un. The young Kim brought his country closer to being a nuclear weapon state by conducting tests defiantly, even at the risk of inviting a preemptive U.S. strike.







Kim has proved confident and audacious enough to upstage Trump or China's Xi Jinping, the supposed main actors in the global arena.







Kim's performance has dwarfed President Moon, who was satisfied with his supporting role. But by many signs, Moon got what he wanted at least for the time being: peace on the Korean Peninsula. Moon clarified peace as his goal at whatever cost.







Indeed, before the Hanoi fiasco, Moon was touted as a candidate to win the Nobel Peace Prize together with Kim and Trump. Now Kim and Trump may have a third summit, but the chance of a breakthrough does not look as high as in Hanoi (remember the hype preceding it) and in Singapore, the site of their first summit.







Now what do Moon, his liberal predecessors Roh or Kim, as well as conservative Lee and Park, have in common in the unsuccessful formula for the North?







They have all striven for a kind of qualified peace that is a little bit more secure.







We keep falling short of even that goal, reminding one of a long jumper who cannot live up to his potential because he sets his goal too low.







Peace is too low to be a national goal. Rather, we should be bold in goal setting and make national unification between South and North Korea our new clear and present goal.







We are not united about unification for fear it would cost us dearly and hurt our standard of living. Overcoming it would give us a sense of purpose as a nation.







Politicians are divided over how to deal with the North  the progressives want to get friendly, while the conservatives prefer a stick-first policy.







The division on methodology can be overridden by unification, an unrivaled unifying cause.







We should let the world know that unification is what we want and work toward that goal  enticing help and clearing obstacles  so the world realizes that a unified Korea is in everyone's interests.







It is a process by which we can take ownership of our fate. Perhaps that way, we may land a step short, but still gain a more stable peace.









Oh Young-jin (

) is digital managing editor of The Korea Times.






By John Rodgers





As I read familiar headlines of early spring smog blanketing the Korean peninsula and see pictures of ghostly Seoul skyscrapers standing amidst the toxic dust, I feel grateful that I now live far away along the shores of a New Hampshire lake, where clean air prevails  every day.



For years I watched as more and more gray, and sometimes ochre, skies dominated days and thwarted outdoor plans. Spring had always been the time to expect a couple of bad days, with what was always the yellow dust or "hwangsa" blowing in from China, leaving a sulfurous sheen on cars and causing some to don masks. But that was about it; generally the rest of the year was alright.



Then more of spring's salubrious days were spoiled by noxious air, sometimes with stretches of days. Then would come some rain, rain that you wouldn't want to sing or dance in, to clean the atmosphere and deliver a few days of fine weather.



Eventually winter had more grey days, not the yellow dust from China but some toxic mix, at least half of it coming from Korean-based pollution producers (i.e., coal power plants and automobiles), according to research from Harvard University.



Summer suffered next, a season when the air is already muggy and sometimes suffocating. More "fine dust" and "bad air" warnings filled newscasts and more discussions of the who and what behind it began to take place.



Finally, the most resilient and invigorating season, when the sky is high and the horse is fat, as Koreans say, autumn, fell victim to particulate matter, to a smog that dared to enshroud the glorious mountains and valleys that draw countless outdoor enthusiasts, especially as foliage fills treetops. No time of year was off limits.



Soon, schools started issuing warnings, keeping students indoors on bad days, some installing air purifiers. People in general started checking websites and apps that provided the latest air quality reading, determining whether to wear a mask or not, closing any open windows, cancelling outdoor engagements. And as the populous grew more concerned, so the government announced more plans, beyond keeping some cars off Seoul's roads.



In 2017, NASA conducted flights over the peninsula to determine the source of the smog and found, as Harvard had, that "over half of the pollution is coming from local sources," which included automobiles (particularly diesels), industrial sites and power plants. Korea now has around 50 coal power plants.



The year 2018 began with four straight days of "bad air," the mountains nearby my Gyeonggi apartment pale, hid obscure figures. Hiking plans were dashed. In the news I read that the Moon administration still had a plan to reduce fine dust by 30 percent, though with little evident progress.



A year later I have seen those familiar headlines and photos, illustrating the worst smoggy stretch ever. The government reiterated its plans: temporarily shutting down old coal power plants; getting old diesels off the roads; seeding clouds to produce rain; building a massive purifier tower; working with China. Some sensible plans.



But nothing bold. No harnessing of the country's immense technological ingenuity on a grand scale. Why not task Samsung and LG with helping defeat this national threat? Why not utilize the knowledge of professors and students at universities across the nation to fight this menace? Why not mobilize engineers from Posco and Hyundai and Kia in a war against fine dust? It's past time for the government and private sector tounite in a broad and determined effort to save the air everyone breathes. Few have the option of escaping to cleaner climes.





The writer (jmrseoul@gmail.com) spent more than 10 years in Korea, where he taught English at both Daewon Foreign Language High School and the Hankuk Academy of Foreign Studies.






Holding the national flag Taegeukgi, citizens shout, "Long live the independence of Korea," in front of Dongnimmun (Independence Gate) in Seoul, March 1, marking the 100th anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement. /Yonhap



By Richard Pennington





You will find me at Tapgol Park on the first day of March, every year  no exceptions. Of course, 2019 was especially important as it marked a century since the promulgation of the Korean Declaration of Independence.



The air was bad in Seoul that day, but I would not be deterred. This old park (the 10-story stone pagoda dates from the 15th century) has seen a lot of history, and I have deep affection for it.



A bigger crowd than usual was present. While a program was to start later, I would see none of it; there was too much going on to just hang around. Banners and TV cameras abounded.



A number of white-clad people were playing harmonicas, and far more banged gongs and drums (a traditional musical form known as nongakdae) all around the park. They went up and down the sidewalk, and in circles.





Residents re-enacts the March 1, 1919, Independence Movement in front of the birth home in Taean County, South Chungcheong Province, of the late Lee Jong-il, one of 33 Korean leaders who organized the movement. /Yonhap



A man stood at the front gate and read the declaration in a loud and solemn manner: "We hereby declare that Korea is an independent state and that Koreans are a self-governing people. We proclaim it to the nations of the world in affirmation of the principle of the equality of all nations, and we proclaim it to our posterity preserving in perpetuity the right of national survival. We make this declaration on the strength of 5,000 years of history as an expression of the devotion and loyalty of 20 million people ..."



I walked a couple of blocks, turned left and made my way to an eight-story office building. There, exactly a century earlier, 33 bold and courageous men had gathered in the Taehwagwan (also known as Myeongwolgwan) restaurant to sign and promulgate the Declaration of Independence, refuting all that the colonizing Japanese had done since their extralegal annexation in 1910.



Knowing that a vigorous response would come, they emphasized that there was no feeling of enmity for the Japanese. The 33 marched to a nearby police station and turned themselves in just as a group of students read the Declaration aloud at Tapgol Park to a crowd that had gathered to mourn the recent death of King Gojong. As is well known, they answered with joyous cries of "long live independence!"



A short subway ride took me to Gwanghwamun Square where President Moon Jae-in was at the center of a large gathering to commemorate what had transpired 100 years ago. The Korean national flag, Taegeukgi, was everywhere, although I had brought my own just in case.



With the statues of King Sejong and Admiral Yi Sun-sin towering over the assembled multitude, I wandered all around this historic venue. The push-pull of Korean politics was evident even on such a day  I saw one banner about eradicating communism and another that spoke warmly of "Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un."





President Moon Jae-in, center, and first lady Kim Jung-sook wave the Korean flag Taegeukgi, at Gwanghwamun Square, Seoul, March 1 during the centennial celebration of the March 1 Independence Movement against Japanese colonial rule. /Korea Times photo by Ryu Hyo-jin
North Korea reconsidering negotiations with US



U.S.-North Korea denuclearization talks stand at a crossroads after Pyongyang said Friday that it is considering suspending negotiations with Washington. It is still too early to tell if the North actually wants to opt out of dialogue or not. But the tone of what the country said appears to bode ill, not well, for the prospects of the North's denuclearization.



News agencies such as the Associated Press and Russia's TASS quoted Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui as saying in Pyongyang that Kim Jong-un would decide soon whether to continue diplomatic talks and keep the country's moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests. This report struck a negative tone rather than a positive one.



If Kim announces he will pull out of talks with Washington, this will certainly derail efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in to find a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear standoff. In a similar vein, Kim's peace offensive since the start of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics may risk going up in smoke.



Yet we have to figure out what the real intention of the Kim regime is now. After failing to reach any agreement with Trump in the second summit in Hanoi on Feb. 27 and 28, Kim may try to blame the U.S. for the failure of the talks. In fact, the two leaders returned home empty-handed because they were unable to narrow their differences over a denuclearization formula and sanctions relief for the North.



Kim's frustration and disappointment at the breakdown of the talks were evident in what Choe told diplomats and journalists in the North Korean capital. Saying the North was deeply disappointed by the summit failure, she clarified Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks if the U.S. refuses to take corresponding steps after the North's 15-month moratorium on nuclear and missile testing.



Choe has also expressed strong dissatisfaction with the U.S. refusal at the Hanoi summit to lift many of the U.N. sanctions. She made it clear that the North has no intention of budging an inch unless the Trump administration changes its negotiation strategy.



Some experts at home and abroad say the Kim regime is trying to put pressure on the U.S. to accept the North's simultaneous and phased denuclearization so the North can get maximum rewards for every step it takes. However, the Trump administration wants a package deal, under which the North dismantles not only the Yongbyon nuclear complex but also its plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities and long-range missiles.



Furthermore, the U.S. has returned to its hard-line position that sanctions will remain firmly in place until a complete denuclearization of the North. This strong stance has been boosted by hawkish officials such as National Security Adviser John Bolton. Against this backdrop, the Kim regime is likely to play hardball and threaten to stop talks with the U.S.



If the two sides refuse to compromise, nuclear talks will eventually collapse. If this happens, both Kim and Trump will become losers. And "fire and fury" will prevail over the Korean Peninsula again. No one can rule of the possibility of Kim returning to brinkmanship tactics by resuming nuclear or missile tests.



We urge both North Korea and the U.S. to refrain from any reckless behavior. Nothing is more important than to keep the momentum for talks to solve the issue through dialogue and compromise.














This image is a screenshot of YouTube when "Korea Times" is searched.



By Jun Ji-hye



Google's YouTube is posing a threat to Korea's largest portal Naver as more and more Koreans use the popular online video streaming site as a primary tool for searching information on the internet, a survey showed Friday.



Nasmedia, KT's digital media lab, said its findings showed 60 percent of Korean internet users use YouTube when searching for information, noting YouTube's influence has appeared to have expanded to the search field beyond the video content service.



Nasmedia surveyed 2,000 PC and mobile internet users, analyzing their service use and acceptance behaviors.



Naver still maintained the top position as a search engine, with 92.4 percent of respondents selecting the portal as their favorite search engine.



But Naver's share in the domestic internet search market can fall if YouTube's popularity continues.



Nasmedia noted the utilization of YouTube as a search engine is expected to expand steadily especially among the young generation.



In the survey, seven out of 10 teenagers said they obtain information from YouTube.



"YouTube's influence is expected to be enhanced as an information search channel, and this will lead to more cut-throat competition between relevant business operators," said Lee Ji-young in charge of business strategy at Nasmedia.



Meanwhile, 56 percent of respondents said they use Google as their major search engine, while 37.6 percent and 27.1 percent said they use Daum and Instagram, respectively, to search for information they need.



A 33-year-old office worker in Seoul said he used Naver previously to search for information in most situations, but has recently moved to YouTube to do so.



"I obtain a variety of information from YouTube including news and recipes," he said. "When I bought a chair at IKEA, I also utilized YouTube to learn how to assemble it. It was easier to learn as I could see an assembly method through video clips."



The findings by Nasmedia also showed that the usage rate of online video content has been increasing continuously from 87.7 percent in 2017 to 91.9 percent in 2018 to 95.4 percent this year.



Among those, 64.8 percent said they consume video content with their mobile phones.



"YouTube is expected to lead an increase in the use of online video content through mobile phones," Lee said.



Nasmedia said a user watches video clips through mobile phones for 75 minutes per day on average. This accounted for 45.5 percent of a user's entire mobile internet use time.



Nasmedia added that a teenager watches video clips on mobile devices for more than 120 minutes per day on average, compared to 100 minutes for those in their 20s and 60 minutes for those over 30.


LG Electronics shareholders attend the company's shareholders' meeting at LG Twin Towers on Yeouido in Seoul, Friday. Yonhap



By Nam Hyun-woo





LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo

LG Group reshuffled the board members of its core units during their shareholder meetings on Friday, in a move to strengthen its new Chairman Koo Kwang-mo's control across Korea's No. 4 conglomerate.



Along with LG, POSCO, Kia Motors and other big name companies also each held a shareholder meeting and appointed fresh board members to solidify their new leaders' power.



LG Electronics shareholders approved appointing LG Corp. Vice Chairman Kwon Young-soo as an LG Electronics board member. The board then appointed Kwon its chairman.



As Kwon becomes the board's chairman, LG Electronics separated its management and board. LG Electronics' Vice Chairman Jo Seong-jin has been serving as the company's CEO and chairman of the board for the past two years, but he will focus on the management side, while Kwon will be handling board-level issues.



Kwon is a finance specialist, serving as chief financial officer of LG Electronics in the 2000s, and also known as Group Chairman Koo's close aide. After leading other core units of the group, such as LG Display and LG Uplus, he was appointed as vice chairman of LG Corp., the holding firm of the group, in July, a month after Koo became the head of the group.



At the meeting, another LG Corp. Vice Chairman Koo Bon-joon stepped down from the LG Electronics board. He is the younger brother of the late Koo Bon-moo, former LG Group chairman and the current chairman's father.



Following the reshuffle, LG Electronics board has three inside directors  Kwon, Jo and Jung Do-hyun, LG Electronics president and chief financial officer.



Kwon was also named as an inside director during a LG Display shareholder meeting on Friday. Chemicals unit LG Chem named its Vice Chairman Shin Hak-cheol as an inside director. Shin, a former vice president of 3M International Operations, was recruited by Koo last year.





POSCO Chairman Choi Jeong-woo speaks during the steelmaker's shareholder meeting at its Seoul office, Friday. Courtesy of POSCO



At POSCO, shareholders voted for six agenda including naming new inside directors. Following the vote, Vice Presidents Kim Hak-dong and Jeong Tak will replace President Oh In-hwan and Vice President Yoo Seong, in what appears to be a move to enhance new Chairman Choi Jeong-woo's grip on the steelmaker.





Hyundai Motor Group Executive Vice Chairman Chung Eui-sun / Courtesy of Hyundai Motor Group
China expects to test its manned submersible, designed to submerge to a depth of 10,000 meters, and put it into service by 2020, which will create a new record to further enhance Chinas ocean capability and research level, the project chief designer revealed.

To realize this goal, China has conducted its deep-sea scientific investigation in an orderly manner, from the recent deep diving of Shenhai Yongshi manned submersible to Jiaolongs planned return to the Mariana Trench for 40-day adaption sea test later this year, according to Ye Cong, the chief designer of the manned submersible project.

After a 121-day expedition in the Indian Ocean, Chinas manned submersible Shenhai Yongshi (Deep Sea Warrior in Chinese) returned to Sanya, a city in southern Chinas Hainan province, on Sunday. In this voyage, the Deep See Warrior operated in hydrothermal area with complex geological conditions.

With an average six-plus-hour underwater operation, the submersible set a series of new records in Chinas manned deep-diving history.

The successful expedition increased our confidence in operating the science ship, personnel management, the submersible, and deep-sea scientific equipment developed by our country, Liu Zhu, captain of Tansuo-1, the ship that loaded Deep Sea Warrior, was quoted as saying by CGTN.

In addition, the localization rate of this 4,500-meter manned submersible reached 95%, which greatly improved the cost-effectiveness of scientific research, according to Science and Technology Daily.

Jiaolong manned submersible, another of the countrys leading scientific developments in deep-sea diving, is another record holder. In 2012, it completed the largest designed depth sea test in the Mariana Trench. Submerging 7,062 meters under the sea, it set a new world record for working manned submersibles.

After five years of development, Jiaolong will return to the Mariana Trench for a 40-day adaptive sea trial this July. It is expected to dive at a depth of 7,000 meters and perform some 10 dives in total. Afterward, Shenhai-1 will carry it to conduct the 56th Chinese voyage mission in the West Pacific, said Ding Zhongjun, deputy chief designer of the National Deep-Sea Base Management Center.




South Korea joined other countries to ban all Boeing 737 Max aircraft from its airspace due to safety concerns, the transport ministry said Friday.







On Thursday, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport issued a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) to inform pilots and airline operators of its decision to ban the Boeing aircraft from its airspace for the next three months.







"The NOTAM notice will restrict any entry of Boeing 737 Max aircraft in Korean airspace until further notice from the aviation authorities," a ministry official said over the phone.







On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said the U.S. will ground B737 Max jets after Europe and other countries ordered a halt to operations due to safety worries.







The measures come as the same plane, operated by Ethiopian Airlines, plunged to the ground resulting in the deaths of all on board Sunday, with another flown by Indonesia's Lion Air involved in a crash in October 2018.







Earlier this week, Eastar Jet said it will halt flights of its two B737 Max 8s. Other local airlines that have signed contracts to add the B737 Max 8 to their fleets said they won't operate the controversial plant until safety is assured.







Korean Air Lines Co. has ordered 30 B737 Max 8 planes, with six of them scheduled to arrive this year. Jeju Air Co. has ordered 40 B737 Max 8s, with their delivery set to begin in 2022. T'way Air Co. expects four B737 Max 8s to be delivered this year.







Korean Air and T'way said they won't operate the B737 Max 8 planes until all safety concerns are fully resolved. (Yonhap)


LG Chem's aggressive investment plan for its EV battery and petrochemicals business has drawn mixed responses. Korea Times file



LG Chem Ltd.'s aggressive investment plan for its EV battery and petrochemicals business has drawn mixed responses from market watchers.



Some analysts are concerned the investment push may come as a financial albatross to South Korea's top chemicals and EV battery maker, while others are upbeat it will likely provide new cash cows for the firm.



LG Chem has announced plans to invest 6 trillion won (US$5.29 billion) this year to expand its production facilities at home and abroad  well above the 1 trillion won to 2.5 trillion won it invested annually between 2011 and 2017.



In a blow to LG Chem, global credit appraiser Standard & Poor's (S&P) downgraded the firm's credit rating outlook from stable to negative while retaining its A- rating.



S&P said LG Chem's room to maintain its current credit rating for the next 24 months has weakened due to its increased facility investment and leverage.



Estimating LG Chem's annual operating cash flow at 3.5 trillion won to 4 trillion won in 2019 and 2020, the rating agency voiced concern it would be insufficient by a considerable amount to finance facility investment and dividend payments.



S&P said LG Chem's adjusted debt is expected to soar to around 6 trillion won at the end of this year, compared with 3.6 trillion won in 2018 and 1.1 trillion won two years ago.



S&P further said LG Chem could face unfavorable conditions in the EV battery and petrochemicals sectors down the road.



Volatility of the petrochemicals industry is likely to limit the company's overall performance improvement, and the EV battery market is confronted with high uncertainty over profitability due to stiffer competition and a supply glut, S&P added.



Domestic analysts, however, are sanguine about LG Chem's investment in the EV battery business.



"LG Chem is supplying batteries to major global automakers such as BMW, Volkswagen, General Motors, Hyundai and Kia," said Ham Hyeong-do of IBK Investment & Securities Co.



"The company has been scaling up production capacity to meet existing orders and secure new orders. Its aggressive investment is bearing fruit."



LG Chem broke into the EV battery business in 2009. It currently operates EV battery plants in China, the United States, Poland and South Korea.



The company said earlier that it aims to raise its EV battery production capacity to 110 gigawatt hours (GWh) by 2020 from the current 34 GWh.



LG Chem's investment push comes after Koo Kwang-mo took the helm at LG Group, South Korea's fourth-largest family-controlled conglomerate, in June last year, a month after his father's death.



Industry sources said LG Chem appears to be trying to find future growth engines under the new leadership of the 41-year-old Koo, who is focused on scouting for outside talent and investment. (Yonhap)


It was a frog that first convinced La Jolla resident Maggie Shen to become a fine artist.

Shen, 39, had enjoyed making art since her parents exposed her to it as a child in suburban Taipei, Taiwan. But she had planned on becoming a veterinarian  a choice that her school district required all students to make by age 14.The croaker lying on Shens biology-class dissection table had another choice in mind for her, however.

I still remember that frog, Shen said. That really hit me. I was told to poke through his heart, which was still beating, with a knife. But I couldnt do it. He was still alive!

Shens Plan-B career flowered into a series of site-specific soft sculptures she installed in public places from 2001 to 2005 in Taiwan. She called the series  which emphasized the softness and steadiness of feminine strengths via stretchy fabrics  Penetration of Flexibilities.

This is the way I express intimacy, Shen said while touring the Light around an untitled similar work, featuring white netting and fiber optics, that she installed for a recent show at La Jollas Misfit Pictures Gallery. I like creating things that cannot be possessed, that cannot be viewed easily as subjects.

Then, until about 2016, Shen went through a period where she said she divorced her art. She used it primarily as a psychotherapy medium, working with cancer patients and children with trauma in private practice in Pennsylvania  where she first settled in the U.S.  and then with children suffering from emotional issues in Switzerland, where she also taught art in boarding school.

I struggled with how to do what Im good at and make a living at the same time, she said. I did not want to accept that I am a fine artist.

Then, when Shen and her husband had a daughter seven years ago, she said, it was necessary to reconnoiter her career once again.

I worked with very difficult cases, which was fine before I had a child, she said. Then it became very difficult to do the job.

When Shens husband accepted a post as a physicist for General Atomics three years ago, the family relocated to La Jolla. And now, with a kid at La Jolla Elementary School most of each weekday, Shen is diving back into her passion.

People started to ask me to do installation again, Shen said. Shows in Carlsbad and Escondido came first. The response was positive. Then, Shen opened her own studio at the Art on 30th gallery in North Park.

I feel like art is something Im really good at doing and I enjoy doing so much, Shen says, although it doesnt bring me so much financial enjoyment!

IF YOU GO: Art on 30th, 4434 30th St., San Diego, is staging a free open house that includes Shens work from 6-8 p.m. Saturday March 23, arton30th.com
At the Bird Rock Community Council (BRCC) meeting on March 5, Bird Rock resident Laura Bertagnolli asked for help battling marijuana billboards lining Turquoise Street near the southern end of Bird Rock.

Some of these billboards  two are currently in place, another was recently replaced with an alcohol ad  are within 13 feet of residences where children live, Bertagnolli claimed, and one is in violation of a current law stating that cannabis cant be advertised within 1,000 feet of a daycare facility or school. (She singled out a sign advertising Torrey Holistics at 926 Turquoise St. as being too close to Pacific Beach Elementary School at 1234 Tourmaline St.)

I have two teenage boys that Im trying to raise not to do drugs, Bertagnolli said, yet everywhere I go, its a message of relax, have it delivered to you.

Bertagnolli stated that she filed multiple complaints with the Bureau of Cannabis Control, the body thats supposed to regulate cannabis billboards, and has not received any response.Im just wondering what we can do as a community to have the law enforced, she said.

Bird Rock resident Laura Bertagnolli asks the Bird Rock Community Council for its help fighting cannabis billboards in Pacific Beach. (COREY LEVITAN)

BRCC secretary Barbara Dunbar asked District 1 Council member Barbara Brys representative Mauricio Medina if the matter could be considered a code-compliance issue.

It mostly right now, unfortunately, falls under the jurisdiction of the State, since the City hasnt put forward its own regulation for these billboards, Medina replied.

When Bertagnolli rhetorically asked what was behind the momentum of the advertising, attendee John Shannon answered: dollars.

The reason why those are cannabis (ads) and not real estate and not a home show is that they will pay more money for those, Shannon said, stating that just getting a cannabis license makes you a millionaire.

One attendee, who did not identify himself, asked if billboards could be banned in Pacific Beach like they are in La Jolla, to which Bird Rock resident Mike Costello replied that they are permitted in the Pacific Beach Planned District Ordinance.

BRCC president John Newsam suggested that Bertagnolli return to the next BRCC meeting and provide an update.

Diane Kane presents her plan to update the La Jolla Community Plan. (COREY LEVITAN)

Kane able

La Jolla Community Planning Association and Development Permit Review Committee trustee Diane Kane asked for support for her proposed update to the La Jolla Community Plan that would include new park land and a list of capital-improvement projects.

Ive had nobody say, This is stupid, said Kane. What Im hearing is that La Jolla looks terrible, theres no money to fix anything and theres no plan to fix anything. We need some leadership and Im willing to take it on.

Initially, Kane said, the Mayors Office said they couldnt see any downside. Then they started asking additional questions, Kane said, and now its apparently at the City Attorneys Office with an issue about jumping La Jolla on the queue and the other is something called the Gift of Public Funds, which I dont understand.

Kane said she intends to plow forward anyway, by gathering information about what needs to be fixed or otherwise improved.

The presentation was not listed on the agenda as an action item, but Newsam pledged BRCCs support.

Overlooks overlooked?

Don Schmidt presented an update from his committee on Bird Rock overlooks. He stated that the City informed the committee that it will take a year to get a right-of-entry permit to perform its suggested clean-ups.

Thats ridiculous, Schmidt said. There are people chomping at the bit to (volunteer).

Schmidt then asked to conduct the work under the indemnification of the Bird Rock Development Council, referring to the corporation run by the BRCC. The issue was liability insurance in case the volunteers injure anybody, including themselves. Dunbar stated that such insurance was prohibitively expensive. Instead, she suggested performing the work in conjunction with the Kiwanis Club, which could provide such liability, an idea to which Schmidt objected.

We need a permit in perpetuity, he said, and none of us have the time to go to the Kiwanis and all that.

Schmidt then asked Dunbar if they could negotiate a hold-harmless agreement, to which she agreed.

The City can indemnify us if they wanted to, Schmidt said. It just hurts me.

Also at BRCC

Field of nightmares: Jennifer Holley provided an update from the Bird Rock Foundation and Bird Rock Elementary School, stating that the school nurse has reported 40 injuries from divots and uneven patches in the grass on the field.Im still not entirely clear on whos responsible for maintenance, because its the only joint-use park in San Diego, Holley said, but I believe its the City. Medina promised to take this issue back to Brys office, along with the possibility of getting larger signs prohibiting off-leash dogs.

Jennifer Holley provided an update from the Bird Rock Foundation and Bird Rock Elementary School, stating that the school nurse has reported 40 injuries from divots and uneven patches in the grass on the field.Im still not entirely clear on whos responsible for maintenance, because its the only joint-use park in San Diego, Holley said, but I believe its the City. Medina promised to take this issue back to Brys office, along with the possibility of getting larger signs prohibiting off-leash dogs. Bird Rock charrette? Sharon Wampler, speaking on behalf of architect Trace Wilson, who was called away on business, announced Wilsons intention to discuss Bird Rocks major development issues with 10 or 15 stakeholders, to increase the density while maintaining architectural integrity and making it more functional. Wampler said the next step was picking a day and finding a place, perhaps the La Jolla Library.

Sharon Wampler, speaking on behalf of architect Trace Wilson, who was called away on business, announced Wilsons intention to discuss Bird Rocks major development issues with 10 or 15 stakeholders, to increase the density while maintaining architectural integrity and making it more functional. Wampler said the next step was picking a day and finding a place, perhaps the La Jolla Library. Events: BRCC board member Ron Fineman reported that this years Bird Rock Tour of Homes raised almost $10,000, half of which was split with the Bird Rock Foundation and $2,000 of which was used to pay expenses ... The July 4th Bird Rock parade will march again down Beaumont Street ... Finally, 2019 is the 25th anniversary of BRCC, so a tie-in was suggested with this years holiday party.

 Bird Rock Community Council next meets 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 2 at Bird Rock Elementary School, 5371 La Jolla Hermosa Ave.
A new, James Hubble-designed altar frontage at St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, 724 Prospect St., will be dedicated to late church rector Robert Wolsterstorff on March 24.He was a very kind man, Hubble said of Wolsterstorff, who commissioned Hubble to create the stained-glass windows of Good Samaritan Episcopal Church in UTC in 1992, after Wolsterstorff went on to become the first Episcopalian bishop of San Diego.

Hubble, 87, received the commission to memorialize his old friend last year, for an undisclosed donated amount. Known for constructing mosaics from natural elements, Hubble studied the La Jolla chapel, then chose tile, marble and scallop shells (one of St. James symbols) to decorate the altars previous wood frontal.

I wanted it to feel a little bit like the city of Jerusalem and the gold within the marble was the people and it was coming from the Earth, Hubble said. The circle was a way of repeating the window up above.

There was some discussion about the circle being off center, Hubble said, but I felt it was necessary when you look at the thing, to have something thats off center  otherwise you dont really see the art.

Current St. James rector Mark Hargreaves said it could be argued that Wolsterstorff  who was rector from 1957 to 1974 and died in 2007  had more influence on St. James than any other single individual, since he built the churchs Glazebrook Hall and installed the Christus Rex, now the focal point of the sanctuary.

He was a very good, wise and generous leader, Hargreaves said of the man known as Father Bob. I think he was quite severe, but everybody loved him because he was very gentle and caring  a nice combination of qualities.

Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori  the first female Episcopal bishop in the U.S.  will bless the installation during the ceremony, for which Hubble, as well as Wolsterstorffs daughters, Ann and Mary, are expected to be on hand.

IF YOU GO: The Robert Wolsterstorff Memorial altar frontal will be dedicated by Bishop Schori during the Choral Evensong Service, 5 p.m. Sunday, March 24 at St James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, 724 Prospect St. All are welcome. (858) 459-3421. sjbts.org
Entertainment New York St Patricks Day Parade Live Stream & TV Coverage

NYC parade live

15.03.2019 21:16:46 - Watch live streaming from NYC for the St Patrick's Day parade. New York St Paddy's Day parade TV and live stream.



(live-PR.com) - The Patrick's Day parade in New York City is one of the city's biggest annual parades, watched by a huge crowd as it makes it's way down Fifth Avenue.



To watch the NYC St Patrick's Parade live:



www.myworldevents.com/parade/new-york-st-patricks.html



The live coverage has been provided by NBC TV for several years now, and with the live online stream now also available from the station - The Patrick's Day parade in New York City is one of the city's biggest annual parades, watched by a huge crowd as it makes it's way down Fifth Avenue.To watch the NYC St Patrick's Parade live:The live coverage has been provided by NBC TV for several years now, and with the live online stream now also available from the station this means the New York St Patrick's Dy parade, often shortened to St Paddy's or even just St Pat's, is watched live in person and worldwide by a total audience of millions.



The New York parade not only has become the largest Saint Patrick's Day parade in the world but is also one of the oldest civilian parades in the world. In a typical year, 150,000 marchers participate in it, including bands, firefighters, military and police groups, county associations, emigrant societies and social and cultural clubs with two million spectators line the streets. The parade marches up the 1.5-mile route along 5th Avenue in Manhattan between 44th Street and 79th Street, is a five-hour procession, and is always led by the 69th Infantry Regiment (New York). The commissioner of the parade always asks the commanding officer if the 69th is ready, to which the response is, "The 69th is always ready." New York politiciansor those running for officeare always found prominently marching in the parade. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch (who was of Jewish ethnicity) once proclaimed himself "Ed O'Koch" for the day, and he continued to don an Irish sweater and march every year up until 2003, even though he was no longer in office.[80]



For many years the parade banned gay groups, saying groups could not display banners identifying their sexuality. On September 3, 2014, the organizers of the parade announced a decision to lift the ban on gay groups, saying they preferred to keep the parade non-political and the ban was having the opposite effect. In 2015 OUT@NBCUniversal, an organization of gay employees of NBCUniversal, became the first gay group to march in the parade.



In 1989 Dorothy Hayden Cudahy became the first female Grand Marshal of the New York City Saint Patrick's Day Parade; in 1984 she had become the first woman, as well as the first American-born person, to be elected president of the County Kilkenny Association.



The first St. Patrick Parade in NYC was held in 1762 by the constantly increasing Irish community of the city. They say, it was the first recorded St. Patrick Parade in the world. With the growth of Irish community in the US, parade traditions spread to other American cities.



The New York parade is moved to the previous Saturday (16 March) in years where 17 March is a Sunday. The event also has been moved on the rare occasions when, due to Easter's falling on a very early date, 17 March would land in Holy Week. This same scenario arose again in 2008, when Easter fell on 23 March, but the festivities occurred on their normal date and were enjoyed by a record number of viewers. In many other American cities (such as Philadelphia), the parade is always held on the Sunday before 17 March, regardless of the liturgical calendar.

this means the New York St Patrick's Dy parade, often shortened to St Paddy's or even just St Pat's, is watched live in person and worldwide by a total audience of millions.The New York parade not only has become the largest Saint Patrick's Day parade in the world but is also one of the oldest civilian parades in the world. In a typical year, 150,000 marchers participate in it, including bands, firefighters, military and police groups, county associations, emigrant societies and social and cultural clubs with two million spectators line the streets. The parade marches up the 1.5-mile route along 5th Avenue in Manhattan between 44th Street and 79th Street, is a five-hour procession, and is always led by the 69th Infantry Regiment (New York). The commissioner of the parade always asks the commanding officer if the 69th is ready, to which the response is, "The 69th is always ready." New York politiciansor those running for officeare always found prominently marching in the parade. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch (who was of Jewish ethnicity) once proclaimed himself "Ed O'Koch" for the day, and he continued to don an Irish sweater and march every year up until 2003, even though he was no longer in office.[80]For many years the parade banned gay groups, saying groups could not display banners identifying their sexuality. On September 3, 2014, the organizers of the parade announced a decision to lift the ban on gay groups, saying they preferred to keep the parade non-political and the ban was having the opposite effect. In 2015 OUT@NBCUniversal, an organization of gay employees of NBCUniversal, became the first gay group to march in the parade.In 1989 Dorothy Hayden Cudahy became the first female Grand Marshal of the New York City Saint Patrick's Day Parade; in 1984 she had become the first woman, as well as the first American-born person, to be elected president of the County Kilkenny Association.The first St. Patrick Parade in NYC was held in 1762 by the constantly increasing Irish community of the city. They say, it was the first recorded St. Patrick Parade in the world. With the growth of Irish community in the US, parade traditions spread to other American cities.The New York parade is moved to the previous Saturday (16 March) in years where 17 March is a Sunday. The event also has been moved on the rare occasions when, due to Easter's falling on a very early date, 17 March would land in Holy Week. This same scenario arose again in 2008, when Easter fell on 23 March, but the festivities occurred on their normal date and were enjoyed by a record number of viewers. In many other American cities (such as Philadelphia), the parade is always held on the Sunday before 17 March, regardless of the liturgical calendar. Author:

Martin Kerrigan

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Business / Business of Luxury

A HSBC report titled Expecting the Unexpected is offering some interesting discoveries with regards to the state of the global luxury markets. Chinese demand could further weaken if proposed increase of luxury goods tax is ratified.

Mar 15, 2019 | By Jonathan Ho

According to a recent HSBC luxury report that has been circling luxury media inboxes, bank analysts Antoine Belge, Erwan Rambourg (global co-head of consumer and retail research at HSBC) and AnneLaure Bismuth downplayed macro-economic concerns regarding China but warned that the luxury sector is slowing from 2018s 9% growth rate to a gentler 6% in 2019 going into 2020. While indicators hint to a general downtrend across the industry, HSBC is confident in a soft rather than sharp decline with luxury conglomerates like Richemont Group, LVMH, and Kering sheltered from larger market headwinds.

This is still robust, and should allow most luxury companies to increase margins further. The industry has been operating in a quasi-blue sky scenario for more than 12 months. All consumer nationalities have been contributing positively to growth, which is not sustainable.  HSBC luxury report, Expecting the Unexpected

HSBC Reports Luxury Growth to Slow at 6% but Conglomerates are Safe and Chinese Tourists are expected to return to Paris

The HSBC luxury report cited greater financial resilience and ability to expand and invest in eCommerce as key attributes which will hold the profit margins of major luxury conglomerates like LVMH, Moncler, Richemont, and Kering steady even in more unstable conditions. However, this positive outlook was couched with investor warnings for Tods and Ferragamo which the bank felt had trading valuations which did not match their weaker fundamentals.

The HSBC luxury report also contends that the recent boost to luxury growth rates were driven by Chinese consumers from the Middle Kingdom but that it was not sustainable for all nationalities to continue contributing to growth.

As it stands, Q4 2018 luxury markets were mixed in luxury capital Paris, dampened by a confluence of gilets jaunes or yellow jackets, a populist, grassroots political movement for economic justice that began in France in November 2018; and growing luxury price parity in Beijing. According to the 2017 HSBC Luxury Barometer, the luxury sector saw an average 60% premium on prices in mainland China relative to France or Italy and so price arbitrage was logically a big driver of growth in Continental Europe. Growing price parity at home (watch and jewellery brands like Cartier and Tiffany offer the best matched pricing, costing only 1 to 2% more in China whereas Moncler jackets can cost up to 48% more) and security concerns from gilets jaunes contributed to slow Christmas sales in what should have been a typical bustling sales period in Paris.

That said, while Chinese tourists are expected to return to the luxury capital on the back of a strengthening RMB currency and reduced security concerns, global Chinese demand is expected to downtrend for the foreseeable period primarily due to external factors like trade wars. Internally, a report that the debt-to-income ratio of maturing Chinese millennials (those born between 1990 to 1996) have reached over 1800% with the average amount of debt owed to creditors at over $17,000 or RMB 120,000.

China has become the worlds largest consumer market for luxury goods Some young people have limited savings but are keen on buying expensive goods. They borrow for such consumption, and this excessive consumption pattern has made them spend out their earnings every month, Cui Bo

This report among other factors, prompted Chinese officials to propose increasing the luxury goods tax rate as a way to curb these older millennials from irrational spending during the countrys annual Two Sessions meeting in Beijing. Two Sessions includes a meeting of the National Peoples Congress (NPC), the countrys top legislature, and the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a body that advises the government on a range of issues. Overall, it is a gathering of 3,000 social, political and economic elites to determine the course for China.

According to GlobalTimes.cn, Cui Bo, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference was quoted at the session saying, the rise of consumerism and money worship in China is squeezing traditional virtues such as diligence and thrift. This proposal to raise luxury goods tax rate stands in marked contrast to the broad reduction of VAT or Value Added Tax across a wide variety of sectors including manufacturing, construction, transport and services, as part of an RMB 2 trillion package which seeks to reduce costs for Chinese businesses amidst a potential trade war with the US and a weakening economy.

Of late, Chinese tech companies like Alibaba, and Tencent, some of the fastest growing corporations in the Middle Kingdom, have begun to offer digital lending to fuel continued eCommerce spending, with some sites even offering balance transfers or a new line of credit to bundle outstanding credit. While there has been no decision taken yet, a policy decision affirming this new proposal would be problematic of luxury brands dependent on the region even with lower operating costs as a result of VAT reductions.

Demand in other markets, especially mature Japanese and European sectors are likely to slow from 2017 and 2018 highs. Reduced tax refunds in the US market are also expected to dampen spending and demand for luxury goods.
RTHK: Suspect charged with murder over NZ massacres

A self-proclaimed white supremacist has been charged with murder after 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand. Two other people are being questioned by police.

The gunman behind at least one of the Chistchurch massacres left a 74-page manifesto on social media under the name Brenton Tarrant, identifying himself as a 28-year-old Australian and white nationalist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.

Titled "The Great Replacement," the manifesto repeats far-right conspiracy theories about how white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by non-white immigrants.

The self-described "ethno-nationalist" also took "inspiration" from other right-wing extremists including Anders Behring Breivik, who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.

He described Oswald Mosley, a notorious British fascist leader and anti-Semite from the 1930s, as "the person from history closest to my own beliefs".

Using a helmet camera, he live-streamed his rampage at the Al Noor Mosque, which was full of Friday worshippers. At least 41 people were killed as he sprayed them with bullets, sometimes firing at victims he had already cut down. Several more worshippers were killed in an attack on second mosque in the city a short time later.

Police gave no details about the three people in custody them except to say that none had been on any watch list. The charged suspect is due to appear at Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning.

Officers also said two improvised bombs had been found in a car and made safe by the military.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said: "It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," noting that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees. "From what we know, it does appear to have been well-planned."

She pronounced it "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

The cold-blooded attack shocked the nation of 5 million people, a country that has is so peaceful police officers rarely carry firearms. New Zealand is also generally considered to be welcoming to migrants and refugees. (AP, AFP)

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Sign-in page of the AI system (Photo/Beijing Youth Daily)

"Hello! This is Little AI, the intelligent voice assistant of the university counselors. I noticed that you were absent from class today." Absent students from Hangzhou Dianzi University, in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, recently started to receive this call. The moment their number is dialed, the students information is also recorded and transmitted to the counselor.

This technology has amazed Chinese netizens, with many noting that it would no longer be so easy for university students to skip classes.

Following the installation of surveillance cameras and fingerprint attendance systems, AI is the next step for many Chinese universities. The result in Hangzhou Dianzi University is visible, with many students confirming attendance is notably higher.

Hu Haibin, deputy director of the university students affairs office, told Beijing Youth Daily that a lecturer is able to use the AI smart app at any time. Announcing a randomly generated verification code to the class, all students must input the verification code on their smartphone in a set amount of time.

The response time is only 36 seconds, and the teacher can manually reduce that time. Although it is not possible to eliminate cheating altogether, we have reduced the possibility to a minimum through manual intervention, Hu said.

Hu added that if a student makes it to class after receiving an AI call, the teacher can modify their attendance information. "Presently, this app has covered more than 50 percent of our courses. Previously, it took a teacher about seven to eight minutes to call absentees, but now the whole process can be completed in 15 seconds. After two weeks of operation, the average attendance rate of the same class has increased by 7 percent compared with the previous semester, he said.

If students do not complete sign-ins as required, the school counselor will receive their information as well. Even if the student attempts to escape the 'Little AI' call by changing his or her phone number, the absentee record still exists. Then, the counselor will contact the student directly and ask for the reason. Later, the system will complete the statistic analysis and give feedback to the counselor again. The counselors and teachers will conduct academic guidance or psychological counseling for students with personal issues.

Netizens were impressed by the AI call technology, but Hu believes that this is by no means the most important part of the whole system. "It just completes the accumulation of big data and provides a basis for the teachers to work with," Hu noted.

Through the big data summary, we can classify student issues, find the real reason for an individual's unwillingness to attend classes, and then guide them to tackle the problem, which is the greatest significance of our development and use of this intelligent system."
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There is a certain trend of opinion amongst the liberal left, particularly in the US, which never felt very comfortable with the Bolivarian revolution. Now, in the midst of a serious and well-organised attempt by Washington to remove Maduros government, they insist on equally blaming both sides for the crisis, one which in their view can be resolved through negotiations between the government and the opposition. A chief representative of this point of view is Gabriel Hetland, who has written several articles on Venezuela for The Nation, Jacobin and other left-wing publications.

His latest article, Venezuelas Deadly Blackout Highlights the Need for a Negotiated Resolution of the Crisis, sums up this argument neatly, so it is useful to analyse it in some detail. The article is full of inaccuracies and half-truths, but its main flaw is a mistaken analysis of the situation in Venezuela, one that avoids a class approach to the different forces involved, from which Hetland derives a completely utopian solution.

The devils in the details

Lets start with some of the factual inaccuracies. The caption of the picture illustrating the articles reads: People collect water from a leaking pipeline along the Guaire River, the same line is then used within the article for effect. It is false. During the blackout there was lack of water supply as a result. People resorted to collecting water from springs coming down the Avila mountain. Some of these springs are canalised and then end up in the Guaire River. People were collecting water from two such springs on the side of the Guaire, not from a leaking pipe. Water pipes were actually not carrying water. This might seem like a small detail but it has a certain importance. The headlines in many of the newspapers claimed people were collecting water from the Guaire river itself, which is extremely polluted (El Nuevo Herald in Miami said: Desperate Venezuelans collect rotten water in the midst of blackout). The mass media exaggerates and sometimes publishes straight lies in order to fit into a narrative of harrowing crisis in Venezuela in order to justify the need for foreign intervention or in any case regime change. Hetland is not new to this business and should know he needs to check all the details he uses in his story.

Another one. In the opening paragraph of his article, Hetland seeks to draw attention to how bad and long-lasting the blackout was. He does mention how power was intermittently restored on Sunday and Monday in parts of Caracas and elsewhere, but then ends the paragraph with a mention of the New York Times headline: ... with The New York Times on Monday publishing an article titled No End in Sight to Venezuelas Blackout, Experts Warn.. Whats the conclusion he wants the reader to draw? That the blackout is far from over, in fact we dont know when power will be restored at all. There is just a small detail: it does not coincide with the facts. By midnight, 11 March, power had been restored in Merida, Zulia and Tachira, the last remaining states affected by the blackout. Hetlands article carries the date of 13 March, when the blackout was already over and there were only a few smaller towns left affected.

In paragraph two, Hetland states the most alarming aspect of the blackout is the lack of power in hospitals. Of course, the lack of power in hospitals is alarming and very dangerous. However, all hospitals in the country have their own independent power generators that activate in the event of an emergency. A report by the opposition-aligned NGO, Medicos por la Salud published on 11 March in the evening a list of all 32 of the countrys hospitals, with a detailed explanation of their situation. In all of them, their own power plants were working with the exception of one where it was working intermittently. Heltand then adds: To be blunt: People are dying, and more will die the longer the blackout continues. To back up his assertion he links to a Reuters report, which quotes from Medicos por la Salud, saying that 17 people have died as a result of problems with electricity supply. When you then look at the NGOs own report the picture is less clear. In the report about the state of hospitals, which I quoted above, of the 32 hospitals listed, all bar two are marked as no deceased, and the other two account for a total of three people dead. In a separate report by the same NGO about the number of people who died during the blackout, 24 are listed but no details are given as to the causes of death. So these could be people who would have died regardless of the blackout. Again, this might seem a small detail, but details are important, because they are what build a story. A story can be constructed in two ways. One would say: Hospitals dealt with the blackout by using their own emergency generators, which greatly minimised the dangerous impact of lack of electricity. The other says: the most alarming aspect of the blackout is the lack of power in hospitals To be blunt: People are dying, and more will die. You are more likely to write the second if you rely largely or solely on material from Reuters and other such agencies, and you are also more likely to stray from the truth.

What caused the blackout?

Of course, Heltands article is built around the blackout and so an explanation of the causes for it should be given. What does he tell us about it? He starts by saying there are two competing narratives, (a word I particularly hate), but neither he goes on,  does justice to Venezuelas reality. In Heltands opinion: The blackout and the broader crisis are not entirely the fault of Maduro, nor of the United States and the domestic opposition. The urgency of the situation demands recognition of shared responsibility for the crisis.

Heltands article is built around the blackout and so an explanation of the causes for it should be given. But he doesn't provide one / Image: TeleSUR

But then Hetland states that only the most myopic analysis could ignore the governments clear responsibility for the perilous state of Venezuelas electric grid, and goes on to give as an example: the scandal of the Tacoma Hydro Plant, a project that was never finished as a result of corruption. (Even here, he gets some facts wrong, by using a report that is now outdated). However, the question is, how does a non-functioning power plant relate to the current blackout? Everyone, government and opposition, agrees that something went wrong inside the control centre for the El Guri Hydro complex. The dispute is about what caused the fault. The opposition says it was a wildfire under the main high power line out of El Guri, while the government claims it was a cyber attack affecting the SCADA system that regulates the plant, which produces 80 percent of Venezuelas power.

What is Heltands opinion about this? He does not say. Though he, of course, mentions the possibility of a cyberattack (quoting an article from Forbes), he does not go into any of the details and his conclusion is clear:

Available evidence suggests that the blackout was not caused by sabotage, but by the electric grid being pushed to the brink by years of increased use and a lack of investment and maintenance.

Available evidence? Perhaps Heltand knows more than everyone else, because so far, neither the government nor the opposition have provided much, if any, evidence to back up their stories. Their arguments are mostly based on circumstantial evidence. The opposition has not provided any evidence of the mysterious wildfire that they say affected the 765KV power line and then caused the El Guri system to shut down, which should be relatively simple if such a fire had occurred. Furthermore, Guaido rejected the idea of a cyber attack, as he alleged that the El Guri Hydro complex was controlled analogically, something that is a straight lie. All of these things are being widely discussed in Venezuela, with claims and counter-claims being made. Heltand ignores all of this and simply claims that available evidence suggests that the blackout was not caused by sabotage, without even mentioning what is this available evidence he bases himself upon, or providing any useful links as a reference.

In fact, he has already decided on an explanation that fits his narrative and has written a story that ignores the available evidence. Just to cover himself, after having declared what the cause of the blackout is he adds: getting to the bottom of the blackout is important; journalists based in Venezuela should investigate the possible causes. Yes, Mr Hetland, getting to the bottom of the blackout is important, jumping to conclusions based on preconceived ideas does not help. Journalists based in Venezuela have already done a very good job of attempting to establish what actually happened, and this article in 15 y Ultimo is perhaps one of the best efforts. It was published on 11 March, two days before Hetlands article was published in The Nation.

The path of negotiation

However, the main problem with Heltands article lies in the conclusions he draws:

Calls for military intervention must be rejected. One must recognize, however, the untenability of the status quo. The combination of Maduros repressive and inept rule and debilitating US sanctions has brought Venezuela to the edge of catastrophe. The longer the situation continues, the worse things will get.

Yes, on one thing we can certainly agree. The situation in Venezuela is bad and has significantly worsened over the last four or five years.

But what is the plausible path for resolving Venezuelas crisis that he proposes? First of all, he accepts the premise that a peaceful transition needs to take place and this must be through free and fair elections. Here we see how our liberal critic in fact accepts all of the premises of regime change on which US imperialism bases its current assault on Venezuela. Washington too says it is for a peaceful transition and above all for free elections. In fact, this is precisely what, nominally, they are trying to achieve with their policy of diplomatic pressure, sanctions and the threat of military intervention. Hetland therefore assumes, without explaining why, that the presidential elections in 2018 were not free and fair and that therefore Maduro is an illegitimate president, otherwise, why should there be new elections when he was just sworn-in in January? Our liberal friend finds himself firmly in the camp of the Venezuelan opposition and US imperialism. His disagreement with imperialism seems to be just tactical, he does not think that this outcome can or should be achieved through sanctions or military action. He seems to will the ends but not the means.

How does he think this can be achieved then? The only real hope for Venezuelas future is the path of negotiations between the government and the opposition. This is completely utopian and ignores Venezuelas recent past. In fact, over the years, there have been many negotiations between the government and the opposition. The current attempt by imperialism is not the first. Already, in April 2002, the opposition carried out a US-backed coup, barely three years into the Chavez government. When President Chavez was returned to power by a mass movement of the poor, what did he do? He called on the opposition to the negotiating table. How did they respond? By immediately starting to prepare for another coup, this time in the form of the sabotage of the oil industry and a bosses lockout, which lasted from December 2002 until February 2003 and nearly crippled the economy. The opposition does not want negotiations, they want to crush the Bolivarian Revolution by any means necessary. If they think they can achieve this via negotiations, they will not object, as long as their objectives are guaranteed.

Hetland says: "The only real hope for Venezuelas future is the path of negotiations between the government and the opposition. This is completely utopian / Image: Flickr, The White House

The most recent attempt at negotiations was the 2016-17 talks in the Dominican Republic, brokered amongst others by the former social-democratic president of Spain Zapatero. The main demand of the opposition in those talks was precisely free and fair early presidential elections. When it seemed that an agreeable compromise had been reached and even a date for the elections had been fixed, then the opposition, under pressure from Bogota and Washington, decided to walk out of the talks. Zapatero was fuming and he advised the government to go ahead with the elections on the agreed date. The election, in which a section of the opposition (led by Henri Falcon) participated, did take place, Maduro won and Zapatero, who acted as an observer, vouched for the process. But, all of this appears to be a closed book to Hetland.

And who is the government supposed to negotiate with? Throughout his article and in other writings, Hetland insists on establishing a difference between radical sectors of the opposition or sectors of the far-right opposition and the opposition as a whole. In practice, on the ground, such a difference does not exist. The current coup attempt led in Venezuela by Guaido is backed by all the opposition parties represented in the National Assembly. The 2016 violent riots, which Hetland mentions in his article, were also part of a joint and united campaign by the opposition as a whole. The bulk of the opposition, under pressure from Washington, boycotted the presidential election and expelled Henri Falcon from the MUD (Democratic Unity Roundtable) for taking part in it.

In any case, how are these negotiations going to happen? The government has said repeatedly that it is prepared to negotiate (even with Trump), but the opposition has rejected any advances. Hetland suggests that perhaps the EUs International Contact Group could make this happen. This is either naive or seriously dangerous. The main EU countries are completely subordinate to Washingtons strategy on Venezuela. It was Spanish president Sanchez who issued an eight-day ultimatum to Maduro to call presidential elections. He was then joined by France, the UK, Germany and the majority of EU members, who went on to recognise Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela. The ICG was only created in order to destroy Mexicos independent initiative to find a negotiated solution. When the ICG representatives arrived in Montevideo, the Uruguayan government, under pressure, abandoned its independent position and left Mexico on its own.

You cannot have half a revolution

To add to Hetlands mythical unicorn of a democratic opposition he then adds that, once the US is removed from the equation (how? By whom?) then we can hope (hope springs eternal in the liberal breasts) for a growth of a much broader opposition movement, one in which the voices of the popular classes could have much more weight. This is perhaps the crux of the matter. The main problem in Hetlands approach is the lack of any discussion of the class nature of this conflict.

The Venezuelan opposition, and behind it Washington, represents the interests of the countrys oligarchy: the rich and wealthy families that have ruled Venezuela for over a 100 years and playing a subordinate role to US imperialism. Their mass base of support is mainly drawn from the middle-class and upper-middle-class areas in the east of Caracas and other major cities. Chavismo has its roots amongst the working class, the poor peasants and the urban poor.

The opposition supporters have an irrational hatred, a primal fear, of the chavista masses. During the violent opposition rioting in 2016, a young man, Orlando Figuera, was burnt alive and died as a result. His crime? Being dark-skinned and therefore looking both poor and like a chavista. Certainly, in this opposition, the voices of the popular classes have no weight. For good reason, most of the Venezuelan poor and the working class have a healthy class instinct, and they reject an opposition that they correctly see as representing Los Amos del Valle, the age-old oligarchy, abiding by the interests of imperialism.

The Maduro government's policy of attempting to compromise with and make concessions to the ruling class has eroded popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution / Image: public domain

The Maduro government has had a policy of attempting to compromise with and make concessions to the ruling class. This has eroded popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution. What progressives need to discuss is the root cause of the crisis in Venezuela, and on that basis, discuss a solution that benefits the countrys working people.

The frightful economic crisis from which Venezuela is suffering was triggered in 2014 by the collapse in the price of oil, and has been aggravated by some of the governments policy decisions (deficit financing, paying the foreign debt), widespread corruption and US sanctions. But its root cause are the well-meaning attempts of the Bolivarian government to regulate the capitalist economy (through price and foreign exchange controls, and robust labour and trade union legislation) in order to protect the interests of the many. This does not work. Capitalism cannot be regulated. If such a thing is attempted, capitalists resort to any measures necessary (legal or illegal) to circumvent such controls, establish systems by which they end up benefiting from them (foreign currency speculation, black marketeering, hoarding) and generally resort to sabotage (investment strikes and capital flight). Venezuela is a textbook case of this.

There are therefore only two solutions to the untenable status quo Hetland talks about. One resolves the crisis in the benefit of the capitalist class and imperialism. That is the one advocated by Guaido in his Plan Pais, with the backing of the US. It involves privatising state-owned companies, opening up the public sector to private capital, and above all opening up the oil industry (which is what John Bolton demanded). This would mean making the poor and workers pay the full price of the crisis. That is the oppositions programme, and it certainly does not give any weight to the voices of the popular classes.

The other solution would be based on pursuing genuine revolutionary policies in the benefit of the majority, a return to the tasks that Chavez announced but left unfinished: a socialist economy and a communal state. A socialist economy would require the expropriation of the multinationals and the main capitalist groups in Venezuela, as well as the latifundia, in order to create a democratic plan of production under workers control to satisfy the needs of the majority. A communal state would imply putting power in the hands of workers committees, peasant committees and neighbourhood councils, so that the people can rule.

Hetland seems to perceive only a handful of actors in Venezuela: the US, the far-right opposition, a mythical democratic opposition and the Maduro government. However, there is also a chavista revolutionary movement, which is not the same as the government. This can be found in the El Maizal, in organisations like Alexis Vive, in the few remaining experiences of workers control and in the tens-of-thousands of poor and working-class Venezuelans who have come out in the last few weeks to oppose imperialist intervention, but you will not find it in the pages of the mass media in the US. They are in different degrees critical of the Maduro government as a whole or at least of some of its worst aspects (corruption, bureaucracy, etc), but they know full well that the coming to power of Guaido, on the back of an imperialist intervention, would be a major disaster.

What progressives in the US should do is, first and foremost, oppose the imperialist policies of their government (including sanctions and military intervention). This should be done, not just through writing articles but by organising a mass campaign in the streets and a mass education campaign amongst students and workers. That campaign must distance itself from and challenge the main premises that imperialism is using to justify its intervention. It does not mean suspending criticism of the Maduro government, but that criticism should be made from the point of view of the interests of Venezuelan workers and peasants, not with a view to pleasing liberal academics in the USA. Of course, such a campaign needs to offer an analysis of what has gone wrong in Venezuela, but that analysis needs to be firmly based on a class perspective, not on the utopian idea that EU-brokered talks can somehow resolve the conflict between the interests of the Venezuelan workers and poor and those of the oligarchy and imperialism.
BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Premier Li Keqiang on Friday expressed hope that China and Russia will exhaust all means possible to double their trade value.

Bilateral trade exceeded 100 billion U.S. dollars last year despite sagging global trade growth, Li told a press conference after the conclusion of China's annual legislative session, calling on both sides to consolidate the achievement.

A sound and stable relationship between China and Russia serves not only both countries, the region, but also the whole world, Li said.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries.

"In the past seven decades, our relationship has traveled an extraordinary journey, and today it has reached a high level featuring deepening mutual political trust and growing people-to-people exchange," said Li, noting that there is great potential for further cooperation.
The map drawn by Wang Xiaolin (Photo/Qianjiang Evening News)

"My mother's work is not only hard but also dangerous. Once, she had an accident on her way to work and had to rest for a week."

"Sometimes, there are snakes in the grass under the viaduct, especially in warm weather. I often hear dogs barking under the bridge. My mother always puts a bench and a small stove under the bridge in winter to warm up when she has a rest. She needs to be careful of the wild dogs."

These words are on a hand-painted map, made by Wang Xiaolin as a safe work manual for her mother, a sanitation worker. On March 8, Xiaolins teacher suggested the students send small gifts to their mothers. Xiaolin decided to draw a picture to remind her mother to pay attention to safety.

The area that Ms. Zhou is responsible for cleaning is along the intersection of Tongxie Road and Desheng East Road in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province.

"My mother is responsible for an area about 600 meters from the intersection," said Xiaolin.

Zhou has worked as a sanitation worker for ten years, working at Desheng Road for the last two.

Wang Xiaolin and her mother (Photo/Qianjiang Evening News)

Every Friday afternoon after school, Xiaolin will accompany her mother to sweep the road. She usually squats on the ground and uses her mother's electric bicycle as a desk to finish her homework. After completing her homework, she will pick up a broom and help her mother clean the road. She knows the area very well.

Xiaolin used all the details she observed to create a map. She included areas where there are wild dogs, locations where her mother can find more garbage, and which intersections her mother should pay attention to.

Xiaolin noted that although her mother is small, she is very diligent when it comes to her job.

Although the work is hard, Ms. Zhou will try her best to spend time with her daughter. Zhou goes to work at 4.30 in the morning, and sends her daughter to school at 6 am when it is breakfast time, working until 8 pm.

Xiaolins father and mother are both sanitation workers. On weekday evenings, after Mr. Wang finishes work for the day, he will take over Zhous work so she can take their daughter home to do homework.

The happy mother said that she was surprised when she received her daughter's gift. "My daughter is growing up and learning fast, and she is a very considerate girl," she said.
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Kari Voutilainen was born in Finland in 1962 and knew already at the age of 10 that he wanted to work with his hands and be independent. After attending watchmaking school in Finland (the only one in the world that is privately owned by the countrys watchmaking association), he went on to work in customer service in Lapland. After attending two courses at Switzerlands WOSTEP watchmaking school, he moved to Switzerland to work at Parmigiani Fleurier on restoration and private label projects. It was during his ten-year tenure in Fleurier that a colleague suggested Voutilainen make his own watch  a project that he finally embarked upon after a period of teaching for three years.

He presented his first watches at Baselworld in 2005 and they were well received, with orders immediately coming in, along with requests for a simpler model. Just two years later the popularity of the Kari Voutilainen brand name was well established and demand was big. But, in order to maintain his independence, Voutilainen decided not to take on the big orders. At Baselworld in 2007, I refused all but three customers, he says.

Derek Cremers, CEO of A lEmeraude, and Kari Voutilainen

Since then the company has gone from strength to strength and now employees 24 people. Thanks to continuous reinvestment, Kari Voutilainen was able to present his own in-house calibre in 2008 and is now almost entirely autonomous, relying on external suppliers only for the balance spring and barrel drum. He makes his own cases in Le Noirmont and movement components and dials at the former Comblemine factory in St. Sulpice, a short drive from the large house in Motiers that accommodates the workshops and living quarters of Kari Voutilainen.

The benefits of independence far outweigh the minor disadvantages, according to Kari Voutilainen. On my own I can fix my own objectives and I dont have to rely on anyone else or accept anyone elses quality levels. It means I dont have to carry much inventory, although I do have relatively high fixed costs, such as salaries. But my independence has kept the company very stable over the long term.

Aside from his activities as a supplier to the industry, producing movement components and dials, Kari Voutilainen produces a thoroughly modest 40 watches per year. The relationship with retail partners is therefore extremely important, since he expects the same passion from them as he has for his own work. You can very quickly see whether the passion is for the watch or for the bank account, he says. Some people dont even look at the watch and just want to know the margin that I am prepared to offer them.

He has even refused some orders from direct customers when he felt that this passion was not there. I put a lot of energy into my work, he reminds us. Its only right that the few watches he produces each year go to good homes. Unsurprisingly, he takes his relationships with retailers very seriously for the same reasons. Its great to work with A lEmeraude, and not just because of the geographical proximity, he says. They share the same passion as me for fine watchmaking, which is very important because only in this way can they convey the passion that I put into my work and explain my watches adequately to the discerning customers that they have. Like me, they also have a long-term approach, which is what has made our working relationship so successful.

For Derek Cremers, Director of A LEmeraude, the close relation with Kari Voutilainen fits perfectly into the long-term vision of the boutique. We knew from the start when our family bought A L'Emeraude that we wanted to be a high-end watch and jewellery store. But the human and personal relation with each brand that we have the chance to work with was also very important in the long-term vision that we have. We know that if we ask Kari to do something for us he will always have an attentive ear. We have done some joint projects with him that have taken several years, including a minute repeater, unique pieces and a 37mm tourbillon model. The customers who discover Voutilainen and who purchase such fine timepieces are willing to wait. Some others who own actually a couple of them understand what is involved.
Al-Azhar has condemned mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday, which killed at least 49 people and injured dozens.

The attack is a serious sign of the terrible consequences that can result from the escalation of the discourse of hate, xenophobia and Islamophobia in a number of Western countries, including even those that used to be known for their well-established values of tolerance, said Grand Imam Ahmed El-Tayyeb in a statement.

The sacrilegious, criminal attack on a place of worship and the shedding of sanctified blood has to be taken seriously as a warning alarm indicating the urgent need to decisively deal with racist currents and groups that dare commit such distasteful acts, read the statement.

The statement also extended its sincere condolence to the families of the victims.

The top Sunni Islamic seat of learning urged more support for the values of coexistence, tolerance, and positive interaction between those of different backgrounds.

Gunmen attacked two mosques in the city of Christchurch during Friday prayers, in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern later described as a terrorist attack.

New Zealand police have said that a 28-year-old man has been charged with murder and will appear in the Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning. Two other suspects remain in custody.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said the attack was "very well-planned," and said that mosques across the country would remain under police protection.

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By Col. William P. Jensen, USAF (Ret), CFP candidate

The Veterans Benefits and Transition Act of 2018 includes a provision that may have a significant financial benefit for certain military spouses. The act allows some spouses to receive a state income tax refund, and potentially eliminate or reduce their state tax bill going forward.

Signed into law on Dec. 31, 2018, the new law covers a variety of important benefits for active duty military members and their spouses. Of particular importance was a change to the way spouses can claim their state of residency. Previously, spouses had to change their residency every time their active duty military spouse was assigned to another state. Besides the time and expense of a new driver's license and voter registration, these spouses could lose state tax benefits depending on the location of their military spouse's new assignment.

[RELATED: FAQ: New Military Spouse Residency Rules]

The new law somewhat mirrors features of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), which allows military personnel to maintain their legal residence when they are required to move due to a Permanent Change of Assignment. Specifically, SCRA allows military members to vote and pay taxes in only one state. This is especially helpful considering a civilian who moves to a different state typically must file a part-year-resident state income tax return with both the previous and current state of residence.

Not All State Are Created Equal When It Comes To Taxes

Because of SCRA, many military members eventually have the opportunity to claim their legal residence in a state that does not have state income taxes (i.e., when they are stationed in the state). Of note, there are currently nine states that do not assess a state income tax:

Alaska

Florida

Nevada

New Hampshire*

South Dakota

Tennessee*

Texas

Washington

Wyoming

(* New Hampshire and Tennessee tax some dividends and interest. Tennessee is phasing out this levy; the last year for the so-called Hall Tax is 2021.)

Previously, a spouse of a military member could only enjoy this tax-free state while assigned in that state. Now, a spouse of a military member can elect to join their spouse in claiming one of the above states and enjoy the same tax-free benefit. The new law also allows the spouse to claim the same state as their military spouse even if they have never lived in that state.

[RELATED: New Law Affects Military Spouse Voting, Taxes]

Alternatively, some military members may belong to a state that has a lower state income tax rate than the spouse's current state of assignment. If so, the spouse can elect to claim the lower-rate state of their military spouse.

Read the Fine Print

It is important to note that state law can vary greatly when it comes to how military members and/or their spouses are treated for tax purposes when they are assigned outside their legal state of residence. For example, Pennsylvania does not assess state income tax on active duty military members assigned outside of the state, but that exclusion does not apply to the spouse. By contrast, California does not assess state income tax for either the military member or their spouse assigned outside the state. So, again, a careful state-by-state assessment is necessary for each spouse.

[RELATED: MOAA's State Report Card and Tax Guide]

This act was signed into law so recently that many states are still establishing processes, which will vary from state to state.

As a preliminary step, a spouse who has decided to choose his or her servicemember's state of residence should file state tax returns in that state. Returns for refunds also would be filed in the state where he or she paid taxes in 2018, if different. That could equate to hundreds or thousands of dollars in refunded state taxes. Keep accurate records for inclusion in both the 2018 and 2019 federal tax returns.

As an immediate benefit, a spouse should also notify their employer about their change in state of legal residence and decrease or discontinue the state income tax withholding.

The Internal Revenue Service started accepting tax returns Jan. 28, and states generally start accepting returns around the same time.

Consult an Expert

While reviewing your specific situation, and ways you could take advantage of this new legislation, be sure to consult with a Tax Expert (Enrolled Agent/CPA), or Certified Financial Planner (CFP) that is aware of these changes and has experience working directly with military families.

Col. William P. Jensen, USAF (Ret), is a Certified Financial Planner (Candidate) with Hughes Financial Services, LLC. in Herndon, Va. He is a Life Member of MOAA.
Egypt has hailed the death sentences issued by an Iraqi court for two men convicted of assassinating its envoy to the country in 2005.

In a statement on Thursday, Egypts foreign ministry hailed the 11 March sentence for two men who were convicting of participating in the kidnapping and killing of Egyptian ambassador Ihab El-Sherif in July 2005.

El-Sherif was kidnapped near his office by an armed group, and died four days later. He was the first Egyptian ambassador in Baghdad after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, according to the Egyptian ministrys website.

An Al-Qaeda militant group led by Abu Musaab Al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and murder of the ambassador.

Egypts foreign ministry expressed its appreciation for efforts exerted by the Iraqi authoritiesto deliver justice against two who participated in the crime, the statement said, asserting its determination to continue in efforts aiming to retrieve the rights of all martyrs who sacrifice their lives for the nation.

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Tonya Lopez is a single working mother with three children, and she feels fortunate that even though she will not be able to give her children the gifts they want this year, she feels blessed just to have them in...
Judge rules compressor air quality permit appeal should be decided by state board
Egypt has condemned a terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand on Friday which killed at least 49 people and injured more than 20.

In a statement, Egypts foreign ministry stressed its support for New Zealand and the families of the victims, saying that this vile terrorist act contravenes all humanitarian principles.

Egypt condemns the attack "in the strongest possible terms," read the statement.

It serves as a new reminder of the necessity of continued and intensified international efforts to face obnoxious terrorism which has no religion, and to counter all forms of violence and extremism, the statement added.

The ministry said it is following up on the attacks through its embassy in New Zealand.

Gunmen attacked two mosques in the city of Christchurch during Friday prayers, in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern later described as a terrorist attack.

New Zealand police have said that a 28-year-old man has been charged with murder and will appear in the Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning. Two other suspects remain in custody.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said the attack was "very well-planned," and said that mosques across the country would remain under police protection.

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Arrive Safe will be offering free cab rides for Montgomery County residents this St. Patricks Day Weekend. These free cab rides will begin at 5pm on Friday, March 15th and run through 6am on Monday, March 18th.

Prosecuting Attorney Matt Heck, Jr says, This St. Patricks Day weekend, its simple to make a responsible choice-have a designated, sober driver or call Arrive Safe at 449-9999 and request a free ride home. We will pay the cab fare up to $50. Remember, the life you save may be your own.

Since Heck started Arrive Safe in December of 2007 there have been over 7200 free cab rides given to Montgomery County Residents.

Nationally, during St. Patricks Day, nearly 69% of fatal traffic crashes involve impaired drivers, and of those, 75% involved a driver whose blood-alcohol content was two times or more over the legal limit. Shockingly, over one-third of pedestrians who were killed in traffic crashes had a blood- alcohol content of .08% or more.
BERLIN  As Christopher Porter looked for a new owner for Porters Funeral Service, he wanted to ensure the fifth-generation family business he inherited retained its personal, local touch.

When you have a family in your neighborhood serving your family...theres more of a personal touch, said Porter, who will now retire.

The new owners are Peter Hansen and his family, who operate Erickson-Hansen Funeral Home in New Britain and helped Porter run his business, at 111 Chamberlain Highway, for the last five years.

I feel very confident in the type of work theyve been doing for a number of years, said Porter, who ran his business for 37 years and turns 69 in July.

To keep the Porter family legacy, the business will be renamed Erickson-Hansen Funeral Home of Berlin/Porters.

"We're well known for a high level of care," Peter Hansen said. "It's very rewarding. We feel it's our life calling to be able to help a family through their time of grief and need and loss.

This year marks the 150th year since Bryan Churchill Porter purchased the funeral homes original location in downtown New Britain, a three story building. It featured a furniture store on the first floor, the funeral home on the second and the Porter household on the third. The furniture business sold caskets for the funeral home.

Peggy Porter, who ran the funeral home alongside her husband, said it was a difficult decision to step away from the business, but theyre looking forward to enjoying themselves in a way they couldnt when they had to be ready to comfort families at any hour.

This is a very bittersweet time for us. Were both getting on in years and its time to hopefully do something we werent able to do before, she said.

dleithyessian@record-journal.com

203-317-2317

Twitter: @leith_yessian
Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi inspected a number of agricultural developmental projects in Toshka in the southern desert on Friday morning.

In an official statement, his spokesman Bassam Rady said El-Sisi inspected date, wheat, and grape farms, as well as sheep farms.

The execution of the mega-projects is part of a plan to develop the area and establish new urban communities which rely on agricultural activities, including food processing and other industries.

Toshka is the biggest plantation in Egypt on an area of 60,000 feddans. It relies on water from Lake Toshka through a lift station; seven pumps supply 7,000 cubic metres of water per hour.

Around 40,000 feddans of land are allocated for 2.5 million date palm trees, with the aim of placing Egypt on the global map in date production and export.

An area of 20,000 feddans has been also earmarked for the cultivation of strategic crops like corn and wheat, as well as 200 feddans for grapes.

The president praised the efforts, pointing at the wide positive impact such projects have on creating sustainable development and a better future for Egyptians.

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BRIDGEPORT (AP)  Connecticut state flags are flying at half-staff to honor a state lawmaker who died suddenly.

Gov. Ned Lamont says Democratic state Rep. Ezequiel Santiago was a man who truly loved public service and his hometown of Bridgeport.

Friend and state Rep. Chris Rosario tells the Connecticut Post that Santiago had a heart attack Friday morning. He was 45.

Santiago was raised in Bridgeport and first served on the City Council before being elected to the General Assembly a decade ago.

Santiago, known to his friends as Zeke, was chairman of the Banking Committee and sat on the Appropriations and Commerce committees.

Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said she was profoundly saddened to learn of Santiagos death.

State flags will stay lowered until the day of burial, which has not been determined.
Rep. Ezequiel Santiago, D-Bridgeport, who began the 2019 session as the new co-chair of the Banks Committee after a decade in the General Assembly, died Friday morning after being stricken by an apparent heart attack, legislators said.

Santiago, 45, was the father of three daughters and the son of a former lawmaker, Americo Santiago.

House Majority Leader Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said he learned of Santiagos death in a 6 a.m. phone call from Rep. Chris Rosario, a Democrat and member of the tight-knit Bridgeport delegation.

He was so proud to represent the city of Bridgeport, and he was so excited about his new role as the chair of Banks, Ritter said.

Rosario, who posted a tribute on Twitter to his friend, was too distraught to talk when reached by phone.

The Bridgeport crew takes such pride in the city, and they are such good friends, Ritter said.

Santiago was a Bridgeport councilman before joining the General Assembly. He won an open seat in 2008, succeeding Democrat Felipe Reinoso.

Gov. Ned Lamont, calling Santiago an outstanding advocate in a statement Friday, ordered the state flag to be lowered to half-staff in Santiagos memory.

We were terribly saddened to learn this morning of the sudden passing of Representative Ezequiel Santiago, a man who truly loved public service and his hometown of Bridgeport, Lamont said. The State of Connecticut has lost an outstanding advocate, and our hearts are broken today as we mourn his loss. He was a devoted father, fighter for his community, and a dedicated public servant. Our prayers are with his family, friends, and constituents at this difficult time.

This story originally appeared on the website of The Connecticut Mirror, www.ctmirror.org.
WALLINGFORD  Ahead of an anti-pot legalization rally planned at Town Hall Saturday, Mayor William W. Dickinson Jr. warned that marijuana remains untested under federal Food and Drug Administration guidelines and has not been approved for medical use, despite Connecticuts law allowing use of the drug to treat certain conditions.

No known studies of marijuana have been accepted by the FDA or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dickinson said.

Their analyses require a lot of scientific research and clinical studies, he said. The word from the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is there is no known medical use for marijuana.

Multiple bills were introduced this legislative session aimed at legalizing marijuana. Dickinson said that the lack of testing and analysis of marijuana makes calls for statewide legalization a public health issue.

Were very concerned about encouraging the use of marijuana when theres been no testing, Dickinson said. How do we know its safe?

He added that marijuana is still illegal at the federal level.

As a Schedule I drug, the government has found no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

However, that hasnt stopped 10 states and the District of Columbia from legalizing small amounts of recreational marijuana, beginning with Colorado and Washington state in 2012.

Connecticut approved marijuana for medical use in 2012.

The rally is planned for 11 a.m. at Town Hall, 45 S. Main St.

Dickinson said guest speakers include the Rev. Todd Foster, pastor of Church on the Rock in New Haven, president of Coalition for a Better Wallingford Ken Welch and a recovering marijuana addict.

Town and state legislators have been invited, Dickinson said.

State Rep. Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said Thursday he plans on attending.

I think that introducing another drug into society isnt positive for anyone, he said. Im concerned about impacts its already having on our children, the impact it will have on employment and job productivity, and also the increase in driving fatalities and driving under the influence.

We know its physically addictive and it causes changes to the brain, but we dont have many long-term studies on usage, Candelora added.

State Rep. Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, takes the opposite approach. He was part of a group of lawmakers that laid out a three-part plan to have the General Law, Judiciary and Finance legislative committees hold public hearings on different parts of a proposed marijuana-legalization package.

Thats an opportunity for the community, in favor and against, to come and testify, he said. Once we have the public hearings with these three committees, then wed combine the legislation into one bill and bring it to a vote in the House.

He said that the state may soon feel economic pressure as other states move forward with legalization.

We in Connecticut are going to be in the middle, he said, and our residents are going to go to New York and Massachusetts (to buy marijuana), and we wouldnt get revenue generated from that.

Its estimated that the state could generate as much as $350 million from marijuana sales, he said.

He said that he hadnt heard about the event planned for Saturday in Wallingford.

Everybody has the right to rally to express their opinions, but I believe people also need to be educated on the benefits of the legislation, Candelaria said.

Without regulation, marijuana being sold is laced with other products, he said.

We have no control over it, he said, but if we regulate the adult use to marijuana, we would control the access.

He said revenue could be used to fund community resources, like prevention and addiction services.

Invest those dollars and really make an impact, he said.

Funds could even be used to fund marijuana studies.

(Existing) studies are inconclusive, he said, because at the federal level, marijuana is a Schedule I drug and cannot be tested on.
I had already intended to write a column about the importance of redeveloping the Bristol-Myers Squibb property because of the very adverse tax consequences of not doing so and the current mood of the state government to starve the towns in order to feed the cities  in fairness, of course.

But I would also like to respond to a letter to the editor published on Thursday, March 14, that had the headline Save the BMS Building. The author recommends to the Town of Wallingford: Forget your greedy need for more and more tax dollars  and suggests that the building be saved through purchase by the town or sale to a tax-exempt educational institution. So this column will present some of the unpleasant realities of why it is important that this valuable property not only be subject to property taxes but be developed such that it will yield significant taxes.

Now forget for the moment that the municipality does not own the building and that it was purchased by a developer for $5 million. Dismiss, as well, the fact that it was practically given away by BMS, and the new owner has had not one single serious inquiry from any taxpaying entity interested in occupying this building, beautiful as it may be.

So lets instead concentrate on the basics. Commercial and industrial property owners pay millions upon millions in local property taxes; and these entities require a small, almost nonexistent, percentage of the services that we residents require. That reason alone should be enough to convince people that it is beneficial to have such organizations as our neighbors.

But now theres an urgency to find a replacement for BMS when that building comes down. In FY2018-19 and again in FY 2019-20, the BMS property will yield around $900,000 in property taxes. In 2020-21, with the building demolished, the taxes on the property will drop to approximately $245,000, a decrease of $655,000.

But even that does not tell the entire story. Assuming Gov. Ned Lamonts budget survives intact, lets look at the other major shortfalls with which the Town of Wallingford will be contending.

Lets start with elimination of the motor vehicle property tax that towns now collect and keep. This will be converted to a state motor vehicle tax, the revenue from which will be used to pay municipalities for hosting tax-exempt properties.

Wallingford has budgeted $1,587,868 in revenue this fiscal year from this tax. That source largely disappears, as we host few tax-exempt properties in comparison to, say, Hartford or New Haven.

Next lets look at the Education Cost Sharing grants. The proposed state budget reduces Wallingfords grant by $588,776 in the 2019-20 budget. No doubt that deficit will increase in the year that follows.

Now lets look at the plan to get the municipalities to pick up part of the teacher pensions. In 2020, Wallingfords share is $395,021. In 2021, it jumps to $815,756. And you can bet, as sure as there will be sunrise tomorrow, that this shifting is just the beginning.

So those reductions in property taxes and state aid total over $3 million dollars. Who picks up the tab for that lost revenue? Every taxpayer in town. The buck stops here.

And that is not the end of it. Not only will the state be cutting municipal aid, but you and I will be paying higher state taxes besides. Take a look at what theyre planning in Hartford.

Our Democrat-led state government is fast living up to the late President Reagans famous quotation: Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Think Im kidding? Have you heard about Raised Senate Bill 999 now in the Environment Committee? This bill not only requires municipalities to raise the cost of a dog license, but the bill has added a fee of ten dollars [up from $7] for each such neutered male or spayed female dog, cat or other domestic animal and the sum of fifteen dollars [up from $10] for each such unneutered male dog, cat or other domestic animal and each such unspayed female dog, cat or other domestic animal 

Yes, you read that right. The State of Connecticut wants to require towns and cities to license cats, turtles, ferrets, gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs, and any other domesticated animal companion you might have. Granted, the towns keep the money, but it illustrates the current thinking in the capital.

In conclusion, let us understand that commercial and industrial development must be a town priority, lest the residents be left holding the bag for all the millions in lost revenue. We must seize opportunities like Calare is offering if Wallingford is to remain affordable.

Licensing Fluffy the Cat and Noodles the Guinea Pig wont be enough.

Stephen Knight is a former Wallingford town councilor.
Sports

NZ-Bangladesh Test called off after Christchurch shootings

New Delhi, Mar 15 (IANS) | Publish Date: 3/15/2019 11:55:15 AM IST

The third Test between New Zealand and Bangladesh in Christchurch was called off on Friday after gunmen opened fire at two mosques in the city, with the police saying that there were multiple fatalities.

The decision was made after discussions between New Zealand Cricket (NZC) and the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB).

Our heartfelt condolences go out to the families and friends of those affected by the shocking situation in Christchurch. A joint decision between NZC and the @BCBtigers has been made to cancel the Hagley Oval Test. Again both teams and support staff groups are safe, NZC said in a tweet.

The Bangladesh team had a narrow escape on Friday morning as they were in the vicinity of one of the two mosques where the shootings took place.

The players took to social media to inform fans and family that they were safe and also asked them to pray for the cricketers.

Senior batsman Tamim Iqbal tweeted: Entire team got saved from active shooters!!! Frightening experience and please keep us in your prayers #christchurchMosqueAttack

Test captain Mushfiqur Rahim wrote: Alhamdulillah Allah save us today while shooting in Christchurch in the mosque... We r extremely lucky ...never want to see this things happen again....pray for us.

The shootings took place at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Masjid.
The Ministry of Education and Technical Education recently kept its promise by distributing tablets to grade 10 students. Tablets numbering 708,000 were sent to around 2,000 schools in 20 governorates.

The ministry is introducing tablets as part of its plan to reform and digitise the educational system.

Through tablets, students will be able to access their curriculum. According to Amina Khairi, spokesperson of the Ministry of Education, students will have the opportunity to access the Knowledge Bank via the tablet. Educational content on the tablet is translated into Arabic and English.

Schools have been provided with high speed Internet networks. Moreover, every school has its own server in case something goes wrong with the Internet, Khairi said.

Tablets have been distributed to private, governmental and experimental schools. International schools will not receive tablets since they have a different curriculum.

Teachers and supervisors will be provided with tablets having different content than that of students.

According to Ahmed Daher, adviser to the Ministry of Education for Information Technology Affairs, tablets are fully protected and impenetrable. It will protect students from becoming victims of immoral practices, including accessing websites with immoral content, he said.

Each student must pay LE100 annually in insurance to receive the tablet. The amount is paid at the post office. Students and teachers are obliged to pay, Daher said.

The ministry is looking to put in place a mechanism that would encourage students to buy the tablet after some of them have shown displeasure at having to pay insurance, Daher said.

If a tablet is ruined due to misuse in a way that it cannot be fixed by the teacher or the student before the three-year insurance period is up, the student must pay LE4,500 to receive a new one.

Students must return the tablets after completing their secondary stage and before joining university, Daher said. Parents or students are to sign a form before receiving the tablets committing them to return them after the identified period, he added.

The Ministry of Education is currently trying to solve the problem of schools that use foreign languages in studying, such as French and German. They will not receive tablets until a solution is found for them, Khairi added.

Daher said students who will sit for the March exam will take it on the tablet. They have been trained on them throughout the past month, he confirmed, adding that more than 300,000 teachers were trained on using the tablet.

Teacher Mohamed Mahmoud believes the use of the tablets will contribute significantly to changing students attitudes and will encourage them to seek education. He said it fits with their eagerness for technology.

The new experience is addressing their minds and moving them from memorising to understanding, however, it will take time to train the students,  Mahmoud said.

Shorouk Mohamed, a grade 10 student, wants more time to get used to the tablet before she has to use it to take an exam. One and a half months of training is not enough, Mohamed said.

I know that March exams are experimental, and grades are not calculated, so we need more training.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Technology at school

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On the worst days, no one expected to get through it alive. A despair set in among members of the battalion that the older ones, the veterans of two other wars, had never seen before. The bestselling book, "Dispatches," a 260-page memoir by war correspondent Michael Herr, includes this up-close perspective of the soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War.

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President's Proposed Budget Reduces Overall Nondefense Spending, Increases Pentagon Funds, and Reaffirms Commitment to the Wall

The Office of Management and Budget released a portion of the presidents $4.7 trillion fiscal year (FY) 2020 budget request, which calls for a 9 percent reduction in discretionary spending for nondefense activities, but an increase of 5 percent, or $33.4 billion over FY 2019 levels for defense spending. The proposal imposes its own budget caps through the reductionsessentially abiding by restrictions of the 2011 Budget Control Actbut ultimately circumvents the limits through cap-exempt Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding increases.

With the goal of achieving a balanced budget in 15 years, President Donald Trump requests $718 billion for the Pentagon, made up of $553 billion in base dollars and $165 billion in OCO funding. The proposal also includes $8.6 billion for border wall funding, reduced Medicare spending of $850 billion from drug cost savings, and major reform of Medicaid expected to generate $241 billion in savings over 10 years.

While the Departments of Commerce (DOC), Homeland Security (DHS), Treasury, and Veteran Affairs (VA) are slated for funding increases, those experiencing the most drastic reductions include the departments of Agriculture (USDA), Education (ED), Energy (DOE), Health and Human Services (HHS), State, Transportation (DOT) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The presidents budget is the first step in what is expected to be a protracted appropriations process. The House and Senate have criticized his proposal arguing in favor of a deal raising caps for both defense and non-defense spending. But with uncertainty surrounding those negotiations appropriators are poised to produce spending bills under their own top-line budget figures. The expiring debt ceiling must also be addressed as currently the Treasury is working under extraordinary measures to avoid default through FY 2019.

As a result of the piecemeal budget rollout, agency-specific supplemental charts will not be released until next week.

View the Federal Funds Information for States (FFIS) table that compares the presidents proposal to FY 2018-2019 funding levels for Major Discretionary and Mandatory Programs.

Following are select agency funding highlights:

Agriculture

Proposes $20.8 billion in discretionary funding, $3.6 billion below current levels. The reduction would affect many programs focusing on crop insurance and conversation.

As part of this reduction, the budget proposes to discontinue the Conservation Services Program, a program that encourages farmers to engage in long-term conservation practices.

Funding for U.S Forest Service is reduced by $900 million to $5.1 billion, with funding for wildfire suppression declining from $1.5 billion to $1 billion. State and private forestry programs would be reduced from $337 million to $182 million. However, the proposal also calls for an increase of $20 million for hazardous fuels reduction to $450 million, and $9 million more for forest products program to $375 million.

Commerce

Includes $16 million to support Trumps trade agenda.

Establishes a new initiative within the International Trade Administration to counter the circumvention or evasion of U.S. trade actions aimed at those who engage in unfair and illegal trade practices.

Requests $12.2 billion for the department, a 9.3 percent increase from the 2019 estimate.

Defense

Supports the creation of a new branch of the armed forces, the U.S. Space Force, and a new combatant space command, the U.S. Space Command.

Increases funding for the U.S. Army to modernize existing forces and provides additional training for soldiers to meet readiness goals by 2022.

Increases compensation for servicemembers, which includes a payroll increase of 3.1 percent.

Requests $718 billion, which represents a 5 percent increase from the 2019 enacted level.

Education

Requests $64 billion for the Department of Education, a $7.1 billion or 10 percent decrease compared to the 2019 enacted level.

Maintains level funding, $15.9 billion, for Title I and $13.2 billion for Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Proposes an Education Freedom Scholarships federal tax credit of up to $50 billion over 10 years for families of elementary and secondary students who voluntarily contribute to state-defined public or private education options.

Requests $650 million to support public school choice, including $500 million for charter schools.

Provides approximately $700 million, an increase of $354 million compared to the 2019 budget, in school safety for the departments of Education, Justice and Health and Human Services, including $200 million for School Safety National Activities, aligned to the recommendations in the Federal Commission on School Safety Report. Read the School Safety Fact Sheet.

Requests $200 million for the Teacher and School Leader Incentive grant program to improve teacher induction and recognize and reward teaching excellence, with emphasis on high-need subjects such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and computer science coding.

Proposes an expansion of the Pell Grant eligibility to include high-quality short-term training programs.

Eliminates 29 discretionary programs for an estimated cost savings of $6.7 billion.

Energy

Includes an 11 percent reduction to the Department of Energy (DOE) funding than the agency was appropriated for in FY 2019, to $31.7 billion from $35.7 billion.

Proposes to eliminate DOE loan programs as well as the Advanced Research Programs Agency-Energy, a proposal that Congress rejected the past two years.

Includes a $1 billion reduction for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, to $696 million. Funding for the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, by contrast, would be increased under the presidents budget to $157 million, $37 million more than enacted levels.

Proposes $116 million to restart the licensing process for a permanent nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain and initiate an interim storage program, which Congress has rejected in past budgets.

Environment

Reduces funding for the Environmental Protection Agency to $6.1 billion, a 31 percent reduction from this years enacted funding.

Significant reductions to the agency include: The Water Infrastructure Financing and Innvation Act Program, which accelerates investment in our nations water infrastructure by providing long-term, low-cost supplemental levelsboth programs help communities upgrade drinking water and sewer infrastructure, to $25 million from the $63 million it received last year. Funding fr regional watershed programsthe Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and the Chesapeake Bay program is reduced to just 10 percent of last years support to $30 million and $7.3 million, respectively, and would eliminate all other regional watershed programs including those in the Gulf of Mexico, Long Island Sound and San Francisco Bay. Clean Water State Revlving Funds (SRF) would be reduced to $1.12 billion under the proposal, a reduction of 34 percent, and the Drinking Water SRF would see a budget of $863 million under the spending blueprint, a reduction of 26 percent from fiscal 2019 enacted,

Calls for $10 million for Multipurpose Grants that allow state and tribal partners to allocate funds to their highest priority environmental statutory responsibilities. However, it also calls for nearly $1 billion reduction in State and Tribal Assistance Grants from enacted levels, and a $.5 billion reduction in Categorical Grants overall.

Homeland Security

Establishes a Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Fund that would expand immigration detention capacity to 60,000, hire 15,000 DHS law enforcement officers, 600 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) immigration court prosecuting attorneys, 100 immigration judge teams, and 50 federal prosecutors at DOJs Offices of the U.S. Attorneys.

Requests an increase, from $7 billion in FY 2019 to $19.4 billion for FY 2020, for recovery efforts in areas recently affected by major disasters, including a $430 million all-hazards competitive grant program under the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Proposes $51.7 billion in discretionary appropriations for DHS, a 7.8 percent or $3.7 billion increase from the 2019 budget.

Proposes $2.7 billion for 54,000 detention beds for apprehended immigrants held by ICE.

Requires mandatory, nationwide use of the E-Verify system.

Provides $7.8 billion, a proposed $100 million increase, to support Transportation Security Administration employees and improve airport security technology.

Proposes $1 billion for DHSs cybersecurity efforts, meant to in part to increase DHS-led risk assessments of state and local electoral systems.

Proposes hiring at least 150 new cybersecurity staff.

Provides $2.3 billion, a decrease of $100 million from FY 2019 levels, for the U.S. Secret Service.

Health and Human Services

Provides $87.1 billion for HHSs discretionary funding, a 12 percent decrease from FY 2019.

Proposes level funding to fight the opioid crisis through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, including for programs like the State Opioid Response Program, and grants focused on providing medication assisted treatment.

Requests $55 million in funding to the Federal Drug Administration for an initiative to address the opioid epidemic.

Proposes to set minimum standards for Drug Utilization Review programs, to provide oversight of opioid dispending for Medicaid enrollees.

Allows states the option of providing full Medicaid coverage for women diagnosed with a substance use disorder for up to a year postpartum.

Provides $70 million in new funds for Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP) within the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration to increase direct health care and support services. It further prioritizes the reauthorization of the RWHAP and proposes $291 million for the presidents announced initiative to end the HIV epidemic by 2030.

Creates a one-time funding of $1 billion to support underserved populations and encouraging employers investments in childcare for working families.

Calls for, in partnership with Congress, to enact legislation to provide paid parental leave.

Proposes requirements to be implemented nationwide for able-bodied, working-age adults seeking employment, training for a job or doing community service enrolled in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid programs.,

Proposes $20.8 billion for USDA, a $3.6 billion or 15 percent decrease from the 2019 estimate of $24.4 billion.

Provides level funding at $5.8 billion for Women, Infants, and Children, a nutrition program providing low-income pregnant women and mothers with nutrition education and food vouchers.

Proposes $17.4 million reduction to reform the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Reintroduces Americas Harvest Box proposal where households receiving $90 per month or more in SNAP benefits, 81 percent of SNAP households would receive domestically sourced food in place of about half of their SNAP Electronic Benefits Transfer benefits.

Housing and Urban Development

Recognizes that state and local governments are better equipped to address local community and economic development needs.

Requests $100 million for the Rental Assistance Demonstration program.

Requests $290 million to promote healthy and lead-safe homes, which represents a $60 million increase compared to the 2019 estimated level.

Requests $44.1 billion, a 16.4 percent decrease from the 2019 estimate.

Interior

Reduces funding for Department of the Interior to $12.5 billion, a $2 billion reduction from enacted levels.

Reduces funding for the National Park Service by $460 million to $2.7 billion while the Fish and Wildlife Service would see a $267 million decrease to $1.3 billion.

Reduces Bureau of Land Management funding by $146 million to $1.2 billion, and the Bureau of Reclamation would be reduced by $462 million to $1.1 billion.

Reduces the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement to $130 million from $134 million.

Reduces the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement to $121.7 million, less than half of the $255.5 million enacted in FY 2019 with much of the reduction coming from eliminating the $115 million Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Economic Development Pilot Program.

Increases the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management by $16 million to $137 million. The administration is expected to release its final five-year offshore drilling plan for 2019-2024 shortly, and expand federal waters open to energy exploration.

Justice

Includes $673 million for the Executive Office of Immigration Review.

Creates a new Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Fund to include expansion of detention beds to 60,000 and additional prosecuting attorneys and judges.

Proposes $754 million for re-entry programming (criminal justice reform), $85 million for Second Chance Act re-entry programs.

Includes $2.3 billion for the Drug Enforcement Administration to combat opioid and fentanyl enforcement efforts, including $330 million for opioid-related state and local assistance.

Requests $405 million, a $10 million decrease from FY 2019, for Byrne/JAG.

Requests level funding, $492 million, for Violence Against Women Act.

Includes $77 million, level funding, to support victims of human trafficking.

Labor

Proposes $160 million in expanding access to apprenticeships.

Proposes to double the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998.

Increases funding for the Employee Benefits Security Administration.

Provides Paid Family Leave for New Parents.

Allows states to establish paid parental leave programs.

Requests $10.9 billion, a 9.7 percent decrease from the 2019 enacted level.

Transportation and Army Corps of Engineers

Proposes a 22 percent reduction to discretionary DOT funds, including significant reductions to federal funding for transit.,

Budget simultaneously requests a $1 billion increase to $43 billion for the federal-aid highway matching the level authorized in the 2015 FAST Act, which is funded via the Highway Trust Fund.

Includes a 2020 Budget Fact Sheet calling on Congress to enact legislation that generates at least $1 trillion in infrastructure investment, backed by $200 billion in federal funding.

Proposes a 50 percent reduction in for Amtrak Northeast Corridor and a separate 53 percent reduction to its National Network, specifically noting that in its analysis that the budget "will mark the end of the government fully subsidizing operating losses on Amtrak's long-distance routes.

No funding is included for the Gateway project, which would replace the 100-year-old tunnels connecting New Jersey and New York that were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Proposes a 31 percent reduction to the Army Corps of Engineers while simultaneously increasing the role of state and local governments in taking on certain projects currently led by the Corps. This would be accomplished through a proposal of $150 million to be transferred to local authorities constructing projects on their own.

Proposes to shift funding for inland waterways trust fund to a per-vessel fee from the current fuel tax method.

Veterans Affairs

Increases VA access to Urgent Care and expands caregivers programs,

Includes $329 million, a 4.2 percent increase to expand veterans access to memorial benefits,

A proposed $22 million would be for direct funding of the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection.

Requests $93.1 billion, a 7.5 percent increase in funding compared to the 2019 enacted level.

This summary was compiled by NCSL's state-federal affairs staff in the Washington, D.C., office.

Additional Resources
By Bloomberg

"Hide all docs," the email read. In a second message, the employee urged a colleague to conceal a laptop.

A squad of lawyers and computer specialists from ArcelorMittal was at the London offices of a company controlled by the Ruia familys Essar Group, as part of efforts to seize assets relating to a $1.5 billion U.S. arbitration award. And a team working for Essar scion Prashant Ruia were out to stop them.

Lakshmi Mittal has opened a new front in the U.K. in a worldwide legal battle with the Ruia family. Set against the backdrop of an ongoing tussle for an Indian steelmaker, the billionaire has accused his fellow Indian tycoons of hiding funds through a series of sham transactions within the Essar Group.

So far not one cent of the U.S. award -- owed to ArcelorMittal following the collapse of an iron-ore contract -- has been paid. The case has moved to London, with Mittal, on one side, and Prashant Ruia, the eldest son of Essar founder Shashi Ruia on the other, awaiting a judges ruling on the legality of the search.

The Ruias must have thought they had "successfully hidden behind the battlements," ArcelorMittals attorney, Anthony Peto, said at a court hearing last week. "They felt they were safe: they were not."

For ArcelorMittal, Essars Lansdowne House offices may be the key to tracing the groups assets. Thats because a company in the building, just minutes from Londons Ritz Hotel, had acted as a financial controller for various Essar units. Not only was a group server found on the premises, but company accounts pointing to where the money had gone.

But for Essar, which settled another London lawsuit earlier this year where creditors sought the seizure of a yacht and an oil refinery, the case is an example of judicial overreach. A U.K. court should have no jurisdiction over an American award against a company incorporated in Mauritius, Essar Steels attorneys argued.

"This is a case of the English court being asked to act not just as the worlds policeman, but as its detective agency as well," Essar Steels lawyer Daniel Toledano said.

Last weeks hearing "was the first opportunity for those Essar entities (and individuals) to fully argue their position in opposition to them," a spokesman for Essar said in an email. "Judgment on these matters is still awaited and as such we are unable to comment further."

ArcelorMittals team faced obstacles from the start of their search. One employee, Rupal Popat, sent two emails to Sanjiv Radia urging him to hide documents and a laptop. Radia "reprimanded Popat for sending the email" but Popat then sent the second message anyway, Peto said. Attorneys for Radia and Popat declined to comment.

The employees at Lansdowne House were all "dancing to a tune played by the Ruias," Peto said, arguing that Popat was unlikely to have acted on her own initiative.

In court documents, the British Essar unit sought to downplay the emails, calling them the work of a junior employee.

"Essar Capital Services does not seek -- how could it? -- to excuse those suggestions which were quite improper," Paul Stanley, a lawyer for the U.K. subsidiary, said in his submission. "Her suggestions were not acted on; documents were produced."

The dispute is taking place alongside a yearlong battle in India, where Lakshmi Mittal, Indias third-richest man, is nearing a $5.9 billion acquisition of an insolvent steelmaker formerly owned by the Ruias. The family is still seeking to challenge the deal in court.

Meanwhile the ruling in the Minnesota arbitration case, which ArcelorMittal is trying to enforce in London, arose out of a terminated contract to supply iron-ore pellets. But Essar Steel Ltd., which had assumed the liabilities of the U.S. contract, has said it couldnt pay. It now has less than $2.5 million in assets.

One document uncovered in the U.K. search tells a different story, according to ArcelorMittals lawyer. Essar Steels 2016 filing of its accounts described how the firm reclassified almost $1.5 billion in assets that put them out of reach of any potential creditor, Peto said.

"They couldnt really cover up the existence of the $1.5 billion lie," he alleged.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: A 34-year-old police constable from Vijayapura, a 21-year-old BSc student and her boyfriend have been arrested by Cottonpet police after they filed complaints against each other. The constable has been accused of wrongful confinement and of not paying Rs 1 lakh after receiving sexual favours from the student.

Mahadev Lakshman Jadhav is the arrested police constable. He was caught based on a complaint filed by Roja (name changed), and she and her boyfriend Ramesh (26) have been arrested after the constable accused them of trying to extort money from him.

Police said Mahadev and Roja came in contact last year on a dating application. He had come to the city to meet her on several occasions and they both shared physical relations on the condition that Mahadev pay Rs 1 lakh to Roja. But in the first week of March, Rojas boyfriend, who introduced himself as Sunil, called Mahadev and demanded to pay up or else they would inform his wife about his affair.

Mahadev came to the city on March 8 and took Roja to his constable friends house at Police Quarters on Mysuru Road, where they usually met. There was an argument over finances, and Roja shared her location with her boyfriend and informed him that Mahadev had locked her up. Ramesh alerted the police and went to the house. All three were brought to the station. After a preliminary probe, Mahadev was arrested for cheating and wrongful confinement, while Roja and her boyfriend were held for extortion, the police said.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: A 24-year-old woman, part of the Army Supply Corps has alleged that her colleague, a Major with ASC, raped her in his car at Old Madras Road in February. The woman had filed a complaint with the Vivek Nagar police and the case has been now transferred to jurisdictional Halsoor police, which has started the investigation.

The accused has been identified as Major Amit Choudary. Both the woman and Choudary work in ASC Centre and College in the city.

On February 4, she had attended a party at a senior officer's house and returned to her quarters. She said that Choudary called her over the phone and asked her to join him for a drive. Since she was hungry, she readily agreed to go for a drive and eat something outside. Choudary asked her to bring liquor if she had some in her room.

She took the liquor bottle and met Choudary near Gate number 1 of ASC Centre and College as asked by the Major. She found Choudary was already consuming liquor in his car bearing registration number DL-6-CG-7878.

They went on a drive to Old Madras Road and he took her to some place which was unknown to her. He again took alcohol and made her also to drink some. Choudary started touching her inappropriately. When the woman forcibly pushed him away, Choudary slapped her.

She told police that she didn't know the place or the route to get back to ASC and as it was a late night, she asked him to drop her back.

He started to drive back, but again stopped the car and put her in the backseat and told her that he brought her out only to have sex and said that he will drop her only after. He forcibly took off her pants and raped her. She said that he didn't ejaculate in her. Later he dropped her back to gate number 1.

As she was in shock for two days, she kept quiet about the incident. On February 7, she asked her parents to come to Bengaluru. Her parents reached on February 8 and she told them of the assault and they met the commandant on February 9.

On February 10, she got admitted to the Command Hospital Air Force and police visited the hospital to take her statement, but she refused, saying first she will complain to her higher-ups, before filing a complaint. Based on her statement the police had taken up a case of rape and assault on Choudary.

An investigating officer said, "if Choudary needs to be arrested during the investigation we will take necessary steps."
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Six children of a Telangana Minorities Residential School for girls at Shahalibanda ended up in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of a private hospital due to food poisoning, after spoilt food was served to them in the school on Thursday. As many as 59 other children of the school were kept under observation at the hospital.

On Thursday morning, 65 students of the school complained of uneasiness and vomiting after breakfast, following which they were rushed to the Princess Esra Hospital. Once the students were brought there, they were attended to and around 20 of them were also discharged by the afternoon. By evening all others, except around 10 students, were sent back to the school after their health was observed to be stable. However, in the late evening, all the students were again brought back to the hospital due to poor health conditions. Following this, six students were admitted to the ICU for treatment due to severe dehydration. Sources at the hospital informed that the health condition of these six children is stable.

Of the remaining students, 15 were discharged from the hospital at night and others were kept under observation. According to sources at the hospital, the students were served bondas for breakfast. Quality of the flour used to make the food is under question. It is being suspected that the midday meal served to children at the school, could also have had something spoilt in it, as they had to be brought back to the hospital in the evening again.

Reacting to the negligence by school authorities, Telangana Minorities Residential Educational Institutions Society (TMREIS), Secretary, B Shafiullah has sought an immediate inquiry into the issue and is likely to take disciplinary action against the schools staff. Shafiullah said, Nobody will be spared. A detailed inquiry will be conducted. The students suddenly felt ill after having their breakfast in the morning. They were immediately admitted to nearby hospital where they were given medication.
Sajin Shrijith By

Express News Service

One of the few contemporary American filmmakers who has not yet made a bad film, JC Chandor continues that winning streak with 'Triple Frontier', a gripping, tautly-paced action film that feels familiar and new at the same time. Its a heist thriller and a survival drama rolled into one.

What begins as a plan to locate and apprehend a most wanted Latin-American drug lord soon turns into a desperate fight for survival when one character makes a weak choice that puts his as well as everyone elses lives at risk.

The nail-biting tension generated as a result brings to mind the films of Kathryn Bigelows The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal are involved as executive producers in this film).

Like Chandors earlier films A Most Violent Year and All Is Lost, the film draws inspiration from some of the acclaimed classics such as The Wages of Fear (or its remake Sorcerer) and The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

It is Oscar Isaacs Santiago Pope Garcia that initiates the films events. He has been on the tail of a cartel member named Gabriel Lorea for years, and he has now struck a deal with the Brazilian police force to take him down.

When he realises that he cant do it alone, he makes a visit to each of his ex-Special Forces buddies  Tom Redfly Davis (Ben Affleck), William Ironhead Miller (Charlie Hunnam), Ben Miller (Garrett Hedlund), and Francisco Catfish Morales (Pedro Pascal)  in the hope of forming his own Oceans Eleven/The Expendables. Reluctant at first, they are lured by Garcias proposition because they all have bills to pay and they miss the good old days.

A tip from an informant has provided Garcia with not just Loreas whereabouts but also the millions of dollars locked away in his house. When Garcia and gang uncover the actual location of the loot, they realize that there is more in there than they can chew, and it will take more than one military helicopter to carry it all.

Its in the middle of this situation that an invisible shift in leadership happens. When Davis (Ben Affleck), a figure whom everyone looks up to, makes a last minute move, everyone, including Garcia, has no option but to go along. What ensues is pure insanity and things get so worse that it becomes increasingly difficult to guess which one of them would get out in one piece. The entire mission becomes a test of morality.

Despite employing familiar templates, Chandor keeps things moving at a brisk pace, taking us from one unforeseen situation to another. The infiltration of Loreas hideout, in particular, reminded me of the opening sequence of Sicario or the finale of Zero Dark Thirty.

Cinematographer Roman Vasyanov uses the cold and wet exterior shots to conjure an atmosphere of dread and uncertainty. Sometimes the image of a lone SUV on an empty bridge heading towards the massive mountainous jungles can induce more anxiety than a crowded freeway, and it immediately evokes Vietnam-set films like Apocalypse Now.

Affleck and Isaac are particularly good, as frustrated men who think they didnt get their due despite serving their country with the utmost dedication and winning medals for bravery.

These men are reminiscent of characters in some of the early Sidney Lumet films like Serpico and Prince of the City. They are neither black nor white. You understand their justification for doing what they do but you dont necessarily agree with them.

One moment youre rooting for someone and in the next, youre not sure if you should be. When they finally get what they deserve, you cant help but nod in agreement because its only fair. Afflecks Davis is more or less the modern day version of Humphrey Bogarts character from The Treasure of Sierra Madre, but unlike the Bogart character, there is a human side to Davis greed, and given his circumstances, one cant help but feel a modicum of sympathy. Its not every day that you see a character who evokes two opposite feelings at the same time.

One thing that 'Triple Frontier' gets right is a palpable sense of brotherhood and camaraderie thats absent in most films of this variety  one could call this a thinking mans Expendables. While some may find the lack of distinct qualities in the characters a bit bothersome, it makes perfect sense because a certain level of detachment is required from the viewers. It is clear that this film was not intended to be an acting exercise. The actors are only required to convey their desperation, not to make an exuberant display of their acting prowess, and Boal and Chandor succeed in doing exactly that.

'Triple Frontier' is now streaming on Netflix.
By IANS

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook blamed a server configuration change that caused the outage of its app along with Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

"Yesterday (Wednesday), as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We're very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone's patience," the social networking giant tweeted on Thursday.

Since Wednesday, Facebook users worldwide reported problems logging into their accounts, sharing posts on its website and Instagram and not being able to refresh feeds or post new files using the social media giant's family of apps.

Yesterday, as a result of a server configuration change, many people had trouble accessing our apps and services. We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. Were very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyones patience.  Facebook (@facebook) March 14, 2019

The company acknowledged the service interruption via Twitter, but it ruled out a possibility resulting from a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS attack, on its platform or servers.

"Never seen this big of an outage from a server configuration issue. Ever. These big ones are usually always networking issues. That's a really horrible server management plane architecture," tweeted Patrick Moorhead, one of the top tech analysts.

However, the outage did lead to people spending some family time together.

We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.  Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019

"I actually went and visited some family yesterday. Go down more often!" a user tweeted on Thursday.

"The family dinner table had actual conversation. @Facebook take your time," read another post.
By Express News Service

Bhopal: A 12-year-old Dalit girl missing since Wednesday was found beheaded more than 24 hours later in Banda area of Sagar district.

The Sagar district police suspect the horrific killing to be the fallout of a land-related dispute which the girls' family had with another family.

According to additional SP of Sagar district Rajesh Vyas a family from Belakhedi village reported at Banda police station at around 12 Noon on Thursday that their 12-year-old daughter hadn't returned from school on Wednesday.

The family searched for their daughter on their own till Wednesday night, but unable to locate her, they reported the matter to Banda police on Thursday noon.

"It was on Thursday evening at around 7 pm that the headless body of the girl was found lying close to her village and her severed head was found around 50-100 meters away," the ASP of Sagar district told on Friday.

The body has been sent for post mortem examination to hospital in Banda town. Although circumstantial evidence doesn't suggest to any wrongdoing with her before the killing, it's the autopsy report which will make the matter clear," he added.

Primary investigations, particularly based on allegations of the girl's family, point towards the killing being the fallout of a land related dispute with a Kurmi caste family (dominant OBC caste in the region).

"We're conducting raids for the suspects and hope to track and nab them soon," the ASP claimed.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: With less than a month left for the Lok sabha elections, as many as 21 Opposition parties have moved the Supreme Court, asking it to pass a direction that electronic voting machines (EVMs) be made tamper-proof.

The parties want stricter standards and safety norms instituted to prevent EVM-tampering. They also want 50% of Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail machines to be tallied with the EVMs.

FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE

The parties that have approached the court include the Congress, the Telugu Desam Party, the Nationalist Congress Party, the Aam Aadmi Party, CPI, CP(M), DMK, Trinamool Congress, National Conference, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal, among others.

Early this year, TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu had said that Opposition parties would move SC against EVMs. He said the decision was taken at a meeting of 15 parties at NCP chief Sharad Pawars residence.

The opposition parties have been raising doubts about the credibility of EVMs. However, the EC has repeatedly denied the allegations that the machines can be tampered with or hacked.
Young Arabs and Africans will meet in Aswan to discuss the challenges they face

Aswan, named the Capital for African Youth by President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi during Novembers second edition of the World Youth Forum, plays host to the Arab African Youth Platform between 16 and 18 March.

The platform will discuss the future of scientific research and healthcare and the impact of advanced technology and innovation on Africa and the Arab region.

Participants will exchange views and recommend initiatives to face the most important regional and international challenges facing their societies.

Africa has the worlds youngest population and it is growing rapidly, according to the United Nations Commission of Africa (UNCOA).

A 2017 study, Africas Youth and Prospects for Inclusive Development, showed that young people aged between 15 and 24 years of age constitute 19.4 per cent of the total population, and those under 15 years of age 41 per cent.

It is clear then that by sheer numbers alone, the choices, opportunities and constraints of young people will play a major role in shaping Africas development, said the study.

Youth also constitute 32 per cent of the population in 22 Arab countries according to a 2010 survey. And young people in Africa and the Arab world face similar challenges.

The UNCOA study showed that while youth literacy rates averaged 70 per cent across the continent there are wide disparities. Algeria, Botswana, Cabo Verde, Egypt, Swaziland, Tunisia and Uganda boasted youth literacy rates of at least 85 per cent. Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Cote dIvoire, Guinea, Liberia, Mali and the Niger all have rates of less than 50 per cent.

Young Africans continue to be marginalised in formal governance and the political system as voters, candidates and members of local and national governments. They are often disenfranchised politically through age-based limits on political participation.

A study by the American University in Cairo, Arab Youth: The Challenges of Education, Employment and Civic Participation, noted that Arab youth today are more likely to attend universities and other tertiary education institutions than their parents.

However, there are concerns about education quality, fed by Arab students results in international aptitude tests.

Despite increased access to education, the Arab region has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment in the world. With very few exceptions youth unemployment in Arab countries is much higher than global youth unemployment rates.

The economic difficulty facing young Arabs in their transition to adulthood is further exacerbated by the blocking of channels of civic engagement and their exclusion from the decision-making process. While social media has been celebrated as part of the Arab Spring, access to this tool is limited to the urban and educated, said the study.

Platform sessions will feature open discussions on how to maximise the possibilities of the Nile Valley becoming a pathway for Arab-African integration and a workshop on developing coastal regions is planned.

The platform will also hold two workshops for entrepreneurs, How to be a Successful Entrepreneur and Social Entrepreneurship from an African Perspective.

Cultural activities are also planned, including tours of Aswan.

Alieddin Hilal a former minister of youth and professor of political science at Cairo University, says Arab and African youths share a similar background and face many of the same conditions, making cooperation between them important for the development of their countries.

Youth in both regions have shown they are capable of developing a promising vision of integration, he said.

Hilal believes the forum offers a great opportunity for different youths from different cultures to mingle together and exchange experience and knowledge.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 March, 2019 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly under the headline: Common challenges, shared visions

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By Online Desk

#Amritsar was trending on microblogging site Twitter during the early hours of Friday, as residents of the Punjab city said they had heard "two loud sounds" in the air.

Rumours soon started doing the rounds as some users said the noise was heard after two fighter jets had passed over the city. While the initial tweets were filled with panic, others soon advised against the propagation of such messages. They told fellow citizens to "trust the Indian Army" instead of floating conspiracy theories.

My entire house shook from the blasts. #Amritsar  Ragini (@raginigauri98) March 14, 2019

Did anyone hear two strange loud sounds last night in amritsar. One really loud and another little less loud about 1.30 am. Well it sounded like bomb blast #amritsar @PunjabPoliceInd  Navneet (@browngirlO1) March 15, 2019

A user tweeted that his entire house shook in the double tremor that was felt around 1:00 am. The sound is likely to be the sonic boom caused by fighter jets of the Indian Air Force (IAF) as a major readiness exercise was carried out last night over Punjab and Jammu. A sonic boom is generated by shock waves when an object travels through the air faster than the speed of sound.

However, the Punjab Police confirmed that there was nothing to worry about. I appeal to the people not to believe in rumours on social media, Amritsar Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Jagjit Singh Walia told ANI. Everything is okay. As per our information nothing has happened.

During the exercise, IAF jets, including frontline aircraft, flew at supersonic speeds in the border districts including Amritsar in Punjab, sources told ANI.

Sources: Indian Air Force carried out major readiness exercise last night over Punjab and Jammu in which large number of fighter aircraft participated. During the exercise, IAF jets,including frontline aircraft, flew at supersonic speeds in the border districts including Amritsar pic.twitter.com/QChQ4szjp6  ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

The reason for carrying out the combat drill was to be prepared for thwarting any misadventure by the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) to intrude into Indian air space, they said.

The IAF has been on high alert ever since it carried out air strikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist camp in Balakot town of Pakistans Khyber Pakhtunwa province on February 26.

A couple of days ago, two PAF fighter jets flew at supersonic speeds over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir around 10 kilometres from the Line of Control in the Poonch sector.

Here are some more tweets

Plains past in the sky of the amritsar and then huge blast sounds,, oh my god what is happening #amritsar  A.P.S sandhu (@amansandhu319) March 14, 2019

Something is up with the #iaf jets passing over my house every 15 mins and reports of a sonic boom in #Amritsar , there's heightened air activity , can someone confirm what happened?  Rishabh Dua (@RishabhDua93) March 14, 2019

A couple of blast sounds and the whole city is awake & apprehensive. Enough to make us realize we wouldnt want a war and destroy the peace in the border cities. #Amritsar  Simardeep S. Bhatia (@simsta11) March 14, 2019

Were those bombs I just heard??? #amritsar  angry young woman (@__kinito) March 14, 2019
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Political leaders switching their loyalties in election season is common as disgruntled elements in various parties start looking for greener pastures. But veteran Congress spokesperson Tom Vadakkan joining the BJP came as a big surprise jolt to the Grand Old Party  as he was known to be a long-time loyalist of the Gandhi family.

Vadakkan said he took the decision because he was upset over the way the Congress reacted after the Pulwama attack. Slamming the dynastic politics practiced by the party, he said, It is not acceptable... Theres no place in it for self-respecting people. He said he had given his prime years to the Congress.

Though Vadakkan was not a heavyweight, he was considered as one of the few loyalists in the Congress. He was part of the first media committee set up by Sonia Gandhi in the late 1990s when she became the party president. Sources said Vadakkan had been keen on a ticket to contest elections and the BJP is likely to have promised him one.

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Influential Trinamool Congress lawmaker Arjun Singh also joined the saffron ranks. He, too, attributed his decision to TMC chief Mamata Banerjee questioning Indias air strike on Balakot.

Singh joined the BJP in the presence of senior party leaders, including Kailash Vijayvargiya, in New Delhi. Earlier, he had a long meeting with BJP leader Mukul Roy in Delhi. I worked for the last 40 years under Mamata ji. But I was extremely disappointed when she questioned the credibility of the Indian Army after the Balakot strike. When the entire country was speaking in one voice...she was questioning the intention of the PM, he said.
By Express News Service

The worlds largest planemaker may be headed straight to a protracted turbulence as its $600 billion-plus order book for 737 Max is likely to shrink with key customers threatening to cancel their orders or defect to rival Airbus in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash last Sunday.

On Thursday alone, two airlines, VietJet Aviation and Kenya Airways said they were reviewing their proposals to buy Max 8 jets.

VietJet, which had doubled its 737 Max order to $25 billion only last month, said its decision will depend on the result of the investigation into the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines tragedy.

Meanwhile, Kenya Airways is reportedly planning to switch to Airbus SEs A320.

Reports said Russias Utair Aviation is also seeking guarantees before taking delivery of the first of 30 planes.

Indonesias Lion Air, which lost its Max 8 jet along with 189 people on board last October, is also reportedly planning to drop its $22 billion order for 737 Max 8 jetliners and switch to rival aircraft from Airbus.

Boeing 737 Max 8. (Photo | AFP)

Separately, Garuda Indonesia plans to cut orders of the Boeing plane and a $5.9 billion order from a unit of Saudi Arabian Airlines hangs in the balance.

The 737, which first entered service in the late 1960s, is the aviation industrys best-selling model and Boeings top earner. The re-engineered Max version has racked up more than 5,000 orders worth in excess of $600 billion, including planes that have already been delivered.

Boeing, whose shares have lost 11 per cent of their value this week, faces escalating financial risk after two disasters involving its newest narrow-body jet in the past five months.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump expressed hope on Thursday that the grounding of 737 Max would be temporary. I hope it is going to be for a short period of time, he told reporters.
By PTI

MUMBAI: Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar Friday released a list of 37 Lok Sabha candidates who will contest the upcoming polls under the banner of his new political front, dealing a blow to Congress-NCP efforts to forge a grand alliance against the BJP in the state.

They will contest the next month's polls under the banner of the VanchitBahujan Aghadi (VBA), a social coalition of Dalits and Muslims jointly formed by Ambedkar and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) led by Asaduddin Owaisi.

The list includes some constituencies in Mumbai.

Interestingly, the VBA has mentioned the castes of all the candidates who figure in the list.

However, the Hyderabad-based AIMIM has already announced it will not contest the Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra, which has 48 parliamentary seats, the second highest after Uttar Pradesh's 80.

Speaking to reporters here after releasing the list, Ambedkar said he has not declared the candidates on the remaining 11 seats, which include Akola, Solapur, Nagpur and Aurangabad.

"In the next four days, suspense over these seats would be over," said Ambedkar, who also heads the Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh, a faction of the Republican Party of India.

FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE

Asked about the Aurangabad seat, he said Owaisi should take a call on who will contest from this constituency in Central Maharashtra.

"Whoever contests from this seat, would be supported by the Vanchit Aghadi," he said.

Asked if AIMIM legislator Imtiyaz Jaleel would contest as an independent from the Aurangabad Lok Sabha seat, he said this question should be put to the Hyderabad-based party.

Ambedkar, the grandson of Dalit icon B R Ambedkar, further said the candidates for Akola and Solapur seats will also be announced soon.

The Dalit leader is expected to contest from at least one of these seats.

Among the prominent candidates announced Friday, Anil Jadhav will contest from Pune, while Navnath Padalkar will be fielded from Baramati.

Aruna Mali will contest from Kolhapur and Anil Kumar from South Mumbai.

Mumbai South Central's candidate will be Sanjay Bhosale.

Sambhaji Shivaji Kashid will be fielded from North East Mumbai, whereas Rajaram Patil will in the poll fray from Maval in Pune district.

Maharashtra will vote in four phases on April 11, 18, 23 and 29.

The Congress-NCP combine had been trying to bring Ambedkar, who has pockets of influence in the state, in its `maha agadhi', a grand alliance of anti-BJP parties.

However, talks in this regard remained inconclusive.
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: A day after the BJP requested the Election Commission to declare all constituencies in West Bengal as super-sensitive in view of heightened possibility of violence, the commission on Thursday decided to send a team to review poll preparedness in the state. The team will also review the poll preparedness in Tripura, Assam and Manipur.

According to EC officials, Deputy Election Commissioner Sudeep Jain will visit West Bengal, which will see polling in seven phases beginning April 11. Mamata had hit out at the BJPs plea to the EC to declare the state as super sensitive and called it an insult to the people of the state.

EC holds observers meet

The EC on Thursday held the first briefing for observers to be deployed in the states that are going to polls. Over 1,800 officials drawn from the IAS, IPS, IRS and other central services attended the briefing.

Reminding the observers of their crucial role, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora said the officers need to be earnest. They had no choice but to ensure no mistakes are committed, he said. Arora said in the last State polls, it took a few instances of mistakes in following the laid-down protocol to render all the good work in the background.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court Friday directed ED to clarify the status of purported Red Corner Notice (RCN) issued against arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari, who has sought the quashing of a money laundering case against him.

While ED submitted in an affidavit that Bhandari was a fugitive, proclaimed absconder and evading the process of law, his counsel said the probe agency has concealed information from the court which last July quashed an order declaring his client as a proclaimed offender.

Justice Mukta Gupta asked Enforcement Directorate to file an affidavit clarifying the facts, its stand and the status of the RCN.

The court listed the matter for further hearing on April 1.

Bhandari and his wife Sonia Bhandari have move separate pleas seeking quashing of the money laundering case lodged against them by ED in February 2017.

Bhandari, who is also an accused in a 2016 case under the Official Secrets Act relating to the recovery of confidential documents of the Ministry of Defence from his residence during an Income Tax raid in 2016, was declared a proclaimed offender by a trial court here in January last year.

He is also facing prosecution under provisions of the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015.

During the probe, ED had found that he helped Robert Vadra, brother-in-law of Congress President Rahul Gandhi, in purchasing a property in the United Kingdom.

ED has lodged a money laundering case against Vadra and his close aide Manoj Arora accusing them of acquiring the London property in an illegal manner.

The case is before Special Judge Arvind Kumar in Patiala House Courts here which has granted anticipatory bail to Vadra.

The court had asked him to cooperate in the investigation by the ED where he appeared several times for being quizzed.

In an affidavit filed in response to Bhandari's plea for quashing the case under Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the high court, ED has said: "It is relevant to note that when the petitioner fled India, there already existed a Look Out Circular (LOC) against him as his presence was needed by various law enforcement agencies."

It added that because of the existence of LOC, Bhandari could not have travelled by air or sea and, therefore, he is believed to have fled by road through Indo-Nepal Border.

"A RCN has been issued by the Interpol declaring the petitioner as a fugitive wanted for prosecution," ED said in the affidavit filed through central government standing counsel Amit Mahajan.

The RCN was issued on October 16, 2017. ED raised the preliminary objection on Bhandari's petition and urged the court to first decide whether a person against whom RCN is issued, a declared absconder and evading the process of law here, can be allowed to invoke the jurisdiction of the court.

Can such a person have the luxury of wasting the time of constitutional courts when a large number of law-abiding citizens are waiting for justice, it said.

Bhandari, in an affidavit notarised in London, claimed that the ED's response was "motivated" and "based on incorrect and misleading information" and ought to be rejected by the court.

His counsel annexed media reports with the affidavit showing that the purported RCN issued against him was not in existence and in any case the documents enclosed by the agency showed they cannot be used in any proceedings.

The high court, in its July 2018 decision, set aside the order declaring Bhandari a proclaimed offender in the OSA case as he was not an accused under the IPC.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Indian exports is likely to record $330 billion during the current financial year despite trade facing hurdles of trade protectionism across the globe, according to Union Commerce secretary Anup Wadhawan.

Addressing global CEOs and trade partners at the International Engineering Sourcing Show (IESS) here, he said this could be an all-time record going past the figure of $314 billion in 2013-14.

He lamented that Indian exporters are capitalising on free trade in a big way and the government is working in this regard. The Union government is considering the need to formulate policies due to the increase in prices of raw materials like that of steel.

Meanwhile, exporters said the withdrawal of the preferential trade status granted to India under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) by the United States has hit the medium, small and micro enterprises.

Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) India chairman Ravi Sehgal and EEPC executive director Suranjan Gupta later addressing a press conference said the MSME sector has been hit, but certain products are unique which even China cannot import to United States. They said the pressure is on Indian exporters to reduce prices as the US feels that the trade is not in the favour of the United States.

Sehgal said the government should introduce price control mechanism and come out with a steel policy or metal policy. He said if such a policy is introduced, even engineering products exports is likely to shoot up to $100 million.

Malaysia Automotive Robotics and IoT Institute chief executive officer Madani Sahari highlighted the Memorandum of Understanding signed with EEPC for a period of three years. Under the MoU, companies in automotive and information technology will be identified and they will form technical agreements and joint ventures to boost trade.
Namita Bajpai By

Express News Service

LUCKNOW: Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadras meeting with Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad at a hospital in Meerut seems to have annoyed Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati leadership so much that she is reportedly considering fielding candidates from the Gandhi family pocket boroughs of Amethi and Rae Bareli. The SP-BSP alliance had decided to leave the two seats for the Congress.

The BSP chief convened an important meeting of its core committee on Thursday in order to give final shape to the partys candidate list for the Lok Sabha elections. The issue of fielding candidates for Amethi and Rae Bareli was also discussed at the meeting, said an informed source.

FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE

According to highly placed sources in the party, the list for the first and second phases of polling is expected any time soon.

On Wednesday evening, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav had called on Mayawati at her immediately after AICC general secretary Priyanka Gandhi visited Azad. The political circles were abuzz that Mayawati was miffed over Priyanka meeting the Dalit leader.

However, SP sources downplayed the meeting as a mere pressure tactics by Congress after BSPs snub, putting an end to all possibilities of Grand Old Party being roped into the alliance. Senior SP leader and spokesman Rajendra Chaudhary claimed Akhilesh had met Mayawati to discuss the joint campaign programme and holding joint public rallies as the alliance was preparing for a full-fledged campaign post-Holi. Sources said the SP-BSP joint campaign will take off from Saharanpur.

Meanwhile, Azad, who announced his candidature against Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Varanasi, has asked Akhilesh to clarify is stand on the issue of reservations in job promotion.

Azad referred to AIIMS

Bheem Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad was referred to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi by the doctors of Anand hospital in Meerut on Thursday. Azad was arrested for violating model code of conduct by taking out the Bahujan Hunkar rally in Deoband in Saharanpur on Tuesday. He was taken to a Meerut hospital after he fell sick in custody.
By Online Desk

Diamond merchant Nirav Modi, accused in the Rs 13,500 crore PNB scam, was recently spotted in London sporting an ostrich hide jacket worth Rs 9 lakh.

Ever since these reports of him living in the city's theatre district surfaced, the one question that everyone puzzled over was how he managed to get a visa. We now have the answer.

According to a newspaper report, Modi entered the UK on a 'golden visa,' a tier 1 visa which allows rich investors outside the European Union and Switzerland to make investments and settle in the UK.

A person is eligible to apply for the golden visa if he can invest 2 million in UK government bonds or shares of a company, sources said.

With a golden visa, a person can work, study or set up a business in the UK. The investment should remain for five years in order to be eligible for permanent residency. The process can be accelerated by investing more money. Modi is reportedly involved in a new diamond business in Britain.

The diamantaire's residence is reportedly worth 8 million. The rent for a similar apartment in the building comes to approximately 17,000 a month.

Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi are under probe by both the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the ED. The ED filed money laundering cases against them and others on February 15 on the basis of an FIR registered by the CBI.

The ED has till date attached properties worth Rs 4,765 crore of Choksi and Modi.
Harpreet Bajwa By

Express News Service

CHANDIGARH: Underlining its security concerns vis-a-vis the Khalistan separatist movement, India told Pakistan to not promote secessionist activities and it should not let the places of pilgrimage be used for separatist propaganda by anti-India elements.

Expressing disappointment at Pakistans response to the various issues raised by India during the first meeting on the Kartarpur Corridor, Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh urged Islamabad to be

more amenable and responsive to Indias demands, keeping in view the interests of the devotees seeking to pay obeisance at the historic Gurdwara across the border.

After the five hours first meeting on Karatarpur corridor issue with the eighteen-member Pakistani delegation at the Attari border yesterday, Joint Secretary of Ministry of External Affairs (Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran) Deepak Mittal, shared Indias concerns about Pro-Khalistan propaganda targeting devotees. "We emphasised to them that they (Pakistan) should not allow any activity against the spirit with which pilgrims will visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur Sahib. They assured us they would not let their soil be mutualised,  he said.

India also reiterated that they wanted consular access to the pilgrims.  It is not part of the current arrangements, but we said that consular access was important this time, said, SCL Das, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

There have also been reports that Khalistan separatist groups could use the corridor route to push terrorists.

Yesterday US-based, Pro-Khalistan advocacy group `Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) which is running a campaign Referendum 2020 announced that SFJ will sponsor 10,000 Sikh pilgrims from Punjab during 550th birth anniversary celebrations of Guru Nanak Dev at Kartarpur Sahib. SFJ is holding a Kartarpur Sahib Convention on Khalistan  Referendum 2020.

Last year on the occasion of the 549th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev when Sikh devotees visited Gurdwara Janam Asthan at Nankana Sahib and Gurdwara Sachcha Sauda at Farooqabad near Lahore they

saw huge posters with pictures of separatist leaders by SFJ calling for secession of Khalistan from India. They were also greeted with slogans and processions.

The officials of the High Commission of India in Islamabad were not allowed to enter the shrines and meet the Sikh pilgrims, thus prompting Indian Government lodged a strong protest with the Pakistan Government.

A day before the India and Pakistan delegation meeting yesterday at Attari, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Wednesday met pro-Khalistan leader and Jaish chief Masood Azhar's aide Gopal Singh Chawla.

Meanwhile, Amarinder said Islamabads response to Indias demands was totally inadequate and the neighbouring country needed to reconsider its stand if the corridor is to serve its true purpose, in the spirit in which it was decided to be opened.

"The limitation of 500 pilgrims a day, as proposed by Pakistan, was extremely insufficient and curtailing the visit to a limited number of days in a week would defeat the purpose even further, they should be allowed all seven days in a week,  he said.
RTHK: US to ban international war crimes investigators

The United States says it will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court personnel who try to investigate alleged abuses by its forces in Afghanistan or elsewhere - a move swiftly condemned by human rights organisations. The ICC is the first global tribunal for war crimes.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Washington was prepared to take further steps, including economic sanctions, if the court pursues any investigations of US or allied personnel.

"We are determined to protect the American and allied military and civilian personnel from living in fear of unjust prosecution for actions taken to defend our great nation.

"The ICC is attacking America's rule of law. It's not too late for the court to change course and we urge that it do so immediately." He said moves had already begun against some employees of the court, but he declined to say how many or what cases they may have been investigating.

Pompeo said any wrongdoing committed by American personnel would be dealt with in US military and criminal courts.

The Hague-based court said it would continue to operate undeterred by Washington's action.

Richard Dicker, international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said the US move "is a naked attempt to bully judges and impede justice for victims in Afghanistan" and "blatant contempt for the rule of law".

The United States never joined the ICC, where a prosecutor has a pending request to look into possible war crimes in Afghanistan that may involve Americans. The Palestinians have also asked the court to bring cases against Israel. (AP, AFP)

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Israeli military aircraft bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip early on Friday, hours after two rockets were launched at Tel Aviv in the first such attack since a 2014 war.

Following the overnight exchanges, sirens sounded again in Israeli border towns after dawn broke.

Palestinian news media reported strikes throughout Gaza, from Rafah in the south to the north of the densely populated coastal strip that is home to two million Palestinians.

Some of the buildings targeted had been evacuated as a precaution, as Hamas had expected an Israeli response.

Health ministry officials in Gaza said two people, a man and a woman, were wounded when their house was damaged in Rafah in the early morning.

Witnesses said powerful explosions from the air strikes rocked buildings in Gaza and lit the skies over targeted sites.

If not Hamas, who?

On Thursday night, the sirens howled farther north, in Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial capital, set off by what the military said were two incoming, longer-range rockets from Gaza.

That salvo caused no casualties or damage, missing built-up areas. But it rattled Israeli nerves ahead of an April 9 election in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking a fifth term on the strength of his national security credentials.

Explosions were heard in Tel Aviv and witnesses said interceptor missiles had detonated - although the military said no rockets were shot down.

It was the first such attack on the city since the 2014 Gaza war between Hamas and Israel. There have been several smaller rounds of fighting since, reined in by Egyptian and U.N. mediation.

"This was basically a surprise," military spokesman Brigadier-General Ronen Manelis told Israel Radio on Thursday.

Manelis said Israel did not yet know who had carried out the rocket launches. But another Israeli military spokesman laid the blame on Hamas on Friday.

"Hamas carried out the rocket fire against Tel Aviv yesterday evening," Lieutenant-Colonel Avichay Adraee said.

Hamas denied involvement, saying the launches took place as its leaders met Egyptian delegates about efforts to secure a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

Israeli analysts speculated that Palestinian militants opposed to any deal between Hamas and Israel were behind the rocket attacks.

Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, two smaller Gaza armed factions, also denied responsibility.

On Friday, Islamic Jihad's armed wing said in a statement that it had put its fighters on full alert to respond to Israeli attacks.

Washington chimes in

The latest flare-up drew a U.S. statement of support for Israel.

"Hamas and other terror orgs in Gaza continue to fail their people day after day & drag Gaza further & further down by constantly choosing violence," Jason Greenblatt, the White House's Middle East envoy, said on Twitter. "This method will never work. Ever!"

Naftali Bennett, a right-wing member of Netanyahu's security Cabinet whose party is competing against the veteran prime minister's for votes in the coming election, demanded that Israel resume its assassination of Hamas chiefs.

"The time has come to defeat Hamas once and for all," he said on Thursday night.

Netanyahu also faced pressure from the centre-left opposition, whose leading candidate, former General Benny Gantz, said: "Only aggressive, harsh action will restore the deterrence that has eroded" under the prime minister's watch.

Tensions have been high for the past year along the Israel-Gaza frontier, as violent protests by Palestinians near Israel's border fence have often provoked the Israeli military into a lethal response.

Some 200 Palestinians have been killed during the demonstrations begun a year ago, on March 30, and about 60 more have died in other incidents, including exchanges of fire across the border. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed by Palestinian fire.

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By PTI

PATNA: The Patna High Court set aside the criminal proceedings initiated against Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar by a lower court in a 28-year-old murder case on Friday.

Justice A Amanullah passed the order on an application moved by Kumar, who heads the Janata Dal (United).

Kumar had challenged the proceedings initiated against him by the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM), Barh, who took cognizance of an FIR lodged at the Pandarak police station in Patna district.

In the FIR lodged on November 16, 1991, Kumar, who was then the Samata Party MP from Barh, was named as an accused, along with others, for the killing of one Sitaram Singh, who was killed during the Lok Sabha polls that year.

The ACJM, Barh had initiated criminal proceedings against Kumar in 2009, which was challenged by the chief minister before the Patna High Court the same year.

Justice Amanullah, who had reserved his order on the petition on January 31, quashed the proceedings on Friday.

It comes as a relief to the chief minister with the opposition parties, especially the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), targeting him over his name figuring in the murder case.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Expressing "deep shock" over killings of scores of people in the Christchurch terror attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies, and expressed India's solidarity with the people of New Zealand at this difficult time.

In a letter to Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, Modi also stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence, the External Affairs Ministry said in an official release.

At least 49 worshippers were kilAl Noor Mosqueled in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's suburb, seen as one of the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

In the letter, Modi offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injured and underscored India's solidarity with the "friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time".

ALSO READ | Victims were shot until their death: Survivors recall chilling stories of New Zealand shooting

Prime Minister has expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch, the release said.

"The Prime Minister stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies," it added.

Modi also expressed his deepest condolences to the bereaved families in the dastardly attack.

Earlier, the MEA said its High Commission is in touch with local authorities for more information and was ascertaining more details about the possibility of Indians being affected by the terror attacks.

"Our mission is in touch with local authorities to ascertain more details.

It is a sensitive matter and therefore we can't give confirmed numbers/names till we are absolutely certain," MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

ALSO READ | Nine Indian-origin persons missing in New Zealand mosque massacre: Envoy

Meanwhile, MP Asaduddin Owaisi, President of All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party, said an Indian has been shot at in the incident.

"A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad and would like to go to NZ for Ahmed's family. I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family," he said in a tweet.

India's High Commission said that any Indian national affected by the attacks can contact it for assistance.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for those affected.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh tweeted,"India stands with New Zealand in this hour of grief & sorrow and offers it's condolences to the bereaved families.

The shootout in New Zealand underscores the importance of the global fight to counter Terrorism - the World needs to get together and defeat this demon.
By PTI

NEW ZEALAND: The ED Friday moved a Delhi court seeking its nod to quiz separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani's son-in-law Altaf Shah in connection with a terror-funding case involving LeT chief and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

The Enforcement Directorate also sought to question Zahoor Watali, an influential businessman allegedly having a friendship with Pakistani leaders and Kashmiri separatists, and Naval Kishore Kapoor, a UAE-based businessman.

Shah, Watali and Kapoor were arrested by the NIA in the terror-funding case and are lodged in Tihar jail. The court will hear the matter on March 19.

The NIA had earlier filed a charge sheet against the accused, including Hizbul Mujahideen head Syed Salahuddin, in the case accusing them of "conspiring to wage war against the government" and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir Valley.

The agency has charged Pakistan-based terrorists Hafiz Saeed and Salahuddin, besides 10 others with criminal conspiracy, sedition, and under stringent provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
By PTI

RAIPUR: Congress president Rahul Gandhi Friday made light of family loyalist Tom Vadakkan's decision to join the BJP. Gandhi said Vadaakkan was not a big leader.

"Vadakkan? Vadakkan is not a big leader," Gandhi told reporters at Raipur airport before leaving for Odisha tour.

ALSO READ: Till now he used to 'abuse' PM Modi: Congress on Vadakkan criticising it after joining BJP

In a huge embarrassment to the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, its spokesperson Tom Vadakkan, once a key aide of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, joined the BJP Thursday and attacked his former party for its stand on Balakot air strikes.

Gandhi also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi over unemployment, farmers distress and alleged corruption in the Rafale deal with France.

FOLLOW OUR ELECTION COVERAGE HERE

"There are three issues in the country. The biggest issue is of unemployment. Narendra Modi has failed (to create employment opportunities). The other issue is of corruption. You must have heard about Rafale. PM has put Rs 30,000 crore in the pocket of businessman Anil Ambani," he said.

The third issue is of farmers. We (Congress) waived off loans of farmers in Chhattisgarh within two days (of coming to power). Narendra Modi talked about farmers for five years of his rule and keeps on talking about them," he said.

Gandhi claimed Modi gave money of farmers, which they had given for (crop) insurance, to "people like Anil Ambani".
Santwana Bhattacharya By

They have not exactly been absent before. But two voting segmentswomen and the youthhave acquired a particularly high salience perhaps for the first time in a Lok Sabha election. They are being targeted through backroom strategies, statistics relating to them are being actively discussed in the chatrooms of election analysts, and publicity material is being specially crafted with these two blocs in mind.

Narendra Modis muscular national security-cum-foreign policy, as a central poll plank, surely keeps the BJPs core Hindutva votebank upbeat, but its apparently also good enough to make the BJP look attractive to the millennials, rural and urban, high on computerised war games and new-age precision weaponry. The opposition, meanwhile, tailors its critiques in order to bring those same young voters back to bread-and-butter issues, reminding them of the stark unemployment figures, low education budgets, etc.

Will the youth get anything substantial from this lavish serving of rhetoric? Its unclear how a demographic is useful if defined in such loose terms: A young Adivasi in Dantewada may have quite different concerns from a traders son in Surat or an IT kid in Bengaluru. Yes, betterment of life-chances is a common objective, but the political systems resistance to change will be the biggest obstacle. The average age of candidates will remain 55-65 plus (even astrologers want Indians to believe only those born between 1950-1965 have a chance of doing well in the coming polls!), never mind the average age of voters.

However, a mini revolution of sorts seems afoot vis-a-vis the other segment, women. Not just in terms of promises of higher anganwadi budgets, or tax cuts, but increased representation. We even heard of the Womens Reservation Bill after a long time. Theres a general churning for sure. Remember how, after the US congressional polls, its the election of a record number of women that got celebrated. Hillary Clinton has lamented that the parliamentary system (unlike the presidential one) allows more scope for women to get top jobs. Is that a chimera that hides reality, or are things changing at a deeper level too? There, indeed, has been no dearth of women leaders in India. On the scale of womens representation in legislatures, though, India is among the bottom twenty. Reservations in panchayats and local bodies, touching 50 per cent in some states, never travelled up.

The picture suddenly changed with Odisha CM Naveen Patnaiks decision to field 33 per cent women candidates in these elections: six-seven women candidates out of 21 in the state. The idea has not been carried to the Assembly polls, being held simultaneously. Nonetheless, a sign of maturation, if the trend holds. It certainly found a ricocheting effect in neighbouring West Bengal, where Mamata Banerjee declared 17 woman candidates in the 42 Lok Sabha seats her state has. Unlike Patnaik, she received criticism. Simply because her women candidates, mostly twenty-something starlets, were seen more as window-dressing. In a seat where Banerjee famously cut her political teeth by defeating then CPM stalwart Somnath Chatterjee, Banerjee has fielded a political novice. Even if she wins, which she very well may given TMCs clout, her contribution to lawmaking remains doubtful. The BJD, on the other hand, claims to have been preparing the ground, grooming eligible woman candidates from the ground up.

The domino effect went beyond Bengal. Congress president Rahul Gandhi has now come out to promise the passage of the 33 per cent Womens Reservation Bill in Parliament, and 33 per cent reservation for women in government jobs, if brought to power. He made the announcement in response to a question posed to him at Stella Maris College, Chennai, almost as if he was waiting for the opportunity. Its another matter that in 10 years of UPA rule, the Congress under Sonia Gandhis stewardship failed to get the bill passed. Even progressive Kerala, where Rahul first dropped hints of reviving the womens reservation debate, had no appetite for the bill.

Why then is womens candidature an issue this time when representation debates rarely go beyond caste, creed, religion? Well, two reasons. Firstly, the steady rise of women voters. In 2014, as many as 65.63 per cent women (roughly 260 million) came to vote, as against 67.09 per cent of men. Not just in states like Manipur, Sikkim and Meghalaya, but also for the first time in Bihar, Rajasthan, Punjab, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand. Indeed, in 16 out of 29 states, women outvoted men.

Secondly, the political nature of that vote is a complicated story. Modi was seen to be a favourite of women voters in Gujarat, but the trend did not quite replicate itself all-India in 2014, barring in some states. Not that the Congress could consolidate them either; regional parties took away big slices of the pie, particularly in states with women leaders in power. Significantly, in 2014, in Odisha and West Bengal, the BJD and TMC were the recipients of the largest chunk of women votes. That partly explains why these two parties, both facing a serious challenge from the BJP, have leaned on women power. Thats also perhaps why Rahul chose Tamil Nadu to make his promise.

This is a votebank that may not get swayed by national security and foreign policy alone, even if both ministries are run by prominent women leaders. It has its own specificities, yet those are hard to generalise in a country of such variety. Women are yet to create a charter of demands, but influencing government formation is a start.

Santwana Bhattacharya

Political Editor, The New Indian Express

Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: The High Court has said that the media should not cross the Lakshman Rekha while reporting matters related to privacy issues like matrimonial disputes. Elaborating on the duty of the media while restraining a private television channel from broadcasting any programme in relation to the petitioners matrimonial dispute, Justice B Veerappa said media attention should be towards exposing corruption, nepotism, law breaking, abuse, arbitrary exercise of power, law and order, economy, health, science and technologyall matters of public interest.

The Lakshman Rekha or line of control should be that the publication of comments and information should not invade the privacy of an individual, unless overweighed by bona fide and genuine public interest, the judge added.

Referring to the purpose of imposing reasonable restriction on the freedom of press, the court said that Right to information has been recognised as a fundamental right and the Right of the Press to furnish the information or facts or opinion should be only to foster public interest and not to encroach upon the privacy of an individual, the court said.

The court further said that when the public has no legal right to impinge upon marital privacy, the press cannot claim a better right to publish in newspaper, magazine or any other media, in exercise of freedom of speech and expression.

Breach of Sec 22(1) punishable with fine

When a matrimonial case is pending between a couple, the television channel should not have proposed to interfere with their personal life. If any person publishes any matter in contravention of the provisions contained in Section 22 (1) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, shall be punishable with fine, said the High Court.

ED urges HC not to stay proceedings against DKS

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday submitted the Enforcement Case Investigation Report (ECIR) in relation to the case registered against Water Resources Minister D K Shivakumar to the High Court. The case will be heard further on March 18.

State, civil rights ED get HC notice

A division bench headed by Acting Chief Justice L Narayana Swamy and Justice P S Dinesh Kumar issued a notice to the state government and the ADGP, civil rights Enforcement Directorate (ED), in response to a public interest litigation petition.

Proceedings against Shashidhar stayed

Justice Aravind Kumar has stayed all proceedings against V Shashidhar, president of Akhila Karnataka Police Mahasangha, after hearing the petition filed by him questioning the FIR registered by Yelahanka police on charges of sedition.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: Former Union Minister and BJP leader SM Krishna on Friday extended support to Sumalatha, wife of late actor and minister Ambareesh, for her candidature from Mandya constituency.

Sumalatha is likely to disclose details of her candidature on March 19. Only then, it may become clear whether she will contest on a BJP ticket or as an independent backed by the party.

Krishna told reporters that he will discuss the issue of Sumalatha's candidature from the constituency with the BJP top leadership.

"We will discuss whether Mandya BJP will field its own candidate or extend support to Sumalatha. After a comprehensive discussion with everybody involved, including the party workers, a decision will be taken," he said.

Sumalatha, who had been an aspirant of the Congress ticket earlier, is expected to now either contest from a BJP ticket or as an independent backed by BJP. Sumalatha was snubbed by the Congress as the Congress-JDS coalition decided to field Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy's son Nikhil Kumaraswamy from the Vokkaliga-dominated constituency.

FOLLOW OUR FULL ELECTION COVERAGE HERE

Considering the performance of BJP in the past bypoll in Mandya, when BJP had secured over 2.5 lakh votes, Krishna indicated that the candidature of Sumalatha will benefit the party.

On whether he will extend support if Sumalatha contested as an independent, Krishna said that he will back the candidate backed by his party.

CM flays Krishna, Sumalatha

In a series of tweets, Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy on Friday hit out at both S M Krishna and Sumalatha Ambareesh.

Targeting Krishna for his remarks on 'dynastic politics', he tweeted that none from his family had entered any elected body via the 'back door's, unlike Krishna - who had knocked on JDS supremo HD Deve Gowda's door seeking election to Rajya Sabha.

In the five tweets, three were aimed at Krishna, where Kumaraswamy recalled the former's association with Congress and how he enjoyed power in the party.

Taking a dig at Sumalatha for her 'sudden concern' for farmers, he wrote, "Respected Sumalatha, I was overjoyed by your pro-farmer remarks. Neither I, nor my father know anything about farmers...".

He added that they were keen to listen to her advice on farming, as she has started talking about her experiences in agriculture after appearing out of nowhere.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: The CBI Court here on Thursday four accused persons, including two officers of the National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC), in a graft case registered in 2007. The court acquitted NSIC senior branch manager K P Kamalakaran, NSIC deputy manager KK Manoj, proprietor of Origin Herbs Research, Venjaramoodu, Madhu and Bhaskaran Nair.

The case pertains to the sanctioning of Raw Material Assistance Facility benefiting the co-accused persons. According to CBI, the accused conspired to sanction facility and cheated NSIC to the tune of `22, 13, 444. After registering the FIR on February 28, 2007, the CBI arrested second accused Madhu on April 14, 2007.

Later, the probe agency filed a chargesheet against the four accused persons. Advocate Thomas Abraham Nilackappilli appeared for the accused. While giving the verdict, the court observed the CBI failed to establish charges against the accused. As many as 35 witnesses, 111 documents and three material objects were examined by the court as part of the trial.
S Kumaresan By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: The 2014 general elections took place amidst a popular wave across the country in support of BJP leader Narendra Modi as Prime Ministerial candidate. However, Tamil Nadu remained unaffected by this wave under the stronghold of Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa under whose leadership the AIADMK won 37 out of 39 parliamentary seats in the state.

The 2014 parliamentary elections were also peculiar in a way since both Dravidian majors - DMK & AIADMK - did not ally with any national parties. So, with the Congress and BJP also in the fray, it turned into a four-cornered contest in Tamil Nadu.

At the national level, the BJP became the first non-Congress party to secure a majority in Lok Sabha, bagging 282 seats.

In 2009 Manmohan Singh took charge as Prime Minister for the second term when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance won the Lok Sabha elections. DMK leaders A Raja, Dayanidhi Maran, MK Azhagiri, SS Palanimanickam, D Napoleon and S Jagathratchagan were among the union ministers.

Within a few months, the 2G scam against Raja rocked the nation, causing heavy embarrassment to the Congress. The situation spiralled out of the Congress control with several other controversies surrounding procurement of goods, construction of bridges and the Commonwealth Games.

In the meantime, the Assembly elections in 2011 saw the AIADMK forging an alliance with the DMDK, CPM,CPI and others. The DMK joined hands with the PMK, VCK and others. The AIADMK won due to anti-incumbency factor in the State and the allegations plaguing the Centre.

Capitalising on the Congress failure to offer a convincing explanations for the scams, the BJP staged various protests, stalling Parliament for many days. Yielding to the pressure from the Centre, Raja, who was then Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, resigned.

It was around the same time that Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, was made a member of BJPs parliamentary board, as the first formal step in bringing him to the national politics. Amidst demands from within the party, Modi was declared the Prime Ministerial candidate in September, 2013.

In the background of Modis rise thus far was an army of BJP cadre who had already begun shooting off SMSes across the country, projecting Modi as the harbinger of hope and bringing to light the extraordinary development he had brought to Gujarat.

Meanwhile, the DMK quit the Cabinet and broke away from the Congress alliance. The BJP high command had hoped to form an alliance with the AIADMK but Jayalalithaa had made it clear that it was not to happen. The BJP then formed a rainbow alliance with DMDK, PMK, MDMK, IJK and others.

During the campaign, Modi met actor Rajinikanth at Chennai and actor Vijay at Coimbatore. The BJP was said to have expected vocal support of actors but was disappointed.

Usually, the Tamil Nadu election is a war between DMK and AIADMK. But, during the 2014 parliamentary elections, then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa tactically converted the fight into one between Modi and herself by raising the slogan We shall see if its going to be Modi or this lady (Jayalalithaa).

She then sought to convince the people that Tamil Nadu, under her rule, was far ahead of Gujarat under Narendra Modi. Her efforts bore fruit and the AIADMK won 37 parliamentary seats out of 39 in the state; it was the first time in Tamil Nadu that a state party won such a huge number of parliamentary seats. Even the Congress had managed to win only 44 seats across the country. The BJP alliance had won only two seats, one by BJP and other one by PMK. The DMK and Congress lost all seats.

Even though Jayalalithaa managed to get 37 seat, her victory was overshadowed by the BJPs massive victory as it was a first non-Congress party to form government at the Centre, crossing the magic number of 272. Both DMK and Congress did not win even a single seat in Tamil Nadu.
S Kumaresan By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: The DMK has allotted as many as 19 of the 39 Lok Sabha constituencies in the State to its allies in the upcoming polls. An analysis of the votes earned by these parties in the past elections shows that except the VCK, none of the allies seems to have secured a decent percentage of public mandate.

Hence, the victory of all these allies would depend heavily on DMK's popularity.

For example, in 2014 when the Congress contested the Lok Sabha polls alone, the national party secured over one lakh votes only in two constituencies.

In all other 35 constituencies, it got less than 50,000 votes.

A party would need at least three lakh votes to win a parliamentary seat and so, the support of the DMK would be very crucial in all nine constituencies that the Congress is now contesting.

So is the case of the Left parties. In 2014, the CPI and CPM formed an alliance among themselves and contested 17 Lok Sabha constituencies.

FOLLOW OUR FULL ELECTION COVERAGE HERE

The CPM is now contesting from Coimbatore and Madurai as part of the DMK-led alliance.

In these constituencies, the party secured less than 50,000 votes in 2014  Coimbatore (34,197) and Madurai (30,216).

The CPI is now contesting in Tirupur and Nagapattinam as part of the DMK alliance.

When the party contested these constituencies in 2014, it secured only 33,331 votes in Tirupur and 90,313 votes in Nagapattinam.

The firebrand leader Vaiko's MDMK is now contesting in Erode as part of the DMK alliance and it is said the party has considerable support in the western town.

In 2016 Assembly polls, the People's Welfare Alliance, in which the MDMK was a vital player, secured a total of only 47,174 in the six Assembly constituencies that constitute the Erode Lok Sabha constituency.

The MDMK itself contested in Erode (west) Assembly constituency and secured only 6,624 votes.

The case of smaller parties in the DMK alliance is even worse. Indhiya Jananayaka Katchi (IJK), which is now contesting in Perambalur, had contested in three of the Assembly constituencies that form the Perambalur Lok Sabha constituency in 2016 Assembly elections.

The party was then in the BJP-led alliance. The votes secured by the party were all in mere three digits  Lalgudi (892), Musiri (816) and Thuraiyur (577).

The Kongunadu Makkal Desiya Katchi is contesting in Namakkal now as part of the DMK alliance.

When the party in 2016 contested in the six Assembly constituencies that form the Namakkal Lok Sabha constituency, it secured a total of mere 33,740 votes.

Though the party claims to have support in the western region, it secured a total of only 1,67,560 votes in the 71 Assembly constituencies it contested in the western region in 2016.

The only party, which had secured a decent vote share is the VCK. For example, in 2016, the party's leader Thol Thirumavalavan secured 48,363 votes in the Kattumannarkoil Assembly constituency alone.

Similarly, in many of the Assembly segments falling under the Villupuram and Chidambaram Lok Sabha constituencies, the PWA, of which VCK was part, had secured at least 19,000 votes.
Islamic State is down to its last few hundred fighters and less than a square kilometre of land in a battle for its final Syrian stronghold, although it may have 15,000-20,000 armed adherents in Syria and Iraq, U.S. envoy James Jeffrey said on Friday.

"We are just about finished with the campaign along the Euphrates to defeat the last territorial holdings of the 'caliphate'. They're down to a few hundred fighters and less than a square kilometre of land," said Jeffrey, the U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS (Islamic State).

Jeffrey said the United States was helping the Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria to secure IS prisoners but was also launching a campaign to get countries to take back foreign fighters and their families, to prosecute or re-educate them.

Islamic State redrew the map of the Middle East in 2014 when it declared its ultra-radical Sunni Islamist "caliphate" and established a rule known for mass killings, sexual enslavement and meting out punishments such as crucifixion.

The militants suffered their major military defeats in 2017, when they lost the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. They were then forced down the Euphrates River to their last bastion at Baghouz, a cluster of hamlets on the eastern bank.

"We believe that there's between 15,000 and 20,000 Daesh armed adherents active, although many are in sleeper cells, in Syria and in Iraq," Jeffrey said, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Speaking to reporters on a video call after attending a Syria humanitarian conference in Brussels, Jeffrey said the struggle to defeat Islamic State ideology would go on and there was no timetable for a full U.S. withdrawal from Syria.

Some troops would be pulled out but a contingent would stay in northeastern Syria, backed by coalition partners and control of air space, to continue the fight and prevent a destabilising vacuum developing.

The United States would also maintain a force at al-Tanf close to the Iraqi and Jordanian borders to bolster local forces against Islamic State.

With a smaller force and much less combat after the territorial defeat of IS in Syria, U.S. costs would be far less, he said. In 2018, U.S. military operations in Syria cost about $2 billion out of a total defence budget of $700 billion, mainly expenditure on precision-guided munitions.

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R Kirubakaran By

Express News Service

COIMBATORE: Soon after the specified contact number was announced to receive complaints on Pollachi sexual assault case, more than a hundred calls have been received by the special team in last two days, said officials.

CB-CID special team has provided a specified helpline mobile number 9488442993 for receiving complaints and evidence related to the Pollachi sexual assault case from the public on Thursday.

"Soon after the number was announced, we have been receiving phone calls continuously. Some of them shared fruitful information and most of the others said their opinion on the case that they asked to execute encounter operation. Some of them from other districts said that offences are happening at their districts" said the official.

He said, "we have got some details which are expected to help for further enquiry. However, we cannot reveal their identity as well as counts of complaints."

Also, he stressed that most of them are fled with hesitation to reveal their identity, so the team has assured that the complainants' details will not be disclosed in any way.

A search operation continued for the second day as the CB-CID sleuths conducted a series of raids in three more houses belonging to the accused.

After the search conducted at Thirunavukkarasu's house on Thursday, the team continued their investigation at the house of N Sabarirajan alias Viswanath (26), located at MGR Colony near Jothi Nagar in Pollachi on Friday.

ALSO READ: Cops reveal Pollachi sexual assault victim's name in G.O., draw ire from Madras HC

The search was continued for three hours and some of the important evidence were reportedly seized by the officials.

Earlier, on Thursday night the team had conducted a search in other two accused's houses located in Makkinampatti surrounding.

However, they failed to continue in Sabarirajan's house, because it was locked at the time.

So the search continued on Friday and then it went up to Chinnappampalayam house, where the offence was suspected to happen.

"Mostly the mobile phones and storage materials were seized from the houses to get evidence also; the financial documents like bank details were taken. In which around 30 materials were collected from Thirunavukkarasu's house, likewise, the seizure held at others residences," said police sources.

Human chain protest

In this juncture, DMK and its allies parties staged human chain protest at Pollachi for condemning the sexual assault issue as well as revealing victims' identity on the public.

Around 1100 members participated in the stir and asked reinvestigation on women suicide cases occurred in the past seven years.

Most of the colleges, in Pollachi, announced leave consecutively for a second day and some college managements asked students to vacate their hostels to avoid the latter's participation on protests.

Congress cadres staged a protest at Thiruvalluvar Thidal for asking to arrest all who behind the sexual assault without any bias.

Besides, Advocates from Coimbatore sent a letter to the chief election commissioner for asking to transfer the Police SP R Pandiarajan for revealing the victim's name.

In Pollachi, as many as 30 advocates staged a protest for the same demand.

Accused taken to hospital for a medical check-up

Thirunavukkarasu, a prime accused who has been taken for police custody was brought to Coimbatore Medical College Hospital on Friday evening for a medical checkup.

Before that, hundreds of armed police personals were deployed as security to handle the outrage among the public.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Almost one-third of the Congress strength since the new Telangana Assembly came into being has vanished, with two more MLAs, Kandala Upender Reddy (Palair) and Jajala Surender (Yellareddy), deciding to join the ranks of the TRS. The Congress won 19 seats in the Assembly elections. Seven of its MLAs have defected to the pink party, so far.

The latest blow to the grand old party came when Palair MLA K Upender Reddy officially announced that he was leaving the Congress and joining the pink panthers. Jajala Surender has not made any official statement, so far, but is likely to join the TRS in the presence of CM K Chandrasekhar Rao during a public meeting to be held in Nizamabad on March 19. Surrender was a close aide of Assembly Speaker Pocharam Srinivas Reddy in erstwhile Nizamabad district.

Rumour mills have it that the defections will continue for a few more days with another five to six Congress MLAs raring to go. Out of the 19 Congress MLAs, if two-thirds (13 MLAs) defect to the ruling TRS, then they will not attract the provisions of anti-defection law. So far, seven Congress MLAs have switched loyalty and it will require another six to follow suit to effect the merger of the Congress into the TRS. Lending credence to the speculation that the Congress may lose Opposition status in the House, Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has repeatedly hinted that a few more lawmakers may join the TRS.

Latest blow

Jajala Surender has not made any official statement, so far, but is likely to join the TRS in the presence of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao during a public meeting

KCR striving for everyones development says Upender

Later in the day, Palair MLA Upender Reddy said KCR was striving hard for the development of all sections of people and all regions. The chief minister saw to it that Bhatka Ramadas project was completed in record time. The project will provide water to many in Palair Assembly segment. He made drought-hit Palair cultivable. I am confident that under the leadership of KCR, all ongoing irrigation projects in erstwhile Khammam district will be completed, Upender Reddy said.

The Palair MLA said in just five years of KCRs rule, Telangana witnessed substantial development, especially in roads and drinking water sectors. I do not see any leader who has complete knowledge about Telangana State and is dedicated to its development like KCR is.

That is why I have decided to strengthen the leadership of KCR. I strongly believe that the development of Palair and Khammam district is possible only with KCR, Upender Reddy said. Like other Congress MLAs, Upender Reddy too declared that he would resign and contest again in the Assembly elections if necessary.
By PTI

LAGOS: Twenty people have been confirmed dead in the collapse of a building housing a nursery and primary school in Nigeria's biggest city, Lagos, the authorities said on Friday.

The dilapidated building in the densely populated Lagos Island area of the city came down without warning on Wednesday morning.

Rescue workers called off the search for survivors on Thursday, with the death toll at nine and the number of injured who were taken to hospital at 37.

But Lagos State health commissioner Jide Idris said the final toll was now higher.

"Twenty people were killed and 45 people were treated in different hospitals," he told AFP by telephone. He did not give a breakdown but said the dead included children. Many of the injured who were pulled from the rubble had now been discharged.

"About 15 were still in hospital in a stable condition", he said.

"One was described as 'serious' and required surgery", he added.

People help rescue teams at the scene of a collapsed building in Lagos, Nigeria, Thursday March 14, 2019.

(Photo | AP)

Lagos governor Akinwunmi Ambode has said the school was operating illegally in the building and pledged to shut down similar establishments throughout the state.

He has promised a full investigation into the tragedy and warned those responsible they would be "severely dealt with".

The updated death toll came as bulldozers moved in to the area around the collapse to begin tearing down poorly-maintained and dangerous buildings.

Omotayo Fakolujo, from the Lagos State Building and Control Agency (LASBCA), said about 100 distressed buildings had been earmarked for demolition.

But local residents and business owners were outraged at the move, as they said they had been given little or no notice to vacate their premises and had nowhere else to go.

A body of a child is recovered from the rubble of a collapsed building in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday March 13, 2019. Rescue efforts are underway in Nigeria after a three-storey school building collapsed while classes were in session, with some scores of children thought to be inside at the time.

(Photo | AP)

"They came about 12:00 pm (1100 GMT) and they (LASBCA) didn't warn anyone," said Toheeb Olasupo, a 25-year-old computer analyst.

"They didn't given them any time. They came yesterday to mark the buildings but it's not enough time."

Building collapses are tragically common in Lagos and elsewhere in Nigeria, because of the use of sub-standard materials and the non-enforcement of building regulations.

Two manslaughter prosecutions are currently being held in Lagos state after scores of people were killed in two separate building collapses in 2015 and 2016.

In one, 116 people were killed, most of them South Africans, when a guesthouse collapsed at the Lagos church complex of celebrity televangelist TB Joshua.

On Lagos Island, many buildings are poorly maintained and have had floors added without any apparent strengthening of the structure or foundations, making them ripe for collapse.

An AFP reporter on the ground said scores of tenants had been displaced as the demolition began of at least three buildings in the area.

Government officials from Standard Organisation of Nigeria examine materials used in constructing the building that collapsed in Lagos, Nigeria, Thursday March 14, 2019.

(Photo | AP)



LASBCA's Fakolujo told reporters most of the buildings had been the subject of long-running court cases, which meant they could not demolished.

One shop owner said she had only just paid a year's rent of 72,000 naira (USD 200, 175 euros) upfront when she was told the building was to be knocked down.

Oluwasina Aina, who lives on the second floor of one of the affected buildings with his wife and their two children, aged 12 and six, said he was asleep when he heard loud banging.

He looked out of the window and saw officials smashing the walls of homes with hammers and using an electric saw to break through window security bars.

"I live here, me and my family," he said, with tears in his eyes.

"I just rented this place in January, barely three months ago. I did not know anything was wrong with the building. My children will come back now and see, my wife is not home."

"As you see now my belongings are still inside. We cannot stay there tonight, we will find somewhere else. If they are doing this they should help us."
By Associated Press

BRUSSELS: World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent Islamophobia.

In a tweet, US President Donald Trump sent "warmest sympathy and best wishes" to the people of New Zealand.

On behalf of my country, I offer my condolences to the Islamic world and the people of New Zealand, who have been targeted by this deplorable act - the latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.  Recep Tayyip Erdogan (@RT_Erdogan) 15 March 2019

He wrote that "49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The US stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 15 March 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the attacks the "latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia."

New Zealand police said at least 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city of Christchurch. More than 20 were seriously wounded in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a "terrorist attack."

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car. Two other people were being held in custody and police were trying to determine how they might be involved.

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister, Erdogan said the Islamophobia that motivated the attacks "has rapidly started to take over Western communities like cancer."

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed those sentiments.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim," he tweeted.

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement that the attack "served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia."

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealand's head of state, said in a message to the country she was "deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch" and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

"At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders," she said in her message.

Princes William and Harry, together with their spouses, the Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Sussex, said that their hearts go out to those who lost their lives in the mosque shootings.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack "with horror and profound sadness."

"The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life," he wrote.

In France, home to western Europe's largest Muslim community, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner ordered regional authorities to bolster security at mosques as a precaution.

London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the city's Metropolitan Police force would be visible outside mosques.

"London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack," he said. "London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy."

Indonesia's president Joko Widodo condemned the attacks, in which an Indonesian father and son were among those wounded. Indonesian Muslim leaders expressed anger at the shooting rampage while urging Muslims to show restraint.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said bigotry in Western countries contributed to the attacks on Muslims in New Zealand. In a Friday tweet, he also criticized the West for "defending demonization of Muslims as 'freedom of expression.'"

Impunity in Western "democracies" to promote bigotry leads to this:



-Israeli thugs enter mosque in Palestine to insult Muslims;

-Terrorists in NZ livestream their murder of 49 Muslims.



Western hypocrisy of defending demonization of Muslims as "freedom of expression" MUST end pic.twitter.com/WcxvtxpDxH  Javad Zarif (@JZarif) 15 March 2019

Anwar Gargash, the United Arab Emirates' minister of state for foreign affairs, tweeted "heartfelt condolences" to New Zealand. "Our collective work against violence & hate must continue with renewed vigor. Our thoughts & prayers are with the families of the victims," Gargash wrote.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks a "brazen act of terror." His office said on Twitter that Israel mourns the murder of innocent worshippers, condemns the assault and sends its condolences to bereaved families.

Israel mourns the wanton murder of innocent worshippers in Christchurch and condemns the brazen act of terror in New Zealand. Israel sends its condolences to the bereaved families and its heartfelt wishes for a speedy recovery to the wounded  Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) 15 March 2019

Jordan's King Abdullah II tweeted that "the heinous massacre against Muslims praying in peace in New Zealand is an appalling terrorist crime. It unites us against extremism, hatred and terrorism, which knows no religion." Jordan's Foreign Ministry confirmed that one Jordanian was killed and five wounded in the attack.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas extended his country's sympathies to those who lost loved ones.

"The horrific terrorist attack in Christchurch targeted peacefully praying Muslims  if people are murdered solely because of their religion, that is an attack on all of us," he said.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the "dastardly terrorist attack" in Christchurch.

A telegram of condolences sent by the Vatican on behalf of Pope Francis said he was "deeply saddened to learn of the injury and loss of life" caused by the "senseless acts of violence" in Christchurch. He assured all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his "heartfelt solidarity."
By PTI

WASHINGTON: An Indian national has pleaded guilty to the charges of smuggling Indians as illegal immigrants into the United States.

Pleading guilty before a New Jersey court on Thursday, Bhavin Patel, 38, said he did this for private financial gain.

He faces a maximum potential sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to USD 250,000. Sentencing is scheduled for July 9.

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court, agents for the Department of Homeland Security Investigations received information that a smuggling operation run by Patel was attempting to find methods to bring foreign nationals from India into the US.

The investigation revealed that the smuggling organisation recruited Indian nationals and others to pay fees in exchange for passage to the US.

Beginning in October 2013, an undercover law enforcement officer posing as a smuggler began meeting with Patel in Bangkok. Patel told the undercover law enforcement officer that he wanted to smuggle Indian nationals into the US.

On three different occasions, Patel or his conspirator transported the Indian nationals to an airport in Thailand, at which point the undercover law enforcement officer would presumably use his contacts to smuggle them into the US via commercial airline flights, the Department of Justice said.

Patel agreed to wire down payments for each individual to be smuggled and to pay a balance of tens of thousands of dollars for each individual once the foreign nationals arrived in the US.

Over the ensuing months, Patel arranged for six Indian nationals to be brought to Thailand for smuggling into the US via Newark Liberty International Airport.

He was arrested on December 7, 2018, upon his arrival at Newark Liberty.
By Online Desk

When Greta Thunberg first heard about climate change, her reaction was not what you'd expect from the average school kid. The news shook her so much that she decided to skip classes and stand in front of the Swedish Parliament with a banner that read skolstrejk for klimatet (school strike for climate).

Cut to March 15, 2019 when thousands of school students from over 1600 cities across 105 countries were inspired by the 16-year-old to take part in a similar protest demanding urgent action over climate change. Greta has now been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for launching this mass movement.

ALSO READ | School students worldwide go on strike to call for climate change action

Greta has Asperger's syndrome, a disorder in which those affected have difficulties in social interaction. But the disability is actually a plus point according to her. "This helps me see things more clearly. I think a lot, especially if anything is bothering me, or if I am scared of anything." Greta told the Guardian.

Being a climate change nerd, she read extensively on the subject and when she came to know about the catastrophic impact of global warming, she was stunned. The then 11-year-old Greta went into a depression and lost 10 kg in just two months.

Slowly she started talking to her parents about her worries about climate change and they offered their support. For starters, the whole family decided to take trains instead of flights but this individual action was not enough for Greta. She realised that without political will, it is almost impossible to bring about change. And the only way politicians would hear anything was through a protest.

The political class across the world has so far not been proactive on the threat of climate change. So when she spoke at the UN Climate Change COP 24 Conference, she had a message for politicians: "You are not mature enough to acknowledge the fact and tell it as it is. I do not need your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear that I fear."

Greta was nominated for the Nobel Prize by Freddy Andre Ovstegard, a Norwegian MP from the Socialist Party and two of his colleagues.

When Greta sat down in front of the Swedish parliament and started a mass movement all around the globe for climate action, she made a contribution to peace too, said Ovstegard.

In a tweet, Greta said that she was honoured and very grateful for this nomination.
By PTI

WASHINGTON: Pakistan owes its "all weather friend" China at least USD 10 billion debt for the construction of the Gwadar port and other projects, the top US general has said, as he underlined Beijing's "predatory economics" to expand its global influence.

The strategic Gwadar Port in Balochistan province on the Arabian Sea is being built by China under the multi-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and is considered to be a link between Beijing's ambitious One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and Maritime Silk Road projects.

"Let us look at just a few examples. Saddled with predatory Chinese loans, Sri Lanka granted China a 99-year lease and 70 per cent stake in its deep-water port," General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

The Maldives owes China roughly USD 1.5 billion in debt - about 30 per cent of its GDP - for construction costs, he said.

"Pakistan owes China at least USD 10 billion in debt for the construction of Gwadar Port and other projects," Dunford said.

ALSO READ | Pakistan fails to secure USD 3.2 billion UAE oil facility

"China is diligently building an international network of coercion through predatory economics to expand its sphere of influence," he said, adding that nations around the globe are discovering the hard way that China's economic "friendship" via OBOR can come at "a steep cost" when promises of investment go unfulfilled and international standards and safeguards are ignored.

In Africa, Djibouti owes China over 80 per cent of its GDP and in 2017, the country became host to China's first overseas military base.

In Latin America, Ecuador agreed to sell 80 to 90 per cent of its exportable crude oil to China through 2024 in exchange for USD 6.5 billion in Chinese loans, he said.

And after leasing land tax-free to China for 50 years, Argentina is denied access and oversight to a Chinese satellite tracking station on its sovereign territory, unwittingly allowing the facility's use for military purposes, the US general said.

Dunford warned that if China's predatory debt tactics is left unaddressed, it will have serious implications on the US's military.

Alleging that China is extending its reach by increasing its overt military and coercive activities through its neighbours, Dunford said China's increasingly provocative behaviour in the Indo-Pacific, particularly the South China Sea (SCS), should concern all.

Between 2013 and 2018, China increased its air and sea incursions into the SCS twelve-fold.

Within those five years, it also increased deployments of offensive and defensive weapons systems to the SCS by the same order of magnitude, he said.

China's land reclamation and militarisation far exceed that of other claimants combined in the South China Sea, he said.

Between 2013 and 2015 alone, China created more than 3,200 acres in the SCS, building features within its self-proclaimed 'nine dash line' - a claim the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in 2016 has no legal basis, Dunford told the lawmakers.

Dunford also accused China of interfering in the freedom of navigation.

"China habitually threatens this freedom, using both conventional military force projection and 'gray zone' or irregular warfare activities," he said.

Citing an example, he said Chinese military vessels came dangerously close to the USS Decatur, a destroyer of the US Navy, off the coast of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

"China's force projection inside and outside the SCS disrespects and undermines our rules-based international order and threatens regional stability and security," Dunford said.
By Associated Press

WASHINGTON: Aviation regulators worldwide laid down a stark challenge for Boeing to prove that its grounded 737 Max jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

In a key step toward unearthing the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, flight recorders from the shattered plane arrived Thursday in France for analysis, although the agency in charge of the review said it was unclear whether the data could be retrieved.

The decision to send the recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the United States, which held out longer than most other countries in grounding the jets. Boeing executives announced that they had paused delivery of the Max, although the company planned to continue building the jets while it weighs the effect of the grounding on production.

ALSO READ | 737 Max 8 customers threaten to cancel orders post air crash, Boeing in $600 billion mess

In Addis Ababa, angry relatives of the 157 people who were killed Sunday stormed out of a meeting with airline officials, complaining that they were not getting enough information.

The US Federal Aviation Administration grounded the planes Wednesday, saying regulators had new satellite evidence that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610.

That flight crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people. The Max jets are likely to be idle for weeks while Boeing tries to assure regulators around the world that the planes are safe.

At a minimum, aviation experts say, the planemaker will need to finish updating software that might have played a role in the Lion Air crash. Regulators will wait for more definitive evidence of what caused both crashes.

Some industry officials think the planemaker and US regulators may be forced to answer questions about the plane's design. Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step while reiterating its "full confidence" in the safety of the 737 Max.

The company has previously characterized software upgrades as an effort to make a safe plane even safer.

Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jet's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Satellite-based data showed that both the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft.

Both crews tried to return to the airport but crashed, killing everyone on board.

How long the planes stay grounded depends largely on what investigators find on the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director for the National Transportation Safety Board.

If the recorders indicate a manufacturing problem or a software glitch in the anti-stall system, the planes could stay on the tarmac for a long time.

But if the crash was caused by pilot error, then the problem could be corrected by training, and the grounding could be short, Goelz said.

Ethiopian Airlines says its pilots received special training on how to deal with Max's anti-stall software.

The French air accident investigation authority, known by its acronym BEA, said Thursday that it will handle the analysis of the flight recorders, often referred to as a plane's black boxes.

The US National Transportation Safety Board sent three investigators to help. Ethiopian investigators likely avoided sending the data to the US because the FAA certified the airworthiness of the Max and has a relationship with manufacturer Boeing, said Goelz, who is now an aviation consultant.

"I think Ethiopia wanted to choose an investigative partner that clearly didn't have a dog in the fight," Goelz said.

Key congressmen say they will investigate why the FAA approved the Max without requiring more training for pilots.

In Addis Ababa, about 200 angry family members of crash victims left a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials, saying that the carrier has not given them adequate information.

Officials said they have opened a call-in center that is available 18 hours a day to respond to questions. People from 35 countries died. At the crash scene in Hejere, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Addis Ababa, growing numbers of family members arrived, some wailing or beating their chests as a bulldozer navigated piles of debris.

Blue plastic sheeting covered the wreckage of the plane.

Moshi Biton, brother of Israeli victim Shimon Daniel Re'em Biton, asked Ethiopia's prime minister to allow Israeli investigators to help recover remains.

Two Israelis were killed in the crash, and members of an emergency response team from the country said they are frustrated because they have not been able to access the crash site.

"Big families, a lot of people and the full Israeli nation is waiting for these remains, and we will not go out of Ethiopia until we find the remains to bury them," Biton said.
By UNI

MOSCOW: School students in some 1,000 cities in over 80 countries plan to skip classes and go on strike on Friday in order to urge governments to take more action against climate change.

The global strike, known as the Fridays For Future movement, is expected to become the biggest event dedicated to the fight with climate change that has ever been held in the world.

In the United States, the demonstrations will take place in New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC, among many other cities.

In Australia the protests will be staged in over 50 cities, including Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. According to the Fridayforfuture website, which unites activists all over the world, the movement was inspired by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, who has been demonstrating every Friday outside Sweden's parliament.

Thunberg has even been reportedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian lawmakers.
Hundreds of thousands of people protested in central Algiers on Friday in the biggest demonstration against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's 20-year rule since unrest began last month.

Protesters crammed streets and squares in the capital after Friday prayers, many draped in Algeria's red, green and white flag. Demonstrations also took place in Bejaia, Oran, Batna, Tizi Ouzou and other cities.

"Bouteflika and his men must go as soon as possible," said student Yazid Ammari, 23.

Bouteflika on Monday reversed a decision to stand for another term after weeks of demonstrations against him but he stopped short of relinquishing office and said he would stay on until a new constitution is adopted.

Algerians quickly rejected his offer and demanded that the 82-year-old president hand over power to a young generation of leaders who can create jobs and stamp out corruption

"Those who think we are tired are wrong. Our protests will not stop," said doctor Madjid Benzida, 37, as police blocked streets leading to government offices and parliament.

Bouteflika has been losing allies in recent days since returning from medical treatment in Switzerland.

A senior FLN figure said in an interview on Thursday night the long-ruling president was "history now".

The remarks by Hocine Kheldoun to Ennahar television were another setback for Bouteflika, who hoped to pacify Algerians by promising to take steps to change a political landscape that has been dominated by a ruling elite for decades.

Kheldoun, a former ruling party spokesman, became one of the most senior FLN officials to break with Bouteflika publicly, saying the party had to look forward and support the aims of demonstrators.

Some parents had brought children to Friday's demonstration.

"I want a better future," said Mohamed Kemime, 10, draped in a national flag.

One of Algeria's most influential clerics appealed for patience.

"Lets be optimistic, Algeria needs to overcome its crisis," said Mohamed Abdelkader Haider from an Algiers mosque.

Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. Protesters say he is no longer fit for office.

The new prime minister, Noureddine Bedoui, said on Thursday he would form a temporary government of technocrats and others to work towards political change, and he urged the opposition to join in a dialogue.

Game over

A former minister who is familiar with Bouteflika's inner circle told Reuters that the president could not survive given the pressure building against him.

"Game over. Bouteflika has no choice but to quit now," the former minister said on condition of anonymity.

Algeria is a major oil and gas producer, but so far exports have not suffered from the unrest. Its biggest oil field Hassi Messaoud and its Hassi Rmel gas field have not been affected, a source from state oil giant Sonatrach told Reuters.

Many Algerians say that the president and other veterans of the 1954-1962 war of independence against France have neglected them for decades.

The military, which has traditionally played a behind-the-scenes power broker role, has distanced itself from Bouteflika and stayed in its barracks throughout the crisis. It is expected to retain influence under all scenarios.

Algeria was relatively untouched when the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings swept away veteran autocrats in the Arab world. Bouteflika and his allies, effective manipulators of the opposition, managed to avoid major unrest by spending oil money on the population, handing out low interest loans and housing.

Bouteflika helped to defeat a civil war against Islamist insurgents in which tens of thousands of people were killed in the 1990s, and many Algerians long accepted heavy-handed rule as the price of stability.

But the public has lost patience with deteriorating economic conditions and the FLN's failure to make the transition to a new generation despite the president's failing health.

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By PTI

LONDON: Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of the earliest large-scale celebrations in Britain -- with people and animals travelling hundreds of miles for prehistoric feasting rituals near the world-famous monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury.

The study, led by Cardiff University in the UK, is the most comprehensive to date and examined the bones of 131 pigs, the prime feasting animals, from four Late Neolithic (2800-2400 BC) complexes.

The four sites -- Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant and West Kennet Palisade Enclosures -- hosted the very first pan-British events, feasts that drew people and animals from across Britain, researchers said.

The results, published in the journal Science Advances, show pig bones excavated from these sites were from animals raised as far away as Scotland, North East England and West Wales, as well as numerous other locations across the British Isles.

The researchers believe it may have been important for those attending to contribute animals raised locally at their homes.

The origins of people that took part in rituals at these megalithic monuments and the extent of the population's movements at the time have been long-standing enigmas in British prehistory.

"This study demonstrates a scale of movement and level of social complexity not previously appreciated," said Richard Madgwick, from Cardiff University.

"These gatherings could be seen as the first united cultural events of our island, with people from all corners of Britain descending on the areas around Stonehenge to feast on food that had been specially reared and transported from their homes," Madgwick said in a statement.

Representing great feats of engineering and labour mobilisation, the Neolithic henge complexes of southern Britain were the focal point for great gatherings in the third millennium BC.

Pigs were the prime animal used in feasting and they provide the best indication of where the people who feasted at these sites came from as almost no human remains have been recovered.

Using isotope analysis, which identifies chemical signals from the food and water that animals have consumed, the researchers were able to determine geographical areas where the pigs were raised.

The study offers the most detailed picture yet of the degree of mobility across Britain at the time of Stonehenge, researchers said.

"Arguably the most startling finding is the efforts that participants invested in contributing pigs that they themselves had raised.

Procuring them in the vicinity of the feasting sites would have been relatively easy," Madgwick said.

"Pigs are not nearly as well-suited to movement over distance as cattle and transporting them, either slaughtered or on the hoof, over hundreds or even tens of kilometres, would have required a monumental effort," he said.

"This suggests that prescribed contributions were required and that rules dictated that offered pigs must be raised by the feasting participants, accompanying them on their journey, rather than being acquired locally," he said.
By IANS

WASHINGTON: Top Pentagon officials have slammed Google, saying its work with China is "indirectly benefiting" the military in that country.

In a report published in The Hill on Thursday, senior defence officials blamed the tech giant of favouring China.

"The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military," General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing there is that indirect benefit," Dunford said.

"And frankly, 'indirect' may not be a full characterisation of the way it really is, it's more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military," he added.

According to CNBC, Dunford's comments come "in the wake of the tech giants' decision not to pursue some of the Pentagon's lucrative contracts while considering projects in China".

Acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan also blasted Google during the hearing for pulling out of its defence contracts.

Last October, facing President Donald Trump administration's ire over its censored China Search engine project, Google CEO Sundar Pichai met Pentagon officials during his trip to Washington and discussed the controversial "Project Maven."

Pichai met "a group of civilian and military leaders mostly from the office of the Under Secretary of Defence for Intelligence the Defence Department directorate that oversees the Artificial Intelligence (AI) drone system known as Project Maven".

After facing backlash over its involvement in the Pentagon project "Maven", Pichai in June emphasised that the company will not work on technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm.

About 4,000 Google employees had signed a petition demanding "a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology".

ALSO READ | Clueless US lawmakers wipe smile off Google CEO Sundar Pichai's face - but not for long

Following the anger, Google decided not to renew the project with the US Defence Department after it expires in 2019.

US senators were also upset with Google about the tech giant's reported plan to create a censored Chinese version of its search engine.

US Vice President Mike Pence in October called on Google to end its "censored" Chinese Search engine -- the "Dragonfly" project. The company later reportedly shut down the project amid widespread criticism.
By PTI

OSLO: The New Zealand mosque attacker claimed inspiration from Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik and the deadly rampage in Christchurch on Friday resembled his 2011 massacre in its methods and motives.

Extremists around the world have sought to emulate Breivik ever since his deadly attacks in Norway which left 77 people dead in 2011.

The Christchurch attacks bore several of the features of Breivik's: mass shootings, multicultural victims, a racist manifesto published online and inscribed weapons.

Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik. (Photo | AFP)

In a 74-page document posted on Twitter just before the attack, the Christchurch shooter said he "took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik", using terminology reminiscent of that used by the Norwegian extremist.

"I have only had brief contact with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights," wrote the shooter.

A lawyer for Breivik, Oystein Storrvik, told Verdens Gang newspaper that "it seems unlikely" the Christchurch attacker had been in direct contact with Breivik, given the strict controls imposed on him in prison.

Breivik killed 77 people on July 22, 2011 when he set off a van bomb near government offices in Oslo, then opened fire on a Labour youth camp on the island of Utoya.

ALSO READ | Victims were shot until their death: Survivors recall chilling stories of New Zealand shooting

He said he killed his victims because they embraced multiculturalism.

The now 40-year-old Norwegian had also posted a more than 1,500-page manifesto in which he called on others to follow his example.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the Christchurch attacker as an Australian "extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

For Norway, the Christchurch attacks brought back memories of the Breivik attacks, its most violent event since World War II.

"It recalls painful memories," Prime Minister Erna Solberg said.

"Anyone who has ever lost a loved one, whether it's because of terrorism or not, understands what these families are going to go through," Vanessa Svebakk, a Norwegian who also holds New Zealand citizenship and who lost her 14-year-old daughter in the Utoya attack, told AFP.

"But for those of us who have lost someone because of terrorism, the feelings are even stronger", Tore Bjorgo, the head of the University of Oslo's Center for Extremism Research, said "there are clearly a lot of the same ideas behind" the two attacks.

IN PHOTOS | Bloody Friday: 49 worshippers killed after gunman unleashes terror on packed mosques in New Zealand

They include, among other things, "the idea that European civilisation is threatened by immigration in general and by Muslim immigration in particular, and that it is legitimate for some people to resort to extreme violence to stop it," he told AFP.

"There are pretty clear indications in the (Christchurch) manifesto that we're dealing with a white supremacist," said Jean-Yves Camus, a French expert on far-right movements.

"The manifesto goes further than what Breivik wrote in his own text. Breivik didn't describe himself as fascist," he said.

Like Breivik, the Christchurch killer compared himself in his manifesto to Nelson Mandela, saying he even expected to win the Nobel Peace Prize one day.

Both attackers share "this narcissism, this grandiose image of themselves," Swedish terrorism researcher Magnus Ranstorp told AFP.

Breivik, who now goes by the name Fjotolf Hansen, is serving a 21-year-sentence that can be extended indefinitely.

A woman lies at the site of shooting . (Photo | AP)

He is held in isolation without internet access, and his limited contacts with the outside world are closely monitored, at times blocked.

"If the correspondence could inspire acts of violence, then we are allowed to stop it," Espen Jambak, the deputy head of the high security Skien prison where Breivik is incarcerated, told AFP.

"We feel we have good control" over his correspondence, he said.

Breivik's attacks have already inspired other extremists in the past.

On July 22, 2016, exactly five years after the Norway attack, a young man with mental health issues and said to be obsessed with Breivik killed nine people in a Munich shopping centre before committing suicide.

"There have also been other terror plots inspired by Breivik at more or less advanced stages, in Poland, the Czech Republic, France and the United States," said researcher Bjorgo.

Each attack risks triggering new ones.

The New Zealand attack "was clearly devised to inspire others, both those on the extreme right and Islamist extremists," Utoya survivor Bjorn Ihler told AFP.

"That it was filmed live indicates there was a deliberate strategy to create a narrative that can be used by extremists on both sides."
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Foggy with periods of rain this afternoon. Thunder possible. High 58F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Windy with thunderstorms, especially this evening. A few storms may be severe. Low 36F. Winds SSW at 25 to 35 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Some 48 people, including children, are being treated in Christchurch Hospital after shootings at two mosques in the city on Friday, New Zealand health authorities said.

Wounds range from minor to critical, they said.

At least one gunman killed 40 people during Friday prayers at two mosques in the country's worst ever mass shooting, which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as terrorism.

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President Donald Trump on Friday will veto a congressional measure to end his emergency declaration to get funds to build a wall at the U.S. border with Mexico, a White House spokesman said.

Trump will be flanked by border officials and people who have had family members killed by someone who is in the United States illegally during the 3:30 p.m. (1930 GMT) event, spokesman Hogan Gidley told reporters.

The veto would be the first of Trump's presidency. On Thursday, Democrats and Republicans rebuked Trump over his decision to circumvent Congress and take money already designated for other programs to pay for his barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump has said he wants a wall to prevent immigrants from crossing into the United States, describing the situation as a national emergency. Democrats deny there is an emergency at the border, saying border crossings are at a four-decade low.

The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate voted to end his border emergency declaration, with 12 of Trump's fellow Republicans joining Democrats. The numbers did not make it to the level required to override a veto, meaning Trump could secure his plans despite congressional disapproval.

Trump thanked Republican senators who voted for his declaration in a Twitter post. "Watch, when you get back to your State, they will LOVE you more than ever before!" he said.

The president made a border wall a central promise of his 2016 campaign for the White House. He initially insisted that Mexico would pay for the wall but it has declined to do so. Last year, Trump forced a government shutdown over an impasse with Congress over funding for the barrier.

When a deal to prevent another shutdown did not give him the funding he requested, Trump declared a national emergency, redirecting funds that were allocated for other projects to build the barrier instead.

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Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Edward Yau will lead a delegation to visit Georgia and Hungary from March 18 to 22 to promote Hong Kong as the prime platform for the Belt & Road Initiative and strengthen the city's economic ties with the two places.

The delegation comprises more than 30 business people and professionals as well as respresentatives from startups and sectors including accounting, finance, insurance, infrastructure and real estate development, legal and dispute resolution services, transport and logistics, and telecommunications.

A 15-person parallel Guangdong trade delegation led by Deputy Director General of the Guangdong Department of Commerce Li Yongyi will also join part of the visit.

Mr Yau said the mission will facilitate formation of strategic partnerships between Hong Kong and Guangdong enterprises in exploring the Belt & Road markets, and will help bring about mutual collaboration.

The delegation will first visit Tbilisi in Georgia from March 18 to 20, to be followed by a visit to Budapest, Hungary, on March 21 and 22.

Apart from meeting relevant government officials, local business leaders and chambers of commerce, the delegates will visit local development projects for business exchanges and to receive updates on the current economic and investment environments of the two countries.

The delegation will also attend the "Hong Kong IN: Exploring New Business Opportunities" Seminar & Networking Dinner jointly organised by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council in Tbilisi, where Mr Yau will deliver a keynote speech.

In Budapest, Mr Yau will speak at a luncheon with the Budapest Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

He will also call on the Chinese Ambassadors to Georgia and Hungary to update them on Hong Kong's latest developments.

Mr Yau will return to Hong Kong on March 23. Under Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Bernard Chan will be Acting Secretary during his absence.
Secretary for Transport & Housing Frank Chan (centre) tours the facilities of an environment-friendly ferry in Bergen, Norway.

Secretary for Transport & Housing Frank Chan and a delegation of the Hong Kong Maritime & Port Board concluded their visit to Nordic countries in Bergen, Norway today.

Mr Chan and members of the delegation called on shipping enterprises in Bergen and toured an environmentally friendly ferry and cruise liner to learn about green shipping technology.

He also met Bergen Mayor Marte Mjos Persen and representatives from Bergen's maritime sector.

They discussed maritime development in the two places.
On Sunday, a seminar titled Know Indias Tourism will take place at Cairos Grand Nile Hotel

As part of the seventh India by the Nile Festival, the Embassy of India in Cairo, in association with Invest India, organised seminars entitled India-Egypt Business in Cairo on 11 March and in Alexandria on 12 March.

A high-level delegation from Invest India (the Investment Promotion and Facilitation Agency of India), led by Managing Director and CEO Deepak Bagla, was visiting Egypt to address the seminars and to meet Egyptian businessmen and investors.

Indias Ambassador Rahul Kulshreshth, Bagla, and other prominent speakers from the Egyptian business community including the Federation of Egyptian Industries (FEI), the Egyptian Businessmen Association (EBA), the Egypt-India Joint Business Council (EIJBC), the Cairo Chamber of Commerce and the Egyptian Junior Business Association spoke at the Cairo seminar.

Bagla, First Secretary at the Embassy of India in Cairo Vinod Bahade, and senior businessmen from Alexandrias Chamber of Commerce and the Alexandria Business Association spoke at the seminar in that city.

The seminars focused on the current status of bilateral trade and investment and potential areas for enhancement in the context of various flagship programmes from the Indian government, including Make in India, Digital India, Skill India, Startup India and Smart City Mission.

Egyptian investor and business community were updated about policies and initiatives taken by the government of India to promote investments in the country.

On Sunday, a seminar titled Know Indias Tourism will take place at Cairos Grand Nile Hotel at 9:30am.

Ambassador Kulshreshth and assistant director of the India Tourism Office in Dubai, A. Seetharaman, as well as senior officials from the Egyptian ministry of tourism and representatives from the Indian and Egyptian tourism industry, are scheduled to attend.

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She is a rare breed of a woman, intelligent, inexplicably calm, composed, collected and soft spoken. But in the cockpit she has the intrepid adrenalin of a soldier, a bomber jet pilot with a heart of a lioness and instinct to hunt and hit the target with precision.





Well, as a bomber jet pilot, if my target includes hitting people and I hit them, I will be the happiest pilot because that will be mission accomplished. That is my job. My job is to be precise.





Air Force of Zimbabwes first and only female fighter jet pilot, Flight-Lieutenant Angelina Bosha was only eight years-old when Captain Chipo Matimba became the forces first female combat pilot in 1998.





The exploits of Captain Matimba charmed Mr Andy Bosha, the father of Angelina who inspired the little girl to work hard and emulate the poster officer of that time.





Little did she know that one day she would not only achieve Captain Matimbas feat but go a step further to become the first female AFZ officer to complete the more revered fighter jet training course.





Though Flight Lieutenant Bosha joined the force after Captain Matimba had left to pursue a commercial career with Air Zimbabwe, the two are now on talking terms and encouraging each other to do well in the flying profession.





My father read about her in the newspaper and encouraged me to work hard at school so that I would be like her.





She is the first female pilot to fly combat aircraft, though our courses are now a bit different she has been a role model from the onset.





These days we talk a lot with Captain Matimba and she is happy I have reached this far in this profession which requires a lot of hard-work, said Flt-Lt Bosha.





Though she is now living a dream after achieving her target, the AFZ pilot recalled the goosebumps her body developed the first day she took to the stars and flying a plane.





Now the service woman has done enough to call her profession a success and finds no reason to dream further but to maintain the dizzy heights she had scaled.





I had mixed feelings of excitement and fear I was excited to fly for the first time but scared because it was something new.





After achieving this I am now living my dream. May be another career goal will come but for now I think I am at a position I never imagined and the feeling is to stay there.





I want to remain an exceptional pilot, serve my country and be an inspiration to other girls and women, she said.





Flt-Lt Bosha is the first born child in a family of four, two boys and two girls, and naturally the family expected her to set the pace as the eldest child.





When she joined the AFZ in 2010 after secondary education at Mavhuradonha High School, military training proved to be tough, arduous and thorny to rise through the ranks.





However, with a strong backing from her family, instructors in the military and later on a supporting husband Flt-Lt Bosha laboured to go the extra mile to achieve her childhood dream.





It has never been easy. I wanted to give up after basic military training but my family encouraged me to continue.





At work my superiors and instructors kept on encouraging me and also inspired me to go for the course in China which I finished last year, she said.





The military profession historically has not been associated with females but Bosha has managed to do well in the profession mainly due the support of husband, Daniel Mukonto, who is not even a soldier.





The AFZ officer first met her husband in March 2015 and the couple is now blessed with a son, Daine Mudiwashe.





I am managing to balance the two because of the support I get from my husband, family and friends. It is difficult but I am managing.

Like everyone I need to spend quality time with my husband and son but sometimes due to work commitments it is not possible, but my husband and son understand that and are always supportive, she said.





Despite her towering achievements in the military, back home and in the society, Flt-Lt Bosha performs the chores expected of all women and also reveals she is a darling of her in laws.





My in laws treat me like their daughter. Before I joined the family they did not have a daughter and I became their first daughter. As such I was given more responsibility akin to that of a mother figure and they are happy with me.





When I am home, my favourite dish is Spaghetti Bolognese and I am very good at preparing it.





In the neighbourhood other women and I relate just like anyone else. There is nothing really different that I do. I just do like any other women.





My daily routine if I am home, I wake up at 05;45hrs and prepare to go for work as well as some morning chores. I leave the house at 07.15hrs for work. in most cases I come back for lunch at 12.30pm.





At home after work I attend to my son, help my young brother with homework and do some household chores.




Tropical Cyclone Idai, which made landfall in Mozambique Thursday evening, has damaged property and crops in Manicaland Province, with more devastating effects feared when it intensifies and spreads to other parts of Zimbabwe between yesterday evening and today.







Manicaland chief meteorological officer Mr Lucas Murambi said what the province experienced yesterday were the peripheral effects of the cyclone, before it hits the province with more intense rains.





In Mutare, vendors at Sakubva Musika escaped death by a whisker after a section of the roof at the popular market was blown off by strong winds, accompanied by rains.



The cyclone also blew off roofs to four houses in Chipinge district. Farmers in Manicaland recorded massive losses as most of the crops that had survived the dry spell were destroyed by the tropical cyclone.





Most of the damage has so far been recorded in Mutasa, Chipinge, Mutare and Chimanimani districts. The province has been experiencing heavy rainfall accompanied by strong winds since Thursday, as a result of the cyclone.Most of the damage has so far been recorded in Mutasa, Chipinge, Mutare and Chimanimani districts.

Some schools in Manicaland were yesterday forced to cancel lessons mid-morning to ensure the safety of pupils and teachers. Heavy rains totalling more than 150 millimetres were recorded yesterday in some areas, mainly in Manicaland, Masvingo, Matabeleland South, southern areas of Midlands and Mashonaland East provinces.





The cyclone had by late afternoon yesterday killed 122 people in Mozambique and Malawi and caused severe flooding in Madagascar which affected hundreds of thousands of people.





The cyclone is taking a north-west direction and is expected to hit the northern parts of Mutare in areas like Mutasa and Nyanga, before moving towards Mutoko, said Mr Murambi. Although we expect the strength of the cyclone to diminish as it moves towards Zimbabwe, due to the mountainous terrain, we still expect more rains.





The Meteorological Services Department yesterday said in a statement that the cyclone was expected to weaken over the Eastern Highlands and downgrade into a low pressure centre when it reaches the southern parts of Mutoko today.





Yesterday, the MSD recorded rainfall in Manicaland, with Chisengu recording 153mm, Chipinge 56mm, Mukandi 16mm, Mutare 10mm, Wedza 8mm and Rusape 8mm.





Cloudy conditions progressively covered much of the country, with strong winds, rain and drizzle trailing closely behind the clouds edge, said the MSD. As Tropical Cyclone Idai continues to track further inland (West-North-West along the periphery of the subtropical ridge) it is expected to weaken rapidly due to increasing frictional effects and dry air entrainment, and is expected to gradually disappear by 36 hour forecast.





However, more rainfall activity both in amount and intensity is forecast to stretch further and reach places in Mashonaland Central, Harare Metropolitan and Midlands provinces.





The MSD said it will continue to closely monitor the system for signs of regeneration.





The Department of Civil Protection yesterday held an urgent civil protection committee meeting with all the relevant stakeholders and came up with a prioritised plan. We are activating sub-national structures and held an urgent meeting with stakeholders who include officials from fire engine, Airforce of Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe National Army, police sub aqua and development partners, including Red Cross, Save the Children, World Vision and International Organisation for Migration that are in the shelter cluster, said the departments director, Mr Nathan Nkomo.





We have come up with a prioritised action plan from now until the critical period tomorrow (Sunday). We are also assisting with logistical arrangements and have transferred petty cash to Manicaland, north eastern parts of Mashonaland East, Mashonaland Central, excluding Bindura.





Mr Nkomo said Gokwe will also be affected by the cyclone as it was along the Zambezi Valley. Mr Nkomo said Gokwe will also be affected by the cyclone as it was along the Zambezi Valley.





He urged communities to be on the lookout for flooding or rising water levels and quickly move to safe places when necessary to do so.




Statistics have to be backed by evidence, maybe of a study concluded of which we are not aware of any that has been done or its results shared or published, said Munyimani.
The prosecution is seeking to forfeit former Cabinet minister Saviour Kasukuweres upmarket leisure home in Nyanga after he failed to appear in court for trial. He was issued with an arrest warrant in January by regional magistrate Mr Hoseah Mujaya.



Kasukuwere on January 10 successfully applied for his passport back on the grounds he wanted to travel to South Africa for medical attention and the State did not oppose the application, saying it was convinced by documents from his doctor confirming the medical check-up.



He was supposed to return the passport on January 17, and his failure to do so prompted the State to apply for an arrest warrant.



Kasukuweres lawyer Advocate Thembinkosi Magwaliba, instructed by Mr Charles Chinyama, contends that his client is not yet fit to stand trial.







The State was not satisfied with the defences explanation on the current condition of the former minister, despite having been shown a letter from the doctor indicating that Kasukuwere was making weekly visits to the doctor.





Representing the prosecution, Mr Zivanai Macharaga from the Special Prosecuting Unit, in his application yesterday told the court that if Kasukuwere was able to visit the hospital on a weekly basis, he was also able to visit the court on the days he was not seeing his doctor.





He then applied to have his Nyanga property forfeited to the State basing on section 133 (a) of the Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act.





The accused is aware that his trial is supposed to commence, said Mr Macharaga. Immediately after his urgent application was dismissed by the High Court, he was supposed to turn up for trial.





He is not detained in a hospital, but making weekly visits, so what is stopping him from coming to court so that the court can decide whether trial should proceed or not.





We are looking at section 133 (a) and see if the court can order forfeiture of the accuseds property on default. The accused is enjoying life in South Africa and benefiting from revenue realised from the Nyanga property, while nothing is being done to the property by the State. This will mean that section 133 is unhelpful to the justice delivery system.





In response, Advocate Magwaliba opposed the application maintaining that Kasukuwere was unwell and would attend trial when he is fit. Herald




A Beitbridge woman (35) who was based in Johannesburg, South Africa, was shot seven times at her house in Cosmos City in a horrific murder which was witnessed by her son (10).





The incident, which has left the Beitbridge community shocked, occurred on Wednesday night.





The motive behind the shooting including the suspect behind it is not known. South African police spokesperson for Honeydew, Captain Balan Muthan confirmed the murder, saying the woman, identified as Ms Excite Mudau, was declared dead at the scene. He said they have since opened a murder inquest.





The woman from Zimbabwe was shot in the lower part of the body and she died on the spot. She was sleeping with her son when the suspect stormed into her house and shot her and the boy then rushed outside and notified neighbours who then alerted police, he said.





Our detectives are investigating the murder and no arrests have been made so far. The body was taken to Hillbrow government mortuary for postmortem.





Relatives who spoke to The Chronicle said they were waiting for police investigations pending repatriation of the body.





A family member who preferred to remain anonymous said they suspected Ms Mudau was shot dead by a lover. Although the details are scant we suspect the murder could be a crime of passion. We understand the person who shot her is a male with whom she had an altercation earlier. We are, however, waiting for a full update from the police, said the family member.





The deceaseds friend Ms Rendani Ngulube Mukwevho, who is also based in Johannesburg, said on the fateful day a male visited Ms Mudaus house at night before an altercation ensued between the two.





On that particular night my friend was at home with her 10-year-old son when a certain man came and knocked on the door. They then went outside during which they had an altercation. When the deceased went back to her house, the suspect followed her to the bedroom where he shot her seven times on the lower part of the body and she died instantly, she said.





Cases of Zimbabweans being murdered in the neighbouring country have of late been on the rise.





In August 2017, a Zimbabwean pastor, Reverend Proud Kanyungwe (32) and his wife Belinda Tarisai Mukucha (28) were shot and killed by two armed robbers at their rented home in Scottsville Extension in Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu Natal province while their two daughters, one of them aged three years, watched helplessly.





The armed robbers went away with two cellphones and a laptop. The incident came barely a month after a Bulawayo woman was shot 13 times by unknown suspects while on her way to catch a taxi in Pretorias Soshanguve area.




(Newser)  A US warship has been staying at sea, not allowed to make a port call, for more than two months because of an outbreak of a viral infection among the crew. Military officials said 25 of the more than 700 sailors and Marines on the Fort McHenry have been diagnosed with parotitis, CNN reports, which is a bit like the mumps. The outbreak began in December, and the most recent case was reported last week. "None of the cases are life-threatening and all have either already made or are expected to make a full recovery," a statement from the Fifth Fleet said. Everyone aboard has received measles, mumps, and rubella booster vaccinations, the Fifth Fleet said, adding that 24 of the patients are back on duty. They had been quarantined after falling ill, and living and work spaces were disinfected.

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Military officials hadn't announced the outbreak, per CNN, before being asked about it. And they don't want to call it a quarantine, per the Navy Times. They say the amphibious warship's schedule is being altered while its medical personnel assess the situation, and they give no schedule for its next port call. The ship, currently in the Arabian Sea, last made a port call in Romania on Jan. 7. A Navy spokesman said the outbreak hasn't affected the warship's ability to perform its mission. A Facebook post says the ship is more than one-third of the way through its deployment. (At one time, the "plague of the sea" was scurvy.)
(Newser)  The Southern Poverty Law Center has fired one of its founders. Morris Dees helped launch the civil rights nonprofit organization, now known for tracking hate groups, in 1971. No reason was given, NPR reports. But in a statement, the SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Ala., said the conduct of its employees must reflect its mission and values. "When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization," the statement said, "we take it seriously and must take appropriate action." Dees told the AP that it wasn't his decision to leave, saying only that it was a personnel issue.

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"I devoted nearly 50 years of my life to it," he said of the organization, "and I'm proud of its work." A 1994 series in the Montgomery Advertiser found that Dees exerted tight control over the SPLC and its budget. Under Dees, the reporting found, staff members complained of discrimination against black employees, who said they felt threatened. The organization denied the allegations at the time. On Thursday, the organization said it was taking steps to make sure that "all voices are heard and all staff members are respected." An outside firm will be brought in to assess the workplace. (Read more Southern Poverty Law Center stories.)
(Newser)  If 2020 candidate Cory Booker managed to win the presidency, he would become a rarity in the White House: a bachelor president. Unless ...? The 49-year-old New Jersey senator let slip last month that he had a "boo," and now TMZ is confirming that it's actress Rosario Dawson, 39. While walking through Reagan National Airport on Thursday, Dawson told the website that she's in a "wonderful" relationship with Booker. "I am just grateful to be with someone that I respect and love and admire so much," she said.

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Dawson's acting credits include Men in Black II and Rent, but Politico notes that she's not a stranger to politics herself. She co-founded a group called Voto Latino, whose goal is to get more young Latinos to vote. So might wedding bells be in the near future? Dawson didn't go that far, saying she had "no idea" about that. (Another 40-something joined the 2020 race on Thursday. See what pundits think about Beto O'Rourke's candidacy here.)
(Newser)  If President Trump faces Beto O'Rourke in the general election, he apparently has two lines of attack ready: The Texan's hands and name. The president mocked the Democrat, who announced his candidacy in a video Thursday, for moving his hands too much, Politico reports. "I've never seen so much hand movement," Trump told reporters. "I said: 'Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?'" He added: "I've actually never seen anything quite like it. Study it. Im sure you'll agree." Trump wouldn't comment on whether he saw O'Rourke or Joe Biden as the bigger threat, but said: "Whoever it is, I'll take him or her on."

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White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley, meanwhile, insisted that a Fox host refer to O'Rourke by his given name, Robert Francis, instead of Beto, Mediaite reports. Gidley said Trump might use that line of attack on the campaign trail, and "why wouldn't he? That's his name." O'Rourke told reporters at a campaign stop in Burlington, Iowa, on Thursday that he had "nothing to say" about Trump's hand remarks, the Hill reports. "I think people want us to rise above the pettiness, the smallnessthey want us to be big, bold, ambitious for this country," he said. "That's what I'm focused on and that's what I see here today in Burlington." (Read more Beto O'Rourke stories.)
The American drummer Chad Smith, a member of famed rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers, gave a special performance with the Egyptian musicians on 13 March at ElSawy Culturewheel in Cairo

While on tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers, the American drummer Chad Smith gave a special performance on Wednesday at El Sawy Culturewheel in Cairo.

The pillar of the international rock scene shared the stage with well-known Egyptian musicians in a jam collaboration facilitated by TOFTrading - Tarek Ramadan, DrumChannel and Drum Workshop Inc.

As Chad Smith told Ahram Online in an interview before the event, the musicians met very briefly before the concert and ran through some ideas. They all really talented, free and open. Theyre embracing the kind of weird western funk thing that I do, and Im trying to figure out the Egyptian way of playing as well, So we are going to have a cross pollination of cultures.

Along with Chad Smith, the event saw Ahmed Hisham on drums, Samer George on bass guitar, Beshoo Shenoda on accordion, Abdelazeem Azema on percussion and Fady Badr on keyboards. The two young female percussionists from Egypt, Donia Sami and Rania Amr, were a unique feature of the show.

I am really excited to feature the girl drummers, because I think it is important to uplift women in this country, and to definitely uplift women percussionists and musicians, Smith commented during the concert opening.

"I am very happy to do that, and be part of that and play with them. When I heard that they are being involved I was really pleased about that aspect.

Chad Smith

A solo by Chad Smith opened the programme, then Ahmed Hisham joined on drums.

Donia Sami and Rania Amr played a darabouka set, demonstrating the drum that is an integral part of Egyptian music. Gradually a jam session unfolded, with solos and spectacular drum offs, fusing well-known rock motifs with Egyptian rhythms. One of the pieces the musicians shared on stage was Black in Black by AC/DC, with Andrew Watt on vocals.

Afterwards, Smith told Ahram Online that the Egyptian musicians he had played with are very good improvisers, they have good ears, they are good listeners.

This is the first time the Red Hot Chilli Peppers have visited Egypt.

The upcoming concert by the pyramids on Friday evening is a big event for fans around the world and the group itself.

We went there yesterday to check out the venue, and it was amazing and mind-blowing. The energy there was incredible. We are really excited to play a concert with such an iconic landmark in the background, Smith told Ahram Online.

According to Smith, the programme might include a special Egyptian song, as it is a tradition of the group to play a local tune wherever they go for a performance.

Summing up the idea behind the concert, Chad Smith told Ahram Online that I just want to make it fun for people that are coming. I dont think they really know what to expect. I want them to come away with the feeling that doesnt matter where youre from, what language you speak, what your culture is, music is the universal language, and you are able to talk to each other musically, play from your heart and your soul and smile.

Chad Smith

For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture

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(Newser)  Getting accepted to 17 colleges is an impressive feat for any high school student. It means something more to New Jersey's Dylan Chidick, considering the 17-year-old came to the US as an immigrant from Trinidad at age 7 and spent the next decade in and out of homelessness. Even before the "unfair" college admissions scandal was revealed, Chidick tells the New York Times he knew there was "always going to be someone with more privilege and more connections, to have it easier  and that means that you have to work harder to achieve the same goals." By mid-2017, the Henry Snyder High School student was living in a shelter in Jersey City. He took advanced placement classes in the summer, andbattling a curfewdid his best to study after 9pm, when he'd return from a job at a recreation center.

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His single mom, raising twin brothers with serious heart conditions, eventually reached out to an organization that helped the family find a permanent home. "Seeing my family become vulnerable  is basically what created my drive to never experience that ever again," Chidick tells CNN. Now an honors student and senior class president, Chidick has his choice among Albright College, Caldwell University, Siena College, and the York College of Pennsylvania, among other schools. He has yet to hear from his first choice, the College of New Jersey, where he hopes to study political science and history en route to becoming a lawyer. Per NBC, strangers have offered to pay his tuition. (This teen was accepted by 113 colleges.)
(Newser)  The father of a man accused of killing four people at a Waffle House in Tennessee last year has been charged with unlawful delivery of a firearm in Illinois, a prosecutor announced Thursday. Jeffrey Reinking's son, Travis Reinking, has been held without bond on first-degree murder charges since the April 2018 attack in Nashville. Authorities said Travis Reinking was wearing only a green jacket when he opened fire at the restaurant with an assault-style rifle. Police credited a quick-thinking patron with wrestling the rifle away from the gunman and likely preventing more deaths. After being charged, Travis Reinking was ordered to receive treatment for schizophrenia at a mental health facility and in October was deemed fit for trial, the AP reports.

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Jeffrey Reinking, 55, is accused of knowingly giving an AR-15 rifle to 30-year-old Travis, despite his son having been a patient in the mental health unit of a Peoria hospital. "Mass shootings have raised public awareness regarding the need to keep firearms out of the hands of persons afflicted with mental illness," State's Attorney Stewart J. Umholtz said. "While I strongly support citizens' rights under the Second Amendment, I also strongly support holding individuals accountable for the commission of criminal offenses related to firearms." At one time, Travis Reinking sent text messages to his father in which he punctuated everyday chitchat with delusional rants. (He told police that Taylor Swift had been stalking him.)
(Newser)  New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has confirmed that at least 40 people were killed and 20 injured in Friday's horrific mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch. Three men and one woman were arrested after the shootings, which Ardern described as a terrorist attack, the New Zealand Herald reports. New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush says improvised explosive devices on vehicles were found and defused after the shootings, the AP reports. He says Christchurch residents should stay off the streets until further notice, and mosques around the country should close their doors until they hear from police again.

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Bush says there were some "absolute acts of bravery" involved in the arrests of the attackers. A 17-minute video posted on social media appears to show part of one attack, with the gunman driving to the Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch, entering on foot, and firing for almost two minutes before returning to his vehicle for another gun, the New York Times reports. Authorities, who urged the public not to share the "extremely distressing" video, have identified the suspect as an Australian citizen who left a 74-page anti-immigration manifesto online. (Read more mass shootings stories.)
(Newser)  A minor car accident in Staten Island may have been a planned precursor to a major mob murder. That's what police are now saying about the Wednesday night shooting death of Francesco "Frank" Cali, reputed head of the Gambino crime family, outside of his home. NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea tells NBC News that Cali may have stepped outside to see what all the racket was after what's being described as a blue or silver pickup truck rammed into his SUV, which Shea says may all have been "part of the plan." "He exits his house," Shea lays out the series of events. "There is a conversation with an individual in front of that residence. The individual pulls a weapon and shots were fired." The officer notes that Cali was struck six times after the suspectdescribed as being between 25 and 40 years old, per the New York Timesfired 12 times from a 9mm handgun.

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What didn't happen, as had been initially reported: The 53-year-old wasn't run over first. "He was probably trying to elude gunfire by getting under a car," Shea says. While Shea is careful to say there's not yet any evidence this was a Mafia-orchestrated hit, USA Today reports the "stunning break in decades of relative mob peace" has experts on organized crime making predictions. "Anybody who was associated with this murder, whether it was mob related or not, a couple of guys got to get killed now," admitted Gambino hitman John Alite says. Anthony Arillotta, who did his own killings for the Genovese crime family, echoes that: "It could be a freak thing, wrong place, wrong house, wrong time," but "there's going to be more violence." NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio's take: "We thought those days were over ... but I guess old habits die hard," he said, per the New York Daily News. (Read more Gambino crime family stories.)
(Newser)  The SEC is going after Volkswagen. At issue: upwards of $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities issued here between April 2014 to May 2015a period when, the SEC's lawsuit alleges, Volkswagen's upper echelons were well aware that its 500,000 diesel vehicles in the US were employing illegal software in order to fool emissions tests. "By concealing the emissions scheme, Volkswagen reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by issuing the securities at more attractive rates for the company," reads the filing, which calls the scheme "a massive fraud," per CNBC. The suit targets both the company and former CEO Martin Winterkorn in an effort to recoup "ill-gotten gains" and prevent Winterkorn from ever being an officer or director at a US public company.

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The Wall Street Journal notes US attorneys have also charged Winterkorn over dieselgate, but Germany doesn't extradite its citizens. VW offered a statement that calls the SEC's filing "legally and factually flawed" and says "Volkswagen will contest it vigorously." It claims the securities were "sold only to sophisticated investors who were not harmed and received all payments of interest and principal in full and on time," and that Winterkorn had no part in those sales. "Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States ... the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company." The BBC reports Volkswagen is already on the hook for more than $25 billion in US criminal and civil fines. (VW's current CEO is sorry about a Nazi gaffe.)
(Newser)  President Trump took to Twitter Friday morning to respond to the mass shootings in New Zealand, tweeting, "My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes [sic] out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The US stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!" NBC News reports his Twitterfeed had an earlier mention of the attack on two Christchurch mosques: The president tweeted a Breitbart News story after news of the shootings broke, though it was subsequently deleted.

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Trump wasn't the only politician to draw headlines with New Zealand-related Twitter activity. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a CNN video of PM Jacinda Ardern speaking and wrote, "At 1st I thought of saying, 'Imagine being told your house of faith isn't safe anymore.' But I couldnt say 'imagine.' Because of Charleston. Pittsburgh. Sutherland Springs. What good are your thoughts & prayers when they dont even keep the pews safe?" In a subsequent tweet, she clarified just who her final words were meant for: not Ardern, whom she "greatly admire[s]," but the NRA and its use of that phrase "to deflect conversation away from policy change during tragedies." (Read more mass shootings stories.)
(Newser)  On the heels of the grounding of its 737 Max planes, Boeing now has a new problem: a "severe situation" tied to its KC-46 Pegasus air refueling tanker aircraft. That's how Will Roper, the Air Force's acquisitions chief, describes the garbage and loose industrial tools found during inspection of multiple tankers sent to the Air Force, per CNN. "This is a big deal," Boeing factory management chastised workers in a Feb. 21 memo seen by the Seattle Times, adding "FOD issues" had diminished the Air Force's "confidence" in Boeing. "FOD" stands for "foreign object debris," and although the debris found inside the tankers wasn't found to cause a specific safety hazard, the Federal Aviation Administration website deems an FOD item as one that is "located in an inappropriate location in the airport environment [and] that has the capacity to injure airport or air carrier personnel and damage aircraft."

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Per Roper's statements, it seems in this situation that the objects left behind are more of an indicator of lax quality control that could raise eyebrows on other matterswhich is why the Air Force reinspected several of the tankers it had already given a once-over to, and why it stopped accepting new tanker deliveries the day before the memo went out. "Processes are in place to prevent FOD or to get rid of it when it occurs," Roper said, per Defense News. "This was Boeing having the right processes but simply not following them." On Monday, Roper visited the Boeing plant in Everett, Wash., where the tankers are assembled, and he says Boeing vowed to more carefully carry out its own inspections. Still, Roper tells the Wall Street Journal it could take up to a year before confidence in the Boeing product is fully restored: "This is a lapse in culture, and they simply have to be able to build it back." (Read more Boeing stories.)
(Newser)  President Trump should have to overcome both Democratic and Republican opponents if he wants to retake the presidency, according to Jeb Bush. In a CNN interview to air Saturday, the former Florida governor who faced Trump in the 2016 primary calls for a competitive round two in 2020 among Republicans. "I think someone should run just because Republicans ought to be given a choice," Bush tells David Axelrod of The Axe Files, per Mediaite. "It's hard to beat a sitting president, but to have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative, I think it's important."

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Bush seems to have Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan in mind. Per CNN, the comment came as Bush was discussing Hogan's January inauguration. Bush spoke at the event, describing Hogan as "at the top of a list of leaders that I admire today." Upon hearing Hogan's own speech, "I kind of got a sense that maybe this was an opening" for a presidential run, says Bush, who was "incredibly candid on all fronts," according to Axelrod. Hogan's comment as of this month, per the AP: "Never say never." (Bush once appeared to suggest Trump's kids don't love him.)
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Variable clouds with snow showers or flurries. High 7F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 50%. Snowfall around one inch..

Tonight

Variably cloudy with snow showers. Low 1F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 50%. Snow accumulating 1 to 3 inches.
Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi has condemned in the strongest terms the vicious terror attack on two mosques in New Zealand on Friday which killed at least 49 worshippers.

In a statement, his spokesman Bassam Rady said El-Sisi denounced the attack which brutally targeted worshippers in houses of God to shake the conscience of humanity and put in front of it its fundamental responsibilities in the importance of joining international efforts for a full-out confrontation with terrorism, violence, and extremism.

The president stressed the importance of exerting efforts to boost and consolidate the values of peaceful coexistence, tolerance, and accepting one another.

Gunmen attacked two mosques in the city of Christchurch during Friday prayers, in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern later described as a terrorist attack.

New Zealand police have said that a 28-year-old man has been charged with murder and will appear in the Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning. Two other suspects remain in custody.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said the attack was "very well-planned," and said that mosques across the country would remain under police protection.

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The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Benue State is leaving no stone unturned ahead of the March 23 rerun elections in the state as it ...

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Benue State is leaving no stone unturned ahead of the March 23 rerun elections in the state as it has announced names of its polling agents and returning officers.









The Independent National Electoral Commission had announced March 23 for the supplementary election.









Benue is among the six states where the electoral commission said rerun governorship election will hold on March 23.









Other states in this category are Kano, Adamawa, Bauchi, Sokoto and Plateau.









Ortom, in the first election, scored 410,576 votes while the governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Emmanuel Jime, got 329,022 votes.









The Returning Officer, Prof. Sebastian Maimako, who declared the election inconclusive, said that 121, 011votes were cancelled.









The list of the partys polling agents and returning officers, which our correspondents sighted on Thursday, was said to have been forwarded to INEC.









Topping the list of the party agents are a former Senate President, David Mark, immediate past governor of the state, Gabriel Suswam, erstwhile Minister of Interior, Abba Moro and Governor Samuel Ortom.









Others are a former Director General of the National Agency for Foods and Drug Administration and Control, Dr Paul Orhii, Speaker of the Benue State House of Assembly, Titus Uba and the Secretary to the State Government, Tony Ijohor (SAN).









Also on the list are the state chairman of the PDP, John Ngbede, the state Attorney-General, Michael Gusa, the National Auditor of the party, Agbo Emmanuel, Mike Mku, Frank Utoo, Dr Elijah Ikpaor, Prof. Tor Iorapuu, Steven Iyorchir, Mark Gbillah, Dave Iorhemba, Tyorkyan Cletus, Orker Jev, Bemgba Iortyom, Matthew Nyinta, David Tsevedo, Cyril Gajir and Tersegu Tsegba.









The returning officers, according to the list signed by the state party Publicity Secretary, Bemgbar Iortyom , are Senator Dino Melaye and former Attorney-General of the state, Alex Adum.









When contacted to speak on the list, Iortyom declined.









Also, the Information Officer of INEC in the state, Andya Terkaa, said he could not confirm the report, adding that such information was not meant for the public.








Forty people have been shot dead and 20 injured in shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch during Friday aftern...

Forty people have been shot dead and 20 injured in shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch during Friday afternoon prayers.









The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, called it a terrorist attack and said it was one of New Zealands darkest days.









It is the worst mass shooting in the countrys history.









She condemned the ideology behind the attack, saying: You may have chosen us but we utterly reject and condemn you.









Four suspects  three men and a woman  were taken into custody and multiple explosive devices found attached to cars in the city.









One person was later released.









Australian prime minister Scott Morrison said one of the suspects in the rightwing extremist attack was an Australian-born citizen.









New Zealands threat level has now been raised from low to high.









Police commissioner Mike Bush urged everyone to avoid all mosques across the country.









He told residents in Christchurch: Close your doors until you hear from us again.









The attacker is believed to have livestreamed at least one of the attacks.








The Jamatu Izalatul Bidaa Wa Ikamatus Sunna (JIBWIS) in Katsina has called for prayers for the release of their abducted members along ...

The Jamatu Izalatul Bidaa Wa Ikamatus Sunna (JIBWIS) in Katsina has called for prayers for the release of their abducted members along Sheme-Kankara local government area of Katsina state.









Confirming the development during Friday prayers, the vice chairman of the state council of Ulamas, Surajo Kankia, urged members to intensify prayers for their release.









Our reporter gathered that a prominent Islamic scholar, Alaranma Ahmad Suleiman, alongside five other co-travellers were picked along the said road.









The victims were returning from Kebbi to Kano after attending a help group camp of the JIBWIS.








President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to take over operatorship of OML 11 from She...





President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to take over operatorship of OML 11 from Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC).





In a letter signed by Abba Kyari, Buharis chief of staff and addressed to Maikanti Baru, group managing director, NNPC, the president said the take over should not be later than April 30.





Buhari said the NNPC will now operate OML 11 through its exploration and production arm, the Nigeria Petroleum Development Company (NPDC).





The letter, acknowledged by the NPDC, said a smooth re-entry to the delicate situation in Ogoniland must be ensured.





The NPDC was ordered to confirm the assumption of the operatorship by March 2.





OML 11 located in Ogoniland, Rivers state, contains 33 oil and gas fields, with eight producing as at 2017.





SPDC has come under fire for two large spills  running into tens of thousands of barrels  that hit the Bodo community in Ogoniland in 2008.





After members of the community took the oil giant to a UK court in 2012, Shell accepted liability for the Bodo spills, agreeing to pay 55 million in compensation.





Other groups had filed a lawsuit against the federal government in November 2018, to stop the resumption of oil production on oilfields in Elema, Gokana, Khana and Tai local government areas  all in Ogoniland.





The Conference of Ogoni Traditional Rulers and Chiefs, one of the plaintiffs, had argued that government cannot issue a mining license over OML 11, until the proposed/recommended cleanup and remediation exercise is undertaken and fully implemented United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).




Chidi Lloyd, an ally of Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transportation, has accused President Muhammadu Buhari of turning against the All ...





Chidi Lloyd, an ally of Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transportation, has accused President Muhammadu Buhari of turning against the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Rivers state.





The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had suspended the governorship and state house of assembly elections indefinitely, citing widespread disruption.





But Lloyd, director-general of the campaign organisation of Tonye Cole, governorship candidate of the Amaechi faction of the party, accused Buhari of abandoning APC party members in the state when they needed him the most.





Speaking as a guest on Channels Televisions Politics Today, he alleged that the states election results were doctored till the exercise was suspended because Buhari turned his back on party members in the state.





The party is being treated like this in the state because of our support for President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 and unfortunately for those who supported the president, he has turned his back on us, he said.





We are in the pains, we are in pains to watch President Buhari do this to us President Buhari should open up a probe into the activities of INEC.




Magnus Abe, senator representing Rivers south-east senatorial district, has asked supporters of Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transporta...





Magnus Abe, senator representing Rivers south-east senatorial district, has asked supporters of Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transportation, to stop blaming President Muhammadu Buhari for their woes.





Abe was reacting to comments made by Chidi Loyd, an ally of Amaechi, who had accused the president of abandoning members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state when they needed him the most.





The senator said Nigerians have heard and ignored stories of the abuses rained on the president on a daily basis by those who are supposed to be his supporters and promoters in Rivers.





I was visibly shocked when Hon. Chidi Lloyd, the Director-General of the Amaechi/Cole campaign went on Channels TV to openly abuse the president and blamed President Buhari for the electoral challenges facing the APC in Rivers state, Abe said in a statement.

This is most unfortunate. The habit of blaming everyone else for our woes must stop immediately. We had a needless and senseless power tussle in the party even when everyone agreed that the minister was the leader, yet that was Senator Abes fault, (because Senator Abe has a gubernatorial ambition as if there is any member of a political party in Nigeria without an ambition).





APC members in Rivers State went to court for a minor issue that could have been resolved internally in ten minutes, they were accused of being sponsored by Governor Wike.





The APC leadership went to physically attack the courts and openly disobeyed court orders and the courts responded by axing the candidates for being products of that disobedience. The judges were accused of being PDP and working for Wike.





Now you have gone into an election for which you are clearly ill-prepared, and yet the president gave you everything. Rivers APC had NDDC, Railway, NPA, Shippers Council; Ministry of Transportation, Police, Army, Air Force, DSS and yet you could not win because the INEC REC is PDP. INEC Chairman is PDP, haba!





The senator sarcastically asked if the president was also working with Wike since he is being blamed for the partys problems.





He noted that if members of the APC had taken their time to remind the people of Buharis love for them, the party would have made more sense to the electorate.





In playing our usual blame game let us leave President Buhari out of it and focus on the real issues facing the party in Rivers state, he said.




The crisis in the Lagos State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over fallout of the last general elections got messy on Wedn...

The crisis in the Lagos State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over fallout of the last general elections got messy on Wednesday with one of the major gladiators revealing sordid details of how campaign funds from Abuja were allegedly cornered by the governorship candidate of the party, Mr Jimi Agbaje.





Reacting to allegations of sabotage leveled against him by Agbaje during a postmortem meeting on outcome of the elections, Director General of Atiku Abubakar Presidential Campaign Council in Lagos State, Chief Layi Ogunbambi said it was unfortunate that the PDP gubernatorial candidate in the state could degenerate to such lowest ebb of fabricating vicious lies just to cover up his inadequacies and greed.





Ogunbambi said right from when he was appointed as DG of Atiku campaign council, Agbaje refused to work with him, despite spirited efforts to diplomatically make him (Agbaje) change his mind and see the reason for all of them to work together.





Let me quickly seize this opportunity to thank our leader, Chief Bode George, immensely for the confidence reposed in me all the time since l became a member of Lagos State PDP. l was duly sworn in as DG of Atiku campaign council at the Party Secretariat in lkeja and curiously Jimi Agbaje never called me to discuss with me the operations and work schedule of my office.





There was no template for harmonization of his group with the legitimate organ and structure at the party office in lkeja. With his rigid application of dogma, it was patently obvious that he was not going to work with me and the party on 2019 general elections.





ln fact, he made it clear to many and even went on social media to put on record that he was not going to have anything to do with me as the DG. l spoke with him several times on the phone in my attempt to diplomatically bring some focus and sanity to his ego without any success, Ogunbambi alleged.





The DG said the calls were made in the presence of many party bigwigs, while he went further to talk to Agbajes close friend in an attempt to make him see the need for unity in the larger interest of the party, all to no avail.





former Chairman of the Party, Rtd Navy Captain Shelle and Taofeek Gani were all there at each occasion these calls were made to Jimi. l also engaged his friend (Osibodu) for several hours on the phone to get him to get Jimi to see reason in the larger interest of the party, but that, in Osibodus own innocent naivety, was more interested in the so-called integrity mantra of Jimi than the larger issue of party cohesion, integration and harmony, hence, and again, all the discussions with Osibodu never amounted to anything significant in the directional way foreword for the party. The Chairman of the Party, theformer Chairman of the Party, Rtd Navy Captain Shelle and Taofeek Gani were all there at each occasion these calls were made to Jimi. l also engaged his friend (Osibodu) for several hours on the phone to get him to get Jimi to see reason in the larger interest of the party, but that, in Osibodus own innocent naivety, was more interested in the so-called integrity mantra of Jimi than the larger issue of party cohesion, integration and harmony, hence, and again, all the discussions with Osibodu never amounted to anything significant in the directional way forewordfor the party.





The stagnation remained substantially the same to date. Jimi was emphatic when he said publicly that Leke was his DG because he needed somebody he could control just like he wanted to control the entire party with his inner core group that have done more to disfranchise the Party in Lagos State for years now, Ogunbambi said.





While questioning the basis for Agbajes allegations that he wanted to sabotage his political efforts, Ogunbambi said the PDP gubernatorial candidate had again exposed his character to the glare of public scrutiny, alleging that all his (Agbajes) interest was the campaign funds from Abuja.





Listening again to his (Agbajes) own version of the money brought from Abuja and the version of the Chairman of the Party, l ask you all: who was telling the truth yesterday? You can lie and deceive the people some of the time but you cannot deceive them all of the time.





Jimi is a cancer in Lagos PDP. A proclamation of no confidence and integrity in him is the most viable option left to the Party and l urge you all to consider it with the seriousness that it deserves!





My issue with Jimi is not about Ceaser and Brutus. lt is about a man l supported with my time and money in 2015 and 2019, and later discovered that he was nothing but a serial politician coming every four years to use our Lagos PDP platform to amass enormous wealth for himself.





The DG also alleged that most of the businessmen who initially bought into the vision of Agbaje and supporting his campaign had since left him having discovered the truth about his character.





However, efforts by PM News to speak with Agbaje proved abortive as calls made to his phone were not picked.




The 80-year-old mother-in-law of Aminu Masari, governor of Katsina state, has regained freedom after one week in custody of her abduct...





The 80-year-old mother-in-law of Aminu Masari, governor of Katsina state, has regained freedom after one week in custody of her abductors.





The governors mother-in-law was abducted last Friday at her home in the Sabon Gari area of the state.





In a statement on Friday, Gambo Isah, spokesman of the Kaduna police command, said Maistiyari, mother of Binta, the governors wife, was released on Thursday.





but he confirmed that she had been reunited with her family. Isah did not specify if any ransom was paidbut he confirmed that she had been reunited with her family.

I am very happy to inform you that the the mother in- law of His Excellency, Aminu Masari, has been released by her abductors yesterday 14/03/2019 by 16:00hrs, Isah said.





She is hale and hearty. She has already been reunited with her family after necessary medical check-ups.





In addition, the command said it has also arrested one Haruna Adamu, a notorious kidnapper, from Zamfara state.





The syndicate attacked the house of one Mustapha Sani M of Bakon Zabo Village, Batsari; and attempted to kidnap his two wives but they were resisted, Isah said.




Rochas Okorocha, Imo state governor, has informed Emeka Ihedioha, governor-elect, that he has no constitutional powers to issue direct...





Rochas Okorocha, Imo state governor, has informed Emeka Ihedioha, governor-elect, that he has no constitutional powers to issue directives to financial Institutions in the state until he has been sworn in as governor.





The outgoing governor said this in a statement issued by Sam Onwuemeodo, his chief press secretary.





Okorocha demanded that the governor-elect should wait until May 29, when he has been sworn in as governor, before he starts giving instructions to banks on the states financial dealings.





Emeka Ihedioha, who was declared winner of the governorship election in Imo State by Prof. Francis Ezeonu-led INEC in Owerri, does not have the right or locus yet to harass or give directives to the financial institutions in the state over their dealings with the state government, he said.





The media report quoting Ihedioha as having given such directive is unfortunate and a sign of ugly things to come. Otherwise, Ihedioha should not have been the first of all the governors-elect in the country to issue such directive.





He said he was not surprised at the directive because as a PDP man, his interest, first and foremost, will be the treasury of the state, and the policy or the slogan of Share the money will soon come back. But he should exercise patience and wait till he is sworn-in.





He shouldnt be in a hurry. There is a government in place and until May 29, 2019, that government should continue to work in the interest of the State and her people and also Continue to carry out programmes and policies for the same purpose, until the end of its approved life span.





To begin to harass or give directives to financial institutions in the State is an act of hostility and he should know that.





The financial Institutions in the State should disregard such directive and continue to do the right thing and take the right action since the best he can do is to confront the outgoing government when he takes over on any financial transaction he has reservations at.




The Delta Police Command says it has apprehended a member of a robbery syndicate terrorising three local government areas in the state. ...

The Delta Police Command says it has apprehended a member of a robbery syndicate terrorising three local government areas in the state.









The Acting Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO) of the command, ASP Chuks Orisewezie disclosed this in a statement made available to newsmen on Thursday in Warri.









Orisewezie said, the suspect, Emmanuel Patrick, was apprehended on March 6, by a team of Anti-robbery Squad led by SP Masoyi Dadi.









He said upon interrogation, the 32-year-old suspect confessed to the crime and also gave the names of members of his gang.









The suspect admitted partaking in three armed robbery operations at Uvwie, Ughelli and Udu Local Government Areas of Delta.









He has also led the police to the gangs' armoury where two other pump action guns, four double barrel guns, one single barrel gun, one Air gun, 274 cartridges, two bulletproofs and four bullet holders were recovered.









The gangs armourer who identified himself as Udenmba Ben has also been arrested and confessed to the crime.









He admitted being in charge of servicing of the gangs' arms and also supplying them with ammunition.









The armourer said he does not manufacture guns, but repairs, buys and sells arms and ammunition, he said.









The commands spokesman said the police was an intensifying effort towards nabbing other fleeing gang members.









Meanwhile, the Delta Police Commissioner, Adeyinka Adeleke has warned criminals in the state that there would be no safe haven for them under his command.








Rochas Okorocha, governor of Imo state, says Adams Oshiomhole, national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is to blame fo...





Rochas Okorocha, governor of Imo state, says Adams Oshiomhole, national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is to blame for the partys loss of the guber polls in the state.





Emeka Ihedioha, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) polled 273,404 to beat Okorochas preferred candidate, Uche Nwosu of the Action Alliance (AA) who polled 190,364.





Okorocha also blamed Hope Uzodimma, APC candidate in the state, who came fourth, for the inability of the party to win the governorship election.





In a statement by Sam Onwuemeodo, his chief press secretary, the governor said posterity would judge the duo for their alleged roles in the election.





According to him, Uzodimas felicitation with Ihedioha after he was declared the winner of the election, showed he (Uzodima ) is a mole who reportedly worked for PDP.





We had maintained that Chief Uzodinma was just a mole in the APC and today, the governorship election in the state and its outcome have obviously vindicated us, aside the fact that a video of Chief Uzodinmas celebration with Ihedioha has gone viral on the social media, the statement read.





Chief Uzodinma succeeded through Adams Oshiomhole to ensure that only his supporters were made agents of the party, from the list he sent from Abuja to the Independent National Electoral Commission.





Unfortunately, none of Uzodinmas and Oshiomholes approved agents were seen either at the ward, local government or at the state level ; they didnt care about the election and its outcome.





At the end of the day, the APC candidate came fourth. And he has been celebrating with the PDP candidate.





Their target as it has been shown now is to totally destroy APC in the South-East and in Imo in particular, thereby authenticating the claim in some quarters that it is all about 2023.





We had equally maintained the contention that Imo people would not vote for Uzodinma because they know him very well, but Oshiomhole refused to listen.





He came fourth and never showed that he took part in the election; posterity and history will judge Oshiomhole and Uzodinma over the fate of APC in the South-East, especially in Imo State.





Okorocha contested and was initially declared winner of the Imo-west senatorial seat.





However, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) struck out his name, saying he was declared winner under duress.




The Presidency and the All Progressives Congress (APC) have not taken any decision on the zoning of the positions of presiding officers ...

The Presidency and the All Progressives Congress (APC) have not taken any decision on the zoning of the positions of presiding officers of the 9th Assembly, Daily Trust has reliably gathered yesterday.









Our correspondent reports that there have been speculations that the positions of the presiding officers have been zoned to the northeast and south-west geo-political zones.









It was reported that the Senate presidency and the position of the speaker of the House of Representatives have been zoned to the northeast and southwest geo-political zones, respectively.









A reliable presidency source, however, said President Muhammadu Buhari has not taken any decision, regarding the composition of the leadership of the next assembly.









There is no decision yet on the zoning of the position of presiding officers of the National Assembly, the source who craved for anonymity said.









The source said the president would soon meet with the leadership of the APC to take a decision. He said the president would consider the input of the party, before arriving at the final decision.









Any decision that is taken would be clearly communicated to all members of the parliament who are of the APC. All these speculations would be laid to rest when thats done, he said.









The source said arrangements are being made to forestall a repeat of the 2015 episode, whereby Senator Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara connived with opposition lawmakers to emerge as Senate president and speaker, respectively.









In 2015, the party had zoned the Senate presidency and speakers position to northeast and southwest respectively. Saraki from north-central and Dogara who is from northeast defied the partys position.









The reported key contenders for the Senate presidency are Ali Ndume (Borno), Ahmad Lawan (Yobe), Danjuma Goje (Gombe) and Abdullahi Adamu (Nasarawa).








Patients, family and donors invited to special bone marrow transplant event in Frankfurt, Germany

The 45th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) will be held from 24-27 March in the host city of Frankfurt. On the Sunday of the Meeting - 24th of March - the 13th Patient, Family and Donor Day will be taking place and will form an integral part of the scientific programme. Also for the first time in Frankfurt, the programme includes a second parallel session dedicated to patient advocates.

The introduction of new drugs and graft manipulation techniques, combined with changes in the clinical pattern of transplantation, particularly in the outpatient setting, has led to remarkable developments in the field over the last few years. The programme is aimed at exploring both scientific trends, aftercare and the special relationship which is often created between donors and receivers as well as between clinical BMT personnel and patients and their families.

Peter Bader, EBMT 2019 Congress Co-President and Head Division Stem Cell Transplantation & Immunology, Children & Adolescents University Hospital Frankfurt Goethe University, explains: "An international panel of specialists will talk about new possibilities in stem cell transplants, new treatments possibilities in GvHD, fertility and sexuality, psycho-oncological support and social aspects" Professor Bader adds: "The programme offers a broad range of topics and we hope that the participants will find this event useful."

The day will be concluded with personal experiences from a former CAR T patient and a teenager donor from Germany who donated her stem cells twice to a patient to help him overcome severe aplastic anaemia, a rare blood disease.

Bregje Verhoeven, Chair of the EBMT Patient, Family and Donor Committee, says: "We are very much looking forward to the upcoming Patient, Family and Donor Day. Our objective is to inform and empower BMT patients, their family members and patient advocates so that they can work hand in hand with transplant teams to achieve the best possible result."

The event will be held at the Messe Frankfurt. Registration to this unique and memorable day is free and interested participants are invited to register online. Onsite registration will be also possible but participants are strongly recommended to register online to secure their lunch spots.

In addition, the sessions will be live-streamed, enabling anyone who cannot attend the meeting to follow the sessions.

###

The event will be held at the Messe Frankfurt. Registration to this unique and memorable day is free and interested participants are invited to register online.

EBMT gratefully acknowledges the supporters of Patient, Family and Donor Day: Anthony Nolan; DKMS and Josep Carreras Leukaemia Foundation.

Note to editors:

Germany, with more than 40 transplant centers and more than 3,000 allogeneic stem cell procedures, is one of the most active countries for Stem Cell Transplantation in Europe. Germany is also known for its Donor Registries, with over 7.5 million volunteer donors providing hematopoietic stem cells all over the world.

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
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14/03/2019 - The Argentinian agro-food sector has grown remarkably over the past thirty years, driven by innovation, an abundance of young, well-educated farmers and strong international prices. While Argentinas use of export taxes has raised much-needed revenue for the federal government, the policy has reduced gross farm revenues by an estimated 14% over the period of 2015-17, discouraging investment in one of the countrys most competitive sectors, according to a new report from the OECD.





The OECD Food and Agricultural Review: Agricultural Policies in Argentina finds that macroeconomic instability in Argentina has placed a heavy burden on the agro-food sector over much of the past two decades. Export taxes on important commodities continue restricting producer access to lucrative global markets while keeeping domestic prices low. Reforming the use of export taxes will be critical to the future development of the agro-food sector, according to the Review.





Argentina is a major player in international agriculture markets today, with tremendous potential to increase productivity growth, on a sustainable basis, said Ken Ash, OECD Director of Trade and Agriculture, during presentation of the Review with Argentinas Minister of Agro-Industry Luis Miguel Etchevehere at the ExpoAgro event in San Nicolas, Argentina. Future success depends on governments and industry working better together, both to ensure sustainable use of land, water and biodiversity resources, and to modernise the agricultural innovation system, Mr Ash said.





The OECD Review says that todays challenging macroeconomic environment makes it crucial for Argentina to find the right balance between the short-term need to raise government revenues and the long-term objective of phasing out export taxes. While environmental pressures are not as severe as in many countries, pressures are increasing and warrant early attention, as does further developing the sector outside the Pampras region, according to the Review.





The OECD Food and Agricultural Review: Agricultural Policies in Argentina is free to read on the OECD iLibrary.





For further information, journalists can contact OECD Media Officer Lawrence Speer (+33 1 45 24 79 70) or the OECD Media Division (+33 1 45 24 97 00).

Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.

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Paducah, KY (42003)

Today

Mixed clouds and sun with scattered thunderstorms. Areas of patchy fog. High around 70F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Strong thunderstorms likely. Damaging winds, large hail and possibly a tornado with some storms. Low 52F. Winds SSW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
ABC/Randy HolmesTom Morello will be the ambassador for the ACLU's Campaign for Smart Justice.

The initiative aims to reduce the population of people in U.S. jails and prisons by 50 percent, and to "combat racism in the criminal justice system."

"I am honored to be chosen the ACLU Ambassador for Smart Justice, the first musician in such a post," Morello says in a statement. "Our justice system is riddled with racial, economic and political injustice and I look forward to working with the ACLU to confront these injustices at every turn."

Morello and the ACLU will team up again when the Rage Against the Machine guitarist plays a show in Los Angeles on March 23 to celebrate the organization's 100th anniversary.

For more info, visit ACLU.org.

In May, Morello will launch his own headlining tour in support of his new solo album The Atlas Underground.

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Popularity is relative, and especially in the digital age. You could have hundreds of thousands of followers online, but be completely unknown in the streets  massively famous on Instagram, YouTube or Twitter, but lack any kind of real, authentic cool in person. For our new series, Coolest Person in the Room, New York-based photographer Megan Walschlager pinpoints all the people whose energy is contagious regardless of their following count or celebrity. Meet McLayne Ycmat, the NY-based art director, fashion obsessive and style icon you need to know.

Tell us about your day job. I'm an art director and a graphic designer. I'm at this company called Framework which is within an agency called Black Frame. Basically I do art direction for fashion campaigns and magazines. I used to work for Fabien Baron when I graduated college, and I did art direction for the Dior campaigns and Dior Magazine. And now I do Garage Magazine and I work on campaigns for the brand Woolrich. They're a heritage brand and we've been working on rebranding them. I also work on Helmut Lang and Kenzo.

Did you go to Parsons?

Yeah. Did you study fashion design? No. Oh, I thought you did. What did you study? Communication design, but everyone at Parsons also thought I studied fashion design. I grew up Mormon in Utah. When I came out and went through all that, I was basically like, "Fuck this!" and applied to Parsons. My parents weren't super supportive of that, so to show them I took out all these loans to come here. Now I pay so much in student loans.

Photo by Megan Walschlager

I'm with you  I have so many loans.

Really? Well, it's good to know other people do too. It's fucking ridiculous. Truly. I always think it's so funny that you're from Utah because you have such a cosmopolitan air about you. It's so funny  a lot of people that work around me in the industry  especially when I worked for Fabien, and I know this is the case for a lot of European brands  but you grow up with this idea of what luxury is and how to look chic or whatever. And people are like, "Oh, my mom was my biggest inspiration." And that was not the case for me. The Internet taught me a lot.

You're also really active in New York nightlife. How did you get started in that? It started pretty organically because I just started going out a lot. My first gig was doing Flash Factory for Nicky Ottav, but my first official gig was subbing for Jordan [Stawecki] at Linda. Then I just started doing other things after that. Like Ty [Sunderland's] pool party and then LadyFag. Harry [Charlesworth] and Jordan [Stawecki] were like, "If you wanna host for Lady, just ask her! That's what we did." So I told her and it wasn't until like months later that I was talking to her at Battle Hymn that she was like, "Oh my God, Why don't you host for me?" and I was like, "I'm waiting on you!" Now I do Lady, and I just hosted Unter which was amazing. The music is so good there. And I got to be on set with Seva [Granick]  who started it  for a campaign I was doing for Woolrich, so we got to know each other and that was really cool.

Do you remember your first party in New York?

Oh girl yes, I do though. It was called The Chocolate Factory and it was in Bushwick. And this was like a Parsons freshmen type of thing. It was like a house party off the Morgan L stop. My first nightlife experiences after that were like The Darby, which is Up and Down now, and lAvenue, the Dream Hotel PH-D. And I remember I hated it. It's funny because it was actually an issue in my relationship at the time. He was so mad that I never wanted to go out and now I'm so not that person. Actually, when I started working my full time job for Fabien, which was super intense, I basically needed to go out. So that was the first time I really started going out every week. Because before that with school and stuff I didn't really.

Photo by Megan Walschlager

Do you have a specific getting ready routine when you're going out? For example one of my friends in college wouldn't have a sip of alcohol before she finished her eye makeup. Oooh, I get that. I guess I'm like a natural host. I always want to bring my friends together. Actually when I lived in Utah and I ran away, I was introduced to this gay group. Since my coming out, I've been surrounded by, like, groups of gays. Salt Lake City is actually like this queer haven, and so when I ran away it was the first time I really saw these gay guys in heels and makeup and they were just so much fun. I love gay people. I guess in terms of pre-game rituals, I try to make everyone meet at my place. Everyone always ends up wearing my clothes.

I feel like you style out your friends.

They always ask to wear my clothes! And I always end up doing everyone's makeup because they ask me to! In no way am I like dressing up my friends to look like me  I'm not that person  I just let them wear my clothes. Totally. You have a very specific aesthetic. Yeah and it caught on.

"Right now I'm super inspired by the cosmos. I'm fucking obsessed with it. Everything I do now needs to have some scientific grounding."

I have to ask you: when, where and what was the inspiration for your iconic smokey eye?

Girl! Paolo says you invented it. Invented it? No. You wanna know the first time I did a smokey eye? It was for a halloween costume of Adam Lambert.

Really?

Yes, I sat there and copied a picture of him. That was in high school. Honestly, I've been wearing makeup everyday since high school  like concealer and stuff like that  and it has always been to just make myself look better. I feel like when I'm doing my smokey eye, I'm doing it to make my face look better. Like more snatched. Like it isn't coming from a place where I'm looking at a photo like, "Oh, I want to be that person in eyeliner." I just kind of do it. It's like photoshopping or FaceTuning in real life.

Photo by Megan Walschlager

What is your go to drink at the club?

A whiskey sour. Or some really really gay drink like a tequila sunrise. I don't drink vodka. I hate vodka. I mean, okay, I do drink vodka but I don't buy vodka.

Where are some of your favorite places to go in NYC?

Well, I used to go to Roosevelt Island all the time. There's this spot where you have to climb over a fence, then you can get down to the rocks onto the river. I love to just like chill there with friends and smoke a joint. In terms of going places, I'm not super attached to any establishment because I think it always depends on who's there and who I'm with. I really just like being outside when it's warm. When it's summer, I'm out.

One of my favorite McLayne memories is that summer when we all went to Fire Island and we met up at the train, and you were wearing three pieces of cloth but none of them were actual pieces of clothing. Yes! Speaking of that. That's where I like to be. In the heat, half naked, on Fire Island.

Photo by Megan Walschlager

I think another layer of your mystique is you always have so many references and so much archival knowledge.

Oh, well that's just because I am obsessed. When I found Style.com  wait, actually you want to know what it was? Ugly Betty on ABC. I was obsessed with it. So, I actually  literally  used looking at runway shows to continue my obsession with it. And eventually I was like, "Woah, this shit's actually fascinating." From the beginning I got books  queue a montage of me studying. I would quiz myself on fashion shows. That's how I knew I wanted to get into fashion advertising. In high school I took a class on graphic design and I did well, and my teacher even helped me get paid gigs. And I just knew, because I love fashion so much that I wanted to do art direction.

Do you have any favorite books or shows that you always go back to? I'm currently obsessed with Dutch Magazine. They've been out of print like 15 years or more now. It was a '90s magazine, but every picture, layout, everything is just amazing. I'm obsessed with magazines particularly. I collect all that shit. But apart from that, the Internet has become such a solid basis for both my career and myself, so it always starts on the Internet. I'll find a picture I like or something, then I'll go deeper. This sounds really cliche, but the things I'm inspired by change. Right now I'm super inspired by the cosmos. I'm fucking obsessed with it. Everything I do now needs to have some scientific grounding. I know that sounds so dumb, but that's why like my Instagram profile picture right now is a diagram of the earth's rotation [Laughs].

Related | Spencer Pratt Interviews Morgan Saint

Do you have any personal projects coming up? Didn't you do a really big side project last year? Yeah, I helped my friend Peter Do with his logo and the launch of his brand. And he's doing really well now. I just did an album cover for my friend Morgan  her name is Morgan Saint and she is signed to Sony. It was so cool because I felt like it was the first thing in a long time that I was able to show my distinct taste. I want to work in music a lot more doing album artwork. Especially for electronic music. I'm really inspired by a lot of electronic music right now. I know that sounds really cliche too. I listen to a lot of trance music, but I realized my personal taste is actually called melodic techno. It's very like Deadmau5, Kaskade. I still listen to Deadmau5. I've been to a Kaskade concert and I was literally, like, crying. I used to be so ashamed of this until my friend also confessed he was into it. Then I was like, "Ok, I guess it's cool to be so unashamedly into something like Deadmau5 and Kaskade."

Photo by Megan Walschlager
Rosario Dawson and baggy-jeans pioneer Cory Booker are officially the hippest couple on the campaign trail! They were previously spotted together at a performance of Dear Evan Hanson, but TMZ spoke with Dawson at Washington D.C's Reagan airport, where she confirmed that she is the "boo" the 2020 hopeful referred to recently on The Breakfast Club.

"Yeah... Yes, very much so, she said when asked if the pair were in a relationship. "So far, so wonderful, he's a wonderful human being. It's good to spend some time together when we can. We're busy."



Although she was a Bernie supporter in 2016, Dawson has officially endorsed her new boyfriend. She showed off a Booker 2020 button at the airport, and heaped praise on him to TMZ: "I am just grateful to be with someone that I respect and love and admire so much who is so brilliant and kind and caring and loving."

Even if they're not sure about Booker 2020, people seem pretty here for Rosario for First Lady (though she told TMZ she "has no idea" about marriage). As far as celebrities in politics go, Dawson has a lot to offer on the campaign trail. She was extremely vocal during the 2016 election and campaigned actively for Bernie: appearing in campaign ads, introduced him at events, and once even penning a letter questioning activist Dolores Huerta's support of Hillary Clinton. She's also the co-founder of nonprofit advocacy group Voto Latino, which has launched a multi-million dollar effort to increase Hispanic voter turnout, and helped organize the celebrity-studded family separation protests that took place at the border last year.

People are also fascinated by Dawson's romantic pivot from ex-husband Eric Andre and extremely versatile taste: she previously dated Jay-Z, Colin Farrell, Quentin Tarantino and Gerard Butler. But maybe Booker is funnier and less dorky in private than he appears on social media, where he's recently revealed his fondness for inspirational quotations and Rupi Kaur-esque Twitter poetry.

Personally, my biggest question is how will the other 2020 candidates try to keep up with Booker on the cool celebrity affiliations front? Boringly, most of his rivals are married to longtime non-famous spouses, and thus, are unlikely to announce celebrity significant others. But Warren or Harris can always get papped attending a performance of Hamilton with Rihanna. Based on 2016 and the recent midterms' onslaught of political endorsements by celebrities, which even brought Beyonce and the notoriously apolitical Taylor Swiftout into the fray, it's only a matter of time until more candidates and celebrities begin courting each other.
There've been many attempts to peer into the lives of America's self-exiled. Labeled crust or gutter or street punks, or simply travelers (or depending on your politics, hobos), I mean the large network of nomadic Americans who have made the deliberate choice to live without addresses or incomes, outside capitalism, the work force, the nuclear family, and most rules of social conduct.

If you live in a large city  especially Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, Asheville, San Diego or New Orleans  you've seen them. As the myths go, they panhandle and perform in parks, hitchhike or ride rails with the weather, give themselves new names and histories, live in squats or on the streets, often adjacent to musical scenes and activist communities. These myths are reified and to some extent confirmed by films and documentaries like Crash Where You Land (a look at New Orleans' French quarter's homeless punks), Hunting Pignut (a fictional gutter punk adventure in Canada), and The Decline of Western Civilization III (the third in a trio of punk documentaries, exploring LA's crust scene).

Our fascination feels like a result of the wrench these people throw into the logic of our own lives. Most of us pour endless labor into the task of acquiring a Good, middle class life. The fantasy of skipping out on that project altogether (though these travelers are sometimes those who never had a good shot to begin with) and the equation of the comforts you sacrifice for the freedoms you gain, is equal parts intoxicating and terrifying.

Michael Joseph, a Boston-based photographer, has spent years traveling around America getting to know members of this complex, transient community, learning about its history, language and codes of conduct. In a new exhibition at the Daniel Cooney Fine Art gallery in Chelsea titled "Lost and Found," Joseph explores its reality with a series of black and white portraits: individuals, couples, parents and children.

"Trey"

Rather than the blurry YouTube footage or dark polaroids typical of punk memorabilia, the photos are exhilaratingly detailed. The figures are rarely smiling but make unyielding eye contact with the camera. The close-ups allow the viewer to see beyond spectacle or curiosity, and admire the clues the photos offer about the subject's stories and journeys. One man's glasses balance on his nose without arms. Another's jacket is embroidered with what look like bird bones. A woman drapes her arm over her head to reveal a line drawing of New Jersey on her armpit. A tattoo on one subject's stomach reads, "Do not fear death, but the inadequate life." Anarchist and squatters rights motifs are common.

"Raskull"

The series insists upon beauty in the constellations of stick and pokes on arms and faces, and the layers of patchwork handmade clothes and jewelry rooted in "crust punk tradition and hobo history." This warmth of Joseph's shots and the agency in the punks gazes eschews the anthropological distance inherent to a photo series of homeless people hanging in a Chelsea gallery. The people appear neither overly romanticized, nor tragic. In a statement, Joseph points out that without context, they might just look like Bushwick's more rugged crowd, until closer study reveals bruises, dirt and scars, "clues of problems including physical abuse, substance abuse, lack of medical care, loss of friends and family." Although they're beautiful, the photos feel ultimately agnostic when it comes to passing judgement on the subjects' lifestyles. However, Joseph admits that he hopes to celebrate the "courage and freedom of lives spent on their own terms."
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IRAN: Qoliyan and Bakhshi Held Without Bail or Access to Lawyers for Almost Two Months, Transferred to Prisons in Ahvaz

03/15/19

Source: Center for Human Rights in Iran

Despite the apparent end of investigations by judicial authorities against labor activist Esmail Bakhshi and freelance reporter Sepideh Qoliyan, the two have not been offered bail and continue to be held, without access to a lawyer, for almost two months, awaiting trial. No date has been set for the trial.





The Haft Tappeh workers union news channel on Telegram on March 5 reported Bakhsi was taken from the Intelligence Ministry's detention center in Ahvaz to the city's Sheyban Prison, and that Qoliyan was taken to the Sepidar Prison for women (also in Ahvaz).

Bakhshi, a Haft Tappeh worker and union representative, and Qoliyan, also a peaceful advocate of workers' rights in Iran, were initially arrested on November 18, 2018, and detained for roughly a month in an Intelligence Ministry-run detention center in Ahvaz.

Informed sources that report on labor issues told the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) on March 12, 2019, that the two have still not been given any access to legal counsel since they were re-arrested on January 20 for revealing acts of torture committed by Intelligence Ministry agents during their initial detention.

Jamal Heidari, Qoliyan's lawyer, wrote on his Instagram on March 6, 2019: "The judicial authorities have shut every avenue to gain access to this case by incorrectly basing their decision on the Note to Article 48 of the Criminal Procedures Regulations, even in regards to charges that are not related to national security. There is no ban on visitation and by law she has the right to see her lawyer but it is not clear why she is being denied this right."

The Note to Article 48 of Iran's Criminal Procedures Regulations limits the choice of defense lawyers to those approved by the Judiciary Chief in cases of "crimes against internal or external security."

The two are also being denied medical treatment and their families have been threatened not to speak to the media.

Meanwhile, labor activists at the Haft Tappel sugar mill near Shush also reported on March 11, 2019, that Bakhshi's salary as the company's employee had been cut off.

"Esmail Bakhsi's salary for the [Iranian] month of Dey (December 22, 2018 - January 20, 2019) has not yet been paid at a time when it is the only source of his family's income," according to the Telegram app channel of the Haft Tappeh sugar mill workers' union.

The union reported the latest situation as follows:

On Wednesday, March 13, Haft Tappeh workers who had retired in 2017 and 2018 held a protest at the mill and production came to a halt when other workers walked off the job. The workers had been promised to receive all their unpaid wages, including a bonus for the Iranian New Year (March 21, 2019), but they still have not been paid for the month of Bahman (January 21 - February 19, 2019). (Lack of payment of back wages is a chronic problem in Iran, with workers having little recourse.)

When Haft Tappeh workers went to the Social Security Organization office to renew their health insurance booklets, they were turned away and told that the company had not paid for their insurance.

Frustrated by the lack of response from judicial and security authorities, Bakhsi's mother (name unknown) has been holding sit-ins in front of the sugar mill's security office.

"On March 10 we witnessed the workers' passion aroused by the presence of Bakhshi's mother at the company. We showed that we have not forgotten him and are confident of his innocence," the workers' union reported.

On March 11, the workers' union reported: "The presence of Bakhshi's mother in the Haft Tappeh sugar mill holding a poster of her son until 14:30 hours coincided with the exit of the day-shift workers, about 200 of whom joined her in the protest."
PHOTOS: Norooz Khani Persian New Year Ritual In Kordkouy, Northern Iran

03/15/19

Photos by Marjohn Sheikhi, Mehr News Agency

Persian New Year Norooz is around the corner. This is a festive occasion for Iranians and many other countries in the region. There are many local cheerful customs associated with Norooz. One such custom is called "Norooz Khani" which is performed in some of the villages and towns.

On the last Wednesday of the year, people of 'Balajadeh' village in Kordkouy city in Golestan province, take part in the 'Norooz Khani' ritual by going from house to house while singing lines of poetry in praise of Spring, the new year and the nature. It is customary for the householders to give them gifts or to offer them sweets in return.























































































About Norooz:

International Norooz Day was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution A/RES/64/253 of 2010, at the initiative of several countries that share this holiday (Afghanistan, Albania, Azerbaijan, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Turkmenistan.

Inscribed in 2009 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as a cultural tradition observed by numerous peoples, Norooz is an ancestral festivity marking the first day of spring and the renewal of nature. It promotes values of peace and solidarity between generations and within families as well as reconciliation and neighbourliness, thus contributing to cultural diversity and friendship among peoples and different communities.
Photos: Tabriz Grand Bazaar Busy With Norooz Shopping

03/15/19

Photos by Morteza Rahmani, Mehr News Agency

Iranian citities are abuzz with excitement in the countdown to the Persian New Year, Norooz which this year coincides with Thursday, March 21, 2019 at 01:28:27 AM Tehran time. Norooz is a festive occasion for Iranians and other countries in the region. One of the customs of Norooz is shopping for new clothes, especially for the children, preparing the Haftsin Norooz spread, and buying nuts and sweets for offering to visiting family and friends.





These photos show the historic Grand Bazaar of Tabriz, in northwestern Iran, busy with people doing their Norooz shopping. Tabriz Grand Bazaar is one of the greatest indoor markets in Iran and Asia. The Bazaar covers an area of one square kilometer, thus deserving the title 'world greatest indoor market.'



































































































































About Norooz:

International Norooz Day was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution A/RES/64/253 of 2010, at the initiative of several countries that share this holiday (Afghanistan, Albania, Azerbaijan, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Turkmenistan.

Inscribed in 2009 on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as a cultural tradition observed by numerous peoples, Norooz is an ancestral festivity marking the first day of spring and the renewal of nature. It promotes values of peace and solidarity between generations and within families as well as reconciliation and neighbourliness, thus contributing to cultural diversity and friendship among peoples and different communities.



Iranian women playing daf in shopping mall welcoming Norooz
A Communication team member of the opposition National Democratic Congress [NDC] in the Ashanti Region, Kwaku Asafo Agyei has described members of the ruling New Patriotic Party [NPP] as liars.



According to him, the fiscal stature of the Ghanaian economy tells the caliber of leaders we have voted into power.



This shows their words during the 2016 general elections especially their promises were just talks to win power, but not critically analyzed to be implemented when they are voted for, he said.



Speaking to UTVs late news bulletin on former President Mahamas call for a stakeholder forum to save the economy, the NDC communicator said that will be the best decision to hold the leaking and hard economic conditions instituted by President Akufo-Addo and his most intelligent Vice-President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.



He mentioned that his advice to Dr. Bawumia who believes himself to be the best economist is to put proper structures in place to stabilize the economic conditions than wanting to use approaches in text books to manage the economy.



Indeed text book theory used by the Vice-President on economic analysis is totally different from the actual practicalities on the ground . . . I am also telling him today that he can also engage in making all the noise and lectures, but the exchange rate will expose him if he manages the economy with text books knowledge, he said on UTV.





Source: Elizabeth Semiheva Bedi/Peacefmonline.com









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Ghana and Ivory Coast have registered their displeasure against attempts by some major stakeholders in the global cocoa industry to impose certain standards on farmers in West Africa which will render them jobless if implemented finally.



At a press conference on Wednesday in Abidjan, Joseph Boahen Aidoo, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Cocoa Board and Yves Brahima Kone, Director General of the Cocoa-Coffee Board, said some aspects of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) 34101 Standards on Sustainable and Traceable cocoa, which were currently being voted on for acceptance by all cocoa producers and farmers worldwide, were hugely skewed in favour of some members of cocoa buyers in the European Unions Committee for Standardization.



Voting started on 8th March, this year, and is expected to end on 20th March, this year to set the tone for the global cocoa industry and determine either gains or losses for farmers whose livelihoods mainly depend on cocoa.



Standards



The standards are captured into four (4) parts namely part 1: which encompasses requirements for sustainability management systems; part 2: which talks about requirements for performance (related to economic, social and environmental aspects); part 3: which concerns requirements for traceability and part 4: which addresses requirements for certification schemes.



Collaboration



He said Ghana and Cote dIvoire were working on reviewing the new standards because the moment we sign these, they become obligatory and our members have to comply. This is the time we have to change aspects that would be harmful to our farmers and ourselves.



Trouble for smallholder farmers



There is an aspect which says that the farmer has to develop a cocoa farm development plan and then have an audit structure. So every year, that plan will be audited and then certain standards the farmer has to meet will be audited. Once the farmer fails, it means that farmer cannot be registered for that year for his cocoa to be bought. So there are so many aspects of the ISO 34101 that we think look inimical. They do not serve the interest of our farmers and must be given a second look.



Bidding for farmers



Mr. Boahen Aidoo said Ghana and Ivory Coast wanted to prove to the world that the upcoming ISO standards on cocoa certification and traceability would not augur well for farmers.



In an interview with DAILY GUIDE, the COCOBOD CEO stated that essentially, these have been crafted in such a way that they import a lot of burden on our cocoa farmers, in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Nigeria. These target smallholder farmers and as I said we are dealing with a very sophisticated market. The people who crafted the standards basically are from the European Union (CEN) committee for standardization. They crafted these and sent them to the international standards organisation (ISO). They did it just to suit the taste of the European Union and carry the concerns of the EU.



Now when we look at the whole thing, eventually when it is implemented, our farmers will be worse off, because there are a lot of things that will restrain our farmers even from farming. So those provisions ought to be changed.



Freeze



In this regard, they asserted that the application of the said ISO 34101 series in Cote dIvoire and Ghana had been put on hold to enable the two countries to complete their work.



Joint declaration



A joint declaration read by Mr Aidoo and Mr Kone emphasised that they were cognizant of the fact that at the conclusion of the development of the standards, the majority of member countries of the ISO voted for the publication of Parts 1, 2 and 3, whilst the majority of member countries of the CEN, in clear disagreement, voted against the publication of parts 1 and 2.



They also said they were mindful of the fact that the vote on part 4 is ongoing; conscious of the failure to reach consensus among the stakeholders in the cocoa value chain in approving the contents of the ISO 34101 series, it is hereby declared that Cote dIvoire and Ghana, through Le Conseil du Cafe-Cacao and Ghana Cocoa Board, have agreed to take into consideration certain aspects of the ISO Standards that are appropriate to the two countries and make the necessary improvements to address the interests and concerns of all stakeholders in the cocoa sector.



The two organizations furthermore declared that they have recognized the general interest in the production of sustainable and traceable cocoa in the cocoa value chain; taken note of the paramount importance placed on quality, sustainability and traceability in the value chain; and were cognizant of the fact that the international cocoa prices did not take into account the massive efforts required from cocoa farmers in complying with the strict demands of consumers in the production of sustainable and traceable cocoa.

Source: Daily Guide









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The Metropolitan Archbishop of Cape Coast, Most Rev Gabriel Palmer Buckle has called for a non-partisan, radical and revolutionary review of our educational system and its content to ensure products were useful to the nations socio-economic agenda and future aspirations.



He further called for an assessment of the competence of the nations teaching force and how they understand what skills todays world demands of them and their pupils and students.



I believe this is not the time to indulge in lamentations or seeking to blame someone else. It is just high time we took the bull by the horns, firmly and dispassionately, he said adding that our times call for re-tooling our educational system delivery.



73 years



Most Rev Palmer Buckle was speaking at the 73rd Speech and Prize Giving day of the Holy Child School in Cape Coast over the weekend.



It was on the theme "Enhancing a Holistic Approach to the Education of the Girl child.



He said he was happy there had been a call for the country to take a good second look at our education delivery, its set up goals and to question the outcomes of our formation programmes in the past few weeks.



Like the legendary Rip van Winkle, I guess we are now waking up from our deep slumber (not to say stupor) and self-complacency, he stated.



No excellence drive



Most Rev Palmer Buckle noted that our educational system was not producing in our students and graduates the needed drive for excellence in every endeavor be it academic, scientific, technological, industrial, ethical or moral, social or cultural and physical among others.



He said the dearth for the drive for excellence in our graduates is an indictment on all of us who are stakeholders and even shareholders and co-operators or collaborators in the education enterprise in Ghana.



He urged the students not to be satisfied but to strive for higher heights to be able to contribute to their families and society.



The Deputy Minister for Energy, Dr Mohammed Amin Adam who was the guest of honour for the occasion said the government was committed to ensuring that poverty did not deprive young Ghanaians of the right to education.



He said the free Senior High School policy and the increase in the capitation grant were some of the policies to ensure universal access to education.



He commended the school for effort at adopting renewable energy saying it was the way to go to ensure judicious expenditure on energy use and sustainable supply.



He said a mix in the energy generation was needed to ensure security and sustainability in the countrys energy supply and to achieve universal access target.



He said the ministry was targeting rooftop solar system for public buildings including for schools, hospitals, security facilities and all other public facilities to reduce the financial burden on government.



Successes and challenges



The Headmistress of the School, Rev Sr Josephine Anto said the school continued to make meaning strides in the academics and in other extra curricula activities.



She called for the completion of rehabilitation and expansion works started three years ago on the schools dining hall and the upgrading of the schools science laboratory multipurpose building.



Rev Sr Anto also called for more staff bungalows and a means of transport.



The Executive Director of the National Road Safety Commission and an old student. Madam May Obiri Yeboah who was the guest speaker called on school authorities to teach human values and social skills while encouraging creativity.



The 1994/1996 year group with support from other year groups handed over a 550,000 solar electrification project to the school.

Source: Daily Graphic









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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has sanctioned three officers stationed at the Ghana Mission in New York in the US, for misappropriating funds.



Their actions caused a revenue loss of over two thousand dollars to the Consulate.



According to the sector Minister, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway, the officials were cited for fraudulent behaviour by a four-man disciplinary committee.



Responding to questions on the floor of Parliament, Shirley Ayorkor Botchway said the officers had been suspended without salary for between two to six months, and they had been asked to refund the amount in question.



The three officers were also made to refund the misappropriated funds and they did not receive salaries for the period of their suspension. This decision was also based on the fact that the evidence was circumstantial in nature.



A repeat of events?



There have been reports of Ghanaian diplomats being involved in similar cases.



A former Accounting Officer at Ghanas mission in Lusaka, Zambia was recently captured in the Auditor-Generals report as having misappropriated an amount of US$160,640.00 and 29,332.00, the cedi equivalent of GH723,425.06, contrary to Regulation 2 of Financial Administration Regulation, 2004 L.I.1802.



He is expected to cough up an amount of GHc1, 191,481.08 which comprises an amount of over GHc720,000 belonging to the mission he allegedly misappropriated as well as GHc468,000 in surcharge.



Ghana mission in Angola: Accounting Officer embezzles 64,655.00 and US$87,534.00



The audit report also revealed that Ghana lost an equivalent to GH531,616.75 allegedly embezzled by a former Accounting Officer of the countrys mission in Luanda, Angola.



We noted during the audit of the accounts of Ghana Mission in Luanda, Angola, for the period June 2012 to 31 December 2014 that Mr. King Pratt Ainooson, the Accounting Officer of the Mission, embezzled 64,655.00 and US$87,534.00, equivalent to GH531,616.75 contrary to Regulation 2 of Financial Administration Regulation, 2004, L.I. 1802.



The audit report said Mr. Pratt admitted the offence and signed an undertaking on 9 December 2014 to refund the embezzled amount in monthly installments of 3,500.00. 13.



The Auditor General disallowed GH531,616.75 being the principal amount embezzled and in addition, he was surcharged GH343,956.04 bringing the total amount for a refund to GH875,572.79, the audit report added.

Source: citi









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Somalia's foreign ministry has condemned the "brutal terrorist attack" at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.



It called the two shootings "a heinous cowardly crime requiring a unified Islamic and international stand".



President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo tweeted that "We stand in solidarity with the New Zealand government and the Muslim community".



"We must unite to defeat the evil of terror in all its forms," he added.



Police say 49 people have been killed and at least 20 seriously wounded.



There are unconfirmed reports that some members of the Somali community in the city are among the victims.



A gunman identifying himself as an Australian live-streamed the rampage at Al Noor mosque to Facebook. He had espoused racist, anti-immigrant views.



Police say a man in his late 20s has been arrested and charged with murder.

Source: BBC









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After a building collapsed in the Nigerian city of Lagos, killing at least 11 people, including several schoolchildren attending a school on the building's top floor, we look at some reasons why such tragedies seem to occur so often in some African countries.



While investigations are still underway into the cause of this collapse, engineers have told us some common problems.



1. The foundations are too weak



Adequate foundations can be costly.



They can cost up to half the price of a building, professor of civil engineering Anthony Ede at Covenant University in Ota, Nigeria said in 2016.



He said two things should be considered when building the foundations - the solidity of the soil and the heaviness of the building and its contents.



In Lagos, the swampy ground requires strong foundations. Far stronger than solid ground.



But he said developers save money that should be spent on foundations when building on the city's swampy ground and many buildings had collapsed in the city as a result.



Even on solid ground, foundations need to be strong enough for the load.



Inadequate foundations for a four-storey building was one of three reasons given by investigators for a building collapsing in northern Rwanda in 2013, killing six people.



2. The building materials aren't strong enough



Materials that just aren't strong enough to withhold the load are sometimes used, Hermogene Nsengimana from the African Organization for Standardisation said in 2016, as its organisation met in Nairobi to discuss why so many African buildings collapse.



He suggested there was a market for counterfeit materials - going as far as to say that sometimes scrap metal is used instead of steel.



When a six-storey building in Uganda's capital Kampala collapsed in April 2016, the director of the city authority suggested it had been constructed with counterfeit materials, reported Ugo news site.



Mr Nsengimana said there were even cases of counterfeiters faking authentification certificates.



But he suggested contractors also knowingly use the incorrect materials to cut costs.



So they may use concrete intended to bear the load of a one-storey building in a four-storey building.



Mr Ede added that this was something regulators were not policing.



3. Workers make mistakes



Even when workers are given the right materials to make the concrete, they might mix them incorrectly, said Mr Ede.



This results in concrete which is not of the sufficient strength to hold the load.



He accused developers of cutting costs by employing unskilled workers who are cheaper than trained builders.



This was one of the reasons put forward by civil engineers Henry Mwanaki Alinaitwe and Stephen Ekolu to explain why a building in Uganda collapsed in 2004.



Their research showed that the workers misunderstood the mixing ratios of the concrete.



It suggested that people used wheelbarrows instead of measuring gauges to measure cement.



The five-storey BBJ new hotel collapsed in construction and 11 people died.



"You find bricklayers and even technicians calling themselves engineers," cautioned the president of the Nigerian Institution of Structural Engineers Oreoluwa Fadayomi in Nigeria's The Punch news site.



To those who want to save money on professionals, he advised: "One should not be penny wise and pound foolish".



4. The load is heavier than expected



Mr Ede said a building collapses when the load is beyond the strength of the building.



He gave the example of asking a baby to carry a heavy box: "The baby will not be able to withhold the strain."



Even if the foundations and the materials are strong enough for what they were originally built for, that purpose may change.



So, Mr Ede said, if a building was designed to be a home and is then turned into a library where boxes and boxes of books are piled up, the building may strain under the weight.



He said another reason why the load was often heavier than the original design was because extra storeys are added.



In March 2016, an upmarket apartment block which had more storeys than planned collapsed in Lagos, killing 34 people the Guardian reported.



This came two years after a church accommodation for the famous preacher TB Joshua collapsed, also, authorities said, because it had more floors than it could hold. In that case more than 100 people lost their lives.



5. The strength isn't tested



At all points of construction the strength of the building should be tested, said Mr Ede.



"You have to be strict," he said, about policing building.



"The law says you must test. It's the enforcement of the law which is the problem," he said.



That's a big problem, he said, when at every stage of construction there is someone with a strong motivation to save money or take money.



There are many physical reasons a building can collapse but only one driving motivation for that to happen said Mr Ede. That's money.



And for him this is the real reason buildings collapse - corruption.



The story doesn't end there.



Just because unsafe buildings are constructed, it doesn't mean anyone has to die - the buildings can be knocked down.



And that is what does happen next.



But things go wrong in those situations too, leading to the loss of life.



6. People stay in condemned buildings



In the case of the building that collapsed on Wednesday, the building had been condemned as unsafe in 2017 and marked for demolition.



Given this, a key question being asked about the tragedy is: Why was there a school in the building?



The Lagos State Building Control Agency said in a statement that it was marked as distressed in 2017, and had remained empty but then "the recalcitrant owner renovated the building with gravel as granite without carrying out a thorough engineering appraisal and integrity test on the structure and let it out for use".



It was a four-storey, multi-purpose building with a primary school on the top floor.



One reason why residents didn't listen to the Lagos State government order was given by engineer Felicia Nnenna Agubata.



She told the BBC's Newsday programme that building inspectors were not backed up by security officers who can enforce evacuations.



So they can ask nicely, but those requests are often ignored.

Source: BBC









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Out of courtesy, former President Mahama, should have addressed the family of the late Dr. Kwabena Adjei with respect, the Ashanti Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party has advised.



Mr. Bernard Antwi-Boasiako, questioned Mr. Mahama for gesturing with his left hand whilst his right hand stayed in his pocket when he addressed the family of his late Chairman.



The NPP Chairman explained that the disrepectful behaviour of Mr. Mahama led him to opposition and instead of working on his weakness, he has decided not to improve on it. According to Mr. Antwi-Boasiako popularly known as Chairman Wontumi, it was totally wrong in the Ghanaian culture for anybody to address the elderly with the left hand.



He stated that even if the former President had unresolved issues with his former Chairman, he shouldnt have done what he did by disrespecting his family.



We all know Mahama didnt like his former Chairman and went as far as using state resources to support other candidates to unseat Dr. Adjei. He is gone and instead of showing some form of remorse, you go there and pocket and throw your left hand about like a 4 year old boy who has no training.



Chairman Wontumi continued that : By your gesture, you have made it clear that you dont even have the proper training at home yet you want to lead us as a country again. What moral does he want to teach the young ones? If the video wasnt available he would have sent his lying brigade to come out and say he didnt use his left hand to address the family of the late Dr. Kwabena Adjei or say it was doctored, he said.



VIDEO below









Former President John Dramani Mahama has asked the party to work hard and win the 2020 elections to honour their fallen former National Chairman, Dr. Kwabena Adjei.



Eulogizing the former Chairman when he visited his home, he said Dr. Kwabena Adjei has done a lot for the party especially when during his tenure as Chairman he led the party to victory in the 2008 General Elections.



"So it will only be proper for us as a party to work hard to secure victory for the party come 2020," he said.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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Organizers of the 2019 Vodafone Ghana Music Awards have reportedly introduced a new category that has become a topic of the day.



This year marks the 20th edition of the VGMA, powered by Charterhouse Ghana and sponsored by Vodafone Ghana.



A new category called the "Joking Artistes of the Year" has been introduced with the nominees being "Ghana 2 Pac, Wee Teacher and Akuapem Polo".



Wee Teacher has been professing his undying love for marijuana whereas Akuapem Polo and Ghana 2 Pac are thought of by many Ghanaians as funny characters.



Another category that is also courting controversy is the Highlife Song of the Year.



In this category, Dancehall artiste Shatta Wale has been nominated with his song "My Level" listed among songs like "Thunder" by Kidi, "Killing Me Softly" by Adina, "CCTV" by King Promise, "Wish Me Well" by Kuami Eugene and Kwesi Arthur's song "Woara" among others.



The Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (VGMA) is a serious brand that needs to be taken seriously. It is one of the most respected awards schemes in Ghana and Africa at large.



VGMA is not to reduce its standards, however, could one say by the introduction of the Joking Artiste of the Year category, this year's VGMA has defeated its purpose?



Meanwhile, speaking in an interview on Okay FM's Drive time, Head of Communication at Charter House, George Quaye has denied knowledge of the new category, stating emphatically that the Board has not introduced any category called "Joking Artistes of the Year".









Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

The White House has proposed a budget of nearly $720 billion for the Pentagon for fiscal 2020, adding $33 billion to counter military expansion by China and Russia, take on some "rogue states" and fight the Islamic State terror group.

It is not unusual that the US has been specific in targeting China and Russia. Washington has released several core reports in recent years, including the US National Security Strategy (NSS), National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review and Missile Defense Review, underscoring the so-called China and Russia threats and a new chapter in competition among great powers.

As a guiding document for US defense, the NSS, published in December 2017, has regarded China and Russia as the main security threats. Following the NSS' lead, Washington's concentrated fire on Beijing and Moscow has become an inexorable trend.

It is crystal clear that US President Donald Trump is relying on military spending in a bid to play the big power game, especially with China and Russia.

Last December, Trump proposed to cut US defense spending, tweeting "The US spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!" He also called for China's and Russia's moves to "start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race." But the defense budget for fiscal 2020, the highest ever in US history, seems even crazier.

Notwithstanding the inconsistency in Trump's words, his basic thinking of defense is relatively consistent. Different from former US president Barack Obama, Trump has always emphasized "America First" and "securing peace through strength."

That his fundamental idea has never changed is backed by various examples such as the sharply increasing military expenditure, and renaming of the US' oldest and largest military command  the Pacific Command  to Indo-Pacific Command.

Washington often has excuses to accuse others of posing so-called security threats. The US' concerns about Russia lie in both hard and soft power. Russia, which possesses a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles, is trying to develop supersonic equipment and other weapons systems. In addition, Washington has claimed that Russia not only interfered in US domestic politics by meddling in elections, but also threatened its neighboring countries' territorial integrity and challenged the international order.

Beijing is also deemed as Washington's target. But it should be made clear that China has no intention of threatening other countries. On the contrary, it is the US that has always maintained an aggressive and confrontational approach to deal with international relations. Washington has neglected the basic consensus and tacit understanding with Beijing on the South China Sea issue and the Taiwan question. The US is also making an issue of the Tibet question.

According to statistics from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, the US military expenditure in 2018 reached $643 billion, nearly four times second-ranking China ($168.2 billion) and 10 times Russia ($63.1 billion). Washington has regarded Beijing and Moscow as political and military targets, betraying its strategic anxiety and overreaction.

China just announced its military budget outlay for 2019 at $177.6 billion with a growth rate of 7.5 percent, much lower than the 8.1 percent in 2018. It also marks the fourth consecutive year in which China's defense budget registered a single-digit increase.

There is still a wide gap between Beijing and Washington with regard to both military spending and equipment. Hence the so-called China threat theory is totally groundless.

Regardless of rivalry and differences between the major powers, common interests in regional security and global issues are paramount. But Washington's doctrines of "America First" and "Make America Great Again" have overlooked common interests and reduced the possibility of cooperation.

If the US continues to be hostile, the "China and Russia threat" theory inside Washington may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which will be extremely harmful to itself.

The author is the director for Strategic Studies Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Oregon State University will host the first Phish Studies academic conference in Corvallis, Oregon on May 17-19, 2019. The conference will showcase research about Phish, its fans, and culture. A wide variety of disciplinary approaches will be represented, featuring scholars from across the country.

Registration is open and a tentative list of presentations is available now. Stay tuned for announcements about schedule details and special guests.

There are a number of ways that you can support the conference and growing field of Phish Studies:

 2019 Ryan Kerrigan

Register ASAP: Are you presenting? Attending the event as an audience member? Register now. Organizing an academic conference takes an enormous about of time, effort, and money. Early participant registration is essential for the planning and budgeting of a successful event. You can also take advantage of the early bird registration rate.

Participate in the Exhibition Fair: Are you an artist or business owner? Register as a vendor to display, promote, and sell your work in our Conference Exhibition Fair, located in the OSU Memorial Union, seconds away from the room in which presentations will take place.

Sponsor a conference event: You can promote your business and support Phish Studies scholarship by sponsoring an art exhibit, poster session, or reception at the conference.

Make a tax-deductible donation: If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to support the event and help create a registration scholarship fund for students and underemployed scholars, you may do so via the OSU Foundations website. The form is prepopulated with the information necessary for our staff to process and earmark your donation for the Phish Studies conference.

Spread the word: Share conference information on social media. Tell friends and colleagues who might be interested about the event. Help us identify potential sponsors.

This conference is the first of its kind. The event will offer unique scholarship, networking, and educational opportunities for participants. Some examples include:

Fan scholars will have the professional opportunity to combine their expertise in and passion for Phish.

Student scholars will receive professional mentoring and close-up encounters with faculty research.

Revised versions of selected presentations will be published in an edited volume following the conference.

The success of this first conference will legitimize the field of Phish Studies within academia and facilitate future growth in this new and exciting area of scholarship. With your help, the tree of knowledge in our souls will grow.
KAMPALA  The quest for Uganda to become the meetings capital of Africa has received a mark of approval from none, other than Africas 8th richest person  billionaire Mr. Strive Masiyiwa.

Mr. Masiyiwa, the Founder and Chairman of global telecommunications group Econet Wireless valued at $2.3 billion by Forbes, was visibly impressed by the expansive Speke Resort Munyonyo and the adjoining Commonwealth Resort said the place should be the official African Conference Centre.

Why dont we declare this venue; this site, the official African Conference Centre?, said Mr. Masiyiwa, amidst applause from guests attending the just ended #AfricaNow19 Summit at Munyonyo.

I go all over Africa to conferences and in big hotels and we go to the basements and we come to this amazing venuethank you very much for organizing it. I will come every year if you want, added an elated Masiyiwa, before a smiling President Yoweri Museveni and several other guests.

Under the theme, Towards a secure, integrated and growing Africa the Africa Now Conference 2019 attracted over 1,000 delegates that included among others, Presidents Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed of Somalia, William Simoei Ruto, the Vice President of Kenya and Samia Hassan Suluhu Vice President of Tanzania and Yoweri K. Museveni, of the Republic of Uganda who co-chaired a number of sessions.

Other high profile guests and speakers included Mr. Rob Shuter, CEO MTN Group, and Mr. Tony Elumelu, a Nigerian economist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

Built on an expansive 100 acres by the breezy shores of Lake Victoria, both Speke Resort Munyonyo and Commonwealth Resort, Munyonyo have 450 tastefully finished rooms and 25 international standard conference rooms.

Recently, Commonwealth Resort Munyonyo and Speke Resort Munyonyo won the coveted 2018 World Luxury Hotel Awards regional and country categories respectively.

Recently, the Ruparelia Group announced plans to construct a 5-star Speke Resort and Convention Centre, in Entebbe.

When it is completed, it will be a beautiful addition to the groups portfolio of luxury and budget hospitality facilities that include: Speke Resort and Conference Centre, Munyonyo Commonwealth Resort, Kabira Country Club, Speke Hotel, Dolphin Suites, Tourist Hotel, Forest Cottages, Speke Resort Bujagali Falls and the recently expanded Speke Apartments.

The group is Ugandas largest hotel chain.

Uganda which has seen a steady rise in tourist arrivals from 945,899 in 2010 to 1,322,522 in 2016 translating into a 107% increment in earnings, from $662 million to $1,371 million targets to earn US$2.7bn by 2020.

Among other tourism sub-sectors, Uganda is looking to become the meetings capital of Africa earning a chunk from the lucrative meetings, incentives, conferencing, and exhibitions (MICE) market, but is facing considerable competition from Kenya and most recently Rwanda.

The MICE industry, according to a global forecast by research firm, Allied Market Research, was valued at $752 billion in 2016, and is projected to reach $1,245 billion in 2023.

Recently, President Yoweri Museveni met Prof Klaus Martin Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and told him that Uganda was ready and willing to host the next World Economic Forum on Africa.

The last forum was held in South Africa and the 2020 version will be held in Ethiopia.

Ugandas hotel sector has recently seen a rise of new high end and mid-level facilities and according to Jean Byamugisha, the Executive Director at Uganda Hotel Owners Association (UHOA) by end of 2018, there was an estimated over 6,000 accommodation facilities in Uganda offering about 410,000 rooms and 487,000 beds.

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Rupee declines by 18 paise to close at 75.78 (provisional) against US dollar.
Rantoul, IL (61866)

Today

Rain showers early will evolve into a more steady rain for the afternoon. Thunder possible. High 57F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

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China will dispatch its seventh batch of 395 peacekeepers to Mali on a UN mission in mid- to late-May, CCTV News reported.

It will consist of a 170-person guard unit, 155 sappers and a medical unit of 70.

They will take on tasks such as repairing roads, bridges, and runways in mission areas, protect headquarters in war zones, and treat the sick and wounded.

The first batch of Chinese peacekeepers to Mali was officially formed in Harbin City, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province on July 12, 2013. China has so far dispatched 22,000 military personnel since it began taking part in UN peacekeeping operations in 1990.
By Fan Yongqiang and Mei Shixiong



Russian helicopters enter the exercise area for mobile defense after the start of the actual-combat phase of the Vostok-2018 strategic joint military exercise at the Tsugol training range in Russia's Trans-Baikal on September 13, 2018.

In the past few days, military deputies attending the Two Sessions remarked that in the new era the Chinese military are fulfilling its international obligations with an open, confident and transparent posture, which showcases Chinas willingness to shoulder the responsibility of a great power.

Building a new pattern of military diplomacy covering all spheres

China has always been a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and a defender of the international order. Chinas armed forces have always been a staunch force upholding world peace, said Major General Ci Guowei, Chief of the Office for International Military Cooperation (OIMC) of the Central Military Commission, as recently talking about the new look and new deed of Chinese military diplomacy in the new era. The word Stability has a rich connotation in Maj. Gen. Cis eyes, including :

---- Steady progress on military relations with great powers. Chinese and Russian military relations have continued to operate at a high-level, creating positive energy for maintaining world peace and regional stability. China and the US maintain overall stability in military relations. Chinese military has worked hard to make the relations between both sides a stabilizer for bilateral relations, following the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation.

----Stable military relations with neighboring countries. Focusing on building a community of peripheral destinies, China has established defense and security consultation mechanisms with 17 neighboring countries, and their strategic mutual trust has been continuously strengthened.

----Expanded relations with other developing countries while maintaining stability. China has strengthened military exchanges with developing countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific, and expanded bilateral military relations in various aspects. Quoting an ancient Chinese poem, A bosom friend afar brings a distant land near, Maj. Gen. Ci said: Chinas military diplomacy has been practicing a new security concept and continuously making contributions to promoting world peace and global development in order to build a community with a shared future for mankind.

Military diplomacy promotes combat effectiveness

Hou Shengliang, a professor at the Army Academy of Border and Coastal Defense, was impressed with the result of China-foreign joint exercises. According to the material he read, in 2018 alone, the Chinese military participated in more than 40 joint exercises with its foreign counterparts. The contribution of military diplomacy to combat effectiveness has increased significantly. For example, the Peace Mission-2018 joint anti-terrorism military exercise under the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has shown an important positive impact on regional stability. The China-Pakistan and China-Thailand joint exercises have achieved new breakthroughs in military strength. Last fall, the Vostok-2018 strategic military drills, which marked the largest joint military exercise abroad that the Chinese military has ever participated, fully presented the effectiveness of Chinas deepening national defense and military reforms.

Military diplomacy must facilitate the boost in military combat effectiveness, said Maj. Gen. Ci. He stated that in the new era, the Chinese military has mindfully planned joint exercises, training and competitions, including the China-ASEAN joint maritime exercise 2018, the US-China Disaster Management Exchange 2018, the Shaheen-VII China-Pakistan joint air exercise, and the International Army Games (IAG). The actual combat capability is highlighted in terms of the theme setting, subject content, and training methods, he added.

Providing public safety products for the international community

Liu Shilei, a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences of the Chinese PLA, who has participated in many international humanitarian rescue missions, said: The development of the Chinese military is not only a responsibility for itself but also for the world.

With the increasing capabilities of the Chinese military, our international security responsibilities increase correspondingly. Maj. Gen. Ci told reporters that in recent years, the Chinese military has actively participated in such operations as international peacekeeping, maritime escort and humanitarian relief, and offered more and more international public security products. China supports UN peacekeeping operations and has been actively participating in 24 UN peacekeeping operations involving over 39,000 peacekeeping military personnel. It has been lauded by the United Nations as a critical factor and key force of peacekeeping operations. Since December 2008, the PLA has sent naval taskforces to the Gulf of Aden and the Somali waters to carry out regular escort operations, providing safety protection for more than 6,600 Chinese and foreign ships in 10 years. Chinese PLA Navys hospital ship Peace Ark (Hull 866) has visited 43 countries, and provided free medical service to more than 230,000 people, since its commission to the PLA Navy a decade ago.

Maj. Gen. Ci said, This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. The Chinese PLA will continue to actively carry out international military exchanges and cooperations, work together with others to address global security challenges and strive to play a positive role in promoting world peace, stability and prosperity.
A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
A spokesman for United States Border Patrol said agents arrested about 52 migrants on Thursday after the group pushed their way through a border fence at Playas de Tijuana and tried running north into the United States.

A group of about 60 people gathered late Thursday afternoon near a broken piece of border fence in Playas de Tijuana, he said.

Border Patrol spokesman Theron Francisco said about half of the group forced their way through the barrier and began running north at about 4:10 p.m. Thursday afternoon into the United States.

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Video shot from the Mexican side shows the group squeezing through metal pillars on the Mexican side and then climbing through a broken piece of metal fencing on the U.S. side.

In the video, the migrants can be seen running north along the sandy coastline toward Imperial Beach, some of them carrying small children in their arms.

Francisco said as a nearby agent responded to the initial group running north, the rest of the group on the Mexico side also pushed through the fence.

Once the agent vacated their position in pursuit, the remaining individuals forced their way through the same border barrier breach and began running north, said Francisco, in a written statement.

More agents responded. Many from the group were apprehended about 200 yards from the border fence on the U.S. side.

The group included 23 men, between the ages of 18 to 53. There were also 12 women aged 21 to 50 and 17 minors between the ages of 1 and 14 years old, Francisco said.

Several of the people told the Union-Tribune they were mostly from Honduras and came to Tijuana in a caravan.

Francisco said agents continue to search the area for additional subjects of interest.

He said the 52 people detained yesterday were transported to a nearby Border Patrol station for identification and processing.
By Huang Yue and Cheng Zhuo

BEIJING, Mar. 14 (ChinaMil) -- The Information Office of Chinas State Council published a report titled Human Rights Record of the United States in 2018 on Thursday. According to the report, the US shirked international responsibilities, unscrupulously carried out unilateral America First policies, constantly played the retreat drama, bullied the weak, and caused human rights disasters in its overseas military operations. The US has become a troublemaker that has drawn the universal condemnation.

The report noted that despite years of strong condemnation and appeal from the international community, the United States decided to break its promise and continue to run the notorious Guantanamo military prison in Cuba. Most of the prisoners there have not been tried. Los Angeles Times reported on its website on July 26, 2018 that a Pakistani, being mistaken for an extremist, had been imprisoned and repeatedly tortured in Guantanamo for as long as 14 years without trial, suffering serious physical and mental damage.

The report citing United Nations statistics said that the number of civilian casualties caused by US air strikes in Afghanistan during the first nine months of 2018 was higher than any year since 2009.

The report pointed out that, according to a CNN report on April 14, 2018, the US and its allies launched the air strike against Syria, in the name of destroying Syrian chemical weapon facilities, without concrete evidence and UN Security Council authorization.

Quoting the Associated Press on Nov. 14, 2018, the report highlighted the large number of civilian casualties caused by the drone war waged by the US in Yemen for 16 years. In a single drone strike in 2018 alone, at least 30 of the dead were civilians. Statistics also showed that the US had launched 176 drone strikes in 2017 and 2018, leading to 205 deaths. Chris Murphy, a US senator, said The US-backed war has made Yemen a hell on earth. There is a US imprint on each of these civilian deaths.

The report marked that the US brazenly announced its withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council. Human rights experts said that the most insidious intention of the US move was to protect itself from allegations of human-rights abuses.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) recently called for the breakup of Amazon, Google and Facebook. Warren thinks the tech companies have too much power over U.S. democracy and use private user information for profit. Warren also alleged that the three companies had bulldozed competition.

Question: Are Amazon, Google and Facebook limiting competition, as Warren suggests?

Phil Blair, Manpower

NO: Not yet. There is a fine line between being the first out of the box with an exciting new idea or concept, capitalizing on it and growing quickly. But there comes a time when society becomes dependent on that product or concept and it stifles competition. We are not at that point yet with these companies but are getting very close. Just like Standard Oil in 1911 when it was determined to be a monopoly the Supreme Court demanded that it be broken up into separate, competing companies. Or, fast forward to the 21st century with technology moving as fast as it is, we may see the demise of A,G and F by newer and more exciting concepts. Only time will tell.

Kelly Cunningham, San Diego Institute for Economic Research

NO: Those private companies do not have coercive, monopolistic power forcing consumers who voluntarily choose to use their services. History is literally littered with obsolete companies replaced by better, newer, more innovative businesses rising, just as those three companies arose and replaced major businesses before them. (Where are Sears, Blockbuster, MySpace now?) Big companies may want to limit their competition, but the last thing we need is government stepping in to entrench and stagnate business innovation.

David Ely, San Diego State University

YES: The tech giants have a large share of online shopping, searches, and/or ad revenue. The volume of personal data they have accumulated on their customers gives them dominant positions in their respective markets, making entry by potential rivals difficult. However, any remedies must be carefully chosen to foster competition without destroying the value of the platforms. Warrens proposed remedy of breaking up the companies risks making the platforms less valuable to users.

Gina Champion-Cain, American National Investments

Not participating this week.

Alan Gin, University of San Diego

NO: The companies are powerful, but economic forces led to that situation. Amazon and Facebook benefit from network externalities, where the value of their product increases as more people use it. This in turn causes more people to use it, and the cycle continued until they reached their current dominant state. Google had competition, but reached its current state by offering a good product. But there are limits to these companies power, as Facebooks loss of 15 million users in the U.S. last year indicated.

James Hamilton, UC San Diego

NO: Amazon is bringing prices down and convenience up, Google is providing information that helps everybody, and Facebook is losing users by the minute. It is true that these companies have a lot of power, but that can serve as a counterbalance to the power of the government. My worry is that if these companies and technology come under government control, well never get our freedom back. Ironically, thats a potential danger of Senator Warrens agenda.

Gary London, London Moeder Advisors

YES: Facebook, absolutely. But the other two are basically utilities that have become the support system for everyday life. Google didnt force Yahoo out of business. Their platform was superior. The angst about Amazon reminds me of the old and mostly incorrect Walmart will destroy your town pushback. Rather than worry about bulldozing the competition, these companies are now adorned with bullseyes and will be targeted by those with the next, big thing.

Norm Miller, University of San Diego

NO: All firms try and beat their competition as they should. Sometimes they create new industries, or displace traditional vendors just as the GPS on your phone displaced Garmin, Uber displaced Taxis, and Google Search displaced encyclopedias, but I would not define this as anti-competitive even when highly successful. We are so lucky that these three companies started here in the U.S. so that most of the jobs created are here, versus some other country, and this will continue if we don't penalize success.

Jamie Moraga, IntelliSolutions

NO: For more than 100 years, antitrust laws have had the same basic objective: to protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, making sure there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up. Warrens comments are campaign rhetoric and a push for bigger government. These companies have a competitive advantage but are not monopolies. Let capitalism and the existing laws work.

Austin Neudecker, Rev

YES: The FAANG companies are victims of their own success. They created superior products and business models to the previous market leaders and wield substantial power in their respective spaces to stifle competition. Consumers love these companies because they provide great services, but do not understand the extent of information they collect and under what conditions they sell or share data with third parties. Legislation lags behind innovation, which leaves consumers vulnerable to the whims of these companies.

Bob Rauch, R.A. Rauch & Associates

NO: We must avoid politicizing antitrust enforcement or making decisions based on ideology. Instead, we should review previous deals and see if there is any economic evidence that those deals harmed the public. The FTC, as part of a current review, has signaled that it would go back and review past mergers in the digital space. Let's not jump to conclusions.

Lynn Reaser, Point Loma Nazarene University

NO: Amazon, Google, and Facebook may have changed its character, but competition remains intense. The rivalry among the three could not be more intense. Their size may also be limiting their flexibility. New entrepreneurs continue to sprout up to challenge them in various niches. Older brick and mortar firms, such as Walmart and Kroger, because of their experience, are challenging them in groceries. Finally, technological change will keep their space competitive.

Chris Van Gorder, Scripps Health

NO: Elizabeth Warren is just staking out her position for political reasons. In reality, the development of these companies has spawned growth in the tech industry and led to the launch of many new companies. But I do think antitrust laws must be updated because they dont work well now. One of the best examples is the permitting of health insurance company consolidation while rejecting hospital and health system consolidation, creating significant leverage imbalance between the two industries.

Have an idea for an EconoMeter question? Email me at phillip.molnar@sduniontribune.com.

Follow me on Twitter: @PhillipMolnar
Facebook Inc.s top executive in charge of all products, Chris Cox, the longtime confidant of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, is leaving the company. Its the highest-level departure at the social media giant amid nearly two years of sustained crises.

Coxs unexpected departure, which he and Zuckerberg announced in separate Facebook posts Thursday, comes months after Cox was promoted in a major reorganization. Last May, Cox was put in charge of Facebooks family of apps, including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Facebook itself  which together have more than 2.7 billion users worldwide. These apps have been distinct until recently, when Zuckerberg announced plans to unify them under a banner of privacy.

Chris Daniels  an executive who ran Internet.org, the companys philanthropic project to promote global internet access, and was recently promoted to lead WhatsApp  is leaving as well, Zuckerberg said.

Facebook will not appoint a direct replacement for Cox; rather, the leaders of each app will report to Zuckerberg. Longtime Facebook executive Will Cathcart will head WhatsApp.

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It is with great sadness I share with you that after thirteen years, Ive decided to leave the company, Cox wrote in his post. Since I was twenty-three, Ive poured myself into these walls. This place will forever be a part of me. Cox didnt offer any explanation for his departure.

In his blog post, Zuckerberg said that Cox had told him that he planned to move on several years ago, but that Cox decided to hold off on leaving until the company made more progress combating misinformation and Russian meddling  controversies that erupted in the wake of the 2016 presidential election.

We have made real progress on many issues and we have a clear plan for our apps, Zuckerberg said in his post. As we embark on this next major chapter, Chris has decided now is the time to step back from leading these teams.

Cox, who dropped out of a Stanford University graduate program to work with Zuckerberg when the company had just 15 engineers, was widely seen as one of Facebooks most popular and capable executives  and a potential replacement CEO, were Zuckerberg to leave. (Zuckerberg has said he has no plans to exit.)

Perhaps more than anyone else at Facebook, even more than Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Cox was a sounding board for Zuckerberg on product ideas. He launched Facebooks flagship scrolling news feed nearly a decade ago and ran human resources before he was promoted to run the Facebook app in 2014.

The announcements of Coxs and Daniels exits come during a bumpy week for Facebook.

On Wednesday morning a global outage hit its services. Facebook announced Wednesday night that Instagram was back in service, and Thursday morning  about 24 hours after the problem began  it said that the issue had been caused by a server configuration change and that its systems were recovering.

During the outage, Facebook product director Rob Leathern said on Twitter that people were also unable to access the social networks ad interfaces, which may exacerbate any lost revenue. The company also raised the possibility of issuing refunds to advertisers.

Compounding Facebooks woes was a report about a federal criminal investigation into the company. The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, reported late Wednesday that a grand jury had issued subpoenas as part of an investigation into Facebooks data-sharing deals.

In addition to facing multiple federal investigations over data privacy, Facebook is experiencing stagnating user growth in its most lucrative markets and a record-low reputation with the public.

Facebook stock fell 1.8% to close at $170.17 a share Thursday. After the executive departures were announced, the shares declined 1.7% in after-hours trading.

The Associated Press was used in compiling this report.
San Diegos second miniature Target is now open for business at 3029 University Avenue in North Park.

The small-format store is part of the retailers big push into urban neighborhoods  and onto college campuses  where its full-format locations wont fit. The new Target location takes up 35,200 square feet, or around 100,000 square feet less than the retailers big boxes.

The North Park Target, which replaced the former Wangs restaurant, quietly greeted its first customers on Wednesday, and will celebrate its grand opening on Sunday. The stores product selection is said to be tailored to neighborhood residents and includes a specialized collection of baby apparel, health and beauty items, and home essentials.

The venue also features a CVS Pharmacy, as well as ChargeItSpot kiosks for guests who need to power up their mobile devices (at no cost) while visiting.

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In San Diego County, Target now operates 24 stores and employs more than 4,000 people. The brand, which opened its first small-format San Diego store in South Park in 2015, plans to expand locally with three more mini stores in Ocean Beach, Spring Valley and on UC San Diegos campus.

Target North Park is open 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays and Sundays; its open 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturdays.

Business

jennifer.vangrove@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1840 Twitter: @jbruin
A San Diego federal jury on Friday found that certain Apple iPhones infringe on three Qualcomm non-standard essential patents and awarded the chipmaker $31 million in damages.

The jury reached a verdict after an eight-day trial in San Diego federal court before U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw. The patents centered on power saving techniques in transmissions between processors, ways to link to the Internet faster after boot up and low power graphics rendering in smartphones.

The award for infringing on three patents amounted to $1.41 per iPhone sold between July 2017, when Qualcomm filed the lawsuit, to today.

While the damages arent huge, the infringement verdict for Qualcomm involving non-essential patents could play a role in the wider dispute between the two companies.

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In other lawsuits, Apple contends Qualcomm has concocted a scheme that allows it to overcharge for its standard essential patents.

Related: Judge says Qualcomm cant seek billions in refunds from Apple for aiding regulators

But Apple has largely ignored or put little value on Qualcomms non-standard essential patents  which make up about two-thirds of the 130,000 patents in its intellectual property portfolio.

Qualcomm licenses patents on a portfolio basis, not individually. Smartphone makers pay 3.25 percent of the wholesale price of the device to license only standard essential patents, and 5 percent of the device price to license both standard essential and non-essential patents. There is a $400 cap  so the maximum device makers would pay for a full portfolio license is $20 per phone.

Standard essential patents center on technologies that have been adopted by the wireless industry to ensure devices from different manufacturers communicate with each other. For example, technologies that enable a text message sent from an iPhone can be read on an Android device.

There are limits on remedies for infringement of standard-essential patents since they must be used.

Non-essential patents arent required to be used in devices. They theoretically can be designed around by engineers to avoid infringement. But if infringement is found, there are fewer limits on damages.

Don Rosenberg, Qualcomms general counsel, said the unanimous verdict holds Apple accountable for using the San Diego companys inventions without paying for them.

The three patents found to be infringed in this case represent a small fraction of Qualcomms portfolio of tens of thousands of patents, Rosenberg said.

An Apple spokesperson thanked the jury but said the company was disappointed by the verdict.

Qualcomms ongoing campaign of patent infringement claims is nothing more than an attempt to distract from the larger issues they face with investigations into their business practices in U.S. federal court and around the world.

In the patent trial, Qualcomm argued that the three patents mostly translate to technologies that improve iPhone performance at low power.

Apple told the jury that it developed technology that didnt infringe on Qualcomms patents. The company also claimed the idea for one of the patents came from an Apple engineer. At the time, the two companies were working together to meet Apples requirements for using Qualcomm chips in iPhones.

The three patents in this trial were all originally part of the complaint that Qualcomm brought before the U.S. International Trade Commission. The company sought to ban the import of certain iPhones that use Intel cellular modems.

Qualcomm withdrew the patent on faster boot up from the ITC case before a hearing was held. An ITC administrative law judge found no infringement on the low-power graphics rendering patent.

But the ITC judge did find infringement on the power saving techniques in transmissions between processor chips in iPhones.

The full commission is now reviewing the administrative judges finding and is scheduled to issue a final determination on March 26.

Qualcomm also has won patent infringement claims against Apple in China and Germany, though it has lost some as well. Several cases are still pending worldwide.

A key trial in the wider legal fight between the two companies is slated to begin April 15 in San Diego federal court.

Qualcomms shares closed trading Friday up 2 percent at $56.60 on the Nasdaq exchange.

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mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;

Twitter:@TechDiego

760-529-4973
Sixteen teachers working under probationary status in the Lemon Grove School District will not be returning to the district next year.

The members of the Lemon Grove school board voted 3-2 Tuesday to accept the resignations of the 16 teachers, who will work for the district until the end of this school year.

The probationary teachers had been notified March 6 that the district had recommended them for non re-election. Had they not resigned, the teachers would have been let go and given a non re-election status from the district.

That would mean that if they go to another district to seek work, a non re-elected teacher would have to check a box on their application that asks for that information, according to Lemon Grove Teachers Association Executive Board President Pierre Finney, which she said can be the kiss of death.

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The district currently has 47 people working as probationary teachers. Probationary refers to the status of certificated teachers in their first two teaching years with a California district school. Credentialed California kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers earn permanent status after two years of teaching.

For 16 to be non re-elected out of 47, and 31 (being retained), that is a lot, Finney said. Typically, in my past 10 years here, every year we get between zero and 3 non-re elects  16 was a shock to me. I think this is going to have a ripple effect thats going to impact not only the teachers and their families, but also any prospective teachers thinking of looking for a job (in Lemon Grove).

An overflow group of parents, students, sheriffs deputies and several teachers who resigned filled the community room of the Lemon Grove Library to share their concerns about the teachers, all in either the first or second year of their probationary period. Five of the teachers were from Mt. Vernon Elementary School, five more from San Miguel Elementary School.

Board members passing the consent agenda, which included the resignations, were Blanca Brown, Katie Dexter and Larry Loschen. Voting no were Jay Bass and Timothy Shaw. Consent items are passed without discussion.

A dozen speakers lashed out at the board and Superintendent Kim Berman, one asking for her resignation.

Spring Valley resident Mark Lane, a product of the Lemon Grove school system whose six children have either matriculated through the Lemon Grove schools or are still attending district schools, said that he was bothered that the teachers who resigned were told by district officials that they werent a good fit.

Lane chastised Human Resources Director Yolanda Rogers, scolded Berman and took aim at the elected board.

im going to run a campaign to replace you, he told the school board members.

Lane said he believed that the 16 were targeted by the district for complaining about flaws in the districts curriculum and are punishing people who spoke up.

A press release sent by the Lemon Grove Teachers Association after the meeting said, This two-year probationary time is fully protected under the law. It isnt until permanent status that due process rights for being dismissed come into play.

According to the teachers group:

Districts have the right to non-re-elect a probationary teacher at the end of the school year any time prior to March 15 of their second year of employment.

Districts do not need any cause or reason to give the notice.

Teachers are not entitled to a hearing.

Good evaluations or a failure to follow the collective bargaining contract are no defense to a non-re-election notice.

Financial reasons were not a factor for teachers to be recommended for non re-election. All positions will be refilled/rehired for the 2019-20 school year, but those positions will not be filled by the recently resigned 16 teachers.

Lemon Grove School District has nearly 4,000 students that attend six schools in the city of about 25,000. There are about 125 teachers represented by the teachers association.

karen.pearlman@sduniontribune.com
DEL MAR

Patagonia gives $23K to nonprofit

The clothing company Patagonia recently awarded $23,000 to the nonprofit Samuel Lawrence Foundation in Del Mar, to support its San Onofre and Beyond campaign. Nearly a quarter of the grant came from the companys store in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. A Patagonia official noted the companys mission statement  Were in business to save our home planet  and thanked the foundation for its work. The Samuel Lawrence Foundation supports a variety of people, projects and foundations with resources, advising and collaboration. That includes pressing regulators and Southern California Edison to find safer solutions to store 3.6 million pounds of high-level radioactive waste produced by the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which closed in 2012. The foundations campaign seeks to halt the transfer of spent nuclear fuel to the oceanfront storage vault. Learn more at samuellawrencefoundation.org/nuclear-energy.

NORTH COUNTY

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Fairmont Grand Del Mar receives honors

The Fairmont Grand Del Mar resort recently received a trio of Five-Star awards from the Forbes Travel Guide for Lodging, The Spa and Addison, the resorts signature restaurant. It also received two AAA Five Diamonds for the hotel and Addison; was voted the No. 1 luxury hotel in California and San Diego by TripAdvisor Travelers Choice; and was ranked the best hotel in San Diego and 14th best hotel overall in the United States by U.S. News & World Report. Fairmont Grand Del Mar is one of 11 hotels to receive three Five-Star designations (hotel, restaurant and spa) from Forbes in 2019, and continues to be the only hotel in San Diego to ever achieve the triple Five-Star status. Visit fairmont.com/san-diego.

OCEANSIDE

Seminar for rental property owners

The Oceanside Public Library and the city of Oceanside Neighborhood Services Department, Housing Division invite the community to a free Rental Property Owners Seminar from 8 to 11:30 a.m. Tuesday in City Council Chambers, 300 N. Coast Highway. This seminar intends to help rental property owners develop thoughtful and informed landlord practices. Speakers include representatives from Interfaith Community Services, Law Offices of Kimball, Tirey & St. John LLP, Legal Aid Society of San Diego Inc., Oceanside Housing Authority and the Oceanside Police Departments Crime Prevention Team. The event is part of the librarys program, Book to Action: Homelessness and the Housing Crisis in North County, which includes a communitywide read of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Continental breakfast will be served. Free copies of the book will be available while supplies last. Register at evictedbook.eventbrite.com. Call (760) 435-5600 or visit oceansidepubliclibrary.org.

SOLANA BEACH

Real estate update at business luncheon

The San Diego Coastal Chamber of Commerce hosts a Lunch and Learn business networking luncheon from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday at The Fish Market, 640 Via de la Valle. The program is a Real Estate Update & Forecast given by Realtor Christine Friesen of Century 21. Cost is $21 for San Diego Coastal Chamber of Commerce members and $30 for nonmembers. RSVP and register at bit.ly/2Hhg9OH.

Please send items to laura.groch@sduniontribune.com at least 10 days before events.

laura.groch@sduniontribune.com
CARLSBAD

CUSD leaders to speak at YES meeting

Carlsbad Superintendent of Schools Ben Churchill will speak at the next Youth Enrichment Services meeting from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. March 21 at 3209 Pine Ave. He will discuss the future of Carlsbad school facilities, the HH bond measure and the renovations. Assistant Superintendent of Instructional Services Rob Nye will give a brief overview of the district Wellness Policy. Light refreshments will be served. Call (760) 331-5021.

Student show offers high school experience

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Coastal High School presents All These Pieces, a student-written production featuring a variety of short performances, at 6:30 p.m. March 21-22 at North Coast Calvary Chapel, 1330 Poinsettia Lane. The performances explore the emotions, relationships, disappointments and celebrations of the high school experience from a students perspective. Tickets are $15 at coastalhs.seatyourself.biz.

NORTH COUNTY

Free STEM conference at Palomar College

Hundreds of local students, educators and parents, will be at Palomar College on Saturday for the third annual STEM Conference, which promotes education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Running from 7:30 a.m. until 2 p.m., the conference is free and open to those in grades 6-9. Students can experience interactive workshops in game development, forensic anthropology and aeronautics; hands-on chemistry and biology experiments; networking with students and STEM professionals; and updates on technologies and programs. Parents and educators will learn how to support their students and will receive information about the Palomar Promise, which provides a free first year of college to local high school graduates. Breakfast and lunch are provided, but registration is required. Visit palomar.edu/pages/stem/2018-stem-conference to register.

Laptop contest now open to applicants

The Metropolitan Transit System, Coca-Cola and the San Diego County Office of Education will award new laptops to 40 San Diego County high school students through their annual laptop scholarship contest. MTS recently approved changes to lower the cost of a Youth Transit Pass from $36 to $23 a month. Students in grades 9 to 12 can submit a persuasive essay outlining whether they think lower-cost monthly passes will help more students ride MTS: why or why not? They must identify three benefits and/or challenges for students when choosing transit, and include at least two strategies for MTS to encourage more students (ages 6 to 18) to ride public transit. Essays must be a minimum of 750 words and will be judged on four criteria: clarity, creativity, research and meets minimum requirements. Submissions are due April 7. Visit sdmts.com/inside-mts/events/high-school-laptop-scholarship-contest.

Fallbrook High School freshman and Youth Advocacy Coalition member Yareli Albino fields fellow teen advocates questions about a coalition project. (Courtesy photo)

Teens showcase work at leadership camp

Eight youth advocates were among several groups that recently presented successful anti-drug and violence projects at a Youth Leadership Institute camp in Julian. The teens  Yareli Albino, Marcos Fonseca, Daniel Mendez and Jaime Salas of Fallbrook High, and Brandon Bazan, Robert Escobar, Justin Soto and Gisselle Zamora of Mission Hills High in San Marcos  gave two separate presentations eight times each to fellow youths rotating by in small groups. The San Diego County Office of Education hosts the two-day leadership institute annually for high school students involved with the agencys Friday Night Live Partnership. The partnership provides training and opportunities that build leadership skills and encourage teens to avoid alcohol, tobacco, drugs and violence. The eight students represented the Youth Advocacy Coalition at the program, which works to reduce alcohol and drug use among young people in inland North County. Visit mhsinc.org.

San Dieguito River Park offers scholarships

Two scholarships of $1,000 each will be awarded through the San Dieguito River Park to students pursuing further education in the fields of biology, environmental studies or resource management. Applicants must be county residents, have successfully completed three years of studies at an accredited high school, be in the their fourth year of high school with a cumulative grade-point average of 2.5 or better, and expect, or have received, a notice of intent to enroll in undergraduate college courses. Find applications and details at bit.ly/2VLMjpA. Deadline is April 1. Contact Leana Bulay, manager of interpretation and outreach, at leana@sdrp.org or (760) 716-1214.

OCEANSIDE

DAR chapter awards student essay honors

The Santa Margarita Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, held its annual student awards meeting, honoring student winners in grades 5-8 for essays on American history, and a 12th-grade student who entered the DAR Good Citizen Essay contest. The elementary students topic was about the womens suffrage campaign. They were to write the essay as if living in 1929. Winners were Carly Glass, grade 5, Molly Glass, grade 7, and Bella Morena, grade 8, all of St. Patricks Catholic School; and Aryana Graff, grade 6, of Coastal Academy in Oceanside. Molly Glass was also the District XIV winner for grade 7. Daniela Rojas Gallegos, a senior at Mission Vista High School, was given two hours to write, off the top of her head, about what the responsibilities of being a citizen meant to her. All students were given their certificates, pins/medals, and checks by chapter American History Chair Mary Catherine Kirby, chapter Regent Charla Boodry, and District XIV American History Chair Laquetta Montgomery. Visit santamargarita.californiadar.org.

Arts foundation seeks scholarship applicants

Oceanside Cultural Arts Foundation is accepting applications for scholarships to be awarded to local graduating high school seniors continuing their education in the performing arts, visual arts and filmmaking. Submit information to OCAF, PO Box 3054, Oceanside, CA 92051. Deadline is April 30. Email ocaf@ocaf.info; visit ocaf.info/ocaf-scholarships.

SAN PASQUAL

Night at Museum event benefits school

The San Pasqual School Foundation hosts a Night at the Museum: The Great Gatsby, from 6 to 11 p.m. March 23 at the Museum at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido, 340 N. Escondido Blvd. 1920s attire is encouraged. Tickets are available at spufoundation.eventbrite.com; general admission tickets are $135 and VIP tickets are $225 (sale ends Saturday). VIP ticket admits you to the VIP Speakeasy Lounge from 5 to 6 p.m. The event includes hosted cocktail hour, hors doeuvres, casino tables, dancing and silent and live auctions. Contact Lindsay Dean at (760) 522-2055 or lindsaydeanevents@gmail.com.

SOLANA BEACH

Solana Pacific offers screen time info

Solana Pacific School continues its series on screen time for children with a Coffee and Conversation gathering at 9 a.m. Friday. The talks are intended to help parents know what is online and how to support their children in being responsible digital citizens. The topic will be how to help children learn about and manage their digital footprint. The school is at 3901 Townsgate Drive, San Diego. Call (858) 794-4500.

Please send items to laura.groch@sduniontribune.com at least 10 days before events.

laura.groch@sduniontribune.com
Step into Jesse J. Perezs office at the University of San Diego and the first thing you spy might be the bobblehead dolls of Darth Vader and company lined up on a shelf.

Were crazy Star Wars fans, Perez  the new leader of the Old Globe/USD Shiley Graduate Theatre Program  says with a smile about the sci-fi fandom he shares with his longtime partner, the stage actor Sofia Jean Gomez.

Actually, those dolls might be about the only things you see: Perez just took over the reins of the renowned classical-acting program in January, and getting up to speed on running things as he bounces between the Globe and USD and all over the country has left precious little time to decorate.

Perez, a seasoned actor, director, choreographer and educator who played the lead role in last years La Jolla Playhouse world premiere of Seize the King, steps into a post held for 25 years by the now-retired Richard Seer, who brought the program to national prominence.

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As Perez sits down to chat at USD during a brief spring-break respite, hes in the midst of consulting on final candidates for the next class in the two-year, Shakespeare-dominated program, which admits just seven students annually; the acceptance rate hovers around 2 percent.

We saw about 320 people, Perez says of recent auditions and interviews in New York, Chicago and San Francisco as well as San Diego.

I forgot about how much pressure it is, having done it so long ago. I was so young and brave, you know?

Perez was just a kid when he first felt the force of artistic inspiration, and it had nothing to do with Star Wars (sorry, Luke).

One of three sons of Mexican-immigrant parents in urban Los Angeles, Perez remembers growing up watching old Charlie Chaplin movies with his dad.

Later, when he was performing in a touring dance troupe as a teenager, Perez pulled the companys director aside one day and told him: I dont think this is what I want to be doing.

What he did want to do, he said, was be kind of like Charlie Chaplin. When the director responded, Well, thats dancing, Perez insisted: No, theres something else going on.

Perez eventually would develop into a multifaceted performer  one conversant, as was Chaplin, with clown work as well as acting both for film and for live audiences.

His talent and drive got him into the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting Los Angeles  although he ultimately would graduate from the L.A. County High School for the Performing Arts, where he transferred when his family no longer could afford the Adler school.

Perez then studied at New Yorks Juilliard School, one of the countrys pre-eminent training grounds for the performing arts.

And at Juilliard and in his subsequent career, he grew adept at making himself indispensable to directors whose work he admired.

Id be like, I just want them to think of me like an apprentice here, he says of forming bonds with such artists as Mary Zimmerman, Robert Woodruff, Christopher Bayes and Daniel Fish. I want them to use me however they want, because Im inspired and I feel like I want to be in their room. And I would basically work with them for years.

I call it being in directors pockets, Perez adds, smiling a little sheepishly at the term. All of a sudden, theyre like, Oh, my God, Ive gotta cast somebody! Oh  theres Jesse Perez!

As he narrates that last part, Perez  who has by this time sprung up from his chair  performs a little Chaplin-esque gesture, reaching into his own pocket and pantomiming a welcome find there.

Putting in the work

That drive to prove himself came in part from his parents; Perezs dad initially supported the family by cleaning restrooms at a leather-manufacturing operation, eventually rising to become part-owner of the place.

My parents have always said, hey, you have to work twice as hard, and create it, so that people can come and be like, We want that thing over here,  Perez says.

Part of the reason his parents pushed the necessity of working hard, Perez acknowledges, was because of the color of my skin, because of where I come from. (They knew) its not going to be easy.

And once I graduated from Juilliard, the business slapped me right in the face  on how they stereotype you, on how they want you to have a thicker accent with that color of skin, on you being the bodega person, on you putting gas in someones car and mowing the lawn, on being the suspect.

Still, that had more to do with TV, Perez says, noting that theater has always embraced me.

And eventually, you start turning that (on its head), by how you start auditioning, and the people you start meeting in casting offices. And then theyre like, Oh yeah, why dont you come in as that tech, or as the forensic scientist? You dont need an accent  lets put scientific jargon in your mouth. I told you he could do that! 

Perez strikes a similar note in talking about interpreting and staging Shakespeare for a new, more diversity-minded age, when the Bard stands to become accessible and relevant to a much broader range of voices.

Jesse J. Perez in the 2018 La Jolla Playhouse world premiere of the Shakespeare-inspired Seize the King. (Jim Carmody)

All of a sudden those stories resonate everywhere, says Perez, whose own first Shakespeare role was as Sir Toby Belch in a high school production of Twelfth Night.

How does it sound in the mouth of a Filipino kid? How does it sound in the mouth of an Asian woman playing Mercutio (from Romeo and Juliet)? Im interested in this new idea of kind of twisting and rubbing up against what Shakespeare is usually seen as.

One of Perezs own key inspirations when it comes to the Bard is someone hell now be working closely with: Old Globe artistic chief Barry Edelstein, who was Perezs Shakespeare instructor at Juilliard, and who helped recruit him for the USD/Globe position.

Perez (who himself taught for 12 years at Juilliard) says Edelstein was really supportive as I became a Shakespearean actor.

Now, as he settles into a new life in San Diego with Gomez (who won a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award for her turn in San Diego Reps A Dolls House, Part 2 last year), Perez is beginning to map out whats next for the Shiley program.

I have ideas, but I feel as though this program is pretty successful already, he says of the 32-year-old MFA module, whose alumni include Emmy Award winner Jim Parsons as well as plenty of highly regarded stage actors around the country.

Its up in the ranks. I feel we can make it better and it can grow into the 21st century.

But I feel the foundation of this place is firm. And Im coming in and building on top of that. Im coming in here and kind of just trying to see what the classics mean today.

And in the classroom, I definitely believe in technique. Lets definitely see how we do it all in this scientific way; lets really slow things down.

But then theres this idea that once we start performing it, or living it in front of people, we have to let that go. And be human beings.

jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @jimhebert
ShamROCK

2 p.m. to midnight Saturday. The event entrance is at Fifth Avenue and G Street. A general-admission ticket starts at $50 (save $5 with advance purchase); various upgrades are available for $7-$30. sandiegoshamrock.com

For the 25th time, the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation brings another edition of ShamROCK  six blocks of downtowns best real estate carpeted with emerald green turf, dotted with roving performers, games and contests, and three stages. On the Pint Stage, six bands bring every genre from Celtic folk to Irish punk to straight-up rock. On the Pub and Clover stages, 10 professional DJs mix a variety of moods and grooves  all guaranteed danceable. Additionally, the ShamROCK wristband includes no cover charge and food and drink specials (posted online) at 25 bars and restaurants. CYNTHIA ZANONE

Jamey Johnson, with Erin Enderlin

8 p.m. Saturday. House of Blues, 1055 Fifth Ave., Gaslamp Quarter. $38, plus service charges. (800) 745-3000. livenation.com

Major stardom seemed imminent for Jamey Johnson after his second album, 2008s brooding, aptly titled That Lonesome Song, earned him three Grammy nominations and his stirring ballad In Color won song of the year honors at both the Academy of Country Music and the Country Music Association award shows. Johnson now has 10 Grammy nominations to his credit, but no wins. A proud country-music outlaw who can also rock out with aplomb, he has performed on the Grand Ole Opry for the past 14 years but still hasnt been invited to become a member. Due to music industry politics and contractual snafus, he has released only two albums since That Lonesome Song, the most recent in 2012. But no matter. Johnsons earthy, no-nonsense music continues to be a force. And he shines on concert stages, where he often mixes his potent original songs with classics by everyone from Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash to The Band and Tom Petty. GEORGE VARGA

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Telly Leung in Sing Happy

7 p.m. Saturday; doors open at 5 p.m. for dinner and seating. Martinis Above Fourth Table + Stage, 3940 Fourth Ave., Second Floor, Hillcrest. $40-$50 reserved seating; $20 per person food/drink minimum. (619) 400-4500. ma4sd.com

The star of TVs Glee, the Old Globe-bred musical Allegiance and (most recently) Broadways Aladdin returns to town for this evening of songs and stories. Leung also will talk about his recent career scare  a serious vocal injury  in the cabaret show, named for a favorite song from the musical Flora and the Red Menace. JAMES HEBERT

San Diego Cake Show

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Exhibit hall at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd., Del Mar. $12-$50 (free for kids 8 and under). sandiegocakeshow.com

Sweet treats are going glam at the San Diego Cake Show, with this years theme of Red Carpet Cakes. From professional pastry chefs to amateur local bakers and decorators, all will show off their best creations, with proceeds going to the Ronald McDonald House Charities. This two-day baking fest features a cake design competition, a number of decorating classes, demonstrations on decorating and other skills, along with raffles and lots of vendors who have all sorts of tools, tips and supplies for confection creators. LISA DEADERICK

Randy Rainbow Live

7:30 p.m. Saturday. Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave., downtown San Diego. Limited tickets available, starting at $39.50. (619) 570-1100. sandiegotheatres.org

Dont let that innocent Who, moi? smile fool you. Do not be lulled into toe-tapping obliviousness by the sprightly show-tune melodies, jaunty rhymes and cheerfully cheesy graphics that make Randy Rainbows videos dance madly across Twitter feeds and Facebook pages like a Rockette on a Pop Rocks bender. In other words, do not underestimate the serious consciousness-raising, nerve-soothing power of Rainbows dizzy, catchy, spit-take-worthy political parody videos aimed at the Trump administration. The man behind the pink cat-eye glasses means business. And not only the funny kind. Rainbow, 37, brings his live show to the Balboa Theatre in downtown San Diego on Saturday. KARLA PETERSON

Hookman by young, renowned playwright Lauren Yee, at Experimental Theatre at San Diego State University. (Ken Jacques)

Hookman

Opens today. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Through March 24. Experimental Theatre, San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego. $20 (discounts available). (619) 594-6884. ttf.sdsu.edu

Who doesnt love an existential slasher comedy as told through a feminist lens? The SDSU School of Theatre, Television, and Film is teaming with Moxie Theatre to stage this twist on urban legend by Lauren Yee, a young playwright of national renown (and a grad of the crosstown University of California San Diego) who received early-career support from the women-centered Moxie. JAMES HEBERT

La Jolla Symphony & Chorus: Bernstein Centennial

7:30 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Mandeville Auditorium, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla. $18-$39. (858) 534-4637. lajollasymphony.com

The La Jolla Symphony & Chorus and its music director, Steven Schick, have never shied away from a challenge, as their Saturday and Sunday concerts will attest. To celebrate Leonard Bernsteins 100th birthday, the orchestra will perform the composers famous  and infamous  Symphony No. 3, subtitled Kaddish. Complex musically and lyrically, Kaddish is a prayer for the dead that doesnt mention death. While expressing reverence for life, Bernsteins text simultaneously praises and questions God. The powerful way in which the piece thematically fits the current La Jolla Symphony season drew Schick to it. BETH WOOD

Poway Symphony Orchestra featuring Fred Moyer, piano

4 p.m. Sunday. Poway Center for the Performing Arts, 15498 Espola Road, Poway. $12-$20. (858) 748-0505. powaysymphonyorchestra.org

Its fitting that Fred Moyer will play Rachmaninoffs Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Poway Symphony on Sunday. He credits the piece for his career as a pianist. The 61-year-old pianist averages almost 300 concerts a year, both solo and with orchestras. His Sunday performance with the Poway Symphony Orchestra will be at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts. In addition to concert halls, Moyer plays frequently in retirement homes and in clubs with his jazz trio. He was performing last year at a La Jolla retirement community, which was attended by John LoPiccolo, music director and conductor of the Poway Symphony Orchestra. Moyer happily accepted LoPiccolos invitation to play here with the orchestra. BETH WOOD

Menopause The Musical

Opens today. 1 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 1 p.m. Sundays. Through June 2. Welk Resort Theatre, 8860 Lawrence Welk Drive, Escondido. $55; $75 with preshow meal.(888) 802-7469. sandiegotickets.welkresorts.com

The much-produced Menopause The Musical has been around for 18 years now  a lot longer (lets hope!) than most women will endure the symptoms of The Change. The subject of this musical comedy is right there in the title, and its told via four women who meet at a lingerie sale and soon bond over their shared experiences with hot flashes, mood swings and more. The Welk Resort Theatre has put together a quartet of San Diego theater royalty  Anise Ritchie, Eileen Bowman, Melinda Gilb and Bets Malone (pictured)  for this latest revival. And even if thetopic doesnt necessarily sound like your cup of tea(or pack of Premarin), those actors ought tomake the excursion worthwhile. JAMES HEBERT

Bono and The Edge Waiting for Godominos

8 p.m. tonight and Saturday. Tenth Avenue Arts Center, 930 10th Ave., Gaslamp Quarter. $20. (619) 920-8503. thetenthpresents.ticketleap.com/waiting-for-godominos

Fans of U2, Samuel Beckett and, um, home-delivery pizza who still havent found what theyre looking for in one entity can breathe easier. Thanks to Bono and The Edge Waiting for Godominos, synchronicity may be at hand. A proudly barbed satire of Becketts 1953 theater classic Waiting for Godot, Godominos skews celebrity culture by way of Becketts absurdist exploration of religion, spirituality and existentialism. In the words of Godominos writer/director Richard Lucas: Bono has ordered a pizza so that maybe the delivery person will come into his castle and talk to him about living a regular life. The castle is in Malibu, of course, and Lucas  as Bono  does a few songs during the play. It debuted at the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival and has since had three six-week runs in Los Angeles and debuted in San Francisco and Las Vegas. This will be its first San Diego staging. GEORGE VARGA

Antonio Sanchez (center) with his Migration band mates (from left) Chase Baird, Thana Alexa, John Escreet and Matt Brewer. (Photo by Bogar Adame Mendoza)

Antonio Sanchez & Migration

7:30 p.m. Saturday. Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI Auditorium, 10620 John Jay Hopkins Drive, La Jolla. $32 members; $37 nonmembers. (858) 454-5872. ljathenaeum.org

Composing and performing the percussion-driven score for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), 2015s Oscar winner for best picture, was transformational for internationally celebrated drummer and band leader Antonio Sanchez. Directed by five-time Oscar winner Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the film earned Sanchez a Grammy Award for best score soundtrack and a Golden Globe nomination. It also fueled controversy when the arcane rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences rendered the soundtrack ineligible for an Oscar nomination. The biggest influence I got from Birdman was the storytelling aspect of it, said Sanchez, the longtime drummer for the Pat Metheny Group. He performs an Athenaeum Jazz at TSRI Auditorium concert Saturday with his genre-leaping band, Migration. They are on tour to promote Lines in the Sand, his ninth album as a leader. GEORGE VARGA

San Diego School of Creative Performing Arts Ellington Jazz Ensemble fundraising concert

8 p.m. tonight. Dizzys at Arias Hall (behind the Musicians Association building), 1717 Morena Blvd., Bay Park. $20. (858) 270-7467. dizzysjazz.com

For the second time in three years, the San Diego School of Creative & Performing Arts Ellington Jazz Ensemble has been selected as one of 15 finalists in Jazz at Lincoln Centers prestigious 23rd annual Essentially Ellington competition in New York. Its a formidable feat for a Title 1 school that receives federal funds to assist lower-income students. The ensemble  whose youngest member is baritone saxophonist Nick Caldwell, 13  will be accompanied to New York by its director, John Reynolds, and three chaperones. To help raise funds for its May trip, the group will perform Friday at the all-ages Dizzys. For those who cant make the Dizzys gig, a smaller lineup of Ellington Jazz Ensemble members will play each Saturday in March during brunch at Madison on Park in University Heights. Donations can also be made via the schools website: scpamusic.com/fundraising. GEORGE VARGA

Cultural Grooming New Work by Jennifer Greenburg

Through May 31. jdc Fine Art, 2400 Kettner Blvd., suite 208, San Diego. (619) 985-2322. jdcfineart.com

Artist Jennifer Greenburg presents her third solo show, Cultural Grooming, with the latest images from her Revising History works and a new series, Colored Stories. The former explores a rejection of the prevailing white, male gaze and the cultural constructs it celebrates, and the latter consists of abstract prints created by taking colors from items marketed to American women in the past. Greenburg, an associate professor of photography at Indiana University Northwest, said: I intend for this series to engage the audience in a conversation about the way we interpret the media, record personal memories, and establish collective history. ... (This) is a study on photography, the nature of the vernacular image, and its role in creating cultural allegories. LISA DEADERICK

Carol Lindemulder: Color Story

Through May 5. San Diego History Center, Casa de Balboa, 1649 El Prado, Suite 3, Balboa Park. Suggested donation of $10. (619) 232-6203. sandiegohistory.org

Carol Lindemulder recently looked out the window of her Borrego Springs home early in the morning and watched the fog roll down the San Ysidro Mountains to the west. For her, the gray blanket was filled with shades of blues and purples. Then the sun peeked through, and she recalled: A light came through, a brilliant, flaming yellow light. Like the heavens had opened up. She grabbed her camera, capturing the moment so she could reproduce it in oil on canvas. It will be the landscape artists next project. Lindemulder sees the world through a kaleidoscope of colors, taking in subtle hues overlooked my most. She translates what she sees into vibrant, boldly colored paintings that reflect her window to the world. She is an extraordinary colorist, said Kaytie Johnson, the curator for the San Diego History Center, where 17 of Lindemulders paintings are on display. The exhibition, Carol Lindemulder: Color Story, focuses on four categories  buildings, trees, deserts and fields  and includes local landscapes as well as other parts of the Southwest. MARTINA SCHIMITSCHEK

lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com
The University of California backed away Thursday from a tuition increase for students from other states and countries after several regents expressed concern that it could limit diversity and hurt some immigrants.

UC President Janet Napolitano had recommended increasing nonresident tuition by 2.6%, from $28,992 this year to $29,754 in the fall. Students from outside California pay this supplemental tuition on top of the base UC tuition of $12,570.

Napolitano announced this month that UC would not raise tuition for California students.

She told regents that the $30 million raised by an increase for nonresident students would help campuses enroll more Californians, increase financial aid and hire faculty, staff and teaching assistants.

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But members of the UC Student Assn. organized against the proposal, saying their peers from outside California have been scapegoated and made to bear an unfair financial burden. Several regents amplified those arguments Thursday.

We need to stop treating them as cash cows, Regent Michael Cohen said of nonresident students.

Regent Hadi Makarechian noted that the strong dollar had devalued many foreign currencies, effectively doubling the cost of education for students from some countries, including Mexico, Brazil and Egypt. Shutting them out would reduce opportunities for California students to make connections with people around the world, some argued.

Others said that raising costs would hurt some local students, including those without legal immigration status who dont meet the qualifications for in-state tuition.

Regent John A. Perez said an added problem was UCs inability to offer financial aid to nonresident students. As a result, some regents said, UC was moving toward limiting seats to more affluent students.

That goes against the nature of everything we do, said Regent Eloy Ortiz Oakley.

UC regents already had approved a $9.3-billion budget in November that included higher fees for nonresidents.

Ultimately, regents voted to hold off on a tuition increase and come up with other ideas to plug in the hole that not raising the tuition will create. Several said they would try to lobby for additional funding in Sacramento even after Napolitano told them that UC efforts to do so had been turned down. Some legislators  and a critical state audit  have blamed nonresidents for taking spots at Californians expense and pressured the UC system to limit their numbers.

Makarechian, a real estate executive, said each campus could save $100 million by squeezing its contractors to reduce construction costs. Others pledged to help raise money.

Perez and Student Regent Devon Graves advocated for multiyear tuition plans so students and their families would know exactly how much a UC education would cost them over time.

In the end, Napolitano bowed to the chorus of concerns even as she told regents that the shortfall would affect UCs renowned quality.

I know how to get out of the way of the train, she said.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

Twitter: @TeresaWatanabe
Earlier, pro-European campaigners wanted a new vote to overturn the 2016 referendum calling for Britain to withdraw from the EU. But lawmakers voted against a new plebiscite, 334-85, with most lawmakers from the main opposition Labor Party abstaining.

The House of Commons voted 412-202 to seek the delay after being unable in several votes this week to muster a majority for an exit plan. The vote to delay calls on Prime Minister Theresa May to seek an extension from the EU until June 30. The lawmakers have already twice rejected her plans for Brexit, but by law, Britain will leave the EU on March 29 with or without a deal, unless it cancels Brexit or secures the delay.

 String of Votes

Lawmakers have held a series of votes on how to proceed with the Brexit deadline two weeks away. On Tuesday, parliamentarians massively voted against May's renegotiated plan with EU leadership that sought to allay concerns about border passage between EU member Ireland and Northern Ireland. On Wednesday, they voted against a plan to quit the EU without any terms of the departure set in place.

The lawmakers on Thursday voted 318-302 against a plan offered by opposition Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn calling for May to use a Brexit delay to give parliament time "to find a majority for a different approach."

EU members would need to approve a delay beyond March 29. They have repeatedly said they would need proper justification to agree to push back the deadline. After Wednesday's vote, they said that while it was one thing for the British government to reject a so-called no-deal exit, at some point it would have to figure out the alternative, a deal that could actually pass.

The EU also prefers that any extension be limited, finishing before its own elections in late May. European Council President Donald Tusk left open the possibility of a longer delay, saying Thursday that ahead of a meeting of EU leaders next week, he would be appealing to member states to consider that option if Britain "finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy."

 3rd Time?

May brought what she said was an improved deal to Parliament for Tuesday's vote, one that sought to remove concerns about the Irish border with Northern Ireland. Opponents want to make sure Britain is not locked into a long-term customs agreement that subjects the country to EU trade rules.

May hinted Wednesday that she could try for a third time to get lawmakers to approve the deal that negotiators from Britain and the EU worked on for two years.

The Wednesday vote rejecting a no-deal exit does not carry legal weight, only political force, meaning it is still possible that without an extension and without an agreement during the next two weeks, Brexit could proceed with no divorce terms in place.


Built 70 years ago by Lloyd Ruocco, this hillside Point Loma house has a new, updated look without losing the soul of the home the renowned San Diego Modernist architect envisioned.

The outside layout is the same. We tore everything out, but we kept the layout. Inside, everything is new, said architect Jesper Pedersen of DNA Design Group, who spent three years reinventing the property in keeping with Ruoccos design while adding sustainable materials.



For the record: Since the publication of this article, this home has been removed from the March 23-24 OH! San Diego architecture tour. The tour, sponsored by the San Diego Architectural Foundation, will feature about 100 locations citywide, including other midcentury designs. For information, visit sdarchitecture.org.

The house was exactly like this but built in the 40s. The whole house was falling apart, said the homeowner, who wishes to remain anonymous.

The home was scheduled to be included in the March 23-24 OH! San Diego (Open House San Diego) event sponsored by the San Diego Architectural Foundation, but it was recently removed from the list of tour homes. The tour features 100 locations in downtown, Bankers Hill, Barrio Logan, Balboa Park and Point Loma, including a number of sustainable and mixed-use buildings as well as affordable housing developments and behind-the-scenes peeks at landmarks such as the Spreckels Organ Pavilion.

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Simplicity is the key to the 4,100-square-foot house that seems to consist mainly of glass under a new metal roof. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls are on the front- and back-facing sides of the house for a see-through view that expands past an infinity pool, across the bay, the cityscape and to the hills of Mexico.

The profusion of glass was part of the original concept of the home, as Ruocco sited his houses to maximize the views. The amount of glass used in this home is no longer permitted, Pedersen said, because of California energy-usage restrictions. But since the homes footprint was unaltered, Pedersen was allowed to keep the design. He installed more energy-efficient glass and added sliding doors to further blur the line between interior and exterior.

The remodel updated the house, including an energy-efficient metal roof, without losing modernist architect Lloyd Ruoccos 1949 glass design. (Mindy Nicole)

Materials were kept to a minimum. Italian Maxfine tiles, which are thin, super hard ceramic, are used both inside and out. Pedersen worked closely with landscape architect Richard Risner of Grounded Modern Landscape Architecture to create a cohesive look.

The floor tiles are white, as is most of the interior of the three-bedroom, 3 1/2-bathroom house. Black window and door frames as well as walnut accents in every room keep the interior from becoming too stark.

I call the project 50 shades of white, Pedersen said.

White limestone tiles from Eldorado Stone of San Marcos set in a 3D pattern decorate the two fireplace walls  one in the living room by the entrance and the other in the family room and bar area. The uneven pattern adds light and shadow to the otherwise white walls. The living and family spaces are separated by a glass-enclosed courtyard and an office. The office is in its original location and is enclosed by a walnut-clad wall, much like the original wood wall. Pedersens version includes a pattern of openings to connect the office space with the living area. Each square or horizonal opening is lined with LED string lights.

Pedersen, a native of Denmark, has that Scandinavian thinking: clean and open, said the owner, who hired Pedersen for the project shortly after he purchased the property in 2015. The house was open, and he opened it more.

The closed-off kitchen was integrated into the home, continuing the clean lines and white palette. (Mindy Nicole)

The kitchen, which was originally walled off from the rest of the home and the view, was completely redesigned. People lived differently in the 40s. They had servants. Now we cook our own meals, Pedersen said.

The kitchens flat ceiling was removed to open the space to the rooflines. A few support beams had to stay in place, but Pedersen said, with their angles, they can be seen as a work of art.

A white lacquered wall of cabinets by Aster Cucine of Italy hides the refrigerator, freezer and wine cooler and sets the tone for the minimalistic space that is now open to the view. Aster Cucine products are made with recycled wood or 100 percent post-consumer particleboard and nontoxic finishes. A 16-foot-long island allows cooks to enjoy the view and face guests seated by a floating walnut-wood bar counter.

The simple finished look of the home lies in the millions of details, Pedersen said. Everything had to be flush with straight lines. There are no cabinet knobs or molding or hanging lamps. To keep the view center stage, even the televisions are concealed in the floor in the living area and the master bedroom when not in use.

Pedersen also furnished the home. The furnishings reflect his Scandinavian aesthetic with classic Danish designs in muted tones and natural leather.

The master bedroom and bathroom are separated only by a free-standing wall. The entire home only has seven interior doors. (Mindy Nicole)

The private area of the home is in one wing of the L-shaped house. The master suite, at the end of the L, is also wrapped in floor-to-ceiling windows. Only the side facing a neighboring house is a solid closet wall.

In keeping with the open concept of the home (there are only seven interior doors), the bedroom and bathroom are separated by a partial wood-clad wall. The bed is set against it on one side and the bathroom sinks are on the other side. A shower and free-standing tub are opposite the sinks against a wall with textured white tiles that resemble abstract flower petals. Even this space has floor-to-ceiling windows that face the courtyard, with the pool and the cityscape beyond.

The house is really about the view, Pedersen said.

The homeowner replaced the lawn with an infinity pool, which creates sight lines to the expansive view. (Mindy Nicole)

OH! San Diego

When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. March 23 and 24

Where: 100 locations citywide including homes, architecture and design studios, museums, schools, hotels, high-rises and historically designated sites.

Tickets: free, although some sites require reservations

Online: sdarchitecture.org

Schimitschek is a San Diego freelance writer.
A group of migrants who breached the U.S.-Mexico border fence by the Pacific Ocean at Playas de Tijuana was detained Thursday by Border Patrol agents in Border Field State Park on the U.S. side.

But the whereabouts are not confirmed of at least five other migrants who crossed over on Wednesday, according to a witness who recorded both the Wednesday and Thursday breaches on video and spoke with some of the migrants.

The group of about 35 people who crossed on Thursday included men, women and children who said they were mostly from Honduras and came to Tijuana in a caravan.

Video shot from the Mexican side shows the group climbing through a broken piece of fencing and running down the beach.

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Agents with the Border Patrol had the group sit on the edge of a muddy trail while they collected their belongings into paper bags.

The detained migrants were instructed by Border Patrol agents not to speak with the media.

One member of the group, a man in his early 20s, was detained separately and kept his eyes closed as he was loaded into a separate van.

The group was apprehended about 200 yards from the border fence on the U.S. side.

Access to the area is typically closed to vehicles during periods of wet weather. The area where the migrants were stopped is about a mile from the parking lot at the entrance to Border Field State Park.

The migrants were loaded into Border Patrol vans, which drove away at about 6:15 p.m. Thursday.

Some areas of the trail were muddy and badly flooded after recent rains.

At center, a 22-year-old Honduran man says final words to his wife before he squeezed through the pillars in Tijuana on Wednesday carrying his young child. (Thomas E. Franklin / For the Times)

A 22-year-old Honduran man squeezed through the pillars in Tijuana on Wednesday carrying his child while Customs and Border Patrol was not on watch. They disappeared into the distance and did not appear to be captured, but this was not confirmed. (Thomas E. Franklin / For the Times)

On Wednesday, photojournalist Thomas E. Franklin, an assistant professor of multiplatform journalism at Montclair State University in New Jersey, captured video of migrants slipping through the porous border fence in Playas, where a section of the lattice fencing had been pulled back. Franklin went back to the fence Thursday to see whether it had been repaired.

As we arrived we saw a large group of people  about 75 people  jammed up against the fence looking through, a group of about 20 to 30 had snuck through the fence and a number of them were running down the beach in the distance, Franklin said.

Franklin had been working in the area on a border-related project when he recorded the footage, which he shared with The Times.

After the last of the migrants slipped through on Thursday  two women with one holding a child  a Border Patrol SUV drove up to the fence and blocked the gap.

Two women, one carrying a young child, followed about 20 to 30 migrants who squeezed through an opening in the border fence at Playas de Tijuana on Thursday, running past Border Patrol heading toward San Diego. (Thomas E. Franklin / For the Times)

In the video shot Wednesday, the migrants can be seen running down the coastline in Imperial Beach while an agent chases after them. The video also shows people on the Mexican side jeering the Border Patrol agent.

One of the men seen in the video is fleeing while he is carrying a small child in his arms.

It remains unknown whether the people who slipped through the fence Wednesday were apprehended.

A spokesman for the Border Patrol said he was not immediately aware of either incident.

Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
A homeless man whose body was found Monday on a Malibu beach turned out to have been shot, the coroners office said Thursday.

Deputies responded to a report of a body found near the 25600 block of Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu around Monday, authorities said.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene at 2:15 p.m., and investigators initially said no foul play was suspected.

But the Los Angeles County coroners office on Thursday said the man, identified as 42-year-old Miguel Guardado Jr., had been shot in the chest and the cause of death was ruled a homicide.

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Anyone with information about the death can reach the sheriffs homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500 or, if they want to remain anonymous, (800) 222-8477.

javier.panzar@latimes.com

Twitter: @jpanzar
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Matt Vecere dropped what he was doing, flew to the island and spent months helping the recovery efforts.

When the Camp fire broke out in Northern California, Vecere immediately flew from his home in Long Beach to Chico to help people in shelters.

And when the migrant caravan crisis erupted at the Mexican border, Vecere picked up his surfboard and went there, too, hoping to help the migrants.

Vecere, a writer, humanitarian and surfer, followed tragedies as often as he could to give as much as he could to victims, his family said. His desire to help was unmatched and profoundly genuine, they said.

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On March 8, Vecere began a long trip for work  traveling to Washington, D.C., with a layover in Ethiopia, before a planned arrival in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Boeing 737 Max 8 jet Vecere was on crashed early Sunday in Ethiopia, killing all 157 passengers on board, including 21 United Nations employees. He was 43.

Surf circle or business circle, within 30 minutes of knowing the guy, you knew he would give everything he had for somebody who didnt have anything, said Mike Reola, the owner of Catalyst surf shop in San Clemente, where Vecere formerly worked as a manager.

Vecere was traveling to a UN environmental conference for IQ Air, the air filtering and monitoring company he worked for.

It was a trip that would bring him closer to marrying his passion of helping others with his career, said Tiffany Allegretti, a spokeswoman for IQ Air and friend of Veceres.

We will miss his laugh, his wit, his sense of humor, but most of all, the kinship and friendship that he brought to everything he did, the company said in a statement. Our heart is with Matts family and friends, as well as the loved ones of all who lost their lives in this horrible tragedy.

Vecere had started working at IQ Air two years ago as a writer and communications specialist, likely drawn by its mission to providing better air quality to those in need. On one of his regular trips to Haiti, he brought along IQ air filters and purchased water filters to distribute to orphanages and other local people, Allegretti said.

Vecere went to Haiti often to distribute water and air filters and help residents recover from the 2010 earthquake. (Tiffany Allegretti)

He did the same after the 2010 earthquake. Pretty soon, I was on a plane to Haiti with a suitcase full of water filters and not much of a clue as to what I was going to do with them, he told The Times then.

When he returned to work, IQ Airs chief executive suggested that Vecere attend the UN conference on behalf of the company, Allegretti said. For his professional career to merge with his passion, it was the pinnacle of success, Allegretti said.

He had a day to prepare for the flight and on the way to the airport went shopping for professional clothing: a single button-down shirt and a blazer. Allegretti asked him if he was ready.

Yeah, I got my button-down and blazer, he texted.

No pants? she asked.

He was wearing them, Vecere replied. Then, he hopped on the plane.

He just made every one of us better people, just by his presence, she said. I pushed for him to do this and I really was excited for him to do it. I have felt and continue to feel a lot of guilt.

Vecere, a New Jersey native, had lived along Californias coast for about 12 years. He made the jump after meeting Reola at a surf competition he was participating in and covering for a surf magazine. Reola was opening a store in San Clemente, and he needed a manager.

Reola was drawn to Veceres charisma and his ability to talk about politics and social issues so eloquently. Plus, he wasnt afraid to cut loose, Reola said.

Vecere helped launch the store and its website in 2005. He would have been a great, game-changing politician, Reola said, struggling to describe Vecere. He would connect with people. He was good. He was striving to make things happen.

Vecere left behind nonprofit organizations, including Emprofit, which provides economic opportunities to Haitian people, and a GoFundMe fundraising campaign to finish building an orphanage in Haiti.

Matt was passionate about the environment, civil rights, social and environmental justice, and advocating for those less fortunate, his mother, Donna Vecere, said in a statement. His passion turned to direct action, rolling up his sleeves to serve causes where he could make a tangible difference.

On Friday evening, Catalyst surf shop is hosting a memorial service for Vecere in San Clemente. In New Jersey, the surfing community is organizing a memorial paddle, to be held in the summer.

Vecere is survived by his mother and sister, Allegretti said.

Vecere at his IQ Air office. (Tiffany Allegretti)

alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com

Twitter: @r_valejandra
The parents of an 8-year-old Corona boy who has been missing for about two weeks were each charged Friday with willful child cruelty as authorities continue to search for their son.

Authorities learned that Noah McIntosh was missing about 7:30 p.m. Tuesday after officers spoke with the boys mother, Jillian Godfrey, 36, in the 4600 block of Temescal Canyon Road. Officers tried to find the boys father, Bryce McIntosh, 32, at a local apartment, but were not successful, police said.

The next morning, investigators served a search warrant at McIntoshs residence. The man was found inside with his 11-year-old daughter, but Noah was not there. Noah was last seen two weeks ago on Temescal Canyon Road, officials said.

Police arrested Godfrey and McIntosh on Wednesday on suspicion of child abuse based on evidence recovered during the continuing investigation, authorities said. Police have not specified what evidence they found. Godfrey is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail, and McIntosh is being held in lieu of $1-million bail, according to jail records.

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I just want him home. I just want to know he s OK. We will pick him up wherever he is. We just want him home, Holly Godfrey, the boys aunt, told KNBC-TV.

Anyone with information about Noah is asked to call Corona Police Det. Mario Hernandez at (951) 279-3659.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @Hannahnfry
An Iraq war veteran convicted of abusing his neighbors dogs  including poisoning them and gouging out the eye of a Siberian husky  was sentenced Friday to more than nine years in custody.

Former Navy corpsman David C. Herbert, 37, was also fined $10,000 for his conviction last year of charges linked to repeated attacks against his neighbors pets.

The accusations included burning the flesh of two dogs with acid. Another dog is still missing.

Vista Superior Judge Carlos Armour noted that he has worked in the criminal justice system for more than 40 years  including handling murder cases  then called the dog abuse case particularly shocking.

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This was a planned and sophisticated effort to bring pain and suffering to other people through the suffering of their pets, Armour said.

Authorities said Herberts computer showed searches for How to get a dog to drink antifreeze.

During his sentencing hearing, Herbert, 37, apologized.

I am sorry that any of this happened, Herbert said. God knows I am sorry.

Police and prosecutors said Herbert repeatedly targeted his next-door neighbors in early 2017, slashing their tires and hurting their dogs with such acts as dumping a caustic chemical on the animals or feeding them poison.

In April of that year, the neighbor and her 4-year-old son came home to find someone had harmed their two huskies. One had had her eye gouged out.

The family quickly moved out of the rental house in north Oceanside.

A new family moved in. The new tenants, a family of six, had two dogs.

Lala, a 9-year-old golden retriever, went missing in June 2017. (Photo courtesy Michelle Plaketta)

Less than 48 hours later, one of the new familys pets  a 9-year-old golden retriever named Lala  went missing.

A small amount of the missing dogs blood was found in Herberts car.

The judge said it was cruel and sadistic that the children whose family pets were harmed are going to suffer for a very, very long time as a result of Mr. Herberts actions.

There is no excuse to do what this man did to these families, to the children or their pets, Amour said.

Last year, a North County jury found Herbert guilty of all 11 charges he had faced, including animal abuse and vandalism.

For the felony crimes, Armour gave Herbert the maximum prison sentence: eight years, nine months.

The judge added a year in jail for misdemeanor vandalism, for slashing his neighbors tires. In one instance, two tires popped while the neighbor was driving with one of her children.

Herbert represented himself at trial. After his conviction, he agreed to have an attorney appointed to represent him at sentencing.

A six-year Navy veteran, Herbert had earned a good conduct medal, a combat action ribbon and an honorable discharge. As a corpsman, he treated combat injuries in Iraq.

He was shot at, withstood mortar attacks every night and dodged grenades, defense attorney Jim Weintre said in court Friday.

Weintre said his client has major depressive disorder.

Before handing down the sentence, Armour heard from the victimized families. Both mothers spoke of living in fear and of traumatized children.

Estrella, a husky, had her eye gouged out in a brutal attack inside her Oceanside home in April. (Courtesy Eddie Mendoza)

How do you explain to a 4-year-old that a human being gets to be so cruel? said Maria Morales, whose dog Estrella lost her eye.

Michelle Plaketta, the owner of the Lala, the dog that disappeared, told the judge that Herbert had terrorized us.

He knew exactly what he was doing, she said. He studied it. He looked it up.

Lala, she said, is not replaceable. She was with my daughter through the death of her father. She doesnt have that best friend anymore.

During trial, Herbert admitted driving off with Lala. She is still missing. Authorities presume she is dead.

After the hearing, Plaketta said wanted only one thing from Herbert: Where is Lala?

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT
An ex-Navy man was sentenced Thursday to three consecutive life terms in prison for trying, over several months, to poison his wife to death.

Race Remington Uto, 28, pleaded guilty last year to three counts of attempted premeditated murder by dosing his wife, Brigida, with thallium, an extremely toxic poison, at the Dulzura home they shared with their toddler son.

How selfish, how cruel, because you were having an affair and you wanted to get rid of your wife, El Cajon Superior Court Judge Robert Amador said to Uto.

Amador called the poisoning inhumane and noted that murder by poison is punishable by the death penalty.

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Investigators with the FBI and Sheriffs Department found a downloaded copy of The Poisoners Handbook on Utos phone, a prosecutor said.

Uto sat still and upright, his face impassive, as he listened to the judge. He also heard his now-former wife read an emotional account of the suffering she endured in the fall of 2017 to the spring of 2018, when doctors finally diagnosed her mysterious illness.

When the doctors told me I had thallium in my system, I was in shock and disbelief, said Brigida McInvale, who now uses her maiden name.

Thallium is a highly toxic metal once widely used in rat poisons and insecticides, but that use has been banned in the United States for many years. It is nearly undetectable after being ingested.

How did you do this to the mother of your child? McInvale continued. The only way out of a marriage is to kill your wife slowly? I cared for you; I loved you, and you silently watched me suffer for months.

She described the progression of her illness, from feeling dizzy and being unable to eat to severe hair loss and becoming too weak to stand. At one point last spring, doctors gave her two weeks to live, she said.

It felt like a nightmare that wouldnt stop, McInvale said.

She said she still suffers from stiff, weak legs, dizziness and emotional trauma.

Uto was still in the Navy, as a third-class electricians mate assigned to Naval Base Point Loma, when he began poisoning his wife.

Prosecutors alleged Uto used a small dose of thallium first, in August 2017, and  when that didnt work  tried a little larger dose in December that year.

Then, in January of 2018, he used a dose five times larger than before, Deputy District Attorney Paul Reizen said in court.

Uto was arrested last March. He pleaded guilty in December.

The prosecutor told the judge that Uto told investigators early on that he was so concerned about his dying wifes mysterious ailment, saying, If I could trade places with her, I would.

And all that time, he had the answer, Reizen said.

Reizen said The Poisoners Handbook describes thallium as one of the worst poisons, killing slowly, giving the poisoner control over how quickly the victim dies.

Defense attorney Dan Cohen told the judge that Uto accepts responsibility for his actions and pleaded guilty to save McInvale and her family from further trauma.

Cohen said Uto suffered a back injury at the Naval Academy in Annapolis and has an electronic implant to aid pain control.

Mr. Uto believes the pain clouded his judgment, Cohen said.

McInvale said her son, now 3, is in therapy to get over the fear of losing his mother. She said the boy was also affected by having been separated from his mother for months while she was in quarantine in the hospital.

McInvale said she and Uto had been married for three years and in a relationship for 10 years. She said it took her a long time to accept investigators suspicions that her husband was trying to kill her.

I wanted to believe he would never hurt me, she told the judge.

Reizen read statements from the victims mother and father, urging the judge to impose the maximum sentence on Uto. Their younger daughter read her own statement, describing the pain of seeing her sister come close to dying in the hospital.

pauline.repard@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @pdrepard
About a thousand students will likely be forced to find a new school this fall after the State Board of Education declined to renew the charters for the four Thrive charter schools.

The San Diego-based charter school network needed to get its charter renewed from the state to continue operating next school year, after the San Diego Unified School Board voted unanimously last year to deny Thrives renewal.

Charter schools are independently-run public schools, but their charters are licenses to operate which must be renewed every five years by the school district where theyre located. If not they can appeal to the State Board of Education.

The State Board voted 4-to-2 Thursday to deny Thrives renewal, largely because of Thrives low state test scores. Linda Darling-Hammond, the state board president, was the lone abstention.

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The vote to non-renew technically did not carry because the state board needs six votes to pass any motion, according to state law. The State Board currently has three vacancies and one board member was not present for Thursdays votes.

Next, the State Board considered approving Thrives renewal under the conditions that Thrive limit its enrollment; receive an independent evaluation of its academics, staff and leadership, and develop an improvement plan.

But that motion only got a 2-to-4 vote, so it did not go through either.

Therefore, because the State Board failed to take any action Thursday, San Diego Unifieds decision stands, meaning Thrives charter will not be renewed and the school will likely close at the end of this school year.

Nicole Assisi, founder and CEO of Thrive, said in a statement that she is beyond disappointed that the State Board chose not to listen to the testimony of Thrives families, but she is considering options that would allow Thrive to continue educating its students. She would not yet elaborate on what those options are.

I am absolutely devastated by todays decision but am also more determined than ever to ensure that every one of our nearly 1,000 students continues on the positive trajectory they have started, Assisi said.

Thrive can choose to sue about the denial of its renewal, because the State Board did not take any action, according to a California Department of Education official.

Some state board members said they believe Thrive has been serving a need for many students, but the state law ties their hands.

Darling-Hammond, a nationally recognized expert in education equity, said the Thrive renewal process has revealed flaws in the way Californias law requires the State Board and school districts to evaluate charter schools.

We need to develop new law and process. We have a very narrow criterion, Darling-Hammond said.

I am coming away with all of those lessons and a heart full of concern, she said, before abstaining from the vote to deny Thrives renewal.

The state education department had advised the State Board to deny Thrives charter because Thrives state test scores have declined every year since it opened in 2014. Last year, only 31 percent of Thrive students who took state tests met or exceeded state standards in English, while 19 percent did so in math.

But Thrives supporters say its unfair to judge Thrive primarily on those scores, because the school network has added hundreds of new students each year, most of whom came to Thrive already years behind their peers in academics because they had been failed by other public schools.

Thrive supporters also say the state testing numbers represent the performance of only about 13 percent of Thrives students, since only students in grades 3 through 8 and 11 take state tests.

Thrive serves kindergarten through 11th grade in four campuses in San Diego.

Thrives internal student data, based on alternative standardized tests, show academic growth for all of its student groups, Assisi said.

Supporters argued that Thrive is effectively being punished for being a desirable alternative to other public schools, especially with students who have been disadvantaged by their old schools.

Dozens of parents, teachers and students spoke in support of Thrive. Many of the parents reported that their children were bullied or written off by teachers at other public schools before coming to Thrive, where they love school.

I wish that the Board of Education would realize that, when you have 1,000 people not choose their local public school, listen to the thousand people, Thrive parent Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra said.

Its been absolutely disheartening. We feel powerless, because I think that the statistics arent probably the whole story.

Supporters also pointed out that 19 district and charter schools within San Diego Unifieds boundaries have been officially identified by the state as low-performing. Thrive is not one of them.

The State Board members said they were sympathetic to the parents and students who spoke of how much Thrive has helped them. But state law says charter schools must, above all, be evaluated based on how well they perform on state tests compared to similar public schools.

This is emotional. This is really hard. It sounds to me like Thrive is meeting the needs of kids that werent met in other places, State Board Member Ilene Straus said.

And yet, I am really concerned about what we are legally required to do under the current law with the multiple measures. I think were faced with a real dilemma with the guidelines that are currently before us.

Darling-Hammond said California needs to change its laws so that public schools are evaluated more holistically and based on factors other than just state test scores, such as students social-emotional health.

We need better ways to look at growth and gains, she said.

Since the fall, an Oakland-based group that has been critical of charter schools, In the Public Interest, and the San Diego Unified teachers union have led a push to close Thrive, where teachers are not unionized.

San Diego Unified Superintendent Cindy Marten traveled to Sacramento Thursday to speak against Thrives renewal.

Thrive has failed to support our most vulnerable students, Marten told the State Board. an Diego Unified has been commended for supporting Hispanic and African-American students

Marten said the district will take extraordinary steps to help Thrive parents enroll at a district school, including giving them priority placement in schools with open seats.

But several Thrive parents said they have vowed to avoid San Diego Unified district schools because of previous bad experiences there.

Pardo-Guerra said the charter schools he is interested in have long waiting lists and the high-performing, high-demand charter schools dont have as diverse a student body as Thrive.

Peri Lynn Turnbull, a Thrive parent and president of the Thrive Education Foundation, said she is not sure where she else besides Thrive she will enroll her son, Jacob, an eighth-grader who has autism.

When Jacob first started attending Thrive, he was three years behind his peers,Turnbull said. Turnbull said she feared he might never attend college or graduate high school, because he was struggling academically and socially.

Now, Jacob is testing on grade level, she said, which means his teachers helped him accomplish six years of learning in three years. He has been elected school president, Turnbull said, and is infinitely better at socializing with his peers, keeping relationships and handling his emotions.

Its saved Jacobs life. We really believe it. We dont think he wouldve made it if he went to another school, Turnbull said of Thrive.

What troubles Turnbull, she said, is the idea that her bringing Jacob  who was initially a failing student  to Thrive likely hurt the schools scores. If parents like her had brought their other high-performing children, it could have been a different story, Turnbull said.

Its his scores that are hurting the renewal process, which is mortifying because [Thrive] did everything we asked of them, Turnbull said. All the parents like me, we brought a child to the school who was struggling.

The State Board generally has followed the education departments recommendations and has mostly voted in charter schools favor. The board has approved the establishment or renewal of 15 charter school petitions since January 2018, according to state board meeting minutes. It has denied only five.

Kristen Taketa

Email: kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @Kristen_Taketa
Rooms were cold with broken heaters. Toilets didnt function. Beds had no sheets. Water leaked from broken pipes and a musty smell filled rooms that had little furnishing.

These were the conditions described by people who have been inside Cortez Hill Family Center, a city of San Diego-owned downtown transitional housing shelter.

Its beyond unacceptable, said San Diego City Councilman Chris Ward, co-chair of the Regional Task Force on the Homeless and whose district includes the Cortez Hill shelter. He added that repairs should be made as soon as possible.

Ward learned about the condition of the shelter last week at a meeting with city officials and nonprofits, including the Alpha Project, which in January took over the contract to provide social services at Cortez Hill. The YWCA had held the contract for more than a decade before that.

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Bob McElroy, president and CEO of the Alpha Project, said he first walked into the 47-room shelter on Jan. 2 and was appalled at what he saw.

I was shocked to see the deplorable, disgusting conditions there, McElroy said. I was embarrassed that anybody would allow their clients to exist in a facility like that. Its absolutely unsafe for our residents to be there.

YWCA of San Diego CEO Heather Finlay on Tuesday saw photos of the shelter shot by Alpha Project staff members and said her organization was not responsible for its condition.

I can assure you that we did not leave the property in the condition reflected in those photos, nor would we move families into units in that condition, she wrote in an email.

McElroy insisted the YWCA was operating the shelter in the conditions shown in the photos.

We hired most of their former staff, he said. They can attest to the condition of the facility and their own working conditions.

Cortez Hill tenants include families who had been homeless and domestic-violence survivors. People typically stay in transitional housing up to 90 days while the program operator provides various services and tries to place them in permanent housing.

McElroy said people who moved in found bunk beds without blankets, windows that leaked in the rain, broken toilets, rats and bugs, leaking pipes, laundry machines that didnt work, window coverings in shreds, bathroom basins torn apart, broken air conditioners and a musty smell in every room.

I replaced a couple of refrigerators that were disgustingly putrid, he said.

McElroy said Alpha Project funds cant be used to make repairs to the city-owned building, but the nonprofit has made repairs to the heating system and paid for an exterminator, and was reimbursed by the city for the cost.

With no cabinets in their rooms, residents at Cortez Hill Family Center had no place to store their possessions, which often are left on the floor or counters. (Courtesy the Alpha Project.)

McElroy said he saw children on the second floor wave to him and enter their unit through a window. A maintenance worker explained that the door to the unit didnt work, he said.

McElroy also recalled a mother of three who showed him a wound on her finger she got from sharp, broken linoleum on a kitchen sink. Alpha Project staff members, he said, discovered a ceiling fire extinguisher that was dripping water onto electrical plugs two floors below.

It was hazardous, he said.

Lisa Jones, senior vice president of homeless housing innovations at the San Diego Housing Commission, said $40,000 has been spent so far to make immediate improvements to the site.

Greg Block, senior press secretary for San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, said the city is looking at Community Development Block Grant funds and other sources to make more improvements.

McElroy said hes been waiting two months for funding to make repairs, and hes stopped accepting new clients until they are made.

I still dont have confidence that theres not toxic fumes, mold or whatever, in those rooms, he said.

There are 30 empty rooms in the building and the waiting list has grown to 63 families, he said.

Joyce Summer lives across the street from Cortez Hill Family Center and was invited by McElroy to tour the building as a member of the Cortez Hill Active Residents Group. Fellow members Nancy Wilson Ramon and group President Ann Murphy also went, along with a staff member from Wards office and someone from the Downtown San Diego Partnership.

We walked into a couple of rooms where the smells were so bad that we had to run out, Summer said. We got nauseous. It smelled like rotten eggs.

Summer said she toured the building in early March after some repairs had been made, but she still saw exposed wires and the need for many other improvements.

Theres a 2-week old baby there, she said. Theres no closets. Clothes are on the floor. The vanities are all broken. The mattresses were dirty. I suppose its better than being on the street, but not much.

On Friday, McElroy received a San Diego Housing Commission email about tests for possible toxic conditions in four rooms. People were moved out of two rooms immediately as directed by the notice. Problems were also found in a third vacant unit and the laundry room, he said.

The city bought the property in 2001 when it was a hotel, and the YWCA began operating programs that year through a contract with the San Diego Housing Commission.

Jones said the YWCA backed away from operating Cortez Hill because the organization felt the work didnt align with their mission.

Its unclear whether any inspections of the site had been conducted over the past several years.

San Diego Housing Commission Chief Operating Officer Jeff Davis said the commission had a contract with the YWCA for services, while the citys Real Estate Assets Department was responsible for the building.

Block said the citys Real Estate Assets Department does not do regular inspections of city properties, but relies on the operator of the property to notify the city of problems.

Window coverings were shreded, beds had no sheets and rooms had not cabinets for storage clothes at Cortez Hill Family Center. (Courtesy the Alpha Project.)

We cant fix something if we dont know about it, he said.

Ward said it would be alarming if the city had never inspected the site.

McElroy said he was open to showing the property to the media, but permission would have to come from the San Diego Housing Commission. The commission declined repeated requests for The San Diego Union-Tribune to access the property. Davis said the request had been passed on to the city, but as of Tuesday he had not heard back.

Dan Shea, a chain restaurant operator and partner at Paradigm Investment Group, LLC., also has visited the site. A philanthropist concerned with helping the homeless, Shea said he had been asked if he would help fund repairs to the building.

My answer was no Shea wrote in an email to The San Diego Union-Tribune. I have never seen a deplorable facility in such disrepair and I was appalled that the city would allow any organization to house people there, especially one owned by the city with oversight by the city.

Shea wrote that it was the responsibility of the city, not philanthropists, to keep up the property.

And although I am told the city is doing everything they can to clean it up right now, the real question is how could it have ever gotten to this state of disrepair? he wrote. Ostensibly the city imposes standards on every service provider they contract with, but not for their own property?

Block said Faulconer also was disappointed to learn of the conditions of the building, and his immediate focus is on making improvements to it.

His reaction is, Lets fix it, he said. There will be time to look back and think about what went wrong, but lets just fix it.

McElroy said he, too, is more interested in getting the repairs funded than trying to find who was complicit in the condition of the building.

Bare floorboards and broken tiles are in some rooms at Cortez Hill Family Center. (Courtesy the Alpha Project.)

While many rooms appear in need of repair, Jones said, monthly reviews of the YWCAs programs at the site found they were performing well.

In the major program areas related to households served, bed utilization, exits to permanent or longer-term housing, they generally performed as well or better against their contract as the other interim shelters, she wrote in an email.

Reviews found that in the last year and a half, occupancy at the shelter had been as high as 220 in some months, but had dipped to 150 in December 2018, the last month the YWCA operated it.

From 70 percent to 90 percent of tenants left for permanent or longer-term housing most months, exceeding the goal of 65 percent.

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

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Two of the three asylum seekers who were supposed to show up for the first immigration court hearings under the Remain in Mexico policy did not make it across the border on Thursday to appear.

After the Homeland Security Secretary announced what she called a historic program, known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols, in December, many wondered  and worried  about the logistics of shuttling migrants back and forth across the border for court hearings.

At least one of the people who had been returned to Tijuana after asking for asylum at the San Ysidro Port of Entry missed the court hearings because of what Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Rico Bartolomei called a glitch in the scheduling system.

Court cases for the program were supposed to start next Tuesday, but somehow cases got scheduled for this Thursday, Bartolomei explained. At first, the court tried to reschedule those hearings for Tuesday but realized it wouldnt have a way to communicate that effectively with the asylum seekers in Mexico.

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At the end of the day, we kept the hearings as scheduled, Bartolomei explained.

The issue was that when the court rescheduled to March 19, anyone who called its toll-free number to check for court date updates thought that the hearings would be on March 19. That happened in the case of one Honduran woman who had Los Angeles-based attorney Olga Badilla representing her.

Badilla explained to the judge that she had only learned the day before that the hearing had moved back to March 14 and that her client hadnt found out in time to be at the port of entry at 9 a.m. She arrived a couple of hours later, but Customs and Border Protection officers wouldnt let her into the U.S. for her hearing.

Shes present at the port of entry and ready to come in, Badilla told the judge, asking for the courts help. Its an unusual situation given the circumstances.

Bartolomei turned to the government attorney, Jason Aguilar, chief counsel for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Aguilar said the judge should order the woman deported in her absence.

Bartolomei denied that motion, saying that the woman had received insufficient notice of the hearing. Instead, he scheduled a future date with Badilla to turn in the womans asylum application.

Though the woman was given another chance to show up for court, she ran into more problems down at the border. Her permit to stay in Mexico was on the verge of expiring in anticipation of her crossing into the U.S. for court. If she had crossed and returned again, she would likely get a new one. Without entering the U.S., she was about to become deportable from Mexico.

When court ended for the day, Badilla went to try to help her client.

The other person who didnt show up for court, a 24-year-old man from Honduras, had also had his case rescheduled through the courts glitch.

ICE attorney Aguilar again moved to have the man ordered deported.

Bartolomei pushed the ICE attorney about whether it made sense to order someone deported from the U.S. while they are still in Mexico. He asked if it made more sense to consider the persons application for admission withdrawn.

According to immigration attorney Tammy Lin, a withdrawal would limit potential restrictions on the mans ability to come to the U.S. in the future. A deportation order would make it much more difficult for the man to come to the U.S.

During the conversation, Bartolomei sighed audibly, weighing the options before him.

Then he decided to reschedule his case for the 19th to see if the man showed up then. Since he didnt have an address to send the new hearing notice to, he gave it to the Department of Homeland Security to pass on to the man.

The one person who did show up did not have an attorney. Also from Honduras, the man arrived at El Chaparral plaza outside the port of entry well before 9 a.m. A volunteer from a legal services organization that supports migrants in the plaza every morning before they ask for asylum saw him and escorted him to the gate inside the port that marks the entry to the U.S.

He waited in line, shuffling down the spiral walkway in a mix of commuters, shoppers and friends returning from trips abroad. When he got to the front of the line, a Customs and Border Protection official held him to the side to wait for the other two who were supposed to come.

He was nervous, he said.

A few minutes after 9 a.m., several CBP officers and two plainclothes officials took him into the U.S. Officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement transported him from the port of entry to the office building in downtown San Diego that houses the immigration court.

He arrived at the court before noon and sat in a corner of the back row of benches, head bowed.

When it was his turn to face the judge, he spoke softly into the microphone and watched attentively as Bartolomei explained each of the documents he had received.

Bartolomei asked him if he wanted more time to find an attorney.

Yes, the man replied.

The judge granted him another month to try to find someone to help him and told him he would likely be taken back to Mexico again.

I know it will be difficult to try to get an attorney from there, Bartolomei told him, urging him to try his best to find a lawyer to take his case.

When his turn was over, ICE officers quickly whisked him away, back to the port of entry.

Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence

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Since the first crash, investigators have focused on the aircraft's anti-stall system that dips the plane's nose down to prevent it from stalling.

The crash of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 was the model's second deadly accident since October, when 189 people were killed after a Lion Air jetliner crashed in Indonesia. The accidents prompted more than 40 countries to either ground the planes or ban them from their airspace.

French aviation investigators began analyzing the flight data recorders Thursday from the American-made jetliner that crashed in Ethiopia Sunday, killing 157 people from about 30 countries.

As Canada closed its airspace to the Max 8 on Wednesday, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations by the two aircraft produced a "similar profile." The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which also ordered the planes grounded Wednesday, said new satellite data and other evidence also showed similar movements by the two planes.

France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) will conduct the "black boxes" analysis as an adviser, as international aviation rules require Ethiopia to lead the investigation. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will also play a key role as a representative of the country where the aircraft is manufactured.

The FAA said Wednesday that Boeing had been working on a software fix for the aircraft since the October crash in Indonesia. Experts who reviewed publicly available data said it indicates a malfunction of the plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) may have contributed to Sunday's crash. Inaccurate sensor readings may have prompted the automated system to push the nose of the planes down, denying the pilots the chance to override the system.

Experts say other possible causes of the crashes are being investigated, including other malfunctioning systems and pilot error.

Months before the Ethiopian Airlines crash, U.S. pilots complained about the aircraft's systems, maintaining they limited their control, according to a U.S. government confidential reporting system. Pilots also complained about the lack of sufficient training on automated-assisted aviation systems.

Some aviation experts have said the two jetliners whipped up and down several times following takeoff. A preliminary report by Indonesian investigators concluded that a defective sensor directed an automation feature to repeatedly force the plane to dive, until it eventually crashed, killing everyone on board.
Fiftyfour years after another Prince of Wales paid a similar call, Prince Charles, the 25-year-old heir to the British throne, arrived in San Diego in March 1974 for a week-long visit as part of the crew of the HMS Jupiter.

From The San Diego Union, Friday, March 15, 1974:

PRINCE CHARLES VISITS

Socially, A Lieutenant Takes Command

By Eileen Jackson

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, bears without arrogance the weight of many titles. The one he wears here with pride of service is lieutenant Prince of Wales. He arrived yesterday morning aboard the HMS Jupiter, on which he serves as communications officer. The ship was 1 hour and 2 minutes late due to what some called the London fog and the British referred to as something out of a Hollywood fog machine.

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Prince Charles said last night at a reception given for 120 guests aboard the Jupiter by Cmdr. J.P. Gunning, commanding officer of the ship, and the 17 officers that the fog washairy. He asked retired Vice Adm. Ruthven Libby of Coronado, What did you do before you had radar?

Prince Charles also was concerned that this unusual California weather will fade the glowing suntan which he recently acquired in Honolulu. He obviously is very proud of it. The guests aboard the Royal Navy frigate were mostly military officers, members of the British communities of San Diego and Los Angeles, including British Consul General Andrew Franklin of Los Angeles, and a few civic leaders from both areas and their wives. They boarded the ship in a light, misty fog on an easy gangplank leading to the flight deck, so called because it serves a helicopter, hidden behind bunting on this occasion.

Warm Reception

It was a cozy, warm reception, the entire deck being enclosed with wide bands of read and white bunting to match the canopied ceiling. The area was softened with palms and potted flowering plants.

Guests were immediately offered a variety of stimulating drinks including such beverages as brandy and ginger.

Guests were warmly greeted by Cmdr. Gunning and all the officers, including ones all eyes sought  Prince Charles. HE was completely accessible and as easy to meet as he was to spot. No formal receiving line had been set up. Guests tended to form an informal circle around the prince, who was on host duty, as were other officrers.

We had a long, informal chat with him at the beginning of the reception and found him an engaging, composed and really very handsome young man with a vast curiosity. He was interested in Coronado and talked about Hotel del Coronado, (he didnt know quite where it was) where, he understood, his great uncle, the former Prince of Wales, was entertained in 1920. Prince Charles hadnt doe his homework on that visit and seemed fascinated by hearing details of it, including the fact that the present Duchess of Windsor lived here at that time.

Surfing Discussed

He discussed enthusiastically the possibility of going surfing, but thought it might be too cold. Prince Charles seemed to us as casual and friendly as his father, Prince Philip, whom, on Oct. 12, 1957, we lightheartedly invited to come to California and bring Queen Elizabeth II.

Historical photos and articles from The San Diego Union-Tribune archives are compiled by merrie.monteagudo@sduniontribune.com. Search the U-T historic archives at NewsLibrary.com/sites/sdub.
A group of migrants who breached the U.S. border fence by the Pacific Ocean at Playas de Tijuana were detained Thursday by Border Patrol agents in Border Field State Park.

The group of about 35 people included women and children who said they were mostly from Honduras and came to Tijuana in a caravan.

Video shot from the Mexican side shows the group climbing through a broken piece of fencing and running down the beach.

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Agents with the Border Patrol had the group sitting on the edge of a muddy trail while they collected their belongings into paper bags.

The detained migrants were instructed by Border Patrol agents not to speak with the media.

One member of the group, a man in his early 20s, was detained separately and kept his eyes closed as he was loaded into a separate van.

The group was apprehended approximately 200 yards from the border fence on the U.S. side.

Access to the area is typically closed to vehicles during periods of wet weather. The area where they were stopped is about one mile from the parking lot at the entrance to Border Field State Park.

The migrants were loaded into Border Patrol vans, which drove away at about 6:15 p.m. Thursday.

Some areas of the trail were muddy and badly flooded after recent rains.

On Wednesday, photojournalist Tom Franklin captured video of two migrants slipping through the porous border fence in Playas, where a section of the lattice fencing had been pulled back. Franklin went back to the fence Thursday to see if it had been repaired.

Two women, one carrying a young child, followed a group of roughly 20-30 migrants who squeezed through an opening in the border fence on the beach on La Playa Tijuana today, running past border patrol heading towards SanDiego. (THOMAS E. FRANKLIN)

As we arrived we saw a large group of people  about 75 people  jammed up against the fence looking through, a group of about 20-30 had snuck through the fence and a number of them were running down the beach in the distance.

After the last of the migrants slipped through  two women with one holding a child  a Border Patrol SUV drove up to the fence and blocked the gap.

In the video shot Wednesday, the migrants can be seen running down the coastline in Imperial Beach, while an agent chases after them.

One of the men seen in the video is fleeing while he is carrying a small child in his arms.

It remains unknown if the two men and child who slipped through the fence Wednesday were apprehended.

A spokesman for Border Patrol said Wednesday he was not immediately aware of either incident.
Israeli warplanes attacked militant targets in the southern Gaza Strip early Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, as the sides appeared to be hurtling toward a new round of violence.

The rocket attack Thursday night caught the Israeli military off guard and marked the first time that Tel Aviv, some 50 miles north of Gaza, has been targeted since a 2014 war. Though the attack caused no damage or injuries, it was a significant escalation and set the stage for a tough Israeli reprisal.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting with his military chief and other top security officials. Shortly after, Israeli warplanes attacked targets in southern and central Gaza.

The blasts were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 15 miles away from some of the strikes. The Israeli warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

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The Israeli military said it was targeting terror sites in Gaza, but gave no further details. Palestinian media said naval bases belonging to the ruling Hamas group had been struck. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Minutes later, the Israeli military reported air raid sirens in southern Israel. It said it had identified a launch attempt out of Gaza, but the rocket misfired and landed inside Palestinian territory.

Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since Israel and Hamas fought their last war, in 2014.

The sudden outburst of fighting comes at a sensitive time for both sides. Israel is holding national elections in less than a month. Netanyahu is locked in a tight fight for re-election and could face heavy criticism from his opponents if he is seen as ineffective against the militants.

Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett, a hardline rival of Netanyahus, called on the prime minister to convene a gathering of his Security Cabinet and demand the army present a plan to defeat Hamas.

Likewise, Hamas has come under rare public criticism in Gaza for the harsh conditions in the territory. An Israel-Egyptian blockade, combined with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and mismanagement by the Hamas government, have fueled an economic crisis in the territory. Residents have little desire for another war with Israel.

Earlier Thursday, Hamas police violently broke up a small protest over the harsh living conditions.

Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said the army had been caught off guard by Thursday nights rocket barrage. He said officials were still trying to determine who had fired the rocket.

Israel holds Hamas responsible for all fire coming out of the territory. Hamas possesses a large arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of striking deep inside Israel.

But with Gazas economy in tatters, the group has been seeking to preserve calm.

Hamas denied responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, saying the rockets were launched when the groups military wing was meeting with Egyptian mediators to try to strengthen a cease-fire with Israel.

In an unusual step that indicated Hamas was attempting to prevent further escalation, the Hamas Interior Ministry said the rocket fire went against the national consensus and promised to take action against the perpetrators.

But Israelis military concluded that Hamas did fire two rockets toward Tel Aviv. In a statement early Friday, the army said we can confirm that Hamas carried out the rocket attack.

Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militant group that also has a large rocket arsenal, also denied firing the rockets. Smaller factions inspired by the Islamic State group also sometimes fire rockets, though it is unclear whether they possess projectiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border. Late Thursday, local media said that Egyptian mediators left the territory.

At the time, Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

I suggest to Hamas, dont count on it, he told his Cabinet. We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general.

Akram reported from Gaza City, Gaza Strip.
At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshipers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called one of New Zealands darkest days.

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack that shocked people across the nation of 5 million people. Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Two other people were being held in custody, and police said they were trying to determine how they might be involved.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the events in Christchurch represented an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence, and that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees. In addition to the dead, she said more than 20 people were seriously wounded.

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It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, Ardern said.

As news of the attacks spread, messages of sympathy poured in from around the world. President Trump tweeted his condolences, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement of support: The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

Police took three men and a woman into custody after the shootings. One person was later released.

Though there was no reason to believe there were any more suspects, Ardern said the national security-threat level was being raised from low to high, the second-highest level.

National carrier Air New Zealand canceled at least 17 flights in and out of Christchurch, saying it couldnt properly screen customers and their baggage following the shootings.

Authorities have not specified who they detained, but said none had been on any watch list. A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack. He said he was a 28-year-old white Australian and a racist.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed that one of the people detained was an Australian-born citizen.

(Los Angeles Times)

Police Commissioner Mike Bush said Friday night that a man had been charged with murder. He did not say whether police believed that the same shooter was responsible for both attacks.

Ardern alluded at a news conference to anti-immigrant sentiment as the possible motive, saying that although many people affected by the shootings may be migrants or refugees, they have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us.

As for the suspects, Ardern said, these are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand.

Bush said police had found two improvised explosive devices in one car, a clarification from an earlier statement that there were devices in multiple vehicles. He said authorities had disabled one and were in the process of disabling the second.

The deadliest attack occurred at the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch at about 1:45 p.m., when 41 people were killed.

Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter the mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door to the mosque, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semiautomatic weapon in his driveway, and fled. He said he then went into the mosque to try to help.

I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said. I dont understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. Its ridiculous.

He said he helped about five people recover in his home. He said one was slightly injured.

 New Zealands police commissioner and eyewitnesses discuss the deadly mass shootings at multiple mosques Friday in Christchurch.

Ive lived next door to this mosque for about five years and the people are great, theyre very friendly, he said. I just dont understand it.

He said the gunman was white and was wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top, giving him a military-type appearance.

A video that was apparently livestreamed by the shooter shows the attack in horrifying detail. The gunman spends more than two minutes inside the mosque spraying terrified worshipers with bullets again and again, sometimes refiring at people he has already cut down.

He then walks outside to the street, where he shoots at people on the sidewalk. Childrens screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get another rifle.

The gunman then walks back into the mosque, where there are at least two dozen people lying on the ground. After walking back outside and shooting a woman there, he gets back in his car, where the song Fire by English rock band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown can be heard blasting from the speakers. The singer bellows, I am the god of hellfire! and the gunman drives away. The video then cuts out.

During a second shooting at the Linwood Masjid Mosque, seven people were killed.

One more person died later at Christchurch Hospital.

Mark Nichols told the New Zealand Herald he heard about five gunshots and that a Friday prayer-goer returned fire with a rifle or shotgun.

Nichols said he saw two injured people being carried out on stretchers past his automotive shop and that both people appeared to be alive.

The police commissioner warned anybody who was thinking of going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand on Friday to stay put.

The man who claimed responsibility for the shooting said he came to New Zealand only to plan and train for the attack. He said he was not a member of any organization, but had donated to and interacted with many nationalist groups, though he acted alone and no group ordered the attack.

(Los Angeles Times)

He said the mosques in Christchurch and Linwood would be the targets, as would a third mosque in the town of Ashburton if he could make it there.

He said he chose New Zealand because of its location, to show that even the most remote parts of the world were not free of mass immigration.

New Zealand is generally considered to be a welcoming country for migrants and refugees. Last year, the prime minister announced the country would boost its annual refugee quota from 1,000 to 1,500 starting in 2020. Ardern, whose party campaigned on the promise of raising the intake of refugees, called the planned increase the right thing to do.

Home to nearly 400,000 people, Christchurch is the largest city on New Zealands South Island. Sometimes called the garden city, it has been rebuilding since an earthquake in 2011 killed 185 people and destroyed many downtown buildings.

A cricket match between New Zealand and Bangladesh scheduled to start Saturday was canceled after the Bangladesh cricket team had a narrow escape.

Players and members of the teams coaching staff were reportedly on their bus, approaching the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Hagley Park when the shooting broke out.

Batsman Tamim Iqbal tweeted entire team got saved from active shooters. Frightening experience and please keep us in your prayers.

Mass shootings in New Zealand are rare. Before Fridays attack, the deadliest shooting in modern history occurred in the small town of Aramoana in 1990, when gunman David Gray shot and killed 13 people following a dispute with a neighbor.
Border Patrol agents from the San Diego Sector intercepted an SUV on Wednesday night that was loaded with more than 150 pounds of methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin worth more than $620,000, authorities said.

Agents spotted the Ford Explorer around 9 p.m. on northbound Interstate 15 and, believing it was suspicious, stopped it near the Temecula Border Patrol substation just north of San Diego County, agency spokeswoman Mary Beth Caston said in a statement.

A drug-sniffing dog zeroed in on the back of the SUV, where agents found 114 separate bundles of drugs, Caston said.

The agents found more than 114 pounds of methamphetamine worth about $230,000, more than 27 pounds of cocaine valued at roughly $277,000 and nearly 11 pounds of black tar heroin worth roughly $114,000.

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The driver, a 36-year-old man, and his passenger, a 41-year-old man, were both identified as Mexican citizens, Caston said. They were detained and turned over to the Riverside County Sheriffs Department on suspicion of drug smuggling charges.

Border Patrol agents seized the Ford Explorer.

Between the beginning of October and the end of February, Border Patrol San Diego Sector agents had intercepted 1,255 pounds of methamphetamine, 506 pounds of cocaine and 114 pounds of heroin, authorities said.

Twitter: @Alex_Riggins

(619) 293-1710

alex.riggins@sduniontribune.com
Leaders of several faiths gathered Friday afternoon at the Islamic Center of San Diego as a sign of unity and to denounce the shooting massacres a day earlier that left at least 49 people dead at mosques in New Zealand.

At a news conference held at the center in Clairemont, Imam Taha Hassane noted that Muslim people havent been the only targets of religious-based hate crimes in recent years, pointing to the attacks on Jews in Pittsburgh and Christians in Texas and South Carolina.

When we start targeting worshipers in their houses of worship, we have no other option but to come together and do our best to stop this evil, he said.

San Diego police were present at the news conference at the center on Eckstrom Street, evidence of tightened security measures at mosques and other religious sites around San Diego County on Friday.

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Although there is no indication of a specific threat in the San Diego area, you will see an increased police presence around places of worship, Police Chief David Nisleit said in a morning statement.

The county Sheriffs Department issued a similar statement, saying it was not aware of any direct threats around the county but would increase patrols at places of worship.

In Escondido, officers were providing extra patrols at the local mosque and at a Christian church that asked for patrols during an Islamic outreach event, said police Capt. Eric Skaja.

El Cajon police Lt. Keith MacArthur said he met with leaders at two mosques in his city early Friday. One asked for extra patrols during services.

I let them know were here to support them, MacArthur said. Hopefully, to make them feel a little safer.

He said patrol officers would keep an eye on all houses of worship overnight.

Imam Taha Hassane, left, of the Islamic Center of San Diego in Clairemont speaks at a news conference organized by the Muslim Leadership Council of San Diego, denouncing hate and the mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

In Christchurch, New Zealand, authorities said one man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car. Two other people were held in custody.

A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack. He said he was a 28-year-old white Australian and a racist, according to Associated Press.

The New York Times reported that the manifesto referred to non-whites as invaders who threaten to replace white people. The author of the manifesto called President Donald Trump a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose, but mocked him as a policy maker and leader.

The gunman wore a camera and livestreamed his actions as he shot numerous people at one of the mosques.

Trump tweeted that the killings were a horrible massacre.

49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all! the president tweeted.

Locally, Dustin Craun, executive director of San Diegos Council on American-Islamic Relations, issued a statement Friday saying, Its not about a mosque, its not about a synagogue, its not about a church. All of our places of worship have been attacked by white supremacists.

Craun said people dont talk about white supremacists like we do other terrorist groups.

We pray for people suffering from the white supremacist ideology around the world, he continued. We have to root out hatred wherever it is.

Interfaith and community organization leaders held a news conference at the Islamic Center of San Diego to denounce hate and the mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

Craun led the news conference at the Islamic Center of San Diego, where speakers included Hassane, the centers director, and Rabbi Scott Meltzer of OrShalom, who said all people came from the same heritage and were one.

Tareq Purmul, chairman of the Muslim Leadership Council, called on elected leaders, including Trump and the Republican and Democratic parties, to denounce white supremacy.

He also said organizations that embolden white supremacists should be shut down and treated like terrorist organizations.

If we have terrorist organizations were fighting against, we need to be courageous enough to do that here at home, he said.

Bishop Cornelius Bowser of Charity Apostolic Church drew applause when he said white supremacist groups should be tracked in the same way law enforcement tracks street gangs.

When you look at white nationalism and white supremacy, its a gang and (police) most definitely need to start documenting them, and they need to start surveying them, and they need to be held accountable, he said.

If theyre spilling this hate thats leading to violence, they need to be arrested and put in jail, Bowser continued. Not just the shooter, but all those who contributed to them. Fear needs to be put into them to let them know that America and we as a people need to stand together, and we will not tolerate hate.

Aside from the five police officers posted at the center, Friday was a normal day there, Craun said, with people coming for prayers as usual by 6 a.m. There is also a school at the center.

Its not like a church where people are in and out a few days a week, he added. Here it is used almost 24 hours a day, until 9 or 10 p.m.

The Muslim Leadership Council of San Diego issued a statement saying it condemns the terrorist attacks in New Zealand and urging all Muslims and worshipers to be extra vigilant.

The prevalence of hate and the rising tide of Islamophobia gives birth to the tragedies we witnessed today, Ismahan Abdullahi, executive director of Muslim American Society-Public Affairs and Civic Engagement in San Diego, said in a statement.

Ramia Sahid, executive director of Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, based in City Heights, issued a statement saying in part: No one should be afraid of entering their house of worship or practicing their religion. Unfortunately, for too many of us that has become a reality.

Hate speech and hate crimes have risen in the last few years , the statement continued, adding an opinion that bigots have been emboldened by anti-Islamic statements made by the Trump administration. Now is the time for San Diegans to rally around their Muslim friends, neighbors, and loved ones and show their support. We can and we must do better.

Law enforcement officials asked that anyone who becomes aware of a threat to any place of worship report it immediately so it can be investigated.

pauline.repard@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @pdrepard

UPDATES:

7:30 p.m.: This story was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 12:50 p.m.
A 23-year-old motorcyclist was killed in a solo crash on Hacienda Drive in Vista on Wednesday, sheriffs authorities said.

According to the Sheriffs Department, the rider was traveling east on Hacienda Drive east of South Emerald Drive at about 1:40 p.m. when he hit the south curb at a slight curve. He was ejected from the motorcycle and crashed into a light pole.

The rider was taken to Palomar Hospital, where he died. His name has not been released.

The Sheriffs Departments traffic division is investigating the crash.

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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

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Unbowed by a congressional rebuke, President Donald Trump issued the first veto of his presidency on Friday in a demonstration that he is not through fighting for his signature campaign promise, which stands largely unfulfilled 18 months before voters decide whether to grant him another term.

Trump rejected an effort by Congress to block the emergency declaration hed used to circumvent lawmakers as he tried to shake loose funds for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The monthslong confrontation now moves to the courts, but not before marking a new era of divided government in Washington and Republicans increasing independence from the White House.

Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, Trump said, and I have the duty to veto it.

A dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats in approving the joint resolution on Thursday as both parties strained to exert their power in new ways. It is unlikely that Congress will have the two-thirds majority required to override Trumps veto, though House Democrats will try nonetheless on March 26.

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Despite the reproach, Trump seized the opportunity to publicly rebuff Congress and show his commitment to the border wall. In embracing the opportunity to deploy the constitutional power of the veto for the first time, he treated the occasion with all the traditional pomp of a bill-signing.

Trump was surrounded in the Oval Office by supporters, including law enforcement officials and the parents of children killed by people in the country illegally, who offered profuse thanks and frequent applause. Trump dramatically signed his veto message and then held the document up for the cameras to capture.

Trump wants to use the emergency order to divert billions of federal dollars earmarked for defense spending toward the southern border wall. It still faces several legal challenges from Democratic state attorneys general and environmental groups who argue the emergency declaration was unconstitutional.

Those cases could prevent Trump from diverting extra money to barrier construction for months or longer. American Civil Liberties Union, which filed one of the challenges, said the veto is meaningless, like the declaration in the first place.

Congress has rejected the presidents declaration, and now the courts will be the ultimate arbiter of its legality. We look forward to seeing him in court and to the shellacking that he will receive at the hands of an independent judiciary, said Executive Director Anthony Romero.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trumps veto a lawless power grab and railed that, even after both chambers tried to stop him, Trump has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people.

Trump, however, insisted the situation on the southern border is a tremendous national emergency, adding, our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point.

Many lawmakers said Thursdays vote was not necessarily a rejection of the president or the wall, but protections against future presidents  namely a Democrat who might want to declare an emergency on climate change, gun control or any number of other issues.

It was the first direct challenge to the 1976 National Emergencies Act, just as a Wednesday vote on Yemen was the first time Congress invoked the decades-old War Powers Act to try to rein in a president. That resolution seeking to end U.S. backing for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen was approved in the aftermath of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and is expected to be the subject of Trumps second veto.

Despite the embarrassing defections of the 12 GOP senators, Trumps grip on the party remains strong and the White House made it clear that Republicans resisting Trump could face political consequences. Ahead of the voting, Trump framed the issue as with-him-or-against-him on border security, a powerful argument with many.

But Friday, Trump said he had sympathy for the Republicans who voted against him and emphasized that he never truly twisted the arms of lawmakers, because he knew there were not enough votes to override the veto.

Look, they were doing what they have to do, Trump said, insisting he put no pressure on lawmakers to vote against the resolution because he realized that the measure was likely to pass.

Still, a White House official said Trump wont forget when senators who opposed him want him to attend fundraisers or provide other help. The official was not authorized to speak publicly on internal deliberations so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump painted his usual portrait of a lawless and violent border. He cited thousands and thousands of gang arrests and claimed many of the asylum seekers released into the U.S. were stone-cold killers, ignoring data that shows immigrants are less likely to commit crime. He noted, correctly, a spike in the number of people coming to the border to claim asylum.

Trump initiated the showdown months ago when he all but dared Congress not to give him the $5.7 billion he was demanding to build the U.S.-Mexico wall, by threatening a federal government shutdown.

Congress declined and the result was the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Against the advice of GOP leaders, Trump invoked the national emergency declaration last month, allowing him to try to tap about $3.6 billion for the wall by shuffling money from military projects, and that drew outrage from many lawmakers. Trump had campaigned for president promising Mexico would pay for the wall.

AP writers Alan Fram, Lisa Mascaro, Catherine Lucey and Colleen Long contributed.
A federal judge has dismissed the bankruptcy petition filed last week by Michael Avenattis longtime firm Eagan Avenatti and raised the prospect of sanctioning the celebrity lawyer.

Judge Catherine Bauer of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana ordered Avenatti to testify May 8 at a hearing on allegations by creditors of the firm that he submitted its petition for bankruptcy protection in bad faith.

Bauers quick dismissal of the case came at the request of Jason Frank, a former Eagan Avenatti lawyer who alleged in court papers that the petition was fraudulently filed in a maneuver to thwart Franks collection of a $10-million judgment against the firm.

Mr. Frank is pleased that the judge dismissed Mr. Avenattis bad-faith bankruptcy petition, Frank lawyer Andrew Stolper said.

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Frank had previously filed papers accusing Avenatti of hiding millions of dollars from the judge in 2017 when Bauer was overseeing the firms previous bankruptcy. Frank withdrew the papers when Avenatti agreed to the appointment of a receiver to take control of the firms financial affairs.

Under a court order, the firms receiver had sole authority to file for bankruptcy. Avenatti filed for bankruptcy in defiance of the receiver, who had told him that he lacked the power to do so.

Avenatti, who denies wrongdoing, said he did not expect to be sanctioned.

Much ado about nothing  old law firm, he said by email.

Avenatti no longer identifies his law practice as Eagan Avenatti, but continues to use an Eagan Avenatti email address and still features the firms former Newport Beach office on his website.

The office landlord, the Irvine Co., which evicted Eagan Avenatti in November for nonpayment of rent, filed court papers backing Franks motion for dismissal of the bankruptcy. It cited Avenattis acknowledgment in the petition that Eagan Avenatti still owed the Irvine Co. more than $500,000.

In the bankruptcy petition, Avenatti listed a new address for the firm, on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. Eagan Avenatti is currently fighting an eviction proceeding for those offices, too.

On Friday, Avenatti is scheduled to testify in Los Angeles Superior Court in another Frank debt collection proceeding. Frank is trying to collect a $4.85-million personal judgment that he won against Avenatti for the portion of the firms $10-million debt that the latter had personally guaranteed.
House Democrats accused Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a contentious face-off Thursday of having lied to Congress about his role in a Trump administration effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Confronted by Democrats for the first time since they won control of the House, Ross reiterated testimony he gave last year that the question was added to the draft census form at the request of the Justice Department. Democrats cited calls, emails and depositions showing that he worked with White House officials to add the question, for the first time since 1950, before the Justice Departments request in December 2017.

The administration has said that the question is needed to help the department enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. California and other states with large immigrant populations have sued, contending that some people will refuse to answer the census, resulting in under-counts that will cost them clout and federal funds for their residents.

The Supreme Court is expected to consider the issue next month.

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Rep. William Lacy Clay of Missouri was the most confrontational of the Democrats at the hearing of the House Oversight Committee, charging that documents obtained by the panel prove Ross lied under oath.

Mr. Secretary, you lied to Congress. You misled the American people and you are complicit in the Trump administrations intent to suppress the growing political power of the nonwhite population, Clay said. You have already done great harm to the census in 2020, and you have zero credibility. And you should, in my opinion, resign.

Ross denied any nefarious purpose, adding, I testified truthfully to the best of my ability in response to what my understanding of the questions were.

He said the conversations Democrats pointed to were an attempt to gather information because he heard the Justice Department might ask to have the citizenship question included.

Acting Assistant Atty. Gen. John Gore told the committee in a deposition last week that he was given a memo from a Commerce Department official justifying the question two months before he made the official request for the Justice Department.

Democrats pointed to depositions of other federal employees indicating Ross was looking for a department to press for the citizenship question. Yet the rationale of citing the Voting Rights Act originated in his Commerce Department or elsewhere in the administration, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) said.

Ross has declined to produce some documents the committee sought, citing the pending lawsuits. Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) gave Ross until Tuesday to provide the documents or, he said, the committee might subpoena them.

Ross appearance came a week after a second federal judge said he had violated the Constitution and the law. The Supreme Court is scheduled to weigh the issue in April, and is expected to decide before it adjourns in June.

The Constitution requires the government to count all U.S. residents every 10 years. The results are used in many ways, including to apportion congressional districts and federal funding and, at the local level, to decide locations for firehouses, schools and polling places.

The census stopped asking Americans about citizenship after 1950, when the government determined it would get a more accurate estimation by polling a fraction of the population. Federal law prohibits the Census Bureau from sharing information from respondents with other agencies. Ross stressed that answers will not be used for immigration enforcement.

The latest from Washington 

More stories from Sarah D. Wire 
The tail end of a weeklong, three-nation tour brought President Moon Jae-in to Cambodia on Thursday, making him the first Korean leader to make a state visit to the country in a decade.

Moon's focus for the last stop of his trip is expanding multilateral cooperation in Southeast Asia.

Moon met Friday morning with King Norodom Sihamoni and then Prime Minister Hun Sen to discuss business in agriculture, infrastructure, construction and finance among other fields.
Beto ORourkes announcement Thursday that hes joined the Democratic scrum means the partys field of presidential candidates is nearly set.

A few more candidates may yet join the race  Rep. Eric Swalwell keeps traveling to Iowa, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock says hell make a decision in the spring. But of the remaining possibilities, only former Vice President Joe Biden would have an immediate impact. Aides indicate his all-but-certain announcement will come in April.

With more than a dozen candidates in the race, nows a good time to debunk a couple of persistent political myths. The first involves the dynamics of such a big, complicated field.

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UNLEARNING THE LESSON OF 2016

In 2016, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination even though he failed to gain a majority of voters in most of the early primaries. Trump had the backing of an ardent base of supporters, his many rivals divvied up everyone else, and by the time only two opponents were left, he had an unstoppable lead.

The lesson some have drawn from that experience is that a candidate with a solidly committed following, Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example, could win the Democratic nomination in a crowded field by holding a consistent 35%-40% of the vote.

It doesnt work that way.

Republicans allow winner-take-all primaries in their nominating contest, and that played a big role in Trumps success. The rules allowed him to get the lions share of delegates without winning a majority of the vote.

In South Carolinas primary, for example, Trump won just under a third of the vote and received all the states delegates. A couple of weeks later, he won all of Floridas delegates with about 46% of the vote.

Democrats dont allow that. Under Democratic rules, designed to open up the process and ensure that all factions of the party get representation, delegates get awarded roughly in proportion to a candidates vote.

In a multi-candidate field, those rules make winning an insurmountable delegate lead very difficult.

The problem Republicans had in 2016 was rules that gave the party no effective way to stop a candidate from taking the nomination with the support of an ardent minority.

In 2020, Democrats face the opposite problem  the rules may provide no way for any candidate to amass a delegate majority.

Its possible, of course, that one candidate will sweep through the early primaries. Perhaps Biden will prove that all the early polls showing him in the lead have measured genuine support, not just name recognition. Perhaps Sanders will widen his support and take a majority. Maybe Sen. Kamala Harris, who has gained ground this winter, will continue a steady rise.

Its also possible that Democrats could arrive at their convention in Milwaukee with multiple candidates still fighting for the prize and no clear victor.

THE MYTH OF THE INDEPENDENT VOTER

While were knocking down myths, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center has released polling data that, once again, disproves one of the most consistent false impressions in politics  the idea that the country has a huge and growing number of independent voters.

As Pew notes, the number of Americans who call themselves independent has grown steadily and now stands at 38% of the adult population. California mirrors that trend, with 28% of voters now registered as no party preference. Among 16- and 17-year-olds who have preregistered, 52% chose that no-party option.

Those numbers often get cited as evidence that voters want an option beyond the two major parties. Thats one of the main arguments for Howard Schultzs possible independent presidential campaign.

Baloney.

As Pews numbers show, Americans may shun the party label, but the vast majority reliably vote a party line. Of the 38% of adults who call themselves independent, just under half, 17% of the population, lean Democratic, while a smaller share, 13% of adults, leans Republican.

Only 7% of Americans say they dont lean either way. What most characterizes them? Lack of interest in politics: Those pure independents mostly dont pay much attention to public debates, frequently dont register to vote and are less likely to cast ballots, Pew found.

Those who do lean to one party or the other behave very much like their more openly declared partisans. Thats especially true on the Democratic side. Independents who lean Republican differ from Republican partisans on some issues  the independents are more likely to favor same-sex marriage, for example, and offer somewhat less support to Trump.

Overall, Democrats and independents who lean their way make up 48% of the population, Pew found. Republicans and Republican leaners make up 39%. Republicans, however, vote more consistently, which keeps U.S. elections close.

SETBACK IN THE SENATE

A dozen Republican senators joined the chambers 47 Democrats on Thursday in voting to overturn Trumps declaration of a national emergency on the southern border.

Trump will veto the resolution, which already passed the House, and neither chamber has the votes to overturn the veto. But the Senate defections were nonetheless important, Jennifer Haberkorn writes.

The White House had tried hard to hold the line in the Senate, but Trump alienated several Republican senators and, once again, undercut administration negotiators by rejecting a deal they thought they had worked out on his behalf.

Whether Trumps emergency declaration will ever lead to more construction of border barriers remains unknown. Look for litigation ahead.

THE GROWING DEMOCRATIC FIELD

Beto ORourke got wall-to-wall coverage Thursday for his announcement tour of Iowa. But as Evan Halper wrote, that just proved what we already know  ORourke knows how to generate publicity. Whether he can translate excitement into actual votes in a big Democratic field remains unknown.

Notably, although he ducked several issues, ORourke did clearly take a more moderate tack than many of his rivals. On the minimum wage, for example, he called for an increase to $15 an hour over the next six years  a much slower pace than other Democrats have advocated.

After a winter in which senators from the partys left dominated the debate, a more moderate element has come to the fore this month, as Janet Hook wrote. That can be seen not only from ORourke, but also from the entry of some governors into the race.

That less ideological style will be further reinforced by Biden. As Hook wrote, he strongly hinted that hes getting in during a speech to a friendly union audience this week.

If Biden does run, however, he bears the heavy burden of history, Doyle McManus wrote. Biden has taken a lot of positions over more than four decades in public life. A lot of them dont square with where the Democratic party currently stands.

PELOSI PREVAILS AGAIN

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a splash earlier this week by telling an interviewer in public what shes been privately telling people for weeks  she doesnt favor the idea of impeaching Trump.

Impeachment would be too divisive for the country, unless the evidence is so compelling that Republicans would join in, Pelosi said.

Of course, that doesnt mean the House should back off from aggressively investigating allegations of wrongdoing by Trump and his associates, Pelosi added.

Democrats may yet decide to try to impeach Trump, but now, if they do go that route, Pelosis highly publicized statement will allow them to say they were compelled by the evidence, rather than by a preexisting condition. And for now, as Haberkorn wrote, Democrats have once again fallen into line behind Pelosi. Even some of the most outspoken members on the left have backed off their impeachment talk.

Meantime, Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort took a double hit this week, as Chris Megerian wrote. A federal judge in Washington added several more years to his potential prison sentence, while New York state prosecutors indicted him.

The state charges, which parallel the bank fraud allegations on which Manafort was tried in federal court, could be vulnerable to legal attack on grounds of double jeopardy. But if they stand up, they could keep Manafort in prison even if Trump pardons him on his federal convictions; a presidential pardon cant overturn a state sentence.

LUDDITE IN CHIEF?

Trump loves several perks of his job, but his favorite may be the audience it gives him to comment on practically anything. This week, he aired his views on modern airplanes, opining that some were too complex to fly. As Eli Stokols wrote, the comment once again showed the presidents odd aversion to technology.

JUDICIAL NOMINEE APOLOGIZES

After a couple of false starts, the administration has gotten serious about efforts to put more conservative judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Trumps least favorite court.

The current nominee, Kenneth Kiyul Lee, a conservative lawyer from Los Angeles, wrote a number of controversial opinion articles as an undergraduate, as Sarah Wire wrote. The articles include some attacking feminists and others that disparaged gay men. To make matters worse for the nominee, he failed to give the Senate Judiciary Committee some 75 articles; he says he had forgotten about them.

Lee apologized to the committee this week.

I absolutely would not write that today. I truly regret writing that. Frankly, as an 18-year-old, I didnt know anything, he said.

RESTORING CONFIDENCE

Del Wilber writes that new Atty. Gen. William Barr has put a high priority on trying to restore confidence in the Justice Department after the rocky tenure of Jeff Sessions.

Barr will face a tough test of that effort in coming weeks when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wraps up his investigation and submits a long-anticipated report. Despite repeated false alarms, the Mueller report does seem likely to come relatively soon.

Another Cabinet official remains under fire. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross continues to draw criticism for his decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census, as Wire wrote.

A STORMY BREAKUP

Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actress who performs as Stormy Daniels and who alleges a sexual encounter with Trump, has split with her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, Michael Finnegan wrote.

Avenatti has had a rough week. In addition to the split with Daniels, Judge Catherine Bauer of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana rejected a bankruptcy petition from his former law firm and ordered Avenatti to testify about allegations from creditors that he had made the filing in bad faith.

DEBATE OVER ISRAEL

Whats the long-term impact of the furor over statements by Rep. Ilhan Omar that many saw as anti-Semitic? Some on the left hope that the controversy will at least open the way for a wider-ranging debate in Congress over Israel, Haberkorn writes. Others, however, fear that Omars comments will backfire and constrain debate even further.

EYES IN THE SKY

Spy satellites used to be the exclusive province of intelligence agencies, but these days, lots of people have access to cameras in space. For the Trump administration, thats been a problem, David Cloud writes.

Administration officials have chafed at second-guessing of their North Korea policy, much of it driven by satellite images of North Korean missile sites.

CAMPAIGNS WITHOUT END

Ever wonder why U.S. campaigns last so long? David Shribman looked back at the history and says presidential marathons took root in 1968. Read why.

LOGISTICS

That wraps up this week. Until next time, keep track of all the developments in national politics and the Trump administration at our Politics page and on Twitter @latimespolitics.

Send your comments, suggestions and news tips to politics@latimes.com.

If you like this newsletter, tell your friends to sign up.

David.lauter@latimes.com

@davidlauter
San Diego attorney Michael Aguirre is suing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for withholding documents he requested last year under the Freedom of Information Act.

Aguirre, a former federal prosecutor and San Diego city attorney, said regulators have refused to release records related to a near-miss accident at San Onofre in August that left a 50-ton container filled with radioactive waste perched precariously 18 feet above the floor of its intended storage area.

He also claimed the NRC is withholding documents that contain details about how plant owner Southern California Edison allegedly violated nuclear-waste rules for months prior to the misalignment. He wants a judge to order federal regulators to turn over the records.

To date, the NRC has engaged in stonewall tactics and has denied plaintiffs request for records without any reasonable justification, states the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court late Thursday by Aguirres law partner, Maria Severson.

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NRC officials said Friday that they do not comment on pending litigation. In an unrelated statement earlier this month, the agency said it works to provide as much information to the public as it can.

The NRC ... has been extraordinarily open and transparent about our oversight of the spent fuel loading operations at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, the statement said.

The nuclear plant at San Onofre closed in 2012 and is in the process of being decommissioned. After the August incident, majority plant owner Southern California Edison has put on hold the process of transferring millions of pounds of spent nuclear fuel from wet to dry storage.

Aguirre filed a pair of records requests in December under the federal open-records law for documents related to the August mishap and the NRCs investigation of it.

According to an NRC inspection report issued in November, a heavy canister of radioactive waste got stuck 18 feet above the floor of its storage area as it was being lowered into its vault. The safety rigging also had gone slack.

It took nearly an hour before work crews were able to safely unjam the canister and complete the downloading.

It was the 29th canister to be downloaded into a temporary storage area Edison constructed. About 40 others remain to be filled.

Edison hopes to resume fuel-transfer operations later this month.

Previously released NRC inspection reports show that Edison violated multiple rules as it moved the waste from wet to dry storage. Regulators are expected to announce a decision on possible penalties against Edison at a hearing scheduled March 25 in Texas.

The utility did not report the August accident within 24 hours as required under federal law. Instead, a contract worker at the plant disclosed the event at a community meeting nearly a week later.

Edison formally notified the NRC about the misalignment six weeks after it happened.

Aguirre requested the writings prepared from the NRC team interview of the licensee and contractor staff involved or present during the Aug. 3, 2018, misalignment incident, the lawsuit states.

He filed another request the next day seeking records related to a separate incident in February 2018, when workers discovered a loose 4-inch bolt inside a canister being prepared for loading. The company halted operations for 10 days after that discovery.

The lawsuit alleges that the NRC deliberately delayed responding to Aguirres two requests. In late January, regulators said the documents would be released by Feb. 28, but by mid-February they requested a $1,500 advance payment for costs related to the production of documents, it said.

Aguirre said the documents should be released as quickly as possible because violations of federal rules for storing nuclear waste represent a significant threat to public health.

There is an obvious public interest in a full and thorough airing of serious abuses that did in fact occur at the San Diego nuclear waste site, in the hope that such abuses will not occur in the future, the complaint states. The information sought will expose any collusion between the NRC and the entities it is supposed to regulate.

The lawsuit also notes that federal regulators have not held any evidentiary hearings on the accident, placed any of the witnesses under oath or held any public proceeding in San Diego County.

jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald
Last December, I asked a question related to Martha McSally as she was about to fill the Senate seat left vacant by the late John McCain: What more could you want in a senator?

Having known McSally during her two terms in the House of Representatives, I was impressed with her spunk and courage, as demonstrated during her 26 years in the Air Force, where she was a squadron commander and the nations first female fighter pilot to fly combat missions. Ive also admired her humility, warmth and, of course, love of dogs. Dont laugh. Must Love Dogs isnt just a romantic comedy. Its the password to my personal universe.

Now we also know that McSally is a rape victim, though the word victim doesnt suit her. Indeed, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Wednesday, where she told her story, McSally referred to herself as a military sexual-assault survivor. She wasnt always able to say that. For years, she told no one about the rape and suffered in silence, as so many assault victims do. McSally told the committee that she felt ashamed, confused and embarrassed, and she blamed herself. Again, as so many victims do. She didnt trust the system, she said.

If you caught McSally at the televised hearing, or in subsequent news clips, you may have seen what I did  a woman of strength, self-control, resolve and determination, despite visible emotion and apparent deep pain. Shes a mavericks maverick, I thought, and one tough cookie. Though she remained composed, one could see McSally struggle as she recounted being raped by a superior officer and then, in her words, being raped again, figuratively, when she eventually reported the assault to the Air Force.

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The system victimized her again, she said, treating her as though she were a perpetrator rather than someone who had been violated. Such was her despair that McSally considered packing her duffel bag and leaving the military.

But I didnt quit, she said. I decided to stay and continue to serve and fight and lead. To be a voice from within the ranks for women  and then in the House and now the Senate.

Weve heard stories like McSallys too many times. Until relatively recently, many women had been afraid to speak up lest they not be believed. Others feared the stigma of rape. A close friend of mine who was sexually assaulted at knifepoint in her own home said she refused to prosecute her assailant when he was captured because she didnt want to be known as a rape victim. She imagined that, no matter whatever else she might do or become, the first thing people would say about her was, Oh, theres so-and-so. She was raped, you know.

Though weve come a long way since the time when McSally was attacked, theres still much to be done, both in civilian and military life. McSally said she decided to tell her story to the world in hopes of further advancing necessary changes.

The military is unique in obvious ways, making sexual assault not just a personal issue but one of national security. Teamwork and morale, which are so critical to military effectiveness, cant possibly be maintained if female (and some male) troops live in fear of rape.

Even one assaulted person would undermine troop cohesion  and word gets around. In McSallys case, circumstances were even worse given the power differential between her and her superior officer. She not only suffered a breach of trust but became his psychological captive.

McSally soldiered on, despite suffering self-doubt and, surely, fear. One can only imagine the horror of essentially being held hostage to a predator who also has power over your future. Meanwhile, lives are at stake. What if you knew your wingman had been raped by your commanding officer?

Grit, it seems, is McSallys wingman. In an interview last Friday with CBS Norah ODonnell, McSally said she decided to become a fighter pilot as soon as she learned that women werent allowed. It just pissed me off, she recounted. And I said, Thats exactly what Im gonna do. And I walked around saying, Im gonna be the first woman fighter pilot. ... I knew nothing about flying, but I was mostly driven because they told me that I couldnt.

Nothing was going to stop her, apparently, including a superior officer who tried to destroy her through the ultimate means of domination. I suspect McCain would be proud of the woman who took his place.

Parker can be reached at kathleenparker@washpost.com.
Our democracy was founded on the core belief that the governments power to act is derived solely from the people. In practice, this means following the rule of law, and that no individual, elected or not, should substitute his own personal beliefs for that of the express will of the people.

The people of the state of California have clearly and repeatedly voiced their support of the death penalty  most recently in 2016, when the people voted to keep the death penalty as a punishment option and simultaneously voted in favor of Proposition 66, which enacted reforms to ensure that it works justly and efficiently. In August 2017, the California Supreme Court upheld these reforms as constitutional, affirming the will of voters who sought to mend, but not end, the death penalty. The Supreme Courts ruling made Proposition 66 the law of the land, and by its enactment, California was poised to bring long-overdue justice to murder victims and their families.

Related: How Newsom is leading California forward on the death penalty

On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in California and issued a blanket death penalty reprieve for eligible inmates based on his own personal beliefs about the death penalty. If this decision had been made by the people through their representatives or the initiative process, I would have no problem with it. However, this reprieve has subverted the express will of the people, disregarded the Supreme Courts binding decisions, ignored constitutional constraints on his power and inflicted lasting damage to the rule of law.

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What is more, Gov. Newsoms abuse of power has opened fresh wounds for murder victims families, and only serves to further delay, if not outright deny, just and deserving punishments for societys very worst of the worst.

At the time of the governors announcement, over two dozen death row inmates had exhausted their decades-long state and federal appeals, their convictions having been scrutinized and invariably upheld by our judiciary. And, because of interventions filed by several district attorneys and other entities on behalf of the people and crime victims families, executions were set to resume in California  finally giving meaning to what the states voters had enacted through Proposition 66 and the rule of law as set forth in the Constitution, the death penalty statutes and judicial rulings.

Where is the reprieve for 15-year-old Susan Jordan, who was attacked, raped, and strangled while walking to school, by previously convicted rapist Albert Brown? Brown, who after raping and murdering Susan, called her family to taunt and torment them, telling her mother she would never see her daughter again and where to find her body.

Or what about Don and Kathy Davis and their two children, 7-year-old Michelle and 2-year-old Melissa, three of whom were murdered by Ronald Deere in 1982 because Kathys sister broke up with Deere? In a savage act of revenge, Deere broke into the home of the Davis family and waited for them. When Don and his little girls arrived, Deere slaughtered them all with a rifle. Kathy and her sister found their bodies later that evening. Deere ultimately confessed, stating he hoped he would get the gas chamber.

These are two of the dozens of depraved murderers whose convictions had been upheld by the courts and were poised for execution before Wednesdays announcement.

These families have been denied justice for far too long, and justice delayed is justice denied.

Hestrin is district attorney for Riverside County. He was first elected in 2014 and was re-elected in 2018.
The same scenario has played out over the last few years: an unnecessary shooting of an unarmed person by law enforcement followed by grief, frustration and protests like those weve seen after Stephon Clarks death. Inevitably, there is no sense of justice for the victims families because under current law, these horrendous deaths are seen as justified, which leads to more grief, protests and calls for reform.

And nothing changes. People continue to die unnecessarily.

Related: How proposed bill criminalizes law enforcement profession

Related: Why Senate Bill 230 is no solution to bad shootings

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Related: Why Senate Bill 230 can reduce use of force

California leads the nation in the number of people killed by law enforcement annually. Of course, these deaths take a terrible toll on the families of shooting victims who have lost not only their loved ones but also their faith in our public justice system. The officers involved in these shootings also pay a price with post-traumatic stress, guilt and apprehension about their careers and reputations. Because the victim is frequently black or Latino, communities of color become increasingly distrustful of police and less cooperative with their efforts, while the chasm between law enforcement and the people it serves widens. In the end, we are all less safe.

After the funerals and the protests, communities expect that law enforcement will pursue policies to prevent these deaths from happening again. Yet out of over 500 law enforcement agencies in California, only a handful have undertaken serious reform aimed at reducing the use of lethal force.

After the decision in the Stephon Clark case, not only were communities of color demanding change, but also some of the states leading elected officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who admitted that the status quo is untenable.

I agree and have introduced Assembly Bill 392 as a way to move California forward by saving lives and restoring trust in law enforcement.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Justices Civil Rights Division (DOJ) conducted a review of Seattles policing practices and found that police were using excessive force to the degree they violated the U.S. Constitution. The following year, Seattle entered into a consent decree with the DOJ to reform their policing practices, including changing the policy authorizing the use of force to require that officers use force only when they have no reasonable alternatives while also requiring greater use of de-escalation tactics to minimize the need for force.

The court-appointed monitor who oversaw Seattles implementation of these recommendations reported that the policy had been effective in reducing the use of force incidents  a 60 percent reduction of moderate and higher-level uses of force  while posing no additional risk to officers or any increase in crime.

Seattles use of force reforms are aligned with the best practices of policing experts and are reflected in Becerras recent recommendations to the Sacramento Police Department to reform its practices. Similar policies have been adopted in Dallas, Cleveland and San Francisco.

Informed by these best practices, Assembly Bill 392 would change California law to authorize the use of deadly force only when it is necessary to defend against a threat of imminent death or serious bodily injury to the officer or another person. Officers are also required to use sound tactics whenever safe and feasible, including time, distance and communications to reduce the need for force. These de-escalation tactics would expand the tools available to officers to better ensure the safety of the public and themselves, rather than excessive reliance on deadly force.

What is also essential to our bill is a change in culture. Assembly Bill 392 reasserts basic principles in American democracy limiting the power of government over the life and liberty of its citizens. This bill affirms that the authority to use physical force is a serious responsibility that must be exercised judiciously and with respect for the sanctity of human life.

I believe I speak for the public and police alike when I say the preservation of human life should be the primary objective of policing. But the current use of force standard allows police to use deadly force and kill someone even when officers have other options. As lawmakers, we are obligated to change that. Assembly Bill 392 will save lives and prevent tragedies by updating our states outdated use of force standard.

Weber, D-San Diego, is the author of Assembly Bill 392 and represents Californias 79th Assembly District.
We can all agree that first responders have dangerous jobs. They run toward life-threatening peril, when most of us run for cover. Its their job. Its what they signed up to do. And its what we expect of them.

We also expect our law enforcement to use the tools at their disposal with good judgment. All our communities rightly deserve transparency and public policies that set the highest and most reasonable policing standards possible, including those for use of force.

Currently, there are competing bills in the California Legislature focused on use of force, but only one of those bills makes sense.

Related: Why Senate Bill 230 is no solution to bad shootings

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Related: How proposed bill criminalizes law enforcement profession

Related: Why California needs to change outdated law to save lives

Under Senate Bill 230, authored by state Sen. Anna Caballero, D-Salinas, California will lead the nation in legislation designed to reduce uses of force  developed in collaboration with experts, researchers and communities with the best available science and research.

Senate Bill 230 sets a clear and enforceable standard for authorizing the use of force, standardizes use of force training and enacts precedent-setting, evidence-based policies to maximize sound judgment and minimize use of force in our state.

Case law  affirmed time and again by the U.S. Supreme Court  establishes clear and enforceable thresholds for authorizing the use of force. It uses reason to determine when use of force has been excessive and provides law enforcement with strict and objective criteria upon which to base their training. Senate Bill 230 modernizes Californias current law to mirror this clear threshold.

Senate Bill 230 also mandates that all California law enforcement agencies adopt comprehensive policies in 13 categories viewed as best practices for preventing use of force, including de-escalation, rendering medical aid and an officers duty to intercede if they witness excessive force.

And it provides our law enforcement communities with the tools and resources needed to minimize the use of force through training and education. Californias law enforcement communities are among the nations vanguard in developing training methods for de-escalation, interacting with vulnerable populations, rendering medical aid, communication and human interaction. These effective training programs have helped California law enforcement officers reduce fatal shootings by 40 percent since 2015. Creating good public policy starts with good data  we must replicate these effective programs to minimize tragic outcomes. Senate Bill 230 will standardize the most effective training methods for minimizing use of force across departments statewide.

The California Law Enforcement Code of Ethics begins with, As a law enforcement officer, my fundamental duty is to serve mankind.

In support of this promise, law enforcement leaders want to work together to pass legislation to improve policing and reduce the use of force in our state.

Since mid-2018, law enforcement has been meeting with the attorney general, state legislators, the American Civil Liberties Union and other stakeholder and community organizations to collaborate on changing the laws governing California law enforcement use of force. We listened to, understand and share their concerns. Senate Bill 230 not only finds common ground but also provides the most effective means to minimize the use of force.

Senate Bill 230 will require all of Californias 500 law enforcement agencies to:

Adhere to the use of force standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Establish the most comprehensive use of force policies and guidelines in the nation.

Undergo the best use of force training available.

Continue to uphold their commitment to protecting all Californians.

What Senate Bill 230 wont do is criminalize our law enforcement for doing their jobs. The men and women of Californias law enforcement communities deserve our support. We owe them the tools and resources to deploy the most effective training based on the best available science and research.

Please join me in supporting Senate Bill 230. It is the proactive, collaborative and effective legislation that will reduce uses of force, improve outcomes and ensure that public safety officers can continue protecting Californias communities.

Marvel is president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California (PORAC).
Jessie is a decorated veteran and a father to a young son. He needed a better paying job and was in dire need of a special drivers license that was required for a job he wanted. However, the license cost $5,000  money he didnt have. He needed assistance and advice. He turned to the San Diego Workforce Partnership and enrolled in one of our career centers.

The Workforce Partnership is one of 550 publicly funded workforce entities in the United States, collectively serving more than 4 million job seekers annually. Many of the individuals we serve have been dislocated from their jobs/careers due to our dynamically changing economy. Many also have various barriers to employment (e.g., child-care needs, work experience, applicable skills, lack of transportation, justice-involved, disconnected young adults, etc.). The majority of our funding is invested in local nonprofits that are doing targeted training and outreach to serve underserved areas and underrepresented populations. We have expanded our federal support with significant investment from many other entities: the city and county of San Diego, the private sector and philanthropic supports.

New skills are needed to fill the jobs that regional employers are creating. The Workforce Partnership addresses this challenge every day with customized, efficient and effective programs. Our network of career centers and funded partners throughout the region reach tens of thousands of job seekers annually  all ages, demographics and potential.

The Trump administration has made workforce and education a high-profile issue. Recent efforts include last weeks inaugural meeting of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, support for last years passage of the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, and a focus on creating a new industry-recognized apprenticeship system.

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Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, the administrations apparent enthusiasm for skills training and workforce development isnt matched with the kind of robust investments needed to support diverse training programs  services that work. Instead of investing at appropriate levels, the presidents budget proposal calls for deep cuts and/or elimination of many workforce and education programs, but Congress can reverse this.

A central reason why businesses continue to struggle to find workers is because the U.S. has not invested in critical workforce and education programs at levels necessary for workers to develop the skills necessary to access  and succeed in  these jobs.

According to a 2018 Council of Economic Advisers report, the U.S. invests in workforce development at drastically lower levels than all other developed countries. And over the past two decades, the federal governments investment in skills training has already been cut by 40 percent  resulting in far fewer job seekers receiving support  and a growing skills gap.

Yet the public (93 percent of voters) wants the government to invest more in skills training. Its also an investment that is overwhelmingly popular with small and mid-size companies. These are programs that help workers succeed in all careers: plumbers and electricians, medical technology, clean energy, information technology and software, advanced manufacturing.

Decades of underinvestment have led regions across the country to shut down career centers that serve workers most in need of upskilling. If we are serious about closing the skills gap, we have an answer  invest in workforce development. The return on investment is incredible. When employed, we all prosper. More taxpayers, growing businesses and a prosperous economy. More importantly, a good job provides something less measurable: purpose, dignity and happiness.

It all starts with a job. Jobs require skills. Job seekers need support. Thats where we come in.

Jessie landed the job thanks to support from the Workforce Partnership. His application was expedited so that he could complete the training in time to qualify for the job. My counselor was so great at explaining things, said Jessie. He received the training at no cost and landed the job at the salary level he needed. With the help of the career center, I have a great position and can now support my family, he said.

If were really going to empower all job seekers with the chance to achieve the American dream and to help businesses grow by providing a skilled workforce  its time to walk the talk.

Callstrom is president and CEO of Workforce Partnership. Spiker is senior federal policy analyst with National Skills Coalition.
Gov. Gavin Newsoms announcement Wednesday that he would impose a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty in California for the 737 prisoners on death row predictably triggered a political firestorm. Few issues have a more primal quality than the death penalty. Many passionately believe it is a moral abomination to take the life of another in any circumstances. Many passionately believe depraved criminal acts deserve the ultimate punishment.

Those with the former view will see Newsoms decision as a noble statement of principle  one backed by hard, uncomfortable facts. Yes, the death penalty is disproportionately given to minorities and the poor. Yes, some of the defendants facing the death penalty had mediocre or worse legal representation. Yes, the Innocence Project has used DNA evidence to prove that wrongful convictions are more common than authorities would ever admit. Yes, the death penalty has been rejected as barbarous by most First World nations  and its costly.

But in 2012, state voters rejected Proposition 34, which would have ended the death penalty. In 2016, state voters not only rejected Proposition 62  which would have ended the death penalty  they endorsed Proposition 66  which was meant to streamline death-penalty appeals and encourage a resumption of the executions that ended in 2006 when a federal judge ruled that the states use of a three-drug combination to kill the condemned was a cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional. All three votes were close, but the voters will was plain. And asked about the death penalty last year in his campaign, Newsom said he would be accountable to the will of the voters while an aide said he would respect the will of the electorate.

On Wednesday, Newsom acknowledged saying he would heed voters but said hed made his strong opposition to the death penalty clear. And he said that as he wrestled with whether he should support the states current lethal injection protocol, the question of whether he could condone killing anyone  potentially hundreds of people  moved from an abstract to a very real question. I dont know about you, but I cant sign my name to that, he said.

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Its a complex, emotional issue. While the governor said he was within his rights to declare a moratorium, his bold action is certain to lead to lawsuits, and more ballot measures for and against the death penalty are sure to follow. But those who are upset with Newsom are unlikely to ever gain satisfaction. Whether the issue is coming up with a legal execution procedure or providing the funding necessary to make Proposition 66 work, Democratic governors and lawmakers have shown with their inaction they consider capital punishment an anachronism.

This institutional opposition subverts direct democracy. But at least Newsom is clear about his intentions, unlike predecessor Jerry Brown. And if millions of Californians disagree, they can use their votes in coming elections to try to move the needle.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion
The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board has long advocated for criminal justice reform and has been heartened by the momentum the reform movement has built in recent years. But while our board has decried what appeared to be the unnecessary killing by police of unarmed civilians  often young African-American men  members have balked at endorsing a change in the California law that allows police officers to use lethal force if an officer believes it is objectively reasonable to do so under the circumstances.

Until now.

Related: Why Assembly Bill 392 is so badly needed

Related: How proposed bill criminalizes law enforcement profession

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Related: Why Senate Bill 230 is no solution to bad shootings

Related: Why Senate Bill 230 can reduce use of force

The argument made by many defenders of the police status quo  that laws with the potential to criminalize split-second, life-and-death decisions are dangerous and rash  has long seemed convincing. In a nation awash in guns  one increasingly plagued by more deadly mass shootings  the argument that California should keep using the minimum standard for use of lethal force established by a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision remains powerful. But just as evidence has increasingly persuaded lawmakers across the nation that prison sentences that warehouse salvageable people for decades are destructive and counterproductive, the evidence is now convincing that California would benefit from a bill introduced by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, that would authorize the use of deadly force only when it is necessary to defend against a threat of imminent death or serious bodily injury to the officer or another person, in Webers own words. Her bill would also require that officers use de-escalation tactics when safe and feasible.

The record of the city of Seattle is instructive. After an investigation by the Obama administrations Justice Department found Seattle police were far too inclined to use force, the city agreed in 2012 to pursue reforms quite similar to those advocated in Webers bill. In 2017, the federal monitor overseeing Seattles implementation of the rules reported that there had been a 60 percent decrease in the frequency of moderate and high-level use of force. Contrary to warnings from critics of the reforms, crime did not increase and the number of injuries to officers was flat or slightly down.

In opposing Assembly Bill 392, police unions and their allies simply havent made an evidence-based case that the use of a higher standard will endanger either the public or officers. The thoughtful measure they are pushing  Senate Bill 230  would improve and standardize training on use of force. But this should not be an either-or decision. The Legislature should approve both measures  then closely monitor the results. Its time for change.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion
Re Older Dems, progressives clash (March 6): Heres how Democrats can lose an election in three easy lessons:

1. Advocate the utopian, socialist and prohibitively expensive Green New Deal.

2. Allow one Muslim congresswoman to shift the party toward anti-Israeli anti-Semitism.

3. Spend all your time prosecuting President Trump instead of legislating on important issues facing Americans.

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Yale Kadesky

Escondido

I wish to thank, in advance, Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, for helping to re-elect Donald Trump in 2020.

After he loses the Democratic nomination, his supporters will once again (as they did in 2016) set aside political reality and take what they believe to be the moral high ground by not voting for whomever becomes the Democratic nominee, or simply not vote at all.

There is also the possibility that Sen. Sanders will run as an independent after failing to secure the nomination, thus siphoning votes from the Democratic ticket. Either way, the Republican party appreciates you.

Also, a huge shout-out to that segment of African-American voters who stayed away in droves in the 2016 vs. 2012 election (765,000 according to Pew Research) especially in key battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania where extremely thin margins of victory delivered crucial electoral votes to Trump.

An honorable mention as well to all voters who simply assumed a Clinton victory and failed to vote at all. By the way, if you failed to vote when you could have and should have, I have no interest whatsoever in hearing you complain about politicians or the political process.

Bruce Osachy

San Diego

Letters and commentary policy

The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below.

Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook.
Gabe Ginsberg/Getty ImagesA Day to Remember has announced the dates and locations for the 2019 Self Help Fest.

This year's edition of the Florida band's annual festival, which first launched in 2014, will take place September 7 in Worcester, Massachusetts and October 12 in San Bernardino, California. The full lineups for the events haven't been announced yet, but A Day to Remember themselves will play both dates.

Discounted tickets are on sale now via SelfHelpFest.com.

Prior to Self Help Fest, A Day to Remember will launch their summer Raisin' Hell in the Heartland tour, beginning June 5 in Columbus, Ohio.

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been sulking like a jilted lover ever since his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi collapsed last month. Various carrots he dangled in front of the North have disappeared, and U.S. government officials dealing with North Korean issues claim their demand for a "final, fully verified denuclearization" has never been watered down.

Trump's style of diplomacy has been typified by unpredictability and the U.S. leader would suddenly shift from a dogged insistence on total denuclearization to normalizing diplomatic ties with North Korea. He could still propose a three-way summit with the two Koreas next week, but as soon as he walked out of the summit in Hanoi, Trump lost interest in Kim.

It would be stretching it to believe that Trump pursued his North Korea policy to achieve peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. The reason he was so passionate about resolving the North Korean nuclear impasse and engaging its reclusive leader because he wanted to show the world that he achieved something no other U.S. leader was able to do. His predecessor Barack Obama barely touched the matter, selling his inactivity as "strategic patience." And Trump is largely motivated by overturning every one of Obama's achievements or doing whatever Obama would not do.

The gamble failed. There had to be short-term results, and none were forthcoming. Trump, no keen traveler or indeed worker, flew halfway around the world twice to meet Kim, because he wanted results before his campaign for the 2020 presidential election. But the Hanoi summit was the moment of truth, where he finally realized how much sustained effort would be needed to get North Korea to scrap its nuclear weapons.

The new reality has also put Seoul-Washington relations under a looking glass. Even though Trump's denuclearization deal fell through, South Korea continues to push for reopening the Kaesong Industrial Complex and resuming package tours to North Korea's Mt. Kumgang resort. This makes Washington uncomfortable in its new hardline approach toward North Korea.

Diplomatic experts in Washington say the most worrying factor after the failed Hanoi summit is the U.S.-South Korea alliance. It is no longer a secret that the U.S. objects to South Korea defending the North's position. The Trump administration officially says there is nothing wrong with the alliance, but there is far too little communication with Seoul.

Trump may try to achieve diplomatic gains through South Korea now his passion for Kim has cooled. One way is to gain the upper hand in the sharing of costs to maintain U.S. troops here. A decrease in the U.S.' share of the expenses could be packaged as a diplomatic victory in line with Trump's "America first" policy. Now the cost-sharing will have to be discussed every year, which offers Trump a chance to score political points.

The U.S.-South Korean alliance is shifting from a pact forged in blood to a more tenuous partnership. Under Trump, even the once-vital alliance could be ruined for nothing but short-term political gain.


We saw a lot of pothole gags this week, but our favorite was submitted by Lin Exline. Congratulations! She will receive Steve Breens signed original in the mail. Thanks to all those who participated.

Next weeks cartoon is below. Please remember to limit your submissions to three and keep em brief. Good luck!

Winner

Potholes, wormholes, whatever. None of them get fixed in San Diego. Lin Exline, San Diego

Finalists

Lets close it before another candidate comes through to run for president. Gary McIntosh, Temecula

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Thats where I went next Thursday. Jess Barmatz, San Diego

I wonder if this will take us back to when the Padres had a winning season. Gregory Hom, Sorrento Valley

Do you think the IRS can track me there, too? Jeff Johnson, La Jolla

Would you mind running in and checking? I think I dropped my cellphone in there. Joseph Puzo, San Diego

Thats nothing ... wait til you see the early bird. Skip Waycott, El Centro

And I thought the scooters on the sidewalk were bad. Kevin Hippensteel, Santee

We dont need a bullet train after all. Jeanie Klemm, Boulevard

Lets travel to a time without social media. Cheryl Sonstein, Normal Heights

Maybe Stan Lee will be in the final Avengers movie. Maggie Pettit, Coronado

Whats Elon up to now? Rainier Dischinger, Spring Valley

Madge says she can be at the mall in 3.2 seconds. Susan Gale Wickes, Richmond, Indiana

If I dont come back, please remind my wife to let the dog out. David Bisby, Chula Vista

I contacted NASA and Homeland Security, but the only one to take me seriously was Caltrans. Mechelle Perrott, La Mesa

K-12

So whos going to get the Frisbee? Milo Bennett, seventh grade, Woodland Park Middle School

I dare you to put a finger in it. Adrian Ferreira, sixth grade, Muirlands Middle School

Zowee mama! Robert Page, sixth grade, Pacific Beach Middle School

Maybe its Gavin Newsoms alternative to high-speed rail. Quentin Phillips, ninth grade, Rancho Bernardo High School

Uh ... lets go ask Bill Nye. Marissa Malone, seventh grade, Woodland Park Middle School

Wow! Fortnite Season 9 looks great. Robert Gilmour, sixth grade, Dana Middle School

Next weeks cartoon

(Steve Breen)

To enter, email entries to cartooncontest@sduniontribune.com by 10 a.m. Tuesday. Please remember to limit your submissions to three and keep em brief. View last weeks winners.
San Diegans just got something more to celebrate at this years upcoming Comic-Con.

The news this week is that the upcoming Marvel Studios film Shang-Chi, which will make history for the Marvel Cinematic Universe by featuring its first Asian lead, now has a local director attached to it.

That director is Destin Daniel Cretton, Deadline reports. He graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University with a communications degree in 2001 and later earned a masters in fine arts from San Diego State Universitys theater, television and film program.

Shang-Chi is a character from Honan, China, whose father is a powerful criminal mastermind. After a lonely childhood focused on martial arts training, the teen-aged Shang-Chi learns of his fathers wrongdoing and devotes his life to the overthrow of his criminal empire, according to a description from Marvel.

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Cretton hails from Hawaii, but after two years of community college there, landed in San Diego to attend Point Loma Nazarene University. During his senior year, he took part in the L.A. Film Studies Centers semester program.

After graduating, he worked at a foster-care facility in San Diego, which inspired his breakout film, Short Term 12. The 2013 feature film starred Brie Larson, now known the world over as Captain Marvel, another new character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Cretton and Larson have worked together on several projects, and Cretton told Vanity Fair in 2017 that he would work with Brie forever if he could. More recently, Cretton directed Larson, Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts in The Glass Castle in 2017.

Cretton has other connections to the expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe. He worked with Black Panther star Michael B. Jordan (aka Erik Killmonger) in Just Mercy, which Cretton wrote and directed and which also stars Larson. That film is expected to debut in 2020.

Cretton has kept ties with San Diego throughout his career, writing and directing 2012s I Am Not A Hipster, which is based on the local indie music and art scene. He joined PLNUs Writers Symposium by the Sea in 2015 to discuss his journey with film making, and you can watch that interview here.

Editors note: Writer Abby Hamblin is also a PLNU alum.

Want more from The Conversation? Check out our podcast.

The Conversation with Abby & Luis is a podcast that slows down the news cycle to make sense of issues and stories that matter to listeners in San Diego and beyond. We talk to news makers, experts and others to offer interesting, in-depth conversations that will keep you up to date and informed.

Check out some of our most recent episodes below, or subscribe on Apple or Stitcher.

Email: abby.hamblin@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @abbyhamblin
San Jose, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/14/2019 -- A recently compiled report of XploreMR, titled "Automotive Coatings Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking  Global Market Insights 2018-2027," gives a comprehensive analysis on the automotive coatings market worldwide. Size of the automotive coatings market has been evaluated for the historical period (2013-2017) and forecast period (2018-2027), and has been delivered in terms of value (US$ Bn) and volume (tons). The report also offers a detailed analysis and forecast on key segments and the competitive landscape of the automotive coatings market.



Chapter 1  Global Macro-Economic Indicator Assessment Outlook



This chapter gives an exhaustive assessment on the macro-economic indicators that impact growth of the automotive coatings market. Analysis on the global coatings industry as well as the global automotive industry has been taken into consideration and their ripple effects on the automotive coatings market have been studied.



Get Sample Copy of this report @ https://www.xploremr.com/connectus/sample/3401



Chapter 2  Automotive Coatings Market Executive Summary



A succinct summary of the automotive coatings market has been offered in the second chapter of the report, which gives a synopsis of key findings in the market, along with information on the industry's structure. Opportunity assessment for companies operating in the automotive coatings market has been given with the aid of Wheel of Fortune. Mega trends impacting growth of the automotive coatings market have also been highlighted in this chapter.



Chapter 3  Automotive Coatings Market Overview



The report offers a concise overview of the automotive coatings market, which includes an introduction to the market, along with a definition of the target product  automotive coatings. A systematic breakdown of the automotive coatings market has been offered in this chapter, which implies scope of the research involved. Size of the automotive coatings market has been evaluated in terms of volume (tons) as well as value (Bn), and forecast on the automotive coatings market has been offered for the period between 2018 and 2027.



Chapter 4  Coating Production Outlook



This chapter gives a brief information and on the coating production outlook at a global scale. Impact of the production and demand trends on growth of the automotive coatings market has also been in this chapter.



Chapter 5  Automotive Coatings Market Associated Indicators Assessment



Key associated indicators with the automotive coatings market have been assessed in detailed in this chapter. Important market dynamics, which include key trends and drivers, challenges, and restraints have been highlighted and analyzed in detail. A detailed study on the supply chain of the automotive coatings market has also been included in this chapter of the report.



Other aspects analyzed for the automotive coatings market in this chapter include cost breakdown, pricing strategy of manufacturers, and raw material cost breakdown. Additionally, forecast factors and forecast scenario of the automotive coatings market have been included in this chapter to understand future prospects of the market.



Chapter 6  Automotive Coatings Market Analysis & Forecast



In-depth analysis and forecast on the automotive coatings market has been offered in the sixth chapter and its sub-sections. The analysis has been done on the basis of key segments identified in the report, based on resin type, coat type, technology, vehicle type, and region. Imperative numbers such as historical and forecast size of the segments in the automotive coatings market have been rendered in this chapter.



Volume and revenue comparison, Y-o-Y growth comparison, and market share comparison of all the market segments has been delivered in the report. The automotive coatings market has been assessed regionally as well as on a country-level. Key regions analyzed in the automotive coatings market include Middle East & Africa (MEA), Japan, Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Latin America, and North America.



Chapter 7  North America Automotive Coatings Market



This chapter gives a succinct introduction to the automotive coatings market in North America, along with a detailed analysis and forecast on regional trends impacting the market growth. Key countries assessed in the North America automotive coatings market are the U.S., and Canada, and value & volume forecast on the automotive coatings market in these countries have also been delivered in this chapter.



Chapter 8  Latin America Automotive Coatings Market



A concise introduction to Latin America automotive coatings market has been offered in the eight chapter of the report. This chapter offers an accurate forecast on the automotive coatings market in the region in terms of volume and value. Key countries studied under the Latin America automotive coatings market are Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Rest of Latin America. The automotive coatings market in Latin America has also been assessed on the basis of resin type, coat type, technology and commercial vehicle.



Chapter 9  Europe Automotive Coatings Market



This chapter gives a succinct introduction to the automotive coatings market in Europe, along with a detailed analysis and forecast on regional trends impacting the market growth. Key countries assessed in the Europe automotive coatings market are the NORDIC, BENELUX, the U.K., EU-4 (Italy, Spain, France, and Germany), and Rest of Europe, and value & volume forecast on the automotive coatings market in these countries have also been delivered in this chapter.



Chapter 10  Japan Automotive Coatings Market



Japan's automotive coatings market has been comprehensively assessed in this chapter, and detailed analysis on key trends impacting growth of the market in the country has been offered. Volume & revenue comparison, Y-o-Y growth comparison, and the market share comparison of all the key segments assessed in the Japan automotive coatings market have been delivered in this chapter.



Chapter 11  APEJ Automotive Coatings Market



An introduction to Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) automotive coatings market has been offered in the eight chapter of the report. This chapter offers an accurate forecast on the automotive coatings market in the region in terms of volume and value. Key countries studied under the APEJ automotive coatings market are South Korea, ASEAN, China, Australia & New Zealand, India, and Rest of APEJ. The automotive coatings market in APEJ has also been assessed on the basis of resin type, coat type, technology and commercial vehicle.



Chapter 12  MEA Automotive Coatings Market



This chapter gives a quick introduction to the automotive coatings market in the Middle East & Africa (MEA), along with a detailed analysis and forecast on regional trends impacting the market growth. Key countries assessed in the MEA automotive coatings market are the Turkey, South Africa, GCC countries, and Rest of MEA, and value & volume forecast on the automotive coatings market in these countries have also been delivered in this chapter.



Chapter 13  Automotive Coatings Market Competitive Assessment



This weighted chapter of the report offers a detailed assessment on the automotive coatings market's structure, along with a dashboard view of all the key companies profiled in the report. A company share analysis on the automotive coatings market players has also been offered in this chapter. In addition, a footprint matrix on the market players profiled in the report has been offered, and the presence of these automotive coatings manufacturers has been depicted with the aid of an intensity map.



Chapter 14  Automotive Coatings Market Company Profiles



Key companies profiled in the automotive coatings market report include PPG, AkzoNobel, The Sherwin-Williams Co., RPM International Inc., Nippon Paint Holdings Co., and Axalta Coating Systems, BASF Coatings, Kansai Paint Co. Ltd., Behr Process Corp., Benjamin Moore & Co., and Nippon Paint (USA).



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Queensland, Australia -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/14/2019 -- Market leading wall art company Blue Horizon Prints recently announced the launch of their wide range of personalised maps. Hand created by skilled artisans, the variety of maps features number of locations in and around Australia and the world in different looks and styles that can be customized to the client's specifications. With the release of their new product, Blue Horizon Prints has gone geographical and they are thrilled.



The people behind Blue Horizon Prints are avid travels who believe that traveling is one of the best ways to grow and learn, and this is something to be proud of. Their love for traveling inspired them to create a range of personalised maps. The new product is an extension of the printing company's other successful product  Printed City Maps. The city maps include artistic word maps and type maps in a wide variety of color choices and style to suit different tastes and aesthetics.



Besides being their passion for travel, the founders of Blue Horizon Prints are highly experienced canvas printers. With the help of their team, the company continues to push the boundaries of creative freedom, which is the focal point Blue Horizon Prints.



Each personalised pushpin map and canvas print is completed in the Blue Horizon Prints' Queensland studio by highly experienced artisans. They will be printing each customized map precisely to the client's specifications, which the customers will provide at the time of placing the order on the Blue Horizon Prints website (https://www.bluehorizonprints.com.au/canvas-art/personalised-push-pin-maps/ ). At the time of placing the order on the website, customers are required to select the location of which the map will be made which can either be a country or a city, the color scheme including the color of the map and the pushpins along with other specification about the font, its size and more.



About Blue Horizon Prints

Blue Horizon Prints is Australia's leading art printing services that offer professional consumers, photographers and artists the highest quality in print reproduction and personalised wall art prints. Through their amazing insight into what their clients want and expect, the company offers the very best when it comes to working with their high-quality printing services. Blue Horizon Prints was created to encourage the artists and their ability to create originals and reproduce the stunning works of art. Blue Horizon Prints is one of the few companies in Australia offering the unique diamond split panel canvas art pictures. For more information, please visit: https://www.bluehorizonprints.com.au/
Rockville, MD -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/14/2019 -- In order to study the various trends and patterns prevailing in the concerned market, FactMR has included a new report titled "China Standard Parts for Tool Market Exhibits Higher Growth Prospects by 2028" to its wide online database including upcoming trends and growth factors. This research assessment offers a clear insight about the influential factors that are expected to transform the global market in the near future. The report studies the china standard parts for tool making market worldwide, especially in North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, India and Other Regions with production, size, growth, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions.



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It is imperative to note before we dive deeper into the key insights of the study what exactly a machine tool is and how are broadly they classified. A machine tool, in its simplest definition is an equipment that requires an external power source, to cut, grind or deform a metal work piece to a predefined shape. The tool in the machine tool is the primary component that comes in direct contact with the work piece to initiate the cutting or deforming process. Machine tools are generally classified into two types that includes metal cutting tools and metal forming tools.



Standard parts, considered in the research study is focused towards those that are used in metal forming tools or presses and not in metal cutting tools and hence it can be described as secondary components attached to the metal forming tools that aids in the precise deformation of metals. With growing demand from the end use industry for newer metal forming tools in China, the consumption of standard parts have been on a rise registering a value of US$ 455.4 Mn by the end of 2017 and expected to hit US$ 703.5 Mn by the end of 2028 with a growth CAGR of 4.1% for a period of 10 years (2018-2028)



From a global perspective, China is among the largest consumers of machine tools, including both metal cutting and metal forming tools. This is due to the fact that the manufacturing industry as a whole has been thriving positively in the country post the recession of 2009. Some of the important drivers contributing the growth of standard parts for tool making in China include dual growth of automotive & auto parts industry, initiation & rise of aircraft production in the country, improvements in foreign direct investments (FDI) & foreign invested enterprises (FIE) inflows, growth in fixed asset investment and others. Some of the opportunities for the manufacturers of standard parts to tap onto in order to increase the revenue returns include development new schemes such as China Manufacturing 2025 (CM2025) Initiative to increase manufacturing activities in the country. The market of standard parts in China faces competition from both developed and emerging economies which can attributed to customers preference towards quality parts that are available outside China, as well as increasing labor costs in the country can influence shifting of parts manufacturing outside China



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Standard parts for machine tools in China is segmented on the basis of component type, application, end use industry and sales channel. Looking at the component type segmentation, it is clear that among all the components taken into consideration, the segment that takes up the majority of market share in terms of value are punches & dies. This is due to the fact that these parts are used the most in metal forming tools in addition to incurring the highest price point which can also vary based the size of the component thereby taking up nearly 41% of the total value share in 2017.



The largest users of metal forming tools are the automotive industry including third party workshops that provides parts to the same, hence in the end use industry segment, automotive industry in 2017 takes up nearly 48% and is expected to increase its market share by the end of 2028 with a value CAGR growth of 4.5%.



If we look into the sales channel segment, direct sales segment takes up more than half of the market share is expected to dominate throughout the forecast period registering a CAGR of 4.1%. However, the fastest growing segment among all in this category is taken up by online sales segment with an expected CAGR of 4.6% in terms of value from 2018 to 2028.



Some of the key players covered in standard parts for tool making market operating in China include MISUMI Group Inc., Barnes Group Inc., Erwin Halder KG, Meusburger Georg GmbH & Co KG, Lapple AG, Hong Yue Mold Fittings Ltd., Shenzhen QH Industrial Co., Ltd., Hongkai Precision Metal Stamping Tool And Product Co., Ltd., Agathon AG, STRACK NORMA GmbH & Co. KG., Changsha Borun Mould Co., Ltd., NITROGAS, S.A.U., DADCO, Inc., Jiashan Honglida Sliding Bearing Co., Ltd. among others.



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Edison , NJ -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/14/2019 -- Advance Market Analytics recently introduced Emerald Earrings Market study with in-depth overview, describing about the Product / Industry Scope and elaborates market outlook and status to 2025. Emerald Earrings Market explores effective study on varied sections of Industry like opportunities, size, growth, technology, demand and trend of high leading players. It also provides market key statistics on the status of manufacturers, a valuable source of guidance, direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.



The competition is expected to become even more intense in the coming years with the entry of several new players in the market. To help clients improve their revenue shares in the market, this research study provides an in-depth analysis of the market's competitive landscape and offers information on the products offered by various leading companies. Additionally, this Emerald Earrings market analysis report suggests strategies Vendors can follow and recommends key areas they should focus on, in order to take maximum benefits of growth opportunities.



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Major Key Players in This Report Include,

TIFFANY (United States), Ernest Jones (United Kingdom), Two Tone Jewelry (United States), Stauer (United States), Bijan & Co (United States), GLAMIRA (Germany), TraxNYC (United States), The Irish Jewelry Company (United States), Artinian (Thailand), Shelby Gem Factory (United States)



This research is categorized differently considering the various aspects of this market. It also evaluates the current situation and the future of the market by using the forecast horizon. The forecast is analyzed based on the volume and revenue of this market. The tools used for analyzing the Global Emerald Earrings Market research report include SWOT analysis.



The market study is being classified by Type (Emerald & Diamond Earrings, Emerald & Gold Earrings, Emerald & Silver Earrings, Others), Application (Decoration, Collection, Others) and major geographies with country level break-up that includes South America (Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America), Asia Pacific (China, Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Rest of Asia-Pacific), Europe (Germany, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Rest of Europe), MEA (Middle East, Africa), North America (United States, Canada, Mexico).



The Global Emerald Earrings Market in terms of investment potential in various segments of the market and illustrate the feasibility of explaining the feasibility of a new project to be successful in the near future. The core segmentation of the global market is based on product types, SMEs and large corporations. The report also collects data for each major player in the market based on current company profiles, gross margins, sales prices, sales revenue, sales volume, photos, product specifications and up-to-date contact information.



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Strategic Points Covered in Table of Content of Emerald Earrings Market:

Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product Objective of Study and Research Scope the Emerald Earrings market

Chapter 2: Exclusive Summary  the basic information of the Emerald Earrings Market.

Chapter 3: Displaying the Market Dynamics- Drivers, Trends and Challenges of the Emerald Earrings

Chapter 4: Presenting the Emerald Earrings Market Factor Analysis Porters Five Forces, Supply/Value Chain, PESTEL analysis, Market Entropy, Patent/Trademark Analysis.

Chapter 5: Displaying the by Type, End User and Region 2013-2018

Chapter 6: Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the Emerald Earrings market which consists of its Competitive Landscape, Peer Group Analysis, BCG Matrix & Company Profile

Chapter 7: To evaluate the market by segments, by countries and by manufacturers with revenue share and sales by key countries in these various regions.

Chapter 8 & 9: Displaying the Appendix, Methodology and Data Source



Finally, Emerald Earrings Market is a valuable source of guidance for individuals and companies.



Data Sources & Methodology



The primary sources involves the industry experts from the Emerald Earrings Market including the management organizations, processing organizations, analytics service providers of the industry's value chain. All primary sources were interviewed to gather and authenticate qualitative & quantitative information and determine the future prospects.



In the extensive primary research process undertaken for this study, the primary sources  Postal Surveys, telephone, Online & Face-to-Face Survey were considered to obtain and verify both qualitative and quantitative aspects of this research study. When it comes to secondary sources Company's Annual reports, press Releases, Websites, Investor Presentation, Conference Call transcripts, Webinar, Journals, Regulators, National Customs and Industry Associations were given primary weight-age.



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Pune, Maharashtra -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/14/2019 -- Kitchen countertop is majorly used in residential kitchens and there are wide range of material choices are available in the market. The different types of materials used for countertops are granite, solid surface, quartz, marble, laminates, ceramic slab, wood, concrete, and stainless. Others Granite is the highly adopted materials for countertops which adds elegance to the kitchen. Granite has a greater availability as compared to other countertop materials along with increased number of fabricators globally. Moreover, granite is affordable and provide luxurious look to the different types of kitchen. Owing to the aforementioned factors, granite is the dominant materials used for the design of kitchen countertops. Along with this, quartz is expected to gain traction in coming years which are considered more adaptable and better-performing substitute for granite and marble. The benefits associated with the use of quartz is easy to maintain, resistant to stain, impervious to acid & heat, and it can be custom-fabricated into any size & shape.



The major companies operating in the field of kitchen countertop market include Quarella, Cosentino S.A., Caeserstone Ltd., Laminam SpA, Pokarna Limited, Vicostone, Cambria Co., Aro Granite Industries Ltd., Asian Granito India Ltd., LG Hausys, Ltd., Neolith, Sapienstone, Florim Stone, Tile & Stone Works, and Strasser Stein among others. Various other companies operating in the market are coming up with new offerings which is helping the market for kitchen countertop to expand over the years in terms of revenue.



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This report contains:



- Market sizing for the global Kitchen Countertop Market.

- Compare major Kitchen Countertop providers strategies and approaches to the challenges they face

- Analysis of the effects deglobalisation trends may have for Kitchen Countertop providers

- Profiles of major Kitchen Countertop providers

- 5-year CAGR forecasts for Kitchen Countertop -intensive vertical sectors



The burgeoning population rate in the developed countries as well as the developing regions is boosting the residential infrastructures, thereby, fueling the demand for kitchen countertop in the current market scenario. The growth of commercial infrastructures like hotels is majorly due to increasing tourism across the globe. Moreover, the developing countries in Asia Pacific and Middle East such as China, India, Singapore, Malaysia, UAE, and Saudi Arabia among others are witnessing significant growth in business from several international organizations. This has propelled the growth of construction of hotels, which invest decent revenue shares in kitchen aesthetics. Additionally, several multi-national hotel chains have found these countries to be prime regions for the development of their business, and owing to this, the hotels have constructed their own hotels building, creating a fair market space for kitchen countertops.



Countries in Asia Pacific region have significantly invested in construction industry, and are still continuing the trend which is catalyzing the infrastructure construction over the years. The increasing focus towards enhancement of new construction of commercial and residential buildings in the APAC region is driving the kitchen countertop market in the present scenario. Further, the high disposable income, and easy availability of bank loans in the region is boosting the adoption of modern interior designing materials. This factor is also rising the adoption of kitchen countertop among the Asia Pacific population. Countries especially, China, India, Singapore, and Malaysia among others are experiencing significant growth of commercial building and residential sectors in the current scenario, which is helping the kitchen countertop market to surge in the recent times. Moreover, the renovation activities of residential and hotel & restaurant interiors are also bolstering the market, and this trend is expected to continue in the years to come, which is anticipated to catalyze the market growth



The report focuses on an in-depth segmentation of kitchen countertop market based on type and application. Geographical segmentation of the study covers five strategic regions comprising of North Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM). The regional market has been further branched by respective countries. By type segment, granite accounted for maximum share in the kitchen countertop market in 2017 and whereas quartz-based countertop is anticipated to surge at the prime growth rate during the forecast period.



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New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/14/2019 -- Persistence Market Research (PMR) has published a new market research report on offshore support vessel services. The report has been titled "Offshore Support Vessel Services Market: Global Industry Analysis 2013  2017 and Forecast 2018  2026." As one of the important international trades in the world, seaborne transportation is estimated to play a pivotal role in global industrialization and progression, authorizing the transportation of very large volumes of processed and raw materials as well as water, food and other products. As per the data collected from the SAE Europe Shipyards & Maritime Equipment Association, the sea borne trade growth rate is sluggish as compared to the long-term historical average.



Global sea-borne trade configuration is estimated to be potentially influenced by planned and current initiatives such as the "One Belt, One Road Initiative", the partnership for quality infrastructure and the expansion of the Panama and Suez Canals. The growing cross border e-commerce and technology advancement coupled with the industrial revolution in developing countries have further reshaped sea-borne trade and maritime trade patterns and in turn will drive global sea-borne trade growth over the forecast period. As a result, leading companies are venturing into partnerships in order to stay competent in the global market. For instance, in September, 2017, M3 Marine Group Pte Ltd. signed a partnership with PT ROV Inspeksi. The main aim of the partnership is to create asset integrity and to enhance their collective capabilities in the offshore marine surveying and inspection arena. The new company offers remote inspection (ariel, underwater and confined space) and inspection services for both onshore and offshore marine projects & assets. Other companies operating in the global offshore support vessel services market are BOURBON Corporation, Vroon Offshore Services Pte Ltd., Pacific Radiance Ltd, Swire Pacific Limited, and Bumi Armada Berhad, among several others.



According to the report, the global offshore support vessel services market is expected to witness a CAGR of 8.9% from 2018 to 2026. The market is expected to touch US$ 11,472.8 Mn by 2018 and further expand to a valuation of US$ 22,746.7 Mn by the end of 2026.



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Burgeoning Natural Gas Exploration to Boost Market Development



Over the years, the high level of emission from power industries and automobiles have made it obligatory to find an alternative for conventional fuels, such as coal and other petroleum-based fuels. As a result, several major consumer countries, such as Japan, ASEAN Countries, U.S. and European countries, have shown willingness to adopt natural gas, which is an effective alternative with reduced emission and is also abundant in nature. Countries such as Australia, Qatar, and Norway have increased the export of natural gas considerably. Demand for LNG is expected to witness significant growth over the forecast period. The global LNG trade was pegged at around 244.8 MT in 2015, an increase of nearly 4.7 MT than that in 2014. Countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Poland and Pakistan entered the LNG import market in 2015. Several new liquefaction and regasification terminals that will accommodate bulk storing and processing facilities are under construction in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas and are expected to start operating during the forecast period.



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Labor Constraints Pertaining to Ecology and Technology to Challenge Market Growth



The growing share of ultra-deep offshore oil production will comprise tailor-made projects adapted to site conditions and characteristics of the reservoir. Industrialization and lowering of costs in deep water are big technical challenges. For production vessels and other marine projects, the development of subsea processing is expected to be more complex. Moreover, lots of work to qualify equipment and materials will be required for managing the ecological risks. Shipbuilding companies involved in the offshore sector are required to build quality employment, minimize negative environmental impact and advance the interest of the society as a whole. Moreover, the issue of promoting equity can be addressed with all-inclusive industrial policies and social programs. This would also allow workers to take advantage of the change.
Los Angeles, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/14/2019 -- An operational amplifier is an integrated circuit that operates as a voltage amplifier. Moreover an operational amplifier is known as an instrumentation amplifier. Its greatest use is in Instrumentation as a PID/PI controller and operational amplifier is the basic component in all the instruments due to its versatile applications.

North America is holding the largest market share for Operational Amplifier market due to increasing demand of connected devices and increasing adaptation of battery-powered products. Due to development and increasing demand of battery-powered products, Asia Pacific will hold maximum market share for Operational Amplifier in near future. Europe is fastest growing market for Operational Amplifier due to increase in adaptation of sensors and transducers in various industry verticals. Sturdy economic progress, driving the growth of Operational Amplifier market in MEA region.



The global Operational Amplifier market is valued at million US$ in 2018 is expected to reach million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of % during 2019-2025.



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This report focuses on Operational Amplifier volume and value at global level, regional level and company level. From a global perspective, this report represents overall Operational Amplifier market size by analyzing historical data and future prospect. Regionally, this report focuses on several key regions: North America, Europe, China and Japan.



At company level, this report focuses on the production capacity, ex-factory price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer covered in this report.



The following manufacturers are covered:



Texas Instruments



STMicroelectronics



ON Semiconductor



API Technologies



Analog Devices



Fairchild Semiconductor



NXP Semiconductors



KEC



Cirrus Logic



Maxim



Renesas Electronics



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Segment by Regions



North America



Europe



China



Japan



Segment by Type



Open-Loop Amplifier



Closed-Loop Amplifier



Segment by Application



Active Filter



Oscillator



Voltage Comparator



Others



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This time the focus is on Puerto Rico.

Readers will remember that after the devastating Hurricane Maria in September 2017 which crippled all parts of Puerto Ricos supply lines, the Jones Act was briefly waived. US carriers, notably Crowley and Tote, stepped up their efforts to resupply the island, not a US state, but is referred to variously as a possession or territory of the US and therefore subject to the mainlands Federal laws.

The latest dust-up concerns the islands energy supply at a time that its electric grid has been slowly patched up and the juice turned back on, 18 months after the terrible storms. The politics, the economics and the science, all intertwined are tricky and complicated, as the islands debt riddled utility rebuilds.

The island has plans in the works for a renewable energy future, with natural gas imports increased, perhaps, along the path towards cheaper and cleaner power generation. These developments come at a time that resurgent US gas production (much of it tied to the opening of new shale fields previously unexploitable) has led to expectations of burgeoning US gas exports. But they wont be supplying Puerto Rico. There are no Jones Act qualified LNG tankers in service, and costs to build such vessels in US yards are thought to be circa $500m per vessel (three times the cost of building in the Far East) or more  obviously a non-starter.

In December 2018, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) received a letter from the Governor of Puerto Rico requesting a 10-year waiver of the Jones Act for gas imports into Puerto Rico, which presently takes gas from Trinidad. In early February, in a rare show of bipartisan unity, as opposed to daily skirmishes between Democrats and Republicans, the US House of Representatives Committee of Transportation and Infrastructure, composed of both Dems and Republicans, sent a letter to CBP asking that the waiver request be turned down.

The legalities surrounding waivers usually turn to national defense reasons; the letter from the Committee to the CBP notes: It is our belief that no valid national defense rationale exists to support this waiver request of the Jones Act for Puerto Rico, especially for a 10-year period.

The very conservative Cato Institute, a noteworthy think-tank, offered that: In an era in which Democrats and Republicans struggle for the common ground necessary to keep the federal government open, its notable and depressing that rare bipartisanship is found in shared opposition to a measure which would provide the struggling people of Puerto Rico access to cheaper energy.

For now, the cargoes of LNG for power generation, if they flow, will likely emanate from Trinidad which has supplied southwest Puerto Rico under a 20-year contract inked back in the late 1990s glory days of Enron Corp.

Capacity at the present facility at Guayanilla will be expanded, after gaining recent regulatory approvals. An Excelerate Energy project to import LNG into southeastern Puerto Rico was recently scrapped in the wake of continuing financial problems at the islands utility.

Meantime, Jones Act stalwart Crowley has a growing business of exporting LNG from its Jacksonville hub, in tank containers, to pharmaceutical users in Puerto Rico, through San Juan.
When Arianna Tellez stopped into Zingermans Delicatessen seven years ago after getting lost in downtown Ann Arbor, she left with more than just directions.

Tellez went home that day with a Zingerman's job application, inspired by what she describes as "this joyful feeling at the deli that I couldn't pass up."

"I applied so I could feel that joy just by going to work in the morning," she says.

Tellez intended to work in the deli only for a summer, but after a couple of months she realized that Zingermans was exactly where she wanted to be. Today, after honing her skills through several different positions, the 29-year-old is a ZingTrain trainer. Her job involves educating people in other businesses on Zingermans best practices.

For years now, Zingermans Community of Businesses (ZCoB) has been one of multiple Ann Arbor businesses that set a high local standard for employee treatment.

Living wages, dental and medical insurance coverage, 401(k)s, a community shares program, subsidized massages and meals, and having a voice in decision-making via open-book management are just a few notable perks for all Zingerman's employees.

But its the intangible benefits that have become just as meaningful to Zingerman's workers.

"I feel like they listen," says Christopher Domienik, a front-of-house manager at Zingermans Roadhouse. "Everyones voice has a chance to make a difference."

Domienik expresses appreciation for the way Zingerman's supports him both on and off the job.

"I recently bought a home and my boss and coworkers have helped cover my shifts when I've had to reschedule inspections, go to last-minute bank appointments, or when my basement flooded the day before signing the title," he says.

Domienik adds, "I never felt like I was inconveniencing any of my coworkers, even though I was. But they were more than happy to give me the opportunity to experience this important life step."

ZCoB co-owner Ari Weinzweig says serving his employees and creating a positive workplace benefits both the "ecosystem" of Zingerman's businesses and the broader ecosystem of their community.

"Essentially, the more that an employer can provide a caring workplace, the more likely people will feel good about themselves. And when that happens, employees are going to do better inside and outside of work, and that returns positively to the ecosystem," Weinzweig says.

"I can't help but radiate the happiness"

Marketing communications specialist and blogger Courtney Suciu is living proof of how employers who go above and beyond for their employees can impact the community.

Suciu works at ProQuest, an Ann Arbor-based technology service provider for libraries. She is also a former Zingermans employee.

"I was super-nervous about leaving a smaller, close-knit community to work in a more corporate culture, because I imagined that it might be cold and impersonal," she says.

But Suciu says her fears were unfounded. Aside from standard benefits, ProQuest has staff parties where people are encouraged to get to know each other and lots of personal development opportunities.

"Im allowed to cultivate my role according to my strengths and interests, and I get a lot of encouragement and support," Suciu says. "Im taken seriously and my insights and opinions matter. It feels really good coming into the building.

Suciu describes being treated as a person  rather than just a body contributing to getting something done  as being deeply nourishing.

"I take that nurtured feeling out with me and into the world," she says. "For instance, when I am in the grocery store I cant help but radiate the happiness I felt at the office. So I pass it on and it affects people."

Paid time off for volunteering is another perk for ProQuest employees. This benefit has been especially meaningful to Suciu, who recently won a company award for her volunteerism.

Originally, she had volunteered to be a companion to an elderly man. It was soon determined that the man needed more than a companion. When his social worker reached out to Suciu to become his guardian, things became complicated.

She had to go to court, fill out paperwork, attend meetings, and take the man to doctor's appointments. Her employer was fully supportive of her need to take time off. Suciu is certain that she would not be able to help her elderly friend without that flexibility.

"Im able to invest in the community and help others feel good because I am seen as a dynamic being with a life outside of work," she says.

ProQuest human resources director Wendy Treppa says running the company with humanity and sincere care for employees is simply the right thing to do and it pays off in the long run.

"We invest in developing careers so that people can grow within the community. This makes for a happier, more rewarding environment and more engaged employees," she says.

A big focus of Treppa's job is to engage a team of people to foster an environment where employees can do their best work. To accomplish this she and her team go well beyond what many consider traditional human resources. A year ago, it was brought to her attention that ProQuest didnt provide benefits for new parents of adopted children.

"This was a blind spot for us," Treppa says. "When we realized the benefit we could provide, we were able to adjust our policy to be more inclusive."

Better culture through communication

Being open to that kind of input is a good way to improve company culture, according to Mickey Swortzel, CFO and owner of New Eagle Consulting,

The Ann Arbor-based engineering consulting company won a Cool Places to Work 2018 award from Crain's. The accolade spotlights companies with outstanding company culture and the winners are selected based on employee surveys.

"We are proud of that award, which reflects the foundational values that have been woven throughout the organization," says Swortzel.

One of the companys core values is teamwork. Swortzel notes that while this isn't unique, it frames the way she approaches her staff.

We filter our time and resource decisions around what is best for the whole team, she explains.

New Eagle offers a standard benefit package, but in 2018 the company added a college loan payoff/save-up program for employees. This perk allows New Eagle to make financial contributions towards helping employees pay off existing college loans and save for future tuition.

"We thought this was a unique benefit that met the needs of our two largest demographics  new grads and those with young families," Swortzel says.

In addition, money is allocated each year to promote company culture through celebration lunches and after-hours events.

Swortzel stresses that a companys culture can be very powerful. She explores this in a short ebook she wrote called Engineering Your Happiness: Five Ways Your Companys Culture Should Make Your Life Better.

Available for download on her companys website, it was written with New Eagles technical team in mind, but Swortzel says anyone can benefit from it. The book echoes many of Zingerman's and ProQuest's shared values when it comes to investing in employee wellbeing.

"... (W)e believe we have a personal responsibility to help you reach your unique goals and pursue your personal passions," Swortzel writes. "When we do that, we help you create an interesting and exciting career path  and we get experienced, committed, knowledgeable engineers that can help our customers in many ways."

Jaishree Drepaul-Bruder is a freelance writer and editor currently in based in Ann Arbor. She can be reached at jaishreeedit@gmail.com.

All photos by

Doug Coombe
Spark New Zealand will take up its right to renew most of its mobile spectrum rights currently used for 3G and 4G services, although it would have preferred the whole lot.

Communications Minister Kris Faafoi this week announced the renewal of most of the 2,100 megahertz and 1,800 MHz bands when they expire in 2021. However, Cabinet decided to pare back the offer in the 1,800 MHz band, where Spark and its rivals Vodafone New Zealand and Two Degrees Mobile each currently have 50 MHz.

Faafoi said the government needed to keep some of that spectrum in reserve to retain flexibility and it might be used for new technologies or by the emergency services network.

Spark general manager of regulatory affairs, John Wesley-Smith, said the reduced renewal offer wasn't unexpected and the company doesn't anticipate any reduction in service.

"We also accept that the creation of a spectrum band that could be used by emergency services could serve New Zealanders well," he said.

The $720,000 per MHz renewal offer would represent a total outlay of $50.4 million excluding GST, which Spark intends to accept. However, it hasn't decided on whether to pay at the time of renewal or in annual installments over the following five years.

Wesley-Smith stressed the spectrum available for renewal was separate to the rights being considered for the 5G auction.

In its May 2018 submission on the renewal, Spark sought to keep its entire allocation, saying if the Crown kept a portion it would have a "material impact on our ability to cost-effectively meet demand and provide better services to customers".

Spark has ardently lobbied for the government to auction spectrum rights for 5G, setting a target of having the new mobile network up and running by July next year.

Faafoi last month flagged the first auction of 5G spectrum in the 3.5 gigahertz band will be early next year to be ready for use in November 2022. In a Cabinet paper accompanying the announcement, he noted that in some cases those rights could be granted sooner where the parts of the band weren't occupied.

He recommended a cap be placed on the amount of 5G spectrum given to a single operator to prevent stronger players squeezing out smaller firms and blocking potential new entrants into the market. That will be a consideration for a later date.

The cap is also seen as a potentially useful tool for setting aside spectrum to deal with Treaty of Waitangi issues, Faafoi said.

The New Zealand Maori Council has urged for the process to be paused until it was apparent what role there would be for Maori and Maori organisations.

Maori were granted the right to buy 3G spectrum at a discounted price in 2000, which effectively paved the way for 2Degrees to enter the local mobile market.

The Hautaki Trust last year transferred its stake in the country's third-placed mobile carrier to the company's majority shareholder, Trilogy International, which bundled 2Degrees into a larger telecommunications group and listed that entity on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Maori missed out on a special allocation in the 4G auction in 2013 and instead received a $30 million development fund to help Maori benefit from new technology.

(BusinessDesk)

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The New Zealand dollar rose after a North Korean official threatened to suspend nuclear talks with the United States.

The kiwi was trading at 68.43 US cents at 5pm in Wellington from 68.16 at 8am; the trade-weighted index was at 74.25 points from 74.03.

North Koreas vice foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, said his country has no intention to yield to US demands, according to Russias TASS news agency.

It said the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will be making an official announcement soon on his position regarding talks with the US.

Its a US dollar story, says Annette Beacher, head of Asia-Pacific research at TD Securities in Singapore. She noted the Australian dollar had also risen on the news.

The kiwi was at 96.58 Australian cents from 96.50, while the Australian dollar was at 70.84 US cents from 70.62 at 8am in Wellington.

Earlier today, the BNZ-Business NZ performance of manufacturing index showed activity increased 0.7 of a point to a seasonally adjusted 53.7 in February from January and was up from a 53.5 reading in February last year. A reading above 50 indicates activity is expanding.

The market will be watching GDP data for the December quarter due out next Thursday to see whether economic activity justifies the currency remaining so strong.

News of shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, evidently by white supremacists, may have distracted traders but hasnt impacted currency markets.

The New Zealand dollar was trading at 51.66 British pence from 51.51, at 60.46 euro cents from 60.32, at 76.39 yen from 76.17 and at 4.5978 Chinese yuan from 4.5816.

The two-year swap rate was at 1.8255 percent from 1.8185 on Thursday; the 10-year swap was at 2.3575 percent from 2.3425  and up from Wednesdays record low at 2.3150.

(BusinessDesk)

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New Zealand needs to get right its gradual transition to more sustainable agriculture and ensure that production values are sustained, Agriculture Minister Damien OConnor says.

The sector has a critical role to play in meeting the countrys emissions reduction goals and the government needs to focus on making the goal posts clear, he said.

Policy decisions around agriculture need to be based on scientific advice and consultation so the sector has well-considered, effective and  most importantly  workable solutions, he said in a joint statement with Climate Change Minister James Shaw and Energy and Resources Minister Megan Woods.

The government today announced plans to tweak the terms of reference for the Interim Climate Change Committee it established last year.

The committee was asked to look at how agriculture could be incorporated into the emissions trading scheme and how the governments goal for 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035 could be effected. It is due to report back by April 30 and was originally to have reported to the incoming Climate Change Commission.

Shaw says the revised terms of reference will allow the committee to deliver its two reports directly to him  something that was inevitable, given the Zero Carbon Bill that will create the commission is five months behind schedule.

Shaw said the change will allow the government to consider the committees findings and act with necessary pace.

This is a step forward, enabling more time for focused consultation with New Zealanders on important climate change legislation proposals.

It is important feedback on the committees recommendations is sought from across the country, including the primary sector, he said.

Agriculture accounts for about half the countrys emissions. In December, the committee received a report from the Biological Emissions Reference Group which said farmers want to reduce on-farm emissions but many were not aware of mitigation strategies and few had any idea of the emission rates from their property.

It suggested improved management practices could reduce emissions from pasture-based livestock by about 10 percent now. The group had medium to high confidence that methane inhibitors would deliver a 10-30 percent reduction in biogenic methane by 2030 and high confidence that a 30-50 percent reduction could be achieved by 2050.

The Interim Climate Change Committee told iwi leaders last month that accountability for livestock emissions should ultimately lie with each farm, but simple, user-friendly ways to measure and report those will not be feasible near-term.

It believed the simplest way to price emissions would be with a levy, and that the government-mandated 95 percent-free allocation for farmers should be enough to lessen the social impacts of the change. Pricing at the processor level could be used in the meantime.

The committee did not favour farm-level accountability for emissions from fertiliser. It believed any of the pricing options  a dual-cap ETS, a quota system, or a levy  could reflect different targets for short- and long-lived gases.

The committee is also wary of pursuing the governments target of achieving 100 percent renewable power generation in a year of normal hydrology.

It says provisional modelling suggests the country is on track to be 93 percent renewable by 2035. Emission benefits from pursuing ever higher levels of renewables are relatively small.

Instead of focusing on the last 8 percent, New Zealand has a major opportunity to use its abundant renewable electricity to get more bang for our buck  using this electricity to reduce emissions from transport and process heat.

Earlier this month, Shaw told delegates at the Downstream energy conference in Auckland that the ETS reform legislation would probably go to parliament mid-year, about a month behind the Zero Carbon Bill, which he thought would probably reach parliament in May.

(BusinessDesk)

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New Zealand's manufacturing activity continued to expand in February, although a build-up in inventories may indicate slower production in the future, Bank of New Zealand economist Craig Ebert says.

The BNZ-Business NZ performance of manufacturing index increased 0.7 of a point to a seasonally adjusted 53.7 in February, and was up from a 53.5 reading in the same month a year earlier. A reading above 50 indicates activity is expanding.

The production sub-index climbed 2.6 points to 53.9 and new orders were up 2.5 points at 54.7. Both of those readings were in line with February 2018. Finished stocks increased 0.7 of a point to 55.4, the highest reading among the sub-indices, and up from a reading of 51.3 a year earlier.

BNZ's Ebert said the increased production supported the view that manufacturing activity is still expanding, although other data sets suggest producers were leaning on their inventories to meet demand rather than simply making more goods.

"Inventory dynamics will thus bear monitoring, lest they continue to warn about slower production down the track," Ebert said in a note. "The net effect still indicates a cloud around the strength of demand, relative to recent production trends."

The PMI's employment measure was the weakest, falling 1.2 points to 50.8, still indicating expansion, while deliveries were up 1.2 points to 55.2.

ANZ Bank New Zealand's February truckometer index earlier this week showed a 0.4 percent increase in the heavy traffic, suggesting activity is picking up, however, a 1.3 percent dip in the light traffic index signalled the economy's momentum has turned down.

Meanwhile, Stats NZ's household labour force survey showed the manufacturing sector employed 240,200 people in the December quarter, or about 9.1 percent of the country's workforce.

Manufacturing accounts for about 9.7 percent of the economy. Fourth-quarter gross domestic product figures are due next week.

(BusinessDesk)

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Diplomatic sources said that a mechanism akin to Rupee-Rial trade between India and Iran is being looked at where Venezuela will be paid in rupee in the branch of an Indian bank for its oil, while this money can be used by Venezuela to import food and other essential items from India.

New Delhi: The government may initiate a barter trade arrangement with Venezuela to prevent disruption of oil supplies from the Latin American country following threats from the United States to extend Iran like sanctions there as well.

Venezuela is the fourth-largest oil supplier to India after Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. It accounted for about 11 per cent of India's oil supplies in 2017-18, supplying close to 18 million tonne (MT). India imported 155 MT of oil in 2017-18. The imports are expected to hit over 170 MT in FY19.

"India and Venezuela discussed the mechanism to continue the oil trade at last month's Petrotech meeting in Delhi. This is being further discussed at official level so that a payment mechanism around Indian rupee is operationalised," said an official source privy to the development.

The total trade between India and Venezuela currently stands at about $6 billion and is heavily tilted in favour of the Latin American country due to oil imports by India. The main items of Venezuelan imports from India include pharmaceutical products, machinery, organic chemicals, cotton, iron and steel and vehicle parts.

Diplomatic sources quoted earlier said that oil-for-medicine or oil-for-food deal has been a non-starter, as in the past Venezuela has favoured bilateral deals with Indian pharmaceutical companies rather than locking supplies of medicines with oil exports.

This experience has not been a happy one for Indian companies such as Novartis and Dr Reddy's, who also faced payment issues earlier there. But now with Venezuela itself facing severe shortages, India sees an opportunity to re-start talks on barter trade arrangements.

It is worth noting that India's trade deficit with Iran narrowed when the latter was on sanctions, as Iran felt compelled to use up its rupee reserves. India's experience in rupee-rouble trade with the erstwhile Soviet Union has also been good.

The US is likely to disapprove of such efforts, but India also does not want to lose yet another oil-rich nation from its import list that could have a bearing on its energy security.

The US is seeking to cut off Venezuela's oil revenue as part of its efforts to build pressure on President Nicolas Maduro to step down. The US has recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as the head of state. The sanctions mean that anyone using the US banking channels or having big presence in the US and also continuing to deal with Venezuela will also face restrictions.

In view of this, Indian buyers such as Reliance Industries and Nayara Energy (formerly Essar Oil) have already expressed their concern. These company are big importers of oil from Venezuela. In fact, Reliance Industries accounted for 80 per cent of Venezuelan oil imports to India in 2018 at 2,70,000 barrels a day. But the company sources said it has decided to cap oil purchases from Venezuela in view of the sanctions.

Alternate payment mechanism in rupee and barter trade arrangement is expected to keep oil flowing from the Latin American country even with hardening of US sanctions.
Embroiled in data privacy scandals amid the unabated spread of fake news on its platform, Facebook has lately seen several high-profile exits.

San Francisco: As Facebook pushes for a more private and encrypted communication across its apps, two of its top executives -- Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels -- have quit the company, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

"Cox and I have worked closely together to build our products for more than a decade and I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does," Zuckerberg said in a blog post late Thursday.

In a separate Facebook post, Cox said Facebook is turning a new page in its product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network.

"It's a product vision attuned to the subject matter of today: a modern communications platform that balances expression, safety, security, and privacy.

"This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through," wrote Cox, who was one of the first 15 engineers Facebook hired 13 years back.

Zuckerberg also announced the departure of Chris Daniel, who helped Facebook define the business model for WhatsApp going forward.

"Daniel has also done great work in many roles, including running our business development team, leading Internet.org, which has helped more than 100 million people get access to the Internet," said the Facebook CEO.

Daniel was in India last year where he met IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to discuss ways to sanitise WhatsApp amid several lynching episodes that happened owing to the spread of rumours on the platform.

"Will Cathcart will be the new head of WhatsApp. Most recently, he has done a great job running the Facebook app," Zuckerberg informed.

Fidji Simo will be the new head of the Facebook app.

"The leaders of Facebook (Fidji Simo), Instagram (Adam Mosseri), Messenger (Stan Chudnovsky), and WhatsApp (Will Cathcart) will report directly to me, and our Chief Marketing Officer (Antonio Lucio) will report directly to Sheryl (Sandberg)," Zuckerberg announced.

Last year, Instagram co-founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom quit after reportedly facing issues with Zuckerberg.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, co-founders of WhatsApp, have also quit to pursue other ventures, as Zuckerberg plans to merge all its apps into one unified experience.
It's peak examination season and the CBO is at a low. Still half a dozen Tamil films are releasing this week, as number of films released this year races to 50!





The Tamil releases are - Aghavan, July Kaatril, Nedunalvaadai, Ispade Rajavum Idhaya Raniyum, Gilli Bambaram Goli and Krishnam.





The Hindi releases of the week are Photograph, 22 Yards and Mere Pyare Prime Minister. The lone English release is Wonder Park.




Aamir Khan, during an interactive session with media on Thursday, reacted on Kangana Ranaut accusation that Aamir did not supporting her recent release Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi.

Soon after her first movie as a filmmaker hit the theatres across the country, Ranaut launched open attacks on B-town celebrities for not getting what she described as support for her films and allegedly ganging up against her. Apart from directly attacking actors like Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor, the actor also reportedly expressed her displeasure over Aamir not attending the trials of her films.
Shraddha Srinath will be making her Bollywood debut with, but she is not "star-struck" about the glitz and glamour of the Hindi film industry. The actress says she has good work in the southern film industry, and would tread the path in Bollywood very cautiously.

Shraddha has worked in Kannada and Tamil films, with projects like U Turn, Vikram Vedha and The Villain to her credit.

"The first step is to wait till Milan Talkies is out. Some calls have come but I can't take that too seriously. I want people to watch me perform, and see how I look on the big screen and then call me," Shraddha told IANS.

"I am in no rush. There is enough work down south. I am going to take it easy. I am not someone who is star-struck about Bollywood and think 'ke abhi Milan... release ho jaegi toh main yeh karungi Bollywood mein'... There is very good work down south for me.

"There is good work in Bollywood also. For me, the idea is to pick wisely regardless of the language. My stories mean the world to me. Bollywood maybe Bollywood, but I will tread very cautiously," added the actress, who is working on the Tamil remake of Amitabh Bachchan and Taapsee Pannu starrer Pink.

Getting into films was never a part of Shraddha's plan. She rejected the idea because of her looks and went on to study law.

"The only reason why I rejected the idea of films was because I thought I was not fit for films. I was like this chubby girl with curly hair and dusky. And I was happy eating my food and not doing any exercise.

"Films were not in the pipeline. I was like 'I am not glamorous enough. I am not beautiful enough to be an actor'. This was the only reason why I never considered films," she said.

Looking back, the actress said: "Before I joined college, I was into acting and for me the most obvious medium to act was on stage. I took up acting in plays in college. By the end of college, I knew that law is not for me and my heart belongs to acting.

"Since I have studied law for five years and my parents paid the fees, I took up work as a lawyer. I forced myself to take up a job and got a good job as a lawyer. I was balancing acting in plays with my job. Sometimes I had to beg my boss to give me extra leave for rehearsal."

The actress said the transition into acting from the law world might seem drastic, but she believes it was pre-written at "some cosmic level".

At the moment, she is looking forward to the release of Milan Talkies, which is helmed by National Award-winning filmmaker Tigmanshu Dhulia. It also stars Ali Fazal, Ashutosh Rana and Sikander Kher. The film, releasing on Friday, tells a love story set in Uttar Pradesh around 2010-2013.

Text: IANS

Images: Shraddha on Instagram
Many people claim that Muslims have become politically irrelevant in India. Their argument is based on flawed premise that the BJP won in the general election 2014 with the largest ever majority in its history, despite Muslims voting overwhelmingly against it. The BJP, according to the same logic, won two third majority in UP assembly again in the year 2017 despite Muslims voting against it. These instances, according to some analysts prove that their voting wouldnt make much of a difference in future elections.

There are several reasons why this theory is erroneous and has been spread with clear intention to deter Muslims from voting or at least erode their enthusiasm to vote. Muslims make more than 15 percent of the Indian population and they hold key in large number of seats in almost every major state throughout the nation. When votes are won and lost with difference of merely a couple of thousand votes even in Lok Sabha elections, lakhs of Muslims in almost every other constituency in UP, Bihar, Assam, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and elsewhere cannot just swing the mood in favour of one party or candidate, they are deciding factor in more than two hundred seats across the country.

The smallest victory margin for any candidate in Lok Sabha election is held by Satyajit Gaekwad of the Congress. It was in the 1996 general election that the candidate from the grand old party defeated his main BJP rival in Gujarat's Vadodata district by a margin of just 17 votes.

17 votes seem to be a large margin compared to other results. In Karnatakas Santhemarahalli (Sc) constituency in the 2004 assembly elections, JDS Krishnamurthy lost by a margin of just 1 vote. He polled 40751 votes, while the winner, Dhruvanarayan, got 40752 votes. In Rajasthan assembly election similar scenario emerged with senior Congress leader C P Joshi lost the election by just a single vote. Notwithstanding the propaganda unleashed across the country that Muslim votes no longer count, the small margins of victories suggest that in a democracy every single vote counts. It is said that Congress leader, Joshi lost by just a single vote as his driver and his spouse didnt turn out to vote. Had they not taken his win for granted and came out to vote, he would have won the election.

Muslims votes are not just deciding factor in many seats, they are the king makers or rather the kings on as many as 74 seats. In these 74 constituencies, Muslims make more than 20 percent of the population, making their votes lucrative for all the political parties. These are the seats, where Muslims can ideally win in straight or multi-cornered fights that we see these days. In Uttar Pradesh, from where 80 MPs are elected, there are at least 16 seats where Muslims make 50 to 20 percent population. These include Rampur (50 percent), Moradabad (41 percent), Saharanpur (39 percent), Bijnor (39 percent), Amroha (38 percent), Meerut (31 percent), Kairana (30 percent), Bareilly (29 percent), Muzzafarnagar (28 percent), Sambhal (28 percent), Domariganj (27 percent), Bahraich (23 percent), Kaiserganj (23 percent), Lucknow (23 percent), Shahjahanpur (21 percent), Barabanki (21 percent). It is surprising that not a single Muslim MP was elected on any of the above seats in an election where communal polarization seemed to be at its highest.

In Bihar there are at least nine seats where Muslims make from 70-20 percent of the population. These include, Kishanganj (67 percent), Katihar (38 percent), Purnea (30 percent), Araria (29 percent), Madhubani (24 percent), Darbhanga (22 percent), Sitamarhi (21 percent), West Champaran (21 percent), and East Champaran (20 percent).

Besides, there are many other seats where Muslim votes may tilt the balance in favour of a particular party or the candidate. There are as many as 145 constituencies where Muslims make 11-20 percent of the population and 183 seats where Muslims make 5-10 percent of the population. In a country where a seat can be won by a difference of a single vote, Muslims vote become crucial in all the above seats.

The fact that in UP, Muslim candidates couldnt win a single seat even from constituencies where Muslims make more than fifty percent of the population proves beyond doubt that Muslim votes get divided sharply between major parties including SP, BSP, Congress and other small regional parties and often those independents who are paid to cut votes. These independent, who are called vote katua, are often funded by the BJP or others. If we analyse the Muslim dominant seat of Sambhal in Western UP, we will find that the BJP walked away with an unlikely trophy as the division of Muslim votes among the Muslim candidates of SP and BSP ensured that BJP could win the seat with a very negligible margin of just over 5000 votes. The BJP got 34.08 percent votes, while SP got close to 34 percent and the BSP 24 percent votes.

Another constituency where the BJP won rather easily due to the division of SP and BSP votes was Ghazipur. The BJP won the seat by around 30,000 votes. The BJP will have no chance in case of the SP-BSP alliance. In the last election BJP polled 31.11 percent votes, while Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party polled 27.82 and 24.49 percent votes respectively. The same scenario was played in Rampur where Muslims make more than fifty percent of the total population. The BJP candidate walked away with an unlikely victory from a constituency where Muslims make more than half of the population. Strong candidates by the Congress, the SP and BSP ensured that BJP won the seat with a handsome margin. In Rampur, BJP's Dr Nepal Singh won the election by getting 358616 votes. Here Samajwadi Party's Naseer Ahmad Khan, who was the first runner up, secured 335181 votes while Congress candidate, Nawab Kazi Ali Khan, got 156466 votes and another Muslim candidate, Akbar Husain of BSP got 81006 votes.

It is certain that the saffron party will once again try to divide the Muslim votes not just in UP but across the nation. It will do so to counter the increasing possibility of Muslims uniting under the common umbrella of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh, under Mahagathbandhan in Bihar, TMC in Bengal, TRS in Telangana and Congress and its allies in the rest of the country. The division of Muslim votes directly helps the saffron party even in seats where Muslims make more than fifty percent of the population, as we saw in Rampur constituency of Rampur.

More columns by Syed Ubaidur Rahman:



Kamal blooms in MP, but Muslims condemned to same old treatment

Will Dalit-Muslim-Yadav alliance stop BJP juggernaut in UP, Bihar?

BSP-SP alliance minus Congress party is an advantage for BJP

Why VHP's efforts to exploit Ram temple proved a dud this time

Asia Bi and the misuse of blasphemy law in Pakistan

Hashimpura massacre by police Finally, a semblance of justice

Will Owaisi-Ambedkar alliance in Maharashtra benefit the BJP?

Modi with Syedna: PM's Muslim outreach is a lost cause now

Mob lynching in India - The menace is growing
He hails from a well-known family of Tamils living and working in government service, his father, the Late Vairamuttu being a confidante of Late Sir Oliver Goonetileke, a Governor General of Ceylon.

by Victor Cherubim





Late V. Varadakumar, Executive Director, Tamil Information Centre, London passed away peacefully at his home on 13 March 2019 after years of voluntary community service.





He was a legend in his time, spending most of his adult life after arriving in UK in the 1980's from Sri Lanka, fighting for for the cause of the dispossessed, the refugee Tamils who sought asylum in UK and in Europe.





At first, he took over the coordination of the work that was left undone by the Late K.Kandasamy and Fr.Pathinather, at the decrepit offices of Tamil Information at Clapham Junction,with little or no funding and scarce personnel.





He later worked as Coordinator, Tamil Refugee Action Group, a charity working with hundreds of refugees, setting up a Resource Centre researching documentation, fighting lost causes in UK High Court and lobbying Parliament not only for refugees but for Human Rights and Women's Rights among many.





He was adept in bringing together all the various Tamil diaspora groups in UK, volunteers, as well as militant and non militant service workers, in search of an equitable resolution of the Tamil struggle.





He remained for nearly 40 years the "Voice of all Tamils" in UK,particularly in advocacy.





He was particular in fostering the training and development of Tamil youth in many fields, taking over the role of coordinating the work of Tamil Information and Research.





Today, Tamil Information Centre maintains a documentation unit thanks to his initiative and perseverance which aims to provide a comprehensive archive of information resource for both researchers and the public devoted entirely to issues relating to Tamil speaking peoples of Sri Lanka.





TIC collects and receives information from its own sources, well authenticated.





The unique collection of nearly 25,000 artifacts,journals,microfilm documents provides the support for research and resource for students,researchers, campaigners, legal practitioners and the media.





Mr.Varadakumar's vision was so wide that he later set up a Community Development and Training programme near Kingston, Surrey involving women, elders, social workers and other volunteers to raise awareness.





He was responsible in bringing together a group of Sri Lankan Tamil and Muslim MP's, political activists and like minded to a Conference which he organised in Geneva to frankly and freely discuss and bring about a settlement of the Tamil issue during the Civil War.





He founded the Tamil Refugee Action Group,London in 1982 and was its first Coordinator of this organisation for over a decade.





His demise leaves a vacuum in community service for Tamils in London, as he had planned a "Conference of Eminent Tamil Speaking Peoples of Sri Lanka" in London in May 2019.Among them,many who have devoted their entire lives in various fields of human endeavour for the betterment of the lives of the people of Sri Lanka, whether as distinguished Writers,literary personalities,or mathematicians and scientists, were to be honoured by publication of a Compendium.





He hails from a well-known family of Tamils living and working in government service, his father, the Late Vairamuttu being a confidante of Late Sir Oliver Goonetileke, a Governor General of Ceylon.





Mr. Varadakumar will be sadly missed for his erudition and his selfless service.





He leaves a son in UK and a brother in Europe.
by our London Correspondent





After three nights of dramatic voting in Parliament on Brexit, and yesterdays vote against a No Deal Brexit by a majority of four in an non-binding vote, today 14 March 2019 MPs appear to have given Prime Minister Theresa May back control.













It was by the narrowest of margins, losing by just two votes 312 to 314 MPs passed up the opportunity to take control.





They have preferred to grant the Prime Minister yet another lifeline, before a third Meaningful Vote next week.





Meanwhile Theresa May will attend another EU summit tomorrow in Brussels, before the default deadline of March 29, 2019.





The EU and Britain both seem tired of negotiations and the possibility of extending

Art.50, which will need all 27 EU Member states approval, which observers warn,is the most highly option.




Air transport is a human endeavour where human lives are placed in the custody of the airline which is required to carry the passenger safely and securely to the destination.

by Dr Ruwantissa Abeyratne

Writing from Paradise Island, The Bahamas





On Sunday 10th March an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft operating flight 302 crashed just after takeoff from Addis Ababa on its way to Kenya. All 157 persons on board were killed as the plane crashed at high speed onto the ground. The captain of the flight had reported flight control problems to air traffic control shortly before the aircraft crashed. It is reported that the manufacturer Boeing issued a statement following the crash saying they would recommend the temporary global suspension of the entire 737 Max fleet. As this article was being written, fifty countries had grounded or banned the planes inside their airspace.





On 2 Sunday 8 October 2018 Lion Air Flight JT 610 took off from Jakarta at 23:30 GMT heading towards Depati Amir airport in Pangkal Pinang. 13 minutes into the flight, authorities lost contact. The aircraft crashed shortly off Jakarta. The flight was operated by a Boeing Max aircraft  the same type which was involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash. The aircraft was carrying 178 adult passengers, one child and two babies. In addition to the two pilots, there were also six cabin crew. It is reported that the pilots were desperately engaged in a futile tug-of-war with the plane's automatic systems in the minutes before it plunged into the ocean, killing all 189 people on board. According to Lion Air, the pilot and co-pilot had more than 11,000 flight hours between them.





Unlike the Lion Air flight which was operated between two points in Indonesia, the Ethiopian Airlines flight was an international one between two countries. Both Ethiopia and Kenya have ratified the Montreal Convention of 1999 which is the Convention for the unification of certain rules pertaining to international carriage by air. Ethiopia ratified the Convention on 24 April 2014 while Kenya ratified it on 7 January 2002. Therefore, the applicable treaty for the adjudication of claims for death of the passengers would come within the purview of the Montreal Convention.





Article 17 of the Montreal Convention stipulates that the airline is liable for damage sustained in case of death or bodily injury of a passenger upon condition only that the accident which caused the death or injury took place on board the aircraft or in the course of any of the operations of embarking or disembarking. For damages arising under Article 17 not exceeding 100 000 Special Drawing Rights for each passenger, the airline is not be able to exclude or limit its liability. This means that the airline (i.e. Ethiopian airlines) is liable in limine (at the outset) to pay 100,000 Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in the case of each passenger. However, the airline is not liable for damages arising under Article 17 to the extent that they exceed for each passenger 100 000 Special Drawing Rights if the airline proves that: such damage was not due to the negligence or other wrongful act or omission of the airline or its servants or agents; or such damage was solely due to the negligence or other wrongful act or omission of a third party. Although the cause of the crash has not been conclusively determined, Ethiopian Airlines may have a valid defence under this provision if the final findings were that there was an inherent defect in the aircraft itself. If, however, it is found that the flight crew were responsible (through negligence) for the crash, (note: it is the airline that has to prove absence of negligence) the plaintiff would be able to claim compensation over and above the 100,000 SDRs limit.





Article 28 of the Convention admits of advance payments in the case of aircraft accidents resulting in death or injury of passengers, where the airline is required to, if required by its national law, make advance payments without delay to a natural person or persons who are entitled to claim compensation in order to meet the immediate economic needs of such persons. Such advance payments do not constitute a recognition of liability and may be offset against any amounts subsequently paid as damages by the airline.





As to the issue of where an action for compensation can be brought against the airline Article 33 of the Convention provides that an action for damages must be brought, at the option of the plaintiff, in the territory of one of the States Parties, either before the court of the domicile of the airline or of its principal place of business, or where it has a place of business through which the contract has been made or before the court at the place of destination. In respect of damage resulting from the death or injury of a passenger, an action may be brought before one of the courts mentioned above, or in the territory of a State Party in which at the time of the accident the passenger had his or her principal and permanent residence and to or from which the airline operates services for the carriage of passengers by air, either on its own aircraft, or on another airlines aircraft pursuant to a commercial agreement, and in which that airline conducts its business of carriage of passengers by air from premises leased or owned by the airline itself or by another airline with which it has a commercial agreement.





Article 35 is explicit in that the right to damages are extinguished if an action is not brought within a period of two years, reckoned from the date of arrival at the destination, or from the date on which the aircraft ought to have arrived, or from the date on which the carriage stopped.





All this is clinical legal jargon to those who lost their loved ones in the crash. Air transport is a human endeavour where human lives are placed in the custody of the airline which is required to carry the passenger safely and securely to the destination. Air transport is not primarily about States. Nor is it about airlines. It is about the young woman  newly married  who texts her husband that she will contact him on landing (which never happened). It is when the ultimate in technology meshes gently with humanity.





The author, who is a former Senior Legal Officer of ICAO, is currently Senior Associate, Air Law and Policy at Aviation Strategies International, a consultancy headquartered in Montreal, having branches around the world. He has written this article while on mission in Nassau, The Bahamas.
If terrorism were to be effectively put down, the countries and regimes that support the terrorists in any manner also need to be disciplined.

by N.S.Venkataraman





The terrorists are causing havoc in many countries by launching bomb attacks , killing innocent people and injuring large number of men and women. There is world wide anger against the acts of terrorism and people around the world want the terrorists to be put down at any cost,so that world will remain in peace.





Though it is mostly thought that most of the terrorists are extremists owing allegiance to Islam, terrorism also happens to settle score amongst various groups.





The latest tragedy is the death of 49 innocent people in a terrorist attack in New Zealand and also injuring large number of people. This dastardly terrorist attack has been preceded by several other similar acts in US, Canada, several European countries and in India as well as in Pakistan and other countries.. So far, the world has not been able to stop the acts of terrorism and United Nations Organisation ,which is supposed to have the responsibility to safeguard peace in the world ,virtually remains as helpless spectator.





After condemning and disapproving such acts of terrorism, finally a decisive step was taken by the United Nations Security Council to act in the matter effectively.





A resolution was moved in the sanctions committee of U N Security Council by three permanent members namely France, U K and US on February,27 to blacklist Jaish e Mohammed and term its leader Masood Azhar as global terrorist.. Apart from the three permanent members ,four non-permanent members Germany,Poland,Belgium,and Equatorial Guinea. supported the proposal. Others who co-sponsored the proposal were six countries-Japan,Australia,Italy,Bangladesh Maldives and Bhutan.





A UNSC tag will subject Masood Azhar to assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities.





While the above proposal reflect the mood of the world and many thought it would be a meaningful and effective step forward to put down terrorism in the world, China , a permanent member of UN Security Council, vetoed the proposal and ensured that the Jaish e Mohammed would go scot free and would not be punished.





Anyone who would support the terrorists and the terrorist organisations in any way for whatever reasons cannot be considered different from the terrorists themselves.. When China protected the well known terrorist Masood Azhar inspite of the world wide consensus that terrorist should be eliminated , it obviously means that China has sympathy for the terrorists and the terrorists would get support from the Chinese government, if it would serve its purpose..





After blocking the move of the UN Security council to blacklist the Masood Azhar as global terrorist , China has exposed itself to the world wide criticism that China has no concern about fighting against terrorism in the world. This is not the first time that China has saved Masood Azhar from being called as a global terrorist and it has consistently extended support to this much dreaded terrorist.





Obviously, the world has to fight not only against the terrorists but also the countries which support the terrorists in one way or the other. Chinas claim of supporting the anti terrorism strategies is now conclusively proven to be hollow and false.





In the past, China has indulged in several acts of violence,which are not different from terrorist acts, to suppress protests in China and in occupying the neighbouring country. Chinas aggression against Tibet and forcibly entering the country and indulging in massacre to gain control over the helpless Tibetan territory, is still fresh in the memory of everyone.





China seem to be under the illusion that the world has accepted its role in Tibet and it seems to have gained confidence that it can do any act without being concerned about the world opinion. In tune with this trend of thinking of Chinese government, China has now supported the terrorist organization Jaish e Mohammed and its leader Masood Azhar.





If terrorism were to be effectively put down, the countries and regimes that support the terrorists in any manner also need to be disciplined.





If terrorism were to be effectively put down, the countries and regimes that support the terrorists in any manner also need to be disciplined.





Obviously, now is the time to vigorously pursue the cause of anti terrorism in the world and in this process, a world wide anti terrorist movement against China is much needed.




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Are terrorists crazy, or suicidal, or psychopaths without moral feelings or feelings for others?





by Dr Ruwantissa Abeyratne

Writing from Paradise Island





Shocked and strongly condemn the Christchurch, New Zealand, terrorist attack on mosques. This reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families. ~ Imran Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan





On Friday the 15th of March in the morning, an Australian man opened fire on those worshipping in a mosque in Christchurch killing at least 49 persons and injuring dozens of others. New York Magazine reported that it appears to be a carefully planned racist attack. The attacker, as well as three other people - two men and a woman  were taken to custody and police are investigating their involvement.





Addressing the nation in the aftermath of the attack, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden said that all of New Zealand condemns in the strongest possible terms the ideology of the terrorists who caused the tragedy.





In an article published in April 20118, titled Ideology Matters: Why We Cannot Afford To Ignore The Role Of Ideology In Dealing With Terrorism, Liesbeth van der Heide, a senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), states that It is not important to what extent someone has a deeper understanding of their own ideology at all. Instead the question is: how does it make them feel and act? The psychological effect of the narrative is what is important. In other words, Ms. Van der Heide seems to be saying that it is not the semantics of an ideology that matters but the impact or thrust of that ideology on a persons mind that impels a person to act in a particular manner.





If one goes back to criminal law 101 one could argue thus: any terrorist act is a crime; for an act to be recognized as a crime, there has to be an actus reus (the act) and mens rea (the mental element or intent to commit the act). These two elements may be coerced by an ideology on a subjective basis, but the narrative of the ideology may not be the inherent cause the criminal act, rather the interpretation of that ideology in the criminals mind. Ms. Van der Heide concludes: [A]ll in all, ideology matters, as long as we understand the difference between ideology as a coherent world view and what the narrative means to individuals and how it enables them to take action. We need to devote just as much time and effort to find out why some individuals refrain from violence as we do to finding out why others do. In the end, its not about whether we think ideology matters, it matters because those that use violence in the name of ideology tell us it matters to them.





Umair Javed in his article Ideology and Terrorism says: [I]deology allows human beings to make sense of the world around them. It arms them with values, moral frameworks, and the ability to understand and add meanings in relations one important contribution that communities can make is to locate and isolate ideologues preaching hatred and violence. Another would be to ensure adequate efforts are exerted to institutionalise non-violent and pro-social interpretations and norms.





Whatever efforts are made, it is increasingly clear that a variety of interventions are required. Only by addressing structural, individual-level, and ideological roots of terrorism do states stand any chance of eradicating this.





Are terrorists crazy, or suicidal, or psychopaths without moral feelings or feelings for others? Clark R. McCauley, Professor of Psychology, Bryn Mawr College, in his book The Psychology of Terrorism says, thirty years ago this suggestion was taken very seriously, but thirty years of research has found psychopathology and personality disorder no more likely among terrorists than among non-terrorists from the same background. He is of the view that the occasional lone bombers or lone gunmen who kill for political causes may indeed suffer from some form of psychopathology and goes on to distinguish between such killers and terrorists in groups, especially groups that can organize attacks that are successful, who are likely to be within the normal range of personality.





A Report prepared under an Interagency Agreement by the Federal Research Division, Library of Congress and published in September 1999 (note, before 9/11) titled: The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism : Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? states: [U]nable to achieve their unrealistic goals by conventional means, international terrorists attempt to send an ideological or religious message by terrorizing the general public. Through the choice of their targets, which are often symbolic or representative of the targeted nation, terrorists attempt to create a high-profile impact on the public of their targeted enemy or enemies with their act of violence, despite the limited material resources that are usually at their disposal. In doing so, they hope to demonstrate various points, such as that the targeted government(s) cannot protect its (their) own citizens, or that by assassinating a specific victim they can teach the general public a lesson about espousing viewpoints or policies antithetical to their own. This description should not be restricted to international terrorists.





Trudy Govier, in her highly readable book A Delicate Balance: What Philosophy Can Tell Us About Terrorism (Westview:2002) suggests that the causes may be poverty, lack of opportunity, absence of institutions permitting democratic political participation, simplistic and intolerant ideologies, resentment and envy, and real or perceived inadequacies in government. Govier says in the Preface: [A]s we struggle to come to terms with vulnerability and fear, we are exposed to a moral rhetoric of evil and justice and encouraged to cultivate a sense that we are engaged in a battle of good and evil. Some such appeals are manipulative and superficial, but others are heartfeltI find the rhetoric evil alarming, not because I dont believe evil exists but rather because of its tendency to polarize and oversimplify. The notion that those who attack us are simply evil discourages questioning and thought and suggests that we can save ourselves only by destroying evil others. I believe that is a dangerous illusion.





A terrorist interprets any given ideology through desperate eyes. He/she wants to be a hero of our times serving a cause through an ideology be it white supremacy or religious fanaticism. As Ms. Van der Heide says: [N]onetheless, ideology is not just a sort of brainwashing device, it functions very much as a tool of empowerment. It puts you in the drivers seat emotionally. If you have anger issues and a tendency to violence and you assault someone on the street, you are an outcast and no one will like you. Do the exact same thing in the name of an ideology and you are a hero, to some at least and more importantly, to yourself.





At the end of the day, the terrorist would fall into the category of a reckless and misguided criminal where he is impelled by what is now called the law of outrage  which is a theory that supports defiance against unjust denial of rights. It is noteworthy that Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics said that the proper sphere of courage lies in the battlefield, which impliedly rules out the terrorist as a courageous person.
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Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe71eb358)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe71558f0)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe71eb358)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe71558f0)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe728a9b0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe71558f0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe71558f0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe682be08)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe71a9600)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe71a9600)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
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context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

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Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6f61958)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe7040850)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6f61958)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe7040850)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe7320268)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe7040850)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe7040850)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe703bff8)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe716d2b0)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe716d2b0)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
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/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6d6fe48)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c1c840)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6d6fe48)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c1c840)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe6d909c8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c1c840)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c1c840)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe682b1e0)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe6d44ba8)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe6d44ba8)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951

/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe7260d88)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe722c548)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe7260d88)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe722c548)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe7259ca0)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe722c548)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe722c548)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe6c3d720)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe7147c10)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe7147c10)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
System error

error: Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.

context: ... 21: </%method> 22: 23: % foreach my $c (@categories) { 24: <%perl> 25: my $category_id = $c->get_id(); 26: my @stories = Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story->list ( { element_type_id=>1148, category_id=>$category_id , Order=> 'cover_date', publish_status => 't' , OrderDirection=> 'DESC' , Limit=>10 } ); 27: </%perl> 28: <table width="90%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> 29: <tr> ... code stack: /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html:25

/usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm:951

/var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj:17

/usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html:149



Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe7339160)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70112c8)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe7339160)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70112c8)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f3fe73546c8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70112c8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe70112c8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f3fe682af88)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe7310f88)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f3fe7310f88)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0
.           .         ,    .     .  ,     ,     .           .      .    ...
ABC/Craig SjodinEddie Vedder is heading overseas this summer for a European solo tour.

The trek starts June 9 in Amsterdam, and will make stops in Italy, Spain, and Germany, among others. The last date on the run will be a previously announced gig at London's Wembley Stadium on July 6, during which the Pearl Jam frontman will be opening for his heroes, The Who.

Members of Pearl Jam's Ten Club currently have access to pre-sale tickets, while general on-sale begins next Friday, March 22. Visit PearlJam.com for all ticket info.

Vedder will be back in the U.S. this fall to headline Southern California's Ohana Festival in September.

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
3 astronauts on Soyuz craft successfully reach ISS



Baikonur, Kazakhstan, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



A Russian cosmonaut and two US astronauts arrived Friday at the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, five months after the failed launch of a rocket carrying two of the passengers.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and his Russian colleague Alexey Ovchinin, who both survived a dramatically aborted Soyuz launch last year, were joined on the smoothly-executed trip by NASA astronaut Christina Koch.

The rocket blasted off without incident from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and docked at the ISS less than six hours later, more than 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the Earth at 01:01 GMT, a few minutes ahead of schedule.

During a live broadcast via high-definition cameras aboard the ISS, the mission commander Ovchinin reported that the mooring mechanism was engaged. A NASA commentator then confirmed the "capture."

The liftoff was closely watched after the two men's space journey was cut short in October when a technical problem with their Soyuz rocket triggered a launch abort two minutes into the flight.

Both men escaped unharmed.

It was the first such accident in Russia's post-Soviet history and a major setback for its once proud space industry.

Speaking to reporters ahead of their six-month mission, Ovchinin said some faulty components in the launch vehicle had been found and replaced this week.

"Yesterday they found some minor malfunctions," the 47-year-old said on Wednesday.

He insisted that the launch vehicle was in good shape.

"There are no problems," Ovchinin said.

Hague, 43, said he was looking forward to the flight -- his second attempt to get into space.

"I'm 100 percent confident in the rocket and the spaceship," he said.

The October abort was caused by a sensor damaged during the rocket's assembly.



- 'Old but reliable' -



Space expert Vadim Lukashevich said last-minute replacements were nothing out of the ordinary.

"The Soyuz is an old but reliable machine," he told AFP.

Russia's space industry has in recent years suffered a lot of mishaps including the loss of cargo spacecraft and numerous satellites.

Ovchinin, who spent six months at the ISS during a previous mission in 2016, has been keen to play down the drama of the October emergency landing.

The abort was "a little disappointing" after preparations that lasted a year-and-a-half but also "an interesting and needed experience" that tested the depth of the space programme's preparedness, he said.

Koch, Hague and Ovchinin's flight was being closely watched for another reason too.

SpaceX's successful test launch to the ISS of its Dragon vehicle has challenged an eight-year monopoly on travel to the space station enjoyed by Russia ever since NASA stopped launches of the Space Shuttle.

Speaking to reporters, the trio and their three-man backup crew stressed cooperation rather than competition following the Dragon mission, seen by some as the dawn of an era of commercial space travel driven by businessmen such as Elon Musk who owns SpaceX.

Koch, a 40-year-old space rookie, called the SpaceX success a "great example of what we've been doing for a very long time."

"And that is cooperating among partners and making things that are very difficult look easy," she said.



- 'First spacewalks' -



There had already been one successful manned launch to the ISS since the failed Soyuz mission.

The trio's arrival will return the orbiting laboratory's crew to six in all.

Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency blasted off to the orbiting outpost in December.

During their mission McClain, Saint-Jacques, Hague and Koch are set to perform the first spacewalks of their careers.

This week in a lighter moment Hague offered an insight into the specifics of personal grooming aboard the ISS.

"In space, we'll use clippers attached to a vacuum device so that the hair particles don't float around or get stuck in our vent systems," he wrote on Twitter.

The International Space Station -- a rare area of cooperation between Moscow and Washington -- has been orbiting the Earth at roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour since 1998.

bur-cr/as/bmm/dcr/ico/it
New Zealand massacre provides test for live video platforms



Washington, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



A horrific video of the New Zealand mosque massacre was blocked by Facebook during its livestream but circulated on other social media, highlighting the challenges faced by internet platforms in curbing the spread of violent content.

Facebook said it "quickly" removed a live video from the suspected gunman in twin mosque shootings in Christchurch that killed at least 49 people.

But the livestream lasting some 17 minutes, according to some reports, was shared repeatedly on YouTube and Twitter, with some footage still being viewed early Friday.

The major internet platforms have pledged to crack down on sharing of violent images and other inappropriate content through automated systems and human monitoring, but critics say it isn't working.

"There's no excuse for the content from that livestream to be still circulating on social media now," said Lucinda Creighton, a former government minister in Ireland and an advisor to the Counter Extremism Project, which campaigns to remove violent internet content.

The online platforms "say they have their own technologies but we don't know what that is, there is no transparency, and it's obviously not working," she added.

The organization has developed technology that would flag certain kinds of violent content and offered it to internet firms, but has been rebuffed.



- YouTube, Twitter scramble -



New Zealand police, in a Twitter message early Friday, urged people not to share the "extremely distressing" footage from the Christchurch killings, which were reportedly seen on platforms such as 4chan and Reddit and some media websites.

"We would strongly urge that the link not be shared. We are working to have any footage removed," the country's police department tweeted.

Both Twitter and YouTube said they were working to remove the videos and related content.

A Twitter spokesperson said issues such as the Christchurch video were handled rigorously by a dedicated team, adding that the platform cooperates with law enforcement.

"Our hearts are broken over today's terrible tragedy in New Zealand. Please know we are working vigilantly to remove any violent footage," YouTube said in a tweet.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a query on the timing of its action but said it had removed the video following a police request and blocked the alleged shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts.

"We're also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we're aware," Facebook said.

But Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University communications professor who follows social media, said the companies were doing far too little to prevent the spread of violent content.

"Facebook is an unmoderated platform where you can stream anything you want," she said, arguing that no meaningful measures have been taken since a 2017 Facebook livestream of a murder in Cleveland, Ohio.

Grygiel said it has become commonplace for perpetrators to use social media to stream acts of violence, and that these are often shared on YouTube and other platforms.

She said platforms like YouTube have the ability to find and remove violent videos with keyword searches, but more people are needed to monitor the platforms.

"They have the tools with social listening to go in with keyword terms and have moderators view and remove all videos linked to this type of incident," she said.

Grygiel noted that artificial intelligence may help but added that "there's no algorithm that can be designed for this, because you can't predict the future."
Qualcomm scores $31 mn win in patent battle war with Apple



San Francisco, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



US smartphone chip titan Qualcomm said Friday it won a $31 million verdict in its multifront war with Apple over patented technology used in iPhones.

A jury in a federal court in Southern California ordered that Apple pay Qualcomm for patent infringement for chips used on iPhone 7, 8 and X models.

The damages were tabulated from July 6, 2017 through the end of the trial, according to a Qualcomm statement.

"Today's unanimous jury verdict is the latest victory in our worldwide patent litigation directed at holding Apple accountable for using our valuable technologies without paying for them," Qualcomm general counsel Don Rosenberg said in a release announcing the verdict.

Qualcomm shares closed the formal trading day up 2.2 percent to $56.60.

Patents at issue in the case involved "flashless booting" that allows devices to connect quickly to the internet after being turned on and technology that lets smartphone apps move online data efficiently.

A third patent related to promoting rich graphics in games while protecting battery life, according to Qualcomm.

On another front in the complex legal battle between two US companies a federal judge in Southern California on Thursday issued a preliminary ruling that Qualcomm owes Apple nearly a billion dollars in patent royalty rebate payments the chip maker is withholding, according to US media reports.

Apple sued Qualcomm two years ago over the payments, which were part of a contracted arrangement. The judge's decision will be on pause until after a trial in the case.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Qualcomm late last year escalated a legal war with Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of stealing secrets and sharing them with mobile chip rival Intel, according to court documents.

Apple's goal was to buy mobile chips from Intel instead of depending on Qualcomm, the dominant maker of mobile phone processors and has argued that Qualcomm abuse of its dominant position was harmful to the whole industry.

Apple's ongoing legal battle with Qualcomm includes accusations that the chipmaker has been charging for invalid patents and claiming the chipmaker was seeking a disproportionate amount for a single component.

The two California tech giants have been locked in a long-running battle over patents and royalties that has played out in courts and administrative bodies worldwide.

gc/rl







APPLE INC.

QUALCOMM
Hundreds of thousands join world youth climate demo



Montreal, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



Hundreds of thousands of young people skipped school across the globe on Friday to march through the streets for an international day of student protests aimed at pushing world leaders into action on climate change.

Classrooms in capitals from Bangkok to Berlin and Lagos to London emptied as organizers of the student strike called demos in more than 100 countries.

Students flooded into the streets across Europe, North America and Asia carrying placards reading: "There is no planet B", "You're destroying our future" and "If you don't act like adults, we will."

Despite three decades of warnings, carbon dioxide emissions hit record levels in 2017 and again last year.

Loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at current rates will eventually lead to an uninhabitable planet, scientists say.

In Stockholm, Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg who inspired the protests, warned that time was running out.

"We are living through an existential crisis that has been ignored for decades and if we do not act now it may be too late," the 16-year-old told Swedish public television station SVT.

Writing on Instagram, Thunberg -- who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism -- estimated more than 10,000 youngsters had joined the Stockholm protest.

Across the world, their placards formed a mosaic:

"Like the ocean, we will rise" (Sydney)

"Our future in your hands" (Berlin)

"System Change not Climate Change" (Vienna)

"Don't be a Trump" (Hong Kong)

"The Titanic would have NO problem in 2019" (Elmshorn, Germany)

And everywhere, "There is no planet B."

Montreal drew among the largest crowds, estimated by organizers at nearly 150,000.

"When you have winds of change, demanded by young people like this, governments have a moral duty to listen and act on the environment," Montreal university student Cedric Remy, 21, told AFP.

In the United States, protests were more low-key, with events held in New York, Washington, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and St. Paul, Minnesota, where one sign read: "So bad even introverts are here!"

In Delhi, one of the world's most polluted cities, 200 students took part in a colourful protest, waving ribbons, juggling and performing stunts with hoops.

"We have to make a choice whether we want to sit and be indifferent or do something for our planet," said 16-year-old student Srijani Datta.

In Sydney, 18-year-old Charles Rickwood warned that Australia's famous Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed.

"If current trends in the environment continue, we'll see the one, two degrees increase in our ocean then it will simply become unsustainable and we could lose the entire Great Barrier Reef," he told AFP.



- Skipping exams -



European students were also out en masse. Several thousand youngsters thronged the streets of central London in a raucous demonstration with banners and placards.

Packing into Parliament Square, they cheered and chanted "Change... now!" before marching past Downing Street and massing outside Buckingham Palace.

"They're not going to stop me trying to save the planet," said 15-year-old Joe Crabtree from southwest London, who had missed two exams to join the demo.

More than one million marched overall, according to estimates by organizing groups such as the Youth For Climate movement and AFP reporters.

The Friday for Future movement said more than 300,000 young people demonstrated in Germany alone.

As youngsters hit the streets, nations meeting at the UN environment assembly in Kenya announced they had agreed to "significantly reduce" single-use plastics over the next decade.

But experts said the pledge -- which only referred to man-made global warming and made no mention of the fossil fuels driving it -- fell far short of the steps needed to tackle Earth's burgeoning pollution crisis.



- 'Adults should learn a lesson' -



The global action drew a mixed reaction from politicians.

Germany's Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said the demonstrators should be in class while Australia's Education Minister Dan Tehan said striking was "not something that we should encourage."

But New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hailed the action, saying: "We hear you and we're getting on with setting a path for carbon neutrality."

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres offered his strongest support yet for the strikes, writing in the Guardian newspaper: "Without ambitious action, the Paris agreement is meaningless."

Guterres also called for world leaders to come to the Climate Action Summit in New York in September "with concrete, realistic plans" to further reduce their emissions by 2020, in order to reach a target of 45 percent lower emissions over the next decade, and to net zero by 2050.

Greenpeace praised the global protests, saying adults needed to learn a lesson.

In the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, students circulated a petition to be submitted to the government demanding concrete measures.

"The planet is heating up, the youth are rising up," they chanted.



- 'My eyes hurt from pollution' -



The Paris treaty calls for capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) but the planet is currently on track to heat up by double that figure.

The UN's climate science panel warned in October that only a wholesale transformation of the global economy and consumer habits could forestall a catastrophe.

"My eyes hurt from pollution. My shirt gets dirty from dust," 13-year-old protester Shagun Kumari told AFP in Delhi.

"I want fresh air that won't harm my lungs and clean water to drink so that I don't keep falling sick."

burs-amc/ft
US, Kabul ties tense over Taliban talks



Washington, March 14 (AFP) Mar 14, 2019



A close aide to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Thursday sparked a diplomatic spat with the United States by offering tough criticism of Washington's talks with the Taliban.

The advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, took particular aim at US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and his personal "ambitions" in Afghanistan.

"We don't know what's going on. We don't have the kind of transparency that we should have," Mohib, Afghanistan's national security advisor, told media during a visit to Washington.

"The last people to find out are us."

Mohib was "summoned" by the US undersecretary for political affairs, David Hale, who rejected the comments made by the Afghan official "criticizing the US approach to reconciliation," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said.

At issue are the direct talks between the US government and Taliban negotiators that began last summer in Doha. The latest round wrapped up Tuesday.

After previous rounds of talks, Khalilzad typically traveled to Kabul to brief Afghan officials -- but not this time. On Tuesday, he came straight back to Washington.

That raised hackles in the Afghan capital.

Afghan officials are not taking part in the talks, as the Taliban insurgents have consistently refused to sit across the table from members of a government they consider to be a US puppet regime.



- 'Viceroy' -



Beyond Khalilzad's possible lapse in diplomatic decorum by not briefing Kabul, Mohib lambasted US intentions, in a rare outburst.

"We like to hear that progress is made. But what is it?" Mohib said. "Our understanding is if there is a deal, it's a bad deal."

On Tuesday, Khalilzad said "real strides" had been made but no agreement was reached on a timetable for a troop withdrawal.

He spoke of an agreement "in draft" on the issues of counter-terrorism assurances from the Taliban and troop withdrawal, but stressed that nothing was finalized.

For his part, Mohib said it was possible that the Taliban were simply trying to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Americans after more than 17 years of war.

As for Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, Mohib recalled that the US envoy "wanted to run for president twice, in 2009 and 2014."

"Knowing Ambassador Khalilzad's own history, personal history, he has ambitions in Afghanistan," he said.

"The perception in Afghanistan, people in the government think that perhaps, perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government of which he will then become the viceroy," Mohib charged.

"He is ostracizing, alienating a very trusted ally and partner."

According to Palladino, the US government warned Mohib that "attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are attacks on the (State) Department and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process."

Palladino nevertheless told reporters that Washington maintains its confidence in Ghani, and admitted there could be more coordination and regular contacts between the two capitals.

"An intra-Afghan dialogue must be a part of any final package," the spokesman said.

He reiterated what Khalilzad said about any eventual agreement with the Taliban: once the components on counter-terrorism and troop withdrawal are finalized, the next phases would be intra-Afghan dialogue and a "comprehensive ceasefire."

Asked if these latter stages had been addressed in Doha, even in principle, Palladino avoided the question.

"There's no agreement until we have a full agreement," he said.

Taliban representatives have so far denied giving the green light to any intra-Afghan negotiations.
Australia to launch Indian Ocean military exercises from Colombo



Colombo, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



Australia will launch a seven-nation Indian Ocean military exercise next week, starting in Sri Lanka where China has invested in strategic ports and loaned huge amounts to build other infrastructure, Canberra's envoy said Friday.

Some 1,000 Australian security personnel in four naval ships and a military aircraft will participate in the biggest joint exercise yet with their Sri Lankan counterparts, Canberra's top envoy in Colombo, Jon Philp, said.

"Sri Lanka and Australia are increasingly like-minded on maritime security and Indian Ocean issues," Philp said adding that the two countries will improve cooperation and familiarity with each other's defence forces.

Australian forces will move to neighbouring India on March 26 and thereafter travel to Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore before returning to Darwin after two and a half months.

The joint exercise comes as concerns grow over Beijing's influence on Sri Lanka's economy and Chinese control over two key ports.

Unable to service a $1.4 billion Chinese loan to build a deep-sea port in the island's south, Colombo leased the facility to a Beijing company for $1.12 billion in 2017.

A state-owned Chinese company also runs Sri Lanka's biggest container terminal in Colombo.

Neighbouring India as well as Western nations have expressed concern about China's foothold on vital locations in Sri Lanka which is strategically placed along the most important East-West sea route.

An ambitious plan, seeking to link Asia, Europe and Africa with a network of ports, highways and railways, has seen China disperse tens of billions of dollars in loans to developing nations, sparking fears of a "debt trap".

The largest single lender to Sri Lanka, China has secured contracts to build roads, railways and ports.

Philp played down China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean region saying Canberra considered Beijing a "extremely important" partner.

"We welcome China's role in the region and look forward to working with China," he said.

Growing fears of political influence from foreign states, particularly China, saw Australia pass a raft of new laws last year to curb potential meddling.
US 'hopeful' for continued talks with N. Korea: Pompeo



Washington, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo voiced hopes Friday that nuclear disarmament negotiations with North Korea would continue following reports that Pyongyang is considering suspending the talks.

"We are hopeful that we can continue to hold this conversation," he told reporters.

Russian news agency TASS reported earlier that the North's vice foreign minister Choe Son Hui rejected yielding to "US demands in any form," after the Hanoi summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump ended without agreement.

Trump told a post-summit press conference in Hanoi that the North Korean leader had promised he would maintain his moratorium on missile and nuclear tests.

Analysts voiced fears that the change of tone from Pyongyang could mean a resumption of tests, but Pompeo remained upbeat about the pause staying in place.

"In Hanoi on multiple occasions, (Kim) spoke directly to the president and made a commitment that he would not resume nuclear testing, nor would he resume missile testing," Pompeo said.

"We have every expectation that he will live up to that commitment."
Pentagon intel official pleads guilty in Chinese spying case



Washington, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



A former US Defense Intelligence Agency official will be jailed for 15 years after pleading guilty Friday to charges of attempting to sell classified information to the Chinese, the Department of Justice said.

Ron Rockwell Hansen, 58, a former DIA operative based in Beijing, was arrested in June while preparing to board a flight to China carrying classified information.

Investigators said Hansen, a fluent Mandarin Chinese and Russian speaker, had fallen into deep financial trouble from 2013 to 2016 and was paid more than $800,000 by Chinese intelligence for US secrets.

During that time they found that he had regular meetings with Chinese intelligence agents that he never reported, used cellphones provided him by Chinese sources and retained classified information to which he was not supposed to have access.

They discovered his work with the Chinese when in 2016 he tried to recruit a fellow intelligence case officer to work with him and the colleague reported it to their superiors.

In a deal with prosecutors Hansen pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to gather or deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government.

The deal set his sentence at 15 years.

US intelligence has been struggling hard against a Chinese espionage offensive that saw the CIA's Chinese informant network rolled up by Beijing several years ago, and saw several US officials exposed as Chinese spies.

In January 2018, former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee was arrested on charges that he sold information to China. He is reportedly suspected of having provided information that allowed China to bring down the CIA's network between 2010 and 2012.

Former State Department official Kevin Mallory was arrested in 2017 for spying for China.

And another US diplomat, Candace Marie Claiborne, was also arrested for taking money from Chinese intelligence officials, though she was not directly accused of supplying information in exchange.

pmh/ska

DIA - DISTRIBUIDORA INTERNACIONAL DE ALIMENTACION SA
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Chancellor Speculation Merkel May Be in Office Longer Than You Think

Angela Merkel has led the current grand coalition government in Berlin for a year now. There has been considerable speculation recently that she may not last through her fourth term. But there is more to suggest she will remain in office than step down.
If terrorism were to be effectively put down, the countries and regimes that support the terrorists in any manner also need to be disciplined.





by N.S.Venkataraman





The terrorists are causing havoc in many countries by launching bomb attacks , killing innocent people and injuring large number of men and women. There is world wide anger against the acts of terrorism and people around the world want the terrorists to be put down at any cost,so that world will remain in peace.





Though it is mostly thought that most of the terrorists are extremists owing allegiance to Islam, terrorism also happens to settle score amongst various groups.





The latest tragedy is the death of 49 innocent people in a terrorist attack in New Zealand and also injuring large number of people. This dastardly terrorist attack has been preceded by several other similar acts in US, Canada, several European countries and in India as well as in Pakistan and other countries.. So far, the world has not been able to stop the acts of terrorism and United Nations Organisation ,which is supposed to have the responsibility to safeguard peace in the world ,virtually remains as helpless spectator.





After condemning and disapproving such acts of terrorism, finally a decisive step was taken by the United Nations Security Council to act in the matter effectively.





A resolution was moved in the sanctions committee of U N Security Council by three permanent members namely France, U K and US on February,27 to blacklist Jaish e Mohammed and term its leader Masood Azhar as global terrorist.. Apart from the three permanent members ,four non-permanent members Germany,Poland,Belgium,and Equatorial Guinea. supported the proposal. Others who co-sponsored the proposal were six countries-Japan,Australia,Italy,Bangladesh Maldives and Bhutan.





A UNSC tag will subject Masood Azhar to assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo. An assets freeze under the Sanctions Committee requires that all states freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities.





While the above proposal reflect the mood of the world and many thought it would be a meaningful and effective step forward to put down terrorism in the world, China , a permanent member of UN Security Council, vetoed the proposal and ensured that the Jaish e Mohammed would go scot free and would not be punished.





Anyone who would support the terrorists and the terrorist organisations in any way for whatever reasons cannot be considered different from the terrorists themselves.. When China protected the well known terrorist Masood Azhar inspite of the world wide consensus that terrorist should be eliminated , it obviously means that China has sympathy for the terrorists and the terrorists would get support from the Chinese government, if it would serve its purpose..





After blocking the move of the UN Security council to blacklist the Masood Azhar as global terrorist , China has exposed itself to the world wide criticism that China has no concern about fighting against terrorism in the world. This is not the first time that China has saved Masood Azhar from being called as a global terrorist and it has consistently extended support to this much dreaded terrorist.





Obviously, the world has to fight not only against the terrorists but also the countries which support the terrorists in one way or the other. Chinas claim of supporting the anti terrorism strategies is now conclusively proven to be hollow and false.





In the past, China has indulged in several acts of violence,which are not different from terrorist acts, to suppress protests in China and in occupying the neighbouring country. Chinas aggression against Tibet and forcibly entering the country and indulging in massacre to gain control over the helpless Tibetan territory, is still fresh in the memory of everyone.





China seem to be under the illusion that the world has accepted its role in Tibet and it seems to have gained confidence that it can do any act without being concerned about the world opinion. In tune with this trend of thinking of Chinese government, China has now supported the terrorist organization Jaish e Mohammed and its leader Masood Azhar.





If terrorism were to be effectively put down, the countries and regimes that support the terrorists in any manner also need to be disciplined.





If terrorism were to be effectively put down, the countries and regimes that support the terrorists in any manner also need to be disciplined.





Obviously, now is the time to vigorously pursue the cause of anti terrorism in the world and in this process, a world wide anti terrorist movement against China is much needed.




A more recent publication of this set of statistics is available. Latest publication: International trade in goods and services 2021, 2nd quarter

Published: 15 March 2019

Service imports grew faster than service exports

Service imports grew by 15 per cent in the last quarter of 2018 compared with the corresponding quarter of the previous year. Service exports grew by five per cent. The value of service imports was EUR 8.6 billion and that of exports EUR 7.9 billion. Other business services were imported most. Their imports also grew more than of any other service item. Exports grew most for the biggest export item of service exports, telecommunications, computer and information services. The data appear from Statistics Finland's statistics on international trade in goods and services, which are part of balance of payments .

Imports and exports of services

The combined exports of goods and services grew by five per cent and imports by 10 per cent in the last quarter of 2018 compared with the corresponding quarter in 2017. In balance of payments terms, goods exports grew by five per cent and goods imports by eight per cent. Goods exports recorded by Finnish Customs grew two percentage points more and imports by two percentage points less than recorded by the balance of payments.

The levels in customs terms and in balance of payments terms can differ, because goods trade in customs terms includes flows of goods where ownership does not change. In contrast, goods trade in balance of payments terms is based on change of ownership. In addition to the changes made to the customs data, goods trade in balance of payments terms includes sales and purchases from aboard to abroad.

According to preliminary data for 2018, the combined exports of goods and services grew by six per cent when comparing exports of the whole 2018 to exports of 2017. In turn, imports of goods and services grew by eight per cent in 2018.

Service imports grew more than exports also when examining the whole 2018.

According to preliminary data for 2018, service imports grew by 10 per cent compared to 2017. Service exports grew by five per cent. Both service exports and imports increased in 2018 due to the growth in international trade in the following items: other business services, transport services and manufacturing services.

In addition, service imports grew on account of purchases of telecommunications, computer and information services from abroad. EUR 0.6 billion more were used for purchasing these services than in 2017, which represents a growth of 20 per cent.

Imports of other business services were over EUR one billion higher in 2018 than one year previously. Imports of other business services grew EUR 0.4 billion more than their exports, but the percentage growth of both imports and exports in these items was the same: 14 per cent. Imports of other business services grew in 2018 in euros almost two times more than telecommunications, computer and information services and over two times more than transport services.

Exports of the most significant item of service exports, telecommunications, computer and information services, remained on level with the previous year in 2018.

Growing sales of telecommunications, computer and information services and transport services continued to show growth for service exports

Exports of telecommunications, computer and information services grew by 12 per cent in the last quarter of 2018. Exports of the second biggest item of service exports, other business services, did not grow in the corresponding period. This is explained by the exceptionally high level of exports in the comparison period, the last quarter of 2017, in the sub-item of other business services, research and development services.

Transport services were still the third biggest item of exports. Their exports grew by 11 per cent in the last quarter of 2018.

The 15 per cent growth in service imports in the last quarter of 2018 was boosted particularly by three service items: other business services, telecommunications, computer and information services, and transport services.

Imports of other business services grew by 30 per cent. Other business services include research and development services, technical, trade-related and other business services, and professional and management consulting services.

Imports of telecommunications, computer and information services grew by 28 per cent, but EUR 0.4 billion less than imports of other business services.

Exports of services by service item

One-third of services bought in Finland are exported to three countries.

In 2018, the most important service export countries for Finland were Sweden, the United States and Germany. Around one-third of Finland's total service exports were exported to these countries. The share of service exports to the United States was some 40 per cent in 2018. For Sweden and Germany, the shares of service exports in total exports were around one third.

Exports to Sweden and Germany thus follow the same structure as Finland's current exports of goods and services where the share of service exports is around one-third of total exports.

According to preliminary data, service exports to Germany grew by 16 per cent in 2018 from the previous year. Goods exports to Germany in balance of payments terms grew less: by nine per cent. Service exports to Sweden grew less in percentages than to Germany according to preliminary data for 2018. The growth to Sweden was four per cent, but exports of services there were EUR 1.3 billion higher than to Germany.

According to preliminary data, service exports appear to have picked up for the United States in the latter half of 2018, when they grew by 13 per cent compared to the corresponding period of the previous year. However, the growth for the whole year remained at three per cent. Goods exports to the United States grew less than service exports in the latter half of 2018: by seven per cent.

Correspondingly, imports from the United States grew in the two last quarters of 2018 compared to the corresponding period of 2017. During the period, service imports grew by 18 per cent and goods imports in balance of payments terms by as much as 28 per cent.

Imports from Russia growing

In addition to the United States, imports from Russia also grew for both goods and services. The growth was also faster for Russia in the latter half of 2018 than in the early part of the year. The growth in the whole 2018 for services was 15 per cent compared to the previous year, while in the latter part of the year the growth was 19 per cent.

Preliminary data indicate that goods imports from Russia in turn grew by 23 per cent in 2018. In the latter half of 2018, goods imports increased by 32 per cent.

Exports of services to Russia reflected the general growth in service exports in 2018. They grew by six per cent, or one percentage point more than service exports to the whole world.

Goods imports in balance of payments terms from the United Kingdom have remained on level with 2017 in 2018. However, preliminary data indicate that six per cent more services were imported from the United Kingdom. In turn, goods exports to the United Kingdom grew by 10 per cent in 2018, while five per cent less services were exported than in 2017.

Exports of goods and services in balance of payments terms by area

Statistics on international trade

The statistics on international trade in goods and services are part of balance of payments . The statistics comprise breakdowns of goods and services on a more detailed level. The guidelines and recommendations of the Balance of Payments Manual (BPM6) applied to balance of payments are consistent with the European System of Accounts (ESA 2010). National Accounts are published on quarterly and annual levels . Finnish Customs publishes data on goods trade across borders. Goods trade published by Finnish Customs is used as source data for the statistics on international trade in goods and services. Removals and additions caused by definitions are made to them to achieve goods trade in balance of payments terms.

Finnish Customs statistical service, tilastot@tulli.fi, +358 29 552 335.

Source: International trade in goods and services 2018, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Tommi Kaatrasalo 029 551 3320, Terhi Tulonen 029 551 3604, globalisaatio.tilastot@stat.fi

Director in charge: Ville Vertanen

Publication in pdf-format (271.7 kB)

Updated 15.3.2019

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): International trade in goods and services [e-publication].

ISSN=2343-4244. 4th quarter 2018. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 10.12.2021].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/tpulk/2018/04/tpulk_2018_04_2019-03-15_tie_001_en.html
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.
A couple times each week well post a Quick Smoke: not quite a full review, just our brief verdict on a single cigar of buy, hold, or sell.

Last summer, Drew Estate unveiled three smaller vitolas for Liga Privada No. 9 and T52 linesCorona Viva, Short Panatela, and Petit Coronaplus the Unico Serie Nasty Fritas. The Nasty Fritas utilizes a Connecticut Broadleaf Oscuro wrapper and a plantation-grown Brazilian Mata Fina binder over Nicaraguan and Honduran fillers, read a press release dated from July 2018. Like the Papas Fritas, the Nasty Fritas filler tobacco incorporates leftover tobacco leaves that are short cut through the manufacture of Liga Privada No. 9 and Liga Privada T52 cigars. Nasty Fritas is a conical vitola measuring just shy of 4 inches long with a ring gauge of 52 at its widest point. It is sold in 50-count boxes for $325, or $6.50 per cigar, and features a pigtail cap and closed foot. The burn line is a bit temperamental, but the flavorscocoa, coffee, and the hints of sweet grassiness that are (to me, at least) synonymous with Ligaare enough to merit a recommendation.

Verdict = Buy.

Patrick A

photo credit: Stogie Guys


The Commonwealth flag could be seen flying in Gibraltar last weekend instead of the EU flag, to commemorate Commonwealth Day.

In the past, the Commonwealth flag was only flown outside No. 6 Convent Place, but last year it was decided to make the change all over Gibraltar.

The EU flag was raised again on Tuesday.
HMS Duncan was in Gibraltar on Thursday, for a routine logistics visit. This impressive Type 45 destroyer recently sailed from her home port in Portsmouth for a six-month operational deployment.

Initially she will be operating in the Mediterranean Sea, tasked with providing area air defence to the French aircraft carrier FS Charles de Gaulle as part of their Carrier Strike Group deployment, Groupe Aeronaval (GAN) 19. She will then resume NATO operations as required.

HMS Duncan is the sixth of the highly-capable Type 45 air defence destroyers and one of the most advanced warships in the world. She sails with a ship's company in excess of 280 personnel.
Irish people all over the world will be celebrating St Patrick's Day this Sunday 17 March. While the most spectacular events will be in Ireland itself, Malaga will be commemorating its own connections with the country and its people.

IRISH EVENTS IN MALAGA Tribute to Robert Boyd. 17 March, 7pm. The tribute will take place at the Jose Maria Torrijos centre (Refectory), next to the Plaza de la Libertad, in El Perchel, Malaga, organised by the Torrijos historical-cultural association in collaboration with the Irish Cultural Circle of Malaga. It is located just 5 minutes' walk from the railway station Maria Zambrano of Malaga. Mass and Choir recital. 17 March, 12.30pm. Schola Gregoriana Malacitana at 12.30 in San Patricio Church, Huelin, Malaga. The Quiet Man film screening. 15 March, 4.30pm, Official School of Languages of Malaga, EOI, Assembly Hall; 20 March, 5pm, Gerald Brenan House, first floor. Directed by Irish-born American director John Ford. Starring John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara and Barry Fitzgerald. Original version with subtitles.

The rebel

In 1831 King Ferdinand VII was the ruler of Spain. Known by his opposition as 'the Felon King', Ferdinand certainly did not have the country's full support. Rebellions began throughout Spain and along the Costa del Sol, led by General Torrijos.

Among his ranks of rebel soldiers was Robert Boyd. Born a Protestant in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Boyd had previous tendencies to support rebel causes. At 19, he left home to join the Bengal Army of East India, and is said to have helped in the Greek War of Independence.

It is understood that Robert Boyd met Torrijos in England, after the general settled there and created an association in support of freeing Spain. Coming from a wealthy background, Boyd played an important part in the funding of the rebellions.

In December of 1831 an attack was planned on the Costa del Sol. The hope was that the rebels could defeat the Royalist troops in Malaga, and then the rest of Spain would fall.

On the approach to the city, the boats were attacked and the rebellion failed in its first attempt. Finding refuge near Mijas, Torrijos, Boyd and the rebels continued to plan for their next attempt. Torrijos was in contact with an informant named 'Viriato', who was later revealed to be General Gonzalez Moreno, a royalist soldier.

The rebels were forced to surrender, with Torrijos and Boyd among those who were executed. They are now seen as heroic martyrs of the liberal movement.

Robert Boyd was buried in the English Cemetery in Malaga. His name is also among the 49 other revolutionaries who tried to free Malaga, engraved on the monument in Plaza de la Merced.

A tribute to Robert Boyd will be held on St Patrick's Day (17 March), organised by the Asociacion Historico Cultural Torrijos 1831.

The artist

Alongside Robert Boyd in Malaga's Irish connections, is George Campbell. Born in Arklow and raised in Belfast, Campbell believed that in his previous life he had been a Spaniard.

Spending much of his adult life painting in Dublin and around Andalucia, the Irish artist is said to have visited Malaga 27 times throughout his life.

His interest in Spain came shortly after World War II. He met a group of Spaniards living in Dublin, and when he was in London he painted visiting Spanish dancers in their traditional costumes. He also learned to play the flamenco guitar.

Campbell is said to have finally visited Spain in the early 1950s, and spent much of the last 25 years of his life here.

The year before his death in 1979, the Spanish government made him a Knight Commander of Spain.

Much of his work was inspired by the landscapes of Andalucia and the Spanish people he encountered both in Spain, England and Ireland.

The inn

The Venta Galwey is a popular restaurant on the Colmenar road through the Montes de Malaga natural park. Its name is pronounced wrongly by the local people, unfamiliar with the letter w, and even appears written on 19th century maps, as 'Galbei'.

Little is known about the origins of this establishment, but it is understood that it belonged to Eduardo Galwey Molina, the grandson of John Galway of Ireland.

According to Antonio Montanez, whose family has run the restaurant since 1993, after the wars in Ireland in the 1700s, Spain played host to many Irish exiles. John Galway, who was made a knight of Carlos III, was one of them. Being in Spain, the family needed a second surname, and so Galwey was invented. Some believe that Galway helped in the construction of San Telmo aqueduct in Malaga.

The Galwey family has a mausoleum in the city's San Miguel cemetery.

Awards

More information will be provided at the Torrijos tribute about the Robert Boyd Prize to be awarded by the University of Malaga's Maria Zambrano Centre for Transatlantic Studies. Along with two other prizes in the names of fellow Irish nationals George Campbell and writer Kate O'Brien, the Robert Boyd Prize will recognise research works focusing on the relations between Ireland and Spain.

Film

The Gerald Brenan Cultural Association joins forces with the Irish Cultural Circle of Malaga to celebrate St Patrick's Day with the screening of the film The Quiet Man. The British writer and Hispanist, Gerald Brenan, spent periods of his childhood at his mother's family home near Belfast, explains the association's president Lola Ortega. He shares his Irish origins, as well as his birth year (1894) with The Quiet Man director John Ford.
The path starts opposite the Dia supermarket, on the main drag - an unlikely place to begin walking a section of one of the world's greatest pilgrimages. A newish-looking sign directed me uphill to the edge of the village and within ten minutes I was amidst olive groves and brightly coloured blossom.

The only sounds were the droning of bees and birdsong. To my right, the cliffs of El Torcal natural park reached into a deep blue sky. Climbing steadily, I left Villanueva de la Concepcion behind, eager to see what other sights awaited me on the 15-kilometre path to Antequera.

Weaving through the heart of Malaga province, this rarely-trodden track is part of the Camino de Santiago (or Way of Saint James), the Spanish pilgrimage that's more associated with its northern sections, particularly the French Way.

The Camino logo and arrows are almost like companions, keeping you on the right track

Something about spending a few hours on this ancient path had made a deep impression

This epic route runs for 770 kilometres between St Jean Pied de Port in the French Pyrenees and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, taking in the landmark cities of Pamplona, Logrono, Burgos and Leon and requiring about a month to complete. In the 2010 film The Way (well worth a watch), Martin Sheen's character Tom Avery walks along this part of the Camino in memory of his son, who is killed by a storm in the Pyrenees while on his own pilgrimage.

The Andalusian sections of the Way of St James are collectively known as the Camino Mozarabe de Santiago and, although they've yet to star in a film about the pilgrimage, are every bit as spectacular as their northern cousins.

They begin in Malaga and Almeria, join at Baena, then snake up to Santiago via Cordoba, Merida and Salamanca. These routes take their name from the Mozarabs - Christians who retained their own religion and customs while living in medieval Moorish Spain.

Add-ons or alternatives to the walk I did a few weeks ago include the path that takes you from Malaga to Almogia (22 kilometres) and the staggeringly beautiful section between Almogia and Villanueva (20 kilometres).

But for a fairly undemanding hike through some of Malaga's most dramatic countryside, the Villanueva-Antequera track is ideal.

I walked it on a sunny Friday morning, during the Dia de Andalucia puente - a weekend when you might have expected to see plenty of budding pilgrims about. But because these Mozarab routes are still fairly obscure, the only other person I saw was a farmer taking a morning stroll outside Villanueva. My mini-camino was therefore walked in solitude and silence - fitting preparation for taking on a bigger chunk of the pilgrimage later this year.

Any concerns I had about getting lost in the wilderness quickly disappeared. The route is frequently punctuated with posts bearing the blue-and-yellow Camino logo and arrows painted onto rocks. These become almost like companions, keeping you on the right track as you weave through the unspoilt countryside at the foot of El Torcal.

The path is at its most dramatic as it cuts between El Torcal's peaks, bringing you down onto the final approach to Antequera. These limestone formations make up one of the most striking karst landscapes in Europe, and were at the bottom of the ocean 150 million years ago.

In the middle of the Torcal pass, before a slightly tricky descent begins, Antequera comes into view for the first time - a giant snowflake topped by a medieval fortress, with the iconic Pena de los Enamorados peak in the background.

Although it still looked quite far off at this point, my final destination was actually just four kilometres away. I was enjoying the track so much, though, that I would happily have carried on for hours.

I thought of a close friend of mine, who cycled several hundred kilometres along the French Way into Santiago a few years ago; she told me that she cried when she reached the end of her Camino because she was so sad it was over.

Much shorter as my southern pilgrimage was, it enabled me to understand how she must have felt as she entered Santiago's great cathedral - the end of the road for weary and emotional peregrinos, wherever their starting points.

Urban finish

Walking into a town or city is something we rarely, if ever, do these days. We cruise in by car or train, paying little attention to how urban areas fit into their natural surroundings. But the final section of this route makes you realise how suddenly Antequera begins. One moment it's all rocky plains and lonely cortijos, their canine sentries barking ferociously as you pass; but minutes later you're coming down Calle de Jesus, surrounded by locals going about their daily business.

It was only here that I realised I'd been in a sort of trance for the last three hours, a zen-like state induced by nature, solitude and silence. My mini-camino sadly over, I entered the first bar I came to for an internal debrief and a beer.

With a soundtrack provided by the animated conversations of locals (most of them knocking back brandy, although it was barely eleven in the morning), I reflected on the walk. I knew straight away that I couldn't just leave it there: something about spending a few hours on this ancient path had made a deep impression on me.

Partly for this reason - and partly to dedicate my pilgrimage to a family member who has recently endured much hardship - I'm planning to walk a 400-kilometre stretch of the Camino Mozarabe, from Zamora to Santiago, in May.

It seems to be true what they say, although before I thought it sounded like pretentious rubbish: the Camino chooses you, and not the other way around.
A 37-year-old Finnish man, with the initials V. T. L., has been arrested by Local Police in Puerto Banus after a European warrant was issued for his arrest.

He was picked up after police spotted him, with two other men, acting suspiciously while riding bicycles on Avenida Julio Iglesias. He was arrested after a chase.

The 'vale tudo' fighter is yet to serve a 2,707-day prison sentence in his home country for, among other offences, drug trafficking.
The EU-wide flight ban on the Max 8 model of the Boeing 737 has seen one aircraft, belonging to Norwegian, grounded indefinitely at Malaga Airport. The plane, which arrived on Tuesday from Oslo, was expected to take to the skies an hour later but has now been grounded following two accidents in the space of five months involving this model. There were no survivors in either case.

The most recent was on Sunday when an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.

Two Spaniards were among the victims: Pilar Martinez Docampo, 32, from Cangas do Morrazo (Galicia); and Jordi Dalmau Sayol, 46, from Granollers (Catalonia). It has been widely speculated that the accident was caused as a result of a fault in the new automated system designed to keep the plane from stalling but in these two cases caused the planes to nosedive.

As a result of Sunday's accident, numerous countries have banned the plane from their airspace. On Wednesday, the US, Hong Kong, Vietnam and New Zealand joined the list of countries that had banned 737 Max models, following China, the European Union and Australia.

This has had major consequences for Norwegian, the fourth largest operator at Malaga Airport. The airline has 18 planes of this type, none more than two years old, of a total 134 planes - all Boeing 737s.

The head of communications at Norwegian, Alfons Claver, admitted that he didn't know when the plane would be back in the air but industry sources suggest that the ban would be lifted, at the earliest, in four to eight weeks.

Claver said that the plane, with capacity for 189 passengers, would remain in Malaga until the end of the ban, highlighting that none of these banned aircraft are based in the city. "It was by chance that it was here," he said, explaining that the of the 177 passengers directly affected, 143 were put on alternative flights, while the remainder, on discovering the problem, made alternative plans themselves.

"At the moment we are trying to minimise the disruption on a day-to-day basis," said Claver, also admitting that having 18 planes inoperative could have a knock-on effect at various airports.

The news comes at a time that the airline has committed to expanding its presence on the Costa del Sol with 1.45 million seats available between the end of March and October, up 11.6 per cent on the same period last year.
The death of 58-year-old Gloria on Saturday night left her local community in shock. She was an independent and sociable woman who was very active in her local community. Her friends described her as a "determined and enterprising" woman who was "very pleasant and polite".

Well positioned financially and socially, for several years she had run a bilingual infant school on the outskirts of Estepona along with two of her siblings. Since the school was sold she had worked for the maintenance firm run by her parents-in-law.

She had left Geoffrey three years ago, but the couple got back together because "he said sorry" explained her friends, who said that she had not told them why they separated.

For some time now, however, she had been planning to leave him again. She wanted to split up on good terms for the sake of their two sons, the 15-year-old who lived with them and an older son living in Australia.

Gloria was the third of eight children and came from the village of Montejaque, near Ronda. Her family had already been hit by tragedy with the death of her two youngest siblings and her mother died last year. "The family is much-loved in Montejaque. They've suffered a lot," said a friend.

Gloria, who had met Geoffrey when she went to work on the Costa del Sol in her twenties, had always made an effort to involve her husband in her world although he has been described as "doing little to integrate and hardly speaking at all" when he went with her to the village.

Geoffrey, who according to sources "earned a lot of money" when he set up a satellite firm years ago had gone on to website design. He was not currently employed.

Sources said that he had become obsessed with security and had installed cameras around their home in Forest Hills. He told one neighbour not to call him because his phone was tapped. He was apparently convinced that his wife and her family were spying on him and that they wanted him to commit suicide.
The two planes were very different. One, a locally owned small, private plane completing the final stage of a four-day journey from southern France. The other, a scheduled Easyjet Airbus with 151 excited passengers from Liverpool. Both flew into Malaga Airport just before 10.30am last Sunday and those on board helped write a little more of the history of the Costa del Sol.

/ NITO SALAS

A CENTURY FLIES BY 9 March 1919. At 10.30am Pierre Latecoere and Henri Lemaitre spot from their biplane an ideal piece of farmland to land on in Malaga, en route to Morocco. Airmail route. A pioneering airmail route from Europe to Africa starts and Malaga airport is born. 9 March 2019. A Piper Warrior III, two other light aircraft and an Easyjet Airbus A319 from Liverpool mark the anniversary.

Last weekend was the hundredth anniversary of the first flight into Malaga airport, except it was far from being an operating airport at the time. Instead, the two crew on the first arrival on 9 March 1919 chose at random from the air a flat piece of farmland in among the sugarcane plantations alongside the single-carriageway road from Malaga to Cadiz.

It was the ideal place to refuel on a pioneering airmail route from Toulouse to Casablanca, Morocco. Finca El Rompedizo was the name of the farm, and part of the sprawl of modern Malaga-Costa del Sol Airport covers the same site today. It is the oldest airport in Spain still operating on the same site.

The 1919 journey from Europe to Africa in a Samson biplane with no enclosed cockpit was revolutionary in its day, only a few months after the end of the First World War. The two people on board, Pierre Latecoere and Henri Lemaitre, set off to bring the mail to the French protectorate of Morocco by air for the first time. The airmail route involved departing from Toulouse and stopping in Spain; first in Barcelona, followed by Alicante (although in the first trip the plane stopped in Castellon instead), then Malaga. After the refuel it continued on via Rabat to Casablanca.

Repeating the same journey last week in a Piper Warrior III were Ignacio Gil and Francisco Cuevas of the Real AeroClub de Malaga. They had set off from the club's Velez-Malaga base for Toulouse several days earlier to get ready and flew back along the same route as a century before into Malaga. They were accompanied in the sky by two small planes from the Latecoere Foundation, which maintains the legacy of the French air pioneers today.

Welcomed by the fire crew

The crew from the three small planes, sporting Spanish and French flags, were welcomed to Malaga Airport with an arch of water from two fire engines and friends and relatives applauding them on the apron. The plan was to arrive at 10.30am last Sunday, 100 years to the minute, but favourable winds saw then touch down at 10.11am.

Pedro Cuevas, brother of Francisco said, "It's been a real effort to organise it all and the trip wasn't straightforward; they've had trouble with the weather... crossing the Pyrennes isn't easy."

/ NITO SALAS

Mario Mirma, the president of the national philatelic association, which was one of several organisations supporting the initiative and which issued a special commemorative cover, said, "Nowadays express mail relies on aircraft, but back then it was a complete adventure."

The lucky passengers on the Easyjet flight from Liverpool arriving at the same time were also welcomed by the water jets and dignitaries from the airport.

Fortunately the passengers had been forewarned, to avoid any shock on seeing fire engines waiting.

Director of Malaga Airport, Salvador Merino, said, "A hundred years flies by. What stands out is how much has changed over that time. Last year we reached 19 million passengers and we continue to break records."

Speaking to SUR earlier in the week from Toulouse before beginning the commemorative flight back to Malaga, Francisco Cuevas explained how the anniversary event idea took shape.

"One day, delving into aviation history, I came across the story of the first flight to the city, and as I carried on investigating, I convinced myself that we had to commemorate that journey; it's something befitting for Malaga and its airport".
Johnny Louis/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Cesar Sayoc, the suspect behind a campaign of letter bombs targeting prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, is expected to plead guilty next week, according to a federal court docket in New York.



Sayoc, of Aventura, Florida, was arrested in October after allegedly mass-mailing explosive devices to top Democrats, CNN and other prominent figures.



Days after the first package was delivered, FBI investigators found a latent fingerprint from an envelope mailed to Democratic California Congresswoman Maxine Waters. The fingerprint belonged to Sayoc, FBI Director Chris Wray said in October.



Also among those to receive packages were Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.



Sayoc faces 30 charges. It is unclear which charges he will plead guilty to.

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Within a few weeks Mijas will have the first Brexit information office in Malaga province. Mijas has more British residents than any other municipality in the province; they account for 25 per cent of the population.

The mayor of Mijas, Juan Carlos Maldonado, announced this and other initiatives at a press conference this week, following a meeting with Anne Hernandez, the president of the Brexpats in Spain association. The mayor offered the council's help after the latest news about the UK's withdrawal from the European Union. He explained that the Junta de Andalucia is drawing up a programme of measures to prepare for Brexit, and the council is setting up a working group to look at all the questions that should be covered in the document, so the information could then be passed to the regional government.

The mayor pointed out that Mijas council has always represented its British residents. "At the town hall we have always been in contact with top-level political representatives at a regional, national and European level, so the voice of British people who live in Mijas can be heard. We are grateful to the Junta for preparing this programme. We need to support them on that, especially because the regional government is responsible for one of the matters which worries British residents most, and that is healthcare," he said.

The Junta de Andalucia is drawing up a programme of measures to prepare for Brexit

The first meeting of the new working group will take place in La Cala de Mijas next week, and the mayor also explained that the council's Foreign Residents Department and Brexpats in Spain are working together to open a Brexit information office. Further details will be given later. "The time has come to give British residents a specific place for dealing with Brexit-related matters," he said.
Malaga-Costa del Sol Airport recorded 1,052,194 passengers arriving or departing in February, which was a rise of 9.2 per cent on the same month the previous year. The increase was spread across passengers arriving from other parts of Spain and from international airports.

According to data from Aena, the airport-operating company, and released on Tuesday, the number of planes entering or leaving also went up, by 6.1 per cent to a total of 8,140.

Of the million-plus passenger movements, 13.2 per cent were travelling to or from other parts of Spain.

The United Kingdom was, as usual, top of the list of international countries passengers were arriving from or travelling to. In total, there were 6.3 per cent more people from Britain, or 273,997 passengers in total.

German passengers were the next biggest group at 94,089.

The busiest day of the month was Saturday 23 February, coinciding with half term in the UK, with 48,524 passengers.

Taking into account both January and February, so far this year, just over two million passengers have used Malaga's airport, an increase of 8.8 per cent.

Malaga Airport is the third busiest on the Spanish mainland, after Madrid and Barcelona, and the main gateway into Andalucia as well as the Costa del Sol.

After Malaga, Seville is the second busiest airport in Andalucia, but with half the passenger numbers.
A man, in his 70s and of Finnish origin, has been arrested and given a restraining order after what appears to be another case of gender violence.

The man apparently tried to strangle his wife with a belt after beating her with it and kicking and punching her in their home on Calle Casablanca in Nerja.

After the Finn, who has mental problems and had been drinking, fell asleep, the woman fled the scene to a neighbour's house where she called for help.
Spain has this week been marking the fifteenth anniversary of the terrorist attack on Madrid's local rail network that killed 192 people, the country's worst ever.

On 11 March 2004, ten bombs in rucksacks exploded on trains during the morning rush hour. At first, in the chaos of the moment, the government blamed ETA Basque terrorists but it was later shown that it was a coordinated plot by al-Qaeda-linked extremists.

For the first time in recent years, the lingering suspicion of some right-wing politicians that there was some kind of conspiracy behind the bombs has resurfaced. The attacks helped turn votes against the conservative PP and usher in the Socialist party in a planned general election a few days later in 2004.

Six acts of remembrance were held at different points in the capital on Tuesday. The prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, led a ceremony outside the regional government's headquarters and was joined by the mayor of Madrid and the president of the Madrid regional government, as well as other political and government leaders.

Later there was controversy at an event at the main Atocha railway station, when the PP's mayoral candidate for Madrid, Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida, left the gathering early claiming it had been politicised after repeated mentions by speakers that the motive for the attacks had been Spain's involvement in the Iraqui war in 2004. The incoming PSOE government of Jose Luis Zapatero at the time withdrew Spain from the Iraqui war soon afterwards.

Current leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, said on Tuesday that "the victims deserve to know the truth", in language not heard at the annual commemorations for some years.

However the current Socialist government of Pedro Sanchez was quick to respond to Casado. "A substantial amount of the truth is already known," said Interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska.
The pro-separatist government of Catalonia has been ordered to take down the yellow ribbon symbol from public buildings. It is used in protest over the arrest of leaders of the failed 2017 declaration of independence.

The authority running the elections in the next ten weeks, including national poll on 28 April and, the municipal, European and, in some areas, regional votes on 26 May, says it is illegal for public bodies overseeing voting to show bias. The Catalan government failed to comply by Thursday's deadline, and central government has said it would ask for regional politicians to be fined.

Sights on Europe

As election fever grows in the country, the self-exiled former leader of the Catalan regional government, Carles Puigdemont, has said he is considering standing as a European MP.

He says it would allow him to return to Spain with immunity from arrest although observers said it was unlikely he would either be allowed to stand or get a seat.
It's been yet another week of uncertainty and more important votes. Thursday evening's vote to ask the EU to extend Article 50 to delay Brexit still lives residents unclear as to when, how and if the UK will leave the EU.

The extension vote followed two other chaotic evenings in the House of Commons: the second meaningful vote Theresa May's deal was rejected again on Monday; then came the vote to rule out a no-deal on Wednesday, the result of which was surprising for many.

For up-to-date official Brexit information for those in Spain Official UK site: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/living-in-spain (sign up there for email alerts) UK Embassy facebook page for daily comment:https://es-es.facebook.com/BritsInSpain/ Spanish goverment site in English: http://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/lang/en/brexit/howtoprepare/Paginas/index.aspx

The general feeling among British people in Malaga is that of relief that the UK and Spain have already set in place bilateral agreements, which will safeguard Britons' rights here regardless of the outcome of Brexit. However, there is still a great deal of concern and frustration over how the UK government is dealing with Brexit and the ongoing feeling of uncertainty for Brits living abroad.

Steve Marshall, Secretary of Fuengirola and Mijas Age Concern told SUR in English on Thursday that the people he works with, "feel Spain is more interested in looking after us than British politicians". He said that while there is a "sense of relief" thanks to the royal decree ensuring Britons' rights here, people are "still on tenterhooks" about what the final outcome will be.

Alex Radford, solicitor and abogado with MylawyerinSpain, said that while Brits are continuing to buy property and do business in Malaga, despite the uncertainties, there is "frustration over the lack of clarity and clear timescales". He added that he believes the "fantastic relationship between the two countries" would pave the way to further agreements even if an EU-wide agreement fails to do so.

Sue Wilson, chair of Bremain in Spain, an anti-Brexit organisatoin, welcomes the results of this week's votes. "Parliament are finally starting to flex their muscles," she told SUR in English on Thursday.

Manilva councillor, Dean Tyler Shelton also used the word "frustration" to describe the "indecisiveness" of the UK government and that business and trade are "more important than people". He added that at this stage a decision needs to be made either way so that people can get on with their lives.
Fourteen have been arrested in a police operation that has led to the discovery of Spain's biggest producer of the drug speed.

The main laboratory was located in a small village in Navarra and further 20 raids were carried out in Navarra, Madrid, Alava and La Rioja.

Substances, thought to have been obtained in Holland, that could have been used to produce between 150 and 200 kilos of the drug were seized.

The suspects are Spanish and Colombian.
Two of Spain's best-known high street names, both still largely family owned, announced record profits for 2018 this week.

On Tuesday, Mercadona, the country's largest supermarket chain, said from its headquarters in Valencia, that its sales last year grew six per cent to 24.3 billion euros. For the second year running, it is also Spain's top-selling company in all sectors, having beaten Repsol to the number-one spot last year. The company now had 27 per cent market share among large supermarket chains, three times its nearest rivals.

The president and founder, Juan Roig, said that despite a 1.5 billion-euro investment programme in updating its store format, earning after costs rose 84 per cent to 593 million euros. Two years ago, Mercadona announced record 636 million gains but this dipped in 2017's results as the investment started to kick in. Some 400 shops were updated last year and by 2023 the firm hopes to have all shops with the new look.

With 1,600 supermarkets across the country, Mercadona says it wants to put more money into its online business in the coming years. It also wants to grow the number of its stores offering ready-made meals.

Inditex growth slows

Inditex's Amancio Ortega. / REUTERS

On Wednesday it was the turn of Inditex to announce its results for 2018 from its base in the town of Arteixo near La Coruna, Galicia. The huge multi-national is owner of brands such as Zara, Massimo Dutti, Pull&Bear, Bershka, Stradivarius and Oysho. Unlike Mercadona, much of its sales come from outside Spain, meaning they are affected by more factors.

Last year profits grew 2.2 per cent on 2017 to 3.4 billion euros. Despite being record-breaking figures for the largest clothing group in the world, the rate of sales growth (three per cent) is the lowest in its history and below its previous low of a five per cent growth in 2013 at the height of the world financial crisis. The company sold 26.1 billion euros across all its markets in 2018.

Like Mercadona, the Inditex group says it is turning its attention to online sales to generate future growth. Last year sales online grew 27 per cent to 3.2 billion euros, 14 per cent of its sales. The company also said it had 150 million followers on social media which it hopes to capitalise on more.

After the presentation, the Spanish stock exchange was unimpressed and Inditex shares fell.

The founder and majority owner of Inditex, Amancio Ortega, is to get an increased personal dividend payout of 1.6 billion euros.
It was heartening to see so many men, young and old, actively participating in the International Women's Day march in Malaga last Friday. However, on Saturday morning, less than 12 hours after International Women's Day had ended, I had been sent, by a male friend in a Whatsapp group and seen on another male friend's Facebook page, the same sexist image: that of an International Women's Day banner, presumably still creased from its packaging, with the words "could've ironed it" written underneath.

Actually, in the worst of the two examples, the one I saw on Facebook, the perpetrator had committed that most heinous of grammar crimes and written "could of." I can only assume that the irony of bad grammar would be lost on the person who wrote it. However, I don't want to be seen as a Feminazi as well as a grammar Nazi all in the same article, so I shall stop.

Later on that same day I was listening to Radio 4's Any Answers, during which the Conservative politician, Michael Forsyth, twice referred to the need for more "policemen" on the streets of England. So it seems that it's business as usual again.

I can't imagine that it really occurred to any of these men that they might actually offend anyone and that the women would just laugh it off.

But isn't that what many men still believe? An inappropriate comment will just be brushed aside and not cause any offence? In Spanish this is referred to as micro-machismo; in English, microaggression: small incidents of sexism that most hardly give a thought to.

Perhaps the men, who felt it was OK to send the offensive image on 8 March, thought it would be fine to do so on the 9th. Thank goodness that's over for another year, they thought. Now we can go about our normal business and even have a laugh at the day itself.

Michael Forsyth's gaffe, to my mind is just another example of these microaggressions and I was horrified that nobody, including the female panellists on the programme, picked him up on it.

According to the headline in last week's SUR in English, it could take more than 100 years for the pay gap between men and women to right itself in Spain. Just how many years is it going to take for microaggressions to disappear?

I know that it is unfair to tar all men with the same brush and that those at last Friday's march and many, many more would also share my views about policemen and ironing banners.

However, there are a great many more who seemingly don't and for that reason the messages that are shared on 8 March cannot be stored in a box for the other 364 days of the year.
Vox might be the new kid on the block in Spain, but there's something very familiar about its shameless double-standards. Because the far-right party gained twelve seats in the Andalusian parliament last December, it is now a beneficiary of just under 3 million of public funds. These are allocated to cover election expenses, the running of day-to-day parliamentary affairs and the salaries of its ministers in Andalucia. As Vox gears up to fight for a share of national power ahead of April 28th's general election, these generous subsidies couldn't have come at a better time.

You might be wondering though, if this is the same party that recently campaigned for a reduction in the amount of public funding received by workers' unions, business associations and, yes - political parties. Indeed it is!

As one of several demands it made of the Popular Party in exchange for backing in the Andalusian parliament last December, Vox requested cuts for subsidies to such groups, in some cases by as much as 75%.

The party is now the recipient of around 1.7 million for expenses incurred by last year's regional election, and every month each of its representatives in Andalucia receives a salary of over 3,000 and travelling expenses of up to 500. But Vox doesn't seem in a hurry to return this public money, nor has it offered to run its affairs on smaller subsidies.

With a general election just over a month away, the party claims that the allocation of public funds is no longer top of its priority list (funny, that). Now Vox's ministers are backed by a hefty chunk of taxpayers' money, they're able to develop and promote their flagship policies - on issues such as Catalonia and immigration - much more effectively. Just as well, then, that their proposals to slash funding for political parties didn't become legislation!

Regarding the Catalan problem and Vox's vehement opposition to secessionists, Spain's Foreign Minister Josep Borrell had some interesting things to say this week.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the former PSOE leader was right to argue that Vox and Catalan separatists are jointly responsible for a "systematic exacerbation of tension and conflict [in Spain], incited by people from both sides because that is what they live off".

Further polarising the county, said Borrell, is Ciudadanos' refusal to consider a coalition with the Socialists because of the latter's attempts to reason with Catalan secessionists. That's probably the only pairing that could secure a parliamentary majority at the end of next month, thus preventing Vox from taking a share of national power.

Unless such a coalition materialises, far-right politicians will take up position in Madrid as they have in Andalucia, aided by subsidies to which they are theoretically opposed.
The 22nd Malaga Film Festival begins today, Friday 15 March, and lovers of the big screen have plenty to look forward to. Over the years the festival, which focuses on film in Spanish, has gained prestige, attracting national and international filmmakers, producers and actors.

Festival de Malaga : For a full festival programme and to buy tickets visit festivaldemalaga.com

There are 22 entries in the main section this year, and festival director Juan Antonio Vigar says 13 of them have been produced in Spain. "We are attracting more entries from this country, but are also opening up to the Latin American sector, which this year is represented by nine films, all of them very different," he said at the festival's launch.

Among this year's entries will be director Santi Amodeo's new film 'Yo, mi mujer y mi mujer muerta', which was co-produced with Argentina and filmed on the Costa del Sol last year. Amodeo has been a judge at the Malaga Festival in the past, and is now hoping to win a 'golden biznaga' awards, modelled on the city's iconic jasmine flower arrangements, for his own film.

Ines de Leon will be making her debut as a director at the festival with 'Que te juegas?', which she describes as "a romantic comedy which laughs at romantic comedies", while Ines Ballus will be presenting 'Staff Only', a film shot in Senegal in which Sergi Lopez is the only professional actor.

Paco R. Banos, who is from Seville, will be at the festival again this year, with his second film called '522. Un gato, un chino y mi padre', in which Natalia de Molina plays "a girl with agrophobia who travels to the end of the world", and Alejo Flah, from Argentina, is presenting 'Taxi a Gibraltar', a 'buddy movie' with Dani Rovira at the wheel.

Netflix is appearing in the official section of the competition with 'A quien te llevarias a una isla desierta?', the second film by Jota Linares, starring Pol Monen and Maria Pedraza.

The film festival continues until 24 March, with screenings at different venues including the Cervantes Theatre, Albeniz Cinema and the Echegaray Theatre. A large number of parallel activities and screenings will be taking place throughout the week.
The world is in the midst of a fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). Following industrial revolutions in mechanisation, mass production and computers, this revolution is about a fusion of cyber-physical systems involving digitalisation across the entire industrial value chain.

Leaders in industry, government, cities, research and educational organisations have a critical role to play in formulating and developing the implementation of Industry 4.0 strategy. Renowned for its innovation and technology expertise, Swinburne is at the forefront of Industry 4.0 transformation.

In October 2018, Swinburne, in collaboration with Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation, Australian Trade and Investment Commission, Hong Kong Smart City Consortium and Hong Kong Productivity Council, held a cross-regional Industry 4.0 Leadership Summit in Hong Kong. It brought together over 300 senior executives and experts to discuss how enterprises can implement Industry 4.0 strategy to help advance innovative technologies and shape the evolution of industries across a range of sectors, including manufacturing, health, smart cities and transport.

Sharing expert opinions

Leaders and experts from public and private sectors in Australia, Hong Kong and the Chinese province of Guangdong shared their views and experiences, bringing unparalleled insights into the latest innovations and strategies. They participated in interactive panel sessions around Manufacturing 4.0, Infrastructure 4.0, Transport 4.0 and Data Security 4.0.

Industry 4.0 is transforming value chains and supply chains across the global business community.

Mr Sudhir Pai, Executive Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer (Global Financial Services) of the professional services and business consulting corporation Capgemini says: "I will use the term Finance 4.0 to describe the impact of Industry 4.0 on the financial industry. Convergence is the key concept of Industry 4.0. For instance, the development of smart cities promotes a more personalised banking, insurance and other financial service models thereby improving the service efficiency.

Capgemini has just signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Swinburne, focusing on financial technology and blockchain. We hope this collaboration will enhance applications of data technology in supply chains as well as analysis of customer behaviours and business models."

Drawing inspiration from Industry 4.0

Hong Kong is making strides to transform into a smart city.

Since the Industry 4.0 concept was introduced by Germany a few years back, its application is no longer limited to the manufacturing sector but has also made an impact on other areas such as municipal administration, says the Secretary for Transport and Housing, the Honourable Chan Fan.

Take the smart light pole as an example. In addition to illumination, various types of data can be collected and used to assist with the management of traffic.

Professor Cheng Man Chung, Honorary President of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries says: Undoubtedly, some difficulties or obstacles will be encountered when implementing Industry 4.0, such as change of the inherent corporate culture. I believe it will be beneficial for established companies to communicate with start-ups constructively for innovative ideas exchange. As a matter of fact, many companies have merged with start-ups in order to enhance their core business value and to transform their operations into Industry 4.0. Nonetheless, the prerequisite for those companies is the willingness to remodel their existing framework."

Strategic partnerships

At the summit, Swinburne signed Memoranda of Understanding with three organisations focusing on a broad range of projects. These include:

Design and Development of Unmanned Electric Vehicles with Urban Systems Company Limited

Development of Intelligent Manufacturing and Robots with Guangdong Intelligent Manufacturing Research Institute, Guangdong Academy of Science

Design and Development of Innovative Products with Kings Flair Development Company Limited.

Developing innovative technology

Swinburne has a strong focus on science, technology and innovation and has undertaken a number of research projects relating to Industry 4.0.

Thanks to a $135 million industrial digitalisation grant from Siemens, the university is committed to advancing the implementation of Industry 4.0 strategy by setting up Australias first cloud-based industrial Internet of Things (IoT) operating centre, Mindsphere. This will be dedicated to the creation of applications in advanced manufacturing, smart cities and transport, health and other areas.

Since 2015, the university has been actively cooperating with Hong Kong and Chinese industry to support the development of innovative technologies in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area. Key research development projects have been undertaken in the disciplines of Product Design, Aviation (pilot training and aviation management), Engineering, Digital Medical Technology and Health Testing, Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0, Network Security and Astrophysics.

Swinburne's Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Development), Professor Aleksandar Subic, is the only Australian university scholar on the Australian Prime Minister's Industry 4.0 Taskforce.

"Swinburne has established strategic partnerships with a number of enterprises to explore opportunities for development of Industry 4.0 in the advanced manufacturing sector. This includes establishing the Victorian Industry 4.0 SME Hub in advanced manufacturing, the Siemens Mindsphere Centre for Australia and the Amazon Cloud Innovation Centre for Australia," says Professor Subic.

Industry 4.0 Leaders Summit presenters respond to key questions on Industry 4.0

Question 1: Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), being the backbone of Hong Kongs economy, are catching up to the digital transformation of manufacturing processes and business models. What suggestions would you give to SMEs in their progress towards Industry 4.0?

Ms Lilia Kanevska, Managing Partner, DMS Solutions/RPA & Machine Learning

As SME business doesnt depend heavily on existing legacy environments, it is recommended they consider intelligent automation operational approaches as part of their strategy (from day one go paperless, focus on data analytics, build a digital workforce powered with cognitive capabilities from day one. For example: machine learning, neuro-linguistic programing, CV, artificial intelligence).

Dr Albert Wong, Director, PwC Hong Kong

SME industry players may have heard about the term Industry 4.0 but not really have concrete ideas of how Industry 4.0 will impact them and to what extent. So, how can they embrace Industry 4.0 in their business operations? I believe that SMEs are very agile and the best way to encourage them to advance towards Industry 4.0 is to make them aware of it and provide support for them to step up their efforts.

Ms Gracie Ng, Associate Director, ICT Cluster & Smart City Platform, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation

1. Assess and set reasonable targets: The basis for Industry 4.0 is the availability of all relevant information in real time by connecting all instances involved in the value chain. However, the situation/level of maturity varies between companies, industries and even countries. Therefore, an assessment/consultancy may be crucial to analyse the existing company status and set an appropriate target/roadmap for each company instead of blindly adopting technology (e.g. automation) which may not be cost effective. 2. Make data available: Digitalisation is one of the key elements of Industry 4.0 - how to make the data visible and transparent in order to pave the way for predictability and adaptability. It is necessary for SMEs to understand the basic enablers such as sensors and input, connectivity, data analytics, output and actuator.

Question 2: There is a saying that academia is the vanguard of technological advancements. In your opinion, how could Swinburne contribute to the development of Industry 4.0 in respect to research and innovation, education and engagement with industry/governments?

Ms Lilia Kanevska, Managing Partner, DMS Solutions/RPA & Machine Learning

To build a world with better technology, it is highly important for students to work with leading tech companies on innovative and disruptive solutions (this could be sponsored either by tech companies or Swinburne). Human intelligence and machine capabilities (tech company assets and resources) should be leveraged and put together to achieve and go beyond Industry 4.0 standards.

Dr Albert Wong, Director, PwC Hong Kong

Swinburne could help industry with application research, technology transfer and commercialisation. Most importantly, Swinburne can engage industry to understand its future needs, support application research and assist the industry with liaising with government on the regulatory front.

Ms Gracie Ng, Associate Director, ICT Cluster & Smart City Platform, Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation

There is a lack of visibility on the Industry 4.0 maturity level among Hong Kong SMEs as well as the market demands. It may be good to have a research project where Swinburne could join forces with local industry, local institutes and government. They could conduct analysis on the Industry 4.0 maturity level among Hong Kong SMEs and come up with a roadmap to support SMEs.

Question 3: Can you name one or two research and development project(s) that is/are most pivotal to the success of such transformation?

Ms Lilia Kanevska, Managing Partner, DMS Solutions/RPA & Machine Learning

Intelligent Data Management.

Dr Albert Wong, Director, PwC Hong Kong

Research and development projects, especially those of application research (rather than basic research), should be driven by the industry. Probably an awareness program that promotes Industry 4.0 and development of real use/business cases for SMEs would be a helpful start.

Ir Conrad Wong, BBS JP, Vice Chairman, Yau Lee Holdings Limited, Deputy Chairman, Vocational Training Council, Member, Advisory Council on the Environment, Member, Energy Advisory Committee

How artificial intelligence, in particular big data, should integrate with robots and automation systems. Industry 4.0 is fully integrated with the Internet of Things and I think data security is critical. How to provide a safe and secure working platform is something we need to address and that has not been discussed in detail. Also Human/machine inaction.
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Another attempt to repeal the Jones Act

US Senator Mike Lee (Republican-Utah) has introduced the Open Americas Water Act of 2019, a bill which would repeal the Jones Act if passed.

In essence, it would allow all qualified vessels to engage in domestic trade between US ports. Restricting trade between US ports is a huge loss for American consumers and producers. It is long past time to repeal the Jones Act entirely so that Alaskans, Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans arent forced to pay higher prices for imported goodsand so they rapidly receive the help they need in the wake of natural disasters, he said. In 1920, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act (more widely known as the Jones Act), which requires all goods transported by water between US ports to be carried on a vessel constructed in the US, registered in the US, owned by US citizens, and crewed primarily by US citizens. US-based Cato Institute estimates that after accounting for the inflated costs of transportation and infrastructure, the forgone wages and output, the lost domestic and foreign business revenue, and the monetised environmental toll, the annual cost of the Jones Act is in the tens of billions of dollars. And that figure doesnt even include the annual administration and oversight costs of the law.




Refinery maintenance to impact tanker trades

Last week, Gibson Shipbrokers took a look at the current refinery situation in view of the maintenance season and how it is likely to affect the tanker markets going forward.

Scheduled turnarounds in North America may have peaked, but globally planned outages will come to a head this month, whilst Asian maintenance will remain through May. High turnaround activity has already impacted both the crude and product tanker markets this quarter, however, evolution in global crude trade flows appears to be supporting tonne/mile demand during what is typically a weak period. In the products sector, export volumes are now falling in line with seasonal trends but should be set for a strong rebound in the second half of 2019, as post maintenance export volumes increase. As OPEC strictly adheres to its output agreement, refiners are increasingly having to look to the Atlantic Basin to fulfil their feedstock requirements. Given that a voyage from the US Gulf to North Asia takes six to eight weeks, with charterers typically fixing a month forward of loading, Asian refineries sourcing post turnaround supplies will have to act now, which has partly underpinned the recent strength in the VLCC market. Forward buying activity may also result from paranoia about crude supplies in the second half of the Year. Even players with period commitments appear to be showing concern over whether they will receive their full contractual volumes this summer when Middle East domestic demand rises. In addition, new refinery start ups, with which several Middle East producers have signed contracts, coupled with higher global run rates, will add to the tightening of the crude oil markets in the second half of this year. Assuming OPEC maintains its production discipline, refiners will be forced to increasingly turn to the Atlantic Basin for supplies, Gibson said. For product tankers, January earnings held up better than expected, mainly on the back of strong Middle East and Chinese export volumes. However, barring any non-fundamental factors, the market is expected to remain under pressure from lower volumes until the third quarter, when product supplies will increase post turnarounds, particularly East of Suez. In the West, refinery turnarounds conclude earlier, but will remain high through April, which potentially signals an improvement in fundamentals sooner than the East market. Much will depend on demand from West Africa and Latin America. Mexico should remain a supportive demand outlet this year. Venezuela remains uncertain, whilst other countries, such as Brazil, should see modest import demand growth. What is uncertain, however, is how much product West Africa, particularly Nigeria will absorb, now that the elections are over. However, against these demand side factors, fleet supply will remain a bearish factor for much of the year. The crude market is yet to fully feel the force of 2019s newbuilding programme, with a number of recently delivered vessels still involved in the gasoil trade. As the year progresses, new tanker deliveries will present more of a challenge to both the crude and products markets. Indeed, whilst the demand side fundamentals look strong moving forwards, fleet growth is expected to place a ceiling on the markets potential for much of the year, Gibson concluded.




Chinas increasing domestic demand for chemical cargoes is forecast to strengthen coastal freight rates.

According to a report by Drewry Shipping Consultants, demand has been boosted by the rapid expansion in Chinese-based chemical production capacity. Some 55% of the new production capacity is located in Eastern China, 23% in Northern China and 22% in Southern China.

Given that domestic supply of major chemical products is increasing, demand for vessels is set to rise. Chinese coastal chemical trade increased by 7% in 2018 year-on- year, up from a 3% increase recorded in 2017.

Meanwhile, due to the Chinese government controlling the domestic chemical fleets development, shipowners have to apply for licenses to operate within the country.

In 2018, the government approved additional licenses for the domestic fleet, due to the surge in domestic demand. Nineteen new Chinese-flagged chemical tankers were delivered in 2018, while three vessels were withdrawn from the chemical shipping market.

Despite an increase in vessel supply, freight rates on Chinas coastal routes will strengthen in 2019 and 2020 on the back of a stronger domestic demand and higher bunker costs, Drewry said.

Chinas move to extend its 0.5% bunker fuel sulfur limit from the initially designated Emission Control Areas (ECAs) to the entire Chinese coastline would also underpin the continued rise in domestic chemical tanker freight rates.
USCG looks at ballast water compliance date extensions

The US Coast Guard has reconsidered its interpretation of next scheduled drydocking with regard to ballast water compliance date extensions.

As a result, the USCG has provided additional guidance on what constitutes entry into drydock and the end of an extension period. It said that it understood that vessel owners and operators face many challenges in selecting and installing a ballast water management system (BWMS) to meet USCG regulations. A number of vessels have received an extension of the ballast water compliance date that was stipulated as the first scheduled drydock after (date). The (date) was the date of entry reported to the USCG for the upcoming statutory out-of-the-water survey for the required inspection of the outside of the ships bottom. Based on the schedule for statutory out-of-the-water surveys, these extensions were expected to extend the compliance date no more than five years. Due to drydock slippage, some of these vessels entered drydock after the date originally reported to the USCG, while other vessels entered drydock before the first scheduled drydock after (date) for emergency purposes or to install an exhaust gas cleaning system (scrubber), but with no change to the schedule of statutory out-of-the water hull surveys. Under the terms of the extension letters and the guidance provided, these circumstances substantially affected the original extension period. The USCG said it had received multiple requests from vessel owners and operators seeking to amend their extensions, due to drydock slippage or entry into a drydock either for an emergency or for the installation of scrubbers, but not for a statutory out-of-the water survey. As a result, it has reconsidered and determined that existing extensions with a compliance date stipulated as the first scheduled drydock after (date) will NOT be affected under the circumstances described above. Vessels that have received an extension of the ballast water compliance date that was stipulated as the first scheduled drydock after (date) and subsequently experience drydock slippage, enter a drydock for emergency reasons, or enter for the purpose of installing a scrubber, will retain the originally issued extension, provided there is no change to the next scheduled statutory out-of-the-water survey of the ships hull for the required inspection of the outside of the ships bottom, the USCG said. A vessels statutory out-of-the-water survey for the required inspection of the outside of the ships bottom will be verified by vessel records, including the Certificate of Inspection, Passenger Ship Safety Certificate, Cargo Ship Safety Certificate, or Cargo Ship Safety Construction Certificate, as applicable. The USCG will provide vessels with updated language that reflects the intent of the originally issued extension. This will tie the extension termination date to the vessels out-of-water statutory survey schedule, not to exceed five years. For those vessels that already received 2.5 year extensions, due to one of the reasons listed above, the USCG will send letters to clarify the beginning and end of the originally issued extension period.




Venezuelas oil industry unsustainable

Problems for Venezuela are escalating.

An illustration of the severe problems that Venezuela is facing was the recent widespread blackout. Not surprisingly, there was no consensus on what caused the blackout. The Maduro government blamed sabotage by right-wing criminals, while the opposition said the current regimes incompetence was the root cause of the problem. US sanctions introduced on 28th January, which ban US companies and individuals from dealing with Venezuelas state-run oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), have hit the country hard, Poten & Partners said in an industry note. While the Maduro regime continues to hang on to power, the crude oil and product trades around the country are in turmoil. US sanctions have had a particularly detrimental effect on Venezuelas heavy oil production from the Orinoco Belt in central Venezuela. Output from the Orinoco region, which has been suffering for years, due to mismanagement and a lack of maintenance, will likely decline significantly by up to 400,000 barrels per day, due to the US embargo on diluent exports to PDVSA, Poten said. Diluent, in particular naphtha, is needed for the production and transport of heavy oil out of the Orinoco Belt. However, some replacement naphtha cargoes from Russia have thrown Venezuela a lifeline after the US cut off its diluent supplies. The Rosneft naphtha cargoes, which are expected to arrive later this month, will help PDVSA maintain a minimum level of exports. Mexico is filling some of the void left by the reduction in exports of heavy Venezuelan crudes by exporting more of its heavier grades, such as Maya, Talam and Altamira to the US, as well as long-haul destinations in Asia (India, Japan) and Europe (Spain, the Netherlands). For Asian customers in particular, Maya is competitively priced. For example, February/March, Maya was priced at around $8 below Saudi Arabian heavy. Canada is another potential source of heavy crude oil. Although there is limited flexibility to increase pipeline flows from that country, there is significant additional crude by rail capacity available. For the right price, another 200,000-300,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude can be shipped to US refiners on the Gulf Coast on unit trains. Venezuelas problems have crippled its ability to transport and export crude. Production has slowed to a fraction of the countrys potential and lack of maintenance in ports and terminals has further complicated exports. Due to the sanctions, Venezuela has also experienced trouble finding customers. The US is off-limits, and many other countries have also limited their purchases. The only country that has increased imports since the sanctions were announced was India. China, historically another big customer, has reduced its Venezuelan crude purchases. For the tanker markets, the implications are clear, Poten said. The Caribbean Aframax market has suffered from the lack of Venezuelan cargoes bound for the US. The VLCC market has not been affected in the same way, as US crude oil exports have been strong, compensating for the reduced flows from Venezuela. The short-term outlook for Venezuela is highly uncertain. The countrys refineries are operating at very low utilisation rates, necessitating imports of refined products. Sanctions and a lack of foreign exchange have also made companies reluctant to do business with Venezuela. Until the political situation is resolved, most charterers and shipowners will likely avoid Venezuela and the domestic oil industry will continue to deteriorate. Even with the support of Russia, this situation seems unsustainable, Poten & Partners said.




Cyclone batters Mozambique coastal city



Maputo, March 15 (AFP) Mar 15, 2019



Tropical cyclone Idai battered Mozambique's coastal city of Beira leaving its 530,000 residents cut off Friday after power cables were downed and communications severed following nationwide flooding that killed 66 people.

"There is no communication with Beira. Houses and trees were destroyed and pylons downed," an official at the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) told AFP.

Officials did not report any confirmed deaths, but local Beira station STV reported the death of a child in Manica province west of Beira, apparently the victim of a falling roof.

"There was no tsunami-type storm but Beira and Chinde (400 kilometres, 250 miles northeast of Beira on the coast) were badly hit," added the NIDM official.

Another official, Pedro Armando Alberto Virgula, in Chinde, said a hospital, police station and seven schools there lost their roofs and four houses were destroyed.

Virgula added that efforts were ongoing to assess the damage caused after Idai made landfall late on Thursday.

Local officials said that this week's heavy rains claimed 66 lives, injured 111 people and displaced 17,000 people.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it would move 20 tonnes of emergency food aid to the affected areas.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs had warned that the storm could bring winds of up to 190 kilometres per hour (118 miles per hour).



- 'Substantial devastation' -



At least 126 people have been killed in Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa as heavy rains hit the region over the past week, affecting more than one million people, officials said.

Late on Wednesday, Mozambique's national carrier LAM said it was cancelling all flights to Beira and Quelimane, which is also on the coast, as well as to Chomoio, which is inland.

But many passengers were unaware of the cancellations, leaving hundreds stranded at Maputo International Airport.

Heavy rains in neighbouring Malawi have affected almost one million people and claimed 56 lives according to the latest government toll.

Authorities there have opened emergency relief camps where malaria and shortages of supplies have led to dire conditions, according to AFP correspondents.

Malawian President Peter Mutharika this week declared a natural disaster.

South African charity Gift of the Givers previously warned of "substantial devastation with massive flooding both from river and sea" when Idai made landfall.

The group has said it was ready to deploy 70 staff, along with 4x4 vehicles, boats, and jetskis to help with rescue efforts.

Mozambique's weather service has warned that heavy rain will continue to batter Beira and surrounding areas until Sunday.

Mozambique and Malawi, two of the poorest countries in the world, are prone to deadly flooding during the rainy season and chronic drought during the dry season.
LaTisha Nixon, mother of Gemmel Moore, filed a wrongful death lawsuit on Feb. 26 against Republican-turned-Democrat fundraiser Ed Buck. Moore was found dead in Buck's Los Angeles apartment in July 2017 due to an overdose of crystal methamphetamine, and while Buck was questioned by the West Hollywood police, no arrest was made.

On Jan. 7 this year, Timothy Dean, another black gay man, died in Buck's apartment of an overdose; there was still no arrest made. Activists in LA and across the nation have been organizing for an arrest and have speculated that Buck being a white male with connections to very high-profile politicians has made West Hollywood police rule both deaths "accidental overdoses." People in the broader LA community have been mixed in their opinions about what kinds of actions should be taken.

Some community members have called for more investigations and have tried to cut ties with Buck if he had an explicit affiliation. "The club broke all ties to Mr. Buck," said Lester F. Aponte, president of the LA Stonewall Democratic Club, of which Buck was a donor and steering committee member. "We have issued public statements calling for a full and thorough investigation, and had conversations with elected officials who have been out front on this issue."

Sepi Shyne, a former candidate for a city council seat in West Hollywood, also has called for a more thorough investigation. "As a community, we need to pressure our elected officials, including the city council, the sheriff, and the district attorney to conduct a full homicide investigation to find justice for Timothy Dean," she said. "This must include limited immunity deals to protect witnesses as well, so that the full picture of what happened can be revealed."

She also spoke about needing to spread the word to people of color and to provide more resources, in an effort to keep them away from crystal meth and more dangerous kinds of sex work that may make them vulnerable to predatory behavior. Shyne believes that as a community we "can call on our elected officials to provide similar resources and work to actively engage people at risk of abusive situations with skills to assist, like counseling, legal representation, and health care."

Many people in LA's black and Latinx communities would like to see Buck arrested. Activist Jasmyne Cannick stated in an opinion piece for Out.com that "the death of yet another Black man in the West Hollywood home of LGBTQ activist and prominent Democratic donor Ed Buck is on the hands of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department and District Attorney because it didn't have to happen. Ed Buck should have been behind bars for the death of the first man who died in his house of an overdose." She has been present at several of the local protests calling for his arrest, and the hashtag #ArrestEdBuck has become popular in social media platforms.

Cannick and others have good reason to call for his arrest, given the circumstances of the deaths. More young black men have come forward and, according to Cannick, have said that Buck "has a Tuskegee Experiment-like fetish, which includes shooting drugs into young Black men who he picks up off the street or via dating hookup websites."

Meth is a highly addictive substance that has been popular in the gay community for a long time, but most recently has become more widely used among queer men of color. It is often used during sex. As use of the drug has increased in major cities among black and Latinx men of color, it has been reported that often times this drug is used as leverage to entice these men to have sex with older, wealthier, white men in order to be paid for sex work. In some cases, people have been allegedly given the drug without their knowledge or consent and have become addicted, such as in situations involving Ed Buck. According to reports from other black gay men, Buck invites black gay men (some of whom are sex workers and/or homeless) to his place to "party" and coerces them into having sex under the influence of meth and GHB, another party drug that sexually disinhibits users and, in large enough doses, can render a person unconscious, which is why it's called the "date rape" drug.

These power dynamics involving white gay men and men of color are beginning to be documented as more men of color speak out about their addiction, and they mirror what Moore wrote in his journal about how he'd been coerced to use with Ed Buck. Last year, I interviewed several Latinx gay men in LA for a story for TheBody who described non-consensual experiences similar to Moore's experiences of using meth among white gay men.

Micheal Rice's documentary, parTy boi, highlights the issues involving crystal meth in black gay communities, particularly in New York. Rice delves into the story of crystal meth in black communities and how white gay men use this drug as leverage amongst escorts and black men.

"These wealthy gay men would start buying black sex workers. And what they would do was pay these escorts to use it," said Rice in an interview on the BrothaSpeak podcast. "We started to have a large quantity of black escorts not knowing how addictive [meth] is. But when those white men finish using these black escorts, where are they going back to?" Rice concludes that they're going back to the communities in which they live, not into white gay neighborhoods.

Once they are home in their own communities, LA-based writer and activist Jayce Baron thinks we can begin to transform the dynamics of substance use and sex (particularly where money and power are involved) by dealing with internalized homophobia and shame in these spaces: "We are taught that our sex is demonized," said Baron, "and sometimes as queer men of color, we don't want to be coherent when we are having sex. We have to help our brothers and sisters get the help they need by having those conversations."

Giuliani Alvarenga is a UC Berkeley alumnus who double majored in English and gender & women's studies. He is a Sidley Austin Pre-Law Scholar and wrapping up his two-year clerkship with Munger, Tolles, & Olson before he begins law school.
100 countries

Latest update say:

2052 places in 123 countries on all continents, including Antarctica.

So, the question is:

What will you do on March 15 2019? https://t.co/ROmtFMrj6Y#schoolstrike4climate #FridaysForFurture #climatestrike #WhateverItTakes

(picture from Sydney today) pic.twitter.com/oFr6IryCnk  Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) March 15, 2019

Extinction Rebellion Australia kept up with the live news from the city.

Students in Delhi at their #SchoolStrike4Climate today!

(spotted a support @GretaThunberg sign too)

Demanding clean air, clean energy, &clean water asking governments to act now!

Solidarity among young activists across the world is so amazing!#ClimateStrike #FridaysForFuture pic.twitter.com/n79fV8yole  Pujarini (@pujarini_sen) March 15, 2019

Strikes began earliest in Australia, New Zealand and across the rest of the southern hemisphere, with a massivejust in Australia.In Melbourne alone,went on strike. According tothe movement in the country began in November last year, when. There have also been strikes across Asia, including India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and many more locations. Strikes were also seen across Africa and the Americas. Even Antarctica saw strikes.These strikes have been meticulously coordinated and organised, with areleased two weeks ago. You only need to searchand thousands upon thousands of tweets about the protests taking place all over the world today will appear. Swedish school girl Greta Thunberg , who inspired the movement and has today been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, has been showing her support for students, retweeting pictures from all over the world of those who are are taking a stand against their governments.The movementwas started in August 2018, following in Greta's footsteps, and has helped to coordinate students' protestsover the past few months. The Guardian today explained how. There have been many movements throughout history of this kind, such as protests against the war in Vietnam and protests to end Apartheid in South Africa. Both of these examples led to change, but it remains to be seen whether these strikes will force the worlds' leaders to listen and take action.

Image Credit: Leonhard Lenz on Wikipedia

A note from our Environment Editor, Matilda Martin:

The strikers have also been joined in many cases by parents, grandparents and other adults who are giving thier full support to the younger generation's statement that enough is enough. These strikes are organised and peaceful, although there is no doubt that the following days will see a vast amount of criticism from leading politicians.writes that young people are calling for 'system change, not climate change'."Our governments, particularly those in the West, are manufactured to reap the benefits of the short term, for those in power right now. The reason that governments have not taken substantial action against climate change is that it is not beneficial in the short term - in other words, for their pay cheques. "Our world revolves around money. Our leaders need to stop being selfish and change this, because in the long run, it is more beneficial for everyone to stop climate change. They've had their chance. Such lack of action shows us exactly why they should not be the ones making decisions for our future - because it is OURS." Lead Image:
Hamna Imran, a candidate running for Education Officer, had her posters vandalised with 'Wote Hamna' in an attempt to mock her accent. The incident was reported as a hate crime by the candidate. A group calling themselves Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action occupied Deptford Town Hall on Tuesday in response to what they deemed an unsatisfactory outcome to the reported hate crime.In the open letter , hand-delivered by Goldsmiths staff, the university say it exceeds the protestors' demands in many places. Responding to Hamna's report, Goldsmiths argue that they responded to the incident 'formally within five working days.' Since the investigation is still ongoing, they cannot comment further on the case. The uni also announced 'significant new investment in student support services, with 100,000 to be spent between now and August on additional specialist mental health and wellbeing staff.' In addition, they outlined plans to work with student and staff unions on mandatory race awareness training in the next academic year. Goldsmiths denied claims made by the student occupiers around discrimination against security and cleaning staff, claiming that security staff earn the London Living Wage. A photograph uploaded to the organisation's social media page shows an annotated letter, with the capitalised word 'LIES' written next to claims made by the university.Goldsmiths Anti-Racist Action has responded critically to the points made in the letter, addressing each point in turn and declaring that they will not leave Deptford Town Hall. Goldsmiths have issued a warning to the protestors, claiming that their behaviour is 'endangering the safety of security staff.' They further stipulate that the 'current behaviour' of the protestors is 'impacting on the learning environment of other students.'The occupiers responded saying the majority of the letter 'is filled with completely blatant lies from the disgustingly racist senior management.'
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Montreal, CA (H4T1V6)

Today

Snow this morning will taper off and give way to cloudy skies this afternoon. High 1C. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 90%. Snowfall around one inch..

Tonight

Cloudy with light rain developing after midnight. Areas of freezing rain possible. Low -2C. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.


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Things to do in the Attleboro area and beyond
MANZINI  After 25 years, the promise of Cairo remains relevant as Eswatini boasts a reduced number in births.



The above has been attributed to the endorsement of the landmark agreement of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) by 179 governments in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, which Eswatini was part of.



Speaking during the national launch of the double celebrations by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Prime Minister Ambrose Dlamini said an average number of 3.3 births per woman compared with 6.4 births per woman during the decade preceding the Cairo, Egypt conference have been met.

The celebrations were held at the Mavuso Trade and Exhibition Centre yesterday, where UNFPA celebrated reaching 50 years of its formation and 25 years since the milestone agreement of the ICPD.



Dlamini, who was the guest speaker, said with fewer children, women had more time to focus on other productive activities as noted in the increase in labour force participation rates from 32 per cent in 1997 to 47 per cent in 2016.

The increase of 15 percentage points is very commendable, he said.



The PM said among the notable achievements over the years worth highlighting was the coming into effect of the Constitution in 2005, which provided for the protection and promotion of fundamental rights and freedoms, through the enshrined Bill of Rights.



Programmes



Dlamini said a rights-based approach had been adopted and guided the formulation of development policies, plans and programmes across government.

In the same vein, he said the country was fully committed to gender equality and the empowerment of women, and has ratified a number of regional, continental and international instruments as a demonstration of the commitment.



On the legislative front, Dlamini said the country had enacted requisite laws to protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society.



Trafficking



He said these included the Girls and Women Protection Act, Maintenance Act, The People Trafficking and People Smuggling (Prohibition) Act, The Children Protection and Welfare Act, as well as the Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Act.

Further, he said Eswatini had made commendable progress in the fight against HIV and AIDS.



Indications are that the HIV prevalence rate is gradually declining and the country is steadfastly on the path to epidemic control, the PM said.

He noted that significant progress had also been made towards the prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV.

UNFPA Regional Director for East and Southern Africa Dr Julitta Onabanjo said Eswatini had made significant progress.



Onabanjo congratulated the country for the enactment of the Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Act of 2018.

She said now was the time to see it being implemented, including the strengthening of the capacity of providers to deliver quality services for GBV survivors.

She said the adoption of the conference outcome, the ICPD Programme of Action marked the beginning of a new era of political commitments and willingness on the part of governments, international community and civil society to integrate population concerns.

Onabanjo said emphasis had been put where it should squarely be; on improving lives of individuals and ensuring respect for their fundamental human rights, agreeing that part and parcel of basic human rights were reproductive rights.
MBABANE  Former Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Sibusiso Shongwe will know his fate next Thursday.



This is in the matter where he has filed an application to have the indictment against him and his law firm, Sibusiso B. Shongwe and Associates, quashed (annulled or set aside).



The Crown is, however, of the view that Shongwes objection to the charges was ill-conceived, opportunistic and disingenuous. The State has applied that the application should be dismissed with costs.



It was further the States submission that it would be an almost impossible task for the court, in the absence of evidence, at this juncture to pronounce upon Shongwes objections, unsustained and undernourished as they were.



Clearly, these objections amount to nothing more than yet a further delaying tactic, for which no support exists, contended the State. Judge Mbutfo Mamba ,who is presiding over the matter yesterday, postponed it to March 21, 2019 for judgment.



Facing



Shongwe is facing a total of 22 counts, which he is now challenging.

He is also seeking an order for excepting of the charges in the indictment on the basis that they did not disclose an offence which was clearly identifiable to the court.

Shongwe was initially charged with 10 counts. The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has amended the indictment to reflect 22 charges predominantly under the Prevention of Corruption Act No.3 of 2006.



In his answering affidavit, Senior Crown Counsel Ngcebo Lukhele submitted that in so far as count one to five and eight to 22 inclusive, these were based on an alleged corruption relationship between former Chief Justice Michael Ramodibedi and Shongwe.



Briefly, the applicants (Shongwe and his law firm) received, unlawfully so, the sum of E2 million to ensure that a judgment in favour of the Swaziland Revenue Authority against Impunzi, a client of the applicants, was set aside on appeal, submitted the senior Crown counsel.



He pointed out that when Shongwe was asked to explain the cash deposits totalling to E2 million into the bank account of his law firm, he either failed to respond within the stipulated time or failed to provide satisfactory explanation.
PIGGS PEAK  They used to get meagre harvest from their hectares of land but now farmers in Ntfonjeni stand a chance of generating over E4 million in turnover.



Thanks to foreign markets as far as Switzerland and Norway through the National Agricultural Marketing Board.

Through the Climate Smart- Market-oriented Agriculture(CSMA) project, the farmers have formed an organisation which owns 23 hectares of land.



According to the Project Manager, Bheki Ginindza, CSMA is assisting the residents who have grouped together to form an organisation known as the Mavulandlela Farmers Irrigation Scheme.



benefitting



Ginindza said the scheme had about 27 members who were now benefitting through NAMBoard, which has also guaranteed an overseas market.

He revealed this during the tour of agricultural projects by the Minister of Agriculture, Jabulani Buy Cash Mabuza.



Ginindza said in the past, each farm would generate a maximum of E15 000 per year but that this would now be a thing of the past.

He said some of the crops they were growing included sweet potatoes, pumpkin, as well as baby vegetables which were usually meant for high end markets.



planted



Ginindza said since the farmers were using smart agriculture, they had also planted fruit trees such as mangoes, litchis and avocados. He further revealed that CSMA had another project around Velezizweni under Ngwempisi Inkhundla. Some of the residents, however, expressed concern that the only challenge they were having was the shortage of water and that the project did not have proper fencing.



They addressed this concern with the minister, who was touring the area at the time.

In response, the minister urged that through the local Member of Parliament (MP), Mthandeni Dube, they could acquire fencing material as well as get a water project going through the Land Management Board. Dube was also present during the tour. Mabuza also visited a fruit pack, which will be used to store produce from the surrounding communities.The fruit pack is situated at Msahweni near Matsamo.



collaboration



It is under NAMBoard and was funded through the European Union (EU) in collaboration with the Eswatini Water and Agricultural Development Enteprise (SWADE). He further visited a place know as Gesawu where he was shown compost organic beds at a greenhouse. The minister said this meant that the seedlings would be closer to the communities.

He further said the vicinity of the fruit house meant that the farmers would not have to travel far.
SIBUKWENI  The dam is average in size but the manner in which people are said to have died in it, is so strange such that it is now referred to it as a deadly dam.



Mvuleni Dam is situated at Sibukweni in Ekutsimuleni Chiefdom under Mkhiweni Inkhundla.

The superstitions surrounding the dam, where three people have died and left another suffering from a mental disorder, has created anger among the community members.



As a result of the superstitions, the police and authorities of the community intervened more than once to stop a group of community members who wanted to carry out a mob justice attack on a Jericho Church member, who is also a traditional healer, whom they accused of being behind the strange drownings in the dam.



As a result of the hysterics among the Ekutsimuleni and Dvokolwako community members, who are benefiting from the dam, the authorities of the two chiefdoms called a prayer service at the so called deadly dam yesterday.



unusually



It was revealed during the prayer service that even though the dam was constructed in 1965, but unusual death took place in 2012. They said the boy allegedly went missing for a week and the community members in partnership with police searched around the area, including the dam but in vain. However, they said on the seventh day, he was discovered floating in the dam.



disturbed



They said a few years later, another boy, who was walking next to the dam, survived after he was pulled by an unseen force to the dam. They said from there, the boys mind was somehow disturbed as he suffered from a mental disorder.

On May 1, 2018, they said a man went to fetch water with his car from the dam. They said he parked the car at a distance from the dam and proceeded to fetch the water using containers.



While fetching the water, they alleged that he saw the car reversing into the dam yet he had pulled the handbrake and the surface was almost flat.

He jumped into the car in a bid to pull up the hand brake but once he was inside, the doors and windows locked, alleged one community member who alleged she saw the whole thing happen.
MATSAPHA  Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi is in the country for a courtesy visit to His Majesty the King.



President Filipe Nyusi landed through the Matsapha International Airport at 1pm yesterday accompanied by a delegation of cabinet ministers and other officials.

Upon arrival the president was met by citizens of Mozambique who live in Eswatini. They displayed entertaining dance moves and sang while their leader walked on the red carpet to his official car.



From the airport Nyusi made his way to Ezulwini where he will be lodging for the duration of his visit.

At 3pm the president headed to the Mandvulo Grand Hall where the King was already waiting for him.



Upon arrival he inspected the guard of honour and went into one of the holding halls where he had a discussion with the King for about an hour before the start of the signing of communique between the two countries.



The first was a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the coordination of search and rescue services.

The second was an agreement on Exemption from Third Party Liability Motor Vehicle Insurance for those whose cars are already insured.

These were signed by the two countries ministers of portfolios dealing with transport and the ministers of portfolios on foreign affairs.



Today the president will pay a courtesy call to the Indlovukazi and also tour the Sidvokodvo Dairy Farm, Eswatini Meat Industries and Forestry Industry among other assignments.

On Sunday (tomorrow) he will meet the Mozambican community at The George and then watch the Ingwenyama Cup before departure.
iStock/Ridofranz(CLOVERDALE, Calif.) -- A California special education teacher is facing multiple charges for allegedly creating and refereeing a "fight club" inside his classroom, according to a statement released by the Cloverdale Police Department.



On March 7, police officials were informed by Cloverdale High School administrators that Federico Vargas was using his classroom to secretly have students fight each other, said Sergeant Chris Parker in a statements released on March 10.



"The fights occurred on multiple occasions over a period of time not yet determined, but isolated to Vargas' classroom," said Sgt. Parker. "Multiple student injuries were reported during the investigation, one of which required medical attention as a result of the fighting."



One of the fights refereed by Vargas was captured on a student's cellphone, according to the statement.



It's unclear if all the minors involved are special education students, said Jeremy Decker, the Cloverdale School District's superintendent. "But, we haven't completed the investigation yet," said Decker.



Vargas, 41, who taught for the Cloverdale School District for eight years, was arrested on March 9 and charged with 13 counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors and five counts of endangering children, according to the statement.



Vargas is out on bail, Sgt. Parker told ABC News in an email on Thursday.



The police's investigation is still ongoing.



Attempts by ABC News to reach Vargas by phone were unsuccessful. It's unclear if Vargas was assigned an attorney as of Friday.





Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
The teenager *Samu was found at one of the bars she hangs around at and does sexual favours that will earn her money. (Pic: Bonisile Makhubu)

MBABANE  At the age of 15, she hangs around bars, and does sexual favours that will earn her money.



The plight of this teenager has been raised by concerned patrons of a bar located at the periphery of the Mbabane City.



*Samu believes that she was disowned by both her father who lives in Durban South Africa and her mother who lives at Logoba in Manzini.

All she does now is to wake up and go to the bar where she has been seen sitting and drinking alcoholic beverages with men until late into the night.

A concerned woman, who said she suspected that the child was underage yet she was a regular patron at two of the bars that the woman also visited, said: One day I approached her to find out why she was here and she explained that she had to make money.



The woman said the girl narrated to her how she was forced to fend for herself and her 13-year-old sister, because they lived alone.

They had to cook for themselves in their one-room house, which she said was allocated to them by their maternal grandfather.



Waylaying



The Swazi News team managed to get hold of the girl after waylaying her for three days at the bar early in the week.

She said she came into the country in 2015 when her father brought them together with her sister.

We used to stay and school in Durban where my father originates. When we came over in 2015 my father said we were visiting my mothers parents and we were due to return to Durban in January 2016, she said.



She said their father dropped them at an informal crossing point on the South African side because they did not have passports.

Samu narrated that when January came they did not have bus fare and means to return to Durban.



Our grandfather tried to call my dad but he was not reachable and we have not been able to get hold of him since then.

She said for all the years that followed she has been idling at home because she did not even have a birth certificate to enrol in a local school and catch up since she was doing Grade VII in Durban.



When she was asked why she opted hanging out in drinking spots and allegedly offering sexual favours to male patrons, as claimed by the concerned woman, the girl said it was due to circumstances.



My sister was fortunate because she had a birth certificate which she used to enrol at a local primary school where she is doing Grade V. I have been idling home since I came and I have to provide food and other necessities for the two of us, she said.



She alleged that her grandfather told them to use a one-room flat while he and his family lived in the main house.

This is where the two cook using firewood or a paraffin stove.



Seeking



My grandparents told me to go out and search for money so I started off by doing washing for neighbours who offered this job but the money was not always enough because I would earn between E30 and E50 on those particular days where I had a job offered.



When asked if they ever considered seeking help from other relatives or relevant organisations, Samu said they had no other relatives except their parents and the ones they lived with currently.



Sometimes we do approach neighbours for assistance, especially for money for purchasing paraffin because we cannot cook outside during rainy days, she said.



She said some people, who are tenants in neighbouring homes, often gave them rice and meat to cook.

It was gathered that the childrens grandparents have no formal jobs save for piece jobs they carry out for neighbours.



My grandfather is a builder while his wife does house chores in peoples houses. Two of my aunts do not live here while one is still at high school, Samu said.

When the news team arrived at the girls home on Tuesday there was no one in sight.



The head teacher of the school that is attended by the younger girl said they had learned about the conditions under which the children lived.

When I first heard that the older girl was literally sitting at home and not attending school I made attempts to call their mother and at first she seemed to be cooperative but later on she would not answer my calls, he said.
Titusville Police Chief Dustin LeGoullon and Titusville Area School District Superintendent Karen Jez take command behind a patrol unit as they oversee an active shooter drill at Titusville Area High School on Friday.
Douglas Helman, the natural resource manager of the Kinzua Dam for the Army Corps of Engineers, speaks on Thursday about the history and function of the dam. This was the second installation of this years Petroleum Series offered by the Drake Well Museum and Park as well as Friends of Drake Well Inc.
Singapore's Civil Aviation Authority has ordered the temporary suspension of all Boeing 737 Max planes flying into and out of the country, said a report.



The decision comes after a deadly Ethiopian Airlines Boeing Max 8 crashed on Sunday which killing all 157 people on board, said a report in BBC.



Singapore's aviation authority said the affected airlines include SilkAir, which operates six Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, as well as China Southern Airlines, Garuda Indonesia, Shandong Airlines and Thai Lion Air.



It said it is working with airlines and Changi Airport to minimise the impact on passengers, the report said.



Several airlines and regulators around the world have already grounded the Max 8 model following the crash, including Ethiopia Airways and Cayman Airways and all Chinese airlines.

According to media reports, Australia has followed Singapore's lead and called for the temporary ban on all variants of the Boeing 737 Max planes in and out of its airport, while Indonesia has grounded its fleet of Boeing's latest model.
A commercial aircraft belonging to Russias Ural Airlines en route from Bahrain to Moscow recently made an emergency landing in Baku due to suspicions of an explosive device on board, a media report said.



"An Airbus A321 plane belonging to the Ural Airlines air company, en route from Bahrain to Moscow, has successfully landed at Heydar Aliyev International Airport on Monday at 14:56 Baku time," reported Russian news agency Tass, citing the airports press service.



The press service added that the plane has made an emergency landing due to "the aircraft captains suspicions of an explosive device on board the plane."



Earlier, the Ural Airlines press service informed Tass that the plane has performed an emergency landing in Baku due to reports of "foreign objects" on board the aircraft.
Bhutan Media Foundation signs MoU with UNESCO

Thimphu, Mar 15 (UNI) Bhutan Media Foundation (BMF) and UNESCO have signed an MoU on the project Strengthening Investigative Journalism to Ensure Public Access to Information.

According to a report in the Kuensel, the year-long project will support an investigative reporting workshop for journalists, production of investigative journalism contents in the Bhutanese media, and develop a resource centre for investigative reporting in the BMF office.

This is the first collaborative project between BMF and UNESCO. The MoU was signed between Executive Director of BMF, Needrup Zangpo, and Regional Director of UNESCO, Eric Falt a few days ago.
SCCL workers strike enters day two, coal production affected 10 Dec 2021 | 3:01 PM Hyderabad, Dec 10 (UNI) Coal production in the 45 underground and open cast coal mines of the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL), located in the six districts of Telangana, continued to be affected as the three-day strike by the workers entered the second day on Friday. see more..

Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav: HAL immerses in week-long celebrations 10 Dec 2021 | 2:49 PM Bengaluru, Dec 10 (UNI) Hindustan Aeronautics Limited will organise a week-long public exhibition showcasing its 80 years of heritage, current and futuristic products at six locations across India to commemorate Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav (India @ 75) celebrations. see more..

Mortal remains of soldier killed in J&K to be brought to Kerala tonight 10 Dec 2021 | 2:25 PM Thiruvananthapuram, Dec 10 (UNI) The mortal remains of Havildar PR Krishna Prasad of Madras Regiment of Indian Army will be brought to Kerala on Friday night. see more..

Trade Unions, Assns hold protest in Pondy against price hike of Petrol, diesel 10 Dec 2021 | 1:47 PM Puducherry, Dec 10 (UNI) Representatives of trade unions, including CITU and different associations on Friday held a protest here by educating the vehicle drivers against the price hike of petrol, diesel, besides increase in LPG cylinder price and demanded its reduction by reducing taxes. see more..
Thimphu, Mar 15 (UNI) The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has presented a Special Award of Recognition to the Bhutanese king Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck for advancing human development and the wellbeing and happiness of the people of Bhutan.

The UNDP Administrator and United Nations Under-Secretary General, Achim Steiner, presented the award to the king.

A press release from the foreign ministry of Bhutan on Thursday stated that the award took into account three major human development achievements: "His Majestys championing of the holistic development paradigm of Gross National Happiness, His Majestys leadership in environment conservation and climate action which has resulted in Bhutan being the only carbon negative country in the world, and His Majestys guidance, which ensured a smooth transition of the system of governance and strong democratic foundations to be established in Bhutan."
Wyoming Business Tips for March 18-24

A weekly look at issues facing Wyoming business owners and entrepreneurs from the Wyoming Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Network, a collection of business assistance programs at the University of Wyoming.

By Rich Lyles, PTAC manager, Wyoming SBDC Network

The United States Air Force has begun the process of replacing the Minuteman III missile system, and this could be a big opportunity for small businesses in Wyoming. Much of the work should be administered from the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne.

A project of this scale means there will be opportunities for entrepreneurs from virtually every industry, including food services, construction and other related businesses. The economic impact of a project of this size and scope will be tremendous for the state.

Congress recently allocated $90 billion for the modernization of the ground-based strategic deterrent weapons system. The engineering and design phase of this project is estimated to begin in 2020 with completion expected in 2029. The prime contractor for this project will soon be chosen, and that is when small businesses throughout the state will have the opportunity to offer products or services.

Now is the time to act and become contract ready. Entrepreneurs will need to obtain a Data Universal Numbering System number; register in the System for Award Management; see whether they qualify for any of the Department of Defenses socio-economic programs; and learn how to respond to solicitations. It may seem overwhelming at first, but there are plenty of resources in Wyoming to help you prepare.

The Wyoming Procurement Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) and various state partners will host the following no-cost webinars to help Wyoming business owners achieve contract readiness:

-- March 27: HUBZone and 8(a) certification.

-- April 10: Women/veteran-owned small business certifications.

-- May 1: Pitching to government agencies.

-- May 15: Responding to federal contracting solicitations.

If you need help wading through the government jargon and the rules, the Wyoming PTAC exists solely to provide assistance at no charge. You can contact your local adviser, register for an upcoming webinar, and access a handful of webinar recordings now at www.wyomingsbdc.org.

The Wyoming SBDC Network offers business expertise to help Wyoming residents think about, launch, grow, reinvent or exit their business. The Wyoming SBDC Network is hosted by UW with state funds from the Wyoming Business Council and funded, in part, through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration.

To ask a question, call 1-800-348-5194, email wsbdc@uwyo.edu, or write 1000 E. University Ave., Dept. 3922, Laramie, WY, 82071-3922.
I love the opportunity to try Italian grapes from around the world and I was introduced to Altipiano Vineyard and Winery via the #winestudio group that I'm part of run by Tina Morey. I've been introduced to so many great wineries and winemaking regions I typically would not have tried including Shelburne Vineyards from VT and my upcoming article on the wines from Michigan.





I discovered that Altipiano was working with some Italian grapes within Escondido, CA in San Diego county and I reached out to the owner and winemaker, Denise Clarke, to have the opportunity to learn more about their wines.





Denise and her husband Peter moved to the Highland Valley area in Escondido, CA in 1997. Their dream was to always own a vineyard and it was further inspired by their trip to Italy in March of 2007 when they fell in love in particular with the Tuscan town of Montalcino. The unfortunate happenings of the 2007 wildfires destroyed their avocado grove, but gave them the opportunity to pursue their dream.

Denise and Peter Clarke - Copyright of Altipiano

Make sure you don't miss my samplings of a couple of their wines including sangiovese at the end of the article. Come meet Denise and learn about how her visit to Italy was part of the reason that drove her into pursuing her dream of opening a winery with her husband Peter.









It seems that you grew up with farming as a way of life. What was your background prior to owning Altipiano?





We produce approximately 10-12 tons from the Estate grapes and purchased another 10-12 tons of fruit from Paso Robles and Amador County. Our total property is 5 acres. My husband and I purchased our land in 1997, it was an avocado groove with 1100 trees. Our landscape was changed in October 2007 when a wildfire ripped through San Diego county and destroyed our avocado groove which prompted us to plant a vineyard. The vineyard was planted on 2.5 acres with 2600 vines of Sangiovese (Brunello Clone), 640 vines of Barbera, 240 vines each of Cabernet Sauvignon and Petite Sirah.We produce approximately 10-12 tons from the Estate grapes and purchased another 10-12 tons of fruit from Paso Robles and Amador County. Our total property is 5 acres.





I have a BA in Human Resources Management and after leaving active duty, I began working in Human Resources for Department of Defense until my retirement in June 2012. My career started in the US Air Force, I served on active duty for 6.5 years.I have a BA in Human Resources Management and after leaving active duty, I began working in Human Resources for Department of Defense until my retirement in June 2012.





Being the winemaker of Altipiano, what is your background in winemaking and the wine industry?



I knew little or nothing about making wine, but I always loved having my hands in the soil. I considered myself an amateur farmer planting all the trees and vegetation. Thank goodness for mentors. I began going to the Garagiste festival in Paso Robles and attending seminars to learn. We had a winemaker for two years and subsequently in 2012 I took over. Winemaking choose me and it has been a steep learning curve of which Im still a student and pursuing the music of the vines and wine. I had no background in the wine industry at all, nor in winemaking.I knew little or nothing about making wine, but I always loved having my hands in the soil.I considered myself an amateur farmer planting all the trees and vegetation.Thank goodness for mentors.I began going to the Garagiste festival in Paso Robles and attending seminars to learn. We had a winemaker for two years and subsequently in 2012 I took over.Winemaking choose me and it has been a steep learning curve of which Im still a student and pursuing the music of the vines and wine.

Winemaker Denise Clarke - Copyright of Altipiano

What drove you and Peter to invest and open a winery and why primarily Italian grapes?



Both Peter and I fell in love with Italian varietals while in Italy. Peter didnt particularly like red wines until he tasted a Brunello. I had fallen in love with Barbera prior to Italy and once we traveled to Italy, we were both hooked.

After losing your avocado grove and replanting vines, how did you determine if the soil and land was suitable for vines?





Our avocado groove was 20 years old when we bought in 1997, so the soil was very fertile. We are decomposed granite with approximately 40 years of organic from the leaves falling yearly. Once our soil analysis came back, we knew what rootstock/clones to look for and we contracted with Novavine out of Santa Rosa CA to graft our Brunello Clone (VCR6) on rootstock 1103p. All our vines are either 1103p or 110R rootstock. After the fire, we contracted with a vineyard consultant, took a vineyard management class and had our soil analyzed.Our avocado groove was 20 years old when we bought in 1997, so the soil was very fertile.We are decomposed granite with approximately 40 years of organic from the leaves falling yearly.Once our soil analysis came back, we knew what rootstock/clones to look for and we contracted with Novavine out of Santa Rosa CA to graft our Brunello Clone (VCR6) on rootstock 1103p. All our vines are either 1103p or 110R rootstock.

Copyright of Altipiano

You mention sustainability on your website. Is this something that Altipiano practices and if so how?



Natural predators being Raptures, Owls, Bees, feral cats for the rodent and natural vegetation. Up until last year, we had a herd of Llamas and chickens who were vegetarian, and their waste would be redistributed in the vineyard. We have crops between our rows for nutrients and oxygen in the soil. Lots of wild life live in our dirt. We are not organic, due to the many vectors already in the area that are host for grassy wine sharp shooter, skeletonizer etc. However, our goal is to be as gentle to the land as possible and to keep the land as healthy as possible for our kids/grandkids. There was an eco-system in place when we purchased the avocado groove.Natural predators being Raptures, Owls, Bees, feral cats for the rodent and natural vegetation.Up until last year, we had a herd of Llamas and chickens who were vegetarian, and their waste would be redistributed in the vineyard.We have crops between our rows for nutrients and oxygen in the soil.Lots of wild life live in our dirt.We are not organic, due to the many vectors already in the area that are host for grassy wine sharp shooter, skeletonizer etc. However, our goal is to be as gentle to the land as possible and to keep the land as healthy as possible for our kids/grandkids.





What is in store for the future of Altipiano?



Im only the conductor interpreting and rendering the best expression and telling the story of each varietal for that vintage. I am excited to have obtained Nero DAvola and Aglianico last year from Paso Robles. The fruit was amazing and aging beautifully. I want my focus to be on big red, with lot of substance, depth, elegance and finesse. We are currently producing Estate Sangiovese, Barbera, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah. Grapes we are purchasing are: Aglianico, Nero DAvola (Paso Robles fruit) , Primitivo, Petite Sirah (Amador County, to blend with the Estate Petite Sirah), and Merlot/Syrah grapes from San Pasqual AVA, San Diego County. To continue to explore the depth of Lady Brunello and allow mother nature to play the orchestra.Im only the conductor interpreting and rendering the best expression and telling the story of each varietal for that vintage.I am excited to have obtained Nero DAvola and Aglianico last year from Paso Robles.The fruit was amazing and aging beautifully.I want my focus to be on big red, with lot of substance, depth, elegance and finesse.We are currently producing Estate Sangiovese, Barbera, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah.Grapes we are purchasing are: Aglianico, Nero DAvola (Paso Robles fruit) , Primitivo, Petite Sirah (Amador County, to blend with the Estate Petite Sirah), and Merlot/Syrah grapes from San Pasqual AVA, San Diego County.





The Wines 2016 Altipiano Sangiovese Vintner's Reserve This wine is made from 100% sangiovese grosso and aged in Pennsylvania oak barrels. Ruby colored with fresh cherries on the nose. Good acid with bright cherry and plum and a hint of vanilla. A medium bodied wine with low to medium tannins and good length on the finish. I found this sangiovese different than the average chianti as it was more plush and fruit forward, but still a beautiful sangiovese . The winery even recommends pairing it with Josh Grobans Per Te ; ) ABV 14.6% SRP $65

Pairing: I paired this wine with a shrimp palermo, a garlic based marinara sauce.

































2015 Altipiano Syrah These grapes are sourced from the San Pasqual AVA and the wine is aged in new French/Hungarian oak. Deep, dark, ruby colored and aromatic with juicy, jammy fruits and vanilla. A full-bodied, fruit-forward wine lending to nice mouthwatering acidity up front followed by the richness of blackberries and blueberries with a hint of vanilla and spice. Good length on the finish tapering off with some olive notes. ABV 14% SRP $54

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*These wines were provided as samples, but opinions are always my own.
In Turkey, the government is building a dam that threatens to destroy a settlement with a history that goes back to 10,000 BCE. Located on the banks of the Tigris River, Hasankeyf is one of the oldest continually inhabited places in the world and has the imprints of over 20 civilizations.

Submerged underwater

According to Turkish officials, the Ilisu Dam will boost irrigation and provide electricity to the region. However, this also means that the settlement will completely be submerged underwater once the dam is constructed. When asked about the destruction of the site, authorities responded by saying that the reservoir will create tourism in the region since people will come for scuba dives to visit the submerged monuments.

People that dont have a past cannot determine their future They are not only destroying our past but also our future by taking away this as a source of income and heritage We would like to apologize to the future generations for allowing this, Ridvan Ayhan, a member of the Save Hasankeyf Initiative, said in a statement (DW).

Hasankeyf is home to 300 medieval monuments and thousands of man-made caves. The residents are divided on the future of the settlement. While some await the promised economic benefits, others are angry that the history of their ancestors is being treated with disrespect. There are also fears that the dam project will end up damaging the ecosystem of the region.

The Tigris River basin is one of the last areas where a river runs freely in Turkey without having been dammed The dam will completely destroy the river banks. The microclimate will change due to the dam, a phenomenon we have already seen after the dams on the Euphrates. The biodiversity will suffer; the rich variety of plant and animal life will be severely diminished, Ercan Ayboga, an environmental engineer, said to The Guardian.

After the area is flooded, around 15,000 people will lose their homes. They will be shifted to a new city being built on higher ground. It is believed that the creation of the reservoir will restrict movements of the Kurdish rebels. Some people think that this has also been a major influence on the governments decision to construct the dam.

Transplanting monuments

In a bid to save some of the cultural relics of Hasankeyf, the government has started to transplant some of the monuments. In June last year, the 800-year old Artuklu Hamam bathhouse was transported over a distance of three kilometers. The cost of relocating the bathhouse is estimated at $7.1 million.

The Ilsu dam will be the biggest of its kind in Turkey and fourth largest for generation of electricity. This is a project that necessitates moving our historic legacy. This is exemplary preservation work. It is our duty to preserve the history here and this sensitive approach prolonged the completion (of the dam). More buildings will be moved and the place where they were moved to will be an open-air museum, he said in a statement (Daily Sabah).

In December 2018, a 15th-century mosque in the region was also moved out of Hasankeyf. Weighing 4,500 tons, the structure was split into three parts and transported using self-propelled robots. Other artifacts transported from the area include the Zeynel Bey Shrine and Imam Abdullah Zaviye, an Islamic monastery.

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Attorney General Dana Nessel and Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Robert Gordon are warning Michiganders about phone scammers posing as public health officials in order to obtain personal information.

Several health departments have received reports from residents about calls from individuals seeking personal information that could be used to steal someones identity. Although no calls have been reported to the St. Clair County Health Department, some Macomb County residents have reported receiving the suspicious calls.

The callers claim to be from a local health department or Medicare and appear to be calling from health department phone numbers.

Anyone who receives a suspicious call is advised to hang up immediately. Residents are reminded never to give out personally identifying information to an unsolicited caller, even if the caller identification appears to confirm the call as legitimate.

Scammers use every tool they have to take advantage of anyone they can, Nessel said. Its important residents remember they should never give personal and confidential information to unsolicited callers. Simply hang up and report the call to our office.

Requests for personal information are one way to identify phone scams. Like the IRS, health agencies do not contact patients to request sensitive information over the phone.

Local public health and Medicaid officials will not call you and request account information, Social Security numbers or passwords over the phone, said Gordon. If you receive one of these calls, we urge you to hang up.

Those who wish to make a report about these calls can do so by contacting the Attorney Generals Consumer Protection Division. A complaint can be filed online or by calling 877-765-8388.

Colleen Kowalewski is a staff writer for The Voice. She can be contacted at 586-273-6197 or ckowalewski@medianewsgroup.com.
As part of a joint initiative with the European Union, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has developed two new tools to help the judiciary and law enforcement agencies fight the illicit trafficking of cultural property.

The first one is the "Toolkit for European Judiciary and Law Enforcement which aims to provide a range of answers to professionals combating this type of organized criminal activity.

The WCO is among the organizations which contributed to the Toolkits development as part of a global effort to enable the judiciary and law enforcement agencies to acquire and/or consolidate knowledge of the international and European legal framework and to offer a set of practical tools designed specifically for them.

The Toolkit, which contains a number of case studies and hands-on exercises, is a self-help training tool ensuring an interactive experience for individuals and groups.

In addition to the Toolkit, UNESCO has also developed an e-learning platform offering step-by-step training to provide an understanding of how this type of organized crime works and explain how to use legal and practical tools to fight it more efficiently and effectively.

It also enables judiciary and law enforcement professionals to learn about different key concepts and special investigative techniques, and to exchange information and ideas with their colleagues from all over Europe.

The toolkit is currently available in English and the French version is in preparation. The e-learning modules are already available in both languages. Both tools can be used in a complementary manner.

For more details, please visit the UNESCO 1970 Convention website
Fort Polk, LA (71446)

Today

Overcast. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 78F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Thunderstorms. A few storms may be severe. Low 63F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
By Mar. 14, 2019

The Paducah Parks & Recreation Department is inviting potential new vendors for the Paducah Homegrown Farmers Market to attend a vendor information meeting. Two dates are being offered. Potential vendors should attend either Monday, March 18 or Tuesday, March 19. Each meeting will start at 5:30 pm at the Robert Cherry Civic Center located at 2701 Park Ave. Each potential new vendor must attend one of the two meeting times.

At the new vendor meetings, information will be provided about the application process, hours of operation, and fees in addition to guidelines from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. If a potential vendor cannot make it to one of the meetings, contact Special Events Coordinator Molly Tomasallo Johnson to discuss products, guidelines, and the application process.



Returning vendors do not need to attend one of the vendor information meetings. Applications already have been mailed to returning vendors with a deadline of March 15 at 5 pm to submit the application along with the $75 fee.



The Paducah Homegrown Farmers Market is located at North Second and Monroe Streets in historic downtown Paducah. It offers a variety of local, homegrown products including fresh fruits and vegetables, meats and dairy products, artwork, and crafts. Vendors will begin setting up and selling April 27 with a grand opening celebration set for May 4. For 2019, Saturdays will have a full market of vendors from 7:30 am until 1 pm.



Vendor applications and an overview of the Paducah Homegrown Farmers Market are available at the Parks & Recreation Office.



For more information, contact Johnson at 270-444-8508. Also, visit the Farmers Market page on the City website, www.paducahky.gov. On Facebook, visit https://www.facebook.com/paducah.homegrown/.

PADUCAH -
Man missing after boat capsizes on Ohio River in Livingston County
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By WestKyStar Staff

Mar. 13, 2019 | PADUCAH

By WestKyStar Staff Mar. 13, 2019 | 09:11 PM | PADUCAH

Paducah's Chef Sara Bradley made it all the way to the final two Thursday evening on Season 16 of Bravo Network's Top Chef. It was the final showdown as the top three chefs created their best four course meals for the final night of judging.



Eric Adjepong was eliminated after the judges were served the first course. Chef Sara and Kelsey Barnard Clark cooked head to head with four courses of creations. The final two ladies are reportedly friends, supporting each other all the way to the top. When judges announced Chef Kelsey won the title of Top Chef, as disappointed as Chef Sara was, she said she was proud of her friend.



Bradley owns Paducah's Freight House restaurant. She was the only chef from Kentucky in this season's competition, which took place mostly in the Bluegrass State. The show also shot an episode in Nashville, and traveled to China for the final three episodes.



The table of diners Thursday evening included Deputy Editor of FOOD & WINE Magazine Melanie Hansche, acclaimed chefs Mitsuharu Tsumara, Alexander Smalls, Dan Hong, May Chow, and Alvin Leung, along with Tom, Padma, Nilou and Graham.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 15, 2019 | 01:50 PM | MCCRACKEN COUNTY

Sgt. Willcutt responded to the US 62-Blandville Road area of western McCracken County on Thursday morning when a tornado warning was issued.





Several deputies also responded to other areas in the western part of the county, basically to provide protection and do whatever might be necessary in such an emergency.





Sgt. Willcutt told West Kentucky Star that he decided to pull into the parking lot of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, and at the time, did not see anything that looked all that bad. He heard a report that the tornado was heading toward Gage, so he thought he would be fine where he was.





He then said that he noticed a large funnel cloud drop down and started pulling up trees, and then power poles along Blandville Road. His estimate was that he was 300 yards from the funnel, but because of the fast movement, he was unable to get his car out of the way.





His description was "everything was gray, and the car was being constantly hit by debris which sounded like it was being pounded by a bat or sledge hammer." He also said the passenger side windows blew out and he put his head down hoping to protect himself.





When the funnel passed, he was able to start his car and move closer to the church. He said he went inside to check on those present and found that much of the roof had been ripped off.





Sheriff Matt Carter mentioned the fact that Sgt. Willcutt had been in harms way in an effort to help others.





Sgt. Willcutt's experience is an example of how quickly conditions can deteriorate when dealing with a tornado, and extreme caution should be taken in such situations.



The tornado that struck western McCracken County on Thursday proved to be an extremely close call for McCracken County Deputy Sheriff, Sergeant Ryan Willcutt.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Mar. 15, 2019 | PADUCAH

By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 15, 2019 | 04:51 PM | PADUCAH

A man faces a list of charges after a traffic stop on Wednesday.



The McCracken County Sheriff's Office says detectives saw 41-year-old Michael Little, who had an outstanding warrant, driving shortly before 5 p.m. on Old Mayfield Road. They attempted to pull him over on Chester Hack Drive, but he reportedly failed to stop.



Detectives said they saw Little taking drugs while they were following him. They were ultimately able to get him to stop, and arrested him without further incident. They also found methamphetamine lying in the driver's seat and on the center console of the vehicle.



Little, who was on parole for trafficking in methamphetamine, was charged with possession of meth and drug paraphernalia, tampering with evidence, and a parole violation.
By WestKyStar & CIty of Paducah Staff Mar. 14, 2019 | 06:50 PM | PADUCAH

At the new vendor meetings, information will be provided about the application process, hours of operation, and fees in addition to guidelines from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. If a potential vendor cannot make it to one of the meetings, contact Special Events Coordinator Molly Tomasallo Johnson to discuss products, guidelines, and the application process.



Returning vendors do not need to attend one of the vendor information meetings. Applications already have been mailed to returning vendors with a deadline of March 15 at 5 pm to submit the application along with the $75 fee.



The Paducah Homegrown Farmers Market is located at North Second and Monroe Streets in historic downtown Paducah. It offers a variety of local, homegrown products including fresh fruits and vegetables, meats and dairy products, artwork, and crafts. Vendors will begin setting up and selling April 27 with a grand opening celebration set for May 4. For 2019, Saturdays will have a full market of vendors from 7:30 am until 1 pm.



Vendor applications and an overview of the Paducah Homegrown Farmers Market are available at the Parks & Recreation Office.



For more information, contact Johnson at 270-444-8508. Also, visit the Farmers Market page on the City website, www.paducahky.gov. On Facebook, visit https://www.facebook.com/paducah.homegrown/.

The Paducah Parks & Recreation Department is inviting potential new vendors for the Paducah Homegrown Farmers Market to attend a vendor information meeting. Two dates are being offered. Potential vendors should attend either Monday, March 18 or Tuesday, March 19. Each meeting will start at 5:30 pm at the Robert Cherry Civic Center located at 2701 Park Ave. Each potential new vendor must attend one of the two meeting times.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Mar. 15, 2019 | METROPOLIS

By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 15, 2019 | 10:37 AM | METROPOLIS

Authorities are investigating two fires at a Metropolis Apartment building that left six families homeless.



Metropolis Fire Chief Harry Masse said Metropolis firefighters responded to an apartment building at 1015 East 8th Street at 8:20 p.m. Thursday. Masse said firefighters contained the fire to the couch in an apartment that the manager told them was supposed to be vacant.



Shortly before 1 a.m. Friday, fire crews were again called to the same location to a report of a much larger fire, which had engulfed the entire roof of the structure.



Masse said all eight units in the building were destroyed, but there were no injuries to anyone who lived there. The building was a total loss.



The Metropolis Fire Department was assisted at the scene by the Massac County, Brookport, Joppa and Paducah Fire Departments.



The Illinois State Fire Marshal is investigating the incident, which officials are calling suspicious in nature.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff Mar. 14, 2019 | 03:22 PM | HICKMAN

KYTN reports that Police Chief Tony Grogan said a single shot was discovered in a bedroom of a home on Highland Avenue.





Chief Grogan said one of the residents left the home for a brief period of time, and returned to discover the shot through a window which stuck into a wall.





He said the bullet was from a handgun, and may have possibly been shot from a vehicle, or come from a stray shot made a distance away. No shell casing was located near the scene of the incident.





Chief Grogan said no one was injured from the shot.



Police in Hickman are investigating a gunshot that was fired into a home.
UEFAs balls of expectation have been plucked from the bowls of fate and formally laid to rest within the welcoming bosom of the plastic egg-box of mercy  the draw for the Champions League quarter-finals is now complete.

Liverpool have been afforded the lightest obstacle betwixt themselves and a place in the semis: a two-legger against Porto.

Man City and Tottenham will face off in an all-Premier League battle to grim death whereas Manchester United face an unenviable couple of games against Barcelona.

2018/19 Champions League quarter-final draw in full:

Ajax vs Juventus

Liverpool vs Porto

Tottenham vs Man City

Barcelona vs Man Utd

As predictions go, we reckon the Solskjaer bubble is primed to burst as Barca hammer four/five/six past United home and away.

Liverpool go through with a couple of low-scoring wins (perhaps a draw in the away leg) and City will make heavy weather of it but sneak through at Spurs expense.

Fuelled by a veinous Cristiano Ronaldo and his self-absorbed quest for Champions League glory, Juve will probably make mincemeat of Ajax over two legs, too.

What do you reckon, Pies fans? Care to stick your necks out
The Blue Ridge Mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina arent on a lot of peoples radar, and that is exactly one of the things that make them so incredibly great! That and their amazing waterfalls, plentiful wildlife, stunning views, and wonderful natural and cultural history. Our Blue Ridge hiking trips begin and end in Asheville, one of Americas most vibrant and culturally rich mountain towns.

If youre coming to Asheville and looking for an Asheville hiking tour to add on to a longer vacation, we offer fantastic day hikes in the surrounding mountains. A Blue Ridge hiking vacation is well worth a stand alone trip to the area though, in the form of backpacking trips, portered treks, or an inn-based tour.

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Mei Hua (middle) watches students knitting in a traditional way with a wooden frame at Yimin Primary School in the Ewenki autonomous banner, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. [Provided to China Daily]

After teaching for 30 years at different villages in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Mei Hua, a deputy to the 13th National People's Congress, hopes she can help more ethnic minority students enjoy better education.

Mei's parents are both herdsmen in the Hulunbuir grasslands, and she knew from an early age that education is one of the most effective ways to change the fate of children living in the grasslands and give them the opportunity to see the outside world.

She became a teacher when she was 19, and has since worked at different schools in remote villages.

In 2009, she was assigned to be the principal of Yimin Primary School in the Ewenki autonomous banner in Hulunbuir amid a shortage of teachers due to poor conditions.

"When I arrived at the school, I almost started to cry," she said. "There were only eight students with one outdated computer that could barely function.

"The teachers lived together in a small rented room, and the heating in their dormitory and the classroom came from coal boilers.

"However, I cannot fail the trust of others and had to do something to make things better."

Mei started to improve facilities at the school by changing the heating system to gas heating, getting internet access, buying necessary equipment, renovating the school buildings and hiring more teachers.

With conditions at the school having improved significantly, the number of students has gradually increased.

The school now has more than 120 students, and with increased government investment it also has an affiliated kindergarten, newly built playground and special classrooms for singing and drawing.

However, like many other schools in rural areas, the quality of teachers at Mei's school still lags behind that in urban areas.

"There are few young teachers at our school, and many teachers have not been trained properly and they do not teach the subject they have majored in," she said.

Mei hopes that more young people and college graduates will come to her school to teach.

According to the Ministry of Education, the country now has 2.9 million rural teachers, 1.7 million of them under the age of 40.

In the past 13 years, 335,000 college graduates have been hired to work at rural schools in central and western China.

From 2013 to 2018, central and local governments invested 542.6 billion yuan ($81 billion) to build and renovate school buildings and buy teaching resources.

To bridge the gap between urban and rural education resources, different levels of government purchased 5.1 million computers.

The ministry also said that more than 90 percent of primary and secondary schools in China now have access to the internet.

As an NPC deputy, Mei visited nearby schools and talked with local teachers, principals and education officials on ways to improve rural education.

"The most sustainable way to keep rural students out of poverty is to give them a good education, and I am willing to offer my help," she said.

(Source: China Daily)
Registration is the selection of classes and arrangement for payment of tuition and fees by the appropriate deadline. Students may register and check their current class schedule through Buff Advisor by selecting Student Planning. Regulations governing course selection, pre-requisites, course load and admission requirements are published in the WTAMU catalog or can be obtained from your academic department.

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Classes begin Monday, December 13, 2021 and run through January 6, 2022. Registration continues through the 2nd class day (December 14, 2021).
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 03:07:08|Editor: yan

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NICOSIA, March 13 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus is unlikely to be affected by the suspension of all Boeing 737 MAX operations imposed by Europe, a Civil Aviation Department official said on Wednesday.

Cyprus actually followed the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) in imposing a ban on over-flights of Boeing 737 MAX, which was announced after the crash of an Ethiopian airlines plane of this type on Sunday.

EASA also published a safety directive suspending all commercial flights performed by third-country operators into, within or out of the EU of the Boeing 737 MAX models.

Cyprus announced that it suspended flight operations of all Boeing Model 737-8 Max and 737-9 Max airplanes inside its airspace on Tuesday night, complying with the EU-wide suspension.

Andreas Paspalides, head of the Safety Regulation Unit at Civil Aviation, said the suspension will be in force until further notice.

Cyprus lies in the eastern region of the Mediterranean and is the most southeastern part of Europe.

Having under its control a Flight Information Region extending from the southern shores of Turkey to the Egyptian-Israeli border to the southeast, it virtually controls the flights all planes entering the Mediterranean from the east en route to any part of Europe.

Paspallides allayed fears of tourist operators that the suspension may affect tourism, the main source of income for Cyprus, as the new season begins in just over two weeks.

"No negative impact on Cyprus is expected by the suspension of flights and over-flights of Boeing MAX aircraft", he said.

He also added that no such airplanes are included in the Cypriot register.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 17:51:09|Editor: Yang Yi

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Minister Xu Xueyuan of the Chinese Embassy speaks at a celebration marking the 40th anniversary of sister city relationships between Chinese and U.S. cities in Washington D.C., the United States, on March 13, 2019. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

WASHINGTON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. on Wednesday held a celebration marking the 40th anniversary of sister city relationships between Chinese and U.S. cities.

"Sister cities relationship is a major channel for people-to-people exchanges and sub-national cooperation. It is an important driving force for our relations," Minister Xu Xueyuan of the embassy told the event.

"Sister cities cooperation between China and the U.S. has almost developed in tandem with the overall bilateral ties," Xu said.

"Over the past four decades, the number of sister provinces/states and sister cities between us has grown into 277 pairs. Following the principles of friendship, mutual benefit and practical results, the two sides have made great achievement in their trade and economic cooperation as well as people-to-people ties, with the purpose of common development and shared prosperity," Xu said.

Officials of U.S. states, cities, and towns that have sister city ties with their Chinese counterparts joined the celebration, co-hosted by both the Chinese Embassy and Sister Cities International (SCI), a non-profit organization that promotes local-level ties between the United States and other countries.

The establishment of sister city relationships between China and the United States started soon after the two countries established their diplomatic ties in 1979, when central China's Hubei Province and the U.S. State of Ohio, and eastern China's Nanjing city and the U.S. city of St. Louis, forged sister relationships.

The event also celebrated the 40th anniversary of the China-U.S. diplomatic relations, the Chinese embassy said in a statement.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-14 19:36:48|Editor: xuxin

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ULAN BATOR, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The Mongolian parliament will use a fingerprint voting system starting from the upcoming regular spring session to make lawmakers more accountable, local media reported on Thursday, citing the secretariat of the country's unicameral parliament.

The move aims to end "ghost voting" and increase lawmakers' turnout for parliamentary sessions, said the secretariat.

Ghost voting is a practice against the rules when some lawmakers cast electronic machine ballots for their absent fellow members. It is widespread in the 76-seat parliament of Mongolia, raising public criticism.

The regular spring session of the Mongolian parliament is scheduled to open on April 5.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 00:28:24|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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ISLAMABAD, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan launched the country's new online visa system here on Thursday to soften, simplify and quicken the visa process to facilitate visit by foreign tourists aand businesspeople.

Addressing the launching ceremony, the prime minister said new visa system is a significant change in Pakistan's policy which will speed up the visa process to open Pakistan's doors to the world, making it more accessible to tourists and investors from across the globe.

"The Pakistani government is creating an atmosphere which can facilitate smooth investments so that businessmen can earn more and more profit from Pakistan," said the prime minister, adding that Pakistan eliminated terrorism after struggling and now it is a safe country.

Earlier, highlighting major features of the new visa policy, Pakistan's Minister of State for Interior Shehryar Afridi said multiple entry visas would be granted within 24 hours to the people of 96 countries.

However, the minister said a pilot project of this new system would be tested under which citizens of five countries, including China, Britain, Turkey, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, which will be granted online immediate visas for a period of three months.

"Once the new system is fully implemented, citizens of 175 countries can apply for online visas," said the minister, adding that visa upon arrival has been extended for passport holders of 50 countries from previously 24 countries.

The minister also announced that the average visa fee has also been reduced by up to 65 percent.

Earlier in January, the Pakistani government also updated its visa policy which would grand work visa to citizens of 96 countries within 7-10 days after they receive a letter from the Board of Investment.

According to the new policy, diplomatic visas would be extended from one year to three years while student visas would be extended from one to two years.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 00:38:27|Editor: yan

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VILNIUS, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The Lithuanian parliament (Seimas) unanimously ratified on Thursday North Macedonia's NATO accession protocol. All 92 MPs attending the session voted in favor.

Lithuania is the eighth NATO member state to have approved North Macedonia's accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

"We are glad that Lithuania is among the first NATO allies to ratify the protocol of the accession of North Macedonia, the last member of the so-called Vilnius Ten Group that has not joined NATO yet," Linas Linkevicius, Lithuania's foreign minister, said in a statement.

Lithuania, a small Baltic country with a population of less than 3 million, joined NATO in 2004. The Vilnius Ten Group, founded in May 2000, includes Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

"Hopefully, our countries will successfully cooperate in addressing international security challenges after North Macedonia becomes NATO's 30th member," said Linkevicius.

In his address to Lithuanian lawmakers before the vote on Thursday, Linkevicius noted that "North Macedonia had actively participated in NATO operations".

The vote in Seimas was attended by Talat Xhaferi, speaker of the Parliament of North Macedonia. He thanked Lithuanian lawmakers for ratifying the accession protocol.

"We are aware of the obligations that arise with fully fledged NATO membership. If necessary, we will stand alongside all other NATO member countries," Xhaferi said at a press conference on Thursday.

In July 2018, North Macedonia was invited to begin accession talks with NATO member countries. The country joined NATO's Partnership for Peace program in 1995.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 04:14:25|Editor: yan

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RABAT, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The Moroccan Prime Minister Saad Eddine El Othmani and the Speaker of Qatari Advisory Council Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud pledged to further strengthen bilateral ties, Morocco's official MAP news agency reported Thursday.

During their meeting in Rabat, the two parties also hailed the Moroccan-Qatari relations and underlined their determination to develop them at the political, economic and cultural levels, the report said.

El Othmani said that the two countries share views on several Arab and Islamic issues, on the top of which is the Palestinian issue.

For his part, the Qatari official expressed his country's pride in its long-standing and deep friendship with Morocco, adding that Qatar has special respect for Morocco and King Mohammed VI.

The Moroccan prime minister received the speaker of the Qatari Advisory Council and several other Qatari parliament members on the sidelines of the 14th session of the Conference of the Union of Councils of Member States of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which was held in Rabat on March 11-14.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 04:24:27|Editor: yan

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TRIPOLI, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The French Ambassador to Libya Beatrice du Hellen on Thursday expressed France's willingness to train Libyan teachers the French language.

The ambassador made her remarks during a meeting with the Libyan Education Minister Othman Abduljalil in the Libyan capital Tripoli.

According to the Ministry of Education, the two officials discussed mutual cooperation between the two countries in public and higher education, including introducing the French language in Libyan secondary education curriculum in the next few years.

The French envoy also expressed the willingness of French companies of printing French school books, the ministry said in a statement.

Due to years of armed conflict and chaos, Libyan authorities have been struggling to provide basic services for the people, mainly healthcare and proper education.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 04:34:29|Editor: yan

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GAZA, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The police of the Islamic Hamas movement forcibly dispersed on Thursday two demonstrations in northern and central Gaza Strip, which protested over the deteriorated economic situation in the coastal enclave, according to eyewitnesses.

Dozens of Palestinians demonstrated in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza Strip against the high living cost and taxes. The demonstrators called for a better living situation and finding jobs for the unemployed.

The demonstration was organized by social media activists. The protesters marched on the streets of the refugee camp, waving Palestinian flags, chanting slogans and carrying banners that said "We seek dignity life, better future."

As soon as the demonstration reached the center of the refugee camp, Hamas-led security forces attacked the demonstrators, opened fire in the air, arrested several demonstrators and confiscated the cameras of journalists, said the eyewitnesses.

Meanwhile, another demonstration was organized in central Gaza Strip town of Deir el-Ballah, where demonstrators burned tires and chanted slogans that called for a life with dignity.

The social media activists published on the pages of their accounts pictures and videos of Hamas police officers beating demonstrators and dispersing them by force.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party condemned the Hamas attack on the demonstrators who held peaceful protests against the expensive prices of consumer goods.

"Repressing demonstrators and using excessive force against them, as well as attacking journalists, are violation of all laws and regulations and a breach of the national values," said Fatah in a press statement.

Two left-wing groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), also condemned in two separate statements the use of force against the peaceful demonstrators in the Gaza Strip.

Ayman Batniji, spokesman of the Hamas-run police in Gaza, told Xinhua that the protests in northern and central Gaza Strip were organized without getting permission from the police.

"The law prohibits gathering in open and public areas without an official permission," he said, adding "the policemen were very conscious in dealing with the demonstrators, who behaved violently and threw stones at the police."

The activists, who included university students and social media activists, said that "the protests were popular and non-politicized and came after the escalating taxes that were added on dozens of commodities in Gaza."

A few days ago, human rights groups in the Gaza Strip accused the security services of Hamas of arresting 12 Palestinian activists from northern Gaza Strip, over their call for protests.

The rights groups in Gaza said in separate press statements that the right of expression, and the right of peaceful gathering and political participation, are inalienable.

They called on the security forces in Gaza, which is run by Hamas, to stop arrests and stop questioning activists for their political backgrounds.

Israel has imposed a tight blockade on the Gaza Strip, home to more than two million Palestinians since mid-2007, after Hamas movement forcibly seized control of the territory.

Unemployment rate has climbed to 52 percent since the Israeli blockade was imposed on the Gaza Strip, according to the latest Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) report.

According to the Palestinian Popular Committee to Confront the Israeli Siege, the per capita daily income of the population does not exceed 2 U.S. dollars, the lowest in the world.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 04:39:31|Editor: Xiang Bo

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British Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street for the House of Commons in London, Britain, on March 14, 2019. British MPs on Thursday voted to reject an amendment calling for a second Brexit referendum. (Xinhua/Han Yan)

LONDON, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Britain is to ask the European Union (EU) to delay its departure from the bloc until at least June 30 after MPs voted on Thursday in which they also rejected a second referendum.

British Prime Minister Theresa May faced a number of challenging votes in the House of Commons, and won them all, including one by a majority of just two.

If EU member states agree to the delay, it will mean Britain not leaving on its scheduled departure date of March 29.

The British government wants the three-month delay to enable MPs to vote for a third time next week on May's Brexit deal, already rejected twice by overwhelming margins.

If the prime minister's deal is again rejected it could mean Britain remaining in the EU beyond the end of June. Remaining in the EU beyond June 30 would mean Britain having to take part in this May's European Parliament elections.

ANOTHER LONG DAY IN PARLIAMENT

The historic chamber of the House of Commons was packed for the third time this week as opposing sides in the Battle for Brexit gathered.

May arrived in the Commons chamber to face a number of challenges, having been battered twice this week in crushing defeats.

But in a sign that the tide may, just be turning, May and her government saw off the challenges.

The first to fall by a margin of 334 to 85 was a bid by MP Sarah Wollaston for a second public referendum.

Next came what had been billed as the biggest threat to May's strategy, an amendment by veteran Labour MP Hilary Benn. He wanted time to be set aside next week to enable MPs to debate a range of Brexit options with indicative votes. The idea was to see if there was any consensus among MPs for an alternative to May's twice-defeated Brexit plan. That lost by 314 to 312, a wafer thin margin of just two.

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the main opposition Labour Party, was next on, with a bid to reject May's deal, reject a no-deal option and delay Britain's departure date to enable an alternative deal to be found. That was beaten by 318 to 302.

It all came down to the main government motion to seek to delay Brexit until at least June 30. That won by 412 to 202.

A GOOD DAY FOR PM

After the chaos in the House of Commons on Wednesday, and a massive defeat for her deal this week, the mood was more somber as May as her advisors must have breathed a sigh of relief.

It's not yet over for May who must now return to the House of Commons next week to have another attempt at gaining support for the deal agreed last July at her country mansion house retreat, Chequers.

If May manages to get the go-ahead for her deal next week, Britain will leave the EU by June 30. It would require the thumbs up for the leaders of all 27 EU member states. But they are unlikely to refuse if the purpose for the delay is to enable all the legislative processes to be completed.

May lost by margins of 230 and almost 150 in the previous attempts to get MPs to back her deal. So in the space of a few days, can she really overturn such as massive margin?

Media reports say British Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox have been holding private meetings with the strongest opponents to May's deal, mainly the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland and members of the pro-Brexit Conservative MPs from the European Research Group (ERG).

If those politicians can be convinced that Britain will not be trapped permanently to EU rules, it could give a turbo boost to May's Brexit deal.

WHAT IF MAY'S DEAL DEFEATED AGAIN?

May's closest allies and advisors are relying on MPs from across the political divides realizing that if May's deal is defeated, the most likely option is Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal or remaining in the bloc for years, and possibly even for ever.

That, in the view of many parliamentarians, would be viewed as treachery in the eyes of the voting public.

Ahead of the June 2016 referendum, ordered by May's predecessor David Cameron, the people of Britain were offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decide whether to stay in the EU or leave.

Against all expectations, the country voted by a 53-48 margin to leave. Even Remain supporting MPs say the will of the people must be respected. Two thirds of MPs backed remain in the referendum, and have had to come to terms that the majority of citizens wanted out of the EU.

Critics have accused many MPs of using every trick in the book to keep Britain in the EU by any means. Despite strong opposition and an almost pathological hatred of May's deal, many British people fear it might end up in being trapped indefinitely in the European Union.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 04:39:33|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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European Union chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier delivers a speech at the European Summit of Regions and Cities in Bucharest, capital of Romania, March 14, 2019. Michel Barnier on Thursday defined Britain's exit from the EU a lose-lose situation, stressing that no one could prove any positive thing Brexit can bring. (Xinhua/Agerpres)

BUCHAREST, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The European Union's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier on Thursday defined the UK exit from the Union a lose-lose situation, stressing that no one could prove any positive thing Brexit can bring.

Barnier made his remarks at a debate at the European Summit of Regions and Cities that takes place here on Thursday and Friday, at the Palace of Parliament.

According to the chief negotiator, Brexit has no added value and no one, not even Nigel Farage, key promoter of Brexit in UK, has so far been able to demonstrate what positive thing the move could bring.

Barnier expressed his regret that the British Parliament once again vetoed the withdrawal agreement, stressing that this would make things even more complicated. However, the official noted that he respects the decision taken by the majority of the British people.

He underscored that during the 18 months of negotiations, he has struggled to have an agreement with the British people and not an agreement against them.

According to him, the priority will have to be the fate of the 4.5 million citizens directly affected by Brexit, including 3.5 million people from EU member countries living or working in the UK and nearly 1 million British citizens in the European Union (EU).

Before arriving in Bucharest, the European official was quoted as saying that the EU has reached a critical point with regard to Brexit and that the solution must be found by London.

With just half a month left before Britain is scheduled to leave the EU, the British parliament rejected the Withdrawal Agreement with EU and the no-deal Brexit on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 04:44:34|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio, whose country is the guest of honor, speaks during the opening session of the sixth International Africa Development Forum (FIAD) in Casablanca, Morocco, on March 14, 2019. The sixth FIAD kicked off Thursday in the Moroccan city of Casablanca under the theme "when East meets West." Organized by the Moroccan pan-African investment fund Al Mada, the two-day meeting is a platform for dialogue, investment promotion and intra-African trade. (Xinhua/Chadi)

RABAT, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The sixth International Africa Development Forum (FIAD) kicked off Thursday in the Moroccan city of Casablanca under the theme "when East meets West."

The opening of the forum was chaired by Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio, whose country is the guest of honor.

Speaking at the opening session, the Sierra Leone's president stressed that Africa has enormous potential with a population of about one billion people and diverse natural resources, but a great deal of the potential remains unexploited.

He added that Africa offers huge opportunities of African investors in various sectors such as agri-food, trade and renewable energy.

Bio also underlined the need for filling the infrastructure gap, and meeting the complex challenges of promoting political stability and fighting corruption.

Organized by the Moroccan pan-African investment fund Al Mada, the two-day meeting is a platform for dialogue, investment promotion and intra-African trade.

It is meant to bring together and connect 2,000 economic operators from 34 African countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 05:04:38|Editor: yan

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LAGOS, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Nigerian police in the northern state of Kaduna on Thursday said unidentified gunmen shot dead 17 members of a local vigilante group following an attack on Jan Ruwa village Tuesday.

In a statement made available to Xinhua, Yakubu Sabo, the state police spokesperson, disclosed that a group of armed men entered the village and rustled many cows.

He said a team of vigilante group of the village mobilized and pursued the criminals into the deep forest. They engaged the gunmen in serious gun duel, during which some vigilante men lost their lives.

He added that 15 dead bodies of the vigilante men were initially recovered, and additional two bodies were found later.

State Commissioner of Police Ahmad Abdurrahaman condemned the killing and vowed to apprehend the perpetrators.

Abdurrahaman appealed to the public to assist police in providing relevant information on any suspicious person or group to ensure effective crime prevention in the state.

Kaduna is one of the states in northern Nigeria that saw a high number of attacks, with women and children being the most affected.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 05:09:38|Editor: yan

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BAGHDAD, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Nine Islamic State (IS) militants were killed in an airstrike by Iraqi airforce and international coalition aircraft in Iraq's northern province of Kirkuk, the Iraqi military said.

"Acting on intelligence reports, the Iraqi and coalition airforce bombarded an IS hideout in Wadi Abu Khanajir area in south of the provincial capital Kirkuk, some 250 km north of Baghdad," according to a statement by the Iraqi Joint Operations Command (JOC).

The Iraqi forces searched the destroyed hideout and found nine IS militants killed inside, along with 20 cellphones connected to explosives, the statement added.

The security situation in Iraq has been dramatically improved after Iraqi security forces fully defeated the extremist IS militants across the country late in 2017.

The IS remnants, however, have since melted in urban areas or resorted to deserts and rugged areas as safe havens, carrying out guerilla attacks from time to time against security forces and civilians.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 05:24:41|Editor: yan

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MOSCOW, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Russia's Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft carrying three astronauts successfully took off for the International Space Station (ISS) and entered the planned orbit Thursday, Russian state space corporation Roscosmos said.

Soyuz-FG rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 22:14 Moscow time (1914 GMT), Roscosmos said in a press release.

At 22:23 Moscow time (1923 GMT), the spacecraft detached from the third launch vehicle stage and continued its autonomous flight to the ISS under the guidance of specialists from the Russian Mission Control Center.

Soyuz MS-12, carrying Roscosmos astronaut Alexei Ovchinin, and NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch, will automatically approach the ISS and dock to it at 04:07 Moscow time (0107 GMT) Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 05:49:45|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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by Ren Ke, Li Meng

BERLIN, March 14 (Xinhua) -- After being taken over by a Chinese state-owned company, Germany's EEW Energy From Waste is on a steady growth track, instead of holding doubts at the beginning.

With a history of over 140 years, EEW was taken over by China's state-owned Beijing Enterprises for 1.4 billion euros (1.6 billion U.S. dollars) in 2016. It was the largest Chinese acquisition of a German company at that time.

"The cooperation is on a very high level. It couldn't be better," said Bernard M. Kemper, chief executive officer of the EEW, told Xinhua in an interview.

As Europe's biggest company dedicated to waste incineration, EEW has 16 incineration facilities in Germany and two in neighboring countries, with a capacity of processing around 4.7 million tons of waste per year for energy production.

"If you go back to three years ago, it was a challenge for both parties. For Chinese shareholders, they need to understand the German framework and market. On the other side, EEW had a Chinese shareholder," said Kemper.

But nothing had changed in EEW except gaining support from the Chinese shareholders, and vice versa. In the past three years, the Chinese shareholders approved several new major projects for expansion, allowing the company to rebuild a line in Premnitz with 70 million euros and a plant near Hamburg with 150 million euros, to name a few.

"The message is that, after three years of the takeover, EEW is not only willing to grow, together with the shareholder we are able to grow. The Chinese shareholder trusts the company and brings assets to the company, and they allow and ask EEW to expand its new and existing business," added Kemper.

At the beginning, the staff was worried about the difference between a German company and a Chinese state-owned one, but later the concern was dispelled.

"There is no difference between a German and a Chinese company in terms of management and the staff. We do the things we have to do, and nothing has changed. The staff is satisfied with this development and the status of the company," said Ronald Philipp, spokesman of EEW.

As the new business is coming, so are new employment and more turnover. Kemper said the new line in Premnitz will bring several million euros more turnover per year, which is considerable for the quite stable industry.

With a reliable Chinese shareholder, EEW is now looking for expansion in neighboring European countries, and on the other hand, with the combination of German technology and the shareholder's channel in China, EEW is now supporting two projects in China, one in Beijing's suburb and another in the coastal tourist city of Beihai in China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The Beihai facility, which is under construction, is designed to deal with 450,000 tons of waste per year. EEW's technicians checked the designs of the Chinese projects, and hold weekly exchanges with their Chinese colleagues. EEW is also trying to give good examples of German work that could be transported to China.

Beijing Enterprises' takeover of EEW came as China is focusing more on sustainable development.

Beijing Enterprises said after the takeover that it would learn Europe's advanced technology, concepts and management experience, in a bid to improve China's environmental protection industry and make contributions to the country's sustainable development.

For EEW, the deal is a good example of a win-win deal and mutual trust.

"They gave us a promise: you should grow in Europe, in a European platform, and you should support us in China on our internal projects. This is what we are doing," said Kemper. (1 euro = 1.13 U.S. dollars)
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 05:54:48|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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LAGOS, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The death toll from the collapse of a three-storey building which housed a primary school in Lagos, Nigeria's economic hub, has risen to 18, as more bodies were recovered in the early hours of Thursday.

Commissioner for health in Lagos, Jide Idris, told reporters that 18 people had been confirmed dead and more than 60 rescued.

Although rescue operation has ended, Idris said medical workers were still working to stabilize some of the victims.

According to the official, it was difficult to give an official figure of casualties now as the list of dead and injured victims was still being compiled.

At least three general hospitals and a children hospital in Lagos are currently treating victims of the collapsed building.

Medical workers earlier confirmed to Xinhua that 12 pupils, a pregnant woman, and the proprietress of the school were killed following the collapse.

Adesina Tiamiyu, head of the state emergency management agency, said rescue operation was brought to a halt at 3 a.m. local time on Thursday.

However, local residents have insisted that the operation must continue as they suspected that more victims were still trapped underneath the rubble.

Security operatives have cordoned off the area, preventing residents and people still searching for their loved ones to go near the rubble.

The collapsed building housed a school which had up to 172 registered pupils.

Soldiers, police personnel, and personnel from local disaster management agencies and the Red Cross jointly attempted to pull out victims stuck in rubles of twisted wreckage.

Heavy machinery types of equipment were deployed to the scene. The cause of the collapse is yet to be determined.

Residents have called on the state government to take firm action to reduce the incidents of building collapse in the area.

Governor of Lagos State Akinwunmi Ambode said a thorough investigation will be launched into the incident.

The collapsed building had been marked for demolition about three times, but the building regulatory agency did not demolish it.

Building collapses often occur in Lagos as some property owners and developers do not adhere strictly to planning and building laws and regulations. In most cases, heavy loads are placed on the building and substandard materials are often used in the construction work.

Kunle Awobodu, the National President of Building Collapse Prevention Guild, said there are over 1,000 buildings unfit for human habitation in Lagos Island.

"There are over 1,000 other distressed buildings of this nature in Lagos, which, if nothing is done to demolish them, they will still collapse, resulting in more calamities in the state," Awobodu said in a statement.

In his reaction, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari expressed sadness over the collapse and sympathized with the parents and relatives of the deceased. He also wished the injured speedy and complete recovery.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 06:04:50|Editor: yan

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BEIRUT, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil said on Thursday that Lebanon will succeed in returning Syrian refugees back to their homeland, Elnashra, an online independent newspaper, reported.

"We will succeed in returning Syrian refugees back to their homeland," Bassil said during a meeting held by his Free Patriotic Movement party.

The foreign minister said that the council of ministers should adopt a unified plan on the return of the Syrian refugees to their country.

Lebanon hosts over one million Syrian refugees who fled their country.

Lebanese officials have been calling on the international community to increase their support in a bid to encourage more Syrians to go back to their country.

Meanwhile, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Thursday requested over 2.5 billion U.S. dollars of funding from the international community during Brussels conference to support long-term projects to facilitate the the return of the Syrian refugees.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 06:14:51|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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Israelis stay inside a bomb shelter in Tel Aviv, Israel, on March 14, 2019. Israel's army said that two rockets were launched at Tel Aviv on Thursday night, wrecking panic in Israel's financial capital. The rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip, a military spokesperson said in a statement. One of the rockets was intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome anti-rocket system and the other fell in an open field. (Xinhua/Gideon Markowicz)

JERUSALEM, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Thursday night an urgent consultation with the country's top military commanders following a rocket attack on Tel Aviv from Gaza.

His office said he headed to the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv to hold "security consultation."

Local media reported that the gathering included Chief of General Staff Aviv Kochavi, Head of the Shin Bet Internal Security Agency Nadav Argaman, and other top military officials.

The military said that two rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip.

"The alert and warning systems operated as required," a military spokesperson said in a statement, adding that "no interceptions were made by aerial defense systems."

Five people were treated for hysteria and a 10-year-old boy and a man in his 50s were injured and needed hospital care, the emergency medical services said.

Israeli army's spokesman Ronen Manelis told Channel 11 TV that the rockets hit Israel by surprise, which occurred without prior warning.

In the wake of the attack, Tel Aviv's Mayor Ron Huldai ordered the opening of all shelters in the city as well as the municipal Operation Room.

The rare attack was an escalation of tensions between Gaza and Israel. Israel usually retaliates such attacks with heavy airstrikes.

No organization has claimed responsibility for the attack yet.

Palestinian security officials said the Egyptian delegation, which arrived earlier on Thursday to the besieged enclave, had left, heading back to Israel.

The intelligence officials held talks with Hamas heads in an attempt to broker calm between Gaza and Israel.

It was the first time that rockets were launched at Tel Aviv since Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip in 2014.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 07:10:01|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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WASHINGTON, March 14 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday questioned Britain's handling of the Brexit while voicing his anticipation of a big trade deal with the country in the future.

"I'm surprised how badly it's all gone from the standpoint of the negotiation," Trump told reporters at the White House during his meeting with visiting Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

"There was no reason for that to happen. They could have had the vote and it should have gone smoothly," the president added.

Meanwhile, Trump claimed that the United States "will stay right in our lane."

Leaving the European Union indicates that Britain could conduct bilateral trade deals with other countries, including the United States. Trump on Thursday voiced his optimism for forging a bilateral tie with Britain.

"We can do a very big trade deal with the UK," he told reporters.

Trump also said in a Thursday morning tweet that his administration "looks forward to negotiating a large scale Trade Deal with the United Kingdom."

"The potential is unlimited!" he tweeted.

British parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal, throwing the country's Brexit process into further chaos.

With May's second defeat over Brexit since January, the British people are facing a hard choice between no-deal Brexit or a delayed Brexit.

On Thursday, British lawmakers voted to reject an amendment calling for a second Brexit referendum.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 07:25:06|Editor: Xiang Bo

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NEW YORK, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Twenty China specialists have been selected for the Public Intellectuals Program (PIP) by the National Committee on United States-China Relations (NCUSCR), the New York-based organization said Thursday.

The 20 fellows comprise a wide range of research interests, geographic locations, and types of institutions.

Launched in 2005, PIP identifies outstanding members of the next generation of American China specialists -- in the academic, professional, or policymaking spheres -- who, in the tradition of earlier China hands, have the interest and potential to venture outside of academia or their professions into areas relevant to foreign policy and public education.

The two-year program is designed to enrich the 20 new fellows' understanding of policymaking processes in both the United States and China; help them establish useful relationships both with their academic colleagues and with policy practitioners; encourage them to move beyond the confines of their own disciplines; and nurture their ability to engage with the public at a national, regional, and local level.

The six round of PIP, starting from March through December 2020, will be carried out through a series of activities, including seminars in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco as well as a study tour of China, according to the NCUSCR.

Founded in 1966, the NCUSCR is a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of understanding and cooperation between the United States and China.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 07:50:11|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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GAZA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Israeli warplanes carried out early Friday airstrike on Gaza Strip military targets in response to two rockets fired from the coastal enclave into Tel Aviv in central Israel Thursday night, security officials said.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Moments before a reputed mob boss was gunned down in front of his Staten Island, New York, home on Wednesday night, the alleged killer lured the unsuspecting man outside by crashing into his parked car, multiple police sources told ABC News.



The unidentified hit man drove to Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali's Todt Hill house and came to a stop.



Law enforcement sources told ABC News that the driver put his vehicle in reverse and crashed into Cali's parked Cadillac SUV  forcing the license plate to fall off Cali's car.



Once Cali came outside the home, sources said, video surveillance showed the two men talking and then shaking hands.



Sources said Cali, 53, appeared unaware of impending danger because he turned his back on his killer to put the license plate inside the rear of the SUV.



Thats when the gunman pulled out a 9mm pistol, held it with two hands - as if he was trained, the sources said  and opened fire. The video is grainy and has not been released because the suspects face cannot be made out, sources told ABC News. Investigators are continuing to canvass the neighborhood in search of clearer video.



Twelve shots were fired and Cali was hit six times, New York Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said at a news conference on Thursday.



Cali, was taken to Staten Island University North hospital and was pronounced dead less than 40 minutes later, police said.

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 08:25:14|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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MUMBAI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The death toll in the foot-bridge collapse in India's financial capital of Mumbai has risen to five including three women, media reported late Thursday.

The collapse also caused 32 people injured.

Constructed in 1980, the foot-bridge collapsed during peak hours on Thursday evening at around 7:30 pm. It was linked to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, one of the busiest railway stations in India.

In a statement, the Ministry of Railways said, "The bridge was of BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation). However, we are extending all our support to the victims. Railway doctors & personnel are cooperating with BMC in relief & rescue operations."

Expressing anguish on the loss of lives, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, "My thoughts are with the bereaved families. Wishing that the injured recover at the earliest. The Maharashtra Government is providing all possible assistance to those affected."

Expressing grief at the incident, Devendra Fadnavis, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, said, "We have ordered high-level enquiry. This bridge was constructed in 1980. This bridge was found 'fit' in the structural audit. We are finding out who is responsible for this audit. We will take strict action against those responsible. Ex-gratia of 7,210 U.S. dollars to the relative of deceased and 721 U.S. dollars to injured. Preliminary enquiry report will come soon."

Mumbai is the capital of Maharashtra, India's South Western state.

Following the collapse of Gokhale bridge in Mumbai's suburb Andheri in last July, the city municipal corporation decided to conduct a structural audit of 296 bridges in the city. Based on the findings of the report, 18 bridges including eight foot-over bridges were to be demolished and reconstructed. Six-one bridges needed major repairs, 107 needed minor repairs while 110 were found to be in good condition.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 09:05:20|Editor: Yang Yi

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BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) held its closing meeting Friday morning.

Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders attended the closing meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Legislators will vote on a draft foreign investment law and draft resolutions on the government work report, and the work reports of the NPC Standing Committee, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate.

They will also vote on draft resolutions on the reports of the national economic and social development plans as well as the central and local budgets, and a draft decision on the resignation of an NPC Standing Committee member.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 09:10:21|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A national pastime that has seen a decline in recent years is once again attempting to take the skies with the Brunei International Kite Festival.

The five-day event, which kicks off on Friday and ends on March 19, will see approximately two hundred kite flyers, 100 of whom international participants from 30 countries and regions, reviving the dormant pastime that has been closely tied to Brunei's culture.

Kite flying has seen a decline in popularity in Brunei due to airspace restrictions, although local residents want to continue the kite flying culture, said Assistant Secretary of the Brunei International Kite Festival Badarudin Murni.

"Kite flying is the traditional hobby of Bruneians but it is slowly disappearing and we want to bring it back," he said.

The inaugural event will be held at the Taman Mahkota Jubli Emas in the capital.

Badarudin said the site underwent approval from government authorities.

"We had to apply for approval from the Department of Civil Aviation because they are the authority for this," he said.

He also said that while limited, there are still places listed on the Department of Civil Aviation's website that allow kite flying activities.

The assistant secretary said the association was especially keen to introduce Brunei's own flavor of kite flying to the country's younger generation.

"The youth are not familiar with the kites we have in Brunei. They do not know the names and the designs and how these kites are made."

"In this festival, we want to introduce Brunei's kites to them through workshops and exhibitions," he said.

Badarudin went on to say that many of Brunei's kites still keep traditional designs but are constructed with modern technology and materials.

"We used to use paper, now we can use the same materials used in parachutes. The kites now are also larger. They can be as large as 10 feet," he said.

He hopes the younger generation could come and participate in this traditional festival and enjoy the old fun.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 09:30:24|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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WINDHOEK, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Namibia and Kenya have agreed to cement their diplomatic and economic ties for the future, a Kenyan diplomat said on Thursday.

"On the international front Namibia supports Kenya's bid for a seat in the Security Council and in return Kenya supports all of Namibia's international relations policies. This support is key for the both nations and our relations will continue to strengthen with such engagements," Kenyan High Commissioner to Namibia Benjamin Langat told Xinhua.

Langat also reiterated that both Namibia and Kenya are keenly pushing for improved relations though the grandiose African Continental Free Trade Agreement meant to hasten inter-Africa trade.

"I must also admit that although efforts have been made in driving the Free Trade Area agreement in Africa, trade relations (in Africa) are still lagging behind," he said, adding that Kenya and Namibia will see more regular trades between each other in future.

Langat added that the forthcoming official visit by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta to Namibia next week for the independence celebrations is a sign of growing relations between the two countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 09:45:28|Editor: xuxin

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A Palestinian checks the site of an Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, March 15, 2019. Israeli warplanes carried out early Friday intensive air strikes on Gaza Strip military targets in response to two rockets fired from the coastal enclave into Tel Aviv in central Israel on Thursday night, said security officials and eyewitnesses. (Xinhua/Yasser Qudih)

GAZA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Israeli warplanes carried out early Friday intensive air strikes on Gaza Strip military targets in response to two rockets fired from the coastal enclave into Tel Aviv in central Israel on Thursday night, said security officials and eyewitnesses.

Israeli drones, helicopters, and F16 war jets hovered over Gaza Strip right after Israeli media on Thursday reported the rocket attacks, which caused no damage or injuries, they said. It was the first time that rockets were launched at Tel Aviv since Israel's military operation in Gaza Strip in 2014.

Eyewitnesses said several powerful explosions were heard in southern Gaza Strip and in Gaza city's southern suburbs. According to security officials, several military facilities were targeted and no injuries reported.

Israeli air forces warplanes have been carrying out air strikes on military facilities in Gaza Strip in response to the rockets fired from Gaza into Tel Aviv, said an Israeli army spokesman in a press statement.

No one has claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks.

In Gaza, Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Hamas movement which rules Gaza Strip, said in a short text message sent to reporters that it "is not responsible for the rockets that were launched tonight towards the enemy."

"The rockets were launched during a meeting held in Gaza between the leadership of Islamic Hamas movement and the Egyptian security delegation on the calm understanding related to the Gaza Strip," the militant group added.

Islamic Jihad spokesman Dawood Shihab also denied in a press statement an Israeli media report which claimed that his group was responsible for launching the two rockets into Israel.

The Hamas-run Ministry of Interior and National Security said in an emailed press statement that it followed the incident of firing rockets from the Gaza Strip.

"Firing the rockets from Gaza Strip is outside the factional and national consensus," said the statement, adding that "the interior ministry will take its measures against the violators."

Palestinian security officials on Thursday said the senior Egyptian security intelligence delegation that arrived in Gaza early on Thursday had left the coastal enclave and headed back to Israel after the rocket attacks.

The Egyptian delegation had held talks with Hamas leaders earlier in Gaza on enforcing an Egyptian-brokered calm understanding that was reached between Hamas and Israel in November 2018, said the officials.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 09:55:31|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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KIGALI, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda on Thursday denied claims made by neighboring Uganda that it has imposed an embargo on bilateral trade with Uganda.

Rwanda's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that recent statements by Uganda in relation to the alleged trade embargo are "diversionary" and do not address fundamental issues raised by Rwanda.

Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa on Wednesday said the export of Ugandan goods to Rwanda and Rwandan goods to Uganda has been prohibited by Rwandan authorities. He said the Rwandan authorities are only allowing in trucks carrying transit goods headed for Rwanda or transiting through the country to the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places.

The statement from the Rwandan Foreign Ministry on Thursday said the country's commitment to free movement of people, including Ugandans, goods and services within the region and on the continent is unquestionable.

Rwanda also called upon the Ugandan government to address what it says were key issues between the two countries.

The Rwandan Foreign Ministry said in the statement that hundreds of Rwandan people haven been "killed, arrested, incarcerated without consular access and tortured," and that close to 1,000 Rwandan people were "illegally deported" to Rwanda in inhumane conditions.

The statement also said armed groups and terrorist organizations hostile to Rwanda are supported by "institutions and officials of the government of Uganda."

It also said the key issues include "the targeting of ordinary Rwandan citizens involved in regular business and trade activities within the framework of the East African Community and the hampering of the free movement of goods, including perishables, to and through Uganda."

Uganda and Rwanda have recently had a frosty relation. Rwanda accused Uganda of harboring its dissidents, an allegation Uganda denied. Uganda has refuted reports that it closed its border with Rwanda, saying that it is committed to ensuring free movement of persons and goods across borders.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 09:55:31|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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WASHINGTON, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The United States has revoked 340 visas from Venezuelans since Monday, including over 100 belonging to people close to incumbent President Nicholas Maduro, announced the U.S. State Department on Thursday.

"Since this Monday ... we have revoked 340 visas, 107 of which include visas of Maduro's former diplomats and their families," said Robert Palladino, the department's deputy spokesperson, at a daily briefing.

Palladino added that the latest move brought the total number of revoked visas from the Venezuelans to more than 600 since late 2018.

"Additional visas are being considered for revocation," the spokesperson said.

The Trump administration recently has kept piling up pressure on Maduro, including imposing several rounds of sanctions on Venezuelan security officials and governors whom it claims were close to Maduro.

It has also been reported that Washington is mulling financial sanctions that could terminate transactions of Visa Inc, Mastercard Inc and other financial institutions in the South American country.

The United States recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's "interim president" on Jan. 23, days after Maduro was inaugurated for a second term as Venezuelan president.

In response to Washington's support for Guaido, Maduro announced that he was severing "diplomatic and political" ties with the United States.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 10:00:32|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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HAVANA, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Cuba said on Thursday that the alleged "acoustic attacks" over the last two years on U.S. and Canadian diplomatic personnel on the island have been "manipulated" and "used for aggressive purposes" by Washington.

Carlos Fernandez de Cossio, director of U.S. affairs at Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a press conference on Thursday that the issue for the Caribbean nation is a matter of "national security."

He said Washington has spread the false accusation since February 2017 that U.S. staff in Cuba reported health symptoms such as brain damage, hear loss, nausea and instability due to alleged use of long-range acoustic equipment.

"We have no evidence this was generated to harm Cuba, but we categorically affirm there's a group of U.S. politicians and officials which have manipulated the issue and have tried to promote it to damage and rollback relations," Fernandez de Cossio said.

He said there is no evidence to support Washington's hypothesis, adding that the island hasn't had the proper collaboration and a fluid exchange with security agencies from the United States and Canada.

"We don't doubt some of these diplomats got sick, what we deny is the ailments and symptoms are the result of attacks in Cuba ... There are no reasons for any diplomat of any country to feel concerned for their health and safety in Cuba," he said.

Fernandez de Cossio said it is "striking and worrying" to see how Washington persists, two years later, in "ignoring repeated public questioning" of the theories about the possible causes of the conditions presented by the diplomats.

"There is no evidence, theory, or research result attached to science that justifies the use of the term attack which the U.S. government continues to publicly express, although it does not use it in the official exchanges that we have sustained," he said.

Fernandez de Cossio also said that Cuba takes the issue with "extreme seriousness" and has appointed its best experts to conduct investigations.

Members of an interdisciplinary investigation committee made up of more than 30 Cuban experts which have carried out the investigation for over two years also participated in the press conference.

The academics, government officials and scientists shared data, information, graphics and details of the ongoing probe.

Some Canadian diplomats have also experienced similar symptoms. Fernandez de Cossio said both nations have cooperated to find out the causes.

Over 20 U.S. diplomats and their family members reportedly showed symptoms such as hearing loss, tinnitus, vertigo, headaches and fatigue since late 2016. In response, U.S. President Donald Trump sharply reduced embassy staff in Havana, and expelled 15 Cuban diplomats in October 2017.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 10:30:38|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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U.S. President Donald Trump (L) welcomes Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar (C) at the White House in Washington D.C., the United States, on March 14, 2019. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

WASHINGTON, March 14 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump met on Thursday with visiting Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar at the White Houseto discuss bilateral ties and other issues.

The two leaders discussed the further expansion of bilateral trade and investment as well as cooperation between their two countries as Britain is leaving the European Union (EU), said the White House in a statement released after the meeting.

Trump and Varadkar also talked about cooperation on cyber-security, according to the statement.

Varadkar's visit came as the White House is celebrating the annual St. Patrick's Day, a holiday that honors Irish culture.

The British parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal, throwing the country's Brexit process into further chaos.

With May's second defeat over Brexit since January, the British people are facing a hard choice between a no-deal Brexit or a delayed Brexit.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 10:35:39|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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WASHINGTON, March 14 (Xinhua) -- A senior Afghan security official on Thursday blasted the U.S. talks with the Taliban in Washington, claiming that it will not lead to peace in the war-torn country.

Talking to reporters, Afghanistan's National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib accused U.S. Special Representative for Afghan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad who leads the U.S. negotiation team in talks with the Taliban.

"We think either Zal -- Ambassador Khalilzad -- doesn't know how to negotiate or in fact there may be other reasons behind what he is doing," Mohib told CBS News.

"What he is doing is not getting a deal that will result in peace in Afghanistan," Mohib added.

Khalilzad has been negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban to end the 17-year conflict. Those discussions have reportedly thus far excluded the Afghan government.

The U.S. State Department expressed its dissatisfaction with Mohib's remarks later in the day.

"We don't believe that the comments that were made (by Mohib) warrant a public response. And we are in discussions with the government to express our displeasure," said Robert Palladino, the department's deputy spokesperson, at a daily briefing.

The United States and the Taliban on Tuesday wrapped up their talks in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, with the U.S. side claiming "meaningful progress" was made.

Washington later revealed that the Taliban had agreed that "peace will require both sides to fully address four core issues," namely "counterterrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, intra-Afghan dialogue, and a comprehensive ceasefire."

It is unclear, however, if the Afghan government and other Afghan political leaders will be ready to embrace the tentative deal worked out by Khalilzad.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 10:40:41|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Gunmen stormed a mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand, which resulted in at least six people dead, local media reported.

It reported that at least two gunmen opened fire at a mosque in Christchurch. Witnesses described that there are blood and multiple deaths.

Armed police have been deployed. Local schools are locked down.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 10:40:41|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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CANBERRA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has launched an attack against social media companies, describing them as "dangerous".

In an interview with News Corp Australia on Friday, Morrison said that he does not allow his daughters, aged nine and 11, to use social media.

He said that global giants in the field such as Facebook and Twitter had a "moral as well as broader societal responsibilities" to teach users that what they read on the platforms is not necessarily true.

"These are valuable tools but they can also be quite dangerous in the wrong hands," Morrison said.

"Just because you read it on the internet doesn't mean it is true and it is important that kids understand that," Morrison said.

"Our kids don't go on social media, but at some point when they do (they have to understand) you don't assume that everything there is genuine and you have to develop that scepticism," Morrison said.

"If you create these things then you have a moral as well as a broader societal responsibility in terms of how they are used," Morrison added.

Friday marked Australia's National Day of Action against Bullying and Violence.

Approximately 2.4 million students at 5,726 schools took part in the action day and committed to reducing the prevalence of bullying.

According to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, 34 percent of students aged between eight and 13 use social media services.

Cyber-bullying has been a prominent issue in Australia since 14-year-old Dolly Everett from the Northern Territory (NT) took her own life in January 2018 after being bullied online.

Malcolm Turnbull, who was Prime Minister at the time of Everett's death, said that much more work was needed from the government to stop cyber-bullying and minimize its impact when it does happen.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 10:50:43|Editor: Yang Yi

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KIGALI, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Embassy in Rwanda donated laptops, desktop computers and printers to Rwanda's FAWE Girls' School here on Thursday.

"We thank the government of China and the embassy of China in Rwanda for supporting education in our country, and most especially girl's education. We are honored to receive these education materials," said the secondary school's headteacher Eugenia Kairaba, who attended the handover ceremony held in the Chinese embassy.

Speaking on the occassion, Chinese Ambassador Rao Hongwei spoke highly of the increasing cooperation and exchanges in all fields between China and Rwanda and stressed the importance of girls' education in women's empowerment.

Rao pledged that the embassy would further support educational activities in Rwanda and revealed that the embassy and the FAWE Girls' School are also working together to set up a Chinese center in the school to help students learn the Chinese language and culture.

The public boarding school enrolls students mainly from middle- and low-income families, and is considered as one of Rwanda's best girls' schools in terms of teaching standards and student performance.

The Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) is a pan-African nongovernmental organization founded in 1992 by five women ministers of education to promote girls' and women's education in sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 11:00:45|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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WINDHOEK, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Namibia is making steady progress in combating domestic violence and general violence against women through introduction of various measures, a senior government official said Thursday.

The key measures taken by the country to combat rampant crimes against women include stiffer minimum sentences for rapists and provisions to explicitly criminalize marital rape, said Yvonne Dausab, chairperson of the Law Reform and Development Commission (LRDC) of Namibia.

She said Namibia also worked on the Combating of Domestic Violence Act which provides for protection orders in domestic violence matters.

"It spells out the critical role of police officers in the incidents of domestic violence offenses. The most notable achievement of this legislation is the provision of easy and quick protection orders for immediate relief," she said.

Dausab said the LRDC, a government commission charged with making recommendations for legal reform, has worked hard to consolidate the legislation framework that combats violence against women.

"Apart from the legislation, the LRDC has produced 30 reports on various topics, ranging from family law, customary law, administrative justice, insolvency, divorce, redline marriages, mental health, torture to name a few. We have also published an academically peer reviewed book, and annual reports setting out our activities," she said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 11:10:47|Editor: Yang Yi

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KITWE, Zambia, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has the potential to cement Zambia-China relations and may result in sustainable economic development for the southern African nation, an economist said Thursday.

Mathews Muyembe, chairperson of the Economics Association of Zambia for the Copperbelt Province Chapter, said China is looking at strengthening intra-African trade by building roads to foster development.

"Chinese are global players. They do not come into the country to dictate, as they are law-abiding citizens. They follow the laws and regulations of the countries they invest into," he said.

He said the BRI will benefit Zambia and other African nations through improvement of infrastructure such as roads and communications.

Zambia, he said, needs more manufacturing plants to enhance development through the export of goods, including intra-African trade and beyond, to build a strong economic foundation.

According to him, Zambia as a land-locked country should enhance its economic activities through various trade corridors whose model was started by Zambia's first President Kenneth Kaunda during the Chinese-financed construction of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway in the 1970s.
Source: Xinhuanet| 2019-03-15 11:18:21|Editor: Li Xia

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Tanzanian ambassador to China Mbelwa Kairuki accepts an interview with Xinhuanet in Beijing, capital of China, March 8, 2019. (Xinhuanet/Li Xia)

By Li Xia, Zhang Yin

BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhuanet) -- The changes that have taken place in China over the past 70 years is a great leap forward, Tanzanian ambassador to China Mbelwa Kairuki said in a recent interview with Xinhuanet.

One of the changes is that hundreds of millions of people in China have been lifted out of poverty, said the ambassador.

The concept of targeted poverty alleviation focuses on peoples well-being, he added. Now, this targeting initiative to reduce poverty has been quite successful at all levels, he praised.

Other changes include that massive infrastructure has been constructed in China and that China is pioneering in agriculture, according to the ambassador.

This year 2019 is special for Tanzania and China as it marks the 55th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations, he said. Over the last 55 years, Tanzania and China have cooperation in many fields.

Tanzania hopes to attract Chinese investment for infrastructure, especially in the construction of industrial parks, he said.

Tanzania is one of the main beneficiaries of various initiatives proposed during the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), said the ambassador.

In addition, Tanzania attended the first China International Importation Expo (CIIE) held in November 2018, which was a good opportunity for Tanzanian products to be promoted in the Chinese markets, he noted.

The ambassador expressed hopes for more trade between Tanzania and China and more Tanzanian agricultural products to be exported to the Chinese market, including coffee, cashew nuts, tea, sesame, and soybeans.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a global initiative by China, he said, It is Chinese innovation and it is Chinese contribution to the world.

Currently, new challenges have arisen such as economic instability around the world. The ambassador thought these challenges need to be addressed jointly by the countries along the Belt and Road.

The ambassador hoped that Tanzania and China have an opportunity to talk on the achievements that have been made and look forward to the future during the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation to be held next month.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 11:30:53|Editor: Li Xia

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TOKYO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Tokyo stocks extended gains Friday morning as the British Parliament's overnight vote on a delay to its planned departure from the European Union was welcomed by investors here, with a weaker yen further adding support.

The 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average gained 217.71 points, or 1.02 percent, from Thursday to 21,504.73.

The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, meanwhile, added 17.19 points, or 1.08 percent, at 1,605.48.

Mining, machinery and chemical-lines issues comprised those that gained the most by the morning break.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 11:30:53|Editor: Li Xia

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CAPE TOWN, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The South African government on Thursday pledged to coordinate efforts to defuse the worsening power crisis since February in the country.

The efforts to seek financial, operational and structural sustainability to the state-owned electricity utility Eskom "are proceeding in earnest," the cabinet said after a fortnightly meeting in Cape Town.

Eskom supplies about 95 percent of the electricity consumed in South Africa. The heavily-indebted power firm on Wednesday just warned of load shedding operations in the days to come.

Regarding the new spate of power outages, one of the topics discussed at the cabinet meeting, government spokeswoman Phumla Williams said, "The performance of the power plants remain volatile even though load shedding has not been implemented since February 15, 2019."

There were a number of major incidents in the distribution system that have contributed to power outages, she added.

Hours after the spokeswoman's statement, Eskom renewed load shedding after a breakdown at its Kusile power plant project, plunging large area of the country into darkness. The utility has said the load shedding conducted rotationally is a measure of last resort to protect its power system from total collapse.

According to Williams, the cabinet has received a report from Deputy President David Mabuza on the work of a joint special cabinet committee on Eskom established in response to the existing power crisis.

A newly-appointed government working team on Eskom's technical review and the Eskom board have started their work this week for producing a preliminary report within four weeks on ways to address the power crisis, she said.

She added the cabinet meeting also addressed such specifics as the supply chain of coal and the performance of Eskom's two major power stations that had broken down recently.

South Africa has incurred an estimated economic loss of some 300 billion rand (some 21 billion U.S. dollars) due to power outages since 2008.

Eskom has been criticized for poor management and corruption has been blamed for a decade-old power shortage in South Africa. It is also accused of using load shedding to blackmail the government into helping it repay its debts estimated at 420 billion rand (some 29 billion dollars).
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 11:35:54|Editor: Li Xia

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LONDON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Scientists have been trying to better predict if and when women's breast cancer could come back using statistical tools.

A team consisting of researchers from the University of Cambridge and Stanford University has examined the patterns of genetic changes within tumours from nearly 2,000 women with breast cancer.

These patients' cancer progress has also been followed for over 20 years, including whether their cancer recurred.

Scientists are working with the collected genetic analysis information to create a routine test affordable in hospitals which could help predict recurrence risk more accurately.

"In this study, we've delved deeper into breast cancer molecular subtypes, so we can more accurately identify who might be at risk of relapsing and uncover new ways of treating them," said Carlos Caldas, lead researcher at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute.

The team previously identified 11 different molecular subgroups of breast cancer, each with distinct clinical trajectories that differ from one person to another.

"We've shown that the molecular nature of a woman's breast cancer determines how their disease could progress, not just for the first five years, but also later, even if it comes back," said Oscar Rueda, first author of the paper that published Wednesday on the scientific journal Nature.

Researchers noted that more researches are needed to understand how to tailor treatments to a patient's individual tumour biology before the test can be introduced universally.

The team is also investigating personalised treatment options for different breast cancer subtypes.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 11:40:55|Editor: Yang Yi

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BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Friday called for continued dialogue, especially between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States, to eventually resolve the Korean peninsula issue.

China is committed to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, Li told a press conference following the conclusion of the annual national legislative session.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 12:01:02|Editor: Li Xia

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CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand, March 15 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern said on Friday after gunshots in Christchurch that "this is one of New Zealand's darkest days."

The prime minister spoke to the public at 4:00 p.m. local time. "It is an unprecedented violence in New Zealand. There is no place for such extreme violence in New Zealand," Ardern said.

"My thoughts are with Christchurch," she added.

Several shooting incidents happened in Christchurch on Friday afternoon including inside two mosques, resulting in at least nine people dead in "six different places."

It is reported that at least two gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch. Witnesses described that there are much blood and multiple deaths.

The prime minister said the situation was still evolving and she could not confirm the casualties at the moment

Chinese Consul General in Christchurch Wang Zhijian told Xinhua that emergence response has been activated. The Consulate General office is working with local police to check if there is any Chinese citizen being caught in the gunfire.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 12:11:06|Editor: Li Xia

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MACHINGA, Malawi, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Malawian President Peter Mutharika said Thursday that the United Nations (UN) will send two experts to Malawi in the next two weeks to investigate the attacks and killings of people with albinism in the country.

Mutharika made the announcement in the eastern district of Machinga, which is one of the districts that has recorded most cases of abductions and killings of albinos.

"I'd like to announce that the United Nations is sending two experts to investigate the killings of people with albinism to establish who are the people involved in these evil acts and where the market, if there's any, is located," said Mutharika when visiting people who have been displaced by recent floods.

Mutharika's announcement follows a series of criticism from the opposition, local and international organizations that he has failed to bring the killings to an end.

On February 28, Mutharika met a group of albinos at his presidential residence where he made seven pledges, including directing the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs to involve international investigators to delve into the atrocities.

The Malawian leader has also instituted a commission of inquiry to investigate the killings that have shocked the sub-Saharan country.

A special parliamentary committee, which has been set to investigate the killings, recommended earlier this week that foreign investigators should be involved in the investigation "because government security agencies such as the police and intelligence have failed."

Mutharika has also directed the country's treasury to release about 4.1 million U.S. dollars to fund the implementation of the 2015 National Action Plan (NAP), which includes equipping and empowering police to protect people with albinism.

Since November 2014 when the first case of killing of albinos was reported, at least 23 brutal deaths have been recorded in Malawi, while 14 people with albinism have been reported missing.

Mutharika has always condemned the killings, describing them as "acts of evil perpetrated by stupidity and primitive way of thinking."
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 12:11:07|Editor: Li Xia

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HANOI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Vietnamese government is considering dismissing the Finance Ministry's proposal on increasing environmental taxes on fuel products, local media reported on Friday.

The government said the tax hike requires further consideration, because the hike, according to experts, not only goes against stimulus measures, but also creates inequality for low and middle income people and reduces domestic consumption, daily newspaper Vietnam News reported.

The ministry has proposed several times almost tripling the environmental protection tax on oil and gas consumption to the maximum 8,000 Vietnamese dong (0.35 U.S. dollars) per liter.

Vietnam imported 1.1 million tons of various kinds of oil and petroleum products totaling 616 million U.S. dollars in the first two months of this year, seeing respective year-on-year declines of 50.5 percent and 56.7 percent, according to the ministry.

Meanwhile, the country imported 253,000 tons of liquefied petroleum gas worth 130 million U.S. dollars, down 3.3 percent in volume and down 14.5 percent in value.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:01:24|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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SYDNEY, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A 48-year-old man in Western Australia has faced court on Friday, charged with allegedly smuggling over 810,000 illegal cigarettes, a ton of molasses tobacco and other prohibited products in a shipping container.

According to the Australian Border Force (ABF), the value of the evaded tax is estimated to be around 1.8 million Australian dollars (1.4 million U.S. dollars).

Officers first became suspicious when X-ray anomalies were detected in a consignment that arrived from India.

Suspicious were then confirmed when an ABF detector dog indicated the presence of tobacco in the container.

Worth around 600 million Australian dollars (425 million U.S. dollars) per year, "these seizures will put a significant dent in the supply of illicit tobacco in Western Australia," ABF acting Regional Commander for Western Australia Emma Newman said.

"People who engage in this kind of behaviour, whether it's growing, importing, supplying or buying black market tobacco, not only put money into the hands of organized crime, but take away potential tax dollars from the Australian community," she said.

"Tobacco smuggling also seriously impacts retailers who abide by the law," she said.

"Targeting and dismantling this criminal activity is an operational priority for the ABF. We will find those who participate in this illegal trade, and hold them to account," she added.

The ABF are also investigating a similar shipment carrying 480,000 cigarettes and 1.6 ton of molasses tobacco which arrived on March 6 from India to the same consignee in Perth.

If found guilty, the man faces a maximum penalty of life imprisonment under the Australian law.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:06:26|Editor: Liangyu

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets the press after the conclusion of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 15, 2019. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Friday the country will further improve its business environment to unleash market vitality and creativity.

Although the business environment in China has notably improved in the past few years thanks to government reform, the improvement still falls short of market expectations, Li told a press conference after the conclusion of the annual session of China's national legislature.

In 2018, China advanced to a global ranking of 46 in terms of ease of doing business, up from 78 in 2017, according to a World Bank Group report.

"To further improve the business environment, the government will continue to focus on streamlining administrative approvals and delegating power to lower levels, as well as on improving regulation," Li said.

China will ensure that companies of all types of ownership will stand to benefit as equals from the measures of administrative streamlining, he added.

"Tax and fee cuts together with administrative streamlining and impartial regulation are important measures to counter the downward pressure on the economy and boost market vitality. The purpose is to ensure steady and sustained growth of Chinese economy," Li added.

China will continue to push forward the reform and opening up toward greater depth and breadth, pursuing market-oriented and law-based reforms to ensure that concrete outcomes will be delivered through specific actions, he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:16:27|Editor: Yang Yi

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NEW YORK, March 14 (Xinhua) -- An online auction sale featuring 110 works of Chinese art will be held here from March 26 to April 16, most of which are representative of various craftsmanship dating from the Shang Dynasty (about 1,600 BC-1,046 BC) through the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The auction items cover a wide range of works in jade, wood, metalwork, stone and porcelain from a private collection purchased from prominent galleries in New Yorks and London, according to a statement by the event organizer Lark Mason Associates, one of the six auction houses participating in Asia Week New York.

A pre-sale exhibition is currently staged in Manhattan through March 23, as part of the events during Asia Week New York.

Artworks catching limelight include an imperial celadon jade Ruyi scepter, incised with a poem by Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799), and an impressive Chinese carved and polychrome wood figure of Avalokiteshvara, dating back to the 14th century.

Other highlights involve a large Zitan (a valuable wood in China) dragon carved cabinet, dating to the middle Qing Dynasty and a rare Chinese blue and white porcelain tray, originating from Yuan dynasty (1206-1368).

Lark Mason, president and CEO of Lark Mason Associates, spoke highly of Asia Week New York, the largest celebration of Asian art in the United States.

"We're delighted to offer them (collectors and enthusiasts) the chance to view and purchase fantastic works of art," said Mason, also a renowned expert in Chinese art and antiquities.

Founded in 2003, the NYC-based company is an international auction house specializing in fine and decorative works of art with an emphasis on Asian art.

This year marks the 10th edition of the annual Asia Week New York, one of the most renowned and influential Asia art market events in North America.

From March 13 to 23, a total of 48 international galleries, 6 auction houses and 16 cultural institutions are scheduled to provide exhibitions, auction sales and lectures.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:21:28|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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LILONGWE, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Malawi's Former President and leader of People's Party (PP) Joyce Banda has pulled out of the May 21 presidential race and she has endorsed main opposition Malawi Congress Party (MCP) to lead the two parties.

The withdrawal of Banda was announced Thursday through a joint statement signed by the Secretaries General of the two parties, Ibrahim Matola for PP and Eisenhower Mkaka, for MCP.

"This press statement serves to announce the withdrawal of the candidature of the former president, Her Excellency Dr. Joyce Banda, President of the Peoples Party, from the 2019 presidential race," the two parties said in the statement." Dr. Joyce Banda is also announcing her endorsement of the candidature of Dr. Lazarus Chakwera of the MCP and Peoples Party fully supports her decision."

Briefing local journalists on the statement in the capital Thursday afternoon, officials from the two political parties said their decision has been reached for "Malawi's greater and common good as Malawi is bigger than individuals."

The officials from the two parties disclosed that their discussions started way back in 2015, a year after Banda lost to the incumbent Peter Mutharika in May 2014.

Banda, who ruled Malawi for two years from 2012 to 2014, said she has endorsed opposition MCP President Lazarus Chakwera since the 2014 elections in which she trailed in third position while Chakwera in second position.

Banda's withdrawal has reduced the number of presidential candidates from 9 to 8 with no female candidate, which has been described as "unfortunate" by advocates of the feminist 50:50 campaign.

Over 6.8 million registered Malawians are expected to take part in the May 21 polls to elect president, parliamentarians, and local government leaders of their choice.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:26:30|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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KIEV, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remains committed to assisting Ukraine's security and defense sector reforms, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in his Annual Report for 2018 unveiled on Thursday.

According to the document, NATO has stepped up political and practical support to Ukraine since 2014 and reconfirmed this commitment at the Brussels Summit in July 2018, where NATO leaders met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

In 2018, the alliance has provided advisory assistance to Ukraine focused on the development and implementation of the framework law on national security, as well as aid for the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers and support for medical institutions.

Besides, NATO provided assistance to Ukrainian military personnel to manage their psychological injuries caused during the conflict in Donbas in eastern Ukraine which started in April 2014.

Kiev revoked in 2014 Ukraine's non-aligned status when pro-West authorities came into power in the country, paving the way for its membership in military blocs.

Last month, Kiev adopted constitutional amendments stating Ukraine's commitment to joining NATO and set a target to get the NATO Membership Action Plan no later than 2023.

The membership action plan is a NATO program offering advice, assistance and practical support tailored to the individual needs of countries wishing to join the alliance.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:26:30|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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ADDIS ABABA, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on Thursday urged African experts and scholars to support the effective realization of the African Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) through quality research outcomes.

Andrew Mold, acting director of ECA's Eastern Africa office, made the remarks as only three more ratifications are expected for the African continental free trade pact to become effective, eventually creating a single trading space for Africa's close to 1.2 billion population.

The regional director also called on African experts "to produce good and high-quality research papers to inform policymakers and help move the agreement forward," the ECA quoted Mold as saying on Thursday.

"The CFTA may give the impression that the agreement is simply about free trade, but in reality it is much more ambitious than that," Mold said, adding that "it is about creating a continental market."

"It is about free movement of people and free movement of goods and services, it is about protocols on government procurement and intellectual property," Mold stressed.

Mold said with the ratification of the CFTA approaching, policymakers will need high-quality policy advice and researches on the potential implications for their economies and where the opportunities reside, as well as where there may be potential vulnerabilities that need addressing.

The continental free trade pact, which requires a minimum of 22 ratifications to enter into force, has so far been ratified by 19 countries.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame said that the free trade agreement "stands only weeks away from entry into force, thanks to the accelerating pace of ratification," during the 32nd African Union (AU) assembly summit held last month.

Kagame commended Guinea-Bissau for signing the instrument during the 32nd AU assembly summit, which became the latest signatory of the continental pact.

"We encourage those signatories who have not yet ratified to do so at the earliest opportunity," he said.

The CFTA was signed in March 2018 at a summit in the Rwandan city of Kigali. The free trade area will be formally established once it is ratified by 22 countries.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:26:31|Editor: Liangyu

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets the press after the conclusion of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 15, 2019. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Premier Li Keqiang on Friday called on China and Russia to exhaust all means possible to double their trade value.

Bilateral trade exceeded 100 billion U.S. dollars last year despite sagging global trade growth, Li told a press conference after the conclusion of China's annual legislative session, calling on both sides to consolidate the achievement.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:46:40|Editor: ZX

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GABORONE, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has offered about 467,000 U.S. dollars in aid to develope Botswana's northwestern district of Ngamiland with rich biodiversity.

Addressing a full council meeting on Thursday, Ngamiland District Council Chairperson Duncan Enga said the program has already funded four projects.

The program will further involve local communities in conserving and managing Okavango Delta, a world heritage comprising permanent marshlands and seasonally flooded plains, and meanwhile provide opportunities for the communities to derive benefits from the site.

In an effort to improve food security in Ngamiland, the Ministry of Agricultural Development and Food Security, together with Okavango River Basin Water Commission (OKACOM), has selected 20 demonstration farmers, said Enga.

The farmers will join projects on horticultural products with high earnings quality. To help them, Enga said, a horticulture specialist had been recruited as the mentor.

Enga added that the success of the initiative will go a long way in diversifying the district's economy by ensuring that business people take part in the value chain of the tourism sector.

OKACOM is an agreement among the governments of Angola, Botswana, and Namibia on the establishment of a permanent international Okavango River water governance. It was signed in the Namibian capital Windhoek in September 1994 and immediately entered into force.

Enga appreciated the good partnership between the district and the UNDP through Sustainable Land Management, which is coming to an end this year.

The 5-year partnership started in 2014 and, through it, the district managed to carry out three pilot projects on Hainaveld range management, bush encroachment in Lake Ngami and land management for Tsodilo Enclave area.

In the landlocked southern African country, key economic sectors such as tourism, mining and agriculture are resource-dependent, and the livelihoods of the majority, especially in rural areas, are largely derived from natural resources, the availability and productivity of which is heavily influenced by climatic conditions, according to the UNDP.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 13:46:41|Editor: ZX

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MOSCOW, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft carrying three crew members successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, Russia's space corporation Roscosmos said.

Soyuz MS-12 docked with the Rassvet module at 04:01 Moscow time (0101 GMT), Roscosmos said in a press release.

A Soyuz-FG rocket carrying the spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 22:14 Moscow time (1914 GMT) on Thursday. Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, who survived unscathed an aborted launch in October 2018, as well as NASA astronaut Christina Koch, are on board the spacecraft.

Their mission will last 204 days. On March 29, Koch, together with another ISS crew member Anne McClain, who arrived at the ISS on Dec. 3 last year, will perform the first-ever all-female spacewalk. Russian cosmonauts are scheduled to conduct a spacewalk in May.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 14:42:01|Editor: Yang Yi

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KATHMANDU, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Nepali government endorsed the protocol of Nepal-China Transit Transport Agreement (TTA) and authorized its commerce secretary to sign the protocol, a cabinet minister of Nepali government has said on Thursday.

In a regular press briefing, the spokesperson for the Nepali government and Minister for Communication and Information Technology Gokul Prasad Baskota said the cabinet had endorsed the protocol which was agreed between China and Nepal.

During the third bilateral consultative meeting held on Sept. 4-6 last year in capital Kathmandu, officials of two countries concluded the protocol of the TTA reached in March 2016.

The agreement enables the Himalayan country vital access to China's sea and land ports for trading with third countries, according to the Nepali officials. Land-locked Nepal had been fully dependent on India which surrounds Nepal from three directions.

Minister for Industry, Commerce and Supply Matrika Prasad Yadav told Xinhua Thursday the date of signing the protocol has not been decided yet.

"It will be signed very soon. Probably, the protocol will be signed during the proposed visit of Nepali President Bidhya Devi Bhandari to China to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative Forum to be held in Beijing next month," he said.

According to Nepal's Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Supply, Nepal can utilize China's four seaports in Tianjin, Shenzhen, Lianyungang and Zhanjiang and three dry ports in Lanzhou, Lhasa and Xigatse for trading with third countries.

But, Nepal would find it difficult to use Chinese transit facility given that infrastructure in Nepal has not been improved, Nepali officials said. "We will make our efforts to improve infrastructure on our side," Yadav said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 14:47:03|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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KABUL, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) was investigating civilian casualties during military operations in three eastern provinces earlier this month that left two dozen civilians killed and injured, the mission said on Friday.

The preliminary findings from UNAMA indicated that 24 civilians were killed and injured in three separate operations against Taliban militants by Afghan security forces backed by NATO-led coalition troops on March 8 and 9 in Maidan Wardak, Nangarhar and Paktika provinces, according a UNAMA statement on its website.

"UNAMA will continue its independent fact-finding and share the findings with the concerned parties. Initial findings indicate that the majority of the victims were women and children," the statement said, adding "UNAMA notes with particular concern the high number of deaths in these three incidents."

In one incident 13 women and children were killed and injured following an airstrike in Hisarak district of Nangarhar, according to the statement.

On Wednesday, Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani instructed top Afghan military officials to take initiative in the battle field and prevent civilian casualties during military operations.

"UNAMA takes note of the recent decision by the Afghan government to address reports of civilian casualties apparently caused by pro-government forces in three separate incidents on March 8 and 9 in Maidan Wardak, Nangarhar and Paktika provinces, including the instruction of the president for a review of mechanisms and procedures used in military operations with a view to preventing civilian casualties."

The Afghan civilians continue to bear the brunt of armed conflicts as more than 3,800 civilians were killed and over 7,180 others injured in conflict-related incidents in 2018 in the war-torn country, according to figures released by UNAMA last month.

The mission has attributed 63 percent of the civilian casualties to the Taliban and other militant groups, 24 percent to security forces over the period while 10 percent were attributed to both sides during clashes and the rest 3 percent were caused by other reasons.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 15:02:06|Editor: xuxin

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SEOUL, March 15 (Xinhua) -- South Korea kept trade surplus for 85 months through February on faster reduction in import than export, customs data showed Friday.

Revised figure for trade surplus amounted to 3 billion U.S. dollars in February, according to Korea Customs Service. The trade balance stayed in the black since February 2012.

It came as import declined at a faster pace than export. Import tumbled 12.6 percent over the year to 36.4 billion U.S. dollars in February, while export dipped 11.4 percent to 39.4 billion U.S. dollars.

Semiconductor export plunged 23.9 percent on lower product price, and oil product shipment retreated 13.5 percent last month.

Car component export shrank in February, but those for home appliances and telecommunication devices, such as smartphone, posted a double-digit expansion.

Export to the United States grew 16.1 percent, but shipment to China, South Korea's biggest trading partner, reduced 17.3 percent. Those to the European Union and the Middle East slumped by a double digit.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 15:17:10|Editor: xuxin

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SEOUL, March 15 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's economy faced external uncertainties such as global economic slowdown and the semiconductor industry slump, though economic indicators showed a positive picture, the Finance Ministry said Friday.

The Ministry of Economy and Finance said in its monthly economic report, called Greenbook, that though a positive momentum was shown in economic data earlier this year, the Asian economy faced uncertainties such as the global economic slump, the chip industry weakness, trade conflict and the Brexit from the European Union (EU).

Production in all industries grew 0.8 percent in January from a month earlier, while retail sales advanced 2.2 percent in the month. Facility investment added 0.2 percent in the first month of this year.

Consumer confidence improved for three straight months through February, and sentiment among manufacturers gained last month.

The number of those employed grew 263,000 in February from a year ago as the government's job program raised employment among those in their 60s or higher.

However, the country's export declined 11.1 percent in February from a year earlier, keeping a downward trend for the third consecutive month amid the global economic slowdown.

Semiconductor export tumbled 24.8 percent last month on lower product price.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 15:17:10|Editor: xuxin

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by Willey Penuela

CARACAS, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The first rays of sunlight that fell on Venezuelan cites Thursday morning revealed to the inhabitants what the country had been waiting for -- a return to normalcy.

The massive blackout from March 7 significantly affected the daily lives of Venezuela's population of over 30 million.

The lack of electricity in a large part of the country added to other problems that Venezuela is facing as a result of difficult economic situation.

However, the residents were able to get through the critical moment calmly and return to tranquility.

"It wasn't easy, in my case I had to cook for two days using wood, because in the past three months, I've had no gas in my house and was relying on an electric stove to cook," Francisca Sanchez, who lives in the state of Miranda, told Xinhua.

Sanchez, who works as a cleaning lady in a museum in Caracas, said she was happy to return to work.

"I'm celebrating that we were able to get past those moments. It was difficult," she said.

Electricity began to be progressively restored between Sunday and Monday, and Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez announced on Wednesday that the entire electricity system had been restored in the country.

President Nicolas Maduro had previously said the country was the victim of a "criminal attack" on its electricity system directed by the U.S. government.

Due to the power outage, Venezuelan authorities declared a suspension of all school and work activities from Monday to Wednesday.

On Wednesday night, the government announced that work activities in both public and private sectors would resume on Thursday.

Ruben Alvarez, a 47-year-old builder, told Xinhua of the difficulties the residents in his neighborhood had encountered.

"At home we were very worried about the children. I have two small grandchildren, and we had very little food left. We were worried because it was very difficult to buy food because cash is not easy to get and the payment systems weren't working," said Alvarez, who was waiting at a bus stop.

The construction worker said the solidarity he witnessed in his community was very important.

"One neighbor made us artisanal candles, and I was happy to see how several neighbors were attentive to the neighborhood children, so the difficult situation also had its positive side," he said.

In a corner of the town square in Caracas, professor Amanda Gomez, who was on her way to the education center where she has been working for 22 years, expressed her joy at being able to return to work.

Though activities across all school levels will not resume until Monday, according to Rodriguez's remarks on Venezuelan state television, Gomez was going to her school to plan for the second half of the month.

"I was tired of being at home," she told Xinhua.

During the blackout, she went through some anguished moments, she said. "I didn't know what was going on. The phones were working, my neighbors didn't know anything, and we were afraid it could be an armed military conflict."

"Hours after the outage began, my daughter came to visit me and in her car we were able to listen to the radio and know that it was an electrical sabotage, and we began to regain our calm after we were informed," Gomez said.

She added that her concern was the lack of water, although local authorities told her water services would resume in her area in a few hours. The blackout has affected the water pumping system across the country.

Rodriguez said the metro and railway systems are operating. "There is no situation which indicates that the metro system is not performing normally."

Despite minor outbreaks of violence, the South American country managed to get through the difficult situation caused by the prolonged blackout that came amid heightened tensions between the ruling socialist party and the right-wing opposition.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 15:22:12|Editor: xuxin

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by Xinhua writers Gu Zhenqiu, Gui Tao and Yang Xiaojing

LONDON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- British lawmakers on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to endorse delaying Brexit beyond March 29, sending Prime Minister Theresa May to seek a green light from the European Union (EU) for extending the two-year Article 50 negotiation process.

The MPs voted 413-202 to put off Brexit until June 30 if a Brexit agreement is struck with Brussels. If there is no deal, a longer extension will be possible.

The voting was an attempt to reset the clock, but the gap over Brexit across the English Channel remains unnarrowed, and differences between the British government and parliament stay unbridged.

With the latest vote, the final decision on whether to grant Britain a delay rests with leaders of the other 27 EU countries who will discuss the matter at a Brussels summit on March 21.

Over the past three days, MPs, in a series of non-binding votes in the House of Commons, succeeded in avoiding a no-deal Brexit in any scenario.

A no-deal divorce is the last thing both London and Brussels are willing to see as it is expected to inflict heavy economic damage on both Britain and the EU, not to mention disrupting supply chains, and causing chaos in ports, airports and on border roads.

As long as London has a plan, the EU is ready to extend Article 50, which sets out how an EU country might voluntarily leave the regional body.

But Britain must offer a "credible" reason for a Brexit extension, according to Donald Tusk, the European Council president. The view is shared by leaders from most of the EU states.

How can a British explanation be considered "credible"? How long should the Brexit process be delayed? Will the cost to the EU be reduced by a longer extension? These are among major issues to be settled.

New problems are piled upon old ones as MPs criticized May for not doing enough to meet their demand over the Irish backstop, a key sticking point in the Brexit negotiations over the past two and a half years.

Thursday's voting results also vindicated statements that the country remains divided over Brexit.

May's cabinet and her Conservative Party are not united. The cabinet splintered yet again and eight cabinet ministers, including Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay and the leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom, voted against the government's motion on extending Article 50.

In total, more than half of Tory MPs voted against the motion.

Tusk urged EU members to be "open" to a longer delay, but time is running out for May, who has to stay alert against a possible race in her Conservative Party to replace her.

The prime minister's authority has been undermined as her Brexit deal has been rejected twice by parliament since January, which has also weakened her hand in Brussels talks.

The trust crisis facing May has intensified as she has been gradually losing control of the painful Brexit process. With televised rifts in parliament and protests on the street, there has been no consensus so far on how to break the current Brexit deadlock.

Politicians in London need tolerance and trust to break the impasse. But the British people are running out of patience.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 15:22:17|Editor: xuxin

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HO CHI MINH CITY, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A workshop under construction in Vietnam's southern Vinh Long province collapsed on Friday morning, killing five local workers and injuring four others, local media reported.

The workshop's walls in Hoa Phu industrial park in Long Ho district fell, killing five workers, including a woman instantly, online newspaper VnExpress quoted local police as saying.

Of the four injured people, two were seriously wounded.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 15:32:18|Editor: xuxin

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CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The terrorist attack in Christchurch has left 40 dead and over 20 seriously injured on Friday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.

Four suspects were arrested, including an Australian-born man. At this stage the government had no reason to believe there are any other suspects, she added.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Ardern told a press conference in Wellington, adding that the attack appeared to have been "well-planned."

Two explosive devices attached to cars have been decommissioned by police.

It was announced that the national security level in New Zealand was raised from low to high.

At least two gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch on Friday.

According to reports, a gunman in camouflage uniforms opened fire inside the Masjid Al Noor mosque full of prayers in central Christchurch during the afternoon praying time.

It was understood that gunshots happened at least in six different places.

Witnesses described that there were much blood and multiple deaths. At least 50 rounds of gunshots were heard during the shooting, said one witness.

New Zealand Police Minister Mike Bush confirmed that three men and one woman were in police custody in relation to the multiple shootings at two separate mosques in central Christchurch.

Bush said he was aware that footage of the Al Noor Mosque shooting was on social media and police were doing everything they could to get it removed.

"This is one of New Zealand's darkest days. My thoughts are with Christchurch," Ardern said in her earlier address.

"It is an unprecedented violence in New Zealand. There is no place for such extreme violence in New Zealand," she said.

People were recommended by the police to stay inside. All mosques nationally were urged to shut their doors, and people were advised to refrain from visiting these premises until further notice.

Local streets and schools were still locked down.

Christchurch airport was operating as normal.

Chinese Consul General in Christchurch Wang Zhijian told Xinhua that emergency response has been activated. No casualty of Chinese citizen has been reported yet.

The Chinese Consulate General office is working with local police to check if there is any Chinese national being caught in the gunfire.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 15:47:25|Editor: xuxin

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MANILA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Three government soldiers and two Maute group militants have been killed in a clash in the southern Philippines, the Philippine military said on Friday.

Military spokesperson Col. Gerry Besana said three more soldiers have been reported missing in the wake of a clash that broke out around 5 p.m. local time on Thursday in Tubaran town in Lanao del Sur province.

"The gunfight ensued for an hour and 30 minutes," Besana said, adding that troops recovered two caliber 5.56 rifles with M203 grenade launchers, a caliber 45 pistol, hand and rifle grenades, assorted ammunition and a bandolier.

"Meanwhile, three soldiers died while three more are missing in action in yesterday's gunfight," added Besana, without identifying the slain and still missing soldiers.

Thursday's clash came three days after army troops also clashed with Maute fighters in Pagawayan town, also in Lanao del Sur, leaving two Maute fighters and two soldiers dead, and a soldier wounded.

The Maute group, founded by Omar and Abdullah Maute, was responsible for multiple attacks throughout the Philippines.

The Maute brothers, with the help of the Abu Sayyaf militants, attacked Marawi City in the southern Philippines in May 2017. The attack dragged on for five months, leaving more than 1,200 dead, including the Maute brothers.

The five-month fierce fighting also displaced thousands of residents and ruined displaced and reduced the city's business district to rubble.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte imposed martial law in the entire Mindanao a few hours after the May 2017 attack.

Congress has granted Duterte's three requests for martial law extension to quell the rebellion in the southern region. Martial law remains in the region until Dec. 31, 2019.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:02:34|Editor: Lu Hui

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HONG KONG, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) has said that it firmly opposed a recent U.S. human rights report interfering in Hong Kong affairs and other domestic affairs of China.

"We firmly opposed the United States interfering in Hong Kong affairs and other domestic affairs of China by releasing the report," a spokesperson of the commissioner's office said late Thursday in response to an annual human rights report released earlier this week by the U.S. Department of State.

Since Hong Kong's return to the motherland, the principles of "one country, two systems," "Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong" with a high degree of autonomy have been successfully implemented and the Chinese central government has acted in strict accordance with the Constitution and the Basic Law, the spokesperson said.

Progress has been continuously made in Hong Kong's cause of human rights, and Hong Kong residents' various rights have been fully respected and guaranteed in accordance with the law, said the spokesperson, adding that this was a fact that cannot be denied by anyone who view the issue without bias.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:12:39|Editor: xuxin

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JERUSALEM, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli army said Friday morning that its war planes struck about 100 Hamas targets in Gaza Strip Thursday overnight after two rockets were fired at Tel Aviv.

The Israeli fighter jets, attack helicopters and other aircraft struck approximately 100 military targets belonging to the Hamas in the Gaza Strip, in response to the rockets that were launched towards Israeli territory earlier Thursday evening by Hamas, said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in a statement issued on Friday morning.

According to the Israeli army, two rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israeli territory. No interceptions were made by aerial defense systems and no damage or injuries were reported.

These strikes came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held an urgent "security consultation" with his defense chiefs in Tel Aviv late Thursday night.

According to the IDF statement, Hamas' headquarters located in central Gaza Strip which was responsible for guiding "terror activities" in the West Bank was struck. Other targets included the main underground manufacturing site of standard-grade rockets in the Gaza Strip, a military training site that served as the Hamas center of unmanned aerial aircrafts array in southern Gaza Strip, and a number of other military sites as well.

After the rocket fire at Tel Aviv, the Israeli army said it was conducted by Hamas. But Hamas denied any involvement with the escalation, as did Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli army said the Hamas is responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip and emanating from it. "The IDF views any attempt to harm Israeli civilians with great severity, and will continue to operate with determination against these acts of terror," added the army.

This is the first time that rockets from Gaza Strip were fired toward Tel Avi, Israeli financial center of Israel, since a major conflict in 2014. It signals a possible dramatic escalation of violence in the Strip before the Israeli elections.

Following the announcement of the Israeli strikes on Gaza Strip, Israel also said Friday morning that four rockets were identified from the Gaza Strip towards south Israel and three were intercepted by the IDF Iron Dome Aerial Defense System.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:17:44|Editor: Lu Hui

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Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders attend the closing meeting of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 15, 2019. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) lowered the curtain Friday.

Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders including Li Keqiang, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji, Han Zheng and Wang Qishan attended the closing meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Legislators adopted China's first unified foreign investment law, which is to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020.

Xi signed a presidential decree to promulgate the law.

"The newly-adopted legislation is a fundamental law in lifting China toward a new stage of high-level opening up in the new era," said top legislator Li Zhanshu when addressing the meeting Friday.

He called for in-depth study and thorough implementation of the law to promote high-quality economic development.

Legislators also approved resolutions on the government work report, and the work reports of the NPC Standing Committee, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate.

In addition, the legislators passed resolutions on the reports of the national economic and social development plans as well as the central and local budgets, and approved the resignation of NPC Standing Committee member Zhang Rongshun.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:32:50|Editor: xuxin

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by Olatunji Saliu

ABUJA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Tucked inside a vast residential area in the Jabi district of Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, the first officially registered medical clinic in this West African country offers integrative medicine to local patients, incorporating traditional Chinese medicine, U.S. alternative medicine and Western medicine.

The health facility, named the Eastern and Western Hospital, was founded by a Chinese couple in 2017 to provide adequate solutions to people's health problems by embracing Eastern and Western medical treatments. For example, the hospital offers acupuncture and other Chinese natural therapies such as moxibustion, vacuum cupping, medical massage, chiropractic adjustment and Chinese herbal medicines.

For nine years, Aisha Dogo, a Nigerian civil worker, had chronic back pain which had made her seek medical treatment in many local and foreign hospitals; however, they were unable to solve her problem.

The unending pain, caused by spinal compression, is often treated in two steps -- painkillers at first and then surgery. For Dogo and many other patients across the world who are suffering from spine problems, the pain may still return even after surgery.

Just as Dogo was about to lose hope for a permanent cure, she happened to read about the Eastern and Western Hospital on the Internet, and learned how it has become a mecca of sorts for ailing people living in the most populous African country.

"The main reason why I came here is that I have gone to several hospitals and had several treatments without a permanent solution to my problem. I was always on (oral) medications," Dogo told Xinhua during one of her bi-weekly appointments at the facility.

"My experience here has been good. It is a therapy, and it has been working slowly and steadily," she said, referring to the physiological, pathological, diagnostic, syndrome differentiation, treatment, and health-preserving aspects of traditional Chinese medicine.

"I came here with a lot of problems, and so far I am grateful that I am getting better," Dogo said, recalling her first visit to the hospital less than two months ago.

The difference between Eastern and Western medicines, according to U.S.-trained medical doctor Muhammed Ibrahim, is that Western medicine is more familiar with healthcare as a model of healing or a mode of correcting an illness, while traditional Chinese medicine focuses more on prevention and health maintenance.

Over the years, a lot of Nigerians have learned about traditional Chinese medicine but demand for it has just increased recently, with many patients realizing that it mainly emphasizes taking care of one's body.

Andy Yuan, a Chinese doctor who founded the hospital together with his wife, told Xinhua that when it opened two years ago, the health facility had only one patient per day. But now, the number of registered patients has risen to over 2,500, with hundreds of them coming from other cities across Nigeria.

"I decided to come to Nigeria because people needed our services. Here, there are many avenues for Western orthodox medicine, but the need for Eastern alternative medicine and traditional natural therapy is huge, as people want their body to be well-maintained," said Yuan, the first fully accredited Chinese doctor in Nigeria.

Having an educational background in both Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine, Yuan said he and his wife deliberately combined Eastern with Western treatments "in order to achieve better results" as each has its own limits.

"Many Nigerians like Chinese traditional medicine. They have been looking for it for a long time. They surf the Internet to search for us. When they get here they get excited because it is real Chinese people practicing Chinese medicine," he said.

Although some Nigerians still doubt its efficacy, overall characteristics and the concept of traditional Chinese medicine, more and more people are willing to experience it.

Umar Ibro, an official of the State Universal Basic Education Board in Abuja, who is also a patient at the hospital, said he was initially scared of acupuncture, as he had seen pictures and videos of people being pricked with needles all over their bodies.

"Honestly, it is the best experience I have ever had. My first contact with acupuncture was more than 20 years ago when a friend of mine talked to me about his experience in China," Ibro said.

Describing his acupuncture experience so far as "wonderful," Ibro believed there's a science behind it and not voodoo as some Africans believe. "It is real and helps the entire body to function well," he said.

Acupuncture, among the many therapies of traditional Chinese medicine, has not only become the most attractive one to Nigerian patients, but also fascinates experienced medical doctors.

Okosun O'Casey, a doctor at the Eastern and Western Hospital, said although he was originally employed to practice Western medicine, it was difficult not to add Chinese medical treatments because there are still some aspects of patient management that Western medicine does not yet have answers to.

"There are some conditions that are better treated in the Eastern medicine way and some are better treated in the Western medicine way. I think the meeting point is what is more important here," O'Casey said.

In the eyes of U.S.-trained chiropractor Rantiola Ogun, the hospital is unique among other facilities in the country.

"Traditional Chinese medicine goes hand in hand with the philosophy of chiropractic because its main thrust is that the body should always be in a state of good health," Ogun said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:32:51|Editor: xuxin

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HANOI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Some 5 million people in Vietnam suffer from kidney problems, and the number rises by about 8,000 each year, Vietnam News Agency reported on Friday.

There are about 800,000 patients with end-stage renal diseases, and the main causes are kidney problems, high blood pressure and diabetes, the agency quoted local doctor Nguyen Vinh Hung, head of the Kidney and Blood Filtration Department of Hospital E in Hanoi capital, as saying.

He noted that more than 50 percent of patients die within five years of renal dialysis, and only 15-20 percent can live at least 10 years under this type of treatment.

They need to have dialysis three times a week, and it costs 100-150 million Vietnamese dong (4,300-6,500 U.S. dollars) each year, a burden on not only patients and their families but also the society, the doctor said.

Vietnam has a population of some 95 million, of whom over 61 million people live in rural areas, according to its General Statistics Office.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:32:52|Editor: xuxin

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YANGON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar is planning to renew its National Export Strategy (NES) which was launched in 2015.

The first stakeholders' symposium was held on Friday to update the NES for the term 2020-2025 for better export performance of Myanmar in the global economy.

"The first NES which was set for 2015-2019 covers seven prioritized sectors and four supporting sectors while the NES for 2020-2025 will add new more sectors including gems and jewelry, agro-food processing, fruits and vegetables, digital economy and handicraft," Vice President U Myint Swe told the opening session of the symposium.

The second five-year-term of NES (2020-2025) would develop the trade and investment sectors in the country's regions and states as well as support for the poverty alleviation, rural development and income generation in the country which are government's priorities, he added.

The symposium is the first of a series of the NES consultations initiated by the Ministry of Commerce.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:37:55|Editor: mingmei

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CHANGCHUN, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Apart from kung pao chicken and dumplings, Russian tourists visiting China have yet another reason to keep their mouths busy, by visiting Chinese dental clinics.

The city of Hunchun, situated on the Chinese side of the China-Russia border, has seen a surging number of Russian tourists coming for less expensive dental services, leading to a boom in the local dental business.

At 8 a.m. on Tuesday, a dozen Russians were already waiting at a dental clinic in the city in northeast China's Jilin Province. Some arrived after taking a bus from Vladivostok not far away, while some flew across the Okhotsk Sea from Kamchatka.

"Dental clinics in Hunchun have an excellent reputation in my hometown. Visiting China for dental treatment is becoming more and more popular," said a patient from Vladivostok who identified himself as Vitaly.

"Dental treatments here are good and inexpensive, and the locals are very friendly," Vitaly explained.

Vitaly and his wife Sveta joined a medical tour group, which costs 200 yuan (about 30 U.S. dollars) per day excluding the medical bill, and took less than a week to have five teeth implanted.

"We spent 30 percent less here than in Russia," said Sveta, who was also content with China's medical efficiency. "Compared with China, Russia has fewer dental clinics, and it takes much longer to get treatment, sometimes even half a year," she said.

Shen Meizi, deputy head of Hunchun's health bureau, said convenient transportation, lower medical costs and quality services are among the city's main attractions for Russian dental patients.

Boosted by the influx of Russian medical tourists, the number of private dental clinics and hospitals in Hunchun has risen to over 70 from only about ten a decade ago, according to Shen.

Ma Fenglong, who runs a dental clinic in Huichun, has 14 file cabinets containing Russian patients' medical records in his office.

Ma's clinic has received about 50,000 Russians since 2011, accounting for one-third of its patients, and the booming business prompted him to hire two Russian-speaking receptionists two years ago.

"It's common for us to meet Russians on the streets of Hunchun, and now we also meet each other in clinics where we're building a stronger connection," said Ma.

According to Shen, Hunchun has set up a foreign affairs service center and hired professional Russian interpreters to better protect the rights of foreign tourists and consumers.

"We are considering to offer comprehensive services combining traditional Chinese medicines, rehabilitation and tourism to further tap into the international market," Shen said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:37:56|Editor: xuxin

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WASHINGTON, March 14 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank announced on Thursday that David Malpass, undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, is the only candidate for the next president of the bank.

The bank's board of executive directors confirmed it received one nomination and that Malpass will be considered for the position. The period for submitting nominations closed on Thursday, and the bank expects to conclude the selection process before the spring meetings in April.

In January, the World Bank outlined the selection process for the next president to replace Jim Yong Kim, who suddenly announced an early departure from the multilateral development bank.

U.S. President Donald Trump last month picked Malpass as the U.S. candidate for the next World Bank chief, calling him "a strong advocate for accountability" at the bank.

Malpass, who has criticized the World Bank before, thanked the president for selecting him to lead "the world's premier development institution."

"I'm very optimistic that we can achieve breakthroughs to create growth abroad that will help us combat extreme poverty and increase economic opportunities in the developing world," Malpass said at an event at the White House last month.

Before joining the Trump administration, Malpass was an economic adviser to Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. He previously served as chief economist at the investment bank Bear Stearns.

Malpass will have to be approved by the World Bank's board of executive directors.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:42:58|Editor: xuxin

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CANBERRA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has expressed his "heartfelt sympathies" for New Zealand following the attacks in Christchurch.

The terrorist attack in Christchurch has left 49 dead and 48 injured on Friday, New Zealand police said.

"We grieve, we are shocked, we are appalled, we are outraged, and we stand here and condemn absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist," Morrison told reporters on Friday evening.

"This attack reminds us of the evil that his ever present and would seek to strike out at any time."

"I particularly want to express my sincere prayers and thoughts for those New Zealanders, indeed Australians of Islamic faith today, who have been the subject of this callous right-wing extremist attack."

New Zealand Police Minister Mike Bush confirmed that three men and one woman were in police custody in relation to the multiple shootings at two separate mosques in central Christchurch.

Bush said he was aware that the footage of the Al Noor Mosque shooting was on social media and police were doing everything they could to get it removed.

"I found the advice of the New Zealand police force to be particularly wise. They have said, and I agree, and do not allow this evil into our lives. Do not share the footage. Do not watch the footage," Bill Shorten, leader of the opposition Australian Labor Party, told reporters.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:58:00|Editor: xuxin

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RIYADH, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Arabia announced on Friday that one of its nationals was injured in the attack that targeted two mosques in New Zealand.

The Saudi embassy in New Zealand revealed in a statement posted on its Twitter account that the citizen sustained minor injuries without revealing its identity.

It called upon Saudis in the Christchurch city where the attack took place to be cautious, follow the local authorities' instructions and stay at home until situations are back to normal.

The embassy also asked its nationals to contact the embassy in case of emergency.

At least 40 people were killed and 20 others were seriously injured in armed assaults on two Christchurch mosques on Friday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 16:58:00|Editor: xuxin

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CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Fear shrouded New Zealand's city of Christchurch on Friday as at least 49 people were confirmed dead so far in multiple shootings in two mosques in the city center.

Streets remained quiet and empty after the attacks, as Mayor of Christchurch Lianne Dalziel urged people to "stay inside" for safety reasons when suspects could still be on the run.

All schools in the city were put into lockdown just before home time, with many parents packed at the school gates waiting for further notice. A mother started to sob when she read the news on her phone. Her friends provided comfort by hugging her.

"This is one of New Zealand's darkest days," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said during a televised speech after the shootings, describing it as a terrorist attack.

A 14-year-old high school student in Christchurch told local media that his uncle was one of the people who got shot. After seeing people falling down, he just ran as fast as he could, all the way to the nearby Hagley Park.

"The gunshots sounded like pop, pop, pop ... I heard over 50," the boy recalled.

About 110 rounds of shots were fired, local media reported.

Four suspects, including three men and one woman, were arrested by the police so far. One gunman, believed to be an Australian, filmed as he shot at the victims in the mosque. The footage was circulated on social media and the police tried to remove it.

The main roads of central Christchurch were cordoned off by police officers shouting "get out" to people who were trying to get closer to see what was happening.

Helicopters hovered over the city, and police sirens were frequently heard. The police urged people not to visit any mosques in New Zealand on Friday.

"I am still shaking, and I am traumatized," a witness said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:18:04|Editor: Lu Hui

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SUVA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Fijian Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama sent his condolences on Friday to the victims of the mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand's city of Christchurch.

"As news of a mass shooting at mosques in Christchurch unfolds, Fijian hearts are breaking for our brothers and sisters in New Zealand, a place where an atrocity of this nature is shocking and almost beyond comprehension," he said.

He said the Fijian people stand with their Pacific family in this time of suffering and sadness, and they condemn all forms of hatred and terror.

Fiji will be working closely with the New Zealand authorities to monitor the welfare of Fijians in Christchurch and will provide updates as they are made available.

At least 49 people were confirmed dead in the terrorist shootings in Christchurch on Friday afternoon and four suspects were arrested by New Zealand police.

A Fijian man was believed to be one of the victims who was shot during the attacks, according to local media reports.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:23:05|Editor: Lu Hui

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AIN SOKHNA, Egypt, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouli toured on Thursday the China-Egypt Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone in Ain Sokhna district of Suez province east of Cairo.

Madbouli was briefed about the area belonging to the Chinese industrial developer Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA) company.

TEDA is set up on an area of 7.25 square kilometers of the Suez Canal Economic Zone (SCZone), the cabinet's media office said in a statement.

"The construction work of the project's primary phase, which covers 1.34 square kilometers, have been finalized in seven years," it said.

"TEDA serves as a best model for economic and trade models of cooperation between Egypt and China," it added.

The cabinet's statement highlighted that the Chinese industrial zone in Ain Sokhna provides an important platform for the Chinese projects that are developing abroad.

TEDA is divided into four sectors, namely fiberglass manufacturing, petroleum, high and low voltage electric and agricultural equipment.

Madbouli also inspected China's fiberglass giant manufacturer Jushi, the largest Chinese project in the field of advanced equipment technologies in Egypt.

Jushi factory produces about 200,000 tons of fiberglass per year, the statement said.

While inspecting the development work in Ain Sokhna Port, the prime minister visited a container freight station in the harbor's second basin, which is implemented by China Harbour Company.

The project, which will be finalized by the end of 2020, costs 550 million U.S. dollars and will increase the capacity of the port to 2.9 million containers, according to the statement.

Madbouli's visit to TEDA and Ain Sokhna Port was part of a larger tour to follow the latest developments in the projects, sub-structure work as well as the demands of the investors in the SCZone.

Egypt sends a message of supporting the private sector after providing the substructure, Madbouli said, noting that the concerned ministers will follow the demands and visions of the investors on a monthly basis.

Upon request of the investors, Egyptian Housing Ministry will establish a residential district for the workers in the region in cooperation with the SCZone businessmen, he reiterated.

"The Suez Canal corridor is a pivotal area for the nation. It's promising with all elements of success," he added.

Madbouli called on the investors to prepare clear plan over the development of the SCZone immediately.

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Suez Canal Authority and Economic Zone Mohab Mamish said "the SCZone has signed deals on projects worth one billion U.S. dollars."

"The SCZone is planned to be the heart of the trade zones in the world," Mamish said.

He stressed the SCZone's projects advance day by day and will contribute to the revival of the Egyptian economy.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:48:14|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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A placard reading "Don't Burn Our Future" is seen during a protest against climate change in Canberra, Australia, March 15, 2019. Thousands of Australian students walked out of classrooms to demand action on climate change on Friday. Students flocked to rallies in about 50 locations across Australia, protesting against climate change for the second time since November 2018, according to the report of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). (Xinhua/Pan Xiangyue)

CANBERRA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of Australian students walked out of classrooms to demand action on climate change on Friday.

Students flocked to rallies in about 50 locations across Australia, protesting against climate change for the second time since November 2018, according to the report of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Minister for Education Dan Tehan told News Corp Australia that it was "incredibly disappointing" that students would miss school time.

"The protest is all about environmental activists, sadly using our schoolchildren to advance their means," he said.

Students took aim at the Adani Group's proposed Carmichael coal mine, which experts have warned could have adverse environmental impacts on the Great Barrier Reef while simultaneously increasing Australia's carbon emissions.

Along with stopping Adani, the protesters also called on the government to rule out supporting new coal or gas-fired power generation and ensure that 100 percent of Australia's power comes from renewable sources by 2030.

Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann took a similar stance to that of Tehan.

"I think most Australians will take a very cynical view of professional adult activists using and abusing kids for this purpose during school time," he told Sky News Australia.

"During school time kids should be at school. They should not be used as pawns by professional adult activists as part of a cynical political activity."
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:53:16|Editor: zh

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COLOMBO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe on Friday offered his deepest condolences to the government and people of New Zealand following the multiple shootings in Christchurch, which left 49 people dead and 48 others injured.

In a statement, Wickremesinghe said New Zealand is a country with a strong history of peace, multiculturalism and tolerance and there was no doubt that its people will not allow this incident to undermine those values.

In the wake of the heinous attacks, Wickremesinghe said he also offered his support to New Zealand.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the incident was one of New Zealand's darkest days.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:53:17|Editor: xuxin

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A road sign is seen near the scene where the terror attacks occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 16, 2019. At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch earlier on Friday. (Xinhua/Lu Huaiqian)

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The death toll from attacks on two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch rose to 49 and 48 others were wounded, New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said on Friday.

Speaking at a press conference in Wellington, Bush said a man has been charged with murder and will appear in court on Saturday. Three others were apprehended.

A number of fire arms were recovered from the two mosques, Bush added.

New Zealand's state-owned television network TVZ, citing Bush, reported that one of the attacks which happened at a mosque called Masjid Al Noor, took 41 lives. An attack at a mosque in a different part of the city killed seven people. One person died later in a hospital.

According to local media, at least two gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch on Friday.

Two explosive devices attached to cars have also been decommissioned by police.

The national security level in New Zealand has been raised from low to high.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told a press conference in Wellington, adding that the attack appeared to have been "well-planned."

Earlier, Ardern, while speaking to public, said "This is one of New Zealand's darkest days. My thoughts are with Christchurch."

"It is an unprecedented violence in New Zealand. There is no place for such extreme violence in New Zealand."
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:58:20|Editor: zh

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YANGON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar authorities seized stimulant tablets worth over 2.89 billion kyats (1.9 million U.S. dollars) in Bago region, according to the Myanmar Police Force on Friday.

The seizure was made on Wednesday when local authorities intercepted a six-wheeled HINO truck which drove away at the checkpoint in Myanmar's southern Taungoo city.

Three bags filled with a total of 965,250 stimulant tablets were confiscated in the truck along with some cash and a mobile phone.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:58:20|Editor: zh

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SUVA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Fijians have been advised to be more cautious and protect themselves from a viral flu going around.

According to a government release on Friday, the Fijian government advised people to adhere to the health advisories and practice safe and healthy habits to protect themselves from contracting the flu and present themselves to the nearest health facilities should they develop any complications.

Medical superintendent at the Labasa Hospital Jaoji Vulibeci confirmed on Friday that with rising number of cases, the hospital has embraced itself with the necessary drugs and other amenities to assist patients.

Meanwhile the Fijian Health Ministry has urged Fijians to take utmost care of their health and their families if they possess such symptoms and to drink a lot of clean water, paracetamol, take adequate rest and sufficient nutrition.

Flu symptoms include fever, joint pains, headache and weakness.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 17:58:21|Editor: zh

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YANGON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Two men were killed and two others injured in a truck crash in Myanmar's Nay Pyi Taw, the Home Affairs Ministry said on Friday.

The crash occurred in Lewe town of the capital on Thursday morning.

A vehicle travelling from Yangon to Mandalay crashed into a 22-wheeled truck on the old Yangon-Mandalay road.

The injured were brought to the Nay Pyi Taw General Hospital for treatment.

The driver who died at the scene was charged with negligent driving.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 18:08:24|Editor: zh

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BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Longfor Group, a Chinese real-estate company, donated 100 million yuan (about 15 million U.S. dollars) to the Palace Museum Thursday, according to the official website of the Palace Museum.

The donation will go towards a cultural fund that will help promote cultural relic protection and conservation, cultural heritage research, collection acquisition as well as traditional culture spreading.

The Palace Museum is committed to using the donation with openness and transparency, and will work with the entire society to protect and utilize cultural heritage, said Shan Jixiang, the museum director.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 18:08:25|Editor: zh

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WINDHOEK, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Award winning South African songstress Lira, real name Lerato Malapo, left revellers in Namibia's capital crying for more following her scintillating performance at Warehouse theatre on Thursday.

Lira who performed to a packed auditorium in celebration of her 40th birthday was a classy act during her performance where revellers in the usually sleepy Windhoek on weekdays braced the wet weather to get a glimpse of the well-travelled musician.

Despite staging a rather short performance, Lira's popularity in Namibia was very visible in the venue as revellers sang along some of the songs from the multi-platinum selling artist who in the past has clinched 11 accolades at the South African Annual music award.

Judging from the atmosphere at the venue one would be tempted to think Lira is one of the many Namibian musicians as her music done both in English and her vernacular saw multitudes of fun lovers serenaded beyond the usual.

"This was perhaps one of those unforgettable performances from Lira that I have witnessed before and better still it came in the middle of the week which is not a common phenomenon in our country," said Mekondjo Paulus who was part of the audience to the many Namibians who attended the act.

Lira was also ably backed by popular Namibian musician Liz Ehlers who did not disappoint fans in a curtain raising act.

Akin to her inviting voice Lira attracted a multicultural crowd that had no option but to sing and dance in one direction to the South African churning her multiple melodious songs that people have been accustomed to in the past year.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 18:18:26|Editor: zh

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BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Brunei's agriculture sector recorded revenues of 436 million Brunei dollars (321.6 million U.S. dollars) in 2018, a 19 percent increase from 2015 as the country continues to work towards achieving self-sufficiency in food.

Brunei's Minister of Primary Resources and Tourism Haji Ali said during Thursday's Legislative Council meeting that the agriculture sector had increased its revenue by 71 million Brunei dollars from the recorded 365 million Brunei dollars in 2015, adding that Brunei had achieved "almost 100 percent" self-sufficiency in eggs and chicken.

Haji Ali said that the sultanate can now cover 47 percent of its needs in vegetables, 37 percent in fruits and 30 percent in meat.

"But we still rely heavily on imports for rice," said the minister.

He expressed confidence that Brunei would be able to achieve 11 percent self-sufficiency in rice in 2020 following the introduction of some new paddy varieties.

Brunei was reported to have just six percent self-sufficiency in rice in 2015.

The minister said they are currently working with research institutes from China and the Philippines to produce higher yielding paddy varieties.

Meanwhile, Haji Ali said that they will establish shelters in marine zones this year to hold onto fish in Brunei waters for longer periods of time.

"The fish will stay here longer and provide opportunities for our fishermen to catch fish such as big tuna," he said, adding that tuna has good market value in Japan and China and that they are processed locally before exported to Japan as sushi or sashimi.

"The best part is that the increased quantity of tuna and skipjack fish will encourage more fish processing and packaging activities in Brunei for export," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 18:23:30|Editor: xuxin

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GAZA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Highest Commission of the March of Return and Breaking the Siege announced on Friday that it decided to call off the weekly anti-Israel rallies and protests in eastern Gaza Strip, close to the border with Israel.

The commission said in an emailed press statement that the postponement of the marches and rallies in eastern Gaza Strip was made due to the growing tension with Israel in the Gaza Strip.

"Due to the public interest, the commission decided to postpone its activities today exceptionally for the sake of the Palestinian people and in preparation for the Land Day and the one-year anniversary for the marches on March 30," said the statement.

It stressed that "this doesn't mean that marches of return have permanently stopped or retreated," adding "the marches of return will go on until it achieves its goals, mainly ending the unfair Israeli siege."

It is the first time since the outbreak of the rallies and protests on March 30 last year that the commission postpones its weekly activities.

Overnight, Israeli warplanes carried out intensive airstrikes on Gaza Strip military targets in response to two rockets fired from the coastal enclave into Tel Aviv in central Israel earlier on Thursday night, security officials and eyewitnesses said.

They said that Israeli drones, helicopters and F16 war jets hovered over the Gaza Strip right after the Israeli media reported that two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip landed in Tel Aviv in central Israel, casing no damages or injuries.

Eyewitnesses also said that several powerful explosions were heard in southern Gaza Strip and in Gaza city's southern suburbs, while security officials said that several military facilities were targeted and no injuries were reported.

An Israeli army spokesman said in a press statement that Israeli air forces warplanes have been carrying out airstrikes on military facilities in the Gaza Strip in response to the two rockets fired from Gaza into Tel Aviv in central Israel.

On Friday, the Israeli army said in an official statement that its warplanes hit around 100 targets that belong to several militant groups, mainly Hamas armed wing. No injuries were reported, but severe damages were caused to the targeted posts.

No one claimed responsibility for the two rockets attacks. Various Gaza-based armed groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, denied in separate statements that their militants were responsible for firing the two rockets.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 18:43:34|Editor: xuxin

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KHOST, Afghanistan, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A local TV reporter was seriously wounded following a shooting attack in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost on Friday, a local official said.

"Sultan Mahmood Khairkhwa was wounded after unknowing gunmen spread bullets on him in Edar-e-Kamplex locality of provincial capital Khost city at around midday," provincial government spokesman Talib Mangal told Xinhua.

The injured reporter was shifted to a hospital in the city where his condition remained critical, the official added.

A probe is underway as the attackers fled the scene, he noted.

On Tuesday, a local TV journalist was wounded after a sticky bomb attached to his vehicle was detonated in Lashkar Gah, capital city of southern Helmand province.

No group or individual has claimed responsibility for the attacks so far.

Reporters frequently come under attack in the militancy-hit country as two media workers were shot dead in northern Takhar province early in February, while 20 Afghan journalists and media workers lost their lives in 2018 in separate attacks.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 18:58:37|Editor: xuxin

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NAIROBI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Regional marine action plans are critical in order to mobilize finance toward elimination of ocean pollution, UN Environment said on Friday.

Gaetano Leone, coordinator of UN Environment/Mediterranean Action Plan-Barcelona Convention Secretariat, told Xinhua in Nairobi that the problem of marine debris is an emerging issue that requires international cooperation.

"Regional marine litter action plans help to mobilize both domestic and international finance because they are product of very strong political commitment of countries involved," Leone said on the sidelines of the fourth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly which will end late on Friday.

Leone said that the plan contains detailed roadmap on which areas should be prioritized in order to tackle marine pollution.

"It also makes it easier to show where the money raised will be utilized," he added, noting that due to increasing visibility of the issue of marine pollution, a number of different financing opportunities both public and private are now emerging.

According to Leone, North Africa countries are part of the Mediterranean Action Plan while sub-Saharan countries are currently developing two regional action plans.

He noted that the marine debris finance mobilized will either be in terms of grants or loans and will be used to reduce the micro-plastics and other pollutants in the oceans.

Leone added that ocean pollution will be defeated through building secure long-term capacity toward developing, establishing and implementing the necessary regulatory frameworks to tackle marine pollution.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 18:58:37|Editor: xuxin

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BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Brunei is looking to capitalize on existing institutions and its pristine natural environment to further promote medical, educational and eco-tourism in the country.

Brunei's Minister of Primary Resources and Tourism Haji Ali said that they are looking to cooperate with various parties to strengthen Brunei's tourism sector.

The minister named the Jerudong Park Medical Center as an opportunity for the country to draw in medical tourists.

"We have also successfully discussed with international schools like the Jerudong International School and International School Brunei to attract students from countries like China, South Korea and Japan to attend summer school here for English courses," he said during Thursday's Legislative Council meeting.

Haji Ali also spoke of the ministry's plans to capitalize on the heavily forested areas to promote eco-tourism in Brunei.

The minister explained that this project will feature a new tourism concept that is sustainable, responsible and inclusive, likening it to a sanctuary or forest reserve.

"We will not disturb the wildlife, forests, existing villages and its architecture or the area," he said, emphasizing that no damage will be done to the natural environment.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:03:39|Editor: xuxin

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COLOMBO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lanka's Tourism Ministry said on Friday that preparations are underway to issue visa on arrival free of charge for tourists from multiple countries from May 1, to boost arrivals during lean months.

Tourism Development, Wildlife and Christian Religious Affairs Minister John Amaratunga told local media that the countries which will be granted this facility are Thailand, Britain, Australia, South Korea, Canada, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand and countries of the European Union.

He said following its successful implementation, the facility would be extended to South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries and China, which was one of the leading markets for Sri Lanka Tourism.

The SAARC countries include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

The minister said the facility would initially be implemented for a trial period of six months and depending on the success rate, it would be further extended with more features to make Sri Lanka an attractive destination for tourists.

Sri Lanka is aiming to attract at least 3 million tourists and earn a revenue of 5 billion U.S. dollars this year.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:08:41|Editor: xuxin

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ISLAMABAD, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Pakistani government and its leadership condemned the terrorist attack in two separate mosques in Christchurch city of New Zealand on Friday, which killed 49 people and injured more than 40 others.

Spokesperson of Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Faisal released a statement at Twitter, saying "Pakistan condemns the tragic terrorist incident in New Zealand. Our High Commission is in touch with the local authorities and trying to ascertain details."

Pakistani President Arif Alvi said in a statement that he was shocked and grieved to learn about the horrific massacre in Christchurch mosques, adding that "hate, once unleashed is difficult to stop."

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan expressed grieve and strongly condemned the attack, saying "this reaffirms what we have always maintained that terrorism does not have a religion."

According to local media reports, over 5,000 overseas Pakistanis are living in New Zealand but there is no report yet on Pakistani casualties in the attack.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:33:46|Editor: mingmei

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NANNING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Police in southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region said they seized 2 tonnes of illegal drugs in 2018 in crackdowns that curbed the outflow of drugs from the border region.

Police also destroyed 21 drug workshops and seized 12.32 tonnes of raw materials for making drugs in Guangxi last year, said Yan Qiwei, director of the region's anti-drugs office.

Yan said the police crackdown has "effectively contained" large-scale drug smuggling in its border areas and led to considerable drops in local drug production and in the spill-over of its drug activities.

Police data shows that in 2018, the amount of heroin flowing from Guangxi into other parts of China declined 56 percent year on year, while the number of drug traffickers coming from Guangxi decreased by 18 percent. Drug production cases cracked by police also dropped by 40 percent in Guangxi last year.

Guangxi, which is close to the drug-producing "Golden Triangle" of Southeast Asia, has been a major channel for drug trafficking apart from its neighboring Yunnan Province.

The region that borders Vietnam also saw its anti-drug cooperation with the Southeast Asian nation updated last year from simply exchanging clues to joint planning and actions.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:33:46|Editor: mingmei

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NAIROBI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer TAILG Group said on Friday that it is set to pilot electric motorbikes in Kenya as art of its entry in the local market.

Jayson Huang, an official with the group, said that the introduction will take place in the western inland port city of Kisumu in July.

"We intend to pilot 50 motorbikes in the city as part of our entry into the Kenyan market," Jayson told journalists on the sidelines of the ongoing fourth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi.

Jayson said that motorbikes will contribute to the reduction of carbon dioxide as part of efforts to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

He said the company that is collaborating with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) will be sending technicians to Kenya to help fix the equipment required.

The company that has plants in Chinese cities, including Dongguan, Wuxi, and Tianjin, plans to expand to Ethiopia and Uganda after setting base in Kenya.

Anyang Nyong'o, Governor for Kisumu County welcomed the company, adding that the project will help reduce pollution in the city.

Nyong'o said that such initiatives should be taken up as they help solve pollution and electricity problems and keep people healthy.

"The program comes at a time when we are working on a modern transport system that will help us decongest the city," he added.

Rob De Jong, head of mobility unit at UNEP, said that the UN agency is currently working on a project that aims at integrating electric two wheelers and three wheelers into existing urban transport modes in developing countries.

"We are piloting and developing a comprehensive policy framework in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam," he added.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:38:47|Editor: xuxin

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SUVA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) on Friday expressed shock and sadness at the mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand's city of Christchurch.

In a statement, PIF Chair Baron Divavesi Waqa expressed shock and sadness at the tragic events that occurred on Friday in Christchurch.

"I convey to the victims, their families, the people and government of New Zealand, the deepest condolences of the Pacific Islands Forum on behalf of all our members," he said, adding "We are a Forum family and what affects one affects all. The people of New Zealand are in our thoughts and prayers."

At least 49 people were confirmed dead in the terrorist shootings in Christchurch on Friday afternoon and four suspects were arrested by New Zealand police.

Founded in 1971, PIF comprises 18 members including Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Samoa and Vanuatu, among others.

With its secretariat being based in the Fijian capital Suva, PIF is one of the region's premier political and economic policy organizations.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:38:47|Editor: xuxin

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BEIRUT, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Syrian Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdel Karim Ali said Friday that the Arab League (AL) should reconsider "its wrong decision to suspend Syria's membership from the organization," local media reported.

"The AL needs Syria because it cannot function well without it. The organization has violated its charter by suspending Syria's membership in the organization," Ali was quoted as saying by Elnashra, an online independent newspaper.

Ali added that the AL made this decision under pressure by the United States and Europe.

"It has become clear that many Arab countries noticed that they have an interest to resume their diplomatic ties with Syria and to return the country to the AL," he said.

The AL suspended Syria's membership in November 2011 in response to the Syrian government's crackdown on protests.

Many Gulf countries have expressed in the past few months their willingness to re-open their embassies in Syria.

However, AL Secretary General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit said over a month ago that there is no consensus yet among Arab countries on Syria's return to the Arab bloc.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:58:52|Editor: mingmei

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BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- China's first Great Wall restoration center will be established in Beijing, combining academic research, restoration and protection of the ancient wall.

The center will have archaeologists, designers and craftspersons working together to make targeted plans for the restoration of the Jiankou section of the Great Wall, which is located in the northern Huairou District of Beijing, according to Beijing Daily.

"The new method will effectively tackle unpredictability in excavation and protection of the Great Wall," Zhang Tong, an official at the cultural relics administration of Huairou, was quoted as saying.

The center will also regularly check the conditions of the Great Wall for preventive conservation. It will keep records of the restoration for future use, the newspaper said.

With a total length of 7,952 meters, the Jiankou Great Wall was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It was once neglected and became damaged over time.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 19:58:52|Editor: mingmei

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NAIROBI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- China will be the global host of the World Environment Day which will take place on June 5 with the main event being held in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang Province, officials said on Friday.

Chinese delegation and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) made the announcement on the sidelines of the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi.

"China will be a great global host of 2019's World Environment Day celebrations. The country has demonstrated tremendous leadership on tackling air pollution domestically. It can now help spur the world to greater action," said Joyce Msuya, acting executive director of UNEP.

This year's World Environment Day, titled "air pollution," seeks to rally governments, industries and communities toward the support for policies, legislations and innovations that can boost air quality.

Msuya acknowledged that air pollution is a global challenge but hailed China's bold actions to contain it amid rapid industrial progress.

"China will now be leading the push and stimulating global action to save millions of lives," said Msuya.

A report launched during the UN Environment Assembly revealed that China's capital Beijing has made sound progress in reduction of air pollution in the last two decades.

The report, titled "Review of 20 Year's Air Pollution Control in Beijing," said the city has leveraged on clean technologies, strong regulatory tools and public awareness to boost air quality.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 20:08:56|Editor: xuxin

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BEIRUT, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Lebanese workforce and shop owners in Baalbek in the Bekaa region demonstrated on Friday to protest competition caused by Syrian workers and business, Elnashra, an online independent newspaper reported.

Protesters held signs calling upon officials to take quick measures in this regard to help citizens keep their business running in the area, the report said.

They have also asked security forces to intervene and close shops belonging to Syrians.

Since the start of the civil war in neighboring Syria, thousands of Syrian refugees moved to Lebanon and opened businesses, causing Lebanese shops to shut down their doors due to great competition.

Other Lebanese businesses replaced local employees with Syrians since they are paid less salaries and not registered in national social security.

This led to an increase in unemployment rate among the Lebanese.

Ola Boutros, advisor to the Foreign Affairs Minister in charge of the Syrian refugees' dossier, announced earlier that around 270,000 Lebanese have lost their jobs after 384,000 Syrian refugees poured into the country's employment market.

The labor ministry issued in January 2017 an order allowing Syrians in Lebanon to work only in farming, cleaning, and construction. Businesses who violate the law will be immediately closed.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 20:14:00|Editor: mingmei

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by Zhang Jianhua, Wang Shan

VIENTIANE, March 15 (Xinhua) -- "I hope that (the) Chinese company will continue to drive local economy by achieving common development with local people," Bounnhang Vorachith, general secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party Central Committee and president of Laos, said when he inspected a Chinese company in central Laos earlier this month.

The president inspected the Sun Paper Holdings Laos Co., Ltd. (Sun Paper Laos), located in Xepon, Savannakhet Province in central Laos, on March 10.

Sun Paper Laos, the first modern pulp mill in Laos established in 2008, is a wholly-owned company of Shandong Sun Paper Group, one of China's top 500 enterprises. Sun Paper Group signed an investment agreement on "Forest-Pulp-Paper Integration" with the Lao government in 2009.

After a decade's development, the company's investment in Laos has reached 500 million U.S. dollars, and has planted 32,000 hectares of pulp forest and 6,450 hectares of cooperative forest in the country.

It has established the hardwood pulp production line with an annual production of 300,000 tons in 2017, which was formally put into use in 2018.

Vongxay Xayachack, governor of Xepon County, spoke highly of the role played by Sun Paper Laos, as the company has created a large number of jobs and promoted local socio-economic development.

Phone Hankhamvong, a 60-year-old villager from Xepon County, has been working as a technician at Sun Paper Laos for two years, leading local people to plant cooperative forests.

"At the beginning, we didn't have a sense of rules and it was difficult for us to adapt to work. Now the company has established a comprehensive and systematic working procedure, which has further streamlined the work of employees," said Phone.

"The modern management is a new thing in the mountains of Laos. We knew nothing about the concept of 'factory' before. Now we understood it," said the technician.

"I think this job has benefited me and society a lot. In the past, it was just a deserted woodland. After the road was neatly trimmed, it is more like a town," said Phone, who now supported his two children to go to school.

"This company can train young people to be more disciplined. I have one son who works as a driver here, and I hope that other two children will come to work at the Sun Paper Laos after they graduate," Phone added.

The Chinese enterprise, which made investment in Laos under the Belt and Road Initiative, has been playing an important role in improving people's livelihood and reducing poverty in Laos.

"The Sun Paper Laos has hired local people of 310,000 person-times, and is employing 458 Lao nationals in the company now. Besides, the company has actively engaged in charitable activities, and spent a total of 1.86 million U.S. dollars repairing bridges, roads and building schools for the nearby villages," said Li Hongxin, president of Shandong Sun Paper Group.

Tieng Xayyasith, 25, whose hometown was in the northern Lao province of Luang Namtha thousands of miles away from the factory, has a Chinese name Aming.

His parents passed away when he was very young. Aming and his brother were brought up by his two elder sisters. He graduated from high school and obtained a government scholarship to study in Sichuan province in China. In 2017, he started to work as a warehouse manager in Sun Paper Laos.

Aming's monthly salary of 477 U.S. dollars was a relatively high income in the local area. He sends a large amount of his salary to his wife and children in Luang Namtha.

Aming said his wife used to work in the factory. If there would be a chance, she would come back to work, and then he would buy a house outside the factory and settle down.

"I am grateful and satisfied with the benefits the company has offered us, both in life and at work," he said.

Khamphouvong Soukkaserm, 25, from the remote Luang Prabang town in northern Laos, is the factory's security chief.

"My hometown is very poor. Only rice is grown. There is no other job, and the harvest is only enough for our needs," said Khamphouvong.

Khamphouvong had studied Chinese in China's Yunnan Province. Now he earns about 600 U.S. dollars a month and sends half of it to his family.

"Sun Paper Laos is kind to local people, provides us with many job opportunities and tries to lead us out of poverty. If I earn enough money, I will buy land and build a house here," said Khamphouvong.

Li, president of Shandong Sun Paper Group, said he regarded Laos as the "second hometown," adding he will continue helping Lao people reduce poverty and become prosperous.

Sun Paper Laos planned to further invest 636 million U.S. dollars in two years to establish a high-level packaging board production line with an annual production of 800,000 tons and a recycled fiber pulp board production line with an annual production of 400,000 tons.

It also planned to invest 1 billion U.S. dollars to conduct the project of "Forest-Pulp-Paper Integration" in Attapeu in southern Laos and Borikhamxay in central Laos.

The company said it will further carry out the cooperation mode of providing seedlings, fertilizers, and technical services to farmers and buying back their harvests at protective prices.

It will continue to employ local people, cooperate with local universities and colleges to cultivate talents, and provide employees with professional technical training, the company said.
At least 49 people were killed and 48 injured in multiple shootings in two mosques in New Zealand's city of Christchurch on March 15, 2019. (Xinhua/Zhu Qiping)

by Sun Zheng'an

CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand, March 15 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand is enduring "one of the darkest days" in its history after the terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch on Friday afternoon left 49 people dead and 48 others injured.

The unprecedented terrorist attacks took place at around 3 p.m. local time (0300 GMT), when a gunman reportedly walked into a mosque with semi-automatic weapon and opened fire.

Police later confirmed that two mosques in central Christchurch had been attacked and multiple deaths were feared. Witnesses said there was much blood and multiple deaths. At least 50 rounds of gunshots were heard during the shooting, said one witness.

The Armed Squad was placed at the scene with additional Defense Force deployment. Four suspects were soon arrested with three of them born in Australia. One of the suspects is a woman.

Police commissioner Mike Bush confirmed later that 49 people were killed and 48 others injured in the shooting.

It is understood to be a well-planned terrorist attack, with further bombs discovered in cars located in Christchurch central by the police. One of the gunmen live-streamed the shooting via social media. His manifesto was also circulated online.

However, the killers were not on any watch list confirmed by the authorities.

After the attacks, New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Arden addressed the public, describing Friday as "one of the darkest day in New Zealand."

She also strongly condemned the terrorist attack, saying "You might have chosen us; we utterly reject and condemn you."

Ardern said New Zealand was not a target because it is a safe harbour of those who hate, nor because New Zealand condones racism or is an enclave for racism.

She said New Zealand represents kindness, compassion and a home for those who share New Zealand's values.

"Those values, I can assure you will not and cannot be shaken by this attack."

After the attacks, the New Zealand government adjusted the national safety level from low to high, the first time that the country's threat level has been raised to this level.

People have been recommended by the police to stay inside. All mosques across the country have been urged to shut their doors, and people have been advised to refrain from visiting these premises until further notice.

Christchurch streets and schools were locked down after the gun shooting. School lock-down was lifted until 6 p.m. local time.

Blood supply in Christchurch is under pressure. A local community organization has urged the public to donate blood.

People across New Zealand are expressing their condolences to the victims. Flowers, candles and notes have been placed near the mosques where the shooting took place.

Christchurch airport is operating as normal. However, outbound flights have been cancelled, in addition to multiple delays.

Chinese Consul General in Christchurch Wang Zhijian told Xinhua that emergence response has been activated in the Consulate General.

No casualty of Chinese citizen has been reported yet.

The Consulate General is working with local police to further check if there is any Chinese citizen caught in the attack, the Consul General said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 20:24:05|Editor: xuxin

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KIGALI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda's civil aviation authority on Friday said it has banned Boeing 737 MAX aircraft from operating over its airspace.

This came after an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board.

It was the second deadly crash for a Boeing 737 MAX 8 model in less than five months. The first one occurred in October last year when an aircraft of the same model operated by Indonesia's Lion Air plunged into the waters off western Indonesia minutes after taking off, killing 189 people.

"The Rwanda civil aviation authority in exercise of its powers under article 16 of the Rwanda aviation law directs pilots and aircraft operators of any Boeing 737 Max 8 and Boeing 737 Max 9 not conduct any flights in the airspace of Rwanda with immediate effect," the authority said in a statement.

The ban remains in effect until further notice, it said.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 20:39:08|Editor: xuxin

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KUALA LUMPUR, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Malaysian government on Friday condemned the terror attacks in New Zealand's Christchurch mosques.

"Malaysia condemns in the strongest term, this senseless act of terror on innocent civilians and hopes that those responsible for this barbaric crime be brought to justice. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and families of the shooting incident," Malaysia's foreign ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said that two Malaysians were injured in the terror attacks and are receiving treatment.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad joined other world leaders in offering sympathy for the victims, urging justice for them.

"I regret very much the incident occurring in Christchurch where 40 people were shot dead by gunmen in two mosques while they were performing Friday prayers. I hope that the New Zealand government will arrest these terrorists and do the necessary under the law of the country," he said in a brief statement.

New Zealand police have confirmed that 49 people were killed and 48 others injured in the terror attacks on two mosques in Christchurch.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 20:44:09|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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Choe Son Hui (C), vice foreign minister of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), attends a briefing in Pyongyang, DPRK, March 15, 2019. The recent summit between the top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump failed because the U.S. side lacked sincerity, DPRK Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said on Friday. (Xinhua/Liu Yanxia)

PYONGYANG, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The recent summit between the top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump failed because the U.S. side lacked sincerity, DPRK Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said on Friday.

During a briefing held in Pyongyang, Choe said that Kim attended the summit in Vietnam's capital Hanoi with real expectations, hoping to implement the consensus he had reached with Trump during their Singapore summit in 2018. But the U.S. side was uncompromising and stuck in its political calculations, missing a golden opportunity to reach an agreement with the DPRK.

Given how insincere the U.S. side has been, the DPRK doubts the necessity of maintaining the negotiations, Choe said.

The international community has no reason to continue to impose sanctions on the DPRK since the country had suspended nuclear tests for 15 months, Choe added, urging the UN Security Council to take a clear stance.

However, Choe emphasized that the personal relations between Kim and Trump are still firm despite the talks breaking down, and the DPRK hopes their good personal relations can push forward bilateral ties at the right time.

After ending the summit on Feb. 28 without reaching an agreement, Trump said at a press conference that there was "a gap" in what the DPRK and the United States were pursuing.

According to Trump, Kim demanded relief from sanctions against Pyongyang "in their entirety" in exchange for denuclearizing a "large portion" of the DPRK's nuclear program, something the United States could not agree to.

Dismissing Trump's claim, DPRK Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho has said that DPRK only proposed partial removal of the sanctions, wanting those impeding the livelihood of their people to be removed first.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 20:54:14|Editor: xuxin

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MOSCOW, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A Boeing 737-800 aircraft made an emergency landing in the northwestern Russian city of Syktyvkar on Friday, causing no harm to its passengers, Russian news agencies reported.

The accident may have resulted from an engine failure, RIA Novosti news agency quoted a spokesman for the Northwestern Inter-regional Transport Office of the Russian Investigative Committee as saying.

The aircraft was on its way from the eastern Siberian town of Mirny to Moscow when the accident happened, it said.

The aircraft, which belongs to Russian diamond miner Alrosa, was preparing for a takeoff after "all the problems were eliminated," Interfax news agency reported.

There were 157 passengers and six crew members on board, it added.

The aircraft took off for Moscow after checks and technical servicing, TASS news agency quoted the head of the Alrosa airline Andrei Gulov as saying.

A Boeing 737 MAX 8 plane operated by Ethiopian Airlines, a newer version of the 737-800, crashed shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday, killing all 157 people on board.

Another jet of the same model, flown by Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air, crashed last October, killing all 189 passengers on board.

The twin tragedies within the time-span of five months had made many countries ground Boeing 737 Max jets or ban them from their airspace.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:04:15|Editor: xuxin

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TRIPOLI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Libya's Higher Council of State on Friday condemned the recent terrorist attack in two separate mosques in Christchurch city of New Zealand, which killed and injured dozens of people.

"The Higher Council of State condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist attack against worshipers in New Zealand that killed and injured dozens, a brutal operation against Muslims worshiping in piece," the Council said in a statement.

The Council stressed that "such acts are results of hate speech and incitement against Islam and Muslims."

The Council demanded the United Nations to "clearly determine the concept of terrorism, which proves that such events are not linked to a certain religion or identity."

The Council also demanded the government of New Zealand to justify its "clear inability to prevent or limit the attack, despite the fact that it happened live on air."

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others were wounded in the terrorist shootings at two mosques in Christchurch a few days ago, and four suspects were arrested by New Zealand police.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the incident was one of New Zealand's darkest days.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:04:15|Editor: xuxin

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JAKARTA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian government on Friday slammed the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which two Indonesian nationals were injured, Vice President Jusuf Kalla said.

The Indonesian vice president also prayed for the the victims of the brutality on Friday afternoon.

New Zealand police have confirmed that 49 people were killed and 48 others injured in the mass shootings.

"We condemn the attacks, the perpetrators," he said.

An Indonesian man and his son were among the targets of the shooting, spokesman of the Indonesian foreign ministry Arrmanatha Nasir said.

The man has been treated at an intensive care unit of a Christchurch hospital while his son also got a medical treatment, the spokesman said.

According to New Zealand police, four suspects have been arrested so far.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:14:17|Editor: xuxin

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BAGHDAD, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Iraq strongly condemned the terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand on Friday, calling for international cooperation to eradicate terrorism.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is following the details of the painful terrorist incident against worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said "it condemns this crime with strongest condemnation and declares its stand alongside the people of New Zealand."

It said that the attack against worshippers "proves that all the nations of the world are not immune to terrorism, and the world has only to unite its efforts to eradicate it."

On Friday, at least two gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch, leaving at least 49 people dead and dozens others wounded, during the weekly Friday prayers for Muslims.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:19:19|Editor: xuxin

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RAMALLAH, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned on Friday the fresh tension in the Gaza Strip, saying that it is a serious Israeli escalation against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

His condemnation was made in an official statement published by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA in response to the intensive Israeli airstrikes on the coastal enclave.

The statement said that Abbas has been holding "intensive contacts with all parties concerned to stop the Israeli escalation against the children of our armless people in Gaza."

Abbas called on his rival Islamic Hamas movement, which seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and still rules it, to get back to Palestinian unity and be committed to the signed reconciliation understandings and agreements to avoid destructive wars.

On Thursday, two long-range rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip into Tel Aviv in central Israel, causing no harms, and no one claimed responsibility for the two rockets attacks, according to Israeli media reports.

An Israeli army spokesman said earlier on Friday that around 100 targets that belong to militant groups all over the Gaza Strip had been hit by missiles fired from Israeli air forces' warplanes.

The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza told reporters that four Palestinian civilians were injured in the intensive Israeli airstrikes that were waged on the Gaza Strip overnight.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:19:19|Editor: xuxin

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OSLO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg on Friday condemned the deadly mass shootings in New Zealand and emphasized the importance of international work against extremism.

"This is a reminder that we have to fight extremism in all forms," Solberg told public broadcaster NRK.

"Even though this happened on the other side of the globe, it is a strong reminder of how important it is for all of us to help bring down tensions, work against extremism and have solidarity with each other when something like that happens," she said.

The prime minister expressed worry that the suspect posted a manifesto online in connection with the attack, which resembles the terror attack in Norway in 2011 that killed 77 people.

"Unfortunately, this gives rise to associations with a situation in Norway, which is some of the worst in our time. It shows that the international work against extremism is extremely important," Solberg said.

"But first and foremost, we are now mourning all those killed and wounded and, not least, have solidarity with their families," she said.

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others injured in multiple shootings in two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch on Friday. One of the shooters was identified as an Australian national, described as "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist" by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:24:20|Editor: xuxin

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RIYADH, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Arabia announced on Friday that another Saudi was among the injured in the attack that targeted two mosques in New Zealand.

The Embassy of Saudi Arabia in New Zealand revealed, in a statement posted on its Twitter account, that it received information about the injury of another citizen.

It announced in a previous statement that a citizen sustained minor injuries. The embassy did not reveal the identity of both victims.

Representatives from the embassy visited the two Saudis at the hospital to inquire about their health condition and offered condolences to the families of the deceased.

It called upon Saudis in the Christchurch city where the attack took place to be cautious, follow the local authorities' instructions and stay at home until situations are back to normal. The embassy also asked its nationals to contact the embassy in case of emergency.

At least 49 people were killed, and 48 others were seriously injured in armed assaults on two Christchurch mosques on Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:29:24|Editor: xuxin

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KUWAIT CITY, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait strongly condemned the terrorist shooting attacks on mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

Kuwait affirms its full stand and solidarity with New Zealand, and support of all measures to preserve the security and safety of its people and residents, the ministry said in a statement.

Kuwait reiterates its firm stand against all forms and manifestations of terrorism and violence, the statement said.

It also urged the international community to exert further efforts to eliminate violence and terrorism.

Kuwait expresses sincere condolences and sorrow to the victims' families, wishing a speedy recovery for the wounded, the statement said.

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch earlier on Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:49:28|Editor: xuxin

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AMMAN, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A Jordanian was killed and eight others were injured in Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand, said the Foreign Ministry of Jordan on Friday.

The ministry also condemned the terrorist attacks that targeted two mosques in Christchurch, a statement issued by the ministry said.

Jordan's Minister of State for Media Affairs Jumana Ghunaimat condemned the attack, urging unified and coordinated efforts to combat terrorism, the state-run Petra news agency reported.

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch earlier on Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 21:54:29|Editor: xuxin

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VILNIUS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The European Union is crucially important for Lithuania, but the Baltic country should not turn away from other regions in its foreign policy, the frontrunner in Lithuania's presidential election Gitanas Nauseda said on Friday.

"The EU is very important on an institutional, political level. It is a huge market, which opens to Lithuania perfect possibilities to develop its exports. However, I would not welcome the situation if Lithuania's orientation towards the EU would mean turning away from the rest of the world," Nauseda was quoted as saying by local media after he presented his foreign policy vision at a discussion held by the Vilnius think tank Eastern Europe Studies Centre (EESC).

The Southeast Asian and African countries, as well as China, Latin America and the U.S. are the regions and countries that should not be underestimated, Nauseda underlined.

"I am in favor of talking with everybody who cares for talking, yet in dialogue we must maintain our principles," Nauseda said.

Lithuania's trade cooperation with China should be developed faster, he said.

"Economic cooperation with China must be developed further. As regards investments, they must be assessed by national security authorities, especially in the energy sector," Nauseda said.

The candidate said once elected his very first official presidential visit would take him to Poland as "bilateral relations need to be improved."

He also noted that Lithuania needs a dialogue with its eastern neighbors, Russia and Belarus: first of all for the sake of economic cooperation, and also in order to raise questions about human rights and reduce geopolitical tensions.

According to a poll commissioned by the local daily "Lietuvos rytas" and carried out by the pollster Vilmorus back in February, Nauseda was in the lead on the list of Lithuania's presidential candidates with 27.3 percent support. Former finance minister and MP Ingrida Simonyte ranked second with 20 percent, and the country's current Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis was third with 16 percent.

The presidential election will be held on May 12, and if necessary, a second round is scheduled for May 26.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 22:04:32|Editor: mingmei

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ULAN BATOR, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The inauguration ceremony of a book on China's contribution to the Mongolian infrastructure development was held here on Friday.

"I published this book for the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Mongolia and China," Dashdavaa Naranjargal, author of the book, said at the inauguration ceremony.

Maranjargal hoped the book titled "Chinese workers in the Mongolian People's Republic" can provide Mongolians with a deeper understanding of China's great contribution to the infrastructure development of Mongolia in the 1950s and 1960s.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Mongolia.

In the 1950s and 1960s, China sent large numbers of workers to Mongolia to help with its infrastructure development. Some of the projects have since become symbols of the Mongolia-China friendship.

Since then, China has consistently contributed to the development of Mongolia.

A development center for children with disabilities, which was build with the assistance of China, was handed over Mongolia on Jan. 24. The center has 250 beds and advanced medical devices and is the first of its kind in Mongolia.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 22:24:36|Editor: xuxin

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TOKYO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Japanese government on Friday voiced its concern over further uncertainty related to Britain's exit from the European Union following a vote in parliament to delay the plan.

While vowing to ensure that Japanese companies would not be adversely affected, industry minister Hiroshige Seko told a press briefing on the matter Friday that the situation remains unclear.

"The outlook remains uncertain because we don't know how long the delay will be and whether the European Union will approve it," Seko said.

"Should the deadline not be extended and Britain leave the European Union without a deal, it will have an extremely grave impact on Japanese businesses," he added.

Britain's House of Commons on Thursday voted to seek a delay to the planned exit from the EU from March 29 as scheduled to June 30.

On Wednesday, Britain's House of Commons voted to prevent Britain from leaving the EU without a deal in any circumstances.

On this point, Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso said that despite the no-deal scenario being shut down, uncertainties remain as to how much more leeway the EU is prepared to give Britain.

"Although a no-deal exit was voted down, we cannot predict what will happen because it depends on how negotiations with the European Union will go, We will have to watch developments closely," Aso said.

Major Japanese automakers based in Britain, which account for around 50 percent of all auto production there, have already been rattled by uncertainty surrounding Brexit.

Japan's top government spokesperson has urged both Britain and the EU to ensure that the departure process holds no further surprises and be "legally stable."

"We will take necessary steps such as providing Japanese companies with information and assistance," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a separate press briefing on the matter Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 22:39:38|Editor: yan

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WARSAW, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese ambassador to Poland has said that his country supported the Chinese enterprises to increase investments in Warsaw, and expected Poland to continue to provide a fair and non-discriminatory business environment for them.

Ambassador Liu Guangyuan made the remarks here on Thursday while attending the inauguration ceremony of the Polish-Chinese General Chamber of Commerce.

Xu Xiaofeng, Economic Counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Poland, Grzegorz Czelej, Chairman of the Polish-Chinese Parliamentary Group, and Andrzej Arendarski, Chairman of the Polish Chamber of Commerce, as well as around 200 representatives from both countries also attended the ceremony.

The Chamber's main goal is to promote the development of Chinese-Polish economic and trade relations, the ambassador said in his speech.

Liu said that expanding and deepening bilateral mutual beneficial cooperation is in the fundamental interests of both China and Poland and the peoples from both countries.

He also expressed hope for the further release of the development potential of Chinese-Polish mutual investments in order to promote common progress and prosperity.

For his part, Andrzej Arendarski said that the establishment of the Polish-Chinese Central Chamber of Commerce was of a great significance to the economic and trade cooperation between Poland and China, adding that Poland strongly supported the promotion of bilateral cooperation within the framework of the "Belt and Road Initiative" and hoped that the establishment of the Chamber may actively contribute to this process.

According to Liu Hongxing, President of the Polish-Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber currently gathered more than 40 Chinese and Polish member companies, covering high-tech, energy, finance, infrastructure, medicine and manufacturing sectors.

The Chamber will protect and support the commercial interests and business development of the Chinese companies in Poland and the Polish enterprises in China and promote healthy development of China-Poland economic and trade relations, Liu added.

In recent years, the mutually beneficial and pragmatic cooperation between China and Poland has continued to expand, while the Chinese companies have continued to increase their investment in Poland.

According to Chinese data, in 2018 the trade volume between the two countries exceeded 24.5 billion U.S. dollars and observed an increase of 15.5 percent over the previous year.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 22:44:40|Editor: yan

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SHANGHAI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Living alone and working hard in Shanghai, Wang Qian, used to buy a dozen self-heating instant hotpots every month, but is now more cautious about them.

A hit on e-commerce platforms, the small bento-box dish, which costs no more than 50 yuan (7.4 U.S. dollars), became extremely popular among young Chinese white-collar workers.

The small bento-box instant hotpot is composed of an inner layer holding half-cooked vegetables and meat and an outer layer with heating materials at the bottom, which can release heat after combining with cold water. A mini hotpot can be prepared within 10 minutes.

A total of 4.53 million packages were sold during last year's Single's Day online shopping carnival, nearly triple compared with the same period in 2017. Some even sold out at local convenience stores.

However, the instant hotpot products might be delicious and convenient, but they been proven unsafe.

A recent test on 20 different such products revealed that inflammable gas can be released during the heating process and the plastic outer or inner layers can distorted because of the heat.

Shanghai Consumer Council, the test conductor, called for the setting of national and industry standards, suggesting careful use of the hotpot in open areas and sorted disposal of the self-heating materials.

Just like the instant hotpot, online best-selling products often go viral on social networks by precisely satisfying the needs of young customers, said Lao Guoling, head of the research center for e-commerce with Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

According to the China Consumers Association, most customer concerns last year were internet-related, including the quality of online goods, saftey of online ride-hailing, mobile payment and personal information protection.

Chinese online shoppers and regulatory authorities are facing bigger challenges as the virtual marketplace booms with popular products emerging one after another, said Lao, noting that such products and services might not be covered by existing industry standard constraints.

China's first e-commerce law took effect on Jan. 1. It bans vendors from unscrupulous practices like deleting shopper reviews, and cancelling orders.

Wang Yunxia, instructor of Zhejiang Gongshang University, said the law could help promote the healthy development of e-commerce and better protect the rights of online consumers.

Starting in 1999, China's e-commerce market has been expanding at break-neck pace, with emerging players, even individuals, joining industry giants like Alibaba and JD in mining the country's consumption potential.

E-commerce platforms has also played their part in protecting consumer rights.

In 2018, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba applied new technologies such as semantic and emotional analysis of online comments, panoramic view of online stores and live streaming monitoring system to discover problematic products and sellers.

Alibaba's online shopping platform Tmall rolled out a slew of return and refund policies concerning trending products. For example, consumers are entitled to claim refunds for cosmetics and diapers that cause allergic reactions, and alcohol that is damaged during transportation.

Alibaba said it aided police in catching 1,953 suspects involved in counterfeiting related crimes in 2018. The cases solved were worth about 7.9 billion yuan (1.17 billion U.S. dollars).

China's authorities also have improved their measures of consumer protection online. The "12315" online consumer protecting platforms now can be reached for help through personal computers and several mobile applications or mini-applications 24 hours a day.

Statistics show that these online platforms were visited nearly 39 million times in 2018.

Wang Qian said she would still buy instant hotpot, but be more cautious and pay more attention to information released by local authorities on online products.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:04:49|Editor: yan

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ATHENS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and visiting Bolivian President Evo Morales on Friday voiced their support for stronger cooperation between Latin America and Europe and called for solving the Venezuela crisis through dialogue, diplomacy and not foreign interventions.

"We oppose and will always oppose any attempted military intervention or solution, because we believe democracy and their own sovereignty is the only way out for people," Tsipras said during a joint press conference with Morales.

"The only way to resolve these issues and strengthen democracy is through dialogue," said the Bolivian president, who was on a two-day visit to Athens.

They also called for closer and deeper international cooperation to strengthen democracy and social justice worldwide and tackle common challenges.

Tsipras hailed the progress steps achieved in Bolivia in the past 13 years.

"Over the last 13 years, the Left in Bolivia led an economic miracle that prompted even the most hardliners of IMF executives - whom we too know here in Greece - to admit that Bolivia is a clear-cut success story," the Greek prime minister noted during an event hosted at Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center on Thursday evening shortly after Morales' arrival at the Greek capital.

On his part, the Bolivian president said Friday during a meeting with Tsipras that "Latin America and the Caribbean are known globally as fighters on behalf of a multifaceted dimension of international law, a multifaceted view on global issues, something which means working together to the benefit of humanity."

He also expressed his enthusiasm at his first visit to the Acropolis hill and the Acropolis Museum and invited Tsipras to visit Bolivia.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:04:50|Editor: yan

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NANNING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- A total of 33 medical staff from south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region left for Niger and the Comoros on Friday to reinforce Chinese medical aid teams there.

They were chosen from hospitals at 12 cities in Guangxi and will join 13 colleagues who remained in the two African nations for an 18-month mission.

The doctors are from neurosurgery, cardiovascular, neurology, gastroenterology, nephrology and radiological departments.

Guangxi has dispatched 749 medical staff to Niger and the Comoros since it sent its first medical aid team to Niger in 1976. They treated 367,900 patients, carried out 55,100 operations and trained 4,600 local doctors between 2013 and 2018.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:30:00|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi talked about high-level exchanges and issues of mutual concern with his French counterpart Jean Yves Le Drian over the phone on Friday.

The two sides agreed that China and France should strengthen their strategic communication and coordination, defend multilateralism, safeguard the tenets and principles of the UN Charter and jointly deal with the various global challenges in the face of the uncertainties in the international situation for the moment.

They also agreed to push forward the China-France comprehensive strategic partnership to a new level.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:35:02|Editor: yan

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BELGRADE, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The terrorist attack in New Zealand is unrelated to Serbia, Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic said at a press conference on Friday, commenting on alleged presence of Serbian nationalist music and symbols in the live video of the attack.

The foreign minister said his country sees reports that allege such connections as abuses.

He said that Serbia strongly condemned the terrorist attack that killed 49 people in the city of Christchurch in New Zealand and wounded dozens of others, and pointed out that the attacker, regardless of the various reports, had nothing to do with Serbia, Serbian public broadcaster RTS reported.

"I condemn these types of abuses, the man (attacker) has nothing to do with Serbia, I do not know who can be his inspiration, but I saw names of other countries on that list too," he said.

Media reported that the weapon of one of the attackers had Cyrillic letters inscribed on his weapon, reading the names of Serbian historic national heroes such as Milos Obilic and Bajo Pivljanin, while others claimed that Serbian nationalist music was heard in the live video.

"Serbia has nothing to do with it, we do not ask anyone to revenge any Serbian victim in the world. We condemn this type of abuse, which is detrimental to Serbian interests and we will arrest anyone suspected of having this kind of interest," Dacic said.

Dacic expressed his condolences to the families of those killed and wounded in the attacks, adding that the result is the result of a "global evil" of terrorism, against which countries can fight only jointly, and with a non-selective approach.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:40:04|Editor: yan

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TOKYO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday sent a message of condolences to his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern, condemning shootings at mosques in New Zealand earlier in the day, local media reported.

In his message, Abe described the shootings as a "despicable terrorist act" and said that they should never be tolerated.

"Terrorism should never be tolerated for any reason. Japan is determined to resolutely fight terrorism together with New Zealand as well as the international community," he said in the message.

Abe also expressed condolences and sympathy to the people of New Zealand that have been affected by the shootings.

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in multiple attacks on two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch on Friday.
RTHK: Forty killed in New Zealand mosque shootings: PM

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday that 40 people were killed and 20 seriously injured in attacks on worshippers at mosques in the city of Christchurch.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," she said. "From what we know, it does appear to have been well planned."

Police said two mosques were targeted and witnesses spoke of victims being shot at close range, with women and children also believed to be among those killed.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

It was not immediately clear how many attackers were involved, but New Zealand police said that four people  three men and a woman  were taken into custody.

Commissioner Mike Bush said a number of IEDS (improved explosive devices) were also found and neutralised by the military.

A Palestinian man who was in one of the mosques said he saw someone being shot in the head.

"I heard three quick shots, then after about 10 seconds it started again. It must have been an automatic  no one could pull a trigger that quick," the man, who did not wish to be named, said.

"Then people started running out. Some were covered in blood," he said, adding that he joined the fleeing crowd and managed to escape.

Video and documents circulating online  but not officially confirmed  suggested the gunman had streamed his attack on Facebook Live.

New Zealand police described it as "extremely distressing" and urged web users not to share it.

A manifesto had also been posted online on accounts linked to the same Facebook page, suggesting the attack was racially motivated.

A social media account had also posted a number of pictures of a semi-automatic weapon covered in the names of historical figures, many of whom were involved in the killing of Muslims.

Police, who initially imposed a city-wide lockdown, sent armed officers to a number of scenes.

"This is an evolving incident and we are working to confirm the facts, however we can confirm there have been a number of fatalities," Bush said.

"Police are responding with its full capability to manage the situation, but the risk environment remains extremely high."

An ashen-faced Ardern said she was unable to confirm the number of fatalities, with events still unfolding.

"It is clear that this is one of New Zealand's darkest days," she told reporters. "Clearly, what has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence."

The two known targets were the Masjid al Noor in central Christchurch, and a second mosque in suburban Linwood.

One witness told stuff.co.nz he was praying when he heard shooting -- and then saw his wife lying dead on the footpath outside when he fled.

Another man said he saw children being shot.

"There were bodies all over," he said. (AFP)

______________________________

Last updated: 2019-03-15 HKT 14:38

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Fiona Goodall/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- President Donald Trump, former President Barack Obama and a number of 2020 presidential candidates weighed in with condolences on social media on the deadly mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand in which at least 49 people were killed and dozens more injured at two mosques on Friday.



Obama tweeted that he and former first lady Michelle Obama "... send our condolences to the people of New Zealand. We grieve with you and the Muslim community."

Michelle and I send our condolences to the people of New Zealand. We grieve with you and the Muslim community. All of us must stand against hatred in all its forms.  Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 15, 2019



Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey who plans to run for president in 2020, tweeted that he is "sickened" by the attack and is determined to work against hate.

Im sickened by the news coming out of New Zealandthe horrific terrorist attack targeting Muslims at prayer that killed at least 49 people.



The rising tide of white supremacy and Islamophobia around the globe must be met with our determination to work against hate.  Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) March 15, 2019



Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat who is also running for president in 2020 called the alleged gunman's actions as "evil and cowardly" and sends condolences with a heavy heart.

My heart is heavy with grief for New Zealand & Muslims worldwide affected by the tragic murders in Christchurch. The massacre of those in a house of worship, in prayer, is evil & cowardly. We stand with our friends around the world to condemn hate & speak out against intolerance.  Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) March 15, 2019



President Donald Trump wants the people of New Zealand to know that the United States stands with them and sends well wishes to those affected.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019



Newly-announced presidential candidate Beto ORourke, a former Texas congressman, vowed on Twitter that "We dont back down in the face of Islamophobia at home or abroad."

We don't back down in the face of Islamophobia and racism at home or abroad. We stand up, stand together and make it clear that terrorism won't be met with indifference but with action that honors our diversity as the people of the world. Thinking of our friends in New Zealand.  Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) March 15, 2019



And Sen. Bernie Sanders, who also recently announced a 2020 presidential run tweeted "No one should have to fear for their life because of their religion."

Our thoughts are with the victims of the horrific attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. No one should have to fear for their life because of their religion. We must come together to condemn all forms of hate and violence to build a future of respect and understanding.  Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 15, 2019



Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said America stands with the New Zealand Muslim community in mourning the deaths of those killed in the attack.

My statement on yesterdays terrorist attacks in New Zealand: https://t.co/VM33Us7o9r pic.twitter.com/CBDcNyaH7D  Leader McConnell (@senatemajldr) March 15, 2019

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:45:04|Editor: yan

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THE HAGUE, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Dutch King Willem-Alexander and several others on Friday sent their condolences to the victims of the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, with the Dutch National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security calling out "to stay alert around mosques".

"I am shocked by the terrible attacks on the two mosques in Christchurch," Prime Minister Rutte said. "My thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. I just offered Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern my condolences."

"We are shocked," the Dutch King said in a joint statement with his wife Queen Maxima. "Hate and intolerance have taken a horrible toll. We are living intensively with all who have been affected by this unreasonable violence."

Dutch Foreign Minister Stef Blok also added condolences. "My heartfelt condolences go out to the victims and their families or this ruthless and horrific act of violence which hit Christchurch today," Blok stated. "We stand by the people and government of New Zealand and our thoughts are with them."

During the attacks in Christchurch at least two gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch on Friday, killing over 40 people and injuring over 20 people.

The Dutch National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV) concluded that "the polarized social debate can have an impact on rapidly radicalizing groups or loners". The NCTV added that the attacks have no impact on the current Dutch threat level. The threat level remains on 4 (out of 5), but "local authorities are and remain alert around mosques in the Netherlands", the NCTV stated.

Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Muslim, visited the An-Nasr mosque in his city. "It is unimaginable if your highest goal in life is to kill other people," he said in a speech. "I don't understand it and have no understanding for it. We decided today to wipe my agenda clean to share this feeling with you here."

"It is important to stay alert and stay sharp," Aboutaleb continued. "We do that too. We have decided to have some extra police patrols driving around the mosques of Rotterdam today because I have received reports that people need them."

Migrant party DENK decided to halt its campaign activities for the Provincial Elections, scheduled for March 20. Representatives of the party visited mosques to support the Muslim community.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:45:04|Editor: yan

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BANGKOK, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Thailand is imposing a ban on sales and distribution of alcoholic drinks ahead of the day of pre-voting and the weekend of the general election on March 24.

Sunday, March 17 will feature a day of pre-voting where alcohol sales and distribution will be forbidden from 6:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 16 until 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 17.

The ban will be preceded on the following weekend of March 23 and March 24 as well.

Violations of the ban are punishable by imprisonment of up to six months or a fine up to 10,000 baht (312 U.S. dollars).

The restriction is imposed to prevent electoral fraud such as vote buying or bribery, according to Thai police. They believe that canvassers usually try to bribe voters in different ways, including throwing parties the night before the poll, to attract votes.

Police said that weddings and parties can still be organized on these dates but there must be no alcohol.

Police will step up security at the polling stations as well as tighten the management of road traffic to facilitate voters exercising their rights.

Thailand is holding a general election on March 24, the first since the current military government took power in a May 2014 coup.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-15 23:50:05|Editor: yan

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THE HAGUE, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Dutch public prosecutor announced on Friday that the Dutch police arrested two persons in Amsterdam on Tuesday following an investigation into the origin of the weapons used by IS terrorists in the 2015 Paris attacks.

The attacks on various locations in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015 caused a total of 130 deaths and more than 350 people got injured. IS claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Automatic weapons, Kalashnikovs and other explosives, were used in these attacks. According to the Dutch public prosecutor, some members of the jihadist suicide cell may have been in the Netherlands in October 2015 to collect these weapons.

The suspects arrested are 29 and 31 years old respectively. The suspicion against them is that they have been involved in some way in the supply of the weapons. Investigation by an international team of Dutch, Belgian and French investigators brought them into the picture.

Computers, documents, other data carriers and mobile phones have been seized in the homes of the suspects. The 29-year-old suspect was brought before the examining magistrate judge in Rotterdam on Friday and was detained for two weeks.

The health of the other suspect does not allow him to be detained any longer. According to the prosecutor there was no other option than to release him on Thursday pending the results of the further investigation.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:00:07|Editor: yan

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BUCHAREST, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Political actors must get closer to their citizens in order to relaunch the European Union (EU), and the best way to do that is to involve local communities, Karl-Heinz Lambertz, president of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR), said here on Friday.

The CoR president made the remark at a press conference held at the conclusion of the two-day 8th European Summit of Regions and Cities.

During the summit, regional and local elected representatives discussed and adopted the Bucharest Declaration, entitled "Building the EU from the ground up with our regions and cities."

According to the document, the signatories are "convinced that the European Union needs its regions and cities as much as they need the European Union." The declaration is their "contribution to the preparation of the Strategic Agenda 2019-2024 to be outlined by the EU leaders in Sibiu" in central Romania during their scheduled May 9 summit.

The Bucharest Declaration identifies ten measures aimed at strengthening the EU's democratic foundation and anchoring the EU's action locally to build a better future for European citizens.

"Europe is being transformed with unprecedented speed by globalization, by the digital revolution, climate and demographic change. If we do not want European integration to become a reversible process, these transformations, which crystalize social, economic and territorial inequalities, have to be accompanied, shaped and regulated through a concentrated effort at all levels of government, in particular when one third of all public expenditure and more than half of public investment is carried out at the sub-national level," the document says.

It also emphasizes that "it is vital to raise awareness amongst EU citizens, especially young people, about the European dimension of their identity and citizenship, in particular through education, culture and youth empowerment policies, in order to increase their feeling of belonging to the European project."

In his address, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis conceded that European citizens sometimes perceive the EU as being too bureaucratic and too slow to respond to the multiple current challenges, while the European leadership is often seen as an abstract and distant structure, with leaders whom citizens tend not to know.

The Bucharest summit focused on the contribution and role of local and regional authorities in ensuring solidarity in the EU, strengthening European democracy and encouraging dialogue with citizens, especially in view of this May's European Parliament elections.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:00:07|Editor: yan

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UNITED NATIONS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The high representative for the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), Miguel Moratinos, on Friday strongly condemned "the barbaric terrorist attacks" on Muslim worshippers in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Hate crimes as such are totally unacceptable and unjustifiable by whomever and wherever they are being perpetrated, said Moratinos in a press statement.

He noted that despite efforts made, certain ideological mindsets continue to project their uncivilized and ugly face in the world and deliberately twist religious interpretation to serve their despicable intentions. "These vicious forces should not hamper our efforts nor dissuade our political will to prevent and combat violent extremism, hate speech and xenophobia in all its forms."

Moratinos reiterated the commitment of the UNAOC to continue to work on promoting tolerance and understanding as well as strengthening the culture of peace among all people, regardless of race, color, language or faith.

On behalf of the UNAOC, Moratinos expressed his heartfelt condolences to the victims' families and his sympathies to the people and government of New Zealand.

Gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch on Friday, killing 49 people and wounding 48 others.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:00:07|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen (C-R) and South Korean President Moon Jae-in (C-L) witness a signing ceremony in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on March 15, 2019. Cambodia and South Korea on Friday signed five cooperation documents to boost bilateral ties and cooperation. (Xinhua/Sovannara)

PHNOM PENH, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia and South Korea on Friday signed five cooperation documents to boost bilateral ties and cooperation.

Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen and visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in witnessed the signing ceremony of the documents after their bilateral meeting at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh.

The documents were focused on cooperation in public health, transport infrastructure development, electricity project, information and communication technology (ICT), and trade and investment promotion, Hun Sen said in a joint press conference after the signing ceremony.

Before the signing ceremony, Hun Sen and Moon held talks, discussing cooperation in all fields for the interests of the two countries and peoples.

"The bilateral talks were concluded with a close, frank and fraternal atmosphere," Hun Sen said. "We highly valued the growing bilateral relations in a number of sectors such as trade, investment, agriculture, finance, industry, tourism and education."

Moon arrived in Cambodia on Thursday for a three-day visit at the invitation of Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:10:09|Editor: yan

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MUSCAT, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Oman on Friday condemned the violent terrorist attacks on two mosques in New Zealand that killed and injured dozens of people, including children.

The Omani Foreign Ministry confirmed in a statement its firm and rejection of all forms of violence, terrorism, hatred and racism against the innocent people at all times and places.

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch earlier on Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:10:09|Editor: yan

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CAIRO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Egypt strongly condemned on Friday the deadly attacks on two mosques in New Zealand that left at least 49 people dead, Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"The heinous terrorist act contradicts with all humanity principles," the statement said.

The attack confirms the need for intensifying international efforts to fight terrorism and combating all forms of violence and extremism, the statement added.

Egypt expressed sincere condolences to the victims' families, wishing a speedy recovery for the wounded, it said.

Egyptian Immigration Minister Nabila Makram has contacted the Embassy of Egypt in New Zealand to ensure safety of the Egyptian nationals in the country.

New Zealand's Foreign Ministry has not yet confirmed whether Egyptian citizens were among the people killed in the attacks, official News Agency MENA reported.

Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Aboul-Gheit described the crime as shocking and horrible as it targeted innocent prayers in religious houses.

"Terrorism has no religion. The accident alarms the growing and severe trends of extremism," Aboul-Gheit said.

He called for stricter measures to be adopted by the international community.

Meanwhile, all Islamic state authorities have issued statement slamming the terrorist attacks.

Al-Azhar, the highest Islamic learning institution in Egypt, denounced the attacks as "a horrible terrorist accident," and called for exerting more efforts to support the values of tolerance and positive integration among different segments of any society regardless of their religions or cultures.

"Such terrorist attacks are prohibited by all heavenly religions' principles and values," said Egypt's Mufti Shawqi Allam, stressing the necessity of launching a plenary investigation.

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch earlier on Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:20:11|Editor: yan

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ADDIS ABABA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopian Airlines Group CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said Friday investigation results from the crashed Ethiopian jet's black boxes "will take some days."

On Thursday, Ethiopian Airlines said both data and voice recorders extracted from the crashed Boeing 737 MAX 8 were sent to France.

All 157 people aboard the Nairobi-bound flight were killed when the jet crashed on Sunday, just minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport.

"We have sent a delegation of six people to France... and right now they are in Paris working on that process," Gebremariam said in an interview with Xinhua on Friday.

It "will take some days to read, analyze and understand" information from the voice and data recorders, he said.

"There is the voice part on one hand and there is also data part on the other hand," Gebremariam said. "They have to connect both, and the analysis may take some days."

Representatives of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Ethiopian Accident Investigation Bureau representatives are working together in the investigation process, he said.

"They are both in Paris, accompanied by FAA (U.S. Federation Aviation Authority) and Boeing experts, Ethiopian airlines' experts. They are working very hard day and night to find out the root cause of the accident," Gebremariam said.

It "is a very difficult situation. It looks like the Lion Air, because the flight only lasted for six minutes," he said.

According to Gebremariam, just three minutes after taking off, the pilot had reported difficulty controlling the aircraft and requested returning to Bole International Airport.

The airport's air traffic controllers gave clearance, but the jet disappeared from the radar screen six minutes after take-off.

"It was a very, very short period of time," Gebremariam said.

"There is clear similarity between our crash and the Lion Air crash," he stressed.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:20:11|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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People join the global "Fridays for Future" initiative in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, on March 15, 2019. Hundreds of students gathered here on Friday to join the global "Fridays for Future" initiative, calling on politicians to tackle the effects of climate change. (Xinhua/Dana Kesnerova)

PRAGUE, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of students gathered here on Friday to join the global "Fridays for Future" initiative, calling on politicians to tackle the effects of climate change.

Holding banners and placards with slogans like "Student strike for climate" and "Save our planet," the students marched through the city centre, warning against politicians' inaction on reducing emissions.

The students said politicians must stop ignoring the obvious effects of climate change and start promoting active measures to tackle it.

"There are thousands of us, we are going to fight for our future and nothing is going to stop us," said an organizer. "If a few kids can do this, imagine what politicians could do with our climate if they really wanted to."

In the Czech Republic, the problems associated with climate change include the lifting of limits on coal mining, exemptions granted to high-emission coal power plants and unsustainable farming practices, said the participants.

Similar protests were also held in other Czech towns, including in Ostrava in north Moravia and Olomouc.

The "Fridays for Future" movement, inspired by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has found resonance with students around the world. This Friday's global event is understood to be the largest to date.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:30:16|Editor: yan

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LUSAKA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The Zambian government on Friday refuted reports on social media that two students from the southern African nation were sentenced to death in China on drug trafficking charges.

The Zambian foreign ministry said such information was mere fabrication that must be treated with utmost contempt, state-run Zambia News and Information Service (ZANIS) reported.

Winnie Chibesakunda, Zambia's ambassador to China, said no such sentencing has been received by the embassy or recorded by Chinese authorities.

There were no Zambian students in China bearing the names indicated in those reports circulated online, she said.

Chibesakunda said the embassy is always monitoring the well-being of all students in China.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:30:17|Editor: yan

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BEIJING, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a message of condolence to New Zealand Governor-General Patsy Reddy on Friday over the deadly shooting incidents earlier Friday in New Zealand's Christchurch City.

In his message, Xi said he was shocked to learn about the serious shooting incidents which have caused heavy casualties.

On behalf of the Chinese government, the Chinese people and in his own name, Xi expressed deep sympathy with and sincere condolences to the New Zealand government and the New Zealand people, while expressing grief for the victims and wishing the injured an early recovery.

Also on Friday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang sent a message of condolence to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, expressing grief for the victims while extending sincere sympathies to the injured and the bereaved families.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:30:18|Editor: yan

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by Zeynep Cermen

ISTANBUL, March 15 (Xinhua) -- "If trees die, I will die too," said Mavi, a Turkish little girl.

The five-year-old made the remarks to reporters in Istanbul on the shoulders of her father.

Mavi was joining about 100 Turkish pupils who missed school on Friday to gather together in a park along the Bosphorus Strait to appeal for action on climate change.

The pupils, mostly aged between seven and 12, were inspired by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager who started missing school every Friday in September last year to strike for climate in front of the Swedish parliament.

The Greta-style strike has spread to around 100 countries and gone viral on Twitter with the hashtag "Friday for future."

In Istanbul's Bebek Park, the pupils called for the authorities to "fix the climate," carrying banners that read, "Make world great again" and "Greta, we are behind you."

"We are less than 12 years away from not being able to undo our mistakes," a young speaker told the crowd.

"We have to stop the emission of greenhouse gases," another one added.

In October last year, a UN report warned of a possible rise in temperatures by 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052 should the world fail to curb the global warming.

Parents, teachers and members of environmental groups were also present at the park to show solidarity with the young protesters.

"Today, children all over the world skip schools and go into action," Hayrettin Nida Kucuk, an environmental activist, told Xinhua.

"They are protesting the inactivity of the world countries on the climate crisis," he said.

In a world where the adults remain silent, it is up to the children to defend the planet, said Irem Cetinor, another environmentalist.

A day earlier, Greta tweeted: "Tomorrow we school strike for the climate in 1,769 places in 112 countries around the world. Everyone is welcome. Everyone is needed. Let's change history. And let's never stop for as long as it takes."
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 00:35:18|Editor: yan

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WASHINGTON, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Several U.S. cities tightened security at their mosques on Friday in light of the mass shootings in New Zealand that have left dozens dead.

In Washington D.C., police said they have provided "an increased presence at the mosques" in the nation's capital, adding that they are "not aware of any credible threats to the religious institutions" across the area.

"We urge our community to report any suspicious behavior to the proper authorities," the Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement posed on Twitter.

James P. O'Neill, commissioner of the New York City Police Department, said the agency "sees no New York City connection to the tragedy in New Zealand at this time" but stands "prepared to protect the people in all of our communities."

O'Neill said they are "increasing patrols and high-visibility counterterrorism presence at locations around the city."

The Los Angeles Police Department said it is monitoring "the horrific events" in New Zealand.

"While this attack appears to be an isolated incident with no nexus to LA, out of an abundance of caution we're providing extra patrols around mosques," the police department said in a tweet.

In Chicago, police said "there are no known threats to the city," while "special attention will be given to Chicago mosques as a precaution."

The White House said earlier in the day that it "strongly condemns" attacks in New Zealand, where mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch have left 49 people dead and 48 others injured on Friday.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families," White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

"We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate," she said.

U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted earlier that he extends his "warmest sympathy and best wishes" to the people of New Zealand after "the horrible massacre."

"The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do," the president added.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 01:00:22|Editor: yan

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ADEN, Yemen, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Internationally-backed government condemned the terrorist attacks on two mosques in New Zealand on Friday, leaving dozens dead and injured.

"The Republic of Yemen condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist attack that targeted worshippers in two mosques of New Zealand," said the Yemeni government in an official statement.

"This terrorist attack against New Zealand's worshippers is strongly denounced by Yemen's government and its people," the statement added.

It also voiced full support for "New Zealand's government in taking any measures for the purpose of protecting its people."

Yemen expresses sincere condolences and sorrows to the victims' families, wishing a speedy recovery for the wounded, the statement said.

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques in New Zealand's city of Christchurch earlier on Friday.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 01:00:23|Editor: yan

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ARUSHA, Tanzania, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania's sustained efforts to fight poaching have cut the number of elephants killed in the Ruaha National Park from 52 in 2012 to just three last year, park conservators said on Friday.

Agricola Lihiru, head of security at the park, attributed the sharp fall in poaching incidences within the protected area to such efforts as deployment of more game warders and stern legal action against poachers.

"We organized a sensitization campaign for communities surrounding the park, which made them more aware of the need to protect the animals and report suspicious activities to authorities," Lihiru said in an interview with Xinhua.

From 2017 to 2018, warders of the park intercepted 360 poaching attempts whereby suspects were arrested and taken to court, he said.

Heightened security, putting a number of poachers behind bars, and wider awareness among communities have collectively made the park safer for elephant, Lihiru said.

Ruaha National Park, the largest in Tanzania, is home to around 15,000 elephants.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 01:30:27|Editor: yan

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ACCRA, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Ghana's Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta on Friday expressed confidence that the local cedi currency, which has seen some of its worst performances in recent years, would begin to stabilize.

Once the inflows of some expected foreign exchange came in, the situation would begin to ease, Ofori-Atta said in an interview.

The parliament has approved a 750 million U.S. dollar bridge-finance facility from Standard Chartered Bank and Standard Bank of South Africa to support some government needs, in lieu of inflows of Eurobond proceeds, he said.

These inflows will support the local cedi currency, which has depreciated more than 8 percent year-to-date, Ofori-Atta said.

"What we are looking for is not only stability but a reversal," he said. "As you know we went through parliament with the bridge-financing, and that has been concluded so the central bank has that facility."

Ultimately, Ofori-Atta said, a 300 million dollar facility procured by the Ghana Cocoa Board and a 3 billion dollar Eurobond to be floated on Tuesday will help stabilize the local currency.

The minister attributed the fall of the local currency against major currencies to such things as the conclusion of Ghana's International Monetary Fund (IMF) program, which has led to some uncertainties.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 02:25:38|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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An engineering vehicle is seen on the road connecting the capital Damascus with its Eastern Ghouta countryside, Syria, on March 12, 2019. After eight years of destructive civil war, Syrians in Eastern Ghouta, a former rebel stronghold, are rebuilding their life from ruins. (Xinhua/Hummam Sheikh Ali)

by Hummam Sheikh Ali

DAMASCUS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- After eight years of a destructive civil war, Syrians in Eastern Ghouta, a formerly rebel stronghold east of the capital Damascus, are pulling themselves together to rebuild their lives from ruins.

Ayn Tarma, one of the towns in war-torn Eastern Ghouta, was a scene for fierce battles between the Syrian army and an array of rebel groups, which controlled the region since the beginning of the civil war eight years ago until their defeat last May.

Now, with nearly daily shelling and gunfires fading away, the main marketplace in the town is bustling with life again, though the scars of war are still visible in surrounding buildings dotted with bullet holes and damaged walls.

Not so far from the marketplace, the destruction of war becomes more noticeable in the residential neighborhoods as most of the buildings are either partially or fully destroyed.

In a sign showing the return to normality in the area, some residents were seen fixing their homes, either by their own hands or hiring workers.

Samir Ghabari, a resident of Ayn Tarma, was quick to return to his home in the same month when the government forces entered the area after clearing the rebels from the neighborhood.

Though shocked by the scene of destruction of his house, Ghabari, who escaped to the Jaramana area in Damascus during the war, was determined to rebuild his home instead of succumbing to anger, sadness and discouragement.

Showing Xinhua reporters around his house that is being renovated, Ghabari said the hardest part of his displacement was the high rent of housing he had to pay.

"I have felt so relieved when I returned here because I was returning to my house and belongings. But when I returned, I found that my house was damaged. And we started repairing from the scratch, because we have to return to our normal live," he said.

Ghabari, a state employee, was among the first to leave their homes as the rebels were targeting the state employees.

Samiha Fares, also a state employee, had to leave her home along with her children to seek refuge in Jaramana during the war. She has been rebuilding her house damaged by the war after her return.

"The most important thing was the high rents and the fact that we were displaced from our homes ... When the situation worsened here, we were displaced to an area where we knew no one and we didn't know what to do," Fares told Xinhua.

After returning home, Fares started fixing it with her salary. She said she was relieved that the nightmare of having to pay high rents was finally over.

In another area in Ayn Tarma, Muhammad Shehadeh was among those who didn't leave their area throughout the war.

For him, hunger was the worst experience during that time, who accused the rebels of keeping the stocks of food for themselves while selling food items to people at unaffordable prices.

Now, the situation is different and his wife is a source of inspiration and hope.

Shehadeh's wife, Samira Ayoub, fills the house with roses, mostly plastic, to give hope for a better life. They also stick a small plastic red rose on their door to lend the grayish area a warm welcoming color.

"The situation has become better since the Syrian army entered the area, as everything has become available including electricity and water," Shehadeh told Xinhua.

Ayoub said hope and optimism should prevail despite all difficulties and hardships that her family had gone through.

"The circumstances we have been through should not prevent us from being hopeful, as we should always look back on the past, and life should be full of hope and optimism," she said.

Notably, the Syrian government is working to facilitate the return of normal life to battered Eastern Ghouta, as work is underway to fix one of the main roads connecting the region with Damascus.
File Photo: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addresses the opening of the United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) 2019 Global Engagement Summit at the UN headquarters in New York, on Feb. 22, 2019. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

UNITED NATIONS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is shocked and appalled at the "terrorist attack" at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, his spokesperson said Friday.

Guterres "recalls the sanctity of mosques and all places of worship" and "calls upon all people on this holy day for Muslims to show signs of solidarity with the bereaved Islamic community," Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson, said at a press briefing.

"The secretary-general reiterates the urgency of working better together globally to counter Islamophobia and eliminate intolerance and violent extremism in all its forms," he added.

The UN chief also extended his condolences to the families of the victims and to the government and people of New Zealand.

Earlier on Friday, gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch, killing 49 people and wounding 48 others.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 04:36:05|Editor: yan

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VILNIUS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- An exhibition from the National Art Museum of China kicked off in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, on Friday.

Held at the National Gallery of Art of Lithuania, the exhibition "Chinese Xieyi. Selected Works from the National Art Museum of China" displays 73 pieces of artworks by 28 Chinese artists working with various traditional techniques, including 26 pieces of artwork kept by the museum.

Xieyi, or freehand brushwork, is an important feature of Chinese art based on an intuitive representation of the artist's inner knowledge and intellectual experience.

According to the organizers, visitors to the exhibition will have a unique opportunity to see contemporary Chinese ink-wash paintings, oil paintings, watercolors, prints and sculptures.

"Through these works, we can perceive how China has tried to fit into the world while preserving its unique cultural trails in the context of globalization, "wrote Wu Weishan, director of the National Museum of China, in the foreword to the album of the exhibits in the exhibition.

The exhibition also featured a pre-open lecture on Xieyi and presentations of the techniques of Chinese ink-wash paintings and calligraphy during the opening ceremony.

As an exchange visit, it follows the exhibition "Lithuanian Art: Thinking Through Landscape"held in 2017 at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, which was a big success.

Organized jointly by the National Art Museum of China, Lithuanian Art Museum and National Gallery of Art, the exhibition will last until May 4.
The anonymous owner of an East Village building associated with infamous landlord Raphael Toledano is trying to force out rent-striking tenants by seeking to terminate their leases in bankruptcy court.

The unusual eviction tactic has prompted Attorney General Letitia James and other state and city agencies to intervene in the case. During a protest rally on Wednesday, James announced that her office, along with the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal and New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, was filing a court motion to oppose a request by the owner of 444 East 13th Street to reject tenants leases.

Bankruptcy Court should not be used as a tool to unjustly oust rent-stabilized New Yorkers from their homes, James said in a statement. In filing this motion, my office is working to ensure that the tenants are not displaced."

Michael Leonard, a senior staff attorney at the Urban Justice Center, said using bankruptcy court to push through evictions was rare. He said that typically, when a building is sold, the tenants get to stay and are able to exercise tenant protections, such as rent stabilization, under state law.

Instead, the building owner is asking for a bankruptcy court to terminate the tenants' leases, on the grounds that a proposed $8.2 million sale of the property can't go through while the rent-stabilized leases are in place.

They are essentially trying to pull a fast one and circumvent tenants rights, Leonard said of the landlord.

Wasim Lone, the director of housing services at Good Old Lower East Side, a grassroots group that has been assisting tenants at the building, called the landlord's filing outrageous.

We see this as litigation harassment, he added.

A group of eight tenants at the building have been withholding rent for months over a range of problems, including lack of heat, failure to make necessary repairs, and rodents. The building currently has 68 outstanding violations, according to HPDs website. They include citations for lead-paint hazards, rat droppings, and defective floors.

The building, which has 16 rent-stabilized units and is registered under an LLC that filed for bankruptcy in 2017, has been on the radar of state and city officials because of its association with East Village landlord Raphael Toledano. The latter has a well-chronicled history of tenant harassment, including threats to have tenants deported and to drop dynamite on the building.

In 2016, Toledano was ordered to pay more than $1 million to settle a tenant harassment case where tenants secretly recorded conversations in which the landlord, building agents, and the property manager used claims of prostitution, a drug investigation, and skyrocketing rents to attempt to frighten them into leaving.

According to the states legal filing, the Attorney Generals office was made aware of the bankruptcy claim through its ongoing investigation of Toledano, who is referred to as the buildings prior controlling member.

Untangling the new ownership is difficult. Property registration documents that listed Toledano as the head officer of 444 East 13 LLC expired in 2017. No new paperwork has since been filed with the state.

Robert Sasloff, an attorney representing the LLC on the bankruptcy filing, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What is clear is that the owner is trying to unload the debt-ridden property, according to court documents. In December 2018, the LLC entered into a $8.2 million stalking horse contract with an individual named Alex Gonter. A stalking horse refers to an initial offer for a bankrupt companys assets from a buyer selected by the owner, which sets a floor for future bids. The agreement, which could be challenged by creditors, will not be finalized until a bankruptcy judge signs off.

Court documents have also turned up an unexpected association between the landlord and a former Democratic power broker. In November 2018, the landlord hired Domenic Recchia, the former City Council finance chair who served as a top lieutenant to then Speaker Christine Quinn, to act as its landlord/tenant consultant. In 2014, Recchia unsuccessfully tried to unseat Representative Michael G. Grimm, the two-term Republican from Staten Island who was indicted for 20 counts of fraud. The Brooklyn native vastly out-fundraised his scandal-ridden opponent with $5 million in donations.

During the race, Recchia's losing poll numbers inspired a segment on Jon Stewarts Daily Show called, Wait, How the f@#k does that happen?

Recchia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A hearing on the bankruptcy case is set to be held on March 19th.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this story misstated the timing of Jon Stewart's segment. It was during the campaign.
Children look through a chain linked fence at al-Hol displacement camp in Hasaka governorate, Syria, on March 8, 2019. (Reuters photo)

DAMASCUS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- As many as 117 children died in a battered camp in northeastern Syria over the past few months, a war monitor reported Friday.

The dead children were mostly under 12 years old and 60 percent of them died as a result of the tough humanitarian situation in the camp over the past 19 days, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The United Nations has made several statements about the tough humanitarian situation in al-Hol camp. Its latest statement on Thursday said there has been an unfolding humanitarian crisis in the camp since December 2018.

About 67,000 people are in al-Hol camp, 90 percent of whom are women and children fleeing hostilities from the town of Baghouz, the last IS-held area in eastern Syria.

A child looks through a chain linked fence at al-Hol displacement camp in Hasaka governorate, Syria, on March 8, 2019. (Reuters photo)

The United Nations said the camp was over-crowded and uninhabitable and threatened human dignity and life where people were forced to sleep on the ground during harsh weather conditions.

People are leaving Baghouz on a daily basis and the Observatory said the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has postponed its last push against the IS in the town as the terror group is holding prisoners from the SDF.

A girl looks through a chain linked fence at al-Hol displacement camp in Hasaka governorate, Syria, on March 8, 2019. (Reuters photo)

The SDF, backed by the U.S.-led coalition, has been carrying out a crushing offensive against the IS in eastern Syria since last September.

In recent reports, the Observatory said the IS militants were in their last days in eastern Syria amid the progress of the SDF.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 05:36:19|Editor: yan

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AMMAN, March 15 (Xinhua) -- At least two Jordanians were killed and eight others injured in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday, a Jordanian official said.

Sufian Qudah from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that the ministry and the Jordanian Embassy in Australia were following the conditions of the injured and the investigations.

"The heinous massacre against Muslims praying in peace in New Zealand is an appalling terrorist crime. It unites us against extremism, hatred and terrorism," King Abdullah II of Jordan said on his official Twitter account.

"May the victims' souls rest in peace. Our condolences to the families," the king added.

The attacks in New Zealand's city of Christchurch killed at least 49 and wounded 48 others, according to New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 05:41:20|Editor: yan

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CHICAGO, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) agricultural futures settled higher on Friday, with soybeans gaining double digits on China trade optimism.

Concerns over heavy rain and flooding that hit the U.S. Midwest also supported crop prices, said market watchers.

The most active corn contract for May delivery was up 3 cents, or 0.81 percent to close at 3.7325 dollars per bushel. May wheat was up 9.5 cents, or 2.1 percent, to settle at 3.6225 dollars per bushel. May soybeans were up 10.75 cents, or 1.2 percent, to close at 9.0925 dollars per bushel.

CBOT brokers estimated that funds bought 4,100 contracts of corn, 2,200 contracts of wheat and 3,700 contracts of soybeans.

Chicago soybeans rebounded after latest reports indicated further "substantial progress" on U.S.-China trade talks.

Corn futures extended gains over short covering and adverse weather, amid concerns that the flooding impacting Iowa and several other Midwest states may lead to possible delay of seeding.

Heavy rain and rapidly melting snow have resulted in floods that hit Iowa, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has issued state disaster declarations for 21 counties due to the massive flooding, which threatened residences and industries, and might disrupt field operations as well.

"(CBOT) wheat is also on the rise as global prices are on the rally and finally we can start to move a little bit higher after the huge sell-off," said Virginia McGathey, a market analyst with McGathey Commodities.

The unfavorable weather can also create logistics problems for wheat, she added.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 05:41:20|Editor: yan

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LAGOS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Local police confirmed that a three-storey building collapsed Friday in Nigeria's southwestern city of Ibadan, with casualties feared.

A police source told Xinhua on phone the building collapsed in a residential area in Ibadan, capital of the southern state of Oyo.

According to local media, many residents have crowded the area, attempting to rescue victims trapped underneath the rubble.

Only three people have been rescued so far, local sources said.

The incident occurred two days after a similar collapse in the commercial capital Lagos claimed 20 lives, including school children.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 06:11:27|Editor: yan

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HELSINKI, March 15 (Xinhua) -- The importance of early childhood education (ECE) was highlighted at a two-day international convention which concluded on Friday in Espoo, Finland.

The International Summits of the Teaching Profession (ISTP) are organized annually by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Education International, a global organization for teachers.

The conference in Espoo, which drew ministers and representatives of teachers' trade unions from 20 countries and regions, was the first which had its theme on early education.

Finnish Minister of Education Sanni Grahn-Laasonen thanked the OECD for emphasizing early childhood education as a tool to promote equality.

In Finland, she said, access to early education has been widened and a larger share of early education staff will be highly educated. She explained that "play pedagogics" has been developed in Finland for the needs of early education. Grahn-Laasonen described the ISTP as a unique dialogue between ministers and union leaders.

Susan Hopgood, the president of Education International, said that now the "illusion is finally removed that early education is less important than primary and secondary levels". She noted that early education has an impact that continues into adult life.

Andreas Schleicher, the director for the Directorate of Education and Skills at OECD, called for a rethinking of free early education. "Many countries here around the table take pride in education being free, including universities. But tuition has to be paid for small children." Schleicher pointed out that even the host country Finland collects fees for early education.

Schleicher suspected that early education is still being considered as "something extra", rather than being the foundation. He noted that while the OECD has been suggesting some cost sharing between the society and the individual at the university level, that is not a good recipe for the early years. "If there is any sector that requires public investment, it is the early years," Schleicher said.

RELEVANCE NEEDED

Besides focusing on early education, the conference in Espoo reviewed in depth the challenges today. Schleicher said that internationally the gap between what society expects from education and what actually happens has become wider in many parts of the world. The biggest challenge for schools in the 21st century, he said, may be the loss of relevance as "we educate the children for "our past" rather than for "their future".

Schleicher referred to comments by Li Yongzhi, deputy director general of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, who told the gathering that sustainability means getting ready for the industrial revolution through reconfiguring the system and technology in education. Then learning becomes more relevant, more inclusive and also more productive.

The OECD director said the current schools were invented in the industrial age, when prevailing ideas were standardization and training once for a life time. "The change requires an enabling environment that can unleash ingenuity in schools and can build a capacity for change. It also requires leaders to tackle institutional structures that are too often around the interests of adults rather than the needs of learners."

Several speakers underlined the need for trust within the education systems. "At the time when command and control systems become weaker, building trust is perhaps the most promising way for us to build and fuel modern education systems."

"Trust can never been legislated or built in administrative structures. Trust can only be inspired through healthy relationships", Schleicher said.

JOY OF LEARNING

During the conference, excursions were offered to early education facilities. Christine Choi, the undersecretary for education in Hong Kong, said she was impressed and would take "the joy of learning" from Finland with her back to Hong Kong. She is also considering plans for early childhood education teachers to be sent to Finland for exchanges.

Kin Yuen Ip, vice president of the HK Professional Teachers Union, told Xinhua that he was impressed with the Finnish view that "less is more." "School days are much shorter than in Hong Kong and there is less homework, but the results are good."

"If we could attain comparable results with less hours, it would be good for the wellbeing of teachers and students. Finland has the shortest school hours, we are somewhere at the other end," he said.

As an example of what Finns learned from the visitors, Minister Grahn-Laasonen singled out the school system in Shanghai as an example Finland can learn from. "They are a front runner in developing cooperation between teachers. They have developed tools for that." Grahn-Laasonen said relations between teachers had been found to be a bit problematic in Finland in an earlier review and needed attention. She also mentioned the Singapore system of continued learning on the job as something Finland could benefit from.

The local co-host of the event was the Finnish Trade Union of Education (OAJ). Its Chairman Olli Luukkainen said the Finns do not generally realize how much admiration the Finnish school system gets internationally. He suggested that a future meeting should focus on vocational schools.
Photo taken on April 9, 2010 shows Russian S-400 air defense systems deployed in the city of Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast of Russia. (RIA Novosti File photo)

MOSCOW, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Russia has deployed another regimental set of the S-400 Triumph air defense missiles in its westernmost exclave of Kaliningrad, the Russian Defense Ministry said Friday.

The new set of missiles has been supplied to the Russian Baltic Fleet from the Kapustin Yar test site in the southern Astrakhan Region after successful test launches, a ministry statement said.

The Baltic Fleet is headquartered in Kaliningrad sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, and the strategically important exclave is a hot spot for the confrontation of Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The S-400 system, designed and manufactured by Russia's Almaz-Antey arms manufacturer, is considered the most advanced of its kind in Russia, capable of destroying targets at a distance of up to 400 km and a height of about 30 km.

Russia started mass production of the system in 2007 and deployed the first batch of missiles in the Moscow Region in the same year.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 06:31:29|Editor: yan

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BAGHDAD, March 15 (Xinhua) -- About 90 people suffocated from the leak of chlorine gas in Iraq's eastern city of Kut, capital of Wasit Province, the Iraqi Ministry of Health said Friday.

The leakage took place "at a water treatment facility in Kut, some 180 km southeast of the Iraqi capital Baghdad," said Sayf al-Badr, the ministry spokesman, in a statement.

Most of the suffocation cases are not serious, he added.

The Health Department of Wasit has taken all necessary precautions to address the situation, al-Badr noted.

The statement did not say if the gas leak resulted from a sabotage or an accident.

In previous cases, the Islamic State (IS) militants used chlorine gas in their terrorist attacks against civilians and Iraqi forces.

The security situation in Iraq has been dramatically improved after Iraqi security forces fully defeated the extremist IS militants across the country late in 2017.

IS remnants, however, have since melted in urban areas or resorted to deserts and rugged areas as safe havens, carrying out guerilla attacks from time to time against security forces and civilians.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-03-16 06:46:31|Editor: xuxin

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A woman holding a placard takes part in a demonstration against climate change in Brussels, Belgium, March 15, 2019. Thousands of school students across Belgium abandoned classrooms for a day of climate demonstrations on Friday as part of the "Global Strike for Future", local press reported. (Xinhua/Zhang Cheng)

BRUSSELS, March 15 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of school students across Belgium abandoned classrooms for a day of climate demonstrations on Friday as part of the "Global Strike for Future", local press reported.

Over 30,000 people, according to police in Brussels, rallied through the streets of the capital to protest against climate change, while over 6,000 people joined demonstrations in other parts of the country.

Protesters held placards screaming "There is no time to waste", "Act now together", "I dry like the planet" in the parade.

Anuna De Wever, co-founder of Youth for Climate, which has been responsible for the previous protests that have taken place in the capital every Thursday since Jan. 10, described the day of global mobilization as historic.

"This is a very strong signal. Actions are carried out in more than 100 countries. The movement continues to grow," she said.

High school and university students, accompanied by their elders, gathered under the banners of the movements "Grandparents for the climate", "Teachers for Climate", as well as organizations such as Greenpeace, Oxfam, Natagora and Amnesty International.

According to local organizers, Friday's strike is to challenge the Belgian state to pursue an ambitious new climate policy and to send a message to the European institutions.

The globally-coordinated day of action has been embraced by about 100 countries, inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who protests weekly outside Sweden's parliament.
A cyclist was fatally struck by the driver of a black sedan this morning while riding on Borden Avenue in Long Island Citya notoriously dangerous corridor where some local residents had recently petitioned the city for a protected bike lane and other pedestrian safety enhancements.

The cyclist, whose name has not yet been released by police, was near Second Street, about a block from the waterfront, when he was hit by the driver just before 8 a.m. on Thursday, authorities said. The victim was transported to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Borden Avenue, a four-lane road with parking on both sides that runs from the waterfront to the Long Island Expressway, was already known to some Queens residents as a hostile stretch for non-drivers.

According to Patch, residents of the Murano Condominium Associationlocated just a block away from the fatal crashhad written to city officials in January requesting a two-way protected bike lane along Borden Avenue. Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer told Patch he followed up earlier this month with a letter to the Department of Transportation asking for the bike lanes and other traffic calming measures.

The DOT has not responded to questions from Gothamist or the councilmember about the request for a bike lane.

In a statement, Tom DeVito, Transportation Alternatives' Senior Director of Advocacy, described Borden Avenue as "the weak link in an otherwise protected bike lane network along Center Boulevard and 2nd Street," and called for its immediate redesign. "A piecemeal approach to redesigning known dangerous streets is no way to achieve Vision Zero," he added.

The Long Island City victim is the sixth cyclist to die while riding in New York City this year, compared to 2018's record low of ten cyclist fatalties.

None of the drivers involved in the deaths of those cyclistsChaim Joseph, Susan Moses, Hector Ayala Jr., Hugo Garcia, and Aurilla Lawrencehave been arrested, according to a police spokesperson. In the case of Lawrence, a 25-year-old bike messenger killed in a hit-and-run earlier this month, the driver has not yet been identified, despite police saying they had a lead 10 days ago.

The driver who struck this morning's victim remained on the scene, and was not charged. A police spokesperson told Gothamist, "There is no criminality at this time."

UPDATE 5:00 p.m. A spokesperson for the DOT tells Gothamist that the agency will "look into potential safety enhancements at Borden Ave and 2nd Street, as we do following any fatality." The spokesperson also noted that safety enhancements were recently added on 5th Street from Borden Avenue to 46th Ave, and that a future area-wide Long Island City/Hunters Point capital street reconstruction project will include traffic-calming components on parts of Borden Avenue.

UPDATE 3/15/19 The victim has been identified as 53-year-old Robert Spencer, a Long Island City resident and father of one who reportedly worked for the Department of Homeless Services. Transportation Alternatives will host a vigil for Spencer on Saturday at noon near Borden Avenue and 2nd Street.
Un tanar din Cugir a fost retinut. A sustras bauturi alcoolice din magazinul unei statii de carburanti

La data de 9 decembrie 2021, politistii din Cugir au identificat si retinut, pentru 24 de ore, un tanar de 20 de ani, din Cugir, care este banuit de savarsirea unui furt. In sarcina acestuia [citeste mai departe]
Ukraine might lose its export duty on scrap metal, which is the main raw material for the metallurgical enterprises. February 28, the law, which provides for an economically justified increase in the duty from the current 42 to 58 euro per ton and an extension of its validity until September 2021, was voted by the parliament. However, a draft decree on the abolition of this decision appeared. If this happens, the consequences for the Ukrainian economy can be very sad. Taking into account the rise in world prices for scrap, the volume of export from the country will continue to grow, and this will lead to a decrease in production at Ukrainian enterprises, a decrease in export volumes, a decrease in foreign exchange earnings into the country and destabilization of the hryvnia exchange rate, experts say. According to them, the metallurgical enterprises will lose an opportunity to invest in development, increase salaries of employees, which will provoke a new outflow of personnel abroad. Ukraine will eventually lose one of its few high-tech industries and finally turn into a resource colony of the developed countries

Ukraines Verkhovna Rada might revise the decision adopted on February 28 to increase the export duty on ferrous scrap from the current 42 to 58 euro per ton and to extend it until September 2021. MP Oleksandr Opanasenko has registered a draft decree on its abolition since the bill allegedly "violates the rights and interests of citizens by providing unlawful economic preferences to large steel producers." In addition, Opanasenko wrote a statement to Andriy Parubiy, the head of the Verkhovna Rada, requesting to eliminate violations of the requirements of the regulations. On March 12, the Regulatory Committee considered the issue at its meeting, but did not find any irregularities.

Why did the MPs raise the fee for scrap?

The economic rationale for such a decision could be found in the explanatory note. A rapid rise in prices for scrap is observed. The average annual price of ferrous scrap for export in January-October 2018 increased to $ 324.1 per ton, which is 30% higher than the 2017 price and 81.6% higher than the 2016 price. Against this background, the abolition of duties on it (if the new document does not enter into force, the duty will be only 8.5 euro per ton in September 2019) will lead to the uncontrolled export of this strategic raw material abroad and its acute shortage in Ukraine. The scrap metal market in Ukraine is mainly shadow. At least 70% of the market is in the shadow. The capacity of the scrap metal harvesting market is estimated at about $ 1 billion a year.

Market participants emphasize that before adopting of the law, according to which the export duty for scrap metal was 30 euro per ton, Ukrainian enterprises experienced an acute shortage, which led to a decrease in production volumes and production capacity shutdowns. Ukraine was losing jobs, taxes, and foreign exchange earnings, which directly adversely affected the Ukrainian currency. Now this situation can repeat.

In the case of the worst scenario, the competitiveness of Ukrainian enterprises would sharply decline, market participants say. Cancellation of duties on the export of scrap metal from Ukraine might lead to the loss of 30 thousand jobs, mainly in the metallurgical industry.

"If Ukraine stimulates the export of raw materials (and not finished products), this will mean that the country has chosen the path a resource colony. If Ukraine stimulates the processing of raw materials in the country, this will mean that it has a future," Dmytro Kiselevsky, Director of Corporate Relations of the Interpipe Industrial Company, notes. Serhiy Belenky, Chairman of the Federation of Metallurgists, agrees: "The country has already lost its engineering industry, which used to be a very developed sphere. Now we can lose the metallurgical industry, which is quite high-tech and can compete with the metallurgical industry from other countries. We should not become a raw appendage of Europe and should preserve high-tech production, which allows receiving goods with a high added value in Ukraine."

The abolition of the decision to raise duties will play into the hands of the main hunter of Ukrainian scrap metal, that is, unrecognized Transnistria, a Russian enclave in Moldavia, where the Moldavian Metallurgical Factory is located. By the way, this company uses energy resources supplied from Russia. Experts do not exclude that some MPs who are opponents of the duty might be lobbyists of both Ukrainian scrap producers and the business of the Russian Federation and Transnistria.

In January - October 2018, the share of Moldova in domestic exports of scrap reached 59.8% against 44% in the previous year. "Taking into account the fact that in 2016 the export of scrap metal to Moldova did not exceed 0,6 thousand tons, the rapid growth in deliveries in 2017-2018 demonstrates the use of the unrecognized part of the territory of Moldova as a convenient harbor to local metallurgical enterprises, all associated expenses are fully compensated by direct subsidies. This is unfair competition, which weakens the effect of the export duty on scrap metal operating in Ukraine," as said in the note to bill # 9474.

Turkey, which is our competitor in the global metallurgical market, is also hunting for Ukrainian scrap metal. The country has recently been pursuing a protectionist policy, protecting its market from the supply of Ukrainian steel products. After the United States imposed a 25% import duty on metal products, Turkey took similar measures. The decision of the largest world economy provoked an escalation of protectionism in other countries of the world, traditionally serving as sales markets for metallurgical products produced in Ukraine.

Turkey is actively expanding and aggressively developing foreign markets. According to the Turkish Association of Steel Exporters, for ten months of last year, exports of Turkish steel products increased by 15.5%, compared to the same period of 2017, and exceeded 16,8 million ton. In monetary terms, it has increased by 35.2% up to 12,4 billion USD. Assessment of Turkeys highest potential as a metal exporting country can be based on the fact that the United States, with a general level of duty above the tariff quota of 25%, applies a 50% duty against Turkish metal. Despite such measures, Turkey is actively increasing its exports both to the US and to the EU markets.

Against this background, our country has experienced rapid growth in imports of ferrous metals. The imports of ferrous metals products to Ukraine accounted for 20.7% during January - October 2018 (of the volumes of similar products of domestic production), whereas in 2015 this figure was only 13.4%. Imports grew at a faster pace, especially rapidly in January-October 2018, when imports of ferrous metals from Belarus increased by 56.1%, from Turkey  by 87.1%, and from China  by 60.4%.

At the same time, all countries protect their markets, especially those with the metallurgical industry, said Volodymyr Tkachenko, deputy general director of ArcelorMittal Kryviy Rih. According to him, for example, Egypt decided that only companies that produce rolled goods, can import semi-procurement. "Last year, the Russians have allowed the export of scrap metal only through certain ports. Previously, it was allowed to export scrap only through one port, located in Magadan. Finished products enter the Ukrainian market absolutely freely. Our domestic market is not protected, and in order to enter foreign markets, Ukrainian producers have to overcome trade barriers, and then compete with their manufacturers," said Tkachenko.

Moreover, the abolition of the decision to increase the export duty on scrap metal will nullify all the positive results, achieved during its operation, experts and market participants say. According to the Ukrmetallurgprom association (which includes leading metallurgical enterprises of Ukraine, mining and processing plants, research, design, educational institutions and commercial organizations, - ed.), for the time of the increased export duty on scrap (from October 2016 to September 2018) the effect was equivalent to almost 35 million USD of state budget revenues from exports. In particular, electrometallurgy showed an increase of 37%, the output of pipes increased by 26%, the production of metal structures increased by 34%. Against the background of the stabilization of scrap metal supplies to Ukrainian metallurgical enterprises (their volume increased by 24%), metal scrap enterprises increased wages to their employees by 66% over two years, saved about 35 thousand jobs, received 3,2 billion USD of foreign exchange earnings.

"Introduction of export duty for scrap had a huge positive effect. During the period of duty, the production of electrometallurgical enterprises increased by 34%, which is a very significant indicator. The average salary at metallurgical enterprises during the operating of the duty has also increased significantly: today, at enterprises that are part of the Ukrainian Federation of Metallurgists, it reaches 570 USD, which is almost 50% more than a few years ago. The enterprises of the full cycle did not feel any interruptions in the provision of raw materials, which took place several years ago. Neither the state, nor metallurgical enterprises, nor enterprises that collect scrap metal suffered from the introduction of the duty, Belenky stated.

How does the increase in duties affect Ukraines obligations

The law on the extension of the duty does not violate Ukraines obligations to the WTO or EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Ukraines Vice-Prime Minister Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze and representatives of the Ministry of Economy have repeatedly stated about the absence of any negative impact of increasing the duty on relations between countries in the framework of the EU-Ukraine cooperation.

"The implementation of the proposed measures (an increase of export duty for scrap) does not contradict Ukraines international obligations. They fully comply with the norms of international trade law within the WTO and other international obligations of Ukraine regarding the regulation of foreign trade. The current provisions within the framework of the WTO Agreements and the Association Agreement with the EU give Ukraine the right to impose any regulatory measures that it considers necessary to protect the essential interests of its security, in particular during the war," according to the explanatory note of the bill # 9474.

Thus, such accusations against the law point to the complete incompetence of their applicants, whose goal is to restore the schemes for the uncontrolled export of strategic raw materials abroad. Market participants and experts expressed the hope that the President of Ukraine will sign the draft law adopted by the Verkhovna Rada, and the MPs will have enough prudence not to vote for the decision to repeal the decision that is obviously lobbied by gray scrap procurement agents.

Read the original text at 112.ua.
Five more ultra-Orthodox schools have been cited by New York Citys Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for letting unvaccinated children attend classes, in flagrant violation of an order put in place in December to hinder the spread of measles.

The schools, like the one cited last month, are all in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which has been the epicenter of the measles outbreak that has so far sickened 158 New Yorkers, including 137 children.

The outbreak is not over, and we will continue to see additional cases as long as unvaccinated students are not properly excluded from attending school, Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot said in a statement.

Health Department investigators based their conclusions by comparing immunization records with school attendance records. None of the schools have been fined, but could face monetary damages if theyre found to still be disobeying city orders during future audits, according to the Health Department.

New York state law normally requires all students to be vaccinated for measles, as well as a number of other illnesses, in order to attend public or private school. But they permit exemptions for a valid religious or medical reason.

In December, however, the health department issued an emergency order prohibiting ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in zip codes where the virus was prevalent from allowing even exempted children in their buildings. Officials said the order would prevent the spread of measles.

More than 96 percent of children in the 133 yeshivas in the targeted zip codes are vaccinated, according to 2017-2018 state records. (Another 7,000 have received shots since the outbreak began.) But thats lower than in public schools, where the rate is 99.3 percent.

Among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn (also known as Haredi), an anti-vaccination hotline and publication have been fueling fears about the supposed dangers of vaccines.

The five schools the health department said violated the order are: Bnos Square of Williamsburg, Bnos Chayil (Wythe Avenue), Bnos Chayli (Hughes Street), Tiferes Bnos Children, and Simche Kinder.

The person who answered the phone at Tiferes Bnos said they didnt have time to comment and hung up. Administrators at the other four schools have not returned requests for comment.

At three of the five schools, according to health inspectors, not just unvaccinated but contagious children went to class, though its not clear yet if they triggered additional cases. The incubation period for measles is up to 21 days, so more children may have been infected and have not shown symptoms yet, officials said.

A number Jewish leaders say they support the health departments order keeping the non-vaccinated students out of yeshivas.

Everyone that does not adhere this policy is violating the very basic Jewish principal of protecting ones health and protecting someone elses health, said Rabbi Simcha Scholar. They do not have the right to endanger other children.

Scholar is chief executive officer Chai Lifeline, a group that works with children with cancer in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, who are particularly vulnerable to measles and severe complications that come with it.

Last month, the health department announced another school, Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov Pupa, had disobeyed its orders. Now officials have linked an additional 42 measles cases to that school, 28 of whom caught it there, plus another 14 who caught the virus second-hand.

Since the measles outbreak began last October, 11 people have been hospitalized and one child needed intensive care. No one has died.

Gwynne Hogan is an associate producer at WNYC. You can follow her on Twitter at @GwynneFitz.


EU Observer focused on the stance of European officials towards the hostilities in Ukraine

Open source

Since February 2014, Russia has been waging an undeclared and unprovoked war on its peaceful neighbor Ukraine.

After establishing control of Crimea through its subversive operation and covert military invasion, on 16 March that year, Russia staged a show of "local support" for its land grab by conducting a fake secessionist "referendum" on Ukraine's territory.

The illegal "referendum" was just one of Russia's many tricks to mask its aggression against Ukraine.

Moscow's camouflage also included "little green men," "local self-defence groups", and "people's mayors".

Kremlin-manufactured propaganda narratives of "persecution of Russian speakers", "a Nazi coup d'etat in Kiev", the "right of Crimean people to self-determination", "declaration of independence", "holy place for Russian Orthodox Christians", "reunification", and many others were promulgated worldwide to mask and simultaneously justify Russia's invasion.

While Ukrainian voices trying to communicate the truth about Russia's war were largely dismissed, Moscow's lies successfully polluted Western mainstream media and expert opinion, influencing political decisions.

Russia's denials were afforded more credibility than observable facts.

Western journalists reporting on Ukraine largely failed to inform the world about the truth, many themselves falling for Kremlin-crafted unreality.

A global network of influencers came online to validate Russia's talking points and to advance its nefarious interests.

The world's response to Russia's aggression has been largely inadequate.

After half a decade of interstate war, Kremlin lies on Ukraine continue to prevail, and the effectiveness and integrity of many international institutions and political actors have been called into question.

Even though the United Nations General Assembly and other international bodies declared the occupation and annexation of Crimea to be "illegal", Moscow's invasion and occupation of Ukraine's Donbas region has not been recognised as part of the same war effort.

To this day, there has been no official recognition that Crimea and Donbas are part of a unitary, multi-vectored Russian war with the single objective of destroying Ukraine's nationhood and submitting the Ukrainian people to Moscow's dictate.

Many lies, one objective

Over the last five years, Russia has pursued a massive, concerted war strategy against the entirety of Ukraine.

It has employed the widest imaginable array of both conventional and hybrid tools.

The list includes: covert and overt military aggression; diversionary operations in areas outside the zone of military conflict; terrorist attacks; economic pressure; cyber attacks (including on critical infrastructure); hate propaganda; disinformation campaigns; political subversion and assassinations; interference in electoral processes; and diplomatic pressure in international fora.

To avoid moral, political, and legal responsibility for its aggression on Ukraine, Moscow has invested unprecedented resources into pursuing a "plausible deniability" strategy, which denies its role as aggressor.

The Kremlin has forged the appearance of an anti-government rebellion in Ukraine which Russia merely supports, allowing Moscow to exploit the weaknesses of international law governing the use of force against another nation.

Its "plausible deniability" strategy relies on the narrative of an "anti-government" "separatist" conflict in Ukraine.

According to Moscow, its role is limited to "protecting the Russian speaking population in Crimea from Ukrainian 'Nazi' extremists" and "supporting rebels in Donbas, who oppose the Western-sponsored coup d'etat in Kiev".

But in fact, the "separatist rebellion" is a Kremlin-engineered subversion tactic and tool of Russian warfare. Local collaborators are pawns, not autonomous players.

Moscow's cover of "local separatism" in Donbas is no different from the smoke screen of "little green men" in Crimea - both were designed to mask Russian invasion by providing a fig leaf of plausible deniability.

The outcome is that Russia continues its war in the comfortable shadows of distorted reality without incurring an appropriate cost.

No peace without truth

It is impossible to achieve a just peace in Ukraine without first acknowledging the truth of Moscow's interstate war.

Recognition of Russia's direct responsibility is key to empowering the international community with the right toolset to repress Moscow's aggression.

Ukraine rightfully recognised Russia as an aggressor-state responsible for the occupation and annexation of Crimea and the equally illegal occupation of Donbas.

Kiev has appealed to the UN, other nations, and international organisations to do the same on numerous occasions.

Ukraine's parliament adopted a resolution in early 2015 calling on other nations for such an act of solidarity, but its plea has gone unanswered.

The European Union's official position fails to recognise Russia's interstate war, instead differentiating "occupation and annexation of Crimea" from Russia's "actions destabilising the situation in eastern Ukraine".

This indefensible position facilitates the false narrative of a "Russia-backed separatist conflict" in Donbas allowing Russia to evade full responsibility.

As a result, the EU's Russia policy framework is inherently flawed, and fails to pursue the right objectives - namely, to repress, reverse, and repair Moscow's violations of international law in Ukraine.

Ukraine has provided a mountain of evidence in international courts proving beyond doubt Russia's role of aggressor.

As far back as 2016, the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court acknowledged that information available about Russia's hostilities in Donbas indicated the existence of an international armed conflict.

Since then, the volume of evidence has grown larger still.

The deafness of the EU and of its member states makes it fair to question Europe's commitment to international law.

After initial denials, Russian president Vladimir Putin admitted that the "little green men" in Crimea were Russian special forces.

Is the EU waiting for a similar admission about the "rebellion" in Donbas before it takes robust action?

Is Russia's acknowledgement the precondition for recognising its crimes?

Are Kremlin lies the truth until Russia stops lying?

Flawed EU policy

The EU's Russia policy is skewed towards appeasement and providing Putin with avenues for a "graceful exit" from the war, even at Ukraine's expense.

He has had more than enough time to act on face-saving opportunities, but consistently chose not to pursue them because they do not let Russia achieve its goal of dominating Ukraine.

Putin is patiently waiting for Russia's subversion efforts in the EU itself to bear fruit, as more and more Kremlin-friendly politicians ascend to power.

With leaders like Italy's prime minister Guiseppe Conte promising to end EU sanctions against Russia, Moscow does not need to end its hostilities, it only needs to wait for the opportunity to go even further with greater impunity.

The EU's Russia sanctions have contained Moscow's aggression and prevented a larger military invasion that would threaten Ukraine's capital, but they have not been enough to end the Kremlin's multi-vectored aggression in Ukraine and further afield.

Emboldened by its almost free ride in Ukraine, Russia has pursued increasingly bigger goals, interfering in Western nations to undermine their global power.

The self-defeating Western desire to return to "business as usual" with Russia is the main motive behind its feeble response.

Business interests clearly inform the pursuit of "win-win" policies with Russia which inevitably entail grave losses - from Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, to international peace and security.

While paying lip service to EU values, countries like Germany are pursuing harmful projects with Russia which can only be explained by political corruption.

The Russia-Germany gas pipeline project, Nord Stream 2, is a prime example.

Unjustifiable as merely an "economic project" to "secure energy" for the EU, Nord Stream 2 is an especially dangerous project at a time when Russia has pulled out from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and is openly increasing its capability to target the EU with its missiles.

EU businesses and governments are enabling Russia's militarisation by increasing the reliance on Russian energy. No economic argument can justify this.

Disturbingly, EU nationals - including politicians - are also complicit in crimes against Ukraine's security, participating in Russia's annexation of Crimea and occupation of Donbas.

Despite their involvement in one of the biggest violations of international law of our era, their crimes are not properly investigated and their actions are not fiercely challenged.

The most recent failure in EU policy was the woefully inadequate response to Russia's naked act of aggression against Ukraine in the Kerch Strait and Black Sea in November 2018.

Russia's unprovoked attack in neutral waters on the Ukrainian naval vessels peacefully exercising their lawful right to passage constituted a blatant violation of international law.

Although the Russian state is legally responsible for the attack under international law, the EU announced that it would impose personal sanctions only against the eight Russian nationals directly involved in the attack.

The choice not to sanction the Russian state carries a perilous precedent which can directly affect EU member states in the future.

Equally problematic is that no meaningful action has backed EU statements condemning Russia's restriction of navigation through the Kerch Strait, inviting Russia's de facto annexation of the Azov Sea.

Leadership means action

The EU must change its approach to dealing with Russia - the status quo is not working.

The EU should drop the pretense that Crimea and Donbas are separate conflicts, and formally recognise Russia's role as aggressor for its interstate war.

Disparate policies for the two occupied regions also raises concerns of a possible "Donbas for Crimea" trade-off where Moscow would be de facto allowed to "keep" Crimea for a nominal sanctions price, as long as it abides by the inherently flawed so-called 'Minsk accords' - the ceasefire pact which governs the peace process.

A just peace cannot be brought to Ukraine by dealing with Russia's aggression as if it was a local Ukrainian conflict, which is exactly what Minsk does.

The inadequacy of the Minsk process, which EU policy heavily relies on, is glaring.

Even the most recent European Parliament resolution of March 12, 2019 assessing the current state of EU-Russia political relations, which marks a growing awareness of Russia's threat to the EU, still rests on the faulty premise that "full implementation" of Minsk would come via "closer cooperation" with Russia.

The EU should champion effective international measures - including an international embargo - commensurate with Russia's violations of international law to force Putin to change his aggressive foreign policy.

Such measures should be tied to the full restoration of Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty and to the cessation of all forms of Russia's multi-vectored warfare.

Instead of friendly handshakes with Putin, the EU should lead in setting up an International Tribunal for prosecuting Russians responsible for crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

Action needs will

The EU has the tools to respond to Russia's violations of international law and to thwart Moscow's aggressive policies, but it lacks the political will and leadership to invoke them.

EU values should no longer take a back seat to shady political agendas - it is high time the EU practices the values it preaches.

Europe cannot afford to passively observe Russia reshaping the world in its illiberal, authoritarian image. We all stand to lose.

The history of international conflicts in the 20th century should have taught us that if we want the world to prosper, global security must take priority over limited national or commercial interests.

By helping to uphold international law in Ukraine, the EU would contribute to its own peace and prosperity instead of allowing Putin's destructive scenario to unfold.
U.S. Congress House of Representatives unanimously voted for the publication of the final report of the investigation of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller on the Russian interference in the U.S. presidential elections in 2016. NBC News reported that on Friday.

The resolution urges to publish report provided to the Justice Department by Muellers investigation, excluding the materials secured by state secret. The resolution urges to pass the full report to the U.S. Congress, the message said.

It is expected that the Senate, controlled by Republicans will not adopt the resolution.

Muellers investigation comes to the end and it is expected that the Special Counsel will publish his final report soon. Both Democrats and Republicans often express the hope that the report will enhance their positions.

As we reported Paul Manafort, President Donald Trumps former campaign chairman, is sentenced to 7.5 years-long imprisonment, as a result of court hearings on his case. Manafort has got approximately 47 months imprisonment from U.S. federal judge of Virginia State for fraudulence and tax evasion in the bank field last week.

Paul Manafort is charged with laundering money and evading taxes over ten years of cooperation with former Ukrainian leaders. Previously, an investigation team released over 300 documents, which reveal the details of Manafort's cooperation with the currently disbanded Party of Regions - the-then pro-presidential and ruling political force in Ukraine.
The law enforcers from Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia participated in the operation

The law enforcers have exposed the grouping, which created the channel for the illegal migration. About 35 people were the members of the grouping, as the Internal Ministry of Ukraine reported.

The citizens of Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Slovakia and Belarus entered the grouping. They tried to illegally transfer people from the countries of South-East Asia to Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and further transfer to Germany.

The migrants gathered in Kyiv and Odesa, and then they were taken to Zakarpattia region and illegally transferred through the state border. The members of the grouping were monitored since last spring.

The law enforcers opened seven criminal proceedings, eight involvants were notified about suspicion and another two criminal proceedings are considered by the court. Even after this actions, the members of the grouping continued the illegal transfer of the migrants.

The law enforcers from the Czech Republic established that the majority of the members who live in the republic originated from Ukraine.

The law enforcers succeeded to spot 16 illegal transfers of the migrants. The majority of them were the citizens of Vietnam, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the total number of these people makes about 100 people. The members got $2,500 for each of the migrants.

On March 11, the law enforcers detained the organizers and accomplices of the grouping, who are free now. Besides, the searches of seven places in Ivano-Frankvisk, Lviv and Zakarpattia regions took place. The police confiscated about a half kilo of drugs, an unregistered weapon, money, mobile phones, SIM cards and camouflage uniforms.

The law enforces detained 12 members of the grouping in the Czech Republic, including eight Ukrainians, three citizens of Uzbekistan and one citizen of Kazakhstan. Some of them were involved in the forgery. Totally, the law enforcers processed at least four cases of the sale of over 30 forged EU documents.

As we reported Ukraine intends to begin the sectoral project in the sphere of the integrated border management along with the international partners. The project will cost about 60 million euro.

Besides, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine created a budget institution Izmail Maritime Border Guard base of Ukraines Border Guard Service.
The Ukrainian side will be represented by regular delegation members and famous Crimean Tatar public figures

UN Security Council Open source

The UN Security Council is going to gather for a session on March 15; the topic will be the situation in the annexed Crimea. Not only Council members, but also representatives of other UN member countries will participate. Serhiy Kyslytsia, the deputy foreign minister of Ukraine said that as quoted by Ukrinform news agency.

The session kicks off at 4 p.m. Friday (Kyiv time).

The Ukrainian side will be represented by regular delegation members and famous Crimean Tatar public figures.

'Apart from the official Ukrainian delegation, the session will involve deputy leader of Mejlis of Crimean Tatar people Ahtem Chyigoz, program director of 'Crimean House' Ailm Aliev, and the member of World Congress of Crimean Tatars Aila Bakalli', Kyslytsia said.

Olga Oprysko, the daughter of one of the Ukrainian sailors captured in the Kerch Strait will be present as well. The deputy minister said it would 'help to keep the focus of the international community on the Russian aggression in Ukraine'.

Kyslytsia added that the discussion of the annexation of Crimea on this session is essential, as it coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Russian occupation. 'We're thankful for our partners, which definitely support this initiative, first of all France and Germany, which head the council in February and March', Kyslytsia said.

The UN Security Council will discuss the actions that could prevent Russia from further breaches of international law.
The session takes place in New York on March 15; it is timed to the fifth anniversary of the peninsula's annexation

Open source

"This meeting will mark five years since the beginning of the occupation of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol by the Russian Federation. It will provide an opportunity to hear first-hand accounts from civil society and experts on the latest developments. It is also a call on the international Community to take a stand for a rules-based international order and condemn the illegal occupation of Crimea by Russia," the message says.

It was reported that not only Council members, but also representatives of other UN member countries would participate.

The session started at 4 p.m. Friday (Kyiv time).

The Ukrainian side is represented by regular delegation members and famous Crimean Tatar public figures.

Olga Oprysko, the daughter of one of the Ukrainian sailors captured in the Kerch Strait will be present as well.
Those restrictions are imposed on those who took the decisions on investigations on the American servicemen

The United States imposed restrictions on giving visas on entry for the workers of the International Criminal Court. The U.S. Secretary General Michael Pompeo said this to the journalists, as TASS news agency reports.

I declare the restrictions on issuing visas to the persons, who are responsible for the investigations of the International Criminal Court concerning the American servicemen. Those restrictions are imposed on those, who have taken the decisions on investigations. Those sanctions could be used for preventing the actions of the International Criminal Court targeted at hunting of the citizens of the neighbor states, including Israel, without the permission of the authorities.

Pompeo reminded that the USA is not the member of the International Criminal Court.

It should be noted that according to the U.S. legislature, the visa issues are confidential ones, so the Secretary-General refuses to provide any further information.

Earlier, National Security Adviser of President Trump John Bolton called the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague dangerous and irresponsible.

According to Bolton, the investigation of the military crimes in Afghanistan is "absolutely ungrounded and illegal".

Bolton also added that the U.S. will do the same against any company or state, which helps the court in the investigation against Americans.
Head of Ukraine's MI Vasyl Burba and his American counterparts discussed the wide range of issues regarding the hybrid aggression of the Russian Federation in Ukraine

Washington, D.C. BBC News

Military intelligence agencies of Ukraine and the United States agreed to join efforts in terms of deterring the Russian hybrid aggression in Ukraine. This was the main agreement that the sides reached during the visit of Vasyl Burba, the chief of Ukraine's military intelligence.

The Ukrainian official met and negotiated with Robert Ashley, the Chief of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, leaders of the CIA and the officials of the U.S. intelligence community. Burba stated that Russia has been acting aggressively, in a provocative manner, aiming to destabilize the situation in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

During the visit, a number of agreements were reached, which stipulates that the U.S. side would assist Ukraine in boosting the capabilities of the Chief Department of Intelligence of Ukraine's Defense Ministry so that it could counteract the Russian aggression more effectively.
The Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov did not comment on the fact that Ukraine sent a note to the Russian Foreign Ministry on the termination of the Friendship Treaty

The representatives of the Kremlin believe that termination of the Treaty on Friendship between Ukraine and Russia does not comply with the interests of the other nations, as Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said, TASS reported.

The document meets the interests of our states, and termination of this document is against the nations of our states, it is like shooting your own leg, he told the journalists.

Dmitry Peskov did not comment on the fact that Ukraine sent a note to the Russian Foreign Ministry on the termination of the Friendship Treaty. He recommended appealing to the Ministry for comments.

Yesterday, on March 12, Russian sent a note due to termination of the Friendship Treaty.

The Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation was signed on May 31, 1997, by President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma and President of Russia Boris Yeltsyn.

The Verkhovna Rada ratified the treaty on January 14, 1998, and the State Duma on December 25, 1998. The document came into force on April 1, 1999.

Ukraine terminated cooperation with the Russian Central Electoral Commission, as the law On the breach of Ukraine-Russia Friendship Treaty came into force.
Spokesperson of the Russian State Duma Volodin called the stay of the peninsula as the part of Ukraine annexation

Russia offers to demand the compensations from Ukraine for the economic loss of Crimea when it entered its structure as TASS news agency reported, citing Spokesperson of the Russian State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin.

Lets order our specialized committees along with the specialized committees of the State Council of Crimea to consider this issue, analyze, calculate: how much did the economy of Crimea loose due to the destructive policy of Ukraine, which was imposed; how much did the population loose, which rights were violated and through our European parliamentarian structures, we will oblige Ukraine to compensate thing, which Crimea lost during these 25 years, he stated.

Volodin ordered his deputy Petr Tolstoy to calculate the so-called 'damage' and then to announce the result before the European parliamentarian structures.

He specified that the issue is not only about the material objects but about the rights of the nations to study their language, the right to speak this language.

Ukraine dealt with Crimea very dishonorable; the fundamental rights of the Crimean citizens were violated  the right for language, right for education; it violated the economy of Crimea and Sevastopol, it was almost the annexation. We should call the things how they are. within the parliamentary structures, Volodin stated.

U.S. Congress House of Representatives approved the draft bill, which defines the non-recognition of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea, its airspace or waters as the policy of the U.S. on March 12.

Crimea was annexed by Russia after the illegal referendum held on the peninsula in March 2014. Earlier, the Russian military captured all strategic military objects and buildings of the key authoritative bodies. Neither Ukraine nor the rest of the civilized countries recognized the results of the referendum. A number of the European and the world countries, including Ukraine, imposed the economic sanctions against Russia.

As we reported Google corporation began to show occupied Crimea as a part of Russia for Russian users.
One-third of the staff of the Russian Embassy in Stockholm is workers of the secret services

The Swedish Security Service (SAPO) emphasized that Russia is the main threat for Swedens security in the 2018 report, as Polske Radio reported.

The document also notes the growth of activity of the extremist groups, the message said.

Russia has developed the doctrine of the gray zone, which means it wants to influence Sweden and other states without solution of the armed conflict. The secret data is constantly gathered within it and data can be used for the destabilization of the country, SAPO Counterintelligence Head Daniel Stenling stated.

According to SAPO, Russia attempted to achieve its goals thanks to the information propaganda campaigns, cyber attacks, absorption of the strategic companies and technologies.

It is noted that in the end of February, the Swedish Security Service detained a worker of high technology industry suspected in the espionage for Russia. A man was recruited by a Russian officer of Foreign Intelligence, who works as a diplomat in Sweden.

Finally, Foreign Ministry of Sweden called the Russian Ambassador for a talk, demanding the release of the diplomat tied with the case. However, he still works in the Russian Embassy. The detained man stays in the custody.

According to the Sweden Counterintelligence, one-third of the staff of the Russian Embassy in Stockholm is the workers of the secret services.

SAPO also mentions threats from Chinese side. This country deals with the economic intelligence and cyber attacks. The development of 5G technology and artificial intelligence is the great challenge for the security sphere, the message said.

Earlier, it became known about the detention of the former colonel of the Austrian armed forces who is suspected of having worked for the Russian intelligence for 20 years.
New Yorkers will gather at Washington Square Park on Friday afternoon to show solidarity with victims of the white supremacist terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand last night, which left 49 dead and dozens injured. The interfaith prayer session begins at 4:30 p.m., and will be hosted by the nonprofit group Muslim Community Network NY.

The event was initially scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m., but was moved up an hour so that Shabbat-observant Jews could attend. "Our hearts are breaking," the progressive Jewish organization Bend the Arc wrote on Twitter. "This is true solidarity even in a moment of intense grief and pain. Jews and Muslims will ALWAYS resist white nationalism."

Correction 4:30 to accommodate our Jewish sisters and brothers.  Dr.Debbie Almontaser (@DebbiAlmontaser) March 15, 2019

This is an unbelievably generous act. Many of us would have been there at 5:30 anyway, but some would not have been able to. Im amazed and so moved by Muslims organizers thinking to adjust their mourning in order to allow more Jews to stand with them. Please show up. https://t.co/WqlRDGmE33  Sophie Ellman-Golan (@EgSophie) March 15, 2019

The attack, believed to be the deadliest in New Zealand's history, occurred at two Christchurch mosques during the Friday evening prayers. A man in his 20s has been apprehended and faces murder charges, while two men and a woman have been detained. Officials say that one of the people in custody is an Australian citizen.

The gunman's rifles reportedly included several white supremacist symbols, including the number 14, a possible reference to the Nazi slogan linked to Hitler's "Mein Kampf." A manifesto believed to be written by the suspect praises President Donald Trump, as well as a Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 people.

Earlier today, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the president to "clearly" condemn the mosque shootings as a "white supremacist" attack, which he has not done.

In New York City, police have stepped up their security presence at local mosques, though Mayor Bill de Blasio has noted that there is "no specific or credible threat at this time."

The city's response to the latest terror attack has also prompted comparisons to the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, in which Muslim New Yorkers stood shoulder to shoulder with the grieving Jewish community to say Kaddish.

After a hate-filled madman entered a US synagogue last October and murdered 11 praying Jews, we held a vigil in NYC for them.



As we cried and remembered the dead, members of the local Muslim community stood along the periphery to protect us. Ill never forget it.  marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) March 15, 2019

Currently, an interfaith group of New Yorkers are observing Jummah, the traditional Muslim prayer held on Fridays, at the NYU Islamic Center. The mayor is also scheduled to visit the Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper East Side at 5 p.m. tonight. We'll update this post as additional solidarity events are planned through Friday and the weekend.

UPDATE 3/16/19 Members of the Jackson Heights community will meet at Diversity Plaza at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday for an interfaith vigil mourning the victims of the Christchurch attack. Participants are encouraged to bring candles. More info here.
Three cases of the illegal sale were confirmed, - local police press office

Open source

Married couples in Kharkiv region, northeastern Ukraine were busted with selling poppy straw to the drug addicts. The law enforcers managed to confirm three cases before arresting the culprits.

According to the press office of Kharkiv regional police branch, the first case was observed in Solonytsivka village. The local drug addicts bought some mixture of poppy straw and poppy seeds from a local entrepreneur. They paid about seven dollars for 500 gram-pack of the mixture.

Another case was reported in Chuguiv town, where the 27-year-old lady was selling a similar mixture from the car; the police found 16 packages, which weighed almost eight kilograms in total.

One more case was observed in Merefa town, where the married couple sold the mixture to the locals. The law enforcers seized 99 packages with a total weight of almost 37 kilograms.

All seized substance was taken to the expertise. The police opened respective criminal proceedings.
Families of the victims of terrorist attack at New Zealand massacres, March 15, 2019 Reuters

The death toll of a terrorist attack in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, reached 49 people, as The Guardian reported.

As Mike Bush, Commissioner of New Zealand police said, 41 people died in Christchurch, seven more  in Linwood. Later, one of the injured passed away in the hospital.

One of the attackers was identified, he broadcasted the assault online. He appeared to be local resident Brenton Tarrant, a supporter of far-right views, who expressed anger towards the migrants multiple times.

Earlier, 40 died, and 48 wounded were reported.

Today, March 15, a shooting incident occurred in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Later, another one took place in a mosque in Linwood suburbs. Besides, the police have defused a number of handmade explosive devices found in the cars after the shooting.

Later, police detained four participants of the attacks, three men and one woman. It was noted that one of the attackers was recording his actions. It is believed that an Australian is one of the perpetrators, he wrote a 74-pages-long manifest, which makes it clear they were preparing a terrorist attack.
Eight new names of the Russian citizens were put on the sanctions list

The European Union has officially imposed the sanctions against the citizens of Russia involved in the capture of the Ukrainian sailors near Kerch Strait in November 2018 as Radio Liberty reported.

Today, on March 15, it was officially announced about the freeze of the accounts and ban for the issuance of the visa to eight Russian officials. Their names were put on the list of persons and entities involved in the violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which was extended for another six months. Thus, the list consists of 44 entities and 171 persons.

It is specified that any of eight people put on the list does not occupy a high position. Thus, the sanctions were imposed against Head of Border Unit of Crimean and Sevastopol FSB Rear Admiral Sergey Stankevich, his deputy Andrey Shein, Commander of troops of Southern Military district Alexandr Dvornikov, commanders Alexey Salaev and Andrey Shipitsyn, participating in the seizure of the vessels, commander of anti-submarine warfare ship Suzdalets Sergey Shcherbakov and two heads of the FSB control points Ruslan Romashkin and Alexey Shatokhin.

It is reported that Deputy Head of Border Guard Service of Russia Gennady Medvedev had to be also on the list; however, Finland blocked it. Permanent Representatives Office of Finland to the EU refused to comment it, stating, they do not comment individual positions of any state-members, including their own.

President Petro Poroshenko thanked the European partners for the solidarity.

I am grateful to our partners for the solidarity with the Ukrainian people in such hard times. Wait for new victories at the sanctions front, he stated.

On November 25, the coast guard ships of the Russian Navy attacked 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. Ukrainian ships were rejected passage via the Kerch Strait, Russian coast guards opened aimed fire on them.

All 24 sailors on board were captured and delivered to Moscow  21 of them were delivered to Lefortovo remand center, another - to 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 attack in the Kerch Strait.

Facing an extension of the sentence term, Ukrainian POWs detained in the Kerch Strait refused to testify in Lefortovo court. Sailors were distributed into six groups, four people in each. On January 15, 2019, Moscow's Lefortovo district court decided to keep 20 Ukrainian sailors in remand until April 24. On January 16, the court extended the detention term for another 4 sailors.

As we reported, lawyer Nikolai Polozov, who deals with the defense of Ukrainian prisoners of war, confirmed that three Ukrainian sailors wounded in the Russian Navy attack on Ukrainian ships were brought from Matrosskaya Tishina to Lefortovo prison in Moscow. He also added that it happened on Monday, January 28.
The letter was taken from Kyiv during World War II

Germany has returned the letter of Russian Tsar Peter the Great on the order of Metropolitan Josaphat on Kyiv Metropolis, which was taken from Kyiv during World War II. Ukraines Ambassador to Germany Andry Melnyk reported that on Twitter.

It is a really historic day. Germany returned the letter of Peter the Great to Ukraine, which urges Metropolitan of Kyiv Josaphat not to favor to the Ecumenical Patriarch. But it did not work: it will familiarize with our Tomos soon, he wrote.

Walter Lindner, the State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry of Germany passed the letter.
Read about Donbas conflict, Azov crisis, Nord Stream 2, corruption schemes in Ukraine and other main news of the week

Donbas

The UN Monitoring Mission released another report with the official number of casualties in the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. Specifically, it recorded 55 civilian deaths in Donbas in 2018, as Fiona Frazer, the Head of the UN Monitoring Mission on Human Rights during the 25th report. In 2018, we have recorded 279 victims among the civilians  55 died and 224 got injured, the report says.

Crews of Ukrainian MLRS conducted an exercise in the combat area in Donbas. The fighters worked on the effectiveness of long-range strikes and land navigation. They also designated enemy positions. The HQ stated that the maneuvers proved successful.

Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has exposed the spy ring of the Chief Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in Donbas. Head of Military Counterintelligence of SBU Serhiy Levchenko said this on Tuesday, March 12.

The occupation authorities of Luhansk region have actually implemented the forced labor for local citizens as OstroV reported, citing the decision of the so-called Council of Ministers of the self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic (LPR). The order of the involvement of the local citizens to the fulfilling of the work for the needs of the defense, liquidation of the consequences of the use of the weapon by enemy, restoration of the damages (destroyed) objects of the economy, life-support systems was developed in accordance with the so-called martial law of non-recognized republic.

A mercenary of Luhansk Peoples Republic was taken in on the administrative border with the occupied Crimea. The 27-year-old man actively participated in the combat actions against Armed Forces of Ukraine as the member of Zaria battalion of the illegal armed formation. He used the code name Kosa in 2014.

The Ukrainian soldiers have downed the hostile drone in the Donbas Conflict zone near the positions of the Joint Forces Operation; the Headquarters of the operation reported that on Facebook.

***

Azov Crisis

The recent reports of psychiatric examinations for Ukrainian sailors illegally held in Russia evoked concerns and outrage. 'Rather than conduct psychiatric exams on Ukrainian sailors that violate their rights, Russia should release immediately all Ukrainian sailors and all Ukrainian political prisoners. We are deeply concerned by Russias treatment of the Ukrainians it has unjustly detained', the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said in the statement on the issue.

Ukrainian ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova claimed that Russia delays the necessary treatment for the captured sailors without any visible reason.

Ukraines Representative to the Trilateral Contact Group Yevhen Marchuk stated that Russia refused to discuss Ukraines demands concerning release of the Ukrainian sailors captured in Kerch Strait last year. The Russian side categorically refused to discuss this issue, they have even tried to leave when I expressed Ukraines position in this regard. Yet, they stayed and listened, he said.

The EU took some action in this regard this week. On Friday, the European Union has officially imposed the sanctions against the citizens of Russia involved in the capture of the Ukrainian sailors. It was officially announced about the freeze of the accounts and ban for the issuance of the visa to eight Russian officials. Their names were put on the list of persons and entities involved in the violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which was extended for another six months. Thus, the list consists of 44 entities and 171 persons.

***

Upcoming presidential elections in Ukraine

This week, it was reported that presidential candidates Yulia Tymoshenko and Petro Poroshenko faces the majority of the criminal proceedings on vote buying.

Besides, Central Election Commission registered 217 official observers for the presidential elections in Ukraine on March 12. Thus, the total number of observers from the international organizations and foreign states made 635 people.

Moreover, you can familiarize with all candidates for presidency in Ukraine here.

***

Corruption scandal in Ukraine

This week, President Poroshenko appointed Serhiy Kryvonos as a new Deputy Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council (NSDC), as earlier, Oleg Gladkovsky, who held this post, was dismissed amid the case on embezzlement in Ukraines army.

March 12, Ukraines Prosecutor General said the Military Prosecutors Office and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) did not cover illegal schemes in the defense sector.

National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) denied the accusations of the involvement in the embezzlement at Ukroboronprom and suspended two detectives mentioned by journalists of Bihus.info in the investigation of the case from their posts.

While Nazar Kholodnytsky, the Head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAP) suspended Senior Prosecutor from management in this case.

This week journalists revealed an audio recording where a person whose voice is very similar to Sytnyks (NABU Head) says he helped the headquarters of the U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016.

***

Nord Stream 2

This week it was reported that the U.S. is preparing to impose the sanctions against European companies, which participate in the financing of Russias Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Rick Perry, the U.S. Secretary of Energy said the government of president Donald Trump stands against the construction of Nord Stream II.

***

Naftogaz and gas price

On March 14, Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolev urged the Government to liberalize gas supplies for all the consumer categories since April 2019, which will keep gas prices same in May.

The next day, Ukraines PM Volodymyr Groysman stated that he would entrust Naftogaz and Finance Ministry to discuss gas prices with the International Monetary Fund. Groysman called Naftogaz offer to cancel state regulation of gas prices for the population, a trap (to sell gas for the population for $319 per 1000 cubic metres). He added that State Treasury did not get money from Naftogaz victory in the Stockholm Arbitration.

***

Crimea

The week has begun with the news that Russia builds up military presence in Crimea. By the way, at least 21 people were convicted for deferring from service in the Russian Armed Forces in annexed Crimea over 2018.

Russia plans to officially launch two power plants in occupied Crimea on March 18, the fifth anniversary of the annexation of the peninsula and it coincides with the visit of President of Russia Vladimir Putin to occupied Crimea.

Besides, another emission of chemicals took place in annexed Crimea this week.

On March 12, U.S. Congress House of Representatives has approved the draft bill, which defines the non-recognition of the sovereignty of the Russian Federation over Crimea, its airspace or waters as the policy of the U.S.

On March 13, Russia stated it will demand the compensations from Ukraine for economic loss of Crimea when it entered its structure.

***

Some important legislation

Agreement between Ukraine and Ecumenical Patriarchate was made public. The agreement has the total of 6 articles. It provides for the agreement of both parties to work on the creation and constitution of the autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine on the grounds of Tomos on autocephaly.

Ukraine believes the decision to terminate the Friendship Treaty with Russia is correct whereas Russia regards termination of Friendship Treaty unsuitable for nations' interests.
Ukraines PM Volodymyr Groysman stated that he would entrust Naftogaz company and Finance Ministry to discuss gas prices with the International Monetary Fund, as he said during the hour of questions to the Government on March 15, broadcasted by Rada official TV channel.

Today, I will assign Naftogaz and the Finance Ministry to start working discussing with the IMF to settle this issue and prevent any gas prices increase basing on Naftogaz offer, he said.

He called Naftogazs offer to cancel state regulation of gas prices for the population (to sell gas for the population for $319 per 1000 cubic metres).

What did Naftogaz offer? Naftogaz offered to cancel ceiling price for gas. Moreover, Naftogaz is a monopolist, they can reduce it for some time, and then raise to $448.5. This might be dangerous, there might be a trap, which we should avoid, the PM added.

He added that he supported gas prices reduction for the population.

As it was reported, Naftogaz CEO Andriy Kobolev urged the Government to liberalize gas supplies for all the consumers categories since April 2019, which will keep gas prices same in May.
Volodymyr Groysman added that the fact that State Treasure got nothing out of the victory in the Stockholm Arbitration, awards for the workers are out of the question

State Treasury did not get anything from the victory of Naftogaz against Gazprom lawsuit in the Stockholm Arbitration. Therefore, there are no awards for the workers, said Ukraines Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman during the hour of questions to the Government on March 15, broadcasted by 112 Ukraine.

If we talk about awards concerning Stockholm, I would like to look at the accounts of State Treasury first. We did not receive money from the victory. Therefore, no awards yet, Groysman said.

Two arbitrary disputes between Gazprom and Naftogaz at the Arbitration Institute lasted for over three years: the dispute on the gas debt  from June 2014 to December 2017, and on the transit agreement  from October 2014 to February 2018. There are less than two years left until both agreements terminate at the end of 2019.

The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce has granted the lawsuit of Naftogaz as to compensation for the volumes of transit gas that had not been delivered by Gazprom on February 28. According to the decision of the court, Naftogaz got a $4.63 billion compensation for the transit gas that had been agreed on, but not delivered by Gazprom.

As a result of two arbitrations in Stockholm, Gazprom is to pay Naftogaz $2.56 billion. The court dismissed the demands of Gazprom that stated that the money hadnt been paid as it was considered the fines for what they called unlawfully seized by Naftogaz volumes of the transit gas. $526,000 of interest per day will be added to the debt from 1 March.
PLEASE NOTE!

Due to the March 23, 2020 NM DOH Public Health Order, These Event Listings Are Not Accurate!

All non-essential businesses are closed, public gatherings are prohibited!

(One day some of these events will be rescheduled or will resume, but they are not happening now!)
Police officers were deployed to mosques in New York City early this morning after a terror attack on two mosques in New Zealand, which have left 49 dead and dozens injured. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the day "one of New Zealand's darkest days. What has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence. Ardern described the shooting as "an act that has absolutely no place in New Zealand."

The attacks on the Christchurch mosques took place around the time of the Friday evening prayers. One man in his 20s has been apprehended and faces murder charges, while two men and a woman have been detained. Australian officials say that one of the people in custody is an Australian citizen.

Authorities say that firearms were recovered as well as explosive devices. One of the explosive devices was defused while the other is in the process of being disabled, according to NPR.

"We represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values, refuge for those who need it. And those values, I can assure you, will not and cannot be shaken by this attack," Ardern said.

Extra NYPD officers have been deployed to visit Mosques through NYC during early morning (Fajer) prayers.



The NYPD is committed to the safety of all houses of worship, and the freedom to practice your religion freely without any fear.#Christchurch pic.twitter.com/m1HLFO6sD5  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) March 15, 2019

NYPD Police Commissioner James O'Neill tweeted this morning, "Police & all the people we serve are together in this global effort against terrorism," adding that the NYPD was not aware of any NYC "nexus" with the massacre.

There is currently no nexus to #NYC. That said, the #NYPD is providing high-profile resources around our city to keep all worshippers, in every neighborhood, safe  and to keep them feeling safe, too. There is no place in our city & the world for hate, whatever form it may take. pic.twitter.com/9M6iSLRGii  Commissioner O'Neill (@NYPDONeill) March 15, 2019

Mayor Bill de Blasio also said, "While there is no specific or credible threat at this time, we are increasing our NYPD presence at mosques throughout the city out of an abundance of caution. New Yorkers heading to prayer can be confident that their city will protect them."

Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered state police to increase patrols around mosques and other houses of worship across New York state.

"My heart breaks for the victims of the horrific attack in New Zealand," Cuomo said in a statement. "And we grieve with the rest of the world. In the wake of this disgusting act of bigoted violence, which appears to be rooted in Islamophobia, New York stands with the Muslim community as we always have and always will...At a time of great division, we will stand up to hate in all its forms and do everything in our power to protect the safety and wellbeing of all New Yorkers."

The New Zealand gunman, who has not been identified by authorities yet, livestreamed part of the attack on Facebook; the NY Times reports, "He appeared to be steeped in the culture of the extreme-right internet. And in the terrible minutes of video that followed, he proved to be a nonchalant, unrepentant killer." A manifesto also appeared just before the attack.

He is expected to be in court on Saturday morning, New Zealand time.
Trace the lineage of flamenco, beginning with Spanish dance and music, such as fandangos, jacara and tona, taking the audience on a journey through the music and gestures of modern flamenco.

The National Institute of Flamenco and the National Hispanic Cultural Center, in collaboration with the University of New Mexico, present Yjastros 34: The Rise of Flamenco. This stunning production features internationally-acclaimed guest artists, dancers/choreographers Daniel Dona (Granada, Spain) and Cristian Martin (Avila, Spain), and the Orchestra of New Spain (Dallas, Texas) under the direction of Grover Wilkins III. Yjastros 34: The Rise of Flamenco traces the profound lineage of the art of flamenco, beginning with early Spanish dance and music forms, such as fandangos, jacara, and tona, taking the audience on an artistic journey through the musical and gestural forms that become modern flamenco.

Both Dona and Martin have garnered some of the most prestigious awards in flamenco and Spanish dance, including the Premio Ojo Critico (Dona), the Coreografia de Danza Espanola y Flamenco de Madrid (Martin). Their unique artistic vision brings the distant past into a dynamic relationship with the contemporary, immersing the audience in moving, unforgettable dance and music.

The Orchestra of New Spain, under the direction of Grover Wilkins III, draws its principal repertory from manuscripts found in the court, public, and cathedral archives of Spain. Ten guest musicians and vocalists will travel to Albuquerque, forming the awe-inspiring musical accompaniment to the performance, grounded in Spanish artistic heritage.

Yjastros will debut new choreography created and set by Dona and Martin, and take the stage with these brilliant guest dancers and musicians to manifest an aesthetic experience unlike any other.
Over a quarter of a century ago, home viewers of a little show called Star Search were left gasping in utter bliss after witnessing the transcendence that is Carrot Top . His humble tools that fateful evening, so long ago? A box of props, a head full of scarlet curls and a dream. Expelled from the loins of Florida, this comic genius has become world-famous since his meek introduction, leaving in his wake a multitude of stunned and emotionally shattered audiences driven blind by the sheer brilliance of his magnificence . He is performing this Saturday, March 16 , at the Legends Theater at Route 66 Casino . The all ages event starts at 8pm . Tickets for the once-in-a-lifetime show start at $26 . (Joshua Lee)

Scott "Carrot Top" Thompson has been making audiences around the world laugh for more than three decades. Since his debut on "Star Search" more than 25 years ago, Carrot Top has soared to success and become one of the most recognizable entertainers in the world. Since 2005, fans have flocked to his Las Vegas headlining residency at Luxor Hotel and Casino to catch comedys King of Props induce sidesplitting laughter with his current take on pop culture, music, and headlines of the day in a continually evolving show.

The trademark red locks and the undeniably inventive use of props have vaulted Carrot Top to the level that most comedians can only hope to reach "Nobody can steal my act," said Carrot Top, who constantly channels his creative genius to invent new props. With a dozen trunks filled with approximately 200 props on stage each night, audience members can count on not seeing the same show twice. "I love creating props that are relevant to whatevers current  from a news headline to a song I heard on the radio."

Carrot Top got his start as a student at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida during his freshman year, when he went to a club and saw live standup comedy for the first time. A few months later, his roommate convinced him to sign up at an open mic night and after a handful of nerve-wracking first performances, he had caught the comedy bug.

After building a following on the comedy circuit that made people laugh nearly every weekend, his first television appearance was on "Comic Strip Live" in 1991. Things changed for Carrot Top forever in 1992 with his first appearance on "The Tonight Show." That appearance exposed his unique brand of comedy to every home in America. After an impressive 31 appearances, Carrot Top had the distinct honor of appearing on the very last episode of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." Carrot Tops other credits include hundreds of television programs including "Live with Regis and Kelly," "Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher," "The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson," "Late Night With Conan OBrien," "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," "Gene Simmons Family Jewels," "Chelsea Lately," "Last Comic Standing," "Criss Angel - Mindfreak," "Tom Green Live," "The Neighbors," "The Jim Gaffigan Show," "Tosh.O," "Glee," "Family Guy," "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," Oprah Winfrey Networks "Where Are They Now?," ESPN commercials, and as spokesman for 1-800-CALL-ATT. Carrot Top also starred in his own movies "Chairman of the Board" and "Dennis the Menace Strikes Again." Most recently, he appeared in "Sharknado: The 4th Awakens," "The Hangover," and the Trailer Park Boys film "Swearnet: The Movie."

Carrot Tops shows are a spectacle worthy of most arena rock bands and features lights, music, fog machines, and confetti cannons  all in addition to his trunks full of props.

"When I started touring at the beginning of my career, I had two trunks and a strobe light," said Carrot Top. "Things got pretty crazy pretty fast and before I knew it, I had a team touring the country in an 18-wheeler with 35 trunks full of props."

MANAGEMENT

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PH (407) 352-5415

FAX (407) 352-7266

Email Ctopjenn@bellsouth.net

Contact: Jennifer Beck

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Email Slevine@icmpartners.com

Contact: Steve
A judge ruled on Thursday that the city wrongly issued a building permit for a controversial Upper West Side supertall and ordered that the project undergo another review.

The decision, handed down in state Supreme Court, gave a rare victory for community groups and elected officials who had fiercely opposed the 670-foot tall residential tower at 200 Amsterdam. The Committee for Environmentally Sound Development and the Municipal Art Society jointly filed a legal challenge in October 2018, arguing that air rights for the project relied on an illegal assemblage of separate parcels on the block connected by thin strips of land.

While community members have been celebrating the verdict, their victory may be short-lived, as the planned 51-story building is already well under construction. At a glance, developers SJP Properties and Mitsui Fudosan appear to be nearing the halfway point.

The court notably stopped short of ordering the developer to stop construction. Instead, the plans must go back to the Board of Standards and Appeals (BSA), which last July affirmed the Department of Buildings decision to issue a building permit despite a concession by the agency that the irregularly shaped zoning lot should never have been approved.

Were in unchartered waters, said George Janes, a planning consultant who filed the zoning challenge on behalf of The Committee for Environmentally Sound Development, a group that seeks to curb overdevelopment on the Upper West Side.

He added: By not stopping construction, the court has made this more complicated.

Developers have in the past built through legal challenges, according to Janes. They have reason to be bold: the majority of cases uphold the citys decision to issue the permit. And in the instances when they do lose, they can apply for a variance by arguing that it would pose an undue hardship to deconstruct the project.

However, at the time of the legal challenge, the developers of 200 Amsterdam told the court they would not use the progress of their construction to argue that the project was entitled to continue. In other words, they would proceed at their own risk.

It is unclear how that statement, which was noted in the judge's decision, will impact their ability to argue hardship before the BSA.

In a statement to Crains, SJP said:

"The development team for 200 Amsterdam has followed the law completely and continues to make construction progress. 200 Amsterdams zoning permits were exhaustively reviewed by both the Department of Buildings and the BSA, the two city agencies with the primary responsibility for interpreting NYCs zoning codes. Following thorough analysis and public testimony, both agencies determined that the building fully conforms with the citys zoning laws.

The unexpected court ruling is the latest in a series of blows to supertall developers. In January, after community backlash, the city proposed closing a loophole that allows developers to use mechanical spaces, also known as voids, to add extra height to buildings. The zoning amendment, which must ultimately be approved by the City Council, is currently before the City Planning Commission. The state also appears to be on the cusp of approving a pied-a-terre tax, which would assess a fee on part-time luxury homeowners in New York City, many of whom buy units in supertalls.

"Maybe the whole atmosphere has changed," mused Olive Freud, president of the Committee for Environmentally Sound Development. "Developers are taking away our sky and leaving us in shadows. Enough people are angry."
ANNECORDON/iStock(WASHINGTON) -- Former Texas congressman and Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke officially entered the presidential race on Thursday. But with every big-name Democrat to get in the race -- the field is now more than a dozen Democrats strong -- the prospect of a contested convention is all the more real.



Thats because the Democratic Party changed its nominating rules over the controversial role superdelegates played in Hillary Clintons nomination in 2016. Now, only pledged delegates will vote on the first ballot at the national convention in Milwaukee next July -- not superdelegates.

The Democratic National Committees rule change was meant to prevent superdelegates from casting the deciding vote in the first round of voting, but with so many candidates in the race, superdelegates could still play an outsized role.



If the results of the primaries and caucuses spread pledged delegates too thin, and no one candidate has a majority, it means superdelegates could still swing the nomination when they cast their preference in a second ballot vote.

So in this case, O'Rourke's relatively late entry into the field, and perhaps that of former Vice President Joe Biden soon, may not be good for the party unless some Democratic challengers drop out or a clear front-runner emerges long before next July.



Here's the weekly candidate roundup:



Mar. 8-14, 2019



Stacey Abrams (D)



After first appearing to set aside any immediate presidential ambitions at South by Southwest, Abrams said on Twitter on Monday that "2020 is definitely on the table."



During an appearance in Austin, Texas, over the weekend, Abrams told the crowd: "In the spreadsheet with all the jobs I wanted to do, 2028 would be the earliest I would be ready to stand for president because I would have done the work I thought necessary to be effective in that job."

Later, Abramss former campaign manager pushed back against the idea that Abrams had ruled out a 2020 run, saying in a tweet that Abrams was "taking a look at all options on the table for 2020 and beyond."



Abrams later explained that her comments at South by Southwest were related to goals she had set for herself earlier in her life but that the circumstances had changed.



Michael Bennet (D)



The Colorado senator said last Friday in New Hampshire that he is still a few weeks away from a decision, but he was forceful in a rebuke of President Donald Trump at a Concord house party, calling it a "tragedy" he was elected.



The former Denver schools superintendent previewed where his priorities would lie as the nation's chief executive.

"If I ever made it to the end of this process, I guarantee you there will not have been a president whos focused more on education," he said, according to WMUR-TV.



Joe Biden (D)



The former vice president dropped perhaps his most obvious hint about his presidential ambitions during a speech to the International Association of Fire Fighters legislative conference Tuesday when he asked those in attendance to save their "energy" because he "may need it in a few weeks."



At least one source close to Biden told ABC News that he has yet to reach a final decision, but those with knowledge of his thought process have told ABC News that he is "90 percent there" as far as joining the race.



Cory Booker (D)



The New Jersey senator offered a critique of the United States' criminal justice system during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last Friday.



"One of my friends says we have a criminal justice system that treats you better if youre rich and guilty than if youre poor and innocent," Booker said. "And there are people from neighborhoods like mine in America, who get convictions for doing things that two of the last three presidents admitted to doing. We are a nation right that that churns into our criminal justice system the most vulnerable people."



On Friday, Booker campaigns in New Hampshire, with stops in Upper Valley and Claremont, before continuing on to Iowa, where he will visit Des Moines, Ottumwa and Indianola on Saturday and Ames, Waterloo and Davenport on Sunday.



Steve Bullock (D)



WMUR-TV reported Monday that later this month, the Montana governor will make his first trip to New Hampshire this year. He will meet with Democratic Party activists, attend a fundraiser and a reception for Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.



Pete Buttigieg (D)



Buttigieg received a lot of attention this week for his performance at a CNN town hall at South by Southwest, particularly for an answer in which he addressed the character of Vice President Mike Pence, who formerly served as governor of Buttigieg's home state of Indiana.



The mayor of South Bend said he was not certain Pence would make a better president than Trump, asking rhetorically: "How could he allow himself to become the cheerleader for the porn star presidency? Is it that he stopped believing in scripture when he started believing Donald Trump?"



In the 24 hours that followed the event, Buttigieg raised $600,000, the largest single day of fundraising for the mayor since he launched his presidential exploratory committee, according to an aide to Buttigieg.



Julian Castro (D)



Castro targeted fellow Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders during a CNN town hall event at South by Southwest, questioning the explanation that the Vermont senator recently gave for his opposition to paying reparations to the descendants of slaves.

On ABC's The View earlier this month, Sanders said that he thinks there are better ways to address the issue than "simply writing out a check."



At South by Southwest, Castro said, "It's interesting to me that when it comes to Medicare for all, health care ... the response there has been we need to write a big check, that when it comes to tuition-free or debt-free college, the answer has been we need to write a big check. And so if the issue is compensating the descendants of slaves, I don't think that the argument about writing a big check ought to be the argument that you make if you're making an argument that a big check needs to be written for a whole bunch of other stuff."



Castro said that if he were elected president, he would establish a group to study the idea of reparations.



Bill de Blasio (D)



The New York City mayor will visit New Hampshire this weekend, making stops in Manchester and Claremont, the birthplace of his mother-in-law.



John Delaney (D)



Delaney used his appearance at a CNN town hall Sunday to discuss his blue-collar roots, reminiscing about "a time when we had institutions in our society that really supported people," including his father's union which provided him with a scholarship to attend college.



During the town hall, the former Maryland congressman outlined his ideas for the nation's health care system, including a government-run program that Americans could choose to opt-out of; for education, including free community college; and the environment, which he would address by pushing for a carbon tax.



Delaney visits Iowa this weekend with a stop in Churdan on Friday; Fort Dodge, Waterloo and Mason City on Saturday; and Charles City and Decorah on Sunday.



Tulsi Gabbard (D)



Gabbard continues to face questions over her personal opinion of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. During a CNN town hall, she refused to say whether she believed Assad was a war criminal and continued to argue on The Late Show against U.S. intervention to overthrow regimes such as his.



The Hawaii congresswoman said on CNN that she believes evidence should continue to be gathered and if it points to war crimes, Assad "should be prosecuted as such." But she was careful with the language she used to describe the Syrian president on The Late Show, characterizing him as a "potential adversary" and saying that her 2017 trip to Syria to meet with him was made in the "pursuit of peace and security."



Kirsten Gillibrand (D)



Politico reported on Monday that an aide to the New York senator resigned last summer after a sexual harassment complaint went unaddressed -- contrasting with Gillibrand's publicly forceful advocacy for victims of such misconduct.



The staffer about whom the complaint was made kept his job until Politico presented its reporting to Gillibrand's office last month, culminating in his dismissal in early March.



Gillibrand defended the actions of her office, telling reporters that it "take[s] these kinds of allegations very seriously" and maintaining in a statement that when such claims of harassment arise, "we must believe women so that serious investigations can actually take place, we can learn the facts, and there can be appropriate accountability."



"Thats exactly what happened at every step of this case last year," she continued.



Gillibrand travels to New Hampshire Friday for events in Portsmouth, Merrimack and finally Manchester, where she will participate in an MSNBC town hall on Monday. Next, Gillibrand will visit Iowa on Tuesday and Wednesday of next week, with stops in Dubuque, Davenport, Muscatine, Burlington, Ottumwa and Des Moines.



Kamala Harris (D)



Harris voiced her support for California Gov. Gavin Newsom's decision to impose a statewide moratorium on the death penalty, characterizing capital punishment as "immoral, discriminatory, ineffective and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars."



"The symbol of our justice system is a woman with a blindfold. It is supposed to treat all equally, but the application of the death penalty -- a final and irreversible punishment -- has been proven to be unequally applied," Harris said. "Black and Latino defendants are far more likely to be executed than their white counterparts. Poor defendants without a team of lawyers are far more likely to enter death row than those with strong representation. Your race or your bank account shouldn't determine your sentence."



During a visit to South Carolina last weekend, Harris detailed her plan for a middle class tax cut, including credits for families earning less than $100,000 per year, paid for by a repeal of the recently implemented tax reform plan backed by Trump.



John Hickenlooper (D)



In a Medium post on Tuesday, Hickenlooper wrote that he "may be a capitalist" but was "sure not a Trump capitalist," criticizing the president for letting "corporations and the wealthy run wild."



He later said on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers that being called a capitalist in the current political environment was akin to being labeled a "nerd" in high school, but his background as the successful owner of a chain of brewpubs made it "hard to argue with."



Next Wednesday, Hickenlooper will participate in a CNN town hall in Atlanta.



Larry Hogan (R)



On Tuesday, the Maryland governor told ABC News' "Powerhouse Politics" podcast that he has still not ruled out a Republican primary challenge of Trump and is "excited" for an upcoming trip to New Hampshire for a "Politics and Eggs" breakfast.



Hogan acknowledged that Trump still has a strong base of support among Republicans, but said with regard to his own plans that "if things were to change, and things do have a way of changing in this volatile environment that we're in, then all bets are off."



Jay Inslee (D)



Inslee called for an end to the Senate filibuster during an MSNBC interview on Tuesday, labeling it "a vestige of an Antebellum era" that would prevent action on his priority: climate change.



"This is absolutely necessary if were going to defeat this beast," he said, "It is time to shake up D.C., and one of the ways to shake it up is to end the filibuster and have majority rule like Americans deserve. Only then can we fight climate change, and thats job number one to get this thing done."



Inslee will visit New Hampshire this weekend for events in Bedford, Exeter and Durham.



Amy Klobuchar (D)



At South by Southwest last weekend, the Minnesota senator joked about an anecdote included in a New York Times report last month on her treatment of her staff, saying that her choice to use a comb to eat a salad on an airplane after an aide forgot a fork was her "sort of doing a mom thing" and a "MacGyver move."



She did not engage in speculation during the interview about whether the coverage of her interactions with her staff constituted sexism, but did use the appearance to decry the less-than-four-year prison sentence given to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort last week. He was sentenced to additional time this week in a separate case.



"You cant have two systems of justice, one for the rich and powerful and one for everyone else," she said.



Klobuchar visits Iowa this weekend for stops in Waterloo, Dubuque and Independence on Saturday, and Cedar Rapids and Davenport on Sunday.



Seth Moulton (D)



The Massachusetts congressman, who is reportedly still considering a presidential run, argued for the abolishment of both the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster in a Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday, writing that such changes were necessary to ensure every vote in the country counts.



Beto ORourke (D)



O'Rourke's long-awaited announcement arrived on Thursday morning when the former Texas congressman revealed that he was entering the race.



"This is a defining moment of truth for this country and for every single one of us," O'Rourke said in his announcement video. "The challenges that we face right now; the interconnected crises in our economy, our democracy and our climate have never been greater."



O'Rourke is spending his first weekend as an official candidate in Iowa. After stops in Burlington and Muscatine on Thursday, he visits Mount Pleasant and Cedar Rapids on Friday, then North Liberty, Waterloo and Dubuque on Saturday.



Tim Ryan (D)



During an event in Akron, Ohio, on Monday, Ryan said that he is "looking very, very closely" at a presidential run and that Sen. Sherrod Brown's decision not to enter the race led him to examine the possibility more closely.



"I felt like Sherrod was talking about the issues many of us were concerned about," the Ohio congressman said, adding that his own decision would come in the next few weeks.



Bernie Sanders (D)



During a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, Sanders probed the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget over Trump's recently revealed 2020 budget proposal, asking "how many thousands ... will die because of massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid?"

Democrats as a whole have criticized the Trump administration for the budget's $845 million reduction in Medicare spending over the next 10 years.



One of Sanders' campaign staffers apologized for a comment she made on a Facebook thread in which she asked whether the "American-Jewish community has a dual allegiance to the state of Israel," similar to language used by Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar.

The staffer, Sanders' national deputy press secretary, told Politico the language was "insensitive" and that such a discussion should occur "with greater care and sensitivity to their historical resonance."



Sanders will hold a rally in Henderson, Nevada, on Saturday.



Howard Schultz (I)



Though he continues to face criticism from Democrats who view his potential independent presidential campaign as helpful to Trump's reelection chances, the former Starbucks CEO himself took aim at Trump during an event in Miami on Wednesday, decrying Trump's national emergency declaration to secure funds for his proposed southern border wall.



Schultz said that as president, he would "restore the presidency to the proper position as one of three branches of government" and would refuse to sign any legislation that does not have bipartisan support.



A Washington Post story Wednesday examined Schultz's upbringing and "rags-to-riches" story, interviewing residents of the Brooklyn housing project where he grew up who characterized it as middle-class as opposed to the "poor" and "low income" community Schultz discussed at recent events.



Eric Swalwell (D)



While Swalwell himself has yet to say whether he will run for president, he predicted on MSNBC on Monday that "Donald Trump is not going to be the president in 2021."



Swalwell made some other "news" too: After a San Jose Mercury News story revealed that the California congressman dyed his hair in his youth, Swalwell joked on Twitter that "all of us make bad decisions in high school. Sometimes those decisions involve bleach."



Elizabeth Warren (D)



Last weekend, Warren unveiled a proposal to break up large technology companies, such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. She argued that unregulated mergers were decreasing competition in the industry.



"Todays big tech companies have too much power -- too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy," Warren said in a statement. "Theyve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else."



The Massachusetts senator visits neighboring New Hampshire on Friday for events in Salem and Exeter, then takes a southern swing through Memphis on Sunday; Jackson, Mississippi, on Monday for a CNN town hall; and Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, on Tuesday.



Andrew Yang (D)



Yang announced this week that he's surpassed the 65,000 donor threshold necessary to earn a spot in the first Democratic primary debate. Provided the number of candidates who reach the threshold does not surpass 20 -- at which point candidates would then be winnowed by poll performance -- Yang will become the first Democratic non-politician to earn a spot in a presidential primary debate since Al Sharpton in 2004.



Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 81F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

A few clouds. Low around 55F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph, becoming NNW and increasing to 10 to 20 mph.
Goat is the Posts resident expert on all things cabritoboth alive and the ones slow-cooking in a pot. Goat occasionally writes about the art of (and recipes for) cooking, um, goats.
A challenge worth trending

The #trashtag challenge is a good way to get everyone to clean their areas
Council instructs varsities to stop medical colleges from fleecing students

The Nepal Medical Council has written to the Tribhuvan University and Kathmandu University, asking them to stop their affiliated colleges from fleecing students.
Italika/iStock(NEW YORK) -- Jessica Nabongo is on a mission to be the first black woman to visit every country in the world.



And she's getting close. So far, she's hit 157 countries. In the next seven weeks, she'll add another 11 to that list.



Nabongo spoke to ABC News' Good Morning America from her home in Detroit as she was packing to head out on the next phase of her adventure. In the next two months, she'll visit, among others, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq and Oman.



Travel has always been a part of her life, she told GMA.



"I'm looking at Canada right now," she said. She visited for the fist time when she was four. "We would always take family vacations."

Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, London were on the list of places she visited before she was 18. Also on the list: Uganda, where her parents are from.

In addition to her U.S. passport, Nabongo carries a Ugandan passport, which she said helps her gain access to nations that aren't amenable to American tourists.



She first had the idea to travel to every country in the world in February 2017. At that point, she had visited about 60 countries.



But Nabango didn't tell anyone her plan, at least not at first.

"I didn't want anyone to beat me to it," she said.



Nabango did some research on who else may have conquered this feat, and came to the conclusion if she were to visit each country, she would be the first black woman to do so.



She went public with her quest in March 2018.



Nabongo had been writing a travel blog since 2009, before social media was so prevalent.

"It was a way to keep family and friends updated," she said.

Today, she documents much of her travel on Instagram, where she has almost 90,000 followers.



She said she gets asked a lot how she got started.

"People look at a photo of me in Bali and they say, 'That's cool, I want to go to Bali.' But everyone needs to ask themselves, 'What is your why?' Why do you want to do what it is you want to do? I hope people would be more reflective than reactive. Not just like, 'Oh Bali, that's a cute picture, I want to go,'" Nabongo said.



What makes it to her Instagram, she said, is "a fraction of my life. There's a lot of really s***** things that go on behind the scenes."



Nabongo recounted a visit to the Eastern European nation of Moldova, a place she'll "never go back there in my life." It wasn't just the fact that she got ripped off on her money exchange, or that her cab driver charged her double. She's had things like that happen before. It was the general unfriendliness of the people she encountered.



"I'm [a] seasoned traveler, used to being a foreigner and people taking advantage of me," she said. "I dont speak the language, I get it, especially in poor countries. In poor countries I don't really even mind."



More often than not, though, people try to be helpful, especially, Nabongo said, when she tells them what she's trying to accomplish.



She plans to end her quest on Oct. 6 in the Seychelles with family and friends on hand to celebrate. Her mom will be there. The date is significant: it's her late father's birthday. Nabongo credits him for her journey.



"Had he not gotten a scholarship to Western Michigan," she said, "none of this would be happening."



And what will she do once she's reached her goal?



"I'll probably go to Uganda right after," she said.

Copyright  2019, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Tika R Pradhan is a senior political correspondent for the Post, covering politics, parliament, judiciary and social affairs. Pradhan joined the Post in 2016 after working at The Himalayan Times for more than a decade.
Dont forget their rights

The proposed labour pact with Japan is a chance to enhance migration governance
E-procurement system on cards to keep tabs on contractors

Contractors will soon have to regularly share updates on the contracts they have in hand as part of the governments bid to discourage those who are already overwhelmed with work.
Government contradicts its decision on Chand outfit and its activities

The government has contradicted its own decision in a span of two days on imposing a ban on the activities of the Communist Party of Nepal, led by Netra Bikram Chand.
In ruling party, leaders are questioning Olis unilateral decisions

When the government signed a deal with Free Madhes campaigner CK Raut at the City Hall on Friday, most of the leaders of the ruling communist party were in the dark about the development.
India agrees to lift ban on 200- and 500-rupee banknotes in Nepal

Indias central bank-Reserve Bank of India-has agreed to allow travellers to carry 200 and 500-rupee Indian currency notes in Nepal but at the same time, restricted them from taking the notes to India.
Innovation Fund to help women-led enterprises

The United Nations Capital Development Fund has launched an Innovation Fund in the Asia-Pacific region in a bid to empower women by promoting micro, small and medium enterprises run by them.




"We are in the process of revising projections for this year. The macroeconomic report with official projections has to be published in April. Estimates are very likely to be revised upwards, but we need technical support for this," Oliva stated.





"For example, the Chancay Port investment was not included in last year's projections because it was not consolidated, but we have to incorporate it now," he added.





"We are confident the economy will show a better performance this year compared to 2018 even though last year was quite good ," he continued.





The cabinet member announced the new official projections will be available in April, and that the sector is still working with predictions from last year when the 2019 public investment growth was projected at 4.5% and private investment at 7.5%









"We received very good news about Chancay Port in January: a US$3 billion investment . Then, the truth is that private investment expectations in several areas of the economy are quite high," he added.





The minister announced the Lake Titicaca treatment plant contract will be awarded soon. So far, five top-level bidders are in competition for the concession of this project.





(END) CNA/JJN/RMB/MVB

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Peru's Economy and Finance Minister Carlos Oliva affirmed the 4.2% GDP growth estimate for this year might be revised upwards, as is the case with public (4.5%) and private (7.5%) investment.Publicado: 15/3/2019
Se decidio que la primera reunion descentralizada del #Conasec en el 2019 se realice en Trujillo por ser una ciudad clave en la lucha contra la delincuencia y el crimen organizado. Asimismo, en esta ciudad se dio inicio a la estrategia multisectorial #BarrioSeguro. pic.twitter.com/HRoOMdQoaq
Police step up security across country after ban on Chand groups activities

A nationwide strike called on Thursday by the Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal, whose activities were banned by the government on Tuesday, largely crippled normal life across the country.
El Peru expresa su protesta por participacion de organizaciones vinculadas a Sendero Luminoso en reunion de la CIDH.

?https://t.co/PoF5ZLlXcb pic.twitter.com/z8An8icKdO
" " Large or small, most mammals have one thing in common: the amount of time it takes to defecate. Maya Ohe Vami/EyeEm/Getty Images

It's a revolting job, but somebody has to figure out the physics of feces. Vertebrates have been pooping on this planet for hundreds of millions of years, yet our understanding of the hydrodynamics of defecation is alarmingly limited. Thankfully, an intrepid team of researchers is on the job.

A new study published in the journal Soft Matter (no, this is not fake news, this is real news) reports that no matter the animal's size, it takes every mammal an average of 12 seconds to produce a bowel movement. We're talking cats, elephants, kangaroos, moles, water buffaloes  you name it, the poop slips out of their individual rectums on a cushion of mucus at the same impressive speed.

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But why? And what allows for this consistency in so many different types of animal bodies?

First, in the natural world, it's kind of a good idea to be an expedient pooper, regardless of size:

"The smell of body waste attracts predators, which is dangerous for animals," lead author Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech told Chelsea Whyte at New Scientist. "If they stay longer doing their thing, they're exposing themselves and risking being discovered."

So, it's pretty obvious why a wild animal wouldn't want to dally on the potty, but the mechanism by which animals of all sizes are able to do this job relatively quickly has been more mysterious. The researchers got to the bottom of the issue by filming different mammals' toilet times at dog parks and the Atlanta, Georgia, zoo, and also by finding videos of pooping zoo animals that tourists have uploaded to YouTube:

"There's a surprising amount of poop videos online," said Yang, perhaps unfamiliar with the internet and human curiosity.

" " Researchers charted the time it took mammals to defecate and compared it to their mass. Georgia Institute of Technology

The body masses of the 23 species of animals studied ranged from about 9 pounds to almost a ton (from 4 to 4,000 kilograms). What the scientists found with animals whose poops are cylindrical  most mammals, in fact  is that their individual turds tended to be about five times the diameter of the animal's rectum, and the necessary pressure each animal needed to apply to the process of expelling their waste was about the same, no matter the species.

Another piece of this poop puzzle had to do with mucus. Although it seems the act of defecation is a process of squeezing something out of a tube, it's actually more like opening the gate of a chute. Mucus is necessary to lubricate the stool so it can move out of the colon to freedom  according to Yang, if humans didn't have this mucus, it would take 500 days for a poop to move completely through our bowels if no pressure were applied. (Fun Fact: Constipation happens when the stool actually absorbs the mucus that's needed to move everything along smoothly!) The researchers found large animals have much thicker mucus than smaller animals, which gets their longer fecal pieces through the rectum at about the same speed as the smaller ones.

" " If an elephant defecates in the woods and a scientist is around to measure it, does it make a sound? (Ask the scientist.) Keabetswe Mabelane/EyeEm/Getty Images

Yang and her coauthors have some practical, scientifically backed advice for humans who count on their 15 minutes of newspaper time on the toilet:

"If it's taking far longer than 12 seconds, I'd say you should go see someone about it," she said.

Now That's Interesting Regardless of the size of the animal's bladder, all mammals urinate for an average of 21 seconds.
Those of you who read what I write know what I have written about the political conundrum in Malaysia these last many months. You know I have written not...
A group of diverse but like-minded individuals, the members of ARC have come together in their common desire to fight hatred, bigotry, intolerance and violence because of the harm these antisocial behaviors cause to our society. In that effort, we will not use or sanction the use of illegal actions (such as violence or intimidation) in pursuit of our desired aims and if we learn of anyone who does use these unethical methods we will report those individuals to the authorities. Instead, we will use the guarantees found in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that ensure freedom of legal speech and expression.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. At least 27 persons have been killed when unidentified gunmen opened fire at people inside Al Noor and Linwood Masjid mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, TASS reports citing Otago Daily Times.

At least 30 of those injured were rushed to city hospitals.

Police detained one of the shooters.

Armed people entered the mosques in Christchurch at about 13:45 local time shortly after the day prayer, blocked the entrance doors and opened fire. According to eyewitnesses, about 200 and 300 people were inside the buildings when the attack occurred.

So far, the casualty reports have not yet been officially confirmed, but police urged citizens to stay indoors. All schools in the city were closed.






YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. The UK parliament on March 14 supported the governments proposal to request Brussels to reschedule its official withdrawal from the European Union, due on March 29, to a later date, TASS reported.

During the vote which took place in the House of Commons on Thursday, 412 members of parliament supported delaying Brexit, 202 were against.

Earlier in the day, the parliament rejected an attempt to secure another referendum on Brexit by 334 no votes to 85 yes votes.

Now the British government is to request a so-called technical delay until June 30, if the House of Commons manages to pass the draft Brexit deal until March 20.

The European Commission said the UK parliamentary vote alone was not enough to secure the delay, and the decision on postponement must now gain approval from all 27 EU member states. It cited Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which envisages extending the two-year withdrawal period, but only if the initiative gets a unanimous approval of the European Council.




YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Yerevan City Hall resumed the dismantlement of cafes near the Opera house, reports Armenpress.

This time the dismantlement is not accompanied by protests, and the works are being carried without any obstacles.

Co-owner of the Jazzve cafe Armen Petrosyan issued a statement urging the remaining cafe owners and staff to stop the protests and move the complaint to a legal dimension.

On March 14 the employees of the cafes near the Opera House were protesting against the dismantlement of the cafes initiated by the City Hall. The cafe employees blocked the Avenue Mashtots and later the Tumanyan street. The Police officers managed to remove the protesters from the streets and resume the traffic. A minor clash occurred between the citizens and the police officers as a result of which both citizens and policeman were injured.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Karin Strenz from Germanys ruling Christian-Democratic Union party has been fined with 20.000 Euros by the Bundestag for keeping secret that she received money from Azerbaijan through a lobbying firm for years, Deutsche welle reports.

The German Bundestag made such a decision on March 14.

The MPs name was also mentioned in the 2018 April report of independent experts on receiving bribes for lobbying Bakus interests in Europe. The report says that former Bundestag MP Eduard Lintner has hired Karin Strenz at Line M-Trade consulting company owned by him and funded by Baku.

Karin Strenz was included in the observer mission for observing the elections in Azerbaijan in 2015. But due to such discoveries, she was not included in the German delegation to PACE in early 2018. She insisted that she didnt know that Lintners firm is funded by Azerbaijan.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. The meeting of foreign minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan and MPs began in the Parliament on March 15, the MFA spokesperson Anna Naghdalyan said on Facebook, reports Armenpress.

The FM visited Parliament at the invitation of the lawmakers.

Foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan meets with the chairman and members of the parliamentary standing committee on foreign affairs, the chairman of the standing committee on human rights protection and public affairs, the chair of the standing committee on state-legal affairs, as well as with the head of the Bright Armenia faction, Naghdalyan said, adding that the meeting will touch upon Armenias foreign policy agenda, including the settlement process of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Will robots kill jobs?

As AI and robotics are changing the world, developing countries need their own strategies to cope up with automation
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Irans Civil Aviation Organization has imposed a ban on the flights of Boeing 737 Max aircrafts in its airspace, Reza Jafarzadeh, head of public relations at the Organization said, Reurters reports.

A ... ban on the passage of the Boeing Max aircraft through Irans skies has been issued as has been the case with other countries, Reza Jafarzadeh said.

An Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed on March 10 killing all 157 people on board, in the second fatal accident involving the 737 Max 8 model in five months.

A wave of countries and blocs have banned the plane from their airspace.

They include the UK, China, the European Union and Australia.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. The upcoming meeting of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will be announced by the two sides, Armenias foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan told reporters in the Parliament, reports Armenpress.

We agree on this and then announce. But this moment hasnt come yet in order to announce. Here the issue between the sides is to respect each other that we announce the meeting dates and place as agreed upon. Currently works are underway on this path, he said.

Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev had a brief meeting in Dushanbe on September 28, 2018, during which they reached an agreement to reduce tension and prevent incidents in the border. An operative connection has been established between the sides since the meeting of the two leaders.

Thereafter, they held another informal meeting in St. Petersburg in December on the sidelines of the informal meeting of the heads of CIS states.

Pashinal and Aliyev also met on January 22, 2019 in Davos on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenias deputy minister of economic development and investments Avag Avanesyan received a group of Indian businessmen, the ministry told Armenpress.

The investors stated that they plan to make investments in Armenia in a number of sectors, in particular, trade, services and industry.

At the request of the guests the deputy minister introduced Armenias investment attractions and foreign privileged markets. Avag Avanesyan drew the attention of the guests on the privileges provided by the state to investment programs.

At the end of the meeting an agreement was reached to continue the discussions on programs and regulations that are interesting to investors.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. The Yerevan court on March 15 has released its decision on the precautionary measure against 2nd President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan.

Kocharyans pre-trial detention has been extended for another two months, his attorney Aram Orbelyan said, reports Armenpress.

The Special Investigative Service earlier filed a motion to extend Kocharyans pre-trial detention for another two months.

Robert Kocharyan has been charged on July 26, 2018, over the 2008 March 1 case, under the Article 300.1 part 1 of the Criminal Code for breaching the constitutional order of the Republic of Armenia.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. The return of the Republic of Artsakh to the negotiation table for the settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict cannot lead it to a deadlock, Armenian foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan told reporters, commenting on the statement of Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev that the change of negotiation format is unacceptable, reports Armenpress.

We will not do anything that will lead to a deadlock because we remain committed to the peaceful settlement of the process. This is a very important issue, and we will move on this direction very decisively. This is a very principled issue to accept that Nagorno Karabakh has a decisive voice and engagement. This is not something new, but in line with this, in order to effectively work on promoting the negotiation process, we must accept practically that the expression of this decisive voice and engagement is needed. Today we are negotiating both with Nagorno Karabakh and with Azerbaijan within the frames of the OSCE Minsk Group. This is not a precondition, and we want to continue discussing and finding the solutions of the issues, the FM said.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, 15 MARCH, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 15 March, USD exchange rate down by 0.12 drams to 486.63 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 0.40 drams to 550.96 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.01 drams to 7.45 drams. GBP exchange rate up by 0.47 drams to 645.17 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price down by 183.40 drams to 20269.55 drams. Silver price down by 4.52 drams to 238.36 drams. Platinum price down by 222.30 drams to 13001.42 drams.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Foreign minister of Armenia Zohrab Mnatsakanyan delivered remarks at the Panel Discussion on Women, Peace and Security: International and Armenian Practice.

ARMENPRESS presents the full text of his speech:

Dear Ms. Hutchinson,

Excellences,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Mr. Sharp,

Dear colleagues,

On this final day of the NATO week in Armenia I express my gratitude to our partner Embassies, my colleagues from the Foreign Ministry and other governmental agencies for their contribution to the series of events of the NATO week.

Likewise, I would like to welcome Ms. Clare Hutchinson, NATO SG Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security and thank her for the participation in this discussion.

In recent years, we have successfully continued our mutually beneficial partnership with NATO. Today we have a solid agenda of cooperation with the Alliance - the main vehicle of it being Armenia-NATO Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP)  including the fulfillment of commitments on implementation of the UNSCR 1325.

Next year, we will mark the twentieth anniversary of the adoption of resolution 1325 (2000). Regretfully, since then the world has not become more secure, in many places people continue to face the reality where violence, discrimination and hate prevail.

It is our firm conviction that women are strong agents of change for peace and security and that peace and security efforts are more sustainable when women are equal partners in the prevention of violent conflicts, the delivery of relief and recovery efforts, as well as in contributing to the lasting and durable settlements.

Thus, ensuring their solid participation in the resolution of conflicts is not merely an exercise of gender equality, it is an instrument enhancing the chances of peace and development.

I would like to recall in this regard the recently inaugurated Women for Peace campaign, which aims to be an inclusive platform for women and mothers to promote peace and reconciliation in the conflict torn areas in our region and beyond. This is an illustrative example of the participation of women in the peace building efforts.

The lead-up to this 20th anniversary provides a suitable opportunity to assess the progress and identify the further steps.

In February of this year, our Government approved the 1st National Action Plan on implementation of the UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. Armenia became the 80th UN member state to have adopted NAP.

Before the adoption of the National Action Plan Armenian Government and the civil society, each in their own way, have been taking action towards implementation of the resolution 1325. However, it was not a duty-coordinated activity.

The elaboration of the NAP was a year-long exercise engaging Government agencies, civil society and international organizations. As a result, we have a comprehensive, coherent and coordinated policy paper with the central role of the State as the primary responsibility barer for the advancement of women, peace and security agenda.

It takes into account the situation on the ground with a view to accelerating political participation and economic empowerment of women in the context of peacebuilding, conflict-prevention and conflict resolution. Particular focus has been given to vulnerable population groups, including women from border communities, women affected by conflict, women displaced or under risk of displacement.

Implementation of the resolution 1325 in the overall context of promoting women's rights which relates to Government priorities to ensure equality of its citizens before the law and create equal opportunities in economic and social life. These priorities square firmly in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 5, where the commitments related to women, peace and security tiding to increasing their participation in public life, at local, national and regional levels.

With the aim to increase the political representation of women, more effective quota for women representation has been prescribed by Electoral Code (25 percent representation of women in elective bodies instead of the previous 20 percent). At the same time, a gradual approach has been stipulated, and higher quota has been prescribed for next elections bringing it up to a level 30 percent.

We need to take innovative, gender-sensitive approaches, with a view to address root causes and risk factors that hamper the participation of women and create conditions that put an effective end to such malpractices.

This discussion is indeed very timely for the Armenian public allowing once again to focus on the important link between the empowerment of women and the sustainability of peace and development, both at national, regional and international levels. And this is an ongoing challenge for all of us, in this country and in this region. That is why I want to renew my appeal to collective, responsible and resolute action on advancing this agenda on Women, Peace and Security.

Thank you very much. I wish all of you, and all of us productive discussion.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenias foreign ministry is in contact with the authorities of New Zealand regarding the note in Armenian and other languages found on one of the weapons used for the attack on the two mosques in the city of Christchurch, MFA spokesperson Anna Naghdalyan told Armenpress.

We are in contact with New Zealands relevant authorities on all issues linked with the incident, Anna Naghdalyan said.

One of the weapons used for the attack on the two mosques in New Zealand is covered with notes in different languages, including Armenian and Georgian, the videos released from the incident show.

The Georgian state security service has already reacted to these reports, stating that it cooperates with its partners to find out details about the persons arrested following the attack and the weapon used.

The gun covered in white lettering featured the names of King Davit Agmashenebeli and Prince David Soslan, the second husband of Queen Tamar, in Georgian, the Battle of Kagul 1770 (Russian-Turkish war) and the Battle of Bulair 1913 were written in Russian.

The Battle of Sarikamish (one of the biggest military clashes between Russian and Ottoman empires during the WWI) is written in Armenian on the gun.

49 people have killed in the shootings in mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand.

New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the shootings as a terrorist attack.

Armed people entered the the Al Noor and Linwood Masjid mosques in Christchurch at about 13:45 local time shortly after the day prayer, blocked the entrance doors and opened fire. According to eyewitnesses, about 200 and 300 people were inside the building when the attack occurred. Police told citizens to stay indoors. All schools in the city were closed.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. President of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan received the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Italy to Armenia Vincenzo del Monaco on March 15, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the parliament of Armenia.

Welcoming the guest the Head of the parliament has highlighted the dynamically developing friendly relations with Italy, which are based on our two peoples centuries-old rich historical-cultural heritage. Ararat Mirzoyan has noted that all preconditions are available for the further development of the bilateral relations.

The President of the National Assembly emphasized the visit of the President of Italy Sergio Mattarella to Armenia in July of the last year, which had given a new impetus to the Armenian-Italian centuries-old relations. According to him, such visits promote the deepening and enlivening of the bilateral ties.

Evaluating the activities of the Parliamentary Friendship Groups in the development of the inter-parliamentary ties, the Head of the legislative body has stated that in the near future in the National Assembly an Armenian-Italian Friendship Group would be formed and firm relations would be established between them.

The President of the National Assembly expressed his gratitude for the participation of the Italian parliamentarians of the OSCE Observation Mission in the parliamentary elections held on December 9.

Touching upon Armenia-European Union Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, Ararat Mirzoyan expressed hope that the Italian colleagues would show support in ratifying the document within possible short term in the Italian Parliament.

The Head of the Parliament highly assessed personally the Ambassadors activities in the development of the Armenian-Italian relations for the benefit of the two countries development and welfare.

The National Assembly President reaffirmed his invitations to the Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies of Italy to visit Armenia.

Vincenzo del Monaco has congratulated Ararat Mirzoyan on being appointed in the high post and agreed that the bilateral relations are based on the centuries-old traditions. Italy is the country, where the Armenian community has been formed since ancient times, the Ambassador said. In the advancement of the political dialogue between the two countries he emphasized the role of the parliamentary diplomacy. With regards to the Armenia-EU Agreement the Ambassador noted that there is no obstacle for its ratification, it is carried out in accordance with the national legislation procedures.
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. The resumption of Artsakhs involvement in Nagorno Karabakh conflict settlement talks should be the joint decision of the sides, ARMENPRESS reports Russian MFA spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a press conference on March 15.

Its not the first time the Russian Federation, as one of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chair countries, has talked about the negotiation format, the change of which can occur in case of the consent of the sides. If at any stage they agree that Nagorno Karabakh should be again represented in the negotiations, it will be the decision of the sides and we will respect it. This is not only our position, but also the other members of the Minsk Group Co-chairs. I would also recommend focusing on March 9 statement of the Co-chairs, where the positions of the RF, USA and France on that issue are clearly presented, she said.

In their recent statement the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group (Igor Popov of the Russian Federation, Stephane Visconti of France and Andrew Schofer of the United States of America) welcomed the commitment of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to meet soon under the auspices of the Co-Chairs. The Co-Chairs, working closely with the two foreign ministers, have been making preparations for this important leaders meeting, which will be the first direct contact between the two leaders conducted under Co-Chair auspices.

The Co-Chairs underline the importance of maintaining an environment conducive to productive discussions and continue to assess positively the recent lack of casualties on the front lines. The Co-Chairs also welcome some initial steps being taken in the region to prepare the populations for peace and encourage the sides to intensify such efforts. At the same time, the Co-Chairs reiterate the critical importance of reducing tensions and minimizing inflammatory rhetoric. In this context, the Co-Chairs urge the sides to refrain from statements and actions suggesting significant changes to the situation on the ground, prejudging the outcome of or setting conditions for future talks, demanding unilateral changes to the format without agreement of the other party, or indicating readiness to renew active hostilities.

With reference to some contradictory recent public statements on the substance of the Minsk Group process, the Co-Chairs reiterate that a fair and lasting settlement must be based on the core principles of the Helsinki Final Act, including in particular the non-use or threat of force, territorial integrity, and the equal rights and self-determination of peoples. It also should embrace additional elements as proposed by the Presidents of the Co-Chair countries in 2009-2012, including: return of the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijani control; an interim status for Nagorno-Karabakh providing guarantees for security and self-governance; a corridor linking Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh; future determination of the final legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh through a legally binding expression of will; the right of all internally displaced persons and refugees to return to their former places of residence; and international security guarantees that would include a peacekeeping operation.

The Co-Chairs stress their view that these principles and elements must be the foundation of any fair and lasting settlement to the conflict and should be conceived as an integrated whole. Any attempt to put some principles or elements over others would make it impossible to achieve a balanced solution.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
1. Yes. The Schlueter Group has extensive experience and contacts. Its a good investment.

2. Yes. The firms namesake has a background as a legislator and knows Killeen well.

3. No. The expenditure is a waste of money. Our lawmakers should be doing that work.

4. No. The contract should be shorter, incentivized and based on performance benchmarks.

5. Unsure. Its not always easy to quantify the outcomes of lobbying efforts.

Vote

View Results
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian sent a condolence message to Governor-General of New Zealand Patsy Reddy on the occasion of the terror attack in two mosques in Christchurch city of New Zealand, that claimed numerous lives, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Armenian Presidents Office.

Condemning any demonstration of terrorism in this difficult moment I share the grief of you and the people of New Zealand.

I extend my sincere condolences to the relatives of the victims, wishing them steadfastness and spiritual strength, and speedy recovery to the injured, reads the Presidents message.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. The Azerbaijani armed forces fired 9 mortar bombs in the eastern direction of Artsakh-Azerbaijan contact line on March 13, press secretary of the Defense Ministry of Artsakh Senor Hasratyan told ARMENPRESS.

60 mm mortar bombs were fired in the direction of Aghdam on March 13 in the period of 10:35-11:15. 9 bombs were fired, Hasratyan said.

He added that the Defense Army has suffered no casualties.

Relative tranquility in Nagorno Karabakh conflict zone could be observed following Pashinyan-Aliyev meeting in Dushanbe in September 2018, during which the leaders agreed to reduce tensions. Since then Azerbaijan violated the ceasefire regime using only different caliber firearms.

Azerbaijan launched large-scale military exercises on March 11 ahead of the planned talks between Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan sent a condolence message to Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern on the occasion of the terror attack in two mosques in Christchurch city of New Zealand.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister of Armenia, the message particularly runs as follows,

Honorable Mrs. Prime Minister,

It was with deep grief that I learned about the terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch city of New Zealand, that claimed lives of numerous innocent people.

Strictly condemning any demonstration of terrorism, I extend my sincere sympathy and solidarity to you, the relatives of New Zealand and the friendly people of New Zealand.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Ethnic Azerbaijanis, as well as citizens of Azerbaijan enter the territory of Armenia without any obstacles, while the entry to Azerbaijan of people with Armenian surnames but holding citizenship of other countries, including Russia, is banned, ARMENPRESS reports spokesperson of the MFA Armenia Anna Naghdalyan said, answering the question of Interfax about the announcement of "What, Where, When?" program expert of Azerbaijani origin holding Russian citizenship Rovshan Askerov, who claimed that his entry to Armenia is banned.

Some parts of the interview of "What, Where, When?" program expert Rovshan Askerov related to Armenia is merely surprising, since its over 2 years the Russian citizens visit Armenia with internal passports, which has significantly facilitated their entry to our country, making Armenia one of the traditionally most demanded directions for Russian tourists.

Moreover, the geography of those visiting Armenia covers all the countries of the world with no exclusions, with no ethnic discrimination. It should be noted that ethnic Azerbaijanis, as well as the citizens of Azerbaijan enter Armenia without any obstacles, while the entry to Azerbaijan of people with Armenian surnames but holding citizenship of other countries, including Russia, is banned.

Armenia is always open for all visitors, including Mr. Askerov.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, MARCH 15, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan had a working luncheon with the members of the Union of Businessmen and Industrialists of Armenia.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister of Armenia, different issues referring to the improvement of investment environment in the country, legislative regulations, and tax reforms were discussed.

The businessmen noted that competitive business conditions, free market relations have been established in the country and that former economic monopolies have been eliminated and these measures have launched the beginning of the economic revolution. They expressed confidence that the created conditions will contribute to the economic activity and progress of the country.

In terms of effective implementation of investment programs and economic development, the parties highlighted the importance of effective dialogue and feedback between government and business.

During the working luncheon exchange of views took place over the strategy and philosophy of economic development.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
The Company Army Recognition Group with its online International Defense and Security magazine will cover IDET 2019 the International Fair of Defence and Security Technology that will be held in Brno (Czech Republic) from the 29 to 31 May 2019. As one of the most popular online defense and security magazine and official media partner of the event, our editorial team will cover IDET 2019 with our Online Show Daily News and Web TV.



IDET 2019 International Fair of Defence and Security Technology will be held in Brno, Czech Republic, from the 29 to 31 May 2019. (Picture source Army Recognition)

The organizers of IDET 2019 understood the interest of using the international notoriety and popularity of Army Recognition online Global Defense & Security magazine to deliver all news of the event and to provide the exhibitors with a global online window in parallel with IDET 2019 exhibition about the latest defense and security technologies and innovations.

As Online Show Daily News including Web TV supplier for IDET 2019, the Army Recognition editorial team will have a significant presence at the show to provide a full coverage about this event. Thanks to the daily online publication and updating, in case you cannot attend IDET 2019, follow all activities of IDET 2019 with our news coverage, reports, pictures and Web Television.

.

Our Online Show Daily News including Web TV IDET 2019 that provides full editorial coverage of the event for all exhibitors with a global online window in parallel with IDET International Fair of Defence and Security Technology about the latest defense and security technologies and innovations. Our Official Online Show Daily News is usually read by more than 35,000 people per day, from 130 countries during the event.

With our Web TV of IDET 2019, we will provide daily videos with interviews, reports and full coverage of the event. Thanks to the popularity of our Online Defense and Security News channel on Youtube with more than 93,000 subscribers, 1,000,000 videos views/month and more than 2,900,000 minutes view/month and our Defense and Security Web TV website https://www.defensewebtv.com, use these new means to communicate and promote your company and its range of products.

At the same time, Army Recognition provides a free service for all exhibitors, with the publishing of the latest press releases in the Official Online Show Daily News IDET 2019. Army Recognition proposes a new range of online marketing and advertising solutions such as product technical data sheets, company profiles, banners, logos, and videos, etc.

Should you wish to have your company press releases in the Online Show Daily News of IDET 2019, simply send them us to this links:

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Submitting press releases for defense events or Show Daily News to our team is free of charge, but we cannot guarantee that all the press releases will be published.

Do you need some advertising and marketing services to increase your impact and presence before, during and after the exhibition in the Online Show Daily News including Web TV IDET 2019? See our offer at this link:

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Rabaul was the capital of Australian-mandated New Guinea and was protected by a tiny garrison consisting mainly of the 2/22nd Battalion Lark Force.

Few Australians know of the carnage at neighbouring Tol and Waitavalo plantations - nor that it came soon after one of the most shameful episodes of our war when 1,400 diggers and civilians were abandoned as hostages to fortune ahead of the Japanese invasion of Rabaul on 23 January 1942.

That this tragedy is barely remembered and rarely commemorated blights Australias national conscience and to this day rankles the distressed families of the victims.

So horrific was the Tol Massacre on the island of New Britain that the Australian government suppressed details for 47 years.

Seventy-five years yesterday, 160 Australian prisoners were bayoneted, beheaded, shot or burned alive by Japanese troops  on what was then Australian territory.

IT WAS one of the most callous atrocities of the Pacific war.

The town was quickly routed by a massive Japanese fleet of carriers, destroyers, submarines and fighter and bomber aircraft.

When the order every man for himself was given, soldiers and civilians fanned out over New Britain looking for escape routes through the most rugged terrain imaginable.

Some endured an epic trek through dense jungle  battling malaria, dysentery, tropical ulcers, leeches, exhaustion, malnutrition and crocodile-infested rivers  to eventually reach points where they were able to escape on small boats.

But this was not the majority, including those who reached Tol Plantation hoping to be rescued.

To their horror, five barge-loads of Japanese troops were on the beach to meet them.

There was no option for the starving, exhausted, virtually unarmed Australians but to surrender. At first it seemed they would be treated as normal prisoners of war. Then an order to execute the prisoners was given.

Red Cross brassards were ripped off medics. Men were trussed together in small groups with fishing line or ropes and taken into the jungle and slaughtered.

They stood or sat listening to their mates death cries  awaiting their own fate by blade or bullet.

The few survivors told of grinning Japanese soldiers emerging from the bush wiping blood from their bayonets and beckoning their next targets.

Some victims - asked if they wanted to be shot or bayoneted - chose the gun only to be stabbed. Two wounded men found alive in Waitavalo Plantation homestead had been smeared in pig grease to be burned alive in the house.

Requests for final cigarettes were refused. Some men prayed, some begged for their lives, others said cheerio to their mates.

They were covered in palm leaves and left to die. Incredibly, several men feigned death and survived to tell the story.

Private Billy Cook of the 2/12 Field Ambulance survived 11 bayonet wounds. He wrote:

The first stab knocked us down. The Japs stood over us stabbing madly. I received six wounds in the back, two just missing the spine, two more breaking ribs

As the Japanese were moving off, the man next to me groaned. One of the Japanese soldiers came running back and stabbed him once more. By this time I could hold my breath no longer. When I drew a deep breath the soldier heard me and inflicted four more bayonet wounds.

The last thrust went through my ear into my mouth, severing an artery on the way. Seeing the blood gushing out of my mouth, he assumed that I was at last dead, he covered the three of us with coconut fronds and vine leaves and left.

Cook somehow crawled off into the jungle  as did five other survivors  and eventually was evacuated from New Britain to Port Moresby with 156 soldiers, sailors and civilians aboard the overcrowded government yacht, the Laurabada.

An estimated 1,053 of the troops and Rabaul residents who remained in the town or who were captured would eventually perish as prisoners when their prison ship, the Montevideo Maru, taking them to Hainan then occupied by Japan, was sunk by mistake by an American submarine off the Philippines.

The details of that episode and the miserable way victims families were treated for decades - plus the disgraceful abandonment of Rabaul itself - are stories for elsewhere.

So, too, is the shameful way in which the Chinese population under Australias protection was left behind along with indigenous workers employed by the colonial administration.

But this weekend we remember the 160 poor souls who died such unspeakable deaths at Tol and Waitavalo 75 years ago.

Many were just boys  the average age of Lark Force soldiers was 18 and a half  while some of the civilian volunteer rifle men were granddads in their fifties and sixties.

Some remains were retrieved post-war and buried at Rabauls beautiful Bita Paka war cemetery - but the bones of others rot still in the jungle soil of a place whose name most Australian have never heard.

They deserve better.

Lest We Forget.
While the delay in the referendum isnt a great surprise, the exact meaning of the referendum continues to be contested.

While preparations have been ongoing, it is believed the Bougainville Referendum Commission, headed by former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern, would have been both financially and structurally struggling to meet the referendums requirements by June.

Under the 2001 peace agreement that followed a decade-long civil war in Papua New Guinea, it was negotiated that a referendum on the future status of Bougainville would be held prior to mid-2020.

WASHINGTON DC - Earlier this month the date of the Bougainville independence referendum was pushed back. Initially  although tentatively  scheduled for 15 June, the poll will now be held in October.

Threat and majesty - Mt Bagana volcano symbolises the contradictions of Bougainville as its people near a vote on its political future

PNG prime minister Peter ONeill recently stated that the referendum is nonbinding, and that after the poll is conducted the PNG parliament will debate the results, and ultimately decide on whether Bougainville will become the worlds newest country.

ONeills assertion that ultimate authority lies with the PNG parliament has the potential to once again inflame tensions between Bougainville and Port Moresby should the Bougainville public vote for independence.

The position of Bougainville within PNG has been an uncomfortable one.

Geographically and ecologically Bougainville forms the northern part of the archipelago that includes the Solomon Islands, maintaining greater cultural and linguistic links to these southern islands as well.

However, during the colonial endeavours of both British and Germans, the archipelago became a contested space, with British controlling the southern islands of the archipelago and the Germans controlling Bougainville.

During World War I, Bougainville was occupied by Australia, which subsequently administered it within the Territory of New Guinea. Several days before PNG gained its independence from Australia in 1975, Bougainville unilaterally declared independence as the Republic of the North Solomons.

However, the republic was never recognised by the international community and it was absorbed into the newly sovereign PNG within six months.

In 1988 the tensions derived from this uneasy relationship became funnelled into a dispute involving the Panguna copper mine, then operated by Rio-Tinto.

Grievances over the distribution of royalties and the environmental damage the mine was creating led to a revolt by the Bougainville Revolutionary Army against the PNG government, and the subsequent decade-long civil war.

A truce was called in 1997, with peace talks sponsored by New Zealand beginning in 1998, and a peace agreement signed in 2001, creating the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG). This made Bougainville the only province of PNG to have its own legislature.

In October last year the question for the referendum was agreed upon. It states: Do you agree for Bougainville to have: (1) Greater Autonomy (2) Independence.

It is an interesting question because it doesnt offer a status quo option. And this is potentially what is proving problematic for ONeill, as either option will weaken the position of the national parliament.

Beyond this, either option also has the potential to inspire other movements in PNG toward their own greater autonomy or indeed independence.

This is a something that is already recognized by ONeill, with his government signing the Inter Government Agreement to begin the process of devolving powers to the provinces of New Ireland, East New Britain and Enga.

However, ONeill is probably wary of losing control of this process as these provinces witness the Bougainville referendum results.

For Bougainville, however, just how it manages to transition from its current political status to one of either greater autonomy or independence remains contentious.

The powers granted to Bougainville under the 2001 peace agreement has effectively allowed it to begin the process of state-building; however, at present only around 14% of the ABGs budget is derived from internal revenue generation.

This has created an ongoing debate about whether the Panguna copper mine should be reopened.

Earlier this year Bougainville president John Momis proposed changes to the Mining Act that would greatly increase the royalties for local landowners. Momis told Radio New Zealand in February that the government plans to set up its own joint venture with an Australian company called Caballus Mining, to be known as Bougainville Advance Mining.

It is estimated that the Panguna mine retains around $US58 billion (K200 billion) worth of copper and gold, making the reopening of the mine an almost irresistible prospect for the revenue-starved Bougainville government.

Yet the community remains divided over the mine.

Being the initial source of grievance that led to the civil war that killed up to 20,000 people, the revenue it could generate for region is not the only consideration to re-establishing its operations.

There is a delicate recent memory that will require continued attention.

This and prime minister ONeills assertion that the results of the referendum would be non-binding both have the potential to disrupt Bougainvilles current peace if not handled carefully.
Outbound real estate investments by Chinese companies slid 63 percent last year to reach a four year low of $15.7 billion in 2018, according to a report just released by Cushman & Wakefield Greater China Research.

The biggest barrier to purchasing overseas property assets is proving to be the mainland governments ongoing controls on debt and outbound capital flows, according to Cushman & Wakefields findings.

As I wrote in April 2015, surveying the "the vigorous (and potentially precarious) ambitions of the new Atlantic Yards majority owner," it's worth recalling a warning at a 3/28/14 board meeting of ESD, the gubernatorial-directed authority that oversees and shepherds Atlantic Yards.Gib Veconi of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council focused on the states failure to consider the option of bringing in other developers. The pending Greenland transaction would not represent a multiple-developer strategy, Veconi observed, but rather a single-source development project, one "under the control of a partner exposed to one of the worlds most volatile economies.Indeed. We have seen Greenland grow significantly, by one metric the fastest-growing company in the world (!) , yet also pulling back on multiple fronts, in California and in Brooklyn. It has sold development leases to three Pacific Park sites to two companies, The Brodsky Organization and TF Cornerstone.As I noted last September, upon the revelation that two developers would take over three sites, the multiple developer alternative--at least one that involved unwinding the existing transactions--was in 2014 dismissed by ESD, as impractical and ineffective. But when the developer makes the deal, it's apparently OK.Will Greenland sell any more pieces of Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park? Who knows. Maybe we'll learn a little about the developer's plans, including an updated timetable for each building, at today's meeting of the Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation (AY CDC), which, by the way, now has Veconi as a member. That timetable was requested in January 2018 but never delivered.But the overall investment framework for the company remains in flux. This past December and then January , I cited news coverage about how Chinese investors, in general, are backing away.And consider this 2/25/19 sponsored feature in Mingiandi.com, which covers Chinese real estate news:That said, according to James Shepherd, Managing Director of Greater China Research, Cushman & Wakefield, some two-thirds of respondents to the firm's survey cited those capital controls: While this shows the effect of government policy, it also indicates that a lack of investor demand was not the reason behind the change, which leaves the door open to a rapid recovery in deal volumes, should policy or the debt situation change in the future."In other words, a volatile economy.
National Australia Bank is still fielding complaints on the back of an IT outage that prevented customers from accessing their accounts for several hours.

Customers were still leaving complaints on social media this morning with some saying they were unable to access their accounts.

It's been 10 hours and it's still down, said one user.

Any word when online banking will be working again, asked another, with a screenshot of the banks app saying it was unavailable.

NAB posted an update on its Facebook page on Thursday where it apologised for the issues its customers had been having.

View this content at Business Insider





NAB told Business Insider Australia that its systems were back up and running on Thursday night.

"We had a short period where some of our digital channels were unavailable, including internet banking and mobile banking  theyre back up and running now," a spokesman said.

"Telephone banking, ATMs and Eftpos services were all operating as normal throughout."

Elsewhere, Bendigo Bank was also hit by an outage yesterday with eftpos and ATM services going down. There does not appear to be any link between the outages.

NAB was taken offline by similar outages twice in January, with blame falling on its data centre.

@NAB Any word when online banking will be working again? pic.twitter.com/fPaEaJ5sDQ  Ivy Eyes (@HerDearPhil) 14 March 2019

This week's outage comes at a terrible time for NAB. The bank recently lost its chairman Ken Henry and chief executive Andrew Thorburn after its defiant and tone deaf response to being singled out by Banking Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne.

Having heard from both the CEO, Mr Thorburn, and the chair, Dr Henry, I am not as confident as I would wish to be that the lessons of the past have been learned, Commissioner Hayne said.

Story continues

Overall, my fear  that there may be a wide gap between the public face NAB seeks to show and what it does in practice  remains, he said.

More particularly, I was not persuaded that NAB is willing to accept the necessary responsibility for deciding, for itself, what is the right thing to do, and then having its staff act accordingly.

Earlier this week NABs incoming chairman Phil Chronican wrote to shareholders saying the bank needed to win back the trust of all its stakeholders.

"The enormity of this task is not lost on me, because the royal commission is right. There is a big gap between where we are today and where we need to be," Mr Chronican said.

The first major thing Mr Chronican needs to do to steady NAB is appoint a new chief executive.

Given the rhetoric from Canberra towards NAB, speculation has centred on former NSW Premier Mike Baird taking over the top job because of his political skills. He is currently chief customer officer of consumer banking at NAB.
Copperas Cove, TX (76522)

Today

Mostly cloudy early, then sunshine for the afternoon. Near record high temperatures. High 84F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. Low 48F. WNW winds at 5 to 10 mph, increasing to 15 to 25 mph.
Apartments are seen in inner Sydney, Monday, December 10, 2018. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)

The Australian Taxation Office will be targeting 2.1 million real estate investors incorrectly avoiding tax on their returns.

A recent batch of 300 audits on real estate investors saw that almost 9 out of 10 returns contained errors, according to ATO commissioner Chris Jordan.

Were seeing incorrect interest claims for the entire investment loan where it has been refinanced for private purposes, incorrect classification of capital works as repairs and maintenance, and taxpayers not apportioning deductions for holiday homes when they are not genuinely available for rent, he said Thursday at a speech in Hobart.

More than 2.1 million Australian property investors claim more than $47.4 billion in deductions each year. But thats against just $44.1 billion of rental income.

You can get a sense of the potential revenue at risk, Jordan told the Tax Institutes National Convention.

A lot of people are getting things a little bit wrong, which adds up to a lot.

As such, he said that real estate investors would be the next focus of the tax office after their close scrutiny of work expenses earlier this year.

The recent work-related expenses crackdown saw the average deduction claim decrease for the first time in almost a quarter of a century  dropping about a $130 over the past two years.

The estimated revenue gain for that same period will be around $600 million, he said.

For those who are antagonistic towards us, and our reform program, who do not want to pay their share of tax, who see the ATO as something of an enemy, I believe community sentiment is against you and will increasingly become more so, he told the crowd of tax agents.

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Now read: $600,000 RAID  Cash thrown all over Sydney yard in panic

Now read: $20 MILLION GONE  Australian broker spent client money to cover losses

Now read: This Melbourne woman made $32,000 driving a women-only rideshare car
The show documented the evacuation on Instagram storiesPhoto: Instagram/Kyle and Jackie O show

Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O had to be pulled off air this morning, but not because of the controversial nature of their breakfast radio show.

An emergency in their North Ryde studios in Sydney forced the pair to momentarily cancel their broadcast just after 10am.

Alarms started sounding in their studio, and a producer informed the duo that they would need to evacuate the building. It appeared to be fire alarm, and Kyle interrupted music to tell listeners, Sorry guys, got to stop the song

If we dont burn to death, well be back on Monday.

As they were already running overtime, Kyle and Jackie did not return to the studio, and listeners were played more music before the stations mid-morning presenter took over.

Fire crews arrived at the studio, but its unclear whether it was a false alarm.

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American Airlines said Friday it is suspending flights to Venezuela amid the deteriorating humanitarian situation and increased safety concerns in the country. "American has temporarily suspended our operation into Caracas and Maracaibo," the carrier said in a statement. "The safety and security of our team members and customers is always number one and American will not operate to countries we don't consider safe." American had been sending two flights a week to Caracas and one to the western city of Maracaibo, all from Miami. The decision came after the US State Department this week issued a "do not travel" advisory urging Americans to avoid the crisis-hit country "due to crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure, and arbitrary arrest and detention of US citizens." Washington also pulled all diplomatic personnel out of the country this week, and urged US citizens to leave. The Allied Pilots Association on Friday called on members to refuse any trips to the country. "Until further notice, if you are scheduled, assigned, or reassigned a pairing into Venezuela, refuse the assignment," the APA said in a statement. United, which offers a flight out of Newark, did not respond to an AFP request for comment. American Airlines had been sending two flights a week to Caracas and one to the western city of Maracaibo, all from Miami
The Islamic State group launched three suicide attacks outside their last redoubt in eastern Syria Friday, killing six people among those fleeing the crumbling jihadist bastion. They were the latest casualties in Syria's devastating civil war, which entered its ninth year on Friday with 370,000 dead. All that remains of a once-sprawling proto-state that the IS jihadists declared in 2014 is a battered riverside camp in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and warplanes of a US-led coalition backing them, have rained fire on the enclave since Sunday, blitzing thousands of IS members into surrender. The exodus of veiled women, dusty children, and wounded men had been peaceful in recent days. But on Friday three suicide bombers blew themselves up on the way out, an SDF spokesman said. "A suicide bomber hid among those fleeing and blew himself up, killing at least six of those who wanted to get out" of Baghouz, Jiaker Amed said. Two others blew themselves up near SDF positions, causing only light wounds among the fighters, he said. Before the attacks, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said "a large number" of IS members had surrendered to the US-backed forces. Earlier in the day, Amed said SDF fighters were consolidating their positions as they expected more people to stumble out. It was however unclear how many remained inside. "There are a lot of suicide bombers but there are also families and children," he said before the attacks. - Tents and scorched cars - The front was largely calm earlier in the day. A reporter heard intermittent gun and artillery fire and war planes overhead. Dozens of metres from what remains of the group's embattled encampment, she saw tents and scorched cars, but no human movement where a week before there had been people. Since the months-old SDF offensive resumed on March 10, more than 4,000 suspected IS members and their relatives have surrendered, according to the SDF. More than 61,000 people have streamed out of IS-held territory since December, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says, a tenth of them suspected jihadists. The exodus has sparked a humanitarian crisis in Kurdish-held camps for the displaced, where women and children have arrived exhausted after weeks of siege. These include the wives and children of alleged foreign jihadists, hundreds of whom are being held by the Kurdish forces. France said Friday it had repatriated five orphaned children -- aged five or under -- from these camps. "The decision was taken in view of the situation of these very young children, who are particularly vulnerable," the foreign ministry said. The International Rescue Committee says 120 people -- mainly young children -- have died on their way to the main Al-Hol camp or after arrival. An IS propaganda outlet said French jihadist brothers Fabien and Jean-Michel Clain had both been killed in air strikes. The coalition declared the former dead last month, and the latter's wife earlier in March said he had been killed. - Death toll tops 370,000 - Eight years of war in Syria have left more than 370,000 people dead including 112,000 civilians, the Observatory said, raising its last toll of over 360,000 issued in September. The monitoring group, which has a network of sources across Syria, said that more than 21,000 children and 13,000 women were among the dead. The conflict flared after unprecedented anti-government protests in the southern city of Daraa on March 15, 2011. Demonstrations spread across Syria and were brutally suppressed by the regime, triggering a multi-front armed conflict that has drawn in foreign powers and militant groups. Over 125,000 Syrian government soldiers and pro-regime fighters figure in the latest death toll, the Observatory said. It said 67,000 of those killed were other fighters including rebels and Kurds. A further 66,000 were jihadists, mainly from IS and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), dominated by Al-Qaeda's former affiliate in Syria. The devastating conflict has displaced or sent into exile millions of Syrians, and cost almost $400 billion in damages, according to the United Nations. With the support of powerful allies Russia and Iran, President Bashar al-Assad has won his war for political survival but his country is fractured and cash-strapped. He now controls almost two-thirds of Syria's territory. But key areas remain beyond regime control, including a swathe of the oil-rich northeast held by the SDF. Idlib in northwestern Syria, held by HTS, is protected by a ceasefire deal between Ankara and Moscow which has seen Turkish troops deployed to the area. All that remains of a once-sprawling proto-state that the IS jihadists declared in 2014 is a battered riverside camp in the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border The zones controlled by Islamic State (IS) group from January 2015 to February 2019 in Syria and Iraq. Dozens of metres from what remains of the group's embattled encampment, a reporter saw tents and scorched cars, but no human movement where a week before there had been people Many of those leaving the jihadist bastion are in poor health Tens of thousands of people have streamed out of territory held by the Islamic State group since December


Australian Muslims have been warned to be extra vigilant following the terrorist shooting massacre of worshippers in New Zealand.

The 49 deaths at two mosques in Christchurch are the horrific consequence of hate, Muslims Australia president Rateb Jneid said on Friday.

This act of terror on innocent worshippers is an atrocity and we grieve with the victims and their families, Dr Jneid said in a statement.

One of the people arrested over the shooting has been identified as Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Grafton in NSW.

A total of three men and one woman have been arrested. One man, aged 28, has now been charged with murder and will appear in a Christchurch court tomorrow.

Bloodied bandages are seen on the road following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Source: AAP

Police Commissioner Mike Bush said of the three other people apprehended, one, who was armed when arrested, may have nothing to do with the incident.

With the two others, who were also armed when they were arrested, we are working through what their involvement is, Commissioner Bush said.

We have recovered a number of firearms from both of the scenes.

NSW Police moved to assure the public there is no ongoing or specific threat to any mosque or place of worship in Sydney or across NSW.

However, police have increased patrols and senior officers have also reached out to community and religious leaders across the state to provide support and reassurance, a spokesperson said in a statement.

Dr Jneid argues the New Zealand massacre is a product of ever-increasing Islamophobia and marginalisation of Muslims.

He said the atrocity was a reminder to all concerned, including political leaders and media commentators, of the horrific consequences that an atmosphere of hate and division can lead to.

He urged all governments to give extra attention to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment and extremism.

Dr Jneid also encouraged all mosques and places of worship in Australia to be extra vigilant  and for members of the Muslim community to be particularly mindful of their safety in the coming days.

Story continues

People stand across the road from a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand. Source: AAP

Queensland Police commissioner Ian Stewart said people should be alert to their surroundings without being alarmed.

He said police have told the multi-faith and multicultural communities in Queensland they will do everything they can to ensure their safety, even though they know there is no credible threat at this time in the state.

Its very important that people know they can go about their daily business, go about their prayers, go about their religious services without any fear, he said.

We also know that at times like these there is heightened concern in certain communities for backlash, for comment, for perhaps even assaults to occur.
Spain's Aena snapped up six airports in Brazil on Friday, in an auction seen as the first major test of foreign investor confidence in President Jair Bolsonaro's market-friendly agenda. The initial sale of concessions to 12 airports generated 2.3 billion reais ($620 million) -- more than 10 times the minimum fee required -- which Bolsonaro said signaled "confidence" in Latin America's biggest economy was returning. "It's Brazil growing again!" the far-right leader tweeted, hailing a "great victory." Rights to operate the airports for 30 years -- sold in three separate lots -- were also won by Flughafen Zurich of Switzerland and a Brazilian consortium, Aeroeste. Nine groups competed. The administrators must invest 3.5 billion reais during the term of the concession. Brazil is to complete the sale of concessions to 42 airports between 2020 and 2022, including Santos Dumont in Rio de Janeiro and Congonhas in Sao Paulo. The airports auctioned Friday represent 9.5 percent of the domestic market. Six airports in northeastern Brazil were bought by Aena, two in the center-west went to Zurich, and four in the southeast to Aeroeste. Aena's successful tender included the auction's most lucrative prize, tourist-magnet Recife airport, a destination seen as having the biggest potential because of its relative proximity to Europe. Infrastructure minister Tarcisio Freitas said the auction was "a great demonstration of confidence in the country." Bolsonaro's conservative predecessor Michel Temer initiated a program of privatizations and concessions. But Bolsonaro, who came to power in January, has made privatizing state-owned companies and overhauling the costly pension system key planks of his policy to reduce soaring public debt and regain investor confidence. The auction, organized by the National Agency for Civil Aviation and the Sao Paulo stock exchange, was also seen as a test of the market's support for Bolsonaro's economy minister Paulo Guedes, a US-trained free-marketeer. Guedes is spearheading the government's policy to inject pro-business vigor into an economy still bearing the scars of a record-breaking 2015-2016 recession. Bolsonaro said previously that of the 138 companies run by the federal government, "100 could be privatized." Brazil ranks among the countries with the highest number of public companies. But the lack of any detail or progress has disappointed investors. Representatives of Spain's Aena, holding a bidding hammer, react after winning the most attractive lot in a Brazilian government auction for airport concessions
It may be grating for some, but hip-hop is music to the ears of Switzerland's most famous cheese. According to research on the musical tastes of Emmental, the holey cheese changes flavour depending on the melodies played as it ripens. The experiment -- "Sonic cheese: experience between sound and gastronomy" -- by Bern University of the Arts and a cheesemaker in western Switzerland probed whether the sounds and vibrations of music could impact the chemical reactions in the bacteria within cheese. Over six months, Emmental made in Beat Wampfler's 19th Century cellar in the town of Bergdorf were exposed to A Tribe Called Quest, Led Zeppelin or Mozart. Other circles of the holey Swiss classic were kept away from music, serving as a control group. "We did two surveys, a scientific one, and another with a jury of culinary experts," said Peter Kraut, deputy director of the music department at the Bern arts university. "Both came to the conclusion that there are differences, there are differences in taste and in the smell, according to the music with which the cheese has been refined," he added. Chef and jury member Benjamin Luzuy said hip-hop triggered a "softer, more floral" taste, but that his favourite was Mozart-exposed Emmental. "My favorite cheese was that of Mozart, I like Mozart but it's not necessarily what I listen to... maybe a sweet little classical music it does good to the cheese," he said. Kraut told AFP that the final step will be a biomedical survey to see if there are actual differences in the composition of the cheeses. Wampfler, a veterinarian by day but consummate apron-wearing cheese enthusiast at night, said he was delighted the experiment worked out and saw opportunities to market cheese based on a customer's musical taste. "I already have people calling me asking if I have cheese with Balkan music, blues...(or) ACDC," he said. Emmental matured with hip hop music triggered a "softer, more floral" taste, one jury member said Emmental cheese was exposed to hip-hop, rock, even yodel
It's hard, heavy, brittle and melts away without trace. But ice is the material of choice for Inge Wegge, who sculps chunks of it and uses it for a most unlikely purpose -- to make surf boards. The Norwegian adventurer rides the ice boards on the waves off Norway's Lofoten archipelago north of the Arctic circle. The blocks weigh 60-80 kilogrammes (132-176 pounds) against two or three kilogrammes for the classic board. They are hard to carry, difficult to float and tough to balance on with cold feet. And they melt away within minutes in seawater warmed by the Gulf Stream. So why bother? Extreme surfer and filmmaker Wegge, 33, has spent nine months trying to carve the perfect ice board. "When I talked about it to people, they thought it was a joke. It was too crazy. I had to make it come true," he said. Just before the blocks melt, the ice boards lose their bulk and weight and achieve a perfect symmetry. For a brief span the ice block becomes the ideal surfing machine. Then it vanishes. "The first 20 minutes, they are surfable," he said. "Then just perfect for two or three minutes ?- you need the right waves just then ?- and then (after that they are) too fragile." Wegge started out by cutting ice blocks from a frozen lake with a circular saw but found they were too full of air and too soft to last more than 10 minutes. So he and his team of fellow surf enthusiasts built a mould and installed it in a fishery refrigeration plant at minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four degrees Fahrenheit) in the fishing port of Svolvaer. The steel-hard ice blocks that come out are shaped with a sculptor's tool and strewn with seaweed so surfers can hold their footing. Staying upright on slippery boards with cold feet was half the battle as Wegge and his pals tested their latest ice boards in February, balling their eyes shut again the snow, driven vertically across the wave by the winter gales. "Next time we will make 20 to 30 boards and use all of them in one day. We are going to make it work," he said. Heading to sea carrying an ice board on Norway's Lofoten archipelago Extreme surfers test a surfboard made of ice in the water off Norway's Lofoten archipelago Catching a wave with an ice board in Arctic waters off Norway's Lofoten archipelago A melting board means surfing is over for Swedish adventuerer Oskar Nordin, in the sea off Norway's Lofoten Islands Cold feet for surfers returning from the waves during a snow storm off Norway's Lofoten archipelago
A man has died after he was allegedly struck in the head with an axe during a road rage attack in Sydneys west.

Emergency services were called to Sydney Luker Road in Cabramatta West after reports of two men fighting following a road collision about 8.45pm on Thursday.

Emergency services arrive a the scene shortly after 8.45pm on Thursday. Source: Sunrise

Officers attended and located a man, 59, with a severe wound to his head. He died at the scene.

A 75-year-old man was arrested at the scene and taken to Fairfield Police Station before being taken to Liverpool Hospital for an unrelated medical condition.

A man died at the scene after suffering a severe head injuries. Source: Sunrise

The incident unfolded on Sydney Luker Road in Cabaramatta West. Source: Google Maps

He was then taken to Liverpool Police Station where he is assisting with inquiries.

A crime scene continues to be examined by specialist officers and detectives from Fairfield City Police Area Command have established Strike Force Pierson to investigate the incident.

Inquiries continue into the circumstances surrounding the incident.

Anyone with information about this incident is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
Spain said Friday it will move the remains of late dictator Francisco Franco from an opulent mausoleum to a state-run pantheon, after months of wrangling between the government and his family. The move, which will take place in June, has long been talked about by sympathisers of the left-leaning government but fiercely resisted by Franco's heirs and many on the right. It has revived tensions dating back to Spain's civil war in the 1930s and the subsequent four decades of Franco's rule. "The reburial of Franco's remains will take place on the morning of June 10," Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo said. She said the body would be exhumed then taken to the Mingorrubio-El Pardo state pantheon in a cemetery north of Madrid, where Franco's wife is buried, with his remains reburied on the same day. Franco's tomb currently lies in a huge hillside mausoleum belonging to the Catholic Church in the Valley of the Fallen, west of Madrid. The imposing basilica has drawn the attention of both tourists and rightwing sympathisers who have rallied there for demonstrations. Carved into a mountainside and topped by a vast 150-metre (490-feet) cross, the mausoleum is a deeply-divisive symbol of a past that Spain still finds difficult to digest. It was built by Franco's regime between 1940 and 1959, using forced labour by political prisoners. The site also houses the remains of some 37,000 victims from both sides of the civil war, which was triggered by Franco's rebellion against an elected Republican government. - 'Reject extremism' - Spain's previous government led by the conservative Popular Party had resisted efforts to exhume him but Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez revived the plans after taking office last year. In September, Spanish lawmakers approved a decree authorising the exhumation of Franco's remains. The government has also gained the Vatican's approval for finding an alternative burial spot. Sanchez's government rejected a proposal by Franco's family to relocate him to Madrid's main cathedral, fearing it would become a place of pilgrimage for sympathisers. The National Francisco Franco Foundation, which defends the memory of the dictator, has said it will appeal against the exhumation at the Supreme Court. "When you attack Franco, you attack my family, over half of Spain, the monarchy and the Church which protected him," Franco's great-grandson Luis Alfonso de Borbon told conservative daily La Razon in October. The announcement comes just six weeks before Spain holds snap elections on April 28. Sanchez is trying to prevent the Popular Party from returning to power with the support of newly-emerged far-right party Vox. The two parties oppose Sanchez's bid to try to rehabilitate the memory of leftwing victims of the civil war and Franco's rule. Last month, Sanchez visited France to pay tribute to the 450,000 Spaniards who sought refuge there at the end of the 1936-39 civil war and during the dictatorship. He has vowed to defend the values of "tolerance and reject extremism" in times of rising populism. The debate over the relocation of the remains of late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco has revived tensions dating back to Spain's civil war in the 1930s General Francisco Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist from 1939 until his death in 1975 Sympathisers still leave flowers on Franco's grave but opponents say the late dictator's remains should not be given a place of honour The mausoleum in Valley of the Fallen also houses the remains of 37,000 victims from both sides of the civil war
A huge crowd of demonstrators marched through the Algerian capital for a fourth consecutive Friday to step up demands on President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to leave, rejecting his offer not to seek re-election. Men, women and children converged in a festive atmosphere outside Algiers' iconic main post office calling on the 82-year-old not to cling to power after scrapping an April presidential poll. Security sources said crowd numbers exceeded demonstrations a week ago that saw tens of thousands of people across the country take to the streets. Major protests were also held Friday in other key cities Oran, Constantine and Annaba, local journalists reported, as people nationwide vented their ire. The latest rallies were the first major test of whether Bouteflika has calmed public anger with his surprise announcement on Monday that he would not stand for a fifth term but was cancelling the upcoming election. "You pretend to understand us, we will pretend to listen to you," read a banner held aloft by the mostly young demonstrators. Bouteflika had initially sparked joy among protesters when he said he would not stand again, but his move to cancel the vote prompted accusations of "tricks" and sparked a new round of demonstrations. He has also named a new prime minister, replacing unpopular premier Ahmed Ouyahia with former interior minister Noureddine Bedoui, who on Thursday defended the postponement of the poll. Bouteflika, who uses a wheelchair and has rarely appeared in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, has promised a "national conference" to carry out reforms. The president said that new elections would be held "before the end of 2019", suggesting he may stay in office for months longer. - 'Stop the interference' - Friday's protest in Algiers was mostly peaceful but on the margins around a hundred youths threw stones at police in clashes that lasted around 30 minutes and left several people wounded. Afterwards dozens of young people armed with plastic bags cleaned up the streets, while in the city centre volunteers picked up rubbish after protesters went home at nightfall. During the demonstrations, many protesters criticised France's stance on the political crisis in Algeria, its former colony, accusing Paris of siding with Bouteflika. "France, 132 years is enough, stop the interference," read one banner, referring to the era of French rule before independence. "Macron, you are too small for today's Algeria." French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday welcomed Bouteflika's announcement but urged Algerian authorities to organise a "reasonable" transition from his rule. Algeria has largely avoided the turmoil unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings that brought down rulers in neighbouring Tunisia and Libya. But discontent, particularly among the young, turned to anger after the veteran leader announced on February 10 that he would seek another term. Demonstrations have drawn tens of thousands for each of the last three Fridays, with smaller rallies taking place on other days. The protest movement has been led by students, in a country where half the population is under the age of 30 and youth unemployment has spurred anger against a government seen as out of touch. Several demonstrators on Friday said they had travelled from the Kabylie area, 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Algiers, and spent the previous night with friends in the capital to avoid roadblocks or bus stoppages. As at previous rallies after the weekly prayers, Algeria's ubiquitous red-white-green flag fluttered from windows and balconies of buildings leading to the city centre. - 'Ducked the real questions' - Algeria's new prime minister on Thursday sought to calm tensions ahead of the new demonstrations that could prove decisive for the protest movement. Bedoui warned at a news conference that the situation was "sensitive" in the North African country. People "must show calm and act peacefully", he said, calling for "dialogue" to resolve the situation. Incoming Deputy Prime Minister Ramtane Lamamra has said that Bouteflika's proposed national conference on political reforms should take place "as soon as possible". "The absolute priority is to reunite the Algerians and allow them to go together towards a better future," he said. "It's not about staying in power for a few weeks or a few months more." But El Watan newspaper on Friday fired back with a "Get Out" message to the new leadership, charging Bedoui had "ducked the real questions" facing the country. The assessment was also harsh on social media, with one commentator in a tweet sarcastically thanking Bedoui and Lamamra for their "efforts to keep Algerians mobilised" for Friday's protests. "Yesterday was the news conference of your prime minister and deputy premier, today is the news conference of the people," another critic of the regime wrote on social media. Huge crowds marched through the Algerian capital for a fourth consecutive Friday calling for President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down Friday's protest is the first major test of whether Algeria's president has calmed public anger with his vow not to seek re-election Algerian protesters want President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to step down
Israel said Friday its aircraft had struck dozens of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rockets from the Palestinian enclave, including rare fire toward its economic capital Tel Aviv. The escalation followed weeks of growing tensions and came at an especially sensitive time ahead of Israel's April 9 elections. As the polls approach, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is widely believed to want to avoid a fourth war in the Gaza Strip since 2008 -- but the exchange of fire again showed the risks. Quiet returned to Gaza and Israel on Friday morning. UN and Egyptian officials were in contact with both sides "to prevent the situation from spinning out of control", a source with knowledge of the discussions said. Organisers of weekly Friday protests along the Gaza border fence, which have been accompanied by violence, announced they would be cancelled -- the first such move since they began nearly a year ago. Four Palestinians were wounded in the Gaza strikes, the enclave's health ministry said, while no Israelis were reported injured. Explosions could be heard throughout the night in Gaza and fireballs lit the sky. In the bustling coastal city of Tel Aviv, sirens wailed late Thursday in scenes reminiscent of the 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants. Rocket fire toward Israel's southern communities near the blockaded coastal territory is common, but Tel Aviv is rarely targeted. Police said Friday they found remains of one rocket in an uninhabited area "in central Israel", with media reports saying the second fell into the Mediterranean. - Hamas denies responsibility - Both Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, and its ally Islamic Jihad denied they were behind the rocket fire towards Tel Aviv. But Israel's military said they were launched by Hamas. Israel has long said it holds Hamas responsible for all violence from Gaza, controlled by the group since 2007. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday the Gaza militants attacking Israel were "armed and financed by their puppet masters in Tehran". "We stand by our ally. Israel has the right to protect its citizens," tweeted Pompeo, who is due to travel soon to the Jewish state. On Friday, Israeli media reported the military's preliminary assessment was that the rockets were fired by mistake during maintenance work -- a sign Israel was seeking to calm tensions. A military spokesman declined to comment. Islamic Jihad said Friday that Palestinian militants would hold fire if Israel did the same. A delegation from Egypt, which has acted as mediator between Israel and Hamas, was in Gaza before the strikes and reportedly left after warnings. Israel said its aircraft hit around 100 Hamas targets, including a complex allegedly used by the group to coordinate militant operations in the occupied West Bank. Another was "the main manufacturing site of standard-grade rockets in the Gaza Strip", an underground location, it said. A security source in Gaza said dozens of strikes targeted bases belonging to both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A position belonging to Hamas's military wing, near its leader Ismail Haniya's family home on the outskirts of Gaza City, was damaged, with rubble strewn across the road, an AFP journalist said. Hamdi, 22, who works in a bakery in Gaza, said "since the morning very few people have come compared to normal Friday mornings. People are afraid of bombs -? like in a war." - Rocket interceptions - Gaza residents reported a number of rockets fired back at Israel in response. Sirens rang out in southern Israel early Friday and the Israeli military said it identified four "launches" from Gaza. Three were intercepted by missile defence systems, it said. Since Thursday night, around 10 rockets were fired from Gaza. Almost daily exchanges between Israel and the Palestinian territory have threatened a wider escalation in hostilities over the past few weeks. It comes as the one-year anniversary of mass protests and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border fence approaches on March 30. An informal truce between Hamas and Israel had led to relative calm, but recent weeks have seen another uptick in violence. Netanyahu warned Sunday that Israel would not hesitate to launch a "large-scale operation" in Gaza if provoked. His main election rival, former military chief Benny Gantz, accused Netanyahu of letting Hamas and other Gaza militants dictate "the agenda". "We have to regain the initiative, implement a harsh and consistent policy against Hamas," he said at the Gaza border. The sky above the Gaza City glows orange during an Israeli air strike late on March 14 Israel said Friday that its missile defence system had intercepted three rockets
From Syria's devastating conflict to unprecedented mass protests in Algeria, the Arab world has seen eight years of turmoil. Only Tunisia pursues democratisation, while other countries are marred by war, repression and chaos. A panorama: - Tunisia: spark of Arab Spring - In December 2010 the self-immolation of a young street vendor, frustrated by police harassment, triggers protests against poverty and unemployment. Less than a month later, popular pressure forces long-time president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country. Tunisia wins international plaudits for its peaceful transition. In 2014 it adopts a new constitution that limits presidential power. General elections are won by Nidaa Tounes, an anti-Islamist party, tailed by the moderate Islamist Ennahda party. In December, Beji Caid Essebsi becomes the country's first democratically elected head of state. Since three major attacks by the jihadist Islamic State in 2015, the security situation has greatly improved. Legislative and presidential elections are planned in late 2019. - Egypt: repression - After a mass 18-day revolt which costs almost 850 lives, Hosni Mubarak steps down from the presidency on February 11, 2011 ending almost three decades in power and handing power to the army. In June 2012, Islamist Mohamed Morsi becomes the first civilian, freely elected head of the Arab world's most populous state. The following year is marked by crises and political dissent, resulting in the ouster of Morsi by the armed forces led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi following vast protests. The new regime launches a bloody crackdown on Morsi supporters. Rights group Amnesty International says 1,400 people are killed in seven months, the majority being Islamist protesters. Rights groups accuse Sisi, elected president in 2014 and again in 2018, of running an ultra-repressive regime. - Yemen: famine - In February 2012 after more than three decades in power and a year of popular revolt, Ali Abdullah Saleh is ousted and his deputy Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi takes over. In 2014 Huthi Shiite rebels launch an offensive from which they seize vast swathes of the country including the capital Sanaa. The following year Saudi Arabia leads an Arab coalition to halt the Huthi advance. Some 10,000 people have died in the conflict, according to the World Health Organization. Ten million are on the brink of famine. - Bahrain: dissent - Tiny Gulf state Bahrain, ruled by the Sunni Khalifa dynasty and backed by powerful neighbour Saudi Arabia, has been rocked by sporadic unrest since 2011 when authorities clamped down on Shiite protests calling for political reforms. Since then opposition has grown and hundreds of demonstrators have been jailed or stripped of their nationality. - Libya: chaos - On February 15, 2011, protests break out against the regime of Moamer Kadhafi, in power for 42 years. The demonstrations are violently repressed and the unrest turns into armed revolt which wins backing from NATO. On October 20, Kadhafi is captured and killed during a battle for his hometown Sirte, east of the capital Tripoli. Two rival authorities now lead Libya: from its base in Tripoli an internationally-backed government headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, and a parallel administration operating out of the east, supported by military strongman Khalifa Haftar. A multitude of militias also vie for control. The Islamic State occupied Sirte for months before being ousted at the end of 2016. Amid the insecurity and political chaos, Libya has become a major transit hub for hundreds of thousands of African migrants trying to reach Europe by sea. - Syria: ninth year of war - Syria has been shattered by eight years of conflict that have killed more than 370,000 people dead and uprooted more than 13 million. Peaceful protests that begin on March 15, 2011, are crushed and transformed into an armed insurrection against President Bashar al-Assad, before degenerating into all-out war in 2012. In 2013-2014, lightly armed rebel groups are pushed aside by Islamic militias such as the Al-Nusra Front, an Al-Qaeda affiliate, then the IS. With military backing from its allies Russia, Iran and Lebanese Shiite organisation Hezbollah, the regime wins back territory it had lost. Today it controls nearly two thirds of the country. - Algeria: massive protests - Algeria is rocked from February 22, 2019, by a wave of unprecedented demonstrations, sparked when ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power since 1999, says he will stand for a fifth term. On March 11, Bouteflika pulls out of the presidential race but postpones the election planned for April 18, effectively extending his term. Protests continue. Tunisia's uprising quickly spread to Egypt, where mass demonstrations toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak and triggered revolutions across the Arab world Unprecedented protests in Tunisia toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and sparked the Arab Spring uprisings Mass demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square produced some of the Arab Spring's most iconic images NATO conducted an aerial bombing campaign in support of rebels battling Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi, leaving a country in chaos The Free Syrian Army, made up largely of fighters who defected from regime forces, gradually lost ground to extremists including the Islamic State group
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed an initial damage assessment and is determining options for repairing the West Barrier Bar Pier in Fair Haven.

Andrew Kornacki, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers' Buffalo district, said Friday that the initial assessment consisted of a review of photos provided to the agency. The photos helped the agency "better understand the extent of the damages sustained," according to a news release.

A team from the Army Corps of Engineers will conduct an onsite assessment next week. Fair Haven Mayor Jim Basile said in a phone interview that the visit is scheduled for Tuesday and a project manager has been assigned to lead the process of repairing the pier.

High water levels and strong winds have damaged the pier. Local officials are concerned that further damage to the pier will lead to severe flooding and could impact the local economy, especially during the busy tourism season.

Basile said the damage includes some sheet piling that has separated from the pier structure. Erosion lower on the structure has caused a portion of the concrete deck to collapse into the pier. The concrete chunks appear confined to the damaged section, he said. He advised boaters and pedestrians who want to get a closer look at the damage to stay back due to the unsafe conditions and the possibility that more of the pier could collapse.

The damage can be repaired, Basile said, but he hopes the Army Corps of Engineers will inspect the east and west piers to determine if there is preventive maintenance that can be done "so we're not talking about this again."

The Army Corps of Engineers explained that design work has commenced to determine options for repairing the pier. The repair options will be finalized this fall, but it's unknown when the repairs will begin.

It will be challenging for the Fair Haven pier to secure funding for repairs. The Army Corps of Engineers noted that there are limited funds available and the pier will be competing against other projects for support.

The funding is needed before repairs can proceed.

If the repairs can't be made immediately, Basile said the channel would remain open. Markers would be placed to notify boaters that they should avoid the affected area.

"This village is resilient," Basile said. "We're open for business. The channel is wide ... There's no reason why we still can't navigate this channel in and out from the bay."

The condition of the pier received more attention last week when Cayuga County's federal representatives  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and U.S. Rep. John Katko  co-wrote a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers urging the agency to fund the Fair Haven pier repairs.

Basile said he contacted the Army Corps of Engineers in February to alert the agency and provide information, including photos of the damage.

"We appreciate the continued support of the local elected officials, channel users and congressional members as we develop a plan of action to address the repair needs," said Maj. Patrick Billmann, deputy commander of the Army Corps of Engineers' Buffalo district.

Fair Haven was one of the Lake Ontario shoreline communities affected by flooding in 2017. The flooding caused extensive damage and led to President Donald Trump issuing a major disaster declaration.

Rising lake levels have federal, state and local officials concerned that flooding could occur again along the Lake Ontario shoreline. The International Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Board reported Friday that the lake level is 245.9 feet, 10.6 inches above its average for this time of year.

With high water levels, the board has increased outflows at the Moses-Saunders Dam on the St. Lawrence River.

Elected officials aren't alone in their concerns about the Fair Haven pier. Billmann said members of the community have contacted the Army Corps of Engineers. The feedback will help the agency determine a solution.

"We are committed to communicating the status of the project as soon as we have more information," he said.

Online producer Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding.

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Every Friday, The Citizen features a pet available for adoption from the Finger Lakes SPCA of Central New York.

This week, we spotlight Franco.

Q: Who is your best friend?

A: That would be my former housemates, Joey and Harry. They got lucky  they both have new homes now. I'm hoping my lucky charm shows up very soon. Plus, my bros left me their lucky hat. That should help, right?

Q: What has been your worst experience?

A: My brothers and I are keeping that information under wraps. It's in the best interest of everyone concerned. However, my best experience was coming here so that my shelter people could clean me up, neuter me, vaccinate me and find me a new home. I am so ready to leave! By the way, is there a vacancy at your home?

Q: If you could describe yourself, what would you say?

A: Well, for looks, I am very like my brother Joey! And a lot of people think he's really cute. I have more gray on my muzzle  that's a sign that I am more mature than Joey, right? Anyway, I have lots of energy, so I could use routine walks and exercise. On the other hand, I can and will be a love bug, so I hope you have a spare lap for me to cuddle on. That's all I'll tell you for now. We canines never want to give away too much  there needs to be a little bit of mystery to make us more interesting.

Q: If you could have a job, what would that be?

A: You know, my shelter people don't know my real name, so someone named me Franco. I think that's a cool name and it would fit me nicely in my future job as a maitre d' at a doggy bed-and-breakfast. If you hear of any openings, please let me know. Thank you.

Q: Do you have an interesting fact to share?

A: Well, I think these facts are interesting and also sad. According to the Humane Society of the United States, in 2014 there were 3,500 shelters in the U.S., and about 10,000 rescue groups and animal sanctuaries. Between 6 and 8 million dogs and cats entered the sheltering system in 2014. This number is significantly lower than it was in 1973, when animal admissions were closer to 13 million. About 4 million of these companion animals are adopted out of the shelter system annually. I would love to become a paw-sitive statistic. Please adopt me!

Q: If you could meet someone famous, who would that be?

A: I recently read about this famous little dog named Marnie. I will be brief. She has 2.1 million followers on Instagram. Her Instagram bio reads, 16-year-old Shih Tzu adopted from a shelter at age 11. I love to party and I hate being alone. Im a lady! Adopt senior dogs. Marnie uses her stardom to advocate for the adoption of senior dogs. I think she's awesome and would love to meet her.

Q: Do you have any advice for our good Citizen readers?

A: I do! I want you to know that my shelter people are having another cat adoption special this weekend! All cats that are 6 months or older are available for adoption  and guess what? You will get to pick what your adoption fee will be. Yes, different levels of fees will be placed into a hat and you will draw your fee for your new fur-friend. It's called the "Luck of the Draw" Adoption Event! My shelter people will give you more information. If you come to the shelter to check out our fabulous felines, please check out my good friend Valentine. She has been here the longest of any cat. She is a very sweet girl and would love to go home. Thank you and love, Franco and friends.

The Finger Lakes SPCA of Central New York is a New York state-registered shelter/rescue, registration No. RR-181. Pursuant to Article 26-A, Section 408 of the Agriculture and Markets Law, the registrant is authorized to operate as a registered pet rescue, in compliance with such law.

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The Port Byron Central School District has grown increasingly concerned over what it feels is a lack of response from the village government regarding a school resource officer contract, while the village feels the district is trying to rush the matter.

District Superintendent Neil O'Brien said Friday the district has had two different officers in the halls over the last five years, with Frank Ryan serving as the latest. The district pays Ryan directly, according to the current agreement. The current contract for Ryan  a retired state trooper currently with the Port Byron Police Department  expires June 30.

O'Brien said that the village clerk asked the Cayuga County Civil Service Commission about how Ryan is paid, and the commission asked the district and village to change the arrangement to have the district send payments to the village, which would then pay Ryan. O'Brien said that since the district would be covering the payments, this change would not affect the agreement on a fundamental level.

But, O'Brien said, the district's attempts to engage the village about the arrangement  including district representatives appearing at a village Board of Trustees meeting March 11  have been ignored.

A petition on the situation has been circulating in the community, O'Brien said. A post on the district's Facebook page is imploring people to call the mayor or attend the next village board meeting. He said the student body has embraced Ryan during his time with the district, adding that students have taken to both Ryan and the feeling of security his presence brings.

"We have yet to have any clear indication that the village is going to move on the issue," O"Brien said.

But village Mayor Ron Wilson painted a different picture Friday, saying he feels the village is being pressured by the district to comply with an agreement board members haven't seen yet.

In February, Ryan asked village clerk Caitlin Bacon questions "related to civil service," Wilson said, and because Bacon didn't know the answer, she contacted the commission. Wilson said the commission said the district had never reported having an SRO, and that the district wasn't complying with civil services rules.

Wilson said he feels the district's public communications on the SRO situation are spreading misinformation and that the district is "trying to arouse public opinion against us." He said he received the proposed agreement Friday. Before any decisions would be made, Wilson said, the board have to discuss it. Wilson said he personally feels determining the village's budget outweighs SRO concerns at the moment due to budget deadlines that have to be met.

"The school is drumming up the public and making the village look like the bad guy," Wilson said.

O'Brien said the district originally preferred the same kind of payment system that's outlined in the proposed new agreement when the original agreement was being hashed out five years ago. He didn't dispute that the district wasn't compliant, but said he believes the commission's concern lies with making sure Ryan is paid like a village employee.

Michael Russell, human resources administrator with the Cayuga County government, said the commission hopes to get both parties in the same room soon to work things out.

"I understand there are issues between parties, and I understand there are things going back and forth and people aren't getting along, and I feel badly about that, but our interest is, what is the compliance with the law?" Russell said.

Staff writer Kelly Rocheleau can be reached at (315) 282-2243 or kelly.rocheleau@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @KellyRocheleau.

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See for yourself how and where vaccinations are ramping up, plus how COVID-19 infections and deaths still persist in most states.
We live in such an exceptional community and are fortunate to have so much access to the arts. Almost daily, we are able to find local music, and even have a Broadway-level theater on our doorstep. Having spent my youth heavily involved in music and art throughout my school career, I have always been so proud that my children would be able to do the same.

This academic year, my first-grader went from having art and music every other day in kindergarten, to having art and music three to four times a month due to budget cuts stemming from New York state improperly funding our district. In September, my daughter will enter kindergarten from a preschool program in which she has music class twice a week and daily art, to less than half of that at the elementary level. As we sit on the edge of another budget crisis, this could dwindle down even further. The arts are essential for developing critical thinking skills, creativity, and fine motor skills. They require making decisions and thinking in different perspectives and develop visual-spatial skills. Music education is directly tied to improving language and math skills. Reducing childrens exposure to the arts is simply shortchanging our education.

I spend a lot of time volunteering within our schools, and one of the things that stands out to me is how truly incredible the educational staff are. These are people who have a fierce passion and dedication to shaping the minds of our children and are some of the kindest souls you will ever meet. Without proper funding, staff and curriculum cuts will continue. Without proper funding, our teachers are losing more and more support. Without support, teachers are going to lose their spirit and passion, and the domino effect that will come crashing down from that is going to be detrimental to the growth of our community.

Our students deserve funding that matches the needs of our community in 2019, not the needs we had 20 years ago. We need our legislators, Senator Helming, Senator Seward, Senator Antonacci and Assemblyman Finch, to stand behind us in our fight for equitable funds before the enthusiasm to teach, and to be taught, is lost.

Danielle Wood

Auburn

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The new United Kingdom anti-porn law, requiring fans who wants to watch porn online to verify their ages by uploading official identification documents, is set to take effect sometime next month, after nearly two years of delays, as AVN.com reported last week. The law requires all porn sites to be blocked by internet service providers, only unblocking them for individuals who upload their official documents certifying that they are over 18 years old.

But as the onset of the radical new regulation regime approaches, critics of the legislation and online rights activists are warning that the law is not going to work quite the way that its backers expect it to. In fact, according to a report by Britains Sun tabloid newspaper, the law, supposedly designed to prevent teens and children from accessing porn online, is likely to have some potentially damaging unintended consequences that will result in exactly the opposite of what the law is intended to accomplish.

"If children want something, they'll generally be able to get it," said Open Right Group executive director Jim Killock. "[Porn] can be shared on USB sticks, sent by email, shared on WhatsApp. And of course, children can guess their parents' credentials and log into these sites that wayor steal them."

Internet-savvy kids are also likely to turn to risky online behaviors, such as downloading pornographic clips from file-sharing sites, which as AVN.com has reported, can result in legal action both by the content's legal owners as well as by shady lawyers demanding thousands in cash to settle a threatened piracy lawsuit.

Teens or even adult porn fans who want to avoid uploading personal information to porn sites may also seek out free proxy sites and software that often comes with spyware and other malware that automatically installs on a users computer or mobile device, Killock told The Sun.

Wired magazine, as well, has branded the imminent UK porn blocking law one of the worst ideas ever, with the number one reason being, according to Wired, simply that it wont work.

There are literally millions of porn websites. Unless you create some kind of government version of Facebooks nipple banwhich, to be clear, is a terrible ideayoure not going to catch all of them, wrote Wireds Roland Manthorpe.

The law could also lead to more widespread internet censorship, because at least in its current form, social media platforms such as Twitter and Reddit will not be blocked, though both permit pornographic imagery to be posted on the sites. Whether the new UK porn blocking law could be expanded to block those popular social media applications is not yet clear.

Photo By Carlos Suarez/Wikimedia Commons
Free Speech Coalition has issued the following statement regarding LA Direct Models and its owner Derek Hay, apparently in response to an NBC News report which interviewed several current and former LA Direct Models clients:

"No performer should have to experience the abuse, coercion, wage theft or fraud detailed by these women, whether at the hands of an agent, manager or producer. Sex work is real work, and sex workers deserve the same professionalism, respect, honesty and consent as any other worker.

"Since the allegations of abuse and coercion were filed against Derek Hay, we have stood for the rights of performers. The subsequent stories told by performers on the recent NBC News broadcast are no different.

"While we have no specific knowledge of Hays actions regarding the allegations, we can say that such behavior is immoral, illegal, and unacceptable. Hay was not a member of Free Speech Coalition, and we do not list him among our licensed talent agents. For years, he has refused to abide by the industrys testing protocols."

(Note: although Free Speech does not list Hay among its "licensed agents," it is AVN's understanding that Hay is currently a licensed agent in California, although that license is currently under review by the California Labor Commission. Also, whether or not Hay has "refused to abide by the industry's testing protocols," many if not all of the performers he represents are tested and available under the industry's PASS system.)

"We understand the vulnerable position newcomers to the industry face. To better help them understand their rights and find reputable representation, we have launched the INSPIRE Program, which includes a list of licensed agents.

"Free Speech Coalition has long called for the decriminalization of consensual sex work, not only on the moral grounds of allowing private consensual behavior, but to allow sex workers to speak openly about abuse, coercion and theft that flourishes when they are forced to work in the shadows.

"Regardless of the outcome of this complaint, Free Speech Coalition will continue to fight aggressively for the rights of all sex workers."
ATLANTA, GALast Thursday, the Georgia state House of Representatives passed what would become one of the United States most restrictive anti-abortion laws. The so-called heartbeat bill would effectively prohibit women from obtaining abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, which is supposedly when doctors can detect a faint fetal heartbeat.

The bill would put Georgia law in direct conflict with United States Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, which has governed U.S. abortion law since 1973. Under that decision, abortion is fully legal through the first trimesterapproximately 12 weeksof pregnancy. Abortion remains legal under Roe v.Wade throughout the second trimester as well, though the court ruled that the government may regulate abortion procedures during that periodbut not ban them.

In response to the heartbeat abortion bill, several state lawmakers in Georgia, led by House Democratic Whip Dar'shun Kendrick, have introduced their own package of legislation under the heading of a Testicular Bill of Rights, that would strictly regulate sexual behavior by men, according to The Washington Post.

You want some regulation of bodies and choice? Kendrick wrote on her Twitter account, announcing the bill. Done!

Among the provisions of the law, any male over 55 years of age would be required to report to local law enforcement authorities any time such male releases sperm from his testicles."

The bill would also require a DNA paternity test on any fetus that reaches the age of six weeks and one day. The proven father would then be required to immediately begin child-support payments to the prospective mother, without waiting the remaining seven-and-half months for the child to be born, CBS News reported.

Vasectomy procedure would be outlawed under the new bill, and any man who engages in sex without using a condom could be charged with aggravated assault under the law proposed by Kendrick. Finally, men would require the permission of their sexual partners before they are permitted to purchase erectile dysfunction medication such as Viagra, and there would be a 24-hour waiting period before men are permitted to purchase pornography or sex toys of any kind.

Though the proposed testicular legislation may seem like a joke, Kendrick told Rolling Stone magazine, Im dead serious about the bill. But she acknowledged that her purpose in drafting the bill was to bring awareness to the fact that if youre going to legislate our bodies, then we have every right to propose legislation to regulate yours.

Kendrick, who represents a district in the Metro-Atlanta region, has long been a vocal proponent of womens reproductive rights, and she describes the heartbeat bill as unconstitutional on purpose, saying that the anti-abortion bills backers want to bring the bill before the Supreme Court, in an attempt to get the court to overturn the Roe v. Wade precedent.

Photo by Wellcome Images/Wikimedia Commons
BERLINWOW Tech Europe announces that SCALA 2.0 has been selected as a new master distributor for We-Vibe in Europe.

The review of our European distribution model for We-Vibe is now complete, and we are pleased to bring on Scala 2.0 as a master distributor for We-Vibe. Our new model brings maximum visibility to the We-Vibe brand throughout Europe and ensures prompt, professional service for our retail partners, said Thuve Bremen, WOW Techs chief commercial officer. Scala brings over 40 years of expertise and a deep understanding and history of working with the We-Vibe brand.

We-Vibe is now represented by two master distribution partners in Europe, Scala 2.0 and Orion. Both distributors carry the full We-Vibe product line, POS and promotional materials, and will launch the new Moxie by We-Vibe, wearable Bluetooth vibrator, in the market this spring.

This master distribution agreement is just one of the prime examples of how Scala goes the extra mile for its customers, Yvet Kuiper from Scalas marketing team said. Our company strives to provide retailers with a carefully curated assortment of top brands, making We-Vibe a very valuable asset in our portfolio. The brands impressive focus on innovation matches perfectly with Scalas aim to always be on trend. This partnership once again solidifies Scalas position as your go-to address for everything erotic and were thrilled to share We-Vibe's quality products with our valued customers.

In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the full We-Vibe product line is available through City Realex.
HORSHAM, Pa.Xgen Products will be exhibiting the newest products from all of its top brands at the Altitude Intimates Show, slated for April 8-10.

Were excited to exhibit at the 2019 Altitude Intimates Show and to present amazing new products from all of our top brands! said Andy Green, president of Xgen Products. Altitude is one of the only shows where we can reach retailers and distributors in the lingerie and apparel space in addition to the adult toy and novelty space. With the best selling products in both segments, we are looking forward to sharing our newest collections with all of our partners.

Xgen will be presenting new items from Baci Lingerie's new White Label Collection which features five new and luxurious styles of bra and panty sets in sexy lace or mesh. Also making their debut will be stylish new intimate apparel products from Envy Menswear, Lapdance, Teachers Pet and Latexwear.

Xgen will also feature unique items from Fredericks of Hollywood Toys like its remote-controlled Kegel Balls which features a powerful motor and wireless controls for hands-free action, along with products from Bodywand like the ergonomically designed Bodywand Curve, or the highly anticipated Bodywand Luxe, a new style of wand made of silicone with rose gold accents set for release later this year. The Rabbit Company will also be featured with its newly released rabbit sets, the Rabbit Love Ring Couples Bedspreader Kit which includes a Vibrating Rabbit Love Ring, Satin Tie, Velcro Bedspreader, and more, along with the Lay-On Rabbit Couples Playtime Set that includes the clitoral Lay-On Rabbit, Satin Tie, Beaded Flogger and Sex Dice.

Other products include Zolos innovative strokers such as the Warming Dome, a unique male stimulator with a warming function that simulates the warmth and feel of oral sex, Zolos Solo Flesh is a discrete suction-mounted masturbator, along with the multifunctional 360 and the squeezable Strokemeister. Xgen will also be featuring the new Euro-themed lingerie brand VIP, and also Cheeks Denim, a new denim booty short brand.

Xgen will be in booth 517 and visitors can meet company executives for presentations, product demonstrations and more. Vendors and retailers interested in meeting with Xgen representatives during the show may email [email protected].

The Altitude Intimates Show will be held at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, 3655 S. Las Vegas Blvd., Las Vegas, NV 89109. The event is the leading trade show for lingerie, intimate apparel, men's novelties, shoes and related merchandise. For registration information, click here.

To learn more about Xgen Products and its library of adult products and novelty items, visit Xgenb2b.com.
On the same day, practically the same hour, two western leaders had to cope with scathing testimonies against them. The testimonies of an ex-cabinet member and an ex-lawyer may well lead to paramount repercussions against the leaders of Canada and the US.

Most North Americans were glued to social and standard media to get the latest on the two testimonies as they flipped between Canadian and US news outlets to get the full stories on both sides of the border.

Lets start with the Canadian one. Judy Wilson-Raybould served as Attorney General of Canada and Minister of Justice in Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus current cabinet from 2015 until January 2019. Judy Wilson-Raybould had become the symbol of Trudeaus commitment to, first, gender parity, and, second, reconciliation with the indigenous peoples of Canada as she is the first Indigenous person to hold such a prize position in a Canadian cabinet.

On January 14, 2009, Wilson-Raybould was demoted from Attorney General to Minister of Veteran Affairs. Three weeks later, she quit Trudeaus cabinet in the wake of a scandal known as the SNC-Lavalin Corporation affair.

The story began when the Globe and Mail of February 9 alleged that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his office pressured Attorney General Wilson-Raybould not to press charges against SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering corporation, charged with fraud and corruption. In essence, the government was, one, interfering in the attorney generals resolutions, and, two, intentionally turning a blind eye to illegal activities. In both matters, if the allegations are true, the government was not implementing due process.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denied any wrong doing, insisting that he was only worrying about the fate of 9,000 SNC-Lavalin employees. SNC-Lavalin had threatened to move abroad to avoid punishment, should it be found guilty of fraud it is alleged to have committed overseas.

Judy Wilson-Raybould testified before the Commons Justice committee on Wednesday, February 27, 2019, confirming the accusations. She verified that she and her staff suffered consistent and sustained pressure to avoid prosecuting SNC-Lavalin.

Will all this hurt Prime Minister Trudeau and the Liberals? Undoubtedly. The narrative is on the side of Wilson-Raybould as Canadians found her testimony genuine, convincing, and painstakingly thorough.

Undoubtedly the crisis will affect the results of the forthcoming October 2019 elections, too, since many Canadians are questioning the cabinets transparency, trustworthiness, and ability to deliver on its original promises. Another female cabinet member resigned citing, loss of confidence over governments handling of SNC-Lavalin. Liberals are also slipping in the polls as the crisis continues.

Calls for an RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) investigation are brewing.

This, while Andrew Scheer, the Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Official Opposition since 2017, has reiterated his call for the resignation of Justin Trudeau several times.

While Wilson-Raybould was testifying in Canada, across the border in the US, Michael Cohen, President Trumps ex-lawyer, personal confidant, and fixer as he has been dubbed, was testifying, too, and calling President Trump a con man, a cheat, and a racist.

In an eight-hour long testimony in front of the House Committee, Cohen implicated President Trump in incriminating wrongdoings including the following: prompting Cohen, even if not directly, to lie to Congress, lying to an investigator, and organizing hush money payments during the presidential campaign.

According to Cohen, President Trump at one point deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes, while in another inflated his assets to borrow money. Much of all this is considered fraud especially during an election period.

Cohen also alleged President Trump was aware of the WikiLeaks release of Hilary Clintons stolen emails, to which Trump had denied any knowledge of.

A few months back Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight federal crimes and was convicted of perjury and fraud. He is to serve a three-year sentencing for lying to Congress though Cohen says he acted at Trumps direction. Republicans explicitly played on Cohens tarnished character during his testimony.

Will all this hurt President Trump? Undoubtedly. It will create even more pressure on the president as further allegations formulate and trigger more public hearings and testimonies, all a public relations nightmare for the president.

Several persons including two of Trumps children have already been asked to produce documents regarding knowledge of Trumps activities during and after elections as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into potential Trump corruption. The most dangerous charges may well be his lying and finance violations while campaigning.

The two testimonies and the consequences prove that leaders often err, no question about that. Still, under these formidable layers of lies, deceit, and erosion of trust is the essence of democracy. No one is above the law; yes, the opposition in Canada and the Democrats in the US may well be on a witchhunt to incriminate both leaders, but the fact that anyone can go after a President or a Prime Minister in a reasonably civilized fashion is a revelation.

And the sagas will continue.
Middle East Monitor (Link: Egypt calls on US not to interfere in its affairs)

Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri on 24 October 2018 [ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images]

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry yesterday called on the United States to respect the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of foreign countries, after a State Department reportcriticised the countrys human rights situation.

In a statement, the ministry criticised the section on Egypt in the State Departments annual report on the human rights situation for 2018 and described it as neither objective nor credible.

Egypt does not recognise the legitimacy of such reports, which rely on unverified data and reports provided by non-governmental organisations and movements driven by hostile political positions.

On Wednesday, the US State Departments annual report on human rights conditions in the world said: the Egyptian government committed unlawful or politically motivated killings.

According to the report, violations in Egypt include extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, torture, life threats, harsh prison conditions and restrictions on press freedom and the internet.

The ministry said the report is not based on any proofs or evidence, and is not objective or credibility, stressing on the importance of respecting the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.

Egypt faces criticism at the local and international levels over human rights abuses including enforced disappearance and torture in places of detention, but the Egyptian authorities have repeatedly denied committing extra-judicial killings.
Italian baked goods supplier Crosta & Mollica has partnered with beer brand Birra del Borgo for its new beverage launch.

Customers who buy a pint of Birra del Borgos Lisa between 5pm and 8pm at selected on-trade sites will be given a free pack of Crosta & Mollicas tarallini. A classic snack from Italys Puglia region, tarallini are dough rings that are boiled and then baked until crisp.

Birra del Borgo said tarallini pairs well with the new beer as their ingredients share Puglian origin. The beer is brewed using Senatore Cappelli wheat grain from the countryside of Puglia, and Italian orange peels.

Crosta & Mollicas tarallini are made in a small family-owned bakery in central Puglia, from a traditional recipe using local durum wheat, extra virgin olive oil, and white wine.

Were incredibly excited to bring this lager to the UK, as well as a touch of classic Italian aperitivo culture, said Leonardo di Vincenzo, founder of Birra del Borgo.

We strongly believe that the genuine simplicity of Italian style and culture can be expressed also through beer, creating a new standard of quality and originality.


The three-judge panel in charge of N.C.'s redistricting lawsuit suggested the state adopt this congressional district map drawn by Jowie Chen, a University of Michigan political science professor. (Image from court documents)

In the twilight of his political career, Ronald Reagan made the media rounds to discuss his administration, legacy, and unfinished business. During several of these interviews, Reagan went out of his way to criticize the longtime practice of gerrymandering electoral districts for partisan advantage.Reagan told ABC news host (and North Carolina native) David Brinkley in 1988,Speaking to Firing Line host William F. Buckley a couple of years later, Reagan argued strongly that the redistricting process should be reformed. Describing the convoluted congressional districts in the Los Angeles area as resembling a "nest of snakes," Reagan complained that legislative majorities in California and most other states had "funneled" as many voters of the opposing party into "a few districts as possible" to subvert the will of the voters.Bill Buckley, by the way, was also critical of partisan gerrymandering during his long career as a conservative columnist and commentator - ridiculing it a "Mickey Mouse" approach to governance, among other things.As a conservative who came of age politically during the Reagan era, I can't help chuckling to myself whenever a Republican critic responds to my longtime advocacy of redistricting reform by questioning my conservative credentials.Reagan considered gerrymandering to be one of the major impediments to enacting his agenda in Washington. In his day, most legislatures were controlled by Democrats. Most victims of egregious gerrymandering were Republicans. That was certainly the case in North Carolina, where gerrymandering has a long, disreputable, and mostly Democratic history.It's an overstatement to say that past districts drawn by Democrats weren't as slanted as today's maps because Democrats lacked modern technology. The most contorted legislative maps I've ever seen - districts that would have locked Republicans out of power in Raleigh regardless of the preference of the voters - were drawn by Democratic lawmakers after the 2000 elections and census. Only successful litigation by the GOP kept this attempted Democratic gerrymander from sticking.Most active North Carolina Republicans supported this litigation, by the way, and continued to advocate redistricting reform throughout the first decade of the 21st century. The only major exception I can recall was the late Richard Morgan, who helped keep his political partner (and future felon) Jim Black in charge of the North Carolina House even after Republicans won a majority of seats in the 2002 elections. Morgan insisted that legislatures should retain maximum autonomy to draw districts however they wished, even if Republicans were on the receiving end of the resulting gerrymander.Needless to say, I don't think Republican leaders in North Carolina today should take governance advice from Richard Morgan. They should take it from Ronald Reagan.Set aside for the moment the prudential case for Republicans to support redistricting reform - that given the uncertainty about who will win the 2020 elections, and how current redistricting litigation will end, reform would keep Republicans from suffering the kind of gerrymanders they faced before 2010. North Carolina conservatives and Republicans should change the system simply because it's the right thing to do, because letting politicians choose their voters rather than letting voters choose their political representatives is incompatible with basic principles of conservative governance.I am part of a cross-ideological coalition, North Carolinians for Redistricting Reform ( NCRedistrict.org ), that is backing a fresh approach to the issue this year. House Bill 140 , otherwise known as the FAIR Act (for Fairness Accountability and Integrity in Redistricting), would use both a constitutional amendment and a statute to place neutral, nonpartisan constraints on redistricting.There will never be a perfect way to draw political maps. Perfection is impossible in any human endeavor - which happens to be another core conservative principle. But conservatives should not accept the current process as "the best we can do." It's not. Indeed, conservatives should take the lead in reforming redistricting. That's what Ronald Reagan would do.
Failure to reform the national health system has led the government to collapse in one of the most statist governments following the Nordic model. Prime Minister Juha Sipila of Finland and his cabinet members have resigned after failing to rein in the nations health care costs and provide greater competition. This comes as reports show private citizens in Finland increasingly turning to the free market to meet the shortfalls of the nationalized system.

Sipilas proposal would give citizens  who may already choose between public-sector health clinics for most health care choice  the right to choose private providers for non-emergency health care. Citizens could have used health care vouchers to receive care from private clinics if a patient cannot access services provided by a county-operated utility within the time frame laid out in the treatment guarantee, a government press release stated.

The nations trade unions opposed the reforms.

Sipila said the changes, which would have saved an estimated 10 billion ($11.3 billion U.S.) over 10 years, were necessary to safeguard the systems financial stability.

The Finnish health care system has been hailed by American socialists as a model for the United States. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted:

In the United States it costs, on average, $12,000 to have a baby. In Finland it costs $60. Weve got to end the disgrace of our profit-driven health care system and pass Medicare for all.  Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 6, 2019



However, the systems failures often deny citizens access to lifesaving care, leaving private doctors to heal the sick in Finland.

Ed Dutton, a British citizen who moved to the continent, described Finlands broken health care system in the Guardian. The first problem is that there is no way to make appointments without going to a central location and swiping a national health card in person. This assigns a number to a sick child:

Then you and your feverish child simply sit and wait. Or rather, you stand, because the room is so crowded that people are sitting on the floor, on steps, or leaning against walls. The numbers come up on a screen every 10 minutes or so, in no particular order so youve no idea how long your wait will be as your daughter complains of feeling cold then hot and then cold again. By 10.45, another patients dad exclaims hes been there since 8.15, hes had enough, and hes going to go to a private GP.  [Y]ou are not even waiting to see a GP. Youre waiting to a see a nurse in order to justify to her how quickly your child needs to see a GP or whether she needs to see one at all.

The system essentially forces people to go private or rely on friends who are doctors, he concluded.

Doctors in Finland also expect a lighter workload, according to those who have worked in multiple health care systems. Finnish doctors have 15 patients a day, and the 16th patient they are quite unhappy and tell everyone about it, saidIngmar Lindstrom,an Estonian doctor who practiced in Finland.

The average doctor in the U.S. sees about 19 patients a day. However, doctors in Finland earn about half as much as their American counterparts.

Dutton blamed underfunding for Finlands health deficits. However, the problems plaguing Helsinkis health care cascade throughout the region. Costs continue to mount in Nordic countries, which feature heavy state-subsidized health care and aging populations. One out of every four citizens will be 65 or older by 2030, according to Statistics Finland.

Providing any highly subsidized public good increases demand. The government must ration care to control costs. Ultimately, Finnish citizens pay for a health care system they cannot use, then pay again for a private doctor to treat them.

Good physical health is the first measure of human flourishing. Importing Finlands troubled health care system would only compound Americas maladies.
By Ritah Kemigisa.

The Physical Infrastructure Committee of parliament is set to fly to Canada to visit the Canadian Jet Manufacturer of Bombardier Air crafts to do a due diligence before the company delivers the four CRJ900 regional jets that Uganda procured as part of the much-anticipated plan for the revival of Uganda Airlines.

Last year, the government placed a firm order worth $190 million (about Shs 711 billion) for four CRJ 900 planes from Bombardier.

Last week the finance ministry requested for a supplementary budget covering Shs 280 billion to secure the delivery of the first two Bombardier planes from Canada.

Now the chairperson of the committee also Nakifuma county MP Robert Ssekitoleko says the visit is aimed at verifying the legitimacy of the company and assess the value of the planes to ensure that they meet travel demands and prevent aviation disasters.

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The recent revelations of a nationwide college admissions and testing bribery scheme have met with a variety of reactions. There have been conversations about fairness and privilege in admissions practices. There have been expressions of lack of surprise, cynicism, or thats just how the world works. And there are already the beginnings of a class-action lawsuit by students who claim their college degrees have been devalued by the rigged admissions system.

There are a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about higher education in America today. But are all these problems and turmoil merely the birth pangs of a new age? A few years ago in a short essay, The Future of Higher Education in his book The System Has a Soul, Hunter Baker argued that higher education was ripe for massive change and directly in the path of creative destruction. Baker saw the revolution in technology and content distribution as a main driver of change in the education market. But he was not talking about the ephemeral online colleges whose ads clutter your Google search results. These institutions, he said, are the kinds of pure intermediaries that will be most susceptible to market changes. Rather, Baker looked further ahead to the disintermediation of the whole education market. Perhaps in the future professors will be able to provide their services directly to students, who will in turn be able to put together a patchwork transcript of courses they have taken from top professors around the world. Baker predicts that a new age of educational choice will chip away at the current system.

The recent bribery scandal would seem to bolster the notion that the system is ripe for creative destruction and for the appearance of education entrepreneurs who can innovate and provide better educational goods at lower costs and lower prices. Yet its hard to imagine that elite universities would ever fail or be supplanted by something new. Baker himself argued that traditional institutions would survive, even if in smaller numbers. After all, they have built up centuries worth of economic and social capitaland government funding. They also have the costly specialized equipment and labs necessary for certain kinds of research. Furthermore, its hard to imagine a world in which prospective students (and their parents) would not desire the prestige of a degree granted by an elite school.

But strange things happen. For instance, Sears was an untouchable companyuntil it wasnt. There was a time when it was unthinkable that the great American retailer would go bankrupt. Is it so unreasonable to think that something like this couldnt happen to the supposedly immovable institutions of higher education? The fact that colleges and universities in America are so dependent on government funding complicates the picture, to be sure. Theres also an intricate system of accreditation that can function as a barrier to entry for new initiatives. Yet with enough scandals, complaints about rigged admissions practices, lifelong student debt, and diminishing returns on private and public educational funding, the scales may tip toward a new educational realityone cooked up not in an elite universitys science lab, but in the mind of an education entrepreneur.

Image source: Wikimedia
As Muslims gathered for Friday prayers, a shooter livestreamed himself entering the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and killing 41 people with a semiautomatic weapon. He then drove to the Masjid mosque in nearby Linwood, where seven more have died. (An additional victim died off the premises, bringing the death toll to 49 as of this writing.) Police also found several improvised explosive devices on vehicles in the area.

Authorities have arrested four people  three men and one woman  but only one man has been charged with murder. Although the 28-year-old Australians name has not been released, he identified himself as Brenton Tarrant in the video.

A man posting online as Brenton Tarrant posted a 74-page manifesto titled The Great Replacement the morning before the attack to explain his motivation. His writing reveals a callous racial collectivist and self-described eco-fascist motivated in part by a concern about overpopulation, whose model society is the Peoples Republic of China, and who believes murdering CEOs, enacting global trade regulations, and raising the minimum wage are keys to preventing white genocide.

What was his motivation?

Tarrant writes that below-replacement white birthrates, paired with the high fertility of non-white immigrants, will lead to the replacement of the white population in the West. He quotes a white nationalist mantra (the 14 words) and refers to the spontaneous process as white genocide.

He writes that he acts to avenge Muslim terrorist attacks on the West, as well as the Rotherham child sex ring, which victimized 1,400 British girls.

The 2017 election of Emmanuel Macron as president of France over civic nationalist (and milquetoast) Marine Le Pen of the National Front provided another tipping point. Tarrant describes himself as an ethno-nationalist: A civic nationalist believes in a multiethnic and pluralistic nation, while an ethno-nationalist believes race and soil are coterminous.

Why did he use a semiautomatic weapon?

Tarrant writes that he specifically chose a semiautomatic weapon in the hopes that leftists will press for gun control legislation, ultimately provoking a racial civil war in the United States. Charles Manson voiced similar hopes for his 1969 murder spree.

What are the mosque shooters political views?

Tarrant describes himself as a fascist and writes that I mostly agree with Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder the British Union of Fascists.Conservatism is corporatism in disguise, he writes. I want no part of it.

What are his concerns about environmentalism and overpopulation?

He adds, [I] consider myself an Eco-fascist by nature. He writes that he was partly motivated by concerns about overpopulation and environmental catastrophe. While the environment is being destroyed by over population [sic], we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world.  Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment. Tarrant writes that he had no children in part because they are ultimately destructive to nature and culture. Under capitalism, Tarrant adds, The natural environment is industrialized, pulverized and commoditized.

Alt-Right figures including Richard Spencer and David Duke have embraced environmentalist or eco-fascist views  emphasizing the soil aspect of blood-and-soil  in recent years, and the works of Finnish eco-fascist Pentti Linkola are published by Alt-Right publisher Artkos Media. (Linkola wrote, The worst enemy of life is too much life: the excess of human life.)

Why would a white nationalist extol China?

The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the Peoples Republic of China, Tarrant writes. The Alt-Right has a soft spot for Asian nations, including North Korea, where mercantilist policies are often put in the service of racial purity.

How does he feel about individual rights and the free market?

Tarrant despises capitalism. His manifesto uses socialist-sounding language while dismissing the myth of the individual, the value of work (productivity for the benefit of your capitalist owners) and the sovereignty of private property (to ensure none of us get grand ideas of taking the unearned wealth of our owners).

The cover of his manifesto praises environmentalism, responsible markets, and workers [sic] rights as ways to build a racially pure society.

What specific economic policies does this terrorist promote?

Tarrant writes that he would abolish free trade, restrict trade to white nations, raise the minimum wage, and promote the unionization of the work force. And murder CEOs.

If an ethnocentric European future is to be achieved global free markets and the trade of goods is to be discouraged at all costs, Tarrant writes. BLOCK FOREIGN GOODS FROM WHITE MARKETS. (Screaming capitalization in original.)

Since much of the non-white invasion responds to capitalist desire for low-wage labor, workers wages must be raised in any way possible, [w]hether that is by encouraging and pushing increases to the minimum wage; furthering the unionization of workers; increasing the native birthrate and thereby reducing the need for the importation of labour; increasing the rights of workers; pushing for the increase in automation or advancement of industrial labour replacement or any other tactic that is available.

CEOs are greedfilled [sic] bastards [who] expect to replace our people with a race of low intellect, low agency, muddled, muddied masses so that new immigrants can earn our wealthy benefactors their second yachts and their fifth properties!

KILL YOUR LOCAL ANTI-WHITE CEO, he instructs his national socialist, terrorist followers.

How do his views compare to those of other Alt-Right terrorists?

His views are in keeping with other white nationalist extremists who have resorted to violence. Jeremy Joseph Christian, an Alt-Right terrorist arrested for murdering two Muslims at a Portland train station in 2017, supported Bernie Sanders over the issue of tariffs and economic interventionism.

Norway mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik  whom Tarrant says he contacted and asked for a blessing before the Christchurch attack  wrote in his own 1,500-page manifesto that his economic views fell between socialism and social democracy. He favored the development of alternative energy to save the environment and argued it is essential that national states have a controlling stake in multinational corporations.

James Wenneker Von Brunn, who opened fire inside the Holocaust Museum in 2009, wrote in his book Kill the Best Gentiles that Christianity is a hoax, denounced JEW CAPITALISTS, and concluded that WESTERN SOCIALISM, represents the future of the West. (Capitalization in the original.)

Why do racialists hate capitalism and the free market so much?

In the Alt-Right/white nationalist worldview, all economic and social activity should be segregated to maximize the power of the white race. The Alt-Right correctly assesses that the free market allows the peaceful exchange of goods and services between any two willing parties. These economic ties create social relationships, friendships, even marriages, which threaten the ethnic purity of their desired ethnostate.

Would he spare anyone?

No. Tarrant wrote, since there are no innocents a racial war, racialists must aim at [p]reventing these enemies from reaching adulthood and their full potential.

Did the Christchurch mosque shooter claim to be a Christian?

Answering whether Brenton Tarrant is a Christian is, in his words, complicated. When I know, I will tell you.The complication may be a semantic distinction derived from Breiviks notion that it is possible to be a cultural Christian without believing in God. Breivik wrote that his followers dont need to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus to fight for our Christian cultural heritage. It is enough that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian atheist.

How would a Christian respond?

Christianity begins with a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ as expressed in the Apostles or Nicene Creed. Building on the divine commandment to love your neighbor as yourself, Christianity has led the way in affirming the innate human dignity of all life from conception to natural death, irrespective of ethnicity, religion, nationality, sex, or disability. Every murder, especially the mass killing of innocent civilians at prayer, is a tragedy that violates Western values.

Life must be taken only by lawful authorities after the commission of a crime, as determined by just laws rooted in natural law and right reason.

Speaking as a member of the Eastern Christian tradition, I am unaware of a single church canon forbidding marriage between members of two ethnic groups in the 2,000-year history of the Christian Church and its ecclesiastical law. However, ethnic separatism has been condemned as anti-Christian.

Where can I learn more about the views of Alt-Right terrorists?

Ill be discussing the Alt-Right again at this years Acton University. If you havent yet, consider signing up.

You can read Brenton Tarrants full manifesto, The Great Replacement, here  if you have the stomach.

(Photo credit: Felipe Frazao / Shutterstock.com.)
In the midst of celebrating LGBTQ Pride the U.S. Supreme Court rained on our virtual parade by ruling in favor of the Catholic Social Serv...
Facebook says all of its apps and internet services, including Instagram and WhatsApp, are again operational after an extended outage on Wednesday. All three services went down at the same time, as did services for Oculus Rift. Facebook execs attribute the downtime to a "server configuration change." Seems legit.

Thomas Ricker at The Verge has a writeup:

The interruption also affected gameplay for owners of Oculus VR headsets, a company Facebook bought in 2014. Some sites, like Tinder or Spotify, that use Facebook credentials were unable to authorize logins. Workplace, Facebook's connectivity platform for companies, also suffered issues. In 2008, Facebook was knocked offline by a bug that affected many of its 80 million users. That outage lasted for about a day. Facebook now boasts about 2.3 billion monthly users, making the recent outage the worst yet for the company, and its family of apps and services. During the outage, Facebook's developer dashboard reported an uptick in the Average API Error Rate. The company did say that it was not caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The November 20th, 2018 outage affecting Facebook and Instagram was caused by a "bug in our server," the company said at the time. With Facebook unreachable for many, its properties were left with little choice but to communicate status of the outages on that other social network: Twitter. Proving yet again that Twitter is the place where the people who write the news get their news.

With Facebook and Instagram down, Borders and Barnes and Noble have just reopened all their stores.  Josh Peck (@ItsJoshPeck) March 13, 2019

Is Instagram still down? Bc after 2 months almost furnitureless in DC I am trying to take you all on the riveting adventure of getting: a chair ? (Also, if you had to start a new apt from scratch, what would be the first 5 pieces of furniture/items you would get? Asking for me)  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 14, 2019

Not an exact science, but analysts expect Facebook to generate $68.93 billion in revenue this year. That's an average of $188.8 million a day. Outages are expensive.  Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) March 14, 2019

Someone overwrote the Facebook php.ini file  Glenn Fleishman (@GlennF) March 13, 2019

Almost 24 hours later, FB says the issue that took down many of its apps for millions of users yesterday has been "resolved" https://t.co/eqMfeteO3C  Kurt Wagner (@KurtWagner8) March 14, 2019

Also, they finally said "sorry" over 24 hours after the problem started https://t.co/dwzzd5BnnZ  Steve Lookner (@lookner) March 14, 2019

We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.  Facebook (@facebook) March 13, 2019

[via TechMeme]
The Eastern District of New York empaneled a Grand Jury into the dirty data dealings of Facebook.

Federal investigators are probing Facebook's data-sharing deals with other companies. A New York grand jury is reported to have subpoenaed "at least two" smartphone makers.

"Both companies had () broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users."

Oh boy.

It's already been reported that there are ongoing federal investigations, incl. by the Dept of Justice. As we've said, we're cooperating w/ investigators and take those probes seriously. We've provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledged that we'll continue to do so https://t.co/v3QkokZq2p  Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) March 14, 2019

From Michael LaForgia, Matthew Rosenberg and Gabriel J.X. Dance at the New York Times:

The companies were among more than 150, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Sony, that had cut sharing deals with the world's dominant social media platform. The agreements, previously reported in The New York Times, let the companies see users' friends, contact information and other data, sometimes without consent. Facebook has phased out most of the partnerships over the past two years. "We are cooperating with investigators and take those probes seriously," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. "We've provided public testimony, answered questions and pledged that we will continue to do so." It is not clear when the grand jury inquiry, overseen by prosecutors with the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York, began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook was already facing scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the Justice Department's securities fraud unit began investigating it after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the Facebook data of 87 million people and used it to build tools that helped President Trump's election campaign. The Justice Department and the Eastern District declined to comment for this article. The Cambridge investigation, still active, is being run by prosecutors from the Northern District of California. One former Cambridge employee said investigators questioned him as recently as late February. He and three other witnesses in the case, speaking on the condition of anonymity so they would not anger prosecutors, said a significant line of inquiry involved Facebook's claims that it was misled by Cambridge.

Facebook's pivot to privacy now making a little more sense https://t.co/pkptcD5wb4  Ryan McCarthy (@mccarthyryanj) March 13, 2019

"We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it."  Mark Zuckerberghttps://t.co/mr8Ubxr9EV  Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) March 13, 2019

Last weekend, I asked @ewarren to speculate: Should Facebook be investigated criminally? It's no longer speculation.https://t.co/ufUl5Dl1Tz  Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) March 13, 2019

FYI: "The Cambridge [Analytica] investigation, still active, is being run by prosecutors from the Northern District of California. One former Cambridge employee said investigators questioned him as recently as late February." https://t.co/6RxWdYqqqq  Peter Jukes (@peterjukes) March 14, 2019

BOOM: Facebook's data deals are under criminal investigation related to #CambridgeAnalytica

(Yet to be reported anywhere: Cambridge Analytica's insolvency administrator is being taken to court in UK on Monday by me.) https://t.co/RlKArgZdpq  David Carroll ? (@profcarroll) March 13, 2019

Here's what Facebook said about this in December https://t.co/9OVV09nBoA pic.twitter.com/MyCydNB3KS  Karissa Bell (@karissabe) March 13, 2019
Living Gospel Equality Now: Loving in the Heart of God: Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests
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About Censored News Censored News is published by Brenda Norrell. Since 2006, Censored News has received more than 20 million pageviews. As a collective of writers, photographers and broadcasters, we publish news of Indigenous Peoples and human rights. Contact publisher Brenda Norrell: brendanorrell@gmail.com

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By AFP

Attacks on two Christchurch mosques left at least 40 dead Friday, with one gunman  identified as an Australian extremist  apparently live streaming the assault that triggered the lock down of the New Zealand city.

Witnesses spoke of victims being shot at close range, with women and children also believed to be among those killed.

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, saying it marked one of New Zealands darkest days.

From what we know, it does appear to have been well planned, she said, adding that in addition to the dead another 20 people were seriously injured.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.

It was not immediately clear how many attackers were involved, but Ardern said three men had been taken into custody.

Two IEDS (improvised explosive devices) were also found and neutralised by the military, police said.

Local media reported at least nine people were dead.
- T. S. Eliot

Thoughts After Lambeth

"The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide."
11 Best Affordable Whiskeys

Bartender-Approved: Budget Whiskeys

The AskMen editorial team thoroughly researches & reviews the best gear, services and staples for life. AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service.

If youre a fan of spirits, you know that whiskey is an extremely complex category. From bourbon to rye, Irish to Scotch, those new to whiskey can find themselves feeling overwhelmed. On top of wading through the river of different styles, there are also various levels of aging to consider.

Some say that when it comes to whiskey, older is always better, hence why the older varieties generally come with an intimidating price tag. While its true that whiskey needs a bit of time in the barrel to transform from a moonshine-like substance to the golden liquid you know and love, the idea that you need to shell out the big bucks for great whiskey is false.

You could spend the equivalent of your monthly (or yearly income, in extreme cases) on purchasing a rare bottle, but you really dont have to. There are myriad bottles of high-quality whiskey available for all budgets. To ensure you find the gems amid the affordable options, we checked in with some experts (read: bartenders) to get their take on the top budget-friendly whiskeys  of all styles.

RELATED: Five Things You Should Never Do When It Comes to Bourbon

Ideal for drinking neat or in a classic cocktail such as the old fashioned, Belle Meade bourbon Classic Sour Mash Straight whiskey typically costs about $40 and is very well balanced.

It has a nice balance of warm baking spices in the nose, caramel and maple syrup in the body, with deep stone fruit flavors that are lifted by hints of citrus and followed by a smooth finish, says Sean Stewart, partner at Stay Golden in Nashville.

$34.19 - $99.99 at Drizly.com

Typically priced around $30, Powers Gold Label, an Irish whiskey, is a great budget buy. Its aged in ex-bourbon barrels and has loads of tropical fruit notes, spice, and is balanced by sweet malt, says Logan Demmy, bar manager at The Citizens Trust in Columbus, Ohio. Ive always found Irish whiskeys to be the divine balance of oaky American whiskeys and dry single malt.

$14.99 - $59.99 at Drizly.com

The Stillhouse is a great sipping whiskey for those on a budget. The liquid, which is rested in coffee beans as a final step of distillation, opens up nicely with a single rock or a splash of water making it simple and convenient while still finishing soft on the palate, says Chris Adams, bartender at YNK Irvine in Los Angeles. Lets be honest, this brand represents a great time.

$15.99 at Drizly.com

Priced just above the $20 mark, the Old Overholt rye is used as a house spirit at a lot of bars but is often overlooked for at-home mixology. Its easy to drink on its own, as well as being complex enough to add into cocktails such as a boulevardier or an old fashioned, says Thom Neil, beverage director at The Ribbon Midtown in New York City. I have worked with hundreds of other bottles of whiskey, yet Old Overholt always seems to find a spot on my liquor shelf. Don't let the old-style label deter you from this excellent rye.

$21.99 at Drizly.com

RELATED: Best Rye Whiskeys for Midwinter Drinking

This Scotch whisky falls at a slightly higher price point than some of the other varieties on this list, but it is still relatively affordable, often available between $75 to $90.

I love the Balvenie 14 Caribbean Cask. Its a Speyside Scotch whisky finished in rum barrels, which really brings a unique tropical character to the spirit, explains Adam Peabody, head bartender at LondonHouse in Chicago. Upfront its all honey and heather as you might expect, but the finish is silky smooth with a touch of Caribbean spice and pineapple. For around $2 to $3 a pour, you cant beat it..

$72.99 at Drizly.com

Known as the good stuff, Templeton rye typically falls within the $30 to $40 price range. Templeton rye is hands down the best rye in its price range or any other for that matter, argues Chad Berkey, owner of the cordova Bar in San Diego. Big spice and smooth sweet finish make this the perfect whiskey for sipping or mixing.

$31.99 at Drizly.com

Ideal for novice whiskey fans and experts alike, the Weller falls just under the $100 mark, but this bourbon is worth every penny.

My recommendation for affordable, approachable, and extremely sought-after whiskeys is Weller. Weller Antique 107 and Special Reserve are the original heated bourbon whiskeys, explains Andrew Holmes, director of food and beverage at The Keep in Columbus, Ohio. Antique 107 provides a great balance of sweet and heat from the mash [the mix of grains]. If youre lucky enough to find the Weller 12-year ... buy it!

$99.99 at Drizly.com

The George Dickel No. 8 is great for those seeking an easy-to-drink, reasonably priced whiskey. The Tennessee whiskey has a beautiful charcoal mellowing, with aromas of light caramel and wood, says Dave Whitton, owner of Prank Bar in Los Angeles. The finish is smoky and has hints of maple and buttered corn. Its my go-to whiskey.

$38.99 at Drizly.com

RELATED: Best High Roller Bourbon Bottles

Four Roses Yellow Label proves you can get tasty whiskey for less than $30. At Sundry and Vice, we're located right in the heart of bourbon country so we tend to favor the local juice, notes Jack Keane, bar manager at Sundry and Vice in Cincinnati. We have Four Roses Yellow Label in our well [house variety] because it's inexpensive and delicious.

$29.99 at Drizly.com

Great in an old fashioned with cherry or cherry bitters, Eagle Rare bourbon typically hits the $30 price point. My go-to is Eagle Rare. Ive recommended it several times for those looking for a good, affordable whiskey. Ive never had a complaint, says Sean Brown, bar manager at Brack Shop Tavern in Los Angeles. Its a nice, smooth 10-year bourbon, and at 90 proof, has a little bite to it.

Find out more at Drizly.com

Retailing for less than $30, Old Grand-Dad is a beloved by many bourbon fans.

Old Grand-Dad 114 is full-bodied and hits your nose and palate with a blend of bold spices, vanilla, and oak. It's a strong whiskey and not necessarily the smoothest of choices, which makes it great for sipping, explains Shane Nasby, pitmaster at HoneyFire Barbeque Co. in Nashville. I enjoy it on the rocks or with a splash of water, as it needs to open up a bit for my preference. It's definitely one of my favorite bourbons in a budget-friendly price range.

Find out more at Drizly.com

As you can see, fantastic whiskey doesnt have to come with an exorbitant price tag. Keep these varieties in mind and youll have a great drink without having to dip into your spending money too much.

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By Ben Jumbe.

President Yoweri Museveni has called for the cutting of wasteful expenditure.

Addressing the NRM caucus in Kyankwanzi, Museveni expressed concern over the increasing public expenditure due to demand for new administrative units.

He says the time is now to put a stop the creation of new districts arguing that new districts can wait.

He says focus should now be put towards the development of the youth programs.

The president has also challenged the legislators to cut foreign travel.
Costcos Taco Bites Are Practically Pizza Rolls

Is It a Pizza or a Taco?! Costcos New Snacks Are Basically Both

High school kids, college students, and fans of bite-sized snacks the world over might agree that the king of the convenience food world are pizza rolls. Now, there's a new contender for the crown, and it may surprise you. Theyre not pizza rolls  theyre Vegetable Taco Bites.

Costco is leading the charge in selling the new munchies from snack company Snakmandoo. According to Delish, these small, savory pockets contain black beans, corn, cheese, and peppers. In other words, theyre like tacos in a pizza crust.

Snack traditionalists might be a bit skeptical of the switch from pizza roll to a veggie taco pocket, but the company also offers other options, many of which are meatier. However, social media users also seem excited to try the new taco bites. After being profiled by popular Instagram account @Costco_doesitagain, several commenters could hardly restrain themselves from gushing over the snack bites.

One user wrote, welp looks like another Costco run sometime soon! preceded by two heart-eyed emojis. A second social media user quipped, I hope our Costco has them! They look so good on the box, trailed by grinning emojis. The comments section of the post profiling the 90-count box of taco bites was largely filled with complimentary remarks

Besides the new taco bites, it looks like Snakmandoo might be trying to corner the market on diverse frozen hor 'd oeuvres with a decidedly global appeal and ethnic flair. In addition to the vegetable taco bites, the company also offers General Tao Bites, complete with chicken and vegetables in a sweet and sour sauce. Butter Chicken Bites are also on the menu, and includes Indian flavors such as curry sauce. Further, Vietnamese Style Bites include a bit of tamarind, and Tandoori Lime Bites blend citrus and lime.

Whether or not these 21st-century snack foods will replace pizza rolls, chicken nuggets, TV dinners, and other long-time favorites remains to be seen. The combination of a trendy design aesthetic, quality ingredients, and word of mouth may be what is needed to launch the new veggie taco bites  and the other varieties right onto a plate near you.

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How to Make a Woman Orgasm

Heres Everything You Need to Know About Making Her Climax

The AskMen editorial team thoroughly researches & reviews the best gear, services and staples for life. AskMen may get paid if you click a link in this article and buy a product or service.

More so than almost any other aspect of human sexual interactions, the female orgasm is a mystery.

Men want to know how to give them. Women want to know how to have them. Porn loves to fake them. Scientists arent clear on why they exist. Prudes and misogynists dont want them to happen at all.

But just like guys, ladies are also capable of having incredibly powerful, awesome orgasms.

RELATED: Understanding the Female Orgasm

In fact, theyre often able to have multiple orgasms within a short span of time, meaning if you know what youre doing, its absolutely possible to give her mind blowing amounts of sexual pleasure.

Intrigued? AskMen spoke with four different sex experts to give you the information you need about how to make a woman orgasm.

What Is a Female Orgasm?

First, its worth clarifying what an orgasm is, period.

An orgasm is the involuntary release of tension at the height of the sexual response cycle, says SKYN Condoms sex and intimacy expert and certifed sex coach Gigi Engle. In most cases, it is a highly pleasurable feeling. It is marked by the release of built-up sexual feelings and the tension in the genitals and other areas of the body that are responding to sexual stimuli.

RELATED: Understanding the Male Orgasm

As Engle notes, its typically a highly pleasurable feeling like an explosion of pleasure, regardless of what your gender is. The more buildup you have, the more pleasurable and intense the orgasm is.

How Are the Male and Female Orgasms Different?

The orgasm is typically different in a few noteworthy ways, all depending on your biological sex.

Ejaculation

For one, the male orgasm is typically tied to ejaculation, whereas the female orgasm really isnt.

Orgasm and ejaculation tend to occur simultaneously when you have a penis, says Dr. Jess OReilly, sexologist and host of the Drive Her Wild With Pleasure video course. This certainly isnt always the case (you certainly have dry orgasms), but for most folks, they occur at the same time more often than not. For people with clitorises, this is less often the case.

Female orgasm and female ejaculation are much less in sync than male orgasm and male ejaculation. Even women who can squirt dont always do so when they climax, and theyre sometimes able to squirt without climaxing at all.

Amount

Men typically dont ejaculate multiple times in a row. Thats because of their refractory periods  the period of time beginning when you orgasm and lasts until youre able to orgasm again  is on average much longer than it is for women.

Its also associated with more noticeable physical signs such as a mans penis becoming flaccid after orgasm. It may even be too sensitive for any further sexual activity for a period of between several minutes and several hours, which typically lengthens as a man ages.

RELATED: Multiple Methods for Multiple Orgasms

Women, however, have quite short refractory periods, to the point where they might be hardly noticeable. Depending on the stimulation, a woman could orgasm dozens of times in a single sex or masturbation session.

Timing

As well, theres the matter of timing. While many men are capable of reaching orgasm pretty quickly, not all women are blessed with the same ability.

Some women need a lot of time to build up to an orgasm while others, with the right sensations, get off fairly quickly, says Kayla Lords, a sexpert for JackAndJillAdult.com.

Generally speaking, the male orgasm takes much less time to occur than the female orgasm  at least, when it comes to intercourse, says OReilly.

When women are on our own, we dont tend to take long at all, she notes. This is because we know what we enjoy and we do it.

Methods

So what do they enjoy, exactly? Lots of different things:

How people achieve orgasm is often quite different between men and women, says Lords. Many women need very specific stimulation: clitoral, G-spot, a combination of the two. They may also prefer, want, and/or need to have other parts of their body touched and stimulated  breasts and nipples, legs, torso, neck, etc.

As for the exact methods, well, those are also varied.

We may use our fingers or a vibrator, lie on our stomachs and rub against the mattress, watch porn, fantasize, and/or play with running water, says OReilly. We can do all of these things with you as well if youre willing to think outside of the box (and often beyond penile/vaginal intercourse).

Orgasm Similarities

Despite the differences, climaxes are relatively similar regardless of your sex.

Both men and women experience the involuntary release of tension, notes Engle, followed by the penis becoming flaccid, the vulva returning to its normal color and the swelling going down.

Perhaps even more important? The sensation is thought to be essentially the same for both male and female participants.

The female and male orgasms arent that much different from each other in terms of sensation, says Lords. In self-reported studies, when people of all genders described their orgasms, researchers were unable to tell which gender was describing their pleasure.

How to Make a Woman Orgasm

Wanting to give your partner pleasure is a great approach when it comes to sex. Theres not much worse than a selfish lover who only cares about their own experience.

RELATED: What Is the Orgasm Gap? (And Why You Should Care)

But wanting to give your partner an orgasm and actually doing so are very different things. So how does one go about it, exactly?

Tips to Give Her an Orgasm

Learn About Her Anatomy

First, you should familiarize yourself with the different parts of a vagina and vulva. If her genitals are different from yours, it wont hurt to know what the different parts are called, and what theyre like.

Learn your anatomy so you actually can figure out what you're doing, and how to touch in ways that are actually pleasurable for her, says sex educator Kenneth Play. It's a combination of technical skill, anatomy awareness and checking in with her for feedback.

Ask Her About What She Likes

If she uses sex toys and masturbates regularly, shell definitely know her body better than you do, notes Lords. Give her the sensation she says she wants. If she tells you slow, gentle touches on her clit, do that. If she says she needs her breasts stroked during penetration, do that.

According to OReilly, it wouldnt hurt to give her multiple choice options:

Here or there?

Slower or faster?

Up or down?

Work With Her to Discover What Feels Good

Just because she has a vagina doesnt necessarily mean she knows what shes into. Because girls and young women are often told that sex is wrong or that they shouldnt engage in it, many have less experience with masturbation or sexual pleasure than boys their age.

RELATED: Why Slut Shaming Is So Harmful

If she doesnt know what she needs, experiment with touch and sensation, says Lords. Start slow and gentle, and ask a lot of questions:

Does this feel good?

Do you like this?

Should I keep going?

If shes used to masturbating but doesnt have experience with partners, Play suggests asking her to show you what she likes.

If she's struggling, ask if she can masturbate herself to orgasm and then calibrate using the techniques she uses, he notes. Mimic what she does, give her the same sensations.

Dont Give Up Too Quickly

Women often take longer to climax, making it important not to get frustrated in the early going.

Don't listen to your dick clock, listen to her clit clock! explains Play. What I mean by that is, don't assume that she's finished cumming when you think she's done, keep going until she says she's good or asks you to stop. The orgasm can actually last a bit of time, if done right, and doesn't have the visual cue like ejaculation does. So keep going!

Use Your Hands

Use your hands or encourage her to do the same, suggests OReilly. Reach down and give her a hand, as external stimulation is more likely to lead to orgasm than vaginal penetration for many people.

In addition to traditional fingering methods, you could also try something called the pussy pocket.

Place your palm on her pubic mound and let your fingers press all along her lips to create a pocket, she adds. You can rub gently to begin with and then increase the pressure and speed as she gets more and more riled up.

Try Clitoris-Friendly Sex Positions

Pay attention to the clitoris like it is the center of your universe. The clitoris is the key to orgasm, says Engle. And according to OReilly, that goes for penetration, too.

If youre having intercourse, adjust your body so that she can rub her pubic mound against your pubic bone, she notes. You may not be able to thrust in and out with the same vigor (which is probably better anyway), but you can still slide inside of her while she rubs her clitoris on the outside.

Things Not to Do

If youre doing things that hurt your partner or make it harder for them to orgasm, you might never succeed at bringing them to climax. Along with the good, what are the female orgasm no-nos you should stay away from?

Dont Assume Intercourse Alone Will Be Enough

You should be cognizant that thrusting your penis in a vagina and thrusting, even if you use some great thrusting techniques, may not be enough to make your partner climax.

Intercourse can and often does feel good, says Engle. But for the majority of women, she notes, the clitoris requires stimulation in order to orgasm

Dont Assume Every Woman Like the Same Things

A lot of guys have this woke bro script  you make out, you touchy-touchy, you go down on her, and then f*ck her, says Play. But not every woman enjoys all of those things or wants them always done like a script! It's good to be giving, yes, but learn to calibrate, ask for feedback, find out what she likes.

Dont Speed Up When She Gets Close

Guys have a tendency to think they need to speed up or change things around as their partner becomes aroused, says Lords. If your partner says, More! or Keep going! do not change what youre doing. Youve found the right spot, intensity and speed, and until she tells you differently, keep it up.

Dont Try to Jackhammer Her

Jackhammering is what you see in porn a lot, says Play. It's not that cervical stimulation isn't pleasurable, but that it's usually more pleasurable after she's already cum a few times. Her clit should already be engorged, she should be aroused and preferably you've given her a few orgasms before you go in like that.

RELATED: Porn Moves You Shouldnt Try in Real Sex

There are plenty of ways to move your hips aside from this aggressive, infamous porno move.

Try sliding in as slowly as possible and pulling out quickly, describes OReilly. Alternate between slow and fast movements. Curl your hips as you slide inside. Undulate your body gently and purposefully. Slide inside, hold still and let her move around to control the speed, depth and angle.

Dont Rush to Overwhelm Her Clit

Dont go straight for the goods! warns OReilly. We know youve found the clitoris, but you dont have to ring it like a doorbell. Instead, slide your hands all around the vulva. Paint figure eights over the lips. Cross your fingers and rotate as you slowly slide in at a shallow depth.

If Youre Struggling to Make a Woman Orgasm

One of the most embarrassing moments a guy can experience in bed is feeling like you cant properly please your partner. Worse than just the realization is the sense of pressure you can feel afterwards  the harder and harder you try to make it work, the more nervous you can get, and the situation becomes deeply unsexy for everyone involved.

But what exactly should you do if youre struggling to get your partner to cum?

Be Consistent

If she starts to have strong reactions (shaking, intense breathing, clenching her thighs around you) don't decide to change your technique then, says Play. The biggest complaint I've had women share with me is that their partner changes his motions at the exact wrong moment. So if she seems to like it, keep doing it!

Ask About What Feels Good...

Talk to your partner, says Lords. Ask what they need you to do, [whether] better or differently. Put your ego aside for this one. This is about giving your partner pleasure, and sometimes it requires hearing that the thing you always do with your tongue or hand doesnt work.

RELATED: How to Ask Questions in Bed in a Sexy Way

...But Dont Pester

Dont ask her over and over again, Did you come yet? advises OReilly. Pressure is the antithesis to pleasure. Its great that youre concerned about her experience, but there are more effective ways to ask for feedback.

According to her, questions like,

Do you like that? or

Do you want more?

are a better strategy.

Make Sure to Enjoy Yourself, Too

Tune into your own pleasure, says OReilly. Dont get so hung up on giving her an orgasm that youre not enjoying yourself. The more you relax, breathe and really indulge in the experience, the more likely she is to do the same. Breathe deeply and let your sounds flow without inhibition.

Try Different Positions

Spend time exploring and experimenting with each others bodies, suggests Lords. Its possible that a different sexual position or just a new way of approaching foreplay will lead to an orgasm, but youve got to be willing to try new things.

Try Sex Toys

Be open to the idea of sex toys, says Lords. Its not a replacement for you  its just a tool to add stimulation. While its working on her clit or G-spot, you can be doing a lot of other sexy things together.

Products to Make Her Orgasm

Lots of things in life can be solved with hard work and determination, but sometimes, a little technological boost doesnt hurt, either.

RELATED: The Best Sex Toys for Women, Revealed

If youre looking to spend some money on your partners orgasm, here are five great options to consider:

Womanizer Classic

Since clitoral pleasure is so central to many womens orgasms, if youre looking to buy her a toy thatll get her there, it makes sense to use a clitoral toy. Probably the best of the bunch right now is the Womanizer, which uses a patented airflow technology to stimulate the clitoris without overwhelming it. Lots of other brands have come to market with their own version of this concept, but the Womanizer Classic powerful vacuum-style suction is tough to beat. In addition to giving her quick, easy and repeatable orgasms, shes less much less likely to suffer from a sore clitoris afterwards, making this a great toy both for solo and couples play.

$129 at AdamEve.com

Adam & Eve Wand Massager

Before airflow tech, massage wand-style vibrators dominated the clitoral pleasure market, and for many theyre still the preferred choice. While theyre big and bulky compared to the slim and trim Womanizer-type toys, with that size comes serious power  and longer battery life. If your partners someone who needs a lot of stimulation to climax, a wand massager like this one from legendary sex toy retailer Adam & Eve might be the way to go. Its got dual speeds, a long handle and a spring head thats both comfortable and gentle so it doesnt totally destroy her.

$54.95 at AdamEve.com

Tracys Dog Vibrator

If shes looking for dual G-spot and clitoral pleasure, the uniquely named Tracys Dog vibrator could be just the thing for her. Its a toy that mixes the Womanizers clit-sucking airflow concept with a powerful internal vibrator featuring 10 different vibration patterns, meaning the clit and G-spot are in for some seriously simultaneous pleasure. Blended orgasms, anyone? The toys flexible enough to accomodate lots of different shapes and sizes, but for couples, its better suited to masturbation, anal or oral play, since the clit and vagina are pretty much spoken for when its in use.

$46.99 at Amazon.com

Swiss Navy Lubricant

One aspect of female pleasure that doesnt always get the discussion its due is lubrication. Because vaginas often secrete a lubricating agent during arousal, lots of people assume that thats enough  but it isnt for everyone, or in every case. If youre trying to make do with just your partners natural lubrication (and/or some saliva), you might be subjecting her to painful sex, which is almost always going to make it much harder to orgasm. Fix that ASAP with some lube, like this one from Swiss Navy, which comes in both water-based and silicone-based varieties. The former dries up more quickly but is toy-safe; the latter will stay slippery for longer, but shouldnt be used with silicone-based toys.

$27.99 at Amazon.com

OMGYES

If the issue with orgasms isnt a lack of products so much as a lack of confidence in your skills, maybe the place to turn is OMGYES, which believes it can teach any man the secret to female sexual pleasure. The company has been around for several years now, and bases its sexual intel on in-depth interviews with literally thousands of women. The site features beautiful, high-quality video content and a smartphone app to let you test your cunnilingus skills in an innovative new way.

Check it out at OMGYES.com

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Man's Oral Sex Skills Lead to Woman Suffering Stroke

An Intense Orgasm Landed a Lady in the Hospital

Sex can be a complicated thing, but for the most part, its rarely dangerous. However, for a British couple, oral sex resulted in a life-threatening situation that landed one of the two people involved in the hospital for 15 days.

According to a report by Dr. Jonathan Holmes and Dr. Yunus Gokdogan in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), an unidentified 44-year-old woman of West London lost consciousness, suffering a transient loss of consciousness (TLOC) while receiving oral sex. She was out cold for approximately two to three minutes when the man became concerned about the state she was in.

He brought her to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London emergency room, relaying to the doctors that during oral sex, he noticed his partners body going stiff. According to the woman, she had a headache, with pain rating a six out of 10.

RELATED: Your 101 Guide to Passing Female Anatomy With Flying Colors

Based on these details, the doctors suspected that the woman had suffered a seizure. However, after inspecting the situation further, they determined that she had suffered a reflex-mediated syncope. In non-scientific terms, thats a blackout that occurs when there is suddenly a lack of blood to the brain. The woman lost consciousness at the point of nearing orgasm from receiving oral sex, leading to an aneurysm and subarachnoid hemorrhage, which is a type of stroke.

While this might seem like a strange and unlikely situation, BMJ researchers said that orgasms causing a stroke can actually occur more often than youd think due to the increase in blood pressure upon climax. Activities that involve sudden increases in blood pressure and sexual activity is well described as a precipitant, it says in the report. Studies with intra-arterial monitoring during coitus demonstrate that during sexual activity blood pressure, as well as heart rate, is very labile, with particular rises during orgasm.

Although this occurs more often with people engaging in penetrative sex, the authors point out that oral sex could still have a similar effect. Older studies with [artery] monitoring during coitus demonstrate that during sexual activity blood pressure, as well as heart rate, is very [liable to change], with particular rises during orgasm, it says.

The womans treatment included an endovascular coiling  a catheter used to transmit a small coil which seals the aneurysm from blood flow.

According to the BMJ report, there have been numerous cases of TLOC that have varied in seriousness from benign to fatal. Fortunately, after a 15-day stay, the woman was released from the hospital and suffered no further problems.

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Rovers Search and Rescue have added an important piece of equipment to their kit  a drone to help them finding lost and missing persons.

The group began a fundraising effort in June 2018 for their new, top-of-the-line, unmanned aerial vehicle.

"From my background in the fire service I can see a lot of places this thing can be used, besides just looking for somebody," Harry Blackmore, SAR team coordinator, said Wednesday during a media conference in Paradise.

"But, it will save us some time. Especially looking for people down over the side of cliffs and everything else, where you can't get out over. Sometimes, as our weather is, you can't get out in boats."

The DJI Matric 210 RTK UAV, or drone, is equipped with two daytime cameras and an infrared camera for night searches, and is designed to fly in typical Newfoundland environments such as areas affected by electrical interference, wet environments, sub-zero temperatures and above-moderate wind speeds.

The drone itself cost more than $80,000, according to Blackmore, but Rovers SAR raised $78,000 in only two months after setting their initial target at $57,000.

The search and rescue group has two Transport Canada-certified pilots in their ranks to operate the drone, with one additional pilot with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary and another with the RCMP in Clarenville. The Rovers often team up with police units when called upon to search for a missing person.

Necessity

Helicopters and droves of volunteers searching for a missing person will often times create a lot of noise, said Blackmore. With the new drone, SAR can quickly and quietly scan an area where they believe someone may be hidden or injured.

Eddy Kennedy/CBC

"It makes it really good for us, especially when we're looking for runaway people," he said.

"This is nice and quiet, it streams everything back to our command post so we can see exactly what's on the ground."

A $5,000 drone could have been purchased in place of the more expensive unit, but Blackmore said the higher expenditure stems from a situation where SAR was searching for a young person with autism and the search carried into the night.

Story continues

The cameras were the selling point. There is no other helicopter in the province that has infrared capabilities, Blackmore said, adding that the daytime optical zoom camera can zoom in on Brigus from where Wednesday's demonstration was held in Paradise.

That's just over 75 kilometres in distance.

Another tool

Rovers SAR stressed that regular helicopters will not be forgotten. The drone is simply an addition to their fleet of vehicles.

"This is just another tool in our toolbox, and the technology that's with it is what we needed," said Blackmore.

"The cameras are the big thing."

Eddy Kennedy/CBC

The group will be able to assist other police detachments in other communities, and at the end of the day it's all about saving a life, he said.

"That's what this is all about, to be able to bring someone home safe and sound to their loved one," Blackmore said.

"Hopefully we don't have to use it, hopefully it's only in practice. But, we know very well that it will happen."

Read more articles from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador
By Benjamin Jumbe.

The NRM caucus chairperson and government Chief Whip Ruth Nankabirwa has defended the blocking of some party members from attending the ongoing retreat at the National Leadership Institute in Kyankwanzi.

It follows concerns raised over the partys move to exclude 6 of its members from attending the retreat on grounds of alleged indiscipline.

Addressing journalists at Kyankwanzi, Nankabirwa said those blocked abandoned the party and its colors, hobnobbing with the opposition and openly opposing party positions which could not be tolerated

Regarding the agenda, Nankabirwa was non-committal about the resolutions of the Central Executive Committee, including endorsement of president Musevenis sole candidature in 2021, but said if brought up it would be discussed.
By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The 1,000-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race ended in a predawn close finish on the snow-covered streets of Nome on Wednesday, with Alaskan Pete Kaiser and his dogs barely holding off defending champion Joar Leifseth Ulsom of Norway.

Kaiser, 31, reached the finish line just 12 minutes ahead of second-placed Leifseth Ulsom, 32, in one of the closest finishes in Iditarod history. It was Kaiser's first Iditarod win.

Crowds of cheering fans packed the city of Nome's Front Street to watch Kaiser and his team sprint under the wooden arch that marks the end of the 1,000-mile (1,609-km) Anchorage-to-Nome run.

His total elapsed time was nine days, 12 hours and 39:06 minutes. It was far from the record time of eight days, 3:40 hours, set two years ago by three-time champion Mitch Seavey.

Kaiser, who became the first Alaska Native musher since 2011 to win, pumped his arms into the air as he crossed the finish line, hugged his wife and small children and then reached into the crowd of well-wishers who had traveled from his southwestern Alaska hometown of Bethel.

He credited the victory to years of preparation, every little detail coming into play, and having a pinch of luck.

Im very, very fortunate to have the support system I have, the whole community of Bethel and the whole Kuskokwim River and all of western Alaska. Its extremely humbling and motivates me every day to perform to my best, he said at the finish line.

The finish line on Nomes Front Street was lined by big crowds who had braved Kaisers early arrival at 3:39 a.m. local time (7:39 a.m. EDT) amid stiff winds and blowing snow.

Warm conditions, with heavy and wet snow, occasional rain and stretches of open water in areas that are usually frozen over at this time of year, hampered the 52 mushers in the race who were slowed to a soggy slog.

For his victory, Kaiser will get $50,000, part of a total $500,000 prize purse, and a new truck.

Story continues

Until Monday, a different musher had been the frontrunner. French-born Nicolas Petit of Girdwood, Alaska, had a significant lead over his competitors until his dogs stopped on a section of the Bering Sea coastline about 200 miles (322 km) from Nome and refused to go on.

Petit dropped out of the race Monday night, sending his dogs off the trail by snowmobile.

Coming in third and fourth were the Iditarods top women, Jessie Royer of Fairbanks and Aliy Zirkle of Two Rivers, Alaska. Paige Drobny of Fairbanks was in seventh place, making this years Iditarod likely to be the first with three women in the top 10.

Close finishes of less than an hour apart are unusual in ultra-endurance races like the Iditarod, but they have happened before. The closest was in 1978, when Dick Mackey came in one second ahead of Rick Swenson, with a winning time of 14 days, 18 hours, 52:24 minutes, his lead dog's nose the first over the finish line, according to Iditarod records.

The Iditarod, run every year since 1973, commemorates a 1925 medical mission that has become part of Alaska legend. At the time, Nome was stricken by a deadly diphtheria outbreak, and the remote Gold Rush town could be reached only by dog sled. Officials used a dog-sled relay to ferry lifesaving medicine to the town.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen in Anchorage, Alaska, writing by Rich McKay and Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Scott Malone and Bernadette Baum)
Two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut have arrived at the International Space Station.

The trio consists of NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin.

This was the second attempt by Hague and Ovchinin to get to the ISS. They were originally scheduled to launch in October, but had to abort their mission after their Soyuz rocket had a booster separation malfunction.

The astronauts blasted off on a Russian Soyuz-MS-12 rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:14 p.m. ET. After two orbits around Earth, the Soyuz capsule docked with the ISS ahead of schedule, at 9:01 p.m. ET.

NASA

Once they are able to open the hatch to get inside the ISS, they will be met by Canadian David Saint-Jacques, who arrived on Dec. 3, as well as American Anne McClain and station commander Oleg Kononenko. The trio welcomed the first commercially built capsule  the SpaceX Crew Dragon  to dock with the station in the early hours of March 2.

Their arrival will mark the beginning of Expedition 59 (Saint-Jacques is part of 58 and 59).

In the meantime, two spacewalks are scheduled in the coming weeks: the first on March 22 with Anne McClain and Nick Hague. The next will take place on March 29 with Anne McClain and Christina Koch, the first all-woman spacewalk team.
A man has been arrested after a nurse was seriously injured in an attack Monday, allegedly by the husband of a patient, while she was working at the Dr.-Georges-L-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton, N.B.

Cpl. Jullie Rogers-Marsh, an RCMP spokesperson, confirmed Thursday that Codiac RCMP were called to the scene shortly after 2 p.m. AT on Monday and a 69-year-old man was arrested.

Earlier, CBC spoke to Norma Melanson, the nurse's mother, who said her daughter was attacked by the husband of a patient. Melanson said the man was upset his wife had been transferred from her room to an area closer to the nurses' station because she was suffering seizures.

The attack allegedly went on for 11 minutes in the nurse's office behind closed doors before security arrived. Melanson said her daughter told her he grabbed her from her chair, pulled out two handfuls of her hair, and struck her in the face and ribs.

"What she tells me was, 'I was sure I was going to die,'" Melanson said.

"Eleven minutes being struck by or hit by someone must be a long, long, long time."

The man was allegedly holding her by the throat when they were found, Melanson said.

What she tells me was "I was sure I was going to die." - Norma Melanson, nurse's mother

The nurse, who's a clinical resource nurse in the orthopedic clinic, was transported to the emergency room and treated for a brain contusion and a broken nose.

Rogers-Marsh said the victim was brought to hospital and later released.

No charges were laid against the 69-year-old man, who's from Acadieville. He was released on promise to appear in Moncton provincial court on June 4, and RCMP said the investigation is ongoing.

'My heart is full of tears'

Melanson said her daughter, who's 44, now suffers from headaches, nausea and vomiting due to a brain injury, and has two black eyes and a swelling near one eye. A brain scan revealed she had a concussion, and Melanson said she suffers from hemophilia.

Story continues

Melanson said she received a call from her son Monday around 4 p.m. telling her what happened.

Melanson hasn't visited her daughter yet, because her children are worried how seeing her condition will affect her. She has only recently been released from rehab herself, after undergoing open-heart surgery in Saint John. Melanson said she was hospitalized for 78 days and in a coma for 62, and is still using a walker to get around.

"She doesn't want me to be upset."

Still, Melanson said the whole family is distraught.

"My heart is full of tears."

Her daughter is currently being cared for at home, because she is afraid to be in the hospital.

"She thinks somebody is going to kill her and she wakes up with nightmares."

Melanson said she's worked in the nursing field for 52 years, but this attack on her daughter is something new.

"I've never seen such a savage, [brutally] battered person in all my life," she said.

Violence in the workplace unacceptable, union says

Paula Doucet, president of the New Brunswick Nurses Union, said in an email to Radio-Canada that staffing levels in hospitals can provoke tense situations.

"We know that our hospitals and other health care facilities are overcrowded and understaffed, increasing the risk of frustration and episodes of violence," Doucet said.

Union vice-president Maria Richard said new legislation that will be in effect on April 1 will require employers like hospitals to do risk assessments of violence in the workplace.

Radio-Canada

Richard said the nature of nurses' work makes them vulnerable because they deal with people in high-stress situations who can lash out verbally or physically.

"It seems to be that it's OK to yell and scream at people, and we need to shift that culture."

The legislation will amend the Occupational Health and Safety Act to cover violence in the workplace. Richard said New Brunswick is the last province to implement this kind of legislation. She said a study in 2017 showed 63 per cent of nurses in New Brunswick have experienced different types of workplace violence.

Vitalite Health Network said in an email statement that it has a zero-tolerance policy regarding violence in the workplace.

"We take each of these situations very seriously and provide support services to all affected employees," the statement said.

"Any incident in which a staff member is threatened, abused or assaulted is immediately reported and necessary actions are taken."
Reported crimes went up by 20.6 per cent last year compared to 2017 in Windsor.

There were 18,413 reported violations of the Criminal Code in 2018, while in 2017 there were 15,274.

Those numbers were released by Windsor Police Service in February.

Here's a breakdown for the types of offences in the city last year.

Property crime

39 arson offences  decrease of 13 per cent

2,133 break and enters/attempts  increase of 35 per cent

887 motor vehicle thefts/attempts  increase of 26 per cent

86 thefts over $5,000  increase of 23 per cent

4,327 thefts under $5,000  increase of 36 per cent

1,448 fraud offences  increase of 51 per cent

1,497 mischief offences  decrease of 9 per cent

Traffic-related crime

253 impaired driving charges  increase of 16 per cent

5,246 motor vehicle collisions  decrease of 5 per cent

Youth crime

358 youths involved in a crime  increase of 12 per cent

According to police chief Al Frederick, things are looking up.

"Internally we have made some huge adjustments," he said. "The changes we've made to both patrol and internal investigations is working."

Insurance on the rise?

With more crime like breaking-and-entering, people's insurance could be on the line. There was a 26 per cent increase in motor vehicle thefts and attempts last year.

Sanjay Maru/CBC

"Insurance companies look to make a profit in the market," said Dan Dupuis, insurance agent.

"And if they're losing money in a certain area, the rates for that area will go up, based on each peril, or based on what type of claim it is."

Even if you haven't made a claim in the past, your rates might still go up if the reported crime has gone up in your area, according to Dupuis.

Sometimes certain areas have so much crime that the rates for the areas would go up, "almost to the point where they wouldn't be allowed to have insurance," he said.

Sanjay Maru/CBC

Joseph Hayak finds that policy unfair.

He said some people are paying for what other people are doing with regards to making claims or committing crimes.

Story continues

"I'd like to say that just because crime rates are going up, we pay some of the highest insurance already in Ontario in Canada, so just as a whole it seems unnecessary," Hayak said.

His car insurance went up by $50 a month for 2019.

According to Dupuis, insurance companies get blamed whenever rates go up.

However, sometimes companies have to pay out on fraudulent insurance claims, which police don't always investigate.

"If they're not investigating the crime we all pay," he said.
The provincial and federal governments are investing in broadband infrastructure that will bring high-speed internet to more rural parts of P.E.I.

This project will deliver high-speed internet to almost 30,000 residents through a combination of fibre and fixed wireless technologies.

Bernadette Jordan, federal minister of rural and economic development, and P.E.I. Premier Wade MacLauchlan made the announcement at a news conference in Tracadie Cross on Friday.

The federal government is contributing more than $33.1 million and the provincial government more than $3.5 million. The remainder, more than $37 million, will come from Bell Canada and Xplornet.

The province says once complete, the project will create new potential for innovation and economic development, helping business owners connect with new markets, allowing better access to services, and providing students with the ability to broaden their studies.

'Building for the future'

It was just a few years ago that Xplornet received federal funding to connect more Islanders to high-speed internet. But the speeds Xplornet was contracted to provide don't meet newer benchmarks that have been set by the CRTC, of 50 megabits per second download speeds, and 10 megabits per second upload speeds.

"When we look at what happened in the past, that was in the past. We now have these standards that have to be met," said Jordan.

Tim Wimborne/Reuters

"It's something that we're building for the future. This isn't just about what's good right now, this is about how we're going to grow into the next 20, 30 years."

Latest in a number of commitments

The province also previously had a plan to build a $30 million internet "backbone" cable across the Island  but scrapped that project in 2018, opting instead for this new plan, to provide funding to companies that came up with their own ideas and will build their own infrastructure.

MacLauchlan defended the progress P.E.I. has made to date when it comes to high-speed internet.

Story continues

"Prince Edward Island has, as of today, a standard of internet service in rural communities  believe it or not  that is superior to other provinces. But where we want to go is to have tip-to-tip, in every community, and in these underserved households, a service that is, by 2021, superior to the current high standards set by the CRTC."

Sarah MacMillan/CBC

The province says the funding for Bell and Xplornet will be disbursed as the companies meet performance and construction milestones.

The province says close to 6,000 homes and businesses should have access to the improved services by the end of this year, with service for all 30,000 underserved addresses by the end of 2021.

More P.E.I. news
The images of bombs falling in crowded urban areas and children in peril have largely disappeared from newspapers and screens around the world, but that doesn't mean the war in Syria is over.

Far from it.

As the conflict drags into its ninth year on Friday, terror still rains down from the sky in the form of airstrikes, and gun battles continue to rage in several dusty, war-ravaged villages on opposite ends of Syria.

Fighting is nearly wrapping up in the eastern part of the country, as American-backed forces press on with their military operation to push ISIS fighters out of Baghouz.

But in the northwest, there are growing fears that an agreement aimed at bringing stability is falling apart, with aid groups increasingly worried about the fate of those living in Idlib province.

Through it all Syria's once-embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, has proven himself to be a survivor, ending up in the what seems to be the strongest position since the days in 2011 when the Arab Spring blew through the deserts of southern Syria in the form of youth-led protest.

Alaa al-Faqir/Reuters

But eight years after the conflict began, few talk of ending the crisis through political dialogue hammered out by "interested parties" gathered in the grand halls of European hotels. Lawyers in The Hague still document alleged war crimes, but as each day passes, the prospect of seeing Assad answering for the slaughter of so many of his citizens diminish.

Syria has largely disappeared from the headlines, but people continue to die every single day.

In fact, the United Nations reports that 2018 was the deadliest year for children, with 1,106 young people killed in the fighting.

"Children in parts of the country remain in as much danger as at any other time during the eight-year conflict," said UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore. "These are only the numbers that the UN has been able to verify, which means the true figures are likely much higher."

Story continues

Reuters

Children in the crossfire

Aid organizations long ago stopped counting the number of dead, but the most conservative of estimates puts the total number of those killed in Syria's long war at 400,000.

Syria's children have paid a particularly high price as war has raged around them. Who can forget the image of Alan Kurdi? The body of the three-year-old boy washed up on a beach in Turkey in 2015 as his family sought a better life in Canada.

More than two million have been displaced, along with their families, to neighbouring nations, where living conditions are often dire and education is scarce.

Inside Syria, according the the UN, there were 262 attacks against educational and health facilities last year, also a record.

These difficulties have led educational experts to warn of a "lost generation" of Syrian children, who simply will not have the learning skills taken for granted by young people around the world.

Nilufer Demir/AFP/Getty

"I compare it to to a Grade 3 student here in Canada, who'd be about eight years old, never having known peace," said Julie McKinlay, who leads the humanitarian and emergency affairs team for World Vision Canada. "That's a situation that children just shouldn't be be placed in."

"They just want to go to school, they want to have a safe place," McKinlay told CBC News. "They want to have food to eat."

Beyond the anti-ISIS fight

Parts of Syria are now safer, compared to years past. The global mission to rid ISIS from Syria has largely succeeded in pushing the group and its fighters from major urban centres in the country. The battle for Baghouz  the last rural area where militants remain  could be wrapped up shortly.

Still, there are concerns that pockets of ISIS men could remain in Syria, taking cover among civilians, especially in smaller towns and villages in the east.

But for many of those who watch Syria, the more pressing worry is what's happening in Idlib province, in the northwest.

Several militant and jihadist groups control the area, which is home to three million people.

World Vision Canada

An expected assault by Assad's military forces, to try to wrest back control of Idlib, was headed off by an agreement reached between Russia and Turkey in late 2018. But there are worries that this deal is already faltering. A recent upswing in fighting between the rebels and government forces has left scores dead, including at least 60 children.

Assad's future

It's unclear whether Assad, who's backed by both Russia and Iran, will try to regain control over the last pocket of resistance by trying to crush the opposition and jihadist forces in Idlib. For now, Russia seems to favour improving relations with Turkey, which have soured over Moscow's major role in the conflict.

Assad's days in the presidential palace seem more secure, but there are few who believe he will ever emerge again as the rightful leader of the country.

"There's always going to be a question mark  that the regime is not legitimate," said Kamrun Bokhari, a foreign policy analyst at the University of Ottawa. "It's there because the Russians and the Iranians are helping."

"Assad's regime  yes, it has won the war against the rebels  but it will never go back to being what it was."
Photo credit: Tom Brenner - Getty Images

From Esquire

The president* had a bit of a setback on Thursday, as the Congress suddenly discovered Article I of the United States Constitution at the bottom of its oatmeal bowl next to the bunny rabbit. First, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure stating its opinion that Robert Mueller's eventual report should be made public. From The New York Times:

Though the resolution is nonbinding and cannot force the Justice Department to take a particular action, Democrats who put it on the House floor are trying to build public pressure on Attorney General William P. Barr in advance of the investigations anticipated conclusion to share what Robert S. Mueller III produces. Far from standing in the way, Republicans joined Democrats en masse. On the 420-to-0 vote, four Republicans voted present.

This report must see the light of day, must be available to the American public for a catharsis that will allow us to start with the facts, understand what happened and begin to rebuild the faith of the American people, said Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, which has undertaken its own Russia investigation.

The Republicans apparently signed on under the political rubric of, "What, us worry?"

With wide bipartisan support the House has agreed: the American people deserve to know the truth about what, if anything, special counsel Mueller has uncovered, and now we should finally see this investigation come to a close, said Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking Republican, in a statement.

Considering that every investigator in the country except Illya Kuryakin has their teeth in the president*'s leg right now, and show no sign of letting go, this seems a bit blithe as to the future.

Photo credit: Pool - Getty Images

Meanwhile, down the clickety marble hallway, the Senate took a very binding vote in which it overturned resoundingly the president*'s phony national emergency at the southern border. From the Washington Post:

Story continues

The disapproval resolution passed the House last month, so the 59-41 Senate vote will send the measure to the Trumps desk. Trump has promised to use the first veto of his presidency to strike it down, and Congress does not have the votes to override the veto. VETO! Trump tweeted moments after the vote.

That's really not how you do it.

Twelve Republicans voted to reject the emergency declaration and, of course, they all had their own spin on why they did. For example, Marco Rubio voted to reject it because he's afraid some Democratic president is going to show up one morning and steal all his cows.

We have an emergency at our border, which is why I support the presidents use of forfeiture funds and counter-drug money to build a wall. However, I cannot support moving funds that Congress explicitly appropriated for construction and upgrades of our military bases. This would create a precedent a future president may abuse to jumpstart programs like the Green New Deal.

Among the Republicans who folded on their constitutional duty were Very Concerned Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who wrote a damn op-ed last month in the Post about how he couldn't go along with the president. But Tillis is up for re-election in 2020, and that's how tat goes.

(And it's a good thing Sasse is a Very Concerned Serious Person, because his statement explaining why he rolled over reads like it was written by drunken coatimundis. He wants Congress to regain the powers it has surrendered to the Executive, but not this way, or something.)

Photo credit: Tasos Katopodis - Getty Images

All of this comes after the Senate had given him another whack and voted to cut off US aid to Saudi Arabia's brutal campaign in Yemen. And if you think the president* is going to accept all this LOSING gracefully, well, consider the interview he gave to Breitbart on Thursday.

"So heres the thing-its so terrible whats happening, Trump said when asked by Breitbart News Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle about how the left is fighting hard. You know, the left plays a tougher game, its very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they dont play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump  I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough - until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress  with all this invest[igations]-thats all they want to do is you know, they do things that are nasty. Republicans never played this.

The president* is telling one of his favorite media outlets that he's prepared to use the police and the military against his political opposition, and even if he's just bloviating, what he's saying is an impeachable act all on its own. I'd like to believe that this is finally the first stirring of a general Republican uprising against being led by a vulgar talking yam, but I'm going to need more proof than a couple of votes.

After all, late in the afternoon on Thursday, the new normal reasserted itself. Senator Lindsey Graham objected, so that House resolution about making the Mueller report public died quietly without any debate at all. But Graham is willing to swing for it as long as the FBI investigates Hillary Clinton and her emails, and the whole country is insane now.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

('You Might Also Like',)
Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh. blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

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..Pundicity/JPost..15 March '19..With predictable petulance, the Palestinian leadership has been deliberately raising tensions on the Temple Mount, seeking to exploit the sensitive preelection season in Israel to further strengthen its hold on the holy site.In recent weeks, both in word and deed, the Palestinian Authority and the Jordanian-Palestinian Wakf Islamic religious trust have engaged in a reckless campaign of incitement and slander against the Jewish state that culminated in a fire-bomb attack on an Israel Police station on the Temple Mount on Tuesday.This latest escalation, coupled with the Wakf's repeated flouting of Israeli law, warrants a quick and firm response by the government to bolster Israel's sovereignty at the Jewish people's most sacred site.The trouble began anew last month, when thousands of Palestinians forced their way into a compound near the Gate of Mercy, or Golden Gate, on the Temple Mount, with the aim of turning it into a mosque. The area had been sealed by court order in 2003 to prevent the Wakf from carrying out illegal construction at the site and destroying priceless Jewish artifacts from the period when the Temple stood.After the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court said last week that it would issue another order empowering police to close the site, Wakf chairman Sheikh Abdelazeem Salhab defiantly vowed to ignore the ruling, and said the new mosque would "remain open for Muslims to pray."This brazen violation of the status quo on the Temple Mount was accompanied by vicious vitriol aimed at sparking acts of violence by Palestinians.Consider, for example, the remarks made by official PA spokesman Yousef al-Mahmoud, who asserted that Israel is seeking "to carry out its schemes to control al-Aqsa Mosque and obliterate the Arab features of Jerusalem." Fatah spokesman Osama Qawassmeh was equally harsh, warning, "Tampering with holy sites, especially al-Aqsa Mosque, is a direct call for violence."Yet, as a study published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on February 28 revealed, it is none other than the Palestinians themselves who are guilty of "tampering with holy sites."That study, by Nadav Shragai and Lenny Ben-David, underlines the extent to which the Wakf has been thumbing its nose at Israel and the status quo on the Temple Mount for decades.IN 1967, when Israel liberated the site, the report notes, "There was only one functioning mosque there."With the latest attempt by the Palestinians to transform the Gate of Mercy compound into another Muslim prayer area, the number of mosques on the Mount has now swelled to five."It has been the Muslim side," the report concludes, "that has been violating the status quo over the years on the Temple Mount." Israel, it correctly points out, "has shown helplessness and weakness in its way of dealing with the constant erosion by the Muslims of the status quo on the Temple Mount".It is time for such weakness to end. The Jewish people did not wait 19 centuries to return to the Temple Mount only to see control over the site slip through its fingers.While the government has taken steps in recent years to make it easier for Jews to visit the Temple Mount, with the number reaching over 30,000 in 2018, this is hardly sufficient to counter the ongoing attempts by the Palestinians to seize control over this sacred ground.Instead of giving in to the Wakf's threats and mischief, Israel needs to reassert its full sovereignty over the area. A good place to start would be to punish the Wakf by reducing its presence at the site, and stripping it of much of its power to decide what goes on there. It is simply absurd that a foreign body controlled by the Jordanian government and the Palestinian regime are allowed to administer the primary holy site in the heart of Jerusalem, even as it periodically whips up violence against Israel and Jews.Furthermore, the discriminatory practice of preventing Jews from praying on the Temple Mount must come to an end. Denying Jews their fundamental right to freedom of worship there for fear of offending Palestinian sensibilities is a stain on Israel's democracy.Through apathy and indecisiveness, successive governments have effectively allowed the Wakf to wreak havoc on the Temple Mount and erode Israeli rule.The latest crisis surrounding the Gate of Mercy compound presents the Jewish state with an opening to turn the tide of the past few decades, and send a clear and unequivocal message as to whom the Temple Mount truly belongs. One can only hope that this opportunity, like others before it, will not be squandered.
In addition to the fact that limousine travel is very glamorous, it is also the most comfortable trip you can...
By Ephraim Kasozi.

Ms Angella Chebet, the wife to socialite Sulaiman Kabangala Mbuga, aka, SK Mbuga, has been denied bail pending trial in connection with fraud accusations.

Justice Margret Tibulya of the Anti-Corruption Court dismissed Ms Chebets application for bail, reasoning that all five sureties presented were not substantial.

The sureties presented and their station of life is not appropriate to the bond required. Considering that the applicant (Chebet) jumped bail and fled another jurisdiction, the application is hereby disallowed, said Justice Tibulya in a ruling read by Chief Magistrate Pamela Lamunu Ocaya.

Ms Ocaya further remanded Ms Chebet to Luzira Prison until March 27 upon States submission that investigations into the case were still ongoing.

Ms Chebet is accused of defrauding millions of shillings from a Swedish national.

She is charged with six counts of obtaining money by false pretence and money laundering.

The court decision came after the state objected to Ms Chebets application, saying she is a flight risk after fleeing Sweden where she was granted bail pending trial.
Top News

As the international community grapples with the Omicron variant, the Bishop of Durham is calling on the UK government to "commit to redoubling efforts" to achieve vaccine equity.
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New Delhi, February 26, 2019The state government of Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir should reinstate its advertisements in two major local newspapers or provide an acceptable explanation concerning its decision not to do so, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The administration of Governor Satya Pal Malik, who runs the state government after the local political parties failed to form a government, stopped buying advertising space in two leading dailies, Greater Kashmir and the Kashmir Reader, beginning on February 16, according to The Telegraph newspaper.

Withholding government-funded advertising to specific newspapers in Jammu and Kashmir without a public explanation reeks of censorship, said Steven Butler, CPJ Asia program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. The government should not wield newspaper ad spending as a tool to influence the flow of information.

Sajjad Haider, editor of the Kashmir Observer newspaper and vice president of the Kashmir Editors Guild union, told CPJ that government advertising is a major source of revenue for newspapers in the state. In absence of a robust private sector, all newspapers are dependent on government advertisement, he said.

Several industry groups and political parties have opposed the move, according to the Kashmir Reader, including the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which said that the government was exerting financial pressure on the dailies in a futile attempt to manipulate the news narrative.

Other papers in the region continue to receive the government advertisements, a local newspaper editor explained to CPJ. The editor did not want to be named, fearing that the state government would retaliate by cutting advertisements to the paper where they work.

According to a statement issued by the editors guild on February 22, the newspapers were not formally informed of any reason for the advertisements removal.

A journalist at Greater Kashmir, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the paper, told CPJ that the decision looks to be part of the governments crackdown on reporting covering separatism in Jammu and Kashmir following a February 14 terror attack in the state.

CPJ was unable to reach the editor of Greater Kashmir for comment.

Speaking to the Indian Express, Kashmir Reader Chief Editor Hayat Mohammad Bhat also expressed surprise at this decision by the state government. He said that the papers manager was told by the Directorate of Information and Publicity in Srinagar that the directorate was ordered to hold back advertisements to the paper.

CPJ tried to reach Bhat directly but calls made to his number were not returned.

Gulzar Ahmed Shabnam, director of information and public relations for Jammu and Kashmir state, and Rohit Kansal, the governors spokesperson, did not reply to CPJs text messages requesting comment.

CPJs reporting has shown increasing restrictions on the press in Jammu and Kashmir. Earlier this month, Kashmir Narrator reporter Asif Sultan was charged under the anti-terror act. In January, the state government stopped journalists from covering a Republic Day function. In December, Reuters chief photographer in Delhi, Cathal McNaughton, was denied reentry into the country after he travelled to Jammu and Kashmir without government permission.
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Miami, March 15, 2019  Venezuelan authorities should conduct an urgent and thorough investigation into the violent assault of reporter Tomasz Surdel, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

Yesterday, Surdel, the Venezuela correspondent for Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, was driving through the Bello Monte district in Caracas when a group of armed men stopped his car, checked his identification, and proceeded to assault him, according to his employer and social media posts by local press freedom groups.

We are alarmed at the depth and pace of increasing violence and hostility to journalists working in Venezuela, and are gravely concerned about their safety, said CPJ Central and South America Program Coordinator Natalie Southwick in New York. Venezuelan authorities should immediately investigate the targeted assault on Tomasz Surdel and identify those responsible.

Armed men in black uniforms stopped Surdels car, asked for his identification documents, and then spoke on the radio with an unknown third party, Gazeta Wyborcza foreign desk head Bartosz Wielinski, who spoke with Surdel, told CPJ.

After the radio communication, the men asked Surdel to exit the car, placed a hood on his head, and proceeded to beat him in his face and ribs, Wielinski told CPJ. They then pointed a pistol into Surdels face and pulled the triggerrevealing that it was not loadedbefore leaving him lying in the street, Surdel told the Venezuelan Press Workers Union, the countrys media union.

Surdels face was swollen and he could hardly speak after the attack, but he did not experience any broken bones, according to Wielinski and Gazeta Wyborcza.

Wielinski told CPJ that Gazeta Wyborczas reporting on Venezuela has been highly critical of the Maduro government and that the newspaper has received complaints about its coverage from the Venezuelan embassy in Warsaw.

A press release from Gazeta Wyborcza described the attackers as members of the Venezuelan National Polices Special Action Forces, a commando unit of the police force. Gazeta Wyborcza did not provide any information to support this claim, and it could not be independently verified by CPJ.

CPJs calls to the Venezuelan prosecutors office, which is in charge of investigating crimes in the country, went unanswered.

Local and international journalists covering the ongoing political crisis in Venezuela have faced threats, harassment, and violence at the hands of multiple groups, including state security forces, protesters, and armed civilians, CPJ has documented.
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The Torch is a weekly newsletter from the Committee to Protect Journalists that brings you the latest press freedom and journalist safety news from around the world. Subscribe here.

In Saudi Arabia, journalist Zuhair Kutbi was arrested on unknown charges, and Eman Al Nafjan and Hatoon al-Fassi, two of the four female journalists critical of the ban on women driving whom Saudi authorities arrested last year, were tried. They appeared in court Wednesday on charges under the cybercrime law, including supporting hostile elements.

In Nigeria, journalists were detained, harassed, and assaulted during state elections on March 9.

CPJs China correspondent, Iris Hsu, explores how, by making little to no information available to the public about imprisoned journalists, Chinese authorities are better able to avoid being held to account for their actions against the press.

Global press freedom updates

Spotlight

At least 1,337 journalists have been killed while covering the news since 1992. Their names form The Last Column logo. (Last Column/CPJ)

This week CPJ launched The Last Column, a book and digital campaign that highlights the human cost of reporting the news. The book collects the final works of 24 journalists killed in connection to their work, and includes videos and a podcast.

The project also ties into CPJs Global Campaign Against Impunity, which advocates for justice and an end to the impunity endemic to murders of journalists. Learn more about the project in Time and Al Jazeera. Join the conversation using the hashtag #LastColumn.

What we are reading

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Do you have an Amazon Alexa-enabled device? Enable CPJ's flash briefing skill to stay up to date with the latest press freedom news from around the world.
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The Committee to Protect Journalists this week joined at least 79 rights organizations to urge African Union and United Nations experts to take action to end the government of Chads nearly year-long block on social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp. The letters, addressed respectively to the African Union Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, emphasized how network disruptions limit the ability of journalists to report safely and for citizens to access information, among other consequences.

We have to circumvent censorship on social networks using virtual private networks [VPNs].Journalists have to wriggle for hours to post articles online, Moussa Nguedmbaye, editorial coordinator for the privately owned, Ndjamena-based news website Tchad Infos, told CPJ in January 2019. Social networks are a way to reach the most readers.Before the block on social networks, each article reached four to five thousand readers. With this block we do not even reach two thousand. The blockage really reduced the traffic.

The letters to the special rapporteurs can be found here: African Union Special Rapporteur Lawrence Murugu Mute and UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye.
Africa-India Joint Field Training Exercise (AFINDEX-19) between the Indian Army and 16 African nations will be conducted in Pune from March 18 to 27.

Features of AFINDEX-19

10 personnel, each from the participating nations from the African continent and personnel of Maratha Light Infantry of the Indian Army will participate in the joint exercise.

The joint exercise would be held at Punes Foreign Training Node at Aundh Military Station and College of Military Engineering in Kirkee.

AFINDEX-19 aims to train the participating contingents in Humanitarian Mine Assistance (HMA) and Peace Keeping Operations (PKO) under the United Nations Charter through practical and comprehensive discussions and tactical exercises

Contingents from Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia, Mozambique, Uganda, Niger & Zambia are part of the joint exercise together with officers from Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Madagascar as Observers.

The joint exercise will also focus on achieving interoperability, learning each others methodologies and tactics through synchronised operational level planning and tactical level training.

The joint exercise will also cover the dynamics of raising a Mission headquarters, nuances of establishing military observer team sites in disturbed

AFINDEX-19 is expected to greatly facilitate sharing of Indian Armed Forces experiences in United Nations Peace Keeping operations with countries in Africa and shall significantly enhance relations with the African continent.
Question: Regarding my posts about the terrible perversion of Torah and halacha that Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky has engineered with his prod...

lt is clear that no one in the world has the authority to establish guilt  anyone without both [the accuser and accused] coming ...

Important!! email - yadmoshe@gmail.com
The federal judge who shot down a Medicaid work requirement plan last June remained deeply skeptical Thursday of the Trump administration's renewed strategy to force enrollees to work.U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who last year blocked Kentucky's work requirement, heard testimony on a revised federal approval. He also had a hearing on Arkansas' Medicaid work requirement  which took effect last July and has led to 18,000 Medicaid enrollees losing coverage.After the court hearings in Washington, Boasberg said he would rule on both states' programs by April 1, which is when the next round of Arkansas enrollees could be kicked off the program. Kentucky plans to implement its work requirement this summer.A ruling against a work requirement would have vast repercussions in more than a dozen other states that have been approved for new work requirements in Medicaid, the federal-state health program, or are seeking them from the Trump administration.Throughout the two-hour-long hearings, Boasberg questioned Justice Department lawyer James Burnham on whether the work requirement plans approved by the Trump administration were helping to achieve Medicaid's goal of promoting health coverage.When Burnham argued that work requirements would give people incentives to find work and improve their lives, Boasberg interjected: 'That is not the purpose of Medicaid.'On Capitol Hill, Democrats grilled Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar about the work requirements. Azar testified this week before three separate committees, two in the House and one in the Senate, on the administration's budget request for the department.Addressing the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, Azar disputed the idea that everyone who lost Medicaid in Arkansas was now uninsured. 'Only 1,000 of those 18,000 people appealed' their loss of Medicaid, he said. 'Only 1,452 of those 18,000 even reapplied for Medicaid when open enrollment came again.'Azar said that 'seems a fairly strong indication' that the rest of those cut from the program 'got a job and insurance elsewhere.'Top health officials for the Trump administration have said getting people on Medicaid into jobs will make them healthier  which they call a key goal of the program.States can implement work requirements since Congress has given the HHS secretary permission to approve their experiments with the Medicaid program, the administration asserts.But advocates for the poor say an experiment that leaves thousands of people without coverage runs counter to Medicaid's aim to improve access to health care.In his rulinglast year, Boasberg, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said Azar's approval of Kentucky's plan failed to consider whether the strategy would 'help the state furnish medical assistance to its citizens, a central objective of Medicaid.' He said promoting health generally or helping someone get a job was not the point of the state-federal program created in 1965.Kentucky last year became the first state to win federal approval for its proposal requiring that certain Medicaid recipients work, go to school or fulfill community service. After Boasberg's ruling last June, the state filed a new waiver application seeking to meet the judge's requirements, and the Trump administration approved it.Federal officials have approved work requirement proposals in seven states Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire and Wisconsin. In each of those states, the requirements would apply only to people who gained Medicaid coverage under the expansion promoted by the Affordable Care Act. Ten other states Alabama, Kansas, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia  also have requested approval. Some of those states have not expanded Medicaid and are seeking to add work requirements to their regular programs.Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, has threatened to scrap the Medicaid expansion unless his state is allowed to proceed with the new rules, a move that would cause the more than 400,000 new enrollees to lose their coverage. He said the work requirement will help move some adults off the program so the state has enough money to help others on the program.Boasberg questioned whether the state has proven its case to the federal government that it needs work requirements to keep its Medicaid program financially sustainable. 'At the end of the day, isn't the centerpiece of your case the fiscal sustainability argument?' Boasberg asked the Trump administration's lawyer.Burnham argued neither Kentucky nor Arkansas was kicking people off their programs and causing them to lose benefits. He said people were just choosing to not comply with the state's new reporting requirements to show they were working, doing volunteer work or meeting one of the states' exceptions.Ian Gershengorn, a lawyer representing the National Health Law Program and other plaintiffs trying to overturn the work requirements, said Kentucky's financial sustainability argument 'seems absurd' because the federal government this year is paying 94 percent of the costs for the Medicaid expansion population.He said HHS should not be approving Kentucky's waiver based on the governor threatening to kill the entire Medicaid expansion if he doesn't get work requirement authority.Gershengorn said Azar cannot argue in approving Kentucky's waiver that he has no idea how many people would lose coverage since the Arkansas experience already shows thousands lost Medicaid coverage.The Kaiser Family Foundation has estimatedthat 1.4 million to 4 million Americans could lose their coverage if work requirements were imposed nationwide. Most of the coverage losses would result from enrollees failing to report their compliance to the state, not because they were failing to fulfill the work or job search criteria. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)The Justice Department attorney tried to show the difference between the first Kentucky approval in January 2018 and the second one made last November was that the HHS secretary analyzed what effect the experiment would have on health coverage. He said keeping the Kentucky program would ensure the expansion stayed in place as well as give adult enrollees access to vision and dental coverage.But Gershengorn argued the difference between the two approvals is that the state and the federal government now know the implications work requirements can have on enrollees.'There is massive harm,' Gershengorn said. 'It is not speculative.KHN chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner contributed to this report.
A professional juggler who lost his job on an Australian cruise ship while jailed in the US in a bizarre case of mistaken identity has successfully sued police.Two rural Nevada counties have agreed to pay 56-year-old Sean Laughlin $US250,000 ($353,000) after jailing him for 18 days in 2016 for a burglary he didn't commit.'Sean certainly deserves it,' Mr Laughlin's lawyer, Terri Keyser-Cooper, said.'He spent 18 days locked up for something he didn't do, lost his job with the cruise company  a gig he had had since 1991  and nearly went out of his mind.'The American entertainer's ordeal began in December 2016 when a state trooper stopped him for a minor traffic offence in Carson City.A routine warrant check showed that a Sean Laughlin was wanted for failing to appear in court for a residential burglary in Pahrump, 620 kilometres away.Police said the theft occurred in March 2016. Jewellery, used women's clothing, DVDs, and an electric screwdriver, totalling about $US4000 ($5656), were taken.Mr Laughlin told police he was in Australia when the crime happened, as he was contracted to perform on the Royal Caribbean 'Voyager', his lawsuit states.The cruise began in Brisbane and ended in Sydney, and 'there was no opportunity for Laughlin to leave the ship to fly to America to steal used clothing', the lawsuit says.He also insisted he had no criminal record, had never been to Pahrump and had not received a summons.But he was booked into jail where his bail rose as high as $US675,000 ($954,000) before he was set free 18 days later with no explanation and without ever seeing a lawyer.He filed a lawsuit in US District Court in Reno in October against Nye and Lyon counties, accusing them of violating his constitutional due process rights and Nevada law requiring that jailed suspects see a judge within 72 hours.Mr Laughlin won, with US Magistrate Robert McQuaid Jr approving the settlement on February 7.Lawyers representing the two counties did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Throughout his incarceration, Mr Laughlin protested almost daily to deputies, inmates  'anyone who might listen,' the lawsuit said.The lawsuit said if he'd been able to go before a judge as required, he could have shown he was the victim of misidentification, had been overseas when the burglary occurred, and never received a summons.
Bangladesh: Blue economy to help building developed BD

March 15,2019 | Source: Daily Industry

Experts have underscored the need for utilising the resources of blue economy with a view to bolstering countrys economy. The prospects of sea-based economy to promote Bangladesh in a middle-income country through the sustainable use of marine resources, they said. Considering this, the government wants more prosperity in blue economy by this year. To fulfill this target, long term investment is essential, say specialists. In the Bay of Bengal, the country has a total of 121,110 square kilometers marine area including Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). With the marking of the maritime boundary, the government is now poised to formulate policies and mobilize resources. Blue Economy is one of the important tools available for achieving sustainable development goals (SGDs) for the country. Bangladesh being a coastal as well as reverie country depends heavily on its international shipping for the purpose of foreign trade. Experts however opined that if the sea bed is properly used then by 2030, around 5 percent of GDP will be earned from ocean economy.



At present, most of the countries are becoming very much concerned about their marine resources to resolve many of the present and future challenges of their economies. In Bangladesh, ocean is contributing a significant role to its overall socio-economic progress through rising up the economic activities across the country and especially to the coastal zone.

There is a need to mainstream the oceans economy into future Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). This effort should go beyond the previous Millennium Development Goal (MDG), they said.



The Blue Economy is visualised as the integration of ocean economy development with the principles of social inclusion, environmental sustainability and innovative, dynamic business models. The blue economy can be defined as sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs and ocean ecosystem health. Contribution of oceans and seas (as well as rivers, waterways and estuaries) in sustainable development is undeniable, they mentioned. A large sea area with 75 islands have been added to the Bangladesh maritime border and specialists feel that these should be developed as tourist spots along with investment in other areas.



Former chairman of Bangladesh Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, (BCSIR), Professor Dr. S M Emamul Huq, says, Bangladesh, being a country of having more than 165 million people, can add another sector to the list if it can exploit the vast potentials of blue economy. Saying that several countries are eager to be associated with blue economy, he added, if expected minerals are accumulated then Bangladesh economy will reach unprecedented heights in ten years.



The delimitation of sea boundary with Myanmar and India has indeed opened up a new window of opportunities in terms of harnessing resources and enhancing existing external trade, he added. Several reports made by the ministry of science and technology inform that there are at least 13 spots in the Bay of Bengal which contain valuable sand, Uranium and Thorium. Bay of Bengal contributes 16 percent of the worlds fish production which can be increased by adopting necessary steps. Around 30 million people are engaged in the ocean based fish industry.



Rightly using the resources of the sea will open up possibilities of renewable energy. Economists say that the usage of ocean side wind power is rising by 40 percent and this can be explored by Bangladesh. There is also a huge possibility in the development of ocean based fishing industry since Bangladeshi fishermen are catching large amount of Tuna and other popular varieties from the deep seas. An official of the ministry of aviation and tourism says, The government is devoted to the expansion of the tourism industry and has already adopted plans to beautify several archeological sites across the country.



Oceans besides has provide a substantial portion of the global population with food and livelihoods. The marine and coastal environment also constitutes a key resource for the significant global tourism industry and expanding domain of nature-based tourism. Blue economy is a much used phrase these days internationally, he added. Former finance and planning adviser to the caretaker government, Dr ABM Mirza Azizul Islam, said, The concept of the oceans economy also referred to as the blue economy is one that simultaneously promotes economic growth, environmental sustainability, social inclusion and the strengthening of oceans ecosystems.
Bangladesh: Dead rivers tell many tales

by Toriqul Islam

March 15,2019 | Source: Prothom Alo

Dead men tell no tales, but rivers do. Bangladeshs rivers, a large number of which have already been killed with the remaining survivors crawling towards death, tell so many tales - tales of crooked politics, spiralling transportation costs, of waning productivity and of a dying ecosystem. Each of Bangladesh's rivers has a story, too, entwined in love and tragedy. The rivers, over a thousand rivers, began with a fairy tale, forming this unique and fertile deltaic land, but in course time, most of them have died a miserable death. Today, the skeletons of the rivers leave so many inglorious stories behind.



The sheer volume of the atrocities which the rivers in this country have had to face, is staggering. A few recent offences against the rivers, especially against the two major rivers -- Buriganga and Karnaphuli, lifelines of the capital city, Dhaka, and business capital, Chattogram respectively -- are recapitulated here to portray the gravity of the situation. The pollution and encroachment of the rivers have already hit rock-bottom.



Statistics say in the last 567 months since the independence, Bangladesh has lost more than three-fourths of the cheapest and easiest navigable waterways. The country had approximately 24,000 km of inland waterways after the independence. However, because of constant pollution, encroachment and scarcity of water, Bangladesh now has 3,865 km of navigable waterways during the dry season and 5,968 km during the rainy season. This is declining every year. These are just numerical facts.



The real-life experiences are worse. After visiting 160 rivers in Bangladeshs northern region Rangpur, Begum Rokeya University teacher Tuhin Wadud, also a national river activist, wrote in Prothom Alo in February this year that of 160 rivers, some are choked by encroachment, some are ploughed for farming crops while some are simply falling prey to the governments development initiatives. The rivers are either grabbed by political parties or local powerful people (Prothom Alo 18 February 2019). He discovered more than 200 rivers in Rangpur division, though Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) found only 82 names in the division out of 405 rivers of the country. Another Prothom Alo report on the same day read that Rajshahis nine rivers - Narad, Shandya, Swaramangala, Doya, Barahi, Hoja, Nabaganaga, Chinarkup and Musakhan - have been killed in the name of flood protection.



Eight days after the report, another one cropped up in Prothom Alo, reading, Dhanshiri is dead. A photo of the 130-km river shows the dried-up bed of the river. The river Dhanshiri has been immortal for Jibanandas poem Abar Ashibo Phire, where he wrote Abar Ashibo Phire Dhanshiriti Tire, Ei Banglay. These are just some random instances. Atrocities against rivers are now an everyday phenomenon.



At the end of the January this year, the government began a drive to clear up the dying river Buriganga, following a court order. The number of encroachers and structures built on the banks of the river reveal the intensity of the danger. From households to business groups to politicians, everyone was on the list of polluters and encroachers.



Between 29 January and 7 February this year, the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authorities (BIWTA) demolished nearly 1,200 illegal structures on the banks of Buriganga. Most of the illegal encroachers were either politicians or powerful businessmen. The authorities found 175 encroachers along 12 kilometres of the Buriganga stretching between Kamrangichar and Pangaon in the old part of Dhaka. The list of the encroachers includes MPs from both ruling and opposition parties and local politicians while the structures comprise illegal dockyards, residential buildings, warehouses and industries.



Coincidently, following a separate court order, the administration in Chattogram launched an eviction drive on the banks of Karnaphuli. The river is one of the major streams for Bangladesh as well as for the business capital both economically and ecologically. In 2015, the Chattogram district administration made a list of 2,122 illegal structures. The structures include illegal jetties, dockyards, shops, hotels, garages and even clubs. From youth groups to petty rich to business conglomerates to politicians, every stakeholder of the society was on the grabbers list.



The pollution data of the Buriganga is even more frightening. Three years ago, the Environment Department estimates that 60,000 cumecs (cubic metre per second) of toxic water, mostly from dying and washing factories, was emitted into the Buriganga water. According to Keraniganj Washing Owners Association, each of the factories in the area use 25-30 thousands of litres of water per day. As per the calculation, 1.8 million litres of toxic water was discharged into the Buriganga from the area alone. In addition, households on the banks discharge 900 cumecs untreated wastewater into the Buriganga every day. These are not stories of Buriganga and Karnaphuli alone. All rivers, especially the rivers along the cities, are now in the same state.



The results are very much expected. The dying rivers have ranked Bangladeshs capital the worst livable place in the world and put the country in front of some harsh realities. Its transportation costs have been scaled up while the productivity of its soil has significantly decreased. Its ecosystem has already reached the boundaries of no return.



In a study in May 2009 on Ecological Health Risk of Buriganga river, a couple of Khulna University researchers came up with some scary findings. For suitability of aquatic animals, the water in a river should have a minimum balanced temperature, hardness, Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), Phosphate (PO4-3), and Dissolved Oxygen (DO) and a few other factors. But, the Dhaka river has failed to meet any of the criteria to become a safe habitat for aquatic animals. This aquatic environment of the river has rendered it no longer livable for aquatics.



Other rivers -- Balu, Sitalakhhya and Turag -- in and around Dhaka are no exception. The rivers have already ceased to be habitats for fish, other aquatic life and plants, whereas they were once replete with a wide variety of native fish such as bowal, chital apart from dolphin, crab and other aquatic animals (The New Age, 23 March 2017).



The productivity of the affected areas has significantly decreased. The World Bank in a study titled People's Republic of Bangladesh Revival of Inland Water Transport: Options and Strategies found in polluted areas, some 45% of households report persistent losses in the production of rice, and more than 20% are experiencing production losses in vegetable crops. It is estimated that agricultural and fisheries production in the Dhaka Statistical Metropolitan Area (DSMA) may be reduced by about one third as a result of poor water quality.



The pollution has significantly upped costs by 22% for industries and 40% for the health sector. The World Bank shows a comparative carrying cost between waterways, the railway and road transportation. IWT tariffs for cargo are below Tk 1 per ton-km whereas the tarrifs are around Tk 4.5 for road while rail tariffs up to Tk 4. The study reads the tariff to transport a 20-foot container, for instance, is around Tk 600 per ton by IWT, compared to Tk 1,200 for rail and Tk 6,000 for road.



Following the persistent threats, in September 2009, the government declared Buriganga, Sitalakhaya, Turag and Balu rivers as Ecologically Critical Areas (ECAs). The BIWTA has launched a hotline to save rivers from pollution and encroachment in February this year.



Bangladeshs apex court made history declaring the rivers of the country living beings on January 30 this year. Through the courts order, the rivers have been declared a juristic or legal person. It means the rivers have been given fundamental rights like human being (BBC, 31 January 2019). This is a third court verdict in this kind in the history of humankind followed by New Zealand and India.



But, none of the efforts could save the rivers. While the eviction continues in Buriganga, pollution continues too as does the grabbing in the other parts of the river and on the banks of other rivers. The rivers and their impact are so extensive that a single course of action, a particular authority or a certain community is not enough to put up an effective fight against the carnage. The problem is recurrent, so the action should be relentless. The action should come from every corner of society and from each and every one of us.
Pakistan: Sindhs fish exports could be increased to $300 million, says minister

March 15,2019 | Source: The International News

Sindh Minister for Livestock and Fisheries Abdul Bari Pitafi has said sea food has the potential to increase the revenue of the country as the province alone could export fish of up to $300 million. This he said during a meeting with Consul General of Thailand Thatree Chauvachata on Thursday. Minister for Education & Culture Syed Sardar Shah, PPP MPA Qasim Siraj Soomro and other officials of the consulate were also present during the meeting.



Pitafi further stated that at present the fish exports to Thailand were worth around 150 million dollars, but they could be increased up to $300 million as Sindh had so much potential . He further stated that the provincial government was working to improve the Karachi Fish Harbour to upgrade to the international and European Unions standards, and that would help the country boost its exports of sea food.



The Thai counsel general stated that the government of Thailand would fully support the Sindh governments initiative and provide all technical support to the provincial authorities to increase its fish exports. Afterwards, the minister presented an Ajrak and a Sindhi cap to the Thai consul general.
The High Court in Botswana on Thursday started hearing an application seeking to decriminalize homosexuality, in a landmark case for Africas legal response to same-sex relationships.





Botswana is touted as one of Africas most democratic nations, yet homosexuality is outlawed under the countrys penal code of 1965.





An unnamed applicant is challenging two sections of that code under which offenders face a jail sentence of up to seven years.





These sections limit me to interact with others who identify in the same way for fear of imprisonment, said the applicant in documents read by lawyer Gosego Lekgowe in the High Court in Gaborone.





We are not looking for people to agree with homosexuality but to be tolerant, said the applicant identified by their initials LM.





Scrapping the relevant laws would help gays and lesbians to more easily access health care and treatment, and will also affirm basic human rights and the diversity of the Botswana nation, said the argument.





Botswana has slowly become more tolerant of homosexuality in recent years.





In 2016 the countrys appeal court ruled that the government was wrong to refuse to register an organisation that represents homosexuals and other minority sexual groups.





Activists had launched the legal battle after the Home Affairs ministry rejected an application to register the Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals of Botswana (LEGABIBO) organisation.





Lawyer Lekgowe said public opinion on same-sex relationships had evolved and employment laws now even outlaw discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.





President Mokgweetsi Masisi previously addressed a meeting on gender-based violence saying there are many people of same sex relationships in this country who have been violated and have also suffered in silence.





Just like other citizens, they deserve to have their rights protected, said the president at the December gathering.





Twenty-eight out of 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have laws penalizing same-sex relationships, according to Neela Ghoshal, a specialist in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights at the Human Rights Watch group.





The death penalty is on the books, under sharia, in Mauritania, Sudan and northern Nigeria, although there have been no known executions in recent times.





In southern Somalia, gay men are believed to have been put to death in territory ruled by the Al Shabaab jihadist group.





However, Angola, Mozambique and Seychelles have scrapped anti-gay laws in recent years, and the High Court in Nairobi is mulling whether Kenya follows suit.

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

Agence France-Presse, Staff, March 14, 2019
New birth certificate to list Jason as Jessica





DESERT HOT SPRINGS, Calif. - Documents just filed in Marin County, California show Jason Michael Hann is now known as Jessica Marie Hann, and is now a female "to match my gender identity."









California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Health Care Communications Chief Liz Gransee said as of February 2019, "10 patients statewide have been approved for gender-affirming surgery." Due to HIPPA guidelines, she could not comment on specific inmates.





Hann's changing mugshots reflect his transition from male to female, the gender now indicated on her birth certificate.





On Feb. 21, 2014, an Indio judge sentenced then 40 year old Jason Hann to death for killing his infant daughter, named Montana, in 2001.





At the time, Hann and Montana's mother, Krissy Lynn Werntz, now 39, were living in Desert Hot Springs.





Montana's body was found in a Tupperware container wrapped in a plastic trash bag in an abandoned storage trailer the couple had left in Arkansas.





The couple was arrested in Portland, Maine, where they were living with another son, who was suffering from life threatening injuries. That son was taken into foster care and later adopted.





The couple's arrest led authorities to find the body of a second infant in a trailer in Arizona.





Authorities determined that the boy had been killed before their daughter Montana, at some point when the couple was living in Vermont.





Hann was convicted first in Vermont, and extradited to Indio, where a jury recommended the death penalty.





"These kids never had a chance at life so it was more than deserved, and I think he tried to cover up the crime as well," said alternate juror Bob Price.





A prison spokesperson said "The Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution requires that prisons provide medically necessary treatment for inmates' medical needs." California was the first state to pay for prisoner's sex reassignment surgery.





Hann in still in custody at San Quentin, which is a male-only facility, and she is allowed personal property items in accordance with her gender identity, such as a bra, hair rollers, or makeup.





Werntz was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for her role in Montana's death. She is housed at Chowchilla, but some part of her case is being heard Friday in Indio.





Hann's attorney did not return a call for comment.

 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com



Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!





"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde




For anyone who thinks Maddow is only good for explaining complicated Putin-Gate conspiracy theories and related judicial developments, the video above is one of her best-ever segments... and unrelated to Putin-Gate. This is Maddow at her very best-- and probably started a ball rolling that put enough pressure on Trump for him to order the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max 8 jets "immediately." Key points about the two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8:

 American pilots have been "describing the same sort of difficulty on take-off, the same specific problem where they are ascending after take off, rising towards the cursing altitude when something in the automated systems in that plane basically takes over and pulls the nose down."

 Although most other countries have banned the Boeing 737 MAX 8, our FAA issued a statement: "This far, our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft."

 This could happen at anytime and "it just makes you wish and hope and pray for competency and capacity in the leadership you've got that has to deal with a crisis like this at all levels. This is the sort of thing that makes you want really good, really smart, really qualified people in place-- when a crisis like this arises. With this particular crisis happening now, at this point in our country, of course, we have some novel concerns right now in our country that we might not necessarily have with any other president in place... For example-- that statement from the FAA today, saying everything's fine as far as they can tell... no need to worry... That statement was put out in the name of the acting FAA administrator, Daniel K. Elwell... Why do we still have an acting FAA Administrator? ... President Trump had wanted to install as the Administrator of the FAA [a year ago] his own personal pilot, the guy who flies the Trump plane. Not Air Force One-- no, the one that says "Trump" on it.

 "Boeing has, in the works, a software fix that they believe will address that problem in these planes... a way to fix the accidental nose-dive problem... The fix had been expected early in January... U.S. officials have said that the federal government's recent shutdown also halted the work on the fix entirely for 5 weeks."





So why is this important? Is a picture still worth a thousand words? How about two-thousand with a caption? Or one-thousand five hundred words if the caption is in French?

This is how presidential candidate Marianne Williamson addressed the Boeing scandal in a note to her supporters this afternoon:




Trump's first choice for college was the University of Southern California, where he wanted to study film-making. He was rejected and wound up going to a much easier school to get into, Fordham. But what people have always wondered is how did Trump get into the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in 1966 after he flunked out of Fordham? Trump has often used his Wharton pedigree as a way of defending his ignorance and stupidity. He claimed on Meet The Press that Wharton is "probably the hardest there is to get into... Some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton." One Trump biographer, biographer, Gwenda Blair, wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton as a special favor from a "friendly" admissions officer, a former high school classmate of his older brother, Freddy. For decades there have been vague rumors that money changed hands to get the intellectually lazy and academically anemic Trump into a top school.





A friend of mine was Jared Kushner's high school tutor. This friend told me that he was a very poor student at a Paramus Orthodox yeshiva high school and would have been lucky to be accepted at any decent college. With his subpar GPA and poor SAT scores, an Ivy League school like Harvard was out of the question. And yet... in 1999, there he was at Harvard Yard. His father, crooked real estate developer and Trump crony Charles Kushner, who was sentenced to 2 years in prison on an array of stunning corruption charges, had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard a few months earlier. (His other son, Joshua, was also enrolled at Harvard but I don't know if he's as dumb as Jared.)





There were other kids at his school who were far more qualified but who were rejected that year. The admissions officers were dismayed-- and my friend, the tutor, was sickened.





I didn't go to an Ivy League school. I was accepted at Cornell but the scholarship they offered-- basically tuition-- wasn't enough for me to afford to go there. I went to a state university instead, but the best one in the New York system, and not academically easy to get into. My roommate was one of the dumbest people I ever ever met-- a nice guy, for sure, but I knew within a week he didn't get into the school based on his high school performance. I didn't care; he paid me to write his papers. The A grades on the papers didn't match up with the rest of his work (F grades, not Ds) and he didn't complete the semester. I asked him how he got in and he told me his mom worked for his hometown's school system and she had altered his records. Wow! Over 50 years later and we have a breaking story in the headlines about how college admissions are still rigged for the rich and well-connected.





Yesterday Chuck Todd and his crew noted how the scandal is playing into the Democratic nomination battle, although there was no mention of Joe Biden's well known propensity to cheat on tests and steal other people's work. Instead, Team Todd reported on how the current scandal "underscores the divide between the haves and have-nots" and how it "plays into the hands of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who have made erasing this divide a central message in their campaigns," namely Bernie, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.

Here was Elizabeth Warren in her campaign launch: Today, millions and millions and millions of American families are  struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged by the wealthy and the well-connected. Hard-working people are up against a small group that holds far too much power, not just in our economy, but also in our democracy.



Here was Bernie Sanders in his first rally as a 2020 candidate: We will no longer accept 46 percent of all new income going to the top 1 percent, while millions of Americans are forced to work 2 or 3 jobs just to survive and over half of our people live paycheck to paycheck.



Here was Kamala Harris in her CNN town hall: The people of our country, the families of our country, deserve to have leaders who are focused on their needs  as opposed  [to] helping the richest people and the biggest corporations.



But the story also might play with Trump voters who think college is rigged, although maybe for a different reason-- affirmative action.



The nation is rightfully outraged after yesterdays news, which exposed 1) how the wealthy have tried to take advantage of the system, and 2) how another American institution (higher education) has let us down.



Get ready for the 2020 candidates to seize on it.

In fact... Elizabeth Warren: "This is just stunning. I mean, the notion that people thought they could keep cheating like this and build this, evidently build this huge cheating network in order for the children of the rich and the powerful to make it into fancy schools. To me, its just one more example of how the rich and powerful know how to take care of their own, and everybody else just gets left behind. I think thats wrong."
Philipp Roeslers main task will be to consult with and support domestic startups. Photo by Reuters/Michael Dalder

Philipp Roesler, former Vice Chancellor of Germany, has been elected as chairman of VinaCapital Ventures' advisory board.

VinaCapital Ventures, one of the largest investment and asset management firms in Vietnam, made this announcement Friday.

It said Philipp Roeslers main task will be to consult with and support domestic startups so that they can connect with investors and bring products to international markets.

Don Lam, CEO and co-founder of VinaCapital, said he believed that the former German Vice Chancellor can contribute his extensive experience working in various government positions and private management environments.

"Philipp Roesler possesses advanced vision and experience in the fields of economics, technology, health, etc... Bringing him in to manage VinaCapital will be very beneficial to Vietnam," Lam said.

Philipp Roesler is a German of Vietnamese origin. He was born in Soc Trang Province in 1973 and adopted by a German couple at 9 months from a Christian orphange. Before entering politics, Roesler was a cardiothoracic surgeon.

Philipp Roesler was the youngest Chairman of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) when he took office in May 2011. He was Vice-Chancellor and Federal Minister of Economics and Technology in Angela Merkels government until December 2013.
Vietnams first undersea tunnel to be built in Ha Long

Artist impression of the Cua Luc Tunnel set to be constructed in Quang Ninh in 2019. Photo courtesy of Vietnam Governments Portal

Quang Ninh Province has completed a feasibility report for an undersea tunnel to connect the eastern and western parts of Ha Long town.

Vietnams first undersea tunnel will cost almost VND9.8 trillion ($423.46. million), according to the government website. Province Chairman Nguyen Van Doc said at a meeting Thursday that the government had sought a feasibility report.

Construction of the 2.75-kilometer (1.7-mile) Cua Luc Tunnel is scheduled to start this year and finished in 2024. It will share the increasing traffic load with Bai Chay Bridge, now the only way across the strait that splits the town.

To run from the Vuon Dao intersection to the Vinhomes Ben Doan urban area, it will be 4.75 meters (15.6 feet) high and the six-lane road inside will be built of reinforced concrete to withstand a magnitude 7.0 earthquake.

Provincial authorities have said in the past that a tunnel is needed to ensure safety and uninterrupted flow of economic and tourism activities even during heavy storms.

Quang Ninh, home to the UNESCO heritage site Ha Long Bay, received 12.2 million domestic and international tourists last year, up 24 percent from 2017, according to its tourism department.

Revenues from tourism were up 28 percent at VND24 trillion ($1.03 billion).
Pork prices in Vietnam have been dropping because of African swine fever outbreaks. Photo by Reuters

African swine fever has hit Vietnams $10-billion pork industry and is set to affect its future exports.

Pork prices have been dropping since the outbreak of the disease in February from VND55,000 ($2.37) per kilogram to VND30,000 ($1.3) in the northern region and VND43,000 ($1.86) in the south.

In the country where three million pigs are consumed every month, the disease has so far caused losses of VND4-5 trillion ($172.7-215.9 million).

The losses are likely to increase since there is a high chance it will keep spreading, according to the Department of Animal Health.

So far 17 provinces and cities have reported outbreaks among pigs, and 23,000 have been culled.

Gabor Fluit, business group director, Asia, of animal feed company Royal De Heus, said since pork prices are around VND13,000 (56 cents) higher in the south, traders could sell northern pork to southern provinces, contributing to the spread of the disease.

China on Tuesday banned the import of pigs, wild boars and related products from Vietnam even as it is battling its own outbreaks in 28 provinces and regions.

The other countries and territories that have banned pork imports from Vietnam include Taiwan, Dubai, the U.S., and the U.K, with violators facing severe fines and even imprisonment.

Industry insiders said that countries often take 20-30 years to completely eliminate the disease, which means Vietnam faces a serious challenge in exporting pork in future.

Twenty countries and territories have reported outbreaks of the disease since 2017 and over one million pigs have been culled, according to the World Organization for Animal Health.

Vietnam is the third Asian country to be hit by the disease after China and Mongolia.

Vietnam produced 3.82 million tons of pork in 2018, equivalent to 72 percent of the countrys entire meat production, up 2.2 percent from 2017, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Aircraft and transit buses are seen at Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi. Photo by AFP/Hoang Dinh Nam

The Airports Corporation of Vietnam needs to spend VND4.2 trillion ($181.27 million) on the maintenance of runways in the countrys two main airports.

In a recent report Ho Chi Minh City Securities Corporation (HSC) said the ACV, which runs 23 airports, is planning to carry out maintenance work at Noi Bai in Hanoi and Tan Son Nhat in HCMC during the rainy season, which begins in a few months time.

The exact start dates are not known yet.

HSC said the two runways, 25R/07L in Tan Son Nhat and 1B in Noi Bai, are in a state of disrepair with many cracks and deformities in the asphalt and wheel marks.

"The maintenance process is expected to take four months and cost about VND4.2 trillion ($181.27 million). The renovation is to ensure flight safety and avoid unexpected shutdowns," HSC quoted the Ministry of Transport as saying.

Furthermore, according to the securities firm, ACV is currently eyeing a public listing on the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX). However, the corporation is still negotiating ownership rights over some of ACVs airport properties with the government, which include the two runways, so these properties are not yet added on to the companys total net worth.

HSC predicts the most likely outcome is that the government will own these runways, but ACV will be assigned to operate these assets and retain revenue and profits generated therefrom. Once the negotiations are complete, ACV will meet the requisite conditions to be listed on HNX, and is expected to do so in the second half of 2019.

The securities firm also believes that given the size of the corporation, ACV could make it to the VN30 basket of the biggest market cap companies on the stock market.

In September 2018 the Ministry of Transport had warned the two runways needed "extremely urgent" repairs.

Tan Son Nhat airport's runway 25R / 07L is designed to handle B777-300 ERs (very large aircraft used for long-haul flights) and up to 55,100 takeoffs and landings over 10 years. But in less than five years as of April 2018 there had been a total of 126,000 takeoffs and landings.

Similarly, Noi Bais 1B, put into operation in 2003 and designed for around 10,500 takeoffs and landings in 20 years, had handled 284,200 in 15 years.

Vietnams airports have been overloaded for many years now, while upgrades are tardy. The biggest airport in Vietnam, Tan Son Nhat, currently handles 36 million passengers a year, way above its designed capacity of 25 million.

Noi Bai handles 24 million while its capacity is 21 million.
Interaction and adaptation using modern technology are crucial elements of contemporary architecture, an award-winning architect says.

Minh Phuc Nguyen, co-founder of architecture firm MPN + Partners, says that architecture, like Industry 4.0, has gone through different phases.

In the first, people simply considered architecture a means to find shelter from external attacks. Later on, as civilization developed, architecture catered to different aspects of our daily life. The character of buildings began to change as society developed and aesthetics acquired importance.

Today, in the Industry 4.0 era, architecture is inseparable from technology, and technological advances enable greater interaction and adaptation, to the extent that it becomes multi-dimensional, based on different times of the year.

Therefore, Minh said, architecture now needs to behave like a living thing, capable of reacting, responding to all conditions.

Minh Phuc Nguyen, co-founder of MPN + Partners

Recently, Smart Tree - a Vertical Future Community project of MPN + Partners, received an award at the Next Architecture 2018 competition in Nanjing, China.

Among the top 5 highest-rated participants, the project was said to take an apartment community to a new level of experience and emotion.

Next Architecture is an international architecture competition aimed at finding new architectural and design solutions for the world. This year, the event attracted around 100 entries from different parts of the world, all aiming to offer a new experience for future apartments.

The idea for this project came from 3 main parts of a tree, with the canopy representing the residents residing in the building living in a flexible, dynamic environment. The stem represented the sustainability of the culture of the community living in the building and the root, the connection between people. Therefore, the stem and the root always be solid and durable.

Project "Smart tree - a vertical community"

The projects flexibility was demonstrated by its interactivity and adaptation to different needs, with modules that could move and arrange themselves seasonally. When this happens, the architecture of the building changes, causing the living space to change as well.

"This brings excitement to the people who live in the building as well as people who visit the buildings public area. The boredom of static architecture exists no longer, because people experience the changes in their living space through every season of the year," Minh said.

The facade of the building can interact with the radiation of heat, tilting to angles that provide maximum comfort to its inhabitants.

Project 'Smart tree - a vertical community'

What this means is that in summer, the facade is a barrier that reduces and prevents direct sunlight, while in winter, it can warm up the living space using sunlight. The project focuses on optimizing natural resources around the building. Rain and air both are used to create an ideal living environment.

Accordingly, reusable water and rainwater would both go through an automatic water filtration system before they are stored in a cistern. Passing through a "green lung mass," a mechanical system that filters the outside air, fresh air is transmitted to the inner area.

MPN + Partners was established in 2012 with a people-focused design philosophy. After 7 years, the company has marked it presence through many international design awards, including the third prize for the Seine Restaurant (Paris, France) and the Third National War Museum (New Delhi, India), Second Prize for DomestiCity (Atlanta, USA), and an Honorable mention at the Aquatecture competition organized by Volzero.

Some large scale projects of MPN + Partners in Vietnam are the 132 hectare Nalanda luxury resort in Long Hai, the 13 hectare Osho Ho Tram Resort, the 13 hectare Vinh Trung Urban Area and the 22 hectare Oceanami Villas & Beach Club.

Interactive architecture demonstrates the future of housing Interactive architecture is the trend of architecture in the 4.0 era. (bai xin Edit, Van bien tap) The project provides housing solutions for the future

More information about the project: https://mpnandpartners.com/
The Thitu Island of the Paracel Islands, as seen on Google Maps.

With tensions rising over Chinese vessels approaching an island occupied by the Philippines, Vietnam has called for calm.

All parties should act responsibly and avoid complicating the situation in the East Sea, Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said Thursday, using the Vietnamese name for the waters.

They need to comply with the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties (DOC) and not complicate the situation in the East Sea, she said at a press meeting.

Vietnam wants that countries do not exacerbate tensions and take over unoccupied structures in the disputed waters.

"Behave responsibly and contribute practically and positively to peace and stability in the region," she exhorted all nations involved.

She said responsible behavior was a must as countries looked for peaceful solutions to disputes in the area.

On March 5, Philippine officials said Chinese fishing boats forced Filipino fishermen to leave Thitu Island in Vietnams Truong Sa (Spartly) Islands, now claimed and occupied by the Philippines.

The U.S.-based think tank Asian Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) of the International Strategic Research Center (CSIS) said on February 7 that 95 Chinese vessels anchored close to the island on December 20. The number dropped to 42 on January 26.

The Philippine government's plan to build a beaching ramp on Thitu to facilitate the transport of materials to lengthen the island's runway to accommodate larger planes.

"The drop in the number of government vessels, mirroring the reduction of the militia presence, suggests Chinese forces have settled into a pattern of monitoring and intimidation after their initial large deployment failed to convince Manila to halt construction," AMTI said.

The U.S. sent B-52 bomber flights over the South China Sea on March 4, saying it was part of routine missions. The U.S. Pacific Airforce sent additional two aircraft on Thursday, saying U.S. aircraft regularly operate in the South China Sea in support of allies, partners and a free and open Indo-Pacific region.

At the Thursday press briefing, Hang reiterated that Vietnam has full legal grounds and historical evidence to assert its sovereignty over the Paracel (Hoang Sa) and Spratly (Truong Sa) archipelagoes.

Referring to the incident when a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat off the central coast last week, the spokeswoman said the five rescued fishermen are on their way back to the mainland.

Vietnamese authorities are continuing to verify the incident and will ensure the legal rights and interests of these fishermen, she said.

According to the Vietnam National Committee for Emergency Response, Disaster Prevention and Rescue in Vietnam, a Quang Ngai fishing vessel was sunk by Chinese ship (BKS 44101) in the vicinity of Da Loi (Discovery) Island in the Hoang Sa Archipelago on March 6.

China seized the Paracel Islands from South Vietnam by force in 1974, and Spratly Islands from Vietnam in 1988.
Six dead in Vietnam wall collapse, search on for missing workers

Six workers died and four were injured Friday after a wall at a construction site in Vinh Long collapsed suddenly.

The accident in the Mekong Delta province occurred at around 10 a.m. at the construction site of a garment factory in the Hoa Phu Industrial Zone, Long Ho District. Dozens of workers were trapped under the rubble when the wall crumbled.

Rescue forces, including police personnel, were dispatched to the accident site. It took them more than an hour to get the victims out.

At around 11 a.m., the bodies of five workers had been taken out and four others were taken to the local hospital for emergency treatment. One of them died later, local authorities confirmed Friday afternoon.

Rescue forces are still looking for missing workers, they said.

An investigation had been launched to establish the cause of the incident.

Construction site accidents are not uncommon in Vietnam. Last year, three workers were killed when a landslide hit a construction site in the northern province of Lao Cai.
The system invests too much power in teachers, inhibiting communication and adding to the childrens insecurity.

Nguyen Thu Quynh

In 2012, when I was doing research in Bo Trach District, Quang Binh Province, I asked kids 8-10 years old to write down the names of the people closest to them. Answers varied from parents and teachers to neighbors and police officers, as expected.

But when asked who could protect them in a crisis, the children were perplexed. They started jotting down random names without being able to pinpoint exactly why those names were chosen.

It seems that our children are clueless when it comes to seeking help on issues concerning their own safety. This fact gains added relevance at a time when increasing cases of child sexual abuse and harassment are being highlighted by local media.

Earlier this month, a primary school teacher in Hanoi was accused of touching several 5th graders in "inappropriate places." However, it was stated at a press conference later that there were no signs that the teacher molested the students; that all he did was "pinching their ears and noses, touching their shoulders, butts and thighs."

How can this happen? What we should be asking is how a teacher could do these despicable things for so long on so many children. Instead we have a press conference absolving the teacher of all blame. How is this possible?

Part of the answer is the imbalanced power relations between teachers and students.

Think about it. Teachers hold absolute authority in a classroom, and students are much lower in the power hierarchy. This instills fear, makes kids cower and tremble before a force mightier than them. And the more the students fear, the easier it is for corrupt teachers to prey on them.

Like a herd of sheep trapped within the fences of a farm with a coyote, our children are unable to do anything to save themselves; as they dont dare to speak out about the abuses they suffer. Their silence is at the heart of the problem.

Vietnamese children return home from school in Luong Son District, Hoa Binh, Vietnam, May 6, 2015. Photo by Shutterstock/Asia Images

One thing I would like to note here is that not all student populations carry the same risk of being abused. Studies have shown that children from ethnic minorities, poor backgrounds, those who are developmentally challenged, or live away from their parents, are more vulnerable populations as they are less equipped to handle situations where they are physically or sexually abused. This has to do with their lack of education and crippling poverty which prevents them from getting a proper education in the first place. All this is worsened by the power dynamics between adults and children, particularly adults as teachers.

As long as a massive power imbalance exists in classrooms, more cases like the one in Hanoi will surface. As long as our children feel that their voices go unheard, they will lack the confidence to convey their concerns to adults.

There are very few communication channels for our children to speak out about abuse, according to a UNICEF report on children in Vietnam. It says that our current legal system is yet to give our youngest citizens proper tools to report abuses, to make them feel safe and secure, to protect them from being ridiculed or be subjected to prejudices.

The social milieu in which children grow up is also part of the problem. Criminals dont grow on trees; they are made and fostered by a social system that either ignores or condones criminal behavior.

While individuals responsible for criminal behavior, including abuse of children, should be punished for their crimes, we will not solve the problem if we do not fix the flawed system itself.

The government needs to conduct research independently to determine the loopholes in a schools operations that give adults too much power and authority, and identify empowering factors missing in our child welfare and protection programs.

"It takes a village to raise a child," says an African proverb.

So if anything bad happens to that child, the village is to blame.

*Nguyen Thu Quynh is a researcher and editor for Tia Sang magazine. The opinions expressed are her own.
Three die as electronics repair shop burns down in southern Vietnam

An electronics repair shop is damaged in a fire that killed three people in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province Friday. Photo by VnExpress/Nguyen Khoa

At least three people died in a fire in an electronic repair shop in the southern province of Ba Ria  Vung Tau Friday.

The blaze began early morning, an unnamed woman witness living nearby on Le Thanh Duy Street, Xuan Moc District, said.

She was sleeping when she heard explosions and smelled something burning, and woke up to see a kiosk at the shop going up in flames.

"I called my husband and others to bring handheld fire extinguishers to put out the fire."

But by then the fire and smoke were too strong, she added.

Dozens of police officers and many firefighter trucks were dispatched to the scene.

Inside the workshop, in the attic, firefighters found the charred bodies of Huynh Tan Duong, 46, his 10-year-old adopted daughter and an unidentified woman.

Three motorbikes and many electronic items were destroyed. The flames also spread to the two-story house belonging to the shop owner, damaging the living room.

The police are investigating the cause of the fire.
Dang Van Hien R) and Tran Thi Duyen are held at a police station in Quang Ninh for trying to smuggle 23 people to China. Photo by VnExpress/Q.K.

A couple in their 20s have been arrested after 23 individuals were found in truck in Mong Cai City headed for China.

Police in Mong Cai, a border town of Quang Ninh Province, said Thursday that they are investigating Dang Van Hien, 29, and Tran Thi Duyen, 24, on the criminal charges of "brokering illegal exit from Vietnam."

The 23 people in the truck told the police that they had left home because they were promised high salaries in China.

On Tuesday afternoon, border guards in Mong Cai discovered a truck carrying the group of 23 people from seven northern provinces.

They had been gathered by Duyen at a local bus station. Then they exchanged Vietnamese currency for Chinese money. Duyen charged 1,200 to 1,300 yuan ($178-193) per person for her service of brokering their illegal exit from Vietnam.

Hien was responsible for guiding and arranging transportation to bring the group to Bac Son commune to cross the border to China.

If convicted, Duyen and Hien can be sentenced for up to seven and 10 years in prison, and be fined up to VND10,000,000 to 50,000,000 ($431  2,159).
U.S. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping arrive at a state dinner at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, November 9, 2017. Photo by Reuters/Thomas Peter

A summit to seal a trade deal between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will not happen at the end of March as previously discussed.

This is because more work is needed in U.S.-China negotiations, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday.

Mnuchin, speaking to reporters following a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing, said both sides were "working in good faith" to try to reach a deal "as quickly as possible."

"There's still a lot of work to do, but we're very comfortable with where we are," Mnuchin said. "I don't think there's anything significantly different on the currency issue from where we were last time."

Since Trump delayed a threatened March 1 tariff hike on Chinese goods following a late February round of talks, no new face-to-face meetings have been scheduled in the negotiations. But Trump and other administration officials have since sought to portray the talks as still making progress.

"We're doing very well with China talks," Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday as he sat down to meet Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. "We're getting what we have to get, and I think we're getting it relatively quickly."

At another White House event later on Thursday, Trump said: "Probably one way or the other were going to know over the next three or four weeks." He added that China had been "very responsible and very reasonable."

Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that Xi may be reluctant to come to the U.S. president's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida without an agreement in hand after seeing Trump end a separate summit in Vietnam with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without a peace deal. But he said he was in no rush to complete a trade deal with China.

Washington and Beijing have been locked in a tit-for-tat tariff battle as U.S. officials press China for an end to practices and policies it argues have given Chinese firms unfair advantages, including subsidizing of industry, limits on access for foreign companies and alleged theft of intellectual property.

At a separate hearing in the House of Representatives on Thursday, Mnuchin said he expected elements of the discussions to be resolved in the near future, as the two sides pore over a 150-page document they are working on.

The United States and China have slapped import duties on each other's products that have cost the world's two largest economies billions of dollars, roiled markets and disrupted manufacturing supply chains.

"As to whether or not we'll strike a final deal, that I would never want to say," Trump said on Thursday. "If it's not a deal that's a great deal for us, we're not going to make it."

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters there "were rumblings" about a possible meeting late next month.

China's state-run news agency Xinhua, in a brief report on Friday, said Chinese Vice Premier Liu He had spoken by telephone with both Mnuchin and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the two sides made further substantive progress on trade talks.

It gave no other details, other than describing it as a third telephone call. (Reporting by David Lawder and Jeff Mason.
Ryanair to launch flights from Kyiv to Katowice from Oct 30

The flights will be operated from Kyiv's Boryspril Airport four times a week.

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Since the start of the year, oil has rallied around a quarter since the start of the year.

Oil prices were stable on Friday, propped up by production cuts led by OPEC and as U.S. sanctions against Venezuela and Iran likely created a slight deficit in global supply in the first quarter of 2019.

Yet prices have been prevented from rising further by concerns that an economic slowdown will soon start denting growth in fuel demand, Reuters said.

Read alsoReuters: Brent crude hits 2019-high amid OPEC supply cuts, sanctions on Venezuela and Iran

Brent crude oil futures were at $67.21 per barrel at 0559 GMT, virtually unchanged from their last close, and within a dollar of the $68.14 2019-high reached the previous day.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures were at $58.58 per barrel, also close to their last settlement and not far off their 2019-high of $58.74 from the previous day.

Since the start of the year, oil has rallied around a quarter since the start of the year.

"Oil continues to grind higher...in response to ongoing production cuts from the OPEC+ group of producers as well as another (output) slump from a blacked-out Venezuela," said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Denmark's Saxo Bank.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and non-affiliated allies like Russia - known as the OPEC+ alliance - have been withholding around 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in crude supply from the start of the year to tighten markets and prop up prices.

OPEC+ ministers will meet at the group's headquarters in Vienna, Austria, on April 17-18 to decide output policy.

"If OPEC+ decide to extend (cuts)...we expect that inventories will continue to draw through at least Q3," U.S. investment bank Jefferies said on Friday.

With OPEC withholding supply and U.S. sanctions preventing Iranian and Venezuelan oil from entering markets, global crude flow data in Refinitiv showed a slight supply deficit likely appeared in the first quarter.
Pork bought by Ukraine abroad in first two months of 2019 estimated at US$7.9 mln

Poland was a major supplier of pork to Ukraine.

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PM Groysman to instruct Naftogaz, Finance Ministry to negotiate gas price with IMF

Ukraine undertook to further raise gas prices for households in 2019 but Naftogaz's CEO says the increase is not necessary in view of falling prices in Europe.

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The credit line will support privately-owned businesses registered in Ukraine with up to 250 employees. Individual borrowers can receive up to 3 million in Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH) equivalent. The local currency loans will protect borrowers from FX-related risks and have long maturities.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and EU4Business have launched a credit line for Ukrainian SMEs where individual borrowers can receive loans of up to EUR 3 million in UAH equivalent.

Thousands of Ukrainian SMEs are expected to benefit from funds worth up to EUR 60 million, the EBRD press service noted.

The credit line will support privately-owned businesses registered in Ukraine with up to 250 employees. Individual borrowers can receive up to 3 million in Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH) equivalent. The local currency loans will protect borrowers from FX-related risks and have long maturities.

The credit line will initially be operated through the State Export-Import Bank of Ukraine (UkrEximBank), which has earmarked an allocation of funds worth EUR 22 million (US$ 25 million) and OTP Leasing Ukraine with an allocation of EUR10 million.

Additional loan resources of around EUR 28 million are expected in the near future and will be available to other local financial institutions set to join the credit line.

Participating companies will also receive support in adjusting their production to relevant EU Directives, which will allow them to access the EU single market as competitive contenders.

Matteo Patrone, EBRD Managing Director, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, said: This credit line is about integration both in a geographical and an economic sense. Following the establishment of the DCFTA between the EU and Ukraine, multiple opportunities have opened for domestic businesses. The launch of the EU4Business-EBRD Credit Line provides local SMEs, which create almost 80 per cent of jobs in the country but are currently responsible for only about 40 per cent of GDP, with additional access to finance, so they can develop further, become more competitive and comply with EU standards.

Read alsoEBRD allocated EUR 13 bln for 410 Ukraine projects

In addition, the EU4Business-EBRD Credit Line will also offer grant incentives to qualified projects. Ukrainian SMEs willing to use eligible technologies, achieve full compliance with sanitary, phytosanitary and food safety regulations or implement complex projects that comply with several EU regulations, will be able to receive an incentive grant for up to 15% of the project cost.

Ambassador Hugues Mingarelli, Head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine: The EU works hard to ensure that these credit lines bring concrete benefits to the Ukrainian small and medium enterprises  and contribute to both economic growth in Ukraine and stronger economic ties between Ukraine and the EU. In 2018 Ukrainian exports to the EU grew by 15 per cent, imports by 11.5 per cent compared to the previous year; we see these DCFTA credit lines as instrumental in continuing these positive trends."

UNIAN memo. EBRD has been operating in Ukraine since 1993, being the largest international investor in Ukraine.

Over the period of cooperation, EBRD has financed 410 projects in Ukraine totaling EUR 13 billion, including seven projects worth EUR 1.577 billion in the state sector.
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.
Open Systems International, Inc. (OSI) is pleased to announce the formation of OSI Colombia in Bogota, Colombia. This represents a significant milestone in the company's continued international expansion and will facilitate the timely and efficient delivery of OSI's leading-edge operations technology (OT) platforms and solutions to new clients throughout the Latin American utility market.

Bogota makes an ideal site for the new regional headquarters: The city provides a central geographical location for direct, unhindered travel throughout Latin America, ensuring rapid support response times; it's in close proximity to numerous large utility customers that have proliferated throughout the region; and it boasts a well-educated and industrious workforce.

Staffed by a multidisciplinary team of experienced technical and business staff, OSI Colombia will provide local support in the tradition of OSI's superior customer service. Members of the support staff are intimately familiar with the language, culture, and customs of the region, enabling them to provide superior communication and interaction with customers.

"We are thrilled to introduce our new Latin American operation," said OSI President/CEO Bahman Hoveida. "We recognize that many of the challenges faced by U.S. utilities are shared by those in Latin America, so we're pleased to bring our superior technology and services to the continent to help customers overcome those headwinds. We're confident that our solutions will continue to be met with enthusiasm in the region and that this new office will bring us closer to our end customers."

"With the formation of OSI Colombia, OSI seeks to recognize and address the present and future needs of our Latin American clients, ensuring our objectives and strategies align closely, facilitating the streamlined implementation of OSI's technology and solutions, and providing superior local support," said Sergio Bajetti, OSI's vice president of European & Latin American Operations.

Open Systems International (www.osii.com) headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota provides open, state-of-the-art and high-performance automation solutions to utilities worldwide. These solutions include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, Network Management Systems (NMS), Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), Generation Management Systems (GMS), Substation Automation (SA) Systems, Data Warehousing (Historian) Analytics, Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS), Situational Awareness Systems, individual software and hardware products, and Smart Grid solutions for utility operations. OSI's solutions empower its users to meet their operational challenges, day in and day out, with unsurpassed reliability and a minimal cost of technology ownership and maintenance.
Indiana Michigan Power (I&M) partnered with Benton Harbor Area Schools to efficiently brighten busy areas of the school building for students.

Through one of I&M's energy efficiency programs, the school earned almost $5,000 in rebates for its effort to reduce its future energy use in the high school. Benton Harbor Area Schools will save more than 114,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year - enough to power 14 homes in Michigan.

"It was a pleasure to partner with Benton Harbor Area Schools and to celebrate their successful lighting project," said Jason Whitman, I&M Energy Efficiency and Consumer Program Coordinator. "As the school has experienced, I&M's energy efficiency programs create boundless opportunities - and together, we are redefining the future of energy."

Benton Harbor High School worked with I&M's energy efficiency experts to replace outdated fluorescent lighting in the facility's first floor hallway and cafeteria. The project upgraded 250 fixtures through installing modern LED tubes, reducing the building's energy use by 80-percent.

"The district wants to thanks Indiana Michigan Power for supporting our efforts to reduce our energy use," said Troy Boone, Benton Harbor Area Schools, Chief Operating Officer . "Benton Harbor Area Schools is committed to finding solutions to improve the experience for our students. By enrolling in I&M's energy efficiency program, the district will help light the future for not only current students but those who will one day walk these halls and sit in the cafeteria."

Incentives for I&M's business customers in both Michigan and Indiana are available for qualifying energy efficiency upgrades. Under the program, customers work with approved service providers to help identify system improvements and efficiency measures. Energy saving incentives are available to help offset the cost of implementing the new efficiency measures. A few of the benefits of the program include reduced energy consumption, enhanced building performance and extended life expectancy of equipment.

For more information on the Energy Efficiency Program visit www.electricIdeas.com.

About Benton Harbor Area Schools: Benton Harbor Area Schools, originally founded in 1872, is a PreK-12 public school district in Benton Harbor, Michigan, with approximately 3,000 students in 7 schools. BHAS students participate in diverse programs and learning opportunities that are supported by teachers, families, community members, nonprofit organizations, local businesses and higher education institutions, including Western Michigan University and Lake Michigan Community College.

About Indiana Michigan Power: Indiana Michigan Power (I&M) is headquartered in Fort Wayne, and its 2,450 employees serve more than 593,900 customers. More than half of its generation is emission-free, including 2,278 MW of nuclear generation in Michigan, 450 MW of purchased wind generation from Indiana, 22 MW of hydro generation in both states and approximately 15 MW of large-scale solar generation in both states. The company's generation portfolio also includes 2,600 MW of coal-fueled generation in Indiana.

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. AEP's more than 17,000 employees operate and maintain the nation's largest electricity transmission system and more than 224,000 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 nation's largest electricity producers with approximately 33,000 megawatts of diverse generating capacity, including 4,200 megawatts of renewable energy. AEP's 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

Schnee' Garrett

Indiana Michigan Power Communications

(574) 283-1852

smgarrett@aep.com
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) today (3/14) approved a filing by Duquesne Light as part of an ongoing statewide effort to help remove uncertainty and potential barriers to the deployment of third-party electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.

The Commission voted 5-0 today to approve a supplement tariff for Duquesne Light, in response to an EV policy statement adopted last year by the PUC.

The Commission's November 2018 policy statement was designed to help promote increased investment in EV charging infrastructure in the state by reducing regulatory uncertainty and providing greater consistency among electric distribution companies (EDCs). The policy statement clarifies that third-party electric vehicle charging is providing a service, and not considered resale of electricity under the Public Utility Code. EDCs were directed to amend their tariffs to address third-party EV charging stations consistent with the new policy.

As the Commissioners noted, technological advancements are transforming the electric consumption of consumers and impacting the grid as a whole - and it is important for utilities to adapt their infrastructure and tariff structure to address these changes, which include a growing number of electric vehicles.

Today's approval of the Duquesne Light filing comes just weeks after approval of similar filings by the four FirstEnergy electric distribution companies serving Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission balances the needs of consumers and utilities; ensures safe and reliable utility service at reasonable rates; protects the public interest; educates consumers to make independent and informed utility choices; furthers economic development; and fosters new technologies and competitive markets in an environmentally sound manner.

Visit the PUC's website at www.puc.pa.gov for recent news releases and video of select proceedings. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. Search for the "Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission" or "PA PUC" on your favorite social media channel for updates on utility issues and other helpful consumer information.

Docket No.: R-2019-3007873

Contact:Nils Hagen-Frederiksen

Press Secretary

717-783-6152

nhagen-fre@pa.gov
In fiscal year (FY) 2017, the economic impact of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) amounted to more than $1.1 billion nationwide, according to a study by the University of Colorado Boulder's Leeds School of Business. The new study estimates NREL's impact on Colorado's economy at nearly $748 million.

"NREL's work in Colorado has far-reaching impact and benefits the country through our award-winning research and advanced energy solutions," said Martin Keller, NREL director and president of the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (Alliance).

The report was funded by the Alliance, which manages and operates NREL for DOE. With the goal of transforming energy through science, NREL links its world-renowned researchers, unique capabilities, and state-of-the-art facilities with partners throughout the country. The laboratory develops advanced energy solutions to integrate energy into systems of every scale.

The study, conducted by Richard Wobbekind and Brian Lewandowski of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business, found that during FY 2017:

NREL employed 1,745 full-time and part-time employees

Approximately 60 percent of employees were involved in core research and development

More than 95 percent of NREL employees hold at least a bachelor's degree, and nearly 64 percent have advanced degrees, with 31.7 percent holding doctoral degrees and 31.9 percent holding master's degrees

NREL employees contributed $478,052 to local nonprofits while logging 1,529 volunteer hours

The laboratory welcomed more than 28,000 visitors to its campus and Education Center, and connected with more than 43,000 people through community outreach events.

A significant element of NREL's impact is tied to jobs, with the greatest number of the laboratory's employees located in Jefferson County, which saw a $413 million economic impact in FY 2017. The research team notes that more than 95 percent of NREL's employees live in the Denver and Boulder metropolitan statistical areas, and that the Golden-based research laboratory is a top 10 employer in Jefferson County.

"NREL positions Jefferson County and metro Denver as a leader in the energy industry," said Kristi Pollard, president and chief executive officer of the Jefferson County Economic Development Corporation. "The lab's highly skilled workforce, innovative facilities, and business partnerships are key to the region's economic vitality."

NREL also is focused on workforce development and, according to the study, the laboratory hosted 122 science, technology, engineering, and math outreach events in FY 2017, directly impacting 11,123 students and 330 teachers. NREL employed 175 student workers during the same fiscal year, further contributing to the science and technology workforce of the future.

NREL continually seeks to expand its impact by working with academia, as well as the public and private sectors. In FY 2017, NREL had 739 active partnership agreements with 513 partners. During the same fiscal year, NREL signed $80 million in new partnership agreements.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

Read the full press release.

Media may contact:

Heather Lammers

303-275-4084

Heather.Lammers@nrel.gov
While key details still need to be worked out, Exelon Corp.'s proposal to reform the electric capacity market is a productive step forward. Illinois has an urgent need for capacity market reform. If the General Assembly doesn't act this spring, Illinois consumers would be forced to pay more for dirty energy we don't need. As Exelon's proposal shows, by putting Illinois in charge of its own clean energy policy, we have an opportunity to guarantee savings for consumers while greatly expanding renewable energy investment in the state. CUB looks forward to working with Gov. Pritzker, the General Assembly and all stakeholders to find a comprehensive, consumer-friendly solution that secures the goals of the Clean Energy Jobs Act (Senate Bill 2132, sponsored by Sen. Cristina Castro, and House Bill 3624, sponsored by Rep. Ann Williams).

CUB is celebrating its 35th anniversary as Illinois' leading nonprofit utility watchdog. Created by the Illinois Legislature, CUB opened its doors in 1984 to represent the interests of residential and small-business utility customers. Since then, it has saved consumers more than $20 billion by helping to block rate hikes and secure refunds. For more information, call CUB's Consumer Hotline, 1-800-669-5556, or visit its award-winning website, www.CitizensUtilityBoard.org.

CUB is a member of the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition, a group of more than 200 organizations, businesses, and community leaders working together to advance clean energy jobs, healthier air and water, and lower energy bills. The coalition championed the Future Energy Jobs Act (FEJA), which passed the Illinois General Assembly with bipartisan support and was signed into law in 2016. The law positioned Illinois to become a national leader in clean energy that creates jobs, sparks investment and reduces energy bills.
API and the Alaska Oil and Gas Association (AOGA) today submitted comments to the Bureau of Land Management on the importance of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program's likely impact on the Alaskan economy and issued the following statement:

"Given the 1002 Area's vast energy potential, opening the Coastal Plain's 1002 Area to oil and natural gas leasing and having the opportunity for exploration to assess its resource value alongside other potentially energy-rich areas is an important first step," said API Vice President of Upstream and Industry Operations Erik Milito. "The oil and natural gas industry has a four-decades long track record of safe and responsible development at Prudhoe Bay and other North Slope fields. Industry has proven its ability to recover that energy safely and responsibly and has continued advancements in technology over the past two decades.

"Nearly 104,000 Alaska jobs are attributable to oil and natural gas investment and activity, which represents 32 percent of all Alaska jobs and 35 percent of all Alaska wages. The oil and natural gas industry has contributed over $150 billion to the state of Alaska through royalties and taxes, and provides the largest cash contribution to the Alaska Permanent Fund. These benefits have been produced through an established record of safe and environmentally responsible development that is respectful of all of Alaska's natural resources, and the communities that depend upon them."

The U.S. Geological Survey's 1998 Petroleum Assessment of the 1002 area estimated at least 11.6 billion barrels of oil in-place, which more than doubled the 4.8 billion barrels estimated in the 1987 report on 1002 area resources. The 1998 assessment further estimated an average of 7.7 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in 10 potential plays. The development of the North Slope has an impressive record of environmental stewardship and innovation. For example, natural gas and oil operators and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service jointly developed procedures, training and best practices for managing human-polar bear interactions that set the global gold standard for human-bear interactions and have been repeatedly recognized as a success.

In their comments, API and AOGA listed several concerns regarding BLM's proposed stipulations and required operating procedures. The two associations noted that only one of the DEIS's four development alternatives offered sufficient access to areas of the Coastal Plain to allow reasonable development of its oil and natural gas resources in the same careful manner in which development of the National Petroleum Reserve has taken place. Industry's comments also include recommendations for corrections to assure the DEIS is not unreasonably restrictive, inappropriate, or not supported by the best available science.

"The Coastal Plain, as well as other energy reserves onshore and offshore, should be seen in a strategic context that can be accessed responsibly and safely, offering national energy and security benefits. In other words, the energy is valuable to the United States' long-term strategic interests," said Milito.

API is the only national trade association representing all facets of the natural gas and oil industry, which supports 10.3 million U.S. jobs and nearly 8 percent of the U.S. economy. API's more than 600 members include large integrated companies, as well as exploration and production, refining, marketing, pipeline, marine businesses, and service and supply firms. They provide most of the nation's energy and are backed by a growing grassroots movement of more than 47 million Americans. API was formed in 1919 as a standards-setting organization. In its first 100 years, API has developed more than 700 standards to enhance operational and environmental safety, efficiency and sustainability.
Halliburton Company (NYSE:HAL) today (3/13) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum & Mineral Resources (MoP) to support a specialized development program for Egypt's middle management and young professional employees.

The MOU, which aligns with the ministry's Oil and Gas Modernization Program, is a collaborative agreement under which Halliburton will utilize its strength in human capital development to provide on-the-job training for Egyptians who show the potential to be future leaders in the oil and gas industry. Additionally, Halliburton will customize a development program for select participants to enhance their capabilities and assist Egypt in its role as a leading regional oil and gas hub.

"We are excited to collaborate with the Ministry to improve the development of its local workforce," said Halliburton Chairman, President and CEO Jeff Miller. "We have a 50-year, established working relationship with Egypt, and this MOU is a testament to our ongoing commitment to the country and its efforts to build its presence in the oil and gas industry."

"As we embark on our Modernization Program to create a more conducive environment for business and investment in Egypt, one of the most important pillars of this effort is to build world-class human capital," said H.E. Eng. Tarek El Molla, Egypt's Minister of Petroleum & Mineral Resources. "We believe Halliburton's robust employee development experience will contribute greatly to positioning our local talent for success and sustaining the promising vision of our ministry."

"This MOU is a wonderful way to celebrate Halliburton's 100th anniversary and our rich history of developing future leaders," said Halliburton Vice President of Egypt and Libya Colby Fuser. "It embodies our core values of creativity and collaboration and helps set us on the right path for the next century."

ABOUT HALLIBURTON

Founded in 1919, Halliburton celebrates its 100 years of service as one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the energy industry. With 60,000 employees, representing 140 nationalities in more than 80 countries, the company helps its customers maximize value throughout the lifecycle of the reservoir from locating hydrocarbons and managing geological data, to drilling and formation evaluation, well construction and completion, and optimizing production throughout the life of the asset. Visit the company's website at www.halliburton.com. Connect with Halliburton on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.
Join Ronald McDonald House Charities Maryland on April 7 as we take one last lap around our current neighborhood in our eighth annual 5K run and walk.

Join your friends at Ronald McDonald House Charities Maryland for its 8th annual Red Shoe Shuffle 5K Run and Walk on April 7, starting at 8:30 a.m. This fun and easy 5K will loop around the Inner Harbor and return to the Ronald McDonald House located on West Lexington Street in the heart of University of Maryland, Baltimores campus. Tell your friends, family, and co-workers to join your Shuffle team to celebrate the day in Baltimore!

There is only one Ronald McDonald House in Maryland, and we have been home to more than 35,000 families over the last 37 years. Each year, more than 1,500 families arrive at our doorstep in search of hope for a child battling a catastrophic illness or injury. Circumstances that bring our families here are unfortunate, challenging, and often tragic. Amidst the uncertainties and fears these families and children face, we offer respite, normalcy, compassion, and love.

We cant make the medicine taste better, the shots hurt less, or the treatments less painful. But each of us can affect the journey with love, hope, compassion, and fun. At the Ronald McDonald House, we believe that with the love and support of community, fear and despair can be overcome through optimism and joy.

Register here
Josep Lluis Trapero (r) arrives at the Supreme Court. Carlos Rosillo

Josep Lluis Trapero, the man who was in charge of the Catalan police when the regional government held an unauthorized independence referendum on October 1, 2017, delivered two forceful messages during his four-hour testimony at the Supreme Court on Thursday.

Speaking as a witness at the trial of the 12 separatist leaders accused of rebellion over their attempt at a unilateral breakaway from Spain, Trapero said he warned then-premier Carles Puigdemont of the risk of unrest on October 1, and asked him to cancel the referendum.

The second revelation by the former head of the Mossos dEsquadra is that he had a police operation ready to arrest Puigdemont and his governing team if ordered to do so by a judge, in light of the independence declaration made inside the Catalan parliament on October 27. But the order did not come, and two days later Puigdemont fled to Belgium, where he remains.

Traperos court appearance was something of a dress rehearsal for his own upcoming trial at Spains High Court

Traperos court appearance was something of a dress rehearsal for his own upcoming trial at Spains High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, where he himself faces rebellion charges in connection with the secession attempt. The former police chief was under no obligation to give testimony on Thursday, as anything he said can be used against him at his own hearings, but Trapero chose to do so in what amounted to an efficient if unofficial defense based on the idea that he, and the police force that he headed, were always on the side of the law.

By the time his own trial gets underway in a few months, the Supreme Court will have already entered a judgment in the current case, a fact that may have influenced Traperos decision to accept giving witness testimony to help his own cause.

Traperos stalwart defense of the Mossos served as a counterpoint to criticism heard at previous sessions, when top officials of the National Police and Civil Guard accused the Catalan police force of not doing enough to enforce a court order to stop the referendum from taking place, and facilitating the vote through their passive attitude.

But his four-hour appearance will be mostly remembered for two statements that he made. The first was when Javier Melero, the defense lawyer for former Catalan interior affairs chief Joaquim Forn, asked him about the Mossos actions on October 27, 2017, the day that separatist parties passed the unilateral independence declaration inside the regional parliament.

We told them that the Mossos would not break the law or the Constitution. That we were not on the side of their separatist project

Trapero replied that he and other high-ranking officials were watching events unfold on television, and that at 1pm, before the vote took place, he phoned Jesus Barrientos, the chief justice at the Catalonia High Court, as well as the chief prosecutor, Jose Maria Romero de Tejada. I told him that the Mossos were at his disposal for any action he might consider necessary, including something we had discussed two days earlier.

What kind of action are we talking about? asked Melero. Trapero had a sip of water and replied: The arrest of Carles Puigdemont and the consellers [cabinet members].

While Trapero had already made earlier statements to this effect at the High Court, on Thursday he revealed that the police operation was planned and ready since October 25, two days before the independence declaration. And his testimony suggested that the heads of the Catalan High Court and the prosecution were aware of this.

Traperos second key message was delivered toward the end of his testimony, at 6.50pm, and only after the presiding judge, Manuel Marchena, used his right to question witnesses for the first time throughout these five weeks of hearings.

The private prosecution, represented by the far-right party Vox, had failed to ask Trapero about a key meeting between Mossos officials and Catalan government leaders on September 28, 2017. This oversight meant that the public prosecutor was not allowed to ask about it, either. Marchena then posed the question himself: What message did you mean to convey to the political leaders [present at the meeting]?

It appeared as though the ex-chief of the Mossos had been waiting for this question all along: I said that [on October 1] there were going to be two million people on the streets and more than 12,000 police officers and that there were necessarily going to be serious conflicts pertaining to public order and the safety of citizens.

Trapero added that the Mossos urged these leaders  Puigdemont, his then-deputy Oriol Junqueras and Joaquim Forn  to obey court orders, and informed them that the Mossos would do so. We told them that the Mossos would not break the law or the Constitution. That we were not on the side of their separatist project.

English version by Susana Urra.
An image uploaded to Twitter of the magazines apparently used during Fridays terrorist attack in New Zealand. Josue Estebanez is among the names written on the ammunition. REUTERS

One of the assailants of the mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand had written the name of Spanish neo-Nazi Josue Estebanez de la Hija on his rifle, according to The New York Times. The weapon also featured the names of far-right figures responsible for mass murders in other countries.

In 2007, Estebanez killed 16-year-old leftist activist Carlos Palomino on a Metro train in Madrid. The case marked the first time the Spanish justice system had recognized ideological reasons as an aggravating factor in a crime.

Estebanez killed 16-year-old leftist activist Carlos Palomino on a Metro train in Madrid

The ex-soldier from the Basque Country, who was sentenced to 23 years in prison, is something of a legendary figure in far-right networks. The message Free Josue is frequently seen written on walls across Spain. The neo-Nazi group Hogar Social Madrid often pays tribute to him and his family sold raffle tickets to raise money for the compensation owed to Palominos family. Estebanez has always maintained that he felt intimidated by the 16-year-old and the people he was with on the train.

Palomino has also become a key figure in leftist circles. In houses occupied by squatters, there is usually a reference to the anti-fascist activist. Outside of Spain, in countries such as Switzerland or Germany, the message Palomino lives, the fight continues can also be seen.

In 2009, the court found that on the morning of the murder Estebanez was on his way to an anti-immigration demonstration organized by the far-right group National Democracy, and authorized by the Madrid regional government.

When he was on the train at Legazpi Metro station, he saw a group of counter-protesters on the platform and waited to attack any one of them under any pretext for expressing a difference of opinion, according to the court.

Security camera footage of the attack.

Once he was aboard the train, Palomino was stabbed by Estebanez in the throat and the 16-year-old died minutes later outside Legazpi station. The court ruled that Estebanez was fully aware of his actions.

In May 2009, EL PAIS was able to access the security camera footage of the incident of the train.

The weapons used by the New Zealand shooter were also covered in the names of historical figures from the Middle Ages who fought against Muslim armies, including Gaston IV, viscount of Bearn, who fought in the Reconquista period in Spain when Christian kingdoms reclaimed Muslim-held territory across the Iberian peninsula. The name Pelayu was also written on the weapon, which could be a reference to Don Pelayo, who became a symbol of the Christian wars against the Muslims during the Middle Ages.

English version by Melissa Kitson.
Flowers on Francos tomb on the 43rd anniversary of his death. santi burgos

The Spanish government is forging ahead with its plans to exhume the body of former dictator Francisco Franco despite a series of legal hurdles and an upcoming general election in April.

The government of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, of the Socialist Party (PSOE), has decided to take Francos body out of its current resting place at the Valley of the Fallen memorial on June 10, said Deputy PM Carmen Calvo following the weekly Friday Cabinet meeting.

The remains will then be taken to the state-owned El Pardo cemetery. Calvo said that Francos family would be given the option of holding a private ceremony at the reburial site. There will be no public communication or announcement, she said.

But the decision could be blocked if the Supreme Court accepts the Franco familys request for a precautionary suspension of the exhumation. Relatives strongly oppose moving the body from its current resting place, and they have been filing legal challenges to delay or stop the exhumation altogether.

As for the possibility of a change of government after the snap election of April 28, Calvo said that the selected date of June 10 falls outside the election period and that any government will be under the obligation to execute the decision, unless the Historical Memory Law itself is modified.

A little over a month ago, the government gave the family 15 days to select a new burial place for Franco, but warned that it could not be the family vault at La Almudena cathedral, in the heart of Madrid. Francos relatives have said that the only option they would consider is La Almudena, located in a major tourist area.

But the Sanchez administration wants to prevent the new grave from becoming a pilgrimage site for Franco nostalgics. A report by the Solicitor General says that Francos current grave is public, and that the Catholic Church does not have the authority to prevent workers from entering the basilica where he lies buried, as a religious official there has threatened to do.

On February 27, a Madrid court temporarily suspended the license to lift the two-ton granite slab covering the grave, on the grounds that workers could be injured in the process.

The attempt at moving the late dictator from a site that is a major tourist destination has become a tug-of-war between the government and the Franco family.

The initiative, which was first approved by the Cabinet in late August, was one of the first government measures announced by Sanchez when he came to power in early June after winning a vote of no confidence against former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. In September, Spanish Congress greenlighted his plan.

English version by Susana Urra.
The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine has presented a project to support the reform of education in Ukraine "New Ukrainian School."

"Our project, we are implementing together with our colleagues from Finland, will be one that develops strategic ideas of ['New Ukrainian School']," Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine Lilia Hrynevych said during the presentation of the project Learning Together on Finland's support of the "New Ukrainian School" reform in Kyiv on Friday.

It is noted that the project "Finland's Support to the Ukrainian School Reform" is a bilateral initiative of the Government of Finland and the Ministry of Education of Ukraine. Its implementation takes place within the framework of the agreement between Ukraine and Finland, which was ratified in 2018.

The document, in particular, provides for EUR 6 million of irrevocable assistance for the implementation of the priority tasks of the "New Ukrainian School."

The project is funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland and the European Union and is designed for four years.

The project will focus on the development of teachers' competencies, their professional development, support for teacher training institutions, as well as training professional standards for directors and primary school teachers.

A new communication strategy will be developed in the course of the project by the Ministry of Education to promote education.

In addition, work will be conducted to develop the educational environment to create a market for electronic educational resources, and to create new standards for educational management.
U.S. Jabil invests $16 mln in construction of second electronics manufacturing site in Zakarpattia region

The U.S. Jabil Circuit has invested $16 million in the construction of a second stage of the electronics manufacturing site in the village of Rozivka, Zakarpattia region, Jabil Director General in Ukraine Serhiy Kartsev told reporters at the presentation of the plant on Friday.

With the opening of the second stage, the site's area has doubled to 46,600 square meters, and in the short term, Jabil plans to increase the staff to 5,000.

"Since the founding of the first Jabil manufacturing site in Ukraine, we have invested over $2 million in infrastructure facilities, which were later transferred to the village council. In particular, we built two new wastewater treatment plants, one of which is intended for Rozivka and it is our contribution to development of the environment protection in the region," Kartsev said.

According to Kartsev, the Jabil plant in Uzhgorod is the only one in Europe engaged in the production of full-cycle products, the plant is constantly expanding its production capacity.

The plant also collaborates with more than 20 universities of Ukraine, including 25 engineering faculties, which programs have certain specifications for work with Jabil.

About 65% of the volume of products manufactured at the site is intended for the telecom industry. Also, Uzhgorod plant produces goods for the smart home market, consumer goods and goods for the automotive industry.

Mobile phones, media players and PCs for exports to the European Union will be assembled at the new site.

Jabil Circuit is among top three global leaders among companies offering supply chain solutions. Electronics for Adtran, Gilat, Nespresso, Cardo, Nokia, Velux, Unify, Ceragon, Tele Tec and Visteon brands is assembled at the Uzhgorod site

Jabil is an electronic product solutions company providing comprehensive electronics design, production and product management services to global electronics and technology companies.

The first manufacturing site in Zakarpattia region was launched in 2004. As of early 2019, around 3,000 employees worked there.
Ukraine seeks to make its share of exports to EU reach 50%  Poroshenko

Ukraine wants the share of its exports to the markets of the European Union to reach 50%, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has said.

"We will ensure that Ukraine makes the share of its exports on the reliable and the world's largest market of the European Union reach 50%," Poroshenko said at a meeting of the Regional Development Council of Zakarpattia region.

He stressed that no one will restrict Ukraine in the European market, impose an embargo, or exert political pressure.

Earlier, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said that the share of Ukrainian exports in the European Union is now 42.6%.
EU extends individual sanctions related to conflict in Ukraine for 6 months

The European Union extended individual sanctions related to the conflict in Ukraine for six months on Friday.

The decision was published by the Official Journal of the European Union.
Presidential candidate of Ukraine, showman Volodymyr Zelensky has reported unlocking of his channel on the video hosting website YouTube.

"All media resources, news channels, Internet trumpeted that our YouTube channel is blocked ... Everything is working already. No hacker attacks are terrible for us, enjoy our video blog," he said in a video message on his Facebook page on Thursday evening.

As reported, the video hosting website YouTube blocked the channel "Ze President Servant of the People," dedicated to presidential candidate of Ukraine, showman Volodymyr Zelensky.

"This account has been blocked for numerous or serious violations of the Terms of Use for YouTube, including in relation to spam, deception and misleading users," the 'President Servant of the People' page says on YouTube.
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko has expressed gratitude to the European Union for the extension of sanctions against persons and organizations that undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine, as well as the introduction of the so-called "Azov" package of sanctions against eight Russians.

"Good news from Brussels! The EU Council has approved the extension of a large package of sanctions against more than 160 individuals and about 50 legal entities responsible for undermining the territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine, as well as creating an "Azov" sanctions package against Russia for an act of armed aggression in the Black Sea area and the gross violation of the freedom of navigation in the Kerch Strait," Poroshenko wrote on Facebook on Friday morning.

The president noted that he was "deeply grateful" to the partners of Ukraine for their solidarity with the Ukrainian people in these difficult times.

"This first list of names is only the beginning, and if Russia continues to attack Ukrainian ships, hinder freedom of navigation and block the Ukrainian Azov Sea area, the sanctions will be expanded and strengthened," Poroshenko wrote.

He added that he is in constant contact with the allies to maximize the price that the aggressor will pay for his crimes against Ukraine.

"Wait for new victories on the sanctions front soon," wrote Poroshenko.

Earlier on Friday, March 15, the European Union expanded the blacklists related to the situation in Ukraine and imposed restrictions on eight Russian nationals involved in the Kerch Strait incident of November 25, 2018.

Thus, eight Russian citizens were added in the EU sanctions list in connection with the attack on the ships of the Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kerch Strait on November 25, 2018. The EU has blacklisted Southern Military District Commander Col. Gen. Alexander Dvornikov and head of the Federal Security Service's Border Directorate in Crimea and Sevastopol Sergei Stankevich.

The other blacklisted individuals are commanding officer of the Russian Navy's Suzdalets corvette Sergei Shcherbakov, head of the Federal Security Service's control point in Crimea and Sevastopol Sergei Romashkin, head of the Kerch branch of the Federal Security Service's control point in Crimea Alexei Shatokhin, Coast Guard commander and deputy head of the Federal Security Service's Border Directorate in Crimea and Sevastopol Andrei Shein, commanding officer of the ship Don Alexei Salyayev, and commanding officer of the ship Izumrud Andrei Shipitsyn.
The EU demands that Russia release Ukrainian prisoener of war (POW) sailors who were attacked and captured in the Kerch Strait on November 25, 2018, according to a press release prepared in connection with the imposition of sanctions against eight Russians because of these events.

"As stated by the European Council on 13 December, the EU requests the immediate release of all detained Ukrainian seamen as well as the return of the seized vessels and free passage of all ships through the Kerch Strait," the documents reads.

The officials sanctioned include the head and deputy head of the border directorate of Russian federal security service for the Republic of Crimea and City of Sevastopol, three commanding officers of Russian border patrol boats and an anti-submarine ship "which actively participated in actions that prevented Ukrainian vessels from accessing their coastline on the Sea of Azov," two heads of service of Russian control points, and a Russian armed forces commander responsible for military forces in the region, including the illegally annexed Crimea and Sevastopol.

"These new listings have been adopted by the Council as a response to escalation in the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov and the violations of international law by Russia, which used military force with no justification," the press release reads.

The Council also extended the validity of these restrictive measures for further six months, until September 15, 2019. The Council removed one deceased person from the list (self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) leader Alexander Zakharchenko). The measures now apply to a total of 170 persons and 44 entities.

It also says that the EU measures in place in response to the crisis in Ukraine include economic sanctions targeting specific sectors of the Russian economy, currently in place until 31 July 2019 and restrictive measures in response to the illegal annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol, limited to the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol, currently in place until 23 June 2019.
The Central Election Commission expects that about 47,000 Ukrainian military personnel who perform tasks in the area of the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) in Donbas will be able to vote in the presidential elections in Ukraine at the polling stations specially created for them.

"Eighty of such polling stations have been created: 46 small, 30 medium and four large. The approximate number of those soldiers who perform the tasks of protecting our country from aggression, which is carried out in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and who can vote at these polling stations, is 47,000 people," CEC member Mykhailo Verbensky said at a press conference in Kyiv on Friday.

He noted that the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine had taken the appropriate initiative, since the mentioned servicemen cannot leave their military units and positions in the JFO zone.
On Monday, March 18, at 10.30, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference entitled "The international community asks the president of Ukraine to sign decrees on the expansion of the three Carpathian national parks and to prevent the destruction of the UNESCO World Heritage site." Participants include MP Ihor Lutsenko, Project Manager at the project for saving the Carpathian primeval forests of the Ukrainian Bird Protection Society Olha Yaremchenko, Director of Kyiv Ecoethics Center Volodymyr Boreiko (8/5a Reitarska Street). Registration requires press accreditation. Details by phone: (067) 715 2790, kekz-office@ukr.net (Volodymyr Boreiko).
Interfax-Ukraine to host press conference 'Elections 2019: Who and what for plays around the subject of voter bribery'

On Monday, March 18, at 13.30, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference entitled "Elections 2019: Who and what for plays around the subject of voter bribery." Participants include: political analyst, head of political programs of NGO Ukrainian Center for Social Development Ihor Reiterovych, expert of Ukrainian Center for Social Development on information and image technologies Tetiana Ilyuk and CEO of Center for Content Analysis Oleksandr Marikovski (8/5a Reitarska Street). Accreditation of journalists by phone: +38 068 166 8659.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has lambasted the Islamic Republic for the continuous violation of Iranian citizens' fundamental rights.

Speaking March 13 on the release of the U.S. State Departments Country Reports On Human Rights, Pompeo accused the Islamic Republic of killing dozens of people and arresting thousands more without due process just for protesting for their rights.

"In response to nationwide protests that began in late December 2017 and continued throughout the year, the government used harsh tactics against protesters. Human rights organizations reported at least 30 deaths of protesters during the year, thousands of arrests, and suspicious deaths in custody," the annual report noted.

The report decried the "arbitrary deprivation of life and other unlawful or politically motivated killings" in Iran, citing the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) as saying, "At least two detainees died in detention--Sina Ghanbari in Evin Prison and Vahid Heydari in the 12th Police Station in Arak. According to reports, the bodies of the detainees were quickly buried without an investigation or autopsy, and officials claimed the deaths were suicides.

Crime And Punishment

The State Department report criticizes the Islamic Penal Code for its death penalty practices, including allowing the execution of juvenile offenders at age nine for girls and age thirteen for boys. it condemns what it describes as "execution with torture," including hanging by cranes.

According to the report, prosecutors frequently used waging war against God as a capital offense against political dissidents and journalists, accusing them of struggling against the precepts of Islam and against the state that upholds those precepts. Authorities expanded the scope of this charge to include working to undermine the Islamic establishment and cooperating with foreign agents or entities.

Furthermore, the report notes that prison conditions in Iran were harsh and potentially life-threatening due to food shortages, gross overcrowding, physical abuse, and inadequate sanitary conditions and medical care. Prisoner hunger strikes in protest of their treatment were frequent.

The report cites the "United for Iran" organization as saying that on average, there were an estimated 800-900 prisoners of conscience held in the country at any given time during the year, including those jailed for their religious beliefs.

Stoking Conflict

The U.S. State Department accused Tehran of recruiting Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani Shia fighters to support the Assad regime and thus prolonging the civil war, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians.

In the meantime, in Iraq, the report affirms, "Iran directly supported certain Iraqi Shia militias, including designated foreign terrorist organization Kataib Hezbollah, which reportedly was complicit in summary executions and other human rights abuses of civilians in Iraq."

Moreover, the report accuses Tehran of providing hundreds of millions of dollars in support to the Houthi rebels in Yemen and exacerbating the conflict.

Civil Liberties

The report lists violations of civil liberties, including freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, media, academic freedom, and cultural Events, as well as the freedom to participate in the political process.

"The government restricted and disrupted access to the Internet, monitored private online communications, and censored online content. Individuals and groups practiced self-censorship online," the report discloses.

Blasting the Islamic Republic for its unfair electoral system that bans independent candidates from running for a public office or a parliamentary seat, the report has also blamed Tehran for "corruption and lack of transparency in government.

Tax-exempted endowed religious charitable foundations, accounted for a quarter to a third of the countrys economy, have also been targeted by the report.

"The government restricted the operations of and did not cooperate with local or international human rights NGOs investigating alleged violations of human rights. The government restricted the work of domestic activists and often responded to their inquiries and reports with harassment, arrests, online hacking, and monitoring of individual activists and organization workplaces," the report avers.

Discrimination and Labor Rights

The report has listed cases of discrimination, including against women, ethnic and religious minorities, and trafficking in persons.

A widespread complaint among ethnic minority groups during the year, particularly among Khuzestanis, Azeris, and Lors, the report notes, "was that the government diverted and mismanaged natural resources, primarily water, often for the benefit of IRGC [the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps]-affiliated contractors."

The report cites international media and human rights reports that these practices have devastated the local environment on which farmers and others depended for their livelihoods and well-being, resulting in forced migration and further marginalization of these communities.

"Throughout the year the government forcefully cracked down on environment-related protests that were largely centered in these ethnic minority communities," says the report.

The report also dedicated a section to workers rights, freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.

"In workplaces where workers established an Islamic labor council, authorities did not permit any other form of worker representation. The law requires prior authorization for organizing and concluding collective agreements. Strikes are prohibited in all sectors, although private sector workers may conduct 'peaceful' campaigns within the workplace. The law does not apply to establishments with fewer than 10 employees," the report concludes.
Saeed Jalili, the conservative former secretary of Irans Security Council and nuclear negotiator criticized officials of President Hassan Rouhanis government, who in his words tie Irans economic difficulties to joining international conventions or sanctions imposed on the country.

Jalili was echoing the statement of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei who on March 14 urged Irans establishment not to be at each others throats over this or that convention, most probably referring to international anti-money laundering and anti-corruption conventions demanded by the international watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a multilateral agency based in Paris.

FATF has asked Iran to amend its laws to ensure adequate financial standards, which President Hassan Rouhanis government and the parliament have agreed to, but the conservatives close to Khamenei have blocked two of the proposed bills.

Jalili also said, The majority of experts and economic actors believe 80 percent of [economic] difficulties are internal.

Living conditions for ordinary people have sharply deteriorated in the past one year, with conservatives trying to blame the Rouhani government.

Irans economy suffers from fundamental structural issues created during the forty years of Islamic Republic rule, that have not been seriously addressed. But various rounds of Western and United Nations sanctions have also weakened investor trust and Irans ability to modernize its oil and other industries.

These sanctions in turn have emanated from Islamic Republics policies, which Khamenei has refused to change.

Jalili who was speaking at Friday Prayers before the main sermon, also criticized those officials who say lets not provide more excuses to the West, and said, if we think we can overcome challenges by pinning our hopes on others, we are wrong.
Before wrapping up his official visit to Iraq, President Hassan Rouhani was granted a rare audience with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, an Iranian-born Shiite cleric based in Iraq, and one of the highest religious authorities in the Shiite world.

Sistani rarely meets officials, and the exception he made for Rouhani marked the first time the ayatollah has met with a sitting Iranian president. He rejected an offer to meet with Rouhanis predecessor, hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during his 2008 visit to Iraq.

The 88-year-old Sistani has also rebuffed an envoy of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Chairman of the Iranian Expediency Council Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.

Iraq-born Shahroudi was reportedly supported by Khamenei and his conservative cleric allies in Iran to succeed Sistani after the ayatollahs death, however Shahroudi died last December.

Earlier, Shahroudi's predecessor as the chairman of the powerful Expediency Discernment Council (EDC), Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, had succeeded to win an audience with Sistani in 2009.

Referring to Sistani as a Sayyid, (a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammad), Rafsanjani said at the time, For a long time, visiting Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Sistani was a yearning for me, and the meeting was historic and so valuable.



Echoing Rafsanjani's phrases, the Islamic Republic's English-speaking television, Press TV, also described Rouhani's meeting with Sistani as "historic" and a "landmark."

Rouhani met Ayatollah Sistani at his residence in the city of Najaf, after visiting the shrine of Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shi'ite Muslims.

Irans Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif was also in attendance. During the meeting, the Iranian president briefed Ayatollah Sistani on his discussions with Iraqi officials, as well as agreements about the further promotion of Tehran-Baghdad ties.

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Sistani welcomed any effort aimed at improving Iraqs ties with its neighbors based on mutual interests, non-interference, and respect for national sovereignty.

Furthermore, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, who reportedly supports separation of the state from religious institutions, said fighting corruption and promoting public services were now the significant challenges facing Iraq.

Sistani's office has reported that it financially supports 35,000 students in the cities of Qom, 10,000 in Mashhad, and 4,000 in Isfahan, in Iran. Additionally, Sistani has a substantial following within Shia communities all over the world and is the current Grand "Marja" or source of emulation of the Twelver sect of Shi'ites.

Following the opening of the Shiite religious cities in Iraq of Najaf and Karbala to Iranian pilgrims after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Iraqi President Hussein in 2003, many Iranian pilgrims return from the cities as supporters of Sistani, according to Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. and a Senior Fellow in foreign policy at Brookings Institution, Vali Nasr, making the ayatollah a an influential figure in Iranian society.
Those who opt to become organ donors will be entitled to a free burial plot when they die, the Islamic Republics Health Ministry has announced.

"To promote a culture of organ donation, plot 305 at [Tehran's main cemetery] Behesht-e Zahra has been allocated to people who volunteer to donate their organs, Health Ministry transplantation department head Mehdi Shadnoush told state-run Iran Labor News Agency (ILNA) March 14.

One close relative of every organ donor will also get a free plot, according to Shadnoush, who says the ministry plans to expand the organs for graves offer beyond the capital to the whole country.

Facing increasing economic hardships, more and more desperate Iranians are turning to the grisly practice of offering their organs for sale. In cities across the country one can see signs pasted to trees, walls, and shop windows that read kidney for sale, accompanied by a telephone number.

Iran is the only country in the world that facilitates the legal sale of kidneys. The government matches buyers and sellers and sets a fixed price of $4,600 per kidney. According to the LA Times, more than 30,000 kidneys have been transplanted through the scheme. However, it hasnt stopped some from seeking a higher price for their kidney on the black market.

While organ donation rates have been growing over the past 18 years, according to Shadnoush, its still not enough to meet the demand, leading to organ sales both legal and illegal.

Shadnoush noted that 57 percent of kidney donations come from donors who are brain dead and have agreed to have their organs harvested in that event. He also highlighted Irans success with liver transplants, saying Iranian doctors have so far carried out 5,500 liver transplants.

It is unclear if the Health Ministrys organs for graves program will encourage organ donation. The market price of a burial plot at Tehrans main cemetery offered for free in the program is between $180-$220, much less than the price an organ can fetch on either the legal or black market.
Hours after terror attacks against Muslims praying in Mosques in New Zealand, Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has sharply condemned Western countries for hypocrisy of defending demonization of Muslims as freedom of expression.

In a tweet, Zarif also included a photo of U.S. President Donald Trump grabbed from a news footage, with printed words, I think Islam hates us.

Zarif also said that Impunity in Western democracies to promote bigotry leads to attacks against Muslims.

Iran in the past has condemned some terror attacks, such as the September 11, 2001 operation by jihadist Sunni militants of Al Qaeda, which killed thousands of Americans. But Iran does not consider attacks against Israeli civilians as terror, although it has issued statements condemning terror attacks in general.

In the case of the Taliban Iran has sometimes condemned their attacks against civilians, but at times has remained silent.
In an unprecedented statement, the Islamic Republic's Assembly of Experts (AE) has warned against Iran joining international financial transparency agreements aimed at curbing money laundering and terrorism funding.

Ending its annual meeting March 13, the AE issued a statement saying that joining the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a step proposed by President Hassan Rouhanis government, would be a strategic mistake.

Rouhani presented the proposal to meet FATF requirements to parliament in November 2017. Backers of the legislation, known collectively as the Palermo Bills, say joining the FATF and other international agreements on financial transparency would reduce international pressure on Irans deteriorating economy.

The bills would also pave the way for Iran to join the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (CFT), and the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crimes.

So far, two of the four bills have been ratified, but the fate of the other two is still in limbo.

Opponents of the bills, mainly Friday prayer leaders, top commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and other conservative allies of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, argue that passing the bills will threaten Irans security. However, analysts say the real fear in circles loyal to Khamenei is that adhering to rules for financial transparency would prevent Tehran from funding the Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas militant groups.

Khamenei has said the international conventions were cooked up by foreign enemies. The bills have triggered a series of heated debates between parliament and the Guardian Council (GC), as well as the Expediency Discernment Council (EDC), which acts as the referee if a dispute occurs between parliament and the GC.



The AEs statement joining the chorus of voices against the legislation is unprecedented, as the bodys constitutional mandate is only to supervise the Supreme Leader, not to comment on the particulars of government policy.

Now the fate of the bills is in the hand of the EDC, which has postponed the final decision until its next session in April. Two EDC members told local media March 1 that Khamenei had instructed them they could only pass the bills with a two-thirds majority, a condition that has no precedence.

Without directly naming the EDC, the AEs statement cautioned the powerful council, For the Islamic Republic to join such international conventions is a strategic mistake if they are intended to neutralize the enemy's excuses (to harm Iran).

The AE further warned that joining the agreements could allow "aliens infiltrating into the Islamic Republic's strategic financial and non-financial transactions with its allies."

Irans participation in the agreements has long been demanded by the FATF, which has asked Iran to strengthen its legal framework to guard against money laundering and financing terrorism. If Iran fails to comply with FATF demands, the watchdog can extend a blacklist on Iran, severely restricting its ability to have banking relations with the rest of the world.

Iran and North Korea are the only countries on the FATF blacklist.

Last month the FATF extended a February deadline it had given Iran to June.

The Paris-based FATF concluded its February meeting, saying that it expects Iran to proceed swiftly in the reform path, according to Reuters.

If the shortcomings are not remedied by June, currently suspended countermeasures would automatically kick in, said Marshall Billingslea, the U.S. assistant Treasury Secretary for terrorist financing, after chairing the FATF meeting.

That is a significant indication from the FATF that time has expired, the action plan is overdue, and we expect it to be implemented without delay, Billingslea told journalists.

If countermeasures are reimposed, FATF members worldwide would be required to step up supervision of Iranian bank branches on their territory, including on-site inspections, Billinglsea said.

In the absence of compliance, the FATF called on its members to advise their banks to scrutinize all business with Iran, including obtaining information on reasons for proposed transactions, stepping up controls on sales and identifying patterns of operations for further scrutiny.
Following lengthy negotiations, giant French carmaker Renault will return to Iran,

Deputy Minister of Industry, Mines, and Trade Farshad Moqimi (Moghimi) announced March 14.

Moqimi was cited by state-run media as saying that a new mechanism had been devised for Renault, enabling it to resume manufacturing in Iran despite U.S. sanctions targeting companies doing business in Iran.

Representatives of Renault have neither confirmed nor denied the ministers statements.

In August 2017, Renault signed a multimillion-dollar deal in Tehran and agreed to raise vehicle production in Iran just days after President Trump signed into law new sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

In the roughly $780 million agreement, Renault promised to produce as many as 150,000 additional cars a year in Iran. The deal was immediately branded as the "largest foreign auto deal in Irans history."

The Islamic Republic's state-owned media praised the deal with typical hype, but when the dust settled, Renault never delivered. Less than a year later, chief operating officer of Renault, Thierry Bollore, officially declared that his company would withdraw from Iran as Washington's renewed sanctions against Tehran weighed on the European car manufacturer.

We are looking to new business opportunities, particularly in Africa, with strong growth to offset the missed opportunities in Iran, Bollore said.

Car manufacturers are not the only major European companies leaving the Iranian market to avoid being targeted by the new U.S. sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic.

In August 2018, French oil giant Total also officially left Iran and abandoned its deal to develop a massive natural gas field in the country.

"Total has officially left the contract to develop the South Pars Gas project's phase 11... the process to replace with another company is underway," Bijan Namdar Zanganeh told state-run TV August 20, 2018.

Currently, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have set up a payment channel with Iran, the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchange (INSTEX), to facilitate continued trade with Iran and circumvent U.S. sanctions. Washington has repeatedly cautioned EU nations against such steps.

Jeremy Hunt, Heiko Maas, and Jean-Yves Le Drian, Foreign ministers of the UK, Germany, and France respectively, announced in January that INSTEX has been officially registered to facilitate "legitimate trade" with Tehran.

The European trio has insisted that INSTEX will focus initially on the sectors most essential to the Iranian population; such as pharmaceutical, medical devices, and foodstuff, excluding oil and other trade. Iranian Foreign Ministry officials have repeatedly expressed hope that INSTEX will not be limited to trade on essential commodities only.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once again cast doubt on INSTEX March 4, saying "The Iranian government should not rely on European countries' proposed packages for solving internal economic problems."

In a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani and his cabinet on Monday, Khamenei went further and warned the government not to be "deceived" by European countries and their "smiles."
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

Trend:

Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have 26 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said March 15, Trend reports.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

Changing the negotiation format on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would be unfair, Matthew Bryza, former US ambassador to Azerbaijan and former co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, told Trend.

He pointed out that the latest statement issued by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs rejects Prime Minister Pashinyan's request for a change in format of the mediation process.

The statement both encourages both parties to continue negotiating in good faith at the highest political level, and is a call by the Co-Chairs for both parties to embrace the "Basic Principles" of a possible framework agreement for a formal settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and refrain from trying to define certain principles as more important than others. Making a change in the format of the Minsk Group as Prime Minister Pashinyan requests would not be fair, said Bryza.

He went on to add that this latest statement reflects the continuing commitment of the OSCE and the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to help the leaderships of Azerbaijan and Armenia define a framework agreement for a final and peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

As has been the case throughout the history of the Minsk Group, the Co-Chairs welcome in this statement the commitment of President Aliyev and PM Pashinyan to meet under the auspices of the Minsk Group. So, there is nothing unusual or new in this latest statement by the Co-Chairs, Bryza believes.

He noted that if the leaderships of Azerbaijan and Armenia follow the Co-Chairs' call in this statement to stick with the "Basic Principles" and develop sufficiently productive and trusting relations with each other, then the prospects for a breakthrough in negotiations could be stronger, especially if both sides continue preparing their citizens for peace.

But, it is not yet clear that the leaderships of the two countries will be able to develop the required level of trust in each other to make the politically difficult compromises required to achieve such a breakthrough. Encouragement from the presidents of the United States, France, and Russia could help in this regard, Bryza concluded.

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, March 15

Trend:

The Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict should be resolved on the basis of the decisions that were made at the time, Russian MP Dmitry Savelyev told reporters on the sidelines of the Global Baku Forum, Trend reports March 15.

He reminded that there are Madrid Principles, the Kazan Formula, the 5+2 principle, which involves the gradual liberation of the Azerbaijani districts occupied by Armenia, with the subsequent return of refugees to Nagorno-Karabakh and further referendum to determine the fate of the region.

He said that Armenia is trying to protract these negotiations, to attract to the negotiation process a third party, representatives of the so-called "independent Artsakh", in order to bring the negotiations to a dead end, and this is an absolutely destructive element.

I believe that Russia, in turn, should work more actively towards the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as one of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, said Savelyev.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

Changing the format of the negotiations on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is possible only with the consent of the sides, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters at a press briefing, Trend reports.

"Russia, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, has repeatedly spoken about the negotiation format, which can only be changed on the basis of the consent of the sides. This is not only our position, but also the position of the other members," she said.

Also, answering journalists' question about whether Russia is ready in the event of an initiative by the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia to meet at the CIS Ministerial Council meeting on April 5 in Moscow, to provide them with a platform, Zakharova noted that in general, when the sides turn to the Russia for the opportunity to provide a platform or play a mediating role, Moscow always respectfully considers these issues.

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: @Hasanli_Azad
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

Trend:

Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov received Ambassador Sergio Osvaldo Perez Gunella, the newly appointed Ambassador of the Republic of Argentina to the Republic of Azerbaijan, Trend reports with reference to Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry.

Minister Elmar Mammadyarov noted that relations between Azerbaijan and Argentina are developing and expressed confidence that further cooperation between the two countries will continue to expand. The existing prospects in furthering the relations especially in economic, trade and tourism spheres were highlighted.

Minister Elmar Mammadyarov stressed that the Republic of Argentina in its capacity of observer has been invited to the 18th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which will be held in October in Baku this year and expressed hope that Argentine will be represented at high level at this event.

Ambassador Sergio Osvaldo Perez Gunella noted that Argentina is keen on development of cooperation with Azerbaijan in economy and other fields and mentioned that he would spare no efforts on further enhancement of bilateral commercial ties during his diplomatic mission.

Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov wished to the Ambassador of Argentine every success in his diplomatic activities.

During the meeting Ambassador Sergio Osvaldo Perez Gunella presented a copy of his credentials to Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

Trend:

Negotiation format on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has been elaborated for many years and any attempt, on unilateral change is considered as an attempt to block the negotiation process with all responsibility on the side which tries to do it, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said.

The president made the remarks at the opening ceremony of the 7th Global Baku Forum, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani presidential press-service.

Our people were the subject of ethnic cleansing and all our historical monuments on the occupied territories are destroyed by Armenian Armed Forces, the president said. And this is reflected in the report of the OSCE, that twice sent missions to find facts on the occupied territories.

Occupation of Azerbaijani lands is a brutal violation of international law and relevant resolutions and decisions of main international organizations, he added. UN Security Council adopted four resolutions demanding immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Armenian troops, from our territories and they are not implemented by Armenia. The UN Secretary General, OSCE, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, European Parliament, Non-Aligned Movement and other organizations adopted similar resolutions and decisions.

They are based on international law, President Aliyev said. They are based on justice, and they create a legal framework for peaceful resolutions of the conflict. Status-quo is unacceptable, and presidents of the countries of the OSCE Minsk group which has a mandate to organized negotiations, on several occasions stated that the status-quo is unacceptable and must be changed. In order to do it, Armenia must start to withdraw its troops from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, and allow refugees and IDPs to return to their homeland.

Armenian government tries to change the negotiation format, he said. This is absolutely unacceptable and counterproductive and we consider it as an attempt to block negotiations process. And not only we think like that, we are glad that international organizations share this view.

Just recently OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs issued a statement actually sending a clear message to Armenia that their attempts to change negotiation format are not accepted, the president added. Couple of days earlier high officials of European Union, made the same statement.

Negotiation format has been elaborated for many years and any attempt, on unilateral change is considered as an attempt to block the negotiation process with all responsibility on the side which tries to do it, he said. Therefore, negotiations format cannot be changed.

Negotiations must be result-oriented not just for the sake of negotiations, the president said. Azerbaijan is ready to continue this process. And as a result of the negotiations, our territorial integrity must be restored.

Territorial integrity is fundamental principle of international law, President Aliyev said. United Nations Charter, Helsinki Final Act has a very clear definition of the balance between territorial integrity and self-determination. Self-determination should not violate territorial integrity of countries. Therefore, the conflicts must be resolved based on international law norms, relevant resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, and based on territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

Trend:

Another plenary session of the Azerbaijani parliament will be held on March 15, Trend reports on March 15.

Azerbaijani Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov will deliver a report on the 2018 activity of the Cabinet of Ministers.

This is Mammadovs first annual report as prime minister.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev  Trend:

The 7th Global Baku Forum contributes to strengthening Azerbaijans international image, former Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told Trend on March 15.

Ihsanoglu stressed the great importance of the Global Baku Forum, adding that the annual participation of incumbent and former heads of state and government in the forum testifies to Azerbaijans authority.

The forum contributes to strengthening Azerbaijans image in the world, as well as bringing Azerbaijans fair voice to the world communitys attention, he said.

The settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an important issue not only for Azerbaijan, but for the entire Turkic, Muslim world.

Ihsanoglu added that the confidence in Azerbaijan in the world is growing every year, the country plays an active role in establishing intercultural and interreligious dialogue.

The 7th Global Baku Forum entitled "New Foreign Policy" opened in Baku, Azerbaijan on March 14.

The forum organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will last till March 16.

Over 500 representatives from 50 countries, including the incumbent heads of state and government of several countries, well-known political and public figures are taking part in this prestigious event.

The issues of global and regional importance will be discussed at 10 sessions to be held within the forum.

The role of big forces in changing global politics, the challenges of sustainable development, Middle Eastern cooperation in the name of security, the role of science and culture in making modern decisions and other important issues are being discussed at the current forum entitled New Foreign Policy.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Matanat Nasibova  Trend:

Under the leadership of President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan pursues a balanced and competent policy and, as a result, has been able to establish itself as a reliable strategic partner and ally, Liang Jianquan, vice president of Chinese Peoples Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA), told Trend March 15 on the sidelines of the 7th Global Baku Forum.

He said that Azerbaijan has established itself as a leading country in the region.

China supports Azerbaijans foreign policy and also considers the countrys role in the system of international relations important, he noted.

China welcomes Azerbaijans foreign policy and its active participation in global processes, he added.

Holding the Global Baku Forum is a very important event, which vividly confirms Azerbaijans importance as a leading regional player, with which many countries want to build close and long-term cooperation, he said.

Relations between Azerbaijan and China are consistently developing on the basis of friendship and mutual respect, and there are good prospects for further strengthening bilateral cooperation, he noted.

The two countries have great potential for developing bilateral cooperation, and the Global Forum will give impetus to strengthening ties between China and Azerbaijan, he added.

The 7th Global Baku Forum kicked off in Baku on March 14.

The forum organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will last till March 16.

Around 450 guests from over 70 countries are taking part in the forum. "New Foreign Policy" is the topic of the 7th Global Baku Forum.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

Trend:

The Azerbaijani army has completed large-scale exercises, Trend reports referring to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry on March 15.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry's session of the board was held following large-scale exercises conducted in accordance with the plan approved by Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev.

Azerbaijani Defense Minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov delivered a speech on the Clarifying the tasks of the Azerbaijan Army in the 2019 at the session of the board held with the participation of the ministrys leadership, commanders and chiefs of staff of Army Corps and formations, as well as other officials.

After analyzing the results of the exercises, Hasanov stressed that all the assigned tasks were fully implemented and according to the plan of exercises, the troops successfully completed large-scale military operations.

The defense minister stressed that during the exercises training of the troops was improved and upgraded to a new level. The staffs successfully completed all the assigned tasks.

The minister appreciated the ability of the command staff in managing the troops involved in the exercises and the fighting spirit of the servicemen.

Hasanov stressing the significance of the exercises, once again brought the tasks, assigned by the supreme commander-in-chief to the Azerbaijan army, to the attention of the participants of the session of the board.

According to the plan approved by President of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev, the large-scale exercises were launched on March 11 under the leadership of the Azerbaijani defense minister.

The exercises involved up to 10,000-member military personnel, up to 500 tanks and other armored vehicles, up to 300 missiles and artillery systems of different caliber, multiple launch rocket systems, and mortars, up to 20 army and front-line aviation for various purposes.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

Successful foreign policy by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev contributed to the growth in the number of countries supporting Azerbaijan, Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov said, Trend reports March 15.

He was speaking in the Azerbaijani parliament with a report on the results of the work of the Cabinet of Ministers in 2018.

He said that the year 2018 was rich in significant events and great achievements in the socio-political and socio-economic life of Azerbaijan.

The prime minister noted that at the presidential election of 2018, Azerbaijani people re-elected Ilham Aliyev as president, voting for stability and development in the country.

He stressed that in 2018, the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh problem continued to remain priority direction of Azerbaijans foreign policy, and the world community was informed that a solution to this conflict is possible only within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

Mammadov added that last year the work continued in Azerbaijan to improve the social welfare of the population, and salaries, pensions and state allowances were raised.

Great attention was paid in Azerbaijan to issues of self-sufficiency in food products, and the state support in this direction was continued, he said.

Attention was paid to improving the irrigation system of the sown areas, 314 subartesian wells were drilled to improve water supply to the population, the relevant work was carried out to create irrigation canals, he added. The work was also done in connection with the creation of 50 agricultural parks.

Mammadov reminded that the centenary of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) was solemnly celebrated last year.
Details added (first version posted on 12:59)

Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

Successful foreign policy by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev contributed to the growth in the number of countries supporting Azerbaijan, Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov said, Trend reports March 15.

He was speaking in the Azerbaijani parliament with a report on the results of the work of the Cabinet of Ministers in 2018.

He said that the year 2018 was rich in significant events and great achievements in the socio-political and socio-economic life of Azerbaijan.

The prime minister noted that at the presidential election of 2018, Azerbaijani people re-elected Ilham Aliyev as president, voting for stability and development in the country.

He stressed that in 2018, the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh problem continued to remain priority direction of Azerbaijans foreign policy, and the world community was informed that a solution to this conflict is possible only within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

Mammadov added that last year the work continued in Azerbaijan to improve the social welfare of the population, and salaries, pensions and state allowances were raised.

Great attention was paid in Azerbaijan to issues of self-sufficiency in food products, and the state support in this direction was continued, he said.

Attention was paid to improving the irrigation system of the sown areas, 314 subartesian wells were drilled to improve water supply to the population, the relevant work was carried out to create irrigation canals, he added. The work was also done in connection with the creation of 50 agricultural parks.

Mammadov reminded that the centenary of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) was solemnly celebrated last year.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

The year 2018 became significant in the social and political life of Azerbaijan, Speaker Ogtay Asadov said March 15 at a plenary session of the Azerbaijani parliament.

He noted that as Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said at a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers on the results of last year, 2018 became a year of profound reforms in Azerbaijan.

Asadov said that as a result of the work done in the country, sustainable development of the economy was ensured.

The increase in the minimum salary, scholarships and pensions at the beginning of this year, as well as the resolution of social issues is the result of the policy being pursued in the country, he noted. Leading organizations highly assess these reforms. In the World Bank report, our country has risen by 22 positions, compared to previous years. In other reports Azerbaijans position has also improved significantly.
Details added (first version posted at 13:44).

Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

In 2018, under the leadership of Azerbaijans President, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev, purposeful work was carried out to increase the country's military-industrial potential, improve the army-building, provide the armed forces with modern military equipment, weapons and ammunition, and raise the fighting spirit of the personnel, Azerbaijani Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov said, speaking in the country's parliament with a report on the activities of the Cabinet of Ministers in 2018, Trend reports.

Mammadov noted that the focus was on equipping the Azerbaijani Armed Forces with the latest military equipment, including the Polonez and Lora long-range missile systems, with air defense systems against ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles and other military equipment.

"A clear proof of this is the demonstration of military equipment in the arsenal of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces at two solemn military parades held in Baku. Thanks to the successful military operation of the Azerbaijani army in the Sharur district of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic last May, strategic heights were taken, and the settlement of Gunnut, which was controlled by Armenian armed forces since 1992, was liberated," he said.

The prime minister stressed that last year the enterprises in the defense industry produced up to 1,200 types of products worth 250 million manats.

"Last year, various segments of society transferred 8.4 million manats to the Armed Forces Relief Fund and the total assets of the Fund amounted to 96.8 million manats," he added.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

There are 5,209,420 voters in Azerbaijan, Chairman of the countrys Central Election Commission (CEC) Mazahir Panahov said at the CEC meeting March 15, Trend reports.

He said that 50.83 percent of voters are women and 49.17 percent are men.

He stressed that by the end of May, it is planned to complete the process of clarifying voter lists.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Rauf Guliyev - Trend:

Concluding a new comprehensive bilateral agreement between European Union (EU) and Azerbaijan remains a top priority, said in the report published on the official website of the organization, Trend reports March 15.

Over the last year, EU-Azerbaijan cooperation has intensified: Partnership Priorities were endorsed; high-level security and transport dialogues launched; improvements to human rights and fundamental freedoms sought, the report says.

The EU report published today sets out the state of play of developments in Azerbaijan since the last meeting of the Cooperation Council on 9 February 2018, and comes ahead of the upcoming EU-Azerbaijan Cooperation Council, scheduled to take place on 4 April in Brussels. The report focuses on key developments and reforms undertaken and reports on bilateral dialogues that took place.

High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, Federica Mogherini, said: We have stepped up our cooperation with Azerbaijan, which is a key partner in our neighbourhood. The negotiations on a comprehensive new EU-Azerbaijan agreement are entering a decisive phase and we will keep working hard to achieve a modern agreement that addresses all aspects of our relationship, and that benefits citizens from both the European Union and Azerbaijan.

Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes Hahn said: The European Union is providing strong support to Azerbaijan's economic diversification and reform efforts, including in the key sectors of education, agriculture and rural development. The Partnership Priorities and the Eastern Partnership 20 deliverables for 2020 are guiding our future cooperation, including stronger people-to-people contacts and support to stronger connectivity, governance and economy in Azerbaijan.

The EU reports also says that the organization and Azerbaijan will continue to cooperate in all areas of mutual interest, in full respect of shared interests and commitments, in particular in the framework of the Partnership Priorities where the European Union stands ready to provide the necessary assistance
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Samir Ali - Trend:

Former chief of staff of Azerbaijans Ministry of Communications and High Technologies Vidadi Zeynalov has been released from prison, Trend reports March 15.

The decision on his release was made by the Sabunchu district court.

The decision states that he served 4/5 of his sentence.

A trial on a number of former high-ranking officials of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Communications and High Technologies, arrested on charges of misappropriation and abuse of power, was completed July 27 last year at the Baku Grave Crimes Court.

Former chief of staff of Azerbaijans Ministry of Communications and High Technologies Vidadi Zeynalov was sentenced to 13 years of imprisonment.

In November last year, Zeynalov filed an appeal, and by the decision of the Court of Appeal his sentence was reduced to four years.

Vidadi Zeynalov was accused under articles 179.3.1 (misappropriation or embezzlement, committed by an organized group), 179.3.2 (large scale embezzlement), 308.2 (abuse of power) and 313 (office forgery) of Azerbaijans Criminal Code.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

Trend:

On March 14, on the eve of the Novruz holiday, the brewing company Carlsberg Azerbaijan together with the environmental organization Green Baku organized the planting of olive trees on the territory of the Baku Engineering University.

The campaign was organized by Carlsberg Azerbaijan in honor of the 50th anniversary of the plant in Baku.

At the beginning of the event, the vice-Rector of Baku Engineering University, Yaver Mammadov, thanked Carlsberg Azerbaijan for the initiative and care for environment.

The Managing director of Carlsberg Azerbaijan, Viacheslav Maltsev, in his turn, stressed the importance of cooperation and collaboration of representatives of various industries in order to preserve the environment for future generations.

V. Maltsev also noted that concern for the environment is an integral part of the Carlsberg Groups activities.

Thus, in 2017, the Carlsberg Group launched a long-term sustainable development program Together Towards Zero, the key areas of which include the reduction of carbon emissions into the atmosphere and the preservation of the planets water resources.

Students of the Baku Engineering University, employees of Carlsberg Azerbaijan and members of the environmental organization Green Baku took part in the campaign. More than 200 trees were planted during the campaign.

It should be noted that Carlsberg Azerbaijan constantly pays great attention to both environmental projects and interaction with the local community.

Thus, in March 2018, the company organized an ecological brain-ring, and in July of the same year, the company provided one-time support to representatives of 100 families - members of the Society of Visually impaired of Absheron district.

Carlsberg is also internationally known for its packaging innovations, designed to reduce environmental impact, including innovative packaging SnapPack, which reduces plastic waste, as well as fiber bottle and a number of other innovative initiatives.

Since 2015, Carlsberg Group has been supporting Global Beer Responsibility Day globally celebrated by the largest brewers in the world.

Carlsberg Azerbaijan brewery is located in Khirdalan, 10 kilometers from the capital of Azerbaijan. The production capacity of the plant is 8 million decalitres per year; the company employs about 250 people and about 400 indirectly (distributors, agencies, contractors).

The total investment of the company in the development of the plant is about 50 million AZN.

The company's portfolio includes such popular brands as Xirdalan, Tuborg, Baltika 7, Baltika 0, Baltika 9, Baltika 4, Baltika KULER, Efsane, Zhigulevskoe Firmennoe, Carlsberg, Holsten, Kronenbourg Blanc, Seth&Riley's Garage.

Carlsberg Group was founded in 1847 and is currently one of the world's largest beer producers. The company is headquartered in Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. Carlsberg Group has factories in many countries of the world's three major regions - Western Europe, Eastern Europe and Asia and its products are represented in 150 countries. The company's portfolio includes more than 140 brands of beer. The total number of employees of the Group is more than 42000.

Carlsberg Azerbaijan Contacts

Senior Corporate Affairs Specialist of Carlsberg Azerbaijan LLC

Lala Afandi

Cell phone: +994 50 286 76 64

[email protected]

www.carlsbergazerbaijan.az
Tehran, Iran, March 15

Trend:

Iran's Minister of Economic Affairs Farhad Dejpasand said that the volume of trade between Iran and Azerbaijan has grown by 75 percent over the past year (end on March.21, 2019).

Speaking at the Iran-Azerbaijan Trade and Investment Conference, the official said it was necessary to establish joint venture companies to deepen economic relations between the two countries, Trend reports citing Mehr News Agency.

Dejpasand traveled to Azerbaijan for attending the 13th meeting of the Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation of Iran and the Republic of Azerbaijan.

"The best way to deepen economic relations between the two countries is establishing joint ventures in the areas of investment, services, tourism and international trade, based on win-win approach, said Dejpasand.

The minister went on to say that both countries have the capacity to do so.

Iran believes that the economic, cultural and social ties between the two countries are expanding further and provide a catalyst for the growth and development of both countries, he said.

Dejpasand acknowledged the level of political relations between the two countries and referred to the numerous mutual visits of presidents of both countries, as well as high-ranking delegations.

He noted that discussions on "promotion of bilateral relations is not a short-term necessity, but it has to be a strategy.

He called on the two countries' private sectors to develop economic ties.
Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier

Mayor Alan Casavant notes the city's successes but says there are problems and all must work together to solve them.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Fakhri Vakilov - Trend:

Kazakhstan lifted restrictions on the import of pomegranate from Uzbekistan, Trend reports via Uzbek media.

Delegations of the two countries held negotiations during which issues of strengthening cooperation between the quarantine services of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, as well as lifting the temporary restrictions on the import of fresh pomegranate fruits to Kazakhstan were discussed.

"The parties exchanged views on the quarantine phytosanitary situation in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, as well as on the export and import control of quarantine products. As a result of negotiations, an agreement was reached to strengthen the phytosanitary control over imported and exported products to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and to remove temporary restrictions on import Kazakhstan is a fresh pomegranate from Uzbekistan since March 14, 2019," Uzbek State Plant Quarantine Inspectorate said in a statement.

The ban on the import of Uzbek grenades to Kazakhstan was introduced on February 19. This was justified by the fact that in two batches of this agricultural production a pest Comstock mealybug was found.

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Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 15

Trend:

Azerbaijan Railways CJSC is considering the prospects of obtaining a loan from the World Bank (WB) for the reconstruction of a part of the Baku-Astara-Iranian border railway, Javid Gurbanov, chairman of the company, told reporters, Trend reports.

According to Gurbanov, part of the funds for the reconstruction will be allocated from the state budget. Overall, as noted by the head of the department, the reconstruction will affect 243 kilometers of roads and will allow for its expansion, making it double-tracked.

Also, work is currently underway in conjunction with foreign companies to design a new section of the Baku-Astara railway in Azerbaijans Lankaran District, he added.

Designing is set to be completed by late 2019.

It was earlier reported that the Azerbaijani government was conducting preparatory work on the relocation of the Baku-Astara railway.

Particular focus was made on the part of the railway that passes through Lankaran and Astara. The railway runs along the sea coast and restricts access to the sea. In addition, the tide erodes the foundation of the road, it falls faster, despite repairs.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

Latvia would welcome investments from Azerbaijan in ports and logistics centres, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Latvia Edgars Rinkevics said in an exclusive interview with Trend.

Noting that Latvian companies are working in Azerbaijans market in transport and logistics, engineering, IT and telecommunications, architecture, tourism and education sectors, the foreign minister said Latvia is interested in expanding this cooperation.

In 2018, Azerbaijan opened its Trade House in Riga seeking to build stronger economic cooperation with Latvia. Azerbaijani companies have shown an interest in developing contacts with Latvia in the food, pharmaceutical, environmental, agricultural and industrial sectors. Latvia would welcome investments from Azerbaijan in ports and logistics centres. This April, we look ahead to hosting a business delegation from Azerbaijan. Hopefully, this visit will contribute to boosting our economic exchanges, said Rinkevics.

He went on to add that investment in small and medium-sized business would bring a lot of benefit to economic relations between Latvia and Azerbaijan.

We already have examples of successful investment in the areas such as wholesale trade, transportation and consulting. Latvia is interested in increasing mutually beneficial investments, added the Latvian foreign minister.

Further, Rinkevics said that in 2018, Latvia and Azerbaijan trade turnover (19.84 million euros) increased for more than 20 percent year-on-year.

Latvian exports to Azerbaijan include food products, construction and building materials, wood products, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. Latvian entrepreneurs are interested in exploring new export markets. We are confident that more Latvian products ranging from electronic equipment to cosmetics will be delivered to Azerbaijan in the coming years, he added.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Tehran, Iran, March 15

Trend:

The first cargo with 47,090 livestock heads has arrived to the Shahid Beheshti port in Iran's Chabahar city on Friday, where it is currently being unloaded, to have meat sent to the markets.

"Shahid Beheshti Port in Chabahar has the capacity to unload cargo from any type of ship and can have important role in development of Sistan and Baluchestan Province, " Director General of Sistan and Baluchestan Ports and Maritime Organization Behrouz Aghaie said, Trend reports via IRNA.

"Importing basic goods into Chabahar port and distribution of the goods in Sistan and Baluchestan province and other eastern provinces would reduce the price of all commodities," he said.

"Utilizing the capacities of Sistan and Baluchestan slaughterhouses would create jobs while people have easy access to red meat," he noted.

Earlier the managing director of the State Livestock Affairs Logistics (SLAL) Inc. Hamid Varnaseri, said that imports of livestock via Chabahar would balance the market and red meat distribution would reduce the prices in the country.

"The capacities of Chabahar is suitable for heavy and light livestock imports and all the slaughterhouses in Sistan and Baluchestan province should be active," he added.

The official noted that after the discharging of the first cargo ship, the import of livestock through Chabahar port would continue in order to provide meat for the market.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

Croatia is intensifying its efforts to realize the Ionian-Adriatic Pipeline (IAP), through which the country will be able to receive Azerbaijani gas, Trend reports with reference to Gas Regulatio.

"Croatia is also intensifying its efforts to realize the Ionian-Adriatic Pipeline as a connection to the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, which is receiving more support from the EU as an alternative gas supply route from Azerbaijan," reads the material.

It is recalled that in 2015, Plinacro proposed and HERA approved the 10 Year Development Plan of the Croatian Gas Transmission System for the period 2018 to 2027.

"The main projects are the construction of the LNG terminal on the island of Krk in the North Adriatic and the Ionian-Adriatic Pipeline. Therefore, the construction of LNG storage capacities on the island of Krk, the finalization of construction of the Croatian transportation network, connection to international pipelines and the construction of natural gas storages are recognized as strategic national project."

IAP is a proposed natural gas pipeline in Southeastern Europe (SEE) that will stretch from Albania through Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Split in Croatia. It will be connected with the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP). The capacity of the pipeline will amount to five billion cubic meters of gas per year.

Total length of the pipeline is 511 kilometers.

TAP worth 4.5 billion euros is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor, which is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union. The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries.

TAP will be 878 kilometers in length (Greece 550 kilometers, Albania 215 kilometers, Adriatic Sea 105 kilometers, and Italy 8 kilometers).

TAPs shareholding is comprised of BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent).

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 15

By Sara Israfilbayova  Trend:

Azerbaijan has suspended oil pumping through Baku-Novorossiysk, Ibrahim Ahmadov, Deputy Head of the Public Relations Department at Azerbaijans SOCAR state company, told Trend.

According to Ahmadov, this is due to scheduled inspections and repair work on the pipeline.

"We carry out regular inspections on the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline and, in case of identifying any flaws or risks, carry out the necessary repairs," he said.

As Ahmadov noted, in order to fulfill the company's export obligations, the oil that was supplied via Baku-Novorossiysk has been redirected to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

"Due to us having an extensive system of pipelines, we can redirect some volumes of oil to other pipelines in order to fulfill our export obligations," Ahmadov said.

The Baku-Novorossiysk oil pipeline transports oil extracted by SOCAR independently, as well as from onshore fields developed within joint ventures. SOCAR has been the operator of the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline since 2008.

The Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline is 1,147 kilometers long, 231 kilometers in its Azerbaijani section, and 916 kilometers in its Russian section. The highest capacity of the pipeline stands at 105,000 barrels a day.

The total length of the BTC pipeline is 1,768 kilometers, 443 kilometers of which passes through Azerbaijan, 249 through Georgia and 1,076 through Turkey. Construction of the pipeline was commenced in April 2003 and was filled with oil on May 18, 2005.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

OPEC calls on oil producers to continue to support oil market stability in 2019, Trend reports citing the OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report.

While oil demand is expected to grow at a moderate pace in 2019, it is still well below the strong growth expected in the non-OPEC supply forecast for this year. This highlights the continued shared responsibility of all participating producing countries to avoid a relapse of the imbalance and continue to support oil market stability in 2019, reads the report.

OPEC members and non-OPEC countries participating in the oil production cut deal will meet on March 17-18 in Baku, Azerbaijan, to review output curbs theyve been implementing to avert a supply glut and defend oil prices. The agreement is due to expire at the middle of the year.

On December 7, 2018, an agreement was reached at the fifth ministerial meeting of the non-OPEC member and non-OPEC countries in Vienna to cut daily oil production by 1.2 million barrels.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

In January-February 2019, Azerbaijan exported 5.78 million tons of oil, which is 58 percent more than in the same period of 2018, Trend reports referring to the State Customs Committee of the country.

The total value of exports amounted to $2.6 billion (an increase of 42.5 percent over a year).

Also during the reported period, Azerbaijan exported almost 92,570 tons of oil products worth $48.5 million. Over a year, these figures decreased by 2.3 times and 2.2 times, respectively. The share of oil products in the country's exports is 1.54 percent.

In just two months, the volume of Azerbaijan's exports amounted to $ 3.15 billion in total, which is over 42 percent more than in the same period of 2018.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @Hasanli_Azad
Tehran, Iran, March 15

Trend:

Removing US dollar from Iran's global transactions is a new guideline to the country's trade relations, said the Governor of Iran's Central Bank Abdolnaser Hemmati.

Referring to agreements with Iraqi officials, Hemmati said that considering the current approach in Iran-Iraq economic and trade ties and with other neighbors including Turkey, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, one can speak of the changes in destination of Iran's exports of goods and services, Trend reports citing IRNA.

He noted the US sanctions have failed in reality and eventually, it would led to a change in the structure of Iran's trade. "The immediate reaction of related public organizations will hasten the change."

"The transaction limit between Iran and Iraq is due to US sanctions that have created complexity in banking relations of the two countries. Nevertheless, our Iraqi counterparts will use special payment mechanism in trade, so we will be able to receive the payment for exported goods," he added.

Hemmati noted that the next step is to ensure a balance in trade between neighboring countries that will reduce Iran's dependency on direct imports and instead important part of exports from these countries will be re-exported to Iran.

"At the moment we are in a special situation to use national capacity for boosting domestic production, exports and cutting dependency on oil exports and importing goods that would have important role in defeating sanction."
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Fakhri Vakilov-Trend:

Central banks of Uzbekistan and Russia will sign an agreement on the integration of national payment card systems, Trend reports with reference to the press service of Uzbek Central Bank

The agreement was reached as result of a meeting of the Sub-Commission on Interbank Cooperation between the countries, which was held in Moscow.

One of the main advantages of the integration of national payment card systems is the fact that citizens of both countries are able to conduct operations at ATMs in the territory of two states.

"During the event, the parties discussed a wide range of issues covering cooperation in the areas of interbank cooperation development, national payment systems, banking supervision and regulation, including consolidated cross-border banking supervision, improving financial affordability, and personnel training," Uzbek Central Bank noted.

The parties agreed to develop a memorandum of understanding between the central banks of the two countries in the field of banking supervision, which will promote close cooperation and exchange of experience.

In order to organize the work on the intersystem integration of the national payment card systems of Russia and Uzbekistan and to bring together approaches to regulation and supervision in the field of payment systems, an arrangement was reached on the elaboration of an agreement on cooperation in this direction.

Central Bank of Russia and the Central Bank of Uzbekistan also signed an agreement on cooperation in the field of personnel training.

Follow author on Twitter:@vakilovfaxri
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, March 15

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

The representatives of the Turkish company Innovera, specializing in digital technologies, met with the representatives of the Turkmen companies at the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan, Trend reports referring to the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

About 20 big local private enterprises took part in the meeting. Turkish businessmen held the presentation about their capabilities in IT sphere, including those in the implementation of projects of the electronic document management system, as well as in the training of specialists.

The ways of cooperation in the abovementioned spheres were determined during the meeting. The process of implementing the Digital Economy Development Concept for the period up to 2025 was launched in Turkmenistan in early 2019.

The concept is aimed at the growth of business and investment activity, the implementation of advanced methods of state governance and the creation of new jobs.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 15

Trend:

A meeting was held between Azerbaijani Minister of Transport, Communications and High Technologies Ramin Guluzade and UNDP Assistant Administrator, Director of UNDP Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS Mirjana Egger, who is on a visit to Baku, Trend reports referring to the ministry.

Among the points of discussion during the meeting were the implementation of start-up projects, technical issues and expert support regarding the backup DATA-center under construction in Azerbaijans Yevlakh District, along with plans for creating an Innovation Lab and an Innovation Center. At the same time, views were exchanged on the provision of qualified expert support from the UNDP to the work being done in Azerbaijan in the field of information and communications technology (ICT).

The minister stressed that the relations between the UNDP and Azerbaijan are developing successfully, and added that, as in all spheres, mutual ties are expanding in the field of ICT.

Guluzade spoke about the reforms carried out in Azerbaijan on the development of the ICT sector and the ongoing national and regional projects. The Minister highly appreciated the UNs support for international projects initiated by Azerbaijan.

In turn, Egger touched upon the importance of successful ICT projects in Azerbaijan and stressed that UNDP intends to further expand areas of cooperation with Azerbaijan.

Afterwards, discussion were held about the prospects for cooperation in the field of ICT, as well as many other issues.
Details added (first version posted on 13:14)

Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

The growth of tourist flow to Azerbaijan shows the development of the tourism sector, Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov said.

He was speaking at the Azerbaijani parliament with a report on the results of the work of the Cabinet of Ministers in 2018, Trend reports March 15.

Mammadov reminded that last year in Azerbaijan great attention was paid to the development of healthcare, strengthening the material and technical base of medical institutions, providing them with modern equipment, as well as repair and construction work was carried out in 47 medical institutions.

The prime minister also noted the development of the tourism sector.

The number of tourists who arrived in Azerbaijan last year reached 2.8 million people, which indicates the development of this sphere, he said.

He added that last year Azerbaijani athletes achieved great success.

Fifty-eight international competitions were held in Azerbaijan last year, he said. Our athletes participated in 236 international tournaments, they won 753 medals, including 263 gold medals.

Mammadov stressed that work will be carried out to improve the business environment in Azerbaijan.

In the Doing Business report, Azerbaijan has risen by 32 positions, taking a leading position among the CIS countries, he said.

He added that last year 1.7 billion manats were allocated for the road infrastructure in the country.

Last year, 2,000 kilometers of roads were overhauled and 14 kilometers of the Lyaki-Gabala railway have already been built, he said.

Mammadov added that last year Azerbaijan also acquired two planes.
Presidents of Kyrgyzstan Sooronbai Jeenbekov and Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon discussed the situation on Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border by telephone, Trend reports referring to the Information Policy Department of the Presidential Administration of the Kyrgyz Republic.

The heads of the two states noted the need to create a joint commission to objectively investigate and prevent similar situations in the future, as well as to intensify negotiations on completion of the process of delimitation of the state border.

The presidents are unanimous in their opinion that the peoples of the two countries, having centuries-old good-neighborly relations, should live only in peace and friendship, the department noted.

Recall, conflict occurred on Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border in Ak-Sai village of Batken region on March 13. According to preliminary data, citizens of Tajikistan wanted to hinder construction of Ak-Sai  Tamdyk road. Kyrgyz border guards prevented this. Residents of the Kyrgyz village also gathered there, people began to throw stones at each other. In the evening, the border guards managed to bring the conflict under control, but, after a while, the situation became tense again. Injured local residents from both countries were reported.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, March 15

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

The first private laboratory on food safety in Turkmenistan opened in Ashgabat city, Trend reports referring to the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan.

The laboratory supported by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was created through the local company Hil Standart within the project on competitiveness, trade and job creation in Central Asia.

The laboratory is designed to contribute to the country's food security, support the private sector of the national economy, use the export potential of the local food industry and obtain international accreditation.

Thus, 1.5 million researches can be conducted in eleven spheres in this laboratory.

A microbiological laboratory has been already put into operation, while a physicochemical laboratory is planned to open in September.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Mar. 15

By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend

A meeting was held between the Ambassador of Belarus to Turkmenistan Oleg Tabanyukhov and Deputy Prime Minister of Turkmenistan Mammethan Chakiyev in Ashgabat, Trend reports referring to the Belarusian Embassy in Turkmenistan.

An agreement was reached on holding the Belarusian-Turkmen business forum as part of the meeting of the intergovernmental commission to be held in Ashgabat this year.

The dates of the business forum are being specified.

The event is aimed at the effective implementation of new plans and projects aimed at the development of cooperation between the countries in a wide range of areas.

The parties exchanged views on cooperation in trade of goods and services during the meeting.

More than 130 bilateral documents have been signed and are being implemented between the countries, constituting the contractual and legal base of multifaceted cooperation.

Belarus mainly supplies high value-added goods to Turkmenistan, such trucks, special-purpose vehicles, tractors, road-building equipment, medicine, woodworking products, and agricultural products.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Mar. 15

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan is hosting the 1st meeting of authorized representatives of the Caspian states to agree on a draft intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in the field of scientific research in the Caspian Sea, Trend reports referring to the ministry.

The event is organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Enterprise for Caspian Sea Affairs under the President of Turkmenistan, and attended by experts from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan.

Turkmen Dovlet Habarlary (TDH) state agency reports that "today, all economic activity in the Caspian Sea needs strict scientific accompaniment, should rely on a holistic perception of the natural and anthropogenic processes that are taking place, a monitoring and forecasting system."

The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland water body, not connected to the oceans and has a climate-forming significance. It is unique in having carried a diverse relict flora and fauna, including the world's largest herd of sturgeon.
Tehran, Iran, March 15

Trend:

Head of Energy Commission of Iranian Parliament Qasem Saedi offered to have water-consuming industries move closer to seaside provinces, to save the waste of country's groundwater resources.

Referring to the issue of water transfer from Karoun River to Isfahan province, Saedi told Trend that "the representatives of Isfahan in the parliament want to take the whole water."

"The water there is used mostly for factories and industries, not for drinking," he said.

Steel and petrochemical industries will definitely face water scarce, he said. One of the problems is the lack of spatial planning in the country.

Some provinces like Kerman, Yazd and Esfahan, which are the three most important provinces of Iran, can develop the industries which need less water, but unfortunately in these provinces, most of the groundwater is used for industries, while underground water should be used for drinking and irrigation at the farms, Saedi explained.

He reminded that two months ago, Yazd province's first steel plant was opened, but the source of water for it remains unclear.

"The issue of water transfer is taken seriously, but the issue of water transfer costs is not," he said.

"Petrochemical producers and steelmakers should move to Sistan and Baluchestan, Hormozgan, Bushehr, Khuzestan provinces, and Northern provinces which have more water and are near the sea," he said. "Meanwhile, those industries that are not as water-consuming, should be moved to Yazd and Kerman provinces," the MP suggested.
Georgia and Japan have signed an agreement on the insurance of exports and investments today within the Georgia-Japan business forum held in Tokyo, Trend reports referring to Agenda.ge.

The memorandum of understanding was signed between Georgian Economy Minister Giorgi Kobulia and President of NEXI, a Japanese government corporation specialised in export credits, Musafumi Nakada.

NEXI aims to facilitate the export of Japanese goods and services, expansion of Japanese businesses overseas and the stable supply of natural resources from foreign countries through such insurance products as export credits, investments and loan insurance.

The memorandum focuses on the development and implementation of macroeconomic policy, production and manufacturing, tourism, energy, transport and logistics, telecommunications and high-tech, trade and export facilitation, public property management, construction policy, investments.

Thus, applicable insurance packages will be offered to Japanese exporters, investors and financial experts.

Nakada is confident that the agreement will significantly contribute to the establishment and expansion of Japanese businesses in Georgia.

Kobulia and Georgian Prime Minister Mamuka Bakhtadze also welcomed the signing of the memorandum and noted that it will lead to the development of cooperation in trade and investments.
Members of Parliament in Britain have allowed the government to seek a delay to its withdrawal from the European Union beyond the planned departure date of March 29, Trend reported citing Press TV.

Lawmakers in the House of Commons on Thursday voted 412 to 202 for a motion tabled by the government which is aimed at requesting a one-off delay to Brexit negotiation period for three more months.

The motion by Prime Minister Theresa Mays government has reiterated that such a delay to Brexit, which is aimed at preparing legislation required for leaving the EU, would have a high chance of approval in an EU summit on March 21 if the Commons agree on a withdrawal deal a day before that.

The motion stresses that if the Commons reject Mays Brexit deal, the EU could reject the request for the extension of the Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, a mechanism Britain triggered following the June 2016 Brexit referendum.

Parliament agrees that if lawmakers approve a divorce deal by March 20, the government will seek to agree a one-off extension until June 30 to pass legislation needed to smooth Britains departure from the EU, read the motion.

Before the vote on governments motion, the Commons voted against a series of amendments, including one seeking a second referendum on Brexit. An amendment seeking to wrest control of Brexit process from the government and give it to the parliament was narrowly rejected by 314 to 312.

The votes came a day after British lawmakers voted to rule out an option to leave the EU without a deal. However, with votes on Thursday and given EUs repeated assertions that it would not change its position on Brexit, there is still a chance that Britain could crash out of the EU on March 29, a disorderly scenario which many believe could have dire economic impacts for the UK.
The ancient Silk Road was a network of trading routes that stretched from China to Italy, transporting goods, skills and ideas half way around the world, Trend reports referring to Reuters.

Jump forward two millennia and Italy now wants to play a pivotal role in the new Silk Road being created by Chinese President Xi Jinping. But joining the latest incarnation is proving controversial and risky for Romes modern-day masters.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte plans to sign a preliminary accord when Xi visits Rome next week, hooking Italy up to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) - a colossal, multi-billion-dollar project designed to improve Beijings trade reach.

Italys drive to be the first Group of Seven industrialized nation to join the ambitious venture has angered Washington and alarmed Brussels, raising fears of a sellout of sensitive technologies and the handover of critical infrastructure.

With ports that offer easy gateways into Europes richest markets, Italy is a promising and prestigious prize for China.

In return for its endorsement, Italys government hopes for a boost in exports and i Belt and Road nvestment that will lift its anemic economy out of its third recession in a decade.

But diplomatic analysts and political foes say Rome has not weighed the geopolitical risks, failed to consult with its Western partners and underestimated growing concern about Chinas burgeoning global aspirations.

I am afraid that up until now we have handled this in too amateurish a fashion, without any real coordination, Lucio Caracciolo, director of the influential Limes geopolitical review, told Reuters.

My fear is that in the end we will lose on both counts, getting nothing substantial from China while the United States retaliates against us for having got too close to Beijing.
Israeli military aircraft bombed Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip on Friday, hours after two rockets were launched from the Palestinian enclave at Tel Aviv, Trend reported citing Reuters.

There was no immediate word of casualties in the air strikes that hit four buildings used by the dominant Islamist groups security forces, and which had been evacuated as a precaution.

Witnesses said powerful explosions from the air strikes rocked buildings in Gaza and lit the skies over targeted sites

The Israeli military said it was targeting terror sites in Gaza. In a possible sign of further escalation, it said rocket sirens were sounded in Israeli communities near the Gaza border.

On Thursday night, sirens howled farther north, in Tel Aviv, Israels commercial capital, set off by what the military said were two incoming, longer-range rockets from Gaza.

That salvo caused no casualties or damage, missing built-up areas.

Explosions were heard in Tel Aviv and witnesses said Iron Dome interceptor missiles were fired skyward and detonated - although the military said no rockets were shot down.
Two rockets were fired from Gaza toward the greater Tel Aviv district on Thursday night, the Israeli army said, without giving further information, Trend reports referring to Al Arabiya.

The Israeli foreign ministry posted a video of what it said was Israels Iron Dome missile defense system shooting down one of the incoming rockets "over the Tel Aviv area".

The video showed two outgoing missiles climbing into the sky above high-rise buildings as sirens wail in the background.

Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai told public television one of the Gaza rockets apparently fell into the sea, the other hit somewhere but not in Tel Aviv.

There were no immediate reports of any casualties or damage.

The station said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also defense minister, was convening an emergency security meeting at the defense ministry in Tel Aviv.

Meanwhile, Hamas denied responsibility for rockets fired into Israel, saying the attack took place as it held truce talks with Egyptian mediators.



The Hamas armed wing said in a statement it was not responsible for the firing of the rockets tonight towards the enemy. They were fired as a meeting was underway between the leadership of the Hamas movement and the Egyptian security delegation over the understandings regarding the Gaza Strip.

In October 2018 a rocket fired by Palestinians in Gaza fell into the sea off Tel Aviv and another hit the southern city of Beersheba.

In response to the October fire, Israel struck 20 targets in Gaza, killing one Palestinian, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

It also closed both its border crossings with Gaza in reprisal, further isolating the blockaded enclave where deteriorating living conditions have stoked violent protests along the border.
Israeli military aircraft bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip early on Friday, hours after two rockets were launched at Tel Aviv in the first such attack since a 2014 war, Trend reports referring to Al Arabiya.

Following the overnight exchanges, sirens sounded again in Israeli border towns after dawn broke.

The Israeli military said its Iron Dome defense system intercepted all but one of six more missiles that were fired at Israel.

In a statement, the Israeli military said it had struck approximately 100 military targets belonging to Hamas, the Islamist militant group which controls Gaza.

The statement included photographs of several sites the military said it targeted, including what it called the headquarters of Hamass West Bank operations, a rocket manufacturing site, and a naval post which it described as a weapons depot.

Reuters was unable to immediately verify the claims.

Palestinian news media reported strikes throughout Gaza, from Rafah in the south to the north of the densely populated coastal strip that is home to two million Palestinians.

Some of the buildings targeted had been evacuated as a precaution, as Hamas had expected an Israeli response.

Health ministry officials in Gaza said two people, a man and a woman, were wounded when their house was damaged in Rafah in the early morning.

Witnesses said powerful explosions from the air strikes rocked buildings in Gaza and lit the skies over targeted sites.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 15

By Matanat Nasibova  Trend:

To resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a peace treaty must be worked out for both sides, said Israeli statesman and former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni while speaking at the VII Global Baku Forum, Trend reports.

According to her, the settlement of this long-term conflict can lead to peace in the region and throughout the world.

The 7th Global Baku Forum entitled "New Foreign Policy" opened in Baku, Azerbaijan on March 14.

The forum organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will last till March 16.

Over 500 representatives from 50 countries, including the incumbent heads of state and government of several countries, well-known political and public figures are taking part in this prestigious event.

The issues of global and regional importance will be discussed at 10 sessions to be held within the forum.

The role of big forces in changing global politics, the challenges of sustainable development, Middle Eastern cooperation in the name of security, the role of science and culture in making modern decisions and other important issues are being discussed at the current forum entitled New Foreign Policy.
Nigerian police in the northern state of Kaduna on Thursday said unidentified gunmen shot dead 17 members of a local vigilante group following an attack on Jan Ruwa village, Trend reported citin Xinhua.

In a statement made available to Xinhua, Yakubu Sabo, the state police spokesperson, disclosed that a group of armed men entered the village and rustled many cows.

He said a team of vigilante group of the village mobilized and pursued the criminals into the deep forest. They engaged the gunmen in serious gun duel, during which some vigilante men lost their lives.

He added that 15 dead bodies of the vigilante men were initially recovered, and additional two bodies were found later.

State Commissioner of Police Ahmad Abdurrahaman condemned the killing and vowed to apprehend the perpetrators.

Abdurrahaman appealed to the public to assist police in providing relevant information on any suspicious person or group to ensure effective crime prevention in the state.

Kaduna is one of the states in northern Nigeria that saw a high number of attacks, with women and children being the most affected.
The North Korean leadership is considering suspension of denuclearization talks with the United States, North Koreas Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui told reporters on Friday, Trend reported citing TASS.

"We have no intention to yield to the US demands [put forward at the Hanoi summit] in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," she told reporters at a news conference in Pyongyang, to which foreign diplomats and journalists were invited.

The deputy foreign minister blamed the breakdown of talks in Hanoi on the US side, who "were too busy with pursuing their own political interests and had no sincere intention to achieve a result."

She also said that during an extended meeting, US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and US National Security Adviser John Bolton "created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States."

"As a result, the summit ended with no significant result," the North Korean diplomat said.

According to the deputy minister, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to make an official statement soon to announce his countrys further actions in the wake of the unsuccessful Hanoi summit.

It was the first statement by a senior North Korean official to comment on the results of the February 27-28 talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. After a series of meetings, including face-to-face ones, the two leaders announced they would not sign a joint document. Earlier, North Korean media said that although the summit produced no tangible result, the leaders agreed to continue their dialogue.
Forty people were killed and 20 were injured in the shootings in mosques in the city of Christchurch, New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern reported, Trend reports referring to TASS.

The police arrested four people - three men and one woman - on charges of organizing the shooting, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said on Friday at a news conference that New Zealand Herald broadcast on its website.

All the arrested were taken to the police, Bush said, where investigators are working with them. He said that the exact number of perpetrators was not identified and it is unclear whether all of them were detained, but investigative actions continue.

The police commissioner reported that several home-made bombs were found in cars parked near the mosques after the firing, but none of them was set off.

Armed people entered the the Al Noor and Linwood Masjid mosques in Christchurch at about 13:45 local time (04:46 Moscow time) on Friday shortly after the day prayer, blocked the entrance doors and opened fire. According to eyewitnesses, about 200 and 300 people were inside the building when the attack occurred. Police told citizens to stay indoors. All schools in the city were closed.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 15

By Rashid Shirinov  Trend:

The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Youssef Al-Othaimeen, has condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attack against innocent Muslims praying on Friday at Al Noor and Lindwood Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Trend reports via citing a statement by OIC.

"This brutal crime had shocked and hurt the feelings of all Muslims around the world, and served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia. While expecting that the killer would be charged with the severest punishment, Al-Othaimeen urged the New Zealand authorities to hold an immediate and thorough investigation on this vicious attack," reads the message.

Al-Othaimeen also urged the New Zealand Government to provide more protection to the Muslim communities living in the country.

At least 49 people have been killed, and 20 seriously injured, after gunmen opened fire at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on March 15.

New Zealand police say they have arrested three men and one woman. An account believed to belong to one of the attackers featured a link to an 87-page manifesto filled with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim ideas.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid
The United Nations Security Council condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist attack at two mosques in New Zealand in which at least 49 people were killed, the envoy for France, which currently holds the council's rotating presidency, said on Friday, Trend reports citing Sputnik.

The members of the Security Council condemn in the strongest possible terms the hideous attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier today, French Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Anne Gueguen said. "The members of the council express their deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of those killed, and they offer their empathy to the people and the government of New Zealand.

Gueguen asked all members who were present at the meeting to rise for a moment of silence for the victims of the massacre.

Earlier on Friday, a gunman opened fire at two mosques in the city of Christchurch, injuring more than 40 people. New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the shooting a terrorist act, saying it was the country's "darkest day."

The gunman who espoused racist and anti-immigration views live streamed the first of two attacks at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch before driving three miles to a second mosque in the city suburbs to continue his rampage, according to published reports.

A 28-year old man has been charged with murder and three others were being questioned, reports said. Ardern said earlier that none of the suspects had been on terrorist watch lists.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres discussed international issues in a phone call on Friday, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Trend reports citing TASS.

"[The parties] exchanged views on pressing international issues," the ministry said.

Lavrov also offered his condolences to Guterrres on 21 UN employees killed in the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on March 10. The Boeing 737 en route from Ethiopias capital of Addis Ababa to Kenyas Nairobi was carrying 157 people, including three Russians. None of them survived.
Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 15

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Turkey condemns the attack on mosques in New Zealand, Ibrahim Kalin, press secretary of the Turkish President, wrote on Twitter, Trend reports.

He noted that the attack on mosques is a clear sign of hatred towards Islam and Muslims.

The world must break its silence over Islamophobic hatred, Kalin wrote.

At least 27 people were killed when unidentified gunmen opened fire at people inside the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. Police detained one of the shooters. At least 30 injured were rushed to city hospitals.

Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern called the shooting incident in the city of Christchurch one of the darkest days in the country's history.

The Prime Minister stated that the events in Christchurch were an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence, stressing that there is no place in New Zealand for extreme violence."

Many of those directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home. It is their home. They are us, Ardern said.

In light of the events, the New Zealand authorities called on the Muslim communities of the country to be more vigilant.
Baku, Azerbaijan, March 15

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

A Turkish soldier was killed in Syria's Jarabulus district, which was freed during the anti-terrorist Operation Euphrates Shield, Trend reports referring to Turkey's Ministry of National Defense.

The Turkish soldier fell during a special operation conducted by the Turkish Armed Forces on March 15.

Another Turkish serviceman was killed in Syrias Afrin district on Feb. 18, 2019.

On Jan. 20, 2018, Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Free Syrian Army, launched the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, Syria.

On Aug. 24, 2016, the Turkish Armed Forces launched the Operation Euphrates Shield against the "Islamic State", and with the support of the Syrian opposition liberated the border town of Jarablus, as well as Al-Bab in northern Syria.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Representatives of the United States and South Korea met in Washington on Thursday to discuss efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino said on Thursday, Trend reported citing Sputnik.

"During the meeting, the United States and the Republic of Korea shared updates on efforts to achieve our shared goals of a final verified denuclearization, including through the implementation of UN Security Council resolutions", Palladino told reporters.

He noted that the bilateral working group is meeting on routine base as a "part of comprehensive and close coordination over North Korea".

US Special Representative on North Korea Steve Biegun is currently in New York meeting with permanent representatives at the United Nations, Palladino noted.

"They are talking about the summit" between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he added.

The second summit between Trump and Kim concluded with no agreement signed in the Vietnamese capital last week. Trump walked away from the talks, saying that Kim demanded full sanctions removal, while not pledging to denuclearize exactly the facilities that Washington wanted.

Despite the fact that that the situation on the Korean peninsula had significantly improved since a series of high-level talks last year between North Korea and the South as well as the United States, the country is still subject to international sanctions.

Last week, several US think tanks and South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that satellite pictures showed the restoration of the Sohae Satellite Launching Station at Tongchang-ri, which North Korea pledged to dismantle after its summit with the United States in Singapore last year. US President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would be very disappointed in North Korean leader Kim Jong-un if these reports turned out to be true. The North Korean side has not reportedly either confirmed or refuted this information.
US National Security Adviser John Bolton said in a statement on Thursday he met with Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid to discuss bilateral cooperation aimed at strengthening security in Europe, Trend reported citing Sputnik.

Great meeting with President Kaljulaid of Estonia, our reliable partner and Ally, Bolton said via Twitter. Productive discussion on enhancing defense and security cooperation in Europe.

The Estonian president held a series of meeting with top US officials to address issues of security and bilateral cooperation during his visit to the United States from 11 March to 14 March.

Estonian-US relations have been strong since Estonia gained independence in 1991. The two countries have signed a number of bilateral agreements, including a cybersecurity partnership statement inked in 2013 on the margins of a NATO ministerial meeting. Also, Estonia has been a member of NATO since March 2004.

Estonia is consistently increasing its military spending. The country's 2018 defence budget reached 523 million euros, which is 44 million more than in 2017. Moreover, the government of Estonia has endorsed the country's budget for the next year with a record $687 million allocated for defence.

Estonia is one of the few NATO members which has brought its defense spending to 2 percent of the GDP, as demanded by the alliance. Other NATO states reaching the yardstick are Greece, Poland, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Moscow have repeatedly expressed concerns over NATO's activities on the borders with Russia, stressing that they posed real threats to Russia's security.
The United States has launched the production of components to support developmental testing of conventional, ground launched missiles, Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza told TASS on Friday, Trend reports referring to TASS.

"With funding provided by Congress in FY19, the United States has commenced fabrication activities on components to support developmental testing of conventional, ground launched missiles," she said, when asked to comment on Pentagons plans to test two types of missiles prohibited by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. "The United States has not taken any irreversible steps at this point. In the unlikely event Russia returns to full and verifiable compliance before the end of the six month period, we will rescind our suspension and planned withdrawal from the Treaty," Baldanza stated.

"But absent such a change in Russias conduct, our decision to withdraw from the Treaty will stand, and the Treaty will end. We must be prepared for this eventuality. Our preparations along these lines include plans to test a conventional ground-launched missile," she added. Baldanza declined to name the specific date of the testing. "As we work through the prototype fabrication process, there are many factors that could come into play. For that reason, I won't provide exact timelines," she stressed.

"Russia alone is responsible for the demise of the treaty if it does not return to full and verifiable compliance by destroying its noncompliant systems by August 2, the end of the six month period," Baldanza stated.
U.S. President Donald Trump condemned the horrible massacre at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday, a deadly attack that killed 49 people in what the White House called a vicious act of hate", Trend reports referring to Reuters.

The massacre during Friday prayers wounded more than 40 others in the countrys worst-ever mass shooting, which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern condemned as terrorism.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do, Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.

Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that the United States strongly condemned the attack.

The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate, Sanders said.

New Zealand police said three people were in custody including one man in his late 20s who was charged with murder.

The accused gunmans manifesto praised Trump as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump drew strong criticism in the days after a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 when he equated white supremacists with counter-protesters and saying both sides were to blame.

He said on the anniversary of the rally in August that he condemns all types of racism and acts of violence.

Trump has at times indicated his supporters could turn to violence. Asked about possible impeachment in a December interview with Reuters, he said, I think that the people would revolt if that happened.
ISIS extremist group is down to its last few hundred fighters and less than a square kilometer of land in a battle for its final Syrian stronghold, although it may have 15,000-20,000 armed adherents in Syria and Iraq US envoy James Jeffrey said on Friday, Trend reports referring to Al Arabiya.

We are just about finished with the campaign along the Euphrates to defeat the last territorial holdings of the caliphate. Theyre down to a few hundred fighters and less than a square kilometer of land, said Jeffrey, the US Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

Jeffrey said the United States was helping the Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria to secure ISIS prisoners but was also launching a campaign to get countries to take back foreign fighters and their families, to prosecute or re-educate them.

We believe that theres between 15,000 and 20,000 Daesh armed adherents active, although many are in sleeper cells, in Syria and in Iraq, Jeffrey said, using an Arabic acronym for ISIS.

Speaking to reporters on a video call after attending a Syria humanitarian conference in Brussels, Jeffrey said the struggle to defeat ISIS ideology would go on and there was no timetable for a full US withdrawal from Syria.

Some troops would be pulled out but a contingent would stay in northeastern Syria, backed by coalition partners and control of air space, to continue the fight and prevent a destabilizing vacuum developing.

The United States would also maintain a force at al-Tanf close to the Iraqi and Jordanian borders to bolster local forces against ISIS.

With a smaller force and much less combat after the territorial defeat of ISIS in Syria, US costs would be far less, Jeffrey said.

In 2018, US military operations in Syria cost about $2 billion out of a total defense budget of $700 billion, mainly expenditure on precision-guided munitions.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday that Washington is still hopeful for continued talks with Pyongyang, Trend reports citing Xinhua.

"We are hopeful that we can continue to have conversation, negotiations," Pompeo told reporters at a press conference held at the State Department.

He confirmed that there is ongoing negotiation between the two sides, but refusing to give the details.

Pompeo said that he and his counterpart of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had "very professional conversations" and he has "every expectation that we'll be able to continue to do that."

Pompeo's remarks came hours after Pyongyang blamed the US side for the failure of the recent summit between the DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump.

After ending the summit in Hanoi on Feb. 28 without reaching an agreement, Trump told a press conference that there was "a gap" in what the DPRK and the United States were pursuing.

According to Trump, Kim demanded relief from sanctions against Pyongyang "in their entirety" in exchange for denuclearizing a "large portion" of the DPRK's nuclear program, something the United States could not agree to.

Dismissing Trump's claim, DPRK Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho has said that DPRK only proposed partial removal of the sanctions, wanting those impeding the livelihood of their people to be removed first.
Home Minister Amit Shah, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday paid respects to Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat and his wife Madhulika.
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While the world may have been speculating whether Pakistan Prime Minister, Imran Khan would be nominated for the Nobel peace prize or not, with him addressing these speculations further, the world missed out on another contender. 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work leading a youth campaign to halt climate change.

Here it is to be noted that the activist, who was named one of TIMEsMost Influential Teens of 2018, and has inspired hundreds of thousands of students at schools around the world to hold strikes in an effort to urge their leaders to act for climate change, was nominated for the prize by three Norwegian lawmakers. If Thunberg wins the prize, she would be the youngest Prize holder, beating Malala Yousafzai from Pakistan, who won it at age 17.

also read ICC World Cup: 'Any team can beat anyone' Virat Kohli refuses to brand India as favourites

However, Thunberg, who describes herself as a "16 year old climate activist with Asperger" on her Twitter bio, rose to fame after she staged a school strike for climate change in front of the Swedish parliament in August 2018. She further spoke at the UN Climate Talks in Poland in December and at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January this year, where she brought up an important point: "We are facing a disaster of unspoken sufferings for enormous amounts of people."

However, for everyone who is still confused about how climate change and peace go together, this tweet summarizes it for you. Thunberg has responded to the nomination of the peace prize on her Twitter. This nomination comes at a time when United States of America president, Donald Trump still doesn't acknowledge that climate change is real.

also read A gunman opened fire at a mosque in New Zealand, 6 dead
In a recent incident, after China blocking Indias bid to get Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar listed, US political scientist C. Christine Fair has said that China has blocked India's bid to declare Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist with a goal of propping up Pakistan to indulge in conflict with India. She further says that China has supported Pakistan conventionally by helping its nuclear program and creating an environment conducive to continue using terrorist assets.

also read Amid world Speculation for PM Imran Khan, this teenage girl get nominated for Nobel Peace Price

Here Geneva, Switzerland: American scholar C Christine Fair reacts on CPEC project She says, "This was a very clever way for moving money from private coffers to private pockets...Pakistanis are going to wake up&realise they have been sold a bill goods that they can't afford." She added From China's point of view, there's no blowback because LeT and JeM are well-behaved proxies of Pakistan,.

However, speaking at a side event titled Economic development and HR repercussions: CPEC why Balochistan bleeds? during the 40th Session of UN Human Rights Council, Fair has said that Pakistanis will collude with the Chinese to kill every Baloch to make Balochistan and its resources safe for Chinese exploitation.

also read A Vietnamese woman lost her bid for immediate release by Malaysian authorities

It is to be noted that the author of Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War adds that many people were expecting China to take action against Azhar by backing the proposal in the UNSC but she never had the expectation that China was going to do anything other than blocking the proposal citing technical hold. Reacting on CPEC project she says that it is a very clever way of moving money from private coffers to private pockets and says that Pakistan will be greatly in debt for projects that are largely going to benefit the elite. Giving the example of Hambantota port Fair says that Sri Lanka was forced to hand over sovereign territory and the strategic port, to the Chinese as it had incurred huge debts.
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BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno

Money sent home by overseas Filipino workers in January this year rose 4.4 percent to $2.48 billion from $2.38 billion a year ago, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Benjamin Diokno said Friday. This growth was in line with the increase in remittances from both land-based ($1.95 billion) and sea-based ($0.53 billion) workers, which rose by 2.3 percent and 12.7 percent, respectively, Diokno said in a statement.By country source, the United States registered the highest share of overall remittances at 35.5 percent. It was followed by Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Japan, Canada, Qatar, Hong Kong and Kuwait. The combined remittances from these countries accounted for almost 78 percent of total cash remittances. Personal remittances, which include non-cash items, also increased 3.4 percent year-on-year in January to $2.75 billion from $2.66 billion. Personal remittances from land-based workers with work contracts of one year or more rose to $2.12 billion, 2.3 percent higher than $2.07 billion recorded in January 2018. Meanwhile, those from sea-based and land-based workers with work contracts of less than one year increased 12.6 percent to $0.58 billion from $0.52 billion.Cash remittances last year reached a record $28.943 billion, up 3.1 percent from $28.06 billion a year ago and surpassed slightly the revised 3-percent growth target for the entire year. Bangko Sentral said cash remittances in 2018 remained strong amid political uncertainties across the globe. This was evident in Asia, the Americas and Europe, which grew annually by 12.3 percent, 9.7 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively. The growth in the regions made up for the 15.3-percent decrease in remittances from the Middle East, partly due to the continued repatriation program of the government. The bulk of cash remittances for the year came from the US, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom, Qatar, Canada, Germany and Hong Kong. Cash remittances from these countries accounted for almost 79 percent of total cash remittances. Cash remittances in December rose 3.9 percent to an all-time high of $2.849 billion from $2.741 billion on year.
(Boston)--Two medical students from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have received the Lancet Global Health Award for Best Student Poster for their presentation, "Uber Health: A Novel Method of Eliminating Transportation Barriers To Care Among Urban OBGYN Refugee Women." The award was presented at the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.

Simone Vais, a third-year student and Justin Siu, a second-year student, began this work as part of a summer research project. It focuses on overcoming transportation barriers to health-care access at Boston Medical Center's (BMC) Refugee Women's Health Clinic (RWHC).

Lack of transportation has been shown to be a major barrier to health-care access nationwide. It disproportionately impacts patients of lower socioeconomic status. This barrier is particularly burdensome for patients at the RWHC, many of whom report lack of familiarity with the public transportation system, triggers to past trauma in encountering large crowds on buses and trains, and who tend to live in clustered communities that are not well linked to the Boston public transit grid.

The pilot project offers roundtrip rides to clinic for patients who report experiencing transportation insecurity, using Uber Health -- a health-care branch of the Uber platform that enables providers to schedule and pay for rides on behalf of their patients.

After nine months, the students found their project decreases patient no-show rates, improves patient satisfaction and has led to significant cost savings. The students now are working on securing additional funding to extend the pilot to continue to provide this service to patients.

Vais is interested in health-care quality improvement, with a focus on improving access to care for underserved populations. She is working on expanding the use of Uber Health to combat transportation insecurity beyond the RWHC, through new pilot studies at BMC's Pediatric Sickle Cell Clinic and General Pediatrics department.

Siu holds a master's degree in global medicine management from University of Southern California and is interested in integrating his knowledge in clinical management with a career in global medicine. He has traveled to Thailand, Panama and Tijuana for various clinical projects and co-led the Global Health Equity Program elective course at BUSM last year.

###
Lisbon, Portugal - 15 March 2019: The discovery of subtypes of atrial fibrillation paves the way for individualised treatment. That's the main message from the joint EHRA/AFNET conference, where new data from the CATCH ME project will be presented, and a consensus reached on personalised medicine approaches to improve patient care.1

The meeting is being held on 15 and 16 March in Lisbon, Portugal. It is organised by the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and the Atrial Fibrillation NETwork (AFNET) with funding from the CATCH ME Consortium EU Horizon 2020 Grant.

Atrial fibrillation is the most common heart rhythm disorder (arrhythmia). It causes 20-30% of all strokes and also increases the risk of heart failure and sudden death.2 Signs of atrial fibrillation include palpitations, shortness of breath, tiredness, chest pain and dizziness.3

Professor Paulus Kirchhof, one of the event organisers and chair of the 2016 ESC atrial fibrillation guidelines, said: "Atrial fibrillation remains one of the most common and most challenging conditions in cardiology. Patients have different profiles and medical problems related to atrial fibrillation. During the meeting we will review emerging data to discover patient profiles for precision medicine, enabling clinicians and researchers to better estimate who will benefit from current and emerging therapies."

Novel results from the CATCH ME project help define clinical types of atrial fibrillation based on the main cause and shed light on mechanisms of atrial fibrillation from gene expression analysis of human atrial tissue. The findings of these studies will be presented in full at the EHRA 2019 Congress.4,5 New information will also be presented on blood biomarkers for different types of atrial fibrillation, and on outcomes of atrial fibrillation patients who also have heart failure and in those who have a bleeding event.

The conference will be attended by around 80 leading scientists and clinicians in atrial fibrillation management and research, and industry partners. It will cover the entire spectrum of atrial fibrillation, from patterns of gene expression in atrial tissue (the "molecular signature"), to clinical types, patient management, healthcare systems, and patient education. This breadth will be reflected in a consensus paper. Among the statements set to be agreed are how to tailor the use of anticoagulation and rhythm control therapy to newly defined types of atrial fibrillation.

The meeting title is "Management of patients with atrial fibrillation: New therapies and special populations". In addition to the populations revealed by CATCH ME, these include patients with:

Bleeding on anticoagulation, for whom a left atrial appendage occluder may prevent stroke at lower bleeding risk

Concomitant heart failure, in whom there is controversy over the benefits of rhythm control therapy, particularly catheter ablation

End stage kidney disease, who have high stroke and bleeding risks

Very rare atrial arrhythmias detected by devices including smartwatches.

The current state of play on applications (apps) for diagnosis and management of atrial fibrillation will be presented, as well as up-to-the-minute knowledge on how atrial fibrillation contributes to cognitive dysfunction and dementia following an EHRA consensus document published last year.6

EHRA President Professor Hein Heidbuchel, one of the event organisers, said: "There is a need for more personalised medicine for the diverse group of patients with atrial fibrillation. Luckily, science is moving quickly, and during this meeting world experts will convene to present data that allow further refinement of the diagnosis and treatment of patients with atrial fibrillation. Our goal is to better control symptoms and further reduce the risks of stroke and premature death for affected patients."

###

Authors: ESC Press Office

+33 (0)4 8987 2499

Email: press@escardio.org

Follow us on Twitter @ESCardioNews

The hashtag for the EHRA 2019 Congress is #ehra2019.

Sources of funding: The Characterising Atrial fibrillation by Translating its Causes into Health Modifiers in the Elderly (CATCH ME) Consortium EU Horizon 2020 Grant 633196.

Disclosures: None.

References and notes

1The 7th EHRA/AFNET Consensus Conference, "Management of patients with atrial fibrillation: New therapies and special populations", will be held in Lisbon, Portugal on 15 and 16 March 2019.

2Kirchhof P, Benussi S, Kotecha D, et al. 2016 ESC Guidelines for the management of atrial fibrillation developed in collaboration with EACTS. Eur Heart J. 2016;37:2893-2962. doi: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehw210.

3Learn to recognise signs and symptoms of atrial fibrillation: https://www.afibmatters.org/en_GB/Signs-and-symptoms.

4The abstract 'Development of a prognostic model for recurrent atrial fibrillation using individual patient data from 2429 patients with AF: preliminary results of the CATCH ME study' will be presented during the EHRA 2019 Congress session Moderated ePosters 10: clinical AF on Monday 18 March at 15:35 to 16:25 WET (GMT) in the Poster Area.

5The abstract 'Side-specific differences in atrial tissue expression are associated with atrial fibrillation and heart failure: the CATCH ME Consortium' will be presented during the EHRA 2019 Congress session Moderated ePosters 9: new basic arrhythmia insight from around the world on Monday 18 March at 10:05 to 10:55 WET (GMT) in the Poster Area.

6Dagres N, Chao TF, Fenelon G, et al. European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA)/Heart Rhythm Society (HRS)/Asia Pacific Heart Rhythm Society (APHRS)/Latin American Heart Rhythm Society (LAHRS) expert consensus on arrhythmias and cognitive function: what is the best practice? Europace. 2018;20:1399-1421. doi: 10.1093/europace/euy046.

About the European Heart Rhythm Association

The European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) is a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). Its aim is improving the quality of life and reducing sudden cardiac death by limiting the impact of heart rhythm disturbances. EHRA ensures the dissemination of knowledge and standard setting; provides continuous education, training and certification to physicians and allied professionals involved in the field of cardiac arrhythmias with a special focus on Atrial Fibrillation (AF) and Electrophysiology (EP). EHRA releases international consensus documents and position papers, it is a source of high quality, unbiased, evidence based, scientific information that promotes the quality of care for patients with AF, and for, has also dedicated a website for patients "afibmatters.org". #EHRA

About the EHRA Congress

EHRA 2019 is the annual congress of the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

About the European Society of Cardiology

The European Society of Cardiology brings together health care professionals from more than 150 countries, working to advance cardiovascular medicine and help people lead longer, healthier lives.

Information for journalists attending EHRA 2019

EHRA 2019 will be held 17 to 19 March at the Lisbon Congress Centre (CCL) in Lisbon, Portugal. Explore the scientific programme.
Mr. Ciruli is the Director of the Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Denvers Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is an adjunct professor teaching public opinion and foreign policy. The Crossley Center conducts research and presents live and virtual programs on foreign policy, politics, public policy and public opinion.





Mr. Ciruli holds a law degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and a bachelors degree cum laude in political science from UCLA. He is a member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), and is the past-president of the Pacific Chapter of AAPOR (PAPOR). Mr. Ciruli is a board member of the Social Science Foundation of the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies and past-president of the Georgetown Law Alumni Board and the Denver Athletic Club.




By Allison Lampert and Debroop Roy (Reuters) - Air Canada and United Airlines on Friday became the first major carriers in North America to warn of negative impacts on business due to the grounding of Boeing Co's 737 MAX planes. Air Canada suspended its 2019 financial forecasts, saying it continued to adapt a contingency plan to address the current uncertainty surrounding the new jets. United Airlines, the No. 3 U.S. carrier, said it would see an adverse effect on its operations if the jets remained grounded heading into the peak summer travel season. Countries around the world, including the United States and Canada, banned Boeing's fast-selling 737 MAX this week after a fatal Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday, the second deadly disaster for the aircraft in five months. Shares of Air Canada fell as much as 3 percent in early trading in Toronto, but recovered later to close down 0.7 percent. Shares of United Continental Holdings Inc, the parent of United Airlines, were unchanged at $81.69 in U.S. after-hours trade. Airlines bought the 737 MAX for its longer range and fuel efficiency, and some carriers' business plans are facing disruption because of the grounding, which U.S. lawmakers have said could last for weeks at a minimum. The causes of Sunday's crash are still unknown. Boeing suspended deliveries of its 737 MAX aircraft on Thursday but continues to produce its single-aisle jets at full speed. Montreal-based Air Canada has said it operated seventy-five 737 MAX flights daily out of a total schedule of approximately 1,600 flights system-wide. Chicago, Illinois-based United Continental operates 14 737 MAX 9 aircraft that accounted for about 40 flights a day. Air Canada, the country's largest carrier, has been renewing its narrowbody fleet with MAX aircraft to replace its existing Airbus A320 narrowbodies. It had expected to expand its fleet of 24 MAX jets to 36 by the end of 2019. The Canadian carrier would face the costs of re-booking passengers after the planes were grounded, and other costs from not having scheduled access to the more efficient MAX, said AltaCorp analyst Chris Murray. The airline estimated that savings on fuel and maintenance costs would make the MAX 8 aircraft 11 percent cheaper to operate per available seat mile (CASM) than its existing Airbus A320s. CASM is a closely watched industry metric. Murray said he expected Air Canada to find a way to "mitigate" the impact of higher costs, and noted the company's forecast for annual profit margin remained in place for 2020 and 2021, suggesting this would be "a short term disruption." The grounding of planes has left U.S. and Canadian carriers wrestling with customer calls and flight cancellations. [ Southwest Airlines, the world's largest MAX operator with 34 jets, and American Airlines with 24 MAX in its fleet, both declined to comment on Friday. Canada's WestJet Airlines, which operates 13 of the jets, could not be immediately reached for comment. (Reporting by Debroop Roy and Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru and Allison Lampert in Montreal; Additional reporting by Sweta Singh in Bengaluru and Tracy Rucinski in Chicago; Editing by Nick Zieminski, Steve Orlofsky and Maju Samuel)
The U.S. joins dozens of other countries in grounding Boeing 737 Max jets after a second fatal crash.

The Federal Aviation Administration says new evidence shows commonalities between the two recent crashes.

Airlines are starting to cancel flights because of the order.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday joined dozens of other countries' regulators in ordering airlines to ground new Boeing BA 737 Max planes, citing evidence linking a deadly crash of one of them in Ethiopia over the weekend to a similar fatal flight in Indonesia in October. (You can find more detail on why the planes were grounded here.)

That has left airlines scrambling to rebook passengers and reassign planes. The three U.S. airlines  United UAL , American AAL and Southwest LUV  that have recently added the planes to their fleets, and have more on order, said they will rebook or waive ticket-change fees and fare differences for travelers affected by the FAA's order, which went into immediate effect.

American Airlines, which has 24 Boeing 737 Max planes in its fleet of nearly 1,000 aircraft, said it was ferrying those planes to be parked until the FAA order is lifted. It operates about 85 flights out its 6,700 flights a day using the Max.

Routes with multiple flights each day, where passengers can more easily be rebooked to another time, are likely to take the biggest hit. Travelers who aren't booked on the Max may also be affected as airlines deploy their planes to cover other routes with less frequent service.

United Airlines has 14 of the Boeing 737 Max 9s, a larger model, in its fleet. The airline said it expects minimal disruptions from the issue, but it will work with customers if their flights are canceled.

Southwest Airlines flies 34 Boeing 737 8s that service about 4 percent of its daily flights. The carrier does not charge travelers to change their trips, but said passengers booked on canceled Boeing Max flights won't have to pay the difference in fares to change their dates if it's within two weeks of their original departure.





More From CNBC


Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade

The government and the stakeholders of the shipping industry on Friday signed a manifesto of support for the efficient utilization of Philippine ports. The manifesto aims to prevent the imbalance of inbound and outbound containers borne by the unscrupulous practice of using the ports for prolonged storage of their containers until the withdrawal of goods. Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade witnessed the manifesto signing led by Bureau of Customs Commissioner Rey Leonardo Guerrero, Philippine Ports Authority general manager Jay Daniel Santiago, International Container Terminal Services Inc. senior vice president Christian Gonzales, Asian Terminals Inc. senior vice president Sean Perez and Association of International Shipping Lines president Patrick Ronas.I give my full commitment and full happiness in witnessing the manifesto. Signing this manifesto is one thing, doing and implementing it is another, and going beyond it will equally spell good business relationships within the country... This is not for show. This is for real, Tugade said. Under the manifesto, the PPA will publish a notice in a newspaper of general circulation directing all cargo owners, shippers, consignees, logistics operators, and customs brokers to withdraw cleared containers currently being stored at ports within 15 days from the date of publication. Failure to comply will lead to the transfer of containers to designated inland container depots by ATI and ICTSI at the expense of the concerned parties.Cleared containers by the BoC that were not removed from the port within 30 days will also be transferred by ATI and ICTSI to their respective inland container depots. Aside from the removal of overstaying containers, ATI and ICTSI will regularly provide the government with information on the health of their respective ports, and information on containers that have stayed at the port for at least 30 days from arrival. Today is a milestone as all stakeholders from the private sector and the government have come together to implement a sustainable solution to face the problems in our ports, Santiago said.
Investors focused on the Finance space have likely heard of Bank of America (BAC), but is the stock performing well in comparison to the rest of its sector peers? Let's take a closer look at the stock's year-to-date performance to find out.

Bank of America is a member of our Finance group, which includes 849 different companies and currently sits at #5 in the Zacks Sector Rank. The Zacks Sector Rank considers 16 different sector groups. The average Zacks Rank of the individual stocks within the groups is measured, and the sectors are listed from best to worst.

The Zacks Rank is a proven model that highlights a variety of stocks with the right characteristics to outperform the market over the next one to three months. The system emphasizes earnings estimate revisions and favors companies with improving earnings outlooks. BAC is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy).

Within the past quarter, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for BAC's full-year earnings has moved 0.18% higher. This signals that analyst sentiment is improving and the stock's earnings outlook is more positive.

Based on the latest available data, BAC has gained about 17.45% so far this year. At the same time, Finance stocks have gained an average of 10.12%. This means that Bank of America is performing better than its sector in terms of year-to-date returns.

Looking more specifically, BAC belongs to the Banks - Major Regional industry, a group that includes 16 individual stocks and currently sits at #48 in the Zacks Industry Rank. This group has gained an average of 12.83% so far this year, so BAC is performing better in this area.

BAC will likely be looking to continue its solid performance, so investors interested in Finance stocks should continue to pay close attention to the company.



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Tale after tale of cryptocurrency companies struggling to open bank accounts (or even going out of business) shows the difficulty of pioneering this new technology. Most banks dont want to work with cryptocurrency companies. But why? More often than not, they point to lax AML controls. But with billions of dollars in fines for AML infringements imposed on banks over the years, that excuse is wearing thin. Banks dont want to work with cryptocurrency companies Take Lamassu, the oldest Bitcoin ATM manufacturer, for example. The company finally relocated to Switzerland a few months ago after struggling to get banked in its native Portugal. According to a blog post on the subject, some 15 banks or so denied the companys request

Tale after tale of cryptocurrency companies struggling to open bank accounts (or even going out of business) shows the difficulty of pioneering this new technology. Most banks dont want to work with cryptocurrency companies. But why?

More often than not, they point to lax AML controls. But with billions of dollars in fines for AML infringements imposed on banks over the years, that excuse is wearing thin.

Banks dont want to work with cryptocurrency companies

Take Lamassu, the oldest Bitcoin ATM manufacturer, for example. The company finally relocated to Switzerland a few months ago after struggling to get banked in its native Portugal. According to a blog post on the subject, some 15 banks or so denied the companys request just because we manufacture terminals for Bitcoin. Lamassu added:

We want to be in a place where rules are well defined and regulators are pro-innovation. An example of this is our struggle to maintain a bank account over the past year. And when I say struggle, I mean weve been bankless for the past year.

Are cryptocurrency companies shirking on their AML obligations?

According to research by P.A.ID Strategies, 68% of cryptocurrency exchanges and custodians are lacking adequate KYC/AML measures. Theyre also unlikely to meet the FATF requirements that come out later this year.

Alma Angotti, a managing director at Navigant Consulting Inc (NYSE: NCI), has held senior enforcement positions at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Treasurys Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), and FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). Shes also one of the top money laundering experts in the country. She explains:

Banks are highly regulated and required to try to detect and prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, and many cryptocurrency exchanges are not well regulated or the regulatory obligations are unclear or undeveloped.

Moreover, many large banks are still struggling with a lack of familiarity with cryptocurrency companies.

Story continues

Digital assets and cryptocurrency are new and not well understood. There are high profile uses of cryptocurrency by criminals, especially ransomware, hacking, and evasion of US sanctions.

That may be so. However, there are also the very real issues of what Fabio Canesin, co-founder of decentralised cryptocurrency exchange Nash, calls a mixture of hypocrisy and protectionism on the part of many others.

The majority of large banks are enablers of illicit financial flows

Warren Buffet was quick to dismiss Bitcoin as a delusion that attracts charlatans. But lets not forget his investment Wells Fargo has been fined close to 100 times since the year 2000.

Wells Fargo, a Buffett investment, has been fined 93 times for fraud and other abuses, for a total of $14.8 billion in fines since just 2000 I'll take bitcoin's "charlatans" over that any day https://t.co/9OZkzxgQ7x  Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) March 9, 2019

The United Kingdom certainly isnt falling behind when it comes to accommodating dirty money either. All five of the UKs largest banks have been sanctioned for money laundering offences over the last decade.

And lets not even get started on Germanys Deutsche Bank. Bloomberg estimates the bank has paid out over $18 billion in AML disputes in the last 10 years.

Some banks, including Denmarks Danske Bank, have even been forced to shut down branches in certain countries because of their despicable behaviour.

All those illicit funds flowing through banks that dont want to work with innovators of a transparent technology is ironic at best.

Studies place the level of illegal activity and money laundering taking place on Bitcoin at less than 1% of all transactions.

Canesin remarks, This is much smaller than the official black market portion of GDP declared by several countries By definition, this means that there is a lot more black money within fiat than cryptocurrency.

Banks are being myopic when it comes to cryptocurrency

One of the issues is that blockchain technology is still new. Many regulators and banking providers are struggling to understand the methods required for companies to comply with AML. Its simply easier to close their doors to this emerging threat.

Yet Canesin believes:

This is a huge mistake, as blockchain can actually help solve a lot of AML issues. Many people realise this and will become important partners of the industry. Others do not move beyond superficial knowledge. They naively try to shut down a potential competing solution, rather than take advantage of the benefits of this technology.

Cryptocurrency companies should embrace AML solutions as well

Canesin further argues that for any business to be legitimate, they need to thrive within their markets. Therefore, any company blockchain or off-chain must comply with AML. The advantage with blockchain-based solutions is that AML could actually be extremely effective  much more so than the existing solutions used by banks.

For example, it would be impossible for a money launderer to bypass a whitelist on a smart contract, but its much easier to corrupt an employee at a local branch, which is what happened in the famous case of HSBC laundering drug money.

Blockchain-based compliance is not granted by an employees rubber stamp but is cryptographically guaranteed by the network and the whitelisting process, which can be traced. This means that there are many promising opportunities for auditing and attestation.

In fact, on several networks, sources known to be associated with illegal activities can be blocked. This occurred recently on the Bitcoin network after the WannaCry ransomware case.

In summary

Banks dont want to work with cryptocurrency companies, and thats causing an issue for many. However, its impossible to halt the charge of innovation, especially when existing institutions own hands are tainted with the dye of dirty cash.

And as Canesin reminds us:

Legitimate businesses will do their best to comply with AML, but blockchain-based businesses will have better tools for doing so.

The post Are banks being hypocritical by not working with cryptocurrency companies? appeared first on Coin Rivet.
Becton, Dickinson and Company BDX, also known as BD, recently announced the FDA premarket approval for its Venovo venous stent device, the first one indicated to treat iliofemoral venous occlusive disease. The latest approval is likely to boost BDs Peripheral Intervention business, part of its new Interventional arm.

However, shares of the Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company lost 0.5% to close at $252.26 following the announcement.

More on Venovo

BDs Venovo venous stent is a flexible nitinol stent specifically designed to reopen blocked iliac and femoral veins in order to maintain adequate blood flow. The device is designed for treating symptomatic post-thrombotic and non-thrombotic iliofemoral lesions.

For investors notice, the device is commercially available in the United States, Europe, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Israel, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Taiwan.

BD Interventional in Focus

With the 2017 acquisition of C.R. Bard, BD formed a new business unit  BD Interventional  which promotes positive clinical outcomes using minimally invasive and percutaneous techniques.

In the recently-reported fiscal first quarter, the segment posted worldwide revenues of $0.97 billion, skyrocketing from the year-ago figure of $183 million.

In fact, for fiscal 2019, management expects BD Interventional growth between 6% and 7%.

BDs Peripheral Intervention, part of this new arm, also grew 0.6% year over year, in line with the companys expectations.

Other Favorable Tidings in Regulatory Front

It is encouraging to note that in recent times, BD has seen many regulatory approvals.

Last December, BD MAX enteric viral panel was granted 510(k) clearance by the FDA. (Read More: Becton, Dickinson's MAX Enteric Viral Panel Cleared by FDA)

In November, the companys Phoenix CPO (carbapenemase-producing organisms) detect test received the same clearance. (Read More: BD's FDA Nod for Phoenix Test Boosts Diagnostic Systems)

Story continues

Price Performance

Over the past year, shares of BD have rallied 12.6% against the industrys 4.2% decline. The current level is also higher than the S&P 500 indexs 2.5% rally.

Key Picks

Some better-ranked stocks from the broader medical space are Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. BIO, Surmodics, Inc. SRDX and Meridian Bioscience Inc. VIVO. While Bio-Rad and Surmodics sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Meridian carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here .

Bio-Rads long-term earnings growth rate is projected at 15%.

Surmodics long-term earnings growth rate is expected at 10%.

Meridians current-year earnings growth rate is estimated at 2.7%.

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Mexico hasn't banned Bitcoin - at least not yet. | Source: Shutterstock

In recent weeks, reports that Mexico has banned bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in general, have surfaced, leading many investors to worry about the future of the crypto market in the region.

Bitso: Mexico Stunted Bitcoin Industrys Growth  But Hasnt Banned Crypto Altogether

According to Bitso, while the Bank of Mexico (Banxico) published new rules to govern cryptocurrencies and it could certainly stagnate the growth of the industry, it does not stop the operations of crypto exchanges.

Banxico publico nuevas reglas, representan un estancamiento para el sector pero no detienen nuestra operacion. Seguiremos enfocados en nuestros usuarios; defendiendo tu derecho al acceso a la tecnologia. Lee mas: https://t.co/Ln87js30A0 pic.twitter.com/zS6jONt2V8  Bitso (@Bitso) March 13, 2019

Banxico published new rules, represent a stagnation for the sector but do not stop our operation. We will continue to focus on our users; defending your right to access technology, a roughly translated statement of the exchange read.

Current State of the Mexican Bitcoin and Crypto Market

In an official statement, the cryptocurrency exchange said that the circular released by Banxico claims the central bank wants cryptocurrencies to be utilized for international operations of financial institutions, not for clients or custody.

The exchange said that the circular is not in line with the existing fintech law of Mexico and will continue to carry out conversations with the financial authorities to grow the local fintech industry.

Bitso said in a roughly translated statement:

Read the full story on CCN.com.
Boeing 737 Max Is Grounded Across the World, but the U.S. and Canada Keep Flying

The global standoff over the airworthiness of Boeing Co.s 737 Max jet intensified as U.S. regulators reiterated their support for the aircraft, even after the European Union and other authorities issued blanket bans.

Investigators are still trying to understand why an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crashed near Addis Ababa on March 10, killing 157 people, less than five months after an identical Lion Air plane plunged into waters off Indonesia.

Key Developments:

Hong Kong, Lebanon, Thailand impose temporary bans on the 737 Max. FAA repeats it sees no safety issue with Boeing 737 Max. European aviation authority grounds 737 Max flights across region. Boeing shares fell 6.2 percent in New York. Boeing CEO defends plane on call with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Where the Boeing 737 Max Is Grounded

Here are the latest developments (timestamps are local time in London):

Chinas Clout (8:12 a.m.)

In grounding the 737 Max, centuries-old American allies including the U.K. and Australia broke convention by snubbing the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, an authority that has defined whats airworthy  and whats not  for decades. New Zealand, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam on Wednesday became the latest countries to block the 737 Max, helping legitimize Chinas early verdict on March 11 that the plane could be unsafe.

The FAAs credibility is being tested, said Chad Ohlandt, a Rand Corp. senior engineer in Washington. The Chinese want their regulatory agency to be considered a similar gold standard.

Who Pays?

Norwegian Air Shuttle expects Boeing to compensate it for revenue lost on account of the grounding of its 737 Max fleet, Reuters reports.

Lebanon, Thailand

The 737 Max has been banned from Lebanese airport, airspace, NNA reports, while Thai authorities also followed suit.

Earlier:

Hong Kong

Hong Kong will impose a temporary ban on Boeing 737 Max aircraft over its airspace from 6 p.m., the Civil Aviation Department said in a statement.

Story continues

India Expands Blockade

India will bar all Boeing 737 Max planes from entering or transiting in its airspace, extending an earlier ban that applied only to its airlines. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation said the aircraft will be allowed to fly until 4 p.m. local time to enable foreign-registered jets to return to their home base and for planes operating locally to go to a maintenance facility for parking. Aviation ministry and airline officials will also meet at 4 p.m. local time, according to the ANI news agency.

Crash Similarities

Ethiopian Airlines Chief Executive Officer Tewolde GebreMariam said in an interview with CNN that there are substantial similarities with the Lion Air crash in October involving the same Boeing plane model. The Ethiopian Airlines pilot had flight control problems shortly before the crash, GebreMariam said. In November, Indonesian investigators found that the Lion Air pilots battled multiple malfunctions almost as soon as their flight began.

Vietnam Suspends Jets

Vietnam suspended all Boeing 737 Max jets of its airlines starting 10 a.m. local time Wednesday, and said it wont grant any operation permits for the aircraft until further notice. VietJet Aviation JSC, which doesnt fly any 737 Max planes now but has 200 of the jets on order, will make a decision on its plans to use the aircraft after U.S. aviation officials finish their investigation, the Vietnamese airline said in a statement.

Russias S7 Grounds Planes

S7 Airlines suspended Boeing 737 Max flights from 00:01 Moscow time Wednesday until it receives detailed information on the latest crash, the carrier said on its website. The airline said it has two 737 Max planes in its fleet of 96 and the suspension wont affect its schedule.

Sunwing Grounds Flights

Sunwing Airlines said its temporarily suspending its four Boeing 737 Max 8 jets for evolving commercial reasons unrelated to safety including airspace restrictions being imposed by some of our partner destinations. The carrier is in the process of revisiting its flying schedule to accommodate the temporary removal of Max aircraft from service.

Blackbox to U.K. or U.S.?

Ethiopia wanted to send the flight-data and cockpit voice recorders to the U.K.s Air Accidents Investigation Branch to recover the data, causing U.S. investigators to hold intense behind-the-scenes talks to bring the remains to America, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. U.S. officials wanted to have the recorders sent to the National Transportation Safety Board on grounds that American government experts would provide the most reliable and accurate data downloads, according to the report. The U.S. hadnt received a final decision as of late Tuesday, according to the Journal.

Canada Holds Off

Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau told lawmakers he wont hesitate to take action on Boeing if needed, but said its too early to determine the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. Our responsibility is to stay clear-minded to navigate this evolving situation, he said, according to a statement obtained by Bloomberg.

FAA Support

Federal Aviation Administration acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency continues to closely monitor an investigation into the fatal crash in Ethiopia and will take action if necessary. No other civil aviation authorities have given the FAA data that would warrant action, the agency said.

New Zealand Ban

New Zealands Civil Aviation Authority suspended Boeing 737 Max flights to or from the country after discussions with other authorities including the FAA. Only Fiji Airways flies the aircraft to New Zealand.

Gulf Hub Ban

The United Arab Emirates Civil Aviation Authority banned Boeing 737 Max jets from its airspace, state-run WAM reported. This means the aircraft is excluded from another major global transit hub, following a similar move by Singapore.

Boeing Call With Trump

Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg defended the safety of the 737 Max to U.S. President Donald Trump in a telephone call on Tuesday shortly after the president criticized modern airplanes for becoming too complicated, two people familiar with the matter said.

Indian Meetings

After India also banned the 737 Max, the countrys aviation minister said hell hold an emergency meeting to prepare contingency plans to minimize passenger disruption. Indian carriers SpiceJet Ltd. and Jet Airways India Ltd. have a combined fleet of about 20 of the planes altogether, with firm orders for more than 260 in total.

European Ban

The European Unions aviation authority suspended all flight of the 737 Max 8 and larger 737 Max 9 in Europe. The agency, which usually goes along with the FAA, said it was acting out of an abundance of caution and out of concern for passenger safety.

Ethiopian Training

Ethiopian Airlines pilots got additional training on the Boeing 737 Max after the Lion Air crashed.

We have installed the additional training procedures in our manuals and in our simulations, Tewolde GebreMariam, Chief Executive Officer of Ethiopian Airlines, told reporters in a broadcast on state-controlled ETV. Tewolde said certain elements of the technical investigation need to be sent abroad for analysis.
An anti-Brexit remain in the European Union supporter, left, plays a guitar as she's surrounded by UKIP pro-Brexit supporters outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Thursday, March 14, 2019. British lawmakers faced another tumultuous day Thursday, as Parliament prepared to vote on whether to request a delay to the country's scheduled departure from the European Union and Prime Minister Theresa May struggled to shore up her shattered authority. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

CANTERBURY, England (AP)  It bills itself as the U.K.'s European university because of its study centers in France, Italy, Belgium and Greece. But now the uncertainty over Brexit is creating anxiety for students at the University of Kent.

There is disappointment and anger at lawmakers as they wrangle over Brexit details as the deadline approaches for Britain's withdrawal from the European Union.

For students, just about everything is uncertain: funding levels for international students, freedom to study at their campuses in Europe and the right to live and work in the 27 other EU countries that generations of students have taken for granted.

Omolade Adedapo, a politics student who is a vice president of the Kent Union, says the lack of clarity about the Brexit plan has meant "a lot of anxiety for students on campus" because of the unknowns.

"There is an uncertainty about what is going to happen when we leave, what's going to happen to students studying here, what's going to happen to European students if they want to come here to the U.K.," said Adedapo, 21. "And it's just very, very confusing at the moment."

The lack of information also is clouding matters for British students planning to study in Europe.

James Osei-Anane, a student adviser at the union, said Brexit will likely cost him a chance to study abroad. He's still hoping the plan can be stopped, which remains a possibility if Parliament cannot agree on a withdrawal deal.

"If we do leave the EU, I will not be able to just go and study there, go and work there," he said. "I think it is very much a wasted opportunity if we do leave, and I very much don't want to leave."

The university is unable to offer any information to students concerned about options and fees.

Professor Jeremy Carrette, the university's dean for Europe, said the implications for tuition, visas and health service are not yet known.

"The system is unclear, and until we have a clear position from our government and from the EU, that will remain unclear," he said.

___

Katz reported from London.
(Bloomberg) -- Brian Wong, co-founder of mobile advertising network Kiip Inc., has held a high profile in Silicon Valley since becoming one of the youngest people, at age 19, to receive venture capital funding for a startup. Now, he could become a cautionary tale.

Wong, now 27, was indicted by a grand jury Friday on felony charges of sexual assault. The indictment stems from events during an evening at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas three years ago that Wong and his date remember very differently.

Brian Wong is innocent of this three-year-old baseless accusation leveled against him, Wongs lawyer, Sam Bassett, said in a statement. Wong maintains that the two met on the app Tinder and had a first date that ended in consensual sexual activity, and that on the second date she falsely complained of this activity being non-consensual. The evidence will show that Mr. Wong acted appropriately at all times, Bassett said.

The situation marks the latest in a series of incidents that underscore the difficult environment for women in Silicon Valley. They include revelations this year over payouts to two executives at Alphabets Google who left in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations and a $10 million settlement last year of harassment and discrimination claims at Uber Technologies Inc., as well as troubling behavior by venture capitalists at several firms.

In Wongs case, the charges stem from an encounter with a young woman Wong had invited to meet with him in Austin in March 2016. The woman, a student at Rice University, drove 160 miles from Houston to join Wong at a party at Perrys Steakhouse, according to an affidavit for his arrest warrant filed in January of this year.

The woman, given the pseudonym Samantha Luu in the affidavit, told police she drank half a glass of wine and began to feel disoriented, dizzy, and physically impaired. She didnt remember how she got to Wongs hotel, but she described what happened next: Wong pushing her down to his bed and removing her clothes, as she, barely able to move, asked him to stop. Instead, he raped her, she alleged.

Story continues

Eventually, she was able to kick him off, yelling rape, the document alleges. His response was, How am I raping you? She passed out and awoke to another attack a few hours afterward, according to her statement to police. Later, she was able to get up, get dressed, and drive back to Houston. Luu reported the assault on March 14, 2016, to Rice University Police, who transferred the case to the Austin Police Department.

The investigation was suspended because Luu chose not to continue with it. The case was reopened after Luu got back in touch with Austin police last year, as she was now in a place where she felt she could participate, according to the affidavit.

Wong doesnt recall the evening that way. Bassett said that all contact had been consensual, and that since learning of the allegations, Wong had fully cooperated with law enforcement and had passed a polygraph examination regarding the events.

Kiip has asked Wong to take a leave of absence to focus on his legal defense, and appointed Chief Revenue Officer Bill Alena as acting chief executive officer. Kiip is committed to maintaining a safe work environment in which every individual is treated with respect and dignity, the company said in a February statement. We expect every employeeincluding our CEOto adhere to our codes of conduct.

Wong achieved tech industry acclaim at a young age. He grew up in Vancouver, Canada, skipped four grades in school and enrolled in college at age 14. He graduated from the University of British Columbia at age 18 with a bachelors degree in 2009. He moved to Silicon Valley, got a job with Digg Inc., was laid off a few months later, and then hung out his own shingle.

After he founded Kiip (pronounced keep) in 2010, the mobile advertising network quickly caught the eye of venture capitalists, raising more than $30 million over the years from backers such as American Express Ventures and Verizon Ventures. Kiips last funding round in 2016 valued the company at $54 million, according to PitchBook data.

American Express Ventures could not be reached for comment and Verizon Ventures declined to comment.

A charismatic regular on the conference circuit, Wong was scheduled to speak at South by Southwest this year, but his talk was cancelled abruptly. A festival spokesman declined to comment due to a policy of not discussing festival participants.

At the end of 2016, Penguin Random House published Wongs book on leadership and entrepreneurship, called The Cheat Code. Its subtitle: Going Off Script to Get More, Go Faster, and Shortcut Your Way to Success.

To contact the author of this story: Sarah McBride in San Francisco at smcbride24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anne VanderMey at avandermey@bloomberg.net, Peter BlumbergMark Milian

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Two private companies have proposed to put oil storage facilities to help secure the countrys reserve requirements, the Department of Energy said Friday. Energy Secretary Alfonso Cusi did not disclose the identify of the two companies that expressed interest to put up the storage facilities. State-owned Philippine National Oil Co. is also studying the possibility of putting up a storage facility for the planned importation of lower priced diesel by unit PNOC Exploration Corp. Some private companies are proposing to do it (stockpiling). PNOC EC has not stopped pursuing strategic reserve, Cusi said. Cusi earlier said the oil importation would push through although it encountered delays due to procurement issues. That will push through because we want PNOC to participate in the supply chain. Of course we are also addressing the reserve requirement of the country, Cusi said. PNOC is the countrys oil and gas arm.Whether prices are high or low, we need ample reserve, he said. PNOC EC earlier negotiated with fuel suppliers for the delivery of the shipment of an initial 50,000 metric ton Philippine standard Euro-4 gas oil or diesel fuel after the second invitation to bid failed. PNOC EC wanted a delivery of 50,000 MT of Euro 4 50 parts per million gas oil or diesel fuel at any safe port in the Philippines designated by the company. Im as impatient, Im the first guy that is impatient about it but there are rules on procurement that they have to follow, the procurement law and of course there are other concerns that they are addressing, Cusi said. He said PNOC EC wanted to make sure the supplier would be able to deliver.
Canada suspended flights on Boeing Co.s 737 Max, joining a global rush to ground the single-aisle jetliner after the second deadly crash in five months.

The safety notice restricts the 737 Max 8 or Max 9 from operating or overflying Canada, effective immediately, Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Wednesday in Ottawa. The decision was based on new but inconclusive satellite data that suggests similarities between a fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash March 10 and a deadly October accident in Indonesia.

Canada is halting flights of the 737 Max a day after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration reiterated its view that there is no basis for grounding Boeings revamped single-aisle workhorse, which debuted in May 2017. The jets operations have already been blocked by regulators in China, the U.K., the European Union a slew of other countries.

There cant be any Max 8 or Max 9 aircraft flying into, out of or across Canada, he said, confirming that it affects domestic carriers like Air Canada, WestJet and Sunwing, as well as international airlines.

Boeing erased a share gain on the announcement and fell less than 1 percent to $374.29 at 12:05 p.m. in New York. The company lost almost $27 billion in market value this week through Tuesday after posting the biggest two-day drop in almost a decade.

Possible Similarities

Garneau said satellite tracking data suggests possible similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes. He stressed that its not conclusive but that it was enough to order the safety measures. The new information was received overnight, he said.

There are some similarities between the two profiles, he said, referring to the fatal flights. Hopefully well be able to resolve this issue in the coming weeks and get the Max 8 back up and flying, but for the moment, caution has to dominate.

A total of 18 Canadians were killed in the latest crash.

This was a great loss for our country, so it is something that has really viscerally caught the attention of Canadians, Garneau said.

Air Canada has 24 of the 737 Max jets, according to company data. Calgary-based WestJet operates 13. Sunwing has four of the planes.

WestJet dropped 1.8 percent to C$19.56. Air Canada fell for a second day, down 1.8 percent to C$31.48.
Canadian's are taking on more debt than they can handle (Getty)

An alarming number of Canadians are burning the furniture to heat the home when it comes to their finances.

One-in-five Canadians surveyed by Leger say they will be forced to sell-off assets like RRSPs or cars to help pay off, or pay down their debt. They might even need to take out a second mortgage.

The results are hardly surprising considering the staggering levels of debt among Canadians. According to Canadas national debt clock, the national debt is more than $691 billion or $18,700 per person. Almost half of Canadians are $200 dollars away from not being able to pay their bills.

The need to liquidate is most prevalent among males at 24 per cent, compared to females at 14 per cent.

Despite the grim outlook, most survey respondents with debt expect to take on new forms of debt. Those under the age of 55 are most likely to take on new debt, but debt among seniors is on the rise.

Credit card debt will represent the biggest form of new debt at 23 per cent. Lines of credit are next at 15 per cent, followed by car loans and increased mortgages at 13 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.

Kelley Keehn, author, educator and consumer advocate for FPSC encourages her readers, family and friends to account for every single dollar spent in a 30-day period.

Keehn says doing nothing else often gets results because awareness kicks in and people effortlessly cut back on spending.

Many Canadians lack awareness of their spending habits and patterns, said Keehn.

There are several ways to create awareness, such as paying only with cash for a month which accesses a different part of the brain that is associated with loss aversion. A good person to take this journey with is a CFP professional who can help create a holistic financial plan.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.
HOUSTON, March 13 (Reuters) - BHP Group Ltd has stepped up exploration drilling in deep water off Trinidad and Tobago hunting for gas which could supply the country's Atlantic LNG (liquefied natural gas) plant in the 2020s, a senior executive said.

The company expects to complete drilling of three wells in block 14, located in its northern contract area, by the middle of this year, Niall McCormack, BHP's vice president for exploration, said on the sidelines of the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston.

"It's an attractive opportunity so we're looking to de-risk it a bit more, so we've got a bit more drilling to do," he said.

The company struck gas at the Bongos-2 well in the south last year. BHP is the operator of the block with a 70 percent stake while BP Plc holds the remainder.

BHP has also found natural gas in two of three wells it drilled in its southern contract area last year. The company operates the southern area with a 65 percent stake and Royal Dutch Shell Plc has a 35 percent stake.

"Overall, it's an area where gas is attractive because it's advantaged by the infrastructure of Atlantic LNG," McCormack said.

The gas could be produced in the middle of next decade when there would be demand from Atlantic LNG, he said.

Trinidad's Atlantic LNG, owned by BP, Shell, China's sovereign wealth fund CIC and Trinidad's state-owned company NGC, operates four LNG units with a total capacity of 15 million tonnes per year.

However the plant has been running below capacity for several years, due to depleting supply from mature gas fields off Trinidad, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a report last September. (Reporting by Florence Tan Additional reporting by Sonali Paul in MELBOURNE; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Just before the occasion of Saint Patrick's Day, which honors Saint Patrick and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland, the country has one more reason to probably celebrate. UK lawmakers have voted in favor of postponing the Brexit process, recognizing that more time is required to sort out the impasse over Britain's departure from the EU. But they definitively rejected a proposition for the second referendum.

Prime minister Theresa May will now turn to European leaders to allow an extension to Article 50, the legal process under which Britain is leaving the European Union. Unless a postponement is approved by the remaining 27 EU leaders, Britain is heading for a confused departure on Mar 29 (read: Brexit Delay in the Cards? Europe ETFs to Rally).

Lackluster Irish Growth in Q4, Still Best in EU

Apart from this hope, the Irish economy is currently in a lackluster space. The Irish economy grew by 0.1% sequentially in Q4, slowing sharply from a 0.9% expansion in the previous period, as solid increases in private consumption and fixed investment were partially counterbalanced by a negative contribution from net exports.

Considering full-year 2018, the Irish economy expanded 6.7%, slower than 7.2% in 2017. However, the annual growth rate still made the European Union the fastest-growing economy for the fifth successive year.

What Lies Ahead?

Ireland's central bank forecasts that GDP growth will come down to 4.4% this year if Britain leaves the European Union with an agreement but 1.5% if it exits without a deal. Brexit could take a toll on agricultural and food exports, while a slowing Eurozone and global economy could weigh on exports (read: see all European Equity ETFs here).

Farming groups estimate that the 800-million-a-year market for beef will go away if the industry misses tariff-free access to the UK and meat from non-EU states is allowed in on the same terms as Irish products.

ETF in Focus

Story continues

Overall, 2019 looks to be a tricky year for the Ireland economy and the pure-play fund iShares MSCI Ireland ETF EIRL. Investors can thus stay away from the Ireland ETF even though the festive moment of St. Patrick's Day is around the corner. The ETFs performance could be anything but green in the coming days given the Brexit drama.

The fund is heavy on CRH Plc (22.16%) followed by Kerry Group Plc (16.16%) and Icon Plc (5.80%). It charges 47 bps in fees. The fund has gained 4.2% in the past month and its future journey is largely dependent on Brexit. The fund has a Zacks ETF Rank #4 (Sell).

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SHANGHAI, China, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ctrip.com International, Ltd. (CTRP), one of Chinas largest integrated travel services companies (Ctrip), today signed an agreement with upscale global hoteliers Millennium Hotels and Resorts (MHR) to develop a global distribution strategy promoting MHR properties to Ctrips 300 million strong customer base.



The agreement was announced jointly at ITB Berlin by David Zhou, Chief Business Officer for Accommodation Business Unit of Ctrip and Nayan Peshkar, MHR Senior Vice President  Digital, Distribution & Revenue Strategy.

It marks the start of an alliance enabling Ctrip to offer MHRs iconic portfolio of hotels in the USA, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia to its China-based business and leisure travel clients. Through the aegis of a strategic collaboration agreement, MHR will partner with Ctrips membership program, which will certify its properties as Chinese Friendly Hotels and enable them to benefit from Ctrips influential ranking system. MHR and Ctrip will also work towards customer initiatives such as the launching of a flagship store on Ctrips digital platforms, joint marketing campaigns as well as knowledge sharing and cross exposure programmes for team members.

Ctrip is the number one platform for Chinese nationals travelling overseas. About one in four Chinese citizens use Ctrip to book and search for outbound flight tickets, making it the worlds largest outbound travel platform. According to Ctrips 2018 Travel Report, its customers top destinations are England, France, Germany, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, and USA, all of which are home to hotels owned or operated by MHR and its associates.

MHR parent company Millennium & Copthorne Hotels Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996. At the end of 2018, it operated or branded a portfolio of 139 properties with over 40,000 rooms. Its respected brands are present in 28 nations around the world, including China where it owns and operates the iconic Grand Millennium Hotel Beijing, as well as operating properties in Hong Kong, Xiamen and other major Chinese destinations. The Group has always had a strong Asian franchise, thanks to its majority ownership by City Developments Limited, one of Singapores leading corporations. This, combined with its unique range of iconic properties in popular destinations will make it a valuable addition to Ctrips customer offering.

Story continues

David Zhou of Ctrip said, We are so grateful to be enhancing our relationship with MHR. Chinese outbound tourists reached nearly 150 million in 2018, and the growth for this year remains strong. By signing this Chinafocused distribution agreement with MHR, we are continuing to offer 300 million members the best hotel experience worldwide whilst enhancing MHRs presence and boosting new business opportunities for them in the China Market.

Nayan Peshkar of MHR said, We are delighted to be joining forces with Ctrip and thus raising the profile of our hotel offering in the large and fast-growing China travel market. Asia is our second biggest region of operations, so we already have a deep and embedded experience of what it takes to meet the high demands of business and leisure travelers from China. With hotels located in some of the worlds most attractive destinations, we look forward to welcoming more of Ctrips customers in the coming year.

About Ctrip.com International, Ltd.

Ctrip.com International, Ltd. is a leading provider of online travel and related services, including accommodation reservation, transportation ticketing, package tour and in-destination services, corporate travel management, and other travel related services. It enables business and leisure travellers to make informed and cost-effective bookings by aggregating comprehensive travel related information and offering its services through an advanced transaction and service platform consisting of its mobile apps, Internet websites and centralized, toll-free, 24-hour customer service center. The family of travel brands mainly includes: Ctrip, the largest online travel agency in terms of gross merchandise value and the best-known travel brand in China; Qunar, a leading online travel agency in China; Trip.com, an online travel agency for global consumers; and Skyscanner, a leading global travel search site. Since its inception in 1999, Ctrip Group has experienced substantial growth and become one of the largest travel service providers in the world.

About Millennium & Copthorne Hotels Plc

Millennium Hotels and Resorts is the umbrella brand of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc, a global hospitality management and real estate group, listed on the London Stock Exchange (MLC.L).



The company owns and/or manages a worldwide portfolio of more than 136 hotels, offering over 40,000 rooms in business and leisure destinations in Asia, Australasia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. Millennium Hotels and Resorts consist of 4 brand collections: Lengs Collection, M Collection, Millennium Collection and Copthorne Collection.

MHR is a dynamic hospitality group with an outstanding reputation for excellence and taking pride in exceeding the needs of business and leisure travellers. Its properties are well located in the worlds most attractive destinations, including New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Auckland and Beijing. Millennium Hotels and Resorts offer its guests the perfect address for business and leisure alike.

For further information, please contact:

International PR

Ctrip.com International, ltd.

Tel: (+86) 21 3406 4880 ext 196455

Email: Pr@ctrip.com

Mango PR UK

Tel: +44 (0)207 421 500

Lara Good | Alexandra Hirst

Email: lara.good@mangopr.com | Alexandra.hirst@mangopr.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/965c0a95-9a56-4680-b3a0-d4c4755906e3
2 nabbed, P6.8-million shabu seized

posted March 15, 2019 at 10:10 pm by PNA March 15, 2019 at 10:10 pm

Cotabato CityAuthorities arrested two women and seized 1 kg. of suspected shabu worth P6.8 million in Marawi City on Thursday afternoon. Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao Police Director, Brig. Gen. Graciano Mijares, lauded the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, Lanao del Sur police, Marawi City police, and the Armys 82nd Infantry Battalion for the arrest. Arrested were Naira Panda, alias Mila, and Saima Moda Imam, alias Ima, both of legal age and residents of Maguindanao. Mijares, in a statement, said government forces conducted a drug buy-bust operation in Km. 00, Barangay Datu Saber, near the Marawi City National High School at 4 p.m.Seized from the suspects were 10 big plastic sachets of suspected shabu estimated to weigh 1 kg., two mobile phones used in the illegal drug transactions, and several piles of boodle money with a genuine P1,000 bill on top of each bundle. The suspects have been detained and are undergoing tactical investigation at the PDEA-BARRM office in Cotabato City. Mijares said the arrest of the big-time drug peddlers was a result of intense intelligence gathering currently being supported by the public.

COMMENT DISCLAIMER: Reader comments posted on this Web site are not in any way endorsed by Manila Standard. Comments are views by manilastandard.net readers who exercise their right to free expression and they do not necessarily represent or reflect the position or viewpoint of manilastandard.net. While reserving this publications right to delete comments that are deemed offensive, indecent or inconsistent with Manila Standard editorial standards, Manila Standard may not be held liable for any false information posted by readers in this comments section.
The city of Denver, Colorado will trial a blockchain-based voting app for military and overseas voters during the 2019 municipal election cycle. The announcement was made on the Denver Elections Twitter page. The app is called Voatz and utilises blockchain encryption to provide security and convenience for people who are unable to vote in person. We are piloting a smartphone voting application for #military and overseas #voters during the 2019 Municipal #Election cycle. The Voatz mobile app uses #blockchain encryption to provide a more secure and convenient way to vote for our military and overseas voters. #COPolitics pic.twitter.com/lT6OxKLj26  Denver Elections (@DenverElections) March 7, 2019 Voatz has been piloted in West Virginia The announcement details how the Denver Elections Division

The city of Denver, Colorado will trial a blockchain-based voting app for military and overseas voters during the 2019 municipal election cycle.

The announcement was made on the Denver Elections Twitter page. The app is called Voatz and utilises blockchain encryption to provide security and convenience for people who are unable to vote in person.

We are piloting a smartphone voting application for #military and overseas #voters during the 2019 Municipal #Election cycle. The Voatz mobile app uses #blockchain encryption to provide a more secure and convenient way to vote for our military and overseas voters. #COPolitics pic.twitter.com/lT6OxKLj26  Denver Elections (@DenverElections) March 7, 2019

Voatz has been piloted in West Virginia

The announcement details how the Denver Elections Division will be soliciting volunteers from their pool of military and overseas voters to pilot a secure and convenient smartphone application.

It will allow voters to receive and cast their ballot directly from their smartphone during the election cycle.

Voters wishing to participate in the pilot must first undergo identity verification through the app. This will include a 10-second selfie video alongside photo identification.

Voters will also need to go through a multifactor biometric authentication process to access the app and cast their ballot.

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Upon submitting a ballot, voters will receive an email receipt with a PDF of their ballot image so they can confirm the information has been recorded correctly.

Voatz has been successfully piloted by the state of West Virginia during the 2018 Primary and General Elections.

Funded by Bradley Tusk  Michael Bloombergs ex-campaign manager

Quartz also reported that Bradley Tusk  ex-campaign manager for Michael Bloomberg  will be funding the project. It estimated the funding will be roughly $180,000 and will not cost the city of Denver a penny.

Deputy director of elections, Jocelyn Bucaro, commented: Denver has always been on the leading edge of elections and technical innovation, and participating in this pilot affirms our commitment to exploring ways to make the voting experience as convenient as possible for military and overseas voters.

In addition to working with Voatz, Denver Elections will also be partnering with Tusk Philanthropies and the National Cyber Security Center on the pilot program.

Denver Elections will be utilising the application in both the May 7th municipal election as well as the possible June 4th run-off election.

Interested in reading more about the Voatz app? Discover more about how it was piloted in West Virginia last year.

The post Denver to test blockchain voting app funded by Michael Bloombergs ex-campaign manager appeared first on Coin Rivet.
Canadian Solar (CSIQ) is expected to deliver a year-over-year decline in earnings on lower revenues when it reports results for the quarter ended December 2018. This widely-known consensus outlook gives a good sense of the company's earnings picture, but how the actual results compare to these estimates is a powerful factor that could impact its near-term stock price.

The stock might move higher if these key numbers top expectations in the upcoming earnings report, which is expected to be released on March 21. On the other hand, if they miss, the stock may move lower.

While the sustainability of the immediate price change and future earnings expectations will mostly depend on management's discussion of business conditions on the earnings call, it's worth handicapping the probability of a positive EPS surprise.

Zacks Consensus Estimate

This solar wafers manufacturer is expected to post quarterly earnings of $0.70 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of -30.7%.

Revenues are expected to be $874.12 million, down 21.2% from the year-ago quarter.

Estimate Revisions Trend

The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has remained unchanged over the last 30 days. This is essentially a reflection of how the covering analysts have collectively reassessed their initial estimates over this period.

Investors should keep in mind that the direction of estimate revisions by each of the covering analysts may not always get reflected in the aggregate change.

Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise

Earnings Whisper

Estimate revisions ahead of a company's earnings release offer clues to the business conditions for the period whose results are coming out. This insight is at the core of our proprietary surprise prediction model -- the Zacks Earnings ESP (Expected Surprise Prediction).

The Zacks Earnings ESP compares the Most Accurate Estimate to the Zacks Consensus Estimate for the quarter; the Most Accurate Estimate is a more recent version of the Zacks Consensus EPS estimate. The idea here is that analysts revising their estimates right before an earnings release have the latest information, which could potentially be more accurate than what they and others contributing to the consensus had predicted earlier.

Story continues

Thus, a positive or negative Earnings ESP reading theoretically indicates the likely deviation of the actual earnings from the consensus estimate. However, the model's predictive power is significant for positive ESP readings only.

A positive Earnings ESP is a strong predictor of an earnings beat, particularly when combined with a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), 2 (Buy) or 3 (Hold). Our research shows that stocks with this combination produce a positive surprise nearly 70% of the time, and a solid Zacks Rank actually increases the predictive power of Earnings ESP.

Please note that a negative Earnings ESP reading is not indicative of an earnings miss. Our research shows that it is difficult to predict an earnings beat with any degree of confidence for stocks with negative Earnings ESP readings and/or Zacks Rank of 4 (Sell) or 5 (Strong Sell).

How Have the Numbers Shaped Up for Canadian Solar?

For Canadian Solar, the Most Accurate Estimate is the same as the Zacks Consensus Estimate, suggesting that there are no recent analyst views which differ from what have been considered to derive the consensus estimate. This has resulted in an Earnings ESP of 0%.

On the other hand, the stock currently carries a Zacks Rank of #1.

So, this combination makes it difficult to conclusively predict that Canadian Solar will beat the consensus EPS estimate.

Does Earnings Surprise History Hold Any Clue?

While calculating estimates for a company's future earnings, analysts often consider to what extent it has been able to match past consensus estimates. So, it's worth taking a look at the surprise history for gauging its influence on the upcoming number.

For the last reported quarter, it was expected that Canadian Solar would post earnings of $0.46 per share when it actually produced earnings of $0.96, delivering a surprise of +108.70%.

Over the last four quarters, the company has beaten consensus EPS estimates three times.

Bottom Line

An earnings beat or miss may not be the sole basis for a stock moving higher or lower. Many stocks end up losing ground despite an earnings beat due to other factors that disappoint investors. Similarly, unforeseen catalysts help a number of stocks gain despite an earnings miss.

That said, betting on stocks that are expected to beat earnings expectations does increase the odds of success. This is why it's worth checking a company's Earnings ESP and Zacks Rank ahead of its quarterly release. Make sure to utilize our Earnings ESP Filter to uncover the best stocks to buy or sell before they've reported.

Canadian Solar doesn't appear a compelling earnings-beat candidate. However, investors should pay attention to other factors too for betting on this stock or staying away from it ahead of its earnings release.



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(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musks unveiling of a new electric vehicle that Tesla Inc. wont deliver to customers for another year and a half rekindled concerns about the companys cash position.

The Model Y crossover that the chief executive officer debuted late Thursday in Hawthorne, California, will start being delivered to customers in the fall of next year. The company immediately began taking $2,500 pre-orders, a bigger ask than the $1,000 it charged at first to reserve a Model 3 sedan.

More expensive customer deposits for Model Y are likely to reinforce bear concerns about Teslas cash, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein Co., said in a report Friday. We expect initial orders to be notably lower than Model 3.

Tesla shares fell as much as 5 percent and traded down 3.8 percent to $278.82 as of noon Friday in New York. The stock is down about 16 percent this year.

At Teslas design studio, Musk showed off a blue prototype of the mid-sized Model Y, which is roughly 10 percent bigger than its best-selling Model 3. Initially, three higher-end editions of the new vehicle will be available, with a standard version scheduled to arrive in spring 2021 that will be priced at $39,000 and equipped with a 230-mile battery.

By showing the Model Y now and yet keeping most customers waiting until the second half of next year, Tesla risks undermining momentum for the Model 3, which catapulted the automaker up the sales charts and helped Musk post back-to-back quarterly profits. Investors are counting on the Model Y to help the company better meet the demands of consumers who are increasingly ditching sedans for roomier crossovers and SUVs.

Prior to the Model Y launch a number of OEMs will be launching direct competitors, including the Audi e-tron, BMW iNEXT, and Mercedes-Benz EQC, John Murphy, an analyst for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote in a report. As such, TSLA appears to be late to the game, which puts the theoretical profit/cash flow opportunity for the Model Y at risk.

Story continues

Missing Buzz

Musk, 47, took the stage before a crowd of customers and fans, but was uncharacteristically subdued. He spent much of his presentation talking about the companys struggles with manufacturing.

He was not the usual charismatic Elon Musk. He was super low-key, said Michael Harley, executive editor of Kelley Blue Book, who was at the event. He was almost apologetic. It was a bit of a reality check. People in the crowd like the car, but Musk only spent a fraction of his time talking about it.

Only one of the new models was driven onto the stage, where it shared the limelight with other, older vehicles. At the 2016 unveiling of the Model 3, by contrast, Musk showed off three cars and flashed the rising number of customer deposits on screen as they rolled in from people eager to be among the first in line to reserve them.

At the Model Ys unveiling, Musk said nothing about taking orders or deposits, although Teslas website allows people to submit fully refundable pre-orders. Whereas Model 3 customers put down $1,000 deposits and then had to pay $2,500 to configure and order, Model Y buyers will pay only the latter amount, according to the company.

Still, the costlier initial charge to Model Y customers suggests Tesla remains in a precarious cash position, Jeffrey Osborne, an analyst at Cowen & Co. with the equivalent of a sell rating on the shares, wrote in a report. We remain concerned about the companys liquidity.

The Model Y is making its official debut after a rough patch for both Tesla and Musk. In late February, the company announced it would finally offer a $35,000 version of the Model 3, though it linked the ability to do so with a plan to close almost all of its stores and pivot to online-only ordering.

This blindsided employees and investors alike, and Tesla backtracked 10 days later, saying in a blog post that more stores would remain open but vehicle prices would have to rise by about 3 percent on average worldwide.

Tesla ended last year with about $3.7 billion of cash and equivalents, but has since had to pay off a $920 million convertible bond. Musk has warned a loss is likely this quarter, and the carmaker has a $566 million note coming due in November.

Analysts are now again skeptical of Tesla executives claims that theyll be able to service upcoming debt obligations with cash.

We continue to believe that Tesla will likely raise cash in 2019, Gene Munster, a managing partner of venture capital firm Loup Ventures, wrote after the event. While a raise would be viewed as negative in the near term, it would be positive in the long term, potentially putting to rest longer-term investor cash concerns.

(Updates with analysts comment in seventh paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Dana Hull in San Francisco at dhull12@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net, David Welch

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Eni SpA E makes discovery in the Nour exploration prospect located in Eastern Egyptian Mediterranean. The company hit oil in Block 15/06 in the Agogo exploration prospect, located in Angolas deep water on Mar 13.



The gas discovery at the Nour-1 New Field Wildcat (NFW) is under appraisal. The field is located in the Nour North Sinai Concession in the Eastern Egyptian Mediterranean, about 50 kilometers north of the Sinai peninsula.



The well encountered 33 meters of gross sandstone pay with good petrophysical properties and an estimated gas column of 90 meters in the Tineh formation of Oligocene age. The company has acquired detailed and exact data post the discovery. However, Eni is yet to conduct tests of the well.



Eni, as the operator of the concession, has a stake of 40% in participation with Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS). The other partners include BP plc (BP), Mubadala Petroleum and Tharwa Petroleum Company holding 25%, 20% and 15%, respectively.



The company will initiate feasibility studies that are required to accelerate the exploitation of these new resources after concluding the assessment of the discovery. The drilling of new resources will capitalize the synergies from existing facilities.



Enis presence in Egypt dates back to 1954. Being among the country's leading producer, Eni has equity of more than 340,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day that is expected to grow further in 2019 with the ramp up of the Zohr Project.



The company allocates 70% of its investment funds toward Egypt and intends to spend about $3 billion in the country during the upcoming period. So far, it has invested $8.4 billion in the Noras and Zohr fields.



Zacks Rank & Key Picks



Currently, Eni carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).



Some better-ranked players in the energy space are Antero Resources Corporation AR, CrossAmerica Partners L.P. CAPL and NuStar Energy L.P. NS. While Antero Resources and CrossAmerica Partners sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), NuStar Energy carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



CrossAmerica Partners is involved in the wholesale distribution of motor fuels, comprising gasoline and diesel fuel. The company delivered an average positive earnings surprise of 655% in the last four quarters.



Antero Resources is an independent explorer, primarily engaged in the acquisition and development of natural gas, natural gas liquids and oil resources in the Appalachian Basin. The company earnings beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate in two straight quarters.



San Antonio, TX-based NuStar Energy is a midstream energy company. For 2019, its bottom line, which has witnessed three upside revisions in the past 60 days, is expected to grow 64.2% year over year.



Is Your Investment Advisor Fumbling Your Financial Future?



See how you can more effectively safeguard your retirement with a new Special Report, 4 Warning Signs Your Investment Advisor Might Be Sabotaging Your Financial Future.



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NuStar Energy L.P. (NS) : Free Stock Analysis Report



CrossAmerica Partners LP (CAPL) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Eni SpA (E) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Antero Resources Corporation (AR) : Free Stock Analysis Report



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American civil aviation and Boeing investigators search through the debris at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

By David Shepardson, Richard Lough and Aaron Maasho

WASHINGTON/PARIS/ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Boeing Co's 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes will be grounded for weeks if not longer until a software upgrade can be tested and installed, U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday, as officials in France prepare to begin analysing the black boxes from a jet that crashed in Ethiopia.

Boeing said it had paused deliveries of its fastest-selling 737 MAX aircraft built at its factory near Seattle but continues to produce its single-aisle jets at full speed while dealing with the worldwide fleet's grounding.

Investigators in France will be seeking clues into Sunday's deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash after take-off from Addis Ababa killed 157 people from 35 nations in the second such calamity involving Boeing's plane since October.

Possible links between the accidents have rocked the aviation industry, scared passengers, and left the world's biggest planemaker scrambling to prove the safety of a money-spinning model intended to be the standard for decades.

U.S. Representative Rick Larsen said after a briefing with U.S. aviation officials the software upgrade would take a few weeks to complete, and installing it on all aircraft would take "at least through April." He said additional training would also have to take place.

Boeing has said it would roll out the software improvement "across the 737 MAX fleet in the coming weeks."

Relatives of the dead stormed out of a meeting with Ethiopian Airlines on Thursday, decrying a lack of transparency, while others made the painful trip to the crash scene.

"I can't find you! Where are you?" said one Ethiopian woman, draped in traditional white mourning shawl, as she held a framed portrait of her brother in the charred and debris-strewn field.

After an apparent tussle over where the investigation should be held, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were handed over to France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA).

Technical analysis would begin on Friday and the first conclusions could take several days, the BEA said, posting a picture of the partly crumpled, orange-cased box.

Story continues

Nations around the world, including an initially reluctant United States, have suspended the 371 MAX models in operation, though airlines are largely coping by switching planes.

Nearly 5,000 MAXs are on order, meaning the financial implications are huge for the industry. Moody's rating agency said the fallout from the crash would not immediately affect Boeing's credit rating.

"We continue to build 737 MAX airplanes while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system," Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers said.

Boeing would maintain its production rate of 52 aircraft per month, and its newest version, the MAX, represents the lion's share, although Boeing declined to break out exact numbers.

CONNECTION TO INDONESIA CRASH?

The investigation of Sunday's crash has added urgency since the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Wednesday grounded the 737 MAX aircraft, citing satellite data and evidence from the scene that indicated some similarities and "the possibility of a shared cause" with October's crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people.

Though it maintains the planes are safe, Boeing has supported the FAA move. Its stock is down about 11 percent since the crash, wiping more than $26 billion (19.6 billion) off its market value. It fell 1 percent on Thursday.

U.S. and Canadian carriers wrestled with customer calls and flight cancellations and Southwest Airlines Co and American Airlines Group Inc, the largest U.S. operators of the 737 MAX, said they had started flying empty MAX aircraft to be parked elsewhere during the ban.

U.S. President Donald Trump, an aviation enthusiast with deep ties to Boeing, said he hoped the suspensions would be short. "They have to figure it out fast," Trump told reporters at the White House.

A software fix for the 737 MAX that Boeing has been working on since the Lion Air crash in October in Indonesia will take months to complete, the FAA said on Wednesday.

And in what may presage a raft of claims, Norwegian Air has said it will seek compensation from Boeing for costs and lost revenue after grounding its fleet of 737 MAX.

Japan became the latest nation to suspend the 737 MAX planes on Thursday. And airline Garuda Indonesia said there was a possibility it would cancel its 20-strong order of 737 MAXs.

GRAPHIC: Ethiopian Airlines crash interactive - https://tmsnrt.rs/2ChBW5M

WHAT HAPPENED?

Under international rules, Ethiopians are leading the investigation but France's BEA will conduct black box analysis as an adviser. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was also sending three investigators to assist.

Only France and the United States have the experience gleaned from being present at almost every crash involving an Airbus or Boeing respectively.

The cause of the Indonesian crash is still being investigated. A November preliminary report, before the retrieval of the cockpit voice recorder, focussed on maintenance and training and the response of a Boeing anti-stall system to a recently replaced sensor, but gave no reason for the crash.

The pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 had reported internal control problems and received permission to return, before the plane came down and burst into a fireball on arid farmland.

(Reporting by Richard Lough, Tim Hepher and John Irish in Paris, Duncan Miriri and Aaron Masho in Addis Ababa, Jeff Mason and David Shepardson in Washington, Omar Mohammed and Maggie Fick in Nairobi; Danilo Masoni in Milan, and Eric M. Johnson in Seattle, Tracy Rucinski in Chicago, Allison Lampert in Montreal; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Ben Klayman; Editing by Jon Boyle, Nick Zieminski and Grant McCool)
Amid the current water shortage, the Civil Service Commission said heads of agencies had the discretion to allow their employees to forego wearing office uniforms. The CSC said heads of agencies, including local government units, were authorized to issue internal rules suspending wearing of office uniforms until the water shortage in National Capital Region and drought in other provinces in the Philippines is over. We understand that there may be employees affected by water shortage who are unable to regularly wash their office uniforms. We do not want this to become a reason for their absence from work and to eventually cause problems in productivity, the CSC said. Under civil service rules and regulations, appropriate dress code of government workers must be prescribed by agency heads through the issuance of internal policies. Manila has been hit by its worst water shortage in years, leaving bucket-bearing families to wait hours to fill up from tanker trucks and some hospitals to turn away less urgent cases. Meanwhile, taps are dry from four to 20 hours per day in the homes of about half of Metro Manilas roughly 12 million people due to rolling outages driven by a dearth of rain and inadequate infrastructure. I have learned to take a bath using only seven pitchers of water, Ricardo Bergado told AFP as he lined up with his buckets. I even save the bathwater to flush our toilet. The shortages started hitting late last week, with some areas in eastern Manila seeing the supplies of water into their homes being completely cut off. However, Manila Water Co., one of the capitals two suppliers, said it would now use rolling cut offs spread across the city to share the pain more evenly. Jerry cans and buckets were flying off store shelves and landing in lines where families were spending hours waiting for deliveries by truck.Instead of doing important things, our time is consumed now by making sure we have enough water, Bergado, a 57-year-old audio-technician told AFP. At least five public hospitals in the capital have started getting supplemental supplies from water tankers, as shortages had led at least one to limit admissions. This is the worst [water shortage] we have experienced. It almost happened last year but we were saved by heavy rains brought by storms, Dittie Galang, Manila Water communications manager, told AFP. The disruption could last until July when monsoon rains are typically in full swing and would replenish regional reservoirs, one of which is at a two-decade low. Better known for flooding from its frequent typhoons, the Philippines is experiencing a dry spell that led to reserves being severely depleted. At the same time, the ageing pipelines and dams that provide Manilas water have not kept pace with the growth of the mega-city, which has roughly doubled its population since 1985. The government has admitted that the problem of growing demand for water has long been forecast but they failed to address it due to delays in projects that would expand capacity. We need an alternative water source and we need it yesterday, Patrick Ty, chief of Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System, told ABS-CBN television. Among the main projects in the pipeline is the construction of $355-million Kaliwa Dam, a Chinese-funded project that met resistance from indigenous peoples and church leaders for its feared effects on communities.
* European stocks climb as oil, Brexit hopes boost market

* Adidas down on warning supply chain issues to crimp sales

* Inditex slides as pace of store closures surprises

* Sterling recoups some losses (Updates prices, adds quotes)

By Julien Ponthus and Helen Reid

LONDON, March 13 (Reuters) - European shares jumped on Wednesday as investors bet British lawmakers would vote to reject a disorderly no-deal Brexit, but underwhelming results from Inditex and Adidas kept gains limited.

The pan-European STOXX 600 index climbed to close up 0.6 percent while London's FTSE 100 barely managed a 0.1 percent gain as sterling extended gains.

Lawmakers resoundingly voted against Prime Minister Theresa May's amended Brexit deal late on Tuesday, forcing parliament to decide whether to back a no-deal Brexit or seek a last-minute delay to the process.

"I think the market can see that today parliament is going to vote against no deal," said Duncan Weldon, cross asset allocation strategist at Legal & General Investment.

But investors were far from exuberant.

"I think a lot of people who dont have to be invested in the UK are sitting this one out for the moment", he added.

European stocks were boosted by a 1 percent jump in oil prices which drove the STOXX 600 oil & gas index up 1.6 percent to its highest level in four months.

Results from several companies disappointed, however.

Zara owner Inditex slid 4.5 percent after it published annual earnings slightly below analysts' expectations and announced more store closures than expected.

"This process of adjusting their store estate is surprising investors and happening faster than people expected," said Alistair Wittet, European equities portfolio manager at Comgest, which holds 11.19 million shares in Inditex and is the 13th biggest investor according to Refinitiv data.

"That naturally weighs somewhat on sales growth in the short term, but I think is the right strategy long term," he added.

Germany's Adidas lost 2.4 percent after announcing supply chain issues would hit its sales growth in the first half of 2019, particularly in North America.

Story continues

Wirecard was Europe's worst performer, falling 6.6 percent after it suspended an accounting employee in Singapore amid allegations of fraud and creative accounting.

"The scope seems to be getting deeper and longer in time than was originally thought," Neil Campling, head of telecoms, media and tech research at Mirabaud Securities' Global Thematic Group, said of the allegations against the German payments firm.

Austria's Verbund lost 6.5 percent after the hydropower specialist said full-year core profit fell as it produced less electricity in a long dry summer period.

One gainer after results was petroleum storage firm Rubis , up 4.1 percent after reporting a rise in full-year revenue.

Shares in Norwegian Air dipped 1.5 percent after it said it would seek compensation from plane maker Boeing for lost revenue and extra costs after grounding its fleet of 737 MAX 8 aircraft in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. (Reporting by Julien Ponthus, Josephine Mason, and Helen Reid; Editing by Alison Williams)
MIRAMAR, Fla., March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hey Indy, how about some more nonstops? Spirit Airlines is celebrating the launch of its inaugural service from Indianapolis International Airport (IND) with the announcement of two additional nonstop routes set to rollout this winter. Beginning November 14, 2019, Spirit will add nonstop routes from Indy to Tampa, Florida and Fort Myers, Florida. The new routes are announced the same day the airline begins nonstop daily service from Indianapolis to Orlando, Florida and Las Vegas, Nevada. On May 2, Spirit will add nonstop seasonal flights between Indianapolis and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina three times weekly. The new routes will create dozens of connections throughout Spirits domestic and international network.



Spirit Airlines is excited to celebrate the launch of our Indianapolis service with the promise of even more nonstop flights on the way, said John Kirby, Spirit Airlines Vice President of Network Planning. These two additional routes reinforce our growing investment from the Crossroads of America. We believe Circle City guests looking to get away will embrace our low fares and the best value in the sky.

Adding additional flights -- at this time -- sends a clear message about the value Spirit Airlines sees in Indianapolis, said Mario Rodriguez, Executive Director of the Indianapolis Airport Authority. Spirit is giving Indy travelers more nonstop flights to the places they love most, and connectivity to international destinations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thats a statement were taking full note of as we welcome Spirit Airlines to the city.

Within the past week, weve not only had the opportunity to celebrate our airport being named the #1 airport in North America for the seventh year in a row, but were also excited to welcome Spirit Airlines to Indy, celebrate their inaugural flight and their announcement of two additional flights, said Leonard Hoops, President and CEO of Visit Indy. A new carrier and quality air service provider at IND like Spirit provides more airlift into the city and more visitors to Indianapolis. One of the benefits of IND continuing to increase its record number of nonstop flights is that weve also seen a record for inbound visitors coming to the city for either business or leisure.

Story continues

Indianapolis, IN (IND) to/from: Starts: Frequency: Orlando, FL (MCO) March 14, 2019 Daily Las Vegas, NV (LAS) March 14, 2019 Daily Myrtle Beach, SC (MYR) May 2, 2019 3x weekly, seasonal Tampa, FL (TPA) November 14, 2019 Daily Fort Myers, FL (RSW) November 14, 2019 Daily

Spirit Airlines was recently named 2018 Value Airline of the Year by Air Transport World. The airline is making good on its promise to offer the best value in the sky by maintaining one of the most on-time operations in the United States and adding high-speed Wi-Fi to its entire fleet. In addition to Indianapolis, Spirit recently began serving Austin and will soon serve Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Burbank and Sacramento.

About Spirit Airlines:

Spirit Airlines (SAVE) is committed to delivering the best value in the sky. We are the leader in providing customizable travel options starting with an unbundled fare. This allows every Guest to pay only for the options they choose  like bags, seat assignments and refreshments  something we call A La Smarte. We make it possible for our Guests to venture further and discover more than ever before. Our Fit Fleet is one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient in the U.S. We offer more than 600 daily flights to 73 destinations in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean, and are dedicated to giving back and improving the communities we serve. Come save with us at spirit.com. At Spirit Airlines, we go. We go for you.

Contact:

Derek Dombrowski

(305) 916-6065

derek.dombrowski@spirit.com
Haley Taylor Schlitz, 16, plans to enroll at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in the fall of 2019.







Most 16-year-olds spend the summer break working, going to camp, or hanging out with their friends. Not so for Haley Taylor Schlitz, who's on track to graduate with both an associate's and bachelor's degree in May. Shell spend the upcoming summer preparing to start law school and attending a six-day program with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington for incoming law students.



Schlitz was accepted to all five law schools she applied to and has decided to attend Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law. (The other law schools were at Howard University, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Southern University and Texas Southern University.)



SMU could not say whether shes the youngest ever to enroll at the Dallas campus, though admissions officials said shes the youngest they know of. We caught up with Schlitz this week to discuss her law school plans, what inspired her to seek a J.D., and what she thinks her new classmates will make of a teenager in their midst. Her answers have been edited for length and clarity.



Why did you pick Southern Methodist University? Was there anything in particular that stood out? A lot of factors went into it. Obviously, Im 16 so I want to stay at home. My parents suggested getting an apartment, but I really wanted to stay at home. That was huge. Ill commute every day I have class. SMU also offered me the biggest scholarship, which is important too. SMU isnt cheaptotally worth it but isnt cheap. Its a top 50 law school. Its the best law school I got into.



How is it possible that you will start law school at 17? Most law students are 21 and older. It starts way back in my elementary years. I went to public school until fifth grade. At the end of the year my parents pulled me out and started to home-school me because they didnt like the way I was being taught. I was just being taught to pass the end-of-the-year test to get to the next grade. I wasnt being taught to learn. I wasnt in the gifted and talented program because they said I wasnt allowed to bethat I couldnt take the test. My parents got me privately tested and then home-schooled me after they determined that I was gifted. I was home-schooled up until I was 13 years old. I skipped quite a few grades.



Then I graduated high school at 13 and went to the community college from 13 to 14, so I could get my core done. Then I got accepted into numerous different universities, and I went to Texas Womans University from 14 to 16. And now Im here at 16 and I applied to numerous different law schools and Im going to law school.



When did you know you wanted to be a lawyer? My moms a doctor, so as you can imagine I wanted to be a doctor until I was 12 or 13. I started at Tarrant County College with the idea I wanted to be a doctor. Then I looked back at my own story and realized the inequities there are in the education system, especially in the gifted and talented program with girls and girls of color. Thats something I felt really passionate about because of my own story, that I wasnt even able to get in. Where I went there were a bunch of boys who were not of color who were able to get in at the same age I wasnt able to get in. It sparked a fire in me and made me want to fight for equality. My mom and dad said, Well, you can be a lawyer.



How was the LSAT for you? It was actually really fun. I did the whole program online and I really enjoyed it. I like standardized tests quite a bit. And the LSAT is really fun because its almost like a puzzle or a mind game. It was really cool. When I took it, its like they were asking me to solve riddles. I didnt really see it as a test, per se, but more like a game. It was awesome.



Do you get weird looks when you show up in college classes, or to take the LSAT, for example? Thats exactly what you would think. And everywhere I go I feel like thats exactly how everybody should look at me. But people must think Im older than I am because they dont. The only time I got kind of weird looks is when I was 13 and went to Tarrant County College, because I guess it was really obvious Im a kid. But when I go to Texas Womans University, nobody knows I am so young. When I go to tour SMU or other schools, nobody ever looks at me like that. And I always expect people to say, Wait a second, how old are you? And no one ever asks that.



How do you think your professors and classmates at SMU will react when you show up next fall? I recently went to a few law school events. When people found out I was 16 they were really surprised, obviously. Then they asked me how I got here. Every single time someone figures out my age, it changes the dynamic a bit. Its not bad, but its new attention. But I like the attention. Everybody is always surprised at my age and they ask me a few questions. Then its over. Theyre my friends and we work together. But its not like I get treated differently, in a negative way, like, Oh, youre a kid. Im not listening to you.



Any other ideas of what you want to use your law degree for? Its the educational policy, like we talked about. Im also really interested in intellectual property. It hits so many things. Thats another thing Im looking into. It sounds cool.



What are you most looking forward to about law school? Probably the classes. I love learning and Im really excited to learn more about the law and our society.
(Bloomberg) -- The speed at which a video of the New Zealand mosque shooting spread across social media platforms has demonstrated yet again that tech companies such as Facebook Inc. are still struggling to control content, especially from popular services that offer live streaming of events.

While platforms including Twitter Inc. and YouTube said they moved fast to scrub any content related to the incident from their sites, people reported it was still widely available hours after being first uploaded to the alleged shooters Facebook account. The first-person view of the killings in Christchurch was easily accessible during and after the attack -- as was the suspects hate-filled manifesto. Footage was still up on Googles YouTube almost 12 hours later.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the difficulty of policing content from the 2.7 billion users that power Facebooks wildly profitable advertising engine. The companys business model depends on showing people posts theyre most apt to have an emotional reaction to, which often has the side effect of amplifying fake news and extremism.

Indeed, the livestream of the murders highlights how technology helped the alleged shooter connect with like-minded people online. Chat sites have acted as sounding boards for anti-immigrant ideas. The alleged shooter is said to have posted on Twitter and controversial message boards such as 8chan about his anti-immigrant ideas, including publishing a 74-page manifesto. Even after the major tech companies acted to take down the video, commenters continued to praise the murders online.

When Zuckerberg introduced Facebooks live streaming feature in 2016, the service was dominated by harmless videos including baby bald eagles and a guy getting a haircut. It didnt take long, though, before people were streaming police shootings, murders and suicides. The company has deployed technology and human monitors to help find and remove offensive or threatening content. Last year Facebook said it was working on chips designed to more efficiently analyze and filter live video content.

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"Once content has been determined to be illegal, extremist or a violation of their terms of service, there is absolutely no reason why, within a relatively short period of time, this content cant be eliminated automatically at the point of upload," said Hany Farid, senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project and a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "Weve had the technology to do this for years."

Some experts warn theres really no way to keep the dark side of human behavior off social media platforms.

Zuckerberg refused to confront the underlying problem of Facebook Live, which is that there is simply no responsible way to moderate a true live streaming service, said Mary Anne Franks, professor of law at the University of Miami. Facebook has known from the beginning that its live streaming service had the potential to encourage and amplify the worst of humanity, and it must confront the fact that it has blood on its hands.

Facebook has 15,000 employees and contractors sifting through posts to take down offensive content. Zuckerberg has said artificial intelligence algorithms, which the company already uses to identify nudity and terrorist content, will eventually handle most of this sorting. But at the moment, even the most sophisticated AI software struggles in categories where context matters.

Hate speech is one of those areas, Monika Bickert, Facebooks head of global policy management, said in a June 2018 interview.

In the U.K., Home Secretary Sajid Javid said in a tweet that YouTube and others needed to do more to stop violent extremism being available.

Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooters Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video, Facebook said on its Twitter account. Were also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as were aware.

A spokesperson for YouTube said in a statement that shocking, violent and graphic content has no place on our platforms, and is removed as soon as we become aware of it.

--With assistance from Jeremy Kahn.

To contact the reporters on this story: Giles Turner in London at gturner35@bloomberg.net;Molly Schuetz in New York at mschuetz9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Robin Ajello

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.
(Bloomberg) -- Social media platforms including Facebook Inc. are facing harsher scrutiny after a shooter accused of killing 49 people in two mosques in New Zealand live-streamed the murders over the internet.

While platforms including Twitter and YouTube said they moved fast to remove the content, users reported it was still widely available hours after being first uploaded to the alleged shooters Facebook account. The video, which shows a first-person view of the killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, was readily accessible during and after the attack  as was the suspects hate-filled manifesto.

Facebook, YouTube and other social-media platforms are struggling to scrub offensive content from sites that generate billions of dollars in revenue from advertisers. In the U.S., those sites also have been criticized for spreading political misinformation, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg being called before Congress.

In August, a shooting at a Madden 19 video-game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida, was captured on live video. Earlier last year, YouTube star Logan Paul posted a clip of a body hanging from a tree in Japan, prompting the Google-owned video portal to remove his channels from a preferred advertising program.

Just before the alleged gunman opened fire, he urged viewers to subscribe to the popular YouTube channel PewDiePie, which itself has been criticized for posting offensive footage in the past. In response, YouTube said its working vigilantly to remove any violent footage.

Our hearts are broken over todays terrible tragedy in New Zealand, YouTube, which is operated by Google, said in a Twitter posting. It said it deleted the video thousands of times but it was still able to be found.

Reddit Inc banned two so-called subreddits which allow people to share links to graphic videos of executions and human injuries, BuzzFeed reported, citing a company spokesperson.

Facebook acted swiftly to contain the fallout.

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Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the live-stream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooters Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video, Facebook said on its Twitter account. Were also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as were aware.

Mia Garlick, of Facebook in New Zealand, said: We will continue working directly with New Zealand Police as their response and investigation continues.

Sky Network Television, New Zealands biggest satellite television provider, removed Sky News Australia from its platform, citing concerns about the broadcasting of distressing footage from the attacker.

This week, negative sentiment toward Facebook rose to the highest level in almost eight months on rival social network Twitter, as the company raced to fix a worldwide outage and faced reports of a grand jury investigation.

Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, who uses the moniker PewDiePie, said on Twitter that he was absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.

(Updates with Reddit ban in seventh paragraph.)

--With assistance from Tracy Withers.

To contact the reporters on this story: Reed Stevenson in Tokyo at rstevenson15@bloomberg.net;Michael Tighe in Hong Kong at mtighe4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brian Bremner at bbremner@bloomberg.net, John McCluskey

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.
* New law comes as U.S., China try to end trade war

* Law is aimed at easing concerns of foreign firms

* Some doubt enforceability of the law's provisions

* Premier Li: Opening up measures 'will be honoured'

* Separating China, U.S. economies 'impossible' - Li (Recasts, adds comments from Premier Li Keqiang)

By Ryan Woo and Kevin Yao

BEIJING, March 15 (Reuters) - Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, addressing scepticism over enforcement of a new foreign investment law, pledged on Friday that the government will follow through and do what the legislation promised in protecting foreign firms.

Shortly before Li spoke at his annual news conference, China's parliament approved the law that aims to create a transparent environment for foreign companies as China and the United States work to end a trade war.

The law, to replace existing regulations for joint ventures and wholly foreign-owned enterprises, is designed to ease concerns among foreign investors about the difficulties they face operating in the world's second-largest economy.

Fast-tracked for approval at this month's annual session of parliament, the law comes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020.

It will ban forced technology transfer and illegal government "interference" in foreign business practices, according to the latest draft. The full text has not yet officially been released.

While previous drafts stipulated criminal punishment for officials who violated the law, a last minute revision detailed by state media this week has strengthened those clauses.

The changes were widely seen within the U.S. business community as an effort, in part, by Beijing to address on paper some complaints underlying the bitter U.S.-China trade dispute.

BASIC POLICY

Li, asked about scepticism over the law, said there was no reason for China not to want to open up to the world, as it was the country's basic policy.

"If opening up measures are being spoken of, then of course they will be honoured," he said.

The new law is about "standardising government actions" and making sure officials act lawfully, and further measures will be coming to protect foreign investors, Li said.

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Washington and Beijing have been locked in a tit-for-tat tariff battle as U.S. officials press China for an end to practices and policies they argue have given Chinese firms unfair advantages. These include subsidising of industry, limits on access for foreign companies and alleged theft of intellectual property.

Jacob Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council in Beijing, said his group was pleased with the last-minute changes to further protect foreign firms' commercial information.

"The addition of language imposing criminal penalties for sharing sensitive foreign company information adopts a much tougher deterrent against counterfeiting and IP theft and will offer new avenues for the enforcement of IP protection," he said.

However, Parker added that "while the language on criminal liability is positive, it will be difficult to enforce."

Some law experts and business consultants have expressed scepticism about how effective the law will be in protecting foreign firms from compelled technology transfers, given a lack of rule of law in China.

ADDITIONS LARGELY COSMETIC?

They maintain that the additions to the law are largely cosmetic because Chinese courts are tightly controlled by the ruling Communist Party.

"What prosecutor is going to bring a case against a Communist Party official?" one person in the U.S. business community asked.

There are also concerns that broad national security reviews could still leave foreign companies subject to overreaching regulators.

The American Chamber of Commerce in China, in a statement earlier this week, said that it in principle welcomed and appreciates "this legislative effort to improve the foreign investment climate".

"We are concerned, however, that such an important and potentially far-reaching piece of legislation will be enacted without extensive consultation and input from industry stakeholders," it said.

The chamber said in February that a majority of its members favoured the United States retaining tariffs on Chinese goods while Washington and Beijing try to hammer out a deal to end the long trade war.

It noted then that 19 percent of its companies were adjusting supply chains or seeking to source components and assembly outside of China as a result of tariffs.

Li said he believed Beijing and Washington could resolve and control their differences.

"To want to artificially separate these two economies is unrealistic and impossible," Li said. (Reporting by Ryan Woo and Kevin Yao; Additional reporting by Michael Martina and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Richard Borsuk)
The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. is seriously contemplating a Temporary Restraining Order to bar the Quezon City government from implementing its proposed gaming regulatory ordinance. Pagcor maintains that not taking this next important step is tantamount to the dereliction of its duties as gaming regulator. By virtue of Presidential Decree 1869 and Republic Act 9487, Pagcor is the national government agency that has been mandated to regulate all games of chance in the country. We also would like to reiterate that with regard to regulation of gaming in local government units, PD Number 771 revokes the authority of LGUs to issue license permit or any form of franchise to operate, maintain and establish forms of gambling, the state firm said in a statement Friday. In a Memorandum from the Office of the President dated April 17, 1996, then-Executive Secretary Ruben Torres directed all local government units and other concerned agencies that only the national government has the power to issue licenses or permits for the operation of gambling since the power of the local government units to regulate gambling through the grant of franchise, license or permit was withdrawn by PD 771 as early as 1975.Relative to abuses of local government in making ordinances beyond their authority, Department of Justice Opinion No. 087, s. 2012, stated that the Department of the Interior and Local Government has been swamped with problems arising from the implementation of ordinances which contain provisions that clearly violate existing national laws One of the remedies suggested by the DOJ opinion is the declaration of nullity of the ordinance and part of such proceeding is the issuance of a TRO while the case is pending in court, Pagcor said. Hence, given the provisions of the law, it is clear that Quezon Citys proposed gaming regulatory ordinance is a violation of national law, it added. With the filing of TRO, we are not only upholding the rule of law, but also ensuring that peoples welfare are protected and LGUs will not be given a chance to abuse their authority, Pagcor said.
The Goldman Sachs Group GS is undergoing annual staff restructuring process and is doing layoffs in its sales and trading division. Per a Business Insider report, employees dealing with clients trading stocks, bonds and currencies are being terminated.

After conducting a performance evaluation of all its employees and overall business, the company decided upon the percentage of people it would lay off. Further, new CEO David Solomon is undertaking such moves with a view to control costs and tap on areas that could generate higher profits.

In early March, Goldman trimmed the commodities business by firing 10 employees, after a similar review on the arm revealed that it was not generating enough returns to justify the amount of capital being invested.

Further, in a filing with the New York state labor department, Goldman announced that it cut 65 positions in its investment banking arm.

Solomon is on track to boost revenues across the company by driving performance of its segments. At its Investment Banking wing, the company plans to expand its product offerings, grow client footprint and deepen relation with existing customers.

Further, in the Investment Management unit, performance growth is expected to be achieved by increasing coverage of ultra-high net worth clients and expansion across region. Also, at Investing & Lending, Goldman plans to build a consumer business over time by solving customer pain points and utilizing technology to deliver at scale.

While the bank is on track to remodel its business into a more profitable organization, it continues to be face investigations over its role in helping to raise funds for the 1Malaysia Development Bhd and other legal cases, which are likely to keep costs elevated.

Shares of the company have lost around 13% in the past six months compared with the 11.1% decline of the industry.

Goldman currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Stocks to Consider

SLM Corporation SLM has witnessed 2.5% upward estimate revisions over the past 60 days. Moreover, the stock has appreciated 23.7% in the past three months. It currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Popular, Inc. BPOP has witnessed 2.6% upward estimate revisions for the past 30 days. Additionally, the companys shares have rallied 13% in the past three months. It holds a Zacks Rank of 2, at present.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for BankFinancial Corporation BFIN has been revised 2.1% upward over the past 30 days. Also, the companys shares have gained 3.1% in the past three months. It carries a Zacks Rank of 2, currently.

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Oil tanks are seen at the gas field of Siba in Basra , Iraq April 25, 2018. REUTERS/Essam Al-Sudani/Files

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq has cut its oil exports average to 3.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in compliance with an ongoing production curb agreement, its oil minister said on Thursday.

Thamer Ghadhban told reporters that an OPEC meeting in Vienna in April would assess member states' compliance with agreed production cuts and whether to extend the curbs until the end of the year.

Iraq exported on average around 3.6 million bpd in January-February, and 3.7 million in December.

Iraq is committed to the deal and working to stabilise markets, and is producing slightly more than 4.5 million bpd, below its full capacity of nearly 5 million, Ghadhban said.

"We do not want severe volatility in prices because this affects producers and consumers," he added.

(Reporting by Ahmed Rasheed; Writing by John Davison; Editing by Mark Potter)
READ: 349 officials aiding Reds? Interior draws up

watchlist

READ: Troops launch

drive against Sulu bandits
The Kroger Co, Inc. KR in collaboration with Nuro will launch its driverless grocery delivery pilot program in Houston, following the success of its initial pilot program in Arizona. This move is in sync with the companys efforts to offer more convenient delivery options to its customers. This service will be available everyday via two Kroger stores located in South Post Oak Road and Buffalo Speedway to customers residing in four zip code areas  77401, 77096, 77005 and 77025.



Also, this delivery option comes with a flat fee of $5.95, with no restriction on minimum order. Krogers customers can shop from either Kroger.com or the Kroger app to avail this service. Once the order is placed, goods will be delivered the same day or next day, per the customers convenience based on slot availability.



Customers will be notified when the vehicle arrives at their doorsteps, after which they will have to provide a code to unlock the vehicle and receive their goods. Similar to its pilot program in Arizona, Kroger will start delivering grocery via Nuros fleet of autonomous Toyota Priuses and then shift to the latters fully autonomous, unmanned R1 vehicles.



Further, Kroger is on track with recruitment in Houston to support this program. Management plans to expand to another market, probably California, by the first half of this year, according to media reports.



In August 2018, Kroger had undertaken this initiative in Scottsdale, AZ, where it used Nuros self-driving vehicles to offer grocery delivery services to customers residing in one zip code. As part of the program, both the companies successfully concluded thousands of deliveries in Scottsdale. Encouraged by this, Kroger is expanding its driverless delivery services to multiple cities. Per sources, this move will enable the company to analyze how this new technology fares across several markets and the need to refine the same.



In the wake of the grocery delivery war, Krogers rivals  Walmart WMT and Amazon AMZN  are ramping up in this space. Early this year, Walmart partnered with autonomous delivery startup, Udelv to launch a pilot program in Arizona. Also, Walmart made yet another move to enhance grocery delivery services by collaborating with Point Pickup, Skipcart, AxleHire and Roadie. Per media reports, Amazon has aced this game, which is apparent from the companys recent launch of autonomous delivery robot, Scout that to Washingtons Snohomish County.



Kroger, which shares space with Target TGT has revamped its strategies and now looks forward to combat stiff competition with the help of such innovative delivery options. Prior to this, the company inked a deal with British online grocery delivery company, Ocado that reinforces its position in the online ordering, automated fulfillment and home delivery spaces. Also, the company had earlier entered into a partnership with Walgreens to sell around 2,300 products at 13 Walgreens locations via Kroger Express, a store-in-a-store concept.



Moreover, this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company is looking into other growth prospects to generate incremental revenues. In this regard, Kroger has undertaken strategies that include store-base expansion, and introduction of items, digital coupons, and the order online, pick up in store initiative. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



In spite of these endeavors, shares of Kroger have plunged roughly 14.4%, against the industry's growth of 7.3% in the past three months. The stock came under pressure following the companys fourth-quarter fiscal 2018 results, wherein the bottom line not only missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate but also declined year over year. Although total sales topped the consensus mark, it dropped from the year-ago quarters figure. Management also provided muted earnings view for fiscal 2019. (Read: Kroger's Q4 Earnings Miss Estimates, FY19 View Soft)

Story continues





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MIT SEC.jpg





On March 910, 2019, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted a two-day event, the MIT Bitcoin Expo 2019. Put together by the student-organized MIT Bitcoin Club, the conference welcomed more than just Bitcoin voices from every corner of the industry. One of those voices was that of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce.

Peirce sat down with Gary Gensler, ex-chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and senior advisor to the director of the MIT Media Lab, to discuss the progress of the SECs efforts to regulate the cryptocurrency industry. Notably, Gensler and Peirce launched into a discussion on what regulators can do better to protect investors from fraud and malicious actors.

Before the debate began, both Gensler and Peirce expressed their appreciation for the emerging technology. Its a new way to have tamper resistant data amongst the consensus of multiple parties, Gensler said. My research is mostly around the business of blockchain technology and  trying to find where are the real use cases where traditional data structures dont work as well.

Peirce expressed her own support for the space in relation to the SECs ongoing efforts to properly regulate it. We have rules on the books that we have to enforce, but on the other hand, we dont want to stop people from doing things that are going to make society a better place to live, that are going to make peoples lives easier, and enable people to interact in ways that they have not been able to in the past.

Later in the presentation, the two veteran regulators went on to discuss what the government can do to protect investors by possibly regulatinged cryptocurrency exchanges.

Gensler believes that exchanges are the gateway to get good public policy, particularly around AML laws, but also around investor protection. He continued, In essence, that theres not a manipulated market with frontrunning and manipulation with the order books and the like.

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The discourse was ongoing, and the most significant takeaway was that regulators like Peirce and the SEC acknowledge that, again, perhaps the current system of rules dont apply perfectly. How could securities-based regulations be placed on all cryptocurrencies, even those that are officially defined as not securities?

The SEC, according to Peirce, is working on what may be an alternative set of rules for exchanges that do not violate the rules of listing unregistered securities. Bitcoin, which is not a security, falls neatly into this alternative rule set. And, though it is currently unclear what the exact precedents will be, Peirces thoughts around the subject at MITs latest Bitcoin Expo were nothing short of encouraging for Bitcoins regulatory future.

People regulate each other in their interactions with one another, and thats sort of the whole purpose of the Bitcoin idea  that it would be this community that would be able to regulate itself. So as problems arise, people in the community are thinking about how to deal with those problems.

I think these markets could regulate themselves if we lived in a world that allowed that, Peirce added.

Peirce has made similar remarks about the SECs awareness of the Bitcoin communitys tendency to self-regulate in the past.

Gensler and Peirce also discussed the topic of initial coin offerings (ICOs) and what is being done to provide clarity to people participating in the once-booming phase. Peirce went on to explain that the SEC has already provided some clarity for investors who want to create a company, raise funds from investors and then distribute returns based on the companys performance. For these individuals, the existing securities rules will apply to their tokens.

There are, however, the countless number of tokens that claim to be used as a utility on the network they belong to, but originate through an ICO in which they accept funds from investors in exchange for these tokens. There are still a plethora of unanswered questions around these.

Thats where we need to do a better job, Peirce said, in providing guidance in how does it change from one thing to another. Eventually, she said, the SEC wants to remove the big gray cloud hanging over these projects heads.

Overall, the uplifting theme of the entire discussion could be summarized by an exchange between Peirce and a member of the audience, addressing the current system that discourages equal opportunity in retail participation.

The audience member asked, It may be hubristic, but many of us are not independently wealthy and we still believe we can make good investment decisions, and right now were excluded from participating. How can we move the accredited investor laws away from wealth thresholds and toward something thats far more reasonable and accessible to mainstream investors?

Our accredited investors rules  I personally think those rules are not consistent with what this country is about, Peirce admitted, which is about people taking opportunities, taking their talents and intelligence and applying it to make their lives better. Weve put this artificial barrier in place so that people cant do that.

As far as whether or not these opinions will translate into legislature, time will tell. The entire MIT Bitcoin Expo 2019 livestream recording can be viewed here.

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.
Despite experiencing drought in the past, Filipinos show varying levels of concern about drought, according to Harvard Humanitarian Initiative DisasterNet Philippines recent study.

READ: El Nino threatens 42 provinces; La Mesa at

low
Investing.com - Oil prices were near flat on Friday in Asia after rising to near four-month highs the previous day.

U.S. Crude Oil WTI Futures was up 0.01% at $58.63 by 10:37 PM ET (02:37 GMT). International Brent Oil Futures edged up 0.1% to $67.27.

Traders attention now turns to the International Energy Agency (IEA) for its monthly publication due later today, with analysts expecting it to underline concerns on oil demand.

Meanwhile, markets are also closely monitoring the latest development on the Sino-U.S. trade front. U.S. President Donald Trump said during a St. Patricks Day reception on Thursday that the U.S. will probably know "in the next three or four weeks" whether a trade deal with China is possible.

If that one gets done, it will be something that people will be talking about for a long time, Trump said, noting that China has been very responsible."

Official data showed this week that crude oil use in China, the world's biggest oil importer, rose 6.1% in the first two months of 2019 compared with a year earlier.

Oil prices rose to four-month highs on Thursday, pushed up by ongoing supply cuts led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and as data showed U.S. output slowed last week, boosting optimism that a global surplus is shrinking.

In its closely watched monthly oil-market report, the OPEC said its crude output had fallen by 221,000 barrels per day (bpd) in February from January, to average 30.55 million bpd.

The bulk of OPECs cuts in February came from Venezuela, which is facing an economic and political crisis and is currently subject to U.S. oil sanctions.

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(Bloomberg) -- Qualcomm Inc. won the first U.S. jury trial in its global dispute with Apple Inc. over how much the iPhone maker should pay for using the chipmakers patented technology.

A federal jury in San Diego on Friday awarded Qualcomm about $31.6 million in damages on its patent infringement claims. Qualcomm jumped as much as 3.5 percent before finishing up 2.2 percent at the close in New York trading.

The outcome boosts Qualcomms contention that its technology provides significant value to smartphones beyond the basic ability to connect to a telecommunications network. Still, its one small part of a global battle between the companies that is headed for a bigger test next month. Billions of dollars are at stake in that trial, which goes to the heart of the licensing dispute between the tech giants.

Qualcomms ongoing campaign of patent infringement claims is nothing more than an attempt to distract from the larger issues they face with investigations into their business practices in U.S. federal court, and around the world, Josh Rosenstock, a spokesman for Apple, said in a statement. While we are disappointed with the outcome, we thank the jury for their service in this case."

Read more: Apple Concedes That Qualcomm Was the Only 4G-Ready Chip Source

The disputed patents pertain to technology for graphics processing and battery power conservation, which the San Diego-based company says improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of smartphones. The infringement verdict covers iPhone 7, 8, and X -- not the latest models. Qualcomm can now ask the judge for an order to halt further infringement of its patents by Apple. U.S. courts have been unwilling to order outright sales bans and favor financial remedies.

Todays unanimous jury verdict is the latest victory in our worldwide patent litigation directed at holding Apple accountable for using our valuable technologies without paying for them, Don Rosenberg, Qualcomms general counsel, said in a statement. The technologies invented by Qualcomm and others are what made it possible for Apple to enter the market and become so successful so quickly.

Story continues

While the damages awarded Friday arent significant to either company, from Qualcomms perspective, valuing just three of its more than 10,000 patents at $1.41 per phone shows the overall worth of its inventions. About 1.4 billion smartphones were sold last year, according to IDC.

Read more: Judges Conundrum: Is Qualcomm a Monopolist, or Merely a Bully?

In the broader licensing fight, Qualcomm has lost billions of dollars in revenue after Apple, through its Asian manufacturers, stopped paying patent royalties in 2017. The companies had a falling out in 2016 when Qualcomm -- which had been the exclusive supplier of iPhone chipsets for five years -- halted quarterly royalty rebates it had been paying Apple. The chipmaker has said it ended the rebates because Apple instigated antitrust investigations of Qualcomm and lied to regulators.

Apple has switched to using Intel Inc. chips in its phones. The Cupertino, California-based company has accused Qualcomm of using its control over so-called standard essential patents, which covers technology uniformly adopted by telecommunications providers and equipment makers, to extract excessive royalties for the entire patent portfolio, including non-essential patents, that it licenses to smartphone makers.

In yet another dispute, the Federal Trade Commission accused Qualcomm of monopolist business practices, the initial volley in a web of litigation that now spans 3 continents. A judge in San Jose has yet to rule on the antitrust allegations following a 10-day non-jury trial in January.

The case is Qualcomm Inc. v. Apple Inc., 17-cv-01375, U.S. District Court, Southern District of California (San Diego).

(Updates with comment from Apple in fifth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Mark Gurman and Ian King.

To contact the reporters on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net, ;Bill Callahan in San Diego at callahan@san.rr.comTo contact the editors responsible for this story:Elizabeth Wollman at ewollman@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Samuel Estreicher and Holly H. Weiss



The Supreme Court and U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court have each recently decided cases involving arbitration. The Supreme Court, in New Prime v. Oliveira, ruled on an exception to arbitrability under 1 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), 9 U.S.C. 1, and the D.C. Circuit, in Diag Human v. Czech Republic, ruled on the binding nature of foreign arbitral awards.





New Prime





In New Prime v. Oliveira, 586 U.S. ___ (2019), the Supreme Court, in an 8-0 decision (Justice Kavanaugh did not participate in the decision), expanded the scope of an exemption under the FAA that applies to certain transportation workers. The case concerned Dominic Oliveira, a truck driver, who worked as an independent contractor for New Prime. When he began working for New Prime, Oliveira signed an agreement that included an arbitration clause. After New Prime made deductions to Oliveiras pay, Oliveira brought a class action law suit against New Prime that alleged Fair Labor Standards Act violations and state law claims. At the district court, New Prime moved to compel arbitration. Under 2 of the FAA, an agreement to arbitrate is valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the revocation of any contract. 9 U.S.C. 2. Oliveira responded that the court lacked authority to compel arbitration because of 1 of the FAA, which provides an exception to the enforceability of arbitration provisions in disputes involving interstate transportation workers. New Prime then argued that the applicability of 1 was a question for the arbitrator, not the court. The district court denied New Primes motion to compel arbitration, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed.



On appeal, the Supreme Court took up two issues: (1) whether a dispute over the applicability of the FAAs 1 exemption must be resolved in arbitration pursuant to a valid clause delegating the question of arbitrability to the arbitrator; and (2) whether the FAAs 1 exemption, which applies only to contracts of employment involving transportation workers, applies to agreements establishing an independent contractor relationship. In regard to the first question, the court held that a court should decide for itself whether 1s contracts of employment exclusion applies before ordering arbitration even if the agreement contains a valid delegation clause. Delegation clauses are merely a specialized type of arbitration agreement and are therefore subject to 1s exception. Thus, it is for the court to determine whether 1 applies.



Turning to the second question, the court looked to the historical meaning of contracts for employment. Based on dictionary definitions of the word employment from around the time that Congress passed the FAA in 1925 and the statutes use of workers in the same context, the court concluded that employment should be construed as a synonym for work. Just as the term employment, as Congress intended it, does not distinguish between an employer-employee relationship and an independent contractor-purchaser of services relationship, the term worker, in the context of 1, also does not distinguish between an employer-employee relationship and an independent contractor-purchaser of services relationship. Therefore, to give proper meaning to 1, the court determined that the exception applies to both employees and independent contractors working in transportation.



The holding in New Prime stands out in the courts recent jurisprudence concerning arbitration. Until now, the courts decisions had worked to strengthen the FAAs arbitration regime. New Prime, however, in expanding 1s exception to arbitration, serves as a modest counterpoint.





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Diag Human S.E.





The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently held that an arbitral award in favor of a Liechtenstein-based company, Diag Human, and against the Czech Republic, was not binding under the New York Convention because an arbitration review panel, authorized under Czech law for arbitrations held in that country, issued a Resolution discontinuing the proceedings without first confirming the underlying award. Diag Human S.E. v. Czech RepublicMinistry of Health, 907 F.3d 606 (D.C. Cir. 2018)



Diag Human runs a blood plasma business and initiated arbitration in the 1990s with the Czech Republic after the Czech Republic allegedly interfered with its business. The initial arbitration panel found that the Czech Republic had wrongfully interfered and that Diag Human was entitled to damages. The panel, however, left the specific amount of damages for later proceedings. In 2002, another panel awarded partial damages of approximately $10 million, an amount representing damages that neither party disputed. Pursuant to the arbitration agreement that the parties had entered into, the parties were entitled to seek a review of arbitral awards. A review panel upheld the award for partial damages. Four years after the partial award, another arbitral panel awarded $400 million for the full extent of damages plus interest. Again, the parties submitted the award to a review panel. This time, the review panel issued a Resolution that discontinued the arbitration. However, the panel did not explicitly affirm the $400 million award.



Diag Human sought to enforce the arbitral award in the U.S. court system and filed suit under the New York Convention in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The district court declined to enforce the $400 million award, finding that it was not binding on the parties. The district court reasoned that under the New York Convention, U.S. courts will generally enforce foreign arbitral awards; however, under the Convention, a court will not recognize an arbitral award if it has not yet become binding on the parties. New York Convention Art. V(1)(e). Under the terms of the arbitration agreement, an appeal of an arbitral award to a review panel prevents the award from becoming binding. Because the appeal of the $400 million award was proper, that award was not binding unless the review panel confirmed the award, which it failed to do.



The D.C. Circuit affirmed, but with different reasoning. The appeals court looked to the language of the Resolution, which noted jurisdictional problems with the $400 million award. The award, according to the review panel, was barred by res judicata because it was based on the same claim as the 2002 award. The D.C. Circuit interpreted the review panels Resolution to conclude that the 2002 award never specified that it was only in regard to a portion of the claims or a portion of the defendants. Thus, the 2002 award was not partial, but was the complete award.



The D.C. Circuit also looked to Czech arbitral law, which identifies two possible outcomes from an arbitral proceeding: an award (which is judicially enforceable and imposes a legal obligation) or a resolution (which ends the proceedings). Because the review panel chose to issue a resolution, and not an award, the panel did not affirm the $400 million award but instead closed the proceedings. The D.C. Circuit therefore held that the $400 million award was not enforceable and subsequently denied a request from Diag Human for a rehearing en banc. The decision illustrates the perils of enforcing foreign arbitral awards in other countries.



Samuel Estreicher is the Dwight D. Opperman Professor and Director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University School of Law. Holly H. Weiss is a partner at Schulte Roth & Zabel.
By Susan Heavey and Nathan Layne WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska sued the United States on Friday, alleging that it had overstepped its legal bounds in imposing sanctions on him and made him the "latest victim" in the U.S. probe into Moscow's alleged election interference. In what legal experts called a long shot attempt, Deripaska asked a federal court in Washington to block the U.S. Treasury Department from using the "devastating power" of such sanctions, which he claims were arbitrarily applied to him last April and violated his right to due process under the U.S. Constitution. Deripaska, his lawsuit says, has been unfairly swept up in a "general hysteria" based on unfounded allegations about him spread by members of U.S. Congress and others, set against the backdrop of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. A Treasury spokesman declined to comment on a litigation matter and referred Reuters to the Justice Department, which declined to comment. Washington dropped the sanctions on Deripaska's two main companies, Rusal, the world's largest aluminum producer outside China, and its parent En+ Group, in January after an intense lobbying campaign in which the oligarch agreed to relinquish control over his corporate empire. But Deripaska himself remains blacklisted. Deripaska, who secured a spot among Russia's elite group of oligarchs after prevailing in the "aluminum wars" of the 1990s, said the sanctions rendered him a pariah, shunned by business partners and banks, and had erased four-fifths of his net worth. "The effect of these unlawful actions has been the wholesale devastation of Deripaska's wealth, reputation, and economic livelihood," his attorney, Erich Ferrari, wrote in the 28-page lawsuit submitted to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. When Deripaska was hit with sanctions in April, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) alleged that he and other rich and influential Russian oligarchs were profiting off their ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and from the state's "malign activity" around the world. The lawsuit questions whether Treasury can really back up those claims. It asks the court to order OFAC to hand over evidence and other records and remove Deripaska from the sanctions list. Doug Jacobson, a trade lawyer in Washington, said that while the court may agree to order OFAC to hand over some records it would likely defer to the agency on the sanctions themselves. "He's asking the judge to basically look at the executive order and make determination independent of OFAC and I think that's a very big ask," Jacobson said. Michael Dobson, a former senior official at OFAC who worked on Russia sanctions before leaving the agency in late 2018, called Deripaska's lawsuit an "annoyance claim" that was unlikely to get traction given the broad deference given to OFAC by the courts. "Ultimately I don't really think this case is going to go far," said Dobson, now at the Morrison & Foerster law firm. Deripaska said that he had been unfairly criticized by members of Congress, including by Senator Robert Menendez, who had called for holding off on the easing of sanctions on Rusal and En+ to see if the Mueller probe turned up anything on Deripaska. Deripaska has come under scrutiny by Mueller but has not been charged or accused of any wrongdoing in that probe. He is of interest to Mueller because of his ties to the Kremlin and his decade-long relationship with Paul Manafort, the one-time campaign chairman for U.S. President Donald Trump, who this month was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison in two criminal cases brought by Mueller's team. Trump has repeatedly called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt" and denies any collusion with Russia. Russia denies interfering in the 2016 presidential election. "After all of that time spent investigating Russia's alleged activities, it is not surprising that OFAC had to rely on rumor and innuendo to designate Deripaska," the lawsuit says. "It appears to be the case that there is simply no evidence Deripaska is involved in the Russian Government's activities." (Reporting by Susan Heavey and Nathan Layne, Additional reporting by Meredith Mazzilli and Karen Freifeld in New York, Arshad Mohammed and Andy Sullivan in Washington and Anastasia Lyrchikova in Moscow, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
The Senate voted 59-41 in opposition of President Donald Trumps national emergency declaration for a wall on the southern U.S. border Thursday, with 12 Republicans crossing the aisle to pass the measure.

Trump has vowed to veto the resolution, ensuring he gets the funds he needs to fulfill a long-held campaign promise. Still, the vote shows Congress standing against the presidents decision to override the bodys constitutional power of the purse.

The Republicans that sided with Democrats include Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Mike Lee of Utah, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rob Portman of Ohio, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, NBC News reports.

While not all oppose Trumps border wall, many Republicans were wary of the precedent Trumps national emergency would set. Trump declared the emergency in February after failing to receive the full $5.7 billion he desired for border wall fundingeven after a 35-day government shutdownallowing him to circumvent Congress to reallocate funds.

Thursdays decision is a vote for the constitution and for the balance of powers that is at its core, said Romney, according to NBC. For the executive branch to override a law passed by Congress would make it the ultimate power rather than a balancing power.

Prior to the vote, Trump tweeted in the early hours of Thursday that he is prepared to veto, if necessary, adding that the Southern Border is a National Security and Humanitarian Nightmare, but it can be easily fixed!

After the Senates decision was announced, Trump restated his position, tweeting VETO! The veto would be the presidents first since taking office in 2017. Its unlikely the Senate would have the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto.
By Geoffrey Smith

Investing.com -- Europes stock markets look set to close the week on a positive note, opening Friday broadly higher after Chinese media reports encouraged hopes of an early end to the countrys trade war with the U.S.

The two sides had contradicted each others spin overnight: Chinese reports had claimed substantial progress in talks with the U.S., according to Reuters. But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that a summit between the two countries presidents would not take place before April at the earliest, pointing to the size of remaining obstacles to a deal.

Europe seems to have chosen to give the Chinese version more weight.

At 04:00 AM ET (0900 GMT), the benchmark Euro Stoxx 600 was up 0.40 points, or 0.1% at 378.92  a rise of over 2.1% this week. Germanys Dax was up 0.2%, while the U.K. FTSE 100 was up 0.4%. Among the leaders are oil and gas stocks, with crude prices hovering close to 2019 highs after the International Energy Agency forecast the oil market could be in deficit in the second quarter.

The positive tone is also partly due to continued optimism that the most destructive Brexit scenarios can be avoided, even though the week's events in London appear to have prolonged uncertainty over the final outcome.

Volkswagen (DE:VOWG_p) shares were down 0.6% after the company disclosed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission had charged its former CEO Martin Winterkorn with securities fraud  the first charges to be brought against Winterkorn personally since the Dieselgate crisis exploded in 2015. The charges allege that VW knew about its problem with excessive emissions while issuing billions of dollars in bonds between 2014 and 2015.

Also in Germany, payments company Wirecard (DE:WDIG)is down 7.2% after reports suggesting that Singaporean authorities have widened their investigations into possible fraudulent accounting to the companys Indian unit. The company said Thursday it had exonerated an employee at the heart of the investigation, although he remains suspended pending the completion of an external probe by a local law firm.

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Elsewhere, Swiss banking giant UBS Group (SIX:UBSG) fell to the bottom of the local Swiss market after putting aside nearly $400 million in respect of the 4.5 billion euro fine it received last month in France for helping clients to avoid tax. The bank is appealing the ruling and says it would release the provision if its appeal is successful.

And finally  later Friday there will be the draw for the quarter-finals of the UEFA Champions League. That should get a reaction from the stocks of Juventus (MI:JUVE)and Ajax (AS:AJAX).

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WATER WOES. The lines gathering water from all sources, including a deep well (upper photo) at Barangay Old Capitol in Quezon City are thickening, while residents in Barangka in the capital city keep their sense of humor over the shared weakening flow of potable water (top photo) for their daily needs. Manny Palmero with AFP

CROSS BORDER PIPE. House Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo vows to help ease the water crisis in the East Zone of the metropolis being serviced by Manila Water, after leading the opening of the cross border pipe at the corner of West Avenue and Bulacan Street in Quezon City. The pipe is the fastest way to transfer water from West Zone to the East Zone.

READ: Manicad: Time to take radical steps to solve El Nino

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By William James and Guy Faulconbridge

LONDON (Reuters) - Brexit could be reversed if lawmakers reject the government's exit deal, British foreign minister Jeremy Hunt said on Sunday after two major eurosceptic factions in parliament warned that Prime Minister Theresa May was facing a heavy defeat.

Just 19 days before the United Kingdom is due to leave the EU on March 29, May is scrambling - so far unsuccessfully - to secure last-minute changes to an EU exit treaty before parliament votes on Tuesday on whether to approve the deal.

If she fails, lawmakers are expected to force May to seek a delay to Brexit which some say could see the 2016 decision to leave the bloc reversed. Others argue that, without a delay, Britain faces an economic shock if it leaves without a deal.

"We have an opportunity now to leave on March 29 or shortly thereafter and it's important we grasp that opportunity because there is wind in the sails of people trying to stop Brexit," Hunt told the BBC. "We are in very perilous waters."

The United Kingdoms labyrinthine crisis over EU membership is approaching its finale with an extraordinary array of options including a delay, a last-minute deal, no-deal Brexit, a snap election or even another referendum.

The ultimate outcome remains unclear, though most diplomats and investors say Brexit will define the United Kingdom's prosperity for generations to come.

The government has previously tried to use the risk of Brexit being reversed as a way to convince eurosceptics to back May's deal despite their deep reservations about it.

"If you want to stop Brexit you only need to do three things: kill this deal, get an extension, and then have a second referendum. Within three weeks, those people could have two of those three things ... and quite possibly the third one could be on the way."

Nigel Dodds, deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) which props up May's minority government, and Steve Baker, a leading figure in the large eurosceptic faction of her Conservative party, warned "the political situation is grim".

"An unchanged withdrawal agreement will be defeated firmly by a sizeable proportion of Conservatives and the DUP if it is again presented to the Commons," they wrote in the Sunday Telegraph.

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The opposition Labour Party's Brexit spokesman, Keir Starmer, said his party should support staying in the EU if there was a second referendum.

However, he said the party would not be seeking to secure support in parliament for a second referendum on Tuesday.

The Sunday Times said May was battling to save her job as aides were considering persuading her to offer to resign in a bid to get the deal approved. The newspaper also said cabinet ministers had spoken about whether to insist she goes as early as this week.

"TOTAL UNCERTAINTY"

Parliament rejected May's deal by 230 votes on Jan. 15, prompting her to return to Brussels in search of changes to address the so-called Irish backstop - an insurance policy designed to prevent the return of a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Many British lawmakers object to the policy on the grounds that it could leave Britain subject to EU rules indefinitely and cleave Northern Ireland away from the rest of the country.

But May's attempts to get the clause rewritten have so far failed to yield any result.

Hunt said Tuesday's vote would definitely go ahead, and that it was too soon to say that negotiations with the EU had "run into the sands". He said realism and a lot of work was needed from both Britain and the EU to get a deal.

If lawmakers reject May's deal on Tuesday, she has promised to let them vote the next day on whether to leave without a deal on March 29. If they reject that, then on Thursday they are due to vote on a "limited" delay.

France's EU affairs minister Nathalie Loiseau told France Inter radio that she did not see any value in extending the window for talks.

"More time, to do what? We've had two years ... If there's nothing new, more time will not do anything other than usher in more uncertainty, and uncertainty just creates anxiety," Loiseau said. "It's not time that we need, but a decision."

Amid the political chaos, many company chiefs are aghast at Londons handling of Brexit and say it has already damaged Britains reputation as Europes pre-eminent destination for foreign investment.

"Business is holding its breath ahead of the votes in parliament this week, knowing that if Brexit has taught us anything, it is to expect the unexpected," said James Stewart, head of Brexit at KPMG UK.

"Companies are now split on whether an extension to the Brexit timeline is a good thing. Some of those who prepared early are locked into March specific contingency plans. Those carrying additional inventory know an extension will squeeze their cashflow for longer."

(Writing by William James and Guy Faulconbridge; additional reporting by Sarah White in Paris; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
President Donald Trump suggests that a report from special counsel Robert Mueller should not be publicly released.

He claims Mueller's Russia probe is "an illegal and conflicted investigation in search of a crime."

President Donald Trump said Friday that "there should be no" report from special counsel Robert Mueller on his Russia investigation.

His comments come a day after the House unanimously passed a symbolic resolution calling for public release of the report Mueller gives to the Justice Department about his probe. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tried to bring the measure up in his chamber on Thursday, but Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., blocked it.

The former FBI director is looking into the Kremlin's efforts to influence the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Mueller is reportedly winding down the probe, which has dogged Trump at every turn since the special counsel's appointment in May 2017.

Mueller has to send his confidential conclusions to the Justice Department. Then, Attorney General William Barr will send his own report to Congress. He can decide what information to give to lawmakers or the public.

In a series of tweets, Trump said the special counsel "should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report." He also claimed Mueller's investigation was "an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime."

"THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!" he added.

Donald Trump tweet 1

Donald Trump tweet 2

Donald Trump tweet 3

Trump has repeatedly railed against the investigation, which he has called an illegal "witch hunt," as it moves closer to him. The probe has contributed to guilty pleas from several former members of Trump's inner circle and charges against numerous Russian nationals and companies.

For instance, federal prosecutors have said Trump directed his ex-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to commit campaign finance violations ahead of the 2016 election. They say Cohen paid off two women who claimed to have affairs with Trump in order to influence the election's result. Cohen pleaded guilty to those charges and others after Mueller's team referred the case to U.S. attorneys.

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Still, the charges against some in the president's orbit, such as his former campaign chief Paul Manafort, did not directly relate to work for the Trump campaign. The president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

During Barr's confirmation process, Democratic lawmakers worried about how he would handle the Mueller investigation. In January, he told senators that he does not believe the special counsel would be "involved in a witch hunt."

Last month, Trump said whether to release the report would be "totally up to" Barr.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while meeting with Ireland's Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, U.S., March 14, 2019. REUTERS/Jim Young

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that whether a trade deal can be reached with China would probably be known in the next three or four weeks.

Well have news on China. Probably one way or the other were going to know over the next three or four weeks," he said at a White House event, adding that Beijing has been very responsible and very reasonable.

(Reporting by Steve Holland; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
By David Lawder and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A summit to seal a trade deal between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will not happen at the end of March as previously discussed because more work is needed in U.S.-China negotiations, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Thursday.

Mnuchin, speaking to reporters following a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing, said both sides were "working in good faith" to try to reach a deal "as quickly as possible."

"There's still a lot of work to do, but we're very comfortable with where we are," Mnuchin said. "I don't think there's anything significantly different on the currency issue from where we were last time."

Since Trump delayed a threatened March 1 tariff hike on Chinese goods following a late February round of talks, no new face-to-face meetings have been scheduled in the negotiations. But Trump and other administration officials have since sought to portray the talks as still making progress.

"We're doing very well with China talks," Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday as he sat down to meet Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. "We're getting what we have to get, and I think we're getting it relatively quickly."

At another White House event later on Thursday, Trump said: "Probably one way or the other were going to know over the next three or four weeks." He added that China had been "very responsible and very reasonable."

Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that Xi may be reluctant to come to the U.S. president's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida without an agreement in hand after seeing Trump end a separate summit in Vietnam with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without a peace deal. But he said he was in no rush to complete a trade deal with China.

Washington and Beijing have been locked in a tit-for-tat tariff battle as U.S. officials press China for an end to practices and policies it argues have given Chinese firms unfair advantages, including subsidizing of industry, limits on access for foreign companies and alleged theft of intellectual property.

Story continues

At a separate hearing in the House of Representatives on Thursday, Mnuchin said he expected elements of the discussions to be resolved in the near future, as the two sides pore over a 150-page document they are working on.

The United States and China have slapped import duties on each other's products that have cost the world's two largest economies billions of dollars, roiled markets and disrupted manufacturing supply chains.

"As to whether or not we'll strike a final deal, that I would never want to say," Trump said on Thursday. "If it's not a deal that's a great deal for us, we're not going to make it."

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters there "were rumblings" about a possible meeting late next month.

China's state-run news agency Xinhua, in a brief report on Friday, said Chinese Vice Premier Liu He had spoken by telephone with both Mnuchin and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the two sides made further substantive progress on trade talks.

It gave no other details, other than describing it as a third telephone call.

(Reporting by David Lawder and Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Jason Lange and Steve Holland, and Ben Blanchard in BEIJING; Writing by Tim Ahmann and Chris Prentice; Editing by Phil Berlowitz and Peter Cooney)
READ: Rody names 46 narco-pols

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, President Rodrigo R. Duterte is set to expose 50 more politicians whose cases are currently being validated. Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Eduardo Ano said the 50 names are the ones that were not read by the President during the joint National and Regional Peace and Order Council meeting here Thursday evening. Ano said there are actually 96 names of local government officials on the narco-list,The others are still under validation so more will be released by the President, he said in Filipino. Ano said validation began in 2017. Their [officials] involvement is variedthere are protectors and coddlers, others are really involved, he said. Ano said some of the politicians in the list have been dismissed. Others are still under suspension but we have included them in the list because there is no finality yet from the courts and the Office of the Ombudsman on their cases so they can still run [for office], he added. Ano clarified that all 46 politicians named by the President are incumbent officials, but four of them are not seeking reelection., 35 are mayors, seven are vice mayors, three are members of the House of Representatives, and one is a provincial board member. Ano said the DILG has already filed complaints against the 46 officials. Duterte said his decision to reveal the names of the 46 officials was anchored on his trust in the government agencies that have vetted and validated the list. The President reminded fellow government officials that public office is a public trust. An officials right to privacy, he said, is not absolute and there is a compelling reason to prioritize the interest of the state and the people. As your President, my ultimate concern is the pursuit of order in government and the welfare of the Filipino people. My administration assures you of our dedication to change the lives of Filipinos now, not tomorrow, he said. On the remaining names, Duterte said, I just want to be doubly sure. Leyte Rep. Vicente Veloso, whose name was on the list, said he would resign if the authorities can prove his involvement in illegal drugs. But Veloso, a former Court of Appeals justice, said Philippine National Police chief Director General Oscar Albayalde and Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency chief Director General Aaron Aquino should resign should they fail to prove his alleged links to the illegal drug trade. If they cannot prove why they put me in that list, the should resign, said Veloso, who chairs the House committee on constitutional amendments. Veloso said his inclusion in the list was based on rehashed charges of which he was already cleared. Magdalo Party-list Rep. Gary Alejano said the so-called narco-list is a desperate act to save the fake drug war of the government. The public-shaming that the government is resorting to is aimed to intimidate and control the local politicians in the coming elections. This is also a mere show of bravado to make the people believe that the war on drugs is working. It is not, said Alejano. Akbayan Party-list Rep. Tom Villarin warned of a possible impeachment case against Duterte, saying his powers are not absolute. While the right to privacy is not absolute, there is no compelling reason for the state to violate it as we have a functioning court system where charges can be filed against these individuals. This could constitute an impeachable offense for culpable violation of the Constitution, said Villarin. Veloso said his inclusion in the list had damaged his reputation. I have been unduly injured by this list and those responsible for the inclusion of my name in that list must be sued criminally, must be penalized criminally, said Veloso. Subic town Mayor Jay Khonghun, son of Zambales Rep. Jeffrey Khonghun, was also included in the list, denied the allegations against him in a Facebook video. Two town mayors in South Cotabato province branded on Friday as politically-motivated their inclusion in Dutertes list of narco-politicians. Incumbent Mayors Albert Palencia of Banga and Pablo Matinong Jr. of Sto. Nino said in separate radio interviews that they were saddened and disappointed with their continuing implication by authorities in the illegal drug trade. The two mayorsboth seeking reelection in the coming May 13 pollswere also included in the initial narco-list released by the President in 2016. I am not involved in any way in illegal drugs. I have been investigated and presented myself to higher authorities to clear my name and yet my name was still on the list. I am really puzzled and dont know what to do with that now, Palencia said in an interview with the Radio Mindanao Network. Palencia said he had submitted various documents and clearances to the National Police Commission, and the PDEA in Manila. In November 2016, joint anti-drug operatives raided the Palencia residence and farmhouse in Banga but did not find any illegal drugs. He was, however, briefly detained after the raid supposedly found ammunition in the mayors cabinet and a rifle grenade in his farm.Palencia said he has supported the anti-drug operations in his town and provided the local police with the necessary support, through the Municipal Anti-Drug Abuse Council. This is clearly politically motivated. But my constituents know me well. If they saw any bad thing that I did and if I had not served them well, they will not vote for me, said Palencia, who was the only mayor in South Cotabato who ran under the PDP-Laban in the 2016 elections. Palencia, who is now running under the Nationalist Peoples Coalition, said he has no ill feeling and will continue to support the President. He just released what was fed to him by the authorities, he said. Matinong reiterated that he has already proven that he was not involved in any way in illegal drugs. Matinong, who is seeking a second term, said he had also submitted documents concerned agencies, such as the PDEA, Napolcom, and the Philippine National Police to clear his name. I was surprised why my name again came up. I had been actually working to cleanse my town of illegal drugs, he said in an interview over DXMC Bombo Radyo. Malacanang on Friday told politicians on the narco-list to avail of legal remedies should they feel injured by its declassification. Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo made the remark after Veloso swiftly denied having a hand in the proliferation of illegal drugs in his area. Veloso maintained he has been cleared of drug allegations in the past by the PDEA and self-confessed drug distributor Kerwin Espinosa. In his speech Thursday, the President also called on the US Embassy in Manila to explain why they granted a visa to former Iloilo City Mayor Jed Patrick Mabilog, who was included in the 2016 narco list, and was said to be in the United States. Duterte said he gave the US embassy a list of suspected drug offenders, including Mabilog, to stop them from getting a visa. Id like to inform the US Embassy. I thought I gave you a list. If this mayor was able to escape, Id like to ask the embassy why did you give him [a visa]? You asked for a list and I gave it to your ambassador so Filipino addicts who would go there only to destroy your country will be denied visas, Duterte said. A spokesman for the Presidents party, the PDP-Laban, said at least 10 of its members were on the narco-list. He told GMA News they were still validating the names with their own list. Senator Aquilino Pimentel III, PDP-Laban president, vowed to expel members included in the list who could not explain why they were linked to illegal drugs. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra on Friday said the DOJ will begin its probe of the narco-politicians as it receives the appropriate complaint or intelligence reports from the Department of the Interior and Local Government. The DILG has already filed appropriate administrative and graft complaints against the 46 local government officials named in the narco-list before the Office of the Ombudsman. As soon as the DOJ receives the intel reports from the DILG/PDEA [Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency] or copies of the complaints filed with the OMB, we shall commence our own criminal investigation, Guevarra said in a text message. In compliance with the requirements of due process, we shall likewise give these persons named in the narcolist ample opportunity to disprove the allegations against them, Guevarra added. The DOJ chief earlier said he would direct the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to conduct the investigation once the list has been released. Ano said the list was evaluated and meticulously validated by the Interagency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs chaired by PDEA in coordination with the Philippine NationalPolice, Armed Forces of the Philippines, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, and the DILG. Senator Panfilo Lacson urged the authorities to move swiftly clear the names of those who are on the list without sufficient basis. Pimentel said that cases should immediately be filed, regardless of whether the incumbent officials named were currently running for office. If you committed a crime, you should be charged immediately, regardless of whether you are running in the midterm elections or not. Running for office does not grant you immunity, he said. Pimentel said that he together with other PDP-Laban officials would go over the list to see if there were candidates who were members of the party. In the interest of fairness and due process, well send formal notice to any member included in the list. He or she can opt to defend himself or herself against the allegations, or choose to voluntarily resign, he said. Reelectionist Senator Grace Poe said those named in the narco-list should answer the charges in court. Senate President Vicente Sotto, meanwhile, said investigators should also name the celebrities who patronize drug pushers.
Josh Lamont poses for a photo in Menlo Park, Calif., Wednesday, March 13, 2019. A cyberattack that leads to down time and lost data can be costly for small companies. Lamont, whose Social Security number was stolen five years ago when he became a joint depositor on his mother's account, has been taking steps to make his business more secure, among them obtaining an Employer Identification Number from the IRS to be used on business accounts instead of his Social Security numbers. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

NEW YORK (AP) -- When cyberthieves attacked Empire Industries' computer network, technology manager Rich Shemanskis could see files in the process of being infected by malicious software.

"We were looking at the network, and I noticed it, and another guy noticed it. We're looking at the files and watching them change," Shemanskis recalls about the attack three years ago.

Shemanskis told staffers to quickly shut down their PCs, which helped limit the malware's spread, but the company did lose about a day's worth of work. The saving grace for the Manchester, Connecticut, manufacturer of building materials was it had backed up most of its files.

A cyberattack that leads to down time and lost data can be more costly for smaller companies than for larger businesses  an average of $763 per affected computer or other device versus $470, according to a 2018 study by the Poneman Institute, which researches data protection. Many small businesses don't have sophisticated systems to protect themselves from hackers, viruses, malware and what's called ransomware, which renders files inaccessible unless a computer user pays thieves to release them. And many owners aren't tech-savvy enough to anticipate potential problems or don't make use of technology staffers or outside help to strengthen their defenses.

After the attack, Empire reassessed its security. "We already had antivirus protection, but we upgraded everything  we added more layers of security," Shmanskis says.

Empire's experience shows why it's critical for small businesses to keep strong defenses against cybercriminals.

"The nature of the threat continues to evolve," says Diana Burley, a professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Education and Human Development whose expertise includes cybersecurity. Cyberthieves use increasingly advanced technology and develop attack methods that are harder to detect and foil, she says.

A company's computers can be invaded indirectly  a supplier or customer could be attacked and the virus or malware is passed along if computer systems are linked. That's how cyberthieves hacked into the computers of discount retailer Target in 2013  they broke in after first invading the system of one of Target's vendors. Target had to settle legal claims for having not protected customers' information that was stolen.

Story continues

Smaller businesses are likely to be even more vulnerable, Burley says, adding that "it is the responsibility of the business to be aware that those things can happen."

Sometimes the invasion is more low-tech. Jay Marose, who has a Los Angeles-based publicity business, allowed a longtime friend who was also a client to use his password to access his website-building account. The friend logged into the account after their work relationship ended, took files that didn't belong to him and reversed his payment to Marose. The incident cost the publicist $10,000 and two clients.

Marose realizes that giving the password to someone else was a mistake. But the theft was made easier by the website company's weak security  it didn't use two-factor authentication, which requires a temporary passcode in addition to a password. Moreover, the theft happened during a hurricane and the company was shut down for 10 days; Marose couldn't get any help.

Marose now guards his information closely. "It changed the way I do business going forward," Marose says.

The attack on Amanda Naor's website showed her why it's critical to back up content and data. Naor, who has a photography business in Los Angeles, tried to log into her site early last year but her password was rejected. Technicians at the company that hosted her site found that someone had hacked in and changed the password. Naor created a new password, but a week later was again locked out and her website was completely disorganized  pictures and text were jumbled haphazardly. She had no backup.

A website security company Naor hired found malware on her site and was able to restore her content. Technicians said she was targeted because cyberthieves develop their skills by practicing on small websites.

"Essentially, I was a playground for a hacker," says Naor. She now has a backup and an ongoing relationship with the security company.

When hackers get hold of a small business owner's personal information, the company can suffer. Josh Lamont's Social Security number was stolen five years ago when he became a joint depositor on his mother's account; unbeknownst to the family, her identity had been stolen and the thieves had access to all the information on her accounts. Lamont discovered his accounts had been hacked when a $13,000 charge to an adult website appeared on his credit card. His bank froze his accounts, including those used in his consulting business, while it investigated what had happened.

"I didn't have access to a single account for a good three or more weeks," says Lamont, whose business, JRL Strategies, is based in Menlo Park, California. Moreover, he had to help with the investigation; that cut into his work time.

Lamont has been taking steps to make his business more secure, among them obtaining an Employer Identification Number from the IRS to be used on business accounts instead of his Social Security numbers.

As can often happen when an identity is stolen, thieves struck again 15 months later. This time Lamont got a provisional line of credit.

Last month, Lamont got an email warning that his files would be attacked by ransomware; it turned out to be a hoax.

But, "even as a hoax, it caused missed meetings and a rescheduled pitch to a new client," Lamont says.

_____

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_____

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(Adds context on resolution)

By Daina Beth Solomon

MEXICO CITY, March 14 (Reuters) - Walmart de Mexico, Mexico's biggest retailer, has reached a deal with a union to raise worker salaries, both groups said on Thursday, heading off a possible strike and offering reassurance to businesses in the early months of a new government.

Walmart Mexico said in a statement it struck the agreement on Wednesday with the Revolutionary Confederation of Laborers and Farmworkers (CROC), offering its workers an average annual salary increase of 5.5 percent and an annual bonus tied to store performance.

CROC, which previously said it was seeking a 20-percent salary hike, confirmed the deal in a separate statement.

The dispute, despite involving only a few thousand of Walmart's 234,000 employees in Mexico and Central America, has been closely followed by economists and business lobbies as a bellwether for how labor negotiations will fare under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office in December.

The leftist has vowed to fight poverty and deep-seated inequality across the country, and in January raised the daily minimum wage by 16 percent.

The same month, factory workers went on strike in the city of Matamoros near the U.S. border and teachers blocked railroad tracks in the western state of Michoacan to press home demands.

Those actions prompted a group representing some of Mexico's biggest companies to urge Lopez Obrador to resist "extortion" by unions.

Walmart Mexico's shares fell 2.58 percent on Thursday, in line with losses across Mexico's benchmark S&P/BMV IPC stock exchange. (Reporting by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Julia Love, Alistair Bell and James Dalgleish)
If you wanted a job with Microsoft at the height of the personal computer revolution, you only needed to display two qualities  at least, that's what Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told NBC's "Today" show in 1989.

Gates, who was then just 33 years old and still CEO of the tech giant, told NBC's Jane Pauley that job candidates' age and experience were less important than their enthusiasm for work and their belief in making computers more accessible for the average person.

"Well, we'll hire people at any age as long as they're super energetic and they want to make personal computers easier to use," Gates says before admitting that most new Microsoft employees were on the younger side. "But, we end up hiring mostly people right out of college or business school."

Of course, new hires also needed "to be smart before they come in," Gates adds, but Microsoft also wanted bright, but malleable, candidates who could be easily trained. "We give them a lot of training on the job, we put them right to work," he says. "But, no, we don't expect that they know a lot about [the work] before they get there."

In other words, in 1989, Microsoft didn't exactly expect every job candidate to be as adept at writing software as the company's co-founders  Gates and Paul Allen developed the programming language software that launched Microsoft in 1975. New hires were expected to be smart, enthusiastic and ready to learn.

Gates also tells Pauley why the company was headquartered in the Seattle area instead of Silicon Valley.

First, said Gates, "I grew up in Seattle, so as soon as my company had over 20 people, I decided to move it back here." (He and Paul Allen co-founded the company in Albuquerque, New Mexico.)

But also, "in California, in Silicon Valley, ... a lot of things happen but the rumor mill makes it hard to keep secrets and employees switch from company to company," he says. In Seattle, "we're able to keep our secrets and, you know, be really on our own," Gates says in the interview.

Story continues

Today, Gates is 63 years old and the world's second-wealthiest person with an estimated net worth of $98 billion. And while Microsoft had a little over 4,000 total employees in 1989, the company now employs nearly 135,000 people worldwide.

What's more, with Microsoft now worth almost $880 billion MSFT in market value, the competition to get hired at the company is fiercer than ever, with millions of applicants each year . Last year, the company told CNBC Make It that, depending on the position being sought, Microsoft asks job candidates to provide examples of their work experience, often including showing off their coding skills or sharing a creative portfolio.

One thing that hasn't changed is that Microsoft still wants passionate candidates who are willing to learn on the job. The company told CNBC Make It that it screens prospective hires looking for "a strong desire to learn, high intelligence, a passion for technology and an entrepreneurial spirit."

Don't Miss: What Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates was doing at 20 years old

Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!

Disclosure: NBC and CNBC are owned by Comcast's NBCUniversal unit.





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For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  March 15, 2019  Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: Rio Tinto plc RIO, Smith & Nephew plc SNN, Endava plc DAVA, AstraZeneca plc (AZN) and British American Tobacco p.l.c. BTI.

Here are highlights from Thursdays Analyst Blog:

Is Britain Headed for a Soft Brexit? 5 Stock Picks

On the night of Mar 13, the British House of Commons delivered another crushing defeat to prime minister Theresa May. Members of parliament voted to reject a no-deal Brexit. Whats more, a large chunk of Mays cabinet abstained from voting, leading to heightened concerns about the validity of her leadership.

Meanwhile, Britains chancellor Philip Hammond indicated in his Spring Statement that May would likely have to agree to a soft Brexit. This would be necessary to break the deadlock currently plaguing the British parliament. He also warned of dire economic consequences if a hard or no-deal Brexit ensues.

A soft Brexit would allow Britain to retain access to the European single market. This would protect Londons position as a global financial hub. Major multinationals would also then continue to base themselves within Britain. With a soft Brexit looking increasingly possible, it would make sense to bet on major multinationals based in Britain.

May Loses Brexit Vote, Faces Dissension

The British House of Commons initially voted 321 to 308 to reject a no-deal Brexit. Another vote followed and lawmakers bolstered their decision by 321 to 278, widening the slim gap to 43 votes.

The governments motion stated that Britain should exit the EU without a deal on Mar 29. It would also have the option to undertake a no-deal Brexit at any other time. Of Mays ministers, 13 abstained with one voting against the party whip.

Story continues

Now, on Mar 14, Britains parliament will decide whether it wants to delay a Brexit beyond the original deadline of Mar 29. However, the delay will only take place if the House of Commons votes for Mays Brexit deal, a proposal which has been rejected twice.

This has caused great anger among legislators keen on a Brexit as well as those supporting its softer version. Instead, Mays defeat has given rise to the feeling that a soft Brexit, where Britain retains stronger links to the EU, is increasingly a possibility.

Hammond Supports Soft Brexit, Touts Benefits

On Wednesday, Britains Chancellor Philip Hammond used his Spring Statement to indicate that May should now veer toward a soft Brexit. Hammond used the Spring Statement, an update on the British economy, to provide a largely upbeat picture. At the same time, he warned that a no-deal Brexit would not only result in short-term pain but could leave the country less prosperous in the longer term.

In the event of a soft Brexit, goods and services would be freely traded with EU members without attracting tariffs. Exports would not be subject to border checks. Britain-based financial firms would continue to enjoy the right to sell services and operate branches in the EU. Other non-members like Norway enjoy similar freedoms and continue to have access to the European Economic Area.

Further, a soft Brexit would help to release a so-called deal dividend of around 26 billion. Additionally, this would be money saved from the bills Britain currently pays to the EU. It could result in a 20 billion increase in funding to the National Health Service (NHS), according to the British government.

Our Choices

Mays latest legislative defeat and the rebellion among her partys ranks indicate that a tougher, hard Brexit looks increasingly unlikely. As MPs prepare to vote on delaying the inevitable, a soft Brexit would be uppermost on their minds. This would enable Britain to endure a difficult phase in its history with the least economic strife possible.

A soft Brexit would allow British multinationals to retain their global headquarters within the country. It could also save the economy from most of its blushes. This is why it makes sense to invest in British MNCs. However, picking winning stocks may prove to be difficult.

This is where our VGM Score comes in. Here V stands for Value, G for Growth and M for Momentum and the score is a weighted combination of these three scores. Such a score allows you to eliminate the negative aspects of stocks and select winners. However, it is important to keep in mind that each Style Score will carry a different weight while arriving at a VGM Score.

We have narrowed down our search to the following stocks based on a good Zacks Rank and VGM Score.

Rio Tinto plc is an international mining company, headquartered in London.

Rio Tinto has a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and VGM Score of A. The companys expected earnings growth for the current year is 23.8%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved by 18.7% over the past 30 days.

Smith & Nephew plc is a global medical device company.

Smith & Nephew has a Zacks Rank #1 and VGM Score of B. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved by 0.4% over the past 30 days.

Endava plc provides information technology services.

Endava has a VGM Score of B. The companys expected earnings growth for the current year is 32%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved by 4.7 over the past 30 days. The stock has a Zacks Rank #1. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

AstraZeneca plc is one of the largest biopharmaceutical companies in the world, headquartered in London.

AstraZeneca has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and VGM Score of B. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved by 5.3% over the past 30 days.

British American Tobacco p.l.c. is a manufacturer, marketer and seller of tobacco products on a global basis.

British American Tobacco has a Zacks Rank #2 and VGM Score of B. The company has expected earnings growth of 8.4% for the current year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved by 2.5% over the past 30 days.

Today's Best Stocks from Zacks

Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%.

This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000  2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year.

See their latest picks free >>

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Fastned, which is building a European network of fast charging stations for electric vehicles, has won a second tender in the UK led by the North East Joined Transport Committee.

Fastned will build and operate five fast charging stations (hubs) for electric vehicles across the region. Each station will initially house two 50kW rapid chargers that will deliver 100% renewable electricity.

Fastned intends to build and operate the five fast charging stations in Gateshead, Blyth, Whitley Bay, Washington, and Kingston Park. These fast charging stations will enable fully electric cars to fast charge their batteries and will be added to Fastneds European network.

The network currently consists of 88 stations in the Netherlands and. Two other Fastned stations are currently under development in Newcastle and Sunderland as part of the Go Ultra Low NE programme.

Michiel Langezaal, CEO Fastned, said: Fastned was founded to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, so we are pleased we can start offering fast charging infrastructure in the north east of England. Reliable fast charging infrastructure will make fully electric vehicles just as practical as cars with internal combustion engines. Fastned has the ambition to build a European network of 1,000 fast charging stations and aims to build more fast charging stations in the UK.

Councillor Martin Gannon, chair of the North East Joint Transport Committee and leader of Gateshead Council, commented: The five rapid charging hubs will help further establish the North East of England as a leader in electric mobility and are good news for electric drivers in our region. The hubs can provide electric freedom and ease of travelling for local commuters, commercial fleets, and travellers passing through the region.

The project is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the UK Governments Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV). The stations will be owned by the North East Joined Transport Committee. Fastned will manage the stations design and construction, and operate and maintain them.
Senator Panfilo Lacson on Friday slammed House members for allegedly confusing the public in defending the pork insertions they made in the P3.575-trillion national budget for 2019. There is a whale of a difference between itemization and realignments of what have been approved by the joint bicameral conference committee and ratified in plenary by both houses of Congress, Lacson said. Instead of engaging in obfuscation and personal attacks by their designated talking heads, Lacson said, the House leaders should pursue a sensible dialogue with the senate leadership. Otherwise, we will have no choice but deal with the next House leadership come July, Lacson said. Senate President Vicente Sotto III has maintained his hard-line stance in not signing the proposed budget if the House members will not agree to stick to what was ratified during the bicameral conference. The Otso Diretso, composed of opposition senatorial candidates, supported Sottos position against signing the 2019 budget, which is said to have been tampered by the House leadership.We will only affix our signature on the document that faithfully reflects the voice of Congress and ratified by its members, the opposition said in a statement. They considered as outrageous how attempts were allegedly made to squeeze kickbacks from the budget document that has yet to leave the halls of Congress. Otso Dirersos campaign manager, Senator Francis Pangilinan, said the Senate would always be on guard to protect the peoples money. For a budget for the people, he cited the need for lawmakers who are efficient and trustworthy and are willing to debate, deliberate and defend in plenary a pork-free budget.
A senior Afghan official accused the U.S. special envoy to his country, Zalmay Khalilzad, of delegitimizing" the Kabul government by excluding it from peace negotiations with the Taliban and acting like a viceroy.



The comments on March 14 by Hamdullah Mohib, who serves as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's national security adviser, drew immediate rebuke from Washington, with the State Department saying that his remarks only serve to hinder U.S.-Afghan ties and the peace process.



Speaking during a news conference at the Afghan Embassy in Washington, Mohib, a former ambassador to Washington, directed his attacks at U.S. Special Representative Khalilzad's conduct of peace talks with the Taliban.



Kabul has been excluded from the talks, held in Qatar, because the Taliban refuses direct negotiations with the Afghan government, insisting it is a puppet of the West and demanding that foreign troops pull out of the country before bilateral talks can begin.



U.S. officials have insisted they will not accept a peace deal with the Taliban without direct talks between the militant group and the Afghan government.



Kabul in the past has expressed anger over being kept out of the talks, but public comments targeting the top U.S. negotiator are extremely rare. Officials were angered again this week when Khalilzad wrapped up the latest round of Taliban talks in Doha and returned directly to Washington without stopping to brief officials in Kabul.



"Knowing Ambassador Khalilzads history, his own personal history, he has ambitions in Afghanistan. He was wanting to run for president twice," Mohib said.



"The perception in Afghanistan and people in government think that perhaps, perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government of which he will then become the viceroy."



Viceroy was the title of the colonial administrator of British-ruled India and holds negative connotations in South Asia.



"We think either Zal, Ambassador Khalilzad, doesnt know how to negotiate [or] there may be other reasons behind what hes doing," Mohib added.



"The Taliban are in no mood to negotiate with the Afghan government, and there is no reason for them to do so. They're gaining. Their sole aim and expectation and reasons in wanting to talk directly with the United States is to give themselves legitimacy."



"The reason he is delegitimizing the Afghan government and weakening it, and at the same time elevating the Taliban can only have one approach. It's definitely not for peace," he said.



Robert Palladino, the State Departments deputy spokesman, said David Hale, the U.S. under-secretary of state for political affairs, "summonded" Mohib and told him he rejected the attack on "the U.S. approach to reconciliation."



Palladino said Hale reminded the Afghan official that Khalilzad represents Secretary of State Mike Pompeo "and that attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are attacks on the department and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process."



The spokesman added that Hale "expressed our commitment to the Afghan governments stability and full participation in the peace process."



The Taliban controlled the Afghan government before being driven from power in 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion after it refused to end support for Al-Qaeda terrorists following the September 11 terror attacks in the United States.



Taliban leaders, who took control in 1996, imposed a harsh form of Islamic law that denied education and work to women and girls as they cracked down on other social activities.



They were accused by international groups of human rights violations, causing concerns among more-moderate Afghans about their participation in any future government.



The U.S. military has some 12,000 troops in Afghanistan, mostly serving in training and advisory roles.

With reporting by Reuters, The New York Times, CBS, AFP, and RFE/RLs Afghan Service
DUSHANBE -- When Sobir Sobirov learned in early 2018 that a Dushanbe-based firm called Garduna was guaranteeing Tajiks $1,300-a-month jobs at a Skoda automobile factory in the Czech Republic, his first thought was that the offer was too good to be true.



Sobirov had lost his job as a driver in Dushanbe and heard about Garduna over social media after searching eight months to find steady work in a city where the average monthly wage is only about $200.



So the money being dangled for work in Europe was certainly appealing, even if there were signs that something was amiss.



For example, Garduna did not ask Sobirov about his training as a software developer or other qualifications he might have to live and work in the European Union.



And the firm's only requirement was that job seekers provide a valid passport and pay an upfront "recruitment fee" of about $1,320 to secure employment at one of three Skoda production plants in the Czech Republic.



To convince Sobirov that Garduna was legitimate, the company's co-owners showed him documents proving that it was legally registered in Tajikistan.



They gave him copies of what they claimed would be his Skoda employment contract and promised to obtain a Czech visa and work permit for him.



They also showed Sobirov photographs of an actual Skoda dormitory near a production plant in the Czech town of Mlada Boleslav where they said he would work and be housed as part of a "Skoda employment package."



Finally, they arranged for Sobirov to have an "interview" with a 51-year-old Czech man named Vaclav Skohoutil -- describing him as an "intermediary" between Garduna and a recruitment agency called Chekhovskaya that they claimed was working with Skoda on "staff issues."



'A Little Bit Dodgy'



Skoda Auto spokeswoman Kamila Biddle told RFE/RL that the automaker "is not linked with Garduna in any way," or with any recruitment agency called Chekhovskaya, and has "no involvement" in the activities of either company.



"This sounds a little bit dodgy," Biddle said.



Sobirov, however, was ultimately convinced by Garduna's elaborate details.



He took out a $600 bank loan and, together with his life savings of about $720, handed the money over to the company.

Then, like 200 other Tajiks who also paid Garduna's "recruitment fee," Sobirov waited for news about when he would be sent to the Czech Republic to start work.



"First. I was told they would send me to the Czech Republic in June or July of 2018," Sobirov said. "They didn't. The next time I confronted them, they promised they would send me to Skoda in October. They didn't, but they assured me that I would start work there in January."



Sobirov says it was when Garduna failed to contact him in January that he finally admitted to himself that he'd fallen for an elaborate "fake job" scam and would never again see the $1,320 "recruitment fee" he'd paid.



Now, on top of trying to find sporadic odd jobs to support his wife and his elderly parents, Siborv is struggling to pay back his bank loan.



He says he has been reduced to begging and borrowing money from his closest friends just to make ends meet.



All Too Common



The International Labor Organization (ILO) says fake job scams have become all too common, with "unscrupulous recruitment agencies" preying upon would-be migrant workers who want to travel abroad to build a better life for themselves and their families back home.



The World Bank says Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are the world's most remittance-dependent economies -- with money sent back home by Central Asian migrant workers totaling more than three times that of official development aid.



The Pew Research Center notes that the vast majority of Central Asian migrant workers -- more than 1 million from Uzbekistan and more than half a million each from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan -- work in Russia where they face complicated bureaucracy, exploitative employment conditions, and social isolation.

The ILO says that makes impoverished Central Asians particularly susceptible to fake job scams that "guarantee" employment in EU countries in exchange for paying a recruitment fee.



Typically, the ILO says, many workers are not aware that they should not pay recruitment fees to get a job.



"This principle is key and has been listed as one of the ILO principles to ensure fair recruitment," the ILO warns.



Sharan Burrow, the General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, says deceitful recruitment agencies also "take advantage of the lack of law enforcement by governments or because workers are simply not aware of their rights."



But law enforcement officials in Tajikistan have vowed that they will take action.



Criminal Investigation



In Dushanbe, the Agency for State Financial Control and Combating Corruption says it has already launched a criminal investigation into the activities of Garduna.



Garduna's three Tajik owners -- company director Bakhtiyor Arabov and his deputies Tokhir Rustamov and Tous Hushkadamova -- have been detained and questioned on charges of running a fraudulent scheme to swindle more than 200 Tajiks from across the country out of nearly $250,000 combined.



More than half of the victims took out bank loans to pay Garduna's recruitment fee, the agency says.



All of them have difficulties paying back what they borrowed and most are becoming desperate as the interest due on their unpaid loans accrues.

Rustam Nuraliev, an investigator at the anticorruption agency, told RFE/RL that Tajik authorities are also searching for Skohoutil -- noting that he has visited Tajikistan on multiple occasions.



Nuraliev says Skohoutil had stayed in contact with the scam victims, using the Viber messaging app to reassure them they'd be sent to the Czech Republic.



But since Garduna's co-owners were detained for questioning in early March, Nuraliev says Skohoutil has "disappeared."



Nuraliev said Tajik authorities are in the process of applying for an Interpol "red notice" on Skohoutil -- an international arrest warrant that would call on police around the world to detain him and wait for a court ruling on a request for his extradition to Tajikistan.



But so far, Interpol's public database of "wanted" criminal suspects does not list Skohoutil.



RFE/RL has been unable to contact Skohoutil in order to discuss his alleged role in Tajikistan's fake-jobs scam.



Public records show that Skohoutil was born in the Czech town of Novy Bor, about 115 kilometers north of Prague, where he has operated several businesses since 1994.



All of those firms are either defunct or are in the process of being liquidated.

Written and reported by Ron Synovitz in Prague with reporting by RFE/RL correspondent Anushervon Aripov in Dushanbe.


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Interstate 25 reopened Thursday afternoon, freeing hundreds of semitrucks and other vehicles trapped by a blizzard that shut down the highway for more than 24 hours while crews cleared crashes, moved abandoned vehicles and rescued drivers stranded overnight.

Truckers and other travelers were lined up on northbound I-25 for miles near Monument  three abreast and stretching as far as the eye could see  until the Colorado Department of Transportation announced about 2:50 p.m. that the last remaining safety closure, which barred drivers from the highway between Baptist Road and Plum Creek Parkway, had been lifted.

"Great news! Truckers, start your engines!" Colorado Springs police tweeted.

The storm, known as a bomb cyclone, pummeled the Pikes Peak region Wednesday with hurricane-force winds and swirling snow that reduced visibility to inches, surprising many who hoped to reach their destinations before roads became impassable. Thousands were caught in whiteout when the blizzard intensified much quicker than anyone had predicted.

Among them was Cade and Mary Coldren, who were heading from their home in Lubbock, Texas, to Fort Collins to visit their children, who attend Colorado State University. The trip typically takes about 10 hours. This time, it took three days, with one night spent on cots in a warming shelter in Monument.

"It was faster than the forecast, was the problem," Cade said. "Because, you know, you could look at the forecast and you could say, 'Well, I think we've got time,' and then, boom, it was there."

In hindsight, Cade said, they should have followed their daughter's advice to drive straight through Tuesday. But they stayed the night at an AirBnb in Raton, N.M., and thought they could make it to Fort Collins before the storm hit.

They were wrong.

"By the time we got to Monument, I could barely see the car in front of me on the interstate," Cade said. Their car got stuck on ice on the off-ramp at mile marker 161, but they pushed it out with the help of a passerby and their windshield ice-scrapers.

Just off of the highway, they got stuck again.

After two hours, a man and his two teenage kids passed by and offered to help push the car into a nearby bank parking lot. The helpful strangers drove the Coldrens to the shelter at St. Peter Catholic Church, 55 Jefferson St.

The shelter didn't have enough cots for everyone  about 150 people showed up, Cade said  so late arrivals unrolled wrestling mats from the gym to sleep on.

"They ran out of blankets for us, and then power kept coming and going, and it got cold," he said. "I've had better nights' sleep."

An estimated 1,100 drivers were stranded across El Paso County on Wednesday with hundreds more trapped along I-25, leading Gov. Jared Polis to declare a state of emergency and activate the Colorado National Guard.

El Paso County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Jacqueline Kirby said crews were able to make "significant progress, even in the dark." By late Thursday morning, about 250 stranded vehicles still needed to be checked along U.S. 24 and Colorado 94, she said.

About 50 soldiers and airmen with the Colorado National Guard assisted emergency crews throughout the state in checking on stranded vehicles. Late Thursday afternoon, the Guard tweeted, "After checking 291 vehicles, the number of rescues remains at 93 people and two dogs!"

Travel by car and plane was sharply curtailed most of Wednesday and Thursday morning, with most major highways shut down and dozens of flights at Colorado Springs Airport canceled. Denver International Airport canceled more than 1,000 flights.

Before it was shut down midday Wednesday, I-25 between Colorado Springs and Denver was blocked by pileups on Monument Hill and in the "Gap," the two lane, 18-mile stretch north of Monument to Castle Rock.

James Lutack of Pueblo slammed into a Dodge Caravan ahead of him on Monument Hill as he was hit from behind.

"It was so quiet after because all the engines turned off and you could just hear the boom-boom-boom-boom of cars piling up behind me," Lutack said. "It was eerie."

He'd left Denver while it was raining, thinking he get home ahead of the storm, but things got "brutal" around Castle Rock and continued to deteriorate, he said.

After the crash, Lutack said he heard four people were taken to area hospitals with minor injuries. Some vehicles had windows busted out by the crashes, forcing owners to seek shelter in the cars of strangers until help arrived.

Lutack didnt have heat, but said he came prepared with boots, extra clothing and a blanket.

He was among the lucky few who were only stranded on the interstate for a couple hours. A state trooper drove him to a church in Larkspur where he spent most of the afternoon before being trucked to the warming shelter at the Douglas County fairgrounds in Castle Rock, where he spent the night.

Many flights were again canceled or delayed Thursday as the airports continue to recover from the severe weather  blowing snow and 80 mph winds closed Denver International Airport's six runways for only the fourth time in the airport's history, and gusts at the Colorado Springs Airport topped out at a record 96 mph.

The Colorado Springs Airport had 57 flights scheduled for Thursday, 21 of which were canceled, said spokeswoman Aidan Ryan. Several more were delayed.

Some of the departures were canceled because the inbound flight had been canceled, creating a domino effect, Ryan said.

About 10 people stayed overnight at the Colorado Springs Airport, which served as a warming shelter. Nearby hotels were full with travelers and airport staff, Ryan said.

The airports provided blankets and sleeping pads.

Schools and government offices remained closed Thursday for the second day in a row, and many businesses delayed openings.

"Our crews have been working hard all night long, coordinating with (Colorado Springs police)," the city tweeted Thursday morning, warning that thick ice and abandoned vehicles remain an issue. "The storm is over but our response is not. If you can stay home and off the roads today, please help us out."

A few districts  including Lewis-Palmer School District 38 and School District 49  announced Thursday that they would be closed for the third consecutive day Friday.

Colorado Springs Utilities reported 117 outages affecting 1,300 customers across the city Thursday morning. Utilities warned people not to go near downed power lines.

More than 8,000 Mountain View Electric Association customers were still without power Thursday morning after "widespread power outages" Wednesday, the company said.
LOVELAND  A Colorado woman accused of faking illnesses to get donations has been sentenced to a year in the Larimer County work release program and 10 years' probation.

The Loveland Daily Reporter-Herald reports 45-year-old Kristin Eagle, of Loveland, was sentenced Thursday after pleading guilty in January to computer crimes and charitable fraud.

The plea deal allows Eagle to shed charges alleging theft between $100,000 and $1 million, two counts of identity theft, unauthorized financial transaction, and forgery of a government-issued document.

Eagle must also pay restitution in the case. Prosecutor Shaun Reinhart implied restitution could be as much as $19,000.

Defense attorney Daniel Jasinski argues that Kristin Eagle's crimes stemmed from unnoticed mental illnesses that led her to siphon funds from the Fort Collins mountain bike community.
The Supreme Court has been asked to resolve the two consolidated petitions assailing the constitutionality of President Rodrigo Dutertes decision to withdraw the countrys ratification of the Rome Statute, a United Nations treaty creating the International Criminal Court. In an urgent motion, the Philippine Coalition for the International Criminal Court warned that the cases of extrajudicial killings could increase once the countrys withdrawal from the ICC takes effect on March 17, 2019. Under the Rome Statute, a state party like the Philippines may withdraw from the Statute through a written notification. The withdrawal shall take effect one year after the date of receipt of the notification. On the case of the Philippines, the one year will be on March 17. If and when the withdrawal takes effect, petitioners submit that it would mean Filipinos would be deprived of effective remedies provided under international law and constitutional law in the event that there is inaction by Philippine law enforcement authorities to investigate or prosecute impunity committed in the Philippines, the urgent motion stated. Indeed, Petitioners fear that with the withdrawal taking effect without this Honorable Courts action, those who kill with impunity will only be further emboldened, it said.PCICC led by former Commission on Human Right chair Loretta Rosales as well as six opposition senators filed separate petitions before the high court questioning the governments withdrawal from ICC without Senates ratification. Oral argument was conducted last year. But court insiders said the consolidated ICC petitions were not tackled during its full court session. It was the last Supreme Court session before March 17. Duterte announced in March last year the governments withdrawal of its ratification of the Rome Statute. In its diplomatic note to the United Nations secretary general, the government explained that the decision to withdraw is the Philippines principled stand against those who politicize and weaponize human rights, even as its independent and well-functioning organs and agencies continue to exercise jurisdiction over complaints, issues, problems and concerns arising from its efforts to protect the people.
The Philippines (winter 2014)Western US (fall 2011/2012/2013/2014)Turkey (fall 2010)France/Germany/Denmark/Hollan (summer 2010)Uganda/Tanzania/Kenya (winter 2010)China (fall 2009)France/Italy (summer 2009)South Africa/Lesotho/Mozambique (winter 2009)Southern U.S. (fall 2008/fall 2010/spring 2011)Spain and the Camino de Compostela (summer of 2008)Israel (winter 2008)Eastern U.S. (fall 2007)Great Britain (summer 2007)Venezuela (winter 2007)Japan (fall 2006)Croatia, Serbia, Czech Republic, Poland (summer 2006)Western US (fall 2005)Ecuador (winter 2005)Italy (spring 2004/summer 2009)France (summer 2004/2005/2006/2007/2008/2009/2010/2011/2012/2013/2014/2015/2016/2017/2018/2019)Iceland (summer 2003)Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia (Fall 2002)Minneapolis to Chicago (summer 2002)Bolivia (spring 2002)Scandinavia--Finland, Norway, Sweden (summer 2001)Hes followed the Tour de France seventeen times beginning in 2004 , riding much of each year's route, fully loaded, before or after the peloton and sent out regular reports during the race, also posted here.He has a long-running email list that he sends updates to every few days when he's on tour.You can write him at: george6567@yahoo.com. If you like, he'll add you to his e-list.He spends the rest of the year also on a bike, working as a messenger in Chicago.He's also an independent film enthusiast, attending or working at several major film festivals annually, including Telluride and Cannes. His coverage of Cannes is also included here in May of 2004-2015.For a "Chicago Tribune" article on George see the January 17, 2002 entry of the blog. There is also a "Hollywood Reporter" article posted October 25, 2005, and a "Streetwise" cover story posted on April 17, 2010 and stories in French newspapers the past few summers.(I'm Jeff Potter and I helped George get his blog going. I run OutYourBackDoor.com , where I report on a wide range of everyday, affordable, healthy outdoor action. I also sell some hard-to-find indy culture media and other goodies. Lotsa bike stuff!)
Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. on Thursday slammed the non-government organizations in the European Union for funding the decades-long communist insurgency in the Philippines. EU funding continues for the widely detested, nowhere supported, and foredoomed communist insurgency composed of the last dregs of the New Khmer Rouge, as US intelligence branded them in the late 80s, Locsin said during the Ministerial Segment of the 62nd Session of the Commission on Narcotics and Drugs on Thursday (Friday in Manila) in Vienna. In other developments:  New Peoples Army rebels attacked a pineapple plantation in the Bukidnon town of Don Carlos and burned a harvesting equipment on Thursday, the Army said. In a statement released by the Armys 403rd Brigade on Friday, an unspecified number of armed men raided the plantation area of Davao Agriculture Ventures Company Inc. in San Nicolas village around 8 p.m. The armed men threatened the workers and announced that they were NPA members, the Army statement said, adding the group disarmed the lone security guard and seized his cellphone.  Two rights groups on Friday filed a complaint before the joint monitoring committee of the National Democratic Front and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines for their alleged red-tagging and terrorist labeling of militant groups. Karapatan, along with the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines, filed the complaint a day before the 21st year of the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on Respect for Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law. Locsin said the insurgency being waged by the Communist Party of the Philippines-New Peoples Army continued to threaten Philippine society and national security. In this endeavor, EU non-government organizations support a cause unquestionably lethal but totally unredeemed by any prospect of success, Locsin said.Their generous contributions promise at best the prospect of a small and ragged parade under a cracked marble arch to the strains of a broken Hallelujah. As always, the Philippines fights its battles alone; it needs no help; it fears no opposition from any quarter; but it wouldnt mind a little understanding. In its official statement, the EU delegation in Manila said the bloc continued to recognize the communist group as a terrorist organization. The Communist Party of the Philippines and the New Peoples Army are on the EUs list of terrorist organizations since 2006 and are treated as such in all respects by the European Union at this point, its statement read. The EU and the US have listed the CPP-NPA as a terrorist group. Presidential Task Force on Media Security Executive Director Undersecretary Joel Egco, who was part of the Philippine delegation that conducted a series of engagements in Brussels in February, said the National Task Force to End the Communist Insurgency created by President Rodrigo Duterte was set to hold several meetings to address the issue and further engage the bloc. Definitely, it is being discussed by the National Task Force as to what moves should be taken next. We will send them evidence, thats the requirement theyve set, he told the Philippine News Agency in an interview on Friday. Belgian officials, during a meeting last month, informed the Philippine delegation that it was the first time that they had heard about their funds reaching the CPP-NPAs front organizations, Egco said. As the government takes its war against local communists a step further, Egco said, the NTF got the assurance of European officials who vowed to look into the information presented by the Philippine government on the reported funding of CPP-NPA activities. Data presented by the Philippine delegation showed that communist front organizations receive funds from groups in the guise of marginalized and pro-poor programs.
Grand Old Partisan honors William Cannon, born this day of 1809. He prospered in a range of businesses: lumber, grain and saw mills, brick factory, banking, newspaper publishing, and railroads. While a Democrat, he was elected state representative and state treasurer.

In 1862, angered by his party's sympathy for the Confederacy, Cannon accepted the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Even though most patriotic young men were away serving in the Union military, he managed to eke out a victory, by one hundred eleven votes. He faced a Democrat-controlled legislature, which rejected both his patriotic messages and Republican proposals for emancipation.

One of his sons died at the Battle of Gettysburg, and another would be the state's first Lieutenant Governor. During his term, Governor Cannon died from injuries sustained in a house fire.

Here is a Video Version of this article on YouTube: https://youtu.be/zcfAcplb_oU

Michael Zak is author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party, a history of GOP civil rights achievement.

Each day, Michael Zak's grandoldpartisan YouTube channel and Grand Old Partisan blog celebrate more than sixteen decades of Republican heritage. And, see Speech Raves for audience feedback from his presentations in thirty-one states so far.

He also wrote the 2005 Republican Freedom Calendar.

Clarence Thomas cited Back to Basics for the Republican Party in a Supreme Court decision.

Buy the book at Amazon

"This is the most amazing book about politics that I have ever read. The Overview should be required reading for anyone with even a minor interest in government. The remainder is an enthralling history lesson that I will never forget. For years, we have all been misled about the true nature of the GOP. This is the real deal! Read it and be proud!"

"Michael Zak wrote the definitive history of the GOP."

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" " Corporal punishment in schools has inspired much debate. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

In December 2015, parents Alana Cole-Faber and Xander Faber went public with allegations of corporal punishment at the award-winning Dora Kennedy French Immersion School in Greenbelt, Maryland. They told The Washington Post their son's kindergarten teacher spanked him while his classmates watched on multiple occasions. At least three other families have accounts of corporal punishment at the school that lend support to the claim.

The teacher denies the allegations of spanking, which is illegal in Maryland public schools. The state banned corporal punishment in 1993 (but forgot to define it), in step with a steep trend away from a practice that many experts oppose.

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But corporal punishment is legal in many U.S. states. Texas, which punishes the second largest number of students in the U.S., defines the practice as "the deliberate infliction of physical pain by hitting, paddling, spanking, slapping or any other physical force used as a means of discipline."

Paddling has its proponents. Those in favor of corporal punishment typically say it engenders discipline, respect and a "healthy fear of authority." Research doesn't seem to back any of that up, though. Most education and psychology (and medical and parenting) experts say the infliction of physical pain is, at best, ineffective at achieving positive behavioral change, and at worst causes long-term harm to the student, the witnesses and the school community.

Lacie Ketelhut, program coordinator at the Gundersen Center for Effective Discipline, points to a "large amount of research that demonstrates the risk [posed by corporal punishment] to a child's mental, physical and emotional health." In fact, a 2016 report that reviewed years of studies on spankings showed that the practice leads to more mental health problems and lower self-esteem. It "impacts ALL children in the school, whether the child is the one receiving or not receiving the physical pain as punishment," Ketelhut writes in an email.

Yet in the 2013-14 school year, 109,000 children were physically disciplined in U.S. public schools, and most of it was perfectly legal.

The Laws on Hitting Students

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld states' rights to administer corporal punishment in 1977's Ingraham v. Wright. Parents of a Florida eighth grader, James Ingraham, filed the suit. Two adults restrained Ingraham while the principal hit him with a paddle 20 times. Even though Ingraham needed medical attention, the Court determined the incident was neither "cruel and unusual" nor in violation of Ingraham's rights to due process.

Only 28 states and the District of Columbia have banned physical discipline entirely, by Education Week Research Center numbers. Fifteen states expressly permit corporal punishment in public schools, meaning their school districts can decide whether to allow it. Many districts ban it, especially those serving large cities like Dallas, Houston and Memphis. Seven other states either allow exceptions or don't directly address the matter in law.

Laws for private schools vary. Some states exempt private schools from bans on corporal punishment. Others require them to jump through administrative hoops if they want to hit students.

While a recent analysis found more than 4,000 schools in 21 states using physical discipline, corporal punishment is primarily a Southern phenomenon. Based on federal civil rights data for the 2013-14 school year, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas lead the country in corporal punishment.

Mississippi, where more than 50 percent of public school students attend a school where hitting is allowed, ranks first.

It's Hard to Learn When You're Scared

"As students are beaten, or see those around them beaten, the trust between administrators, teachers, and students is often destroyed. Over time, students may become less engaged in school and less interested in exploring and discovering new academic concepts," describes a 2009 report by the Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Corporal punishment creates a threatening atmosphere that works against positive learning and impacts students' ability to perform academically," Ketelhut says. Corporal punishment has been linked to increased aggression, defiance, antisocial behaviors and risk of future drug and alcohol abuse.

There is also an apparent bias in who gets paddled, which shouldn't surprise anyone who studies discipline in U.S. schools. Other forms of harsh punishment associated with the "school-to-prison pipeline," including suspension and arrest, also disproportionately affect minorities.

In schools administering physical discipline, black students were twice as likely to receive punishment than their white classmates. "Black students make up 22% of overall enrollment in schools using corporal punishment, but 38% of students receiving this form of discipline in the 2013-14 school year," reports the aforementioned analysis. "By contrast, white students comprise 60% of total enrollment, but just 50% of students disciplined using physical punishment."

Other studies have found that students of Native American descent, as well as disabled students, are physically disciplined in school at higher rates than their white, non-disabled peers.

Redefining "Discipline"

Most of corporal punishment's effects bode poorly for academic excellence (and equality). Ketelhut says healthy relationships and safe environments are essential to positive learning. While every student population has unique needs, she says, "[m]ore work would be upstream through positive modeling, skill building and early intervention, instead of waiting for a problem to happen and applying a punitive reaction." The first step, according to Ketelhut, "is to change our perspective on how we define 'discipline,' and then the right tools and steps will follow."

Perspectives are changing. The 109,000 students physically disciplined in 2013-14 was down from more than 166,000 in 2011-12, almost a quarter million in 2006-07 and 1.4 million in 1980.

Ketelhut is optimistic. "There is still a lot of work to be done," she says, "but I believe that schools and families are becoming more informed of safe, healthy and effective discipline practices." She notes initiatives like "No Hit Zones," which assist schools and communities in implementing disciplinary models that don't involve paddling or spanking, but use nonviolent conflict resolution and supportive communication.

Now That's a Mixed Signal Foster parents are often required to opt their children out of corporal punishment in schools, as it can hurt students who are recovering from past trauma and interfere with their ability to trust adults.
New YorkThe reputed boss of New Yorks Gambino crime family was left riddled with bullets outside his home on Staten Island, an old-school hit akin to the storied executions of 20th-century mafia dons. The grisly scene saw Francesco Frank Cali shot dead outside his colonial-style red-brick home on Staten Island, police said Thursday. The 53-year-old with deep ties to Sicilian organized crime factions-thought to have been leading the Gambinos since 2015, wielding influence both stateside and in Italysuffered multiple gunshot wounds to the torso in the attack on Wednesday evening, police said. Cali, also known as Franky Boy, was shot six times, then hit by a blue truck in which the suspects fled. He was pronounced dead at Staten Island University North hospital, according to police. There are no arrests and the investigation is ongoing, police said. The Gambino family is one of New Yorks five historic Italian Mafia familiesalong with the Genoveses, Luccheses, Colombos and Bonannos. US media reported that Calis death marked the first murder of a New York mob boss in 34 years, since the death of Paul Castellanoanother Gambino family bossby order of the infamous John Gotti, also known as Teflon Don. Following Castellanos murder, which saw the boss dramatically gunned down outside a Manhattan steakhouse after stepping out of a black limo, Gotti took over as the Gambino family don. A paparazzi darling who sported flashy suits with his signature slick pompadour, police ultimately toppled Gotti and incarcerated him for conspiracy and murder in 1992. He died in prison in 2002, leaving a notorious legacy that cemented New Yorks place in mob lore. Cali is thought to have taken the helm of the Gambino family in 2015, replacing Domenico Cefalu. His power and rise within the Gambino clan was owed in large part to his family connections in Palermo, Sicily; Cali reportedly married Rosaria Inzerillo, the daughter of a prominent Sicilian mob faction that was once one of the islands most powerful. He began ascending within the ranks under capo John DAmico, who went by Jackie and became the familys acting boss in 2005 -- after which Cali became an acting captain, according to court documents. Cali faced just one arrest over his career, over an extortion plot linked to a failed bid to build a Nascar race track. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 16 months in prison.But federal prosecutors held that Cali was involved in a number of other crime schemes, including operating illegal gambling machines in Brooklyn establishments and snatching profits from an annual Italian Feast festival in the borough. Cali shunned the limelight even after becoming don, ruling from the top while lying low in his affluent Todt Hill neighborhood in Staten Island, where Castellano also held court. Situated on top of a hill with curving streets and large, shady trees, the district offered an ideal cover -- one of its Tudor-style homes was even featured in The Godfather film. The post-Gotti chapter saw the mobs influence on the US eastern seaboard wane -- but Wednesdays hit threw New York back to its golden years of organized crime. We thought those days were over, the citys mayor Bill de Blasio told journalists. But I guess old habits die hard. It wasnt the first such spattering of gore in recent years, however. Last October, 71-year-old Sylvester Zottola of the Bonanno family was shot dead while waiting in his car for an order from a Bronx McDonalds. His son Salvatore had been shot three months earlier outside the family home, but survived. In another burst of mob drama, authorities announced Thursday that a Gambino family associate of over a decade, Anthony Pandrella, was arrested for robbing and murdering his friend Vincent Zito. After prosecutors called him a danger to the community Pandrella, 59, pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn federal court to accusations of shooting Zito in his own home and stealing money from him. He then allegedly returned to the scene of the crime hours later to grieve with the older mans family. But he had been caught on CCTV cameras leaving and entering the house at the time of the murder, and his DNA was discovered from the trigger of the gun used to commit the crime. It takes a certain type of evil to murder a friend in their own home, and then console the grieving relatives, said FBI assistant director in charge William Sweeney.
WashingtonPresident Donald Trump suffered an embarrassing defeat Thursday at the hands of US senators, including fellow Republicans, who voted to terminate his declaration of an emergency on the border with Mexico. Trumps response was swift and unequivocal: VETO! he tweeted after a dozen Republicans joined Democrats in voting down the emergency, declared as a way to secure alternative funding for the border wall denied to him by Congress. Opponents had argued that Trumps emergency amounted to executive overreach, saying a vote to curtail his authority would preserve the constitutionally mandated separation of powers in Washington. Half a dozen Republicans had already spoken out publicly against the February declaration. But on the morning of the vote, the simmering revolt grew to 12 Republicans, and the final tally was a resounding 59 to 41. Trump had made clear he planned to use his veto powers to override any congressional block, after failing to strong-arm enough Republicans into line. I look forward to VETOING the just passed Democrat inspired Resolution which would OPEN BORDERS while increasing Crime, Drugs, and Trafficking in our Country, he tweeted, following up on his initial one-word response. I thank all of the Strong Republicans who voted to support Border Security and our desperately needed WALL! Unless there is a substantial weakening of support for Trump among congressional Republicans on the issue, the first veto of his presidency is expected to stand. The Senate and House of Representatives would each need a two-thirds majority to override a block by the White House, and both parties say the numbers are not likely there. It wont be overturned and the legal scholars say its totally constitutional, Trump told reporters of his emergency. Trump argues the move allows him to skirt Congress and repurpose billions of dollars in other government funds, including money earmarked for military facilities. But Democrats and some Republicans point to Congresss constitutional duty to control government purse strings -- and say declaring an emergency to seize more money is an abuse of executive authority. Senator Mitt Romney, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, opposed Trump on the declaration, saying he cast his vote for the constitution and for the balance of power that is at its core. A group of Republicans had sought to limit defections by cutting a deal with the president to rein in emergency declaration powers, but Trump refused. He set the stage for the showdown by using now-familiar pressure tactics, unsuccessfully warning Republicans not to rebuke him on the emergency. Dont vote with Pelosi! he boomed on Twitter early Thursday, referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi whose Democratic-led chamber had already approved the resolution.Pelosi, who lunched with Trump and the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar at the US Capitol two hours before the critical Senate vote, had urged the upper chamber to reject the presidents unconstitutional measure. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed support for Trump as he sought to rally his troops. The president is operating within existing law, and the crisis on our border is all too real, McConnell said, citing rising numbers of border detentions. But the chambers top Democrat couched it as a power grab by an unrestrained president acting out of pique. Its our job, here in Congress, to limit executive overreach, to defend our core powers of controlling how federal dollars are spent, Senator Chuck Schumer said. This is not an everyday moment, he added. The judgment of history weighs on this vote. Numerous Senate Republicans, including some who sided with Trump Thursday, have called for a narrowing of parameters of the National Emergencies Act of 1976, under whose authority Trump and other presidents have acted in declaring their emergencies. I think that law is overly broad and I want to fix it, Senator Ben Sasse said. But at present Nancy Pelosi doesnt, so I am therefore voting against her politically motivated resolution. The White House laid out an ambitious 2020 budget proposal Monday which contains $8.6 billion in new wall funding, considerably above the $5.7 billion Trump sought for this year. Lawmakers are unlikely to go along. Congress recently provided just $1.4 billion for construction of 90 kilometers of barriers along the border in Texas. The White House has signaled it will seek to repurpose some $6 billion from military funds, without specifying which Pentagon programs would be slashed. But re-apportioning military money is a prickly undertaking, and several lawmakers from both parties have warned against it. Thursdays vote was the second bipartisan rebuke of Trump in as many days, after the Senate Wednesday voted to end US military support for the Saudi-led war effort in Yemen. Trump has threatened to veto that measure too.




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.




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"To be a Peter or do a Judas is a choice we must make many times in our lives." "To be a Peter or do a Judas is a choice we must make many times in our lives."

In the first Sunday of Lent, the Gospel brought us into the desert where Jesus after fasting for 40 days is tempted by Satan. The scripture narrative tells us how Jesus rebuffed Satan such that the latter had no power over the Messiah. After the event in the desert, for tomorrows Gospel, the scripture brings us to the Transfiguration which occurs after Peter's confession that Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus' prediction about his Passion. The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus, together with Peter and James, and John his brother, climbed up a high mountain where Jesus was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. And Peter said to Jesus, Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah. He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him. When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, Rise, and have no fear. And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only. It was a special grace for Peter, James, and John to see Jesus transfigured. They experienced a preview of the glory of Jesus risen from the dead and his glory in heaven. It was also a sneak peak of the glory all hope to partake in heaven. Yet despite this intimate experience Peter did not remain faithful to him especially during his most trying time. They had seen Jesus transfigured, heard the Fathers command to listen to Jesus, saw personally the miracles performed by Jesus yet they were scandalized by the Passion of Jesus. Much like the disciples, we too experienced and met Jesus in special ways and yet we too often let him down. All of us because of our fallen and imperfect nature are vulnerable to sin and most often reject and turn our backs from Jesus. Even the closest apostles like Peter denied Christ three times. Yet in the end Peter was entrusted the keys to the Church only because he knew how to ask for forgiveness; to atone sincerely for his sins. His response after realizing the gravity of his sin was to ask for Gods forgiveness. In contrast, Judas after he betrayed his Master was overcome by shame and despair to hang himself into perdition. To be a Peter or do a Judas is a choice we must make many times in our lives. It is a choice that the Catholic Church has to face also as it addresses the problem of child sex abuse.Pope Francis took the right direction when he convened the bishops all over the world to tackle the issue of clerical sex abuse. Acknowledging ones sin is the first step toward healing and reconciliation. In his speech during the four-day summit, Francis condemned the clerics who allowed themselves to become instruments of Satan by abusing the children. He said: The brutality of this worldwide phenomenon becomes all the more grave and scandalous in the Church, for it is utterly incompatible with her moral authority and ethical credibility. Consecrated persons, chosen by God to guide souls to salvation, let themselves be dominated by their human frailty or sickness and thus become tools of Satan. In abuse, we see the hand of the evil that does not spare even the innocence of children. No explanations suffice for these abuses involving children. We need to recognize with humility and courage that we stand face to face with the mystery of evil, which strikes most violently against the most vulnerable, for they are an image of Jesus. For this reason, the Church has now become increasingly aware of the need not only to curb the gravest cases of abuse by disciplinary measures and civil and canonical processes, but also to decisively confront the phenomenon both inside and outside the Church. Pope Francis then added: In people's justified anger, the Church sees the reflection of the wrath of God, betrayed and insulted by these deceitful consecrated persons. The echo of the silent cry of the little ones who, instead of finding in them fathers and spiritual guides encountered tormentors, will shake hearts dulled by hypocrisy and by power. It is our duty to pay close heed to this silent, choked cry. The Church is in a crisis. How the church leadership will respond and correct its own failings will spell the difference between the response of Peter and that of Judas. Will Gods calling for reconciliation be approached with meekness, humility or will it be treated with obstinacy, pride and lack of faith in Gods compassion and mercy? All of usall sinnersare confronted with the same challenge, that is the challenge to either reach out to Gods grace of forgiveness or remain mired in complacency and stubbornness. In the next column for these Lenten series, I will write about specific measures that have been suggested so that the Church, like each of us, can be transfigured. Facebook Page: Professor Tony La Vina Twitter: tonylavs
Hypocrites such as the opposition and human rights advocates opposing the capital punishment must attend the funeral of Christine Lee Silawan, the 16-year-old high school student raped and slaughtered in Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu. This is so that they would feel the anger of the citizenry. I would want to see the reaction, particularly the faces of those who profess a holier than thou attitude, as they come near the remains of this innocent victim of a most heinous crime. Anyone, who would shout human rights, human rights in defense of the cold-blooded murderers might as well burn in the hottest place in hell. Christine, a 9th Grader at Maribago National High School, was last seen alive last Sunday at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Barangay Pajac where she served as one of the tithes collector during the Holy Mass. She was found dead the following day, March 11th at a vacant lot in Barangay Bankal. Her brutalized body bore at least 30 stab wounds, her face appeared to have been skinned, while her tongue and oesophagus cut and perhaps carted away by the suspects as souvenirs according to police investigators on an interview over at Radyo Pilipinas last Thursday. Christine's most horrible death cries for justice. Her friends and family are wailing for justice. The whole nation calls for justice. Police authorities said she might have resisted the rape by one or more attackers, whom she probably knew.People say and I agree that this gruesome murder could have been committed only by heartless drug addicts. I say this unspeakable crime could only be committed by demons not entitled to any human rights and due process. They must burn in hell, along with whoever would coddle them here on earth. These extremely dangerous criminals, who have no respect for the life of the defenseless, innocent youngster must go to hell as soon as they are arrested. These scums deserve to pay the ultimate price. Unfortunately, Congress is pussy-footing on the reenactment of the capital punishment and our useless laws concocted by hypocritical human rights advocates have produced an entire generations of heinous criminals. While we await the passage of the death penalty, Christines treacherous killers must be accorded with a special one-way trip to hell courtesy of the nanlaban or agaw-armas method of some police operatives. These rapists/murderers do not deserve to live a day longer in this world, do they, Mr. President, Sir?
As such, the committees decision has met with predictable backlash from human rights advocates and political groups with an interest in Iranian affairs. Among these are UN Watch, which declared that Irans appointment sends the worst possible message regarding the international bodys core commitments.

As UN Watch also pointed out, the committees move was announced just a day after it was reported that a renowned female human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, as sentenced to 33 years in prison on vaguely defined charges, in addition to the seven years she previously received for insulting the supreme leader and colluding with foreign states through her human rights work.

The Iranian regime routinely dismisses criticism of its human rights record, including its record on the rights of women, as instances of foreign imperialism, despite being a party to multiple documents that codify international standards in these areas. The work of Tehrans own internal human rights monitor is dedicated almost entirely to disputing independent accounts of the regimes abuses.

In view of this past behavior, it stands to reason that Iran will utilize its position on the Womens Rights Committee to similar effect, either by opposing information that showcases the second-class status of Iranian women or by promoting its own backwards view of womens rights on the international stage. This latter project has been a feature of Iranian propaganda, both at home and abroad, throughout the regimes 40-year history but particularly in recent years.

Coinciding with the administration of so-called moderate President Hassan Rouhani, the nations ultimate clerical authority, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has pushed for reinforcement of the status of women as wives and mothers, discouraging their entry into the workforce and their escalating push for equal rights.

Toward this end, the office of the supreme leader and other hardline institutions have reduced access to birth control, expanded the segregation of women and men in public places, empowered hardline militias to more aggressively confront women over perceived violations of the countrys mandatory veiling laws, and so on.

Meanwhile, state media and semi-independent purveyors of hardline propaganda have been hard at work controlling public imagery regarding womens role in society. This trend was featured by IranWire last week, in a report marking International Womens Day.

The article described billboards that have been erected by one media group, the Owj Organization, which is close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Those public displays exclude women from images supposedly celebrating national unity, while actively promoting scenes of motherhood and no other female social roles.

This prompted one Iranian Twitter user to opine that by simply pretending that women do not exist outside of the home, Owj has undertaken a project that is even worse than humiliation and insults.

This is not to say that humiliation and insults have not also been elements of the regimes counter-pressure against womens liberation. Indeed, in recent months, there has been a veritable outpouring of viral videos depicting the nations morality police harassing, often violently, women whose manner of dress is deemed to be insufficiently compliant with the theocratic regimes interpretation of Islamic law.

While such incidents constitute a longstanding phenomenon, the numbers of morality policy have been deliberately bolstered in recent years, and the latest upsurge in clashes presumably reflects their attempt to crack down on womens rights protests in the wake of the movement called Girls of Revolution Street.

Referring to the location of the first protest in which a woman removed her white hijab publicly to hold it over her head like banner, the movement has grown to involve dozens of women since December 2017, many of whom have faced charges such as encouraging immorality and prostitution. It was for attempting to defend these protesters in court that Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested last year and subsequently sentenced to more than three decades in prison on the basis of seven politically-motivated charges.

Mohammad Moghimi, a fellow attorney who had represented Sotoudeh in other cases, identified the specific charges as: assembly and collusion against national security; propaganda against the state; membership in the Defenders of Human Rights Center, the Legam group (Step by Step to Stop the Death Penalty, and the National Peace Council); encouraging corruption and prostitution; appearing at the judiciary without Islamic hijab; disturbing public peace and order; and publishing falsehoods with the intent to disturb public opinion.

The Iranian judiciary initially acknowledged only that seven years had been added to her pre-existing sentence, but a fuller accounting of her cases was provided via social media by Sotoudehs husband and fellow political prisoner Reza Khandan, among other advocates.

It remains unclear how much of the total 38 years she will be order to serve, however. Recent changes to Irans penal code call for prisoners to serve only the longest of multiple sentences when they are passed simultaneously.

As such, some reports indicate that Sotoudeh may effectively be sentenced to only 10 years, although this has hardly diminished criticism of the fact that she is being penalized solely for defending womens rights and attempting to perform her work as an attorney.

An effective 10-year sentence would not be the worst to be passed against a woman associated with the Revolution Street protests. At least one of the public protesters has been condemned to 20 years imprisonment. Such reactionary sentencing arguably reflects a sense of panic within the Iranian regime regarding not only the upsurge in public advocacy for gender equality but also ongoing political and social rest in general.

Only one day after the first Revolution Street protest, the city of Mashhad became site to the first in what would become a string of mass demonstrations that generated explicit calls for regime change in more than 100 Iranian cities and towns.

The prosecution of Nasrin Sotoudeh is relevant to both the general and the specific crackdowns being undertaken by the regime. As well as being only one of dozens of womens rights activists to be targeted over the past year, she is also one of at least seven human rights lawyers to be prosecuted during that same timeframe, according to the BBC.

The overall trends have been widely reported in international media, as have been the irregularities in the Sotoudeh case. As such, a number of governments and international organizations have issued nearly simultaneous condemnations of both phenomena.

For instance, the US State Department condemned the sentencing of Ms. Sotoudeh  in the strongest possible terms, calling it beyond barbaric on the same day that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented the Departments annual human rights report and gave special emphasis to Irans arbitrary executions, attacks on peaceful protesters, and a 40-year pattern of cruelty.

On Thursday, the UNs Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights issued a statement expressing shock at the length of Sotoudehs sentence and calling attention to the denial of due process through such practices as barring the defendant from selecting any counsel other than those lawyers who had been pre-approved and listed by the judiciary.

The commission joined a previous statement by European Union External Action in urging the Iranian government to immediately free both Sotoudeh and her husband, pending a review of their cases.

Days earlier, the UNHRC also issued a statement highlighting the general findings in the first report by Javaid Rehman, the current special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The statement began by saying: Worrying patterns of intimidation, arrest, prosecution, and ill-treatment of human rights defenders, lawyers, and labour rights activists in Iran signal an increasingly severe State response to protests and strikes in the country.

Although the general statements by the UN and the US State Department did not give special emphasis to womens rights issues, these have been a common feature of criticisms levied against the Islamic Republic for many years. Furthermore, the relationship between those general statements and the Sotoudeh case should leave no question about the persistent nature of the regimes negative record on womens rights.

Even the general complaints about Irans crackdown on dissent might be considered sufficient to disqualify the regimes delegates from commenting, via the UN Womens Rights Committee, on some of the issues that were identified by UN Watch as being within the committees purview. Among these are deaths and torture of women in custody, forced disappearances or abductions of women, threats or pressure exerted on women not to complain or to withdraw complaints, and violation of the rights of women human rights defenders to freedom of expression and assembly.

Other designated areas of concern, like gender stereotyping, domestic violence, virginity testing, and legal discrimination call for a more targeted assessment of Irans record in order to judge the validity of its inclusion on the committees working group.

Iranian officials may try to dispute these assessments, for instance by highlighting the high level of education among women in the Islamic Republic. But as IranWire pointed out in another article published on International Womens Day, these features of Iranian society exist in spite of the regimes official attitudes on gender and sexuality, not because of them.

According to the article, institutionalized discrimination and legal incongruities, combined with the regimes push for wider recognition of a confined female social role challenge future prospects for Iranian women, positioning them as the countrys most vulnerable population.
In her tweets published today Mrs. Rajavi stated:

I strongly condemn the mass shootings on two mosques in #NewZealand and the heinous killings of worshipers. #Iran

On behalf of the people of #Iran who have been suffering under the rule of the Godfather of terrorism for 40 years, I extend my deepest sympathies to the families of the victims and pray for quick recovery of those injured. #NewZealand
That plan did not ultimately come to fruition and there is presently no information to suggest that it is being actively pursued, but Shamkhanis remarks suggest that the Iranian regime has seized upon the mere hint of Western nuclear cooperation for propaganda purposes and to justifying the continuation of a longstanding military buildup, which was already amplified around the time of last months 40th anniversary of the Iranian revolution.

This will force us to revise our strategy based on the nature and geography of new threats, and predict the requirements of our country and armed forces, Shamkhani said, according to Reuters. Without acknowledging international concerns over Irans own failure to fully disclose the details of its nuclear work, the security official declared that suspicious nuclear projects can endanger the security of the region and the world.

Tehran routinely insists that even amidst large-scale buildups, its military projects are purely defensive in nature. However, the rhetoric of Iranian officials, particularly members and supporters of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, frequently consists of explicit threats against perceived enemies including the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates.

Shamkhanis statement was no doubt intended to strengthen the former trend by giving the impression that there is an actively growing regional threat that Iran must be prepared to meet. But that statement closely coincided with the continued outpouring of militarist rhetoric that eagerly highlighted the prospect of war. On the same day that Shamkhani spoke out on this topic, Fars News Agency published a report highlighting the threats and warnings offered in recent days by three separate military officials.

While these remarks generally upheld the official line about Irans defensive posture, they also emphasized the supposedly distant geographical reach of Irans military capabilities. The overall message, according to Fars, was that Iran is powerful and its enemies are weak. And as such, General Rahim Safavi was quoted as saying, We tell these groups that the Iranian Armed Forces will destroy them even beyond the borders.

Referring to Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, General Hossein Salami said the IRGC and its proxies will chase them thousands of kilometers away and will not stop this chasing until purging their remnants. But foreign action and the threat thereof has certainly not been limited to ISIL targets, least of all when one takes into account instances of Iran-backed terrorism. At least six such terror plots were uncovered in Europe and the United States during 2018, including a plot to set off explosives at the annual gathering of Iranian expatriates near Paris under the banner of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

In the midst of Irans recent military buildup, some officials have also teased the prospect of a conventional military threat against Western targets, ostensibly in order to counterbalance perceived Western threats in the Persian Gulf. In January, for instance, Admiral Touraj Hasnai Moqaddam was quoted as saying that an Iranian flotilla would soon be ready to travel to the Atlantic Ocean, near the American coast.

In an apparent effort to amplify such threats on Thursday, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called for maximum mobilization against the US and Israel, adding that Iranian forces are capable of inflicting the heaviest defeat on its declared enemies. Once again, these comments were justified by appeal to an unspecified hostile campaign by those countries, thereby giving the supreme leader and his supporters plausible deniability in the face of criticisms that Iran is assuming an aggressive posture in its foreign policy.

The Iranian regime has made every effort to extend that deniability to its much-criticized ballistic missile program as well, even though international arms experts recognize very limited defensive applications of such technology.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution that codified the 2015 Iran nuclear deal also called upon the Islamic Republic to avoid all work related to such nuclear-capable weapons, but Iranian ballistic missile tests have continued uninterrupted. In fact, the Algemeiner published an extensive report on this weapons program on Wednesday and pointed out that IRGC officers have personally boosted plans for upwards of 50 ballistic missile tests per year.

This situation provided a major part of the foundation for the Trump administrations withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action last May. Because of the potential nuclear applications of Irans ballistic missiles, the ongoing development of those weapons leads many observers to conclude that the regime has not given up its ambition to develop nuclear arms. This in turn encourages questions about Tehrans seriousness when it condemns prospective nuclear projects among its regional adversaries, though it will surely have little impact on the regimes efforts to leverage that issue in its war of words with the US and its allies.
Australian Government data stored by American companies which have been certified as Protected cloud providers is not subject to the US CLOUD Act, which allows Washington to obtain data stored overseas by American companies in the event that it is deemed to be needed by law enforcement authorities.

A spokesperson for the Australian Cyber Security Centre told iTWire in response to a query sent to the Australian Signals Directorate: "The Australian Government is not subject to the US law under the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act 2018 (the CLOUD Act) as it only applies to US citizens or individuals residing in the United States."

Cyber law expert Helaine Leggat, principal lawyer for cyber law at local firm Sladen, told iTWire that the position stated by the ACSC was correct as of the moment. "It will change for us if/when The US and Australia enter into an agreement," she added.

In April last year, it was reported that Australia would seek an agreement with the US in order to gain access to data located there when needed upon execution of a local warrant with a US tech outfit.

It said then Law Enforcement and Cyber Security Minister Angus Taylor would visit the US soon to set the stage for an agreement. Taylor has since moved to the energy portfolio and it is unclear whether the matter has progressed given the ructions with the government.

In a paper Leggat presented to the Information Security Forum's World Congress in Las Vegas last year, she pointed out that there was a way by which the US could obtain any data it wanted from another country.

"Recent amendments to US Rules of Criminal Procedure (Rule 41), authorise extra-territorial governmental hacking," she wrote.

"US law enforcement agencies, (local police and federal agents), can compel US and foreign technology companies to disclose communications data of US and foreign users that is stored overseas, regardless of the physical location of the data, potentially bypassing privacy and data protection laws."

Last year, when the Act was passed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American organisation that fights for digital rights, outlined the following scenario as one that could eventuate under the Act:

"London investigators want the private Slack messages of a Londoner they suspect of bank fraud. The London police could go directly to Slack, a US company, to request and collect those messages.

"The London police would not necessarily need prior judicial review for this request. The London police would not be required to notify US law enforcement about this request. The London police would not need a probable cause warrant for this collection.

"Predictably, in this request, the London police might also collect Slack messages written by US persons communicating with the Londoner suspected of bank fraud. Those messages could be read, stored, and potentially shared, all without the US person knowing about it.

"Those messages, if shared with US law enforcement, could be used to criminally charge the US person in a US court, even though a warrant was never issued."

Two American companies  Microsoft and Amazon Web Services  are among the six firms that can bid to store top-secret data from Australian federal agencies. The others are Vault, Macquarie Government and Sliced Tech (all Australian) and Dimension Data (South Africa).

The CLOUD Act was passed to overcome an obstacle faced by the FBI in obtaining data which Microsoft had stored in Ireland. The agency said the data in question was related to a drug-trafficking case.

The Act was tagged onto a defence spending bill, ensuring that it would get through the US Congress, as very few US politicians vote against such bills.
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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.
Rape. Torture. Massacre. Historian James M. Scotts Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila narrates in gruesome detail the atrocities of World War II for an audience that has not heard its stories, but must in order for the past not to be repeated. Rampage is hefty at 640 pages and spares no detail about the worst urban fighting that war ever saw. It also tells the stories of two military generals, the wars most prominent figuresDouglas MacArthur and Tomoyuki Yamashita. The events 74thanniversary came and went last week with nary a peep from pundits, historians, and the media. The battle lasted from Feb. 3 to March 3, 1945, and was part of the 1944-1945 Philippine Campaign. Some 35,000 American troops and 3,000 Filipino guerillas fought against an estimated 17,000 Japanese sailors, marines, and soldiers. The loss of life was horrificmore than 100,000 civilians were killed, as were 1,010 Allied forces and 16,665 Japanese troops. Manila, then lauded as the Pearl of the Orient, was devastated. The grand neoclassical buildings built by the Americans, the walled city of Intramuros and its centuries of Spanish legacyall were laid to waste. Scott ransacks a trove of sources to deliver eyewitness accounts of the slaughter, rape, and plunder committed by Japanese forces against Filipinos and foreign civilians. He quotes an internee at the University of Santo Tomas: He saw a high explosive shell hit against human flesh and then dust, debris mixed with human arms, legs, and bodies that were twisted and torn under. Where there were men and women, living and breathing, now only blood, bones, quivering flesh. The carnage took place not only at UST but also at the German Club, De La Salle, St. Pauls Collegeall over the city, in fact. Inside Intramuros, much of it destroyed by fire, were the dead bodies of Filipino men, some naked, dangled from lampposts. Some were burned aliveTheir bodies were just like charcoal. To survive, Filipinos ate what they could. Not just the fruit from banana and papaya trees, said Andrea Lopez, but the leaves and even stalks. The wealthier Spanish families offered up pets to the hungry. My family killed four dogs, Lopez said. As the people were fighting to get a piece we had to eat it raw most of the time.The book contains many other accounts that for some may be difficult to read, as they contain graphic descriptions of wartime violence. Scott examines each atrocity and massacre to bring to a new audience the truth of what happened during that battle, and to honor and remember the victims and survivors who suffered greatly at the hands of the angry Japanese who realized they could not defeat the American forces. The Battle of Manila was counted as a success for General MacArthur, who had kept his promise: I shall return. After the war, General Yamashita was tried and sentenced for war crimes and hung. Although he did not directly order his troops to commit the atrocities, the war crimes court found him liable for his mens deeds under the chain of command principle. It was the Imperial Japanese Navys Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi who ordered his troops to fight to the death, ignoring the Armys instructions to withdraw from the city and thus frustrating Yamashitas attempts to face the Americans with a unified defense. The civilians, Filipinos and otherwise, were helpless against the Japanese rampage. Scott quotes the January 6, 1945 diary entry of Pacita Pestano-Jacinto: There is no weapon against cruelty, against warped minds and warped souls. What Rampage delivers is the truth of war, the evil of war, and the reasons why modern societies must avoid it at all cost. Manila has never truly recovered from the battle, writes Scott. Not only did the war rob the Philippines of its capital, but it also destroyed generations of families, the effects of which still ripple through lives even today. For those for whom World War II is just a vague notion of an old conflict, this should be required reading. Scotts voluminous research delves into letters, news dispatches, diaries, investigator and court records, and survivor testimony to make the 29-day battle for the city come alive. Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila by James M. Scott is available at National Bookstore. Call (02) 8888-627 to inquire for availability or buy online at nationalbookstore.com / FB and Twitter: @DrJennyO
US Federal Borrowing Crosses the Rubicon

A year ago, Republicans in control of Congress suspended the cap on federal borrowing. The limit was automatically re-imposed on March 1st. Politicians now have a few months to hammer out legislation to raise the cap as the Treasury employs extraordinary measures to fend off default.

The federal deficit is mushrooming once again. The 2017 tax cuts have taken a bite out of receipts at the IRS and economic growth has not met expectations.

This years borrowing to fill the gap between government tax revenue and expenditures may reach a trillion dollars for the first time since 2012.

If Washington politicians follow the usual script, we can expect Republicans to posture as fiscal conservatives and then relent either just before or just after a federal shutdown.

Democrats will chastise the GOP for playing politics with Americas sacred responsibility to pay its bills.

This drama has played out dozens of times over recent decades and is therefore likely to repeat once more this fall.

Perhaps it wont, though. The Associated Press notes that there just arent many people in the Capitol who even pretend to care anymore when it comes to deficits.

The AP quoted former senator Judd Gregg from New Hampshire on Sunday: The president doesnt care. The leadership of the Democratic Party doesnt care. He should also have included Republican leadership, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who have reliably supported metastasizing federal debt.

Meanwhile, the socialist Left has touted so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as the mechanism to fund the economy-killing Green New Deal and any and all other government boondoggles. At its core, MMT advocates for perpetual money printing to fund government spending.

There has already been one government shutdown this year. Congress and the President may decide another one, for the sake of a bit of theater around the borrowing limit, is not a good idea.

Genuine conservatives in the Republican Senate are few and far between.

President Donald Trump released a portion of his proposed 2020 budget which calls for 5% cuts in non-defense domestic discretionary spending. He is requesting $8.6 billion in funding for a wall.

Needless to say, he will be vehemently opposed by House Democrats, and many expect Trump to compromise. In any event, should the Presidents budget be enacted, officials estimate the budget might balance by 2034.

The borrowing cap is going to be raised as always. Even the will to pretend to fight against limits is fading. 2019 may be the year when the fiction of a federal borrowing limit is removed all together.



By Clint Siegner

MoneyMetals.com

Clint Siegner is a Director at Money Metals Exchange, perhaps the nation's fastest-growing dealer of low-premium precious metals coins, rounds, and bars. Siegner, a graduate of Linfield College in Oregon, puts his experience in business management along with his passion for personal liberty, limited government, and honest money into the development of Money Metals' brand and reach. This includes writing extensively on the bullion markets and their intersection with policy and world affairs.

 2019 Clint Siegner - All Rights Reserved

Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.








Attorney David Ogden has written an article in the National Law Journal discussing why the Supreme Court should side with the petitioner in Flowers v. Mississippi. Flowers, scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court on March 20, will examine whether the Mississippi Supreme Court erred in its application of Batson v. Kentucky. The prosecutor in Flowers repeatedly and routinely used peremptory challenges to strike potential African American jurors. There is an extensive track record because Flowers was tried 6 times. Ogden chairs the Government and Regulatory Litigation Practice Group at WilmerHale and previously served in various positions in the federal government. According to his article

public trust in the justice system requires public confidence that justice is administered fairly; that all citizens are governed by laws, not by individuals; and that all members of society get a fair shake, free from invidious discrimination. Perception of unequal treatment, particularly of criminal defendants, undermines the public trust. Its that very trust that makes effective law enforcement possible. The vital work of law enforcement professionals, from police to prosecutors and policymakers, depends on public cooperation with, and public faith in, law enforcement and our system of justice.

National Law Journal: Public Safety Depends on Juries Chosen Without Racial Discrimination
- The Justice Department said that all affected consumers can sue Manila Water for the water interruptions

- Manila Water announced that all of their consumers will be experiencing daily water interruptions that might last until May

- President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the Manila Water and Maynilad to release water from the Angat Dam

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According to Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra, affected consumers of Manila Water can file a complaint against the water service provider amidst the water shortage. KAMI learned that there should be evidence of Manila Waters fault that can be presented to the court during the trial.

"If there is showing of fault or negligence on the part of Manila Water and if it is established that this crisis is caused not by natural causes or force majeure, then affected consumers may file damage suits individually," Guevarra said, as reported by the CNN Philippines.

PAY ATTENTION: The Amazing Cast Of Game Of Thrones In Then And Now (PHOTOS)

However, the consumers cannot file a class suit because the water interruptions in different places may vary as well.

KAMI previously reported that all consumers of Manila Water will be experiencing daily water interruptions that may last from 6 to 21 hours starting March 14 and 15. It has been reported that the daily water interruptions may last until May or until the end of summer season.

Manila Bulletin recently reported that President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the Manila Water and Maynilad to release water from Angat Dam effective today (March 15) that will last up to 150 days.

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Failure to do so, Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said that the President will personally go to Maynilad and/or Manila Water to identify those who should be held accountable for the artificial water shortage.

Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news!

Aquino-Falcis Controversy: Brother Speaks Up! Atty. Jesus Falcis, brother of Nicko Falcis, discloses how the controversy involving Kris Aquino and Nicko, her former project manager, has affected the life of his family. Check out all of our exciting videos  on KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: Kami.com.ph
- Comedian Chokoleit had his final wake in Manila on March 14

- Reportedly, he will be transferred to his hometown in Davao City

- A lot of celebrities visited the late actor during his wakes last night

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Many famous celebrities in the Philippines allotted time to visit and pay respect to the late comedian Chokoleit at his wake in Manila.

KAMI learned that the jolly actor passed away on March 9 after succumbing to pulmonary endema and heart attack.

Chokoleit had the final night of his wake in Manila on March 14 and his corpse will be brought to his hometown in Davao City.

Aside from the comedians closest friends Vice Ganda, Pokwang, Pooh, and K Brosas, there were other prominent personalities who were present during the gloomy event.

These celebrities were Ryan Bang, Jhong Hilario, Ogie Diaz, and Candy Pangilinan.

Former Pinoy Big Brother (PBB) housemates Kisses Delavin and Vivoree Esclito were also spotted at Chokoleits last night in Manila.

Mami-miss ko po yun lagi siyang nakikipag-kwentuhan Lagi ko po siyang hina-hug kasi siya po yung pinaka-huggable sa lahat, Kisses said in an interview.

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Here is the video:

In a previous article by , the tragic and sudden death of Chokoleit drew various reactions from social meida users.

Chokoleit, or Jonathan Garcia in real life, was a veteran Filipino actor who gained popularity after portraying an important role in the hit drama series Marina.

He died at the age of 48 shortly after his performance in Abra.

PAY ATTENTION: Pointers To A Healthy Relationship We All Should Know About

Enjoyed reading our story? Download KAMI's news app on Google Play now and stay up-to-date with major Filipino news!

Tricky Questions: What is the English of "bahing? We have included one of the trickiest questions and interesting challenges in this channel. Do you enjoy watching street interviews and listening to different opinions?  on HumanMeter!

Source: Kami.com.ph
First -- writing advice from the back of a pencil.

_______________________________

The following is a press release from Metropolitan State University of Denver, Chicana/Chicano Studies (with some edits and additions from me.)

Metropolitan State University of Denver, Chicana/o Studies Department invites the community to the 12th Annual Lalo Delgado Poetry Festival -- Thursday April 4, 2019 from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm. at the St. Cajetans Center, on the Auraria Campus, Denver.





This years theme: Raices Y Alas: Looking Back and Moving Forward ~ Roots and Wings: Looking Back and Moving Forward will center on social action through poetry.









Abelardo "Lalo" Delgado











Lalo Delgado is remembered as Colorados social justice poet and considered the National Grandfather of Chicano Poetry. Among many other awards and recognition, Delgado received a Civil Rights Award from Rosa Parks, Scholar/Elder of the Civil Rights Movement who worked with Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez to support thousands of migrant farm workers in the Unites States. Lalo was originally from El Paso Texas, but he eventually made Denver his family's home. His numerous publications include the seminal poem Stupid America, regarded as a masterpiece of Chicano thought and a powerful example of resistance poetry.







Ariana Brown

The 2019 Lalo Delgado Poetry Festival will feature nationally recognized poet: Ariana Brown. Brown is a poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes and a 2014 collegiate national poetry slam champion. Ariana, who has been dubbed a part-time curandera, is primarily interested in using poetry to validate Black girl rage, in all its miraculous forms. Follow her work online at arianabrown.com or on Twitter & Instagram @arianathepoet.

Eden Nicole

Lalos Poetry Festival also welcomes Denvers own Eden Nicole. Eden merges her inspirations from her three sons with her indigenous roots and environmental activism to create her spoken word. Eden has various works published through Cafe Cultura, Red Rising Magazine in Canada and she has been showcased in the Cuatro: A Series of Artist Interactions with the Denver Art Museum (2017), amongst many other events throughout the Denver Metro area. Through Groupo Tlaloc Danza Azteca, Medicine Heart Dancers, and the Indigenous Two Spirit and LGBTQ+ communities, she is teaching her sons the traditions of their people; while also pursuing her Bachelors Degree in Environmental Engineering and Hydrology.





Ana Duran, Lalos eldest daughter, welcomes the poetry recited by Lalos great grandchildren.





The festival opening at 9 a.m. begins with a blessing ceremony by Aztec Troupe Huitzilopochtli, followed by a free continental breakfast and lunch. The event is free and open to the public. Sponsors include MSU Presidents Office of Institutional Diversity: Chicana/o Studies, GITA, Student Activities and CU Denver Latinx Services.





For more information, please contact Christina M. Sigala at selim@msudenver.edu





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Another horse has been euthanized at Santa Anita Park because of an injury sustained during training, bringing the total to 22 horses that have died at the racetrack in less than three months.

According to the Daily Racing Form, Princess Lili B, the horse who died Thursday, broke both front legs after a half-mile workout. The 3-year-old filly was euthanized immediately after.

https://t.co/78CYJChXfC report Princess Lili B broke both front legs at conclusion of half-mile workout Thursday at Santa Anita. Euthanized. Somber mood trackside. Training will continue this morning.  Brad Free (@BradFree1) March 14, 2019

In response to the death, The Stronach Group, which owns Santa Anita Park, released a statement saying that they will be making marked changes in the way they do business -- most notably, by declaring zero tolerance for race day medication. Race day medication is an umbrella term for a number of drugs that are administered on the same day that a horse is racing, but critics have argued they mask underlying injuries and put horses at greater risk for those injuries to become fatal.

"We have arrived at a watershed moment," said Belinda Stronach, The Stronach Group's chairman and president. "The Stronach Group has long been a strong advocate for the abolishment of race day medication, but we will wait no longer for the industry to come together as one to institute these changes. Nor will we wait for the legislation required to undertake this paradigm shift."

Princess Lili B's death marks the second time this year that Santa Anita Park has closed in response to the staggeringly high number of horse fatalities, then reopened only to have more animals sustain fatal injuries.

In February, after 19 horses died on Santa Anita's grounds, the park's main track was evaluated and deemed "100 percent ready" for training and racing by Michael Peterson, director of the University of Kentucky's Agricultural Equine Programs.

This time, the park closed on March 5 after the death of the 21st horse in under three months. Park officials later announced that they brought on trackman and consultant Dennis Moore to evaluate the racetrack's conditions. Four days later, Moore said in a statement that "this track is in outstanding condition, and it's ready for training."

Princess Lili B was fatally injured five days after that statement.

Representatives from the park have not provided a definitive reason for the unusually high number of injuries and deaths. On Monday, spokesperson Mike Willman said that it was likely due to the effect of rain on the soil, but wouldn't confirm.

On Wednesday, representatives from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals staged a protest outside the offices of District Attorney Jackie Lacey, demanding an investigation of the track. That protest was planned prior to the latest fatality.

Following the death of Princess Lili B, training continued at Santa Anita Park.
Moroccos telecom giant Maroc Telecom continues its international development focusing on its expansion in Africa wherein the company is present in several African countries.

It signed on Thursday an agreement with international telecommunications & media company Millicom to acquire 100 pc of the shares of its subsidiary Tigo Chad, 1st mobile operator in Chad.

The transaction, whose amount has not been disclosed, needs the approval by the Chadian Authorities.

In 2001, Maroc Telecom acquired Mauritel, the incumbent operator in Mauritania. Five years later, it took over Onatel, the public operator in Burkina Faso. In 2007, it purchased Gabon Telecom, while in 2009, it acquired Sotelma in Mali.

The Moroccan telecom group says its goal set for all these subsidiaries is to make them reference operators in their country, to ultimately make Maroc Telecom an important player in the region and help them develop new information and communication technologies.

An important share of the subsidiaries sales is dedicated for investment. This effort helps modernize the infrastructures, innovate, and provide a quality service at ever lower prices, thus democratizing telephony in Africa.
The African Development Bank (AfDB) will soon launch Green Baseload Facility to provide concessional finance to support reliable and affordable renewable energy, the banks president Akinwumi A. Adesina said.

Speaking at the One Planet Summit in Nairobi, Adesina said that the Bank would commit at least US$25 billion towards climate finance.

In his words, the Bank is on course to achieve its target of allocating 40% of its funding to climate finance by 2020, a year ahead.

The Banks commitment on the target, the highest among all multilateral development banks, has progressed steadily from 9% in 2016 to 28% in 2017 and 32% in 2018, the Abidjan-based institution said in a statement.

The required level of financing is only feasible with the direct involvement of the entire financial sector, said Adesina.

The green baseload facility will be launched under the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA 2.0) to provide concessional finance and technical assistance to support the penetration and scale-up of renewable energy, to provide affordable and reliable renewable energy baseload, the former Nigerian agriculture minister explained.

The AfDBs project will be supported by the World Bank. The Washington-based financial institution said in a statement that it had pledged $22.5 billion for 2021-2025.

Some of the beneficiaries of the World Banks funding would include projects in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Kenya.
For Jussie Smollett, One Story Equals 16 Felony Counts

News that a grand jury had indicted Empire actor Jussie Smollett for allegedly lying to Chicago police about being attacked by two masked men may not have made much of a splash except for one thing: The lone felony count that Smollett had been arrested on last month had turned into 16.

The reasons Smollett is facing 16 counts rather than just one count of disorderly conduct _ the felony in Illinois that people are charged with when accused of lying to police _ are not fully explained in the indictment that a grand jury returned Thursday. But legal experts say indictments like that arent uncommon in Chicago, and there are some explanations as to how the grand jury could have arrived at the 16 counts, eight of them for Smolletts comments to a police officer and eight others for what he told a detective.

The first starts with something that has been apparent since Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson briefed reporters last month on the investigation: Authorities are angry at Smollett.

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What you have is a police department and prosecutors that are obviously mad at him for embarrassing the city so they took every one of his lies and made it into another count, said Terry Sullivan, a prominent local attorney who as a young prosecutor helped convict serial killer John Wayne Gacy in 1980 of killing 33 young men.

Smolletts attorney, Mark Geragos called the 16-count indictment prosecutorial overkill. But prominent Chicago defense attorney Joseph Lopez, who is not involved in the Smollett case, said its the way prosecutors in Chicago do business.

It is common practice for the Cook County states attorney to charge as much as they can for any kind of crime, he said.

A former state appellate judge suggested such a strategy might be employed by prosecutors trying to protect themselves from the possibility that a jury or a judge might believe some, but not all, of the allegations.

If you only charge him with one or two counts and they find him not guilty of them, youre done, said David Erickson, who now teaches at Chicago Kent College of Law. This gives the prosecution the ability to convict him of any one of these lies.

Lopez said it appears that when prosecutors went to the grand jury they simply dissected the case, breaking Smolletts account into each individual pieces and accuse him of one count per detail they believe he made up.

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That means that one count might stem from Smolletts contention that the men hurled racial and homophobic taunts at him and another for what he said was the way they beat him. Another could be tied to his claim that the men doused him with an unknown chemical and another still for his statement that one of them looped a rope tied like a noose around his neck. Then there was his assertion, police said, that he could see one of the men was white because he could see the skin around his eyes. The two men police say Smollett hired to take part in the attack are both black.

The lies add up pretty fast, Lopez said.

Another explanation for the multiple counts is that perhaps Smollett gave multiple statements to the police, meaning that individual counts represent separate interviews with police. But Lopez finds that unlikely because all the counts list the same date _ Jan. 29.

Each count is a Class 4 felony, which carries a possible prison sentence of one to three years. If Smollett is convicted, a judge could allow him to be given probation instead of imposing a prison sentence.

Lopez and Erickson agreed that if Smollett is convicted, it wont matter whether its on one or several counts when it comes to sentencing. Thats because he would be sentenced for only one of them.

If you add them all up its still only one crime, Erickson said. Thats just how it is.

And Lopez said that if Smollett is convicted of multiple counts, prosecutors can ask that the sentences be served consecutively but it is highly unlikely a judge would do so.

Smolletts legal troubles may not begin and end with this one indictment. Days before the Jan. 29 incident, a letter threatening Smollett was sent to the studio where the television show is filmed _ a letter Johnson told reporters the day Smollett appeared in court that the actor had actually sent.

The FBI, which is investigating that letter, has declined to comment on the investigation. But if Smollett did talk to the FBI, depending on what he said, he could be in more legal trouble.

Lying to the FBI is a crime, said Erickson.

Smollett is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday, where he will likely enter a formal plea to the 16 counts.

Jussie adamantly maintains his innocence even if law enforcement has robbed him of that presumption, Geragos, his attorney, said.
Harris, Colleagues Introduce Bill to Limit Use of Solitary Confinement

U.S. Senators Kamala D. Harris (D-CA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chris Coons (D-DE), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) last week introduced legislation to reduce the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) use of solitary confinement and improve conditions for inmates separated from the general prison population.

As incarcerated people repay their debt to society and prepare to re-enter their communities, we must also ensure that prison facilities are respecting their basic human rights. Overuse of solitary confinement is a violation of basic dignity and respect that does nothing to further public safety, said Senator Harris. Thats why Im joining my colleagues to reintroduce this legislation to restrict the use of solitary confinement, putting us one step closer to a smart and fair criminal justice system.

The Solitary Confinement Reform Act limits solitary confinement to the briefest term and under the least restrictive conditions possible, because the overuse of solitary confinement threatens public safety, strains prison budgets, and violates fundamental human rights. The bill also improves access to mental health services for BOP prisoners in solitary confinement, and provides resources to state and local jurisdictions to assist them in reforming their own confinement practices. Additionally, the bill protects inmates civil rights through the creation of a Civil Rights Ombudsman position and bans the practice of placing LGBTQ inmates in solitary confinement as a means of protection.

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Harris, Durbin, Coons, Booker, Leahy, and Warren last week also pressed Acting Bureau of Prisons Director Hugh Hurwitz to take measures to address the significant increase in the use of restricted housing in the Federal prison system. Unfortunately, the once-encouraging decline in the restricted housing population has reversed over the last several months. As of February 27, 2019, 7.8 percent of the total Federal prison population was housed in restricted housingincluding 10,581 inmates in special housing units, 892 inmates in special management units, and 398 inmates in the ADX supermax facility in Florence, Colorado.

This is a deeply troubling development. While we understand BOP is currently addressing significant challenges, including increased contraband, we are also concerned by the sharp rise in a practice that DOJ has acknowledged can cause serious, long-lasting harm and should be used only as necessaryand never as a default solution, the members wrote in a letter to Acting Director Hurwitz. As we reintroduce the Solitary Confinement Reform Act, we urge you to take steps to address this concerning rise in the use of restricted housing. We are ready and willing to work with you to reform and reduce this practice.

Full text of the letter is available here.

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The Solitary Confinement Reform Act has been endorsed by the American Civil Liberties Union, National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Human Rights Campaign, National Alliance on Mental Illness, Campaign for Youth Justice, and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Kinecta Federal Credit Union Announces its 2019 Youth Scholarships and Teaching Grants for Grow Program

Kinecta Federal Credit Union has announced its highly anticipated 2019 Youth Scholarships and Teaching Grants for Grow program. Beginning March 1, 2019 and running through March 29, 2019, eligible students and teachers can apply at https://www.kinecta.org/youth-scholarships/ and https://www.kinecta.org/teaching-grants/. Eight $2,000 scholarships will be awarded to help full-time students make higher education a reality, and six $2,000 grants will be given to teachers to help them bolster instruction and classroom projects.

All applications and supporting documents must be received by March 29, 2019, and Kinecta Scholarships and Grants winners will be announced on or around May 31, 2019. To date, Kinecta Federal Credit Union has awarded more than $180,000 to help 85 students to make higher education a reality and has helped 14 teachers to purchase supplies or fund classroom projects through its Youth Scholarships and Teaching Grants for Grow program.

Kinecta Federal Credit Union is dedicated to helping young adults reach their academic goals and teachers enhance their classroom offerings, said Latrice McGlothin, Manager, Community Engagement at Kinecta Federal Credit Union. Weve been banking the South Bay for 80 years, so we have a vested interest in this community and its education. We want the best for our students and teachers.

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Application Guidelines

Students Scholarships: Eligible applicants should be:

24 years of age of younger at time of application.

A high school senior applying or accepted to attend full-time at an accredited college or university OR a full-time student currently attending an accredited college or university.

Teachers Grants are open to:

Pre-K to 12th-grade teachers certified in their state of residence, as well as home school teachers.

Only ONE grant will be awarded per teacher, although there is no limit to the number of applications an individual may submit.

Recipients must use grant funds to purchase supplies and/or fund a classroom project.

Evaluation and Selection Criteria

Students Scholarships: Eligible applicants must submit a written essay (minimum 1,000 words). Essay question: Pick an experience from your own life and explain how it has influenced your development. Applications will be scored based on the following criteria:

Essay  40%

Community Involvement  20%

GPA*  15%

Awards & Achievements  10%

Extracurricular Activities  10%

SAT or equivalent  5% (transcripts required)

Teachers Grants: Grants will be awarded based on the information provided in the application. Several factors will be taken into consideration, including financial need, number of students impacted and project creativity.

For more information about Kinecta, visit www.kinecta.org.

For more information about the Consumers Cooperative Society of Santa Monica, an association affiliated with Kinecta Federal Credit Union, visit www.ccssm.org.
L.A. City Council President Calls for Expungement of Pot Convictions

City Council President Herb Wesson expressed his support for accelerating the expungement and resentencing of cannabis-related convictions in Greater Los Angeles.

This is the right thing to do, plain and simple, Wesson said.

California voters told us with the passage of Prop. 64 that this is what they want their elected officials to do. My hope is that this will right some wrongs sooner rather than later for Angelenos whose lives have been negatively impacted by the War on Drugs.

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Wesson also co-signed a resolution that was introduced on Friday and would formally align the city of Los Angeles with legislation being considered at the county and state level on cannabis convictions.

The resolution follows the announcement by the San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon that his office plans to wipe more than 9,000 cannabis- related convictions.

Wessons office also said that various studies have shown that while cannabis use is roughly equal between Black and White people, Black people are nearly four times as likely to be arrested for simple marijuana possession.
L.A. County Seeks Public Comment on Vision Zero Draft Action Plan for Traffic Safety

Zero traffic fatalities on County roadways. Thats the vision. Its global. Its local. Its ambitious. And, its vitally important for everyone. Los Angeles County is launching its draft Vision Zero Action Plan to guide the first five years of this effort. Its a plan with a role for everyone.

During the month of March, the public is encouraged to help review and provide comments to the Vision Zero Plan that is intended to be applied to unincorporated communities where local streets and roadways are managed by the County of Los Angeles.

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With Vision Zero, traffic deaths and severe injuries are looked at through the lens of actions and behaviors that can be changed through engineering, education and enforcement. Vision Zero is nothing new. Its a traffic safety initiative that began in Sweden in the 1990s that has grown to U.S. cities and counties over the past decade.

In 2017, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors embraced bringing Vision Zero to unincorporated communities and roadways, where about 80 of those deaths and 500 of those injuries occur each year.

The draft plan identifies actions aimed at enhancing County processes, trainings and practices. It outlines how County agencies will work together and with the public to enhance roadway safety and improve the health and wellbeing of the unincorporated communities.

Public officials will be holding community meetings to discuss the draft plan.

Download the draft plan online at: VisionZeroLACounty.com which includes a user-friendly form for public comment. Copies are also available at LA County Public Library branches and other locations. Comment may be also submitted by calling toll-free (833) VZ4-LACO (833) 894-5226, by email to [email protected] or by U.S. Mail to LA County Public Works (Vision Zero), P.O. Box 1460, Alhambra, CA 91802.

The 30-day public comment period continues through March 31.

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LAX Soars in World Airport Rankings, Moves to Fourth Busiest in the World, No. 10 Busiest Cargo Operation Globally

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) has regained its position as the fourth busiest commercial airport in the world, while also growing in the global rankings for its cargo operations, according to Airports Council International (ACI) World data released, which can be viewed here.

According to ACI World, LAX has surpassed Tokyo-Haneda Airport to become No. 4 in the world for overall passenger traffic and remains the second busiest airport in the United States. In 2018, LAX served a record 87.5 million guests, an increase of 3.5 percent from 2017.

Los Angeles is a global crossroads and a place where everybody is welcome, said Mayor Eric Garcetti. From reimagining our airport infrastructure to opening new routes that connect our city to the world, LAXs ascent is just another reminder that Los Angeles is continually reaching new heights.

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Los Angeles is a leading international destination for commerce and leisure travel, and the continued growth of passenger and cargo traffic in 2018 further affirms the importance of our global airport, said Deborah Flint, Chief Executive Officer, LAWA. LAXs record number of passengers and rise in world rankings is a testament to the discernible modernization and innovation that is underway, and the gold-standard service we take great pride in delivering

LAXs total passenger count for 2018 was 87,534,384 travelers, comprised of 61,480,817 domestic passengers (up from 59,614,616 in 2017) and 26,053,567 international passengers (compared to 24,944,160 in 2017).

The increase in passenger traffic is attributable to guest demand, increased aircraft sizes, and an expansion of destinations offered by LAXs airline partners. From 2014 to 2018, LAX added 21 new airlines and 36 new nonstop routes to international destinations. Passenger traffic has grown consistently during this period, maintaining LAXs position as the second-busiest commercial airport in the country. In 2018, new routes included Shenyang and Xian, China; and Buenos Aries. New domestic routes included Arcata/Eureka, Calif., and Flagstaff, Ariz.

In 2023, many passengers will get to experience the LAX Landside Access Modernization Program (LAMP), which will reduce traffic in LAXs central terminal area and provide a variety of easier ways to enter the airport. Upon completion, guests will enjoy a 2.25-mile elevated automated people mover (APM) that will connect LAX to a brand new consolidated rent-a-car facility and Los Angeles County Metropolitian Transit Authoritys regional light rail system across six APM stations.

LAXs world ranking for cargo operations also jumped three spaces to become No. 10 for the most cargo tonnage processed. In 2018, LAX processed a total of 2.2 million metric tons, an increase of 2.4 percent over 2017.

LAXs 2018 cargo figure of 2,209,850 millon metric tons breaks its previous record of 2.158 million metric tons in 2017. This increase reflects the critical role that LAX serves as a conduit for trade in the United States and beyond.

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Every day, more than 1,200 flights carrying cargo arrive and depart from LAX. More than half of this number is international trade, served by carriers from the Asia-Pacific, North American, Latin American, European, and Middle Eastern regions. Cargo includes shipments sent on any one of the dedicated cargo airlines that land at LAX, or in the bellies of passenger aircraft.

LAX has more than 2.1 million square feet of space devoted to air cargo across 194 acres. The airport is home to the largest airport refrigeration facility and perishable center on the U.S. West Coast, maintained by Mercury Air Cargo, at a size of 12,700 square feet. FedEx also has an LAX presence with one of its major regional cargo centers. The LA-area cargo trade also engages more than 800 freight forwarders and 360 customs house brokers, who are in the L.A. area to expedite the regions air cargo delivery.

LAWA is in the midst of modernizing its cargo facilities with the Century Cargo Redevelopment project, which will allow LAWA to maintain and enhance LAXs air cargo market position among United States airports and the world. The aims of the project are to solicit innovative design and operational concepts which will allow LAWA to continue to modernize its LAX air cargo functionality and provide for additional capacity to help meet current and anticipated demand, including the creation of the first ever vertical cargo facility in the U.S.
PACIFIC FISHERY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL RELEASES ALTERNATIVES FOR 2019 WEST COAST OCEAN SALMON FISHERIES

The Pacific Fishery Management Council adopted three alternative season structures for 2019 ocean salmon fisheries off of Washington, Oregon and California today for public review. The Council will make a final decision on salmon seasons at its meeting in Rohnert Park, California, on April 11-15. Detailed information about season starting dates, areas open, and catch limits for all three alternatives are available on the Councils website at www.pcouncil.org.

Although some forecasts are up over last year, this years salmon runs are still challenging for ocean fishermen and managers, said Council Executive Director Chuck Tracy. In the north, conservation requirements for Fraser River (Canada) and other natural coho runs, as well as lower Columbia River natural tule fall Chinook, will constrain fisheries*. In the south, we need to protect Sacramento River fall and winter Chinook, as well as California Coastal Chinook.

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Northern Oregon and Washington (north of Cape Falcon)

Fisheries north of Cape Falcon (in northern Oregon) are limited by the need to reduce catch of lower Columbia natural tule Chinook and coho stocks of concern. Additionally, three stocks of coho (Queets River, Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Snohomish) remain categorized as overfished, which is also a concern when structuring 2019 fisheries.

Sport season alternatives

Ocean sport fishery alternatives north of Cape Falcon in Oregon and off the Washington coast include Chinook recreational quotas ranging from 22,500 to 32,500, compared to 27,500 in 2018. For coho, recreational quotas range from 100,000 to 205,000 hatchery coho, an increase from 2018. Starting dates range from June 15 to June 29, and in all alternatives, recreational fisheries are scheduled to run through mid-to-late September. Both coho and Chinook retention are allowed in all alternatives.

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Commercial season alternatives

Non-Indian ocean commercial fishery alternatives north of Cape Falcon include traditional Chinook seasons between May and September. Chinook quotas for all areas and times range from 22,500 to 32,500, compared to 27,500 in 2018. Coho quotas in the commercial fishery alternatives range from 5,600 to 32,800 marked coho, compared to 5,600 in to 2018.

Tribal ocean fisheries north of Cape Falcon

Chinook and coho quotas for tribal ocean fishery alternatives range from 25,000 to 45,000 for Chinook salmon (compared to 40,000 in 2018), and from 35,000 to 65,000 coho (compared to 12,500 coho in 2018). Seasons open May 1 and run through September 15.

California and Southern Oregon (south of Cape Falcon)

Fisheries south of Cape Falcon are limited by the need to reduce catch of Oregon Coast natural coho, California coastal Chinook, Sacramento River fall Chinook, and Sacramento River winter Chinook. Klamath River fall Chinook and Sacramento River fall Chinook contribute significantly to ocean harvest, and currently remain categorized as overfished. Both stocks are projected to meet their spawning escapement objectives under this years management alternatives.

Sport season alternatives

Chinook fishing in the Tillamook, Newport, and Coos Bay areas all open March 15 and run continuously through October 31.

Oregon ocean recreational alternatives include mark-selective coho fishing seasons starting in late June and running through mid-August or September in the area south of Cape Falcon. Quotas range from 80,000 to 105,000 marked coho (compared to 35,000 in 2018). In addition, non-mark-selective fisheries are proposed for the area between Cape Falcon and Humbug Mountain in September, with quotas of 8,000 to 10,000 coho (compared to last years 3,500).

All alternatives include proposed fisheries from late May through late August/early September in the Klamath Management Zone in both California and Oregon.

Ocean sport fishing below Horse Mountain, California will see increased opportunity compared to last year due to some improved forecasts. Alternatives for 2019 fisheries were structured to target spawning escapements in excess of what is required under the Salmon Fishery Management Plan in an effort to rebuild Sacramento River and Klamath River fall Chinook.

Commercial season alternatives

Commercial season alternatives south of Cape Falcon to Humbug Mountain are constrained this year to protect Sacramento and California coastal Chinook. Chinook salmon seasons are open late April or May through October, with closed periods in May through August.

The commercial alternatives in both the California and Oregon sectors of the Klamath Management Zone are provided primarily by a range of monthly Chinook quotas between June and August, with some additional time for the Oregon sector in May.

The alternatives for commercial seasons south of the Klamath Management Zone vary considerably, with constraints primarily intended to protect Sacramento River fall Chinook and California Coastal Chinook. In general, the commercial alternatives in these management areas (Fort Bragg, San Francisco, and Monterey) provide similar or increased levels of opportunity compared to last year.

Concerns Regarding Southern Resident Killer Whales At the Vancouver meeting, National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) announced plans to look further into the effects of Council-area fisheries on southern resident killer whales, which are listed as endangered. The Council will work collaboratively with NMFS on this issue beginning in 2019.

Council Chair Phil Anderson, who also serves on the Governors Southern Resident Killer Whale Task Force, said, I dont think theres any question that southern resident killer whales are in peril. Pollution, noise disturbance, and lack of prey are the main factors believed to be responsible for the decline. It will be important for the Pacific Council to understand the impacts of the prey base associated with their needs when they consider seasons in April. We would like to discuss these issues with NOAA before we make our final recommendations.

Management Process

Public hearings to receive input on the alternatives are scheduled for March 25 in Westport, Washington and Coos Bay, Oregon, and for March 26 in Ukiah, California. The Council will consult with scientists, hear public comment, revise preliminary decisions, and choose a final alternative at its meeting April 11-15 in Rohnert Park, California.

The Council will forward its final season recommendations to National Marine Fisheries Service for its approval and implementation by May 1.

All Council meetings are open to the public.

Council Role

The Pacific Fishery Management Council is one of eight regional fishery management councils established by the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 for the purpose of managing fisheries 3-200 miles offshore of the United States of America coastline. The Pacific Council recommends management measures for fisheries off the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington.
Friday, March 15, 2019

The Delaware Supreme Court has ordered a 15-month suspension of an attorney retroactive to the date of his interim suspension.

The Court has considered the matter carefully. Vavala admitted the ethical violations alleged in the ODCs petition against him. The Board carefully considered Vavalas ethical violations, his knowing state of mind, the potential injury and actual injury, the presumptive sanction, and all of the applicable aggravating and mitigating factors. Under the circumstances, we find the Boards recommendation of a 15-month suspension to be appropriate. We therefore accept the Boards findings and recommendation for discipline.

The attorney pleaded guilty to criminal charges of carrying a concealed dangerous instrument, driving under the influence and illegal possession of Adderall.

The incident took place on April 24, 2018.

The attorney - admitted in 2015 - went to a party after work and then to two Trolley Square bars and then to Famous Joe's, from where he departed about 2 am.

He was stopped on the way home. On the floor of his car were two loaded weapons for which he did not have a permit.

He testified that he is an "avid target shooter" and had failed to follow his usual procedure of removing the ammunition because he was in a hurry to get to work.

There was a significant amount of favorable testimony as to his abilities as a lawyer and general good character.

He was a part of a team defending a Wilmington Trust criminal defendant that was working long hours when the crimes occurred.

He also is participating in addiction recovery treatment.

AP reported on his interim suspension. (Mike Frisch)

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2019/03/the-delaware-supreme-court-has-ordered-a-15-month-suspension-of-an-attorney-retroactive-to-the-date-of-his-interim-suspension.html
Babu Owino has joined two other members of parliament in defending self-proclaimed prophet David Owuor and his Ministry of Repentance and Holiness Church.

The Embakasi East MP, together with Igembe South MP John Paul Mwirigi and Nominated MP Gideon Keter, faulted the media for what they termed as unwarranted attacks on Church leaders.

This follows the recent critical media coverage on the activities of Prophet Owuor was is accused by a family of brainwashing one of their kin and swindling billions from her estate in Nairobi.

Addressing a media briefing in parliament building on Thursday, Babu Owino revealed that he is a follower of Prophet Owuor.

We will pray and forgive those fighting the church. Mimi ni mtoto wa misa and I encourage Prophet Owuor to continue serving the flock, said Babu.

His sentiments were echoed by Mr Keter who castigated the Citizen TVs News Gang show last week Thursday for allegedly attacking the church.

Some people want to ground the church, those who are saying pastors should have a degree are wrong. Some opinions should be kept to oneself, said Keter.

Meanwhile, the Kenya Media Sector Working Group has warned religious leaders against threatening and harassing journalists who pursue incriminating stories about them.
After winning an award for singing, Nelson Ebo left Angola and studied music in Spain. He lives in the United States and is famous all over the world for his talent. He would like to return to Angola to teach the beautiful world of music.
Dozens of people were killed Friday in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand. More than 40 others were injured.

One man was arrested and charged with murder in connection with the attacks, which happened in the city of Christchurch. Two other suspects were also being held.

Officials said that, as of Friday night, 49 people were confirmed dead. Health officials said at least 48 other people were being treated for gunshot wounds. Injuries ranged from minor to serious.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the shootings as a terrorist attack. She said Friday was one of her countrys darkest days. Ardern said the government raised the national security threat level from low to high, the second-highest level.

By late Friday, officials had not named the suspect who was charged or the others being held. Police said none had been on any terrorist watch list. Police also said they had found explosive devices in a vehicle.

A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto. In it, he identified himself as a 28-year-old white Australian. He used the term white genocide. The term is often used by racist groups to describe the effects of immigration and the growth of minority populations. The manifesto cited white genocide as a motivation for the attacks.

The man who claimed responsibility wrote that he came to New Zealand only to plan and train for the shootings. He said he acted alone and that no group ordered the attacks. He said he chose New Zealand to show that even the most distant parts of the world were not free of mass immigration.

Ardern told a news conference that many people affected by the shootings may have been migrants or refugees. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home, she said. They are us.

Ardern said of the suspects, These are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand.

The gunman reportedly broadcast live footage of one of the attacks. The video shows him shooting for more than two minutes inside a mosque, the Associated Press reported. The gunman is shown taking repeated shots at people gathered to attend religious services.

The video continues as the shooter walks out of the mosque and onto the street, where he fires at people there, the AP reported. Later, he is shown going back into the mosque, where at least 20 people are seen lying on the ground. After walking outside again and shooting more, he gets into a car and drives away.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

mosque  n. a building used for Muslim religious services

manifesto  n. a written statement that describes the policies, goals, and opinions of a person or group

cite  v. say something as an example or evidence

motivation  n. the need or reason for doing something

absolutely  adv. completely
The flight recorders from an Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed Sunday have arrived in France to be studied.

The aircraft, a Boeing 737 Max 8, went down six minutes after leaving Ethiopias capital Addis Ababa. All 157 people on the plane were killed. The crash has led more than 40 countries to ground 737 Max 8 planes or refuse to let the aircraft fly into their airspace.

Another 737 Max 8 crashed similarly in Indonesia last October. The Lion Air plane went down 13 minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing 189 people.

Some countries began grounding Boeings 737 Max 8 hours after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. The United States Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, did so Wednesday. Officials said they had discovered new satellite information and evidence showing that movements of the Ethiopian Airlines plane were very similar to the Lion Air aircraft that crashed.

Officials at Lion Air have said sensors on the 737 Max 8 had been producing false information on flights that took place before the crash. The sensor issue caused the plane to go into a downward position, the officials said.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said its pilots had received special training on how to deal with the sensor problem. After the Lion Air crash, questions were raised, so Boeing sent further instructions that it said pilots should know, he said.

Boeing said it supported the FAAs decision to ground 737 Max 8 planes, even though it continues to have what it called full confidence in the safety of the model.

Ethiopia is leading the investigation of Sundays crash. But Frances air accident investigation group, the BEA, will examine the planes flight information recorders, or black boxes. The BEA has a lot of experience with international air crashes, and is often sought in Airbus plane crashes because Airbus is based in France.

A BEA spokesman told Reuters he did not know what condition the black boxes were in. First we will try to read the data, he said. He added that the examination could take several days.

The victims in Sundays crash came from 35 counties.

On Thursday, about 200 angry family members walked out of a briefing by officials from Ethiopian Airlines. They said the airline was not providing enough information. Officials said a call center had been operating 18 hours a day to serve the families needs.

Some family members who lost loved ones decided to go to the crash site themselves.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Caty Weaver was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

instruction  n. direction or order

confidence  n. feeling or belief that you can do something well or succeed at something

data  n. information or facts
Malaysia's attorney-general ordered the continuation of the murder case against a Vietnamese woman accused of killing the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Government lawyers announced the decision in court Thursday.

Prosecutor Iskandar Ahmad did not explain the decision to continue the trial of Doan Thi Huong. She is now the only person on trial for the murder, following the decision earlier this week to drop charges against an Indonesian woman, Siti Aisyah.

Huongs lawyer and Vietnam's ambassador to Malaysia both criticized the decision. They had hoped the charges would also be dropped for Huong.

Ambassador Le Quy Quynh said he was "very disappointed" with the decision. He said Vietnam's justice minister had written to Malaysias chief attorney asking for Huongs release. He added that Vietnam would continue to ask for her release.

Huong's lawyer, Hisyam Teh Poh Teik, told the court that the decision was "perverse." He said government lawyers were being unfair to Huong, because her case was similar to Aisyahs situation.

Teh said, "Very obviously, there is discrimination.

Both Huong and Aisyah were accused of putting a poisonous nerve agent on Kim Jong Nam's face at the Kuala Lumpur airport on February 13, 2017.

Both women have said they thought they were taking part in a prank for a television show. They were the only people arrested for the crime, after four North Korean suspects fled the country the same morning Kim was killed.

Both women were charged separately, but the charge against them is the same -- that they worked with the four North Korean suspects to murder Kim.

Last August, a High Court judge found there was enough evidence to show that Aisyah, Huong and the four North Koreans had worked together on a plan to kill Kim.

Lawyers for both women argued that they were pawns in a political assassination with clear links to the North Korean Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. They also said that government lawyers failed to prove that the women had aimed to kill Kim. Under Malaysian law, intent to kill is critical to a murder charge.

Huong's lawyer had sought a delay for the trial Thursday. Teh said Huong was unwell and needed medical treatment. He said Huong only slept one hour each night since Aisyah's release. He added she was not in a position to answer questions from both sides.

When the judge asked Huong if she was unwell, Huong said she was suffering from tension and stress.

"I have no idea what is going on," Huong said in the courtroom Thursday.

The judge agreed to delay the trial until April 1, but warned there should not be any more delays after that. The defense part of the trial was to have started Monday.

Huong cried as she spoke to Vietnamese Embassy officials after Thursday's court hearing ended.

In Huong's village in Vietnam, her family was extremely sad and disappointed.

"I had hoped for good news today, butthere is noneI had hoped my daughter would be freed like the Indonesian woman," said her father, Doan Van Thanh.

Huong could face a death sentence if she is found guilty of the charges.

Another lawyer for Huong urged Malaysias attorney-general to explain why he dropped the case against Aisyah but not Huong.

During the prosecution part of the trial, expert witnesses said that poisoning caused Kim's death. The nerve agent was found on his face, in his eyes and on his clothes. It was also found on the womens clothes.

Experts have said the case against Aisyah appeared weaker since there was no video evidence of her with Kim at the airport. There was security camera video of Huong with Kim.

Prosecutors have said the women were trained killers who knew they were holding poison. They said the women held their hands away from their bodies and went to separate restrooms to wash their hands afterwards.

The defense part of the trial is expected to discuss the role of the four North Koreans, who fled the country and are believed to now be home in Pyongyang.

I'm Susan Shand.

The Associated Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

prosecutor  n. a lawyer who represents the side in a court case that accuses a person of a crime and who tries to prove that the person is guilty

perverse  adj. wrong or different in a way that others feel is strange or offensive

prank  n. a trick that is done to someone usually as a joke

pawn  n. a person or group that does not have much power and that is controlled by a more powerful person or group

stress  n. something that causes strong feelings of worry or anxiety

disappointed - adj. feeling sad, unhappy, or displeased because something was not as good as expected or because something you hoped for or expected did not happen
Twelve Republican senators on Thursday joined Democrats to vote against American President Donald Trumps declaration of a national emergency.

The vote for the resolution to end the border emergency passed in the U.S. House of Representatives last month.

The 59-41 Senate vote, however, is short of the two-thirds majority that will be needed to overturn Trumps veto.

Minutes after the Senate vote, Trump wrote on Twitter, VETO!

The 1976 National Emergencies Act gives presidents special powers to declare an emergency during a crisis. Congress can end a state of emergency with a joint resolution. If the president vetoes the resolution, Congress would need two-thirds of lawmakers to vote to end the declaration.

Thursdays vote marked the first time that Congress has rejected a presidential emergency under the act.

The vote was also one of the few times that the Republican-controlled Senate has voted against Trumps position. But it is the second time this week; on Wednesday, the Senate voted to end U.S. support of the Saudi-led coalitions war in Yemen.

Trump declared a national emergency last month to get the money needed to build a wall along the nations border with Mexico. Trump had demanded $5.7 billion to build the wall. But Congress, which is powered with making spending decisions, only provided $1.4 billion for barriers.

Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky had already announced their opposition to Trumps emergency declaration. On Thursday, Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Mitt Romney of Utah joined them.

Senator Alexander said Trumps action was inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution that I took an oath to support. He added that Congress has the power to control spending.

Senator Romney was the Republican Partys 2012 presidential nominee. He said in a statement that Trumps declaration is an invitation to further expansion and abuse by future presidents.

Democrats have long said there is no emergency at the border. They say Trump issued his declaration only to secure his campaign promise to Build the Wall.

After the presidents veto, the strongest chance of blocking Trumps emergency order is likely to be through legal action taken by Democratic state attorneys general, environmental groups and others.

Hai Do wrote this story for Learning English with additional reports from the Associated Press. Ashley Thompson was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

inconsistent - adj. not in agreement with something

oath - n. a formal and serious promise to do something
(CNN) Bernie Sanders advocated for the nationalization of most major industries, including energy companies, factories, and banks, when he was a leading member of a self-described "radical political party" in the 1970s, a CNN KFile review of his record reveals.

Sanders' past views shed light on a formative period of his political career that could become relevant as he advances in the 2020 Democratic primary. Many of the positions he held at the time are more extreme compared to the more tempered democratic socialism the Vermont senator espouses today and could provide fodder for moderate Democrats and Republicans looking to cast the Democratic presidential candidate and his beliefs as a fringe form of socialism that would be harmful to the country.

If CNN wants to describe this as "fringe" they can do that, I guess. But it seems to us that with only 10 years or so left to do anything at all about climate change, the time to start taking these measures is... well, actually, the best time would have been forty years ago when Bernie was saying all this. But now would be good too.Unfortunately we've only got moderate Bernie in 2020. CNN seems to think this 70s Bernie stuff is some sort of negative against his current campaign, though. Not sure where they're getting that from.
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Lenovos annual sale kicks off today, with deep discounts on select laptops, PCs, tablets, and accessories. Some deals are more attractive than others, and Ive rounded up some pick here, but make sure to head over to Lenovo for a full list.

Meanwhile, the Microsoft Store is offering some of the best prices Ive seen to date on Huaweis excellent MateBook X Pro laptop. Its still not cheap but its cheaper.

Here are some of the days best deals.

Lenovo annual sale

Other computers

Tablets

Media Streamers

Smart speakers

eReaders

Games

Other
Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko has once again extended his philanthropic hand to a Kenyan in need.

The wealthy governor has come to the rescue of popular Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) supporter Roselyne Akinyi alias Mama Orange.

Mama Orange is synonymous with ODM party rallies and campaigns in which she dresses in an improvised oranges-themed outfit. Over the last year, Ms Akinyi has endured a trying period that has culminated in the loss of her two sons.

In April last year, Mama Orange reached out to wellwishers to help offset a huge hospital bill after her sons were hospitalised at Mbagathi Hospital. The sons, who were both matatu drivers in Nairobi, had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and meningitis.

One of her sons, Victor Otieno, succumbed on October 23, with the ODM party bowing to pressure from the public to come to her rescue with burial arrangements.

Mama Oranges younger son, Boniface Obina, took his last breath this month.

Ms Akinyi, who says that her tag name is now Mama Orange Handshake Power Together, reached out to Sonko for assistance with funeral plans and the good governor was happy to oblige once again.

On his Facebook page, Sonko said his rescue team has catered for the funeral expenses, including transport to Kisumu.

A video on Sonkos page also shows a delighted Mama Orange singing the praises of the Nairobi governor.

Nampenda Governor Sonko na yule anaona uchungu nikisema nampenda ajinyonge, mama Orange says in the clip.

Watch:




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.
Police in Thika are holding a house-help who injured her employers baby during a bizarre attack that left the minor needing stitches on his forehead.

The babys father, Gerald Kimani, said that the house help, Joyce Namuma Magoha, hit the baby with a glass plate that slit open his forehead. She then added salt to the wound before she fled from the scene and left the baby bleeding and crying.

She hit the baby with the plate which broke into pieces and fled leaving the baby profusely bleeding, Mr Kimani told Nairobi News.

Kimani added that the baby was left unattended until evening when the mother returned from work and found him on the floor crying.

The suspect, who hails from Bungoma County, was arrested on Tuesday at her hideout in Banana, Kiambu county and detained at Thika Police Station.

Upon interrogation, Ms Namuma said she committed the act because she had personal stress.

Meanwhile, a woman who had previously employed the same house help noted that she fired her after a day when she noticed that her baby was crying every time.

I decided to send her away on the same day, I am shocked to hear what she did to the other baby. I just cant imagine what she might have done to my daughter, she said.
Macau residents would not have been surprised by the Times expose (Special Report March 8) of the conditions our most vulnerable workers are at times forced to accept. The Labour Affairs Bureau has been handling cases of security guards made to surrender acceptable contractual terms and conditions. It was reported that some had worked up to 24 hours continuously and others had not been adequately compensated for overtime or for working on what should have been days off.

These are the unskilled workers from less fortunate economies. With fewer opportunities at home, they seek jobs in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet  in 2017 Macau ranked 4th in per capita GDP (PPP) globally. Behind each in a job stands a line of others ready to take the position. The never-ending supply, low skill requirements, lax labour protection, and blind eyes being turned all go to creating a power imbalance in this sector of the labour market. For some employers there is no value in values, if values undermine the bottom line. Economic rankings might define a first world nation but unfortunately it does not guarantee ethical standards or humanitarian values.

The reports first message was the lack of adequate protection for non-resident workers. Long have we heard of the appalling conditions and treatment suffered by some domestic helpers. Regulating human behaviour behind private doors is certainly challenging, but one would expect the more visible conditions of security guards employed by large firms to be less at risk. The report confirms that the blame can be laid not so much at the feet of the exploitative employer, but with a system that readily allows such behaviour to go unchecked.

The institutions that could have facilitated equitable labour protection have continuously disregarded the plight of the disposable non-resident worker year after year. In their eyes the local resident has always been most deserving of attention; any suggestion that labour protections should extend to non-resident workers has risked being perceived as undermining the rights of the local worker and is a politically fraught position to take. Yet again, the structural discriminatory practices and values of our community rear their ugly heads.

Labour protections should cover workers in an employment relationship regardless of their visa status.

The idea that there is a voluntary-work loophole (the law doesnt have a limit on voluntary work) whilst a worker is in a paid employment relationship is a nonsense. The use of waivers to relinquish rights under contract or under minimum labour standards is also a nonsense, and is clearly against the law (Labour Relations Law, Article 14, paragraph 2). Any institution that allows such a namby-pamby, wishy-washy system of pseudo-contractual obligations is abrogating its responsibility under International Labour Organization conventions, which explicitly apply to Macau.

Migrant groups have been calling for more protection. Rights to bargain collectively and to have minimum standards protected are required be in place to safeguard all workers (ILO convention No. 98), but non-residents remain powerless and they sorely need an advocate. It is not as if the law does not give non-resident workers equal treatment to resident workers, in regards to rights, obligations and working conditions, it does (Article 2 of Law No. 21/2009). One additional problem lies with an issue similar to that of the gender-pay gap: the different groups do different jobs. A sufficient-protection test would be whether a local resident would be prepared to do the same job under the same conditions as a non-resident worker. The fact that resident workers demand and are in an unquestioned privileged position is precisely the reason why non-resident workers warrant additional protection against exploitative employers and a weak system.

I would argue that under the Principle of Equality in the Macau Labour Law that non-resident workers are indeed one of the social groups in need of special protection.
Macau businessman David Chow has not yet provided a definitive answer regarding whether or not he will apply for a gaming concession, according to a report by TDM. While in Beijing, Chow was asked by the public broadcaster about his intentions. Instead of giving an answer, Chow said whether he will bid or not is a matter of both private interests and of conditions set by the government. However, the director of Macau Legend Development, Ltd. thinks that competition yields improvement. He also hopes that the government will listen to more opinions from different sectors in town.

Increased remittance limit to mainland proposed

Nine Macau members of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) have proposed a bigger daily remittance limit for the mainland. The nine, including Chui Sai Peng and Si Ka Lon, suggested that the daily remittance limit (currently RMB50,000) for the mainland granted to Hong Kong residents should be increased to RMB80,000. In addition, it is also necessary, according to the Macau CPPCC members, to allow each person to apply for an increase in the remittance limit within a certain period of time and within limits, if they meet specified conditions.

CE election budget remains at MOP32m

The budget for this years Chief Executive election is about MOP32 million, the Chairman of the Electoral Affairs Commission for the Chief Executive Election, Song Man Lei, announced yesterday. The budget for the previous CE election was also MOP32 million. This years budget still has to be approved by Chief Executive Chui Sai On. The previous election had five polling stations, and this year the commission is considering only setting up three polling stations, however, no final decision has been made yet, according to Song. Voting for candidates of the election committee will take place on June 16, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Chinas brokerages are on pace for their best quarter since 2014, though a rare sell call is a sign the rally may be topping out.

CSC Financial Co.s rating was cut to sell from accumulate by Huatai Securities Co. on March 8, based on the risk that the stock was overvalued following its almost 220 percent surge this year. Its valuation as measured by the price to book ratio is 4.97, outstripping the 1.78 measure for a broader Bloomberg gauge of China-listed brokerages, which in turn has risen to align with its 1.73 three- year average.

I dont see this wild surge going too far, said Vincent Hsu, a Taipei-based fund manager at Fuh-Hwa Securities Investment Trust Co. The prices of some brokers have reached the peak of 2015, and theyre not that cheap.

Shares of Chinese securities firms were bashed in 2018, amid concern that authorities crackdown on risky financing and the trade war with the U.S. would hurt business. They saw a turnaround this year, however, as the government took steps to spur demand for local stocks and on speculation that policy makers are pushing for consolidation.

The sector has risen 54 percent this year, more than the Shanghai Composite Indexs 21 percent advance. CSC Financial paces gains on the domestic CSI 300 Index and Chinese brokerages dominate the top 10 spots on Bloombergs gauge of Asia Pacific financial companies.

The surge has swelled the market cap of 34 China-listed securities firms to USD367 billion, nearly five times the value of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yet, the groups combined profit for the past 12 months is only about 11 percent bigger than Goldmans.

Risks are also building up as the sector prepares for an influx of new competition as China opens its market to foreign companies.

UBS Group AG was the first overseas firm to win approval to raise its ownership in a local securities venture to 51 percent under new rules. Nomura Holdings Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have also filed applications for majority ownership in securities ventures. BNP Paribas SA plans to expand its China operations to include brokerage, futures trading and wealth-management ventures. MDT/Bloomberg
The Civil Aviation Authority of Macao SAR (AACM) has decided to follow the measures already enforced by other worldwide counterparts and temporarily suspend the flights of Boeing aircraft models 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 across all airlines, the AACM informed in a statement.

The AACM notes that the decision comes in view of the two accidents [that] occurred with Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircrafts and the safety precautions gradually taken by the aeronautical authorities in other places.

The Aviation Authority also notes that none of the locally registered airliners currently have any of the listed models among their fleet operation to or from the Macau International Airport. As such, the suspension does not affect any present flight operations at the local airport.

The AACM also noted that it will continue to closely monitor the safety concerns with the MAX aircraft, and will lift the suspension only when the safety concerns surrounding Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft are cleared.

The same measures were also enforced by the neighboring authorities in Hong Kong, with the Civil Aviation Department also announcing a ban of the aircraft models in the Hong Kong airspace from 6 p.m. on Tuesday.

On the other hand, and in opposition to measures taken by many aviation authorities (including the European Union), US regulators reiterated their support for the aircraft, with the Federal Aviation Administration saying on Tuesday evening that their review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft, as quoted by Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, investigations continue to try to understand why an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crashed near Addis Ababa on March 10, killing 157 people, less than five months after an identical Lion Air plane plunged into waters off Indonesia.
The European Union added ten countries and territories to its blacklist of tax havens, including the United Arab Emirates, with Cape Verde remaining on the grey list, according to official information released in Brussels.

European finance ministers approved the return of the United Arab Emirates, Barbados and Marshall Islands to the blacklist for failing to honor their commitments, as well as the inclusion of Aruba, Belize, Bermuda, Fiji, Oman, Vanuatu and Dominica.

Following the listing process, dozens of countries have adjusted their tax regimes to international standards of transparency, said European Commissioner for Financial Affairs Pierre Moscovici.

Meanwhile, Macau moved off the tax haven grey list in the latest update and is now no longer among the EUs list of jurisdictions to monitor. Previously the territory had been added to the blacklist in December 2017 before moving to the grey list the following month.
A distressed mother is crying for justice for her daughter who died in mysterious circumstances at the Gatanga CCM school in Muranga County.

Ms Martha Wanjiru, the mother of the deceased form one student Ebbie Noelle Samuels, says she received a call from the schools Principal on Saturday morning informing her that her daughter was unwell and she should rush to Naidu Hospital in Thika.

On arriving at the school at about 9:35 am, I found my daughters lifeless, ice cold, body with a swollen tummy. She also had foam in her nostrils. On inquiring to know what had happened, the principal told me that my daughter had gone to sleep the previous night, but failed to wake up in the morning, recalls Ms Wanjiru.

Initial reports had indicated that Ebbie, 15, had complained of chest pains to the schools deputy principal who ignored her only to be later found dead in her bed.

According to Principal Veronica Wanjiku Mwangi, Ebbie had run a cross-country race the previous day, finishing among the first 10 out of 900 girls.

Later on, she ate dinner, went for evening preps, then did her laundry before saying goodnight to all 1st Form students from 3 dorms and going to bed. When she failed to wake up the following morning, her dorm mates alerted the matron, who came and found her to be unresponsive, Martha Wanjiru narrated what the principal told her.

But an autopsy conducted by three different pathologists has thrown a curve ball into the investigations.

The autopsies conducted by the government pathologist, the schools pathologist and an independent one hired by the family, have all proven that Ebbie died from a head injury inflicted by a blunt object.

It is for this reason that the girls distraught mother is demanding answers that havent been forthcoming from the schools management.

Ms Martha Wanjiru shared her plight in a Facebook post on Boniface Mwangis page.

Read it below.

**************************************************

Justice for my daughter by Martha Wanjiru

My 15-year-old daughter, Ebbie Noelle Samuels, just recently joined Form 1 at Gatanga CCM school. On Saturday 9th March, at 7:47 am, I was called by the principal of the school, Ms.Veronica Wanjiku Mwangi, with news that my daughter was unwell and I should rush to Naidu Hospital in Thika and that I shouldnt go alone. I left for Thika, accompanied by my friend, but on the way, I decided to call my cousin to check on the situation before I got there, since she lives in Thika.

On arriving at the school at about 9:35 am, I found my daughters lifeless, ice cold, body with a swollen tummy. She also had foam in her nostrils. On inquiring to know what had happened, the principal told me that my daughter had gone to sleep the previous night, but failed to wake up in the morning.

She went on to add that my daughter had run a cross country the previous day, finishing among the first 10, out of 900 girls. Later on, she ate dinner, went for evening preps, then did her laundry before saying goodnight to all 1st Form students from 3 dorms and going to bed. When she failed to wake up the following morning, her dorm mates alerted the matron, who came and found her to be unresponsive.

The Principal of Gatanga CCM says that the matron called the Deputy Principal at 7:05 am, who then issued instructions to have my daughters clothes changed and then taken to the hospital. The hospital note indicates that they received a dead body, meaning she had been dead all along. I made plans to move her body to Nairobi and then proceeded back to the school. I met the Deputy Principal and asked her what had happened and she quickly replied, Its what the principal told you and then she left. We met the Principal and asked her if we could see where my daughter slept, but she refused, saying we would cause anxiety to the students. We then asked her to allow us to take her belongings, which she allowed us to do after we insisted. We collected her stuff and left.

Among the things we collected was a bucket of wet clothes, which the Principal had said were clean clothes, yet they were mixed with dirty ones. This, even after the Principal, Ms. Veronica, had earlier said that my daughter had washed her clothes and hung them on the lines.

3 different autopsies conducted by the government pathologist, the schools pathologist and an independent one, hired by the family, have all proven that my daughter died from a head injury inflicted by a blunt object. She bled at the vertex of her brain on the left side and right side. Why is the school giving scant information? What is the Principal, Ms. Veronica, hiding? How is it that our daughters cant be safe even within a school compound? Who hit my daughter on Friday night and left her for dead at the school dorm? Please help me get justice for my daughter. #SemaUkweli #JusticeForEbbieSema Ukweli Kenya.
China responded to new U.S. allegations of widespread human rights abuses with its own accusations of prejudice and interference, saying yesterday that Washington should drop its Cold War mentality and stop interfering in Chinas internal affairs.

In presenting the annual U.S. State Department report on human rights around the world, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that China is in a league of its own when it comes to human rights abuses, citing mass detentions of an estimated 1 million Muslims and the repression of Christians, Tibetans and other religious minorities.

At a daily briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang dismissed the report as similar to those of previous years and full of ideological prejudice. He said China hoped the U.S would also take a good look at its own human rights record.

The exchange marks the latest dust-up between the worlds two largest economies, already locked in a trade war and disputes over Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, Taiwan and Chinese foreign policy maneuvering seen as aimed at reducing Americas global influence.

Lu said the U.S. report disregarded facts and made groundless allegations against China, and he praised the advancement of rights in the country.

Chinas human rights cause has made great progress, Lu said. We hope the U.S. will remove the colored lenses and discard the Cold War mentality [] and view Chinas human rights progress in an objective and just way and stop interfering in Chinas internal affairs with human rights as a pretext.

Yesterday, China issued its annual tit-for-tat on human rights in the U.S., relying heavily on American media reports, including from outlets that the Chinese government frequently condemns for critical reporting on its own country.

Human rights have been a prominent irritant in the U.S.-China relationship, dating from the Chinese militarys crushing of the 1989 pro-democracy protests focused on Beijings Tiananmen Square and subsequent crackdowns on civil liberties.

Conditions have grown harsher under President Xi Jinping, Chinas most powerful ruler in a generation, who has sought to crush all perceived challenges to his authority and reassert Communist Party control throughout the government and economy.

In its summary, the State Department said China over the past year significantly intensified its campaign of mass detentions, with between 800,000 and 2 million members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region interned in camps designed to erase religious and ethnic identities.

Government officials claimed the camps were needed to combat terrorism, separatism, and extremism. International media, human rights organizations, and former detainees reported security officials in the camps abused, tortured, and killed some detainees, the report said.

The report also accused the government of arbitrary or unlawful killings, forced disappearances, torture and arbitrary detention. Other concerns included political prisoners, harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions, physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others, along with their family members.

Interference in the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, overly restrictive laws covering foreign and domestic NGOs, restrictions on freedom and religion and movement, and severe restrictions on labor rights and union organizing were also cited.

It also faulted Xis six-year-old anti-corruption campaign for using opaque internal party disciplinary procedures.

Authorities harassed, detained, and arrested citizens who promoted independent efforts to combat abuses of power, the report said.

Chinas own 12,000-word report on U.S. human rights infractions outlined violations on U.S. soil month-by-month, from shocking gender discrimination to the unceasing immigration tragedy along the Mexican border.

Other topics touched on included gun crime, infringements of civil rights, money politics, income inequality, racial discrimination, threats against children, women and immigrants, and human rights violations related to President Donald Trumps America First policies.

The U.S. continues to point fingers at the human rights condition of more than 190 countries, smearing and slandering, while turning a deaf ear to its own grave human rights problems, said the preface to the document, published by Chinas State Council Information Office. Christopher Bodeen, Beijing, AP
A mainland researcher has encouraged Taiwan to join the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) plan, so that Taiwan may also benefit from the GBAs development.

Sheng Jiuyuan, Director of the Taiwan Research Centre at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said that by joining the Greater Bay Area, Taiwan could sign free trade agreements with other countries under the name Chinese Taipei, and that Taiwan could also join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In Shengs opinion, published yesterday by the United Daily News, Taiwan could therefore enjoy 10 economic benefits, with the top benefit being the signing of free trade agreements with other countries.

In turn, it is also believed that mainland China will be able to give Taiwan beneficial policies in fields such as finance, education, logistics, biotechnological and green energy.

Gradually, their joint cooperation would hopefully lead to the mainland canceling some restrictions regarding Taiwan investments in mainland China.

The Chinese researcher proposed another idea. Sheng suggested that Taiwans northern region could work with the Yangzte River Delta, while central Taiwan and southern Taiwan could work with other mainland provinces in a model similar to the Greater Bay Area.

Overall, the scholar expressed that Taiwan could fully play out its special status and role in the countrys opening up to the outside world if it joins the Greater Bay Area.

Sheng also speculated that Taiwanese companies and residents could enjoy special tax policies once Taiwan-GBA cooperation becomes a reality.

In addition, the academic and specialist in Taiwanese affairs highlighted that Taiwan residents could enjoy further benefits.

The research comes during a period of strained relations between Beijing and Taipei.

Earlier this week, China said that attempts to block it from bringing the island under its control are futile, like stretching out an arm to block a car, AP reported.

The statement took aim at President Tsai Ing-wens recent announcement of measures to counter Chinas one country, two systems framework for political unification with the island.

Tsai of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party was elected in a 2016 landslide, but has seen her approval ratings fall as she prepares to seek re-election next year.

In a meeting on national security this week, Tsai said Taiwans legal and political institutions need strengthening and its military needs bolstering  including through bigger budgets  while economic competitiveness needs to be raised and greater outreach made to the international community to counter Beijings isolation campaign. JZ
BELT & ROAD China pledged greater cooperation with American and European companies on Belt and Road ventures, in its latest bid to counter criticism that President Xi Jinpings initiative is focused on projecting Beijings influence at the expense of host countries.

SOUTH CHINA SEA A U.S. Navy flagship has sailed through the South China Sea to Manila with its commander renewing an American vow to sail, fly and operate wherever the law allows us to amid Chinas objection to U.S. military presence in the disputed sea. Capt. Eric Anduze, commander of the USS Blue Ridge, told reporters on board that the visit was the latest affirmation of the strong U.S.-Philippine alliance.

PHILIPPINES Everyone on a Taiwanese plane has disembarked safely after one of the planes wheels got stuck in the grass off a Philippine runway. All the 122 passengers and an unspecified number of crewmen were safe and the Far Eastern Air Transport plane was towed to the airport terminal in central Kalibo town for inspection.

BRAZIL Classmates, friends and families of the victims of a mass shooting at a school began saying goodbye yesterday, with thousands attending a wake in this devastated Sao Paulo suburb while authorities worked to understand what drove two former students to attack with a gun, crossbows and small axes.

USA Donald Trump said yesterday that Britains debate over leaving the European Union is tearing the country apart. Trump said hes surprised at how badly the negotiations have been handled. Trump, who sees himself as a master deal-maker, said he gave advice to Theresa May but that she didnt listen to him.

NEW YORK The reputed boss of Gambinos crime family Francesco Franky Boy Cali was gunned down outside his home, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor John Gotti. Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island and was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Here are todays biggest headlines.

Explosive revelations in Russia saga add up to a bad day for Trump It would be hard to think of a more damaging day for a President than one on which his former campaign chairman disappeared behind bars for years to come. But Paul Manaforts new sentence was the least of Donald Trumps worries Wednesday as his Russia investigation nightmare took yet another turn for the worse.

Theresa May has lost control of Brexit and now anything is possible After two nights of voting against the government, Conservative MPs have acquired the taste for rebellion, renewing their motivation to get the Brexit plan they want.

What the college cheating scandal says about race The scandal has hit a nerve  raising issues of elitism, wealth, race and privilege.

Woman told to cover up or leave plane London (CNN)  An airline has apologized to a 21-year-old woman for threatening to offload her from a flight for wearing inappropriate attire. Emily OConnor, who was traveling on a Thomas Cook Airlines flight from the UKs Birmingham Airport to Tenerife in the Canary Islands on March 2, said the cabin crew told her that her clothing was causing offense.

This is the Opportunity rovers final photo of Mars Even though we bid farewell to the intrepid Opportunity rover in February at the conclusion of its 15-year mission, it still had one last gift to give.

Facebook struggles to deal with epic outage Facebook, the worlds largest social network, had rely on Twitter on Wednesday to explain that its apps including WhatsApp and Instagram were experiencing outages around the world.

Luke Perry buried in Tennessee Actor Luke Perry was laid to rest in Tennessee earlier this week, according to a death certificate obtained by CNN.

Children killed in Lagos school collapse At least eight children have died and many more are feared trapped after a building containing a school collapsed in the Nigerian city of Lagos. The school, which was on the top floor of the three-storey building in Ita Faji on Lagos Island, had more than 100 pupils, a rescue official told the BBC.

Are Kenyans still scandalised by scandals? In our series of letters from African writers, Kenyan journalist Waihiga Mwaura asks whether Kenyans have lost hope of tackling the scourge of corruption in the country. Shocking revelations over the last month that Kenya may have lost 21bn shillings ($210m; 162m) of taxpayers money only resulted in a few newspaper headlines.

Facebook services suffer widespread outages Related TopicsFacebook messaging integration Several of Facebooks products are suffering partial outages, affecting users globally. Facebooks main product, its Messenger service, and image-sharing site Instagram have all been disrupted. The cause of the interruption is not yet known, or is yet to be made public.

US to ground all Boeing crash aircraft President Donald Trump has issued an emergency order to ground all Boeing 737 Max aircraft following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet on Sunday. The Federal Aviation Administration had previously held out while many countries banned the aircraft from flying over their airspace.

Charlie Whiting: F1 race director dies aged 66 on eve of season-opener in Melbourne Charlie Whiting, the head of Formula 1 for governing body the FIA and one of the most influential people in the sport for decades, has died aged 66. Whiting suffered a pulmonary embolism on Thursday morning in Melbourne, where he was due to officiate this weekends season-opening Australian GP.

Boeing grounded: What it means for air travel The grounding of Boeings 737 Max fleet is expected to cause little air travel disruption  at least for now. The plane-maker grounded its global fleet of the aircraft as a safety precaution after new evidence emerged about a fatal crash involving the jet.

What happens when anaesthesia fails It can be the smallest event that triggers Donna Penners traumatic memories of an operation she had more than ten years ago. One day, for instance, she was waiting in the car as her daughter ran an errand, and realised that she was trapped inside.

Trump Issues Emergency Order To Ground Boeing 737 Max 8 Planes President Donald Trump has announced an immediate grounding of all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 planes in the wake of a worldwide boycott of the model. All of those planes are grounded effectively immediately, Trump said at a press conference on Wednesday. Boeing is an incredible company.

Beto ORourke To Announce Presidential Run: Reports EL PASO, Texas/WASHINGTON, March 13 (Reuters)  Beto ORourke, the Texan who gained a national following with his long-shot election battle against U.S. Senator Ted Cruz last year, will seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, a source close to the campaign said on Wednesday. ORourke, a 46-year-old former three-term U.S.

Samuel L. Jackson Issues Blistering Warning To People Staying Silent About Trump Samuel L. Jackson has sent a scathing message to people who arent speaking out against President Donald Trump. In a new interview with Esquire magazine, the Captain Marvel star said it was not fucking okay that this motherfucker is like ruining the planet and all kinds of other crazy shit.

Google Chrome adds the privacy-first DuckDuckGo as a default option Google has made a curious addition to its Chrome browser. With the release of Chrome 73, the browser has added the pro-privacy DuckDuckGo to its suite of default search engines, alongside Google, Yahoo, and Bing. As per TechCrunch, the addition was spotted in the changes for Chrome, and the option will be available in 60 markets around the globe.

Jimmy Fallon hooks up Mark Ruffalo to a lie detector to force Avengers spoilers Mashable Debuts exclusively premieres music, videos, artwork, trailers and more. You saw it here first! Mark Ruffalo has proven time and time again he cant be trusted with Avengers spoilers. So, naturally, Jimmy Fallon hooked the Marvel star up to a lie detector to force secrets out of him ahead of the release of Avengers: Endgame in April.
A woman is laughing all the way to the bank after a court awarded her Sh1.5 million as compensation after a company used her picture on a brochure without her permission.

Ann Njoki Kumena won the amount in a case against Kenya Tea Development Agency Limited (KTDA). In the judgment delivered last month in Kerugoya, Judge L.W. Gitari ruled that KTDA infringed on her privacy for use of her image in a marketing brochure.

Ms Kumena had alleged that the company, without her knowledge or consent, unlawfully photographed her and used the photographs in its marketing brochure titled KENYA TEAS.

In its defence, KTDA argued that the woman had consented and voluntarily posed for the picture.

The court had asked KTDA to file witness statements and list of documents to show consent but it did not present any proof.

The plaintiff has proved that the defendant took a photograph of herself, without her consent and that the defendant used her photographs for commercial purposes that is, advertisement of its products. No compensation was paid, the Judge ruled.

Where a right is violated and the culprit has gained from that violation, the person is entitled to damages.

Judge Gitari cited Article 31 of the Constitution which provides that every person has a right to privacy which includes the right not to have their personal home or property searched and, their possession seized.

The ruling was published on Thursday by Kenya Law.
Introducing The Main Index

There are now over 43,000 individual posts here on A Light In The Darkness. They have all been individually added into Main Index categories.



To get the full experience out of A Light In The Darkness and its very extensive library of items, covering virtually all things paranormal, supernatural etc ... we recommend that you flick down the Main Index, which runs down the right hand side of the blog page ... to find the indexed category in which the subject matter you seek is located.



Alternatively, why not use long search bar you will find towards the top of the blog page ...



ENJOY


Israeli Craft Beer Saga * The Beer Bazaar has been in touch with me, and I hope to have a proper visit in the near future. I must say that they really seem to care ...

Bye, Bye Cafe Rimon For as long as I remember Jerusalem, going on forty-nine 49 years, there has always been a restaurant, or two, called "Rimon" just...

the easiest cake recipe Plain Cake, Simply Delicious! This is the basis for all sorts of cakes, including chocolate, apple, chocolate chip, etc. It can be multipl...

Best Salad Deal in Jerusalem The other day my friend and I needed a quick lunch before going to our "next stop/event." All I wanted to eat was a salad, and she...

Jerusalem Light Festival 2018, Rather Dull The other night I went to the Jerusalem Light Festival 2018, even though I couldn't find anyone to go with. There were thousands of othe...

Piccolino Friday Brunch, What Took Me So Long? For years I had been hearing about the Friday Brunch served at Piccolino , but it took me until last Friday to finally experience it. The oc...

Newly Decorated "Tunnel" Last night, when my husband and I got off of the bus that had taken us from Ashdod to Jerusalem, I wondered how we were going to cross the ...

Totally Amazing Challah Shaping Tutorial I found this on facebook. It's making the rounds. I hope this works for all of you. I learned a lot watching it and didn't ev...
Tibet Week begins Monday, March 18, with the colorful opening ceremony in the Carlos Museums Ackerman Hall. At the end of the ceremony, monks will begin constructing the intricate sand mandala that will be built throughout the week. Emory Photo/Video

Tibet Week 2019 reaches out to the Emory community and broader general public with its theme of Engaging Compassion in Our World. A packed slate of activities is planned for March 18-23.

This years them represents a wonderful opportunity to see how compassion, a fundamental human value that is deeply integrated into Tibetan culture, manifests in many forms, says Carol Beck, associate director for communications and operations for Emorys Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics (CCSCBE).

As with past celebrations of Tibet Week, the Michael C. Carlos Museum will be the location of most of the activities, all of which will be held in Ackerman Hall of the museum unless otherwise noted. They begin Monday, March 18, with the Opening Ceremony at noon with Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi and the monks of the Drepung Loseling Monastery.

Every day, Monday through Friday, a guided compassion meditation will be held, open to the public, from 5 to 6 p.m. Each evening, there will be a talk or panel discussion related to the theme, Buddhism, Tibetan culture, science, compassion and more.

On Monday at 7:30 p.m., a panel will discuss Two Decades of Collaboration: His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Emory University. Beck will moderate. Panelists Brendan Ozawa-deSilva, a CCSCBE associate director; Tsetan Dolkar, assistant director for the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative; and Timothy Harrison, associate director for cognitively-based compassion training, will talk about how the Emory-Tibet Partnership has expanded under a new name to include new initiatives even as it retains its original mission to bring two worlds together for one common humanity.

We are also using the opening evening of Tibet Week to showcase the work of the new Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, Beck says.

Originally the Emory-Tibet Partnership, our center has grown out of the relationship His Holiness the Dalai Lama has had with Emory over the last two decades, expanding to include new initiatives related to promoting a compassionate and ethical world for all," she notes.

Venerable Jamyang will speak Tuesday, March 19, at 7:30 p.m. on Compassion in Action: An Ordinary Monks Extraordinary Transformation of a Community, describing the challenges and opportunities of working with children in extreme poverty and the transformative effects of a holistic education that incorporates Emorys SEE (Social, Emotional and Ethical) Learning. Jamyang is founder of the Tong-Len Charitable Trust, which supports educational programs. Beck describes this presentation as focusing on engaged compassion, highlighting the work of the Tong-Len School in Dharamsala, India, a school for street children that is transforming young lives.

Beginning on Wednesday, March 20, at 6 p.m., there will be a viewing of the new Rose Library acquisition The Murals of Tibet, a limited edition book signed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama featuring life-sized depictions of 1,000 years of Tibetan masterpieces, followed by a talk and discussion. The Murals of Tibet: Visual Imagery and Symbolism in Tibetan Culture is the topic of a talk at 7:30 p.m. to be given by Robert Paul, Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies in Emory College. Paul will be joined by Geshe Kelsang Damdul, director emeritus of the Buddhist Institute of Dialectics in Dharamsala, India. Lobsang Tenzin Negi, executive director of the CCSCBE, will moderate the discussion.

Education and the Science of Compassion is the topic of a talk on Thursday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m. Robert Roeser, Bennett Pierce Professor of Caring and Compassion at Pennsylvania State University, will provide an overview of what he sees science saying about the role compassion plays in social-emotional development and how contemplative practices can enhance the effectiveness of schools and other educational institutions. Beck says this is an opportunity to learn more about the science of compassion and how it can be incorporated in education.

Mandala sand painting

A live exhibition of mandala sand painting will be held every day through Saturday, March 23. This years mandala will be of the Avalokiteshvara, Buddha of Compassion. The exhibition is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the public to view the work. On Wednesday, March 20, Emory students are invited to join monks of the Drepung Loseling Monastery for a hands-on experience of sand painting using traditional chak-purs and colored sand.

On Saturday, March 23, Carlos Museum members are invited to participate in the members-only Tibetan Sand Painting for Families from 10 a.m. to noon. At noon, this event will be open to all. Museum members are free; nonmembers pay $10 for adults and $8 for children from 6-16; children under 5 are free. Registration is required for both events.

Geshe Lobsang Tenzin and the monks of Drepung Loseling will conduct the closing ceremonies on Saturday, beginning at 2 p.m.

Sponsors of Tibet Week 2019 include The Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, the Carlos Museum, Emory College, the Hightower Fund, Trust for the Meditation Process, the Joni Winston Fund, Drepung Loseling Monastery, Gaden Phodrang Foundation of the Dalai Lama, the Yeshe Khorlo Foundation and the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Fund.
Academics at the University of Bristol have taken the first long-term look at potential factors that could lead to suicide attempts in high-risk young people.

Published in The Lancet Psychiatry today researchers examined questionnaire data from 16 and 21 year olds who are part of Bristol's Children of the 90s study, concentrating on those who'd thought about suicide.

From the sample of 310 16year olds who had experienced suicidal thoughts, researchers wanted to know what proportion would make an attempt on their own life and if those at greatest risk could be identified. This could help clinicians in their assessment of high-risk young people.

They found that 12 per cent of adolescents with suicidal thoughts went on to make a suicide attempt during the five-year follow-up. The researchers looked at lots of different types of predictors and found that the factors that best helped to predict attempts were non-suicidal self-harm, cannabis and other illicit drug use, exposure to self-harm in friends or family, and having a personality type that is more open to new ideas and experiences ('intellect/openness').

The study also looked at factors that predict attempts among those who reported non-suicidal self-harm at 16 years old and found that the best predictors in this group were cannabis and drug use, sleep problems and a less extroverted personality type.

The researchers found that young people who experienced both suicidal thoughts and non-suicidal self-harm at 16 were a particularly high-risk group, with one in five attempting suicide over the follow-up.

Funded by NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, this is the first time academics have looked at predictors of future suicide attempts and it is hoped that the findings will help professionals who work with teenagers assess those at high risk.

Research Fellow at the University of Bristol Dr. Becky Mars said:

"Most young people who think about suicide will not make an attempt on their life. To help us identify which teenagers are most at risk, it's crucial that we know more about how we can predict thoughts into actions.

"Although other studies have found differences between young people who have thought about suicide and those who have made an attempt, this is the first study to look at predictors over time. Findings from our study could be used to help those who work with young people identify those in greatest need of timely help, support and interventions.

"We're now planning studies to look at predictors during shorter time frames (hours/days/weeks) and to look at other predictors which are not covered in this study. This is important as many well-established risk factors for suicide (such as mental health problems) do not predict suicide attempts in these high-risk groups"

Co-author and Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Bristol David Gunnell has lead on a series of research studies funded by NIHR and MRC to inform suicide prevention strategies. He added:

"While suicidal thoughts and self-harm are common in young people, with around one in six young people reporting self-harm, suicide and suicide attempts are thankfully relatively rare. Being better able to identify those at greatest risk and intervening may help reduce suicides in young people."

Papyrus HopelineUK is a confidential support and advice service for Children and Young People under the age of 35 who are experiencing thoughts of suicide or anyone concerned that a young person could be thinking about suicide. Call 0800 068 41 41 (Monday to Friday 10am- 10pm, Weekends and Bank Holidays 2pm10pm).

The Samaritans can be contacted by anyone FREE any time from any phone on 116 123, even a mobile without credit. This number won't show up on a phone bill. Or email jo@samaritans.org or visit http://www.samaritans.org to find details of a nearby branch, to talk to a trained volunteer face to face.

Jacqui Morrissey, Samaritans Assistant Director of Research and Influencing, said: "Identifying young people most at risk from suicide will help save lives. Looking at a group of young people over a long period, five years, and understanding more about potential predictors of suicide attempts provides us with valuable information.

"We know that the majority of young people, even those who have suicidal thoughts, will not try to take their own lives. This new research should help improve ways of identifying and supporting those young people who are in the high-risk category."

Explore further Teen suicide risk greatest in developing countries, study says

More information: Predictors of future suicide attempt among adolescents with suicidal thoughts or non-suicidal self-harm: A birth cohort study by Becky Mars, Jon Heron, Paul Moran, Rory C O'Connor, Kate Tilling, Paul Wilkinson and David Gunnell was published in Lancet Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/S2215-0366(19)30030-6 Predictors of future suicide attempt among adolescents with suicidal thoughts or non-suicidal self-harm: A birth cohort study by Becky Mars, Jon Heron, Paul Moran, Rory C O'Connor, Kate Tilling, Paul Wilkinson and David Gunnell was published in
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Dementia rates among older Australians are falling, sparking suggestions that measures aimed at improving the physical health of older people may also be having positive cognitive effects.

However, the South Australian researchers warn that the reduction is likely to be short lived with dementia rates expected to rise again as the population ages.

The study of 348,311 older people receiving home care services found the prevalence of dementia fell from 26 per cent in 2005 to 21 per cent in 2014.

For 188,846 older people starting long-term care the dementia rate fell from 50 per cent in 2008 to 47 per cent in 2014.

The research, the first in Australia to investigate dementia prevalence, was published today in the Journals of Gerontology: Series A.

The project's lead author was Dr. Stephanie Harrison, a Research Fellow from the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI).

She said the positive findings could be the result of national public health measures to improve overall health of the population.

"Research consistently shows that there are measures which can be taken to reduce risk of dementia," Dr. Harrison said.

"By improving our physical health, we might also be improving our cognitive health.

"Initiatives to improve factors such as smoking rates might be helping but we also have to consider that some risk factors for dementia, such as mid-life obesity rates, are increasing in Australia.

"It's likely there are a combination of factors impacting dementia prevalence so there is probably still room for improvement."

While there has been a decrease in recent years, dementia rates and the number of people accessing aged care in the coming years is expected to increase as the population ages.

There are more than 436,000 Australians living with dementia. Those figures are predicted to rise above 589,000 people by 2028 and above 1 million people by 2058.

"The findings are consistent with other studies reporting a decline in the prevalence of dementia in countries such as the US and the UK," Dr. Harrison said.

"But there could be a need to reassess current estimates as we should consider that the prevalence of dementia in Australia might be changing."

Dementia describes a collection of symptoms that are caused by disorders affecting the brain. It is not one specific disease.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, accounting for around two-thirds of cases. It causes a gradual decline in cognitive abilities, often beginning with memory loss.

South Australia, which has the oldest population of any mainland Australian state, has been positioning itself as a global leader in the emerging industry of 'ageing well' for several years.

The Global Centre for Modern Ageing in Adelaide was established last year to enable people, businesses, researchers and governments to work together to seize the opportunities presented by modern ageing.

The centre includes a living laboratory called LifeLab, a testing and innovation facility which allows people in their 60s and older to co-design products and services with businesses in an environment as close as possible to real life.

Explore further Dementia's gender differences revealed

More information: Stephanie L Harrison et al. Trends in Prevalence of Dementia for People Accessing Aged Care Services in Australia, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A (2019). Stephanie L Harrison et al. Trends in Prevalence of Dementia for People Accessing Aged Care Services in Australia,(2019). DOI: 10.1093/gerona/glz032
White British people are almost twice as likely to hold extremist views as people of Pakistani heritage in England, according to a study by Queen Mary University of London.

The study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, also found that depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress were associated with having extremist sympathies.

Professor Kam Bhui CBE from Queen Mary University of London said: "British counter terrorism policy has had an undue focus on Islamic fundamentalism, with White British extremism normally considered as a lesser problem.

"The fact that those who are White British are approximately twice as likely to have extremist sympathies as those of Pakistani heritage will therefore come as a surprise. This raises concerns about right wing extremism and suggests that a focus on tackling Islamic fundamentalism is flawed, and we need to consider extremism more generally.

"The link we've found between poor mental health and extremist thoughts shows that we need much more progressive thinking and better research on the causes of extremism and what might be done to prevent it. Our study suggests some mood symptoms, anxiety and traumatic symptoms may be important susceptibility factors.

"It shows us how important it is to support people with mental health issues, who may be less able to manage radicalising messages, and could end up adopting extremist sympathies. This provides yet another reason why it's so important to think about our communities' mental health."

The study used a survey of 618 people, including White British and Pakistani heritage men and women living in Blackburn with Darwen, Bradford, and Luton.

Extremist sympathies were assessed using ratings on seven items of an established measure of sympathies for violent protest and terrorism (SVPT), and information was collected on diagnoses of depression and symptoms of anxiety, personality difficulties, autism and post-traumatic stress.

341 (61 per cent) respondents condemned violent protest and terrorist actions; 144 (26 per cent) were neutral, and 73 (13 per cent) were sympathisers of violent protest and terrorism

Extremist sympathies were more common in those with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress

15.1 per cent of the White British and 8.1 per cent of the Pakistani groups showed extremist sympathies

Those born in the UK more often expressed extremist sympathies (14 per cent), compared to those born outside the UK (6 per cent)

Extremist sympathies were significantly more common in lifetime alcohol drinkers, tobacco users, and illicit drug users, and in those with a criminal conviction

Younger people and single people more often expressed extremist sympathies, compared to older, married or divorced people

Gender, religion, religious attendance, education level, political engagement, life events, discrimination, social capital, and social support were not associated with extremist sympathies

Autism and personality disorder scores were not associated with extremist sympathies. However, the individual item of 'losing one's temper easily' was positively associated with holding extremist sympathies

Measuring actual extremist behaviour and engagement with extremist networks is complex. Instead, measuring sympathies for such acts provides a way of studying a potential susceptibility to violent behaviour and terrorism ethically, in the population at large, without incrimination, or breaches of confidentiality. This can help test prevention policies and practices if the measure were included in national surveys.

Extremist views and attitudes are also more common than acts of terrorism, and may indicate a preliminary stage of the radicalisation process that can be prevented, yet this link needs more research.

The findings of this study may also be used in helping UK public servants, such as doctors and mental health professionals, who have been asked to show 'due regard' to the identification of those at risk of radicalisation. The measure may be a useful supplement to mental health assessments.

Dr. Clive Gabay, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the study, added: "This research should serve as a wake-up call to policy makers and political commentators who continue to downplay anti-BAME racism from white population groups. Racism is a serious factor in the current political debates around immigration and integration, and we need to be mindful of the re-emergence and growing popularity of extremist anti-BAME and anti-immigrant views.

"These findings also dovetail with other research that suggests that large numbers of those who voted in favour of leaving the European Union were rural and suburban middle class voters with racist and prejudicial attitudes towards migrants driven by socio-economic anxieties concerning their own historically accrued privileges."

The study is limited in that the data are self-reported by participants. A potential limitation of the SVPT measure is that respondents need only sympathise with one item to be considered to hold extreme views. Using a threshold of two or more sympathies to classify sympathisers led to similar results, although only 23 people then showed sympathies. Sympathising with committing minor crime was the most commonly endorsed item. Excluding this item from the classification of those with sympathies, however, produced no major changes in results.

Explore further Study finds links between depression and risk of developing extremist ideas

More information: 'Extremism and common mental illness: a cross-sectional community survey of White British and Pakistani men and women living in England' by Kamaldeep Bhui MD, Michaela Otis MSc, Maria Joao Silva MSc, Kristoffer Halvorsrud PhD, Mark Freestone PhD, Edgar Jones PhD. British Journal of Psychiatry. Journal information: British Journal of Psychiatry 'Extremism and common mental illness: a cross-sectional community survey of White British and Pakistani men and women living in England' by Kamaldeep Bhui MD, Michaela Otis MSc, Maria Joao Silva MSc, Kristoffer Halvorsrud PhD, Mark Freestone PhD, Edgar Jones PhD.
Mens behaviour change programs often include weekly group therapy sessions. Credit: Photographee.eu/Shutterstock

Domestic violence creates an unhealthy and toxic family environment that devastates the lives of all members of the family.

Domestic violence not only causes physical injury, it can also contribute to a range of mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

For children, the trauma of witnessing or experiencing violence can accumulate over time. This can contribute to severe social, behavioural, emotional and cognitive problems, which persist into adulthood.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently announced A$328 million to combat domestic violence. The investment is focused on housing solutions and front-line services for women and children.

While this investment is very welcome, we also need to stop violence occurring. This means also focusing on perpetrators, who are most commonly men.

We need to engage and motivate men to reduce unhealthy behaviours, seek help early, and stop using violence in their intimate relationships.

What do behaviour change programs do?

Men who use domestic violence are likely also to experience alcohol and other drug issues, depression, suicidal thoughts, stress, anxiety and low self-esteem.

In Australia, the preferred referral pathway for men who use domestic violence in their intimate relationships is men's behaviour change programs. Most men are referred to these programs from courts or lawyers.

Men's behaviour change programs are usually educational and therapeutic, including weekly group therapy. The topics covered include masculinity, intimate partnerships, conflict resolution, anger management, fatherhood, alcohol and drug use, trauma, stress, sexual health, oppression and spirituality.

One model, the Duluth behaviour change model, focuses on exposing beliefs that reinforce abuse. It encourages accountability and taking responsibility for behaviours.

Another model, based on cognitive behavioural therapy, challenges dysfunctional beliefs and helps men develop effective strategies to regulate their emotions. It also focuses on enhancing communication skills.

But the use of these programs in Australia is plagued by a major issue: men are often mandated into a program only once their behaviour becomes so severe that they've been charged with an offence.

Instead, we need to engage men earlier by increasing their awareness and motivation to seek help for their violent behaviour.

A key challenge for men's behaviour change programs is participants' lack of readiness to change. This is because most men who use domestic violence are ordered into treatment by courts, or forced to seek treatment by their partners or child services.

But men who volunteer to participate in behaviour change programs are more likely to alter their behaviours in the longer term than those who have little choice but to take part.

First, men need to identify their actions

Many men who use abuse don't realise their controlling and intimidating behaviour constitutes domestic violence.

The No To Violence website asks men, Is your behaviour causing problems for your relationships or family? and uses these questions as prompts. Credit: No to Violence

Helping men identify their abusive actions as domestic violence is an important first step towards changing behaviours. Some men are so conditioned to violence that they can struggle to recognise the harm of what they're doing and its negative impact on their families. This conditioning often occurs as a result of their own upbringings, and either witnessing or experiencing domestic violence.

Friends, family, general practitioners  even barbers  could potentially be trained to identify domestic violence and hand out referral options.

New technologies and social media can play an important role. As part of our research, we have engaged men to develop their digital stories to motivate others about seeking help early. Here is one example:

We have also worked with men who use violence and with the organisation No to Violence, the peak body for services, to develop an early intervention for men to reach out for help to change their use of violence.

The resulting Better Man website helps men identify their behaviour as domestic violence and develop and motivate a greater readiness to change and seek help early.

Better Man has three modules: Better Values, Better Relationship, Better Communication. It engages men in the community and provides them with awareness and motivation to seek help for their violent behaviour  before the justice system intervenes.

All men are prompted to contact the Men's Referral Service and other services, if they are using abusive, violent or controlling behaviours in their relationships.

As an initial pilot trial over four weeks, we recruited over 120 culturally diverse male volunteers aged 18-50 who live in Tasmania, New South Wales or Victoria to try out Better Man. It will be available more widely later this year and will be studied closely to assess its effectiveness.

Going forward, we need a greater focus and investment in reaching all members of the family, pivoting to the perpetrators and intervening early for a sustainable pathway to create safer families.

Explore further How domestic violence affects women's mental health

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

This World Sleep Day (March 15), Australia is waking up to the fact that around a quarter of children aged 7-8 are using mobile phones at night (between 10pm and 6am) when they should be sleeping.

It's a worrying statistic which highlights an increasing use of mobile phones in the bedroom and is based on a survey of 180,700 Australian students, aged 7-19, between 2013-2018.

The project, undertaken by researchers from the University of South Australia's (UniSA) Behaviour-Brain-Body Research Centre and UniSA Online, in partnership with Resilient Youth Australia, also highlights the negative mental health impacts on pre-teen children of using mobile phones at night.

While the marriage of mobile phone technology and social media is a well-known factor in keeping teenagers awake at night, UniSA Online's Dr. Stephanie Centofanti says this research highlights how even younger children are negatively impacted by night-time mobile phone use.

"This is a huge data set and it provides us with a good snapshot of how Australian children are doing in terms of their wellbeing and technology use. It will enable us to identify ways to support children in this unprecedented technological age," Dr. Centofanti says.

"Our research is based on surveys with primary and high school students in which we found that 83 per cent of those aged 17-18 had reported using phones between 10pm-6am more than once in the previous week.

"What may be considered more surprising is that 25 per cent of those aged 7-8 also reported the same use.

"Using smartphones at night is now common among children at that age and it will be a concern for parents and carers because not only does phone use impact negatively on sleep, but we are finding that it also increases angry or hurtful communication."

One of the more obvious ways in which using a smart phone at night disrupts sleep, relates to the phone's light which can disrupt circadian rhythms and cause havoc to the body's biological clock.

This research highlighted other negative effects, indicating that night time phone use was associated with a fourfold increase in the odds of receiving hurtful messages and an almost threefold increase in the odds of being cyberbullied.

This can be equated to the way children use their phones at night, through the use of messaging and communicating on social media networks. But technology use isn't all badthe data also indicated that night time phone use facilitated friendship building.

"Technology is a part of young people's lives and there are benefits to using these devices but we are also finding there's a reliance on it, a physiological addiction, with anxiety felt by children when they are cut off from these devices," Dr. Centofanti says.

"Technology use is creeping into the evening hours and this is having a big impact on the amount of sleep children are getting and the quality of sleep; children will wake up in the middle of the night, check their phone and send text messages.

"The other issue this raises is the flow over of bullying. Bullying that might have been confined to school days is now flowing over at night as children access [for example] social media accounts. Not surprisingly this can lead to difficulties falling asleep.

"The problem is that kids aren't able to catch up on lost sleep by having a lie-in after staying up on their phones. They still need to wake up early for school, and shorter sleep times relate to poorer functioning the next day.

"Lack of sleep can lead to poorer academic outcomes and can negatively impact mood and communication skills which can be really detrimental for kids' ability to maintain positive relationships."

Explore further Screen time before bed puts children at risk of anxiety, obesity and poor sleep
By charging undocumented child migrants for healthcare, the UK is failing to provide universal health coverage-in contravention of the Sustainable Development Goals and its obligations under the UN convention on children's rights-argue infectious disease and global health experts in an editorial published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

The term 'undocumented' refers to people who don't have any documentation proving their immigration status. It includes unrecognised victims of trafficking and modern slavery as well as those yet to seek, or refused, asylum in the UK.

An estimated 600,000 people in the UK are thought to be undocumented migrants, 120,000 of whom are children, including 65,000 born in the UK.

As part of the government's 'hostile environment' policy to curb immigration, legislation passed in 2014 increased restrictions on the entitlement to NHS care as well as imposing a tariff that is 150% of the usual cost for those deemed ineligible for free NHS care.

In 2017 further legislation in England introduced mandatory upfront charging before treatment for those unable to prove their eligibility, and denial of non-urgent care for those unable to pay.

Emergency and primary care treatment are currently exempt, as are some infectious diseases. Other urgent care or treatment deemed immediately necessary, such as maternity care, can be provided, but can still be charged later on.

And as the authors point out, anyone with unpaid NHS debts of 500+ is referred to the Home Office after two months, and this can affect their immigration status or asylum application.

"Therefore, families may face legitimate concerns that seeking care for their sick child may result in immigration enforcement such as detention, deportation and even family separation," explain the authors.

What's more, the recent introduction of a 400 annual surcharge per child to immigration applications to what is already a very costly process is likely to make it even harder to obtain or maintain regular status, they point out.

Even children born in the UK can only apply for citizenship after 10 years of residency, they add. "The Windrush scandal highlighted publicly how changing residency rules, combined with reduced NHS entitlements, can also lead to misclassification of status and denial of NHS care," they emphasise.

What research there is on healthcare use by undocumented migrants suggests that they underuse services, and often have poor health outcomes.

Exactly who is entitled to healthcare is often poorly understood by healthcare professionals- something that isn't helped by the complexities of the current system, contend the authors.

"Restricting healthcare access is clearly detrimental for health outcomes, but also child safeguarding," because it puts obstacles in the way of identifying those at risk, they suggest.

"NHS charging regulations undermine the government's stated commitments to child health and our obligations to children under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 24) and contradict recommendations outlined in the UN Global Compact for Migration, signed by the UK in December 2018," they write.

Health professionals need to collect data to show the effects of the policy, they suggest, as government reviews can't be relied on.

"Ultimately, health professionals will be instrumental in advocating against the NHS charging system and its links to immigration enforcement, and for restoring universal health coverage and the right to health for children," they conclude.

Explore further Charging migrants for access to health services will not ease strain on NHS

More information: Editorial: Changing undocumented migrant children for NHS healthcare: implications for child health, Archives of Disease in Childhood (2019). Journal information: Archives of Disease in Childhood Editorial: Changing undocumented migrant children for NHS healthcare: implications for child health,(2019). DOI: 10.1136/archdischild-2018-316474
Florida lawmakers will have $7.4 million less to work with than they thought this legislative session, state economists estimated on Thursday.

But thats a minuscule loss to the states general revenue fund, the pot of money that pays for schools, agencies and lawmaker projects.

Overall, the fund for the 2019-20 fiscal year is estimated at $33.5 billion, about $600 million more than the revised estimate for 2018-19.

Legislators base their budget each year on state economist estimates, and lawmakers are required to balance the budget each year. Thats their sole legal responsibility during the annual two-month legislative session, which started March 5 this year.

The Legislatures chief economist, Amy Baker, said Wednesday that the national economy is slowing down thanks to tariffs and the end of a decade of economic expansion , and that affects Florida.
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5G technology is in the process of rolling out worldwide, and promises exponentially faster mobile Internet speeds.

Brands such as Samsung, Huawei, and LG have already released smartphones that support 5G, and ICASA has said it will proceed in allocating 5G spectrum despite the governments retraction of the requisite amendments to the Electronic Communications Act.

However, the allocation of spectrum in South Africa has been a sore point for years, with South African networks repurposing their 3G spectrum to provide users with 4G connectivity.

A 5G spectrum auction has been slated for 2020, but given the governments track record, the likelihood of this deadline being met is questionable.

Adequate spectrum is an important resource for mobile operators, and Vodacom CEO Shameel Joosub said it would allow mobile networks to cut mobile data prices in half.

5G testing

While spectrum may be tight, South African networks have started showing off the possibilities that 5G provides.

Rain showcased its 5G capabilities, clocking speeds of up to 747Mbps, while Comsol and Samsung combined to launch a 5G network in Soweto that saw speeds peak at 1.75Gbps.

Speeds like these could become a widespread reality in South Africa if 5G is rolled out effectively in the country, and MyBroadband spoke with South Africas top networks about their progress in readying themselves for 5G locally.

MTN

MTN said that it needs spectrum before it can roll out 5G mobile Internet in the country.

However, MTN has been investing in expanding and enhancing its network to be 5G ready.

We have conducted indoor and outdoor trials with 5G technology, but we dont have the spectrum in order to roll out at scale, said MTN SAs executive for corporate affairs Jacqui OSullivan.

In addition, the 5G device ecosystem is now starting to develop, so we envisage 5G devices and competitive device pricing to be mainstream by 2020.

MTN believes that new mobile spectrum is critical in the sub-1GHz and the 3.5GHz bands, while it also encouraged 2.6GHz spectrum to be auctioned.

Vodacom

A Vodacom spokesperson said that the company is ready to implement 5G, and is waiting for spectrum to be made available so that it can begin this process.

Vodacoms network in South Africa is 5G ready, as demonstrated at Vodacom World in Midrand last year using a temporary spectrum licence, said Vodacom.

Given our extensive 4G population coverage and the close interworking between 5G and 4G networks, we are well positioned to deploy a 5G network in a meaningful way.

Vodacom highlighted that 5G spectrum could be licensed immediately  specifically in the 3.5GHz band.

This band is also the key band being targeted for mass 5G rollouts in many countries currently leading on wide-scale 5G deployments across the world, said Vodacom.

Licensing 5G spectrum now is key to ensuring that South Africa doesnt get left behind in participating in the fourth industrial revolution and being at the forefront of new technologies as well as encouraging significant investment in the country.

Rain

Rain CMO Khaya Dlanga said that Rain plans on rolling out 5G in the middle of 2019, and will cover Johannesburg and Cape Town to begin with.

Dlanga said there are two factors that will affect Rains implementation of 5G: Our continued rollout of infrastructure and local availability of 5G-capable devices.

As far as legislation is concerned, we are fully compliant with our licence conditions, added Dlanga.
1 year after elections, some Ghanaians say ...
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For more than 12 years, Mark T. Palmer taught students the art of drafting at Napa Valley College.

One summer Mark decided to get back in the field and practice what he had been teaching his students all those years.

In 1998, Mark left Napa Valley College to work for a small pump company in Sonoma doing 3D modeling of new mechanical parts and, after a year, moved on to lead the detailing department at Ogletrees Inc. in St. Helena.

After two years and with encouragement from his wife, Mark decided to explore a different trade that would earn higher income.

Marks first step was to contact an acquaintance who left a career building expensive, high-end custom bicycles for corporate executives. His friend left to own and operate a carpet cleaning business.

He immersed himself in learning everything about the carpet cleaning business. He became a textile expert in cleaning and one of two master certified carpet cleaners in Northern California, said Mark. I thought of what can I do and I thought of windows!

In 2002, Mark went online, found an international trade association to join, researched and began studying the window washing trade.

He purchased the tools to get started, loaded his ladders onto the rack of his Mercedes wagon and started going door-to-door to businesses in Napa Valley.

Sixteen years in business and two employees later, Mark is ready to expand and grow his business.

Realizing he needed a business plan to guide the growth of his company, Mark attended the Napa-Sonoma SBDCs NxLeveL Entrepreneurial Training program in the fall of 2018.

"The Napa-Sonoma SBDCs NxLeveL course has been a rich and extremely informative experience. The guest speakers all offered valuable and current information relating to today's business environment. My SBDC Business Advisors, Carolynne Gamble and Michael Basayne, provided guidance in our individual sessions and are a wealth of knowledge, said Mark.

My formal business plan is always with me as a reference and a reminder of how to stay on task and achieve my business goals."

Mark T. Palmer Company LLC has established a reputation for providing a high level of service by catering to customers' needs. Its not just about windows for some of his customers. He cleans glass artwork and chandeliers too.

We have a reputation in the Valley of being the best. We are a customer service enterprise in the window cleaning trade, said Mark.

Our overall goal is to make people happy and comfortable and window cleaning is a good way to do that because it makes people happy to have super clean glass.

For more information about Mark T. Palmer Company LLC visit mtpco.com or email Mark at mtpalmer@mtpco.com. The website is impressive and there are many testimonials from happy clients.

The Napa-Sonoma Small Business Development Center (SBDC) provides expert no-cost advising and low cost workshops in English and Spanish.

Call 707- 256-7250 or go to napasonomasbdc.org

Mary Cervantes is the business services director for Napa Valley College Napa-Sonoma Small Business Development Center. Reach her at 256-7253 or mcervantes@napavalley.edu
A short police chase started Friday morning when a stopped American Canyon motorcycle officer noticed a car go by with no front license plate and a rear plate that had no registration tag.

When the officer jumped on his motorcycle to make a stop, the Honda sped away from the intersection of Newell Drive and Donaldson Way at a high rate of speed, Police Chief Oscar Ortiz reported.

The Honda ran several stop lights before crashing into the median on Flosden Road, just south of American Canyon Road, shortly after 8 a.m., Ortiz said.

The driver, who was uninjured, abandoned the car and fled on foot into the Canyon Creek development. He was apprehended as he started to go into a resident's open garage door to ask to use the resident's cellphone, he said.

Police arrested Angel Rangel, 26, of Vallejo for investigation of felony failure to yield, and three misdemeanors -- obstructing arrest, property damage hit and run and driving with a suspended license.

The Honda was not registered to Rangel and had not been registered with the DMV since 2016, Ortiz said. The investigation continues.

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Blockbuster claims in a lawsuit that a racist, sexist, corrupt culture contributed to the near-catastrophic failure of Oroville Dam two years ago can go forward, a Sacramento judge ruled Thursday.

The decision by Sacramento Superior Court Judge James McFetridge sets the stage for what plaintiffs attorneys vow will be a deep dive into claims of a poisonous work culture that nearly disastrously compromised the nations tallest dam and the safety of nearly 200,000 residents downstream.

The lawsuit was brought by the city of Oroville, dozens of farmers, businesses and others against the states Department of Water Resources. The plaintiffs seek hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.

The plaintiffs attorneys allege the culture cultivated by the states Department of Water Resources was a dangerous distraction for workers at the Butte County site.

A toxic culture was part of the harm. Were going to shine a light on what happened at Oroville Dam, Niall McCarthy, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, said Wednesday, promising a full top-to-bottom examination of DWR so a crisis like this doesnt happen again in the future.

The crisis at Oroville Dam in February 2017 began when a large crater formed in the spillway. The spillways failure forced 188,000 people to evacuate.

The lawsuit before McFetridge includes wide-ranging allegations of sexual and racial harassment of dam employees, widespread equipment theft by dam officials, book-cooking to hide financial misdeeds and destroying evidence of shoddy maintenance that plaintiffs attorneys allege contributed to the dam disaster.

State attorneys blasted the allegations as salacious and sought to throw them out in February, saying the claims had nothing to do with the spillways failure. Plaintiffs attorneys disagreed, telling McFetridge in their filings that the allegations illustrate the dams mismanagement and the alleged theft of items crucial to the dams operation.

McFetridge in his ruling allowed the allegations to stand, saying plaintiffs attorneys Cotchett and McCarthy levied the same claims in 2018 in their complaint filed on behalf of Butte County plaintiffs Marys Gone Crackers and Wilbur Ranch, known as the MGC Complaint. McFetridge said that because the claims listed in that complaint were not contained in DWRs February motion to throw out the allegations, the claims cant be stricken.

Because the Court cannot strike the contested allegations from the MGC Complaint, those allegations necessarily remain included in this case, McFetridge wrote. Striking the allegations from the pleadings that are the focus of the motion would serve no purpose or benefit, he wrote in denying the state attorneys motion.

Department of Water Resources officials again flatly rejected the allegations in the lawsuit and downplayed the ruling as one handed down solely on procedural grounds in a statement Thursday evening.

The judge did not in any way rule that these allegations are appropriate for inclusion or true. Instead, he denied DWRs motion strictly for procedural reasons, department spokeswoman Erin Mellon said in a statement. DWR remains prepared to defend its zero tolerance policy before and during the Oroville spillways incident by our dedicated DWR employees.

McCarthy said he plans to issue subpoenas to gather more evidence to bolster plaintiffs claims.

Were issuing subpoenas and taking testimony on the very aspect of what was happening at the dam when they should have been focusing on safety, McCarthy said.

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Some Napans may soon have an easier time posting signs during election season or construction work  or after a natural disaster.

Upcoming changes to Napas sign code would allow markers endorsing political candidates to appear on commercial property as well as outside homes, and let merchants post temporary signs to direct customers to their front door when road work threatens to block or obscure the way in. The proposal will head to the City Council Tuesday after winning the Planning Commissions endorsement last month.

One of the rule changes fills a hole in what non-commercial displays are permitted during electoral campaigns, according to city senior planner Michael Walker.

The revised language adds to an existing code that currently authorizes signs for candidates and ballot measures on residential sites only.

Meanwhile, a new section of the sign code would govern additional temporary directional signs sought by business owners when construction or safety barriers screen a store from view, or block the streets and sidewalks providing direct access.

When a physical event such as construction, natural disaster or special event forms a barrier to a business, the owner would be able to apply for a temporary sign permit to the community development director.

The changes would follow an overhaul of Napas rulebook for the size and height of commercial signs, which the council approved in January. While debating those rule changes, council members including Mary Luros called on Napa to lift a 2011 ban on A-frames and other displays intended to help business owners better survive street closures  an issue that became acute after the August 2014 earthquake when the city cordoned off one shoulder of Brown Street due to building damage downtown.

After briefly relaxing oversight, Napa code enforcement officers began re-enforcing the ban on temporary markers about five months after the quake.

However, the grassy strips separating Napa streets from sidewalks will remain off limits to signage, political or otherwise. While homeowners are responsible for tending to the green patches known as parkways, they are part of a streets right of way and remain under city control.

Despite council support for allowing residents to plant election signs in such strips as they would in their front yards, no such change appears in the revised rules. Planning officials have said they cannot exempt campaign displays from the ban because such a carve-out would clash with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring neutral treatment of different kinds of content.

In that 2015 case, the high court ruled that an ordinance in Gilbert, Arizona violated the First Amendments free-speech protections by imposing stricter rules for directional signs on churches than it did for other non-commercial messages.

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PETALUMA  Petaluma police on Thursday arrested a Santa Rosa Junior College student on suspicion of raping a female student in a library on the Petaluma campus Monday morning, police said.

The victim reported the sexual assault to the Santa Rosa Junior College District Police Department and Petaluma police joined the investigation as the lead agency, Detective Sgt. Paul Gillman said.

Gilman said the victim is a young, college-age female and there were no witnesses in the library when the assault occurred around 10:30 a.m. Monday.

Petaluma police on Thursday arrested Brandon Cortes, 19, of Petaluma, on his way to the school where he also is a student. Cortes was booked into Sonoma County Jail under $126,000 bail on suspicion of rape, sodomy and sexual battery, Gilman said. He is expected to appear in court Monday afternoon.

Police are asking any witnesses to the alleged sexual assault to contact Detective Walt Spiller at (707) 778-4456.
The Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo has assured that President Muhammadu Buhari's administration would connect more with Nigerians within the next four years.

Osinbajo gave the assurance during a dinner to appreciate volunteer groups who campaigned for the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Abuja, on Thursday.

The Vice President also highlighted some efforts the Buhari-led administration was making in the area of infrastructure across the country.

A statement signed by his Media Aide, Laolu Akande, quoted Osinbajo as saying, "Just before I make a couple of remarks, we know that a few of our supporters lost their lives during the course of the campaign. I want us to stand for a moment and observe a minute of silence in honor of them. We thank the Lord for their souls and ask for comfort for all members of their family in Jesus name.

"For me, this campaign was about the Nigerian people. One of the things I discovered, and I'm sure most of us know, is that our people are so trusting and supportive of their leaders everywhere. I think that one of the major characteristics of Nigerians is how supportive they are and also they don't ask for too much. They never really ask for anything that is impossible to do.

"For many of us, as we went around the country, we realised the tremendous amount of work that we need to do and our capacity to do so much work and what our people need. As a matter of fact, I don't know any nation where the people are so generous no matter how poor they are.

"I met a woman in one of the markets in Kwara State, and she gave us some vegetables and I thought she wanted to sell them, but she was actually offering it to us free. I thought to myself, here is this woman I should be giving something to and she is the one giving a gift instead. That is just a typical Nigerian. I was walking past another woman in Kogi while shaking hands with people there, she gave me N200. I thought to myself, I am the one meant to be giving her something.

"There was another elderly woman here in Gwagalada, and that made the news, she pulled me aside and said, "Young man, you need prayers" and she prayed for me. People saw her holding my hands and praying for me, and I thought to myself, I am meant to be offering these people comfort and succor, but they are hopeful and offering the support, comfort, love and all of the things they thought at the time that we needed.

"On behalf of all of us who are here, I want to say a very big thank you to the Nigerian people for their contributions to getting us back here.

"We visited many homes across the country; we did the house-to-house campaign, visiting many homes and most of those homes were the homes of the poor. But they were still very hospitable and they would still ask, "What will you eat? What will you drink?"

"I remember an encounter in Idanre, Ondo State, where we met a man; he was so excited we visited him in his home. He said, "This your government is the best I have ever seen." He said all sorts of very nice things, then the Local Chairman of the APC in Idanre said to him, "But you are PDP this man." The man then said, "How can you say I am PDP? Okay, I used to be PDP, but from now on, I am now APC!"

"It struck me that what we need to do more is connect with the people that we govern. All that the people want are opportunities for us to interact more with them. Somebody who gave a speech earlier said that we should govern in this same way.

"One of the complaints that people made about our government is that we didn't communicate well enough and people didn't even know what we had done. I think they were probably right, and we did very well in terms of our messaging during the 2015 campaign, but thereafter, we seemed to have slacked and over time, the opposition began to get the better of us, especially on Social Media and Radio. But all of that is definitely going to change.

"I am going to take on everyone who has challenged us on this matter, including the gentleman who has offered his services for communication purposes because this has to be a joint effort in ensuring that we put across our point of view.

"And the simple reason why that is so is that today what our country needs the most is honest government, that's what our country needs. And I'll tell you why as I repeated many times in the course of the campaign; our country is not short of ideas, projects or money. What we are short of is integrity in office. Corruption is the major problem that our country has faced. And once we are able to deal with it effectively, and we will, we will be the great nation we ought to be.

"I was saying to someone that this same President, President Muhammadu Buhari, of the four refineries that we have in our country today, he built three of them when he was Minister of Petroleum. Then he built 3km of pipelines, how much has been added to it since then?

"So, you don't need to be a great orator. And this is one of the responses I gave to people when they were saying  "oh the president doesn't talk." He doesn't need to be an orator; all he needs to do is be a doer. And that is what he is doing today.

"And what we've seen today is despite the fact that we are earning 60% less than the previous government, we are spending almost 8 times more especially for capital projects. Why? Because the president is not stealing the money, simple! That is why we are able to spend more.

"And just in terms of achievements in infrastructure, the Lagos-Kano rail, we have just commissioned the first phase, which is the Lagos-Abeokuta-Ibadan, and we are going to complete the Lagos-Kano rail.

"We completed the Itakpe-Warri rail after 5 years it has been completed. Even the Abuja Light rail that was started in 2005 has just been completed.

"We put money aside to do the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, which had been practically abandoned; they would start and stop, they put it into the budget, but it would disappear. Today, the money is there to complete it.

"Sometimes, I talk to my friends in the Southeast about the second Niger Bridge, which was commissioned in 2014, but it was not designed, it was just commissioned. How does anybody do that? Today, the highest amount of money as an immediate payment for any project we have ever done was for the second Niger Bridge, 33billion immediate payment for that bridge. That is the highest amount of money we have ever put for one single payment.

"We're going to start the Mambila Project, and have put money aside for it. All these projects are projects that the President himself not just negotiated, but supervises on a regular basis.

"And that is the thing; a lot of work needs to be done in this country. Infrastructures we need to put in place will be put in place. And the reason why is because the President is not a thief. And that is to just put it very simply. Many believe that the government is very complicated, no. If the man who is in charge is honest, everything we want to be done will be done, just take a look at our Social Investment Programmes.

"I was saying to some group of people that today we are feeding 9.2 million children every single day as part of our school feeding programme. We're paying for 500,000 N-Power beneficiaries every month. We have given almost 2million traders TraderMoni loans, and almost 500,000 MarketMoni. Apart from that, we are giving N5,000 to the poorest of the poor per month, we are now approaching 500,000 and we are going to do a million.

"All of that has still not cost us N300billion. Yet some people ran a programme called Sure-P, and we cannot find a single beneficiary and it cost N700billion. On everything I've said, we still haven't spent N300billion in 2 years.

"So, it's not as if this business of doing the right thing is rocket science. The major thing is an honest man, as we have an honest man, everything we want to be done is what will be done.

"And I believe very strongly with your support, all of what we wish and want for our country will be done.

"And by the grace of God, every one of the infrastructure projects we want to be done will be done. Our economy will turn around and we will see prosperity in this great nation of ours.

"Finally, let me just say that we are still not done with elections. On the 23rd of March, we still have some outstanding states. As you know, we are re-running in 6 States. All of the efforts that we need to put into those 6 States should be done, we cannot afford to slack up and say we are done; we still have some things to do."
Its pretty clear to anyone whos watched firefighters try to control the massive blazes bedeviling California over the last two years that they have the right stuff. But questions have arisen over whether they are using all the right stuff.

The maker of a rival firefighting substance has cried foul over an exclusive contract between suppliers of Phos-Chek fire retardant fluids and the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.

That pact sees the state using no long-term fire retardant other than Phos-Chek, a highly visible pinkish-red fluid dropped from air tankers onto fast-moving flames. Phos-Chek, produced by the St. Louis-based ICL Performance Products in Ontario, California and Moreland, Idaho, slows fires and can steer them, but doesnt put them out.

With ingredients including ammonium polyphosphate and attapulgus clay, it is toxic to most fish; firefighters must try to avoid spills into rivers and creeks. It is the only long-term fire retardant recommended by the U.S. Forest Service.

Cal Fire pays just under $3 per gallon for Phos-Check, about $47,000 per full load for a Boeing 747 tanker, a total of $28.4 million last year, records show.

But backers of the less toxic competitor Pyrocool maintain their product is better, partly because it actually extinguishes fires, partly because it is cheaper at about 17 cents per gallon and partly because of its lower toxicity. It won a major federal Environmental Protection Agency safety award in 1998.

Weve been trying for at least 10 years to get Cal Fire to use our product, says Pyrocool CEO Robert Tinsley, a resident of Brentwood in the far East Bay. With these devastating fires, youd think theyd take a look at something else that has credentials.

In fact, some California locales have used Pyrocool, including the University of Californias Davis campus and the cities of San Rafael and El Centro. Its also been employed by the federal bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs, British Petroleum and the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

But Cal Fire wont try it because its not on the approved list of the U.S. Forest Service. We dont do the testing; they do, says Scott McLean, Cal Fire spokesman. Were very comfortable following the USFS lead. Cal Fire does not have a chemicals testing lab, relying on the USFS, whose own lab is not accredited.

Meanwhile, the Forest Service wont certify Pyrocool because it failed a safety test almost 20 years ago. In that episode, Pyrocool says it provided two drums of its product to the USFS. One passed, the other failed as too corrosive of magnesium-based substances.

Pyrocool refuses to pay for a USFS retest, maintaining the Forest Service lab is unaccredited and unreliable, unable to duplicate results. The USFS said in an email its wildfire products lab is not accredited because there is no legal requirement for that.

Tinsley offered to let Cal Fire test Pyrocool at an accredited lab in California, at company expense. But McLean said in an email that Due to being a state agency, we cannot honor the offer by Pyrocool to have another lab test their product specifically for Cal Fire.

McLean also said Cal Fire is not sure Pyrocool (like Phos-Check, a mix of water with a base concentrate) would stay in solution in an air tanker.

But Pyrocool officials recount a January 2017 case where during raging wildfires in Chile, the Walmart-linked Walton Family Foundation paid to send a 747 loaded with Pyrocool in solution to the rescue of the city of Llico, which was threatened with the same fate suffered last year by Paradise, California.

When it arrived and made several drops, disaster was averted.

Tinsley also cites the case of the oil tanker Nassia, burning in the Bosporus Strait near Istanbul, where the Lloyds of London insurance consortium estimated flames would burn at least 12 days. A salvage firm dropped a helicopter load of Pyrocool and the fire was out in 20 minutes.

No one can be sure Pyrocool or some other product would do better than Phos-Chek against California wildfires. But given Cal Fires inability to stop recent big fires, its an open question whether this states very capable firefighters are getting the right stuff to do their job well.

Thomas D. Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column. He is author of the book, The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Governments Campaign to Squelch It.
HILLSBORO, Ohio - Something I occasionally do is address high school and college students on the subjects of journalism and politics. In most cases, the students are quite liberal, and my presence is designed by organizers to expose them to a point of view that differs from what they otherwise ingest.

When I have mentioned this habit to people familiar with the handful of schools I visit, it has not been unusual for them to reply, "Oh, they'll eat you alive." That has never been the case, in part because my goal is not to alter anyone's political leanings, and in part because every student has unfailingly returned the respect I try to show them.

Of course, any discussion of the news media and politics quickly turns to the topic of President Donald Trump. The left-leaning high school and college students almost all loathe him (as do most of the faculty members). Among their stated reasons are his positions on immigration, climate change, race relations, tax cuts (for the rich, they say) and the environment (particularly his deregulation of the energy industry).

During one such recent visit, students were asked to come up with something good to say about Trump. Reluctantly, some complied. The economy is good, said one. Relations with North Korea are improved, said another. Trump does try to keep his campaign promises, yet another volunteered. By the time students were finished, it was grudgingly acknowledged that although Trump might be bad, he might not be all bad.

And yet, their animus toward the president was mostly unabated, and in further discussions, the real reason became clear. No matter what he might actually accomplish, the president's demeanor is offensive, the students said. His name-calling, his insults, his swearing and his bullying are traits that diminish him daily, as far as they are concerned. Although these characteristics don't faze most of Trump's supporters, they sincerely alienate others, particularly high school and college students - not because they are liberal "snowflakes," but because they have been raised by their parents to be polite and considerate.

A faculty member volunteered that Trump is failing younger Americans because he does not seem to care that, although policies and actions are important, a president setting a good example as a human being is just as crucial. The presidents under which most of today's students came of age - George W. Bush and Barack Obama - certainly exhibited those qualities, most students agreed.

The Robert Mueller probe is apparently winding down, potentially with no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. At the same time, whatever House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., may say, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., seems to be leading the very definition of a witch hunt. All of these developments and encounters have led me to believe that although Trump may soon get the chance to move past talk of impeachment and accomplish great things, it is unlikely that he will ever be regarded as among our greatest presidents. Such a designation requires not just the approval of supporters, but, as time passes, also detractors.

Trump might well lead the nation to an unprecedented employment and economic boom, develop better relations with age-old global adversaries and (hopefully) save the United States from an unhealthy acceptance of socialism. But his disregard for upholding the inherent dignity of the presidency will never allow those who oppose his policies to eventually admire him personally, as has largely happened with Ronald Reagan.

Does Trump care? Probably not. He is satisfied to be loved by those who love him now. An excellent examination of his various personas, based on his recent Conservative Political Action Conference speech, appeared over the weekend in The Washington Post. Among his obvious identities as enumerated in the article were "entertainer," "rebel," "bully," "fighter" and "pundit." But neither "gentleman" nor "statesman" was among those that could honestly be listed.

A friend of mine who has decades of experience in Republican politics and is not a fan of Trump's has decided that Trump is among the most consequential presidents of his lifetime. But being consequential is not the same as being great, a stature Trump will never achieve, whatever his accomplishments. For many, Trump will forever be defined by the glee he takes in his rudeness and cruelty toward all who oppose him.

Millions of Americans are willing to shrug off Trump's malice, believing it is offset by the needed disruption he is bringing to a stale and corrupted political swamp. But for millions of others, including many among our next generation of leaders, the absence in the White House of someone they can emulate, or teach their children to admire, will leave a lasting stain. Even as they might occasionally like what Trump does, they will forever despise who he is.

Abernathy, a contributing columnist for The Post, is a freelance writer and former newspaper editor based in Hillsboro, Ohio.
Recently, one of the many cable pundits was wondering if the blackface revelations from Virginias political leaders created a teaching moment.

Instead, why not first revisit some of the teaching moments of the past and ask if we absorbed the lessons that should have been inherent in what we were witnessing.

What have we learned from the decades of lynchings in this country, the most being in my home state of Mississippi? It took until 2018 for the United States Senate to pass a bill that classified lynching as a federal hate crime. The first anti-lynching bill was introduced in 1918. That teaching moment only took a century to mature.

And, in case you didnt notice, the presiding officer when the vote unfolded was Mississippis Cindy Hyde-Smith, the same senator who said she would be on the front row for a public hanging if a supporter invited her.

What have we learned from the roll call of the dead in the civil rights battles? The names of the martyrs have been written in blood: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Medgar Evers in Mississippi; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Viola Liuzzo in Tennessee; Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, all 14 years old, and Denise McNair, 11, in Birmingham, Alabama.

What have we learned from the bravery of Rosa Parks who refused to no longer sit in the back of the bus? Or from the Little Rock nine who confronted the jeers and threats of a crowd to integrate a high school, or from the sit-in at the Woolworths lunch counter, or the bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, or the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965?

What have we learned from the brutal slayings of nine people in an historic black Charleston, S.C., church, nine worshipers engaged together in prayers gunned down by a young white man? Or from the day of rage in Charlottesville, Va., when a group of white supremacists came to town and a violent clash broke out, leaving one woman dead, and the President claiming there were good people on both sides?

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson created the Kerner Commission in an attempt to better understand the genesis of the riots that had crashed across America, from Watts in Los Angeles to the streets of Newark in New Jersey, and many locations in between.

The final report was much more scathing than Johnson anticipated and he did little to achieve its recommendations.

But its most quoted passage rings loudly in our memories: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal.

Then in 1998, President Bill Clinton received a report from his presidential panel that studied racism in America. He believed at the time that the board had raised the consciousness and quickened the conscience of America. And that they have moved us closer to our ideal, but we have more to do.

The panel, chaired by the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, declared that the greatest promise of the 21st Century would lie in our ability to harness the strength of our racial diversity. And that the greatest challenge would be in accepting and taking pride in defining ourselves as a multi-racial democracy.

Looking through the lens of history it appears that both the promise and the challenge remain in the dustbin of our indifference.

Which reminds me of a line spoken by the Finchs housekeeper, Calpurnia, in Aaron Sorkins brilliant Broadway version of Harper Lees To Kill a Mockingbird. Sorkin has given the character a stronger and more assertive voice.

So when Atticus tries to argue that Maycomb needs more time to overcome racism, Calpurnia mockingly replies, How much time would Maycomb like?

How much time?

Gregory Favre, the former executive editor of The Sacramento Bee and retired vice president of news for the McClatchy Company, is a CALmatters board member. He wrote this commentary for CALmatters, a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how Californias Capitol works and why it matters.
The rains of last week have caused us to recall the history of flooding in Vineyard Valley and the involvement of both the city and the county in building the St. Helena Comprehensive Flood Control and River Restoration Project.

When we moved here in May of 2000, this mobile home park was like a ghost town teeming with contractors, trucks, noise and dust. They were still rebuilding from the 1995 flood.

However, we had looked at several other locations and could see the beauty of the design and the landscape. We also liked the sales staff and management who were very friendly and helpful. We had been discouraged by Realtors in Santa Rosa because of the two flooding events in 1986 and 1995 but we forged ahead. That was the start of a 10-year relationship with the City of St. Helena in working with them to achieve the building of the project.

At this time, we have conflict in Vineyard Valley about the Space Rent Stabilization Ordinance proposed by the city of St. Helena and supported by many residents of Vineyard Valley. The most prominent who oppose the ordinance cry We dont want government involvement in our business here. This caused us to go back and look at the history of Vineyard Valley since it was envisioned in 1968. We have a wonderful little booklet of 14 pages titled The Tumultuous History of the Development of Vineyard Valley Mobile Home Park. This information came from microfilm copies of the St. Helena Star.

Fox and Bentley were the original developers, who in 1968 sought rezoning necessary to build a mobile home park on this acreage. There was an immediate outcry from the community who opposed a trailer park. In 1969, the developers continued their campaign and the City Council unanimously approved the rezoning. The opponents gathered signatures to make the building of the trailer park a referendum. Does this sound familiar? Seventy-six percent of qualified voters cast their ballots. The result was 890 in favor of the mobile home park and 342 opposed.

The city however, put strict, unusually restrictive terms on the permit. Many of those terms having to do with design and landscape are why this park is as beautiful as it is. Restrictions on space prevent me from describing more of the requirements but it should be of interest to the St. Helena Public Works Department that much of the sewer line including a loop from Pratt and a line from the park to Allison were installed by Vineyard Valley Developers. In 1974 the Park went into bankruptcy and Bank of America took possession.

In 1975, a group led by Dick McDonnell purchased the park.

The first flood occurred in 1986 and city government had to step in to assist in evacuation and the establishment of flood prevention restrictions.

In 1995, another flood occurred with the need for park residents and owners needing assistance from the city.

In 1998, the voters of Napa County passed Measure A, an increased sales tax measure, which allowed the beginning of serious flood prevention measures.

So, for those of you who want government to stay out of Vineyard Valley, we wanted to provide a little history lesson. Without assistance and involvement from the city and county, Vineyard Valley would not be here today.

Pat Dell and Grace Kistner

St. Helena
The Duero River starts in the north of Spain and travels 460 miles through Portugal to the Atlantic Ocean. Along the river, there are several recognized wine-producing regions, including Ribera del Duero in Spain. Just outside the Ribera del Duero wine region sits a unique destination, Abadia Retuerta, the Abbey of the Twisted River.

General Manager Enrique Valero Quintana recently visited the United States to tease and entice me about this special property. Abadia Retuerta is the 12th century abbey of Santa Maria de Retuerta, which has been restored, rebuilt and converted into a five-star hotel with a one-Michelin star restaurant and winery.

A 700-hectare estate located on the corner of the Duero river, the property is split so that half of the land lies within the Ribera del Duero denomination, but the other half does not. There are 210 hectares on the property that have been planted to vine, and these vines are planted outside of the Ribera del Duero region. The vines are separated into 54 plots that lie over a set of hillsides that reach a height of 850 meters and then slope down to the southern bank of the Duero River. Sedimentary soils, altitude and climate contribute to the uniqueness of the winery that is just a few miles away from the famous Vega Sicilia located in Ribera del Duero.

The rebirth of a historical vineyard began in the late 1980s with replanting the vines. The winery opened in 1996, followed by the hotel opening in 2012 and the spa opening in 2014. Since opening, Abadia Retuerta has received numerous accolades for both the wine and the hotel and for three consecutive years has been in the Wine Spectators top 100 wines of the world.

While Enrique Valero Quintana could only tempt me to visit the distinct property, where they tout having the only spa in the world with a spa sommelier, he was able to share the wines from Abadia Retuerta.

We started with the 2016 Le Domaine Blanco de Guarda. A region known for red wine, especially Tempranillo, making white wine is purely the result of a mistake. After phylloxera, the plan was to plant Merlot. But the nursery was disorganized and made a mistake. At first they thought it might be white Merlot but, alas, it was Sauvignon Blanc.

Le Domaine is made with 80 percent Sauvignon Blanc with 20 percent Verdejo, which is barrel fermented on the lees with battonage. The first vintage of the wine was in 2011, the same year it won best white wine in Spain. The straw-colored 2016 has an intense, bright, aromatic nose with notes of grapefruit, pineapple, green apple and white flowers. On the palate, the wine has a round mouthfeel with more weight on the mid-palate than what was anticipated by the nose. Good acidity and a long finish, this is a white wine that can age for five or 10 years.

The primary grape of the region is Tempranillo, and the Pago Negralada is made from the best Tempranillo plot on the estate. The vines are planted in deep gravel soils topped with sand and the wine is aged for 24 months in new French oak barrels.

Quintana brought three vintages of the Pago Negralada to try. The 2014 Pago Negralada has an intense nose with aromas of dark red fruit, brown sweet spices and cedar. On the palate, sandy tannins coat the tongue and the wine has a long finish.

The 2012 Pago Negralada comes from a colder vintage, and the resulting wine has rich aromas of dark black fruit and tobacco.

The 2004 Pago Negralada has aromas of slightly stewed fruits and soft, smooth tannins on the finish.

Pago Valdebellon is made with Cabernet Sauvignon, which has adapted well to the region. The Cabernet Sauvignon grows on a limestone-rich terroir, and after maceration, it spends 17 months aging in new French oak barrels.

The 2015 Pago Valdebellon is a dark red color with notes of ripe dark fruits like blackberries and black currants, sweet spices, cocoa and coffee. On the palate the acids and tannins are well-balanced as the wine tingles the tongue and then lightly dries the palate.

Petit Verdot, another Bordeaux variety, was also planted at Abadia Retuerta. Planted in sandy soil, the Petit Verdot is aged for 16 months in oak barrels. The 2014 Petit Verdot is a dark ruby color with intense notes of ripe fruit, rose petals, roasted coffee and tobacco. On the palate, it is structured but silky in the mouth. This limited release wine will get better with age.

Enjoying these wines over lunch with Enrique Valero Quintana, with photos of the property in the background, I was utterly enamored, and I would find my mind wandering off as I dreamt about sipping these wines at Abadia Retuerta. Perhaps the next time I drink them, that is where I will be.

Allison Levine is owner of Please The Palate, a marketing and event-planning agency. A freelance writer, she contributes to numerous publications while eating and drinking her way around the world. Allison is also the host of the wine podcast Wine Soundtrack USA. Contact her at allison@pleasethepalate.com.
Although a missionary planted vines in 1819 and stated, New Zealand promises to be very favorable to the vine, it took another 160 years for those vines to materialize. In the meantime, the tiny country, with just 4 million citizens and more than 30 million sheep, was known for its dairy, beef and wool production.

Then in the late 1970s a few farmers in the Marlborough region of the South Island decided to take a chance on planting vines. The warm days, cool nights, free draining soil and abundantly pure artesian water made the area seem well suited for grape growing.

Chris and Phil Rose, owners of Wairau River Winery, were the first people to apply for a "change of land use" from farmland to vineyards, subject to objection. After 56 objections, they took the issue to the Court of Appeals and won, but the process took two years before they could begin planting. But their success opened the way for other wine growers to also begin to plant vineyards in the region.

During the early years, in the late '70s and throughout the '80s, the Roses grew grapes for others while learning as they went along and raising five children. In 1991, they released a Sauvignon Blanc under their own label, creating Wairau River Winery. Their first vintage won a gold medal at the New Zealand National Wine Show.

Their winery started with the Home Vineyard, 40 hectares, (90 acres), on the edge of the Wairua River and gradually expanded. The winery now consists of 13 estate vineyards, producing 100,000 cases or a million bottles a year. Their vines are some of the oldest in the region, which give lovely ripe characters and flavors to the wines.

Their Sauvignon Blanc, known for its crispness, freshness, and a balance of fruit and acidity, is still their corner stone, at 80 percent of their wine production. They also produce Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. They plant all their vines by hand and their company is 100 percent family-owned and run; from the ground to the bottle, they do it all.

They now have 35 employees in the winery and their Cellar Door Restaurant and Tasting Room. Their wines continue to win awards and recognition. In 2018, their Sauvignon Blanc earned gold medals in the New Zealand International Wine Show and for the New Zealand Wine of the Year.

A Family legacy of wine-making

As the Roses five children grew up, completed their studies and overseas travel experiences, they each returned and found niches in the family run business. The eldest daughter, Phillippa, runs the Cellar Door Restaurant where the youngest daughter, Caroline is the chef, with her partner Tane Malcolm. Middle daughter Anna helps out in various roles in the family business.

Son Hamish, once an abalone diver, loves his job as the viticulturist. I just love it out in the vineyard, watching the plants grow and develop. You can taste the differences in the grapes, due to variations in the soil, he said.

Son, Sam Rose, whose passion is fishing in the nearby Marlborough sound, has claimed the job of Wine-Maker.

When you enter the Wairau River Winerys elegant tasting room, youll notice the photographs of the family on the walls. Chris and Phil sit surrounded by their five grown children, spouses and twelve grand-children, all smiling happily into the camera. After the free wine tasting, you can step outside to the Cellar Door Restaurant, next to rows of their beautifully tended vines, for a delicious lunch paired with their award-winning wines.

Phillippas husband Lindsay Parkinson, heads the company as the General Manager and CEO and when I visited the winery on our recent trip to New Zealand, we sat down for an interview.

Chris and Phil helped to open the doors to the industry in the seventies. They are the most amazing people, and we so appreciate their vision and what theyve set up for all of their children. We are a true family company now, Parkinson said.

Though Chris and Phil have stepped back, turning the reins over to the younger generation, they still stay involved. Each morning, they come into the restaurant for coffee and to catch up with the staff.

Weve had some staff for twenty years. We pay them well, create a nice work environment and have good retention, Parkinson said.

Phil Rose won the life-time achievement award from Wine Marlborough, recognition by his peers in 2011.

Phils willing to try new things, works hard and expects the same from everyone, Parkinson said of his father-in-law. But hell only do business with someone hell have a beer with.

The elder Roses live at the Home vineyard, the first and original vineyard to be planted by hand.

My mother-in-law Chris loves to cook, so Hamish, Sam and I go home for lunch several times a week and chat about the business with Chris and Phil. Nothing is hidden, everything is open and honest, Parkinson said. Were so lucky weve been given something so well founded.

The Roses pioneering spirit laid the groundwork for the success of the regions wine industry, which produces two-thirds of the countrys wine. When you visit Marlborough, neat rows of vines surround you as far as the eye can see. In the distance, the deep blue water of the Pacific sparkles in the sun.

New Zealands Sauvignon Blanc, makes up 60 percent of the wine grown and 86 percent of the nations exports.

In 1990, the value of the countrys wine exports was $18 million New Zealand dollars, (roughly $12 million US ). The forecast for 2020 predicts 2 billion (1.3 billion US dollars), a hundred-fold increase.

Parkinson shared some thoughts about the growth and success of the New Zealand wine industry in general: Kiwis are collegial, were in this together. Were a small country at the end of the world, but we pack a pretty good punch.

New Zealand wine information is at nzwine.com/en/our-regions/marlborough/. The website for the Wairau River Winery, Tasting Room and Cellar Door Restaurant is wairauriverwines.com.

Diane Covington-Carter is an award-winning writer who married a Kiwi and now spends her winters on the South Island of New Zealand. www.dianecovingtoncarter.com
Armenia MOD: Azerbaijan attacked in eastern direction of border

Special court hearing underway on case of Armenia opposition lawmaker behind bars

Artsakh officials visit Stepanakert memorial

2 more die of coronavirus in Karabakh

Vardenis protesters dismiss Armenia MOD statement on obstructing car taking wounded soldier to Yerevan

Armenia FM briefs Francophonie chief on regional security issues (PHOTOS)

Armenia Police: 13 people apprehended near MFA building

Armenia protesting residents reopen Martuni-Vardenis motorway due to border tension

Armenia parliament passes changes to some laws

Armenia MOD: Deputy commander was told in Vardenis that car taking wounded soldier to Yerevan would be obstructed

347 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Armenia opposition movement staging protest inside MFA building

Armenia has new environment minister

Artsakh MFA: Referendum on independence is solid legal basis for statehood

Special court session to be held on case of imprisoned Armenia opposition MP

Biden promises Zelenskyy to punish Russia in case of invasion of Ukraine

Newspaper: Armenia parliament recent fight case to have former ones fate

Newspaper: What is reason for recent long visit to Armenia by ex-commander of Russia peacekeepers in Artsakh?

Petition to arrest one of accused Armenia soldiers returned from Azerbaijan captivity is granted

Russian Aerospace Forces consider practice of reconnaissance and strike UAVs during Karabakh conflict

Investigative Committee: Motion filed for arrest of 5 of 10 POWs returned to Armenia on Dec. 4

Armenia State Revenue Committee chief hosts Iran Customs Administration head

Armenia Shirak Province ex-deputy governor Boris Aleksanov dies

Constitutional Court announces decision on release of arrested MPs of opposition 'Armenia' parliamentary faction

Iran, Azerbaijan discuss cooperation in petrol and natural gas sectors

Lavrov: We understand the complexity of the situation in Armenia, but it's not right to speculate Russia's role

Cem Ozdemir who initiated adoption of Armenian Genocide resolution is Germany's first minister with migration history

Armenia FM, France Secretary of State sign 'Roadmap for Armenian-French Economic Cooperation'

Armenia PM scheduled to deliver speech at Summit for Democracy on Dec. 10

Zakharova says news about recall of Russia's Ambassador to Armenia is misinformation

Opposition 'Armenia' Alliance: 3 deputies of parliamentary faction will be released

Attorney: MP Armen Charchyan needs to be released immediately by virtue of Armenia Constitutional Court decision

Armenia ex-environment minister Romanos Petrosyan appointed Head of State Supervision Service

Armenia MOD: 2 Armenian soldiers receive slight firearm injuries as a result of Azerbaijanis' provocation

NEWS.am daily digest: 09.12.21

Zakharova: Moscow hopes Armenia and Azerbaijan leaders reaffirm commitment to implementing agreements

Zakharova on Aliyev's statement and murders of Armenian peaceful civilians

Ex-chief advisor to Armenia PM Hakob Simidyan appointed Minister of Environment

Joe Biden's Summit for Democracy kicks off, Armenia PM is also participating

Armenia environment minister sacked

Residents of Armenia's Vardenis shut down Martuni-Vardenis road in support of opposition alliance's leader (PHOTOS)

Armenia MOD: Azerbaijan opened intense fire toward Gegharkunik Province military positions

Armenia President meets with Emir of Qatar

Azerbaijan opened fire on Artsakh village tractor operator, says Machkalashen mayor

Parliament ruling majority obstructs decriminalizing severe insult in Armenia

Armenia deputy defense minister: No group has come from Moscow for demarcation

Armenia parliament approves several amendments to laws in first reading

Ambassador: American Studies center at YSU will play important role in deepening relations with Armenia

Armenia Parliament Speaker receives IFRC Secretary General-led delegation

Armenia PM receives IFRC Secretary General

Dollar still gaining more value in Armenia

Armenia Parliament Speaker sues opposition MP Aregnaz Manukyan for previous allegations

Law will lead to positive changes in Armenia universities administration, says US ambassador

Georgia formally refuses attending '3+3' regional cooperation platform meeting

Armenia MFA officials pay tribute to innocent victims of genocides

2 Azerbaijanis killed in mine explosion near Karabakh's Karin Tak village

MFA: Armenia will continue to work diligently to raise awareness of genocides

American Studies center to open at Yerevan State University

Gerasimov: Russian military in Karabakh working to restore peaceful life in region

Armenia opposition MP: Authorities present at household level establishment technical furnishing on frontline

Bomb threat in Yerevan building

Armenia: 6,500 people in border communities to receive cash for winter needs

Armenia government restricts access to open information from gov.am, govtravel.am

1 more person dies of coronavirus in Karabakh

Armenia envoy, US congresswoman discuss situation after 44-day Artsakh war

All Azerbaijan soldiers captured in Karabakh have been returned, says Rustam Muradov

Armenia legislature approves 2022 draft state budget

Armenia wounded soldier undergoes surgery

300 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

Turkey MFA: First meeting of 3+3 format on South Caucasus to be held Friday, Armenia will also participate

Armenia parliament to convene special session on December 15

MOD: Azerbaijan army opened fire on Armenia positions late Wednesday night

Newspaper: Number of deaths in Armenia rise sharply this year

Newspaper: Armenia PM asks for political, propaganda support from extra-parliamentary political forces

Meta plans to fully reopen its US offices in January

Armenia MOD: Soldier wounded from shot fired by fellow serviceman

Raisi, Erdogan discuss cooperation in many fields

Armenia's Pashinyan blames parliamentary opposition for delivering Nagorno-Karabakh, threatens to present evidence

Armenia PM: Even today I am ready to deliver my son in exchange of Armenian POWs

Armenia Parliament Speaker: We haven't stopped and won't stop efforts for our boys to return safe and sound

Opposition 'Armenia' faction: All statements made in parliament need to be explored and investigated comprehensively

Armenia PM: Mutual understanding was reached during meeting with Russian and Azerbaijani presidents in Sochi

Frank Pallone: Azerbaijan continues to threaten Armenia's safety and sovereignty

Karabakh Ombudsman: 21-year-old resident of Martuni region was subjected to violence by Azerbaijanis

Armenia PM: Several circumstances behind loss of Karabakh's Khtsaberd and Hin Tagher contain state secret

Nikol Pashinyan: Armenia will have railway communication with Iran and Russia via Azerbaijan's territory

Lavrov underscores need to launch demarcation of Armenian-Azerbaijani border during talk with Mirzoyan

PM: Armenia will participate in initial meeting in '3+3' format

Joe Biden: Putting American troops on the ground in Ukraine is 'not on the table'

Armenia PM: Final status of Nagorno-Karabakh doesn't imply its independence

Assistants to deputies of opposition 'Armenia' parliamentary faction summoned to National Security Service

Armenia Parliament Speaker's meeting with relatives of Armenian POWs and missing servicemen is over

Armenia, Russia FMs discuss Karabakh issue, November 26 agreements and '3+3' format

Armenia's Pashinyan rules out possibility of provision of corridor to Baku through Armenian territory

Putin says Iran's President might pay visit to Russia

Armenia Parliament Speaker in meeting with relatives of Armenian POWs and missing servicemen

Armenia Parliament Speaker to move to governmental mansion in Yerevan district soon

Armenia MOD has new General Secretary

Armenia MOD: Azerbaijani army fires at water truck of Armenian military unit in border's southeastern direction

NEWS.am daily digest: 08.12.21
YEREVAN.  The Ministry of Transport, Communication and Information Technologies (MTCIT) plans to make the Republic of Armenia (RA) one of the most appealing countries to carry out space activities, according to Zhoghovurd (People) newspaper.

This department is even proposing legislative amendments noting that 0 drams are entered into the RA budget from the space industry sector, whereas the amount of the global market for space industry makes about 270 billion [US] dollars a year.

Space industry does not exist in Armenia.

But, in spite of this, those at the MTCIT are confident that a skilled generation of specialists (...) of the space industry sector will be formed in Armenia. And one day we [Armenia] will conquer space, Zhoghovurd wrote.
Four people in custody and explosive devices found after dozens killed at two mosques in the city of Christchurch.











Two assailants opened fire Wednesday in a school near Sao Paulo, Brazil, killing eight people and wounding 15 others, state military police said. Four suspects  three men and a woman  were taken into custody and multiple explosive devices found attached to cars in the city. One person was later released. Australian prime minister Scott Morrison said one of the suspects in the "right wing extremist attack" was an Australian-born citizen. Police say none of the suspects were on their terror watch lists. They remain vigilant but are not looking for anyone else in connection with the attacks.New Zealand's threat level has been raised from low to high. Police commissioner Mike Bush urged everyone to avoid all mosques across the country. He told residents in Christchurch: "Close your doors until you hear from us again." The city was placed in lock down, with schools and public buildings closed. Nearby climate change protests were evacuated and council staff looked after children separated from their relatives in the chaos. The school lock down was later lifted but residents urged to stay indoors. The attacker is believed to have livestreamed at least one of the attacks. Police have urged people not to share the "distressing" footage. Earlier, Ardern spoke of the attacker's motivation, saying the victims might include refugees and migrants. "They are us," she said, before saying the perpetrator "has no place in New Zealand". Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter the mosque  believed to have hundreds of people inside  and then heard dozens of shots. He says he also saw a gunman flee before emergency services arrived. The two mosques targeted were the Al Noor mosque, where at least 30 people died, and the Linwood Islamic Centre, where at least 10 were killed.






Turkeys purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems is a national security problem for NATO, since the deployment of F-35 fighter jets is impossible amid the Russian systems, Reuters reported referring to US officials.

According to them, the purchase of S-400 air defense systems was not tantamount to it withdrawing from NATO, but that Ankaras purchase should be viewed as a national security issue, not a merely commercial decision.

We are continuing to work on a range of options to ensure that Turkeys participation in the NATO alliance and bilateral relationship can continue unabated and unimpinged, one of the officials said. The gravity of the risk to the F-35 both to the United States and to NATO allies is such that the two systems cannot be co-located.

The US State Department last week said Washington had told Turkey that if it buys the S-400 systems, the US will have to reassess Ankaras participation in the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter program.

On Thursday, Erdogan repeated that it was not possible for Ankara to back out of the deal with Russia.
The Russo-Turkish Treaty (Treaty of Moscow) of 16 March 1921 was a record of the consequences of seizure of the Republic of Armenia, partition of its territory and deprivation of its independence through the aggression of the Turks and Russians. This is stated in the statement issued by the Sasna Tsrer (Daredevils of Sassoun) Party.

The statement particularly reads as follows:

The regional architecture shaped under the Treaty of Kars  concluded under and for legitimizing the Treaty of Moscow on 13 October 1921  was called for ruling out the rebirth of Armenian statehood and the Armenian entity.

This 'architecture' became the foundation on which the system of governance for colonizing the state-shaped remnant of the Republic of Armenia (deprived of its rights)  Soviet Armenia, as well as for keeping wide layers of Armenians under the influence of the Russian Empire, was built.

In essence, the Treaty of Moscow of 16 March 1921, along with the Treaty of Kars of 13 October 1921 (deriving from the Treaty of Moscow) is a certificate on ultimate deprivation of the homeland of Armenians and exclusion of Armenian Statehood. Thus, revising the 'regional architecture' shaped through those treaties must become the starting point for shaping the State that we have today.

These treaties are acts that contradict international law and have no legal force in reality. However, international legal acts on the existence of Armenia as an entity, its territory and borders, including and first and foremost the Treaty of Sevres of 10 August 1920 and Woodrow Wilsons Arbitrary Verdict, are legitimate international legal acts and must serve as a ground and pave the way for the ultimate decolonization and deoccupation of Armenia.

This process has already begun with the demise of the former USSR and the establishment of the Armenian jurisdiction over a part of Artsakh.

The incorporation of Artsakh within the composition of the Republic of Armenia as a province and the solution to the issue of Nakhichevan, which has turned into a platzdarm for military aggression against the Republic of Armenia, are also goals that have to be accomplished in the context of the international legal and political evaluations of those unlawful treaties and the processes deriving from those treaties, and this will enshrine the subsequent phase of decomposition of the anti-Armenian architecture in the region.

At the same time, in this context, fulfillment of the legal acts on the fact that Armenia is an entity, its territory and borders, will generate a sufficient international legal resource for ensuring our national security and the functioning of the State.

We are certain that only by the specified national strategy will there be an opportunity to lay the foundation for a new, pro-Armenian architecture in the region in line with the international legal acts on the fact that Armenia is an entity, its territory and borders."
When the time comes to dismantle the cafes in other parks, well meet and talk to all the cafe owners, but dismantling of the cafes near Opera House is a priority for us. This is what head of Kentron Administrative District Victor Mnatsakanyan told journalists on 15 March.

He informed that no other area will be allocated to any one of the cafes being dismantled. Were considering allocating an area to Marr cafe. As for the Shokoladnitsa cafe, 20% will be dismantled, Mnatsakanyan stated.

He stressed the fact that whatever is located near a park in Yerevan and is made from concrete is temporary. Were warning everyone, but of course, well talk it over and give the cafe owners time to move.

According to the head of the administrative district, for the time being, cafes in the premises of the Opera House that are beyond the gate will remain. We acknowledge the fact that cafes are a part of the identity of Yerevan. For instance, were not against cafes near the Cascade Complex because that is not a park.

According to him, new zones will be created in Yerevan and people will be provided with the opportunity to diversify their businesses, but not at the expense of parks.
YEREVAN.  Armenia has been and remains guarantor of Artsakh's security, Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan told reporters in Yerevan on Friday.

Asked whether the attitude of the Armenian side towar the principles and elements on the negotiating table is changing, the minister recalled that at the joint meeting of the Security Council of Armenia and Artsakh in Stepanakert, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan unequivocally stated that there are principles and elements, and the matter is how they are interpreted and perceived.

We clearly said that Armenias priorities are status and security of Artsakh. Participaton of Nagorno Karabakh, its decisive voice is not a condition, but a move contributing to the efficiency of the negotiations, Mnatsakanyan said.

At the same time the minister added that seeking solution that is acceptable for all three nations cannot be unilateral, each of the parties has to make a contribution, including on the matter of creating an atmosphere of confidence.

We are trying to give momentum to efficient advancement of the negotiations by new ideas and approaches, he said.

At the same time he noted that Armenia is consistently holding negotiations both with Artsakh and within the framework of the OSCE Minsk Group.

The authorities of Armenia and Artsakh are different units. We in no way give up our position and our role. Armenia has been and remains the security guarantor of Artsakh. Realizing our role and remaining committed to the negotiation process, we can have approaches that we want to discuss with our Artsakh colleagues, this is normal, the minister noted.

Returning to interpretation and comparison of the approaches and obligations, the Foreign Minister stressed that imbalance is unacceptable.

If it is expected that one side can be more compliant, this approach will not work. We have repeatedly said that the problem concerns a person, 150 thousand people. Their safety remains a crucial issue. We need to talk about their physical security. This is the main approach. Nagorno-Karabakh is a political unit that has every reason to build its own life, he added.

Aked about Bakus claims that changing the format of the negotiations would lead them to a dead end, the minister assured that Armenia would not do something that would bring talks to a stalemate.

We are committed to a peaceful settlement. We will resolutely move forward. But in order to continue the negotiations effectively, it is necessary in practice to accept the need to express the decisive vote of Artsakh, the minister said.

He recalled that the people of Karabakh elected their own authorities, but did not choose the authorities of Armenia, and the system of government in Artsakh was recognized in various documents by the international community. At the same time, the minister stressed the need to create an atmosphere of trust in the region, and it is important for Azerbaijan to work in this direction as well.
President of Armenia Armen Sargsyan today hosted congregate of the Mekhitarist Congregation in Venice, Supreme Archimandrite Vahan Ohanian and Australian-Armenian figure Ara Katibian.

The guests informed that the Congregation is publishing a 10-volume English-language series of books devoted to the articles published in U.S. newspapers in the periods before and after the Armenian Genocide that will feature articles published in the six top newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Daily Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

They presented the two-volume book The Armenian Genocide: Prelude and Aftermath. As reported in the U.S. Press  The New York Times (the first of the series of books) as a gift to the President of Armenia. The 2,666 articles touch upon the 1894-96 Hamidian massacres, the Adana massacre, the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the direct consequences of those massacres.

The authors stated that the books are designed for field-related specialists and researchers, are not on sale and are granted to libraries and universities.
Trumps national security adviser, John Bolton disputed the North Korea's allegation, saying that he he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo created an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust at last months nuclear summit in Hanoi, Vietnam. According to him, these statements are "inaccurate.The president is our decision-maker," AP reported.

A senior North Korean official said earlier Friday in Pyongyang that Kim will soon decide if he wants to continue diplomatic talks and whether to continue to refrain from doing missile launches and nuclear tests. Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui suggested that while Trump was more willing to talk, Pompeo and Bolton expressed uncompromising demands of the North Koreans.

On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission said, For what reason do we have to make this train trip again? she said. I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger. We have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation.
On 15 March, Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Italy to the Republic of Armenia Vincenzo del Monaco, reports the press service of the National Assembly to NEWS.am.

Greeting the guest, the parliamentary speaker attached importance to the friendly relations that are growing dynamically and are hinged on the rich and centuries-old historical and cultural heritage of the two nations. According to Mirzoyan, all the preconditions exist for further development of the bilateral relations.

The speaker of the National Assembly attached importance to the visit that President of Italy Sergio Matarela paid to Armenia in June 2018 and added that this visit gave a new impetus to the Armenian-Italian relations spanning centuries.

Valuing the activities of parliamentary friendship groups for the development of inter-parliamentary relations, Mirzoyan stated that the National Assembly would soon set up an Armenia-Italy parliamentary friendship group.

Touching upon the Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, Ararat Mirzoyan voiced hope that the Armenian MPs Italian counterparts would help the Italian parliament ratify the document as soon as possible.

The parliamentary speaker highly appreciated the ambassadors efforts for the development of the Armenian-Italian relations. He also reaffirmed the invitations to the chairpersons of the Italian Senate and Chamber of Deputies to visit Armenia.

Vincenzo del Monaco congratulated Ararat Mirzoyan on being appointed to the high position and agreed that the bilateral relations are hinged on centuries-old traditions. Italy is one of the countries in which the Armenian community was established a very long time ago, the ambassador said. He attached importance to the role of parliamentary diplomacy in the advancement of the political dialogue. As for the Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, the ambassador stated that there is no obstacle for ratification and that everything is being done in accordance with the procedures established by Italys national legislation.
Uh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here.
I am certain that the slogan for the economic revolution reflects the attention that the Armenian government pays to the economy. This is what Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Armenia, Ambassador Piotr Switalski said during the event entitled EU for Business on 15 March.

The Government of the Republic of Armenia needs that because there is still 30% poverty in Armenia, unemployment is quite high, and there is quite a high level of capital outflow, including the brain drain, he stated.

Switalski stressed once again that the EU is ready to help the Armenian government. We are ready to discuss with the government the paths through which we can help Armenia, he said.

During the visit of the Prime Minister to Brussels, Armenian government officials presented a list of 13 priority programs. We believe that these programs are extremely important. I can tell you that the EU and the Armenian government are currently discussing the main paths through which the EU can provide its support and help implement these programs. We are currently considering the timetable since some of those programs are long-term programs. We are currently discussing how we can introduce our tools to implement these programs, but we believe that the existence of that list attests to the governments commitment to develop the economy, Switalski said.
The United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom said in a joint statement on Friday that they will not consider providing reconstruction assistance to Syria until a credible political process is underway, Urdu Point reported.

"The Governments of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States reiterate our support for the UN-led process in Geneva and UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2254 to bring about a peaceful and stable Syria," the statement said. "We are clear that we will not consider providing or supporting any reconstruction assistance until a credible, substantive, and genuine political process is irreversibly underway."

The United States and its allies reject the opinion of Syria and Russia that conditions are right for reconstruction and call on them to come to the negotiating table to reach a political solution to the conflict, the statement said.

As the armed conflict in Syria seems to be nearing its end and Damascus has regained control over the vast territories that were previously controlled by terrorist groups and rebels, Syria has already launched the reconstruction process and started welcoming back refugees.

Last year, Syrian President Bashar Assad estimated that it may take up to $400 billion to reconstruct the country after the conflict. In many Syrian cities, infrastructure was destroyed, while the country's transport system also needs to be restored. The situation is compounded by the fact that the United States and European Union have imposed sanctions that prevent other countries from helping Syri
YEREVAN.- Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, UNDP Assistant Administrator, Director of UNDP Regional Bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, on 15 March arrives on a three-day visit to Armenia, as part of her official tour to the South Caucasus.



Last month, the National Assembly of Armenia approved the governments five-year program, which aims to boost economic growth, diversify the economy and make sure all citizens are able to both participate in key decisions and enjoy higher living standards. Eliminating corruption is another key priority of the government.

Armenia has seen remarkable political transformation, and 5 percent economic growth in 2018. The country is facing a number of challenges, including out-migration, boosting inclusion and participation and involving the Armenian diaspora and other stakeholders in development.

The objective of Ms. Spoljaric Eggers visit will be to review UNDPs partnership with the Armenian government and look at key priorities, from governance reforms following the 2018 elections, to the countrys leadership to promote innovative methods and financing for sustainable development.



Together with UNDPs Resident Representative in Armenia, Dmitry Mariyasin, she will meet with President of the National Assembly Ararat Mirzoyan, Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinyan, Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanian and other officials. She will also hold discussions with the UN country team, key international partners, members of business and civil society, and meet with women leaders.



Mirjana Spoljaric Egger assumed her duties in October 2018. Prior to her appointment, she served as Ambassador and Head of UN and International Organisations Division of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.
Newly elected President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili is on an official visit to Armenia, and one of the topics of her negotiations with Armenias leadership was the conflict in the region. During her visit to Yerevan, Armenias leadership tried to find out what the President of Georgia had meant when she made a statement on the occupation of territories of Georgia and Azerbaijan during her recent visit to Baku. As a result, the President of Georgia not only affirmed her position on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, but also addressed allegations to Armenias leadership. Salome Zourabichvilis crude position may put an end to the uniform policy towards the parties to the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict by which Georgia had been guided throughout the post-Soviet era.

Armenias government, which received Georgias President in Yerevan, was particularly interested in Salome Zourabichvilis clarifications regarding her ambiguous statement made in Baku. During an official visit to Azerbaijan on 27 February, Zourabichvili touched upon the topic of occupation of territories of Georgia and Azerbaijan. Her statements on the Russian occupation of the former Georgian autonomous regions (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) didnt come as a surprise to anyone since Georgias representatives often address allegations to Moscow. However, this time, for the first time ever, the President of Georgia openly alleged Armenia for occupying Nagorno-Karabakh.

We have restored the independence of our countries and experienced a similar tragedy almost at the same time, Salome Zourabichvili said as she addressed President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev. Moreover, the President of Georgia clarified that by saying similar tragedy, she had meant occupation of territories.

For us, the occupied territories are a wound that still hasnt healed, the President went on to say and expressed satisfaction with the fact that Georgia and Azerbaijan have managed to strengthen their statehood and develop their economy, in spite of the occupation.

According to Kommersants information, the topic of Zourabichvilis statements made in Baku were touched upon with varying degrees of sharpness during the meetings with President of Armenia Armen Sargsyan and Premier Nikol Pashinyan in Yerevan. However, the President of Georgia didnt even justify or refute her statements. On the contrary, she presented several demands to the Armenian party.

In particular, during a meeting with Speaker of Armenias National Assembly Ararat Mirzoyan, Salome Zourabichvili warned that it was very important for Georgia to see Armenia recognize Georgias territorial integrity not only with words, but also in practice. The head of state immediately clarified that she was referring to the visit of the delegation of Nagorno-Karabakh to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The organizers of those visits show that the conflicts are proportionate, the President of Georgia said, without concealing her discontent. This is very painful, Zourabichvili went on to say and added; We find that there is no friendliness that there has to be towards our country.

Tbilisi believes that the latest statement by President Zourabichvili is unprecedented in the entire post-Soviet era during which Georgia maintained neutrality within the scope of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

This is the opinion that one of the leaders of the oppositional European Georgia Party, ex-deputy minister of foreign affairs Sergi Kapanadze expressed in an interview with Kommersant. According to him, the President has to be much more careful when speaking about such a sensitive topic. Alongside that, Mr. Kapanadze admitted that Salome Zourabichvilis statements didnt come as a surprise to him. This is only the beginning. There will be more statements like this, the diplomat said with confidence.

The Georgian government hasnt commented on the Presidents statements in Baku and Yerevan. All the MPs of the ruling Georgian Dream Party, who supported Salome Zourabichvili during the presidential elections, also havent commented on the statements.

Independent politician Davit Avalashvili reminded that, according to Georgias Constitution, the powers of the head of state shall be of a symbolic nature. Due to that, the expert added that even though the statements of Mrs. Zourabichvili were very important and unprecedented, serious and responsible figures in Yerevan and Baku wont view them as an indicator of radical change of position of the Georgian government on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.
COLOMBIA  In Cali, they met with municipal officials to discuss the environmental implications of the historic peace deal between the Colombian government and that countrys largest rebel group.

At Uramba Bahia Malaga National Natural Park in the municipality of Buenaventura, they studied park management and conflict resolution.

And on the northern coast, they visited the port city of Cartagena, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

For the 15 University of Miami students who traveled to Colombia over spring break as part of the class Fieldwork in Coastal Management/Tourism, Conservation and Development, the South American nation offered unparalleled opportunities to learn about port management and structure, marine protected areas, and the peace accords.

Taught by Daniel Suman, a professor of marine ecosystems and society at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, the class focused on the Valle del Cauca Department in Southwestern Colombia and was organized in collaboration with the law program at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali.

Colombia is such a culturally rich country, and Im grateful to be experiencing it with Dr. Suman and the class, said Kathryn Beaulieu, a graduate student at the Rosenstiel School. Weve had a unique experience meeting with government officials in Cali and Buenaventura, giving us a perspective on the history and challenges of Colombia that would have never happened on a tourist trip. We spent an awe-inspiring afternoon exploring the marine-protected area Bahia Malaga, sharing laughs and Wow, look at that! moments. Many memories to last forever.

The 15 students are enrolled in various programs at UM, including coastal law and policy, environmental science, and Latin American studies.

During our time in Colombia, I have gained more knowledge than I could have imagined about the countrys history, culture, and challenges, said Madeline Miller, a master of professional science student at the Rosenstiel School, who is studying coastal zone management. I enjoy sharing my perspective of such a beautiful place with my fellow classmates and am thrilled to be experiencing coastal activities and management practices firsthand.

A trip everyone should experience at least once in their lifetime is how marine science and physics major Raymond Leibensperger described his academic stay in Colombia.

Seeing how the country operates and tackles environmental issues helps add perspective to all of the problems we study at UM, he explained. And seeing the poverty and wealth gap in Colombia has really opened my eyes to the reality of most of the world.

Upon their return to UM, the students will prepare manuscripts and presentations based on field data collected during the trip.

Suman said he selected Colombia for the 2019 course because it is one of the most diverse Latin American countries in terms of biodiversity, politics, and culture.

I wanted our students to understand this important nation that is attempting to implement peace accords after 50 years of internal violence, he explained. In addition, we are examining port management and policies in Colombias two major ports that are rapidly growing as international trade and commerce boom, and the third focus area of our study is management of protected areas. Since January, we have read about and discussed these topics so that our students already had a good background before traveling to Colombia. In March and April they will write short research papers on these topics.
SIUs 67th annual All Ag Banquet recognizes students, alumni and faculty

by Hannah Erickson

CARBONDALE, Ill.  In keeping with their long-time tradition, the College of Agricultural Sciences at Southern Illinois University Carbondale recently recognized alumni, students and faculty members for their service to the college and the community.

More than 200 students and 150 alumni, donors, legislators and community members attended the 67th annual All Ag Banquet on Feb. 22. The evening began with remarks by Chancellor John M. Dunn and Dean Karen Midden, and followed with awards given in honor of several unique achievements. Illinois state Reps.Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro and Dave Severin. R-Benton, and state Sen. Paul Schimpf, R-Waterloo, joined the festivities to honor the remarkable achievements from those within the college.

Three alumni receive awards

Three alumni received recognition for their commendable post-graduation work. The Outstanding Alumni Early Career Award, presented to an alumnus who graduated within 10 years, went to Ashlee Spannagel.

Spannagel completed her bachelor and masters degrees in plant, soil science and agriculture systems, with a specialization in agriculture education in 2010 and 2012, respectively. After serving as a high school teacher for three years, she went on to complete a Ph.D. of Education and started her career in higher education. She lives in Iowa with her husband and works as the director of Delabar CTE System. She also serves as the compliance officer for the states Regional Office of Education #33 in Monmouth.

The Outstanding Alumni Mid-Career Award, presented to an alumnus who graduated 11 to 20 years ago, went to John Lhotka.

Lhotka received his bachelors and masters degrees in forestry before going on to complete his doctorate in silviculture at Auburn University. He served as a forester for the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station, before joining University of Kentucky faculty in 2007, where he built a silvicultural research program related to forest regeneration and growth.

The SIU forestry degree program was the genesis for my future success, Lhotka said. I was honored and very thankful for the award I received. The event was made even more special as I got to reconnect with several key faculty who were my early mentors including Jim Zaczek who gave me my first opportunity in forestry research. That interest he showed in me set me on the path I follow today.

Three-degree alumnus Steven Launius received the colleges Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes an alum who graduated more than 21 years ago.

Launius earned his bachelors degree in agricultural education, masters degree in agribusiness economics and doctorate in educational administration. Launius worked as an agriculture teacher for eight years and he also served as superintendent of several school districts. Over the past 27 years, he has served as a judge for many FFA and agricultural-related activities.

Three students earn outstanding student recognition

In addition to recognizing notable alumni from the college, three students received honor and a $500 scholarship for their excellent work. A selection committee, with representatives from Farm Credit Illinois, the Beta Alpha Alumni Association of Alpha Gamma Rho and the College of Agricultural Sciences department chairs, chose winners.

The 2019 Outstanding Sophomore Award went to Paxton Morse, an agriculture systems and education student from Eldorado, Illinois.

Morse, the son of Scott and Shelly Morse, previously served as the Illinois State FFA vice president and as the 2017-18 president for Collegiate FFA. He is the National Alpha Tau Alpha president, FarmHouse Fraternity president, executive vice president of the SIU Agbassadors and a member of Collegiate Farm Bureau.

The 2019 Outstanding Junior Award went to Kendra Flood, an agricultural systems and education major from Montrose, Illinois. An SIU Chancellors Scholar, Flood holds a 4.0 GPA. She is a current Agbassador and serves as secretary for the Ag council. Flood is active in multiple other student organizations and she received the Illinois Farm Bureau Legacy of Leadership Scholarship earlier this year.

The 2019 Outstanding Senior Award went to agribusiness economics student Charlotte Metz.

Graduating with a minor in marketing, a hospitality and tourism administration certificate and an honors certificate, Metz is on track to complete with a 4.0 GPA. A three-year Agbassador, she is Ag Council vice-president. She is active in several other student organizations and was the colleges nominee for 2018 Lincoln Laureate. . Metz will begin a new position with ADM as a grain merchandiser when she graduates.

The other nominees for outstanding student were:

Sophomores  Cody Suddeth, Tim Weber and Jason Weller.

Juniors  Sarah Dintelmann, Sidney Roling and Tess Schaefer.

Seniors  Dakota Discepola, Rebecca Harris, Allyson Lintker and Gabriel Wrye.

Outstanding student organization also recognized

Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) play an important role in the college and one group is recognized annually for their outstanding participation and campus work. FarmHouse Fraternity earned the award this year. The award sponsor is Farm Credit Illinois.

All members of the group perform at least 10 hours of community service each semester and this year participated in a wide variety of campus and student activities. The fraternity excelled beyond philanthropic efforts, with the highest GPA for any fraternity on campus and the second highest for any Greek organization.

Other RSO nominees were:

Alpha Gamma Rho

Sigma Alpha

Society of American Foresters

Collegiate Farm Bureau

Forestry Club

Elson earns staff excellence award

Kathy Elson, an academic adviser in the college received the Donald M. Elkins Excellence Award. The award originated in 1995, honoring an outstanding staff member who follows the same spirit of commitment, dedication and enthusiasm as the late Elkins. Elson is devoted to the welfare of students and helping them find educational success both in and outside of the classroom. An alumna herself, Elson is adviser for the Pause for Paws RSO and is always willing to help her students find their best educational and career fit.

Outstanding mentor award

Gary Apgar, a professor and distinguished teacher in animal science, food and nutrition, received the Gary L. Minish Outstanding Advisor-Mentor Award. The student-nominated award recognizes those who advise and mentor students at a personal and impactful level.

A long time professor at SIU, Apgar serves as a faculty adviser for many students. Commonly known as the pig guy, Apgar manages a research and production experience for students who are looking to work in the swine industry. His dedication to student success leaves a lasting impression on those he works with.

Live auction concludes event

At the conclusion of the awards ceremony, The Ag Council hosted a philanthropic fundraiser for Camp Little Giant, a camp at Touch of Nature Environmental Center. The camp is devoted to providing individuals with disabilities to get interact with nature in a safe and exciting manner.

The students raised more than $5,100 to purchase a customized swing for individuals to use at the camp. Multiple student organizations banded together to sell raffle tickets for a variety of gift baskets and experiences, along with hosting a live auction to sell larger donated items.

Many organizations joined the effort and sponsored items, such as Illinois Farm Bureau, Pitchford Elevator and more.
SIU Carbondale will host student summit aimed at helping revive, rebuild Illinois

CARBONDALE, Ill  University students from around the state will come to Southern Illinois University Carbondale later this month with the goal of developing strategies to revive and rebuild Illinois.

The Paul Simon Public Policy Institute is hosting Renewing Illinois Summit: Ambitious Dreams and Practical Steps to Revive the Prairie State on March 28-29. Limited registration remains, and organizers anticipate about 35 professors and students will participate in the conference at the Student Center.

Media Advisory

Reporters, photographers and camera crews are welcome to cover the Renewing Illinois Summit: Ambitious Dreams and Practical Steps to Revive the Prairie State March 28-29 in the Student Center. For more information or to arrange for interviews, contact Cary Day at the Institute at cbryant7@siu.edu or 618/453-4008.

Decisions ahead for state leaders

John T. Shaw, Institute director, said critical decisions are ahead for lawmakers with Illinois having a new governor and Democratic-controlled general assembly.

Illinois is at a crossroads as a new administration takes power in Springfield and confronts a myriad of serious challenges. Policymakers must decide if they will tackle these problems or defer them to another day, Shaw said.

Three primary areas of focus for students to consider will be:

The state budget.

The future of higher education in Illinois.

Illinois political climate and future.

Participants are receiving a 24-page report put together by longtime state government and political analyst James Nowlan and the Institute: Renewing Illinois: From leader to laggard, and back again? to review and use as a guide for the conference. The report discusses in detail the states issues and touches various topics including tax burdens, the states neglected transportation network, the history of political corruption and finding ways to fund higher education and stop student flight.

Decided the time was now for fresh ideas

Shaw said Institute officials developed the plan for the summit as a way to engage students from throughout Illinois in generating fresh ideas for lawmakers and state officials to consider.

Illinois is at a critical juncture in our history and policymakers are certain to receive plenty of ideas  and advice  from scholars, analysts and political operatives, Shaw said. At the Institute, we think its important for our leaders to also hear from an important group that is often overlooked: the young people who will decisively shape Illinoiss future. 

After the summit, a report highlighting the main conclusions and recommendations will go to Gov. J.B. Pritzker and leaders of the Illinois General Assembly.

The Institute is eager to bring together students from across Illinois to consider ideas to renew and rebuild Illinois, Shaw said. We are determined to stimulate vigorous discussion and generate constructive proposals. The Institute is convinced this summit can provide a constructive platform for university students in Illinois to generate fresh and important ideas to revitalize our state.

Schedule includes variety of speakers

The summit will include keynote addresses from several people who provide insight and perspective into the states situation. The schedule includes:

March 28  5 p.m., Sam Wheeler, Illinois state historian, will place Illinois current challenges into a historical perspective.

March 29  8:30 a.m., James Nowlan will discuss Illinois current political and economic challenges.

March 29  12:30 p.m., Erika Harold, a Champaign attorney who was the states Republican nominee for attorney general in 2018. She will reflect on her experiences on the campaign trail and offer her views on what Illinois voters are asking of their public officials.

Illinois universities sending delegations to the summit

Eight universities and colleges in Illinois are sending delegations and Shaw said there might be additional Illinois delegations attending. Students and faculty are coming from:

SIU Carbondale

Eastern Illinois University.

Illinois State University.

Illinois Wesleyan University.

McKendree University.

Northern Illinois University.

Western Illinois University.

Wheaton College.

The event is part of the Institutes Renewing Illinois Initiative, which examines ways to improve public policy in Illinois.

For more information on this event or other Institute programs, visit paulsimoninstitute.siu.edu or call 618/453-4009.
Maputo (AFP) - Tropical cyclone Idai battered central Mozambique on Friday killing at least 19 people and cutting off more than half a million people in one of the country's largest cities Beira.

State broadcaster Radio Mocambique, said "preliminary information points to 19 deaths and more than 70 injured in Sofala province as a result of cyclone Idai".

Most of the deaths occurred in Beira -- a port hub and capital of Sofala province -- a city which has virtually been cut off after power lines crashed, the airport was shut and roads swamped by flooding.

The flooding had already killed 66 people nationwide in days preceding the cyclone.

"The hardest moment was overnight and this morning," provincial governor Alberto Mondlane told state radio referring to the time the cyclone barrelled through the province.

"There has been a lot of damage. Many homes have been left without roofs," he added.

An official at the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) told AFP earlier that "houses and trees were destroyed and pylons downed".

Authorities were forced to close Beira international airport after the air traffic control tower, the navigation systems and the runways were damaged by the storm.

"Unfortunately there is extreme havoc," said the official.

"Some runway lights were damaged, the navigation system is damaged, the control tower antennas and the control tower itself are all damaged.

"The runway is full of obstacles and parked aircrafts are damaged."

Late on Wednesday, the national carrier LAM cancelled all flights to Beira and Quelimane, which is also on the coast, as well as to Chomoio, which is inland.

Power utility Electricidade de Mocambique said in a statement that the provinces of Manica, Sofala and parts of Inhambane have been without power since Thursday.

Another official, Pedro Armando Alberto Virgula, in Chinde north of Beira, said a hospital, police station and seven schools there lost their roofs and several houses were destroyed.

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Bonifacio Cebola, a spokesman for the Beira Central Hospital, said that the theatre at the country's second largest hospital was not spared and surgeries have been suspended.

"Because of the cyclone, the (theatre) no longer has conditions for patients to be operated on," Cebola said to Radio Mocambique.

Local officials said that this week's heavy rains had already claimed 66 lives, injured 111 people and displaced 17,000 people.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it would move 20 tonnes of emergency food aid to the affected areas.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had warned that the storm could pack winds of up to 190 kilometres per hour (118 miles per hour).

- 'Devastation' -

At least 126 people were killed by the downpour that has struck parts of Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa over the past week, officials said.

Heavy rains in neighbouring Malawi have affected almost a million people and claimed 56 lives, according to the latest government toll.

Authorities there have opened emergency relief camps where malaria and shortages of supplies have led to dire conditions, according to AFP correspondents.

Malawian President Peter Mutharika this week declared a natural disaster.

Mozambique's weather service has warned that heavy rain will continue to batter Beira and surrounding areas until Sunday.

The UN warned of damage to crops, "including about 168,000 hectares (415,000 acres) of crops already impacted by flooding in early March, which will undermine food security and nutrition".

Mozambique and Malawi, two of the poorest countries in the world, are prone to deadly flooding during the rainy season and chronic drought during the dry season.

In neighbouring Zimbabwe, weather services have warned that violent thunderstorms, lightning and strong winds will be experienced in the eastern regions of the country.
With around $717.1 billion assets under management as of Sep 30, 2018, Franklin Templeton Investments is a well-known global investment management firm. It offers investment management strategies and integrated risk-management solutions to individuals, institutions, pension plans, trusts and partnerships.

Founded in 1947, Franklin Templeton Investments prides itself in offering "exceptional asset management" to its clients in more than 170 countries throughout the globe. It has presence in 17 countries and more than 600 investment professionals. Franklin Templeton Investments is the biggest cross-border fund management group in the world.

Below we share with you three top-ranked Franklin Templeton mutual funds. Each has earned a Zacks Mutual Fund Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and is expected to outperform its peers in the future. Investors can click here to see the complete list of all Franklin Templeton mutual funds, their Zacks Rank and past performance.

Templeton Global Bond A TPINX seeks current income with both income and capital growth. The fund invests the majority of its net assets in bonds. These bonds consist of debt obligations of any maturity. The non-diversified fund mostly invests in bonds issued by government and related bodies. TPINX has returned 5.8% in the past three years.

As of December 2018, TPINX held 141 issues, with 7.96% of its assets invested in Mexico (United Mexican States) 8%.

Franklin Income A1 FKINX aims for maximum income while keeping scope for capital growth. The fund invests in a portfolio of equity and debt securities, with common stocks primarily constituting the equity securities. The fund may invest all of its net assets in debt securities that are rated below investment grade. Franklin Income A1 has three-year annualized returns of 10.2%.

FKINX has an expense ratio of 0.61% compared with the category average of 0.79%.

Templeton Global Total Return Advisor TTRZX seeks total return of investment that consists of a blend of capital growth, interest income and currency gains. The non-diversified fund primarily invests in fixed and floating rate debt securities and debt obligations of governments and related agencies. TTRZX has three-year annualized returns of 7.4%.

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Michael J. Hasenstabis the fund manager of TTRZX since 2008.

To view the Zacks Rank and the past performance of all Franklin Templeton mutual funds, investors can click here to see the complete list of funds.

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Zacks' free Fund Newsletter will brief you on top news and analysis, as well as top-performing mutual funds, each week. Get it free >>



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Earnings growth and valuation multiples are indeed important for investors to determine a stock's ability to offer considerable returns. But these are also essential in determining whether a stocks price performance is better than its peers or the industry average.

If the stocks performance is lacking that of the broader groups despite impressive earnings growth or valuation multiples, then something must be wrong.

Its always advisable to stay away from these stocks and bet on those that are outperforming their respective industries or benchmarks. This is because betting on a winner always increases the odds of winning.

Then again, it is imperative that you determine whether or not an investment has relevant upside potential when considering stocks with significant relative price strength. Stocks delivering better than the S&P 500 over a period of 1 to 3 months at the least and having solid fundamentals indicate room for growth and are the best ways to go about this strategy.

Finally, it is important to find out whether analysts are optimistic about the upcoming earnings results of these companies. In order to do this, we have added positive estimate revisions for the current quarters (Q1) earnings to our screen. When a stock undergoes an upward revision, it leads to additional price gains.

Screening Parameters

Relative % Price change  12 weeks greater than 0

Relative % Price change  4 weeks greater than 0

Relative % Price change  1 week greater than 0

(We have considered those stocks that have been outperforming the S&P 500 over the last 12 weeks, four weeks and one week.)

% Change (Q1) Est. over 4 Weeks greater than 0:Positive current quarter estimate revisions over the last four weeks.

Zacks Rank equal to 1:Only Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stocks  that have returned more than 26% annually over the last 26 years and surpassed the S&P 500 in 23 of the last 26 years  can get through. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Current Price greater than or equal to $5 and Average 20-day Volume greater than or equal to 50,000:A minimum price of $5 is a good standard to screen low-priced stocks, while a high trading volume would imply adequate liquidity.

VGM Score less than or equal to B:Our research shows that stocks with a VGM Score of A or B when combined with a Zacks Rank #1 or #2 (Buy) offer the best upside potential.

Here are the five stocks that made it through the screen:

Abercrombie & Fitch Co. ANF: Abercrombie & Fitch, headquartered in New Albany, OH, is a specialty retailer of premium, high-quality casual apparel for men, women, and kids in the United States and across Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East. The firm has a VGM Score of A and an excellent earnings surprise history. It has a 100% track of outperforming estimates over the last four quarters at an average rate of 88.3%.

Quanta Services, Inc. PWR: Quanta Services is one of the largest contractors serving the transmission and distribution sector of the North American electric utility industry. The 2019 Zacks Consensus Estimate for this Houston, TX-based company is $3.52, representing some 25.3% earnings per share growth over 2017. Next years average forecast is $3.66 pointing to another 3.9% growth. Quanta Services has a VGM Score of A.

SS&C Technologies Holdings, Inc. SSNC: A leading provider of software products and software-enabled back-office administration services to the asset managers, SS&C Technologies Holdings has a VGM Score of B. Over 30 days, the Windsor, CT-based company has seen the Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 and 2020 increase 6.4% and 3.7%, to $3.81 and $4.21 per share, respectively.

Funko, Inc. FNKO: Funko is a leading creator, developer and provider of pop-culture collectibles including figures, accessories and apparel among others. Sporting a VGM Score of A, this Everett, WA-headquartered companys expected EPS growth rate for three to five years currently stands at 17.4%, comparing favorably with the industry's growth rate of 10.6%.

Americas Car-Mart, Inc. CRMT: Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Bentonville, AR, Americas Car-Mart is an automotive retailer that sells used cars and provides financing for customers. The company has a VGM Score of B and an excellent earnings surprise history having surpassed estimates in each of the last four quarters.

You can get the rest of the stocks on this list by signing up now for your 2-week free trial to the Research Wizard and start using this screen in your own trading. Further, you can also create your own strategies and test them first before taking the investment plunge.

The Research Wizard is a great place to begin. It's easy to use. Everything is in plain language. And it's very intuitive. Start your Research Wizard trial today. And the next time you read an economic report, open up the Research Wizard, plug your finds in, and see what gems come out.

Click here to sign up for a free trial to the Research Wizard today

Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

Disclosure: Performance information for Zacks portfolios and strategies are available at: https://www.zacks.com/performance.



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Paris (AFP) - In March 1959 Tibet's ruler and spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, fled his homeland amid a deadly Chinese crackdown, escaping to India in a gruelling two-week trek.

There he would form a government-in-exile and demand autonomy for Tibet, going on to earn international renown and respect while remaining a bete noir for China.

Here is an account of his dramatic escape.

- Tibetans revolt against Chinese -

Buddhist Tibet, a vast Himalayan area of plateaus and mountains, declared independence from China in the early 20th century.

But China took back control in 1951, having sent in thousands of troops.

Lhamo Dhondup, chosen at the age of two in 1937 as the 14th incarnation of Tibetan Buddhism's supreme religious leader under the name Tenzin Gyatso, was enthroned as head of state after the Chinese invasion.

His co-existence with the Beijing authorities was tense and when the Chinese authorities summoned him to an event without his bodyguards on March 10, Tibetans feared a trap that could endanger their leader.

Thousands assembled at his summer palace to prevent him from leaving; thousands more demonstrated in Lhasa to demand the Chinese depart, the Dalai Lama would later say.

Beijing poured more troops into Tibet: as tensions mounted, they opened fire on March 17, targeting and eventually razing the Dalai Lama's palace.

The revolt was suppressed by March 21, ending in a bloodbath. The government in-exile later claimed the Chinese army killed tens of thousands.

- Dalai Lama disappears -

The outside world was largely unaware of the turmoil engulfing isolated and remote Tibet. Only neighbouring India had diplomatic representation there and rare reports of the unrest trickled out via its media.

On March 22 AFP reported from India that there was concern over the fate of the Dalai Lama, then aged 23, who seemed to have disappeared.

"According to some rumours, the young man could be in his Lhasa palace or under Chinese military guard," the report said, citing India's The Statesman newspaper.

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It later emerged that he had been able to slip past Chinese troops massed around his palace on March 17, another AFP story said.

- A great escape -

He left the palace dressed as a soldier and met up with a group of Tibetan resistance fighters 60 kilometres (37 miles) out of Lhasa, AFP reported, again citing The Statesman.

His entourage included his mother, sister, younger brother and several top officials.

They travelled for two days and two nights without stopping, on foot and on horseback, AFP later cited a Tibetan official as saying.

A month's supplies were carried by mules. To cross the major 457-metre-wide (1,500-foot) Brahmaputra river, they used a single boat made of yak skin, the official said.

The group then continued on foot, walking only at night through the harsh Himalayan terrain.

They had a head start on Chinese troops who had not realised the Dalai Lama had disappeared until two days later, only then sending out a ground and air dragnet, and combing monasteries where he could be hiding.

It was "one of the most fantastic escapes in history", an AFP story said.

- Arrival in India -

On March 31 the Dalai Lama walked across the border into the Indian state of Assam.

"The Dalai Lama entered India on March 31 in the evening," Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announced on April 3, AFP sending out the information in a top priority flash.

In mid-April an official statement provided details of his escape. "It is thanks to the affectionate support and the loyalty of his people that the Dalai Lama was able to make his way, by an extremely difficult route," it said.

It denied a Chinese claim that he had been forced into exile.

"The Dalai Lama wishes to categorically state that he left Lhasa and Tibet and came to India of his own free will and not by force", it said.

- Government-in-exile -

India granted the Tibet leader asylum on April 3 and permission to establish a government-in-exile in the northern hill station of Dharamsala, already a sanctuary for thousands of Tibetan exiles fleeing Chinese repression.

From there he launched a campaign to reclaim Tibet, gradually easing this into an appeal for greater autonomy.

Talks between the two sides failed, China adamantly rejecting any suggestion of Tibetan autonomy and blacklisting the Dalai Lama a dangerous "separatist".

Beijing continues to be accused of political and religious repression in the region, but insists Tibetans enjoy extensive freedoms and that it has brought economic growth.

More than 150 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since 2009 in protest against Beijing's presence in Tibet, most of them dying.

The Dalai Lama, who gave up his political role in 2011 but remains based in Dharamsala, has gained worldwide respect for his pacifist approach, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.
Axios

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu were the closest of political allies during the four years they overlapped in office, at least in public. Not anymore. "I havent spoken to him since," Trump said of the former Israeli prime minister. "F**k him."What he's saying: Trump repeatedly criticized Netanyahu during two interviews for my book, Trumps Peace: The Abraham Accords and the Reshaping of the Middle East." The final straw for Trump was when Netanyahu congratulated President-elect Biden for h
By Conor Humphries, Jamie Freed and Allison Lampert

DUBLIN/SINGAPORE/MONTREAL (Reuters) - The grounding of Boeing's global 737 MAX fleet has brought headaches for airlines that need to find alternative aircraft to fly in their place, but it has given some carriers a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate orders for the plane.

Countries and airlines around the world banned the 737 MAX this week after a deadly Ethiopian Airlines plane crash killed all 157 people on board. The disaster followed a fatal crash of the same model operated by Lion Air in Indonesia in October.

For airlines that over-ordered the latest version of Boeing's 737 workhorse, the grounding could be a good excuse to delay or cancel purchases, saving cash on the balance sheet, analysts said.

"These unfortunate developments could give airlines that have potentially over-ordered an opportunity to review their requirements and fleet strategy," CAPA Centre for Aviation Chief Analyst Brendan Sobie said.

Many airlines have had to quickly find other aircraft to substitute for the grounded 737 MAX, which has also complicated plans by airlines to use the fuel-efficient, longer-range jet to serve new destinations.

Southwest Airlines Co, the world's largest operator of the MAX, was planning to fly the jet on its new California-Hawaii route later this year, while Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes inaugurated flights from Brazil to Orlando and Miami in November after receiving its first 737 MAX planes.

Normally there are financial penalties for airlines that cancel orders and for manufacturers that do not deliver according to the contract terms. It was unclear how much legal leverage the MAX grounding might give airlines to wiggle out of commitments or seek damages for costs and lost revenue.

Among airlines that may regret ordering too many 737 MAX, Sobie cited Vietnam's VietJet Aviation JSC, which he said had based a decision to expand from an all-Airbus A320 fleet by adding 200 737 MAX jets on a flawed strategy of opening joint ventures in overseas markets.

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VietJet said it was closely monitoring developments and would make a decision about its order once more is known.

Among other Asian airlines, financially troubled Malaysia Airlines said on Friday that its order for 25 737 MAX jets was under review. Garuda Indonesia said this week it might cancel its order for 20 737 MAXs, which it had already reduced from 49 before the crash.

Lion Air, one of Boeing's top three MAX customers in terms of total orders, had already thrown into question 187 unfilled orders after its October crash. It told Reuters on Wednesday it would halt all planned 737 MAX deliveries until after a final report into its crash is released later this year.

In Europe, analysts said there was a case for and against cash-strapped Norwegian Air cancelling MAX orders: The ban would offer a reprieve from debt commitments but could leave the airline at the back of a congested Airbus order queue or increase operating costs if flights were replaced with less fuel-efficient jets.

Loss-making Norwegian already said in February it was postponing delivery of 12 MAX aircraft from 2020 to 2023 and 2024 to cut expenditure and shift its focus from expansion to profitability, and this week became the first major airline to publicly say it will seek compensation from Boeing over the MAX grounding.

A Norwegian Air spokesman declined to comment on Friday on whether it was discussing delaying or cancelling altogether MAX 8 orders, saying it was in dialogue with Boeing about a range of topics but had nothing new to share.

FLEET PAIN

For many large carriers like American Airlines Group Inc and China Southern Airlines Co Ltd, the 737 MAX a tiny proportion of the total fleet.

But smaller airlines Iceland Air, Poland's LOT and Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA had planned to use 737 MAX jets to cover 25 percent, 17 percent and 11 percent of their summer schedules respectively, Goodbody analyst Mark Simpson said, giving them a higher exposure to the grounding.

"This is going to impact on their operations and cash flow," he said. "Particularly into the Easter peak season next month and potentially through the summer as well... People will be scrambling for spare aircraft and there are not many, so lease rates will rise."

Meanwhile, Air Canada on Friday became the first major airline to publicly attach dollars and cents to the uncertainty surrounding the 737 MAX, saying it was suspending its 2019 financial forecasts.

One silver lining for the airlines: Reduced seat capacity may allow them to hike passenger fares, analysts said.

(Reporting by Conor Humphries in Dublin, Jamie Freed in Singapore, Allison Lampert in Montreal and Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; additional reporting by Tracy Rucinski in Chicago, Marcelo Rochabrun in Sao Paolo, Cindy Silivana in Jakarta and Liz Lee in Kuala Lumpur; writing by Tracy Rucinski; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Donald Trump is falsely asserting that the latest trial of his former campaign chairman proved there was no collusion with Russia. That's twice in two cases that Trump claimed vindication that did not occur.

The ex-campaign chief, Paul Manafort, was sentenced to nearly 3 years in prison Wednesday on top of a nearly four-year sentence given by another judge last week.

As if anticipating Trump would claim exoneration from the case, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson reminded her courtroom during the sentencing hearing Wednesday that the case before her was unrelated to questions about whether the Trump campaign worked with Russians to tilt the 2016 election.

"The 'no collusion' mantra is simply a non sequitur," she said, scolding Manafort's lawyers for bringing it up during the trial. It's not accurate, she continued, because "the investigation is still ongoing."

She said pointedly: "Court is one of those places where facts still matter."

The president was undeterred.

TRUMP: "I can only tell you one thing: Again that was proven today, no collusion."  remarks to reporters at the White House.

THE FACTS: There was no such proof in either trial. Whether collusion happened was not a subject of the charges against Manafort. It's one of the central issues in a separate and continuing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

In the case that produced Manafort's first prison sentence, he was convicted of tax and bank fraud related to his work advising Ukrainian politicians. Judge T.S. Ellis III neither cleared nor implicated the president, instead emphasizing that Manafort was "not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government."

Trump ignored that point afterward, tweeting Friday: "Both the Judge and the lawyer in the Paul Manafort case stated loudly and for the world to hear that there was NO COLLUSION with Russia." He misquoted the lawyer as well as the judge.

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On Wednesday, Jackson sentenced Manafort for misleading the government about his foreign lobbying work and for encouraging witnesses to lie on his behalf. Again, the case did not turn on his leadership of Trump's campaign.

As with other Americans who were close to Trump and have been charged in the Mueller probe, Manafort hasn't been accused of involvement in Russian election interference. Nor has he been cleared of that suspicion. The same is true of Trump.

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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Chad Day and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

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Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

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EDITOR'S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures
At least 50 people were killed in shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Friday in what appeared to be a carefully planned "terrorist" attack that included a lengthy anti-immigrant manifesto and live streaming of the carnage.

More than 20 people were seriously wounded in the racist rampage.

One person, a self-proclaimed racist who described himself as a 28-year-old Australian, was arrested and charged with murder and two others were detained in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, Ardern said.

The Australian suspect, who claimed responsibility for the shootings, left a 74-page manifesto against immigrants and used a helmet-mounted camera to capture footage of the killings.

Australian police identified the suspect as Brenton Tarrant, a white male whose name was also used by the shooter in his 17-minute live video, the Herald reports.

The suspect later made a brief court appearance, lasting only about a minute before District Court Judge Paul Kellar.

He registered no expression as a charge of a single count of murder was read and he was ordered to be returned April 5. Other charges are expected later.

The video shows the gunman saying, Lets get this party started before walking in the front door of the Al Noor mosque and opening fire. After three minutes, he returns to his vehicle for more ammunition and goes back into the mosque and opens fire again, according to the New Zealand Herald. It ends with him driving away from the scene at high speed.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush confirmed that video of the shooting had been circulating on social media. Facebook said it had taken down the gunman's Facebook and Instagram accounts and was attempting to remove any copies of the video.

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One unidentified survivor told TV New Zealand that the gunman, wearing black and carrying an semi-automatic weapon, appeared to target the men's prayer rooms at the Al Noor mosque on Deans Avenue first, opening fire on worshipers before moving on to the women's section.

Another witness, Len Peneha, said a man dressed in black entered the mosque at about 1:45 p.m. Peneha heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque.

As the shooter fled the mosque, he dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in Peneha's driveway. Peneha said he rushed to the mosque to try to help.

"I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque," he said. "I don't understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. It's ridiculous."

The attacks occurred the Al Noor mosque and the Linwood Islamic Center.

The national cricket team of Bangladesh almost walked into the deadly melee, arriving at the mosque only moments after gunfire erupted.

Mario Villavarayen, a strength and fitness coach with the Bangladesh team, told New Zealand media the players did not see the shooter but heard shots and took off running. None of the athletes or support staff, who were in New Zealand for a series of matches, were injured.

Syed Mazharuddin, a survivor at the Islamic Center attack, told the Herald that a young man who takes care of the mosque jumped on the gunman and took his weapon as he was opening fire on a group of elderly people sitting near the entrance.

"The hero tried to chase and he couldn't find the trigger in the gun ... he ran behind him but there were people waiting for him in the car, and he fled," Mazharuddin told the newspaper.

Police, who defused a number of improvised explosive devices found in one car nearby, said the second shooting occurred at the Linwood Masjid Mosque.

"Let's not presume the danger is gone," he said, adding that police had also defused a number of improvised explosive devices found on vehicles after the mosque shootings.

The attack, which occurred as people were attending Friday prayers, was the deadliest in the nation's history since 1990, when David Gray killed 13 people before being shot and killed by police in the town of Aramoana.

In Washington, the White House issued a statement condemning the "vicious act of hate," and President Donald Trump expressed his condolences on Twitter.

"My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques," Trump said. "49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

Trump tweeted Friday afternoon that he had spoken with the New Zealand prime minister and assured her that the U.S. stood "in solidarity with New Zealand  and that any assistance the U.S.A. can give, we stand by ready to help." He added: "We love you New Zealand!"

In earlier remarks, Ardern called the killings "an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence."

She described the suspect as "having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand and in fact have no place in the world."

He said he grew up in a working-class Australian family, had a typical childhood and was a poor student. A woman who said she was a colleague of his when he worked as a personal trainer in his hometown of Grafton said she was shocked by the allegations against him.

I cant ... believe that somebody Ive probably had daily dealings with and had shared conversations and interacted with would be able of something to this extreme, Tracey Gray told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Tarrant reportedly set off on a seven-year trip around the world in 2010 after his father died.

In his lengthy manifesto, the gunman said he was first pushed toward violence while touring Europe in 2017 after an Uzbek man drove a truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm, killing five people, including an 11-year-old Swedish girl.

He said his desire for violence grew when he arrived in France, where he became enraged by the sight of immigrants in the cities and towns he visited.

He said New Zealand, far from Europe, was not the original choice for attack but described it as target-rich of an environment as anywhere else in the West."

The dossier, which was described by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as a "work of hate," hailed Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose."

He said he was carrying out the attacks, "to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves."

By choosing Christchurch, he wrote, he would show that no place on Earth was safe and that even a country as far away as New Zealand is subject to mass immigration. He said he settled on his target three months ago.

Asked at an Oval Office meeting Friday whether he sees rising white nationalism, Trump responded, "I don't really. I think it's a small group of people."

Ardern said that authorities did not have any reason to believe there are other suspects but were not assuming that, and that the national security threat level was lifted from low to high.

She said many of the people affected by the atrocity were immigrants who "were parts of communities that they loved and who loved them in return."

Post by 1NEWSNZ.

She voiced "the strongest possible condemnation of the ideology of the people who did this. You may have chosen us  we utterly reject and condemn you."

Iman Atta of Tell MAMA, a British organization that supports victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, said in a statement: "Anti-Muslim hatred is fast becoming a global issue and a binding factor for extremist far right groups and individuals. It is a threat that needs to be taken seriously."

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils issued a statement calling he attacks "a product of the ever-increasing Islamophobia and marginalization of Muslims and is a reminder to all concerned, including Political leaders and media commentators, of the horrific consequences that an atmosphere of hate and division can lead to." It added, "No country or community is immune to such atrocities."

Extra NYPD officers have been deployed to visit Mosques through NYC during early morning (Fajer) prayers.



The NYPD is committed to the safety of all houses of worship, and the freedom to practice your religion freely without any fear.#Christchurch pic.twitter.com/m1HLFO6sD5  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) March 15, 2019

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement that the attack served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia. Al-Othaimeen called on New Zealand to provide more protection to the Muslim communities living in the country.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced stepped-up police security around mosques in the the city and state.

"At a time of great division, we will stand up to hate in all its forms and do everything in our power to protect the safety and well-being of all New Yorkers," Cuomo said in a statement.

Contributing: Mike James, Jane Onyanga-Omara; The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Police identify racist suspect in New Zealand's terror attack that killed 50
WASHINGTON  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew backlash on Twitter after criticizing those who offered prayers after the mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand.

"At 1st I thought of saying, 'Imagine being told your house of faith isnt safe anymore.' But I couldnt say 'imagine.' Because of Charleston. Pittsburgh. Sutherland Springs," the first-term Democrat from New York wrote hours after the shooting. "What good are your thoughts & prayers when they dont even keep the pews safe?"

Ocasio-Cortez's tweet sparked a firestorm of replies from people who criticized her for attacking those who chose to pray while absorbing the details of the heinous attacks.

At 1st I thought of saying, Imagine being told your house of faith isnt safe anymore.



But I couldnt say imagine.



Because of Charleston.

Pittsburgh.

Sutherland Springs.



What good are your thoughts & prayers when they dont even keep the pews safe?pic.twitter.com/2mSw0azDN8  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 15, 2019

The shootings in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Friday resulted in at least fatalities and the detention of three armed suspects, one charged with murder, in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a terrorist attack.

"Just wow. Incredible nasty thing to say after a tragedy," one woman wrote on Twitter, continuing in another post: "Even if you dont believe in prayers dont judge "other because they do. Arent we supposed to love and accept everybody for what they believe and who they are ??"

Another person chimed in, calling Ocasio-Cortez's tweet an "awful take," adding that it's "REALLY not the time to belittle people of faith."

Just wow. Incredible nasty thing to say after a tragedy.  Maria Pia (@mariapia1983) March 15, 2019

Awful take and REALLY not the time to belittle people of faith.  Jetberry (@Jetberry1) March 15, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez attempted to clarify her comments in another tweet, saying her "'thoughts and prayers' is reference to the NRAs phrase used to deflect conversation away from policy change during tragedies."

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That wasn't enough for Republicans, who for months have continuously scrutinized Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described Democratic socialist.

National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch responded, saying Ocasio-Cortez was mocking the act of prayer even after these attacks targeted places of worship.

Pretty sure thoughts and prayers isnt anyones phrase, and prayer especially (which you mocked earlier after what happened in a house of prayer?) is a real action, a petition to, a conversation with, God -- in this case, to request protection, comfort for those suffering.  Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 15, 2019

"Pretty sure thoughts and prayers isnt anyones phrase, and prayer especially (which you mocked earlier after what happened in a house of prayer?) is a real action, a petition to, a conversation with, God -- in this case, to request protection, comfort for those suffering," Loesch wrote on Twitter.

Republicans, including Liz Wheeler, a host on the conservative network One America News, also criticized Ocasio-Cortez's response.

"Our thoughts & prayers do matter. No, prayers wont bring back loved ones, but prayers bring comfort, respite & God's grace to those who mourn," Wheeler wrote on Twitter. "Anyone who's lost a loved one to tragic death, murder, or terror knows prayers matter."

Our thoughts & prayers do matter.



No, prayers wont bring back loved ones, but prayers bring comfort, respite & God's grace to those who mourn.



Anyone who's lost a loved one to tragic death, murder, or terror knows prayers matter.



Dont let @AOC or the left tell you otherwise.  Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) March 15, 2019

Ocasio Cortez's tweet also sparked conversation about whether the NRA had a presence or pull on politics in New Zealand, as it does in the U.S. The group does have an affiliate in the country but it does not appear nearly as influential as it is in the U.S.

Philip Alpers, who founded GunPolicy.org, told CNN that the gun lobby in New Zealand is "small but very strong" and said gun groups in the country have foiled attempts to alter gun laws over the years.

The BBC notes the minimum age to own a firearm in New Zealand is 16 and 18 for a military-style weapon.

New Zealand doesn't require that guns be registered, making it hard to know how many are owned throughout the country. In 2016, police estimated that number at about 1.2 million, meaning about one gun per every four people, BBC reported.

BBC notes the country requires firearm owners to pass a background check and examines medical records, where mental health issues are considered.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'What good are your thoughts & prayers': Ocasio-Cortez criticized for comments on New Zealand shooting
WASHINGTON  In ways big and small, some congressional Republicans are distancing themselves from President Donald Trump  though at-risk Republicans seem more willing to stick with him as the 2020 elections approach.

Thursday brought a fairly big rebuke: The Republican-run Senate voted 59-41 to nullify Trump's national emergency declaration on border security, with a dozen GOP members voting against their president.

"VETO!" Trump tweeted just moments after the Senate recorded the vote, a day after saying that Republican opposition to the emergency declaration would be "a bad vote."

For the most part, however, Republican senators who face the toughest re-election bids next year stuck with Trump, who continues to enjoy strong support from Republican voters at large.

"It suggests that they see more electoral peril voting against the president than voting with him," said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabatos Crystal Ball newsletter at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Still, the emergency declarations vote magnifies a series of lower-profile disputes between GOP lawmakers and Trump. It signals that the president could meet resistance on policy items ranging from the budget to political appointments to foreign policy initiatives.

Indeed, Trump, who hasnt vetoed a single bill so far in his presidency, may need the veto pen more frequently in the coming months. If so many Republican were willing to buck Trump on his signature campaign issue  building a border wall  it signals more trouble ahead for him from GOP lawmakers who have until recently been reticent to cross Trump.

Scott Jennings, former adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said "some tension has existed from the beginning" between Republicans and Trump, the brash outsider businessman who basically took over the party en route to the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

And he still has control. While some Republican lawmakers grumble about Trump, his approval ratings among Republicans at large are as high as 90 percent in some polls.

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"People voted for someone who would defy norms," Jennings said. "He is defying norms."

Trump and aides expressed annoyance at Senate and House Republicans who defected on the emergency declaration vote. But he predicted the tension will pass, also citing the president's strong support among rank-and-file Republicans.

On the other hand, Trump dropped more than a few veiled threats in the run-up to the vote.

"I think if they vote that way, it's a very bad thing for them long into the future," he said at one point.

Republicans who have criticized Trump say the party should buck the president even more.

"Encouraging to hear reports of Republican senators breaking away from their party loyalty  at long last  to stand up to the president against his emergency declaration and defend the Constitution," tweeted former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is reportedly considering a primary challenge to Trump.

Most of the senators who opposed Trump on the declaration occupy safe seats or won't face re-election until 2022.

GOP senators who face tough re-election bids next year  or possible primary challenges  sided with Trump, a group that included Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona, Joni Ernst of Iowa, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Another vulnerable Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against Trump.

The emergency declaration vote wasn't the first sign of friction between Trump and the Republicans, and those tensions will resurface in the months ahead.

Next up: lawmakers will jettison Trumps budget proposal, overturning his proposals to slash funding for the global health and diplomacy programs.

Prospects for his renegotiated trade agreement with Canada and Mexico  the new NAFTA  are murky at best.

Some Republicans fought  with success  against Trump's snap decision late last year to pull all U.S. troops our of Syria. The White House has since announced it will keep about 400 military personnel in the country as part of the battle against the Islamic State.

Just this week, seven GOP senators bucked the president by supporting a bill that would force the administration to end its support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen.

The measure passed 54-46  not enough to override another threatened veto by Trump, but still a remarkable rebuke to the president.

The vote showcased the growing unease in Congress with America's role in a far-flung, four-year conflict that has left more than 50,000 civilians dead and millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation.

The United States involvement in providing support to Saudi Arabia  which was never properly debated or approved by Congress in 2015  has prolonged needless suffering, and our engagement in this war must come to an end," said Sen. Jerry Moran, a conservative Kansas Republican, in explaining his yes vote.

That vote was about far more than the war in Yemen, however.

It was also a condemnation of Trumps refusal to admonish Saudi Arabia for its role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Saudi operatives killed the American resident and Washington Post columnist inside a consulate in Istanbul.

Trump has cast doubt on the CIAs conclusion that Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman ordered the murder, and he has insisted that Khashoggis death should not have any impact on U.S.-Saudi relations.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not an ally that deserves our support or military intervention, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said during the Senate floor debate.

Republicans have also challenged Trump over his criticism of long-standing U.S. alliances, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

McConnell, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., extended an invitation to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to address a joint session of Congress.

It's a signal honor for the head of NATO, an organization Trump has frequently criticized over claims that some members are not paying their fair share for mutual defense.

The invitation was not designed to "send any message to the president," McConnell said, but he and Pelosi "both think that NATO is the most important military alliance in the history of the world ... We need to continue to demonstrate support for it and to reassure our European allies."

In the House, the new Democratic majority is already finding support for key bills countering Trump on foreign policy, from the Yemen resolution to support for NATO.

On Wednesday, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, joined his Democratic counterpart in unveiling three pieces of legislation aimed at pushing back against Trumps disdain for Americas allies and his reluctance to confront foes over human rights abuses.

McCaul called those unshakable pillars of American values and said it was vital to reaffirm Americans trusted alliances around the globe.

The measures are nonbinding but send seem to signal that some Republicans are fed up with Trumps attacks on allies like Germany and Canada  and his coziness with autocrats such as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

When it comes to Republican restlessness, the worst-case scenario for Trump is a primary challenge of his own.

Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld is exploring such a bid, but he is little-known and Trump allies are quick to point out he has switched parties in the past.

Anti-Trumpers had hopes for Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, but he has yet to express a desire to challenge the president.

A Kasich bid is also uncertain at this point.

Republican tension has been a frequent storyline during the Trump political era, Kondik said. He noted that, in the fall of 2016, after the release of a "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump could be heard speaking lewdly about grabbing women's genitals, some Republicans called on him to abandon his own ticket.

Trump still wound up as president and still has sometimes tense ties with Republicans.

"It sort of stretches at times," Kondik said, "but never breaks."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What GOP split on border emergency means for Donald Trump and 2020
Brenton Tarrant was charged Saturday with murder in the terrorist attack shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch that killed at least 50 people. He livestreamed his own rampage, the deadliest massacre in the nation's history.

Tarrant is a 28-year-old white male with white supremacist views. He captured Friday's deadly incident at Masjid Al Noor mosque in a 17-minute video taken on a helmet camera.

Here's what we know about him:

'Extremist, right-wing violent terrorist' from Australia

Tarrant, 28, was born in nearby Australia, the country's Prime Minster Scott Morrison confirmed, according to the New Zealand Herald. Morrision called Tarrant "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist."

Media reports have found that Tarrant is from Grafton, a town of around 19,000 people in New South Wales, Australia.

Author of an anti-immigrant manifesto

Tarrant is the author of a more than 70-page anti-immigrant "manifesto" called "The Great Replacement," which according to The Guardian, consists of a rant about white genocide and advocates for "an atmosphere of fear against Muslims.

He posted the document on Twitter before the shooting. His Twitter account has since been disabled.

'Just a regular white man,' he wrote

In the document, Tarrant refers to himself as "European" instead of Australian and also says he grew up in a low-income working class family, The Guardian reported.

He wrote that his language, culture, political beliefs, philosophical beliefs, and identity are all European and "most importantly, my blood is European.

"I am just a regular white man, from a regular family, who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people, it says. My parents are of Scottish, Irish and English stock. I had a regular childhood, without any great issues.

Had planned attack for two years, he claims

Tarrant describes himself as a ethno-nationalist and a fascist in the manifesto, The Guardian reported, and claims to have planned Friday's attack for two years. He said New Zealand wasn't his original choice as a target but had scoped it out for three months.

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In addition to the shooting, police defused explosive devices found in a car.

Tarrant arrived at the mosque in a car with at least three guns. On the stereo, he played a song glorifying a Bosnian Serb war criminal. His riles were covered in white-supremacist graffiti.

At least two rifles used in the shooting, according to the Associated Press, mention Ebba Akerlund, an 11-year-old girl killed in an April 2017 truck-ramming attack in Stockholm by Rakhmat Akilov, a 39-year-old Uzbek man.

The number 14 is seen on the gunmans rifles. It may refer to 14 Words, which according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is a white supremacist slogan linked to Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf.

Worked as a personal trainer at a gym, traveled the world

ABC reported that Tarrant worked as a personal trainer at Big River Gym in Grafton from 2009 to 2011, when he then traveled in Asia and Europe.

He also made income through Bitconnect, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, that he used to help fund his trips. He was described by his gym employer as "a very dedicated trainer" and someone who didn't seem interested in guns.

"I think something must have changed in him during the years he spent traveling overseas," gym manager Tracey Gray told ABC.

Father died of cancer nearly a decade ago

Tarrant's father, Rodney Tarrant, died of cancer in 2010, when his son was in high school. Gray, his former employer, said she believes that he has a surviving mother and sister.

Some media reports have pointed to his death as the period when Tarrant started to become radicalized.

Inspired by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik

Tarrant in his manifesto, according to MSN News, wrote that he has read the writings of Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, "and many others."

But he wrote that he "only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik." Breivik killed 77 in a terrorist attacked in Oslo, Norway.

Contributing: Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Violent terrorist': Who is the white supremacist suspected in New Zealand mosque shootings?
South Africa: Fronting poses risk to transformation

Economic transformation is still hampered by fronting, says Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies.

Speaking at the annual conference of the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Commission (B-BBEE Commission) in Ekurhuleni on Thursday, Davies said fronting is still a problem.

In South Africa, too much [black] ownership is not real economic ownership; too often it is only legal ownership."

"Black people only experience real ownership of a business entity when they are involved in major decision-making and day-to-day operations, the Minister told the gathering.

Fronting, which has been made a criminal offence through the B-BBEE Amendment Act of 2013, is becoming more sophisticated and complex.

In terms of the Act, the B-BBEE Commission, which is an entity of the Department of Trade and Industry, is empowered to investigate, and refer for prosecution, any conduct that directly or indirectly undermines or frustrates the Acts objectives. All such conduct is defined as fronting.

While fronting is still a challenge to true economic transformation and needs to be eradicated, Davies said it is equally important to identify, support and value those who are implementing B-BBEE in the spirit in which it is intended.

The B-BBEE Commission's compliance executive, Busisiwe Ngwenya, said in the major transactions that were reported, up to 30% were not complying with the Act.

Research done by the commission also indicated that there is room wherein government can intervene in challenges of economic transformation, including those of access to finance.

Government has aided funding in just 2% of transactions, said Ngwenya.

This years conference explored black ownership, particularly major black ownership transactions, defined as transactions amounting to R25 million or more.

The value of the B-BBEE transactions reported in 2017 and 2018 was around R115 billion.

The annual conference also handed out awards to four entities that have worked towards South Africas economic transformation in 2018/19. The following awards were handed out:

Gauteng Department of Economic Development (Empowering Province)

The Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (Empowering Public Service Organisation)

Leomat Construction Pty (Ltd) and Menston Holdings Pty (Ltd) (Transformed Agent) and

Mthokozeleni Mbili (B-BBEE Commissioners Special Award)

The Commission is expected to release its first monitoring report on major B-BBEE transactions next month. - SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Investors can buy low cost index fund if they want to receive the average market return. But if you invest in individual stocks, some are likely to underperform. Thats what has happened with the Asia Standard International Group Limited (HKG:129) share price. Its up 29% over three years, but that is below the market return. Unfortunately, the share price has fallen 25% over twelve months.

See our latest analysis for Asia Standard International Group

In his essay The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville Warren Buffett described how share prices do not always rationally reflect the value of a business. One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.

Asia Standard International Group was able to grow its EPS at 22% per year over three years, sending the share price higher. The average annual share price increase of 8.9% is actually lower than the EPS growth. Therefore, it seems the market has moderated its expectations for growth, somewhat. This cautious sentiment is reflected in its (fairly low) P/E ratio of 1.71.

The companys earnings per share (over time) is depicted in the image below (click to see the exact numbers).

SEHK:129 Past and Future Earnings, March 14th 2019

Before buying or selling a stock, we always recommend a close examination of historic growth trends, available here..

What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). Whereas the share price return only reflects the change in the share price, the TSR includes the value of dividends (assuming they were reinvested) and the benefit of any discounted capital raising. Its fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. In the case of Asia Standard International Group, it has a TSR of 36% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. This is largely a result of its dividend payments!

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A Different Perspective

We regret to report that Asia Standard International Group shareholders are down 24% for the year (even including dividends). Unfortunately, thats worse than the broader market decline of 8.5%. Having said that, its inevitable that some stocks will be oversold in a falling market. The key is to keep your eyes on the fundamental developments. Regrettably, last years performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 1.9% per year over five years. We realise that Buffett has said investors should buy when there is blood on the streets, but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality businesses. You could get a better understanding of Asia Standard International Groups growth by checking out this more detailed historical graph of earnings, revenue and cash flow.

Of course, you might find a fantastic investment by looking elsewhere. So take a peek at this free list of companies we expect will grow earnings.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on HK exchanges.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material.



If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading.
A right-wing member of the Australian parliament blamed the murder of 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Muslim immigration. "I am utterly opposed to any form of violence within our community, and I totally condemn the actions of the gunman," said Queensland Sen. Fraser Anning in a written statement. "However, whilst this kind of violent vigilantism can never be justified, what it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence."
By Tom Westbrook and Alex Fraser SYDNEY/LONDON (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of school students around the world walked out of classes on Friday in a global strike to protest against government inaction on climate change. "Climate change is worse than Voldemort," read a handmade sign carried by one student in Wellington, referring to the evil wizard in the hugely popular Harry Potter books and films. "The oceans are rising, so are we," read another in Sydney. In Europe, students packed streets and squares in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Brussels and other cities for "Fridays for Future" protests. Demonstrations also took place across the United States. In Washington, some 1,500 students rallied in front of the Capitol chanting "climate action now!" and waving homemade placards with slogans such as "Our planet, our future." The worldwide student strike movement started in August 2018, when 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began protesting outside her parliament on school days. She has since been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. On Friday, she spoke at a Stockholm demonstration. Other rallies were held in 100 towns around Sweden. "We have only been born into this world, we are going to have to live with this crisis our whole lives. So will our children and grandchildren and coming generations," Thunberg said. "We are not going to accept this. We are striking because we want a future and we are going to carry on." Thousands marched through central London with banners reading "The future is in our hands" and "We're missing lessons to teach you one". "Education is important but climate change is more important," 14-year-old Molly Powell said. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres tweeted his support on Friday evening. "Young people can, and do, change the world," he said. "You understand we are in a race for your lives; your commitment & activism makes me confident we will win it." "CLIMATE CATASTROPHE" Scientists say fossil fuel use releases greenhouse gases that trap heat and lift global temperatures, bringing more floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels. The 2015 Paris climate conference pledge to keep the increase in global average temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (35 F) above pre-industrial levels requires a radical cutback in use of coal and fossil fuels. In Dusseldorf, Germany, some 2,000 school children paraded with a carnival float depicting a giant effigy of Thunberg with "Do something about the climate catastrophe at last" written on her raised arms. They stopped around the city, home to the headquarters of many of Germany's largest manufacturers, reading out calls for change. "The clock is ticking and time is against us!" they shouted. "We are the last generation that can fix this." About 60 students protested at government house in Bangkok, holding cardboard signs to campaign against plastic. Thailand is one of the world's worst marine plastic polluters. "As youths who will inherit the land, we gather here to demand that the government work with us to solve these problems," said 17-year-old Thiti Usanakul, of student-led group Grin Green International. The group was later invited to meet officials at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in two weeks. There were also demonstrations in South Korea, India and South Africa. In Singapore, where strict laws regulate public assembly, young people planned a virtual campaign on social media. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern supported the strikes, saying teenagers should not wait for voting age to use their voices. That contrasted with politicians in Australia and Britain, who rebuked them for missing lessons. "For action on issues that they think is important, they should do that after school or on weekends," said Dan Tehan, Australia's education minister. Wellington parent Alex, who marched beside his 11-year-old son, disagreed: "It's a much better day of education. This is the greatest issue of our time." (Reporting by Charlotte Greenfield in Wellington, Tom Westbrook in Sydney, Sonali Paul in Melbourne and Alex Fraser in London; Additional reporting by Jane Chung and Yijin Kim in SEOUL, Aradhana Aravindan in SINGAPORE, Patpicha Tanakasempipat in BANGKOK, Thomas Escritt in BERLIN, Simon Johnson and Phil O'Connor in STOCKHOLM, Bart Biesemans in BRUSSELS, Caterina Demony in Lisbon, Marie-Louise Gumuchian in LONDON, Roberto Mignucci in ROME, and Lee Van Der Voo in WASHINGTON; Editing by Mark Heinrich, Gareth; Jones, Rosalba O'Brien and James Dalgleish)
WASHINGTON  Workers on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign voted to unionize on Friday, becoming what is possibly the first presidential campaign staff in history to organize.

A majority of the Democrat's staff signed on to unionize, meaning all current and future employees would be part of the bargaining process for better pay and benefits. The workers, everyone below the title of deputy director, will be represented by United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 400, which represents about 35,000 employees in six states and the District of Columbia.

Jonathan Williams, a spokesman for the UFCW, said to his knowledge the Sanders campaign is the first to unionize in history, marking a new path that could be used for campaigns for years to come.

"The best time to join a union is always now," Williams said. "High working standards should be the standard and I would certainly call upon every presidential campaign to look toward the leadership Bernie Sanders' campaign has shown."

MORE: Sanders signs loyalty pledge for 2020 bid

Williams said the next steps are for workers to set up negotiations, something he said would have to happen very soon due to it being a campaign. The UFCW said the agreement could grow to more than 1,000 workers throughout Sanders' 2020 campaign. Employees who transition to the White House, if Sanders were to win, would not be members of the union.

"I hope this breakthrough serves as a model for other presidential campaigns, as well as party committees and candidates for other offices," UFCW Local 400 President Mark Federici said in a statement. "While political campaigns arent the easiest work environment, every worker has the right to respect and dignity."

MORE ELECTION NEWS: Who is running for president in 2020?

In January, Sanders apologized after multiple women said allegations of sexual assault within his campaign were not properly addressed during his 2016 bid for president.

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The allegations from multiple women who worked on Sanders' campaign surfaced in the New York Times, which criticized Sanders' campaign for not adequately addressing incidents of sexual harassment, sexist mistreatment and pay disparities between men and women.

On CNN, Sanders apologized to "any woman who feels like she was not treated appropriately." When asked if he had been aware of the complaints, Sanders said, "I was a little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case (to be elected as president)."

The allegations and his perceived failure to rectify the issues, female campaign workers told the Times, bring into question whether he can fight for women's interests if he again seeks the presidency.

"I am not going to sit here and tell you that we did everything right in terms of human resources, in terms of addressing the needs that I'm hearing from now, that women felt they were disrespected, that there was sexual harassment which was not dealt with as effectively as possible," Sanders said on CNN.

And we're very proud of it https://t.co/XjjmClTZUf  Faiz (@fshakir) March 15, 2019

The UFCW said Sanders' campaign stayed neutral in the unionizing process. Sanders' campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, wrote on Twitter the campaign was "very proud" of the unionizing effort.

"Bernie Sander is the most pro-union candidate in the field, he'll be the most pro-union president in the White House and we're honored that his campaign will be the first to have a unionized workforce," Shakir said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Bernie Sanders campaign workers unionize, becoming likely first presidential campaign to do so
WASHINGTON  The head of the Congressional Black Caucus weighed in Friday on a simmering dispute in Mississippi over who deserves credit for the push to designate civil rights icon Medgar Evers' home a national monument.

Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, called Mississippi Republican Gov. Phil Bryant "despicable" and accused him of ignoring the work of Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lone Democrat and African-American in the state's delegation, who has advocated for years for Evers' home to be named a national monument.

"I dont know much about the governor of Mississippi, but he is clearly despicable," Bass said in a call with reporters Friday. "There is no way in the world that he should not have acknowledged the decades of work that Congressman Bennie Thompson has put in. So for him to specifically ignore him is really just an example of his pettiness."

Last month, Congress passed a massive lands bill that, among other things, added four national monuments, including Evers' home located in Jackson. President Donald Trump signed the legislation into law this month.

Bryant, a Trump ally, thanked the president and the state's Republican senators.

"Thank you to @realDonaldTrump for signing legislation today to designate Medgar and Myrlie Evers home as a National Monument," he tweeted. "@SenatorWicker & @SenHydeSmith have worked very hard on this for some time and are to be commended."

That launched a Twitter war.

US. Rep. Bennie Thompson-D-Miss. (left) and Miss. Gov. Phil Bryant-R

After Thompson pointed out the slight on Twitter, Bryant lashed out at the congressman in a statement to WJTV-TV, said the congressman was demonstrating "anger and hatred" of the kind that "separated our people in the civil rights era."

"He has become a tragic figure who has squandered this opportunity to help bring our state together," he told the station.

Over the years, Thompson has testified at hearings, proposed legislation and called for a study of the feasibility of the National Park Service taking over the Evers' home.

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Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker and former GOP Sen. Thad Cochran have also championed the designation. Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, who last fall won Cochrans seat, recently supported the effort.

Evers, a field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP, was killed in his driveway on June 12, 1963. He had been active in registering blacks to vote and challenging segregation in the state.

Evers' widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, told SiriusXM radio host Joe Madison on Friday that she was "incensed'' that only a few were credited, noting that Thompson and others worked for 16 years to get the historic designation.

"I have given too much to sit down and be quiet about something that I feel is unjust,'' said Evers-Williams, 87. "How dare that be taken and given credit to one or two people who are new?"

Thompson took to Facebook Thursday to do a video about the importance of designating Evers' home a national monument and why he pushed for it.

After years of crafting legislation to enact the home of the late Civil Rights icon, Medgar Evers, and his wife Myrlie Evers, as a national monument, I am proud to say it has been signed into law," he tweeted.

Democrats and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus also took to Twitter to praise Thompson for his work on the monument.

You can take my word the entire Congressional Black Caucus was highly offended that he would be so disrespectful of one our most important members and a member who chairs a full committee  the Homeland Security Committee," Bass said. For him to disrespect him in the manner that he did, I hope the governor of Mississippi knows that the slight will not go unnoticed."

Mississippi has a long history of racial tension, including efforts to block African-Americans from voting and the lynching of African-Americans. Last year, the U.S. Senate race in Mississippi between Hyde-Smith and her Democratic challenger, Mike Espy, entered the national spotlight over comments from Hyde-Smith that some viewed as racially charged.

Hyde-Smith praised a local cattle rancher and joked that if he invited her to a "public hanging," she would gladly attend. Espy, an African-American former congressman, said her remarks gave the state a "black eye" that it didn't need. She apologized.

Thompson also has feuded with Republicans in Mississippi and Congress over the state flag. He called on Congress to remove all items bearing the Confederate battle flag, including his state flag, which he said is a symbol of racism.

Supporters of the flag argue it is part of the Souths heritage. Bryant proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month.

Contributing: Luke Ramseth, Clarion-Ledger

More: Donald Trump downplays threat of white nationalism after New Zealand shootings

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Black Caucus chairwoman rips Mississippi governor as 'despicable' over Medgar Evers dispute
WASHINGTON  Even as experts investigate two recent crashes of the same type of plane, two dire issues in the worldwide regulation of aircraft manufacturers and airlines have emerged.

One is how much pilot training is enough when a new model of aircraft is introduced. Today, special training is often not required for modifications to the latest version because of similarities in a family of planes.

The other issue is how quickly engineers can fix critical software on planes that fly millions of passengers around the world on thousands of flights.

Each issue will be at the center of debate in the United States and around the world as investigators explore ways to prevent future tragedies. Already, some in Congress plan hearings on how Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration approved the 737 Max 8 and how they responded after the crashes.

Both crashes remain under investigation and no cause has been found. But investigators have focused on the lack of pilot training on new software that helps fly the 737 Max 8 in a Lion Air crash in October. Now investigators say an Ethiopian Airlines plane was behaving similarly before it crashed Sunday.

New aircraft models can mean major changes

When the Max 8 began flying commercial routes in 2017, it was the latest model for Boeings 737, an aircraft that first debuted in the mid-1960s.

Unlike the latest model year for an automobile, when subtle changes are made, the new model of an aircraft can come with significant hardware and software changes. That was the case with the Max 8, with changes to its wings, engines and flight controls.

Yet, the FAA didn't require special training on new software to help cope with the larger engines by tilting the nose down if sensors suggest the plane is about to stall. Pilots have complained about the lack of special training.

I think that this incident is a watershed aviation safety moment, Justin Green, an aviation lawyer and a former pilot, told USA TODAY. If the systems operate differently than youre used to, you dont want to be climbing out with a full airplane full of passengers and then youre trying to figure out how the systems work.

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Preliminary findings in Indonesia suggested the pilots had trouble controlling the plane after taking off. After the accident, the FAA issued an emergency directive to revise flight manuals, to reinforce for pilots how to recognize and respond to the software.

Now Boeing is working on a software fix, which the company is still testing. The FAA said it plans to have the fixes in place in April.

The FAA denied that a partial government shutdown in January slowed consideration of the remedy. Boeing and the FAA need to test and validate the remedy thoroughly because it could have unintended consequences on other aspects of the planes flight, according to safety experts.

Clearly when youre going to implement these software changes, you want to be absolutely sure you havent created another problem. Its the law of unintended consequences, Al Diehl, a former investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, told USA TODAY. April looks like a pretty expeditious effort to try and fix the known problem.

Regulators didn't require special training

Many of the largest global air regulatory agencies, including the FAA, didn't require extra training on the new software for the 737 Max 8.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency  the umbrella regulator for the European continent  initially questioned the lack of extra training on the software but didnt require it, safety experts said.

But Brazil did require special training.

Brazils national civil aviation agency analyzes how all new planes operate and tested the differences in the Max 8 compared to other models in the family, according to spokeswoman Karen Cordeiro.

Training is "quite simple" because it involves pushing a button to turn off the software called Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), she said. The MCAS is what takes over the airplane and tilts the nose down.

The Brazilian regulator was one of the only civil aviation authorities to require specific training for the operation of the 737-8 Max, Cordeiro told USA TODAY.

In a statement Thursday, the FAA said that while Boeing 737 Max training requirements did not include details about the new MCAS software, overall training in how to shut off an automatic stabilizer in the event of stalls was included.

"A nose-down scenario resulting from an issue with the MCAS system would have the same characteristics as a runaway stabilizer trim scenario," which is addressed in stall training, the agency said.

Congress on to training, aircraft certification

House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., and the head of the aviation subcommittee, Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., said in a joint statement that "there must be a rigorous investigation into why the aircraft, which has critical safety systems that did not exist on prior models, was certified without requiring additional pilot training."

Daniel Elwell, acting administrator of the FAA, told NBC's Today show Thursday the MCAS software change is described in flight manuals. He said the FAA studied data from 40,000 U.S. flights of this type of plane and found no incidents of the software being activated.

There was not a single incident in our examination of this MCAS system being activated or pilots having to work with it or deal with it," Elwell said. It has not been an issue."

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly issued a statement Thursday saying the 737 has a "stellar safety record." The airline, which has 34 of the Max 8 planes, collects a ton of data about its flights and "nothing has presented any safety concerns," he said.

"Our experience with the MAX, along with the other U.S. operators, has been phenomenal," Kelly said.

Roll out of the 737 Max 8 and tragic problems

Dec. 8, 2015: the first 737 Max 8 rolls off the assembly line. The planes first flight was in January 2016, the FAA certified it in March 2017 and the first customer  Lion Air  received one in May 2017.

Boeing has since delivered 350 planes to airlines around the world, including 74 in the U.S., through January. More than 4,600 are on order.

The latest iteration of the plane model marks the third major overhaul to the 737 since the program launched in 1967. The 737 Max features new engines, redesigned wings and computer software meant to make the aircraft more efficient. The jets also are able to seat more passengers than the 737 models theyre replacing, accommodating more than 200 passengers in an all-economy configuration.

The range of the Max also is longer than previous 737 models, giving it the ability to fly overseas routes connecting the eastern U.S. to Western Europe or the southern U.S. to South America. Larger and more powerful engines required a significant update to the wing, which is what led to the software changes that investigators are studying as possibly contributing to the crashes.

August 2018: The Air Line Pilots Association, the largest pilots union, published an article saying computer-based training will be provided for the plane. Pilots who are qualified on the B-737NG and will fly the B-737 Max will receive computer-based training before flying the Max on the same B-737 type rating, the article said. Dozens of airlines around the world have successfully introduced the Max into their existing B-737NG fleet using this computer-based training, which highlights the minor differences between the two airplanes. The training did not address the new MCAS software.

Oct. 29, 2018: Lion Air flight 610 crashes after taking off from Jakartas airport, killing 189 people. The pilot reported to air-traffic controllers a flight control problem with aircraft instruments indicating different altitudes, according to a preliminary report by Indonesian authorities.

Nov. 6: Boeing issued a bulletin to airlines calling attention to the safety feature, which automatically pushes the nose of the plane down when it senses the plane is stalling.

Nov. 7: The FAA released an emergency directive warning that the feature could erroneously engage repeatedly and lead to significant altitude loss, and possible impact with terrain.

November: Pilots file anonymous complaints about 737 Max 8 with the federal Aviation Safety Reporting System. The Flight Manual is inadequate and almost criminally insufficient, wrote one pilot. All airlines that operate the Max must insist that Boeing incorporate ALL systems in their manuals.

Late November: Boeing officials meet with airline pilots from the three U.S. airlines flying the planes  Southwest, American and United  after unions publicly lambasted the manufacturer for failing to disclose the feature in training materials.

"Boeing listened, and in our opinion they have an aggressive agenda regarding positive steps to address our concerns, Dennis Tajer, spokesman for Allied Pilots Association, which represents American Airlines pilots, said at the time.

Dec. 6: Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg was asked on CNBC whether the manufacturer provided enough information to pilots about how the aircraft behaved, even as pilots said they loved the new plane. Muilenburg said the plane is safe and that Boeing is in constant communication with its customers and reinforced that with the safety bulletin. The companys goal was to have seamless training for airlines switching from one version of the 737 to another, he said.

We purposely designed the airplane to behave in the same way, Muilenburg said. "So even though it's a different airplane design, the control laws that fly the airplane are designed to make the airplane behave the same way in the hands of the pilot.

Dec. 22: The federal government partially shuts down, in a dispute between Congress and President Donald Trump about funding for a wall along the southern border.

Jan. 7: FAA recalled the necessary personnel to support the development and approval of Boeings software remedy, the agency said. This came more than two weeks before the federal government shutdown ended.

Jan. 21: Boeing submitted the proposed fix to the FAA for certification, the agency said.

March 10: Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashes after taking off from Addis Ababa, killing 157 people.

March 11: FAA sends airworthiness notice noting that on-going oversight on the plane includes the software fix.

March 13: After dozens of airlines and countries around the world ground the plane for safety concerns, the FAA follows suit based on new evidence collected at the Ethiopian site and satellite data. The FAA is ordering the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 Max aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory," the FAA said in a statement. "The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today. This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision." The agency said Boeing is still testing the software fix.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Boeing 737 Max 8 fallout: How much pilot training is enough when airplanes debut?
By Eric M. Johnson SEATTLE (Reuters) - Boeing Co confirmed suspension of deliveries of 737 MAX aircraft on Thursday but continues to produce its single-aisle jets at full speed while dealing with the worldwide 737 MAX fleet's grounding following a deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash. Reuters reported on Wednesday that deliveries were effectively halted as most airlines would avoid taking a jet banned from entering service in the wake of two crashes in five months. Most countries have stopped the 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes from flying after an Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday that killed all 157 people on board. In October, a Lion Air 737 jet that crashed in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board, was the same type of relatively new Boeing model. Boeing said it had paused deliveries of its fastest-selling 737 MAX jetliner built at its factory near Seattle because of the temporary grounding order by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), confirming a Reuters report from Wednesday. "We continue to build 737 MAX airplanes while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system," Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers said. Boeing would maintain its production rate of 52 aircraft per month, and its newest version, the MAX, represents the lion's share of production, although Boeing declined to break out exact numbers. Reuters has reported Boeing's goal of speeding up production again in June. Manufacturers avoid halting and then speeding up production as this disrupts supply chains and can cause industrial snags. But having to hold planes in storage consumes extra cash in increased inventory. Customers typically pay over the bulk of the money for a new jetliner on delivery. A pause in deliveries while keeping production rates unchanged at its Renton, Washington factory raises the prospect of a new logistical headache: what to do when airplanes start cluttering up the tarmac outside the factory? Industry sources said Boeing plans to make use of every inch of available space at Renton while exploring other options such as King County International Airport, unofficially called Boeing Field. It could also look at Grant County International Airport in central Washington where Boeing regularly tests aircraft. The FAA order allows for special flight permits for testing and other scenarios, so Boeing could use this provision to fly its planes off-site. The 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes will be grounded for weeks if not longer until a software upgrade can be tested and installed, U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday as officials in France prepare to begin analyzing the black boxes from the crashed jet. Each month of the grounding could cost Boeing around $1.8 billion to $2.5 billion in delayed revenue, according to analyst estimates, although that could be recouped once the ban is lifted and the planes are delivered. Boeing in January provided guidance it would report $109.5 billion to $111.5 billion of revenue in 2019. Boeing has already been working through supplier delays on engines from CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric Co and France's Safran SA, and fuselages from Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc that led to dozens of planes being parked outside the Renton factory last summer. This week, at least three freshly built 737s were parked at or near the factory with yellow weights hanging in the place of engines, signs of lingering issues, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. "We are still a few weeks behind the requirement, but have a line of sight to be back on track in the second quarter of this year," CFM spokeswoman Jamie Jewell said. (Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; editing by Grant McCool)
March 10 dawned in Addis Ababa with excellent visibility and little wind, perfect flying weather that nonetheless became a backdrop for tragedy. That morning, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people aboard. Emergency responders discovered only burning wreckage and bodies. The victims loved ones were left to grieve and wait for answers.

The world waits with them. The incident was the second fatal crash involving a Boeing 737 Max 8 in just five months. Another Max 8, flown by Indonesias Lion Air, also crashed quickly after takeoff in October, killing everyone aboard. Experts have speculated that a new automated system meant to prevent aerodynamic stallswhich occur when a plane isnt producing enough lift and are addressed by pointing its nose downmay have sent the Lion Air plane into a dive after detecting a stall where none existed.

In the case of Ethiopian Flight 302, it will take months, maybe even years, to determine the cause of the crash. What we know about the Lion Air crash comes from only a preliminary report. But together, the incidents pressured airlines and their regulators worldwide to actand shone a harsh spotlight on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that oversees U.S. aviation safety.

After the second crash, China, Australia and Ethiopia were quick to ground the Max, which has been Boeings fastest-selling plane ever. Other places, including the E.U., followed suit. In the U.S., however, the FAA insisted the plane was safe to fly, even as it announced a new requirement that airlines install an April software update for the Max. But the pressure was intense. Passengers bombarded Southwest and American Airlines, which both fly the aircraft, with Twitter requests to change airplanes, and flight attendants unions demanded that their employers ground the plane. Boeing lost $12.7 billion in market value on March 11 alone. Many American travelers, assured on every flight that the FAA was concerned about nothing more than their safety, began to wonder.

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Then came the abrupt reversal. On March 13, during a briefing on another subject, President Trump announced that all of those planes are grounded, effective immediately. The airlines worked quickly to rearrange their fleets, and even Boeing appeared to scramble to get ahead of the news. In a subsequent announcement, the company said that while it still had full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max, it was recommending that all of the planes worldwide be grounded temporarily as the company works to understand what went wrong.

Thats the question. Two unrelated crashes in five months is awful luck. Two crashes caused by the same issue is something far worse.

As recently as March 12, the FAA had said it had no basis to ground the aircraft, and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao even flew on a Max 8 with her staff from Texas to Washington, D.C. She wasnt alone: in the time between the Flight 302 disaster and the FAAs about-face, the Max 8 flew between U.S. cities dozens of times, carrying hundreds of passengers. Boeing has a generous lobbying budget, and the companys chairman phoned Trump personally to argue against grounding the plane.

The FAA said its shift in policy came after it received new information from the developing investigation. Data collected from the Ethiopian crash site, combined with satellite-based tracking data, indicates some similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes, the FAA reported on March 13. Those data, the agency continued, warrant further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause.

While regulating air travel serves to reassure the public, zigzagging is never helpful. Flying remains the safest major means of travel, so perhaps the most striking aspect of the disaster response was that the FAA itself was fanning apprehensions about air travel. The agency is running on autopilot; none of its top three officials has been confirmed by the Senate. But it does have precedent for grounding an entire type of aircraft, and the 737 Max 8 is just beginning commercial service and so is still in limited use worldwide. Its grounding will likely have a minor impact on most passengers.

Theres no question in my mind that if those two events had happened in our country, the aircraft would be grounded, said Jim Hall, a past head of the National Transportation Safety Board, speaking to TIME before the FAA announcement. A handful of complaints from American 737 Max pilots have been logged in a federal database since the aircrafts introduction in 2017, though its unclear if those issues are linked to the two downed aircraft. Michael Barr, a former Air Force fighter pilot and an accident-investigation instructor, criticized the agencys decision to wait.

The worlds 737 Max fleet will remain grounded until further notice, and Boeing and the FAA alike will surely face additional questions. As for answers, the world will look to Flight 302s black boxes, which are on their way to be analyzed in France. Whatever they reveal should make aviation safer in the futureif the system works the way it should.

With reporting by W.J. Hennigan
ATHENS (Reuters) - Bolivia's leftist President Evo Morales, a supporter of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, said on Friday that European nations should support a dialogue within the country. Morales, who is on a visit to Greece, said meddling in the domestic affairs of another country never bodes well. "History has taught that there have been many interventions from the outside, such as the case of Libya and Iraq, and they never offered a solution", Morales said in translated comments after meeting Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. "On the contrary it abolished democracy," he said. Morales is one of a few Latin American leaders to support the embattled Maduro, whose country has been reeling from a humanitarian crisis. "The only solution .. is dialogue, and that is what the European countries should support," he said. "The opposition of Venezuela should sit at the same table with the official authorities of this country for dialogue and find a solution." Venezuela plunged into a deep political crisis in January when Juan Guaido, head of the opposition-controlled congress, invoked the constitution to assume an interim presidency, arguing Maduro's 2018 re-election was not legitimate. The move has put Venezuela at the heart of a geopolitical tussle, with the United States leading most Western nations in recognizing Guaido as the legitimate head of state, while Russia, China and others support Maduro. Greece has said it supports a political dialogue between opposing sides in Venezuela. (Reporting By Renee Maltezou, writing by Angeliki Koutantou and Michele Kambas)
Brasilia (AFP) - Brazil's far right President Jair Bolsonaro will meet US counterpart Donald Trump next week to strengthen ties in the nascent regional conservative alliance aiming to ramp up the pressure on Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro.

After decades of fractious relations between Brasilia and Washington, things have improved with the assumption to power of ex-army captain Bolsonaro -- nicknamed the "Tropical Trump" both due to his admiration for the US president and his ideological proximity in terms of nationalism and anti-globalization.

"It's the president's first foreign bilateral visit, which demonstrates the priority the government is giving to building a solid association with the United States," Bolsonaro's spokesman Otavio do Rego Barros said on Wednesday.

Alongside six ministers and his federal lawmaker son Eduardo -- who has been active in building links with fellow conservatives -- Brazil's president will spend four days in Washington from Sunday to Wednesday.

He will stay at Blair House, an official US state residence opposite the White House used for visiting dignitaries.

As well as a "private meeting" with Trump at the Oval Office on Tuesday, Bolsonaro will sit with Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro, and participate in various forums discussing the opportunities offered by the Brazilian economy.

The US is Brazil's second biggest trade partner after China.

On Sunday night he will dine at the residency of Brazil's ambassador with "several opinion formers" including, according to press reports, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and US-based Brazilian writer Olavo de Carvalho, considered Bolsonaro's guru.

- 'Military action unlikely' -

Trump and Bolsonaro will discuss one of the issues that most unites them: their desire to drive Maduro from power.

The US was the first of more than 50 countries, closely followed by Brazil, to recognize Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president, boosting his power struggle with Maduro.

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Washington has also cranked up sanctions against the Maduro regime, including imposing an embargo on Venezuelan crude oil, due to come into effect on April 28.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that "all options are on the table" with regards to military intervention in Venezuela.

But that's not an opinion shared by Bolsonaro, who in line with other members of the mostly Latin American Lima Group has ruled out military action in favor of a policy of tightening the economic and diplomatic noose around Maduro.

"Brazil is unlikely to take military action to address the situation in Venezuela, but we may see a strong stance being taken by Bolsonaro publicly following this trip to Washington," Roberta Braga, associate director at the Latin American center of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, told AFP.

Trump wants a heavyweight ally such as Brazil "to continue putting the pressure on Maduro and ensure the wave of support Guaido has received doesn't diminish over time," said Thomaz Favaro, an analyst at Control Risks.

- Satellite launching base -

Spokesman Do Rego Barros said Trump and Bolsonaro will sign three agreements, without elaborating what they could be.

One of those is expected to be the granting of technological safeguards for the US to use the satellite launching base in Alcantara, an idea that has angered sectors of Brazilian nationalists who view it as a potential loss of sovereignty.

The base in northern Brazil is ideally located for launching satellites.

Its position close to the equator allows for the saving of up to 30 percent in fuel or the loading of an increased cargo.

"The Alcantara agreement is another sign of Bolsonaro's alignment with the United States, like his accepting the deal between Boeing and Embraer," internationalist Paulo Wrobel, from Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University, told AFP.

Analysts expect the two leaders to discuss measures to increase bilateral business -- without infringing on Mercosur limits imposed on Brazil -- and the entry of the South American giant into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Following his US jaunt, Bolsonaro will visit Chile and Israel in a clear sign of his intention to approach governments he considers committed to his ideological conservatism and economic liberalism.
A Colorado state trooper has died as a bomb cyclone level winter storm continues to batter parts of the US, according to local officials.

The storm, which began late Tuesday and hit Colorado on Wednesday, has caused widespread power outages, strong winds and dangerous travelling conditions.

In Colorado, the storm, which formed from a rapid pressure drop of at least 24 millibars, forced Governor Jared Polis to declare a state of emergency.

Blizzard warnings were also issued throughout the state as people were urged to cancel all travel plans.

The dangerous conditions contributed to the death of Corporal Daniel Groves, who was assisting a vehicle that slid off the road on Interstate 76 on Wednesday when he was struck by a vehicle driven by John Carpenter.

Groves, 52, who was outside of his vehicle at the time of the accident, was transferred to Platte Valley Medical Centre in Brighton, where he later died.

Following Groves death, the state patrol said it was investigating the accident for high speed in poor driving conditions.

Colorado state trooper Daniel Groves died during the bomb cyclone (Colorado State Patrol)

Polis called Groves death a tragic reminder that every single day, the men and women of the Colorado State Patrol put their lives on the line to keep Coloradans safe.

Countless other drivers were left stranded in the state as the bomb cyclone brought near zero visibilities, making it extremely dangerous to drive.

The storm has made its way across more than 25 states, leading to flooding, blizzard-like snow, and possible tornadoes as it continues its path across the central US.
Canadian regulators are looking

The infamous QuadrigaCX scandal has culminated in the losses of $150 million in users cryptocurrency funds. Now, Canada has called for input on tailoring new regulation to cryptocurrency exchanges operating within its borders.

Canadas Securities Regulator and Investment Body Issue a Consultation Paper to Increase Investor Protection

Canada has held back on detailed cryptocurrency regulation. It currently adopts a wait and see approach and utilizes its existing securities laws and regulators. In this way, Canada monitors and guides emerging fintech and cryptocurrency businesses in the country.

An exchanges entire funds vanishing as the founder dies without leaving access to cold cryptocurrency wallets could be a regulatory turning point for Canada. With the QuadrigaCX scandal growing and changing almost daily, Canadas regulators nod to building consumer confidence and investor protection in the press release issued today.

Canadian Securities Regulators are seeking input on the regulation of #Cryptocurrency #Exchanges, here is a link to the report in case you're interested in providing a submission: https://t.co/UZomllOAG3  Aaron Grinhaus  (@A_Grinhaus) March 14, 2019

The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) have jointly published a consultation paper with which the pair seek input from the fintech community, market participants, investors and other stakeholders.

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The paper questions how regulation could be tailored to Canadian cryptocurrency exchanges. Though it also signifies Canada is continuing an open approach to a sector positively impacting its economy.

Cryptocurrency Exchanges in Canada Welcome Regulation

Louis Morisset, CSA Chair says exchanges too are open to the prospect of sensible regulation:

Read the full story on CCN.com.
The New Zealand mosque attacker claimed inspiration from Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik and the deadly rampage in Christchurch on Friday resembled his 2011 massacre in its methods and motives.

Extremists around the world have sought to emulate Breivik ever since his deadly attacks in Norway which left 77 people dead in 2011.

The Christchurch attacks bore several of the features of Breivik's: mass shootings, multicultural victims, a racist manifesto published online and inscribed weapons.

In a 74-page document posted on Twitter just before the attack, the Christchurch shooter said he "took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik", using terminology reminiscent of that used by the Norwegian extremist.

"I have only had brief contact with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights," wrote the shooter.

A lawyer for Breivik, Oystein Storrvik, told Verdens Gang newspaper that "it seems unlikely" the Christchurch attacker had been in direct contact with Breivik, given the strict controls imposed on him in prison.

Breivik killed 77 people on July 22, 2011 when he set off a van bomb near government offices in Oslo, then opened fire on a Labour youth camp on the island of Utoya.

He said he killed his victims because they embraced multiculturalism.

The now 40-year-old Norwegian had also posted a more than 1,500-page manifesto in which he called on others to follow his example.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the Christchurch attacker as an Australian "extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

- 'Painful memories' -

For Norway, the Christchurch attacks brought back memories of the Breivik attacks, its most violent event since World War II.

"It recalls painful memories," Prime Minister Erna Solberg said.

"Anyone who has ever lost a loved one, whether it's because of terrorism or not, understands what these families are going to go through," Vanessa Svebakk, a Norwegian who also holds New Zealand citizenship and who lost her 14-year-old daughter in the Utoya attack, told AFP.

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"But for those of us who have lost someone because of terrorism, the feelings are even stronger."

Tore Bjorgo, the head of the University of Oslo's Center for Extremism Research, said "there are clearly a lot of the same ideas behind" the two attacks.

They include, among other things, "the idea that European civilisation is threatened by immigration in general and by Muslim immigration in particular, and that it is legitimate for some people to resort to extreme violence to stop it," he told AFP.

"There are pretty clear indications in the (Christchurch) manifesto that we're dealing with a white supremacist," said Jean-Yves Camus, a French expert on far-right movements.

"The manifesto goes further than what Breivik wrote in his own text. Breivik didn't describe himself as fascist," he said.

Like Breivik, the Christchurch killer compared himself in his manifesto to Nelson Mandela, saying he even expected to win the Nobel Peace Prize one day.

Both attackers share "this narcissism, this grandiose image of themselves," Swedish terrorism researcher Magnus Ranstorp told AFP.

- Monitored mail -

Breivik, who now goes by the name Fjotolf Hansen, is serving a 21-year-sentence that can be extended indefinitely. He is held in isolation without internet access, and his limited contacts with the outside world are closely monitored, at times blocked.

"If the correspondence could inspire acts of violence, then we are allowed to stop it," Espen Jambak, the deputy head of the high security Skien prison where Breivik is incarcerated, told AFP.

"We feel we have good control" over his correspondence, he said.

- Copycat effect -

Breivik's attacks have already inspired other extremists in the past.

On July 22, 2016, exactly five years after the Norway attack, a young man with mental health issues and said to be obsessed with Breivik killed nine people in a Munich shopping centre before committing suicide.

"There have also been other terror plots inspired by Breivik at more or less advanced stages, in Poland, the Czech Republic, France and the United States," said researcher Bjorgo.

Each attack risks triggering new ones.

The New Zealand attack "was clearly devised to inspire others, both those on the extreme right and Islamist extremists," Utoya survivor Bjorn Ihler told AFP.

"That it was filmed live indicates there was a deliberate strategy to create a narrative that can be used by extremists on both sides."
As earthquakes go in recent British politics, this one was the largest. Across three successive evenings, lawmakers handed down three scathing defeats to Prime Minister Theresa May. The scale of the early damage was unquantifiable, there was no immediate plan for how to rebuild, and nobody knew how dangerous the aftershocks would be.

But two things were clear. After two years of tortuous negotiations with the E.U., the U.K. was back to square one. And, in a turning point, lawmakers had wrestled control over the Brexit process out of the hands of Mays government.

The events played out in three stages. First, on Tuesday, lawmakers rejected the deal May had spent two years negotiating with the European Union. By doing so, they set Britain on course to crash out of the E.U. on its scheduled exit date, March 29, without a deal.

But then, on Wednesday, lawmakers voted to rule out such a no deal Brexit. Confusingly, that vote was not binding, and did not change the reality that Britain is legally bound to leave on March 29 if no deal has by then been agreed by Parliament.

So, to undo that paradox, lawmakers instructed May on Thursday to request the E.U. to postpone Britains exit date. The order, by a margin of 412 votes to 202, was an embarrassment for May, who had been steadfast in her rhetoric until Wednesday that Britain would leave on March 29. And it meant that E.U. member state governments now hold the power to allow the U.K. to postpone its departure, or force a no-deal Brexit.

With just 15 days to go before Brexit, heres what to know about what could happen next.

Will Brexit happen on March 29?

Probably not, but there are several options. Perhaps the most likely is that E.U. member states accept Mays request for an extension, and Britains exit date is postponed until June 30. (May will likely make the request for an extension at the upcoming E.U. council meeting on March 21.)

But if just one E.U. member state vetoes Mays request to postpone Brexit, then Britain legally must leave on March 29. In the case a country chooses to veto, there are three options. The simplest is that Britain leaves on March 29 without a deal.

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But there are yet more possibilities. Staring down a no-deal Brexit, U.K. lawmakers could either vote to accept Mays deal (or a slightly modified version of it) and leave the E.U. with that deal; or they could hold a vote to revoke Article 50 (the legal instrument allowing Britain to leave the E.U.) and remain a member state  in other words, lawmakers could cancel Brexit.

Still more complexity arises from the fact that the E.U. might choose to grant an extension, but only a long one, in the order of a year or more. Lawmakers in the U.K. have made clear that a short extension, of months, is more palatable. Faced with a choice between a long extension and a no-deal Brexit, there is no predicting what lawmakers or the government might choose to do.

How is Theresa May still Prime Minister?

Despite leading a divided country, a divided party, and even a divided cabinet, somehow May has remained prime minister since 2016. How has she got this far?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that nobody wants the job of finishing off the Brexit negotiations. Many members of her party covet the role of Prime Minister, but would prefer for May to see out the negotiations and then step down. May calmed the most strident voices calling for her resignation when, in December, she pledged to step down before the next election, which is currently scheduled for 2022.

But its unclear whether she will be able to stay in her role amid the current chaos. She is safe from an internal party challenge, having narrowly won one in December, but she could still be ousted as Prime Minister either by her cabinet resigning en masse, making her position untenable, or opposition parties calling and passing a vote of no confidence in the government.

Can Britain cancel Brexit?

Yes. In December, the European court of justice ruled that the U.K. could unilaterally revoke Article 50 before March 29, thus cancelling the Brexit process, allowing Britain to remain a member of the European Union on its current terms.

Could there still be a second Brexit referendum?

Maybe. Lawmakers rejected a motion on Thursday to hold a second referendum by 334 votes to 85. Nevertheless, the opposition Labour Party indicated it could change its mind and instruct its 229 lawmakers to vote for one (it told them to abstain on Thursday). The Peoples Vote campaign, a cross-party group calling for a second referendum, also told its members to abstain, suggesting that Thursday was not the right time  but that another vote would happen in due course.

I reiterate our support for a public vote, not as political point scoring, but as a realistic option to break the deadlock, said the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn after the result of Thursdays votes came through.
Council on American-Islamic Relations Executive Director Nihad Awad delivered a direct message to President Donald Trump following scores of deaths in shootings at two New Zealand mosques: Your words and policies matter.

Demanding Trump speak out against the attacks more strongly, Awad warned the president during a Friday press conference that his actions impact the lives of innocent people at home and globally.

You should condemn this not only as a hate crime, but as a white supremacist terrorist attack, he said. You need to assure all of us  Muslims, blacks, Jews, immigrants  that we are protected and you will not tolerate any physical violence against us because we are immigrants or we are minorities. You need to condemn this clearly today and you do not need to be vague. You have to be very clear on this.

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Executive Director Nihad Awad to Pres. Trump:



"Your words matter. Your policies matter ... You should condemn this not only as a hate crime, but as a white supremacist terrorist attack ... You need to condemn this community today." pic.twitter.com/xp6WjAbGs7  MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 15, 2019

Fridays massacre in Christchurch killed at least 49 people, leaving dozens more injured. One man in his 20s has since been charged with murder, and police have taken at least two others into custody. Before the shooting, the alleged gunman appears to have posted a lengthy manifesto on Twitter and 8chan, an online forum, citing his hatred for Islam and his love of American extremist movements.

Awad pointed out the evident shift in religious tolerance that has played out since Trumps White House run, and he didnt hesitate to place the blame partly on the president.

During your presidency and during your election campaign, Islamophobia took a sharp rise and attacks on innocent Muslims, innocent immigrants and mosques have skyrocketed, Awad said. We hold you responsible for this growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the country and in Europe, but also we do not excuse those terrorist attackers against minorities at home and abroad.

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Related Coverage

Mass Shooting At 2 New Zealand Mosques Leaves At Least 49 People Dead

A Suspect In New Zealand Mass Shootings Appears To Be A White Supremacist

'New Zealand's Darkest Day': Celebs, Politicians, Others Share Heartbreak On Twitter

American Muslims Grieve, Call For Action After New Zealand Mosque Shootings

Also on HuffPost

A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called "one of New Zealand's darkest days." Authorities detained four people and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned attack.

Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019.

People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch where many people were killed in two mass shootings in New Zealand on March 15, 2019.

Police console a man outside a mosque in central Christchurch after a mass shooting in New Zealand on March 15, 2019.

Police attempt to move people away from outside a mosque in central Christchurch after a mass shooting in New Zealand on March 15, 2019.

An image grab from TV New Zealand shows a victim arriving at a hospital following a mosque shooting in Christchurch on March 15, 2019.

Police stand outside a mosque in Christchurch after a mass shooting in New Zealand on March 15, 2019.

An image grab from TV New Zealand shows a victim arriving at a hospital following a mosque shooting in Christchurch on March 15, 2019.

Police officers guard the area close to the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting in Christchurch on March 15, 2019.

Police escort witnesses away from a mosque in central Christchurch after a mass shooting in New Zealand on March 15, 2019.

Police attempt to clear people from outside a mosque in central Christchurch after a mass shooting in New Zealand on March 15, 2019.

A police officer patrols at a cordon near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called "one of New Zealand's darkest days," as authorities detained four people and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned attack.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
A woman who claims asbestos in Johnson & Johnson products caused her deadly cancer was awarded $29.4 million by a California jury on Wednesday, Reuters reports.

A jury in a California Superior Court in Oakland determined that defective Baby Powder was a substantial contributing factor to Terry Leavitts mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer that affects the tissue that coats internal organs, the Associated Press reports. Leavitt said she often used two talcum-powder-based Johnson & Johnson products  Baby Powder and Shower to Shower powder  in the 1960s and 1970s, and claims they contributed to her 2017 cancer diagnosis, according to Reuters.

Johnson & Johnson said in a statement provided to TIME that it plans to appeal the decision, citing serious procedural and evidentiary errors.

We are disappointed with todays verdict and will pursue an appeal because Johnsons Baby Powder does not contain asbestos or cause cancer, the statement says. Plaintiffs attorneys have fundamentally failed to show that Johnsons Baby Powder contains asbestos, and their own experts concede that they are not recognizing the accepted definition of asbestos and are ignoring crucial distinctions between minerals that are asbestos and minerals that are not. We respect the legal process and reiterate that jury verdicts are not medical, scientific or regulatory conclusions about a product.

Nonetheless, 2018 investigations from the New York Times and Reuters suggested that the company feared for decades that some of its Baby Powder could be tainted by asbestos, a type of carcinogenic mineral that has been linked to cancers of lungs, larynx and ovaries, as well as mesothelioma, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Asbestos is found insulation, roofing and some plastics, but according to the American Cancer Society (ACS), the naturally occurring minerals also turn up in the pure form of talc, which is the basis for talcum powder like that used in Johnson & Johnsons products. (In the 1970s, U.S. cosmetics companies began formulating their products with talc that is free from detectable amounts of asbestos.)

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While asbestos is classified as a known carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer and other groups, the ACS says the science on whether talcum powder causes cancer is more ambiguous. Johnson & Johnson has repeatedly pointed to studies that have not shown such a link.

That hasnt stopped people around the country from filing lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson. The company is currently embroiled in roughly 13,000 lawsuits brought by people who claim the companys products caused or contributed to serious health issues, the AP reports.

Just last year, a jury decided that Johnson & Johnson had to pay more than $4 billion in damages to a group of women who claimed that asbestos in its products caused their ovarian cancers. Before that, in 2016, the company was ordered to pay $55 million to a woman who claimed she got cancer from its talcum powder.
Canadian passport and boarding pass and entry stamps. Getty Images

If youre longing to spend some time relaxing in the south of France or ski the alps in a winter getaway, it looks like that may be a bit more difficult in the coming years.

The European Union has now announced the European Travel Information and Authorization System (ETIAS) that will take effect in January 2021.

What is it?

The ETIAS is an electronic system that keeps track of visitors from countries that do not need a visa to enter the Schengen zone. This area represents 26 European countries that have agreed upon common entry and exit requirements.

Right now, Canadians do not need a visa to travel to Europe for up to 90 days. But in two years travellers from over 60 countries, including Canada and the U.S., will have to obtain this ETIAS security clearance before visiting countries in the Schengen area.

By implementing ETIAS, the EU Commission intends to improve the security of the Schengen area primarily requiring these visa-free travellers to obtain travel authorisation and undergo various security checks prior to their arrival to the EU, the ETIAS website states.

The ETIAS would ensure possible security threats are identified and dealt with outside EU borders and ensures citizens remain safe from such threats inside the EU.

What countries do I need ETIAS clearance to travel to?

The ETIAS security clearance is needed to travel to the following countries:

Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland

The U.K. and Russia are not included in the ETIAS system as Canadian citizens require a visa to travel to Russia. Throughout Brexit procedures, the EU has said that as of 2021, British travellers will have to pay for the ETIAS process to travel into the area.

How do I apply?

The process for starts with an online application and a 7 euro payment for those over the age of 18 (free for individuals who are younger).

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The information that will be gathered in the application includes travel documentation, questions about any previous criminal records and travel history.

In approximately 10 minutes, each person should be able to fill out the application and receive a decision on their ETIAS approval.

Once you received a response of valid travel authorization, you will not need to repeat this process for three years or until your passport expires, whichever comes first.

How does it work in practice?

You will need to indicate the first EU country you plan to enter first when completing the online application. Travellers will only be allowed to enter the Schengen area through that country when they first travel to the EU under the ETIAS system.

After you enter through the country listed on your application, you can travel to any country in the Schengen zone for 90 days in a 180 days period.

ETIAS approval will be checked when traveling to the EU by air, land and sea.

What happens if my application is denied?

If your ETIAS clearance is denied, the EU says you will receive information on why your application was not approved, including the country that has flagged your request.

Travellers do have the ability to appeal the decision with the national authority that denied the application.

What do you think of this new travel authorization system? Vote in the poll above and leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Bangula (Malawi) (AFP) - "We just sleep on the floor in the tents," said 28-year-old mother-of-five Mary Amidu who like thousands of other Malawians fled her flood-ravaged home.

"It's a camp, so the situation is dire. You just find a small space in the tent with your family and make it home."

Her village is just 10 kilometres (six miles) away on the Mozambique border, beside the west bank of the Shire river which has burst its banks following days of torrential rain.

Across Malawi, at least 56 people have been killed following flash floods while the government estimates almost 83,000 people have been displaced.

The waters last week invaded her home so swiftly that the young widow had to scramble to get her family to safety.

"The floods came very quickly and we had no time to rescue anything, most of my property went with the floods," she said. "What was important was to save lives."

They are now at the emergency camp, located in Bangula, southern Malawi -- close to the border with Mozambique which was hit by tropical cyclone Idai late Thursday, cutting off the coastal city of Berea.

"Although we have food, we have no cooking utensils to prepare the food because everything was lost," said Amidu who said she fears a long stay at the camp as waters begin to subside.

- 'No other choice' -

"We cannot go back soon because the water has not receded and so the house has been destroyed. So we will hang around the camp until the situation normalises. We have no other choice."

Pilirani Andulu, walked 15 kms to the camp after her home collapsed and has been forced to sleep in the open with her two-year-old girl because the tents are full.

A lack of blankets and mosquito nets means her child is exposed to mosquitoes, malaria and cold.

Relief official Humphrey Magalasi has been battling to ensure the 21 camps opened to handle the crisis can keep up.

"We have huge gaps in terms of resources such as food and non-food items," he told AFP. "What we desperately need right now is food, tents, medication and mosquito nets."

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As many as 1,700 households had settled at the Bangula camp as of Thursday.

So far, the Department of Disaster Management Affairs has received just 5,000 bags of rice, supplied by China.

At Bangula airfield, Magalasi has also been dispatching food and emergency supplies to areas cut off by flooding including Makhanga, 65 kms from Bangula.

- 'Accessible by boat or by air' -

"We are airlifting supplies to Makhanga where about 2,000 households have been affected," he said.

"Due to the flooding, the area is only accessible by boat or by air. We intend to airlift 600 bags of rice and other non-food items to Makhanga."

At least 56 people have died in flood-hit areas as of Wednesday, according to the government, while 577 had been injured and three are missing.

"Most of the displaced families are living in camps. So far, a total of 187 camps have been established in the affected districts," said the government in a statement.

"Assessments to establish the extent of damage in all the 14 affected districts (of Malawi's 28) are still underway."

The floods also caused heavy damage to property, including roads and crops which forced President Peter Mutharika to declare a state of disaster.

An AFP correspondent saw extensive damage to fields of corn, also known as maize, around Bangula. The destruction could potentially wreak havoc with the harvest due in April and May.

The country's Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services has warned Malawians to expect further downpours.
China's rubber-stamp parliament approved a foreign investment law Friday that may serve as an olive branch in trade talks with the United States, but it received a lukewarm welcome from business groups.

The legislation aims to address long-running grievances from foreign firms including stronger protections for intellectual property, but the US and European chambers of commerce voiced concerns that they were not given enough time to give their input.

The National People's Congress voted 2,929 in favour of the law -- with eight against and eight abstentions -- barely three months after a first draft was debated, an unusually quick turnaround for the legislature, which meets once a year.

The move comes as US and Chinese negotiators hold complex talks aimed at resolving a months-long trade war that has pounded businesses with tariffs on $360 billion in two-way commerce.

US President Donald Trump said Thursday the negotiations should wrap up within four weeks, adding: "We are getting what we have to get."

China's top trade negotiator, Liu He, held phone talks with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, with the official Xinhua news agency saying they made "substantial progress".

The bill will eliminate the requirement for foreign enterprises to transfer proprietary technology to Chinese joint-venture partners and protect against "illegal government interference" -- major sticking points in the trade negotiations.

The legislation will come into force on January 1, 2020.

China will also amend its intellectual property law and "introduce a punitive damages mechanism to ensure that all infringements will be seriously dealt with", Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told reporters at the end of the parliament's two-week session.

The changes will "ensure violators have no place to hide", he said.

Under the bill, foreign investors will enjoy the same privileges as Chinese companies in most sectors, unless they have been placed on "negative lists", officials say.

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- 'Small slice' of concerns -

Li said China will soon announce shorter negative lists and continue to trim them in future, "increasing the scope of what is not prohibited".

Tim Stratford, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, said "the last minute efforts are appreciated".

But, he added, the changes "only address a small slice of the overall set of concerns our members have about the uneven playing field foreign companies encounter in China".

The chamber was concerned about vague language in provisions that allowed local governments to expropriate investments that "harm public interest" and the inability to appeal against the outcome of national security reviews.

Jacob Parker, Beijing-based vice president at the US-China Business Council, welcomed the "positive language" in the bill but added that "real investment on the ground will depend on how narrowly tailored those negative lists are going forward".

Businesses are still concerned that industry-specific laws and local administrative approvals may impede full market access despite provisions in the negative list.

The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China had earlier complained that Beijing was rushing the investment law to appease the United States.

"More than anything else, foreign companies want equal treatment and opportunities," said Mats Harborn, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.

"While not all of our concerns were addressed in this law, it is time to move forward," he added.

Both the EU and American trade chambers had urged China to consider having a single Company Law to govern both foreign and domestic enterprises, as is common in many countries.

The law includes a new article on protecting foreign companies' commercial secrets, and fleshes out criminal penalties for officials who leak confidential information they obtain from overseas businesses.

"I think we can safely assume that this language is a result of the trade negotiations as it was slipped in at the last minute," Parker said.

The European Chamber singled out one of the law's stipulations that permits China tit-for-tat retaliation against any country that discriminates against Chinese investment.

"This clause allows for political issues to influence investor-state relations, and gives China power to take unilateral action," the European chamber said.
The deadly mass shootings on Friday at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch are the latest attacks in places of worship.

The five most recent such attacks in the United States:

Tree of Life Synagogue

A gunman screamed anti-Semitic epithets as he opened fire on worshipers in the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Robert Bowers killed 11 and wounded six others gathered for Shabbat morning services on Oct. 27, 2018.

Sutherland Springs Church

At a First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, a gunman killed 25 people, plus an unborn child, on Dec. 5, 2017. Devin Kelley later killed himself in the rural area outside of San Antonio.

A memorial for the victims of the shooting at Sutherland

Burnette Chapel

One woman died and seven others were wounded at an attack at Burnette Chapel Church of Christ in the southeast Nashville neighborhood of Antioch. Emanuel Kidega Samson opened fire as Sunday services were ending on Sept. 24, 2017.

Charleston Church

A gunman killed nine people gathered for Bible study at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. Dylann Roof shot the victims at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church while they prayed.

Wisconsin Sikh Temple

At a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, a shooter killed six people and wounded three others on Aug. 5, 2012. Wade Michael Page walked into the Oak Creek gurdwara and opened fire shortly before Sunday services were set to begin.

Members of the Sikh temple of Wisconsin pray inside the place of worship Sunday, August, 12, 2012.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Christchurch mosque shooting adds to growing list of attacks in places of worship
Students across the UK are joining their peers around the world in walking out of their schools to demand politicians take urgent action on climate change.

Young people have already taken to the streets in Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, with around 2,000 events expected to be held in more than 120 countries.

The global day of action against climate change was inspired by Greta Thunberg, a teenager who has protested outside Swedens parliament every Friday to urge leaders to take action and has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

In the UK, students gathered in Parliament Square in London with placards reading: By the time were in charge it will be too late, we want you to panic and the greatest threat to the planet is the belief someone else will save it.

They chanted this is what democracy looks like while primary school children, who were at the protest with their parents and holding handmade placards, shouted climate change, boo!

Organisers said they expected a larger turnout on Friday than the UKs first strike on 15 February, which saw thousands of students ditch school for demonstrations.

In Berlin, at least 10,000 protesters, mostly students, gathered in a central square waving signs with slogans such as There is no planet B and Climate Protection Report Card: F, before a march through the capitals government quarter.

In Poland, thousands marched in Warsaw and other cities to demand a ban on the burning of coal.

In Indias capital New Delhi, schoolchildren protested over inaction on climate change and rising air pollution levels that often far exceed World Health organisation limits.

Several thousand students gathered around the Pantheon building in Paris. Some criticised French president Emmanuel Macron, who sees himself as the guarantor of the Paris climate accord but has been lambasted by climate activists for being too business friendly and not ambitious enough in his efforts to reduce French emissions.

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Police in Vienna said around 10,000 students rallied in the Austrian capital, while in neighbouring Switzerland a similar number protested in the western city of Lausanne.

In Helsinki, police said about 3,000 students gathered in front of Finlands parliament sporting placards such as Dinosaurs thought they had time too!

Students in the UK have staged events in 100 British towns and cities including London, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge.

They demanding the government declare a climate emergency and take active steps to tackle the problem, and have called on politicians to communicate the severity of the ecological crisis to the public and reform the curriculum to make it an educational priority.

They also want recognition that young people have the biggest stake in the future, to be involved in policymaking, and for the voting age to be lowered to 16.

It follows in the wake of a UN report published last year which warned limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which the impact of climate change would become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action.

It would require cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12 years, and slashing them to zero by mid-century.

In a video released ahead of the strikes on Friday, environment secretary Michael Gove tells students walking out of lessons and lectures to call for urgent action on cutting emissions: Dear school climate strikers, we agree. Collective action of the kind youre championing can make a difference, and a profound one.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also backed the strikers, tweeting: Thank you for standing up against climate change. You shouldnt have to pay the price for the mistakes of previous generations.

Additional reporting by agencies
WASHINGTON  The deaths of a Michigan family of five in January when a truck slammed into their car in Kentucky has Congress wondering whether interlock devices that keep drunken drivers off the road entirely should be mandatory for all vehicles.

On Thursday, members of the House Consumer Protection and Commerce Subcommittee specifically invoked the deaths of Issam Abbas, his wife, Rima, and their three children as they questioned whether technology that could keep vehicles from being operated by any drunken driver should be more widely required.

And while any move to mandate devices in all vehicles to keep them from starting without the driver first blowing into a tube or taking some other action to test his or her sobriety is unlikely in the near future, it was clear that some members of Congress and safety advocates believe that federal regulators should be moving in that direction.

"Whats sad is that this story has been repeated over and over again and Congress needs to step up and do something about it," said U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn. "The technology exists to save lives."

Tesla Y: Tesla CEO Elon Musk reveals Model Y electric SUV: 'It will ride like a sports car'

The Abbas family, clockwise from left, Ali, Rima, Issam, Isabelle and Giselle, pose for a photo at a wedding in 2018.

At present, interlock devices are generally only required by state courts after someone has been arrested for drunken driving. But with more than 10,000 drunken driving fatalities a year, some safety advocates and members of Congress are pushing legislation, such as Dingell's Abbas Stop Drunk Driving Act, which could mandate interlock devices in an effort keep drunken drivers off the road.

The family was headed home from a vacation trip when a truck operated by 41-year-old Joey Bailey hit their vehicle head-on on Jan. 6 on I-75 in Kentucky. A coroner said Bailey had a blood-alcohol level of .306, well above the .08 legal limit to drive.

The only technology currently available involves an interlock device that connects to the car and requires the driver to blow into a tube before the vehicle will start.

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But for more than a decade, the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety  an organization funded by domestic and international automakers  has been working on technology that could result in devices that keep a car from starting based on more passive testing, such as automatically measuring the blood-alcohol of a driver as he or she breathes naturally behind the wheel, or a touch-based system that "measures blood alcohol levels by shining an infraredlight through the fingertip of the driver."

Robert Strassburger, the president and CEO of the coalition, said the technology is still being developed and is only being tested on less than a half-dozen vehicles in Virginia. But he hopes it will be available for a wider fleet of vehicles  such as government agency vehicles  for testing by next year and for commercial purchase by 2004.

Automakers aren't, at this point, advocating making such technology  or the available interlock devices  mandatory, however, and are generally loathe to have federal regulators or Congress force requirements on them, especially if there are fears that the public isn't ready to accept them or they could result in unacceptably high costs.

The auto industry has also been investing heavily into the promise of automated vehicles, which could potentially make the problem of drunken driving virtually disappear  though that technology is also unlikely to be widely available in the near future.

The Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, a trade group of domestic and international automakers, put out a statement saying that automakers continue to work to address impaired driving and support present-day ignition interlocks and law enforcement's use of them, though it said those rules could always be reviewed.

"Industry, in cooperation with the federal government, is also examining emerging technologies to combat drunk driving," the Alliance statement continued. "Such technology must not hassle the sober driver. It also must be small, quick, noninvasive, accurate, reliable, repeatable, foolproof, durable and easy to maintain. And, of course, it must have the publics support."

Safety advocates and others, meanwhile, argued that Strassburger and the industry are dragging their feet and that if they won't make faster progress, Congress and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) should require  by a certain date  that the existing interlock devices be mandated on vehicles.

"I dont know whats wrong with the industry on this issue," said Joan Claybrook, a board member of the safety group Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and a former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) administrator in the Carter administration.

"Where is this system?" she continued. "It didnt take this long to produce (the technology for) air bags and air bags are a lot more complicated than this. Why is this not in every car?"

Strassburger and David Kelly, the executive director of the Coalition of Interlock Ignition Manufacturers, said that it is vital to build consumer support for such systems or there could be backlash. Some members of the committee questioned whether drivers might also find ways to disable or otherwise get around the technology.

"(We have) always been built to try to increase consumer awareness at the same time as technology," said Stassburger. He added that "not hassling drivers (who) are not the problem is a very important consideration."

Dingell, however, said that the promises of technology that will end drunken driving still seem to keep getting pushed off. "We keep funding it, but it doesn't get there."

Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @tsspangler. Read more on Michigan politics and sign up for our elections newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Congress considers devices on cars to prevent drunken driving after death of Michigan family
New York (AFP) - Connecticut's supreme court ruled Thursday that US gunmaker Remington can be sued over the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school in which one of its weapons was used.

The narrow 4-3 ruling raised the hopes of the families of the 20 schoolchildren and six school staff killed in the December 14, 2012 attack of punishing the marketers of the powerful Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle used by shooter Adam Lanza.

It also sets a precedent that could lead to more lawsuit against manufacturers whose guns are used in mass shootings.

The ruling Thursday overturned a lower court's judgment that rejected the lawsuit, which charged that Remington Outdoor Co., arms distributor Camfour, and the Connecticut store which sold the gun, could be held liable in a wrongful death lawsuit.

Lanza was a 20-year-old with known developmental disabilities who lived at home with his mother when he undertook the attack.

His mother, a gun enthusiast, had bought him the AR-15-style Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle more than two years before the shooting. Lanza killed his mother before assaulting the school, and then killed himself afterward.

The lawsuit alleged that Remington and the other two defendants are culpable because they knowingly marketed a military grade weapon that is "grossly unsuited" for civilian use yet had become the gun most used in mass shootings.

They alleged that the gun was marketed immorally and unscrupulously, sold on its warfighting capabilities to civilians who would never experience combat.

- 'Used to kill' -

That included, they alleged, popularizing the AR-15 in combat and mass shooting-type situations through the type of violent video games that Lanza was known to play.

They specifically cited Remington's marketing of high-capacity magazines, which have only combat utility, for use with the gun.

They noted that video games feature shooters using multiple high capacity magazines, and that Lanza attacked the school with ten 30-round magazines.

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"Prior to December 14, 2012, assault rifles like the Bushmaster XM15-E2S had been used to kill in department stores and fast food chains, at offices and homecoming parties, on courthouse steps, and in schools," the suit said.

"Despite the unreasonable risks associated with selling assault rifles under these circumstances, defendants continued to market, promote and sell AR-15s to consumers."

The court ruled that, even though the US Congress passed a law in 2005 that explicitly immunized gunmakers when their products are used in crimes, Remington could still be sued on the grounds that its marketing violated Connecticut's unfair trade practice laws.

Congress did not seek to fully protect gunmakers and dealers from practices that promote criminal conduct, the judges said in their ruling.

Hence, they said, "it falls to a jury to decide whether the promotional schemes alleged in the present case rise to the level of illegal trade practices and whether fault for the tragedy can be laid at their feet."
Daniel Mays appeared in Star Wars spin-off movie Rogue One. (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for dunhill + Disney/Lucasfilm)

British actor Daniel Mays has discussed his relief that his brief performance in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story managed to survive the cutting room floor.

He said he was like a fanboy on the set and explained that the secrecy and security of being involved in Star Wars was on another level.

It was an amazing day. I was on the reshoots, Mays said to Yahoo Movies UK in an interview promoting his new movie Fishermans Friends.

He added: I was just thankful that I didnt hit the cutting room floor because you could have dropped that character. But in actual fact, when I watch that film back, its a really good scene.

Its an integral part to that movie because Diego Lunas character assassinates me. Rogue One is dark, isnt it? All of those characters snuff it and Im the first one to go. I thought that, as a standalone Star Wars film, it was right up there with the very best.

Mays character played a crucial role on Rogue One, but he was a late addition to the story. (Disney)

Mays played insurgent figure Tivik in the film, who served as an informant for Diego Lunas rebel character Cassian Andor. Tivik informs the rebels of the existence of the Death Star.

Hes killed by Andor when Stormtroopers arrive on the scene, as the rebel fighter does not want his wounded informant to be captured by the forces of the Empire.

Read more: Rogue Ones editors reveal how the film changed in reshoots

The 40-year-old actor, who has appeared in numerous films and television programmes including Line of Duty and the Dads Army movie remake, said he and his family are big fans of the franchise.

He said: I was absolutely like a fanboy. I love Star Wars and so does my son, so it was the coolest thing I couldve been in, in terms of telling my son the news. But I loved it.

To cap it all, the Stormtroopers are in the scene as well. The level of creativity and professionalism, costume and set design, was just on another level. It was extraordinary.

Daniel Mays poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film Dads Army in London, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016. (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

Mays added that he was impressed by the level of secrecy that goes into the filming of a Star Wars adventure.

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He said: You cant tell anyone youre in it. You go to set in a big, black cloak so no one sees your costume. Your script for the day has to be signed out at the beginning of the day and checked back out at the end. Its on another level.

Read more: Full interview with Daniel Mays on Fishermans Friends

In Fishermans Friends, Mays portrays city boy music executive Danny Anderson, who falls for the natural talent of a Cornish group of singing sailors. He also finds love with local girl Alwyn, played by Tuppence Middleton.

Daniel Mays gets his sea legs in British underdog comedy Fishermans Friends (Credit: Entertainment Film Distributors)

The film is based on the true story of the titular group, who rose from obscurity to chart success and eventually performed on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury.

Fishermans Friends is in cinemas this Friday, 13 March.




Washington (AFP) - Upstart Democrat Beto O'Rourke announced Thursday he is running for president, joining a crowded field of candidates vying to challenge Donald Trump in 2020.

"The only way for us to live up to the promise of America is to give it our all and to give it for all of us," O'Rourke, 46, said in a video.

He has been discussed as a potential candidate ever since his unexpectedly tight race last year to unseat Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, when his grassroots campaign of inclusion and getting people politically involved gained national attention.

O'Rourke now enters a big pool of Democrats seeking to oust Trump.

They include several US senators -- Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, and the leader among current candidates, liberal powerhouse Bernie Sanders.

The last main piece of the 2020 election puzzle on the Democrat side is former vice president Joe Biden, who has said he will reveal his political plans soon.

O'Rourke, a former punk musician who sometimes went skateboarding to blow off steam on the Texas campaign trail, has been tipped to quickly achieve rockstar status with a run.

But that will come with intensifying scrutiny from the media, Democratic power brokers and donors, as well as voters.

In his Senate run Beto ran an unconventional campaign, espousing progressive positions on immigration and health care, while traveling to every county in strongly Republican Texas in a bid to heal political divisions.

The campaign was time-consuming and he signaled that he felt disconnected from family as a result.

"My family hasn't seen me," he told Oprah Winfrey in February. "I haven't been there for them."

His disappointment about his narrow defeat was clear when he embarked on a low-key road trip and blogged about the experience, writing on January 16 that he has been "in and out of a funk."
Washington (AFP) - Beto O'Rourke, a skateboarding former punk rocker feted as one of the Democratic Party's rising stars, announced Thursday he is running for president -- joining a crowded field of candidates vying to challenge US President Donald Trump in 2020.

"The only way for us to live up to the promise of America is to give it our all and to give it for all of us," O'Rourke, 46, said in a video, filmed alongside his wife in their El Paso, Texas home.

O'Rourke has been discussed as a potential frontrunner since dazzling the grassroots during an unexpectedly tight race last year to unseat Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

Early Thursday, he was already taking questions from voters in Keokuk, Iowa -- following in the footsteps of other Democrats keen to raise their profiles in the state that will vote before any other in the 2020 primary process.

The president's first reaction to the latest pretender to the Oval Office was typically Trumpian -- a playful but dismissive takedown of his new rival's delivery style.

"I think he's got a lot of hand movement ... I said, 'Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?'" grinned Trump, whose own oratory quirks -- including effusive hand gestures -- have been fodder for political impressionists.

O'Rourke, on the other hand, has vowed to run a positive campaign that would seek to "bring out the very best from every single one of us" and unite a country riven by political, social and cultural fissures.

"Man, I'm just born to be in it, and want to do everything I humanly can for this country at this moment," he told Vanity Fair in this month's cover story.

Published online hours before his official announcement, it features a spread by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz with images of O'Rourke at home with family relaxing, making pancakes, playing music and posing against the desolate Texan landscape.

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- Large field -

O'Rourke has entered a large field of other Democrats seeking to oust Trump.

They include several US senators -- Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar and liberal powerhouse Bernie Sanders. Former vice president Joe Biden has said he will reveal his political plans soon.

To one Iowan's question on running alongside so many other Democrats, O'Rourke said it was "critically important that we not denigrate, demean any other candidate."

"Any single Democrat running today... would be far better than the current occupant of the White House," he said to applause.

O'Rourke, once a bassist in the moderately successful El Paso band Foss, has been tipped to quickly achieve rockstar status.

But with that will come with intensifying scrutiny.

As a three-term congressman, O'Rourke was politically cautious, joining the House's centrist, pro-business New Democrat Coalition.

But in his Senate run, he ran an unconventional campaign, espousing progressive positions on topics such as immigration.

His native El Paso, which borders Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, was recently visited by Trump for a rally filled with dire warnings about Mexican criminals and calls for bigger and longer border walls.

"All of us, wherever you live, can acknowledge that if immigration is a problem it's the best possible problem for this country to have," O'Rourke insisted in Thursday's announcement video.

- 'Nothing to lose' -

In Iowa, he touched upon several progressive hot topics -- from universal health care and a $15 minimum wage to cannabis legalization and women's reproductive rights.

Some of his strongest statements came on climate change and the Green New Deal touted by the left of the Democratic party.

"I haven't seen anything better that addresses this singular crisis we face, a crisis that could at its worst lead to extinction," he said of the proposal to de-carbonize the US economy while offering universal healthcare and guaranteed employment.

"Not to be dramatic, but the future of the world depends on us right now here where we are," he said.

O'Rourke's 2018 campaign was time-consuming and he signaled that he felt disconnected from family -- casting doubt on a possible presidential run.

But it also showed a candidate appearing to enjoy himself.

He could be seen skateboarding between events. He jammed onstage with country music legend Willie Nelson, and pledged to "listen to everyone, regardless of the differences."

In a new documentary on his improbable Senate campaign, "Running with Beto," O'Rourke offered sage advice for candidates like himself: "Run like there's nothing to lose."

burs/oh/ska
Since the birth of Bitcoin 10 years ago, hundreds of imitators have appeared, and even more cryptocurrencies have been created in an attempt to solve different issues we see in society. Whilst Bitcoin is seen as a form of money, you also have smart contract platforms such as Ethereum, data storage platforms such as Siacoin, and even computational power-sharing platforms such as Golem. Here are a few different types of cryptocurrency and how you can use them.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency. Although it has since split into different versions, on the whole their aims are the same  its just that the paths they take to reach that end goal are different. Bitcoin can be used to purchase goods in any outlet that will accept it, but it can also work in a similar way to PayPal if you want to send your money overseas. The benefits of Bitcoin over PayPal are cheaper fees and that there is no centralised company that can stop you from sending your money. Bitcoin doesnt need a central authority to process transactions.

In the early years of Bitcoins life, a lot of people used it to buy drugs on the dark net. Since then, tracing illegal transactions has become much easier for law enforcement agencies. Nowadays, Bitcoin is used for much more traditional transactions, although there is still a long way to go for it to be used in day-to-day life for many.

Smart contract platforms

Cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and EOS are based upon the idea of smart contracts. In their simplest form, smart contracts can facilitate the nature of a normal contract, just digitally. Smart contracts are nothing new, with Nick Szabo exploring this idea in the 1990s. Ethereum has evolved into its own beast however. Since Ethereum is also a platform that can be built upon, many cryptocurrencies are built on top of the Ethereum network.

This ultimately led to the ICO boom of 2017 which partially turned Ethereum into nothing more than a fundraising platform. With the ICO craze dying down, this trend has since slowed, although competitors such as Tron have jumped on board a similar train.

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Ethereum can still be used to send and receive payments, but the possibilities go much further. The plethora of different tokens built upon Ethereum may mean you use the network without even realising it. There are games and gambling apps amongst many other tokens.

Data storage

There are always going to be risks associated with storing files in the cloud via Dropbox or Google. Firstly, although these are gigantic companies with high levels of security, it doesnt guarantee that your files are safe. If the central database is hacked, then your files could disappear. There is also a slight chance that private documents could be snooped on by those companies charged with protecting your data.

Data storage cryptocurrencies such as Siacoin or Storj aim to decentralise the online storage system. Through them, you share your files with other members of the network (who wouldnt be able to access them) and pay those hosts in cryptocurrencies. Not only is the system more secure from hacks as it will employ a blockchain, but it also encourages the sharing of money between participants instead of a large central company.

Computational processing

Golem is a platform built upon Ethereum. It shares similar ideas to Siacoin and Storj mentioned above. However, Golem aims to use the spare computational processing power of your computer and harvest it for other uses such as rendering. If I was to have unused computing power, another person could then pay me in Golem to use it themselves. With the vast amount of computers sitting idle for large periods of time, this could be an extremely effective way of reorganising energy.

Privacy coins

Whilst Bitcoin tracing has become more common, there are anonymity coins such as Monero and Zcash that aim to prevent this. They both have similar goals to that of Bitcoin in that they work as a medium of payment. You can purchase goods with both and send money internationally without relying on a third party. It remains to be seen how these privacy coins will come to be viewed by the authorities and nation states however. Until they grow in popularity, it is unknown whether the authorities will attempt to clamp down on them.

Conclusion

Since the birth of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology that accompanies it, there have been numerous ideas on the best ways to utilise this technology. There are many more different types of cryptocurrency aiming to do a variety of things than just the ones listed above. Whether all of them or none of them will achieve success remains to be seen. There are many who believe that anything other than Bitcoin is doomed to failure and others who see a world in the future full of varying types of cryptocurrencies.

The post Different types of cryptocurrency and how to use them appeared first on Coin Rivet.
By Guy Faulconbridge LONDON (Reuters) - The United Kingdom's exit from the European Union is uncertain nearly three years since the 2016 Brexit vote. Most diplomats and investors think the United Kingdom faces three main options: leaving with a divorce deal, throwing the question back to the people or crashing out without a deal. To see a graphic of no-deal Brexit probabilities from major banks: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/editorcharts/GLOBAL-MARKETS/0H001PBEZ505/index.html Following are the main scenarios: 1) BREXIT WITH A DEAL - May gets her deal approved at a third, or even fourth, attempt and the United Kingdom leaves in an orderly fashion. May's divorce treaty, the product of more than two years of tortuous negotiations with the EU, was defeated by 149 votes on March 12 and by 230 votes on Jan. 15. She may try again next week. She told lawmakers that unless they approved her Brexit divorce deal, Britain's EU exit could face a much longer delay than three months. To get it through parliament, she must win over dozens of Brexit-supporting rebels in her own Conservative Party and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) which props up her minority government. The DUP said it had good talks with British ministers on Friday to see what additional assurances would be needed for them to save her deal. [nL8N2121L3] If she fails next week, there is even talk she could come back for a fourth vote. May could seek to get last-minute concessions at a March 21-22 EU summit. The EU has repeatedly said it is the only deal on the table and that it will not reopen it. Many banks and investors still say a last-minute deal could be struck and approved, and cite previous EU crises such as the Greek debt crisis where solutions were found at the eleventh hour. Goldman Sachs sees a 60 percent chance that May's deal, or a variant of it, is eventually ratified. It sees the probability of a second referendum at 35 percent and a no-deal exit at 5 percent. If May's deal fails, another option is that parliament at some point takes control of Brexit and lawmakers seek a closer relationship with the EU, staying in the EU customs union. Lawmakers could seek indicative votes on a way forward and there might be a majority for a softer Brexit than May's deal. 2) BREXIT REFERENDUM - May's deal fails and a long delay allows the campaign for another referendum to gain momentum. It is far from clear how the United Kingdom would vote if given another chance. An often chaotic set of votes in parliament this week has shown that none of the alternatives to May's deal - such as leaving with no deal, a referendum or allowing parliament to decide how to leave - can muster a majority among lawmakers yet. In the June 23, 2016 referendum, 17.4 million voters, or 51.9 percent, backed leaving the EU while 16.1 million, or 48.1 percent, backed staying. While many surveys ahead of the vote incorrectly predicted that the United Kingdom would vote to stay in the club it joined in 1973, polls now suggest no great desire for a second referendum and indicate that many voters, fatigued by the political squabbling, would be happy to leave without a deal. Corbyn, who voted against membership in 1975 and gave only reluctant backing to the 2016 campaign to remain in the EU, has given ambiguous backing for another referendum, saying he would push for one alongside a national election. At the highest levels of government, there are worries that a second referendum would exacerbate the deep divisions exposed by the 2016 referendum, alienate millions of pro-Brexit voters and stoke support for the far-right. If Britons voted to remain, Brexit supporters might demand a third and decisive vote. A new party backed by Nigel Farage, the insurgent who helped shove Britain toward the EU exit, has a message for the country's leaders: The foundations of the political system will explode if Brexit is betrayed. 3) NO-DEAL EXIT - The chaos in London is such that it cannot find a way to approve May's deal or find another divorce deal option and after one or more delays, the EU says it will extend no longer. The United Kingdom then leaves without a deal. The British parliament on Wednesday voted 321 to 278 in favor of a motion that ruled out a potentially disorderly "no-deal" Brexit under any circumstances. While the approved motion has no legal force and ultimately may not prevent a no-deal exit, it carries considerable political force, especially as it passed thanks to a rebellion by members of May's own Conservative Party and her cabinet. Still, as the March 29 exit date is set in law, the default is to leave on that date unless May agrees a delay or parliament changes the law. "By the end of March we have to have an alternative in place, not just a resolution of the House of Commons, a preference, but a solution in place that enables us to have an extension so there isn't crash out on March 29," May's de-facto deputy David Lidington said. While that would avoid a no-deal exit on March 29, the risk would remain a delayed exit date if the British parliament was unable to approve a deal. And the European Union's 27 other members must unanimously approve a delay to Brexit. Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay said Britain should not be afraid of leaving without a deal if it cannot get a divorce deal approved. "If we can get the deal through as I hope we still will, we will now need a short, technical extension, but if not we shouldn't be afraid to leave with no deal," Barclay told the BBC. No-deal means there would be no transition so the exit would be abrupt, the nightmare scenario for international businesses and the dream of hard Brexiteers who want a decisive split. Britain is a member of the World Trade Organization so tariffs and other terms governing its trade with the EU would be set under WTO rules. (Editing by Anna Willard)
The worst ideas in Washington are often bipartisan. Big Tech is about to learn this lesson, if it hasnt already.

Elizabeth Warren is out with a headline-grabbing proposal to break up Big Tech companies, the sort of overly ambitious government plan that once would have engendered knee-jerk Republican opposition. Not anymore. Who says we all cant get along?

When the senator tweeted her (understandable) objection that Facebook had taken down her ads attacking Facebook and other tech companies, Ted Cruz agreed that the companies have too much power.

Tech is caught in a rightleft pincer. Conservatives dont like these companies because they are owned and operated by sanctimonious Silicon Valley liberals subject to the worst sort of groupthink. Progressives dont like them because they are colossal profit-making enterprises.

Thats why there is some chance Washington might get together and, along the lines Warren proposes, effectively outlaw the business models of some of the most successful and iconic American companies.

Warrens idea to cleave off the platforms of the tech companies and have them run as platform utilities separate from the rest of their business is unworkable and is justified by a series of errors and misjudgments.

Its not true, as Warren asserts, that the antitrust suit against Microsoft in the 1990s opened up the space for Google and Facebook to thrive. Microsoft never got the Internet and left the space open for Google and Facebook all by itself, as often happens with a large incumbent wedded to its business model.

She charges that the tech companies use mergers to limit competition and cites Facebooks acquisition of WhatsApp. Its hard to discern the harm here. When the social network bought it, WhatsApp was available for a fee. Now its free, and more people use it than ever. Whats the problem?

She calls out Google for allegedly killing off its competitors by burying them in its searches. Its not obvious that Google actually does this, although its search business inherently involves constantly making choices to try to best serve what people want to see. No government regulator is going to improve Googles searches, or is qualified to even try.

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Warrens proposal is obviously formulated without taking any account of the interests of consumers, who are the ones who made the tech companies so large.

Why does Google provide for free a tool without which its impossible to imagine contemporary life? Because it can monetize it with advertising. Without the advertising, which Warren insists should be a separate business, Google has no incentive to devote engineers to improving its search engine.

By the same token, no one will welcome iPhones that no longer come with or sell Apple apps. And would people really appreciate having to go to two different Amazons, one just a platform, one selling Amazon products?

This is all silly, as are the mergers that Warren pledges to reverse, including Amazons acquisition of Whole Foods. Amazon doesnt have anything close to a monopoly in food retail. Rather than taking over the sector, its spurring investment and innovation. The nations largest supermarket chain, Kroger, was slated to increase its spending on investment 200 percent in 2018.

The tech giants arent stand-pat companies. Amazon alone spent more than $22 billion on investment in 2017. The development of autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition wouldnt be nearly as advanced if it werent for the research of the tech companies. The behemoth of yesteryear, General Electric, isnt making these investments.

None of this is to deny genuine concerns about tech companies. They need rules for content that honor the spirit of the First Amendment, and perhaps there should be tighter regulations around privacy. But any real offenses should be addressed with fixes directed at specific conduct, rather than with a massive politically imposed reorganization.

Thats a very bad idea, and if you had any doubt, watch it get a respectful hearing from both sides in Washington.

 2019 by King Features Syndicate

More from National Review
Correction: Corrects to make clear that Trump tweeted a link to Breitbarts homepage, not the specific story about the interview with him.

WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump sparked controversy in a Breitbart interview during which he touted the toughness of his supporters.

In his chat with the Breitbart News Network, Trump said: "I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump  I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough  until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad."

Trump's critics accused him of fomenting violence. Breitbart said Trump was talking about the "vicious" tactics of "the left."

"So heres the thingits so terrible whats happening, Trump said before discussing his supporters. You know, the left plays a tougher game, its very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they dont play it tougher. Okay?"

Trump on Thursday night tweeted a link to the Breitbart homepage but the tweet had disappeared as of Friday morning. The White House did not comment on Trump's deletion of the tweet.

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Christchurch attacks: Donald Trump, White House condemn New Zealand mosque shootings

Mosque shootings: What we know about New Zealand Christchurch shootings

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, speaking on MSNBC, said Trump's comments to Breitbart sounded "like a threat to me. I think it's appalling."

"I think it sounds very much to me like hes encouraging them to engage in something thats probably illegal such as assaulting people, you know behave in a dangerous way," she said.

Social media users criticized Trump for tweeting the Breitbart homepage as news was breaking about the shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 49 people dead.

On Friday morning, Trump tweeted a condemnation of the the attacks.

"My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured," Trump said. "The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump stirs controversy with Breitbart interview about his 'tough' supporters
WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump and the White House on Friday condemned the terrorist attacks at New Zealand mosques and said the U.S. will extend any support necessary.

"My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured," Trump tweeted. "The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

Trump plans to speak with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern later Friday.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders sent out a separate statement saying "we stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

The shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch left 49 people dead in what Ardern called "one of New Zealand's darkest days."'

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, Ardern said.

Trump extended prayers to New Zealand while under criticism in the United States over an interview in which he spoke about how his supporters could "play tougher" if necessary.

"I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump  I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough  until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad," Trump told the Breitbart News Network website.

Breitbart said Trump was talking about the "vicious" tactics of "the left."

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So heres the thingits so terrible whats happening, Trump said before discussing his supporters. You know, the left plays a tougher game, its very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they dont play it tougher. Okay?"

Trump's critics accused him of fomenting violence by his backers.

"I think it sounds very much to me like hes encouraging them to engage in something thats probably illegal such as assaulting people, you know behave in a dangerous way," said Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, speaking on MSNC. "That sounds like a threat to me. I think its appalling.

Leaders from around the world also expressed their remorse over the shooting.

French President Emmanuel Macron called the shootings heinous crimes" in a tweet.

France stands against all forms of extremism and acts with its partners against terrorism in the world, he said.

Queen Elizabeth II said she was deeply saddened at the appalling attack.

Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives, she said.

Amnesty International Secretary General Kumi Naidoo called on world leaders to fight hate.

This is also a moment of reckoning for leaders across the world who have encouraged or turned a blind eye to the scourge of Islamophobia," Naidoo said. "The politics of demonization has today cost 49 people their lives. Reports that the attackers followed a white supremacist manifesto must galvanize world leaders to start standing against this hate-filled ideology."

Russian President Vladimir Putin's office said he sent a message of condolence to Ardern. Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe published his message to the New Zealand leader, which said "Terrorism cannot be justified for any reason."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., urged people to "be there" for the Muslim community in the wake of the attacks.

"Perhaps extend a kind gesture at your local mosque. There is so much fear and hate," she tweeted. "We must negate it with active, courageous love."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump, White House condemn New Zealand mosque shooting in Christchurch
DEIR AL-ZOR PROVINCE, Syria (Reuters) - The young Syrian man crossing out of Islamic State's last enclave in eastern Syria brought confirmation that the fight was still not over despite days of ferocious bombardment by U.S.-backed forces.

"There are people coming out and others not coming out," said the bearded man wearing a robe and head scarf, one of hundreds of people who left the enclave at Baghouz on Thursday to surrender to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Asked if there were many people still inside, he said "yes" in the footage obtained by Reuters from the Kurdish TV station Ronahi. "I was injured in my back," said the man, originally from the nearby city of Deir al-Zor.

On Friday suicide attackers struck a group of people leaving Baghouz and surrendering, the SDF said, the first such blasts to target any of the thousands of people abandoning the enclave.

It has been five weeks since the SDF declared the start of its attack on the enclave, a group of villages surrounded by farmland where IS fighters and followers retreated as their "caliphate" was driven from once vast territories.

While Islamic State's defeat at Baghouz has appeared a foregone conclusion - U.S. President Donald Trump prematurely declared the group "100 percent" beaten on Feb. 28 - the SDF has yet to deal the final blow.

The campaign has stalled to allow for the evacuation of large numbers of people, many of them wives and children of IS fighters. The SDF has evacuated thousands of people from the enclave, adding to the tens of thousands who have crossed out of the diminishing IS territory in the last few months.

The assault has also been complicated by resistance from hardened jihadists holed up inside seeking a fight to the death.

A big push this week has met with counter attacks involving groups of suicide bombers who had survived intensive artillery bombardments and air strikes by a U.S.-led international coalition.

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GRAPHIC: https://graphics.reuters.com/MIDEAST-CRISIS-ISLAMIC%20STATE/0100913M1H0/index.html

MINES, BOMBS, TUNNELS, SHELTERS

More women and children emerged from the enclave on Thursday along with wounded men, many of them limping, with crutches or propped up by walking sticks as they hobbled along a dirt track out of the remaining IS area.

Some of the women, fully veiled and dressed head-to-toe in black, carried babies wrapped in blankets.

The SDF believes Islamic State has dug extensive tunnels and shelters, tactics it used in places such as Raqqa, its former Syrian headquarters that the SDF captured in 2017.

"The numbers that came out in the last 20 or 25 days were truly a surprise," SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel said.

"The reality we have seen shows the extent of preparations by Daesh for this last battle," he said, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

"You have the mines, the bombs, the tunnels and shelters. We don't see the enemy in front of us."

The SDF has said it is proceeding cautiously in Baghouz to avoid losses and the fighting continued on Friday, with machine-gun battles and shelling.

"The operations will take the time needed to ... completely eliminate Daesh," Gabriel said.

U.S. envoy James Jeffrey said Islamic State was down to its last few hundred fighters and less than a square kilometre of land in the battle, although it may have 15,000-20,000 adherents in Syria and Iraq.

France said on Friday that it had brought back five young children from camps in northern Syria, but repeated its position that adult citizens who had joined Islamic State should stay where they are and face justice.

Western nations have been wrestling with how to handle suspected militants and their families seeking to return from combat zones in Iraq and Syria, as well as those in detention, as more pour out of Baghouz.

(Additional reporting by a Reuters journalist in Deir al-Zor province and Tom Miles in Geneva; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Robin Pomeroy and Raissa Kasolowsky)
German Billionaire Marc

Famed Swiss investor, analyst and, until recently, crypto skeptic Marc Faber, 73, has bought his first bitcoin in another sign the old guard of investments is warming to crypto.

Speaking to German finance website Cash, Faber revealed he recently bought bitcoin for the first time to learn more about cryptocurrencies and following some persistent and high-profile badgering.

Gloom, Boom and Doom

His normally pessimistic market outlook earned him the nickname Dr. Doom. Faber, with a net worth reportedly around $25 billion, famously predicted the crash of 1987. He pens the Gloom, Boom and Doom monthly market report.

March report The Dilemma between the ethical and virtuous versus the pragmatic and opportunistic capitalistic System" published. https://t.co/k29bzcK3DY  Marc Faber (@gloomboomdoom) February 28, 2019

Younger readers of the newsletter, plus a one-hour talk with Wence Casares, CEO of Xapo, convinced Faber to take the plunge and buy bitcoin.

Its a sign younger, clued-up investors who place more trust in crypto than traditional markets, are gradually asserting their influence on the old guard.

But Faber is not the only billionaire investor to be linked to crypto. Warren Buffett, 88, who famously called Bitcoin rat poison squared last year is also warming to blockchain.

Read the full story on CCN.com.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch police arrested two men in Amsterdam for their suspected involvement in the co-ordinated Islamic State attacks on Paris in November 2015 that killed 130 people, prosecutors said on Friday. A 29-year old and a 31-year old man were arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of having helped deliver weapons to the men who carried out the attacks. Several of the attackers might have traveled to the Netherlands in 2015 to collect weapons, the prosecutors said. The 29-year old suspect will be held in restrictive custody for at least two weeks, while the other suspect had to be released for health reasons. (Reporting by Bart Meijer; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
CAIRO (AP)  Egypt's Interior Ministry says security forces have killed seven members of a militant group with suspected links to the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo shootouts.

The ministry says three militants were killed on a highway known as Ring Road in Cairo's district of Giza while the remaining four were killed in a firefight when police raided their hideout in the Egyptian capital's suburb of Sixth of October on Thursday morning.

The ministry says weapons and ammunition were found among the militants' possession. A police officer was wounded.

Egypt, which has been under a state of emergency since April 2017, has been battling Islamic militants for years.

The insurgency gained strength after the 2013 overthrow of elected but divisive Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

Militants mainly target security forces and minority Christians.
HEJERE, Ethiopia (AP) -- In Ethiopia, an ancient land of pilgrimage, people are making a grim, new journey of grief.

One by one, friends and families of the 157 people killed on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 came to the crash site Wednesday with quiet offerings to the dead.

Photographs. Heartfelt notes. Bouquets.

They were placed under a makeshift, bright green floral arch, in striking contrast to the arid land. White roses were plucked from a bucket and placed in a slender frame that wavered in the wind.

Some of the relatives staggered with sorrow.

One man was supported by others as he cried out. They sought footing on the freshly churned and blackened landscape.

Others stood in silence: the security forces in camouflage blue, the searchers in face masks, the diplomats in polished shoes.

"We owe it to the families to understand what happened," said British Ambassador Alastair McPhail, who represented nine of his countrymen among the victims.

The dead came from 35 countries. Around the world, relatives numb with grief began a bewildering journey to the site outside Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa.

Farmers, some with their cattle, witnessed the plane going down. When they hurried to the smoking ground, they found little there .

A pilot, Solomon Gizaw, was among the first to see the crash site from above. He said it appeared as though the plane had slipped right into the earth.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam said the same, noting that the aircraft was "totally sunken under the ground."

Yellow tape rings the scene. Onlookers watch at the edge, while close relatives have the heartbreaking right to go inside. Some carry armfuls of flowers.

"We want to go there often and make offerings," said Dawit Gebremichael, who lost his sister.

A few have visited the site with little fanfare. As the world first learned about the crash on Sunday, Ethiopia's young new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed went to bear witness and grieve.

Ethiopia is lined with footpaths to ancient churches and other places of reflection. Now it is Africa's aviation hub, with jet contrails streaking across the sky.

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The public pilgrimage to the crash site began with Tewolde. He stood alone in the gaping crater, holding a piece of wreckage, in an image that swiftly made its way around the world.

Investigators have now arrived in a multinational inquiry into the crash.

New arrivals Wednesday included Indonesia's recently appointed ambassador, who told reporters he had arrived in the country only a day earlier. He mourned one of his countrymen.

Chinese aviation experts at the site paused and made a modest offering to the victims: incense, fruit and pieces of Ethiopian bread known as injera.

They bowed in unison and resumed their work.

___

Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa
Spain reported a 75% drop in interceptions of illegal migrants arrivals compared to a month earlier period, the interior ministry said.

Only 936 migrants were intercepted last month compared to 4104 people in January, official figures showed.

However, the number of people who made it to Spain was higher in the first two months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018.

The ministry attributed the drop in interceptions to bad weather conditions and the good coordination with transit and origin countries.

But, it is too early to say that there is a drop of migrant arrivals. A Spanish official told EFE it is too early to announce a general drop in arrivals.

Meanwhile, Oussama El Baroufi of the International Organization for Migration told EFE that Morocco and Spain might have signed a deal to return migrants at sea to the north African Kingdom.

Morocco prevented some 88,000 people from illegally crossing to Spain last year, 37% up from the previous year.
BERLIN (Reuters) - The European Union's competition watchdog is considering opening a probe of Apple over allegations that it uses its app store to gain an advantage on its own services over rivals', the authority's chief said on Thursday. Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, told German newspaper Tagesspiegel her watchdog would examine if there were parallels with Google, which in 2017 was fined over 2 billion euros for unfairly disadvantaging rivals on its platform. "We have to examine the role of Apple and Apple's app store," she was quoted as saying. "If we conclude that they have a market-dominating position, then the case would be comparable to our proceedings against Google." The EU's consideration of a possible probe of Apple comes after music streaming service Spotify filed a complaint against the iPhone maker, saying it was unfairly limiting rivals to its own Apple Music streaming service. (Reporting by Tassilo Hummel, writing by Thomas Escritt, editing by Joseph Nasr)
By Aditya Kalra NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's health ministry has called for Juul Labs Inc's electronic cigarettes to be blocked from entering the country, a letter seen by Reuters showed, potentially dealing a blow to the U.S. company's plans to tap the South Asian market. Juul has plans to launch its products in India by late 2019 as it looks to expand away from its home turf. The company has hired new executives and plans to open an India subsidiary, Reuters reported in January. Citing the Reuters article, India's top health official wrote a letter to the federal commerce secretary in February, saying necessary measures should be taken to "prevent entry of such products in our markets". "Novel products such as 'JUUL' are harmful and addictive and could potentially undermine our tobacco control efforts," Health Secretary Preeti Sudan wrote in her letter dated Feb. 18. "It is felt that the young generation would be particularly vulnerable to such products and gimmicks." Asked for a comment on the letter, Juul spokeswoman Victoria Davis said the company was "open to dialogue with lawmakers and regulators in order to help switch" adult smokers in India to a viable alternative to combustible cigarettes. Juul has previously said India was among the Asian markets under evaluation, but there were no "definitive plans". The details of Sudan's letter have not previously been reported. She also sent a copy to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's office. The commerce ministry, which is likely to be involved in discussions if Juul was to receive an India approval, did not respond to Reuters queries. Modi's office also did not respond. Juul's sleek vaping devices, which resemble a USB flash drive and offer flavors such as mango and creme, are a sensation in the United States, but have drawn tighter regulatory scrutiny due to surging use among teenagers. India has 106 million adult smokers, second only to China in the world, making it a lucrative market for firms such as Juul and Philip Morris International Inc. However, India's regulatory environment for tobacco and electronic cigarettes is highly restrictive. The health ministry last year advised states to stop the sale or import of e-cigarettes, saying they pose a "great health risk". About a third of India's 29 states currently ban e-cigarettes. In February, India's federal drugs regulator told all states to ensure that e-cigarettes were not sold or manufactured in their regions, according to a circular seen by Reuters. Advocates for the devices say e-cigarettes are far less harmful, because users do not inhale the dangerous matter taken into the lungs through cigarette smoking. But many tobacco-control activists are opposed to e-cigarettes, saying they could lead to nicotine addiction and push people to consume tobacco. Juul has said its mission was to "improve the lives of the world's one billion smokers by offering a satisfying alternative to combustible cigarettes". Indian health secretary Sudan, however, said in her letter that products such as Juul would hurt India's anti-tobacco efforts through their "easy availability, disguised appearance and the false notion of being safe". More than 900,000 people die each year in India due to tobacco-related illnesses. (Reporting by Aditya Kalra; Additional reporting by Chris Kirkhman in Los Angeles and Aftab Ahmad in New Delhi; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Fawzia Koofi was hesitant to face the Taliban militants who jailed her husband, threatened to stone her for wearing nail polish, and -- when she became a high-profile MP and women's rights champion -- tried to assassinate her.

But the trailblazing politician and mother of two daughters could not refuse a rare invitation this month to stand before her oppressors and declare unequivocally that their brand of misogyny and prejudice would never again take root in Afghanistan.

"It was not that I wanted to do it, but I was doing it for the women of Afghanistan," she told AFP in an interview at her Kabul home.

"I felt powerful. It was a room full of people, all male... For me, it was important that I make myself visible and my message clear to them."

Koofi was one of just two Afghan women invited to a grand hotel in Moscow earlier this month for informal meetings with the Taliban.

The talks came days after other, separate negotiations between the militants and the US in Qatar raised expectations of a breakthrough in the 17-year conflict.

Washington, which resumed talks with the Taliban in Doha on Monday, is seeking a way out of its longest war -- but Afghans and many observers fear a hasty departure could see the Taliban return to power, or the country fracture into civil war.

Many women, in particular, are afraid of being forced back under Taliban rule, beneath burqas and behind walls, without access to education or jobs.

In Moscow, in scenes unthinkable under the Taliban regime, the mullahs sat in silence as Koofi defended her daughters' rights to thrive in a modern Afghanistan, free from harsh limitations.

The other 48 delegates at the unprecedented conference in the Russian capital were all men, Afghan political heavyweights and bearded Taliban officials, none used to being addressed so assertively by a woman.

"You cannot just put her in her house and deprive her, like you did me, seeing the world through the small window of their burqas," Koofi said, recalling her defiant speech before the delegation.

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"She has now much more connectivity. She will not go back to your time."

- Life of defiance -

One of Koofi's fellow passengers on the flight to Moscow was the Taliban's head of vice and virtue -- the dreaded moral police who cruised the streets in white pickup trucks flogging women accused of indecency.

"I remember how dangerous... the Hilux pickup car sound was to every woman when we heard it. That sound is still in my ears," said the 44-year-old widow.

"I tried to be friendly with him, and I tried to be open and cool. I didn't try to hide my hair, or whatever... I was just making fun, trying to tell them 'you might not be happy the way I am, but I am the way I am'."

Not everyone was pleased Koofi was given a seat at the table in Moscow.

Squarely in the minority, she had to lobby to get into smaller discussion circles. At the official press conference, she was stuck at the back, given no chance to speak while the men addressed foreign media at the front.

But that was nothing new for the female lawmaker, who has developed a thick skin in a country often described as the most dangerous on earth to be a woman or a politician -- let alone both.

- 'Why should I beg?' -

As an unwanted newborn girl, Koofi was left to die in the sun by her exhausted mother, one of seven wives in a family of 23 children.

She lay screaming and sunburned for almost a day until her mother relented and took her back in.

From that moment on she thrived under her mother's love and support, becoming the first girl in her family to attend school -- though her education was interrupted when she was forced out of medical college in 1996 as the Taliban stormed to power.

But after the US invasion she rose in a new Afghanistan to work for UNICEF, before entering politics in 2005 and becoming the country's first female deputy speaker of parliament.

She has spent her political life tussling with male parliamentarians trying to water down women's rights, and is used to not being popular.

"My fight is not a very pleasant fight... It's not something that people like, especially politicians in Afghanistan. I see that as a positive sign," said Koofi.

"I am perhaps most hated because I make many people unhappy. Which is OK, you cannot make everybody happy."

One fight she did not take up in Moscow -- the Taliban's outright refusal to consider a female president for Afghanistan.

"Why should I beg them to get what I deserve? It is a right that is guaranteed in our constitution," she said.

"I see myself eligible for any position, regardless of my gender."
IndusInd Bank Limited (NSE:INDUSINDBK) is a large-cap stock operating in the financial services sector with a market cap of 986b. As major financial institutions return to health after the Global Financial Crisis, we are seeing an increase in market confidence, and understanding of, these too-big-to-fail banking stocks. A set of reforms called Basel III was imposed in order to strengthen regulation, supervision and risk management in the banking sector. These reforms target bank level regulation and aims to improve the banking sectors ability to absorb shocks arising from economic stress which could expose financial institutions to vulnerabilities. Operating in INR, INDUSINDBK is held to strict regulation which focus investor attention to the type and level of risk it takes on. Investors should be more cautious when it comes to financial stocks given the different type of risk to which they are exposed. Today we will analyse some bank-specific metrics and take a closer look at leverage and liquidity.

Check out our latest analysis for IndusInd Bank

NSEI:INDUSINDBK Historical Debt, March 15th 2019

Why Does INDUSINDBKs Leverage Matter?

Banks with low leverage are better positioned to weather adverse headwinds as they have less debt to pay off. A banks leverage may be thought of as the level of assets it owns compared to its own shareholders equity. Though banks are required to have a certain level of buffer to meet its capital requirements, IndusInd Banks leverage level of less than the suitable maximum level of 20x, at 9.3x, is considered to be very cautious and prudent. With assets 9.3 times equity, the banks has maintained a prudent level of its own fund relative to borrowed fund which places it in a strong position to pay back its debt in times of adverse events. Should the bank need to increase its debt levels to meet capital requirements, it will have abundant headroom to do so.

How Should We Measure INDUSINDBKs Liquidity?

Handing Money Transparent

Since loans are relatively illiquid, we should know how much of the banks total assets are comprised of these loans. Usually, they should not be higher than 70% of total assets, which is the case for IndusInd Banks ratio at 65%. This means slightly over half of the banks total assets are tied up in the form of illiquid loans, leading to a sensible balance between interest income and liquidity.

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What is INDUSINDBKs Liquidity Discrepancy?

Banks profit by lending out its customers deposits as loans and charge an interest on the principle. These loans tend to be fixed term which means they cannot be readily realized, yet customer deposits on the liability side must be paid on-demand and in short notice. This mismatch between illiquid loans and liquid deposits poses a risk for the bank if unusual events occur and requires it to immediately repay its depositors. Relative to the prudent industry loan to deposit level of 90%, IndusInd Banks ratio of over 96% is higher, which places the bank in a relatively dangerous territory to go into negative discrepancy in liquidity. Essentially, for 1 of deposits with the bank, it lends out more than 0.9 which is risky.

Next Steps:

The banks prudent management of its risk levels is reflected in its sensible leverage and liquidity ratios. This means it is well-placed to meet its financial obligations in the case of any adverse and unpredictable macro events. Today, weve only explored one aspect of IndusInd Bank. However, as a potential stock investment, there are many more fundamentals you need to consider. Ive put together three important factors you should further examine:

Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for INDUSINDBKs future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for INDUSINDBKs outlook. Valuation: What is INDUSINDBK worth today? Has the future growth potential already been factored into the price? The intrinsic value infographic in our free research report helps visualize whether INDUSINDBK is currently mispriced by the market. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material.



If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading.
Paris (AFP) - The French government said Friday it had repatriated five orphaned children of French jihadists' from camps in northeast Syria, where a five-year offensive against the Islamic State (IS) group is drawing to a bloody close.

The children, aged five or under, were flown home in a military aircraft and placed under medical supervision, the foreign ministry said.

"The decision was taken in view of the situation of these very young children, who are particularly vulnerable," the foreign ministry said, adding that the government was in touch with their French relatives.

The government thanked the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led outfit which has spearheaded the fight against IS, with backing from a US-led coalition, "for their cooperation, which made this outcome possible".

The mothers of all five children are dead and their fathers are either dead or missing, a diplomatic source said, adding that more children could follow but that no mothers would be allowed return.

France has been adamant that citizens who fought alongside IS in Syria or Iraq must face local justice.

Like many other European countries however it had faced a quandary over what to do with the widows and children of jihadists who died in Syria or been taken prisoner there.

The situation gained urgency as the battle against IS enters its final days, with the Syrian Kurdish forces in charge of the camps where the women and children urging the jihadists' home countries to take their families back.

While expressing compassion for the children France has been reluctant to be seen helping French women who travelled to Syria to join IS and sometimes acted as cheerleaders for the group's atrocities.

On Wednesday President Emmanuel Macron said the government was taking a "humanitarian" case-by-case approach to the children but that the government's position on "adult fighters and jihadists who followed IS to the Middle East had not changed."

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"They must be tried in the place they committed their crimes."

Britain too has taken an uncompromising stance with female jihadists.

It refused to take back a pregnant British teen, Shamima Begum, who begged to return home, stripping her of her citizenship after interviews in which she appeared to show little remorse for being an IS propagandist.

Her newborn baby later died, triggering widespread criticism of the British government's decision.
By Nick Carey

DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett earned salary, bonus and stock awards of $17.1 million in 2018, up from $16.3 million the previous year, while adjusted pretax profit for the automaker dropped $2.6 billion from 2017, the company said on Friday.

Including pensions and perks, Hackett made $17.7 million. The company said Hackett, who took the helm of the No. 2 U.S. automaker in May 2017, made 276 times the median total compensation of all Ford employees of $64,316.

Ford Chairman Bill Ford earned salary, bonus and stock awards for the year of $12.5 million. Including pensions and perks, he earned $13.8 million.

The company reported 2018 adjusted pre-tax income of $7 billion, down from $9.6 billion in 2017.

Ford is restructuring its global operations, including recent plans to make cuts in Europe. It also has announced an alliance in commercial vehicles with Germanys Volkswagen AG, with plans to jointly develop electric and self-driving vehicles, in moves meant to save billions of dollars.

In January Ford, the No. 2 U.S. automaker, posted a lower operating fourth-quarter profit as losses in every global region except North America weighed on results.

In a Jan. 24 email to employees after posting those results, Hackett told employees the company would not accept last years "mediocre" results and said Ford was aiming to nearly double its annual operating profit. He provided no time frame for hitting that target.

Hackett, told employees in that email "time to bury (2018) ... in a deep grave."

(Reporting By Nick Carey; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Trott)
Ford(F) is cutting 5,000 jobs in Germany and more in the U.K. as part of an effort to reduce costs in Europe, the company said Friday.

The automaker offered voluntary separation packages for employees in Germany and the U.K. to help accelerate its plan to improve performance in the region, where Ford has struggled. The total number of jobs affected in the U.K. have yet to be determined.

The automaker is undergoing a larger plan to restructure its operations worldwide, which it's said will cost $11 billion. Ford is reshaping its European business into three different business groups that focus on commercial vehicles, passenger vehicles, and imports. The carmaker plans to simplify its product lines and focus on the most profitable vehicles.

Ford said in January it plans to partner with German carmaker Volkswagen on a number of initiatives, including trucks and commercial vans for markets around the world.

Europe has also been difficult for Ford's Detroit rival General Motors(GM) sold off its European business entirely in 2017, to French automaker Groupe PSA and French banking groun BNP Paribas.
Austin (AFP) - We've all dreamed while stuck in traffic jams of being able to just lift off and fly over the gridlock.

According to experts gathered this week at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that is likely to happen sooner than later, with flying taxis expected to take to the skies by 2025.

"People have been dreaming about it for decades on paper, and now the technology is here," said Michael Thacker, executive vice-president for technology and innovation at Bell. "The only question is, what are we going to do with it?"

Thacker said his company has joined with ride-hailing app Uber and several aeronautics firms, including France's Safran, to create a fleet of flying taxis that are called vertical take-off and landing vehicles (VTOL).

The Nexus, as this hybrid electric propulsion aircraft is named, was first unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Between 20 and 30 other firms are working on similar concepts, among them start-ups or major companies such as Airbus, which recently presented its electric aircraft CityAirbus.

Uber plans to launch its air taxis first in Los Angeles and Dallas, two major traffic-congested American cities.

Asked about using helicopters as an alternative, Thacker said the taxis are financially sounder and quieter.

"The noise has to blend in with the background noise of the city," he said.

He predicted the vehicles could start to be commercially used around 2025.

"It's not going to replace ground transport, it will augment it in another dimension," he said. "And it's not going to jump overnight with thousands of aircraft.

"There will rather be a few dozens of them in a few cities... at first using helipads and helicopter routes."

Bell executives said drones transporting goods, such as emergency medical products, should take to the skies well before taxis given lesser restrictions imposed on such aircraft.

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"Transport of goods don't have so many requirements in terms of safety and acceptability by people," he said.

Jaiwon Shin, associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA, said although 2025 appears like a reasonable date for a limited launch of flying vehicles, it will take longer for the market to fully expand.

"For this market to really flourish... I think we really need to mature the market at scale and that may take a decade," he said.

Also, experts say, several barriers still need to be overcome before flying vehicles get the green light.

- A third dimension -

You have to see "if you can actually test the vehicle in an urban space without having visual line of sight over people with buildings," said Shivika Sahdev, with the consulting firm McKinsey.

One of the biggest technological hurdles to overcome is the battery. Most of the prototypes designed use electric propulsion and batteries currently don't have enough power to fly a car for a long distance.

Still, industry experts are optimistic about the new technology.

In a report entitled "Vision 2050" presented at SXSW, the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) predicts that by 2050, the use of flying taxis and other autonomous drones will be widespread, mainly thanks to artificial intelligence.

"For me, artificial intelligence is easier in the air," said Scott Drennan, director of innovation at Bell. "There's a lot of space up there and so we have a lot of room, we have a third dimension to maneuver in.

"It's not the Wild Wild West up there," he added. "I think the rules of the sky are more defined than the rules of the road."

Another advantage to flying cars is their GPS, said Anil Nanduri, vice president of Drone Group at Intel.

"GPS precision today is a couple of meters plus minus," he said. "For ground-based vehicles... it's not accurate enough to have the precision you need. But once you go up to third dimension, it's enough."

For those still skeptical about driving in the skies, tech reporter Aarti Shahani has only this to say: "If you had told me 10 years ago that I would open something called an app to order a car driven by a stranger for my mom who lived 3,000 miles away, I'd tell you you were crazy.

"And actually, that's what I do now all the time for her."
Former OpenTable Executive Joins Papa Johns Board

Papa Johns is getting more help in the midst of its turnaround in the form of two digitally savvy board members.

The pizza chain announced on Thursday that two new members will be joining the companys board: Jocelyn Mangan, a former executive at OpenTable and Snagajob and founder and CEO of Him For Her, as well as Michael Dubin, founder and CEO of Dollar Shave Club.

Mangan brings a deep-seated knowledge of restaurant technology innovation to the company. She previously spent over a decade in various product management roles at OpenTable, and also sits on the board at online food ordering platform ChowNow. Dublin is expected to lend operational and marketing expertise to the beleaguered chain.

We expect their skills and insights to contribute to the positive actions we have underway to capitalize on Papa Johns BETTER INGREDIENTS. BETTER PIZZA market position, Jeff Smith, chairman of Papa Johns board of directors, said in a statement.

Papa Johns reported a dismal state of affairs at its last quarterly earnings report. Comparable store sales dropped 7 percent, while overall revenue plummeted by 12 percent in 2018. The chain also paid out millions of dollars to struggling franchisees who were affected by the negative media attention surrounding the antics of Papa Johns former CEO, John Schnatter.

The North American results are disappointing to all of us, and continue to reflect the consumers sentiment challenges our brand has experienced in the U.S., Steve Ritchie, Papa Johns CEO, said on the companys fourth-quarter earnings call with analysts.

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President of Sierra Leone Julius Maada Bio has commended the sound commitment and the sustained efforts made by King Mohammed VI for the development of the African continent.

Addressing the opening session of the 6th International Africa Development Forum (FIAD), Thursday in Casablanca, President Maada Bio said Morocco is a success story in Africa, noting that the Kingdom shares its experience with African countries in various vital sectors to speed up their socioeconomic development.

Morocco must be proud of its long history, centuries-old tradition and take pride in its real commitment that inspires hope as well as its development agenda for the continent, which deserves to be followed, said President Maada Bio, whose country is the guest of honor of the business and development event.

The African continent, which has enormous potential with a population of about one billion people and diverse natural resources, offers investors huge business opportunities in infrastructures, agriculture, renewable energies, tourism, he added.

FIAD 2019 aims to promote African trade, investment and south-south cooperation. It seeks to bring together and connect economic operators from African countries to explore partnership projects underpinning Africas economic potential.

The International Africa Development Forum has become a flagship platform on the continent for political and economic debates for Africas development.

The sixth FIAD is held under the theme when East meets West. Organized by the Moroccan pan-African investment fund Al Mada, of Attijariwafa bank Group, the two-day meeting is a platform for dialogue, investment promotion and intra-African trade development. It is gathering dozens of African countries as well as thousands of business people from the continent and from around the world.

The 5th edition saw the participation of 7,500 business people from 36 countries.
By Richard Lough and Aaron Maasho PARIS/ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - The grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX jets after the crash in Ethiopia has had no immediate financial impact on airlines using the planes, but it will get painful for the industry the longer they do not fly, companies and analysts said on Friday. Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed soon after take-off from Addis Ababa last weekend, killing 157 people, the second such calamity involving Boeing's flagship new model after a jet came down off Indonesia in October with 189 people on board. Investigators in France on Friday examined the black boxes of the jet that crashed in Ethiopia as the global airline industry waited to see if the cause was similar to a disaster in Indonesia months before. Regulators have grounded the 737 MAX around the world, and the U.S. planemaker has halted deliveries of the several thousand planes on order for a model intended to be the future industry workhorse. Air Canada and United Airlines on Friday became the first major carriers in North America to warn of negative financial implications to business as a consequence of the grounding of the Boeing planes. Canada's biggest carrier Air Canada suspended its 2019 financial forecasts, while United Airlines, the No. 3 U.S. carrier, said it would see an adverse effect on its operations if the jets remained grounded heading into the peak summer travel season. U.S. bank Citi said it expected the grounding to eat into the profits of Southwest Airlines, which operates the world's biggest 737 MAX fleet, leaving the carrier facing a plane shortage and likely passenger compensation costs. For airlines that over-ordered the 737 MAX, the grounding could provide an excuse to delay or cancel purchases, analysts said, though others are scrambling to adjust business plans that bet heavily on the fuel-efficient, longer-range jets. In the two crashes, pilots asked to return minutes into flight. "It looks like the Lion Air, because the flight only lasted for six minutes," Ethiopian Airlines Chief Executive Tewolde Gebremariam told state Chinese state news agency Xinhua on Friday. "There is clear similarity between our crash and the Lion Air crash." Reuters was not able to reach Gebremariam for comment. A link between the two accidents makes blame more likely to lie with Boeing and less likely with the airline. Parallels between the twin disasters have frightened travelers worldwide and wiped billions of dollars off Boeing stock. U.S. authorities say information from the wreckage in Ethiopia and data on its flight path show some similarities. Two sources said investigators retrieved a piece of a stabilizer, which moves the nose up and down, set in an unusual position - similar to that of the Lion Air plane that crashed in Indonesia. Pilots were waiting anxiously for results of the investigation. "Looking at the crash site photos, the aircraft appears to have nose-dived," Paul Gichinga, former head of the Kenya Airline Pilots Association, told Reuters. "The pilot must have gotten some sort of indication that maybe the airspeed was unreliable or something and decided, instead of climbing and going to sort out the problem up there, the best thing was to return to have it sorted." U.S. President Donald Trump spoke by telephone on Friday with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed about the crash, according to the White House. "The president reiterated his sorrow over the loss of life and underscored America's commitment to work with the government of Ethiopia  a longstanding partner and friend of the United States  and international civil aviation authorities to determine the cause of the crash," the White House said in a statement. BOEING PLANS NEW SOFTWARE Boeing, the world's biggest planemaker, has said the 737 MAX is safe, though it plans to roll out a software upgrade in coming weeks. Despite pausing shipments, it continued to produce at full speed at its factory near Seattle. French authorities have the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, though Ethiopia is formally leading the investigation and U.S. experts are in Paris and Addis Ababa too. First conclusions could take several days. The New York Times said the captain, Yared Getachew, initially reported a "flight control" problem in a calm voice before asking to return in panicked tones three minutes into the flight. "Break break, request back to home," he told controllers, the newspaper reported. The jet initially flew below the minimum safe height for its climb, then once at higher altitude was oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet, all at abnormally fast speed, the Times said. It then disappeared from radar over a military zone and lost contact with controllers five minutes after take-off. In Ethiopia, relatives have been visiting the charred and debris-strewn field to pay last respects. The victims came from 35 nations. Diplomats fear trucks and excavators at the site could be destroying vital evidence, while some policemen have been taking selfies inside the security cordon. FAMILIES 'STUCK AND EMOTIONAL' Israeli Ilan Matsliah came quickly to Ethiopia thinking it would be quick to find the remains of his brother for burial in accordance with Jewish tradition. "More than 24 hours is a problem for us. But I have been here for more than 96 hours," the 46-year-old told Reuters. "We are now stuck in the same place, the same as Monday. We are very emotional." With heightened global scrutiny, the head of Indonesia's transport safety committee said a report into the Lion Air crash would be speeded up for release in July or August. A preliminary report focused on maintenance, training and an anti-stall system. Elsewhere, a potential new Chinese order for more than 100 jets worth well over $10 billion was put in doubt. Legal experts said even non-U.S. families of the Ethiopia victims may be able to sue Chicago-based Boeing in the United States - where payouts are larger - as eight of the dead were American and plaintiffs may argue liability hinges on system design and safety decisions made by executives. (Reporting by Richard Lough, Tim Hepher in Paris; Duncan Miriri and Aaron Masho in Addis Ababa; Omar Mohammed, Katharine Houreld and Maggie Fick in Nairobi; David Shephardson and Jeff Mason in Washington; Tracy Rucinski in Chicago; Eric M. Johnson in Seattle, Rishika Chatterjee, Rachit Vats, Savio D'Souza and Debroop Roy in Bengaluru; Jamie Freed in Singapore; Josephine Mason in London; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and Ben Klayman;Editing by Angus MacSwan, Nick Zieminski and Tom Brown)
100 Bishopsgate



Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is preparing for next year's move to its new Bishopsgate headquarters by creating replica offices designed to resemble the new premises and be used as a test bed for staff to adjust before the formal move in August 2020.



The imitation offices will be identical to those almost completed at 100 Bishopsgate near London's Liverpool Street Station.





An example layout design for office space at 100 Bishopsgate conceived by owners Brookfield



The set up - which the firm has yet to finalise - is expected to replicate desk space, digital systems and interiors of the new Bishopsgate office, enabling lawyers and other staff to immerse themselves in their new environment ahead of the actual physical move, and provide feedback to the London leadership.



Following a trial, the firm expects to roll out the new office design, systems and equipment across its current offices in Fleet Street, which have been its home for 30 years.



The idea, as well as the move at large, is being spearheaded by the firms London management group, which is chaired by new City managing partner Claire Wills, alongside London disputes head Sarah Parkes, tax head Helen Lethaby, employment partner Kathleen Healy, competition partner Simon Priddis and transactional practice head Julian Pritchard.



The move to Bishopsgate will mean a 20 percent reduction in floor space to 255,000 square feet and is intended to coincide with a sizeable reduction in the use of paper across the firm, with lawyers transitioning en masse to new digital storage systems and more advanced management tech.



Freshfields signed a pre-let agreement with 100 Bishopsgate owner and firm client Brookfield Properties in 2017, to occupy floors 20-34 of the 37-storey tower. The magic circle firm has signed a 20-year tenancy and will share the tower with U.S. firm Paul Hastings, investment house Jefferies and the Royal Bank of Canada. Several floors are still on offer.
By Charlotte Greenfield and Praveen Menon CHRISTCHURCH/WELLINGTON, New Zealand (Reuters) - New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Saturday promised to reform the country's gun laws, a day after at least one gunman attacked worshippers in two mosques, killing 49 and wounding 42 others. The attack, labeled terrorism by the prime minister, was the worst ever peacetime mass killing in New Zealand and the country raised its security threat level to the highest. Armed police were deployed at several locations in all cities, unusual in a country where levels of gun violence are low. The gunman broadcast footage of the attack on one of the mosques in the city of Christchurch on social media. A "manifesto" was also posted online, denouncing immigrants as "invaders". The video footage, posted live online as the attack unfolded, showed a man driving to the mosque, entering it and shooting randomly at people inside. Worshippers, possibly dead or wounded, lay on the floor, the video showed. Reuters was unable to confirm the authenticity of the footage. Police said three people were in custody including one man in his late 20s who had been charged with murder. He will appear in court on Saturday. Police have not identified the suspects. "Our investigations are in their early stages and we will be looking closely to build a picture of any of the individuals involved and all of their activities prior to this horrific event," Police Commissioner Mike Bush said. Ardern said the main perpetrator used five weapons during his rampage, including two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns, which he was legally licensed to own. "I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change," Ardern told reporters. The man facing murder charges was an Australian citizen who had spent a lot of time traveling overseas and spent time only sporadically in New Zealand, Ardern said. None of those arrested had a criminal history or was on any watchlist in New Zealand or Australia. Among the wounded, two were in a critical condition, including a four-year-old child, he said. There was a heavy police presence at the hospital where families of the wounded had gathered. Funerals were planned on Saturday for some of the victims, several of whom were born overseas. Dozens of people laid flowers at cordons near both mosques in the South Island city, which is still rebuilding after a devastating earthquake in 2011 that killed almost 200 people. GRAPHIC: New Zealand shootings - https://tmsnrt.rs/2O3v80l SORROW, SYMPATHY Leaders around the world expressed sorrow and disgust at the attacks, with some deploring the demonization of Muslims. U.S. President Donald Trump, who condemned the attack as a "horrible massacre", was praised by the accused gunman in a manifesto posted online as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose". Asked by a reporter in Washington if he thought white nationalism is a rising threat around the world, Trump said: "I dont really. I think its a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand perhaps thats a case, I dont know enough about it yet." Ardern, who was flying to Christchurch on Saturday, said she had spoken to Trump, who had asked how he could help. "My message was sympathy and love for all Muslim communities," she said. Political and Islamic leaders across Asia and the Middle East voiced concern over the targeting of Muslims. "I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11," Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan posted on social media. "1.3 billion Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror." 'SHOOTING EVERYONE IN THE MOSQUE' One man who said he was at the Al Noor mosque told media the gunman burst into the mosque as worshippers were kneeling for prayers. "He had a big gun...He came and started shooting everyone in the mosque, everywhere," said the man, Ahmad Al-Mahmoud. He said he and others escaped by breaking through a glass door. Facebook said it had deleted the gunman's accounts "shortly after the livestream commenced" after being alerted by police. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all said they had taken steps to remove copies of the videos. Ardern said she had asked authorities to look into whether there was any activity on social media or elsewhere ahead of the attack that should have triggered a response. Forty-one people were killed at the Al Noor mosque, seven at a mosque in the Linwood neighborhood and one died in hospital, police said. The visiting Bangladesh cricket team was arriving for prayers at one of the mosques when the shooting started but all members were safe, a team coach told Reuters. Muslims account for just over 1 percent of New Zealand's population, a 2013 census showed, most of whom were born overseas. Social media was flooded with messages of shock, sympathy and solidarity. One image shared widely was of a cartoon kiwi, the country's national bird, weeping. Another showed a pair of figures, one in a headscarf, embracing. "This is your home and you should have been safe here" the caption read. (Additional reporting by Tom Westbrook, John Mair and Swati Pandey in Sydney; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Sonya Hepinstall)
Gavin Newsom, the newly inaugurated governor of California, would very much like to be president of the United States someday. It is fitting, then, that Newsom has begun his audition for the role by engaging in the sort of brazen executive overreach that we have become accustomed to seeing from White Houses.

On Tuesday, Newsom confirmed that no executions will be performed in California while he is governor. This change, he explained, will be made unilaterally, without reference to either the legislature or the judiciary, by applying his gubernatorial reprieve power on a wholesale basis. There are 737 people on death row in California. Should their execution dates coincide with his tenure, Newsom will automatically grant a commutation. I cannot, Newsom insisted, sign off on executing hundreds and hundreds of human beings.

If that is the case, then Newsom should not have run for governor of California, and nor should he have sworn an oath to see that the law is faithfully executed.

The reprieve power that Newsom wields is intended to be applied on a case-by-case basis, as a final check against judicial error or egregious injustice. It is not intended to be invoked indiscriminately as a means by which to nullify or thwart well-established laws that the executive happens not to like. During his press conference, Newsom repeatedly used the word moratorium. Perhaps this was an attempt to cast minds back to that brief period in the 1970s during which the death penalty was ruled nationally unconstitutional. But, in truth, Newsoms recalcitrance has little in common with that moment. There exists no pending litigation or constitutional challenge to Californias arrangement, and there exists no confusion as to the integrity or meaning of the underlying statute. Newsom just dislikes the status quo and so has resolved to change it by force.

The arrogance of his position is remarkable. Californians were asked as recently as 2016 whether they wanted to abolish capital punishment in the state and not only answered No by a margin of six points but voted to speed up the appeals process in concert with that refusal. It is entirely reasonable for Newsom to have been disappointed by that result; in California, as everywhere else, the death penalty is a topic of considerable debate. It is not reasonable, however, for Newsom to seek to undermine that result in its entirety. What, Californians might well ask, is the purpose of having a system of legally binding propositions if the executive branch can reverse them on a whim? What, by the same token, is the California legislature for? And why convene juries  and guide them in painstaking detail through complex and difficult questions  if their judgment is to be summarily replaced by a single officer in Sacramento?

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During the debate over the merits of the federal Constitution, many prominent anti-Federalists worried that to give the president the power to pardon was, in effect, to make him a king. For most of American history, this fear proved unfounded. In recent years, however, the ghost of Patrick Henry has begun to rattle his chains, as a growing number of executives have begun to transmute their pardon power into a general veto. This is what Barack Obama did in pursuit of DACA; it is what Governor Terry McAuliffe did, against the will of the Virginia legislature, in order to re-enfranchise felons who he believed had paid their debts to society; and  perhaps this is where Newsom got the idea?  it is what former Illinois governor George Ryan did back in 1999 when he responded to the failure of a death-penalty moratorium in the legislature by issuing his own. When Gavin Newsom announced his run for governor, he suggested that California has a responsibility and opportunity to show the country and the world what inclusive, progressive government can achieve. If this is what he meant, the country should say, No, thank you.

More from National Review
George Clooney has explained why he defended Meghan Markle.

The Oceans Eleven actor, 57, addressed the press attention the Duchess of Sussex has received since she became a royal last May.

Well I think its a little unfair at times Ive seen it first hand when the press turns on you for sort of ridiculous reasons and almost nothing, he said, during a pre-recorded interview with Good Morning Britain today.

It seemed to be a little unjust as she hadnt done anything except live her life.

He added: [Meghans] a kind and smart and intelligent young woman and theyre a really wonderful and loving couple.

George Clooney has spoken out in defence of Meghan again [Photos: Getty]

His comments come after he said the pregnant duchess has been pursued and vilified, and compared the treatment of Meghan to Princess Diana, during a press junket in Australia in February.

George and his wife Amal Clooney attended Meghan and Harrys wedding in May last year and are said to be very close to the couple.

READ MORE: What you need to know about Meghan and Harrys new royal household

He and Amal also attended a dinner at Buckingham Palace, hosted by Prince Charles, to celebrate the Princes Trust earlier this week.

According to Mail Online, human rights lawyer Amal, 41, has joined the charity as a figurehead for the first global youth campaign.
By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Alphabet unit Google is likely to be hit with a third EU antitrust fine next week related to its AdSense advertising service, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, with the sanction expected to be much smaller than previous fines.

The European Commission in 2016 opened a third case against the world's most popular internet search engine by accusing Google of preventing third parties using its AdSense product from displaying search advertisements from Google's competitors.

It said that Google, which at that time had held 80 percent of the European market for search advertising intermediation over the previous ten years, had kept its anti-competitive practices for a decade.

In response, Google changed the conditions in its AdSense contracts with large third parties, giving them more leeway to display competing search ads.

European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager earlier this month told reporters that she was finalizing the case.

The Commission on Friday declined to comment on the timing of the AdSense decision. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Financial Times earlier reported on next week's European Union antitrust fine.

Last year, Vestager slapped a record 4.34 billion euro ($4.91 billion) fine on Google for using its popular Android mobile operating system to block rivals.

That following a 2.4 billion euro fine imposed on the company in 2017 for blocking rivals of shopping comparison websites.

The AdSense case may not be end of Google's EU antitrust woes.

EU antitrust enforcers have asked Google's rivals if it unfairly demotes local search competitors, according to a questionnaire seen by Reuters, a move which could lead to a fourth case.

Online mapping services and others could also soon be in the spotlight.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; Editing by Jan Harvey)
UK finance minister Philip Hammond. Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/PA Images

The government unveiled ambitious plans this week to boost investment in research and development across the UK.

Chancellor Philip Hammond announced 124m of investment for the UKs research and development sector as part of the Spring Statement delivered on Wednesday.

This investment will include 79m for a new national super-computer in Edinburgh, which will run five times quicker than existing capabilities. Its processing power will contribute to discoveries in medicine, climate science, and aerospace, as well as build on previous British breakthroughs including targeted treatments for arthritis and HIV.

READ MORE: UK firms to get 13m AI funding

A further 45m will go towards genetic research in Cambridge, Hammond announced.

As part of this package, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) unveiled additional measures on Friday to support the UKs industrial strategy. Under this strategy, the government is committed to raising investment in research and development to 2.4% of GDP by 2024.

These measures include committing to fusion research at the Joint European Torus (JET) megaproject in Culham to further nuclear technology, BEIS said.

READ MORE: UK announces 48m funding to cut bus emissions

The department also called for evidence supporting small businesses to reduce their energy bills, as well as evidence on how to turn the UK into a global hub for offshore oil and gas decommissioning.

BEIS said it will implement a new requirement for company audit committees to review payment practices and report on them in their annual accounts.

Additionally, the department made a commitment that new-build homes will feature more sustainable and efficient ways of heating, alongside other energy saving measures.

READ MORE: Hammond offers more spending, lower taxes if a Brexit deal is done

BEIS said on Friday that it hopes these new measures will create jobs, growth, and opportunity across the country.

BEIS also announced independent expert Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, would be appointed to undertake a review of the impact of minimum wages internationally. The government will engage with stakeholders through a roundtable in conjunction with the Low Pay Commission, as part of the commitment to end low pay in the UK, according to BEIS.
In 21st-century pop culture, Bonnie and Clyde are folk heroes. The gunslinging pair memorably portrayed by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Arthur Penns now-classic 1967 film were re-immortalized in a 2013 miniseries and in recent songs by Taylor Swift, Quavo, Gucci Mane and Ariana Grande. They inspired a viral rap battle and hovered over the 2017 Oscars debacle. They have come to represent the platonic ride or die couple: alluring anti-establishment heroes who built their own outsize personas long before Instagram and stuck it to the banks long before Occupy Wall Street.

But The Highwayman, a new Netflix film, paints them in a very different light. The movie, which debuted at South by Southwest, plays in select theaters starting March 15 and begins streaming on March 29, tells the story through the eyes of the two officers, Frank Hamer and Maney Gault (played by Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson), who hunt them down as they leave a trail of death and wreckage across the South. In this version, Bonnie and Clyde arent populist legends but remorseless killers who discard innocent lives for their own gain.

In attempting to recast a story that has become ingrained in pop culture, however, The Highwaymen takes its own liberties with history. Heres what the film gets right and wrong about Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and the men who killed them.

Did Bonnie and Clyde stage a breakout at the Eastham jail?

The Highwaymen opens with a dramatic breakout at Eastham Prison Farm, an infamously brutal jail in Texas where Barrow himself served time. In the scene, inmates retrieve hidden guns, shoot guards and then run for the treeswhere Parker, wearing a pink dress and wielding a machine gun, is waiting to give them cover with a thunderous stream of fire. Three inmates make it to Clydes car, and they easily escape.

The broad strokes of the portrayal are accurate. In 1934, Barrow and Parker whisked off several inmates from a jail that was previously considered impenetrable. The inmates would become part of the Barrow Gang, a rotating cast of accomplices alongside the infamous duo. Newspapers were quick to give them all the credit, and the breach of security led directly to the hiring of Frank Hamer to track them down.

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But the plan was devised not by the Barrows. It was arranged by Raymond Hamilton, one of the escapees and an associate of the Barrow Gang. Clyde Barrow simply served as the driver of the getaway car.

How murderous were Bonnie and Clyde?

Bonnie Parker is portrayed as particularly violent in The Highwaymen, from her use of an automatic rifle in that opening sequence to a murder in cold blood on the side of a highway. Jeff Guinn, who wrote the biography Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, refutes this depiction of her, saying that there are only two or so records of her firing a gun, and no evidence that she killed anyone.

Bonnie did not grab guns and lay down covering fire ever. She simply did not, Guinn said in an interview with TIME.

While the popular conception of Bonnie and Clyde depicts them as grandiose bank robbers, the truth was more mundane. They were small-time crooks, Guinn said. The Barrow Gang mostly robbed gas stations and convenience stores; they would even break into gumball machines to collect the change.

Their criminal lifestyle resulted in them killing around a dozen people in all, most of them law enforcement officers. Guinn and other historians contend that Barrow preferred to run from most confrontations but was willing to shoot his way out when necessary. In all but two instances when people died at the hands of the Barrow Gang, its because they found themselves in messes that got out of control, Guinn said.

Who was Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger co-credited with killing Bonnie & Clyde?

Frank Hamer was legendary long before he gunned down Bonnie and Clyde. Hamer was an integral member of the Texas Rangers, a law enforcement agency which fought Mexicans, Native Americans, bank robbers and bootleggers in Texas and along the border in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The group was extremely violent and ruthless; their tactics led Mexicans to dub them Los Diablos Tejanos (the Texas Devils).

Hamer became a senior captain of the Rangers in 1922 and played a large role combating the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. He became known for his ability to control riots and his patient, skilled investigative work. He resigned in 1932 when Miriam Ma Fergusonwho detested the Rangersrecaptured the Governors Office. He turned to mostly private investigation work before being hired to hunt down Bonnie and Clyde following the Eastham breakout.

In the 1967 film Bonnie & Clyde, Hamer (played by Denver Pyle) is given a villainous mustache and humiliatingly captured by the Barrow Gang; he then hunts them down for revenge. In reality, he was never actually captured by them, and when his family saw this simplistic portrayal, they sued the films producers for defamation of character and settled out of court.

In The Highwaymen, Costner plays Hamer with a growl, a sluggish gait and a steadfast sense of right and wrong. His version of Hamer had been out of the force for a long time and is brought back for the proverbial one last job. He struggles to even shoot a bottle out of the air. But Hamer had only been off the force for two years before being hired to hunt Bonnie and Clyde; he was not as domesticated as the film suggests. Bob Alcorn, a member of the Barrow hunt, called him one of the bravest men and the deadliest shots in the state in a 1934 interview.

Who was Maney Gault, portrayed in the film as Hamers right-hand man?

In True Detective, Woody Harrelson plays a charming, hard-drinking, down-on-his-luck detective who forms one half of an odd couple (with Matthew McConaughey) that hunts down murderers. He steps into a very similar role in The Highwaymen as Maney Gault, an unemployed former Texas Ranger who is plucked off his couch by Hamer. The pair shakes off rust and creaking joints in their quest to rekindle their old glory from fighting wars together against Mexican forces.

While Gault was indeed part of the posse that shot Bonnie and Clyde, his role in the film is inflated for dramatic effect. The Maney Gault character is a composite character, Jody Ginn, Ph.D., an adjunct professor of history who consulted on the film, said in an interview. The real-life Gault joined the Texas Rangers in 1929 and stayed for only three years; he was working for the highway patrol when Hamer selected him to bolster the team after the Barrow Gang killed two patrolmen on Easter Sunday in 1934. (The films version of Gault helps to investigate that murder scene, but he had yet to join the team at that point.)

What was Hamer and Gaults journey like?

The film accurately depicts Hamers chase in his painstaking attention to detail and the long stretches of monotony. In an effort to emulate the Barrow Gang and learn their habits, Hamer drove hundreds of miles a day in Barrows preferred car model, the Ford V-8 Sedan, ate hot dogs and slept out of his car. In later interviews he remembered coming across their abandoned campgrounds, finding stubs of Bonnies CamelsClyde smoked Bull Durhamlettuce leaves for the white rabbit, pieces of sandwiches, a button off Clydes coat.

He soon discovered a pattern in which Bonnie and Clyde would make loops rampaging around the South, only to return home to their families. This pattern allowed Hamer to make frequent trips home to his wife Gladys, a reality that stands in contrast to The Highwaymens portrayal, in which she forlornly says goodbye to him at the beginning of the film, never to appear again.

Did Hamer and Gault set up Bonnie and Clyde?

In The Highwaymen, Hamer and Gault follow an instinct to go to Bienville Parish, Louisiana, where they find Ivy Methvin, the father of Barrow Gang member Henry Methvin. Alongside the local sheriff, they cut a deal with Ivy Methvin to set up Bonnie and Clyde in exchange for his sons legal protection.

But Hamer and Gault didnt actually find Ivy Methvinit was the other way around. According to Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde by John Boessenecker, Methvin sought out the local sheriff, Henderson Jordan, through an intermediary with the hopes of cutting a deal for his son. Sheriff Jordan then contacted Hamer, who arrived in Louisiana with Gault and other officials shortly thereafter. Within a month, Hamer, Gault and Jordan would all be part of the team that ambushed Bonnie and Clyde in May 1934 with a hail of gunfire.

But while the film inflates Hamers role in tracking down an inside man, Guinn says Hamer led the actual ambushand that his involvement made the Barrows capture inevitable. Once a professional like Hamer was on the hunt, there was no way they were escaping, he said. Bonnie and Clyde were dead a little more than three months after Hamer took on the job.

What was the scene following Bonnie and Clydes death?

At the end of the film, a horde of people surrounds the bullet hole-ridden Ford carrying the pairs bodies, with officials pushing back those trying to grab at the corpses. This grotesque scene did happen in real life: One man tried to cut off Clydes ear. Somebody with scissors managed to snip off locks of Bonnies hair and bits of her gory dress before being pulled away, Guinn wrote in Go Down Together.

Do historians approve of the film?

While Guinn and Ginn, the two historians interviewed for this article, said that the film took several liberties with the facts, both said they mostly didnt mind those deviations in service of the larger story. They dont romanticize Bonnie and Clyde. Thats been the biggest problem in popular media, Ginn said.

If seeing the Netflix film not only entertains people but makes them actively seek out more information, said Guinn, then I think its probably a good thing.
OUTFRONT Media Inc.s OUT superior portfolio of billboard, transit and digital displays in high traffic regions and prime iconic locations has a national audience reach and this brings numerous advantages to its advertisers. However, high level of indebtedness lowers its financial flexibility, which is a concern.

Specifically, the company has multiple growth drivers, including acquisitions, billboard conversions, cell-site leasing and transit franchise assets. These strategic moves will help improve its performance and stoke long-term growth.

Notably, OUTFRONT Media has been ramping up investments in digital-billboard portfolio and focusing on billboard conversions that have driven year-over-year growth of its digital revenues. In fact, U.S digital billboard count increased to 957 as of Dec 31, 2018, from 822 in the previous year. Further, in 2018, OUTFRONT Media converted and built 88 digital billboards. As the company aims to accelerate digital conversions in 2019, revenue growth is expected to continue in the upcoming quarters as well.

It is also leveraging on existing 4G and emerging 5G opportunities, and is leasing vacant spaces on its assets to wireless carriers. This is a strategic fit as it can accommodate 1-3 wireless carriers per site, requires no additional capital expenditures, and provides fixed, monthly rental income under long-term leases.

OUTFRONT Media has also been active on the acquisition front with strategic buyouts aimed at portfolio enhancement. It anticipates closing the acquisition of a digital display portfolio in Atlanta in second-quarter 2019. Furthermore, the companys acquisitions amounted to $7 million in 2018 and $113.8 million in 2017. These efforts are expected to drive inorganic growth and complement its growth strategy.

Encouraging growth in out-of-home (OOH) advertising is also opening up opportunities for the company to capitalize on this trend and provide a unique technology platform to marketers to help draw more audiences and give real-time audience data.

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However, OUTFRONT Media generally depends on borrowings for its acquisitions and capital requirements. This has inflated its debt levels to nearly $2.3 billion as of Dec 31, 2018. Such high level of indebtedness lowers financial flexibility and impacts the companys ability to fund acquisitions. A rising interest-rate environment further magnifies the concern, flaring up interest expenses and impeding bottom-line growth.

Moreover, stiff competition from other outdoor advertisers for customers, display locations and structures remains a concern. It also competes with other media, including conventional platforms such as television, radio, print media, direct mail marketers and online, mobile & social media platforms. This is anticipated to affect the companys pricing power in the market.

Also, there is uncertainty in business as the OOH advertising industry has to comply with regulations at the international, federal, state and local levels. These regulations, which may change frequently, have a deep impact on the outdoor advertising industry and OUTFRONT Medias business.

Shares of this Zacks #3 (Hold) Ranked company have outperformed its industry over the past six months, gaining 11.5% compared to the industrys rally of 5.5%. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Key Picks

Better-ranked stocks from the REIT space are Terreno Realty Corporation TRNO, Alexandria Real Estate Equities ARE and Boston Properties, Inc. BXP. All three stocks carry a Zacks Rank of 2 (Buy).

Terreno Realtys funds from operations (FFO) per share estimates for first-quarter 2019 remained unchanged at $1.32, over the last month. Further, it has a long-term growth rate of 8.40%.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 FFO per share has been marginally revised upward to $6.96 over the last month. Also, it has a long-term growth rate of 4.40%.

Boston Properties FFO per share estimate for the ongoing year has been revised marginally north to $6.91 in 30 days time. Additionally, it has a long-term growth rate of 6.20%.

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The city of Dakhla, the Pearl of Southern Morocco, is hosting for the 5th consecutive year in a row the Crans Montana Forum from March 14 to 17 under the theme: Building together a powerful & modern Africa dedicated to its Youth.

The event brings together high-level government officials and businessmen from around the world as well as MPs, politicians and representatives of regional and international organizations.

The agenda features debates and presentations on energy security, environment, digital economy, public health, sustainable agriculture and the promotion of youth entrepreneurship and female leadership.

Participants will also discuss the major challenges facing Africa, its digital transformation, the importance of IT for Africans in education, finance, energy and agriculture.

Youth features high on the agenda of this forum, which will examine ways to strengthen youths participation in the fight against extremism, promote the role of youth organizations in preserving peace and fully and effectively involve young people in decision-making processes.

According to the forum chairman Pierre-Emmanuel Quirin, the Dakhla event is a key platform for decision-makers interested in Africa-bound investments.

The African continent is taking its destiny in its own hand, through the launching of large-scale projects in sustainable agriculture, railways, hotel infrastructures and ecotourism, explained Mr.Quirin.
WASHINGTON/QUITO (Reuters) - An international human rights organization has turned down a request by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that Ecuador, which has sheltered him for more than six years at its embassy in London, ease the conditions it has imposed on his residence there. A spokeswoman for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is linked to the Organization of American States, said the group rejected Assange's complaint. Assange's lawyer Jennifer Robinson had no immediate comment. Assange took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That probe was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks. He says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and is putting pressure on him by isolating him from visitors and spying on him. He had sought the support of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in his case against Ecuador. He also demanded that he be protected from extradition to the United States and that U.S. prosecutors unseal secret criminal charges that have been filed against him. While the commission did not back Assange in his complaint against Ecuador, it said it reminded Ecuador of international law that no state should deport, return or extradite someone to another country where that person might face human rights abuses. Ecuador said in a statement that the commission confirmed the country's treatment of Assange was in line with international law. It added that Assange's situation "cannot be extended indefinitely and (Ecuador) expects it to be resolved as soon as possible." A friend who regularly visits Assange says he privately complains that Ecuador's government recently replaced Embassy diplomats sympathetic to Assange with officials who are much less friendly. Last year, U.S. federal prosecutors in the state of Virginia mistakenly made public a document saying that Assange had been secretly indicted. Officials have since declined to confirm or deny he has been charged. U.S. federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, have maintained a long-running grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. One source said it includes a probe into leaks of Central Intelligence Agency documents to the WikiLeaks website. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Alexandria ordered former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be jailed for contempt after she refused to testify about WikiLeaks before the grand jury. (Reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington and Alexandra Valencia in Quito; Editing by Leslie Adler and Rosalba O'Brien)
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)  Hungarians want strong new leaders for Europe and a "fresh start" to halt the continent's decline amid Muslim immigration, Hungary's populist prime minister said Friday as he looked ahead to May's European Parliament elections.

"We're the ones who want a strong Europe, strong nation-states and strong new leaders at Europe's fore," Viktor Orban told a crowd gathered at the National Museum for commemorations of Hungary's 1848 revolution against the Habsburgs. "We want a fresh start to stop Europe's decline, to put an end to the fever dreams about a United States of Europe and to let Europe again belong to the Europeans."

Orban also took pride his country's role in stopping "the migrant invasion" of the continent, when Hungary built fences on its southern borders in late 2015 to divert the migrant flow.

"We wish for the veil to fall from the eyes of the people of Europe, so they can see and understand that without Christian culture there will be no free life in Europe," said Orban, who sees Muslim immigrants as threats to Europe's lifestyle. "Without defending our Christian culture, we will lose Europe and Europe will no longer belong to Europeans."

Despite his fiery speech, Orban toned down his message from previous speeches on the commemoration day. He once compared EU officials to Soviet troops, and this year he did not mention by name some of his favorite targets of recent years, like European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Hungarian-American financier George Soros.

On Wednesday, Europe's main center-right group, the European People's Party, will debate the possible suspension or expulsion of Orban's ruling Fidesz party, requested for now by 13 of the EPP's 49 parties.

After years of quarrels, some EPP members say Orban  who returned to power in 2010 and has become a role model for Europe's far-right for his anti-immigration, anti-European Union rhetoric and autocratic style  has strayed too far from Christian Democratic values.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also spoke at Friday's commemoration, highlighting centuries of Polish-Hungarian friendship. Orban said last week that he would seek to form an alliance with Poland's ruling Law and Justice party, helmed by his ally Jaroslaw Kaczynski, if Fidesz is ousted from the EPP.
Investors can approximate the average market return by buying an index fund. But if you buy individual stocks, you can do both better or worse than that. That downside risk was realized by Coastal Greenland Limited (HKG:1124) shareholders over the last year, as the share price declined 33%. That falls noticeably short of the market return of around -9.0%. Longer term investors have fared much better, since the share price is up 32% in three years.

See our latest analysis for Coastal Greenland

To quote Buffett, Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace One imperfect but simple way to consider how the market perception of a company has shifted is to compare the change in the earnings per share (EPS) with the share price movement.

Unfortunately Coastal Greenland reported an EPS drop of 11% for the last year. The share price decline of 33% is actually more than the EPS drop. This suggests the EPS fall has made some shareholders are more nervous about the business. The less favorable sentiment is reflected in its current P/E ratio of 1.62.

The graphic below depicts how EPS has changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image).

SEHK:1124 Past and Future Earnings, March 15th 2019

It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on Coastal Greenlands earnings, revenue and cash flow.

A Different Perspective

We regret to report that Coastal Greenland shareholders are down 33% for the year. Unfortunately, thats worse than the broader market decline of 9.0%. Having said that, its inevitable that some stocks will be oversold in a falling market. The key is to keep your eyes on the fundamental developments. Unfortunately, last years performance may indicate unresolved challenges, given that it was worse than the annualised loss of 0.6% over the last half decade. We realise that Buffett has said investors should buy when there is blood on the streets, but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality businesses. Most investors take the time to check the data on insider transactions. You can click here to see if insiders have been buying or selling.

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But note: Coastal Greenland may not be the best stock to buy. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with past earnings growth (and further growth forecast).

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on HK exchanges.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material.



If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading.
One frequently hears that impeachment is a political question, not a legal one. After all, Congress, which brings impeachment proceedings, is a political body. Then minority leader of the House Gerald Ford even claimed in 1970 that the grounds for impeachment are whatever the House takes them to be by voting for an indictment.

But impeachment should be a matter of law.

The Constitution does not say that the President can be removed whenever one-half of the House and two-thirds of the Senate want to do so. It specifies legal bases for pursuing it: Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. The text commands the Senate to try the case referred to it by the House. It requires Senators to take a special oath to apply the law of the Constitution. It provides that the trial is presided over by the Chief Justice. In Federalist No. 65, Alexander Hamilton took pains to show that the Senate can in fact act in their judicial character as a court for the trial of impeachments.

The politicization of impeachment stems in part from the phrase other high Crimes and Misdemeanors. Treason and bribery are clear-cut. But treason is only applicable in wartime and proving bribery requires evidence of a corrupt motive, which is usually hard to find. So nine days before the Framers signed the Constitution, George Mason expressed the concern that all attempts to subvert the Constitution were not covered. After some debate, they settled on the phrase other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The key to construing the legal meaning of this otherwise elusive phrase lies in the word other. The high crimes that serve as the basis for impeachment must be crimes like treason and bribery. They must be extremely serious constitutional crimes, acts that subvert our basic political and governmental processes.

Which brings us to the 2016 election and the Trump presidency.

The hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was clearly legally comparable to the Watergate burglary of the DNC in 1972, which led the House Judiciary Committee to approve articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. We dont yet know whether Donald Trump is implicated in the hack, but even if he isnt, the Watergate precedent applies if he contrived to use his office to thwart an investigation into the crime. After all, there was no evidence that Nixon knew about the Watergate burglary beforehand.

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What about the digitalization of disinformation by Russian agents in 2016? If implicated in this activity, President Trump could be impeached, even though those actions would have occurred before he took office. Mason observed during the Constitutional Convention that a President who has practiced corruption & by that means procured his appointment in the first instance might properly be impeached.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution contains the emoluments clause that prohibits federal officeholders from accepting payments or gifts from a foreign state without the consent of Congress. Can a violation warrant impeachment? The answer turns on whether U.S. policy is affected. For example, Trump could be impeached if he showed leniency toward Saudi Arabia or Russia in return for payments made to the Trump Organization, even if those payments are not provable bribes.

The President can be impeached for promising or granting pardons. Suppose a President were to announce and follow a policy of granting full pardons to all federal agents or police who killed anybody in the line of duty in the District of Columbia, whatever the circumstances and however unnecessary the killing. Such an act is not unequivocally unconstitutional, given the sweep of the Presidents pardon power, yet no one should doubt that such a policy would be a breathtaking abuse of executive authority of the kind and on a scale that plainly subverts the political and governmental process.

In the past 20 years, we have drifted toward making impeachment a political decision, determined by polls and calculations of partisan advantage. That course should be reversed before it further undermines the Constitution that the impeachment clause is meant to protect.
A handful of black oil rich sand from Alberta Canada.

Imperial Oil Ltd. (IMO.TO) is putting the brakes on development at its $2.6-billion Aspen project in the Alberta energy patch, citing an uncertain business environment.

The Calgary-based company has been a vocal opponent of the provincial government-mandated production curtailment strategy that took effect on Jan. 1. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley introduced the cuts as a means to stabilize prices for heavy Canadian crude.

This was a difficult choice in light of our final investment decision on Aspen announced last November, said Imperial Oil President and CEO Rich Kruger in a release. However, we cannot invest billions of dollars on behalf of our shareholders given the uncertainty in the current business environment.

Imperial said in November that it would forge ahead with the 75,000 barrel-a-day Aspen project located about 45 kilometres northeast of Fort McMurray. Last month, Kruger said the company is reevaluating its assumptions about Aspen after Albertas oil curtailment introduced new risk.

First production at the site was expected in 2022. The company said on Friday that the production slowdown will likely result in a delay of at least one year.

The decision to return to planned project activity levels will depend on factors such as any subsequent government actions related to curtailment and our confidence in general market conditions, Kruger added.

Imperial said the project would create more than 200 permanent jobs, and employ 700 people during its construction phase. The company estimated the Aspen would generate more than $4 billion in federal and provincial tax revenue, and $10 billion in royalties, over its lifespan.

CIBC analysts Jon Morrison and Trevor Bolland said Imperials decision in November to greenlight the project was surprising given the deep discount on Canadian crude and slim hopes for new pipeline capacity.

We view the delay as a logical one, they wrote in a research note on Friday. We dont consider this update as terribly surprising, especially given the company's vocal stance against curtailments since they were announced.

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Morrison and Bolland also note that a number of M&A opportunities have emerged in Canadas energy patch that could prove more cost effective for Imperial than moving ahead with Aspen.

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Indonesia's anti-corruption agency arrested a key political backer of President Joko Widodo on Friday, just a month before he bids for re-election in the world's third-biggest democracy.

United Development Party chief Muhammad Romahurmuziy was taken into custody by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) along with several others, including an official from the religious affairs ministry.

The anti-corruption agency offered few details, but said the case involved jobs at the religious affairs ministry and payments made to public officials.

"The KPK team in East Java made arrests this morning," agency spokesman Febri Diansyah told reporters.

United Development, an Islamic party, is among a string of parties backing Widodo's April 17 re-election bid in the world's biggest Muslim majority country.

The president's campaign team spokesman expressed surprise that one of his closest confidantes was arrested, but insisted the charges were unrelated to next month's polls.

"Of course we were shocked to hear this and we're concerned," Fikri Satari told broadcaster Kompas TV.

"But this is not related to the presidential election. It's a personal case," he said.

"It's evidence of the government's commitment to upholding justice, especially in corruption cases."

The Southeast Asian nation is riddled with corruption at all levels of society and its parliament is widely viewed as one of its most graft-hit institutions.

In 2018, ex-parliamentary speaker Setya Novanto was jailed for 15 years for accepting bribes and millions of dollars in kickbacks.

The arrest of Romahurmuziy, 44, marked the second time the head of the Islamic party has been arrested in a corruption case.

In 2014, then United Development chairman Suryadharma Ali, who was also religious affairs minister, was arrested for helping relatives skip a long waiting list to go on the annual Hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

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He was later sentenced to six years in prison.

Some 8,000 people are vying for seats in parliament and regional councils, with about 192 million registered voters eligible to cast a ballot next month.

Widodo is leading polls in the race for the presidency against challenger Prabowo Subianto, a former military general.
Shares of Infinity Pharmaceuticals Inc. INFI rose almost 24% after the company announced that it has entered into a master clinical supply agreement with Roche RHHBY. Per the deal, Roche will supply Tecentriq (atezolizumab) to Infinity for use in MARIO-3, a phase II multi-arm combination cohort study. The study will evaluate Infinitys lead immuno-oncology candidate, IPI-549in combination with Tecentriq and Abraxane (nab-paclitaxel) in front-line triple negative breast cancer (TNBC), and IPI-549 in combination with Tecentriq and Avastin(bevacizumab) in front-line renal cell cancer (RCC). The study is anticipated to initiate in the second half of 2019.

Shares of Infinity have declined 26.3% in the past year compared with the industrys decline of 15.2%.

The data that will be generated in the front-line with MARIO-3 complements the data that will be generated in the second-line with MARIO-275. MARIO-275, being conducted in collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb BMY, is a phase II study evaluating the combination of IPI-549 and Opdivo (nivolumab) in immuno-oncology naive patients with urothelial cancer. The study will be initiated in the second quarter of 2019.

In November 2018, Infinity announced updated clinical and translational data from the MARIO-1 phase I/Ib study. The data showed that IPI-549 and Opdivo can reverse resistance to an immediate prior checkpoint inhibitor therapy. It also showed early signs of clinical activity in chemotherapy resistant TNBC. The results from this study led to the initiation of MARIO-3 and MARIO-275 studies.

In 2019, the company will also initiate a study in collaboration with Arcus BioSceinecs Inc. RCUS to evaluate IPI-549 combined with the latters adenosine inhibitor, AB928 and chemotherapy in patients with relapsed/refractory TNBC.

2018 Results

The company reported a loss of 20 cents in 2018, narrower than a loss of 83 cents in 2017.

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Revenues in 2018 were $22.1 million, up from $6 million in 2017. Revenues in 2018 were related to the amount received from Verastem for the approval by the FDA of duvelisib for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia or small lymphocytic lymphoma after at least two prior therapies, as well as adult patients with relapsed or refractory follicular lymphoma after at least two prior systemic therapies and royalties on net sales of duvelisib following the FDA approval.

2019 Outlook

The company expects net loss for 2019 to range from $30 to $40 million.

Infinity expects that its existing cash, cash equivalents and available-for-sale securities will be adequate to satisfy the company's capital needs into the second half of 2020.

Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise

Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise | Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Quote

Zacks Rank

Infinity currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Northwest Angle, Minn., is a community that defies the odds. It is the only place in the United States besides Alaska that sits north of the 49th parallel, the geographic border which divides the U.S. from Canada. The land includes several islands, and residents must travel by boat in the summer, or by snowmobiles or cars on ice in the winter.

The area is also home to the last one-room public school in the U.S.The Angle Inlet School, which enrolls nine children who commute there by boat, ATV, sled or car from across the communitys islands and the mainland.

Linda LaMie, a former customs official, has taught at the school for more than 30 years. When traveling is too difficult, she says, she sometimes sleeps at the school. She once lived in the building for nearly a month.

In the winter the commute is actually the easiest  I go by snowmobile, says LaMie. It just gets cold. Minus 20 isnt uncommon. In the spring though, everything melts and this is marshland. The commute gets much harder during those times of the year.

The education at the schoolhouse is more independent and self-directed than at other public schools, says LaMie. Students are given all their assignments at the beginning of the day, which they can work on in any order. Students of all different ages share the same space, and older students help the younger children.

Tyson McKeever, a 9-year-old third grader, attends the school with his sister, 7-year-old first grader Andie McKeever.

Of course I like my school, its unique. You dont get lost in the shuffle, Tyson McKeever says.

His mother, Lisa McKeever, says that she appreciates that the school has a low student-to-teacher ratio. However, she regrets that they dont have enough time to participate in activities, or to make friends.

Its a great place to raise kids, but you always worry  are they missing out? says McKeever.

Iris Knight, 6, waves to the local schoolbus. The schoolbus transports students from the Northwest Angle to Warroad - a 2 hour commute with multiple border crossings.

Lisa LaMie has been the teacher at the one room schoolhouse in Angle Inlet for over thirty years. She lives around five miles from the main road in town, and commutes to school by snowmobile in the winter, and by boat in the summer.

Lisa LaMie arrives to school via snowmobile on a freezing March morning.

The Goulet family dresses in warm winter clothes before heading outside to play. The Goulet family has eight children, and operate the Angle Outpost Resort in Angle Inlet, offering lodges and outdoor activities such as ice fishing and hunting. They all have attended or are attending the Angle Inlet School.

Students at the Angle Inlet School take a break after sledding outside.

Ava McKeever, Andie McKeever, Iris Knight, Adley Goulet and Emma Goulet stand for a portrait during a weekly

Students recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the Angle Inlet School. The school offers personalized studies for the students, allowing the students to structure their own schedule and studies for the day. The Angle Inlet School teaches grades 1-6 for the 100-or so population of the area.
Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Thursday pledged to achieve at least 10 per cent forest cover in the next three years.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the third annual One Planet Summit, President Uhuru Kenyatta indicated that his government has identified the forestry sector as a key investment to hitting its development targets.

Our forestry has been identified as a key sector of investment to realize our goals and our government has set clear targets to achieve global sustainability development goals, said President Kenyatta.

Deforestation has hit Kenya hard, as its effects have interfered with economic progress.

Interim World Bank head Georgieva backed President Kenyattas sentiments and highlighted the rapid shift from the harsh 2017 drought to last years countrywide floods.

Note that Kenyattas vow came days after the National Land Commission (NLC) allowed thousands of squatters to settle on a 419-acre piece of land in Karura Forest that has been at the heart of a row with the Kenya Forest Service. Currently, the East African nation has a forest cover of seven per cent.

Faced with ecological, economic and social consequences of climate change, the One Planet Coalition mobilizes public and private actors. Through 12 commitments, this international coalition calls for concrete actions.
Recently the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a powerful report on Confucius Institutes, the Chinese-government-funded centers that have been established at some 100 American colleges and universities, ostensibly to promote Chinese language and culture. It raises key questions about the propriety of hosting campus centers sponsored by an authoritarian government  and concerns about the outdated and unenforced laws in the U.S. regarding foreign-gift disclosures.

The report, written by committee staff for subcommittee chairman Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and ranking member Tom Carper (D., Del.), blasts Confucius Institutes as part of Chinas broader, long-term strategy to develop soft power and export Chinas censorship to college campuses. It declares that unless Confucius Institutes become fully transparent and the Chinese government reciprocates by welcoming U.S. State Departmentfunded American Cultural Centers in China, Confucius Institutes should not continue in the United States. (Full disclosure: I consulted with the subcommittee staff and my own research, Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education, is cited in the subcommittee report.)

China has spent some $158 million on U.S.-based Confucius Institutes, the report finds  and at least $2 billion worldwide since 2006. Many Confucius Institutes offer for-credit classes taught by Chinese nationals vetted by the Hanban, an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education, which requires them to pledge not to violate Chinese laws or engage in activities detrimental to national interests. Its not hard to see how that language chills speech on topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the persecution of the Uyghurs, leaving students at Confucius Institutes with a one-sided education.

A new Government Accountability Office report found that most universities were comfortable letting Hanban vet and propose a pool of candidates from which they hired Confucius Institute teachers  an alarming indication that universities are either unaware of or indifferent to Chinas stifling of their teachers academic freedom.

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The subcommittee report tracks how China has sought to harness Confucius Institutes to control its image. Universities must seek Hanban approval for all Confucius Institute programs. In 2013, Hanban tried to create a database of pre-approved speakers. In at least one state, Hanban forbade all Confucius Classrooms (the K12 version) from attending Shen Yun, a performing-arts show related to Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned in China.

Hanban has asked Confucius Institutes, in their annual self-assessment reports, to describe the positive media coverage they generated. In 2011, a Hanban official asked Confucius Institute directors if CCTV, Chinas national television station, was available on campus. CCTV has since been rebranded China Global Television Network, which is registered with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent.

Those details make it all the more alarming that federal transparency laws are outdated and unenforced. Nearly 70 percent of colleges receiving Chinese-government funding for Confucius Institutes never reported those donations to the Department of Education, the subcommittee report found  contra federal law.

In a hearing last month, Senator Portman questioned Deputy Secretary of Education Mitchell M. Zais, who pledged that the department will update and reissue its 15-year-old guidance on foreign-gift disclosures and will send copies of the subcommittees report to all colleges and universities with Confucius Institutes.

Those are good steps, but Congress also needs to update and strengthen existing statutes. The Higher Education Act stipulates an unreasonably high threshold for disclosure: $250,000 from a single source in a calendar year, even though the average salary for a full-time instructor at a four-year college is only about $50,000.

Lawmakers must also close loopholes, making clear that gifts to university foundations are subject to the same disclosures. And we need more specific information on where donations come from and what they are used for  such as the name of the government office making the gift, the terms or conditions under which the gift was made, and the program or purpose for which the recipient college earmarked the gift. The American public and lawmakers need this information in order to distinguish benign gifts from those that are potentially problematic.

Last year the Foreign Influence Transparency Act, sponsored by Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), and Representative Joe Wilson (R., S.C.), and the Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act, sponsored by Senator Ted Cruz (R., Tex.) and Representative Francis Rooney (R., Fla.), proposed important improvements to these disclosures, but Congress failed to pass either bill.

Senator Rob Portman is asking the right questions, and his subcommittees report sheds much-needed light on how China intends to co-opt American campuses. Its time for Congress to act.

More from National Review
Its easy to match the overall market return by buying an index fund. When you buy individual stocks, you can make higher profits, but you also face the risk of under-performance. Unfortunately the Shop Apotheke Europe N.V. (ETR:SAE) share price slid 10% over twelve months. That falls noticeably short of the market return of around -7.1%. Because Shop Apotheke Europe hasnt been listed for many years, the market is still learning about how the business performs. Unhappily, the share price slid 3.1% in the last week.

View our latest analysis for Shop Apotheke Europe

Shop Apotheke Europe isnt currently profitable, so most analysts would look to revenue growth to get an idea of how fast the underlying business is growing. When a company doesnt make profits, wed generally expect to see good revenue growth. Thats because its hard to be confident a company will be sustainable if revenue growth is negligible, and it never makes a profit.

In the last year Shop Apotheke Europe saw its revenue grow by 97%. Thats well above most other pre-profit companies. Given the revenue growth, the share price drop of 10% seems quite harsh. Our sympathies to shareholders who are now underwater. Prima facie, revenue growth like that should be a good thing, so its worth checking whether losses have stabilized. Our monkey brains havent evolved to think exponentially, so humans do tend to underestimate companies that have exponential growth.

The chart below shows how revenue and earnings have changed with time, (if you click on the chart you can see the actual values).

XTRA:SAE Income Statement, March 15th 2019

Take a more thorough look at Shop Apotheke Europes financial health with this free report on its balance sheet.

A Different Perspective

We doubt Shop Apotheke Europe shareholders are happy with the loss of 10% over twelve months. That falls short of the market, which lost 7.1%. Theres no doubt thats a disappointment, but the stock may well have fared better in a stronger market. With the stock down 3.4% over the last three months, the market doesnt seem to believe that the company has solved all its problems. Basically, most investors should be wary of buying into a poor-performing stock, unless the business itself has clearly improved. Most investors take the time to check the data on insider transactions. You can click here to see if insiders have been buying or selling.

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If you are like me, then you will not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying.

Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on DE exchanges.

We aim to bring you long-term focused research analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material.



If you spot an error that warrants correction, please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. Simply Wall St has no position in the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading.
A cyclist in one of Dublins main financial districts. Photo: Reuters

Irelands economy may have grown by a colossal 6.7% last year  but things could be showing signs of slowing down. And that might not be the worst thing.

Data released this week show that the countrys economy grew by a miserly 0.1% in the final quarter of 2018, right at the same time that construction-related investment unexpectedly declined by more than 2%  the first such downswing since 2015.

February tax receipts also point to something of a downturn. Around 1.6bn (1.4bn, $1.8bn) was collected in income tax  or around 156m less than expected. VAT receipts were similarly below target.

And though the number of people employed in Ireland hit a record high in 2018, the rate of job growth began to slow.

The same can be said about consumer spending, which fell by 0.4% in the final quarter of the year. Ditto for manufacturing output.

In recent years, analysts have consistently talked about the risk the Irish economy will overheat.

Contrastingly, Irelands central bank has also warned about the risk of a recession. Though it has pointed to Brexit as a possible factor, until now theres been far more talk of a Brexit dividend, with Dublin a big beneficiary of firms looking to set up post-Brexit hubs.

But what this data point to is more of a modest slowdown  or what Irish politicians like to call a soft landing.

Still, the countrys government, long forced to impose stringent austerity measures, has only recently been able to take the shackles off.

Marking the first year in which the country had money to spare since the 2008 financial crisis, 2018 saw Ireland record a budgetary surplus of 100m (90m, $113m).

But instead of using unexpected corporation tax income to pay off the countrys still enormous public debt, the government has decided to spend: Exchequer spending continues to grow.

And so, though Irelands economy has been growing at a strong rate for years now, the Irish government has continued to pump money into the system.

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With the looming spectre of Brexit, some economists have suggested that this may have been somewhat prudent. Though it depends on who you ask, Irelands economy is likely able to withstand the impact of even a crash-out Brexit.

But everyone is certain that it would severely dent the countrys economic growth.

And though the UKs departure from the European Union may not happen anytime soon, signs of a gradual slowdown suggest the expenditure may have given Ireland the elbow room it needs to avoid an all-out bust.
LONDON (Reuters) - Leaders and organizations around the world expressed disgust and sorrow at the killing of 49 people in shootings at two New Zealand mosques on Friday, attacks that many blamed on the demonisation of Muslims by the West.

Western leaders from Donald Trump to Angela Merkel expressed solidarity with New Zealanders, deploring what the White House called a "vicious act of hate".

The response from some Muslim countries went further, blaming politicians and the media for stoking that hatred. The nationalities of the victims included Indian, Pakistani, Malaysian, Indonesian, Egyptian, Bangladeshi, Saudi, Somalian and Turkish, authorities said.

New Zealand police said 49 people were killed and 42 were being treated for wounds, including a four-year-old child. Three people were in custody including one man who has been charged with murder, police said.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 (where) 1.3 billion Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror," Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote on social media.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the attack was a result of Muslims being demonised. "Not only the perpetrators, but also politicians & media that fuel the already escalated Islamophobia and hate in the West are equally responsible for this heinous attack," he tweeted.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reiterated "the urgency of working better together globally to counter Islamophobia and eliminate intolerance and violent extremism in all its forms," a spokesman said.

Hundreds of protesters in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, chanted "Allahu akbar!" (God is Greatest) after Friday prayers.

"We will not let the blood of Muslims go in vain," said one protester. Members of the Bangladesh national cricket team, in Christchurch for a match against New Zealand, arrived for Friday prayers as the shooting started but were not hurt.

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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said some of the victims may have been new immigrants or refugees.

"They are us," she said. "The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand."

Trump, following a phone call with Ardern, said on Twitter: "...I informed the Prime Minister ... that we stand in solidarity with New Zealand - and that any assistance the U.S.A. can give, we stand by ready to help. We love you New Zealand!"

The accused gunman's manifesto posted online praised Trump as "a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose".

Asked by a reporter if he thought white nationalism is a rising threat around the world, Trump said: "I don't really. I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. I guess if you look at what happened in New Zealand perhaps that's a case, I don't know enough about it yet."

Trump said he had not seen the gunman's manifesto.

'EXTREMIST'

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said an Australian national arrested after the attack was an "extremist, right-wing violent terrorist".

Britain's Queen Elizabeth, who is New Zealand's head of state, said she was "deeply saddened by the appalling events".

Pope Francis deplored the "senseless acts of violence".

In a message of condolence sent by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Francis "assures all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his heartfelt solidarity in the wake of these attacks".

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called for an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the worlds largest Muslim body, to discuss this "horrible crime", Irans state news agency IRNA reported.

"Western hypocrisy of defending demonisation of Muslims as 'freedom of expression' MUST end," Zarif said on Twitter. He posted a picture of U.S. President Donald Trump saying "I think Islam hates us," during the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

The Palestinian chief peace negotiator, Saeb Erekat, called the attack a "consequence of racist ideologies that continue trying to promote religious wars".

He compared it to the shooting last October at a synagogue in the U.S. city of Pittsburgh that killed 11 people, deadly attacks on churches in Egypt by Islamic State and an attack by a far-right Israeli gunman on a West Bank mosque in 1994 that killed 29 people.

A statement by Lebanons Iran-backed Hezbollah, which has been accused by the United States of terrorism, said in part: "Hezbollah warns against the tendency of extremism against Muslims and foreigners and against the politics of hate that the United States nourishes in the world, rather than religious values that advocate tolerance, dialogue and acceptance of the other."

'FLAMES OF HATRED'

German Chancellor Merkel mourned "with the New Zealanders for their fellow citizens who were attacked and murdered out of racist hatred while peacefully praying in their mosques". Her foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said: "When people are murdered solely because of their religion, this is an attack on us all."

Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, said Londoners stood shoulder to shoulder with the people of Christchurch. He also pointed his finger at those who promote religious hatred:

"When the flames of hatred are fanned, when people are demonised because of their faith, when people's fears are played on rather than addressed, the consequences are deadly, as we have seen so sadly today," he said.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said the attack brought back memories of the 2011 attack by anti-Muslim extremist Anders Breivik that killed 77 people: "It shows that extremism is nurtured and that it lives in many places."

Al-Azhar University, Egypt's 1,000-year-old seat of Sunni Islamic learning, called the attack "a dangerous indicator of the dire consequences of escalating hate speech, xenophobia and the spread of Islamophobia".

(Reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa and Gayatri Suroyo in Jakarta; Nadine Awadalla in Cairo; Ruma Paul in Dhaka; Joseph Sipilan in Kuala Lumpur; Krishna N. Das in New Delhi; Mike Holden in London, Gwladys Fouche in Oslo; Jan Strupczewski in Brussels, Michelle Martin in Berlin, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and Roberta Rampton and Doina Chiacu in Washington; Philip Pullella in Rome; Michelle Nichols in New York; Writing by Tom Allard, Peter Graff, Frances Kerry, Grant McCool; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Robin Pomeroy and Sonya Hepinstall)
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Benny Gantz, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's toughest rival in Israel's upcoming parliamentary election, dismissed as "political gossip" on Friday media reports of allegations that his mobile phone had been hacked by Iranian intelligence. The former Israeli armed forces chief was speaking near the border with Gaza following a day which saw the most serious escalation in months between Israel's military and Palestinians in the coastal enclave. "We're in the middle of an ongoing security event...and someone's putting out a political gossip story," Gantz said. "I do not think Benny Gantz is the story here. There's no security issue there. No threat and no blackmail." Israel's Channel 12 news reported on Thursday that the country's Shin Bet security services believed Iranian state intelligence had accessed the ex-general's personal information and correspondences and had informed him of the hack five weeks ago. Gantz's centrist Blue and White party has outpaced Netanyahu's conservative Likud in polls in the run-up to the April 9 vote. Israel and Iran, arch-enemies, have long been locked in a shadow war. "Iran attacks Israel on a daily basis," Netanyahu told a cyber-security conference in January. Israel and the United States are widely suspected of deploying the Stuxnet malware, uncovered in 2010, and which sabotaged components of Irans nuclear program. (Reporting by Rami Ayyub; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
ROME (Reuters) - Italy should support a delay to Britain's exit from the European Union if London makes such a request, Italian Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero said on Thursday. Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29, but on Wednesday its parliament rejected withdrawing without a deal, further weakening Prime Minister Theresa May and paving the way for a vote that could delay Brexit for weeks or even months. "My position is that if there were a request we should say yes," Moavero told a parliamentary panel. "It's in Italy's interests ... because a head-to-head confrontation doesn't lead anywhere." (Reporting by Giselda Vagnoni, writing by Gavin Jones)
MILAN (AP)  Italian energy firm ENI is aiming to make its upstream business carbon neutral by 2030 as part of a transformation to meet its Paris Agreement targets, CEO Claudio Descalzi said Friday during the presentation of a new business plan.

The goal will be achieved by reducing carbon emissions through increased efficiency while offsetting remaining emissions through forestry projects. But Descalzi said "buying carbon credit is no longer enough."

The company is also working on a series of green initiatives, including using organic waste to produce biofuels that can be used for now in boats, one day in cars; and harnessing the power of waves to provide energy to power off-shore structures, and eventually feed the grid.

Descalzi said that the presentation of the company's goal on the day many students around the world were protesting against climate change was a "welcome coincidence."

"ENI needs to transform," Descalzi said. "It needs to transform because it needs to exist in 10, 20, 30 years.

He said that while his green energy proposals were met with some skepticism when he took over five years ago, they are now proving their value, with low double-digit returns on investments.

Still, ENI's bottom line remains reliant on oil and gas production. The company said it will increase oil and gas production by 3.5 percent a year over its new 2019-2022 business plan, in line with the prior four years.

The production growth will be supported by ramp-ups of existing projects and startups that target 2.5 million barrels of new resources from 140 new wells. Investment in exploration is forecast to reach 3.5 billion euros ($4 billion).

By 2022, 18 new startups will contribute 660,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day and the expansion of existing fields will reach 290,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day. More than a third of the new production will come from the Middle East, Norway and Mexico.

Of the 8 billion euros that ENI will invest this year, about 2.3 billion euros will be invested in Italy, which covers also green energy investments.
King Mohammed VI of Morocco has strongly condemned as a despicable terrorist act the attack that targeted two mosques on Friday in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, killing several innocent victims.

In a message of condolence and compassion addressed to Mrs. Patsy Reddy, Governor General of New Zealand, the Sovereign, who says how he is deeply saddened and shocked by the news, expresses, in his name and on behalf of the Moroccan people, his strong condemnation of this abject racist and terrorist attack, which targeted innocent worships.

This is a despicable violation not only of the sanctity of places of worship, but also of the universal human values of coexistence, tolerance and brotherhood, the king states in his message.

The Sovereign extended his heartfelt condolences and deepest sympathy to the grieving families, and wished the injured a speedy recovery.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you and the bereaved, he adds.

According to authorities, at least 49 people were killed and 48 injured in the shootings at the two mosques.

A man in late 20s has been charged with murder and should appear in Christchurch court Saturday, Police sources said.

The suspect held extremist views but had not been on any police watchlists.
Band tees are a trend that never really went away, but are now coming back full force. This week, Katy Perry showed up to the American Idol auditions in a vintage Lionel Richie tee to honor her fellow Idol judge. Katy dressed up her Lionel tee with another trend that I love  a matching denim set aka a "Canadian tuxedo." Of course, Katy added her own flare to the trend by wearing a denim jacket and jeans that were studded, a look that was also seen on Bethenny Frankel, while the Real House Housewives of New York City star was hanging out in the Hamptons. What I love most about this look is it's super easy to recreate and, most likely, you already have the pieces you need in your closet right now! Denim jacket? Check. Your favorite pair of jeans? Check. An over-priced t-shirt you bought while a little tipsy at that Beyonce concert? Double check!
LOS ANGELES  One of this city's most popular malls was being evacuated by police Friday after a man was reportedly seen with a gun and a suspicious package was found.

Los Angeles police officers swarmed the Westfield Century City Mall on the city's tony Westside shortly after 1 p.m PT. Shoppers were seen running from stores, which include such upscale department stores as Nordstrom and Bloomingdale's.

UPDATE: If youre sheltering in place within the Century City Mall you can begin to calmly exit the location. We ask that you remain calm and follow instructions of the officers at scene. We have NO evidence of a shooting or any victims at this time.  LAPD HQ (@LAPDHQ) March 15, 2019

Officers emphasized that no shots had been fired and it was not considered an active shooter situation.

Police confirmed the bomb squad was on the scene.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: L.A. police evacuate Westfield Century City mall after report of gunman, bomb threat
By Lamine Chikhi and Hamid Ould Ahmed ALGIERS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of people protested in central Algiers on Friday in the biggest demonstration against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's 20-year rule since unrest began last month. Protesters crammed streets and squares in the capital after Friday prayers, many draped in Algeria's green, white and red flag. Demonstrations also took place in Bejaia, Oran, Batna, Tizi Ouzou and other cities. "Bouteflika and his men must go as soon as possible," said Yazid Ammari, 23, a student. Reuters journalists estimated the crowd at hundreds of thousands of people, though there was no police estimate. The number fell to thousands by late afternoon. A statement from the Algerian national police (DGSN) said it arrested people involved in vandalism, theft and destruction of public and private property. No heavy clashes were reported but the authorities said some 75 protesters were arrested and 11 policemen were slightly injured during the demonstrations. Bouteflika on Monday reversed a decision to stand for another term after weeks of demonstrations against him, but he stopped short of relinquishing office and said he would stay on until a new constitution is adopted. Algerians quickly rejected his offer and demanded that the 82-year-old president hand over power to a young generation of leaders who can create jobs and stamp out corruption. "Those who think we are tired are wrong. Our protests will not stop," said doctor Madjid Benzida, 37, as police blocked streets leading to government offices and parliament. Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. Protesters say he is no longer fit for office. The president has been losing allies in recent days since returning from medical treatment in Switzerland. Hocine Kheldoun, a senior figure from the ruling National Liberation Front party, known by its French acronym FLN, said in an interview on Thursday night the long-ruling president was "history now." The remarks by Kheldoun to Ennahar television were another setback for Bouteflika, who hoped to pacify Algerians by promising to take steps to change a political landscape that has been dominated for decades by a ruling elite. Kheldoun, a former ruling party spokesman, became one of the most senior FLN officials to break with Bouteflika publicly, saying the party had to look forward and support the aims of demonstrators. Some parents brought their children to Friday's demonstration. "I want a better future," said Mohamed Kemime, 10, draped in a national flag. One of Algeria's most influential clerics appealed for patience. "Lets be optimistic, Algeria needs to overcome its crisis," said Mohamed Abdelkader Haider from an Algiers mosque. The new prime minister, Noureddine Bedoui, said on Thursday he would form a temporary government of technocrats and others to work toward political change, and he urged the opposition to join in a dialogue. 'GAME OVER' A former minister who is familiar with Bouteflika's inner circle told Reuters that the president could not survive given the pressure building against him. "Game over. Bouteflika has no choice but to quit now," the former minister said on condition of anonymity. Algeria is a major oil and gas producer, but so far exports have not been affected by the unrest. Its biggest oil field Hassi Messaoud and its Hassi Rmel gas field have been operating normally, a source from state oil giant Sonatrach told Reuters. Many Algerians say that the president and other veterans of the 1954-62 war of independence against France have neglected them for decades. The military, which has traditionally played a behind-the-scenes power broker role, has distanced itself from Bouteflika and stayed in its barracks throughout the crisis. It is expected to retain influence under all scenarios. Algeria was relatively untouched when the 2011 "Arab Spring" uprisings swept away veteran autocrats in the Arab world. Bouteflika and his allies, effective manipulators of the opposition, managed to avoid major unrest by spending oil revenue on popular programs, such as handing out low interest loans and housing. Bouteflika helped to defeat a civil war against Islamist insurgents in which tens of thousands of people were killed in the 1990s, and many Algerians long accepted heavy-handed rule as the price of stability. But the public has lost patience with deteriorating economic conditions and the FLN's failure to make the transition to a new generation despite the president's failing health. (Additional reporting by Abdelaziz Boumzar, writing by Michael Georgy; editing by Angus MacSwan, Alison Williams and G Crosse)
By Rupam Jain and Rod Nickel KABUL (Reuters) - At a dinner party in Kabul's high-security "green zone" in March, a senior European diplomat poured himself a glass of red wine and pulled up a photograph on his iPhone. Released by Qatar's foreign ministry on Feb. 25, it showed seven Qatari officials alongside U.S. and Taliban negotiators as talks on ending the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan had restarted in the Gulf state the previous day. "If Qatari officials can be at the negotiating table, then how did the U.S. forget to invite its key allies who have fought the Afghan war since 2001?" said the diplomat, whose nation has contributed hundreds of troops to NATO's mission in the country. "We continue to pour millions of dollars as an act of solidarity, but when it comes to peace talks, the U.S. decided to go solo." Reuters spoke with 10 diplomats from countries spanning three continents that are among the 39 that provide military personnel to the NATO training operation, known as Resolute Support, in Afghanistan, and those that provide development aid. (graphic: https://graphics.reuters.com/NATO-SUMMIT-AFGHANISTAN/0100908D0G1/index.html) Many of those countries are significant, consistent donors. Most of the diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the situation. The diplomats interviewed said their governments were broadly rethinking their commitments to rebuilding the country. That process had been hastened by feeling excluded from peace talks, and also by a weariness for supporting the Afghan campaign among voters and lawmakers in their respective countries, they said. Asked about those comments, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said regular reviews of foreign assistance was "good practice" and Afghanistan's development remained in the interest of the international community. "We see no signs that interest and investment are wavering," said the spokesperson, adding that U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad has briefed NATO allies and other partners three times since December, and effective coordination remained a priority. Nick Kay, NATO's newly appointed senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, said NATO allies "fully support" Khalilzad's efforts to negotiate a settlement. But even the Afghan government has complained of being left out. President Ashraf Ghani's national security adviser on Thursday accused Khalilzad of "delegitimizing" the Kabul government by excluding it from deliberations. Qatari officials did not respond to a request for comment. In 2017, U.S. development aid for Afghanistan totaled about $1.2 billion, well ahead of the next biggest donors Germany, European Union institutions, Britain and Japan, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data. But the United States' junior aid partners collectively contributed nearly two-thirds of all development assistance, highlighting their critical if less visible importance to the country's future. CHANGING PRIORITIES U.S. and Taliban negotiators wrapped up their longest round of peace talks on Tuesday with progress made but no agreement on when foreign troops might withdraw. Whether funding countries keep investing in Afghanistan could prove pivotal to sustaining any peace. Diplomats say that, after troops leave, it may be the only leverage they have to retain influence over future Afghan governments. Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, Afghanistan has been among the top recipients of foreign government aid to promote economic and social development. In 2016, international donors pledged $15.2 billion in aid for Afghanistan until 2020. With those pledges due to expire, many countries are re-evaluating their military and funding commitments. "Priorities have changed for every EU nation," a European diplomat said, adding that countries besides Afghanistan needed support. "The donor fatigue is intense and no one is in the mood to overlook it after 2020," another diplomat said. A third diplomat said their country was re-evaluating its future aid with different scenarios in mind, including whether to continue development if the Taliban joins Afghanistan's government, and what to do if peace talks fail. Any drop-off in international aid would be disastrous for Afghanistan, since much of it funds basic health and education services, said Adele Khodr, country representative for Unicef. "It is definitely something we are concerned about. Imagine what would happen - (Afghanistan) would be Yemen," Khodr said. "(By) pulling out, the international community will pay a much higher price in insecurity across the world." Ninety percent of the money spent on the health sector in Afghanistan comes from the international community, said Toby Lanzer, deputy special representative in Afghanistan for the UN. An official in Ghani's office in Kabul declined to comment on potential risks to future aid. He said the government was making every effort to hold peace talks with the Taliban. The militant group said on Tuesday that such talks would have to wait until after a troop withdrawal plan is set. 'CRUCIAL TO STICK TOGETHER' Some diplomats caution against a quick retreat. "If we leave the country hastily, all these (advances) will go down the drain," Ambassador Markus Potzel, Germany's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan and one of the 10 diplomats interviewed, told Reuters in Kabul. Potzel was referring to gains such as Afghan girls' attendance in school and new employment opportunities. Maintaining aid was also critical to holding influence in Afghanistan, he said. "That's our leverage. We can attach strings," Potzel said. "It is crucial to stick together." A spokesperson at the British Embassy in Kabul said any changes to Britain's troop contribution would be made in consultation with coalition partners. As of March 2019, 39 countries contributed 17,034 foreign forces in Afghanistan for Resolute Support, of which the U.S. provided 50 percent, according to NATO. U.S. troops are also deployed in a separate mission directed against groups such as al Qaeda and Islamic State. U.S. President Donald Trump's questioning of NATO's value to Washington, along with the absence of allies at the negotiating table, has deepened the unease within the military alliance created in 1949 by the United States, Canada, and Western European nations. "The concern is that we need to be appraised of the progress of the discussions and to be involved. We have invested a lot," said a European diplomat. "This commitment should be reflected in influence or at least information on the peace talks." The diplomat said it was understandable that access to the negotiating table was narrow right now, but "what I would find abnormal is that we would be served a deal in which we had nothing to say and then be asked to foot the bill". SHRINKING FOOTPRINT? The senior diplomats interviewed by Reuters, who are based in Kabul and Islamabad, said their governments were finding it harder to justify the continuing presence of their troops and the steady drain of aid funding to Afghanistan. "It is increasingly difficult to tell our people why we are still here especially when they read reports about more than half of country being under the Taliban control," said a Western diplomat. "Almost all NATO countries are now struggling to justify their presence in Afghanistan to voters back home." The war's long duration has also weakened commitment. "If we had known that the war could go on as it has been for 18 years, we would have had a rethink in 2001," the Western diplomat said. The withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan has always been the Taliban's main demand, and Trump's interest in drawing down U.S. troops has stimulated efforts to end the war. "The prime concern is that we may wake up one day to a tweet by Trump about a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops before a peace agreement has been negotiated," said a diplomat whose country supports Afghan healthcare projects. Neighboring Pakistan sees a similar danger, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said. "An immediate vacuum can also be detrimental for peace and security and an indefinite presence is also not acceptable, so this is the detail that has to be worked out," he said. NATO members and partners said they also expect regional powers to share costs and step up their roles in Afghanistan to prevent civil war after foreign forces depart. "China has been sitting on the bleachers for a long time now," a diplomat said. The Chinese embassy in Kabul did not respond to requests for comment. Michael Kugelman, a South Asia expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center, said the U.S. continues to count on friends to share the burden in Afghanistan. "But so long as the war continues with no peace deal, that supply of states willing to assist will shrink," said Kugelman. (Reporting by Rupam Jain and Rod Nickel in Kabul; additional reporting by Eric Knecht in Doha, James Mackenzie in Islamabad and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Lockheed Martin Corp. LMT recently secured a $506.9-million modification contract to produce Phased Array Tracking to Intercept of Target (PATRIOT) Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile. The contract was awarded by the U.S. Army Contracting Command, Redstone Arsenal, AL.



Per the deal, Lockheed Martin will provide incidental services, hardware testing and other technical services for the production of PATRIOT missiles. Work related to the deal will be performed in Grand Prairie, TX and is scheduled to get completed by Dec 31, 2024.



Whats Favoring Lockheed Martin?



Lockheed Martins PAC-3 team achieved several notable milestones throughout 2018, and owing to its rapid growing popularity, similar trends are expected in 2019 as well. Recently, the company's Missiles and Fire Control unit secured a PAC-3 Award to deliver more than 450 interceptors, launcher modification kits and other associated equipment to the U.S. Army and international customers. Inevitably, such massive order inflows for its PAC-3 missiles tend to boost the companys top line.



Furthermore, midway last year, the fiscal 2019 U.S. defense budget provisioned for a spending plan of $6 billion for varied missile programs. Since then, Lockheed Martin has successfully secured a number of major contracts related to missile development. The company is expected to gain significantly from such favorable budgetary provision in the days ahead.



Looking Ahead



Per Markets and Markets research firm, the global rocket and missile market is projected to rise from $55.5 billion in 2017 to $70 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 4.74%. Given this huge opportunity for expansion, the need for developing complexed technologies for different variants of missiles, including PATRIOT, will also grow. Such projections will certainly benefit U.S. defense giant and top missile maker, Lockheed Martin in the future.



Price Performance



Shares of Lockheed Martin have dropped about 9.9% in a year compared with the industrys decline of 3.9%.

Story continues





Zacks Rank & Key Picks



Lockheed Martin currently carries Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A few better-ranked stocks in the same sector are The Boeing Company BA, Spirit Aerosystems Holdings SPR and HEICO Corporation HEI.



While Boeing and Spirit Aerosystems sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Heico carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



Boeing came up with average positive earnings surprise of 17.08% in the last four quarters. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 earnings has risen 11.3% to $20.13 in the past 90 days.



Spirit Aerosystems long-term growth estimates currently stand at 7.80%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 earnings has increased 3.7% to $7.56 in the past 90 days.



HEICO Corporations long-term growth estimates currently stand at 12.10%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2019 earnings has risen 7% to $2.14 in the past 90 days.



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Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT) : Free Stock Analysis Report



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Heico Corporation (HEI) : Free Stock Analysis Report



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Lupita Nyongo paid homage to her latest onscreen character in spooky contact lenses [Photo: Getty]

Actress Lupita Nyongo is not one to put a sartorial foot wrong and last night, the Hollywood heavyweight gave a lesson in the art of dramatic red carpet dressing.

Eschewing tradition, the 36-year-old paid fashionable homage to Jordan Peeles newly-released horror, Us, in an aptly-hued red sequin dress by Attico at the London premiere.

The Kenyan-Mexican actress paid sartorial homage to new psychological thriller Us on the red carpet [Photo: Getty]

To finish the vampy wrap-around number, she sported a pair of metallic Aquazurra heels  another covetable accessory on our lust list.

READ MORE: March 2019s best dressed celebrities

But as if that wasnt enough to secure her position as one of this years greatest style muses , Nyongo threw a surprising pair of spooky lenses into the mix.

Yes, in a fitting tribute to onscreen character, Red, the actress frightened paps with a smokey eye, wicked lips and bloodshot eyes.

READ MORE: Celebrity red carpet poses decoded

Though its not the first time Nyongo has sought inspiration from the silver screen, as she pulled off a series of warrior-inspired looks to promote 2018s buzziest film, Black Panther.

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The 36-year-old pulled off a series of powerful looks while promoting Black Panther in 2018 [Photo: Getty]

At the Los Angeles premiere back in January 2018, the actress wore a heavily embellished gown by Atelier Versace on the red carpet.

Courtesy of its sweeping regal chiffon skirt and boundary-pushing harness, the look soon garnered a spot as one of the best celebrity ensembles of the year.

A heavily-embellished Balmain number also proved a hit with fashion critics [Photo: Getty]

While a seriously high thigh-split Balmain dress worked wonders across the pond, as Nyongo scored more points with the London fash pack.

The actress latest flick, Us, follows the tale of a family who head to a beach house to spend time with close friends but their holiday makes a surprise turn, when a group of strangers  who are also their doppelgangers  show up on the doorstep.

Nyongo  who plays the role of mother Adelaide and Adelaides doppelganger Red  described the film as a nightmare from from Jordan Peeles mind.

Us is showing in cinemas across the UK now.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo
Jerusalem (AFP) - The main challenger to Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel's April elections said Friday that his phone had been hacked, but insisted there was nothing on it that could be used by Iran to blackmail him.

A report by Channel 12 on Thursday said that the phone of former military chief of staff Benny Gantz had recently been hacked by Iranian intelligence.

In a briefing on the Gaza border following the latest escalation with the Palestinian enclave, Gantz acknowledged the hacking, but denied his phone's contents could prove a liability.

"There's nothing security related that could happen, there's no threat to me, no extortion -- it's just unethical nosiness," Gantz said.

According to the Thursday report, Gantz was informed by the Shin Bet internal security agency about the hack some five weeks ago, with officials warning him that any sensitive materials on the phone could be used against him.

Gantz dismissed the reporting and speculation that his hacked phone could have contained intimate correspondences or images as "a gossipy, delusional political story".

His party implied that election rival Netanyahu was behind the timing of the Thursday broadcast.

Gantz's Blue and White alliance said the breach took place "a few months ago" and stressed the phone contained "no embarrassing videos".

"Briefings of sources close to Netanyahu and massive spreading of lies prove beyond any doubt who's behind the publication, and why," a statement from the party read.

Yair Lapid, the former finance minister who joined forces with Gantz to form Blue and White, said in a Friday tweet that Netanyahu's "use of sensitive security materials to try and besmirch Benny Gantz proves he's afraid of him".

Netanyahu's office said in a statement that the premier was not updated by the head of the Shin Bet on the affair.

Gantz's alliance, formed in January, is posing a major challenge to Netanyahu's lengthy rule, with opinion polls saying it would win more seats at the April 9 vote than the premier's Likud party.

But the same polls show it would be Netanyahu, not Gantz, who would be able to form a coalition government with right-wing and religious parties.
Test tubes holding plants line shelves in a Malaysian laboratory, the heart of a breeding programme for dwarf palm oil trees which scientists hope will cut costs and limit the environmental damage caused by the controversial industry.

Palm oil has become a key ingredient in everyday goods from biofuels to chocolate, leading to a production boom in the world's top two growers, Indonesia and Malaysia.

But green groups blame rapid expansion of plantations for laying waste to jungle that is home to orangutans and other animals, as well as tribespeople's lands, and sustained environmental campaigns have damaged its image in the West.

The adverse publicity, combined with rising stockpiles and sluggish demand from key importers, has led to precipitous falls in prices.

Now the Malaysian Palm Oil Board hopes an initiative to breed smaller trees could go some way to improving industry woes.

"With this smaller variety, we can improve yields, maximise land use and improve palm oil sustainability," plant scientist Meilina Ong-Abdullah told AFP in the lab in the town of Bangi, as other women in white gowns and facemasks sliced at plants and transferred them into test tubes.

But the plan faces huge challenges, not least the relatively high price of the newly created trees, which may make them too expensive for many of the country's hard-pressed farmers.

- Smaller space, more trees -

The dwarf trees, which are about 30 percent smaller than regular ones and have shorter fronds, are the fruit of a decades-long research programme by the palm oil board, which is a government agency.

Their small size makes it easier and quicker for the bunches of red berries from which the oil is extracted to be collected, and means fewer workers are needed for harvesting.

A greater number of the trees can be packed into a smaller space, and they produce about 37.5 metric tonnes of palm oil fruit per hectare -- twice the current per hectare average.

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This should mean that less rainforest needs to be logged to cultivate the world's best-selling vegetable oil, and could make more productive use of land that is being replanted after previous clearances.

The plan may help address the problem of land scarcity for cultivation caused by voracious growth of plantations.

In Malaysia alone, palm oil plantations already cover some 5.8 million hectares (14.3 million acres) -- roughly the size of Croatia.

- 'Killer' price -

As part of the palm oil board's breeding programme, the dwarf trees have been planted in several areas, including on an estate in Bukit Lawiang in southern Johor state. The dwarf trees there are about five metres (16 feet) tall, compared to an average of about 7.5 metres for conventional trees in the area.

The dwarf trees went on sale in 2017 but take-up has been slow. At about 30 ringgit (seven dollars) each, the seedlings are around twice the price of conventional varieties.

Mohamad Isa Mansor, who has a five-hectare palm oil plantation, said he wanted to buy them -- but the cost was a "killer".

"Smallholders are poor and sustaining our daily life is a challenge due to depressed prices of crude palm oil," he told AFP.

He added: "To replant a hectare with the new variety will cost about 6,000 ringgit. Where are we going to find this huge sum of money?"

Nor does the government appear ready to step in and help. Minister Teresa Kok, whose portfolio includes the palm oil sector, told AFP that the cash-strapped government "doesn't have funds to assist smallholders to do replanting at the moment".

Using smaller trees is unlikely to be enough to take the sting out of environmental campaigns and growing opposition to palm oil, particularly in Europe.

The latest challenge facing Indonesia and Malaysia is a move by the European Parliament to ban the use of palm oil in biofuels, which industry groups claim would devastate the livelihoods of millions of small farmers.

Environmentalists were positive about the dwarf tree programme, but said it needed to be accompanied by efforts to reforest areas already stripped bare for plantations.

"My biggest concern about the palm oil sector is the destruction of biodiversity -- there should be no more clearance of forests," Mohideen Abdul Kader, from Friends of The Earth, told AFP.

"And if possible cleared jungles should be rejuvenated."
Paul Manafort's prison sentence increased to seven-and-a-half years Wednesday  three years longer than the 47-month sentence he was given last week. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is among many who questioned how race, wealth and privilege play a role in the U.S. justice system after the former Trump campaign manager's initial sentence fell short of the 19-to-24-year guideline.

Letters edited for clarity and grammar:

I am really perplexed by the ruling in the Paul Manafort tax evasion case. He was only sentenced to 47 months for a scheme that involved evading millions in taxes and lying to the government. Sentences for lesser crimes, say for example theft, are sometimes harsher. Some people get a 10-year sentence for possession of marijuana. It seems like the justice system is tilted toward rich criminals.

What does Manafort's 47-month sentence say to people who are not wealthy in America, when wealthy people who commit crimes are held to a more lenient standard? If we are to have faith in our justice system, don't we really need to have a more just system when it comes to sentencing? Or is this just an example of the privilege of wealth? How else are we supposed to see this extreme disparity in our justice system?

John R. Munn; Englewood, Fla.

Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, leaves federal district court in Washington.

No doubt, there will be many who are disappointed in Paul Manaforts 47-month prison sentence. But Manafort killed no one. His crime is financial. And worse crimes have been committed, where the prison sentence was less than the guideline. Forty-seven months is a long time to be separated from family, the comforts of home and freedom. Most importantly, the man will be punished for his crimes.

JoAnn Lee Frank; Clearwater, Fla.

After Judge T.S. Ellis went rogue by breaking so drastically from sentencing guidelines, why aren't the Republicans crying about an activist judge writing his own law? Maybe the jury should do the sentencing. Or perhaps at least two judges should have to agree on the sentence. Ellis' apparent bias is another argument for judicial term limits.

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Manafort defrauded American banks and taxpayers out of millions of dollars. If a desperate, unemployed minority with no record stole hundreds of dollars worth of groceries, he would likely get a longer sentence than Manafort.

Curt Freeberg; Byron, Ill.

Facebook comments edited for clarity and grammar:

Hard to feel sorry for him. Lots of people get long sentences for lesser offenses. Name, color and money make a difference in too many cases. There should be some recourse when judges are as corrupt as the people they are sentencing.

 Betty Ann Manock

I think this has less to do with race and more to do with wealth and class. O.J. Simpson was black and got away scot-free because he had the best defense team money could buy.

 Nick Schooler

Of course they were at play. "A blameless life"! When did he think Manafort committed those crimes, a week before being arrested? No, he committed those crimes over a 30 year span, that is not a "blameless life", he never got caught because he led a deceptive life.  Richard Kapuaala (@rkapuaala) March 11, 2019

Manafort is rich and therefore considered intelligent and ambitious. He is seen as a pillar of society and too well-connected to be rubbing shoulders with average, everyday prisoners. White collar criminals are considered a cut above the rest.

 Linda Rose

Want to sound off about what's happening with justice system? Email letters@usatoday.com or use #policingtheusa on Twitter. See something in your neighborhood (good or bad) involving police? Tell us. Share your experiences with law enforcement and the justice system by calling our hotline at 540-739-2928.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Manafort sentence exemplifies privilege in the justice system: Readers sound off
Innovative Industrial Properties (NYSE: IIPR), which owns and leases properties to companies involved in the cannabis sector, reported robust fourth-quarter and full-year 2018 results after the market closed on Wednesday.

The market's reaction was muted, with shares closing essentially unchanged -- down 0.2%, to be exact -- on Thursday. That's probably due to high expectations already being built into the price of the stock, which has returned a whopping 71.3% in 2019 through Thursday, far outpacing the S&P 500's 12.6% return.

Here's how the quarter worked out for the company that's organized as a real estate investment trust (REIT) and its investors.

Innovative Industrial Properties' results: The raw numbers

Metric Q4 2018 Q4 2017 Year-Over-Year Change** Total revenue (rental revenue plus tenant reimbursements) $4.78 million $2.28 million 110% Rental revenue (the important revenue metric) $4.70 million $2.22 million 111% Operating income $1.81 million $573,000 215% Net income $2.33 million $284,000 720% Earnings per share (EPS) $0.24 $0.07 243% Adjusted funds from operations (AFFO)* $3.63 million $817,000 344% AFFO per share $0.38 $0.23 65%

Data source: Innovative Industrial Properties. *Adjusted funds from operations (AFFO) is a closely watched metric for companies organized as REITs, as it's the main driver of dividend changes. **Percentages calculated using figures from financial statements, not the abbreviated ones listed in table.

In the quarter, Innovative Industrial Properties' (IIP) revenue growth was driven by the acquisition of new properties and the annual increase of base rent for select properties. For some context, last quarter, IIP's revenue, EPS, and AFFO per share increased 152%, 133%, and 81%, respectively, year over year.

Fourth-quarter revenue slightly beat the $4.6 million that Wall Street was looking for. While EPS fell a bit short of the $0.26 consensus estimate, AFFO per share -- the more important profitability metric for REITs -- edged by the Street's expectation of $0.37.

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For full-year 2018, rental revenue jumped 128% year over year to $14.34 million, driven primarily by acquisitions, along with contractual rental increases at some properties. Net income was $5.63 million, or $0.75 per share, compared with a new loss of $395,000, or $0.13 per share, in 2017. AFFO soared 314% to $9.73 million, which translated to AFFO per share doubling to $1.34.

Marijuana plants in a greenhouse with building's supporting structure and fans shown.

Image source: Getty Images.

What happened with Innovative Industrial Properties in the quarter?

It paid a quarterly dividend of $0.35 per share on Jan. 15 to stockholders of record as of Dec. 31, representing an increase of 40% year over year. At Thursday's closing price, shares are yielding 1.96%.

IIP acquired two properties during the quarter and two after the quarter ended through March 13, the date of the earnings release. Leases are triple net, with tenants responsible for paying property taxes, insurance, and maintenance costs.

During the quarter (October), it "acquired a 58,000 square foot cannabis cultivation facility in Colorado for approximately $11.3 million (excluding transaction costs) and entered into a long-term lease with The Green Solution," according to the earnings release.

During the quarter (December), IIP "acquired a 75,000 square foot medical-use cannabis cultivation and processing facility in Illinois and entered into a long-term lease with a subsidiary of Ascend Wellness Holdings" for $25 million, excluding transaction costs.

After the quarter ended (February), the company "acquired a 43,000 square foot industrial property in California and entered into a long-term lease with an experienced operator, which intends to operate the facility for cannabis cultivation upon completion of redevelopment, with IIP's total investment ... expected to be approximately $11.5 million (excluding transaction costs)."

After the quarter ended (March), IIP "acquired a property in Ohio and entered into a long-term lease with a subsidiary of PharmaCann ... for ... facilities that are expected to comprise a total of 58,000 square feet upon completion of development, with IIP's total investment ... expected to be $20.0 million (excluding transaction costs)."

Big dividend hike just announced

On March 12, Innovative Industrial Properties announced its eighth consecutive quarterly dividend of $0.45 per share, which will be paid on April 15 to stockholders of record as of March 29. This dividend represents a 29% increase from IIP's fourth-quarter dividend and an 80% increase from its first-quarter 2018 dividend.

What management had to say

On the semiannual analyst conference call, Innovative Industrial Properties Executive Chairman Alan Gold summed up the company's activity in 2018 and ts current portfolio:

[W]e acquired six properties in five new states, which included both follow-on transactions with our tenant partners ... and new tenant relationships. We see that momentum continuing in 2019, acquiring our first property in California and executing another transaction with PharmaCann in Ohio. ... As of today, we own 13 properties in 11 states, totaling approximately 1,128,000 square feet, which are 100% leased on a long-term basis to high-quality, licensed medical-use cannabis operators. Our current blended yield on these properties is 15.1%, with each lease providing minimum annual rental escalations ranging from 3% to 4%, with a weighted average remaining lease term of over 14 years.

Looking ahead

Innovative Industrial Properties doesn't provide guidance. On the earnings call, Gold commented on the company's pipeline, which he views as "extremely strong":

We have about $47 million of transactions under contract. We have just under $40 million of transactions under letter of intent. We have another $10 million in final negotiation. We have a very strong and growing pipeline beyond that, with very strong tenants.

In addition to being interested in acquiring assets in the company's existing states, IIP also aims to "penetrate new states, such as Florida," Gold said.

More From The Motley Fool

Beth McKenna has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Innovative Industrial Properties. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Two days before the murder of more than 49 Muslims in two New Zealand mosques, the apparent shooter  one of four people currently detained in connection with the attacks  uploaded several videos to his Twitter account. He then published his manifesto on the 8chan imageboard and Twitter. During the shooting, he set up a live-stream, recording the event and broadcasting it on Facebook Live.

As the news broke, dazed, ordinary people looking for information stumbled upon and shared the Twitter account, screenshots of the manifesto, and the video before any of the platforms that hosted them could stop it, making the massacre go viral. Christchurch was a distinctly modern horror.

And, as with anything modern, people were unsure how to react. The attack almost resembled past terrorist incidents, but parted with them in bizarre ways. Like Anders Breiviks, this shooters manifesto was a white-supremacist clarion call  but it doubled as a series of in-jokes meant for frequenters of the politics forums on 4chan and 8chan. Like the ISIS beheadings, the video was gruesome and sickening  but it doubled as a hyperreal homage to first-person-shooter video games and was captioned with a Serbian-nationalist meme. Like Cesar Sayocs, this shooters Twitter account provided a window into the time he spent on the online right  but rather than being compiled over several months in an organic portrait of the terrorists habits, it was self-consciously curated in the course of a day. Even for ideologically motivated violence  even for white-supremacist violence  Christchurch seemed novel.

Nobody in the press wants to further this mans goals, and everyone agrees that caution is paramount when discussing events this delicate. So what should we do? One approach is to avoid sharing any of the shooters online output, the goal being to minimize any potential social contagion and to prevent people from stumbling upon his twisted beliefs and being radicalized. Insofar as the shooting was a performance, we want to minimize its audience; insofar as it was fundamentally thoughtless, we want to avoid attributing any unearned logic to its perpetrator.

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Those guardrails are important to keep in mind. But just as its important also to understand that the shooter was a fascist, it is, I think, equally important to understand that the shooter made certain choices in his presentation of the attack because he expected people to react to it in certain ways. The shooter says he carried out the attack for my people, because he believes that Muslim migration to European countries constitutes an invasion for which he wished to exact revenge. But he also included a number of ironic tropes intended to signal to his in-group and obscure what he was thinking to the out-group, only widening the cultural gulf between the two.

Luckily, these signals arent impenetrable. Some of what the shooter wrote in his manifesto was sh**posting, low-quality online trolling designed to shock those who arent sufficiently desensitized or in the know. The gleeful cruelty of the alt-rights sh**posting in 2016, for instance, fooled mainstream journalists who couldnt imagine people being glib about death threats or ethnostate advocacy. Their defensive and outraged reactions to something ostensibly ironic fueled the thing they were trying to stamp out. Sh**posting is ironic, vacuous. But it can also conceal something darker, as the apparent shooters 8chan post reveals: Well lads, its time to stop sh**posting and time to make a real life effort post.

If the mindset of the effort-poster is understandable  hes an old-fashioned fanatic, like Breivik or Theodore Kaczynski  the mindset of the sh**poster is understandably confusing. And after this shooting, the retreat in some corners to preexisting partisan frames demonstrated that confusion. For example, the tendency to make every mass shooting, however international, a referendum on American gun-control policy is currently on display, but the shooter says explicitly that he hoped this would happen in the aftermath of his shooting because he believes a fear among white Americans that their gun rights are insecure will one day be the catalyst for a race war in the U.S.

Meanwhile, there are already calls to deplatform two people mentioned in the manifesto, Swedish YouTuber Pewdiepie and Turning Point USA communications director Candace Owens, from social media. But astute observers have discerned the shooters claims that Pewdiepie and Owens drove him to action to be sarcastic. Did he intend to draw extra attention to them, to convince social-media platforms to jettison them, and to create a backlash among their fanbases? As with the gun debate, the shooter might have been trying to provoke a response that would radicalize his in-group and drive others into its arms.

How can we know when the shooter was being sincere and when he was kidding? The writer Robert Evans makes a convincing distinction:

It is possible, even likely that the author was a fan of Owenss videos: she certainly espouses anti-immigrant rhetoric. But in context seems likely that his references to Owens were calculated to spark division, and perhaps even violence, between the left and the right. At multiple points in the manifesto the author expresses the hope that his massacre will spark further attempts at gun control in the United States, which he believes will lead to gun confiscation and a civil war. He believes this civil war would be the best opportunity destroy the American melting pot. This idea is repeated often enough that it seems to be something the author legitimately believes in. Given the tone surrounding the Candace Owens passage, it seems clear that it was bait, thrown out to attract attention on social media and sow further political division.

This doesnt mean the conversations about gun policy and social-media moderation should be off-limits simply because the shooter wanted to provoke them. But we should bear his potential intentions in mind. Like disinformation campaigns that seek to exploit partisan divisions, the manifesto is acting as a wedge in our most contentious, divisive policy debates. It is simultaneously sincere and trollish in ways that appear to contradict each other but actually are mutually reinforcing.

Like others before him, the shooter wanted to commit eliminationist violence in service of a white-supremacist dream. But Im left thinking he also wanted to deepen existing conflicts in a way that will prompt a cycle of overreach and radicalization that culminates in other people like him deciding to one day join him. We should be able to condemn the evil ideology he represents while also being careful not to accidentally become vectors of it ourselves  whether that means uncritically sharing a manifesto, or unwittingly behaving as the shooter anticipated, or unduly attributing to it any special power, any undeserved mysteriousness.

More from National Review
Microsoft MSFT recently introduced Game Stack with an aim to provide developers with a comprehensive platform, enabling them to design, test, publish and monetize on engaging games.



As part of Game Stack, the developers can access Microsofts cloud computing platform Azure, and game development tools including PlayFab, Visual Studio, DirectX, Xbox Live, Havok and App Center. Notably, the company expects developers to choose Azure as the preferred cloud partner, although it is not a compulsion.



With an intention to democratize innovation, the company extended the availability of Xbox Live to Android and iOS devices via a new SDK (software development kit) as part of Game Stack.



Also, management is looking forward to demonstrate its new services at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2019, to be held on Mar 18-22 at San Francisco, CA.



We believe, these initiatives will enable the company to enhance its competitive position against Amazons AMZN Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud platform. Notably, Amazon GameLift cloud-based service enables developers to deploy, scale, operate and manage multiplayer game servers. Google is reportedly working on subscription-based streaming service, dubbed Project Yeti.



New PlayFab Service Suite



Apart from Game Stack, Microsoft rolled out five PlayFab services, namely PlayFab Matchmaking, PlayFab Party, PlayFab Insights, PlayFab PubSub and PlayFab User Generated Content.



PlayFab Matchmaking, inspired by Xbox Live matchmaking, is available for use. Meanwhile, the remaining four are under preview.



Notably, the company acquired PlayFab last January with an objective to up its game in cloud gaming market. PlayFab provides a backend services platform to help developers design and introduce enthralling cloud-connected games.



We believe, the integration of PlayFab platform with Azure and Game Stack bodes well. The managed game-development tools and LiveOps capabilities of PlayFab are expected to complement Azures strength in game telemetry analytics, player data security and immersive gamer experience through robust machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) skills.



Microsoft announced that PlayFab will continue to support the major game engine platforms, cloud platforms and devices (running on Android or iOS), going forward.



This shows Microsofts efficient evolution on multiple platforms and open source infrastructure, thereby enabling third-party developers to build innovative tools on any device or network.



Cloud Gaming Initiatives Hold Promise



Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned to integrate cloud capabilities of Azure into its gaming segment. This is allowing the company to innovate its gaming domain beyond exclusive gaming content on X-box consoles.



Microsoft anticipates Azures availability scale across 54 regions globally to strengthen its upcoming Project xCloud streaming technology, targeting to provide an immersive gaming experience. Notably, with Project xCloud, users can stream games across major device options with suitable latency levels.



Notably, Azure already aids prominent companies like Wizards of the Coast, Rare and Ubisoft to host multiplayer game servers and monetize exciting gameplay in a secure infrastructure.



Per latest IHS Markit data, consumer spending on cloud gaming content subscriptions reached $234 million in 2018 and is forecast to grow to $1.5 billion by 2023.



We believe Microsofts domain expertise in gaming and strength in Azure sets it apart from peers in both cloud and gaming sectors. The same also positions the company well to capitalize on the cloud gaming market.



Microsoft Gaming Segment Highlights



In the second quarter of fiscal 2019, Microsofts gaming revenues increased 8% (9% at constant currency) to $2.25 billion, driven by a robust performance from Xbox software and services (up 32% at cc) owing to third-party title strength.

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Microsoft Corporation Revenue (Quarterly)

Microsoft Corporation Revenue (Quarterly) | Microsoft Corporation Quote

For fiscal third quarter, Microsoft anticipates Gaming revenues to grow at a moderate rate. The company is likely to benefit from an improving user engagement.



Wrapping Up



Microsoft seems to gain traction from the cloud gaming industry with the latest breakthroughs. The companys increasing investments will possibly expand its market reach and drive innovation in the streaming games.



Microsoft is not only focusing on an exclusive original content but also making gaming easily accessible to all consumers including mobile users, which is a positive. Thus, this is likely to keep gaming revenues ticking, moving ahead.



Zacks Rank & Key Pick



Microsoft currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the same industry are Synopsys, Inc. SNPS and Symantec Corporation SYMC, both sporting 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 Synopsys and Symantec is projected at 10% and 7.9%, respectively.



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Rabat (AFP) - Moroccan authorities said Friday the navy had rescued 21 people after a boat carrying migrants sunk in the Mediterranean, with a rights group saying 45 others had drowned in the incident.

Tangiers-based association Caminando Fronteras said survivors and relatives reported "45 people lost their lives" Thursday after the vessel hit trouble as it headed towards Spain.

The group's director Helena Maleno wrote on Twitter that there were a total of 67 people onboard the boat and that seven women were among the survivors.

"Only one body has been recovered," she said.

A senior Moroccan official refused to confirm the death toll given by Caminando Fronteras, but said the navy had rescued 21 people.

A second human rights organisation, AMDH-Nador, confirmed to AFP that one body had been taken to a local hospital after the navy rescue operation.

In the wake of the incident the Spanish coastguard said they had offered to help Morocco and sent a helicopter to assist.

The issue of migrants making illegal crossings to Europe is highly sensitive in Morocco and the authorities are often cagey about giving details.

In January Caminando Fronteras reported that 50 migrants from Mauritania drowned off the Moroccan coast, but the authorities never confirmed the deaths.

The NGO alerts naval authorities to migrant boats in distress at sea as they attempt the crossing to Europe.

Activist Maleno said this month that a Moroccan court has dropped human trafficking charges against her, saying it sets a precedent for her struggle to save lives at sea.

Last year saw a "substantial increase" in arrivals to Europe along the western route from Morocco, with over 65,000 people making it across the Mediterranean there, the European Union has said.

The International Organization for Migration says over 2,200 people died trying to make the perilous sea journey to Europe in 2018.

Moroccan authorities say they stopped 89,000 people from sub-Saharan Africa and Morocco from making the journey during the year and rescued 29,715.
WASHINGTON  As Vice President Mike Pence increasingly becomes a punching bag for Democrats running for president, some of his defenders are punching back.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, Pence's press secretary and the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services took to Twitter Thursday after Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., criticized Pence for his self-imposed rules to avoid infidelity temptation. Those include not eating alone with a woman other than his wife.

"Any suggestion that the @VP has not supported women is blatantly false and disrespectful," tweeted CMS Administrator Seema Verma, who worked with Pence when he was Indiana's governor. "He has been a strong supporter and mentor to me throughout my entire career and, I would not be where I am today without his guidance."

And on Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell went after South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg's comment to Buzzfeed News that it's chilling to people in the LGBTQ community to see Pence in a position of power.

"For those of us in the LGBT community who deal in facts, we are chilled by recklessly repeated gossip," Grenell tweeted. "Mike Pence is a humble Christian who loves God, and all His creation. I know him. You obviously dont."

Administrator Seema Verma, Vice President Mike Pence

Pence's record on gay rights has been a particular target for Democrats lately.

Asked on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Wednesday whether Pence is an "honorable man," Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren said he is not.

"Anyone who engages in the kind of homophobia and attacks on people who are different from himself is not an honorable person," she said. "That's not what honorable people do."

As Indiana's governor, Pence signed into law a religious freedom bill that critics said was a license to discriminate against gay people.

Pences record also includes advocating for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, opposing measures to protect gay men and lesbians from discrimination in the workplace, and opposing expanding the definition of hate crimes to cover offenses based on a victims sexual orientation or gender identity.

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Recently, Pence has defended his wife against criticism for teaching at a Christian school that bans gay students and employees.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who reportedly had regular conversations with Pence in the first year of the Trump administration, quickly backtracked last month after getting criticized for calling Pence a "decent guy."

There is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ rights, and that includes the Vice President, Biden tweeted.

Pence told Fox News Thursday that Biden, who is deciding whether to run for president, caved to liberal pressure.

They got an awfully big field on the other side," Pence said on "Fox & Friends." "The reality that you see on the Democrat side is it's largely being driven by the most extreme liberal elements in their party. And the way Joe Biden caved in to liberal activists after making a kind comment toward me is evidence of the pressure that all of their candidates are going to face."

Harris made her comments about Pence to NBC's Andrea Mitchell.

"I disagree when he suggests it's not possible to have meetings with women alone by himself," Harris said. "I think that's ridiculous. The idea that you would deny a professional woman the opportunity to have a meeting with the VP is outrageous."

During his 12 years in Congress, Pence had rules to avoid any temptations to stray in his marriage, or even trigger rumors of impropriety. If Pence needed an aide to to assist him after regular working hours, the aide had to be male.

He told Gannett News Service in 2002 that the practice didn't discriminate against women staffers because the aide wasn't there to provide policy advice.

His other rules included never dining alone with a woman other than his wife, and not attending an event where alcohol was being served unless his wife was there.

In a 2002 interview with The Hill, Pence called it, "building a zone around your marriage."

"If there's alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me," Pence said of his wife, Karen.

When the Washington Post revived that comment in a 2017 profile of Karen Pence, his version of the Billy Graham rule entered pop culture as "the Pence rule."

I am proud to say I am one of a few women who Mike Pence dines with alone, Pence's daughter Charlotte wrote in a book about her dad published last year.

And now female aides are joining the defense, disputing the charge that Pence discriminates against women.

"Hi, @SenKamalaHarris: Im a female Senior Advisor to Mike Pence & am wondering why you are repeating this false claim?" tweeted his press secretary, Alyssa Farah. "Hes elevated women to positions of leadership throughout his career & relies on their advice & counsel. Get your facts straight."

Conway, who was Pence's pollster before both teamed up with Donald Trump, tweeted that Pence "elevates, not excludes, women, giving equal weight to our opinions/advice."

"And hes a gentleman," Conway said.

Hi, @SenKamalaHarris: Im a female Senior Advisor to Mike Pence & am wondering why you are repeating this false claim? Hes elevated women to positions of leadership throughout his career & relies on their advice & counsel. Get your facts straight. https://t.co/oCTHKQpcdn  Alyssa Farah (@VPPressSec) March 14, 2019

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Is Mike Pence unfair to women, gays? Those who work with him slap down Democrats' criticism
Manila has been hit by its worst water shortage in years, leaving bucket-bearing families to wait hours to fill up from tanker trucks and some hospitals to turn away less urgent cases.

Taps are dry from four to 20 hours per day in the homes of about half of the Philippine capital's roughly 12 million people due to rolling outages driven by a dearth of rain and inadequate infrastructure.

"I have learned to take a bath using only seven pitchers of water," Ricardo Bergado told AFP as he lined up with his buckets. "I even save the bath water to flush our toilet."

The shortages started hitting late last week, with some areas in eastern Manila seeing the supplies of water into their homes being completely cut off.

However, Manila Water Company, one of the capital's two suppliers, said it will now use rolling cut offs spread across the city to share the pain more evenly.

Jerry cans and buckets were flying off store shelves and landing in lines where families were spending hours waiting for deliveries by truck.

"Instead of doing important things, our time is consumed now by making sure we have enough water," Bergado, a 57-year-old audio-technician told AFP.

At least five public hospitals in the capital have started getting supplemental supplies from water tankers, as shortages had led at least one to limit admissions.

"This is the worst (water shortage) we have experienced. It almost happened last year but we were saved by heavy rains brought by storms," Dittie Galang, Manila Water communications manager, told AFP.

The disruption could last until July when monsoon rains are typically in full swing and would replenish regional reservoirs, one of which is at a two-decade low.

Better known for flooding from its frequent typhoons, the Philippines is experiencing a dry spell that led to reserves being severely depleted.

At the same time, the ageing pipelines and dams that provide Manila's water have not kept pace with the growth of the mega-city, which has roughly doubled its population since 1985.

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The government has admitted that the problem of growing demand for water has long been forecast but they failed to address it due to delays in projects that would expand capacity.

"We need an alternative water source and we need it yesterday," Patrick Ty, chief of Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System, told ABS-CBN television.

Among the main projects in the pipeline is the construction of $355-million Kaliwa Dam, a Chinese-funded project that met resistance from indigenous peoples and church leaders for its feared effects on communities.
Bethan was found dead at the family home in October 2017 (Hampshire Constabulary)

A former teacher has been found guilty of murdering her three-year-old daughter by drowning her in the bath.

Claire Colebourn drowned Bethan at their home in Fordingbridge, Hampshire in October 2017, following the breakdown of her marriage.

The former biology teacher, 36, did not react as the jury foreman read out the verdict at Winchester Crown Court and there was silence in the public gallery.

The five women and six men deliberated for around two-and-a-half hours following an eight-day trial.

She will be sentenced on Monday morning.

Claire Colebourn will be sentenced next week. (PA)

Police outside the property in Whitsbury Road, Fordingbridge, where Bethan died (PA)

The court heard Colebourn hit rock bottom after her high-flying husband Michael ended their 16-year-relationship.

She woke the couples daughter Bethan in the early hours of October 19 2017, led her to the bath and drowned her by holding her body down under the water, before making multiple suicide attempts.

Colebourn was discovered by her mother about 14 hours later, in a diabetic coma.

The ex-sixth form teacher initially denied all memory of the incident, but later recalled how Bethan agreed to have a bath in the middle of the night at her mothers instruction, telling police: Sadly, my little girl trusted me completely.

Colebourn  who met Michael, now the chief executive of luxury marine interior company Trimline  at university, admitted she killed Bethan but said she only wanted to save her from the little girls father.

But jurors rejected her account, delivered during a fraught and emotional days evidence from the witness box on Wednesday.

Michael Colebourn had moved out of the family home just over a month before Bethan died (PA)

Kerry Maylin, prosecuting, said that the couple had separated just over a month before Bethans death, and Mr Colebourn had moved out.

Miss Maylin said their relationship had been difficult and the defendant went on to make unfounded accusations on Facebook and in an email sent to his work, that her husband was having an affair with the companys finance director, Kelly Futcher.

In the email to Trimline, she wrote: He has been having an affair with his finance director at work, everything has been pre-planned, of course the finances.

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They are aiming to take over the business and set up a new life together.

Miss Maylin said Colebourn also told friends she had visited Ms Futchers home looking for her husbands car.

The lawyer said Colebourn also became worried, without foundation, that Mr Colebourn was monitoring her computer and arranged for an IT firm to supply her with a new laptop and wifi at her home.

She said that within minutes of receiving the new computer in October, she began searching for suicide-related websites.

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Miss Maylin said that following her arrest, she told medical staff she had tried to kill herself the previous day.

The prosecutor said a doctor described how she was only emotional when discussing the fact Michael Colebourn had left her and her daughter and her father had done the same to her mother.

She later wrote in a letter intercepted at a hospital she was staying in: In my eyes I saved her, everything over those days is a blur.

She later told police: I am responsible for Bethans death because she drowned and I am responsible for it. Bethan drowned because I was there, I held her under the water.
Rick Gates Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

President Trump once again declared vindication when his campaign manager was sentenced for financial crimes earlier this week. I can only tell you one thing, again that was proven today: no collusion, he said to reporters at the White House. Theres no collusion. Theres noooo collusion and there hasnt been collusion.

Of course, the judge who handed down the sentence explicitly said just the opposite. The no collusion refrain that runs through the entire defense memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand, said Amy Berman Jackson. The no collusion mantra is simply a non sequitur. Manafort was sentenced for matters unrelated to collusion, but this hardly indicated he did not collude, any more than Al Capones sentence for tax evasion proved he never ordered any murders.

And the notion that Manafort was just a simple white-collar criminal swept up in an unrelated investigation took another hit when the special counsels office asked a judge today to delay the sentencing of Rick Gates, Manaforts former partner. Gates continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations, the prosecution asserted.

It is of course possible that the delay means very little. It is also possible that of the several investigations in which Gates has turned states evidence, none have anything to do with Russia or collusion. But this is not, and never has been, terribly likely.

A prosecutor previously described an August 2016 meeting between Manafort and his employee/Russian intelligence agent Konstantin Kilimnik as something that goes very much to the heart of what the special counsels office is investigating. Also during the campaign, Manafort passed on to Kilimnik complex polling data running to 75 pages in length. Even before the Gates news came out, Natasha Bertrand made the case that Robert Mueller is probably building a larger conspiracy case against Trumps campaign or business. One telling fact is that the polling data was supposed to be redacted, but was revealed mistakenly by Manaforts lawyers. The fact that the special counsel hasnt brought it out but it was only revealed inadvertently, former prosecutor Mimi Rocah told her, reinforces the idea that [Mueller] is saving it for something else.

Reports of the imminent conclusion of the Mueller investigation have driven much of the recent belief that its findings will underwhelm. But those reports keep proving false. The latest 60-day extension of the Gates sentencing suggests it will probably take at least another two months to see the final word. The assumption that Manaforts story in the investigation is over seems quite premature.
A major cyclone the equivalent of a strong Category 2 hurricane approached the coast of Mozambique late Thursday, prompting residents to brace for what weather authorities have called a likely worst case scenario.

Cyclone Idai was forecast to make landfall just south of Beira, the nations fourth-largest city with a population of half a million, late Thursday night. It is now carrying sustained 110 mph winds gusting to above 130 mph, according to the Washington Post.

"Extremely dangerous" tropical cyclone #Idai is approaching landfall in #Mozambique, with sustained max winds of 165 kmh and life threatening storm surge which may coincide with high tide. Potential "worst case scenario" for Beira, says WMO RSMC La Reunion @meteofrance pic.twitter.com/yGJKO1K9xe  WMO | OMM (@WMO) March 14, 2019

Flooding from Idais path inland has already killed 122 people in Mozambique and Malawi, making it the deadliest weather disaster this year.

The landfall will pose further threat to the African country, with authorities saying it could bring a life-threatening storm surge of up to 13 feet along Mozambiques coastline, and close to 20 feet at the mouth of the Pungwe river, which runs to Zimbabwe. The surge could submerge thousands of homes and businesses, and potentially displace more than 1,000 residents, the Post reports.

Mozambique ranks third among countries in Africa most susceptible to weather-related hazards, according to the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. In 2015, Cyclone Chedza killed 140, and in 2000, Tropical Cyclone Eline left 350 dead and 650,000 homeless across southern Africa. Cyclone Idai is predicted to be the strongest to make landfall in Mozambique since Eline.

Mozambican authorities have issued a red alert regarding Tropical Cyclone Idai and humanitarian response is ongoing in Malawi and Mozambique. The government, with support from local and international partners, is providing assistance to people already displaced by floods, but access is being impeded by road damage, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The mother of a Swedish girl killed in a 2017 jihadist attack expressed her horror at Friday's New Zealand mosque gun rampage, committed by a man who claimed to want to avenge the child's death.

The gunman, who killed 49 worshippers at two mosques in the quiet New Zealand city of Christchurch, published a racist manifesto on Twitter, saying he wanted "to take revenge for Ebba Akerlund". He also wrote her name on the weapon he used.

The Swedish 11-year-old was the youngest of five victims killed in an April 2017 Stockholm truck attack, when a rejected Uzbek asylum seeker ploughed through pedestrians on a busy shopping street with a stolen beer lorry.

Friday's attack in Christchurch, thought to be the deadliest against Muslims in the West in modern times, "goes against everything Ebba stood for", Jeanette Akerlund told Swedish public television SVT.

"She spread love and caring, not hate. I feel the pain of the families affected by this. I condemn any form of violence," she added.

"It's deeply tragic that Ebba's name is abused in the name of political propaganda," she told daily Aftonbladet.

Ebba's death shook Sweden.

That Friday afternoon, she was on her way to meet her mother after school and had texted her to ask if they could buy ice cream together on the way home.

She had just stepped off a city bus when she was mown down by the truck.

The attacker, Rakhmat Akilov, was sentenced to life in prison for terrorism in June 2018.
Enthusiasm for marijuana stocks is at an all-time high, and that buzz has enabled Aurora Cannabis (NYSE: ACB) to expand operations at a mind-bending pace. As a result, the marijuana producer has a large share of the Canadian market for legal cannabis, rapidly expanding international operations, and a billionaire activist investor on the payroll.

Aurora Cannabis will soon be able to grow 700,000 kilograms of marijuana annually at a per-gram price that its big-name competitors can't match. Hiring billionaire-activist Nelson Peltz as a senior advisor could inspire Coca-Cola to return to the deal table or another fortune 500 company to take a chance.

Viewing dry marijuana flower with a hand lens.

Image source: Getty Images.

What's great about Aurora now

Peltz has a lot of experience as a director of international companies with operations that span the globe, and Aurora's eager to convince at least one of them to take a large stake in the company. You may remember, Canopy Growth received $4.2 billion from Constellation Brands in return for 38% of Canopy's shares. More recently, Altria scooped up 45% of Cronos Group for $1.8 billion.

Aurora's eponymous brand of medical-cannabis products are relatively popular in Canada, thanks to the right combination of low pricing and fairly consistent quality. Recently, Aurora acquired Whistler Medical, which gives the company a high-margin luxury brand that's well-loved by a smaller number of patients who can afford it.

Aurora can produce half a million kilograms of cannabis per year, and production could exceed 700,000 kgs in 2020. Aurora's fancy automated greenhouses have lower labor costs than most of its peers, which could give the company a long-term advantage in a market that's getting crowded.

Cannabis flower and some cash.

Image source: Getty Images.

How Peltz could make Aurora even better

If Nelson Peltz were in control of Aurora's Board of Directors, there's one overarching change he would probably make -- and that's to end a growth-at-any-cost strategy that's created an endless string of investments made with money the company doesn't have. Whistler Medical was probably a wise addition, but spending heavily to build operations in 24 countries across five continents in a few short years probably won't work out for long-term investors dipping their toes into Aurora right now.

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Although the stock has soared 1,940% over the past three years, its market cap has risen 15,840% over the same time frame to a whopping $9.07 billion. Producing a similar return from recent prices would require the company's market cap to reach at least $175 billion in a few short years, which would make Aurora around twice as valuable as General Electric is today.

Aurora finished 2018 with $205 million in cash and securities, which means another capital raise is right around the corner unless demand for legal cannabis skyrockets in the first quarter while prices either stay level or improve.

Why Peltz won't get his way

A Rolodex full of potential new partners and an air of dignity are the key reasons Aurora's willing to pay Peltz up to 620 million Canadian dollars for advisory services. So far, though, the activist and the fund he manages haven't disclosed any investment in Aurora Cannabis beyond Peltz's time and reputation.

Activist investors all follow the same basic formula that involves buying stocks that are underperforming and trying to raise them in ways their associated management teams don't agree with. Without any shares to vote, Peltz isn't going to stop Aurora from making extremely risky investments.

Guy in a suit with binoculars.

Image source: Getty Images.

What's next

Aurora's taken what looks like a strong position in new markets trying to get their government-run medical-marijuana programs off the ground. While Germany tends to pay a much higher cost per gram, it's also the strictest EU member when it comes to cannabis. Prosecutors generally can't charge anyone with possession of less than 7.5 grams, and anyone can grow it for personal use, as well. In Spain, you're allowed to grow cannabis on private property as long as it's to be consumed by adults in private, which has given rise to dozens of non-profit Cannabis Social Clubs that function as marijuana shops.

Stock-market enthusiasm knows no bounds, but the odds of Aurora getting big enough to provide outstanding gains from its current starting point are slim. Sales, general, and administrative costs reached CA$66.3 million during the last three months of 2018; during that time, the company reported a gross profit of just CA$32 million. With Social Clubs and their counterparts throughout the EU operating with less concern than Canada's illicit market, it's going to be hard to maintain wide profit margins on medical marijuana in the region.

During the last three months of 2018, Aurora reported a net loss of CA$240 million and a comprehensive loss of CA$405 million once you account for fluctuating prices of other marijuana stocks that it owns. In Aurora's domestic market, cannabis prices are contracting and Aurora can only trim so much from cost of sales per gram that reached CA$2.60 during the last three months of 2018. That means investors can expect further losses ahead.

More From The Motley Fool

Cory Renauer has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Niamey (AFP) - Health authorities in Niger said Friday they had found a fake version of a meningitis vaccine after the country had launched a campaign to innoculate millions of children against the disease.

In a statement, the health ministry asked doctors to be vigilant over a "counterfeit" version of a vaccine called Mencevax ACWY.

The fake drug is marked as having been manufactured in December 2016, with an end-date for use by November 2021, it said.

Niger launched a week-long campaign on March 5 to vaccinate six million children against meningitis, which killed nearly 200 people two years ago.

The country lies in the so-called "meningitis belt" stretching from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, where outbreaks of the disease are a regular occurrence.

The vaccination programme is against meningitis A, one of the six groups of meningitis bacteria that can cause epidemics.

The ministry's spokesman told AFP the bogus drug had been discovered during a "routine inspection" of a privately-owned pharmacy in the capital Niamey.

An investigation is underway to try to ascertain how many of the fake vaccines have been used, the spokesman said.

Health workers administering meningitis jabs are being asked to take special care about their supply source, and the public are being urged to scrutinise vaccines clearly, even if they buy them in "licensed" pharmacies.

Fake drugs -- medications that are outright counterfeits or whose active ingredients have been diluted -- are a major problem in West Africa.

In the 2017 outbreak, and in an epidemic in 2015 in which nearly 500 people died, Niger sounded the alarm over purported vials of vaccine that just contained water.

Meningitis is transmitted between people through coughs and sneezes, close contact and cramped living conditions.

The illness causes acute inflammation of the outer layers of the brain and spinal cord, with the most common symptoms being fever, headache and neck stiffness.
Hundreds of thousands of young people skipped school across the globe on Friday to march through the streets for an international day of student protests aimed at pushing world leaders into action on climate change.

Classrooms in capitals from Bangkok to Berlin and Lagos to London emptied as organizers of the student strike called demonstrations in more than 100 countries.

Students flooded into the streets across Europe, North and South America, and Asia carrying placards reading: "There is no planet B", "You're destroying our future" and "If you don't act like adults, we will."

Despite three decades of warnings, carbon dioxide emissions hit record levels in 2017 and again last year.

Loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at current rates will eventually lead to an uninhabitable planet, scientists say.

In Stockholm, Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg -- who inspired the protests -- warned that time was running out.

"We are living through an existential crisis that has been ignored for decades and if we do not act now it may be too late," the 16-year-old, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, told Swedish public television station SVT.

Across the world, their placards formed a mosaic:

"Like the ocean, we will rise" (Sydney)

"Our future in your hands" (Berlin)

"System Change not Climate Change" (Vienna)

"Don't be a Trump" (Hong Kong)

"The Titanic would have NO problem in 2019" (Elmshorn, Germany)

And everywhere, "There is no planet B."

Montreal drew among the largest crowds, estimated by organizers at nearly 150,000.

In the United States, protests were more low-key, with events held in New York, Washington, Chicago, Portland, Oregon, and St. Paul, Minnesota, where one sign read: "So bad even introverts are here!"

Further south in Latin America, placards with messages such as "climate change is not 'fake news'" were seen in Buenos Aires, Argentina -- while young people also took to the streets in the Chilean capital Santiago and Colombia's Medellin.

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In Delhi, one of the world's most polluted cities, 200 students took part in a colorful protest, waving ribbons, juggling and performing stunts with hoops.

"We have to make a choice whether we want to sit and be indifferent or do something for our planet," said 16-year-old student Srijani Datta.

In Sydney, 18-year-old Charles Rickwood warned that Australia's Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed.

"If current trends in the environment continue, we'll see the one, two degrees increase in our ocean then it will simply become unsustainable and we could lose the entire Great Barrier Reef," he told AFP.

- Skipping exams -

European students were also out en masse. Several thousand youngsters thronged the streets of central London in a raucous demonstration with banners and placards.

Packing into Parliament Square, they cheered and chanted "Change... now!" before marching past Downing Street and massing outside Buckingham Palace.

"They're not going to stop me trying to save the planet," said 15-year-old Joe Crabtree from southwest London, who had missed two exams to join the rally.

More than one million marched overall, according to estimates by organizing groups such as the Youth For Climate movement and AFP reporters.

The Friday for Future movement said more than 300,000 young people demonstrated in Germany alone.

As youngsters hit the streets, nations meeting at the UN environment assembly in Kenya announced they had agreed to "significantly reduce" single-use plastics over the next decade.

But experts said the pledge -- which only referred to man-made global warming and made no mention of the fossil fuels driving it -- fell far short of the steps needed to tackle Earth's burgeoning pollution crisis.

- 'Adults should learn a lesson' -

The global action drew a mixed reaction from politicians.

Germany's Economy Minister Peter Altmaier said the demonstrators should be in class while Australia's Education Minister Dan Tehan said striking was "not something that we should encourage."

But New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hailed the action, saying: "We hear you and we're getting on with setting a path for carbon neutrality."

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres offered his strongest support yet for the strikes, writing in The Guardian newspaper: "Without ambitious action, the Paris agreement is meaningless."

Guterres also called for world leaders to come to the Climate Action Summit in New York in September "with concrete, realistic plans" to further reduce their emissions by 2020, in order to reach a target of 45 percent lower emissions over the next decade, and to net zero by 2050.

In the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, students circulated a petition to be submitted to the government demanding concrete measures.

- 'My eyes hurt from pollution' -

The Paris treaty calls for capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) but the planet is currently on track to heat up by double that figure.

The UN's climate science panel warned in October that only a wholesale transformation of the global economy and consumer habits could forestall a catastrophe.

"My eyes hurt from pollution. My shirt gets dirty from dust," 13-year-old protester Shagun Kumari told AFP in Delhi.

"I want fresh air that won't harm my lungs and clean water to drink so that I don't keep falling sick."

burs-amc/ska/it
By Joyce Lee and David Brunnstrom

SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, a senior diplomat said on Friday, according to news reports from the North's capital.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States wished to continue talks with North Korea and had "every expectation" that its leader, Kim Jong Un, would stick to pledges not to resume nuclear and missile testing.

Pompeo gave no sign of U.S. willingness to soften its stance in demanding that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last month's summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in Hanoi, Russia's TASS news agency and the Associated Press reported.

"We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital.

The second Trump-Kim summit broke down over differences about U.S. demands for Pyongyang to denuclearize and North Korea's demand for dramatic relief from international sanctions imposed for its nuclear and missile tests, which it pursued for years in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Choe said Pompeo and U.S. national security adviser John Bolton "created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States", TASS reported.

Kim would make an announcement soon on his position on the denuclearization talks and North Korea's next steps, TASS quoted Choe as saying. She said Washington had thrown away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, AP reported.

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"I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger," AP quoted Choe as saying.

However, she added: "Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful."

Bolton told reporters outside the White House Choe's statement was "inaccurate." He said he had spoken to his South Korean counterpart but wanted to consult with other U.S. officials before responding further.

Bolton later accompanied Trump to a pre-arranged meeting with top defense officials at the Pentagon.

U.S. SEEKS MORE 'CONVERSATIONS' WITH NORTH

Pompeo told reporters it was not the first time he had been called "gangster-like" by North Korea. "And following that we continued to have very professional conversations ... I have every expectation we will be able to continue to do that," he said.

Pompeo said that in her remarks, Choe had left open the possibility that negotiations would continue.

"It's the administration's desire that we continue to have conversations around this," Pompeo said. "As the president said when he was in Hanoi, the offer that they made simply didn't rise to the level that was acceptable, given what they were asking for in exchange."

Kim had committed multiple times to Trump in Hanoi that he would not to resume nuclear or missile testing, Pompeo said. "That's Chairman Kim's word. We have every expectation he will live up to that commitment."

Pompeo told Fox News he did not want to forecast "what we will do or what we might do" if Kim were to resume testing, but added: "That would be most unfortunate. I think Chairman Kim understands that."

Trump has pointed to North Korea's freeze in nuclear and missile testing since 2017 as a positive outcome from nearly a year of diplomatic engagement with North Korea. He and Kim had previous exchanged fiery rhetoric that had raised fears of war.

Washington has said it is closely watching activity at a North Korean rocket site that U.S. think tanks have said could be preparations for a new launch.

Trump has made much of his personal chemistry with Kim and has said he would be "very disappointed" in Kim if North Korea were to resume testing.

South Korea, which has an ambitious agenda of engagement with North Korea that is dependent on Pyongyang and Washington resolving at least some of their differences, said it was too early to tell what Choe's comments might mean.

"We cannot judge the current situation based solely on Vice Minister Choe Son Hui's statements. We are watching the situation closely. In any situation, our government will endeavour for the restart of North Korea-U.S. negotiations," South Korea's presidential Blue House said in a statement.

Choe's comments echoed the North's usual rhetoric at tense points in its dealings with Washington. North Korea expert Joshua Pollack said North Korea may be delivering an ultimatum.

"They're putting down a marker, saying which way things are headed if nothing changes," Pollack, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said.

Joel Wit of the 38 North think tank said North Korea was likely toughening its negotiating position after the collapse of the Hanoi summit. "It is likely to gauge the U.S. reaction in the days ahead before making a decision to launch a rocket," he said.

Choe had said after the Hanoi talks that Kim might lose his commitment to pursue a deal with the United States after seeing it reject a request to lift some sanctions in return for the North destroying its main known nuclear complex.

In Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang urged patience and further dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

Earlier on Friday, a spokeswoman for South Korea's Ministry of Unification told a press briefing that the weekly inter-Korean meeting scheduled at a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, had been cancelled after the North Koreans said they would not be sending senior officials.

The spokeswoman said the ministry had not confirmed why the North Korean officials decided not to attend.

(Reporting by Joyce Lee and Josh Smith in Seoul and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Additional reporting by Choonsik Yoo, Ju-min Park and Joori Roh in Seoul and Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Jack Kim; Editing by Nick Macfie, Jeffrey Benkoe and James Dalgleish)
By Joyce Lee and David Brunnstrom SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, a senior diplomat said on Friday, according to news reports from the North's capital. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States wished to continue talks with North Korea and had "every expectation" that its leader, Kim Jong Un, would stick to pledges not to resume nuclear and missile testing. Pompeo gave no sign of U.S. willingness to soften its stance in demanding that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last month's summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in Hanoi, Russia's TASS news agency and the Associated Press reported. "We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital. The second Trump-Kim summit broke down over differences about U.S. demands for Pyongyang to denuclearize and North Korea's demand for dramatic relief from international sanctions imposed for its nuclear and missile tests, which it pursued for years in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. Choe said Pompeo and U.S. national security adviser John Bolton "created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States", TASS reported. Kim would make an announcement soon on his position on the denuclearization talks and North Korea's next steps, TASS quoted Choe as saying. She said Washington had thrown away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, AP reported. "I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger," AP quoted Choe as saying. However, she added: "Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful." Bolton told reporters outside the White House Choe's statement was "inaccurate." He said he had spoken to his South Korean counterpart but wanted to consult with other U.S. officials before responding further. Bolton later accompanied Trump to a pre-arranged meeting with top defense officials at the Pentagon. U.S. SEEKS MORE 'CONVERSATIONS' WITH NORTH Pompeo told reporters it was not the first time he had been called "gangster-like" by North Korea. "And following that we continued to have very professional conversations ... I have every expectation we will be able to continue to do that," he said. Pompeo said that in her remarks, Choe had left open the possibility that negotiations would continue. "It's the administration's desire that we continue to have conversations around this," Pompeo said. "As the president said when he was in Hanoi, the offer that they made simply didn't rise to the level that was acceptable, given what they were asking for in exchange." Kim had committed multiple times to Trump in Hanoi that he would not to resume nuclear or missile testing, Pompeo said. "That's Chairman Kim's word. We have every expectation he will live up to that commitment." Pompeo told Fox News he did not want to forecast "what we will do or what we might do" if Kim were to resume testing, but added: "That would be most unfortunate. I think Chairman Kim understands that." Trump has pointed to North Korea's freeze in nuclear and missile testing since 2017 as a positive outcome from nearly a year of diplomatic engagement with North Korea. He and Kim had previous exchanged fiery rhetoric that had raised fears of war. Washington has said it is closely watching activity at a North Korean rocket site that U.S. think tanks have said could be preparations for a new launch. Trump has made much of his personal chemistry with Kim and has said he would be "very disappointed" in Kim if North Korea were to resume testing. South Korea, which has an ambitious agenda of engagement with North Korea that is dependent on Pyongyang and Washington resolving at least some of their differences, said it was too early to tell what Choe's comments might mean. "We cannot judge the current situation based solely on Vice Minister Choe Son Hui's statements. We are watching the situation closely. In any situation, our government will endeavor for the restart of North Korea-U.S. negotiations," South Korea's presidential Blue House said in a statement. Choe's comments echoed the North's usual rhetoric at tense points in its dealings with Washington. North Korea expert Joshua Pollack said North Korea may be delivering an ultimatum. "They're putting down a marker, saying which way things are headed if nothing changes," Pollack, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said. Joel Wit of the 38 North think tank said North Korea was likely toughening its negotiating position after the collapse of the Hanoi summit. "It is likely to gauge the U.S. reaction in the days ahead before making a decision to launch a rocket," he said. Choe had said after the Hanoi talks that Kim might lose his commitment to pursue a deal with the United States after seeing it reject a request to lift some sanctions in return for the North destroying its main known nuclear complex. In Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang urged patience and further dialogue between North Korea and the United States. Earlier on Friday, a spokeswoman for South Korea's Ministry of Unification told a press briefing that the weekly inter-Korean meeting scheduled at a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, had been canceled after the North Koreans said they would not be sending senior officials. The spokeswoman said the ministry had not confirmed why the North Korean officials decided not to attend. (Reporting by Joyce Lee and Josh Smith in Seoul and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Additional reporting by Choonsik Yoo, Ju-min Park and Joori Roh in Seoul and Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Jack Kim; Editing by Nick Macfie, Jeffrey Benkoe and James Dalgleish)
Kim Jong Un may abandon diplomatic negotiations with the Trump administration and restart his regime's missile and nuclear tests, a senior North Korean official said Friday.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, addressing a meeting of diplomats and foreign media in Pyongyang, said the U.S. threw away a "golden opportunity" last month at the summit in Hanoi, where Kim and President Donald Trump met over two days but failed to reach any agreement on denuclearization or sanctions relief.

Now, Choe said, we have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation.

In Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed the threat, saying Trump would continue to pursue negotiations with the North Korean leader.

"She left open the possibility that negotiations would continue, for sure," Pompeo said of Choe's remarks. "Its the administration desire that we continue to have conversations around this."

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, center, speaks at a gathering for diplomats in Pyongyang, North Korea on Friday, March 15, 2018. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon make a decision on whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain the country's moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, the senior North Korean official said, noting the U.S. threw away a golden opportunity at the recent summit between their leaders. Interpreter is on Choe's right and the man standing is unidentified vice director of foreign ministrys North America desk.

Pompeo said Kim personally promised Trump that North Korea would not restart its nuclear and missile weapons testing. Kim's regime has not conducted any such tests for more than a year.

"In Hanoi on multiple occasions, he spoke directly to the president and made a commitment he would not resume nuclear testing, nor would he resume missile testing," Pompeo said. "We have every expectation he would live up to that."

Choe, who attended the February talks in Hanoi, said Kim was puzzled by what she called the eccentric negotiation position of the U.S. She blamed Pompeo and Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, for creating an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust by making uncompromising demands of North Korea.

"They're wrong about that," Pompeo said in response to her pointed accusations against him. The secretary of state noted that North Korean officials have attacked him before, alleging in June 2018, for example, that he had made "gangster-like" demands during a meeting in Pyongyang. Choe used that term again on Friday.

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But Pompeo said his relationship with North Korean officials is "very professional" and he has "every expectation" that will continue.

More: South Korea, US sign deal on Seoul paying more for US military

More: Amid reports that North Korea rocket launch facility operational; Trump would be 'very surprised' if Kim Jong Un renews testing

Choe said that despite the collapse of the Hanoi talks, Kim and Trump still had a good personal relationship. The chemistry is mysteriously wonderful," she said

She said she expects Kim to decide soon whether to restart the missile tests or keep the moratorium in place.

On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission said. For what reason do we have to make this train trip again? she said. I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger.

Trump and other U.S. officials say the summit collapsed because Kim asked for sweeping economic sanctions relief. In exchange, Kim offered to dismantle North Korea's main nuclear facility, Yongbyan. But the North Korean dictator would not commit to giving up North Korea's stockpile of nuclear bombs, its missiles or its other capabilities, U.S. officials said.

On Friday, Choe repeated North Korea's assertions that Kim had only asked for limited relief from the sanctions and had offered to permanently dismantle all its nuclear material production, including plutonium and uranium, around the Yongbyan facility.

More: Trump would be 'very disappointed' in Kim Jong Un if North Korea is rebuilding launch site

More: Exclusive: Pompeo on the failed North Korea talks, Otto Warmbier and his own trip to Iowa

Choe said the U.S. had been inflexible during the Hanoi discussions and called the demand that denuclearization come before sanctions are eased an absurd sophism. She added that while South Korean President Moon Jae-in has tried to help bring the U.S. and North Korea together to talk, the South is a player, not an arbiter because it is an ally of Washington.

She said even though the people, military and officials of the munitions industry have sent Kim thousands of petitions to never give up the nuclear program, he went to Hanoi to build trust and carry out mutually agreed commitments one by try and step by step.

What is clear is that the U.S. has thrown away a golden opportunity this time, she said. Im not sure why the U.S. came out with this different description. We never asked for the removal of sanctions in their entirety.

This time we understood very clearly that the United States has a very different calculation to ours, she added.

She refused to comment directly when asked by one of the ambassadors about news reports the North may be preparing for another missile launch or satellite launch. Recently released satellite images show that North Korea began rebuilding a key launch site around the time of the Vietnam summit between Trump and Kim.

Whether to maintain this moratorium or not is the decision of our chairman of the state affairs commission, she said, using one of Kims titles. He will make his decision in a short period of time.

Journalists were not allowed to ask questions during the briefing, which lasted nearly an hour.

Deirdre Shesgreen of USA TODAY contributed to this story

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: North Korea threatens to restart missile tests, end negotiations with Trump
SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP)  A court in North Macedonia on Friday sentenced 16 people, including a former interior minister, from 7 to 18 years in prison for their role in a mob invasion of parliament at the height of a political crisis in 2017.

In one of the largest trials since the country's independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, the court sentenced former interior minister Mitko Cavkov to 18 years in prison after finding him guilty of charges of endangering the constitutional order and security.

Fifteen others received sentences between seven and 15 years for similar offences, while one defendant  prominent opera singer Igor Durlovski  was acquitted.

More than 100 people, including lawmakers and journalists, were injured in the April 2017 incident when an angry mob stormed parliament and tried to block the election of a new speaker.

Judge Dobrila Kacarska said the attack had been carefully planned in advance, with pre-selected targets including current Prime Minister Zoran Zaev and other lawmakers in his left-wing Social Democrats and their allies.

"The shameful parliament violence jeopardized the reputation of North Macedonia," she said.

Defense lawyers said they would appeal the verdicts.

The conservative main opposition VMRO-DPMNE party claimed Friday's rulings were politically biased and unfair. Most of the convicted are former VMRO officials or supporters.

"This case was judged by political motives, not legal facts," party secretary-general Igor Janusev said in a statement. "(North) Macedonia is a country where justice is trampled upon and the rule of law does not exist."

A total pf 33 people had been initially charged over the parliament invasion. But 15 were later pardoned under a special amnesty because they had not been accused of engaging in acts of violence.

Those pardoned included three VMRO lawmakers, who  after the amnesty  rebelled against their party's line and backed the government in a crucial vote on North Macedonia's historic name deal with neighboring Greece. VMRO expelled the three for that, accusing them of a trade-off with Zaev's Social Democrats.

One more suspect is due to be tried separately.
Trump declaring an emergency at the southern border. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Republican senators standing up to Trump, Beto ORourkes presidential announcement, and the national fascination with the college admissions scandal.

The struggle between the White House and an empowered Congress has spread to the Senate  and to congressional Republicans  who have voted down Trumps national emergency declaration and U.S. support for Saudi Arabias military campaign in Yemen. Is this about Congress trying to reclaim its position as a coequal branch of government, as some Republicans claim, or is the party turning against Trump?

Republicans in general, who continue to give Trump a 90 percent approval rating, and the Vichy Republicans in Congress in particular, have not remotely turned against their dear leader. Yes, a dozen GOP senators voted to express disapproval of Trumps faux declaration of a national emergency, but almost all of them are in locked-down Republican seats or retiring. Even Ben Sasse, the Nebraska senator who has marketed himself as something of a principled conservative Trump critic, capitulated, coming up with a Rube Goldberg-esque argument that blamed his pro-Trump vote on Nancy Pelosi. If nothing else, hes now certified his status as a successor to the insufferable, now mercifully departed, Jeff Flake. Whats most telling is that of the half dozen senators up for reelection in 2020 in states that are purple or purple-ish  that is, the endangered Republican incumbents who could benefit by dissing Trump on what was fated to be only a symbolic vote  only one defied him: Susan Collins of Maine. If Collins is the partys sole profile in courage, its hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

The most notorious among Collinss Trump-bootlicking colleagues is by default Thom Tillis of North Carolina. He took the trouble to publish a Washington Post op-ed declaration that he would sacrifice his intellectual honesty if he voted to ratify an Executive branch power grab like Trumps, then flipped and voted to uphold Trumps power grab anyway. Why? He is terrified of a possible primary challenge by a far-right loon back home. That could be Mark Meadows, whom many will recall from his indignant performance in the Michael Cohen hearing, where he proved he was not a racist by having a silent black woman, Lynne Patton, pose wordlessly and inanimately behind him. Truly, the term intellectual honesty and Republican member of Congress should never be used in the same sentence.

No doubt some Democrats will inflate this very mild GOP expression of cajones  soon to be neutered by a Trump veto  into a sign that impeachment might now be in the cards. Not happening. The GOP controls the Senate by a 53-47 majority. The vote against Trump on the resolution disapproving of the national emergency, with those 12 GOP defections, was 59-41. The vote required to impeach Trump in a Senate trial: 67-33. Pelosi was completely correct when she said its not worth expending energy on an impeachment push that is doomed to defeat. Of course the Democrats must (and will) investigate Trumps high crimes to the fullest under the excellent auspices of House committee chairmen like Elijah Cummings, Adam Schiff, and Jerrold Nadler. But if Trump vacates the presidency before he finishes his term, its not going to be because hes impeached by the Republican majority in the Senate. Itll be because, like Nixon and Agnew before him, hell feel compelled to make a deal to escape the criminal penalties that imperil his resumption of a post-Washington private life.

Among those flogging Pelosi for tabling impeachment, there may be no more destructive Democrat than the deep-pocketed donor Tom Steyer, the impresario of the Need to Impeach PAC. He is attacking Pelosi (among other Democrats) for somehow being squishy. Hard as it is to fathom, Steyer may well surpass Howard Schultz as the most clueless billionaire in American politics today  assuming we leave out Trump, whose professed billionaire status has never been verified.

After weeks of speculation, Beto ORourke has officially opened his 2020 campaign. How will his entrance change the race for the other Democrats?

God knows. It remains way too early for prognostications. The race is a scramble with a vast cast of characters and no clear narrative. Its so wide-open that a candidate like Kirsten Gillibrand, already polling near zero in Iowa, can stay in the race even after shes been exposed harboring a sexual harasser on her staff while portraying herself as a crusader for sexual-harassment reform in Congress. Theres also a big missing piece of the puzzle, Joe Biden, whose preening, buck-raking public vacillation about his intentions is eroding his credibility as a chief executive by the day.

As for ORourke, I was struck by the negative editorializing in the Times news story on his announcement of his candidacy. The paper pointed out he had few notable legislative accomplishments, was without a signature proposal that might serve as the ideological anchor of his bid, and only offered a broad message of national unity and generational change. Wasnt every word of this true about Barack Obama? It made me wonder if ORourke might actually have a shot. (True, he is white, but nobodys perfect.)

As Democrats look at the campaign ahead, its important they heed the lessons of Trumps victory. Few notable legislative accomplishments is not an impediment to winning. Oversharing on social media  whether on Facebook Live (in ORourkes case) or Twitter  is not an impediment. And ORourkes youthful DWI arrest is not disqualifying  least of all in the context of our current presidents ever-expanding rap sheet.

ORourkes political skills will be tested soon enough in the caucus and primary states that favor his brand of retail politics. His ability to attract small donors is not to be sniffed at, and his race against Ted Cruz was impressive, if a defeat. Another good sign for ORourke was Trumps first volley in response to his entrance into the race: Ive never seen so much hand movement. I said, Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts? Two things Trump should never be talking about are (a) hands, and (b) insanity. Hes rattled by the guy.

The so-called Varsity Blues prosecution continues to provide a cast of grifters and clowns, but also points to the quieter, completely legal ways that college admissions can exacerbate social inequities. Why are onlookers so drawn to one scandal, and not the other?

There has been an enormous amount of good journalism about the inequities of college admissions, especially at elite schools, in recent years, and I do think many Americans have been rightfully angry. But those most affected  especially the nonaffluent Americans at the bottom of the heap  have been powerless to do anything about it. Whats more, the grotesque inequality built into the system is usually legal, with exhibit A being Charles Kushners donation of $2.5 million to speed his son Jared into Harvard in the 1990s. (Charles Kushner, a felon, did go to prison, but not for this.)

What put this prosecution to the top of public awareness is, first of all, that it actually is a prosecution, and one that triggered the kind of flashy multiple arrests one associates with the smashing of a drug ring. The other contributing factor, of course, is celebrity, although until now I did not know that the former Full House star Lori Loughlins daughter was a beauty vlogger who publicly mocked the school that admitted her, USC, even as she used her dorm room to hawk products for Amazon Prime and Sephora. Still another factor in this scandals wide appeal, as others have noted, is that its refreshing, if only for a few days, to have a scandal involving a fresh cast of entitled rich assholes who are not Trumps.

Of all the outrages in this story, the ultimate may be the revelation that the front to which Felicity Huffman wrote her check to fix her daughters test scores, the so-called Key Worldwide Foundation, purported to be a charity providing guidance, encouragement, and opportunity to disadvantaged students around the world. This is literally the reverse of the Robin Hood Foundation. Its just the sort of collision of scam and hypocrisy that would make a great Mamet play were it not for the fact that the only celebrity in Hollywood publicly defending Huffman is David Mamet.
Paris (AFP) - Attacks on two mosques in New Zealand which left at least 49 people dead on Friday have sparked horror, revulsion and dismay around the world.

One of the gunmen  believed to be an Australian extremist -- apparently livestreamed the deadly assault.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, describing it as "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

Here is a summary of the main international reactions so far.

- Muslims face 'mass killing' -

"With this attack, hostility towards Islam that the world has been has been idly watching and even encouraging for some time, has gone beyond the boundaries of individual harassment to reach the level of mass killing," said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"If measures are not taken right away, news of other disasters will follow this one... I am calling on the world, in particular the West, to take quick measures," he said.

- 'Do the necessary' -

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said he hoped New Zealand "will arrest these terrorists and do the necessary under the law of the country."

Indonesian President Joko Widoyo, head of the world's largest Muslim country, said "we strongly condemn these kind of violent acts".

- Cruel, cynical attack -

"An attack against peaceful people gathering for prayer is shocking in its cruelty and cynicism," Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

"I hope that those involved will be severely punished," he said in a message to Arden.

- 'Harrowing news' -

"Harrowing news from New Zealand overnight" said EU Council president Donald Tusk.

"The brutal attack... will never diminish the tolerance and decency that New Zealand is famous for."

- 'Sickening act of violence' -

British Prime Minister Theresa May offered deepest condolences "after the horrifying terrorist attack in Christchurch. My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence."

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- 'Racist hatred' -

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she mourned "with New Zealanders for their fellow citizens who were attacked and murdered out of racist hatred while peacefully praying in their mosques. We stand together against such acts of terrorism."

French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Merkel's message, condemning an "odious attack" and saying France "stands against any form of extremism".

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the US-led alliance "stands with our friend and partner New Zealand in defence of our open societies and shared values".

- 'Fanatics want to destroy society' -

Spanish Premier Pedro Sanchez said his thoughts were with the victims, families and government of New Zealand after attacks by "fanatics and extremists who want to destroy our societies".

- 'Painful memories' -

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg urged the international community to combat all forms of extremism after the Christchurch attacks, which revived painful memories of the 2011 Breivik mass killings in Norway.

"It's obviously very sad. It recalls painful memories of our own experience with July 22, the most difficult moment in the post-war period in Norway."
Attacks on two mosques in New Zealand which left at least 49 people dead on Friday -- the Muslim day of prayer -- have sparked horror, revulsion and dismay around the world.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the massacre in the city of Christchurch was clearly a "terrorist attack" and described it as "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

Here is a summary of global reactions.

- 'Horrible massacre' -

"My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the mosques," US President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter as his spokeswoman denounced it as a "vicious act of hate".

- Muslims face 'mass killing' -

"With this attack, hostility towards Islam that the world has been idly watching and even encouraging for some time, has gone beyond the boundaries of individual harassment to reach the level of mass killing," said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"If measures are not taken right away, news of other disasters will follow this one."

- 'Depraved and despicable' -

"Murder of people at prayer, in their most holy and sacred place, is a depraved and despicable act. For people of all religions and of none, a red line has been crossed," Israeli President Reuven Rivlin wrote on Twitter.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also said Israel "mourns the wanton murder of innocent worshippers in Christchurch and condemns the brazen act of terror."

And Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas described it as a "horrific and heinous criminal act", the official WAFA news agency said.

- 'Painful memories' -

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg urged the international community to combat all forms of extremism, saying the Christchurch attacks revived painful memories of the 2011 mass killings by rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik.

"It recalls painful memories of our own experience with July 22, the most difficult moment in the post-war period in Norway."

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- Not in my daughter's name -

The mother of an 11-year-old Swedish girl killed in a 2017 jihadist attack expressed shock after the New Zealand gunman said one of his motivations was to avenge her death.

The attack "goes against everything Ebba stood for," Jeanette Akerlund told Swedish public television SVT.

Another person flagged by the Christchurch shooter was Luca Traini, an Italian jailed for 12 years over six non-fatal racist shootings in 2018, whose name was reportedly engraved on one of the guns.

But Traini's lawyer Gianluca Giulianelli told Italian radio his client "would certainly distance himself from this tragedy... because he has... a strong feeling of repentance for what he did."

- 'Odious but not my fault' -

Writing on Twitter, Italy's far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini condemned the attacks but also said he pitied those who would blame him for the bloodshed.

"Massacre in #NewZealand, condemnation and utter contempt for the odious murderers, prayers for the innocent victims, compassion for those who say 'it's always Salvini's fault'," he tweeted.

Elsewhere, Dutch far-right MP Geert Wilders, who is known for his outspoken anti-Islam views, said such violence was never acceptable.

"These are shocking images. It is always sick to see people use violence, whoever you are and whatever you may think," he told public broadcaster NPO.

"You never use violence... This is simply inhuman."

- Prayers, solidarity with Muslims -

At Friday prayers in Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque, Grand Mufti Muhammad Ahmad, the city's highest Muslim authority, urged worshippers to hold special prayers for the victims of the attacks.

And in Rome, Pope Francis assured "all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his heartfelt solidarity," saying he was deeply saddened by such a "senseless acts of violence."

And Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand's head of state, sent condolences to those touched by the "appalling events" in Christchurch, saying her "thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders."

- Increased patrols -

London's Metropolitan police stepped up "reassurance patrols around mosques" and increased its contact with "with communities of all faiths," offering advice on how people and places could protect themselves.

Australian police in New South Wales also increased patrols around mosques as a precaution.

- 'Shocking cruelty' -

Indonesian President Joko Widoyo, head of the world's largest Muslim country, said "we strongly condemn these kinds of violent acts," while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi denounced the bloodshed as a "dastardly attack."

"An attack against peaceful people gathering for prayer is shocking in its cruelty and cynicism," said Russian President Vladimir Putin, expressing hope that those responsible would "be severely punished."

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a message of condolence to New Zealand, with the country denouncing the violence and extending "sincere sympathy to the bereaved families."

"Harrowing news from New Zealand overnight," said EU Council president Donald Tusk, denouncing it as a "brutal attack" but one which would never "diminish the tolerance and decency that New Zealand is famous for."

- 'Racist hatred' -

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she mourned for those "attacked and murdered out of racist hatred while peacefully praying" while French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the "odious attack" and Britain's Theresa May denounced it as a "sickening act of violence."

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his thoughts were with those affected by the attacks of "fanatics and extremists who want to destroy our societies".

- UN minute of silence -

"The murderous, Islamophobic, terrorist attack is yet another reminder that racism kills," said UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet as the Human Rights Council observed a minute of silence during a session on combatting extremist ideologies.

UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi said bloodshed "motivated by hatred and fear of others" was "deeply shocking."

burs-hmw/har/dcr
SYDNEY (Reuters) - One of four people detained in New Zealand after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch is Australian, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday.

"I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody I have been advised is an Australian-born citizen," he told reporters in Sydney.

"As family members with our New Zealand cousins today, we grieve, we are shocked, we are appalled, we are outraged, and we stand here and condemn absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist."

New Zealand media have reported that between nine and 27 people were killed in the shootings.

(Reporting by Tom Westbrook; Editing by Nick Macfie)
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A Malaysian was among those wounded during a shooting at two mosques in the city of Christchurch, Malaysia's High Commission in New Zealand said on Friday.

"So far, one Malaysian is confirmed injured and currently receiving treatment at the hospital," the commission said on its Twitter account.

Multiple fatalities were inflicted when at least one gunman opened fire on worshippers at the mosques.

(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; Editing by Kim Coghill)
Paul Manafort helped pioneer the business of helping foreign governments sway American policy, but his prison sentence on Wednesday may mark the end of the era he helped kick off.

For hiding his work advising politicians in Ukraine and the tens of millions of dollars he received for it, the former chairman of Donald Trumps presidential campaign was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in federal prison by two separate judges.

Before handing down her sentence, D.C. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson chastised Manafort for his work.

The longtime Republican consultant spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system, she told the courtroom. It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved. Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann described Manaforts work as corrosive to faith in the political process, both in the United States and abroad.

Last week, a federal judge in Virginia sentenced Manafort to four years for tax and bank fraud hiding the money he made. On Wednesday, Jackson added three and a half years to that sentence for his failure to register his actions on behalf of the government of Ukraine, that countrys pro-Moscow Party of Regions and former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych.

Manaforts case had already sent a message to the D.C.s foreign lobbyists, but the jail time put an exclamation point on it.

When he and a former partner, Rick Gates, first faced charges for failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, lobbyists and public relations firms rushed to update their paperwork and, in some cases, registered for the first time.

The FARA law was passed in 1938 in response to pro-Nazi propaganda efforts trying to influence American views of Hitlers Germany. Under the law, individuals in the U.S. working to help foreign governments influence U.S. policy must register with the Justice Department and provide updates on what countries they represent, how much they are paid and their activities.

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Former prosecutors said that foreign lobbyists like Manafort should expect more scrutiny in the future.

Its clear that FARA enforcement has been relatively dormant for a long time, Duncan Levin, a former federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York and former chief of asset forfeiture in the Manhattan District Attorneys Office, told TIME. The public can expect to see a new dawn in cases exposing people who have made money representing foreign governments but failed to disclose those ties, Levin said.

All you have to do is look at the [2016] election to see that unregulated foreign agents can pose a major threat to the U.S. election process, Levin said.

Indeed, the Justice Department has recently added prosecutors to a unit that enforces FARA  headed by a former prosecutor from Special Counsel Robert Muellers team  with agency officials saying earlier this month that those investigations would be a priority.

In the early 1990s, Manafort and has partners, Roger Stone and others, advised clients including Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko and Jonas Savimbi, the former Angolan rebel leader responsible for trading millions of carats in diamonds for weapons. In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Manafort also developed a niche advising the campaigns of politicians running in newly founded democracies in former Soviet Bloc states.

But it wasnt until he stepped into the limelight, managing the Republican national convention for Trump, that Manaforts work started to draw attention from prosecutors.

As with other key players in the 2016 election, Mueller pursued the charges in part to try to entice Manafort into cooperating by testifying about what he knew. After a jury convicted him on eight financial crimes in Virginia, Manafort pleaded guilty in the D.C. case and began cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

But that cooperation deal fell apart after investigators said that Manafort was not truthful, including about central parts of the probe.

Still, lobbyists for foreign governments can take comfort from the fact that Manaforts crimes were not just failing to register but also included hiding that income on his taxes and bank forms as well as his handling of the investigation.

Had Manafort not lied to Muellers team, he would be in and out of federal prison in a just a few short years, Levin said. The lie to Mueller is becoming his most serious thing that happened to Manafort, Levin said.

Trump has repeatedly showed sympathy for Manafort and his reaction to Wednesdays verdict was no different. I feel very badly for Paul Manafort, Trump told reporters during a White House meeting highlighting drug trafficking at the border. Its a very sad situation, Trump said, adding that he has not thought about a pardon for Manafort.

But even a pardon would only help Manafort so much. Manafort is now facing charges in New York state for mortgage fraud. If convicted and sentenced in that case, he could face serving time in New York State prison, which a Trump pardon could not save him from.
Pivotal Software PVTL reported fourth-quarter fiscal 2019 non-GAAP loss of 7 cents per share, much narrower than the year-ago quarters loss of 12 cents. The figure was also narrower than the Zacks Consensus Estimate of loss of 9 cents.



Revenues of $169.2 million increased 27% on a year-over-year basis, primarily driven by higher subscription revenues. The figure missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $170 million.



Pivotal Software, Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise

Pivotal Software, Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise | Pivotal Software, Inc. Quote





Quarter Details



Subscription revenues (66.5% of total revenues) were $112.5 million, up 50% year over year due to an increase in the number of customers and growth in service adoption. Services revenues (33.5% of total revenues) declined 2.6% year over year to $56.7 million as a few projects were moved out of the reported quarter.



Subscription customers grew 18% year over year to 377. The company added nine net new customers in the quarter and 58 in fiscal 2019 up 32% year over year.



Notably, Pivotal stated that about 33% of its customers are Fortune 100 companies.



In the reported quarter, company also added a few Fortune 500 customers including HSBC, British Telecom, Prime Therapeutics and CVS Health Corporation CVS.



Dollar-based net expansion rate was 149% in fourth-quarter fiscal 2019. During the quarter, the company released updates to Pivotal Application Service (PAS) and Pivotal Container Service (PKS).



Notably, the latest release, PKS 1.3 provided the latest Kubernetes support to Microsoft MSFT Azure. The company noted that currently it has more than 100 customers who are using PKS.



Pivotals exclusive solutions are helping it retain and attract customers per management. This is evident from the fact that the company closed 55 software deals worth more than $1 million and 15 deals worth more than $10 million in fiscal 2019.



Operating Details



In fourth-quarter fiscal 2019, non-GAAP gross profit surged 45.7% year over year to $114.9 million. Gross margin expanded 870 basis points (bps) to 67.9% owing to growth in subscription revenues.



Non-GAAP sales & marketing (S&M) expenses increased 19.3% year over year to $69.3 million. Non-GAAP general & administrative (G&A) expenses increased 17.3% to $19 million. Non-GAAP research & development (R&D) expenses increased 22.6% to $47.4 million.



Non-GAAP operating expenses increased 20.1% year over year to $135.7 million.



Non-GAAP operating loss of $20.8 million was narrower than the year-ago quarters loss of $34 million.



Balance Sheet



Pivotal exited the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $ 701.7 million compared with $664.8 million as of Nov 2, 2018.



Cash flow from operations was $7.9 million in the reported quarter. Cash used in operations was $36.2 million in third-quarter 2019 .



Guidance



First-Quarter Fiscal 2020



Subscription revenues are anticipated between $124.5 and $125.5 million. Total revenues are anticipated between $183 and $185 million.



Non-GAAP loss from operations is expected between $12.5 million and $13.5 million. Non-GAAP net loss is expected between 5 cents and 6 cents per share.



Fiscal 2020



Subscription revenues are anticipated between $542 and $547 million. Total revenues are anticipated in the range of $798-$806 million.



Non-GAAP loss from operations is expected between $36 million and $38 million. Non-GAAP net loss is expected to be in the range of 13 cents to 15 cents per share.



Pivotal stated that it will continue to work with VMware VMW to increase adoption of PKS.



Currently, Pivotal Software carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



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A police van outside Makkah Mosque in Leeds (PA)

British police patrolled mosques in London, Manchester and Birmingham on Friday following the terror attacks in New Zealand which left 49 people dead.

The head of British counter-terror police said his officers would stand together with Muslim communities across the country in the wake of the deadly attacks.

Today we will be stepping up reassurance patrols around mosques and increasing engagement with communities of all faith, giving advice on how people and places can protect themselves, said Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Neil Basu.

We are standing together with our Muslim communities and all those shocked and horrified by this terrorist attack in New Zealand.

A police officer stands opposite Finsbury Park Mosque in London, ahead of the Friday prayer service, following the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand.

West Midlands Police assistant chief constable Matt Ward said there was no intelligence suggesting an increased threat but said patrols were needed because of what happened elsewhere.

Officers will be engaging with key religious buildings today to reassure local people, he said.

We will continue to work closely together and unite against those who seek, through violence and extremism, to intimidate or cause fear.

Christian James Lynch, from Riverside Church, hands out flowers to Muslims as they leave Birmingham Central Mosque as Friday prayers finish after the attack on the Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

There have been attacks carried out on British mosques in recent years, most notably that by Darren Osborne who was jailed for 43 years after driving into a crowd at Finsbury Parkl mosque and killing one person.

Assistant chief constable Russ Jackson, of Greater Manchester Police, said: We will be working hard to reassure them and communities of all faiths.

We have nothing to suggest a threat locally but regardless of this we want to reassure people and so we will be increasing patrols in and around local mosques.

Imam Qari Asim talks to PC Plumber as he visits the Makkah Mosque in Leeds to lend assurance following the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon expressed solidarity with the Muslim community after attackers opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch during Friday prayers.

On behalf of the Scottish Government and the people of Scotland I extend my thoughts to the people of New Zealand and everyone affected by the horrific attacks in Christchurch, she said.

Story continues

The UK authorities were not alone in authorising such patrols.

A policeman looks at flowers following the attack on the Finsbury Park mosque (PA)

Read More

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Racist Australian senator condemned for anti-Muslim comments

YouTube star PewdiePie sickened after gunman uses his name

In France security measures near religious sites were also stepped up.

Mr Basu said British counter-terror police were monitoring events in New Zealand closely.

He added: Our international network of UK counter terrorism officers will be ready to support our counterparts in New Zealand in responding to and investigating this appalling attack.

We stand together with all our communities and partners here in the UK and overseas.
Warsaw (AFP) - Poland's powerful Catholic church on Thursday published a report admitting that nearly 400 of its clergy had sexually abused children and minors over the last three decades, reflecting findings published last month by a charity focused on abuse in the church.

The Polish Bishops' Conference said in its report that it found 382 clergy sexually abused a total of 624 victims, including 198 under 15 years of age and 184 adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18.

The statistical report which covers the period between 1990 and 2018, did not include the names of perpetrators.

"We know that this is still only the tip of the iceberg," Jesuit Adam Zak, the Polish episcopate's coordinator for child protection and youth, told reporters at a press conference in Warsaw.

"The church must be impeccable and firm in stigmatising evil. But it must... also show mercy to the perpetrators if they strive for internal transformation, if they regret (their actions)," Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski told journalists in Warsaw.

Archbishops speaking at the news conference insisted that paedophilia was not limited to the Catholic Church and that the majority of abuse took place in families.

"Nevertheless, even if there were just one victim (of clerical) abuse, this can only bring pain and shame," Polish Primate, Archbishop Wojciech Polak, told reporters.

In February, a charity supporting victims of paedophile priests in Poland released a groundbreaking report documenting nearly 400 cases of sex abuse by clergymen in the staunchly Catholic country.

Activists from the "Be Not Afraid" foundation presented the 27-page document to Pope Francis at a gathering of the world's top Catholic bishops at a Vatican summit tackling clerical sex abuse.

Liberal opposition politician Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus, who was a key figure in the creation of the victims' report, on Thursday said that the Polish church's report "spat in the face" to victims.

Story continues

"Today the Episcopate... defended itself as an institution, defended the perpetrators, and did not stand on the side of the victims," she said, adding that the church failed to address the issue of compensating victims.

The foundation's report documents details the cases of 85 priests convicted of paedophilia, another 88 whose alleged abuse has been exposed by the media and 95 others accused by alleged victims.

The report also names 24 Polish archbishops and bishops accused of covering up abuse.
Caracas (AFP) - A Polish journalist in Venezuela was beaten by police in the troubled South American country, he said in accounts published by his newspaper and Venezuela's press union on Friday.

The account added to a long list of allegations of brutality and arbitrary arrest of media workers in Venezuela, mostly targeting Venezuelans not working for state media but also increasingly foreign correspondents.

Tomasz Surdel, who has been in Venezuela for two months on assignment for Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza daily, said he was grabbed by masked and armed members of the FAES special actions unit of the police in Caracas.

The officers put a bag over his head and started hitting him with blunt objects in the head and ribs, he was cited as saying by the Venezuelan SNTP press union.

"When they finished and removed the bag I saw a pistol barrel in front of my eyes. One of them ordered the gun to be fired in my face. The other one, laughing, pulled the trigger. The gun wasn't loaded," Surdel was quoted saying.

The union published photos of Surdel's bloodied and bruised face.

His newspaper emphasized that the alleged police violence occurred as Surdel was carrying out his journalistic duties.

It urged "a strong reaction from the (Polish) foreign ministry and the Polish embassy in Caracas to the authorities" in Venezuela.

Venezuela's political tensions are bubbling over as President Nicolas Maduro grapples with a challenge to the country's leadership from Juan Guaido, the head of the opposition-run congress who has been recognized as interim president by the US and 50 other countries.

Security forces remain loyal to Maduro. But economic pressure is building as US sanctions on Venezuelan oil sales bite harder and the country's population struggles with scarcity of food and basic necessities.

Two weeks ago, the two biggest Spanish-language TV networks in the United States, Univision and Telemundo, condemned the brief detention of their reporters and crews after they interviewed Maduro.

Last week, a US journalist, Cody Weddle, who had worked in Venezuela for several years, was detained then deported after a 12-hour interrogation by military intelligence officers in Caracas.

An NGO backing freedom of expression in Venezuela, Espacio Publico, has counted around 50 detentions of news media employees in Venezuela so far this year.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - All U.S. diplomats remaining in Venezuela left the country on Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, amid a political crisis over the legitimacy of President Nicolas Maduro's 2018 re-election. "U.S. diplomats will now continue that mission from other locations where they will continue to help manage the flow of humanitarian assistance to the Venezuelan people and support the democratic actors bravely resisting tyranny," Pompeo said in a statement. A U.S. official said the diplomats were flown out in a civilian charter aircraft. The State Department had already announced that it would withdraw its remaining diplomatic staff from Venezuela this week. Washington has taken the lead in recognizing Juan Guaido, the 35-year-old Congress chief who declared himself interim president in January, calling Maduros 2018 re-election a fraud. Most countries in Europe and Latin America have followed suit. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Additional reporting by Phil Stewart; writing by Doina Chiacu; editing by David Alexander and David Gregorio)
This story is published in conjunction with THE CITY, an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that gets results for the people of New York. Vendor Bertha Vidal, 47, works near the 111th Street subway stop in Corona, Queens, on March 5. Photo: Christine Chung/THE CITY

On most days for the past 12 years, Sanwar Ahmed has made a living preparing jhal muri, a spicy puffed rice snack, on the streets of Jackson Heights, Queens.

He walks to his rectangle of sidewalk on bustling 73rd Street, home to dozens of Bangladeshi small businesses, and unpacks his mobile kitchen: a white card table and a faded baby-changing table.

Ahmed, 89, used to entice customers with his joyful singing of folk songs from his native Bangladesh. He doesnt sing anymore  not after two police officers and two inspectors from the citys Department of Health and Mental Hygiene hauled away his pushcart, his puffed rice, and even his mustard oil in June 2016, all never to be seen again.

Ahmed lost his means of earning a living  and got a $1,000 fine for a permit violation.

There are no fun parts now, because the police bother me, but before I had a lot of joy, Ahmed said in the Sylheti dialect, through an interpreter. A lot of people liked me.

Court papers filed Thursday indicate that Ahmed will soon see a small measure of relief: a settlement in the class-action lawsuit filed in 2017 by the Urban Justice Center on behalf of hundreds of vendors whose carts were seized and apparently trashed.

The vendors never got the requisite vouchers for their belongings  or even notice of their right to hearings, their lawyers argued.

The settlement pending before Manhattan federal judge Sidney Stein commits the city  without admitting to any wrongdoing  to pay about $188,000 to more than 300 street food vendors whose carts were confiscated without documentation.

Ahmed, the named plaintiff, stands to receive $2,501. Other class members who file a claim within a year will each receive $585 to $1,000, according to court documents.

The NYPD and the Health Department also committed to enhanced training of their enforcement personnel, in order to ensure that vendors get their seized-property vouchers. The settlement does not, however, require city agencies to stop confiscating carts deemed to be operating illegally.

A fair settlement has been reached in the best interest of all parties, said Christian Madrid, a city Law Department spokesman.

A Long Waiting List for Permits

Sanwar Ahmed now has a much smaller food stand in Jackson Heights after city officials confiscated his larger food cart. Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

City officials confiscated several food carts from vendors operating without permits in Corona, Queens, in October 2017. Photo: Courtesy of the Street Vendor Project

Attorneys working with Ahmed and other vendors say that ensuring that city enforcers dont simply send unpermitted carts to the scrap heap marks an important step forward for those without access to any of the just roughly 3,000 citywide food-vending permits currently issued by the Health Department.

The waiting list for the permits, last opened in 2007, currently runs to 1,450 names. Vendors say that the coveted $200 permits, which last two years, can resell illegally for as much as $28,000.

The city has rules and laws that require them to properly voucher, and some enforcement agencies just were not following the rules, said Matthew Shapiro, an attorney with the Urban Justice Center. As long as everyone knows to follow those rules that other people were using, its going to stop the practice of throwing peoples stuff away.

Ahmed and his attorneys searched for his cart. A representative from the Department of Sanitation told the lawyers that seized carts are transported back to police precincts.

But the Police Department reported it didnt have the goods. Nearly three weeks after the carts seizure, a Health Department official relayed in an email that Ahmeds property likely had been discarded.

Without his cart, Ahmed told THE CITY, he was unable to pay for food for several days, and relied on community support to get back on his feet. He shields his new cart with fabric whenever he can, trying to remain under the radar.

Bertha Angelica Vidal, 47, recalled wanting to cry when her cart  filled with tamales, vats of arroz con leche and two types of corn salad she had made  was taken away by authorities three years ago in Corona, Queens.

I return home and I say, Oh my God, and my little 5-year-old son tells me not to go back out there anymore, Vidal said in Spanish, through an interpreter. I have another son who is in a wheelchair  I have to work a lot to pay for that.

Vidal said she plans on using her settlement compensation to upgrade her shopping cart to a more durable aluminum cart  and is saving up to possibly rent a permit in the future.

Vendors swap stories about being wrestled to the ground by police, and which locations appear to be hotspots for enforcement, which they say varies widely depending on the time and place.

Some vendors report receiving less police attention as of late, but say that fears and anxieties persist.

Packing Up and Heading Home

From left: Food vendor Maria Calle, 50, at her home in Corona, Queens, on March 5. Calle uses a makeshift setup with a grill on a shopping cart in the winter. Photo: Christine Chung/THE CITY. From left: Food vendor Maria Calle, 50, at her home in Corona, Queens, on March 5. Calle uses a makeshift setup with a grill on a shopping cart in the... more From left: Food vendor Maria Calle, 50, at her home in Corona, Queens, on March 5. Calle uses a makeshift setup with a grill on a shopping cart in the winter. Photo: Christine Chung/THE CITY.

Since Ahmeds cart was confiscated, the number of tickets the Health Department has issued annually for unpermitted mobile food units has decreased by 58 percent  from 1,468 in 2016 to 608 in 2018.

Maria Calle, 50, who sells grilled meat skewers in Corona, said her wares have been confiscated multiple times by police. While shes operated without incident for a while, she still feels nervous.

With police, they are kind of two-sided. Sometimes they are nice. They are protecting us. But some of them are also harassing us, Calle said. The fines are tough and there are some bad people, but this is the life I have.

A persistent fear of costly fines and difficulties with his immigration status have Ahmed planning to soon shutter his business and move back to Bangladesh.

This lawsuit is giving me some kind of peace. Im happy that I can survive with this money and that justice is done, he said. Im happy to leave with some kind of victory.

Are you a food vendor or work with someone who is? Whats been your experience with NYPD, city officials or navigating the permit process? Wed like to talk to you. Call, text, WhatsApp or Signal us at 718-866-8674 or email us at workers@thecity.nyc.

Dont miss out on the next big story. Sign up for THE CITYs newsletter here.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to attend the May 6-7 Arctic Council meeting in Finland in a show of Washington's commitment to the region amid growing U.S. concern about China's interests there, a senior U.S. official said on Friday. Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States are members of the Council, which coordinates Arctic policy and is gaining clout as sea ice thaws to open up new trade routes and intensify competition for its oil, gas and mineral resources. Asked if Pompeo was expected to attend the May gathering in Rovaniemi, Finland, the senior Trump administration official said: "We do ... unless he gets pulled off to one of his many other issues." "We want to show that we are committed to being an Arctic nation, an Arctic power," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told a small group of reporters. "Chinese action has really focused everyone's minds, including the Russians." China became an observer member of the Arctic Council in 2013 and last year it outlined its ambitions to extend President Xi Jinpings signature Belt and Road Initiative to the Arctic by developing shipping lanes opened up by global warming. Asked if Pompeo would attend the meeting, a State Department spokesman said he had no travel to announce. (Reporting by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Tom Brown)
WASHINGTON  The Trump administration is barring International Criminal Court officials from entering the United States, a move intended to shield American military and intelligence personnel from an investigation into alleged torture in Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the move Friday in response to a pending investigation  launched in 2017 by the international court's prosecutor Fatou Bensouda  into what she said were possible "war crimes" committed in Afghanistan.

"Im announcing a policy of U.S. visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of U.S. personnel," Pompeo told reporters.

He declined to say how many would be blocked from coming to the U.S.. He also said visa confidentiality rules prohibited him from naming the people affected.

In response, the ICC said it would "continue to do its independent work, undeterred, in accordance with its mandate and the overarching principle of the rule of law."

Pompeo said the visa restrictions are intended to get the ICC to drop its probe and the administration is ready to ratchet up the pressure to achieve that outcome.

"We are prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions, if the ICC does not change course," he said.

He said the U.S. military system handles any wrongdoing by its personnel. "When U.S. service members fail to adhere to our strict code of military conduct, they are reprimanded, theyre court-martialed, and sentenced if thats whats deserved," he said.

The ICC has provided few details about the allegations. But the court prosecutor's office said it has "found a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity were and continue to be committed by members of Afghan and foreign government forces, and by anti-government forces such as the Taliban."

The ICC has long been controversial, with critics suggesting it's a threat to American sovereignty. Supporters say the Netherlands-based court offers recourse for victims of genocide and other war crimes in lawless countries.

Story continues

It was first envisioned in 1998 by the Rome Treaty as a tribunal to prosecute genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity. The ICC calls itself a court of last resort" that seeks to "complement, not replace" domestic judicial systems.

In a speech last year, Trump's national security adviser John Bolton blasted the court and said the administration would "use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court."

More: Afghanistan: Americas longest war

More: Afghan who risked his life for Iowa soldiers becomes US citizen

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pompeo: State Dept. bars war crimes court members from the U.S., citing torture probe
Porsche employees install the windshield of a Porsche 911 at the Porsche factory in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, Germany. Photo: Reuters/Ralph Orlowski

Porsche, which manufactures its cars in Germany and exports them around the world, said it would have to put surcharges on its vehicles in the US if Washington imposes higher tariffs on cars imported from the EU.

At the very least we would need to pass on any higher tariffs to our customers in the form of price increases, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume said on Friday. That would not be very conducive to our sales. In 2018, 22% of our new vehicles were shipped to the USA.

Where Brexit is concerned, it was reported last month that Porsche would consider adding a 10% tariff surcharge (in keeping with WTO tariffs) to purchase prices for UK customers in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

Lutz Meschke, deputy chairman of the executive board, said today that Porsche had been watching the Brexit process from the beginning, and that as the Brexit song and dance enters another round of uncertainty, the company is bracing ourselves for everything and has taken some precautionary measures, such as increasing stockpiles.

If there were to be toll increases, which we all dont know I would assume there probably wont be any toll increases for between one and two years, Meschke said, as he believes the Irish border issue wont be solved quickly. But if there are toll increases, we would need to decide how we deal with that, which part we could pass on to the customers and which not.

Out of more than a quarter million cars Porsche sold last year, more than 12,500 were sold into the UK. A 10% surcharge would increase the price of a Macan SUV by 4,600, as well as add 10,000 and upwards to pricier Porsche models like the 911.

READ MORE: Porsche reveals its bestselling Macan SUV is going electric

US President Donald Trump has threatened to slap a tariff of up to 25% on cars imported from Europe. The EU is currently waiting for his response to a US report on whether EU automotive imports represent a threat to US national security. Cars imported from the EU to the US represented some 37bn (31.6bn, $41.9bn) in 2017, with German carmakers making up the bulk.

Research firm Evercore ISI recently said tariffs could cost Volkswagen 2.5bn (2.1bn, $2.8bn) a year. Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess agreed, telling the Financial Times in February, In the worst-case situation, that would probably be close to the real figure.

Porsche reported a 4% year-on-year rise in operating profit to 4.3bn (3.7bn, $4.9bn) in 2018, and a 10% rise in sales revenue to 25.8bn. It reported 12% growth in deliveries to China, and a less robust 3% growth in US deliveries. However, sales growth in the US last year was almost flat at 17.3 million units.
A new Porsche 718 Cayman T is displayed at the 89th Geneva International Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland. Photo: Reuters/Denis Balibouse

Porsche will have electrified more than half of its entire model range  either with a plug-in hybrid or a fully battery-electric option  by 2025, the company said Friday. The German automaker plans to electrify every model by 2030.

One thing is clear: From 2030 onward, there probably wont be any vehicle model from Porsche without an electric variant, Lutz Meschke, deputy chairman of the executive board, said at the companys annual press conference on Friday.

Porsche will not stop making internal combustion engine cars over the next decade, but has committed to investing more than 6bn (5.1bn, $6.8bn) into its electrification shift by 2022. The automaker stopped producing diesel vehicles in 2018.

Since 2012, our workforce has more than doubled, and electromobility is another job engine, Porsche CEO Oliver Blume said. We are creating 1,500 new jobs for the Taycan alone.

That stands in contrast to Porsches owner Volkswagen, which announced this week that it would need to cut thousands of jobs in Germany as making e-cars requires fewer workers than putting together an internal combustion engine car.

READ MORE: Volkswagen says making electric cars will lead to job cuts

The Taycan is set to launch at the end of this year and will be the first fully-electric car from Porsche. Expressions of interest in pre-ordering the Taycan have already shot past 20,000, the cars original production target. Porsche did not officially state what the new, increased production figure will be.

Porsche announced this year that its bestselling Macan SUV, which sold over 86,000 globally in 2018, will also go electric. Porsche confirmed on Friday that the fully electric Cross Turismo SUV will be out starting in 2020.

READ MORE: Porsche reveals its bestselling Macan SUV is going electric
Duchess Kate of Cambridge talks with Duchess Meghan of Sussex, with husbands Prince William and Prince Harry, at the Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey, March 11, 2019.

The long-rumored, much-debated "split" is here: Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan of Sussex are getting their own "household," as they say in royal circles.

Kensington Palace announced Thursday that Harry and Meghan, who is about eight months pregnant, will set up their own office apart from that of Prince William and Duchess Kate of Cambridge, and it will be based at Buckingham Palace instead of Kensington Palace where both couples now live.

"The Queen has agreed to the creation of a new Household for The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, following their marriage in May last year," the palace statement said. "The Household, which will be created with the support of The Queen and The Prince of Wales, will be established in the spring."

Translation: Grandmother Queen Elizabeth II and father Prince Charles will foot the bill for Harry and Meghan's new office and staff.

Harry has had his own private office at Kensington Palace for some time, and it took over handling the former Meghan Markle's public appearances and activities after they announced their engagement in November 2017.

"This long-planned move will ensure that permanent support arrangements for The Duke and Duchesss work are in place as they start their family and move to their official residence at Frogmore Cottage" on the Windsor Castle estate about 25 miles from London and both palaces.

Duchess Kate of Cambridge greets Duchess Meghan of Sussex at Westminster Abbey for a Commonwealth day service on March 11, 2019 in London.

The queen granted permission for Harry and Meghan, 37, to base their household office at her London base in Buckingham Palace.

Kensington Palace also announced that Harry and Meghan will hire a new communications staff, with Sara Latham named as their chief public spokeswoman. She and their team will be reporting to the queen's communications team and press secretary, Donal McCabe.

Latham served as chief of staff to John Podesta, who served as Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman during the 2016 presidential election. She is a longtime Democratic fixer: Summoned in 1996 to help choreograph Bill Clintons reelection campaign and again in 2008 when she helped Podesta sneak President Obamas cabinet prospects in for secret interviews. Before coming to work for the royals, she was employed by Freuds, a communications and PR firm, according to a press release from the royal communications team.

Story continues

While this sort of office reorganization is routine for senior royals as they grow up and take on new duties, the rumors about this move circulating in the British media for months have been used as "evidence" of an alleged "feud" festering between the brothers and their wives.

So, too, have the plans by Harry and Meghan to move from a cramped two-bedroom apartment at Kensington Palace to a more spacious and renovated home, Frogmore Cottage.

Harry, 34, and Will, 36, have different responsibilities now and will in the future (Will is the presumed Prince of Wales and future king). Like any pair of brothers, they have different interests that grow more apparent as they grow older.

Harry and Meghan's household, however, had been expected to remain at Kensington, Palace so the news that it will be in Buckingham Palace comes as a surprise.

Meanwhile, the "feud" rumors have been quieting, partly because the royal sisters-in-law have appeared in public together twice in recent weeks and showed no signs of any tension.

In fact, on Monday, Duchess Kate, 37, publicly kissed Duchess Meghan on both cheeks when the two joined the royal family for the annual Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey.

"There has long been reason to doubt the reports of a feud between the two women, though there was indication last fall that Harry and William were experiencing some tensions," reported Vanity Fair's Katie Nicholl, who has followed the story for months. "Now theyre said to be getting along well, and there were no signs of any distance between William and Harry on Monday."

Contributing: Heidi M Przybyla

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Harry and Meghan hire Sara Latham from Hillary Clinton's campaign to head communications
San Francisco (AFP) - US smartphone chip titan Qualcomm said Friday it won a $31 million verdict in its multifront war with Apple over patented technology used in iPhones.

A jury in a federal court in Southern California ordered that Apple pay Qualcomm for patent infringement for chips used on iPhone 7, 8 and X models.

The damages were tabulated from July 6, 2017 through the end of the trial, according to a Qualcomm statement.

"Today's unanimous jury verdict is the latest victory in our worldwide patent litigation directed at holding Apple accountable for using our valuable technologies without paying for them," Qualcomm general counsel Don Rosenberg said in a release announcing the verdict.

Qualcomm shares closed the formal trading day up 2.2 percent to $56.60.

Patents at issue in the case involved "flashless booting" that allows devices to connect quickly to the internet after being turned on and technology that lets smartphone apps move online data efficiently.

A third patent related to promoting rich graphics in games while protecting battery life, according to Qualcomm.

On another front in the complex legal battle between two US companies a federal judge in Southern California on Thursday issued a preliminary ruling that Qualcomm owes Apple nearly a billion dollars in patent royalty rebate payments the chip maker is withholding, according to US media reports.

Apple sued Qualcomm two years ago over the payments, which were part of a contracted arrangement. The judge's decision will be on pause until after a trial in the case.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Qualcomm late last year escalated a legal war with Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of stealing secrets and sharing them with mobile chip rival Intel, according to court documents.

Apple's goal was to buy mobile chips from Intel instead of depending on Qualcomm, the dominant maker of mobile phone processors and has argued that Qualcomm abuse of its dominant position was harmful to the whole industry.

Apple's ongoing legal battle with Qualcomm includes accusations that the chipmaker has been charging for invalid patents and claiming the chipmaker was seeking a disproportionate amount for a single component.

The two California tech giants have been locked in a long-running battle over patents and royalties that has played out in courts and administrative bodies worldwide.
Washington (AFP) - Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska filed suit against the US Treasury Friday, accusing it of illegally targeting him for sanctions and victimizing him as part of the Russia meddling investigation.

The suit, which named the US Treasury, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Andrea Gacki, the head of the Treasury's sanctions unit, said Deripaska had seen his net worth drop by $7.5 billion after sanctions were imposed on him and six other Russian oligarchs on April 6, 2018.

Shares of his Rusal metals group plunged and, to keep Rusal, EN+, and other companies in business, Deripaska was forced to transfer his shares to others.

The Russian billionaire was included in the 2018 sanctions action because he was seen as a close backer of Russian President Vladimir Putin and was also formerly involved in business with Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's ex campaign chairman who has been sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for financial and other crimes.

The sanctions can effectively lock those targeted out of the global financial system.

Treasury applied the penalties to punish Putin's inner circle for Moscow's alleged interference in the politics of Western democracies.

But Deripaska said he was "the latest victim of this country's (the US) political infighting and ongoing reaction to Russia's purported interference in the 2016 presidential elections."

The sanctions were implemented illegally and based only on "false rumor and innuendo and... decades-old defamatory attacks originated by his business competitors," he said in a court filing.

"The effect of these unlawful actions has been the wholesale devastation of Deripaska's wealth, reputation and economic livelihood."

He asked a federal judge to order the Treasury to remove the sanctions on him.

The lawsuit objects to the US allegation that Deripaska is close to Putin and questions the use of the sweeping term "oligarch" for Russian tycoons targeted by Washington.

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In January the Treasury lifted sanctions on Rusal and two related companies after Deripaska took action to reduce his stakes in them.

But sanctions remain on him personally, preventing others from doing business with him.

Deripaska has been mentioned frequently in the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but he has not been charged.

During the 2016 campaign, according to court filings, Manafort offered Deripaska briefings and polling data on the presidential race, making the offer through Manafort's former business partner and suspected Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik.
Moscow (AFP) - Moscow may soon leave the Council of Europe, depriving Russians of what activists call the last hope for justice and crushing efforts to integrate the country into the international rights framework.

Russia has been under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights -- overseen by the continent's top rights organisation -- for more than 20 years, becoming its biggest purveyor of cases.

But after the 2014 annexation of Crimea ties between Moscow and the Council of Europe reached a crisis point, and Russia may quit the rights body or be suspended this year, activists and observers warn.

"For Vladimir Putin, Council of Europe membership is certainly seen as being part of the civilised world and an exit has always been considered an unwelcome scenario," said Tatyana Stanovaya, head of R.Politik, a Paris-based analysis firm.

"However there may not be another way out in the current circumstances."

A Russian departure -- dubbed "Ruxit" by the council's secretary general Thorbjorn Jagland -- would have far-reaching consequences.

Campaigners warn of a potential intensification of a clampdown on civil society, worsening abuse of prisoners, a new wave of emigration, and a possible reinstatement of the death penalty.

Ruxit would also weaken the council itself, and create new fault lines in Europe.

After Moscow's annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe deprived the Russian delegation of voting and other rights.

In retaliation Russia has suspended its annual 33 million euro ($37 million) payment to the Strasbourg-based council -- about seven percent of its budget -- and has not participated in PACE sessions.

As a result more than half of ECHR judges, who serve for non-renewable nine-year terms, and the Commissioner for Human Rights have been elected without Russia.

- Crunch time -

After two years of non-payment of contributions -- from June this year -- Russia could be suspended from the council.

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More importantly, Moscow probably will not be able to participate in the June election of the council's next secretary general, and Russia warns that if this happens it may go.

Pyotr Tolstoy, deputy speaker of parliament's lower house and head of the country's PACE delegation, said Moscow would take part in the election only if all its rights were restored and if PACE agreed to eliminate a possibility to impose sanctions against national delegations.

"If this does not happen, the Russian delegation will not take part in the election," Tolstoy told AFP.

"This brings into question the overall necessity of our participation in this organisation."

Russia's top opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who has filed many complaints with the court on behalf of himself and others, said Moscow may be bluffing.

"The Kremlin is relishing the fact that our delegation has been deprived of voting rights," Navalny told AFP in an interview, noting that the Kremlin uses tensions with Europe to boost its standing at home.

"Even though the Russian government really does not like many of the ECHR decisions, they don't want to withdraw from the Council of Europe, and the Council of Europe does not really want to exclude Russia," he said, suggesting that rules could be bent to keep Moscow in the organisation.

Rights attorney Karinna Moskalenko, the first Russian lawyer to win a case at the ECHR, said that even if Moscow was playing a game it was a "very dangerous" one.

"They may reach a point of no return," said Moskalenko.

The 47-member council -- which is not linked to the European Union -- promotes democracy and the rule of law across Europe and also includes Turkey and Ukraine.

Were Russia to leave the council, it would only be the second such case in its 70-year history. Greece quit the body under the military junta in 1969 to pre-empt being kicked out, but was re-admitted in 1974.

- 'Faraway justice' -

Talks to resolve the crisis are underway but the margin of manoeuvre is very small, said rights activists, noting the organisation may not be in a position to fulfil all Russian demands.

Council of Europe spokesman Daniel Holtgen said the organisation was hoping to find a solution by May when the council's decision-making body meets. He stressed Russia took part in all of the council's bodies except PACE.

Late last year more than 60 campaigners and lawyers signed a memorandum calling on both sides to find a compromise, saying Russia's departure would punish victims of unfair prosecution and trials.

They also warned of a potential reinstatement of the death penalty, which must be banned as a prerequisite for council membership.

"It is quite obvious that the losses will be huge," said Yuri Dzhibladze, president of the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, calling the court "an ultimate hope for justice".

In 2017 alone, the Russian government paid more than 14.5 million euros in "just satisfaction" to victims, compared with 222,667 euros for Britain and 88,279 euros for France.

Russia has made a point of paying but it often fails to act to root out the cause of problems behind violations, activists say.

Tolstoy dismissed campaigners' worries, saying Russia's courts and law-enforcement bodies were in line with European standards.

"Human rights campaigners simply cannot imagine how they will live without the ECHR, but they will have to live without the ECHR."

Navalny said many Russians lived with the feeling that "somewhere out there, far away in France there is justice" and Moscow's departure would pose a major problem.

"The realisation that fair trial will no longer be available -- even theoretically -- will be the main and most terrible consequence."
Photo: AARON P. BERNSTEIN/Bloomberg via Getty Images

For the 53.4 percent of Americans who disapprove of the presidents performance, the Mueller report, whenever it is released, will be must-read material. Unfortunately for this small majority, there are several reasons why the public might not be able to see the results of the nearly two-year investigation in full.

Obviously, the president wants it under wraps. Attorney General William Barr, who will send the report to Congress, is unlikely to provide lawmakers with derogatory information about people who were not charged with a crime  meaning juicy, if tangential, details will stay confidential. And, as a criminal investigator, its unlikely that Mueller would prepare a report meant to be read as a comprehensive thriller. Thats just the way this works, John Q. Barrett, a veteran of the independent counsel that investigated the Iran-Contra scandal, told Politico. Hes not government oversight, and hes not a historian.

On Thursday, Lindsey Graham made clear another roadblock to the publics access to the report: the Republican-controlled Senate. In the morning, Democrats passed a House resolution 420 to zero in support of releasing the probe to the public, serving as a gesture to pressure William Barr into showing as much of the report as possible. In the afternoon, Graham promptly shut down the symbolic gesture, blocking Chuck Schumers request to pass the House resolution. Graham, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, went a step further, requesting that AG William Barr should appoint a second special counsel to investigate misconduct in the Department of Justice over the handling of Hillary Clintons emails, and the government surveillance of Trump campaign staffer Carter Page.

We let Mueller look at all things Trump related to collusion and otherwise, Graham said. Somebody needs to look at what happened on the other side and find out if the FBI and the DOJ had two systems, one supporting the person they wanted to win and one out to get the person they wanted to lose. Graham added: Any American out there who did what Secretary Clinton did, youd be in jail now. The question I want to know is, does anybody other than me believe that?

As the Mueller investigation draws toward its end, deflections like Grahams will be inevitable. Despite calls for transparency  including an impressive uncontested vote in the House  some Republican leaders will make distracting noises or otherwise try to suppress the report in order to limit Trumps chance at a one-term presidency. But there is some conciliatory news for people off the hill who want to read the Mueller report: the bulk of its details may already be public. The immense reporting project of the past two years may contain much of the Mueller investigations final details, just without the affirmation that the special counsels office also finds the misadventures of Trumps son and son-in-law utterly captivating.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging Volkswagen(VOW3-DE) and former CEO Martin Winterkorn with defrauding American investors during an emissions scandal, The Associated Press reported Friday.

The complaint claims Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance and the company's financial standing, which gave Volkswagen a financial benefit when it issued securities at more attractive rates for the company.

Volkswagen did not immediately respond to The Associated Press early Friday.

On Thursday, the SEC alleged in a court filing that Volkswagen "perpetrated a massive fraud" and repeatedly lied to U.S. investors in connection with the so-called dieselgate scandal.

The regulator is suing Volkswagen and Winterkorn over the German automaker's diesel emissions scandal. The suit seeks to bar Winterkorn from serving as an officer or director of a public U.S. company and recover "ill-gotten gains." Winterkorn was charged by U.S. prosecutors in 2018 and accused of conspiring to cover up the German automaker's diesel emissions cheating.

The SEC said in its complaint filed in San Francisco that from April 2014 to May 2015, Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets at a time when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 U.S. diesel vehicles grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

"By concealing the emissions scheme, Volkswagen reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by issuing the securities at more attractive rates for the company," the SEC said in a summary of its filing.

Volkswagen said the SEC complaint "is legally and factually flawed." Reuters reported that a lawyer for Winterkorn could not immediately be reached early Friday.

VW had said in its annual report that the SEC could take enforcement action against the company over the German automaker's involvement in the emissions scandal.

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The automaker said the agency is "piling on" and that the agency's complaint is without merit.

The SEC has asked Volkswagen for information on potential securities law violations over certain investments the company may have sold to investors. The agency is looking for evidence determining whether the automaker failed to disclose information about vehicles that didn't comply with U.S. emissions standards when it issued certain securities to investors.

One of the world's largest carmakers, Volkswagen was rocked by reports first surfacing in 2015 that it had been caught cheating on emissions tests in the United States. The subsequent scandal cost Volkswagen billions of dollars to settle and forced the automakers to recall millions of vehicles.

Here is Volkswagen's full statement to CNBC:

The SEC's complaint is legally and factually flawed, and Volkswagen will contest it vigorously. The SEC has brought an unprecedented complaint over securities sold only to sophisticated investors who were not harmed and received all payments of interest and principal in full and on time. The SEC does not charge that any person involved in the bond issuance knew that Volkswagen diesel vehicles did not comply with U.S. emissions rules when these securities were sold, but simply repeats unproven claims about Volkswagen AG's former CEO, who played no part in the sales. Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company.

 The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
By David Shepardson and Edward Taylor

WASHINGTON/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is suing Volkswagen (VW) and its former chief executive Martin Winterkorn over the German automaker's diesel emissions scandal, alleging a "massive fraud" on U.S. investors.

VW was caught using illegal software to cheat U.S. pollution tests in 2015, triggering a global backlash against diesel that and has so far cost it 29 billion euros ($32.8 billion).

Regulators and investors argue VW should have informed them sooner about the scope of the scandal, while VW says it was not clear it would face billions of dollars in fines and penalties as others had paid out much lower sums for similar offences.

The SEC said in its civil complaint on Thursday that from April 2014 to May 2015, VW issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets at a time when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 U.S. diesel vehicles grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

VW "reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by issuing the securities at more attractive rates for the company," the SEC said, adding it "repeatedly lied to and misled United States investors, consumers, and regulators as part of an illegal scheme to sell its purportedly 'clean diesel' cars and billions of dollars of corporate bonds and other securities in the United States."

The suit filed in San Francisco seeks to bar Winterkorn from serving as an officer or director of a public U.S. company and recover "ill-gotten gains" along with civil penalties and interest.

Winterkorn, who resigned days after the scandal became public in September 2015, was charged by U.S. prosecutors in 2018 and accused of conspiring to cover up the German automaker's diesel emissions cheating.

A lawyer for Winterkorn, who remains in Germany, declined to comment on the SEC action.

VW said in a statement the SEC complaint "is legally and factually flawed, and Volkswagen will contest it vigorously. The SEC has brought an unprecedented complaint over securities sold only to sophisticated investors who were not harmed and received all payments of interest and principal in full and on time."

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The automaker added that the SEC "does not charge that any person involved in the bond issuance knew that Volkswagen diesel vehicles did not comply with U.S. emissions rules when these securities were sold" but repeats claims about Winterkorn "who played no part in the sales".

German markets regulator Bafin could not be reached for comment about whether it was working with the SEC.

"FRAUDULENTLY OBTAINED"

VW has spent billions to pay claims from United States-based VW owners, environmental regulators, states and dealers, and has offered to buy back about 500,000 polluting U.S. vehicles. That figure included $4.3 billion in U.S. criminal and civil fines.

But the SEC said VW "has never repaid the hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit it fraudulently obtained."

VW admitted to secretly installing software in 500,000 U.S. vehicles to cheat government exhaust emissions tests and pleaded guilty in 2017 to felony charges. 13 people have been charged in the United States, including Winterkorn and four Audi managers.

The SEC suit also names VW's VW Credit and Volkswagen Group of America Finance LLC, the entity used to sell the securities.

VW also faces investor lawsuits in Braunschweig, Germany.

Critics argue that VW should have informed investors on September 3, 2015 about having used a "defeat device" to cheat emissions tests, the same day that VW managers admitted to using illegal software to U.S. regulators.

Investors were informed about VW's diesel cheating after U.S. regulators blew the whistle on September 18, 2015.

VW argues it did not have to inform investors earlier because it did not believe it was facing significant fines.

VW's management had sought to strike a deal with U.S. regulators behind closed doors, a process that would lead costs to be "controllable overall with a view to the business activities of Volkswagen Group," a VW document showed.

A defense filing made with the Braunschweig court says VWs chief financial officer was informed that there was a potential problem with United States authorities on September 14, 2015.

At the time, VW believed it could fix polluting vehicles with a software update and gauged the potential financial risk to be around 150 million euros, the Braunschweig document shows.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Additional reporting by Jan Schwartz, Hans Seidenstuecker; Editing by Shreejay Sinha, Muralikumar Anantharaman and Alexander Smith)
A Volkswagen badge on a production line at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, Germany. Photo: Fabian Bimmer/Reuters

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged one of the worlds largest carmakers, Volkswagen (VOW.DE), and its former CEO Martin Winterkorn for defrauding bond investors during the 2015 emissions scandal  dubbed dieselgate.

The SEC filed a civil complaint in San Francisco late on Thursday that covers the period from April 2014 to May 2015.

The regulator said in a statement that its complaint centres around VW issuing more than $13bn (9.8bn) in bonds and asset-backed securities in the US markets at a time when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the United States grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits, exposing the company to massive financial and reputational harm.

The SECs complaint also alleges that VW made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance, and VWs financial standing. By concealing the emissions scheme, Volkswagen reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by issuing the securities at more attractive rates for the company, according to the complaint.

The lawsuit seeks to ban Winterkorn, VWs former CEO, from serving as an officer or director of a public US company. The SEC said the complaint aims to recover ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest, and civil penalties.

The dieselgate scandal first emerged in 2015 when VW was caught cheating on emissions tests in the US. This cost VW billions of dollars in lawsuits and settlements, and the company was forced to recall millions of vehicles.

Winterkorn resigned in September 2015 and was charged by US prosecutors in 2018 for allegedly conspiring to cover up the German automakers diesel emissions cheating.

VW did not immediately respond to a call for comment at the time of publication. However, the automaker gave a statement to CNBC ahead of the formal SEC complaint filing:

The SECs complaint is legally and factually flawed, and Volkswagen will contest it vigorously. The SEC has brought an unprecedented complaint over securities sold only to sophisticated investors who were not harmed and received all payments of interest and principal in full and on time.

The SEC does not charge that any person involved in the bond issuance knew that Volkswagen diesel vehicles did not comply with US emissions rules when these securities were sold, but simply repeats unproven claims about Volkswagen AGs former CEO, who played no part in the sales.

Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state, and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company.
Construction site and cranes on the banks of the River Liffey in Dublin, Ireland. Photo: Artur Widak/Getty Images

The Irish government has made it a top priority to solve the countrys housing crisis and build new homes, but is acutely aware of avoiding another boom-bust cycle, according to Irelands finance minister Paschal Donohoe.

Speaking at an event in London on Friday morning, Donohoe said the rebound in the Irish economy  combined with the hyper interest of companies to grow in the country  has fuelled the housing crisis and pushed the government to focus its long-term spending on this area. Tax policy and land-planning are being adapted in an effort to build more homes in an economically sustainable fashion, he said.

Brexit-ing firms looking to move operations and jobs to Ireland have become both a blessing and a curse. Brexit has directly led to the creation of 4,500 new jobs in Ireland, according to recent statistics from the countrys development agency, IDA Ireland. There is also a record number of people currently employed by multi-national companies in the country, with giant firms like Google (GOOGL) attracted to Irelands low tax rates and business-friendly culture.

However, this situation has created further pressures on tight housing supplies and actually started repelling new companies.

Michael Carey, the chair of Irelands Housing Agency, said last year that the scale of the Dublin housing crisis has begun to limit the citys ability to reap a Brexit dividend.

A recent report by the American Chamber of Commerce in Ireland said that housing is one of the most critical pressure points when looking at recruitment for expansion in the country. It pointed to an inability of supply to meet demand [that] has been particularly acute since the end of the recession in 2011.

Donohoe said that as he pushes to invest in expanding Irelands housing supply, hes acutely aware that previous governments have failed to avoid housing market bubbles, yet he is trying to learn from past mistakes.

Irelands finance minister Paschal Donohoe is working to avoid a boom-bust cycle in the Irish housing market. Photo: Aidan Crawley/Getty Images

Donohoe said hes thrown his absolute support behind the Central Bank of Ireland, which has clear mortgage lending rules and policies that should help the country avoid a repeat of the 2008 housing market bubble.

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A key point of difference [from] our past is limits on easy money in the Irish economy, the finance minister said, noting that available credit is at a fraction of the level it once was.

His decision to raise taxes on commercial property and the hospitality sector is another part of a strategy to help direct more funds towards solving the housing crisis, he said.

Government reforms of real estate planning laws and planning processes are also designed to help ease the housing crunch, Donohoe said.

Irelands financial services firm Goodbody estimates that nearly 18,900 new homes were built in Ireland last year, which was in line with forecasts. It predicted in a report in February that another 22,000 new homes would be finished in 2019 and 25,000 new homes would be built in 2020.

Having grown fourfold since 2013, there has clearly been significant progress in growing output, but problems remain in terms of viability, breadth of activity, and affordability, Goodbody said in the report.
Singapore (AFP) - The Singapore Sling is being shaken up in the city where it first caused a stir as mixologists pour new life into a drink in danger of being dismissed as something solely for the tourist trail.

The distinctive pink, gin-based drink has long been a favourite with visitors to the colonial-era Raffles Hotel, where it is served in the historic Long Bar.

A stalwart of cocktail menus and sometimes dubbed Singapore's national drink, it has nonetheless struggled to capture the attention of a younger generation spoilt for choice with a buzzing bar scene offering everything from trendy craft beer to artisan vodka.

"We've taken away the sweetness and we've balanced the drink much better," Christian Westbeld, the Raffles Hotel's general manager, told AFP.

It is still made from the same recipe, including gin, cherry liqueur, pineapple juice and bitters, but uses superior ingredients which the creators say make it better suited to the modern palate.

The Long Bar recently reopened to the public after renovations -- part of a broader overhaul of the entire hotel -- and it was decided the Singapore Sling also needed a revamp.

The cocktail was first created in 1915 at the bar, which was a hangout for British colonialists and rubber planters visiting from neighbouring Malaya.

At the time it was socially unacceptable for women to drink in public but the Singapore Sling -- so colourful for the era that many believed it was fruit juice -- gave them a chance to have a sneaky tipple and quickly became a hit.

Creators hope the updated version will extend its appeal beyond visitors to Singapore's local and expat workforce.

But in a recent trip, the bar was still packed primarily with tourists, many of whom were happy to sample the new version of the classic cocktail.

British tourist Bridget Stevenson said: "Lovely texture and lovely drink, and I love the experience of being in here."
Caracas (AFP) - A weeklong blackout and ever-tightening US sanctions have nudged Venezuela's already declining oil production into an even steeper dive, experts say.

Even before the massive, unprecedented power cut swept across the South American nation on March 7, Venezuela's outlook for its one vital export resource was grim, with the state-owned oil company PDVSA in default and under sanctions pressure.

From April 28, US companies and citizens will be barred from dealing in Venezuelan crude, effectively cutting PDVSA off from its biggest customer.

Oil expert Luis Oliveros said "not a barrel was shipped during the blackout," paralyzing the oil sector and marking "the start of a bigger cycle of deterioration."

- Long decline -

Venezuela's crude output has slipped for years, and in February was calculated by secondary OPEC sources to amount to a million barrels a day -- 142,000 less than a month earlier and a fraction of the 3.2 million barrels pumped a decade ago.

Observers say the blackout's damage to the sector could trigger even more sharp cuts to production.

It could go as low as 500,000 barrels a day, according to Asdrubal Oliveros, an economist and director of the economic analysis firm Econometrica, citing a report by British financial services outfit Barclays.

Such a figure -- staggeringly low for a country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world -- would put Venezuela on par with minor OPEC member Ecuador, or non-member Romania.

PDVSA has not revealed the impact of the electricity cut on its operations. It said only that it managed to meet domestic demand for gasoline after long lines of cars formed at service stations.

On Thursday, however, more bad news hit the company when three storage tanks at a heavy-oil processing plant in the east caught fire. The government claimed it was a "terrorist attack" organized by arch-foe the United States.

President Nicolas Maduro also blamed the blackout on US "cybernetic and electromagnetic attacks."

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Experts, though, discount that possibility and say chronic neglect of Venezuela's infrastructure means more dysfunction of the power grid and oil production will occur again.

- US pressure -

Bringing oil installations back online after the blackout will not be easy, Luis Oliveros said, explaining that knock-on effects would be felt for some time.

"The damage to the (oil) wells, in some cases, are irreversible. And in others major investment will be needed to make them operational. The impact is going to be very hard," he said.

According to oil sector monitoring firm Baker Hughes, Venezuela has 26 oil platform left functioning, down from 47 a year ago. In 2014, the number was 74.

US President Donald Trump has intensified measures against Maduro's regime and PDVSA as he tries to swing support behind Juan Guaido, the head of Venezuela's opposition-ruled congress who is recognized as interim president by some 50 countries.

The aim is to shore up Guaido and seek to shear away military chiefs and others who are propping up Maduro.

After blocking PDVSA from getting new credit by issuing bonds, Trump has frozen PDVSA assets and accounts and started targeted companies dealing with it, including a Russian bank, Evrofinance Mosnarbank.

"We think export revenues could fall to as low as $1 billion per month by year-end (from an average of $3 billion last year). That will make it very difficult for Mr. Maduro keep his inner circle intact," the economic research firm Capital Economics said in a briefing note.
The Sopranos (Credit: HBO)

The Sopranos prequel movie is set to commence under the working title of Newark, according to reports, and now has an official release date too.

Being made by New Line Cinema and penned by original series creator David Chase  and originally being called The Many Saints of Newark  it will hit screens on September 25, 2020, says The Wrap.

Read more: James Gandolfinis son cast as the young Tony Soprano

Director Alan Taylor, who helmed nine episodes of the original series, including the devastating penultimate episode The Blue Comet, will be behind the camera.

Signed up for principal roles are Alessandro Nivola, Vera Farmiga, Ray Liotta, Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, John Magaro, and Michael Gandolfini.

Michael Gandolfini (Credit: Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Michael Gandolfini is the son of the late James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano in the HBO series, and who died in 2013 following a heart attack while on holiday in Sicily.

He will play the young Tony Soprano in the movie, which is set in the 1960s.

The action will play out during the Newark riots in New Jersey, when five days of violence erupted after a white police officers beat up a black man.

Read more: How to watch Game of Thrones season eight

26 people died in the ensuing riots, and 700 were injured, with African-American and Italian-American gangs clashing.

Nivola, who is married to British actress Emily Mortimer, will play Dickie Moltisanti in the film, often referred to  but never seen  in the original TV series.

Dickie was the late father of Michael Imperiolis Christopher Moltisanti, and a mentor to the teenage Tony Soprano.




Taipei (AFP) - Taiwan has made a formal request to the United States for new fighter jets to defend itself against increasing Chinese threats, Deputy Defence Minister Shen Yi-ming told reporters Thursday.

"We made the request to purchase (fighter jets) because China has been increasing its military strength and we are starting to have an imbalance of power in our air defence capabilities," Shen added.

The request, if granted, could ramp up tensions between China and the United States.

Beijing sees Taiwan as part of its territory awaiting unification, even though the two sides have been ruled separately since the end of a civil war in 1949.

China has significantly stepped up diplomatic and military pressure on Taiwan since the Beijing-sceptic President Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016, including staging a series of military exercises near the island.

Chinese bombers and surveillance aircraft have also begun flying much more regular sorties around the island.

Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but has remained Taiwan's most powerful unofficial ally and biggest arms supplier.

Last year, the US irked China over its plans to sell a batch of military parts to Taiwan in a $330 million contract including standard spare parts for aircraft.

Beijing has been incensed by warming ties between Washington and Taipei, including the approval by the US State Department of a preliminary licence to sell submarine technology to the island.

But fearing a possible backlash from Beijing, the US has repeatedly denied Taiwan's requests since 2002 for new fighter jets including newer F-16s and F-35s.

In that time China has massively ramped up spending on its armed forces, including highly advanced fifth-generation jet fighters.

That has left Taiwan with an ageing airforce that analysts say is in desperate need of an upgrade.

The island currently has 326 fighter jets, all in service since the 1990s, including US-made F-16s, French Mirage 2000s and Taiwan's own indigenous fighters (IDF).

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Defence officials would not confirm how many fighter jets they have asked for in the purchase request, or what model.

Local media Apple Daily reported Taiwan was seeking 66 F-16V at a cost of $13 billion including missiles, logistics and training.

"It does not matter if it is F-15, F-18, F-16 or F-35, as long as it fits our combat needs," Tang Hung-an, a major-general with Taiwan's Air Force Command Headquarters said.

Tang added that the letter of request to the US did not specify which type of aircraft Taiwan wants.
Montreal (AFP) - Tens of thousands young Canadians marched on Friday as part of global demonstrations calling for action to stem climate change.

Organized by students, and joined by families and politicians, the crowd snaked more than one kilometer (0.62 miles) along downtown streets in Montreal, where the biggest march occurred in temperatures barely above freezing.

They came out in droves also in the Atlantic port city of Halifax, the capital Ottawa, Quebec City and Winnipeg in the country's western prairies.

"When you have winds of change, demanded by young people like this, governments have a moral duty to listen and act on the environment," Montreal university student Cedric Remy, 21, told AFP.

"If climate was a bank, the government would have already saved it," a protester's placard said.

Another demonstrator, Nicolas Oligny, noted that "a lot of young people had come out for the demonstration, showing that it really matters to them."

He lamented that older generations were less well represented, which he took to mean that they care less about the issue.

Hundreds of thousands took part in similar protests around the world on Friday.

Classrooms in capitals from Bangkok to Berlin and Lagos to London emptied as organizers of the student strike called demonstrations in more than 100 countries.
Photo: Chris Kleponis/Getty Images

One of Donald Trumps favorite riffs is a wish, cast as a warning, that his supporters inside and outside the state security services will unleash violence on his political opponents if they continue to oppose the administration. The specifics of the riff dont vary much. Trump laments that his opponents are treating him unfairly, praises the toughness and strength of his supporters  a category that combines the police, military, and Bikers for Trump, which he apparently views as a Brownshirt-like militia  and a prediction that his supporters will at some point end their restraint.

He does it again in a new interview with Breitbart:

I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they dont play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump  I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough  until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

Early warnings that Trump could undermine the Constitution have not been borne out, which has produced a certain complacency about the issue. It is true that Trump is only an aspirational authoritarian, and to date has failed to bring his most illiberal dreams to life. He has used the government to punish independent media, prevailing upon the Post Office to raise rates on Amazon in retaliation for Jeff Bezoss ownership of the Washington Post, and repeatedly told his staff to order the Justice Department to block a merger in order to punish CNN. So far, this has had little effect.

On the other hand, if Trump wins a second term  a prospect that, under current economic conditions, is close to a toss-up  his presidency will only be a quarter of the way through. Already his authoritarian rhetoric is so thoroughly normalized that it hardly even registers as news any more. Anybody whose political efforts involve helping Trump gain more power, rather than opposing that project, is playing Russian roulette with the Constitution.

Republicans have had some success in restraining Trumps abuses  in large part by slow-walking his most blatantly illegal or authoritarian orders. But the GOPs willingness to defy Trump has also eroded steadily over his presidency. Congresss failure to block Trumps use of emergency powers to build the border wall that Congress has declined to fund is an important marker in that deterioration.

Republicans used to define more modest exertions of executive power by President Obama as dangerous Caesarism. Republicans turned Obamas rather casual vow to use his pen and phone to carry out executive authority into a Hitleresque claim of total power. Accordingly, when Trump claimed executive power to fund a project Congress refused to fund, at least some conservatives denounced his plans. North Carolina senator Thom Tillis wrote an op-ed calling for Congress to deny Trumps authority.

Conservatives rightfully cried foul when President Barack Obama used executive action to completely bypass Congress and unilaterally provide deferred action to undocumented adults who had knowingly violated the nations immigration laws. Some prominent Republicans went so far as to proclaim that Obama was acting more like an emperor or king than a president, he wrote, There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that theres an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach  that its acceptable for my party but not thy party.

But then Trump started looking into supporting a primary challenger against Tillis. And lo and behold, Tillis abandoned the sacred principle. Republicans could have mustered a veto-proof majority to join with Democrats and block Trump, but failed. If Republicans are too frightened to defend what they themselves regard as a vital principle of the Constitution, what confidence should we have that theyll stand in the way of Trumps continued assaults on the Republic?
Tommy Robinson (PA)

English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson has described a man suspected of carrying out the mosque attacks and killing at least 49 people in New Zealand as a monster.

The right-wing activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also attacked the media for seeking his opinion the killings, accusing journalists of trying to link him to the attacks.

Mr Robinson reacted angrily when he was asked about the mass shootings, which saw two mosques attacked during Friday prayers in Christchurch.

New Zealands prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, called the attacks one of New Zealands darkest days.

Ambulance staff take an injured man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Speaking in Peterborough on Friday when approached by the Press Association, Robinson said: When jihadis do an attack, they tell you the verse from the Koran that inspired them to do it.

You, the mainstream media, and every politician then bend over backwards to say its got nothing to do with Islam.

This monster who committed a completely cowardly attack against innocent people.

Read More

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This monster wrote a manifesto. In that manifesto, is my name in it? Does he mention me?

No he doesnt.

He specifically tells you why he done it, but yet here you are as the mainstream media attempting to somehow associate me with a coward on the other end of the planet.

How can you do that?

Mr Robinson continued: So when theres an Islamic terrorist attack, do you go stand outside every mosque and ask the imam that follows the same book as the terrorist?

I dont follow the same book as this white supremacist.

In fact for 10 years Ive called out white supremacy, the same as Ive called out Islamic extremism.

Any supremacy, Ive called out.

But yet here you are as a journalist, trying to associate my name somehow with the murder of 49 innocent people.

Tommy Robinson talking to the media as he arrives at Peterborough County Court in Cambridgeshire during a civil court case (PA)

Youre a coward, your journalism is a disgrace.

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Mr Robinson said that the suspect has told you why hes done it, with his alleged reasons including immigration policy and Rotherham.

I didnt rape any girls in Rotherham, said Mr Robinson. That wasnt me. I didnt take 1,400 children as slaves. That wasnt me.

So youre a coward and your journalism is absolutely disgusting.

Robinson is currently pursuing a harassment claim against Cambridgeshire Police at Peterborough County Court.
The grand imam of Egypt's famed Al-Azhar mosque and university has condemned a mass shooting targeting mosques in New Zealand on Friday as a "horrific terrorist attack".

Attacks on two mosques in Christchurch left at least 49 dead.

One gunman armed with semi-automatic weapons - identified as an Australian citizen -- live-streamed the assault and published a manifesto online.

"This horrific terrorist attack is a serious indicator of the consequences of rising rhetoric of hatred and xenophobia and the spread of Islamophobia" in countries "known for the coexistence of their inhabitants", said Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb.

The grand imam, who heads Egypt's most revered centre of Sunni Islamic learning, joined Pope Francis last month in the United Arab Emirates to call for peaceful coexistence among religions.

The Sunni leader urged Western states to "increase efforts to support the values of tolerance and coexistence" within their societies.

The Christchurch attacks have sparked global revulsion, with leaders around the world calling for solidarity with Muslim communities.

During afternoon prayers on Friday -- Islam's holy day -- a gunman opened fire inside the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch, killing forty-one.

Another seven were slain at a second mosque five kilometres away in suburban Linwood, three of them outside the building.

It is unclear where the remaining victim died.

None of the victims has yet been publicly identified.
President of Toyota Motor Corporation Akio Toyoda speaks during the unveiling of the 2020 Toyota Supra during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., January 14, 2019. REUTERS/Brendan Mcdermid

Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda says the idea that imported Japanese cars represent a national security threat to the United States makes him feel sad.

Toyoda was asked about the possibility of auto tariffs at an Economic Club event in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

President Trump has threatened enacting tariffs on the basis of national security.

I just dont know why they call it a national security threat. That really makes me feel sad. I hope this kind of conversation can go away, Toyoda said through an interpreter.

Toyoda also stressed the automakers commitment to America  and said about 50% of all Toyota vehicles sold in the United States are made in the United States.

Regardless of the direction we go, we will never leave the United States. We will stay here, said Toyoda.

On Thursday, the Japanese automaker announced it would increase its investment in the U.S. to $13 billion, up from $10 billion, over five years adding nearly 600 manufacturing jobs. Toyota says it plans to expand facilities or increase production capacity in Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri and Tennessee.

Jim Lentz, Toyota Motor North America CEO, told reporters the company is eager to understand the findings of the Commerce Departments investigation into whether auto imports pose a threat to national security.

I think our team members  the 137,000 from design to engineering to manufacturing to sales and service I think theyre eager to understand, are they a threat to national security?, said Lentz.

Lentz said Toyoda did not plan to meet with Trump administration officials while hes in Washington.

I am confident the administration wants to do whats best for the American people and for the American economy. And I think if they really look at the impact that it [auto tariffs] would have, the impact on reduced sales and reduced production and reduced employment  Im confident theyre going to make the right decisions, said Lentz.

The auto industry has lobbied the administration not to place tariffs on imported cars and parts, saying they would add thousands of dollars to car costs and might hurt the economy by slashing jobs.

Story continues

Jessica Smith is a reporter for Yahoo Finance based in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter at @JessicaASmith8.

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Toyota Motor Corporation TM and Softbank Group along with others are in talks to invest in the autonomous vehicle division of the ride-hailing provider, Uber Technologies, Inc., per Reuters. The deal led by these two companies based in Japan is expected to invest $1 billion in the Uber division, which will value the unit around $5-$10 million. The deal is anticipated to close in April 2019.



The funding will aid Uber's unit to develop autonomous technology that is already losing money. Further, the investment will help this ride-hailing provider to improve its valuation as it prepares for market debut.



In 2018, Toyota invested $500 million in Ubers autonomous division for the development of self-driving cars. Apart from the investment, Toyota is providing automated safety features for Ubers autonomous driving system. The combined technology will be used in Toyotas Sienna minivans that will be deployed on Ubers ride-hailing network, beginning in 2021.

Toyota Motor Corporation Price and Consensus

Toyota Motor Corporation Price and Consensus | Toyota Motor Corporation Quote

Unlike others in the auto industry, Toyota has been less aggressive toward the development of autonomous vehicle technology. Further, accident concerns cautioned the company to build fully-autonomous cars and rather focus on partial autonomous technology like Guardian. Nevertheless, Toyota has been investing in research and development. It will likely start testing its self-driving vehicles by 2020.



Over the past six months, shares of Toyota have outperformed the industry it belongs to. Shares of the company lost 3.9% compared with its industrys decline of 15.8% during that period.



Zacks Rank & Stocks to Consider



Toyota currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the broader auto sector are Ferrari N.V. RACE, Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd. GELYY and PACCAR Inc. PCAR, currently sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



Ferrari has an expected long-term growth rate of 18.5%. Over the past three months, shares of the company have gained 31.3%.



Geely Automobile has an expected long-term growth rate of 7%. Shares of the company have gained 0.3% on a year-to-date basis.



PACCAR has an expected long-term growth rate of 10.8%. Shares of the company have gained 22% over the past three months.



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By Joshua Franklin

NEW YORK (Reuters) - TPG Capital said on Thursday it had fired senior executive Bill McGlashan after he was charged in connection with a U.S. college fraud scheme that has ensnared Hollywood celebrities and corporate elite.

"We believe the behavior described to be inexcusable and antithetical to the values of our entire organization," TPG said in a statement.

In a separate statement via a spokesman, McGlashan said he was resigning from the TPG Rise Fund and TPG Growth. McGlashan was managing co-founder and chief executive of TPG's impact investing Rise Fund.

"I will be focused on addressing the allegations that have been presented, and there are aspects of the story that have yet to emerge that I wish I could share," he said.

McGlashan, who was placed on indefinite administrative leave on Wednesday, was among those named in an investigation by U.S. authorities into a scheme that helped wealthy Americans cheat their children's way into elite universities.

TPG Capital has offered investors in its Rise Fund II the chance to withdraw, a person familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

TPG raised $2 billion for the first Rise fund in 2017, which was backed by pop star Bono and aims to generate profits while benefiting society and the environment.

TPG is aiming to raise up to $3.5 billion for its second Rise Fund, according to documents from the State Investment Council of New Jersey, which has committed up to $125 million in the fund.

The Rise Fund is a small part of the $103 billion in assets that TPG has under management, but a high-profile area of investment among a growing trend for more impact investing.

Impact investing aims to generate some benefit to society while also delivering financial returns.

TPG made the offer to investors who participated in the first close of the fund. A spokesman for TPG's Rise Fund declined to comment. The news was reported earlier by Bloomberg.

TPG has said Jim Coulter will take over managing partner responsibilities for TPG Growth and Rise.

(Reporting by Joshua Franklin in New York, editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Lisa Shumaker)
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Donald Trump is not amused by the #FakeMelania conspiracy theories circulating on social media.

He spun off a new theory on Wednesday to debunk the idea that there's a body double of his wife who steps in for her at times. The "fake news" did it, he claimed without evidence.

Trump alleged on Wednesday in a tweet that photos of his wife had been altered to make them appear as though a look-alike accompanied him to Alabama last week to survey tornado damage. His favorite morning TV program, "Fox & Friends," reported on the body-double theory Wednesday as the show's hosts weighed in on a discussion that aired Monday on ABC's "The View." Hosts of the ABC program debated whether an impostor had traveled with Trump.

"The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that it's actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places," the president tweeted. "They are only getting more deranged with time!"

Hosts of "The View" had commented on how the woman at Trump's side in photos of the trip appeared shorter than usual and had a different facial structure than the first lady's. One host allowed that the first lady might have been wearing flat shoes.

In fact, the 5-foot-11 first lady had ditched her customary stilettos for sneakers to walk around the rough terrain with the 6-foot-3 Trump.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on who specifically Trump thought had doctored the photos. The president showed his frustration with press coverage of his wife during an interview this week with a conservative online news organization.

"If our first lady, if I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, she'd be Jackie O times twenty. Instead, they go after her," Trump told Breitbart News in Monday's interview. Trump was referring to President John F. Kennedy's wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who often was referred to as "Jackie O" after she remarried following Kennedy's assassination.

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Several factors can influence the way people appear in photos, including the angle at which the photos are taken, the type of camera lens that is used and the positioning of the photographer, said Akili Ramsess, executive director of the National Press Photographers Association.

News images are not to be altered beyond basic toning and cropping, she said.

"Manipulation is against photojournalism ethics," Ramsess said, adding that most newsrooms follow the ethics guidelines on the association's website. "Photographers or editors can be fired over such manipulation."

The "FakeMelania" hashtag has been around since at least 2017, Trump's first year in office, with Twitter searches producing numerous photos of the first lady and unfounded commentary that the woman in the images is not Melania Trump.

Toward the end of the debate on "The View," contributor Ana Navarro-Cardenas, who opposes Trump, said: "Let's have fun with Melania. She's beautiful, and we're doing this in jest." Abby Huntsman, a Republican on the panel, followed up by asking, "Does that make it better?" That prompted co-host Joy Behar, who also disapproves of Trump, to say: "We're not here to be better people. We're here to have a good laugh."

Stephanie Grisham, the first lady's spokeswoman, said the episode "went beyond the petty mean-girl spirit that we've grown accustomed to."

"People died, people lost family, people are hurting in Alabama," Grisham said Wednesday in an email. "I personally watched the president and first lady hug, listen to and comfort people who had lost everything - and the 'ladies' of The View instead chose to laugh and joke about a body-double conspiracy."

An ABC spokesman declined to comment.

___

Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap
By Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump issued the first veto of his presidency on Friday to block a measure passed by Democrats and Republicans in Congress that would terminate his emergency declaration for a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. The veto, made necessary after a strong and unusual rebuke from members of Trump's Republican party, capped a week that left Trump politically wounded, at least temporarily, as immigration and his signature promise of a wall become a flashpoint again in the 2020 presidential campaign. Congress is unlikely to muster the votes to override Trump's veto, a fact that left White House officials confident despite disappointment that it passed the Republican-controlled Senate at all. The bipartisan vote on Thursday was a slap at Trump for his decision to circumvent Congress and take money already designated for other programs to pay for a barrier on the southern border. Twelve Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate to pass the measure, concerned that the president had overstepped his authority. Trump repeated his view that a crisis existed at the border, called the resolution reckless and said he was proud to veto it. "As president the protection of the nation is my highest duty. Yesterday, Congress passed a dangerous resolution that if signed into law would put countless Americans in danger, very grave danger," he said, sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office. "Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, and I have the duty to veto it." The White House had lobbied heavily for Republicans to back Trump, despite concerns among some about executive overreach and precedent-setting action that a future Democratic president could copy on policies that Republicans oppose. The president, without acknowledging that lobbying, said he had sympathy for those who defied him, adding they did what they had to do. U.S. Attorney General William Barr said the president's emergency declaration was legal. It is being challenged in court as an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress' power of the purse. Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi said her chamber would vote on March 26 to override the veto. The House and Senate resoundingly rejected the presidents lawless power grab, yet the president has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people," she said in a statement. The Senate would have to vote to override the veto as well, requiring more Republicans than the original 12 to sign on, which is unlikely to happen. Trump was flanked by border officials and people whose relatives were killed by someone who was in the United States illegally. They praised the president for standing firm on the issue, which resonates strongly with his political base. Researchers have said that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, despite Trump repeatedly linking immigration and crime. The president has said he wants a wall to prevent immigrants from crossing into the United States illegally. Democrats deny there is an emergency at the border, saying border crossings are at a four-decade low. Trump thanked Republican senators who voted for his declaration in a Twitter post earlier on Friday. "Watch, when you get back to your State, they will LOVE you more than ever before!" he said. Trump made a border wall a central promise of his 2016 campaign for the White House. He initially insisted that Mexico would pay for the wall but it has declined to do so. Last year, Trump forced a government shutdown over an impasse with Congress over funding for the barrier. When a deal to prevent another shutdown did not give him the funding he requested, Trump declared a national emergency, redirecting funds that were allocated for other projects to build the barrier instead. (Reporting by Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton; Additional reporting by Tim Ahmann; editing by Grant McCool)
Donald Trump has said there should be no Mueller report in a series of tweets denouncing the special counsels investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

It was just the latest misleading tirade Mr Trump has launched in recent months as the special counsels investigation appears to come to a close.

Mr Trump tweeted on Friday morning: So, if there was knowingly & acknowledged to be zero crime when the special counsel was appointed, and if the appointment was made based on the Fake Dossier (paid for by Crooked Hillary) and now disgraced Andrew McCabe (he & all stated no crime), then the special counsel should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report.

This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win.

He added: THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!

Since the special counsels appointment in May 2017, the president has repeatedly tried to undermine Mr Muellers work, casting the probe as a witch hunt and proclaiming there was NO COLLUSION with Russia.

Under Justice Department guidelines, Mr Mueller will produce a confidential report to attorney general William Barr that explains his decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions.

Mr Barr will then prepare his own report that would be released to the US Congress. He has said he intends to share some information with the public, though its unclear whether the special counsels actual report will ever be made public.

Six of Mr Trumps aides or advisers have been charged in Mr Muellers investigation.

On Friday, six House Democratic committee heads called on Mr Barr to make the full report public, including any evidence of misconduct by the president.

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The US House of Representatives also voted overwhelmingly across party lines for a resolution calling on the Justice Department to make the report public and available to Congress.

Mr Muellers team has been dwindling in recent weeks and lawyers from the US attorneys office in Washington were assigned to the criminal case of Mr Trump confidant Roger Stone since his arrest last month, which could be an indication the special counsel is planning to hand off the investigation.

The White House said the president will let the attorney general decide whether to release the findings of the Russia investigation to the public.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Mr Trump was following the proper process by leaving the decision to Mr Barr. But she stressed that the White House was not concerned about the findings.

Ms Sanders said Mr Trump was president because he was the better candidate, adding that he didnt need to, nor did he collude with the Russians.

Additional reporting by AP
President Trump on Friday issued the first veto of his presidency, blocking a congressional resolution that would have prematurely terminated the national emergency he declared in February in an attempt to unilaterally fund the construction of his long-promised wall on the southern border.

Today I am vetoing this resolution. Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution and I have the duty to veto it, Trump said while flanked by an angel mom in the Oval Office.

Trump railed against Congress during the Oval Office signing ceremony, calling the resolution reckless and repeatedly asserting that the influx of illegal immigration at the southern border qualifies as an emergency. Attorney General William Barr joined Trump in the Oval Office, making a rare public appearance to confirm Trumps reading of the national-emergencies statute.

The resolution passed the Senate Thursday 5941 with the support of twelve Republicans, who split with the president and much of the GOP establishment in condemning the national-emergency declaration as an abuse of executive power.

Congress, lacking a veto-proof majority, will be unable to terminate the national emergency  but the declaration must still survive numerous legal challenges before Trump can unilaterally re-appropriate the $3.6 billion in military funding that hes sought for the construction of the border-wall.

While much of the Republican establishment enthusiastically backed the emergency declaration, a number of conservative lawmakers  including Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and Mike Lee of Utah  expressed concern about executive overreach, but voted against the resolution anyway. The group of Senate conservatives relented after trying in vain to negotiate a compromise with the White House wherein Trump would vow to support some version of Lees Article One Act, which would significantly constrain the the National Emergencies Act of 1976, in exchange for the lawmakers support for his current exercise of emergency powers.

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Tillis, who initially vowed to support the resolution in an op-ed urging his colleagues to do the same, explained in a Thursday statement that he decided to back Trumps declaration after Vice President Mike Pence provided assurances that the administration would to reform the national-emergencies statute to prevent future abuses.

Sasse similarly urged his colleagues to support Lees bill reining in the presidents emergency powers, but said he decided to vote against the resolution because he believes there is a true crisis at the southern border, which Trump is legally entitled to address using a national-emergency declaration under current law.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in anticipation of Trumps veto, prematurely scheduled an override vote for March 26 in what amounts to a symbolic gesture, since there is no companion vote scheduled in the Senate.

More from National Review
The Youth Climate Strike in Hong Kong. Photo: ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images

On Friday, tens of thousands of student activists with the Youth Climate Strike will walk out of class in over 110 countries, demanding that their respective governments stop treating the environmental crisis with comically sub-par measures. Inspired by the activism of Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the youth organization has quickly become one of the most visible movements to plead for serious, immediate action on climate change.

In August 2018, Thunberg began camping outside the Riksdag, claiming that the Swedish parliament had not maintained the countrys commitments to the Paris Agreement from 2015. By December, more than 20,000 students had taken on Thunbergs mantle, striking in at least 270 cities. In an example of protest cross-pollination, Thunberg says she was inspired by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who organized the March for Our Lives, which drew around 2 million people in March 2018. Fridays protest is expected surpass that number by a significant margin.

In the United States, the strikes on Friday are planned in over 100 cities and 45 states. Three student activists, all young women, helmed the protests in the U.S.: Alexandria Villasenor, Haven Coleman, and Isra Hirsi, daughter of Representative Ilhan Omar, who announced she would be attending the Youth Climate Strike in D.C. Already, in Australia, the protests have drawn impressive numbers in Perth and Brisbane. In New York City, the strike will take place at 2 p.m. at Columbus Circle.

One of the most striking elements of the young organizers thus far has been their refined media presence  a trait thats quickly becoming standard practice for the post-millennial generation. Why go to school if we wont have a future? asked U.S. Youth Climate Strike leader Alexandria Villasenor in an interview with the Nation. Why go to school if were going to be too busy running from the next hurricane or fire? Well be migrating to places where we can actually live. In a striking letter to the Guardian, the groups leaders wrote:

Young people make up more than half of the global population. Our generation grew up with the climate crisis and we will have to deal with it for the rest of our lives. Despite that fact, most of us are not included in the local and global decision-making process. We are the voiceless future of humanity.

You have failed us in the past. If you continue failing us in the future, we, the young people, will make change happen by ourselves. The youth of this world has started to move and we will not rest again.

For her work spurring the movement into existence, Greta Thunberg was nominated on Thursday for the Nobel Peace Prize. We have proposed Greta Thunberg because if we do nothing to halt climate change it will be the cause of wars, conflict, and refugees, said Norwegian lawmaker Freddy Andre vstegard.

With just 11 years to cut emissions in order to stave off catastrophic levels of climate change, young climate activists are gaining momentum in other pursuits  most prominently, the Juliana v. United States lawsuit. Filed by a group called Our Childrens Trust in the U.S. District Court in Oregon in 2015, the suit asserts that the governments failure to act on climate change has violated young Americans constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property. The trial was originally scheduled to begin last October; in January, the Ninth Circuit court denied a request by the Trump administration to delay proceedings.

Though both the Obama and Trump administrations have claimed the judicial branch should not weigh in on the matter, on March 1, eight Congressional Democrats wrote to affirm the validity of the case. As a citizen of America, I have the same right to life, liberty, and property as my forefathers, wrote 17-year-old Leon Zha in an amicus brief. But what life do I have if I die twenty years early from carcinogenic smog? What liberty, if I must stay indoors all day to avoid the stroke-inducing heat? What property, if the land itself is burned to ash?
Tucker Carlson joked about having sex with a vulnerable teenage beauty pageant contestant, newly unearthed audio has revealed, as advertisers turn their backs on the prominent Fox News presenter over a string of controversial comments.

The right-wing talk show host also said the Miss Teen USA contender would make a a pretty good wife because she was so dumb, in a series of misogynistic and degrading remarks during an interview with a US shock jock.

The audio, first published by social news provider Now This, is the latest of several clips recorded between 2006 and 2011 and released by left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America.

In other recordings from radio interviews with Bubba the Love Sponge, Carlson is heard defending statutory rape, describing women as "primitive", and saying he love[s] the idea of schoolgirls sexually experimenting. He also claimed white men deserve credit for creating civilization and describes Iraqis as semi-literate primitive monkeys.

Drug company AstraZeneca and sleepwear manufacturer Sheex this week announced they are pulling all advertising from Carlsons show in light of the "inappropriate" comments. They join dozens of other advertisers that have reportedly cut ties with the programme in recent months over the presenters inflammatory remarks about immigrants and women.

In the latest recording, Carlson is heard making lewd comments about Caitlin Upton, who won the 2007 Miss Teen Carolina contest when she was 17. Ms Upton was subjected to ridicule online and in the media for an answer she gave to a question during the pageant  derision she later said left her suicidal.

During the interview with Bubba, Carlson says: I gotta be honest, I thought she was kind of appealing.

Shed probably be a pretty good wife ... Dont you think, if you had a wife that dumb, would it be good or bad?

Bubba replies emphatically: Good.

Exclusive: Tucker Carlson's sexual comments about a Miss Teen USA pageant are some of the most shocking yet - in new unearthed audio. pic.twitter.com/QCOzaYVYIC  NowThis (@nowthisnews) March 13, 2019

Later in the exchange, Carlson suggests without evidence that actor and Miss Teen USA host Mario Lopez had sex with Upton after the pageant. He jokes the contestant would be easy to trick into sex because shes so dumb.

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Shes vulnerable, he adds. Shes like a wounded gazelle separated from the herd.

Asked by Bubba, who believes the teenager was underage, if it would be a problem legally if Mario f***ed it, Carlson responds: No. No are you kidding. Hes like James Brown.

The normal laws for that kind of thing dont apply to him. He gets a pass.

Carlson has not commented on the latest clip, but has previously refused to apologise for his remarks on Bubba the Love Sponge Show and vowed he "will never bow to the mob".

In a statement posted on Twitter this week, he said: "Media Matters caught me saying something naughty on a radio show more than a decade ago. Rather than express the usual ritual contrition, how about this: Im on television every weeknight live for an hour. If you want to know what I think, you can watch.

"Anyone who disagrees with my views is welcome to come on and explain why.

The Independent has approached Fox News for a comment.
Istanbul (AFP) - Ankara on Friday opened an inquiry after it emerged that the man alleged to be the New Zealand mosque gunman made several visits to Turkey, an official said.

A right-wing extremist armed with semi-automatic weapons rampaged through two mosques in the city of Christchurch during afternoon prayers on Friday, killing 49 worshippers and wounding dozens more.

A visitor believed to be the 28-year-old Australian -- who has been arrested and charged with murder in New Zealand -- "visited Turkey several times and stayed for a long period in the country," the Turkish official said without giving dates.

"We think that the suspect could have been to other countries (from Turkey) in Europe, Asia and Africa. We are investigating the suspect's movements and contacts in the countries," added the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Turkish media reported that a manifesto published online allegedly by the gunman contained specific references to Turkey and ridding the famed Hagia Sophia in Istanbul of its minarets. Now a museum, the building was once a church before being turned into a mosque during the Ottoman empire.

Sofia earlier said it too was investigating after discovering that the gunman might have visited Bulgaria in November 2018.

A man believed to be him spent a week in the country supposedly to "visit historical sites and study the history of the Balkan country," Bulgaria's chief prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov said.

He said the inquiry would establish if this was "correct or if he had other objectives".

The same man also made a short visit to the Balkans in December 2016, travelling by bus across Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday broadened the scope of what it will consider in resolving the legal fight over the contentious decision by President Donald Trump's administration to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, agreeing also to decide whether the move violated the U.S. Constitution. In the aftermath of a March 6 ruling by a federal judge in California, the high court said it will decide whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ran afoul of the Constitution's so-called Enumeration Clause, which sets out the terms under which people should be counted in the census, when he added the citizenship question in March 2018. Various states including New York and California as well as civil rights groups have challenged the question in court. They have said that asking people about their citizenship could scare immigrants and Latinos into abstaining from the census, disproportionately affecting Democratic-leaning states. Two judges have blocked the addition of the question. The Supreme Court previously agreed to resolve whether adding the question violated a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act, as a federal judge in New York ruled on Jan. 15. The Supreme Court, which has a 5-4 conservative majority, is set to hear oral arguments on April 23, with a ruling due by the end of June. The U.S. Constitution mandates a census every 10 years. The official population count is used in the allocation of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the distribution of billions of dollars in federal funds. There has not been a census question about citizenship status since 1950. Opponents have accused the administration of trying to engineer an undercount of the true population and diminish the electoral representation of Democratic-leaning communities in Congress, benefiting Trump's fellow Republicans. Non-citizens comprise an estimated 7 percent of people living in the United States. The Supreme court last month granted the administration's request to hear its appeal of Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman's January ruling even before a lower appeals court had considered the matter. San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg this month found in a suit brought by the state of California not only that the administration failed to follow the correct process under federal law in adding the question but also that the move violated the Enumeration Clause, an issue not decided by Furman. "The evidence admitted in the trial of these actions demonstrates that a significant differential undercount, particularly impacting noncitizen and Latino communities, will result from the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 Census," Seeborg wrote. By taking up both questions, the Supreme Court ensures that all legal issues relating to the census will be resolved quickly. Time is of the essence, as the official census forms are due to be printed in the coming months. Ross defended the administration's decision to add the question in congressional testimony on Thursday, but faced sharp criticism from Democratic lawmakers. When announcing that the citizenship question would be added, Ross said the Justice Department had requested the data to help enforce the Voting Rights Act, which protects eligible voters from discrimination. Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections. Democrats call the citizenship question part of a broader Republican effort at the federal and state level, also including voter-suppression measures and redrawing of electoral districts, to diminish the voting power of areas and groups that typically back Democratic candidates, including immigrants, Latinos and African-Americans. Republicans reject the accusation. (Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
By David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee emerged from a closed-door meeting with former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Wednesday with conflicting accounts of their conversation with the controversial Trump ally. Whitaker was called to Capitol Hill to clarify his testimony at a combative Feb. 8 committee hearing, during which he denied speaking with President Donald Trump about a federal case involving Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who met for two hours with Whitaker and the panel's top Republican, Representative Doug Collins, said Whitaker no longer denied speaking to Trump about Cohen or about the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York. "Unlike in the hearing room, Mr. Whitaker did not deny that the president called him to discuss the Michael Cohen case and personnel decisions in the Southern District," the New York Democrat told reporters. Nadler also said Whitaker told the lawmakers that he was involved in conversations about U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman's recusal from the Cohen investigation in the Southern District of New York and about whether its campaign finance case involving hush money payments to two women who claim they had affairs with Trump had gone too far. Nadler's committee is seeking evidence that Trump may have urged Whitaker to put the investigations under the supervision of Berman, a Trump donor and former law partner of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who is recused. But Collins, a Georgia Republican, contradicted much of Nadler's account. "He (Whitaker) said that he had not talked with the president about Mr. Cohen at all," Collins told reporters. Collins described Whitaker's conversations about Berman and the campaign finance case as questions for his personal staff. "(Whitaker) had no conversations with the Southern District of New York," he said. Collins also dismissed a Nadler statement that Whitaker was involved in conversations about firing one or more U.S. attorneys as "normal personnel issues." Whitaker, who left the Justice Department after Attorney General William Barr's arrival last month, caused alarm among Democrats when Trump appointed him acting attorney general without Senate confirmation in November, after ousting former Attorney Jeff Sessions last November. Democrats warned that he could interfere with U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. In his February testimony, Whitaker denied interfering in the Mueller probe. The campaign finance case in New York mentioned by Nadler involves hush money payments made to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, just before the 2016 election. Both women have claimed they had affairs with Trump. Trump has denied those claims. Whitaker refused to answer questions about the topic during the hearing. He also denied media reports that Trump had lashed out at him after learning that Cohen would plead guilty for lying to Congress about a proposed Trump tower in Moscow. Cohen was sentenced in December to three years in prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, including making the hush money payments. Cohen said he made the payments at the direction of Trump. (Reporting by David Morgan, editing by G Crosse)
(Reuters) - U.S. federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook Inc struck with some of the world's largest technology companies, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the requests and without naming the companies.

Both companies are among the more than 150, including Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Microsoft Corp, that have entered into partnerships with Facebook for access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users, according to the report.

Facebook is facing a slew of lawsuits and regulatory inquiries over its privacy practices, including ongoing investigations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and two state agencies in New York.

In addition to looking at the data deals, the probes focus on disclosures that the company shared the user data of 87 million people with Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm that worked with U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign.

Facebook said it was cooperating with investigators in multiple federal probes, without addressing the grand jury inquiry specifically.

"We've provided public testimony, answered questions, and pledged that we will continue to do so," Facebook said in a statement.

Facebook has defended the data-sharing deals, first reported in December, saying none of the partnerships gave companies access to information without people's permission.

A spokesman for the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York, which The New York Times reported is overseeing the inquiry, said he could not confirm or deny the probe.

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Bengaluru and Katie Paul in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang and Leslie Adler)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has revoked hundreds of visas from Venezuelans since Monday, nearly a third of which belonged to former diplomats from Venezuela and their families, and is urging U.S. citizens in Venezuela to flee the country days after the United States withdrew its diplomats from Venezuela, the State Department said on Thursday. "Since this Monday ... we have revoked 340 visas, 107 of which include visas of Maduro's former diplomats and their families," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters. The United States has been stepping up actions against President Nicolas Maduro's government as it tries to pressure Maduro to step down. (Reporting by Lesley Wroughton; Writing by Makini Brice; Editing by Leslie Adler)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's opposition Labour Party will not support a proposal for a second Brexit referendum due to be voted on in parliament later on Thursday, the party's Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer said. Parliament will later vote on a government proposal for a three-month delay to the Article 50 Brexit negotiation period if a deal is approved by March 20, and a longer delay if it is not. Lawmakers have proposed changes to that including one, amendment H, which says a delay should be used to hold a second referendum. "We will not be supporting H tonight," Starmer told parliament. "Today is about the question of whether Article 50 should be extended." Starmer said Labour would support holding a public vote on any Brexit deal which is approved by parliament. (Reporting by Kylie MacLellan, editing by Elizabeth Piper)
Bogota (AFP) - The UN warned the Colombian government Thursday that "there can be no going back" on the landmark peace agreement with FARC guerrillas, despite President Ivan Duque's plans to modify the deal he sees as too lenient.

"The current government will have the historic responsibility to continue with the full implementation of the peace agreement," Alberto Brunori, the UN's human rights chief in Colombia, said in a speech in Bogota.

Duque was elected last year on a pledge to roll back some aspects of the deal that ended five decades of conflict in the South American country.

He announced plans last week to reform the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), set up under the agreement to try former combatants accused of atrocities.

The right-wing president has announced that he will object before Congress to six of the 159 articles of the law that regulates the JEP, considered the backbone of the peace pact negotiated in Havana.

Under the JEP, ex-rebels or soldiers would receive alternative sentences to prison time if they confess their crimes, compensate victims and pledge never to resort to violence again.

Negotiators of the 2016 peace pact have warned the United Nations that the move would "seriously damage" the accord.

"The construction of a stable and lasting peace depends on the urgent approval and promulgation without denunciations of the draft statute law of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace," said Brunori, who was presenting the annual human rights report for Colombia.

Transformed into a political party since the peace deal, FARC has hit out repeatedly at the lack of security guarantees for its members.

While some 7,000 ex-fighters laid down their weapons, Colombia's peace and reconciliation commission estimates 1,600 dissident rebels remain active.

The UN office has also described as "worrying" the human rights situation in Colombia, including the killings of activists and community leaders.

Some cases are linked to "substantial delays in the implementation" of the peace agreement, according to the UN. Brunori reported 113 killings in 2018 alone.
Paris (AFP) - From Syria's devastating conflict to unprecedented mass protests in Algeria, the Arab world has seen eight years of turmoil. Only Tunisia pursues democratisation, while other countries are marred by war, repression and chaos.

A panorama:

- Tunisia: spark of Arab Spring -

In December 2010 the self-immolation of a young street vendor, frustrated by police harassment, triggers protests against poverty and unemployment.

Less than a month later, popular pressure forces long-time president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country.

Tunisia wins international plaudits for its peaceful transition.

In 2014 it adopts a new constitution that limits presidential power. General elections are won by Nidaa Tounes, an anti-Islamist party, tailed by the moderate Islamist Ennahda party.

In December, Beji Caid Essebsi becomes the country's first democratically elected head of state.

Since three major attacks by the jihadist Islamic State in 2015, the security situation has greatly improved. Legislative and presidential elections are planned in late 2019.

- Egypt: repression -

After a mass 18-day revolt which costs almost 850 lives, Hosni Mubarak steps down from the presidency on February 11, 2011 ending almost three decades in power and handing power to the army.

In June 2012, Islamist Mohamed Morsi becomes the first civilian, freely elected head of the Arab world's most populous state.

The following year is marked by crises and political dissent, resulting in the ouster of Morsi by the armed forces led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi following vast protests.

The new regime launches a bloody crackdown on Morsi supporters. Rights group Amnesty International says 1,400 people are killed in seven months, the majority being Islamist protesters.

Rights groups accuse Sisi, elected president in 2014 and again in 2018, of running an ultra-repressive regime.

- Yemen: famine -

In February 2012 after more than three decades in power and a year of popular revolt, Ali Abdullah Saleh is ousted and his deputy Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi takes over.

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In 2014 Huthi Shiite rebels launch an offensive from which they seize vast swathes of the country including the capital Sanaa. The following year Saudi Arabia leads an Arab coalition to halt the Huthi advance.

Some 10,000 people have died in the conflict, according to the World Health Organization. Ten million are on the brink of famine.

- Bahrain: dissent -

Tiny Gulf state Bahrain, ruled by the Sunni Khalifa dynasty and backed by powerful neighbour Saudi Arabia, has been rocked by sporadic unrest since 2011 when authorities clamped down on Shiite protests calling for political reforms.

Since then opposition has grown and hundreds of demonstrators have been jailed or stripped of their nationality.

- Libya: chaos -

On February 15, 2011, protests break out against the regime of Moamer Kadhafi, in power for 42 years.

The demonstrations are violently repressed and the unrest turns into armed revolt which wins backing from NATO. On October 20, Kadhafi is captured and killed during a battle for his hometown Sirte, east of the capital Tripoli.

Two rival authorities now lead Libya: from its base in Tripoli an internationally-backed government headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, and a parallel administration operating out of the east, supported by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

A multitude of militias also vie for control.

The Islamic State occupied Sirte for months before being ousted at the end of 2016. Amid the insecurity and political chaos, Libya has become a major transit hub for hundreds of thousands of African migrants trying to reach Europe by sea.

- Syria: ninth year of war -

Syria has been shattered by eight years of conflict that have killed more than 370,000 people dead and uprooted more than 13 million.

Peaceful protests that begin on March 15, 2011, are crushed and transformed into an armed insurrection against President Bashar al-Assad, before degenerating into all-out war in 2012.

In 2013-2014, lightly armed rebel groups are pushed aside by Islamic militias such as the Al-Nusra Front, an Al-Qaeda affiliate, then the IS.

With military backing from its allies Russia, Iran and Lebanese Shiite organisation Hezbollah, the regime wins back territory it had lost. Today it controls nearly two thirds of the country.

- Algeria: massive protests -

Algeria is rocked from February 22, 2019, by a wave of unprecedented demonstrations, sparked when ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power since 1999, says he will stand for a fifth term.

On March 11, Bouteflika pulls out of the presidential race but postpones the election planned for April 18, effectively extending his term.

Protests continue.
The OECD Observer online archive takes you on a journey through half a century of public policy and world progress.

Since November 1962, the OECDs experts and leading guests offer insights on the questions facing our member countries with concise and authoritative analysis, and provide our audiences with an excellent opportunity to understand policy debates and consider solutions.

Each edition of the OECD Observer reports on a core theme of the OECDs on-going work, from economics and society through governance, finance, and the environment, and articles are bolstered by tables and graphs.
Washington (AFP) - Washington on Thursday accused Russia and the Syrian government of being responsible for "escalating violence" in rebel-controlled Idlib province.

Russian jets on Wednesday carried out air strikes in Idlib, the first such attacks since a September Turkish-Russian truce deal.

At least 13 civilians, including six infants, were killed in the raids, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor that relies on sources inside Syria.

"The United States views with grave concern escalating violence in recent days in Idlib and neighboring areas prompted by Russian and Assad regime airstrikes and artillery," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"Despite Russia's claims to be targeting terrorists, these operations have caused dozens of civilian casualties and have targeted first responders as they attempt to save lives on the ground," he added.

"These abhorrent attacks on civilian infrastructure and on settlements for internally displaced people must end now."

As a party to the September ceasefire agreement with Turkey, "Russia bears full responsibility for these offensive operations," Palladino said.

Idlib is Syria's last major rebel bastion and is mainly controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Syrian group led by former Al-Qaeda fighters.

The truce deal was meant to stave off a planned offensive by the regime and its Russian backers that aid groups feared could spark the eight-year-old Syrian conflict's worst humanitarian crisis to date.

The government assault has been held off but the deal's provisions have not been implemented.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Aerospace giant Boeing is a juggernaut in Washington, employing a team of in-house lobbyists and blue chip firms as part of a multimillion dollar influence operation built to shape policy on Capitol Hill and inside the Trump administration.

But the company's clout goes only so far.

Bowing to international pressure, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the U.S. were being grounded following the Ethiopian Airlines disaster and another crash involving the same model jet five months earlier in Indonesia. Many nations in the world had already barred the aircraft from their airspace.

Trump said he didn't want to take any chances, even though the Federal Aviation Administration had said it didn't have any data to show the passenger jets are unsafe.

Still, Trump gave Boeing a vote of confidence, declaring it "a great, great company with a track record that is so phenomenal."

The crash in Ethiopia had cast a spotlight on the FAA's decision to continue to permit the airliner to fly even as other countries grounded it  and onto Trump's ties to Boeing and the company's influence in Washington.

The president spoke by phone with Boeing's CEO Dennis Muilenburg, a frequent participant in White House events, on Tuesday. The FAA said the same day it remained confident in the aircraft even as governments in Europe and Asia grounded the plane.

Muilenburg urged Trump not to ground the fleet, according to a White House official not authorized to publicly discuss a private conversation. It was not clear whether the call influenced the FAA's decision.

Trump's acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, worked as a top executive for the aviation manufacturer for decades. Trump has often praised Shanahan publicly, noting his reputation at Boeing for managing costs and rescuing a troubled Dreamliner 787 jet airliner program.

Trump has long showcased American business abroad on his international trips and last month, mere hours before he was set to meet with North Korea's Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, he touted a sale of 100 of the 737 Max planes to Vietnamese airlines.

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Boeing said the order was worth $12.7 billion but, in the wake of the crashes, the Vietnamese government said the safety issues must be addressed for the planes to go into service.

Trump also used Boeing as a backdrop of an early rally, standing in front of a new Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner at a South Carolina plant in February 2017. Boeing employs more than 153,000 people, including more than 7,300 in South Carolina.

"We want products made by our workers in our factories stamped with those four magnificent words  'made in the USA'," Trump said.

But his relationship with Boeing has been, at times, rocky. He clashed with the company before even taking office, slamming Boeing for the cost of its plan to build new versions of Air Force One, a broadside that sent the company's shares tumbling.

Boeing spent $15.1 million on lobbying in 2018, with more than a dozen firms working on its behalf, according to disclosure records filed with the House and Senate. Among them are Norm Dicks and Associates. Dicks was serving as the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee when he ended his 36-year congressional career in 2013.

Boeing paid Dicks' firm $290,000. He most recently lobbied lawmakers to support Boeing's KC-46A tanker, an aircraft that acts as a flying gas station and can refuel all U.S. and allied aircraft. Boeing has a contract with the Air Force for 52 of an expected 179 tankers.

The executive in charge of Boeing's government operations office is Timothy Keating, who worked in the Clinton White House as special assistant to the president and staff director for legislative affairs. Before joining Boeing, Keating was a senior vice president at Honeywell International and a managing partner at the lobbying firm Timmons and Company.

Boeing's connections in the nation's capital extend beyond the people on its payroll. When a Senate oversight committee convenes a hearing on aviation safety following the Ethiopian Airlines crash, John Keast, the Republican-led panel's staff director, won't be far from the dais where the members are sitting. Keast was a Boeing lobbyist just before he accepted the committee post late last year.

The committee chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., announced Keast's hiring in early December. Keast joined Cornerstone Government Affairs in 2006 and had most recently monitored congressional developments on defense, foreign policy, space exploration and homeland security for Boeing, according to the disclosure records.

No date has been set for the hearing, although Wicker signaled that the committee would not interfere with the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board investigations of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster.

Boeing also makes its presence felt through campaign contributions made by a political action committee and individual employees to lawmakers from both political parties. Boeing-affiliated groups and employees have donated close to $8.4 million since 2016, according to the political-money website Open Secrets.

Among the recipients is Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chairman of the Senate's aviation and space subcommittee, who received more than $60,000. Cruz on Tuesday joined a number of other lawmakers who called for the Max 8 aircraft to be grounded, declaring such a move would be prudent "until the FAA confirms the safety of these aircraft and their passengers."

___

Contact Richard Lardner on Twitter at http://twitter.com/rplardner
The Australian suspect who claimed responsibility for the New Zealand shootings that killed at least 49 people in two mosques wrote a 70-page anti-immigrant manifesto calling himself a racist, ethno-nationalist and fascist. He also called President Trump a symbol of "renewed white identity." Trump has condemned the attack.

(In 2017, a man in Quebec killed six people at a mosque and cited similar influences.)

In a less publicized shooting this week, two young men killed seven people at a school in Brazil. Police say they were obsessed with the 1999 Columbine attack.

(Shooters in Germany, Canada and Finland have also cited Columbine.)

Mass shootings are often called a uniquely American problem, but experts say violence here has global impact.

"There's no doubt that previous mass shooters in the United States have been imitated by shooters in the U.S. and outside it," said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama who studies mass shootings, noting "the influence of America culturally and cross-culturally."

The United States is ranked No. 1 in international influence, based on its economic and military power as well as its "cultural imprint," according to U.S. News & World Report.

"Americas culture and actions are contagious, as the U.S. draws a lot of attention," said Gary Slutkin, founder of Cure Violence, a nonprofit which treats gun violence like a disease.

Though the U.S. has long held a position of cultural dominance in the world, news of American mass shootings  and the motivations and ideologies behind them  spread faster and farther than ever. CNN International is seen in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. And if it weren't on TV, it would still be on Twitter.

"It's the viral nature of school shootings, the ubiquity of technology and the spread of ideology ... that have made mass shootings a global problem," said Colin Clarke, an adjunct political scientist at the RAND Corporation and a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, which does research on human security. "But while we pay a lot of attention to jihadist terrorism, we've been very slow and stubborn to realize that right-wing terrorism is very global, too."

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Social media amplifies hate, said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups.

The atrocity in New Zealand shows us, once again, that were dealing with an international terrorist movement linked by a dangerous white supremacist ideology thats metastasizing in the echo chambers of internet chat rooms and on social media networks," he said.

The mosque shooting suspect used a helmet-mounted camera to capture footage of the killings which he streamed live on Facebook and posted on YouTube and Twitter. It has since been removed.

An extremely small percentage of people commit mass shootings, but it is in these spaces online, Lankford said, where toxic ideas spread, and where many alienated men feel safe to worship the gunmen who terrorize the rest of us. Lankford says he's presenting a new study at the National Science Foundation next month showing that since 2010 there's been a more than 80-percent increase in highly lethal mass shooters that were influenced by a previous attacker.

A 2016 paper presented at the American Psychological Associations annual convention blamed media contagion for an increase in mass shootings. The authors wrote: "We would argue identification with prior mass shooters made famous by extensive media coverage, including names, faces, writings, and detailed accounts of their lives and backgrounds, is a more powerful push toward violence than mental health status or even access to guns."

Indeed, the majority of gun deaths in the U.S. are due not to mass shootings but to suicide, which also has a contagion effect.

Mass shooting contagion is particularly heightened for 13 days after an event, according to a 2015 analysis by researchers at Arizona State University. Some shooters, however, spend much more time planning their attacks. The New Zealand shooter claims he planned for two years.

Evidence shows mass shootings often have strong copycat effects, particularly for a certain kind of offender, said Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland.





"The thing that's being exported is not just mass shootings, it's a particular form of hate and hate crimes that blames immigrants and outsiders and people who look different," Metzl said. "It's impossible to see this crime and this mass murder just as a mass shooting. It took place in the context of the global spread of white nationalism."

WHITE SUPREMACY: U.S. hate group count hits 20-year high

Contributing: Cara Kelly, USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Zealand shows America's mass shootings have global consequences
Long-forgotten video footage of Madeleine McCann boarding the plane that took her to Portugal has been released as part of a new TV series.

The video shows the little girl struggling to make her way up the steps to the plane at East Midlands Airport five days before she disappeared.

Madeleine seen boarding the plane at East Midlands Airport (Netflix/The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann)

A clip of her on board an airport bus in the Algarve has also been unearthed.

The footage was first shared by Madeleines parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, in the weeks after the three-year-old vanished in May 2007.

It has now re-emerged as part of a new eight-part Netflix documentary into Madeleines disappearance, which has been made without the approval of the McCanns, now 51.

Kate and Gerry McCann have previously criticised the programme, saying it could potentially hinder the search for Madeleine, who vanished from the resort of Praia da Luz while on holiday with her family.

Madeleine on the airport bus in the Algarve (Netflix/The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann)

The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann will be released from today, the streaming service has confirmed, saying it will be a detailed look at the disappearance of the three-year-old.

Netflix said the series had access to never-before-heard testimonies from those at the heart of the story, including friends of the McCann family, investigators working the case and from those who became the subject of media speculation and rumour.

Madeleine was just three-years-old when she disappeared (Netflix/The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann)

Read more

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YouTube star PewdiePie sickened after New Zealand gunman uses his name in mass shooting live stream

Racist Australian senator condemned for anti-Muslim comments following New Zealand terror attack

Kate and Gerry McCann previously said in a statement: The production company told us that they were making the documentary and asked us to participate.

We did not see  and still do not see  how this programme will help the search for Madeleine and, particularly given there is an active police investigation, it could potentially hinder it.

Consequently, our views and preferences are not reflected in the programme.

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Kate and Gerry McCann havent given up home of finding their daughter (PA)

Scotland Yard launched an investigation, Operation Grange, after a Portuguese inquiry failed to make any headway on Madeleines disappearance.

In November last year, a further 150,000 was granted to the investigation to allow it to continue until March 31.

Force bosses have been applying for funding from the Home Office every six months to continue the inquiry, which has cost about 11.75 million so far.
What's Apple going to call the next iPhone? iPhone XI or iPhone 11? What about the R variant? Will the next be named XIR, 11R or XRS? Perhaps it's time for Apple to rethink its iPhone naming.

And its entire product line, too, because it's all quickly turning into a cluster-you-know-what.

Apple's main competitor has been thinking about renaming its flagship phones for a while. In 2018, Samsung Mobile CEO DJ Koh said that the company will stick to Galaxy, but it was thinking of dropping the S and numbering system after the 10. Rumors of the company rebranding its 2020 phones resurfaced again last month.

But Apple's problem is not only naming its future phones. It's about the iPhone line itself and the rest of the Apple products.

Right now, someone working at the Apple Store can't honestly help the average Joe when asked if it is better to buy the iPhone XR or the XS. "Well, the XR has a bigger screen, which is better, but the XS smaller screen has a higher quality, although it can burn," John Appleseed will tell a buyer, "but both products run at the same speed and have more or less the same specs  except the XS has two cameras instead of one camera. AND both have Animoji." It doesn't sound like a clear explanation in any way. There's not a clear distinction and a clear message.

The same applies to other Apple products. For example: laypeople  not tech heads  get easily confused by the MacBook and the MacBook Air. The "Air" had a meaning back when all the other MacBooks were heavier  but now the former is clearly lighter than the latter. So what the hell does Air mean for me?

The truth is that Apple's product line is a mess. And thus consumers are getting confused.





Simplification was the key to Apple's success

There was a time when Apple's product line was a lot easier to understand.

Historically, Apple has founded its business in simplicity, said branding expert Joseph Anthony, CEO of the Hero Group Inc. "Now, they are hurting themselves with so many product variants."

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For Anthony, at some point you have to ask yourself if there is a way to simplify this instead of making so many different SKUs. (SKUs are stock keeping units, a technical way to refer to each distinct product you can order from a company.)

MORE: Best Smartphones - Here Are the 10 Best Phones Available

This will be a hard exercise. The Cupertino, California, company is facing extreme pressure from two sides. First, Asian manufacturers are releasing myriad models at different price points  phones and electronics that match Apple's quality and, in some case, surpass them in functionality.

Second, consumers are no longer keen to pay Apple's premium prices for upgraded products that have dubious positive impact on their lives. With phones and electronics turned into commodities with little distinctions between each other, Tim Cook and his minions are struggling to keep people from escaping their ecosystem by introducing new (slightly) cheaper products for those who can't afford the top of the line.

Credit: Apple Insider

Credit: Apple Insider

This is not a new situation for Apple. Back in the '90s, facing extreme competition from Microsoft and the PC clones, Apple fell into the same trap of trying to have multiple products to cater to consumers and professionals. In a few years, the company's product line had grown to dozens of product lines and hundreds of SKUs.

"Apple has founded its business in simplicity. It was always the benchmark, but now they are hurting themselves with so many product variants."

Joseph Anthony, CEO, Hero Group Inc.



When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, there was the PowerBook, the Power Macintosh, the Macintosh Performa, the Macintosh LC, the Network Servers, the Workgroup Servers, the Newton, the Newton MessagePad, the eMate, the StyleWriter, the LaserWriter, the Multiple Scan Displays, the ColorSync Displays lines. And all of those had multiple numbers attached to them, things like 3400, 5500, 7300, 8600 or 9600. And that's only from memory  I'm sure I'm missing more stuff.

MORE: Galaxy S10 Plus vs. iPhone XS Max: Which $1,000 Phone Wins?

Obviously, buyers were confused. And Apple's development, manufacturing and product stocking was a total mess. So, the first thing Jobs did when he replaced Gil Amelio as interim CEO was to call each product manager and axe  well, almost everything. He brutally simplified the product line and rebranded half of it, creating his famous 2 x 2 Apple product quadrant.

Source: Apple

Source: Apple

Apple products were divided in two: Consumer and Pro. And those were going to be divided in desktop and notebook. That's it. The iMac and the PowerMac, the iBook and the PowerBook. All of a sudden, consumers had a clear idea of what to buy. Sure, these products have different specs. You could buy a Power Mac in good, better and best configurations, each with different processor speeds and different RAM and storage options. But you knew what you were getting from the beginning: a computer for professionals. Same with the other products.

"General best practices for naming are to think many generations ahead and ensure extensibility for an evergreen system," Jake Hancock, a partner of brand strategy at global branding company Lippincott, told us over email. Jobs' quadrant system guaranteed that.

But as the company became bigger and more successful, complexity started to build up in the product line. The iPod came  with variants like nano, mini and shuffle. The iPhone, of course, went from simply iPhone to iPhone 3G and 3GS, the 3G meaning a communication standard and the S the revision to the original 3G. After the 4, the numbering sequence started, adding the S suffix every other year. And there was the iPad, with the Mini, the Air and the Pro.

Bionic, Retina, Liquid Display, Neural Engine, QuantumAudio, TrueDepth. One of those is fake, but 99 percent of people don't know that  or what the hell these things mean.

Things got a lot more complex, but at least there was some logic to it all. The MacBook Air, for example, had a clear branding.

But eventually the company fell victim to its own innovation, as Anthony told me. The prefixes and suffixes that were supposed to add context instead became confusing. "When you see Pro you instantly think it is for professionals," Anthony said. "But R or S doesn't really mean anything [...] adding a letter is not enough to inform the consumer."

That is true. If you are layperson, this doesn't add any context. You need to educate yourself before making a decision, and that's not good.

Even worse: in this competitive market, Apple is overemphasizing features by giving them new brand names, like Bionic, Retina, Liquid Display, Neural Engine, QuantumAudio, TrueDepth One of those is fake (QuantumAudio), but 99 percent of people won't know that  or what the hell the other things mean for that matter. And that's a problem.

The solution is complex

"Parallel conventions across product families offer another way to simplify the [buyer's journey]," Hancock points out. "A Pro and Air version of iPhones may not be right, but in a perfect world, the brand could create one disciplined approach across all products."

Credit: Mercury News

Credit: Mercury News

But we don't live in a perfect world and there is not a simple solution for all this. It is a problem that affects both the (excess of) product SKUs and a promotional issue, with names that lead to confusion.

Obviously, Apple needs to keep competing with Android manufacturers regarding phones, so it needs products to address other segments if it wants to keep people buying hardware, and its ecosystem thriving. The App Store and its subscription services have became the growth engine for the company, and you need lots of people using your hardware to keep that engine going.

"A Pro and Air version of iPhones may not be right, but in a perfect world, the brand could create one disciplined approach across all products."

Jake Hancock, partner of brand strategy, Lippincott

So how do you solve this product mess? According to Hero Group's CEO, at some point you have to ask yourself if there is a way to simplify the product line like Jobs did.

But, in addition to that, you need a better branding strategy. Apple has been the gold standard of what branding should be, Anthony said. It needs to create a master brand that it can continue to invest in over time, adding meaningful sub-brands that give consumers a clear idea of what these products to do for them, to quickly understand their attributes.

One obvious solution for the iPhone is to drop the numbering and the S convention and just use iPhone or iPhone X. "Like the automotive industry, just use the release year to identify them," Anthony tells me. People already know that, if they are buying the 2019 model, that's going to be "the best phone that Apple has ever built." It is obvious.

MORE: Apple's Big 'Show Time' Event March 25: Three Things to Expect

Hancock points out that there "will be greater emphasis on the model names (S versus R) and less on the generation names, which have less relevance to customers who either want newest/best or most affordable  or special features like size or color  and have little personal investment in version 10 or version 11."

But the S and the R don't tell much, like we already discovered. You need sub-brands that instantly tell regular consumers what they are buying without being part of the fanboy club. "iPhone X versus iPhone X Pro or whatever you want to call it," Anthony said, "but you need to create a language that gives a more distinct idea of what it is, which will result on a more efficient business model."

"The key for Apple will be learning how much complexity their customers are willing to learn and remember," Hancock told me. My guess is they are nearing the limit with multiple coexisting generations and versions of alphanumeric names."

I believe that we are way past that limit already. Apple needs to come up with a new Jobsian product matrix. Not a 2 x 2, obviously, but one that allows them to keep growing, building their brands and expanding their products without being confusing for consumers. That much is clear.

Credit: Tom's Guide
Growth investors focus on stocks that are seeing above-average financial growth, as this feature helps these securities garner the market's attention and deliver solid returns. But finding a growth stock that can live up to its true potential can be a tough task.

In addition to volatility, these stocks carry above-average risk by their very nature. Also, one could end up losing from a stock whose growth story is actually over or nearing its end.

However, the task of finding cutting-edge growth stocks is made easy with the help of the Zacks Growth Style Score (part of the Zacks Style Scores system), which looks beyond the traditional growth attributes to analyze a company's real growth prospects.

Douglas Dynamics (PLOW) is on the list of such stocks currently recommended by our proprietary system. In addition to a favorable Growth Score, it carries a top Zacks Rank.

Research shows that stocks carrying the best growth features consistently beat the market. And returns are even better for stocks that possess the combination of a Growth Score of A or B and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy).

Here are three of the most important factors that make the stock of this snowplow maker a great growth pick right now.

Earnings Growth

Earnings growth is arguably the most important factor, as stocks exhibiting exceptionally surging profit levels tend to attract the attention of most investors. For growth investors, double-digit earnings growth is highly preferable, as it is often perceived as an indication of strong prospects (and stock price gains) for the company under consideration.

While the historical EPS growth rate for Douglas Dynamics is 4.9%, investors should actually focus on the projected growth. The company's EPS is expected to grow 12.2% this year, crushing the industry average, which calls for EPS growth of 9.3%.

Cash Flow Growth

While cash is the lifeblood of any business, higher-than-average cash flow growth is more important and beneficial for growth-oriented companies than for mature companies. That's because, growth in cash flow enables these companies to expand their businesses without depending on expensive outside funds.

Story continues

Right now, year-over-year cash flow growth for Douglas Dynamics is 25.6%, which is higher than many of its peers. In fact, the rate compares to the industry average of 23.3%.

While investors should actually consider the current cash flow growth, it's worth taking a look at the historical rate too for putting the current reading into proper perspective. The company's annualized cash flow growth rate has been 24.7% over the past 3-5 years versus the industry average of 10.2%.

Promising Earnings Estimate Revisions

Superiority of a stock in terms of the metrics outlined above can be further validated by looking at the trend in earnings estimate revisions. A positive trend is of course favorable here. Empirical research shows that there is a strong correlation between trends in earnings estimate revisions and near-term stock price movements.

The current-year earnings estimates for Douglas Dynamics have been revising upward. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has surged 10.4% over the past month.

Bottom Line

While the overall earnings estimate revisions have made Douglas Dynamics a Zacks Rank #1 stock, it has earned itself a Growth Score of B based on a number of factors, including the ones discussed above.

You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

This combination positions Douglas Dynamics well for outperformance, so growth investors may want to bet on it.



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By Andrea Shalal BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's foreign minister on Friday called for urgent efforts to ensure that humans remained in control of lethal weapons, as a step toward banning "killer robots". Heiko Maas told an arms control conference in Berlin that rules were needed to limit the development and use of weapons that could kill without human involvement. Critics fear that the increasingly autonomous drones, missile defense systems and tanks made possible by new technology and artificial intelligence could turn rogue in a cyber-attack or as a result of programming errors. The United Nations and the European Union have called for a global ban on such weapons, but discussions so far have not yielded a clear commitment to conclude a treaty. "Killer robots that make life-or-death decisions on the basis of anonymous data sets, and completely beyond human control, are already a shockingly real prospect today," Maas said. "Fundamentally, it's about whether we control the technology or it controls us." Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands signed a declaration at the conference vowing to work to prevent weapons proliferation. "We want to want to codify the principle of human control over all deadly weapons systems internationally, and thereby take a big step toward a global ban on fully autonomous weapons," Maas told the conference. He said he hoped progress could be made in talks under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) this year. The next CCW talks on lethal autonomous weapons take place this month in Geneva. Kathleen Lawand, head of the arms unit at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told Reuters the weakened power of multilateral organizations made the push for regulation difficult, but action was urgently needed. "The technology is fast outpacing any norm-setting," she said. Human Rights Watch's Mary Wareham, coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, urged Germany to push for negotiations on a global treaty, rather than a non-binding declaration. "Measures that fall short of a new ban treaty will be insufficient to deal with the multiple challenges raised by killer robots," she said in a statement. Russia, Israel, South Korea and the United States, all of which are investing significantly in autonomous weapons, in November said they would not back negotiations for a new treaty. China is also developing such weapons, but has called for a ban on their use. In a new Ipsos survey, 61 percent of respondents in 26 countries opposed the use of lethal autonomous weapons. (Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand. Source: AP

Google has been condemned for not immediately taking down graphic footage of the terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand.

At least 49 people have been killed and 48 injured in shootings at Masjid Al Noor and the Linwood Masjid mosques in Christchurch.

One man has been charged with murder and three more held in custody over the attacks, which began at 1.40pm local time on Friday.

One of the gunmen live-streamed the attack on Facebook and identified himself as an Australian called Brenton Tarrant.

Brenton Tarrant wrote a multi-page document, praising previous attacks done by white supremacists.

Soon afterwards, the footage was available on Google, YouTube, Reddit, and other social media sites.

Googles initial response was to place an inappropriate content warning overlaid on top of the film, but users still had the option of clicking through to watch the attack unfold.

The footage shows the gunman picking up the gun, entering the mosque and opening fire on his victims.

Their response has been widely condemned, with Home Secretary Sajid Javid saying enough is enough and accusing YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter of not taking ownership of this content being shared on their networks.

You really need to do more @YouTube @Google @facebook @Twitter to stop violent extremism being promoted on your platforms. Take some ownership. Enough is enough https://t.co/GTSgRufOow  Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) March 15, 2019

Deputy leader of Labour Tom Watson also denounced Google, the parent company of YouTube, for failing to fully remove the broadcast, saying their response was not good enough.

Google have contacted me to explain that they posted the "inappropriate" content warning on the NZ massacre footage while they "reviewed the video" for YouTube. Not good enough. They should have just taken it down, then reviewed it. pic.twitter.com/5Zh2IfxwgR  Tom Watson (@tom_watson) March 15, 2019

In another tweet he said: If broadcasting mass murder is not a violation of YouTubes terms of service, then what is?

Story continues

Downing Street has also demanded UK news and media companies remove from their websites terrifying footage.

Theresa Mays spokeswoman said: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other providers have taken action to remove the video and other propaganda related to the attack.

The government has been clear that all companies need to act more quickly to remove terrorist content.

There should be no safe spaces for terrorists to promote and share their extreme views and radicalise others.

NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gives a press conference from Wellington, after the shootings at two mosques. Source: AP

Facebook New Zealand spokeswoman Mia Garlick said the video of the attack was quickly removed and any praise or support for it was being taken down.

In a statement, she said: Our hearts go out to the victims, their families and the community affected by this horrendous act.

New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooters Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video.

Were also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as were aware.

YouTube released a statement saying it was working vigilantly to remove the footage.

Our hearts are broken over todays terrible tragedy in New Zealand. Please know we are working vigilantly to remove any violent footage.  YouTube (@YouTube) March 15, 2019

An archive of a Facebook page thought to belong to attacker Brenton Tarrant contained dozens of posts in the last week about multiculturalism in Europe, several referring directly to the UK.

Among them were YouTube recordings of speeches by former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley.

NZ police have asked the public not to share the extremely distressing video on any social media platform.

At the time of publishing this article, Facebook has yet to post a statement.
Marginal 2.44 per cent increase in exports as well as lower imports of gold and petroleum products in February significantly narrowed the country's trade deficit to $9.6 billion, according to data released by the commerce ministry Friday.

India's merchandise exports rose to $26.67 billion in February from $26.03 per cent in the year-ago month mainly on account of higher shipments in sectors such as pharmaceutical, engineering and electronics.

Imports declined by 5.4 per cent to $36.26 billion in the last month, narrowing the trade deficit to $9.6 billion. The gap between imports and exports was $12.3 billion in February 2018, and $14.73 billion in January 2019.

As per the data, the decline in imports was mainly on account of sharp decline in inward shipments of gold and petroleum products.

While the import of gold fell by about 11 per cent to $2.58 billion in February as against $2.89 billion in the corresponding month last fiscal, inward shipments of petroleum products were down by nearly 8 per cent to $9.37 billion.

During the April-February period of the current fiscal year, exports grew 8.85 per cent to $298.47 billion, while imports rose by 9.75 per cent to $464 billion.

The trade deficit has widened to $165.52 billion during the 11 months of the current fiscal from $148.55 billion compared to the year-ago period, the data said.

Non-petroleum and non-gems and jewellery exports in February 2019 stood at $19.87 billion, as compared to $18.90 billion in year-ago month. Non-petroleum and non-gems and jewellery exports in April-February 2018-19 were $217.43 billion, as against $201.95 billion in the comparative period last fiscal.

Oil imports in April-February 2018-19 were $128.72 billion, which was 31.98 per cent higher over the same period last fiscal.

The global Brent price (USD/bbl) decreased by 1.97 per cent in February 2019 compared to the same month previous year.

Commenting on the trade data, President of exporters' body FIEO Ganesh Kumar Gupta said that exporters have managed to do well despite increasing protectionism, tough global conditions and constraints on the domestic front.

He said economies across Asia specially China and South East Asian nations have been showing signs of sluggishness with contraction in manufacturing due to slowdown in the global trade and fragile world economy.

Gupta said 18 out of 30 major product groups were in positive territory, with most of them with marginal growth during the month.

"However, with this trend, we will be able to achieve merchandise exports of about $330 billion, the highest ever exports for a fiscal," he added.

Meanwhile, the RBI said services exports in January 2019 were $17.75 billion, registering a negative growth of 1.02 per cent over December 2018. The imports stood at $11.03 billion, down 3.07 per cent over December 2018.

Taking merchandise and services together, overall trade deficit for April-February 2018-19 is estimated at $93.32 billion as compared to $82.46 billion in year-ago period.

ALSO READ:Govt notifies phased import duty hike on electric PV parts, lithium-ion cells

ALSO READ:Russian arms exports to India sank by 42% between 2014-18 and 2009-13, says report
For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  March 15, 2019  Zacks.com announces the list of stocks featured in the Analyst Blog. Every day the Zacks Equity Research analysts discuss the latest news and events impacting stocks and the financial markets. Stocks recently featured in the blog include: DowDuPont Inc. DWDP, LyondellBasell Industries N.V. LYB, Ingevity Corp. NGVT, Innospec Inc. IOSP and W. R. Grace & Co. GRA.

Here are highlights from Thursdays Analyst Blog:

Why a U.S.-China Trade Pact Will Be a Boon for U.S. Chemicals

The United States and China are inching toward a trade deal that could lead to a potential end to the year-long trade spat between the worlds two biggest economies.

The countries, which are engaged in a fierce trade conflict since last year, are in the final stages of negotiation for a deal that could see the roll back of most of the U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods as long as Beijing pledges to lower retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products, protect intellectual property rights and purchase a significant amount of American-made products.

Top trade negotiators of both countries are currently discussing major issues that must be resolved before the parties could hammer out a formal deal to ease the trade disputes that have cost both economies billions of dollars. One of the top priorities of the U.S. administration is to achieve structural changes to end Chinas unfair trade practices. If everything goes well, a deal may happen by the end of this month.

U.S. Chemical Industry Bearing Brunt of Trade Tariffs

The chemical industry is among the industries that have been badly hit by the trade tariffs. The damaging effects of the trade war were evident from the industrys lackluster performance in 2018. The U.S. chemical industry, in particular, is caught in the crosshairs of Sino-U.S. trade tensions.

The Trump administration slapped punitive tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese products last year while China has imposed retaliatory tariffs on $110 billion in U.S. goods. Chinas tariffs on American products include a wide range of petrochemicals, specialty chemicals and plastics. The list includes chemicals such as polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polycarbonates.

Story continues

According to the American Chemistry Council ("ACC"), a leading industry trade group, the United States has levied tariffs on $15 billion worth of imports of chemicals and plastics from China, with Beijing retaliating with duties on $11 billion in U.S. exports of chemicals and plastics to China.

Progress on trade negotiations in February led the Trump administration agreeing to hold off raising tariffs (to 25% from existing 10%) on $200 billion in Chinese goods that would have taken effect March 1. However, the tariffs currently in place are already doing damage to the chemical industry.

China is one of the biggest export markets for U.S. chemicals, leaving the American chemical industry heavily exposed to Chinas countermeasures. The tariffs have created an uncertain demand environment for U.S. chemical products in this major market. The tariffs are hurting U.S. chemical exports and the competitiveness of the American chemical industry.

According to the ACC, Chinas tariffs on U.S. chemicals and plastics exports have put roughly 55,000 American jobs and $18 billion in domestic activity at risk as a result of lower demand for those products, which would lead to considerable losses for U.S. manufacturers. The ACC estimates that the loss to U.S. chemical and plastics exports to China could reach as much as $6.1 billion annually.

There is also concern that the tariffs may dampen new chemical investment in the United States. According to the ACC, 333 chemical projects (both on new plants and capacity expansions) have been already announced by chemical makers since 2010 worth $202 billion. A significant portion of the investment is directed toward U.S. export markets including China.

The shale boom has incentivized a number of chemical companies to pump in billions of dollars for setting up facilities (crackers) in the United States to produce ethylene and propylene in a cost-effective way. Chemical makers including DowDuPont Inc. and LyondellBasell Industries N.V. are investing on shale gas-linked projects to take advantage of abundant natural gas supplies.

However, the tariffs have raised concerns that chemicals companies would reconsider their investments in new projects, which could lead to a slowdown in growth in the American chemical industry.

Trade Truce Will Bring Respite

A U.S.-China trade pact, if eventually takes place, will likely provide a much-needed relief for the U.S. chemical industry. As part of the trade deal, China is reportedly offering to lower tariffs and other sanctions on U.S.-made goods including chemicals, automotive and farm products. Beijing has also reportedly pledged to import a significant number of U.S. products.

The ACC has urged the United States and China to remove all chemical products from their tariff lists. The trade group has also appealed to the Trump administration to include chemicals and plastics on Beijings import list as the United States seeks commitment from China to purchase more American products. The ACC sees this as the most promising and advantageous opportunity for U.S. export growth.

China is among the most important trading partners of the U.S. chemical industry. Moreover, export markets are expected to contribute to the growth of the American chemical industry in 2019.

The ACC expects growth in manufacturing and exports markets to drive demand for U.S. chemicals this year. As such, a potential trade deal could provide a significant boost to American chemical exports which would augur well for the U.S. chemical industrys growth this year and beyond.



Chemical Stocks Worth a Look

A few stocks currently worth considering in the chemical space are Ingevity Corp., Innospec Inc. and W. R. Grace & Co. Both Ingevity and Innospec sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), while W. R. Grace carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Ingevity has an expected earnings growth of 17.9% for the current year. Earnings estimates for the current year have been revised 2.7% upward over the last 60 days.

Innospec has an expected earnings growth of 3.5% for the current year. Earnings estimates for the current year have been revised 5.3% upward over the last 60 days.

W. R. Grace has an expected earnings growth of 10.4% for the current year. Earnings estimates for the current year have been revised 2.9% upward over the last 60 days.

Today's Best Stocks from Zacks

Would you like to see the updated picks from our best market-beating strategies? From 2017 through 2018, while the S&P 500 gained +15.8%, five of our screens returned +38.0%, +61.3%, +61.6%, +68.1%, and +98.3%.

This outperformance has not just been a recent phenomenon. From 2000  2018, while the S&P averaged +4.8% per year, our top strategies averaged up to +56.2% per year.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.



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For Immediate Release

Chicago, IL  March 15, 2019 Stocks in this weeks article include Columbia Sportswear Company COLM, Tactile Systems Technology Inc. TCMD, Wright Medical Group N.V. WMGI, Carbonite Inc. CARB and Palo Alto Networks Inc. PANW. Kevin Matras screens for companies showing their 'first' profit and explains why they are ones to watch.



Screen of the Week written by Kevin Matras of Zacks Investment Research:



Play Potential Earnings Beats with These 5 Top Stocks

There is no mystery to investors hunt for stocks with estimate beating potential ahead of an earnings season. This is because investors always try to place themselves ahead of time and look to play stocks that are rich in quality.

Why Is a Positive Earnings Surprise So Important?

Historically, stocks of companies with solid quarterly earnings (on a nominal basis) tank if they miss or merely meet market expectations. After all, a 20% earnings rise (though apparently looks good) doesnt tell you if it has been decelerating.

Also, seasonal fluctuations can come into play. If a companys Q1 is seasonally weak and Q4 is strong, it is likely to report a sequential earnings decline. In such cases, growth rates are misleading while judging the true health of a company.

On the other hand, after a whole lot of research and analysis on a companys financials and initiatives, Wall Street analysts project its earnings. They also take a companys guidance into consideration when deriving an earnings estimate.

Thus, outperforming that estimate is almost equivalent to beating the companys own expectation as well as the market perception. And if the margin of earnings surprise is big, it typically drives the stock higher right after the release. Thus, more than anything else, an earnings surprise can push a stock higher.

How to Locate Potential Outperformers?

Now, finding stocks that have the potential to beat on the bottom line is a dream that investors chase but might not always come true. One way of fulfilling it is by looking at the earnings surprise history of a company.

Story continues

An impressive track in this regard generally acts as a driver in sending a stock higher. It indicates the companys ability to exceed estimates. And investors generally believe that the company will have the same trick up its sleeve to deliver yet another earning beat in its upcoming release.

For the rest of this Screen of the Week article please visit Zacks.com at:https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/359364/play-potential-earnings-beat-with-these-5-top-stocks

Disclosure: Officers, directors and/or employees of Zacks Investment Research may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material. An affiliated investment advisory firm may own or have sold short securities and/or hold long and/or short positions in options that are mentioned in this material.

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Strong Stocks that Should Be in the News

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Inherent in any investment is the potential for loss. This material is being provided for informational purposes only and nothing herein constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold a security. No recommendation or advice is being given as to whether any investment is suitable for a particular investor. It should not be assumed that any investments in securities, companies, sectors or markets identified and described were or will be profitable. All information is current as of the date of herein and is subject to change without notice. Any views or opinions expressed may not reflect those of the firm as a whole. Zacks Investment Research does not engage in investment banking, market making or asset management activities of any securities. These returns are from hypothetical portfolios consisting of stocks with Zacks Rank = 1 that were rebalanced monthly with zero transaction costs. These are not the returns of actual portfolios of stocks. The S&P 500 is an unmanaged index. Visit https://www.zacks.com/performance for information about the performance numbers displayed in this press release.



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An Australian gunman whose assaults on two New Zealand mosques Friday left at least 49 people dead, published a racist manifesto on Twitter before livestreaming his rampage.

The New Zealand government said it could be illegal to share the video, which showed the gunman repeatedly shooting at worshippers from close range.

The Facebook Live video, taken with a camera that appeared to be mounted on the gunman's body, shows a clean-shaven, Caucasian man with short hair driving to the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch.

He enters the building and fires repeatedly at worshippers as he moves from room to room.

AFP determined the video was genuine through a digital investigation that included matching screenshots of the mosque taken from the gunman's footage with images available online showing the same areas.

The "manifesto" detailing motivations for the attack was posted on Friday morning onto a Twitter account with the same name and profile image as the Facebook page that streamed the attack.

In the video, the shooter parks his car next to the mosque and gets out of the vehicle with a rifle. He slowly goes to the boot of his car and retrieves another firearm.

He then walks into the compound of the mosque and fires at a person standing near the doorway before dropping the rifle and shooting repeatedly with the second weapon as he moves inside.

The gunman fires dozens of bullets at people trying to run away or lying down in huddled groups in corners of the rooms.

In the excerpt of the video viewed by AFP, which did not appear to be the full clip, he can be seen changing cartridges three times in just under two minutes.

The framing of the video, which shows only the gunman's hands holding the gun as he shoots and reloads, is eerily similar to the style of a first-person shooter video game.

AFP is not publishing the footage.

- Conspiracy theory -

In the 74-page manifesto entitled "The Great Replacement", the gunman details his intention to attack Muslims.

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The title of the document has the same name as a conspiracy theory originating in France that believes European populations are being displaced in their homelands by immigrant groups with higher birth rates.

The gunman identified himself as an Australia-born, 28-year-old white male from a low-income, working-class family.

He said that key points in his radicalisation were the defeat of the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen in 2017 elections, and the death of 11-year-old Ebba Akerlund in the 2017 Stockholm truck attack.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday confirmed the attacker at the Masjid al Noor mosque was an Australian.

"We stand here and condemn, absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist," Morrison said.

New Zealand authorities said that three people had been arrested, but their identities were not made public. They later announced one man, aged in his late 20s, had been charged with murder and would appear in court on Saturday.

- Historical references -

The gunman spoke only occasionally while in the car, with what sounded like an Australian accent. Satellite navigational audio could also be heard in the video as he drove to the mosque.

Distinctive writing on his weapons was seen in the footage as well as images posted on the Twitter account.

Scrawled in English and several Eastern European languages were the names of numerous historical military figures -- many of them Europeans involved in fighting the Ottoman forces in the 15th and 16th centuries. A few took part in the Crusades, centuries earlier.

The Facebook account that posted the video was no longer available shortly after the shooting. The Twitter account of the same name was quickly suspended.

"Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video," Facebook said in a tweet.

"We're also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we're aware."

A spokesman for New Zealand's interior ministry said the video is likely to be classified as objectionable content under local law, and could be illegal to share.

"The content of the video is disturbing and will be harmful for people to see," he said. "This is a very real tragedy with real victims and we strongly encourage people to not share or view the video."
Donald Trump tweeted a link to Breitbart, a far-right website that peddles xenophobia and extremist ideologies, as a terrorist conducted a brutal massacre in New Zealand after releasing a manifesto that celebrated the US president as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.

The tragedy, in which two mosques were seemingly the target of a terrorist attack spearheaded by an Australian 28-year-old white male, occurred on Friday in Christchurch, New Zealand  the same day Breitbart featured an interview with Mr Trump on its homepage.

The president responded to the mass shootings the following morning on Twitter in a statement that failed to describe the event as an act of terror, as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had called it the night before. He also deleted his tweet to the Breitbart website the day after the attack.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques, Mr Trump wrote. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do.

He added, God bless all!

The Australian man behind the attacks appeared to be a right-wing extremist who described anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant motives in an 87-page manifesto that named the president and right-wing influencer Candace Owens.

He and three other suspects, including two men and one woman, have been taken into custody amid an ongoing investigation.

At least 41 people died after he opened fire in the al Noor mosque, and seven others at the Linwood mosque. The attacker live-streamed the shooting, telling viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie, a popular YouTube star who has faced numerous controversies over anti-Semitic and other hateful content.

The interview Breitbart had published this week featuring Mr Trump included thinly-veiled threats of violence from the president, who he claimed his supporters were tougher than his critics on the left and warned things could get very bad amid a potential confrontation between the two groups.

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I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump  I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough  until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad, he said. But the left plays it cuter and tougher. Like with all the nonsense that they do in Congress ... with all this invest[igations]  thats all they want to do is  you know, they do things that are nasty. Republicans never played this.

Critics of the president have decried both the interview and his response to the tragedy.

Trump could have not responded; responded gracefully; or linked to any other website about the NZ terror attack. He chose Breitbart.



Breitbart has published vile anti-Muslim hatred, mocking Islamophobia, calling Muslims "rapefugees," and vilifying most Muslims as terrorists. pic.twitter.com/yM7VyCt76t  Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) March 15, 2019

It's pretty easy to not be political and say the following, Joe Walsh, a conservative radio host and former congressman, wrote on Twitter, adding, The white supremacist, anti-Muslim hate that attacked two Mosques in New Zealand is evil and must be universally condemned.

All hate is bad and must always be condemned, he added. We pray for our Muslim brothers & sisters.

Trump could have not responded; responded gracefully; or linked to any other website about the NZ terror attack. He chose Breitbart, Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, wrote. Breitbart has published vile anti-Muslim hatred, mocking Islamophobia, calling Muslims rapefugees, and vilifying most Muslims as terrorists.
Chuka is an experienced certified web developer with an extensive background in computer science and 18+ years in web design &development. His previous experience ranges from redesigning existing website to solving complex technical problems with object-oriented programming. Very experienced with Microsoft SQL Server, PHP and advanced JavaScript. He loves to travel and watch movies.
Home | News | General | Obasanjo, Atiku reportedly meet in Abeokuta

- Alhaji Atiku Abubakar reportedly visits Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in Abeokuta, Ogun state

- The former vice president was said to have observed his prayers inside the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL)

- The presidential candidate of the PDP also reportedly held a private meeting with his former boss

Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), reportedly met with his former principal, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, in Abeokuta, the capital of Ogun state on Thursday, March 14.

The Nation reports that Atiku had a private meeting with his host inside the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) around 1pm.

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It was learnt that the former vice president also observed his prayer at the mosque facility and also had lunch with Obasanjo before quietly leaving the town.

The report said there were no details of the discussion Atiku had with the former president.

It quoted a source as saying: I can confirm that Atiku visited Baba Obasanjo today around 1pm. It was purely private visit.

He came, observed his prayer, had lunch with Baba and left. The visit was brief. There was nothing else done.

Legit.ng earlier reported that one visually impaired prophet, Muhideen Kasali, recently called on the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, not to lose hope as he still has a chance of being president.

President Muhammadu Buhari was declared winner of the presidential election, although the former vice president has rejected the result and has gone to court to challenge it.

He said: There is no loser in an election but a learner. Atiku can still rule Nigeria in no distant future. God sparing our lives 2023 will soon be here, he can contest again.

"It is not about age but what he has to offer. He should join hands with President Buhari to make Nigeria great again and get out of her numerous challenges."

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It also reported that Tanko Yakasai, former liaison officer to the National Assembly in the administration of Shehu Shagari, recently advised President Muhammadu Buhari not to dismiss Atiku Abubakar.

Yakasai said there would be consequences in putting Atiku away in power equation of the country.

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2019 elections: Do you still trust INEC to conduct fair elections? - Nigerians speak| Legit TV

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Home | News | General | Lagos, Anambra must do something - Buhari speaks as tragedies hit both states

President Muhammadu Buhari, in the evening of Thursday, March 14, charged the governments of Lagos and Anambra to make efforts to avert the future incidents that could be described as tragic.

Buhari also consoled the family of the victims of the incident as he prayed that God should comfort them.

He also prayed for the survivors wishing them quick recovery.

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Yesterday was a dark day for the people of Lagos and Anambra states: The news of the collapsed building in Itafaaji area of Lagos Island, and the tanker accident in Onitsha.

It touches one to lose precious lives in any kind of mishap, particularly those so young and tender.

May the Almighty God comfort the bereaved and grant quick recovery to the injured. Condolences to the government and people of Lagos and Anambra states.

I charge both State Governments to do all that is needful, so that these tragic developments do not recur, Buhari said.

Legit.ng learnt that two people were killed while 14 others sustained injuries in Anambra when two trucks collided in a market in Ibughubu, Umuchu, Aguata local government area.

Earlier, it was reported that an undisclosed number of children of a primary school were feared killed after a three-storey building reportedly collapsed in Lagos state on Wednesday, March 13.

Other persons were trapped in the debris of the collapsed structure which was reportedly housing the primary school on the top floor.

The building located at the Itafaji area of Lagos Island was reported to be a residential building with several apartments.

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It also reported that families of survivors of the collapsed building stormed a hospital premises in the state that was reportedly demanding for nothing less than N150,000 before commencing comprehensive treatment of the survivors.

The aggrieved families complained that despite being told that treatment will be done and for free too, the Lagos Island general hospital is requesting for money to treat the victims.

Lagos School Collapse: My aunts children are trapped - lady weeps| Legit TV

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Home | News | General | INEC must be planning special event to issue me certificate of return - Okorocha

- Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo state is confident that INEC will issue him a certificate of return

- Okorocha says some persons who are opposed to his senatorial election victory are working to rig him out

- The governor criticises INECs declaration of PDP governorship candidate, Emeka Ihedioha, as Imo Governor-elect, saying he fell short of the criteria

Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo, says the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) may be planning to organise a special event to issue him a certificate of return.

Okoricha stated this on the backdrop of the omission of his name from those that INEC issued certificates of return.

He stated this on Thursday, March 14, in Abuja while speaking with newsmen in reaction to the development.

READ ALSO: Breaking: Osinbajo, Governors Bindow, Abubakar meet in Aso Rock

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Okorocha was suspended from the All Progressives Congress (APC) on March 1 over alleged anti party activities by the partys National Working Committee (NWC).

Though he was said to have won the Imo West Senatorial election held on Febuary 23, INEC omitted his name from those it issued certificates of return.

There have been speculations that Okorocha was declared winner of the February 23, election under duress by the Returning Officer of the election.

Okorocha, while debunking the allegation, said some persons who are opposed to his elections victory are working to rig him out.

Those behind the plot, are however, not smart in executing the project to rig me and my son in-law who is the governorship candidate of the Action Alliance (AA) Uche Nwosu out, he said.

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Okorocha criticised INECs declaration of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, Chief Emeka Ihedioha as Imo Governor-elect, saying he fell short of the criteria.

He alleged that Ihedioha did not have the needed spread of 25% votes across the local government areas of the state as required by law to emerge winner.

He stressed that the PDP candidate could,therefore not be declared winner of the poll.

I am sure you are aware that I was conspicuously absent at the certificates issuance ceremony.

I was not there because INEC has removed my name from the list of elected Senators, having been declared the winner by the zonal returning officer.I am actually waiting to hear why INEC struck my name out.

READ ALSO: Obasanjo, Atiku reportedly meet in Abeokuta

I think probably, INEC must be trying to do something special, because I understand that once results have been declared and returns made, then you are bound to be issued a certificate of return,he said.

He added that he was however, in the dark as to why the commission exempted him from the ceremony and why he was not invited to collect his certificate of return.

Maybe, INEC will want to organise a special programme for me to hand over the certificate of return to me, because clearly, I won and it was a peaceful election, the best you can ever think of, he said.

He said the allegations in some quarters that he was declared winner under duress as claimed by the electoral commissioner could not be true.

I do not understand what that means, because there was nothing of such. How can you put somebody on duress to declare you the winner of an election that you have already won?

It is not true, but I must let the world understand that this is a game that is being played.

The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) in Imo is playing a script, and the script is so funny, it is so cruel and crude actually and they are executing it in a funny way.

I understand that people are beginning to fight a war of the future now when we are not even yet there.

The idea is that, do not give Okorocha a certificate; you must slow him down until after they have elected the presiding office, then you can let him come in, he said.

He added that the idea is to also ensure that he does not become anything in the Senate and to make sure that his governorship candidate, who is his son in-law does not emerge winner.

Okorocha further added that his political opponents wanted to cripple him politically before 2023, saying that this is what is happening.

I will advise INEC to do the right thing, to release my certificate so that I can celebrate as others, I want to be in the Senate, and it will be interesting if am there, Okorocha said.

He said INEC should not allow his political opponents to use it as an instrument to achieve their desires

In a related report, Governor Rochas Okorocha has said the national chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, and the partys governorship candidate, Senator Hope Uzodimma, are to blame for the inability of the party to win the governorship election.

He said posterity would judge the two for their alleged roles in the election, The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

In a release issued by his chief press secretary, Sam Onwuemeodo in Owerri on Thursday, March 14, the governor alleged that Uzodinma worked for Peoples Democratic Party in the just concluded elections.

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Why Governors Steal? Rochas Okorocha of Imo State | Legit TV

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Home | News | General | Bode George leads Oyo governor-elect, others to Obasanjo as ex-president gives touching advice

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Thursday, March 14, advised the governor-elect of Oyo, Seyi Makinde, to govern the state based on democratic principles rather than one that could make him pocket it.

Obasanjo told Makinde this when the governor-elect and others were led by Chief Olabode George, a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the former president.

Those hosted by Obasanjo also included the deputy governor-elect, Akeem Ademola, the Oyo state chairman of PDP, Kunmi Mustapha, Bose Adelabu, and the chairman of the party in Lagos, Dominic Agboola.

Be transparent and embark on developmental projects, which would be a delight to the people of Oyo state. Please run a government that will be making them ask, where have this type of government been all these years in Oyo state.

You must give them something (positive), you must give them good democracy and not that one my younger brothers will call democratic so sa po (pocketing democracy).

Where there is misunderstanding, call yourselves( your people) together and make peace in the overall interest of Oyo state.

He cannot do it alone and since you have supported him now, you should continue to be together. You should be mindful that Oyo people are fearless and they dont mind, whose oars is gored, that is why you are there now, Obasanjo said.

The Nation reports that Obasanjo promised to support Makindes government when the need arises.

Makinde said he was at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) to appreciate the former president and seeks wisdom from the elder statesman.

The governor-elect noted that Oyo was in a bad shape but pledged to apply wisdom to make things better.

We are very much aware of this too. With God, Oyo state will never be the same again. This is the type of visit that will give us the needed tonic to forge ahead positively in Oyo state, he said.

Olabode George said: I want to thank him for granting us audience within the short notice.

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Home | News | General | Lagos building collapse: Comedian Ali Baba explains how society encourages lawlessness

Veteran Nigerian comedian, Ali Baba has taken to social media to address the tragic Lagos building collapse and how the society has contributed to the ills that affect people everyday.

Earlier on, Legit.ng reported the news of how a three-storey building reportedly collapsed in Lagos state on Wednesday, March 13, trapping several pupils, some of whom have been confirmed dead. Following numerous blames being thrown at the government, comedian Ali Baba has taken to his Instagram page to speak on the issue.

He wrote: "Someone sent me a message asking why I have not said anything about this Lagos Island building collapse, since yesterday... I ignored it. My condolences to all the families who lost loved ones and properties. God will console you. But just to avoid being considered insensitive, let me say this, we are our own problems.

READ ALSO: Personal letter from the Editor-in-Chief of Legit.ng (former NAIJ.com)

If Lagos State Government marked that building for demolition and actually went through with the demolition, many of the people going emotional and getting angry about the non demolition now, would have been the same persons calling out the government. For being insensitive to the plight of the poor. How can they break down a school because they believe the integrity of the structure is suspect? Close a road for repairs, you will hear people shout.

Clamp down on commercial drivers with out prerequisite certification, NURTW will go on strike. Try to weed out the teachers in our schools who need to be taught, NUT will go on strike. Query a Chief Judge who can not explain the source of monies that can not be from his salary, it is called a witch hunt. Arrest buses for indiscriminate parking anywhere but the bus Stop, it's oppression of the masses. People will throw dirt and refuse into drainage and complain of flooding. Ask a young man with no means of livelihood driving a range rover, it's oppression of the youths. Stop a man who is driving with a child in the front seat, they will ask you is it your job? Stop someone driving against one way, they will say, just let him go.

Posted a video of 2 Soldiers riding an okada without helmets, and the question some were asking was how much do the soldiers paid? How many times have we complained of tankers on the bridge? How many engineers have been punished and licenses withdrawn? How many properties have Been seized? How much compensation has been paid? How many of such structures are insured? What is the Institute of Quantity surveyors doing about these issues? What do I know Sef? Shebi I am just a comedian?

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Lagos School Collapse: My aunts children are trapped - lady weeps| Legit TV

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Nirav Modi entered the United Kingdom on a 'golden visa' issued on his now-revoked Indian passport, said a Times of India report quoting UK government sources. It is a tier-1 investor visa issued to individuals from countries outside the European Union and Switzerland.

The golden visa is issued against investment of 2 million pounds in UK government bonds, share capital or companies. Applicants, however, cannot invest in companies engaged in property investment. The golden visa also allows for the spouse and children of the applicant to apply for residency.

The one time investment of 2 million pounds has to remain invested for at least five years for the applicant to gain permanent residency. The process can be expedited if the invested amount is higher. An investment of 5 million pounds can get the applicant eligibility for permanent residence within 3 years. The golden visa allows applicants to work, study, or set up a business in the United Kingdom.

ALSO READ:PNB fraud case: Nirav Modi secured fake LoUs to divert funds through dummy firms, says ED

The visa was issued reportedly years before the lid was blown over the PNB scam. Although Nirav Modi's Indian passport has been revoked, it does not affect his application for permanent residency in the UK.

Nirav Modi has been on the run from Indian agencies since January 2018, after his involvement in the Rs 14,000-crore PNB scam came to light. His Indian passport was revoked in February 2018, but Modi reportedly kept using it to travel till November 2018, before a red corner notice was issued against him by Interpol. Now he cannot leave the UK, but continues to run his business from London.

Reports suggest Modi has been living in London for the past several months, and has even started a new jewellery business there. While the exact date of his entry into UK is not known, he reportedly flew in from New York towards the end of February. The TOI report said that a new jewellery business called Diamond Holdings was tracked in the Centre Point London apartment block, the same locale where Modi is staying.

ALSO READ:Nirav Modi invested Rs 327 crore of PNB money in US firm he bought in 2010

The company was set up on May 24, 2018 and deals in wholesale of watches and jewellery, retail sale of watches and jewellery in specialised stores and specialised design activities, the report said. The registered address of the company is 4th floor Scottish Provident House, 76/80 College Road, Harrow HA1 1BQ, the same as Modi's accountants Dattani Chartered Accountants.

The company has only one officer - 55-year-old British accountant named Raju Thakorbhai Patel. Nirav Modi is not listed as a director of Diamond Holdings. He reportedly lives close to his workplace in a swanky three-bedroom apartment worth 8-million pound in the Centre Point tower block.

ALSO READ:Nirav Modi diverted Rs 934 crore to personal, wife, father's accounts: report
Home | News | General | Breaking: 2 governors with inconclusive elections meet Osinbajo in Aso Rock

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Thursday, March 14, met behind closed doors with some governors from the northern part of the country at the presidential villa, Abuja.

Present at the meeting are the Bauchi state governor, Mohammed Abubakar, and the Adamawa state governor, Jibrila Bindow.

The meeting, which held at the vice presidents office, may not be unconnected with the inconclusive polls in the state.

READ ALSO: Court stops INEC from conducting supplementary governorship election in Adamawa

The two governors who are seeking second tenure on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) have been unable to secure a clear victory as the elections in their two states were declared inconclusive.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had fixed Saturday, March 23, for the re-run elections in some states, including Adamawa and Bauchi.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported that President Muhammadu Buhari met with seven governors at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

The seven governors are Yahaya Bello (Kogi), Nasir El-Rufai (Kaduna), Atiku Bagudu (Kebbi), Abdulaziz Yari ( Zamfara), Abubakar Badaru, (Jigawa) Kashim Shettima (Borno) and Fayemi Kayode (Ekiti).

Recall that President Buhari left Daura for Abuja in the early hours of Tuesday, March 12. The president had gone to Daura, his country-home, where he went for the governorship and state assembly elections.

Buhari left Daura with his wife, Hajiya Aisha. The president took off from the Daura helipad at 11.10 am in a presidential chopper marked NAF-541 in company of his aides and close relations.

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Home | News | General | No court can stop us from conducting election - INEC

- The Independent National Electoral Commission says the law does not empower courts to stop the commission from conducting elections

- The Adamawa Resident Electoral Commissioner, Barrister Kassim Gaidam, says section 87 sub section 10 of the Electoral Act notes that courts lack the power to stop INEC from holding primaries or general elections

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has stated that no court has the power to restrain the commission from conducting the governorship supplementary election in Adamawa state scheduled to hold on March 23.

The Adamawa Resident Electoral Commissioner, Barrister Kassim Gaidam, said the law does not empower courts to stop it from carrying out its election duties, Daily Trust reports.

READ ALSO: Breaking: Osinbajo, Governors Bindow, Abubakar meet in Aso Rock

He made the statement on Thursday, March 14, when reacting to a court judgment by Justice Abdulazeez Waziri ordering INEC to desist from conducting the election in 44 polling units where election was cancelled during the governorship election held on 9th March.

Though we are not aware of any court restricting INEC, however let me tell you that court order will not stop any election, Gaidam said.

Citing Section 87 sub (10), of the Electoral Act, the INEC official said: "Nothing in this section shall empower the courts to stop the holding of primaries or general election or the processes thereof under this Act pending the determination of a suit.

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In another report, the Akwa Ibom Liberation Movement (AILM) has urged the Police Service Commission (PSC) to open investigation into the activities of policemen in the state who took part in the just concluded elections and called for the immediate redeployment of the police commissioner, CP Kaoje Ibrahim.

The group accused the CP of compromising police affairs and structures in the state with a retired Deputy Inspector General of Police, DIG Udom Ekpudom, and junior officers close to Senator Godswill Akpabio during the just concluded elections in the state.

In an open letter to the PSC signed by its leader, Prince Emmanuel Sam, AILM accused CP Ibrahim of partiality, incompetence, ineptitude and partisanship.

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Election not a do or die affair - Sanwoolu | Legit TV

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Home | News | General | Why incoming PDP governor will not pay N30,000 minimum wage in Kano - Kwankwaso

- Governor Abdullahi Ganduje has been accused of emptying the state government treasury

- Rabi'u Musa Kwankwaso, leader of the PDP, said incoming PDP's administration will not fulfill the promise that Ganduje made to workers in the state

- According to Kwankwaso, the PDP is sure of victory in the supplementary election but will not continue with the payment of N30,000 minimum wage

Rabi'u Musa Kwankwaso, leader of the PDP in Kano and former governor of the state, claimed that Governor Abdullahi Ganduje's administration has emptied the state government treasury.

According to a medium, Sahara Reporters, Kwankwaso said due to the empty treasury, the incoming PDP's administration in the state might not be able pay N30, 000 minimum wage to workers.

Kwankwaso, who addressed a group of Kwankwassiyya supporters in Kaduna, said the PDP is sure of victory in the supplementary election and will not continue with the payment of N30,000 minimum wage as promised workers by Ganduje.

READ ALSO: INEC set to weigh 4 options on Rivers election on Friday, March 15

According to him, As the leader of the party in Kano, I have directed our governor, Abba Kabir Yusuf, not to pay the minimum wage because that is the APC manifesto and we will not take it.

"Anyway, we will ensure that workers get their salaries on or before the 25th of every month, but what we will not do is to pay the minimum wage."

Earlier, Legit.ng had reported that Civil society groups in Kano state have called on EFCC to investigate Governor Abdullahi Ganduje for allegedly withdrawing N235.5 from the state government treasury ahead the supplementary election.

READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda

This is contained in a petition by the group to EFCC entitled Petition against Kano state government over attempt to buy votes ahead of the 23rd March 2019 re-run gubernatorial election in Kano signed by Kabiru Saidu Dakata, and Abdulrazaq Alkai, co-conveners of the group.

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Home | News | General | 'Grief-stricken' PDP reacts to Lagos building collapse (full statement)

- PDP has reacted to the Lagos building collapse in Ita Faaji, Lagos Island of Lagos state

- The opposition party, in statement, said it was saddened by the incident which claimed lives of pupils

- PDP also called on the government to take appropriate measure against future occurrence of such incident

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said it was saddened by the incident of school building collapse in Ita Faaji area of Lagos Island in which innocent school pupils were killed while many severely injured.

PDP, in a statement on Thursday, March 14, by its national publicity secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan expressed its sadness, saying it was grief-stricken over this ''tragedy, which has traumatized not only the families of the victims, but also the entire nation with bereavement, pain and anguish.''

The opposition party also thanked Nigerians and sympathizers for their love and solidarity towards rescuing the victims trampled by the debris.

READ ALSO: We are optimistic of success in supplementary polls - PDP boasts

It, however, called on Nigerian government to rise up against the prevalent case of building collapse and take bold appropriate measure against future occurrence of such incident

PDP said: ''The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) commiserates with the people of Lagos state, particularly the victims of the devastating building collapse in Lagos, which led to the unfortunate death of compatriots, including little school children.

''The party has been grief-stricken over this tragedy, which has traumatized not only the families of the victims, but also the entire nation with bereavement, pain and anguish.

''The party joins all well-meaning citizens and people of faith across our country in supplicating for the peaceful repose of the souls of the deceased, the fortitude for their families to bear the loss of their loved ones as well as speedy recovery for the injured.

''The PDP also commends Nigerians for their show of love and solidarity in the search and rescue effort, which saved the lives of many of the victims of the tragedy. Such solidarity reinforces our unity and resilience as a people.

''The party calls on the authorities to look into the issue of building collapse in the country and take strong steps to forestall such ugly incidents in the future.

''It also urged all public-spirited groups and individuals to continue to reach out to the victims at this moment of grief.''

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the All Progressives Congress (APC) had said that it was deeply saddened by the collapsed of a building housing a school and residential units in Itafaji, Lagos Island area of Lagos state.

Malam Lanre Issa-Onilu, the APC national publicity secretary, in a statement in Abuja on Thursday, March 14, said the incidence which led to several deaths and injuries, particularly among children was avoidable.

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Home | News | General | Prioritise constituencys interests - Governor Bello tells new National Assembly members

- Governor Yahaya Bello has urged the new members of the National Assembly to prioritise the constituencies

- The governor said the well-being of the people of the state should be of paramount importance to the lawmakers

- Governor Bello made the remark while receiving the new lawmakers who were issued return certificate by INEC on Thursday, March 14

The Kogi state governor, Yahaya Bello, has charged the newly elected Kogi state members of the National Assembly to make the interest of their constituencies priorities when they resume their duties as legislators.

Bello while receiving the elected members of 9th Assembly from Kogi state who paid him a courtesy visit on Thursday, March 14, after receiving their certificates of return said the well-being of the people of the state should be of paramount importance to the lawmakers.

Two senators out of three who contested and seven House Of Representatives members out of nine were elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress into the National Assembly.

He also said that Kogi people at various levels have conferred on them the right to legislate on their behalf and represent their interest at both the upper and lower chamber of the National Assembly.

READ ALSO: Buhari allegedly shuns Aso Villa meeting with Bauchi, Adamawa governors

According to the governor, such trust should motivate the lawmakers to attract development projects to their respective constituencies and also ensure quality representation of their people.

Bello also advised that they all partner with the state as progressive collaborators so as to jointly move the state further towards the direction of good governance and progress.

In his remark, the senator-elect for Kogi east federal constituency, Jibrin Isah Echocho, thanked the governor for standing by the candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the just concluded elections while declaring their support to the government.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari says his victory at the polls is a clear demonstration of appreciation by Nigerians for his commitment to a greater Nigeria.

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The president stated this when he received a delegation comprising Borgu people from Niger, Kebbi, Kwara and Kishi in Oyo states who were in the Presidential Villa, Abuja on Thursday, March 14, to felicitate with him on his re-election for another four-term in office.

President Buhari reiterated his administrations determination to continue to provide infrastructure to all communities across the country to uplift the quality of life of all citizens.

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Home | News | General | Southeast has better chance to produce speaker of House of Reps than Senate president - Coalition

- A coalition of southeast civil society has said that the zone has better chance to produce the next speaker of House of Representatives

- The convener of the coalition, Jasper Uche, said that Senate presidency for Igbos in the 9th National Assembly was not realistic

- Uche said the coalition has adopted Nkeiruka Onyejeocha, a fourth time member of the House of Representatives, to lead the green chamber in the 9th Assembly

The coalition of southeast civil society and human rights organisations have said that the zone stands a better chance of heading the House of Representatives rather than the Senate presidency in the 9th Assembly.

Legit.ng regional reporter in Enugu, Ikpechukwu Chinedu, reports that the chairman of political committee of the coalition, Jasper Uche, said from all political calculations and for the fact that the southeast had held the position of the Senate president and the deputy Senate president in the past, it was only realistic for the zone to go for the speaker of the House of Representatives.

READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda

The group said it was adopting Nkeiruka Onyejeocha, a fourth time member of the House of Representatives, who, according to it, has not been indicted or involved in any scandal all through her stay at the National Assembly.

It maintained that Onyejeocha had sponsored a number of bills including the local government autonomy bill, the anti-torture bill and the gun shot victims compulsory treatment bill.

Uche said that Onyejeocha's re-election for the fourth time clearly shows the level of confidence reposed in her, adding that the coalition also hinged its demands on the fact that the southeast region has held the Senate president, deputy Senate president an deputy speaker positions since return to democracy in 1999.

He maintained that the selection of Onyejeocha as speaker would help to douse the tension and also assuage the feeling of exclusion and marginalization of the southeast region.

Uche also stated that it would further change the perception held by many that the President Muhammadu Buhari dislikes the Igbo race completely.

"In the national tripod, the north west has the president, the southwest has the vice president. The southeast should therefore take the speaker since the zone has held Senate president and deputy senate president for over two terms." he said.

He recalled that in Abia state where Onyejeocha comes from, like other states in the southeast, gave Buhari the needed 25 percent votes which shows their level of support and readiness to work with him.

Also speaking during the event, the coordinator of civil liberty organization and centre for development and media advocacy, Onyebuchi Igboke, recalled that the president promised to form a national government through the appointment of officers from the entire region.

"Part of the ways through which the president can show the people that he Is out to represent their interest this time is to grant our request and make Onyejeocha speaker of the house of representatives in the 9th Assembly'', he said.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that politicians in the southeast were advised by the Coalition of Southeast Civil Society and Human Rights Organisations (CSECSHRO) to forget their agitation for Senate presidency in the ninth National Assembly.

READ ALSO: PDP chieftain to Makinde - Learn from Ajimobi, Akalas mistakes

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Home | News | General | UN secretary-general reacts to collapse of school building in Lagos

- Antonio Guterres expressed shock over the collapse of a school building in Lagos

- The UN secretary-general said he would be writing to the Nigerians government

- Governor Akinwunmi Ambode promised that serious investigation will be carried out

UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, was shocked and saddened by the fatal collapse of a building in Nigeria, his spokesperson said on Thursday, March 14.

The secretary-general will be writing to the government of Nigeria to express his condolences, Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson, said at a regular news conference.

READ ALSO: Buhari allegedly shuns Aso Villa meeting with Bauchi, Adamawa governors

On Wednesday, at least 12 pupils have been confirmed dead following the collapse of the three-storey building which housed a primary school in Lagos in southwestern Nigeria, according to a hospital source.

Governor of Lagos State Akinwunmi Ambode said a thorough investigation would be launched into the incident.

The building, located in Ita-Faji area of Lagos, had collapsed, leaving several dead and others injured on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Red Cross (NRC) appealed for blood donations for victims of the collapsed building on Lagos Island.

Olakunle Lasisi, secretary of NRC, Lagos, made the appeal in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday, March 14 in Lagos.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari said he was extremely saddened by the collapse of the Lagos school building which left fatalities, particularly, small children.

President Buhari made his feelings known in a press statement released by Femi Adesina, the presidential spokesman, in Abuja on Wednesday.

The president sympathised with the parents and relations of the deceased, wishing them Gods comfort. He also wished the injured speedy and complete recovery.

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Home | News | General | INEC to weigh 4 options on Rivers election on Friday, March 15

- The Independent National Electoral Commission will be meeting on Friday, March 15, to make a decision on the stalemated gubernatorial election in Rivers state

- The disclosure was made by a source who spoke on condition of anonymity

- The source says INEC will be weighing four options on the stalemated governorship election

A meeting has been summoned by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to receive and consider the report of a fact-finding team it sent to Rivers state over the stalemated governorship election in the state.

A source who spoke on condition of anonymity said the electoral umpire would receive the report on Friday, March 15, after which chairman of the commission and his team would consider the findings and make a pronouncement.

READ ALSO: Troops kill 33 Boko Haram terrorists, recover gun trucks, others

The source said: The panel on Rivers State will on Friday submit its report to INEC management. Thereafter, the Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu and his team will consider the findings and make a pronouncement.

We are aware of the interest which the suspension of the elections in Rivers State has generated and we want to resolve it as soon as possible.

The Nation reports that there are four options before INEC, which include: whether or not to cancel the governorship and House of Assembly elections in Rivers State;

Restrict conduct of elections only in units, wards or areas affected by violence.

Announcement of collated or retrieved results if the security situation does not permit a fresh poll;

Declaring the results as it were and leaving the aggrieved to go to the tribunal.

Legit.ng gathers that the source said any delay in taking a decision may lead to a constitutional crisis in the state.

The source added: INEC will be fair, just, equitable and it will be guided by the Electoral Act, 2010( as amended) in its decision on Rivers State.

The panel has concluded its assignment. Were it not for the issuance of Certificates of Return to senators and Representatives-elect, we would have considered the report on Rivers on Thursday (yesterday).

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) suspended the electoral processes in Rivers state citing widespread irregularities.

In a statement signed by Festus Okoye, INEC's national commissioner and chairman of information and voter education committee, the electoral body said it's decision to suspend the elections was based on "reports from our officials on the field".

The statement read: "Based on reports from our officials in the field, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has determined that there has been a widespread disruption of elections conducted on the 9th day of March 2019 in Rivers state.

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"These initial reports suggest that violence occurred in a substantial number of polling units and collation centres, staff have been taken hostage and materials including result sheets have either been seized or destroyed by unauthorised persons. In addition, safety of our staff appears to be in jeopardy all over the state and the commission is concerned about the credibility of the process.

"Consequently, at a meeting held today 10th March 2019, the commission has decided to suspend all electoral processes in the state until further notice. This is in line with Section 26 of the Electoral Act, 2010 (as amended) and Clause 479e0 of the Regulations and Guidelines of the commission."

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Home | News | General | Kwankwaso reacts to alleged order to PDP Kano governorship candidate not to pay N30k minimum wage

- Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso denied asking the PDP governorship candidate in Kanonnot to pay the N30000 minimum wage

- The former Kano governor said it was spread by mischief maker

- Kwankwaso said they were focused on the rerun election

Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso has denied ordering Kabir Yusuf, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the Kano State governorship election, not to pay N30,000 minimum wage.

Sahara Reporters had earlier reported that the former Kano governor ordered the PDP governorship candidate not to pay the new minimum wage as it was an All Progressives Congress project.

READ ALSO: Buhari allegedly shuns Aso Villa meeting with Bauchi, Adamawa governors

In a statement however from Binta Spikin, the media aide to Kwankwaso, the PDP chieftain said he did not utter such order.

He said: To the dismay of all well-meaning Nigerians, particularly those of us from Kano, recent unfolding happenings are disturbing and will not augur well for the development of our dear state. What is more baffling is the extent some people want to go, all in the name of politicking, which should not have been. Ordinarily, elections should have been over. However, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Kano state result inconclusive, read the statement.

As a law-abiding citizen, Sen Rabiu Kwankwaso along with all his followers are patiently awaiting the 23rd of March when the rerun election would take place, and when we will confidently emerge victorious.

The people of Kano have spoken, and they will at all times stand on the side of Sen Kwankwaso because of his people-oriented policies and programmes that have added value to the quality of lives in Kano and beyond.

Hence, it is disheartening that some media outlets carry reports with distorted information attributing it to Sen Rabiu Kwankwaso. These include a sponsored write-up that says Sen Kwankwaso will retrench workers if Engineer Abba Kabir Yusif is elected governor and a badly written piece insinuating that Sen Kwankwaso has instructed Engineer Abba Kabir Yusuf not to pay the N30,000 minimum wage if elected.

On this note, we wish to call on the general public to disregard these concocted lies written solely to blackmail the person of Sen Kwankwaso who is not the gubernatorial candidate. These concocted stories are deliberate and mischievous machinations intended to deflect our minds as we await the rerun election to take back our mandate and set Kano along the track of developmental progress.

We wish to draw the attention of the public to the fact that Sen Kwankwaso has never been and will never be an advocate of retrenchment, neither will Engineer Abba Kabir Yusuf. The people of Kano can testify to the doggedness of Senator Kwankwaso when it comes to issues pertaining the well-being of Kano people, civil servants or not, in or out of government and that will never change.

Therefore, our attention should now be focused on seeing that the rerun election is free and fair. Against this background, we urge the general public to disregard the concocted false information as it has no basis.

Legit.ng had reported that Rabi'u Musa Kwankwaso, leader of the PDP in Kano and former governor of the state, claimed that Governor Abdullahi Ganduje's administration has emptied the state government treasury.

According to a medium, Sahara Reporters, Kwankwaso said due to the empty treasury, the incoming PDP's administration in the state might not be able pay N30, 000 minimum wage to workers.

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Home | News | General | Lagos building collapse: 9 things we know so far

Wednesday, March 13 was a sad day in Lagos as a three-storey building housing a primary school collapsed in the Ita-Faji area of the state.

Here are some key pieces of information regarding the incident so far:

1. Casualty figures

A pregnant woman, the proprietor of the Nursery/Primary school and 19 others, including no fewer than 12 pupils died in the collapsed building at Massey Street, Itafaji on Lagos Island on Wednesday, March 13, witnesses and hospital sources said.

However, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), said eight persons died, while 34 others were rescued in the wreckage so far.

Lagos residents at the scene of the incident as rescue operations continue

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Over 69 children trapped as three-storey building collapses in Lagos (photos)

2. Rescue operations

Following the collapse, the federal government sent a delegation of the National Emergency Management Agency NEMA (NEMA), led by Air Commodore Akugbe Iyamu, to the scene of the incident to ascertain the level of damage.

Iyamu said NEMA would collaborate with the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency (LASEMA) to provide relief materials for the victims as rescue operations come to an end.

3. Buhari charges the state government to ensure the incident does not recur

Shortly after the incident, President Muhammadu Buhari sent his condolences to the families of the victims of the incident and charged the state government to do all that is needful, so that these tragic developments do not recur.

4. Intervention by the Nigerian Red Cross

The Nigerian Red Cross (NRC) has appealed for blood donations for victims of the collapsed building on Lagos Island.

5. Treatment of the survivors

Those rescued from under the rubble were taken to the Island General Hospital on Broad Street in Marina to receive treatment.

Also about 17 of the rescued students and occupants of the building were taken to Massey Children Hospital, very close to the scene.

The young lady is in tears as her aunt's child she helped take to the school earlier in the morning got trapped in the rubble.

Source: UGC

6. Collapsed school building marked for demolition

The building at 63 Massey Street, it was learnt, had been marked for demolition by officials of the Lagos State Building Control Agency. However, the occupants of the building reportedly frustrated the demolition until the building eventually caved in.

7. School proprietress told to vacate the building

Miss Bukola Salami, a former staff teacher in the school who spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) said the proprietress of the school had been told to vacate the building but she balked on account that she had no money to rent another apartment.

It was because of the situation of the building that forced me to resign from the school in December, because I dont want to risk my life. It is unfortunate that such incident happened. It looks like a dream to me," she said.

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8. Demolition of marked buildings

Shortly after the building caved in, Governor Ambode visited the scene of the incident, vowing to make sure all the buildings that have failed integrity test in the area are demolished. In the early hours of Friday, March 15, the Lagos state began the demolition of the marked buildings on Freeman street at the Ita Faji area of Lagos Island.

9. Victims families protest request for payment before treatment

Families of survivors protested against the Lagos Island General hospital for reportedly demanding for nothing less than N150,000 before commencing comprehensive treatment of the survivors.

One of the protesters, a woman in her late forties who spoke in Yoruba, said the government should be sensitive to the plight of parents who are battling to save their last surviving child from the disaster.

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A special court in Mumbai on Friday issued a non-bailable warrant (NBW) against the wife of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi, a key accused in the $2 billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case.

The warrant against Ami Modi was issued by Special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) Judge M S Azmi after he took cognisance of the supplementary chargesheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against Nirav Modi (48) and other accused a few days ago.

The financial crime probe agency has alleged that Ami Modi used an international bank account to move $30 million, suspected to be proceeds of the scam.

The funds were used to buy property located in New York's Central Park, the ED has said.

In its supplementary chargesheet, the agency has recorded additional evidences gathered in the case and attachments made.

ALSO READ:Nirav Modi in UK: What is the 'golden visa' the conman used to enter Britain?

It is understood that the ED has underlined the role of Ami Modi and funds routed by her in the supplementary chargesheet.

The ED had filed the first chargesheet in this case in May last year.

According to investigating agencies, Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, in connivance with certain bank officials, allegedly cheated PNB to the tune of Rs 14,000 crore through issuance of fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoUs).

These LoUs were allegedly issued in a fraudulent manner by a Mumbai branch of the PNB to the group of companies belonging to Nirav Modi since March 2011 till the fraud came to light in January 2018, the agencies have said.

ALSO READ:PNB fraud case: Nirav Modi secured fake LoUs to divert funds through dummy firms, says ED

Nirav Modi, Choksi and other accused are facing charges under the PMLA Act and the Indian Penal Code in the fraud case which is being probed by multiple agencies, including the ED.

According to a UK media report last week, Nirav Modi is currently living in a three-bedroom flat occupying half of a floor of the landmark Centre Point tower block in London, where rent is estimated to cost 17,000 pounds a month.
Home | News | General | Buhari assented more bills than any president since 1999 - Presidency

- President Muhammadu Buhari according to his aide, Ita Enang, assented to more bills than his predecessor

- Enang said President Buhari has assented to the highest number of bills compared to any other president since 1999

- The president's aide said this while debunking reports that the President had declined assent to the highest number of bills since 1999

The Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Sen. Ita Enang says President Muhammadu Buhari has assented to the highest number of bills compared to any other president since 1999.

Enang made this known while debunking reports that the President had declined assent to the highest number of bills since 1999.

He said while there was no doubt that the 8th Senate had passed the highest number of bills since the return of democracy, it was not true that Buhari had penchant for refusing to sign such bills.

Under the 8th Assembly, the highest number of bills have been passed in the life of the legislature from 1999 to date.

Also, it is President Muhammadu Buhari that has assented to and brought into law the highest number of bills. So, he deserves accolade on this, he said.

READ ALSO: Stop disrespecting south south, middle-belt leaders - PDP to APC

Enang explained that on every occasion where the President declined assent, he acted in the public interest.

Whenever Mr President assents to a law and there is something wrong with that law, it is the public that will question both the legislature and the Executive through the court.

So, what the President has done is to state detailed reasons why he withholds assent to some of the bills.

I know that when Mr President withholds assent, the legislature looks back again at the reasons the president gives.

Some is that it runs contrary to the Constitution. Some may be that it runs in conflict with existing laws.

Some maybe that there is a drafting error which if assented to in the manner it is, will create ambiguity in the course of interpretation. Some may be that it will cause revenue leakage, he said.

Enang added that the presidents decisions were always in consultations with stakeholders, citing the the Competition Commission Act which Mr President assented to about three months ago.

He said that beginning from 2018, that the bill had problems, and had to be withdrawn, worked on and then re-presented for Mr Presidents assent.

On the Petroleum Industry Bill(PIB), for instance, the president said there will be too much money available to the Petroleum Regulatory Commission than will be available to be distributed to the other tiers of government.

Also, the amount of money that will go to the agency will be too high for that agency alone as against what money will be made available to be distributed to the local governments and the state governments, he said.

The presidential aide stated that the National Assembly was aware of such concerns and had made efforts to address such issues.

Enang, however contended that the president was not bound to sign every bill, but that the most important thing was that he communicated his assent or withholding of assents within 30 days.

He also called on the National Assembly, particularly the Senate, to prioritise passage of the 2019 Budget and Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), the Minimum Wage Bill, as well as the budgets of about 64 revenue generating agencies currently before it.

Enang added that Ministries, Agencies and Departments (MDAs) were ready to defend their budgets when called upon.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng earlier reported that President Muhammadu Buhari reportedly declined assent to the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) Act (Amendment) Bill.

The National Assembly passed the Bill and transmitted it to the president for assent in 2018.

Senate President Bukola Saraki read the refusal of assent letter on the floor of the Senate on Wednesday, March 14.

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Home | World | Africa | Shongwe Lookout opens its doors, tourism boom is expected

Zimbabwe's tourism investment continues to grow despite trouble with the country's economy.

The opening of a US$1.5 million lodge, Shongwe Lookout, in the heart of the country's tourism mecca of Victoria Falls is evidence that the tourist boom experience last year is far from over in the eyes of investors.

The 23-bedroom lodge, located in the suburbs, was funded by a mix of local and international investors.

Jamie Henson, the lodge manager, is a Zimbabwean who has lived in New Zealand for the past 17 years. He says he and his family were lured back by the opportunities in tourism.

"We were looking at the statistics on tourist numbers in Victoria Falls, and realized there is a very positive future here."

Henson arrived in Zimbabwe just before the currency crash last year and said thanks to good management the lodge is still on track to take its first guests from June 1 this year.

"So far the response from travel agents has been fantastic. They love the concept of what we are doing and say they simply do not have enough accommodation in Victoria Falls at present."

Henson said Shongwe Lookout is targeted at "the more discerning traveler" looking for comfort and great value for money.

The lodge will offer guests access to two platforms on a viewing tower, with vistas of the Zambezi River and spray rising from Victoria Falls, as well as a pool, restaurant area, boma area and bar.

Henson said he and his wife are excited about living in Zimbabwe.

"My wife is from New Zealand, so we were a bit nervous about how she would adapt. But, so far, we are both loving it. There is so much happening around Victoria Falls, so many young people like us with a passion to make the town the best it can be.

"It's a really positive place to be."

Last year saw Zimbabwe's tourist arrivals jump 15 per cent on the back of positive international coverage of the country after changes in government. Trouble with the economy kicked off 2019, and its impact remains to be seen on tourist numbers to the country.

However, Henson said anecdotal evidence suggests that tourist numbers remain high.





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Home | World | Africa | Biti's book he co-authored with 2 former presidents seized by CIO

The Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) has seized a consignment of books co-authored by Movement for Democratic Change MP Tendai Biti.

The book, 'Democracy Works', is set to be launched in Johannesburg on March 27, at an event to be attended by two former presidents - Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.

Biti said 18 copies of the book were dispatched by the publisher in Johannesburg in early January, and the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA) "ridiculously asked us to pay duty, and we did."

The Harare East MP said on Twitter: "Now the President's Office, a euphemism for the CIO, has abducted these books. Who does that?"

Biti told ZimLive he had been contacted by parcel delivery company, DHL, who informed him that the CIO had taken the books.

"They just said the books had been taken by the President's Office. It's outrageous," he said.



Democracy Works was co-authored by Biti, Obasanjo, Greg Mills of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation and Jeffrey Herbst, the president of the American Jewish University. Sirleaf wrote the foreword.

Published by Pan Macmillan, the authors explore how we can learn to nurture and deepen democracy in Africa to ensure economic growth and political stability. They argue that making democracy work relies on much more than having free and fair elections, but depends on what happens between elections  systems and institutions of government as well as what politicians want to do with the power they acquire, beyond the power itself.

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Home | World | Africa | Mphoko heading to court to get his pension, benefits

Former Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko is heading to court to force the government to pay him his pension, his lawyer said.

Mphoko, forced out in a military coup that ousted former President Robert Mugabe in November 2017, is entitled to a lifetime salary, security and an office, according to his lawyer Professor Welshman Ncube.

"We've been going round in circles and haven't achieved any progress. We've been communicating back and forth the communication we have so far with the Ministry of Justice through the advice of the Attorney General is that they appear to be conceding that he's entitled to his pension, but continue to dispute his entitlement to other benefits like security, office and others," Ncube told The Daily News.

The lawyer said government officials initially appeared to take the view that Mphoko was not entitled to the pension he is seeking because he did not serve out a full five-year term, having been appointed to the job in December 2014.

Ncube said there was a conflict between the Presidential Pensions Act, which government officials were relying on, and the country's new Constitution adopted in 2013. The Constitution is silent on the full term, stating in section 102(3): "A person who has ceased to be President or Vice President is entitled to receive; (a) a pension equivalent to the salary of a sitting President or Vice President, as the case may be; and (b) such allowances and other benefits as may be prescribed under an Act of Parliament."

Where an Act of Parliament is in conflict with the Constitution, the latter is superior, Ncube said.

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Home | World | Africa | Man dumps blind wife, marries tenant

A BLIND woman's attempt to stop her husband's secret wedding yesterday at the Harare Magistrates' Court failed after she arrived moments after the signing.

Only identified as Mrs Chidzoka, the woman only arrived at the court when her husband John Chidzoka and his new bride Charity Tembo were heading for a photo shoot.

A forlorn Mrs Chidzoka was at a loss for words after she discovered it was too late for her to stop the wedding.

"I never thought that my husband would betray me in this manner," said a visibly distraught Mrs Chidzoka.

"I would have understood if it was any other woman but not my tenant.

"These people are taking advantage of the fact that I am blind hence I cannot see what will be happening right under my nose. Honestly, I am heartbroken."

It is understood that John has been married to Mrs Chidzoka for more than 11 years now but they did not bear children during their marriage.

Tembo, who is said to have been a tenant at Chidzoka's homestead for about two years, is alleged to have been enjoying an illicit affair with John.

"Charity does not have a husband of her own and she has a habit of cooking food which she offers to my husband without my knowledge.

"Ever since my husband started eating her food, his behaviour has changed because he has turned into a drunkard.

"There was a time when I visited my parents in the rural areas for about 11 days and on my return, I caught my husband red-handed as he was sleeping undressed in my kitchen with Tembo who was also naked.

"After this incident, Tembo has been threatening me and she once told me that she will take over my home, now she has.

"John's relatives are the ones who informed me early in the morning that my husband was getting married today at the court and I arrived late because I would have stopped this fake marriage from proceeding," added Mrs Chidzoka.

Asked by the wife's relatives who were also present at the court yesterday why John did what he did, he claimed he got married because he wanted to commence lessons at a bible school hence he needed a marriage certificate for registration since it is a must.

John refused to entertain H-Metro whilst Mrs Chidzoka was shouting that she was proceeding to the police to lodge a complaint against Tembo.

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Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has left Ghana to India on Friday, March 15, 2019.



The Vice President, according to a statement by the Director of Communications at the Office of the Vice President, Frank Agyei-Twum; is attending the 14th CII - Exim Bank Conclave on India - Africa Project Partnership slated for 17th to 19th March, 2019. at New Delhi.



Read full statement below:



The Vice President of the Republic, H.E. Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, left Accra, Ghana for New Delhi, India on Friday, March 15th, 2019 for the 14th CII - Exim Bank Conclave on India - Africa Project Partnership slated for 17th to 19th March, 2019.



Over the past 13 editions, the CII- EXIM Bank Conclave on India Africa Project Partnership has emerged as the pioneer event for Indian and African governments and industry to meet and explore new avenues of partnerships, and enables the Indian and African leadership to take stock of the progress of the partnership and address future needs.



Ahead of a number of important meetings and networking sessions, Vice President Bawumia will address the Inaugural Session of the Conclave as Guest of Honour, and give the closing remarks at the end of the Conclave.



From India, on Friday, 22nd March and Saturday 23rd March, 2019, Vice President Bawumia will be Special Guest at the Humanities and Law graduation ceremonies respectively at the Buckingham University, United Kingdom.



H.E. Dr Mahamudu Bawumia returns to Accra on Sunday, 24th March, 2019.



Signed:



Frank Agyei-Twum



Director of Communications

Office of the Vice President

Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
"We just sleep on the floor in the tents," said 28-year-old mother-of-five Mary Amidu who like thousands of other Malawians fled her flood-ravaged home. "It's a camp, so the situation is dire. You just find a small space in the tent with your family and make it home." Her village is just 10 kilometres (six miles) away on the Mozambique border, beside the west bank of the Shire river which has burst its banks following days of torrential rain. Across Malawi, at least 56 people have been killed following flash floods while the government estimates almost 83,000 people have been displaced. The waters last week invaded her home so swiftly that the young widow had to scramble to get her family to safety. "The floods came very quickly and we had no time to rescue anything, most of my property went with the floods," she said. "What was important was to save lives." They are now at the emergency camp, located in Bangula, southern Malawi -- close to the border with Mozambique which was hit by tropical cyclone Idai late Thursday, cutting off the coastal city of Berea. "Although we have food, we have no cooking utensils to prepare the food because everything was lost," said Amidu who said she fears a long stay at the camp as waters begin to subside. - 'No other choice' - "We cannot go back soon because the water has not receded and so the house has been destroyed. So we will hang around the camp until the situation normalises. We have no other choice." Pilirani Andulu, walked 15 kms to the camp after her home collapsed and has been forced to sleep in the open with her two-year-old girl because the tents are full. A lack of blankets and mosquito nets means her child is exposed to mosquitoes, malaria and cold. Relief official Humphrey Magalasi has been battling to ensure the 21 camps opened to handle the crisis can keep up. "We have huge gaps in terms of resources such as food and non-food items," he told AFP. "What we desperately need right now is food, tents, medication and mosquito nets." As many as 1,700 households had settled at the Bangula camp as of Thursday. So far, the Department of Disaster Management Affairs has received just 5,000 bags of rice, supplied by China. At Bangula airfield, Magalasi has also been dispatching food and emergency supplies to areas cut off by flooding including Makhanga, 65 kms from Bangula. - 'Accessible by boat or by air' - "We are airlifting supplies to Makhanga where about 2,000 households have been affected," he said. "Due to the flooding, the area is only accessible by boat or by air. We intend to airlift 600 bags of rice and other non-food items to Makhanga." At least 56 people have died in flood-hit areas as of Wednesday, according to the government, while 577 had been injured and three are missing. "Most of the displaced families are living in camps. So far, a total of 187 camps have been established in the affected districts," said the government in a statement. "Assessments to establish the extent of damage in all the 14 affected districts (of Malawi's 28) are still underway." The floods also caused heavy damage to property, including roads and crops which forced President Peter Mutharika to declare a state of disaster. An AFP correspondent saw extensive damage to fields of corn, also known as maize, around Bangula. The destruction could potentially wreak havoc with the harvest due in April and May. The country's Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services has warned Malawians to expect further downpours. Homeless: Children cook corn at a camp for displaced people in Bangula, southern Malawi The basin of the Shire River in southern Malawi, swamped by flash floods A Malawi Defence Force helicopter takes off after delivering aid -- the Bangula camp is cut off by land Destroyed: The floods have wrecked cornfields -- the harvest is due just two months from now
It looks like after all the juicy promises the New Patriotic Party made to the people of Ghana to help fix DUMSOR permanently, things are not going on smoothly as they promised and planned.



For the past few days, the whole of the country has been subjected to some form of DUMSOR. Even though the managers of power in Ghana have continually assured us that they are working hard to solve the issue, things gets worse by the day.



A lot of people in the country have been gravely angered by this situation we find ourselves in and have taken to social media to pour out their frustrations.



Ghanaian comedian DKB has taken to his Instagram page to also pour his frustrations about the DUMSOR situation in Ghana. He has threatened government that if they do not fix the situation in one week, he will organize a mammoth demonstration against them.





















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
Loris husband is a trump supporter who complains about people who dont carry their own weight unlike his daughters

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Please tell me he complained about this on Twitter so we can read the responses.

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Tom Arnold outed him lmaooooo

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OF COURSE

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lmao of course he is

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LMAO, of course

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I heard this on the radio. The fucking audacity

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I hope this bankrupts their family, but doubt it since his dad is rich and he basically funded his business after scamming his dad for tuition money. Theyre a mess. Must be some luxury bootstraps they have to help them carry their weight.

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Of course he is. The entire family probably is. They seem like Evangelical Christians too.

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Not surprised. Hes a scammer too.

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Sounds like your typical Trump supporter to me. 

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BLOOP. fuck that white devil family. Hope they do time.

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Of course!

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The Mossimo brand at Target SUCKED.





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Smfh hypocritical trash

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Think I feel sorry for that bitch?.gif

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i came in here just for this!

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Eff an SAT my mans needs a blunt rolling tutor https://t.co/iQf0w8LByx  Desus Nice (@desusnice) March 14, 2019





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OMG LOL

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That has got to be the most pathetic looking blunt Ive ever seen in my entire life.

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Looks like my cats shit.

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Honestly. It makes me sad looking at it. What a waste of some likely good weed. 

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Legit. It looks like some kind of vegetable root

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I don't even smoke and I know that's rolled badly

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Hes such a failure in life he cant even properly roll a blunt. Smh.

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This picture should be in the dictionary next to the word "useless"

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I'm crying, I've never rolled or smoked a blunt in my life and I know that's a travesty

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If your parents need to fix your ass to go to college, the least you should be able to do is roll a decent blunt.

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This looks like an SNL skit

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i was reading this yesterday and...good luck with that rap career he speaks of.



also, that rollup is raggedy af

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Omg she has got to be the most obnoxious person ugh

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the thumbnail alone...she's nuts

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The asteroid is going to hit our planet one day and Meghan will find a way to make it all about herself.

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lmfao this was embarrassing to watch

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She really needs to sit down and just eat her food.



Why is she prepping herself to be dragged. This is not the hill she wants to die on.



This mess needs to sit down.

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500 billion though, lol

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Dr. Evil would be proud.

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lmfao

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i love it lol

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ikr. might as well go for a trillion.

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Bullying my ass. They left before they got kicked out.

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Its all well deserved but Im genuinely surprised that theres been this much fallout

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Right? I just kind of figured it was like an accepted thing that rich people bribed schools to get their kids in, I get that this was lying about test scores and whatever but I'm pretty shocked they're actually in real trouble lol. It's nice to see the rich facing consequences for once.

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The rich people are just mad that these rich people did it the wrong way. That's one reason they're not getting away with it, I think.

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Same. Though now it's feeling a little new money vs old money. Like the ~Hollywood Elite~ did it this way because they either didn't know or care about the ways of the legacies and how they've been getting away with it for so long.

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Same. I know I'm alone in this but it seems like a bit of an overkill, like I'm sure they won't do any jail time but all the fallout and Lori getting kicked off shows...

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the photo at the top look like BATTLE OF THE FILLERS

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Felicitys neck lookin like beef jerky

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0.5% of the world's GDP apparently.. aim high!

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Lol. Maybe she thinks her son was the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. She has high expectations.

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It's provocative, it doesn't have to make sense!

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The only thing more ridiculous than this scandal is the amount shes suing for. I mean, does she even know what $500 billion is. JFC

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Class action though

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Let me consult my lawyer friend so I can claim a stake into these law suits to pay off my student loans....



Edited at 2019-03-15 10:49 pm (UTC)

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lmfao mte...i'm disadvantaged as a result of rich people, give me money please!

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ya I want in on that money. I actually looked up which schools are involved and see if I got rejected from them.

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fuck these people



being wealthy enough to pay 500k just to get your kid INTO a school is obscene and immoral

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Trash.

Shit this would have been great 5 yrs ago, could have dumped Frank.





A terrible nightmare your greed and dumb daughters created.

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People throw around the word bullying so much.

If you're being called out for something you did, that is not bullying.

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Yea I'm sick of people using it against criticism or people telling them things they don't want to hear.

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totally agree

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mte getting mocked and treated like the assholes they are isnt bullying



no wonder they couldnt get a decent SAT score

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tbh

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Mte

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THIS THIS AN INFINITE TIMES THIS

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Thats how white trumpies think whenever they get called out when they say the most ignorant shit.



And that is why they think they are discriminated now.



How I fucking wish to be discriminated like them and still have that amount of privilege.

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i was thinking the same thing at first but most of the missives i've read haven't simply been people calling them out for conspiring in crime it's been to shame and embarrass them and while not unwarranted it does constitute bullying.

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All the rich assholes really suck, but the mom filing the lawsuit is being ridic and sounds super annoying. She goes on about how he had a 4.2 GPA which sounds nice but pretty much means he's a B student that took some honors classes and of course that's going to get you a rejection letter from most of the schools in the scheme regardless of whether or not rich kids are taking admissions spots while pretending to be on sports teams.



Edited at 2019-03-15 10:53 pm (UTC)

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I always laugh about 4.xxx GPA because it's so fucking stupid. Vanity grading.



My school did not do that.

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Isn't a 4.2 like an A+?

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Honors classes give you an extra point iirc

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It's over 4.0 so it's a weighted GPA which means honors/AP classes are marked on a 5 point scale. Even USC apparently has a 13% acceptance rate so you'll need close to perfect grades and great test scores (which she neglected to mention so they probably weren't great).

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Yeah, that was about my gpa in high school and I even got Ds in AP math classes. Other AP classes helped me out. It's not that impressive if you go to a school that weights grades and offers a lot of AP courses.

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It depends on how the classes are weighted and how many APs your school offered. Some states have AP classes weighted 2.0 quality points and honors classes being 1.0 quality points, while other states APs are worth 1.0 quality points, with honors classes being 0.5 quality points. It's annoying tbh b/c it's not uniform and some students have more opportunities than others. If his school only had APs worth 1.0 quality point and only offered like 2 or 3 classes, that's possible. Also depends on how their grading scale is divided up.

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lol I was OBSESSED with the whole applying to college process and spent countless hours on CollegeReview's message board (this was in 2001) and I was so pressed that my HS didn't weight our GPAs so I couldn't compete with all the other losers on there posting their ~stats

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500 billion is a ridiculous amount to ask for. and i'm not on their side, but 500 billion is stupid as hell.



also wasn't r. kelly's bail like 5-10 times less than lori's or something? i'm all for throwing the book at people, but abduction, rape and abuse of women/underage girls should have a higher bond than bribing colleges.



Edited at 2019-03-15 10:56 pm (UTC)

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R. Kelly is apparently broke though. Lori is a much bigger flight risk.

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good! even more reason for the bond to be higher! abusers should have it as HARD as possible to be released from prison.

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All of this. And that's why I mentioned John in an earlier post. Yes, Lori and the others deserve to face consequences for this BUT their consequences should in no way be more severe than those who have raped, abducted, facillitated rape, etc.

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Oil prices jumped to their highest level since November this week, and the Trump administration deserves a lot of the credit.

Sanctions on Iran and Venezuela together have combined to knock huge volumes of supply offline over the past year. At the time of this writing, data on Venezuelas oil exports were not readily available, but one of the countrys main oil export terminals was reportedly set to resume operations after being forced offline because of a widespread electricity blackout.

However, its safe to assume that problems with the oil sector continue. Reuters reported that two storage tanks at the Petro San Felix heavy oil upgrading unit exploded on Wednesday. Estimates vary, but some analysts say that the electricity outage crippled oil exports, dropping them to perhaps 500,000 bpd, down by half from just a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, the sanctions on Iran are also knocking supply offline, but maybe not as much as Trump had wanted. The Trump administration is aiming to slash Irans oil exports by about 20 percent by May, according to Reuters, putting exports below 1 million barrels per day (mb/d), down from over 2.5 mb/d last spring.

Reuters reported that the U.S. is likely to grant extensions on waivers to most of the eight countries that obtained them last year. In exchange, they have to reduce imports from Iran. The U.S. is aiming to get exports below 1 mb/d, down from roughly 1.25 mb/d currently. Related: Is A Crisis Looming For Canadian Oil?

But the effort noticeably stops short of cutting Irans exports to zero, as top U.S. officials repeatedly discussed last year. Zeroing out could prove difficult one source with knowledge of the deliberations told Reuters. The source added that a Brent price of $65 was the high end of Trumps crude price comfort zone. Brent topped $68 per barrel during midday trading on Thursday.

President Trump hates high gasoline prices more than he hates the Iranian regime. The U.S. backtracked on its bellicose position last year when Brent surged above $80 per barrel just ahead of the implementation of sanctions. Its doubtful that this time would be any different. Cutting Irans oil exports to 1 mb/d is a much more attainable goal than zero.

Importantly, the U.S. wont have the help of Saudi Arabia this time around. Riyadh ramped up oil production to 11 mb/d last year, adding more than 1 mb/d in new supply in the months leading up to sanctions. When the U.S. backtracked, prices crashed because the market was suddenly not as tight as everyone had expected.

Having been burned by Trump, the Saudis are unlikely to be as amenable to his demands for more production. The way that the Saudis were misled by the U.S. president concerning Iran sanctions is something that they can still taste, Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citigroup, told Bloomberg. The difference the tone coming out of Riyadh between 2018 and 2019 is stark. Last year, the Saudis tried to soothe the market, repeatedly reassuring everyone on adequate supply. They, along with their partners, abandoned their production cuts to avoid price spikes.

Now, Saudi Arabia not only got everyone in the OPEC+ coalition to recommit to production cuts, but Saudi Arabia has pledged to cut 0.5 mb/d more than required. And they will keep those cuts in place through April at least.

There are very few tools the U.S. has that can satisfy the administrations competing objectives of isolating Iran and Venezuela while also maintaining low gasoline prices. One tool is the NOPEC legislation, which would open up OPEC members to antitrust action by the U.S. Justice Department. Related: Is This A Precursor For Peak Oil Demand?

OPEC officials reportedly made it very clear to U.S. shale drillers in Houston this week that if NOPEC becomes law, it could be very bad for the shale industry. The NOPEC bill could make it difficult for OPEC to engage in coordinated production cuts, which could mean that they return to producing at maximum levels. Not coincidentally, major U.S. oil groups, such as the American Petroleum Institute, are lobbying the U.S. Congress not to pass the bill.

Still, the legislation gives Trump a bit of leverage over the Saudis, although its not clear that it is enough to convince them to ramp up supply.

The other factor that could help the Trump team isolate Iran and Venezuela while also heading off a price spike is U.S. shale supply, although the White House doesnt exactly have any influence over this dynamic. U.S. shale is still growing quickly, although there are signs of a slowdown.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spent time in Houston at the IHS CERAWeek Conference, urging shale drillers to do all they can to boost output. He characterized American oil companies as pivotal to U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, in the context of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and Iran, what happens West Texas is essential. But again, Pompeo cant do much to influence what is already occurring in the shale fields.

Pompeo surely wishes he could. Just days ago, the EIA downgraded its forecast for U.S. oil production for this year and next. The agency also reported a surprise drawdown in inventories, an indication that the market may not be oversupplied after all.

Reports that the U.S. is moderating its position on Iran sanctions, perhaps only aiming to get Irans oil exports down to 1 mb/d as opposed to zero, is a clear recognition that the oil market is tightening to the point that the Trump administration feels constrained in its foreign policy objectives.

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
The oil industry has suddenly grown concerned about its methane emissions.

In Houston, Shell executives urged the EPA to stick with federal regulations on methane. EOG Resources has agreed to methane targets at the behest of its own shareholders. BPs CEO Bob Dudley made a big show of support for action on climate change, as well as a more open approach to the way the oil industry does business. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is rolling back methane limits at the federal level.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, as much as 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over a shorter time period. Methane can leak from pipelines and processing facilities during the extraction and shipment of natural gas. While the oil and gas industry has opposed federal regulations on methane emissions, some are warming up to the idea.

There are a few reasons for this. First, capturing methane, rather than letting it leak, can be more profitable for companies, at least in theory. Second, the oil majors are increasingly gas majors. They are making long-term bets on natural gas, particularly as climate regulations force out dirtier forms of energy like coal. If future economies are going to be carbon-constrained, the industry had better plug their leaks. Third, the majors have the resources and technologies to cut methane emissions, and since they are under pressure to do so, they want to drag the rest of the industry along.

Related: Is This A Precursor For Peak Oil Demand?

ExxonMobil has been working with Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on monitoring and reducing methane emissions. Matt Kolesar, regulatory manager at XTO Energy, a subsidiary of Exxon, said that they have slashed methane leaks since launching a leak detection program in 2017. Just 18 months into our voluntary program weve achieved nearly a 40 percent decrease in observed leak frequency, Kolesar said in an interview with EDF.

But XTO and Exxon also want federal regulations on methane to level the playing field. As we explained in our written comments to the EPA, ExxonMobil strongly encourages the agency to continue regulating methane emissions at new and modified sources, and to expand methane regulation to existing sources, Kolesar of XTO said.

It hasnt always been the case that shareholders, advocacy groups and the oil industry are on the same page. BP and others lobbied against methane regulations in the United States. The American Petroleum Institute lobbied against the Obama-era methane rules, calling them burdensome.

But there seems to be a change in tone more recently. BP, despite having lobbied against methane rules, announced that it too was going to team up with EDF to limit methane emissions. We believe in direct federal regulation of methane for new and existing sources here in the United States, Bernard Looney, head of BP oil and gas production, told Reuters.

BP has aimed to cut methane emissions to just 0.2 percent of its total production by 2025, and says that it achieved that goal last year. EDF said that if the entire oil industry did as well as BP did on methane leaks, it would be the equivalent of shutting down roughly 2,000 coal-fired power plants.

Related: The Billionaires Battling It Out Over Biofuel

So, we now have BP, Shell and ExxonMobil calling on the Trump administration to tighten methane regulations. We are pleased that companies like Exxon and Shell acknowledge the need for federal methane regulation, said Lila Holzman, energy program manager of As You Sow, a nonprofit organization that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy. Smart methane controls represent the low-hanging fruit that companies should implement while transitioning their business models toward complete Paris-compliance.

The oil industry is under increasing pressure to take action from both the public and from shareholders. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is taking its deregulatory campaign to lengths that even the oil industry is uncomfortable with. If the likes of ExxonMobil, BP and Shell are on board with tighter regulation, it seems likely that it will occur with a new President in the White House.

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Production outages and Iran and Venezuela will tip the global oil market into a shortage during the second quarter, the International Energy Agency said in the new edition of its monthly Oil Market Report.

This will happen against the background of steadily rising demand despite a slowdown during the last quarter of 2018, the agency said, adding that it had kept its 2019 global demand forecast unchanged from the last OMR at 1.4 million bpd.

The IEA said Venezuelas oil production had stabilized around 1.2 million bpd before the massive power outage that hit the country earlier this week, noting this is the same amount as the one OPEC and its partners agreed to take off global markets in December in a bid to prop up prices.

While it did not say it expected Venezuelans oil production to grind to a halt, further decline is more or less a certainty. However, any serious market disruption should be limited because OPEC membersexcluding U.S. sanctioned Ian and Venezuelaare sitting on some 2.8 million bpd in spare capacity. This, with two-thirds of it in Saudi Arabia, could be quickly brought back online to cover any shortages, especially of heavy crude. OPEC has cut mostly its heavy crude oil output. Related: Is This A Precursor For Peak Oil Demand?

Whether the cartel would be willing to do this, however, remains an open question in light of recent comments by the Saudi Energy Minister, who suggested the cuts might have to be extended beyond the April deadline to boost prices enough for the Kingdoms comfort.

On the other hand, OPEC is likely to face the vocal opposition from the U.S. President as well as India and China if oil gets too expensive for importers comfort.

Speaking of importers, the IEA noted the U.S. has started buying a lot more crude from Russia to replace lost Venezuelan barrels. As exports to the US have slumped following the imposition of sanctions, Russia has taken the opportunity to increase its shipments to the US from relatively modest levels to around 150 kb/d.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Growing instability in Venezuela, and the potential of a slowdown in U.S. shale, has pushed oil prices up to multi-month highs this week.

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Friday, March 15th, 2019

Oil prices have surged to their highest level in months, with WTI rising above $58 per barrel and Brent trading north of $67. The instability in Venezuela and the growing evidence of a slowdown in U.S. shale have pushed prices up.

U.S. production dips. Weekly figures show that U.S. oil production dipped to 12 mb/d last week, down from 12.1 mb/d the week before. The figures are just estimates, and are rounded off to the nearest 100,000 bpd, but they at least offer an indication that the explosive growth could be slowing down.

Venezuelas Guaido proposes liberalizing oil sector. Opposition leader and self-proclaimed president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, is working on overhauling the countrys oil sector if he gains power. The proposal would include weakening PDVSA and allowing a vastly larger role for private sector companies. The reforms would resemble those of Mexico over the past few years and would amount to a historic change, although for now, Guiado is still struggling to gain power.

OPEC lowered output in February. OPEC reduced production by 221,000 bpd in February, a more modest reduction than in prior months. Most of the reductions came from Venezuela, which saw output drop by 142,000 bpd. Meanwhile, OPEC estimated that OECD inventories rose by 22 million barrels in January, or 19 million barrels above the five-year average. Related: How The Californian Oil Boom Died

IEA: OPECs spare capacity a cushion for oil market. The IEA said that although the crisis in Venezuela is disrupting the oil market, the OPEC+ production cuts have rebuilt spare capacity, providing a supply cushion that can offset the turmoil. Much of this spare capacity is composed of crude oil similar in quality to Venezuelas exports, the IEA said. Therefore, in the event of a major loss of supply from Venezuela, the potential means of avoiding serious disruption to the oil market is theoretically at hand.

U.S. hints at Iran waivers extension. The Trump administrations lead envoy on Iran sanctions, Brian Hook, said that waivers granted to eight countries importing Iranian oil could be extended, as long as they demonstrate reductions in purchases. The U.S. is aiming to get Irans oil exports below 1 mb/d, a reduction of roughly 20 percent from current levels, but a far cry from zero. Higher oil prices are constraining the Trump team. He has made it very clear that we need to have a campaign of maximum economic pressure ... but he also doesn't want to shock oil markets, he wants to ensure a well-supplied and stable oil market, Hook said, referring to Trump.

OPEC warns shale drillers. Earlier this week, a group of top OPEC officials warned U.S. shale executives in a meeting on the sidelines of the IHS CERAWeek Conference in Houston that the NOPEC legislation working its way through the U.S. Congress could result in much higher levels of production from OPEC, which would crash prices. They made clear that without the ability to coordinate, they would produce at maximum levels.

Libya clash feared. Although Libyas oil production is at multi-year highs and could rise even further, the division of the country between two governments could lead to a conflagration. The Libyan National Army (LNA) has piled up multiple victories on the battlefield, and analysts now fear it could turn its sights on the capital in Tripoli, where the internationally recognized government lacks the military might to fend off an invasion.

Investors to shale: show me the money. Investors continue to pressure the shale industry to demonstrate profits. Shareholders expectation a couple years ago was drill, baby, drill, John Hess, CEO of Hess Corp. (NYSE: HES) said Tuesday in an interview with CNBC at the CERAWeek conference. Now its show me the money. But spending cuts could translate into much lower production growth, he said.

Related: Is This A Precursor For Peak Oil Demand?

Offshore decline rates top 10 percent. Decline rates at offshore oil fields worldwide grew significantly beginning in 2016 due to lower infill activity. Last year, decline rates reached nearly 10 percent, almost double the rate from 2015, according to Rystad Energy.

Canadian oil sands could slow on pipeline delays. MEG Energy Corp. (TSE: MEG) and Imperial Oil (TSE: IMO) are reconsidering expansions of oil sands projects in Canada due to the inability for the region to build a new long distance pipeline, according to Bloomberg. MEG had planned to bring an expansion online later this year, but the most recent delay of the Line 3 pipeline means that the probability of that going ahead this year has decreased, MEG said. We dont want to be building capacity into a system where we dont have the ability to move it, MEGs CEO Derek Evans said in a conference call last week.

Exxon targets $15 breakevens for Permian. ExxonMobil (NYSE: XOM) plans on cutting the cost of production in the Permian to just $15 per barrel, putting it on par with some of the lowest cost oil fields in the world. The President of XTO Energy, a subsidiary of Exxon, said that the oil majors scale could allow it to cut costs that low. He also said that the Permians total production, currently at 4 mb/d, could double by 2025. Exxon will deploy 55 rigs in the Permian this year, more than any other company.

Unrest in Algeria threatens more disruptions. No oil and gas production has been affected yet, but political unrest in Algeria has raised the risk of more outages at a time when the oil market is already reeling from disruptions.

Egypt to sell LNG in remarkable turnaround. Egypts state gas company EGAS tendered a sale for four LNG cargoes for April, only a few years after the country was forced to buy up LNG to plug a supply deficit. Egypt has lofty aspirations to build a gas hub in the Eastern Mediterranean.

By Tom Kool for Oilprice.com

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The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will once again become a nemesis for U.S. shale if the U.S. Congress passes a bill dubbed NOPEC, or No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act, Bloomberg reported this week, citing sources present at a meeting between a senior OPEC official and U.S. bankers.

The oil minister of the UAE, Suhail al-Mazrouei, reportedly told lenders at the meeting that if the bill was made into law that made OPEC members liable to U.S. anti-cartel legislation, the group, which is to all intents and purposes indeed a cartel, would break up and every member would boost production to its maximum.

This would be a repeat of what happened in 2013 and 2014, and ultimately led to another oil price crash like the one that saw Brent crude and WTI sink below US$30 a barrel. As a result, a lot of U.S. shale-focused, debt-dependent producers would go under.

Bankers who provide the debt financing that shale producers need are the natural target for opponents of the NOPEC bill. Banks got burned during the 2014 crisis and are still recovering and regaining their trust in the industry. Purse strings are being loosened as WTI climbs closer to US$60 a barrel, but lenders are certainly aware that this is to a large extent the result of OPEC action: the cartel is cutting production again and the effect on prices is becoming increasingly visible. Related: Pakistan Aims To Become A Natural Gas Hotspot

Indeed, if OPEC starts pumping again at maximum capacity, even without Iran and Venezuela, and with continued outages in Libya, it would pressure prices significantly, especially if Russia joins in. After all, its state oil companies have been itching to start pumping more.

The NOPEC legislation has little chance of becoming a law. It is not the first attempt by U.S. legislators to make OPEC liable for its cartel behavior, and none of the others made it to a law. However, Al-Mazroueis not too subtle threat highlights the weakest point of U.S. shale: the industrys dependence on borrowed money.

The issue was analyzed in depth by energy expert Philip Verleger in an Oilprice story earlier this month and what the problem boils down to is too much debt. Shale, as Totals chief executive put it in a 2018 interview with Bloomberg, is very capital-intensive. The returns can be appealing if youre drilling and fracking in a sweet spot in the shale patch. They can also be improved by making everything more efficient but ultimately youd need quite a lot of cash to continue drilling and fracking, despite all the praise about the decline in production costs across shale plays.

The fact that a lot of this cash could come only from banks has been highlighted before: the shale oil and gas industry faced a crisis of investor confidence after the 2014 crash because the only way it knew how to do business was to pump ever-increasing amounts of oil and gas. Shareholder returns were not top of the agenda. This had to change after the crash and most of the smaller playersthose that survivedhave yet to fully recover. Free cash remains a luxury.

Related: The EIA Cuts U.S. Oil Output Projections

The industry is aware of this vulnerability. The American Petroleum Institute has vocally opposed NOPEC, almost as vocally as OPEC itself, and BPs Bob Dudley said this week at CERAWeek in Houston that NOPEC could have severe unintended consequences if it unleashed litigation around the world.

Severe unintended consequences is not a phrase bankers like to hear. Chances are they will join in the opposition to the legislation to keep shales wheels turning. The industry, meanwhile, might want to consider ways to reduce its reliance on borrowed money, perhaps by capping production at some point before it becomes forced to do it.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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San Francisco and Oakland have approached a federal appeals court with a request to reinstate their lawsuits against five Big Oil companies, which a U.S. District Judge dismissed last year.

NBC reports the two municipalities had also asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of San Francisco to return the lawsuits on their own turf, to the San Francisco Superior Court and the Alameda County Superior Court, where the lawsuits were filed originally.

San Francisco and Oakland are suing Chevron, Exxon, Shell, BP, and ConocoPhillips for selling oil products despite their knowledge of the effect these products had on the environment.

"Defendants have known for decades that the continued burning of fossil fuels would increase global temperatures and cause devastating impacts on coastal communities like Oakland and San Francisco. Yet they continued to wrongfully promote the increased, unrestricted use of their products," the attorneys of the two plaintiffs wrote in a brief.

The five companies stance was that control over the production of oil and gas and carbon emissions from the industry is the prerogative of environmental regulators and not courts. They argued the case should be dismissed, which is exactly what happened eventually.

Yet, the Big Oil defendants have also argued the environmental damage the two cities authorities claim they have sustained is speculative, involving billions of people using oil and gas as well as long environmental processes.

Another anti-Big Oil case against the same five companies was dismissed in New York City as well, a month after the SF/Oakland case dismissal. Climate change is a fact of life, as is not contested by Defendants, the Manhattan judge wrote in his ruling. But the serious problems caused thereby are not for the judiciary to ameliorate. Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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LNG Canada may end up with a total capacity of 28 million tons of the fuel annually, to be built in two phases, the projects chief executive told Reuters on the sidelines of CERAWeek.

We want to take FID on phase 2 before LNG flows from phase 1. (The partners) want to have some insight overall on the project before FID, Andy Calitz said. First LNG from phase one is scheduled to start flowing in 2025.

The five companies behind the US$31 billion (C$40 billion) LNG Canada project announced their final investment decision on the project last October, ending months of uncertainty and worry that the large-scale project could become the second failed LNG initiative in British Columbia after Petronas quit its proposed Pacific North West project on depressed LNG prices.

LNG Canada is a project of Shell, with a 40-percent stake, Malaysias Petronas with 25 percent, PetroChina with 15 percent, Mitsubishi with 15 percent, and South Koreas Kogas with 5 percent.

The facility, which is expected to become operational before 2025, will initially have two liquefaction trains, each with a capacity of 6.5 million tons of LNG with the prospect of adding another two trains at a later stage, the consortium said at the time. Now, it looks like the prospects for LNG demand look bright enough to boost this and finalize the decision to do this early on.

Related: U.S. Aims To Bring Iran Oil Exports Below 1 Million Bpd

Yet there are problems around the project despite the approval of the British Columbia government, and these problems have to do with environmentalist and indigenous opposition. Most recently, LNG Canada made headlines when work on the pipeline that would feed natural gas to the B.C. coast liquefaction facility was halted after a couple of indigenous artifacts were found at the construction site.

The artifacts, according to the B.C. energy regulator, did not originate in the place where they were found. Some read this as the regulator insinuating that they were put there to stop work on the pipeline.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Last month, Samsung introduced us with one of the best flagship smartphone in the world  Galaxy S10. No doubt, the smartphone comes with great specifications and a lot of features. But one feature that is face unlock is not the best, you can easily fool face unlock feature of Galaxy S10 with a video or photo of yourself. This face unlock feature can be also fooled on Galaxy S10+ and Galaxy S10e.

Lewis from Unbox Therapy tricked and fooled S10s face unlock with a video played on another phone. Face unlock feature doesnt even recognized the screen resolution, not even pixel details, not the focus distance or any other things, it just bypassed everything and unlocked the smartphone with just a video of yourself played on another smartphone.

Emanuele from AndroidWorld.it also fooled S10s face unlock with just a static photo of himself. The smartphone quickly unlocked without recognising it is a static photo.

In Settings, Galaxy S10 enables by default a faster recognition for face unlock which states that it reduces security, increasing the possibility of a video or image being incorrectly recognized as your face. So, it advised that if you are planning to set face unlock on your new S10 then turn faster recognition setting to off.

But SmartWorld claims that they had this setting off when testing face unlock with static photo and still S10 unlocked.

To recall, last years Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9+ and Galaxy Note 9 used to come with Iris Scanner on the front which was way more than any face unlock feature but Samsung quietly removed it on S10 series to introduced bezel-less display with the punch-hole display.

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Harrisburg, PA -(Ammoland.com)- A new bill introduced in Pennsylvania would establish a gun registry within the state.

HB0768 is known as the Firearms Registration Act. The Democrats that introduced the bill were Mary Louise Isaacson (D), Angel Cruz (D), and Mary Jo Daley (D). Last Friday, the General Assembly referred the bill to the committee on judiciary.

The bill would require gun owners in the Keystone State to register their firearms with the Pennsylvania State Police. Owners would have to provide the police with the make, model, and the serial numbers of all their guns.

Along with the application that the gun owner must swear to under oath, the gun owner would have to submit fingerprints, two photographs that are no older than 30 days and go through a background check for each firearm that they own. This background check is the same one that they must go through to purchase a gun.

In addition to this requirement, they must also provide the Pennsylvania State Police with their home and work address, telephone number, social security number, date of birth, age, sex, and citizenship. This requirement is more information than a person needs to vote.

If the State Police rejects the person's application, then they will have ten days to appeal the decision. The owner must turn their firearms into the State Police within three days of receiving notification of the rejection. If a person does not appeal the decision within ten days, their right is forfeit.

A gun owner cannot transfer any unregistered firearm. Anyone caught with an unregistered gun is guilty of a crime even if they are unaware of the firearm registration status. Also just holding an unregistered firearm at a range is a crime.

The gun owner must keep all firearms unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock. If a firearms owner doesn't secure their firearm that way, they would be guilty of a crime. This rule even applies to homes with no children.

The gun owner has 48 hours to update the State Police if they change jobs, phone numbers, addresses, or anything else on the application. If they do not update the State Police, then they could be prosecuted for violating the law.

The certificate which will cost $10 per firearm will expire after one year. The gun owner would have to start the process over again to renew their certification. This process must be done 60 days before the certificate expires. The procedure can get confusing for gun owners with large collections.

The bill makes no mention of how the state will enforce the law.

Other states that have tried gun registration and bans have seen limited success. New Jersey has had zero magazines turned in since their magazine ban went into effect.

New York saw nearly one million firearms owners defy the state law to register their assault weapons. The same thing played out in Connecticut when only 50,000 out of 350,000 registered their semi-automatic rifles.

Expanding a registry to all firearms will be impossible to enforce without conducting door to door searches of houses. It is unclear how these Democrats plan to deal with this reality.
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...
" " A single lane road winds through farms and villages that dot the coastline of the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry, Ireland. PhotoviewPlus/Getty Images

For starters, Ireland is not one country, but two, situated on an island just east of England, and roughly the size of South Carolina. Officially established in 1949, the independent Republic of Ireland (capital: Dublin) takes up most of that land mass. Northern Ireland (capital: Belfast) is situated on the northeast side of the island and belongs to the United Kingdom, and thus, falls under English rule.

Yet this currently stable political environment is a recent development. For hundreds of years, Ireland has seen occupiers come and go, violence and peace wax and wane, as the people across the so-called Emerald Isle searched for a defining and unifying sense of self and culture.

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Out of all the chaos and strife, many rock-solid traditions arose, all the while adding to Irish culture and giving this people an identity that's recognizable the world over. And part of that identity is awash in green.

Green has become the most Irish hue. This is in part because this temperate island is literally very green with foliage. The green shamrock, with its three leaves, is what St. Patrick purportedly used to teach the Christian Trinity to potential converts.

And although blue was the color originally associated with St. Patrick's Day, green eventually became the symbolic color of choice. This is because natives who supported Irish-Catholic nationalism often pinned shamrocks to their clothing. During one rebellion, a group of soldiers even went so far as to dress in green uniforms to draw attention to their desire for an independent Ireland.

In the mid-1800's, famine struck Ireland. Many Irish left behind their homeland and dispersed throughout the world, taking their traditions and customs with them. Much of the Irish culture is tinged with the struggles of their long oppression and suffering, yet in each song, dance, and delicious family recipe is steely resolve and hope.

And there's one slice of their culture in particular that speaks to the root of what it means to be Irish  the food. On the next page you'll read more about how Irish culinary choices are intertwined with the culture as a whole.
Australia will launch a seven-nation Indian Ocean military exercise next week, starting in Sri Lanka where China has invested in strategic ports and loaned huge amounts to build other infrastructure, Canberra's envoy said Friday. Some 1,000 Australian security personnel in four naval ships and a military aircraft will participate in the biggest joint exercise yet with their Sri Lankan counterparts, Canberra's top envoy in Colombo, Jon Philp, said. "Sri Lanka and Australia are increasingly like-minded on maritime security and Indian Ocean issues," Philp said adding that the two countries will improve cooperation and familiarity with each other's defence forces. Australian forces will move to neighbouring India on March 26 and thereafter travel to Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore before returning to Darwin after two and a half months. The joint exercise comes as concerns grow over Beijing's influence on Sri Lanka's economy and Chinese control over two key ports. Unable to service a $1.4 billion Chinese loan to build a deep-sea port in the island's south, Colombo leased the facility to a Beijing company for $1.12 billion in 2017. A state-owned Chinese company also runs Sri Lanka's biggest container terminal in Colombo. Neighbouring India as well as Western nations have expressed concern about China's foothold on vital locations in Sri Lanka which is strategically placed along the most important East-West sea route. An ambitious plan, seeking to link Asia, Europe and Africa with a network of ports, highways and railways, has seen China disperse tens of billions of dollars in loans to developing nations, sparking fears of a "debt trap". The largest single lender to Sri Lanka, China has secured contracts to build roads, railways and ports. Philp played down China's growing presence in the Indian Ocean region saying Canberra considered Beijing a "extremely important" partner. "We welcome China's role in the region and look forward to working with China," he said. Growing fears of political influence from foreign states, particularly China, saw Australia pass a raft of new laws last year to curb potential meddling.
China on Friday flatly rejected criticism of mass detainment of Muslim minorities in its restive Xinjiang region, insisting it has set up "campuses", not camps, in a bid to counter radicalisation. China's vice foreign minister Le Yucheng, the head of a delegation speaking before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, slammed "ill-intentioned accusations against vocational training centres in Xinjiang." He was responding to a long line of comments and recommendations regarding the situation in Xinjiang made during a so-called Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of China's rights record before the council last November. A number of countries at the time cited estimates that some one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic minorities are being held in detention centres in Xinjiang, and asked China to halt the practice. But Le insisted Friday that such claims showed "a total disregard for the facts", and were aimed at "interference under the disguise of human rights." "The training centres... are actually boarding schools or campuses, and not camps as claimed by the ill-intentioned few," stressing the official line that they are meant to help educate and rehabilitate people susceptible of falling "prey to terrorist extremism". He said the "trainees" at the centres were free to go home regularly and to have contact with their families, and that those who graduated easily found jobs, allowing them to break "free of both extremist ideology and poverty. "We are delighted to see on the faces of the trainees smiles of contentment and appreciation of the government." Le said there had been "thousands" of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang since the 1990s, but that thanks to the use of the "vocational training centres", not a single attack had taken place in the past 27 months. - Stifling criticism? - "As the counter-terrorism situation improves, the training programme will be gradually downsized, leading to its completion," he said. Nearly 100 countries requested the right to respond to China's remarks, but due to strict time constraints, only around a dozen were permitted to take the floor. In advance, the rights council drew the name of the first country, Mali, from a hat, and from there countries were called upon in alphabetical order, through to the Philippines. This meant that most critical voices from Europe and North America were not called upon, with only Norway speaking up against China's Xinjiang policies. Most other speakers took the opportunity to praise China for accepting and respect for human rights. Non-governmental organisations were also given a chance to speak, but there too, groups praising China grabbed six of the 10 available speaking slots. Activists said this showed that China had gone to great lengths to stifle criticism at the event. John Fisher of Human Rights Watch commented on the lack of criticism during the event, suggesting that Beijing had coerced states into singing its praises. "Let me start by acknowledging China's active participation in the UPR process - not just through its national report, but also through its tireless efforts to encourage such a large number of states to uncritically endorse its approach," he said. Sarah Brooks of the International Service for Human Rights agreed, telling AFP that the numerous pro-China NGO's speaking at the event was "yet again an example of the investment they will make to buy silence and cover of abuse."
THE National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) has removed over 650,000 campaign materials all over Metro Manila.NCRPO Director Major General Guillermo Eleazar urged the candidates to also do their

PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday, March 14, made another about-face on his call to stop harassing the Catholic Church leaders, saying he does not mind the clergy getting killed because of their "foolishness."

Duterte made the remark after some priests exposed death threats they have reportedly received under the current administration.

The President said he should not be blamed for the death threats against the church leaders, stressing it was the latter who first wished for his death.

"Ngayon mag-ganti ako sa kanila. And they tried to picture me na pag namatay sila, I should be blamed because of my outburst. The hell. Wala akong pakialam kung mamatay kayo ngayon lahat. Maluwang pa ang ating cemetery," he said during the national peace and order council meeting in Davao City.

(I just hit back. And they tried to picture me that if they die, I should be blamed because of my outburst. The hell. I don't care if you get killed today. The cemetery is still spacious.)

"P***** i**, wala akong pakialam kung mamatay kayo sa kag****** ninyo inyo yan. You started the g****** b***** fight. Kayo yung in a solemn sacrament of the mass of the Catholic Church, hiningi ninyo ang kamatayan ko sa Diyos," he added.

(Son of a b****, I don't care if you die because of your foolishness. You started the g****** b***** fight. You are in a solemn sacrament of the mass of the Catholic Church and you ask God for my death.)

More Catholic priests critical of the Duterte government have come forward to make public the death threats against them. Their revelation came after Caloocan Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, who was repeatedly slammed by Duterte, confirmed receiving deaths threats from unknown people.

Malacanang earlier said that the death threats against the clergy might have been "fabricated" or may have been plotted by "pranksters" or anti-Duterte "trolls."

Duterte, in his impromptu speeches, had repeatedly called on the street idlers to "rob" and "kill" the moneyed bishops.

Story continues

But on February 25, the Chief Executive appealed to the public not to harm and harass the Catholic Church leaders, following the death threats being received by some prelates.

However, Duterte seemed to have a change of heart, saying his scathing tirades against the Catholic Church have nothing to do with the threatening messages sent to some bishops and priests.

"Eh sinabi ko oh kayong mga adik, pag wala kayong pera kailangan niyo ng shabu, mag-hanap kayo ng tubo hampasin mo yang ulo ng mga bishops na yan. Oh ngayon nagalit sila. Lahat ng pari nag-rereklamo. Their lives are in danger because of my fumigations in public," he said.

(I told addicts to strike bishops' head if they need money to buy shabu. Now, church leaders were irked. The priests are complaining. Their lives are in danger because of my fumigations in public.)

"Stop scaring people about your holiness. Do not scare me about you dying and getting me blamed," Duterte added. (SunStar Philippines)
THE National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) has removed over 650,000 campaign materials all over Metro Manila.NCRPO Director Major General Guillermo Eleazar urged the candidates to also do their

LOCAL furniture manufacturers are looking to expand their businesses to new markets overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia, while tapping strong local demand.

The forecast globally is that in the next 10 to 15 years, Asia would be the fastest-growing region. so we really shouldnt look too far, Nicolaas de Lange, chairman of the board of the Chamber of Furniture Industries of the Philippines (CFIP), said in an interview on the sidelines of the Philippines International Furniture Show.

As the Philippines chairs the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Furniture Industries Council (AFIC) for 2019 to 2020, de Lange said the country can take advantage of its position to enable local furniture makers to explore markets within the region.

Traditionally, we want to sell to the US (United States). We want to sell to Europe. But if the fastest-growing region is our own region, then we really should be studying our region a little better and try to focus on it a little more, he said.

De Lange, also secretary general of the AFIC, noted that the Philippines aims to increase intra-trade in Asean within the next two years.

I think it makes the most sense for us either to sell or to collaborate. A lot of them are wanting to come to the Philippines... Everybody wants a piece of our pie.

Apart from Southeast Asian countries, de Lange said industry players are targeting specific markets, citing Qatar.

We are looking at identifying markets and then hopefully, working with the trade attaches that we have there to identify which companies would be potentials for us to deal with. And then hopefully, find the way to meet those companies, introduce our companies to them, and then tell them that the Philippines has a lot of talented designers and we can actually design and develop products specifically for them, he stressed.

To meet buyers needs, de Lange noted it is imperative to improve the product development process.

Our product development process is very general, a little scattered. We just design what we think looks nice, what we think is in trend, but we dont really design with the specific market in mind, he said.

De Lange also underscored the need to promote the business at trade shows and exhibitions as they also tap the robust local market.

I guess the growth (this year) would come if at all from the local market. I think the local market is what is keeping a lot of companies alive. Some companies have really focused more on the domestic market already rather than exports, he said. (Philexport News And Features)
THE National Capital Region Police Office (NCRPO) has removed over 650,000 campaign materials all over Metro Manila.NCRPO Director Major General Guillermo Eleazar urged the candidates to also do their

GLOBE Telecom launched the Globe Future Makers (GFM) 2019, in collaboration with The Spark Project, as it takes its position as an accelerator for social innovators in the countrys startup community.

Introduced in 2017, GFM is the social innovation program of Globe which aims to help build the ecosystem of support for startups which are using technology to solve the Philippines most challenging social problems.

GFM 2019 is open to Philippine-based individuals, groups, or organizations with solutions that use technology such as a device, platform, hardware or software, to achieve wide-scale positive impact.

Entries must be beyond the ideation and conceptual stage, with a solution that has been working for at least two years and a functional product or service with actual users. It must also address any of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Chosen GFM finalists will each receive technology support from Globe and dedicated mentorship from industry leaders. The finalists will also have access to a robust ecosystem of passionate peers, partners and potential investors both locally and internationally, plus increased brand awareness with access to nationwide communications channels and potential for regional visibility. (PR)
Seated with other students on the steps at the Islamic University of Gaza with his backpack, the young Italian doctor-to-be draws looks from passersby. Riccardo Corradini is the first exchange student in the Gaza Strip under a popular European programme known as Erasmus and hopes to gain a unique experience in emergency surgery. When his university in Siena, a city in central Italy's Tuscany region, announced a year ago that a spot was open to spend a semester studying in the impoverished Palestinian enclave, he didn't have to think long. Still, he was the only one to apply. The sixth-year medical student had already studied in the occupied West Bank two years earlier, but the blockaded Gaza Strip is a different atmosphere. The strip of some two million people has endured three wars with Israel since 2008 and suffers from shortages of electricity and other infrastructure, like clean water. But Corradini, 25, says he has been welcomed warmly at the university in Gaza City and is glad to receive hands-on experience in his chosen speciality. "I came here for many reasons," said the young Italian who receives training at three Gaza hospitals. "The first reason is because I want to specialise in emergency surgery, so coming here, I can see with my own eyes unfortunately how emergency surgery is really," he added, giving the example of a 16-year-old who underwent an amputation. The past year has flooded hospitals in the Gaza Strip with wounded patients. In March 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began mass protests along the border fence with Israel. Since then, at least 255 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, the majority shot during weekly border demonstrations and clashes. Others have been hit by tank fire or air strikes in response to violence from Israeli-blockaded Gaza. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period. Israel accuses Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, of orchestrating the violence and protests. Palestinians and rights groups say protesters have been shot while posing no real threat. A UN probe has said Israel may have committed crimes against humanity in its response to the unrest, which Israel firmly rejected, saying its actions are necessary to defend its border. More than 7,000 Palestinians have been wounded by gunfire since the start of the protests, according to the Gazan rights group Al-Mizan, while around 100 of those have undergone amputations. - 'Like a novel' - For now, Corradini does not work on Fridays, when the protests peak and the atmosphere can become too stressful for a trainee. "Of course, it's not easy... to live here," he said, pointing to shortages of medicines and medical equipment on top of the insecurity of daily life. "Maybe you cannot have some medical tools that you need for therapy or stuff." But he said he had been warmly welcomed. "I really love how Gaza is," he said. "It can look like a novel." One of his friends, Saadi al-Nakhala, said: "It's brave of him to make the decision to come to an area under blockade." But, the 23-year-old Palestinian student said, "Gaza is a place with people like everywhere else." In his office overlooking the campus, Ahmed Muhaisen, in charge of external affairs for the university, said he "hopes that other students from other universities will follow". The university has formed several hundred partnerships worldwide, particularly in Europe. Three Gazans are currently studying abroad in Siena. Muhaisen said it is "a way of showing the world that there is an excellent level of academia" in Gaza. Corradini had become a form of "ambassador". Since he arrived in February, at least four Italian universities have applied to the Erasmus programme in Gaza, said Meri Calvelli of Italian NGO ACS, which helps facilitate the exchanges. She says it is important that the rest of the world see Gaza beyond the conflict-stricken zone it appears as in news stories. Erasmus began in 1987 and was first limited to students in European countries. It has since been expanded to other regions under the name Erasmus Plus. The partnerships are formed between universities. The Italian government, which like other European countries and the United States considers Hamas a terrorist organisation, is not involved. Corradini hopes that his four months there will, at least in a small way, help "the population of Gaza to live in a better way to create a path of peace". As for his family, he said: "At the beginning they were saying, 'What are you doing?' But then they were very proud of me."
THE military is validating information that Abu Dar, the alleged successor of the Maute brothers who led the Marawi City siege, was among the four suspected terrorists killed in a clash in Lanao del Sur.Colonel

THE military is validating information that Abu Dar, the alleged successor of the Maute brothers who led the Marawi City siege, was among the four suspected terrorists killed in a clash in Lanao del Sur.

Colonel Romeo Brawner, commander of the 103rd Brigade of the Philippine Army, said four suspected members of the Maute Group were killed following a firefight in Tubaran, Lanao del Sur on Thursday afternoon, March 14.

He said they believe Abu Dar was among the four slain terrorists.

"We have four body count. We believe that one of them is Abu Dar based on accounts of our informants. One of them was identified as Abu Dar but we are validating this from other sources," Brawner said.

Three soldiers were also killed while three others were missing.

Colonel Gerry Besana, Western Mindanao Command (Westmincom) information officer, said the firefight broke out at 5:04 p.m. Thursday in the village of Dinaigan, Tubaran, Lanao del Sur. It lasted for about an hour and 30 minutes.

Besana said the troops chanced upon 10 suspected Maute followers while on security operations in Dinaigan.

He did not release the identities of the slain and missing soldiers except that they belonged to the Armys 49th Infantry Battalion. The remains of the slain soldiers were taken to Iligan City for proper disposition.

He said the troops recovered the remains of two slain Maute followers as well as two M-16 Armalite rifles with attached M-203 grenade launchers, a caliber .45 pistol, a hand grenade, a rifle grenade, several ammunition, and a bandolier.

Lieutenant General Arnel dela Vega, Westmincom chief, said the troops advanced on the enemy target with deliberate offensives, hitting and inflicting heavy casualties on the Maute group.

We console with the families of our departed comrades, who fought valiantly and paid the ultimate sacrifice. We lost not only brave warriors but comrades who served the nation with such devotion, Dela Vega added. (SunStar Philippines)
President Rodrigo Duterte reads out the names of alleged narco-politicians

MANILA, Philippines  Several personalities whose names were mentioned by President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday (March 14) as among those listed on his narco-list have spoken up to clear their names.

El Nido, Palawan Mayor Nieves Rosento questioned the governments claim that the allegations against them have been validated.

Sinasabi po nila na they validated all of these. Saan po talaga actual na nakukuha yung mga information? Will it be sa mga taong kumakalaban sa atin o yung mga nasagasaan natin ng pagi-implement natin ng batas? (They were saying that they have validated all of these. Where did they get the actual information? Was it from our rivals in the election or was it from those offended by our implementation of the law?), she said.

Pangasinan 1st District Rep. Jesus Celeste maintained his clean conscience on the matter ever since his name was implicated in illegal drugs two years ago.

Sa unang una pa lamang noong 2016, nagrequest na ako na imbestigahan ako . Binuksan ko ang pamamahay ko na imbestigahan lahat . Meron namang resulta na . Negative lahat ang result, (Even before in 2016, I requested to investigate myself. I opened my house doors for investigation. And the results were negative,) Celeste argued.

Los Banos Laguna Mayor Ceazar Perez, for his part, asserted his innocence ever since his name was dragged into the controversy.

2017 pa lang kumakalat na iyang involved ako sa drugs. Binabalewala ko lang kasi walang katotohanan yung bagay na yun, (These drug allegations against me has been going around since 2017. I just ignore it because there is no truth to that matter,) he said.

On Thursday (March 15), President Rodrigo Duterte surprised the public by naming the alleged drug personalities on his narco-list.

The list involved 35 mayors, seven vice mayors, one provincial board member and three congressmen.

They are from Ilocos Region, Cagayan Valley, MIMAROPA, Caraga Region, Central Visayas, Zamboanga Peninsula, Central Luzon, SOCCSKARGEN, Northern Mindanao and Western Visayas.

Story continues

There can never be a valid argument to deny the public, the people of the Philippines at large, to know who are the officials who should not be there in their office and in these particular case now, those who are involve in the deadly name of drug trafficking, the President said.

According to DILG Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya, they released the narco-list as part of their mandate adding that such a move has nothing to do with the upcoming election.

I would like to assure na ang ating mga kababayan, even yung mga nagsasabi ng negative campaigning na wala po kaming instensyong ganun. (I would like to assure the public, even those who accused us of negative campaigning, that we have no such intention.) This is just incidental na panahon ng eleksyon ngayon (that election period is on,) explained Malaya.

The official said the narco-list was carefully screened by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), the lead agency in the Inter-Agency Committee On Anti-Illegal Drugs with the help of other law enforcement agencies to nclude the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Armed Forces Of The Philippines (AFP), and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency.

So itong apat na ahensyang ito, nagtulungan para mabuo itong listahan na ito,(These four agencies worked together to come up with this list.) So we are very confident. Mabigat yung ating mga ebidensya at sana panigan tayo ng Ombudsman, (We have strong evidence and we hope the Ombudsman will rule in our favor,) Malaya concluded.  Marje Pelayo (with details from Nel Maribojoc)

The post Some personalities on Dutertes narco-list deny allegations appeared first on UNTV News.
THE song is not meant to be taken seriously, but it has, at least for me, become something of a date checker. When somebody asks me of the date of Ferdinand Magellans arrival in our archipelago, I sing Yoyoy Villame. On Marts sixtin piptin handrid twinti wan, wen Pilipins was diskobird by Madzilan... 

Today is precisely March 16, the same day almost five centuries ago when a hardy band of Spanish explorers led by the Portuguese Magellan saw a small Limasawa Island after sailing day and night, across the big ocean. That date is important specifically for Cebuanos not for what happened on that day but for what happened weeks later in Mactan Island. That merited an entry in world history books.

History, however, is not written by the vanquished. Magellans defeat in Mactan by natives led by Lapulapu paved the way for the conquest of the archipelago by the Spaniards decades later. Colonization distorted our view of our own past. While there were efforts by the colonizing power to piece together out precolonial past, the interpretation of the big picture was overwhelmingly pro-Spanish.

In 2021, that little incident in world history will already be 500 years old. The celebration will certainly be huge and the governments of the Philippines and Spain are already preparing for it. Thats expected. Cebu will be at the center of it all. And since it will be celebratory, the brutal colonization by Spain would be downplayed and the exploitative and oppressive nature of its rule glossed over.

But that is not my main beef. The commemoration of the arrival of the Magellan expeditionary forces in the archipelago will necessarily focus again on a story that has been told and retold already: the archipelago during the Spanish rule. I thirst rather for the story of the archipelago before the Spaniards, and later the Americans, shaped us in their own image.

I realized this when I wrote the history of the town where my father was born, Tudela, in the Camotes group of islands. Reading materials that chronicled life in the archipelago before the arrival of the Spaniards led me to one theory: that what we are now is a result of our failure to embrace our true identity. The greatest irony is when we laugh at the practices of the lumads: our impure selves mocking our old and pure selves.

We should celebrate March 16 but not for the arrival of the Spaniards. I say it pays if we take a closer look at what happened prior to the first mass, or during the Spaniards first contact with the natives. It is just unfortunate that what we know about March 16 are seen in the prism of the glasses worn by the westerner Pigafetta. Even then, we can glean from him the level of civilized conduct achieved by the natives of the archipelago at that time.

We celebrate March 16 not because the Philippines was discovered by Magellan but because we discovered our own selves based on how the natives interacted with the Spaniards. March 16 should be seen, finally, in the perspective of Lapulapu and Humabon and not of Magellan and Pigafetta.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Data privacy is an important topic, but will it help sell iPhones?

Apple obviously believes it will.

The iPhone maker has just released its first privacy-focused TV commercial, a 54-second ad that, without mentioning the names of Facebook and Google, subtly dings rivals whose privacy lapses have garnered the attention of lawmakers.

The commercial, titled "Privacy on iPhonePrivate Side," is amusing, a bit quirky, and It spotlights a variety of scenarios where keeping private is paramount. In one scene, a guy tries to keep his distance when nature calls in a public urinal. In another, two men who had been gabbing in a restaurant go silent when the waitress approaches. The ad also showcases many of the keep out-type signs we runs across, from No Trespassing to Beware Of Dog. The spot ends with the tagline "If privacy matters in your life, it should matter to the phone your life is on," after which a padlock morphs into the Apple logo.

Verizon teamed up with Apple on the ad.

Apple's approach to privacy is to process as much data as possible on the iPhone and other devices themselves so that only you get to see that information. The company also attempts to dissociate that data so that you're not personally identifiable.

This isn't Apple's first crack at spreading the gospel on privacy through its marketing efforts. In January, at the CES tech industry conference in Las Vegas, Apple posted signs that read, "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone," with a link to the company's privacy page on the web.

That same month, CEO Tim Cook, long outspoken on the subject of privacy, published an essay in "Time Magazine," calling for a landmark package of reforms that protect and empower the consumer.

Explore further Apple updates iPhone to address privacy worries

(c)2019 USA Today

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The role played by symbiotic microorganisms isolated from the skin of anurans has been discovered by researchers in Brazil. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (photo: adult female (left) and calling male of Boana prasina) Credit: Andres Brunetti

Brazilian scientists have discovered that the strong odor released by some amphibian species is produced by bacteria and that attracting a mate is one of its purposes.

The bacteria in question are a noteworthy example of symbiosis as they assist in the animal's mating process. A paper recounting the discovery of this role of microorganisms isolated from the skin of frogs has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Frogs emit a pungent odor. Sometimes, a particular species can be recognized by its scent, but until now, the function of this odor was unknown. It was typically assumed to be an aposematic smell, meaning a chemical warning sign that served to repel predators, as in the case of skunks [Mephitis mephitis] among mammals, for example," said Celio Haddad, a professor at Sao Paulo State University's Rio Claro Bioscience Institute (IBRC-UNESP) in Brazil and a coauthor of the article.

According to Haddad, who is also affiliated with the university's Aquaculture Center (CAUNESP) in Jaboticabal, this hypothesis was considered plausible because many amphibian species, especially when poisonous, are brightly colored, and this serves as a visual alert to frighten predators. "We thought odor might play a similar role among anurans [frogs and toads]," he said.

The new study resulted from the postdoctoral research of Argentinean biologist Andres Eduardo Brunetti, supervised by Professor Norberto Peporine Lopes. Conducted at the University of Sao Paulo's Ribeirao Preto School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCFRP-USP), the research was supported by Sao Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP.

"The importance and originality of Brunetti's research is that for the first time it shows a pronounced difference in the odors emitted by frogs of opposite sexes," Haddad said. "No other studies of anurans have ever described this type of behavior. The results suggest that the odor serves to permit mutual recognition between males and females of the same species for mating purposes."

The research was also supported by the FAPESP Research Program on Biodiversity Characterization, Conservation, Restoration and Sustainable Use (BIOTA-FAPESP) and by the University of Sao Paulo (USP), the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and Brazil's Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).

"In anurans, you often see different species sharing a lake or marsh. In such places, there are 30 male frogs for every female of the same species on average. The question is how the females recognize males of their own species among a multitude of males belonging to several species while they're all vocalizing at the same time," Brunetti said.

"It's well-known that the function of the call of anuran males is to attract females and that every species has a characteristic song. Our findings suggest that odor appears to play a similar role, serving as an olfactory signal that enables females to recognize males of their own species."

Biologists were also unaware of a difference in the scents of male and female frogs. Brunetti discovered this difference during his research, whose primary goal was to understand the chemical composition of the volatile components emitted by the skin of various frog species.

His working hypothesis suggested that smell was a chemical warning sign that served to repel predators. To verify the hypothesis, Brunetti conducted field surveys at several sites in Sao Paulo state and Rio de Janeiro state, collecting specimens of the tree frog Boana prasina.

"It's very hard to collect females in the wild. Initially, we managed to collect only males. When we noticed what appeared to be a sexual difference in their odors, I went into the field again with the specific aim of capturing females for comparison," he said.

"During my doctoral research at the Argentinian Natural Science Museum in Buenos Aires, while investigating the volatile compounds in two other frog species, I discovered that the secretions were made up of a blend of 35 to 42 compounds in nine different chemical classes. We then realized that some of the compounds had the specific signature of compounds produced by bacteria."

Brunetti came to Brazil to investigate whether the selected tree frogs had skin bacteria that produced the characteristic odor of each species, and if so, which compounds they produced. His laboratory research proceeded on two fronts: analysis of the volatile compounds released by the skin of these frogs and identification of the bacteria on their skin.

Brunetti and colleagues used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyze the diversity of the volatile components secreted by the skin of B. prasina. They found that adult males and females secrete a blend of 60-80 compounds, including alcohols, aldehydes, alkenes, ethers, ketones, methoxypyrazines, terpenes and thioethers.

The compounds were exactly the same in both males and females, but the researchers were surprised to find a pronounced sexual difference in the levels of methoxypyrazines, terpenes, and thioethers.

"These three components were responsible for the difference between males and females. Thioethers and methoxypyrazines are typically produced by microorganisms," Brunetti said.

They decided to determine whether microorganisms were the source of these compounds in B. prasina. To do so, they isolated, cultivated and identified bacteria associated with the skin of these frogs and analyzed their volatile components.

No fewer than 128 different components were detected. Analysis of each component revealed that four methoxypyrazines present in males and females were produced by a single bacterium of the genus Pseudomonas.

In B. prasina, Brunetti discovered, methoxypyrazines were much more abundant in females than in males. Two of the four types of methoxypyrazines were measured at higher levels in females, while two were found at higher levels in males.

Symbiotic relationship

"The interesting thing about Pseudomonas sp. is that these bacteria live on the skin of males and females, where they metabolize the same volatile compounds but at different levels of concentration according to the sex of the host," Brunetti said.

The levels of methoxypyrazine measured in these frogs, he added, suggest the existence of a complex mechanism of metabolic interactions that creates a different environment on the skin of males and females, favoring the synthesis of characteristic methoxypyrazines in each sex.

"These frogs and bacteria have a symbiotic relationship. In exchange for the service provided by the bacteria, entailing sexual differentiation by scent, the frogs provide an environment - their own skin - on which the bacteria can proliferate," he explained.

The function of this sexual difference in methoxypyrazine levels is unknown. "However, we assume that the difference in scent helps male frogs of this species recognize females of the same species in places inhabited by other frog species," Brunetti said.

"We know that many anurans use visual communication [bright skin colors] to repel predators as well as acoustic communication [vocalization] to attract female mates. Perhaps B. prasina uses a form of olfactory communication for the same purpose.

Brunetti will attempt to confirm this hypothesis in future research. If correct, it will have major repercussions. "Only one anuran, in Madagascar, is currently known to communicate by odor. Among amphibians, salamanders, which are distant relatives of anurans, are known to use this form of communication," Haddad said.

"If B. prasina uses scent as a form of communication, it may well be the case that other species also use olfactory communication, given that each species has a characteristic odor. Brunetti's discovery, if confirmed, opens up a new field of investigation in herpetology, which will now focus on olfactory communication among anurans, rather than just visual and acoustic communication."

Explore further Pheromones and social status: Macho mice smell better

More information: Andres E. Brunetti et al, Symbiotic skin bacteria as a source for sex-specific scents in frogs, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Andres E. Brunetti et al, Symbiotic skin bacteria as a source for sex-specific scents in frogs,(2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1806834116
The ban on Boeing 737 MAX aircraft spread worldwide after the US joined other countries in grounding the plane

US aerospace giant Boeing said Thursday it was suspending deliveries of its top-selling 737 MAX as French investigators took delivery of the black boxes from the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 passengers and crew.

The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disasterthe second involving the model in five monthsand the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond.

"We are pausing the delivery of the 737 MAX until we come up with a solution," a Boeing spokesman said, adding that "we are going to continue the production, but we are assessing our capacities."

France's BEA air safety agency confirmed it has received the black box recorders from the plane, which was just four months old and crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday.

Starting Friday, BEA investigators will try to retrieve information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster.

Thousands of miles (kilometers) away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.

Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyze the data.

The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts.

On Wednesday, US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between the Ethiopia crash and that of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October that killed 189 people.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said findings from the crash site near Addis Ababa and "newly refined satellite data" warranted "further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents."

Forensic experts comb through the dirt for debris at the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft

Boeing shares hit

An FAA emergency order grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice, effectively taking the aircraft out of the skies globally.

The move came after a growing number of airlines and countries had already decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it is determined there are no safety issues.

US President Donald Trump told reporters the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern."

FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency had been "working tirelessly" to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because of the damage to the flight data recorders.

The new information shows "the track of that airplane was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight" to warrant the grounding of the airplanes so more information can be gathered to determine if there is a link, Elwell said Wednesday on CNBC.

Boeing's shares have fallen 12 percent in the days after the crash in Ethiopia, wiping out nearly $30 billion in value.

The MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model, but it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service.

There are 74 registered in the United States and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA.

Pilots' concerns

The accounts of the recent crashes were echoed in concerns registered by US pilots on how the MAX 8 behaves.

Chart showing changes in Boeing shares over the past five days.

At least four American pilots complained following the Lion Air crash that the aircraft would suddenly pitch downward shortly after takeoff, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by NASA.

In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air disaster, pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane's trajectory.

It was unclear if US transport authorities review the database or investigated the incidents. However, the FAA said this week it had ordered Boeing to update its flight software and training.

Questions about the Lion Air crash have honed in on an automated stall prevention system, the MCAS, designed to automatically point the plane's nose downwards if it is in danger of stalling.

According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the MCAS repeatedly pushed the nose down following takeoff.

The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged to the ground.

According to The New York Times, air traffic controllers observed the Ethiopian Airlines plane "oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet" prior to the crash.

Speaking in a "panicky voice," the doomed aircraft's captain requested permission to return to the airport almost immediately after takeoff as the plane "accelerated to abnormal speed," the newspaper reported Thursday, citing a person who had reviewed the air traffic communications.

"Break break, request back to home," the Times quoted the pilot as saying just prior to the crash. "Request vector for landing."

Boeing was criticized after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the stall prevention system.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said the doomed flight's captain Yared Mulugeta Getachew, 29, was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours.

Explore further France probes Boeing black boxes as jets grounded worldwide (Update)

 2019 AFP
In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo students from the Theodore T. Alexander Science Center School practice brushing dog's teeth at an interactive display during a preview of an exhibition called "Dogs! A Science Tail" at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The new exhibit that opens Saturday examines the relationship between dogs and humans and explores why the two species seem to think so much alike and get along so well. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Did people domesticate dogs or was it the other way around? And why do these two species seem to think so much alike, act so much alike and get along so well?

The California Science Center has spent the past five years sniffing out the answers to those and hundreds of other vexing canine questions. It will begin revealing the conclusions Saturday with an ambitious, if somewhat lighthearted, new exhibition called "Dogs! A Science Tail."

And, yes, real dogs will be there. (Just try hiding contraband from that drug-sniffing dog and see what happens.)

"It's really not about just dogs and science. It's really about how dogs and humans are both social animals. About how dogs and humans have evolved together over thousands of years. And the fact that because we are both social animals, we've learned to work together," said Jeffrey Rudolph, the center's president and a devoted dog lover who worked for years to pull this show together.

As he spoke during a recent pre-opening walkthrough of the exhibit, he paused briefly at what he imagines might be its most popular stop for the pre-teen crowda replica of a fire hydrant next to a button that you can push to smell what a dog smells.

In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo Puppy raiser for Guide Dogs of America Lexie Dreyfuss and her 6 month old Labrador Retriever Hathi prepare for a demonstration at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. A new exhibit at a Los Angeles museum examines the relationship between dogs and humans and explores why the two species seem to think so much alike and get along so well. "Dogs! A Science Tail" opens Saturday, March 16, 2019, at the California Science Center. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

"But we just smell pee," Rudolph explained with a laugh. "A dog can tell what dog was there, what time they were there and actually which direction they were going."

It's one of the ways dogs can evaluate how safe the surroundings are. It's also how they manage to mark time without wristwatches or smartphones.

"They have an amazing ability to learn information," continues Rudolph, noting the 300 million sensory receptor sites they carry in their noses far outnumber our 6 million.

Nine similar stations allow people to see like a dog does (their color vision is limited, but they pick up motion better than us), determine what a person has just eaten by licking their hand and hear sounds so subtle we're oblivious to them.

In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo, a visitor takes part in an immersive experience showing visitors how dogs see from inside the head of a dog at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. A new exhibit at a Los Angeles museum examines the relationship between dogs and humans and explores why the two species seem to think so much alike and get along so well. "Dogs! A Science Tail" opens Saturday, March 16, 2019, at the California Science Center. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

"In a bedroom they can hear a termite scratching on the wall," Rudolph says.

Such skills allow an avalanche rescue dog to sniff out a person buried in snow in a minute's time while its handlers stand there without a clue. They can sniff out bombs people would never find until they exploded.

But those are the highly trained working dogs, like those shown in the center's Imax Theatre, where the Cosmic Picture film "Superpower Dogs" will play throughout the exhibition's run.

As Captain America actor Chris Evans narrates, viewers watch dogs from around the world help save people from drowning off the coast of Italy, rescue people trapped in collapsed buildings, even track down Kenyan poachers preying on endangered elephants and rhinos.

In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo Jeffrey Rudolph President of the California Science Center announces a new exhibition called "Dogs! A Science Tail," that is part science, part history, part Norman Rockwell Americana and of course all canine. The exhibit opens to the public on Saturday March 16, 2019. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

In the museum itself, people could watch Garmin, a 2-year-old golden Labrador retriever who is about to graduate from guide-dog school, take blindfolded folks through a maze of obstacles during a demonstration earlier this week.

When one person hesitated, Garmin pulled gently on his leash as if to say, "Come on, let's go. I've got this."

Depending on the day, there will be therapy dogs, rescue dogs, drug-sniffing dogs and others demonstrating their abilities.

For those more interested in mutts like the one sleeping at the foot of their bed, there is also plenty to see, including a small gallery of original dog paintings by legendary American artist Norman Rockwell. They are on loan from "Star Wars" filmmaker George Lucas.

This Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo shows what a dog's vision is inside an immersive experience showing how dogs see at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. A new exhibit at a Los Angeles museum examines the relationship between dogs and humans and explores why the two species seem to think so much alike and get along so well. "Dogs! A Science Tail" opens Saturday, March 16, 2019, at the California Science Center. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Although "Dogs! A Science Tail" will travel to museums across the country after it closes in Los Angeles early next year, the California Science Center is the only place to see the paintings until Lucas opens his own Museum of Narrative Art down the street in 2021.

But do those dogs that Rockwell immortalized playing with kids, comforting owners, even comically tying up traffic in a crowded Los Angeles alley in 1949, really love us?

Or are they just trying to wheedle another treat when they open those big black eyes of theirs and give us that look?

"If you look a dog in the eye, a dog will look back at you and you will produce oxytocin," Diane Perlov, the center's senior vice president for exhibitions, says of the chemical known as the love hormone because of the feelings it evokes in people.

In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo students from the Theodore Alexander Science Center School check an interactive display of the internal organs of different dogs at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. A new exhibit at the Los Angeles museum examines the relationship between dogs and humans and explores why the two species seem to think so much alike and get along so well. "Dogs! A Science Tail" opens Saturday at the California Science Center. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

"And," she adds, "the dog will produce oxytocin in his own body from looking back at you. It's a mutual affection."

A chimp, on the other hand, will just look away.

So who launched this enduring love affair that has resulted in dogs and people sharing living quarters in more than 60 million American households?

Scientists can't quite figure that out. They know dogs descended from wolves and that wolves and people crossed paths more than 10,000 years ago, says Perlov, an anthropologist.

In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo students listen in on how a dog hears the world at an interactive display during a preview of a new exhibition called "Dogs! A Science Tail", at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The show opening Saturday is part science, part history, part Norman Rockwell Americana and all canine. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Both wolves and people could see the other was pretty good at hunting for food. But did the wolves walk up and offer their help in that endeavor? Or did people make the first move?

Whoever did, they created an enduring bond.

"It's that social bond and our ability to communicate with them, and our ability to understand each other that forms the basis of our relationship," Perlov says.

In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019 photo students from the Theodore T. Alexander Science Center School play with interactive display at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. A new exhibit at a Los Angeles museum examines the relationship between dogs and humans and explores why the two species seem to think so much alike and get along so well. "Dogs! A Science Tail" opens Saturday, March 16, 2019, at the California Science Center. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Explore further Electronic nose to sniff dogs for deadly tropical disease in Brazil

 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Emmental matured with hip hop music triggered a "softer, more floral" taste, one jury member said

It may be grating for some, but hip-hop is music to the ears of Switzerland's most famous cheese.

According to research on the musical tastes of Emmental, the holey cheese changes flavour depending on the melodies played as it ripens.

The experiment"Sonic cheese: experience between sound and gastronomy"by Bern University of the Arts and a cheesemaker in western Switzerland probed whether the sounds and vibrations of music could impact the chemical reactions in the bacteria within cheese.

Over six months, Emmental made in Beat Wampfler's 19th Century cellar in the town of Bergdorf were exposed to A Tribe Called Quest, Led Zeppelin or Mozart.

Other circles of the holey Swiss classic were kept away from music, serving as a control group.

"We did two surveys, a scientific one, and another with a jury of culinary experts," said Peter Kraut, deputy director of the music department at the Bern arts university.

"Both came to the conclusion that there are differences, there are differences in taste and in the smell, according to the music with which the cheese has been refined," he added.

Chef and jury member Benjamin Luzuy said hip-hop triggered a "softer, more floral" taste, but that his favourite was Mozart-exposed Emmental.

Emmental cheese was exposed to hip-hop, rock, even yodel

"My favorite cheese was that of Mozart, I like Mozart but it's not necessarily what I listen to... maybe a sweet little classical music it does good to the cheese," he said.

Kraut told AFP that the final step will be a biomedical survey to see if there are actual differences in the composition of the cheeses.

Wampfler, a veterinarian by day but consummate apron-wearing cheese enthusiast at night, said he was delighted the experiment worked out and saw opportunities to market cheese based on a customer's musical taste.

"I already have people calling me asking if I have cheese with Balkan music, blues...(or) ACDC," he said.

Explore further Cheesy music: Swiss experiment with sound to make cheese tastier

 2019 AFP
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An island of solar panels floats in a pond at the Los Bronces mining plant, about 65 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) from Santiago, Chile, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The island of solar panels could give purpose to mine refuse in Chile by using them to generate clean energy and reduce water evaporation.(AP Photo / Esteban Felix)

A floating island of solar panels is being tested in Chile as a way to generate clean energy and reduce water loss at mine operations, a cornerstone of the Andean country's economy that uses huge amounts of electricity and water.

The experimental "Las Tortolas" power-generating island is being run by the giant Anglo American mining company at its Los Bronces mine, and the initiative comes as the government pushes to put Chile at the forefront of renewable energy use in Latin America and the world.

The 1,200-square-foot array of solar panels was inaugurated Thursday by Chilean Mining Minister Baldo Prokurica. Officials said that if the test is successful, the $250,000 plant could be expanded to cover 40 hectares, or nearly 100 acres.

The array floats in the middle of a pond that is used to contain the refuse from mining, known as tailings, and it is expected that its shadow will lower the water temperature and reduce evaporation by 80 percent. Thus, the mine would retain more of that water for its operations and could reduce the amount of fresh water it pumps in the dry mountainous region where water is a scarce commodity.

"With this system, we can make our fresh water consumption more efficient, in line with our goal of re-imagining mining and reducing Anglo American's fresh water consumption by 50 percent by 2030, as well as the CO2 emissions by producing non-polluting energy," said Patricio Chacana, Los Bronces' vice president of operations.

Workers stand on a floating island of solar panels on a pond at Los Bronces mine, about 65 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) from Santiago, Chile, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The 1,200-square-foot array of solar panels was inaugurated Thursday by Chilean Mining Minister Baldo Prokurica. Officials said that if the test is successful, the $250,000 plant could be expanded to cover 40 hectares, or nearly 100 acres. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

If the yearlong experiment works as planned, the solar panel island could be expanded and new ones could be installed at other mining ponds. Experts say there are approximately 800 such ponds in Chile.

"It is an excellent idea for the traceability of the mining industry and especially in terms of more efficient use of water. This is a company that recycles 76 percent of the water it uses in its processes," the mining minister said at the unveiling and he encouraged other mining companies to follow suit.

In addition, Prokurica said the Mining Ministry is working on a plan to improve the safety of the mine holding ponds, to guard against failures such as one at an iron ore mine recently in Brazil that unleashed a wall of mud that killed at least 186 people and polluted hundreds of miles of river. Many of the tailing ponds in the north of the country are near urban centers.

A worker on a boat approaches a floating island of solar panels at Los Bronces mine, about 65 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) from Santiago, Chile, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Los Bronces is about 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level. In 2018, the mine produced 370,000 tons of fine copper and 2,421 tons of molybdenum. (AP Photo / Esteban Felix)

Los Bronces is about 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) above sea level and is 65 kilometers (40 miles) from the country's capital, Santiago. In 2018, the mine produced 370,000 tons of fine copper and 2,421 tons of molybdenum.

Almost 20 percent of the energy currently produced and used in Chile comes from renewable sources, up from 6 percent in 2013.

A worker stands on a floating island of solar panels at Los Bronces mine, about 65 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) from Santiago, Chile, Thursday, March 14, 2019. If the yearlong experiment works as planned, the solar panel island could be expanded and new ones could be installed at other mining ponds. Experts say there are approximately 800 such ponds in Chile. (AP Photo / Esteban Felix)

An island of solar panels floats in a pond at the Los Bronces mining plant, about 65 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) from Santiago, Chile, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The array floats in the middle of a pond that is used to contain the refuse from mining, known as tailings, and it is expected that the island's shadow will lower the water temperature and reduce evaporation by 80 percent. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix)

Explore further Ten towns hit by river pollution from Brazil dam disaster

 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
This year, as part of her research into the Ross Sea region Marine Protected Area, Gateway Antarctica scientist Dr Regina Eisert partnered with Boxfish Research to study Type-C killer whales with a new kind of remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Credit: University of Canterbury

A University of Canterbury scientist is using Kiwi technology in her Antarctic research to capture fascinating footage of life beneath the surface in McMurdo Sound.

This year, as part of her research into the Ross Sea region Marine Protected Area, Gateway Antarctica scientist Dr. Regina Eisert partnered with Boxfish Research to study Type-C killer whales with a new kind of remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

The stunning footage is just a snippet of what was recorded during 21 hours underwater this season. It includes, Adelie penguins, whales, Weddell seals, bright red octopus and a glowing ctenophore.

A University of Canterbury marine mammal expert, Dr. Eisert says the technology is a game changer for marine science, being safer and having a wider scope than scuba divers.

"Before this, I feel that my view of marine animals was quite biased, we would observe penguins waddling along and seals sleeping on the ice and whales on the surface, but they spend most of their lives in the water and this is the important stuff to see.

"We got confirmation of the overlap between penguins and Type-C killer whales, the ROV captured unconcerned penguins freely entering and exiting the water in the presence of theses whales, and being ignored by them" she says.

The Boxfish ROV carried out 15 dives, gathered 21 hours of footage and reached depths of 210 metres this season.

Boxfish Co-Founder Ben King travelled to Antarctica to drive the device and see how it would perform in the extreme cold.

"This season went exceptionally well and there is scope for us to take it further in years to come. Alongside killer whale surveying we did some environmental monitoring around the sea floor near Scott Base and could go to many more sites," he says.

Antarctica New Zealand Chief Science Advisor Dr. Fiona Shanhun says the footage showcases the underwater Antarctic world which is rarely seen.

"The possibility of using this technology to support future research projects is exciting," she says.

The Boxfish ROV carried out 15 dives, gathered 21 hours of footage and reached depths of 210 metres this season. Credit: University of Canterbury

Dr. Eisert's research is supported by Antarctica New Zealand and a Pew Marine Conservation Fellowship.

Ross Sea region Marine Protected Area

The Ross Sea region is one of the most pristine marine environments in the world and now hosts the largest Marine Protected Area. In December 2017, the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area was formed, covering 1.55 million square kilometres of which 1.12 million is a no fishing zone.

At different times of the year the region is home to more than 30% of the world's Adelie penguins, around quarter of all emperor penguins, around half the Ross Sea killer whales and rare and vulnerable benthic species like sponges that can live for 500 years.

It is also a breeding ground and habitat for Antarctic toothfish. The Ross Sea MPA requires active research and monitoring to ensure it provides effective protection for its unique ecosystem.

Explore further Researcher captures striking Antarctic video of minke whale
In this Feb. 27, 2017, file photo Facebook's Chief of Product officer, Chris Cox, speaks at the first day of the social media week at the Landmark centre in Lagos, Nigeria. Two top Facebook executives are leaving the company, including Cox, who was long one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's top deputies. Zuckerberg wrote in a post announcing the news Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba, File)

Facebook is losing its product chief Chris Cox, a top-ranking executive who spent more than a decade at the company, just a week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major new direction for the social network.

The departure, announced Thursday , follows Zuckerberg's announcement that Facebook will shift its emphasis to private messaging over public sharing. The change reflects Facebook's changing audience and continued problems with serving as a conduit for misinformation and vitriol.

Cox, 36, worked closely with Zuckerberg through the company's ups and downs, having joined up about 20 months after Facebook was hatched in 2004 in Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room.

Cox "is a great guy who is someone who has always tried to do good," said David Kirkpatrick, an author who became well acquainted with Cox and Zuckerberg while writing a book about Facebook. "My guess is there was some sort of disagreement. He would not be leaving at this challenging time if there wasn't something else going on."

Neither Cox nor Zuckerberg specified what led to their split.

"Most all my personal highs and lows of the last decade have been tied up in the journey of this company, with Mark, and with so many of you," Cox wrote in a post. "This place will forever be a part of me."

Zuckerberg said Cox first mentioned he might leave a few years ago, but decided to stay on after 2016 as evidence emerged that Russians had manipulated Facebook's services to provoke discord in the U.S. and influence the election won by President Donald Trump.

In this Feb. 27, 2017, file photo Facebook's Chief of Product officer, Chris Cox, speaks at the first day of the social media week at the Landmark centre in Lagos, Nigeria. Two top Facebook executives are leaving the company, including Cox, who was long one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's top deputies. Zuckerberg wrote in a post announcing the news Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba, File)

"I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does," Zuckerberg said of Cox in his parting note.

Like many other longtime Facebook executives, Cox is unlikely to ever have to work again if he doesn't want to. He pocketed $310 million in gains from exercising Facebook stock options from 2014 through 2017 alone, according to the company's filings with securities regulators.

Zuckerberg also announced another departureChris Daniels, who had been overseeing Facebook's encrypted messaging service WhatsApp. Daniels is leaving less than a year after WhatsApp founder Jan Koum resigned in an apparent dispute with Zuckerberg over the future direction of the widely used messaging service.

Facebook isn't hiring another executive to replace Cox. Instead, the leaders of the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps that Cox oversaw will report to Zuckerberg. Longtime Facebook executive Will Cathcart will take over Daniels' job running WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg wants to evolve Facebook's messaging apps into private forums where people can communicate without worrying about what they are sharing being seen and shared by others.

That effort will include introducing WhatsApp encryption technology to Facebook's Messenger app and Instagram's messaging option. Zuckerberg is also promising to make photos and posts automatically disappear from public view.

Facebook's social network and Instagram photo app won't change, and will remain available for sharing places, adventures and minutiae with a broader audience.

Forrester analyst Jessica Liu said it sounded like Cox was "subtly disagreeing" with Zuckerberg's privacy memo, based on Cox's farewell post. "Facebook Inc. is a massive and evolving company, so it's only natural that in a company that large, not everyone will agree with every strategic change," she said.

Explore further Two top Facebook executives depart the company

 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Coral ecosystems support biodiversity and provide food to at least 500 million people, particularly in developing countries as this image from a Fijian market demonstrates. Credit: Dr Candida Savage

A University of Otago study has shown the positive impact bird poo, or guano, has on coral growth in tropical seas. Published online in the respected scientific journal Scientific Reports, the study Seabird nutrients are assimilated by corals and enhance coral growth rates demonstrates that seabird nutrients can significantly boost coral growth rates, offering a positive news story in a decade that has documented dramatic declines in reef health and percentage cover.

"The findings have important implications for catchment-to-reef connectivity and demonstrate that coral conservation should also consider catchment management in addition to marine protection," says author Dr. Candida Savage, of Otago's Department of Marine Science.

The research was conducted in two Fiji marine protected areas; one remote island (Namena) with an intact coastal forest with breeding seabirds, the other (Cousteau) is away from any seabirds and their associated guano. Natural chemical tracers in coral tissues showed that corals growing near the roosting seabirds took up seabird nutrients. A one-year growth experiment demonstrated that corals grew up to four times faster at the Namena reef compared to the Cousteau reef due to the presence of seabirds.

"Bird guano is known for its qualities as a fertiliser, however the impact it had on coral growth has been unknown until now. I was astounded at how much of a difference the presence of guano had in promoting coral growth," Dr. Savage says. The research shows that natural sources of nutrients like seabird guano may benefit coral reefs, in contrast to man-made nutrients from land that tend to degrade coral reefs.

Comparison of staghorn corals grown for one year without the influence of seabird guano (three corals on left) with corals grown near a seabird colony (three corals on right). Credit: Dr Candida Savage

Coral reefs face multiple global and local threats including excess nutrient runoff from land. Over the last decade, the percent of threatened reefs has increased by 30 per cent, with nearly 75 per cent of the world's reefs threatened today. Coral reefs are crucially important for biodiversity and people. Despite covering less than one per cent of the earth's surface, coral reefs are home to one-quarter of all marine fish species and countless invertebrates.

Data obtained on the reefresilience website illustrates the importance of coral reefs for humans. At least five hundred million people rely on coral reefs for food, coastal protection, and livelihoods. In developing countries, coral reefs contribute about one-quarter of the total fish catch, providing food to an estimated one billion people in Asia alone. They form natural barriers that protect nearby shorelines from the eroding forces of the sea, thereby protecting coastal dwellings, agricultural land and beaches.

Corals growing underwater at a site with roosting seabirds grew up to four times faster than corals grown distant from seabirds. Credit: Dr Candida Savage

"Given that nearly one-third of seabird species are at risk of extinction globally and now that we know how beneficial seabird subsidies are for coral growth, we should consider catchment-to-reef management to protect our marine ecosystems. This could be in the form of protection of established seabird nesting grounds or promoting new seabird habitats by enhancing natural vegetation on land alongside protecting marine areas. If the birds are there, the benefits of their droppings will be too," Dr. Savage says.

More information: Candida Savage. Seabird nutrients are assimilated by corals and enhance coral growth rates, Scientific Reports (2019). Journal information: Scientific Reports Candida Savage. Seabird nutrients are assimilated by corals and enhance coral growth rates,(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-41030-6
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute cooled a chip containing a large array of spin qubits below -273 Celsius. To manipulate individual electrons within the quantum-dot array, they applied fast voltage pulses to metallic gate electrodes located on the surface of the gallium-arsenide crystal (see scanning electron micrograph). Because each electron also carries a quantum spin, this allows quantum information processing based on the arrays spin states (the arrows on the graphic illustration). During the mediated spin exchange, which only took a billionth of a second, two correlated electron pairs were coherently superposed and entangled over five quantum dots, constituting a new world record within the community. Credit: Niels Bohr Institute

At the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, researchers have realized the swap of electron spins between distant quantum dots. The discovery brings us a step closer to future applications of quantum information, as the tiny dots have to leave enough room on the microchip for delicate control electrodes. The distance between the dots has now become big enough for integration with traditional microelectronics and perhaps, a future quantum computer. The result is achieved via a multinational collaboration with Purdue University and UNSW, Sydney, Australia, now published in Nature Communications.

Size matters in quantum information exchange even on the nanometer scale

Quantum information can be stored and exchanged using electron spin states. The electrons' charge can be manipulated by gate-voltage pulses, which also controls their spin. It was believed that this method can only be practical if quantum dots touch each other; if squeezed too close together the spins will react too violently, if placed too far apart the spins will interact far too slowly. This creates a dilemma, because if a quantum computer is ever going to see the light of day, we need both, fast spin exchange and enough room around quantum dots to accommodate the pulsed gate electrodes.

Normally, the left and right dots in the linear array of quantum dots (Illustration 1) are too far apart to exchange quantum information with each other. Frederico Martins, postdoc at UNSW, Sydney, Australia, explains: "We encode quantum information in the electrons' spin states, which have the desirable property that they don't interact much with the noisy environment, making them useful as robust and long-lived quantum memories. But when you want to actively process quantum information, the lack of interaction is counterproductive  because now you want the spins to interact!" What to do? You can't have both long lived information and information exchange  or so it seems. "We discovered that by placing a large, elongated quantum dot between the left dots and right dots, it can mediate a coherent swap of spin states, within a billionth of a second, without ever moving electrons out of their dots. In other words, we now have both fast interaction and the necessary space for the pulsed gate electrodes ", says Ferdinand Kuemmeth, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute.

The collaboration between researchers with diverse expertise was key to success. Internal collaborations constantly advance the reliability of nanofabrication processes and the sophistication of low-temperature techniques. In fact, at the Center for Quantum Devices, major contenders for the implementation of solid-state quantum computers are currently intensely studied, namely semiconducting spin qubits, superconducting gatemon qubits, and topological Majorana qubits.

All of them are voltage-controlled qubits, allowing researchers to share tricks and solve technical challenges together. But Kuemmeth is quick to add that "all of this would be futile if we didn't have access to extremely clean semiconducting crystals in the first place". Michael Manfra, Professor of Materials Engineering, agrees: "Purdue has put a lot of work into understanding the mechanisms that lead to quiet and stable quantum dots. It is fantastic to see this work yield benefits for Copenhagen's novel qubits".

The theoretical framework of the discovery is provided by the University of Sydney, Australia. Stephen Bartlett, a professor of quantum physics at the University of Sydney, said: "What I find exciting about this result as a theorist, is that it frees us from the constraining geometry of a qubit only relying on its nearest neighbours". His team performed detailed calculations, providing the quantum mechanical explanation for the counterintuitive discovery.

Overall, the demonstration of fast spin exchange constitutes not only a remarkable scientific and technical achievement, but may have profound implications for the architecture of solid-state quantum computers. The reason is the distance: "If spins between non-neighboring qubits can be controllably exchanged, this will allow the realization of networks in which the increased qubit-qubit connectivity translates into a significantly increased computational quantum volume", predicts Kuemmeth.

Explore further Using one quantum dot to sense changes in another

More information: Filip K. Malinowski et al. Fast spin exchange across a multielectron mediator, Nature Communications (2019). Journal information: Nature Communications Filip K. Malinowski et al. Fast spin exchange across a multielectron mediator,(2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09194-x
Mark Karpeles, former head of the collapsed bitcoin exchange MtGox, has got a suspended sentence of two and a half years

A Japanese court on Friday sentenced the former high-flying boss of the MtGox bitcoin exchange to a suspended jail sentence of two and a half years after finding him guilty of data manipulation.

The Tokyo District Court convicted Mark Karpeles, a 33-year-old computer whizz from France, for tampering with computer data but acquitted him over charges of embezzling millions from client accounts.

The sentence was suspended for four years.

In a summary of the ruling, the court said Karpeles had "harmed the users' trust greatly" by manipulating data and "abused his expertise as an IT engineer and his position and authority".

Prosecutors had claimed that Karpeles had embezzled some 341 million yen ($3 million) of clients' money and splashed it on a lavish lifestyle. They called for him to serve 10 years behind bars.

However, in throwing out these embezzlement charges, the judge said there was no financial damage done to MtGox and ruled that Karpeles did not intend to cause any damage.

The judge cited an expert opinion that said owners of small and medium enterprises often borrow funds without proper accounting and ruled that the court assumed Karpeles intended to return the money.

Karpeles' lawyer, Nobuyasu Ogata, told AFP: "It became clear that he is innocent as far as the charge that Mark committed a wrongdoing for his personal benefit."

"He (Karpeles) says it was very significant" that the court recognised that point, added Ogata.

Karpeles entered the courtroom wearing a dark suit and black shoes and he bowed politely to the judge. He was motionless after the verdict was read out.

After the sentencing, the judge asked if Karpeles understood the sentence. Karpeles responded simply: "Yes, I did."

'Cold wallet'

MtGox was shut down in 2014 after 850,000 bitcoins (worth half a billion dollars at that time) disappeared from its virtual vaults.

The scandal left a trail of angry investors, rocked the virtual currency community, and dented confidence in the security of bitcoin.

At one point, MtGox claimed to be handling around 80 percent of all global bitcoin transactions.

When Karpeles emerged from detention, he had lost a considerable amount of weight

During his trial, Karpeles apologised to customers for the company's bankruptcy but denied both data falsification and embezzlement.

"I swear to God that I am innocent," Karpeles, speaking in Japanese, told the three-judge panel hearing when his trial opened in 2017.

Karpeles always claimed the bitcoins were lost due to an external "hacking attack" and later claimed to have found some 200,000 coins in a "cold wallet"a storage device not connected to other computers.

"Most people will not believe what I say. The only solution I have is to actually find the real culprits," he told reporters his trial hearing in July 2017.

Doubts about bitcoin

The acquittal on embezzlement came as the vast majority of cases that come to trial in Japan end in a conviction.

Karpeles himself said in an interview with French business daily Les Echos on Wednesday that he had little chance of acquittal.

"All I can hope for is a light sentence which will mean I do not have to go back into detention and do forced work," he said.

The Frenchman was first arrested in August 2015 and, in an echo of another high-profile case against former Nissan chief and compatriot Carlos Ghosn, was re-arrested several times on different charges.

Karpeles eventually won bail in July 2016nearly a year after his arrestpaying 10 million yen to secure his freedom pending a trial, which began in July 2017.

During his time on bail, Karpeles has been active on social medianotably voicing doubts about bitcoin and replying to some media questions about conditions in Japanese detention centres.

However, he has largely avoided commenting on his case in detail.

In many ways, the rollercoaster ride of Karpeles has mirrored that of the bitcoin cryptocurrency that made him rich.

At its height in December 2017, the value of a single bitcoin was around $20,000.

It has since slumped and is now worth just under $4,000.

Explore further Verdict due in MtGox bitcoin embezzlement case

 2019 AFP
Cracks in the front of a glacier as it reaches the ocean. Credit: NASA/Adam Klein

Only seven months after NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission wrapped its last field campaign on the world's largest island, an OMG crew is back in Greenland to collect more data. With two or three field projects a year since 2016, no wonder OMG has made the most comprehensive measurements yet of how ocean water lapping at the undersides of Greenland's melting glaciers affects them. All that data has answered a lot of existing questionsand it's raised plenty of new ones.

"We've seen some really surprising results that suggest the oceans have a huge effect on Greenland's biggest glaciers," said OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "This year, we hope to figure out whether the ocean's impact is widespread or if it's just a few big glaciers that care about ocean temperatures."

JPL engineer Ron Muellerschoen has flown back and forth across Greenland during its snowiest season for the last three years. He might be excused for feeling a little blase about spending a few more weeks in an aircraft over Greenland's ice sheet. But no.

"It's huge. It's just amazing," Muellerschoen said. "I'll never reach a time where it's 'just snow' out there. I feel really lucky to be able to do this four years in a row." (Click on the slideshow above to see Greenland from his viewpoint.)

Besides the scenery, Muellerschoen is looking forward to this year's inevitable technological challenges. Although he flies NASA's Glacier and Ice Surface Topography Interferometer (GLISTIN-A) radar on a NASA G-III aircraft each year, "It's never the same," he said. "We're always trying to push the limits of what we can look at in the field. There's new hardware, new configurations for installing equipment on the plane, and we have a new recording system."

A large iceberg near Thule Air Base, Greenland. Credit: NASA

The GLISTIN-A radar maps the edges of glaciers along the entire coastline of the island and measures their heights precisely. As a glacier loses ice and speeds up, it stretches out and gets thinner, so that its surface is lower than before. The height measurement enables researchers to estimate how much ice has been lost since the preceding year's measurement.

OMG also measures ocean temperatures around the coastline every fall and has completed a multiyear effort to make high-precision maps of the ocean floor off the coast. With these combined data sets, scientists have a complete view of Greenland's 200 or so coastal glaciers and how they are responding to changes in the water below and the air above them.

The G-III aircraft and its crew are based at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. This spring campaign is using two bases: Keflavik, Iceland, and the U.S. Air Force's Thule Air Base in Greenland. Flights began last week from Keflavik to map glaciers in southern and eastern Greenland. The crew will soon transit to Thule to survey western and northern Greenland. The campaign will continue until all measurements have been completedaround March 20, depending on weather.

A Greenland glacier. Credit: NASA

Explore further NASA releases new, detailed Greenland glacier data
A close-up artist's rendering of quantum dots emitting light they've absorbed. Credit: Ella Marushchenko

Tiny, easy-to-produce particles, called quantum dots, may soon take the place of more expensive single crystal semiconductors in advanced electronics found in solar panels, camera sensors and medical imaging tools. Although quantum dots have begun to break into the consumer marketin the form of quantum dot TVsthey have been hampered by long-standing uncertainties about their quality. Now, a new measurement technique developed by researchers at Stanford University may finally dissolve those doubts.

"Traditional semiconductors are single crystals, grown in vacuum under special conditions. These we can make in large numbers, in flask, in a lab and we've shown they are as good as the best single crystals," said David Hanifi, graduate student in chemistry at Stanford and co-lead author of the paper written about this work, published March 15 in Science.

The researchers focused on how efficiently quantum dots reemit the light they absorb, one telltale measure of semiconductor quality. While previous attempts to figure out quantum dot efficiency hinted at high performance, this is the first measurement method to confidently show they could compete with single crystals.

This work is the result of a collaboration between the labs of Alberto Salleo, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, and Paul Alivisatos, the Samsung Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a pioneer in quantum dot research and senior author of the paper. Alivisatos emphasized how the measurement technique could lead to the development of new technologies and materials that require knowing the efficiency of our semiconductors to a painstaking degree.

"These materials are so efficient that existing measurements were not capable of quantifying just how good they are. This is a giant leap forward," said Alivisatos. "It may someday enable applications that require materials with luminescence efficiency well above 99 percent, most of which haven't been invented yet."

Between 99 and 100

Being able to forego the need for pricey fabrication equipment isn't the only advantage of quantum dots. Even prior to this work, there were signs that quantum dots could approach or surpass the performance of some of the best crystals. They are also highly customizable. Changing their size changes the wavelength of light they emit, a useful feature for color-based applications such as tagging biological samples, TVs or computer monitors.

Despite these positive qualities, the small size of quantum dots means that it may take billions of them to do the work of one large, perfect single crystal. Making so many of these quantum dots means more chances for something to grow incorrectly, more chances for a defect that can hamper performance. Techniques that measure the quality of other semiconductors previously suggested quantum dots emit over 99 percent of the light they absorb but that was not enough to answer questions about their potential for defects. To do this, the researchers needed a measurement technique better suited to precisely evaluating these particles.

"We want to measure emission efficiencies in the realm of 99.9 to 99.999 percent because, if semiconductors are able to reemit as light every photon they absorb, you can do really fun science and make devices that haven't existed before," said Hanifi.

The researchers' technique involved checking for excess heat produced by energized quantum dots, rather than only assessing light emission because excess heat is a signature of inefficient emission. This technique, commonly used for other materials, had never been applied to measure quantum dots in this way and it was 100 times more precise than what others have used in the past. They found that groups of quantum dots reliably emitted about 99.6 percent of the light they absorbed (with a potential error of 0.2 percent in either direction), which is comparable to the best single-crystal emissions.

"It was surprising that a film with many potential defects is as good as the most perfect semiconductor you can make," said Salleo, who is co-author of the paper.

Contrary to concerns, the results suggest that the quantum dots are strikingly defect-tolerant. The measurement technique is also the first to firmly resolve how different quantum dot structures compare to each otherquantum dots with precisely eight atomic layers of a special coating material emitted light the fastest, an indicator of superior quality. The shape of those dots should guide the design for new light-emitting materials, said Alivisatos.

Entirely new technologies

This research is part of a collection of projects within a Department of Energy-funded Energy Frontier Research Center, called Photonics at Thermodynamic Limits. Led by Jennifer Dionne, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, the center's goal is to create optical materialsmaterials that affect the flow of lightwith the highest possible efficiencies.

A next step in this project is developing even more precise measurements. If the researchers can determine that these materials reach efficiencies at or above 99.999 percent, that opens up the possibility for technologies we've never seen before. These could include new glowing dyes to enhance our ability to look at biology at the atomic scale, luminescent cooling and luminescent solar concentrators, which allow a relatively small set of solar cells to take in energy from a large area of solar radiation. All this being said, the measurements they've already established are a milestone of their own, likely to encourage a more immediate boost in quantum dot research and applications.

"People working on these quantum dot materials have thought for more than a decade that dots could be as efficient as single crystal materials," said Hanifi," and now we finally have proof."

Explore further More stable light comes from intentionally 'squashed' quantum dots

More information: David A. Hanifi et al, Redefining near-unity luminescence in quantum dots with photothermal threshold quantum yield, Science (2019). Journal information: Science David A. Hanifi et al, Redefining near-unity luminescence in quantum dots with photothermal threshold quantum yield,(2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aat3803
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

LAKE ELSINORE, Calif. - In the hills of Lake Elsinore, children carried drooping apricot-colored poppies while panting dogs ran alongside them, their paws tainted orange.

Girls braided flowers into their hair and nature photographers juggled tripods and cameras, waiting for the lighting to be just right in Walker Canyon.

Throngs of visitors are trooping to the fields in Riverside County and elsewhere as Southern California revels in a super bloom of wildflowers, thanks to an unusually wet winter.

"It's better than going to Disneyland," said Randy Solis, a patrol officer with the Riverside County Habitat Conservation Agency, who was stationed at a trailhead last weekend in the Temescal Mountains, where the hills were carpeted in Day-Glo orange poppies.

But with all of the crowds, some flowers are paying the price. Blooms are being trampled, despite efforts by park rangers to keep people on trails and walkways.

"Look at those people. They're stepping all over the poppies," Solis said. "The people are niceexcept when they're fighting about poppies."

In Lake Elsinore, the rolling green hills, splashed with touches of bright orange and purple, were interrupted by moving dark speckspeople veering off the paths to find the perfect patch of poppies to pose for a photograph. And many came down the trail with bright-orange souvenirs, plucking the flowers from their beds.

The only enforcement were the visitors themselves, who sometimes scowled at people stepping on or plucking the flowers. One young woman walking past a pair of photographers loudly commented on the poor positioning of their tripods, edged right on top of the poppies.

Southern California last experienced such a super bloom in 2017. The eruption of flora was the largest in more than a decade after years of punishing drought.

Great blooms are the natural product of a wet year following a bad droughtand that's what's happening now, said Richard Minnich, a professor in the University of California, Riverside's earth and planetary sciences department.

Sightseers have been anticipating this year's flowers, wondering whether they would be as exceptional as those from two years ago.

Sang Han came to Lake Elsinore this week with his brother, Mathew Kim, to photograph the super bloom.

The 69-year-old Han seemed oblivious of his faux pasor his neighbors' disdainas he scooted his tripod across a clump of orange flowers. He and Kim, 58, were waiting for passing clouds to let in a ray of sunshine and bathe the hillside flowers in light.

The two men follow the blooms every year, Han said, checking wildflower websites to learn when and where the blooms will be best.

"This is the hill," Kim said after shuffling to his camera. "It's beautiful."

It was their second day at Lake Elsinore in a week, and the brothers were planning a new trek to Carrizo Plain National Monument.

"That's going to be prettier than here," Han said, every so often pointing toward the mountains and motioning for his brotherwho was honing his photography skillsto get the shot.

Graciela Fonseca said she didn't know about the blooms in Walker Canyon until her daughter saw photos of the flowers on Instagram and urged the family to make the trip from San Marcos.

Standing on the edge of a trail and watching her daughter pose for a picture among the poppies, Fonseca said she wasn't expecting the crowdsor the hike.

"I'm not dressed for this," she said. "But this is beautiful!"

Kim Cousins, president of the Lake Elsinore Chamber of Commerce, said about 1,000 people have been traveling each day to see the super bloom there.

The spectacular sight is creating a bit of a traffic nightmare around Walker Canyon, though.

An extra parking lot was opened, but even with the additional space, drivers can still anticipate a jam on the 15 Freeway, with cars backing up as much as 20 miles at times.

In 2017, frustrated drivers left their vehicles on the shoulder of the freeway to reach the blooms. This season has been no different as visitors descend on the flowered hillsides.

During the last super bloom, there were two-hour delays on nearby roads as more than 140,000 people visited Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, according to park official Dennis Stephen. Most headed to the visitors center, overwhelming staff. But this year, he said, rangers were making sure people know exactly where to go to see the flowers.

"Prior to 2017, there wasn't the social media experience," Stephen said. "We were not quite as prepared. We just want everyone to enjoy the flowers. To do so with large crowds always requires a lot of patience."

Two years ago, the park reported several instances of visitors being overcome by the heat, and off-leash dogsas well as humanstrampling the flowers.

This year, Anza-Borrego has placed booths throughout the park to assist visitors, including notices for guided hikes and tours.

November rains gave the blooms a head start, said Jim Dice, a reserve manager for UC Irvine's Steele/Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center.

But unlike 2017, when the flowers blossomed all at once in one area, Stephen said, there's no need to rush to take in the spectacle this year. This winter's rains were scattered across different areas at different times, which means the blooms to the south will be around until April.

Officials at the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve are also expecting a later bloom there.

But in Lake Elsinore, the poppies are already at their peak, decorating the hillside with splashes of color.

"I've seen it on the way, when I've driven by," said Diane Bosma of San Diego, who recently stopped for the first time.

"From the freeway, you get a taste, but there's so much more than that."

Explore further Rain brings 2nd California super bloom in 2 years

2019 Los Angeles Times

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Environmentalists and Democratic lawmakers increasingly are working to bar the sale of sunscreens that may damage coral reefs, but the bans are dividing a surprising group: coral scientists.

Hawaii last year became the first state to ban sales of sunscreens with oxybenzone and octinoxate, chemicals that are found in as much as three-quarters of sunscreens on the U.S. market. Key West, Fla., followed suit last month, making it the first city to ban sales of such sunscreens. Florida and California are considering similar bans.

The bans are a response to a decline in coral health. Corals around the world have been stressed to the point of turning white, or "bleaching," which happens when they expel the energy-supplying algae that live within them.

Scientists often cite warming oceans because of climate change as the main culprit, but initial research shows sun-blocking chemicals oxybenzone and octinoxate also might be damaging corals, spurring bleaching.

Scientists disagree, though, over whether the evidence merits banning sales of sunscreen with the substances. Last month, many scientists and professors who specialize in corals, toxicology and chemistry flooded the Coral-List, a Listserv run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with comments for and against such bans.

Even among a group of people with a strong interest in protecting coral health, the discussion was divisive, with some accusing the sunscreen industry of ignoring the dangers of its products.

Others mused that they were facing a situation similar to the early days of climate change awareness, in which scientists risk being too passive, cautious of advocating action on a growing problem until there is broad evidence.

Scientists agree that the major culprit in coral degradation is climate change. C. Mark Eakin, an oceanographer and the coordinator for NOAA's Coral Reef Watch program, described sunscreen damage to corals as death by a thousand cuts. "Climate change," he added, "has been like a nuclear blast."

"If we don't deal with climate change," he said by email, "it won't matter what we do about sunscreens."

Some scientists say it's too early to know how damaging sunscreen is to corals because the studies are limited. About half a dozen studies examine the effects of oxybenzone on corals, and some researchers have questioned the methods behind the studies.

But other scientistsoften those favoring a bansay those studies are a small part of a growing body of research that documents the negative impact of oxybenzone and octinoxate on corals and other species with an endocrine system, including humans and animals.

Meanwhile, some dermatologists and sunscreen makers oppose the bans, saying they will lead to fewer people protecting themselves from sun exposure and increase the risk of skin cancer.

To be sure, prohibiting certain sunscreens is a small action in the larger fight against global warming, but local officials are calling it a start.

"If it's something we can do to minimize damage to reefs," said Key West Mayor Teri Johnston, "it's one small step we're going to take."

As in Hawaii, sales of sunscreen with oxybenzone and octinoxate will be prohibited in Key West starting in 2021.

Those laws were spurred in part by a 2015 study from Craig Downs, a forensic ecotoxicologist and the executive director of the Virginia-based nonprofit Haereticus Environmental Laboratory, which researches how to conserve and restore habitat.

His study, published in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, was one of the first to find oxybezone can harm corals.

Downs told Stateline oxybenzone is an "ecologically threatening chemical" that, when compounded by other local problems like sewage pollution and erosion of dirt into the ocean, can damage corals beyond repair, ending a cycle in which corals are able to bounce back from a bleaching event over the course of five to 10 years.

Supporters of Hawaii's ban cited a 2017 letter to legislators from Cheryl Woodley, a NOAA coral scientist, that said existing research was enough to spark action.

"While additional research may incrementally add to our understanding of its impacts to additional coral reef species," the letter said, "additional research on the impacts of oxybenzone should not be a prerequisite to management action."

Many Key West residents supported the banpeople wearing coral-colored shirts that read "oxybenzone free" filled city hall during debate on the measure.

Nicole Crane, a coral reef biologist and professor at Cabrillo College in California, said corals are dying off due to multiple stressorswarming ocean temperatures, pollution and chemicals. Still, she joined the Coral-List conversation in recent weeks to support banning sunscreens with oxybenzone and octinoxate.

"There are so many things about coral reefs that are a problem, and not many of them are easily tackled, whereas the sunscreen is easily tackled," Crane told Stateline. "I think we should be grabbing at anything we can in getting the public involved in trying to protect these habitats."

Douglas Fenner, a coral scientist in American Samoa and a consultant for Conservation International and NOAA, said he's normally sympathetic to the idea of taking a precautionary approach to chemicals and conservation efforts, but in an email to the Coral-List he called banning oxybenzone and octinoxate a "feel good" exercise and a waste of time.

A number of studies show the chemicals can be dangerous, Fenner told Stateline, but they are still very low on the list of threats to corals, while skin cancer remains a high risk to human health. Melanoma rates in the United States have nearly doubled since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some dermatologists and sunscreen companies likewise say they're concerned about skin cancer rates if people switch to a sunscreen that doesn't offer as broad a protection, or even skip sunscreen entirely.

Kurt Reynertson, a biologist with Johnson & Johnson, which produces many skin care products using oxybenzone and octinoxate, said audience members hissed at him when he testified against the ban in Key West.

Reynertson heads the company's product stewardship division, analyzing how certain chemicals impact human and environmental health. Normally the job involves telling the company not to use certain chemicals, he said, but he doesn't think there is enough data to support banning oxybenzone and octinoxate.

"What I know is that climate change is killing [corals], and that I don't have enough evidence to ban oxybenzone," he said. "Taking something out of the arsenal of what you could truly call a life-saving drug is a big decision. You don't base global public health decisions on a couple studies."

The Skin Cancer Foundation, an education and research nonprofit supported in part by skin-care and cosmetics companies, said in a statement last year that the Hawaii ban was "cause for concern."

"By removing access to a significant number of products, this ban will give people another excuse to skip sun protection, putting them at greater risk for skin cancer," the foundation said in its statement. The American Academy of Dermatology declined to take a position on the sunscreen bans.

The bans in Hawaii and Key West don't stop visitors from bringing any sunscreen they choose, but locals will need a prescription before buying those with oxybenzone or octinoxate. Otherwise, shoppers will be limited to mineral sunscreens that rely on components like zinc oxide to block the sun or a smaller selection of sunscreens without the offending chemicals.

Reynertson said the public often perceives mineral sunscreens, which Johnson & Johnson also makes, as being better for the environment, but he's concerned that if they become widely used, the high dosage of substances may be just as damaging to corals.

But Downs said the mineral particles are too big to be absorbed by wildlife.

Sunscreen manufacturers and some environmentalists have been lobbying the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expand its list of approved ingredients for sunscreen, which hasn't been modified since the late 1990s.

They point to Europe, which has a longer list, hopeful that a diversity of ingredients would help reduce the impact of any one substance. The Skin Care Foundation supports expanding the list.

The FDA recently announced it would ask sunscreen makers to turn over more data about the active ingredients in their products, including oxybenzone and octinoxate.

California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, a Democrat who sponsored legislation to ban sales in her state, said sunscreen producers have told her they could create less toxic products. "But with what they have approved now," she said, "they don't have an alternative that works as well that's not toxic."

Explore further Beaches are banning sunscreens to save coral reefs

2019 Stateline.org

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Gary Grider, left, and Brad Settlemyer discuss the new Los Alamos and Carnegie Mellon software product, DeltaFS, released to the software distribution site GitHub this week. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

A new distributed file system for high-performance computing available today via the software collaboration site GitHub provides unprecedented performance for creating, updating and managing extreme numbers of files.

"We designed DeltaFS to enable the creation of trillions of files," said Brad Settlemyer, a Los Alamos computer scientist and project leader. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University jointly developed DeltaFS. "Such a tool aids researchers in solving classical problems in high-performance computing, such as particle trajectory tracking or vortex detection."

DeltaFS builds a file system that appears to the user just like any other file system, doesn't require specialized hardware, and is exactly tailored to assisting the scientist in new discoveries when using a high-performance computing platform.

"One of the foremost challenges, and primary goals of DeltaFS, was scaling across thousands of servers without requiring a portion of them be dedicated to the file system," said George Amvrosiadis, assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a coauthor on the project. "This frees administrators from having to decide how to allocate resources for the file system, which will become a necessity when exascale machines become a reality."

Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The file system brings about two important changes in high-performance computing. First, DeltaFS enables new strategies for designing the supercomputers themselves, dramatically changing the cost of creating and managing files. In addition, DeltaFS radically improves the performance of highly selective queries, dramatically reducing time to scientific discovery.

DeltaFS is a transient, software-defined service that allows data to be accessed from a handful up to hundreds of thousands of computers based on the user's performance requirements.

"The storage techniques used in DeltaFS are applicable in many scientific domains, but we believe that by alleviating the metadata bottleneck we have really shown a way for designing and procuring much more efficient HPC storage systems," Settlemyer said.

Explore further Large Hadron Collider pushing computing to the limits

More information: GitHub link: GitHub link: github.com/pdlfs/deltafs/
Credit: University of Sheffield

A pioneering predictor tool developed by the University of Sheffield will give scientists an alternative way to visualise the world and help to forecast the impact of climate change, population growth and energy use.

The Supply Chain Environmental Analysis Tool (SCEnAT) 4.0 uses large scale databases  including from the World Bank and NASA Satelillite maps  numerical, graphic and textual data with embedded autonomous learning.

The new tool will be able to predict the relationship between climate change, political economy, innovation, life expectancy, population growth and energy use, on sustainable development and resources. With the flexible design of SCEnAT 4.0, any sustainability questions and any resources can be built.

The University of Sheffield, in collaboration with Microsoft, has been working for the past eight years to solve the global challenge of depleting resources. The new tool has been pioneered through the University's Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre (AREC) by Professor Lenny Koh.

"We are very proud of the long standing relationship between the University of Sheffield AREC and Microsoft," said Professor Koh, Director of the AREC.

"SCEnAT 4.0 is borne from this ongoing collaboration in the era of Industry 4.0; and the Cloud and AI economy. SCEnAT 4.0 AI capabilities fit strategically with the AI sector Deal announced by the UK Government.

"Globally, AI interests are on the rise especially in the USA, China and Europe, whilst the global revenues from the AI market is projected at circa 90 billion USD in 2025 in tune with the increasing global demand for more sustainable and resource efficient solutions. SCEnAT 4.0 framework and platform are well-positioned for such worldwide scale-up rapidly."

SCEnAT 4.0 has evolved from the original SCEnAT Cloud based tool, powered by Microsoft Azure, which has helped companies reduce the environmental impact of their supply chains.

The collaboration between the University of Sheffield and Microsoft progressed the tool into SCEnAT+ and SCEnATi  funded by the EU  which has the addition of big data analytics and benchmarking capabilities along with Power BI integration, a Microsoft business analytics service.

Anthony Bitar, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft UK, said: "Policy makers and industry leaders can exploit the prediction experiencer from SCEnAT 4.0 to have a deeper understanding of the implications of policy and investment decisions.

"We are excited by how the combination of Microsoft's Azure cloud and AI services are being used in the SCEnAT 4.0 platform to de-risk and visualise the relationship of economic, environmental and social impact from the way we produce and consume resources."

Explore further Helping global organisations reduce environmental impact of their supply chains
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
The Israeli military said early on Friday that it had launched strikes against "terror sites" in the Gaza Strip.

On Thursday night, rocket alarms went off in the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv for the first time since 2014. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that it had registered "two launches from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory."

We have just started striking terror sites in Gaza. Details to follow.  Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) 14  2019 .

According to Palestinian eyewitnesses, cited by Reuters, several blasts were heard early on Friday from what they claimed to be IDF jets' attack on Hamas positions.

IDF said Friday that they could confirm that the rockets fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv earlier "were launched by the Hamas".

We can confirm that the rockets fired from #Gaza at #TelAviv earlier tonight were launched by the Hamas terrorist organization. March 15, 2019

Notably, Hamas said earlier in a statement, quoted by Reuters, they were "not responsible for the firing of the rockets tonight towards the enemy. They were fired as a meeting was underway between the leadership of the Hamas movement and the Egyptian security delegation over the understandings regarding the Gaza Strip".

Meanwhile, moments after the IDF launched its air raid against alleged Hamas targets in Gaza, alarm sirens went off in the southern part of Israel, signaling possible Palestinian shelling.

INITIAL REPORT: Sirens sounded in the Eshkol Regional Council. Details to follow. pic.twitter.com/5oj58C3wZl March 14, 2019

After a while, the IDF issued another rocket alert.

Sirens sounding in southern Israel  Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) 15  2019 .

Moments after the issued rocket alert the IDF said it had intercepted one of the projectiles fired from Gaza toward Israel.

The Israelis usually respond to alleged Palestinian shelling by attacking military targets belonging to Hamas, holding the movement responsible for any aggressive actions originating from the territory of the Hamas-controlled enclave.

The new wave of escalation near Israels border with Gaza began last March, when Palestinian protests, dubbed the Great March of Return, kicked off. The tensions further mounted in fall due to continued shelling and arson balloons launches from Gaza into Israeli territory and Israeli strikes on Palestinian targets in response to those actions.
Kathmandu, Nepal: Nepal Communist Party (NCP) Co-Chairman and former Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal is scheduled to visit the United States (US) of America on March 18 for the treatment of his ailing wife, Sita Dahal.

As Dahals journey to US is set nearly a month after the controversy over his statement on the USs position on Venezuela. His visit to US is taken meaningfully in the diplomatic as well as political level.

As Dahal had issued a statement in last January criticizing the US and its allies for interfering in the South American country Venezuela, serious diplomatic spat was erupted between the two countries.

There was a speculation that travelling to the US or other European countries for the former rebel leaders including Dahal could not be safer due to the incompletion of the countrys transitional justice process.

Dahal had visit to the US in 2008 rightly after he was elected prime minister.He, however, had cancelled a trip to Australia about three years ago following reports that he could be detained there over complaints of insurgency-era crimes.

It is said that Dahal would stay about two weeks in the US. As soured relationship between the two countries is believed to have repaired now, it is said that he would meet some leaders during his stay in USA.
(Source: Twitter @AzminAli)

The government will be drafting a new economic policy for the Malays, said Economic Affairs Minister Datuk Seri Azmin Ali. The new inclusive policy will be centred on fairness, growth, and sharing of prosperity. It will reflect the spirit of inclusiveness and justice, which will contribute to the concept of prosperity-sharing  where wealth would be shared with all Malaysians.

In the current financial climate, this new policy will help in tackling the economic challenges faced by the people. But no details were given on the policy specifics yet.

According to Datuk Seri Azmin, the government is concerned with the struggling Felda community and smallholders. His visit to Kelantan this month has strengthened the relation between the federal government and the state government. He added the stronger ties will help in boosting the economy of the people especially those in rural areas.

(Source: New Straits Times)

The Economic Affairs Minister added that the government is looking into new initiatives to help sustain the agriculture and farming sectors. This will lead to the growth of income and purchasing power of the rural folks. A series of discussions with stakeholders in the economic sector including chambers of commerce, government-linked companies, non-governmental organisations and economic experts will be carried out. Azmin is optimistic that Malaysias economy will get back on track and would be fit to compete in the global market.

(Source: The Star)

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Intro

Greetings! I am a political scientist , specializing in International Relations , my research and teaching focus on ethnic conflict and civil-military relations . I watch way too much TV, and I like movies as well so I tend to write about both and find IR stuff in pop culture. I rant alot about American politics and sometimes about Canadian politics. I like to take ideas I once learned a long time ago and apply them to whatever strikes my fancy.


" " More people live inside the highlighted circle than outside of it. Cartarium/iStock/Thinkstock

The world's human population now exceeds 7.5 billion, but all those people are not distributed evenly over the available land. For instance, fewer humans live in deserts than along coastlines, and more people live in cities than in rural areas. You get the idea. But what might come as a surprise is that there is one geographical area on a two-dimensional map about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) in diameter where over half of us live.

This is actually nothing new.

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It's thought that in the year 1000, human population distribution looked very much the same as it does today, with most people hanging out in relatively small geographical areas in Asia  although the continent's population was less than 300 million instead of more than 4 billion, as it is today.

But in 2013, a Reddit user called "valeriepieris" created a visual that took the internet by storm. Valeriepieris, a teacher named Ken Myers, observed and verified that more people live inside a circle comprising 21 nations  including China, India and Southeast Asian countries  than live outside it. Not only does the circle account for just a sixth of the world's landmass and include Mongolia, one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, but it is also mostly covered in water.

The Valeriepieris circle made a splash on Reddit and was picked up by multiple news outlets, including The Washington Post in its article "40 maps that explain the world." But how accurate is Myers' projection?

In 2015, Danny Quah, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, tested the Valeriepieris circle to see if Myers correctly estimated the size and positioning of the circle that holds over half the world's population. Quah used a different mapping projection and asked a slightly different question than Myers: What's the smallest circle on Earth with more people living inside than out? Although Quah ended up moving the circle over a bit to exclude most of Japan, he conceded in a blog post that "Ken Myers nailed the key idea."

Now That's Interesting In 2015, back when the world's population was just 7.3 billion, it was estimated that every living human could stand (really closely together) in an area of land the size of New York City.
" " Hundreds shelter in place from Irma at the Miami-Dade County Fair Expo Center, which was converted into an emergency shelter, Sept. 8, 2017. Florida Gov. Rick Scott warned the state's 20 million residents should be prepared to evacuate to a safe location. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

Several days after Category 5Hurricane Irma blew through the Caribbean and Florida in September 2017, more than a half-dozen seniors died in a steamy hot Florida nursing home when the air conditioning failed due to lack of power. As rescue crews evacuated the surviving residents to a hospital across the street, people began questioning whether sheltering in place during a disaster is wise. The answer is complicated. For some, staying put makes a lot of sense. For others, however, it can have catastrophic consequences.

Such was the case in the Hollywood, Florida nursing home. As Irma ripped through the state, millions were left without electricity. When the air conditioning system failed at the nursing facility, it became unbearably hot. For whatever reason, administrators didn't evacuate the 150 residents to the hospital just next door, despite temperatures outside reaching 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius). Eight people between the ages of 71 and 99 ultimately died. Authorities, who immediately launched a criminal investigation, believed the intense heat was a factor.

The tragedy underscored the perils of sheltering in place. Keeping the elderly safe during a disaster is especially tricky. However, because the elderly have a range of age-related disabilities and medical conditions, evacuation can be deadlier than the disaster itself. Studies have shown staying put might be the best option if communities and facilities are prepared.

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Moving the Elderly

"Frail ... residents are adversely affected by hurricane disasters," concluded a 2012 study in the Journal of Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medicine. "While there is significant increased morbidity and mortality related to exposure, there is added risk in evacuation. While it is important that facilities, public health and emergency management officials evacuate homes likely to flood during a hurricane, in light of the significant increase in mortality and morbidity associated with evacuation, the policy of universal evacuation of facilities requires careful reconsideration."

"Elderly do not do well when moved," Claire B. Rubin, a social scientist with nearly 40 years of experience in emergency management," says in an e-mail. "It stresses them, and those on life support machines have to be near a power source. Transporting nursing home patients usually results in some deaths."

Yet, Rubin adds, the decision to stay or go is a dicey one, especially when it comes to the elderly. "Unless the nursing facility is a safe structure, it does not make sense to shelter in place. [It's a] tough tradeoff between risks of staying and [the] risk of moving."

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When You Can't Leave

Sheltering in place can be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't decision. In general, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, people should shelter in place "when conditions require that you seek immediate protection in your home, place of employment, school or other location when disaster strikes ... local officials are the best source of information when determining whether to evacuate or shelter in place."

Staying put can be a smart move, or in the case of one couple, a really dumb thing to do. The couple tried to ride out Irma, get this, on their sailboat off Jensen Beach north of Palm Beach. The inevitable happened. Sheriff's deputies had to rescue the pair before the storm struck with all its fury.

Despite such a poor decision, there are many sensible reasons why people choose to stay during major storms. For one, they might have no place to go. That generally occurs when emergencies pop up quickly. Tornados, for example, can roar through a neighborhood with little notice, forcing people to seek refuge in their homes, at work or at school. In other instances, people cannot afford to leave, or they might not have transportation out of town. And as was the case before Hurricane Irma, most major freeways were jammed with traffic and fuel was in short supply, and all flights out of Florida were booked, leaving people with few options.

" " Traffic crawled on the northbound lanes of Florida's Turnpike near the intersection of I-75 north of Orlando on Friday, Sept. 8, 2017 as people evacuated from Hurricane Irma. Stephen M. Dowell/Orlando Sentinel/Getty Images

A traffic nightmare scenario was part of the reason Texas didn't order Houston residents to evacuate before Hurricane Harvey hit in August. Officials there were afraid a mass evacuation would be worse than the storm itself. That's because in 2005, 60 of the 118 storm-related deaths from Hurricane Rita in Texas were people trapped during the evacuation. Harvey ended up dumping more than 50 inches of rain, ultimately flooding the entire city of Houston and displacing more than 32,000 people.

So, when officials do issue mandatory evacuations and people are too stubborn, or in the words of Rubin, "too stupid" to leave even though the threat is imminent and dangerous, what then? "Often people say 'I survived the last hurricane/flood/whatever and I will be fine this time if I shelter-in-place,'" Rubin says. "Usually, that is a mistake since characteristics of each threat [and] hazard is different."

Gender and age play a role in the decision to leave, too. "Men behave differently than women," Rubin says, "and older people are reluctant or unable to move quickly or dread relocation."

Rubin says communities need to prepare if residents shelter in place. Some communities plan for a "vertical evacuation." In other words, they shelter people in buildings that have been designated safe, like schools or in Irma's case, the Miami-Dade County Fair Expo Center. Public safety officers and other first responders also hunker down in these buildings. "It makes sense to create or designate safe structures," Rubin says. Still, there are emergencies when Rubin says sheltering in place should always be avoided, such as during a wildfire or dangerous chemical spill, unless authorities say otherwise.

Now That's Smart If you are going to shelter in place, first make sure your pantry is stocked with food and water. Have an emergency supply kit. Most importantly, put enough space between you and the disaster. Get into an interior room away from doors and windows. Check out ready.gov for more tips.
" " The ruins of a jetty at Port Coon in Ulster, Northern Ireland, near the mysterious geological formation known as the Giant's Causeway. Daniel Bosma/Getty Images

For many, March 17 serves as an excuse to drink beer, wear green and maybe watch "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." But there's more to St. Patrick's Day than alcohol, pinches and little green men.

Naturally, Irish culture runs deeper than stereotypical shenanigans, so let's take a moment to plunge deeper into the rich well of Irish myth. Forget leprechauns and banshees, because far more wondrous and terrifying things await you in the earth barrows of Sidh.

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While mischievous leprechauns steal most of the attention, King Iubdan and his kin are but a subset of a globally diverse spirit folk collectively known as "fairies." They include the pixies and the pari of modern Iran, the Dahomeyan azizan of Nigeria and the shiwanna of New Mexico's Keresan Keres Pueblo people, just to name a few. Everywhere you look, the people of the invisible kingdom seem to watch from the shadows  and Irish myth is no exception.

In his book "Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry," William Butler Yeats divided fairy folk into two categories: solitary and trooping fairies. The solitary variety are often loners tied to a particular place. They include the wish-granting leprechauns and wailing banshees. In fact, the "shee" in banshee is the source of the diminutive word sheehogue, the Gaelic word for fairy.

But it's the trooping fairies who exhibit all the culture, community and strife. Of this classification, the Daoine Sidhe (fairy people) are the most intriguing. Formally known as the Tuatha De Danann (people of the goddess Dana), this legendary race of super beings overthrew native Fir Bholgs.

Also known as the Corca Oidce or "people of darkness," the Fir Bholgs fled the might of the Daoine Sidhe into deep mountain caves and lonely forests, where they transformed into goblinoid creatures. But don't be too quick to pity them! The Fir Bholgs had dished the same treatment out to the Formorians, driving them into the soul-warping depths of the sea.

Magical powers, grace, intellect  the Daoine Sidhe had it all. While they could die in battle, they were essentially immortal. They could change their shape, become invisible or vanish into thin air. They lived among humans for a time, but eventually fell to the conquering Milesians (thought to be the Celts), who later worshiped them as gods. And so the fairy folk retreated into Earth barrows of Sidh, a secret underworld where they still practice their magic and culture today.

" " Much of the Irish countryside, like the pictured Gap of Dunloe located near Killarney, Kerry, is evocative and wild. Trish Punch/Lonely Planet/Getty Images

Among these magical fairy folk, you'll find numerous colorful and grotesque characters. Consider Balor, king of the Fir Bholg, whose evil eye could slay a hundred enemies with a single glance. However, as Yeats points out, his massive brow "required four men to raise it whenever he wanted to exert the power of his venomed glance over his enemies." Bholg finally perished when, according to folklorist Carol Rose, the Daoine Sidhe warrior Lug fired a stone missile that "took Balor's eye clean through his brain and out through the back of his head, killing 27 warriors behind him." (Surely that body count tops anything you'll find in a Warwick Davis "Leprechaun" movie.)

Or consider King Nuada, a mighty Daoine Sidhe warrior who lost an arm in battle and replaced it with a suspiciously cybernetic silver prosthetic  and later one of living flesh  to reclaim his throne. To think, all of this went down in Irish myth ages before "Star Wars" or "The Terminator."

If monsters are more your thing, you'll find plenty of nightmarish specimens in Irish myth. There's the monstrous dog Saidthe Suraraighe (or "bitch of evil"), just one of the Coinn Iotair "hounds of rage" of legendary Chieftain Crom Dubh. Or consider the dog-headed Coinchenn, who decapitated any and all suitors to her beautiful mortal daughter Delbehaem. And if you want a creature with a little more holiday flair, there's always the monstrous Caoranach, mother of demons. According to legend, St. Patrick himself banished the creature to the bottom of Lough Derg, a freshwater lake in central Ireland.

This is just a taste of Irish mythology, but there's plenty more out there for your seasonal consumption. Yeats' "Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry" is available via Project Gutenberg and Carol Rose's monster and fairy encyclopedias are required reading for any March 17 night of overindulgence.
Kathmandu, Nepal, March 15, 2019: Nepal government has condemned the deadliest attack at two mosques in Christchurch of New Zealand that left at least 49 dead and dozens injured on Friday.





Issuing a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) condemned the attack terming it as senseless act of terrorism.





The Government of Nepal (GoN) strongly condemns this senseless act of terrorism, reads the statement issued by the MoFA.




" " It's hard not to be a little disappointed that a comet seems to have been behind the Wow! signal. Wikimedia Commons/Art Montes De Oca/Getty

It looks like one of the most famous signals in the history of searches for intelligent extraterrestrials wasn't triggered by chatty aliens after all  it was likely caused by a mischievous comet that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

On Aug. 15, 1977, Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope was fixed on three star systems called Chi Sagittarii in the constellation of Sagittarius as part of a SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project when it detected something weird.

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For 72 seconds, a powerful burst of radio waves erupted from deep space. On reviewing the computer printout from that observing session a few days later, astronomer Jerry Ehman noticed the strange clump of letters and numbers. To the untrained eye, the digits are nothing more than a random computer burp. But to Ehman, the message was clear: An unprecedented narrowband radio signal had been received from deep space, and it looked artificial. Excited by the find, Ehman circled the cluster of letters and numbers, writing an exuberant "Wow!" on the printout.

"I mean, without thinking, I wrote "Wow!"" Ehman recalled during a 1994 interview. "It was the most significant thing we had seen."

As time went on, Ehman became skeptical that Big Ear had detected an alien transmission, saying: "Even if it were intelligent beings sending a signal, they'd do it far more than once." After dozens of investigations into that same region, he had settled on the idea that the signal was more likely a radio signal bouncing off space debris, like a defunct satellite, than anything SETI related.

Astronomers exhaustively continued to seek out natural explanations, but the popular view of the signal always tended toward the improbable (yet possible). Nearly four decades later, the "Wow!" signal has remained the most captivating pieces of evidence that alien life  an intelligent, transmitting alien civilization, no less  might exist in our galaxy.

But over the years, SETI astronomers have been frustrated by the lack of replication. Science is a stickler for replicating results, so while the Wow! signal was certainly interesting, until more Wow! signals are found, the 1977 detection was nothing more than an anomaly and a mysterious addition to the SETI annals.

Last year, however, Antonio Paris, an adjunct professor at Florida's St. Petersburg College and a former analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense, had an idea that would assess the Wow! signal's cause and, from November 2016 to February 2017, he tested his hypothesis.

Paris had been trying to find alternatives to the "alien explanation" of the Wow! radio burst, and he realized that the explanation might be a little closer to home.

Big Ear was tuned to a very specific radio frequency for good reason. The universe is filled with neutral hydrogen and, in this natural state, radiates radio waves at a frequency of 1420 megahertz. Any self-respecting alien astronomer would know this. By SETI logic, if we know 1420 megahertz is the most abundant radio emission in the known universe and they also know it, perhaps it is the perfect frequency to transmit on as there is some guarantee that other intelligent beings are observing at that frequency. There's an entire electromagnetic spectrum to transmit from, why not narrow down the odds from the get-go?

However, Paris pondered another possible emitter of 1420 megahertz radiation: comets. Comets contain large quantities of water ice and therefore release neutral hydrogen gas into space as they orbit the sun. At the time of the Big Ear observation, there were no known comets in the Chi Sagittarii observing region. But many comets have been discovered since then  might an undiscovered comet have "photobombed" the Big Ear 1977 observations?

Paris identified two cometary candidates, comets 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, which were discovered in 2006 and 2008 respectively that, after historic orbital analysis, would have placed them in the general vicinity of Chi Sagittarii on Aug. 15, 1977. And it just so happened that 266P/Christensen was soon making a return visit to the same patch of sky. So, between November 2016 and February 2017 an exhaustive observing campaign was carried out. This time, the detection was replicated, and it appears that aliens had nothing to do with the infamous Wow! signal.

"The investigation discovered that comet 266/P Christensen emitted a radio signal at 1420.25MHz," Paris writes in a study published in the Journal for the Washington Academy of Science. "All radio emissions detected were within 1 (60 arcminutes) of the known celestial coordinates of the comet as it transited the neighborhood of the "Wow!" Signal."

As part of the study, Paris also studied the emissions from a random selection of three other comets  P/2013 EW90 (Tenagra), P/2016 J1-A (PANSTARRS), and 237P/LINEAR  and found that, yes, they also produced a strong 1420 megahertz radio signal.

In short, this could be the last nail in the coffin for the alien explanation of the Wow! signal.

"The results of this investigation, therefore, conclude that cometary spectra are detectable at 1420 MHz and, more importantly, that the 1977 "Wow!" Signal was a natural phenomenon from a solar system body," Paris concludes, bluntly.

Now That's Interesting Big Ear made it into the Guinness Book of Records for its long-running, full-scale SETI project, which began in 1973 and ended in 1997.
Hong Kong favourite Anthony Wong Chau Sang is to be honoured with the Golden Mulberry Award for Outstanding Achievement at this years Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy.

The controversial performer has been a ubiquitous presence in the Hong Kong film industry since the late 1980s, with more than 200 acting credits to his name. Wong is probably best known in the west for his deranged turns as Sweeney Todd-style serial killers in the Herman Yau-directed Category III classics The Untold Story (1993) and Ebola Syndrome (1996), but also gave memorable performances in the likes of Hard Boiled, Infernal Affairs and the Young and Dangerous series. Wong has also appeared in Hollywood productions including The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and The Painted Veil, and most recently in the UK television series Strangers (aka White Dragon) opposite John Simm.

To honour the occasion, FEFF will host the local premiere of Oliver Chans excellent new drama Still Human, which boasts one of Wongs best performances in years, if not of his career, as a paralysed and curmudgeonly retiree whose family saddles him with a Filipino domestic helper with whom he struggles to communicate. Still Human has been nominated for 8 Hong Kong Film Awards, with the 57-year-old a strong contender to take home the Best Actor prize on 14 April. Wong previously won the award twice, for The Untold Story, and Dante Lams Beast Cops in 1999, as well as Best Supporting Actor gongs for Infernal Affairs and Initial D.

The festival will also include a rare screening of Angie Chens 1985 comedy My Name Aint Suzie, starring Pat Ha and Deannie Ip, as well as the very first big screen appearance from a then 24-year-old Wong.
Demonstration in front of the National CERT of Philippines for failing to act on cyber attacks targeting regime critical media and civil society organizations

On March 12, the World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, media and civil

society organizations in Philippines held a demonstration in front of

NCERT (National Computer Emergency Response Team) to protest against the negligence of the NCERT to support the investigation of the three

months long Distributed Denial of Service attacks against regime

critical media and civil society organizations in the Philippines.

It is the first time in history that civic groups hold a protest against a national CERT for not performing their duties. For more than three months, cyber attacks have targeted Philippine independent media such as Bulatlat, Kodao Productions, Pinoy Weekly, Manila Today, Altermidya and the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines.

Since the attacks only target regime critical sources, they are likely to be politically motivated and perhaps even state supported.

Qurium Media Foundation, a non-profit digital solutions provider, is assisting the organizations that are under persistent and intense DDoS attacks and is hosting a handful of them. As a member of CiviCERT, a Computer Incident Response Center for Civil Society, Qurium has reached out to NCERT (the national CERT of the Philippines) to request assistance to investigate the attacks, which were sourced from Philippine infrastructure. Despite three attempts from CiviCERT to reach NCERT by email, no response has been received. According to NCERTs operations manual, they are required to notify an international reporter (like CiviCERT) within 48h if a request is regarded as false alarm. If the request is deemed as valid, a forensics analysis must be initiated.

Due to the lack of response from NCERT, Qurium has opened a digital forensic investigation to attribute the attacks. The investigation has not yet been published, but is expected to be released later this month.

These attacks are in fact part of a series of attempts to stifle press freedom here as seen in the recent arrest of long-time journalist Maria Ressa and several threats that no less than the president himself issued against dominant news agencies Philippine Daily Inquirer and ABS-CBN says Bulatlat.

On 13 February Maria Ressa, one of TIME Magazines Person of the Year 2018 and CEO of the news site Rappler, was arrested on charges of cyber libel, stemming from a story that linked a businessman, in illegal drugs and human trafficking, to former Supreme Court Justice Renato Corona. Ressa was released on 14 February.

Bulatlat adds in its statement; Statistics, too, can speak for itself on the dire situation of press freedom in the Philippines. There are now 12 journalists killed under President Duterte. The National Union of Journalists in the Philippines has documented 85 cases of threats and intimidation against journalists as of November 2018.

About the author Clara Zid

Outreach and Media  Investigative journalist

Qurium Media Foundation | Virtualroad.org

Pierluigi Paganini

( SecurityAffairs  National CERT of Philippines, hacking)

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By Nathan Layne NEW YORK (Reuters) - One of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's top prosecutors will soon leave his post, a spokesman said on Thursday, confirming a move likely to add fuel to speculation that the investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 U.S. election is nearing an end. Andrew Weissmann, who orchestrated the prosecution of President Donald Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort, will leave the special counsel's team "in the near future," Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said. News of his departure, first reported by National Public Radio, came a day after Manafort was sentenced by a federal judge in Washington, bringing his total punishment to 7-1/2 years in prison from two criminal cases brought by Mueller's team. Manafort was convicted of or pleaded guilty to a litany of financial and other crimes. Weissmann, who has taught at the New York University School of Law in the past, is in talks with the school to return to a teaching post "following his current commitments," said Michael Orey, a university spokesman. Weissmann has been a pivotal member of Mueller's team, which has brought charges against 34 people and three companies during a 22-month-old investigation into whether Trump's 2016 campaign conspired with Russia and whether the Republican president unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Unless Weissmann is leaving for unspecified personal reasons, his departure signals Mueller has likely completed all of the inquiry's major investigative steps, although there could still be additional indictments, said Barbara McQuade, a former senior federal prosecutor in Michigan. "I see this as the surest sign yet of a wrap-up," McQuade said. A handful of other prosecutors working with the special counsel already have left their posts, while a senior FBI agent on Mueller's team, David Archey, this month became head of the FBI's office in Richmond, Virginia. Mueller is preparing to deliver a confidential report on his findings to Attorney General William Barr, marking the conclusion of the special counsel's work. Barr will then decide how much of the report to make public. The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution on Thursday calling for Mueller's report to be released to Congress and the public. The vote was 420-0, with four conservative Republican lawmakers allied with Trump voting "present." Before joining Mueller's team in May 2017, Weissmann was best known for two assignments: the investigation of now-defunct energy company Enron and organized crime cases when he was a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn. Weissmann was detailed to the special counsel from the U.S. Justice Department, where he had headed the criminal fraud section. He has given notice to the department that he will not be returning, according to a person familiar with the matter. A department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Weissmann, who was in a Washington federal court on Thursday to attend a hearing in the special counsel's prosecution of longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, did not respond to a request for comment. Stone was indicted in January, accused of lying about his communications with associates about the Wikileaks website that released documents that prosecutors said were stolen by Russia and made public to hurt Trump's 2016 Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Stone has pleaded not guilty. His trial is set for on Nov. 5. (Reporting by Nathan Layne; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball, Susan Heavey and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington, and Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
The logo of Huawei Technologies in front its German headquarters in Duesseldorf. (Photo:REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay)

By Eli Lake

(Bloomberg Opinion)  The U.S.-led campaign against Huawei Technologies Co., Chinas telecom giant, has attracted a lot of attention for the indictment of the companys chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. On Thursday, Huaweis lawyers pleaded not guilty in a New York federal court to 13 counts of fraud involving an elaborate scheme to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran.

That case is no doubt important, not only because of the possibility that Meng, the daughter of Huaweis founder, could face incarceration. It is also a major irritant in U.S.-China trade talks.

That said, the case is a sideshow. Of greater consequence is a renewed U.S. campaign to pressure and persuade Americas allies to keep Huawei technology and equipment out of the next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G. The stakes in this campaign are much bigger than U.S. market share or the effectiveness of Iran sanctions. If Huaweis chips and routers find their way into this new network, everything from digital privacy to intellectual property could be at risk.

U.S. intelligence agencies, along with those of many of its allies, have concluded that Huaweis equipment provides Chinas military with a backdoor into the telecom systems that use it. Huawei is a spy agency for the Communist Party of China, thinly veiled as a technology company, says Senator Ted Cruz in a March 14 letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.

The U.S. intelligence community has been sounding this alarm for years. Only recently, however, have these worries begun to inform policy. Pompeo himself has been the public face of it, warning last month on a tour of Eastern Europe that it would be difficult for the U.S. to partner with countries that use Huawei equipment. Meanwhile, I am told, senior military and intelligence officials have been delivering more explicit warnings to U.S. allies in private. The message is particularly effective with Eastern European countries that see a U.S. military presence as a trip wire against Russian aggression.

Story continues

Its still early days, but so far the anti-Huawei campaign is not going well. Last month, the United Arab Emirates announced that it would be using Huawei equipment. India, too, has rebuffed U.S. concerns and is reportedly looking for a way to grant some contracts to Huawei.

India and the U.A.E. are important U.S. allies, but for national security they are in a different category from the five English-speaking nations that share intercepts and surveillance data in an arrangement known as the Five Eyes security alliance. These countries  Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.S. and the U.K.  have partnered since the aftermath of World War II to share this kind of signal intelligence against common adversaries, such as the former Soviet Union and China. The prospect of a Chinese backdoor into the wireless networks of any of these countries is what stirred Cruz to write his letter.

The danger is real. Cruzs letter points to reports from last month that the U.K.s National Cyber Security Centre has determined that security risks associated with Huawei equipment could be mitigated, paving the way for the country to approve some Huawei technology in its 5G network. Canada and New Zealand have yet to make a determination. Western Australias transportation authority, meanwhile, is pursuing a deal that would use Huawei technology in the radio networks of its rail system.

In all of these cases, there is still time for the Five Eyes allies to make the right decision. But the U.S. campaign is facing an uphill fight. To start, the Chinese have pressured other countries to drop what they say are discriminatory policies against Huawei. And because Huawei is heavily subsidized, it can often outbid its competitors. The Chinese have also aggressively pressured international standards-setting bodies to adopt specifications for equipment that would force countries to choose Huawei over its competitors.

The U.S. campaign has also suffered from some confusion of its own. Last month, on the eve of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, President Donald Trump tweeted that he wanted the U.S. to win markets for its technology through competition, not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies. That tweet earned kudos from Huaweis rotating chairman, Guo Ping.

U.S. officials tell me that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin opposes the aggressive campaign to ban Huawei. One senior national security official says there is a possibility that the U.S.-China trade negotiations could result in a deal that would relieve the U.S. pressure against Huawei. And while Mnuchin has said there are no discussions with Huawei in regard to the indictment of Meng, forced technology issues are part of trade discussions.

For now, Americas Five Eyes partners and other allies will have to wait to see whether the campaign against Huawei survives a U.S.-China trade agreement. In the meantime, Trump should listen to his spies and his generals. No trade deal is worth letting China become the world leader in eavesdropping.

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

 2019 Bloomberg L.P
Boeing announced Sunday that some of its medium-haul 737s, including the 737 MAX 8, could have a defective wing part, but that there had been no reports of flight issues linked to the defect

Boeing quietly unveiled its newest aircraft, the 777X, to employees this week. The plane is billed as the largest aircraft in the industry.

Following the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed all 157 passengers and crew, Boeing nixed its original plans for a splashy unveiling and instead introduced its newest aircraft at an employees-only event.

Earlier this week, Boeing announced plans to postpone external promotional activities and announcements about their 777X aircraft in light of the crash and the controversy surrounding their Boeing 737 MAX 8 jets.

Following the tragic loss of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, we are respectfully postponing the external 777X global debut activities, including broadcasts on our social media channels.  Boeing Airplanes (@BoeingAirplanes) March 11, 2019

But photos of the new jetliner appeared on Twitter via DJ's Aviation, an account dedicated to all things aviation.

The Boeing 777-9 variant measures 77 meters (252 feet) in length and can seat up to 425 passengers.

Boeing also claims that the 777X is built with the most efficient twin-engine jet in the world.

So far, carriers like All Nippon Airways, Cathay Pacific, British Airways, Lufthansa, Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Etihad and Qatar Airways have placed orders for the newest aircraft.
Brazil's far right President Jair Bolsonaro will meet US counterpart Donald Trump next week to strengthen ties in the nascent regional conservative alliance aiming to ramp up the pressure on Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro. After decades of fractious relations between Brasilia and Washington, things have improved with the assumption to power of ex-army captain Bolsonaro -- nicknamed the "Tropical Trump" both due to his admiration for the US president and his ideological proximity in terms of nationalism and anti-globalization. "It's the president's first foreign bilateral visit, which demonstrates the priority the government is giving to building a solid association with the United States," Bolsonaro's spokesman Otavio do Rego Barros said on Wednesday. Alongside six ministers and his federal lawmaker son Eduardo -- who has been active in building links with fellow conservatives -- Brazil's president will spend four days in Washington from Sunday to Wednesday. He will stay at Blair House, an official US state residence opposite the White House used for visiting dignitaries. As well as a "private meeting" with Trump at the Oval Office on Tuesday, Bolsonaro will sit with Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro, and participate in various forums discussing the opportunities offered by the Brazilian economy. The US is Brazil's second biggest trade partner after China. On Sunday night he will dine at the residency of Brazil's ambassador with "several opinion formers" including, according to press reports, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and US-based Brazilian writer Olavo de Carvalho, considered Bolsonaro's guru. - 'Military action unlikely' - Trump and Bolsonaro will discuss one of the issues that most unites them: their desire to drive Maduro from power. The US was the first of more than 50 countries, closely followed by Brazil, to recognize Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president, boosting his power struggle with Maduro. Washington has also cranked up sanctions against the Maduro regime, including imposing an embargo on Venezuelan crude oil, due to come into effect on April 28. Trump has repeatedly insisted that "all options are on the table" with regards to military intervention in Venezuela. But that's not an opinion shared by Bolsonaro, who in line with other members of the mostly Latin American Lima Group has ruled out military action in favor of a policy of tightening the economic and diplomatic noose around Maduro. "Brazil is unlikely to take military action to address the situation in Venezuela, but we may see a strong stance being taken by Bolsonaro publicly following this trip to Washington," Roberta Braga, associate director at the Latin American center of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, told AFP. Trump wants a heavyweight ally such as Brazil "to continue putting the pressure on Maduro and ensure the wave of support Guaido has received doesn't diminish over time," said Thomaz Favaro, an analyst at Control Risks. - Satellite launching base - Spokesman Do Rego Barros said Trump and Bolsonaro will sign three agreements, without elaborating what they could be. One of those is expected to be the granting of technological safeguards for the US to use the satellite launching base in Alcantara, an idea that has angered sectors of Brazilian nationalists who view it as a potential loss of sovereignty. The base in northern Brazil is ideally located for launching satellites. Its position close to the equator allows for the saving of up to 30 percent in fuel or the loading of an increased cargo. "The Alcantara agreement is another sign of Bolsonaro's alignment with the United States, like his accepting the deal between Boeing and Embraer," internationalist Paulo Wrobel, from Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University, told AFP. Analysts expect the two leaders to discuss measures to increase bilateral business -- without infringing on Mercosur limits imposed on Brazil -- and the entry of the South American giant into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Following his US jaunt, Bolsonaro will visit Chile and Israel in a clear sign of his intention to approach governments he considers committed to his ideological conservatism and economic liberalism.
WELLINGTON/SYDNEY: Thousands of school students walked out of classes across Australia and New Zealand on Friday in a global student strike to protest against government inaction on climate change.

Climate change is worse than Voldemort, read a handmade sign carried by one student in Wellington, referring to the evil wizard in the hugely popular Harry Potter books and films.

The oceans are rising, so are we, read another in Sydney.

Student protests in capitals and cities from Wellington to Melbourne and Sydney drew tens of thousands of people, with more demonstrations planned later in the day in Asia, Europe and the United States.

The worldwide student strike movement started in August 2018, when 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began protesting outside her parliament on school days. She has since been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

If we dont do something, itll be our lives affected, not the 60-year-old politicians, said Sydney student Callum Frith, 15, who was wearing his school uniform. We need action.

Elsewhere in Asia, about 60 students protested at government house in the Thai capital of Bangkok, holding cardboard signs to campaign against plastic. Thailand is one of the worlds top marine plastic polluters.

As youths who will inherit the land, we gather here to demand that the government work with us to solve these problems, said 17-year-old Thiti Usanakul, of student-led group Grin Green International.

The group was later invited to meet officials at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in two weeks.

In the South Korean capital of Seoul, more than 100 students held recycled cardboard signs with slogans such as Too Warm 4 School, and Dont deny climate change.

I think environmental education should be mandatory from elementary school, said 15-year-old high school student Bang Tae-ryung. Although we learn, we should know more about why its happening and how we can resolve the problem.

In the wealthy city state of Singapore, where strict laws regulate public assembly, young people planned a virtual campaign on social media.

The government just needs to change some things, which is why, if we go on strike on a school day, then theyll notice and they might actually do something, said 14-year-old New Zealand student Inese, who did not want her full name used.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has pledged NZ$100 million ($68 million) to cut greenhouse gas emissions, supports the strikes, saying teenagers should not wait for voting age to use their voices.

That contrasts with politicians in Australia and Britain who have rebuked them for cutting class.

For action on issues that they think is important, they should do that after school or on weekends, Dan Tehan, Australias education minister, told reporters ahead of protests in Melbourne.

Wellington parent Alex, who marched beside his 11-year-old son, disagreed. Its a much better day of education, he said. This is the greatest issue of our time.

Scientists say fossil fuel use releases greenhouse gases that trap heat and lift global temperatures, bringing more floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

The 2015 Paris climate conference pledge to limit the rise to 2 degrees C (35 F) requires a radical cutback in use of coal and fossil fuels.
AFPTV

An eyewitness recounts what he saw as rescue operations are underway following a helicopter crash in India, in which Indian defence chief General Bipin Rawat and 12 other people were killed. Rawat was the first Chief of Defence Staff of India and was travelling with his wife and other senior officers in the Russian-made Mi-17 chopper, which crashed near its destination in southern Tamil Nadu state.
(Photo: Pixabay)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which is characterised by recurring irrational thoughts (obsessions) that produce anxiety and manifest in repetitive and ritualistic behaviours (compulsions), is among the top three mental disorders in Singapore. And its incidence is rising, having grown from 3 per cent of the population in 2010 to 3.6 per cent (about 1 in 28 people) in 2016.

However, a majority of individuals with OCD dont seek professional help, according to the second Singapore Mental Health Study (SMHS). While theres no known way to prevent OCD, early treatment may prevent the condition from worsening.

OCD is a chronic mental disorder that can begin at any age, but its onset commonly occurs in the teenage or early adult years, often by the age of 19.

You are at greater risk of developing OCD if

you have a family history of OCD, with a parent or sibling suffering from it

you have suffered physical/emotional abuse or trauma in childhood

Biological factors related to brain structure and functioning and childhood streptococcal infections have also been linked to OCD.

(Photo: Pexels)

What are the symptoms of OCD?

OCD symptoms may include obsessions and/or compulsions, and these may vary from mild to severe. They may come and go, and are likely to worsen during periods of high stress.

Common obsessions/compulsions are associated with:

Fear of germs, infection, contamination

Need for order and symmetry

Doubts related to personal safety

Desire for self-harm

Forbidden topics, e.g. sex, religion

An obsession may manifest as compulsive behaviour such as excessive cleaning, repeatedly washing your hands, constantly checking that the oven is turned off, arranging books in perfect order, repetitive counting, etc.

OCD may also be accompanied by other disorders, such as depression, body dysmorphic disorder (when you believe a part of your body is abnormal) and tics (sudden, brief, repetitive movements, such as eye blinking, head or shoulder jerking, grunting sounds).

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If you have OCD symptoms and they are affecting the quality of your life, you should seek professional help.

How is OCD diagnosed and treated?

A mental health professional will diagnose OCD and prescribe medication or psychotherapy, or a combination of the two, to treat it.

Medication: This treatment option includes antidepressants such as clomipramine and newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as fluoxetine. These drugs may take several weeks to show results, and they may have side effects.

Psychotherapy: Exposure and response prevention (ERP), a type of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), has been found to be effective in treating OCD. It involves gradual exposure to the object of your obsession and learning coping mechanisms.

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President Rodrigo Duterte reads the names of alleged narco-politicians during a speech in Davao City

DAVAO CITY, Philippines  President Rodrigo Duterte yet again surprised the public by revealing the names of politicians on his narco-list.

On national TV, the firebrand president read several names of politicians including 35 mayors, seven vice mayors, one provincial board member, and three congressmen.

Some of them are elected officials and election candidates for the upcoming May midterm polls.

Joint National Peace and Order Council (NPOC)  Regional Peace Order Council (RPOC) Clusters Meeting and AFP-PNP Command Conference 03/14/2019 President Rodrigo Roa Duterte announces the names of politicians allegedly involved in illegal drug operations or the narco list during the Joint National Peace and Order Council (NPOC)  Regional Peace Order Council (RPOC) Clusters Meeting and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP)  Philippine National Police (PNP) Command Conference at the Arcadia Active Lifestyle Center in Davao City on March 14, 2019.#ComfortableLifeForAll#PartnerForChange Posted by Radio Television Malacanang  RTVM on Thursday, 14 March 2019

President Duterte denied undermining the politicians bid ahead of the elections, but insisted that the list has been validated by government agents.

He added that the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) has already filed administrative cases against government officials on the list before the Office of the Ombudsman.

The President said the governments Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) and the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC) are both investigating the officials to build criminal cases against them.

The results of which will aid us in filing airtight cases against them, the President said.

Remember that public office is a public trust; an officials right to privacy is not absolute and there is a compelling reason to prioritize the interest of the state and the people, he stressed.  Marje Pelayo

(UNTV will publish the list upon verification.)

The post Duterte stuns by naming 46 politicians on new narco-list appeared first on UNTV News.
In the capital of Cameroon's Southwest Region, people drily say the streets are so dangerous that even the dogs are too scared to go outside. The city has been stalked by violence for 18 months, after English-speaking separatists declared an independent state and took up arms against the French-speaking authorities. In Buea, barely a day goes by without the "Amba Boys" attacking police stations, state-run enterprises and public buildings -- anything that is a recognisable symbol of the state. Gunfire is heard frequently, despite army patrols introduced as part of a wide-ranging crackdown, and kidnapping is rampant. Last month, around 15 rebels entered the city, firing into the air and burning cars. After they left, people found a decapitated head left on the pavement. The victim has so far not been identified. A disturbing video being shared on social media shows a woman in her 30s being disfigured by separatists who accuse her of being an informant for the army. On Tuesday, the EU issued a statement warning about Cameroon's political and security situation, pointing especially to the two restive anglophone regions, where there were "persistent violence and violations of human rights". - Fear - One civil servant, who asked not to be identified, told AFP he had been living in his office for five months out of fear of being attacked. "I spend the night at the office to avoid the trip home," he said. "Informants could see that I was disobeying the Amba Boys' ban on working for the government." Nearby, his camp bed was folded in one corner, just beside his suitcase. Two jackets were hung up nearby while the remains of the previous day's meal sat on a hotplate. The town, once known as a peaceful haven nestled at the foot of Mount Cameroon, has been transformed by the conflict. "Buea is suffering," one local radio presenter recently lamented on air. Some businesses say they are struggling to survive. Fearing reprisals, they do not dare defy the shutdowns regularly declared by the rebels. The cost of living is mounting. One woman selling mangoes at a crossroads for 1,000 francs (about 1.8 euros, $2) apiece said the price of the fruit was rising "because there are few people to go and harvest them." - Exodus - The authorities in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde have responded to the rebellion by stepping up the security presence in the region. Troops and rebels alike have been accused of targeting civilians. At least 500 civilians and more than 200 members of the security forces have died in clashes, attacks and a government crackdown, the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank says. At least 437,000 people have fled the two regions, according to UN estimates, with another 32,000 fleeing across the border to Nigeria. Many people in Buea have fled to the port of Limbe, around 30 kilometres (19 miles) away. The road between the two towns is littered with the burnt-out remains of cars. As night falls on Down Beach, the view over the bay comes with an incessant roar of armoured vehicles carrying troops. In the local schools, teachers have got used to pupils turning up wearing uniforms from other establishments. "They come from nearby villages," said a teacher at one secondary school. "We put up with it." - Colonial legacy - Around a fifth of Cameroon's population of 24 million are English speakers. The roots of the conflict today date back a century, when post-World War I Germany surrendered Kamerun, its principal colony in West Africa, which was then taken over by Britain and France. France was given the greater part of the territory, which became independent in 1960. A year later, the British colony also gained independence. Some of the English-speaking areas opted to join newly-formed Nigeria, while others chose to join the federation of Cameroon. In 2017, anglophone resentment at perceived discrimination by the francophone majority came to a head, leading to the declaration of the "Republic of Ambazonia" in the two regions, named after the local Ambas Bay.
People carry their national flags as they protest over President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to postpone elections and extend his fourth term in office, in Algiers People carry their national flags as they protest over President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's decision to postpone elections and extend his fourth term in office, in Algiers, Algeria March 15, 2019. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

By Lamine Chikhi and Hamid Ould Ahmed

ALGIERS (Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of people protested in central Algiers on Friday in the biggest demonstration against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's 20-year rule since unrest began last month.

Protesters crammed streets and squares in the capital after Friday prayers, many draped in Algeria's green, white and red flag. Demonstrations also took place in Bejaia, Oran, Batna, Tizi Ouzou and other cities.

"Bouteflika and his men must go as soon as possible," said Yazid Ammari, 23, a student.

Reuters journalists estimated the crowd at hundreds of thousands of people, though there was no police estimate. The number fell to thousands by late afternoon.

A statement from the Algerian national police (DGSN) said it arrested people involved in vandalism, theft and destruction of public and private property.

No heavy clashes were reported but the authorities said some 75 protesters were arrested and 11 policemen were slightly injured during the demonstrations.

Bouteflika on Monday reversed a decision to stand for another term after weeks of demonstrations against him, but he stopped short of relinquishing office and said he would stay on until a new constitution is adopted.

Algerians quickly rejected his offer and demanded that the 82-year-old president hand over power to a young generation of leaders who can create jobs and stamp out corruption.

"Those who think we are tired are wrong. Our protests will not stop," said doctor Madjid Benzida, 37, as police blocked streets leading to government offices and parliament.

Bouteflika has rarely been seen in public since suffering a stroke in 2013. Protesters say he is no longer fit for office.

The president has been losing allies in recent days since returning from medical treatment in Switzerland.

Hocine Kheldoun, a senior figure from the ruling National Liberation Front party, known by its French acronym FLN, said in an interview on Thursday night the long-ruling president was "history now."

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The remarks by Kheldoun to Ennahar television were another setback for Bouteflika, who hoped to pacify Algerians by promising to take steps to change a political landscape that has been dominated for decades by a ruling elite.

Kheldoun, a former ruling party spokesman, became one of the most senior FLN officials to break with Bouteflika publicly, saying the party had to look forward and support the aims of demonstrators.

Some parents brought their children to Friday's demonstration.

"I want a better future," said Mohamed Kemime, 10, draped in a national flag.

One of Algeria's most influential clerics appealed for patience.

"Lets be optimistic, Algeria needs to overcome its crisis," said Mohamed Abdelkader Haider from an Algiers mosque.

The new prime minister, Noureddine Bedoui, said on Thursday he would form a temporary government of technocrats and others to work towards political change, and he urged the opposition to join in a dialogue.

'GAME OVER'

A former minister who is familiar with Bouteflika's inner circle told Reuters that the president could not survive given the pressure building against him.

"Game over. Bouteflika has no choice but to quit now," the former minister said on condition of anonymity.

Algeria is a major oil and gas producer, but so far exports have not been affected by the unrest. Its biggest oil field Hassi Messaoud and its Hassi Rmel gas field have been operating normally, a source from state oil giant Sonatrach told Reuters.

Many Algerians say that the president and other veterans of the 1954-62 war of independence against France have neglected them for decades.

The military, which has traditionally played a behind-the-scenes power broker role, has distanced itself from Bouteflika and stayed in its barracks throughout the crisis. It is expected to retain influence under all scenarios.

Algeria was relatively untouched when the 2011 "Arab Spring" uprisings swept away veteran autocrats in the Arab world. Bouteflika and his allies, effective manipulators of the opposition, managed to avoid major unrest by spending oil revenue on popular programs, such as handing out low interest loans and housing.

Bouteflika helped to defeat a civil war against Islamist insurgents in which tens of thousands of people were killed in the 1990s, and many Algerians long accepted heavy-handed rule as the price of stability.

But the public has lost patience with deteriorating economic conditions and the FLN's failure to make the transition to a new generation despite the president's failing health.

(Additional reporting by Abdelaziz Boumzar, writing by Michael Georgy; editing by Angus MacSwan, Alison Williams and G Crosse)
Australian Christian preacher Colin Stringer delivering a sermon on 10 March, 2019, at the Star Performing Arts Centre as part of New Creation Churchs services. (PHOTOS: nccsg/Facebook)

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) did not receive information that Australian preacher Colin Stringer made any statements of concern during his sermon at the New Creation Church last Sunday (10 March), the MHA said in response to queries by Yahoo News Singapore.

A petition has been created to highlight Stringers offensive comments about other religions and call on authorities to ban him from preaching in Singapore. As of 8pm, it had over 280 signatures.

Jeremy Tan, who started the petition on Monday, wrote, He has made offensive statements about religions. Also, he has voiced vehement opposition to the separation of church and state in his home countryIn the interest of maintaining Singapores religious harmony, he should not be allowed to speak here again.

In an email statement, MHA confirmed that Stringer was granted a Miscellaneous Work Pass (MWP) to deliver the sermon in Singapore.

An assessment was done of his past sermons, including those he had given in Singapore (when he was granted MWPs to speak here) previously, said a ministry spokesperson.

Any foreigner who intends to deliver a talk in Singapore related to religion is required to apply for the MWP issued by the Ministry of Manpower, which will consult the relevant agencies including the MHA.

A quick online search showed that Stringer had made critical comments about other religions in a newsletter and on his blog.

In an article published in a newsletter entitled Volume 1 No. 3 subtitled Australia  Todays No.1 Mission Field, Stringer said Islam is a religion still bent on world conquest, through the weapons of oil and immigration  a modern invasion of the west.

He quoted a Rick Joiner (sic) in the article, It is a basic doctrine of Islam to subject the world to Allah, by either conversion or by force of arms (holy war). Nations are being added to the camp of Islam while they are being lost to Christianity. Unless we throw off the humanistic yoke that would restrain us from sharing our faith with foreigners because it may infringe upon their rights, we will be in danger of losing our faith to Islam which is not so restrained.

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In an entry on his blog, Stringer wrote, (T)he Gospel conveys the truth that there is only one way to God the FatherNot through Buddha, Islam not the New Age  but one way, Jesus.

The two links were taken down sometime this week but their cached versions are still accessible on the internet.

The blog currently consists of a single post published on Wednesday. The post indicated that Stringer and his wife are currently in Japan enjoying family time.

In their field of work, some people try to cause strife (sic) confusion and discord. Their love and respect for all people shines through in their every day (sic) lives, it added.

Stringer spoke at the Star Performing Arts Centre as part of New Creation Churchs English services at 8.30am, 11.30am, 2.30pm and 5.30pm last Sunday, according to a calendar of events on the churchs site.

He was previously engaged to speak in front of the churchs congregation on a number of occasions, including in 2009, 2016 and 2017.

Screen shot of New Creation Churchs website

Yahoo News Singapore emailed New Creation Church about Stringers comments on Monday and the church has yet to reply.

The MHA spokesperson said, The organising bodies inviting foreign religious preachers, regardless of faith, are under an obligation to advise these foreign religious preachers to avoid any actions or statements that may undermine our social cohesion and racial/religious harmony.

In March last year, American Christian preacher Lou Engle spoke at a conference in Singapore at the invitation of Cornerstone Community Church, where he made the remark about holding back the push of the new modern Muslim movement in Spain.

The incident prompted the MHA to investigate and the founder of the church to apologise to the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore.



The ministry has banned or rejected the applications of some Christian and Muslim preachers over the years, as recently as 2017.

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FILE PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump listen to questions from the media during the one-on-one bilateral meeting at the second North Korea-U.S. summit in the Metropole hotel in Hanoi FILE PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump listen to questions from the media during their one-on-one bilateral meeting at the second North Korea-U.S. summit in the Metropole hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam February 28, 2019. REUTERS/Leah Millis/File Photo

By Joyce Lee and David Brunnstrom

SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, a senior diplomat said on Friday, according to news reports from the North's capital.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States wished to continue talks with North Korea and had "every expectation" that its leader, Kim Jong Un, would stick to pledges not to resume nuclear and missile testing.

Pompeo gave no sign of U.S. willingness to soften its stance in demanding that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last month's summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in Hanoi, Russia's TASS news agency and the Associated Press reported.

"We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital.

The second Trump-Kim summit broke down over differences about U.S. demands for Pyongyang to denuclearize and North Korea's demand for dramatic relief from international sanctions imposed for its nuclear and missile tests, which it pursued for years in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Choe said Pompeo and U.S. national security adviser John Bolton "created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States", TASS reported.

Kim would make an announcement soon on his position on the denuclearization talks and North Korea's next steps, TASS quoted Choe as saying. She said Washington had thrown away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, AP reported.

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"I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger," AP quoted Choe as saying.

However, she added: "Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful."

Bolton told reporters outside the White House Choe's statement was "inaccurate." He said he had spoken to his South Korean counterpart but wanted to consult with other U.S. officials before responding further.

Bolton later accompanied Trump to a pre-arranged meeting with top defense officials at the Pentagon.

U.S. SEEKS MORE 'CONVERSATIONS' WITH NORTH

Pompeo told reporters it was not the first time he had been called "gangster-like" by North Korea. "And following that we continued to have very professional conversations ... I have every expectation we will be able to continue to do that," he said.

Pompeo said that in her remarks, Choe had left open the possibility that negotiations would continue.

"It's the administration's desire that we continue to have conversations around this," Pompeo said. "As the president said when he was in Hanoi, the offer that they made simply didn't rise to the level that was acceptable, given what they were asking for in exchange."

Kim had committed multiple times to Trump in Hanoi that he would not to resume nuclear or missile testing, Pompeo said. "That's Chairman Kim's word. We have every expectation he will live up to that commitment."

Pompeo told Fox News he did not want to forecast "what we will do or what we might do" if Kim were to resume testing, but added: "That would be most unfortunate. I think Chairman Kim understands that."

Trump has pointed to North Korea's freeze in nuclear and missile testing since 2017 as a positive outcome from nearly a year of diplomatic engagement with North Korea. He and Kim had previous exchanged fiery rhetoric that had raised fears of war.

Washington has said it is closely watching activity at a North Korean rocket site that U.S. think tanks have said could be preparations for a new launch.

Trump has made much of his personal chemistry with Kim and has said he would be "very disappointed" in Kim if North Korea were to resume testing.

South Korea, which has an ambitious agenda of engagement with North Korea that is dependent on Pyongyang and Washington resolving at least some of their differences, said it was too early to tell what Choe's comments might mean.

"We cannot judge the current situation based solely on Vice Minister Choe Son Hui's statements. We are watching the situation closely. In any situation, our government will endeavour for the restart of North Korea-U.S. negotiations," South Korea's presidential Blue House said in a statement.

Choe's comments echoed the North's usual rhetoric at tense points in its dealings with Washington. North Korea expert Joshua Pollack said North Korea may be delivering an ultimatum.

"They're putting down a marker, saying which way things are headed if nothing changes," Pollack, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said.

Joel Wit of the 38 North think tank said North Korea was likely toughening its negotiating position after the collapse of the Hanoi summit. "It is likely to gauge the U.S. reaction in the days ahead before making a decision to launch a rocket," he said.

Choe had said after the Hanoi talks that Kim might lose his commitment to pursue a deal with the United States after seeing it reject a request to lift some sanctions in return for the North destroying its main known nuclear complex.

In Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang urged patience and further dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

Earlier on Friday, a spokeswoman for South Korea's Ministry of Unification told a press briefing that the weekly inter-Korean meeting scheduled at a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, had been cancelled after the North Koreans said they would not be sending senior officials.

The spokeswoman said the ministry had not confirmed why the North Korean officials decided not to attend.

(Reporting by Joyce Lee and Josh Smith in Seoul and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Additional reporting by Choonsik Yoo, Ju-min Park and Joori Roh in Seoul and Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Jack Kim; Editing by Nick Macfie, Jeffrey Benkoe and James Dalgleish)
(Getty Images file photo)

The private information of more than 800,000 blood donors in Singapore was put online without authorisation by a Health Sciences Authority (HSA) vendor.

The database contained information such as name, NRIC, gender, blood type and dates of blood donations and did not contain other sensitive, medical or contact information, the HSA said in a statement on Friday (15 March).

The authority said preliminary findings show that a cybersecurity expert discovered the vulnerability and alerted the Personal Data Protection Commission on Wednesday.

HSA then contacted the vendor, Secur Solutions Group (SSG), to disable access to the database, and made a police report.

It noted that the cybersecurity expert had told the HSA that he does not intend to disclose the data that he had accessed, and is working with the agency to delete the information.

Preliminary findings by HSAs review of the database show that no unauthorised person other than the cybersecurity expert had accessed the database.

HSA had provided the blood donors data to SSG for updating and testing purposes. The vendor placed the data on a server that was accessible via the Internet on 4 January without putting adequate safeguards to prevent unauthorised access.

SSG did so without the HSAs knowledge and approval, and that the action was against the vendors contractual obligations, the HSA said.

The leak comes less than two months after the Ministry of Health (MOH) announced the online leak of confidential data belonging to 14,200 HIV-positive individuals and 2,400 others who were identified through contact tracing.

American citizen Mikhy K Farrera Brochez, 34, was fingered as the culprit behind the leak.

In July last year, the MOH announced that health records of 1.5 million Singaporeans, including Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, were stolen in a suspected state-sponsored attack, the countrys biggest ever data breach.

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Police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. (Reuters)

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said on Friday (15 March) that he was deeply shocked by the horrific terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch.

In a post on his Facebook page, Lee said that even though New Zealand is far away from the turbulence in the Middle East and the terrorists groups in Southeast Asia, it still experienced the attack.

It is a sombre reminder that terrorism remains a serious threat across the world, and that Singapore must be constantly vigilant and prepared. This heinous act is an attempt to spread fear and hatred, and create divisions within societies, Lee said.

Lee added that he is writing to New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern to express his deepest condolences to the families of the victims.

Singapore stands in solidarity with the people of New Zealand to strongly condemn such vicious acts of terror.

The attacks on the Masjid Al Noor and Linwood Masjid have left at least 49 people dead, said New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush at a news conference.

Lee also advised Singaporeans in Christchurch to stay safe and keep their families informed of their whereabouts.

Singapores Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) issued a statement to strongly condemn the terrorist attacks at the mosques in Christchurch. Singapore extends its deepest condolences to the victims and bereaved families, and wish the injured a speedy recovery, the MFA statement said.

The MFA and the Singapore High Commission in Wellington have reached out to all Singaporeans who are e-registered in Christchurch. Thus far, there are no Singaporeans injured in the shooting incidents. The authorities are providing assistance to some Singaporeans who have contacted MFA because their family members are in Christchurch.

The Singapore High Commission will continue to monitor the situation.

Singaporeans who need consular assistance can contact the following:

Singapore High Commission in Wellington

Tel: +64-4-470-0850

Emergency contact: +64-21-280-3161

Email: singhc_wlg@mfa.sg

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A weeklong blackout and ever-tightening US sanctions have nudged Venezuela's already declining oil production into an even steeper dive, experts say. Even before the massive, unprecedented power cut swept across the South American nation on March 7, Venezuela's outlook for its one vital export resource was grim, with the state-owned oil company PDVSA in default and under sanctions pressure. From April 28, US companies and citizens will be barred from dealing in Venezuelan crude, effectively cutting PDVSA off from its biggest customer. Oil expert Luis Oliveros said "not a barrel was shipped during the blackout," paralyzing the oil sector and marking "the start of a bigger cycle of deterioration." - Long decline - Venezuela's crude output has slipped for years, and in February was calculated by secondary OPEC sources to amount to a million barrels a day -- 142,000 less than a month earlier and a fraction of the 3.2 million barrels pumped a decade ago. Observers say the blackout's damage to the sector could trigger even more sharp cuts to production. It could go as low as 500,000 barrels a day, according to Asdrubal Oliveros, an economist and director of the economic analysis firm Econometrica, citing a report by British financial services outfit Barclays. Such a figure -- staggeringly low for a country with the largest proven oil reserves in the world -- would put Venezuela on par with minor OPEC member Ecuador, or non-member Romania. PDVSA has not revealed the impact of the electricity cut on its operations. It said only that it managed to meet domestic demand for gasoline after long lines of cars formed at service stations. On Thursday, however, more bad news hit the company when three storage tanks at a heavy-oil processing plant in the east caught fire. The government claimed it was a "terrorist attack" organized by arch-foe the United States. President Nicolas Maduro also blamed the blackout on US "cybernetic and electromagnetic attacks." Experts, though, discount that possibility and say chronic neglect of Venezuela's infrastructure means more dysfunction of the power grid and oil production will occur again. - US pressure - Bringing oil installations back online after the blackout will not be easy, Luis Oliveros said, explaining that knock-on effects would be felt for some time. "The damage to the (oil) wells, in some cases, are irreversible. And in others major investment will be needed to make them operational. The impact is going to be very hard," he said. According to oil sector monitoring firm Baker Hughes, Venezuela has 26 oil platform left functioning, down from 47 a year ago. In 2014, the number was 74. US President Donald Trump has intensified measures against Maduro's regime and PDVSA as he tries to swing support behind Juan Guaido, the head of Venezuela's opposition-ruled congress who is recognized as interim president by some 50 countries. The aim is to shore up Guaido and seek to shear away military chiefs and others who are propping up Maduro. After blocking PDVSA from getting new credit by issuing bonds, Trump has frozen PDVSA assets and accounts and started targeted companies dealing with it, including a Russian bank, Evrofinance Mosnarbank. "We think export revenues could fall to as low as $1 billion per month by year-end (from an average of $3 billion last year). That will make it very difficult for Mr. Maduro keep his inner circle intact," the economic research firm Capital Economics said in a briefing note.
An Indonesian man has been arrested for trying to smuggle 2,000 endangered pig-nosed turtles, police said, marking the latest wildlife-trafficking arrest as the Southeast Asian nation battles the vast trade. Authorities in Papua province said they seized 2,227 of the palm-sized turtles which were stuffed into boxes on a boat docked in the remote town of Agats. "Officers saw a port worker carrying three big boxes and got suspicious," Papua police spokesman Ahmad Musthofa Kamal said late Thursday. "This is protected species and they are not for sale." Following the discovery, police arrested another man believed to be involved in the trafficking bid. The port worker was not detained. If convicted, the arrested man could face up to five years in prison and a 100 million rupiah ($7,000) fine, police said. It was not clear where the turtle shipment was headed. The pig-nosed turtle -- which has a distinctive snout-like nose and webbed feet -- is only found in Australia and New Guinea, an island shared between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, and is protected under Indonesian conservation laws. Some turtle species are popular in China and elsewhere in Asia as food or for use in traditional medicine. In 2014, Indonesian officials rescued more than 8,000 baby pig-nosed turtles hidden in suitcases and thought to be destined for China and Singapore. This year, smugglers were arrested in neighbouring Malaysia with some 3,300 endangered turtles aboard their boat. Indonesia, an archipelago of some 17,000 islands, is home to a kaleidoscope of exotic animals and plants, but the illegal trade in wildlife is rampant and laws aimed at providing protection are often poorly enforced. Numerous endangered species, from the Sumatran elephant to the Javan rhino, have been driven to the brink of extinction.
A huge crowd of demonstrators marched through the Algerian capital for a fourth consecutive Friday to step up demands on President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to leave, rejecting his offer not to seek re-election. Men, women and children converged in a festive atmosphere outside Algiers' iconic main post office calling on the 82-year-old not to cling to power after scrapping an April presidential poll. Security sources said crowd numbers exceeded demonstrations a week ago that saw tens of thousands of people across the country take to the streets. Major protests were also held Friday in other key cities Oran, Constantine and Annaba, local journalists reported, as people nationwide vented their ire. The latest rallies were the first major test of whether Bouteflika has calmed public anger with his surprise announcement on Monday that he would not stand for a fifth term but was cancelling the upcoming election. "You pretend to understand us, we will pretend to listen to you," read a banner held aloft by the mostly young demonstrators. Bouteflika had initially sparked joy among protesters when he said he would not stand again, but his move to cancel the vote prompted accusations of "tricks" and sparked a new round of demonstrations. He has also named a new prime minister, replacing unpopular premier Ahmed Ouyahia with former interior minister Noureddine Bedoui, who on Thursday defended the postponement of the poll. Bouteflika, who uses a wheelchair and has rarely appeared in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, has promised a "national conference" to carry out reforms. The president said that new elections would be held "before the end of 2019", suggesting he may stay in office for months longer. - 'Stop the interference' - Friday's protest in Algiers was mostly peaceful but on the margins around a hundred youths threw stones at police in clashes that lasted around 30 minutes and left several people wounded. Afterwards dozens of young people armed with plastic bags cleaned up the streets, while in the city centre volunteers picked up rubbish after protesters went home at nightfall. During the demonstrations, many protesters criticised France's stance on the political crisis in Algeria, its former colony, accusing Paris of siding with Bouteflika. "France, 132 years is enough, stop the interference," read one banner, referring to the era of French rule before independence. "Macron, you are too small for today's Algeria." French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday welcomed Bouteflika's announcement but urged Algerian authorities to organise a "reasonable" transition from his rule. Algeria has largely avoided the turmoil unleashed by the Arab Spring uprisings that brought down rulers in neighbouring Tunisia and Libya. But discontent, particularly among the young, turned to anger after the veteran leader announced on February 10 that he would seek another term. Demonstrations have drawn tens of thousands for each of the last three Fridays, with smaller rallies taking place on other days. The protest movement has been led by students, in a country where half the population is under the age of 30 and youth unemployment has spurred anger against a government seen as out of touch. Several demonstrators on Friday said they had travelled from the Kabylie area, 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Algiers, and spent the previous night with friends in the capital to avoid roadblocks or bus stoppages. As at previous rallies after the weekly prayers, Algeria's ubiquitous red-white-green flag fluttered from windows and balconies of buildings leading to the city centre. - 'Ducked the real questions' - Algeria's new prime minister on Thursday sought to calm tensions ahead of the new demonstrations that could prove decisive for the protest movement. Bedoui warned at a news conference that the situation was "sensitive" in the North African country. People "must show calm and act peacefully", he said, calling for "dialogue" to resolve the situation. Incoming Deputy Prime Minister Ramtane Lamamra has said that Bouteflika's proposed national conference on political reforms should take place "as soon as possible". "The absolute priority is to reunite the Algerians and allow them to go together towards a better future," he said. "It's not about staying in power for a few weeks or a few months more." But El Watan newspaper on Friday fired back with a "Get Out" message to the new leadership, charging Bedoui had "ducked the real questions" facing the country. The assessment was also harsh on social media, with one commentator in a tweet sarcastically thanking Bedoui and Lamamra for their "efforts to keep Algerians mobilised" for Friday's protests. "Yesterday was the news conference of your prime minister and deputy premier, today is the news conference of the people," another critic of the regime wrote on social media.
BEIRUT (Reuters) - On the eighth anniversary of Syria's crisis, this timeline shows how the war flared, the country splintered, foreign powers waded in, peace-making efforts failed, and Russia eventually helped Damascus drive back rebels.

- March 2011 - The first protests against President Bashar al-Assad quickly spread across the country, and are met by security forces with a wave of arrests and shootings.

- July 2011 - Some protesters take up guns and military units defect as the uprising becomes an armed revolt that will gain support from Western and Arab countries and Turkey.

- January 2012 - A bombing in Damascus is the first by al Qaeda's new Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, which gains in power and starts crushing groups with a nationalist ideology.

- June 2012 - World powers meet in Geneva and agree on the need for a political transition, but their divisions on how to achieve it will foil years of U.N.-sponsored peace efforts.

- July 2012 - Assad turns his air force on opposition strongholds, as rebels gain ground and the war escalates with massacres on both sides.

- April 2013 - Lebanon's Hezbollah helps Assad to victory at Qusayr, a battle seen as halting rebel momentum and showing the Iran-backed group's growing role in the conflict.

- August 2013 - Washington has declared chemical weapons use a red line, but a gas attack on rebel-held eastern Ghouta kills scores of civilians without triggering a U.S. military response.

- January 2014 - An al-Qaeda splinter group seizes Raqqa before grabbing swathes of territory across Syria and Iraq, declaring a new caliphate and renaming itself Islamic State.

- May 2014 - Rebels in the Old City of Homs surrender, agreeing to move to an outer suburb - their first big defeat in a major urban area and a precursor to future "evacuation" deals.

- September 2014 - Washington builds an anti-Islamic State coalition and starts air strikes, helping Kurdish forces turn the jihadist tide but creating friction with its ally Turkey.

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- March 2015 - With better cooperation and more arms from abroad, rebel groups gain more ground and seize the northwestern city of Idlib, but Islamist militants are taking a bigger role.

- September 2015 - Russia joins the war on Assad's side, deploying warplanes and giving military aid that soon turns the course of conflict decisively against the rebels.

- August 2016 - Alarmed by Kurdish advances on the border, Ankara launches an incursion with allied rebels, making a new zone of Turkish control that it later extends in 2018 to Afrin.

- December 2016 - The Syrian army and its allies defeat rebels in their biggest urban base of Aleppo after months of siege and bombardment, confirming Assad's growing momentum.

- January 2017 - Russia, Iran and Turkey start talks in parallel to the faltering U.N. peace effort, but the opposition believes the results help Damascus consolidate its gains.

- March 2017 - Israel acknowledges having conducted air strikes against Hezbollah in Syria, aiming to degrade the growing strength of Iran and its allies.

- April 2017 - The United States launches a first cruise missile attack on a Syrian government airbase near Homs after a poison gas attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun.

- November 2017 - U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led forces defeat Islamic State in Raqqa. That offensive, and a rival one by the Syrian army, drives the jihadist group from nearly all its land.

- April 2018 - The Syrian army recaptures eastern Ghouta, before quickly retaking the other insurgent enclaves in central Syria, and then the rebels' southern bastion of Deraa in June.

- September 2018 - A Russian-Turkish deal over Idlib and the rebel-held northwest freezes the front lines, but jihadists seize control of much of the area and violence continues.

- March 2019 - As its local allies take Islamic State's last area in the east, the United States decides to keep some troops in Syria after earlier saying it would pull out, reducing the chances of a security vacuum that might spark a new bout of fighting.

(Compiled by Angus McDowall; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Apart from Uber, we also have updates from Ofo, Mswipe, and a cyber security bill in Thailand

Uber plans to kick off IPO in April  Reuters

Ride-hailing giant Uber is set to kick off its initial public offering in April, according to an exclusive report by Reuters.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the report said that Uber will issue its required public disclosure (S-1) and launch investor roadshow next month.

The company is set to hit public markets immediately after its competitor Lyft began theirs at the end of March. The two companies had filed confidential paperwork for the IPO at the same time in December.

Uber has declined to comment on the matter.

Singapore extends deadline for Ofo to remove bicycles  Tech In Asia

Singapores Land Transport Authority (LTA) has extended the deadline for bike-sharing service Ofo to remove its bicycles from the country, from its original deadline of Wednesday this week, Tech In Asia reported.

During this extension period, Ofos license will continue to be suspended.

An LTA spokesperson said that the agencys decision was influenced in part by the companys success in implementing the countrys new QR-based parking regime, which requires bike-share users to scan a QR code to confirm they have parked their dockless cycle in a designated area.

The company has also informed LTA that it is in advanced stages of negotiations to partner its Singapore unit with a third party.

In February, Ofo had its operators license suspended for failing to comply with updated regulatory requirements for bike-sharing services, particularly due to its lack of progress in QR-code parking integration and failure to ban users who repeatedly park outside designated zones.

Also Read: Todays top tech news, March 14: SoftBank, Toyota in talks to invest US$1B in Ubers self-driving unit

Indias Mswipe raises US$31.7M  Economic Times

India-based mobile point-of-sales (POS) company Mswipe raised around INR2.2 billion (US$31.7 million) in a new funding round from its existing investors, Economic Times reported.

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The investors list included US-based hedge fund Falcon Edge, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin-promoted B Capital Asia, technology investment firm Epiq Capital, and DSG Consumer Partners.

The funding round followed the companys Series D funding round in 2017 when UC-RNT Fund and existing investors invested around INR2 billion (US$28.8 million) into the company.

Thai cyber security bill raises criticism  The Bangkok Post

Thailands new cyber security bill, which was introduced just weeks ahead of the countrys first democratic elections since 2014 military coup, has raised criticism for the possibility that it might be used to curb political dissent, Bangkok Post reported.

Authorities have already penalised scores of journalists, politicians, activists, academics and students under vaguely worded legislation. This new law would entrench the stifling political climate cultivated by the military government, said Katherine Gerson, a Thailand researcher at Amnesty International.



Image Credit: Jimi Filipovski on Unsplash

The post Todays top tech news, March 15: Uber plans to kick off IPO in April appeared first on e27.
Israel said Friday its aircraft had struck dozens of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rockets from the Palestinian enclave, including rare fire toward its economic capital Tel Aviv. The escalation followed weeks of growing tensions and came at an especially sensitive time ahead of Israel's April 9 elections. As the polls approach, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is widely believed to want to avoid a fourth war in the Gaza Strip since 2008 -- but the exchange of fire again showed the risks. Quiet returned to Gaza and Israel on Friday morning. UN and Egyptian officials were in contact with both sides "to prevent the situation from spinning out of control", a source with knowledge of the discussions said. Organisers of weekly Friday protests along the Gaza border fence, which have been accompanied by violence, announced they would be cancelled -- the first such move since they began nearly a year ago. Four Palestinians were wounded in the Gaza strikes, the enclave's health ministry said, while no Israelis were reported injured. Explosions could be heard throughout the night in Gaza and fireballs lit the sky. In the bustling coastal city of Tel Aviv, sirens wailed late Thursday in scenes reminiscent of the 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants. Rocket fire toward Israel's southern communities near the blockaded coastal territory is common, but Tel Aviv is rarely targeted. Police said Friday they found remains of one rocket in an uninhabited area "in central Israel", with media reports saying the second fell into the Mediterranean. - Hamas denies responsibility - Both Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, and its ally Islamic Jihad denied they were behind the rocket fire towards Tel Aviv. But Israel's military said they were launched by Hamas. Israel has long said it holds Hamas responsible for all violence from Gaza, controlled by the group since 2007. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday the Gaza militants attacking Israel were "armed and financed by their puppet masters in Tehran". "We stand by our ally. Israel has the right to protect its citizens," tweeted Pompeo, who is due to travel soon to the Jewish state. On Friday, Israeli media reported the military's preliminary assessment was that the rockets were fired by mistake during maintenance work -- a sign Israel was seeking to calm tensions. A military spokesman declined to comment. Islamic Jihad said Friday that Palestinian militants would hold fire if Israel did the same. A delegation from Egypt, which has acted as mediator between Israel and Hamas, was in Gaza before the strikes and reportedly left after warnings. Israel said its aircraft hit around 100 Hamas targets, including a complex allegedly used by the group to coordinate militant operations in the occupied West Bank. Another was "the main manufacturing site of standard-grade rockets in the Gaza Strip", an underground location, it said. A security source in Gaza said dozens of strikes targeted bases belonging to both Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A position belonging to Hamas's military wing, near its leader Ismail Haniya's family home on the outskirts of Gaza City, was damaged, with rubble strewn across the road, an AFP journalist said. Hamdi, 22, who works in a bakery in Gaza, said "since the morning very few people have come compared to normal Friday mornings. People are afraid of bombs - like in a war." - Rocket interceptions - Gaza residents reported a number of rockets fired back at Israel in response. Sirens rang out in southern Israel early Friday and the Israeli military said it identified four "launches" from Gaza. Three were intercepted by missile defence systems, it said. Since Thursday night, around 10 rockets were fired from Gaza. Almost daily exchanges between Israel and the Palestinian territory have threatened a wider escalation in hostilities over the past few weeks. It comes as the one-year anniversary of mass protests and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border fence approaches on March 30. An informal truce between Hamas and Israel had led to relative calm, but recent weeks have seen another uptick in violence. Netanyahu warned Sunday that Israel would not hesitate to launch a "large-scale operation" in Gaza if provoked. His main election rival, former military chief Benny Gantz, accused Netanyahu of letting Hamas and other Gaza militants dictate "the agenda". "We have to regain the initiative, implement a harsh and consistent policy against Hamas," he said at the Gaza border.
The United States on Friday clashed with China at the UN Security Council over Beijing's Belt and Road initiative, saying the infrastructure investment scheme had "known problems" with corruption and debt distress. The US-China spat soured negotiations on a resolution on Afghanistan, forcing the council to adopt a temporary rollover of the UN mission there for six months instead of a year. Beijing's flagship initiative, which aims to develop new trade routes through major infrastructure projects such as airports and roads, has been described by critics as Chinese expansionism. US Acting Ambassador Jonathan Cohen accused China of demanding that the resolution highlight the Belt and Road initiative "despite its tenuous ties to Afghanistan and known problems with corruption, debt distress, environmental damage, and lack of transparency." Cohen bluntly accused China of holding UN negotiations hostage "by making it about Chinese national political priorities rather than the people of Afghanistan." China shot back, with Deputy Ambassador Wu Haitao telling the council that Cohen's remarks were "at variance with facts and fraught with prejudice." "This is an initiative of economic cooperation aimed at achieving common development and prosperity. It has nothing to do with geopolitics," said Wu. The sharp exchange came as the United States and China are locked in negotiations aimed at ending a trade war that has left businesses struggling with tariffs on billions of dollars in two-way commerce. The UN resolution on the Afghanistan mission has contained language on cooperation with the Belt and Road initiative since 2016. The US insistence that the call for cooperation with the Chinese initiative be dropped from the resolution followed sharp criticism last year by Vice President Mike Pence who said the program had left countries drowning in debt. The United States has sought to challenge the Chinese scheme but the initiative continues to draw support. On Monday, Italy said it would sign a memorandum of understanding to officially support the Belt and Road Initiative. More than 123 countries have signed agreements to cooperate with China under the program, Wu said.
Residents of Addition Hills in Mandaluyong City queue to receive water distributed on water tank truck and fire trucks on March 15, 2019. (Photo: NOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty Images)

By Andreo Calonzo and Cecilia Yap

The Philippine Senate will investigate a worsening water shortage in the capital region that has spread to the main business district in Makati City and will likely last for months.

Officials from Ayala Corp.s Manila Water Co. Inc., whose tens of thousands of customers have been hit by water interruptions since the first week of March will face a probe on March 19, Senator Grace Poe said in a statement. Manila Water, which supplies half of the capital region, said the situation will return to normal when the rains come.

The interruptions lasting as long as 12 hours initially affected only dozens of villages. It has escalated to entire cities including Manila and Quezon City with longer outages. Some districts have gone without water for several days.

We are calling this investigation because the public is already thirsty for the truth, now that they dont have water to drink and clean with, Poe said.

Highlights

More areas, including parts of Makati City will have no water supply for six hours to almost an entire day starting Wednesday, Manila Water said in on its Facebook page. Officials from another water concessionaire, Maynilad Water Services Inc., as well as from government agencies have also been invited to the hearing, Poe said. President Rodrigo Duterte is preparing an order for closer coordination of government agencies to address the problem, Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles said in a separate statement. Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said in a briefing Wednesday that the shortage would have been prevented if the China-funded Kaliwa Dam south of the capital was built earlier. Billionaire Enrique Razon is also offering to build another dam.

Manila Water

Shares of Manila Water fell 3.7 percent, its lowest close since Nov. 27. In an exchange filing, Manila Water said it needed to adjust operations after forecasts made at the end of 2018 showed water in La Mesa Dam may reach the critical level of 69 meters, where it can no longer draw sufficient volume. Demand surged after it announced supply interruptions last week. La Mesas level has dropped to a 21-year low, ABS-CBN reported on Thursday. Manila Water said earlier this week that the shortage was caused by rising demand and delays in the operation of its Cardona water treatment plant that was supposed to augment supply. The start of summer aggravated supply woes. Angat Dam in Bulacan province is Metro Manilas main water source, providing about 4,000 million liters a day. Of that, 40 percent is allocated to Manila Water (which draws the Angat water supply from La Mesa Dam). The rest is given to Maynilad, which serves a bigger portion of the metropolis. Manila Water said the 1,600 million liters daily from Angat is no longer enough so new sources must be developed.

 2019 Bloomberg L.P
In the Polisario headquarters in Tindouf, Brahim Ghali and his lieutenants are holding their breath in view of the situation in Algeria, as the fate of the separatist front is linked to that of the Bouteflika regime, which faces unprecedented popular protests.

The Polisario leaders concern has even increased since President Bouteflika announced his decision not to run for a 5th term and the postponement of the presidential election of April 18th. Actually, Algerian demonstrators no longer require the departure of Bouteflika after 20 years in power only, but also demand the end of all the rotten system surrounding this regime.

Protesters are not lured by the announcements made by the ailing and impotent president. They know this is a mere trick to end the protests and extend his fourth term. Therefore, the demonstrators continue their protests in the capital Algiers and in other cities of the country.

Shortly after the Presidents announcement, the Arabic hashtag leave means leave began trending on Twitter and protesters are also demanding the resignation of the new Prime Minister, Noureddine Bedoui, and Deputy Prime Minister Ramtane Lamamra.

The students remain the spearhead of the protest, which also brings together teachers, lawyers, judges, opposition and demonstrators from large sections of the population.

Calls for huge demonstrations on Friday (March 15) are circulating on social networks.

Thats why, the Algerian rulers and their Polisario puppets are in cold sweat.
No show is more alert to the innate selfishness of children than Better Things, the loosely autobiographical FX comedy from star and co-creator Pamela Adlon. A slice-of-life series that remarkably distills the essence of its protagonists (affluent, semi-bohemian, drained-to-the-bone) existence into mood-driven vignettes, the critical darling never feels realer than when Adlons Sam, a single parent and working actress, contends with one of her three difficult daughters. The trickiest is eldest Max (Mikey Madison), a teenage brat whose explosive temper and conspicuous beautynot to mention the slimy males it attractsdrive Sam crazy in equal measure. The most impressive is middle child Frankie (Hannah Alligood), a precociously political, possibly genderqueer loner on a mission to find her mothers weak spots and brutalize them as efficiently as possible. The sweetest is elementary schoolage Duke (Olivia Edward), the baby of the family who Sam can relax the most around, but whose innocence is occasionally revealed as an act to curry her moms favor.

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Currently in its third season, Better Things is dedicated to Adlons own daughtersaffectionately, notwithstanding the fact that Max, Frankie, and Duke (the older two, especially) are frequently monstrous in their narcissism and thoughtlessness. In the shows first episode, Max sulks because Sam wont buy her weed: Dont you want me to have clean, organic pot? You should want me to have good nugs. Frankie sneers in Season 2, Actresses have a shelf life, and Ive got to hand it to you, it is astonishing how long youve been able to stretch it out. Youre working well beyond your expiration date. At the end of that season, Max asks her mother to throw her a party, complete with underage alcoholand for Sam to not attend. As she usually does when her daughters demand the preposterous, Sam relents. In a different episode, Max apologizes for being a total bitch lately. Sams response falls neatly within the lines of her pushover parenting style: Thats OK. I can take it.

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Better Things was co-created and heavily influenced by Louis C.K., whose own Louie explored the dating and parenting travails of an entertainer in formally loose, episodic bursts. Like his artistic hero, Woody Allenhold the jokes, pleaseC.K. garnered sympathy for his misanthropic, lovelorn protagonist by making him the only reasonable man left in New York.

Similarly, Better Things frequently frames Sam as the only adult in the room, dutifully bound to wrangle her three wayward kids, as well as her gently unhinged mother Phil (Celia Imrie). Hers is a story of maternal martyrdom, of nailing herself to the cross every day if it brings another half-second of joy to one of her children.

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All of which makes the central question of Better Things: Are Sams daughters to-be-tolerated pains in the ass, or are they spoiled hellspawn whose mild sociopathy is never acknowledged by their mom? Adlons portrayal of the trio isnt one-dimensional; every so often, the show features moments of tenderness and gratitude toward Sam from her daughters. But the majority of the scenes with Max, Frankie, and Dukeand Sams willingness to silently put up with whatever bullshit they fling at hermakes Adlons fictional persona less like the everymom shes clearly intended to be and more a victim of her own making. Were supposed to relate to Sams willingness to give until shes got nothing left, but thats hard when all I wanna do as a viewer lately is scream at her, Grow a spine! Learn what boundaries are! It wont traumatize your kids if you yell at them once in a while!

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Yes, teenagers are notoriously tough to parent. Yes, every parent has their own child-rearing approach. But the more times that Sam lets her daughters walk all over her and declines to explain why their behavior crosses a line, the more I wonder if were watching a show about a frazzled mom or a hostage who doesnt realize she can free herself, if only temporarily. Id like to root for Sam, and everything about Better Things makes it clear that thats what Im supposed to do. But fair or not, its hard to believe in someone who wont help herself.
This recipe originally appeared on Food52.

I make the same damn salad every night. Even though Ive gathered many far more delicious and interesting ones over the years, night after night I toss together arugula, lemon, olive oil, and salt with one hand and claw it onto our platesonly because it fills the green gap in any dinner, and I dont have to fire up a single extra brain cell.

Given my requirements, it took this forcefully simple green salad to shove me out of my workday rut. And even though the recipe comes from the other side of the world, Ive found it fits just as neatly into my routine as my snoozy pile of arugula.

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As Georgia Freedman was gathering recipes and stories in the Yunnan province of China for her recent cookbook Cooking South of the Clouds, she encountered many salads in this style, but learned this particularly gripping one from Tusheng Shiguan (Native Foods) restaurant, founded by Yang Lifen to support the farmers surrounding Kunming, the provinces capital city. The resulting recipe solves at least two major salad problems, and takes precious little effort to get there.

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The first major salad problem (MSP1) is the sad lettuce impasse, when you get to the market and every last head of red leaf and sack of spinach is looking limp and uninspiring. At Tusheng Shiguan, the kitchen uses a rotating cast of locally foraged greens, including one thats a close cousin of the carrot (without the sweet, carrot-y root)so Freedman adapted the recipe to work with the bushy carrot tops that so many of us throw away. (No, despite what you may have heard, the greens are not poisonous.)

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All you have to do to take carrot tops from unruly to proper salad is to give them a blanchaka a dunk in boiling water, rinse, squeeze, and chop. This trick works well with other hardier leafy greens too, or other cold, cooked vegetables, tofu, or meats in the genre of salads known as liang ban. With decent lettuce no longer a prerequisite, this breaks our green salad options on any old night wide open. MSP1, overcome.

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The second major salad problem (MSP2) is our desire to make a balanced, just-right vinaigrettefastthat will inspire us to eat heaps of otherwise plain vegetables. You might have your favorite ratio of vinegar to oil (and I have my lemon), but this dressing offers another, more exciting path.

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Its just four ingredients with far more personality than straight oil and acid: the funky-sweet pow of black vinegar, the salty umami of soy sauce, the heat of garlic and fresh chile. Though this style of salad is common across China, the garlicky, tangy dressing specific to this region is Freedmans favorite. I can see whyonce it burrows into the cooling, parsley-like flavor of the greens, you could easily eat a whole bushel.

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For the best moments to serve this salad, Freedman recommends richer meals that need a bright pick-me-up, in a similar spirit to the vinegary slaws that lift up the weight of barbecue. She mentioned roast chicken and, from one memorable visit to a local ham-maker in Eastern Yunnan, stir-fried ham with fried potatoes and garlic chives. But Id also recommend it any time youre resenting your own every-night salad and ready make the break.

 6 cups packed (1 pound) carrot greens

 5 teaspoons Shaanxi vinegar (or substitute Chinkiang black vinegarsee note)

 4 teaspoons light soy sauce (see note)

 1 tablespoon minced garlic

 1/2 teaspoon minced fresh Thai chiles

See the full recipe on Food52.

More from Food52:

4 Make-Ahead Salad Strategies for Busy Weeks (& Better Meals)

This Genius Smashed Chickpea Salad is Vegan, Big-Batchable Comfort Food

A Secret Weapon for Super-Quick Salad Dressing

Mujadara with Collard Greens

Quinoa-Red Lentil Risotto With Asparagus & Peas

Berardinos Crispy Pancotto
This post was published in partnership with Wirecutter, the site devoted to finding the best gear and gadgets. Every product is independently selected by the Wirecutter team. We update links when possible, but note that deals may expire and prices are subject to change. If you buy something through our links, Slate and Wirecutter may earn an affiliate commission.

By Kevin Purdy

Wirecutter

Thanks to the 2017 tax bill, taxes are different this yearand so are our recommended online filing apps. We think H&R Block Free is best for people whose taxes are simple, without itemized deductions, consisting of any combination of a W-2 job, basic investments, kids, and student loans. The company also offers H&R Block Free File for people who make less than $66,000 and are under age 51 but have more complicated taxes.

If you have mortgage interest or other deductions still worth itemizing (instead of your taking the new, nearly doubled standard deduction) or high-deductible health insurance, and you make more than $66,000, we recommend starting with TurboTax Deluxe. For everything more complicated than that, we suggest finding a tax professional.

Our pick

H&R Block Free covers the most potential free filers since it handles student-loan interest with no additional fees and has no income cap. And it has become much friendlier to use: Its interview process, explanations, interface, and support have improved over our five years of testing, and all of these features are now nearly as good as those of our previous frontrunner, TurboTax.

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The higher standard deduction (PDF) starting with the 2018 tax yearthe taxes you pay in 2019 to cover income from the year 2018means that most households (around 90 percent, according to estimates) wont have an incentive to itemize. Among tax software, H&R Block is the most versatile choice for the vast majority of people taking a standard deduction.

If you need to itemize, have a 1099-MISC form, paid medical bills with an HSA, or otherwise have a form not included in H&R Block Free (PDF), you might still be able to file free with H&R Block Free File. Its the same software as H&R Block Free, but it removes nearly all form limitations.

But to use H&R Block Free File, you have to make $66,000 or less in adjusted gross income (income after adjustments such as student-loan interest but not before deductions), and you must either be under the age of 51, be active military, or qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit.

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Aggravatingly, its nearly impossible to find a path into H&R Block Free File on the companys website; the clearest way to get there isnt through H&R Blocks homepage but rather via the IRS website. But this filing option could save money for the right filer.

If you made more than $66,000 in gross income this tax year, and you have HSA contributions, or enough itemized deductions (such as mortgage interest) to skip the standard deduction, you cant file for free with H&R Block. In this case you should start your filing process with TurboTax Deluxe.

Our pick

What TurboTax Deluxe covers:

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 everything H&R Block Free covers

 itemized deductions (Schedule A)

 mortgage interest credit (Form 8396)

 HSA contributions for high-deductible health insurance (Form 1099-SA)

 freelancing or side income over $600 (1099-MISC)

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What TurboTax Deluxe doesnt cover:

 deductions and expenses for self-employment or freelancing (Schedule C)

 capital gains and losses (Schedule D)

 rental-property income (Schedule E)

If you can itemize more homeowner, medical, or childcare expenses than the standard deduction ($12,000 single filers, $24,000 joint married), if you took in some side income without being a full-time freelancer, or if you need to write off contributions to an HSA account, the free version of H&R Block is not suitable, as it doesnt support those situations. If you made less than $66,000 in gross income, you could file with H&R Block Free File; otherwise, we recommend TurboTax Deluxe because its interview, interface, and support are better for sussing out deductions and entering a lot of forms.

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If youre not sure whether you need to start with Deluxe, thats okayyou can start with TurboTax Free Edition and upgrade only if you need to.

That recommendation doesnt extend to folks with self-employment concerns, capital gains or losses, or rental property to figure out. If thats you, especially in this new tax year, we recommend finding a tax professional.

Our pick for self-employed and complicated returns: A Certified Public Accountant (CPA)

A good tax professional can handle:

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 self-employed filers and small businesses with deductions, inventories, or employees

 investors with complicated portfolios and tax strategies

 income from partnerships or small companies with K-1 forms

 big life events such as getting married or divorced, sending kids to college, or receiving inheritance

 advice for future tax planning

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If you own a business or freelance full-time, if you manage rental property, or if you have investments more complex than interest or dividend payouts, we think you should hire a tax professional, especially this year.

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A pro can catch deductions you may not have considered, save you time, ensure that you dont pay a penalty over a button you didnt click, and set you up to better save money in future tax years.

Hiring a tax professional will likely cost you more than filing online, typically at least $50 more than the fees for software, depending on where you live and your tax situation. But the pro enters your data for you, and their pricing is often transparent and based on individual forms rather than on broad packages you might not need. Even if you can fit your tax forms into H&R Block Free File and its $66,000 income limit, we think a tax professional is worth the forward-looking advice and certainty.

Why you should trust us

Wirecutter writer Kevin Purdy has run his personal taxes through tax software each year from 2014 through 2016, and now again this year. He spent five years as a freelance writer, co-owned an LLC business, organized an annual not-for-profit event, and is married with a mortgaged house and some investments. He has a few years of experience in maximizing his deductions, keeping revenues straight, writing off relevant expenses, and working with professional accountants to cover every contingency.

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Editor Mark Smirniotis is no stranger to tax forms. Before e-filing was mostly mandatory, he did his taxes by hand because it was more fun that way. Mark also worked as a freelance bookkeeper and served as CFO of a growing manufacturing and e-commerce business. In addition to previously testing and reviewing tax software for Wirecutter for the 2016 tax year, he has written or edited reviews of other financial products, including cash-back and travel rewards credit cards, pet insurance, and budgeting apps.

The writers and editors of Wirecutter Money have collectively written about and edited personal finance content for nearly 20 years, including in-depth coverage of consumer tax topics.

Who this is for

Taxes are for everyone, but not everyone should use the same tools to pay them. Most people, of any age, have concerns about filing their taxes. Its understandable, because taxes involve a lot of it depends qualifiers, especially with more complicated situations that call for a variety of deductions.

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Despite that, many people can use relatively simple forms to file, and tax software makes the task even simpler.

Heres who our guide can help:

Simple filers

Both H&R Block and TurboTax let you file your federal and state taxes for free if your taxes are simple enough to fit in the new simplified 1040 form (that is, you have just W-2 income to deal with and dont have loan interest or freelance side gigs to account for). H&R Block also allows more forms through its Free File offering, but with an income limit. The companies behind these free services ultimately hope youll sign on for extra services, or that your future returns will require more complicated, expensive filing.

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Filers with more than one source of income

If you have a more complicated life and expensesincome outside your primary job, education loans or expenses, home ownershipyou can also file online and save yourself some close form reading. However, doing so may cost you between $50 and $100, depending on which forms you need.

Filers with substantial income from atypical jobs

If you have substantial income from places or work other than a typical jobfull-time freelancing, running your own business, owning rental properties, or having substantial investmentsyou have a more complicated decision to make.

Most of the services weve tested or recommended can handle these scenarios. If youre confident in your bookkeeping and you have experience filing taxes for your operations, online tax software may work for you.

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But with the changes to income taxes in tax year 2018, we think more people should consider hiring a CPA or tax professional they can meet with face-to-face (or at least by videoconference). Although the online tax flow mimics the process by which tax professionals interview their clients, according to CPAs weve interviewed, software has limitations: For example, it cant hear the uncertainty in your voice or guess that, based on where you live, you might be due a historic-renovation credit.

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Not only can a tax professional help you pay the least (or get refunded the most) right now, but their guidance and advice can also set you up to better track your expenses and possibly save you money the following year. Online services can get expensive for complicated tax returns, and you may find that a local CPA adds a lot of value for sometimes as little as $50 more.

How we picked

This year we tested a total of seven contenders (two more than in the 2017 tax year):

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 TurboTax and TaxAct, our picks from last year

 H&R Block, an unavoidable name in tax preparation

 eSmart Tax, a product of Liberty Tax, another nationwide vendor

 TaxSlayer, a particularly low-priced app that sees notable revisions each year

 Credit Karma, which files taxes for free if you sign up for its service (funded by referral fees on customized financial-product pitches)

 FreeTaxUSA, a prior bare-bones pick, on the advice of some Wirecutter readers and commenters

For each one, we prepared returns for three fictitious profiles. Each of these fake people had complexities aimed at the different levels of tax software (free, Deluxe, and Self-Employed, in particular). We also tailored each profile to see how each app handled and explained the newest tax changes.

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Under the hood, every tax software platform fills the same IRS forms and uses the same math to calculate the amount you owe or your refund. But we consider several key distinctions in determining which service to recommend over another:

 Accurate, effective interview and guidance: The best tax-prep suites identify both common and uncommon circumstances in your life and show you the relevant buttons and questions to catch the necessary stuff while discarding irrelevant bits. Its a difficult balancing act.

 Clear, accessible language: Friendly prompts and jargon-free explanations go a long way toward accurate numbers and a stress-free experience. We took note when we encountered screens filled with unexplained tax terms or vaguely labeled fields, and we gave credit when software made it easier to understand something tricky.

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 Variety of supported forms and clarity of pricing: People with the simplest returns can expect to file for free with any major tax app. Everyone else will have to choose which level of service they need to buy into, or at least which level to start with. We prefer apps that cover more situations in lower price tiers, and we strongly dislike those that hide upsells and additional fees until youre deep into the process.

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 Interface and design: If a tax app is poorly made and hard to use, it doesnt just cause annoyanceit can produce errors that cost money. People tend to click from screen to screen when they become bored or locked into routines, and they also tend to scan long lists (such as deduction categories), and thats a bad scenario for tax filing. In tax software, everything should be labeled unambiguously, and bugs and glitches warrant demerits.

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 Service and support: Thorough and well-written help screens are crucial when youre uncertain about what counts and what doesnt for income and deductions. You should be able to find clear answers to common problems quickly. Some services offer live chat or, at higher cost levels, on-demand support from a CPA or EA. Where possible, we test these support services, too.

 Niceties and year-round help: Most people want to use a larger screen to enter their taxes, but mobile apps can be convenient. Uploading filled-out tax forms with a camera scan, for example, is quick and easy. Some tax apps integrate with banks and employers to offer automatic import of employment income, bank interest, or even investment gains and losses.

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You can find other platforms that allow you to file simple income tax returns for free under the IRS Free File program, but we didnt test much-lesser-known services. Free is free, and our picks are, at the least, a known quantity.

How we tested

For the 2018 tax year, we created fictional profiles of people with interesting tax situations and filled in as much backstory and detail as necessary to move through the entire tax-filing processsave actually submitting the returns to the IRS.

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Our fictional filers:

 Freddie Freebie makes $32,000 and is a Florida resident who works for a freight-delivery firm. He has a bank account and no health insurance (and will pay a penalty for the 2018 tax year). We also checked to see if he could still file for free if he had student loans and used HSA money.

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 Mark and Mary Middleclass make $50,000 each, working in office jobs. They own a home and have two children (one needs daycare), plus work-provided health insurance, retirement accounts, and some small investments.

 Tabitha Taxable makes $150,000 running her own event-planning business in Massachusetts, uses her car for work, and has a home office. She also has student-loan debt and investments, and buys health insurance through a state marketplace.

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We ran Freddie Freebie through the free-filing options of all seven tax sites we tested. As a result, we dismissed FreeTaxUSA, TaxSlayer, and eSmart Tax without further testing (more on why in the Competition section). We then ran Mark and Mary Middleclass through the remaining four candidates. Finally, we used Tabitha Taxable and her complicated return to decide between our last two potential picks (and to retest TaxAct after it went through a redesign during our testing).

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We screen-recorded each filing and noted any glitches, annoying pop-ups and upsells, and moments where we were entirely unsure how to proceed.

We expected the actual refund amounts to be the same and noted when one of the tax sites gave a different result. Even when the error was our own fault or concerned a detail of our fake filers we hadnt yet figured out, we looked to the help or support section of each site to evaluate those functions.

With the tax changes taking effect in 2019 for the 2018 tax year, we looked closely at how each service communicated those changes. We wanted to see highlights on the new rules and credits as well as explanations of the changes, especially if they affected the refund amount.

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We primarily used a desktop computer to test. Using a mobile app to file your taxes with any of the big names is possible, and sometimes even fine. But if you have access to a laptop, a desktop, or even a tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard, youre better off using that instead, as youre less likely to be distracted by a notification or to miss something hidden in a cramped interface.

Our pick for simple returns and no income restrictions: H&R Block Free

What makes this software great

We think most people should use H&R Block Free because it offers support for student-loan interest in its free version and has no income restrictions.

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If you make less than $66,000, and are also under 51 years old, active military, or claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, you can file nearly any form with H&R Block Free File. The two confusingly similar offerings cover a lot more free-filing scenarios than nearly any competitor. Aside from the different income and form limits, the software behind Free and Free File is the same.

TurboTax may still have a slight interface edge, but student-loan interest kicks even the simplest returns into its $80 Deluxe tier, which simply isnt worth the money given H&R Blocks improved free offerings.

If you start out with H&R Block Free but discover forms (such as for HSA contributions) or deductions that demand an upgrade to H&R Block Deluxe, theres no need to start over and switch to our other pick. H&R Blocks Deluxe package isnt as excellent as TurboTaxs Deluxe package, but its still good and useful.

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Our favorite tax software offerings have always stood out for helping you learn what information you need to enter, and not just being an electronic version of an IRS form. H&R Blocks software will confidently get your information into the right spots.

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It hides rare items in screens you can grasp at a glance and confidently dismiss when appropriate. For example, after you fill out a W-2 section, H&R Block says that corrected, nonstandard, and active-duty military W-2s are uncommon, instead of just presenting checkboxes for you to indicate that one of those situations applies to you.

When youre done with a W-2, it asks if you need to tell us about any additional income and advises you to click Yes if youre not sureit will help you figure that out later.

Compare that experience with the typical approach of less-known competitors such as TaxAct: That software drops you into a 15-item list of potential incomes to choose from and hides the common 1099-INT form (PDF), to report interest income from a bank, under a vague taxable interest income header.

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When its time to deal with deductions, H&R Block suggests the most common items at the beginning of the section rather than making you start from a long, brain-numbing list.

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Although H&R Block has a list of deductions, it breaks them up with easy-to-grasp icons, regular-language examples, and the names of the actual forms you might have piled on the desk next to your mouse. That arrangement makes it easier to know what to look for and harder to miss what you didnt know you needed to include.

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A great tax-prep app also helps you prevent mistakes. H&R Blocks software was the only tax app that stopped us because our middle-class fake filers had strange and possibly erroneous withholding amounts.

After we entered a fake W-2 for Freddie Freebie in Florida, it noticed that our stated wages eligible for federal withholding were the same as the amounts eligible for Social Security and Medicare withholdingthose last two should be lower.

H&R Block also did a better job than other tax apps (save TurboTax) of telling us about deduction limits and rules before we entered a bunch of numbers. It can save you time by ruling out a possible deduction before you bother to tally and enter your receipts.

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Navigation is a weak point in a lot of tax software, but the best ones are clear about what youve completed, what you still need to do, and how to go back and correct something. H&R Blocks interface is a clean, uncluttered tool that doesnt leave you guessing where you should go next.

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An overview menu is always available from the three-dot menu in the upper-right corner, just underneath buttons for the help sidebar and a box that shows your filing cost (which goes up if you upgrade to Deluxe or add more states where you received income).

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Every time you finish a section, you can jump back to any part to edit something without getting caught in a loop or leaving something unfinished. H&R Block remembers every section you visited, even if you didnt finish filling it out.

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As you work through your return, H&R Block offers little blue help prompts everywhere you might need one, and they stand out from the gray and green of the app. Clicking one brings out a sidebar that explains pretty much anything and also lets you search to find more detail.

H&R Blocks in-app help, which you can access by clicking a blue question in the text or the help button in the upper right, covers granular items (the legal definition of a second home, for example) and big-picture questions (Once you get married, is it best to itemize?).

It doesnt offer answers from community users, as TurboTax does, so it fails to catch some alternate phrasings of questions. Generally, though, H&R Block avoids jargon and explains what it can about tax laws and strategies. Other apps, in contrast, sometimes lack explanations of confusing items or, worse, use frustrating tautologies.

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Any tax-prep software collects a lot of sensitive information about you, and in the past, tax filings have been subject to fraud and scams. Most major companies have gotten better about securing their platforms, but few offer specifics about their tactics.

H&R Block broadly explains its security practices as involving bank-level encryption technology and inspections by top security firms, which is about what we expect from tax software. It verifies your account and offers two-factor authenticationa practice we strongly recommend for any online accountincluding an option to use a six-digit authenticator app.

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Were not convinced that mobile apps add a ton of value to online tax prep, but H&R Block and most other major tax appsincluding TurboTax, TaxAct, Credit Karma, and TaxSlayeroffered us the choice to import our W-2 using a mobile app for iOS or Android. (FreeTaxUSA and eSmart Tax had no mobile apps that we could find.)

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Once you log in to the app, you can snap a picture of your form with your phones camera, and the app automatically processes and enters the numbers into the software. But H&R Blocks app, like the others, can import only your W-2 form, which isnt hard to input manually.

If H&R Block says you need Deluxe to file an HSA 1099-SA form, to make deductions related to owning your home, or to report substantial charitable donations, you should stick with that version.

But if you need more schedules or forms, and the software prompts you to move up to the Premium or Self-Employed edition, we think you should find a tax professional. Considering this years new tax laws, its a good idea to talk out your taxes and strategize for the year ahead.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

As with TurboTax, H&R Blocks pricing is based on broad categories (such as best for homeowners) rather than prices for individual forms or schedules, so you cant be entirely certain that youll really be able to file for free. This kind of Oops, you need to pay more upgrade also crops up in TurboTax and, to a lesser extent, TaxAct. But one exception in our testing of H&R Block was notable.

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On H&R Blocks site is a list of forms (PDF) you can supposedly file with the free version. We found that the 1099-MISC form, which freelancers (or anyone who earned $600 that wasnt salary, hourly wages, or tips) would receive, was listed as covered in late January 2019.

However, if you try to enter that form, it triggers an upgrade to H&R Block Premium, the $50 (plus $37 for each state) version. A representative for H&R Block confirmed to us that 1099-MISC was not covered in the free edition and thanked us for bringing that typo on the forms support list to our attention.

Add to that confusion the fact that H&R Block has two different free-filing options: the Free version prominently displayed and linked around its site, and another version offered through the IRSs Free File Alliance, named Free File. We spent at least a dozen hours on H&R Blocks site for this years guide, and we never saw mention of Free Filea commenter alerted us to H&R Blocks Free File offering with a higher income cap after this guide was first published.

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A free offering that allows almost every major tax form is generally a good thing. But if you start filing through H&R Blocks Free File and exceed the income or age limits, you arent offered their Free edition, even if youd qualify for that. Youre instead asked to pay for the normally third-tier Premium, which cost more than $70 when we tested in early February. We asked an H&R Block customer service rep through online chat if they could switch one of our accounts with too much income from Free File to the Free edition and were told we would have to set up a brand new account and that all the info you have inputted will not be transferred over. So if youre not sure that your adjusted gross income is under the $66,000 limit for the Free File program, be ready to pay up or start your return over.

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We still think H&R Block Free and Free File cover more scenarios than TurboTaxs no-cost equivalent (and TurboTaxs own very restrictive Free File offering), and it has a better interview and interface, which together recommend it over other competitors.

If youre not sure whether the free version will let you file with the forms you need to deal with, check the PDF lists of covered federal and state forms.

H&R Block advertises the Deluxe version as best for homeowners, which might confuse someone into signing up for Deluxe even if this years standard deduction will total more than their itemized mortgage interest and real estate deductions.

The wording gets even more vague when the software forces you to decide whether youre a freelancer or self-employed. Thats partly why we recommend a tax pro over the more expensive versions of either of our software picks for such situations.

H&R Block is a bit better than TurboTax about upsells, as it doesnt ask you Are you sure? after you decline to upgrade, and it doesnt ask about add-on return storage at all. But you can still expect a couple of interruptions while youre filling out your free tax return, often at the end of each major section or if you hit a form not included in your price.

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If you upgrade the H&R Block software only to realize later that you didnt need to, its help section claims that you can downgrade your account while retaining your data. (This is unlike the situation with TurboTax, which states that you cant downgrade but can start over.)

Like TurboTax, H&R Block also tries to sell its Deluxe package with the promise of six years of access to your return. But your best option is to save the PDF when youre done and then store it yourself (preferably with an online backup service).

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The biggest complaints we have about both H&R Block and TurboTax are indirect but important. In 2016, H&R Block and TurboTax parent company Intuit spent $3 million and $2.5 million, respectively, on federal lobbying.

The companies have spent millions for at least a decade before that, fighting bills that would instruct the IRS to send US residents copies of the return numbers the agency already has on filea change that would lead to drastically simplified taxes that most people could simply verify to file.

More people will be able to file for free this year with H&R Block and TurboTax because of the larger standard deduction, which will make itemizing and schedule filing unnecessary for somebut most people could file for free if tax-prep companies didnt win over politicians.

Our pick for HSAs or itemized deductions: TurboTax Deluxe

What TurboTax Deluxe covers:

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 everything H&R Block Free covers

 itemized deductions (Schedule A)

 mortgage interest credit (Form 8396)

 HSA contributions for high-deductible health insurance (Form 1099-SA)

 freelancing or side income over $600 (1099-MISC)

What TurboTax Deluxe doesnt cover:

 deductions and expenses for self-employment or freelancing (Schedule C)

 capital gains and losses (Schedule D)

 rental-property income (Schedule E)

What makes this software great

If you put money into an HSA this year to pay for medical expenses (Form 1099-SA), if you have a 1099-MISC from freelancing or a job you do in addition to your main gig, or if you know youre going to itemize your taxes for mortgage interest or other write-offs, you should start with TurboTax Deluxe. TurboTax was our top online tax-app pick for five years in a row because its interview process, support, and interface are the best in the category.

If youre not sure whether youll actually itemize your homeowner or charity expenses, and you dont have student loans or side income (1099-MISC forms), you can start with TurboTax Free Edition and upgrade to Deluxe if you need to (you wont have to start over). If you make less than $66,000 and are under the age of 51 or are active military, however, consider H&R Block Free File before jumping into TurboTax.

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TurboTax continues to do a better job than other tax apps of asking you questions that are easy to understand, offering further explanations for any terms or calculations that might confuse you, and telling you whether each thing is a common concern or a rare issue.

For our fake filers Mark and Mary Middleclass, TurboTax was the only suite we tested that specifically asked if we had paid any money into an FSA account for daycare, something we hadnt considered while setting up the fake kids. Other apps allow you to enter this amount, but TurboTax created context by bringing the question to the surface during our dive into childcare rather than showing it as part of a huge list of potential deductions.

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Since tax time can be stressful even for the most organized people, in our testing we paid extra attention to tax software that offered reassuring guidance throughoutand we found that using TurboTax can feel like collaborating with a professional.

At the end of each section of questions, TurboTax (like H&R Block) helpfully shows how your entries affect your refund. The math isnt revelatory, but this feature isnt something that every app offers, and it gives you a chance to catch any glitches or typos. Almost all the other software we tested, minus H&R Blocks, simply shoved us forward to the step for filing state forms, without explaining the numbers.

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Clicking any of the numerous question-mark boxes inside TurboTaxs Web app pops out a box, from the right side of the browser window, that usually covers what youre wondering about. The search function should cover most everything else, as TurboTax staff and community members have answered a litany of questions about the smallest of details.

TurboTax also does a great job of keeping you engaged in the process and preventing you from mindlessly clicking past important details. Its entry forms switch between boxes that look like nicer IRS forms, nested lists of categories you can explore, animated loading screens, and yes-or-no or multiple-choice questions.

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In our tests, most other tax apps (FreeTaxUSA and eSmart Tax most egregiously) had runs of five or more similar questions asked in succession, or very long lists of dozens of deductions or topics to click.

TurboTaxs flow made the most sense and had the least errors, very rarely dumping us back to a menu when we hit Back, and never trapping us in endless deduction loops.

These are all small things that other tax software companies could easily replicatebut those companies dont seem to care as much about letting customers know where they are and where theyre going.

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Although most major tax software has added features to reduce data-entry time (and errors), TurboTax also does the best job of helping you skip data entry entirely. If your employer, bank, or investment service is a TurboTax partner (or uses TurboTax for payroll), you can import your W-2, bank interest, and dividend statements by logging in to those services within TurboTax.

The list is extensive, and youll find some big names, including ADP, Kronos, and Workday payroll, as well as banks such as Ally, Bank of America, and Chase. No other tax software we tested offered this kind of automatic account import.

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Although H&R Block caught us entering seemingly erroneous withholding data, TurboTax also called us out twice for suspicious entries while we filled out our fictitious returns. Once, TurboTax noticed that the deductions for both Mark and Mary Middleclass and Tabitha Taxable looked like round numbers plugged into a spreadsheetbecause they were.

Later, TurboTax noticed that we slipped up and typed in that Tabitha had paid $30,000 in estimated state taxes alreadyTurboTax suggested that was a pretty big and unusual refund. Catching such data-entry errors can mean saving considerable money, either by snagging you deductions youre owed or by avoiding penalties for taking ones youre not.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

TurboTax didnt take the top-pick spot this year because the companys free edition forces you to upgrade to Deluxe to file for student-loan interest. Many people may need certain forms beyond whats offered for free, but the exclusion of student loans seems egregious given that 30 percent of all adults have student debt and the percentage is probably higher among people looking to save money by filing their taxes for free online.

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We asked TurboTax about not covering student loans and 1099-MISC in its free edition. A TurboTax representative wrote in reply that, in light of the new 1040 form and its broken-out schedules, TurboTax Free Edition is designed for taxpayers that only file the new 1040 tax form without the new schedules and existing schedules. This means that the millions of taxpayers who can claim the standard deduction, Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit can easily file their federal and state taxes for free.

TurboTax doesnt go out of its way to let you know this up front. It acknowledges that student-loan interest isnt covered for free on its price-comparison page, but that detail is tucked inside a pop-out box. The site also has a search tool that specifies which package covers which tax form, but that too requires a few clicks to access.

Still, if you know youll need other forms for HSA payments, side income, or itemized homeowner deductions that will kick you out of H&R Blocks free version, TurboTax Deluxe is a better fit.

TurboTax offers two-factor security on accounts, encrypts your stored data (though it doesnt provide details on your datas access or its level of encryption), and emails you when your account changes or someone uses a new device with it.

We would have liked to see TurboTax offer two-factor authentication through a one-time code or a security key rather than the relatively insecure SMS. But its still a decent level of protection for a modern tax app.

Our pick for small-business owners and complicated returns

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What a good tax professional can handle:

 self-employed filers and small businesses with deductions, inventories, or employees

 investors with complicated portfolios and tax strategies

 income from partnerships or small companies with K-1 forms

 big life events such as getting married or divorced, sending kids to college, or receiving inheritance

 advice for future tax planning

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Considering the major revisions to tax laws for the 2018 filing year, anyone whose tax needs take them beyond the Deluxe level of TurboTax should strongly consider hiring a tax professional. Not only can a pro accurately capture all your deductions, but they can also set you up for future tax strategies and savings. You also dont have to do any form-by-form price comparison or hope that you fit inside an income or age capa tax professional takes whatever you have, and most charge you based on the complexity of your situation.

The average cost for a professional ranges from $176 for federal and state returns with no itemized expenses to more than $450 for a business owner who itemizes, according to the National Society of Accountants. That might make even the nearly $140 cost of TurboTax Self-Employed look appealing.

But along with regional price differences, you have many factors beyond sticker price to consider.

Having prepared fake returns for three filers 14 times in our testing, we know that returns with more forms and complications present a much greater chance for error.

For our free-filing guy with a W-2 and a checking account, we arrived at the same refund amount on his federal return with each tax app. Our middle-class couple with kids, a house, and retirement accounts got the same numbers with two out of three apps; we caught a missing local real estate tax credit that one app had not made easy to find. However, for the self-employed woman with complicated finances, who had income in two states plus dividends and a business with a lot of expenses to deduct, we got three different numbers with three different apps, in both the federal and state returns.

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Most self-employed types wont fake-file their returns in three different apps, but whos to say which return amount was correct? How much did the interface of each app affect which deductions or income questions caught our attention?

This is the kind of situation where sitting down with a tax professional pays off. A good tax-pro session can feel like financial therapy, except for the part at the end where you hand them a stack of documents and they sort through everything much faster than you ever could.

Tax professionals will also prompt you to send them any documents that you mention you might have, and you can often consult them during the year with questions that may become important next year (although this service may carry an additional cost).

The competition

Credit Karma

We liked Credit Karmas tax service, especially for relatively simple returns. Thats in large part because Credit Karma doesnt charge anything for any level of complexity, federal or state.

You pay by signing up for a Credit Karma account, which then allows the service to use your financial data for targeted financial-product advertisements. Using Freddie Freebies simple tax return, we arrived at the same numbers as in all the other apps. Credit Karmas mobile and tablet apps are particularly useful, allowing you to do everything available through the desktop app on mobile, or to use the app as a sidekick for uploading forms.

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When we filed for our middle-class couple, Credit Karma looked less polished. Help tools sometimes pointed to the IRSs own documents to explain things or essentially used tautologies.

For example, when Credit Karma asked if Mark and Mary had dependent-care benefit items to enter, we clicked a ? button. The explainer said, Select yes if you carried forward dependent care benefits from 2017 and/or forfeited dependent care benefits this year. Googling this topic led us to the IRS publication on the matter (PDF), and opening that file triggered an immediate sense of horror and dreadand little in the way of reassuring help with our fake filers taxes.

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Unlike TurboTax and H&R Block, Credit Karma didnt stop us from filling out whole form sections only to discover that, as with out-of-pocket medical expenses, they wouldnt apply unless they constituted more than a certain percentage of our income.

These are not insurmountable problems, especially if you know your taxes well and want to save on a filing fee. But we think most people are better served by using H&R Block Free or using TurboTax Deluxe for medium to complicated taxes rather than filing their medium or seriously complex taxes with uncertainty.

Other tax software we tested

TaxAct, our former budget pick, remains a strong lower-cost contender, but with the changes in tax laws that mean more people can file with H&R Block at no cost, its simply less appealing to use a more formlike tax app for filing to save money, especially on moderately complicated taxes.

TaxAct has added a mobile app for scanning and uploading documents, and it sometimes provides strong explanations for tax terms.

But its flow can slow you down, and its help can be comically poor. When we entered a dividend form, TaxAct asked if the issuer was an investment or entity that invest, at least partially, in U.S. Government, state, or municipal securities which would be exempt from federal and/or state tax. It offered no help for that question, and although the wording may be straight off the tax form, no other tax app stopped us in our tracks while filling out that section.

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TaxSlayer, like TaxAct, competes with TurboTax and H&R Block in its Classic and Premium tiers, with an interface that seems to improve a bit every year we test it. But its still not comparable to TurboTax.

Some sections ask whether you want to Quick File to type in forms just as they look on paper or to get guidance from questions. If you choose one but change your mind, hitting Back takes you back only one question, not back to the interface option. We ended up in a loop entering deductions for our free filer more than once.

The interface doesnt change during some long sections, asking you the same text questions with Yes or No options over and over. That kind of design potentially lulls people into ignoring things or racing to get through what feels like boilerplate questions that are all No answers.

FreeTaxUSA (a budget pick years ago) and eSmart Tax both have bare-bones interfaces, a scant amount of jargony help, and few features that help you import forms, discover deductions you hadnt considered, or otherwise do more than enter your forms in a slightly more organized fashion than the IRS offers on paper.

Sources

1. How tax reform changed deductions, Fidelity, January 14, 2019

2. How did the TCJA change the standard deduction and itemized deductions?, Tax Policy Center

3. Millennials Fear Filing Taxes More Than Most Americans, NerdWallet Survey Finds, Nerdwallet, February 17, 2016

4. About Form 1040, U.S. Individual Income Tax Return, IRS, December 14, 2018

5. Lisa Rein and Jonnelle Marte, Hackers stole personal information from 104,000 taxpayers, IRS says, The Washington Post, May 26, 2015

6. Jessica Huseman, Filing Taxes Could Be Free and Simple. But H&R Block and Intuit Are Still Lobbying Against It, ProPublica, March 20, 2017

7. National Society of Accountants Reports on Average Tax Return Preparation Fees, National Society of Accountants, January 27, 2017

Read the original article on The Best Tax Software.

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.
At least 49 people were killed at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday. The suspect who has been arrested in the attacks appears to have decorated the weapons used in the killings with white-supremacist iconography and written online that his acts constitute a defense of the white race and/or the West against Islamic invaders. The paranoid belief that such a conflict exists, which was once a fringe position in U.S. politics, has become almost commonplace in recent yearslargely thanks to Donald Trump, his advisers, and his allies.

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In 2014, then-Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon, whod go on to serve as Trumps campaign chairman and as a White House adviser, appeared at a Catholic Churchconnected conference to discuss what he described as the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict between the Judeo-Christian West and jihadist Islamic fascism. Bannon said the threat of ISIS and other global jihadist movements had to be taken in context with the long history of the Judeo-Christian West[s] struggle against Islam, and that every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didnt act. On at least three occasions, Bannon has praised the foresight of a 1973 novel called The Camp of the Saints in which whites in Europe and the U.S. are violently oppressed by invading armies of nonwhite refugees. The (white) author of the novel once said he believed the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, to extinction.

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While Bannons 2014 comments arguably implied a distinction between radical and normal Islam, the Trump campaign that he joined in August 2016 drew no such lines, repeatedly portraying Muslims in the U.S. as a fifth column. In December 2015, Trump called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States after the San Bernardino, California, mass shooting, a call that he reiterated when 49 people were shot and killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. (The shooter in Orlando was Muslim but had in fact been born on Long Island.) In a speech he gave about the Pulse massacre, Trump criticized Florida and San Bernardinos Muslim communities, asserting (with, it hardly needs to be said, no supporting evidence) that those communities had known in advance that the perpetrators were bad but didnt turn them in. Shortly before Bannon became campaign chairman, Trump suggested that Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of an American soldier who died in Iraq, supported terrorism.

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After Trump took office, his speechwriter Stephen Miller collaborated with Bannon to create the first version of the so-called travel ban, an executive order which shut down travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries on national security grounds. That order was struck down in courts; a revised version of the ban, which is less restrictive and targets non-Muslim countries as well, is still in effect. In 2017, Trump gave a speech in Warsaw in which he asked rhetorically whether the West had the will to surviveto protect our borders and preserve our civilization against threats from the south that include radical Islam. Miller was reportedly also the driving force behind a Trump push to restrict legal immigration by cutting the number of visas allotted to shithole countries in Africa and increasing the number given to places like Norway.

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Throughout Trumps campaign and presidency, he and his son Don Jr. have frequently engaged online with enthusiasts of the so-called alt-right who espouse the belief that whites are justified in maintaining political dominance by virtue of cultural and/or genetic superiority. This belief is sometimes accompanied by claims that laws and norms which allow for increasing nonwhite populations constitute a slow-motion white genocide, a phrase that appears in both the New Zealand shooters writing and in the handle of a Twitter user Trump once retweeted. Its a concept embraced by one of the presidents most outspoken allies in Congress, Iowa Rep. Steve King, who has said that we cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies and that if we dont defend Western civilization, then we will become subjugated by the people who are the enemies of faith. King was stripped of his committee assignments in January after he told the New York Times he didnt understand why it was considered offensive to be a white supremacist, but Trump never criticized the remark.

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Trumps defenders will no doubt argue that every mainstream political belief system has its own extreme offshoots. What makes Trumps connections to white nationalist attackers unique, however, is that hes the one who made white nationalism mainstream. Even George W. Bushs aggressively anti-terror administration enforced a distinction between radical and peaceable Islam, and getting caught endorsing racial hierarchies was until recently something that even Republicans had to resign over. Trump took a politically dormant, race-obsessed subcultureone that has been strongly associated, both historically and in recent times, with violenceand demonstrated that its ideas could still support a national figure. He shouldnt be able to argue that he comes from the respectable, morally acceptable wing of the American nationalist movement, because such a thing doesnt exist.
Words from a vile manifesto, written by an Australian, have been floating around the internet following the New Zealand terrorist attack that saw 49 people killed at mosques during Friday prayers.

It calls Islam a savage belief and the religious equivalent of fascism. Worldwide, Muslims are killing people in the name of their faith on an industrial scale, it reads. The entire religion of Islam is simply the violent ideology of a sixth century despot masquerading as a religious leader, which justifies endless war against anyone who opposes it and calls for the murder of unbelievers and apostates.

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But it wasnt written by the alleged shooter, Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant. It was written by an Australian politician.

Just incredible: As 49 Muslim worshippers lay dead in New Zealand, a sitting Australian senator blames the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand. pic.twitter.com/13w7aAK8IR  Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) March 15, 2019

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Sen. Fraser Anning also tweeted, even before Fridays death toll was public, Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence? That link is Fraser Anning, and people like him.

Anningthe Aussie Steve King, perhapsis a now-independent senator who is too racist even for the extremely racist party that elected him. Elected in 2017 as a One Nation party replacement candidate (after free speech crusader Malcolm Roberts was caught up in the citizenship debacle), Anning chose to sit as an independent, then opted to join another fringe party, until he was kicked out of that one too, for his infamous speech calling for a final solution to the Muslim immigration problem.

His latest comments have been roundly condemned by everyone in Australian politicsby the prime minister, the recent exprime minister, the soon-to-be prime minister. Prime Minister Scott Morrison tweeted that Annings comments were disgusting and have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament.

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Of course, they shouldnt have a placebut they do.

Anning and Tarrant may be extremists, but they are extreme representatives and undeniable products of a racist Australian cultureone that is at best quietly tolerated and at worst wildly stoked by politicians, not to mention a Rupert Murdochfueled mass media. Whether its demonizing asylum-seekers, demonizing African youths, demonizing Indigenous Australians, or demonizing Muslims, racism is insidious in the mainstream culture.

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Note that while Annings 2018 final solution speech was condemned, he wasnt removed from Parliament over it. A man who made an approving Hitler reference remains an Australian senator, a tacit endorsement of his bigotry. Politicians are falling over themselves to condemn Anning now, amid another open show of racism, but there seems to be no rush to condemn the dog whistle kind going on in the media every single day.

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The alt-right has a strong presence Down Under, inviting figures like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak and holding fascist ralliesone of which Anning defended attending earlier this year. (Anning was also expected to address a meeting of neo-Nazis with Hitler fan Blair Cottrell later this weekend.) Its alive and thriving online, a community that Tarrant was reportedly a part of. This report dives into one of the favorite memes of the Australian far right, one recently used by Tarrant both on the forum 8chan and on Twitter. It shows a highly stereotypical Aussie bloke, wearing Outback get-up, brandishing the bottle of a popular Aussie beer, with the caption hold still while I glass you. The same meme is frequently used by the Dingoes, an online group known for anti-Semitic views. Lest you think this is a murky subculture, a onetime Labor Party leader has appeared on the Dingoes podcast. That leader, Mark Latham, is now a One Nation candidate.

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Latham, admittedly, has fallen far in the years he has been out of politics. But this excellent tweet thread from Guardian columnist Jason Wilson, who covers the far right, chronicles the horrific racism even mainstream figures have engaged in. Remember when the Australian Senate almost passed a literal white nationalist meme? he tweeted. Remember all the free media Milo and Lauren Southern got? Remember African Gangs? Remember white farmers? Remember the Soros conspiracy theories during the SSM referendum?

I dont speak for all Aussies when I say I was not surprised to learn the shooter in the mosque attack was an Australianbut I do speak for many. Tarrant may have been radicalized online, but he was emboldened by the words surrounding him on national platforms, by right-wing commentators writing in major newspapers that a tidal wave of immigrants sweeps away our national identity (this from one of the most well-known journalists in Australia). His article was called The Foreign Invasion. Tarrants manifesto is called The Great Replacement.

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Other parts of Tarrants manifesto echo words by other public figures. Australia, you may recall, is not in Europe, but Tarrant refers to himself as European and treats Australia as an outpost of Europe. One recent former prime minister seems a little obsessed with Australia being part of the Anglosphere, while Anning was ultimately kicked out of his second party for continuing to distinguish between European and non-European migration.

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The nationality of the other suspects has not yet been revealed, so its hard to speculate on any extent to which New Zealands own alt-right was involved. I often tell Americans that New Zealand is Australias Canada, a better, more progressive version of Australia with a reputation as a welcoming place. The relationship between white and indigenous New Zealanders is much better than that of many colonial societies, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. Ironically, the National Front, a far-right group with only about 1,000 members, is said to have been influenced by the Canadian alt-rightthe Lauren Southerns and Stefan Molyneuxes and Jordan Petersonsto adopt a pseudo-academia, clean-cut appearances. New Zealand journalist Paula Penfold spoke to i24 on Friday, saying that while New Zealand is not known for hate crimes or mass violence, there has been knowledge of white supremacy in Christchurch for some decades now. Weve never seen violence like this, but there is a sense now that this is a situation that has been building.

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As Joshua Keating noted Friday, New Zealand has had one of the fastest-growing immigration populations among developed countries in recent years, much of it from Asia. This has led to at least some political backlash, with [Winston] Peters New Zealand First party calling for immigration restrictions and accused of fomenting racism. Police clashed with right-wing nationalists who rallied outside the Parliament in Wellington in 2017.

The world is again in shock, but its no surprise that Tarrant was Australian. After all, as he wrote in his manifesto, he was a regular white man from a regular family. So true.
CHRISTCHURCH, New ZealandOn Feb. 22, 2011, Christchurch, New Zealands second-largest citymy homewas hit by a devastating earthquake. When the dust settled, 185 people were dead and tens of thousands of buildings and homes were demolished or otherwise made unlivable. For weeks, there were tanks on the streets; for years, the central city was cordoned off from its citizens.

Just before 2 p.m. on Friday, a gunman entered the citys largest mosque and started massacring innocent people. It was the busiest time at the mosque, with as many as 300 people in the building for Friday prayers. About 7 kilometers to the east of the Al Noor Mosque, a gunman entered the Linwood Mosque and started doing the same. Police are being cautious about releasing information, but what we do know is that 41 people were killed at Masjid Al Moor, a further seven at Linwood, with another person dying at Christchurch Hospital to bring the death toll to 49. With an unknown number of injured currently being treated, that number is likely to rise.

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It should have been a day of hope and optimism. That afternoon, the citys main gathering point, Cathedral Squarein the central business district, just on the other side of Hagley Park from the mosquewas filled with a cacophony of school uniforms and handmade placards as children assembled for the school climate strike. With a mix of anger and joy, determination and optimism, thousands of young New Zealanders rallied to show their fears for the future of the planet. As the event wound down, police came into the square and asked people to dissipate. At first, it was thought that they were just trying to break up a protest, a case of overvigilant policing at a peaceful event. Then, as those in the square started turning to their phones, hints of the unfolding tragedy traveled in whispers around the crowd.

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All the students who were bunking off school soon found that they couldnt go backall the schools were on lockdown. The news first suggested that a few shots had been fired; in a country so unfamiliar with shootings, let alone mass shootings, a report of any shots being heard would be enough to close nearby schools. There was nothing yet to suggest the seriousness of the incident. As the afternoon went on, the scale of the horror would slowly reveal itself. Christchurch residents were asked to stay indoors. Many had no choice, with businesses and council facilitiesas well as the schoolscontinuing the lockdown. Some followed the news on TVs or their phones, finding out what was happening in their city at the same time as the rest of the country, and indeed the world.

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Christchurch is a city that has known trauma. The quakes are a wound that has left permanent marks, not only on the landscape, but on the people who walk upon it. Mental health services have struggled to cope with the lingering effects of that tragedy. But ultimately, nature is blameless. This attack traumatizes the city and its residents in a new, yet more awful way, because it was perpetuated by people: People who are angry, scared, threatened, and radicalized. Racists. White nationalists. Heavily armed cowards.

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On the eighth anniversary of the earthquake, less than a month ago, there was a creeping optimism in the air. Alongside the new buildings and landscaped promenades, a small but important step: Christchurch has started to resettle refugees, a process that had been halted since the quakes. During the recovery period, rehoming migrants was seen as a lower priority than fixing roads and houses, but as that process was largely complete, it could resume again. As Rachel OConnor, the migration manager for the Red Cross, said, This is an important milestone in the Christchurch rebuild as the city is ready once again to say refugees are welcome.

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We all want to believe in that version of Christchurch, a vibrant city thats recovering and greeting new residents with open arms, that values its citizens and communities of every faith. On Friday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to a shocked nation, talking of what she saw as this countrys values: We represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values, refuge for those who need it. Those values will not and cannot be shaken by this attack. I think we all want to believe that those words hold true. Yet at the same time, there is now a suspicion that under our facade as a safe, tolerant country, there lies a violent, reactionary undercurrent, only too happy to prey on our naivete.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson completed her sentencing of Paul Manafort for federal charges earlier this week, and the Manhattan District Attorneys Office wasted no time indicting the former Trump campaign chairman on 16 additional counts for state crimes. The indictment seemed calculated to prevent Donald Trump from letting a potential confederate off the hook with a presidential pardon, while the timing allowed for the federal prosecution to fully conclude. (I have been suggesting this state-action backup strategy in Slate since July 2017.) District Attorney Cyrus Vance was quickly showered with praise (including, initially, from me). After more closely reading the indictment, though, most of the charges seem to violate New Yorks double jeopardy law.

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In ignoring the spirit, and possibly the letter, of these double jeopardy provisions, Wednesdays state charges could result in a damaging setback for New Yorks civil liberties and the rule of law.

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At least nine, but probably 11 or 12, of the 16 counts seem to substantially overlap with Manaforts federal conviction in August for defrauding Citizens Bank, leaving just four or five more minor charges pertaining to his involvement with a second bank. Its unclear whether Lender #1 in many of Vances charges is Citizens Bank, but it sure looks like those charges are related to the Citizens Bank loan. Whether Lender #1 is Citizens Bank or another bank assisting the same loan, it seems like Vance is trying to prosecute Manafort for the same transaction and the same basic offense for which he was already convicted. (The New York County District Attorneys office declined to provide comment on the case.)

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To be clear, this is not a matter of federal constitutional law. The Fifth Amendments rule against double jeopardy permits successive federal and state prosecutions for the same acts and offenses based on the doctrine of dual sovereignty. The Supreme Court is reviewing this doctrine now in Gamble v. U.S.. But even if this rule remains in effect, many other states have their own double jeopardy rules, and New York has one of the most stringent ones in the country. New Yorks provision has some exceptions that could conceivably allow this sort of prosecution to go forward. Here is that statute and its relevant exceptions:

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2. A person may not be separately prosecuted for two offenses based upon the same act or criminal transaction unless: (a) The offenses as defined have substantially different elements and the acts establishing one offense are in the main clearly distinguishable from those establishing the other; or (b) Each of the offenses as defined contains an element which is not an element of the other, and the statutory provisions defining such offenses are designed to prevent very different kinds of harm or evil; or  (e) Each offense involves death, injury, loss or other consequence to a different victim.

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In New York, jeopardy attaches after a guilty plea, a conviction, or an acquittal. The problem in these cases is that if a Trump co-conspirator is convicted or pleads guilty but then receives a pardon, that co-conspirator cannot be tried again for the same crime in New York and many other state jurisdictions. Even though presidential pardons dont affect state law, federal prosecutions do affect state law in states with such double jeopardy rules, and that creates a kind of immunity if a pardon is strategically timed after the conviction.

As I have noted, in Manaforts trial, a lone pro-Trump holdout juror actually backfired on the former political strategist, because those hung juries preserved bank fraud charges for state prosecutors, particularly in Illinois and California. And Manafort could also face state tax charges.

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However, I did not expect New Yorks state prosecutors to bring charges for the same underlying facts of the bank fraud for which Manafort was already convicted. In the August trial in the Eastern District of Virginia, Manafort was convicted of defrauding Citizens Bank for a $3.4 million loan on his New York condo on Howard Street. He had been renting out the condo, not living in it, but the bank would have given him a bigger loan if it was his residence. He lied and filed false claims through much of 2016.

The new indictments under the states mortgage fraud statutes appear to be primarily about this same transaction. At least nine of the 16 counts, and seemingly 11 or 12, are related to a completed loan in 2016 for the same Howard Street condo, through which Manafort defrauded Lender #1. Counts 1, 2, and 3 say the defendant received proceeds for the Howard Street property, indicating that it is specifically this loan.

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It is possible that Lender #1 is not Citizens Bank, but another bank that assisted Citizens in this same loan. It seems likelier that Lender #1 is Citizens Bank, but either way there should be a double jeopardy problem.

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First, the factual evidence cited for this fraud by the Manhattan DA overlaps with the evidence from Muellers case. For example, page four of the state indictment cites an email from Manafort dated Jan. 26, 2016: The appraiser for Howard St is calling to make an appointment to view the condo.Remember, he believes that you and [Individual #3] are living there. That same email was cited on page 22 of Muellers indictment. There are other similar examples.

If this case goes to trial, state prosecutors will likely use even more of the same documents and evidence that the feds used to convict Manafort for the same act[s] and the same transaction. If this is essentially the same crime, might any of the states double jeopardy exceptions apply?

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The new indictments under the states mortgage fraud statutes appear to be primarily about this same transaction.

Lets start with exception (a), which says the offenses must have substantially different elements and that the acts in each offense must be clearly distinguishable from each other.

It seems implausible that this might apply. Both cases use the same evidence of the same criminal act. Four related charges for falsifying business records, meanwhile, are part and parcel of the same transaction.

What about exception (b)? That rule states that [e]ach of the offenses as defined contains an element which is not an element of the other, and the statutory provisions defining such offenses are designed to prevent very different kinds of harm or evil.

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If prosecutors can produce more direct evidence from the legislative background that the older federal bank fraud statute and the state mortgage fraud statute from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis had fundamentally differing purposes, this exception might be a closer call. Still, even if there are separate elements and a different timing of passage, can one really claim that bank fraud is preventing a very different kind of harm than mortgage fraud? When is mortgage fraud not a kind of bank fraud? And how could Manaforts case possibly be an example of such a difference? In whatever context legislators passed these criminal laws, both statutes serve to protect the banks, their investors, and consumers who want access to capital. The federal bank fraud statutes and the state residential mortgage fraud statutes seem to have similar general purposes: to protect access to capital for lenders, borrowers, and shareholders from fraudulent practices. Further, the double jeopardy statute doesnt say the harms have to be different. The statute says they have to be very different. Surely that must mean something. Even if one can somehow make a case that bank fraud (in a mortgage loan) and mortgage fraud (of a bank) are different in any meaningful sense, it would be tough to argue that they are very different. [Update: Please see additional precedents below.]*

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In order to defeat a likely effort to dismiss the Manafort charges based on double jeopardy, the DAs office might be banking on a precedent by New Yorks highest court 20 years ago. In People v. Bryant, three defendants were charged federally with bank robbery and New York state tried them again for the same events, but with charges unrelated to robbing banks. These new charges were for attempted murder and possession of defaced weapons. Again, the acts were basically the same, but the New York court distinguished between the specific purpose of the federal offenses of protecting banks as opposed to the state offenses that were aimed at firearms control and the protection of police officers safety. The court distinguished between the protection of financial institutions in the federal statute as opposed to curtail[ing] the availability of defaced firearms and the exclusive focus on the prevention of the killing of police officers.

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New Yorks highest court gave a relatively permissive reading of double jeopardy here, but it is understandable how it read the purposes of each law as being very different. But Bryant seems clearly distinguishable from Manaforts bankmortgage fraud combination. Ultimately, this exception should not apply.

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Finally, the third exception can apply if the offenses affected different victims.

Is it possible that the victim in New Yorks charges is not Citizens, but a bank behind the scenes helping Citizens finance the loan? This sort of financing is common in mortgages. But can a prosecutor get multiple shots at trying a defendant because he can rotate through a list of direct and indirect victims of any crime? This would be an enormous loophole. Most crimes have multiple victims in an indirect sense. If prosecutors think you threw something into a crowd, can they rotate through a new trial for each member of the crowd until they get a conviction for assault? And even if they win one, can they keep going with trials and new convictions for each direct and indirect victim of the same act? Most frauds have indirect victims. A prosecutor could regularly circumvent double jeopardy rules by filing an endless series of indictments based upon one victim at a time. There surely must be a more clear distinction between different victims for this rule to make sense.

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Last April, I argued that New York should amend its double jeopardy laws to defend against potentially abusive pardons. A bill was proposed in the Legislature, but it has not yet passed. What if New York were to finally amend its laws now? If these state charges against Manafort are indeed plagued by double jeopardy concerns, as appears to be the case, could they be saved by any statute to amend New Yorks double jeopardy statute to close a pardon loophole? Probably not. Ex post facto laws, which impose criminal liability after the crime, are unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court has applied that prohibition to procedural changes, such as statutes of limitations.

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Ultimately, is it ethical in any case to push the limits of double jeopardy to the maximum? Whether or not its against the letter of the lawand I think it issuch a prosecution appears to at the very least be against the spirit of this law. The case is also politically risky. President Donald Trump takes advantage of any opportunity to attack the legitimacy of these investigations, generally through distortions and outright lies. Why provide a legitimate excuse to attack the extensive case against Paul Manafort?

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And these extra dozen charges that appear connected to Citizens Bank seem to be unnecessary. The separate four counts of falsifying financial statements to Lender #2 appear to be sufficient to prevent Manaforts immediate release in the case of a pardon. Illinois and California can also still charge Manafort for the hung jury bank fraud indictments. And there are surely state tax frauds in the mix in either New York or Virginia. Even if, somehow, Manafort suddenly decides to cooperate, his credibility is destroyed anyway. The right move now would be to drop the dozen Lender #1 charges to save the legitimacy of the remaining charges and of other states possible charges in the future. Otherwise, these state efforts will be tainted by these overzealous charges.

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In the end, the costs of prosecutorial overreach and disrespecting state civil liberties laws could actually be even deeper than the apparent strategic errors of this prosecution. Trumps investigators and their defenders claim the high ground about the rule of law, and rightly so. But the Manhattan DA cannot claim to defend the rule of law while, in this particular case, seeming to not take Manaforts civil liberties seriously. The case against Manafort is not just about winning and maximizing punishment. It is about higher principles of fairness and justice. Vances office has time to reaffirm those principles by dropping these doubled-up charges.

*Update, 3:40 p.m., March 15, 2019: Twitter user @alegalnerd has identified earlier precedents that appear to be even more problematic for Vances indictments. In the 1975 case Matter of Abraham v. Justices, defendants had been convicted federally for illegal drug distribution, and then the state tried to prosecute them for drug possession. New York prosecutors argued that double jeopardy did not apply because the two statutes purposes were different. But New Yorks highest court determined that possession and distribution were not very different enough to evade double jeopardy scrutiny:

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[P]aragraph [b] does not permit separate prosecutions where one offense is greater or lesser than another. Rather, it requires that the offenses be designed to prevent very different kinds of harm or evil. Clearly, the Federal drug conspiracy laws and the States drug possession laws are aimed at the same evilnarcotics trafficking.

In the 1987 case Matter of Kaplan v. Ritter, meanwhile, New Yorks highest court lauded a state prosecutor for correctly dropping a state security fraud/larceny case that followed a federal RICO case, despite initial efforts to paint the goals of the statutes as very different. Commenting in dicta on the distinction between RICO and the state charges, and citing Abraham, the court held that it can hardly be said that the underlying penal statutes were aimed at very different kinds of harm or evil within the meaning of [the double jeopardy statute].

The court then warned against prosecutors taking such a flexible interpretation of that exception provision, which could well lend itself to unilateral evasion [of the rule] by the very entity that the Legislature sought to regulate by enacting a statutory double jeopardy protection for those accused of crimes. This is a clear warning from New Yorks highest court to prosecutors not to do what Vance appears to have done in his case against Manafort.

Drug distribution and drug possession seem to be more different than bank fraud and residential mortgage fraud. Similarly, racketeering statutes and state securities fraud and larceny statutes also cover different harms. Yet the court rejected double jeopardy exemption claims on both sets of statutes and warned against such efforts to erase the rule. These cases clarify that by very different, the Legislature meant very different. It is difficult to see how New York courts will allow these charges to go forward, and it is difficult to understand why Vance and his team brought these unnecessary and seemingly impermissible charges.
As a Muslim American, I was particularly struck by news of Fridays harrowing attacks at New Zealand mosques. With at least 49 worshippers dead and the attack livestreamed on Facebook, this latest massacre epitomizes the surging white supremacist violence that has targeted racial and religious minorities here and abroad. Here in the United States, the October mass shooting at Pittsburghs Tree of Life synagogue, the 2017 bombing of a Minnesota mosque, and the 2015 massacre targeting black parishioners at a Charleston, South Carolina, church all point to the gravity of the threat. Like other Muslim Americans, I not only grieve the loss of so many lives but fear that white nationalist violence will continue to imperil our own communities at home.

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But as a scholar of national security law, I worry that political leaders in the United States will respond to the swell of white nationalist violence with the wrong solutions. Law enforcement officials must absolutely do more to counter white nationalist terrorism. But some proposed solutions, like calls for expanded federal terrorism charges, are both unnecessary and prone to abuse. Moreover, a focus on reforms of the penal code deflects attention from the political dynamics that have fueled and mobilized white nationalist movements here and elsewhereespecially the racist rhetoric and policies of President Donald Trump and like-minded demagogues.

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Even before recent U.S. incidents, studies from the Government Accountability Office, criminologists, and the New America Foundation documented a sizable death toll from far-right violent extremist incidents. And media investigations showed that new neo-Nazi groups like the Atomwaffen Division are engaging in paramilitary exercises and encouraging members to acquire military training to prepare for a race war. But even during the Obama administration, intelligence agencies often ignored right-wing threats for political reasons.

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Any serious response to white nationalist violence must challenge the presidential rhetoric and policies that embolden its supporters.

These domestic extremist threats are prompting new and deserved attention. Following the arrest last month of Christopher Hasson, a Coast Guard lieutenant and self-declared white nationalist who stockpiled weapons for a potential terrorist attack, a former national security official and a U.S. attorney both advocated laws to create new federal terrorism charges to address such threats. While well-intentioned, these proposals misfire for several reasons.

First, law enforcement officials do not need new terrorism charges to counter domestic extremists. Prosecutors already have hundreds of federal criminal charges at their disposal, which they have used to prosecute Charleston shooter Dylann Roof; Charlottesville, Virginia, assailant James Alex Fields; and Hasson. In addition, prosecutors already use Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act charges to seize assets of domestic terrorist groups and increase penalties against their members. And the FBI can already conduct far-reaching investigations of domestic organizations based on relatively low levels of suspicion.

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Second, and relatedly, these new proposed laws create a potential for abuse. Consider, for instance, the recent proposal to make it a federal terrorism crime to kill, assault, or destroy property with the intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or affect the conduct of a government. Pitched as a modest proposal, such a law could actually convert a large number of ordinary crimes to federal terrorism offenses and ratchet up sentences. For instance, acts of violence designed to intimidate people, but with no political motive, could fall within the statuteas might attempts to threaten a judge in an individual child custody case in order to affect judicial conduct. Moreover, in light of federal agencies history of targeting civil rights activists and communities of color, there is no guarantee that federal agents would aim expanded charges at white nationalists, rather than Black Lives Matter members, indigenous rights activists protesting oil pipelines, or Muslims.

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Third, government officials can properly stigmatize white supremacist violence as terrorism without adopting new charges. For instance, prosecutors labeled Hasson, the Coast Guard lieutenant, a potential domestic terrorist, even though they charged him with firearms and drug possession charges. Thus, government officials can extend the moral stigma of terrorismoften reserved for Muslimsto other perpetrators without new laws.

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So what can the government do to address the threat of white nationalist violence? To start, the government has to monitor and assess a problem it has often ignored. Even now, the Justice Department only reports statistics on terrorism crimes with an international nexus, omitting attention to most U.S. terrorists while stoking fears of immigrants and Muslims. Law enforcement agencies must direct greater investigative attention and resources to the problem. For example, the military must curb the participation of service members in extremist hate groups like Atomwaffen. In addition, social media platforms must counter online incitement far more effectively than they have so far.

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But ultimately, any serious response to white nationalist violence must challenge the presidential rhetoric and policies that embolden its supporters. Trumps tweets extending condolences to the people of New Zealand do nothing in the face of years of hateful statements and policies directed at Muslims and immigrants and the promotion of ideas of white cultural threat, popular among white nationalists. If members of Congress want to get serious about right-wing extremism, they should begin by defunding the Muslim travel ban and overturning Trumps veto of national emergency powers to build a border wall. Rescinding racist policies and holding accountable the president who issues them will do more for the security of U.S. racial and religious communities than misguided attempts to create new terrorism laws.
A South Florida police officer has been suspended after a video circulated on social media showing him putting a black woman in a headlock after she called to report a crime, according to local media reports.

Dyma Loving has said she had called 911 on March 5 after getting into an argument with her neighbor, who waved a shotgun at her. She told reporters later that the neighbor had called her and her friend whores. She said the two had ignored it at first, but her friend, Adrianna Green, eventually threw a potted plant toward the neighbors yard. The neighbor, a white man, then allegedly pulled out a shotgun and said he would shoot my burnt black-ass face off my neck, she told the Miami New Times.

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When police showed up, they interviewed the two women. One officer, later identified by the department as Alejandro Giraldo, started interrogating us like we were the suspects, Loving told the New Times. Loving said she asked him if she could go to her friends house to charge her phone and call her children. He kept telling me I needed to calm down, but I was so scared at that moment, she told the New Times.

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In the video, which was filmed by Green and appears to start after she asks Giraldo to go to her friends house, one of the officers can be heard saying, she needs to be corrected if anything. Loving, visibly upset, asks the police officers, Why do I have to be corrected when my life was just threatened and my daughters sick? I just want to go to the store to charge my phone.

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Giraldo takes a step toward her. He then seizes her arm and appears to push her toward the fence behind her as Green protests that she hadnt done anything.

Loving repeatedly tells the officers not to touch her, and as another officer holds her wrists, Giraldo forcefully tries to handcuff her. Loving, though shouting, does not appear to physically resist. Then, Giraldo yanks his arm away, andas Green repeatedly cries out, Why are you doing this?places her in a headlock and wrestles her to the ground. The three officers then pin her to the ground.

A black woman Called Miami-Dade Police For Help After A Man Brandished A Weapon and threaten her life. Yet, She Was Arrested for being distraught pic.twitter.com/xQ2vvDZZsW  Brother Tyrone X (@tyrone345345) March 13, 2019

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I just said I wanted to call my kid, Loving shouts, still pinned to the ground. My phone was dead. What do you not understand? I got a gun pointed in front of me and my kid is sick. Im stressed out. I need to go call my children. I need to call my kids. I do not understand.

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Two of the officers then pull Loving forcefully to her feet and drag her to the car. Green then asked another officer, Why does he have to handle her like that? She didnt do anything wrong? The officer replied, I understand, but when hes giving her orders and saying shes being disorderly, she needs to calm down.

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But she wasnt being disorderly, though, Green replies. Its just him thinking he can use his authority to do what he wants to do. And thats not cool. And this shit is going to get dealt with. Yall not going to keep abusing your authority like that. Theres ways to do it.  He knows she wasnt trying to get all crazy. She just got a gun pulled on her.

Loving told NBC News that Giraldo had told her she needed a mental evaluation. She was taken to jail on charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest and released after posting a $150 bond. An incident report from the encounter described Loving as acting belligerent and would not obey commands. The report went on to say she became further upset, very irate, and uncooperative and began to scream at us causing a scene.

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The report also said she violently pulled her arm away from the officers and tensed in front of her not allowing her to be handcuffed behind her back. The department told NBC that the man who allegedly threatened Loving with a gun was not arrested.

Juan Perez, the director of the Miami-Dade Police Department, said on Twitter on Wednesday that his department was investigating the incident and that the Giraldo had been suspended. I find the actions depicted on the video deeply troubling and in no way reflective of our core values of integrity, respect, service and fairness, he said.
New Zealand suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history on Friday when 49 people were killed in two shootings at mosques in Christchurch during Friday prayers. Three people are in custody and onea man in his late 20s who has not been namedhas already been charged with murder.

One of the attacks, on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch, was livestreamed on Facebook by the alleged shooter, Brenton Tarrant, who identified himself as a 28-year-old Australian. The BBC reports that the footage showed him firing indiscriminately at men, women and children from close range. The suspect appears to have published an online manifesto before the attack in which he espoused far-right, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim beliefs.

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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the attacks as one of New Zealands darkest days and an unprecedented act of violence, which is no exaggeration. Terrorist attacks have been exceedingly rare and minor in the country in recent decades. New Zealand was ranked the worlds second-most-peaceful country after Iceland in 2018 by the Institute for Economics & Peace. It has one of the worlds lowest murder rates and extremely strict gun laws. Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters said there would be a review of those laws to determine how the perpetrators obtained automatic weapons.

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New Zealand has had one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations among developed countries in recent years, much of it from Asia. This has led to at least some political backlash, with Peters New Zealand First party calling for immigration restrictions and being accused of fomenting racism. Police clashed with right-wing nationalists who rallied outside the Parliament in Wellington in 2017.* According to New Zealands most recent census, 1.1 percent of the population is Muslim.

The main suspect announced his attack on the online message board 8Chan, known for hosting white supremacist content and conspiracy theories. The manifesto appears to be a mix of genuine far-right ideology with a fair bit of trolling and irony. It cited previous right-wing terrorists including Norways Anders Breivik and Charleston, South Carolina, shooter Dylann Roof as inspirations.*
Right-wing violence is usually considered a dangerous form of domestic terrorism, but the horrific attack on two mosques in New Zealand on Friday shows its growing international dimensions. Brenton Tarrant, an Australian man, reportedly traveled to New Zealand, where he allegedly killed 49 worshippers at two mosques, wounding dozens of others. In addition, Tarrant appears to have been inspired by a 2011 attack in Norway, praised current U.S. political figures, and drew on U.S.-based social media platforms to spread his message. (Tarrant may have also had several accomplices.)

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Just as jihadis look to figures like al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or the Paris attackers as they plan their own violence, white nationalists like Tarrant now look globally before they strike. Anders Breivik, who killed eight people in a car bombing in Oslo and then 69 more in a sustained shooting attack on a summer camp for youth members of Norways Labor Party, wrote a 1,500 page manifesto he posted online before carrying out his massacre. Terrorism analysts believe that Tarrant saw Breivik as a model, aping his anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Tarrant declared in his own manifesto, I have read the writings of [Charleston, South Carolina, church shooter] Dylann Roof and many others, but only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik, referring to Breivik by the Norwegians self-image as a heroic defender of Christian civilization. Tarrant also claimed he was avenging the killing, in Sweden, of an 11-year old girl, who was run down by an asylum-seeker from Uzbekistan who drove a truck through a crowd in 2017.

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Breivik is more than an ideological modelhe is also a model for action. His mix of attacks, a car bombing and a shooting spree, combined with posting a long treatise to justify his murder offers a template for other white nationalists to follow, just as Columbine offered a model for troubled youths to conduct school shootings.

Because of the increasingly international nature of right-wing violence, the response must be international as well.

Right-wingers, however, are not just looking to the past. Tarrant also expressed admiration for President Donald Trump as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose and made reference to Black Lives Matter and Democratic Party critic Candace Owens. The reference to Owens may have been ironicthe document if rife with trolling and online in-jokesbut suggests a deep familiarity with U.S. culture war flashpoints. One would think that an Australian targeting New Zealand would not focus on America-specific concerns or personalities, but the broader issuesopposition to immigrants, hatred of racial and religious minorities, and scorn for liberalsare sadly more universal and show up in different forms in much of the world.

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The technologies used to spread the word are also global. Tarrant apparently warned before the attack that he would livestream his violence on Facebook. He then used a helmet camera to do this while posting links to his own manifesto on Twitter and the message board 8chan. Although the major internet companies have been working to take down his content, it is likely to survive on at least some platforms and, as its author intended, inspire others to act.

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Because of the increasingly international nature of right-wing violence, the response must be international as well. Intelligence cooperation, honed to a fine edge in the struggle against the Islamic State and other jihadi groups, can also be used against right-wing organizations. This would involve sharing information on known activists, tracking their connections across borders, disrupting attempts to fundraise in other countries, and otherwise making sure that pressure on these networks is not confined to national borders.

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Because right-wing organizations exploit social media, technology companies must be part of the solution. Some of this effort should involve taking down right-wing sites and blocking prominent users, just as internet companies already do for jihadi groups. Some companies are already starting to take such measures. But there is more to be done than takedowns. Jigsaw and its partners, for example, designed a program to redirect individuals seeking jihadi content online to content that tried to turn them away from violence and radical ideas. Similar content for right-wing extremism should be created and promoted by social media companies. Borderline content might be prevented from being monetized, have the comments functioned disabled, and otherwise be limited in how it might spread.

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The United States also needs to revisit the legal basis for going after right-wing terrorism and draw on its international power to do so. At the very least, existing counterterrorism laws should be applied to right-wing groups when appropriate. For example, Mary McCord and Jason Blazakis point out that groups like the Atomwaffen Division have a presence in Germany as well as the United States and thus could be designated as a foreign terrorist organizationa move that would subject the groups followers to devastating legal and financial consequences. More broadly, the United States should consider legislation to expand government powers to go after white nationalist and similar groups. The rules should be different than going after jihadis, but many of the principles still apply.

We know white nationalist and other forms of right-wing violence are here to stay. The true question is whether the United States and other governments will treat it with the seriousness it deserves and work together to counter this growing international scourge.
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On Thursday, the Senate voted 5941 for a resolution that would halt President Donald Trumps plan to build a border wall under his self-proclaimed emergency authority. Press reports are calling this a setback for the president. But the real story is that 41 of the Senates 53 Republicans voted with Trump. Thats enough to sustain the veto he has promised. So the wall will proceed, even though Americans and their elected representatives oppose it.

Most Americans, in polls, have rejected Trumps wall. Four months ago, in an election that Trump framed as a referendum on border security, voters installed a Congress that opposed the wall. Congress, in turn, refused to give Trump the money he had demanded for the project.

So the president issued an emergency decree to proceed on his own. Most lawmakers have voted to block Trumps decree, but thats not enough. Because of the presidents veto power, all he needs is one-third of either body to stand with him. And he has that. A president who lost the popular vote in 2016, backed by a party that lost the election of 2018, is acting against the will of the public. The threat to America isnt coming from beyond our borders. Its coming from within.

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Many senators who stood with Trump on Thursday argued that this isnt a constitutional crisis. They pointed out that Trump based his emergency decree on the 1976 National Emergencies Act, which affirms the presidents authority to declare a crisis and thereby claim extraordinary powers. Since Congress itself passed this law, these senators reasoned, the law itself amounts to legislative consent. Trump made the same argument on Thursday morning. Our actions to address the National Emergency at the Southern Border, he tweeted, are EXPRESSLY authorized by Congress.

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This argument is a ruse. The Congress of 1976 couldnt have expressly authorized Trumps emergency, because in 1976, no such emergency had been declared. Trump is claiming his powers through creative interpretation. If you read the Emergencies Act, youll see that it focuses on constraining executive powers, not extending them. The principal constraint written into the law is that if the president declares an emergency, Congress has to vote on whether to terminate the declaration. The law includes specific timetables to make sure Congress moves quickly.

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Just give us this one coup, says the authoritarian party, and well restore democracy.

The problem with the 1976 law is that it posited a basic level of integrity. It assumed that the president wouldnt use his emergency powers to appropriate money in defiance of the express will of Congress. It also assumed that if the president abused his authority, Congress would terminate the declaration. Those assumptions held true for four decades. But we now have a president willing to abuse his power, backed by a party willing to defend his abuses.

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The senators who voted on Thursday to stand with Trump, based on the argument that Congress gave him the requisite authority in 1976, abdicated their responsibility under the law. The Congress of 1976 wrote into the Emergencies Act a mandate to future members of Congress. That mandate was to exercise independent judgment in assessing the presidents declaration and in applying the intent of the act. The Republican senators of 2019 were entrusted by the Congress of 1976 with the duty to check executive power. And they shirked it.

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On Thursday morning, hours before the Senate voted, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered his Republican colleagues a cynical excuse to support Trumps abuse. If the 116th Congress regrets the degree of flexibility that the 94th Congress gave the executive, then the 116th Congress has the ability to do something about it, said McConnell. He proposed to revise the Emergencies Act through future legislation enacted under regular order. Trump made the same pitch, offering to update the Emergencies Act at a later date. In the meantime, Trump and McConnell urged Republican senators to give Trump enough votes to sustain his veto and preserve the current emergency declaration. And they succeeded.

No one should trust this offer. A president who seizes the power of the purse in defiance of the will of Congress, which no president has done before, cant be expected to accept real constraints. In fact, on Wednesday, Trump rejected a Republican proposal to limit his authority under the Emergencies Act. Its laughable that McConnell, while urging Congress to give the president immediate and unprecedented emergency powers, insists that constraints on these powers should be deferred to a more orderly legislative process. Just give us this one coup, says the authoritarian party, and well restore democracy.

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One of the senators who voted with Trump on Thursday is Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina. Two weeks ago, in the Washington Post, Tillis wrote that he opposed Trumps declaration. I am a member of the Senate, and I have grave concerns when our institution looks the other way at the expense of weakening Congresss power, the senator explained. It is my responsibility to be a steward of the Article I branch, to preserve the separation of powers. There was no intellectual honesty, Tillis observed, in Republicans defending executive overreach by Trump after opposing it under President Barack Obama.

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But thats exactly what Tillis did on Thursday. In a grotesque obeisance on the Senate floor, he reversed himself and announced that he would vote with Trump. The White House has been very gracious, and I should say very patient in tolerating Republican dissenters such as himself, Tillis told his colleagues. In fact, he added, the White House had magnanimously arranged for Trump to make a statement that hes willing to work with us. Tillis concluded: That this president is prepared to transfer power back to the Article I branch by his statement, either publicly or through his administration, is extraordinary.

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No. Whats extraordinary is a senator bowing and scraping over a presidents hypothetical offer to transfer power back to Congress. Whats extraordinary is a bloc of senators colluding with a president to force through an expenditure that the American people and their representatives rejected. Whats extraordinary is the Congress of 2019 betraying the Congress of 1976 and the Framers of the Constitution.

The election, by a non-plurality of voters, of a commander in chief with no respect for rules or precedents was just the first stage of our descent into autocracy. Were now in the second stage: consolidation of power behind the autocrat, secured by his abettors in Congress. There is indeed a national emergency. But the threat isnt coming from Mexico. Its coming from the Republican Party.
The Trump administrations latest step to prevent the International Criminal Court from investigating war crimes in Afghanistan was announced Friday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but its hard not to see it as the result of national security adviser John Boltons influence.

Pompeo announced a policy of U.S. visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of U.S. personnel and said the administration was already implementing the policy, though he would not name any individuals involved. He cited the authority granted to the secretary of state under the 1990 Immigration Act to bar individuals whose presence would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States. He also said the policy could be used to deter investigations of allied personnel, including Israelis, and said further steps could include economic sanctions.

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Bolton previewed these steps in a speech in September. Bolton, a longtime opponent of the court, sees the ICC as a dangerous threat to American sovereignty as well as, somewhat contradictorily, an ineffective and redundant organization. He has called his work to push back against it under the George W. Bush administration one of my proudest achievements.

While this is a longtime fixation of Boltons, the State Departments actions Friday were specifically prompted by ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensoudas November 2017 request for a formal investigation into war crimes committed in Afghanistan. ICC investigations look at all actions in a given country rather than those of a particular actor, so this one could include alleged crimes by the Taliban and Afghan government forces as well as the U.S. military. While the U.S. is not a party to the ICC, Afghanistan is, so actions committed there fall under the courts remit. However, the courts ability to enforce that remit is notoriously weak, and its very unlikely U.S. troops would ever actually go on trial at The Hague. In any event, no significant action has been taken on the Afghanistan case since Boltons speechjudges are still weighing the evidence to decide on Bensoudas requestso its not quite clear what prompted this latest escalation. Pompeo said only that it was unacceptable that the prosecutors request for an investigation remains pending. One of the ICCs judges quit the court in January, partially in protest of the pressure by the Trump administration.

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Its worth noting that U.S. law already includes restrictions on ICC agents. The American Servicemembers Protection Act, an anti-ICC measure Congress passed in 2002, already prohibits ICC agents from conducting any inquiries or investigations on U.S. soil. The new policy takes things a step further, since ICC personnel are apparently being barred before an investigation has even begun.

The ASPA has been nicknamed the Hague Invasion Act by opponents because of a clause that authorizes military action to rescue any U.S. citizens who have been detained for prosecution by the court. That used to seem like a far-fetched scenario.
Before embarking on his attack, the 28-year-old gunman who killed at least 49 people at a pair of New Zealand mosques Friday posted a detailed manifesto explaining his motivations. The document is packed with rhetoric and themes popular with the online white nationalist communities that gather on message boards such as 8chan, where he announced his spree minutes before it began. The document is largely focused on the notion of white genocidethe idea that around the world, people of European descent are having too few children and as a result are being replaced in their own countries by foreign invaders, particularly Muslims. He claims to have taken his deepest inspiration from Anders Breivik, the anti-Islam fanatic who murdered 77 people during a 2011 terror strike in Norway.

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The manifesto has also caused some confusion as snippets have circulated around Twitterin part because of some peculiarities in the ideology he describes, and in part because of passages that read like ironic shitposting. Neither should confuse from the central lesson from the attack and the manifesto: that we are confronting a global movement of white hate, one that has inserted far too many of its tendrils into the firmament of respectable politics.

Some of this puzzlement stems from the shooters description of himself as an eco-fascist and open fretting about global warming, which is not a concern mainstream readers typically associate with racist reactionaries. But eco-fascists are in fact an established, if somewhat obscure, brand of neo-Nazi. As Sarah Manavis wrote last year at the New Statesman, they believe that living in the original regions a race is meant to have originated in and shunning multiculturalism is the only way to save the planet they prioritise above all else.*

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The manifesto is also challenging because it is clearly written for the shooters fellow channers; Like any conversation youll find in the nastiest bogs of Reddit or 8chan, it includes some trollish misdirections and memes, which makes it a tiny bit hard at some points to tell exactly where the irony ends and the sincere racist ideology begins. In one small example, he tosses in a popular passage known as the Navy SEAL copypasta, which basically makes fun of people who claim to be ex-snipers or special forces on the internet. In a Q&A section, he suggests he was radicalized by Candace Owens, the 29-year-old communications director for Turning Point USA, the campus conservative group run by Charlie Kirk:

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Is there a particular person that radicalized you the most? Yes, the person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.

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Read in the context of the manifesto, this is pretty obviously not serious. Owenswho became prominent for being a young, pro-Trump black womanhas recently started dipping her toes into European ethnonationalism; in one clumsy appearance, she launched a bizarre half-defense of Hitler (the only problem with him was apparently that he had dreams outside Germany) and she has taken to tweeting about how Frances declining white birth rates could soon make it a Muslim-majority country. The shooter, too, spends much of his manifesto obsessing about demographic change in France (he claims he was radicalized as he traveled the countrys shrinking and increasingly diverse towns). But he also writes that he started planning his attack at least two years ago, before Owens was prominent. And to put it bluntly, it is pretty clear that a would-be mass murderer would not consider her calls to action extreme. This reads like a joke about Owens trying to jump on the nationalist bandwagon.

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Picking out the parts of a killers screed that are meant to be funny may feel uncomfortable. But its also necessary, in order to single out the core material that tells us about the global, white racist ideology that is gradually metastasizing online and producing a new breed of terrorist. The Christchurch killer says he took his true inspiration from Breivik, who produced his own 1,500 page manifesto of hate. (He even suggests that he had brief contact with Breivik, who is currently in prison, though its unclear how or if thats true.) The shooter also claims to have read the writing of Dylann Roof, who perpetrated a massacre in a black Charleston, South Carolina, church with hopes that it would spark a race war. The Christchurch shooter claims to have similarly grandiose ambitions (in a new twist, he suggests he used guns, as opposed to other weapons, in order to further the political conflict over firearms and the Second Amendment in the U.S.). He is drawing from and adding to a growing online ecosystem and literature of white radicalization.

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In the U.S., that ecosystem gave us the Tree of Life massacre and the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, both of which were motivatedat least in partby the fear that whites are in the process of being demographically outnumbered and replaced. Hence the chants in Charlottesville, of Jews will not replace us! Blacks will not replace us! Immigrants will not replace us! And yes, U.S. politicians and pundits feed that ecosystem, too. When Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham talk on Fox about Democrats trying to replace white voters with immigrants, theyre mainstreaming its rhetoric. When Rep. Steve King says we cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies, hes mainstreaming its rhetoric. Candace Owens almost certainly isnt inspiring anybody to kill, but she is guiding them toward the sorts of online discussions that lead to dark, dangerous places. And theres our president himself. As the Christchurch shooter wrote in his Q&A:

Were/are you a supporter of Donald Trump? As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.

Not a leader, but a useful symbol. Maybe that was just more shitposting, too. But my guess is not.
On Thursday, in an effort to determine the cause of the crash of Flight 302, Ethiopian Airlines delivered the aircrafts data recorders to Paris for analysis. The flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday, killing 157, and the planes flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder were recovered on Monday. Colloquially known as the black boxes, these two crucial data repositories will be examined by Frances Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety, or BEA. Why were the black boxes from an Ethiopia-based airline sent to Paris?

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The International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets the standards for aircraft accident investigations, says that the country where an incident occurs is in charge of the investigation. But according to Al Jazeera, Ethiopia doesnt have the tools to analyze the black boxes, which capture voices and noises from the cockpit and data about the aircraft, such as altitude and speed, and help investigators determine the cause of a crash. The Ethiopian government asked Germany to analyze the black boxes, but according to CBS, the Germans also lacked the necessary software. Experts say a conflict of interest likely stopped the boxes from being sent to the U.S., since Boeing, which manufactures the 737 Max 8 aircraft that crashed, is based in the States.

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Black boxes are designed to withstand extreme heat, impact, and pressure, but the one from Flight 302 was badly damaged. Extracting data from them is a delicate process, and processing the data requires specific decoding software. Specialists must then sort through the information they obtain and analyze it, trying to piece together possible technical causes of a crash. The level of damage for the Ethiopian Airlines flight meant the investigators need to be able to directly read into the memories of the black boxes, because the standard interfaces probably cannot be used, says Eric Feron, professor of aerospace software engineering at Georgia Tech.

Feron says Frances BEA is among the agencies with capabilities for extracting information from damaged devices, and the Associated Press notes the agency has extensive experience in plane crash investigations. (The U.S. is sending investigators to assist.) He notes that black boxes are a niche market, and most major commercial aircraft black box manufacturers have been based in the U.S. or France. When seeking certification for their products, these manufacturers must provide evidence that the black box can be reliably interrogated by a number of third parties, including accident investigation teams, Feron says. [Its] like brain surgery, something uncommon and very hard to do. Think of the teams having to do something similar to recovering the contents of your hard disk after a fatal computer crash, but not being allowed to mistakenly erase stuff.

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According to Feron, decoding software can usually be made available to countries that request it. But he believes that this particular investigation was sufficiently critical that the black boxes went to the team that happened to already have the correct softwarethe French. Several countries, including the U.S., have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 after data suggested similarities between the Ethiopian Airlines crash and one involving a Lion Air jet that killed 189 in October.

Aircraft accident investigations can often take years to complete, since the outcome is critical for victims families, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, and government regulators. Deutsche Welle reported that the BEA would begin its analysis on Friday, and preliminary conclusions will take several days. Airlines, anxious travelers, and more are undoubtedly eager for any information about the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash. Anything the investigators may unearth inside the black boxes in the coming days will prove crucial.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Excerpted and modified from Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat. Out now from University of California Press.

Silicon Valley is famous for disrupting industries through innovative technology. But this language is also a coded way of saying that a new middleman is in town, with the implicit suggestion that the promising technology is inseparable from the business practices that become associated with it. This slippery rhetoric is part of how Silicon Valley companies create exceptions to the norms of their industry competitors and rewrite those industries rules.

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Uber is one such new middleman. It has changed the rules of the ride-hailing industry by collecting and analyzing data from all of its app users and using this informational access to manipulate passengers and drivers alike through the platform. Uber has also taken advantage of its position as an intermediary to pocket differing commission than it agrees to collect from drivers on the fares passengers pay. And as Alison Griswold reported for Quartz, Ubers upfront pricing helps the company overcharge passengers. But Uber may also be changing the definition of work by using the tools and rhetoric of technology to blur the line between entrepreneurship, employment, and consumption.

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Uber brings the technology culture of Silicon Valley to the world of work. Facebook sparked a public outcry after it quietly experimented with the psychological states of select users by displaying happier or sadder posts to them in their news feed to study the effects of emotional contagion. People were outraged both because they didnt want to be the unwitting subjects of mood experimentation, and also because the experiment contradicted the idea that a neutral, objective, and benevolent algorithm curates their news feed. Similarly, Uber experimented with driver pay by implementing upfront pricing without alerting drivers or adjusting their contracts, until months later, after drivers crowdsourced evidence of a new pay policy.

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When Uber takes advantage of the unwitting users of its technology, it could be within its rights to do so, though its particular machinations actually contradict the companys own description of its business model: In legal forums and in its contracts with drivers, the company says it provides a platform that connects all its users, implying that its technology is neutral, like a credit card processor. In one court hearing, Ubers lawyers used rough metaphors to explain this logic in oral arguments, saying, People demand ice cream. We have vendors, vendors who produce ice cream that are able, through our software, demandedon demand to people that want ice cream. We facilitate that transaction. Were not in the ice cream business, you know.

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But Uber is in the figurative ice cream business. Uber monitors drivers through the data they generate on the job and controls their workplace behavior through various methods, from in-app behavioral nudges that influence when and where drivers work to the threat of account deactivation if drivers dont follow some of Ubers behavioral suggestions. Yet Uber also explicitly adopts a model of customer service communications in managing its workers as if they were mere consumers. In fact, beyond intense supervision, Uber controls drivers by creating an appeals process that limits their ability to find resolutions to their concerns.

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For years, drivers primary point of communication with Uber was by email. While Uber has added phone service and some in-person hubs in select locations, drivers still dont have a dedicated human manager who responds to their inquiries. Instead, they have community support representatives at the email equivalent of a call center, often located abroad and managed by third-party companies. Effectively, Uber offshores and automates its main communications with drivers. Drivers receive automated replies to most of their inquiries, which often appear to be based on keywords in the text of their emails. In other words, Uber is managing drivers without a human that understands and is responsive to nuances. While automated responses might be practical for basic factual inquiries, they can prove woefully insufficient when a passenger overdoses in the backseat or harasses a driver. In my research, I have scrambled details of driver experiences to protect their anonymity, though I have made every effort to preserve the accuracy of their accounts. I have included the surnames of drivers who preferred to have their real names used. One driver, echoing a sentiment commonly posted in an online forum, remarked, the support is nil at best. Most of the responses I get are less than adequate to the topic at hand. It seems that if it involves something other than a rider issue or a fare not starting on time, no one understands wtf you are talking about.

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Consumers are familiar with bad customer service, but this approach takes a greater toll in an employment context when drivers depend on community support representatives to resolve questions related to their livelihood. One driver I spoke with who drives for both Uber and Lyft in Atlanta told me a story about a passenger who accused him of drunk driving in the passenger feedback comments. He went to great lengths to explain to me that he works at night, when many passengers have been drinking, and that they can leave the smell of alcohol in the car. This driver, who is a diabetic, told me he would be passed out in the hospital if he had been drinking. When a passenger complained to Uber, he was instantly deactivated once the passenger submitted the comment, and he had to stop in the middle of working to write several emails to try to get reinstated. Another Uber driver, Jay Cradeur, authored an article on the Rideshare Guy detailing how he was deactivated for no reason, jeopardizing his livelihood, and then spent weeks trying to resolve the problem, without any success.

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The customer-service-as-management process provides disincentives to drivers to collect missing wagesa practice analogous to cellphone companies cramming unauthorized fees into bills.

Even when Uber does offer a solution to an individual driver, it may not address the root cause or unfairness in the system, which creates a particularly challenging work environment. For example, one driver, Cecily McCall, from Pompano Beach, Florida, disputed a previously adjusted fare (where Uber claws back some of the drivers earnings following a passenger complaint), writing in an email to a community support representative: I had to end the trip early because the passenger got in the car, started to curse me out, [and] called me a dumb stupid nigga because I told him we was on an Uber pool. He said, You dumb stupid niggas cant ever get shit right.  The community support representative replied with generic Uber policy details and robotic emotional drivel (Were sorry to hear about this. We appreciate you taking the time to contact us and share details.) and emphasized, in bold print, that the passenger in question would not be matched with her as a driver again. Disgusted, the driver wrote back, So that means the next person that picks him up  he will do the same, while the driver gets deactivated. Welcome to America. Ubers response also signals that McCall might be matched with other harassing passengers that drivers have reported, just not this particular one.

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Because community support representatives are responsible for mediating disputes between Ubers drivers and Ubers passengers, low-quality responses multiply the unfairness that drivers experience at work, particularly because Ubers technologically mediated employment is still plagued by classic workplace problemslike sexual harassment. For example, Leticia Alcala shared with me experiences she had of sexual harassment by passengers. She said she reports harassment to Uber, and the company promises not to match her with those passengers again. They may not match you with them, but theyll match other women with them, she fumed. And some drivers fear recrimination if they detail an issue like harassment to community support representatives. Another driver who told me that he has been sexually harassed on the job multiple times fears that if he reports such an incident, the passenger may turn the accusation on him. He could lose access to the Uber platform and his livelihood. Drivers know that Uber controls their access to future rides, and therefore drivers may just fold sexual harassment and other complaints into the cost of doing business.

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Community support representatives also serve as a poor replacement for driver management when it comes to the wage discrepancies drivers have experienced. In forums, many drivers comment on unpaid or missing wages that they tried, and failed, to collect, such as cancellation fees. Many drivers check their pay stubs weekly or monthly, while others dont look at them carefully until tax season. Lets say that a small percentage of drivers are actually going over their pay stubs each night and manually tracking their wait times. Only a percentage of those are going to write to Uber to complain. If a driver is willing to go back and forth with community support representatives, she might get her cancellation fee. Many drivers have demanded satisfaction from Uber and some showcased proof of their hard-won wages in forum postings. But given the time that the accounting and communications process would take, many drivers decide its not worth it for what could amount to a little less than $4. Drivers figure theyll probably make more money by spending the same amount of time on doing an additional trip instead. Some say they give up after three to six emails with unfeeling community support representatives because its simply not worth the pocket change they might recover.

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The customer-service-as-management process essentially provides disincentives to drivers to collect the wages theyre owed. This practice is analogous to cellphone companies cramming small, unauthorized fees into customer bills. Only a low percentage of customers actively track their bills, and only a low percentage of those are willing to spend an hour on the phone with a well-meaning but ineffective customer service agent to get a refund. Effectively, in app-mediated work its possible to withhold small amounts from wages (fees in Uber parlance) on a massive scale. Contesting this kind of wage omission doesnt make sense on an individual levelit makes more sense to address it as a systemic issue on behalf of a large constituency of drivers. But the fact that drivers have to contest missing wages through community support representatives at all tells us how Uber speaks to the combination of consumer logic and employment logic of Ubers model. The role of community support representatives substantiates the idea that Ubers drivers are consumers of technology rather than workers.

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The very vocabulary that Uber deploys to describe its drivers and its own practices reinforces this view of labor: It treats its workers as end users and customers of its software. The terms are used in Ubers lawsuits, and a senior Uber employee casually referred to the companys workforce as end users in conversation with me. The rhetorical impact of that language is clever. By fudging the terms of employment within its control, Uber provides us with a template for questioning what we know about employment relationships that can create legal distance between a worker and an employer. And it ushers in a new way of doing business all while the same old problems, like workplace harassment, persist under the veneer of technological neutrality.

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Uber has tried to maneuver around legal walls using this thin argument of technological exceptionalism to protect its management practices. However, Judge Edward M. Chen seemed to find the companys reasoning highly improbable in a class-action lawsuit brought by Uber drivers alleging that Uber violates labor law by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors, rather than as employees. When presented with the idea that drivers are customers of Ubers technology, he said, The fact that you screen drivers, select them, the fact that you, Uber, sets the fare, not the drivers, the fact that the company could not operate and exist as a company and make money without drivers, you think that does not establish, among other things, that these drivers serve Uber? Ubers shifts between the language of labor and the language of consumers evoke its earlier tactics of regulatory arbitrage. Theres no sharing in the sharing economy it has come to represent. In practice, drivers are hardly the entrepreneurs that Uber implies they are, or even true partners with Uber, even though the company calls them Uber Driver-Partners; drivers are not suspended or fired, they are deactivated. This conflation of workers with customers is clearly cause for disbelief. And yet, the miscategorization has deep roots within Ubers claims about the employment relationship it has with its drivers. Regulators may support that blurring by using language consistent with Ubers own: In 2016, the Federal Trade Commission brought legal action against Uber on the basis that it had misled drivers about their earnings, but the FTC also referred to Uber drivers as entrepreneurial consumers.

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The implications are stark: If the problems that Uber drivers experience at work can be reframed as customer satisfaction problems, these drivers lose access to remedies like employment law, which is available to workers in other businesses to redress any harms they suffer as part of their employment. And it isnt just Uber using this languageits echoed by other companies, including Lyft and, across the ocean, a British food delivery service called Deliveroo. The kind of employment relationship that Uber has with its drivers is not unique. Rather, it signals a greater social force that is turning workers into customers through the power of technological tools and narrative. Deliveroo, for example, classifies its food-delivery people as independent contractors in a dozen or so of the countries where it operates, and classifies some, in other countries, as employees, such as in the United Arab Emirates. According to several Deliveroo employees I spoke with in 2017, this boils down largely to the laws that define employment relationships in those respective places. But the company contorts itself in order to avoid giving the impression that any of its workers are considered employees. As the Verge reported in April 2017 about a leaked Deliveroo document: It says bicycle couriers who work for Deliveroo are never to be referred to as workers, employees, or staff, and that the Deliveroo jackets they have to wear on the job are not uniforms but branded clothing. These workers dont have contracts, says the document, but supplier agreements. They dont schedule shifts, but indicate their availability. 

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The central conflict of how to categorize a driverand how to consider work in the sharing economy more broadlyanimates the conflict between labor advocates and Uber. And Ubers defense of their labor practices articulate dynamic changes in how employment and consumption are negotiated in digital spaces. The question in this new economy is whether algorithmic management really creates a qualitative distinction between work and consumption. Because by encouraging this distinction and describing its technology as a way to merely connect two groups of users, Uber can have its cake and eat it too, avoiding responsibility for prospective labor law violations while its ostensibly neutral algorithms give the company vast leverage over how drivers do their work.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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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 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.
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.




Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and president of the Slovak State during the Second World War, was sentenced to death on April 15, 1947. He died three days later. (Source: Interior Ministry of the Slovak Republic/Slovak National Archive)

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It was 80 years ago when people began to send their first pleas to Jozef Tiso, the then president of the Slovak State, to help them. American researcher Madeline Vadkerty discovered the letters in an archive during her business trip to Slovakia back in 2002.

I came across the letters in the collection of the Office of the President of the Slovak Republic at the Slovak National Archive, she claimed. Vadkerty then worked for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was sent out to Slovakia to single out documents from the period of the Second World War, which could be of interest to the museum.

I promised to myself I would return once I had more time to learn what happened to their authors," she added. I was touched by the deep humanity the letters contained.

Vadkerty is also writing a book about these letters.

Emotional letters

She is now ploughing on in Slovakia, trying to uncover stories of their authors. Bardejov, Lucenec, Pezinok and Bratislava are just a few places researcher Madeline Vadkerty, accompanied by historian Ivan Kamenec and publicist Peter Juscak, have visited in Slovakia to read the letters.

People penned their letters shortly after the establishment of the Slovak State on March 14, 1939. This was around the time when the first restrictions began to be introduced, including a numerus claucus to exclude the Jews from universities and other professions.
However, Jaroslav Hascak claims he did not communicate with the controversial businessman about murdered journalist Jan Kuciak.

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One of the proofs used for bringing the charges against controversial businessman Marian Kocner for ordering the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, is reportedly a text message communication with an influential businessman. The information was obtained by the private broadcaster TV Markiza.

Meanwhile, the Dennik N daily informed that Kocner sent a vulgar text message about eliminating an unnamed man to the co-owner of the Penta financial group, Jaroslav Hascak. The communication allegedly happened on January 17, 2018, i.e. one month before Kuciak was murdered together with his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova, according to the daily.

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Read also: Threats, scandals, and dubious political ties. Who is Marian Kocner? Read more

Hascak has not denied the communication, but says he does not remember it. However, he has denied the claims that it was about Kuciak.

Hascak is 100-percent sure that he has not talked or communicated in any other way with Kocner about Jan Kuciak, Martin Danko, external relations manager of Penta, told the Sme daily. If the text message is real, it has no connection with Kocners activities concerning Jan Kuciak.

When asked whether Hascak had been heard in connection with the murder, Danko replied no.

Connection with Peter Toth

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Read also: Ex-SIS agent reportedly discussed his steps with Pentas spokesperson Read more

The investigators revealed the connection with Penta at the time ex-journalist and former agent of the Slovak Information Service (SIS) intelligence agency Peter Toth was interrogated.

They, for example, have a conversation between Toth and Danko that happened only a few days after the police detained a group of people from Kolarovo (Nitra Region) who now stand accused in the Kuciak case, Sme wrote.

At the time, Kocner was already in custody due to the suspicion of falsifying promissory notes concerning the private broadcaster TV Markiza.

Disclaimer: The Penta financial group has a minority share in Petit Press, the co-owner of The Slovak Spectator.
Kuciak murder investigation throws light onto many other cases.

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The investigation of the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova has led the police to look at many other cases in a new light, the Special Prosecutor's Office informed on Thursday.

For now, the Slovak public only has information about some of them, such as the monitoring and screening of journalists, the preparations made for the murders of two lawyers and Marian Kocner's influence over the former general prosecutor.

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Read also: Marian Kocner has been charged in the case of Kuciak's murder Read more

On Thursday, March 14, the prosecutor mentioned, for the first time, suspicions regarding the illegal actions of police officers. He declined to give any more details about this but said that the prosecutors are making sure that all the questions that arise from the witness hearings or from other evidence in the case of the Kuciak murder are being properly investigated.

Most of the suspicions have so far been derived from the data found on computers, mobile phones and USB keys that the police have confiscated during house searches at Kocner's residence.

1. Murder of prosecutors and attorney
After having been an OBrien Award winner at two, Kadabra Queen had a sophomore campaign to forget about. Thats why a close second-place finish in Thursday qualifying action at Woodbine Mohawk Park has trainer Chad Milner in a darn-fine mood.

As a two-year-old in 2017, Kadabra Queen was a force in the Ontario Sires Stakes Gold ranks and capped off her juvenile campaign by hauling down her $225,000 Super Final in thrilling fashion. When all was said and done, the Kadabra miss won five of ten starts, missed the board just once, and banked $328,380 in cold, hard cash and captured divisional honours.

Given how the filly had excelled at the beginning of her career, Kadabra Queens connections were looking forward to see what she could do at three  and thats where things took an unexpected turn.

She came back terrible last year and we didnt know why, Milner told Trot Insider after his fillys Thursday (March 14) qualifier at Mohawk. She had some chips taken out after her two-year-old season, but, unexpectedly, she was just no good when she came back at three.

After a pair of lackluster pari-mutuel efforts to start her 2018 season, Kadabra Queen ran early in an OSS Gold clash at Mohawk in June and was distanced. Its safe to say that Team Kadabra Queen was searching for answers at that point.

We took her to Toronto Equine where they gave her a nuclear scan, Milner explained. The scan revealed that she had some bone bruising in her ankles, so we quit with her and gave her a good deal of time away from the races.

Milner and Kadabra Queens owners -- Mileo and Jean Monte, of Campbellvilles Harness Horsepower Inc. -- were forced to play the hurry up and wait game with the distaffer, although they took steps along the way to ensure she would have a good chance to start 2019 off on the right hoof.

She had about two months of swimming, said Milner, so shes in really good shape right now. We were looking to school her today (Thursday, March 14), but Mohawk was forced to cancel the schoolers, so we decided to qualify her.

After having started from Post 2, Kadabra Queen and pilot Sylvain Filion raced fifth through the first three quarters of the mile. Racing over a good track that was rated three seconds slow, Filion worked out a second-over trip for Kadabra Queen. The duo was three and a half lengths off the lead at the three-quarters pole, but closed well and finished second, just a head back of AJ Cash, in what was a 2:00.1 mile.

We were thrilled with her mile this morning, Milner told Trot Insider, just the fact that she was out there racing in good form was fantastic for us.

Shell put in at least one more qualifier, but, if all goes well, she could be back in the box soon. When it comes to her racing plans for this year, were going to take a wait-and-see approach. Shes been paid into a couple of stakes, but were going to let her tell us what she is ready for. Were just looking forward to having her back racing.

To view the harness racing results for the Thursday qualifying session at Mohawk, click the following link: Thursday Results  Woodbine Mohawk Park (Qualifiers).
It is with sadness that the family of James Manson Madill (Jim) announce his passing at Matthews House Hospice, Alliston, ON on March 13, 2019.

Jim was born at Mrs. McVanel's Nursing home in Shelburne, ON on Feb. 20, 1942 to parents Manson Maurice Madill and Ethel Bernice Madill (Rutledge). He was raised on a family farm in Melancthon, ON. Here he learned the strong work ethic that he carried throughout his life and developed his passion for animal husbandry and responsible stewardship of agricultural land.

Jim met his wife and best friend Ina Mae Hillis at a Junior Farmers dance in Shelburne when he was 19 years old. They were married two years later on June 29, 1963the same month and day as his parents. Jim and Ina started their life together working on a dairy farm in Shelburne, milking a large herd morning and night. While continuing to farm, Jim began his career in 1964 with United Cooperatives of Ontario (UCO) as a fuel-truck driver in the Shelburne area.

Through the years Jim continued to advance in his career with UCO specializing in feed, fertilizer and crop management in Shelburne, Hanover and Orangeville districts. In 1984 Jim was hired as CEO of Simcoe District Coop in Barrie and the family moved to Stroud, ON. While in the role he grew the organization both in number of store fronts and profitably with his vision, determination, integrity and dedication to farmers.

Upon retirement in 2002, Jim and Ina continued to farm in Stroud. At that time they also decided to follow in the footsteps of two of Jim's uncles, Bill and Bert Madill, and pursue Jim's passion for training, breeding, and racing Standardbred Horses. Together they made many trips to the winner's circle, most notably with their beloved horse Andreios Kardia. Jim joined the team of Georgian Downs Raceway as Paddock Judge in 2003 and was deeply respected by the Standardbred Horse community.

Jim is survived by his beautiful wife Ina, and children Nancy (Pat Perry), Rob (Adria), Tammy and James (Leigh). He is also survived by grandchildren Ryan Perry, Rhiannon, Kieran, Aidan, Ashton and Amelia Madill, Meghan Heshka and brand new baby Paige Madill. Jim leaves behind sister Jeanette (Bob Wakem), and sisters and brothers in law Lois and Dean Strutt, Doreen McKitrick, Gary and Darlene Hillis and Cindy Storey as well as many nieces and nephews. He will be especially missed by his best friend, horse partner and 'honourary' little brother Clare Hayes. Jim is predeceased by his parents and his ever cherished granddaughter Raena Perry.

The family would like to extend special thanks to Dr. DasNeurosurgeon on the Eighth-Floor Neuro Team at St Michaels Hospital, Dr. Nay and Dr. Falwell from the Oncology Team at Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie, to our special nurse from Saint Elizabeth Eric Bancolita, Rev Patricia James and to everyone at Matthews House for their special care and compassion for Jim and the entire family during Jim's short battle with cancer.

Funeral services will be held at St James United Church, 2230 Victoria Street Innisfil (Stroud), ON on Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at 2 p.m. A Come-and-go reception will follow at Liberty North Banquet Hall, 100 Caplan Avenue, Barrie from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Should anyone wish to remember Jim's life with a donation, his family suggests St. James United Church, Innisfil or Matthews House Hospice, Alliston. Private messages of condolences can be sent to [email protected]

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the friends and family of James Madill.
The schedule for the "Internets favorite harness racing handicapping show", North American Harness Update, is set for Friday, March 15.

Host Ray Cotolo will be joined by Mike Pribozie and Rod Allums Jr. to provide live coverage of the Pick 4 from The Raceway at Western Fair District and the Meadowlands Racetrack. The three will also preview the opening round of the George Morton Levy Series on Saturday, March 16 at Yonkers Raceway.

The Hanover Hustler Russ Adams from Rosecroft Raceway will also come on to preview racing action from Rosecroft for Sunday, March 17 including their signature Pick 3.

North American Harness Update airs Fridays from 9-11 p.m. (EST) on SRN One as well as on video livestream on Facebook Live, Periscope and YouTube, and can be accessed by archive via the YouTube page or from our website, nahupicks.com, the day after it airs.

(North American Harness Update)
The fifth peace talks meeting between the Taliban and the Americans in Qatar were not expected to achieve a final deal, in part because the Taliban insisted the Afghan government not be involved because that government is considered a creation of the West and since that government was democratically elected it is seen, according to the Taliban, as an affront to Islam as the Koran says nothing about democracy. The Americans went along with that exclusion while making it clear that the Afghan government was being informed of all that went on in the negotiations. The sixteen days of talks ended with optimistic press releases and not much else except to meet again in a few weeks. There was some general agreement that U.S. forces would withdraw in return for Taliban assurances that Afghanistan would not become a sanctuary for international terrorism. There was no agreement on how this agreement would be implemented or what that would mean for the elected Afghan government or the majority of Afghans who oppose the Taliban and the drug gangs. The Taliban are vague about what they would do if a deal were signed and American troops left. If the U.S. cut military and economic aid to the government the Taliban would still have the payments it receives from the drug gangs (to protect drug production and smuggling). The Taliban say everything will be all right but they said that when they first arrived in the mid-1990s and that did not turn out well. Meanwhile, the Taliban is desperate to get rid of foreign troops, who are a major cause of Taliban casualties.

The Afghan government is crippled by corruption but so is Afghan culture as a whole. The Afghan government insists the foreign troops are necessary until the war is over. That means eliminating the drug gangs and that is difficult because the gangs have bribed or intimidated a large number of government officials to tolerate the drug gangs.

American, NATO and Afghan military leaders agree that the Taliban cannot win a battlefield victory as long as Afghan forces have training, air and financial support from NATO countries (mainly the U.S.). That is why the Taliban insisted that the discussions include the possibility of American (and all foreign) troop leaving the country. The Americans are proposing a withdrawal over a 3-5 year period. That Taliban insist it is done in a year or less. There is still no agreement on this.

With the troop withdrawal topic agreed to the Taliban were willing to discuss how to handle Islamic terrorism (not all of it caused by the Taliban), dealing with the many Afghan groups (in fact the majority of Afghans) who oppose the Taliban, and details relating to a ceasefire. It was quickly apparent that there would be difficulties agreeing on how to define terrorism. The Taliban consider ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) violence to be terrorism but not many of the attacks made by the Taliban and other Islamic terrorist groups. Most Taliban do not consider the September 11, 2001 attacks terrorism, nor do they regard many recent attacks in the West as terrorism, but rather righteous defense of Islam. Well, at least that is finally out in the open.

Other items will be equally difficult to agree on, like the common belief among Islamic terror groups that negotiations with the Infidels are merely a tactical means to defeat the non-believers. Lying to them is permitted, even encouraged if it will work. There are also problems with Pakistani control of the group and the majority of Afghans (and many fellow Pushtuns) opposing the Taliban. One reason for this is the fact that the majority (over 80 percent) of the civilian deaths are caused by the Taliban who consider such civilians involuntary martyrs and not victims of terrorism. Even more of an issue is that increased Taliban violence has increased civilian deaths 11 percent in 2018 (to 3,804). Then there is the economic impact of imposing Taliban practices on the current economy. Since 2001 Afghanistan has made a lot of progress in reducing illiteracy, raising educational levels and adding many women, especially those recently educated, to the workforce. The Taliban forbids all that (educating women and allowing women to work outside the home).

As a practical matter, the peace talks will serve a purpose in pushing all these issues into the spotlight. So far that is making a lot of Afghans angry. Pakistan and Iran see potential opportunities.

Fear And Factionalism

These negotiations are supported by most Afghan Taliban factions because all those factions do not agree on how to handle Afghans who oppose them and the Afghan government (which has a lot more popular support than the Taliban). Getting rid of the foreign troops would simplify matters and would serve to unite the increasingly factional Taliban. The peace talks serve a purpose in determining how united the Afghan Taliban is and whether the Afghan Taliban can agree on anything beyond making a lot of money, providing muscle for the drug gangs and using that power to sustain the idea that the Taliban can eventually regain a dominant position in Afghanistan.

The Taliban understand, from their experience after 2014 (when most foreign troops left) that NATO (mainly American) air power is the key element that prevents the Taliban from defeating the Afghan security forces. Its not just the airstrikes, its also the American ability to airdrop supplies to areas that the Taliban have under siege. The Taliban take heavy losses to maintain those sieges and American supply drops enable Afghan forces to survive and win most of those siege situations. The Taliban learned this the hard way in 2018 when they saw many of their sieges fail because of the air delivered supplies. In 2017 the U.S. Air Force dropped 15 tons of supplies by parachute (often guided parachutes that can assure delivery in a small area.) In 2018 that increased to 304 tons and that, plus even more, airstrikes made sieges unpopular with Taliban fighters. Since 2014 there has been more hostility and often fighting, between Taliban factions. There is growing resentment over the continued Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban while slaughtering thousands of Pakistani Taliban. One thing Afghan and Pakistani Taliban can agree on is that Pakistan is no friend of the Pushtun tribes (who provide most of the manpower and leaders for both Talibans).

Promoting Polio For Islam

Polio is making a comeback among refugees on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. This comes after another major effort in 2017 to vaccinate vulnerable Afghan and Pakistani children against polio. In 2016 there were 20 cases of polio in Pakistan and 13 in Afghanistan. There were four in Nigeria, a country that is expected to be free of polio this year or next. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are still religious problems with vaccination. The Afghan Taliban have openly supported the vaccination program but there still some rural areas where local Moslem clerics or teachers still denounce the vaccinations. There is a similar situation in Pakistan, where some fringe Islamic groups will still try and kill members of the vaccination teams. Despite this continued resistance polio cases in both nations continues to decline, except in Afghanistan (where there were 14 cases in 2017 and 21 in 2018). In Pakistan, the situation is similar with 54 cases in 2015, 20 in 2016 and eight in 2017. But in 2018 there were a dozen cases, eleven of them on the Afghan border. The sharp drop in polio cases was largely a result of the four-year campaign to shut down Islamic terrorist groups who had long enjoyed sanctuaries in North Waziristan, which is on the border of eastern Afghanistan. That campaign lasted four years but had an impact on vaccination opponents after the first year because most civilians in North Waziristan fled (with encouragement from the Pakistani army) to refugee camps in Pakistan or to stay with kin across the border in Afghanistan. Either way, the refugee children could now be treated by the vaccination teams, especially those in Pakistani refugee camps. The Afghan side of the border is not the Islamic terrorist sanctuary North Waziristan was but it is a sparsely populated and little policed region where any outsider requires an invitation or an armed escort to enter safely.

It was easier to ensure vaccination at the major (and legal) border crossings. An example of Afghan-Pakistan cooperation was several vaccination teams stationed at the Khyber Pass (the Torkham border crossing), which is the busiest crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There the vaccination teams operated 24 hours a day to offer polio vaccinations for all children under age ten. This not only catches children who missed the regular vaccination teams in either country but prevents infected children from carrying polio from one country to another.

Despite problems like this in Pakistan and Afghanistan the global vaccination effort has worked. In the 1980s, when the polio elimination effort began there were 350,000 cases in 125 countries. For the last several years there have been fewer than a hundred cases worldwide. In the last decade, the main obstacle has been Islamic terror groups who ban polio vaccinations and attack anyone trying to deliver the vaccine to vulnerable children. Islamic terrorists, in general, tend to believe the vaccination teams are spying for the government and that the vaccinations are a plot to sterilize or otherwise harm Moslems. Once there are no more active cases of polio the disease, like smallpox before it, will be extinct.

The Pakistan Threat

Pakistan, in general, is not a threat to Afghanistan but the Pakistani military has long been and still is a problem on both sides of the border. In Pakistan, the military have pulled off a silent coup since 2017 and took control of the top elected leaders, the mass media and highest courts. The Pakistani military plans to keep this power by doing what they have done for decades; create foreign threats where none exist and use that to justify the continued power, prosperity and immunity from prosecution of Pakistani military leaders. To make this work Pakistani generals have to ensure that several volatile situations do not blow up. One of the more obvious examples of this is Afghanistan, which the Pakistani military sees as a potential problem that is best handled by establishing a degree of Pakistani control over who does what in Afghanistan. Thus Pakistan created the Taliban in the early 1990s to end the civil war in Afghanistan and that had unfortunate side effects. For Pakistan, Afghanistan seems to be nothing but unfortunate side effects, especially with the Pakistani military having its own foreign policy which is often at odds with what the Pakistan and Afghan governments want.

The Afghan Taliban insist Pakistan plays no role in the current peace negotiations yet the Pakistani media and military make it clear that Pakistan is a key player in all this and that Pakistani demands must be respected. While the Pakistani military continues to crack down on Islamic terrorist violence inside Pakistan they have increased their efforts to export such violence to India and Afghanistan. The neighbors also have issues with the Afghan drug gangs, who continue to produce, with Pakistani cooperation, the majority of the worlds supply of heroin in addition to the cheaper opium and hashish for local markets. This is unpopular with the civilian populations of all nations adjacent to landlocked Afghanistan. Thats because the exported heroin passes through all of these nations and creates millions of local addicts in the process. Then there is the violence on the borders as the Afghan drug smugglers are armed and, if bribes dont work bullets come next. Bribes work best on the Pakistani border while the Iranian border has been a war zone for years.

The current effort to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan is not popular with Iranians. The Taliban are seen as inherently anti-Iranian. Iran also has issues with the Afghan drug gangs, who continue to produce, with Pakistani cooperation, all that heroin, opium and hashish.

As bad as the Taliban and Pushtun political pressure is, the threat of all Pushtuns in the region uniting is worse. This is complicated by the fact that Pakistan considers Afghanistan a client state and many Pakistanis support that attitude because of the ancient, and still potent Pushtun threat. That threat is getting worse inside Pakistan. The Afghans are considered a collection of fractious tribes pretending to be a nation. With no access to the sea, most Afghan road connections to ports are with Pakistan. The Afghans resent this, especially since for thousands of years invasions of northern India (which, historically, lowland Pakistan was a part of) came out of Afghanistan where many Pushtun tribesmen would join the invaders. Pakistan and India are well aware of this, and still consider the Pushtuns a bunch of bloodthirsty savages from the mountains. Afghanistan has only been around for a few centuries and Pakistan was carved out of British India in 1947. Before that, it was a collection of feudal states and tribal territories. When you get right down to it, Pakistan's big problem is that it contains two-thirds of the Pushtun people (who are 15 percent of Pakistan's population) while Afghanistan contains the other third (who are 40 percent of Afghanistan's population.) "Pushtunstan" is a nation of 30-40 million Pushtuns caught between Pakistan (still over 170 million people without the Pushtuns) and northern Afghanistan (with about 20 million non-Pushtuns) Without Pushtuns, Afghanistan would become yet another Central Asian country with a small population (neighboring Tajikistan has 7.7 million and Uzbekistan has 30 million).

Pushtunstan is never going to happen because the Pushtuns have long been divided by tribal politics and cultural differences. When the Pushtun aren't fighting outsiders, they fight each other. The violent and fractious Pushtuns are a core problem in the region and have been for centuries. There is no easy solution to this and now more Pushtuns are openly calling for the establishment of a Pushtunstan and are making common cause with the Baluchis to the south (in Baluchistan) who have long fought to establish an independent Baluchistan. Both tribal separatist groups want to be rid of the Pakistani military and the Islamic terrorist organizations the military supports.

March 12, 2019: The fifth meeting between American and Taliban representatives ended with a mention of another negotiating session within a few weeks.

March 11, 2019: In the west (Badghis province), Taliban forces surrounded a small army base near the Turkmenistan border and attacked. After hours of fighting and no reinforcements had arrived the soldiers surrendered. Half the 60 troops in the base were killed or wounded and the Taliban said they took 40 prisoners. The Turkmenistan border is an important smuggling route for drug gangs and the Taliban have been attacking army outposts and forward bases near the border for over a month.

March 7, 2019: In Kabul, someone fired ten mortar shells at a large gathering commemorating hundreds of Hazara (a Shia minority) who are often a target of Taliban and other Sunni Islamic terrorist groups. The ceremony was attended by many Sunni Moslems including politicians. ISIL took credit for the attack, which killed eleven and wounded twice as many. The attack effectively canceled the commemoration.

March 6, 2019: In the east (Nangarhar province), someone used a suicide bomber and several gunmen to attack a construction sites near the Jalalabad airport. The attack was repulsed but five people were wounded and several of the attackers killed.

March 5, 2019: In the east (Nangarhar province), a wanted Haqqani Network leader, Mullah Mirwais, was arrested in the provincial capital (Jalalabad). Mirwais was known to command about 50 men operating in the province.

March 1, 2019: In the south (Helmand province), the Taliban attacked Camp Shorabak, where several thousand Afghan and several hundred American troops are based. The attack was defeated but there were over 50 dead, most of them the attackers.

Because of the air battles between Pakistan and India in Kashmir Afghanistan air transports could not use Pakistani air space to reach India. For the first time Iran allowed Afghan transports to reach India via Iranian air space (to the Indian Ocean and then east to India.) This took a lot longer (and was more expensive in terms of fuel and other operating expenses). Via Pakistan, the flights take 90 minutes. Via Iran, the same flights take 300 minutes. Thus passengers had to pay $300 to fly to India versus the usual rate of $160. The air space closures lasted until late March.

February 26, 2019: Russia donated $9 million worth of military radar and command and control systems to Afghanistans northern neighbor Tajikistan. While second-hand, the equipment is modern and will improve the ability of Tajikistan to monitor and control its air space, especially along its border with Afghanistan. That border has long been a concern for both Tajikistan and Russia. In 2013 the Tajik parliament approved an extension of the military cooperation treaty with Russia to 2042. This included Russia continuing to station 6,000 troops there, mainly on the Afghan border to help keep out drugs and Islamic terrorists. All this required operating three Russian bases in Tajikistan. Russia also continues to train Tajik military personnel (mainly officers) and supply weapons and ammo at low cost or for free. The Russians also agreed to provide trainers to improve the skills of all Tajik soldiers. Tajikistan was part of the Soviet Union until 1991.

February 25, 2019: Another round of peace talks between American and Taliban negotiators began in Qatar.

February 24, 2019: The first shipment of Afghan exports for India departed via the newly rebuilt Iranian port of Chabahar and the Indian financed road and rail network from the Afghan border to Chabahar. Afghanistan has been using the Chabahar connection to export and import items that previously moved via Pakistan. Afghanistan has already received over a million tons of food from India. The Chabahar connection is but one of many reasons why most Afghans support India in any conflict with Pakistan. India has never harmed Afghanistan and since 2001 has provided quite a lot of foreign aid, which includes building the Afghan parliament building and most of the cash and tech assistance required to upgrade a major hydroelectric dam. India has also supplied military equipment and trainers. Many of the Indian civilian and military personnel working in Afghanistan are Indian Moslems who can confirm that Moslems have more economic and educational opportunities in India than they would in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Thats a major reason why Islamic terrorists have had little success recruiting Indian Moslems and learned that most Indian Moslems will report Islamic terrorist activity to the police rather than tolerate or support it.

February 22, 2019: The Afghan government has sent the UN a letter complaining about nearly a decade of Pakistani border violence. The Afghan letter details incidents since 2012 to the present in which Pakistani troops fired 28,849 rockets, mortar or artillery shells into eastern Afghanistan from just across the border in northwest Pakistan. Much of this firepower is directed at Kunar province and has been going on since 2010 in an effort to hit real or suspected Pakistani Taliban bases in Afghanistan. These incidents increased to the point where the Afghans began keeping track of them in 2012. Since 2012 this violence has killed 82 people and wounded 187 that the Afghan government knows about. The shelling occurs against rural areas that are often unpopulated so it is unclear if the Pakistanis have hit many Pakistani Taliban. The Pakistani government propaganda insists that these Taliban Islamic terrorists are based in eastern Afghanistan and regularly cross into Pakistan to carry out attacks. The letter details how the situation is getting worse and that since January 2018 there have been 161 of these incidents that involved at least 6,025 Pakistani projectiles landing in Afghanistan. The letter points out that several elected Pakistani leaders have pledged to halt these border violations but those pledges are ignored by the Pakistani military.
While Assad has achieved success on the ground, he now faces new battles on the diplomatic stage, which look set to be an insurmountably task writes Anadolu News Agency.

On Feb. 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted his Iranian and Turkish counterparts, Hassan Rouhani and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Sochi to discuss the resolution of the Syrian civil war. These peace talks were the first Russian-led negotiations on Syria since the United States announced its withdrawal from the conflict in December and underscored the commitment of all three countries to achieving a political solution in Syria.

In spite of the shared desire of all major stakeholders in Syria to end hostilities and the growing consensus around President Bashar al-Assads long-term staying in power, the prospects of a swift peace settlement in Syria and a rapid reconstruction of the country are remote. This grim prognosis can be explained by lingering discord amongst regional powers over Idlib and northeastern Syria, and the unwillingness of major powers to invest in an Assad-led Syrian reconstruction process.

While the amount of Syrian territory controlled by rebel forces has steadily diminished since Russias military intervention began in Sep. 2015, northern Idlib is the last-remaining bastion of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate. The substantial HTS presence in Idlib has caused Russia and Iran to periodically threaten a military offensive against the city. Even though the Sept. 2018 Russia-Turkey buffer zone agreement has not resulted in the much-anticipated withdrawal of HTS from Idlib, Turkeys fears of a refugee crisis on its borders and anti-Assad sentiments have caused Ankara to oppose a Russian or Iranian-led military intervention in Idlib.

Although Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov continues to request Turkish diplomatic cooperation on Idlib, his deputy Sergei Vershinin claimed, during last months Munich Security Conference, that negotiations with terrorists were impossible and hinted at an eventual Russian-led military intervention in Idlib. Russias uncompromising attitude towards Islamist groups in Syria suggests that Vershinins rhetoric should be taken seriously, and that last Septembers buffer zone agreement is at serious risk of unravelling. If an offensive does take place in Idlib, countries that have thus far been unwilling to recognize Assads legitimacy, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, will likely be forced to compromise their long-held opposition to Assad and accept a peace settlement that consolidates his hegemony over Syria.

The presence of the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) and associated militias in northeastern Syria, which are designated by Turkey as terrorist entities, presents another challenge to peace in Syria. On Dec. 12, Erdogan warned that Turkey would launch a military offensive against the YPG in northeastern Syria in a few days, but ultimately postponed a large-scale military offensive in Manbij, after Syrian government forces entered the city for the first time since 2012. This delay was likely a mere tactical adjustment, however. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu announced on Jan. 10 that Turkey would launch a military campaign against the YPG if the U.S. delayed its withdrawal from Syria, and Erdogan warned U.S. President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 of Turkeys willingness to intervene in Manbij.

As Russia, Iran, the United States and Saudi Arabia have all expressed varying degrees of opposition to a Turkish offensive in northeastern Syria, unilateral Turkish military action carries more risks now than it did in Jan. 2018 when Turkey undertook its Operation Olive Branch counter-terrorism operation in Afrin. The risk of an accidental confrontation with Russia has also increased, as Moscow wants Kurdish nationalists in Syria to accept Assads hegemony under the guise of a new federal state constitutional framework. A safe zone agreement is the only way for durable peace settlement in northeastern Syria to come to fruition, but it would require the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to overcome their long-standing aversion to accepting Turkish security guarantees.

Even if outstanding issues that are impeding a Syrian peace settlement, like the presence of HTS in Idlib and the YPG in northeastern Syria, are eventually resolved, the prospects of long-term stability in Syria are hampered by disagreements between international stakeholders on Syrias reconstruction process. On Dec. 14, Assad claimed that the reconstruction of Syria would cost $400 billion and increased refugee repatriation from Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon would raise these prohibitive costs further.

Although Assad is likely to be a fixture of Syrias political environment for the foreseeable future, the U.S. refuses to invest in an Assad-led reconstruction process until Damascus expels Irans military presence from southern Syria. While the European Union is less concerned about Iranian influence in Syria than the U.S., concerns about retaliatory U.S. punitive measures and a consensus around the need to isolate Assad for his conduct during the Syrian civil war will also likely prevent European assistance to Damascuss rebuilding initiatives.

The Wests reluctance to provide economic assistance to an Assad-led Syrian government has led to increased speculation about Saudi Arabia and Chinas potential to assist in the Syrian reconstruction process. In spite of this speculation, little has occurred to suggest that either Saudi Arabia or China would be willing to bear a substantial portion of the costs associated with reconstructing Syria.

On Dec. 24, Trump announced that Saudi Arabia had agreed to finance Syrias rebuilding efforts, but Riyadh, four days later, denied any such agreement existed. Saudi Arabias subsequent refusal to re-establish diplomatic relations with Damascus, even after its closest allies, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, normalized relations with Assads government was also seen as further proof of Riyadhs unwillingness to invest in the rebuilding of Syria. There is still a possibility that Saudi Arabia could ultimately invest in Syria, in an attempt to pry Damascus away from Iran, but Assads security dependence on Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Irans entrenched positions in southern Syria make this prospect increasingly remote.

Chinas potential contributions to the reconstruction of Syria have also inspired widespread speculation, as Beijing participated enthusiastically in Septembers Damascus Trade Fair and Chinese policymakers have viewed Syrias location on the Mediterranean coast as a useful asset for their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The perilous security situation in Syria and Chinas reluctance to engage more deeply in Middle East affairs could derail future Chinese investment, however, leaving Syria desperately short on capital to finance its reconstruction.

The reluctance of Western powers to finance an Assad-led reconstruction of Syria, and uncertainties surrounding Saudi Arabia and Chinas willingness to rebuild Syria suggest that Damascus will remain firmly in the geopolitical orbit of Russia and Iran for the foreseeable future. In order to preserve the hegemony that Russia accrued as a result of its military intervention in Syria, Moscow has secured its presence in the Tartus naval base and Khmeimim air base for 49 years. Russian companies have also taken steps to secure preliminary reconstruction contracts with Syria, which could entrench Moscows future dominance over Syrias oil industry and burgeoning construction sector.

Iran has responded to Russias actions with similar strategic maneuvers, as Tehran has secured preferential land ownership deals for Syrian Shiites and devised plans to convert the IRGCs close relationship with the Syrian Armed Forces into a leadership role in reforming the Syrian security sector. As Russian policymakers remain concerned by Irans hegemonic ambitions in southern Syria and Tehran actively competes with Moscow for reconstruction deals, Syria risks becoming mired in an incessant tug-of-war between Russia and Iran.

Even though the international community has gradually accepted Assads retention of power in Syria as a geopolitical reality, lingering disputes over Idlib and Kurdish groups in northeastern Syria remain major obstacles to the implementation of a Syrian peace settlement. As the U.S., EU, Saudi Arabia and China appear unwilling to pay the tremendous costs associated with rebuilding Syria from eight years of civil war, Syrias political future could be shaped by the vagaries of the Russia-Iran alliance for a long time to come.

Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
The UN Special Envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, has said that he is working towards constitutional reform, rather than, a brand new constitution writes Hurriya Press.

The UN Special Envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, said that his task is to work for, constitutional reform and comprehensive elections under the supervision of the United Nations.

In a lengthy interview with the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper published on Wednesday, Pedersen, who took over his duties this year following the resignation of Staffan de Mistura, said that his authorization from the United Nations in accordance with Resolution 2245 was to work towards constitutional reform and comprehensive elections with UN supervision, but what is very much necessary is not to issue judgements on the results of the negotiations. It is not my role to say what the content of the constitution will bethis is a sovereign Syrian decision.

By summarizing the UN role as constitutional reform and elections the new Envoy is falling completely into the Russian trap, and has become envoy to their plans and is not implementing the international mechanisms that are stated clearly in the Geneva declaration of 2012, which should achieve a political transition and establish a fully-empowered transitional ruling body. Russia has been able to circumvent this by creating an alternative track to the Geneva track (Astana and Sochi). This is evidenced by the fact that the Envoy has given up the Geneva declaration issued by the United Nations and has started working to achieve the outcomes of the Sochi National Dialogue conference which was held at the start of 2018 under Russian pressure. Over time, forming a constitutional committee to draft a new Syrian constitution, has become just constitutional reform to Bashar al-Assads constitution, which he approved in 2012 and which confirms him in power for two additional terms after 2021.

A few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron proposed to Russia a plan to resolve the situation in Syria, which included constitutional reform and cancelling the constitutional committee, and disregarding the development of a new constitution. With this plan being developed in the West, it suggests that it being prepared to market it through the United Nations.

Pedersen noted in his interview that work is underway to form a Syrian constitutional committee saying that he is working at the same time for a comprehensive approach including an agreement on the committees operating rules and discussion of the four baskets, which include, governance, the constitution, UN-monitored elections, and security and counter-terrorism. The Special Envoy did not address the issue of prisoners, which is a priority for many Syrians, despite the fact that a delegation from the Negotiations Committee had discussed the matter with Pedersen two days earlier.

In this respect, the head of the Negotiations Committee, Nasser al-Hariri, said that, the prisoners committee in the Negotiations Committee discussed with Special Envoy Geir Pedersen in Geneva the matter of prisoners and mechanisms to fundamentally resolve the issue under the Geneva umbrella, considering that it is a basic criteria for a secure and neutral environment and a central issue for the Syrian people.

The constitutional committee, which resulted from the Sochi National Dialogue Conference, has not been announced officially by the United Nations as its formation has stumbled several times due to the dispute over the independents who are supposed to comprise a third of the committees members (150 members: 50 for the opposition, 50 for the regime, and 50 for independents). Russia is insisting that the Assad regime head the committee and that the independents be those close to it to ensure that it constitutionalizes the rule of the Assad regime and legitimizes the Russian occupation of Syria.

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 has declared intentions to provide a further five million dollars worth of funding to the Syrian Civil Defense writes The U.S. Department of State.

At the direction of the President, subject to congressional approval, the United States intends to provide $5 million for the continuation of the vital, life-saving operations of the White Helmets in Syria and in support of the UNs International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) which is charged with assisting the investigation and prosecution of persons responsible for the most serious crimes under International Law committed in Syria since March 2011. Today, at the third Brussels Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region, Special Representative for Syria Engagement and Special Envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS Ambassador James Jeffrey publicly announced these contributions. In addition to those made last year, these contributions to the White Helmets and IIIM demonstrate the United States commitment and ongoing support for justice and accountability in Syria.

The United States Government strongly supports the work of the White Helmets. They have saved more than 114,000 lives since the conflict began, including victims of Assads vicious chemical weapons attacks. With over 2,800 volunteers, they continue to provide search and rescue, emergency response, and early recovery operations helping civilians in areas outside of the control of the regime.

These heroic first responders have the most dangerous job in the world. In addition to operating in an active war zone and in dire humanitarian circumstances, the Syrian regime and Russia deliberately target White Helmets centers and volunteers; since 2013 more than 250 White Helmets have been killedmany in so called double-tap strikesand 60 White Helmets centers have been damaged or destroyed by Russian and regime airstrikes and the regime. Despite these dangers, the White Helmets provide these services based on strict humanitarian principles and have become a symbol in Syria and world-wide for these courageous values.

Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
Dr. Joseph George Hoeg, 75, of Leonardtown, MD passed away on March 10, 2019 at MedStar St. Mary's Hospital. Dr. Hoeg was born on December 13, 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, PA to the late Joseph Hoeg and Frieda Heinbach Hoeg. Joseph moved to St. Mary's County in 1963. He met and married the love of his life, Jeannie Daniel Hoeg on June 30, 1973. Together they have celebrated over 45 years of blissful marriage.



Dr. Hoeg was a graduate of Missouri University of Science and Technology with his Bachelors, Masters and Doctorate all in Engineering. Joseph proudly worked over 53 years of hands on experience at NAVAIR in Flight Test and RDT&E. Joseph held positions as the Technical Director for the Strike Aircraft Test Directorate, Director of the Flight Test and Engineering Group, and the Executive Director of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division. He worked as a Senior Scientist at Pennsylvania State University with a specialty in Applied Research working on Naval Weapon Systems.



Dr. Hoeg and his loving wife, Jeannie, traveled extensively throughout Europe and had an affinity for Western Europe. Joseph loved to relax while boating. He also found great relaxation in "fixing" things. Joseph was an active member of First Saints Community Church in Leonardtown. He will missed by his family and friends.



Along with his wife, he is survived by his sister, Marilyn Przirembel (Hans), of Monterey, TN; niece, Janet Przirembel; and nephew, Scott Przirembel.



Family will receive friends on Saturday, March 16, 2019 from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. with a Funeral Service celebrated by Pastor John Wunderlich at 12:00 p.m., at Brinsfield Funeral Home, 22955 Hollywood Road, Leonardtown, MD 20650. Interment is private. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Leonardtown Volunteer Rescue Squad, P.O. Box 299, Leonardtown, MD 20650. Arrangements by the Brinsfield Funeral Home, P.A.
The head of the National Security Bureau, Major General Ali Mamlouk, was secretly transported to Turkey by the Russians on a boat to meet with members of the Turkish intelligence writes Al-Modon.

Al-Modons sources have confirmed reports that the head of the National Security Bureau, Major General Ali Mamlouk, visited the city of Antalya in Turkey in the last days of 2018, where he met a delegation from Turkish intelligence.

A spokesman for the Turkish presidency had stated in February that there was contact between Syrian and Turkish intelligence at a low level, denying that this contact was an acknowledgement of Assads legitimacy.

Al-Modons sources said that Russia oversaw this meeting and facilitated the transport of Mamlouk, who is close to them, from Syria to Turkish territory secretly by the sea, as they were keen to hide the matter from many regime leaders and their staff.

The sources said that the Russians summoned Mamlouk to the Russian Hemeimeem base in Lattakia for a routine visit, and after that took him across the Mediterranean on a private boat to the Turkish city of Antalya.

The meeting with Turkish intelligence lasted more than six hours before Mamlouk returned to Hemeimeem and from there to Damascus, according to the sources. The sources said they were unable to determine the contents of the meeting because of the secrecy of the mission.

Antalya was chosen because it was easy to access by sea quickly from Syria, and because of the heavy Russian presence there, as Russians comprise a large portion of the investors in Antalya, which is one of the most important centers for Russian intelligence activities in Turkey.

Mamlouk previously traveled to Italy at the start of 2018 and to Saudi Arabia in 2015, and he has repeatedly visited Egypt, most recently at the end of 2018. Reports leaked of a new visit carried out by Mamlouk to Saudi Arabia in January 2019, but Al-Modons sources did not confirm that.

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.
French filmmaker Gaspar Noe is no stranger to controversy. His 2002 movie Irreversible, starring Monica Bellucci, is famous for its brutal depiction of the rape of the lead character. Additionally, Noe was criticized for the film also being homophobic, something he vehemently denied.

Climax (A24), Noes unconventional latest, probably wont win him any GLAAD awards either. Nothing about the movie conforms to expectations. End credits roll at the beginning, whereas the opening credits are seen 45 minutes into the picture. Pretentious statement cards appear (including one upside down) out of nowhere. The performances by the mostly inexperienced and young cast gives the proceedings a feeling of awkward improvisation.

Set in the mid-1990s, on the grounds of a Catholic school, Climax is about a talented group of dancers who have been brought together to rehearse and perform as troupe with the promise of trip to New York. After the opening shot of a woman, covered in blood collapsing in the snow, we are shown videotaped interviews with each of the straight and gay, black and white dancers, most of whom are French, talking about what dancing means to them and how they are willing to do anything to be chosen.

The opening dance number, a breakdancing and voguing-inspired sequence, filmed in one long shot, is dazzling. If theres one thing these performers can do, its dance. They put their bodies through a series of contortions and gyrations that are almost beyond belief, fittingly to Cerrones `70s disco classic Supernature (co-written by Lene Lovich).

At a party given as a reward for three days of exhausting rehearsals, the dancers, including the popular choreographer Selva (Sofia Boutella) relax, mingle, and flirt. Through their conversations, we get to know them better, find out whats on their minds (hint: its sex). Den-mother Emmanuelle (trans actress Claude Gajan Maull) even prepared sangria for the dancers to drink, which they do liberally (with the exception of a few). Unbeknownst to them, however, the punch bowl has been spiked with LSD.

Before you can say 9th circle of hell, the drug kicks in and its Lord of the Flies meets Fame. Good-natured Omar (Adrien Sissoko), who didnt partake in the punch, is banished to the snow-covered landscape where he freezes to death. In an effort to keep him safe, Emmanuelle locks her young son Tito (Vince Galliot Cumant) in an electrical closet, but that doesnt work out so well. Lesbian couple Psyche (Thea Carla Schott) and Ivana (Sharleen Temple) argue and then Ivana goes off and seduces Selva. The young queen in the group, who is hot for stud David (Romain Guillermic), is rebuffed and seeks comfort in the arms of DJ Daddy (Kiddy Smile). Brother and sister Taylor (Taylor Kastle) and Gazelle (Giselle Palmer) take an unexpected detour down an incestuous path. Secretly pregnant Lou (Souheila Yacoub), who didnt have anything to drink, is kicked in the gut by a distrustful troupe member who is convinced she is behind the spiking, then takes a knife and slashes her own flesh. The resident cokehead catches fire, and so on.

To say that Climax will appeal to a very specialized audience is an understatement. At least 20 minutes too long, Climax is nevertheless worth seeing simply for the mind-blowing dance numbers.

Rating: B-

Check out the official trailer
Families of victims search the site of the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 15, 2019

Boeing is upgrading the stall prevention software on its 737 MAX, industry sources said Friday, as French investigators scoured black box data from the latest of two deadly crashes involving the aircraft in recent months.

The MAX has been grounded worldwide following Sunday's Ethiopia Airlines disaster that killed all 157 on board, and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond.

Boeing will fine-tune its MCAS systemimplicated in the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 in Indonesia in Octoberwithin 10 days, said two sources, who cautioned that the cause of the latest crash has yet to be determined.

Boeing has halted deliveries of its top-selling model ahead of the software patch, which was already underway prior to the latest incident near Addis Ababa.

Asked for details about the timeline for the fix, a Boeing spokesman Friday would only say it would be installed in "coming weeks."

The black boxes from the Ethiopian craft, which was only a few months old and crashed minutes after takeoff, are being analyzed by the French authorities to determine the cause of the accident.

An Ethiopian delegation delivered the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster, to France's BEA air safety agency to begin the investigation on Friday.

The Lion Air crash also came just minutes after takeoff, killing 189 people, and US authorities say there is evidence of similarities between the accidents.

Oromo women perform a traditional chant at the crash site at Hama Quntushele village, in Oromia region

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said findings from the crash site and "newly refined satellite data" warranted "further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents."

Several American pilots also reported issues with the MCAS and the FAA said it had ordered Boeing to issue a fix by April.

The aerospace giant held a conference call on Thursday with at least three carriers using the 737 MAX and gave them the patch, one source said, and the other airlines will get it early next week.

Meanwhile, American pilots have raised questions about the training provided to the flight crews.

One who flew a MAX 8 on Monday told AFP that US-trained pilotsmany of whom come from the militarywould have been able to react quickly to the MCAS flaw, if that occured in the accident last weekend.

And Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenbergernoted for his safe landing of a damaged plane on the Hudson River in New York without loss of life questioned the lack of experience of the Ethiopian first officer on the doomed flight, who reportedly had only 200 hours of flight time.

"A cockpit crew must be a team of experts, not a captain and an apprentice," he said on social media.

But he also worried about the lag in getting a software fix installed.

A man holds an Ethiopian flag as children from neighbouring Hama elementary school arrive to pay condolences at the crash site

"It has been obvious since the Lion Air crash that a redesign of the 737 MAX 8 has been urgently needed ... and the announced proposed fixes do not go far enough."

Boeing shares hit

Thousands of miles away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.

Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyze the data. The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts.

An FAA emergency order has grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice, effectively taking the aircraft out of the skies globally.

The move came after a growing number of airlines and countries decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it is determined there are no safety issues.

US President Donald Trump told reporters the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern".

Trump and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed exchanged condolences Friday, Abiy said on Twitter, with the US president praising Ethiopian Airlines as a "strong institution" and offering technical support.

Chart showing changes in Boeing shares over the past five days.

The 737 MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model and it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service.

There are 74 registered in the United States and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA.

Boeing's shares have fallen 10 percent since Sunday's crashwiping out about $25 billion in valueafter regaining some ground Friday after report that a fix was coming soon.

'Panicky voice'

According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the MCAS repeatedly pushed the nose down after takeoff.

At least four American pilots later complained of the same problem with the aircraft, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by NASA.

In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air disaster, US pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane's trajectory in response.

The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged to the ground.

Countries that have closed their airspace and suspended flights of the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, as of Wednesday, March 13 at 1900 GMT

According to The New York Times, air traffic controllers observed the Ethiopian Airlines plane "oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet" prior to the crash.

Speaking in a "panicky voice," the doomed aircraft's captain requested permission to return to the airport almost immediately after takeoff as the plane "accelerated to abnormal speed," the newspaper reported Thursday, citing a person who had reviewed the air traffic communications.

"Break break, request back to home," the Times quoted the pilot as saying just prior to the crash. "Request vector (direction) for landing."

Boeing was criticized after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the stall prevention system.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said the doomed flight's captain was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours.

Explore further Boeing suspends 737 MAX deliveries as France probes black boxes

 2019 AFP
Only a few months after the Kansas City Chiefs cut star running back Kareem Hunt following video of his February altercation with a 19-year-old woman in a hotel, another one of their offensive stars appears to be in some hot water. And its someone whos been there before; star receiver/returner Tyreek Hill, who while at Oklahoma State in December 2014, was accused of assaulting his 20-year-old pregnant girlfriend, Crystal Espinal, and was dismissed from the team. Now, Steve Vockrodt and Brooke Pryor of The Kansas City Star have reported that Hill is under investigation by the Overland Park, Kansas police for alleged battery, that the incident is against his son, and that Hills fiancee (Espinal, whos still with him, is the mother of the son in question, and is pregnant with twins) is listed in others involved:

The Star has obtained a police report from the Overland Park Police Department about a battery incident that lists a juvenile as the victim. Hills fiancee, Crystal Espinal, is listed under others involved. The report is dated Thursday but its unclear when the alleged incident took place. The club is aware of the investigation involving Tyreek Hill, the Chiefs said in a statement to The Star. Were in the process of gathering information and have been in contact with the league and local authorities. Well have no further comment at this time. A source familiar with the situation said Hills fiancee has been in contact with Overland Park police. The source said that the incident was against the couples son. The source said that the incident was against the couples 3-year-old son, resulting in a broken arm.

As per Angie Ricono, Emily Sinovic and Chris Oberholtz of KCTV 5 (the CBS affiliate in Kansas City), this is the second time in just over a week that police were called to Hills house:

Overland Park police were called at 4:20 p.m. Thursday to a home in the 16400 block of Switzer Road. Officers were previously called to that same address on March 5 to investigate a report of child abuse or neglect. Hills name is directly listed on that report. According to Overland Park police, the original report was closed three days later when prosecution was declined. Hills name is not listed on the most recent battery report, but his address is the listed location. Sources tell KCTV5 that the Overland Park Police Department has turned over their investigation to the Johnson County District Attorneys Office for review.

In the 2014 case, Hill eventually pled guilty to domestic assault and battery by strangulation and was sentenced to three years of probation, plus anger management counselling and a year-long batterers program. He returned to football at West Alabama, and the Chiefs drafted him in the fifth round in 2016. That was controversial, and his NFL success has come with questions, even while hes reportedly been following the terms of his plea deal (which led to his conviction eventually being expunged). And now that this has come out, there are going to be more questions about Hill. Well see what the details of this case are, but it definitely doesnt sound good.

[The Kansas City Star]
1 hour ago

Funko Stock is Worth Collecting Lower

Pop culture toymaker Funko Pop (NASDAQ: FNKO) stock has made a dramatic recovery in early 2021 but has sold off just as dramatically into year-end as the collectors market cools off. The versatile, vertically integrated maker of its unique pop dolls has seen its stock rise with the popularity of comics and movie speculation as the market peaked in the summer of 2021 during the peak of FOMO.

Read Article
Gavino Rodriguez, a gay man living in southwest Detroit, was robbed, beaten, murdered and burned by two men in 2013. Six years later, both of the men have been sent to prison.

Hameer Alkotait was sentenced to 18-20 years in prison Wednesday in connection to the murder of Rodriguez, according to Detroit News. His co-defendant, Andrew Czarnecki, was sentenced to life in prison. The case was prosecuted by Jaimie Powell Horowitz, a lawyer with Fair Michigan, an LGBTQ rights foundation.

Alanna Maguire, president of Fair Michigan, says she is excited to finally see justice served for the Rodriguez family.

"These cold-case murder convictions resulted from Detective Kevin Wight and the Detroit Police Departments tenacious investigation of this brutal crime, and Special Prosecutor Jaimie Powell Horowitzs determined prosecutions," Maguire said in a statement. "We are grateful for their efforts, and we are committed to continue the fight for justice for the LGBTQ community in Wayne County."
Prairie Villages St. Annes Catholic School banned the child of a gay couple from attending their kindergarten. Now, almost 1,000 people have signed a petition urging the church leaders to admit the student.

The school argued that though the church says to treat gay people with dignity, gay parents are inconsistent with the churchs teachings, Superintendent Kathy OHara said. The petition points out that the school admits students who arent Catholic, which would go against their teachings, according to The Kansas City Star.

Respectfully, we believe that the decision to deny a child of God access to such a wonderful community and education, based on the notion that his or her parents union is not in accordance with the Churchs teaching in Sacramental marriage, lacks the compassion and mercy of Christs message, the petition says, according to the Star.

The schools pastor, Rev. Craig J. Maxim, said he will consult the Archdiocese of Kansas City further on the decision.
See yourself on a new pathway at NHTI. Whether your path leads directly into a career, or to continuing education at a 4-year college or university, envision the future you want  at NHTI.

Explore NHTI at our Spring Open House, Wednesday April 3rd, from 4:30 - 6:30 pm in the Student Center / Wellness Center Gym. Learn about our 90+ academic programs. Tour our 240 acre campus. Find out about Campus Life at NHTI. Meet current and former students, Academic Department Heads and representatives from Admissions and Financial Aid. Start here  go anywhere!

Contact the Admissions office at (603) 230-4011 or nhtiadm@ccsnh.edu for further information  or just come and join us! Open to all prospective students and their families.

Cant make Open House? We have Drop-in Tuesdays weekly from 4:30  6:00 pm. Get a

15-minute overview of the college and bring your questions for Admissions and Financial Aid representatives. Campus tours available for those who arrive by 5:15 pm. No reservations required.

Or schedule a tour at your convenience at http://www.nhti.edu/sign-campus-tour.

NHTI is a dynamic public institution of higher learning providing accessible, rigorous education, serving students, businesses and the community by creating pathways for lifelong learning, career advancement and civic engagement. With 100 full-time faculty and 250 adjunct faculty, NHTI Concords Community College offers more than 90 academic programs to more than 4,000 students annually. NHTI is a member of the Community College System of New Hampshire, and has been accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education, a nongovernmental, nationally recognized accrediting agency, since 1969.
Every year as winter ends, Luxembourg's blood banks end up nearing depletion and require blood donors.

Although the country has a rather large reserve of volunteer blood donors (13,000), Luxembourg's hospitals often face periods where more blood transfusions are required than at other points of the year. This usually occurs by the end of winter, as is the case this year.

According to Dr Andree Heinricy, the doctor in charge of the Red Cross's Luxembourg City transfusion centre, the blood bank is at its lower stock limit. This is due to the last winter season, as there were a number of influenzas affecting residents in Luxembourg.

Everybody is eligible to donate

Whilst certain factors do prohibit some people from donating, e.g. certain medications, illness, recent tattoos, recent travel to specific countries, and certain risky sexual practices, globally all residents and cross-border workers are eligible to donate.

Once registered, the Luxembourg Red Cross (Croix-Rouge Luxembourgeoise) will call donors when its stocks are low. As Dr Henricy explained, the organisations sends invitations based on their needs and based on blood group. Unfortunately, the response rate remains low, which is why the organisation sends out a number of invitations.

If you are already a registered donor, the easiest way to donate is to send a positive response to the latest invitation to give blood. If you haven't already registered, there is still time to request an appointment to register.

Mobilising potential donors is crucial in light of the organisation needing to renew its volunteers. In order to compensate the departures of older donors, the organisation has to search and recruit between 1,000 and 1,5000 new donors each year. Thankfully, Dr Heinricy, explained, young people are happy to join. She confirmed that the Red Cross's most successful recruitment campaign takes place at the student fair.

Donations needed throughout the year

While the Red Cross may make targeted appeals, this is mainly an efficiency question and way of managing donors. Dr Anne Schumacher, biologist and head of the Red Cross's laboratory, explained that donations must have continuity rather than peak periods.

Whilst donations may trail off during certain times, the demand for blood transfusions never ceases.

The Red Cross consequently struggles to equalise stocks, as they cannot be too low or too high. Blood cannot be kept forever: red blood cells can be kept for 42 days and platelets for five.

Five mistakes to avoid when giving blood

Giving blood on an empty stomach: When giving blood, you are advised to eat normally.

Thinking the process takes ages: Your first appointment could last one hour and fifteen minutes, as you have to fill in a form and meet to ensure you're eligible before donating. Afterwards, you also receive a snack to restore iron levels. For a regular donor, this should take 37 minutes.

Being scared of pain: Giving blood is no more painful than a blood test, with the donation lasting between five and ten minutes.

Fearing you might faint: People fainting from giving blood is rare, even if the stress or sight of blood might frighten some donors. Professionals are present at all times if you do require assistance.

Leaving without your snack: You need to restore your iron levels and recover after a blood donation. You should also drink plenty of fluids after donating blood.

Men are asked to donate a maximum of four times per year whereas women should donate a maximum of three times a year. As well as blood donation centres in Luxembourg City near the Glacis (wich is open between 8am and 4pm Mon/Tues/Fri, and to 6pm on Wed/Thur), there are also mobile blood giving centres throughout the country.
The school has informed parents that a case of measles has been detected at European School Luxembourg II, located in Mamer.

Parents are asked to check the status of their child or children's vaccinations. If your child is at the school but not vaccinated, you should contact your paediatrician or GP, or the Sanitary inspection division of the health directorate in Hamm through +352 247 856 50.
It is not often that notaries resign or retire, but there will be two open positions this year  one in Luxembourg City and one in Clervaux.

Notary Emile Schlesser, whose office is based on Rue Notre Dame, is retiring as of 1 September. In Clervaux, notary Martine Weinandy will also be leaving her position on 1 July.

Those interested in the positions can contact the Ministry of Justice by the last week of March to express an interest.

The number of notaries distributed throughout Luxembourg's cantons has been set at 36 for the last 25 years. There are 13 throughout the canton of Luxembourg City, and only one in Clervaux, which will now be open to new notaries.

The law dictates that notaries can work until the age of 72, unless they are dismissed or they resign.
"Friday's for the Future" - under this slogan, thousands of Luxembourgish students are currently protesting for climate action in Luxembourg City.

Twitter is ablaze with #FridaysForFuture and #ClimateStrike posts as tens of thousands of young people across the world set off to march for the climate. A comprehensive list of events can be found on fridaysforfuture.org.

From Glacis to Knuedler

At 11am, the first students arrived and prepared ahead of the march. The above photo gallery will update with the most recent photos.

Around 12.30 pm, the students started marching from Glacis to Place Guillaume II (Knuedler) in the city centre. Since 1.15 pm, large numbers are gathering at Knuedler.

Earlier on Friday, police estimated that approximately 3000 students were participating. The estimated number later ballooned to 7500 participants. According to organisers of the events, up to 15,000 students have taken to the street to protest.

Grey skies but optimistic atmosphere

Ignited by role models like teenage climate warrior Greta Thunberg, many students showed themselves optimistic and expressed hope that the strikes would make a difference. One of the young protesters, Aurelia, said she felt "proud to stand up for our future generations."

Another teenage protester, Mihika, stressed that she felt "proud to make sure mine and my friends' future will be in a better place."

Mara, a 17-year-old secondary school student, also optimistically saw the protests as "a great initiative to raise awareness about the climate crisis."

"I really hope," she added, "that the masses of students that participated today will be taken seriously and that there will be the necessary political change."

Cars removed from the Glacis

As the police warned, cars were forbidden from parking at the Glacis car park to allow the marchers to assemble. Consequently, some cars have been towed from the area, as seen in the photos below.

The photos published on this site are subject to copyright and may not be copied, modified, or sold without the prior permission of the owner of the site in question.

Politicians welcome initiative

Minister for the Environment Carole Dieschbourg and Minister for Energy Claude Turmes welcomed the students' initiative and expressed their support. Both politicians highlighted that the situation was urgent and that climate action needs to be taken seriously. They also explained that students would have their say when it comes to working out the the national climate and energy plan.

Travel information

The march will begin moving from the Glacis car park towards Place Guillaume II. As a result, Avenue Porte Neuve and Grande Rue will be completely closed to traffic to allow the protesters to walk along the route agreed upon by the organisers, the police, and the city's municipal authorities. The police have consequently advised motorists to avoid the area entirely.

There will also be no parking at the Glacis car park to allow students to assemble.

VDL.lu has warned that disruption on their entire bus network will last between 10am and 5pm due to the march. Some bus stops will be temporarily cancelled. Luxembourg City Buses (AVL) personnel will be on hand to guide public transport users.

The below Facebook post shows the exact route of the march. Surrounding roads are likely to be affected too.

Controversy: European School prohibits students from striking



In an interview with our colleagues from RTL5minutes, one of the student organizers of the strike explained that the school board of the European School had prohibited the students from striking.

"They do not respect the strikes at all," she said. Even though not all students will respect the decision, this may reduce the turnout, she explained.




25 million were invested in the new Brasserie de Luxembourg brewery in Diekirch. Energy and water saving systems as well as carbon footprint reduction strategies lie at the heart of the impressive new building.

Back in January 2010, rumour had it that Diekirch may no longer be brewed... in Diekirch. To avoid negative publicity of this kind, the owner of the Brasserie de Luxembourg (multinational drink and brewing holdings company AB InBev) decided to invest a significant sum and set up a new brewery.

According to the director of the Brasserie de Luxembourg, Gilles Nackaerts, this investment demonstrates the company's "undeniable will to stay true to its roots and its customers." The location of the new brewery also shows commitment to the city of Diekirch, he added.

The new brewery was designed by the Luxembourgish architecture firm Beiler Francois Fritsch. Building works began in 2017 and, 25 million later, the new brewery was finally inaugurated this Friday. Several officials, including prime minister Xavier Bettel, were present during the inauguration.

Modernity and green technologies



The company hopes that the new state-of-the-art brewery will do justice to the expectations and demands of the costumers. Technological innovation plays a key role in this context, Nackaerts explained. In fact, the brewery will reduce electricity consumption by 15%. The main brewing room is also equipped with a vapour condensation system that allows it to recover energy and consequently reduce calorific energy by 38%. Water consumption will similarly decrease by 10%.

As operational director Pierre Van Vynckt enthusiastically explains, the brewery also prides itself on its new filtration system, which is unique in Europe. A membrane filter allows filtration of the beer without the use of any filter additives.

No bottling in Luxembourg

Even though the Brasserie de Luxembourg produces both Diekirch and Mousel beer, the priority for now remains Diekirch, Nackaerts confirmed.

Operational director Pierre Van Vynckt added that the alcohol-free version of Diekirch beer is produced in Belgium, where the company has the infrastructure required to de-alcoholize beer.

The bottling of the beer also takes place in Belgium. In Diekirch, the beer is only put in barrels that are then shipped to Louvain.

Considering the current popularity of microbreweries, Nackaerts does not exclude the possibility of starting to brew other beers. If their infrastructure allows it, a small seasonal series may be an option, he explained.
A Latvian Catholic priest and two other people have been charged with human trafficking and sexual abuse of a male teenager with learning difficulties, local media reported Friday, citing justice authorities.

Laura Majevska, a spokeswoman for Latvia's prosecutor general confirmed the charges against three suspects, although she refused to reveal their identities.

Citing unnamed sources, the Baltic News Service named one of the accused as Pavels Zeila, a 73-year-old priest, who had served in a diocese in eastern Latvia.

"The abuser did horrible things to me while talking to me in a sweet voice: 'What a cute boy!'," the alleged victim told Latvian public broadcaster LTV in an interview aired before the indictment.

"Only later I was told he is a priest," the vulnerable young man said, in the broadcast to a national audience.

Police arrested Zeila on suspicion of abuse in September, but he has since been released on bail.

Describing the details of the allegations at the time of the arrest, Armands Lubarts, chief of a police task force on human trafficking and pimping, told media that "one of the suspects 'delivered' the defenceless victim for a fee.

"The church representative, who was the end buyer, paid the fee and then committed violent sexual crimes against the victim," Lubarts added.

Neither Zeila nor his lawyers have commented on the charges, which come as the Catholic Church has vowed to fight child abuse within its ranks.
This post is prompted by a number of things that have left me pondering how as Christians we are to bring about change in our churches. When we strongly b...

6 years ago
Wonder Caves: Ideal Spot for Hikers and Cave Explorers
LGBT people are under attack in Armenia and the country could care less, said journalist Vic Gerami.

Seeking to bring attention to what he termed, the Armenian authorities complacency, Gerami is circulating reports and photographs of LGBT people who have suffered harassment and violence in Armenia.

A lot of homophobia, hate crimes, gay bashings are justified and not just by the people but also the authorities, Gerami said in a telephone interview. Its pretty bad.

Gerami, a Los Angeles based journalist and owner of the website, The Blunt Post, visited Armenia last year during what he called a velvet revolution.

When I got there the country was in celebration, Gerami said. There was lots of good energy, positive. Overall, I had a fantastic time.

The situation has deteriorated since with younger Armenians and women becoming intolerant of LGBT people, said Gerami. On Feb. 11, a staff member of the trans activist group, Right Side NGO, reported being beaten and thrown into traffic on the streets of Yerevan, Armenias capital city.

Armenia is a landlocked country in southwest Asia, smaller than Maryland, with an estimated population of more than three million. It is bordered by Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

Strict adherence to religion, Gerami said, remains a source of the problems.

Armenia prides itself as the first Christian nation, Gerami said. There is a lot of misguided and misinformed Christian-based myths that are thrown out and used as weapons. Some of the homophobia is justified as patriotism and its also coming from Armenias Godfather if you will, which is Russia.

Russia is its backer in many, many ways, Gerami said. So what Putin says goes.

In 2018, the Maryland and New York attorney generals office's trained prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges analyzing reports in Armenia, said Kirsten D. Madison, U.S. State Department assistant secretary for the bureau of international narcotics and law enforcement affairs in remarks to the National Association of Attorney Generals on Wednesday.

SFGN has reached out via e-mail to the Armenian delegation to the United Nations for comment. This story is developing.
Nearly a dozen overseas projects invested in by state-owned Vietnam Oil and Gas Group (PVN) and its oil exploration subsidiary PVEP are either loss-making or at risk of incurring losses worth billions of U.S. dollars, a recent report compiled and released by the Ministry of Industry and Trade, shows.

PVN, wholly owned by the central government, is one of Vietnams largest oil producers, with activities covering all operations from oil and gas exploration and production to storage, processing, transportation, distribution and services.

The corporation is one of the countrys pioneers in making investments in oil and gas projects overseas, with 13 offshore projects in South America, Europe, Africa, Western Asia, and Southeast Asia.

Eleven out of the 13 investments are currently in the red or at risk of incurring losses, according to the trade ministry's report.

PVNs largest offshore investment, made via its subsidiary PVEP, fully known as PetroVietnam Exploration and Production Corporation, is in the Junin 2 heavy oil extraction project in Venezuela.

Between 2010 and 2015, PVEP poured approximately US$1.82 billion into the project as part of a joint investment with the state-run Venezuelan Petroleum Corp (CVP).

Junin 2 was expected to extract 200,000 barrels of crude oil daily after the second phase of investment.

In December 2013, the then-prime minister ordered that PVEP halt the investment until further review after seeing little progress on the mega-project.

The Corruption, Economic and Trafficking Crimes Department under the Ministry of Public Security has sent an official dispatch to PVN requesting the submission of all documents related to its Junin 2 investment by March 20 for investigation.

PVN has also contributed $1.29 million to a joint investment with Moscow-based Gazpromviet to study and launch oil exploration and extraction projects in Russia, but so far the projects effort has borne no fruit.

In 2017, PVN asked for government permission to withdraw its money from the investment, a request that was turned down.

The Vietnamese government at the time asked that PVN re-negotiate terms with its Russian partner to prevent additional costs from arising.

PVEP also invested 8.5 percent of the total investment in an oil and gas exploration project in the Republic of the Congo, known under the name of Marine XI.

In June 2017, PVEP asked to transfer the entire equity to another party after seeing that it was a bad investment.

In Iran, PVEP has poured more than $82 million into developing the Danan Block Project, which is currently suspended due to several issues.

In early 2018, PVN asked for government permission to transfer one hundred percent of its share of investment into Block PM304 in Malaysia, and terminate other projects on Block XV and Block SK305 off the Malaysian coast.

In Myanmar, PVEP has made three investments into Block M2, Block MD2, and Block MD4, all of which are now under re-consideration due to doubts of their effectiveness.

After investing $72.4 million into a project to explore oil fields in Cambodian waters, PVEP failed to launch any extraction projects and is now being forced to transfer extracting rights to a foreign partner.

To clean up the mess on these 11 projects, the Ministry of Industry and Trade has compiled a list of PVN subsidiaries, including PVEP, that are up for re-organization and privatization by 2020.

This week, the member council of PVN convened a meeting to review and approve the resignation of its general director Nguyen Vu Truong Son, who had submitted a letter of resignation, a source told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

The reason for Sons resignation is unclear.

Son, 57, was general director of PVEP from 2009 until 2012, when he was promoted to deputy general director of PVN.

He has been PVN general director since 2016.

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A high school teacher in Ho Chi Minh City who got suspended last year for giving her students the silent treatment has been suspended again merely two months after resuming her job, this time for throwing students notebooks to the ground in a fury.

Tran Thi Minh Chau, who teaches math at Long Thoi High School in Nha Be District, was in April 2018 admonished and suspended from teaching after she had refused to utter a word in class for three months straight.

Between January and April last year, Chau would spend all her time in one specific class, 11A1, writing lessons on the board without speaking a word to her students.

The teachers unusual silence made headlines when one of her 11A1 students, Pham Song Toan, burst into tears at a meeting with city officials as she recounted the dreary atmosphere during the lessons taught by the female teacher.

The school later convened another meeting and decided to suspend her from teaching and assign her non-teaching duties until the end of 2018 as disciplinary actions.

In January 2019, she was given a second chance to teach and was assigned her first class in eight months, according to Long Thoi High School headmaster Bui Minh Binh.

However, the teacher managed to get herself suspended for a second time in March, only two months after returning from her first suspension, Minh said.

While Chau no longer turned on her silent mode teaching this class, she got in hot water for throwing her students notebooks to the ground in a fit of rage when the students failed to finish their homework or did not follow her instructions in doing it, the headmaster added.

The principal did not elaborate on whether it is a single or repeated incident.

A number of parents also made complaints to the school that Chau frequently showed up in class in a bad mood and terrorized students with her incessant scolding.

Chau has been suspended for an indefinite period until a further decision is made on her case, Minh said.

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The father of a Vietnamese woman accused of killing the half-brother of North Korea's leader had washed bedding in anticipation of her homecoming after her Indonesian co-accused was suddenly freed earlier this week.

But his daughter is still in custody after a Malaysian prosecutor said Thursday Doan Thi Huong would remain on trial for the murder of Kim Jong Nam with a toxic nerve agent at a busy Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017.

"I am very sad. The government gave us the best support but the other side could not solve it, what can we do?" said Huong's father Doan Van Thanh from his village in northern Vietnam.

Vietnam's government made an 11th-hour plea to Malaysian authorities this week to free Huong after fellow suspect Siti Aisyah was sent home following back-door lobbying from Jakarta.

Thanh was sure it would work. He insists his daughter was tricked into Kim's murder and believes she thought she was part of a prank for TV, as she has said in court.

She could face death by hanging if found guilty of the assassination.

"I still believe Huong is innocent," the parking lot attendant said at his home surrounded by rice paddies in Nam Dinh province.

He has had little news from his daughter since she was arrested in February 2017, just three brief calls from custody on a borrowed phone asking after the family's health.

He implored his 30-year-old daughter not to lose hope, optimistic she could still be freed.

"Please be patient, the Vietnamese government will support your release," he said in a message to his daughter.

Huong's lawyer said he would try again to get the charges dropped after Thursday's ruling, which left Huong in tears in court.

Doan Van Thanh, the father of Vietnamese woman Doan Thi Huong accused of killing Kim Jong Nam, insists his daughter is innocent and hopes she will be home soon. Photo: AFP

'So unfair'

A former hair salon worker, Huong was propelled into the global spotlight after the Cold War-style murder shocked the world.

The slight, round-faced girl left home after high school to study pharmacology and accounting in Hanoi.

But her life took a turn when she moved to Malaysia, where like so many migrant workers she sought a brighter future than the one on offer in her poor rice farming village.

Her flashy fashion, foreign boyfriends and edgy hairstyles raised eyebrows back home, a conservative hamlet where most people work in the fields.

Soon after she was charged with murder, unverified clips of her auditions for "Vietnamese Idol" started circulating online. Other unsubstantiated images showed the same young woman kissing a famous social media prankster on a popular YouTube channel.

Her family says she is a good girl who fell into the murder plot unwittingly.

Buoyed by the news that Aisyah was freed -- and after Vietnam's foreign minister publicly called for Huong's release this week -- they were certain she would be home soon.

Vietnam said it was disappointed in the outcome of Thursday's hearing.

"We regret the fact that the Malaysian court did not set free Doan Thi Huong immediately," foreign ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said, urging a fair trial.

Huong's stepmother Nguyen Thi Vy was so hopeful her stepdaughter would be back Thursday she bought extra cassava at the market for a celebration meal with the media that had gathered at her home since early Thursday.

She was crushed when she did not get the good news she was hoping for.

"Why was the other girl was released, and not our girl? They were together. Why is this the outcome?" Vy said, sobbing.

"It is so unfair... we are calling for help from the most senior people at the trial to consider releasing my daughter, free her as soon as possible," she said.
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Administrators in Hue, the capital city of the central province of Thua Thien-Hue, are searching for a way to properly display a giant sculpture gifted by a city in South Korea in honor of the friendship and cooperation established between the two cities.

Hue and Namyangju City in the northwest South Korean province of Gyeonggi entered into a friendship and cooperative relationship in the fields of economics, tourism, culture, education, and urban management last October.

Namyangju governor Cho Kwang Han recently offered to present a six-meter-tall statue called Greeting Man to Hue to celebrate the two cities friendship.

Upon receiving the offer, the Hue administration held a meeting to discuss suitable downtown locations for the statue that would not affect the cityscape, city chairman Nguyen Van Thanh said on Thursday.

Greeting Man," a work by 48-year-old South Korean sculptor Yoo Young-ho, is an aluminum statue of a blue, naked man bowing in a typically Asian greeting gesture.

A naked figure represents no prejudice, while blue means no racial discrimination.

The statue is expected to be transported to Vietnam after its production is completed. South Korea has said it will bear all shipping costs.

A Greeting Man statue is placed in the northeast province of Gangwon, South Korea. Photo: Hankyoreh

Despite its representation of peace, reconciliation, and communication, finding a fitting location for Greeting Man has become a headache for Hue administrators.

Though the citys administration decided that the two banks along the citys iconic Huong (Perfume) River were the most suitable sites for the statue, the option was disapproved of by researcher Nguyen Dac Xuan, who said the statue is much higher than other existing artworks along the river.

Xuan suggested resizing the statue to make it smaller, and place the sculpture on the south bank of the river, where several buildings constructed with South Korean help are located.

Meanwhile, administrators from the South Korean city suggested either the Hue Imperial Citadel, the park opposite the Hue Cultural Center, or Dong Ba Market.

But Thanh said the most suitable location would be the park in front of the Hue Central Hospital. He also backed the idea of making the statue smaller than its original design.

Hue will submit an official proposal for the resizing of the statue to the Thua Thien-Hue administration and the South Korean side for consideration, according to the chairman.

A Greeting Man statue is placed in the neighborhood of Buceo, Montevideo, Uruguay. Photo: CNN

Vietnam is not the first country outside South Korea that the modern sculpture project Greeting Man has been placed.

In October 2012, a Greeting Man statue was unveiled in the neighborhood of Buceo, Montevideo, Uruguay, as part of a planned world series in multiple locations.

Another statue was erected in Panama City, Panama in January 2016, marking the second to be unveiled in Latin America.

Last March, South Korea went on to gift Merida City in Mexico, where a community of about 2,000 South Korean citizens is living, another Greeting Man."

At home, a Greeting Man was introduced in October 2013, near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, in Haean, Yanggu County, in the northeast province of Gangwon.

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A viral challenge calling on netizens to go outside, pick up trash, and post their before and after photos is sweeping through social media, and young Vietnamese people do not want to stay away from the trend.

Challenge for Change, or the #Trashtag Challenge, has become a global viral sensation, inspiring youth to make a difference in their community, one trash bag at a time.

The #Trashtag Challenge is simple  find an outdoor area that has been overrun with litter, gather a group of friends to help clean it, and post 'before and after' photos to social media.

In Vietnam, a country labeled as one of the world top polluters, young locals have been quick to jump on the #trashtag bandwagon, posting dozens of photos of freshly cleaned areas in cities across the country, including Vinh, Da Nang, Da Lat, and Ho Chi Minh City, and several more.

Huong Ly, Vietnam's Next Top Model winner, participates in the #Trashtag Challenge to support good actions that benefit the community. Photo: Supplied

Ive never participated in a challenge on social media, but this time I made an exception, Huong Ly, winner of Vietnam's Next Top Model, said.

Wanting to make a difference in her own community, Ly convinced her brother to join her in cleaning up the area under the Phu My Bridge in District 7, Ho Chi Minh City.

I saw all these people partaking in a meaningful trash-cleaning challenge and I just thought that lending a hand to make our surroundings prettier and spreading positivity would help convince others to do the same, the model explained.

It took the two about five hours over the course of two days to collect all the trash that had been dumped under the bridge by nearby households and restaurants, but Ly says it was worth the effort.

Everyone can help make each corner of the city clean. If more people participate, the city will be cleaner, she shared.

Doan Hoang's 'before and after' photos of cleaning up a riverbank area near the Ong Cay Bridge in District 2, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Supplied

Doan Hoang, a 22-year-old student at the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, is another local youth who rolled up his sleeves for the #Trashtag Challenge.

His impressive 'before and after' shots of the riverbank he cleaned near the Ong Cay Bridge in District 2, Ho Chi Minh City are a shining example of just how much a single person can do to make a difference.

Not everyone can do big things, but we can all do small things with a big love, the caption of the 'before and after' photos he posted to Facebook reads.

Together, we can make a big change.

Hoang acknowledged that he was happy to help improve his community, but was quick to add that permanent change will only happen when people stop littering instead of waiting for others to clean up.

A group of friends cleaning up an area at Cua Lo Beach in Nghe An Province. Photo: Supplied

In Vinh, the capital of Nghe An Province in north-central Vietnam, Nguyen Manh Tuan and three friends took it upon themselves to clear Cua Lo Beach of the trash that had accumulated there over the years.

In Da Nang, Huynh Ba Luc, 26, and his cousin spent a whole afternoon filling dozens of trash bags on Son Tra Peninsula, around ten kilometers northeast of the city center.

There were so many different types of trash, like dishes and bowls, beer bottles, plastic bags, and single-use containers left by the tourists, Luc said.

This was not the first time he had participated in a clean-up activity. In the past, Lu joined a cleaning event in Tho Quang Fishing Village in Da Nang, but the area became polluted again not long after.

Peoples awareness is still a problem, he commented.

I keep cleaning up but they litter right after. I hope that these challenges will raise awareness of this issue, he said.

Huynh Ba Luc in Da Nang collects trash on Son Tra Peninsula. Photo: Supplied

A backpacking group in Da Lat cleans up during their trip. Photo: Supplied

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Heres what you need to know to start your day!

Politics

-- Vietnam requested China and the Philippines to completely respect the codes of conduct at the East Vietnam Sea where they are both signatories, Vietnamese foreign affairs ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said Thursday in response to the latest conflict of China and the Philippines at Thi Tu Island of Vietnams Truong Sa Archipelago.

-- Vietnam was sorry that Malaysian prosecutors rejected at a court in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday an appeal to drop a murder charge against a Vietnamese woman accused of killing North Korean man Kim Jong Nam in 2017, the foreign ministry said the same day.

Society

-- Cases of African swine fever were confirmed in 17 cities and provinces across northern and northcentral Vietnam up until Thursday, causing at least 23,442 pigs to be destroyed since the disease was noticed in early February.

-- Events to commemorate the death of 64 soldiers who were killed defending the countrys Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelago against Chinese invaders in 1988 were held across the country Thursday.

-- A man of American nationality was arrested Thursday after his car crashed into multiple vehicles along the one-kilometer portion of a street in Da Lat. The man, still smilingly excited when his car slammed into a utility pole, seemed to be under the influence of meth, police said.

-- Two taxi drivers were Thursday fined VND1 million ($43) each for causing environmental pollution by urinating at the wall along a street in Ho Chi Minh Citys neighboring province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau.

-- A man was found dead following a fire inside his rented room in the south-central city of Nha Trang in what some neighbors suspected as suicide behind the closed door. His wife escaped the fire.

-- A tenth grader was killed on the spot Thursday after a truck ran over her when she was riding a bicycle at a roundabout in the southern province of Binh Phuoc.

-- A one-meter-long torpedo weighing nearly 100 kilograms, believed to be left from the war, was found Thursday in a lake in the central province of Quang Ngai while authorities were searching the body of water for other possible explosives.

Business

-- Vietnams total losses in pig sales caused by African swine fever since the contagious disease was first found in early February were estimated at VND4-5 trillion ($172-215 million) and counting, according to the countrys husbandry association. The disease also crippled Vietnams pig exports, said the director of De Heus Group in the Asia Pacific region.

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The outage of several apps and services powered by tech giants Facebook and Google over the past few days brought tremendous problems to the work and daily life of Vietnamese users.

The outage affecting Facebook and its sister apps such as Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, was first recorded on Wednesday and it was not until late Thursday when the apps appeared to return to normal.

Many Facebook users reported being unable to post new statuses or share content on their personal accounts during this period, whereas others reported not even being able to log into their accounts.

The problems were encountered in both web and mobile app versions of the social media platform.

Many claim that the issues had considerable impacts on both their daily and professional life. Internet retailers, in particular, seemed to have suffered the most serious consequences.

Thao Nguyen, the owner of a childrens clothing store in Tan Binh District, Ho Chi Minh City, said she was unable to reply to customer questions submitted via the shops Facebook page.

The problem persisted for an entire day and I ended up receiving a lot of complaints from buyers, Nguyen continued, adding that the credibility and revenue of her store were severely affected.

Hoang Hai, a media professional, said that the company was unable to live-stream an important event on its Facebook page, which affected its operations.

A user is unable to access Facebook on March 14, 2019. Photo: Hoang Dong / Tuoi Tre

According to Huynh Thanh Phi, director of Ho Chi Minh City-based Leo Brothers Marketing Company, the Facebook downtime resulted in serious damage to advertisers who depend on the platforms services.

Facebook announced via Twitter on Thursday night (Vietnam time) that a server configuration change was to blame for the massive outage.

We've now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering, the tweet reads.

This is not the first time the major social media site has been hit with an outage, but it might have been the longest. Facebook has also confirmed the issue is not related to a DDoS attack.

In the meantime, users of many Google services including Gmail, Drive, and Maps, also faced multiple inconveniences on Wednesday morning.

In Vietnam, people could not send emails with attached files, which posed huge challenges to companies throughout the country.

My job is to deal with emails from my companys clients on a daily basis, which greatly depends on Gmail, said Nhat Thien, who works for an export firm in District 4.

Google said on Thursday all of its problems had been fixed and services have returned to normal.

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Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are cooking up an alien atmosphere right here on Earth.

In a new study, JPL scientists used a high-temperature "oven" to heat a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 Celsius), about the temperature of molten lava. The aim was to simulate conditions that might be found in the atmospheres of a special class of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) called "hot Jupiters."



Hot Jupiters are gas giants that orbit very close to their parent star, unlike any of the planets in our solar system. While Earth takes 365 days to orbit the Sun, hot Jupiters orbit their stars in less than 10 days. Their close proximity to a star means their temperatures can range from 1,000 to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (530 to 2,800 degrees Celsius) or even hotter. By comparison, a hot day on the surface of Mercury (which takes 88 days to orbit the Sun) reaches about 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius).



"Though it is impossible to exactly simulate in the laboratory these harsh exoplanet environments, we can come very close," said JPL principal scientist Murthy Gudipati, who leads the group that conducted the new study, published last month in the Astrophysical Journal.



The team started with a simple chemical mixture of mostly hydrogen gas and 0.3 percent carbon monoxide gas. These molecules are extremely common in the universe and in early solar systems, and they could reasonably compose the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter. Then the team heated the mixture to between 620 and 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit (330 and 1,230 Celsius).



The team also exposed the laboratory brew to a high dose of ultraviolet radiation -- similar to what a hot Jupiter would experience orbiting so close to its parent star. The UV light proved to be a potent ingredient. It was largely responsible for some of the study's more surprising results about the chemistry that might be taking place in these toasty atmospheres.



Hot Jupiters are large by planet standards, and they radiate more light than cooler planets. Such factors have allowed astronomers to gather more information about their atmospheres than most other types of exoplanets. Those observations reveal that many hot Jupiter atmospheres are opaque at high altitudes. Although clouds might explain the opacity, they become less and less sustainable as the pressure decreases, and the opacity has been observed where the atmospheric pressure is very low.



Scientists have been looking for potential explanations other than clouds, and aerosols -- solid particles suspended in the atmosphere -- could be one. However, according to the JPL researchers, scientists were previously unaware of how aerosols might develop in hot Jupiter atmospheres. In the new experiment, adding UV light to the hot chemical mix did the trick.



"This result changes the way we interpret those hazy hot Jupiter atmospheres," said Benjamin Fleury, a JPL research scientist and lead author of the study. "Going forward, we want to study the properties of these aerosols. We want to better understand how they form, how they absorb light and how they respond to changes in the environment. All that information can help astronomers understand what they're seeing when they observe these planets."



The study yielded another surprise: The chemical reactions produced significant amounts of carbon dioxide and water. While water vapor has been found in hot Jupiter atmospheres, scientists for the most part expect this precious molecule to form only when there is more oxygen than carbon. The new study shows that water can form when carbon and oxygen are present in equal amounts. (Carbon monoxide contains one carbon atom and one oxygen atom.) And while some carbon dioxide (one carbon and two oxygen atoms) formed without the addition of UV radiation, the reactions accelerated with the addition of simulated starlight.



"These new results are immediately useful for interpreting what we see in hot Jupiter atmospheres," said JPL exoplanet scientist Mark Swain, a study coauthor. "We've assumed that temperature dominates the chemistry in these atmospheres, but this shows we need to look at how radiation plays a role."



With next-generation tools like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021, scientists might produce the first detailed chemical profiles of exoplanet atmospheres, and it's possible that some of those first subjects will be hot Jupiters. These studies will help scientists learn how other solar systems form and how similar or different they are to our own.



For the JPL researchers, the work has just begun. Unlike a typical oven, theirs seals the gas in tightly to prevent leaks or contamination, and it allows the researchers to control the pressure of the gas as the temperature rises. With this hardware, they can now simulate exoplanet atmospheres at even higher temperatures: close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius).



"It's been an ongoing challenge figuring out how to design and operate this system successfully, since most standard components such as glass or aluminum melt at these temperatures," said JPL research scientist Bryana Henderson, a coauthor of the study. "We're still learning how to push these boundaries while safely handling these chemical processes in the lab. But at the end of the day, the exciting results that come out of these experiments is worth all the extra effort."



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At least five people died and three were injured after a prefab wall fell down in the Mekong Delta province of Vinh Long on Friday morning.

The incident occurred around 10:00 am at an under-construction factory of Bo Hsing Enterprise located in Long Ho District.

A brick wall 20 meters high and 20 meters long unexpectedly collapsed when over a dozen laborers were cement-rendering it, according to district chairman Le Phi Long.

A number of rescuers were dispatched to the scene to extricate the victims trapped under the rubble.

Around eight people were found alive while at least five were pronounced dead, Tran Van Ron, secretary of the provincial Party Committee, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper, adding the search was still underway.

The cause of the accident has not been known.

Officials and police watch the effort to find laborers in the rubble of a collapsed wall in Vinh Long Province, southern Vietnam, March 15, 2019. Photo: Thanh Nam / Tuoi Tre

People search for trapped laborers following a wall collapse in Vinh Long Province, southern Vietnam, March 15, 2019. Photo: Thanh Nam / Tuoi Tre

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Just over a year ago UK reality star Vicky Pattison became a favourite on 10s Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, in which she was looking forward to her pending nuptials (yep thats the same gal in the photos).

But fast-forward to November and it was not to be.

But she was already committed to a TV special on the whole darn thing, so instead it has become something else altogether.

Later this month TLC screens a special Vicky Pattison: The Break Up.

TLC takes viewers behind the headlines for a raw look at heartbreak in Vicky Pattison: The Break Up premiering Monday 25 March. In November 2018, Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattisons world imploded when, after two years together, she split from fiance John as pictures of him getting much too close to a number of mystery women in Dubai hit the tabloids. Due to be married this year the fairy tale wedding was called off.

Already signed up to film a TLC special, Vicky and John Said Yes, Vicky was confronted with the difficult decision of whether to carry on filming. With intimate access to her close circle of family and friends, this one-hour special follows Vicky in the aftermath of the split as, under the glare of the media spotlight, she tries to understand and come to terms with whats happened and attempts to move on.

Vicky Pattison: The Break Up gives viewers an insight into the person behind the headlines, revealing her behind-the-scenes heartache as she puts on a brave face for the press  appearing live on breakfast TV and even as a special guest at a Body Confidence Event just days after the break-up and despite feeling anything but confident herself. With the support of her friends and especially her mum Caroll, experience the highs and lows in the immediate weeks after Vickys break-up as she attempts to re-evaluate her whole life plan from searching from a new home and going speed dating with Pete Wicks (The Only Way Is Essex) to distract herself, to confronting some dark thoughts head on while on a retreat in Portugal with her mum, and even seizing the controls of a light aircraft.

In Vicky Pattison: The Break Up, the vivacious Geordie Shore star and winner of Im A Celebrity (UK) shows a rarely-seen vulnerable side to her personality, as we get an all-access look into her world.

Monday 25 March at 9:30pm on TLC.
The college admissions scandal in the US (where this kinda thing is a very big deal) has resulted in actress Lori Loughlin has been dropped by the Hallmark channel.

Loughlin, best known for Fuller House, has built a lucrative brand as wholesome characters on the Hallmark Channel. She starred in When Calls the Heart, telemovies Homegrown Christmas and Northpole: Open for Christmas, and the Garage Sale Mysteries series, which she executive produced.

The Hallmark parent company said in a statement, We are saddened by the recent news surrounding the college admissions allegations. We are no longer working with Lori Loughlin and have stopped development of all productions that air on the Crown Media Family Network channels involving Lori Loughlin including Garage Sale Mysteries, an independent third party production.

There are also suggestions Fuller House is dropping her -she was a guest on the shows 4 seasons having been a Full House regular.

Loughlin was in Canada shooting for Hallmark when arrests were made but has since surrendered to US authorities.

Meanwhile Desperate Housewives fans recall a plot in Season 1 Episode 5 in which Lynette Scavo (Huffman) tried to get her twin sons into an elite private school, with her husband, Tom (Doug Savant).

After the Scavos end up in a private school bidding war, they learn they will beat out another family for their spots if they can cough up a donation of $15,000.

As fate would have it, $15,000 is the exact same amount Huffman stands accused of paying in revelations this week.

You couldnt make this stuff up if you tried.

Source: Buzzfeed, Washington Post.
The Australian International Screen Forum will take place in New York next week and while the programme is dominated by film, Shane Brennan (NCIS: Los Angeles) will discuss transitioning to the U.S. television market.

The 4 day event aims to facilitate collaboration between Australian professionals and local US and international screen industry decision-makers.

Baz Lurhmann will preside over Pitch Royale, a series of competitive rounds of live-pitching, where the all-Australian Showcase will be launched.

Greer Simpkin (Mystery Road) discusses building an Indigenous Australian TV franchise with global appeal, Jason Blum, Producer of Get Out & Blackkklansman talks about producing low budget films, and speakers at a Women in Television session include Anna Dokoza (Insecure, Lady Dynamite, Flight of the Conchords) and Laura Eason (House of Cards, Here and Now).
US comedy One Day At a Time has been axed by Netflix after three seasons.

But producers are hoping to shop the show elsewhere.

The reboot of the classic Norman Lear sitcom follows three generations of a Cuban-American family.

The news comes after co-creator Gloria Calderon Kellett recently took to social media to say Netflix loved the show but it needed a bigger audience.

Its been a great honor to work with the legendary Norman Lear on One Day at a Time, said Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos in a statement. Ive personally spoken with Norman, and co-creators Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce, to express my gratitude to them, all the writers, the dedicated crew and the cast including the brilliant Justina Machado and dazzling Rita Moreno for creating a series with such humor, heart and humanity. This was a very difficult decision and were thankful to all the fans whove supported the series, our partners at Sony, and all the critics who embraced it. While its disappointing that more viewers didnt discover One Day at a Time, I believe the series will stand the test of time.

Veteran producer / writer Norman Lear also took to Twitter.

Thank you for the outpouring of love. #saveodaat To the beloved cast, crew, and fans of @OneDayAtATime: pic.twitter.com/qboxcQPMq1  Norman Lear (@TheNormanLear) March 14, 2019

Source: Variety
Empire star Jussie Smollett has pleaded not guilty to 16 felony counts of disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report.

Appearing in a Chicago court, he remained defiant in the face of ongoing media coverage.

Chicago police say Smollett staged a racist, homophobic attack on himself. Smollett said he was attacked by two white men in ski masks. The 36 year old actor said the men told him this is MAGA (Make America Great Again) country, tied a rope around his neck, and poured bleach on him.

US police say the attack was a hoax.

Meanwhile Empire returned to screens in the US overnight, averaging 4.4 million viewers. Variety notes that is down a little over 10% compared to the midseason finale in December.

Smollett has been written out of the last two episodes in the current block while producers consider further moves for the next season.

His next court date is set for April 17.

Source: Vulture
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Expedition 59 crew members Anne McClain, Oleg Konoenko, and David Saint-Jacques welcome their new crew members, Nick Hague, Christina Koch, and Alexey Ovchinin, who arrived to the International Space Station on March 14, 2019. Image Credit: NASA TV.

NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch, and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos joined NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Expedition 59 commander Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos, and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency aboard the International Space Station when the hatches between the Soyuz spacecraft and the orbiting laboratory officially opened at 11:07 p.m. EDT.

The trio's arrival returns the orbiting laboratory's population to six, including three NASA astronauts. McClain, Saint-Jacques and Kononenko are scheduled to remain aboard the station until June, while Hague, Koch and Ovchinin are set to return to Earth early this fall.

McClain, Saint-Jacques, Hague and Koch also are all scheduled for the first spacewalks of their careers to continue upgrades to the orbital laboratory. McClain and Hague are scheduled to begin work to upgrade the power system March 22, and McClain and Koch will complete the upgrades to two station power channels during a March 29 spacewalk. This will be the first-ever spacewalk with all-female spacewalkers. Hague and Saint-Jacques will install hardware for a future science platform during an April 8 spacewalk.

Three resupply spacecraft - a Russian Progress, Northrop Grumman Cygnus and SpaceX Dragon - are scheduled to arrive with additional supplies for the crew and various science investigations. The crew also is scheduled to be onboard during test flights of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which will return human spaceflight launches for space station missions to U.S. soil.

For more than 18 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space, including the Moon and Mars. A global endeavor, 236 people from 18 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 2,500 investigations from researchers in 106 countries. Investigations conducted on the International Space Station impact the daily lives of people on Earth and prepare the way for humans to venture farther into space.

On-Orbit Status

58 Soyuz (58S) Launch and Docking: The 58S Soyuz launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome this afternoon at 2:14 PM CT and completed a nominal 4 orbit rendezvous and docking to the ISS MRM1 Port at 8:01 PM CT. The 58S crew Aleksey Ovchinin, Nick Hague, and Christina Koch returned ISS to 6-crew operations after hatch opening at 10:09 PM CT. This evening, the entire ISS crew will conduct a Safety Briefing to familiarize the new Soyuz crew with potential hazards and available safety measures on-board ISS. Each crewmember will practice their emergency egress routes and familiarize themselves with emergency equipment locations.

ISS Experience Node 1 Setup: The crew set up Space Station Computer (SSC) 25 and the ISS Experience Z-Cam in order to capture a recording session. The ISS Experience creates a virtual reality film documenting daily life aboard the space station. The 8 to 10 minute videos created from footage taken during the six-month investigation cover different aspects of crew life, execution of science aboard the station, and the international partnerships involved. The ISS Experience uses a Z-CAM V1 Pro Cinematic Virtual Reality (VR) 360-degree camera with nine 190 fisheye lenses.

Time Perception: Using a head-mounted Oculus Rift display, headphones, finger trackball and laptop computer, the crew performed the Time Perception science sessions. A program on the laptop induces visual and audio stimuli to measure a subject's response to spatial and time perception in a microgravity environment. The accurate perception of objects in the environment is a prerequisite for spatial orientation and reliable performance of motor tasks. Time is fundamental to motion perception, sound localization, speech, and fine motor coordination.

Common Video Interface Unit (CVIU)-8 Replacement: In January, the Remote Power Controller (RPC) for CVIU-8 tripped open. After several troubleshooting efforts by crew and ground teams, the problem was isolated to CVIU-8. Today, the crew replaced CVIU-8 with a new unit. Flight Controllers then successfully activated the CVIU. CVIUs provide an interface between camcorders and the ISS Video System fiber-optic lines. In addition to video signal conversion, the CVIU also supplies electrical power to the camcorders.

Completed Task List Activities:

None

Ground Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

ISS commanding in support of 58S rendezvous and dock

Look Ahead:

Friday, 03/15 (GMT 074): (Crew Off-Duty)

Payloads:

None

Systems:

None

Saturday, 03/16 (GMT 075):

Payloads:

ISS experience stow

Veg-03H plant thin and pillow prime

Systems:

EVA Preparation

EVA Procedure Reviews

LCVG Water Fill

EMU Water Recharge

Sunday, 03/17 (GMT 076):

Payloads:

None

Systems:

EVA prep

ARED crew handover

Today's Planned Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

Space Acceleration Measurement System Control Unit Activation

Robot Startup

Team Task Switching Experiment Survey

Acoustic Monitor Data Transfer and Stow

TIME experiment combined session (Setup + Science)

 maintenance

Team Task Switching Experiment Survey

Regenerative Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) Recycle Tank Fill Part 3

Installing Waste Water Filter Assembly on LSR Rack.

TIME experiment combined session (Science + Stowage)

Health Maintenance System (HMS) ISS Food Intake Tracker (ISS FIT)

USOS Window Shutter Close

Perfect Crystals Hardware Restow

On Board Training (OBT) ROBoT T&C Self Study

Soyuz 742 ODF Ops. Start drying two space suits

ISS HAM Radio Power Down in Columbus

ISS HAM Radio Power Down in Service Module

Actiwatch Spectrum HRF Rack 1 Setup

Troubleshooting for EDV 1258

HRF Rack 2 Supply Kit Resupply

Pressurization of Elektron-VM Liquid Unit before Activation

 maintenance

Actiwatch Spectrum HRF Rack 1 Stow

In Flight Maintenance Common Video Interface Unit (CVIU 8) R&R LAB1D7

ISS Experience Node 1 Setup

Monitoring shutter closure on windows 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14. Note 7.

Gas Analyzer Activation in Soyuz 741

Review TV Coverage procedures Hatch Opening from MRM1 and Arrival of Expedition 59"

Preparation for Soyuz 742 Docking

USOS Window Shutter Close

MPEG-2 Downlink Test via Ku-band (Activation/Deactivation of TV Data Monitoring and MPEG2 Multicast hardware)

 configuration for Soyuz 742 docking to MRM1. Comm check with Soyuz 742 in RSA-S/G2

Monitoring Soyuz 742 Rendezvous with ISS (MRM1)

Activation of TV Data and MPEG2 Multicast Monitoring Equipment

On MCC Go Activation of mpeg2 multicast video recording mode

On MCC Go Moding MRM1-SOYUZ PEV to ELECTR CONTR position

Closing Applications and Downlink of MPEG2 Multicast Video via OCA

ISS Experience Astronaut Log Recording

Comm reconfig after Soyuz 742 docking

On MCC Go Soyuz 742 - MRM1 Interface Leak Check

Hardware Setup in SM for Expedition 59 Arrival TV PAO Coverage from SM

ISS Experience Recording Stop

Disconnecting -153 TV Camera from MRM1 TV System

Hardware Setup in MRM1 for Hatch Opening TV Coverage from MRM1

ISS Experience Recording Start

Soyuz-MRM1 Transfer Hatch Opening

-58S hatches open and PAO-TV-rep. Hatches open

Handover of the 3rd space suit and gloves for drying in Soyuz 741

Start drying the third space suit (Soyuz 741)

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Central figures in the investigation and prosecution of one of the largest state-sponsored killings in Latin America in the 20th century  the El Mozote Massacre  will be the recipients of an international human rights award from the University of Dayton.

David Morales from Cristosal and Ovidio Mauricio Gonzalez and Wilfredo Medrano from Tutela Legal will receive the University's Romero Human Rights Award for their efforts to seek justice and accountability for current and past violence in El Salvador.

Cristosal advances human rights in Central America through rights-based research, learning and programming. Morales was previously the human rights ombudsman for the government of El Salvador and now leads Cristosals Observatory on Forced Displacement by Violence covering El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Tutela Legal, originally associated with the Archdiocese in San Salvador during Saint Romero's tenure as archbishop, was one of the key human rights agencies that archived and collected stories and evidence during El Salvador's civil war from 1979 to 1992. Tutela Legal continues to promote transitional justice and accountability for contemporary issues of state violence.

On Dec. 11, 1981, soldiers in the Salvadoran army's Atlacatl Battalion, some of them trained at the U.S. Army's School of the Americas, massacred nearly 1,000 civilians in El Mozote, El Salvador, as part of the militarys "scorched earth" campaign. Official data released by the Salvadoran government in December 2017 revealed 553 of the victims were children, 80 percent of them younger than 12 years old. For more than two years, Morales, Gonzalez and Medrano have been fighting in the Salvadoran courts to hold accountable those who ordered the massacre.

The honorees, selected by the University of Dayton Human Rights Center, will receive the award from University of Dayton President Eric Spina during a ceremony starting at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in the Kennedy Union Boll Theatre on the University of Dayton campus.

Created in 2000, the award is presented to an individual or organization promoting the dignity of all human beings and alleviating human suffering. It honors the ministry and martyrdom of Saint Romero, a Salvadoran archbishop slain while officiating at a 1980 Mass because of his vocal defense of the human rights of the poor and disenfranchised. Click here to see a list of honorees.

In addition to the award ceremony, the Human Rights Center will host a free, public symposium discussing the links between past and current violence in Latin America and the rights of migrants and asylum seekers in the United States from 4:30 to 5:45 p.m. in the Kennedy Union Boll Theatre. Speakers include Ashley Feasley, director of policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Migrant and Refugee Services; Linda Rivas, executive director and managing attorney for the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center; Craig Hovey, director of the Ashland Center for Nonviolence and University of Dayton Human Rights Center visiting scholar; and Dayton activist and artist Gabriella Piquett.

A reception will follow the ceremony nearby in the Keller Hall atrium. The reception will feature the premiere of the "American the Borderland" exhibit by University of Dayton students in the Moral Courage Project of the Human Rights Center. The students traveled to El Paso, Texas, in May 2018 to interview and photograph human rights advocates, community leaders and faith leaders about their daily struggles for the rights of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. See a video about the Moral Courage Project in El Paso here.

For more information or interviews, contact Shawn Robinson at 937-229-3391 or srobinson@udayton.edu.
A floating island of solar panels is being tested in Chile as a way to generate clean energy and reduce water loss at mine operations, a cornerstone of the countrys economy that uses huge amounts of electricity and water.

The experimental Las Tortolas power-generating island is being run by the giant Anglo American mining company at its Los Bronces mine, as the government pushes to put Chile at the forefront of renewable energy use in Latin America and the world.

The 1,200-square-foot array of solar panels was inaugurated by mining minister Baldo Prokurica.

An island of solar panels floats in a pond at Los Bronces (Esteban Felix/AP)

Officials said that if the test is successful, the 190,000 plant could be expanded to cover 40 hectares, or nearly 100 acres.

The array floats in the middle of a pond used to contain the refuse from mining, known as tailings, and it is expected that its shadow will lower the water temperature and reduce evaporation by 80%.

This means the mine would retain more of that water for its operations and could reduce the amount of fresh water it pumps in a dry mountainous region where it is a scarce commodity.

Workers stand on a floating island of solar panels (Esteban Felix/AP)

With this system, we can make our fresh water consumption more efficient, in line with our goal of re-imagining mining and reducing Anglo Americans fresh water consumption by 50% by 2030, as well as the CO2 emissions by producing non-polluting energy, said Patricio Chacana, Los Bronces vice president of operations.

If the year-long experiment works as planned, the solar panel island could be expanded and new ones could be installed at other mining ponds. Experts say there are approximately 800 such ponds in Chile.

It is an excellent idea for the traceability of the mining industry and especially in terms of more efficient use of water. This is a company that recycles 76% of the water it uses in its processes, the mining minister said at the unveiling, and he encouraged other mining companies to follow suit.

The mine is about 40 miles from Santiago (Esteban Felix/AP)

Mr Prokurica said the Mining Ministry is working on a plan to improve the safety of mine holding ponds, to guard against failures such as one at an iron ore mine recently in Brazil that unleashed a wall of mud that killed at least 186 people and polluted hundreds of miles of river.

Story continues

Many of the tailing ponds in the north of the country are near urban centres.

Los Bronces is about 11,500ft above sea level and 40 miles from the countrys capital Santiago. The mine produced 370,000 tons of fine copper and 2,421 tons of molybdenum last year.

Almost 20% of the energy produced and used in Chile comes from renewable sources, up from 6% in 2013.
Far-right terrorist Brenton Tarrant described himself as a supporter of the US president.

Donald Trump has been urged to denounce white supremacists after a far-right terrorist who killed 49 people in New Zealand cited his support for the US President.

Australian gunman Brenton Tarrant described Mr Trump as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose in a 74-page document posted online shortly before the attack on mosques on Friday.

TV presenter Piers Morgan, who has previously referred to the president as a friend, implored Mr Trump to speak out.

He tweeted: This is the time, Mr President @realDonaldTrump. You must now denounce all white supremacists without equivocation. They are using your name to justify their racist barbarism.

You got it wrong after Charlottesville, please get it right today. The world is watching & waiting.

This is the time, Mr President @realDonaldTrump. You must now denounce all white supremacists without equivocation. They are using your name to justify their racist barbarism. You got it wrong after Charlottesville, please get it right today. The world is watching & waiting.  Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 15, 2019

Mr Trump was criticised for saying there was blame on both sides after clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist demonstrator drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring many more.

The US president sent a tweet on Friday offering warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand and described the incident as a horrible massacre in which people senselessly died.

The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all! he added.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

But 20 minutes later he was tweeting about Jewish people allegedly leaving the Democrat Party and sharing claims Barack Obama had conspired with US authorities against him.

Story continues

The Jexodus movement encourages Jewish people to leave the Democrat Party. Total disrespect! Republicans are waiting with open arms. Remember Jerusalem (U.S. Embassy) and the horrible Iran Nuclear Deal! @OANN @foxandfriends  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

Fewer than two hours later he sent a string of tweets railing against the Mueller investigation and allegations of collusion between his election campaign and Russian agents.

New evidence that the Obama era team of the FBI, DOJ & CIA were working together to Spy on (and take out) President Trump, all the way back in 2015. A transcript of Peter Strzoks testimony is devastating. Hopefully the Mueller Report will be covering this. @OANN @foxandfriends  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

So, if there was knowingly & acknowledged to be zero crime when the Special Counsel was appointed, and if the appointment was made based on the Fake Dossier (paid for by Crooked Hillary) and now disgraced Andrew McCabe (he & all stated no crime), then the Special Counsel.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

.should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report. This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win..  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

..THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

One tweet for New Zealand victims, four tweets for victim in chief, wrote the Washington Posts national security correspondent Greg Miller.

One tweet for New Zealand victims, four tweets for victim in chief. https://t.co/GTn2su5Mr7  Greg Miller (@gregpmiller) March 15, 2019

Typically in the past, when youve seen a terrorist attack or a tragedy on this scale, what you see world leaders doing is putting out statements of condolence and then giving them some time to breathe, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at progressive non-profit organisation Media Matters For America, which monitors Mr Trumps Twitter activity.

Trump doesnt do that. He moves immediately back into his typical patterns.

His typical patterns on a weekday morning, said Mr Gertz, involve watching the TV panel show Fox and Friends and tweeting about the subject matter.

His routine does not break, he said.

No matter what is going on in the world he is going to move on immediately to what he does, and he spends his morning live tweeting.

After tweeting "warmest sympathies and best wishes" to NZ, Trump is now hyping rw media segments about the purported "Jexodus" movement (no evidence Jewish millenials actually leaving Dems at scale). F&F segment was Tues, OAN last night. Left, OAN, 9:19 pmRight, Trump, 8:03 am pic.twitter.com/aQZ17ERou3  Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 15, 2019

Mr Gertz also said the US presidents reaction to such attacks will differ depending on whether he can use the tragedy to support his own political objectives.

This is different because its not useful for him, he said.

This is a massacre of Muslims by reportedly a white supremacist.

This isnt something he can use to bolster his political platform in a way that he can take a Christmas market bombing and turn it into his core message of we need to keep out immigrants, we need to prevent them getting into the country.

In December 2018, a gunman  French national and convicted criminal Cherif Chekatt  killed three and injured 12 by shooting into a Christmas market in Strasbourg.

After the attack, Mr Trump responded: Another very bad terror attack in France. We are going to strengthen our borders even more. Chuck and Nancy must give us the votes to get additional Border Security!

Another very bad terror attack in France. We are going to strengthen our borders even more. Chuck and Nancy must give us the votes to get additional Border Security!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 12, 2018

Similarly, after an Uzbek immigrant drove a truck into pedestrians in New York City in October 2017, he tweeted: In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person. Law enforcement is following this closely. NOT IN THE U.S.A.!

In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person. Law enforcement is following this closely. NOT IN THE U.S.A.!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2017

He continued to tweet about security, immigration and extreme vetting in the following days.

If he can create the sense of fear and if its in his worldview hell just run with it, Mr Gertz claimed.

Straight for the fear-mongering is often the direction that he moves.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the suspect in an attack that left 49 dead and 40 wounded at two Christchurch mosques on Friday is an Australian national who travelled around the world and was not a long-term resident in New Zealand. He travelled sporadically to New Zealand and stayed for varied amounts of time", Ardern said, adding that he was not on a watch list in either New Zealand or Australia.The offender was in possession of a gun licence. Im advised that this was acquired in November of 2017, she said, saying the suspect also had a small arsenal of semi-automatic weapons. I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change.Bulgaria's chief prosecutor said his country launched a probe on Friday into a November 2018 visit by the suspect. A Turkish offcial said Ankara had also opened an inquiry after it emerged the man had made several visits to Turkey.Revenge, fearIn a manifesto he left behind, the suspected gunman described himself as a 28-year-old Australian and sought to make clear that he was a white nationalist who hates immigrants, that he wanted revenge over attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslim assailants and that he wanted to create fear.Though he claimed not to covet fame, the man whose name was not immediately released by police left behind a 74-page document posted on social media under the name Brenton Tarrant in which he said he hoped to survive the attack to better spread his views in the media.He also livestreamed to the world in graphic detail his assault on the worshippers at Christchurchs Al Noor Mosque.That rampage killed at least 41 people, while an attack on a second mosque in the city not long after killed several more.While his manifesto and video were a clear ploy for infamy, they do contain important clues for a public trying to understand why anyone would target dozens of innocent people who were simply spending an afternoon engaged in prayer.There could be no more perplexing a setting for a mass slaughter than New Zealand, a nation so placid and so isolated from the mass shootings that plague the US that police officers rarely carry guns.Yet the suspect himself highlighted New Zealands remoteness as a reason he chose it. He wrote that an attack in New Zealand would show that no place on earth was safe and that even a country as far away as New Zealand is subject to mass immigration.He said he grew up in a working-class Australian family, had a typical childhood and was a poor student. A woman who said she was a colleague of his when he worked as a personal trainer in the Australian city of Grafton said she was shocked by the allegations against him.I cant ... believe that somebody Ive probably had daily dealings with and had shared conversations and interacted with would be capable of something to this extreme, Tracey Gray told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.Rambling documentThe rambling manifesto is filled with confusing and seemingly contradictory assertions about his beliefs.Beyond his white nationalistic views, he claimed to be an environmentalist and said he is a fascist who believes China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values. He said he has contempt for the wealthiest one percent. And he singled out American conservative commentator Candace Owens as the person who had influenced him the most, while saying, The extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.In a tweet, Owens responded by saying that if the media portrayed her as the inspiration for the attack, it had better hire lawyers.The manifesto also included a single reference to US President Donald Trump in which the author asked and answered the question of whether he was a Trump supporter: As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.Throughout the manifesto, the theme he returns to most often is conflict between people of European descent and Muslims, often framing it in terms of the Crusades.Among his hate-filled statements is a claim that he was motivated towards violence by an episode that occurred in 2017 while he was touring through Western Europe. That was when an Uzbek man drove a truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm, killing five.He said his desire for violence grew when he arrived in France, where he said he was offended by the sight of immigrants in the cities and towns he visited.Three months ago, he said, he started planning to target Christchurch. He said he has donated to many nationalist groups, but claimed not to be a direct member of any organisation.The suspected gunman rambled on about the supposed aims for the attack, which included reducing immigration by intimidating immigrants and driving a wedge between NATO and the Turkish people. He also said he hoped to further polarise and destabilise the West, and spark a civil war in the United States that would ultimately result in a separation of races.The attack has had the opposite impact, with condemnation of the bloodshed pouring in from all quarters of the globe, and calls for unity against hatred and violence.The Christchurch suspect's manifesto also used various hate symbols associated with the Nazis and white supremacy.The victims, he wrote, were chosen because he saw them as invaders who would replace the white race. He predicted he would feel no remorse for their deaths.The scene of carnage left on Friday shocked the nation, and the world. It was, in the words of PM Ardern, one of New Zealands darkest days.(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and REUTERS)

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the suspect in an attack that left 49 dead and 40 wounded at two Christchurch mosques on Friday is an Australian national who travelled around the world and was not a long-term resident in New Zealand.

He travelled sporadically to New Zealand and stayed for varied amounts of time", Ardern said, adding that he was not on a watch list in either New Zealand or Australia.

The offender was in possession of a gun licence. Im advised that this was acquired in November of 2017, she said, saying the suspect also had a small arsenal of semi-automatic weapons. I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change.

Bulgaria's chief prosecutor said his country launched a probe on Friday into a November 2018 visit by the suspect. A Turkish offcial said Ankara had also opened an inquiry after it emerged the man had made several visits to Turkey.

Revenge, fear

In a manifesto he left behind, the suspected gunman described himself as a 28-year-old Australian and sought to make clear that he was a white nationalist who hates immigrants, that he wanted revenge over attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslim assailants and that he wanted to create fear.

Though he claimed not to covet fame, the man whose name was not immediately released by police left behind a 74-page document posted on social media under the name Brenton Tarrant in which he said he hoped to survive the attack to better spread his views in the media.

He also livestreamed to the world in graphic detail his assault on the worshippers at Christchurchs Al Noor Mosque.

That rampage killed at least 41 people, while an attack on a second mosque in the city not long after killed several more.

While his manifesto and video were a clear ploy for infamy, they do contain important clues for a public trying to understand why anyone would target dozens of innocent people who were simply spending an afternoon engaged in prayer.

There could be no more perplexing a setting for a mass slaughter than New Zealand, a nation so placid and so isolated from the mass shootings that plague the US that police officers rarely carry guns.

Story continues

Yet the suspect himself highlighted New Zealands remoteness as a reason he chose it. He wrote that an attack in New Zealand would show that no place on earth was safe and that even a country as far away as New Zealand is subject to mass immigration.

He said he grew up in a working-class Australian family, had a typical childhood and was a poor student. A woman who said she was a colleague of his when he worked as a personal trainer in the Australian city of Grafton said she was shocked by the allegations against him.

I cant ... believe that somebody Ive probably had daily dealings with and had shared conversations and interacted with would be capable of something to this extreme, Tracey Gray told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Rambling document

The rambling manifesto is filled with confusing and seemingly contradictory assertions about his beliefs.

Beyond his white nationalistic views, he claimed to be an environmentalist and said he is a fascist who believes China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values. He said he has contempt for the wealthiest one percent. And he singled out American conservative commentator Candace Owens as the person who had influenced him the most, while saying, The extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes.

In a tweet, Owens responded by saying that if the media portrayed her as the inspiration for the attack, it had better hire lawyers.

The manifesto also included a single reference to US President Donald Trump in which the author asked and answered the question of whether he was a Trump supporter: As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.

Throughout the manifesto, the theme he returns to most often is conflict between people of European descent and Muslims, often framing it in terms of the Crusades.

Among his hate-filled statements is a claim that he was motivated towards violence by an episode that occurred in 2017 while he was touring through Western Europe. That was when an Uzbek man drove a truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm, killing five.

He said his desire for violence grew when he arrived in France, where he said he was offended by the sight of immigrants in the cities and towns he visited.

Three months ago, he said, he started planning to target Christchurch. He said he has donated to many nationalist groups, but claimed not to be a direct member of any organisation.

The suspected gunman rambled on about the supposed aims for the attack, which included reducing immigration by intimidating immigrants and driving a wedge between NATO and the Turkish people. He also said he hoped to further polarise and destabilise the West, and spark a civil war in the United States that would ultimately result in a separation of races.

The attack has had the opposite impact, with condemnation of the bloodshed pouring in from all quarters of the globe, and calls for unity against hatred and violence.

The Christchurch suspect's manifesto also used various hate symbols associated with the Nazis and white supremacy.

The victims, he wrote, were chosen because he saw them as invaders who would replace the white race. He predicted he would feel no remorse for their deaths.

The scene of carnage left on Friday shocked the nation, and the world. It was, in the words of PM Ardern, one of New Zealands darkest days.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, AFP and REUTERS)
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP)  The Latest on shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (all times local):

2:40 p.m.

A Super Rugby match between the Christchurch-based Crusaders and the Dunedin-based Highlanders has been canceled in the wake of the shootings at two mosques that killed 49 people.

New Zealand Rugby spokesman Nigel Cass said the decision to cancel Saturday's game in Dunedin was made after an urgent meeting involving both teams, venue management and police.

Cass said police advised that the game could go ahead but both teams agreed to not proceed with the match as a mark of respect.

The Crusaders are the defending champions in Super Rugby, a competition that involves teams from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Japan and Argentina.

Crusaders chief executive Colin Mainsbridge says "yesterday's horrific attacks have left us all feeling stunned. All other issues and considerations pale in significance."

___

1:55 p.m.

Christchurch Hospital chief Greg Robertson says seven of the 48 gunshot victims admitted after Friday's mosque shootings in have been discharged.

Roberson says a 4-year-old girl who has been transferred to an Auckland hospital in critical condition and 11 patients who remain in Christchurch are also critically wounded.

He says: "We have had patients with injuries to most parts of the body that range from relatively superficial soft tissue injuries to more complex injuries involving the chest, the abdomen, the pelvis, the long bones and the head."

He says many patients will require multiple operations to deal with their complex series of injuries.

___

1:40 p.m.

New Zealand police commissioner Mike Bush says authorities have no information about any imminent threats in the country but everyone should continue to be vigilant in the wake of mass shootings at two mosques.

Bush told a news conference that the investigation into Friday's attacks that killed at least 49 was wide ranging and ongoing. When asked if they believed the same person was responsible for both attacks, he said he couldn't go into details, but "we know nothing that will contradict what you've just suggested."

Story continues

Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old man, has been arrested and charged with murder. He appeared in court earlier Saturday.

Bush said it took 36 minutes from the first attack to the suspect's arrest.

The gunman posted a 74-page manifesto on social media in which he identified himself as Tarrant and said he was a 28-year-old Australian and white supremacist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.

___

12:10 p.m.

Australian police say the family of the suspect in the New Zealand mosque shootings is helping their investigation.

New South Wales state Police Commissioner Mick Fuller says his officers are investigating to help New Zealand police and to ensure the safety of residents in the Australian state where suspect Brenton Tarrant is from.

Fuller says Tarrant's family is from the northern New South Wales town of Grafton and contacted police after seeing media reports of the shootings that killed at least 49.

Fuller says Tarrant has spent little time in Australia in the past four years.

Acting Deputy Police Commissioner Mick Willing says Tarrant was only known to police for "minor traffic matters."

Willing says there's no information to suggest any further threat in New Zealand or Australia.

___

11:35 a.m.

A man suspected in at least one of the shootings that killed at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand has appeared briefly in court.

Two armed guards brought Brenton Tarrant into court Saturday. He showed no expression as District Court Judge Paul Kellar read one charge of murder to him.

The court appearance lasted only about a minute and he was led back out in handcuffs. He was ordered to return to court again April 5.

After Tarrant left, the judge said that while "there is one charge of murder brought at the moment, it is reasonable to assume that there will be others."

The gunman posted a 74-page manifesto on social media in which he identified himself as Tarrant and said he was a 28-year-old Australian and white supremacist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.

___

This item has been corrected to show the suspect appeared in court Saturday.

___

10:50 a.m.

There was strict security at the district court in Christchurch, awaiting a court appearance by a suspect in the killing of at least 49 people at mosques.

Authorities say most if not all were killed by an immigrant-hating white supremacist.

More than 10 armed officers guarded the courtroom even before the suspect entered. Nearly 50 reporters packed the courtroom in downtown Christchurch. Only a pool video and still camera were allowed in the room.

There did not appear to be any victims' family members there.

___

10:10 a.m.

New Zealand's prime minister says the "primary perpetrator" in the killing of at least 49 people in two Christchurch mosques was living in Dunedin, a seaside city south of Christchurch.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Saturday the Australian suspect has traveled around the world and spent sporadic periods in New Zealand.

Police say homes around a "location of interest" in Dunedin have been evacuated as a precaution. Two improvised explosive devises were found in a suspect's car.

At least 49 people were shot to death at the mosques. Authorities say most if not all were killed by an immigrant-hating white supremacist. He will appear in court on Saturday charged with murder.

Ardern says police are still investigating whether two more suspects who were arrested were directly involved in the crimes.

___

9:55 a.m.

New Zealand's prime minister says the "primary perpetrator" in the mosque shootings was a licensed gun owner and legally acquired the five guns used in the shootings.

Jacinda Ardern said Saturday the country's national gun laws will change after at least 49 worshippers were shot dead in the two mosques in Christchurch.

She did not specify how the laws will be changed.

The Australian suspect will appear in court on Saturday morning.

___

9:50 a.m.

President Donald Trump is downplaying the threat of white nationalism in the aftermath of a self-described racist's shooting rampage at a pair of New Zealand mosques.

Trump spoke in the Oval Office Friday, answering"I don't, really" when asked if he felt that the racist movement was a rising threat around the world.

He said that it was "a small group of people that have very, very serious problems."

Trump added that the shooting in Christchurch was "certainly a terrible thing."

An immigrant-hating white nationalist killed at least 49 people gathered for weekly prayers in a live-streamed attack. Another 48 people suffered gunshot wounds.

The alleged gunman, in a rambling manifesto, deemed Trump "a symbol of renewed white identity."

___

9:45 a.m.

A man who can't find out information about what happened to his father and two brothers in one of the New Zealand mosques that were attacked has pushed through police barricades in an effort to get closer.

A police officer stopped Ash Mohammed, who told the officer "we just want to know if they are dead or alive."

Mohammed said Saturday that he has repeatedly called cellphones for his relatives that rang unanswered and then appeared to have run out of battery power.

He says he has not heard from his father and brother since Friday, when they went to the mosque.

Mohammed says he had planned to join them for prayers but did not because an appointment he had with a lawyer about buying a house went late.

At least 49 people were shot to death at the mosques. Authorities say most if not all were killed by an immigrant-hating white supremacist.

___

9:20 a.m.

The Frenchman who coined the term "the Great Replacement" used as the title of the alleged manifesto by the New Zealand mosque attacker says his theory is "diametrically opposed" to the bloodbath at the mosques.

Renaud Camus said in an interview on Friday that the shootings by a white supremacist that killed at least 49 people are "totally contrary to what I defend."

Camus held firm to his notion that immigrants are replacing natives in France and elsewhere. He says it is a "changing of the people" that should be combated with what he calls "re-immigration" and not with violence.

Camus is 72 and developed his theory 20 years ago.

The term has been used more recently by French politicians opposed to immigration, notably far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

___

8:55 a.m.

Christchurch's mayor says graves are being dug for the dozens of worshippers who were shot dead in two New Zealand mosques.

At least 49 people were slain during midday prayers Friday.

Mayor Lianne Dalziel says city officials on Saturday were working closely with the community on the specific requirements of a large number of Muslim funerals.

Authorities say most if not all were killed by an immigrant-hating white supremacist.

___

8:40 a.m.

A senior Turkish official says the suspect arrested in the New Zealand mosque attack travelled to Turkey multiple times and spent what the official called an "extended period of time in the country.

He says the suspect may have also travelled to countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with Turkish government rules.

The official says an investigation is underway of "the suspect's movements and contacts within the country."

He did not say when the suspect travelled to Turkey.

 By Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey.

___

8:35 a.m.

President Donald Trump is pledging "any assistance" the U.S. can give New Zealand following deadly shootings at a pair of mosques.

Trump tweeted that "we stand in solidarity with New Zealand" after speaking with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

The president says "any assistance the U.S.A. can give, we stand ready to help. We love you New Zealand!"

At least 49 people were shot to death at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during midday prayers Friday.

Authorities say most if not all were killed by an immigrant-hating white supremacist.

___

7:55 a.m.

Officials say nine Indian nationals or people of Indian origin are missing after the mosque attacks in Christchurch.

India's high commissioner to New Zealand, Sanjiv Kohli, tweeted Saturday that nine people were missing and called the attack a "huge crime against humanity."

Indian officials have not said whether the nine were believed to be living in Christchurch.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a letter to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern saying that "hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies."

An immigrant-hating white nationalist killed at least 49 people gathered for weekly prayers in a live-streamed attack. Another 48 people suffered gunshot wounds.

___

6:55 a.m.

Lawyers for a gunman who killed six people at a Quebec mosque in 2017 say their client is troubled his name is being associated with the mass killings at two New Zealand mosques Friday that claimed at least 49 lives.

Charles-Olivier Gosselin and Jean-Claude Gingras released a statement Friday stating convicted killer Alexandre Bissonnette is not looking for his acts to be imitated or to serve as a model for others.

Bissonnette was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for 40 years. Both the prosecution and his lawyers have recently announced they are appealing the sentence.

Gosselin and Gingras say Bissonnette profoundly regrets what he did and has been very affected by the shootings in New Zealand.

___

6:40 a.m.

The U.N. says Secretary-General Antonio Guterres "is shocked and appalled at the terrorist attack" at two New Zealand mosques and is urging people everywhere to work better together "counter Islamophobia and eliminate intolerance and violent extremism."

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters Friday that the U.N. chief stresses "the sanctity of mosques and all places of worship."

Dujarric says Guterres also "calls upon all people on this holy day for Muslims to show signs of solidarity with the bereaved Islamic community."

The attacks by an immigrant-hating white nationalist killed 49 people and injured dozens of others.

___

3 a.m.

Swedish YouTube personality PewDiePie says he feels sickened that the alleged gunman in the New Zealand mosque attacks referred to him during a livestream of the shooting.

In the video posted on Facebook, a voice is heard saying "Remember lads ... subscribe to PewDiePie."

PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, says on Twitter that he's "absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person. My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected."

PewDiePie is famous for his video game commentaries and has some 86 million followers. YouTube distanced itself from him in the past after he made jokes criticized as anti-Semitic and posted Nazi imagery in his videos. He has apologized.

He is engaged in an online battle with Indian music channel T-Series over which channel has the most subscribers. Supporters post messages encouraging others to subscribe to his channel, with the phrase "subscribe to PewDiePie."

___

2 a.m.

Pakistan's foreign ministry says four Pakistanis were wounded in mass shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

Ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal tweeted that five other Pakistani citizens are missing after Friday's attacks.

He said Pakistani diplomats in New Zealand are in contact with local authorities.

Separately, the ministry said Pakistan views the attacks as an "assault on the values of freedom of conscience and association common to all mankind."

It asked New Zealand to take immediate action to bring the perpetrators to justice and ensure the safety of the Muslim community.

___

1:30 a.m.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says at least three Turkish citizens were injured in attacks on Muslim worshippers in New Zealand and that he has spoken to one of them.

Addressing an election rally on Friday, Erdogan described a suspect in the attacks as "impertinent, immoral, vile and scum" and said he had chosen innocent worshippers as an easy target.

He told the crowd: "As Muslims, we will never bow our heads, but we will never fall to the level of these vile people."

New Zealand authorities have arrested and charged a man with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. At least 49 people died.

Dozens of demonstrators protested the shootings after Friday prayers in Istanbul.

___

1 a.m.

Indonesia's foreign ministry says two Indonesians, a father and his son, were injured in mass shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

Ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir says the father is in intensive care and his son is being treated at the same hospital. He declined to identify them.

The man's wife, Alta Marie, said on Facebook that her husband, Zulfirman Syah, and their son are being treated at Christchurch Hospital.

"My husband was shot in multiple places and has a drain in his lung and has been in surgery," she wrote. "I was recently united with my son, who has a gunshot wound to the leg and backside. He is traumatized."

At least 49 people were killed and 48 others were hospitalized as a result of the attacks Friday.

___

12:45 a.m.

Bangladesh's honorary consul in Auckland, New Zealand, says three Bangladeshis were killed in Friday's mosque attacks in Christchurch and at least four others were injured.

Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan says "so far" three Bangladeshis are among the 49 people killed in the shootings. He said two of the injured Bangladeshis are in critical condition.

He says one person's leg had to be amputated and another has gunshot wounds to his chest.

New Zealand health authorities say a total of 48 people are being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds.

___

12:30 a.m.

Facebook says it has taken down a video of shootings at a New Zealand mosque and removed the alleged shooter's accounts from its platforms after being alerted by police.

The man who allegedly carried out the shootings in Christchurch on Friday reportedly broadcast 17 minutes of the attack on a Facebook livestream.

Facebook New Zealand spokeswoman Mia Garlick said in a statement that the company is "also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we're aware."

She said the company "will continue working directly with New Zealand Police as their response and investigation continues."

Both YouTube owner Google and Twitter also say they're working to remove video of the shootings from their sites.

___

12:15 a.m.

New Zealand health authorities say 48 people with gunshot wounds are being treated at Christchurch Hospital after mass shootings at two mosques killed 49 people.

The chief executive of the Canterbury District Health Board, David Meates, says the patients range from young children to adults and the injuries range from minor to critical.

Meates says 12 operating theaters are being used and some patients will need multiple surgeries.

He says about 200 family members are at the hospital early Saturday awaiting news about their loved ones.
There is also significant backing for cutting the UK's emissions to zero as soon as possible, the survey for Conservative Environment Network says.

The UK public supports students walking out of the classroom to call for more climate action, a poll suggests ahead of a global youth strike on the issue.

More than half (53%) of those quizzed by Opinium for the Conservative Environment Network supported youngsters leaving lessons to demonstrate, while just 15% opposing the move.

There is also significant public support for cutting the UKs greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible, it suggests.

The surveys findings comes as organisers of the Youth Strike 4 Climate say events will take place in more than 100 towns and cities from Penzance to Aberdeen on Friday, in the second walkout for climate action in the UK.

The strikes are driven by what students say is an alarming lack of government leadership on climate action.

They are part of a global day of action in more than 100 countries.

They have been inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg, who protests every Friday outside Swedens parliament to urge leaders to tackle climate change.

1659 places in 105 countries. And counting. Tomorrow we schoolstrike for our future. And we will continue to do so for as long as it takes. Adults are more than welcome to join us. Unite behind the science. https://t.co/EFTn7eCfm6  Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) March 14, 2019

Organisers here say they expect attendances to be larger than the first UK strike on February 15, which saw thousands of students defy headteachers and politicians to ditch lessons for demonstrations.

The poll suggests they have the majority of the public on their side, and young people are even more supportive of the walkout, with 60% of 18 to 34-year-olds backing the move.

Half of the 2,000 UK adults quizzed said the Government is not doing enough to stop climate change.

Story continues

And 70% think it is important the Government reduces greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible.

A UN report last year warned that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate impacts become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action.

That includes cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12

years, and to zero by mid-century.

While recognising the importance of climate change in response to the first UK strike, Downing Street said the disruption increased teachers workloads and wasted lesson time and Education Secretary Damian Hinds said missing class was not the answer.

Conservative MPs have lined up to praise the inspirational strikers ahead of the latest action.

In the video released ahead of Fridays strikes, Environment Secretary Michael Gove tells the students walking out of lessons and lectures to call for urgent action on cutting emissions: Dear school climate strikers, we agree.

Collective action of the kind youre championing can make a difference, and a profound one, he says.

Mr Gove says the transition to a clean economy will require us to change the way in which our energy is generated, change the way in which our homes are built, change the way in which our land is managed and farming operates.

But that change is absolutely necessary, he says in the new video, published via the Conservative Environment Network.

Energy and Clean Growth Minister Claire Perry says: This Government has committed to setting a net zero emissions target, so that we are no longer adding harmful emissions to the climate.

Together, we can stop climate change.

Richard Benyon, MP for Newbury said: The extraordinary passion of the school strikers is inspirational.

These are young people whose lives will be much more affected by climate change than the generations leaving them this legacy.

Zac Goldsmith, MP for Richmond Park, said: Heat records are being made, ecosystems are undergoing extraordinarily rapid changes, lands are becoming harder to farm, and the spectre of a global refugee crisis is looming.

He also said the IPCC report showed that the difference in curbing emissions to 1.5C rather than 2C is dramatic.

In this light, it seems absurd and mean-minded to admonish children for missing school to ring the alarm bells, he added.

Simon Clarke, MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, said he had led the charge in Parliament for the UK to reach net zero emissions before 2050 and had gained cross-party support for the move.

This polling shows that a net zero target is not just necessary but hugely popular, and not just within Parliament  over 70% of British people support us in our argument.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also backed the strikers, tweeting: Thank you for standing up against climate change. You shouldnt have to pay the price for the mistakes of previous generations.
Thousands gathered in Algiers on March 15 to protest against President Abdelaziz Bouteflikas decision to cancel a planned April election, and extend his fourth term, local media reported.

Protests were held in multiple cities across Algeria, including Oran, and Tizi Ouzou, according to reports. Prior to Bouteflikas announcement, protests had already been taking place, against the possibility of him seeking a fifth term in office. Bouteflika has been in office since 1999 and recently turned 82.

Multiple Algerian outlets, including Algerie 360, TSA Algerie, and Algerie 1, reported that the protests attracted millions. Storyful has not independently verified this figure.

Footage here was captured by local journalist Nadjib Belhimer, and shows protests outside the Grand Post Office in Algiers. Belhimer told Storyful that he believed the protests were the largest held in the country since the demonstrations started, Credit: Nadjib Belhimer via Storyful
Outrage: Australian senator Fraser Anning

A racist Australian senator has been condemned after he blamed the New Zealand terror attack on Muslim immigration.

In the wake of the outrage, which left 49 people dead at two mosques in Christchurch, Fraser Anning tweeted: Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?

In a statement shared by an Australian journalist on Twitter, the Queensland senator also wrote: As always, left-wing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of todays shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views but this is all cliched nonsense.

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.

A man on the phone outside a Christchurch mosque in the aftermath of the deadly attack (AP)

The remarks were denounced by several people including the UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid, who accused the senator of stoking extremism.

Mr Javid tweeted: At a time for grieving and reflection, this Australian senator @fraser_anning fans the flames of violence & extremism.

At a time for grieving and reflection, this Australian senator @fraser_anning fans the flames of violence & extremism. Australians will be utterly ashamed of this racist man. In no way does he represent our Australian friends https://t.co/uzezIeNjbN  Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) March 15, 2019

Australians will be utterly ashamed of this racist man. In no way does he represent our Australian friends.

Australias prime minister Scott Morrison said: The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting.

Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament.

Read more

Toddler and child aged 10 killed in horror car crash in West Midlands

Story continues

Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull wrote: Fraser Annings comments today are contemptible.

He is a disgrace to the Senate and what is worse by spreading hatred and turning Australians against each other he is doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Among others to attack the politician was media commentator Piers Morgan, who tweeted: Are you f*cking kidding me???

Morgan added that it was a disgusting statement.
Following the U.S. Trotting Associations 2019 Board of Directors Annual Meeting held March 8-11 in Columbus, OH, the USTAs Call to Action Subcommittee issued an announcement regarding the issue of hidden trainers on Thursday, March 14.

At the Call to Action Subcommittee meeting on Friday night (March 8), the committee updated their plan regarding the initiative to prohibit hidden trainers from continuing to use program trainers (commonly referred to as beard trainers) when that hidden trainer is banned from being licensed or has been suspended.

The essence of the beard trainer problem is that trainers currently under suspension or whose license has been denied are conducting business as usual, they are making a mockery out of the industry, said Call to Action Committee Chairman Mark Loewe. Currently, we have to rely on the state regulators and licensing is their only tool to combat this problem.

It is important to note that beard trainers are cooperating in a scheme to defraud the regulators and the public, so they are also culpable, Loewe also said.

USTA Director and Subcommittee member Joe Faraldo previously presented the concept of regulatory discovery to end the unethical practice.

Essentially, regulatory discovery requires suspected beard trainers to provide a series of documents to regulators, who could examine the flow of money and other communication to ascertain they are just acting as a shill for the hidden, unlicensed trainer. If so, the beard trainer would also be suspended or have his or her license application rejected.

It is important to note that this process is not expensive for the regulators because it requires no additional detectives or other investigatory expense," said USTA President Russell Williams. And it should also be noted that it is very likely that it wont be necessary to get every commission to adopt regulatory discovery or to catch every beard trainer. A few prosecutions will go a long way.

The USTA first presented the regulatory discovery concept at Association of Racing Commissioners International meetings in Omaha, NE last July and will pursue it to a conclusion. As a result, the proposal was assigned to an ARCI subcommittee for further consideration. The committee determined that they will submit it again for discussion at the ARCI meeting scheduled for Aug. 8-10 in Saratoga Springs, NY.

The USTA is also prepared to take the concept directly to regulators, track operators and horsemens organizations. In fact, Faraldo indicated that the policy has already been implemented at Yonkers Raceway, where he is the president of the Standardbred Owners Association of New York.

At this years Call to Action Subcommittee meeting, the committee drafted three proposals regarding guidelines for regulatory discovery to be distributed to racing commissions, racetracks, and horsemens associations, respectively.

In addition, the USTA is also looking at its own licensing and membership structure to determine whether it can act as an association to implement regulatory discovery.

(USTA)
Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.
The LA Galaxy midfielder is happy to return to a call-up with the Mexican National Team, which is now in charge of an old acquaintance of him from his time in the Old Continent, Gerardo Martino.

Although Jonathan dos Santos met 'Tata' Martino when he was playing in Barcelona, the Mexican discards that this fact comes as an advantage for him in 'El Tri.'

Jonathan Barcelona

Centrocampista

Mexico

"I talked with him right from the start, when I knew he was going to be the new manager of the National Team, basically we talked about if I wanted to return to the team, to play. He obviously wants the best of me, and won't give me anything for free just because he knows me from previous years," explained Jona.

The younger of the Dos Santos restated his confidence in the Argentine strategist, and that 'Tata' Martino will help develop the Mexican National Team.

"Clearly this is a new stage, and that is good, I know the Mister because I spent a year working with him at Barcelona, which is why I know he will help us a great deal to be better.

LA Galaxy

LA Galaxy will play his third match of the 2019 MLS season on Saturday against Minnesota United. The Mexican, Jona dos Santos has played the first two games of the season where they have one win and one loss.
The number of Democrats hoping to make it to the White House in 2020 is already into double digits and Beto O'Rourke, one of the rising stars of US politics, has joined the list. His confidence is high because of his showing in the midterm elections. At that time, he nearly ousted Republican Senator Ted Cruz in the Republican stronghold. Obviously, Beto feels he has it in him to take on existing president Donald Trump.

Sky News reports Beto O'Rourke is a former three-term Texas congressman. He has confirmed via a video that he will be another contender in the president 2020 campaign.

In the video, he talks about the campaign and says it seeks to unite a very divided country." His plan is to kick off his campaign in El Paso, his hometown, on 30 March. Before that, he will tour the country beginning with Iowa, the starting point for Democrat primary elections.

"I'm running to serve you as the next President of the United States of America."



Beto O'Rourke announces he is jumping into 2020 presidential race. https://t.co/PgVNpGwAEP pic.twitter.com/Ql6hHZsEWY  The Hill (@thehill) March 15, 2019

Beto O'Rourke comes center stage

The November midterm elections brought Beto O'Rourke (46) into the limelight. He was pitted against Republican Senator Ted Cruz and the fight was in a Republican stronghold.

Moreover, Ted was not just a former presidential candidate but also a national figure. Therefore, O'Rourke had to mobilize all his resources to put up a spirited fight. He rejected corporate contributions and still managed to raise nearly $80m in donations. His rallies always had large crowds who came to listen to him. One of his favorite topics was health care for all, and it brought him a certain amount of national recognition.

Discuss this news on Eunomia

What we learned about Beto O'Rourke's policy beliefs on day one of his presidential campaign https://t.co/CDso4QJGa1 pic.twitter.com/kyo3YealeE  CNN (@CNN) March 15, 2019

It will be a tough task for Beto O'Rourke to get the final nod. Sky News says the field of Democrats is already crowded with the likes of senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders while Joe Biden, former vice-president and likely front-runner, has not yet confirmed his stand.

He was once a guitarist

According to The Guardian, Beto O'Rourke used to be a guitarist for an El Paso punk band. That was before his Senate bid and he had always maintained a relatively low profile in spite of being a three-term congressman. However, things changed when he lost to Republican Ted Cruz in the 2018 Texas Senate race by a narrow margin. He garnered support from the grassroots level, had a historic fundraising haul, and is now poised to take on Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. He knows that it will require determination of a very high order. There are women like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Amy Klobuchar in the fray. One of them could become the first woman President of the United States. In short, it will not be a cakewalk for any of the Democrats.
At the end of Friday's episode of "The Bold and the Beautiful," Dollar Bill Spencer and Taylor both received phone calls that seemed to rock them to the core. Spoiler alerts say that on Friday it will be revealed that they were given the news that Caroline Spencer has died. There are no details yet as to what caused her to pass away but Thomas and his son Douglas will soon be returning to LA. Dollar Bill once perpetuated a fraud by telling Ridge's son that his niece was dying. Now that she is truly deceased, Bill and others will be feeling a lot of different emotions and with Taylor's son coming home drama is sure to follow.

Thomas and Douglas return to LA

Soaps She Knows says that Bill and Taylor's phone calls are connected and Celeb Dirty Laundry reveals the reason why. Caroline Spencer has died and this will change everything. Thomas is coming back to LA with his son so Steffy will no doubt postpone her business trip to Paris. Dollar Bill may feel a lot of guilt as he pretended his niece was dying to get Thomas away from Sally. Now Caroline is really dead a lot of lives will be complicated.

Thomas broke Sally's heart twice because of Caroline but Ms. Spectra has now moved on with Wyatt and Dollar Bill is going to help her revive her fashion designing career. With Douglas and his dad coming back to LA, it will bring all the reminders of Caroline going along with her unce's plan so she could get Thomas away from Sally.

'B&B' has an agenda for Thomas

Now that Sally is working for Dollar Bill, and Thorne has left LA, Thomas may be returning from New York to eventually assist at Forrester Creations. After the shock of Caroline's death subsides and a period of her loved ones mourning her loss, things could get pretty tense. There is most certainly an agenda behind the B&B writers having Ridge and Taylor's son return at this time.

Discuss this news on Eunomia

He may cause problems for Sally and Wyatt or throw himself into being a single father. His parents will be on hand to assist him which will bring them closer together and also frustrate Brooke.

Katie and Bill are getting closer so if Taylor and Ridge reunite, Brooke will be left out in the cold. There must be a reason why the role of Thomas is being recast but Caroline has been written out of the show.

Be on the lookout for spoiler alerts to update this storyline as new information becomes available. Continue watching "The Bold and the Beautiful" weekday afternoons on CBS at 1:30 PM EST as this plot thickens.
Nasrin Sotoudeh was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. The woman is guilty of spreading information against the state, espionage and insults to Khamenei. NGOs and activists speak of a "shocking" sentence. Disputes over the sentence: a judge speaks of seven years in prison, pending appeal.

Tehran (AsiaNews / Agencies) - An Iranian court has sentenced a lawyer and human rights activist to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. She has been at the forefront in recent months in defending those who fought against the mandatory veil.

The family members of Nasrin Sotoudeh, who was indicted for offenses related to national security, reported the sentencing. However, there are conflicting sources about the real extent of the sentence: a judge of the Islamic Revolutionary Court speaks of seven years in prison, awaiting the appeal process.

NGOs and pro-human rights activists speak of a "shocking" sentence imposed on a leading personality of the country, awarded prizes and honors for her professional activity in the past. Sotoudeh is famous for representing women who protested against the obligatory hijab and for having fought against the death penalty.

Yesterday in a long post on social media, her husband confirmed the verdict, after talking to her on the phone from prison. According to the activists of Center for Human Rights in Iran, she is accused of spreading information against the state, espionage and insulting the supreme leader Ali Khamenei.

Nasrin Sotoudeh is one of seven lawyers and human rights activists arrested in Iran last year. Before her detention, last June she defended a group of women imprisoned for appearing in public without the mandatory veil, a legacy of the 1979 Islamic revolution and punishable with prison under the penal code.

The woman has to face nine different charges, in the context of two different trials, one of which took place in her absence. The judges imposed a long detention and flogging as an accessory penalty. In the past, Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested and imprisoned between 2010 and 2013 for her political activity (propaganda against the state and attacks on national security).

The woman has always rejected the accusations, in the past and still today. On 26 October 2012, the European Parliament awarded her - along with director Jafar Panahi - the Sakharov prize, the EU's highest honor in terms of human rights. In her professional activity, the lawyer assisted prominent Iranian dissident and opposition figures, including journalist Isa Saharkhiz, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and the head of the National Democratic Front (party banned by Tehran ) Heshmat Tabarzadi.
Catholic Citizens Calls for Action on Sex Abuse Scandal

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Catholic Citizens of Illinois

March 15, 2019



CHICAGO, March 15, 2019 /Standard Newswire/ -- Catholic Citizens of Illinois commends Pope Francis for addressing the sexual abuse crisis. We now call upon Blase Cardinal Cupich, as our Archbishop for the following:

Make full disclosure of the Vatican's investigation of Theodore McCarrick.



Your unequivocal denial that you were aware of Theodore McCarrick's reputation for abusing seminarians, or that he was responsible for your elevation to Chicago reassured us, and we are grateful for your calling for "responsibility, accountability and transparency" regarding McCarrick. We ask that you join Cardinal O'Malley's call for the immediate release of the Vatican's report on its McCarrick investigation.



Make full disclosure of credibly accused abusing priests.



We also commend you for the disclosures made to date of priests credibly accused of abuse. Not disclosed, however, are the years when, or the seminar(ies) where these priests trained, or the gender or age of their victim(s). There cannot be accountability without transparency. Nor can any reliable screening processes be in place unless we understand that for which we are screening. We call on you to disclose those additional details.



Reaffirm that men with homosexual inclinations cannot be priests.



Our beloved church is credibly accused of evading the extent of men with homosexual inclinations have been drawn to our seminaries, for example through Casa Jesus. We need full disclosure of what you found at Casa Jesus that caused you to shut it down and confirm also that you share the view of Pope Francis, that men with homosexual inclinations have no place in our seminaries, or our priesthood.



Reaffirm the Church's teachings on human sexuality.



Our beloved Church teaches that men with homosexual inclinations are not "made that way," but suffer from an objective disorder which if acted upon under no circumstances can acts be approved. We call on you to continue to teach clearly our Faith regarding human sexuality.

For further information, contact Kevin E. White, at (312) 606-8602



Founded in 1997, Catholic Citizens of Illinois supports Catholic values in the public life of Illinois, educating our fellow Catholics to serve as responsible witnesses to Christ in the midst of human society. For more information about us, please visit CatholicCitizens.org.



SOURCE Catholic Citizens of Illinois



CONTACT: Kevin E. White, 312-606-8602



Related Links



CatholicCitizens.org


Apple is bracing itself for another court battle this time against music streaming app Spotify. In filing a complaint with the European Commission, Spotify claims that it has been subjected to discriminatory practices by the maker of the iPhone. Bloomberg reports that the complaint has something to do with Spotify on the App Store.

Discriminatory and unfair practices

According to Horacio Gutierrez, Spotifys general counsel, Apple is treating the music streaming app unfairly. As a direct competitor to its iTunes and Apple Music, Spotify believes that it is suppressing its opportunity to provide Apple customers with an alternative to its two music platforms.

A report by Engadget reveals that Spotify believes that Apple is singling it out because it is a direct competitor.

According to the streaming music app, the makers of the Mac computers modified its Apple Store rules to give itself a competitive advantage over its rivals. It claims several unfair practices which prompted it to lodge a complaint with the European Commission. One such issue is that Spotify products had been unfairly excluded from accessing Apples hardware services.

Another issue is that the Cupertino-based company has been charging a 30-percent tax on in-app purchases. Apple gives two options on charging the taxlet consumers handle the cost or refuse to pay the commission. The latter will result to different technical hurdles that Apple implements.

According to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, the issue is not about Spotify vs Apple but rather about implementing fair rules for companies. Spotify also revealed that Apple broke its own company by launching different services.

Apple fights back

For its part, Apple says that it is not blocking the music streaming app because it is still not blocked from the App Store.

Discuss this news on Eunomia

It would be easy for them to make changes to its policies but it has not. On the issue that the music streaming platform cannot make users subscribe to Premium services through the website or link to the website in the app, Apple says that it would open up opportunities for large scale fraud, hacking, and harassment.

Finally, the transactions fees at the App Store is part of a blanket rule.

It takes a 30-percent cut from all transactions as it is needed to run the store itself. In reality, subscription decreases to 15 percent after a year. The transaction fee is used for managing security, app review, hosting, distribution, and payment processing.
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness,

where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.

The devil said to him, If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.
Luby was focused on his new job with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he would be investigating emerging infections in a region considered a global hot spot. I believed in what I was doing.

As Luby, his wife, Jeni, and their four children moved into their U.S. embassy-furnished house in a quiet enclave of Dhaka, they found a rattling electrostatic air purifier the size of a small refrigerator.

I thought, Where is the data showing that thing has any effect? recalled Luby, now a professor of medicine at Stanford and director of research at the Center for Innovation in Global Health. I turned it off. It stayed that way for eight years.

Over time, though, Luby became aware of a catastrophic airborne health threat facing tens of millions of people, and a likely culprit was the production of a ubiquitous building material: the humble brick. The realization forced Luby to rethink basic medical assumptions, and to challenge development community dogma that was failing to address the issue.

Now, after more than eight years of research, analysis and on-the-ground negotiations, Luby is poised to launch a plan to transform the brick kiln sector in Bangladesh and, ultimately, across South Asia.

Silent killer

Consistently ranked among the worlds least livable cities, Dhaka is a cacophonous overflowing sprawl of more than 10 million people, with a population density of 44,500 per square kilometer. While other metrics of misery have declined in the face of the countrys burgeoning economy, air pollution remains a scourge during the dry, winter months. Dhakas air quality index, a representation of pollutant concentration over a specified period of time, hovers above 150  a level considered unhealthy for all groups  but often spikes much higher between November and February.

When you open the door to go out in the morning, theres a haze of smoke that hits your face, said Alex Yu, MD, a postdoctoral scholar in infectious disease who works in Lubys Stanford lab. You have a chronic low-grade cough. We call it Dhaka lung. People dont want to go out, but life has to go on.

Still, when a Bangladeshi colleague of Lubys suggested they install air particulate sensors in Dhaka households as part of a 2011 influenza and pneumonia study, Luby was skeptical. I was looking at it primarily through the lens of the pathogen  what organism was causing problems, Luby said. I was not attuned to air quality. I hadnt really thought about the science.

The findings were stark: Air pollution had a huge impact on respiratory infections, but indoor air pollution  the focus of most related public health community efforts  wasnt the only culprit. It turned out that the most important determinant of indoor air quality was outdoor air quality. Surprised, Luby shifted his focus to the environments effect on health.

Its different from a medical model that says lets wait until they get sick and treat them in clinic, he said. We need to think, like a physician, about how we can treat the environment.
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Three Saudi womens rights activists whose arrests last year have been condemned worldwide are being honored by PEN America. Nouf Abdulaziz, Loujain al-Hathloul, and Eman al-Nafjan have won the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, the literary and human rights organization announced Thursday. The award was established in 1987 and is given to writers imprisoned for their work, with previous recipients coming from Ukraine, Egypt and Ethiopia among other countries.

In custody for working to undermine the security of the kingdom, Ms. Abdulaziz, Ms. Hathloul, and Ms. Nafjan have openly opposed such government policies as a ban on women driving and the restriction of womens travel, education, and other rights without approval from a male guardian. On Wednesday, Ms. Hathloul and Ms. Nafjan were among those at a closed-door hearing in Riyadh, according to Amnesty International. Reporters were not allowed in. The PEN award comes at a time of international outrage at Saudi Arabia and at Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, especially after the Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in October 2018 by Saudi agents at the countrys consulate in Istanbul. Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council denounced Saudi Arabias continuing arrests and arbitrary detentions of human rights defenders

Activists have alleged that the PEN winners have been subjected to torture, including flogging and sexual assault. Saudi officials have denied the allegations.

More here.
When trendsetting Unionmade shut down suddenly in Summer 2019, longtime clients were stunnedwhere oh where would they procure those nonchalant Woolrich sweaters, selvedge jeans, and subtly curated accessories?

But the beat marches on, and there are still plenty on-point menswear shops here waiting to lead the band. Ready to fall into some fresh looks? Here are our favorite men's clothing storesfrom casual to hipster to classicfor fashionable guys of all ages in San Francisco.

Welcome Stranger: For self-styled urban nomads See on Instagram Slip into this Hayes Valley mainstay and you'll find a savvy selection of rugged men's clothing from brands including Carhartt and A.P.C., along with a hipster-friendly collection of Instagram-able home pieces and grooming products. With a dedicated range of wardrobe staples such as canvas jackets and chinos under the house label, Welcome Stranger is also the perfect place to stock up on homegrown basics. // Welcome Stranger, 460 Gough St. (Hayes Valley), welcomestranger.com



Tanner Goods: For the guy who aces weekend casual See on Instagram Portland-based Tanner Goods has everything an aspiring (and stylish) weekend warrior might want, from Tellason denim to handmade and ruggedly handsome household items from the likes of Mazama Wares. Don't miss their in-house collection of leather accessories, especially the belts, which are made from English bridle leather that gets better with age. Select according to length and color, then have it customized with the hardware of your choice. // Tanner Goods, 651 Divisadero St (NoPa), tannergoods.com



Maas & Stacks: For the guy who knows underground designers See on Instagram Maas & Stacks is your proverbial pit stop for men's clothing stores from too-cool-for-school underground designers. The minimalist interior on Market stocks an edit of some of the coolest names in the business. From Hiroki Nakamura's highly sought after Visvim label to fleece tracksuits from Noma T.D., the boutique helpfully pre-announces key drops on their website. Although, seeing as how limited each collection can be, you have to be quick on your toes to avoid disappointment. // Maas & Stacks , 2128 Market St. (Upper Market), maasandstacks.com



The Archive: For the avant-garde guy who doesn't go with the flow See on Instagram Check out The Archive for avant-garde, fashion forward pieces that you're unlikely to find elsewhere in the city (or most of the country). A great place to discover unique menswear from a thoughtful curation of visionary designers, The Archive is worth checking out for its design-focused, high-end men's clothing and accessories from the likes of Boris Bidjan Saberi, Kloshar, and Incarnation, to name but a few. Think sculptural silhouettes, textural layers and innovative design details, all set against a predominantly black, white and gray palette. // The Archive, 317 Sutter St (Union Square), archivesf.com



The Darkside Initiative: For the guy who knows his kicksand then some See on Instagram In a city where sneakers have a firm footing in the daily dress code, the regularly updated selection at The Darkside Initiative caters to aficionados with a dark, goth-ish side. With its slick collection of sneakers, streetwear and limited-run accessories, including hard-to-find pieces by Japanese street labels Neighborhood and WTaps (they are the exclusive distributor of WTaps in SF), the brand presents each item in a clear, coherent way in two stores in the city. // The Darkside Initiative, 1827 Powell St. (North Beach) and 989 Valencia St. (Mission), thedarksideinitiative.com



Cable Car Clothiers: For the guy who wants classic style and a shave See on Instagram A Financial District institution for over 75 years, the high-ceilinged, emporium-style Cable Car Clothiers is an impressive one-stop destination for dapper dressers. The traditional men's clothier caters to enthusiasts of classic menswear, with an emphasis on British stylethough they also carry updated renditions of old favorites such as a Tellason's indigo striped selvedge shirt. Step inside and you'll find everything from handmade Loake wingtips to iconic Stetson fur felt and straw hats. There is also an on-site barber shop and shoe shine service, ensuring a head-to-toe finish for those so inclined. // Cable Car Clothiers, 110 Sutter St. (FiDi), cablecarclothiers.com



Self Edge: For the die-hard selvedge denim fan See on Instagram If denim's your thing, then Self Edge on Valencia should be your first stop. This SF outpost stocks an unparalleled range of jeans from some of the best makers in the world, including Iron Heart, Stevenson Overall Co. and Studio D'Artisan. It's where denimheads come to feed their addiction for unsanforized denimjeans that come with a grittier texture and are then shrunk to fit, rather than being pre-shrunkand a sweet spot for rugged silver jewelry and leather accessories from the likes of The Flat Head, not to mention an on-point collection of inspirational indie mags. // Self Edge, 714 Valencia St (Mission), selfedge.com


With declining mortality rates, the number of breast cancer survivors is increasing. Ongoing care after breast cancer treatment is often provided by primary care physicians. This care includes surveillance for cancer recurrence with a history and physical examination every three to six months for the first three years after treatment, every six to 12 months for two more years, and annually thereafter. Mammography is performed annually. Magnetic resonance imaging of the breast is not indicated unless patients are at high risk of recurrence, such as having a hereditary cancer syndrome. Many breast cancer survivors experience long-term sequelae from the disease or treatment. Premature menopause with hot flashes can occur and is managed with pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic treatments. Vaginal dryness is treated with vaginal lubricants and gels. Because cardiotoxicity from chemotherapy is possible, clinicians should be alert for this complication and perform echocardiography if appropriate. Impaired cognition after chemotherapy is also common; treatment includes cognitive rehabilitation therapy. Patients with treatment-induced menopause develop decreased bone density and should receive dual energy x-ray absorptiometry and pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic therapies. Others experience lymphedema, often best managed with weight loss and complex decongestive therapy. Some women develop chronic pain, which is treated by addressing psychological factors and with appropriate pharmacologic therapy.

There are approximately 300,000 new cases of breast cancer (in situ or invasive) each year in the United States, with about one in eight women having breast cancer at some point in life.1 The annual incidence is 129 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic whites, 126 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic blacks, 100 per 100,000 for Native Americans, 92 per 100,000 for Hispanics, and 91 per 100,000 for Asians.1 Mortality rates have been declining for many years. The current annual mortality rates are 21 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic whites, 30 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic blacks, 14 per 100,000 for Native Americans, 14 per 100,000 for Hispanics, and 11 per 100,000 for Asians.1

Because of the declining mortality rates, most patients with breast cancer survive and require ongoing surveillance for recurrence and management of sequelae from the disease or its treatment. Primary care physicians are often involved in the care of these patients.

Primary care physicians should monitor breast cancer survivors for signs and symptoms of cardiotoxicity. Routine echocardiography is not recommended in asymptomatic patients unless they are at high risk of cardiotoxicity.

Annual magnetic resonance imaging is indicated only in breast cancer survivors at high risk of recurrence (high lifetime risk, strong family history of breast or ovarian cancer, or personal history of Hodgkin disease).

Breast cancer survivors should receive a history and physical examination every three to six months for the first three years after treatment, then every six to 12 months for two more years, then annually thereafter.

Primary care physicians should monitor breast cancer survivors for signs and symptoms of cardiotoxicity. Routine echocardiography is not recommended in asymptomatic patients unless they are at high risk of cardiotoxicity.

Annual magnetic resonance imaging is indicated only in breast cancer survivors at high risk of recurrence (high lifetime risk, strong family history of breast or ovarian cancer, or personal history of Hodgkin disease).

Breast cancer survivors should receive a history and physical examination every three to six months for the first three years after treatment, then every six to 12 months for two more years, then annually thereafter.

Do not perform surveillance testing (biomarkers) or imaging (positron emission tomography, computed tomography, and radionuclide bone scans) for asymptomatic individuals who have been treated for breast cancer with curative intent.

Do not routinely recommend follow-up mammograms more often than annually for women who have had radiotherapy following breast-conserving surgery.

Do not perform surveillance testing (biomarkers) or imaging (positron emission tomography, computed tomography, and radionuclide bone scans) for asymptomatic individuals who have been treated for breast cancer with curative intent.

Do not routinely recommend follow-up mammograms more often than annually for women who have had radiotherapy following breast-conserving surgery.

A Cochrane review studied standard follow-up surveillance (history and physical examinations with annual mammography) conducted by a primary care physician vs. follow-up surveillance conducted by a subspecialist. 3 Patients treated by a subspecialist received the same care as those treated by a primary care physician, but some in the subspecialist group also received enhanced radiology and laboratory testing (e.g., chest radiography, bone scans, tumor markers). All patients were survivors of breast cancer stage I, II, or III. There was no difference in overall survival, disease-free survival, or quality of life; however, patient satisfaction was higher among patients treated by a primary care physician. Another study showed that patients receiving follow-up care from a primary care physician are as likely as those receiving care from a subspecialist to receive recommended surveillance testing. 7

In addition to breast cancer screening, breast cancer survivors should continue to be screened for cervical, colon, lung, and ovarian cancers according to published guidelines. In the absence of a genetic syndrome, there is no indication for enhanced screening for these other cancers.

Clinicians should use a validated tool to screen for risk factors for hereditary breast cancer. 6 These risk factors include developing breast cancer before 50 years of age, triple-negative cancer types (estrogen receptor negative, progesterone receptor negative, and human epidermal growth factor negative), or a strong family history of breast or ovarian cancer. Genetic counseling referral is indicated if there is a hereditary component. Tools for determining risk are available in the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guideline at https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/Page/Document/RecommendationStatementFinal/brca-related-cancer-risk-assessment-genetic-counseling-and-genetic-testing . This guideline is currently being updated.

Radiologic surveillance should consist of annual mammography of both breasts or the remaining breast. 2  4 Annual magnetic resonance imaging should be performed only in patients at high risk of recurrence. 5 Risk factors for recurrence include a calculated lifetime risk of more than 20%, a strong family history of breast or ovarian cancer, and a personal history of Hodgkin disease. 5

Guidelines published by the American Cancer Society/American Society of Clinical Oncology emphasize that primary care physicians should ensure that breast cancer survivors follow the recommendations of the oncology team, as well as receive a history and physical examination every three to six months for the first three years after treatment, every six to 12 months for two more years, then annually thereafter. Patients should also be educated about the signs and symptoms of local recurrence. 2

Treating Sequelae from Breast Cancer or Its Treatment

HOT FLASHES AND VAGINAL DRYNESS

Breast cancer survivors may have a variety of symptoms related to low estrogen levels as a result of chemotherapy-induced ovarian failure or antiestrogen hormonal therapy. Low estrogen can lead to hot flashes, dyspareunia, vaginal dryness, and urogenital atrophy.

The prevalence of hot flashes varies with the type of therapy, but it may be as high as 50% to 70% in premenopausal survivors who are treated with tamoxifen.8 Because of the risk of cancer recurrence, the use of oral estrogen to treat hot flashes is contraindicated in breast cancer survivors.9 There is also concern about topical estrogen preparations because some have been shown to increase serum estradiol levels.10 Treatment of hot flashes in breast cancer survivors begins with lifestyle modifications (e.g., dressing in layers, using a fan, sipping cool drinks). For women who want pharmacologic treatment, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor venlafaxine, and gabapentin (Neurontin) are preferred medications.2,11,12 Physicians should consider each medication's adverse effects when deciding which one is most appropriate for individual patients.

For vaginal dryness and dyspareunia, guidelines suggest the use of vaginal lubricants for sexual intercourse and vaginal moisturizers for general comfort.10 In addition, there is evidence that pH-balanced vaginal gel is effective for vaginal symptoms and a lidocaine compress applied to the vulvar vestibule is effective for dyspareunia.13,14

CARDIOTOXICITY

Multiple aspects of breast cancer treatment may contribute to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease in survivors.15 These risk factors include induced menopause, use of hormonal treatments, and use of certain chemotherapies such as anthracycline-type drugs (e.g., doxorubicin [Adriamycin]) and trastuzumab (Herceptin). Current doses and techniques of radiation therapy for breast cancer do not appear to increase cardiovascular toxicity.16 Breast cancer survivors should continue to receive regular age-appropriate cardiovascular risk screening and risk factor reduction according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and other guidelines. Patients should be encouraged to report potential cardiac symptoms, such as shortness of breath or unexplained fatigue.2 If symptoms are present, appropriate workup and cardiology referral should be initiated.17

There are no well-established recommendations on screening for cardiotoxicity in breast cancer survivors. However, echocardiography should be considered six to 12 months after breast cancer treatment in asymptomatic patients at high risk of cardiotoxicity (e.g., those who received high-dose anthracycline chemotherapy, trastuzumab or low-dose anthracyclines in combination with cardiac risk factors or radiation therapy with the heart in the treatment field, or high-dose radiation with the heart in the treatment field).17

COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENT

Cognitive impairment is common during and after breast cancer treatment and may affect the patient's daily functioning.18 Cognitive impairment, measured by a variety of neuropsychiatric tests, is most pronounced in survivors who received systemic chemotherapy, with 39% of these patients reporting cognitive difficulty up to five years after diagnosis.19 Verbal memory and psychomotor function are particularly affected.19

Physicians should ask about cognitive impairment after breast cancer treatment and refer affected patients for neuropsychiatric testing.2 There is evidence that cognitive rehabilitation therapy, consisting of exercises to improve verbal and visual memory and speed of processing information, is effective in reversing cognitive deficits in breast cancer survivors.20 Cognitive rehabilitation is effective in group and individual settings.20,21 Stimulants, mindfulness-based stress reduction, and cognitive behavior therapy are ineffective.22

DECREASED BONE DENSITY

Breast cancer survivors, including those who are premenopausal, are at increased risk of osteoporotic fractures. Rapid and profound bone loss may occur as a result of chemotherapy-induced ovarian failure or ovarian suppression from adjuvant therapies such as aromatase inhibitors.23

Women who have chemotherapy-induced premature menopause, women who are premenopausal and were treated with tamoxifen or a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist, and women who were treated with an aromatase inhibitor should receive dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) at baseline and then every two years, unless more frequent screening is indicated by DEXA results. For postmenopausal breast cancer survivors without these risk factors, DEXA should be performed at baseline, and then existing guidelines for osteoporosis screening should be followed.2

There are several strategies to limit the bone loss associated with breast cancer treatment, most importantly weight-bearing exercise, limiting alcohol intake, not smoking, and adequate intake of dietary calcium and vitamin D.

Zoledronic acid (Reclast) or denosumab (Prolia) is recommended for the prevention of bone loss in patients receiving aromatase inhibitor therapy.24 If zoledronic acid is chosen, it should be given for three to five years. The optimal duration of denosumab therapy is unclear, but durations of up to 24 months have been studied.24,25 Of note, the use of bisphosphonates may be associated with a lower risk of metastatic disease in patients with early breast cancer.26

Teriparatide (Forteo), a parathyroid hormone agonist, is not recommended for improving bone density in patients with breast cancer because of the risk of bone metastases or radiation-induced osteosarcomas.27 Selective estrogen receptor modulators are contraindicated because of their antiresorptive effects, which mitigate the benefits of aromatase inhibitor therapies.28

LYMPHEDEMA

The reported occurrences of lymphedema after breast cancer treatment vary widely, depending on the type of treatment received and the criteria used to diagnose lymphedema. Rates of lymphedema are as much as double in women who undergo radiotherapy, and they are also increased in women who were obese or who had advanced cancer at the time of diagnosis. There is also a greater incidence of lymphedema in patients receiving axillary lymph node dissection vs. sentinel node biopsy. Of women who undergo axillary node dissection, the cumulative incidence of lymphedema is 41% at 10 years.2,29

New cases of lymphedema may emerge months or years after treatment, with the cumulative incidence rising over five years of follow-up.30 However, not all cases of lymphedema are clinically significant. In one study, the incidence of lymphedema at 60 months posttreatment was 94% when using a criterion of increased arm circumference of 2 cm or more, but only 43% of the same patients had signs and symptoms of limb heaviness or swelling.30

Guidelines advise primary care physicians to counsel patients about weight management as a strategy to prevent or reduce the risk of lymphedema after breast cancer. Patients who develop lymphedema should be referred to a lymphedema therapist. There is ample evidence for the effectiveness of complex decongestive therapy in the management of lymphedema related to breast cancer.2,4,31 Complex decongestive therapy consists of therapist-administered drainage massage followed by a maintenance phase of self-administered manual lymphatic drainage, ongoing skin care, and use of compression garments. Complex decongestive therapy has been shown to decrease arm volume and increase quality of life.32 In addition, physical therapy improves range of motion and strength in the affected arm and does not cause or worsen lymphedema.31

Women with breast cancerrelated lymphedema are twice as likely as age-matched controls to develop cellulitis or lymphangitis.33 Episodes of cellulitis may further damage lymphatic drainage, worsening lymphedema. It is therefore imperative to promptly diagnose and treat infections.

CHRONIC PAIN

Chronic pain after breast cancer treatment is a well-described phenomenon. The most common subtype, postmastectomy pain syndrome (PMPS), lasts at least three months. The pain occurs in the arm, axilla, chest wall, scar, or shoulder, or it may present as phantom breast pain.34 This syndrome is thought to be neuropathic in nature. The quality of pain is usually burning, stinging, or like an electric shock.35 The incidence of PMPS is estimated to be 20% to 50% but varies depending on type of surgery and use of chemotherapy or radiation.36

Axillary node dissection leads to a higher rate of persistent pain than sentinel node biopsy alone. The pain is thought to be caused by damage to the intercostobrachial nerve that occurs with node dissection.37 The effect of chemotherapy on the incidence of PMPS is inconsistent and may be confounded by stage of breast cancer or patient age,38 but radiation therapy increases the risk of persistent pain.37 Lower age is another risk factor for persistent pain, possibly because younger women may have more severe disease.39 Pain may also be a result of peripheral neuropathy related to use of chemotherapy in breast cancer treatment.38

There are many other risk factors for the development of chronic pain after breast cancer treatment, such as the presence of preoperative breast pain (from breast cancer itself or prior treatments) or an unrelated preexisting pain syndrome, such as headache or back pain.37,40 Aggressive postoperative pain control has been demonstrated to reduce the risk of persistent pain.41

Psychological factors are also involved in chronic pain after breast cancer treatment. Anxiety, catastrophizing mindset, disturbed sleep patterns, and tendency toward somatization each predict the presence of ongoing pain at three years of follow-up.42 Depression is also a predictor of chronic pain in breast cancer survivors. The incidence of chronic pain at nine months was decreased by approximately one-half in patients who were psychologically resilient before breast cancer treatment.43

Primary care physicians should assess patients for persistent pain beyond the expected time of healing and for neuropathy. Preferred treatments include acetaminophen, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, physical activity, and occupational therapy as indicated. Duloxetine (Cymbalta) is recommended for neuropathic pain, numbness, or tingling.2 Amitriptyline has an established role in treating neuropathic pain, and there is evidence that it relieves pain in the ipsilateral breast and surgical scar after breast surgery.44 However, physicians must consider the anticholinergic adverse effects of amitriptyline and its possible contraindication in older patients. Because neuropathic pain may be resistant to opioid analgesia, there is little or no role for chronic opioid use in patients with PMPS.

Physical and occupational therapies after breast surgery focus on preserving range of motion and strength in the ipsilateral arm and are effective in treating postoperative pain. Early referral for physical or occupational therapy may be more effective than delayed referral.45

HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY OF LIFE

Nearly 50% of breast cancer survivors experience anxiety and/or depression in the first year after diagnosis.46 In addition, one year after treatment, breast cancer survivors have significantly lower scores than the general population in the domains of emotional state, social functioning, fatigue, insomnia, and body image. They also have ongoing breast cancerspecific symptoms (e.g., arm and breast symptoms).47 Another study showed that some quality-of-life difficulties persisted at 10 years, including cognitive issues, social issues, and fatigue.48 Body image may be negatively affected by surgeries, weight gain, changes in physical conditioning, and changes in sexual functioning. Younger women are particularly affected by declines in body image.49,50

Patients with breast cancer should be screened for depression and anxiety, and asked about body image and social support.2 Group therapy using guided imagery has been shown to lessen concerns about appearance and increase quality of life.51 Women with body image concerns should be referred for adaptive therapies, such as breast reconstruction, breast prosthesis, or wigs.2 A systematic review found that the only interventions that improved body image were those containing an exercise component.49
This year also marks seven years running that the specialty is able to brag about a new all-time record for the number of medical students matching into family medicine in the NRMP Match.

Count it out: 3,848 medical students and graduates just matched into family medicine -- 313 more than matched to family medicine residency programs in 2018.

Overall, combining totals from the NRMP Match and the February American Osteopathic Association Intern/Resident Registration Program (AOA Match), family medicine filled 112 more positions than in 2018 (4,152 versus 4,040).

Add to that figures from December's Military Match, which brought another 132 students into the family medicine column. Of those, 52 positions were gained in the Air Force, 41 in the Navy and 39 in the Army.

AAFP President John Cullen, M.D., of Valdez, Alaska, extended his congratulations to all of the new recruits.

"I'd like to personally welcome our new family medicine colleagues. We're proud to have you join our ranks. Know that you are an important part of our team now and in the future."
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Veterans across the country are suing 3M over combat earplugs they say did not seat properly in their ears, which they say resulted in tinnitus and hearing loss.

This follows 3Ms settlement last July with the U.S. government, in which the Minnesota-based company agreed to pay $9.1 million to resolve allegations that the dual-ended Combat Arms Earplugs, Version 2 were sold without disclosure of defects that hampered the effectiveness of the product.

The earplugs were used by active-duty service members between 2003 and 2015 and were designed to protect soldiers from hearing damage caused by noises from aircraft machinery, gunfire, explosions and armored vehicles, according to law offices of Peter Angelos, who filed a case Feb. 14 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. Angelos represents Joshua Keiner, who served in the Army in Korea and Iraq and is seeking unspecified compensation for medical expenses, pain and lost wages.

The earplugs have likely caused thousands of soldiers to suffer significant hearing loss and tinnitus in addition to exposing millions to similar risk, according to the Angelos firm.

3M described its settlement last year with the government, in a resolution announced by the Justice Department and the Army and Defense Department criminal investigative divisions, as a business decision and not an admission of liability or blame.

It said in a statement at the time that settling the investigation into this discontinued product at this point allows the matter to no longer be a distraction to the business, and frees former and current 3M employees from having to go through the inconvenience of a protracted investigation and litigation. We take great pride in our products and this resolution is not an admission of liability, but simply a decision to move forward with our mission to provide high quality personal safety equipment products to our customers.

As for the current lawsuits by veterans, 3M told AARP in a statement, We deny this product was defectively designed and will defend against the allegations in these lawsuits through the legal process.

The company cited its long history of partnering with the U.S. military, and we continue to make products to help protect our troops and support their missions.

The two-sided earplugs were designed to allow service members to change the amount of sound they were subject to, depending on which side they used.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has reported that hearing problems are the most prevalent service-connected disability among American veterans.

In the settlement announcement last year, the Justice Department claimed the earplugs were too short for proper insertion and could loosen, weakening their performance. The government said 3M and its predecessor, Aearo Technologies Inc., did not disclose the design defect to the military.

Lawsuits by veterans have been filed in recent months in states including Maryland, Texas, South Carolina and Florida.

In Texas, former Army Sgt. Scott Rowe, a combat veteran who served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, said in his lawsuit that the earplugs were responsible for daily tinnitus, hearing loss and other damage.

"3M knew that the earplugs did not meet the specifications and design criteria of the military and instead of correcting the flaws it chose to conceal the problem, said Rowes attorney, Mo Aziz, in a statement.
For Subscribers Basketball season opens; Aberdeen Central girls host Cobblers, Raiders

Here's what to know before Aberdeen boys and girls opening high school basketball games this weekend.
What a difference a year makes, at least when it comes to Steel Bender Brewyard.

Steel Bender marks its second year with a new brewing operation and a larger reach. It recently signed a distribution agreement with Admiral Beverage, meaning Steel Bender products will soon be available throughout New Mexico..

We started doing some self-distribution, Id say about a year after we opened up, with friends we knew at restaurants that wanted to carry our beer, Steel Bender co-owner Ethan Chant said. We were doing it with one of the bartenders who would drive out there and drop off kegs. We bought a van, and that van got too small in a hurry. We got another guy, Adam (Auden). We brought him aboard, and he organized the distribution. Instead of selling kegs to just friends, it started taking off like crazy. We were fortunate a couple of chains wanted to start carrying our beer. We didnt have enough people to deliver the beer and didnt have the space to brew that much beer.

To accommodate the expansion in distribution, Steel Bender built another brewery to accommodate demand. The new brewing area is expected to open on March 22. Steel Bender will then have the green light to produce beer in the new facility.

It is an 8,000-square-foot operation, seven more tanks, 30 to 60 barrels, Chant said. In contrast, (the system) we first bought were 15-barrel. It has transformed a tremendous amount. As much as we wanted to do distribution on our own, if we wanted to go throughout the state, we had to partner with someone. Were really excited.

Steel Bender is marking its growth and another year with a celebration that starts today and runs through Sunday, March 17.

Today is the release of Steel Benders Daydream Belizer Belgian Ale, which boasts big and fruity Belgian notes. The cold-pressed, medium-roast Guatemalan coffee from local coffee roasters Pour Vida Coffee introduces a smooth, nutty character. The 100 percent Belize Mayan Mountain Chocolate from Los Ranchos Eldora Chocolate provides the perfect amount of chocolate sweetness, according to Steel Benders Facebook event page.

Saturday festivities will include the release of two Steel Bender ciders: Los Ranchos Cider in bottles and CE-1 Cider Expedition on tap.

Weve been making cider now for 6 to 8 months, co-owner Shelby Chant said. We have basically been testing batches of cider to get to the cider we love.  The first bottle is called Los Ranchos Cider. We got 7,000 pounds of apples from the orchard, (that is) walking distance in the village. The only thing in the cider is water and pressed apples from the incredible orchard and yeast, thats it. It is a dry cider, and were really excited. Our first bottled cider has that name because it is made with village apples.

CE-1 Cider Expedition features apples grown at the base of the San Juan Mountains. There are nine varieties of apples in the cider as well as one pear variety, water and yeast. Guests who enjoy the cider might also want to purchase the suggested pairing of Brie en Croute with housemade green chile jelly created specifically for the cider.

The festivities wrap up on St. Patricks Day with the release of Mulvaneys Irish Red on nitro. There also will be $1 off Blue Bullet Stout. Steel Benders chef Jason Baczkiewicz also will be doing a gammon boxty and some corned beef and cabbage egg rolls with horseradish for the event. Baczkiewicz recently made some minor tweaks to Steel Benders menu has added 10 new items. Its smoked meats, including smoked pork and smoked chicken, have been so popular with patrons it plans on adding pork spare ribs to the mix.
Tricklock Company is known for bringing international theater to Albuquerque.

Its been that way for 19 years.

This year, a few more American artists are featured in the Revolutions International Theatre Festival.

Throughout March, the festival presents groundbreaking performances, free library shows with partner Amp Concerts, artist/audience gatherings, galas, and the infamous cabaret, the Reptilian Lounge.

We have artists from The United Kingdom, Colombia, Italy, Argentina, France and the United States and selections from Excavations: New Works Series from Tricklock Company,  says Juli Hendren, co-founder and producer. The second week of the festival is packed with performances that are amazing.

Hendren says the festivals curation is reflective of the socio-political world we live in, at the same time expressing the humor, punk ideals, and thrills weve all come to expect from live theater.

We celebrate the arts and their essential ability to cross borders and oceans, bringing us all together in the shared, sacred space of artistic exchange, she says.

Hendren never looks for a straight-style theater show.

Im more interested in political work, she says. I have more U.S. artists than ever before. They are tackling global perspectives. There are quite a few stories of people of color or first generation and whats happening to them.

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The weekends events start with a performance of Ask an American at the Tricklock Performance Laboratory at 7 tonight.

The show is created and performed by Marya Errin Jones, and it is a partly improvisational work that explores the detritus of the American psyche.

At 6 p.m. Sunday, March 17, a pay-what-youdecide performance of Excavations: New Works Series, Part 1 will take place at the Tricklock Performance Laboratory. The series will be staging the work Music for Houseplants.

Hendren says this is a chance for an audience to get a sneak peek at what Tricklock is creating.

On Tuesday, March 19, at the South Broadway Library, a free performance of Figmentally will be staged by Drea Lusion and Eric Parthum.

It follows a curious writer whose uncontrollable imagination overtakes her life and permanently warps reality. There will also be performances on March 21-23.

The Words From the Walls will be performed at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 21, and March 23 at the National Hispanic Cultural Centers Plaza Mayor.

The piece is from Colombian company Nemcatacoa Teatro and is directed by Nicolas Cifuentes.

It is a site-specific performance that explores different points of view about walls that separate people.

Some could be invisible walls, and some could be walls on paper, Hendren says.

The performance mixes bilingual poetry, video projection, and physical theater on stilts to create an ambulatory, theatrical experience.

Weaving a story connected by poetry and visual images, stilters, live musicians and a poet takes audiences on a journey through the NHCC campus, Hendren says.

Its immersive and investigates walls and borders, both real and imaginary, she says. Its a really powerful piece.

Hendren is also looking forward to presenting Monkey and Roy at 9 p.m. Thursday, March 21, at the Tricklock Performance Laboratory, 110 Gold SW.

The performance pairs Albuquerque native Shenoah Allen with Nina Conti.

Conti, as Monkey and Allen, as Roy, delve into the lives of audience members to create a comedy show that ultimately exposes their own cracked worldview.

Shenoah is famous for being in The Pajama Men,  she says. He started working with Nina, and shes a big deal in the U.K. Her stage performances are wildly popular. People that love The Pajama Men will definitely love this performance.
An epic world exists in the mind of Oliver Galvan-De la Cruz.

Its a world that is drawing comparisons such as the Pueblo Revolt meets Games of Thrones.

And Galvan-De la Cruz will take the praise.

The New Mexican is gaining buzz with his 70-page book Nativo, and hopes to make the jump to TV.

He worked with Santa Fe-based filmmaker Jaima Chevalier and illustrator Israel Francisco Haros Lopez on the book, which is written as a pilot episode.

Im envisioning this as an eight-season series, he says. The world is complex and tells a very human story.

In fact, Chevalier and Galvan-De la Cruz have pitched it to producers in California.

The log line of the series is: Multiple tribes of indigenous people battle parasitic colonizers allied with supernatural creatures in an epic story spanning multiple continents and spanning five centuries of time.

Work on the pilot episode  The Birth of a Butterfly  took about two months to complete, though the story rests in Galvan-De la Cruzs head.

The story is based on the violent history of Spanish conquest of the indigenous people of Mexico and the Southwest.

It delves into Hernan Cortes conquest of the Aztec empire in Mexico during the 1500s and Don Diego de Vargas conquest of the pueblo people in New Mexico.

And then it heads into the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which indigenous people united to drive out the Spanish conquerors.

Of course, theres a supernatural element to the story.

When we wrote this, I fell in love with the main character, Butterfly, he says. Her journey of trying to survive with this Spanish colony. Her pueblo is conquered by the Spanish, her parents die and she is left with her little sister, Chief Eagle. Butterfly is married to Spanish man and leaves her sister behind when she leaves the colony.

Galvan-De la Cruz says Butterfly knows her sister is destined for greatness and must keep her alive.

Chief Eagle is is supernatural, he says. She is a guardian of the Earth and is given powers by special turquoise. Shes destined to be a tribe leader that protects her people.

When it came to writing, Galvan-De la Cruz looked at the entire project simply.

I wanted this to be about the human story, he says. I imagined myself living in these situations and felt what they were feeling. I immersed myself into each page.

The book is available on Amazon, and he and Chevalier continue to pitch to producers.

I think that this story is such a New Mexico story, it should be told by us, Chevalier says. We feel strongly that this story needs to well up from here. Were closest to the well.

SEND ME YOUR TIPS: If you know of a movie filming in the state, or are curious about one, email film@ABQjournal.com. Follow me on Twitter @agomezART.
Had she not been allergic to cats, Kate Gallego, the newly elected mayor of Phoenix and an Albuquerque native, might have been a veterinarian.

Instead, the former Kate Widland 37, will be sworn in next week as the youngest and the only woman mayor of one of the top 10 largest cities in America.

Its exciting, a real honor, she told the Journal on Thursday. It says something good about Phoenix  that its an open community and the results you can get matter more than where you were born or your name.

First elected to the Phoenix City Council in 2013, Gallego was re-elected in 2017. But when former Mayor Greg Stanton announced he was running for Congress, Gallego gave up her City Council seat to run in a special election to succeed him. Gallego subsequently beat opponent Daniel Valenzuela in a March 12 runoff election.

The midterm elections, which changed the composition of the U.S. House of Representatives, were a statement by voters that they really want people who are like them, raising families and involved in their community, Gallego said. We dont want elected officials on a pedestal; we want real people facing real challenges.

Nationwide, there was a wave of women who ran in response, I think theyd say, to the Trump election, Gallego said. I would not count myself in that group because I was already involved in public life and public service.

Public life, however, was not something she thought about growing up in Albuquerque, although she was the student body vice president at Albuquerque Academy at the same time Elizabeth Kistin Keller, now the wife of Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, was president.

Rather, she entertained the notion of becoming a veterinarian, she said, until her cat allergy put the kibosh on that.

Gallego is the daughter of attorneys Jim Widland and Julie Neerken, who fled Chicago after the infamous blizzard of 1979 and settled in the more moderate climate of Albuquerque. Here, daughter Kate celebrated her bat mitzvah at Congregation Nahalat Shalom and enjoyed the citys amenities, including the parks and hiking in the citys open spaces and in the mountains.

She left Albuquerque to attend Harvard University, where she earned a bachelors degree in environmental studies and later earned a Master of Business Administration degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before becoming a councilwoman, Gallego worked on strategic planning with the electric utility company in Phoenix. It was there, she said, that I spent a lot of time complaining we could do better, and then I finally gave up and said Ill run for public office, believing that she would get better results from that vantage point.

During her tenure on the Phoenix City Council, and as the citys mayor and the mother of a young son, the environment remains a top concern to her, including clean air, clean water, preserving the citys open spaces and parks, and having a safe place to call home.

But she said she is also focused on economic development, luring high-wage jobs, and improving the citys infrastructure and public transportation system.

It was Albuquerque, however, that provided her with the groundwork and foundation for going into public life.

It was such a diverse community, she said. Its a community where you know youre going to live and work with people who dont look like you, and thats important preparation, particularly when so many cities across America seem ethnically segregated.
Copyright  2019 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  New Mexico lawmakers on Thursday rejected a proposal that would have repealed the states 1969 anti-abortion law  an issue that emerged as one of the most emotional of the session.

The legislation, backed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, failed on a 24-18 vote after a brisk debate on the Senate floor.

Eight Democrats joined all 16 Republicans in voting against it.

A few lawmakers shared intensely personal stories  speaking about miscarriage, grief, religion and the sanctity of life  during speeches on the Senate floor.

The legislation, House Bill 51, sought to repeal a law that makes it a crime to end a womans pregnancy, except in certain circumstances, such as rape.

The statute is largely unenforceable now because of the U.S. Supreme Courts 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, but supporters said they fear the court will revisit the landmark abortion decision.

The issue divided Democrats in the Senate.

Sen. Gabriel Ramos, a Silver City Democrat appointed to fill a vacancy in the Senate earlier this year, cited his religious beliefs and the Catholic Church before voting against the bill.

This is one of the toughest decisions any of us will ever have to make, he said as senators prepared to vote. I stand unified against legislation that weakens the defense of life and threatens the dignity of the human being.

Senate Majority Whip Mimi Stewart, an Albuquerque Democrat who supported the bill, said she twice endured miscarriages because of a medical condition. Women should be able to choose for themselves, she said.

These are private decisions made by women under unusual circumstances, Stewart said. Its crucial that we do not criminalize doctors, nurses or women for these procedures.

The legislation set off hours of emotional debate in the Legislature this session. Supporters and opponents sometimes testified through tears as they spoke about the proposal in committee hearings.

The proposal passed the House last month 40-29.

The legislation targeted a law thats one of just eight of its kind left in the country.

Supporters said the repeal was important because of President Donald Trumps pledge to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court.

In her State of the State address, newly elected Democratic Gov. Lujan Grisham pushed for passage of the measure.

Lujan Grisham said she was disappointed in the vote.

This old, outdated statute criminalizing health care providers is an embarrassment, she said in a statement posted to Twitter. That removing it was even a debate, much less a difficult vote for some senators, is inexplicable to me.

Democrats hold a 26-16 edge in the Senate, but the vote didnt fall along party lines.

Voting against the bill were Democratic Sens. Pete Campos of Las Vegas, Carlos Cisneros of Questa, Richard Martinez of Espanola, George Munoz of Gallup, Senate President Pro Tem Mary Kay Papen of Las Cruces, Ramos, Clemente Meme Sanchez of Grants and John Arthur Smith of Deming.

Debate lasted less than an hour  brief by legislative standards on a controversial bill.

If approved, the bill would have gone back to the House because a Senate committee had amended the legislation.

The Senate change left in place a section of law that said people who object on moral grounds cant be forced to participate in an abortion. Supporters of the legislation had argued the conscience clause was redundant and not actually needed to ensure people dont have to participate.

That issue, in any case, didnt surface during Thursdays floor debate.
Despite hours of public testimony from opponents that veered from highly technical arguments about development law to impassioned pleas about wildlife, Albuquerques Environmental Planning Commission on Thursday advanced a controversial West Side housing development.

The EPC voted 5-1 to approve the site plan for Overlook at Oxbow, a residential development slated for 23 acres above the Oxbow wetlands at the east end of Namaste Road NW, adjacent to the citys Oxbow Major Public Open Space.

Gamma Development is proposing 76 single-family homes for the site, still known to many as the Poole property after its former owners, the late Suzanne and Rufus Poole.

The EPC  an appointed citizen board  heeded the recommendation of City of Albuquerque staff planners, who had urged approving the plan with certain conditions. Staff held that the site had the proper zoning for the development and that the proposal meets the standards of the citys recently adopted Integrated Development Ordinance.

The project must go through several more steps before construction could start, including site plan approval by the citys Development Review Board. But Gamma Development co-owner Brian McCarthy  who said the homes would likely sell in the $400,000-$500,000 range  hailed Thursdays decision as a significant win.

This is a huge milestone for the project, and by the way, it is an affirmation that we interpreted the IDO the same way as the city staff and the EPC, and all the separate (city) departments, he said. That in and of itself  is a huge victory because this is really one of the first projects of this type to be scrutinized under the IDO and go through the EPC.

Neighbors and environmental advocates have for months fought the project and showed up by the dozens to Thursdays hearing. All but a handful of the 40-plus people who spoke during public comment expressed objections. Some contended that developers were gaming the IDO by proposing two separate cluster developments on the same site, thus allowing for more density, and that Gamma had not completed a sufficient analysis of the propertys sensitive land areas.

Others expressed fear about the potential fire risk of that many homes on the edge of the bosque. Many touted the ecological value of leaving the land  which currently boasts just two homes  mostly undeveloped, raising concerns about birds and fish. One speaker brought a plush-toy crane as a prop; another quoted Joni Mitchells famous lyrics they paved paradise to put up a parking lot.

We must all ask ourselves if this project is good for the city, not just the developers. This is such a unique property  a jewel on the West Side of Albuquerque, a historic homestead, said West Side resident Ann Prinz. If the property is developed with a typical subdivision, Albuquerque will lose irreplaceable open space and a sensitive land that would better serve the public than a gated community with limited open areas for passive recreation.

The hearing spanned more than seven hours, with commissioners asking many detailed questions of both city staffers and Gammas planning consultant, Jim Strozier.

The citys zoning enforcement officer said he determined two clusters were allowed under the IDO. Strozier, meanwhile, said the development team has already had meetings with the fire marshal and that the project had a drainage plan that could actually benefit the bosque below by diverting storm water that would otherwise rush downward to a drainage pond.

Commissioner Bill McCoy made the motion to approve the site plan, saying he was voting for approval because he believed in the evaluations already done by the city staffers and that more technical matters could still be resolved.

My determination to support is based on the trust of the process with the other professionals involved, he said.

Board member Karen Hudson said some matters remained vague, such as the homes required setbacks, but that she trusted the city staffs work. She also addressed some opponents argument that the land should be preserved.

Everyone says its one of the last pieces of property over on the bosque we can walk in and its beautiful, and thats nice, she said. (But) one of the reasons its only the last piece of property is because the Oxbow and La Luz (communities) were developed.  We heard several people say this is beautiful property; we love living in La Luz, we love living in Oxbow. To develop this property would also give 76 people the opportunity to do the same.

Only Commissioner Richard Meadows voted against the site plan, saying he thought more of the projects designated open space  which totals over 7 acres across the site  should be concentrated to serve as a buffer to the more sensitive areas around the property.

Mayor Tim Keller had last month unsuccessfully asked the propertys owner, Kevin Daniels, to discuss possible land trades so the city could preserve the land as part of its Open Space network.

Following the EPCs approval Thursday, Kellers spokeswoman said, Of course wed rather see more open space, but rules are rules, and there is a process for making these decisions that we respect.
Its only been a few months since Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham asked New Mexicans to Aim High, declared an end to the states status quo, and vowed to dramatically re-imagine the state and to build something better.

We accept the governors challenge.

And not a minute too late. It may be the Land of Manana, but there is no excuse for New Mexico to be nearly two decades into the 21st century and lack the infrastructure or political will to freely publish catalogs of government datasets online in an open and usable format.

During National Sunshine Week, were asking the governor to make transparency the framework of her administration.

It should be a no-brainer. A year ago, during a gubernatorial candidate forum focused on open government issues, then-Congresswoman Lujan Grisham pledged to create an atmosphere where all information is readily available to the public.

Even better, as a candidate, she promised to reduce the burden of sorting through records by putting more digital records online.

Yes, that is a good start. Just dont look at some of the bills still working through the Legislature, including proposals to increase fees, shield applicants names and reduce government transparency.

In 2015, as stewards of open government, we were embarrassed when the state got a big fat F for the publics access to government data and records. The states declared state policies are good, but the laws are often ignored or unenforced.

Its a shame that four years later nothing has been done to close the enforcement gap or adopt best practices from other states like Washington. Even President Donald Trump signed the Data Act.

Its more than disappointing that New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, who promised to develop training requirements for records custodians and work with legislators on proposals to close the gap, is now taking a bow for simply taking baby steps and proposing to reduce fees on electronic copies that are already free in other states, and being applauded for a proposal to codify a court decision.

No bueno. Its not the bold changes we expected from Balderas and we shouldnt settle for incremental steps. For example, in the attorney generals bill, introduced by Rep. William B. Pratt, state agencies do not have to export a data file in a standard format the public can use. Instead, they can charge up to $10 and provide a proprietary file that most personal computers cant open. Not many citizens can afford to buy a $20,000 program.

During the current legislative session, weve seen folks debate spending money on students books and seen another bill rejected that would make capital outlay budgets more transparent.

Forget about taking a moon shot. Aim High may just mean that policymakers need to lift their eyes past the horizon, and look at what other states and public entities have in place.

There are scores of online educational resources offering electronic books, study guides, curriculum and test materials at no cost. Several states have interactive budgets where citizens can drill down and view how taxpayer money is spent on government programs and hold bureaucrats accountable when money is not used efficiently. In Seattle, city residents can view the status of every capital-funded project.

During the Sunshine Forum broadcast a year ago, Lujan Grisham said government transparency is an issue of leadership at all levels of government.

Knowledge is power, and if we dont provide that knowledge to the public, it subjects itself to real abuses in the system, Lujan Grisham stated.

So lets show the world that New Mexico can take the next step. No, lets jump and spend the next year or two making access to government records and data open by default.
With the Senates comprehensive education bill now on the way to the governor and the duplicate House version likely on its way by the time you read this, the Legislature has made great progress toward addressing the inequities and shortfalls in the public school system identified as unconstitutional by a district court.

Once the governor signs one of the bills into law, public school leaders will have powerful new tools and stronger resources to create the best education system for our kids.

For the most part, New Mexico has been moving in the right direction on education. But weve been taking tiny steps in random directions when our children need a giant leap into a system-wide transformation. With robust revenues and a court order, this legislative session provided both the opportunity and impetus to take that leap.

The result was the bipartisan Senate Bill 1 and identical House Bill 5. Along with a budget plan that supports them, these bills recognized that, if we want our children to succeed, New Mexico needs to not only address the courts orders but, more importantly, to create an integrated system that serves all children from birth to college- or career-readiness. Research shows the worlds best schools have a comprehensive, aligned system; strong early childhood programs with extra supports for struggling children; highly skilled, well-compensated teachers; and robust career and technical education options.

SB 1 and HB 5 nearly double the factor in the public school funding formula  which starts with enrollment then adds dollars depending on the needs of each child  for children at risk of failing because of low income, limited English, and mobility. New Mexico has high rates of poor children, and we know these children start out behind and need extra supports to catch up.

A new multiplier in the formula would be created to expand a proven extended school year program to more grades and to any school that wants it.

Research shows the K-5 Plus program, when combined with prekindergarten, can wipe out the achievement gap between at-risk students and their more affluent peers and continues to have an impact on students into high school.

For public schools alone, the latest version of the proposed budget has almost $500 million to cover the costs of new and expanded formula factors and for pay increases for teachers and other school employees. Separate legislation, and the latest version of the proposed state budget, would increase access to and funding for prekindergarten and early prekindergarten and add tens of millions of new dollars to scholarships and wage subsidies for early childhood educators, childcare subsidies, and home visits to new families, an intensive parenting education program.

In addition, career and technical education is emphasized in, among other proposals, the redesign of the school accountability system, and numerous proposals are working their way through the Legislature that emphasize multicultural education, and Indian education in particular  a focus of the court.

The bills have not been without controversy.

Early in the session, language was stripped that would have limited the growth of charter schools, which perform no better than traditional public schools but generally get more funding per student.

More recently, funding was added to allow public schools that serve adults to stay open another year, although a provision that defines school-age as under 22 years remains in the bill. That provision is intended to focus the funding formula on serving children, instead of allowing it to be siphoned off for costly programs for adults already served by other state programs.

There is no magic bullet that will address the courts issues or create the high-quality education system our children and families need and deserve. But, together, these efforts to take care of our youngest learners, support our struggling learners, build strong curricula and accountability with options for all learners, and recognize our educators will create a school system that allows New Mexico students to thrive.

Sen. Mimi Stewart, past chair of the Legislative Education Study Committee and Senate majority whip, has represented Senate District 17 in Bernalillo County since 2015. She previously served in the House for 20 years. A retired educator, Stewart taught in the Albuquerque Public Schools for 30 years.
Could it finally happen?

Could New Mexicans in the near future actually know how capital projects are funded by their legislators and governor? Who offered how much from their respective capital outlay buckets for which projects?

This has been a well-kept secret for decades, with many key lawmakers resisting efforts to shine a light on this process.

But, much as was the case with live webcasting, New Mexico could be on the verge of moving away from this unnecessary secrecy to a more enlightened system.

House Bill 262, a project of Think New Mexico and sponsored by Democratic Reps. Matthew McQueen, Natalie Figueroa and Joy Garratt, would require that, beginning in 2020, the Legislative Council Service publish on the legislative website a searchable list of capital projects that passed the Legislature and the names of legislators or the governor who allocated a portion of the capital outlay appropriation or bond authorization for each project. It goes on to require publication of the amount of the allocation designated by each legislator and the governor.

This would allow constituents to understand which projects their elected representatives selected for funding and how they ordered priorities.

As there was with livestreaming, there has been incredible resistance to this  with the exception of some legislators who voluntarily agreed to make their requests public. Why the resistance? Perhaps because secrecy avoids scrutiny and questions.

Why, for example, did a lawmaker decide to allocate money to a small but perhaps politically expedient pork item rather than something that would be a significant investment in the state or in his or her hometown or district? Which of the many requests lawmakers receive did they decide to fund?

If all that is secret, you dont have to do much in the way of explaining your decisions. Its part of why New Mexico consistently gets terrible grades for its capital outlay system.

But there is progress.

HB262 has passed the House unanimously and is awaiting a hearing in Senate Judiciary in the closing hours of the session. It had been slated for consideration Wednesday, but committee time ran out and it didnt reconvene after a long floor session. The measure already has cleared Senate Rules on a 4-2 vote and there is no reason for delay in Finance as the measure has no real fiscal impact. Moving it to a floor vote would be an important step forward.

And there is growing grass roots support.

In the House  where then-Rep. Janice Arnold Jones, R-Albuquerque, simply started streaming hearings over loud objections  there already has been a strong statement of support. Further, House Republicans announced they will publicly disclose their projects to ensure total transparency.

These dollars belong to the taxpayers and they deserve to know how theyre being spent, said Minority Leader Jim Townsend of Artesia.

Going a step further, they also vowed to make public their funding requests in the so-called junior spending bill  a pot of cash available this year from the general fund overflowing with oil and gas generated surplus dollars. The spending plan for that money essentially was crafted in secret.

Think New Mexicos executive director, Fred Nathan, is urging action in Senate Finance and a floor vote, no doubt encouraged by both the House passage and Republican caucus statement, as they seem to reflect a growing appetite for transparency  a glimmer of light in a session where there have been too many assaults on open government and the publics right to know.

New Mexicans who would like to know how their money is being spent no doubt would agree with him.

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.
The state Public Education Department is looking for crafty students to give the department a new look.

Secretary Karen Trujillo announced an art contest for students  pre-kindergarten to 12th grade  to design a new PED logo.

Schools will submit their top piece of artwork to the education department.

The winning design will be featured online and on PED materials. All the submissions will be displayed at the Santa Fe headquarters.

YOUNG SCIENTIST PUBLISHED: Ksenia Sevostianov is only in eighth grade, but she is already published in a reputable journal for her research on bone cancer.

The Sierra Middle School student studied the makeup of bone cancer cells, and her project, Play Spot the Difference to Fight Cancer, was published in the December volume of the New Mexico Journal of Science.

The young scientist was one of the 2018 New Mexico Junior Academy of Science competition winners and has a slew of first-place science fair awards under her belt.

APS WATER: Albuquerque Public Schools Board of Education member Barbara Petersen was admittedly angry last week. At a meeting, she talked passionately about the districts failed mill levy and bond election, and expressed concern that the results would perpetuate inequity.

And Petersen claimed the lack of funds would mean children at Whittier and Hawthorne (elementary schools) are going to keep drinking brown water because thats what comes out of their pipes.

She was emphasizing that some schools have the community support to raise funds for things  say, a filtered water system  and others dont.

While APS Chief Operations Officer Scott Elder said the district will undoubtedly see impacts from the failed election, he also clarified that brown water isnt one of them.

Nobodys drinking brown water, he said. Because thats a life, health and safety issue.

He said pipe projects and making sure kids have clean water is a top priority for the district.

Shelby Perea: sperea@abqjournal.com
Copyright  2019 Albuquerque Journal

From high-end operations catering to Brazilians to overcrowded stash houses in rural New Mexico, organized criminal groups are smuggling immigrants into the U.S. through New Mexicos southern border using the crush of asylum seekers from Central America and elsewhere as cover.

Homeland Security Investigations and Border Patrol agents have identified several organized criminal groups that have been smuggling immigrants across the southern border to ultimate destinations in Alabama, New Jersey, Tennessee and elsewhere.

Over the last year, federal agents have arrested human smugglers in the small towns of Hachita in New Mexicos Bootheel and Dexter south of Roswell as well as Albuquerque and Birmingham, Ala.

On Wednesday, Maximo Gonzalez-Sebastian, one of three men arrested in connection with a stash house in Roswell, was convicted in federal court in Las Cruces on charges of hostage taking and conspiracy. Gonzalez-Sebastian, who had a Guatemalan passport on him when he was arrested, could face up to 20 years in federal prison.

Two of his associates have already pleaded guilty and also await sentencing.

We are making a concentrated effort to investigate and prosecute organizations involved in human trafficking, U.S. Attorney John C. Anderson said, adding that includes both smugglers and those taking advantage of asylum seekers.

It is a more diverse immigrant population than weve seen in the past, he said. New Mexico is primarily a transit point for people entering the country either illegally or through the asylum process.

Efforts to control the numbers of people arriving at the official ports of entry seeking asylum have led people to self surrender to Border Patrol agents at more remote areas of the border like the small port of entry in New Mexicos Bootheel at Antelope Wells or the deserts outside Deming.

Under U.S. law, migrant families who have requested asylum are typically released to join relatives or sponsors recruited by charities in other parts of the country. They will be issued a Notice to Appear in immigration court for their asylum hearing.

This has led to a flood of asylum seeking immigrants  more than 76,000 in the El Paso sector, which includes all of New Mexicos border, in February alone. Customs and Border Patrol agents say they have been so overwhelmed in processing and finding medical attention when needed that they are concerned they are missing criminal smuggling operations and drug runners.

Business booming

The asylum wave is a boom for smugglers.

In a recently unsealed search warrant, agents from Homeland Security Investigations said three Guatemalan families independently gave agents at the Border Patrol headquarters in Deming the same contact information  the phone number and address for what turned out to be a billiards parlor in Nashville, Tenn.

One woman told the agents she was recruited and smuggled through Mexico by a man named Geronimo and contacted him at the Tennessee phone number while they traveled through Mexico.

There was no answer when the Journal called the telephone number several times this week.

Agents believe Geronimo is connected to the Bartolo Alien Smuggling Organization, which has operated in Mexico and Guatemala for a number of years, generating more than $5 million for the organization.

The promises Geronimo makes are similar to other smugglers, but his have been consistent for the last several years.

One of the women who talked to agents said she made a down payment of 15,000 quetzals (approximately $1,950 U.S.) for her and her son to be smuggled into the U.S. She was promised a job in the U.S. to pay the remainder of the smuggling fee.

Asylum seekers can get a federal work permit if they win their asylum case. Or they can apply for a work permit if the case has dragged out more than 150 days.

The smugglers promise that people willing to pay the fee  45,000 quetzals or about $5,800 U.S.  get unfettered entry into the U.S. if the adults are accompanied by a child. They will get a job in the U.S., a place to live and documents allowing them to work to pay off their smuggling fee.

Agents said in the search warrant that the organization recruits businesses in the U.S. willing to hire undocumented immigrants.

Agents have not been able to identify Geronimo.

In the past, U.S. and U.N. investigators have identified the Bartolo organization as smuggling people from Central America into Florida and recruiting girls from Central America with false promises of jobs at hotel resorts who were then forced to work in brothels.

Dexter bust

While agents havent tracked down Geronimo and others in the Bartolo organization, they have been able to break up other groups or at least interfere with their operations.

Last December, the first thing ICE agents noticed after talking with Tomas Mateo outside a fifth-wheel trailer in the small town of Dexter, N.M., was clothing and hundreds of pairs of shoes scattered around. The shoes were different styles and sizes  mens, womens and childrens shoes.

Mateo told agents he was renting the trailer, but wouldnt allow them to search it or the attached shed.

As agents continued to talk to Mateo, several people began exiting the trailer. Then it became a rush of people running away.

Agents eventually rounded up more than 60 people, mostly from Guatemala and Ecuador.

They were all in the country illegally and told agents they had been held in the trailer for three to five days awaiting transport  and payment to the smugglers.

They said Mateo was in charge of when they could eat, use the restroom and make telephone calls.

Some of the immigrants were crammed into an unfurnished and filthy 20-foot-by-20-foot wooden addition to a travel trailer and provided with minimal food and water. The addition didnt have a working toilet, and a sign was placed on the bathroom door that read in Spanish, Dont use the bathroom.

They said Mateo made them take off their shoes before entering the trailer so they couldnt run away.

According to court records, Mateo, 38 and from Guatemala, told agents he, himself, was smuggled into the country in September and was put in charge of the stash house by the smuggling organization.

He wouldnt identify the leaders, but said he followed their instructions such as collecting money from the people brought to the trailer.

Mateo is charged in a federal criminal complaint with harboring the illegal immigrants and with unlawfully re-entering the United States after having been previously deported.

Guatemalan smugglers in Roswell

The Dexter stash house was the second one raided in the Roswell area last year.

Last July, Homeland Security agents were told that illegal immigrants were being threatened if their families didnt pay their smuggling fees.

According to court records, agents knocking on the door of a house in Roswell discovered 13 people  four from Mexico and nine from Guatemala.

They said they had been smuggled into the country near El Paso where they were picked up and brought to the stash house.

They told agents the smugglers threatened to beat them and have their associates in Mexico and Guatemala harm their families if the $5,000 smuggling fees were not paid.

The men, the immigrants said, had left the house in a gold SUV, and they later identified three men  all from Guatemala  as being involved in the operation.

One of the smugglers admitted he had just picked up a wire transfer for $767 as part of the smuggling fee for one of the immigrants found in the stash house.

Christian Garcia Gutierrez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to take a hostage and hostage taking.

Agents said Garcia had a Guatemalan passport when arrested. In his plea agreement, Garcia said they held three Mexican nationals under threat until their smuggling fees were paid.

A second defendant, Tomas Feliciano Francisco-Pedro, pleaded guilty to transporting the illegal immigrants to the house where they were found, and also transporting nine other illegal immigrants from the stash house in Roswell to New Jersey.

They pleaded guilty prior to Wednesdays trial of Gonzalez-Sebastian.

Sentencing dates for the men have not be set.
WASHINGTON  To mark the first anniversary of her favorite cats death, Amber Smigiel took a few days off from her job at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to grieve  and may have ended up with a new feline.

Smigiel fell in love with Henry, a ginger-colored kitten she met at Crumbs & Whiskers pop-up kitten lounge in Georgetown. Two hours after she arrived, she had applied to adopt him and was asking the staff to extend her time-limited visit just one more time. Each half-hour cost her $10, half the regular price because she was there for the recent soft opening.

Theyre probably going to run my credit card and itll be like $100, but I dont care, Smigiel said, laughing as kittens roamed around her. Its for a good cause.

That cause is saving kittens from high-risk shelters whose resources are strained each spring during cats annual breeding season. The pop-up lounge, which officially opened Feb. 2 and runs through June, offers guests the chance to snuggle with kittens and apply to take one home.

The project is the brainchild of 28-year-old entrepreneur Kanchan Singh, who owns the Crumbs & Whiskers cat cafes in the District of Columbia and Los Angeles, where people can buy 70-minute time slots to hang out with grown cats. When she realized her customers wanted to play with kittens, and not just adult cats, she set out to make that happen.

Were actually a giant foster home, Singh said. Thats how we see ourselves.

About 25 kittens at a time meander around the lounge as guests play with them on fluffy, human-size cat beds and watch them climb on shelves that line the space. A neon sign hanging on a painted brick wall reads, Youve got to be kitten me! Singh hopes to spur adoptions for 500 mixed-breed kittens that otherwise would be at risk of euthanasia due to a lack of shelter space.

The spring through early fall is known as kitten season or kitten mountain because the birthrate of cats rises dramatically at this time of year, said Stephanie Janeczko of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The offspring of cats who have not been spayed or neutered frequently end up in shelters and require intensive care from mostly volunteer staffs.

Kittens less than 8 weeks old need bottle feeding every few hours, medical care to protect against infectious diseases and socialization with other cats and humans, Janeczko said. As a result, she said a portion of the roughly 860,000 cats that are euthanized each year are kittens, though she couldnt say how many.

Crumbs & Whiskers partners with Homeward Trails, a local animal rescue organization that connects the lounge with kittens from shelters in rural Wise County, Va., and Fayette County, W.Va. Sue Bell, the rescue groups founder, said it also is taking in kittens the Wise County Humane Society has rescued from outdoors. Those kittens often die of exposure, illness or being hit by vehicles.

Wise and Fayette counties are areas that have economic challenges, and are home to thousands of unspayed and unneutered cats, Bell said.

Us taking in cats and kittens from that particular area, our hope is that its going to save a lot of lives, but its also going to give the people in the county who really care about the cats a bit of hope, Bell said.

Because kittens have weak immune systems, they are generally kept in a separate space from grown cats, Singh said, so the pop-up creates a safe place for them. The underground lounge, which does not have an elevator, sits at the former site of the mens underwear store Trunk and Drawer. Veterinarians visit the lounge daily to perform health checks, and Homeward Trails also stops by periodically to care for the kittens. Staff members feed the felines several times each day.

As a kitten rested in Matthew Booths lap at the revamped lounge, he said the space fills a void created by not owning his own cat. He said hes a fan of blueish-gray cats and hopes one day to name a cat Major Tom after a character from a David Bowie song.

Booth, 25, said his work as a saxophonist takes him to Asia and up and down the East Coast, making it hard for him to care for a pet. On Thursday, however, he almost changed his mind.

I always say I shouldnt have a cat, said Booth of Gaithersburg, Md. But you come here and you start playing with the kittens, and youre like, Jeez. You start thinking about it.

The pop-up has proved popular since tickets became available online on Valentines Day. That day alone, the lounge raked in $25,000 in sales from play sessions they call encounters (15 minutes for $15), experiences (30 minutes for $20) and extravaganzas (70 minutes for $35) Singh said. Most visitors so far have been women in their 20s and 30s, a lot of whom share photos of their visits on Instagram.

The space is decorated with white and pink pillows on the oversize cat beds, climbing shelves for the kittens on the wall and decorative fake foliage hanging from the ceiling. On small tables throughout the room, guest books invite customers to leave a message and chalkboards announce the number of cats saved from death. A mix of bouncy and slower-paced music pulses from an Amazon Echo.

The kittens, who range from 3 to 8 months old, wear name tags and bows denoting their sex  gray for males and pink for females. A cats only room in the back of the lounge gives them a space for when they need alone time.

Each visit includes a Polaroid picture with the felines, and the lounge sells cat-themed merchandise ranging from sweatshirts for $54 to coffee mugs for $19.95.

Time slots of at least 30 minutes include the option to buy coffee and other nonalcoholic drinks, cookies or ready-to-eat cookie dough from the Dough Jars Georgetown location.

A gray kitten named Foxie meandered up to Elhi Brown of Upper Marlboro, Md., as her kids tried to choose a kitten to adopt. Hes so dapper with his bow tie! Brown said as Foxie nuzzled her finger.

The family had never had a cat before, Brown said, and she wanted to see how her kids would react to one. Each kitten the lounge puts up for adoption must go to a home with another playful cat or be adopted with a sibling so they can get used to being around other cats. Brown said she was happy to take home two kittens.

Well definitely adopt  100 percent. Its just a matter of which ones, Brown said as she looked around the room. Id like to live here.

Browns 11-year-old daughter, Indira, said she liked the lounges vibe.

Its just kind of chill and happy  no stress and no worries, she said.

Indira used a sparkler toy to play with a kitten named Bo. Her brother, 9-year-old Castor, said he liked Foxie the best. The family eventually settled on adopting Matt, a ginger-and-white kitten, for $160.

Elhi Brown sat at a table in the corner, writing answers to questions about her home and caretaking plans for the kitten. A staff member told her that Matt probably would be paired with one of his eight siblings at the lounge for an additional $135.

The Browns would find out within a few days if their application had been approved. Then, they would welcome their familys first cat home.
WASHINGTON  Unbowed by a congressional rebuke, President Donald Trump issued the first veto of his presidency on Friday in a demonstration that he is not through fighting for his signature campaign promise, which stands largely unfulfilled 18 months before voters decide whether to grant him another term.

Trump rejected an effort by Congress to block the emergency declaration hed used to circumvent lawmakers as he tried to shake loose funds for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The monthslong confrontation now moves to the courts, but not before marking a new era of divided government in Washington and Republicans increasing independence from the White House.

Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, Trump said, and I have the duty to veto it.

A dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats in approving the joint resolution on Thursday as both parties strained to exert their power in new ways. It is unlikely that Congress will have the two-thirds majority required to override Trumps veto, though House Democrats will try nonetheless on March 26.

Despite the reproach, Trump seized the opportunity to publicly rebuff Congress and show his commitment to the border wall. In embracing the opportunity to deploy the constitutional power of the veto for the first time, he treated the occasion with all the traditional pomp of a bill-signing.

Trump was surrounded in the Oval Office by supporters, including law enforcement officials and the parents of children killed by people in the country illegally, who offered profuse thanks and frequent applause. Trump dramatically signed his veto message and then held the document up for the cameras to capture.

Trump wants to use the emergency order to divert billions of federal dollars earmarked for defense spending toward the southern border wall. It still faces several legal challenges from Democratic state attorneys general and environmental groups who argue the emergency declaration was unconstitutional.

Those cases could prevent Trump from diverting extra money to barrier construction for months or longer. American Civil Liberties Union, which filed one of the challenges, said the veto is meaningless, like the declaration in the first place.

Congress has rejected the presidents declaration, and now the courts will be the ultimate arbiter of its legality. We look forward to seeing him in court and to the shellacking that he will receive at the hands of an independent judiciary, said Executive Director Anthony Romero.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trumps veto a lawless power grab and railed that, even after both chambers tried to stop him, Trump has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people.

Trump, however, insisted the situation on the southern border is a tremendous national emergency, adding, our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point.

Many lawmakers said Thursdays vote was not necessarily a rejection of the president or the wall, but protections against future presidents  namely a Democrat who might want to declare an emergency on climate change, gun control or any number of other issues.

It was the first direct challenge to the 1976 National Emergencies Act, just as a Wednesday vote on Yemen was the first time Congress invoked the decades-old War Powers Act to try to rein in a president. That resolution seeking to end U.S. backing for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen was approved in the aftermath of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and is expected to be the subject of Trumps second veto.

Despite the embarrassing defections of the 12 GOP senators, Trumps grip on the party remains strong and the White House made it clear that Republicans resisting Trump could face political consequences. Ahead of the voting, Trump framed the issue as with-him-or-against-him on border security, a powerful argument with many.

But Friday, Trump said he had sympathy for the Republicans who voted against him and emphasized that he never truly twisted the arms of lawmakers, because he knew there were not enough votes to override the veto.

Look, they were doing what they have to do, Trump said, insisting he put no pressure on lawmakers to vote against the resolution because he realized that the measure was likely to pass.

Still, a White House official said Trump wont forget when senators who opposed him want him to attend fundraisers or provide other help. The official was not authorized to speak publicly on internal deliberations so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump painted his usual portrait of a lawless and violent border. He cited thousands and thousands of gang arrests and claimed many of the asylum seekers released into the U.S. were stone-cold killers, ignoring data that shows immigrants are less likely to commit crime. He noted, correctly, a spike in the number of people coming to the border to claim asylum.

Trump initiated the showdown months ago when he all but dared Congress not to give him the $5.7 billion he was demanding to build the U.S.-Mexico wall, by threatening a federal government shutdown.

Congress declined and the result was the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Against the advice of GOP leaders, Trump invoked the national emergency declaration last month, allowing him to try to tap about $3.6 billion for the wall by shuffling money from military projects, and that drew outrage from many lawmakers. Trump had campaigned for president promising Mexico would pay for the wall.

___

AP writers Alan Fram, Lisa Mascaro, Catherine Lucey and Colleen Long contributed.
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DIRECTOR POSITION

Interim Economic Development Corporation Director Tim Kelty recently posted a job listing for EDC director. The position pays up to $90,000 a year depending on experience. The ideal candidate will:

1. Have a degree in economic development or a related field.

2. Be certified by the National Economic Development Institute.

3. Have a minimum of three years experience.
SANTA FE  New Mexico lawmakers enter the final hours of this years 60-day legislative session with lingering disagreements over how to set up a voter-approved ethics commission.

An ethics commission bill approved by the Senate earlier this week was revised Thursday by a House committee, which then sent the measure on to the full House.

We are creating what I consider to be a fourth branch of government, so I think its critical that we get it right, said Rep. Greg Nibert, R-Roswell.

The changes by the House Judiciary Committee to the legislation, Senate Bill 668, include limiting the ethics commissions scope and keeping enforcement of the states open meetings laws with the Attorney Generals office.

In addition, valid ethics complaints would have be made public if a settlement is not reached within 20 days of a probable cause finding that a violation of state law had likely occurred  down from 45 days under the Senate plan. Settlement agreements would also be publicly disclosed.

The House already approved a separate ethics commission bill during this years session, but that bill stalled in a Senate committee  along with a dueling Senate bill.

Top-ranking senators then used a procedural maneuver to bring forward a third bill, which quickly moved to the Senate floor and was approved without opposition shortly after midnight on Wednesday.

But several House members expressed concern with provisions in the Senate measure.

If it comes down to the (original) Senate bill or nothing, Id rather have nothing, Rep. Daymon Ely, D-Corrales, the sponsor of the original House bill, told reporters after Thursdays hearing.

If approved by the House, the revised bill would go back to the Senate. If the Senate resisted signing off on the changes, a conference committee featuring representatives from both chambers would be appointed to try to come up with a compromise before the session ends at noon on Saturday.

New Mexico lawmakers have for years debated creating an independent ethics commission to investigate claims of wrongdoing against legislators, lobbyists, elected officials and state employees.

But this years debate has added urgency as statewide voters approved  by a roughly 3-to-1 ratio  a proposed constitutional amendment in November to create the commission.

New Mexico is currently one of just eight states without an independent ethics commission.
Copyright  2019 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  A proposal to more than double New Mexicos annual spending cap on film incentives won approval in the state House early Friday and now heads to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

The House voted 41-24 in favor of the legislation after a debate that started a little before midnight Thursday and stretched to nearly 3 a.m. Friday.

The proposal, Senate Bill 2, has been a priority of Lujan Grisham  who pushed to lift or eliminate the cap during her campaign last year.

The Senate passed the bill 32-8 earlier this week.

The bill would raise the annual cap on state spending for film incentives to $110 million a year, up from $50 million now.

Rep. Antonio Moe Maestas, an Albuquerque Democrat who presented the legislation during the House floor debate, said New Mexico is well-suited to the film industry. The states natural landscapes, workforce and proximity to Los Angeles give New Mexico an advantage over competing locations, he said.

Were good at it  were darn good at it, Maestas said. This is an opportunity to continue going to our strength and build this industry responsibly.

Republican lawmakers raised legal questions about the legislation and slammed it as an unfair giveaway to one industry.

Were doing this on the backs of hardworking New Mexican taxpayers who arent able to write themselves this kind of special law, said House Minority Whip Rod Montoya, R-Farmington.

The measure would authorize one-time spending of up to $225 million over the next 16 months to pay down a backlog in film incentives. The backlog is projected to hit $382 million by the end of this year.

For future years, the bill would establish a $100 million rolling limit on accrued rebates  a move intended to ensure the backlog doesnt get out of hand.

The state now offers a 25 percent tax rebate to film companies for most direct, in-state spending, and long-running television programs are eligible for more.

Senate Bill 2 was sponsored by Democratic Sen. Nancy Rodriguez of Santa Fe.

Maestas said the bill has provisions aimed at increasing transparency and encouraging film production in rural parts of New Mexico.

Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-Albuquerque, said the film industry is an important part of the state economy, employing caterers, seamstresses and others  not just actors.

I think a lot of people dont realize this industry employs people in all trades, in all crafts, she said. Were talking about welders and carpenters and machinists.

Rep. Larry Scott, R-Hobbs, said the film industry will move if another state offers a better deal.

Is that the economic development we want to foster in this state  if its the kind of economic development we have to bribe to stay here? he asked.
A bill outlining new rules dealing with violations by oil and gas operators and management of produced, or brackish, water is headed to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishams desk.

A joint House and Senate conference committee voted 6-0 Friday morning to approve the legislation, and both chambers passed the bill in voice votes in the early afternoon.

Legislative approval follows weeks of negotiations among industry representatives, environmentalists and government officials on Senate Bill 186, sponsored by Sen. Richard Martinez, D-Espanola. That bill aimed to amend the state Oil and Gas Act to give the Oil Conservation Division authority to directly impose penalties on industry operators for violations rather than having to file suit in the courts. It also raised fines for violations for the first time since 1935.

Martinez, however, opted to add those measures as friendly amendments to House Bill 546 on wastewater management, allowing legislators to vote on a combined bill.

The governor considers it priority legislation, and support from cabinet officials was critical in moving the bill through the session, said Jon Goldstein, the Environmental Defense Funds regulatory and legislative affairs director.

This bill is New Mexicos first major oil and gas legislative reform in over decade, Goldstein said in a statement. Their leadership catalyzed these reforms and created a bill that all sides  industry and environmentalists, as well as Democrats and Republicans  support.

Changes negotiated in the bill include:

n reducing proposed penalties from $15,000 per day for each violation to $2,500, and from $25,000 per day for noncompliance or incidents that cause serious human or environmental damage to $10,000

n reducing the total, accumulated-fine cap from $500,000 to $200,000, with the OCD required to file legal suits for anything above that amount

New Mexico Oil and Gas Association Executive Director Ryan Flynn said all sides gave a little.

Its a reasonable compromise, Flynn said. Were happy with the outcome.

As for the provisions on wastewater, the bill clarifies operators ability to re-use water that comes out of oil and gas activities, known as produced water. That could lead to less fresh water use by industry, Goldstein said.

Five to seven barrels of produced water are generated for every barrel of oil produced, totaling more than 1 billion barrels of wastewater in 2018, according to the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has appointed three judges to fill vacancies in the 2nd Judicial District, covering Bernalillo County, and in the 1st Judicial District, covering Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Los Alamos counties.

Two of those spots were vacated when Lujan Grisham made appointments to the New Mexico Supreme Court.

Bryan Biedscheid, who earned his law degree from the University of New Mexico in 1996 and was admitted to the New Mexico bar the same year, will fill the seat in the 1st District Court left vacant by Judge David Thomson.

Thomson was appointed to the state Supreme Court in late January.

Biedscheid has extensive experience in domestic relations and juvenile law where he is frequently appointed as guardian at litem in cases involving minors and incapacitated adults, according to a news release from the governors spokeswoman, Claudia Tristan. Biedscheid is currently a shareholder and vice-president at Sawtell, Wirth & Biedscheid, PC.

Tristan said Biedscheid had also served on the board of Equal Access to Justice and is an active volunteer with the 1st Judicial District Alternative Dispute Resolution Program.

In the 2nd Judicial District, Lujan Grisham appointed Joshua Andrew Allison and Lisa Chavez Ortega to fill vacancies left by Judge Valerie Huling and Judge C. Shannon Bacon.

Huling recently retired and Bacon was appointed to the state Supreme Court in late January.

Allison, who earned his law degree from the UNM in 2008 and was admitted to the California bar the same year and the New Mexico bar the following year, most recently worked with Sheehan & Sheehan law firm in personal injury and products liability.

He currently serves as a commissioner on the board of Bar Commissioners of the State of New Mexico and is a board member of the Disciplinary Board of the state Supreme Court, Tristan said in the news release. He clerked for former Chief Justice Edward L. Chavez.

Chavez Ortega, a native New Mexican, graduated from the UNM in 1997 and was admitted to the New Mexico bar the same year. She has more than two decades of experience, mainly in personal injury law, and has been with Rodey, Dickason, Sloan, Akin & Robb firm her entire professional career, Tristan said. She is now the director there.

Chavez Ortega is a longtime member of the New Mexico Defense Lawyers Association and has previously served on the board of directors, Tristan wrote.
NEW YORK  President Donald Trump played down any threat posed by racist white nationalism on Friday after the gunman accused of the New Zealand mosque massacre called the president a symbol of renewed white identity.

Trump, whose own previous responses to the movement have drawn scrutiny, expressed sympathy for the victims who died at places of worship turned into scenes of evil killing. But he declined to join expressions of mounting concern about white nationalism, saying I dont, really when asked whether he thought it was a rising threat around the world.

I think its a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess, Trump said. If you look at what happened in New Zealand, perhaps thats the case. I dont know enough about it yet. But its certainly a terrible thing.

Trump was asked about white nationalism and the shooting deaths of 49 people at mosques in Christchurch after he formally vetoed Congress resolution to block his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexico border. His veto, aimed at freeing money to build more miles of a border wall against illegal immigration, is expected to survive any congressional effort to overturn it.

Questioned about the accused gunmans reference to him, Trump professed ignorance.

I didnt see it. I didnt see it, he said. But I think its a horrible event  a horrible, disgraceful thing and a horrible act.

The man accused of the shootings, whose name was not immediately released, left behind a lengthy document that outlined his motivations. He proudly stated that he was a 28-year-old Australian white nationalist who hates immigrants and was set off by attacks in Europe that were perpetrated by Muslims. In a single reference, he mentioned the U.S. president.

Were/are you a supporter of Donald Trump? was one of the questions he posed to himself. His answer: As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no.

The White House immediately denounced the connection. But the mention from the suspect, who embraced Nazi imagery and voiced support for fascism, nonetheless cast an uncomfortable light on the way that the president has been embraced by some on the far right.

Trump, who as a candidate proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the United States, has drawn criticism as being slow to condemn white supremacy and related violence. After a 2017 clash between white nationalists and anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one demonstrator dead, Trump said there were very fine people on both sides of the confrontation. He also did not immediately reject the support of David Duke, a former KKK Grand Wizard, during his presidential campaign.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., tied Trumps inflammatory language to the violence half a world away.

Words have consequences like saying we have an invasion on our border and talking about people as though they were different in some fatal way, Blumenthal said on CNN. I think that the public discourse from the president on down is a factor in some of these actions.

Former Texas Rep. Beto ORourke, who declared his Democratic candidacy for president this week, said, We must call out this hatred, this Islamophobia, this intolerance, and the violence that predictably follows from the rhetoric that we use.

The White House, in comments before those remarks, rejected any link to Trump.

Its outrageous to even make that connection between this deranged individual that committed this evil crime to the president who has repeatedly condemned bigotry, racism and made it very clear that this is a terrorist attack, Mercedes Schlapp, the White Houses director of strategic communication, told reporters. We are there to support and stand with the people of New Zealand.

Trump himself telephoned New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, offering condolences, prayers and any help the U.S. might be able to provide. She told reporters she answered, My message was: to offer sympathy and love to all Muslim communities.

Trumps hardline immigration rhetoric and calls to return America to its traditional past have been embraced by many on the conservative fringes, including some who troll online with racist imagery, as well as white supremacists who have looked to engage in violence.

In Florida, Cesar Sayoc, who had decorated his van with Trump propaganda, was accused of mailing explosives last fall to Democratic Party officials and media members, many of whom had been criticized by the president. The president said Sayoc had been insane long before he became a Trump fan.

Last month, a former Coast Guard official was accused of stockpiling weapons in a plot to kill media members and liberal politicians as part of a plan to transform the U.S. into a white ethno-state. It took more than a week for Trump to respond to the plot, which he deemed a shame.

Many experts who track violent extremists have identified white nationalism as a growing threat in the U.S. and abroad. In January, for example, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League said that domestic extremists killed at least 50 people in the U.S. in 2018, up from 37 in 2017, and said, White supremacists were responsible for the great majority of the killings, which is typically the case.

Some critics have accused U.S. authorities of not dedicating adequate resources to stem a threat of domestic terrorism. However, The Washington Post reported last week that internal FBI data showed more domestic terror suspects were arrested last year than those allegedly inspired by international terror groups.

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Michael Kunzelman in Washington and Alexandra Jaffe in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, contributed reporting.

___

Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire
SANTA FE  New Mexico would replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day under legislation that passed the Senate on a 22-15 vote Friday.

The legislation, House Bill 100, was already approved in the House, so it will move next to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Democratic Reps. Derrick Lente of Sandia Pueblo and Andrea Romero of Santa Fe jointly sponsored the proposal, and Sen. Benny Shendo Jr., D-Jemez Pueblo, presented the bill on the Senate floor.

Supporters said changing the name of the holiday  celebrated on the second Monday of October  would better reflect New Mexicos culture.

Native Americans make up more than 12 percent of New Mexicos total population, according to 2017 U.S. Census data.

New Mexico would become the fourth state to do away with Columbus Day, joining South Dakota, Hawaii and Oregon.
Copyright  2019 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham got a hearing Friday on a high-profile plan to increase New Mexico early childhood funding  but she didnt get the votes.

The Democratic governor made a personal appeal to members of a key Senate committee to pass a proposal to take more money from the states largest permanent fund to expand prekindergarten and other similar programs.

But the Senate Finance Committee did not vote on the measure, likely signalling its death for the 60-day session that ends today.

Lujan Grisham, who testified to lawmakers with her 3-year old granddaughter, Avery, on her lap, said she wont stop fighting for her goal of getting 80 percent of New Mexicos 3- and 4-year-olds enrolled in prekindergarten programs by 2024.

If theyre thinking of other revenue streams.  Im open to anything theyre willing to propose, the governor told reporters after Fridays hearing.

She added that her testimony was not intended to put political pressure on senators, saying, Its not about politics for me  its about meeting the needs of these families.

Backers of the plan to take more money from the Land Grant Permanent Fund  valued at $17.7 billion  and spend it on home visiting, child care assistance and prekindergarten programs have been able to win approval in the House in recent years but have been stymied in the Senate.

Advocacy groups have in the past paid for billboards targeting moderate Senate Democrats, some of whom have joined Republicans in opposing the proposals. But those efforts dont appear to have worked.

Some senators said Friday that they support the idea of increasing early childhood spending, but not using the permanent fund to accomplish that.

The permanent fund that weve got is a working fund, said Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, the Finance Committees chairman.

He later told the Journal the committee did not plan to vote on the bill before adjournment.

The permanent fund, which gets funding from certain oil and natural gas royalties and investment gains, is distributing more than $780 million this year for public schools and other designated beneficiaries.

Increasing the distribution rate from the fund by 0.5 percentage point, from 5 percent to 5.5 percent  as called for by the bill pushed by the governor  could generate an additional $75 million a year by 2021, which could be spent on prekindergarten programs statewide.

That proposal, Senate Bill 671, was brought forward by Sen. Linda Lopez, D-Albuquerque, after a different measure  calling for a 1 percentage point increase in the distribution rate  was tabled by the Senate Rules Committee earlier this month.

Total New Mexico spending on child care assistance, home visiting, prekindergarten and other programs has gone from $136.5 million in 2012 to $313.2 million in the current budget year.

But the governor said only about one-quarter of 3- and 4-year-olds in the state  roughly 12,000 out of 50,000  are enrolled in prekindergarten programs.

We have not done a good job as a state of putting together an adequate early childhood system, Lujan Grisahm said Friday.

She has already signed into law a separate bill creating an Early Childhood Education and Care Department in state government in an attempt to consolidate the various programs offered by the state.

But taking more out of the Land Grant Permanent Fund has proved to be a tougher political fight, as opponents have long expressed concern that doing so would undermine the funds long-term health and lead to smaller distributions in future years.

When we take too much out of it, we can hurt the growth of the corpus, Sen. Steven Neville, R-Aztec, said during Fridays hearing.

Lujan Grisham, who took office in January, has contested that assertion, calling on lawmakers to take a responsible pinch out of the fund.

She and other backers also argue that a cash infusion into programs benefiting the states youngest residents is needed now, given that New Mexico is grappling with chronically high poverty rates and a string of high-profile child abuse cases.

While the issue may be settled for this years session, Lujan Grisham made it clear she wont let it fade away.

I dont want to close the door; I want the opportunity to keep making our case, the governor said after Fridays hearing.

Any bill to tap the permanent fund would still need the approval of statewide voters. The soonest it would likely appear on the ballot is during the next statewide general election, in November 2020.
Richwood, TX (77531)

Today

Decreasing cloudiness and windy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 81F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy skies this evening followed by thunderstorms late. Low 68F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand - Police in the New Zealand city of Christchurch said that there are multiple fatalities after shootings in two mosques in the city center on Friday.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said that four people are in custody -- three men and one woman -- but police are unsure if there are any other suspects.

The shootings occurred at the Masjid al Noor mosque at Deans Avenue and Linwood Masjid in Linwood.

"We are unsure if there are any other locations outside of that area that are under threat," Bush said.

Multiple improved explosive devices were attached to vehicles as part of the attack, Bush told reporters. These had been "made safe by the defense force."

"This goes to the seriousness of the situation," he said.

Authorities said that they "will not be discussing the offenders' possible motivations or the causes of this incident" at this stage.

However, in a social media post just before the attack, an account that is believed to belong to one of the attackers posted a link to an 87-page manifesto that was filled with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim ideas and explanations for an attack. The manifesto was not signed.

Police were still treating the incident as ongoing and urged Christchurch residents to stay indoors and monitor the police website and social media.

The situation was also considered as to limited to Christchurch and Bush asked "anyone who was thinking of going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand today not to go. To close your doors until you hear from us again," he said.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern held a press conference into the shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, describing it as "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

"What has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence," she said.

Ardern said the attacker has "no place in New Zealand."

"For now my thoughts and I'm sure the thoughts of all New Zealanders are with those who have been affected their families," she said.

Police said they have mobilized every national police resource to respond to the incident.

Gunman opened fire 'for ten to 15 minutes"

This is a developing story, stay tuned for updates:
BUTTE COUNTY, Calif.  With prom just around the corner for many students, Prom Project is ready to host their 16th annual free prom attire event.

Students can get free dresses and tuxedos, along with accessories like shoes and jewelry, which have all been gently used or even new.

With the event coming up next month, they are seeking clothing and accessories as theirs were lost in the Camp Fire. They say that they would typically have donations left over from years past but those items were being stored in Paradise.

If you'd like to donate, they are in need of plus size dresses and men's formal attire that are new and gently used. You can make monetary donations, as well.

If you want to receive the free prom attire and accessories, the event will be held next month in Oroville.

If you have any further questions, please do contact Emily at (530) 303 7042 or on Prom Project Butte on Facebook.

Donations are being accepted at the following locations:

Oroville

Curves, 2190 Meyers St, Oroville



Chico

Esplanade Cleaners, 164 E 2nd Ave

Prom Project Event:

April 3-5 from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Saturday, April 6, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Curves, 1435 Meyers St, Oroville
Redding, Calif. --

Redding Police teamed up with a local Neighborhood Watch group to zero in on a home that has been the center of several crime problems.

Police say, during the past couple months, the Redding Police Department Neighborhood Police Unit (NPU) and the Shasta Inter-agency Narcotic Task Force (SINTF) received dozens of complaints from residents regarding ongoing problems in the Henderson Road neighborhood. Residents reported narcotic transactions, thefts, vandalism's, and assaults occurring at all hours of the day and night. The incidents occurred with such regularity it began dramatically impacting the neighborhoods quality of life. Because of the consistent problems, the residents came together and started a Neighborhood Watch group with the goal of communicating with each other and law enforcement to help curb the criminal activity.

Based upon the ongoing problems, an investigation was initiated by NPU and SINTF. Officers worked with the Henderson Road Neighborhood Watch group and identified a residence that appeared to be attracting a majority of the criminal activity. The suspected problem residence was found to be in the 2800 block of Henderson Drive and maintained by two brothers, David Lawrence Fruits, 52, and John Patrick Fruits, 54.

The investigating officers say they were familiar with David Fruits and John Fruits as they have had multiple prior contacts with them. David Fruits has 19 prior arrests and is currently on probation through the Shasta County Probation Department for possession of drug paraphernalia. John Fruits has 39 prior arrests and is on active parole through the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation for elder abuse.

Believing the Fruit's residence was responsible for a significant amount of the problems in the neighborhood, NPU and SINTF responded to their home on March 13th, 2019, at 9 a.m. and executed a probation search. Upon arriving at the location, officers found John Fruits asleep in the living room with a methamphetamine pipe near his feet. David Fruits was found in a bedroom and initially refused to comply with officers commands. David Fruits was eventually taken into custody and additional drug paraphernalia was located in his possession.

Once the home was secured, officers began checking the surrounding yard where they located numerous disabled vehicles and outbuildings with subjects living inside. A total of eight other individuals were located living on the property, two of which were found to have active arrest warrants. Ronald Bruce Brooks, 62, had a warrant from Modoc County for violation of probation and being under the influence of a controlled substance. Victoria Miller, 52, was found to have a warrant for illegal camping.

At the conclusion of the investigation, officers arrested three subjects from the property. David Fruits was arrested for violation of probation, obstructing or delaying a peace officer, and possession of drug paraphernalia. John Fruits was arrested for violation of parole and possession of drug paraphernalia, and Ronald Brooks was arrested on his outstanding warrant. All three subjects were transported to the Shasta County Jail where they were booked without incident. Although Victoria Miller had a warrant, she was not arrested but rather issued a citation and released from the scene.

Due to the condition of the property, along with people living in multiple vehicles and outbuildings, NPU will work with City of Redding Code Enforcement to identify violations and will address them with the owners.
49 killed in New Zealand mosque shooting

New Zealand police say a gunman killed 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch Thursday. The man charged in the murder will appear in court Friday. Police believe the motive was terrorism.

Police arrest domestic violence suspect after car chase

Redding police arrested Mark Hense for felony domestic violence. Officers say he led police on a car chase through Win-River Casino, weaving through cars before abandoning his truck. Police found a woman with abuse signs who said Hense had threatened to kill her if she ran.

Redding police identify home with criminal activity

Redding police teamed up with a local neighborhood watch group to identify a home they believe is the center of criminal activity on Henderson Road. Authorities arrested John Fruits, along with two others. Officers say they have arrested the brothers 58 times before.

Butte County Sheriff's Office investigating vicious attacks by a pack of dogs in Magalia

The Butte County Sheriff's Office is investigating two attacks by a pack of nine dogs in Magalia. The attack happened on Rosewood Drive on Thursday. Investigators say the owner of the dogs, Peter Ricca, was in court Thursday regarding earlier complaints about the dogs. No charges have been filed at this time.

Sheriff's deputies rescue couple and dog in Trinity County

The Trinity County Sheriff's Office rescued a couple and their dog near Hells Gate Campgrounds. The couple climbed down a cliff to save their dog after he fell 200 feet down a cliff. Crews used a kayak to get the couple across the river near Devil's Hole.

Police arrest Redding man for breaking into cars on Reddington Drive

Redding police say Crain Coulter was breaking into cars on Reddington Drive around 2 a.m. on Friday. Officers found him hiding inside a homeowner's truck with property from the burglaries. Police say Coulter confessed to the crime.

Yuba County Sheriff's Office welcomes back deputy

The Yuba County Sheriff's Office has welcomed back a deputy who was injured in the line of duty. Deputy Phillip Bronson was injured in an officer-involved shooting on August 1, 2017. On Thursday, the department celebrated deputy's Bronson's return to patrol.

Secret Trail Brewing to unveil Paradise Strong brew

The Secret Trail Brewing Company will unveil its Paradise Strong special brew on Saint Patrick's Day. A portion of the proceeds from the beer will go to the Camp Fire Relief Fund. Sunday's event kicks off at 7:30 a.m. and lasts until 4 p.m.

Senate votes to terminate President Trump's border order

Congress has approved a resolution that would overturn President Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southern border. The president responded on Twitter with one word - veto. It would be President Trump's first veto since taking office.
HT Media has seen some senior level exits in the span of a week. Close on the heels of Ashu Phakey putting in his paper as COO of HT Media, Debabrata Mukherjee, Executive Director, HT Media, and Rajiv Bansal, CEO, HT Digital Streams and Chief Digital Officer, HT Media, has also decided to move on from the organisation. Industry sources have confirmed the developments to Adgully.

The sources further said that Mukherjee is joining Diageo India. During the course of his career spanning 24 years, Mukherjee has undertaken a diverse set of roles spanning marketing and sales operations. Prior to joining HT Media, he was Vice President of South West Asia Operations at Coca-Cola.

Rajiv Bansal's next destination is not yet known, During the course of his career, Bansal has been associated with organisations like HT Media, Microsoft, Samsung, Logitech and several start-ups, where he led consumer-focused businesses in media, internet services, IoT, video, music, home security, communication, virtual reality and wearables.
In 2018, Google took various efforts to handle the misleading advertisements. Google brought in 31 new advertiser policies to take up issues of abuses like, cryptocurrency, ticket resellers, third-party tech support. They also took care of local services such as bail bonds, garage door repairmen and rehab facilities.

Google also has taken actions against the actors that have done contributed to these ads. Google identified and terminated almost one million bad advertiser accounts using improved machine learning technology.

The number of ads removed in the year 2018 are almost double of those that were terminated in 2017. Google helps search and secure the root cause of bad ads and better protect users.

Approximately 734,000 app developers and publishers were terminated from the Google ad network, and removed ads completely from nearly 1.5 million apps. Google also took severe action by taking ads off of about 28 million pages that violated the publisher policies.

The questions about the purchase of political ads and the fake news sites to be handled well, Google launched a new policy for election ads in the U.S. ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

143,000 election ads in the U.S. were verified and listed in a new political ads transparency report that gave more information about who bought election ads.

Also, Indian Political Advertising Transparency Report and searchable Political Ads Library will go live, before the Lok-Sabha elections to come up in April.



Google has been using several different policies to assure their ads were supporting legal publishers. In 2018, approximately over 22,000 apps, nearly 15,000 sites and 1.2 million pages across its ad network were removed for violations of policies directed at misrepresentative, hateful or other low-quality content.
Interbrand, the worlds leading brand consultancy, has named Tata, Reliance, and Airtel as the three most valuable Indian brands of 2019. In its sixth year, the Best Indian Brands ranking saw Retail make its presence felt in the league table, which was otherwise dominated by Automotive, Diversified Businesses and Financial Services sectors.

Auto sector shifts gears to drive top growth. Mirroring the brave global brands more than any other sector, the auto brands showed the way to the rest this year. Royal Enfield, Bajaj Auto, Ashok Leyland, Hero, Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra demonstrate growth higher than average.

This years table features three new entrants. Big Bazaar joins at #33 (Rs 26.86 Billion), DMart at #37 (Rs 20.15 Billion) and Nerolac Paints enters the table at #39 (Rs 19.19 Billion) for the first time. On the other hand, Reliance Group (R-ADAG; last on in 2017, Rs 46.56 Billion) and Canara Bank (last on in 2017, Rs 19.73 Billion) exited the list this year.

The combined value of the Top 40 brands was Rs 5.03 Trillion, which represented a 5.2 per cent growth in value over the previous year. Tanishq, Royal Enfield, Kotak, Bajaj Auto, Ashok Leyland and Britannia were amongst the fastest growing brands.

Ever since its inception, Tata has continued to hold the top position in the Best Indian Brands table. However, Tatas brand value grew by a modest 6.5 per cent  contributed significantly by its tech services business TCS. In the same vein, Reliance, which after taking over the No. 2 spot from Airtel last year, consolidated itself as a strong No. 2 with a growth in brand value of 12 per cent. This performance was bolstered by the phenomenal growth of Jio. HDFC Bank, LIC, State Bank of India, Infosys, Mahindra, ICICI Bank and Godrej round off the Top 10.

Financial Services and Auto contributed the most to this years Top 40, at 27 per cent and 13 per cent of value, respectively.

Most Indian businesses looked at change as a big risk to their existence. But to them we would say: Risk is no longer in changing, but in not changing. And challenge is no longer just the competition or the ever-changing business environment. It's our own inertia. Our fear of the new, of the unknown. And yet, most inevitably fight that change, trying to bend a fast-changing world to their obsolescence. Whats really encouraging is that we are now seeing the progressive few accept that the world is changing and making attempts to change. They acknowledge the new consumer preferences. They accept the new desire for experiences and respond positively. Replacing complacency with competitiveness. To reinvent themselves before they reinvent their categories. And remain unafraid of the change to drive brave growth. That, in sum, is the secret behind this years Top 40s success, said Ashish Mishra, Managing Director, Interbrand India.

Providing a global perspective on the Best Indian Brands 2019, Rebecca Robins, Interbrands Global Culture and Learning Officer, in India to unveil the Best Indian Brands, said, In a fast-changing world, brands are the only assets that companies can fall back on to navigate the challenges. Indeed, brands are the crucial interface between technology and consumers that channel an organisations efforts to engender growth. Globally, the one category that has managed this well, to constantly evolve; to lead new ecosystems; to craft highly personalised and meaningful micro-experiences while still being rooted in a larger purpose, is Luxury. No wonder then, that the worlds and Indias top change drivers are taking a leaf out of the Luxury playbook, to grow by adopting a Luxury Mindset.

Methodology

Interbrands sixth annual report analyses how brands grow in a changing world, showing that using technology at scale to deliver intimate human experiences, will help drive economic growth value. This methodology was the first brand valuation method to become ISO certified.
Bucking the odds is a common theme of Walter-Mitty-type fantasies  overcoming daunting obstacles to become a winner, or a hero at some level. Few of us actually live the dream, but sometimes it happens, and during Womens History Month, an incredible North Country example comes to mind: Rhoda F. Graves of Gouverneur in St. Lawrence County.

The extreme unlikelihood of her becoming a historic figure in state politics makes her story all the more compelling. And the details are amazing.

Extreme unlikelihood? Well, consider that for the first two-thirds of her life, the groundbreaking events of the final third were hardly even possible. For one thing, she was a woman, and politics was almost solely the purview of men. Women couldnt vote, a right they had sought for nearly a century  and the idea that men would elect a female legislator in New York was an absurdity. Aside from that, she was in her late forties at a time when life expectancy for American females was in the low fifties. For most women in that situation, it was time to break out the rocking chair and wait for the end. But Rhoda Graves was not most women.

She was born in July 1877 in Fowler, in southwestern St. Lawrence County, about five miles southeast of Gouverneur. Her parents were Leander and Rhoda Austin, but her mother died in childbirth. Rhoda was placed with the nearby family of Lafayette and Rhoda Fox, who adopted her before she was two years old. Her father had remarried by then, but Rhoda remained a Fox. She attended area schools and was a very attentive, capable pupil (at age 10 in Spragueville she had no absences or tardies and carried a 96 average). After graduating, she worked as a teacher at Rossie, Oswegatchie, and other area schools into the early 1900s, and lived in the village of Gouverneur.

She frequently visited with friends living in several area villages, and socialized often. In the late 1890s, her most frequent companion was Perle Graves, a village resident nine years her senior. They married in late April 1905 (he was 36; she was 28) and had two sons, Paul (1907) and Mark (1910). Perle was a clothing-store clerk, but forged a close friendship with Frank Seaker that would deeply affect how Rhodas life unfolded.

With many friends among farmers (he was raised on a nearby farm) and connections among the local chamber of commerces 90 members, Perle assisted Frank on an important project: getting elected to the New York State Assembly in Albany. Seaker was the unanimous nominee, won the election, and took office in January 1912. Perle, already serving the party in different capacities, was named in March to the Republican County Committee and became an alternate delegate to the state GOP convention. In winter 1913, courtesy of Seaker, Perle held a clerk job in the Assembly, and the following year was a Railroad Committee clerk (the family moved with him to Albany until the job was done), prompting rumors that he might one day seek an Assembly position.

The Graves and Seaker families traveled and socialized together, and in late 1915, Perle and Frank formed a business partnership, purchasing a Main Street corner lot in Gouverneur, where they spent approximately $20,000 ($503,000 in 2019) on building a large, two-story garage to house the Seaker-Graves Motor Company.

Personal, political, and business ties between the two families remained strong, and clearly had an impact on Rhodas future. During that same period, while handling the traditional job of housewife and mother to two young boys, she became active in the affairs of multiple organizations. Back in 1904, the year before she married, Rhoda was elected vice-president of the St. Agnes Guild of the Trinity Church, her first leadership position as an adult. Many more would follow during the decade spanning 1910 to 1920, when she played a very active role in guiding the paths of several organizations, including the local WCTU unit (Womens Christian Temperance Union, the national anti-alcohol organization), the Gouverneur library, the Womens Relief Corps (a patriotic group in support of Americas army), and the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). She served on Red Cross committees, was team captain on drives for the YMCA and the Victory Loan Program, and attended meetings of the Northern New York Federation of Womens Clubs, which brought many groups together for common causes.

Two factors stood out in Rhodas evolving persona: her role in most organizations progressed to leadership positions; and the common sense, personality, and other traits that got her there attracted many appreciative admirers.

In early 1918, while maintaining the positions she held, Rhoda began gravitating towards politics. With the benefit of hindsight, a convergence of events that provoked the change becomes evidenther husbands and Frank Seakers political success for nearly a decade, her own achievements on behalf of multiple organizations, and the burgeoning womens movement, especially the push for suffrage.

She became a regular attendee at GOP meetings, and in July was selected by the Republican County Committee as a delegate to the state meeting in Saratoga. In February 1920, she was one of 50 New York State women chosen to attend a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City with US Senator James Wadsworth, who was running for reelection. The importance of women had recently reached a game-changing moment: they had finally won the right to vote. In June 1919, the 19th Amendment had been ratified, and was destined to become law in August 1920, less than three months before Election Day. Wadsworth and most other politicians sought support among this massive new source of voters, and for good reason: more than eight million women cast ballots during their first year of eligibility. In New York State, Republicans dominated the effort to register women voters by a margin of almost ten to one (in March the numbers were 226,000 Republicans to 25,000 Democrats). Up north, Rhoda was one of two women chosen to lead the registration effort.

With thousands of connections made during the past decade, and the many leadership roles she held, Rhodas potential political power suddenly skyrocketed with the advent of womens suffrage. Any influence she might wield could drastically affect future election campaigns, which county political men recognized. At the GOP organizational meeting in April 1920, Rhoda was selected as vice-chairman of the Republican County Committee. (Baby steps  the term chairperson was still many decades away.) In a brief address, she declared that most women would side with Republicans and bring about victory in November. Said the Ogdensburg Republican-Journal: Mrs. Graves is a very entertaining speaker  her address was listened to with great interest and was heartily applauded.

From that moment forward, her already busy life was a whirlwind of political activity on behalf of the party. In May she helped organize a luncheon/fundraiser in Potsdam. In July she was appointed to the committee on nominations, organized a Campaign School for Republican Women (three state officials addressed how to organize, recruit, etc.), and (with Perle, and Frank Seaker) attended the GOP convention in Saratoga. In early September, as a member of the Century Club reception committee, she helped host a Republican luncheon with former Ambassador to Mexico Henry L. Wilson as the featured guest. In late September, she supervised in hands-on fashion the establishment of campaign headquarters for Gouverneur GOP members. In their home in early October, she and Perle hosted party leaders and their wives, and late in the month, she spoke at a party rally in Lisbon.

Such was life for one of the most active political women in the North Country. She and Perle, financially sound, hired a live-in housekeeper, which allowed Rhoda to be a mom while maintaining such a busy schedule. She sponsored, organized, and spoke at numerous events on behalf of the party over the next few years, pointing out that men were as welcome to attend as women were. She arranged rallies, spoke on important issues, and continued to serve as vice-chairman of the Republican County Committee. In that capacity, she hosted many successful events, epitomized by a reception and tea in November 1922 that attracted more than 200 attendees, including sitting and former state congressmen.

Next week, part 2: aiming high and running hard, but anybody could beat a woman.

Photos: Rhoda Fox Graves; headlines, Ogdensburg Journal, 1920
Our second child, Michael, was born. Vaccinated. From the first day, all children are vaccinated, all the way through the schedule. We saw some signs, but around the sixteenth month vaccines, which is the MMRWe lost our son. Thats a fact. He went to stimming, he went to losing eye contact, he quit responding to his name, and he went blank. 

Nico LaHood: For my family, I tell people, we became an unintended experiment. As Bobby told you, Im the proud daddy of four children And our first two children were vaccinated per the schedule. Our first child, at the six months old, after the sixth month vaccination, she broke out in hives, tremendous hives. Its an autoimmune disease. Whats that? Shes allergic to your wifes breast milk. How ridiculous does that sound? 

And Bob De Niro who came here because of censorship, again like Del, because he tried to play a movie that he saw and there was an uproar. And ultimately, he made the decision that its too much, its going to disrupt the festival, shut it down.

Robert Kennedy, Jr.: Tony Muhammad came because he saw autism exploding in his community. It is the black neighborhoods that are getting the thimerosal vaccines. It appears to be that African Americans are much more susceptible to vaccine injury than other Americans. Its the poor clinics in the urban neighbors who are getting these shots. If youre living in a suburban neighborhood, people who are questioning your doctors and saying I dont want that. But if youre living in a poor clinic, theyre going to take the cheapest vaccines, which have thimerosal vaccines, and your ability to stand up to your doctor, the power to stand up to him doesnt exist. So you take them, and those kids end up being grievously injured.

37:25

Robert De Niro: Im glad Im here. Im here because my son is within the autistic spectrum. I thought what Bobby said was great, it was eloquently said, I couldnt have said it any better myself. I agree with him a hundred percent. 

38:10

Rev Tony Muhammad: I have been blessed, as of May of last year, after finding out about the study of a scientist who works for the CDC as we speak. His name is Dr. William Thompson, who admitted that he lied about a study he did. And it was brought to our attention by Mr. Kennedy, of whom Im deeply, deeply grateful for him. And not just him, his family and their legacy because were taught history is most attractive and best rewarding in any research. This has happened to us before. That the Tuskegee Experiment could be back and live and well. It took a Kennedy to shut down that experiment.

Now we have to ask ourselves as a community, could it be that its happening to us again? That two hundred and forty percent of black boys are more disproportionately affected by vaccines when it comes to autism?

Our community, the poor community dont even know what that word means. I have just finished the first half of a tour that I have been commissioned to go on by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. I have visited thirty urban cities, and the rooms are packed with poor people. And when the movie or the documentary Vaxxed was shown, the screams, the cries from black mothers who are poor.

In St. Louis, MO, a black mother fainted after looking at the movie Vaxxed, and it took us minutes to revive her. She said, I knew it was the vaccines, but the doctors bullied me and told me that it was me genetically who gave that to my child. She said, Im crying because Ive had a hysterectomy because I refused to have any more children.

Something is wrong. And I just want to say to the press as a spiritual man Isaiah in the Bible, Chapter 59, he says these words,  Truth has fallen to the streets and justice stands a far-off, and equity cannot enter. It is impossible for us to judge while the truth is being hidden.

It is your responsibility, as Mr. Kennedy said, you are the last line of defense for truth, but if you have been compromised, then in the minds of the American people, we are hemorrhaging because you have to muster up the courage to go behind these lines and vet out the truth for our children and our childrens sake.

And Im saying to you that the black community is waking up in leaps and bounds. And as you the press now [are] under attack, show us, show us that we can trust you. Prove to us that you will leave no stone unturned, because the CDC has admitted that in the 1960s, Elijah Muhammad told the members of the Nation, do not take the polio vaccinewe are for vaccines, but we are very careful with which vaccines we take. And thirty years later the CDC admitted that the polio vaccine had in it SV40 [which caused cancer]. Were twelve percent of the population and now we lead all categories in cancer. 

So we hope that you the press will do your job while the American public somewhat trusts you. For when this comes out, in truth, the community is going to be upset.

In the thirty cities that Ive been in, when our community found out that our Congress voted to give the vaccine makers a pass on the very bill that Mr. Kennedy spoke of, they [were] irate. The American public [doesnt] even realize that Congress passed a bill that the vaccine makers cannot be sued. If the vaccines are so safe, why has our government, using the taxpayers money, [been] covering up for a pharmaceutical industry that makes billions in profits? Why wont they stand behind their own vaccines? Why do we the American people have to pay for the mistakes of the vaccine makers. Thats a crime in my opinion and we must do something about it. 

45: 25

Del Bigtree: We may have to seek them out and destroy them where they live. That was what came out in a court case against Merck when their product Vioxx was proved to cause heart attacks in over 50,000 people. That lawsuit, that case, went behind the scenes, into the emails and showed that Merck knew that that drug caused heart attacks and covered it up from the FDA, the American people and the world. In an internal email they sent out doctors that questioned the safety of Vioxx, We may have to seek them out and destroy them where they live.

Think about that. How does a company continue to even work in the United States of America? Murdering over 50,000 innocent peoplesome say that number could go up into the hundreds of thousands. To put it in perspective, we lost roughly 65,000 people in Vietnam, and we marched in the streets. And we have a company that knowingly killed people, and still they work in this country. Better yet, they make most of our childhood vaccines.

We are the press. I worked on the daytime talk show, The Doctors, celebrating the best that medicine had to offer, the best doctors, the best science, the best surgeries, cutting edge techniques. And then I ran into the story of Dr. William Thompson, a whistleblower from the Centers for Disease Control that laid out how they committed scientific fraud when it came to vaccine safety research.[He] didnt just make that claim but backs it up with 10,000 documents including internal emails.

[He] spoke to Congressman Bill Posey, handed over those 10,000 documents, was also interviewed by Bill Posey. And Bill Posey stand before the U.S. government, in front of the Congress [and]said we have a problem. We have one of our top scientists providing information to me that we are lying to the American public and that children are in harms way. The American people trust us. And he said in closing, Please, please, I beg you, we must subpoena Dr. William Thompson. And yet, no newspaper covers that story. No news station covers that story. Nobody cares about a top scientist for the most important health agency in the world coming forward saying weve committed scientific fraud.

What has happened to us? Why am I the only one that leaves a job because I refused to have television tell me we cant cover stories about innocent children being ruined and damaged? Stories youve heard here today. 

Yet we let the pharmaceutical industry buy our advertising and control what we say. At the heart, at the foundation of media, of press, the same heart and foundation of science is one single idea: We must never stop asking questions. If we do, science is dead. If science believes it has the only truth, there will never be another Einstein. There will never be another breakthrough event. And if journalists stop asking the important questions, then there will never be the dream of the United States of America. Thomas Jefferson said to us, if we lose a free press, a press that can challenge the government, can challenge the tyranny of industry, hold their feet to the fire, then we will lose our freedom. We will lose the United States of America.

They call us the Fourth Estate, the fourth branch of government. And we report concern about the branches of government being bought out by industry. Senators and congressmen that bow down to oil and gas industries, or pharmaceutical industries as Bobby Kennedy as pointed out, now the most powerful lobby in Washington.

But what about us? What about the fourth branch of government? If we have been bought out, if we cannot go back to our networks and say, We must run this story,I dont care that Merck is going to follow this story with an ad for a drug and a ridiculous list of tickertape side effects, and we giggle in our living rooms, Who would buy that?

We must stop giggling because we are lying to the public. They believe we have a free press. They believe we are telling the truth. They believe we will cover a story when a top scientist says we have lied to the American people.

Journalists are the first ones to step up when a murderer is on death row and new evidence or a new witness steps forward. We say we must reopen this case. We cannot let an innocent man die, or an innocent woman die.

I tell you right now, we have a new witness in Dr. William Thompson, we have new evidence in 10,000 documents that hes provided, and you have great scientists and lawyers pointing out that it is impossible to say that vaccines are safe. It is impossible because weve paid out over three billion dollars in damages, paid for with taxpayer money, because the pharmaceutical industry has no liability. If weve paid out $3.3 billion, how can we say that vaccines are safe? How can we say that vaccines are safe when we have a top scientist still working at the CDC? How can we say that theyre safe when you cannot provide a study that shows that the second most toxic substance on earth, the most toxic nonradioactive substance, has no study saying it can be injected into children and pregnant women, into fetuses?

And we have a rise in childhood illness like weve never seen: autism now at one in 45, up from one in 10,000, asthma in every classroom, anaphylactic food allergies, diabetes, eczemathe list goes on and on. That is not the classroom I grew up in. We have got to stop saying our children are so safe because of vaccinesour children are sick. We said it on The Doctors television show. This is the first generation of children that we believe will not live to be as old as their parents.

Isnt that enough questions for the media?

Isnt that enough questions for science to do what is right?

Not a single person up here today is trying to do away with the vaccine program. None of us have ever made anti-vaccine statements. Weve made statements that we want science to do better. It has injured children of people sitting on this stage.  It has injured hundreds of thousands of parents children, telling the same story. Those are the facts.

Now is the time to begin asking the appropriate questions. We are saying fix the failing vaccines because no child should be allowed to be injured by anything

Next Kennedy pointed once again to the stack of documented studies showing the harmful side effects of vaccines which our government refuses to look at. He added, I told you theres no safety studies [showing mercury in vaccines is safe], but there are studies CDC has createdCDC and the industrythere are 19 studies that purport to say that thimerosal does not cause autism. Thats it. And theyre population studies, theyre not clinical, theyre not animal studies. Theyre simply population studies, and theyre all very badly flawed. These are those studies. These are the studies and three of these studies were written by Dr. Thompsonthe three lead studieswho now says that he was ordered by his boss at CDC to destroy evidence, to manipulate the data, to bury the evidence that showed that it was in fact causing illness to black boys, specifically black boys who received the vaccine on time at a 250 percent greater chance of getting autism than black boys who waited.

He and four other scientists were ordered by Frank DeStefano, the vaccine branch chief, to come into a conference room at CDC and dump that data into a garbage can.



And then they published that DeStefano study and found no effect. And that study has been cited 110 times on PubMed as the definitive evidence that vaccines dont cause autism. These are all of those studies. This is the entire universe of their autism studies.

Even these studies, which are CDCs own studies, admit that it causes tics, ...language delay, it causes mental retardation, it causes lower IQ in girls, so even the studies they use to defend it from autism, are admitting that its causing all these other illnesses. Nobodys looking at this stuff. Reporters need to look at this and they need to look at it in detail.

Why did not a single mainstream reporter cover this story? You have a senior scientist at CDC whos saying everythings fraudulent. We caused the autism epidemic. Thats what he says. He says every time I see a family with an autistic kid, I have great shame because we were at fault.Thats a quote.

And nobody covered this story. There are just crickets in the American media.
Donald Trump often complains about journalists.

This week we learned that his administration has also been tracking them at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In an attempt to determine who was behind the caravans that were bringing large numbers of migrants from Central America to the southwest border, the Trump administration created a list of activists and journalists whom they subjected to additional scrutiny when they entered the United States last year, noted The New York Times.

The list indicates that alerts were placed on the photojournalists passports, and in some cases notes that the photojournalists were interviewed by federal agents, added PDN, citing a report from San Diego media outlet 7 Investigates. Photojournalists on the list include Kitra Cahana, Ariana Drehsler, Go Nakamura, Bing Chen Guan and Robert Wilson.

According to the 7 Investigates report, Drehsler was pulled into lengthy screenings and warned by customs officials that an alert was placed on her passport. Cahana told 7 Investigates she was detained for 13 hours in Mexico City before being denied entry into the U.S. for no reason, and that she was denied entry into Mexico on other occasions, noted PDN.

Customs and Border Protection officials said they had identified people because they may have had information in connection to assaults against Border Patrol agents that took place last November and in January, but said that gathering this type of information was standard, reported The Times.

C.B.P. does not target journalists for inspection based on their occupation or their reporting, said an agency spokesman.

Nonetheless, immigration authorities faced criticism over the secret database. The implications of this are really disturbing. It is unconstitutional for the government to target people for punishment or retaliation solely based on their first amendment protected activity, Esha Bhandari, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Times.

In a bipartisan letter released Monday, two senators, Democrat Ron Wyden and Republican Chuck Grassley, called on U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to provide an unclassified briefing on the operations, noted The Intercept.

Unless CBP had reason to believe the individuals in question were inciting violence or physical conflict, it is deeply concerning that CBP appears to have targeted American journalists at our borders, they wrote.

Here are some of the other photo stories we spotlighted this week:

__________________________



1. Top Photos from the 2019 POYI Competition

Fabio Bucciarelli was named Photographer of the Year in the 76th Pictures of the Year International competition for a portfolio featuring his coverage of Gaza and the United States-Mexico border (above), noted The New York Times, which spotlighted some of the contests top images. Jessica Phelps was named Newspaper Photographer of the Year for her work at The Newark Advocate, her hometown newspaper in central Ohio. The Multimedia Photographer of the Year award went to Emily Kassie of the Marshall Project.





2. Underwater Photographer of the Year

UK-based photographer Richard Barnden is the grand-prize winner of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year contest for his image The Gauntlet, which shows the final moments of life for a parrot fish swimming among a gathering of sharks near Fakarava South Pass, a famous diving spot in French Polynesia. More than 5,000 images were submitted to this years contest from around the world. The contests website has all the contests winning shots  and stories from the photographers who made them.





3. Alec Soth Returns to Photography, Quietly

Alec Soths 2004 book Sleeping by the Mississippi helped establish him as a skilled chronicler of American life and successful photographer. But in 2016 he decided to step back from a burgeoning career: Soth stopped traveling and making photos of people, intending to live more in the moment rather than try to possess it, noted The New York Times. After a year of contemplation, he returned to photography, capturing people in the quietness of their homes. The work is being published this month by MACK.





4. Documenting the Bomber Jackets of WWII

The A-2 bomber jackets of World War II aviators tell stories. Often the flyers had their jackets hand-painted with elaborate images symbolizing missions flown, unit crests, enemy aircraft shot down, and more. "The multitude of designs and colors created is mind-boggling," says John Slemp, an Atlanta-based commercial photographer who has been photographing the vintage bomber jackets for a series called "Even Captains Prayed," which we featured. The painted jackets, once a morale booster, speak to time when bomber crews faced daunting odds for survival.





5. Kezi Ban Leaps Into Motion

Stopping time with photography is magic, says photographer Kezi Ban. But working in motion has, she told us, opened new creative doors and business opportunities. "It's so funny to think back how video has become such an integrated part of our lives, and it will continue to do so," she says. "Just a few years ago, when I first started in video, it was wasn't what it is now." She launched her photography career in 2011, specializing in fashion editorial and architectural work. Her video work, like her commercial photography, is distinguished by its sensitivity to mood and expression.

________________________

At top: From Alec Soth
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Algerians gathered in the hundreds of thousands in cities across the country today to maintain the weeks of peaceful protest against the continued rule of 82-year-old ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and his circle.

Under relentless public pressure, the government has offered a series of concessions. However, none have quelled the tide of protest against Bouteflikas continued rule. For protesters, both the presidents ailing health and the countrys economic and social stagnation have proven a tipping point. The country has seen years of growing dissatisfaction spill over into the widespread popular protests that have gripped the country since the initial demonstrations on Feb. 22.

I'm here because we should all be here," one protester, who gave his name as Khalil Khalil Che, told Al-Monitor from Oran. "Everyone should be here every Friday to keep the pressure on the government. It cant and wont stop until we have our rights, because now the population knows everything and we know what we want."

In Algiers on Friday, as helicopters circled overhead, smiling demonstrators took selfies with watching policemen, as diverse groups of protesters, including families and children, crowded the citys plazas chanting, Bouteflika, get out." Some held banners proclaiming, "You pretend to understand us, we will pretend to listen to you," as thousands rallied against a president they no longer see as fit for office, overseeing a power structure they have come to regard as inherently corrupt.

We aren't only against the government," journalist Mahraz Rabia told Al-Monitor shortly before Fridays protest in Algiers. "We're against the government and all aspects of the system, whether it be the economic or industrial apparatuses. All the people that were born into and built fortunes thanks to the clans [networks] of the system, including the central union, intended to represent the rights of the workers, but in essence an extension of the regimes inner circle, or pouvoir. Then, you have the ministers, you have the protocol system which has failed, annoyed and, especially, exasperated the whole population, he said.

Apparent concessions by the government over the last several days have done little to quell public ire. On Monday, a statement attributed to Bouteflika postponed the countrys forthcoming elections in which he had intended to stand for a fifth term. Instead, he proposed extending his fourth term while initiating a "National Conference," to be chaired by former UN diplomat, 85-year-old Lakhdar Brahimi, designed to oversee sweeping constitutional reform. However, for many of the demonstrators, this apparent olive branch offered less than the previous offer by the president to limit any fifth term to a year, while overseeing largely the same reform program as offered on Monday.

Further to the promise of constitutional reform has been the appointment of a new prime minister, Noureddine Bedoui, who has been charged with forming a new technocratic government designed to include the voices of  and reflect the needs of  Algerias youth, who, despite 45% of the population being under the age of 25, find themselves adrift in a country whose ruling elite seems figuratively and generationally distant.

Though protests have now grown nationwide, cutting across all ages and social classes, it is Algerias youth that have served as the countrys engine of dissent. Anys Mezzaour, a 22-year-old Algerian author, told Al-Monitor there was little unusual in Algerias youth spearheading the protests. This generation didn't live  or [only lived a small amount of]  the black decade, he said, referring to the period of Algerias savage 1990s civil war, cited increasingly by Algerias leading politicians as the fate the demonstrations threaten to return the country to.

Its a story our old[er] brothers and sisters and/or our parents tell us. He continued, So the fear of having a radical Islamic power isn't real and the vast majority of people demonstrating are driven by ambitions of liberty, democracy and social justice. The majority of these people are educated, studying law, medicine or engineering. They are the future of the country."

For Mezzaour, the current generation no longer needed the tactics of past generations. Instead, it had recourse to the internet as a weapon of mass expression, giving Algerias youth the ability to channel memes, slogans and funny pop culture references as tools with which to vent their frustration accumulated over years of frustration and humiliation.

There are signs that the relentless pressure from Algerias youth, as well as wider society, may be bearing fruit. Last weekend, several members of the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) resigned from their party to side with the demonstrators. Exacerbating the pouvoirs difficulties were the anonymous comments during the week by a former minister said to be familiar with its workings, who told Reuters, Game over. Bouteflika has no choice but to quit now. On Thursday, former FLN spokesman Hocine Kheldoun took to late night television to urge the party to break with tradition and support the protesters, commenting that its ailing leader was history now.

Given the strength of opposition to Bouteflikas rule, as well as the incumbents failing health, to many observers it seems impossible that the FLN does not simply select a new candidate. Bouteflika cant step aside because those around him still cannot agree on a successor, Sarah Feuer, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Al-Monitor. Should they continue to struggle for a successor, Feuer said, it was possible the government could issue a more detailed timeline for the national conference, or perhaps announce steps toward a major economic reform package. But neither move is likely to mollify the protesters as long as Bouteflika remains, at least nominally, at the top.

Even the appointment of the veteran diplomat Brahimi and the prospect of dramatic constitutional reform was far from straightforward, So far, the protesters do not seem to be satisfied with the offer for Brahimi to chair the national conference, but that may have less to do with Brahimi himself than it does with the broader process he is reportedly being tapped to lead.

If the regime moves quickly to invite stakeholders from a broad cross-section of Algerian society to participate in the national conference, it could imbue the process with more legitimacy and garner more support, Feuer said.

However, with the regime finding itself forced to choose between the demands of the swaths of young people and families crowding the city centers of Algeria and entrusting them with the power to effect genuine change, its innate prejudices again appear to have come to the fore. Brahimi himself is well respected enough among an older generation of Algerian elites, Feuer said, but its unlikely that he has much of a following among the younger generation taking to the streets.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  Al-Azhar University has traditionally been a Gaza Strip stronghold of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement, but supporters of his rival Mohammed Dahlan recently won a union election there, exposing the depth of a split in the organization.

In the annual election of officers for the Employees Syndicate on March 5, the Yasser Arafat bloc, affiliated with the Democratic Reformist Current (DRC), an organization formed by Dahlan after his falling out and dismissal from Fatah, defeated the slate of the University's Shield and Workers, which is affiliated with Abbas and supported by the university administration and board of trustees. The nine-member syndicate leadership consists of six academics and three administrative employees. Dahlans bloc secured three academic and two administrative seats, perhaps suggestive of the DRCs growing influence at the university.

Fatah founded Al-Azhar in 1991. As a Fatah stronghold in Gaza, it is also a competitor of slamic University, which was established by Hamas. Despite administering Gaza, Hamas has no real presence at Al-Azhar.

Dahlan was dismissed as Fatah's security chief in 2011 following a dispute over the movement's leadership and alleged wrong-doing on his part. He has since emerged as a frequent and bitter critic of Abbas and has even made overtures to Hamas.

Ahmad Dahlan, geography professor and head of Al-Azhar's election committee, told Al-Monitor, There are 547 employees who are eligible to vote, with 515 employees casting their votes in this election for  94% voter turnout. Both electoral lists went to great lengths to garner voters to prove their power and popularity within the union. Ahmad Dahlan is a relative of Mohammed Dahlan, but is nonetheless respected by Fatah.

According to Ahmad Dahlan, some of the tactics of the Universitys Shield and Workers went beyond acceptable limits. The university administration and the board of trustees tried to sneak in 69 names of unregistered contract employees so they could vote, with promises from the administration to verify their status or improve their working conditions, Ahmad Dahlan noted. But the election committee rejected these proceedings.

He added, We avoided politics in announcing the outcome of the election. We made sure to defuse the tension between the two Fatah sides."

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights monitored the elections, and Mohammad Abu Saada, the workers union representative from the University of Palestine, was present, to vouch for the transparency of the election.

The Arafat bloc's win indeed represents a political power boost for Mohammed Dahlan, suggesting deepening DRC relations with and popularity among civil society groups and an ability to make inroads into Fatah strongholds in Gaza.

Also, in light of the DRC's improved relations with Hamas in recent years, Dahlan's current has intensified its activities at other Palestinian universities. In November, the DRC paid some 2,500 students' tuition, including at Al-Azhar, so they could graduate, and in January supplied graduation robes for them. In doing so, it worked through the National Islamic Commission for Development and Social Solidarity, which is headed by Majed Abu Shamala, leader of the DRC in Gaza.

On top of this, Fata, a humanitarian organization led by Jalila Dahlan, Mohammed Dahlans wife, has provided financial grants to university students, including medical students at Al-Azhar. Such support likely was reflected in the outcome of the Employees Syndicate elections.

Universities in Gaza fall into one of three categories: government universities (Al-Aqsa University, the University College of Science and Technology and Palestine Technical College); public schools (Islamic University and Al-Azhar); and private universities (University of Palestine, Gaza University and Israa University).

The Ministry of Education runs government universities at the financial, administrative and regulatory levels. It appoints their boards, and university employees are considered government employees. In general, public universities are managed by boards of trustees at the regulatory level, and a board of directors oversees finance and administration. Public universities get their resources from students tuition. The Ministry of Education is only in charge of the curriculum. Private schools raise funds from tuition, and they follow the curriculum set by the Ministry of Education but receive no funding from it.

Fatah appoints board members at Al-Azhar University, while Hamas appoints them at the Islamic University. Elections for the Employees Syndicate at the Iatter are conducted by acclamation or by voting for individuals, all affiliated with Hamas.

Ayman Shahin, the newly appointed president of the Employees Syndicate at Al-Azhar, stressed the need to boost the syndicates role following the election. The university is suffering a crippling financial crisis due to students inability to pay tuition. This has resulted in salary cuts for some employees, and retired employees are not receiving their pensions. He views this year's elections as important in the effort to ensure employees rights and duties, because it is the first time that those elected have not been close to the university's board.

The election was conducted in a democratic, transparent environment, as attested by the human rights groups, Shahin told Al-Monitor. Everyone is expected to respect the wishes and will of the university workers. Our program is a union in the pure sense whose primary aim is to serve workers' rights.

Azzam Shaath, a researcher and expert in Palestinian affairs, cautioned against Abbas taking actions that might undermine the outcome of the election.

Its not inconceivable that [as] president of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas [could] take punitive action against the people who took part in the election, whether as candidates or voters, particularly those who voted for the Reformist bloc or won from that blocs list, Shaath told Al-Monitor. This would have a negative impact on the university first and foremost and would constitute another hit to the future of the state of Palestine's democracy.

Emad Mehsen, spokesperson for the DRC in Gaza, told Al-Monitor, The outcome of the Employees Syndicate election at the esteemed Al-Azhar University is emblematic of the mood of the Palestinian public, which longs for reform and is looking forward to exercising its democratic rights in choosing its representatives.

Two days after the Al-Azhar vote, Fatah suffered another loss, in elections for the Palestinian Doctors Syndicate on the West Bank. Kamal al-Wazni, Fatahs candidate, lost in a landslide to Shawqi Sabha, an independent, perhaps a sign that Fatahs popularity is diminishing even on the West Bank.
On the evening of March 14, sirens went off throughout the Tel Aviv metro area, shattering the calm indifference of Israels secular hub. At first, residents were convinced it was a mistake. Sirens? In Tel Aviv? Most people out on the street did not follow standing instructions to run for cover into a nearby building, a shelter or concrete-enforced safe room that all newer Israeli homes are supposed to have. Tel Avivians have not heard such sirens since the war with the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014, unlike residents of the southern town of Sderot and neighboring kibbutzim on the Gaza border where alarms go off periodically alerting them to incoming rockets.

Several loud explosions reverberated throughout the area soon after the clamoring alarm, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis suddenly realized this was no mistake. It took the chief military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Ronen Manelis, an embarrassingly long time to announce that rockets had indeed been fired at Tel Aviv, to concede they had taken the army by surprise and to say that the authorities were trying to understand who was behind the attack. They were busy all night doing just that.

A recent military assessment expressed concern about an escalation with Gaza, especially ahead of Israels April 9 elections, but no one believed Hamas would dare fire rockets or allow some local militia to do so. Such attacks are a doomsday weapon Hamas reserves for critical times of an all-out war with Israel. Thursday was not such a critical moment; it was more like a mishap-default reaction. Qatars latest cash installment had reached the Gaza Strip March 11 after a lengthy delay. A senior Egyptian delegation was in Gaza on an ongoing mission to mediate a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel. And then two long-range M-75 rockets rose into the sky and headed north toward Israels biggest metropolis.

The rockets did not explode near any civilians and did not result in casualties. The explosions, however, were heard loud and clear shocking Israelis less than a month before they go to the ballot box. Most shocked was Prime Minister and Defense Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A rocket attack on Tel Aviv was the last thing he needed as he is waging a bitter campaign to restore to his Likud Party the votes it lost to smaller right-wing parties in order to ensure its election victory. Gaza is a major sore on Netanyahus soft underbelly, with right-wing voters viewing his governments policy as capitulation to Hamas. Rockets directed at Tel Aviv, Netanyahu knows, forces him to retaliate forcefully, which could in turn result in a forceful Hamas reaction. This would invariably result in a powerful Islamic Jihad attack, because the group is also vying for the hearts and minds of Gazas 2 million Palestinians, and this in turn would require Israel to raise the bar further. Netanyahu would be faced with an escalation, which could veer out of control on the eve of the elections. In other words, a potential catastrophe. Netanyahu has built up an image as the ultimate Mr. Security in recent years, and the rockets could shatter it at a critical point in time.

Israel was quick to announce that it views Hamas as directly responsible. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are the only groups in the Gaza Strip with long-range rockets in their arsenals. At the same time, Hamas was quick to deny any role in the attack, and Islamic Jihad followed suit. Both organizations understand the implications of an attack on Tel Aviv. Hamas rushed to evacuate its positions and outposts. Israel asked the Egyptian delegation to leave Gaza immediately, all the while trying to understand whether Hamas had authorized the attack, and if so, what made it up the ante and go for broke at such a crucial time.

Following the attack, the Israeli air force bombed overnight some 100 Gaza targets. Fighter jets, choppers and drones pounded the Gaza Strip, striking the central Hamas headquarters in Gaza Citys upscale Rimal neighborhood, among other targets. Rimal is home to senior Hamas leaders and Israel targets it whenever it wants to wind up a round of violence with Gaza. Hamas gets the hint and things generally calm down. On Friday morning, the question was whether all sides had had enough.

The Israeli strikes were widespread and included quality targets: The Hamas headquarters from where, according to Israel, the group directed anti-Israel terror attacks in the West Bank. Also bombed and destroyed were an underground rocket-manufacturing plant and additional outposts including one used by Hamas' naval force, which Israel had been eyeing for quite some time.

Netanyahu faces two problems. First, Israels response proved once again that the lives of Israelis living on the Gaza border were of less account than the well-being of Tel Aviv area residents some 50 miles to the north. While Israel retaliates after most rocket attacks in the south, the minister of defense only bothered to order a full-scale bombing of Gaza when sirens blared in Tel Aviv. At the same time, Netanyahu knows that the nighttime raids would hardly satisfy public anger at the ongoing violence from Gaza or moderate right-wing criticism. If he were head of the Knesset opposition, Netanyahu would have been making mincemeat out of the prime minister and defense minister. He would have accused them of weakening Israels powers of deterrence, lamented the gall of those cheeky Hamas people and Israels approval of the Qatari funding propping them up and being used for terror activity. Netanyahus problem, of course, is that he himself holds both top jobs.

Yet another event went largely unnoticed several hours before the rocket launches: Gaza residents took to the streets in two large demonstrations against the cost of living, with protesters chanting slogans against Hamas and the disastrous economic situation in the Gaza Strip. Hamas was caught unprepared for this rare popular protest, and it reacted with force, with a large-scale deployment shooting in the air to disperse the demonstrators. The protests indicate that the ground is shaking under the feet of the movement that has been running Gaza with an iron fist for over a decade, with popular support eroding in light of the ongoing humanitarian crisis there. A senior Israeli military source told Al-Monitor following the attack on Tel Aviv that this could be why Hamas decided to gamble on Thursday night. As always, whenever leaders of the organization or Arab leaders find themselves in trouble at home, they try to shift the blame to Israel.

Early Friday morning, the picture became clearer. The Israel Defense Forces assessed that the rocket fire was a mistake. The two rockets were fired at 9:17 p.m. These were M-75 rockets, launched from Hamas launching batteries. Exactly at the same time on Thursday evening, representatives of the Egyptian intelligence convened with heads of Hamas and Islamic Jihad discussing the arrangement with Israel. An Israeli security source told Al-Monitor that according to Israels intelligence, the rocket launch was not decided or approved by Hamas seniors.

All that is left now is to count on Netanyahu to handle the embarrassment, and to make every possible effort to avoid an escalation that could lead to war.
At a time when political parties, such as Finance Minister Moshe Kahlons Kulanu, Avigdor Libermans Yisrael Beitenu and in some polls even Meretz, are treading water around the vote threshold of four Knesset mandates, one new party that is not currently represented in the Knesset seems to be drawing the support of a growing public. Polls, despite their drawbacks and lack of accuracy, lately point toward the possibility of an election surprise and project Moshe Feiglins Zehut party would win at least four mandates. In one poll, he even reaches seven mandates.

Zehut has an extremist right-wing platform that includes, among other items, canceling the Oslo Accord; annexing all Palestinian territories as well as the Gaza Strip; deportation of Palestinians who oppose this; and granting residency status to Palestinians who openly declare loyalty to the state. Pledging allegiance to Israel should accord the Palestinian residence with civil rights such as the right for property and human rights in general, but no right to vote for the Knesset. Another status would be accorded to those interested in serving in the army, like the Druze or the Bedouins. According to Zehuts platform, they would go through a process of proving their loyalty to the state. Only after that would they receive full citizenship. According to Feiglin, the states institutions should function according to Jewish religious law, and the Chief Rabbinate should manage the Temple Mount. Despite all this, Zehut has many supporters on the left.

Feiglin debuted on the public scene with his This Is Our Land movement that he founded in 1994, which opposed the Oslo Accord with nonviolent protests. His sharp political sense led him into the Likud in 2000 in order to transform and influence the party from within. The change the Likud has undergone in the past decade  from liberal right sympathetic to Jewish tradition to super-conservative with ultra-Orthodox leanings on matters of religion and state  attests to the fact that Feiglin succeeded.

Feiglin had run twice for the leadership of the Likud and was elected to the Knesset once in 2013. But he decided to quit the party when in the Likud primaries of 2015 he was elected to an unrealistic spot. When he left, he established Zehut  an Israeli Jewish Movement. The key tenets of the party seem to include an internal contradiction: On the one hand, it calls for a state that returns most of the freedoms to citizens, defends the values of the family and the community, and upholds a free market; on the other hand, it calls for a state that realizes and strengthens its sovereignty over all the land, starting with Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, and aims to end the situation of conflict and bloodletting by defeating Israels enemies. The Land of Israel belongs only to the Jewish people by virtue of divine election, Feiglin asserts.

Here is another example of the internal contradiction: The platform speaks of canceling religious coercion  such as in marriage registration  but on the other hand greatly deepens the involvement of religion in the state according to the principle that the states official institutions must be committed to Jewish law and the heritage of Israel. According to Feiglin, Orthodox Jewish law should determine conversion (invalidating conversions by progressive-Judaism rabbis). A Jew who is not considered as such according to Orthodox Jewish law  for instance, a person born to a Jewish father but not to a Jewish mother  could immigrate to Israel but would receive the status of resident instead of citizen.

On the economic side, Zehuts platform is rife with clauses based on libertarian and free market principles like the privatization of the education and health systems, canceling the biometric database and its erasure, and granting the possibility of carrying guns to nearly every citizen. This aspect winks at supporters of the distinctly liberal stream in Israel, who ignore the diplomatic and religious elements of the Zehut platform.

One of the main banners of Zehut  at least for the media  that draws many supporters from the liberal stream and otherwise to Feiglin is the legalization of cannabis. According to Zehuts platform, the use of cannabis and its components, their noncommercial cultivation, and their possession or acquisition would be allowed by law. The decision of the Green Leaf Party  which pioneered for years the campaign to legalize soft drugs  not to run in the coming election sent its 47,000 supporters (number of votes gathered in the 2015 elections) into Feiglins arms.

Netanyahu held a question and answer session March 11 on his private news network, Likud-TV, on Facebook. One of the questions dealt with legalization. He answered thus: I advanced several changes in this area. We increased the use of medical cannabis; we brought Israel to one of the highest levels in the world. Second, Ive been told theres a global market so I allowed growers to cultivate it and turn it into a significant export for the State of Israel. I am now looking into the topic of legalization, and I will give you an answer soon.

Netanyahu sees Feiglin, who is extremely right wing, as a potential partner in a future coalition. Since Zehut garners quite a few votes according to the polls  especially from center-left voters interested in the legalization of soft drugs  Netanyahus response has encouraged Feiglin in making the topic of legalization legitimate and essential in current political discourse. Left-wing parties Labor and Meretz, which have emphasized that they support legalization and even thought of it before Zehut, have reinforced this analysis. Moshe Kahlon also announced that he would act to cancel the criminal record of anyone who had previously used cannabis, while Orly Levy-Abekasis announced that as health minister she would work to effectively distribute medical cannabis.

Some argue that legalization is meant to cover for Feiglins true platform, conservatism in liberal clothing. Dr. Gail Talshir of the political science department at Hebrew University tells Al-Monitor that as Feiglin sees the public sphere, religious Judaism is dominant and democracy has virtually no significance. She views the legalization of cannabis as a green fig leaf behind which hides a state governed by Jewish law that is not democratic.

In order to portray a serious image, Feiglin added to his party list people known in their domains. No. 2 is Rabbi Haim Amsalem (formerly of the Shas movement), considered an ardent opposer of religious coercion. No. 3 is Gilad Alper, a well-known businessman and economist. Dr. Ronit Dror, an expert of family and welfare and a known social activist, was also added to the list.

Feiglin himself explains to Al-Monitor that there is no contradiction between liberal values of justice and equality and the reoccupation of all Palestinian territory, including the Gaza Strip, and the imposition of Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinians in the Gaza Strip received their full national rights over the territory, but since then the human rights situation has deteriorated under the Palestinian Authority and then Hamas, he said. He thinks that any liberal who loves humanity should be shocked at the trampling of Palestinian rights by their own governments. The vision, according to Feiglin, is to turn Gaza into [the Israeli city of] Jaffa and not the opposite.

Feiglin admits that his campaign focuses on civil issues from legalization to a liberal market and leaves the diplomatic and security issues backstage. On April 9, after the votes are counted, well see if Feiglin succeeds in bringing an extremist right-wing party into the Knesset with the help of voters from the left.
The name of Yair Netanyahu, the prime ministers son, has been associated in recent years with countless scandals. We dont have room to enumerate them all here, but in order to get to know the personality in question, the following are some of the headlines for Yair  the son who is firing in every direction and drawing fire in return.

In September 2017, he shared a caricature with anti-Semitic symbols and motifs in order to attack former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and he received a warm embrace from the American neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer. On the memorial day in November 2018 for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he shared the following post: 24,000 Israeli war casualties  one memorial day. Six million victims of the Holocaust  one memorial day. Rabins assassination  10 memorial days.

In January 2018, the News Corporation revealed recordings of conversations Yair held with his friends as they returned from a strip club. He spoke derisively toward women, including a young woman he had been in a relationship with, and even boasted that his prime minister father granted a favor to his friends father, the gas tycoon Koby Maimon, totaling 20,000 billion NIS ($5.5 billion). By the way, the trip to the strip club was in a Shin Bet vehicle and with its security.

His wild, arrogant and dissolute behavior, and his venomous disparagement of politicians and security personnel by cyberbullying would remain in the gossip columns if Yair didnt have an active and even a central role in the election campaign conducted by his father. While neither Yair nor the prime ministers close circles nor senior Likud officials have ever admitted that Yair has an active role in the inciteful campaign of the elder Netanyahu, this week we received proof of it. The right-wing organization Shurat Din, where Yair has worked as a new media coordinator for the past six months, let him go on an extended vacation until after the April 9 elections in light of the vitriolic remarks he posts on social networks on March 12. Haaretz quoted a source from the organization, who said that Yair requested to go on vacation because hes a significant partner in shaping the messages of the Likuds campaign. That is, the dagger is out of the bag. Yair isnt acting as a rebellious son his parents cant control but is a key part of the Likuds negative, hate-filled campaign.

Here we should note that in the past Yair brought several of the friends who served with him in the Israel Defense Forces spokesmans unit into the prime ministers hive. They work in public information, media and new media, and they all, it seems, have adopted his callous style.

One final and prominent example of his behavior is his unrestrained disparagement of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. Its no secret that the Netanyahu family is not fond of the popular president. Prime Minister Netanyahu tried to prevent his election to the extent that he tried but didnt succeed to bring about the elimination of the institution of the presidency. On March 11  the day the presidents wife, Nehama Rivlin, had a lung transplant at Beilinson Hospital  Yair attacked President Rivlin for his support of Rotem Selas remarks. Its all because some of your people chose terrorism; why are you surprised? Yair rudely tweeted, paraphrasing Rivlins words after the murder of the Palestinian Dawabsha family by Israeli assailants in July 2015. At the time, Rivlin wrote that he was embarrassed over the path taken by his own people who were choosing terrorism.

In 2017, after President Rivlin rejected the pardon request of Elor Azariah (the shooting soldier from Hebron), radical right-wing elements distributed a photo of the president wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh. Prime Minister Netanyahu didnt respond to the incitement at the time, even when Knesset members asked him to defend the president and defend the institution of the presidency from the right-wing bullies. Even now, when his son feels free to address the president of the State of Israel in such a manner on a day when his wife is undergoing a dangerous and complicated surgery, the elder Netanyahu remained silent. Even after the Blue and White party and the Labor party defended the president and demanded the prime minister rein in his rebellious son, he didnt respond. Control the mouth and keyboard of your son, read a Blue and White statement. It continued, Your incitement against the president of all of us has crossed every line.

The next day, Yair attacked again. This time, the target was former head of the Mossad Shabtai Shavit. I encountered a heated argument between Yair Netanyahu and Dr. Yoaz Hendel [a candidate with Blue and White]  the son shows outrageous ignorance, tweeted Shavit. "He doesnt understand that his father erased [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] Abu Mazen in order to fatally kill the idea of separation [from the Palestinians] and is conducting an intensive negotiation with Hamas, read the tweet. Yair tweeted in response, What an idiot, scary to think that you had a security role.

It could likewise be said how scary it is to discover that these are the messages Yair learned in the prime ministers home: hatred of Arabs, hatred of the left and disparagement of anyone who thinks differently from him  even if hes a former senior security figure.

In the past, Yair has attacked journalist Amnon Abramovich, who received an honorable citation from the chief of staff for heroism he showed in the Yom Kippur War. Yair called Abramovich  who was burned all over his body in the war  a Soviet propagandist. What my colleague Ben Caspit, author of a biography on Prime Minister Netanyahu, wrote in response is all the more applicable today: This parasite, who has never worked for his living, who did his army service at the army spokesmans unit  boorishly disparages a war hero. But then I remember where this neer-do-well grew up, and I understand that hes not really to blame.
WASHINGTON  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will emphasize the threat from Iran and Iranian-backed proxies such as Hezbollah when he travels to Kuwait, Israel and Lebanon this week, offering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yet another boost from the Donald Trump administration ahead of Israeli elections next month.

Pompeo will meet with Netanyahu as the head of Israels government, not as a candidate, and will not meet with retired Gen. Benny Gantz or any other candidates running in Israels elections, scheduled for April 9, a State Department official said.

We have major US interests with Israel that dont go into suspension because of the electoral cycle in Israel, [or] when we are in [an] electoral cycle, is precisely how you should view the frame for this visit, the senior State Department official, speaking not for attribution, told journalists on a call today.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu and Gantz are both due to give keynote addresses to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington, DC, March 24 and 25, just after Pompeo returns from his latest trip to the region.

In Jerusalem, the second stop of the trip, Pompeo will meet with a range of regional officials to discuss regional issues and challenges, [including] by Iran and Iranian proxies, the US official said. The secretary will reaffirm both privately and publicly the unwavering commitment to Israels security and right to self-defense.

The State Department did not mention any prospective meetings with Palestinians.

Pompeo last traveled to the region in January but had to cut short his visit. He will begin the trip on March 19 in Kuwait, where he is leading the US delegation to the third annual US-Kuwait Strategic Dialogue.

In Kuwait City, in addition to the strategic dialogue, Pompeo will also hold bilateral meetings with Kuwaiti leaders to discuss regional issues, such as Yemen and Syria, as well as progress on the Middle East Strategic Alliance and the need for [Gulf Cooperation Council] unity, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said in a statement. The Kuwaiti emir, Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah, has been leading the stalled regional efforts to resolve the dispute between Qatar and the bloc led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which launched a blockade of Qatar in June 2017.

In Israel and Lebanon, Pompeo will offer US mediation to try to resolve a maritime border dispute between the two countries, in order to advance oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean that could boost the regions economies.

The US stands ready  to facilitate discussions between the governments of Lebanon and Israel  for the resolution to their mutual benefit of the dispute involving potential off-shore resources, the State Department official said. The rest of the eastern Mediterranean is moving forward.  It would be regrettable if the people of Lebanon were denied, as a result of Hezbollah.  We stand ready to help.

Pompeos trip to Beirut, his last stop, is aimed at showing that the United States is going to stay engaged in Lebanon and not cede it to Iranian influence.

The United States will continue to support political, security and economic counterweights to Iran and Hezbollah, particularly the Lebanese Armed Forces. The United States is also likely to announce further sanctions on Hezbollah-affiliated financial institutions and figures around the time of Pompeos visit, the Middle East Institutes Randa Slim said.

Pompeo will meet with Lebanese President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Saad Hariri, among other officials, the State Department official said. He will offer the Trump administrations support for what he called legitimate Lebanese institutions, such as the Lebanese Armed Forces, over Hezbollah.

We strongly support the continued US engagement with Lebanese security forces  as legitimate security institutions of Lebanon, the US official said. Our support for them, the work they do, [their] ability to be seen by the people of Lebanon as legitimate  stands in stark contrast to Hezbollah.
ALEPPO  The National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, commonly known as the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), on March 10 accepted the resignation of Jawad Abu Hatab as prime minister of the Syrian Interim Government at its 44th general assembly meeting in Istanbul. Abu Hatab, who had held the office since May 2016, had resigned Feb. 28 without publicly stating a reason. The Anadolu Agency quoted SNC President Abdul Rahman Mustafa as saying, A new president will be selected at the next assembly in May.

Some have linked Abu Hatab's resignation to the expanding influence and control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its political arm, the Syrian Government of Salvation, over most of the areas previously administered by the Interim Government in Idlib province. Abu Hatabs departure follows shortly after HTS in early February took over opposition-controlled areas in Idlib, the neighboring northern countryside of Hama and the western countryside of Aleppo, in the process ousting factions of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Al-Monitor contacted Abu Hatab to inquire about the reasons behind his resignation, but he declined to comment.

Al-Monitor did, however, manage to speak with Yasser al-Haji, director of the public relations office of the Interim Government. Almost three years into the establishment of the Interim Government in the opposition areas inside Syria, and in light of the difficult circumstances and the many changes that affected the Syrian revolution, it is necessary to uphold the common good over personal interests, Haji said. Prime Minister Abu Hatab decided to resign in order to allow someone else to assume the government premiership and pump in new blood to serve our people.

He further asserted, There may be a new formation of the interim government. This task will be assumed by the SNC. There will certainly be new blood that will revive institutional work in opposition areas.

The expansion of HTS in Idlib province at the expense of the NLF has been extremely damaging to the Interim Government's work, Haji said. This has reduced its scope of activity and influence in the cities and towns taken over by HTS. This has also greatly harmed our people in those areas because the Interim Government can no longer serve them after being replaced by the Government of Salvation.

An FSA source told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that deliberations have been underway in Idlib since the beginning of February between HTS, the FSA and the SNC. These deliberations aim to merge the Interim Government and the Government of Salvation into one government to manage the affairs of the opposition-held areas in northwestern Syria, the source said. Talks also focused on efforts to unite the ranks of armed factions in northern Syria under one structure to be agreed upon.

The source added, These are efforts exerted by Turkey to contain HTS and its Government of Salvation. These efforts aim to put an end to HTS peacefully, by pushing it to disband and join the FSA, and to create one civil administration for the opposition-held areas.

Ziad Nanaa, Interim Government secretary, told Al-Monitor, We have moved most of the offices and departments of the Interim Government in Idlib and the western countryside of Aleppo to the town of Izzaz, in the northern countryside of Aleppo, since Feb. 1. This started when HTS deployed in this area. We will keep working after Hatabs resignation. We expect the National Coalition to choose a new prime minister.

Mohammed Yasin Najjar, the Interim Government's minister of communications, transport and industry, told Al-Monitor, The Interim Government is at a crossroads. It must have clear discussions with the Friends of [Syria]. Are they serious about supporting a true interim government?

He continued, The Interim Government needs a competent national staff and appropriate financial support. A national consensus on this government is needed among the military opposition institutions, local and political councils and organizations so as to be able to assume its governmental tasks. An international consensus on supporting the Interim Governments is all the more needed.

Najjar noted that the Interim Government has faced several hurdles since its establishment in 2013, including the lack of adequate political support and the scarcity of financial support at certain periods. Its activities conflicted with those of influential military forces and some organizations and councils in FSA-controlled areas, he said.
DERIK, Syria  In a dimly lit room the men sit on rows of bunk beds, their legs crossed or extended. Some smoke or read. Others rock rhythmically to and fro, mumbling prayers under their breath. Bright pink blankets stand in stark contrast with the grim atmosphere. A pale, thin man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a wispy beard stares daggers at a reporter who is allowed to peer briefly through a grilled window built into the cells iron door. Hes from Dagestan and, like the rest of his fellow prisoners at the Derik Central Prison for Terrorists in northeastern Syria, he was a fighter for the Islamic State.

Al-Monitor is the first Western media outlet to have been granted access to the maximum security detention center. It is run by the Syrian Kurdish administration, which controls a swath of northeastern Syrian territory the size of England that is protected by the US-led coalition battling IS together with the Kurds.

This is the main detention center for captive fighters. The most dangerous terrorists are here, Murad Ser, who has run the facility since 2014, told Al-Monitor on a recent afternoon. The converted warehouse currently houses around 400 IS combatants. There are Canadians, Europeans, Chinese, Saudi Arabians, Tunisians, Libyans, Russians, Turks, Moroccans and many other nationalities, Ser said, drawing an imaginary globe. Four hundred security guards watch over them.

The issue of what to do with captured foreign fighters is an increasingly pressing one as Western governments refuse to take their nationals back. The Syrian Kurdish administration says it cannot cope on its own and is demanding that they be either repatriated to be prosecuted in their home countries or tried by an international tribunal in a northeastern Syrian court.

Until such time, the international community must provide us with money to care for these people, Aldar Khalil, a senior official in the Syrian Kurdish administration, told Al-Monitor in an interview in Qamishli. So far we have not received a penny from anyone, he said. A US official speaking on condition of strict anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue confirmed that no funds had been given by the United States to the Syrian Kurds to care for the IS captives. The cost of just feeding and clothing inmates at the Derik facility is in excess of $20,000 per month, Ser asserted.

The tour of the prison starts in a roomy kitchen. It's ugly but clean. Any filming or photography inside the prison is strictly forbidden. A giant pot bubbles on a gas stove. Crates full of vegetables sit on the floor. Tonights menu is boiled eggs and potatoes, said Ali, the in-house cook. There are exactly 425 eggs in there. The men are fed three times a day inside their cells. The food is wheeled in on large steel trolleys. But a dining hall will soon be built where inhabitants of each cell will eat in separate shifts. Special-needs detainees such as diabetics are given separate meals. Pulses, rice, soups and salads are daily staples. Sometimes when they ask for something particular we order it from outside, the cook explained.

Smokers are given one pack of cigarettes a day. Everything here is free, Ser said. A doctor comes in for weekly health checks.

The next stop is a large, empty hall where prison authorities are planning to build five different workshops so that prisoners can spend time productively outside their cells. We also intend to hold seminars and training programs, but most of these men are already quite educated, you know, like doctors, engineers, Ser added.

Inmates are allowed to exercise for an hour and a half per day but again only with their own cellmates. Interaction with other prisoners is strictly forbidden for security reasons. There are three courtyards where they can walk and smoke. Barely legible lines of Arabic are etched on the towering gray walls separating them. One reads, First we rode the horses.

We are aware of their plans to escape but so far they havent tried anything. But dont forget, they are Daesh, said a counter terrorism official who asked not to be identified by name, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. Torture, ill treatment and verbal abuse of prisoners are strictly forbidden here, he insisted. We abide by the Geneva Convention. The Red Cross carries out routine inspections. In battle these people are the enemy but here they are treated like human beings, the official said. Tens of thousands of IS wives and children are meanwhile struggling to survive in the squalor of overcrowded outdoor camps while the men bask in the comparative luxury of Derik prison.

It all sounds and looks too good to be true. There are other interrogation centers where IS fighters who either turn themselves in or are captured go through initial screening. It's hard to believe that conditions there are quite as clement, considering the brutality inflicted by IS on the Kurds.

A cell that was emptied of its residents for Al-Monitor to inspect had 23 bunk beds with stained, wafer-thin sponge mattresses. There was a medium-sized flat screen television attached to the wall. Prisoners quarrel over which channels to watch. They are in either Arabic or Kurdish. Usually it's about whether the content is too un-Islamic or not. Otherwise they generally dont fight, Ser observed.

Two well-thumbed Qurans with loose pages sit on a shelf alongside a bottle of olive oil-based shampoo and two bars of soap. Theres a small toilet with its own door but no lock. Prisoners can play cards and chess. Some like to sing Islamic nasheeds. When I ask if there is a separate prayer room, Ser responds with an icy No. The cell has an air conditioner, as do all the rest, Ser said.

I am allowed to speak with three inmates. Pick a nationality and well see if theyll talk. A Turk, a Tunisian and a Trinidadian who holds Canadian citizenship agree to be interviewed.

Oguzhan Emre, a 46-year-old accountant from Ankara who migrated to the IS caliphate together with his wife and five children in 2014, has been held here since December 2017 after turning himself into the YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Deir ez-Zor province. He was radicalized by a bookstore owner called Kamil in Ankaras Sincan neighborhood who died later on in Raqqa. I dont remember his last name. What about the book store? I cant remember its name. Emre came, he claimed, to lead an Islamic life. It all sounded so rosy. He forced his wife to come. Otherwise, I was going to take the children and leave. She had to obey. They crossed in broad daylight by foot from the southern Turkish province of Gaziantep.

There were no Turkish border guards in sight.

He denied participating in the jihadi orgy of head-chopping violence and regretted coming and starting making plans to flee as soon as I arrived. But it was like being trapped in a spiders web. The more you flapped your wings to get out, the more you got enmeshed.

Ser later tells me that all of the inmates deny involvement in the violence. They are lying. Every male who joins Daesh is trained to fight and is sent to the front line.

Emre earned $250 a month assisting an accountant first in Al Bab then Mayadeen. An armed minder who sits with us throughout the interview briefly steps out. I seize the opportunity to ask him how he is being treated. In all fairness, God is my witness, they treat me very well. Theres no beating or anything, the food is nice and clean, he said. The Red Cross visited me once in my cell. A 20-year-old from Gaziantep is among his cellmates. His main complaint is that his wife and children, who are being held in the nearby Roj camp, have not been permitted to visit him. Considering how he treated her, perhaps it's she who refuses to come. Asked if he has a message for her  I was supposed to interview her there in the coming days, but the camp has since been put off limits to journalists  he says no.

The Tunisian is next up. I had already interviewed Jamel Ben Moussa last month via Skype for a piece I did on Tunisian jihadis. Oh, hello Zaman, he said as if greeting an old friend. He seemed very agitated. What is going to happen to us? They are sending our brothers to Iraq where they will be executed. We saw it on the television news. This is criminal, he said. Will we be next? Ben Moussa was referring to reports in early March that the SDF had handed over at least 280 IS prisoners, mostly Iraqi nationals, to Iraq. But at least 13 French IS prisoners were alleged to be among the group. One of them was my friend. He wasnt French, he just had a residence permit, Ben Moussa claimed.

The SDF has formally denied the reports. But in late February, Iraqi President Barham Salih announced that Iraq would prosecute the French extremists in accordance with Iraqi law and within the confines of international law, prompting rebukes from Human Rights Watch. Detainees are subject to unfair trials that could still end in the death penalty, the New York-based watchdog said in a statement, adding, Trials of IS suspects fail to meet even the most basic markers of due process and that they can be a short as five minutes.

What will our families do, our children in the camps? Our sons, do you think they will accept that their fathers are murdered like this? They will seek revenge. I am warning France, Europe, a new war will start, he said. I glance at the minder to gauge his reaction. He seems unfazed. I turn the subject to Ben Moussas two wives, a Syrian and a Swede. Hes had a pair of children with each. Ah, he said, the difficulty with polygamy in Islam is that you are supposed to treat the wives equally. But you know there is always a favorite. I love the Swedish one more. I want to go back with her to Tunisia. A smile flickers on the the minders lips.

Safraz Ali, a 39-year-old dual Trinidadian and Canadian citizen, says he was recruited by fellow Trinidadians and joined the Islamic State in 2015 to help the Syrian people. He explained, I didnt seek out [IS execution] videos. I was against all of that. They sent me to Iraq to fight. I refused and fled to Syria on a bus. I had trauma training. I would go out after coalition bombings and pick up wounded children and take them to the hospital. He ended up in Al Bab, where people were so kind they would give you the shirts off their backs. After Turkish troops captured the town in 2016 he moved on to Raqqa. People were much harsher, crueler there.

Ali is rail thin. His eyes are glazed. He seems weak. I have terminal Crohns disease, he said. They dont have proper medicine here. I have rectal bleeding, dizzy spells and blurry vision. He clutches an inhaler in his hand. Asthma, he explains. He says he is scared but far more concerned for his wife. It emerges that he is married to Kimberley Gwen Polman, 46, a dual US and Canadian citizen he met in Raqqa who was profiled by the New York Times.

They were married in 2016 and made plans to flee together soon after. They were in touch with Polmans family and a Canadian official who handled such cases, he claimed. The pair was ratted out by spies and briefly imprisoned in Raqqa and continued to plot their escape once they were freed. We led the life of fugitives, he said, describing a harrowing odyssey that took the couple from Raqqa to Mayadeen and then Hajin. They finally turned themselves over to SDF forces a little over a month ago. We desperately wanted to have children. Kimberley had five miscarriages, he said. I spend all my time thinking about my wife.

I feel sorry for him and offer reasons he might have joined the Islamic State. His father, a Christian, and his mother, a Muslim, were divorced. Had he had a rough childhood? His Gandhi-like demeanor evaporates. You are psychologically profiling me, he said with a cold, hard look. It's time to end the conversation. The minder handcuffs Ali and leads him away.

Correction: March 16, 2019. Al-Monitor incorrectly stated the number of Kurdish guards protecting the prison as 200. There are 400.
TUNIS, Tunisia  Tunisian government spokesman Iyad Dahmani told the state-owned Tunis Afrique Presse Feb. 27 that Tunisian Prime Minister Youssef Chahed decided not to extend the agreement on sea salt exploitation with Frances Compagnie Generale des Salines de Tunisie (COTUSAL), which dates back to 1949.

The agreement has been subject to much controversy, as it is said to favor the French company that held a monopoly over Tunisias salt market and benefited from very low operating rates.

Dahmani said that COTUSALs legal representative was notified of the government decision to end the agreement, which was supposed to expire in 2029 as per the convention signed between Tunisia and the French company. The convention stipulated that France would exploit sea salt in Tunisia for 50 years. It was automatically renewed twice for a period of 15 years, in 1999 and 2014.

The termination of the agreement has long been a demand of several Tunisian parties and parliamentarians, most prominently Ameur Larayedh, chairman of the parliamentary Committee on Industry, Energy, Natural Resources, Infrastructure and Environment.

In a Feb. 27 statement to the privately owned Al-Fajr newspaper, Larayedh said that the committee has been pressuring the government to terminate the salt agreement since October 2018. He stressed that the committees efforts have finally paid off.

In a Facebook post Feb. 28, Larayedh said the 2004 government bears responsibility for the automatic renewal of the agreement with COTUSAL. He stressed that a new agreement for exploiting salt will be put out to tender with new terms in favor of Tunisia, in terms of financial and fiscal returns and environmental impact.

The opposition Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) wrote on its official Facebook page Feb. 27 that Chaheds decision to terminate the contract came in response to the partys statement March 7, 2018, on the need to end the agreement with COTUSAL.

The 2018 statement stressed that the French company has been exploiting Tunisias salt at a rate of one French franc per hectare per year. The PDP blamed Chahed and warned that they would take him to court if he did not take immediate action to terminate the agreement on charges of squandering the countrys resources.

Member of parliament for the opposition People's Movement Zuhair al-Maghazawi told Al-Monitor that the decision to stop the agreement with the French company is of great significance but not enough as long as other contracts relating to the exploitation of other natural resources, such as oil and phosphate, have not been reviewed yet. He stressed that this is an old demand, and that Chahed has finally yielded to the popular and political pressure, after mounting calls for scrutiny into the dossier of Tunisias natural resources.

On Oct. 2, 2018, 39 parliamentarians from various blocs signed a petition calling on the government to terminate the salt exploitation agreement.

During a press conference Oct. 3, 2018, the opposition party Democratic Forum for Labor and Liberties (FDTL) considered the agreement to be unfair to the Tunisian state, prolonging the colonial policy of the French protectorate of Tunisia, which extended from May 1881 through March 20, 1956.

During the conference, an FDTL spokeswoman said that her party filed a case against COTUSAL in 2014 in a bid to terminate the contract.

The decision was also praised by Tunisian General Labor Union spokesman Sami al-Tahiri, who spoke to Al-Monitor. Tahiri said that the governments decision reflects the strong will of the people who have always called for the end of the agreement. He considered the move to be a necessary step in the right direction, albeit late, stressing the need to begin the nationalization of the rest of Tunisias natural resources, including oil and phosphate, to compensate for what the country has lost for decades since the French colonial era.

In a statement at the opening of the Made in Tunisia symposium Feb. 28, Chahed stressed that the government was not pressured by any party into taking the decision to end the agreement with the French company, which was based on Tunisias best interest only.

Hassouna Nasfi, member of parliament for the Free Bloc, told Al-Monitor that the prime minister exercised his role as the head of the Tunisian government and he took the right decision to protect the countrys natural wealth. She added that the most important thing currently is to determine how the country can exploit its own salt, now that the COTUSAL agreement has come to a halt.

Mohamed Ghazi Ben Jemia, the national coordinator of the Tunisian Coalition for Transparency in Energy and Mines, told Al-Monitor that although the governments move is important, he believes it is not enough. He calls for the need to review all contracts with regard to the exploitation of the countrys natural resources that are included in the Tunisian Mining Code, noting that most of these contracts provide for unfair conditions for Tunisia.

According to official data, COTUSAL produces between 900,000 and 1 million tons of salt per year, with a turnover of 35 million dinars ($11.5 million) out of the total 51 million dinars ($16.8 million) achieved by Tunisias salt extraction sector.

Meanwhile, the Tunisian state has been losing 900,000 Tunisian dinars ($297,000) annually, as the French company has not been abiding by the mining code that regulates the exploitation of natural resources and pertinent agreements. COTUSAL has failed to pay any tax to the governmental Coastal Protection and Planning Agency.

Sadiq Jabnoun, an expert in investment strategies, told Al-Monitor that he does not believe that the termination of the agreement would have a big impact on Tunisia, since salt is not of great value on international markets and is not in high demand, with the exception of some derivatives such as psyllium.

Psyllium production requires a large electric power, which Tunisia cannot afford, he said.

To me, the only good outcome of the agreement termination is that Tunisia took back its legal sovereignty over a part of its natural wealth, Jabnoun concluded.
Turkey and Iran have maintained cooperation in regional affairs in recent years, including most notably joint efforts for a settlement in Syria but also solidarity against US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. Earlier this month, Turkeys interior minister even raised the prospect of a joint operation against Kurdish militants.

The political solidarity has been widely expected to strengthen bilateral trade, with a number of steps taken to that effect. In 2015, a preferential trade agreement between the two neighbors lowered tariffs on 125 industrial and 142 agricultural products. Two years later, a swap agreement took effect to allow the use of national currencies in bilateral trade.

When introducing the preferential trade agreement, the two countries had set a target to boost the volume of bilateral trade to $35 billion. Four years on, the result is a disappointment in full measure. In 2018, bilateral trade was worth $9.3 billion, the lowest level over the past nine years.

Official Turkish statistics show a steady downtick since 2012, when the bilateral trade volume peaked to $21.9 billion after exceeding $10 billion in 2010.

Turkeys exports to Iran, which had hit $9.9 billion in 2012, stood at $3.3 billion in 2017 and $2.4 billion in 2018. Imports from Iran, meanwhile, were worth $7.5 billion in 2017 and $6.9 billion in 2018, down from $12.5 billion in 2011.

Many had hoped that with the Iranian rial and the Turkish lira at play, commercial ties would become easier and boost the volume of trade. The hopes, however, have not materialized. Iran ranks 19th among the top 20 buyers of Turkish goods and, despite oil and gas sales to Turkey, ranks 10th among the largest exporters to its western neighbor.

Still, the trade balance is in Irans favor, with Turkey running a deficit of $4.5 billion last year.

The downtick in bilateral trade has continued this year. In January, Turkeys exports to Iran fell 27% to $191 million and its imports decreased 16% to $485 million.

The decline in commercial exchanges has to do with hitches in the functioning of the preferential trade agreement, which took effect in 2015. Fatih Cayabatmaz, the Tehran representative of Turkeys Independent Industrialists and Businessmen Association, has warned that the worst might still be ahead.

Iran banned the importation of 339 products, among them 61 products within the scope of the preferential trade agreement, Cayabatmaz told Anatolia news agency in January, adding that the association had asked the competent Iranian authorities to lift the ban and that the issue had been discussed also between the two countries presidents. Bilateral accords such as the preferential trade agreement are international agreements that cannot be repealed with decrees. Weve communicated this to the Iranian authorities, he said.

But as the Turkish side awaited a solution to the problem, the Iranian parliament delivered another blow to bilateral trade, approving legislation that bans until March 2021 the import of goods that have locally produced equivalents to meet the needs.

Cayabatmaz argued that countries with preferential trade agreements with Iran should have been exempt from the restrictions. Textiles, white appliances, food, medical supplies and cosmetics are among the products we sell the most to Iran. Similar goods are being produced in Iran. Following the decision of the Iranian parliament, our exports to Iran could nearly grind to a halt, he said.

Yet, despite the disappointment in commerce, cooperation is strengthening in other realms, especially tourism. The Association of Turkish Travel Agencies (TURSAB) and the Association of Air Transport and Tourist Agencies of Iran signed a deal in February in a bid to increase the number of tourists between the two countries. According to TURSAB chair Firuz Baglikaya, out of 40 million tourists who visited Turkey in 2018, 2 million were Iranian.

The 2 million figure suggests that political solidarity between the two countries is also encouraging tourism, despite the economic difficulties in Iran. Another factor the may encourage Iranian tourists is the Iranian currencys 20.9% appreciation against the Turkish lira in 2018. However, the latter is based on the official exchange rate, and open market prices for foreign currency have dramatically increased since US President Donald Trumps withdrawal from the nuclear deal in May 2018.

Iranian investment in real estate in Turkey is also on the rise. Last year, Iranian nationals bought 3,652 homes in Turkey, ranking second after Iraqis, who bought 8,205 homes.

Iranian businesspeople are also increasingly attracted to Turkey. According to figures obtained from Turkeys Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges, Iranians set up 1,019 companies in Turkey last year, up from 357 in 2017, ranking among the top three on the list of foreigners establishing companies in the country.

The companies, along with the touristic exchanges and the realty purchases, serve to strengthen the bridges between the two peoples. Yet the Iranian states increasing introversion under the impact of moves to protect its economy is making things harder for business. No wonder Turkeys Trade Ministry warns local entrepreneurs on its website that Iran ranked 124th among 190 countries in terms of the ease of doing business in 2017.
Construction has begun on the 17-story Falls Tower project in Greenville, S.C., Birminghams Brasfield & Gorrie announced today.

The mixed-use facility, within the Camperdown development, will include seven floors of office space and more than 33,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space. There will be a floor of conference space, 18 condominium units on the top five stories of the building, and private garage units at ground level.

Architect Wakefield Beasley & Associates designed the project. It is slated for completion next year.

Brasfield & Gorrie Vice President and Division Manager Ben Barfield said the development "will bring new opportunities to the citys downtown, thanks in part to the partnership we have with Centennial American Properties and the City of Greenville.

Brasfield & Gorrie recently topped out luxury apartments at Camperdown, which are being developed by Daniel. The general contractor is also working with developer Centennial American Properties on other parts of the mixed-use development, including a recently completed 629-space parking deck that will service Camperdown.
Alabama has approved applications from 180 farmers who want to grow hemp, and the first crop will be planted by April, said Alabama Department of Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate.

The people who have applied are serious farmers, Pate said. These are not people who have been growing marijuana.

A couple of applications that didnt include the $100 application fee, or were not from qualified farmers, may have been rejected, Pate said.

There may been one or two who wanted to grow it in their backyard, Pate said. Thats not the intent.

Otherwise, no real farmers were turned down. The deadline to apply was by the start of March.

We approved all the legitimate applications, Pate said. Those notifications are going out this week.

Alabama also received about 70 applications from people wanting to have hemp processing operations, Pate said. We ended up approving them all, he said.

The idea was to keep out people who didnt know what they were doing, he said.

The next step for farmers is to purchase hemp seed, which costs about $1,000, and plant it. We have to give the certification to get the seed, Pate said. It cant come into the state without a certification from us.

Although marijuana is a type of hemp, industrial hemp contains far smaller amounts of THC, the intoxicating substance in marijuana.

Its industrial hemp, Pate said. It doesnt have the THC. If you tried to smoke it, youd get sick as a dog before you got high. It has no value to smoke it or use for hallucinogenic purpose. Its a different species (than marijuana).

Hemp is valued for its fiber, which can be used to make rope. Stalks and seeds can be used to make fabric, fiber board, carpeting, insulation, livestock feed and automobile components. Hemp can also be the source for cannabidiol, or CBD oil, which some people use as a treatment for physical ailments.

Theres obviously a market for it, Pate said. Were going to inspect it and test it.

CBD oil can also be derived from marijuana and the Alabama Legislature has allowed limited exceptions to the law against marijuana possession for the use of CBD oil.

The 2018 Agriculture and Nutrition Act changed the legal status of hemp from a controlled substance to an agricultural commodity.

It is a pilot program, Pate said. We have a responsibility to go out and inspect it. We need to see which varieties are doing better.

If somebody planted the wrong kind of hemp, well plow it under, Pate said.

Pate declined to identify any hemp farmers by name. But clearly, hemp will be coming to farms across the state soon.

Theyll be planted in mid-to-late April, harvested after about 90 days or 100 days, Pate said.

So, by late summer, Alabama will have its first legal hemp crop in decades.

Then, in-state processors will have to be able to turn it into a product.

There might not be any market or processor, Pate said. Somebodys got to process it.

Alabamas hemp processing plants will have to take shape quickly for an industry that doesnt exist yet.

Otherwise, hemp farmers wont be able to use the crop.

They need to consult a lawyer before they send it across state lines, Pate said. We think there will be processing places, but they may not be ready by this fall.

The first year of hemp-growing may be full of trial-and-error. Maybe theyll learn from it, and come next year, be ready to go, Pate said.

But the potential for a new cash crop is there.

I hope so, Pate said. We dont have a good one right now. That could happen. Otherwise, were just wasting our time.
by Thanh Thuy

The trial of the young Catholic woman will resume tomorrow. All the relatives are gathered in prayer, her mother said. The other defendant has been released. Both have the same defence argument: They were duped by North Korean agents.

Hanoi (AsiaNews)  Vietnam has called on the Malaysian government to release oan Thi Huong (pictured), a 30-year-old Vietnamese woman held in connection with the murder of Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Two days ago, the Shah Alam High Court released Siti Aisyah, an Indonesian woman also accused of the assassination.

Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, who is also Deputy Prime Minister, spoke with his Malaysian counterpart Saifuddin Abdullah yesterday, noting that senior leaders and the people of Vietnam were paying close attention to the trial.

Vietnam asked Malaysia to ensure a fair trial and free Vietnamese citizen Doan Thi Huong, the government said.

In a separate statement on Wednesday, Vietnamese authorities also said that Justice Minister Le Thanh Long had sent a letter to Malaysias Attorney General, Tommy Thomas, asking Malaysia to free Huong.

The murder took place on 13 February 2017 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. oan Thi Huong and Siti Aisyah were taken into custody three days after the assassination.

After their arrest, the two women claimed that they were duped by some North Korean agents, who got them involved in what they thought was a television prank.

I dont know what will happen to me now. I am innocent, please pray for me!" Huong said on the day of Siti Aisyahs release.

The young woman was born into a Catholic family from Nghia Binh, a town near Nan inh City (northern Vietnam). Fr Ph Xm Xuan Thi, a priest from Phuong Lac parish, said that the accused's father turned to him "for help and pastoral advice".

According to Fr Thi, "in the parish no one has anything negative to say about the young woman, except perhaps that she doesnt come home very often."

The trial against her will resume tomorrow. Meanwhile, family members continue to clamour for her innocence. "I don't think my daughter is capable of committing such a crime," said oan Van Thanh, the defendants 65-year-old father.

"I don't sleep at night because of anxiety over the verdict. My daughter was deceived. I love her, but now I can't do anything," said Nguyen Thi Vy, the young womans mother. "All the relatives are gathered in prayer, so that my daughter will soon be reunited with our family."
Alabamas Kelsey Barnard Clark took first place tonight on Top Chef.

Clark, executive chef and owner of KBC in Dothan, was one of three finalists on the Bravo reality series this season, competing against Eric Adjepong of Washington, D.C., and Sara Bradley of Paducah, Kentucky.

On tonights 90-minute episode, which aired at 8:30 p.m. CT, the trio could be seen visiting markets in Macau, China, and preparing a four-course meal for the judges. Tensions ran high among the contestants, and in a twist for the finale, only two were allowed to serve their full menu to compete for the win.

In the end, Clark and Bradley made it to the final cooking heat in China after Adjepong was eliminated after the first course of the final meal. In the end Clark was declared the winner. As the champ, Clark received $125,000, a prize package and bragging rights.

Clark also won the title of fan favorite, determined by viewer votes, and she received an additional $10,000.

In the finale Clarks first course was cornbread and buttermilk in honor of summers in the South. She brought her grandmothers cast iron cornbread stick pans to China.

After eliminating Adjepong after the first course the head judge, Tom Colicchio, told Clark and Bradley Roll Tide and Go Big Blue as he sent them on their way to begin preparation for the final.

Clark was one of 15 contestants originally chosen for Season 16 of Top Chef, which was filmed in 2018. She was the only Alabama chef on the show this season. Her fortunes went up and down on the 15-episode series, but along the way she received kudos from judges Colicchio, Nilou Motamed, Padma Lakshmi and Graham Elliot.

Although most of Season 16 was filmed in Kentucky, the top five finalists on Top Chef traveled to Macau, China, for the last few episodes. Clark appeared to thrive in that exotic locale, combining her love of Southern cooking with the ingredients and flavors of Macau.

On the website for KBC, a restaurant, bakery and catering company, Clark is described as a small town girl, big city chef. Shes an Atlanta native who was raised in Dothan, according to her bio on the Alabama Gulf Seafood website, where she was featured as Chef of the Month in December 2018. Clark attended Auburn University, but left college to train at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. When she returned to her hometown, Clark started a catering company, then founded KBC Butcher Block on Westgate Parkway in Dothan. KBC followed at 151 N. Foster St., and its now Clarks primary focus as a chef.

Heres Clarks official bio from the Top Chef website:

Kelsey Barnard Clark is a born and raised 'Gulf Southerner from Dothan, Alabama. She got her start in the food industry as a middle school student with a baking obsession and catered her first wedding at age 15. Kelseys most impressionable memories were made at the beach catching, gutting and eating fresh fish with her large family. At 20 years old, Kelsey dropped out of college and left the deep South to attend the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. While in New York, she fine-tuned her skills and learned the art of elevated food by working under Gavin Kaysen at Cafe Boulud and then in pastry at John Frasers Dovetail. Kelseys passion is cooking from the heart, and from her memory. Her dishes are inspired by Southern classics with her French techniques sprinkled throughout. Kelsey runs her restaurant and catering company, KBC, in Alabama with her husband, baby Monroe and two horse-dogs.

Clark was celebrated tonight in her hometown at a street festival on North Foster Street, hosted by the Dothan Convention and Visitors Bureau. She also attended a wrap party at The Grand on Foster, a nearby event space in Dothan.

Video: Heres a look a Clarks winning moment.
Volunteers Amata Hinkle, Steven Gaffin, and Tricia Spiliotis & members of the Huntsville Cave Rescue Unit Recite Poetry in Limrock Blowing Cave.

Weve been up in airplanes weve been in and on the water, weve been all over Alabama, mostly traveling the roads, places above ground, and at some point I started wondering, What are parts of Alabama that are less obvious, parts we dont see every day?

That got me thinking about caves, and then we learned about the Huntsville Cave Rescue Unit. HCRU volunteers Amata Hinkle, Steven Gaffin, and Tricia Spiliotis all agreed to meet with us at Limrock Blowing Cave to read for this project.

In the cave everyone had their headlamps and flashlights on, and were seeing rock formations, and stalagmites or stalactites, and even little critters -- a little frog, a centipede, a translucent-looking crawfish. You begin to see the shape of things, the character of such a space. But then you can not see. When you turn off all artificial light sources, headlamps and flashlights, theres complete darkness -- not an ounce of light. How often do we find ourselves in utter blackness? Senses shift and you begin to hear more strongly, realize you want to touch things to understand how to situate yourself. Sounds become more important, seemingly louder and interesting -- the echoes and the reverberations, the trickling water and sounds of footsteps or fingers against rock trying to feel your way with your other senses. Very cool.

These underground worlds are hidden yet alive -- they exist and have their form and character and presence and inhabitants whether we realize it or not. And theyre entirely invisible, literally, to the naked eye, unless we bring something artificial down there to help us see.

For the volunteers that make up the cave rescue team, caves are spaces they work hard to understand and to exist confidently in. They have rich, deep knowledge of how to navigate, work and be in cave systems. And thank goodness because for people who go caving and exploring, whether professional or people just doing it for fun, accidents happen. People get in trouble and its good to know there is a crew that exists for that.

You can visit the collection of videos from Whitman, Alabama.
Former Jefferson County Commissioner Gary White, the last Alabama politician still imprisoned for the sewer scandal, has been moved to a re-entry program.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, his sentence officially ends on Aug. 1.

White, 72, is listed as being in the Residential Reentry Management Program, which helps inmates transition from the Maxwell Federal Prison Camp back to civilian life. It usually involves inmates moving to a halfway house, then being allowed to leave the facility wearing an ankle monitor for the duration of their sentence.

Whites wife, Judy, reached by AL.com on Thursday, responded to a question on Whites release with a written statement, apparently referring to her belief that White should have been released immediately after the passage of the First Step Act: For 83 days, the Federal Bureau of Prisons - the poster-agency for deep state corruption - has unlawfully imprisoned Gary, causing extreme and foreseeable harm, as prison employees have engaged in First Amendment retaliation and other violations. We call on members of Congress and the Senate to fulfill their oversight responsibilities and compel accountability.

In 2010, U.S. District Judge Scott Coogler sentenced White to 10 years in prison for accepting bribes from a county sewer contractor.

Coogler also ordered White to serve two years of supervised probation after his release, pay $22,000 in restitution to Jefferson County, forfeit another $22,000 to the federal government and pay a $900 fee -- $100 for each bribery count for which he was convicted.

White, convicted in 2008, was the last of the more than two dozen people or companies convicted in two federal criminal probes into the Jefferson County sewer system scandal.

Before he became a Jefferson County commissioner, White was a Homewood city councilman and state legislator.

White was the last to be sentenced among 21 people and five companies convicted in connection with two federal probes into the construction and financing of the county's $3.2 billion sewer system project. Among the others who were convicted or pleaded guilty were former Jefferson County commissioners Larry Langford, Chris McNair and Mary Buckelew. Buckelew pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation but not prison time.

Langford, 72, died Jan. 8, about a week after his early release from prison because of failing health.

McNair was released early from prison for health reasons in 2013, just before the 50th anniversary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that killed his daughter, Denise McNair, and three other girls on Sept. 15, 1963.

In 1996, Jefferson County entered a consent decree with the federal Environmental Protection Agency to make extensive improvements to its sewer system. The county financed the improvements through bond offerings. The project, originally estimated to cost $1.5 billion, surpassed $3 billion.

In 2002, the FBI launched an investigation into the county's construction program, which resulted in the conviction of 21 people, including contractors, county commissioners, and county employees. The convictions were mainly related to construction firms bribing local officials to obtain business.

Langford, his friend brokerage firm owner William Blount, and lobbyist Al LaPierre were indicted for conspiracy, bribery, and fraud related to the later refinancing of the sewer debt. Blount entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 52 months in prison. LaPierre entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 48 months in prison.

Langford went to trial, was convicted in 2009, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Jefferson County filed a $4.21 billion bankruptcy in November 2011, which was the largest by a U.S. city or county until it was overtaken in July 2013 by Detroits $18 billion case. The county emerged from bankruptcy in 2013, after selling new warrants needed to raise $1.84 billion to refinance about $3 billion in sewer debt.
The high-profile firing of the co-founder of a liberal group best known for monitoring hate organizations is only the latest trouble for the nonprofit, which got its start handling civil rights cases in the Deep South.

At least three lawsuits filed by U.S. conservatives are pending against the Southern Poverty Law Center over its public labeling of groups it considers extremist, and a separate claim by a British organization resulted in a multimillion-dollar settlement and an unusual public apology less than a year ago.

The Montgomery, Alabama-based law center announced Thursday it had dismissed its 82-year-old founder, Morris Dees. A statement from the group's president, Richard Cohen, didn't specify the reason for Dees' dismissal but said the organization must act when staff conduct doesn't meet its standards.

"The SPLC is deeply committed to having a workplace that reflects the values it espouses - truth, justice, equity and inclusion, and we believe the steps we have taken today reaffirm that commitment," Cohen said.

The firing could be a blow to the organization where Dees gained fame during a career that included winning multimillion-dollar verdicts against the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations. He is arguably its best-known public face with thousands of donors who helped the organization build assets totaling $450 million.

Kathy Laing, program manager of the Institute on Philanthropy at the University of Richmond, said tax forms documenting the law center's finances make it appear "they have the financial ability to weather this storm."

But, she added: "The dangers come when the founder has the relationships with donors and funders."

In a message on the law center's website, Cohen praised Dees' "incredible contributions to the fight against racial injustice in our country" and added: "But our work is about the cause, not the person."

Dees said his dismissal involved a personnel issue but would not elaborate. He also didn't criticize the organization he helped found nearly 50 years ago.

"I think the Southern Poverty Law Center is a very fine group and I devoted nearly 50 years of my life to it and I'm proud of its work," Dees said.

Board members contacted by The Associated Press either declined comment or referred questions to the law center.

Dees' dismissal came nine months after the law center agreed to a $3.4 million settlement after wrongly labeling a British organization and its founder as extremists. The law center issued statements saying it was wrong to include the London-based Quilliam and Maajid Nawaz in a "Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists."

Meanwhile, the law center or its staffers face three similar lawsuits from conservative groups.

Most recently, the founder of a far-right men's group called the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, sued the Southern Poverty Law Center last month for labeling the organization a hate group. The lawsuit contends the designation is false and damaged McInnes' career.

The conservative Center for Immigration Studies sued Richard Cohen, the law center's president, and Heidi Beirich, the director of its intelligence unit, in January in federal court claiming the organization had wrongly labeled it as an anti-immigrant hate group. And a Maryland attorney, Glen K. Allen, sued the law center, Beirich and a former staffer in December saying it wrongly called him a "neo-Nazi lawyer."

The lawsuits opened a new front for the law center, which has long been a target of the groups it monitors. Three Klansmen pleaded guilty to firebombing the organization's office in Montgomery in 1983; Dees helped sort through charred papers outside the building the morning after the attack.

Dees got his start in sales, founding a direct mail marketing company that specialized in publishing while he was a student at the University of Alabama. A company the Alabama native started with the late Millard Fuller, who went on to begin Habitat for Humanity, which constructs homes for the needy, grew into a major regional publishing company.

Eleven years after earning his law degree, Dees and partner Joseph J. Levin Jr. formed the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971 to handle civil rights cases and represent clients including the poor, minorities and prisoners. Dees was finance director for President Jimmy Carter's campaign in 1976.

After a career that included near-constant court fights against right-wing extremists, Dees was honored with the American Bar Association's highest honor in 2012. In his acceptance speech, Dees praised the tenacity of the law center, which now has more than 350 employees in five states.

None of our lawyers have ever backed down or quit; or any of our staff has ever backed down or quit because of the trials and tribulations weve had to face, he said.
Hoover schools on Thursday took a step forward in the lengthy process of ending federal oversight of desegregation efforts in the district, talking through the new plan to ensure all children, regardless of race, are treated fairly and given equal educational opportunities.

Many in the school community are still reeling from a video that surfaced last week of white students who attend the city's two high schools using racial and anti-Semitic slurs and making jokes about the Holocaust and concentration camps.

Hoover Superintendent Kathy Murphy spoke about the importance of the federal desegregation case, saying, Im very committed to making certain we get this right.

"It is about every child, every student being given every opportunity," Murphy said, "without any of that being contingent on the color of the child's skin."

Around 100 people, including government officials, Hoover school employees, parents and graduates of the school district, attended the meeting, held at Trace Crossings Elementary School.

Hoover is among dozens of systems in Alabama still under the watch of the Department of Justice, which generations later is still ensuring these systems comply with ongoing federal court orders to eliminate traces of dual schooling based on race. Hoover, which broke away from the county schools in 1988, still comes under the active desegregation order issued in 1965 in Stout vs. Jefferson County.

The new framework could become part of a federal consent decreean updated roadmap approved in court that the district must follow in order to correct any lingering Constitutional wrongs that trace back to segregated schools. The joint plan was presented during the meeting by attorneys for the school district, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

If the order is approved by the court, it would stay in place a minimum of three years, according to Department of Justice attorney Peter Beauchamp. Attorneys for the plaintiffs would continue to monitor reports and ensure the district takes the required actions.

The framework for the decree includes standardizing teacher hiring and interview practices, hiring more teachers of color, and training current and future teachers to eliminate bias in instructional and disciplinary practices, officials said.

The district is planning to provide a more equitable way for elementary students to be identified for gifted programs and to lay stronger foundations for black students to take advanced coursework in middle and high school.

School officials and attorneys for the plaintiffs have been working for more than a year, they said, visiting all of the schools and examining data on discipline, educational opportunities, and hiring practices for evidence of racial bias.

The consent order is a work in progress, attorneys said, and can be modified at any time if circumstances arise or events occur that show a need to do so.

"This is intended to be---and I want to be very clear---a starting point," NAACP LDF attorney Monique Lin-Luse said.

Nearly a dozen parents in Hoover took turns at the microphone Thursday night to tell officials how their African American and multiracial children have fared in Hoover's schools in recent years.

Most spoke about the lack of diversity among Hoover's teachers---9 percent of teachers in the district are African American according to school officialsand how that impacts their children. Some said they believe white teachers have shown bias toward their African American children.

Others said there should be a sense of urgency to ensure schools are working well for their African American children.

"This case is over 60 years old," said parent Traci Jones, who has four children in Hoover schools. "I'm sorry. I'm impatient. I don't have another 60 years to give Hoover an opportunity to get it right."

Parent Romel Williams said the district needs to take action now, not wait for court approval of the consent order. She said African American students deal with microaggressions every day that put them under stress and interfere with their education.

Wonlia Blain said she moved here from Texas in 2013 and chose Hoover schools for her children but has not found the community accepting of her family. "I can tell you," Blain said, "that there has not been one year that I lived here that my child has not been called a n----r."

Blain said Hoover school officials need to develop a disciplinary policy for students who use hate speech.

The Hoover school system is 55 percent white, 24 percent black, 8 percent Hispanic, 5 percent multiracial and 6 percent Asian. On Thursday, all but one parent who spoke were African American. The one white woman who spoke, Loni Curtis, said she is from California. She said she is married to an African American man and told the panel: This is all crazy weird to me.

U.S. Department of Justice attorney Natane Singleton addressing attendees, saying "we are very concerned about the video, the impact on black students" and reports of racial tension. #aledchat  Trisha Powell Crain (@Trish_Crain) March 14, 2019

One parent asked for the district to publish whatever data it is collecting to allow the community to see the information, too. The district is already required to file annual reports, attorneys said, and those reports are publicly available. Those reports include data on the demographics of the students, teachers, faculty and staff, as well as the number of students of each race in each class period of every school. (Scroll to the end of this article to view reports the district filed in February.)

Some parents said their children had been negatively impacted by the rezoning that went into effect at the start of the school year. They asked district officials to follow up with families to see how their children were faring. Murphy agreed to do so.

The student video was mentioned by many parents who said they felt Hoover school officials still had not fully addressed it with students.

The district's director of equity initiatives, Terry Lamar, said student focus groups, created in the days after the video surfaced, will begin at the high schools after spring break. Lamar, who took the newly-created position in November, said a diversity committee was created in January.

Lamar, who is African American, said he could not sleep the night that he saw the video. "It kept me up the entire night," he said.

Retired federal Judge U.W. Clemon, who represents the black plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said U.S. District Judge Madeline Haikala, who is overseeing the case, will receive a report on the district's investigation into the video and any resulting disciplinary action the board took.

Murphy told AL.com on Tuesday the districts investigation and process regarding the video has concluded but could not comment further.

She said the district is still investigating allegations a Spain Park teacher used the n-word while talking with students at school on March 5. According to students, the teacher used that word in describing how she hears some black students greet each other.

After the meeting, Murphy said she felt the meeting went well but knows there is work to do.

"There are challenges that are before us," she said. "We heard those this evening, very loud and very clear." Murphy, who became superintendent in 2015, said she is proud of the work that has been done in recent years and there are good things in the consent order.

Attorney Colvin said school officials will now go back to the table with attorneys for the plaintiffs and make adjustments to the proposed consent order before officially filing it with the court. Colvin said a court hearing will be held before the judge rules on the order.

Everybody wants to get this in place so that we can start the work, Colvin said. The sooner we can get started on the plan, the better.

TEXT
A letter from one of the young victims of the March 3 tornado in Lee County has been found among the debris.

The letter by 8-year-old Mykhayla Waldon was found in a wallet inside her mother Tyesha Harts black purse that had been lost during the storm. Waldon and her 9-year-old cousin, Jonathan Marquez Bowen, were among the 23 people killed when a tornado hit Lee County on March 3. The storms scattered debris as far away as Georgia and people have taken to social media to try and reconnect lost items  such as the black purse - with their owners.

According to WRBL, Kerry Pickard with Easy Alabama Fire recognized a photo of the purse after it was shared on social media sites and was able to retrieve it and see that it was returned. The letter was inside.

To my mom, from Mykhayla," the letter, written on notebook paper, said in part. "I love you a lot and you mean a lot to me. Also, I love you with all my heart and I want you to know that everywhere you take me, Im glad to go.

Letter from Lee County tornado victim found in debris. >>> https://t.co/fSVYJMXtsc  WAFF 48 (@waff48) March 15, 2019

The Facebook group Lost Treasures and Photographs for Tornado Victims has been sharing found items, ranging from jewelry and pets to photographs and a wedding dress, in hopes of reconnecting them with their owners. Many of the items and animals have been reunited with those who lost them during the storm.

The page has almost 2,000 members.
An iconic sign at a Pennsylvania casino will soon undergo an Alabama-related change.

An ore crane sign bearing the name Sands at Sands Casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania will soon be replaced with the name Wind Creek, WFMC reported. Wind Creek is the gaming arm of Alabamas Poarch Band of Creek Indians.

The sign change plan was approved by the Bethlehem Planning Commission Thursday.

This rendering shows how the massive ore crane will look with Wind Creek's name.

The casino opened in 2009 at the site of the former Bethlehem Steel Plant.

The Poarch Band of Creek Indians purchased the Sands Casino Resort for $1.3 billion last year. It will be renamed the Wind Creek Casino and Resort and undergo a $190 million renovation.

Wind Creeks properties include casinos in Alabama and the Caribbean, a greyhound track in Alabama and poker rooms in Florida.
The newly elected Alabama Legislature this week hiked the states gas tax to raise an additional $300 million a year. It took five days, the minimum time it takes to turn legislation into law.

The plan to increase funding for roads rolled through the State House in a special session that ended with Republican and Democratic leaders standing side-by-side behind Gov. Kay Ivey for a celebratory bill signing.

There were no late nights or filibusters. Most members of a large freshman class of lawmakers supported the tax with the first meaningful votes of their legislative careers.

Most Republicans voted for the tax and only three Democrats voted against the bill, which raises state fuel taxes by 10 cents a gallon over three years to fund road construction.

Was the quick special session a product of arm-twisting and deal-making or just a bipartisan group of informed legislators agreeing on a problem and a solution?

The plan was the top priority for Ivey and legislative leaders. They started getting ready before last years election.

Ivey said legislative leaders vetted candidates and those opposed to the tax were not encouraged to run. House Speaker Mac McCutcheon and Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh said they talked to candidates but only to let them know that the gas tax bill was coming.

McCutcheon said he has worked on the issue for five years. Marsh said months of preparation set the stage for what took less than a week to execute.

Everybody seems amazed it went through in five days, Marsh said. Its because I think everybody was so well informed and knew all the issues dealing with it. All these issues had been talked about for months.

The special session began March 6. Two days later, the House passed the plan and lawmakers went home for the weekend. By Tuesday, it was finished. The Senate approved the plan with no changes, sending it to Ivey, who signed it within a couple of hours.

The state tax on gasoline will increase from 18 cents to 24 cents a gallon on Sept. 1. The law adds another two cents to the tax each of the next two years. The state tax on diesel, which is a penny higher than gasoline, will rise the same way. Its the first increase in the state fuel taxes since 1992.

Starting in 2023, the tax could be adjusted by a penny once every two years according to a national index of highway construction costs.

The law adds a $200 annual registration fee for electric vehicles and a $100 fee for plug-in hybrids. The bill is expected to raise about $320 million a year once the 10-cent increase is phased in.

Up to $12 million a year will go to fund a bond issue to widen and deepen the shipping channel in Mobile Bay. The rest will go into a new fund for road projects on the state, county and municipal levels.

Advocates for the plan, including bill sponsors Rep. Bill Poole of Tuscaloosa and Sen. Clyde Chambliss of Prattville, said the funding increase was needed to make roads and bridges safer, expand their capacity to move vehicles and products, and boost the states economy. They backed their arguments with numbers, including a chart showing Alabama had the lowest state gasoline tax in the southeast, just a shade below Mississippis.

Their messages connected. Only 26 of the 140 legislators voted against the tax increase.

Rep. Corey Harbison, a second-term Republican from Cullman, said he got a call from the governors chief of staff about the tax. Harbison said he expressed his concerns and did not feel like he was being pressured. Harbison cast one of the 20 no votes in the House.

I think that it was just a well organized, a well greased machine, Harbison said. I really dont think that there was so much pressure from within the leadership. Or at least I didnt feel it too much from them.

Harbison said there were several reasons he voted no. He wanted to see a larger share of the new revenue go to Cullman County, which he said maintains more miles of roads than most counties. Harbison said he wanted more time to talk to residents in his district. And he was concerned about the link to the index that can raise the tax automatically.

Its hard to go down and cast a vote like that, Harbison said. Its always better to have time to have town hall meetings and talk to constituents.

More than one-fourth of the 105 House members are first-year lawmakers and about three-fourths of the newcomers voted for the tax increase. Seven of nine first-time lawmakers in the Senate voted for it.

As the special session was starting, Ivey suggested there was an effort to keep opponents of the tax off the ballot in legislative races last year.

In an interview on WSFA on March 6, Ivey was asked to respond to the complaints of lawmakers who said they had not had time to study the gas tax issue.

The governor said: All the freshmen who ran for House and Senate were indeed briefed on the need for an infrastructure bill well before they were elected. And they were vetted by the House and Senate leadership. And if they were not for increasing the gas tax for infrastructure they were not encouraged to run.

Rep. Andrew Sorrell, R-Muscle Shoals, a first-year lawmaker, was asked if he had such a meeting.

The governor was telling the truth, Sorrell said.

Sorrell declined to say who he met with or go into details about the conversation.

No, there werent any threats made or anything like that, Sorrell said. But it was obviously understood that this issue was going to come up. And they asked us where we were going to be on the issue. And of course, I replied, undecided. I havent seen a bill. I will approach it with an open mind. That was always my response.

McCutcheon said legislative leaders met with candidates and talked about the gas tax, as well as other issues. McCutcheon said it was to let them know what was coming, not to seek a promise for a vote or to keep anybody out of a race.

We felt like they needed to be aware of issues that they would be facing if we moved forward in this state, McCutcheon said. Infrastructure was just one of the big issues that we talked about. We talked about everything from education to the Corrections Department.

McCutcheon said he told candidates to gauge opinions in their districts.

The encouragement we gave them was go into your districts, talk to your people about these issues, McCutcheon said. Learn and educate yourself on these issues so youre aware of what youre going to be facing when you get down here.

As it turned out, Sorrell voted against the tax. He said almost 90 percent of respondents to a telephone poll in his district said they opposed it.

Tom Fredricks of Decatur, who lost a Republican primary race for a north Alabama House district last year, said McCutcheon met with him before the election. Fredricks said he told McCutcheon he was against a gas tax.

I got that out before he even asked me. I have been actively and vocally opposed to an increase in the gas tax without an offset since day one, Fredricks said.

Fredricks said he didnt think McCutcheon was trying to bully him into a commitment.

But its fair to say that we were interviewed, Fredricks said. And out of that interview, you have to draw your own conclusions as to what manifested. But it became clear that the candidates that aligned with the issue of a gas tax got the support of the relevant political action committees. And those of us who openly opposed it did not.

Fredricks hasnt changed his stance. At the state Republican Partys meeting in February, the partys executive committee approved his resolution to oppose the gas tax without an offsetting tax decrease.

Rep. Parker Moore, R-Decatur, who defeated Fredricks in the race in House District 4, said McCutcheon met with him after Moore was first elected in a special election in May 2018. Moore had to run a second time later in the year and won again. Moore said McCutcheon talked to him about the gas tax but did not ask for a commitment.

I never was vetted with any questions in any way like that, telling me that I need to support it if I want any help or anything like that, Moore said. And the speaker always has told everybody that I talk to to vote your district, listen to your district.

Moore, one of the first-year lawmakers, did not vote on the gas tax. His wife went into labor on March 8, the day the House passed the bill. Their daughter was born early Saturday.

Moore said he would probably have voted against the bill because he thinks that reflected the will of the people in his district.

Moore said he had made no promises to support the tax during the campaign.

The only thing that I ever told anybody is that I will always have an open-door policy and I am willing to listen to both sides of every issue because I represent 48,000 people, Moore said. And I know everybodys opinion is not the same.

Sen. Will Barfoot, R-Montgomery, one of the first-year senators, said he was asked about infrastructure when he sought endorsements from groups during last years campaign, but not asked for a commitment on a gas tax.

I was not told dont run if you cant support this specific plan, Barfoot said.

Barfoot voted against the tax. He said he believes that more funding is needed for roads but wanted to explore other sources. He said he would have preferred a plan listing road projects with a commitment to repeal the tax when those projects are paid for.

Barfoot said lawmakers had only a few days to study the bill before the session. He said there was ample evidence to support the need for more funding for roads.

There was a lot of information about the need, Barfoot said. And obviously I dont think you need to attend a week-long class to figure out that we need to improve infrastructure in the state.

Barfoot said he wont question the reasoning of his colleagues who voted for the tax. He said some probably knew the vote could hurt them politically.

There were a lot of good people, at least I know in the Senate, that had some reservations but thought it was the right thing to do, Barfoot said. I cant hold it against anybody for doing what they think is the right thing to do.

Marsh said he talked to Senate candidates about the issue but didnt ask for a commitment in exchange for support.

I just let them know up front we would be dealing with infrastructure, Marsh said.

Sen. Chris Elliott, a Republican from Fairhope and a first-year senator, said nobody vetted him as a candidate on the issue of the gas tax, but they didnt have to. Elliott said he campaigned in support of increased funding for infrastructure.

As to why it passed so readily, Elliott said the facts sold the plan.

Republicans are low tax, not no tax, said Elliott, a former Baldwin County commissioner. This bill went through because it was time to make an adjustment in the revenue that we have for our roads and for our state infrastructure. Its past time to make that adjustment. The last gas tax was 27 years ago.

Ivey took the lead on the plan. In her inaugural address and her State of the State address, the governor talked about the need to address years of neglect to state infrastructure. She went to rural Chilton County to use a decaying bridge as a backdrop for her press conference announcing the plan. Then she called a special session to isolate the issues.

Democratic leaders who supported the plan said they were encouraged by Iveys willingness to discuss issues of importance to them, including Medicaid expansion. Ivey made no commitments on expansion but said she would listen to concerns and assess the facts.

Ivey Press Secretary Daniel Sparkman said the governor made no deals regarding votes for or against the plan.

The legislative leaders, business groups and associations that backed the plan had tried and failed before. Gas tax bills died without votes in 2016 and 2017.

Sorrell, the first-year lawmaker from Muscle Shoals, said those advocates have been busy since. Their collaboration made the special session outcome look deceptively easy, he said.

Ever since it failed in 2017 theres been people working on this, Sorrell said. All the Montgomery associations have been working on this, obviously the governor, the speaker, the pro tem were all supportive of this. So, they had a very unified front all pushing this. And they had it all very well planned out. And you can see by how fast it went through and how easily it played out. It looked easy but it wasnt easy.

Sorrell said he isnt bothered that legislative leaders quizzed candidates about the tax last year.

Its exactly what I expected, Sorrell said. Its just politics. But at the end of the day nobody else decides who runs. You pay a qualifying fee at the party and put your name on the ballot. Thats all there is to it. So, whether or not someone was encouraged to run, that wouldnt make any difference to me.

Long debates are not unusual in the Alabama Senate, where the rules allow senators to speak two times for an hour on every question. Marsh said he was prepared for lengthy dialogue Tuesday but it never materialized. The Senate started at 10 a.m. and the talking was mostly done by early afternoon.

I told my colleagues if we need to go two, three days on this, talk about it, debate it, fine, Marsh said. But actually, I was trying to find people to go to the microphone toward the end.

This story was edited at 10:10 a.mm. on March 17 to specify that the new registration fee applies to plug-in hybrids.
An east Alabama woman is facing more than a few days in Facebook jail after authorities say shes repeatedly used social media to bully multiple victims.

Catherine Patterson, 48, was arrested this week on nearly two dozen felony warrants  23 counts of aggravated stalking to be exact. Her arrest comes after she was previously ordered to stay off social media.

Clay County Sheriff Jim Studdard said the investigation began several months ago after sheriffs officials received multiple complaints of cyber bullying from different victims. They launched a probe which the sheriff described as complex and lengthy because of the need to identify a suspect or suspects by means of obtain IP addresses. Additionally, he said, they had to then obtain physical addresses.

Clay Count sheriffs investigators, as well as Lineville and Ashland police, carried out a search warrant at Catherine Pattersons Ashland home on Wednesday, March, 13, 2019.

Sheriffs investigators, as well as Lineville and Ashland police, carried out a search warrant at Pattersons Ashland home on Wednesday. They recovered multiple electronic devices.

Few details about the alleged bullying have been released but authorities say there is a history of conflict between Patterson and the victims, which include some former family members. Court records show Patterson was charged with harassment in 2017 and with violation of a protection order in 2017 and 2018. All of those charges against her were dismissed.

Photographic evidence in one of the previous cases included a Facebook post that read, My target shooting getting better but I know I wont missed (sic) a Fat Pigs male or female Ill shot (sic) to kill not injured (sic).

Aggravated stalking is a Class B felony. Pattersons bond is set at $23,000.

Studdard said social media bullying is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
A Birmingham couple is facing felony charges after their infant son was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Reginald Xavier Bean, 26, is charged with aggravated child abuse in the injuries inflicted upon boy last weekend. The babys mother, 19-year-old Ivanna Flute, is charged with simple child abuse.

Birmingham police investigators were called to Childrens of Alabama on March 9 after the boy was taken to the hospital by his parents, said Sgt. Johnny Williams. Bean told authorities he had dropped the child, but the severity of the injuries did not correlate with his story.

After further examination by doctors and additional investigation by detectives, Bean and Flute were taken into custody and subsequently charged. Police have not released additional detail about the allegations against Bean and Flute or the nature of the boys injuries. The boy remains hospitalized.

Ivanna Flute

According to charging documents against Bean, he willfully tortured and/or abused by the child by dropping, striking and/or shaking him, causing serious physical injury. Court records for Flute have not yet been made available.

In Alabama, the crime of child abuse is a Class C felony punishable by one to 10 years in prison and up to a $15,000 fine. Aggravated child abuse is a Class B felony punishable by two to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $30,000.

Flute was booked into the Jefferson County Jail on March 12 and released the same day after posting $15,000 bond. Bean was booked on March 11 and remains held on $60,000 bond.
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Authorities have released the name of a man fatally shot in Birminghams Southtown public housing community midday Thursday.

The Jefferson County Coroners Office on Friday identified the victim as Paul Gabriel Harris Jr. He was 33 and lived in Hoover.

South Precinct officers responded 23rd Street and Ninth Avenue South at 11:33 a.m. Thursday. They found Harris lying on his back in the middle of the street. He was holding a stick in each hand.

Harris was pronounced dead at 11:45 a.m. Birmingham police spokesman Sgt. Johnny Williams said no one was outside in the neighborhood when first responders arrived.

An arrest has not been announced.

Anyone with information is asked to call Birmingham police homicide detectives at 205-254-1764 or Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777.
An Indian foreign national living in Panama City pleaded guilty to a vast immigration fraud scheme that included more than 80 phony marriages in Alabama.

Ravi Babu Kolla, 47, issued the guilty plea Thursday in federal court in the Northern District of Florida to charges of conspiracy to commit marriage and visa fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. His co-defendant, 40-year-old Krystal Cloud, pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced earlier this week to two years in prison.

Authorities said that between February 2017 and August 2018, Kolla operated an immigration marriage fraud business in Bay County that recruited U.S. citizens to marry Indian foreign nationals to gain immigration benefits. U.S. Attorney Lawrence Keefe said the majority of the Indian foreign nations overstayed their Visas or Student Exchange Visitor Program requirements and wee unlawfully living in the U.S. The investigation identified the more than 80 fraudulent marriages that were performed in Alabama as part of Kollas scheme.

Cloud, his accomplice, is a U.S. citizen who took part with Kolla in the marriage fraud business, Keef said. After entering into a fraudulent marriage in October 2017, she began recruiting U.S. citizens to marry Indian foreign nations.

Cloud directly recruited or took part in the recruitment of 10 or more U.S. citizens from the Panama City area, as well has Calhoun and Jackson counties. She also helped gather personal information so Kolla could create fraudulent immigration forms that allowed the Indian foreign nations to remain in the U.S.

The case was investigated by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Bay County Sheriffs Office, the Panama City Police Department, the Blountstown Police Department and the Coffee County Sheriffs Office in Alabama.

Kolla remains in federal custody pending his sentencing hearing, which is set for May 22 in Tallahassee. He faces a maximum of five years in prison for conspiracy to commit marriage and visa fraud and maximum of 20 years in prison for money laundering conspiracy.
Authorities are asking for the publics help identifying a suspect in a robbery at a Birmingham pharmacy.

The holdup happened Thursday, March 14, at the CVS at 632 Tuscaloosa Avenue. Birmingham police Sgt. Johnny Williams said the suspect entered the store about 3:45 p.m.

He went to the pharmacy portion of the business and handed the clerk a note on a brown paper bag that read, This is a robbery. You have 30 seconds to fill this bag up with all the pills. Dont alarm anyone. Dont make me come back there!!! (Oxycodone, Percocet, Hydrocodone, Lortab, Roxy Pills.

The holdup happened Thursday, March 14, at the CVS at 632 Tuscaloosa Avenue

The suspect left the scene with an undisclosed amount of drugs. Investigators believe the suspect may have been involved in another robbery at the Green Springs Walgreens.

Anyone with information on the identity of the suspect is asked to call robbery detectives at 205-254-1753. Tipster can remain anonymous by contacting Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777. If the tip to Crime Stoppers leads to an arrest, Crime Stoppers will provide a cash reward.
The teeming life of a coral reef will be on display in a 15,000-gallon saltwater aquarium. Fish and turtles will glide through a 600-gallon freshwater tank. Kids can crawl through a replica of a typical Alabama cave with no fear of getting stuck.

While the biggest north Alabama attraction  the U.S. Space & Rocket Center  celebrates mankinds relationship with space, the Cook Museum of Natural Science opening in Decatur this summer will focus on the wonders of Earth.

The $32 million museum in downtown Decatur is expected to be a game-changer for regional tourism with live animals, a jellyfish aquarium, mounted wildlife in lifelike settings and displays of minerals and gems.

A small natural history museum operated in Decatur for decades. More than 750,000 people toured the 5,000-square-foot original Cook museum from 1980 to 2016.

That was kind of the starting point, said Mike Taylor, marketing and public relations manager for the new museum, which opens June 9 at 133 Fourth Ave. SE. The expansion will showcase what you would see in nature if you were to go out right now.

Exhibits in the new 62,000-square-foot space will focus on Alabama because our executive director is very passionate about the fact that we are kind of the Amazon of the South here in Alabama, Taylor said. We are ranked very high in biodiversity. Thats a fact that a lot of people dont know.

A baby alligator, which can be found as far north as Wheeler Wildlife Refuge in Limestone County.

Market research told museum planners that people want to interact with exhibits.

From Birmingham to Nashville and from about Florence to Huntsville what everyone around here is interested in is something that shows nature in its natural state, but something you can see up close and get your hands on, Taylor said.

Visitors will build biomes, simulate volcanic eruptions, crawl into a beaver lodge, scan exhibit tags to learn more about displays and scramble around in a play area for younger children.

The Discover section will be an introduction to the museum with live amphibians and reptiles, including baby alligators, turtles and snakes. Looking Up will display the meteorite from the original museum. In Foundations, visitors can play with a kinetic sand table. Rivers and Streams will have the 600-gallon freshwater tank with life fish and turtles. The long-range plan includes an endangered green sea turtle.

The big saltwater aquarium is the centerpiece of the Oceans exhibit, which will feature a shell collection, live coral and fish and a smaller aquarium with a species of jellyfish known as Moon Jelly. The saltwater tank will be roughly 35 feet long, 7 feet deep and 7 feet wide, Taylor said. In Forests, dioramas will showcase different kinds of plants such as Alabamas carnivorous pitcher plant. Birds will be on the second-floor mezzanine.

A saltwater aquarium will feature fish found in Alabama's Gulf Coast waters.

If you look at the Forests exhibit, theres a tree called Big Tree, said Taylor. Its a replica of a tree in Sipsey Wilderness. We wanted to communicate with the public in kind of fun way what you would see if you were to go out in Alabama and North America. Forests will include a tree that kids can climb and a rope bridge to cross to a squirrels nest.

Rivers and Streams focuses on waterfowl. Obviously, being the River City thats a big exhibit for us, he said.

Although the non-profit museum carries the name of the family that owns Cooks Pest Control, Taylor said the two are not connected. It is, however, the realization of the namesake familys dream. Founders Hall will explain the museums history.

The opening of the Cook Museum in June 2019 marks the culmination of an approximately 50-year vision in the making, Brian Cook, Cooks president and board chairman said in a statement. My grandfather started this concept back in 1968 and the dream that was in his heart  to have a positive impact on generations to come  is coming to life in a powerful way this summer.

Live and pinned insects will be in the Wonderful World of Insects and Little Larvae area, with insect terrariums and the play area for younger visitors.

Educational classrooms, a cafe, community space and a retail store are also included. The fund-raising effort just crossed the $20 million mark, Taylor said.

Live and pinned insects will be in the Wonderful World of Insects and Little Larvae area, with insect terrariums and the play area for younger visitors.

Company beginnings

Most people who see bugs look for the closest shoe or can of spray. In 1928, John L. Cook saw a business opportunity.

He formed North Alabama Termite Control, which is now known as Cooks Pest Control Inc. and the eighth largest pest control company in the country.

John R. Cook took over after his father died. The company is in its fourth generation of ownership with Brian Cook, president and CEO. The regional pest management company has more than 1,600 employees and serves over 300,000 customers in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Tennessee.

In 1968, the Cook family opened a small museum with wildlife exhibits. John Cook Sr. would let the public view his insect collection by appointment. That turned out to be the larva stage for the Cook Natural History Museum opening in June.

Earth and space

Cook Museum Executive Director Schelly Corry moved from Dallas to be part of the museum expansion. Because Alabama ranks fifth in the U.S. in the number of species, North Alabama is the best place to build a natural science museum that shows some of the most amazing life you can find, she said.

In the Looking Up area of the museum, visitors will see what would happen if the Earth, sun or moon shifted only slightly.

Taylor hopes the natural history museum will be a good fit with the tourist attraction of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville.

This would be an alternate place to come see, he said. Its just a different feel. Being just outside of Huntsville, which is applied science, and being just outside the Arsenal and a lot of engineering jobs, its just a good complement.

Dr. Deborah Barnhart, USSRC CEO and Executive Director, welcomes the museum.

Between us the two institutions address every major Next Generation Science Standard, creating a robust science education for Alabamas children, Barnhart said. We address Earth, space and physical science while the Cook museum focuses on natural science and chemical science. We complement each others strengths.

Field trips for schools and home-schooled groups begin in the fall. Admission pricing will be announced in March. For information on working or volunteering there, see www.cookmuseum.org.
Formerly missing Madison County, Ala., girl Paxton Marie Glenn was picked up at a school earlier this week by two young acquaintances and not a dangerous stranger as widely rumored, the sheriffs office said today.

During the investigation information was developed and verified that Glenn was picked up by two juvenile acquaintances in the van that was captured on video, the sheriffs office said in a statement. Those acquaintances then transported Glenn to a location in Decatur and dropped her off.

Working with the FBI, Glenn was picked up at the Decatur location, taken to the Neaves Davis Center for Children in Huntsville and later returned to her parents custody.

Glenns case never met the criteria for an Amber Alert, the sheriffs office said, but an Emergency Missing Child Alert was released to media. Todays statement was released to counter widespread rumors of her abduction, a sheriffs spokesman said.

Glenn was last seen Tuesday getting into a van outside the Sparkman ninth grade building on Ford Chapel Road. Sheriffs spokesman Lt. Donny Shaw said then that they believed she left school voluntarily.
A Butler County Juvenile Probation Officer is accused of sex crimes involving minors under his supervision at least 20 years ago.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall on Friday announced the arrest of 63-year-old Terry Van Lewis. The Montgomery man is charged with one count of first-degree rape and two charges of first-degree sexual abuse.

Lewis surrendered at the Butler County Jail Friday and has since been released on $300,000 bond. Jail officials said a mugshot was not available.

His arrest followed indictments issued Tuesday by a Butler County grand jury. Specifically, one indictment charges that Lewis engaged in sexual intercourse with a member of the opposite sex by forcible compulsion, first-degree rape. The two remaining indictments charge that Lewis subjected another person to sexual contact by forcible compulsion.

The victims in the cases were juveniles who were under his supervision at the time. The approximate dates of the alleged offenses range from 1994 until 1999.

Marshall said no further information about the investigation or about Lewis alleged crimes are being released at this time. If convicted, Lewis faces a maximum penalty of life in prison and a $60,000 fine for the first-degree rape charge, which is a Class A felony. For each charge of first-degree sexual abuse, Lewis faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $15,000 fine. First-degree sexual abuse is a Class C felony.
Activists say Muslims are often victims of wrongful conviction as accused men reflect on case that ruined their lives.

Bhusawal, Maharashtra  On May 28, 1994, Farukh Ahmad Khan, a tall, slim man, was delivering a lecture to his students in Thane, Maharashtra, when he was told that a police officer was looking for him.

Khan, then 24, wanted to work abroad and had applied for a passport. He thought that the officers visit was related to his application.

The officer left a message for Khan to visit the local police station. When Khan arrived, he was escorted to the commissioners office for questioning.

He was asked whether he knew someone named Jamil Khan, and responded that Khan was his cousin.

He was then asked if he knew Ashiq Hussain Khandey, and responded that he didnt know anyone by this name.

Police described Khandey as a Kashmiri terrorist and accused Farukh of planning attacks in Maharashtra with him, saying the pair wanted to spread terrorism.

They then, he claimed, took him into custody and assaulted him.

Khan was unaware that in his hometown of Bhusawal, more than 400km away, police had already picked up Jamil and Yusuf Khan, his cousins.

With them, he became part of a group of Muslim men accused of planning to carry out bomb blasts across the state of Maharashtra, which is home to more than 100 million people, of which Mumbai is the capital.

For weeks, they appeared on the front pages of newspapers, slammed as terrorists.

Twelve people were accused initially  one accomplice gave evidence to the prosecution and escaped trial.

The eleven suspects  Jamil Ahmed Khan, Mohammed Yunus, Yusuf Khan, Wasim Asif, Ayyub Ismail Khan, Shaikh Shafi, Farukh Ahmad Khan, Abdul Qader Habibi, Syed Ashfaq Mir, Mumtaz Murtuza Mir and Mohammed Haroon Ansari  were accused of sedition and conspiring against the country.

We cried a lot in the courtroom and hugged each other. It took 25 long years for us to prove that we were innocent. Jamil Ahmed Khan, acquitted suspect

On February 27 this year, after a 25-year battle, they were all acquitted.

Police had initially claimed to have had information that Jamil, a member of now the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), along with his two cousins and other associates, were planning assaults against Hindus to avenge the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition.

Following the demolition of the Babri mosque by Hindu attackers in Ayodhya in December 1992, communal riots erupted in several cities, including Mumbai.

The tense situation worsened when in 1993, bomb blasts in Mumbai killed 257 people and injured hundreds.

As well as the sedition charges against the 11 men, police invoked the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, an anti-terrorism law which was used in India between 1985 and 1995.

After facing court in Bhusawal, the group was remanded in custody where they were allegedly tortured and forced to accept the charges.

Farukh Ahmad Khan, seen with his son at their house in Bhusawal, lost his job as a lecturer; he struggled to rebuild his life after being accused of terrorism [Bilal Kuchay/Al Jazeera]

We were accused of harbouring terrorists, criminal conspiracy, planning terror activities and so many other things. We kept saying that we dont know anything and are innocent, but the police kept torturing us, Khan told Al Jazeera.

The cops would tie our hands by rope behind the body, and stretch our legs in the opposite direction making a 180-degree angle. On several occasions, our hands were tied, and we would be hung upside down.

After torture, they would ask us to sign on blank papers.

They spent four months in jail before being released on bail by a special court that deals with terror cases in Nashik, a city in Maharashtra.

We never went to jail again, but we were not free also, said Jamil, earlier the prime suspect.

A life of discrimination

After being stained with the terrorist label, life was not easy. Jamil said he was viewed with suspicion, not only by police.

Khan said: Such was the environment in Bhusawal in 1994, that half of our friends had left the town with fear that police might arrest them as well. Many of our relatives and friends wouldnt even exchange greetings with us. We had become strangers among our own locality.

In the group, three were doctors and two were engineers. Abdul Qader Habibi now has a PhD.

Khan had a diploma in electronics and telecommunication and another in industrial electronics.

I wanted to work outside for a few years, make some savings and then move back to my city and start something of my own. That is why I had applied for the passport, but this case ruined my life, he told Al Jazeera.

After being accused, he lost his professional job. He now repairs home inverters for a living.

This case ruined our lives, he said.

Mohammed Yunus, 63, is a doctor by profession and runs a small clinic in his hometown.

After coming out of the jail on bail, for months people wouldnt visit my clinic. A prefix, TADA, was added to my name, he said, referring to the acronym for the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act.

Though TADA was repealed by the government in 1995, the case stalled because of administrative hurdles.

There is a systematic investigative bias in terror-related cases against certain communities in India. Whenever there is a terror attack, the first instinct is to arrest Muslims, which is very sad. Manisha Sethi, author and activist

The Maharashtra government in 2003 claimed that no offence was filed under TADA and recommended dropping proceedings.

But a judge in Nashik rejected the recommendations.

For years, the court didnt drop the TADA charges despite the state governments recommendations. We then approached the Supreme Court in 2012 appealing that charges under TADA be dropped against us, Jamil told Al Jazeera.

In 2016, they approached Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, a Muslim civil rights group, for legal aid.

After they received legal support, the group approached the Supreme Court again. On this occasion, the court directed the TADA court in Nashik to complete the trial in one year.

The trial began in July 2018.

Mohammad Yunus, a doctor, said people taunted him after he was accused [Bilal Kuchay/Al Jazeera]

When TADA court judge SC Khatti acquitted the men, we cried a lot in the courtroom and hugged each other. It took 25 long years for us to prove that we were innocent, said Jamil.

It was like Eid here, said Jamils wife, Rehana. There was so much happiness.

In December 2016, Innocence Network, which campaigns for the wrongfully prosecuted, released a report calling on the government to pay compensation to victims of wrongful convictions.

Indian officials behind wrongful arrests and prosecution should be held accountable, the report said.

There is a systematic investigative bias in terror-related cases against certain communities in India, said Manisha Sethi, an author and member of the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association human rights group.

Whenever there is a terror attack, the first instinct is to arrest Muslims, which is very sad.

Its unfortunate that there wasnt any discussion on that report. Unless the police and investigating agencies are made accountable, things wont change.

Muslims in India, according to several recent reports, believe they are unfairly targeted by police.

Arshad Madani, president of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind (Council of Muslim theologians in India) said that within moments of an attack, fingers point towards Muslims.

Action is not being taken against the officers involved in these bogus cases that have destroyed lives of thousands of innocent Muslims, he told Al Jazeera. And the reason given is that it would demoralise the police force.

Are police superior to people? This lack of accountability and denying of justice only shows that no matter to what extent injustices are done to Muslims in India, their perpetrators will not be punished.
As the French President Emmanuel Macron tours East Africa, he is certain to get a cordial welcome. If everything goes to plan, it will be all smiles and few uncomfortable questions. However, this should not be the case. Macron has called for an international conference on the return of African art and artefacts looted during colonialism. But art and artefacts are not the only things that should be returned.

The colonial archive, the thousands of official records and documents that trace the history of subjugation, oppression and looting of the continent by the European powers is largely resident in Europe. And it is not a history that the Europeans have been eager to reveal, preferring to think of their time as overlords of the continent as something of a benevolent occupation.

Yet, as Howard French noted in the New York Times two decades ago, In the closing years of this century, though, historians, political scientists and other students of African affairs have begun a searching re-examination of the continents recent past. Increasingly, they have concluded that many of its most persistent curses  from the plague of ethnic hatred widely known as tribalism to endemic official corruption  have powerful roots that are at least partly traceable to European subjugation and rule.

Yet, a more comprehensive re-examination of this history, especially by the Africans who daily endure its worst legacies, is made difficult by the fact that the documents on which it is inscribed are retained by the architects of the oppression. France, for example, has refused to return Algerian colonial records. The Algerian government wants to take back their archives. For us, they are not Algerian but French, so its a big political problem, says Herve Lemoine, head of the National Archives. The only reason why it would be a political problem would be that the French would be potentially handing over the power to re-frame history. In this regard, it is important to contextualise Macrons call for the return of artefacts to Africa.

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In fact, just three years ago, the French government asked the National Archives to collect private souvenirs from West Africans relating to the colonial period. In the official archives in France, we have official data and records, produced by the government but we dont have the vision of the people of those countries. For historians and for citizens, its important to understand the relationship between the colonial administration and the people of those countries, says Lemoine without a hint of irony. One is left to wonder whether the need to understand history is any less felt in West Africa.

In the case of the British Empire, the re-evaluation of the impact of its policies has been made unnecessarily difficult by the UK governments illegal, widespread and systematic destruction, theft and concealment of colonial-era documents in an effort to cover up its crimes. In the last decade or so, however, some of these hidden archives have come to light, showing the scale of the second attempt at appropriation and alienation of African history. A 2015 article in Vice by Katie Engelhart details how in 2011, after repeated denials, the UK government owned up to possessing 20,000 files from 37 colonies in Migrated Archives hidden in a secret facility at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire. Three years later, an audit discovered yet another 170,000 Colonial Office documents, some of them stamped Top Secret. In fact, as late as the 1980s, the British were still destroying records on colonial Kenya.

The effects of such an attempt at hiding away and even erasing history can be seen even at the highest levels of the British political establishment. When a recent documentary aired on Al Jazeera highlighted the plight of African World War II veterans abandoned by the British Empire, it inspired a new season of carefully curated imperial guilt. There must be an urgent inquiry into Britain having paid its African and Asian soldiers according to the colour of their skin, thundered Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the UKs opposition Labour Party in a tweet.

It was an amazing demand. Surely the man who could one day be prime minister would not be so completely ignorant of the nature of the colonial empire his forefathers built, would he? That a racist enterprise which murdered and oppressed millions of Africans and Asians, stole their wealth and land, and profited from their forced labour also paid its troops according to skin colour should not come as any sort of surprise.

While it is important to ensure justice for African veterans or their widows and families, as well as the return of stolen cultural treasures, it must be recognised that for the most part, these are feel-good actions that do not cost the former imperial powers much loss of face. In fact, as the Al Jazeera documentary shows, the British government has sought to spin payments it has made to its former African soldiers as acts of charity, rather than restitution. Similarly, Macron risks little by offering to, temporarily, return the stolen art. The report he commissioned that recommended African art and artefacts held in French cultural institutions be returned, characterised the collections as part of a system of appropriation and alienation that takes away from Africans their spiritual nourishment that is the foundation of their humanity. Their return can thus be spun as an act of benevolence. In similar fashion, the British Museum has also struck a deal to loan back to Nigeria bronze statues stolen by British soldiers from the Kingdom of Benin more than a century ago.

Such actions seek only to preserve the paternalistic relationships between Africa and Europe, where the former have no right to demand justice and must somehow earn the privilege of getting back their stolen property by proving they can properly preserve it. The idea that Europe can continue to keep what it looted because Africans lack the capacity to take care of their own things is as racist and colonial an argument as any made a hundred years ago.

However, colonial archives are a completely different kettle of fish. In there lie the uncomfortable truths of colonial occupation that the likes of Macron and Corbyn do not want to face up to. While the latter has stated that the British should, at the very least, be willing to discuss the return of anything stolen or taken from occupied or colonial possession  including artefacts looted from other countries in the past, it is far from clear whether that includes the colonial archive.

Fully opening up that archive and returning the documents to the countries they were taken from would be a significant first step in a long-overdue journey of reckoning. Returning colonial archives would make Africans the curators of their own history, allowing them, and others, to begin constructing more accurate narratives of colonial experience. It would lead to a better and more grounded understanding of what it is that Europe owes, not just a few aging soldiers, but all the societies she colonised.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Shootings at Christchurch mosques are only the latest on a long list of acts of white supremacist terrorism in the West.

Todays New Zealand mosque shootings, which killed at least 49 people and were allegedly carried out by white supremacists, are only the latest on a long list of recent acts of white supremacist terrorism. Despite the growing and constant threat, Western governments have failed to adequately address the danger of white supremacy.

An abbreviated list of recent acts of white supremacist terrorism includes Robert Gregory Bowers killing of 12 Jewish worshippers at a Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018; Alexandre Bissonnettes massacre of six Muslims in the Quebec City mosque in 2017; Dylann Roofs murdering of nine black Christian parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015; and Anders Behring Breiviks slaughter of 77 people in Norway in 2011.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, numerous other white supremacist plots, including some that planned to kill as many as 30,000 people, have been foiled by law enforcement in the United States. Just last month, the American FBI arrested Christopher Paul Hasson, a white supremacist and lieutenant in the US coastguard, for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks against black and liberal politicians and media personalities.

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All of this is to say nothing of less recent white supremacist history, including anti-black violence perpetrated by USs Ku Klux Klan (KKK), thousands of 19th and 20th century lynchings of black Americans by white supremacist mobs, millions of black people murdered during the African slave trade, or millions of brown people killed during the peak periods of Western colonialism. Scholars and analysts have cogently and repeatedly argued that both the African slave trade and Western colonialism were carried out largely in the service of white supremacy.

Although US media and political elites spend considerable time discussing Islamic terrorism, far-right, white supremacist terrorism is far more common. A recent study showed that two-thirds of terrorist attacks in the US are carried out by far-right individuals and groups. Research by the Southern Poverty Law Center, meanwhile, shows that most far-right violence is unambiguously linked to white supremacy.

In spite of the obvious and continued threat of white supremacist terrorism, Western societies still arguably do not take the danger as seriously as they should. A recent New York Times report showed that for decades USs domestic counterterrorism strategy has ignored the rising danger of far-right extremism, which, the report also noted, is tied explicitly to white supremacy.

The propping up of white supremacy

Political movements may help explain why many Western societies do not take the threat of white supremacy as seriously as they should  many Western political leaders are themselves beholden to white supremacy.

White nationalism has taken firm root in both European and American political mainstreams. In Europe, white nationalists have gained political traction and influenced elections and referendums, including the United Kingdoms 2016 Brexit vote, while in the US, President Donald Trump and numerous Republican politicians have been linked to white supremacy.

White supremacist and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke explained why white supremacists voted for Trump in USs 2016 presidential election, and Trump made headlines in 2016 when he refused to disavow Dukes support. In 2017, Trump famously equivocated on the KKK and called white supremacists protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia very fine people. Earlier this decade, Trump spearheaded campaigns challenging the intelligence, grades, and citizenship of the USs first black President, Barack Obama.

White supremacy isnt always violent, at least not at the level of the individual. Some effects of white supremacy are more insidious, but also more widespread and common. Scientific studies on implicit biases show that white people view black people as intellectually inferior and more threatening, among other things.

Implicit biases help explain why, for example, black Americans have more difficulty in obtaining loans and getting jobs, even after all non-race variables are controlled for. Perhaps most relevant to todays anti-Muslim massacres in New Zealand is research showing that large proportions of white people in western societies tend to view Muslims and other brown immigrants as subhuman.

Another problem directly relevant to todays New Zealand massacres is media coverage. Western news media coverage of Muslims tends to be negative and highly stereotypical. Violent crimes carried out by Muslims are highlighted in reportage, while violent crimes perpetrated against Muslims are often de-emphasised or ignored.

One peer-reviewed quantitative analysis showed that acts of terrorism committed by Muslims receive 357 percent more news attention than acts of terrorism committed by non-Muslims. Additionally, the word terrorism is often ignored in the context of non-Muslim violence and used exclusively in news reports describing Muslim crimes.

Political elites and media coverage, then, are two factors helping to explain the largely negative perceptions of Muslims, black people, immigrants, and other minorities in contemporary Western societies. Todays shooters in New Zealand werent born to hate Muslims or any other minority group. They were taught, just as all other white supremacist terrorists are taught, via bigoted discourses which have attained hegemonic status in western societies.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad accused by Afghan official of not knowing how to negotiate with Taliban.

A senior Afghan official has accused the US of delegitimising the Kabul government by excluding it from peace talks with the Taliban.

Hamdullah Mohib, a national security adviser to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, levelled a fierce attack on US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad on Thursday, suggesting the veteran US diplomat held ambitions to run for political office in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad was born in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, but has worked in the US government since 1984, first in the Reagan administration, then under Bill Clinton, George Bush and briefly under Barack Obama.

In recent months, Khalilzad has held a series of talks with the Taliban, in an attempt to end the more than 17-year conflict in the country.





Knowing Ambassador Khalilzads history, his own personal history, he has ambitions in Afghanistan. He was wanting to run for president twice, Mohib told the Reuters news agency.

We think either Zal, Ambassador Khalilzad, doesnt know how to negotiate (or) there may be other reasons behind what hes doing.

The reason he is delegitimising the Afghan government and weakening it, and at the same time elevating the Taliban can only have one approach. Its definitely not for peace.

Mohibs comments were the most strident public complaints to date by an Afghan official over the Kabuls governments exclusion from negotiations with the Taliban.

The talks have gained momentum in recent months as the United States has decided to engage with the armed group, which has been waging a deadly rebellion since it was removed from power in 2001.

The latest round of US-Taliban talks, which lasted for 16 days, ended on Monday in Doha, Qatar. The sides reported progress, but no final deal on a withdrawal of US-led international forces.

The perception in Afghanistan and people in government think that perhaps, perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government of which he will then become the viceroy, said Mohib.

Viceroy is a politically loaded term in South Asia as it was the title of the colonial administrator of British-ruled India.

After previous rounds of talks, Khalilzad typically travelled to Kabul to brief Afghan officials  but not this time. On Tuesday, he flew straight back to Washington.

The Taliban rejects direct negotiations with the Kabul government, accusing it of being a US puppet.

Attacks on Khalilzad are attacks on the US

Mohibs remarks drew a strong admonition from David Hale, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs.

In a meeting with Mohib, Hale rejected his attack on the US approach to reconciliation, Robert Palladino, the departments deputy spokesman, said in a statement.

The departments number three diplomat reminded Mohib that Khalilzad represents Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and that attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are attacks on the department and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process, Palladino said.

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Hale expressed our commitment to the Afghan governments stability and full participation in the peace process, Palladino said.

US negotiators have been pressing the Taliban to accept a ceasefire and talks on Afghanistans political future with representatives of Afghan society, including Ghanis government.

But the talks have primarily focused on the Talibans counterterrorism assurances and a US troop withdrawal.

The lead Taliban negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, on Thursday, assured Afghans that they had no reason to fear a settlement.

Afghan officials worry that Khalilzads priority is securing an end to the USs longest war at Kabuls expense.
The ruling in favour of the Ngaliwurru and Nungali groups paves the way for billions of dollars in compensation.

Sydney, Australia  The High Court of Australia has handed down the biggest native title ruling affecting Aboriginal ownership of the land in decades, amid claims that billions of dollars in compensation will need to be paid by governments to indigenous groups.

Native title refers to the rights of Australias indigenous people to their traditional land and water recognised by Australian common law.

Lawyers, including those representing mining companies, said the ruling in favour of the Ngaliwurru and Nungali Aboriginal groups  from a remote part of the Northern Territory  paved the way for billions of dollars in compensation nationally.

The High Courts decision will likely to trigger compensation applications from many of the hundreds of native title holder groups around Australia, said Tony Denholder, in the wake of a case that a federal court ruled on in 2016  before the High Court became involved.

The Native Title Act came about after the landmark Mabo decision in 1993 overturned the British claim that Australia was terra nullius  nobodys land. It found that Aboriginal rights to some, but by no means all land, survived colonisation and were not extinguished.

Since then, Aboriginal groups have been able to file native title claims over large parts of the country.





Now, the High Court has handed down another landmark ruling on the matter of paying compensation for the loss of those rights  the loss of economic income related to the land and the loss of a spiritual connection to the land. Or in other words, putting a financial price on the severing of cultural ties.

In 2016, the Ngaliwurru and Nungali Aboriginal groups awarded $2.3m in damages because the federal court found that their native title rights were extinguished by the Northern Territory government when it built roads and infrastructure through their country near Timber Creek in the 1980s and 90s.

About $1m of that was for spiritual harm, which the Northern Territory and Federal governments argued was excessive. But the High Court this week disagreed.

Megan Brayne, a native title lawyer and director of the Comhar Group, told Al Jazeera it was the most important native title ruling in more than 20 years.

This is a very important case because it is the first time the High Court has set out the principles for compensation. State lawyers will be particularly interested in analysing their compensation liabilities, she said.

Where companies are operating on land post-1975 there will be lawyers looking at this.

Racial discrimination act

That 1975 date is key because it is the year Australia brought in the Racial Discrimination Act  18 years before the Native Title Act, but just as important.

Only then did governments have to treat the property rights of Aboriginal Australians the same as other Australians, explained James Walkley, a native title lawyer with Chalk and Behrendt.

Since the first colonisation of Australia, Aboriginal people have been dispossessed of property and culture, [but] only since 1975 has the loss of native title become compensable.

Unwittingly, state and territory governments, or mining and pastoral companies working with the blessing of the government, continued to extinguish native title by their activities, right up until that landmark Mabo ruling and the Native Title Act in 1993.

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Others step forward

The Ngaliwurru and Nungali groups were assisted in their fight for compensation by the Northern Land Council  the major Aboriginal representative group on land matters in the Northern Territory  which took the case to court.

Interim CEO Jak Ah Kit confirmed other groups were in the works waiting to take advantage of the ruling.

Already Ive been notified of other groups, he told Al Jazeera.

This is a ruling that brings a different light on native title and the cultural and spiritual loss, let alone the inability to take any economic opportunities [from the land]. We need to revisit those cases where they were unjustly compulsorily acquired by governments, and well then need to take instructions from them, he said.

The whole board game changes.

Brayne said while the ruling provides significant guidance in looming court cases, there were still many matters left open by the case, not least how to determine the appropriate amounts of compensation.

She remained hopeful agreements could be found before the more costly path of litigation.

If not, we can expect therell be more matters before the courts, said Brayne.


Mike Pompeo says US will deny visas to ICC personnel investigating possible war crimes by US troops in Afghanistan.

The United States will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court (ICC) personnel seeking to investigate possible war crimes by US forces or allies in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said.

The ICC is attacking Americas rule of law, Pompeo told reporters in Washington on Friday.

Im announcing a policy of US visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of US personnel.

We are determined to protect the American and allied military and civilian personnel from living in fear of unjust prosecution for actions taken to defend our great nation.

US officials have long regarded the Netherlands-based ICC with hostility, arguing that American courts are capable of handling any allegations against US forces, and Pompeo framed the action against the ICC as necessary to prevent the international tribunal from infringing on US sovereignty.

These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis, without allies consent, he added.

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Pompeo said the policy was already being implemented but would not elaborate, citing visa privacy laws.

These visa restrictions will not be the end of our efforts, he said. Were prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions, if the ICC does not change its course.

Pompeos announcement was the first concrete action the US has taken against the ICC since the White House threatened reprisals against the body last year.

Undeterred

The Hague-based court, the first global tribunal for war crimes, issued a statement saying it would continue to operate undeterred by the US action.

The court is an independent and impartial judicial institution crucial for ensuring accountability for the gravest crimes under international law, the statement said.

The ICC, as a court of law, will continue to do its independent work, undeterred, in accordance with its mandate and the overarching principle of the rule of law.

The US has never joined the ICC, where a prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, asked judges in November 2017 to initiate an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Afghan national security forces, Taliban and Haqqani network fighters, as well as US forces and intelligence officials in Afghanistan since May 2003.

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The prosecutions request said there is information that members of the US military and intelligence agencies committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations, principally in the 2003-2004 period.

Judges are reviewing all material submitted by the prosecutor, and must decide whether to authorise an investigation.

The Palestinians have also asked the court to bring cases against Israel.

Al Jazeeras Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington, said ICC investigators were also seeking to probe the US militarys conduct not just in Afghanistan, but also in black sites that we now know was spread across the globe, where [people] were held in secret detention for months, and where some say detainees were tortured.

Misguided and dangerous

Supporters of the court slammed Pompeos announcement on Friday.

Human Rights Watch called it a thuggish attempt to penalise investigators at the ICC.

The Trump administration is trying an end run around accountability, it said.

Taking action against those who work for the ICC sends a clear message to torturers and murderers alike: Their crimes may continue unchecked.

Amnesty International described the move as the latest attack on international justice and international institutions by an administration hellbent on rolling back human rights protections.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents three people before the ICC who say they were tortured in Afghanistan, called the decision misguided and dangerous and an unprecedented attempt to skirt international accountability for well-documented war crimes that haunt our clients to this day.

James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, said Pompeos remarks reflected the administrations view that international law matters only when it is aligned with US national interests.

With 123 member states, including the entire European Union, the ICC was established in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity when a country is unable or unwilling to prosecute perpetrators.

Other major powers, including Russia and China, are not members.
Victim of New Zealands worst ever mass shooting greeted the attacker at entrance of mosque before being shot dead.

A Muslim worshipper, who was among the first people to be killed in New Zealands worst ever mass shooting, appeared to say Hello, brother to the attacker just moments before he was shot dead.

According to a live stream video of the attack, the man, who is yet to be identified, could be overheard saying Hello, brother as the gunman approached the entrance of the Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch.

At least 49 people, including children, were killed in Fridays attacks targeting the Al Noor and Linwood mosques. Police said on Saturday morning that 42 people were being treated for wounds following the terrorist attack. Two of them, including a four-year-old child, were in critical condition.

Video footage of the assault, which has been widely shared on social media, showed a gunman shooting indiscriminately at worshippers as they ran for safety or lay huddled on the floor.

A 28-year-old Australian man, who police have not identified, has been charged with murder. He is set to appear in court on Saturday.

The reply was three bullets

As the attack shocked New Zealand, a nation where violent crime is rare, several social media users hailed the Muslim man who greeted the attacker before he was murdered.

Hello, Brother were the last words of the first New Zealand victim. As he faced a rifle, his last words were peaceful words of unconditional love. DO NOT tell me that nonviolence is weak or pacifism is cowardice, one Twitter user said.

Hello brother a word came out of a pure soul filled with a peaceful faith. Hello brother was said to a killer with a rifle pointed to this greeting. Hello brother he said thinking that he is talking to a human with soul and feelings. Hello brother was shot dead, another wrote.

Hello brother and the reply was three bullets  Bi-ayyi thanbin qutilat (For what crime. She was killed) [Quran: 81, v9], said another.

"I don't know if i'm going to be feeling safe walking by myself wearing my headscarf."  Christchurch resident Muslims in #Christchurch are in fear following deadly mass shootings that killed at least 49 people at two mosques. #NewZealandShooting pic.twitter.com/MVDTbvQWpF  Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 15, 2019

Aziz Helou, a resident of Melbourne, Australia, wrote on Facebook that amongst the chaos of today, the evil we both heard and saw, that one incident stood out.

The first Muslim man to die, his final words were hello brother. These words were uttered by a man who symbolised Islam. He had a rifle pointed at him by a man with clear intentions to kill and how did he respond? With anger? With aggression? No, with the most gentle and sincere greeting of hello brother.

Perhaps this hero was trying to defuse the situation? Maybe Allah used this man to show the world the kindness that is Islam. I dont know but what I want, is to make certain, is that this detail isnt lost amongst you. That this mans final act was an Islamic one, a sincere courageous and warm way to stop violence instead of fuelling it.

Attack blamed on rising Islamophobia

In a social media video, former New Zealand rugby star Sonny Bill Williams gave a tearful tribute to those killed.

Williams, a practising Muslim, struggled to hold back tears in the 64-second Twitter post, telling families of those killed that you are all in Paradise.





I heard the news. I couldnt put it into words how Im feeling right now, Williams said.

Just sending my duas (prayers) to the families.

Before the attacks took place, the gunman reportedly published an Islamophobic manifesto on Twitter. He then live-streamed his rampage, according to an analysis by the AFP news agency.

Political leaders across the world condemned the killings, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan describing them as the latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan also blamed the attacks on rising Islamophobia.

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam and 1.3 billion Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim, said Khan.

This has been done deliberately to also demonise legitimate Muslim political struggles.
Measures target Russian officials over Moscows actions against Ukraine, including 2018 naval clash in the Kerch Strait.

The United States, in coordination with Canada and the European Union, has slapped new sanctions on more than a dozen Russian officials and businesses, citing Moscows continued aggression in Ukraine.

Six Russian officials, six defence firms and two energy and construction firms were targeted, either over the seizure of Ukrainian vessels in the Kerch Strait, or for their activities in Russian-annexed Crimea or separatist eastern Ukraine, the US Treasury said in a statement on Friday.

The United States and our transatlantic partners will not allow Russias continued aggression against Ukraine to go unchecked, said Steve Mnuchin, the US treasury secretary.

This joint initiative with our partners in the European Union and Canada reinforces our shared commitment to impose targeted and meaningful sanctions in response to the Kremlins attempts to disregard international norms and undermine Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity, he added.

The US sanctions freeze all property and interests in property belonging to the designated individuals and entities, and prohibits US persons from transacting with them.

Four of the individuals are border guard or coastguard officials, singled out for their role in a November 25, 2018, naval confrontation, in which Russian ships fired on and seized three Ukrainian vessels in the narrow Kerch Strait linking the Black and Azov seas near Crimea.

The Russian navy captured 24 Ukrainian sailors during the clash.

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Canada imposed sanctions on 114 people and 15 entities in response to Russias military action against the Ukrainian ships, while the EU sanctioned eight more Russians over the standoff.

The decision takes the number of people blacklisted by the bloc over the crisis in Ukraine to 170 persons and 44 entities.

The EU said its sanctions affected senior security service officials and military commanders accused of preventing Ukrainian ships from reaching port.

Attack on Ukrainian ships

The US, Canada and the EU on Friday again pressed for Moscow to release the detained Ukrainian crew.

Canada and its allies are unwavering in our support for Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russias provocations in the Kerch Strait and its illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Crimea will not go unchecked, said Chrystia Freeland, Canadas foreign minister.

Robert Palladino, a spokesman for the US State Department, called on Russia to respect Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity.

He added: We call upon Russia to immediately return to Ukraine the seized vessels and arrested crew members, and keep the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov open to ships transiting to and from Ukrainian ports.

The US also imposed sanctions on two Ukrainian separatists  Aleksey Naydenko and Vladimir Vysotsky  involved in organising November elections in the breakaway east, which Washington says were a sham.

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The six defence firms were targeted over their operations in Crimea, where the US says several misappropriated Ukrainian state assets to provide services to the Russian military.

Among them are Russian shipbuilding giant Zelenodolsk, the hydroacoustic equipment producer Okeanpribor, a diesel engine supplier to the Russian military, Zvezda, and an electronic parts supplier to the military, Fiolent.

Political scheming

Separately on Friday, Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska sued the US alleging that it had overstepped its legal bounds in imposing sanctions on his companies.

The billionaire was slapped with sanctions in April last year, which targeted tycoons with close ties to the Kremlin.

In a legal filing, Deripaska asked the US District Court in Washington to block the US Treasury Department from using the devastating power of such economic sanctions. He claimed his net worth has dropped by $7.5bn because of the measures.

I have spent 30 years of my life building companies that are major players in the global economy, and will not let that hard work  along with millions of jobs and individual livelihoods  be destroyed by political scheming, he said in the statement sent by his spokeswoman.
Chinas economic slowdown and the ongoing trade war with the United States topped the agenda of Chinese legislators who gathered in Beijing.

They endorsed a foreign investment law in the Chinese parliament aimed at appeasing the concerns of trading partners in Washington and elsewhere.

Al Jazeeras Adrian Brown reports from the Chinese capital.
The drive-by shooting has sparked fears of a return of mob violence of the past.

Investigators in New York are searching for an attacker who killed an alleged gangster, Franky Boy Cali, outside his home on Wednesday night.

The drive-by shooting has sparked fears of a return of the mafia killings portrayed in the Sopranos TV series and Hollywood movies.

Police fear the murder of Cali will provoke revenge attacks.

Al Jazeeras Gabriel Elizondo reports from New York.
A huge crowd has gathered in the Algerian capital to protest for a fourth consecutive Friday demanding urgent change and an end to the rule of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has been in power for 20 years.

Demonstrators crammed streets and squares in central Algiers after Friday prayers, many draped in Algerias red, green and white flag. Reuters news agency said protesters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, describing the rally as the biggest since the start of the rallies last month.

Demonstrations also took place in Bejaia, Oran, Batna, Tizi Ouzou and other cities.

The rally was the first major test of whether 82-year-old Bouteflika has calmed anger on the streets with his surprise announcement on Monday that he would not seek reelection but would instead cancel the presidential poll scheduled for April 18.

You pretend to understand us, we will pretend to listen to you, read a banner held aloft by the mostly young demonstrators.

The options for the authority to stay in power have become nil, law student Kenza Sulaimani was quoted as saying by the DPA news agency. We dont want to see anyone belonging to the present regime.

While Fridays protest in Algiers was mostly peaceful, a total of 75 protesters were arrested and 11 policemen were lightly injured.

Meanwhile, Algerias ruling FLN party showed more signs of turning its back on Bouteflika, with one senior figure saying in an interview overnight that the long-serving president was history now.

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Former spokesman Hocine Kheldoun, who talked to Ennahar television late on Thursday, became one of the most senior FLN officials to break with Bouteflika publicly, saying the party had to look forward and support the aims of demonstrators.

A former minister who is familiar with Bouteflikas inner circle told the Reuters news agency that the president could not survive given the pressure building against him.

Game over. Bouteflika has no choice but to quit now, the former minister said on condition of anonymity.









Vote cancelled

Protesters were initially overjoyed when Bouteflika announced he would not stand again, but his move to cancel the vote prompted accusations of tricks and set off a new round of demonstrations.

He has also named a new prime minister, replacing the unpopular Ahmed Ouyahia with former interior minister Noureddine Bedoui, who, on Thursday, defended the postponement of the polls.

The protest movement has been led by students in a country where half the population is under the age of 30 and youth unemployment has spurred anger against a government seen as out of touch.

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The military, which has traditionally played a behind-the-scenes power-broker role, has distanced itself from Bouteflika and stayed in its barracks throughout the crisis. It is expected to retain influence under all scenarios.

Bouteflika, who uses a wheelchair and has rarely appeared in public since suffering a stroke in 2013, has promised a national conference to carry out reforms.

The president said new elections would be held before the end of 2019, suggesting he may stay in office for another year.
A new survey from MTV Entertainment Group and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 46% of Americans in Generation Z, those age 13 to 24, said the pandemic has made it harder to pursue their education or career goals, compared to 36% of Millennials and 31% of Generation X. Have you experienced similar negative impacts from the pandemic?

You voted:
Israels military says attacks in response to rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli civilians  a claim the group denies.

Israel has launched air attacks on Gaza hours after rockets were allegedly fired near Tel Aviv, raising fears of a major escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Explosions were heard in the Gaza Strip early on Friday and Palestinian witnesses said Israeli warplanes bombed Hamas security positions. Four Palestinians were wounded in the raids, the enclaves health ministry said.

The Israeli military, in a post on Twitter, said it targeted 100 Hamas targets in Gaza, including an office complex used to plan and command the groups activities, an underground complex that served as its main-rocket manufacturing site, and a centre used for drone development.

The Israeli military said the attacks were in response to rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli civilians  a claim the group has denied.

Palestinian news media reported raids throughout Gaza, from Rafah in the south to the north of the densely populated coastal strip that is home to two million Palestinians.

Maher Abdullah, a programme officer at Save the Children charity, said he and his family stayed awake all night because of the bombings in Gaza City.

My children were already asleep but then the heavy bombardments started and they woke up screaming, he said in a statement.

We tried to reassure them that it was thunder, but they know now that thunder doesnt shake a whole building the way ours was  What happened last night has happened many times and we fear for what will happen next.

#Photos of the destruction caused by the Israeli occupation strikes on the Gaza strip last night.#GazaUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/yqVMW35KQ8  Said Shoaib (@saidshouib) March 15, 2019

The late-night attack on Tel Aviv, Israels densely populated commercial and cultural capital, marked a dramatic escalation in hostilities. It was the first time the city had been targeted since a 2014 war between Israel and Hamas.

The rockets triggered air raid sirens across the city. Explosions were heard in Tel Aviv and witnesses said Iron Dome interceptor missiles were fired skyward and detonated  although the military said no rockets were shot down.

I heard the rocket and I heard the siren going off. It was a bit surprising, I didnt think that, you know, it could really reach Tel Aviv, said resident Yonah Zeff.

The salvo missed built-up areas and caused no casualties or damage.

Ron Huldai, mayor of Tel Aviv, said he had ordered the city to open public air raid shelters as a protective measure. But he said there were no special instructions and encouraged residents to stick to their daily routines.

Continue life as usual, he told Channel 10 TV. Be calm, but be alert.





Against national consensus

Hamas has denied responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, saying the rockets were launched when the groups military wing was meeting with Egyptian mediators to try to strengthen a ceasefire with Israel.

In an unusual step that indicated Hamas was attempting to prevent further escalation, the interior ministry in Gaza said the rocket fire went against the national consensus and promised to take action against the perpetrators.

Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, two smaller Gaza armed factions, also denied responsibility.

These accusations are mere lies by the Israeli occupation, said Daoud Shihab, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad. Our movement and its military wing the Al-Quds Brigades did not fire any rockets, he told Palestinian news agency Quds Network.

Israel has long said it holds Hamas responsible for all violence from Gaza, controlled by the group since 2007.

The sudden outburst of fighting comes at a sensitive time for both sides. Israel is holding national elections in less than a month. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is locked in a tight fight for re-election and could face heavy criticism from his opponents if he is seen as ineffective against the violence.

Netanyahu met with defence chiefs at military headquarters in Tel Aviv after the rockets were fired, and Israels response began later.

Naftali Bennett, Israels education minister, called for action against Hamas, saying: Its time to defeat Hamas. Its time to act unilaterally and demilitarise Hamas in order to defend Israeli citizens.

High tensions





Likewise, Hamas has come under rare public criticism in Gaza for the harsh conditions in the territory.

An Israeli-Egyptian blockade, combined with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and mismanagement by the Hamas government, have fueled an economic crisis in the territory. Residents have little desire for another war with Israel.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since the group seized control of Gaza.

Hamas possesses a big arsenal of rockets and missiles, but it has sought to contain violence with Israel since the 2014 last war.

Tensions have been high for the past year along the Israel-Gaza frontier since Palestinians began popular protests near Israels fence west of the Gaza Strip.

The response from the Israeli military has often been lethal, with around 200 Palestinians killed in the demonstrations.

About 60 more Palestinians have died in other incidents, including exchanges of fire across the border. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed by Palestinian fire.
Marielle Franco was killed a year ago but has since become a symbol of resistance in Brazil.

Sao Paulo, Brazil  Woman, black, mother, lesbian, from the favelas, open about sexuality and Rios problems, and on top of all this, a human rights activist.

Thats how Marielle Franco once described herself in an event in Rio de Janeiro, the city where she was elected a councilwoman. And thats also why she was killed.

The black activist and Rio de Janeiro councilwoman was killed on March 14, 2018, in a drive-by shooting. It took police 363 days to arrest two former policemen allegedly involved in her murder, which authorities say was politically motivated.

A year later, thousands gathered across the country on Thursday to demand justice and answers for the real question: Who ordered Marielles killing?

We are all outraged, we are sad, Monica Benicio, Marielles wife, told Al Jazeera. But theres also a feeling of courage, of hope. Because Marielles figure has become a symbol of resistance and the feeling of solidarity is also a big driver for the events today, she said.

Regarding Francos case, Monica said, the real answer is yet to be known.

Who pulls the trigger isnt the only one killing, she said.

Franco was an outspoken defender of women, black and LGBT rights and often criticised police brutality.





How many have to die?

In Sao Paulo, hundreds gathered at the city centre to remember her. Her face plastered across numerous banners and flags and her name echoed by the voices of those demanding justice. A group of black women on top of a speaker bus, chanted, Marielle asked and Ill ask again, how many people have to die for things to change?

A few minutes later they recited the names of several slain activists and female figures in Brazilian politics. After each name, the crowd replied, present!

We are not going to let her name be forgotten, said Ediane Nascimento, one of the protesters.

They tried to silence us but only woke us up, now we are millions shouting Marielle lives, she told Al Jazeera.

Nascimento, who wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, is black, lesbian and comes from the suburbs, like Marielle.

Thats why shes so important to me, she represents me, she said.

A few metres away, a 17-year-old holds a card she wrote reading, we have to keep fighting.

Mayara Valeria was with her family and joined the crowd singing, Marielle lives and well always live, black women will never stop fighting.

We still have a lot way to go, we still have a lot of people dying, or trying to speak who cant, she said.

Seeds planted

Guilherme Boulos, leader of PSOL, Francos political party, said her death inspired many black women to run in the 2018 elections. Last year saw a record number of seats taken by black women.

When [Marielle Franco] was killed, she planted these seeds, Boulos told Al Jazeera from the protest in Sao Paulo.

They killed the person but the ideals, the values Marielle represented, they cannot kill those, he said. Marielles strength and memory remain alive.

As night fell and thunder and rain came down, the protesters stood their ground, their fists in the air, singing songs by mostly black Brazilian artists.

A woman with tears running down her face read one of Francos most well-known quotes.

I want people to think where my people will be in 20 years And they need to be alive.
North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a ban on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, news reports from Pyongyang have said quoting a senior diplomat.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top US officials for the breakdown of last months summit in Hanoi between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Russias TASS news agency and the Associated Press said on Friday.

We have no intention to yield to the US demands [at the Hanoi summit] in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind, TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States, Tass quoted Choe as saying.

Kim is set to make an official announcement soon on his position regarding the denuclearisation talks with the US and the Norths further actions, it added, citing Choe.

Gangster-like stand

Choe said Washington threw away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, the AP reported.

I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the US will eventually put the situation in danger, AP quoted her as saying.

But she added: Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful.

Choes remarks echoed the Norths usual rhetoric at tense points in its dealings with Washington.

She said statements by senior Trump advisers since the summit have further worsened the climate.

In Washington, Pompeo and Bolton disputed the allegation. They are wrong about that. I was there, Pompeo said on Friday. Bolton said in any case Trump is our decision-maker.

Pompeo said the US expects Kim to live up to his promise to Trump to maintain the moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests.

In Hanoi, on multiple occasions, he spoke directly to the president and made a commitment that he would not resume nuclear testing nor would he resume missile testing, Pompeo said. So thats Chairman Kims word. We have every expectation he will live up to that commitment.





South Koreas presidential office Cheong Wa Dae has come out to say Choes comments alone are insufficient to gauge the current situation, and that it is monitoring it closely.

It reiterated it is committed to doing whatever it takes to reopen negotiations between North Korea and the US.

Chinas Prime Minister Li Keqiang urged patience and further dialogue between North Korea and the US.

The peninsula problem can be said to be complicated and long-standing, and it cannot be solved overnight, Li told an annual news conference on Friday, although his remarks were not made in response to the TASS report.

Failed talks

The second Trump-Kim summit broke down over differences about the US demand for Pyongyang to denuclearise and North Koreas demand for dramatic relief from international sanctions imposed for its nuclear and missile tests, which it pursued for years in defiance of the United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Choe had said after the Hanoi talks that Kim might lose his commitment to pursue a deal with the US after seeing it reject a request to lift some sanctions in return for the North destroying its main known nuclear complex.

In Washington this week, the US special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, said the US expected to be able to continue its close engagement, though he offered no specifics on when new talks might be held.

Bolton, who has argued for a tough approach to North Korea, said last week that Trump was open to more talks but also warned of tougher sanctions if the North did not denuclearise.
Women activists imprisoned by Saudi Arabia for almost a year face bogus charges, including contacting foreign media, human rights campaigners and international organisations, Amnesty International has said.

The trial of at least 10 women opened in Riyadhs criminal court on Wednesday after they were held last year in a sweeping crackdown on activists, legal authorities said, without specifying the charges.

Amnesty put the number of women who appeared in court at 11, adding that they were charged with promoting womens rights and calling for the end of the restrictive male guardianship system.

The women were also charged with contacting international organisations, foreign media and other activists, including the Amnesty International, the rights group said on Thursday, calling the charges bogus.





ALQST, a London-based rights group, said the women were charged under the kingdoms sweeping cybercrime law, which carries prison sentences of up to 10 years, based on their contact with hostile entities, including human rights organisations.

The charges against the activists are the latest example of the Saudi authorities abusing legislation and the justice system to silence peaceful activists and deter them from working on the human rights situation in the country, said Samah Hadid, Amnesty Internationals Middle East campaigns director.

This trial is yet another stain on the Saudi authorities appalling human rights record, and shows how empty the governments claims of reform really are.

Traitors

More than a dozen activists, many of whom campaigned for years for the right to drive, were arrested in May last year  just a month before the kingdom ended its long-standing ban on female motorists. Some were subsequently released.

At the time, the activists were accused by some government officials of undermining national security and aiding enemies of the state, while state-backed media branded them as traitors and agents of embassies.

A court official said the women would have access to independent lawyers for the trial, a right that family members claimed they had been denied for the entire stretch of their detention.

The official did not specify a date for the next court hearing.

The trial of the women comes as Saudi Arabia seeks to placate international criticism over the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdoms Istanbul consulate last October.
Gunmen kill at least 49 people during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch in the countrys worst ever attack.

At least 49 people have been killed and more than 40 others wounded in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a gunman opened indiscriminate fire at Muslim worshippers.

The mosques targeted in Fridays attack, the worst mass shooting in the countrys history, were the Masjid Al Noor in central Christchurch and another place of worship in the suburb of Linwood. Women and children were among those killed.

A 28-year-old Australian man, who police did not identify, was charged with murder. He is set to appear in court on Saturday.

Two other men and one woman were arrested in connection with the attack, two of whom remain in custody.

Two IEDs (improvised explosive devices) were found in a car and neutralised by the military, police said.

Authorities have also warned Muslims not to visit mosques anywhere in New Zealand.

New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the assault on the mosques appeared to be a well-planned terrorist attack.

This is, and will be, one of New Zealands darkest days, an ashen-faced Ardern told a press conference.

Sam Clarke, a reporter with TVNZ, spoke with several people inside the Masjid Al Noor mosque when the shooting began. He told Al Jazeera a man entered with an automatic weapon and began firing.

A gunman  dressed in black with a helmet carrying a machine gun  came into the back of the mosque and started firing into the people praying there, Clarke said.

An extremist, right-wing terrorist

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed the suspect charged with murder was an Australian citizen and described him as an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.

He said Australian security authorities were investigating any links between the country and the attack, but declined to provide further details about the suspected gunman.

The 28-year-old suspect published a racist manifesto on Twitter before the shooting, then livestreamed his attack on Facebook.

Police have asked people not to share the footage, which was circulated online following the assault, and are working to have it removed. Officials also warned web users they could be liable for up to 10 years in jail for sharing such objectionable content.

Police patrol outside the Masjid Al Noor in central Christchurch [Mark Baker/AP]

Len Peneha, a witness, said he saw a man dressed in black enter the Masjid Al Noor mosque and then heard dozens of shots, which sent people running from the place of worship in terror.

He said he also saw the gunman flee before emergency services arrived.

Peneha, who lives next to the mosque, said he went into the building to try and help and saw dead people everywhere.

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One man in the mosque, with blood stains all over his clothes, said he hid under a bench as the shooting took place. He said about 50 people were inside the building.

TVNZs Clarke said some worshippers managed to escape through windows and doors but many people had been hit, some as young as 16.

About 10 to 15 people were seen outside the mosque, some alive, some dead, he said.

Farid Ahmed, a wheelchair-bound witness in Christchurch, told Al Jazeera he was at the back of the mosque and heard the shooting for about seven minutes.

I pushed myself at the back where my car was parked and I was behind the car. And from there I was hearing shooting after shooting, he said.

After about 10 minutes, I thought the shooter has left. I pushed myself to get inside the mosque and it was unbelievable. I saw in the main room on the right-hand side more than 20 people, some of them dead, some screaming.

I saw on the floor hundreds of bullet shells. I saw one guy trying to run out and he was shot dead.

 Mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand: All the latest updateshttps://t.co/A3KtHUzN1I  Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 15, 2019

Ramzan Ali, a second witness in Christchurch, said he heard one of the women died.

The mosque has segments, you know, he shot inside, went to another room, shot there. There is the ladies section, he went and shot them. I just heard one of the ladies died, I am hoping that it is not true, he said.

Tahir Nawaz, of the International Muslim Association of New Zealand, said they had decided to restrict activities at the mosques.

The whole community is shocked. They would never have expected anything like this [to happen] in this peaceful country. As a result of that [the attack], we are restricting our activities in the mosque and we are trying to keep safety in our area.

Al Jazeeras Andrew Thomas, reporting from Christchurch, said New Zealand had never before experienced anything like Fridays attack.

I cannot stress how devestating this will be for the Muslim community here in Christchurch, and the psyche of New Zealand, Thomas said.

Just about every person of Muslim faith here in Christchurch will know somebody, personally, who has been killed or injured in this attack, he added.

Police escort people away from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand [Mark Baker/The Associated Press]

Anger towards Muslims through media

Muslims account for just one percent of New Zealands population, a 2013 census showed.

Media portrayal of Muslims is fueling anger against the community, according to a 2017 academic research in which 16,000 New Zealanders were surveyed.

Highly educated and leftist-oriented people normally tended to have a positive attitude toward not just Muslims but migrant populations in general, lead researcher John Shaver, of the University of Otago, told Al Jazeera from Dunedin.

Our study found that highly educated people, even those on the left, developed anger towards Muslims through the media. The more they watched the news, the more prejudiced they became.

Police officers inspect the shooting site as dead body of a victim is seen on the ground behind of the car in front of Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand [Anadolu Agency]

He was, however, careful to add that New Zealand is a multi-cultural society which is accepting of all groups. There have been only a handful of incidents in which Muslims were harassed or their properties vandalised, Shaver said.

Things here are not like they are in Australia, the US or the West, he added.

Overwhelmingly, Shaver said New Zealand media tends to absorb content generated by US and European news outlets without providing context.

In the Western media, the focus is only on the conflicts in the Middle East, he said.

"I don't know if i'm going to be feeling safe walking by myself wearing my headscarf."  Christchurch resident Muslims in #Christchurch are in fear following deadly mass shootings that killed at least 49 people at two mosques. #NewZealandShooting pic.twitter.com/MVDTbvQWpF  Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) March 15, 2019

He went on to say that there is very little coverage in the New Zealand media of the Muslim population in country which is very diverse and has a history stretching back more than 100 years.

Instead of focusing on the domestic Muslim population, the media focuses on violence and looks at the community from a western media lens, he said.

Mass shootings in New Zealand are exceedingly rare. The deadliest in modern history occurred in the small town of Aramoana in 1990, when gunman David Gray shot and killed 13 people following a dispute with a neighbour.

It really is a quiet country in a quiet part of the world and this will really, really rock the country to its foundations, Al Jazeeras Thomas said.

A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone near a mosque in central Christchurch [Mark Baker/ The Associated Press]




In 2017, Fitaihi was one of about 200 prominent Saudis detained at Riyadh Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The son of a dual United States-Saudi citizen who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia has met members of the US Congress as he seeks help in securing his fathers release.

Ahmed Fitaihi said his father, Walid, has been beaten, electrocuted and subjected to other forms of torture and allowed little contact with his family in 16 months of his custody so far.

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Walid Fitaihi was a physician in Boston before he returned in 2006 to his native Saudi Arabia, where he helped found a hospital built by his family and became a popular motivational speaker on television.

In November 2017, Fitaihi was one of about 200 prominent Saudis detained in a mass roundup and held a prisoner at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The Saudi government described the mass arrests as a crackdown on corruption. Critics, however, decried it as a move to consolidate power by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and claimed the detainees were being tortured.

His family says they have not been told if he is facing any charges.

Im sure you can see how confusing it is to see this man, being dragged, and beaten and electrocuted. This doesnt make any sense at all, the son said at a news conference in Washington organised by Human Rights Watch (HRW). Hes dedicated his entire life to making peoples lives better.

Fitaihi spoke alongside a brother of Lujain Alhathloul, a womens rights activist who has been in custody since May and went on trial this week.

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Her brother, Walid al-Hathloul, said she has been subjected to electrocution and threatened with rape. I am desperate to save my sisters life, he said.

The Saudi embassy said in response that the kingdom prohibits torture and that authorities are investigating the allegations of mistreatment of the prisoners.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia takes any allegations of ill-treatment of defendants awaiting trial or prisoners serving their sentences very seriously, it said in a statement.
World leaders react with horror to the deadly attacks at two mosques in Christchurch during Friday prayers.

Political and religious leaders from across the world have expressed their condemnation at the deadly shooting at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

Forty-nine people were killed and at least 48 suffered serious injuries in the shootings targeting the mosques during Friday prayers.

New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the shootings appeared to be a well-planned terrorist attack.

Police said three men and a woman were in custody in connection with the attacks.

The timing of the shootings and the posting on social media of what appeared to be live, point-of-view video footage of the assault by a gunman, added to the distress of many.

Here is how political leaders around the world reacted soon after the incident.

Turkey

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the deadly attack on the mosques, describing them as the latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.

With this attack, hostility towards Islam, that the world has been idly watching and even encouraging for some time, has gone beyond individual harassment to reach the level of mass killing, Erdogan said at the funeral of a former Turkish minister.

It is clear that the understanding represented by the killer that also targets our country, our people and myself, has started to take over Western societies like a cancer.

Erdogans spokesman separately condemned what he called a racist and fascist attack.

This attack shows the point which hostility to Islam and enmity to Muslims has reached, Ibrahim Kalin wrote on Twitter.

We have seen many times Islamophobic discourse against Islam and Muslims turning into a perverse and murderous ideology. The world must raise its voice against such discourse and must say stop to Islamophobic fascist terrorism, he said.

We strongly condemn the fascist terrorist attack in #ChristChurch.

May Allah have mercy on those who lost their lives today.

This cowardly act shows how anti-Muslim rhetoric and hatred leads to murderous acts.

The world must break its silence over Islamophobic hatred.  Ibrahim Kalin (@ikalin1) March 15, 2019

United States

US President Trump sent out a 270 character Tweet but failed to mention the word Muslims when condemning the deadly shootings.

Instead, he sent his warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of the country.

49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The US stands by New Zealand for anything we can do, Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.

Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement that the US strongly condemned the attack.

The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate, Sanders said.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

UN

The UN Security Council condemned the mass shootings in Christchurch as heinous and cowardly and said acts of terrorism were criminal and unjustifiable.

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The members of the Security Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, the 15-member body said.

A spokesman for Antonio Guterres, UN secretary-general, said the UN chief was shocked and appalled at the terrorist attack in New Zealand and was urging people everywhere to work together to counter Islamophobia and eliminate intolerance and violent extremism.

Jordan

According to the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, a Jordanian man was among those killed and five other Jordanian nationals have been injured in the attack.

This heinous massacre is an appalling terrorist crime. It unites us against extremism, hatred and terrorism, which knows no religion, Jordans King Abdullah said.

Lebanon

Lebanons Foreign Minister Jubran Bassil warned against the rise of extremism in the West, saying it puts communities at great risk and in direct confrontation that will only lead to the scourge of war.

Egypt

Egypt said it stands by New Zealand and the families of the victims, and condemned the despicable act of terrorism that goes against all principles of humanity and serves as a new reminder of the need to continue and intensify international efforts to fight terrorism, violence and extremism.

Qatar

Qatar said it condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist and brutal attack in New Zealand.

In a statement on Friday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Qatar reiterated its firm stance on rejecting violence and terrorism, regardless of motives and reasons.

Indonesia

Indonesia, the worlds biggest Muslim-majority country, strongly condemned the shooting as authorities were checking on whether any of its citizens were victims.

The government and the people of Indonesia convey deep condolences to the victims and their families, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said in a statement.

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She was earlier cited by media as saying six Indonesians had been inside the mosque when the attack occurred, with three managing to escape and three still unaccounted for.

Malaysia

In Muslim-majority Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the biggest party in its ruling coalition, said one Malaysian had been wounded in the attack he described as a black tragedy facing humanity and universal peace.

I am deeply saddened by this uncivilised act, which goes against humanistic values and took the lives of civilians, he said in a statement.

We extend our deepest sympathies and condolences to the families of the victims and the people of New Zealand.

Pakistan

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan blamed the New Zealand attacks on rising Islamophobia after 2001s September 11 attacks.

Shocked and strongly condemn the Christchurch, New Zealand, terrorist attack on mosques. This reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families, he tweeted.

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim. This has been done deliberately to also demonize legitimate Muslim political struggles, he added.

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim. This has been done deliberately to also demonize legitimate Muslim political struggles. https://t.co/5bBREoayLz  Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) March 15, 2019

Afghanistan

Afghanistans ambassador to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, Wahidullah Waissi, said on Twitter three Afghans had been wounded.

My thoughts are with the family of Afghan origin whove been shot and killed at this heinous incident.

I am receiving terrible news out of Christchurch mosques shootings. My thoughts are with the family of an Afghan origin whos been shot and killed at this heinous incident and with three other Afghans who are injured. Watching this closely as the situation is still unfolding.  Wahidullah Waissi (@WahidWaissi) March 15, 2019

Organization of Islamic Cooperation

The Jeddah-based Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) said the attack served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia.

OICs Secretary General, Youssef al-Othaimeen, urged the New Zealand government to provide more protection to Muslim communities living in the country.

Al-Azhar University in Egypt

Al-Azhar, the worlds foremost Sunni Islamic institution and university, said the attacks reflects an escalation of the discourse of hate, xenophobia and Islamophobia in Western countries.

Ahmed al-Tayyeb, the Grand Imam of the Cairo-based institution, condemned the atrocious terrorist attack, and conveyed his condolences to the families of those killed.

Germany

German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed sorrow over the citizens who were attacked and murdered out of racist hatred in attacks on the mosques.

We stand together against such acts of terrorism, Merkel said through her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, on Twitter, adding that the victims had been doing nothing more than peacefully praying in their mosque.

Scotland

Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon called the incident beyond awful and called Muslims a valued part of Scottish society.

Innocent people being murdered as they worship is horrific and heartbreaking. My thoughts and solidarity are with New Zealands Muslim community and all of its people on this dark day, she tweeted.

She added: Today, at mosques across Scotland and elsewhere, Muslims will attend Friday prayers. They are a valued part of our diverse and multicultural society. It is terrorists who commit acts such as who offend our values as a society. We must stand against Islamophobia and all hate.

Today, at mosques across Scotland and elsewhere, Muslims will attend Friday prayers. They are a valued part of our diverse and multicultural society. It is terrorists who commit acts such as who offend our values as a society. We must stand against Islamaphobia and all hate.  Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) March 15, 2019

Australia

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said his country stood with New Zealand after the tragic attack.

We stand here and condemn, absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist, Morrison told a press conference.

He confirmed media reports that the gunman who mowed down worshippers in the main mosque in the southern New Zealand city of Christchurch was an Australian-born citizen, without providing further details.

We are not just allies, we are not just partners, we are family, he said.

It is such a sad and devastating reminder of the evil that can be ever present about us, Morrison said of the attacks.
Global day of student protests aims to prompt world leaders into action on climate change.

Young people around the world are skipping school on Friday to march through the streets, kicking off a global day of student protests aiming to drive world leaders into action on climate change.

Classrooms in capitals from Lagos to London are expected to be empty, as the ambitious organisers of the international student strike hoped to stage 1,000 demonstrations in more than 100 countries.

George Bond, a student protester in London who travelled several hours to demonstrate outside the British Parliament, told Al Jazeera it was imperative that young people are able to break the cycle of inaction that directly threatens the security of their future on this planet.

There is not sufficient and effective policy to keep the UKs carbon targets below where they need to be, he said. And equally they are not following the advice of the [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC report that says we only have 12 years left for climate justice to be realistic.

Students flooded into the streets of Wellington, Sydney, Bangkok and Hong Kong carrying placards that read There is no planet B, Youre destroying our future and If you dont act like adults, we will.

In New Delhi, one of the worlds most polluted cities, about 200 students took part in a colourful protest, juggling, waving ribbons and performing stunts with hoops.

The demonstrations attracted mixed reactions from politicians [Francois Mori/AP]

We have to make a choice whether we want to sit and be indifferent or do something for our planet, said 16-year-old student Srijani Datta, who also issued a warning to the worlds politicians.

Most of us are 16 to 17, and we are going to turn 18 soon. We are going to be eligible for voting. As voters, we will show we care about climate change. If you cant give us that [fresh air and water], you will not get our votes.

In Sydney, 18-year-old Charles Rickwood warned that if nothing is done, Australias famous Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed.

Especially if current trends in the environment continue, well see the one- or two-degree increase in our ocean, then it will simply become unsustainable and we could lose the entire Great Barrier Reef, he told the AFP news agency.

In South Korea, demonstrations only began once lessons finished for the day.

Its hard for students to skip school in order to participate in this climate strike, said organiser Jeong Juwon, 25.

In South Korea, exam results are very important and its a big burden, and also the unemployment crisis is at its worst.

Carbon dioxide emissions hit record levels in 2017 and again last year [Sean Gallup/Getty Images]

In Hong Kong, activists dressed up as polar bears and sharks to highlight the damage done to the environment by climate change.

The main thing we want people to realise is that we are not only asking the Hong Kong government to do more, it is also people themselves who need to do more, said Zara Campion, 17, co-organiser of the strike.

Greta Thunberg

The worldwide protests were inspired by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who camped out in front of parliament in Stockholm last year to demand action from world leaders on global warming.

We are only seeing the beginning, tweeted Thunberg, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism.

However, the demonstrations attracted mixed reactions from politicians.

In Australia, Education Minister Dan Tehan said the strike was not something that we should encourage.

A full transformation of the global economy is needed to forestall a catastrophe, the UN says [Adnan Abidi/Reuters]

But the budding activists received encouragement from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who said it was important for the young generation to send a message about climate change.

We hear you and were getting on with setting a path for carbon neutrality, the 38-year-old leader said in a statement.

Please keep bringing as many people as you can with you because we simply wont achieve our goals alone.

Despite 30 years of warnings about dire impacts, carbon dioxide emissions hit record levels in 2017 and again last year.

Loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at current rates, scientists say, will eventually lead to an uninhabitable planet.

The Paris treaty calls for capping global warming at well below two degrees Celsius. The planet is currently on track to heat up by double that figure.

The UNs climate science panel warned in October that only a wholesale transformation of the global economy and consumer habits could forestall a catastrophe.
The Australian suspect who shot dead dozens of Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, is believed to have been inspired by historical figures who fought against Muslims, among others, as well as a convicted Serb war criminal responsible for the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995.

In photographs from a now-deleted Twitter account associated with the 28-year-old suspect that match the weaponry seen in his livestreamed video of the mass shooting on Friday, there were references  written in Cyrillic, Armenian and Georgian  to people famous for fighting against Muslims, according to screengrabs posted by other social media users.

Among the names seen on the weaponry were several Serb military figures, including Milos Obilic, a national hero in Serbian folklore who fought against the Ottomans, most notably in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo when he killed the Ottoman Sultan Murad I.

Military leaders who led uprisings against the Ottoman Empire such as Marko Miljanov Popovic, Novak Vujosevic and Bajo Pivljanin, praised in Serbian epic poetry, were also marked on the assault rifle.

Prior to the shooting, a video on Twitter showed the gunman driving and playing a song honouring Radovan Karadzic, a convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal and first president of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s.

In 2016, United Nations judges sentenced Karadzic to 40 years in prison, ruling that he was guilty of war crimes including the genocide committed in Bosnias Srebrenica, in which more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serb forces.

The song played in the gunmans car known as God is a Serb and he will protect us is from a propaganda music video produced by three Bosnian Serb soldiers, which warns Turks (Bosnian Muslims) that the Serbs were coming, led by Karadzic.

Over the years, the song has spawned a plethora of parody images and videos, evolving into a meme known as Remove Kebab, a euphemism for ethnic cleansing against Muslims.

The Remove Kebab video & accompanying memes have been shared millions of times over the last several yrs. The Bosnian Genocide has become major ideological pillar among, and model for new-age far-right extremists, like the Holocaust in previous generations of their ilk.  Jasmin Mujanovic (@JasminMuj) March 15, 2019

Kebab removed is written on the rifle, referring to the song.

Turkofagos (Turk-eater) was also inscribed on the assault rifle, a nickname widely used for Greek armed groups fighting against Ottoman Turkish forces.

Political scientist Jasmin Mujanovic commented on Twitter that the markings on the suspects rifle were steeped in toxic, faux-historical narratives about defending white Christendom.

Inspired by Breivik

The 28-year-old, who is now in police custody, also claimed that he had brief contact with Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.

In his 74-page manifesto published online just before the attacks on two mosques, the gunman wrote he took true inspiration from Breivik and had received a blessing for his actions from his acquaintances.

In his dossier, he wrote that the motive for his attack was to create fear and called for killings of Muslims.





He also included a section about the Kosovo conflict, according to Balkan Insight.

Balkanisation will also reduce the USAs ability to project power globally, and thereby ensure that never again can such a situation as the US involvement in Kosovo ever occur again (where US/NATO forces fought beside Muslims and slaughtered Christian Europeans attempting to remove there Islamic occupiers from Europe), it read.

NATO had conducted air raids in Serbia in June 1999 to end Serbias military campaign against ethnic Albanian rebels in the province.

Similarly, Breivik had shown to be inspired by massacres of Muslims in the Balkans in his 1,500-page manifesto published prior to his mass shooting.

In his manifesto, Breivik called Karadzic an honourable crusader.

In court, Breivik reportedly explained that the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 was the straw that broke the camels back regarding his radicalisation.

According to Balkan Insight, Serb nationalists enjoy cult status among many far-right groups in Europe where they are admired for their militancy, extreme Islamophobia and  most importantly  for having put words into action in the 1990s, when Serb nationalist paramilitaries killed thousands of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Suspected gunman behind the Christchurch rampage dubbed the US president a symbol of renewed white identity.

The Australian-born suspect who shot and killed dozens of Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, has published a manifesto praising US President Donald Trump and Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.

The 74-page dossier, which has been described by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison as a work of hate, hailed Trump as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.

The 28-year-old, who is now in police custody, also claimed that he had brief contact with Breivik and had received a blessing for his actions from the mass murderers acquaintances.

The dossier stated objections to immigration and multiculturalism and decries the decaying culture of the white, European, Western world.

Earlier on Friday, at least 49 people were killed and 20 others seriously wounded in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch in the worst attack in the Pacific Island countrys modern history.

The majority of the victims were shot at the Al Noor mosque, while the rest were killed at another mosque in suburban Linwood.

The Muslim worshippers had congregated for Friday prayers, Islams holy day of the week.

Trump, whose rhetoric is sometimes aligned with the far-right in the United States, condemned the horrible massacre in a post on Twitter.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The US stands by New Zealand for anything we can do, he wrote.

Moments before, his spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said: We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate.

The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families, she added.





Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, described the shootings as a well-planned terrorist attack, and said this is one of the countrys darkest days.

In addition to the Australian-born man, three other suspects, including a woman, have been arrested, according to Mike Bush, New Zealands police commissioner.

Live stream

The main suspect also livestreamed his rampage on social media.

The New Zealand government said it could be illegal to share the video, which showed the gunman repeatedly shooting at worshippers from close range.

The Facebook Live video, taken with a camera that appeared to be mounted on the gunmans body, shows a clean-shaven, Caucasian man with short hair driving to the Al Noor mosque.

He enters the building and fires repeatedly at worshippers as he moves from room to room.

AFP determined the video was genuine through a digital investigation that included matching screenshots of the mosque taken from the gunmans footage with images available online showing the same areas.

In the video, the attacker parks his car next to the mosque and gets out of the vehicle with a rifle. He slowly goes to the boot of his car and retrieves another firearm.





He then walks into the compound of the mosque and fires at a person standing near the doorway before dropping the rifle and shooting repeatedly with the second weapon as he moves inside.

The gunman fires dozens of bullets at people trying to run away or lying down in huddled groups in corners of the rooms.

The framing of the video, which shows only the gunmans hands holding the gun as he shoots and reloads, is eerily similar to the style of a first-person shooter video game.

The Facebook account that posted the video was no longer available shortly after the shooting. The Twitter account of the same name was quickly suspended.

Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooters Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video, Facebook said in a tweet.

Were also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as were aware.

Disgusting

A spokesman for New Zealands interior ministry said the video is likely to be classified as objectionable content under local law, and could be illegal to share.

The content of the video is disturbing and will be harmful for people to see, he said. This is a very real tragedy with real victims and we strongly encourage people to not share or view the video.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Australian Senator Fraser Anning published a statement where he blamed immigration and Muslims.

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration programme which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place, Anning said.

The truth is that Islam is not like any other faith. It is the religious equivalent of fascism. And just because the followers of this savage belief were not the killers in this instance, does not make them blameless.

The Queensland senators comments were condemned by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who expressed his repulsion.

The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning in blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting, Morrison said on Twitter.

Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament.
Peter Beinart's piece in the Guardian, "Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic," published on March 7, 2019, is based upon a number of flawed assumptions.

Beinart's first point is that "states based on ethnic nationalism" do not have a monopoly on maintaining "public order and individual freedom." But is Israel a state based on ethnic nationalism? The Law of Return allows for Jews to immigrate, including converts to Judaism, but excludes Jews who practice another religion. A state based on ethnic nationalism alone would neither accept converts nor deny citizenship to an ethnic Jew who converts to another religion, as Israel does.

Beinart's second point is that it is not bigotry to try to change this "ethnic nationalism" into a civic nationalism. He refers to the apartheid regime in South Africa, where the white nationalist regime was replaced with a civic nationalism in 1994 aimed at ensuring that all ethnicities enjoyed equality under the law. The comparison with South Africa is not a valid one for reasons mentioned earlier. Perhaps it is more correct to define Israel as an ethno-religious democracy. Beinart goes on to advocate steps toward inclusivity that would include, among other things, a stanza added to the Israeli national anthem that acknowledges the hopes of its Palestinian citizens. Underlying this vision is the hope that a cessation of hostilities will follow.

The cold reality is that this is but a pipe dream, for the foreseeable future, at least. Few Palestinians express enthusiasm for the two-state solution. The popular belief in the Arab and Muslim world is that Israel will one day be abolished, and the Jews, like the Crusaders of old, will be driven back to Europe or face annihilation. Even for those who reluctantly accept the notion of a two-state solution, it is but a bitter pill to swallow until the armies of Islam are strong enough to defeat Zionism and Israel militarily. That appears to be the desired outcome, rather than working toward an independent state for Palestinians who serve as a means to an end toward the greater goal. For it is shameful and a grave loss of face if Jews (whose "corrupted" religion Islam was supposed to replace) usurp "Islamic" land. The honor of Islam needs to be restored. A similar zeal drove the desire to oust the Christian Crusaders centuries earlier.

Openly calling for Israel's destruction, as is the norm in Muslim countries, would hardly be tolerated in the West, where "resistance groups" like Hamas and Hezb'allah have been outlawed as terrorist outfits, and the overwhelming majority believe that a two-state solution is the road forward to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this climate, it is impossible to support jihad against Israel openly. Consequently, many Muslims in the West  including prominent Palestinian activists  have instead joined forces with the Israel-hating hard left in calling for a one-state solution coupled with the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Demographical change is the only way they can hope to destroy Israel due to Israel's military might. Under the guise of human rights, the hard left, driven by its Marxist tendencies, enthusiastically collaborates in a subversive project designed to destroy Israel's Jewish majority from within.

What many in the West do not appreciate is that the Muslim street identifies with Hamas, Hezb'allah, and other extremist groups seeking the destruction of Israel more than they do with the leaders who may be conducive to resolving the conflict through diplomacy and concessions. Thus, Egypt and Jordan may have normalized relations with Israel, but many Egyptians and Jordanians remain opposed to the idea of peace. When the West Bank was under Jordanian control during 19481967, no Arab or Muslim country demanded that Jordan declare the West Bank an independent Palestinian state. Why did the Arab or Muslim nations not champion Palestinian rights to independence during this period?

The "individual freedom" that Beinart speaks about is hardly a cherished dream in the Muslim Middle East, where the culture dictates that tribal and family allegiances trump individual freedoms. Even in Baathist, socialist, or secular nations like Iraq, Syria, or Lebanon, practices like honor killings are still sanctioned. The liberal, freedom-loving idealism that the West upholds cannot be imposed on shame and honor cultures, which still cling to ancient traditions.

Beinart's third point is that in the real world, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism do not always go together. Historically, some state actors supported Zionism in order to decrease the Jewish population in their own nations. As he notes, Arthur Balfour welcomed the 1905 Aliens Act, which sought to limit Jewish migration to the United Kingdom. Similarly, in the 1930s, Poland's government chose not to recruit qualified Jewish fighters in the Polish military in the hope that they would emigrate to Israel. Therefore, Beinart's assertion that one can find ardent supporters of Zionism among anti-Semites is plausible. However, it is to a large extent irrelevant in that it assumes that 100% concurrence between anti-Zionists and anti-Semites alone ought to confer legitimacy upon Zionism; it is sufficient that the majority of Zionists are not anti-Semites. As the former Chief Rabbi Mirvis wrote in 2016:

Zionism is a belief in the right to Jewish self-determination in a land that has been at the centre of the Jewish world for more than 3,000 years. One can no more separate it from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.

Historically, Jews sometimes attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to establish a Zionist state in their ancient homeland. In 1666, Shabtai Tzvi managed to convince the multitudes that he was the promised Messiah. Many Jews began to prepare to emigrate to Israel in the belief that he would lead them to their redemption. These plans were scuppered by the Ottoman sultan, who gave Shabtai Tzvi the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Traditional Islamic belief dictates that one day, the entire world will be the domain of Islam.

Beinart observes that Zionists can be anti-Semitic and points to rightist European leaders like Hungary's Viktor Orban, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria's Freedom Party, and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, who are avid supporters of Zionism. He cites Richard Spencer, who in 2017 referred to himself as a "white Zionist," lauding Israel as the model state for his racist dream of a white homeland for the United States. Tellingly, these views serve to highlight the ignorance of the far right in that they view the world through the prism of race, whereas Israel has welcomed successive waves of immigration from places like Russia, the Arab states, and Ethiopia. Does Beinart really believe that would-be Nazis projecting their racist agenda upon Israel delegitimizes Zionism?

Nor does Beinart's claim that anti-Zionism clearly exists without anti-Semitism hold any water. He writes:

In 2017, 20,000 Satmar men  a larger crowd than attended that year's American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference  filled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organiser: "We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes."

Actually, here the Satmar hasidim are affirming that they are Zionists but that the State of Israel should be established after the Messiah comes. In other words, they differ over only the time frame and not the belief in the eventual establishment of a Zionist state. Therefore, it would be more than mildly amusing to see the reaction of anti-Zionists like Nazim Ali, who like to wheel out the Neturei Karta to distance themselves from charges of anti-Semitism, if these hasidim were to suddenly declare that their Messiah had arrived. Would they welcome the establishment of that Zionist state any more than they do the current Israel?

There is therefore ample evidence to conclude that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

Zeyba Nur writes about issues concerning Muslim anti-Semitism. She can be contacted at zeybanur@outlook.com.
Is it any wonder that Washington governor and announced 2020 Democratic candidate Jay Inslee polled at an almost statistically insignificant 1% among at least 13 Democratic candidates in a new Iowa poll, conducted last week by the Des Moines Register and CNN?

For insight, one need look no farther than Inslee's response to the loaded question asked of him by CNN reporter Jake Tapper that explicitly probed his ability to lead the Democratic party  and ultimately the nation  as a "straight white male." (The journalistic judiciousness of a supposedly old-hand reporter like Tapper asking such a question is a whole separate subject.)

Instead of making the most of an opportunity to school Tapper  and voters  on what qualities and talents are truly important for presidential leadership, Inslee chose to respond with an obsequious genuflection to political correctness and liberal politics.

Tapper asked: "Our new CNN/Des Moines Register poll shows only 38 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa say they would be satisfied with a straight white male nominee[.] ... So why are you as a straight white male the right person to lead the Democratic Party if there's so much skepticism from Democrats in Iowa?"

Acknowledging that, yes, he is "straight, white, and male," Inslee responded, "I think I have a humility about being a straight white male that I have never experienced discrimination like so many do. I've never been pulled over as an African-American teenager by an officer driving through a white neighborhood. I've never been a woman talked over in a meeting."

Inslee, who announced his candidacy only on March 1, said that because he hasn't faced discrimination in the same way, he approaches governance with humility.

"That's why I've been so dedicated to a 25-year public career of advancing justice in our society, of making sure that we have as much diversity as possible in the 2,000 people I've appointed  and we have done really well in that regard  of making sure the people work with me have to go through bias training so they understand how implicit bias can really discriminate, doing criminal justice reform," Inslee replied.

Ironically, Tapper failed to mention that that same CNN/Des Moines Register poll has two straight, white  and verifiably "old" as well  males in the early lead of the Democratic primary. Former vice president Joe Biden leads with 27 percent, and Senator Bernie Sanders polled second with 25 percent.

American voters have over the years expressed differing, sometimes changing views on what they look for as important in the job performance of a president, but scholarship on the history of the U.S. presidency provides some consensus on the subject. Common leadership qualities that our good presidents appear to have had are a strong vision for the country's future, an ability to put their own times in the perspective of history, effective communication skills, the courage to make unpopular decisions, crisis management skills, character and integrity, an ability to make wise appointments, and know-how to work with Congress.

Expectations are placed on that person to then use his leadership qualities to succeed at seven major roles for the president, including chief of state, chief executive, chief diplomat, commander-in-chief, legislative leader, chief of the party, and guardian of the economy.

It should be clear to Inslee  indeed, to any candidate seeking the job of president of these United States  that the called for job qualifications and expectations of the position have not a thing to do with a candidate's sex, sexual preferences, age, or religion and everything to do with one's ability to lead the nation on a variety of fronts.

Could one even imagine Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir, Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush, having to rationalize their abilities to lead their nations as somehow requiring an "intersection" with sex, race or sexuality, let alone age and religion? For Americans around long enough to remember Ronald Reagan's well known quote from when he was grilled in a campaign debate over his age, we can only imagine, and then smile to think of what his response to Jake Tapper might have been for even asking such a question.

U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN FLASHBACK: In the second presidential debate of the 1984 election season with Democratic candidate Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan was grilled over his age by Henry "Hank" Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun. "You already are the oldest president in history, and some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall, yes, that President Kennedy, who had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuba missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?" Reagan replied, "Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt, and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." Smiling, Trewhitt responded, "Mr. President, I'd like to head for the fence and try to catch that one before it goes over." The Republican actor-turned-statesman ended up winning by a landslide.

Chris J. Krisinger (colonel, USAF ret.) served in policy advisory positions in the Pentagon and the State Department. He was a National Defense Fellow at Harvard University.
Why do so many of our university professors argue that socialism is a better way to peace and prosperity than capitalism? Because it is, to them, an article of faith. To admit that socialism has failed -- repeatedly, consistently and abysmally -- for over a century would be, for them, to deny their god.

Theirs are the eyes of faith that cannot see.

Venezuela, once one of the wealthiest countries in Latin American, is now on the brink of economic collapse and political anarchy after two decades of Chavez/Maduro socialism.

Cuba has languished under the Communist Party of Fidel and Raul Castro, who promised free and open elections when they came to power. Sixty years later, Cubans are still waiting.

The Soviets tried for 74 years to build a socialist workers paradise, killing millions in the process. Their empire wound up on the ash heap of history, so broke that President Mikhail Gorbachev had to borrow a pen to sign the document dissolving the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Some nations experimented with socialism, then came to their senses and reversed course.

India followed the socialist line for the first 40 years of its independence. It was mired in inefficient state-owned enterprises and excessive government regulation. But the country then adopted market-oriented reforms, particularly in technology, that have produced the largest middle class in the free world.

Following World War II, Great Britain was nationalized from top to bottom by the British Labour Party. The resultant economic decline was so serious that Britain was routinely called the sick man of Europe. However, with the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister, Great Britain denationalized its basic industries and unleashed free enterprise which put Britain back into the first rank of economic powers. According to the Heritage Foundations Index of Economic Freedom, the United Kingdom has one of the worlds most efficient business and investment environments -- a finding that would stun Karl Marx, who wrote The Communist Manifesto while living in England.

Why have so many Western intellectuals -- from George Bernard Shaw to Jean-Paul Sartre to Susan Sontag -- waxed so enthusiastic about Communism, even at its most repressive? Their sympathetic observations often border on the pathological.

An English Quaker wrote that the Communist view of human nature seems to me far more inspired by Faith, Hope, and Charity than our own. Dismissing the existence of the Gulag, a criminologist asserted that in the Soviet Union, the whole idea of punishment has been frankly dropped and the aim of reformation alone pursued.

About the infamous trumped-up Moscow trials of the 1930s, which sent an estimated 1 million Communist Party officials to their deaths, the New York Times Walter Duranty wrote, It is unthinkable that Stalin and the Court Martial could have sentenced their friends to death unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming. Duranty was an early practitioner of fake news, writing there was no forced famine in Ukraine, although he had personally witnessed skeleton-like children and hollow-eyed women while traveling through the region.

Of China, where at least 50 million Chinese died in socialist experiments like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, John K. Fairbank, Americas leading sinologist, wrote, The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that has happened to the Chinese people in centuries. The reason for such blatant pandering? The professor did not want to risk being denied entry to the Middle Kingdom.

Author Paul Hollander has explained that such intellectuals avoid the truth because they are caught in an intricate web of utopianism, secularization, and alienation, all of which breeds an abiding contempt for the West. They find the God they need in Marxism just as the Marxist professors do in our universities.

Yet some intellectuals who initially succumbed to the siren song of socialism managed to free themselves. Among the great writers of the early 20th century who joined and then rejected the communist cause were: the black American novelist Richard Wright, the Italian realist writer Ignazio Silone, the French Nobel Prize winner Andre Gide, the Hungarian novelist Arthur Koestler, the British poet Stephen Spender, and the American foreign correspondent Louis Fischer. They chose Communism because they had lost faith in democracy. It was a decision, wrote the British author and editor, Richard Crossman, rooted in despair, a despair of Western values.

Desiring an end to poverty and war, they turned to Communism only to discover that its promises were all lies. The words brotherhood and freedom were only slogans. Truth was whatever the Communist Party said it was. The very things for which these intellectuals had joined the Party were most endangered by the Party.

At first they practiced unswerving obedience to the socialist line, but their commitment was shattered by the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact. Socialists condemned Adolf Hitler throughout the 1930s until the summer of 1939 when Joseph Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact. Immediately, all true socialists reversed course and hailed the agreement as a major step toward peace. It was, in fact, a grossly cynical deal that allowed the Nazis and the Soviets to invade and divide up Poland, precipitating World War II.

Scales fell from the eyes of the writers starting with the novelist Arthur Koestler, who wrote, At no time and in no country have more revolutionaries been killed and reduced to slavery than in Soviet Russia. After visiting the Soviet Union, Andre Gide said, I doubt whether in any country in the world have the mind and the spirit ever been less free, more bent, more terrorized over and indeed vassalized than in the Soviet Union.

Writing in the mid-1930s, Louis Fischer said, Nineteen years after the fiery birth of the Bolshevik regime, ubiquitous fear, amply justified by terror, had killed revolt, silenced protest, and destroyed civil courage. He might have been writing about Venezuela or Cuba or China. Its always the same with socialism and its ready tanks and troops.

Fischer reflects the anger and revulsion of his once-communist colleagues writing, I see that I turned to Soviet Russia because I thought it had the solution to the problem of power I now realize that Bolshevism is not the way out because it is itself the worlds biggest agglomeration of power over man. The Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek put it succinctly, Planning leads to dictatorship.

And the planners are always planning, trusting we will not notice what they are doing. It is therefore our solemn duty to call out socialism for what it is -- a pseudo-religion posing as a pseudo-science enforced by political tyranny -- a god that has failed each and every time it has been tried.

Lee Edwards is The Heritage Foundations distinguished fellow in conservative thought and chairman of The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
On March 12, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he, along with his colleague Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), will lobby the Trump administration to recognize the Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory "now and forever." In response, Martin Indyk, the former ambassador to Israel under President Clinton and special Middle East envoy under President Obama, stated that "like it or not, the Golan Heights are Syrian territory."

Indyk is wrong. The United States should adopt Graham's view and recognize the Golan Heights as part of Israel. Israel has a stronger claim to the Golan than Syria does. The Golan is of essential strategic value to Israel and the free world. And given increased threats, that value has only appreciated.

Israel's Claim to the Golan Has Ancient Roots

Despite what Mr. Indyk says, the Jewish people's claim to the Golan Heights predates the existence of any country called "Syria" as well as the Arab invasion and occupation of the Middle East beyond Arabia, beginning after the death of Mohammed in 632. The region is featured in biblical history. More recently, Gamla, whose ruins exist today, was a Judean city to which the Romans laid siege in 67 C.E. during the Great Revolt (also known as the First Jewish-Roman War) (6673). In this battle, Roman soldiers slaughtered 4,000 Jews, while another 5,000 perished, having "thrown themselves down" a ravine to their deaths in either an attempt to flee or a mass suicide (Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 4:1:9:80). Following the defeat of the Jews by Rome after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135, the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem and fled to Galilee and then to the Golan. In fact, a coin found in Gamla contains the inscription "For the redemption of Jerusalem."

Ein Keshatot, a synagogue with origins dating from the first century C.E., destroyed in an earthquake in 749 and rededicated in October 2018 after fifteen years of reconstruction, is on the Golan. In the fourth century, 25 percent of the Land of Israel's synagogues were distributed among three dozen communities in the Golan. Towns included Devora, Kanaf, Yehudiya, Pik, and Ein Nashut. In Devora, a decorative lintel was discovered bearing the inscription: "This is the beit midrash (house of study) of Rabbi Elazar Hakapar," a major rabbi of the Talmud.

Israel's Modern Claim to the Golan is Stronger than Syria's

The Jews regained sovereignty of the Golan when Israel gained control of two thirds of the Heights following Syria's defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War. (Israel later applied Israeli law to these territories in a de facto annexation in 1981.) Syria had gained independence in 1945. Before that, the Golan was part of the French Empire (19231945), jointly administered between the British and French Empires (19171923) and part of the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire for approximately 400 years preceding 1917. So Syria had control of the Israeli-administered part of the Golan for 22 years (19451967), while Israel has had it for almost 52 years (1967 to the present). Israel has a stronger claim to the Israeli-controlled part of the Golan, given that it has been Israeli longer than it has been Syrian.

The Great Strategic Value of the Golan...

Enemies of Israel, both past and present, have used the high elevation of the Golan Heights against her. The ancient, pre-Arab Assyrian Empire literally looked down on the ancient northern kingdom of Israel from the Heights. Assyria's conquest of Israel in 722 BCE was launched from the Golan.

Fast-forward almost 2,700 years, and the Golan served similar aims for Israel's enemies. Prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, modern Syria, like ancient Assyria, held the high ground over Israel from the Heights. (See cross-section and topographical maps on page 6 and 18, here). This topography enabled Syria to shell Israeli towns with ease and sponsor Fatah fedayeen attacks from the Golan. Since gaining parity in elevation with the Syrians following the Six-Day War, the Syria-Israel border has been largely quiet. Given the many other conflicts in the Middle East, some of which I list here, that is a good thing for the world as well as Israel.

...Has Only Appreciated Given Current Threats

Israel's (and the free world's) enemies have grown stronger, and closer in proximity to Israel since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War. While the Islamic State's power has been significantly reduced, it very well could re-emerge as a significant threat in Syria. Regardless, Iran has gained significant power in Syria and stands to be a major military player in Syria in the foreseeable future. Giving up the Golan would be foolish and would most likely result in it being controlled by forces hostile to Israel and the West.

One estimate places Iranian investment in the Syrian Civil War at over $30 billion, while another places it at over $100 billion. The New York Times reported that as of February 2018, there are over thirty Iranian bases in Syria. Foreign Policy calculated that of those bases, 11 are Iranian, 9 are run by Iranian-backed Shia militias, and 15 are Hezb'allah bases. Further, as many as 20,000 Iran-sponsored foreign fighters are in Syria, with 6,000 of those fighters being from Hezb'allah, while the rest come from "Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and elsewhere."

Some of the Iranian and Iranian-backed military bases are on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. On March 13, the Israel Defense Forces revealed that Hezb'allah has set up a "covert force in the Syrian Golan Heights that is designed to act against Israel when given the order." Israel formally complained to the United Nations about this covert force a day later. This force, dubbed the "Golan Project" by the IDF, is led by Hezb'allah commander Ali Mussa Daqduq, who was in jail in Iraq for five years for his role in an attack that killed five American soldiers. Hezb'allah has been reportedly trying to set up a base in the Syrian Golan since at least 2013.

If Israel relinquishes the Golan, there is a greater risk that Israel will be fighting Hezb'allah in both Lebanon and the Heights. On the other hand, Israel's retention of its share of the Heights would serve as a strategic advantage in a future war. Israel and the world need the Golan to balance against growing Iranian hegemony.

Conclusion

The thought of Israel giving its part of the Golan Heights back to Syria is ridiculous. Syria is Israel's historic archenemy and has supported and harbored jihadist groups such as Fatah, Hamas, Hezb'allah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

Continued Israeli sovereignty in the Golan is of great strategic value to Israel and the West, especially in these troubled times. United States recognition of this sovereignty, hopefully followed by international recognition, would strengthen the security of Israel and the free world.
With every passing week, we're learning more about how the FBI and the Obama Justice Department did their best to ensure the election of Hillary Clinton by undermining Donald Trump. Try as Democrats might to prevent it, the truth is slowly coming into the light, thanks to some tenacious seekers of truth on the right side of the political spectrum. What has become crystal-clear in this forensic process is the reality that the Democratic Party, led by Barack Obama, is a corrupt criminal enterprise that if left unchecked will eventually poison the lifeblood of this country, a societal sepsis that, like most such systemic infections, may prove fatal to the body of America.

What has brought us to this critical point in our nation's destiny? I submit that it is the malignant Chicago political machine and Chicago politics, introduced into the national bloodstream in the form of Barack Obama, a local community organizer whose pleasing demeanor and sonorous, mellifluous oratory, and nothing more, led to his phenomenal rise from political unknown to frontrunner for president. He was a product of the Chicago Machine, a political cartel quite willing to front this unknown young black man for president if it brought the machine's bosses greater national influence and power, which it did.

To head up a corrupt system of enforcement, a thoroughly corrupt leader is required, and the Democratic Party had a ready candidate waiting in the wings: senior legal advisor to the Obama campaign Eric Holder. If you tried, you couldn't devise a better agent for the toxic infection of the federal Justice Department and its enforcement arm, the FBI, than Eric Holder. In testimony before a congressional investigation of white voter suppression by Philadelphia Black Panthers, Holder made it clear with his "my people" reference that he and his Justice Department were unquestionably skewed racially. It is only now that we are confirming our suspicions as to how thoroughly and corruptly he and his boss had skewed it politically.

With the revelations coming out of congressional hearings into the FBI investigations into Donald Trump, we are learning just how despicably corrupt our national law enforcement has become, employing venal Chicago prosecutorial and policing methods on a national scale. The latest has an FBI lawyer telling congressional investigators that her agency's investigation of Hillary Clinton's all too obvious violations of federal security laws were thwarted by unnamed persons in the Obama Justice Department, persons who, as we all know, do not ever operate without the approval and direction of their superiors, a rule that holds true going all the way to the top.

Or the bottom  depending on your point of view.
This headline summarizes the whole sorry story of the tragic joke that the U.N. has become.

Expanding on this latest U.N. action on site at the U.N. Women's Commission, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Hillel Neuer of the invaluable U.N. Watch tweets out the charade of the U.N.'s latest action better than any summary.

As you follow the tweets, be sure to admire Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for publicly stating, "We can never rest in the fight for human rights."

And then puzzle at the "obscene decision" by Ireland's female ambassador to the U.N., Geraldine Byrne Nason, in her capacity as chair of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, to nominate Iran to the U.N.'s Working Group on Communication on the Status of Women "a day after the regime sentenced women's rights lawyer Nasrin Sotudeh to 38 years prison & 148 lashes." Or any other day.

For good measure, Nason also approved the selection of Nigeria to the committee. And just two years ago, Ireland elected Saudi Arabia  yes, that Saudi Arabia, which does not allow women to travel abroad without a male guardian's permission  to the same women's commission.

Neuer explained the implications of this decision:

In Iran's new position on the UN working group, the theocratic government of Ayatallah Khamenei will consider complaints and government responses to allegations of discriminatory practices against women in categories including forced disappearances, death and torture of women in custody, and violation of the rights of women human rights defenders to freedom of expression and assembly. According to the UN, as a working group member, Iran will be responsible for identifying "trends and patterns of reliably-attested injustice and discriminatory practices against women." The working group submits a report to the full commission, in a procedure that is entirely confidential to avoid embarassing [sic] accused governments.

Interestingly, other women ostensibly all concerned about women's rights, such as those involved with Time's Up and #MeToo, remained silent.

Is this U.N. action another example of the U.N.'s worthlessness? Ask Nikki Haley, the U.S.'s recently resigned ambassador to the U.N.:

"The American people need to decide if it's worth it," she said in an interview with a small group of journalists last week. There is a lot of waste and abuse at the U.N., she said, and it is often "politically unfair" to the U.S. and its allies. That said, she also noted that the UN was the vehicle for imposing tough sanctions on North Korea and an arms embargo on South Sudan. "There are rays of light," she said. "But the verdict is still out."

Last June, the U.S., under Haley's stewardship, withdrew from the U.N.'s so called Human Rights Council. Two years ago, it left the Paris Climate Agreement, and the U.S. also lobbied successfully to reduce its disproportionately high share of funding the U.N.

Will this latest U.N. award to Iran for toxic behavior spur other countries to complain? It doesn't seem likely  sanctions or not, they still do business with Iran. After all, business is business, and thanks to President Barack Hussein Obama (D), the Iranians have untold U.S. billions. And oil.

Maybe it is time for the U.S., under President Donald Trump (R), to act to protect Iranian women.
The murder of Bambi Larson didn't have to happen.

Liberals don't seem to understand this. While every murder is a tragedy, including abortions and black-on-black homicides, we don't have legal grounds for kicking citizens out of the country for committing any crime. We can send them to jail, but we can't demand that some other country take them off our hands. They are our citizens. Our country is responsible for handling them.

Illegal aliens are a different case. They aren't our nation's responsibility, except insofar as we have laws that apply to them. Our nation, in fact, has such laws, and sanctuary cities and states ignore those laws, rendering them ineffective. Democrats and other open borders advocates want to admit anyone who wants in. If Hitler and all the other evil legends were still alive and coming from Latin America, it would be fine with the idiots who expect them to vote Democrat or, better yet, socialist.

I don't care about the statistics on what percentage of violent crimes is committed by aliens or what percentage of aliens is committing violent crimes. The numbers are a distraction, because every crime committed by an illegal alien is a crime that didn't have to happen to an American citizen. That's the point of government: to keep its citizens safe first and foremost. That's why people accept that the government will have police, armies, and any other personnel to be involved in law enforcement activities. It's why we call these people heroes, because they protect us, not because they write lots of traffic tickets.

Sanctuary policies are turning formerly safe and enjoyable places to live into hunting grounds for illegal aliens, who know they won't be deported or, generally, punished in any way. Charges will be diminished to preserve eligibility for deferred deportation and eventual amnesty. It's all about the votes, baby, and our lives aren't worth protecting, especially if there's any possibility we might go rogue and vote for a conservative. We are just livestock, and if the wolves take out a few sheep and cows, no problem. There are plenty more, and the homes of the rich will still be cleaned and their kids will have nannies until it's time to scam and bribe some college into taking them. Pre-empting a spot that might have been given to one of the children of the hoi polloi is an added benefit from their perspective.

It's a funny thing about hunting grounds. The elites might want to be careful about coming into the area themselves, as the wolves have no discipline.

Do people who fight for abortion care whether their children live or die? Is getting them into particular schools anything but a topic of competition and bragging rights for the parents? If they love even themselves, they need to rethink the sanctuary policies  before the wolves are at their doors, because after that, it will be too late.
Saboto Caesar, Minister of Agriculture, is aware of onging conversations but could not say if and how many partnerships had been entered into.

Saboto Caesar said that he could not give a figure with respect to the number of parties looking to enter into business partnerships towards conducting business, research, etc., in the local medicinal marijuana industry.

He did, however, in responding to a question by Parliamentary Representative for North Leeward, Roland Matthews during Mondays Sitting of Parliament, say that he was aware of one party of which his ministry, the Ministry of Agriculture, had received official notice.

Matthews had asked the Agriculture Minister if he was aware of any investor and traditional farmer who were looking to enter into a contractual agreement.

Caesar explained that just prior to the Medicinal Marijuana Bill being brought to the House in December 2018, the Ministry of Agriculture received a Memorandum of Overstanding between an investor and a group of traditional farmers from the Rastafarian community.

He also said that he was informed that following the protest that occurred outside Parliament by a group opposed to the Medicinal Marijuana Bill, an investor met with some of the individuals and were discussing investment opportunities.

"I am not aware of all the conversations, Caesar said.

In addition to the conversations that were ongoing among individuals and loose groups, the Minister noted that traditional farmers had formed themselves into groups, some going as far as to form and register companies and cooperatives.

There were also farmers who had no history of marijuana cultivation who were seeking advice on getting support from investors to assist them to get into the cultivation of marijuana.
Call it the procession of the RINOs. Call it the dirty dozen, standing up and getting themselves counted.

Loaded with piety, tears, and flapdoodle, 12 GOP senators proudly voted to halt President Trump's declaration of a "state of emergency" at the U.S. border as migrant caravan after migrant caravan after migrant caravan from Central America and beyond prepare to roll into the states through our porous border, and cartel human smugglers prepare for a big cash flow to themselves, the better to wreak havoc on Mexico and Central America.

Utah Senators Mitt Romney and Mike Lee, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, plus the usuals, Maine's Sen. Susan Collins and Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski, all made their Democratic colleagues in the Senate very, very happy with that vote cast against President Trump. Proud of yourselves, Utah?

For us, they threw out pious slop like this:

My statement on the emergency declaration resolution of disapproval pic.twitter.com/cVOMVBODpn  Senator Roy Blunt (@RoyBlunt) March 14, 2019

My statement on todays emergency declaration vote pic.twitter.com/QbP7VCL81S  Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) March 14, 2019

Thanks for your support in the fight for Article One, Josh! https://t.co/ypQAnOzt0S  Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) March 13, 2019

I support @POTUS plan to spend $5.7B to implement the top 10 priorities of the @CBP Border Security Improvement Plan. He can access sufficient funding w/o a national declaration, as I outlined in my floor speech  Rob Portman (@senrobportman) March 14, 2019

Oh, the sudden appeal of the constitution! Oh, that sudden 'concern' about separation of powers, and an imperial presidency. Oh, those creepy claims to really, truly, ooly, caring about border security as the caravans with a 's' prepare to roll in.

Funny they only come out with this crap when the issue is President Trump's border wall. Where were they, and all their Elmer Gantry pieties, back when President Trump and his recent predecessors declared other states of emergency - such as the one on the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, or the importance of not doing business with Burundi, or the one about blocking property of bad people running Nicaragua?

Because let's face it, declaring states of emergency is routinely done by presidents these days.

Somehow, they didn't get as loud. In fact, we didn't get any of this talk from them, based on what I was able to find, though I wouldn't put it past Rand Paul.

No, they've decided that now is the time to bring up constitutional separations of powers as the real issue and let what happens, happen, at the border, never mind that it actually is an emergency.

Think I'm kidding?

A Gallup poll of Latin Americans revealed that five million people from that region alone are planning to migrate here this year alone. With just one million legal immigration slots available, most would therefore be planning to do it illegally. U.S. immigration law has become an irrelevant detail to them.

That's the crisis. The Border Patrol guys see it - they've seen a massive surge in illegal crossings in just this year alone. According to left-wing NPR, they are arriving by the busloads in family units in numbers at a 10-year high. So long as a wall isn't there but it's being talked about, and courts keep thwarting any effort to send illegal border crossers home while the goodies are being rolled out as incentives from the state, the word getting out is get in while you can. The time is now. Start the surge.

What we are looking at is a Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan-style human-wave migrant exodus of the kind that rolled into Europe in 2015 and changed the face of Europe, and not particularly for the better, as illiterate migrants presented big bills to the state, while migrant rapes and robberies and killings became normalized. It might be workable if the coming migrants were people with English language skills and enough education to help the country. Congress is the one that has the job of expanding quotas to accommodate that possibility, which is something it won't do. But the ones coming don't have those things - they're coming for the free stuff, offered as actual enticements to migrate illegally by states such as California.

And now these dirty dozen decide that this vote was a good time to have a constitutional debate instead as the tens of thousands of unvetted illegal migrants breach the border?

What the heck are they doing about that? The answer? Nothing. They're telling Trump he's on his own and if the illegals flow in, the illegals flow in. Some border concern.

All I can say is, look at the comments on Romney's pious tweet, explaining himself to constituents - the opponents criticizing him are getting 'likes' in the hundreds. The constituents praising him are getting 'likes' that can be counted on one hand.

To their credit, wavering Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina,* Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Cory Gardner of Colorado didn't join the dozen. Those are people we can still respect because they see that there is a problem out there, Trump' call to emergency in the wake of the constant thwarting of the border wall at a time of vast electoral fraud and massive social spending based on the presence of illegals does make some sense, even for those who are concerned about overridding presidential power. It's also a fact that voters sent Trump to the White House instead of some prettyboy who says the right things, all because they trusted him to get something done and wanted the elites taught a lesson.

The twelve here aren't all horrible people on every issue, but their refusal to back Trump at a critical time is disturbing. Since they're part of the elites who haven't learned the voters' lesson, maybe it's time for the voters to make it more personal for them in their next election. This won't be forgotten.

*An earlier version of this piece misidentified Sen. Tillis's state and has since been corrected.
Yesterday, Beto (Robert) O'Rourke announced his candidacy for the presidency. Only six months ago, he said he would not run. Increasing the field by another white heterosexual will help dilute the already crowded field. Hopefully, many more Democrats will choose to run soon. Maybe the next will be former Vice President Biden.

Here is the benefit of Beto's announcement.

Beto is the new rock star on the left. He cannot stake a moderate position, as he has already supported the usual extreme positions that most of his opponents have previously enumerated. But his most ardent followers are younger and highly motivated to change the world. Already pundits are arguing that he is moderate. If that is so, which it is not unless his opponent is Bernie Sanders, he is likely to take votes and polling numbers from Biden.

So far, Uncle Joe presents the most reasonable option to fend off Trump's attack on socialism. But at 76 and clearly without any energy in his last few speeches, he lacks the support of the media, which have chosen Beto. This will keep Biden from showing enough star power and will likely doom his candidacy as time wears on. Beto will have to find a way to kill off the rest of the pack. This is unlikely. You can ride a skateboard only so far.

Kamala Harris has not gone up after a great start. She could come with a win in California and the western states. This may make her a contender or a vice presidential candidate. But her shameless search for more leftist causes (now including reparations for slavery) does not get her to the head of the class.

Senator Warren has no chance to lead the party after her false use of Indian heritage. Senator Gillibrand now has her own sexist scandals to defend. Soon Georgia's Abrams may join the fracas, but she is hardly likely to gain traction, since she also is running from the left.

This is great for Bernie, as he has a committed crowd that will support him under any circumstances. This means he will come to the convention with a strong number of delegates.

Bernie may not be your average socialist. He does not deny that socialism is his aim. He adds that he is a democratic socialist. This reminds me of one more thoughtful person, now dead. Howard Zinn said he was a bit anarchist, part socialist  yes, a democratic socialist. Thanks to him and his minions at Boston University, we now have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Bernie-supporter.

Beto said he was born to run for president. What an ego  makes Trump wonder. Women will swoon, and some will vote, but he has already supported the Green New Deal in principle. He gave a rather forlorn rationale for his campaign, as he sees himself as the last great hope for the planet. Maybe he can take a weather balloon and float away. Bye!

Image: Kelly Kline via Flickr.
Little girls and boys across the country are skipping school today to protest inaction on climate change by adults.

I guess schools have changed a lot since I was suspended for walking out on Vietam War Moratorium Day in 1969. In the case of the climate change "strike," school authorities are, in many cases, looking on with approval.

The stunt is supposedly the kids' idea, but they're recieving some "help":

NPR:

In Denver, 12 year-old Haven Coleman is a co-founder and co-director of the organization planning the first school strikes in the U.S. "I've always been passionate about fixing something when I see something is wrong," says Coleman, whose environmental activism began with a campaign to help manatees. "I ended up saving one manatee. His name is Cheese. He's adorable," she says.

Well, of course he's adorable - just like you. And it's that "adorable" quality that the adults behind this stunt are using.

Inspired by Greta Thunberg's protest in Sweden, Coleman says she searched for other young activists to organize a similar school strike here. Now she co-directs the project with Isra Hirsi, 16, of Minneapolis, and Alexandria Villasenor, 13, of New York City. Their platform includes a call for Congress to pass the Green New Deal, which is aimed at speeding the country's transition to carbon-free energy and re-making the economy to spread wealth more evenly. A number of Democratic presidential candidates have come out in favor of the non-binding resolution, while other Democrats  including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi  have downplayed it. When Senator Dianne Feinstein explained her opposition to the Green New Deal to a group of schoolchildren last month, video of the exchange went viral. Coleman says Friday's campaign received some help from adults, including The Future Coalition, but much of the planning and preparation was done by young volunteers across the country.

Little Miss Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and would join other cuties like Yassar Arafat and Le Duc Tho who were so honored.

The innocence of the children is very appealing, of course, and seeing kids take to the leftist battlements in support of climate change activism is just so darn adorable you want to throw your arms around them and give them a great big hug.

But their ignorance is appalling. Climate change might impact some of their futures. Passing the Green New Deal would surely destroy those futures. The young embrace the Green New Deal because it's a simple minded answer to enormously complex questions, made popular by a simpleton, and pushed by hysterics. But those behind the Green New Deal know exactly what they're doing, what it means for the economy, and see the destruction and devastation that would be wrought by the plan as an opportunity, not a tragedy.

The "Future Coalition" has been weaponizing children in support of left wing causes like gun control and abortion rights for years. Using ignorant children as fodder for protests is fundamentally wrong, bordering on child abuse.

Do you know where your kids are today?
Pity the rich.

It used to be the middle class that got squeezed. We had too little money to pay for college, but so much money that we had to buy tuition (and books, etc.) for the poor. Still, we found other ways to succeed. Then, having earned our way into the middle class, we struggled to get our kids into college, only to see them fall to the back of the line as members of the favored quota gentry were ushered to the front.

These days, it is the rich who are suffering (sarcasm intended). Their money has not only failed to gain them the preferential treatment to which they have become accustomed, but worse for them, buying their way past more accomplished students has potentially landed them in jail.

Note that the topmost of the wealthy have not suffered these depredations. The Kennedys and the Rockefellers can legally bribe their way into academia by founding a chair, a building, or parlaying their connections in the legacy category. No one challenges them.

It is the rich who suffer now. Ironically, there is now such a thing as being the second-rate wealthy, and being second-rate at anything is to be an abysmal failure.

But wait. Are we not the nation of equal opportunity? Do not applicants for college compete on a level playing field?

Of course not. That has never been the case, nor will it be for the foreseeable future. Ask any brilliant student trapped in a hellhole teachers-union-controlled school. If they cannot land in one of the few charter schools, their prospects for educational excellence are dim, very dim indeed. I remember seeing a TV news broadcast where a lottery was held for a limited number of charter school posts, and the losers were literally bawling, gushing tears of grief, as they faced their doom. Their uncontrolled sobbing did not move the hearts of the unqualified so-called teachers who oppose, tooth and nail, opening up any more charter schools.

Life is not fair, and that is the first lesson that people should learn. How to deal with the unfairness is the second.

Political reform is of course, badly needed, but waiting for it has seen generations of students graduate whether or not they could read their diplomas. It will not come about for many more years, if ever.

So what, then, can be done? Maybe its hopeless, but if there is hope, here is a list.

For starters, education can return to its original duty of training students for good citizenship, and stop being the vehicle for ideological and political indoctrination by the left. Western Civilization and civics must be reintroduced, along with history. Discipline and accountability must be rigid, at least compared with todays lax standards. The so-called studies of gender-class-oppression must be replaced by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Students who fail, for any reason, must be redirected to career fields in which they can both produce something of value for society, and succeed at it for themselves.

Our existential enemy, Communist China, is already implementing goal-oriented policies comparable to these, adapted of course to their society.

And they do not play fair.
The Singapore Exchange (SGX) has set its sights on the US marketplace as a growing source of liquidity for its iron ore derivatives contracts.

We are absolutely already seeing liquidity in iron ore in the US time zone, SGX head of derivatives Michael Syn said in an interview with Fastmarkets on Wednesday March 14 at the 44th annual International Futures Industry Conference in Boca Raton, Florida.



More traders in Asia continuing to trade into their evenings is one of the key factors driving this increased liquidity, he explained. The market is starting to trade longer and longer, he said.



This increased trading activity during US business hours is encouraging US-based participants to follow the price of iron ore more closely and participate in trading more than they have, he said.



That is why it has become clear to the exchange that a significant push is needed to get closer to users in the United States, according to Syn. As part of that strategy, the SGX added five US-based employees to its staff over the last year. All five are part of the exchanges North American business development team:



Thomas Connors and Laurent Partouche in New York City, primarily focusing on derivatives and equities

Serene Cai and Craig Cohen in Chicago, also concentrating on derivatives and equities

Michael Avila in San Francisco, targeting new technology listings and initial public offerings

Some people need help understanding why its worth connecting to an exchange like SGX, Syn said. We make sure we send them information about lots of new Asian asset classes that are developing, which are areas where their consciousness might not be as high.Although the US is a heavyweight producer and consumer of commodities, iron ore generally isnt one of them, according to Syn. Thats because most US steel is produced from scrap, and most iron ore is Asia-centric in terms of price references, he said.Thats why this sort of education is important, he said, pointing to new products such as the SGXs high-grade iron ore derivatives, which are settled against the daily Fastmarkets MB 65% Fe Iron Ore Index. There are many things happening in China that impact the US, and an exchange like SGX has them covered.The SGX does not view Chinas internationalization of its domestic iron ore or coal contracts as a threat to their objectives, according to Syn. Iron ore is still in the very early stages of network growth, he said. If China internationalizes, that helps the network of people who are connected to iron ore prices.US companies exposed to global markets can use the SGXs risk management tools to strip out fluctuations in raw materials prices. Just as with oil, the price of iron ore and the component prices of the steel value chain turn up in all sorts of ways, in any piece of infrastructure, Syn said.SGXs core customer base is physical market participants. No one really blindly speculates in iron ore; our customers genuinely have needs that are involved or have roots in the physical business in some respect, he said. Our job, apart from trying to make sure more people trade it and find uses for it, is to address the needs of the physical marketplace.That is why the exchange continues to work on developing products such as the high-grade iron ore derivatives to make sure the physical market is entrenched with us, Syn said.Succeeding in spreading awareness and usage of SGX products in the US will be an ongoing process, Syn said. When youre delivering a service success is about getting more adoption and more users interacting with each other. Success is a bigger, higher-quality network that is more deeply embedded in the US.By comparison, hedging iron ore in Asia gained traction during the 2008-09 financial crisis, according to Syn. Before that, most market participants sold and bought iron ore based on annual pricing models, he said.There was a constant and almost unacceptable dislocation between what the fixed price was and what people understood the spot price to be, he said. Competition drove an advantage in converting from a fixed to a floating price All it takes is fear of competitive pressure - thats what drives evolution.The SGX has seen a tremendous uptick in iron ore futures trading due to supply concerns following the deadly breach at one of Vales tailings dams in Brazil earlier this year.
Bell provides fastest download speeds in Canada, ties with Telus for best quality network

Over 1.8 billion records from more than 1 million handsets over 6 months benchmark the network speeds and quality offered by operators across Canada

Victoria, BC. March 14, 2019: Mobile network quality across Canada is notably excellent, especially compared to the United States. This is according to a new report published by Tutela, an independent Canadian mobile quality measurement company. Only Manitoba failed to see consistent quality on any operator exceed 75%, while Saskatchewan and Quebec provided users with the best overall network experience  able to conduct HD video calls or stream 1080p video 87% of the time.

Key findings:

Despite Bells clear advantage in download speeds (27 Mbps compared to 23 Mbps), Bell and Telus deliver virtually identical consistent quality to their customers. Meanwhile, across the whole country, Rogers' excellent consistent quality score was nine percentage points lower than the other two national operators. Overall, in one out of four tests, Rogers customers' network connection did not meet Tutela's threshold for excellent consistent quality, which may translate to an inferior experience with demanding use-cases like HD video streaming and real-time group video calling.

On a state by state level, regional operators have a clear home-field advantage , Videotron wins in Quebec when it comes to providing a consistently excellent experience to subscribers. Meanwhile, while Sasktel falls slightly short of Rogers consistent quality score in Saskatchewan, it achieves an impressive 83% excellent consistent quality even given its focus on rural coverage.

MVNO download speed caps significantly affect network quality levels on the lower cost networks (Lucky, Public and Chatr). While these networks perform fine for less demanding use cases, they fall short of being able to reliably allow users to make video calls or stream HD video on YouTube or Netflix.

Hunter Macdonald, Founder and CEO at Tutela, said: As a BC-based company (with HQ in Victoria), we have always enjoyed a high-quality cellular network from the operators here - and from our new research, it's great to see that this extends across all of the other provinces too - albeit with the best performing operators varying in each case. Operators across the country have worked to upgrade 3G networks to LTE-Advanced technology, and now peak throughput speeds have increased to a point where they outstrip the maximum needed for most current use cases. At this time, operators need to refocus on ensuring that these maximum potential speeds are also matched with a reliable, consistent mobile experience. After all, what use is occasionally hitting gigabit download speeds if half the time youre struggling to load a Google search result?

Tutela uses crowdsourcing to test mobile networks in a way that represents the day-to-day usage and experience of real-world mobile users, directly from the users handsets. Tutelas software runs in the background of over 3,000 diverse third-party mobile apps, which have partnered with Tutela to study network quality. This report used over 1.8 billion measurements, collected between August 1, 2018 and January 31, 2019. The full report is available here , and supporting images here .

Okay, so I'm a little peeved lately with my mobile provider. Bell.None of them are perfect, but recently it's been because they increased my plan by $5/month ... WITHOUT TELLING ME. Grumble...It wasn't enough they kept increasing the out of country "roam better" plan by a buck then two bucks per day... oi.Anywho ... they have recently been touted tho' as the fastest mobile network by Tutela when they compared the providers.Here's what Tutela had to say about their research:
Foldable smartphones are all the rage these days and a good many OEMs seem eager to cash in on the latest trend. The latest possible entrants are Google and ZTE, as patents from both the companies have been spotted which suggest they are considering phones with flexible displays.

Google filed its patent back in June 2018 and it was published in December. Apparently, the search giant is considering multiple designs. The first is an inward folding device with a clamshell-like design. The company is also considering a phone with a Z-shaped phone that has three sections and two hinges. Such a design would allow for a much bigger display when the phone is unfolded.

Although Samsung and Huawei have both revealed their foldable smartphones, neither Galaxy Fold nor Mate X has been released yet so it remains to be seen how the market would respond to devices that cost around $2,000. Although the first generation of foldable devices will have their own inherent problems, such as a creasing display and chunky dimensions, some analysts believe that foldable phones are one of the inventions that can take the smartphone market out of the current lull. Although Googles patent has only been spotted now, the company has already pledged software support for the new form factor and the Android Q Beta 1 also supports foldable phones so its not all that surprising too that it is also considering making a bendable phone of its own.

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Based on the patents, it seems that Google is in the early stages of the design phase so it could be a long time before the company actually starts producing foldable phones. For now, Google is reportedly gearing up to launch Google Pixel 3 Lite and Pixel 3 XL Lite, which would be affordable versions of the Pixel 3 duo without all the bells and whistles.

Moving on, certain images from ZTEs patent application that was published in China in December have also surfaced which show that it might also come out with a foldable phone. The images show a phone that is reminiscent of the Galaxy Fold with an outward folding design. However, it seems like ZTE is considering multiple designs too, as a patent filed with WIPO shows a phone that folds inwards horizontally but not completely, leaving the lower part of the display visible.

Of course, a patent doesnt necessarily mean anything and in no way confirms that the design would be commercialized. That being said, foldable displays are considered the next big thing by many and it is unlikely that any major OEM would decide to skip the trend.

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However, some, like Apple and LG are testing the waters and waiting to gauge market response before diving in. Like with any other nascent technology, OEMs would need time to perfect their foldable designs. Beyond the physical design, there is also an aspect of utility as consumers are unlikely to shell out 2000 bucks on a phone for the mere thrill of bendable displays. However, in the next few years, the price of foldable smartphones might come down, provided they stick around for that long.
Huawei has reportedly reiterated claims that it is working on its own mobile operating system as a fall back in case of further problems between itself and the US government. The companys top mobile division executive, Richard Yu, says that the measure is effectively a plan B. That seems to strengthen earlier comments from Huawei indicating that it doesnt necessarily want to be forced to switch over from Googles widely popular Android OS.

The comments are not without reason

Huaweis decision to reaffirm its efforts to build out a new operating system is not surprising, following more than a year of back-and-forth between the worlds second largest Android manufacturer and US authorities. The country has repeatedly called out Huawei as effectively acting as a front from Chinese government spying, going so far as to threaten diminished cooperation with allied nations that choose to use the companys networking infrastructure for 5G.

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The Chinese tech giant doesnt enter into that fray, which now includes a lawsuit against the country, with its own hands clean either. Huawei executives have been caught blundering into espionage using tactics more fitting for a spy thriller than the real world. Additionally, the US is currently attempting to extradite and prosecute another executive recently arrested in Canada for allegations related to trade violations and fraud.

The most recent development in Huaweis bout with the US centers around a comparatively mundane string of statements made by founder Ren Zhengfei against US security policy and more directly against current US President Donald Trump. Mr. Ren  whose daughter is currently being held at the request of US authorities criticized the policies and practices being enacted and encouraged by the US as both frivolous and more symbolic than genuinely effective.

Nothing new here but tensions are growing

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As suggested above, the newest statements from the company arent necessarily anything new. Instead, they serve as a reinforcement of previously made announcements and may represent a fundamental shift in how seriously Huawei is taking matters.

Prior to its reiteration, Huawei had been rumored to be testing an alternative to Android OS  built and maintained via an open-source project by US-based Google. At various points over 2018 and leading into 2019, those rumors were both denied and confirmed, leading to some confusion about its plans but that no longer seems to be the case.

Marked by multiple statements pertaining to the OS, Huawei appears to recognize that tensions between itself and the US over of its alleged ties to the authoritarian Chinese government are not becoming less prominent. Even as the handset maker continues to gain new ground in the Android market against top contenders Apple and Samsung, the chance that it will be entering more deeply into western markets is shrinking.

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If relations deteriorate further, it stands to lose access to Android OS entirely due to the fact that its headquartered within the US. If that does happen, lacking an alternative would leave the company in the undesirable position of either having to negotiate terms with the US on an unequal footing or losing the progress its made in the mobile market.
Huawei pleaded not guilty to all 13 counts of an indictment filed against the company by the United States government earlier this year. The move marks the first development in a case whose existence only became known in late January after a federal court in New York unsealed the attorney generals lawsuit targeting the Chinese firm.

Not only is Huaweis U.S. arm accused of wire fraud and bank fraud but its Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou is specifically named in the litigation, with stateside prosecutors apparently having reason to believe the 47-year-old not only directed and oversaw those illegal activities but participated in them personally. In addition to the aforementioned charges which Ms. Meng is facing as an individual, she has also been accused of a conspiracy to commit various frauds, though not always successfully.

According to heavily redacted court documents previously issued by a Vancouver court where Ms. Meng is presently trying to fight off Washingtons attempts to have her extradited, the prosecution can prove at least one instance of Ms. Meng telling lies that heavily misrepresented Huaweis relationship with Skycom Tech, a former Hong Kong electronics firm with a commercial presence in Iran.

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Huawei is accused of leveraging that asset in order to circumvent stateside trade embargoes imposed on the Middle Eastern country, which is something the government is particularly wary of, especially when it comes to technologies such as handsets and tablets which inevitably use some American components; parts that trade embargoes are meant to stop from being freely delivered to a hostile or otherwise unfavorable nation. While Huawei continues to insist Skycom has been nothing but a business partner since the turn of this decade, previous reports claim the firm organized a fake divestment in order to distance itself from the perception its building a media and tech empire like no other.

Huawei dismissed Washingtons allegations as baseless immediately after they were publicized as the Shenzen-based firm continues to argue the U.S. is simply afraid of how amazing its technology is and consequently wants to prevent it from gaining a foothold in its backyard because that would essentially be a move against American firms and allied entities. Huawei officials are always happy to point out that the firm experienced no major security breaches to date, as well. And while that claim is highly debatable as Huawei certainly doesnt lack in the bizarre-and-unexpected department, one of the things that arent is Chinas legal framework regulating state-sponsored intelligence gathering activities.

According to several recently revised laws, there are exactly zero things Huawei could do if Chinese intelligence set its sights on strong-arming it in exchange for information. Being the worlds largest manufacturer of telecom equipment, Huawei has no shortage of customers that could end up being compromised by Chinas communist state apparatus, assuming thats not already happening.

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Thats pretty much what Huaweis case comes down to; no, the Internet juggernaut was never caught actively spying on its clients on behalf of Beijing but the possibility of such a grim scenario doesnt simply exist  its codified in Chinas core group of laws used for oppressive policies and policy enforcement. Not only are Huaweis close ties to Beijing a concern for many but the companys consistent refusal to share concrete info about its convoluted corporate structure and operations unsurprisingly made the U.S. and its allies even more suspicious of it.

The next hearing in the federal governments case against Huawei is scheduled for April 4. In the meantime, representatives of the two sides should meet once again over a counter-lawsuit Huawei filed earlier this month, maintaining its left with no other choice regarding such unfair behavior on the U.S. part. In the meantime, Washington-Beijing relations continue to deteriorate as the Far Eastern country is now openly attacking the American political leadership, threatening its allies, and sentencing people to death in response to Ms. Mengs arrest.
The Carnival Breeze Liner, one of four mega liners that will remove Antigua and Barbuda from its itinerary. (Photo Credit: Cruise Mapper)

Carnival Cruise Lines has cancelled its scheduled calls to Antigua.

The discouraging news was relayed to Antiguans and Barbudans by President of the Antigua and Barbuda Cruise Tourism Association Nathan Dundas, who also warned that "more cancellations could be on the horizon.

The Antigua media did not report Dundas as giving any reason(s) for the decision taken by the Florida-based Carnival Line.

But speculation is rife that it could well be in direct response to Prime Minister Gaston Browne accusing the Florida Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA)  which is comprised of 19 member cruise lines operating in Florida and Latin America and the Caribbean  of exploiting regional countries.

"The reality is that the FCCA is literally exploiting the Caribbean. So you will charge, for example, thousands of dollars for your visitors to the Caribbean  and I know that the cruise business is capital intensive  but when you are giving these countries five or six dollars per head this cannot cover the capital costs for the infrastructure, Browne is reported by Antiguan media as saying.

Browne also advanced the view that the only way for small countries like his to fight the FCCA "is to form a regional port facility and mandate that cruise associations pay more.

Carnival Cruises was expected to bring an estimated 250,000 tourists to Antigua and Barbuda during the 2019  2020 season.

The fear is that the withdrawal by Carnival Cruise Lines, i.e Carnival Corporation, could well set off similar action by its subsidiary lines such as Princess, Holland America, Seabourn and other European lines.

(Source: Caribbean 360, Antigua Observer)

This development comes in the face of Antigua and Barbuda government signing US$83 million agreement with the London-based Global Ports Holdings (GPH) to develop the main cruise port in St Johns, capital of Antigua.
Qualcomm has come out the other side victorious in its latest battle with Apple.

The San Diego-based company today confirmed that a U.S. court (also in San Diego) has found Apple to be in breach of three of its patents.

One of the parents relates to flashless booting which helps smartphones to quickly connect to the internet. The second helps to mitigate against the speed of data transfer between smartphone apps and the internet. While the third involves improvements to battery life and specifically within the context of gaming.

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It would seem the court agreed that various iPhone models infringed on two of the Qualcomm patents while the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X managed to infringe on all three. However, collectively Qualcomm was only awarded $31 million in damages.

The damages value is fairly low considering what it could have been and this is due to them being limited to the date in which Qualcomm originally filed the lawsuit  July 2017. Therefore, although Apple is likely to be disappointed with the overall loss, it will feel somewhat of a win as it could have been far worse if the iPhone-maker was found to be liable for the entirety of the iPhones existence. This is something Qualcomm has originally been seeking and if successful it could have resulted in financial damages being awarded for each iPhone sold to date that used the disputed technology. However, that was not the case with the damages limited to iPhone sales since the lawsuit came about.

In either case, it is a win for Qualcomm and that matters as it continues to see the company making minor gains as part of its much wider litigation efforts with Apple with the announcement also highlighting past wins in Germany and China during the last six months for different patent infringements.

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Qualcomm is no stranger when it comes to patents as it currently holds a significant amount. However, it has come under criticism by some for the way in which it executes those patents and in particular the fees it charges companies for use of its patented technologies.

The latter of which has escalated quickly for Qualcomm with the company coming under the scope of various government agencies in different parts of the world, along with accusations of monopolizing the market.

This has led to a fairly public fight between Qualcomm and Apple specifically, with Apple refusing to pay for the use of patents and Qualcomm looking to enforce the rights afforded to it through the patent ownership.

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Neither currently seem that interested in dialing down the battle going forward and neither has been that concerned about vocalizing how they feel about the other in public. For example, as part of the announcement today, Qualcomm took the opportunity to add the technologies invented by Qualcomm and others are what made it possible for Apple to enter the market and become so successful so quickly.

Although this is a win for Qualcomm, it is only a win for today with the two due to do battle in the courts again next month. This win may prove useful in the larger upcoming lawsuit though, as it does establish an awarded per-iPhone damages value.
U.S. mobile chipset manufacturer Qualcomm will host a special announcement on March 19, according to a recent tweet from the company. Qualcomm did not outright specify what the announcement will be about but the caption Have you heard? along with an attached promotional image featuring a speaker icon strongly suggest that the company might have some new audio-related mobile technologies to reveal.

Qualcomm and the wireless earphones rising popularity

Bluetooth-based wireless earbuds have been around for several years now, but the segment experienced somewhat of a slow start partly because of the relatively high prices as well as the fact that wired alternatives have some benefits in terms of size, weight, and autonomy since they dont require a battery.

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But last year as the segment strengthened its foundation, wireless earbuds have become more common and more OEMs began offering their wireless solutions at varying price points. Qualcomm confirmed this rising trend at Mobile World Congress last month when the chipset maker revealed that an increasing number of OEMs have adopted its own Bluetooth audio chipsets for their products.

Likewise, a previous report from the research firm IDC revealed that the wearable market benefited from a 27.5-percent year-on-year increase throughout 2018, and in part, this success was achieved by the rising popularity of wireless audio wearables.

Qualcomm might be preparing new Bluetooth audio SoCs

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More than a year ago around CES 2018, Qualcomm introduced two Bluetooth-based audio chipset solutions designed primarily for wireless audio. The QCC30xx series was a low-power, entry-level solution for manufacturers of wireless earbuds, headsets, and speakers, while the QCC5100 series was positioned by the OEM as a premium-tier, ultra-low power solution for a new generation of wireless audio products.

These chipsets introduced more than a year ago have had a slow start as well, mainly because the market they were supposed to power was still in its infancy at the time of release. But as Qualcomm confirmed at MWC 2019, these chipset solutions have become more prevalent as OEMs including Cleer Inc., OPPO, Marvin, Jabra, and more have adopted them.

With this boost in popularity seemingly experienced by wireless earbuds, Qualcomm might be preparing to unveil new purpose-built Bluetooth-based audio chipsets next week and replace last years solutions with more modern chipsets.

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If so then one of the main areas where the new chipsets could improve is power consumption. The ongoing QCC30xx series introduced last year boasted up to 50-percent better power management whereas the QCC5100 high-end solution promised improvements in power consumption of up to 65-percent compared to previous chipsets.

Another improvement the company might have in store is a smaller package. Wireless earbuds are already constrained by their limited volume especially since truly wireless solutions need to include a battery in each bud, so any component that can be shrunk down further will have a considerable impact on how OEMs approach design from the early stages of development.

Not much has been confirmed so it remains to be seen exactly what audio-related technologies Qualcomm might have in store for mobile enthusiasts next week. A new audio chipset solution for smartphones is unlikely given that this component is generally integrated with the Snapdragon SoCs. For now, the safest bet remains a new audio solution for wireless earbuds.
Qualcomm expects smartphones equipped with 64-megapixel cameras and higher to be released this year by various OEMs, according to a recent MySmartPrice interview with Qualcomms Sr. Director of Product Management, Judd Heape. In the interview passed along by Android Authority, the executive also explained how some of its Snapdragon chipsets were updated to support 192-megapixel imaging earlier this week, and what its current plans for HDR10+ are.

How have the Snapdragon chipsets been updated to support 64-megapixel sensors?

Earlier this week Qualcomm updated the product pages for a number of Snapdragon chipsets to reveal that they support 192-megapixel imaging. As to how this feature was achieved, the short answer is its always been there.

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According to Judd Heape, the Snapdragon 660, 670, 675, 710, 845, and 855 have always supported 192-megapixel imaging but this characteristic was hidden because the higher resolution mode doesnt support 30fps or 60fps, nor multi-frame noise reduction and ZSL (zero shutter lag).

The maximum resolution supported by the chipsets was not advertised in the past because Qualcomm thought customers should know only about the resolutions that support the aforementioned technologies. However, since several OEMs have equipped some of their recent smartphones with cameras boasting a higher resolution than what was advertised for the Snapdragon chipsets they employ, the chipset maker decided to adjust its spec sheets to reflect the OEMs configurations.

The race for higher-resolution mobile cameras continues

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Some smartphone OEMs including Samsung and Sony have abandoned the race for higher resolution cameras in favor of bigger sensors and fewer but larger pixels, thus resulting in better mobile photography. But other manufacturers  particularly those from China  are still competing in this area and continue to push resolutions higher every year.

This trend will not change in 2019 either and according to the Qualcomm executive, several OEMs are now collaborating with mobile camera manufacturers to create smartphones equipped with units that have a resolution of 64-megapixels or even higher than 100-megapixels. These mysterious devices are said to launch by the end of the year.

The executive didnt reveal any specific OEMs but by looking at the flagship phones released so far in 2019, its relatively safe to assume that Xiaomi, Honor, and Vivo are among these manufacturers. The aforementioned trio already launched devices equipped with 48-megapixel cameras and theres no reason to believe they wont push for an even higher pixel count.

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Next Snapdragon flagship chipset will have its own HDR10+ implementation

The current implementation of HDR10+ based on the HDR10 industry standard was developed and introduced by Samsung and Amazon in 2017. In the recent interview, Judd Heape confirmed that Qualcomm is now working on its own HDR10+ implementation which will contain scene-by-scene and frame-by-frame metadata.

This will be a new addition to Qualcomms chipset solutions so it wont be achieved by editing a spec sheet. The Snapdragon 855 does support HDR10+ but again, this is a Samsung implementation and not something developed in-house by the U.S.-based chipset manufacturer.

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Qualcomm expects its next flagship-grade chipset to launch alongside its own take on HDR10+ which sounds like it will compete with Samsungs existing solution, even though the HDR10+ is an open, royalty-free standard.

Interestingly, the executive referred to the next-gen chipset as the Snapdragon 865. He underlined that the name has not been set in stone but even if it may still be subject to change, it does follow Qualcomms naming scheme for its top-tier Snapdragon chipset series.
The Minister General of the First Order Brothers of the Anglican Society of St Francis, Brother Christopher John SSF, writes about the training of novices by the religious communities in Melanesia.

Im writing this, the first of a regular blog, in the Solomon Islands where Im with our brothers for nearly two months visiting them and assisting their life and work in about 10 different friaries.

On the weekend of 1  3 March, we travelled west of Honiara out to Veranaaso, site of the Melanesian Sisters training house. There I joined with more than one hundred mainly young members of the four religious orders in the Anglican Church of Melanesia (Melanesian Brotherhood, Community of the Sisters of Melanesia, Community of the Sisters of the Church, and the Society of St Francis). It was the annual Religious Life Sunday, observed in each diocese by prayer for the religious communities and for vocations, and just by having fun together.

Novices in the communities here are measured by the truck-load, and indeed the trucks had brought in a huge gathering. The weekend included some spiritual input, worship, a singing competition (the judges diplomatically declared that every community was a winner), and to finish with, a huge feast which had taken the whole day before in preparation.

I asked those who were there what they liked about the weekend. The answer was the same from everyone: being together and getting to know people in the other communities.

The religious communities here are a vital part of the Church and are present throughout all the dioceses of the province. Hundreds join the communities every year. For most of them the communities are a time of spiritual growth and service, and then they leave, now ready to take on the responsibilities of marriage and family life.

But they never really leave. They are forever former brother or former sister and part of the extended reach of each order. There is also a huge network of Companions, Associates, Third Order, etc, who are also part of that wider reach. Some stay longer, and a few eventually make life profession, providing a stable core of leadership.

Increasingly so the communities here are looking to mission beyond Melanesia. What they have is the joy of simple Gospel living. And this is the gift they have to share beyond their own shores.

I give thanks to God for the communities of the Anglican Church of Melanesia, and pray that they can respond to the call to share their life and faith both within the many islands of their own land, and across the seas beyond.
Posted on: March 15, 2019 10:10 AM

Anglican archbishops in New Zealand, Australia and England have spoken out after gunmen attacked two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. At 9 pm Friday NZDT (8 am GMT), the official death toll from the terror attacks stood at 49 people with another 39 being treated in Christchurch Hospital. New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush told a press conference that 41 people were killed at the al-Noor mosque on Deans Avenue; and seven at the Linwood Islamic Centre on Linwood Avenue. Another person died at Christchurch Hospital.

The City of Christchurch was put on lockdown after news of the attacks emerged at around 1.40 pm NZDT (12.40 am GMT). Four people have been arrested. One, a man in his twenties described as a white supremacist, has been charged with murder and will appear in court tomorrow (Saturday). One armed man arrested near the scene has been ruled out of involvement. Police are continuing to investigate whether two other people arrested at the scene with firearms were involved in the attacks.

The Bishop of Christchurch, Peter Carrell, issued a statement on behalf of the leaders of churches in Christchurch city and Canterbury province. Church leaders are absolutely devastated at the unprecedented situation in Christchurch this afternoon and our hearts and prayers go to all involved, the statement said. No religious organisation or group deserves to be the target of someones hate  regardless of beliefs.

We stand for an Aotearoa New Zealand which will never condone such violence. So across the churches of Christchurch and Canterbury, we are praying for our Muslim brothers and sisters, for those injured and those who have lost loved ones, for the police, ambulance and other emergency services, and for all in the city of Christchurch who are feeling distress and fear due to this event.

We are upholding you all in our prayers. We pray too for the shooter and their supporters, because for any person to do this, they must have such hatred in their hearts, such misalignment of the value of human life, that they too, need our prayer. We thank many others from around our nation and the world who are praying for peace in Christchurch.

In a separate letter, addressed to Dear Friends, Bishop Peter offered his personal response, writing: the tragic violence this afternoon in Christchurch  an ongoing situation as I write  will already be a matter for prayer for you.

Lets pray and continue praying for those who have been injured, for those who care for them, for those who are sorrowing and for our police and other services who are working hard and bravely to bring this shocking event to a peaceful end.

We understand that some of the central city churches are opening up their doors for prayer, once they are able to do so safely. We have heard that All Souls Merivale will be doing so.

Many of us will have family and friends who have been affected by the disruption to central Christchurch, some of whom may still be in a lock-down situation. Prayer for our inner Christchurch city ministers (all denominations), our schools, our hospitals and our chaplains would be much appreciated.

Especially, lets pray for the Muslim community of Christchurch who appear to be the single community most affected by the shootings.

The Christchurch Inner-City Christian Ministers Association, an ecumenical association which unites the leaders of 10 Christian churches in Christchurch City Centre, including Christ Church Cathedral, published a letter to the Muslim Community of Christchurch.

In it they say: In the face of todays horrific shooting, the combined inner-city Christian ministers and their congregations wish to extend our love to the wider Muslim Community of Christchurch and assure them of our friendship and support at this time of great loss.

Be assured of our continuing prayers as our joint city community and people struggle to understand what has happened in the wake of this unconscionable act. As members of two faith traditions, born out of a shared Abrahamic inheritance, we stand in solidarity with you. Looking, and crying, to God, the source of all.

Peace be with you.

The two New Zealand-based Primates of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, Archbishops Philip Richardson and Don Tamihere, issued a joint statement saying that they were shocked at the appalling and horrific acts of violence that occurred in Christchurch today.

They add: We feel utterly saddened for those who have lost their lives, and for their families and loved ones who mourn them. Indeed, we mourn with them as fellow citizens and members of the same human whanau [extended family], and we utterly condemn the despicable and cowardly acts of violence that took their lives.

The freedom of worship and religious life is an absolute right to all in this land. We choose to stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters and support their continued and inalienable right to live and worship here in peace.

All of us who live here in Aotearoa New Zealand must stand in solidarity in the face of such evil  and we call upon Anglicans throughout Aotearoa New Zealand to uphold all those affected in prayer, and to respond to this act by rejecting the rhetoric of hatred and religious intolerance, and to show compassion and kindness to all our neighbours who wish to live here in peace.

The Precentor of St Pauls Cathedral in Wellington, Canon Simon Winn, has prepared a set of prayers and liturgy that can be used by churches on Sunday in response to what is the worst mass shooting in New Zealands history. In it, he acknowledges that It can be very difficult to know what or how to pray in the wake of a terrorist attack.

The Anglican Assistant Bishop of Wellington, Dr Eleanor Sanderson, and local Roman Catholic Priest Father Ron Bennett, Christian co-chairs of the interfaith group the Wellington Abrahamic Council of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, led a small group of church representatives to the headquarters of the Federation of Islamic associations of New Zealand (FIANZ), which is based in the citys Kilbirnie Mosque.

In a statement, the group said that it: condemns the violence against the Muslim Community in Christchurch today. While the situation is still unfolding, it is clear that many innocent people have been killed  may they rest in peace.

The Jewish and Christian communities send love and support to our Muslim brothers and sisters.

Such deadly violence aimed at religious people has been unknown in New Zealand  until now, and has no place in our normally peaceful country. Now is the time to stand together, support our Muslim friends, and most importantly, keep talking and keep working to better understand each other.

Responding to the church leaders visit, the Chief Executive of FIANZ, Sultan Eusoff, said: We want to thank you all for your prayers and coming here today. Its important we stay together at this time of sadness. Its good to know we have friends supporting us in all of this.

By and large New Zealanders of all walks of life have shared their lives with us and we live happily together. Most importantly we must remain united and are glad of people of other faith groups coming together with us and praying for us, which brings us great solace and comfort at this time. 

Anglican leaders outside New Zealand have also responded to the attack. The Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, Archbishop Philip Freier, said that Acts of brutality like the outrage in Christchurch offend the decency of our common humanity.

Our hearts go out to all who grieve or have been traumatised. Australia and New Zealand are closely bound by history, geography and heritage, and Australians know how appalled the people of New Zealand are at such awful mass murder in their country.

We pray for all who suffer.

Profound sympathy for the victims and relatives of the New Zealand terrorism. Let all Christians pray for healing of people, interfaith relations and New Zealand itself. Jesus calls us to welcome strangers and love our neighbour however different.  Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) March 15, 2019

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, responded to the attack in a Tweet, in which he expressed his profound sympathy for the victims and relatives of the New Zealand terrorism.

He added: Let all Christians pray for healing of people, interfaith relations and New Zealand itself. Jesus calls us to welcome strangers and love our neighbour however different.
FLIGHT: Meet the people working tirelessly to stop Indonesias jungles falling silent 14 March 2019

One year on from its founding, Animals Asias Indonesian partner FLIGHT has rescued thousands of birds and returned song to the jungles of Indonesia.

In January 2019, less than a year on from their founding, Indonesian charity FLIGHT rescued nearly 1,500 birds from smugglers.

As part of their investigations into bird smuggling, the group also helped the authorities rescue 13 slow Lloris, 14 turtles and five eagles  all in January alone.

Marison Guciano, Director of FLIGHT Indonesia, said:

We spent years monitoring the illegal trade in Indonesias birds and were absolutely shocked by the sheer scale of the industry.

The jungles were literally being emptied and we knew that if we didnt step in, they would soon go silent.

Rare and indigenous birds are poached from throughout the Indonesia archipelago to be sold in markets on the nations largest island, Java.

Particularly desirable are a variety of birds native to Sumatra such as sunbirds, tailorbirds, leafbirds, bulbuls and nuthatches.

FLIGHT believe more than 10,000 birds are smuggled from Sumatra to Java every week to be sold at markets to collectors who value their singing voices.

Thankfully, with FLIGHT now monitoring the trade and working with the government to catch poachers, the number of birds recovered and re-released is on the rise.

In December 2018, FLIGHT helped to confiscate 3,175 birds being smuggled from Sumatra to Java with all surviving birds released, while a further 2,140 birds were saved by the group in November.

Sadly, the brutal conditions endured by the birds during capture and transport mean that many dont survive.

In the summer of 2018, quarantine officials found 6,000 birds in a van being smuggled from Sumatra into Java. Tragically, 2,000 of the birds died before they could be released back into the wild.

Marison said:

We have been able to rescue a huge number of birds in our first year and disrupt major poaching and smuggling rings, but more needs to be done.

The markets are still full with protected bird species being openly sold and the authorities simply must do more to stop this cruel trade. Well continue to work with them to avert the tragedy of Indonesias forests falling silent after millennia of birdsong.

Animals Asia provides funding and mentorship to FLIGHT in order to help them achieve their goal of saving Indonesias songbirds.

Animals Asia Animal Welfare Director Dave Neale said:

FLIGHTs work is truly vital and what they have achieved in their first year  saving nearly 10,000 birds  has exceeded all expectations. They have also played a huge role in alerting Indonesia to the issue of songbird smuggling. With their help, Indonesias songbirds, and the ecosystems they are central to, have a chance of surviving, and well give FLIGHT all they help they need.
One of the original partners in this countrys Geothermal Project has pulled out, delaying the signing of the power purchase agreement.

Dr Ralph Gonsalves said in Parliament on Monday that the government had received notification from Emera Caribbean Incorporated (ECI) on October 25, 2018, that it was not in the companys best interest for them to remain in the project, and gave notice of their intention to exit the agreement.

He was at the time responding to a question posed by Leader of the Opposition, Dr Godwin Friday who had asked for an update on the power purchase agreement.

Emera, Reykjavik Geothermal of Iceland and the Government of St Vincent and the Grenadines had entered into a partnership - registered as St. Vincent Geothermal Company Limited [SVGCL]) in 2015 - to undertake the exploration and eventual construction and commissioning of a Geothermal Plant, using La Soufriere volcano as its source. The plant was expected to generate 15 megawatts (MH) of power initially.

The estimated cost of the project has been put at US$91 million, excluding transmission lines, which are estimated to cost between US$14 and US$16 million.

But, Gonsalves said that the government has expressed an interest in gaining the majority shares, to which he said Reykjavik had no objection.

Reykjavik, though, has requested that the government enters into a service agreement with them, and, according to the Prime Minister, "that is the area, broadly speaking, where we want to go.

"Clearly, after the drilling, we have to work out arrangements as to how that infrastructure cost would be handled if and when we get the majority shareholding, Dr. Gonsalves said.

In giving a further update on the project, Dr. Gonsalves said that the drilling equipment was expected to arrive in early April, and that drilling was earmarked for commencement in May.

And in an effort to ensure that residents within the immediate area of the site of the project and those (residents) along the path of distribution are kept up to date on developments with respect to the Geothermal project, and to address their concerns, the St. Vincent Geothermal Company Limited (SVGCL) will host a series of meetings as follows: Orange Hill Thursday, March 21 at 2.30 PM at the Orange Hill Agriculture Biotechnology Centre; Byera  Friday, March 22 at 3.30p.m. at the Byera Square (between Mas Tuckey and Cool Spot); Biabou Friday, March 22 at 5.30 PM next to Biabou Playing Field; Calliaqua Saturday, March 23 at 3.00 PM at the Calliaqua Town Hall; Georgetown Monday, March 25 at 3.00 PM at the Dickson Methodist School; Arnos Vale Wednesday, March 27 at 6.00 PM at the Arnos Vale Playing Field; Sandy Bay Thursday, March 28 at 3.00 PM at the Sandy Bay Primary School.

In keeping with the objectives and safeguarding against any reputational harm to themselves, Emera entered into a sale purchase and option agreement, and has sold its shares to Reykjavik Geothermal, making it the majority partner with 51%, with the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines holding the remaining 49%.Both parties agreed that nothing should be altered until the quality of the resource has been realized.Residents of these areas are hopeful that the Company would address the concerns about drilling and the noise involved, among other concerns related to general heatlh and well being issues.
Time off for funerals is an issue that needs addressing, the PM implied.

According to Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, while there are some funerals that one cannot avoid, there is work which still needs to get done.

He said that he was making the point as one for reflection, and did it during the obituaries segment of Mondays Meeting of the House.

Dr. Gonsalves said that he was finding himself having to attend funerals almost every weekend and occasionally during the week, and they were taking up a lot of time.

"Can one attend every funeral? he asked.

It had reached a stage now, the PM said, where he had to comment to the Comptroller of Customs that during his tenure as the minister of finance, he had never seen permission granted for a half day off for workers to attend the funeral of a former colleague.

"What would happen if that the leadership and members will go and leave a skeleton staff to do the work of the living while we mourn the dead and celebrate his or her life? Gonsalves questioned.

And when the Customs is closed, the port is also closed, which results in a tremendous inconvenience to business and other individuals, the Prime Minister pointed out.

Permission for the half holiday was granted, he was told, however such a request ought not to have been made in the first place, the Prime Minister said.

"If it came to me, I would have raised this particular question, he said.
Josep Lluis Trapero came through. The head of the Catalan police during the October 1st (1-O) referendum agreed to take the stand as a witness despite being tried for rebellion in Spains National Court, and did so to explain in detail the decisions he made during the key dates of the independence bid. Trapero defended the Mossos dEsquadra (the Catalan police force) at all times. He described his differences with the Catalan government at the time and referred to statements by former Interior Minister Joaquim Forn ahead of 1-O as slightly irresponsible. He also admitted to disagreements with Diego Perez de los Cobos, the coordinator of the police operation appointed by the Spanish government, but he stressed that they were expected to act as a single force on the day of the referendum. He pointed out that all police were under a court order to conduct themselves with restraint and preserve social peace, and left his headline for the end, during the cross-examination by the defenses.

In response to Joaquim Forns lawyer, Trapero assured that he had a police team ready to enforce any possible court orders he stated that this could include the arrest of president Carles Puigdemont and the entire government following the declaration of independence and he communicated as much to Jose Maria Romero de Tejada, lead prosecutor for Catalonia, and to Jesus Maria Barrientos, president of the TSJC (the Catalan High Court). As he had declared before the National Court during the cases investigatory phase, Trapero told the Supreme Court that on the day of the declaration of independence he had sent Romero de Tejada and Barrientos two email messages offering the services of the Catalan police.

Traperos testimony confirmed that he played no part in the Catalan governments plans, as he had anticipated at a September 28 meeting in the Palau de la Generalitat with Carles Puigdemont, Oriol Junqueras, Joaquim Forn, and the police top brass. We conveyed our concern that on the day of the referendum there would be 2 million people and 12,000 police officers on active duty, and that this would necessarily lead to major disturbances, explained Trapero, when asked by Justice Manuel Marchena .

After the midday recess, public prosecutor Javier Zaragoza brought up the issue of the priority of preserving peaceful coexistence vs. the fulfillment of the judicial orders. Trapero made it clear that Judge Armas had delivered the operational section of the court order issued to prevent 1-O, and he learned about the reference to guaranteeing "peaceful coexistence", mentioned in one of the legal grounds of the order, the next day through media reports. The head of the Catalan police assured that preserving social peace did not prevail over the fulfillment of the judicial instruction, but it was the means that had to be used to carry it out.

At this point, Trapero revealed an instruction from judge Armas -which he had disclosed at the National Court at the end of a meeting on September 27 with police leaders: You must act patiently, in a collected manner, and guarantee social peace at all times. Given this, he argued that it was offensive to him that De los Cobos labeled the fact that Trapero set limits on the use of force as an excuse for not complying with the judges instructions.

Differences with minister Forn

Another key aspect of his testimony was Traperos intention to clearly distance himself from the Catalan government. He noted that he had been uncomfortable for a while with the political drift of the government. According to his perception, Jordi Jane (the Interior Minister before Joaquim Forn) stepped down because he did not want to run any kind of risk. The Catalan police boss also criticized some of Forns statements about the role of the Mossos just before 1-O, saying that they would not prevent the referendum, as irresponsible. And he remarked that he had conveyed this concern to the government.

He also denied any political interference by the Interior Ministry. In reply to the state attorneys question about whether Forn gave any order to minimize risks, Trapero said he didnt. When asked by Forns lawyer, he mentioned the concern in the police force when following his appointment the new minister insisted that the referendum be facilitated. If you have a government that somehow favors or promotes an illegal act, but at the same time has a police force that reports to that government, this will naturally go against the opinion of the unions and of the force as a whole, he noted. However, he did make it clear that Forn later made quite a strong statement on the independence of the corps because with time he came to understand the differences between the Government and the Police.

The actions of the Catalan police in the days leading up to the vote have been the subject of debate, and Trapero clearly demonstrated that the actions of the TSJC magistrate Mercedes Armas changed the plans with regards to the Prosecutor's instructions. He emphasised that he had submitted an action plan to comply with the prosecutors order to close off the polling stations and cordon off a perimeter of 100 meters. The plan involved 40,000 officers and it would require assistance from the other police forces, as the Mossos do not have this number of officers. The TSJC instructions were different," Trapero said, and he later noted that the judges order superseded the prosecutors, which were then no longer in force.
The Smithsonian Institution has canceled this summers 10-day Folklife Festival celebrating the music and culture of Benin and Brazil and will replace it with a smaller event. Instead, [there] will be a two-day event, June 29 and 30, focused on the Social Power of Music, in keeping with the Smithsonian-wide 2019 Year of Music theme.  The Washington Post
In todaysI review two Broadway musicals, the transfer ofand a new revival of. The first is terrific, the second lousy. Heres an excerpt.

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Be More Chill has moved to Broadway after a sold-out downtown run whose popularity was fueled by an unexpected tsunami of grass-roots social-media enthusiasm. It now looks set to replicate its off-Broadway success, as well it should. Grudging reviews notwithstanding, Be More Chill is one of the strongest new musicals of the past decade, a charming, astutely crafted tale of neurotic post-millennial geeks in love whose appeal is in no way limited to those whom it portrays.

Be More Chill plays like a cross between Dear Evan Hansen and Napoleon Dynamite. Jeremy (Will Roland), the protagonist, is an incapacitatingly shy New Jersey high-school junior whose congenital nerdiness prevents him from asking out Christine (Stephanie Hsu), an explosive enthusiast who acts in school plays in order to ameliorate her own social awkwardness (Life is easy in rehearsal/You follow a script/So you know what comes next). Then hes introduced to the Squip, an under-the-counter drug that instantaneously turns those who consume it into popular kids. Of course theres a catch, about which Ill say no more than that it has dystopian implications

The score comes at you like a fistful of Roman candles: Not since Hamilton has a musical opened on Broadway that is so closely in tune with contemporary pop-music style. Just as important, though, Mr. Iconis songs are embedded in a book that follows to the letter the time-honored structural rules of school-of-Hammerstein musical theater.

Kiss Me, Kate, Cole Porters ingenious 1948 transformation of The Taming of the Shrew into a backstage musical, is back on Broadway for the first time in more than 17 years. The Roundabout Theater Company has reunited the production team behind its 2016 revival of She Loves Me for a big-budget version directed by Scott Ellis and choreographed by Warren Carlyle whose cast is headed by Kelli OHara and Will Chase. Would that it were even half as good, but this Kiss Me, Kate is bland and unimaginative.

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To read my review ofgo

To read my review ofgo

A rehearsal for I Love Play Rehearsal, a number from Be More Chill:
5 Legal Ways to Profit Off Your Body

How to Make Bank by (Legally!) Selling Your Body

Find yourself strapped for cash a little more often than you would like? Contemplating taking on a part-time job to make ends meet? Sure, you could do that  but at what price? Yes, youd be paying the bills, but youll probably be cutting into your social life, too. Maybe you should consider making some extra money another way: by selling your body.

RELATED: How to Make Money on the Side

Now, were not talking prostitution here. What we are talking about is making bank off your blood, your baby-making juice, and everything in between. Whether youre looking to rake in $100 a week donating plasma or up to $1,500 a month for ejaculting into a cup, selling your bodys precious byproducts can prove to be a lucrative side hustle.

Here are five ways to nab extra cash if you find yourself in a pinch:

Sell Your Sperm

With more and more prospective parents relying on artificial insemination to start a family, the U.S. sperm market is booming. While some countries such as Canada and Australia prohibit men from selling their seed, here in the good ol U.S. of A., compensation depends on which sperm bank you go to and the quality of your little soldiers.

Some places will tell you straight up what they pay for each sample  Seattle Sperm Bank, for example, compensates donors $70 for each approved donation  while others, like Manhattan Cryobank and Northwest Cryobank (which has three locations in Washington State), say you can only earn up to $1,500 per month. If you break it down, though, that equates to three donations per week at a rate of $125 each. Whether you consider that a lot or a little, its extra money for something you likely (read: definitely) do anyway.

Not every guy can make a quick buck with his babymakers, however, as sperm banks tend to be pretty choosy. Donors at California Cryobank, for instance, which has four locations nationwide and claims to be the worlds No. 1 physician-recommended sperm bank, must be at least 5 feet, 8 inches tall, between the ages of 19 and 38, a current two- or four-year college student or graduate and in good physical health (as established by a physical exam, multiple screenings for infectious diseases, a genetic screening, and an evaluation of family history).

California Cryobank is extremely selective in the donor selection process and only accepts about 1 percent of the 20,000-plus donor applicants each year, says Scott Brown, the companys communications VP.

Once you get past the rigmarole, how often and when you donate throughout the month is up to you; one to two times per week is fairly standard, adds Brown.

So, whats the catch? Well, besides the fact that youll likely need to refrain from ejaculating (whether via sex or masturbation) for at least two days prior to making a donation, theres also the whole business of fathering children that you may never meet, or who, at some point in the future, might want to reach out to you. Though some still do, not all sperm banks offer the option to make an anonymous donation anymore. California Cryobank, for one, stopped accepting anonymous donors in 2015. For those interested, Sperm Bank Directory is a great place to check out to help find the right sperm bank for you.

Sell Your Blood

Plasma, the clear liquid portion of your blood, is used to create products that can help people with blood clotting disorders and other diseases. As with sperm, you can get paid for donating yours. Though the process, which involves getting your blood drawn, your plasma separated, and then having the blood returned to your body, is a tad extensive, you can make up to $400 a month, according to CSL Plasma, a self-described leader in plasma collection with numerous centers scattered across the U.S.

The good news here is that there arent nearly as many criteria to meet as with donating sperm. Generally speaking, you need to be at least 18 years of age (but no older than 65) and weigh at least 110 pounds. When you go to donate for the first time, the donation center will put you through a screening process that involves taking an initial blood test, have you fill out a questionnaire, and subject you to a physical exam. Make it past this relatively low threshold and youre golden.

While there is minimal risk and few to no side effects involved in selling your plasma, some donors may experience slight bruising where the needle was inserted in their arm. According to Octapharma Plasma, a U.S.-based company that runs more than 80 collection centers, its also possible you might feel dizzy or lightheaded after donating. Because plasma is made mostly of water and proteins and takes up to 48 hours to replenish, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration dictates that donors can give up to only twice a week.

This plasma site will help you find find a certified donation center near you. And similar to plasma, there is money to be made from selling your platelets  tiny cells in your blood that form clots and stop bleeding. These little buggers help millions of Americans survive and fight cancer, chronic diseases, and traumatic injuries. Typically, selling platelets will earn you about as much as you would for selling plasma, and the donation process is practically identical.

Sell Your Hair

Tired of that big ol man bun youve been rocking since 2015? It could be the perfect time to chop it off for some cash. If your mane is at least six inches long, an inch or more thick, and has never been dyed, bleached, colored, or otherwise chemically treated, you may literally have some dollar bills growing out of your head.

Ad listings on Just Sell My Hair, a U.S.-based site that acts as a middle man for buyers and sellers, run anywhere from $50 up to $10,000 (though dont expect to find many buyers at that price point). Another fairly popular option, Hair Sellon, out of the U.K., is also worth checking out.

Both sites come equipped with hair price calculators to help you figure out what your luscious locks are worth, but the selling price is completely up to you. There can also be certain fees involved in placing an ad on sites such as these  HairSellon.coms $14.50 fee for a three-month listing, for instance  so be on the lookout for that.

Enter Clinical Trials

If you dont mind being used as a human guinea pig, taking part in clinical research might prove to be a lucrative side hustle. Clinical research involving human volunteers is intended to add to general medical knowledge, and if youre interested, there are two ways to get your foot in the door: clinical trials or observational studies.

While some of these studies involve you being poked and prodded, others allow you to walk away a couple thousand dollars richer just for allowing researchers to watch you sleep. You can find plenty of paid clinical trials at this website here. Another idea would be to check out what your local universitys research department is up to.

Before deciding to become a test subject, though, it might be a good idea to first seek advice from your regular doctor as well  you know, just to make sure youre not putting yourself in harms way.

Sell Your Poop (No, Really!)

Yes, this is a real thing, as well as a serious help to the thousands of Americans who contract an infection known as Clostridium difficile each year. According to the folks over at the Microbiome Health Research Institute, a nonprofit organization based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that does business as OpenBiome, half a million Americans contract C. diff annually and one in five patients will see the infection come back even after taking antibiotics.

Enter fecal microbiota transplantation  FMT for short  a treatment that has proven effective in curing 85 percent of patients after the first try. During FMT, a fecal preparation from a carefully screened, healthy stool donor is transplanted into the colon of the patient, it says on OpenBiomes site. There are multiple routes of administration (e.g. via colonoscopy, naso-enteric tube, capsules), each of which has unique risks and benefits.

While there are procedural risks that come with receiving an FMT, donors arent exactly putting much at stake in selling their stool. Other places may do things a little differently, but at OpenBiome, would-be donors fill out an extensive questionnaire, attend an in-person interview, and go through at least two rounds of rigorous screenings for known infectious agents, including blood and stool tests. If your crap makes the cut (literally), you are then required to drop off donations (worth $40 each) several days a week for at least 60 days.

Oh, whats that? Nothing, just the sound of your bank account increasing. Ka-Ching.

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What Your Girl Wants: An Easter Egg Made Out of Cheese

Who Needs a Chocolate Easter Egg When You Can Have a Cheese One?!

If you're looking to spice things up this Easter, or just happen to prefer the taste of cheese to the usual chocolate, Sainsbury has a solution. They call it the "Cheester Egg," and it's a 5 (about $6.50 in American dollars) treat that slots somewhere between a clever Easter gag and a much-appreciated alternative to the usual chocolate eggs.

RELATED: 7 Desserts You Shouldn't Be Eating

Each egg is made by Butler's Farmhouse Cheeses, from 120g of cheddar from Lancashire farms (England, let it be said, is known for making a good cheddar), which should make each one filling and delicious without being too filling. More than that, its texture is soft, which means you can spread it over a morning toast or mid-day crackers, if the idea of biting into a giant egg doesn't appeal to you.

The eggs will go on sale on April 10, at Sainsbury supermarkets across the United Kingdom, or on the Easter section of Sainsbury's website.

Emma Garvey, the head cheese buyer for the supermarket chain, explained their appeal: Were always looking for new and unique products to offer to our customers, especially during gifting periods throughout the year when people are on the lookout for something special to give their loved ones.

Unfortunately, American and Canadian gluttons  or good boyfriends looking to score points with their significant others  will have to make the trek across the Atlantic to smuggle one state-side.

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Dr. Ralph Gonsalves expressed his disappointment with some governments who continue to avoid funding LIAT even though they benefit from the airlines service.

"The simple truth is that LIAT is facing grave challenges to its very survival and continuance; but as always, there are possible solutions at hand for the airline and the traveling public.

So said Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves last Monday during a ministerial statement in this countrys Parliament, even as he took umbrage with certain governments who failed, and/or refused to contribute to the funding of the airline.

"I am fed-up too with some other stakeholders, Dr. Gonsalves told the Parliament.

Dr. Gonsalves explained that during the CARICOM Intercessional meeting in St Kitts in February, the principal shareholders of LIAT provided information about the financial condition and the immediate prospects for the survival and development of the airline.

However, some individuals did not heed the request, as accepted, not to share information publicly until the shareholders and other prospective participating governments had an opportunity to resolve some of the issues touching and concerning the air carrier.

In a not so veiled rebuff of Dr. Keith Rowley, PM of Trinidad and Tobago, Gonsalves declared, "Unhelpfully, some participants at the conference. could not resist the temptation on leaving the conference to alarm the public with declarations such as "LIAT will run out of cash to operate in 10 days, "LIAT will close down by the end of March if reluctant government shareholders dont cough up some money, even "Ralph is fed-up with LIAT, and added, in reference to the Barbados Minister of Tourism, "One minister even dusted off an insulting and tiring declaration that his government was not going to be an ATM machine for LIAT.

According to Dr. Gonsalves, one or two persons decided to spread fear and alarm which created uncertainty among the travelling public, creditors and even the Federal Aviation Authority/USA, who inquired about the airlines capacity to serve Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

This was not the only issue. There were also pilots contracts, inflexible work arrangements, unproductive scheduling arrangements, sub-optimal technology/IT systems, anti-developmental management practices and high taxes on airline tickets.

In the wake of this unwanted publicity, LIATs management was compelled to issue a statement distancing itself from the doomsday scenario and gave assurance of the airlines continued services, the PM explained.He added that, despite the many worthwhile efforts within the last 15 years - re-fleeting of the airline, reducing the work force, and alterations in the management system, the airline was still racked up by unresolved legacy issues relating to non-participating in LIATs financing by governments whose countries are served by LIAT."The bottom line is that in a small regional market, LIATs revenues are way below its expenditure, Dr. Gonsalves said, and as it stands, there were three possible paths for the airline; an orderly dissolution and bankruptcy; a disorderly dissolution and bankruptcy; a sensible restructuring  something he said that St Vincent and the Grenadines supported.
Armaguard Group is buying Cuscals rediATM network with the help of Clarendon Lawyers.

The acquisition, which is expected to close later this year, includes Cuscals ATM assets, ATM services arrangements, and the rediATM scheme.

It will support Armaguards growth by investing in technology and will allow the company to quickly expand its core business and customer offering. It adds another facet to the end-to-end currency-management services being offered by Armaguard, which will be positioned as a leading ATM-utility player.
"We are delighted for our lawyers and clients in Seoul that we are now back to business as usual," said Asia managing partner Justin D'Agostino. "Our team is particularly grateful to the South Korean Ministry of Justice and the Korean Bar Association for their quick consideration of our application, and to the British and Australian embassies for their support since this issue first arose."

Diverse teams and innovation among key issues for legal teams

Corporate legal teams need to adapt to better collaborate with external stakeholders according to a new study.

Both in-house and external legal teams must improve diversity, shown to boost performance; the study says only 29% of in-house teams have a formal diversity programme.

It is disheartening to see that law firms and in-house legal teams still struggle with diversity issues, said Lisa Hart Shepherd, CEO of Acritas. Our research shows that male in-house counsel are biased in favor of selecting male external advisors and pick women as lead partner in just 17 percent of cases, and just 29 percent of law departments require diversity information from their law firms.

Other findings of the 2019 State of Corporate Law Departments: Improving the Impact of Legal Services report from Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute and Acritas, include the importance of legal departments to embrace technology, overhaul work processes and pricing models and build collaborative partnerships with external law firms and alternative legal service providers. Those that do achieve higher performance rankings.
The car, as it currently presents itself on the market, is based on the Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid, a car that because of no fault of its own died quicker than it should have.The premium sedan currently on the market as Karma is powered by a 4-cylinder turbocharged internal combustion engine that develops 260 horsepower, but an additional electric motor brings the total output to 403 horsepower. The Revero can travel in all-electric mode for as much as 50 miles (80 km).Those figures are apparently nothing compared to whats to come, as Karma promises new 2020 version will be faster, smarter, and even more stunning in design than its predecessor. No actual numbers or details were released.Together with the Pininfarina concept and a second one, called Karma Vision, the 2020 Revero will be unveiled in April, at the 2019 Shanghai Auto Show.To support the production of the new Revero and other vehicles in the years ahead, Karma also announced it has invested $7.5 million in the installation of a new suite of powertrain test labs at its facility in Irvine, California.The companys engineers will use the labs to evaluate the performance and durability of electric motors, generators, and range-extended powertrains.We have a solid product plan that spans the next decade and relationships with the right partners who are helping us accelerate technology and product development, said in a statement Karma CEIO Lance Zhou.Since 2014, Karma has been quietly building a full value chain and planning a strong relaunch; now, we are ready to tell everyone: Karma is back!We expect more details on the new Revero to be unveiled sooner than the April Shanghai debut, so keep an eye out for more.
Dr. Keith Mitchell, Prime Minister of Grenada, is prepared to assist with LIATs financial woes, but is stern in his demand for vital information before deciding on any amount. Inset: Gaston Browne, Prime Minister of Antigua, must have felt pleased and encouraged by Dr. Mitchells announcement.

Reports reaching THE VINCENTIAN from Grenada late last week indicate that that CARICOM territory is prepared to make a cash contribution to the financially challenged regional airline LIAT.



This contribution, the reports says, could come by the end of March, but no value has been given to the contribution since, and the Grenada authorities say this will be determined by information on LIAT which the Dr. Keith Mitchell-led administration is awaiting.

Further, at least one Minister of Government in Grenada, Minister of Trade, and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Affairs Oliver Joseph, has said that "in order for us to contribute state resources to LIAT, the airline must be restructured and operated in a manner that ensures sustainability.

Notwithstanding this uncertainty, Grenadas preparedness to respond to the cry for assistance to ensure LIATs sustainability, extends beyond a direct cash infusion. According to Minister Joseph, his government is also willing to pay LIAT additional funds based on load factor.

"If, for example, LIAT is operating a flight between Trinidad and Grenada that is unprofitable, Government will pay to ensure that the airline breaks even on that particular route, Joseph explained.

LIAT is majority owned by several Caribbean governments, with Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Dominica being the largest shareholders, owning 97.4 per cent of the airline. Private shareholders and employees hold the remaining shares.

LIAT shareholders have promised some restructuring of the airlines operations, guided by data from LIATs own internal studies and a Caribbean Development Bank study conducted in 2018.

While this is seemingly forthcoming, when, how and at what rate remain elusive.On the outside, and even from some parties within the scheme of things, there have been calls for governments to review the taxes that they affix to the costs of air travel within and out of the region, so as to make it more competitive.
TDI

Sadly, these could be among the last hardcore models, as the development of new V6 and V8 engines is restricted. On a more positive note, nine S and four RS or R models are supposed to hit showrooms this year, and we wanted to figure out what they were.We already know about three RS models, the RS7 is coming in the 3rd quarter, followed by the RS Q3 and RS6 towards the end of the year (Q4). The fourth is probably something we know about already, like the TT RS facelift, the R8 phase II or the European launch of the RS5 Sportback.So what about the S models? Well, they weren't on the previously leaked roadmap , and there's a lot of them, apparently. Usually, the S version comes out before the RS ones, so we can already count in the S6 and S7.Both of them are going to switch to a twin-turbo V6, which makes us a little sad. Also, considering the A8 was the first of the new generation of sedans, it should have an S8 version soon, before the S5 and S7 come out. Prototypes have been spied a number of times at the Nurburgring throughout 2018.The same can be said about the SQ8 , which is likely to make use of the same complex 4.0as the SQ7. We'd put that on the list as well since the Q7 facelift is supposed to be ready for the Frankfurt Motor Show.And that's five; four more left to go. Audi probably took the SQ2 and TTS facelift into consideration when counting. They've already been revealed, sure, but have yet to hit the market.The last two could be Audi taking separate body styles into consideration (like the S6 Avant or TTS Roadster), the recently spied S4 facelift or that TDI engine for the SQ5.
This type of pedestrians has come to be known as smartphone zombies, and if the fact that they needed their own dictionary term isnt clue enough that things are bad, consider this: zombie traffic lights have been implemented in several major cities around the world, protecting the pedestrians from themselves.Tel Aviv, Israel, is just the latest on that list. For the time being, the municipality is running a trial, with a single crossing using specially designed LED sidewalk lights that should keep zombies from being run over by cars, Times of Israel reports.Since the zombies are always looking down at their phone, putting lights at their feet should work to get their attention  at least in theory. Or, as Tomer Dror, head of the traffic management division at the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, puts it: We cannot force them to take their eyes out of the smartphone and into the road. We need to find ways to put the road into their eyes.The sidewalk lights turn green when pedestrians can cross the street and red when theyre supposed to stop. The newly-debuted program will run for 2 weeks at a busy intersection in central Tel Aviv, with plans to extend it further if results show that pedestrians are made more attentive by the zombie lights and the number of accidents is reduced.Similar programs have already been deployed in China, Brazil, Singapore, Australia and Germany, and authorities in the U.K. are also talking about implementing one in the near future. Clearly, simply warning pedestrians to put their phone away when theyre crossing the street is not working.
The movement is comprised of so-called free individuals who oppose all forms of government and authority. Though its most prominent in the U.S., it can also be found in other countries. The Sovereign Citizens will refuse to pay taxes, obey police commands, or respect the law  save for their own interpretation of it.The driver now in custody in Bellevue, Washington, had slapped a fake, homemade license plate on his Chevrolet and hit the road. As you can see from the attached image, his plate now read, PRIVATE. No driver license or insurance required. Not for commerce use  private mode of travel.An officer noticed the strange plate and pulled him over. As it turns out, the fake license plate was the top of the iceberg, because the dude was completely outside the law in all regards. He didnt even own the car he was driving.Suspect refused to provide identification, Registration, or Insurance, the police report says. The Officer discovered that the vehicle was unregistered with the title failing to have been transferred. The suspect refused to exit the vehicle after being asked to numerous times. The suspect was eventually arrested for the criminal traffic offenses and for obstructing an officer. The suspects vehicle was Impounded.Police qualify the Sovereign Citizen movement as domestic terrorism and officers are instructed to act in such situations cautiously, because members are prone to being aggressive to cops. Recent surveys ranked the risk of terrorism from this group higher than the risk from other groups, like Islamists, racists or Neo-Nazis. Fortunately, no one was hurt on this particular occasion.
The effort will see four new mini vehicles introduced in Japan as both companies continue to expand their collaboration. The production of the all-new Nissan Dayz, Nissan Dayz Highway Star, Mitsubishi eK Wagon, and Mitsubishi eK X Wagon began yesterday, March 14, in Mitsubishis Mizushima Plant. From the simple straightforward kei cars then, the new models will be the first to offer semi-autonomous driving technology, designed for single-lane use along highways.

If you remember, it was a fuel economy issue that was declared as one of the triggers for Nissan acquiring a major stake in Mitsubishi Motors. The issue was because of a tiny kei car that Mitsubishi manufactured for Nissan that had supposedly ambitious fuel economy claims. Now Nissan and Mitsubishi are working on a new series of kei models, and they just kickstarted production.

Aside from the self-driving tech and designs, the new models also promise markedly improved performance. This will be by way of upgraded platforms, engines, and the transmissions that they will be using. Despite the fact that Nissan and Mitsubishis mini vehicles share key components with each other, they will be retaining separate brand features of which, either manufacturer has yet to enumerate.

NMKV, a joint venture of the two companies, integrated Nissan's advanced technologies and Mitsubishi's extensive experience in mini-vehicle production into the light, tall wagon-type cars. The companies launched the first generation of the models in 2013 and have increased their collaboration since becoming Alliance partners in 2016. Last month, the all-new Nissan Livina, which shares a platform with the Mitsubishi Xpander, went on sale in Indonesia.

The models are set to go on sale in Japan later this month. Although they will not make their way to the Philippines, both Nissans and Mitsubishis push for electrification (and autonomy) may play a vital role in models well see in the future.
Beto O'Rourke, current presidential candidate, was once "Psychedelic Warlord," member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker group in the late 1980s, according to Joseph Menn in Reuters.

Why it matters: This is the kind of jagged edge that sticks out on a presidential candidate's resume. For instance, now-Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-N.Y.) received more attention for having been a rapper during his 2018 campaign than for being a Harvard Law grad or a Rhodes Scholar.

Details: O'Rourke was a member of the Lubbock, Texas-based Cult of the Dead Cow before heading to college.

He acknowledges using cracked software and tricks to obtain free long distance phone calls.

O'Rourke's writings as Psychic Warlord are still visible online.

He credits Cult of the Dead Cow for his understanding of technological issues and his desire to see a free and open internet, including his stance in favor of net neutrality.

Our thought bubble: It's easy to look at membership in a hacker group as a signal O'Rourke is some kind of secret anarchist, but the hacker groups of the '80s and '90s have produced people with civic bone fides.

Peiter Zatko, aka Mudge, a member of both the Cult of the Dead Cow and The L0pht, a Boston group with significant overlap, advised then-President Clinton on DDoS attacks and worked at DARPA.

Katie Moussouris, once associated with the L0pht, helped negotiate a cybersecurity trade pact for the State Department and played a major role in the Department of Defense's bug bounty program

The grownup versions of late 1980s hackers ultimately founded several influential cybersecurity firms, and the L0pht testified before congress en masse on securing the internet in 1998.

Hacking in the late 1980s and early 1990s didn't just appeal to people who actively wanted to rob, steal and tear the system down. It was both a countercultural movement and, before universities started cybersecurity programs in bulk, an information sharing community many computer security enthusiasts went to in order to learn the field.
Friday marks the eighth anniversary of Syria's "Day of Rage," the series of protests that provoked an aggressive government crackdown and ignited a nationwide uprising. Some 165,000 civilians have died in the ongoing violence.

Expand chart Data: Violations Documentation Center in Syria; Chart: Harry Stevens/Axios

Why it matters: Eight years into a conflict that has created millions of refugees, helped fuel the rise of ISIS, and left much of Syria in ruins, innocent people are still dying.

The Violations Documentation Center in Syria, using a team of human rights activists and reporters, has attempted to document the identity of every person who has died in the war.

Some have perished in mass executions, such as the one in late August 2012 in Darayya, a working class town near Damascus. After retaking the town from rebel forces, Syrian troops reportedly marched in and massacred hundreds of civilians.

such as the one in late August 2012 in Darayya, a working class town near Damascus. After retaking the town from rebel forces, Syrian troops reportedly marched in and massacred hundreds of civilians. ISIS fighters have killed thousands of civilians, many of whom were kidnapped and tortured before being executed.

have killed thousands of civilians, many of whom were kidnapped and tortured before being executed. Still others have died in U.S. airstrikes , including thousands who perished in Raqqa during the air offensive against ISIS. Rescue workers told NPR that those airstrikes killed more civilians than they did ISIS troops.

, including thousands who perished in Raqqa during the air offensive against ISIS. Rescue workers told NPR that those airstrikes killed more civilians than they did ISIS troops. And weapons containing the lethal chemical sarin, fired by the Syrian government on its own people, have claimed thousands of lives.

The civilian death toll has declined from its peak in mid-2012, yet the carnage continues. This February alone, 158 civilians died in the violence.

Go deeper:

The U.S. is leaving Syria, and will stay as long as it takes

Where the U.S. is bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria
The cruise port in St Lucia is located in Castries the main city and capital of the Island Nation. (Photo Credit: Dysongs.net)

March 2019 is expected to be a record-breaking period in St Lucias cruise sector.



Between March 1 and 3, 12 cruise vessels, including the inaugural call of Crystal Esprit, brought an estimated combined capacity of 19,052 travellers to the destination; and it is expected that an additional 125,434 visitors are expected for the rest of the month, tourism officials say.

"We are doing everything possible to ensure that St Lucians benefit more from these impressive numbers, said Tourism Minister Dominic Fedee.

With St Lucias capacity to welcome Vista, Quantum and Freedom Class vessels, cruise visitors increased by 13.6 per cent in 2018. The Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO) is projecting six to seven per cent growth this year, continuing an upward trend that began in September 2018.

(Source: Caribbean 360)

And the St. Lucian government promises more to see and do, with the Department of Tourism moving to spread the Village Tourism programme into eight more communities, highlighting their unique culture, cuisine, heritage and history, in keeping with the the aim of promoting linkages between onshore businesses and other sectors of the economy.
In several midsize cities across the U.S., unusual software teams are programming apps and websites. In past lives, these workers delivered pizzas and parcels, tended stores and taught in schools, or drove Ubers and forklifts.

They made the unlikely jump to tech by way of apprenticeships  free intensive training followed by jobs at the companies that taught them.

Why it matters: This train-and-hire model is a potential answer to a huge outstanding issue: how to get people whose jobs are likely to be automated into new, future-proof work that requires vastly different skills.

What's going on:

Catalyte, a Baltimore company, runs five-month training programs and hires graduates to work on software projects for clients like Nike and eBay, deploying them into its offices in Chicago, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, as well as Baltimore.

a Baltimore company, runs five-month training programs and hires graduates to work on software projects for clients like Nike and eBay, deploying them into its offices in Chicago, Denver, and Portland, Oregon, as well as Baltimore. Techtonic, a software consulting company, runs three-month trainings in Boulder, Colorado, and hires graduates into six-month apprenticeships. Afterward, most stay on  Techtonic says it has kept on 80% of its 100-plus graduates  and some are later hired away by clients.

These companies are hunting for potential tech workers where most don't look. They advertise on Craigslist, on social media and in local workforce training centers, and they give the people they find aptitude tests.

Rather than programming know-how, they are screening for character.

"We don't care where you come from, or what degrees or certifications you have," says Techtonic CEO Heather Terenzio. The majority of Techtonic apprentices don't have technical backgrounds, she says.

where you come from, or what degrees or certifications you have," says Techtonic CEO Heather Terenzio. The majority of Techtonic apprentices don't have technical backgrounds, she says. Getting the answers right on Catalyte's online test matters little. Instead, the company is watching for test-taking behaviors  how long is spent answering a question, or even how many browser tabs are open  that hint at qualities like resourcefulness and perseverance.

on Catalyte's online test matters little. Instead, the company is watching for test-taking behaviors  how long is spent answering a question, or even how many browser tabs are open  that hint at qualities like resourcefulness and perseverance. No resume is required: As a result, Catalyte tells Axios, hiring bias is reduced. The firm's demographics are unusual for tech: In Baltimore, 26% of its employees are African-American, one in three did not attend college and the average age is 33.

The goal is to find "people who have largely been ignored, from pools that have largely been ignored by this digital economy," says Catalyte CEO Jacob Hsu.

Looking in uncommon places can be a shrewd move as companies struggle to find good hires from the usual sources, like universities.

"People who have traditional indicators that they have tech talent  an engineering degree or previous work experience in tech  those people are being snapped up really quickly," says AJ Tibando, executive director of Palette, a Toronto nonprofit that helps workers adapt to automation.

traditional indicators that they have tech talent  an engineering degree or previous work experience in tech  those people are being snapped up really quickly," says AJ Tibando, executive director of Palette, a Toronto nonprofit that helps workers adapt to automation. "Now it's about how we can look at people who are maybe a good fit, but don't fit the traditional profile or have those traditional indicators," Tibando says.

how we can look at people who are maybe a good fit, but don't fit the traditional profile or have those traditional indicators," Tibando says. There's also a business reason to hire unusual talent: Hsu says that one client reported a threefold bump in productivity when working with Catalyte's unorthodox teams, compared to consulting giants Accenture and Cognizant.

to hire unusual talent: Hsu says that one client reported a threefold bump in productivity when working with Catalyte's unorthodox teams, compared to consulting giants Accenture and Cognizant. Cognizant declined to comment, and Accenture did not reply to requests for comment.

But, but, but: One enormous obstacle stands in the way of people hoping to slide sideways  or uphill  into a technology career. For some, the training and apprenticeship programs can be a serious, if temporary, financial strain.

Catalyte pays a small stipend during training, and graduates begin earning $17 an hour. If they leave within two years, they have to repay the company for the training, up to $25,000. But the company says that within five years, 39% of former apprentices are making six-figure salaries.

during training, and graduates begin earning $17 an hour. If they leave within two years, they have to repay the company for the training, up to $25,000. But the company says that within five years, 39% of former apprentices are making six-figure salaries. Techtonic pays $15 an hour for the first three months, and $17 an hour for the next three. Then apprentices begin making salaries in the $55,000$65,000 range, about the average pay for entry-level programmers in Boulder.

What's next: Techtonic says it will open offices in Kansas City and El Paso in the next six months. And Catalyte says it will begin using its hiring test for new tech jobs, like cybersecurity or quality assurance, within the year.

Go deeper: From schoolteacher to software developer
HOUSTON  The CEO of Norwegian oil company Equinor, Eldar Stre, spends more than half his time on climate change and is optimistic the industry will unite on the issue despite the existential threat it presents, the executive told Axios on the sidelines of a major conference.

Why it matters: Equinor, partially owned by the Norwegian government, is the most progressive global oil and gas company in the world when climate change. It even changed its name last year from Statoil to reflect its transition away from oil and toward cleaner sources like offshore wind. Here are excerpts of our interview Monday at CERAWeek by IHS Markit.

Axios: The Norwegian government recently announced it was divesting its sovereign wealth fund  the largest in the world  from exploration and production companies as a way to make its economy less dependent on oil. That spares bigger companies like Equinor, BP and Shell. Whats your reaction to this?

"I dont see this having a big impact on these companies.  Its being read and interpreted in many ways, including getting away from oil and gas, but the government is very clear, it has nothing to do with that."

Axios: In your speech at this conference, you talked a lot about how populism and extreme politics is getting worse. What do you mean by this?

You see this in quite a few countries, where the politics is becoming more short-sighted, driven by how political processes are being run through social media and communicated directly to people.

Reality check: He said he wasnt referring specifically to any country or politician, but his description captured the dynamic here in the U.S. with President Trump.

Axios: To what extent have you considered ending memberships in trade associations, such as the American Petroleum Institute, for their positions that dont align with your aggressive stance supporting action on climate change?

When it comes to API, there are dilemmas with API, but we also feel we can have differing views on specific themes, and agree on other themes. As long as we can do that, we find that it's an association we can be a part of. We can also work from the inside, in our view, and promote our views.

Axios: It takes a large amount of new investments in new oil discoveries just to keep pace with global oil demand. As you shift your portfolio, do you foresee ceasing looking for new sources of oil?

"Well shrink our portfolio at some point. Our exploration portfolio is still growing.  Renewables displace oil and gas: We dont have that situation yet. We do meaningful oil and gas projects, still growing it, not a lot but some, and we can still do a lot of good renewable projects."

Axios: You talked a lot about how the industry can unite around climate change. But youre a very different company than, say, ExxonMobil or EOG Resources. How can such a diverse industry get on the same page on what ultimately is a competitive space?

Stre laid out three areas where he thinks the industry can agree, including transparency, supporting regulations and engagement:

Transparency is an obvious one. Investors want that insight into what our portfolio looks like. Its not an attack on our industry.  We can engage more. Some companies are hiding a little bit, seeing whats going on, but staying out of this discussion. We need to engage.

Axios: How much time do you spend on climate change?

A lot. Externally, its more than 50%. Go back, five, 10 years ago, its a big increase. Its also a big part of the dialogue with investors, almost just in the last year.

Go deeper:
Thousands of youth students and protestors joined global protests on Friday in a massive demonstration against climate change, sparked by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Our thought bubble, per Axios' Andrew Freedman: The protests on Friday are the largest and most widespread demonstrations on this issue since the run-up to the Paris Climate Summit in 2014 and 2015, and illustrate that young people feel a sense of urgency on this issue that those in power have lacked.

Greta Thunberg walks with protestors in Stockholm, Sweden on March 15. Photo: Pontus Lundahl/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images

Climate change protesters and police clash in Naples, Italy on March 15. Photo: Ivan Romano/Getty Images

Students protest in New Dehli on March 15. Photo: Laurene Becquart/AFP

Young people chant outside the Pantheon in Paris, France on March 15. Photo: Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

Youth gather on March 15 in front of Barcelona City Hall in Madrid, Spain. Photo: Lluis Gene/AFP/Getty Images

Protestors outside Sydney Town Hall in Australia on March 15. Photo: James Gourley/Getty Images

Students protest in Kampala, Uganda on March 15. Photo: Isaac Kasamani/AFP

Hundreds of youth gather on March 15 in Munich, Germany. Photo: Alexander Pohl/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Austrian students gather outside the Hofburg palace in Vienna, Austria on March 15. Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP/Getty Images

Students rally in Auckland's Aotea Square over climate change on March 15 in Auckland, New Zealand. Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images

Gatherings emerged in Seoul, South Korea on March 15. Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

Protestors congregate near the Ministry of Energy and Coal Industry in Kiev, Ukraine, on March 15. Photo: STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Students and protestors walk down the street in Tokyo, Japan on March 15. Photo: Takashi Aoyama/Getty Images

Go deeper: Read more on the global Future for Friday protests
Poland's Catholic Church leaders released a study on Thursday that said 625 minors have been abused by 382 priests from 1990 through June of last year  a revelation marking the first time officials have ever presented statistics about the scope of the child sex abuse problem there, the AP reports.

Details: Officials found that 345 victims were under age 15, 280 victims between 15 to 18 and 58% of the victims were male, per the AP. The report comes as the Catholic Church, one of the worlds most powerful institutions, grapples with backlash over the growing number of child sex abuse scandals around the globe.

Go deeper: The stunning scale of the global Catholic sex abuse crisis
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pushed back against the Senate's recent vote to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen at a press conference on Friday.

What's happening: Pompeo said giving more support to the Saudi-led coalition is the best way to "alleviate the Yemeni peoples' suffering." The war waged by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Yemen has resulted in the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Trump is expected to veto the Senate's bill, which is a rebuke of the administration's foreign policy amid broader pushback over his defense of Saudi Arabia.
In yet another disconnect between the Trump administration's science findings and its climate policies, a new report released Tuesday found that rapid Arctic climate change has pushed the region into "uncharted territory," with a host of sweeping changes that are transforming the vast area.

Why it matters: The Arctic contains some of the most productive fisheries in the world, and it acts as the Northern Hemisphere's refrigerator, supplying most of the frigid air that invades the U.S., Europe and Asia during winter. As the report lays out, some scientists have shown that the rapidly warming Arctic is altering weather patterns in the mid-latitudes, contributing to deadly extreme events.

Details: The new report, known as the Arctic Report Card, is a peer-reviewed document produced by dozens of researchers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) oversaw the research and the report's release at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington.

Findings: The report found that the Arctic continues to warm at about twice the rate of the rest of the globe, resulting in less snow and ice to reflect incoming sunlight.

The annual average air temperature across the Arctic from October 2017 through September 2018 was the 2nd-warmest such period on record, just behind the same period in 20152016.

All 5 of the hottest years on record in the Arctic have come since 2014. Records extend back to 1900. "The multi-year persistence of record and near-record warmth since 2014 is unlike any other period on record," the report states.

As ocean temperatures increase, toxin-producing phytoplankton have increased in number and geographical range, leading to a steep rise in paralytic shellfish poisoning in humans, the report says. Alaska now has one of the highest incidences of this shellfish poisoning in the world.

Populations of reindeer and caribou are declining, with a drop of 56% from a total estimated population of 4.7 million to about 2.1 million over the past two decades. The largest declines have been seen in populations across the U.S. and Canada.

Startling sea ice statistics:

The Arctic sea ice cover is becoming thinner, younger and more prone to melting each summer.

In March 1985, sea ice that had survived at least 4 summers made up 16% of the Arctic ice pack at winter maximum. In March 2018, it made up less than 1%.

During 2018, there was an unprecedented mid-winter sea ice loss in the Bering Sea, which shocked scientists. This ocean, which is typically ice-covered at the time, lost an area of ice the size of Idaho during February.

Yes, but: The Trump administration continues to issue climate science reports that show this is an urgent issue to address, while pursuing policies to boost consumption of fossil fuels that cause global warming. This dichotomy was visible at the press conference, when reporters pressed NOAA acting administrator Tim Gallaudet on whether the science agency has communicated its findings to the White House.

I personally have not briefed the president on climate change. I cant answer the statement of has anyone ever, I dont know that."

 Tim Gallaudet, an oceanographer and retired rear admiral

Go deeper:
HOUSTON  Power from offshore wind is finally poised for liftoff in the U.S.

Why it matters: The U.S. has long been a laggard, but that's poised to change thanks to a convergence of forces that analysts see bringing enough coastal wind online over the next decade to power millions of homes.

What's happening: A huge energy conference here in the nation's oil-and-gas capital offers a window into what's prompting giant energy companies to plan multibillion dollar investments. It's a story of...

Atlantic Coast states moving ahead with zero-emissions power procurement policies.

Oil-and-gas majors expanding their low-carbon power portfolios.

Technology evolution and falling costs.

The Trump administration supporting the development even as it abandons Obama-era climate programs.

What they're saying: "The missing piece for some time was actually an interest from the states up along the coast to acquire this power from this industry," says Christer af Geijerstam, who heads U.S. wind efforts for the oil-and-gas giant Equinor.

"That's where we have seen the significant shift the last 23 years being led by New York and Massachusetts," he tells Axios while at the big CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference.

ICYMI: In December, Equinor was among the winning bidders in a federal auction of development sites that are off the Massachusetts coast.

This adds to another site in federal waters off New York that it had acquired in 2016.

They paid $135 million for the Massachusetts site in the Interior Department auction that brought in a record-shattering $405 million.

I asked if Equinor would bid in federal lease auctions in the planning stages off New York and California. He said yes and offered no caveats.

The big picture: IHS Markit's current forecast sees 7 gigawatts of offshore wind coming online in the U.S. by 2030, up from almost nothing today. But that estimate could rise.

"We will be looking carefully at what the outcome of solicitations in Massachusetts and New Jersey and New York is going to be," IHS associate director Max Cohen says.

Bloomberg NEF already projects 11.4 gigawatts of capacity by 2030. They've upped their estimate thanks to a combination of specific solicitations and long-term targets by state governments in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere.

Where it stands: Equinor is among several deep-pocketed companies in the space planning projects. Here are some other players...

Danish wind giant Orsted bought the U.S. firm Deepwater Wind last year.

bought the U.S. firm Deepwater Wind last year. A joint venture between Shell and EDP also had a winning bid in the recent Massachusetts sale. "The U.S. has a magnificent wind resource right next to a large population and highly densely populated areas," Enrique Alvarez Uria of EDP Renewables said at a panel here yesterday. He estimated EDP's effort with Shell could be a $4 billion to $6 billion capital investment.

also had a winning bid in the recent Massachusetts sale. "The U.S. has a magnificent wind resource right next to a large population and highly densely populated areas," Enrique Alvarez Uria of EDP Renewables said at a panel here yesterday. He estimated EDP's effort with Shell could be a $4 billion to $6 billion capital investment. Vineyard Wind, which is co-owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Iberdrola's Avangrid Renewables, snapped up a lease that adds to their plans for a separate project in the region.

What we're hearing: One real but hard to quantify factor is the role shareholder pressure plays in the moves by oil majors to diversify into renewables.

The changing ESG [environmental, social and governance] landscape is really going to move capital, Jonathon Kaufman, the co-head of the power and renewables group at Credit Suisse, said at a separate panel discussion yesterday.

Kaufman tells me that for oil majors, the growing moves into renewables require a balance between competing goals, particularly when fossil fuel projects deliver higher margins.

"There's this tension between putting money into something that's much lower returns, but also evolving their business mix," he adds.

The intrigue: Offshore wind has long been a big thing in Europe. But one irony of the U.S. delay in entering this sector is the upside of being a late mover  lower costs.
Armenia wants officials in Tbilisi to show a balanced approach to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Parliament Speaker Ararat Mirzoyan said on March 14 as he met with visiting Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili.

Speaking at a meeting with the Zourabichvili-led delegation, Mirzoyan stressed the fact that as a member of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Georgia has also joined the Minsk Group format for the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that is co-chaired by the United States, Russia and France. Therefore, we should make efforts to ensure that balanced and neutral wordings from now on be also guidelines in all statements relating to Nagorno-Karabakh, Mirzoyan said, as quoted by the Armenian parliaments press service.

In this context, the top Armenian legislator voiced concerns over the October 29, 2018 statement by the foreign ministers of Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia, in which only one principle of settling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict reflecting Azerbaijans territorial integrity was mentioned. Meanwhile, the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairmanship shows a more balanced and versatile approach in this matter, said Mirzoyan.

Mirzoyan also raised Yerevans concerns over Zourabichvilis statements during her latest visit to Azerbaijan.

During her meeting with President Ilham Aliyev while on an official visit to Baku in February the Georgian president, in particular, said that Azerbaijan and Georgia had gone through the same problems. Today, we know what occupation means for a country and what it is when your territorial integrity is not restored yet. Lines of contact with occupied lands are open wounds that hinder our development. Nevertheless, despite these tragedies, we have managed to strengthen and develop our economies, Zourabichvili said then, implying the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Mirzoyan said that the Georgian presidents statements had caused concerns in the Armenian society.

All international structures, and I will also refer to the European Union, draw a clear distinction between the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and other conflicts, the Armenian parliament speaker emphasized.

Zourabichvili was in Armenia on a two-day official visit on March 13-14 at the invitation of her Armenian counterpart Armen Sarkissian.

During the joint press conference of the two presidents on March 13, Sarkissian also spoke about regional conflicts, stressing that Armenia and Georgia are unanimous in their opinion that conflicts in the region are not identical and the grounds for their settlement are not identical.

Zourabichvili, for her part, said that for Georgia, a country that hosts sizable Armenian and Azerbaijani communities, it is important that the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh should not be shifted onto its territory. It is very important for us that Georgian citizens of Armenian and Azerbaijani descents live in peace and be integrated into the political, economic and cultural life of Georgia, she said.

While in Yerevan the Georgian president also met with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Garegin (Karekin) II.
Two activists involved in an attack on a video blogger highly critical of Armenias government have been charged with attempted kidnapping, a spokesperson for the countrys Prosecutor-Generals office said on Friday.

Following the incident that occurred earlier this month prosecutors originally opened criminal proceedings on the hallmarks of hooliganism. Later, due to new evidence that emerged in the case members of the Restart student group Davit Petrosian and Davit Simonian were charged with attempting to kidnap the blogger, Narek Malian. The two are confined to country limits pending investigation.

Malian was confronted outside his home in downtown Yerevan by members of the group shortly after midnight. A YouTube video of the incident showed the Restart leader, Petrosian, and several other men forcibly carrying Malian along an adjacent street before being stopped by police officers.

Petrosian posted the video on his Facebook page, writing: There are moments in life when you cant choose between the good and the bad and just have to listen to your conscience.

In a statement, Restart said it wanted to throw Malian into a trash container. Petrosian likewise explained that he and his comrades tried to put the garbage in its place in response to what he called Malians offensive and slanderous statements about their activities.

Malian, Petrosian, and four other men were detained on the spot but were set free a few hours later. Malian was later recognized as a victim in the case.

Originally, the investigation was conducted under an article of the Criminal Code dealing with hooliganism. Malian, who worked until last year as an adviser to former police chief Vladimir Gasparian, described the assault as a kidnapping attempt. He linked the incident to his vocal efforts to prevent the sacking of the long-serving rector of Yerevan State University (YSU), Aram Simonian, which is sought by the government. Late last month the former police official staged a lone protest at a meeting of YSUs supervisory board that narrowly failed to fire Simonian.

Restart has on the contrary been campaigning for the controversial rectors ouster since last years velvet revolution in Armenia. The youth group comprising current and former YSU students actively participated in the revolution.

By contrast, Malian has been very scathing about the dramatic regime change in the country. He regularly attacks Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and other government officials and pours scorn on their supporters on his Facebook page.

Incidentally, Pashinian was quick to condemn the assault, saying that any attempt to solve issues in Armenia through violence must meet with a tough legal reaction.
By Trend

Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have 26 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said March 15, Trend reports.

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
LIAT lost millions in a 2012 fire at its hanger in Antigua. A new 5-year agreement to have LIAt remain headquartered in Antigua was signed in 2014.

Shareholder Heads of Government of regional airline LIAT on Saturday 9th March endorsed a draft of a proposed Minimum Revenue Guarantee (MRG) model for the cash-strapped airline.



According to Gonsalves, he and Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley failed to persuade other Caribbean leaders to come to the table to deal with the original restructuring option.

He explained that the original restructuring option required four essentials: addressing the old debt; providing transition funding; securing more affordable and flexible contracts with the pilots and other LIAT employees; defining a model which included all the territories contributing going forward.

But not a single government outside the four shareholders responded positively with any offer of any funding to advance the restructuring as was originally proposed, Gonsalves told Parliament.

"Accordingly, the shareholders have agreed to amend the original restructuring plan to ensure LIATs survival and continuance, Gonsalves said.

The issue of converting the Caribbean Development Banks (CDB) debt to equity was a work in progress with the governments of Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda and St Vincent and the Grenadines servicing their share of that debt, the prime minister explained.

The amended restructuring option, however called for a burden sharing approach including all stake holders, lessors, suppliers and financiers.

The MRG was expected to become operational in all countries served by LIAT by April 2019.

"If there are unfavourable responses from the various territories served by LIAT, and from the unions in respect of certain proposals, the shareholders may consider further options including reducing the number of aircraft or starting a new company, Gonsalves said.

Letters have already been distributed throughout the territories where LIAT operates except Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Marteen and Puerto Rico, and meetings have been held with major lessors, bank officials, unions and management with preparations to brief other stakeholders on the plan going forward.

Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, in a ministerial statement in Parliament on Monday, said the proposed MRG model replaces the original restructuring programme for the airline, which, he said, was now in tatters.Gonsalves said that it was envisaged that the draft MRG for 12 countries would yield some US$16 million annually, and that the MRG would address the funding of the airline going forward and not old debt including the US$5.4 million.
By Leman Mammadova

Pomegranate juice and pomegranate concentrate hold main share in Az-Granata LLC's export, which are exported to more than 20 countries of the world, Deputy Director of Az-Granata LLC Vugar Mikayilov told Azernews.

Since 2018 pomegranate wines, grape wines, vodka, cognacs and fruit vodka are exported mainly to Ukraine, Russia, Baltic states, Japan, China and Germany. The results of ProdExpo Food Fair held in Moscow in 2019 allow us to double our export portfolio this year, he noted.

Mikayilov went on to say that the pomegranate wine produced in Azerbaijan will become an Azerbaijani brand in the near future as it differs from the pomegranate wines produced by other countries in taste and aroma.

The deputy director mentioned the achievements of the company for the last seven years.

Although Azerbaijan's national beverage Abgor (Black Sea) has more than 1,000 years of history, it has been first produced in the industry by Az-Granata, he said.

For the first time in our country, whiskey production has been achieved on the basis of Scottish technology. It is gratifying that some of our consumers in the domestic market are foreign guests coming to our country. Today, our whiskey storage container has a large number of oak vessels of 500 liters each, and we have 5-6- and 7-year whiskey in these tubs, Mikayilov added.

Mulberry and cranberry vodka, our high quality national drink, was produced on the basis of new technologies, the deputy director noted.

For the first time in Azerbaijan, the production of "Turkish Raki" was achieved. This is confirmed by Mrs. Filiz Shenler, who has a tasting experience of 30 years in Turkey, after tasting the raki produced by Az-Granata. Not only in Azerbaijan, but for the first time in the world we started producing vodka by a completely new technology. And, soon our vodka not only left behind many foreign vodka, but also overcame them. As a result, demand for foreign vodka in the country dropped by more than 30 percent. This has somehow prevented certain currency flows to foreign countries, he said.

Mikayilov went on to add that Az-Granata used a method of extracting toxic substances from "vodka" by using fresh goat milk in its production.

This technology belongs only to us in the world. Honestly, milk processing currently exists, but they are processed with dry, lean milk, so that dry milk also reduces the quality of the product due to denaturation, he said.

Our vodka is left to infuse for 7 - 14 and 28 days and then it is offered for sale, Mikayilov added.

The Az-Granata uses 20 tones of natural honey a year for the production of Vodka, deputy director said.

Moreover, he noted that Az-Granata produced and sold collection wine for the first time in Azerbaijan.

It's about 30-year-old Mil dessert wine. As we know, desert wines are selected from high quality grapes by special methods. "Mil" white dessert wines, built in Ganja by the Hummel brothers in the 19th century and stored in the underground wine store in the 30-year-old oak barrels, were packed by cold means in the Az-Granata plant, he said.

Speaking of one more innovation of Az-Granata, Mikayilov underlined that the company could produce a zero percent wine, that is, non-alcoholic wine in three varieties.

For many, this was not convincing, but we did it. Thus, this wine is taken as a result of the use of alcohol in the vacuum apparatus. Resveratrol, polyflavanols and a number of complex ingredients in the non-alcoholic wine contain powerful antioxidant properties. This significantly reduces the risk of serious illnesses such as cancer, and prevents radioactive radiation in the body, he added.

In this regard, he noted the importance of non-alcoholic wine for the human body since it helps to get rid of excess weight by drinking 150 milliliters of wine every day.

Mikayilov also added that, Az-Granata introduced Feijoa fruit juice into the market for the first time in our country.

There are many kompots that we offer for sale in domestic and foreign markets, so far, in our country, there has never been kompot production in Tetra Pak packaging, he added.

"What's more pleasant is that we have already exported juice to European countries that made in the aseptic vats of our company. It should be noted that there are only two enterprises with aseptic vats in our country, one of which is Az-Granata. We have obtained a concentrate by bringing the most up-to-date vacuum unit made in Germany, so that we delivered the concentrate to several foreign countries," deputy director underlined.

Speaking about the role of Az-Granata in promotion of Azerbaijani products in foreign markets, he said that at present, Az-Granata products are exported to 27 countries in the world - Russia, U.S. Canada, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, UAE, Malaysia, Japan, China, Bahrain, Israel, Australia and etc.

We have entered to Russian and Ukrainian markets with 18 types of alcoholic beverages and various juices, he added.

Our participation in the wine tasting competition held in 2018 in Shanghai, China, resulted in two medals. Thus, Rubai wine, one of the branded wines of our company, won the bronze medal, and the Kehreba wine was awarded silver medal, highlighted deputy director.

Mikayilov pointed out that the greatest demand is for the production of pomegranate juices and wines. Basically, the demand for these products is evident in foreign markets.

We fully use our ability to find new customers and satisfy the wishes of our existing customers. Export missions, business forums and exhibitions organized by the Ministry of Economy help us to reach more customer markets, he said.

Touching upon the situation of orchards in Azerbaijan he noted that there were 160,000 hectares of vineyards in Azerbaijan in the Soviet era and less than 10,000 hectares remained in 2000s. Only since 2006-2007, as a result of the establishment of new vineyards and the continuation of this process, vineyards have reached 17,500 hectares, 500 hectares of which belong to Az-Granata LLC.

In addition, for the liqueur and fruit vodka production Az-Granata established 10 hectares and 5 hectares of orchards, respectively, in 2017.

Mikayilov also noted that 100 hectares of 400 hectares of pomegranate orchards, laid in the Agsu region by our company have been granted Bio Certification by German Lacon GmbH.

Pomegranate varieties such as Bala Mursel, Gulovsha, Firuzeyi, Donuz Burnu and Veles are grown in our pomegranate orchards, Mikayilov stressed.

In my opinion, there is a need to establish 10,000 - 15,000 hectares of technical vineyards of the aboriginal varieties, since there are fewer varieties of them in Azerbaijan, he concluded.

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Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888

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By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade

Over 1,500 Khazar cars of local production have already been sold in Azerbaijan, and the production of Peugeot 207 cars will be launched in the near future, Emin Akhundov, Chairman of the Board of the Azermash Open Joint-Stock Company (OJSC) Azermash, told Sputnik Azerbaijan.

Some manufacturers began to build car assemblies in Azerbaijan, and only then were engaged in finding a solution to the issue of selling finished products.

The approach of Azermash in organizing the production of various brands of vehicles is that the company has been importing cars for a long time and organized their sales in the local market. Accordingly, when the issue of car production became relevant, the company already knew which brands of vehicles would be in demand in the market and how the process of their implementation would proceed.

"We have already sold over 1,500 Khazar cars, and we will soon start producing Peugeot 207 cars," Akhundov said.

In the assembly of cars, the company uses local wiring, the production of which is also established in Azerbaijan.

Akhundov also expressed his confidence that small-tonnage Russian trucks, the assembly of which in Azerbaijan is scheduled for next year, will also be popular in Azerbaijan.

A joint venture between Khazar OJSC Azermash and Iran Khodro, commissioned in Neftchala industrial park on March 29, 2018, cost $ 15 million (75 percent is Azermashs share and 25 percent is Iran Khodros share).

The plant has 300 employees and capable to manufacture up to 10,000 cars per year. At the same time, if necessary, it is possible switch to a three-shift operation, and without additional space, bring the assembly volumes to 30,000 cars a year.

Generally, cars, trailers and semi-trailers were produced in the country worth 106.6 million manats according to the results of 2018, which is 31 times higher compared to 2017, according to the State Statistics Committee of Azerbaijan.

As many as 969 cars were produced in 2018, which is 32.4 times more than in 2017.

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By Trend

A meeting was held between Azerbaijani Minister of Transport, Communications and High Technologies Ramin Guluzade and UNDP Assistant Administrator, Director of UNDP Regional Bureau for Europe and the CIS Mirjana Egger, who is on a visit to Baku, Trend reports referring to the ministry.

Among the points of discussion during the meeting were the implementation of start-up projects, technical issues and expert support regarding the backup DATA-center under construction in Azerbaijans Yevlakh District, along with plans for creating an Innovation Lab and an Innovation Center. At the same time, views were exchanged on the provision of qualified expert support from the UNDP to the work being done in Azerbaijan in the field of information and communications technology (ICT).

The minister stressed that the relations between the UNDP and Azerbaijan are developing successfully, and added that, as in all spheres, mutual ties are expanding in the field of ICT.

Guluzade spoke about the reforms carried out in Azerbaijan on the development of the ICT sector and the ongoing national and regional projects. The Minister highly appreciated the UNs support for international projects initiated by Azerbaijan.

In turn, Egger touched upon the importance of successful ICT projects in Azerbaijan and stressed that UNDP intends to further expand areas of cooperation with Azerbaijan.

Afterwards, discussion were held about the prospects for cooperation in the field of ICT, as well as many other issues.

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By Laman Ismayilova

Icherisheher State Historical and Architectural Reserve invites you to celebrate the spring arrival on March 20-26.

Every day throughout the festival, Baku residents and city's guests will enjoy spectacular shows, fantastic songs and dances not only from Azerbaijan, but also from those countries where Novruz is widely celebrated.

During the festival, colorful ribbons, balloons along Gull Street in Icherisheher will create a sense of a fairy tale. On Gull Street, guests can visit the Oriental Bazaar, where they can meet merchants, as well as see camels.

Retail outlets will open behind the Maiden Tower, children's ensemble will perform.

On March 23, viewers will be able to enjoy the concert of young Turkish pop star Alein Tilki. The concert will take place at Gosha Gala Square at 17:00.

The festival will be open from 12:00 to 18:00.

Novruz, being a family holiday, is celebrated on March 20-21, and before the actual day of the holiday, people celebrate the four last pre-holiday Tuesdays.

Noruz holiday is rich with ancient traditions and games. Khidir Ilyas (the symbol of fertility and blossom),Kos-Kosa an entertaining game (symbol of spring) and fortunetelling are among them. The important Novruz symbols are khoncha (a tray with sweets, nuts fruits and dyed eggs on) and samani( green shoots from wheat seeds).

The holiday was given the status of an official holiday in Azerbaijan by a presidential decree dated 13 March 1990. In 2009, Novruz was included in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and since then, March 21 was declared the International Day of Novruz.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on holding the 120th anniversary of Jafar Jabbarli.

The Ministry of Culture was entrusted with preparing and implementing a plan of events dedicated to the 120th anniversary of outstanding poet and playwright Jafar Jabbarli.

A solemn event will be held at the State Academic National Drama Theater.

The event will be filmed by Salname Documentary Film Studio, Report.az informed.

The play "The Bride of Fire" (Od glini) will be staged at the Azerbaijan State Academic Drama Theater.

The opera "Sevil" by Fikrat Amirov will be presented at the Opera and Ballet Theater.

The work is based on the play of the same name by Jafar Jabbarli.

The cultural centers operating at the embassies of Azerbaijan in Austria, France and Uzbekistan will host a series of events dedicated to the playwright.

The film " Wilted Flowers" (Solgun cicklr ) will be screened as part of the events.

Born in 1899, Jafar Jabbarli is one of the Azerbaijani most talented and prolific artists, whose works are still topical, which can be seen in his plays that are still staged, and films based on his works that are still screened.

The author's focus was on the theater where he achieved great success. The works including Baku War, Devoted Sariyya or Laughter through Tears, Shah Nasreddin, Bride of Fire, Sevil, and Almaz, gained widespread acclaim among readers and viewers.

Jabbarli was also committed to cinema. He believed in the development and future success of the art and along with his theater work, he became the first Azerbaijani screenwriter.

Jabbarli chose the freedom of women in society as the main theme of his works. His first script, Sona, was an essential rewriting of the Haji Gara play by the founder of Azerbaijani classical drama, Mirza Fatali Akhundov, where he made a woman as the lead character. He accentuated the idea that women have the right to freely express their opinions.

Another well-known play, Sevil, which was lately screened, also pointed viewers' attention to women's freedom. In this play he showed two women, Sevil, a beautiful woman who obeyed her husband unquestioningly and Dilbar, Balash's mistress, as well as a man, Balash, who disliked his past, repudiated traditions and customs and turned away from his own father.

The play shows the young woman's ability to keep pace with life, even when caught up in the whirl of social and political events, and transformation into an active fighter for a new life.

Jabbarli was a very eager director, and he made actors repeat scenes many times. A major scene of the "Sevil" film where Sevil takes off her veil was shot over and over again.

He said to the actress, "You are taking the veil off in a very artificial way. It is the culmination of the play. The veil removing scene must fuel the viewer's rage against the veil - the embodiment of obscurantism and superstition."

Inspired by the success of the play and then of the Sevil film, Jabbarli rewrote his own "Almaz" play and created a screenplay for the "Almaz" film. He again decided to direct the film himself, prepared the script and created his creative team.

A few days before New Year in 1935, Jabbarli began to suffer heart pains at the studio and on December 31, 1934, the shining artist passed away, at the very time when his creativity was flourishing.

However, his friends and colleagues continued his cinema work and completed the shooting of Almaz. The film was released at the commemoration of Jabbarli's death.

Unlike Sevil, Almaz has a clear path and is confident in herself. She was not scared to come across a "kulak" (a wealthy peasant), Haji Ahmad. She fights with the kulaks, sparks a revolution in the village, struggles and wins.

The writer tried to avoid exaggeration in order to achieve naturalness and reality in the play and the film, to reliably transmit the thoughts and emotions of the characters to the audience. All this was highly appreciated and the film still attracts spectators.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Laman Ismayilova

The International Animation Festival (ANIMAFILM) will be presented in the Czech Republic.

The event will take place at Kino Pilotu movie theater in Prague on March 23, Trend Life reported.

The project aims to develop creative and production activities of filmmakers, film and animation studios of the country, to review various genres of professional animation by foreign directors and to exchange experience.

Among the guests are animation masters Firangiz Gurbanova (Azerbaijan), Jahangir Suleymanov (Russia), Masood Panah (Germany), representatives from Ireland, Russia, Iran and other countries.

The event is timed to Novruz holiday, therefore, guests will be presented dishes and sweets of the Azerbaijani national cuisine, as well as a cartoon dedicated to this holiday.

Notably, ANIMAFILM, the international festival of animation art was held in Baku on October 19-21.

The festival brought together films from Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iran, Russia, UK, Ireland, USA, Germany, Sweden, Belgium and other countries.

Of the 63 countries, 480 films and 15 screenplays were presented at the festival.

The three-day event featured and workshops, various presentations, exhibition "ReAnimasiya" as well as awarding ceremony.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade

The issue of collection of contributions for compulsory medical insurance from the tax administration in Azerbaijan should be considered.

Advisor to the President on Twinning Projects of the European Union Gediminas Chernyauskas stated this at ceremony of presentation of twinning project entitled "Support to the application of the compulsory medical insurance system in Azerbaijan" on March 14, Trend reports.

The resident advisor recommends that state sources should prevail in the financing of the health sector in the medium term.

Expensive medical technologies should be covered by compulsory medical insurance and should be accessible to the public. In the health care, the share of public funding should be increased. Improving the quality of medical services should be a major factor in the medium and long term, he added.

Chernyauskas also said that a compulsory medical insurance system will be applied throughout Azerbaijan from 2020.

With the use of the compulsory medical insurance system, the populations needs in the field of medicine will be more and more covered, illegal payments will be eliminated, medical workers will be provided with a profitable income, Chernyauskas said.

He also spoke about the results Azerbaijan can achieve by using compulsory medical insurance in the country in 2020-2023.

Chernyauskas noted that the availability of medical services and hospitalization will be on a loss of advanced European countries.

Azerbaijan has all the capabilities to provide the necessary medical services. However, the performance (length of stay in the hospital, access to a doctor, the level of workload in hospitals) must be brought to the level of the EU member states or to a level close to it, Chernyauskas concluded.

2019 can be considered the year of preparation for a full-scale implementation of the compulsory medical insurance.

Since the end of 2016, a test project on compulsory medical insurance is being implemented in Azerbaijan. The project currently covers the city of Mingachevir, as well as the Yevlakh and Agdash districts.

The project is being implemented by the State Agency for Compulsory Medical Insurance, which began operating in Azerbaijan in February 2016.

During the first year of implementation of pilot project, a lot of attention was paid to the number of services and their accessibility for the population, then within the framework of the second year the attention was paid more to quality. At the same time, organizers prepared a plan for a full transition of the entire country to compulsory medical insurance.

In July 2018, a consultant who would be responsible for the successful transition period was appointed. A lot of work has been done and a special road map was prepared.

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By Trend

Changing the negotiation format on Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would be unfair, Matthew Bryza, former US ambassador to Azerbaijan and former co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, told Trend.

He pointed out that the latest statement issued by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs rejects Prime Minister Pashinyan's request for a change in format of the mediation process.

Beyond that, I do not interpret this statement as an example of pressure on Prime Minister Pashinyan. Rather, the statement both encourages both parties to continue negotiating in good faith at the highest political level, and is a call by the Co-Chairs for both parties to embrace the "Basic Principles" of a possible framework agreement for a formal settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and refrain from trying to define certain principles as more important than others. Making a change in the format of the Minsk Group as Prime Minister Pashinyan requests would not be fair, said Bryza.

He went on to add that this latest statement reflects the continuing commitment of the OSCE and the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs to help the leaderships of Azerbaijan and Armenia define a framework agreement for a final and peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

As has been the case throughout the history of the Minsk Group, the Co-Chairs welcome in this statement the commitment of President Aliyev and PM Pashinyan to meet under the auspices of the Minsk Group. So, there is nothing unusual or new in this latest statement by the Co-Chairs, Bryza believes.

He noted that if the leaderships of Azerbaijan and Armenia follow the Co-Chairs' call in this statement to stick with the "Basic Principles" and develop sufficiently productive and trusting relations with each other, then the prospects for a breakthrough in negotiations could be stronger, especially if both sides continue preparing their citizens for peace.

But, it is not yet clear that the leaderships of the two countries will be able to develop the required level of trust in each other to make the politically difficult compromises required to achieve such a breakthrough. Encouragement from the presidents of the United States, France, and Russia could help in this regard, Bryza concluded.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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By Trend

The Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict should be resolved on the basis of the decisions that were made at the time, Russian MP Dmitry Savelyev told reporters on the sidelines of the Global Baku Forum, Trend reports March 15.

He reminded that there are Madrid Principles, the Kazan Formula, the 5+2 principle, which involves the gradual liberation of the Azerbaijani districts occupied by Armenia, with the subsequent return of refugees to Nagorno-Karabakh and further referendum to determine the fate of the region.

He said that Armenia is trying to protract these negotiations, to attract to the negotiation process a third party, representatives of the so-called "independent Artsakh", in order to bring the negotiations to a dead end, and this is an absolutely destructive element.

I believe that Russia, in turn, should work more actively towards the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as one of the co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, said Savelyev.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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By Trend

Changing the format of the negotiations on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is possible only with the consent of the sides, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters at a press briefing, Trend reports.

"Russia, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, has repeatedly spoken about the negotiation format, which can only be changed on the basis of the consent of the sides. This is not only our position, but also the position of the other members," she said.

Also, answering journalists' question about whether Russia is ready in the event of an initiative by the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia to meet at the CIS Ministerial Council meeting on April 5 in Moscow, to provide them with a platform, Zakharova noted that in general, when the sides turn to the Russia for the opportunity to provide a platform or play a mediating role, Moscow always respectfully considers these issues.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

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Nurses and educators pause for a photo outside the UWI School of Nursing in Trinidad.

Twenty-seven nurses, drawn from five countries across the region, have successfully completed specialised training in the care of children with cancer and other blood disorders.



The nurses completed the Paediatric Haematology/Oncology Nursing Diploma Programme at the University of the West Indies School of Nursing in Trinidad, with the last cohort finishing last April.

In 2013, with the support of SickKids Foundation, the SickKids-Caribbean Initiative (SCI), a partnership with the University of the West Indies (UWI), Ministries of Health, hospitals and institutions in six Caribbean countries, was established. This partnership focuses on building sustainable local capacity to diagnose, treat, and manage paediatric cancers and blood disorders.

Regional bank CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank also came on board with the initiative, pledging USD$1 million over a seven-year period (2014  2020) through its charitable arm, FirstCaribbean International Comtrust Foundation. As nurse training partner, the bank funded the full training for all but one of the 27 nurses.

"We are truly proud to be a partner with SCI and to support the life-changing work they have been doing across the region to ensure that hundreds of children diagnosed with cancers or blood disorders have access to the very best care delivered by trained professionals, said Colette Delaney, Chair of the FirstCaribbean International ComTrust Foundation and Chief Executive Officer of CIBC FirstCaribbean International Bank.

"The work of the dedicated doctors and nurses of SCI have greatly improved the outcomes and enhanced the quality of care and quality of life for so many of our most vulnerable citizens  our children, Ms. Delaney added.

Officials of SickKids recently paid a courtesy call on Ms. Delaney where they updated her on the great strides which have been made in the treatment and management of paediatric cancer cases across the region.

To date, the SCI has significantly improved the diagnosis and care of scores of children across the region. In Jamaica and St. Lucia alone 57,790 newborn sickle cell disease screening tests were conducted.

In addition, seven telemedicine centres were established, 302 consultations have taken place, 179 specialized diagnostic tests were done on patients newly diagnosed with leukemia, 528 patients were registered in local oncology databases, 21 lectures held on the work of SCI, and three doctors trained under the Haematology/Oncology fellowship programme.

(Contributed by FCIB)

Twenty-six of the 27 nurses from Barbados, The Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, who completed the specialised one-year programme, were part of SickKids-Caribbean Initiative.The initiative has also added to the library of regional medical literature and resources, with the completion of five supportive care guidelines and five clinical care guidelines documents. Seven custom built local data bases were established in SCI partner hospitals to record and track patients, and seven local data managers hired and trained in those territories.
By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade

Before being sent by train to Russia, a group of Turkish soldiers will arrive in Azerbaijan to learn and train the S-300 command and control system.

A specially selected group of 100 soldiers will arrive in Azerbaijan to study the S-300 missile systems. After that, the group will go to Russia for final preparation at the end of the spring.

The Ministry of Defense and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Turkey have already decided on the group that will be sent for training. After undergoing training in Azerbaijan and Russia, this group will return to Turkey and will train the rest of the military personnel selected for work with new anti-aircraft missile systems from 2020

According to the agreements between Ankara and Moscow, the first missile system will be delivered to Turkey this summer. In total, Ankara is purchasing two Triumph S-400 missile systems from the Russian Federation.

Touching upon the military cooperation between two states, especially joint trainings, it is vital to note that Azerbaijan and Turkey had joint military exercises Sokol TourAz - 2018, organized by the commanders of the Air Forces of Turkey and Azerbaijan on September 3, 2018.

The air forces of the two countries took part in the exercises, which started at the 3rd Main Reactor Base in Konya.

The purpose of these training is to contribute to military cooperation between countries through the development of interoperability in flight training. It was reported that combat air elements from the Turkish Air Force and the Azerbaijani Air Force were involved.

Moreover, according to a plan approved by the President of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces Ilham Aliyev, large-scale exercises are held under the leadership of the Minister of Defense from March 11 to 15. Up to 10,000 military personnel, up to 500 units of tanks, armored vehicles, including vehicles and special vehicles, up to 300 rocket and artillery installations of various calibers, multiple launch rocket systems and mortars, up to 20 units of army and front-line aviation for various purposes take part in the exercises.

At the same time, combat firing with the use of new weapon systems, including the practical launch of missiles, is carried out in training centers and combined-arms ranges.

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By Trend

Another plenary session of the Azerbaijani parliament will be held on March 15, Trend reports on March 15.

Azerbaijani Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov will deliver a report on the 2018 activity of the Cabinet of Ministers.

This is Mammadovs first annual report as prime minister.

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By Trend

A delegation led by Chairman of the Investigative Committee of Belarus Ivan Noskevich in order to further strengthen the working relations with Azerbaijani Prosecutor Generals Office has arrived in Azerbaijan, Trend reports with reference to the press service of the Prosecutor Generals Office.

A meeting with the delegation was held in the Prosecutor Generals Office of Azerbaijan.

During the meeting, Azerbaijani Prosecutor General Zakir Garalov told the guests about the creation of a regulatory framework for the activities of the prosecutors office as part of judicial and legal reforms carried out in the country under the leadership of the president of Azerbaijan, the comprehensive modernization of the prosecution authorities, fundamental reforms in the full reorganization of the corps of personnel, establishment of effective relations with other law enforcement agencies in order to ensure the rights and freedoms of citizens as well as other upcoming challenges.

Noskevich said that Belarus attaches particular importance to strengthening cooperation with Azerbaijan in the legal sphere, and noted that there are great prospects for deepening relations between the investigation agencies of the two countries.

During the meeting, an exchange of views took place on the protection of the rights and freedoms of citizens of both countries, joint fight against crime, as well as terrorism and extremism, the parties discussed effectiveness of mutual activities, both bilaterally and within international organizations, as well as improving the existing legal framework in the judicial cooperation.

The issues of interest were also discussed, and confidence was expressed that mutual cooperation would continue successfully in the future as well.

Following the discussions, a Cooperation Agreement was signed, defining the prospects for cooperation ties between the two state agencies.

The agreement covers areas such as combating terrorism and crime, in particular its organized forms, joint cooperation in the prevention of corruption crimes, as well as crimes in the field of economics and high technology and other crimes that threaten society, and also covers information and experience exchange, legal assistance and other areas.

Then the Belarusian delegation visited the General Directorate for Combating Corruption under the General Prosecutors Office.

The head of the General Directorate for Combating Corruption under the Prosecutor General Kamran Aliyev told the guests in detail about the creation of the necessary legal framework for the activities of the prosecutors office and the reforms being carried out, and also about the activities of the General Directorate.

The chairman of the Investigative Committee of Belarus highly appreciated the events held in Azerbaijan in the fight against corruption. Noskevich noted that Belarus is interested in studying Azerbaijans experience in the fight against corruption.

During the meeting, useful exchange of views on the prospects for cooperation in the fight against corruption took place.

The visit of the Belarusian delegation to Azerbaijan continues.

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By Trend

High-level relations have been established between Azerbaijan and Montenegro, Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic told reporters, Trend reports.

The head of state noted that friendly relations exist between Azerbaijan and Montenegro.

Djukanovic expressed his certainty that there are opportunities for even greater expansion of ties.

He further added that attention is being paid to the development of relations between the two countries in the tourism and energy sectors.

The Montenegrin president noted that the Global Baku Forum is also of great importance. He said that current and former heads of state and government participate in the forum and discuss important issues.

The 7th Global Baku Forum kicked off in Baku on March 14.

The forum organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will last till March 16.

Around 450 guests from over 70 countries are expected to take part in the forum. "New Foreign Policy" is the topic of the 7th Global Baku Forum.

Panel meetings titled Role of big forces in changing global politics, Sustainable Development Challenges, Middle Eastern cooperation for security, Role of science and culture in making modern decisions and other topics will be held during the forum.

One of the main meetings of the forum will be devoted to the role of young leaders in global politics.

The well-known statesmen, politicians, reputable public figures are expected to participate in the forum. The incumbent heads of state and government will attend the event.

The forum participants will discuss global political and economic issues, various aspects of modern international relations and other issues.

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By Trend

Fruitful cooperation has been established between Bulgaria and Azerbaijan, Prime Minister of Bulgaria Boyko Borisov told reporters in Baku, Trend reports March 14.

He noted that Azerbaijan and Bulgaria effectively cooperate in many areas, including tourism, cultural and other spheres.

I think that this cooperation will continue to develop, he said. The Baku Global Forum makes an important contribution to the development of cooperation between the countries.

The 7th Global Baku Forum kicked off in Baku on March 14.

The forum organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will last till March 16.

Around 450 guests from over 70 countries are taking part in the forum. "New Foreign Policy" is the topic of the 7th Global Baku Forum.

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TBy Trend

he Global Baku Forum has become a very effective platform that will develop from year to year, former president of Slovenia Danilo Turk told Trend March 14.

He noted that this forum creates excellent opportunities for forum participants to exchange views on important issues of concern to the whole world.

This forum is another step that has created favorable conditions for discussing foreign policy issues, added Turk.

He noted that Azerbaijan is doing an excellent job of establishing a dialogue between civilizations.

Azerbaijan is an Islamic country, but with very progressive approach, he said. Baku supports the restoration of Christian churches, and this contributes to the establishment of trust and dialogue between peoples.

The 7th Global Baku Forum kicked off in Baku on March 14.

The forum organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will last till March 16.

Around 450 guests from over 70 countries are taking part in the forum. "New Foreign Policy" is the topic of the 7th Global Baku Forum.

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By Trend

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with President of Albania Ilir Meta, who is attending the 7th Global Baku Forum.

President Ilham Aliyev thanked the Albanian President for his visit to Azerbaijan, and his participation in the 7th Global Baku Forum. The head of state described the growing number of Forum participants as a sign of the increasing influence of the event. He noted that the Forum creates ample opportunities for discussing the international issues, including the bilateral relations.

Pointing to the TAP project, the head of state underlined that the construction is successfully underway and is in its final stage. President Ilham Aliyev emphasized that the project also unites the two countries and their peoples. The President noted that Azerbaijan attaches great importance to bilateral relations with Albania.

Albanian President Ilir Meta hailed the importance of the 7th Global Baku Forum, underlining the events contribution to international cooperation. He thanked President Ilham Aliyev for supporting the development of bilateral relations. The Albanian President said he saw great changes in Azerbaijan.

On the TAP project, the Albanian President reaffirmed that the construction work is successfully underway. President Ilir Meta expressed his countrys keenness to expand relations with Azerbaijan in various fields, particularly in tourism, as well as Azerbaijans creating domestic gasification system in Albania.

The two countries successful cooperation, and their support for each other within international organizations was hailed at the meeting.

The sides also exchanged views on expanding mutual trade, exploring the export and import opportunities, establishing cooperation between the business structures and a number of other issues.

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By Trend

Successful foreign policy by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev contributed to the growth in the number of countries supporting Azerbaijan, Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov said, Trend reports March 15.

He was speaking in the Azerbaijani parliament with a report on the results of the work of the Cabinet of Ministers in 2018.

He said that the year 2018 was rich in significant events and great achievements in the socio-political and socio-economic life of Azerbaijan.

The prime minister noted that at the presidential election of 2018, Azerbaijani people re-elected Ilham Aliyev as president, voting for stability and development in the country.

He stressed that in 2018, the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh problem continued to remain priority direction of Azerbaijans foreign policy, and the world community was informed that a solution to this conflict is possible only within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

Mammadov added that last year the work continued in Azerbaijan to improve the social welfare of the population, and salaries, pensions and state allowances were raised.

Great attention was paid in Azerbaijan to issues of self-sufficiency in food products, and the state support in this direction was continued, he said.

Attention was paid to improving the irrigation system of the sown areas, 314 subartesian wells were drilled to improve water supply to the population, the relevant work was carried out to create irrigation canals, he added. The work was also done in connection with the creation of 50 agricultural parks.

Mammadov reminded that the centenary of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) was solemnly celebrated last year.

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By Leman Mammadova

President of Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR Rovnag Abdullayev met with Advisor to the President of Afghanistan for Banking and Finance Ajmal Ahmadi on March 14.

At the meeting, the sides spoke about the history of cultural and political cooperation between Afghanistan and Azerbaijan, the expansion of economic cooperation in the modern era.

Noting that oil products were imported to Afghanistan from abroad, Ajmal Ahmadi said that they intend to raise cooperation with SOCAR to a new level in order to diversify imports.

The products of SOCAR, such as diesel and kerosene, are already imported by Afghanistan's fuel market. The sides exchanged views on expanding ties at the state level in areas such as fuel imports, and also agreed to hold meetings to clarify opportunities for cooperation. Initial agreement was reached on holding consultations to clarify cooperation opportunities through working groups.

The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR) is one of the world's 50 largest oil companies. SOCAR's mission is to ensure the energy security of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Established in 1992, SOCAR aimed at manage Azerbaijan's oil resources on the basis of a single state policy, to improve the management structure of the oil industry and to ensure the development of fuel and energy complex.

Three production divisions, one oil refineries and one gas processing plant, a deep water platform fabrication yard, two trusts, one institution, and 23 subdivisions are operating as corporate entities under SOCAR. SOCAR has a significant position in a number of regional and international energy projects.

SOCAR carries out various operations, including sales, transportation and trade operations across all continents in more than 40 countries, among over 100 points of sale. The company is also exploring opportunities to enter new markets and develop operations in existing markets.

Currently, SOCAR is the only producer of oil products in the country, and also operates more than 370 filling stations in Switzerland, Georgia, Romania and Ukraine.

Relations between Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, based on friendship and brotherhood, have strong background.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan recognized the independence of the Republic of Azerbaijan on December 21, 1991. The diplomatic relations between the two countries were established on November 16, 1994.

Azerbaijan strongly supports Afghanistan on its path towards reaching stability. The contribution of Azerbaijan to the stability and development of Afghanistan is not restricted in the involvement in NATO operations. Azerbaijan supports the Afghan way of reforms by its assistance in the areas of education, infrastructure and transport development, investments and enhancing the role of women in the society.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan supports the fair position of Azerbaijan in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Afghanistan supports the solution of the conflict on the basis of international law within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.

Relations between Azerbaijan and Afghanistan are developing both in bilateral and multilateral formats.

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Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888

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By Mirsaid Ibrahimzade

Croatia intensifies efforts to implement the Ionian-Adriatic pipeline (IAP), via which the country can receive Azerbaijani gas, Trend reports referring to regulatory documents on the gas market in Croatia.

Croatia is stepping up its efforts to implement the IAP, which will be connected to the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline - a project that receives greater support from the European Union (EU) as an alternative route for gas supplies from Azerbaijan, the documents say.

It is also recalled that in 2015, at the suggestion of the Croatian company Plinacro, a ten-year development plan for the Croatian gas transmission system was approved for the period 2018-2027.

The main projects are the construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal (LNG) on the island of Krk in the North Adriatic and the Ionian-Adriatic pipeline. Therefore, the construction of LNG storage facilities on the island of Krk, the completion of the Croatian transport network, connection to international pipelines and the construction of natural gas storage facilities are recognized as strategic national projects, the documents say.

Note that the IAP pipeline in the Albanian city of Fier is planned to be connected to the Trans-Adriatic Gas Pipeline (TAP), which is intended for the supply of Azerbaijani gas to Europe. The IAP will ensure the supply of Azerbaijani gas to a number of countries in South-Eastern Europe.

The pipeline will pass through Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and will be completed in Croatia.

Recall that the TAP worth 4.5 billion euros is part of the Southern Gas Corridor project.

The initial capacity of TAP will be 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year with the possibility of doubling it.

It is expected that the construction of TAP will be completed in 2020, so that in the same year the first Azerbaijani gas would enter Europe.

The length of the pipeline is 878 kilometers, of which 550 kilometers will be laid on the territory of Greece, 215 kilometers on Albania, 105 kilometers on the bottom of the Adriatic Sea and eight kilometers on the territory of Italy.

The shareholders of TAP are: BP - 20 percent, SOCAR - 20 percent, Snam - 20 percent, Fluxys - 19 percent, Enagas - 16 percent, Axpo - five percent.

On November 21, 2018, Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) have been joined along the shores of the Maritsa River at the Turkish-Greek border. As a result of the joining of these two pipelines, Azerbaijani natural gas from the Shah Deniz-2 field can be transported to Italy via Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Albania, and the Adriatic Sea.

The Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) is a natural gas pipeline in Turkey. It is the central part of the Southern Gas Corridor, which will connect the giant Shah Deniz gas field in Azerbaijan to Europe through the South Caucasus Pipeline, TANAP and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline. The pipeline has a strategic importance for both Azerbaijan and Turkey. It allows the first Azerbaijani gas exports to Europe, beyond Turkey. It also strengthens the role of Turkey as a regional energy hub.

The TANAP is operated by SOCAR. SGC holds 58 percent stake in the project. Turkey's pipeline operator BOTAS own 30 percent, while BP acquired 12 percent in the project on March 13, 2015. The TANAP project company is headquartered in the Netherlands.

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A mathematical formula has been proposed to address the immediate need for US$5m to get LIAT off the ground and keep it in the air.

As they promised, the major shareholders of LIAT are preparing to provide a substantial portion of the US5 million that the regional airline needs to keep it operational.



The appeal for an immediate infusion of cash, has fallen on at least one receptive ear.

While no other territory  shareholder or otherwise  has made a concrete commitment, Dr. Gonsalves told parliamentarians here that the four major shareholders of LIAT  Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines - will contribute on a pro-rata basis, calculated on the number of LIAT flights that service each territory on a weekly schedule.

In the case of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, its contribution to the requested infusion was calculated on the basis of 52 departures per week.

Barbados, with 116 weekly departures, the highest by LIAT, is expected to contribute US$1.614 million, this even as that countrys Minister of Tourism had warned that "Barbados wont be the lone ATM machine for the cash-strapped airline.

Antigua and Barbudas anticipated contribution was put at US$960,310, in keeping with the 69 weekly departures handled by LIAT from that territory, which is home to the airlines headquarters.

Dominica is being asked to contribute US$347,938, in light of its 25 weekly flights.

Grenada, which late last week had indicated its preparedness to assist, on condition of receipt of certain information from LIAT (see article on page 3), is being requested to contribute at least US$487,113, based on LIATs 35 weekly departures from that territory.

St. Kitts and Nevis was the only other CARICOM territory to give some early indication that it would look at assisting, and Dr. Gonsalves is hopeful that that territory would avail US$389,691 to keep the airline in the skies.

Expectations are that Guyana and St. Lucia would contribute US$292,280 and US$584,536, respectively.

Dr. Gonsalves highlighted that Trinidad and Tobago did not feature in this overall overture; that country had indicated from the initial stages, that they are opposed to providing emergency funding for LIAT.

The Vincentian Prime Minister went on to say that there may be some LIAT flight cuts to Trinidad and Tobago, and disclosed that Caribbean Airlines (CAL) was expected to meet with LIAT to discuss functional cooperation between both airlines.

Dr. Gonslaves also pointed out that territories which are served by LIAT flights that are not financially viable, will be requested to pay a guarantee for the operation of those flights, a practice that exists in relation to international carriers.

St. Vincent and the Grenadines has agreed to contribute US723,711 to the cause. This was disclosed by Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves as he addressed a sitting of Parliament here last Monday.Grenada had already made public its commitment to an arrangement of this sort with LIAT.
By Trend

The construction of the SOCAR Carbamide Plant in Azerbaijan will minimize the import of urea fertilizers, Khayal Jafarov, director of the plant, said at the international conference "Argus Mineral Fertilizers 2019 - Production and Logistics in the Caspian and Black Sea region" in Baku, Trend reports.

He noted that about 90 percent of the carbamide produced in the world is used in agriculture, adding that it will be the same in Azerbaijan.

According to him, since the mid-20th century, Azerbaijan has become one of the main players in the chemical industry in the former USSR, especially in fertilizer production.

"Production ceased with the fall of the USSR. However, given the centuries-old agricultural traditions in Azerbaijan, the government made the decision to construct a carbamide plant," Jafarov said.

He noted that the plant was built as part of 2 state programs  the first being the Food Security Program of Azerbaijan, one of the main tasks of which was to minimize imports of carbamide fertilizers," and the second being the Industry Development Program.

The SOCAR Carbamide Plant, built on the territory of the Sumgait chemical industrial park, was commissioned on January 16.

The beginning of production at the SOCAR Carbamide Plant will eliminate the need to import nitrogen fertilizers, thereby reducing the country's foreign currency expenditure. While using 435 million cubic meters of natural gas as raw materials, the plant is capable of producing 650,000-660,000 tons of carbamide products.

About 70 percent of the production volume accounts for export. This will enable the country to receive additional income worth up to $160 million annually. The commissioning of this plant will play an important role in the development of agriculture in Azerbaijan.

Carbamide fertilizers have the highest nitrogen content, therefore, they are considered the highest quality nitrogen fertilizer.

The demand for carbamide is connected with its low cost, economical transportation, convenient use, which contributes to high yields in agriculture. This product is also widely used in the production of other chemicals and pharmaceutics.

Presently, the SOCAR Carbamide Plant is the biggest project in the country, implemented in the non-oil sector, its total cost is about 800 million euros.

The project was initially financed through the funds allocated from the state budget. During the construction of the plant, a number of international banks allocated funds in the amount of 500 million euros through the state guarantees.

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By Trend

Azerbaijan may increase fuel exports to Afghanistan, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijan's State Oil Company.

SOCAR President Rovnag Abdullayev and Advisor to the President of Afghanistan for Banking and Finance Ajmal Ahmadi have discussed the matter at a meeting.

It was noted at the meeting that SOCAR already supplies diesel and kerosene to Afghanistan. The sides reached a primary agreement to hold meetings at the level of working groups to clarify opportunities for cooperation.

Ahmadi said that Afghanistan is interested in taking cooperation with SOCAR to a new level to diversify the sources of petroleum products supply.

SOCAR is the sole producer of petroleum products in Azerbaijan owning over 370 filling stations in Georgia, Ukraine, Romania and Switzerland. It is also a co-owner of the largest Turkish petrochemical complex Petkim.

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By Leman Mammadova

Bulgaria is interested in additional gas supplies from Azerbaijan, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov told reporters, Report informs.

Borisov noted that during the meeting with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev in Baku, the issue of the construction of an interconnector for connecting to the Trans-Adriatic Gas Pipeline (TAP) for the delivery of 1 billion cubic meters of gas to Bulgaria was discussed.

Bulgaria expects to receive Azerbaijani gas through Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB), a gas pipeline that will be connected to the TAP.

IGB is a gas pipeline which will allow Bulgaria to receive Azerbaijani gas, in particular, the gas produced from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz 2 gas and condensate field. IGB is expected to be connected to TAP, to create an alternative source to Russian gas flowing to Bulgaria. The initial capacity of IGB will be 3 billion cubic meters of gas. The total investment cost for the realization of the IGB interconnector amounts to 240 million euros.

TAP in turn is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor which provides for the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region through Georgia and Turkey to Europe.

Bulgaria through state gas company Bulgargaz EAD has already concluded a contract with the Azerbaijani state-owned company SOCAR for the delivery of 1 billion cubic meters per year from the second phase of Shah Deniz gas field.

Azerbaijani natural gas from Shah Deniz 2, which will be delivered to Bulgaria per year via IGB, will meet about 25-30 percent of the consumption of natural gas in Bulgaria, which is a serious share and will significantly increase Bulgarias energy security and promote competition on the Bulgarian gas market. Bulgargaz EAD signed 25-year agreement gas purchase in September 2013 within Shah Deniz-2.

In addition, in July 2017, SOCAR and Bulgartransgaz, signed a memorandum of understanding. According to the document, the parties will explore the possibility of additional gas supplies to Bulgaria and through it to other countries of South-Eastern Europe.

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Leman Mammadova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @leman_888

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By Trend

Azerbaijan has suspended oil pumping through Baku-Novorossiysk, Ibrahim Ahmadov, Deputy Head of the Public Relations Department at Azerbaijans SOCAR state company, told Trend.

According to Ahmadov, this is due to scheduled inspections and repair work on the pipeline.

"We carry out regular inspections on the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline and, in case of identifying any flaws or risks, carry out the necessary repairs," he said.

As Ahmadov noted, in order to fulfill the company's export obligations, the oil that was supplied via Baku-Novorossiysk has been redirected to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.

"Due to us having an extensive system of pipelines, we can redirect some volumes of oil to other pipelines in order to fulfill our export obligations," Ahmadov said.

The Baku-Novorossiysk oil pipeline transports oil extracted by SOCAR independently, as well as from onshore fields developed within joint ventures. SOCAR has been the operator of the Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline since 2008.

The Baku-Novorossiysk pipeline is 1,147 kilometers long, 231 kilometers in its Azerbaijani section, and 916 kilometers in its Russian section. The highest capacity of the pipeline stands at 105,000 barrels a day.

The total length of the BTC pipeline is 1,768 kilometers, 443 kilometers of which passes through Azerbaijan, 249 through Georgia and 1,076 through Turkey. Construction of the pipeline was commenced in April 2003 and was filled with oil on May 18, 2005.

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By Trend

Removing US dollar from Iran's global transactions is a new guideline to the country's trade relations, said the Governor of Iran's Central Bank Abdolnaser Hemmati.

Referring to agreements with Iraqi officials, Hemmati said that considering the current approach in Iran-Iraq economic and trade ties and with other neighbors including Turkey, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, one can speak of the changes in destination of Iran's exports of goods and services, Trend reports citing IRNA.

He noted the US sanctions have failed in reality and eventually, it would led to a change in the structure of Iran's trade. "The immediate reaction of related public organizations will hasten the change."

"The transaction limit between Iran and Iraq is due to US sanctions that have created complexity in banking relations of the two countries. Nevertheless, our Iraqi counterparts will use special payment mechanism in trade, so we will be able to receive the payment for exported goods," he added.

Hemmati noted that the next step is to ensure a balance in trade between neighboring countries that will reduce Iran's dependency on direct imports and instead important part of exports from these countries will be re-exported to Iran.

"At the moment we are in a special situation to use national capacity for boosting domestic production, exports and cutting dependency on oil exports and importing goods that would have important role in defeating sanction."

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By Trend

The representatives of the Turkish company Innovera, specializing in digital technologies, met with the representatives of the Turkmen companies at the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs of Turkmenistan, Trend reports referring to the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

About 20 big local private enterprises took part in the meeting. Turkish businessmen held the presentation about their capabilities in IT sphere, including those in the implementation of projects of the electronic document management system, as well as in the training of specialists.

The ways of cooperation in the abovementioned spheres were determined during the meeting. The process of implementing the Digital Economy Development Concept for the period up to 2025 was launched in Turkmenistan in early 2019.

The concept is aimed at the growth of business and investment activity, the implementation of advanced methods of state governance and the creation of new jobs.

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By Abdul Kerimkhanov

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have agreed to strengthen phytosanitary control over imported and exported products.

Kazakhstan lifted restrictions on importing fresh pomegranate from Uzbekistan starting from March 14, according to the press service of the State Plant Quarantine Inspectorate under the Cabinet of Ministers of Uzbekistan.

Following the talks, Head of State Quarantine Inspectorate Ibrohim Ergashev with Deputy Minister of Agriculture of Kazakhstan Gulmira Isayeva and Deputy Chairman of the Committee of the State Inspection in the Agricultural Sector of the Kazakh Ministry of Agriculture Almabek Mars reached an agreement on lifting restrictions.

During the talks, the parties also discussed issues of strengthening cooperation between the quarantine services of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the quarantine phytosanitary situation in the two countries and control over the export and import of quarantine products.

Kazakhstan introduced a temporary ban on the import of Uzbek pomegranates into the republic on February 19. According to the Ministry of Agriculture of Kazakhstan, the reason was the identification of pests in pomegranate fruits, in particular, the Comstock worm.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture of Uzbekistan, the main export market for the Uzbek pomegranates is Russia.

Besides, the Uzbek pomegranate also comes to Russia due to re-export from Kazakhstan.

Earlier, Kazakhstan revealed two facts of the delivery from the territory of Uzbekistan of pomegranates infected with a quarantine object.

Worm colonies cause plants to dry out. With a strong infection, the fruits are stiffened, their taste deteriorates, and their weight decreases.

Diplomatic relations between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were established on November 23, 1992.

Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan currently experience a rise in mutual economic ties. In January-June 2018, the trade turnover between the two countries increased by 52 percent, with Uzbek exports growth of 48 percent. Over 200 companies with Kazakh capital currently operate in Uzbekistan.

The countries agreed to take further measures to ensure the growth of trade turnover to $ 3 billion in 2018 and $ 5 billion by 2020. The countries also intend to increase the number of rail, bus and air communication between two states.

Kazakhstan exports to Uzbekistan petroleum and their products, the milling industry, grains, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, products of inorganic chemistry, food products.

Uzbekistan exports to Kazakhstan energy sources (gas), cotton fiber, chemical products and plastics, fertilizers, fruits and vegetables and other types of goods.

Uzbek investments in Kazakhstan for the past 10 years amounted to $ 31.3 million, half of which falls for 2016. Kazakh investments in Uzbekistan totalled $ 114.4 million in the past decade.

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Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94

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By Trend

A meeting was held between the Ambassador of Belarus to Turkmenistan Oleg Tabanyukhov and Deputy Prime Minister of Turkmenistan Mammethan Chakiyev in Ashgabat, Trend reports referring to the Belarusian Embassy in Turkmenistan.

An agreement was reached on holding the Belarusian-Turkmen business forum as part of the meeting of the intergovernmental commission to be held in Ashgabat this year.

The dates of the business forum are being specified.

The event is aimed at the effective implementation of new plans and projects aimed at the development of cooperation between the countries in a wide range of areas.

The parties exchanged views on cooperation in trade of goods and services during the meeting.

More than 130 bilateral documents have been signed and are being implemented between the countries, constituting the contractual and legal base of multifaceted cooperation.

Belarus mainly supplies high value-added goods to Turkmenistan, such trucks, special-purpose vehicles, tractors, road-building equipment, medicine, woodworking products, and agricultural products.

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By Abdul Kerimkhanov

Development and strengthening of bilateral cooperation between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan is of strategic importance not only for the future of two peoples but also for ensuring peace, stability and security throughout the region.

The volume of trade between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan after the January fall was able to recover in February 2019, reports Asia Plus.

For the first two months, the two neighboring countries gained $ 29,9 million between them. Tajik exports were worth $ 15,67 million, and goods worth 14,2 million were imported from Uzbekistan, according to the Customs Service under the Government of Tajikistan.

The Tajik-Uzbek bilateral trade increased by 3 percent (by $ 987,000) in January-February 2019 compared to the same period last year. The trade turnover between the two countries was $ 28,9 million In January-February 2018.

Meanwhile, the volume of Tajik exports exported to Uzbekistan decreased by $ 3 million, while the import of Uzbek goods in Tajikistan grew by almost $ 4 million.

Despite this, Uzbekistan remains the only neighboring country with which Tajikistan has a positive balance, exports prevail over imports by $ 1.4 million.

Bilateral trade between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan declined significantly in January after continuous growth in recent years.

According to the Statistics Agency under the President of the Republic of Tajikistan, the trade turnover between the two countries amounted to slightly more than $ 10.2 million in January 2019, which is almost 35 percent less than the same period last year.

Prior to this, over the past four years, the Tajik-Uzbek trade increased almost 22 times, from $ 13 million by the end of 2014 to almost $ 287 million in 2018.

Tajikistan supplies the neighboring republic with primary aluminum, electricity, cotton fiber, ore, cement, raw skin, cocoon, raw silk, various fabrics, alcoholic beverages, carpets, etc.

Natural gas, textile products, mineral fertilizers, plastics, footwear, ceramic products, non-ferrous metals, electrical and mechanical equipment are imported from Uzbekistan to Tajikistan.

Diplomatic relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan were established on October 20, 1992.

Having come to power in December 2016, the current head of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev firmly stated that he intends to improve relations with neighbors. In November 2017, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Uzbekistan announced "deep changes in the Tajik-Uzbek relations".

Since the beginning of 2018, more than 10 checkpoints have opened on the border of the two countries. Uzbekistan has restored the Galab-Amuzang railway line.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev visited Dushanbe with an official visit on March 9-10, 2018. In two days, the President of Tajikistan and the head of Uzbekistan signed over 27 documents. In particular, the parties determined the deadlines for demining the Tajik-Uzbek border, abolished visas and agreed to fully restore air traffic.

It is planned to open air communication between Dushanbe and the Uzbek cities of Bukhara and Samarkand in 2019, where a large number of ethnic Tajiks live.

Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are counting on an increase in trade turnover to $ 500 million by 2020.

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Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94

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By Abdul Kerimkhanov

The Iranian automobile industry was the fastest growing branch of the Iranian economy. It ensured the inflow of financial revenues through the export of cars and attracted foreign investment.

Until 2012, Iran was the number one automaker in the Middle East, ranking 12th in the world. The country annually exported about $ 1 billion of cars.

However, after the imposition of sanctions by the United States and the EU, car production in Iran has dropped quite sharply.

Deputy Minister of Industry, Mines and Trade of Iran, Farhad Mokimi, said that Renault had invested $ 1 billion in Iran on March 14, reports Tasnim News.

Iranian Deputy Minister of Industry, Mines and Trade said that the French automaker Renault SA would return to Iran after it ceased cooperation with Iranian companies under U.S. sanctions.

"After the negotiations and consultations, as well as taking into account the volume of investments that Renault has invested in Iran, we announce that this company will return to Iran again," he added.

The Deputy Minister also noted that a mechanism had been developed that would allow the resumption of Renault car production in Iran.

In July 2018, Renault suspended its operations in Iran to comply with U.S. sanctions against Tehran.

In 2017, Renault signed an agreement with the Iranian Industrial Development and Reconstruction Organization and the local dealer "Parto Negin Naseh Co." to increase its Iranian production by 75 percent.

The company said that it had not yet begun the production of vehicles and had not invested in this transaction, but it has been producing cars there with two other partners since 2003.

The history of Renault in Iran comes back to many years ago. The first car of Renault imported to Iran in 1918.

However, the presence of Renault as car manufacturer has a new history in Iran. In 2002, Renault came to Iran based on a mutual contract with the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization (IDRO) in order to be a strategic partner in the car industry of Iran.

Quality has always been an obvious and non-negotiable principle in Renault products. Therefore, produced cars are always in top of quality among the competitors in Iran.

Subject to the last report of Iran Standard and Quality Inception, Renault SANDERO & Renault TONDAR 90 have four quality stars which are benefiting the best quality in their price range.

Then, Renault TONDAR PICKUP has three stars which has been known the best quality in this class and among its competitors in Iran.

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Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94

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By Trend





The growth of tourist flow to Azerbaijan shows the development of the tourism sector, Prime Minister Novruz Mammadov said.

He was speaking at the Azerbaijani parliament with a report on the results of the work of the Cabinet of Ministers in 2018, Trend reports March 15.

Mammadov reminded that last year in Azerbaijan great attention was paid to the development of healthcare, strengthening the material and technical base of medical institutions, providing them with modern equipment, as well as repair and construction work was carried out in 47 medical institutions.

The prime minister also noted the development of the tourism sector.

The number of tourists who arrived in Azerbaijan last year reached 2.8 million people, which indicates the development of this sphere, he said.

He added that last year Azerbaijani athletes achieved great success.

Fifty-eight international competitions were held in Azerbaijan last year, he said. Our athletes participated in 236 international tournaments, they won 753 medals, including 263 gold medals.

Mammadov stressed that work will be carried out to improve the business environment in Azerbaijan.

In the Doing Business report, Azerbaijan has risen by 32 positions, taking a leading position among the CIS countries, he said.

He added that last year 1.7 billion manats were allocated for the road infrastructure in the country.

Last year, 2,000 kilometers of roads were overhauled and 14 kilometers of the Lyaki-Gabala railway have already been built, he said.

Mammadov added that last year Azerbaijan also acquired two planes.
By Abdul Kerimkhanov

The aviation authorities of Tajikistan and Georgia reached an agreement on the establishment of direct flights between the cities of the two countries.

The air traffic memorandum was signed in Tbilisi on March 6, the Georgian Civil Aviation Agency reports.

The document was signed during the two-day visit to Georgia of representatives of the Ministry of Transport of Tajikistan.

"The memorandum regulates technical issues related to the launch of direct flights prior to the signing of an intergovernmental bilateral agreement on air traffic," the message says.

In accordance with the signed document, the parties have the right to designate one or more airlines to carry out direct scheduled flights and air freight traffic.

Designated companies have the right to fly to any point of Georgia and Tajikistan.

The Ministry of Transport of Tajikistan confirmed the signing of this memorandum, noting that the details will be published later.

Regular flights in Georgia were carried out by 58 airlines in 2018, which is 9.4 percent more compared to 2017. In general, the airports of Georgia served more than 5 million passengers in 2018, which is 23.6 percent more than in 2017.

Tajik Air specializes in air transportation of passengers, baggage and cargo, as well as performs maintenance (Transit Check, Daily Check, Weekly Check, 100-Hour Check, A-Check) and repair aviation technology.

Expansion of flight geography, safety, reliability and comfort are the main tasks of Tajik Air, which determine its development strategy.

To this day, more than 500 aviation specialists are working at Tajik Air. Most of the pilots, navigators and flight engineers of the company are highly qualified and have extensive experience in flying in the most difficult mountain conditions of the Pamir Mountains.

The company carries out regular flights to five cities of Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Surgut, Novosibirsk), as well as to Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek), Kazakhstan (Almaty), Iran (Tehran), India (Delhi), China (Urumqi ). On local airlines, regular flights are operated to Khujand and Khorog.

In the near future, the airline intends to open flights Dushanbe-Beijing-Dushanbe, Kurgan-Tyube - Ekaterinburg, Kurgan-Tyube - Novosibirsk, Kurgan-Tyube - Kazan.

Diplomatic relations between Tajikistan and Georgia were established on August 4, 1994.

The main areas of cooperation between the two countries are agricultural and mining industries, tourism development, education and pharmaceuticals.

---

Abdul Kerimkhanov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AbdulKerim94

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
By Trend





The 7th Global Baku Forum dedicated to the topic "New Foreign Policy" continues with panel meetings, Trend reports March 14.

The first panel meeting of the forum is devoted to the theme Role of big forces in changing global politics: China, the US, Russia and the EU.

Rapid development of the Chinese economy in recent years, the fact that the country is interested in the stable development of the economy was highlighted at the panel meeting. It was noted that the economic ties between China and the EU amount to billions of US dollars.

The issues of the formation of a European society and the problems encountered in this process were also touched upon. It was noted that the EU is taking important steps to solve problems, but some issues are still pending settlement, and the European countries should cooperate for this.

At the panel meeting, the role of the US in ensuring peace was emphasized and it was noted that the US highly appreciates the contribution made by Azerbaijan to the restoration of peace.

At the first panel meeting, the significance of the 7th Global Baku Forum was also touched upon.

The 7th Global Baku Forum kicked off in Baku on March 14.

The forum organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center will last till March 16.

Around 450 guests from over 70 countries are taking part in the forum. "New Foreign Policy" is the topic of the 7th Global Baku Forum.




Kern County Supervisor Leticia Perez is expected to be going to court soon on charges of using her position for financial gain.
You can reach Sam Morgen at 661-395-7415 or smorgen@bakersfield.com. You may also follow him on Twitter @smorgenTBC.
By Trend





President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Sefik Dzaferovic.

President Ilham Aliyev thanked Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Sefik Dzaferovic for his participation in the 7th Global Baku Forum, and described this visit as a good opportunity for discussing the bilateral ties. The head of state noted that political relations between the two countries are rapidly developing.

Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Sefik Dzaferovic expressed gratitude for inviting him to the Forum. Sefik Dzaferovic hailed the high level of political relations between the two friendly countries, saying they are expanding on the basis of mutual interest. He praised the bilateral cooperation as well as Azerbaijan`s support for Bosnia and Herzegovina and humanitarian projects implemented by Azerbaijan in his country. Sefik Dzaferovic underlined that as a member of the Bosnian Parliament he was personally involved in the adoption of a document supporting Azerbaijan`s territorial integrity and condemning the Khojaly genocide. The member of the Presidency invited President Ilham Aliyev to pay an official visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The head of state thanked for the adoption by the Parliament of the friendly Bosnia and Herzegovina of the resolution on the Khojaly genocide. President Ilham Aliyev mentioned the fact that Baku and Sarajevo became sister cities in the 1970s, and noted the significance of cooperation among the cities, people-to-people contacts and the development of cultural and humanitarian ties.
This week, college students are trading books for booze in celebration of the week-long, mid-semester holiday popularly known as spring break.

Many will travel to Florida and others to Mexico, but Texas beaches are home to some of the most popular spring break destinations for students.
By Trend





President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with President of Moldova Igor Dodon.

President Ilham Aliyev thanked Moldovan President Igor Dodon for his participation in the 7th Global Baku Forum. The head of state noted that the 7th Global Baku Forum is a very important platform for discussing international and regional issues. This Forum also allows us the opportunity to discuss prospects for developing our bilateral relations. President Ilham Aliyev congratulated Igor Dodon on the victory in the elections.

Moldovan President Igor Dodon expressed gratitude to the Azerbaijani President for the excellent organization of the 7th Global Baku Forum. The Moldovan President described the Forum as an important platform for discussing international and regional matters.

The sides had a broad exchange of views on the development of the bilateral ties in a variety of fields. They emphasized the importance of the Intergovernmental Joint Commission in developing economic and trade relations between the two countries. The two countries` successful cooperation and mutual support within international organizations was underlined at the meeting.
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By Trend





President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with Vice Prime Minister of Romania Ana Birchall.

Ana Birchall extended greetings of the Romanian president and prime minister to the head of state. She said that this meeting creates new opportunities for developing bilateral relations between the two countries. Ana Birchall noted that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and Romania.

The head of state asked the vice prime minister to extend his greetings to the Romanian president and prime minister. President Ilham Aliyev underlined that Ana Birchall`s personal contribution to and support for the development of ties between the two countries are highly appreciated in Azerbaijan. The head of state pointed out that there are big opportunities for further developing bilateral relations between the two countries, in particular promoting economic and trade cooperation.

Ana Birchall noted that a meeting of the Intergovernmental Joint Commission last year was very fruitful, adding that this commission plays an important role in developing economic ties between the two countries.

The sides also touched upon the cooperation within international organizations, and hailed the two countries` mutual support. It was also noted that the development of the transport sector was one of the key issues on the agenda of a recent meeting of foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania and Turkmenistan.

The head of state touched upon Romania`s involvement in the Southern Gas Corridor Advisory Council.

Ana Birchall said that during its Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Romania supported the expansion of Azerbaijan-European Union relations.
By Trend





President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with President of Montenegro Milo Dukanovic. The Montenegrin President thanked President Ilham Aliyev for inviting him to the 7th Global Baku Forum, and the excellent organization of the event. He described the event as one of the important platforms for discussing international issues. The Montenegrin President hailed relations with Azerbaijan, saying the jointly implemented projects are indicative of the development of bilateral ties between the two countries.

President Ilham Aliyev underlined very close political and economic relations, and praised the successful implementation of joint projects between Azerbaijan and Montenegro. The head of state hailed Montenegros participation in the meeting of the Southern Gas Corridor Advisory Council, saying that this project will bring the two countries closer to each other. President Ilham Aliyev also pointed to the implementation of various transport projects in Azerbaijan. The head of state noted that coordination of Azerbaijans transport system with European countries and particularly the launch of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway also create ample opportunities for cooperation between the two countries. The President pointed out great potential and prospects for the development of cooperation between Azerbaijan and Montenegro in tourism, gas and transport areas.

President Milo Dukanovic noted that Montenegro considers Azerbaijan as a friendly country, and hails President Ilham Aliyevs support for the development of relations between the two countries.

President Ilham Aliyev also expressed Azerbaijans great respect for Montenegro, saying the country attaches great importance to its relations with Montenegro.

The sides also discussed the strengthening of the legal and treaty base, and development of other areas between the two countries.
Caleb Brock is a budding activist who says he's already taken part in several protests, though he is just 17.

But the high school senior took a different political tack for an event hosted by a local tea party group after finding out that Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, R, would be in appearance. Brock turned on the charm. He told organizers that he was a "huge fan" of Patrick - and brought a painting that he wanted to give him, that he had covered in a GOP flag.

"I was just like, I want to get a picture with Dan Patrick," Brock said in an interview.

Patrick eventually came by and told him how much he liked the painting, Brock said.

"I told him, I want you to run for 2020," Brock said.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Beto ORourke, Julian Castro make history for Texas Democratic party

According to video of the event published by the Young Turks YouTube channel, Patrick did seem pleased with the gift. He stood holding it as another speaker introduced him - and then brought it onto the stage when he went up to speak. Caleb stood a few paces away.

"I walk in the door, and Caleb, delightful fellow, just met him tonight," Patrick said. "He traveled an hour here, and he brought me a painting, he did. And so I want to show you this, it's pretty cool."

Patrick turned the painting around to show it to the audience. It is a messy mix of colors and words; "Dan 2020," it says on one side, along with "principled" and "conservative leadership" elsewhere.

"This is all of the things, like conservative, principled conservative, it's kind of abstract," Patrick said, making a joke about running for president of his homeowner's association. Patrick said he planned to bring the painting in the plane back home.

But the painting was embedded with two hidden messages: "Abolish ICE," and "Impeach Trump," two rallying cries for the far left, were written across its top, visible but hazy, and written backward and thus legible clearly only in a mirror. ICE refers to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The lieutenant governor had been duped. Brock is not a Patrick fan.

Political pranks - satire brought to life - are a time-honed tradition in the emotional world of politics, made famous by groups such as the Yes Men and others. Richard Tuck, a longtime Democratic strategist and trickster, was famous for many of these stunts, perhaps foremost among them booking Richard M. Nixon during Nixon's Senate campaign in 1950 to an empty auditorium. Groups such as the Yippies, a counterculture consortium of pranksters, made waves in the 1960s - for pranks like when they rained small-denomination bills onto the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange, brokers making a mad dash to pick them up in what made for an effective portrait of greed. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the Yes Men targeted corporations such as Dow Chemical and Halliburton.

But pranks, which can quickly bleed into the world of hoaxes, misinformation campaigns and other less-savory and underhanded political tricks, have seemed to occupy a less prominent space in recent years as the intensity and nastiness of the political sphere has ramped up.

It is not clear when Patrick found out about the prank, but the ruse was exposed when the Young Turks wrote about it Wednesday.

Patrick took the trickery in stride.

"I meet lots of young people in my travels around the state, and I always try to engage with them when I can," he said in a statement. "This young man's very elaborate prank - painting all the letters backward in abstract so it couldn't be read until it was flipped in a photograph - and giving it to me as I walked in the door of a speech was certainly clever - but if that's the worst that happens on the trail, it has to make you laugh."

AT CERAWeek: Hickenlooper pledges to bring nation together

Julie McCarty, president of the NE Tarrant tea party, which hosted the event, said "of course this guy had to sneak and manipulate his way onto the stage."

"Nobody would willingly give up time and attention for his nonsense," she wrote in an email.

Brock said in an interview that he was not a student of political pranks; he just didn't think the logistics of the event would have allowed him to confront Patrick in another way.

"This was one of the first ideas that came to me," he said. "I wanted to start a conversation on the topic of the cruel immigration policies we have in this country right now."

Patrick was chosen solely because of his prominence in the state's powerful Republican constellation - and the fact that he was appearing in the Fort Worth suburb of North Richland Hills, about 30 miles south of Brock's home in Denton.

Brock said he does not know what happened to his painting.

The high schooler will be a freshman next year at the University of Texas, where he hopes to begin a course of study that will lead to a career as an immigration lawyer. He particularly likes the refugee and immigrant advocacy organization RAICES. He said looks forward to voting after he turns 18 in May.

"We have an older generation that is viewing youth and dismissing our voices a little bit. They're saying 'They're too young to really know what's going on,' " he said. "No, we're living in this world, and we can all see the atrocities being committed by ICE and this administration."
Arvest Bank granted Little Rock, Ark.-based Premier Gastroenterology Associates a $26 million construction loan for its Premier Medical Plaza, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette reports.



What you should know:

1. Premier is developing a $38 million medical complex.

2. The physician group purchased the property for $12 million in 2018.

3. Developers could begin renovating the property March 18, with a year-end completion targeted.
Livonia-based Ophthalmic Specialists of Michigan celebrated Employee Appreciation Day with a special surprise for team members.

Three details:

1. The practice, which has three locations, gave staff members the chance to get chair massages during an Employee Appreciation Day celebration March 1.

2. OSM brought Michael Griffin onboard as a physician liaison in October. OSM's seven physicians specialize in areas including cataract and glaucoma surgery, vitreoretinal disease and surgery, oculoplastics and optometry.

3. Other ways the organization has demonstrated staff appreciation include providing donuts during Allied Ophthalmic Personnel Week in November and hosting a festive team holiday party.

"Although we believe that appreciation should be expressed every day, we look forward to opportunities like Employee Appreciation Day to demonstrate just how much we value our team," the organization said in a LinkedIn post.
Eight Vermont hospitals saw negative operating margins in fiscal year 2018 as expense growth outpaced revenue growth, according to operating results outlined in a Green Mountain Care Board review.

The operating results show hospital revenues including net patient revenue and fixed prospective payments under Vermont's all-payer model  increased 3.1 percent systemwide in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, compared to the year prior. At the same time, operating expenses grew 5 percent year over year.

The hospitals' average operating margin, representing revenues over expenses, was 1.4 percent systemwide in fiscal year 2018, down from 2.7 percent in fiscal year 2017.

Overall, eight hospitals saw negative operating margins in fiscal year 2018:

Springfield (Vt.) Hospital  12.8 percent

Gifford Medical Center in Randolph  10.7 percent

Brattleboro (Vt.) Memorial Hospital  2.4 percent

Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin  3.8 percent

Copley Hospital in Morrisville  3.3 percent

Grace Cottage Family Health & Hospital in Townshend  2.9 percent

Northwestern Medical Center in St. Albans  3.4 percent

North Country Hospital in Newport  2.3 percent (preliminary)

Only six hospitals saw positive operating margins in fiscal year 2018:

Mt. Ascutney Hospital and Health Center in Windsor 1.9 percent

Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital in St. Johnsbury  1.7 percent

Porter Hospital in Middlebury 1.8 percent

Rutland Regional Medical Center in Rutland City  0.5 percent

Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington 4.6 percent

UVM Medical Center in Burlington  3.4 percent

Jeff Tieman, president and CEO of the Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, told VTDigger that some hospitals are in "really challenging financial situations."

"We also believe, especially here in Vermont, that they are facing pressures and making investments, [such as financial support of the state's all payer model and the statewide accountable care organization], that challenge them to an even greater degree," he said.

Mr. Tieman said cost control is also a key focus for hospitals.

"There's a laser focus on expense management and reduction across our system, and also a deep commitment to health reform and moving to a value-based system," he said. "And we need the financial headroom to achieve that."

More articles on healthcare finance:

New York governor adjusts Medicaid reduction plans amid federal budget proposal

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Out-of-network ED physicians charge patients 150 percent more than counterparts in network receive, insurer finds
The CEO of CarePlus New Jersey in Paramus said while behavioral health treatment has been booming  thanks in part to more awareness around mental healthcare  low reimbursement continues to plague the specialty service, according to New Jersey business publication ROI.

Care Plus NJ CEO Joseph Masciandaro said more patients are seeking treatment as stigma around opioid misuse and other behavioral health issues eases. However, a new reimbursement system put in place by New Jersey's former Republican Gov. Chris Christie is putting increased pressure on behavioral health providers, according to ROI.



Under the system, Medicaid reimbursement was moved to fee-for-service billing, despite a national trend away from the payment model. New Jersey's prior payment system for Medicaid was contract-based payments per patient.



Mr. Masciandaro told ROI that being acquired by another hospital isn't out of the question to remain financially viable.
By Trend





Changing the format of the negotiations on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is possible only with the consent of the sides, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters at a press briefing, Trend reports.

"Russia, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, has repeatedly spoken about the negotiation format, which can only be changed on the basis of the consent of the sides. This is not only our position, but also the position of the other members," she said.

Also, answering journalists' question about whether Russia is ready in the event of an initiative by the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia to meet at the CIS Ministerial Council meeting on April 5 in Moscow, to provide them with a platform, Zakharova noted that in general, when the sides turn to the Russia for the opportunity to provide a platform or play a mediating role, Moscow always respectfully considers these issues.

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.
Carl Hall serves as Vice President and General Manager for Presource Products and Services for Cardinal Health.

On April 3rd, Carl will speak at Becker's Hospital Review 10th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 1-4, 2019 in Chicago.

To learn more about the conference and Carl's session, click here.

Question: What is the biggest evolution you've seen among the hospitals/health systems you work with over the last two to three years?

Carl Hall: In today's value-based care landscape, with increasing pressures to reduce costs, leaders are looking for more visibility into what they are spending and how they can save money while ensuring quality of care remains the same. An effect of this emphasis on value is the convergence of supply chain and perioperative decision-making, as customers are taking a holistic view to total cost of care. A procedural supply chain is increasingly important with the consolidation we see on the provider side: Customers need help organizing and making decisions around supply procurement and delivery and are leaning more heavily on peer best-demonstrated practices and benchmarking.

Q: Most people understand innovation as starting something new. The lesser discussed side of innovation is when you stop something. What is one thing health systems would benefit from stopping, quitting or banning?

CH: Health systems can benefit by reducing needless variation, which can develop over time and be caused by industry consolidation, contractual or equipment constraints and clinical practice variation. The key here is a consultative approach among hospital executives and physicians. Reducing variation helps to enhance the quality of care  leaving clinicians more time to spend on patient care  and reduces costs by taking advantage of scale where possible. Because it can be difficult to find the right balance between cost and clinical requirements, there is a need for solutions that identify savings opportunities beyond traditional supply cost. We see a huge interest in reducing variation in care across providers and within our customer base, and we see our role in this quest as a consultative partner to bring opportunities forward from a supply perspective. Ultimately, standardization initiatives that look to reduce process and product variation help to maximize value of an organization's resources and spend throughout the delivery of care.

Q: What do innovators/entrepreneurs from outside healthcare need to better understand about hospital and health system leaders?

CH: Supply chain touches every corner of healthcare. Because of that, partnership across clinical and operational stakeholders is key to success. Not only is it important for clinical leaders to understand operational challenges that impact delivery of care, but we see that supply chain decision-makers are relying on clinical data and insights to drive change. As a result, innovation and change in health systems needs to address a breadth of operational challenges in order to help every person throughout the organization perform at their highest level of capability. Data science that helps hospital and health system leaders connect the dots from supply chain through delivery of care is highly desirable in todays healthcare landscape. At the end of the day, efficiency is currency in healthcare. We deliver value to our customers by helping them get the most out of their organizations resources  and that starts in the supply chain.

Q: What one strategic initiative will demand the most of your time and energy in 2019?



CH: We are continuing to commit to an insights-driven approach that helps our customers achieve predictable success through greater visibility, short- and long-term planning and thoughtful execution at scale. With actionable insights and broad implementation support, we are seeking to give our customers broader purview over their business to empower management. Our scale, data and tenure enable us to expertly calibrate supply and clinical practice to enhance the delivery of high-quality care, and we are committed to employing this data to provide targeted recommendations. To that end, we will continue expanding our data-driven solutions that enable customers to understand and track savings and streamline product procurement and delivery mode, all with the goal of driving clinical and operational efficiencies.
The board chairman of Baton Rouge, La.-based Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System resigned one day after the system fired its CEO, according to The Advocate.

In a statement obtained by The Advocate, James Moore Jr. said, "In light of the fact that the sisters have chosen to pursue a different direction for the system with respect to its leadership  I felt the timing was right to also allow them the opportunity to choose new board leadership."

Mr. Moore had served on the health system's board for seven years and spent the last three as board chairman of the six-hospital system.

"With Mr. McBride's separation, Mr. Moore felt his obligation had been met. We thank him for his many years of service to our ministry," Sister Barbara Arceneaux, regional minister of Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady, told The Advocate in a statement.

The state's largest Catholic health system released a statement March 13 regarding the decision to fire Mr. McBride, who had served in the position for just over one year.

"After a year of working together and much discernment, we have made a decision to end Mike McBride's services as CEO of Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System," the statement said.

A health system spokesperson confirmed to the publication March 13 that the board did not vote to fire Mr. McBride, but that the decision was made by the sisters who run the organization.

To access the full report, click here.
HCA Healthcare is now the majority stakeholder in the parent company of one of the nation's leading nursing schools, the Nashville, Tenn.-based health system announced March 14.

The 185-hospital system will be a majority stakeholder in the Louisville, Ky.-based Galen College of Nursing, a private enterprise that offers online degree programs in addition to the programs across its five campuses. No changes to the college's leadership will be made.

The goal of the partnership is to provide better access to nursing education and career development for nurses to improve patient care. Officials said the collaboration will offer additional career development opportunities to HCA's 94,000 registered nurses and will allow the Galen College of Nursing to establish programs at the health system's affiliated hospitals nationwide.

HCA is one of the largest nurse employers in the nation and already owns two nursing schools and five advanced nursing simulation training centers. The health system also began investing up to $300 million in more benefits for employees, including additional career development opportunities for nurses.

"Nurses are the lifeblood of our organization, and we've been intentional about investing in nursing so they can be successful and provide the best possible patient care. Galen has an excellent reputation in nursing education, and we look forward to working with them to advance their mission and expand their programs to more of our markets," HCA CEO Sam Hazen said in a statement.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approval. The terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, Mass., part of Springfield, Mass.-based Baystate Health, tried to union bust regarding security and engineering employees, the National Labor Relations Board found, according to The Recorder.

NLRB Administrative Law Judge Paul Bogas on March 11 ruled that Baystate Franklin violated various federal labor laws involving its recently formed security and trades unions. The judge found that hospital officials were guilty of coercive interrogation of the security union employees, who had recently organized, as well as trade employees, including engineers, who were in the middle of unionization efforts, The Recorder reports. The actions primarily occurred in May 2017.

"There was definitely union busting going on. No question about it," Steve Maritas, organizing director of the security union, told The Recorder. "The truth speaks for itself."

The judge ordered Baystate Franklin display notices that it violated federal labor law around the hospital for two months, according to the report.

Baystate Franklin may appeal the decision to the labor board's national office in Washington, D.C. Spokesperson Shelly Hazlett said the hospital is reviewing the decision but did not indicate whether Baystate Franklin will appeal.

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Hospitals and unions: 7 recent conflicts, agreements
A judge tasked with signing off on a government settlement allowing CVS Health to acquire Aetna ordered a hearing on the matter, according to Reuters.

Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia scheduled the hearing for April 5. Mr. Leon said the hearing is being held to discuss if any witnesses should testify on the deal before he approves it.



While CVS and Aetna closed their $70 billion transaction in November, Mr. Leon still has to complete certain procedures required by the Tunney Act. The Tunney Act is a federal law requiring the Justice Department to get a federal court's approval for merger settlements.



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Two co-pharmacy owners were sentenced to 10 years in prison each for creating a bogus pharmacy to obtain and distribute OxyContin and other prescription narcotics to black-market customers, according to NBC Los Angeles.

Dalibor Kabov and Berry Kabov were convicted in January 2017 of multiple charges including conspiracy to distribute narcotics, conspiracy to import controlled drugs and money laundering.

The Kabov brothers pocketed more than $3 million from the fraud scheme. The brothers were the operators of Global Compounding Pharmacy, which was a fake pharmacy.

"In the midst of a national opioid epidemic, these defendants used a seemingly legitimate pharmacy as a front to flood the black market with dangerous opioids for their own personal profit," U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna told NBC Los Angeles. "The lengthy sentences imposed should send a resounding message that medical and pharmacy professionals who seek to profit from the spread of opiate addiction will be met with severe punishment."
Oral forms of medications include inactive ingredients to help stabilize the drug or aid in its absorption. While these components are usually harmless, nearly all of these pills contain some ingredients that can cause allergic reactions, a new study published in Science Translational Medicine found.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.; Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston; and Harvard Medical School in Boston, set out to determine how "inactive" these ingredients are.

Researchers found that on average 75 percent of a pill or capsule was made up of inactive ingredients, and some of the pills had as many as 35 inactive compounds.

Drugmakers can choose to add thousands of compounds into their drugs, including things like gluten, lactose and dyes.

The researchers found that 38 ingredients have been associated with a very specific allergic reaction, and about 90 percent of pills have at least one of those ingredients.

Generally, the amounts in any given pill may not be enough to trigger an allergy, but a subset of patients may be incredibly sensitive and develop symptoms. In addition, when patients take multiple medicines with the same inactive ingredients, the doses can add up.

"I don't want to malign inactive ingredients in any way," study co-author Giovanni Traverso, MD, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told NPR. "I think inactive ingredients are very helpful."

However, because there are many formulations of drugs, physicians don't often know what ingredients are in a specific pill they prescribe.

While allergic reactions to inactive ingredients are rare, the study authors hope their research will underscore "the need to maximize the tolerability and safety of medications and their inactive ingredients."
A proposed bill in New Jersey would ban insurers and pharmacy benefit managers from charging a higher copay than the cash price of a medication, according to New Jersey 101.5, a local radio station.

The bill would also prohibit "gag clauses" in contracts between PBMs or insurers and pharmacies. Gag orders prevent pharmacists from notifying patients they can obtain the drug for cheaper without using insurance.

President Donald Trump signed a bill into law last year that banned gag orders. Implementation of the law is ongoing.

The New Jersey measure was unanimously approved by the Senate in late February. It now awaits Assembly approval.
A New York City-based Hospital for Special Surgery study examined anterior cervical discectomy and fusion outcomes, finding it safe for select patients in the outpatient setting.

Researchers studied 103 patients, 57 outpatient and 46 inpatients, examining outcomes for both groups.

What you should know:

1. HSS surgeons performed the procedure on an outpatient-basis more frequently when removing fewer discs.

2. Of 83 two-level ACDF cases, physicians performed 60.2 percent in outpatient settings. Of 20 three-level cases, physicians performed 35 percent in outpatient settings.

3. Outpatient surgeries were shorter (71 minutes versus 84 minutes) and resulted in a shorter length-of-stay (8.5 hours to 35.8 hours).

4. There was no difference in postoperative pain.

5. At six-months, both groups reported improved pain and function.

HSS' Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery Patty and Jay Baker Chair Sheeraz Qureshi, MD, said, "In our study, the surgical setting did not impact patient-reported outcomes. The results suggest that multilevel ACDF can be performed safely in the outpatient setting without an increased risk of complications in appropriately selected patients."
Saudi Arabias maritime sector is gearing up to make the kingdom a regional logistics hub and drive forward economic diversification and job opportunities, highlighted leading experts and officials at the recently concluded Saudi Maritime Congress, held in Riyadh.



Engineer Saad Bin Abdulaziz Alkhalb, president, Saudi Ports Authority (Mawani), said: This event takes place at a time of significant change within the kingdoms logistic and maritime infrastructure.



The congress highlights major projects and strategic opportunities that will solidify the kingdoms position as a global maritime and logistics hub, and will undoubtedly further our aim of attracting strategic investments and viable ventures into Saudi Arabia by highlighting our objectives over the short, medium and long terms, he added.



Saudi Arabia is the key player in the Red Sea, which has recently seen a scramble to develop maritime assets as the importance of its strategic location on the section of the worlds shipping trunk route between Colombo and Suez increases in significance to global shipping lines.



Princess Sarah Al Saud, director of Maritime Business Development, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, said: Saudi Arabias maritime sector is set to receive a much-needed boost, with the generous allocation of $8.8 billion to the energy, mining and logistics sectors in [the governments] recently announced budget for 2019.



In fact, the country is on an aggressive diversification path, with substantial government spending expected to catalyse Vision 2030 goals and drive sustainable growth and development, she said.



Port development is moving ahead, with projects at Dammam and King Abdullah Economic City launched in the last five years to boost the kingdoms import, export and transhipment potential.



One of the largest projects recently undertaken in the sector is the King Salman International Complex for Maritime Industries and Services, a joint venture of Saudi Aramco, Bahri (National Shipping Company of Saudi Arabia), Hyundai Heavy Industries, and Lamprell.



A report published in 2018 by leading Saudi investment bank, Jadwa Investments, said completion of the complex was expected 2022.



According to Saudi Aramco, the entire project is designed to contribute around SR64 billion ($17 billion) to the kingdoms GDP, boost import substitution for maritime products and services by around SR45 billion ($11.99 billion), and create more than 80,000 direct and indirect jobs by 2030. The integrated maritime yard is expected to be the largest in the region, in terms of both production capacity and scale.



Conference organiser Seatrade has become a key catalyst for maritime development in the GCC region, structuring events of particular significance in the UAE as well as Saudi Arabia, and boosting the viability of the container, tanker, bulk and offshore segments.



At the first Saudi Maritime Congress, which was held in Dammam in 2014, and some of you here I believe attended that event, the message was pretty clear. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was committed to the development of the maritime and logistics sector, and indeed the maritime industry across the board, Chris Hayman, chairman, Seatrade, told the congress opening session.



Four years on, that forecast has been overwhelmingly fulfilled in the Saudi Vision 2030 programme. The world is watching in admiration the unfolding of a strategy that will position the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a global hub, delivering connectivity between Asia, Europe, and Africa, increasingly, he added.



Engineer Abdullah Aldubaikhi, chief executive officer, Bahri, dwelt on recent adverse trade and regulatory developments that have made the life of shipowners more difficult.



The trade war between China and the US has a negative effect on the shipping business, in addition to the different regulations imposed recently by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), regarding sulphur emissions. The call to reduce sulphur content in bunker fuel from 3.5 per cent to 0.5 per cent by 2020 has made shipowners confused. The question now facing the industry is: will sufficient fuel be available to the industry, and how much will it cost?, he said.



Our company has implemented several programmes for aspiring local talents designed to open doors to promising career opportunities within the shipping industry and is playing an active role in the kingdoms Saudization drive, added Aldubaikhi.



According to Rayan Qutub, CEO of King Abdullah Port, the inauguration of the port by Prince Mohammed bin Salman earlier this month, had led to a number of agreements, including the launch of petrochemicals exports from the facility.



Expansion of container capacity at the facility to 7 million TEU is now expected, as is the commencement of drilling of the northern basin, paving the way for a capacity of 10 million TEU.



Dr Nabil Al Amudi, Minister of Transport of Saudi Arabia, said that Saudi Arabia was concentrating on improving efficiencies in the maritime sector and that a priority would be the improvement of landside infrastructure, especially rail, in order to improve the logistics performance.



We have witnessed a major transformation in the effort to develop the maritime sector, as well as exceeding difficulties. And now, for the time being, we are going to reap the fruits of the efforts made by all these entities [to drive the industry forward], he added.



The third Saudi Maritime Congress will be held in Dammam in March 2020.  TradeArabia News Service
Entrepreneur Bill Wolsey has hit out at the inaction of political parties here in an interview with BBC Radio 4.

Mr Wolsey, whose company Beannchor owns a string of hotels, bars and restaurants, told morning news programme Today that the province was facing a "double-whammy" from Brexit and the lack of an Executive.

"The fact that we don't have a government and haven't had for quite some considerable time has led to all sorts of problems," he said.

"We have the longest hospital waiting lists in the whole of the UK and failure to invest in all sorts of areas, it's a sort of double-whammy."

He accused the DUP and Sinn Fein of putting party before people in not going back into government.

"The two parties are always thinking of themselves rather than people," he said.

"You regularly hear people here say of our two parties one couldn't organise a drink in a brewery and the other hopes the brewery will go bust. It's truly depressing."

But he was still investing in Northern Ireland and in the Republic - which he said was emulating Conservative Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Mr Rees-Mogg's firm Somerset Capital Management has opened two funds to invest in the Republic since the vote to leave the EU in 2016.

Beannchor Group owns assets including the five-star Merchant Hotel in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, as well as the Bullitt Hotel, Dirty Onion bar and The National. The group is planning to open a new hotel, The Haslem, and co-working space in Lisburn.

Mr Wolsey said those plans were "really fulfilling obligations that have been longstanding".

He added: "So, like most businesses here are waiting to see what happens (with Brexit), I - in fact, like Jacob Rees Mogg - have decided to invest in Dublin to sort of hedge our bets."

Beannchor Group is planning to open a sister hotel of Belfast's Bullitt in Dublin.

And he said the uncertainty surrounding Brexit was damaging. Developments in the House of Commons this week just added to that, he said. "It's truly frustrating. We haven't a clue what's happening here. In Northern Ireland, this can have very very serious implications."

But he welcomed a proposal from the UK Government that tariffs could be lifted on goods moving from the Republic to Northern Ireland to help ensure an open border. "Anything that helps freer trade between north and south on this island will be welcomed, yes," Mr Wolsey added.
Lidl has been granted planning approval to build a new foodstore in Newcastle. (Isabel Infantes/PA)

Lidl has been granted planning approval to build a new foodstore in Newcastle.

The German supermarket chain will build the branch on the site of the former St Mary's Girls' Primary School.

The site on Shan Slieve Drive, which was once mooted as the potential location for a council leisure centre, will also feature a new base for the Mourne Mountain Rescue Team.

The former school, which will be demolished to make way the supermarket, was sold to Lidl by the local Catholic parish in 2016.

The supermarket chain will relocate from its current store, next to the Slieve Donard Hotel at Newcastle's listed former train station, where it has operated since 2001.

Conor Boyle, Lidl's regional director, said the company had been seeking a new site in Newcastle for a number of years.

"Newcastle is a vibrant town offering significant growth potential," he added.

"We have invested heavily in engaging with local residents and representatives on our ambitions and we are delighted that our plans have been formally approved."

"As an important next step, we will continue to work alongside our specialist teams before lodging the final design plans.

"We would like to wholeheartedly thank members of the local community for their positive and constructive engagement during this process and we would like to reassure them again of our ongoing commitment to delivering an outstanding new shopping experience for the town."

Dave Goddard, of the Mourne Mountain Rescue Team, said: "This new base will give us the chance to lower our running costs and increase our capabilities to train more people from the local area who want to join the team.

"Like Lidl, we are very grateful to the local community for their incredible level of support. We look forward to the benefits our new base will bring to the area."
An organisation set up to help rural areas in Northern Ireland has said political instability is partly to blame for its decision to close down over a shortfall in its pension fund.

The Rural Development Council (RDC), based in Cookstown, was set up in 1991 to support rural areas across the province.

It is led by chairman Tony McCusker and chief executive Teresa Canavan, and has seven members of staff.

It is now preparing to close following a creditors' voluntary liquidation because of a deficiency in its pension fund of more than 3m.

A creditors' meeting is to be held at the offices of insolvency solicitors Napier & Sons in Belfast on March 28.

The RDC was set up as a government body, with staff qualifying for a pension through the local government pension scheme, administered by the Northern Ireland Local Government Officers' Superannuation Committee (NILGOSC).

However, after the Review of Public Administration, it became an independent company, and later a registered charity.

The RDC said: "At the time of change there was no reason to believe that future pension demands would threaten the solvency of the organisation."

The council's board said it was closing due to circumstances beyond its control.

But NILGOSC said it was not able to comment on a specific employer within the scheme and added: "In any circumstances where a scheme employer ceases to function, the pensions of members are secured and suffer no detriment."

The RDC is estimated to have paid in around 420,000 to shore up its pensions since 2014, with the contribution for April 2018/19 put at 187,000.

Nonetheless, the deficiency has escalated to around 3m, with the funding crisis leaving it with no option but to enter a creditors' voluntary liquidation.

Mr McCusker said: "A series of unfortunate circumstances, including a substantial pension deficit, a continued annual hike in pension costs, the inflexibility of the NILGOSC pension scheme regulations and a lack of political stability, have all played a part in the closure.

"We have witnessed a number of charities closing over recent years, with increasing pension costs often being the main contributor.

"For us it is extremely frustrating and disappointing that our local government pension scheme is not doing more to protect Northern Ireland charities in the way that other government schemes are across the UK."

He said the Government needed to find solutions other than insolvency for organisations to leave the scheme.

Mr McCusker added: "RDC has worked with and supported over 7,000 rural projects during its 28 years in operation.

"We hope that those communities empowered by local action continue to champion rural issues and we thank all those who we worked with over the years for their commitment and dedication to advancing rural Northern Ireland."

It had been suggested the council could have benefited from a letter of guarantee from the Government, in which the Government would pledge that it would honour pension contributions in the event of collapse.

But partly because of the lack of an Executive, it has not been possible to obtain such a letter.

The Department for Agriculture said: "The RDC is not a public body and the department has no responsibility for the RDC pension liability.

"There would be no reasonable basis upon which to make a request for permission to guarantee such a liability."
The Northern Ireland technology company behind a headset intended to control the impulse to over-eat has won 4.6m in equity funding. (Gareth Fuller/PA)

The Northern Ireland technology company behind a headset intended to control the impulse to over-eat has won 4.6m in equity funding.

Neurovalens said the funding was one of the largest ever generated by a tech company in the province in one of its first major rounds of financing.

The Belfast firm's products aim to combine neuroscience and technology to tackle health issues such as obesity, with the Modius headset stimulating the area of the brain associated with appetite and cravings.

The equity round was led by London-based Wharton Asset Management and supported by Neurovalens' initial investor, Techstart Ventures, through its Invest NI fund, Techstart.

Other investors include Cambridge-based IQ Capital, Beltrae Partners, Co-Fund NI managed by Clarendon Fund Management, and Angel CoFund.

A spokesman said the investment would fund more trials in obesity and type 2 diabetes and will also support the company's wider research into insomnia, mental health and epilepsy.

Chief executive Dr Jason McKeown added: "This latest wave of funding is vital as it will propel our work to a new level.

"Modius has been an incredible success story since its launch in 2017 and, with medical device approval expected within the next 12 to 18 months, the prospects are extremely exciting.

"With the concept now proven, our immediate focus is on the development of neurological science to tackle the wider health and lifestyle issues affecting today's generation. It's a very exciting time for our business."
Recruitment firm SThrees quarterly profits rose thanks to growth in international markets which offset a weak UK performance.

Gross profit for the first quarter ended in February increased 9% to 78.1 million as the company saw 85% of profits generated from markets outside of the UK and Ireland.

All the groups international units reported higher profits apart from the UK and Ireland, which declined 7% to 11.7 million.

For Continental Europe, profits rose 12% to 45.5 million, the US increased 17% to 16.4 million, and Asia Pacific and the Middle East was up 5% to 4.5 million.

The company, which specialises in staffing for the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) industries, said there was good momentum in contract recruitment, which rose 12% and accounts for 74% of the groups profits. Permanent recruitment rose 1%.

SThree operates from 44 offices in 16 countries, of which 37 are outside the UK, and headcount for sales staff increased 5% year-on-year.

Chief executive Gary Elden said: We have made an encouraging start to the year, with robust Group GP (gross profit) growth in what is our seasonally least significant quarter.

It is pleasing to see growth in both contract and permanent, with a particularly strong performance in contract, driven by continued progress in our key markets, Continental Europe and the USA.

Looking ahead, Mr Elden said: SThree will continue to invest in our teams to drive growth, consistent with our vision to be the number one STEM talent provider in the best STEM markets.

Our focus on contract and the continued strength of our performance across key regions and sectors provides resilience in todays more turbulent market conditions. Set against this context, we remain confident in achieving good growth in the current year.
Jennifer Kane, who died in hospital following a single vehicle accident which happened on the Moycraig Road in Ballymoney yesterday morning

A Co Antrim woman has died in hospital after a one-vehicle road accident yesterday morning.

The victim, who is understood to have been in her 50s, was named locally as Jennifer Kane from Dervock.

The accident happened on the Moycraig Road in Ballymoney, between Mosside and Dervock, just before 8.25am.

Ms Kane, who was the only occupant of a black Vauxhall Corsa, was taken to hospital but later passed away from her injuries.

She is the ninth person to die on Northern Ireland's roads this year.

Her heartbroken son Brent Kiloh Kane broke the news of his loss to friends on his Facebook page.

He also wrote a moving tribute to his beloved mother.

"Sadly this morning I got the worst news imaginable, that my mammy had passed away after an awful car accident," he said.

"Like I've said from a child till (sic) now. I love you to the moon & back. You'll be missed by us all. Rest easy beautiful."

Ballymoney DUP councillor John Finlay said: "I want to offer my sincere condolences to the Kane family as they try to come to terms with their loss at this difficult time.

"I would also call for an investigation into the area of road where the collision occurred, in case there is anything that can be done to prevent something like this happening in future."

The PSNI confirmed that a woman had died "from injuries sustained in a single-vehicle road traffic collision on the Moycraig Road in Ballymoney" yesterday morning.

Inspector O'Brien also issued an appeal for information.

"Anyone who was travelling on the Moycraig Road this morning and who witnessed the collision or saw the black Vauxhall Corsa involved prior to the collision is asked to contact local officers in Coleraine or the collision investigation unit on 101, quoting reference 192 of 14/03/19," the inspector said.
The families of 13 people killed in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday have spoken of their disappointment that the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) is pursuing charges against just one member of the Parachute Regiment.

A PSNI probe into the day investigated 17 soldiers, one of whom has since died, and two suspected members of the Official IRA, but the PPS told the families gathered in Derry yesterday there were no grounds for prosecution in all but one case - that of Soldier F.

He is to be charged with the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell.

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John Kelly, whose brother Michael was also shot by Soldier F, said justice for the Wray and McKinney families would be shared by other families, including his own, who did not hear the news they had hoped for.

He added: "The director of the PPS came to the podium, went through each sector, named each individual soldier and then said 'no prosecution, no prosecution, no prosecution' until he came to the forth sector, when he said Soldier F, who was involved in the (death) of my brother (would be prosecuted).

"He said Soldier F would be prosecuted for the murder of William McKinney and Jim Wray and the injury of four others, but not Michael.

"I looked around my family and all I could see was tears. People were devastated.

"In the room itself people everywhere were crying. It was unbelievable... a shock.

"We had heard rumours and speculation that there would be four and we were disappointed at the thought of that.

"In saying that, he (Soldier F) will be prosecuted for two other murders, and (those families') victory is our victory. I will take solace from that."

Michael McKinney, the brother of William McKinney, said yesterday's announcement brought mixed emotions.

He added: "When the PPS director said about all the soldiers who would not be prosecuted, I had a feeling we were going to get a prosecution, which was the case, but it came with mixed emotions.

"I feel very disappointed. I share in the disappointment of all these families we have been involved in the campaign with. They share in our family's relief.

"I think the soldier will be charged within the next few days and things will be set in place. This has to start happening right away.

"If there had been a fairer decision, this could have been the end of the campaign, but this has been a slap in the face. It's very, very disappointing."

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 Bloody Sunday families carried a banner reading towards justice as they marched to Londonderrys Guildhall on Thursday (Niall Carson/PA) John Kelly comforts Alana Burke PA Wire/PA Images Families embraced after the march (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images A minutes silence at the Guildhall (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Families of those killed in Bloody Sunday speak to the media at the Guild Hall. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Relatives march to the Guildhall (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday after hearing the prosecution decision (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images (PA Graphics) Press Association Images Families march through the Bogside in Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images John Kelly whose brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images James Wray (left) and William McKinney, who died on Bloody Sunday (PA/Bloody Sunday Trust) PA Wire/PA Images The Bloody Sunday Memorial in Derrys Bogside (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Mickey McKinney looks at a photo on the wall of the Museum of Free Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images A mural in Derry depicting Dr Edward Daly during Bloody Sunday in January 1972 (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA John McKinney holds a picture of his brother, William, as the families of those who died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Retransmission, amending byline. Politicians Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill (left), Elisha McCallion, MP for Foyle, (centre) and SDLP's Colum Eastwood (right) join families before a march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those who died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those who died march through Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE Bloody Sunday Trust undated handout photos of (top row, left to right) Patrick Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, John "Jackie" Duddy and Gerald Donaghey, (bottom row, left to right) Gerard McKinney, Jim Wray, William McKinney and John Young who were killed on Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland's Director of Public Prosecutions has announced that a solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Thursday March 14, 2019. Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead on January 30 1972, in Londonderry on one of the most notorious days of the Northern Ireland Troubles. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Bloody Sunday Trust/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those died gather outside the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those died gather outside the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Supporters hold a posters of Edward Heath former British Prime Minister and General Sir Michael David Jackson outside the city hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Linda Nash whose youngest brother William Nash died on Bloody Sunday with Eamonn McCann outside the city hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA L-R Gerry Duddy, Mickey McKinney, John Kelly and the families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA John Kelly comforts Alana Burke who was injured on Bloody Sunday reacts during the press conference at the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA L-R Linda Nash, holds an image of their brother William Nash who was killed on Bloody Sunday, and Kate Nash holds an image of their father Alex Nash who was wounded on the day inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA A woman listens on during a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Relatives of those who died march to the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Two woman watch on as families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972.PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday leaving a briefing with DPP Stephen Herron at the City Hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA SDLP leader Colum Eastwood (left) and new Fine Gael MEP candidate Mark Durkan attending a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA John Teggart from the Ballymurphy Families speaks with Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill and SDLP's Colum Eastwood at the City Hotel in Derry. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker L-R Jean Hegarty, sister of Kevin McElhinney, John Wray, brother of James Wray, and Paddy Nash, brother of William Nash, stand for a minute's silence with the families of those who were killed, ahead of a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry. Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Bloody Sunday families carried a banner reading towards justice as they marched to Londonderrys Guildhall on Thursday (Niall Carson/PA)

John Wray, aged nine when his brother James (22) was killed - also allegedly by soldier F - said: "I'm relieved that somebody is being held to account for his death, but I'm highly disappointed that the rest of the families haven't seen justice here today."

Alana Burke, who was badly injured when she was run over by an Army vehicle on Bloody Sunday, said: "This announcement is vindication of our decades-long campaign to clear the names of our loved ones and to bring those responsible for their deaths and injuries to justice."
Families of those killed on Bloody Sunday learn one soldier will be prosecuted for murder and attempted murder of six people. Credit: Jonathan Collins, Ulster Image

Families of those killed on Bloody Sunday learn one soldier will be prosecuted for murder and attempted murder of six people. Credit: Jonathan Collins, Ulster Image

Families of those killed on Bloody Sunday learn one soldier will be prosecuted for murder and attempted murder of six people. Credit: Jonathan Collins, Ulster Image

Yesterday's decision by the PPS in the Bloody Sunday case sharply divided opinion. Here, two people from different sides of the debate have their say.

John Kelly: We are not going to lie down under this, were going to take them on

Yesterday was a very disappointing and distressing day. We were so shocked by the outcome but we can take solace in the fact that at least one soldier, Soldier F, will be prosecuted for two of the killings, of Willie McKinney and Jim Wray. A victory for them is a victory for everyone.

When I heard that no one was to be charged with my brother's murder I was totally devastated. I couldn't take it in. It was as if I wasn't there and it was a dream.

I looked around at my family - my eight sisters and my brother - all sitting around the table listening to this and they were all devastated. People were crying and leaving, not able to believe what they were hearing or seeing.

Michael was very much in my thoughts yesterday. My brother was a 17-year-old boy. He loved to laugh, he kept pigeons, had a girlfriend and worked hard. He was non-political. On the day of Bloody Sunday he went simply because his friends were going and it cost him his life.

His death had a massive impact on our family. My mother Kathleen never got over it. When Michael's body was brought home to our house for the wake he was laid out in the coffin in the back room. We were sitting that night in the wake house and all of a sudden my mother came running into the room.

She had been heavily sedated and she ran to the coffin and bodily lifted my young brother out, holding him and crying out 'Michael son, Michael son'.

My mother kept everything belonging to Michael. She kept the clothes that he died in and his school textbooks. She even kept a Mars Bar that she bought him that Sunday morning and he didn't get to eat. I still have it at home, a 47-year-old Mars Bar.

My mother went to Michael's grave every day in life. One snowy day she walked to the cemetery with a blanket. A woman stopped her and asked her where she was going with it. She told her she was taking it to Michael's grave to keep him warm, because he's going to be cold. My mother saw the start of the Saville Inquiry but she died before the end. Every day after I came from the inquiry I would go and see her in her sick bed and tell her about how the inquiry was going.

When I knew she was coming to the end of her journey I told her a lie that they were all declared innocent. And she said Thank God, son and she went to her grave happy.

We are planning an appeal about yesterday's decisions and will look at a judicial review. We are not going to lay down under this. We are still going to take them on. I would say my brother Michael is looking over my shoulder and saying 'keep at it John' and that is what I intend to do. I'm going to keep at it as far as I can go. The last thing we want to do is to pass this on to the next generation, we want to finish the job.

John Kelly's brother, Michael, was shot dead by soldiers of the 1st Battalion the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday

Alan Simpson: Why its important that we beware vengeance dressed up as justice

Yesterday, the Public Prosecution Service delivered its decision on the evidence available to it about the horrific events of Bloody Sunday - that there is only the prospect of obtaining a conviction against Soldier "F" for two murders and several attempted murders.

This followed a 12-year enquiry by Lord Saville and a two-year criminal investigation by detectives from the PSNI.

There is bound to be disappointment among many of the relatives of those killed or wounded on that fateful day that not all seventeen soldiers involved are to face trial.

I served as a police officer during most of the Troubles and finished my career as a CID Detective Superintendent. I reached that rank by investigating scores of crimes and presenting my evidence to the equivalent of the Public Prosecution Service

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 Bloody Sunday families carried a banner reading towards justice as they marched to Londonderrys Guildhall on Thursday (Niall Carson/PA) John Kelly comforts Alana Burke PA Wire/PA Images Families embraced after the march (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images A minutes silence at the Guildhall (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Families of those killed in Bloody Sunday speak to the media at the Guild Hall. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Relatives march to the Guildhall (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday after hearing the prosecution decision (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images (PA Graphics) Press Association Images Families march through the Bogside in Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images John Kelly whose brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images James Wray (left) and William McKinney, who died on Bloody Sunday (PA/Bloody Sunday Trust) PA Wire/PA Images The Bloody Sunday Memorial in Derrys Bogside (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Mickey McKinney looks at a photo on the wall of the Museum of Free Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images A mural in Derry depicting Dr Edward Daly during Bloody Sunday in January 1972 (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA John McKinney holds a picture of his brother, William, as the families of those who died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Retransmission, amending byline. Politicians Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill (left), Elisha McCallion, MP for Foyle, (centre) and SDLP's Colum Eastwood (right) join families before a march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those who died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those who died march through Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE Bloody Sunday Trust undated handout photos of (top row, left to right) Patrick Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, John "Jackie" Duddy and Gerald Donaghey, (bottom row, left to right) Gerard McKinney, Jim Wray, William McKinney and John Young who were killed on Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland's Director of Public Prosecutions has announced that a solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Thursday March 14, 2019. Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead on January 30 1972, in Londonderry on one of the most notorious days of the Northern Ireland Troubles. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Bloody Sunday Trust/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those died gather outside the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those died gather outside the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Supporters hold a posters of Edward Heath former British Prime Minister and General Sir Michael David Jackson outside the city hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Linda Nash whose youngest brother William Nash died on Bloody Sunday with Eamonn McCann outside the city hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA L-R Gerry Duddy, Mickey McKinney, John Kelly and the families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA John Kelly comforts Alana Burke who was injured on Bloody Sunday reacts during the press conference at the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA L-R Linda Nash, holds an image of their brother William Nash who was killed on Bloody Sunday, and Kate Nash holds an image of their father Alex Nash who was wounded on the day inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA A woman listens on during a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Relatives of those who died march to the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Two woman watch on as families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972.PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday leaving a briefing with DPP Stephen Herron at the City Hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA SDLP leader Colum Eastwood (left) and new Fine Gael MEP candidate Mark Durkan attending a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA John Teggart from the Ballymurphy Families speaks with Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill and SDLP's Colum Eastwood at the City Hotel in Derry. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker L-R Jean Hegarty, sister of Kevin McElhinney, John Wray, brother of James Wray, and Paddy Nash, brother of William Nash, stand for a minute's silence with the families of those who were killed, ahead of a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry. Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Bloody Sunday families carried a banner reading towards justice as they marched to Londonderrys Guildhall on Thursday (Niall Carson/PA)

I soon found that they were scrupulously fair in only proceeding with a prosecution if there was a reasonable prospect of a conviction.

In my early days, I often felt frustrated at their findings, but as I gained more experience, I realised that there was much wisdom in their decision-making.

There can be few things worse than charging someone with a serious crime on flimsy evidence, as it can be life-changing for those in the dock and their families.

We should realise that we all benefit greatly from having such a fair and strictly objective Prosecution Service that is completely insulated from political interference.

Their decision-making is reflected in the high number of convictions in our courts for serious crimes, and much of this is due to presenting only cases where there is strong evidence.

Several other cases arising from the Troubles are active in the form of inquests, and here I think mainly about the Ballymurphy and Kingsmill massacres.

No doubt many of the relatives of the victims of these tragic events are anticipating satisfaction in the possibility of prosecutions of those involved.

I completely understand that for many it is difficult so many years later to contextualise the situations that existed at the relevant time and it's impossible to replicate them in the quiet, controlled atmosphere of a courtroom.

Looking back almost half a century, I can hardly believe the events that my colleagues and I experienced during those horrible, turbulent years.

In those circumstances of so long ago, it's impossible to imagine that true justice can now be delivered and I, therefore, think it only fair to advise those relatives to lower their expectations in that respect.

Much better that, than vengeance disguised as justice should occur.

Retired RUC Detective Superintendent Alan Simpson was a probationer constable in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday
Derry Girls star Siobhan McSweeney will join a pro-abortion campaign for this year's St Patrick's Day parade in London.

The actress, who plays the no-nonsense principal Sister Michael, said she was inspired to take part by the campaign to relax abortion laws in Northern Ireland.

At present a termination is only permitted here if a woman's life is at risk or if there is a risk of permanent and serious damage to her mental or physical health.

The 1967 Abortion Act has not been extended across the Irish Sea, and a series of groups are calling on the Government to legislate at Westminster to bring Northern Ireland into line with Britain.

Currently starring in season two of the Channel 4 comedy, Ms McSweeney said: "I'm proud to stand beside London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign and lend my voice in the hope that in the near future there will be no need to fight for basic and humane healthcare.

"I've always thought the spirit of Ireland has been female and on this St Patrick's Day, seeing Irish women support all mna (women), is truly a day to celebrate being Irish."

Also joining the march will be The Fall and Hollyoaks actress Bronagh Waugh, Labour peer Lord Dubs and Labour MPs Stella Creasy and Diana Johnson.

This year will mark the third time the London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign has joined the capital's St Patrick's Day parade, which attracts around 100,000 spectators.

The group's float has been designed by campaigner Anna Kealy and will celebrate the Giant's Causeway.

Cara Sanquest from the group explained: "In the past we've celebrated important women from across the island of Ireland. This year we've chosen to honour one of our most well-known landmarks.

"For us the Giant's Causeway's interlocking columns represent the inter-sectional supporters of the pro-choice community - people from all walks of life in Northern Ireland who come together to recognise the right to abortion care. It also represents a tangible connection between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK."

She added: "Our members will be carrying signs of interlocking hexagons in a variety of colours to show the diversity of our community."

The procession will start tomorrow at noon from Piccadilly and will pass some of London's most famous landmarks.

Ms Sanquest added: "This is a family-friendly event and we encourage as many people as possible to come along.

"It's a chance for us to show our solidarity with the 28 women forced to leave Northern Ireland every week for abortion care. But above all it gives us a chance to celebrate our culture and heritage and drum up support to make Northern Ireland a fairer and more equal place for all."

In a landmark referendum last May the Republic voted overwhelmingly to overturn the country's abortion ban by 66.4% to 33.6%.

The eighth amendment, which grants an equal right to life to the mother and unborn, was removed.
At least 40 people were killed and more than 20 seriously wounded in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Attackers used semi-automatic weapons on worshippers gathering for Friday prayers in two locations: a mosque at Deans Avenue in central Christchurch and another mosque in the nearby suburb of Linwood.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the incidents as a terrorist attack, and one of the country's "darkest days".

Three men and one woman are in custody, police commissioner Mike Bush said, but warned more suspects may be at large.

Reports also claimed one of the shooters had an IED strapped to his person, but NZ police confirmed he has also been made safe.

"There have been huge acts of bravery to apprehend these people, but let's not assume that the threat is over. We are as visually equipped as we can be," NZ Police Commissioner Mike Bush said.

"As you can imagine this is requiring every police and emergency resource that we have available. We have defence force aircraft in Wellington ready to fly more resources into the area, and we will do that from other locations nearby as well."

The first report of an attack came from the Al Noor mosque, located in central Christchurch along Deans Avenue, facing Hagley Park. Witnesses there reported seeing people bleeding on the ground outside the building.

One unnamed survivor told TV New Zealand he saw a gunman shoot a man directly in the chest.

The attacker reportedly targeted the men's prayer room in the mosque, then moved to the women's room.

"He came to this side, he shot this side, he went to another room and went to the ladies' section and shot them. I just heard one of the ladies has died," he said.

Witnesses told local media they ran for their lives and saw people bleeding on the ground outside the Al Noor mosque.

The Linwood mosque has been evacuated, and Police Commissioner Mike Bush said "multiple fatalities" were recorded at two locations. As yet, far fewer details have emerged from the second site.

They said they had responded to "a number of IEDs (explosive devices) attached to vehicles, that we also stopped".

Authorities have advised all mosques in the city to shut down until further notice, saying this was an unprecedented act of violence.

Armed police have also been seen at Papanui High School in Christchurch, which has been cordoned off.

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It is not yet known how many shooters there were, but one gunman is an Australian who is believed to have written a manifesto outlining his intentions. In it, he espouses far right and anti-immigrant ideology.

Footage taken by one shooter has emerged, which he appears to have live-streamed as he shot victims in a mosque. Police called on the public not to share the "extremely distressing" material online.

Facebook said it had removed the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts as well as any support voiced for that crime.

Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison said one of those arrested was an Australian citizen. He described the suspected attacker as an "extremist right-wing violent terrorist".
An inquest is being held into the deaths of 10 men in Ballymurphy in August 1971 (Niall Carson/PA)

A mother-of-eight left lying in a field for up to five hours after being shot in the face in Ballymurphy in 1971 was not being punished by paratroopers, their former commander has claimed.

The ex-Army Major, known only as Witness M45, made the claim yesterday as he continued giving evidence at the inquest into the fatal shootings of 10 people almost 48 years ago.

The 86-year-old said Joan Connolly was wearing a distinctive yellow and brown checked coat and that, as the main "protagonist", she incited a crowd to attack Henry Taggart barracks on August 9, 1971.

He was asked by a barrister representing Mrs Connolly's relatives if he felt "uncomfortable" that she had been left "dead or alive" in an adjacent field known as the Manse until 1.47am the following day.

"Yes, in retrospect," the former Major replied.

When pressed as to why he felt that way, he said: "Humanity, I suppose."

However, he rejected the barrister's suggestion that soldiers left her body outside without knowing if she was alive or dead as a "punishment". "You can't punish a dead body," he said.

When told Mrs Connolly was in fact wearing a black and white coat on the day in question, Witness M45 said it was "half-light" when she was shot. "The first thing to go missing in those conditions is colour," he added.

He also rejected claims the base was being overrun by rioters as "completely untrue".

One of the barristers representing victims' families dismissed allegations from a number of military witnesses saying people had been "shooting from the hip" as being "like something out of a spaghetti western".

The witness agreed and accused a soldier called Mr Mumford of "trying to make a name for himself" by penning westerns. However, he did recall a crowd of people being "warned off in a big way" after they attempted to pull a fence down.

The retired soldier apologised for laughing at questions relating to events from decades ago and told the coroner he was struggling to understand the inquest.

"It's inquisitorial, yet I appear to be being attacked all the time," he said.

The ex-Major, who commanded B Company 2 Para, said he presumed his men were not already firing at a flat on Moyard Park when he ordered them to shoot at two gunmen on the balcony, killing at least one. However, a barrister for the next-of-kin suggested he was actually watching his men shoot into the Manse field, which they had "no justification" for doing.

Yesterday, barristers claimed there was no evidence that anyone was killed or injured in or outside the Moyard Park flat.

A representative for the family of another victim, Joseph Murphy, claimed Witness M45's men acted in an "ill-disciplined" and "unlawful" way when they fatally shot four people.

While the former commander accepted his soldiers may have made a mistake in shooting Mr Murphy, he denied allegations of abuse or misconduct.
A DUP councillor has said the level of violence in Belfast this year has been "unbelievable" after a man was killed on Friday morning.

Two men have been arrested after the murder in Kyle Street in the east of the city.

DUP councillor George Dorrian said there was speculation the man had been stabbed after an "altercation" in the area.

He said the latest violence was concerning after three murders in the greater east Belfast area this year and a stabbing last weekend.

"It's worrying, you're seeing a level of violence that's just unbelievable. It's just shocking," Councillor Dorrian said.

"It's not clear what the background to the incident was, the police were quick to arrest two people which is welcome.

Councillor Dorrian said that the DUP would be liaising with police on domestic violence and knife crime following recent incidents.

"One of things we'd be looking to do is to meet with the police to find out what practical steps can be taken to challenge this type of activity," he said.

"You've seen three murder potentially using knives and one attempted within the last five weeks or so, this is a growing concern.

"It looks like it is a growing problem here, certainly among young people knives are almost becoming acceptable."

Expand Expand Previous Next Close Police and forensics at the scene in Kyle Street, east Belfast, after a man died in a house in the street early on Friday morning. Two men have been arrested in connection with the incident and police have launched a murder investigation. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 15, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Murder. Photo credit should read: David Young/PA Wire PA Police and forensics at the scene in Kyle Street, east Belfast, after a man died in a house in the street early on Friday morning. Two men have been arrested in connection with the incident and police have launched a murder investigation. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 15, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Murder. Photo credit should read: David Young/PA Wire PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Police and forensics at the scene in Kyle Street, east Belfast, after a man died in a house in the street early on Friday morning. Two men have been arrested in connection with the incident and police have launched a murder investigation. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Friday March 15, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Murder. Photo credit should read: David Young/PA Wire

PUP Councillor Dr John Kyle said that a young man had been killed in "yet another tragedy".

The levels of violence and loss of life in East Belfast are deeply concerning. The increasing use of knives is alarming," Dr Kyle said.

"Police, politicians, community leaders and statutory agencies need to recognise their responsibilities and work together to urgently address these issues.
A former soldier facing prosecution over a shooting during Northern Ireland's Troubles has gone to the UK's highest court in a bid to have his trial heard by a jury.

Dennis Hutchings (77), a former member of the Life Guards regiment, is charged in relation to the fatal shooting of a man with learning difficulties.

John Pat Cunningham was killed in disputed circumstances in Co Armagh in June 1974.

The 27-year-old was shot in the back as he ran away from an Army patrol.

His family contend that he ran across a field because he feared men in uniform.

More than 40 years on, a case was brought against Hutchings after Northern Ireland's attorney general asked prosecutors to review the case.

Hutchings, from Cawsand in Cornwall, is due to stand trial in Belfast charged with attempted murder and attempted grievous bodily harm with intent. He denies the charges.

He has now gone to the Supreme Court in London to challenge a decision by prosecutors that his trial will be heard by a judge alone, rather than by a jury.

Supporters from campaign group Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans clapped and cheered as Hutchings arrived at the court yesterday morning.

Hutchings thanked his supporters and said: "Victory for veterans, that's what we want."

Speaking outside court, Hutchings said he was "a bit nervous, obviously, although I don't think we will get a decision today".

The Supreme Court reserved its decision until a date to be fixed.
A retired Army colonel who served in Londonderry two years before Bloody Sunday has described the prosecution of Soldier F as "wrong".

Bob Stewart, now a Conservative MP, was speaking out in defence of the veteran, who is facing murder charges over the deaths of James Wray and William McKinney in Londonderry on January 30, 1972. He is also facing prosecution for the attempted murders of four others.

Mr Stewart, who completed seven operational tours of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, said that while he was pleased 16 other former soldiers facing prosecution were not being charged, he was sorry that one is.

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 Bloody Sunday families carried a banner reading towards justice as they marched to Londonderrys Guildhall on Thursday (Niall Carson/PA) John Kelly comforts Alana Burke PA Wire/PA Images Families embraced after the march (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images A minutes silence at the Guildhall (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Families of those killed in Bloody Sunday speak to the media at the Guild Hall. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker Relatives march to the Guildhall (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday after hearing the prosecution decision (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images (PA Graphics) Press Association Images Families march through the Bogside in Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images John Kelly whose brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images James Wray (left) and William McKinney, who died on Bloody Sunday (PA/Bloody Sunday Trust) PA Wire/PA Images The Bloody Sunday Memorial in Derrys Bogside (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Mickey McKinney looks at a photo on the wall of the Museum of Free Derry (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images A mural in Derry depicting Dr Edward Daly during Bloody Sunday in January 1972 (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA John McKinney holds a picture of his brother, William, as the families of those who died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Families of those died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, towards the Guildhall ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Retransmission, amending byline. Politicians Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill (left), Elisha McCallion, MP for Foyle, (centre) and SDLP's Colum Eastwood (right) join families before a march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those who died march through the Bogside in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those who died march through Londonderry, in Northern Ireland, ahead of an announcement over the prosecution of 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA BEST QUALITY AVAILABLE Bloody Sunday Trust undated handout photos of (top row, left to right) Patrick Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, John "Jackie" Duddy and Gerald Donaghey, (bottom row, left to right) Gerard McKinney, Jim Wray, William McKinney and John Young who were killed on Bloody Sunday. Northern Ireland's Director of Public Prosecutions has announced that a solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Thursday March 14, 2019. Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead on January 30 1972, in Londonderry on one of the most notorious days of the Northern Ireland Troubles. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Bloody Sunday Trust/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those died gather outside the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Families, relatives and supporters of those died gather outside the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Supporters hold a posters of Edward Heath former British Prime Minister and General Sir Michael David Jackson outside the city hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Linda Nash whose youngest brother William Nash died on Bloody Sunday with Eamonn McCann outside the city hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland ahead of the announcement as to whether 17 former British soldiers and two former members of the Official IRA will be prosecuted in connection with the events of Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA L-R Gerry Duddy, Mickey McKinney, John Kelly and the families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA John Kelly comforts Alana Burke who was injured on Bloody Sunday reacts during the press conference at the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA L-R Linda Nash, holds an image of their brother William Nash who was killed on Bloody Sunday, and Kate Nash holds an image of their father Alex Nash who was wounded on the day inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA A woman listens on during a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Relatives of those who died march to the Guildhall in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA Two woman watch on as families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972.PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Families of those who were killed hold a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday leaving a briefing with DPP Stephen Herron at the City Hotel Londonderry, Northern Ireland, after the announcement from the Public Prosecution Service that one former paratrooper, soldier F is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders during Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Niall Carson/PA Wire PA SDLP leader Colum Eastwood (left) and new Fine Gael MEP candidate Mark Durkan attending a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry after the Public Prosecution Service announced that one solider will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell on Bloody Sunday in the city in January 1972. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Thursday March 14, 2019. See PA story ULSTER Sunday. Photo credit should read: Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA John Teggart from the Ballymurphy Families speaks with Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill and SDLP's Colum Eastwood at the City Hotel in Derry. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker L-R Jean Hegarty, sister of Kevin McElhinney, John Wray, brother of James Wray, and Paddy Nash, brother of William Nash, stand for a minute's silence with the families of those who were killed, ahead of a press conference inside the Guildhall in Londonderry. Liam McBurney/PA Wire PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Bloody Sunday families carried a banner reading towards justice as they marched to Londonderrys Guildhall on Thursday (Niall Carson/PA)

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"I totally accept the families are deeply upset that only one soldier is facing charges, and the actions of the Army were wrong that day, but they didn't do it deliberately, it was in human error," he told the Belfast Telegraph.

Mr Stewart said the difference between a soldier and a terrorist is that the latter sets out to deliberately take human life.

He added: "I am sorry that 14 people lost their lives. Mistakes were made on Bloody Sunday as Saville demonstrated, big mistakes... but they were not acts of deliberation."

Adding that he was "not trying to justify what happened", he pointed out that he had supported the apology made by the then Prime Minister David Cameron, who had described the actions of the Army as "unjustified and unjustifiable".

"He (Soldier F) didn't go out to murder, if you listen to the soldiers they felt they were under fire," he added.

Describing the court prosecution of Soldier F as "wrong", he emphasised that soldiers serving in Londonderry at that time were under immense pressure.

In 1970, Mr Stewart was attached to the 1 Battalion The Cheshire Regiment.

He recalled one incident which took place in the vicinity where Bloody Sunday would unfold two years later.

"I was caught by a crowd of women, who knocked me to the ground and took off my helmet and started hitting my head with a rock," he added. "Their intention was not benign, their intention was to hurt me, and even try to kill me."

The Beckenham MP said that in same year he had witnessed "one third" of the platoon being hospitalised with injuries - including burns - sustained while carrying out their duties.

He continued: "We were deployed there to look after the Catholic population of Londonderry and try to keep the peace. The British Army did not wish to open fire."

Other high-profile Army personnel spoke out in defence of Soldier F yesterday.

Colonel Richard Kemp, who also served here, branded the decision to prosecute Soldier F "wrong".

"I think it is wrong for any soldier to be prosecuted over this," he told the BBC. "Not because there weren't real problems. I think if there is enough evidence to consider a soldier is guilty of a serious offence he should face the law. But we have got a unique situation here.

"Hardened, known terrorist criminals have been released early from jail. Others have been given royal pardons. Others have been given letters of comfort.

"There is no intention of pursuing or prosecuting them and it is wrong for soldiers to be treated even worse than hardened terrorist killers, torturers and killers."

He continued: "Political decisions have been taken not to prosecute and not to imprison IRA terrorists who were setting out to go and kill and bomb innocent civilians.

"Whereas soldiers who were there to protect innocent civilians were - and in this case clearly acted wrongly - these soldiers must be prosecuted."

Conservative Johnny Mercer, a former Army captain, hit out at his party yesterday in a tweet that said the charges brought against Soldier F were the result of "an abject failure to govern and legislate, on our watch as a Conservative administration".

"When I speak of a chasm between those who serve and their political masters in this country, I mean this," he added.
Retired British Army Colonel Tim Collins has said the prosecution of a former paratrooper over his actions on Bloody Sunday has "nothing to do with justice".

Colonel Collins grew up in Belfast and served in the British Army from 1981 to 2004. He did four tours in Northern Ireland and also served in Kosovo and both Gulf Wars.

He came to prominence after an eve-of-battle speech he gave before the Iraq war in 2003.

On Thursday it was announced that one paratrooper, 'soldier F' will face prosecution for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell in Londonderry on January 30 1972.

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Writing in the Daily Mail Col Collins said that the Bloody Sunday prosecutions had "nothing to do with justice".

He wrote that the Republican movement wanted to rewrite its own role in the Troubles.

Collins pointed to the atrocities carried out by the IRA, with 27 murders attributed to the group in the Derry area in 1972.

"While genuine terrorists walk free, those who served their country and sought to defend the public find themselves in court," he wrote.

Col Collins said that he grew up in Belfast "at the peak of the Troubles".

He called on the British Government to "go after the real perpetrators of terrorist incidents, many of whom are known to the authorities".

He wrote that the history of the Troubles had been rewritten to put the blame on the British Government, calling it a "travesty of history".

"Responsibility for the overwhelming majority of violence in the Troubles lies with the Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries," Col Collins wrote.

"According to the most authoritative estimates, less than 0.5 per cent of the questionable killings in Ulster during this period were perpetrated by police officers or soldiers.

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"In contrast, British troops were discharging their duty to uphold order and defend the public, often in the toughest circumstances."

Col Collins said that Secretary of State Karen Bradley had been "in essence, right", when she controversially said that the killings by security forces were "not crimes".

He wrote that he did not believe the Bloody Sunday prosecutions would have any effect on British Army recruitment.

"Our armed forces remain one of the finest fighting units in the world, with a sense of duty and discipline that is far greater than all the shenanigans of the politicians," Col Collins said.

"British and Irish recruits will continue to join up, going on to serve heroically. What will undoubtedly be lost is the soldiers sense of trust in politicians and their bureaucratic leadership.

"They will be infused with the wariness that at any time they could be thrown to the judicial wolves simply for carrying out their orders."
Their soft voices may have whispered a "no comment" but the solemn faces of the Bloody Sunday families spoke volumes about their disappointment as they filed slowly out of their meeting with the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) yesterday morning.

The relatives of the 13 people shot dead by the Parachute Regiment on January 30, 1972, had waited 47 years for justice, but for many of them their hopes were dashed yesterday in an instant in an upstairs conference room of the City Hotel in Londonderry.

For some the revelation that one Para, 'Soldier F', is to be charged with murder was hailed as a vindication of their decades-long campaign for prosecutions.

But even they expressed heartbreak and sadness that they weren't marking a complete victory because the other Bloody Sunday families were not getting their day in court.

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Just an hour earlier a biting wind had whipped in off the Peace Bridge as the relatives of victims of one of the most notorious days in Northern Ireland's grim history finished their walk from the scene of the slayings in the Bogside to the talks which, they hoped, would open the door to closure in the form of ex-Paras being charged with murder.

The thoughts of the families were clearly in flashback mode to their dead loved ones as they retraced some of the steps of the banned civil rights march that was ended by 108 bullets fired by the Paras.

Yesterday the relatives even reprised the old civil rights anthem - We Shall Overcome - as they approached their date with destiny at the City Hotel.

The families had their mobile phones taken from them so they couldn't leak news of the PPS decision to an expectant crowd outside, but their reaction afterwards was all that was needed to communicate what they had been told.

Body language was enough to say it all, and one politician who had been privy to the PPS announcement left the hotel with an anything but cryptic aside: "We're in for a tough day."

Shortly afterwards the downcast families travelled the short distance to the Guildhall in almost stunned silence.

A few dozen people braved the rain and wind to applaud the relatives into their city's civic hub.

It was all so different from 3,194 days earlier in June 2010 when thousands packed a sunny Guildhall Square to roar a welcome for the results of the Saville Inquiry, which exonerated all the Bloody Sunday victims, and to hear former Prime Minister David Cameron apologise for the Army's behaviour.

It was a much more sombre gathering yesterday as dozens of family members listened as John Kelly, whose brother Michael Kelly was shot dead on Bloody Sunday, opened a news conference at which he tried but didn't entirely succeed in sounding positive about the PPS ruling.

"I was going to say good morning. But I don't think it is," he said, before describing the charging of only one soldier with the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and four attempted murders as a "terrible disappointment".

But referring to the McKinney and Wray families, he said: "Their victory is our victory."

Mr McKinney's brother Michael said if Bloody Sunday had been properly investigated 47 years ago the outcome in terms of prosecutions could have been different. After the news conference Jim Wray's brother John was still shaking with emotion. "I can't stop," he said as he clutched a poster of his brother.

"I've been in shock ever since I heard that Soldier F was going to be prosecuted over my brother's murder. I wasn't expecting that.

"It's a relief that after 47 years of struggling on with the campaign someone is going to be held accountable, but at the same time there's a great sadness for the other families who are highly disappointed that they're not receiving justice.

"I'm not a lawyer so I can't comment on all the circumstances of evidence and what not."

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Linda Nash, whose brother William Nash was killed, is comforted by Eamonn McCann Getty Images Kay Duddy, whose brother Jackie Duddy was killed, hugs Andrew McCartney PA Crowds celebrate the findings of the Saville Inquiry outside the Guildhall in 2010 PA Colum Eastwood and Mark Durkan at the Guildhall PA Relatives gather outside the City Hotel after meeting Public Prosecution Service / Facebook

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Mr Wray said Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Herron and three other members of his staff were present as a prepared statement was read to the families in the City Hotel, breaking down all the deaths sector by sector.

He added that there were gasps and sighs in the room when the DPP repeated "no prosecution" in relation to most of the shootings, meaning that 16 of the 17 soldiers under investigation weren't being charged with anything.

He went on: "It hasn't been a glorious day all-round.

"Obviously I was thinking about James today and what he might have achieved if he hadn't been shot dead on Bloody Sunday. I feel for everyone who has lost out because of the conflict, but the state has a responsibility to look after its citizens and when something like this happens to you it's a bit harsher."

Two sisters, Linda and Kate Nash, whose brother William was killed and father Alexander injured on Bloody Sunday, said they were devastated but vowed their fight for justice would go on.

Kate said: "It was shocking but I still thought we would get prosecutions. This is the second worst thing to happen for me after Bloody Sunday."

Linda said what she was dreading was the prospect of telling her children there would be no prosecutions over the killings of their loved ones.

A lawyer for the Bloody Sunday families, Ciaran Shiels of Madden and Finucane solicitors, said he was "disappointed that not all those responsible" for the killings will face trial.

He added: "We will give detailed consideration to the reasons provided for decisions not to prosecute the other soldiers, with a view to making further submissions to the Prosecution Service.

"We shall ultimately challenge in the High Court, by way of judicial review, any prosecutorial decision that does not withstand scrutiny."

Mr Shiels said getting the prosecution was a "remarkable achievement" for the families and added that it was a matter of concern that the PPS and the PSNI didn't start their inquiry into Bloody Sunday of their own volition after Saville, and only did so after submissions from the relatives and their legal advisers.

"And for a period the Bloody Sunday murder investigation was put on ice because of a funding issue. And that was another cause of concern," he added.

John Teggart, whose father Danny was shot dead by the Paras at Ballymurphy in 1971, travelled to Derry from the ongoing inquest into the 10 deaths in Belfast to show solidarity with the Bloody Sunday families.

"I have mixed emotions," he said. Referring to news that Soldier F is to be charged, he added: "It's a victory for the families, and a victory for them is a victory for us also."

But he voiced disappointment that others were not charged.

Among politicians at the Guildhall were SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, former party leader Mark Durkan, who is standing for Fine Gael in the European elections in the Republic, and Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill and Raymond McCartney.

Denis Bradley, a past Policing Board vice-chairman who was a priest in Derry on Bloody Sunday, said the PPS announcement represented a bad day for justice, describing the claim about a lack of evidence as "almost an insult" to the witnesses who testified at the Saville Inquiry.

Rev David Latimer from First Derry Presbyterian Church said he had gone as a Protestant and a unionist to the Guildhall to "identify with my neighbours", as he had done every year at the Bloody Sunday prayer service in the city.

He said members of his own church had lost their lives to the IRA, adding: "We have to try and sort out how we can help each other to recover from what has happened in the past and to move forward in a way that is going to give our children a future that is different to the past that has allowed a cloud to hang over our city."
A vigil took place in west Belfast last night following the news that one soldier is to be charged with the murder of civilians on Bloody Sunday.

Around 100 people gathered at the former site of the Andersonstown police station to stand in solidarity with the families of the victims. Many held black flags and pictures of those who were killed on Bloody Sunday, as well those who died in the 1971 Ballymurphy massacre.

West Belfast MP Paul Maskey, Lord Mayor Deirdre Hargey, former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly were among those in attendance last night.

Mr Maskey said the decision to prosecute only one soldier over Bloody Sunday was "wrong".

He added: "The Bloody Sunday families have shown determination and dignity over the past 47 years that has been remarkable.

"They are continuing on their journey for justice and Belfast will stand with them, the message to the British Government and its forces is very clear, justice will prevail."
Leicester City boss Brendan Rodgers will travel to Thailand next week for the cremation of the club's late owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha.

The billionaire (60) died in a helicopter crash outside the King Power Stadium on October 27 last year.

The tragedy also claimed the lives of two members of his staff, Kaveporn Punpare and Nursara Suknamai, pilot Eric Swaffer and his girlfriend and co-pilot Izabela Lechowicz.

Srivaddhanaprabha bought Leicester for 39m in 2010 and oversaw the club's remarkable rise to become Premier League champions in 2016.

The Leicester squad and staff attended his funeral in November. Foxes' players not on international duty next week, Rodgers and his backroom staff will fly out to Asia to pay their final respects.

Rodgers said yesterday: "I was made aware of that (Khun Vichai's cremation) when I came in.

"Next week the international players will go away with their teams and the remainder of the staff and players will go and show their respects and travel to Thailand for the funeral."

The Carnlough man (46) left his role as Celtic manager last month to take over at Leicester, sparking anger among some fans of the Glasgow giants.

Last week he spoke of his family's "horrendous" ordeal after a break-in at his Scottish home.

His wife and stepdaughter, Charlotte and Lola, were sleeping in the house in Bearsden near Glasgow at the time.

A number of items were stolen but nobody was injured.
MPs are to probe the government's attempts to slash payments to those in the RHI scheme.

The Government is attempting to slash payments for those on the botched green energy scheme. Some on the scheme could see their annual payments reduced from 13,000 to 2,000.

Boiler owners have warned they could face financial ruin over the changes with many having taken large bank loans on the back of government guarantees over the payments. They are also concerned they will be uncompetitive with a similar scheme operating in the rest of the UK and one soon to be introduced in the Republic.

Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley said the bill needed to be fast-tracked in order to allow business continuity.

The government's was accused of trying to "bludgeon legislation through the House" in a bid to fast-track the changes.

On Friday the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee launched a short inquiry into the new payments structure.

The committee said it was concerned that not enough time was given to scrutinise the revised payments before a decision had to be made.

It has written to Sir Patrick Coghlin, chair of the Independent RHI Inquiry, to advise of the scope of this inquiry.

The Committee will be considering the following matters throughout the new inquiry:

The rationale for the new tariff structure

How tariffs affect businesses

What other options could be considered

How tariffs compare with GB scheme

The consequences of not introducing changes on March 31

How far voluntary buy-out scheme could mitigate potential impact of new tariffs.

The committee comprises of Northern Ireland MPs, Gregory Campbell, Ian Paisley and Jim Shannon of the DUP and independent Lady Sylvia Hermon.

Chair of the Committee, Dr Andrew Murrison MP said: "Businesses across Northern Ireland have structured their finances on the very reasonable assumption that RHI payments were copper-bottomed.

"While the Renewable Heat Incentive scheme can hardly be regarded as a wholly successful policy, righting its wrongs requires proper scrutiny. My Committee will be looking at the Governments hurried revision of the tariff rates to make sure they are fit for purpose and good for Northern Irelands businesses.

The RHI scheme led to the collapse of Northern Irelands devolved government in January 2017.

It was the subject of a lengthy public inquiry, which heard detailed evidence about the escalating costs to the taxpayer.

The initiative went massively over budget, running to hundreds of millions of pounds.

Inquiry chairman Sir Patrick Coghlin is expected to deliver his conclusions later this year.
Airbus, a global aerospace, defence and security manufacturer, will be attending the World Border Security Congress being held in Morocco for the third time.



The event will be held at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in Casablanca from March 19 to 21 and will be co-hosted by the Moroccan Ministry of Interior and the General Directorate for Migration and Border Protection.



In the exhibition hall, the Airbus stand (number 9) will show visitors maritime and border security as well as coastal surveillance solutions. The booth will also display a demo of Styris, the Airbuss product family focusing on maritime safety and security, which includes Vessel Traffic Services (VTS), Coastal Surveillance Systems (CSS) and Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP).



In addition, March 21, Olivier Yvon, maritime program manager of Airbus Defence and Space, will give a lecture entitled Integrated Coastal Surveillance System.



The World Border Security Congress is the premier multi-jurisdictional global platform where border protection policy-makers, managers and practitioners meet annually with security industry professionals to discuss evolving international border security challenges.  TradeArabia News Service
Theresa Mays DUP allies are holding talks with the Government over Brexit, as the Prime Minister desperately seeks to build support for her deal after it suffered a fresh setback.

A source said the Unionist party was engaging in ongoing and significant discussions with Government on Friday.

Support from the DUP could lead to Mrs Mays deal being approved by the Commons next week, after it was defeated for the second time on Tuesday.

It comes as European leaders consider whether to agree to UK calls for Britains departure to be delayed.

MPs backed a bid to push-back Brexit beyond the scheduled date of March 29 in dramatic parliamentary scenes which saw a majority of the Conservative party in the opposite lobby from the Prime Minister.

Among those who voted against the motion seeking an extension was Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay.

He defended his stance, telling the BBC: There were two parts of the motion, so, a short technical extension which we need with the deal, and we are pushing that.

Thats separate from whether you just have a long extension, rather than no deal.

Mr Barclay added: We need a deal. We need to get that over the line.

But, if we dont have a deal then we should leave with no deal.

Thats always been my position and I voted as the constituency would expect me to do last night.

If we get the deal through as I hope we still will, we will now need a short, technical extension.

But, if not, we shouldnt be afraid to leave with no deal.

But any delay will require the agreement of the other 27 European Union members, with talks about any conditions for an extension set to begin before leaders gather at a summit next week.

European Council president Donald Tusk met Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in The Hague on Friday before talks with the blocs key power brokers Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on Monday.

Following the talks, Mr Rutte said the current Withdrawal Agreement is the only deal on the table.

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On Tuesday, Mr Tusk will travel to Dublin to meet Taoiseach Leo Varadkar before the summit in Brussels on Thursday.

Mr Tusk said: I will appeal to the EU27 to be open to a long extension if the UK finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy and build consensus around it.

But European Parliament Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt questioned why the leaders of the 27 should grant an extension if Mrs May was not ready for a cross-party approach to break the current deadlock in the Commons.

The Prime Minister is set to bring her Brexit deal back to the Commons for a third meaningful vote next week, and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has sought to provide further legal assurances about the Irish backstop.

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But Mrs Mays hopes of persuading Eurosceptics and the DUP to back the deal were dealt a blow after the Star Chamber of Brexiteer lawyers rejected Mr Coxs latest assessment.

The group of lawyers, led by veteran Tory Sir Bill Cash, said a suggestion that the UK could use the Vienna Convention  the international agreement that lays down the rules about treaties  to unilaterally pull out of the backstop was badly misconceived.

The panel of lawyers, which significantly also includes DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds, rejected the supplementary legal advice from Mr Cox.

The Attorney Generals advice hinges on Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, which says that if there has been a fundamental change of circumstances following the conclusion of a treaty which was not foreseen by the parties, then the countries involved would be allowed to withdraw from it.

Mr Cox said: It is in my view clear and undoubted in those exceptional circumstances that international law provides the (UK) with the right to terminate the Withdrawal Agreement.

But the Brexit-backing lawyers said given the high burden that a state must meet to use it, and given the extreme reluctance of international courts and tribunals to accept it, the Vienna Convention route supplies no assurance whatsoever that the UK could terminate the Withdrawal Agreement in a lawful manner.
DUP councillor Ian Stevenson has been suspended from his role after being convicted of sexually assaulting a female work colleague.

Causeway Coast and Glens councillor Stevenson had already been suspended by the DUP after his conviction in November 2018. He maintains he is innocent and is appealing his sentence. He says he expects the conviction to be overturned.

On Thursday, the Acting Local Government Commissioner for Standards ruled that he should be suspended until May 6, the remainder of his term in office.

It is understood the 48-year-old former Mayor plans to run for re-election as an independent candidate.

Stevenson was judged to have breached the Local Government Code of Conduct as a result of his conviction.

The Chief Executive of Causeway Coast and Glens Council David Jackson provided a statement saying that he believed Stevenson's conduct had brought "both his position as a councillor and the council into disrepute".

Ms Michaela McAleer, representing the Deputy Commissioner, stated that "the matter was about public confidence and that such confidence is inextricably linked with disrepute".

She believed "that there would be a further loss of confidence if the councillor remained in office".

Stevenson submitted no evidence to the investigation and expressed a belief that "the proceedings should not continue as he expected his conviction to be overturned an appeal".

The Acting Commissioner stated that "the potential outcome of any appeal is not material to a decision on interim measures, which must be taken in accordance with the law".

After considering the submissions, the Investigation Report, and the Commissioners Guidance to the Code, he was satisfied that "there was prima facie evidence of a breach of the Code".

He also found that Stevenson's actions were "likely to have caused reputational damage to the council".

In considering a sanction, the Acting Commissioner accepted the Deputy Commissioners belief that a conviction for sexual assault "is likely to lead to loss of confidence if the councillor were to continue in public" office.

It was deemed an interim suspension was therefore "necessary to preserve public confidence".

The sanction is to have effect from Tuesday 19 March 2019 and a full Adjudication Hearing is to take place before the Commissioner at a future date.

Stevenson may appeal to the High Court against the decision. He maintains his innocence and is set to appeal his sexual assault conviction.
A man murdered in Derry had been stabbed more than 40 times, the High Court heard.

Prosecutors also said a trail of blood suggested Eddie Meenan was dragged to a Creggan Street alleyway where his partially clothed body was discovered in the early hours of November 25 last year.

Details emerged as one of the men charged with murdering the 52-year-old was refused bail.

Ryan Walters, 19, of Crawford Square in the city, is allegedly linked by blood found on a shoe. He denies the charge.

Police were informed Mr Meenan was attacked after a number of men emerged from a house in the area.

When the victim's body was found he was wearing boxer shorts, with multiple injuries and slice marks detected.

A Crown lawyer said post mortem examinations confirmed at least 42 stab wounds, including some to his neck, chest, arm and leg.

Signs of blunt-force trauma to the face and a fractured nose pointed to heavy punches and possibly kicks having been inflicted as well, the court heard.

According to the lawyer one witness claimed Walters later told her over the phone: "I killed the fella, I stabbed him."

But it was stressed in court that any such comments made had been untrue.

Opposing bail, the prosecution argued that Walters is forensically linked by the blood on a trainer seized from his address.

It was also contended that he was involved in an attempt to destroy evidence by burning clothing at a fire in the area that night.

A defence barrister rejected assertions that the accused may flee if released.

"That is cloud cuckoo land; he has nowhere to go and no resources," counsel insisted.

He further argued that it could be a year before any trial gets underway.

But denying bail, Judge Brian Sherrard cited the potential risks of flight and further offences.
Bob Farmbrough and Bryan Greenwood were killed in the crash.

A plane that crashed in Co Antrim killing two people suffered a critical reduction in airspeed and a loss of control, a report has concluded.

Bob Farmbrough was at the controls of the two-seat light aircraft that came down and caught fire in a wooded area near Ballyhill Lane outside Crumlin last April.

The father-of-four (77) from Carrickfergus was a retired commercial pilot with more than 40 years' experience.

His passenger Bryan Greenwood from Larne, a father-of-two and grandfather, who ran his own aerial photography business, also died.

The Cessna 152, rented from the Ulster Flying Club in Newtownards, came down between Nutts Corner and Loanends on April 19.

A report by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) found that during a manoeuvre at low level the aircraft stalled and descended rapidly, passing through some trees, before it struck the ground.

The purpose of the flight was to allow Mr Greenwood to carry out aerial photography. The arrangement was that the passenger would provide a route plan around various properties and the pilot would then fly the route. The pair had flown regularly together for 14 years.

The aircraft took off from Newtownards at 10.47am and flew in a north-westerly direction. The last radio communication between the pilot and air traffic control was at 11.17am, with the final radar point recorded two minutes later.

Witnesses on the ground saw the aircraft circling. Several reported seeing it flying apparently normally before suddenly "nosediving" to the ground.

Two witnesses also reported hearing the engine "spluttering" as the aircraft passed overhead at a low height.

After the aircraft struck the ground witnesses also heard a "popping" noise and then a larger explosion.

There was an intense fire in the cockpit area and inboard section of the right wing, which contained one of the fuel tanks.

Bystanders who arrived on the scene were unable to assist the two occupants.

The AAIB report concluded that the aircraft was flying at low level and low airspeed when, for an undetermined reason, there was a critical reduction in airspeed and a loss of control.

"There is an increased level of risk associated with flying close to the stalling speed without sufficient height to recover from a stall, particularly when focused on a task such as taking aerial photographs," the report added.
A police officer was left traumatised by a dissident republican gun attack on a three-vehicle PSNI convoy in north Belfast more than five years ago, a judge was told yesterday.

The officer's statement about the events of the evening of December 6, 2013, was read at the trial of three men at Belfast Crown Court.

Colin Duffy (51), Henry Fitzsimons (50) and 57-year-old Alex McCrory, whose addresses cannot be given, deny preparing and directing terrorism and membership of, or professing to be members of, the IRA.

Fitzsimons and McCrory deny attempting to murder police officers in the convoy and possessing two AK47 assault rifles and ammunition used in the attack.

Mr Justice O'Hara, sitting without a jury in the Diplock-style trial, was told that on the night in question an armoured police Land Rover with three officers on board was leading two unmarked vehicles to a loyalist protest at Twaddell Avenue.

The unmarked vehicles were a blue Volkswagen Transporter and a silver Mitsubishi Shogun.

One of the vehicles had a sign instructing loyalist protesters to refrain from playing music. The other was carrying a loudspeaker.

The officer driving the VW Transporter explained that as the convoy approached Holy Cross Church on Crumlin Road he heard the sound of gunfire on his right-hand side.

The constable said he heard "two bursts" of shooting and believed a total of 15 rounds had been fired.

His statement said that he "swerved his vehicle to the left-hand side" of the Crumlin Road as a result of the attack.

While he wanted to get out of the area quickly, his way was blocked by the police vehicles in front of him, which were slowing down.

He told the court the events of that night had a "traumatic effect" on him, impacting his concentration to the extent that "any thoughts I have are only half-thoughts".

The police officer said that as a result of the gun attack, he was off work and had sought assistance from the PSNI's occupational health unit.

The officer driving the armoured Land Rover also gave evidence about the gun attack.

"We were approaching Holy Cross Church, which was on my left-hand side, just after 7pm when I heard five or six loud cracks," he said.

"It was very quick and at first I thought it was fireworks.

"There was a pause and then there was another series of loud cracks, maybe 10 to 12. My initial reaction was that they were coming from my right-hand side."

The officer said he noticed three male civilians on the footpath beside the chapel and saw them "hunker down" after the shots were fired.

The men then moved in the direction of the roundabout at Twaddell Avenue.

The police officer said he did not believe they were involved in the incident.

The constable explained that after the second burst he no longer thought it was fireworks and believed "it was something more serious and more sinister than that".

Mr Justice O'Hara heard that there was a number of radio transmissions between the three police vehicles about the incident and that the officers decided to rendezvous on Woodvale Road.

When they arrived at the location, they inspected the vehicles and discovered that the Land Rover had been struck a number of times.

One round had hit the steel latch on the vehicle's fuel cap.

There was also a bullet hole in the sign being carried by one of the unmarked vehicles, as well as two burst tyres and bullet rounds to the vehicle along its bulkhead, the passenger side and rear doors.

After confirming the bullet marks, the officers contacted senior colleagues to let them know their vehicles had been hit by gunfire.

A female constable who was in the Land Rover said that on approaching the vicinity of Holy Cross Church she heard a "number of bangs".

"(It was) a small burst and then it stopped," she said. "I believed them to be fireworks."

She said she heard a short burst lasting a few seconds and then a long one.

"The first burst lasted four of five seconds and the second burst was in double figures," she told the court.

Asked by a prosecution barrister what type of weapon she believed had been used to open fire on the vehicles, the officer replied: "It was a longarm (gun), not a handgun."

On the opening day of the trial this week, the senior judge was told that police recovered two AK47 assault rifles in the aftermath of the attack.

One was found in a burnt-out silver VW Passat car used by the gunmen, who had fired on the convoy from behind a wall while standing on scaffolding.

The judge was also told that the three defendants were covertly recorded during an operation codenamed 'Operation Idealistic', which was carried out by MI5 the day following the gun attack.

The prosecution claims that Duffy, Fitzsimons and McCrory can be identified from the covert video footage and from an hour-long audio recording made of them as they talked in Demesne Park in Lurgan.

It is the prosecution's case that an analysis of the audio recordings made by two voice recognition experts provides strong to moderately strong evidence that the defendants had talked about how to move forward "in light of Ardoyne and how the leadership were regrouping".

A prosecution lawyer alleged that this was supported by the video recordings, with the clothing worn by the three suspects in Demesne Park similar to clothing seized from the defendants following their arrests.

Counsel claimed that a transcript of the covert recording also showed the trio had "an intimate knowledge" of the attack on the police convoy, the number of gunmen involved and the weapons used - weapons that were subsequently recovered by police officers.

The trial continues.
Irish political and religious leaders have condemned the attacks on two mosques in New Zealand.

Forty-nine people have been killed and four people are in custody after shootings took place during Friday prayers at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

The Irish President said the attacks were an attack on democratic values.

Our thoughts, prayers, friendship and solidarity this Saint Patricks weekend are with #NewZealand and all of the diverse people that make that country so wonderful. Irelands heart is broken for what has happened in Christchurch, you are not alone!    Simon Coveney (@simoncoveney) March 15, 2019

Michael D Higgins said: The attacks on mosques in New Zealand will have appalled people all over the world.

As President of Ireland may I offer the sympathy of the people of Ireland to the families of the victims, and express the solidarity of the people of Ireland with the people of New Zealand at this time.

This attack on innocent lives at spaces of worship for a religious community will be condemned by all those who believe in freedom and democratic values.

I have conveyed deepest sympathies on behalf of the Irish people to Prime Minister (Jacinda) Ardern and to Governor-General (Patsy) Reddy.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, speaking from the US, said that hatred would not triumph and that he would be contacting New Zealands Prime Minister.

New Zealand and its people are open, tolerant and welcoming. We join them today, united in our condemnation of this appalling attack and determined in our resolve that hate will not triumph, a statement said.

I will be writing to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to express sincere sympathies and support. I would also like to pay tribute to the valiant work of Christchurchs emergency services.

The New Zealand ambassador to the EU and Nato spoke emotionally in Dublin, and said his home country is reeling from the dreadful events.

New Zealand represents diversity, kindness, compassion.Ambassador David Taylor

At an Irish Farmers Journal conference, David Taylor said: Our prime minister described this as one of our darkest days and she condemned in the strongest possible terms whats happened.

New Zealand is reeling from this. But, as the prime minister said, New Zealand represents diversity, kindness, compassion.

Were a home for those who share our values and a place of refuge for those in need  Im getting choked up  and that will not change. We will stay as strong as we have been and will continue and go forward from here.

Deputy leader Simon Coveney said there can be no justification for the attacks, and that Irelands heart was broken for the people of New Zealand.

I unreservedly condemn the terrorist attacks which took place in Christchurch, New Zealand today. There can be no justification for acts of violence and discrimination based on religion or beliefs, he said.

On behalf of the Government, I extend my deepest sympathies and condolences to the families and friends of those injured and killed. 

Sinn Fein deputy leader Michelle ONeill labelled the attack horrific.

The attack at two mosques in Christchurch, which have left scores of people dead and injured are horrific and to be condemned, she said.

I have watched with shock and horror as the scale of this terrible atrocity became known.

I have been in contact with New Zealands Ambassador to Ireland Brad Burgess to convey our condolences and solidarity at this time.

This attack on innocent lives at spaces of worship for a religious community will be condemned by all those who believe in freedom and democratic values.



Reaction from President Higgins to the #MosqueAttack in Christchurch, New Zealand:https://t.co/OojAdwfYhr pic.twitter.com/yIbg486NqC  President of Ireland (@PresidentIRL) March 15, 2019

Brendan Howlin, leader of the Labour Party, sent solidarity to the Muslim community in New Zealand and noted the similarities between the two countries.

On behalf of the Labour Party in Ireland and, I know, on behalf of the vast majority of people of Ireland, I want to add my words of solidarity to the people of New Zealand, especially members of its Muslim communities, he said.

We utterly condemn the appalling terrorist atrocity perpetrated by individuals whose only motivation appears to be blind hate.

Ireland is like New Zealand in many ways. We have a similar size of population and we are a peaceful country with a similarly low level of violence or gun crime. Of course, we bear the scars of the conflict in Northern Ireland, but despite that history, modern society on this island is resolutely against violence.

The Bishop of Elphin, Kevin Doran, asked that people pray this weekend for the victims.

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All of us, of whatever religious tradition, can identify with what that might mean for a congregation gathered for worship, he said.

Responsibility for these attacks clearly rests with some violent individuals. At another level, however, there are serious questions to be answered, including in our own society, by those who unjustly blame the entire Muslim community for the extremism of some.

It is just as unacceptable to speak and write in racist or sectarian terms against Muslims as it is to speak and write in similar terms about Christians.

A male in his late 20s has been charged with murder and is due to appear at a Christchurch court on Saturday morning.

The countrys prime minister Jacinda Ardern has called it one of New Zealands darkest days.
Petrofac has been awarded a contract worth around $1 billion with Groupment Isarene, the joint operating group set up by Sonatrach, Petroceltic and Enel, for the Ain Tsila Development Project in Algeria.



Located around 1,100 kilometres south-east of Algiers, the Ain Tsila field will produce gas, LPG and condensate, for the local Algerian market and for export. Under the terms of the 42-month contract, the lump-sum engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) project scope of work includes commissioning, start-up and performance testing.



E S Sathyanarayanan, Group managing director, Engineering & Construction, said: I am delighted we have the opportunity to be working with the Groupement Isarene partners to deliver this strategically important project.



This award builds on Petrofacs significant track record in Algeria where we have been operating successfully for more than 20 years, with a strong record for project execution and the development of local capability. We are focused on delivering an effective, safe solution that meets our high standards and continues our commitment to the local energy sector.



Petrofacs EPC activities in Algeria include Sonatrachs Tinrhert Field Development Project, along with the Alrar and Reggane projects that commenced production last year.  TradeArabia News Service
Charlotte Reat (daughter of Jayne Toal Reat ) leaves Court with and Family and Friends after Nathan Ward was sentenced at Craigavon Court on Friday. Pic Colm Lenaghan/Pacemaker

A woman who held her dying mother in her arms until her final breath after she was stabbed in a frenzied attack spoke of how she has been "destroyed" at the death of her best friend.

The court heard how the killer, who had been living with the family at the time, had an "evil look" and even smiled as he carried out the savage attack on the two women and his own father who tried to rescue them.

Nathan Ward was sentenced to a 17-year minimum tariff for the murder of Jayne Toal-Reat, attempting to murder her daughter Charlotte and wounding of his father Joseph Tweedie on Christmas Day 2017.

Charlotte, speaking after the sentencing, said: "This has been an extremely long and tough journey without my mum and it will only continue. The courts are finally over however I will never see my mummy again and this destroys me she was my best friend, my everything and I love her so much."

Read More

It was revealed in court that Ward also confessed to three counts of sexually assaulting Charlotte. Twice on December 9 and again on Christmas Day. It was the sexual assault at 5.17am on Christmas morning that sparked his murderous attack with a 9 inch combat knife. Charlotte waived her right to anonymity in respect of the attack.

Describing an entirely normal Christmas Eve, the Judge Patrick Lynch outlined how Charlotte, Jayne and Joe had been out shopping and visiting relatives before going home and eventually to bed at around 1am.

The sleeping arrangements were that Jayne and Charlotte were in one bedroom with Joe and Ward in the other but around 5am, Ward went into the womens bedroom, dressed in boxer shorts, armed with the lethal knife, where he began to sexually assault the sleeping Charlotte.

Jayne woke up and said what the f***, waking Charlotte by her reaction and Judge Lynch outlined the inference to be drawn is that she had seen the defendant in the room and if not specifically aware that he was abusing her daughter, knew that something was seriously amiss.

The full horror of what happened then is captured in Charlottes statement which I shall quote directly from, said the judge.

He stared at Mum for 20 seconds. He had an evil look on his face. He didnt speak. There was no sound. Mum looked scared and said again-what the f*** are you doing in my room? Mum turned towards the door and he pounced on her.

"He started hitting her. Mum turned away to protect herself. She let the most painful scream out. Nathan was stabbing her and stabbing her but I did not see the knife.

"She tried to get out the door but he got her from behind. I think he stabbed the back of her head or neck. I went to get up to save her When he realised that I was awake he ran towards me in the creepiest way.

"Nathan ran to my side of the bed. He ran and got on top of me. I tried to defend myself by lying on my back, kicking and punching him. He grabbed my hands. I didnt know he had a knife. He got me on the side of the face.

"He was smiling. I managed to kick him off for a slight second. I went to crawl off the bed. He grabbed me and pulled me back.

"He sat on top of my legs and I thought at that moment I was going to die. He got my neck.

"I could see the knife now Then Joe came in and saved my life.

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Awoken by the screaming, Mr Tweedie ran into the room and quoting his witness statement the judge continued: I jumped up and went into the bedroom that Charlotte was in. It was like a horror scene, blood everywhere Charlotte was screaming, he was getting on top of her and was trying to stab her like a person possessed, trying to kill her, wanting to knife her to death and Charlotte was Fighting him off and she had blood all over her face.

"I intervened and he turned the knife on me and I got cuts to the forehead and one to the stomach with the knife."

Mr Tweedie was able to overpower him and grab the knife and threw it to the ground. He said Ward then calmed down and said: "It wasnt me daddy, I dont know what Im doing."

The judge told the court that in a panic, Charlotte fled the room but shortly returned to where her mortally wounded mother was.

Holding Jayne in her arms, Judge Lynch said Charlotte briefly felt a pulse but then Jayne gasped a big breath and her head dropped to her shoulder".

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In a heartbreaking description, the judge said how Charlotte described how she hugged and hugged her mother and tried to hard to bring her back.

DCI Peter McKenna, speaking after sentencing, said he had "no doubt" society is a safer place with the dangerous killer in jail.

He said: Jayne and her daughter Charlotte, who was only 21 at the time, shouldve been waking up to enjoy a special festive time at Christmas.

"Instead they awoke to the horror of Nathan Ward standing beside their bed armed with a knife.

"He stabbed defenceless Jayne multiple times before stabbing Charlotte and attacking his own father who had come to their aide.

"Tragically Jayne passed away from her injuries, dying in Charlotte's arms.

"No daughter should ever have to go through such a traumatic and heartbreaking ordeal.

"Jayne was a psychiatric nurse. She dedicated her life to helping others yet she was murdered in cold blood in her own home by Nathan Ward who she had welcomed into that home.

"Nathan has robbed her of the joy of seeing her daughter Charlotte growing into a young woman and his callous actions have also denied Charlotte of the love, guidance and friendship of her mother.

"I am in no doubt that Nathan Ward is a dangerous man and he has shown no remorse for his actions.

"The community is a much safer place now that he is behind bars and I would like to pay tribute to Jaynes family who have shown great courage throughout this investigation.
A woman whose sister was murdered by the IRA while leaving church has said many people in Northern Ireland understand what the families of those killed in the Christchurch mosque shootings are going through.

Ann Travers' 22-year-old sister Mary was shot dead and her father seriously injured in an IRA gun attack as the family left Mass at St Brigid's Church in south Belfast on April 8, 1984. Ms Travers' father Tom, who was a prominent magistrate, was shot multiple times.

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Ms Travers took to social media after at least 49 people were killed in New Zealand in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers. One man is to appear in court charged with murder.

Ms Travers' posting on Twitter, said: "To those of us who lived through terrorism in Northern Ireland understand what you are going through. Many of our loved ones lost their lives while leaving churches, in churches and services of remembrances. Thoughts prayers and support are with you all."

Many victims of the Troubles were targeted by paramilitaries when attending church services.

In Darkley, Co Armagh, three gunmen attacked worshippers attending a church service at Mountain Lodge Pentecostal Church, killing three Protestant civilians and wounding seven. The gunmen were members of the INLA.

To those of us who lived through terrorism in Northern Ireland understand what you are going through. Many of our loved ones lost their lives while leaving churches, in churches and services of remembrance. Thoughts , prayers and support are with you all. https://t.co/fKcV4fAshs  Ann Travers (@AnnTravers6) March 15, 2019

A book of condolence has been opened in Belfast in tribute to those killed in the attack. There has been widespread condemnation of the attack with the Queen leading tributes.

MLA Doug Beattie described it as an "absolutely appalling horror".

"An evil white supremacist terrorist has stolen the lives of so many innocent people. Thoughts with their families," he said.

Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill expressed her sympathy and condemned the attack.

"Today, at this tragic time our thoughts are with the families and communities of all those killed and injured, the emergency services and the people of Christchurch and New Zealand," she said.
The UK's top lawyer, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, has told MPs he has identified a way for the UK to escape the Irish border backstop if it causes disorder in Northern Ireland.

The backstop, aimed to prevent a hard border in Ireland, has caused a deadlock in the Brexit process, with both the DUP and Brexiteer MPs rejecting it outright.

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However, the Irish Government and EU are adamant that there will be no withdrawal deal without the backstop.

The Telegraph has reported that Mr Cox believes that the UK would be able to get out of the backstop under the terms of the Vienna Convention.

The Vienna Convention is an international treaty that defines a framework for diplomatic relations between independent countries.

In his legal advice the Attorney General said that the UK could end the backstop if it had a "socially destabilising effect on Northern Ireland".

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However, a team of lawyers, which includes DUP MP Nigel Dodds, set up to analyse legal changes to the Brexit deal, have rejected the advice as "erroneous" and "badly misconceived".

Mr Cox had argued that the Article 62 of the Vienna Convention would allow the UK to exit the backstop in the event of an "unforeseen and fundamental change of circumstances".

"Those facts might, for example, be that the prolonged operation of the Backstop was having a socially destabilising effect on Northern Ireland, contrary to its objective," his legal advice read.

"It is in my view clear and undoubted in those exceptional circumstances that international law provides the (UK) with the right to terminate the Withdrawal Agreement. If that were to happen, the (UK) would no doubt offer to continue to observe the unexhausted obligations in connection, for example, with citizens rights.

However, the so called 'star chamber' of lawyers, which includes Mr Dodds, argued that the Vienna Convention could only be invoked under "extreme circumstances".

In the past the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia were not seen as sufficient circumstances to enact the convention.
A sadistic killer who stabbed a mum to death in a frenzied knife attack after she caught him sexually assaulting her daughter was told it will be 2034 before he is even considered for release.

Imposing a 17 year minimum tariff on 20-year-old self-confessed killer and pervert Nathan Ward at Craigavon Crown Court, Judge Patrick Lynch QC told him  I emphasise again that this is a minimum term-when, or even if, you are ever safe to be released will be a matter to be determined by the parole commissioners not before 2034.

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The judge told Ward, who sat handcuffed, leaning forward continually looking at the floor throughout the half hour hearing, that by murdering Jayne Toal-Reat and attempting to murder her daughter Charlotte, you, Ward, have robbed her of her life and prospects".

Nothing this court, or you can never do well even begin to undo the damage you have caused her through your own uncontrolled hatreds and passions.

This destroys me she was my best friend. Charlotte

As Ward was being led to the cells to begin his life sentence Charlotte, who continually cried in dignified silence, jumped over the three foot wooden partition separating the gallery from the body of the court and was held back by four uniformed police officers, shouting at Ward I will kill you, before being comforted by friends and relatives who had packed the public gallery.

Speaking after the hearing, Charlotte said, while she couldn't say she was happy, she was glad he had admitted to his actions.

"This has been an extremely long and tough journey without my mum and it will only continue. The courts are finally over however I will never see my mummy again and this destroys me she was my best friend, my everything and I love her so much."

Ward, wearing a black t-shirt and blue track suit bottoms, showed no emotion and remained impassive during Friday's hearing.

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At an earlier hearing Ward admitted the murder of 43-year-old psychiatric nurse Jayne, the attempted murder of Charlotte and wounding his father Joseph Tweedie with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm on Christmas Day 2017.

It can now be revealed that Ward also confessed to three counts of sexually assaulting Charlotte, twice on December 9 after she celebrated her 21st birthday and again on Christmas Day. She waived her right to anonymity.

It was the sexual assault at 5.17am on Christmas morning that when caught by Jayne, sparked Ward into launching his savage and murderous attack with a 9 combat knife he had bought online.

During his sentencing remarks on Friday Judge Lynch said Ward appeared to have had an unhealthy sexual obsession with Charlotte, not reciprocated, which, in part at any rate, underlies the tragic events giving rise to the Christmas day murder".

His reaction was, by implication, an attempt to cover up his own perverted actions. Judge Lynch

Ward told police that when Jayne woke up and challenged him, he just snapped and felt he had no other choice but to just go for it.

Addressing legal guidelines for sentencing in murder cases, the judge said he assessed Ward as a dangerous offender due to  The extreme nature of the offences of violence, the degree of premeditation, the defendant arming himself preparatory to the attack.

He told Ward the murder was aggravated by the fact that his victim had been asleep and vulnerable in her own home, the gratuitous violence used in the attacks and that the killing was carried out to defeat the ends of justice by killing the two witnesses to his sexual assault of Charlotte.

His reaction was, by implication, an attempt to cover up his own perverted actions by silencing the two potential witnesses, however irrational response that may have been.

In mitigation, the judge said Ward was 19 at the time of the brutal murder, has expressed remorse and was due some credit for pleading guilty although he added that  I can scarcely avoid commenting that he had no option but to accept them.

Jailing Ward for at least 17 years, Judge Lynch told the killer the sentence would have been 20 years if he had been convicted after a trial.

The judge also imposed 12 years for the attempted murder of Charlotte, five years for wounding his father and five years on each of the sexual assaults, with all those sentenced to be served concurrently to the life term.

Police welcomed the sentencing.

Detective Inspector Michelle Griffin said: Everyone deserves to feel safe in their own home yet on Christmas Morning in 2017, Jayne was lying sleeping in her bed with her daughter Charlotte when she awoke to find her step-son Nathan standing at the bedside.

"When Jayne challenged Nathan and asked why he was in their room, he stabbed her multiple times. Charlotte, who was 21 at the time, was stabbed three times in the head and when Nathans father Joseph came to their aid from another room in the house he was also stabbed in the stomach by Nathan. Police officers arrived at the scene but despite their efforts, they were unable to save Jaynes life and she passed away in her daughters arms."

The officer continued: "No young woman should have to see their mother murdered and to hold them in their arms as they pass away. Charlotte and her mother should have been waking up looking forward to the excitement of Christmas day and sitting down for a family dinner. Instead Jayne was savagely murdered and Charlotte and Joes life were changed forever.

Jayne was a psychiatric nurse who made her living looking after others and she was murdered in cold blood by Nathan who she had welcomed in to her home. Nathan has robbed her of the joy of seeing her daughter grow as a young woman, possibly getting married and giving her grandchildren. Nathans callous actions have also denied Charlotte the love and friendship of her mother and robbed his father of the chance to have a long and happy future with his partner.

Nathan is a dangerous man who has shown no remorse for his actions. I welcome the fact that he is now behind bars and the community is a safer place as a result of this police investigation.

Despite having been left extremely traumatised by the incident, Jaynes family have displayed great courage. Whilst no sentence can ever take away their pain, I hope they get some comfort from knowing that Nathan Ward has been held fully accountable for his actions."
The sister of a teenage shop worker shot from behind as he crawled away from soldiers on Bloody Sunday has said she would like to meet his killer.

Jean Hegartys brother Kevin McElhinney was 17 when he was shot dead during a civil rights march in Londonderry in 1972.

After learning no paratroopers will be prosecuted over his death, Ms Hegarty, 70, said she would ask his killer why he did it.

She said: I would love to know what was going through his mind when he pulled that trigger. What motivation he had to do that.

I mean, if the opportunity presented itself I think I would take it and ask those questions.

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Ms Hegarty was among the relatives of the 13 killed and 15 injured, who were informed that just one of 17 soldiers would be charged for his involvement in Bloody Sunday.

She said while she was disappointed for her brother and the others who did not receive news of a charge in their loved ones cases, she was happy for those who got good news.

Soldier F will face charges for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick ODonnell.

Ms Hegarty said she felt she needed to immediately approach some of those families to assure them they had our complete support after they were briefed by prosecutors at the City Hotel in Derry on Thursday.

She said: Theres a feeling of unity that would transcend personal feelings (of disappointment).

Forty-seven years ago on her journey home from Canada, where she was living when Kevin was killed, Ms Hegarty said she had wanted to kill the soldier responsible for shooting her brother.

But the sight of her beaten father at his sons funeral quickly removed her desire for revenge, she added.

Kevins dead. He resides up in the cemetery. A prosecution or no prosecution, nothing is actually going to change the salient fact that Kevin lost his life.Jean Hegarty

She said: On the plane on the way back from Canada, I plotted to kill the soldier that killed Kevin.

And I had a sort of moment at the funeral mass, I looked across to see how my mammy was coping, and my father was a beaten man.

And I just thought if I do anything to that soldier, theres another beaten man. And so revenge left me then, I have no desire for revenge. All it would bring is another hurt family.

Asked if she believes the soldier concerned with her brothers death has remorse, she said: I would hope so.

She added: Kevins dead. He resides up in the cemetery. A prosecution or no prosecution, nothing is actually going to change the salient fact that Kevin lost his life.

Expand Close Jean Hegarty, the sister of Kevin McElhinney, stands with other relatives of victims (Liam McBurney/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Jean Hegarty, the sister of Kevin McElhinney, stands with other relatives of victims (Liam McBurney/PA)

Ms Hegarty will discuss with her other siblings what their next steps are, including whether they can and want to challenge the non-prosecution decision.

Solicitors for another family have sent a letter to the Attorney General for Northern Ireland claiming Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson may have jeopardised the chances of a fair trial for soldier F.

Lawyers acting for the family of William Nash, whose death no soldier is to be charged over, have taken issue with the comments made by Mr Williamson after the announcement, in which he referred to safeguards to ensure members of the armed forces are not unfairly treated.

Phoenix Law said it appears Mr Williamson seeks to assert that the decision to prosecute, and the subsequent prosecution, is in some way unfair or that the accused has been, or is being, unfairly treated.

A Government spokesman said the safeguards referred to are for how we deal with wider legacy issues, not specific legal cases, which it would be inappropriate to comment on.

The attorney generals office declined to comment.

Meanwhile a veterans group founder has denied reports a mass rally is being planned in Derry to protest against the Public Prosecution Service decision to charge soldier F.

Grenadier Guard Alan Barry, of the Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans group, said: We wont be marching in Londonderry, it would be a fruitless exercise.
A man and woman were yesterday acquitted of people trafficking after it emerged the complainant no longer wishes to co-operate with the prosecution.

Tibor Kozlik and Bozena Stojkova - who are both 49 and originally from Slovakia - were each charged with arranging or facilitating the arrival into the UK of a woman, intending to exploit her or believe that another was likely to exploit her, on September 10, 2009.

The charge was brought under the Asylum and Immigration Act 2004, and the pair were due to stand trial at Belfast Crown Court after denying the offence. Bozena Stojkova, from Clanchattan Street in Belfast, faced two other charges, including stealing cash and child tax credits from the same woman between November and December 2009. A third Slovakian national, 32-year-old Svetlana Fatonova from Fort Street in Belfast, also faced the theft charge.

In addition to the people trafficking charge, Kozlik, from Seaview Street in Belfast, was charged with, and denied, seven further offences.

These included sexually assaulting the same woman in May 2014, blackmailing her out of 2,400 between December 2009 and January 2011, and falsely claiming he was her partner, and claiming Housing Benefit he was not entitled to at a property in Belfast in November 2009.

The trial against all three was due to start yesterday, and a jury was sworn in.

After all the charges levelled at all three accused were read by the clerk of the court, Crown barrister Robin Steer addressed the 12 members of the jury and revealed the prosecution would be offering no evidence.

Saying "an issue has arisen with the injured party", who is now in England, Mr Steer said her account has now changed and she "no longer wishes to co-operate".

In light of this, Mr Steer said "a decision was made not to proceed with the case".

The jury was then directed to find Mr Tibor, Ms Stojkova and Ms Fatonova "not guilty" of all the charges.

Judge David McFarland then asked Mr Steer if the Home Office was seeking to deport the trio, and when he was told this was not the case, the judge told all three - via a translator - "You have been found not guilty by this court. You are free to go."
Prime Minister Theresa May enjoys a lighter moment during the Brexit debate in the Commons yesterday

Frantic talks aimed at winning over the DUP and the hardline European Research Group to back the Prime Minister's Brexit deal have ended in failure.

Talks were expected to last all weekend, with the hope that a deal would be backed next week.

The breakdown came after MPs last night voted to seek an extension to the Brexit deadline from the EU, the length of which will depend on whether Mrs May can get her deal through Parliament in a third-time-lucky attempt next week.

But May's hopes of winning over Eurosceptics and the DUP were dealt a fresh blow after the "Star Chamber" of Brexiteer lawyers rejected a further attempt to allay their concerns about the backstop.

The group of lawyers, led by Tory Sir Bill Cash, said the suggestion that the UK could use the Vienna Convention - the international treaty that lays down the rules about treaties - to unilaterally pull out of the backstop was "badly misconceived".

The panel of lawyers, which significantly also includes DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds, rejected supplementary legal advice from Attorney General Geoffrey Cox.

The Attorney General's advice hinges on Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, which says that if there has been "a fundamental change of circumstances" following the conclusion of a treaty "which was not foreseen by the parties", then the countries involved would be allowed to withdraw from it.

But the Brexit-backing lawyers said "given the high burden that a State must meet to use it, and given the extreme reluctance of international courts and tribunals to accept it" the Vienna Convention route "supplies no assurance whatsoever that the UK could terminate the withdrawal agreement in a lawful manner".

Earlier yesterday, DUP leader Arlene Foster told Channel 4 News her party was "talking to the Government and to the Attorney General at the moment to try and make a deal happen because we want to see Brexit working".

"We want to see it working for the whole of the UK in a way that doesn't leave Northern Ireland behind," she added.

Mrs Foster claimed that the issue of the backstop had been overplayed and that Northern Ireland has a "very small market".

The DUP had signalled it could perhaps back the deal, which was seen as dead just a few days ago.

Revised legal advice was pursued in a bid to get the divorce deal over the line.

Mr Cox is said to have redrafted the legal advice that ultimately killed Mrs May's vote last Tuesday.

His legal opinion on the backstop dealt a massive blow to Mrs May's hopes of getting her Brexit deal passed by the Commons when he declared on Tuesday "the legal risk remains unchanged" that the UK may have "no internationally lawful means" of leaving the backstop without EU agreement.

But late last night, the move appeared to have failed.

Earlier, Philip Hammond suggested that Mr Cox should consider the opinions of other eminent lawyers on the backstop.

The Chancellor said: "The Attorney General's legal view is clearly very important.

"This is a very complex agreement and many other eminent lawyers are coming out with views and interpretations.

"I'm sure that the Attorney General will want to consider very carefully all the evidence and all the qualified opinion that there is around this issue."

Meanwhile, the EU offered to restart efforts this weekend to help Mrs May get the deal through but also insisted that negotiations were over.

One suggestion being floated is offering further clarity on the role Stormont could have in negotiations in the trade deal talks.

Mrs May's performance over the coming days will determine if she attends the EU council next week with a deal in hand, or if she will be begging for an extension to allow the UK to get its house in order. If her deal - which has already been defeated twice in the House of Commons - is agreed next Wednesday, then she will seek an extension the following day to give her until June 30 to allow Westminster to legislate for the deal to take effect.

However, if the withdrawal agreement is not passed, then she will have to petition for a longer extension and the UK will need to participate in the European elections.

European leaders have expressed differing views on the idea of a long extension, but European Council president Donald Tusk has suggested a year or more.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said a longer extension would give the UK time to consider options that have been taken off the table "like participation in the customs union and single market".

"I think we need to be open to any request they make, listen attentively and be generous in our response," he added.

Ireland is expected to lobby other European leaders to help Mrs May secure an extension if she comes to plead for more time.

A two-year extension would mean the UK has to continue paying into the EU budget and would also throw up questions about the type of mandate MEPs would have in Europe.

Sources in Dublin described the potential battle over the extension as a "robust debate" and a "bunfight" over what to give Mrs May if she comes seeking an extension.
The Irish premier has told US President Donald Trump that he can see the results of his ambitions to make America great again.

Speaking at the traditional shamrock presentation at the White House, Leo Varadkar described US military power as unrivalled.

During the annual event, the Taoiseach presented the US president with a bowl of shamrock to mark his St Patricks visit to Washington DC.

The bowl presented to Mr Trump, in the company of his wife, Melania, was made at Kilkenny Crystal in Callan, the home town of Irish-American architect James Hoban.

LIVE: President Trump Participates in the Shamrock Bowl Presentation by the Prime Minister of Ireland https://t.co/CU2S1osAlU  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) March 14, 2019

Mr Hoban designed both Leinster House in Dublin and the presidents official residence, the White House.

Mr Varadkar said: The American economy is booming. More jobs. Rising incomes. Exactly what you said youd do.

However, I believe the greatness of America is about more than economic prowess and military might.

It is rooted in the things that make us love America  your people, your values, a new nation conceived in liberty. The land and the home of the brave and the free.

The Taoiseach added that the futures of the US and Ireland were entwined.

I believe that future generations of our citizens should have the same opportunity to enrich one anothers societies as past generations have, he said.

Mr Trump, who was joined on stage by US vice president Mike Pence, said that millions of Americans across the country celebrate the inspiring Irish people on St Patricks Day.

He also welcomed the Taoiseachs partner Matt Barrett, who also attended the event.

Mr Trump added: I know many Irish people and they are inspiring, theyre sharp, theyre smart, theyre great and they are brutal enemies so you have to keep them as your friend. Always keep them as your friend.

You dont want to fight with the Irish, its too tough, its too bloody.

He reminded the crowd that the shamrock tradition began almost 70 years ago when Irelands first ambassador to the United States, John Hearne, gave then US president Harry Truman a small box of it.

He added that he accepted the gift as a symbol of Americas enduring friendship with Ireland.

The Irish are confident and fearless. They never give up, they never give in, he added.

The event marked the end of Mr Varadkars trip to Washington DC before he travels to Chicago on Friday for the second part of his St Patricks trip.
A woman was allegedly beaten with a curtain pole by two ex-partners as part of an "invasion" into her home, the High Court has heard.

She sustained a fractured cheekbone during an attack which left the house in Saintfield, Co Down, in a state of disarray, prosecutors said.

It was claimed that intruders kicked open the front door, targeted the woman and also assaulted a man inside with her.

Details emerged as bail was granted to one of the men accused of forcing their way into the Queen's Park property on September 16 last year.

Simon Johnston, of New Line in Saintfield, is charged with burglary inflicting grievous bodily harm, possession of an offensive weapon, criminal damage, and stealing a mobile phone and 20 in cash.

A Crown lawyer said police called to the scene found the front door lying in the hallway and an upstairs bedroom door hanging by the hinges.

Fresh blood was discovered on the floor, walls, a bedside cabinet and a wooden pole broken in two.

The woman claimed the attack occurred after she returned home with her friend.

"She stated that Simon Johnston and a co-defendant, both ex-partners of hers, had forced entry into the property by kicking open the front door and told (the other man) to leave," the prosecutor submitted.

"He left, but on his way out he was hit by one of the suspects."

It was alleged that the intruders then grabbed curtain poles and began assaulting her.

She sustained the facial fracture, cuts, bruising and needed seven staples for a laceration to her head, the court heard.

Sean Doherty, defending, insisted Johnston had "no culpable involvement" in the incident.

Counsel said his client had a brief romantic relationship with the woman years ago and doesn't know the male complainant.

Mr Doherty added that Johnston had played the role of "peacemaker".

Seeking bail, he revealed that the accused wanted out to spend as much time as possible with his terminally ill son.

Referring to the circumstances, Judge Brian Sherrard said: "These are very serious offences which involve an alleged home invasion."

But he ruled that Johnston is to be released on strict conditions, including a curfew and ban on any contact with the alleged victims.
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Gardai will be out in force checking motorists for driving under the influence this St Patricks weekend (Niall Carson/PA Wire)

More than 1,400 drivers have been arrested for driving under the influence of drink or drugs in the first two months of this year.

New figures issued by the Gardai and the Road Safety Authority showed there was a 17% increase in arrests for driving under the influence in January and February, compared with the same period last year.

A total of 1,429 drivers were arrested.

The Medical Bureau of Road Safety also reported an increase in the number of blood and urine specimens being sent for analysis this year.

The figures were released as Gardai warned they will be checking motorists for driving under the influence of drink and drugs over the St Patricks weekend.

Last year one person died and three others were seriously injured over the same weekend.

Transport Minister Shane Ross said some motorists continue to ignore warnings about the dangers of drink and drug driving.

He said penalties for drink driving at lower levels have increased since the introduction of the Road Traffic Amendment Act 2018 and apply at any time.

Drink driving is drink driving whether it is at midnight or midday and any drink drivers detected with a blood alcohol concentration between 50mg and 80mg now face losing their licence for three months, he said.

The aim of road safety legislation is to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads.

RSA chief executive Moyagh Murdock said: If you are heading out this weekend please plan ahead. Make sure you know how youre getting home, whether by taxi, with a designated driver or public transport.

She also warned people not to walk home if theyre drunk.

Almost half of pedestrians killed on our roads have consumed alcohol, she said.

Im also reminding drivers and passengers to wear seatbelts and to understand that there is a close link between drinking alcohol and the non-wearing of seatbelts in fatality statistics.

To date, 34 people have been killed on Irish roads since the start of the year.
Thousands of children have taken to streets across the country for climate change demonstrations.

Primary and secondary school pupils missed classes on Friday to protest against the Governments inaction on the issue.

Expand Close Pupils warned there is no Planet B and said climate change is easy to ignore till the Earth is no more (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Pupils warned there is no Planet B and said climate change is easy to ignore till the Earth is no more (Niall Carson/PA)

The demonstration was part of a global movement by schoolchildren which has been inspired by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, who staged a series of strikes over climate change at her school.

In January, 35,000 students took to the streets of Brussels on a single day to highlight the need for global action on the issue.

In Dublin, children gathered on St Stephens Green on Friday afternoon chanting: What do we want? Change. When do we want it? Now.

They then made their way to the gates of Dail Eireann, where they carried hand-made banners and posters, some of which read there is no Planet B, Leo try harder and easy to ignore till the Earth is no more.

The demonstrations were organised by a loose coalition of pupils in schools across the country.

Thousands of school children have taken to the streets of the capital calling for action on climate change @PA pic.twitter.com/EDLZVetzlc  Michelle Devane (@michelledevane) March 15, 2019

Primary school pupil Sadhbh Kenny and her mother Roisin were among those taking part in the protest in the capital.

We want to help the environment and the Taoiseach isnt helping, Sadhbh said. I want him to help.

The eight-year-old, who attends Kilcoskan National School in north Co Dublin, painted a picture of the Earth with the words save me.

Roisin Kenny said her daughter had asked her to come into the city.

Im blown away by the passion of the young people and the movement by Greta Thunberg, she said.

We just wanted to get involved and have a voice and say our piece. Its something great to be part of, especially for children.

Expand Close Thousands of pupils march from St Stephens Green to Leinster House (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Helena Cheah and her two sons, Sean, nine, and Oisin, six, who attend Educate Together in Portlaoise, were among the protesters who turned up to call for action.

The family travelled from Portlaoise to get involved because Ms Cheah said they think a lot about the planet and her son Sean stresses about how to change Earth for the better.

This was an opportunity to make a point and do something so thats why were here, she said.

Portlaoise mother Annette Morris Keane said had travelled to Dublin with her children Rori, 11, and Kila, eight, because she feels responsible for their future when it comes to climate change.

Whats happening now is going to affect their future, she said.

They can feel a little helpless sometimes so this is so that they dont have to feel so helpless and they have a say in what happens in their future.

Rori and Kila made their way through the streets to the gates of Leinster House with posters that read sorry, I cant clean my room, I have to save the planet and Earth provides enough to satisfy every mans need, but not every mans greed.

Expand Close The Dublin march was one of dozens in Ireland (Niall Carson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Italian teacher Cristiana Ziraldo attended the event with 22 of her pupils, who were in Dublin to learn English.

She said the teenagers had skipped their last class on Friday to take part in protest with Irish students.

They wanted to, they asked me to, so I couldnt possibly turn down their request because their peers back home in our home town near Venice are doing the same, Ms Ziraldo said.

Federica De Biero, 17, from the town of Pordenone, said she wanted to join Irish students because it was part of an international movement.

Its beautiful to see all the students fight for our rights, she said.
Irelands Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has urged Donald Trump to embrace free trade.

The protectionist US administration has been engaged in a tariff war with China.

It pulled back from escalating aggressive action towards the EU last year.

President Trump hosted Ireland this morning in the White House. The Irish relationship with the US remains very strong. We had a great discussion about trade, Northern Ireland, Brexit and Irish immigration and I thanked him for his support protecting jobs at Aughinish. pic.twitter.com/dKoS0HBkSh  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 14, 2019

Mr Varadkar told the US President: Free trade and free enterprise make everyone better off in the round.

And I would like to keep it that way.

US import tariffs were imposed on European steel last year.

A threat to act against cars was put aside following talks between Mr Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Mr Varadkar met Mr Trump at the White House on Thursday to mark St Patricks Day.

Earlier today, President Trump met with the Prime Minister of Ireland in the Oval Office for a bilateral meeting. pic.twitter.com/SgdrKRgxPc  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) March 14, 2019

Earlier, Mr Trump said: Tariffs are a very, very great way of getting people to the table.

He said China had been very responsible and reasonable during recent discussions.

Decades of investment by US firms in Ireland have helped transform the Republic from one of the least developed in Europe to one of the most prosperous, the Irish premier said.

He told the president: We thank you and will never forget your role in making that economic transformation possible.

Mr Varadkar said their economic relationship was very much a two-way street.

Almost 100,000 Americans across 50 states are employed in Irish-owned companies, with more jobs to come.

A total of 119 Irish firms have invested in the US since Mr Trump took office.

Investment by Irish companies in the United States has trebled in recent years.

The Taoiseach again referenced the plight of Irish illegal migrants in the US.

Creating a path to citizenship for people who may have lived in the country for decades has been wrangled over in Congress for years.

Mr Varadkar said: Mr President, our history is shared, our future is entwined.

And so I believe that future generations of our citizens should have the same opportunity to enrich one anothers societies as past generations have.

No nation at the moment with as many ties as Ireland has to the United States has so few pathways to legal immigration.

Whenever weve talked about thisweve found agreement.

He thanked Mr Trump and Congress for supporting a new E3 visa programme, which would allow a limited number of Irish people to go to the US annually.

We know that making America great again will not mean forgetting or losing sight of what makes it great already.

The Taoiseach presented the president with the traditional shamrock bowl at the White House St Patricks Day reception.
Three men died in an avalanche on Ben Nevis on Tuesday (Andrew Milligan/PA)

The survivor of an avalanche on the UKs highest peak has paid tribute to his fellow climbers who died, telling them you will forever be in my heart.

Swiss national Mathieu Biselx, 30, lost three members of his group on Ben Nevis in the Highlands on Tuesday.

They were caught by a deluge of snow and ice, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in treacherous conditions.

The men were members of the Swiss Alpine Club in the town of Sion in the southwestern canton of Valais.

Mr Biselx, who has been receiving treatment for leg injuries at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, said in a Facebook post: Raph, Cedric and Adrien, thank you for your friendship.

Have a good trip to your new mountains.

Thank you for all you have done for our community, and for your inspiration. You are going to be missed.

Thank you for having come so far with me. My thoughts are with your families. We are all there for you.

You will be forever in my heart.

Two of the avalanche victims were French, aged 41 and 32, and the third was a Swiss 43-year-old.

Le Club Alpin Suisse CAS est profondement attriste par la terrible nouvelle des trois membres de la section Monte Rosa... Posted by Club Alpin Suisse CAS on Thursday, March 14, 2019

The mens mountaineering club said in a statement: The Swiss Alpine Club is deeply saddened by the terrible news of the three members of the Sion Monte Rosa branch who died on Ben Nevis on Tuesday.

We send all our sympathy and our most sincere condolences to the families and those close to those who died.

Our thoughts are with Mathieu who survived the avalanche and who lost his three climbing companions.

Mr Biselx said his companions were experienced climbers who took advice from local guides.

He said they had been given two routes to take on the mountain, and upon reaching the second route in the afternoon they saw there had already been an avalanche.

They had barely reached the area when they were swept away.

Mr Biselx, who has a young daughter, said he was amazingly lucky.

He told Valais newspaper Le Nouvelliste: We werent very high up and suddenly we heard a noise. We looked round and two seconds later we were carried away by heavy, compact snow.

When I regained consciousness only my head and an arm were sticking out of the snow.

He described his companions as wonderful people who were also fathers.

Expand Close Inspector Isla Campbell updates members of the media in Fort William (Andrew Milligan/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Inspector Isla Campbell updates members of the media in Fort William (Andrew Milligan/PA)

The men were recovered by members of the Lochaber and Glencoe Mountain Rescue teams with assistance from volunteer rescuers training in the area.

It is the third fatal accident on 1,345m Ben Nevis in recent months.

On January 1 a 21-year-old Bristol University student from Germany died after falling from a ridge.

In December, Patrick Boothroyd, 21, from West Yorkshire, died after falling in the Tower Gully area.
People taking part in a vigil at the New Zealand War Memorial on Hyde Park Corner (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

Hundreds of mourners stood in a silence in honour of those who were killed in the New Zealand shootings.

Flowers and candles were laid as night fell on the peaceful gathering at the New Zealand memorial in central Londons Hyde Park.

Organiser Zaharan Sofi, said she spent Friday her 30th brithday, feeling very emotional.

Expand Close People taking part in a vigil at the New Zealand War Memorial (Dominic Lipinski/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Ms Sofi, a corporate accountant of Brixton, south London, said: I am a British Muslim and I wanted to make sure that people come together.

It is a very important time to bring people together and not to try and divide.

Bringing people together is how you deal with terrorism. In this sensitive time and in our society, it is important that we all know we are human beings first.

The event was aimed at showing solidarity and to provide comfort after the horror of the Christchurch shootings in which at least 49 people were killed at two New Zealand mosques.

Uniformed police officers stood a discreet distance away.

A minutes silence and traditional Moari music were part of the moments of reflection.

Hundreds of people, of nationalities including British-based New Zealanders, attended and stood in respectful silence.

Expand Close People lay flowers at the New Zealand War Memorial on Hyde Park Corner (Dominic Lipinski/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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New Zealand couple Blair Godby, 25, originally from Invercargill, and Amy Louise Mill, 24, originally of Nelson, both said that waking up to hear that terror had struck their homeland was a shock.

Mr Godby said: It is just hurtful and just plain shocking.

New Zealand is very small, and now so far away.

I have always taken such pride in these sorts of things not happening.

It feels like a betrayal.

Coming here and knowing that we are around New Zealanders brings a feeling that we are together and can send some if that support back to the communities at home.

Ms Mill, who said she had always felt New Zealand was a safe haven, added: Being here makes you feel a little connected to you community in a way.

It is a little thing we can do to help acknowledge the 49 people who were murdered and the communities who are mourning them.

Written on a white balloon fluttering among the tributes was the message: Heartfelt sympathies to everyone. RIP to the victims. There is no such place for hatred in my country. We carry you in our hearts. Know you are loved.

A wreath of white roses marked from the people of Australia, a kiwi bird soft toy and a handwritten placard which read We Stand With New Zealand were also among the tributes offered.
Theresa May has made clear that she hopes to bring her Agreement back to the Commons by March 20 (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Europes leaders are considering whether to agree to UK calls for Brexit to be delayed as Theresa Mays efforts to build support for her deal at Westminster suffered a fresh setback.

MPs backed a delay to Brexit beyond the scheduled date of March 29 in dramatic parliamentary scenes which saw a majority of the Conservative party in the opposite lobby from the Prime Minister.

But any delay will require the agreement of the other 27 European Union members, with talks about any conditions for an extension set to begin before leaders gather at a summit next week.

European Council president Donald Tusk met Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in The Hague on Friday before talks with the blocs key power brokers Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on Monday.

Following the talks, Mr Rutte said the current Withdrawal Agreement is the only deal on the table.

On Tuesday Mr Tusk will travel to Dublin to meet Leo Varadkar before the summit in Brussels on Thursday.

Mr Tusk said: I will appeal to the EU27 to be open to a long extension if the UK finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy and build consensus around it.

But European Parliament Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt questioned why the leaders of the 27 should grant an extension if Mrs May was not ready for a cross-party approach to break the current deadlock in the Commons.

Why EUCO should allow an extension, if the UK gov and her majority in the House of Commons are not ready for a cross-party approach to break the current deadlock ? https://t.co/lj1Tm4kmIg  Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) March 14, 2019

The Prime Minister is set to bring her Brexit deal back to the Commons for a third meaningful vote next week, and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has sought to provide further legal assurances about the Irish backstop.

But Mrs Mays hopes of persuading Eurosceptics and the DUP to back the deal were dealt a blow after the Star Chamber of Brexiteer lawyers rejected Mr Coxs latest assessment.

The group of lawyers, led by veteran Tory Sir Bill Cash, said a suggestion that the UK could use the Vienna Convention  the international agreement that lays down the rules about treaties  to unilaterally pull out of the backstop was badly misconceived.

The panel of lawyers, which significantly also includes DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds, rejected the supplementary legal advice from Mr Cox.

The Attorney Generals advice hinges on Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, which says that if there has been a fundamental change of circumstances following the conclusion of a treaty which was not foreseen by the parties, then the countries involved would be allowed to withdraw from it.

Mr Cox said: It is in my view clear and undoubted in those exceptional circumstances that international law provides the (UK) with the right to terminate the Withdrawal Agreement.

But the Brexit-backing lawyers said given the high burden that a state must meet to use it, and given the extreme reluctance of international courts and tribunals to accept it the Vienna Convention route supplies no assurance whatsoever that the UK could terminate the Withdrawal Agreement in a lawful manner.

After a chaotic week in the Commons, the Tory party appears deeply divided from the top down.

More than half of Tory MPs  including seven Cabinet ministers  voted against Mrs Mays motion to put back the date when Britain leaves the EU.

Chief Whip Julian Smith abstained, with sources suggesting he did so in order to be able to broker peace going forward by appearing impartial.

Mrs Mays de facto deputy David Lidington denied the Government was falling apart and said the entire Cabinet has accepted the position that Parliament voted for last night.

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster also told BBC Radio 4s Today programme that leaving on March 29 with no deal remains the legal default position but the likelihood of it happening had diminished after this weeks votes.

He said he was still hoping that the UK will leave as soon as possible in an orderly fashion by MPs backing Mrs Mays Withdrawal Agreement next week.

Asked if defeat for the PMs deal might mean an extension of a year or more, Mr Lidington said: Those are the indications which the Brussels institutions of the EU  the Commission, the Council secretariat and certain member state governments  have been giving to us.

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He added: I hope that MPs of all parties will be over this weekend just reflecting on the way forward.

Among those in the opposite lobby from the Prime Minister was Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay, who closed debate on the motion on behalf of the Government with a plea to act in the national interest and put forward an extension that is realistic before voting against it.

Others taking advantage of the free vote to oppose the Prime Minister included Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss.

Downing Street sources denied that Mrs May had lost control of her Cabinet or her party, insisting that the results were a natural consequence of the decision to offer a free vote on an issue where many hold strong views.

The motion authorising the Prime Minister to request an extension to the two-year Article 50 negotiation process, was passed by 413 votes to 202  a majority of 211.

Only a refusal by the leaders of the 27 remaining EU states to grant the UK an extension at a Brussels summit next week could now preserve the totemic date of March 29 as Brexit Day.

Mrs May has made clear that she hopes to bring her Agreement back to the Commons by March 20 in the hope of securing the support of MPs who rejected it by 230 votes in January and 149 earlier this week.

If she succeeds, she will go to the Brussels summit to request a short delay to a date no later than June 30, to give herself time to pass legislative changes necessary for a smooth and orderly Brexit.

But if her deal is rejected for a third time, she believes any extension would have to be far longer and would involve the UK taking part in European Parliament elections in May.

Irelands Taoiseach Mr Varadkar said: I think we need to be open to any request they make, listen attentively and be generous in our response.

A spokesman for the European Commission said it takes note of tonights votes, adding that president Jean-Claude Juncker was in constant contact with all leaders.
Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Parliament Square (Kirsty OConnor/PA)

Students have joined school strikes around the world demanding that politicians take urgent action on climate change.

Expand Close Students take part in a global school strike for climate change outside the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK. PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students take part in a global school strike for climate change outside the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK.

In the UK, walkouts have taken place in more than 100 towns and cities, driven by what students say is an alarming lack of government leadership on climate action.

Expand Close Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Canterbury, Kent, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK. PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Canterbury, Kent, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK.

The global day of action has been inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg, who protests every Friday outside Swedens parliament to urge leaders to tackle climate change.

Expand Close Parliament Square in London was packed (Kirsty OConnor/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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A poll ahead of the walkouts suggests a majority of the British public support UK students who first ditched lessons and lectures for demonstrations on February 15 to call for greater climate action.

Expand Close Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Parliament Square, London, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK. PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Parliament Square, London, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK.

Expand Close Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Parliament Square, London, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK. PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Parliament Square, London, as protests are planned in 100 towns and cities in the UK.

The climate change protests were taking place across the globe.

Expand Close A woman takes part in a march during a demonstration to call for strengthened measures against global warming in Tokyo Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Jun Hirata/Kyodo News via AP) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp A woman takes part in a march during a demonstration to call for strengthened measures against global warming in Tokyo Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Jun Hirata/Kyodo News via AP)

Expand Close Students take part in a protest against climate change, in Aarhus, Denmark, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes Friday in protest over their governments failure to act against global warming. (Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix via AP) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students take part in a protest against climate change, in Aarhus, Denmark, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes Friday in protest over their governments failure to act against global warming. (Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix via AP)

Expand Close Students and activists hold slogans as they join a demonstration to call for strengthened measures against global warming in metropolitan Manila, Philippines on Friday, March 15, 2019. The group joins others worldwide as they protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students and activists hold slogans as they join a demonstration to call for strengthened measures against global warming in metropolitan Manila, Philippines on Friday, March 15, 2019. The group joins others worldwide as they protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Expand Close Students gather in protest to demand action on climate change, in Rome, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming.(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students gather in protest to demand action on climate change, in Rome, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming.(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Expand Close Students participate in a climate protest, at Stortorget in Lund, Sweden, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide skipped classes Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Johan Nilsson /TT News Agency via AP) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students participate in a climate protest, at Stortorget in Lund, Sweden, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide skipped classes Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Johan Nilsson /TT News Agency via AP)

Expand Close Students in Cape Town, South Africa take part in a protest, Friday, March 15, 2019 as part of a global student strike against government inaction on climate change. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes to protest their governments failure to act against global warming. (AP Photo/Nasief Manie) AP / Facebook

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Whatsapp Students in Cape Town, South Africa take part in a protest, Friday, March 15, 2019 as part of a global student strike against government inaction on climate change. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes to protest their governments failure to act against global warming. (AP Photo/Nasief Manie)
Prime Minister Theresa May has led the UK condemnation of the despicable Christchurch mosque shootings that killed 49 people.

In a statement, the Prime Minister said she had spoken to her New Zealand counterpart, Jacinda Ardern, and that the UK stands ready to support New Zealand however we can.

She said: To target Muslims as they were attending their place of worship is despicable. And our thoughts and prayers are with the people of New Zealand, with the families and friends of those who have died in these attacks and with all those who have been injured. The UK stands ready to support New Zealand however we can.

Through terror attacks that have taken place on UK soil we know only too well the pain that such horrifying attacks can cause. As New Zealand has stood by us, so we stand shoulder to shoulder with them, and with Muslims in New Zealand, here in the UK and around the world.

There can be no place in our societies for the vile ideology that drives and incites hatred and fear. Together we will defeat those who seek to destroy our values, our way of life and seek to divide us.

In an earlier tweet she sent deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand, adding: My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence.

"On behalf of the UK, my deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand after the horrifying terrorist attack in Christchurch. My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence." - PM @theresa_may  UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) March 15, 2019

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: Our hearts go out to the people of New Zealand following the news of this terrible act in Christchurch.

NZ is one of the most peaceful, peace-loving and generous nations in the world.

Your friends in the UK stand with you today in deepest sympathy.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted he was absolutely heartbroken to hear about this attack on peaceful worshippers.

Mr Javid added: We stand with New Zealand and Muslims across the world against all forms of racism and anti-Muslim hatred. We will not let extremists divide us #ChristchurchAttack.

A horrific terror attack. We will never let the terrorists win and divide our communities. My thoughts and prayers with the victims and families of all those affected.

A horrific terror attack. We will never let the terrorists win and divide our communities. My thoughts and prayers with the victims and families of all those affected.  Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) March 15, 2019

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Twitter: My heart goes out to the victims of the horrific terror attack in New Zealand. We stand in solidarity with the Muslim community in Christchurch and around the world.

We must defeat the bigotry which fuels such hatred and violence.

My heart goes out to the victims of the horrific terror attack in New Zealand.



We stand in solidarity with the Muslim community in Christchurch and around the world.



We must defeat the bigotry which fuels such hatred and violence.  Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) March 15, 2019

Baroness Warsi, a former Minister of State for Faith and Communities, said violence started with the demonisation and vilification of communities.

She tweeted: I urge a moment of self reflection by politicians on how THEY impact public discourse around Muslims.

I welcome colleagues condemning the murderous attack on Muslims in mosques in #NewZealand

Violence is the end bt it starts with the demonisation & vilification of communities

I urge a moment of self reflection by politicians on how THEY impact public discourse around Muslims  pic.twitter.com/J7b5UVi1bu  Sayeeda Warsi (@SayeedaWarsi) March 15, 2019

UK-based Anti-Islamaphobia group Tell MAMA said the attack showed how Anti-Muslim hatred is fast becoming a global issue and a binding factor for extremist far right groups.

Iman Atta from the group said: We are appalled to hear about the mass casualties in New Zealand.

The killer appears to have put out a manifesto based on white supremacist rhetoric which includes references to anti-Islamic comments.

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He mentions mass immigration and an assault on our civilisation and makes repeated references to his white identity.

The killer also seems to have filmed the murders adding a further cold ruthlessness to his actions.

We have said time and time again that far right extremism is a growing problem and we have been citing this for over six years now.

That rhetoric is wrapped within anti-migrant and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Anti-Muslim hatred is fast becoming a global issue and a binding factor for extremist far right groups and individuals.

It is a threat that needs to be taken seriously

We call on Governments around the world to step up security for Mosques and Islamic Centres, the days ahead will be full of mourning and sadness but together as one human family we will prevailMohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation

Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation said the attacks were by far right extremists inspired by their hatred of Muslims and Islam.

He said: An attack on a place of worship is an attack against all faiths, Im confident that in the days ahead you will see all communities come together.

This sadly is not an isolated incident, for many years commentators, the media, politicians and far right extremists have dehumanised Islam and Muslims, have perpetuated the narrative that Muslims are responsible for the ills of the world and that our lives are not worthy of defence.

He added: We call on Governments around the world to step up security for Mosques and Islamic Centres, the days ahead will be full of mourning and sadness but together as one human family we will prevail.
Students take part in a global school strike for climate change outside the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh (Jane Barlow/PA)

Hundreds of schoolchildren and students have gathered across the country to demand action over climate change.

The strikes of lessons and lectures follow similar days of action already taken around the world this year with Scottish youngsters protesting in at least 21 different locations on Friday.

In Edinburgh an event was staged outside the Scottish Parliament building, while young people in Glasgow descended on George Square chanting for change.

The sun was shining when the youngsters started to arrive at the square at 11am but a heavy downpour came over the protesters an hour later.

Glasgow University student Marianne Mylchreest told the Press Association the weather proved action was needed.

The 20-year-old said: It was sunny five minutes ago and now its raining. If that doesnt tell you something has to be done I dont know what will. Were in Scotland but thats insane.

The youth in Glasgow is really involved in climate change. I saw the big event on Facebook and thought Id come along and support the cause.

I passed here last month when it was on and there was a great crowd and atmosphere so I thought Id come along this month.

Were out here saying that theres not enough being done so were trying to get people to actually make a difference.

Its incredible  schools are coming out, unis are coming out, people that have kids are coming out, theres dogs here, its just great.

Expand Close Protests were planned in 100 towns and cities across the UK (Jane Barlow/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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Many pupils and students of all ages came carrying signs and placards with slogans including There is no Planet B and The climate is changing, why arent we?.

Scottish Greens co-convener Patrick Harvie joined the Glasgow event, telling PA it was amazing to see so many young people here.

He added: A generation of young people who know that theyve been failed on climate change by political parties, by governments, by corporations and they need to put new energy and urgency into this global crisis if were going to have a chance of a solution.

These young people would otherwise have been in their classrooms, getting lessons about their future  theyre not going to have a future unless we radically transform our world and begin living sustainably.

Theres not just one day of climate protests and then we solve it or dont solve it. This is not a deal or no deal situation.

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Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard also joined protesters in George Square to hear the demands of the young people.

Speaking to PA, he said: Clearly all of these young people, some of them as young as primary school children, are here because theyre stirred by this as an issue.

They think that this is an important challenge not just for today but for tomorrow. They want to show that they are not prepared to just sit back and allow other people take decisions about this.

They want to make sure their voices are heard.

Large number of schoolchildren outside the Scottish Parliament this morning calling for action to tackle climate change #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/vv4mWUeMda  Lewis McKenzie (@LewisMcKenzie94) March 15, 2019

Six-year-old Anna Arbuckle said she joined the George Square demonstrators to stop the ice from melting.

Protesting alongside her were older sister Lucy, holding a sign saying This is my future  act now and stop climate change, and Chloe Barker  both aged 10.

Lucy said: The people in power arent taking control of the situation and we need to stop it from happening, otherwise our world will heat up and all the ice will melt and therell be no place for the polar bears and penguins.

I came here last time as well and we saw it on the news, I said to my mum we have to go, were responsible.

Itll be our future, not the leaders of our countrys future, right now.

Asked if she would one day be a future leader of the country, she said: My granny says I will, but Im not sure.
A Turkish Airlines plane travelling from Istanbul to New York encountered severe turbulence just 40 minutes before reaching its destination, with 30 people suffering minor injuries, officials said.



In a statement released by the airline, the Boeing 777 type aircraft, which had taken off from Istanbul with 326 passengers and 18 crew members, landed safely at the airport at 5.35pm Saturday, after experienced the said turbulence.



Twenty-eight passengers onboard and two cabin staff, who had sustained non-life threatening injuries, were taken to the hospital upon the flights landing, for their overall control, it said.



Turkish Airlines said it is deeply saddened by this unfortunate experience, and closely monitors the health status of injured passengers, and is making resources available to them. - TradeArabia News Service


Hungary would respect the result of any vote that could reverse the UKs decision to leave the European Union, according to its Minister of State for EU Policies.

Szabolcs Takacs visited Britain this week to provide Hungarians with clarity over their status in Britain post-Brexit.

The UK was due to depart the EU on March 29 but MPs on Thursday voted to delay the date of exit.

Just had a candid meeting w/ Ben Macpherson, Minister for Europe and Migration of the Scottish Gov't on #Brexit, the rights of Hungarians in Scotland and #migration. HU appreciates the SCOGOVs support to the HU expat community. Full respect to Scottish identity and traditions. pic.twitter.com/21eN8SWwXB  Szabolcs Takacs (@_SzabolcsTakacs) March 15, 2019

A number of MPs and campaigners have called for another vote on EU membership, with the option to remain on the ballot paper.

Mr Takacs told the Press Association on Friday: As we speak today, I dont see a high probability of a new referendum but what is not a probability today might be a possibility tomorrow.

If this is the majority opinion, then we will accept it and we will respect it.

We were not very happy with the result because we enjoyed our partnership with the UK inside the European Union as a full member of the European Union.

British politics in general very much respects constitutional identities, traditions, parliamentarianism, the role of national parliaments in decision-making  also at the European level  and this has been very dear to our hearts.

Thats why for us a country is leaving which is close to us in European policy issues, so in case there is a reverse procedure Hungary will look at it in a constructive manner.

I think we can say that the acquired rights of the European Union citizens, including Hungarians, were guaranteed at a very early stage of the Brexit negotiationsSzabolcs Takacs

Mr Takacs was speaking at the Hungarian Consulate in Edinburgh, which opened in December.

He said it was important to give clarity to Hungarians living in the UK and suggested that even in the event of a disorderly Brexit their rights would still be protected.

I think we can say that the acquired rights of the European Union citizens, including Hungarians, were guaranteed at a very early stage of the Brexit negotiations and its rightly so, he said.

We have to make sure that their life will not suffer any negative consequences just because there was a democratic decision on the referendum on Brexit.

Even if there is a disorderly withdrawal, a scenario we wouldnt like to see in Hungary, there are unilateral political statements by high level representatives of the UK Government, including the Prime Minister, that they will anyway guarantee the acquired rights of those who are already here and who come and stay in the UK before the check-out date.

Mr Takacs added he believes Hungary and Scotland would continue to have close ties when the UK departs the EU.

He said: We see a lot of potential economically in the Hungarian-Scottish cooperation in future.

Culturally, we very much respect and value your traditions, your culture 

I believe that Scotland and the Scottish people, the vast majority of them voted for remain, certainly have a high ambition to stay close to the European Union and the member states, including Hungary.
Police attempt to clear people from outside a mosque in central Christchurch (Mark Baker/AP)

US President Donald Trump has joined other world leaders in condemning the Christchurch terror attack.

He described the atrocity as a horrible massacre and expressed sympathy for the people of New Zealand.

The international reaction to the shooting of dozens of worshippers attending Friday prayers in two mosques has been one of outright condemnation.

In a tweet, Mr Trump wrote: My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques.

49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he was shocked at the terrible attacks.

Mr Sanchez sent condolences to the victims, their families and the government of New Zealand.

Conmocionado por los terribles ataques en Christchurch. Mi pesame y apoyo a las victimas, a sus familias y al Gobierno de Nueva Zelanda. Nuestra rotunda condena a la violencia y la sinrazon de los fanatismos y los extremismos que quieren quebrar nuestras sociedades. https://t.co/TMpHVj5x2o  Pedro Sanchez (@sanchezcastejon) March 15, 2019

Indonesias foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, said: Indonesia strongly condemns this shooting act, especially at a place of worship while a Friday prayer was ongoing.

Indonesia, the worlds biggest Muslim-majority country, said six nationals were inside the mosque when the attack occurred, and two were injured.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims, their families and friends affected by the horrific and unprecedented shooting, including the 2 Indonesian citizens injured in the incident.



There is no place for such acts in New Zealand or anywhere else in the world.  Menteri Luar Negeri Republik Indonesia (@Menlu_RI) March 15, 2019

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the attacks as the latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.

Mr Erdogan said on Twitter: On behalf of my country, I offer my condolences to the Islamic world and the people of New Zealand, who have been targeted by this deplorable act.

On behalf of my country, I offer my condolences to the Islamic world and the people of New Zealand, who have been targeted by this deplorable act - the latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.  Recep Tayyip Erdogan (@RTErdogan) March 15, 2019

Germanys foreign minister said the attacks are a brutal crime that touches everyone.

In two tweets, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Germanys sympathies were with the friends and families of the victims.

Wir sind tief erschuttert von dem brutalen Verbrechen in #Christchurch.



In diesen schweren Stunden stehen wir fest an der Seite unserer neuseelandischen Freunde.



Unser ganzes Mitgefuhl gilt den Familien und Freunden der Opfer. https://t.co/zgdbTZQXQz  Heiko Maas  (@HeikoMaas) March 15, 2019

He said the attack targeted peacefully praying Muslims, adding that if people are murdered solely because of their religion, then it is an attack on all of us.

Der grausame Terroranschlag in #Christchurch trifft friedlich betende Muslime. Wenn Menschen allein wegen ihrer Religion ermordet werden, ist das ein Angriff auf uns alle. Wir stehen zusammen an der Seite der Opfer. Stay strong, New Zealand!  Heiko Maas  (@HeikoMaas) March 15, 2019

Anwar Gargash, the UAEs minister of state for foreign affairs, tweeted heartfelt condolences to New Zealand on Friday.

Mr Gargash wrote: Our collective work against violence & hate must continue with renewed vigor. Our thoughts & prayers are with the families of the victims.

Heartfelt condolences to Gov & people of peaceful New Zeland on terrorist mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch. Our collective work against violence & hate must continue with renewed vigor. Our thoughts & prayers are with the families of the victims.  .   (@AnwarGargash) March 15, 2019

Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan said terrorism does not have a religion.

He added: I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim.

Shocked and strongly condemn the Christchurch, New Zealand, terrorist attack on mosques. This reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families.  Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) March 15, 2019

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim. This has been done deliberately to also demonize legitimate Muslim political struggles. https://t.co/5bBREoayLz  Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) March 15, 2019

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen also tweeted her condolences, saying: Im utterly saddened by the mass shooting in Christchurch, #NewZealand. My thoughts go to the victims & their families.

Im utterly saddened by the mass shooting in Christchurch, #NewZealand. My thoughts go to the victims & their families. https://t.co/Ng36JFL71j   Tsai Ing-wen (@iingwen) March 15, 2019

Swedens Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said she was shocked by the attacks, saying we condemn terrorism in all forms.

Shocked by attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. We condemn terrorism in all forms. My thoughts are with the victims, their families and loved ones.  Margot Wallstrom (@margotwallstrom) March 15, 2019

Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said extremism has again shown its ugly face, adding: Thoughts go out to New Zealand and #Christchurch. We must continue to fight extremism and violence no matter the shape it comes in.
Cross-border fighting between Israel and Gazas ruling Hamas group appears to be winding down amid reports of a truce and Israeli media suggestions that a misfire was responsible for the rocket attack on Tel Aviv that triggered the exchange.

Two rockets struck late on Thursday, taking Israels military by surprise, and overnight Israeli warplanes hit 100 Hamas targets in Gaza.

The army said targets included an office complex in Gaza City used to plan and command Hamas militant activities, an underground complex that served as Hamass main rocket-manufacturing site and a centre used for Hamas drone development.

In Gaza, health officials reported that four people were wounded, including a husband and wife in the southern town of Rafah. The office building struck by Israel had been used by Hamass office of prisoner affairs.

Expand Close An explosion caused by Israeli air strikes on Gaza City (Adel Hana/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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On Friday, Israeli media quoted defence officials as saying a preliminary investigation indicated the rockets were fired by mistake. It was not immediately clear if it was a technical malfunction or human error.

The Haaretz daily quoted the officials as saying the rockets were fired during maintenance work.

Also on Friday, a Hamas official said an agreement to restore calm had been reached. He said Egypt led meditation efforts that have apparently paid off.

The sudden outbreak of violence came at a sensitive time for both sides.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the middle of a tight re-election battle. A tough response would draw international criticism and domestic accusations that he is acting out of political motivations ahead of the April 9 vote, but a restrained response would draw criticism from hardline rivals.

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Hamas is coping with its own domestic troubles. Israel and Egypt have maintained a crippling blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over the territory in 2007. The blockade, along with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and Hamass own mismanagement have fuelled an economic crisis that has driven unemployment over 50%.

Shortly before the rocket attack, Hamas police violently broke up a rare protest by demonstrators angry about dire living conditions in Gaza.

The crackdown triggered heavy criticism on social media. The organisers of a weekly protest along the Israeli border cancelled the demonstration after the escalation.

The fighting came as Egyptian mediators were trying to extend a ceasefire between the bitter enemies, which last fought a war in 2014. The Egyptians left Gaza late on Thursday.

Hamas, which typically claims responsibility for its military actions, denied involvement in the rocket attack on Tel Aviv and even said it had undermined its interests. Israels military said earlier that it held Hamas responsible for all attacks coming from Gaza.

The late-night attack on Tel Aviv, Israels densely populated commercial and cultural capital, marked the first time the city had been hit since a 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants.

Following the first Israeli air strikes, several additional rockets were launched into Israel. The military said several were intercepted by its air defence systems, and there were no reports of injuries.
The wreckage of a Hamas military site hit by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City (Adel Hana/AP)

Israeli warplanes struck some 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.

Rocket fire persisted into the morning, setting the stage for additional possible reprisals.

The army said its targets included an office complex in Gaza City used to plan and command Hamas militant activities, an underground complex that served as Hamass main rocket-manufacturing site, and a centre used for Hamas drone development.

In Gaza, health officials reported four people wounded, including a husband and wife in the southern town of Rafah. There were no further details.

The office building struck by Israel had been used by Hamass office of prisoner affairs.

The sudden outbreak of violence comes at a sensitive time for both sides, and it appeared that Israel and Gazas Hamas rulers had incentives to end the fighting.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the middle of a tight re-election battle.

A tough response would draw international criticism and domestic accusations that he is acting out of political motivations ahead of the April 9 vote. But a restrained response would attract criticism from his fellow hardline rivals.

Hamas, meanwhile, is coping with its own domestic problems.

Israel and Egypt have maintained a crippling blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over the territory in 2007. The blockade, along with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and Hamass own mismanagement, have fueled an economic crisis that has driven unemployment to more than 50%.

Shortly before the rocket attack, Hamas police on Thursday violently broke up a rare protest by demonstrators angry about the dire living conditions in Gaza.

The crackdown triggered heavy criticism on social media, raising the possibility that the rocket fire was a diversionary tactic.

Palestinian media in Gaza said a weekly protest along the Israeli border would take place as usual.

The fighting came as Egyptian mediators were trying to extend a ceasefire between the bitter enemies, which last fought a war in 2014. The Egyptians left Gaza late on Thursday.

Hamas, which typically claims responsibility for its military actions, denied involvement in the rocket attack on Tel Aviv and even said it had undermined its interests. But Israels military said it had concluded the group was behind the attack.

The IDF holds the Hamas terror organisation responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip and emanating from it, the military said in a statement.

The late-night attack on Thursday on Tel Aviv, Israels densely populated commercial and cultural capital, marked a dramatic escalation in hostilities. It was the first time the city had been targeted since a 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants.

Following the first Israeli air strikes, several additional rounds of rocket fire were launched into Israel. The military said several rockets were intercepted by its air defence systems, and there were no reports of injuries.

The initial blasts from the Israeli air strikes in southern Gaza were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 15 miles (25km) to the north. The Israeli warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

Expand Close A Palestinian inspects the damage of destroyed building belonging to the Hamas ministry of prisoners which was hit by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City (Adel Hana/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp A Palestinian inspects the damage of destroyed building belonging to the Hamas ministry of prisoners which was hit by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City (Adel Hana/AP)

Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Despite its denial, Hamas is one of the only groups in Gaza with the means to strike Tel Aviv. A smaller militant group, the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, also possesses a large arsenal of rockets, though it too denied involvement.

Smaller Salafi groups inspired by Islamic State also operate in Gaza, though it is unclear whether they have powerful rockets capable of striking so deep inside Israel.

Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said the army had been caught off guard by Thursday nights rocket barrage and had no advance intelligence.

Israeli Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett, a hardline rival of Mr Netanyahu, called on the prime minister to convene a gathering of his Security Cabinet and demand the army present a plan to defeat Hamas.

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border. Late on Thursday, local media said Egyptian mediators had left the territory.

At the time, Mr Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

I suggest to Hamas, dont count on it, he told his Cabinet. We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general.
The Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Soyuz MS-12 space ship blasts off (Dmitri Lovetsky/AP)

A Russian-American crew of three has blasted off to the International Space Station, making a second attempt to reach the outpost after Octobers aborted launch.

A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying Nasa astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch along with Roscosmoss Alexey Ovchinin, lifted off as planned from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12.14 am Friday (1914 GMT Thursday).

They are set to dock at the space station in about six hours.

On October 11 a Soyuz that Hague and Ovchinin were travelling in failed two minutes into its flight, activating a rescue system that allowed their capsule to land safely.

That accident was the first aborted crew launch for the Russian space programme since 1983, when two Soviet cosmonauts safely jettisoned after a launch pad explosion.
I've written here before about the vile practice of 'upskirting'. Last time, I asked: what kind of grubby little creep sticks his camera phone under an unsuspecting woman's skirt, in the hope of getting images of her private parts? Who would indulge in such a sick, salacious act?

Well, now we have an answer, and a name. Timothy Boomer is a young gentleman from Northern Ireland who was recently found guilty of taking "upskirt" pictures.

Currently aged 18, and living in Wales, Boomer was convicted of five counts of outraging public decency, in relation to videos he took when he was a pupil at Enniskillen Royal Grammar school in Fermanagh.

Other kids might occasionally play truant, or skip detention, or give a bit of lip to the dinner ladies. Fairly low-level stuff. Timothy decided that he was going to secretly and deliberately film the most intimate parts of two of his teachers' bodies.

He's sorry now, he says: "It was a wrong, horrible thing to do, and at that age I stupidly and wrongly thought it was a daredevil prank, which I genuinely meant no harm by."

But Boomer's sordid, personally violating actions did cause harm, dreadful harm, to the women he targeted.

These teachers were in a position of authority over him and he humiliated them in the most disgusting way.

That's not a schoolboy prank, that's criminal misogyny in action.

And that's why I'm glad to learn that Boomer may have to face his teachers again, as part of the sentencing process.

Natural justice demands that instead of leering up their skirts, he should be forced to look them in the eyes as they describe the damaging impact his actions had on them.

But this is more than a morality tale about one young man's sick perversions.

It also tells a story about the sickness at the heart of the entire Northern Ireland political and legal system.

The case took years, and very nearly didn't come to court, because in Northern Ireland - unlike England and Wales - we have no specific laws against the modern crime of upskirting.

When Boomer's verdict was handed down, NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said that the case highlighted "the inadequacy of current laws around sexual harassment" and called for "clear new powers" to make upskirting an offence.

Obviously, an update to the statute book is overdue, but we won't get one because we don't have a legislative Assembly to do the business.

It's yet another example of how society is declining and laws becoming moribund, as the two main parties maintain their outrageously irresponsible stand-off.

Women are suffering in other ways too, even worse ways than having their privacy violated. Last year, the PSNI recorded its highest ever figure for incidents of domestic violence in Northern Ireland in the 12 months leading up to September 2018.

During that time, there were 31,008 domestic abuse incidents recorded.

Those numbers shock me forcibly, every time I read them.

They are almost incomprehensibly huge. And the situation has never been worse: the figure represents an increase of 5.4% on the previous 12 months, making it the highest since records began in 2004/05.

On average, police respond to an incident every 17 minutes. Abused women are having to be turned away from refuges, at times, because there just isn't the space to accommodate them.

Of course, domestic abuse isn't always physical. There are many forms of torture. In England, a 2015 law which criminalised abusive coercion and control of partners was recently tested in the case of Sally Challen, who had been sentenced to life in 2011 for the murder of her husband Richard. Last month she won an appeal against that conviction because of the years of psychological abuse she had allegedly suffered.

Challen's son, David, who fought a fierce campaign to have his mother's name cleared, has called for an urgent update to the law in Northern Ireland, to include coercive control as a crime, thus bringing here in line with the rest of the UK.

The dreadful irony is that we do actually have a new law, the Domestic Abuse Bill, which recognises coercive and controlling behaviour, sitting ready to be signed off by ministers.

Only we don't have any ministers to sign it.

Lives are being wrecked, opportunities squandered, while our so-called leaders look the other way, or trade shots over Brexit and the border.

We have to do better by our long-suffering society than this.
By Daisy K, TwoCircles.net

Even though there exist laws to protect forest dwellers in the country, residents, especially women, continue to face severe forms of harassment at the hands of officials, said women activists from Sonbhadra District of Uttar Pradesh during an event in Mumbai.

They recounted stories of resistance and struggles in their attempts to secure land during an event organised on Wednesday by Citizen of Justice and Peace (CJP), along with All India Union of Forest Working People (AIUFWP). The event saw the participation of women leaders of AIUFWP including Roma Malik, Sokalo Gond, Kismatiya Gond and Rajkumari Bhuiya.

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Speaking on the occasion, Roma Malik traced the struggles for land claims. This struggle is not just for the Adivasis but for the entire civil society. There is no law here in India which talks about the protection of jungles and the protection of peoples livelihoods. The British made all the laws, they looted our jungles and then they bought in the Land Acquisition Act of 1894. After that, they bought in the Indian Forest Act in 1927 and people were then called encroachers of forests.

The Forest department post-independence became one of the biggest landlords in the country by appropriating land through the Gazette of India. This went on from 1947 till the 1970s. After that came the Wildlife Protection Act which began the rhetoric that the people are harmful to the jungles. Further, the entire system of Zamindari dislodged the actual cultivators and caretakers of the land and the jungles, she said. She added that the AIUFWP had reclaimed more than 20,000 hectares of land which is now been collectively cultivated by the women.

Senior activist Sokalo Gond pointed out the importance of collective work in the community. We always come together and cultivate the land, it is not something that the family does on an individual basis. We as a community come together and till the land, she said.

The FWP (Forest Working People) have staked claim to land under The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, known as the FRA. It is applicable to the forest regions across India. Even though the act has been enacted for 12 years, people, especially women, face brutalities at the hands of the police.



Rajkumari Gond, a senior forest rights activist from her community, recalled her arrest in 2015 from her village Lilasi, located about 80-90 kilometres from the Robertsganj district headquarters. The village is a cluster of 300-400 homes. I was taken to jail some 100 Kilometres from my village, I was not allowed to inform anyone about my arrest. I refused to eat any food which they provided me, this was our struggle, I could still feel a sense of power, I never lost my faith, she said.

The activists added that many villagers have been implicated under the cases of cutting trees under the FRA wherein, the Act, which was a form of protection, has now also been utilised to victimise the people who are staking claim to the land. Teesta Setalvad, who is part of the NGO Citizens for Justice and Peace, said they have been working on a project called Jail Ke Pare which deals with the treatment meted out to the prisoners in women.



Sukalo Gond further spoke about the arrests and attack by the police in her village. The state took away our land which was taken care of by our forefathers, we are here to seize the land which they have captured. We have built a school in our village and whatever the land we have been able to seize back from the Forest Department, we have named it as Birsa Nagar after Birsa Munda.
Officers inspect the scene where two suspected drug dealers were killed during a police operation in Manila, Nov. 17, 2016.

Rights advocates and Philippine opposition figures on Friday criticized President Rodrigo Duterte for releasing names on a drug-watch list, including those of politicians, and described the leaders move as a veritable hitlist ahead of mid-term elections in May.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said the presidents list was clearly meant to weaken the chances of candidates. The Philippines is to elect half of the 24-member Senate, more than 250 congressmen and thousands of governors, mayors and other local officials in polls scheduled for May 13.

Carlos Conde, HRWs Philippine researcher, accused Duterte of trying to pull off an outrageous attempt to influence the mid-term polls.

More critically, its a veritable hit list in his drug war as past politicians accused of drug involvement all too often end up being shot dead by the police, Conde said in a statement.

Dutertes list deprives those named of due process and the presumption of innocence. If the government really has evidence against them, they should be arrested, charged and tried, not be the target of administrative cases by an agency  the interior department  that is under the office of the president, he added.

Drug enforcement officials said Duterte had more than 80 names on his list, but the president only named around half of them during a speech in southern Davao City on Thursday night.

He ordered anti-money laundering officials to investigate the names as well as file administrative cases against those whom he named.

Since my assumption in 2016, I have committed to eradicate the drug problem. I have done that. My decision to unmask these drug personalities was anchored on my trust in the government agencies who have vetted and validated the narco-list, Duterte said in his speech, according to the Manila Times.

The names of 35 mayors, seven vice mayors, one provincial board member and three congressmen appeared on the list, the Philippine Star reported.

Several Filipino mayors whom Duterte had named as drug suspects on a list that he had publicized earlier in his presidency ended up being shot and killed.

In a report it published in January, Human Rights Watch said that the Duterte governments war on illegal drugs had expanded to areas outside Manila in 2018, including the nearby suburbs of Bulacan, Laguna, Cavite, and the cities of Cebu and General Santos in the central and southern Philippines.

Conde accused Duterte of weaponizing the drug war to target opposition politicians. The move undermines the rule of law, Conde said.

Public shaming

Gary Alejano, a member of the House of Representatives who is running for the Senate in May, said Duterte was abusing his power.

If the administration has solid evidence, then file appropriate charges and let them roll in the courts. The problem is, time and again, the list have been proven inaccurate, and even the president himself admitted to this, Alejano told reporters.

He said the public shaming was meant to intimidate and control the local politicians in the coming polls.

This is also a mere show of bravado to make the people believe that the war on drugs is working. It is not, said Alejano, a former Marine captain and a close ally of outgoing Sen. Antonio Trillanes, one of the staunchest critics of Dutertes drug war.

Human rights lawyer Chel Diokno, who is also seeking a seat in the Senate, cast doubt on the list, stressing that the first list that Duterte had released contained some erroneous names.

There are still many drug lords on the loose, while ordinary Filipinos are wrongly accused, placed under suspicion or killed, Diokno said. This is not just.

Diokno was apparently referring to the first list of 150 names that Duterte released shortly after becoming president in 2016. That list included the names of judges, mayors, police and military officers.

But one of the justices that was named there, turned out to be long dead, a mistake that the president did not directly address although he had acknowledged then that errors could have been made.

Duterte, however, has never said where he got the information on which his lists were compiled.

Recently, in a series of speeches, the president also claimed that drug addicts in the Philippines now numbered between seven million and eight million  a staggering figure that even the countrys police chief said he could not verify.

Since Duterte became president in 2016, more than 5,000 suspected addicts and dealers have been killed in police operations. But the figure could be higher, with HRW saying that the figure could be more than 20,000.
Moncks Corner, SC (29461)

Today

Considerable cloudiness. High 66F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable.
Candace Owens, center, listens as President Donald Trump speaks at the 2018 Young Black Leadership Summit in the East Room of the White House, Friday, Oct. 26, 2018, in Washington. (AP Archive)

The person who has influenced me above all is Candace Owens. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped me push further and further into the belief of violence over meekness, Brenton Tarrant wrote in a manifesto he published on Facebook before committing a massacre against Muslims.

At least 49 people have been killed and over a dozen others were seriously injured after terror attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, said New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, terming it a 'terrorist attack'.

Police said they took three men and woman into custody after the incident, without specifying they detained but said none had been on any watchlist.

Tarrant who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack.

And he pointed out Candace Owens as one of his main inspirations.

But who is Owens and how did she inspire a terror attack?

Who is Candace Owens?

Candace Owens is a popular 29-year-old American right-wing commentator with over 1.1 million followers on Twitter.

She has repeatedly drawn criticism over her controversial statements on politics.

Owens, an African-American political activist, is the founder of the Blexit movement that calls for all black people to stop supporting the Democratic Party in the United States.

She is one of the few prominent black figures to openly support President Donald Trump who has several times been described as the most racist president in modern American history, including by his party members.

Her Blexit movements biggest win to date has been through the support of rapper Kanye West, a self-proclaimed supporter of Trump and who has said he likes how Owens thinks,

Owens and West no longer share the same views after a dispute over a T-shirt design that with a Blexit slogan.

Owens promoted the T-shirt as a Kanye West design, but West denied having anything to do with it.

My eyes are now wide open and now realize Ive been used to spread messages I dont believe in. I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative !!!, West wrote in a tweet when he announced he wouldnt be part of the political movement.

Her statements on nationalism are some the most discussed and recently she used Hitler in a metaphor.

When we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a national socialist. If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine, Owens said last month.

Her statement drew condemnation, which forced her to apologise for using Hitler as metaphor.

However, it wasnt the first time Owens mentioned authoritarian dictators.

She has used Twitter to quote Libyas former leader Muammar Gaddafi who once said Europe would turn into a Muslim continent within decades giving the number of Muslims living there.

The number of Muslims living within Europe was also a key point in the 74-page manifesto of New Zealand shooter Brenton Tarrant.

You [Muslims] can live in peace in your own lands, and may no harm come to you on the east side of the Bosphorus. But if you [Muslims] live attempt to live European lands, anywhere west of the Bosphorus, we will kill you and drive you roaches from our lands, Tarrant wrote.

Following the reports that Owens inspired him for his actions, she laughed and threatened legal action against media.

Source: TRTWorld and agencies
TCN News

Al-Ghazali International School was inaugurated with all pomp and show at Karbala Maidan, the heart of Araria city of Bihar on March 14, 2014. The program was presided over by Maulana Tauqir Ahmad Qasmi, head of department of English Language and Literature, Darul Uloom Deoband. Head of Markaz Group of 40-School and Education department of Markazul Maarif, Hojai Assam Dr. Razi Ahmad Qasmi and Dr. Hifzur Rahman Qasmi of Jawaharlal Nehru University graced the occasion with their presence as chief guest and the guest of honor respectively.

Maulana Mudassir Ahmad Qasmi, director Al-Ghazali International School welcomed the guests and informed the audience that the school aims at providing quality education to both male and female students in an Islamic atmosphere. It has also therefore prepared to provide separate hostels and classrooms to girls and boys. Explaining the aims and objectives of the school, chairman Shahjahan Nadvi said: Al-Ghazali International School has prepared its own syllabus which comprises both religious and contemporary sciences. This syllabus will enable the students to either attend madrasa or dini maktab for acquiring religious knowledge. The school has especially prepared Tahfeezul Quran program for the intelligent and eligible students in the second shift. Highlighting the underlying concept of the school, he said: The school aims at providing doctors, engineers, bureaucrats and professors to the nation with the Holy Quran in their hearts so that they can play a positive and constructive role in nation and community building. Emphasizing on female education, the principal of the school Miss Tasneem Kausar said: If there is no balance in male and female education in a society, it cannot be said to be a developed society. It is therefore essential to pay equal attention to education of girls, so that our society becomes truly developed.

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In his presidential address, Maulana Tauqir Ahmad Qasmi emphasized on the need of education and told that the community which has a teacher/ guide like Prophet Muhammad (saws) cannot lag behind in education. If Muslims are left behind in the field of education, it is a matter of utmost concern.The history bears witness that education does not guarantee only religious success, but also is a great means of acquiring worldly prosperity.

The chief guest Dr Razi Ahmad Qasmi appealed to the audience in his address that they need to make sacrifices for educational revolution. Muslims should minimize their daily needs and equip their children with higher education. Highlighting the importance of education, the guest of honour Dr. Hifzur Rahman Qasmi said: This world is always ruled by the community or group of people which has the quality of leadership, and the quality of standard leadership can be attained only through education. So, if the Muslims want to regain their lost glory, they will have to give first priority to education.

The important point to note here is that the school has been launched in the Seemanchal area of Bihar which always remains in the spot light of the media due to different reasons. The television anchors and the political leaders always talk of this region with regard to poverty, illiteracy and natural calamities that are part of this area. But there are a few persons who genuinely think of ways to cope with the problem and uplift the region with all-around development. In this scenario, the establishment of Al-Ghazali International School is considered to be a highly significant initiative.

The guests formally launched the school van, computer lab, office, classrooms and hostels. A large number of aspiring students also got enrolled in presence of the guests. The program was attended by a large number of male and female audience; especially Maulana Faiyaz Alama Nadvi, Syed Shamim Anwar, Master Asrarul Hasan and Arshad Anwar were among those who addressed the program. The program began with recitation of the Quran by Maulana Aftab Alama Mazahiri, the patron of the school. Afifah Sadiyah recited the Naat while the famous announcer and poet Haroon Rashid Ghafil shouldered the responsibility of anchoring.
For Immediate Release, March 15, 2019 Contacts: Steve Holmer, American Bird Conservancy, (202) 888-7490, sholmer@abcbirds.org

Patrick Donnelly, Center for Biological Diversity, (702) 483-0449, pdonnelly@biologicaldiversity.org

Laura Cunningham, Western Watersheds Project, (775) 513-1280, lcunningham@westernwatersheds.org

Taylor Jones, WildEarth Guardians, (720) 443-2616, tjones@wildearthguardians.org Motion Filed to Defend Bi-state Sage Grouse From Off-roaders' Lawsuit RENO, Nev. Four conservation groups filed a motion today to intervene in a lawsuit from off-road vehicle groups who object to protection for the bi-state sage grouse in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. The protections require buffers and seasonal limits to racing in the birds habitat. The Sierra Trail Dogs hold a 250-mile dirt bike rally through some of the best remaining sage-grouse habitat in the Mono Basin region. They object to shifting the event from June to July to comply with protections the Forest Service added after it reviewed new scientific information about the birds habitat requirements. Conservation groups say the additional protective measures are critical to the survival of the species. The restrictions that the Forest Service put in place are needed to prevent the extinction of the bi-state sage grouse, said Steve Holmer of the American Bird Conservancy. The lawsuit is quibbling about six extra weeks of closure and an extra mile of buffer that protects the bird during breeding season. This was part of a settlement negotiation concerning the continued existence of a highly imperiled species, and we are fighting to uphold the agreement and protect this habitat. The bi-state sage grouse of the Mono Basin on the California-Nevada border are genetically isolated from the larger population of greater sage grouse and are designated a distinct population segment. Sage grouse will abandon nesting habitats and breeding grounds, known as leks, if they are disturbed. Human activities like livestock grazing, development and off-road vehicle use stress the birds and could negatively impact important breeding periods. The Forest Service did the right thing by strengthening sage-grouse protections under the Humboldt-Toiyabe plan, said Taylor Jones, endangered species advocate for WildEarth Guardians. We want to defend the grouse and the Forest Service from the selfish interests of a user group that is showing a prominent lack of respect for the native wildlife. In response to science brought forward by conservationists during the planning process, the Forest Service expanded lek buffers to four miles and expanded seasonal moratoriums on off-road vehicle contests to include the entire breeding and nesting period. These conservation measures are essential to the survival of these beautiful birds, said Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Bi-state sage grouse are teetering on the brink of extinction across much of their range. Sage grouse are crucial to our precious Great Basin ecosystems and the hundreds of plants and animals that depend on them. Well do everything we can to protect them. All but one bi-state sage-grouse population management units have been declining, and the Pine Nut Mountains population has been crashing in the last two years. Running a motorcycle race through this imperiled birds habitat during the lekking season would only add to threats that are pushing this population over the cliff, said Laura Cunningham, California director for Western Watersheds Project. The groups that filed todays motion to intervene in the lawsuit are the American Bird Conservancy, the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project and WildEarth Guardians. They are represented by Mills Legal Clinic at Stanford Law School.


For Immediate Release, March 15, 2019 Contacts: Greta Anderson, Western Watersheds Project, (520) 623-1878, greta@westernwatersheds.org

Randi Spivak, Center for Biological Diversity, (310) 779-4894, rspivak@biologicaldiversity.org

Taylor Jones, WildEarth Guardians, (720) 443-2616, tjones@wildearthguardians.org

Steve Holmer, American Bird Conservancy, (202) 888-7490, sholmer@abcbirds.org Trump Administration Slashes Sage Grouse Protections Final Plans Will Open Imperiled Birds' Habitat to Drilling, Fracking BOISE, Idaho The Trump administration released final land-management plans today that wipe out critical protections for imperiled greater sage grouse in seven western states. The new plans  covering millions of acres of public land in Colorado, northeastern California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming  allow enormous new loopholes for fossil-fuel development that conservation groups say will doom the bird to extinction.



The new plans will allow sage grouse habitat needs to be overlooked and ignored whenever industry wants to site a new oil well, create a new road or build new fences, said Greta Anderson of Western Watersheds Project. They undercut what few protections already exist and do nothing to conserve this iconic bird. The new Bureau of Land Management plans unravel greater sage-grouse protections approved in 2015 by western states and federal officials. That Obama-era agreement was intended to reverse the birds decline and prevent the need to list it as endangered. Among other things, the new plans will allow the BLM to lease hundreds of thousands of acres of high-priority sage-grouse habitat for oil and gas drilling. They also eliminate science-based habitat standards for grazing in sage-grouse habitat and make it easier for BLM officials to waive protective buffers around sage-grouse mating and nesting areas, called leks. This could drive the greater sage grouse to extinction and forever damage the American West, said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Trump and former oil lobbyist David Bernhardt are blatantly rigging the system to benefit oil and gas operators. This will spell disaster for the vanishing sage grouse and for hundreds of species that depend on unspoiled public land. The greater sage grouse is under threat because it is intensely loyal to particular areas, reliant on large expanses of intact sagebrush, and especially sensitive to disturbance and habitat fragmentation. Protecting the grouse and its habitat benefits a host of other species that depend on the Sagebrush Sea ecosystem, including pronghorn, elk, mule deer, golden eagle, native trout and nearly 200 migratory and resident bird species. In 2015 many people wanted to believe that the Obama-era plans were enough to save the sage grouse, said Taylor Jones, endangered species advocate at WildEarth Guardians. But the wiggle room and discretion built into these plans made their implementation subject to the influence of industry. Now even the tentative measures of buffer distances and disturbance boundaries are subject to change. The changes finalized today amount to a systematic undermining of some of the most important safeguards in the 2015 BLM sage grouse plans. These include: Opening 225,000 formerly protected acres of public land in Colorado to new oil and gas leasing;

Eliminating requirements to prioritize oil and gas development outside of sage grouse habitat on 4 million acres of public land in Utah;

Eliminating or weakening requirements to prioritize oil and gas development outside of sage grouse habitat from 26.2 million acres of habitat in Wyoming, the birds last, best stronghold;

Removing specific management requirements for livestock grazing and downplaying the impacts this land use has on the species. The Trump administration began dismantling these restrictions as soon as it could, removing each layer of conservation management the Obama-era plans and mitigation policies provided, said Steve Holmer of American Bird Conservancy. Now grouse populations are in decline across the range and have nearly disappeared from the Washington State and the Dakotas. The trend is ominous. Background

As many as 16 million greater sage grouse once ranged across 297 million acres of sagebrush grasslands, a vast area of western North America known as the Sagebrush Sea. Over the past 200 years, agriculture, oil and gas drilling, livestock grazing and development have reduced the grouses range by nearly half, and sage grouse populations have steadily declined. Today sage grouse are found in 11 western states: California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The BLM is responsible for managing about half of the remaining sage grouse habitat. After years of inaction and prompted by a 2011 decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the bird for protection under the Endangered Species Act, the BLM initiated sage grouse protection planning. This unprecedented five-year effort, led by the Department of the Interior, resulted in land-use plans with new measures to protect the bird. The Fish and Wildlife Service's decision not to list the greater sage grouse as endangered was predicated on the assumption that the public land management plans would be implemented and would reverse the decline of the grouse.
ECHAs Committee for Socio-economic Analysis (SEAC) adopted its final opinion supporting the proposal by Denmark, Italy, Norway and ECHA to restrict the placing on the market of tattoo inks and permanent make-up. Substances within the scope of the restriction include carcinogenic, mutagenic and reprotoxic (CMR) substances, skin sensitisers or irritants, substances corrosive or damaging to the eye, metals as well as other substances regulated in cosmetic products.



The proposal includes concentration limits for the substances within its scope. The aim of the restriction is to make inks for tattooing safer and protect people from serious health problems or effects.



SEAC concluded that the proposed restriction is the most appropriate measure to control the risks posed by these substances, and that it is proportionate to the risk because it will bring significant benefits to society (i.e. avoided adverse skin effects and other health impacts), while not imposing significant economic impacts on supply chains. Suppliers of tattoo inks may have to reformulate their inks within 12 months of the restriction entering into effect.



Following SEACs adoption of its final opinion, according to the procedure envisaged in the REACH Regulation, the opinions of RAC and SEAC will be forwarded to the European Commission for a draft regulation and possible amendment of Annex XVII to REACH. If the restriction is adopted in its currently proposed format, the requirements for tattoo inks and permament make-up will enter into effect one year after their publication of the measure in the Official Journal of the European Union. However, further changes during the subsequent steps are still possible.




Garvan researchers have made it possible to do genomic analysis on a smartphone. The new technology can analyze data obtained through commercially available sequencers, such as the Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION sequencer (pictured).

The ability to read the genome - all the DNA of an organism - has vast potential to understand human health and disease.

Researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and UNSW Sydney have published a method to take genome analysis 'offline', by adapting a computer algorithm that can perform accurate analysis - with far less computer memory than current programs. The scientists' algorithm may make it possible to identify infectious diseases in remote locations, or at the hospital bedside, using the computational memory of devices as small as a smartphone. They published their findings in Scientific Reports .

Genomics without borders

Devices that can sequence entire genomes, such as the Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION sequencers, are small enough today to clip onto a smartphone - and have already been used to track the Ebola virus in New Guinea and the Zika virus in Brazil.

Such devices are able to create over a terabyte of data in 48 hours, but their use has been limited, because comparing or 'aligning' the DNA from an unknown sample to a reference database of known genomes is computationally intensive. Until now, this process was only possible with either high performance computer workstations or an internet connection.

Now, Dr Martin Smith, Team Leader of Genomic Technologies at the Garvan Institute's Kinghorn Centre for Clinical Genomics, and his team have published a computational method for how to reduce the amount of memory necessary to align genomic sequences from 16GB to 2GB, making it possible for analysis to be done on-the-spot, using the memory available in a typical smartphone.

"We're focused on making genomic technologies more accessible to improve human health. They're becoming smaller, but still need to function in remote areas, so we created a method that can analyse genomic data, in real time, on just a mobile device," explains Dr Smith.

Divide and conquer

The team adapted the Minimap2 program, which aligns DNA sequencing 'reads' to a reference library of known genomes. The reference library is usually sorted, or indexed, which helps quickly map the sequencing reads to their corresponding positions in a reference genome.

"The challenge, so far, has been that the reference index requires too much computer memory," explains Dr Smith. "We took the approach of splitting the reference library up into smaller segments, against which we mapped the DNA reads. Once we finished mapping to the smaller segments, we pool results together and tease out the noise, much like creating a panorama by stitching together smaller photos."

"Other algorithms, which take a similar approach of splitting up the reference data, produce a lot of spurious and duplicate mappings - just like overlapping photos in the panorama. What we did in this study was fine-tune parameters and select the best mappings across several small indexes. This approach gave us similar accuracy as current standard genomic analyses, which previously required the memory available in high performance computers," says Dr Smith.

Dr Smith's team compared the accuracy of their algorithm to standard genomics workflows. Not only did their results reproduce 99.98% of the alignments, but by using the smaller index segments the team could map an additional 1% of sequencing reads.

Dr Smith is optimistic about his technology. "The potential of lightweight, portable genomic analysis is vast - we hope that this technology will one day be applied in the context of point-of-care microbial infections in remote regions, or in doctors' hands at the hospital bedside," says Dr Smith.
Corin's strategy is to revolutionize orthopedics by gaining, understanding and sharing insight at every stage of the joint replacement experience

Orthopedic company Corin Group ("Corin"), backed by the Permira funds, has acquired the US-based OMNI Orthopedics ("OMNI"), a pioneer in robotic-assisted total knee replacement. It is further evidence of Permira and their co-investors' determination to accelerate Corin's strong organic growth with a focused M&A strategy.

Founded in 1999 by a team of medical device engineers, OMNI is now at the forefront of robotic-assisted knee replacement. Their OMNIBotics is a unique imageless total knee replacement solution which combines a robotic cutting guide with the world's first robotic tool to measure ligament function. The system allows tailoring of the implant positioning to each individual patient, resulting in less patient pain and faster rehabilitation.

Corin's strategy is to revolutionize orthopedics by gaining, understanding and sharing insight at every stage of the joint replacement experience and delivering clinically proven implants which are optimized by unique procedural technologies. OMNIBotics, combined with APEX knee replacement, accelerates Corin's strategy.

Corin is creating a connected digital ecosystem that combines biomechanical, physiological and logistical information to generate insight; this ecosystem will empower patients throughout their treatment journey and support surgeons to improve patient outcomes and maximize value for the healthcare system. This is Connected Orthopaedic Insight.
The platform will focus on promoting translational research to convert nanobiotechnology research to practical applications

The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and the TERI-Deakin Nanobiotechnology Centre (TDNBC) have set up Nanobiotech@DBT. This platform will bring together the nanobiotechnology community and translate lab-based research into practical applications that benefit society.

On the occasion, Dr Ajay Mathur, Director General, TERI, said, The idea is to convert research into scalable ideas that lead to the kinds of applications that farmers, doctors and others in allied areas need.

Dr Alok Adholeya, Senior Director, Sustainable Agriculture division, TERI, added, This platform is one of the key steps in bringing the nanobiotechnology community together to collaborate and share resources, information, knowledge, facilities, ideas, and infrastructure to create impactful and strategy driven research.

TDNBC, which is implementing the Nanobiotech@DBT platform, will provide support from ideation to conceptualisation, implementation, incubation, and commercialisation. The platform will utilise both physical and virtual platforms for researchers and stakeholders to connect. It will be the first of its kind platform to bring all nanobiotechnology related research to a common platform and provide regular online updates on the DBTs nanobiotechnology supported projects, nano-biocommunity, facilities and infrastructure, and related information and links.

It will focus on five key areas of (i) Diagnostics & Imaging (ii) Nanomedicine & Therapeutics (iii) Delivery Vehicle (iv) Nanoenabled Systems & Devices; and (v) Agriculture, environment, nanotoxicology.

Dr Renu Swarup, Secretary, DBT, spoke about the platform at the International workshop on Disruptive Translational Research in Nano-biotechnology: Advancing Sustainable Food Systems and Human Health Solutions in India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on Wednesday. The workshop was organised by Deakin University, Australia, in association with TERI and DBT.

Translational research requires human resource, expenditure, deep domain research experience, and a whole ecosystem. Currently, there is a gap in translational research that we need to plug. Research is not getting translated into products. TDNBC, with its vast experience, is in a great place to do this, Dr Swarup added.

Stressing on the importance of regulation in product development, she added, The DBT has made efforts and prepared guidelines for the pharmaceutical sector. TERI and other partners could do the same for agriculture sector. This will benefit not just regulators, but also innovators and the industry at large.

Speaking on the Indo-Australian collaboration of TERI and Deakin University, she said, We have to take partnership in this field beyond India and Australia. Going forward, it should be opened up to neighbouring countries. There are large opportunities for the Centre to provide leadership for research, capacity building, and innovation in translational research in the region.

Rakesh Kapur, Joint Managing Director, Indian Farmers Fertilisers Cooperative Ltd, and a member of the governing board of TDNBC, delivered the guest of honour address at the event. He stressed that research has to be of use to the industry.

As compared to conventional fertilisers, 20 per cent less nanofertilisers are required to be applied. With nanobiotechnology, there will be rapid disruptive change in the usage of fertilisers, he said.

At the workshop, Dr Adholeya also announced a collaboration with Aurea Systems, Germany, to launch TERIs mycorrhiza products in India. Aurea has been marketing the product in North America and Europe and is set to enter the Indian market with this collaboration. Mycorrhiza is a biofertiliser that has the potential to reduce the use of chemical fertilisers globally by nearly 50 per cent.

John Stanhope AM, Chancellor, Deakin University said, Nanobiotechnology has opportunities in agriculture, health, food, and environment. When industries and research come together, they make a powerful team.

A collaboration between TERI and Osho Resources India for bioreclamation of fly ash dumps, coal and coal waste dumps, and Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) was also announced.
The announcement of an MHM was made against the backdrop of an engaging and thought-provoking series of panel discussions at the inaugural edition of The Force Beyond, a philanthropic effort by the Tata Trusts, to create a level playing field for women.

Under the Tata Water Mission umbrella, the Tata Trusts has announced its intervention into Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) in the rural areas of Karnataka, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.

Since 2015, the Trusts Tata Water Mission has been working among rural communities for improved access to safe, assured, and adequate drinking water, improved environmental sanitation and hygiene facilities.

Divyang Waghela, Head, Tata Water Mission, The Tata Trusts, said, Behaviour change is our primary objective with regard to hygienic menstrual practices in an environment that supports menstruation. In addition to the trainings delivered, we will facilitate women federations and local social entrepreneurs to establish supply chain mechanism to provide options of a range of products, preferably environment friendly products. Normalizing conversations on menstruation in all spheres helps create a platform to provide comprehensive information, safe products, and infrastructure. It is essential to streamline efforts and messaging related to normalizing menstruation and reach out to influencers at all levels from families to policy makers to shift the conversations on menstruation from impurity and shame to normal and healthy.

The announcement of an MHM was made against the backdrop of an engaging and thought-provoking series of panel discussions at the inaugural edition of The Force Beyond, a philanthropic effort by the Tata Trusts, to create a level playing field for women. The gathering brought to the fore the unwavering and inimitable force of women with messages of hope and encouragement to inspire more people to become Champions of Change.

The MHM programme has been split into two parts - school interventions and community interventions:

The community interventions will see sessions being delivered to menstruating women up till the age of 55.

In schools, adolescent girls from Class VI to Class XII, will have school modules delivered over 4 sessions, building capacities of peer mentors and teachers who in turn ensure sustainability within the school in the coming years.

Additionally, boys from Class VIII upwards will be made aware of subjects such as the reproductive cycle (male & female) and how to provide a supportive socio-cultural environment for their mothers and sisters.

The Tata Trusts will train community members and young girls to become Community Resource Person(s) to implement the community and school programmes respectively. The Trusts have partnered with organizations such as Sukhibhava, Bangalore and Jatan Designs, Rajasthan for providing technical support.

The Tata Trusts will also partner with Government authorities, local stakeholders and like-minded entities addressing all aspects of the MHM value chain; by ensuring sustainability through building capacities of front-line workers.
The M&C Saatchi Group has announced that Jerry Mpufane, chairman of the diversified marketing agency's Johannesburg Group, is departing for New York. He will be taking up the position of Hub Head in the Americas for SA Tourism.

Mpufane shared: It is a privilege to get the opportunity to fly the South African flag, and to join the efforts of positioning our country as a fantastic holiday destination for the people of the Americas. I believe that the past few years in advertising agency executive management have prepared me for this very important role. I am eternally grateful for an experience filled with great success at M&C Saatchi Abel, an agency that is led by some of the best talent in our country, who work on some of the most sought-after client brands.At the M&C Saatchi Group, he leaves behind a powerful and cohesive Johannesburg leadership team of immense depth and breadth, ably spearheaded by the Groups Chief Creative Officer, Neo Mashigo, and supported by senior partners like Makosha Maja-Rasethaba, Head of Strategy, and Adam Weber, Executive Creative Director. The Groups national Partner Model also means that co-founders and senior executives work weekly across the Cape Town and Johannesburg agencies to ensure sustained growth and the continual creation of compelling advertising and marketing solutions underpinned by the agencys founding principle of Brutal Simplicity of Thought.Mike Abel, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of the M&C Saatchi Group (Africa), said: Jerry has made an enormous contribution to growing our Group in Johannesburg over the past five years. He has seen in the arrival of many wonderful partner businesses, amazing clients and has attracted lots of incredible talent. He leaves our company stronger and broader and I want to thank him for his enormous contribution.For more information, visit www.mcsaatchiabel.co.za
I had a patient last year, a four-year-old boy, with a type of cancer called neuroblastoma. After initial treatment, the cancer came back, growing in the confined space between his spine and stomach, causing unbearable pain. His mother was a police officer; a strong, stoical woman who had seen a lot, but she was struggling.

Many children in South Africa are in pain because they do cannot access palliative care medicines. Photo: Flickr user John Campbell (public domain)

Plan never implemented

Specialist palliative health care teams and beds in all major hospitals and district hospitals.

The Essential Drug List to include up-to-date palliative care drugs and to make them available to all patients who needed them.

Palliative care training for all healthcare officials, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social workers and clergy.

Practical steps government can take now

After several weeks, using every available drug, including numbing him from the waist down, I managed to get the pain under control, and he died a peaceful death.A month ago, a colleague in Durban asked for advice on managing a similar case. She didnt have access to half the drugs I had (at Red Cross Hospital in Cape Town) and the nurses were refusing to administer even those that were available because they hadnt been trained how to use them. The child died in excruciating pain.The difference between my patients relatively good death and the nightmare one of the Durban child is access to proper pain relief within an effective paediatric palliative care system.There are only a few places in South Africa offering proper pain relief, despite the fact that at least a million children are dying from  or living with  incurable conditions. Frustratingly, efforts to remedy this unacceptable situation have ground to a halt.In 2010, the Hospice Palliative Care Association of South Africa (HPCA) initiated an alliance that hospices, professionals working in palliative care, academics and some officials from the Department of Health. A draft policy was created but never implemented.A turning point came in 2014 when South Africa co-sponsored a resolution at the World Health Assembly in Geneva which called on all member countries to integrate palliative care into the hospitals and community care structures. A section of the resolution highlighted the need for policy-making that was tailored towards the needs of children.We heard nothing from government until July 2016 when the Health Minister, Aaron Motsaoledi, appointed a 12-member steering committee to develop a palliative care policy. I was invited to represent paediatric palliative care. The policy was approved by the National Health Council in 2017 and by 2018, we had developed an implementation plan. It was quite an ambitious plan, which included:However, it seems that the plan is not being implemented because of financial constraints. A budget was created but not approved or allocated.We showed that palliative care is cost-effective. The problem with medicine is that we are so cure-focused that we are stumped if we cant cure a patient. Palliative care comes in at that point  even if we cant cure, we can manage pain and distressing symptoms. With the proper support, patients can be cared for at home and in the community. With proper counselling, the family of a patient with an incurable condition can accept it early on, avoiding unnecessary, futile interventions. We have patients all across the country being admitted to intensive care units when we should call it quits beforehand and support the family through that end phase.In an attempt to regain momentum, we have called a public meeting in Johannesburg on 18 March which will include all stakeholders in paediatric palliative care from both government and the NGO sector.We hope to emerge with achievable goals. If the national policy is not affordable, what can practically be done in the short term?We could look at how to make drugs more available. We could train people already on the ground to use those drugs. We could train social workers to better support families.We should also extend the Care Dependency Grant. This is a grant to families with very sick children: it funds travel to doctor appointments and to fetch medication, as well anything else the child might need such as more nappies or formula.Currently, the grant is terminated in the month of the childs death. Yet we see so many cases where a single mother has had to give up her job to care for the child and has been relying on the grant and suddenly she is left destitute. Would it not be possible to extend the grant by three months so that she can get back on her feet and feed her family again?Another problem is access to up-to-date pain relief. Many pain drugs we use for children are off licence, which means that insufficient studies have been done to see if they are safe in children. This poses an ethical dilemma as you dont often get consent to do studies on these very vulnerable children. So a lot of prescriptions are based on expert opinion.While South Africas Essentials Medicine Committee has agreed to include some drugs for the management of symptoms other than pain in the Essential Drugs List where the only available evidence is expert opinion, this still leaves us without certain medications that are being used internationally by paediatricians to manage difficult pain in children.If that rule were lifted, ordeals such as that suffered by the little Durban girl would be averted overnight.
Directives recently issued by the national and Gauteng health departments requiring foreign nationals to pay in full for healthcare at public facilities weren't only a threat to public health, they may have been downright illegal.

People queue in makeshift camps following past threats of xenophobic attacks in South Africa. Today, rescinded health department memos requesting foreigners pay in full for healthcare have sparked a national debate. (Fredrik Lemeryd)

Who is entitled to free healthcare in South Africa?

Everyone is entitled to free primary health care services at government facilities. This means that clinics are free to all;

All women are entitled to free abortion at government facilities. Under South African law, anyone can terminate a pregnancy up until 12 weeks for whatever reasons and between 13 and 20 weeks if the pregnancy endangers the woman's mental, physical or socioeconomic health;

All pregnant and breastfeeding women and children under the age of six are eligible for free health care services at public clinics or hospitals.

What health services do foreigners pay for?

What do you need to know?

Walk into a public hospital, and you may be asked to fill out a form stating just how much you earn. Thats because many services in the public sector are billed for on a sliding scale based on a means test: You pay what you can for the treatment you need. At least in theory.In mid-January, a national health department circular reportedly instructed clinics and hospitals to begin billing foreign nationals the full rate for public health services. Low-income refugees, the memo said, would be the sole exception and would be means tested,reported.Only Gauteng passed these instructions onto its clinics and hospitals, specifying that all non-South Africans other than documented refugees should be charged full fees for all services including emergency treatment, maternity care and basic health services. The national health department has now said that the circular should have never gone out.Speaking to, Gauteng Health MEC Gwen Ramokgopa said the province had aligned itself with national policies but had withdrawn its circular to public facilities.As a public interest law organisation, we believe that Gautengs circular was unlawful in that it had the potential to withhold previously available services from patients, contravened the National Health Act and could have led to violations of peoples constitutional rights. It also threatened to derail progress towards HIV targets contained in the countrys latest national plan that require 90% of all people to know their HIV status and 90% of those to be on antiretrovirals.Section 27 of the Constitution says that everyone has a right to have access to health care services, including reproductive health care services and that no one may be denied emergency medical treatment.What does this mean? Heres a break down of who is entitled to what in South Africas public sector.Section 4(3) of the National Health Act provides for certain free health care services for people who dont have medical aid. It does not limit access to these services based on nationality or immigration status, meaning that these services are available to all, South African and not; documented and not.It says:Until a health minister publishes conditions to the contrary, this is the law that applies. In the future, if this happens, a health minister wont just be able to impose whatever conditions they like. Theyll have to show their proposals take into account the free services already available and how changes would impact access to health care services and the needs of vulnerable populations such as women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities.A 2007 national health department directive also guarantees free HIV and TB care and treatment to anyone regardless of status.Like what you're reading? Sign up for our free weekly newsletter or donate to support great journalism.Refugees, asylum seekers as well as undocumented migrants from Southern African Development Community (Sadc) states including Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe who need hospital care  should be treated like South African citizens. That means theyll have to take the means test given to South Africans to determine how much they have to pay for hospital care.Undocumented people from countries outside Sadc who attend hospitals  except pregnant or breastfeeding women, children under six and women seeking an abortion  are expected to pay the full fees as laid out in the national schedule.Nationally, what people pay for hospital services is defined by a patient fee schedule, that lists fees for procedures such as dialysis for patients with kidney failure, for which the state bills full paying patients about R2000 per session.But health MECs can impose additional criteria and procedures concerning this, including fees for different groups of people. For instance, the Gauteng Hospitals Ordinance Amendment Act 4 of 1999 provides that the CEO of a hospital may require identification documents before admission to a hospital except where deferring treatment may have "dangerous or detrimental consequences" to the person seeking treatment.The vagueness of the legislations wording leaves it open to a broad interpretation, meaning that this may be more widely used than it was intended to be. Hospitals need some proof of identification to see a patient, and they may also require proof of income. But the failure of staff to communicate what they need and how it can be provided can sometimes lead to patients being turned away when they are unable to offer a South African ID book or an asylum document or a refugee permit.Patients that cant produce these documents can, however, submit foreign passports or an affidavit.A 2008 Gauteng health department memorandum also says that no patient should be denied access to any health care service, including access to antiretrovirals, irrespective of whether they have a South African identification document or not.Finally, no one may be refused emergency medical treatment, including on the basis of ability to pay. This means that it doesnt matter who you are or where you seek care, if its emergency treatment you need, you may be charged for it after it has been provided (based on the provisions above), but you cant be required to pay for it before it is delivered.Basically, everyone regardless of their documentation is entitled to free primary healthcare, antenatal care, abortions as well as HIV and TB treatment. Pregnant, breastfeeding, under the age of six? Then your healthcare at clinics or hospitals should be free too.If youre not from here but are from a Sadc country, or youre a refugee or asylum seeker, you should be treated just like South Africans at public hospitals and will be assessed to see how much you can afford to pay.Everyone else? Youre looking at paying full price but just for hospital services.
#Newsmaker: Keval Ramraj takes on the world of whisky

Keval Ramraj was recently appointed as brand manager for single malts at Pernod Ricard SA. His career in marketing started with an internship at the Durban office where he worked his way up the ranks, and he's determined to take The Glenlivet brand to the country's number one spot.

Keval Ramraj I regard it as a privilege to represent The Glenlivets finely crafted whisky range, with its rich heritage and unsurpassed quality. Dedication to excellence underlies our approach to creating whisky, and that has remained unchanged since our founder George Smith started the first licensed distillery in 1824, he says.



Here, Ramraj tells us what it took to get to where he is today and what hes looking forward to in his new role



How do you feel about your appointment? How do you feel about your appointment? I regard it as a privilege to represent The Glenlivets finely crafted whisky range, with its rich heritage and unsurpassed quality. Dedication to excellence underlies our approach to creating whisky, and that has remained unchanged since our founder George Smith started the first licensed distillery in 1824, he says.Here, Ramraj tells us what it took to get to where he is today and what hes looking forward to in his new role

What do you love most about your career and marketing in particular? What do you love most about your career and marketing in particular?

Tell us about your work experience, starting at the bottom and working your way up? Tell us about your work experience, starting at the bottom and working your way up?

Any career highlights youre particularly proud of? Any career highlights youre particularly proud of?

What are you most looking forward to/what do you hope to achieve in your new position? What are you most looking forward to/what do you hope to achieve in your new position?

Whats at the top of your to-do list (at work)? Whats at the top of your to-do list (at work)?

What are you currently reading/watching/listening to for work? What are you currently reading/watching/listening to for work?

Tell us something about yourself not generally known. Tell us something about yourself not generally known.

Jessica Tennant's articles About Jessica Tennant Jess is Senior Editor: Marketing & Media at Bizcommunity.com. She is also a contributing writer. Jess is Senior Editor: Marketing & Media at Bizcommunity.com. She is also a contributing writer. moc.ytinummoczib@swengnitekram

This is something Ive worked towards for many years, and Im extremely excited about my new appointment. Im grabbing this opportunity with both hands.I love meeting and engaging with people. This job allows me to meet new people from so many different industries every day, whether it be at a networking event or a night out in the trade. Its what energises me most.I actually started out as an intern at Pernod Ricards KZN sales office, though I joined Pernod Ricard officially in 2013, as an on-trade sales representative. I then worked my way up to regional events manager, before taking a side-step into marketing, where I see myself ultimately playing a key role within the group. I guess from day one the goal was always to join the marketing team. I knew what my goal was and I didnt allow anything to deter me from reaching it.Being offered the position of brand manager: single malts is undoubtedly my proudest career moment. Another was during my time as assistant brand manager for Ballantines Whisky  our team won the Campaign of the Year Award at our annual conference for Boiler Room X Ballantines True Music Africa. We worked like demons to roll out the campaign, and I was extremely chuffed when we won.Im really looking forward to The Glenlivet JazzTown which we are taking to the Durban July again this year. Were working on a stellar stage lineup and an exceptional hospitality experience for our guests, and its bound to be an amazing success. My plan is to take The Glenlivet JazzTown to cities that it hasnt been before, to bring the jazz lifestyle experience to new communities where we would love to welcome new friends of the brand to the Glenlivet family.Finding ways of stepping things up with The Glenlivet. Watch this spaceAt the moment Im reading. Im also currently attending a course on digital marketing to upskill myself and to stay on top of this ever-evolving digital environment.I have a twin sister who lives in Australia. Im the elder sibling.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Seven Franco-Ethiopian agreements were signed this week, dealing with space cooperation and economic cooperation.

Signing of Franco-Ethiopian cooperation agreements.

On the sidelines of the state visit to Ethiopia of the president of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, one public and six private agreements were signed between the two governments:1. Memorandum of Understanding between the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute and the National Center for Space Studies on Cooperation on Space Activities.2. Memorandum of Understanding between the Castel Group and the Ethiopian Investment Commission (EIC) for the construction of the SOMDIAA maize processing plant.3. Memorandum of Understanding between CMA CGM and the local MACCFA company for the creation of a joint venture.4. Letter of intent between CMA CGM and Ethiopian Shipping & Logistics Services Enterprise (ESLSE) for the management of Modjo Dry Port.5. Letter of intent between Meridiam, Global Infrastructure Hub and the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance for the implementation of the Africa Infrastructure Fellowship Program (AIFP).6. Memorandum of Understanding between the Canal + Group and Mr. TEODROS for the Implementation of a Distribution Agreement for the Commercialisation of a Pay-TV Offer.7. Memorandum of understanding between Bollore Africa Logistics and the local company CLS Logistics for the creation of a joint venture.This ceremony took place in the presence and under the auspices of several French and Ethiopian ministers.
Brussels has branded China a systemic rival and threatened tighter rules on its investments in Europe as some of the largest EU countries push back on Beijings contentious Belt and Road Initiative. The Financial Times reports in its article Brussels ramps up criticism of Chinas investment strategy in EU that in a paper released on Tuesday, the European Commission and the EUs diplomatic unit called on China to stop unfair treatment of European companies and investment practices that threatened the rule of law in recipient countries and risked plunging them into debt.

There is a growing appreciation in Europe that the balance of challenges and opportunities presented by China has shifted, the document reads. Chinas publicly stated reform ambitions should translate into policies or actions commensurate with its role and responsibility.

The wide-ranging criticism reflects growing pressure from EU countries including Germany to adopt a tougher response to Chinas ambitions. Beijing is simultaneously a co-operation and negotiating partner, an economic competitor and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance, the paper warns.

Brussels policy document sets the tone for more defiant discussions with Beijing in the next few weeks as bloc leaders prepare for a bilateral summit next month and Italy plans to become become the first G7 country to endorse Chinas Belt and Road global investment drive.

The EUs document urges a more balanced and reciprocal economic relationship, saying that China preserves its domestic markets for its champions by restricting foreign companies access to its market, subsidising local competitors and failing to protect intellectual property rights.

Chinese investments overseas have contributed to economic growth but often neglect socio-economic and financial sustainability, because they seize control of strategic assets, undermine the rule of law and benefit from Beijing-backed financing that puts foreign rivals at a disadvantage, the paper says.

The EU should build a new arsenal to fight takeovers by state-subsidised firms and other aggressive Chinese trade tactics, it adds, picking up on recent proposals from the German business federation for the EU to restrict market access for non-EU companies receiving extensive subsidies and to block their ability to buy European technology firms.

European businesses have complained that while they face strict EU limits on state aid, foreign competitors are not bound by the same rules. The document says the commission will now look at ways to fill existing gaps in EU law to tackle the distortive effects of foreign state ownership and state financing in the internal market. The commission will come up with options by the end of this year, it says.

Brussels also seeks to reignite longstanding plans to prevent companies winning public procurement contracts in the EU if they are based in countries that discriminate against European suppliers. Berlin has recently signalled support for the approach, raising hope for an EU-wide accord on the matter. EU officials, however, cautioned that the plans were unlikely to be adopted this year.

Brussels policy tacitly acknowledges disagreements over China among EU member states, highlighted by Italys talks to join several other countries including Hungary in backing Beijings Belt and Road infrastructure initiative. Li Keqiang, Chinas premier, is due to travel straight from the EU summit on April 9 to a meeting in Croatia of the 16+1 grouping, that includes 11 EU members and is seen by some in Brussels as Chinas Trojan horse.

Beijing has denied it wants to hobble the EU, arguing that a stable Europe is in the interests of China and international trade and security. It has also rebutted criticism of Belt and Road plans, pointing out that more than 150 countries and international organisations have endorsed it.

In the policy document, Brussels also pledges measures in response to growing fears over security risks in using Chinese technology from companies such as Huawei in 5G mobile communication networks  concerns that both the company and Beijing say are groundless. Brussels plans to push for a common EU approach to 5G security risks, including information exchange, risk assessment and risk-management measures.

The document chides Beijing over its claims to most of the South China Sea and its failure to honour a 2016 UN court ruling against it. The paper nods to Chinas progress in economic and social rights, but criticises crackdown on human rights lawyers and defenders as well as mass internment of Uighur Muslims in the western province of Xinjiang.
This year marks 20th anniversary of the march to Pristina, when a battalion of Russian paratroopers arrived from Bosnia to Kosovo in a few hours, taking control of the Slatina airport (today it's called Pristina International Airport). NATO forces invasion was supposed to be carried out through this airport. The task to prevent this development was gived to Major Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who was part of the international peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia and Herzegovina at that time. As part of a group of 18 soldiers of the GRU special division, he secretly entered Kosovo and Metohija, took control of the airport and prepared for the arrival of main forces of the Russian contingent...

The Balkan Frontier film is dedicated to these events. It will be released in a few days. Yevkurov is called Bek Ethoev in this movie, and he's played by Gosha Kutsenko, who also produced this film.

Kutsenko said that the idea of this movie came up in 2012 in a friendly conversation with future co-producer of the Balkan Frontier, Vasil Shevts: "We were sitting in a restaurant. We talked about our cinema, and he said that if he was me, he would film a serious movie about our country, about those events that I, as a resident of the USSR, remember, about those feelings that I remember. When the USSR collapsed, I was just a student of the film school, but I remember 1999 well. I was at Taganka, watched March bombings of Belgrade and suddenly felt lonely, felt devastated."

In this film, a group of Russian paratroopers is forced to participate in an unequal battle against terrorists. Russian peacekeepers and NATO forces are rushing to the airport. The world is once again close to a huge war. But the commander of the special forces, Andrei Shatalov, doesn't care about politics: his beloved Jasna is among hostages at the airport.

According to Gosha Kutsenko, there were obviously no women among real hostages. However, according to director's idea, character of a woman sniper was introduced.

Creators of this movie were personally consulted by Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who today holds the post of head of Ingushetia. We became friends, I flew to Ingushetia for some festival, we have friendly relations, Kutsenko said. Obviously, we can't know everything about secret operations. The word 'secrecy' exists for a reason. Yunus-Bek Yevkurov read our version of the script and when we got it back, it was full of his hand written notes. He wrote them while he was on trips, during breaks. We studied them, met with him, he told us what could have actually happened and what couldn't have happen at all. We explained: "It's a movie." He smiled, jokingly proposed several new ideas, and in the end we used them all."

Kutsenko admitted that he didn't try to achieve complete resemblance to prototype. When we showed fragments of the movie, Yunus-Bek looked and said to me: Thank God! My biggest fear was that you're going to put mustache on and speak with accent. Then he said in a very serious tone: 'That's the first time someone plays me in a movie.' "It was a huge compliment for me," Kutsenko added.
Azerbaijan and Iran are discussing an agreement on the construction of a road bridge and a pedestrian crossing over the Astarachay river, Azerbaijans Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev said, AzerNews reported citing Trend.

He was speaking at the 13th meeting of the State Commission for Economic, Trade and Humanitarian Relations between Azerbaijan and Iran held March 15 in Baku.

The minister also raised the issue of connecting the Iran-Azerbaijan-Russia and Iran-Azerbaijan-Georgia electricity systems.

I think that Azerbaijan, Iran and Turkey may take the appropriate measures to create an energy corridor and expand trilateral energy cooperation, he said.
The UK parliament supported the governments proposal to request Brussels to reschedule its official withdrawal from the European Union, due on March 29, to a later date.

During the vote which took place in the House of Commons yesterday, 412 members of parliament supported delaying Brexit, 202 were against.

Earlier in the day, the parliament rejected an attempt to secure another referendum on Brexit by 334 "no" votes to 85 "yes" votes.

Now the British government is to request a so-called technical delay until June 30, if the House of Commons manages to pass the draft Brexit deal until March 20.

The European Commission said the UK parliamentary vote alone was not enough to secure the delay, and the decision on postponement must now gain approval from all 27 EU member states. It cited Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which envisages extending the two-year withdrawal period, but only if the initiative gets a unanimous approval of the European Council, TASS reported.
The European Union has extended sanctions against certain Russian individuals for another six months, the Council of the EU said in a statement.

According to the document, the restrictive measures, which expire on March 15, are extended "in respect of actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine."

In addition, the Council of the EU "added eight Russian officials to the list of those subject to restrictive measures in respect of actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine." "These new listings have been adopted by the Council as a response to escalation in the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov and the violations of international law by Russia, which used military force with no justification," the statement says.

"The measures now apply to a total of 170 persons and 44 entities," the Council of EU pointed out.
Georgia and Japan have signed an agreement on the insurance of exports and investments within the business forum held in Tokyo.

The memorandum of understanding was signed today between Georgia's Economy Minister Giorgi Kobulia and President of NEXI, a Japanese government corporation specialised in export credits, Musafumi Nakada.

According to the Georgian ministry, the agreement aims to facilitate the export of Japanese goods and services, expansion of Japanese businesses overseas and the stable supply of natural resources from foreign countries through such insurance products as export credits, investments and loan insurance, Agenda.ge reported.

The memorandum focuses on the development and implementation of macroeconomic policy, production and manufacturing, tourism, energy, transport and logistics, telecommunications and high-tech, trade and export facilitation, public property management, construction policy, investments.
Photos of cartridges of firearms with inscriptions in Georgian were released by Daily Mail, following the deadly attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand today.

The cartridges and other weapons were seized by law enforcers after the attack, containing inscriptions also in Armenian, Serbain and other languages.

The names of David Soslan and David Agmashenebeli are inscribed in Georgian, the names of the husband of Georgias Queen Tamar and one of the most famous kings of Georgia - David the Builder.

"The Georgian State Security Service is cooperating with its partners in order to receive information regarding the detainees and the weapons seized," Agenda.ge cited the agency as saying.

The investigation is in progress.
After a seven-month ordeal, a local landlord wants to bring attention to the difficulties of dealing with tenants behaving badly.

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After a seven-month ordeal, a local landlord wants to bring attention to the difficulties of dealing with tenants behaving badly.

Jason Roblin, CEO of Brandons largest rental and property management group, Vionell Holdings Partnership, has never encountered tenants like a group occupying two rental units he faced recently.

After taking over the management of the properties in August 2018, it took until this month to have them legally removed from the area.

"As soon as we went there, we knew there were problems," Roblin said. "I was disturbed."

While giving a tour of one of the apartments in question, Roblin pointed out the lasting legacy of the former renters.

Pushing open the door of a unit, the damage is immediately apparent and one is struck with the lingering smell of stale cigarette smoke. The apartments are non-smoking.

The furnishings have been removed from the area, leaving the grime, garbage, unknown substances and needle packages that litter the floor.

Large red graffiti reading "Notorious Bloods" stands out on one of the walls.

Most alarming, one of the rooms appears to have unauthorized locks on the outside of a door enabling someone to secure it from the outside.

"If you show up to a showing and theres needle caps in the hallway, it's hard to convince (potential renters) that this is going to be their new, exciting home," Roblin said.

During a walkthrough of the residences in September, several needles were found and it was determined that long-term repairs would be required.

In the months leading up to the tenants eviction in March, they failed to pay their full monthly rent for several months running.

An eviction notice was served in November and multiple hearings were held, but the tenants remained in place.

In the end, this marked the first time Roblin has required the aid of sheriffs to remove someone from a property, having received an order for their removal from the Court of Queens Bench.

At the end of February, members of Vionell and sheriffs went to a unit to remove one of the tenants, only to discover drugs and stolen property. The tenant broke into the unit later that night, and continued breaking in multiple times.

One of the doors in the area is now sealed shut with screws to ensure this does not happen again.

Roblin thinks that the tenants in question manipulated their rights as dictated by the act, purposely missing hearings to buy more time in the apartments.

At the end of the ordeal, Vionell was left holding the bag for $7,237 in owed money.

Unclear what the final tally for the damage will be, Roblin said, the apartments will need new carpets, deep cleans and new appliances potentially adding at least another $8,000, on top of the unpaid rent.

Roblin never envisioned encountering a situation like this, and while the tenants have been removed, he still worries they will once again appear at the residence, as they have a number of times already.

"Its very frustrating," Roblin said. "This is not normal. This is not an everyday occurrence."

As a result of these tenants, changes have been made to Vionell safety protocols, now requiring employes have sharps containers in company vehicles and wear gloves. A private security firm has been hired to patrol the area.

"Hopefully, we can turn the corner and have it safe like our other places," Roblin said.

He hopes that the experience of Vionell will serve to educate people on the effects of people who make these life choices, motivating the community to create positive solutions.

"If we dont change this, this is going to get worse," Roblin said.

Already screening tenants for income and rental history, he plans on taking all necessary action to be proactive and responsible in an effort to prevent situations like this from rising again.

Cautioning against increasingly scrutinized screenings while acknowledging the need for landlords to mitigate their risks, Brandon Neighborhood Renewal Corporation Executive Director Carly Gasparini said anecdotally that cases of this nature are rare. The corporation is a non-profit organization focused on reinvigorating neighbourhoods in the core of the city while improving residents quality of life.

"There is a risk to be a landlord for sure," Gasparini said. "But tenants have rights, and I think there has to be a balance between these things."

Cases like this are an anomaly, creating a nightmare for all sides when navigating tenants rights, creating terrible situations that have the potential to bankrupt and place great stress on property owners.

"I dont want that for landlords," Gasparini said. "There are some hard-to-house (tenants), but that is against the norm."

Cases like this make it increasingly difficult to get landlords to rent "hard-to-house" individuals, and the community plays an essential role in helping protect and support all landlords and renters.

"Sometimes things arent going to work out beautifully and sometimes they really do," Gasparini said. "Im cautious to speak to one individual case."

 ckemp@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @The_ChelseaKemp
Darren Humphreys was practically born on the back of a snowmobile.

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Darren Humphreys and his daughter Paisley, 6, pose for a photo in his Moto-Ski filled garage Friday. (Chelsea Kemp/The Brandon Sun)

Darren Humphreys was practically born on the back of a snowmobile.

When he was growing up, his parents would wrap him up when he was a little baby and take him out for rides, exploring the area around his farm near Brandon, a tradition he maintains to this day.

Darren Humphreys and his daughter Paisley, 6, pose for a photo in his snowmobile engine repair shop Friday. (Chelsea Kemp/The Brandon Sun)

Humphreys received his first snowmobile, a Moto-Ski, from his uncle when he was 10, launching a passion that has lasted for more than 30 years.

"I grew up thinking they were the best ones," Humphreys said, adding that he still feels that way.

Visiting his close neighbour Ken Davies every Saturday morning, the two would be out working on sleds when they werent checking out Ski-Doos in Brandon.

"Summertime, wintertime, it didnt matter  I could go over and talk about snowmobiles," Humphreys said. "Every week we would be gone snowmobiling."

Continuing his obsession with sleds, Humphreys spends almost every day riding or tuning up his prized possessions.

Boasting a collection of about 75 new and vintage snowmobiles, Humphreys is especially fond of his Moto-Skis. He has a massive collection of about 50 Moto-Skis, along with all the smaller Moto-Skis made for kids and teenagers over the years.

"I ride the old ones more then I ride the new ones," Humphreys said.

For the most part, the Moto-Skis are rarely ridden. Instead, each one has been painstakingly restored, carefully curated and maintained in a heated garage.

"My wife thought she was going to be parking in here. I had other plans," he chuckled.

Confident he has the largest collection of Moto-Ski gear and memorabilia in the world, Humphreys estimates that he has amassed thousands of knick-knacks from the brand.

"My plan is Im going to build a bigger museum to hold everything," Humphreys said.

His oldest sled is a 1963 Moto-Ski  the first one ever released by the company. He has two of the five known to still exist.

Well known in the snowmobile community for being into Moto-Skis, the sleds were brought into his orbit by a fellow fan.

"A guy contacted me to see if I would be interested. He knew I was a Moto-Ski collector," Humphreys said. "I took them for sure."

Having a huge collection of Moto-Skis proves interesting, as one can see how the sleds evolved over time, tracking the ride quality and suspension changes.

The biggest change to the brand came in the 1970s when the Moto-Ski brand was purchased by Bombardier.

"A lot of the later ones are just the same as the Ski-Doo brand, theyre just orange," Humphreys said.

His personal favourite is the Sonic Moto-Ski  his "childhood dream machine," purchased about 10 years ago.

Owning almost every Moto-Ski he ever wanted, one machine remains elusive  the sled driven by famous Quebec race car driver Gilles Villeneuve.

"They built him a one-of-a-kind Moto-Ski racer," Humphreys sighed wistfully.

Humphreys has travelled to Chicago to visit Villeneuve's racing snowmobile, which has been restored and is currently sitting in a collection. He hopes he can one day add it to his collection and has made it known he would scoop it up if it ever became available.

A collector for years now, Humphreys has seen sleds come in all stages of restoration, to the skeletons of sleds that look near impossible to fix to, to others that look nearly new.

Ready to tackle any project, for the most part, his massive collection has all the parts he would ever need while working on a snowmobile.

"Ive stocked up lots I have kind of my own inventory," Humphreys said. "I like working on them more then I like riding them."

When all else fails, he looks to the internet and others in the Moto-Ski community to track down parts.

Humphreys recently completed work on another shop for his sleds. It has proven to be one of his favourite places on the farm because it is where he works on both his old and new machines.

The shop is a snowmobile riders dream, featuring a test track and timing system for racing.

Surprisingly, summer keeps Humphreys just as busy, as he drag races his sleds on grass.

He has travelled as far as Minnesota and Wisconsin for the grass races.

Humphreys daughter Paisley, 6, is just like her dad, riding snowmobiles practically from the day she was born.

"Five years old we were on the trails and she was following along with her own little sled," Humphreys said.

Just as obsessed with sleds as her dad, Paisley is eager to hit the trails eager for any opportunity to kick up some snow.

"This morning at 6:30, she was shaking my arm at the edge of the bed asking if we were going snowmobiling soon," Humphreys grinned.

 ckemp@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @The_ChelseaKemp
OTTAWA - Canada is restricting the finances of another 129 people, companies and organizations over Russia's treatment of Ukraine.

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Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland speaks to media following a cabinet meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019. Canada is restricting the finances of another 129 people, companies and organizations over Russia's treatment of Ukraine. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

OTTAWA - Canada is restricting the finances of another 129 people, companies and organizations over Russia's treatment of Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the additional sanctions today, calling the measures a response to the ongoing occupation of Crimea and the Russian arrests of Ukrainian sailors in the Black Sea last November.

Those arrests came in a naval confrontation in the Kerch Strait, an import marine link for southern Ukraine that runs past the Crimean Peninsula. The Russians planted a freighter across the narrow strait, asserted it was Russian territorial water and seized two Ukrainian gunboats and a tug. They took 24 sailors into custody.

"Canada and its allies are unwavering in our support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Freeland said in a statement. "Russia's provocations in the Kerch Strait and its illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Crimea will not go unchecked."

Canada's most prominent new targets are Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and current chairman of Russian's state oil company, and Vladimir Yakunin, a former president of the state-owned Russian railway system. The list also includes a former Russian justice minister and envoy of President Vladimir Putin, mid-ranking public officials, and industrial concerns such as aircraft corporations and a shipyard.

Several of them had already been targeted by sanctions from the United States and the European Union.

The restrictions freeze any assets the targets have under Canadian jurisdiction and forbid Canadians and anyone in Canada to do business with those named on the list. The Canadian government has also tightly limited dealings with the Russian financial and oil sectors.

Global Affairs Canada says the number of people and entities sanctioned over Russia's aggression toward Ukraine has now reached 429.

The relationship between Ukraine and Russia has grown ever more tense since protests drove Ukraine's Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office in 2014.

Russia responded by occupying Crimea and helping separatists in eastern Ukrainian provinces close to the Russian border begin a violent rebellion.

The new sanctions list includes figures in the separatist governments set up in those provinces.
The federal government has finalized a deal that will deliver millions of dollars to a remote Indigenous community in northern Ontario to help tackle a housing crisis that is affecting the health of residents.

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The federal government has finalized a deal that will deliver millions of dollars to a remote Indigenous community in northern Ontario to help tackle a housing crisis that is affecting the health of residents.

Ottawa says the agreement signed Thursday represents an investment of up to $12.8 million in Cat Lake First Nation  more than the roughly $10 million promised in an interim deal reached last month.

In a statement, Indigenous Services Minister Seamus O'Regan says the government will provide $5 million to build 15 new housing units in Cat Lake and $2.1 million to repair and renovate 21 houses.

The federal government will also put up another $3.1 million for 10 new portable homes and $200,000 for a new temporary warehouse.

Another $2.4 million has been earmarked for "associated costs," such as site surveying and inspections, transporting materials on the winter ice road and hiring various managers to oversee the project and the maintenance of units.

The Cat Lake band declared an emergency in January, saying terrible housing conditions in the community had led to severe lung and skin ailments, especially affecting about 100 children.

The fly-in Ojibway community of about 450 people is about 180 kilometres north of Sioux Lookout, Ont.

O'Regan said Thursday the signing of the final deal  which was done by videoconference because bad weather prevented him from flying out from Thunder Bay, Ont.  represents "an important step."

The minister said he and Cat Lake Chief Matthew Keewaykapow discussed ongoing challenges such as the impact of weather on the winter ice road that leads to the community.

"This is a primary and urgent concern. The chief and I agreed to stay in close contact to ensure that materials, construction supplies, and modular units, especially those that already mobilized for delivery from Pickle Lake, will be transported to the community as soon as the winter road is able to support the weight of those loads," he said in a statement.
TORONTO - Five people employed by Ontario's environmental watchdog are losing their jobs as a result of the government's decision to merge the office with that of the province's auditor general.

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TORONTO - Five people employed by Ontario's environmental watchdog are losing their jobs as a result of the government's decision to merge the office with that of the province's auditor general.

A spokeswoman for the auditor general's office said they were unable to offer positions to the five full-time employees because their roles duplicated those of existing staff members or because their specific positions were not required under the organization's expanded mandate.

Christine Pedias said in an email Friday that they will also be seeking to hire a commissioner of the environment who will report to the auditor general.

The position of environment commissioner is currently held by Dianne Saxe, who has been critical of many of the changes brought in by the Progressive Conservative government.

A spokesman for Premier Doug Ford said Friday that the government is not responsible for the job losses.

"Any staffing decisions made during the process were made by the Office of the Auditor General," Simon Jefferies said in an email.

The premier has long said that no jobs would be lost as a result of his cost-cutting measures to eliminate a multibillion-dollar deficit. However, his government has recently begun saying that no front-line jobs would be eliminated, a qualifier that had not previously been applied.

Ford also announced this week that management-level jobs will be lost as a result of his government's changes to the heath-care system that will see the merger of 20 provincial health agencies.

The office of the auditor general is expected to absorb the environmental commissioner's office by no later than May 1.

The move was announced in the fall economic statement, which also saw the child advocate and the French-language services commissioner's offices rolled into the ombudsman's. The ombudsman has said some workers in the child advocates office will also lose their jobs when his office assumes its duties.

Critics have denounced the decision to combine the watchdog offices, saying it will erode government accountability on key issues.

Advocacy groups have noted some of the environment commissioner's duties, such as the power to issue special reports on topics like climate change, will not carry over to the auditor.

They have also warned there will be less scrutiny of the Tories' recently announced climate change plan, which replaced the cap-and-trade system brought in by the Liberals.

Opposition parties have also condemned the move, calling it an effort to remove independent criticism of government policy.
Iran is preparing to take control of Syrias main commercial port in Latakia, advancing its plans to secure a trade route from Tehran to the Mediterranean and establishing a significant foothold on Israels doorstep, the Times newspaper reported.

Talks began last month to transfer the container port at Latakia to Iranian management from October 1, when its lease expires, according to The Syria Report.

That would give Tehran unhindered access to the facility, which has 23 warehouses and was handling 3 million tonnes of cargo a year before the conflict.

The current contract for the management of Latakia port is held by a joint venture between Souria Holding, a Syrian investment company, and CMA CGM, a French shipping firm.
ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - A Newfoundland mother sobbed Friday after a jury convicted her estranged husband of first-degree murder in the death of their five-year-old daughter.

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Trent Butt is seen in the defendant's box, at St. John's Supreme Court, in St. John's on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Butt faces charges of first degree murder and arson in the death of his five-year-old daughter, Quinn. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Holly McKenzie-Sutter

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - A Newfoundland mother sobbed Friday after a jury convicted her estranged husband of first-degree murder in the death of their five-year-old daughter.

The jury returned Friday afternoon with the verdict against Trent Butt  it carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Andrea Gosse (right) leaves a St. JohnAos, N.L. courthouse on Friday, March 15, 2019 surrounded with supporters shortly after hearing the first-degree murder conviction of Trent Butt, found guilty of killing their five-year-old daughter Quinn almost three years ago. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Holly McKenzie-Sutter

It prompted cheers and sobs in the packed courtroom in provincial supreme court in St. John's, N.L.

His estranged wife, Andrea Gosse, tearfully hugged family members, friends and Crown lawyers, as others wiped away tears.

"It felt like it took forever, but we got justice for Quinn," Gosse said between sobs, a memorial pin over her heart showing her daughter's smiling face.

"I can't explain it, I have never felt this type of emotion in my life," she said. "But this is what he chose to do to our life."

The Crown had argued that Butt killed Quinn in 2016 in a calculated plan to inflict suffering on Gosse.

Surrounded by her family on the courthouse steps, Gosse said she hopes the verdict brings changes that could help the next child like her daughter.

Gosse said the verdict may not mean closure for her right away, but she sees it as a new chapter to grieve and talk about her daughter's death, now that the emotional trial is over.

Butt will be sentenced April 23. He had previously pleaded guilty to arson, having set his Carbonear, N.L., home on fire after the murder.

Crown prosecutor Lloyd Strickland said the guilty verdict offers some relief in the tragic case, the disturbing details laid out over the course of the highly publicized trial.

"There's no happiness to be taken from any of this," Strickland said. "The verdict doesn't obviously take away the pain and it doesn't bring Quinn back, but I suppose there's satisfaction knowing this stage, the trial stage, is over."

No one at the murder trial disputed that Butt killed their daughter Quinn at his home in April 2016, before attempting to take his own life. The jury was asked to decide whether the death was planned and deliberate, which would mean Butt was guilty of first-degree murder, or if he was guilty of a lesser charge.

Butt testified at trial that he did not remember killing Quinn, but said he found himself over her body and concluded he must have suffocated her.

The jury, which began deliberations Thursday, had asked Friday to hear Butt's testimony again, and to view a security video taken from his house.

The video from the night in question showed Butt moving his truck and later putting something in it. Quinn's voice is heard on the tape after Butt moved the truck.

In closing arguments on Thursday, the Crown pointed to the security video as evidence that the killing was premeditated. The Crown noted that Butt moved the truck before Quinn was killed, suggesting he had been planning to set fire to his home, presumably with Quinn inside.

Butt left a suicide note in the truck saying he had killed Quinn and himself to keep her apart from her mother.

The story has haunted the small province in the nearly three years since Quinn's death.

The provincial RCMP issued a statement Friday expressing condolences to the family and commending the work of first responders who worked on the difficult case.

"The local volunteer firefighters who were among the first on scene, the paramedics, the health professionals at Carbonear General Hospital - you all were outstanding and provided professional and compassionate care during a very difficult and emotional time," the statement from Cpl. Peter Gosse read.

After Friday's verdict, Butt faced the judge, a few feet away from Gosse and the crowd gathered behind him in the courtroom.

Gosse said she had little left to say to Butt after the conviction.

"What else to say? Was it worth it?"
NEWCASTLE, N.B. - Kevin Vickers, hailed as a hero for helping to end the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill, is making a leap to politics with a bid for the leadership of New Brunswick's Opposition Liberals.

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Kevin Vickers, Canadian Ambassador to Ireland and former Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons, speaks during the annual Press Gallery Dinner at the Museum of Nature in Gatineau, Que., on June 4, 2016. Vickers is expected to announce today if he intends to seek the Liberal leadership in New Brunswick. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

NEWCASTLE, N.B. - Kevin Vickers, hailed as a hero for helping to end the 2014 attack on Parliament Hill, is making a leap to politics with a bid for the leadership of New Brunswick's Opposition Liberals.

The former House of Commons sergeant-at-arms made the announcement to a packed hall Friday in Newcastle, N.B.

"My roots are here. My heart is here. I love New Brunswick. And I love the people of New Brunswick. New Brunswick has been good to me. It's now time for me to give back," said Vickers, who is making his political debut in his early 60s.

"I hope to make a difference right here in New Brunswick."

Vickers retired this month as Canada's ambassador to Ireland, and has been travelling New Brunswick over the last two weeks.

He is hoping to replace former premier Brian Gallant, who lost power last fall after the Liberals failed to form a minority government in the weeks following the Sept. 24 provincial election.

Vickers acknowledged his many years away from the province, but played up his roots in New Brunswick, saying: "I'm finally home."

Kevin Vickers, the former House of Commons sergeant-at-arms, is greeted by Mi'kmaq elder Tulley Eagle Starman as he announces his intention to run for the leadership of the New Brunswick Liberals, in Miramichi, N.B. on Friday, March 15, 2019. Vickers recently retired as Canada's ambassador to Ireland. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

He said he had learned much during his long career as an RCMP officer about respecting the importance of everyone. His announcement Friday began with both an Indigenous honour song and an Irish dance troupe.

"I bring people together. That is what I do. That is who I am," Vickers said to a standing ovation.

He listed multiple policy priorities, from health care and education to tackling climate change and green-lighting a highway project delayed by Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs.

Vickers said he wants to increase immigration to one per cent of the provincial population annually, and to bring former New Brunswickers home again, saying growth is key.

"Demography is destiny," he said.

In a dark suit and green tie, the proud Irish-Canadian switched between French and English in front of an audience that included many sitting Liberal members of the legislature and former Liberal premier Camille Theriault.

"I think Mr. Vickers brings a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge of the different facts in the province of New Brunswick and he offers hope," Theriault said.

Donald Wright, a political scientist with the University of New Brunswick, said Vickers' entrance limits the candidates for the leadership.

"I think him getting into the race might dissuade other people from getting into the race because he's generated by his name a lot of buzz and a sense of inevitability, coronation. I think it's troubling," Wright said.

"It's an unknown quantity  Kevin Vickers. Should we embrace it, I'm sure I have no idea. I think the Liberal party should be wary of throwing its lot in with an untested political neophyte."

Vickers has had a long career of public service, including 29 years in the RCMP. He also served as aide-de-camp for the lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick. He was sergeant-at-arms of the House of Commons between 2006 and 2015.

Vickers said he learned a lot in his nine years in the House of Commons and especially enjoyed question period.

On Oct. 22, 2014, Vickers was working in the Commons when he shot and helped take down a man armed with a .30-30 rifle. Michael Zihaf Bibeau had barged into Centre Block on Parliament Hill after killing honour guard reservist Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial.

He did not focus on the event during Friday's announcement.

Vickers was appointed ambassador to Ireland in January 2015 by then-prime minister Stephen Harper.

Rene Ephestion, leader of the New Brunswick Liberal Multicultural Inclusion Commission, has also expressed his interest in seeking the leadership.

Higgs' minority government is relying on support from a third party  the right-leaning People's Alliance, led by Kris Austin. But that arrangement is set to expire next year.
Police forces in Ontario are stepping up security measures in areas with large Muslim populations after deadly shootings at mosques in New Zealand on Friday.

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Police forces in Ontario are stepping up security measures in areas with large Muslim populations after deadly shootings at mosques in New Zealand on Friday.

Officers in Toronto, Hamilton and surrounding communities say they're boosting patrols around all places of worship with a particular emphasis on mosques.

The moves come in response to two deadly rampages at mosques in Christchurch in which at least one gunman sprayed bullets at crowds of worshippers observing Friday prayers. At least 49 people died, with dozens more reported injured.

The Ontario police forces say they have not received reports of threats or suspicious activity at local places of worship, but say there will be a "heightened police presence" around the facilities in the coming days.

Many also say they have been in touch with community leaders to express solidarity and provide reassurance that safety is a top concern in light of the attacks.

"I want to send our condolences to those impacted by the heinous attacks in New Zealand," Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders wrote on Twitter. "Please be assured that police officers will be patrolling your communities today, visiting mosques and other places of worship, to ensure everyones safety."

A similar message was issued by York regional police, who said uniformed officers would be on hand to reassure people anxious about pursuing their ordinary routines.

Their actions drew thanks from the mayor of Markham, Ont., one of the northern Toronto cities in the region.

"Thank you ... for always helping us feel safe and secure," Frank Scarpitti wrote in a tweet. "People of all faiths should be free to worship freely without fear. We stand with New Zealand and Muslim communities here and around the world during this difficult time."

In Hamilton, police said they had increased their presence at all area mosques and other places of worship after connecting with leaders in the Islamic community.

Social media posts suggested the heightened presence was not going unnoticed, with some noting the officers stationed at many mosques who were inquiring after the welfare of religious leaders and worshippers alike.

In Peel Region, consisting of cities west of Toronto such as Mississauga, Ont., and Brampton, Ont., Chief Chris McCord said specialized equity and community mobilization units would be making the rounds of mosques and other places of worship. The goal, he said, is "to check on their well-being and work to resolve any concerns they may have."

"This is a sad day for the Muslim population and all residents of New Zealand," he said in a statement. "Acts of violence not only have an effect on those directly involved, but have a long-lasting impact on communities."

McCord's words rang true for the executive director of the Muslim Council of Peel, an organization representing mosques, Islamic centres, schools and NGOs.

Rabia Khedr said reading word of the violence in Christchurch shortly before bed left her sleepless all night.

The news felt particularly jarring for a community still in shock from the 2017 shooting at a Quebec mosque that killed six people, she said, adding Canada's close political and societal kinship with New Zealand made the latest shooting feel "weirdly close to home."

Khedr called for a stop to divisive language inciting fear and mistrust and pleaded for unity to stamp out all forms of racial or faith-based hate.

"We need upstanding political and community leaders to speak loudly denouncing all forms of discrimination, including Islamophobia," she said. "And we need to work together as people who value our shared freedoms in this country."
BROMONT, Que. - Quebec Premier Francois Legault says his government isn't ruling out buying shares in SNC-Lavalin in order to prevent the company from being sold or dismantled.

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BROMONT, Que. - Quebec Premier Francois Legault says his government isn't ruling out buying shares in SNC-Lavalin in order to prevent the company from being sold or dismantled.

Legault said Friday that all options are currently on the table when it comes to saving the troubled Montreal-based engineering giant and the thousands of jobs it provides.

The province's pension fund manager already has a stake of about 20 per cent in the company, but not enough to form a blocking minority.

SNC-Lavalin is currently facing fraud charges stemming from alleged dealings with the Libyan regime under Moammar Gadhafi between 2001 and 2011. A conviction would mean a 10-year ban from bidding on federal contracts, which could cripple the company.

Former attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould quit Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's cabinet last month, testifying later that he and his staff inappropriately pressured her to negotiate a remediation agreement that would allow the company to avoid criminal charges by admitting responsibility and paying a fine.

Legault told reporters in Bromont, Que., that he has spoken with Trudeau on the need to find a way to save SNC-Lavalin and the jobs it creates.

Meanwhile, Quebec's justice minister said Friday that she'd refused a request to meet the engineering firm last fall to discuss a remediation agreement because she hadn't believed it would be pertinent.

Sonia LeBel did not rule out meeting with the company or the federal government to discuss the matter in the future, but she doesn't see the need right now. "I don't know. It will depend. I never rule anything out," she told reporters in Trois-Rivieres, Que.
MONTREAL - A human wave of chanting, sign-waving protesters made their way downtown from the base of Montreal's Mount Royal on Friday as they joined a series of student-led marches around the world demanding that government take action on climate change.

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Students hold a demonstration to protest against climate change, Friday, March 15, 2019 in Montreal.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

MONTREAL - A human wave of chanting, sign-waving protesters made their way downtown from the base of Montreal's Mount Royal on Friday as they joined a series of student-led marches around the world demanding that government take action on climate change.

A beating drum signalled the beginning of the march, which spanned several city blocks as thousands of students and other protesters denounced what they see as government's failure to take action to stop an impending climate crisis.

Earlier Friday, students formed human chains around six Montreal high schools, forcing the cancellation of morning classes.

The protesters are demanding stronger government action on climate change, including a law to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Organizers said that under current commitments, the temperature could rise twice that much by 2020.

"Although individual actions are crucial, the fact is that collective and institutional decisions must be taken to reflect the seriousness of the situation," read a statement by a group of university organizers.

"While the student population is investing in education that is costly in money and time, in precarious conditions accentuated by indebtedness, unpaid internships and a culture of competitive performance, climate change is increasingly threatening the future for which they struggle."

The group said 150,000 students were on strike, representing 120 student associations.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna praised the young Canadians participating in the marches and encouraged them to continue taking action for a more sustainable future.

"They know climate change is real, and that the cost of inaction is enormous," she said in a statement.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault also said he was encouraged by the message being sent by Quebec's youth. "We all live on the same planet, and it's an effort we have to do together," he said.

Other climate marches took place in cities including Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Regina and Vancouver, as well as in close to 100 countries around the world.

High school students protested outside of Ontario's legislature in Toronto on Friday afternoon, demanding the government take action to address climate change.

Leilani Rocha, an 18-year-old student from St. Mary's High School in Pickering, Ont., said she's concerned that no level of government is taking the impacts of climate change seriously.

"This is an emergency," she said. "We need extreme change and to actually take action right now."

Rocha said she hopes the collective protests across the country send a message that youth are ready to make sacrifices in their lives to improve the environment.

"We can't take our cars everywhere," she said. "Sometimes we may need to take the bus or walk or bike. We're okay with that ... but the government needs to realize, because we're okay with that, they need to make legal change."

-- With files from Shawn Jeffords
Canadians were quick to speak out against the attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand that left at least 49 people dead. Here is a selection of quotes:

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Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called "one of New Zealand's darkest days," as authorities detained four people and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned attack. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Canadians were quick to speak out against the attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand that left at least 49 people dead. Here is a selection of quotes:



"Canada condemns this attack, and will continue to work closely with New Zealand, our close partner and friend, and others to take action against violent extremism. Hate has no place anywhere. We must all confront Islamophobia and work to create a world in which all people  no matter their faith, where they live, or where they were born  can feel safe and secure."  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau



"Freedom has come under attack in New Zealand as peaceful worshippers are targeted in a despicable act of evil. All people must be able to practice their faith freely and without fear. There are no words strong enough to condemn this kind of vile hatred. I am praying for peace for the families of those lost and recovery for those injured."  Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer



"As Canadians are learning the horrific details of last nights terror attack at two New Zealand mosques, I wish to express both my deep sadness at the tragic loss of innocent life and my profound condemnation of this cowardly and hateful attack on the Muslim community."  Scheer in a later statement, which specified that the victims were Muslim.



"Heartbroken by the devastating news of deadly shootings at two mosques in New Zealand. My heart goes out to the families of the murdered and all those impacted by this act of terror. Islamophobia kills  and has no place anywhere in the world."  NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh



"Like Quebec and Canada, New Zealand is a peaceful place where people want to live in safety and peace. We have recently experienced a tragedy that has affected everyone in Quebec. I feel totally in solidarity with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and I fully understand her emotion today. There is no room for extremism in our societies; there is no room for intolerance. We will not allow violence to take root in our democratic societies."  Quebec Premier Francois Legault



"I am devastated by the news of the despicable and cowardly shootings in New Zealand. Freedom of religion, peace and rule of law are pillars of democracy and the world we share."  Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister



"There are those who want to fan the flames of intolerance, but that is not how Alberta was built. Today, as Albertas Muslim community gathers for Friday prayers, I want to thank the police officers and community members  people from all faiths and backgrounds  who have already stepped up to show love and support to help defend the sense of security that all of us expect and deserve." Alberta Premier Rachel Notley



"This is a very dark day for those of us who care about the rule of law, plurality, acceptance, and religious freedom. As Canadians, we are acutely aware that this is not the first time Muslims have been targeted while at prayer. That these innocent victims were murdered in their house of worship adds an additional dimension of horror to a deeply tragic situation."  Jeffrey Rosenthal, co-chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs



"Once again, my heart breaks. Not because I am Muslim, but because I am human. But as we condemn the horrific terrorist act in New Zealand, we also must commit ourselves to fighting hatred wherever we find it. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un. We belong to God to him we return."  Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi



"I think we need the politics of division to stop feeding into the fringe with their rhetoric. We need upstanding political and community leaders to speak loudly, denouncing all forms of discrimination, including Islamophobia. And we need to work together as people who value our shared freedoms in this country. We need to stand together, and we need to speak loudly against anything that attempts to divide us."  Rabia Khedr, executive director of the Muslim Council of Peel
Pre-tax losses at the Irish arm of logistics firm TNT Express more than doubled to 2.2m last year, after its parent group was hit by a crippling cyber-attack.

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New accounts filed by Dublin-based TNT Express Ireland Ltd show that the companys losses increased by over 130% in the 12 months to the end of May.

The Irish operation posted revenues of 36m in the 12 months, compared with almost 52.6m it generated in its previous financial year of 17 months.

The year under review coincided with a global cyber-attack on TNT Express, which cost the business worldwide $400m (353m) for the 2018 financial year.

The cost was primarily from the loss of revenues triggered by the huge disruption to shipments in the TNT Express network, as well as from additional costs to restore operations.

The cyber attack, which was called NotPetya, occurred on June 27, 2017 and involved the spread of an information systems virus through a tax software product from Ukraine.

Immediately following the attack, it mounted contingency plans to recover TNT Express operations and communications systems.

The directors report for the Irish arm states that no data breach or data loss to third parties is known to have occurred.

Last year, the firms costs increased by 224,600, after it paid compensation for loss of office to one or more unnamed directors.

Staff numbers fell from 154 to 135, and staff costs, last year, amounted to 8.1m.
A Criminal Assets Bureau led investigation conducted a search operation today in three counties, seizing 115 vehicles and a large sum of cash.

In total, eight searches were conducted at two homes, two car sales outlets and four professional businesses - including a solicitor, an accountant and a finance company - in counties Limerick, Tipperary and Dublin.

A bank account held by one car sales business was frozen by a Court Order.

The following was seized:

115 vehicles

43,000 and 1,000 cash

1 Rolex watch

Financial documents, mobile phones and electronic devices

Documentation in relation to the ownership of assets, financial documentation, mobile phones and electronic storage devices were seized and are currently being examined by Bureau Officers.

The CAB investigation centres on an Organised Crime Gang involved in the sale and supply of controlled drugs in the Limerick City and County areas, and who suspected of being involved in laundering the proceeds of their criminal conduct through a Car Sales Outlet in Limerick City, gardai say.

No arrests were made.

The search was assisted by Garda Emergency Response Unit (ERU), the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau (GNDOCB), the Garda Stolen Motor Vehicle Investigation Unit (SMVIU), the Garda Technical Bureau and the Garda Dog Unit.

Investigations are ongoing.

CAB targeting organised crime gang in searches in Limerick, Tipperary and Dublin

The Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) is conducting a search operation this morning targeting the assets and activities of an organised crime gang based in the Limerick city and county areas.

Picture: An Garda Siochana / Facebookl

Searches are being conducted in counties, Limerick, Tipperary and Dublin.

The CAB investigation centres on an organised crime gang involved in the sale and supply of controlled drugs in the Limerick city and county areas.

The gang is believed to be laundering the proceeds of their criminal conduct through a car sales outlet in Limerick city.

The search operation is currently ongoing and no further details are available.
Community gardai are attending Friday prayers in mosques today in a bid to reassure the Muslim community following the terror attacks in New Zealand.

Imams and senior leaders in the community have expressed concern and anxiety for worshippers after reports emerged early this morning about the gun attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, claiming 49 lives.

In a statement to the Irish Examiner, the Garda Press Office said: An Garda Siochana has a productive and positive relationship with the Muslim community in Ireland built up over many years.

As part of this and to provide support following the terrible events in New Zealand, community gardai will be attending Friday prayer in their local mosque and making themselves available to those communities.

Shaykh Dr Umar Al-Qadri, head Imam of the Islamic Centre of Ireland, said that he had been in contact with gardai this morning in a bid to get a garda presence at his mosque in Blanchardstown, west Dublin today.

A representative of the Islamic Foundation of Ireland also said they had been in contact with local gardai regarding a community garda calling in early to their mosque on Dublin's South Circular Road to provide assurance.

Dr Al-Qadri, who is chair of the Irish Muslim Peace and Integration Council, also issued a statement: Our thoughts and prayers are with the 49 people who have been killed, and dozens more who have been injured, after a gunman opened fire at Mosques in New Zealand during the Friday prayers.

The gunman, like all other terrorists, aimed to spread hatred and fear. Innocent people have been killed in cold blood, but we will not let these terrorists and Islamophobes succeed. We must all stand together against all forms of extremism with unity.

He said: As Muslims, we are deeply concerned and anxious about growing levels of Islamophobia across the World. The threat of the far-right extremists is real, and we must realise the threat that they pose to our societies. Hatred of any community creates a downward spiral of violence and terror, which affects all in a society.

We urge Muslims to remain calm and extra vigilant in this distressing time. IMPIC will continue to work with authorities to protect all of our communities against the growing threat posed by all extremists.

He added: Mosques in Ireland will hold special services during Friday prayers in memory of those affected by the terrorist shooting in New Zealand. We will be praying for the grieving families and for Peace and Compassion in our increasingly polarised world.

I welcome the statements and messages of condemnation of these terrorist attacks and underlying messages of Unity and Solidarity with the Muslim communities from political, faith and civic leadership in Ireland.

He had this to say to social media companies: We also urge the social media companies around the world to play their important role by clamping down on extremism and hate narratives which are spread through their platforms.
Plans have been approved to kickstart the first phase of a new-town development in east Cork. Up to 2,500 houses are scheduled to be built.

County councillors rubber-stamped plans to open up land at Waterrock, 23kms east of Cork City, for the project which will initially provide the infrastructure to create 525 new homes.

The land, between Carrigtwhohill and Midleton, is on the Cork Commuter Rail Corridor which is designated by the local authority for major housing projects.

The council is to utilise 5.5m from the Government-provided Local Infrastructure Housing Activation Fund to open up key sites for development.

The council has decided to plough ahead with the first phase of housing by providing infrastructure to facilitate 520 houses, likely to be constructed next year.

However, it will be constrained from opening up the rest of the land in the area for further development until Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) upgrades the main Cork-Midleton road (N25) to provide for improved accessibility to the new town.

TII says it has no plans to carry out the upgrade until 2027 at the earliest.

In the interim, the local authority plans to build a link road connecting the Midleton Northern Relief Road to the Waterrock site.

The council's Waterrock Masterplan, which foresees all 2,500 homes constructed within the next 20 years, also includes the development of two new primary schools in the area and a series of parks and amenity spaces close to the Cork-Midleton railway line.

Ross Palmer, the county council's senior planner, is on record as saying the connecting road will be designed in a way to discourage speeding.

Its got numerous signalised junctions, numerous bends along it that will reduce speed, and it will also include raised (speed ramp) tables, he said.

A separate investment of 8m by Irish Water will upgrade water and sewage facilities to accommodate the development of the new town.

A new pumping station and mains will be constructed near Waterrock to pump waste to the Carrigtwohill Waste Water Treatment Plant. Irish Water has said it could become operational by 2021.

The plan also includes construction of a new railway station for potential commuters, close to the former Dawn Meats plant in Midleton.

The 160-hectare Waterrock development is part of two masterplans drawn up by the county council for major development adjacent to the Cork-Midleton railway line.

The local authority has also drawn up a plan for the further expansion of Carrigtwohill, on 120 hectares of land to the north of its railway line. This land is also capable of accommodating a further 2,500 homes.

Andrew Hind, the former chief planner who drew up both plans, said the two areas were ideal for further expansion as they were close to the railway line and thus offered sustainable transport for commuters.
South Africa: Soshanguve mechanic building young minds

Having struggled to become a motor mechanic, Isaac Boshomane has vowed to help young people to acquire the skills and qualifications needed to become a qualified mechanic.

Aged 52, Boshomane from Soshanguve is the proud owner of Kgabo Cars, a workshop that offers artisan skills training for learners studying at Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges.

Boshomanes company was registered in 2001, while he was still working. He only started working on it full-time in January 2012. Since then, more than 60 artisans have been produced from Soshanguve township.

In the workshop, young people do service, repair and car maintenance, while transferring their skills to others.

We give them practical exposure until we take them for a trade test to qualify as national artisans in motor mechanics. For them to love what they are doing, I try to make them not see it as a hard work, but something that they chose and they can excel in, Boshomane said.

SAnews caught up with Boshomane just after receiving the Ministers award for recognition of the most outstanding individual at the National Annual Skills Development Awards on Thursday.

The most outstanding individual award, which was presented by Higher Education and Training Minister Naledi Pandor, recognises an individual who has distinguished themselves in their professional, organisation and community within the skills development system.

Boshomane said the award is a beacon of hope for young boys and girls in the township.

With this award, I think they will now have hope. It will actually motivate other young people at the workshop to work harder and say if he [Boshomane] can do it, we can also do it because he is also from our own surrounding, Boshomane said.

Held under the theme, Building a demand-led skills development system that focuses on inclusive economic growth, the awards recognise the best skills development practices in National Skills Fund-funded projects in various sectors and categories.

The emphasis of the award is also on individuals, organisations and institutions that have shown excellence in promoting employment, and on the needs of unemployed people, especially young people.

Speaking at the prestigious award ceremony held in Boksburg, Gauteng, Pandor said skills development remains governments priority, and it is the key enabler for inclusive economic growth.

Dynamic changes are taking place in the world of work. These changes require a well-coordinated and collaborative approach, Pandor said.

Pandor urged all key role players to focus on monitoring and evaluating their progress in learning progress and identifying and reporting blockages, detours and loops.

By highlighting what needs to be improved, we will be able to review policies, curriculum and Sector Skills Plans, so as to ensure that we respond quickly and efficiently to any issues that emerge, the Minister said.

Other recipients, who scooped top awards in various sectors, include:

Media Works Interactive, Chemical Industries Education & Training Authority (CHIETA) sector.

False Bay College, Education, Training and Development Practices Sector Education and Training Authority (ETDP SETA) sector.

Aranda Textiles Mills, Fibre Processing and Manufacturing Sector Education and Training Authority (FP&M SETA) sector.



 SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Thousands of teachers across Kentucky have called out sick over the past two weeks, protesting new legislation that could affect the states teacher pension systemand now Kentuckys education commissioner wants their names.

On Thursday, Commissioner Wayne Lewis requested a list of the teachers who had taken sick days in the 10 districts where teacher absences caused work stoppages.

He also asked these districts to turn over any doctors notes that could prove these teachers were actually sick, and to provide copies of any district policies around verification of sick leave.

Lewis said that he supports teachers constitutional rights to demonstration and protest, but that teachers cant use their sick leave when they arent actually ill.

Teachers do not have the constitutional right to call in sick when you are not sick, and force a work stoppage that results in Kentucky schools closing. There is no such right in Kentucky, Lewis said during a press conference on Friday.

Anyone who says to teachers that thats a right, theyre ... being dishonest with them. Theyre not their advocates. They are not their friends.



Teachers had left their classrooms to speak out against a bill that would restructure the board that oversees the states teacher pension system . The proposed legislation would shift some of the nominating power away from the Kentucky Education Association to a wider group of education-related groups in the state.

The Kentucky Education Association has called the bill a retaliatory effort in response to last years teacher protests over the states pension system, which is one of the worst-funded in the nation.

This years sick-outs closed the Bath, Boyd, Bullitt, Carter, Fayette, Jefferson, Letcher, Madison, Marion, and Oldham county school systems. Jefferson County saw the longest work stoppage, with the district forced to shut down for six days.

School district closures disadvantage students, who are supposed to be the states first priority, Lewis said.

When we get to the place where six days over the last two weeks, kids education and a community has come to a halt, something has to be done.

Lewis said he has spoken to officials in several of the 10 districts, and has not yet heard from any that are refusing to comply with his request.

He may soon see a legal challenge, however. A Lexington county attorney has sent a letter to the state education department, informing the agency that he may file a lawsuit on behalf of teachers affected by unprecedented interference with their first amendment rights, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports .

Teachers should not be intimidated if they exercise their right to take sick leave, the attorney, Mark Wohlander, told the Herald-Leader.

The Kentucky Education Association has also condemned Lewis request, and urged Lewis and district superintendents not to discipline teachers whose names would be released.

Making educatorswho are citizens of this Commonwealthchoose between keeping their livelihood and exercising their constitutional rights is despicable, the organization wrote, in a statement posted to Twitter Thursday. We hope that all superintendents recognize that such a show of political force by public school employees is a gesture of support for public school students, parents, school boards and school administrations all across the state.

In Fridays press conference, Lewis was adamant that his goal was not to punish teachers, or have the state press charges. But he wouldnt guarantee that disciplinary action wouldnt be taken against any of the teachers.



It would be irresponsible for me to go on the record now and make a statement saying, regard of what we find, we wont take any action, he said.

The best outcome, Lewis said, would be for districts in the state to develop policies to verify teacher sick leave requests.

But in a statement posted to Twitter after the conference, the Kentucky Education Association accused Lewis of using scare tactics that would create an enemies list of teachers for Governor Matt Bevins administration.

This tactic serves only one purposeto intimidate educators, public employees, school board members and superintendents across the Commonwealth and keep them from speaking out, the statement read.

Photo: Several hundred teachers gather to protest perceived attacks on public education at the Capitol, in Frankfort, Ky, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Bryan Woolston/AP
The Israeli military hit about 100 targets in the Gaza Strip today in response to a missile attack on Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, the press service of the Israel Defense Forces reported.

"In response to the missile attack out of Gaza, about 100 terrorist targets were attacked across the Gaza Strip," a press service official wrote on Twitter.

Two rockets were fired at Tel Aviv from the Gaza Strip yesterday. Israels Iron Dome missile-defense system detected the incoming rockets around 9 p.m. and sounded alarms that were heard across metropolitan Tel Aviv on a rainy night. No injuries or damage were reported, but residents reported hearing loud blasts and the mayor ordered bomb shelters opened.
US president Donald Trump intervened to help safeguard hundreds of jobs in the Limerick region after the impact of sanctions against Russia threatened to damage the Aughinish Alumina plant.

The US Treasury announced in December that it would lift sanctions that had been imposed on the plants Russian parent company Rusal.

Mr Trump confirmed in the White House this week that he had a role in this.

Speaking in the Oval Office, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he wanted to thank him for his help, saying that hundreds of jobs were threatened as a result of the Russian sanctions. And with the help of the administration, we were able to save those jobs.

Mr Trump replied: Thats right. They [the press] dont know about that.

Mr Varadkars spokesman confirmed that the threat of the sanctions on the plant was first raised at last years Washington DC meeting with Mr Trump. Mr Varadkar had said a lot of jobs depended on it, that the plant was important for EU aluminium producers and for Irish exports.

Mr Trump asked his officials to then look into the issue. US authorities then designed a solution so that Aughinish did not fall under the sanctions regime.

A restructuring deal was then agreed to end Russian oligarch and billionaire Oleg Deirpaskas control of Rusal.

In January, the US Senate then voted to support the White House efforts to lift the sanctions.

Around 700 workers and contractors are employed at the Aughinish Alumina plant near Askeaton, making it one of Limericks biggest employers.

Rusal supplies 6% of the worlds aluminium and operates mines, and refineries in locations including Ireland Jamaica, and Russia.

Irish ambassador to the US Daniel Mulhall had warned of the unintended consequences of the sanctions on communities such as Aughinish, with 700 direct jobs at stake and another 1,000 who depend indirectly on it.
A massive fire has broken out at an abandoned four-storey building in Co. Louth.

Emergency services are currently at the scene of the blaze at Donaghys Mill in Drogheda.
A former soldier's action against the State over health problems he claimed he suffered as a result of being prescribed the anti-malaria drug Larium has been adjourned to next week.

Patrick Fedigan has brought proceedings over what he claims were the effects of taking the drug while he served with the Defence Forces during UN peacekeeping deployments to Africa between 2001 and 2009.

The claims are denied. The case is of one of several brought against the State by members of the Defence Forces who claim they suffered various illnesses as a result of being prescribed the drug.

Mr Fedigan from Lobinstown, Navan, Co Meath, claims that he was prescribed Mefloquine Hydrochloride (Larium) when he served in Eritrea in 2001, Liberia in 2002 and Chad in 2010.

The 51-year-old claims that as a result of his exposure to Larium he has suffered from various conditions including loss of balance, anxiety, panic, insomnia, vertigo, and memory problems.

He further claims the Minister for Defence, Ireland and the Attorney General were negligent and in breach of their duty towards him on grounds including he was not a suitable person to be prescribed Larium.

His prior medical history had not been ascertained before he was prescribed Larium, he alleges, and he further claims he did not get adequate support, treatment or management when he made complaints of symptoms of being prescribed the anti-malaria drug.

He further claims there was an alleged failure to provide him with a safe system of work. All the claims are denied.

Mr Fedigan retired from the Defence Forces in 2013.

The case, expected to last up to 10 weeks, was adjourned shortly after it opened before Mr Justice Bernard Barton today to allow Mr Fedigan's s lawyers consider documents recently discovered by the defendants.

The case before Mr Justice Bernard Barton resumes on Tuesday.
The Criminal Assets Bureau is to ask the High Court to order a sister of gangster Liam Byrne to promise a house she is due to hand over shortly to CAB will be intact.

It follows separate incidents of vandalism last Sunday to two houses which belonged to Byrne and his associate Sean McGovern hours before they were also due to be handed over.

The houses, one at Grange View, Clondalkin, owned by Byrne, and at Kildare Road, Crumlin, owned by McGovern, were broken into and substantial damage caused to them, Grainne O'Neill BL, for CAB, told the court today.

As a result, CAB has been given liberty by the court to re-enter the cases it brought against Byrne and his associates which led to orders that the houses be forfeit to State because they, and other assets, were acquired from the proceeds of crime.

Ms O'Neill said CAB also wanted to seek undertakings that no fixtures and fittings will be removed from a property at Raleigh Square, also in Crumlin, which has also been found to be acquired through crime, before it is handed over next June. The court last month gave a stay of four months on an order the house be vacated.

CAB wants Maria Byrne, the registered owner and sister of Liam Byrne, to give the undertakings before it is vacated. Some 750,000 was spent on fitting it with luxury improvements, all paid for by Liam Byrne, who also paid rent for it to his sister, the court heard previously.

Ms O'Neill said the houses in Crumlin and Clondalkin were due to be handed over to CAB at midnight last Sunday.

When an officer attended the Clondalkin house he found substantial damage was done to it, counsel said. Local gardai had received a call that day that two males were observed kicking in the door.

Extensive damage was done including smashed windows, fixtures and fittings removed or smashed along with flooding caused by the removal of water pipes and sanitary ware, counsel said.

In Crumlin, a garda on patrol on Sunday saw two men driving away in a van from the house in Kildare Road. Officers found all fixtures and fittings there had been removed.

The court heard garda investigations into the crimes are ongoing and both properties have been boarded up.

Ms O'Neill said as well as seeking liberty to re-enter proceedings against Liam Byrne and Sean McGovern, CAB wanted to bring an application against Ms Byrne seeking the undertakings about Raleigh Square before the keys of that property are handed over. Directions on how a receiver is to proceed with the sale of the properties are also to be sought

Ms Justice Carmel Stewart granted liberty to bring applications in relation to all matters and adjourned the case to next month.
EU Commissioner Phil Hogan has said the UKs no-deal tariff plans  proposals that would see no import duties levied on goods entering Northern Ireland across the border  likely breach World Trade Organisation rules.

Mr Hogan, who is commissioner for agriculture and rural development, claimed the plans unveiled by Whitehall this week were political and designed to change in the news cycle from the political chaos on London.

I think they are incompatible with WTO rules, he said of the plans, after arriving at the Irish Farmers Journal's Global Trade Conference in Dublin today.

Mr Hogan added: I think the timing of it was unfortunate and it was a deliberate attempt to put Ireland more on the agenda, as if it wasnt on the agenda already.

Mr Hogan said there were no more excuses for Westminster not to ratify the deal.

He noted that intensive discussions were taking place with the UK Government and the DUP and some Brexiteers.

They do realise they are risking a no-deal but also a no Brexit, and I think thats concentrating their minds, he said.

I hope she (Theresa May) is successful in getting some deal because the deal is on the table from the European Union side with the UK since November 25. All the clarifications that were needed were given in a very open and generous way by the European Union last Monday  theres no more excuses.

Mr Hogan said MPs in Westminster were behaving in an unacceptable way.

They have had a long time to do all of this up until now and leaving it until the eleventh hour is creating instability and uncertainty for their own people, but also for Irish people and for the European Union generally, he said.

That is certainly not an acceptable way of political behaviour from the mother of parliaments.

He said he would not pre-judge whether European leaders would be prepared to offer Mrs May a Brexit extension.

Mr Hogan said the EU stood ready to support Irish farmers who might be adversely impacted by Brexit.

But he urged those in the sector to remain calm until the final shape of Brexit was clear.

We are well advanced for all scenarios including very difficult situations for farmers in Europe generally and indeed for Irish farmers because we are very exposed, particularly in the beef sector, he said.

He added: The European Union is ready to help them at the appropriate time when we see what the conclusions of the negotiations in London are.

Mr Hogan said there was not yet a market crisis  characterising the situation as only a political crisis.

He said Irish farmers had weathered previous troubled periods, such as mad cow and foot and mouth diseases, with EU help.

We shouldnt talk ourselves into a crisis, he added.

PA
Revenue officers have seized more than 7,800 cigarettes, 20kgs tobacco and a car in Co. Wexford.

Officers found the haul during a raid on a house in Enniscorthy today.
Students are marching on the Dail this lunchtime demanding the Government takes action against climate change.

Protests are taking place around the country, with students demonstrating outside their local authorities and school gates.

This is part of a global action in an escalating movement among young people that was started by 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thurnberg.

Students have issued the Government with six demands, including asking them to crack down on companies that are contributing to the problem.

Thirteen-year-old Lucy Dunne says if no action is taken, her future could be lost.

"We only have 11 years left to drastically cut our emissions and by then I will only be 24 - which will be the prime of my life, some would say.

"Just to think that if nothing happens now I might not even have a future, I might not have the future that I have dreamed for."

The protest includes hundreds of students from dozens of Cork schools.

Cork school students marching for action on climate change as part of the Global Climate Strike. Picture: Jack Squibb

Large crowds gathered in Emmett Place near the city's Opera House more than an hour before the match was due to start.

The message was loud and clear: We want change now.

Chants of "change now" and "leave your carbon in the soil" could be heard as the students marched through the city to Cork's City Hall with huge numbers of pedestrians and shoppers showing their support.

Cork city Kids Climate Strike Im crying with pride #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/CutbU5jJA2  Rachael OSullivan (@Ravenroots) March 15, 2019

Placards called for immediate action on climate change.

Slogans such a "the greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it" made it clear that these students have had enough.

Meanwhile, youngsters have staged events in 100 British towns and cities including London, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge calling for urgent action to tackle climate change, cut emissions and switch to renewable energy.

Anna Taylor, 17, from north London  co-founder of the UK Student Climate Network, said the Government was failing to recognise the severity of the crisis.

Theyre failing to make environmental reform and environmental policy a priority, they focusing on economic policy and Brexit and failing to address the climate crisis facing us.

-Additional reporting Kevin O'Neill
The Taoiseach will meet with emigrant support groups in Chicago this afternoon, as he continues his US St. Patrick's engagements.

Leo Varadkar will hold talks on the plight of the undocumented Irish with local immigration organisations who receive government funding.

This evening he will attend the annual Irish Fellowship St. Patrick's Day dinner, attended by over 1,000 Irish Americans.

Emigration is a key theme of this week's events.

The Taoiseach has already raised Irish emigration several times.

Yesterday he brought up the plight of the undocumented Irish with President Trump in the Oval Office.

At last night's Shamrock exchange, he said no nation with as many ties as Ireland has to the United States has so few pathways to legal immigration.

And he thanked Congress for supporting a new E3 visa, which would allow a limited number of Irish people to go to the States.

Those issues will be raised again when he leaves Washington this morning and heads to Chicago, where so many Irish now call home.
The Russian Foreign Ministry's spokesperson Maria Zakharova, answering a question from the corespondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, condemned the statement by chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford against changing the U.S. military policy which allows it to be the first to use nuclear weapons during a possible conflict with an adversary.

"These statements are made so easy, which demonstrates, in my opinion, absolute incompetence in the matter. When having rhetorical, political and PR goals, people start to fiddle with things that can just put an end to our world's existence with all its evil and good, it only means they simply do not realize what they're talking about," she noted in the first place.

"Such provisions should be discussed. Of course, there are public issues, there are military doctrines in which nuclear states reflect their approaches - but the frequency with which many politicians in the West fiddle with these things, reason on these topics, cannot but confront us with a question regarding their responsibility. I think that to some extent we should be grateful and more attentive to the dream factory's production on this topic," Maria Zakharova pointed out.

"One way or another, artists largely act as futurists, trying to make sense of the future in the context of this scenario. Why not reconsider all these films and understand that reasoning on topics which represent a danger to all humanity for political purposes is simply unacceptable. It is important to think whether speculations, using nuclear issues as an important political argument, may lead to apocalyptic consequences," the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry concluded.
Moscow is closely monitoring the situation in Idlib, Aleppo, Lattakia and Hama after receiving information that terrorists from the so-called 'Hayat Tahrir al-Sham' (aka Nusra Front, aka al-Qaeda* in Syria) are planning to stage chemical attacks in the provinces, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has said, Sputnik reports.

"We are closely monitoring the situation in the Idlib de-escalation zone," Zakharova said, speaking to reporters on Friday. "The terrorists operating there from the Nusra alliance are not stopping their provocative false flag attacks against government forces. Since the beginning of the year, over 460 such incidents have been recorded. Over 30 people have been killed, and 100 injured," she added.

According to Zakharova, Moscow is "seriously concerned" by fresh reports that "militants from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, with the assistance of the notorious White Helmets, are making preparations for another staged attack involving the use of toxic substances, with the subsequent imposition of blame for the use of chemical weapons on government forces. "Terrorists are dispersing the corresponding warheads and caches in the provinces of Aleppo, Idlib, Lattakia, and Hama," the spokeswoman stressed.
And it's the classic, mass-market beer brands that are driving the steepest decline. "VB and Carlton Draught are still the cornerstones of our portfolio and very iconic brands within the Victorian and Australian landscapes," says Filipovic, who describes the challenge facing the industry as multi-pronged. "But tastes are changing. Consumers are wanting more. Moderation is a big trend  and we have got to adapt." Inside the big breweries of the world, the effects of these changes are filtering through. Industry analysts estimate that revenue in the Australian beer manufacturing sector has contracted by an annualised 1.1 per cent over the past five years and margins have shrunk.

Loading There's still money there. The most recent accounts for global beer colussus Anheuser-Busch InBev's Australian operations, which includes CUB, show it pulled in $2.87 billion in revenue here in the period from October 2016 to the end of last year. From that, it was able to generate a profit after tax of $331 million as it sold roughly half of the beer drunk in Australia. But consumers' rising health consciousness, preferences for more complex craft beers and take-up of other drinks like cider and spirits, analysts say, are all to blame for the beer industry's "constrained" performance. The impact of our dwindling love affair with traditional beer is being felt already. In October last year, CUB's biggest competitor, Lion, was forced to retrench dozens of employees at its XXXX brewery in Queensland and its West End brewery South Australia, citing falling sales. "The decline in per-capita alcohol consumption and the move away from traditional beer is still a problem for the industry, and especially the larger companies like Lion and CUB," says Matthew Reeves, a senior industry analyst with IBISWorld."However these companies have certainly begun addressing these issues and have seen positive results."

With Lion boasting 40 per cent market share, the two companies sell nine out of every 10 beers in the country. This is a big business moment. For companies like CUB and Lion, it's an adapt-or-die proposition. The solution, Filipovic insists, is to innovate and keep up with the societal changes he has seen sweep the industry over his career. The decline in per-capita alcohol consumption and the move away from traditional beer is still a problem for the industry. IBISWorld's Matthew Reeves Before becoming CEO, he had worked for CUB for more than 20 years, starting out as a tax graduate when the brewer was owned by Fosters Group. Later, when it was owned by SABMiller, he was made sales director and Australian business unit president.

Now, under the ownership of the world's biggest brewery Anheuser-Busch InBev, whose best-known beer is Budweiser, he has been in the top job since January. "Back when I started ... most people had one or two beers in their repertoire, now we have three to seven, which is quite a big increase," says Filipovic. "I dont know whats going to happen in three years," he goes on, "but our role in society is to continue to adapt to what consumers want." IBISWorld notes the industry has found commercial success in new product lines targeting changing preferences for easier-drinking lagers and the alcohol "moderation" trend, including CUB's mid-strength Great Northern Super Crisp Lager. That beer shot to prominence as one of the most popular beers in Australia, accounting for up to 5.7 per cent of beer sales in 2016-17.

Lion, meanwhile, has invested heavily in the hugely successful Furphy and Iron Jack beers  sales of which grew 125 per cent and 86 per cent respectively in the 2018 financial year, according to Lion's parent company Kirin Holdings. Loading Last month, Lion launched its first gluten-free beer, Hahn Ultra Crisp, made from rice, which Lion brand manager Amy Darvill says will ensure Hahn continues evolving to "meeting the needs of the modern Australian consumer". Across CUB's parent AB InBev, about eight per cent of global beer volumes is now from low- and no-alcohol beers. One of its newest products, the no-alcohol Carlton Zero, hit supermarket shelves in Australia in August. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' latest figures show that alcohol consumption among people over the age of 15 has continued on downward trend that began in 2010 and, in 2016-17, reached a 55-year low.

Per person alcohol consumption for the year was equivalent to 9.4 litres of pure alcohol per person, or 224 stubbies, down from more than 500 stubbies in 1974-75, with beer driving the bulk of the decline. According to Filipovic, the industry's move towards low- and no-alcohol beer is both driven by the companys promotion of responsible drinking, in addition to catering to what consumers want. How will the beer industry respond to far from frothy times? Illustration: Joe Benke. Credit: "We have done a lot to promote responsible drinking, as well as adapt to the consumer trend," he says pointing out that CUB is the single biggest contributor to an industry-funded responsible drinking group called DrinkWise. "Carlton Zero has been incredible."

Public health advocates, the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, have welcomed the increase in low- and no-alcohol beers, but have been critical of CUB for offering the products for sale on supermarket shelves, "where it is visible to children alongside grocery items such as water and Easter eggs". Trish Hepworth, the foundation's policy director, rejects the argument that brewers like CUB are doing enough to drive down alcohol consumption, accusing them of prioritising their responsibilities to shareholders, "irrespective of the harm" alcohol causes. "Alcohol companies, supported by alcohol industry bodies, sell alcohol for profit," says Hepworth. "Alcohol is a harmful commodity that confers no health benefit and leads to detrimental health outcomes, which is in direct conflict with the public interest and public health objectives." Hepworth says there is a general trend of improving health consciousness among Australians.

"However, this does not translate across all population groups," she says. "Older Australians are drinking more than ever before." As drinking rates among younger generations keep dropping, industry analysts point to another interesting trend that is coming into view. Millennials appear to be increasingly favouring "quality over quantity", gravitating towards smaller, more natural and more locally produced food and drink products. Loading In the beer sphere, what this means is a move away from classic, mass-produced lagers like Carlton or VB, and a move towards craft and microbreweries instead. In the US, craft beer has experienced double-digit growth in market share over the past several years. In Australia there are more than 400 craft or boutique breweries operating nationally.

"Millennials, being the 'information generation', like to know the story about what they are buying, especially when it comes to food and beverage purchases," says Reeves. "Millennials prefer to buy locally produced products, so in buying craft beer, they know they are buying a local brew and not an import." Craft brewers  much smaller operations than major beer companies  have focused on European and American styles that were previously under-represented in the Australian market, such as pilsners, pale ales, porters, amber ales, dark ales and wheat beer. Having people talk about beer again is actually the positive attribute. CUB's Peter Filipovic Mass-market brewers, too, have been steadily increasing their 'craft beer' offerings in response. CUB has long owned the Matilda Bay Brewing Company, best-known for its Yak ale range, while Lion snapped up Little Creatures in 2012. Both brewers have also embarked on a run of further acquisitions in the fast-growing craft beer sector. In 2017, CUB parent AB InBev bought out Sydney-based Four Pines and Adelaides Pirate Life.

For his part, Filipovic says he is a classic lager drinker: VB in the fridge at home, Carlton on tap at the pub. "But what the craft category has been able to do for us is provide romance  the wine category has led that for many years, he says. "Having people talk about beer again is actually the positive attribute." Adding to big beer's challenges are their largest customers, retail chains Woolworths, Coles and Aldi, which have substantially increased their own private-label beer offerings in recent years. Products like the Woolworths-owned John Boston and the Coles-owned Steamrail are putting a dent in demand, intensifying price competition and damaging manufacturers profit margins. The other major buyers of beer, of course, are the nations pubs, bars and nightclubs. The relationships between the two big beer giants and these venues have been the subject of scrutiny in recent years. Independent brewers say they are being "locked out" of beer taps in many venues because of CUB and Lion contracts requiring venues to dedicate more than 80 per cent of their taps exclusively to their beers.

The national competition watchdog, following a three-year investigation, ultimately rejected the concerns. The head of the pubs industry group in Victoria, where CUB is most prominent, says the vast majority of its members had CUB beer taps, either through exclusive contracts with CUB, contracts allowing for a mix of CUB, Lion and independent beers, or no contracts at all. According to Australian Hotels Association state chief executive Paddy O'Sullivan, CUB under Filipovic has gone from being "not only a supplier to the pub industry, but a key partner", and was proving adept in responding to rapidly changing consumer demands. "The pub industry looks to CUB under the leadership of Flip to drive a lot of that customer insight and that market insight, says O'Sullivan. "They are leading the way to deal with those obvious challenges." He says Filipovic, whom he describes as skilled and respected, "never looks to create an unfair advantage" against competitors, but was more interested in growing the industry as a whole.

"He's got a great knowledge of the business, a great commercial background, but what's really impressive is he spends a lot of time and effort on industry partnerships and relationships," O'Sullivan says. From runaway energy prices to high labour costs, much has been made in recent years of the pressures facing the Australian manufacturing industry, making tough times even tougher. Filipovic, however, is upbeat when he talks about the manufacturing environment, and the prospects of CUB's five breweries nationally, stressing the company has a focus on working collaboratively with its employees' unions to drive efficiency and sustainability. "We make and sell a lot of beer," he says, "and we work with our employees here to be efficient for the long term." His comments reflect a sharp turnaround in CUB's approach to unions in recent years after a long and hostile dispute in 2016 when the company sought to cut costs at its heavily unionised Abbotsford brewery to make it more competitive. CUB said conditions negotiated over the decades had resulted in an "unsustainable situation".

CUB's then management stoked the ire of trade unions when it axed a long-standing maintenance contract and left 55 workers out of a job unless they agreed to re-sign on a new contract on lower pay. The laid-off fitters and electricians and their union officials protested outside the brewery gates for more than six months, prompting sometimes ugly confrontations, while the broader labour movement launched a national boycott campaign urging drinkers to stop drinking CUB beers. Well-known pubs including the Tote in Collingwood, the Lincoln Hotel in Carlton and the Kent Street bar in Fitzroy backed the union push and ditched their CUB taps. The protracted and highly public dispute ended within two months of CUB being taken over by AB InBev, with the workers winning their jobs back. The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), since the dispute, now represents the majority of CUB Abbotsford workers.

A new workplace agreement struck earlier this year provided a 4 per cent wage rise per year for the next three years, a joint consultative committee with union representatives, a full-time health and safety representative and a special production run of a limited-edition VB can celebrating Labour Day. The union's assistant state secretary, Elias Spernovasilis, said the mood among the workforce was positive. "It's great to see a more consultative approach from CUB Abbotsford to industrial relations," he says. The other question hanging over the future of the business at its historic home is related to that other great Australian passion: property prices. CUB's sprawling Abbotsford brewery sits on valuable real estate, 10 hectares of prime inner-city river frontage about four kilometres east of the city centre. With an estimated value of more than $100 million, questions have arisen over the years about CUB's plans for the site, which would be a contender for future development.
A student pub in Carlton, the Clyde Hotel, is embroiled in a Supreme Court fight with Melbournes top-tier sandstone university over a tiny, nine square-metre rubbish store.

The small room in the base of the Melbourne University-owned earth sciences building is across the laneway from the Clyde and has been used by the pub for several decades to store its garbage bins.

The Clyde has been using the storeroom for at least 44 years. Credit:Joe Armao

The Clyde Hotels owners, Margaret Kearney and Frank Viola, have lodged an adverse possession claim over the storeroom with the land titles office, prompting Melbourne University to take the matter to court.

Victorias adverse possession laws allow someone who has used another owners land for more than 15 years without consent to claim possession of the property without compensation.
A flood of iconic Melbourne heritage sites are now worth as little as $1 after their owners successfully disputed their value in the wake of a controversial planning tribunal decision.

The upmarket Intercontinental Rialto Hotel at 495 Collins Street is understood to have joined a growing list of noteworthy heritage sites with nominal values.

"The Block Arcade is today as it was in 1892," arcade manager Grant Cohen said. Credit:Jesse Marlow

The Intercontinental's historic facade, at the property controlled by specialist property fund SB&G Hotel Group, is ranked 40th on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Another city landmark believed to be valued near $1 is the dazzling, 124-year-old National Trust-listed Block Arcade in Collins Street.
City limits Fresh from listing the Flagstaff City Inn in West Melbourne, developer Nicole Chow is now off-loading a medical centre at her recently completed North Melbourne development. CBRE agents Jimmy Tat, Josh Twelftree and Lewis Tong are handling the sale of the 590 sq m medical centre which is on level one at 33 Flemington Road. Its across the road from the citys medical hub, which includes the Comprehensive Cancer Centre, the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Royal Womens Hospital. 33 Flemington Road, North Melbourne

Mr Tat said the centre is leased to five tenants, including the Leukemia Foundation. It has an average lease term of 4.5 years and returns $321,047 a year in rent. The property is expected to sell for around $5 million. The timing of the medical centre sale was opportunistic, Ms Chow said. "We still retain a significant interest in the retail shops, car parking and the residential apartments at North. In May 2017, Ms Chows United Asia Group paid a record $20 million for the still-operating Flagstaff City Inn in West Melbourne on Dudley Street.

45-55 Dudley Street is back on the market. A permit for a 25-storey 212-room hotel project was wrestled off the City of Melbourne last year via a trip to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The developer had pitched for 32 levels. Savills agent Clinton Baxter, who is handling the sale for the second time running, is expecting it will sell in the low to mid-$20 million range. The result will be keenly anticipated. A nearby property on Roden Street sold for $1 million less than its 2015 purchase price of $17 million. Ms Chow told Capital Gain she is actively looking for more sites in Melbourne. Last year, she paid around $35 million for Vision Australias office and warehouse at 346-350 Macaulay Road in Kensington. The Singaporean-born developer, who has lived in Australia for more than 25 years, said planning is underway for a development on the Kensington property.

Bourke Hot Investors keen on grabbing a piece of the steadily warming Bourke Street hill action could have their chance with a strata shop in one of the citys earliest apartment projects. Shop 3 at 50 Bourke Street is leased by Golden Star Massage on a 10 year lease that started in 2012. Shop 3 at 48 Bourke Street is for sale. Its just 80 sq m in a ground floor strip across the Liverpool Street laneway from Jobs Warehouse where speculation is rife about a hot new restaurant spearheaded by the O'Brien Group, which owns the nearby Imperial Hotel and the Bondi Iceberg restaurant in Sydney.

The little shop is across the street from 19-21 Bourke where Chin Chin restaurateur Chris Lucas is opening his French bistro Batard; and the old Society site at No. 23-29 for which Swisse Vitamins heir Stephen Ring paid $8.1 million in 2017. Down the hill is Grossi Florentino and Pellegrinis; while up the hill on Spring Street, crowds pack The European and Ronnie di Stasio new Citta restaurant. Colliers International agents Chris Ling and Anthony Kirwan are expecting around $1.5 million for the shop which returns $73,755 a year in rent. The three-to-six storey property was built in 1983. It had been the site of a prominent William Angliss emporium that was demolished to make way for one of the citys first mixed-use projects. There are eight shops on the ground and some 28 apartments upstairs built around a central courtyard. The penthouse sold a year ago for $2.8 million.

All that jazz Elsewhere in the city, Aust Global Investments has received approval to change its permit for 22-24 Bennetts Lane to hotel use from residential. AGI is planning a 14-storey 44-room hotel in the alley which was once home to famous jazz club Bennetts Lane. The skinny tower is going up on a tiny 150 sq m plot of land at the end of the lane which is now dominated by apartment towers and the family offices of rich-listers. The warehouse and carpark at 22-24 Bennetts Lane.

Around the corner on Exploration Lane, the Knowles Group is also going ahead with a hotel on its pocket handkerchief site at No.9-11. Property developer and rich-lister John Knowles had planned to build a 130-room hotel on the 170 sq m site in a joint venture with fellow rich-lister Jonathan Hallinan. It was offered for sale - before construction - for around $50 million. Mr Knowles had paid $2.15 million for the Exploration Lane site in 2010. The venture came undone last year after Mr Hallinan sold a separate off-the-plan hotel project on Flinders Lane to Indian billionaires group Interglobe for $91.3 million. The Knowles Group then tried to sell the raw site but it has now been withdrawn for sale. Mr Knowles and his brothers sold their retirement community business to Stockland in 2007 for $329 million. The move comes as Mr Knowles wife Coral, splashed out $4.07 million on the Sportsgirl shop in Sorrento over the long weekend.
The NSW government and the Council of the City of Sydney are locked in a "battle of the styles" over the revitalisation of the Waterloo Social Housing Estate.

City of Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore and her council planning staff have put a shot across the bow of the NSW government's masterplan with their own vision.

Amazingly Ms Moore's team have resorted to the colonial authoritarian plans of the 1820s when a town must have a public square or park and eight rows of housing lined up next to the square.

The City of Sydney council would create one large park with a community centre at the estate site, under a lower-density plan. Credit:City of Sydney

Government Order No. 29, issued May 30, 1829, set down the regulations for new towns in NSW and Ms Clovers plan for Waterloo seems to fit the format.
For many of us, a print was our first foray into the art world. Wed moved into our first homes, the posters of our youth, whether they were of Farrah Fawcett or some inspirational quote urging us to keep calm and carry on, were discarded for something much more grown up.

Printmaking has always been a way to make art more accessible, and affordable, both for buyers and the artists themselves, and now a retrospective exhibition Imprint: A survey of the Print Council of Australia explores the diverse history of the process.

Rebecca Richards, left, and Emilie Patteson, from the Australian Parliament House art collections team check Meow, a work by Maria Kozic, on display in the Imprint exhibition.

The PCA was established in Melbourne in 1966 by printmakers Udo Sellbach, Grahame King and curator Dr Ursula Hoff to promote the artform of printmaking.

The exhibition at Australian Parliament House features historically significant works from the Print Councils archive, including some of the first prints created by significant Australian artists, including John Brack and Fred Williams.
How can we write about a dystopia when we already live in it? That was one of the themes at the 2019 Adelaide Writers' Week, where, despite the sunshine and the idyllic garden setting, the troubles of the world kept creeping in.

Margaret Morgan nearly stopped writing her dystopian novel The Second Cure when Donald Trump was elected US president. "I thought the world was going to end  and what would happen to my book then?"

Author Ginger Gorman, who has written a book about internet trolls, was a guest at the Adelaide Writers Festival. Credit:Dion Georgopoulos

We had sessions on global frenzies, wars in the Middle East and the Philippines, wartime sex slaves, war crimes, the rise of China, India's Untouchable caste, the trauma of loss, mental illness, arson, troubles in South Africa, America's polarised politics, class wars, democracy in chains, the AIDS epidemic, an Indigenous massacre, trolls, the dark web, Australia's urban-rural divide, how Australia's politics have let us down, the rise of the right, and the Holocaust.

For light relief, we had panels on crime and gleefully murderous women. These speakers were novelists, but readers sometimes thought the stories were true. Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister the Serial Killer, said the most common question asked of her was "Which one of your sisters is it?".
Mr Steel said in response: "In 2018, the ACT Government doubled the number of Domestic Animal Services Rangers from eight to 16 and they are actively using the new legislation in their compliance activities". There is little doubt owners of dogs involved in dog attacks do face hefty penalties - if they can be found and convicted. Should the owner of the dog involved in this week's attack be located, charged, prosecuted and convicted, he could face thousands of dollars in fines and potentially time in jail as well. Mimosa (front ) and Hercules from Alpaca Therapy were attacked by a black staffy dog that was off lead in Giralang After laws were beefed up at the end of 2017, the owner of a dog responsible for an attack could face penalties including:

Up to $16,000 and a year in jail for doing something which resulted in a dog attack that causes serious injury;

Up to $8000 for failing to give any assistance or provide their details;

Up to $8000 for not reporting the attack to Domestic Animal Services;

Up to $8000 for encouraging a dog to attack and

$2400 for not effectively controlling a dog in a public place.

Serious offences also exist under the Animal Welfare Act. When a person commits an act of cruelty on an animal that causes death, and the person is reckless about causing the death of the animal there is a maximum $32,000 fine and imprisonment of two years. Under the proposed new animal welfare laws, this would increase to $48,000 and three years's jail. Seizure powers were also strengthened in the 2017 amendments. And a persons dog registration can be cancelled and they can be prevented from registering any future dog where they cannot demonstrate responsible dog management, care or control. Loading Under the Domestic Animals Act and the 2017 amendments, a dog that is involved in an attack that kills another animal must be destroyed unless exceptional circumstances exist Mr Steel says since new laws were introduced, 43 dangerous dogs had been euthanised after being involved in serious attacks. Another eight dogs were awaiting their fate after legal appeals.

There had been 217 seizures of dangerous dogs and 68 control orders issued. "Often it is the case that the owner is at fault, not the dog and the circumstances around the case have to be investigated and control orders are often issued where the owner has to make changes such as putting up a new fence to stop a dog escaping," he said. Another 117 warnings had been issued and 59 infringements issued, mainly for not effectively controlling a dog in a public place, which attracts a fine of $2400. City Services Minister Chris Steel says dog attack laws in the ACT are working. Credit:Jamila Toderas "We think the dog laws are working but they're only one part of the picture," Mr Steel said.

"The other part is focusing on responsible dog ownership. " Mr Steel said the government would be releasing mid-year its response to an independent review into dog management. "Which will have a focus on responsible pet ownership and making sure people understand that they must have effective control of their dog at all times," he said. "But also promoting the key things which are important in reducing dog attacks such as registration, as well as micro-chipping and particularly de-sexing [to reduce aggression]." We do have the best laws in the country, the strongest laws on dogs, but you also need to make sure owners are responsible. City Services Minister Chris Steel

The Liberals' acting spokeswoman for urban services Candice Burch MLA says more can be done. "For years the Canberra Liberals have fought for legislation to protect Canberrans and their pets from dangerous dog attacks," she said. "The ACT Labor-Greens government have repeatedly rejected every attempt, despite an increase in dog attacks every year. "Most recently we put forward three practical reforms to enhance public safety; waive registration fees for owners who undertake approved training with their new dog, abolish fees for owners who surrender dangerous dogs to the pound and double the fees for choosing to keep a dangerous dog.

The Liberals including Candice Burch says not enough is being done to stop dog attacks in Canberra. Credit:Dion Georgopoulos "These were introduced on February 20 and were subsequently voted down by the government, despite vocal support from members. "It is disgraceful to see violent dog attacks continuing to take place without any real action from the Labor/Greens government. "The government needs to stop ignoring the injuries and deaths being cause by dangerous dogs in our community, and work in a bipartisan way to protect Canberrans and their pets from violent dog attacks." Ms Le Couteur reiterated the existing laws are not being used to their full potential and enforced to the full degree.

"When my colleague Shane Rattenbury was TAMS Minister, we strengthened dangerous dog laws to some of the strongest in the country," she said. "ACTs domestic animal legislation has tough penalties, but theyre only worthwhile if properly enforced and prosecuted. "Outside of designated off-lead areas, dogs must be kept on lead and must be effectively controlled by their owners. Penalties do exist for irresponsible dog owners. The problem is enforcement, not legislation." ACT Greens MLA Caroline Le Couteur says enforcement of dog laws is the issue. Credit:Jay Cronan Mr Steel, meanwhile, says Labor believes the changes pushed by the Liberals would not result in fewer dog attacks.

"You can already relinquish your dog to DAS and they already have the provision to waive your fee," he said. "Doubling the current fee for owning a dangerous dog would also virtually have no effect because of the eight dogs who were declared dangerous last year, seven of them were relinquished on the basis the person couldn't pay the fee." Mr Steel said one reform being considered was yearly rather than one-off registration of all dogs in the ACT. "That is something that would assist in identifying the owner of an animal, particularly where their personal details might have changed," he said. "We're currently considering that as part of the development of a Canberra model for dog management and we're looking at releasing that in the middle of the year and that will really focus on responsible pet ownership.
It is tall and nestled back from the street, and built from what look to be the red bricks so familiar in this quiet street in Reid. In fact, Pegrum, who has created some of Canberra's most admired houses and public buildings, designed the house himself, and built it from the ground up 12 years ago. With the multiple children from his blended family long grown, he now shares it with his wife Annabelle Pegrum, a fellow architect and former head of the National Capital Authority. The bricks, he says, were chosen to echo the classic houses around him, the metal window frames selected to blend in with the conventional timber frames on other homes nearby. The house, in other words, is bespoke but designed to blend in, to be in harmony with its surrounding environment. How very considerate, is the first thing that comes to mind.

In fact, says Pegrum, consideration, or lack thereof, is a topic thats been preoccupying him of late, as he drives around Canberra taking in the morphing skyline, or trying to visualise what our future gateway will involve along Northbourne Avenue. It isnt, he says, the same Canberra he arrived at in 1948, having spent the first 10 years of his life in Singapore where his father was posted. I remember standing on Mount Ainslie and being told that there would one day be a great city laid out below me, he says. We were just kids, we got on with our lives and didnt spend too much time wondering when this great city would arrive and what it would be like when it did. Canberra in 1948 had been occupied for not much more than 20 years, but it had everything to please and intrigue a young boy. Architect Roger Pegrum. Credit:Elesa Kurtz

Were sitting in the graceful, upper-floor kitchen of the Reid house, with Pegrums new book spread before us. Its one of several; his 1983 book The Bush Capital is credited - incorrectly, it turns out - with coining the term that has come to define Canberra. In fact, the phrase was borrowed from history, as is the case with the title of his new book, A Very Great City One Day. Its a riff on an early quote from the descendant of an American president, writing to a friend about Washington DC. Pegrums book is also something of a love letter to the city he has returned to several times and eventually made his home, as well as a call for Canberra to find its way back to those days of early promise. He has been in and out of Canberra several times throughout his career; after finishing school, he went to Sydney to study architecture, and returned as an apprentice in what was then the Department of Works. One of his earliest jobs was to design a visitors centre for Tidbinbilla Nature Park, which was duly built. It was very spooky - I was 22 or something, he says.

He went on design schools in Garran, Mawson and Hughes, as well as the light fittings along Anzac Parade. It was the early days of what would be an illustrious career; while the Tidbinbilla centre would unfortunately be destroyed during the 2003 bushfires, Pegrum has spent many years in private practice, working on countless private and commercial projects throughout the city. One of his most significant public buildings is, paradoxically, one that hardly anyone gets to see - the Chancery at Government House, for which he won a competition and of which he is still proud. And the smattering of houses he created around the city - notably in Mawson, Aranda and Farrer, are considered prime examples of classic Canberra architecture. He has never gone in for tall buildings, at least from a practical perspective. Nobody's asked me and I don't think I'd get much joy out of it anyway, he says, although he has no problem with apartments and urban density per se. Its the lack of thought - for quality of life, and for the future - that gives him pause. The thing is that if you look at the buildings that were here when I was a kid, and for some time after, they were often quite carefully placed, he says - the War Memorial, on the base of Mount Ainslie; University House in the curve of Balmain Crescent.

What's happening now is that there isn't the same care, it seems to me, about where things are put. I don't know that anybody's really got a vision, there's no real plan anymore. And then on top of that, as primarily an architect, is that in terms of the buildings, we're just going through one of those low points. He knows of what he speaks; he has a master's in town planning, and sees it as a necessity for most things in life. I decry or question anything that's built or planned that doesn't look as if it's been thought through, or considered adequately, he says. I like imagination. If the imagination is crazy, it will get knocked down before it becomes annoying, but better to have a bright idea than not to have an idea at all. Or to just keep on doing what you're doing, because it's cheap or easy.

In terms of potential, Canberra is in much the same place as it was 70 years ago, when the mighty trees that line the streets were saplings and great buildings mostly in the dreaming stage. The city is nowhere near complete - an adolescent with growing pains, in the first stages of renewal as early-stage houses are knocked down to make way for new ideas. Every time you drive round Canberra, you think 'we've got so much land, we can do anything we like', but we've got to make sure it's not the wrong thing, he says. We are in the middle of nowhere, [for] all intents and purposes, but we do have a brilliant setting: the Brindabellas, and the hills out there, and the inner ridges. We've got everything going for us, we're not in a dry dustbowl at all. They are further west, but we're not. There's no reason why we can't have that beauty that's in the inner Canberra Valley. He concedes that Canberra is far from alone when it comes to low points in planning and vision; Sydney is in the doldrums, along with many towns and cities throughout the world. But I don't know that comparing ourselves with others is what it's all about, he says.
Numerous people were killed this morning when unidentified gunmen opened fire at people inside two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

At least one gunman killed 40 people and wounded more than 48 during Friday prayers at two mosques in the countrys worst ever mass shooting, which the country's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as terrorism.

Armed people entered the the Al Noor and Linwood Masjid mosques in Christchurch at about 13:45 local time (04:46 Moscow time) shortly after the day prayer, blocked the entrance doors and opened fire. According to eyewitnesses, about 300 people were inside the buildings when the attack occurred.

One of the attacks appears to have been livestreamed on social media. The graphic video has since been removed and police are requesting that people refrain from sharing it.

New Zealand was placed on its highest security threat level, Ardern said, adding that four people in police custody held extremist views but had not been on any police watchlists.

Ardern at a news conference alluded to anti-immigrant sentiment as the possible motive, saying that while many people affected by the shootings may be migrants or refugees "they have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us."

She said that this is "one of New Zealands darkest days," as authorities detained four people and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack.

As for the suspects, Ardern said these are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand," the AP reported.

Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said at least one of the Christchurch attackers is an Australian born citizen. Speaking at a press conference in Sydney, Morrison condemned the attackers as "extremist right wing, violent terrorists."

Police said improvised explosive devices were found with a vehicle they stopped. All mosques in New Zealand had been asked to shut their doors, police said.
A Vietnam veteran and former police officer has been jailed for 10 years for the historical sexual abuse of his nieces from when they were as young as three years old.

The man's family had confronted him in the 1990s but it wasn't until last year that he faced trial.

In letters to the victims at the time he had apparently made peace with his offending after forgiveness from God, but now at 70 years old claims he was the victim of vexatious allegations.

The man, whose name is suppressed, denied the allegations at trial but a jury found him guilty of five counts of indecent assault and one of carnal knowledge against three victims 30 years ago.

On Friday in the ACT Supreme Court he was finally jailed for the abuse.
The National Party website mentions climate change just once. It comes under "Defending Our Local Way of Life for Future Generations"  which you might think would include protecting land, air, water. But no. The Nats want only to meet the challenges of a changing climate in a sensible way that  doesnt throw out our way of life, local jobs and industries. And there you have it, in a sentence, the whole reason for the existence and success of the movement known as AnyoneButNats. Betrayal.

Slowly but surely, the countryside is changing. In dismay people mutter; Weve voted National for four generations and here Im going to vote (Green/Labor/Shooters/Independent). I have no choice.

It breaks peoples hearts. They feel theyre betraying their birthright. But a greater loyalty drives them, loyalty to the future of the land, and a greater betrayal: the National Partys wholesale betrayal of farming culture for the mining lobby.

Its not the first time. Morgan Knoesen noted this week in the Gippsland Times, quoting Bob Katter, "it was the National Party which deregulated the dairy industry, taking the farmers income from 59 cents a litre down to 41 cents a litre, tossing farmers to the ruthless supermarket duopoly in the name of competition.
What does it mean to be a citizen today in Australia? Legally it means being a fully fledged member of a political community with certain rights and obligations. Politically and practically it means being an "active citizen" prepared to stand up publicly and debate the major issues of the day.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, started a global campaign for student action. Credit:DPA

On Friday thousands of Australian primary, secondary and university students exercised their rights and obligations as "active citizens". They left class and took to to the streets in Melbourne, joining millions of other young people across 500 other cities in over 50 countries in the Global #Climate Strike, many of them be accompanied by parents, grandparent and teachers.

These young people want to "save their future", demanding that our governments take responsibility and act on climate change. This movement owes much to a 15-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, who in mid-2018 wagged school to begin a lone protest outside Sweden's parliament in Stockholm as she called for her government to reduce carbon emissions.

On March 29, two weeks after the climate strike, Australia's Joint Parliamentary Committee on Electoral Matters delivers its report on an inquiry into a bill to reduce the voting age in federal elections and referenda to 16 years. The bill, introduced by 23-year-old Senator Jordon Steele-John, has ruffled more than a few feathers.
Allianz Stadium will be destroyed after a Sydney community group lost its fight to halt the controversial knockdown before the state election.

Local Democracy Matters had its legal challenge against the Berejiklian government's plans to demolish the stadium thrown out of the NSW Land and Environment Court last week.

Demolition works underway at Allianz Stadium on Thursday. Credit:AAP

The group, which is backed by the Greens, swiftly launched an appeal in an 11th-hour attempt to block the state government's $730 million plan to rebuild the Moore Park venue.

Footage showed heavy machinery tearing down walls at the stadium on Thursday.
A coronial inquest into the death of Naomi Williams, who was pregnant when she died of sepsis 15 hours after being discharged from hospital treated only with paracetamol, has led to calls for reform in how Aboriginal communities are engaged with by the health system.

Ms Williams was remembered as a much-loved disability worker, who could "light up a room" and was looking forward to becoming a mum, at the conclusion of the inquest at the NSW Coroner's Court on Friday.

Naomi Williams' mother, Sharon, centre, wants her daughter to have not died in vain. Credit:AAP

Ms Williams' former partner, Michael Lampe, said he would be "forever haunted by the pain and suffering" he saw her experience on the day of her death on January 1, 2016.

"When I look back and read the text messages that she sent that night  asking for help with her pain  it makes me sick," he said.
A woman who died in a car crash in Peakhurst, in Sydney's south-west, on Tuesday evening is being remembered by friends as someone who was "full of life".

Carol Chambers, 66, "was hilarious, the funniest and kindest girl you could meet", long-time friend Sylvia Ross said. "She had the biggest, biggest laugh."

Carol Chambers was killed in a car crash on Tuesday night.

Ms Chambers, from Queensland, was in a Honda Jazz with three others when Revesby man Tyron Knodler, 21, allegedly crossed a median strip in a stolen Toyota LandCruiser, causing a head-on collision.

Gayle Gibson, 62, a teacher at Canterbury Girls' High School, was also killed. Ms Gibson's husband, Tony Giorgio, and a third woman, Kim Alden, 62, were injured and taken to St George Hospital before being released on Wednesday.
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An estimated 10,000 climate change protesters have flooded the heart of Brisbane as part of a global day of action.

City traffic was brought to a standstill as motorists abandoned their cars to watch or honked their horns in support.

The gathering began at Queens Gardens park on George Street about 11am and finished with a march that engulfed the entrance to Parliament House.

By 3pm, large groups of activists were heading for home as dark clouds rolled in overhead and threatened to dampen the spirits of those who remained.

Thanks for following our coverage.
On Wednesday, at the same time as the Chief Judge of the Victorian County Court, Peter Kidd, was sentencing of George Pell, the High Court released its decision on whether Jones and the rest of the Ngaliwurru and Nungali should be compensated for the dislocation and hurt caused by the construction of the water tanks, and 52 other acts that impaired or extinguished their native title. The courts unanimous decision was that they should be compensated. It was the first occasion for the court to rule on an entitlement to compensation for the loss or diminishment of native title. (Since the enactment of the Native Title Act in 1994, other compensation determinations had occurred through agreement).

Another elder, Jerry Jones, told of the lasting pain caused by the destruction of dreaming sites. The destruction triggered the shame of being unable to pass on law and lore. The grandkids have to go through ceremonies. I went through with my mob. Im really feeling hard for it because this site is very important to us, and all these sites got rid of it, Jones said. There was a wrenching sense of failing in ones responsibilities. Each group has to look after its bit of the dreaming. If something goes wrong of our part, others think we are no good, Jones said. Thats what happened when all of these things have been built in the town. Other Aboriginal people will complain about it and say that we are letting them down.

In other instances, there was no attempt to consult. There was no attempt to consult when town water tanks were built directly on a "Winan" path. Access to the "Winan", a track significant for ritual and trade and which derived from the Dingo Dreaming, should have been mediated by elders. Well, everything happening here on Timber Creek on my site, I always feel real bad, the elder told a court about the construction of those tanks. You know I had a big operation for my heart just over the country worrying too much.

As in the Pell matter, the Timber Creek litigation underlined the immeasurable value of the justice system in providing a place for people to tell their stories, and find redress. During multiple trials, the Timber Creek claimants proved they hold native title, and established that the loss of those rights entitled them to compensation. In 2016, John Mansfield of the Federal Court awarded the claimants about $2 million for the economic loss of their land, and $1.3 million for the non-economic or spiritual aspect of their loss. On appeal, a full Federal Court reduced the amount of economic loss by about $400,000, but left intact the $1.3 million for non-economic loss.

The High Court reduced the compensation for economic loss by another $400,000. But significantly  very significantly  it left intact the $1.3 million for non-economic loss. The court endorsed Mansfields assessment of the spiritual and emotional hurt suffered by the Ngaliwurru and Nungali peoples. This was an assessment he had arrived at by listening to first-hand accounts of the claimants, as well as anthropologists. There was nothing inevitable about arriving at a figure of $1.3 million. The Commonwealth, as well as other states and territories, strongly resisted the size of the award. If $1.3 million could be awarded for pain and suffering at Timber Creek, which was a small claim area, much larger figures are now likely to be awarded elsewhere.

The courts majority judgment - credited to Chief Justice Susan Kiefel, as well as Virginia Bell, Patrick Keane, Geoffrey Nettle, and Michelle Gordon  built upon Mansfields assessment of the nature of this spiritual loss. The judgment introduced new imagery and metaphor to help think about the impact on Indigenous Australians when land has been interfered with. It would not be appropriate, the court said, to consider questions of compensation in relation to individual acts that caused damage. Rather, the majority said, each act put a hole in what could be likened to a single large painting  a single and coherent pattern of belief in relation to a far wider area of land. It was as if a series of holes was punched in separate parts of the one painting. The damage done was not to be measured by reference to the hole, or any one hole, but by reference to the entire work.

Susan Kiefel, Australia's first female High Court Chief Justice, "doesn't like lipstick feminists," one female barrister says. Credit:Robert Shakespeare

The Timber Creek decision has been hailed as the most significant ruling on Indigenous land rights since Mabo and Wik. But if it demonstrates the usefulness of courts as a place to seek redress, it also underlines the weaknesses of that system. Courts take a long time to get anything done. The first native title claim for Timber Creek was filed in 1999. It was not until 2006 that that claim was determined in favour of the Ngaliwurru and Nungali peoples  establishing that they did, in law, hold title over lands that they had occupied for thousands of years. And it was not until 13 years later that they were awarded compensation for the loss of parts of this title. The native title system is also notoriously limited and limiting. There might be many potential claimants for compensation, more deserving than the traditional owners of Timber Creek, who do not meet the strict demands of native title.
Veteran broadcaster Barrie Cassidy will retire this year from ABC's Insiders, the Sunday morning political panel program he founded in 2001 and has hosted ever since.

Cassidy announced on Friday night he would vacate the hosting chair on June 9, allowing him to remain in the role to cover the federal election, expected in May.

Cassidy opens the Sunday morning program with a short, standing monologue. Credit:Meredith O'Shea

The 69-year-old made the announcement while giving an acceptance speech for the prestigious Lifetime Achievement award at the Melbourne Press Club's annual Quill Awards for Excellence in Journalism, in recognition of a journalistic career spanning five decades.

In his speech, quoted by the ABC, the broadcaster was coy on who his replacement might be for the highly-coveted hosting gig.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent a message to New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, offering condolences over a deadly terrorist attack at two mosques in Christchurch, the Kremlin press service said.

"It was brutal and cynical attack on civilians who had gathered for prayers. I expect that all those involved in this crime will receive the punishment they deserve," the Russian leader stressed.

The head of state noted that the Russian people share the grief of those who lost their loved ones and wish a speedy recovery to the wounded.

Shooters opened fire in the Al-Noor and Linwood mosques in Christchurch at about 13:45 local time (01:45 GMT) on Friday. The attacks killed at least 49 people and left over 50 wounded.
Police patrols have been increased at mosques and Islamic community events in Victoria after the massacre in Christchurch on Friday, as faith leaders condemn the attack.

Victoria Police deputy commissioner for specialist operations Wendy Steendam stressed there was "no current intelligence to suggest there is any threat to the Victorian community".

But she urged Muslim worshippers to remain vigilant by "being alert to anything that might be suspicious or cause concern  and to talk to police".

A police officer guards a door at a mosque in Melbourne on Friday afternoon. Credit:Alaa El Zokm.

Police confirmed they would have a "visible presence" at mosques and Islamic community events throughout the weekend. Twenty-one mosque 'open days' scheduled for Sunday are still set to go ahead.
Heaving school bags and clutching placards, thousands of Victorian students deserted their classrooms on Friday to call for urgent action on climate change.

Event organisers estimate that about 20,000 people attended the Melbourne protest outside the Old Treasury Building, with the crowd shutting down city streets, blocking traffic and disrupting trams.

Students flocked to the streets of Melbourne to protest climate change inaction Credit:Justin McManus

Chants of "hey ho, hey ho, fossil fuels they have to go" echoed through CBD streets as thousands of students staged their school strike.

While many of the attendees were too young to vote, their message was political.
A mother who claimed in court that she has medical conditions making her prone to impulsive behaviour has been fined $800 after telling airport check-in staff that she had a bomb in her luggage.

Richelle Marissa Penny, 42, from Knoxfield, made the "stupid" claim at Hobart airport before boarding a Virgin Australia flight to Melbourne on December 14.

Passengers at Hobart airport Credit:Louise Kennerley

She was removed from the flight and the plane was delayed for an hour.

On Thursday she pleaded guilty in Hobart Magistrates Court to threatening to commit an act of unlawful interference with aviation.
I was taught that burning coal and other fossil fuels actually release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which means that it traps heat within the atmosphere and is one of the gases that greatly induces the worst effects of climate change. The coal barons and gas merchants are currently profiting off this, and humanity is losing as a result. I became interested in climate change as scathing headlines regarding natural and ecological disasters started to appear more frequently. Bushfires are more intense than ever, floods and droughts are crippling the eastern states, the great barrier reef is dying etc. The list is endless, but all of these disasters point to one culprit, climate change. I am absolutely appalled at the way that the Federal and state government are dealing with this issue. It is sickening that our leaders have rejected the EPAs emissions guidelines; instead, they have given in to the demands of giant fossil fuel cry-babies. While the big coal and gas bullies have struck fear within our governments, they have not struck fear within young people. We wont be silenced; we will march onto the streets and well be making our voices heard.

Students are planning to go on strike to demand serious climate action. Credit:Eddie Jim My parents are very supportive of my intention to strike, they think that I am doing the right thing, and that young people like me deserve a chance to voice their concerns and make sure they aren heard. While the Department of Education has silenced public school staff from voicing their opinions when it comes to this, I strongly believe there are very supportive and sympathetic faculty members within my school. Climate change is one of the biggest problems facing my generation, but it isnt being addressed and acted upon quickly enough. I dont want to live and raise children in a dead planet. Simply going to school isnt doing anything about climate change and it seems like our Politicians arent either. So, to tell our politicians to change our fate of impending climate doom, I am striking from school on March 15.

I urge anyone who are passionate about the wellbeing of our planet to join us on March 15, no matter who you are or how old you are, all are welcome. Sampson McCrackan, 15 The more I learn the more desperate things feel. I cant say I have had much of an education about climate change in school, I have learnt most about its effects outside of school, and the more I learn the more concerned I become; desertification, droughts, flooding, cyclones deforestation, famine and extinction of species are becoming more and more common. I have been concerned about climate change for a long time, probably since I was roughly 10 to 11 in Year 6 and again, the more I learn the more desperate things feel and in general Id say the climate reports are becoming more and more dire with each one. I am extremely concerned over how world leaders are handling climate change, many treat it as just another partisan squabble, lots of them seem to be under the notion that we can do too much to slow climate change, this is simply not true. Climate Change is the biggest catastrophe humans have ever faced, bigger than any war or plague in our history.

I havent even begun to mention Jair Bolsonaro who wants to build a highway through the Amazon and open it up to logging, and Donald Trump who seems completely unable to grasp the idea of climate change, seeing it as a good thing. My parents are supportive of the strike and my school has said that they are fine with it if the parents are and have been OK with me putting up posters around my school. Students across Australia walked out of school in November last year to protest inaction on climate change. Credit:Louie Douvis In summary, the reason why Im striking is because the governments and businesses of the worlds have done too little to deal with climate change and too much for short-term profit. My main message and hope is for people to stand up and take action; participating in protests and contacting your local MPs and tell them they need to do more to deal with climate change for example, and know what policies are required. Siobhan Sutton, 14

We need a swift and just transition to renewable energy, and we need our government  the very people elected to protect us and our rights  to facilitate this transition. Despite the prevalence of climate change to both the youth of this generation and society in general, I havent received much education on this issue at school. I find this to be an appalling oversight  climate change is one of the biggest threats to the future so not educating those who will be directly affected is atrocious. Personally, climate change has always been a very important issue to me since a young age. But the recent observable effects of climate change have really scared me, particularly in terms of the lack of action by our government. We are already feeling the effects of climate change on our ecosystems, showcasing the fact that we must act now. To put it bluntly, our leaders arent dealing with this issue. We need a swift and just transition to renewable energy, and we need our government  the very people elected to protect us and our rights  to facilitate this transition. That the government is not taking any steps in this direction is very worrying in terms of our future.

Loading I am so thankful and lucky to have my parents see the importance of this issue and support me in my endeavours to make change; however, in terms of my school, the administration has decided not to support the movement  although I have talked with various teachers encouraging of and sympathetic to the cause. Today, tens of thousands of students across Australia and across the world will take to the streets to protest the inaction on climate change by our governments. Australian students specifically will be protesting for three main aims: to stop the Adani Carmichael coal mine, to have no new fossil fuel projects established, and to commit to and reach plans of 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030. Bella Burgemeister, 13

We need future thinkers. People who can plan 50 years and even 100 years into our future. They are destroying our planet for greed and power and will leave us with nothing but a depleted and dead planet. They can ignore us but we are going to continue until they listen. My school at the time wasnt supportive and our principal told the kids that Without Fracking you wouldnt have food or clothes. I knew this wasnt right from my research I was doing writing my book, so I started to educate myself at home. My Mum showed me The Worlds Largest Lesson by Malala at age nine, and I knew I wanted to make change. I got passionate and went to a Millennium Kids meeting and realised there were kids just like me. I decided to write a book about the 17 UN Global Goals called Bellas Challenge and now I take my book into schools and talk to the students about how they can help the planet and climate change which is Global Goal #13 Global Action. They are not dealing with it at all. They are right-now thinking, and we need future thinkers. People who can plan 50 years and even 100 years into our future. They are destroying our planet for greed and power and will leave us with nothing but a depleted and dead planet. They can ignore us but we are going to continue until they listen and take action. My parents are my teachers. Right now, I am home-schooled. My parents support my decision and know how hard I work to make my community and the planet a better place.

Students Manit Anand, 14, Meg Raven, 15, and Danielle Villafana-Pore, 15, will strike on Friday for climate action. Credit:Jessica Hromas If left climate change will cause average global temperatures to increase beyond 3C and will badly affect every ecosystem on Earth. We are seeing how climate change can cause species worldwide becoming extinct at an alarming rate, cause coral bleaching, increase storms and natural disasters, land is being consumed by rising water levels and threats such as food and water shortage which can lead to conflict and wars on many levels. By the middle of this century, experts estimate that climate change is likely to displace between 150 and 300 million people. Climate Refugees! We must stand up and fight like our lives depend on it because they do! We are giving up our childhood to fight for our future. Laleuca Banister Jones, 12 They're choosing their own power and bank accounts over our planet and our future.

I have just started at high school and so far we haven't done anything on climate change. We had an excellent environment program at Walpole Primary School and learned a lot about the Walpole Wilderness and Marine Park. I realised climate change was a major issue last year when I heard about the global strike for climate. I suppose I've grown up knowing that climate change is happening, but it wasn't until the students started striking that I became curious about why it's a problem that so many people are taking so seriously. It bothers me that the people in power, who could take immediate action on climate change, just aren't. They know it's serious but they're not taking action. They could stop the emissions but they're choosing their own power and bank accounts over our planet and our future. I want to see them making this a priority, by getting rid of petrol cars and replacing them with electric cars, replacing coal and oil with renewable alternatives and acting on what the scientists and other experts are saying. The scientists say we only have 12 years to turn this around or it's going to be too late and it seems to me that the government doesn't have the plans or the willingness to put us on the right track.

The fact that the government is talking about allowing new coal mines is unthinkable. My parents are very supportive. I'm lucky to have a mum who has been working in forest conservation for the whole time I've been alive so I've seen that when things matters and people make a noise and be persistent they can make a change. Loading I've really enjoyed working with some other students to organise the strike. I feel grateful that I've got a group of friends around me who feel the same way and understand how I'm feeling. We've been disappointed that our principal has been negative about the strike. I guess there are going to be people who don't support what we're doing but I think that once everyone realises how important it is that we deal with climate change urgently, they'll realise that everyone needs to take action, and this is the action we can take to make a difference. I'm striking tomorrow because it's clear that the government isn't doing nearly enough to stop destructive climate change. Striking works, it gets people's attention. This is an emergency.
A Sydney Morning Herald poll this week that showed climate change and environmental protection will be top of mind for most voters at next weekends NSW election. Tens of thousands of students skipped half a day of school on Friday to demand more action on climate change, and internal party polling by the Nationals has also shown that the issue is a priority for voters in their federal seats. But that public sentiment sits in staggering contrast to Australias contribution to global climate efforts. The nations carbon emissions are rising year on year. The collapse in 2018 of the National Energy Guarantee was the latest in a string of epic fails by Parliament on reaching climate consensus. And the Coalition this week continued to rip itself apart over funding new coal plants from the taxpayers purse. Despite its internal divisions the government this month bent in the prevailing wind, injecting $2 billion into the emissions reduction fund and committing to a multibillion-dollar expansion of the Snowy Hydro project. Even Tony Abbott has reluctantly arrived at the party, backflipping on his insistence that Australia abandon the Paris climate accord. Environment Minister Melissa Price said the government "understand[s] Australians are concerned by climate change, and weve been taking action since we came to government". The Coalition would cut emissions by 26 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 in line with the Paris treaty a goal Ms Price says is "responsible and achievable".

Labor would go much further, setting targets of a 45 per cent emissions reduction and 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030. Price said Labor was yet to release important details of its climate plans and repeated the governments claim that the policies would "destroy whole sectors of the economy". She cited modelling released last month that suggested Labors policies would increase wholesale electricity prices by almost 60 per cent. "This is not a scare campaign  its independent modelling which lays bare the cost of a 45 per cent target," she says. Contradictory modelling cited by Labor has found its policies will push wholesale prices down. Reed says modelling the economic impact of climate policies was notoriously difficult, and "we dont think the evidence is terribly strong in any direction" on the effect of Labors policies. But the relative ease with which Australia met its Kyoto emissions targets were cause for hope, he says.

"We should be a little more optimistic about our capacity to make things work if we have a clear policy pathway that is ... plausibly going to be sustained," he says. Labor remembers well the political punishment meted out to the Rudd-Gillard governments when the party walked away from an emissions trading scheme, then introduced a carbon price dubbed by Abbott as a "great big tax on everything". But Butler believes Australians are increasingly cognisant that when it comes to climate action "the world is going in one direction and we are going in the other". "[The government is trying] to pretend that everything is going fine and emissions are coming down and we are going to meet our Paris targets in a canter," he says. "But an array of voices in the community  scientists, business, regulatory agencies, bodies who measure performance in this area - they are all saying Australia is underperforming."

A recent series of reports outlining the need for radical action, including sobering findings from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has helped galvanise voter concern. The Reserve Bank of Australia this week became the latest major financial regulator to highlight the potential economic harm if businesses do not immediately address the climate change risk. Many businesses have already cottoned on. Among them are Australia's largest coal miner Glencore, which last month announced it would cap coal production at 2019 levels due to climate change concerns. In contrast to government predictions of a Labor-induced economic apocalypse, the Greens have decried Labor for running a "small target" strategy that fails to deal with the burning problem of coal, including its fence-sitting on the proposed Adani mine. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has expressed scepticism over the economic and environmental credentials of the Adani project but has stopped short of committing to halt it should Labor win power.

On Thursday he said fossil fuels would be part of the Australias future energy mix and export industry, but emphasised that the nation "can't live in the past". Labor must walk a politically risky line between appealing to voters in marginal Queensland seats who want the Adani mine to proceed, and not alienating progressive voters in inner-city seats who want serious action on climate change. Greens climate and energy spokesman Adam Bandt says Labor "is trying their hardest not to talk about" coal. "But I think over the next couple of months it will become increasingly impossible to either continue to promote coal or to be silent about it," he says. Successive Newspolls suggest the Greens have not capitalised on voter concern on climate, showing their primary vote has not improved since their disappointing 10.2 per cent share in 2016. The partys defeat in the Batman byelection did not augur well, and a public airing of divisions within the NSW Greens in recent months has not helped matters.

But Bandt does not believe the NSW issues will erode the federal Greens vote, and the Newspoll findings do not "gel" with his experience of talking to voters, who in particular recognised the need for a strong Greens presence in the Senate. The Australian Conservation Foundation has been phoning and doorknocking voters in three marginal seats - Chisholm and Macnamara in Victoria, and Bonner in Queensland  to gauge the public mood on climate change. The organisations chief executive Kelly OShanassy said people were more prepared than ever to "take action through their vote". "People are looking at the cost of climate change in human terms and not just dollar terms," she says. O Shanassy said of the policies announced so far, the Greens, predictably, had pledged the boldest climate action.

While Labors emissions targets and stance on coal were far from ideal, the party had "started to move into an area of having clearer climate policies" which may be thwarting a Greens resurgence, she says. As Labor and the Greens tussle over the progressive vote, the Liberal Party is fending off challenges from pro-climate independents in a number of blue-ribbon electorates. In the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is up against former Liberal Party stalwart and ex-Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief Oliver Yates. Yates says the government is "too busy arguing internally to genuinely help people manage their own electricity needs". Among his election pledges is a bid to encourage rooftop solar uptake through environmental upgrade agreements, whereby households can obtain a low-cost loan to install the infrastructure and pay it back via council rates. Yates, a former Macquarie banker, says moderate Liberal voters are dismayed at the Coalition's climate inaction after it was "body snatched by the far right".
Achieving some common purpose at the Commonwealth level was but a first step to getting the agreement of the states, themselves major providers of services to the disability community. At the core of the proposal was the idea that a massive overlap of schemes, at all levels of government, could be rationalised to provide better and more personalised and (it was to be hoped) less bureaucratised services for all. It is quite true the NDIS has had teething problems and that the boffins underestimated demand. Yet it went from proposal to operation in a remarkably short time. Given the difficulties that government, Labor and Coalition, have had with nation-building developments such as the NBN, and health, school and university reforms, it may well be that the NDIS will be judged by history as the most substantial change to the lives of ordinary citizens so far in the 21st century. It would be nice if we could say the same with the Gonski reforms to primary and secondary education funding, whether of the Mark 1 or 2 variety. The Gonski committee considered some fundamental problems of imbalance and inequity in the resources going into different school systems, seriously weakening the possibility of many students reaching their potential. The committee looked at types of proven disadvantage resulting from the income and resources available to parents, remoteness, and disadvantages of Aboriginal and migrant children, and established a formula whereby every school, private, Catholic systemic or government, received base funding per student, plus loadings according to the types of disadvantage that existed.

Even better, there was more available so the many different school systems could be grandfathered in, with no one worse off, even if some (disadvantaged schools) received far greater increases than rich private schools. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten together with Labor caucus pose for photos at the Gonski showcase. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The Commonwealth sought to negotiate the new arrangements with the states and territories  eight separate government school systems  and also with independent schools. It also negotiated with Catholic bishops, each controlling funding in their dioceses, often with great disparities of resources and not generally in favour of disadvantaged students, in different places. The government wanted to get the whole deal through during its term of government. Some states, particularly NSW, came to agreement quickly, even though NSW was a Liberal state dealing with a Labor government. Others, such as West Australia (also a Liberal state) were more fundamentally hostile  if not to the formula then to any idea of being dictated to be the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth, with leadership woes, seemed to have a new education minister every month, but, as the deadlines approached, Shorten was education minister. He had to deal with scores of stakeholders, some, frankly very greedy and aware they had the Commonwealth  clearly outgoing  at a time disadvantage. Shorten signed virtually everyone up, sometimes with little bribes and concessions about base rates and speed of implementation, at other times over much more fundamental principles such as addressing disadvantage.

He agreed, for example, with many Catholic dioceses that they would continue to receive into their treasuries, each year, money allocated according to the formula, including by disadvantage. But the money would go to each diocese as a lump sum, and it was up to the diocese how it divvied up the money among its schools. There was, certainly, no promise that it would go, as per the formula, according to local disadvantage. Loading Shorten had also to take some care to ensure states who signed up early were not put at a disadvantage because of their co-operation, with recalcitrant states able to screw the Commonwealth for higher sums. His success came in part because the Commonwealth was so desperate for signatures that it increased the pot of money being divided. It may well have been, as the next prime minister Tony Abbott alleged, that Labor made unfunded promises and concessions, confident that the bill would have to be paid by a new government. It was a dirty, bitter and acrimonious process, with many of the players, including the Catholic bishops, ramping up the blackmail as the deadlines approached. Critics, including myself, must remember the risks of making the satisfactory the enemy of the perfect. That said, the Commonwealth taxpayer was done like a dinner in the negotiations, and some of the outcomes, particularly with the Catholic systemic schools, ran counter to the basic principles of the Gonski review. They may well have seen a net transfer of money intended for the most disadvantaged towards the Catholic middle class. One might say this reflects on Shortens negotiation ability and suggests the Commonwealth will be a softer touch whenever it really wants, or needs, state co-operation for one of its pet projects.

In fact, however, most Commonwealth-state agreements, over decades, have been full of just the sort of compromise, retreat from principles and sweeteners seen in the Gonski 1 negotiations. As often as not, the Commonwealth has broken a united front from the states and territories by bribing and corrupting state treasurers with extra sums of money for their states, or other little concessions, some having little to do with the actual project. The capacity of the states to allow themselves to be bribed owes no relationship to whether the government is of the same side as the Commonwealth; the greed of state treasurers usually overwhelms everything. But more is involved than the risk that Commonwealth taxpayers are paying too much, or allowing too much flexibility, for Commonwealth-state projects organised through the council of Australian government. Mostly, the deals are on display, even if (as with Shortens deals) they have not been open and transparent at the time binding agreements have been made. Loading Much of the real rorting has come instead from failures of the states and territories to spend the money in the quantity and quality promised, to meet basic standards of governance and transparency, to be open to any sort of quality audit. As often as not, accountability for failure to achieve outcomes, or for the way money has been spent, is of a very low standard. Auditors-general find it hard to follow the money trail once it has passed to another level of government. Australia needs a special national audit office with the power, authority and the will to investigate matters such as cost shifting, improper (though not, strictly, illegal) diversion of funds into other areas, and the mixing of streams of money in such a way that there is no reasonable way one can find out who paid for what.

But just as importantly, we need a new national audit office to look closely at the outcomes being achieved by many joint projects. And able to check lines of accountability, and, if necessary, responsibility (perhaps to individual officer level) for poor outcomes. There is work aplenty with health and education spending but imagine how much more there would be in a dedicated audit office looking at, say, the building and maintenance of houses in Indigenous communities, or local school-based expenditure in schools assessed as being need. Or looked at combined Commonwealth and state performance in the management of the Murray Darling basin? Or combined state and federal progress on climate change activity? Audits based not on assessments of inputs in various types of activity, but in measurable outcomes. The Murray Darling Basin Authority was established with just the sort of untidy compromises between government and vested interests, particularly the irrigation lobbies, that was evident in the Gonski negotiations. The states, moreover, were jealous of their prerogatives, because it has never been clear just how far Commonwealth power extends and where it stops. Upstream state water bureaucracies have been notoriously partisan for large water users in their state. Ministers, particularly National party ones, have been transactional in any exercises of discretion about allocations. We need a new national audit office to look closely at the outcomes being achieved by many joint projects. The basin authority itself is a governance and accountability nightmare. Its power to do anything is tightly circumscribed by the need for the agreement of each of the relevant states. At both the ministerial and the bureaucratic level, most of the players are, in effect, delegates of their states, rather than servants of an agreed national interest.

The authoritys view (which a recent South Australian Royal Commission says is contrary to its enabling act) is that the allocation of water to the environment, towns or agriculture is a political divvie-up, (conducted according to who makes the loudest clamour) rather than a process governed firstly by an independent scientific assessment of the need for environmental water. Dont think Labor will be more pure than Barnaby Joyce; Tony Burke, the likely next minister, presided, eight years ago, over the creation of the mess in the first place. Unless we fundamentally reform lines of accountability in Commonwealth-state joint or co-operative activities we may need a separate public service for bodies such as the basin authority, which are not strictly under purely Commonwealth control. A basin authority employee there because of arrangements with NSW or Victoria (and, effectively, operating as an agent of that state), is, at present in an accountability black hole. I would be fairly sure such an employee was outside the jurisdiction of the NSW ICAC, but I am not sure they could ever be forced into the jurisdiction of a Commonwealth Integrity Commission. Loading Sometimes states formally hand over powers within their own constitutional remit to the Commonwealth. In such a case a body administering such powers (or the sum of Commonwealth and state powers) is clearly under Commonwealth control. The position is far less certain when powers are pooled, to be jointly administered, or arrangements are informal, sometimes with officers posted into the other jurisdictions with no clear definition of their powers, responsibilities or lines of accountability. A lot of politicians, including deal-makers like Shorten (or Scott Morrison) like informal, unclear, uncertain arrangements, if only because it gives them space to manoeuvre and scope to sweeten arrangements according to a political (rather than an administrative or professional) view as to importance of coming to agreement.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he understood voter concern over congestion. But very little has changed. Rather, Morrison and the major parties, including the Greens, do not understand population pressure as polling this week revealed.

A Newspoll revealed that 80 per cent of NSW voters want the population to either fall or remain as it is. Only 16 per cent want it to increase.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. Credit:

Not only do politicians refuse to get the message that people do not want the population to grow. The Murdoch press also refuses to get the message. The Australian newspaper, which commissions Newspoll, ran a headline opposite to what the poll showed.

It read Most happy to keep population growth rates at current level. No they are not. They do not want any population growth at all, let alone at the astonishingly high rate it is now.
Indigenous, women's and children's advocacy and peak bodies say they have lost access to democracy after being told they won't be able to attend the federal budget lock-up on April 2.

At least eight groups, many of whom have been long-time attendees, have confirmed they were told there wasn't enough room for them at this year's stakeholder lock-up.

Scott Morrison, then treasurer, speaks with members of the media during the budget lock-up in May 2018. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

One organisation was told the Treasurer's office and the Department of Treasury had chosen a list of stakeholders most relevant to the year's budget measures, while others were told the event had moved to a smaller space.

Australian Council of Social Service boss Cassandra Goldie slammed the decision as "arrogant and undemocratic", with many organisations offended and confused that they had been deemed less relevant, and left wondering if business and industry groups had faced the same rejections.
In 1980 one photo crystallised the ugliness of the Labor Partys factional system: a bruised and swollen mugshot of state MP Peter Baldwin, bashed in a branch-stacking war. Voters recoiled, and a desire to do left politics differently was no small part of the impulse to form the Sydney Greens just a few years later. Fast-forward another 35 years, and the Greens in NSW have just had their own horrified look-in-the-mirror moment.

The infamous picture of Labor MP Peter Baldwin in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital recovering from a bashing., the victim of a vicious branch-stacking war. Credit:Peter Morris

Last year, when Greens MP Jenny Leong accused her then-colleague Jeremy Buckingham of an act of sexual violence, the public got a panoramic view of the poisonous feuding inside the NSW Greens. Factional brawling cannot get much dirtier than allegations of sexual violence and counter-allegations that a sexual violence accusation has been "weaponised".

Buckingham has flatly denied the allegations (which an independent investigation found could not be substantiated), ripped up his membership of the toxic NSW Greens and is standing as an independent. His upper house colleagues Cate Faehrmann and Justin Field threatened to split, and only desperate negotiations fronted by Australian Greens leader Richard di Natale and state member for Balmain Jamie Parker pulled them back from the brink. The federal party has appointed a so-called "elder" - former Tasmanian Greens MP Paul OHalloran  to oversee an independent review and everyone is keeping up appearances this side of a critically tight election in seven days time. The partys campaign launch is on at Redferns Carriageworks tomorrow.

The big question is what impact will all the dirty laundry aired in public over the past year have on the election outcome. Public polls show primary support for the Greens is steady at around 10 per cent. The party expects to hold its three lower house seats  Newtown, Balmain and Ballina  and has a chance of taking Lismore, where the Nationals are on the nose and the Greens have a strong local candidate in former Environmental Defenders Office chief Sue Higginson. Her campaign was launched by Greens cofounder Bob Brown last month in Bangalow to huge buzz.
Illustration: Simon Letch Credit:

Tokyo is a destination often associated with the nebulous future  all robots and capsules and pods, like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's some truth to that vision, as anyone who has experienced the awesome bustle of Shibuya Crossing can attest. Yet one of the city's trendiest bars is a careful and loving homage to a relic, a blast from the past which challenges the idea that shiny and new always equals progress.

At Bar Martha, the record player takes centre stage. Literally. In a dark room in the nightlife-heavy area of Ebisu, turntables are spot-lit and amplified by one-metre-tall vintage Tannoy speakers. Pop, rock and soul from the 1960s and '70s are on high rotation, and album covers from the period make up most of the bar's decor. The sound system cost the bar more than $40,000 and its staff are determined that patrons appreciate the expense. This is a place for listening. Loud laughter is rebuked; large groups, forbidden.

TripAdvisor is full of disgruntled one-star reviews: "Just leave them to have fun in their own silent, rigid place," says a French visitor. Another writes, "Please don't give your business to this bar unless you like being treated with thinly veiled contempt by staff who may literally tell you to shut up or even kick you out for doing nothing more than raising your voice a few decibels above a normal conversational level."

Of course, I had to go. On a recent visit to Tokyo, I donned my most serious-looking outfit, a pair of black jeans which I hoped marked me as a serious audiophile, and braced myself for a stiff drink served with a side of thinly veiled contempt. It didn't arrive. Well, the drink did: a perfectly executed mojito. But the accompaniment was a spicy and addictive nut mix, and the whole experience was considerably more enjoyable than I had anticipated. As Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited played, I ruminated on the power of vinyl.
The North Korean leadership is considering suspension of denuclearization talks with the United States, North Koreas Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said.

According to her, the North Korea has no intention to yield to the U.S. demands put forward at the Hanoi summit in any form, nor is willing to engage in negotiations of this kind.

The deputy minister added that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to make an official statement soon to announce his countrys further actions in the wake of the unsuccessful Hanoi summit, TASS reported.

It was the first statement by a senior North Korean official to comment on the results of the February 27-28 talks between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
The dossier seemingly compiled by the self-described terrorist who shot dead Muslim worshippers in Christchurch reveals an obsession with violent uprisings against Islam.

The shooter, identifying himself as Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old born in Australia, characterises the country of his birth as little more than an outpost of Europe with a propensity for political apathy.

A man claiming to be "Brenton Tarrant" from Australia posted a bodycam video of the attack.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed an Australian had been arrested in New Zealand, and said he had been briefed on the manifesto, describing it as "a work of hate".

Across 74 pages, the man's dossier regurgitated familiar objections to immigration and multiculturalism, and laments the "decaying" culture of the white, European West.
New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed to change the nation's gun laws after confirming the "primary perpetrator" in Christchurch's terror attack used five weapons.

"I can tell you one thing right now, our gun laws will change. There have been attempts to change our laws in 2005, 2012 and after an inquiry in 2017. Now is the time for change," Ms Ardern told reporters in Wellington on Saturday morning.

Two Australian gun law experts have welcomed the tightening of New Zealand gun laws.

Rebecca Peters, who was the chair of Australian National Coalition for Gun Control at the time of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, said New Zealand had the opportunity to tighten its gun laws at the same time but did not.
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Call them the women of their words.

The words of the black women who led the civil rights movement of the 1960s will ring out at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights on March 16. The reading event The Black Woman: She Does Exist, co-sponsored by the National Black Theatre and the historic Center, pays tribute to the often-overlooked women who pressed for progress during a pivotal period of history, said the shows director.

Knowing that the 60s were such a time of social revolution, we wanted to look at, who are the mothers of that revolution? The mothers are never given homage or acknowledgement, especially the black women, said Jonathan McCrory.

The show features four pieces written by black women in the 1960s, each dealing with the stereotypes, prejudice, and resistance the authors faced. And all of the works rings true nearly six decades after they were written, said the shows co-curator.

What surprised me most about reading these women thinkers from the 60s is the outlook that they had, said ChelseaDee Harrison, who lives in Cypress Hills. Its going to amaze people to see how relevant the conversations still are.

The event takes its name from the first reading, a 1967 essay published in the New York Times by National Black Theatre founder Dr. Barbara Teer about the stereotypes facing black actresses. Other historic readings will include an article on preservation by the first director of the Weeksville Society, Dr. Joan Maynard; activist Ella Bakers Address at the Hattiesburg Freedom Day Rally, which she read at a 1964 protest in Mississippi against voter suppression; and a manifesto by anonymous members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee decrying the poor treatment of women in the civil rights movement.

The event will also feature a trio of younger black women giving a modern response to those readings, with a re-imagined to be or not to be speech highlighting black female tropes, a poem discussing the #MeToo movement, and a monologue  performed by Harrison  about Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the abolition of slavery across the United States.

A final discussion between the performers and the audience will close out the evening, and hopefully help build links among the crowd, said Harrison.

Jonathan and I were interested in an inter-generational conversation, and we wanted to bring that into the audience, she said. There are going to be a lot of age ranges in the audience, and hopefully this post-show conversation will get them to talk to each other and realize that we do need to have this link across time.

The Black Woman: She Does Exist at the Weeksville Heritage Center (158 Buffalo Ave. at St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights, www.weeks ville socie ty.org ). March 16 at 6 pm. $10.

Reach reporter Julianne McShane at (718) 2602523 or by e-mail at jmcsh ane@s chnep smedi a.com . Follow her on Twitter @juliannemcshane.
A new regimental set of the air defense system S-400 Triumf has entered combat duty in the Kaliningrad Region.

"In the Kaliningrad region the crews of new generation air defense systems S-400 have entered combat duty to protect the air borders of the countrys westernmost region," the Baltic Fleets press-service said.

The Baltic Fleet received a batch of S-400s in the beginning of March. The systems arrived at their permanent location in the Kaliningrad Region from the Kapustin Yar test site in the Astrakhan Region after successful test launches, TASS reported.
One should take time to appreciate the finer things in life, they say  like a vintage red wine or a great novel that you can read over and over again and discover something new every time. The new, 10th-generation compact Honda Civic is one such thing that calls for repeated appreciation.

The new sedan  the company's biggest launch in years  is an entirely different car from what was first brought to India in 2006. One of the earliest premium Japanese cars, it was pulled out owing to dwindling sales and a mismatch in Honda's portfolio of petrol and ...
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The grounding of Boeing 737 MAX jets across the world in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines plane that killed over 150 passengers could lead to an increase in lease rentals of the aircrafts earlier variant, 737NG (next generation), according to aviation consultants and executives from leasing firms. Demand for the Boeing 737NG model remains firm, they said, adding that rates might rise by about 10 per cent.

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Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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Weeks after a deadly crash involving a Boeing plane last October, company officials met separately with the pilot unions at Southwest Airlines and American Airlines. The officials said they planned to update the software for their 737 MAX jets, the plane involved in the disaster, by around the end of 2018. It was the last time the Southwest pilots union heard from Boeing, and months later, the carriers are still waiting for a fix. After a second 737 MAX crashed, on Sunday in Ethiopia, United States regulators said the software update would be ready by April. Boeing was going ...
India's embattled Jet Airways put photographs of smiling women employees on social media last week for Women's Day, using the tagline "Standing tall; touching the skies" but few passengers reacted cheerfully. "'Touching the skies' is a good joke at a time when your flights are getting grounded," said a respondent on Twitter, while others expressed anger and dismay at cancellations, delays in refunds and long response times to telephone calls. India's second-largest carrier, grappling with debt of more than $1 billion, Jet has delayed ...
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will visit Turkey, Trend reports referring to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

Lavrovs visit is scheduled for March 18, the ministry said.

The Russian foreign minister will hold a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu.

The meeting will be held as part of the Turkey-Russia Joint Strategic Planning Group Meeting in Antalya, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said.
Some lessors of Jet Airways have begun terminating lease deals over unpaid dues and are preparing to move the leased planes abroad, escalating a crisis for the cash-strapped carrier, five sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Two lessors have applied to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), India's aviation regulator, to deregister at least five planes leased to Jet, three of the sources said. Termination of lease agreements normally precedes applications made to the DGCA. Jet has delayed payments to its pilots, suppliers and lessors for months ...
He was able to travel in and out of Britain at least four times since his passport was cancelled by the Indian authorities in February 2018. Nirav Modi, whose whereabouts remained a mystery, was spotted in London where, as per reports, he has been living for several months now. A UK media report said that he had been ...

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Details emerging from Pulwama mastermind Maulana Masood Azhar's interrogation report -- when he was in Indian captivity for five years -- reveal that like 26/11 perpetrator David Coleman Headley, he too roamed around India without any fear. On exiting IGI, like Headley, he too was driven to the Ashok Hotel slapbang in the middle of LBZ and the heart of India's diplomatic community (Headley had stayed at the Mumbai Taj and got GPS coordinates for all the locations for 26/11).

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Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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However, the benefits have to passed onto the consumers at the SKU level. According to B N Sharma, chairman of the National Anti-Profiteering Authority (NAA), who was talking to various members of the Merchants Chamber of Commerce and Industry at an interactive session in Kolkata, although the law mandates that companies have to cut prices on goods if the GST is lowered for those products, ...

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Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

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Changing the format of the negotiations on the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is possible only with the consent of the sides, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters at a press briefing, AzerNews reported citing Trend.

"Russia, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, has repeatedly spoken about the negotiation format, which can only be changed on the basis of the consent of the sides. This is not only our position, but also the position of the other members," she said.

Also, answering journalists' question about whether Russia is ready in the event of an initiative by the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia to meet at the CIS Ministerial Council meeting on April 5 in Moscow, to provide them with a platform, Zakharova noted that in general, when the sides turn to the Russia for the opportunity to provide a platform or play a mediating role, Moscow always respectfully considers these issues.
Boeing Co's 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes will be grounded for weeks if not longer until a software upgrade can be tested and installed, U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday, as officials in France prepare to begin analysing the black boxes from a jet that crashed in Ethiopia. Boeing said it had paused deliveries of its fastest-selling 737 MAX aircraft built at its factory near Seattle but continues to produce its single-aisle jets at full speed while dealing with the worldwide fleet's grounding. Investigators in France will be seeking clues into Sunday's deadly Ethiopian ...
If youre an airline passenger, automation is your friend  setting aside the fears over its role in the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max planes in the past five months. The gradual spread of automation through the civil aircraft fleet is a primary reason the accident rate worldwide has fallen from about four accidents per million flights in 1977 to less than 0.4 today. Many modern airliners are capable of taking off, flying and landing without any human assistance. Pilots today, as one former pilot puts it, are less stick-and-rudder movers than they are overseers of ...
The United Nations instructed its travel bureaus to avoid booking the organizations personnel for flights carried out by the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that crashed in Ethiopia and Indonesia, UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.

"The instructions have gone out to all the travel bureaus not to book any UN personnel on the type of aircraft that crashed in Ethiopia. It is a standard safety procedure and follows basically decisions taken by civil aviation authorities in many countries in the world," Sputnik cited Dujarric as saying.

The spokesman added that the United Nations did not have any communication with the aircraft manufacturer following the crash in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

The Nairobi-bound Boeing 737 MAX 8 of the Ethiopian Airlines crashed early on March 11. All 157 people from over 30 countries who were on board were killed.
Police are responding to an 'active shooter' situation at a mosque here, according to local media.

"A serious and evolving situation is occurring in Christchurch with an active shooter," Al Jazeera quoted Police Commissioner Mike Bush as saying.

Local media reports suggest that a gunman entered a mosque here on Friday and started shooting with an automatic weapon.

"A gunman - dressed in black with a helmet carrying a machine gun - came into the back of the mosque and started firing into the people praying there," Al Jazeera quoted local media as saying.

People as young as 16 years are reported to have been inside the mosque at the time of firing.

Several casualties are feared, as authorities are yet to confirm the exact figure of deceased or wounded.

Further information is awaited.

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Ahead of the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, illicit liquor worth Rs 10 lakh has been seized from Bapiraju Gudem village in Andhra Pradesh.

After receiving directions from the Election Commission, excise officials on Thursday conducted search operations and raids in various parts of West Godavari district.

"Excise department has seized illicit liquor worth Rs 10 lakh from MRC Wines in Bapiraju Gudem village. The wines shop has stored liquor illegally and no valid documents were found," Eluru Excise Assistant Commissioner Srilata said.

"We will take strict action against the accused. We have set up check posts across the district and more raids will be conducted by the Excise department and police," she added.

Police have registered a case and further investigation is underway.

Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sunil Arora on Sunday in New Delhi announced the schedule for 17th Lok Sabha polls and the Assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh as well, which will take place on April 11 in a single phase.

The results of the Assembly and Lok Sabha polls will be announced on May 23.

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Putting an end to all speculations, Apna Dal has entered into an alliance with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for Lok Sabha elections 2019 and will be contesting on two seats in Uttar Pradesh.

Before the announcement, Apna Dal (S) leader and union minister Anupriya Patel met with BJP president Amit Shah and finalised the seat sharing arrangement.

Post discussion, Apna Dal was given the Mirzapur seat to contest, where most likely Anupriya Patel may contest from. The name of other seat is yet to be decided.

Since last month there were many variations in the statements of Apna Dal leaders signalling that not everything was alright between the two political parties.

On February 22, Apna Dal (S) convener and minister of state in Modi cabinet Anupriya Patel had said that her party will now be free to choose its own path as the BJP leadership was not displaying any interest in resolving her party's issues.

However hours later, Ashish Patel, President of Apna Dal stated that the party is very much part of NDA as of now and the future course will be decided by the end of February after a meeting of party office bearers.

Later amidst tension in ties with the BJP, Apna Dal (S), had called a meeting of all its state and leaders in Lucknow on February 28.

Apna Dal joined NDA before 2014 elections. The party contested 2014 general elections alongside the BJP. Together, they won 73 out of the 80 Lok Sabha seats.

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The 'Election Chariot' that proved to be lucky for the Congress party during the Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh arrived at the party's Lucknow office on Thursday for poll campaigning ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.

The top leadership of the party including party president Rahul Gandhi, his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and leaders Jyotiraditya Scindia and Raj Babbar will be reaching out to voters in various Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttar Pradesh riding on the 'Chariot'- a luxury bus specially equipped for campaigning purposes.

"We are fully prepared and we will win the elections in Uttar Pradesh and all other states. The time is for the change as the youth, farmers and all others want to change. They have sold dreams and we are riding this chariot for realizing the dreams of people. All the top leadership of the party will be campaigning on it," said Ashok Singh, Congress leader.

Priyanka Gandhi will be kick-starting her campaign for Lok Sabha elections 2019 from Prayagraj on March 18, where she will meet people living on the banks of the holy river, Ganga. During her visit, she is likely to visit the Nehru family's ancestral home Anand Bhawan in the city. Ahead of her Prayagraj visit, Priyanka will also be meeting booth level workers of the party in Lucknow.

From Prayagraj, Priyanka will head to Varanasi covering the Lok Sabha seats adjoining the district. In Varanasi, Priyanka is expected to visit various temples and Ghats, however, no official word of her schedule in Varanasi has been released yet by the party.

As of now, the Congress party has decided to contest all 80 Lok Sabha seats at stake in Uttar Pradesh after the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) announced their seat-sharing arrangement without making Congress a part of their alliance. The two parties have agreed to not field their candidates from Rae Bareli and Amethi.

The Lok Sabha elections, which are due in April-May, will see a high voltage campaign in Uttar Pradesh this time around, where the BJP and its ally had almost swept by winning 74 seats in 2014. The Congress and the SP had won two and four seats, respectively, while the BSP drew a blank.

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The Indian Air Force carried out a major readiness exercise last night over Punjab and Jammu in which a large number of fighter aircraft participated.

During the exercise, Indian Air Force (IAF) jets, including frontline aircraft, flew at supersonic speeds in the border districts including Amritsar in Punjab, sources said here.

The reason for carrying out the combat drill was to be prepared for thwarting any misadventure by the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) to intrude into the Indian air space, they said.

The IAF has been on a high alert ever since it carried out air strikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist camp in Balakot town of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunwa province on February 26.

A couple of days ago, two PAF fighter jets flew at supersonic speeds over Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir around 10 kilometres from the Line of Control in the Poonch sector.

After the PAF started flying its planes close to Indian borders and were detected and monitored closely by the air defence network, the Indian fighter plane fleet was also ready to respond to them.

The IAF had an edge over the adversary in the aerial combat as its vintage MiG-21 fighter flown by Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman shot down a modern F-16D fighter plane of the PAF in a beyond visual-range fight.

The IAF also managed to thwart the PAF attack on Indian Army positions on February 27 after India targeted non-military positions a day earlier.

During the February 26 air strikes also, the PAF F-16s had to return gauging the enormity of the IAF attack with 12 Mirages.

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The Israeli army on Thursday said that two rockets were fired into the country from Gaza, triggering rocket alerts in Tel Aviv.

While one of the rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defence system, another landed in an open area, Al Jazeera reported quoting Israeli military forces.

According to Israeli media reports, explosions were heard and a military spokesperson said that the incident was under investigation.

Unnamed military officials said that the projectiles were Iranian-made Fajr rockets and there were no reports of casualties inflicted.

No one has claimed responsibility for the two rockets fired from Gaza.

Following this, the Israeli army said in a statement that it launched retaliatory strikes on "terror targets" in Gaza, without elaborating much.

The last time rocket sirens were activated in Tel Aviv about two years ago, in what turned out to be a false alarm.

Tel Aviv has not been attacked by rocket or missile fire since 2014 when the Israeli military forces had launched an assault on Gaza Strip, administered by the Hamas.

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A 40-year-old civilian was shot dead allegedly by terrorists in Gulzarpora of Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday night.

The man has been identified as Manzoor Ahmad Lone, a resident of Dogripora.

Police investigation revealed that he was forcibly taken away by terrorists and later he was shot dead.

"Initial investigation has revealed that he was forcibly taken away by the terrorists and shot dead. We have registered a case in this regard," police said.

The body will be handed over to the family members after completion of medico-legal formalities.

Police have registered a case and are investigating the circumstances which led to this incident.

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Jammu and Kashmir police has denied reports of a man being abducted from his home in Shopian district.

"The individual who is being reported as abducted in Shopian is present at his home," said the police.

The clarification from the state police comes after some media reports had suggested that a person was abducted by militants in Shopian.

The development comes a day after a 40-year-old civilian was shot dead allegedly by terrorists in Gulzarpora. The man was later identified as Manzoor Ahmad Lone, a resident of Dogripora.

Police investigation revealed that he was forcibly taken away by terrorists and later he was shot dead.

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The US has imposed sanctions targeting 6 Russian nationals, including Board Guard Service Deputy Director Medvedev, the notice from Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control stated on Friday. At the same time, new sanctions have been imposed on 8 enterprises for their alleged role in the Ukrainian crisis.

According to the US State Department, Washington's new set of restrictions have been introduced in coordination with the European Union and Canada.

Commenting on the reason behind the fresh sanctions introduction, the State Department referred to last year's Kerch Strait incident, Sputnik reports.

Later in the day, the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press release that Canada has also imposed its new sanctions targeting more than 100 Russian individuals and 15 entities in response to the Kerch Strait incident and Crimea's reunification with Russia.

"In coordination with the European Union and the United States, Canada is today announcing new sanctions in response to Russia's aggressive actions in the Black Sea and Kerch Strait and Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea," the release said. "The Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs, is announcing these sanctions on 114 individuals and 15 entities, under the Special Economic Measures Act."
Actor-turned-politician and chief of Makkal Needhi Maiam Kamal Haasan hit out at the Tamil Nadu ruling party AIADMK over its alleged links and inaction in connection with the Pollachi sexual assault case.

In a video posted on his Twitter, Haasan said, "This is a country where gods lived and fought if something happened to their wives. How are you going to wipe the insult made to your Amma Mr Edappadi K Palaniswami." Haasan was referring to ex Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalitha.

In Pollachi sex scandal, more than fifty women were lured and sexually harassed by a gang of four and the acts were video-graphed.

Four accused persons identified as Sabarirajan, Sathish, Thirunavukarasu, and Vasan Kumar were arrested in the case. The expelled AIADMK functionary, Nagaraj, who is one of the accused in the assault case.

The Crime Branch of Chennai Police on Thursday registered an FIR against DMK president MK Stalin's son-in-law Sabareesan, is one of the accused in the assault case.

"When Nirbaya incident happened, Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha released a statement that sexual incidents against women should be considered as rarest of rare case and will be investigated by high-level police officers. How does this government who ruled in name of Amma remain silent?" Haasan said.

He further questioned the police administration for its careless handling of the case by revealing the name of the survivor. "The SP who is investigating the case has admitted that he revealed the name of the survivor by mistake in a press conference. Don't you think he went against the law but the government is also silent about it."

"The survivor's video is leaked. But, how is it leaked when the police are saying that the accused have deleted the videos? Who released these videos and for what reason?" he asked Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu Palaniswami adding that there is a "limit" for everything.

Continuing his tirade against the Chief Minister, he asked Palaniswami: "Can you tell me what steps has the government taken to help the survivors and ensure women's safety in the state."

"Mr Chief Minister, all these questions are for you. There is a limit for everything," he added.

"The ministers keep the photo of Amma in their pockets but also threaten the students who are staging protests against this heinous crime."

Stressing that he is questioning the government as a politician but as a father of two daughters, Haasan said: "I want to know as what you're going to do to correct all these missteps? How will you assure all those women who are scared that their video will be released, if they file a complaint? Why and what are you waiting for? Are you waiting for the elections to be over?"

Meanwhile, students of Madurai government medical college on Thursday protested against the Pollachi sexual assault case and demanded a special tribunal consisting of a female judge for crimes against women.

"The Pollachi issue should be conducted without political intervention, criminals should be given severe punishment. Special police officers should be given the charge of the case and other issues related to sexual violence in schools and colleges," one of the protestors said.

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Pakistan on Thursday said that the meeting with India to discuss and finalise the modalities of the Kartarpur corridor went well overall, despite some differences on some issues, and the talks were held in a positive and conducive environment.

Mohammad Faisal, DG (SA and SAARC) of Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which led the delegation, said that discussions were held on issues related to the corridor, its construction, road, and other technicalities, The Dawn reported.

Terming the meeting as an achievement, Faisal said that both India and Pakistan had issued a joint statement after a few years, adding that the same was reached in 2015.

Reading out the statement, he said, "Both sides held detailed and constructive discussions on various aspects and provisions of the proposed agreement and agreed to work towards expeditiously operationalising the Kartarpur Sahib Corridor."

"Both sides also held expert-level discussions between technical experts on the alignment and other details of the proposed corridor," he added.

An eighteen-member Pakistani delegation had arrived in India on Thursday. The Indian delegation was led by S.C.L. Das, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs.

India and Pakistan agreed to work "expeditiously" to operationalise Kartarpur corridor and decided to hold a meeting of the technical experts on March 19, which will be followed by another round of talks on the issue on April 2.

"The first meeting to discuss the modalities and the draft Agreement for facilitation of pilgrims to visit Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib using the Kartarpur Corridor was held today at Attari, India in a cordial environment. Both sides held detailed and constructive discussions on various aspects and provisions of the proposed agreement and agreed to work towards expeditiously operationalising the Kartapur Sahib Corridor," according to a statement by India's Ministry of External Affairs."It was agreed to hold the next meeting at Wagah on 2 April 2019. This will be preceded by a meeting of the technical experts on 19 March 2019 at the proposed zero points to finalise the alignment," the statement added.

On November 26 last year, India's Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu and Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had laid the foundation stone of the Kartarpur corridor in Punjab's Gurdaspur district.

Two days later, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan laid the foundation stone of the Kartarpur corridor in Narowal near Lahore.

Once the corridor is opened, it would allow Sikh pilgrims direct access to the historic Gurudwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, Pakistan, where Guru Nanak Dev breathed his last in 1539.

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Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are set to jointly kick-start their election campaign for ensuing Lok Sabha elections with a joint rally in Kolhapur on March 24, a joint statement released by both parties confirmed.

"The first joint rally of Shiv Sena-BJP will be held on March 24. There will be joint rally/ meetings of their party workers before that," the statement said.

"The joint meetings with both parties' workers are scheduled to take place on March 15, March 17 and March 18 at different locations. These meetings will be addressed by the Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray," it said.

According to the information out, after the meetings with party workers, a big joint rally of senior leaders from both parties would be held in Kolhapur on March 24.

"A joint manifesto will be released soon. Dates for grand joint meeting of Mumbai workers from both parties will be announced later," the statement further said.

BJP-Shiv Sena had last month finalised a plan to contest the upcoming elections jointly. While BJP will contest on 25 seats, Shiv Sena will contest on 23 seats.

Although both the parties have been in alliance for past several decades, they broke up in 2014 for a brief time just before the legislative elections in Maharashtra. BJP demanded a higher share of seats which Shiv Sena was not willing to concede.

Out of 288 legislative seats, BJP won 122 while Shiv Sena managed to win only 63 seats.

Shiv Sena later joined the government headed by BJP Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. Even while being a part of the alliance, it repeatedly criticised the central and state government of which it was a part.

The two parties contested the 2014 Lok Sabha elections jointly and won a landslide victory. Out of 48 seats, the BJP-Shiv Sena combined managed to win 41 seats. Swabhimani Shetkari Saghtana (then in NDA) headed by Raju Shetti also won one seat.

This year, Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra are slated to take place in four phases. The results will be announced on May 23.

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China on Thursday defended its technical block to the UN resolution to declare Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as an international terrorist, saying it needed "more time" as it is "conducting a comprehensive and in-depth review" on the listing request put forth by the countries.

China said that it will continue "coordinating" with all the relevant parties to find a "lasting solution" to the issue if is to be resolved in a "responsible and sustainable way."

"The 1267 Committee of the UN Security Council has clear criteria for the procedures to list terrorist organizations or individuals. China is conducting a comprehensive and in-depth review on the listing request put forth by the relevant countries. We still need more time and that is why we decided to put a technical hold on it," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told reporters at a regular briefing here.

"It complies with the rules of procedure of the 1267 Committee. We hope that relevant actions taken by the 1267 Committee will help countries concerned to settle their issues through dialogue and consultation and avoid adding more complex factors to regional peace and stability. China will continue its communication and coordination with all relevant parties in a constructive and responsible way to properly settle this issue," he added.

For the fourth time in the last ten years, China on Wednesday blocked a proposal by the US, the UK and France, among others, to enlist Pakistan-based Azhar as a global terrorist at the UN Security Council, despite his outfit carrying out the ghastly Pulwama terror attack on February 14, which killed 40 CRPF personnel.

A global terrorist tag under the UN's 1267 committee would have led to a freeze on Azhar's assets and a ban on travel and keeping arms.

"By putting a technical hold on the listing of Masood at the 1267 Committee, China aims to get more time for the Committee to review this issue and for all parties to engage in consultations and create a favourable atmosphere. In the long run, it will help ease tension and maintain stability in the region," Lu remarked.

"If this issue is to be resolved fundamentally and in a sustainable way, we need a solution agreed by all. China will continue to step up communication and coordination with all relevant parties including India to properly settle this issue," he further said.

India expressed disappointment over the development but vowed to continue to pursue "all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens" are brought to justice.

The United States also said that the failure to designate Azhar as a global terrorist "runs counter" to Washington and Beijing's goal of regional stability and peace.

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Investigation Agency on Friday issued fresh summons to separatist Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Naseem Geelani, the son of another separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, to be present here for questioning on March 18 and 19 in connection with a terror funding case.

The move comes amidst the government crackdown on separatist leaders in Kashmir in the aftermath of Pulwama terror attack.

Earlier this month, the NIA had carried out searches at seven locations of separatists in Kashmir, including that of Mirwaiz in connection with the said case.

The agency claimed to have recovered several incriminating documents, including letterheads of different terrorist organisations as well as high-end communication systems, during the raid.

During the searches, the teams also recovered electronic devices including laptops, e-tablets, mobile phones, pen drives, communication system, and DVRs.

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Prominent Lingayat pontiff and Basava Dharma Peetha President Maate Mahadevi breathed her last at a private hospital here on Thursday. She was 74.

Reportedly, she passed away due to multiple organ failure. Hospital authorities said that she was on life support ever since she was admitted.

Installed as 'Jagadguru' in the 1970s, Maate Mahadevi established several educational and religious institutions and published several books.

In 2017-18, she was at the forefront of a movement in Karnataka demanding separate religion status for the Lingayat community.

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The US House of Representatives on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution directing the Justice Department to release special counsel Robert Mueller's highly anticipated inquiry report in the alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Lawmakers passed the non-binding measure by 420 votes to nil. Notably, four Republicans voted present on the resolution in the House.

"I've said to millions of Americans on television that I support releasing the Mueller report. I take specific exception to the elements of the resolution noting praise for Mueller, without also noting the criticism of his very biased staffing decisions," Matt Gaetz, a Republican senator from Florida told The Hill.

The resolution calls for the Justice Department to release Mueller's report on Russia probe to the Congress and the public.

The measure, which was introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, stated that there is "overwhelming public interest" to release the contents of the report. It also urges the department to release the report to the public "except to the extent the public disclosure of any portion thereof is expressly prohibited by law."

The vote on the resolution came after William Barr, who was appointed as the US' attorney general by President Donald Trump in February, was quizzed on Mueller's probe and his final report on possible Russian interference in the 2016 polls.

At that time, Barr had said that he would release Mueller's investigation as much as possible but stopped short in committing to release the report fully to the public.

Mueller is currently investigating the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between Moscow and Trump's electoral campaign.

He has almost finishing conducting the inquiry, which has been on for almost two years amid constant rebukes from Trump.

The US President has been a vocal critic of Mueller's investigation and has repeatedly called it a "witch hunt" and "unnecessary." He has repeatedly urged Mueller to wrap up the investigation as there was no "trace of collusion".

Last month, Trump said that it was totally up to Barr whether and when to release the special counsel Robert Mueller's report on links between the Russian government and Trump's campaign.

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The Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) - the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's economic wing - on Thursday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to withdraw the most favoured nation status from China for blocking the UN resolution to declare Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist.

"India should withdraw the most favoured nation (MFN) status from China, impose more restrictions on Chinese products and take immediate action to raise tariff duties on all Chinese imports," the SJM said in a letter to the Prime Minister citing that the government has already done so with Pakistan

"It is the time to make use of all possible measures, diplomatic and economic, to make China conscious of the repercussions of its irresponsible action," the SJM said.

All India Co-convener of the SJM, Ashwini Mahajan said that that there is need to work harder to discourage Chinese imports as the group's research reveals that the average tariff being applied on Chinese imports is much lower than bound tariff rates on various commodities.

"The government needs to take immediate action to raise tariff duties on all Chinese imports to discourage Chinese imports. China, which is already under economic stress, thanks to the trade war initiated by the US and other trade partners of China, will definitely realize the implications of unjust action of protecting terrorists. This action of India will help our and global fight against terrorism," Mahajan wrote.

Mahajan stressed that India has been importing more than $76 billion worth of goods from China and has been running a huge trade deficit, which is impacting Indian economy in general and manufacturing in particular.

"It is appreciable that in the past, the government has adopted various measures to curb Chinese imports by way of anti-dumping duties, countervailing duties, increase in tariffs, imposition of tariffs and invoking reciprocity clause to stop Chinese companies taking infrastructure projects in India," he added.

Meanwhile, the RSS also urged the Centre to boycott Chinese goods, adding that India should raise tariff duties on Chinese imports.

"Jawaharlal Nehru gave the slogan of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai, but China had betrayed Nehru ji. However, it was because of Nehru ji that China is a permanent member of the United Nations and India is out from P5 (Permanent members). Today, every Indian should boycott Chinese goods," the RSS said.

The call for boycotting Chinese goods comes after China once again blocked on Wednesday a proposal in the UN Security Council to enlist Masood Azhar as an international terrorist despite his outfit carrying out the ghastly Pulwama terror attack.

This was the fourth time when China used the technical hold to block the proposal, which is being pushed by other permanent members of the UNSC, particularly the US, Britain and France.

India expressed disappointment over the development but vowed to continue to pursue "all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens" are brought to justice.

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Officials from South Korea and the United States met here on Thursday and discussed ways to dismantle North Korea's nuclear weapons programme, amid a layer of sanctions imposed on the communist country.

The US-South Korea working group met for the first time after the last month's meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam, which ended in a stalemate with no agreement reached.

The two sides "shared updates on efforts to achieve our shared goal of final, fully verified denuclearization, including through the implementation of United Nations Security Council resolutions," Yonhap News Agency quoted US State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino as saying.

They also "reaffirmed their commitment to continue regularly hosting these consultations and co0rdinations as alliance partners," he added.

Rhee Dong-yeol, who heads the South Korean Foreign Ministry's bureau of peace in the peninsula, led the delegation, while Alex Wong, deputy assistant secretary of state for North Korea, led the US side.

In New York, US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun met with UN Security Council members to discuss the Hanoi summit and North Korea's sanctions, Palladino said.

The working group meeting by the US and South Korea comes amid several reports surfaced by South Korea's spy agency and two American think tanks speculating that restoration work is underway at the long-range missile launch site in Dongchang-ri in North Korea.

The speculations about the North Korea's possible preparation to launch a missile or a satellite-carrying rocket have also been reported by the US media wherein they stated that there has been an increase in the activity at the missile assembly facility in Sanum-dong.

Ties between the US and North Korea hit a roadblock over the ease of sanctions, where Pyongyang sought relief in economic sanctions as recognition of the steps taken towards denuclearisation.

Washington has, until now, reinforced that relief in sanctions would only be given after the communist country carries out "complete and verifiable" denuclearisation.

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Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Thursday slammed Digvijay Singh for questioning the outcome of air strike conducted by the IAF in Pakistan.

Addressing a gathering here, he said, "There is one person here who has been the chief minister of the state for ten years, I will not take his name otherwise I will have to take bath. He insults the soldiers who have lost their lives and in order to oppose Modi he insults Bharat Mata, will you tolerate such people?"

His statement comes after Congress leader Digvijay Singh sparked controversy by terming the Pulawama terror attack 'an accident'.

He said after the Pulwama "durghatna" (accident) and the Indian Air Force (IAF) strike, "sandeh" (doubt) is being expressed in some foreign media reports following which "vishwasniyata" (credibility) of the government is under question.

In another tweet, Singh had questioned the outcome of the air strike and demanded Prime Minister Narendra Modi to come clear on the same.

"Prime Minister, some ministers of your government say 300 terrorists killed, BJPpresident says 250 are killed, Yogi Adityanath says 400 people were killed and your minister SS Ahluwalia says that no one died. And you are silent about this issue. The country wants to know who is a liar here," he had said.

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Enlightening the shadow economy: why and how Updated: 15:52 - 15/03/2019

A press conference held by the Ministry of Planning and Investment to debut the scheme on measuring NOE activities on February 20__Photo: VNA

Online shopping via social media apps are rampant but not yet controlled__Photo: Internet

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Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has recently signed a scheme on measuring non-observed economic (NOE) activities, with a view to drawing a clearer and more comprehensive picture of the national economy.According to the scheme, the General Statistics Office of Vietnam (GSO) will soon start collecting statistics on NOE activities. It is expected that from 2020, NOE activities will be incorporated in the countrys GDP.As explained by GSO Director General Nguyen Bich Lam, the NOE sector covers five groups of economic activities, including underground activities, illegal activities, informal activities, activities undertaken by households for their own final use, and activities missed due to deficiencies in statistical data collection.Although there are no verified data about the scope of NOE activities in Vietnam, economists believe that they make up a fairly large part of the countrys economy.In an interview with Tuoi Tre News, Do Thien Anh Tuan, an expert from the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program, said Vietnams shadow economy made up some 15 percent of its GDP in the 1991-2015 period. During the peak of Vietnams economic expansion, that proportion swung at 25 percent. At present, the underground economy accounts for 25-30 percent of Vietnams GDP and uses around 57 percent of the countrys workforce, he said, citing statistics from a study published by Fulbright University Vietnam.The Chinese Embassy in Vietnam has recently released a report on China-Vietnam bilateral trade, stating that the total import and export turnover between the two countries reached USD 120 billion in 2017 and USD 66 billion in the first half of 2018. However, according to the GSOs statistics, the figures were just USD 93.8 billion and USD 47.7 billion, respectively. The big differences in statistical data published by the two countries, which mount to USD 26.2 billion for the whole year 2017 and USD 18.3 billion for the first half of 2018, have shocked many economic experts.This manifests the vast scope of underground activities in Vietnam-China bilateral trade, mainly unofficial cross-border trade, including even smuggling, trade fraud and tax evasion practices, which probably exert great negative impacts on domestic production, an industry and trade insider was quoted by Tuoi Tre newspaper as saying.Another datum that can help figure out the scale of NOE activities is the number of businesses not yet managed by tax authorities. According to data published on Dau Tu newspaper, the country has a total of 726,000 businesses and more than 2 million business households. However, the General Department of Taxation disclosed that in 2018, there were approximately 582,000 business households omitted by tax offices nationwide. It is not to mention those who conduct business via social media apps. Against the backdrop of the ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution, NOE activities are now booming in not only the real world but also the cyber environment. Social networks like Facebook and Instagram have actually become marketplaces where people can buy and sell everything, ranging from home-made foodstuff to medicines and machinery, but in most cases, do not pay any taxes.Economists all agree that failure to include the value of NOE activities in GDP will lead to inaccuracies in economic indicators, while the State will suffer a huge tax loss. Although the coexistence of shadow and formal economies in developing nations is a long acknowledged fact of life, as Vietnam is trying to restructure its economy, it is the right time for the country to enlighten its shadow economy and on that basis, adopt appropriate policies for this sector.GSO leader Nguyen Bich Lam affirmed that collection of statistical data on NOE activities will bring about positive effects.The Government has long since failed to formulate policies to manage and support NOE activities. If wishing to attain inclusive growth, the Government should not omit any sector of the economy in the policy-making process. Inclusive economic policies can hardly be shaped if a fairly large part of the economy is missed out, Lam explained, adding that once policymakers fail to observe and acknowledge all particular features of a certain sector, policies would become impractical.According to Lam, the GSO will use the direct method to measure informal production and business activities, activities undertaken by households for their own account, and activities missed out in statistical programs. Meanwhile, underground and illegal economic activities will be measured by indirect method or estimated by the method of building macro-economic models.The scheme on measuring NOE activities also underlines six solutions for narrowing the scope and scale of underground and illegal economies, attaching importance to the improvement of legal documents on registration of production and business operations; obligations to make contributions to the state budget; grant of credit facilities; social insurance premiums and benefits; and administrative sanctions and examination of penal liability of those who commit underground economic activities.In an interview with Dau Tu newspaper, GSO Deputy General Director Nguyen Thi Huong said GSO will work closely with related agencies, particularly tax offices, customs offices, finance agencies and banks, so as to have the most accurate statistics.Dinh Tuan Minh, an economist from Viet Analytics Company, commented that it would be very difficult to obtain reliably accurate statistics of the non-observed economy. Even registered enterprises sometimes conduct off-balance sheet transactions, he told Tuoi Tre, emphasizing the need to take drastic measures to boost cashless payment and legalize a number of underground economic activities so as to improve statistical work.Meanwhile, statistical expert Bui Trinh expressed his worry about the inclusion of statistics on NOE activities in GDP. At present, Vietnams GDP data are still doubted as statistics are based on many estimations with errors. If the underground economy is taken into consideration when calculating GDP, which means another vague estimation is added, it would be dangerous, Trinh was quoted by the local newswire CafeF as saying. When underground economic activities are included in GDP, then GDP growth rate would become delusive as it shows an increase in per-capita income and a decrease in overspending and public debt ratios while the truth is far from that, Trinh said.Public policy expert Nguyen Quang Dong share Trinhs viewpoint. One of the Governments objectives is to make the full use of every resource to upsize the national economy. But this would be accompanied with public debt and overspending risks, Dong said to Nguoi Lao Dong newspaper.To ease this concern, Lam has once and again reaffirmed: The measuring of NOE activities aims to reflect the scope and size of the national economy in a more complete and comprehensive manner, thus improving the effectiveness of the state management but neither to beautify data nor to lay foundations for increase of public debts, spending or investment.-
Recalling the 'Guest House episode', Union Minister Uma Bharti on Friday advised BSP supremo Mayawati to save her contact number as she believes that the SP workers will definitely attack her again.

"Jab Rest House mein un par hamla hua tha tab Brahm Dutt Dwivedi Ji the. Ab woh nahi hain toh main hun ab. Jaise hi unko sankat aaye toh mera mobile no. rakhein aur turant mujhe phone karein. SP ke log un par hamla karenge zaroor (Brahm Dutt Dwivedi was there when she was attacked at the guest house. Now I am there in his absence. She can save my number and immediately contact me in case of any trouble now. SP people will definitely attack her)," Bharti told ANI here.

The 1995 infamous guest house scandal is one of the grimmest chapters of UP In 1993, then Samajwadi party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and BSP founder Kanshi Ram had come together in Uttar Pradesh at the time of state polls to fight the BJP, which was garnering enormous support over its Ram temple pitch.

The SP-BSP alliance bagged a total of 176 seats and managed to form the government under Mulayam's leadership with the Congress' support.

However, in less than two years, the government collapsed as Mayawati severed its ties with the SP and joined hands with the BJP. Miffed by the move, irked SP workers allegedly attacked Mayawati when she was holding a meeting with her party workers at a Lucknow guest house on June 2, 1995. Her room was vandalised and she was allegedly abused and beaten up.

It is widely believed that then BJP MLA Brahm Dutt Dwivedi stepped into the room and saved Mayawati from the ire of SP workers. Since then SP-BSP ties went sore until 2018 when the two parties came together to fight UP by-polls.

The SP and the BSP will contest on 38 seats each, while they will not field their candidate against Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Amethi and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareli. They have also kept two seats for the smaller parties.

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A Patiala House court on Friday asked Delhi Police to file its reply in connection with an interim order restraining the sharing of documents relating to the Sunanda Pushkar death case.

Sessions Judge Arun Bharadwaj asked Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) Atul Srivastava to file his reply and posted the matter for hearing to March 29.

Earlier, Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (ACMM) Samar Vishal had restrained the prosecution from sharing any document relating to the case with any third party.

In the last hearing before the sessions judge, Srivastava had orally challenged the interim order and informed the court that he needs to share some documents with third persons for advice but is unable to proceed because of the order.

The magistrate's court had on February 4 committed the case to sessions for trial.

On the same day, the magistrate had also dismissed a plea by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy to assist the court in the investigation.

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor's wife Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a Delhi hotel on the night of January 17, 2014. The couple were staying in the hotel as their house was undergoing renovation.

Tharoor has been charged under Sections 306 (abetment of suicide) and 498A (husband or his relative subjecting a woman to cruelty) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). He, however, has dismissed the charges as "preposterous.

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The Chhattisgarh government is expected to soon roll out its Universal Healthcare Scheme as an alternative for the Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojana (PMJAY), better known as Ayushman Bharat, the central government's flagship health insurance scheme, state health minister TS Singh Deo said.

Speaking of state government's Universal Health Scheme (UHS), the senior Congress leader and the Chhattisgarh health minister on Thursday told ANI: "Health services should be the right of citizens like the Right to Information, Right to Work, Right to Food. This is what we want to implement in Chhattisgarh."

The Congress in its poll manifesto for the state assembly elections in 2018 had promised to launch universal healthcare scheme in the state. After coming to power the Congress-led government in the state had announced its plans to replace PMJAY with its universal healthcare scheme. Doing so will make the state the first in the country to implement the universal healthcare scheme.

Incidentally, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is scheduled to interact with health professionals at a meeting in Raipur on Friday.

Underlining the difference of Ayushman Bharat scheme with UHS, Deo said: "Ayushman Bharat is an insurance-based model in which tax payers money is given to Insurance companies. We are of the view that instead of insurance companies where some irregularities are reported, we should provide quality healthcare to people based on our infrastructure."

Deo alleged that only Rs 50,000 is covered in Ayushman Bharat instead of Rs 5 lakh.

"In Ayushmaan Bharat, your OPD treatment is not covered. You need to get admitted to the hospital for insurance cover. So, more than 70 per cent of people are not covered in the scheme. In Chhattisgarh, it covers only Rs 50,000. The expense above this limit is provided by the state government," the Health Minister told ANI.

"In the tender, there was a premium of Rs 1100 in which Rs 660 paid by the central government and the rest Rs 440 is paid by the state government," he added.

Deo further said that the UHS scheme can be implemented with the existing infrastructure.

He said, "There is no need for more infrastructures. We can do a lot with the current 170 Community Health Centres. We can increase it with the requirement. Every village is being covered by the health workers. CM has given assurance to help."

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on April 14, 2018 inaugurated the first health centre under Ayushman Bharat Scheme at Bijapur district in Chhattisgarh.

The PMJAY scheme aims to provide financial protection to over 10 crore poor and vulnerable families including rural families and identified occupational categories of urban workers' families. The scheme provides a Rs 5 lakh annual cover per family for secondary and tertiary healthcare, mainly for hospital care at public and empanelled private hospitals.

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YSR Congress Party leader and former Andhra Pradesh Minister YS Vivekananda Reddy, who was found dead at his residence on Friday morning, is suspected to have been murdered.

"This morning Pulivendula Urban police station received a complaint about the demise of YS Vivekananda Reddy. We visited the scene. There are blood marks at the scene. It seems as if murder. Further, there are two injuries on the head and one on hand. A special investigation team has been constituted led by additional SP (Operations)," said Kadapa SP Rahul Dev Sharma.

"We have started an investigation with the available clues. We will find out how it took place. We have collected some fingerprints. Dog squad has also been deployed... See, the back door was not locked, it was open, whether anybody entered house will be known only after investigation. Vivekananda came home at around 11.30 pm last night. And the matter of his death is known at around 5.30 am to 6 am this morning. Who would have come in that time, whether watchman was there... we will investigate all details," he added.

Sharing further details, Sharma said: "Once we get post mortem report, we will get more details. Another expert team is coming from the headquarters. The Kadapa team gathered some clues. We preserved fingerprints. I appeal to all to remain calm, and cooperate in maintaining law and order. A SIT is formed in this regard. We will complete the investigation."

YSR Congress Party had earlier today demanded CBI probe into the death of YS Vivekananda Reddy, brother of former Chief Minister YS Rajasekhara Reddy.

Alleging a conspiracy in his death of YS Vivekananda Reddy, YSR Congress Party said that YS Rajasekhara Reddy was a victim of a helicopter crash and recently Leader of Opposition YS Jagan Mohan Reddy was attacked at the Vizag airport.

YS Vivekananda Reddy had returned from election campaign at Jammalamdugu on Thursday. He was given the Kadapa Lok Sabha ticket.

He is survived by his wife and a daughter. Reddy was elected as an MLA from Pulivendula constituency in 1989 and 1994. He became a Member of Parliament from Kadapa Lok Sabha seat in 1999 and 2004. In 2009, he was elected as MLC.

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A meeting of the Sub-Committee of the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) was held in Mumbai yesterday. Shaktikanta Das, Governor, Reserve Bank of India, chaired the meeting. The meeting was attended by the members of the Sub-Committee - Subhash Chandra Garg, Finance Secretary, Ministry of Finance; Injeti Srinivas, Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs; Dr. Krishnamurthy Subramanian, Chief Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance; S. C. Khuntia, Chairman, Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI); Hemant G Contractor, Chairman, Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA); Deputy Governors of the Reserve Bank - N. S. Vishwanathan, Viral V. Acharya, B.P. Kanungo and Mahesh Kumar Jain; Shashank Saksena, Secretary, Financial Stability and Development Council; and Deepak Mohanty, Executive Director of the Reserve Bank. Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) was represented by G. Mahalingam, Whole Time Member, while Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India (IBBI) was represented by Navrang Saini, Whole Time Member.

The Sub-Committee reviewed the major developments on the global and domestic fronts that impinge on the financial stability of the country. The Sub-Committee discussed ways to address challenges pertaining to the quality of credit ratings; and interlinkages between housing finance companies and housing developers. The Sub-Committee also deliberated on interlinking of various regulatory databases and National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (NSFI). Further, the Sub-Committee reviewed the functioning of State Level Coordination Committee (SLCCs) in various States / Union Territories (UTs), activities of its various Technical Groups, and a thematic study on financial inclusion and financial stability.

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Stocks held firm in early afternoon trade on sustained buying demand in index pivotals. At 12:28 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was up 270.23 points or 0.72% at 38,025.12. The Nifty 50 index was up 84.10 points or 0.74% at 11,427.35. IT stocks rose.

The Sensex was currently trading above the psychological 38,000 level after moving above and below that level in inttraday trade. Domestic stocks nudged higher in early trade on positive Asian stocks. Key benchmark indices extended early gains and hit intraday high in morning trade. Stocks hovered in positive zone in mid-morning trade.

The S&P BSE Mid-Cap index was up 0.49%. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was up 0.28%.

The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, was positive. On the BSE, 1262 shares rose and 1110 shares fell. A total of 167 shares were unchanged.

IT stocks rose. TCS (up 2.62%), Infosys (up 0.93%), Wipro (up 1.62%), HCL Technologies (up 1.35%), Oracle Financial Services Software (up 0.01%), Tech Mahindra (up 1.46%), Hexaware Technologies (up 1.38%) and Mphasis (up 0.19%) gained. MindTree (down 0.8%) fell.

A2Z Infra Engineering hit an upper circuit limit of 5% at Rs 18.05 after the company said it signed full cash one time debt settlement agreement with Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction Company. The announcement was made during trading hours today, 15 March 2019.

Overseas, Asian markets were trading higher Friday as China took a step to appease U.S. trade negotiators. Chinese legislators on Friday approved a new law against the forced transfer of technology by foreign companies, which has been a major complaint by the U.S. and other countries. The move was intended to smooth the path to a trade deal, but it's unclear if it will be enough.

US stocks closed mostly lower Thursday as investors digested headlines suggesting progress toward a US-China trade deal has stalled against the backdrop of weaker-than-expected Chinese economic data.

A meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be delayed until at least April, as per reports, indicating that a bilateral trade deal will not be finalized this month.

Meanwhile, the U.K. Parliament voted to request an extension of the March 29 Brexit deadline to June 30 if lawmakers can agree to a withdrawal deal by March 20. Thursday's vote comes after Prime Minister Theresa May failed to secure support for her revised Brexit plan and lawmakers on Wednesday ruled out a no-deal exit.

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Domestic stocks nudged higher in early trade on positive Asian stocks. At 9:25 IST, the barometer index, the S&P BSE Sensex, was up 204.95 points or 0.54% at 37,959.84. The Nifty 50 index was up 64.45 points or 0.57% at 11,407.70.

The S&P BSE Mid-Cap index was up 0.62%. The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was up 0.44%.

The market breadth, indicating the overall health of the market, was strong. On the BSE, 940 shares rose and 375 shares fell. A total of 65 shares were unchanged.

Overseas, Asian markets were trading higher Friday as China took a step to appease U.S. trade negotiators. Chinese legislators on Friday approved a new law against the forced transfer of technology by foreign companies, which has been a major complaint by the U.S. and other countries. The move was intended to smooth the path to a trade deal, but it's unclear if it will be enough.

US stocks closed mostly lower Thursday as investors digested headlines suggesting progress toward a US-China trade deal has stalled against the backdrop of weaker-than-expected Chinese economic data.

A meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be delayed until at least April, as per reports, indicating that a bilateral trade deal will not be finalized this month.

Meanwhile, the U.K. Parliament voted to request an extension of the March 29 Brexit deadline to June 30 if lawmakers can agree to a withdrawal deal by March 20. Thursday's vote comes after Prime Minister Theresa May failed to secure support for her revised Brexit plan and lawmakers on Wednesday ruled out a no-deal exit.

Back home, Tech Mahindra rose 0.57%. Tech Mahindra's arm acquired 100% stake in Japan's K-Vision for $1.5 million. The target is engaged in providing network services for mobile communication carriers in Japan. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

Reliance Industries (RIL) rose 0.51%. Brookfield has filed the preliminary placement memorandum, in terms of which India Infrastructure Trust, an InvIT set up by Brookfield as sponsor and 90% investor, will invest Rs 13,000 crore to acquire the East West Pipeline (Pipeline). As a part of the transaction, the InvIT will acquire 100% equity interest in Pipeline Infrastructure Private Limited (PIPL) which currently owns and operates the Pipeline.

RIL's current investment in preference shares valued at Rs 4,000 crore will continue and will be converted into equity at the end of 20 years. Further at the end of 20 years, RIL has the right to acquire equity shares of PIPL held by the InvIT at an equity value of Rs 50 crore. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

Adani Transmission rose 2.41%. Adani Transmission said that the meeting of the board of directors of the company is scheduled on 20 March 2019 to consider buyback of non-convertible debentures (NCDs). The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

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Trading of Nifty 50 index futures on the Singapore stock exchange indicates that the Nifty could rise 20 points at the opening bell.

Overseas, Asian markets were trading higher Friday as China took a step to appease U.S. trade negotiators. Chinese legislators on Friday approved a new law against the forced transfer of technology by foreign companies, which has been a major complaint by the U.S. and other countries. The move was intended to smooth the path to a trade deal, but it's unclear if it will be enough.

US stocks closed mostly lower Thursday as investors digested headlines suggesting progress toward a US-China trade deal has stalled against the backdrop of weaker-than-expected Chinese economic data.

A meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will be delayed until at least April, as per reports, indicating that a bilateral trade deal will not be finalized this month.

Meanwhile, the U.K. Parliament voted to request an extension of the March 29 Brexit deadline to June 30 if lawmakers can agree to a withdrawal deal by March 20. Thursday's vote comes after Prime Minister Theresa May failed to secure support for her revised Brexit plan and lawmakers on Wednesday ruled out a no-deal exit.

Back home,key equity indices ended almost flat yesterday, 14 March 2019 as investors booked profits after recent upmove amid mixed global cues. The Sensex rose 2.72 points or 0.01% to settle at 37,754.89.

The trading activity on that day showed that the foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) bought shares worth a net Rs 1,482.99 crore yesterday, 14 March 2019, as per provisional data released by the stock exchanges. Domestic institutional investors (DIIs) sold shares worth a net Rs 817.77 crore yesterday, 14 March 2019, as per provisional data.

Among corporate news,Tech Mahindra's arm acquired 100% stake in Japan's K-Vision for $1.5 million. The target is engaged in providing network services for mobile communication carriers in Japan. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

Reliance Industries (RIL) will be watched. Brookfield has filed the preliminary placement memorandum, in terms of which India Infrastructure Trust, an InvIT set up by Brookfield as sponsor and 90% investor, will invest Rs 13,000 crore to acquire the East West Pipeline (Pipeline). As a part of the transaction, the InvIT will acquire 100% equity interest in Pipeline Infrastructure Private Limited (PIPL) which currently owns and operates the Pipeline.

RIL's current investment in preference shares valued at Rs 4,000 crore will continue and will be converted into equity at the end of 20 years. Further at the end of 20 years, RIL has the right to acquire equity shares of PIPL held by the InvIT at an equity value of Rs 50 crore. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

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Tech Mahindra's arm acquired 100% stake in Japan's K-Vision for $1.5 million. The target is engaged in providing network services for mobile communication carriers in Japan. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

Reliance Industries (RIL) will be watched. Brookfield has filed the preliminary placement memorandum, in terms of which India Infrastructure Trust, an InvIT set up by Brookfield as sponsor and 90% investor, will invest Rs 13,000 crore to acquire the East West Pipeline (Pipeline). As a part of the transaction, the InvIT will acquire 100% equity interest in Pipeline Infrastructure Private Limited (PIPL) which currently owns and operates the Pipeline.

RIL's current investment in preference shares valued at Rs 4,000 crore will continue and will be converted into equity at the end of 20 years. Further at the end of 20 years, RIL has the right to acquire equity shares of PIPL held by the InvIT at an equity value of Rs 50 crore. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

IDBI Bank has been categorized as a 'private sector bank' for regulatory purposes by Reserve Bank of India (RBI) with effect from 21 January 2019 consequent upon Life Insurance Corporation of India acquiring 51% of the total paid-up equity share capital of the bank. RBI made the announcement after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

CMI said that it received vendor approval for power cables from four government entities in Q3 December 2018. With the increased list of vendor approval the manufacturing capacity of Baddi plant in Himachal Pradesh is going to improve considerably in the year 2019, CMI added. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

Adani Transmission said that the meeting of the board of directors of the company is scheduled on 20 March 2019 to consider buyback of non-convertible debentures (NCDs). The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 14 March 2019.

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Aam Aadmi Party volunteers led by their respective MLAs from Delhi's Assembly constituencies on Friday burned copies of the BJP's 2014 Lok Sabha manifesto in protest against the party's "deception and treachery on full statehood for Delhi".

While attacking the BJP's Delhi unit president Manoj Tiwari, AAP Delhi convenor Gopal Rai said that a "baffled and confused" BJP is changing its stand on Delhi statehood.

"Tiwari is giving lame and laughable excuses in a desperate bid to justify the indefensible u-turn of the BJP.

"He is saying that Delhi cannot be given statehood when there is a Chief Minister like Arvind Kejriwal who sat on a dharna near the Rail Bhawan in January 2014," Rai told the media here.

Rai argued that if full statehood was not possible then why did the party promise it in its 2014 Lok Sabha manifesto.

Tiwari had earlier said that it was the Supreme Court's decision to not allow statehood for Delhi. Rai retorted that it was in fact a case of powers of the elected government and the Delhi LG.

"Though Tiwari is not a Constitutional expert, but as a Member of Parliament he should at least know that Delhi statehood is in the domain of Parliament and not of the courts," Rai said.

Rai added that because of the same fact, the AAP has been stating Delhi needs seven MPs who will raise the issue of statehood and not those who are afraid of speaking for the rights of Delhi.

Giving details of the action of burning the BJP's manifesto, Rai said Friday's action has shown that people of Delhi are no longer ready to bear the injustice being meted out to them since the last seven decades.

He said AAP volunteers will now take the statehood movement to the next level by burning the BJP manifesto in all 272 wards of Delhi on Sunday.

--IANS

nks/oeb/bg

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NA Standing Committee wraps up 32nd session Updated: 09:32 - 14/03/2019

NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan speaks at the session

__Photo: VNA

, ,

The National Assembly (NA) Standing Committee wrapped up its 32session in Hanoi on March 13 under the chair of NA Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan.Speaking at the closing session, Chairwoman Ngan asked the Government, permanent members of the NA Ethnic Council and committees, the State Audit Office of Vietnam, and other relevant agencies to collect feedback to refine five draft laws and one draft resolution for submission to the NA Standing Committee at its session in April 2019, as well as to complete four draft resolutions for signing.She said the upcoming session from April 10-19 will discuss a number of contents and as such the collection of feedback on several draft laws is very urgent.In the afternoon of the same day, the NA Standing Committee gave opinions on the draft resolution on the settlement of tax arrears and fine payments.In accordance with the Law on Tax Management and documents on amendments and supplements to it, the Ministry of Finance set up units in charge of tax arrears management and coercion from the central to local levels.The collection of tax arrears has increased over the years, reaching 81 percent of the total from 2011-2017. The ratio of debt to domestic state revenue fell from 12.2 percent in 2014 to 7.6 percent in 2017, and down to 7 percent in 2018.As of December 31, 2017, total tax arrears topped VND 78.47 trillion (USD 3.4 billion), down 2.8 percent from the previous year.Lawmakers shared the view that the removal of tax and fine debts need to be taken in a cautious and serious manner in line with the law.They agreed that after the amended Law on Tax Management was adopted by the NAs seventh session, the Government should collect opinions during the 32session to refine the draft resolution to submit to the legislature at its eighth session.The NA Standing Committee also adopted a resolution regulating the military ranks of lieutenant general and major general, which have yet to be set specifically in the 2018 Law on Peoples Public Security Forces.-
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, MP Sanjay Singh and several Aam Aadmi Party MLAs protested outside the office of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) here to denounce "atrocities" by Delhi Police.

The sit-in came hours after an AAP delegation led by Sisodia and Sanjay Singh met CEC Sunil Arora alleging that the police were harassing employees of a call centre hired by the party.

Sisodia later returned to the site after police allegedly continued its raid against the call centre and tweeted that he would remain standing outside Arora's office until the latter again met him.

AAP's Lok Sabha candidates in Delhi Raghav Chadha and Atishi Marlena joined Sisodia.

"Sisodia, Singh, Chadha, myself and MLAs are waiting outside Election Commission till CEC meets us! It is the responsibility of EC to ensure free and fair elections and not let BJP's 'Delhi Police' intimidate our call centres," Atishi tweeted.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, in a tweet, asked the other MLAs to join the protest. He also denounced the Delhi Police.

"The Police has raided without any search warrant and is barging into server rooms and interrogating all call centre agents. What is this going on? What is the crime?" Kejriwal asked.

"Police reach another call centre. Asking for server details and our data," he said.

--IANS

nks/rs/mr

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Air India has ferried around 5,000 army and Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) personnel to Srinagar in special night flights in recent weeks as boots on the ground are being strengthened in Jammu and Kashmir after the Pulwama attack.

There are at least three flights every night full of security personnel leaving for Srinagar from New Delhi. Air India is also operating the wide-body 787 Dreamliner from Kolkata to fly soldiers in.

There are now Delhi-Leh-Delhi flights twice a week chartered for Border Security Force (BSF) troopers apart from a separate flight for the army on the same route. Another regular Air India chartered service is going to be added for the army on the Delhi-Leh-Chandigarh route.

Sources said that the Union Home Ministry had requisitioned the aircraft which were pulled out of the normal schedule to operate special night flights to Srinagar.

After the February 14 Pulwama attack, the Centre had come under criticism for not flying the soldiers as road transport made them vulnerable to terror attacks.

As the situation remain tense in Jammu and Kashmir after crackdown on terrorists by security forces post-Pulwama and the prevailing political situation against the backdrop of Supreme Court taking up challenges to the Constitution's Section 35A, the Centre had decided to dispatch 45 additional companies (around 135 personnel) of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), 35 companies of the Border Security Force (BSF) and 10 companies each of the Sashatra Seema Bal (SSB) and the Indo-Tibetan Police Force (ITBP).

The diversion of the fleet has forced Air India to stretch its resources as 17 of its aircraft are already grounded because of technical issues. The domestic aviation circuit is already reeling under the impact of shortage of aircraft.

Even private carriers are running low. Jet Airways has 53 of its aircraft grounded because of various reasons including the ban on operating the Boeing 737-8 Max after the crash in Ethiopia.

Twelve aircraft of Spicejet are grounded and 30 flights of Indigo are impacted because of shortage of pilots.

--IANS

gd/vd

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As Akshay Kumar's "Kesari" nears its release, actor Mohit Raina says he feels nostalgic as he was the first actor to be a part of a project based on the battle of Saragarhi.

Known to television audiences as Mahadev of "Devon Ke Dev... Mahadev" and Ashoka of "Chakravartin Ashoka Samrat", Mohit left an indelible mark with his powerful portrayal as Havildar Ishar Singh, the man who along with 21 Sikh soldiers defeated an Afghan battalion of 10,000 soldiers, in "21 Sarfarosh: Saragarhi 1897".

Now, of course, audiences relate to Mohit for his role as Captain Karan Kashyap in "Uri: The Surgical Strike".

Looking forward to Akshay's "Kesari", Mohit told IANS here: "It's great that now filmmakers are making projects on the Saragarhi battle. Many people do not even know about the sacrifice of those brave Sikh soldiers. It's the power of cinema through which the battle has been brought alive among people."

On Akshay's stint as Ishar Singh, Mohit said he got "nostalgic" when he saw the promotional material of "Kesari" for the first time.

"When I saw the promos for the first time, I was quite nostalgic about it because I could feel Ishar Singh since I have portrayed it and lived that character.

"Akshay Kumar is now portraying that character. Obviously it would be at a different scale and (will give a) different perspective to everybody. Akshay sir's turbaned look made me nostalgic. I started thinking of all those days when I used to be in those attires and gears. It's a great feeling that I got an opportunity to be a part of such project," Mohit said, adding that he has "high hopes" from "Kesari".

The film, which is directed by Anurag Singh and also stars Parineeti Chopra, is releasing on March 21.

Apart from Mohit and Akshay, actors like Randeep Hooda and Ajay Devgn were also prepping up for the films based on the battle, but their films got shelved due to certain reasons.

--IANS

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Taking exception to Spotify's complaint with the European Union (EU) alleging that the iOS App Store rules are unfair, Apple has slammed the Swedish music streaming giant for wanting "all the benefits of a free app without being free".

"A full 84 per cent of the apps in the App Store pay nothing to Apple when you download or use the app. That's not discrimination, as Spotify claims," Apple said in a statement.

In its complaint with the EU, Spotify said that Apple requires it and other digital services pay a 30 per cent tax on purchases made through Apple's payment system, including upgrading from a free to premium subscription.

According to Spotify, if it pays this tax, it would force it to artificially inflate the price of its premium membership well above the price of Apple Music.

"And to keep our price competitive for our customers, that isn't something we can do," Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, wrote in a blog post this week.

Apple said its revenue share is 30 per cent only for the first year of an annual subscription. It drops to 15 per cent in the years after.

"The only contribution that Apple requires is for digital goods and services that are purchased inside the app using our secure in-app purchase system," Apple said, adding that building a secure payment system which allows users to have faith in in-app transactions was no small undertaking.

The Cupertino, California-headquartered tech giant also alleged that Spotify was also trying to squeeze the artists, musicians and songwriters -- not just the App Store.

"Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn't just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backwards for the music industry," Apple added in the statement.

--IANS

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An Australian Senator has drawn flak for blaming "Muslim migration" for the New Zealand mosque massacres that left at least 49 people dead.

At least 49 people were killed on Friday after gunmen opened indiscriminate fire at two mosques in Christchurch in what a shocked New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern termed as a terror attack.

Fraser Anning, a Senator in Queensland since November 2017, issued a statement in which he described the attacks as "vigilantism," and said "while Muslims may be the victims today, usually they are the perpetrators."

"Worldwide, Muslims are killing people in the name of their faith on an industrial scale. As always, left-wing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of today's shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views but this is all cliched nonsense," the 69-year-old Senator said in the statement.

"The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place," he said.

"Whilst this kind of violent vigilantism can never be justified, what it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence," Anning said.

The Senator later took to Twitter to further express his opinions. "Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?" he wrote.

"I wonder if there will be as much outrage from the left wing when the next Muslim terrorist attack occurs? Most likely silence and talk about 'lone wolf attacks, mental illness and no connection to Islam,'" he tweeted.

Commenting on Anning's remarks, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said there was no place for his "disgusting" views.

"The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting. Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament," Morrison tweeted.

--IANS

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The Election Commission of India (EC) headed by Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Sunil Arora on Friday convened a meeting of a multi-departmental committee on election intelligence and directed the officials to work in close coordination to curb misuse of money power in the coming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections.

The heads of tax boards, law enforcement agencies, Central paramilitary forces and representatives of financial institutions attended the meeting.

Addressing the meeting, the CEC said conducting clean elections was one of the biggest challenges in the country given the prevalent abuse of money power, particularly when it manifests in inducement of voters.

He said the Commission is determined to curb this menace and added that individually and collectively the agencies participating in the meeting are the bulwark of clean elections.

He emphasised the need for coordinated efforts of various expenditure monitoring teams and the agencies tasked with enforcement.

Sharing of intelligence amongst the agencies should ensure that multidimensional crime is tackled with coordinated action, the CEC said.

He underlined that due follow-up action on seizures done in one model code of conduct phase should be so demonstrative as to act as a deterrent in the next phase.

The issues discussed at the meeting included ways of curbing covert expenditure by candidates and political parties; sensitisation of the law enforcement agencies about their role during elections; mapping of constituencies by agencies to check smuggling of goods, drugs, liquor and cash, including fake currency, through seaports, inter-state borders and international borders.

--IANS

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Hollywood star Ben Affleck has come to the defence of his controversial back tattoo and says it represents something important.

The actor and director told TV personality Ellen DeGeneres that the colourful phoenix "represents something really important" to him, reports foxnews.com.

"There was a photo of your back tattoo that got a lot of attention," DeGeneres said after she and Affleck discussed his new Netflix film "Triple Frontier".

"It did, not so much positive," Affleck responded. DeGeneres followed up, calling it "a commitment".

As the "Gone Girl" actor started to explain, Ellen said that it was "rising from your a--."

"It's a phoenix, rising from my a**," Affleck acknowledged. "I was about to say it represents something really important to me, but maybe, just, we'll skip that.

"It's meaningful to me, I like it. It's something that I sort of kept private. It wasn't like I was sort of doing photo shoots or whatever. We didn't know the paparazzi was there so they got a picture of my tattoo and yeah the sentiment ran against," he said.

But despite criticism, the "Argo" star stood by the tattoo, adding: "I love my tattoo. I'm very happy with it."

In a March 2016 interview, Affleck had said the phoenix was "fake for a movie", but two years later when it was still there, another publication issued an article criticising the tattoo.

--IANS

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The Congress on Friday accused the Narendra Modi government of having "slept and snoozed" while fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi set up a diamond business in London after fleeing the country with the support of a firm linked to the Panama Papers.

It asked the government why it could not trace him globe-trotting, despite having the resources of all the probe agencies at its disposal.

"Today is 'World Sleep Day', therefore today the Congress party shall expose how PM Modi i.e 'Desh Ka Chowkidar' and his government slept and snoozed while 'Chhota Modi' i.e Nirav Modi looted crore (of rupees), fled the country, posed with the PM, globe-trotted, opened a new diamond business in London which has a Panama Papers connection," Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said in a press conference here.

"Simple question is - If the Congress party can expose this entire chain of events and trace his trail, why could the CBI, ED, and other investigative agencies of the Modi Government not do the same after 14 months of his escape?

"Is it not a clear-cut case of criminal complacency, complicity and connivance by Modi government with economic offenders like Nirav Modi," he said.

To bolster its point, the party produced a timeline of Nirav Modi's travels to several countries after he fled from India on January 1 and after revocation of his passport by the Indian government on February 23.

The party spokesperson said after his passport was revoked, Modi travelled to six countries: UK, UAE, Hong Kong, France and Germany. He said that the government's reasoning that he was able to travel because his passport was not "physically cancelled" was a "lameduck excuse".

He also raised the point that why was the Red Corner notice against Modi issued only in July, six months after the diamantaire, accused of defaulting on loans worth Rs 26,306 crore, fled the country.

"Is it not a criminal delay?," Khera asked.

He said that the new diamond business Modi has set up in London shares the same address as that of 'Dattani Chartered Accountants'-- a company, he claimed, named in the Panama Papers investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

He said the accountancy firm was linked with 53 entities in all by those papers.

The party claimed that Modi fled the country with as much as 8 million pounds in cash, for he bought an apartment in London for 7.5 million pounds on January 5 -- four days after leaving India.

The party also pointed out how Modi has been able to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in London, where he was spotted on March 9 by a Daily Telegraph reporter, reportedly wearing a 10,000 pound ostrich hide jacket. It was also reported that he lives in a Rs 73 crore house in London and owns an office in upmarket Soho.

Khera said that Modi's London firm, Diamond Holdings, has one officer named Raju Thakorbhai Patel, who owns an accountancy firm in north London.

He claimed that as recently as March 7, Diamond Holdings changed its address to Scottish Provident House, 76/80 College Road, Harrow, HA11BQ, the same as Dattani Chartered Accountants and Balmoral Corporate Services Limited, also named in the Panama Papers.

-- IANS

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With six MLAs crossing over to the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) in the last 15 days, the opposition Congress party in Telangana looks demoralised ahead of next month's Lok Sabha elections.

The series of defection by MLAs including senior leader and former Home Minister Sabitha Indra Reddy has plunged the party in utter chaos in the run-up to April 11 polls for 17 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

At a time when Congress leaders were trying to recover from the shocked defeat in Assembly elections held in December, the desertions have rattled the leadership and upset their calculations for the ensuing polls.

While the Congress party's tally has come down to 13 in the 119-member Assembly, the TRS has further bolstered itself to achieve its goal of a clean sweep in the Lok Sabha elections.

TRS Working President K.T. Rama Rao has already started campaigning with an appeal to people to elect 16 candidates of TRS, leaving Hyderabad for its ally Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM).

The ruling party, which won 88 Assembly seats, is eyeing eight more Congress MLAs to make sure the defectors do not attract disqualification under the Anti-Defection Law.

If two-third legislators of Congress party defect, it may be recognised as merger of Congress Legislature Party (CLP) with TRS.

If two more Congress MLA switch loyalty, the party may lose the status of main opposition in the Assembly as the party requires minimum 10 per cent of the members in the House.

The Congress lost the status of main opposition in Legislative Council in December when four of its members defected to TRS. Legislative Council Chairman Swamy Goud recognised their merger with the TRS.

With the strength of the Congress reduced to two in 40-member Council, party legislator Mohammed Ali Shabbir lost the post of Leader of Opposition. This was the first major shock for Congress after biting the dust in Assembly elections.

The defections of MLAs started on March 2 with two tribal MLAs switching loyalties to the ruling party. This evoked strong protest from the leaders of Congress party, who accused the TRS of engineering defections in view of the elections to five seats of the Legislative Council from MLA quota on March 12.

As 21 votes were required to win a seat, Congress had fielded a candidate, hoping to get both votes of its ally Telugu Desam Party (TDP). After defection of two Congress MLAs, one of the two TDP MLAs also crossed over to TRS, dashing all hopes of Congress.

Since then, the Congress has been losing a MLA almost every day. Jolted by desertions, the Congress boycotted the Council elections, accusing TRS of murdering the democracy.

The biggest jolt came when Sabitha Indra Reddy, a key leader from Ranga Reddy district bordering Hyderabad, met Rama Rao last Sunday at the residence of MIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi.

After preliminary talks with Rama Rao, she met his father and Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao on March 13, reportedly to bargain for a ministerial berth for herself and Lok Sabha ticket for her son Karthik Reddy.

CLP leader Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka has alleged that TRS was murdering democracy in Telangana by resorting to horse-trading.

TRS leader Rama Rao, however, said Congress MLAs were joining TRS on their own as they were impressed with the development and welfare programmes taken up by the government.

--IANS

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A Delhi court on Friday allowed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to question corporate lobbyist Deepak Talwar in judicial custody in a case related to the purchase of 43 aircraft by Indian Airlines in 2005.

ED's Special Public Prosecutors D.P. Singh and Nitesh Rana told Special Judge Santosh Snehi Mann that the interrogation of Talwar is necessary to ascertain the money trail.

ED has registered a case related to purchase of aircraft by Indian Airlines from Airbus Industrie, France, in 2005.

Meanwhile, the prosecutors have withdrawn the plea seeking to issue a production warrant against Talwar, who is in judicial custody in another money laundering case related to his suspected role in the irregular seat sharing on Air India's profitable routes with some international airlines.

The ED is also probing various other cases related to money laundering against Talwar who was deported from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on January 30.

--IANS

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A day after a portion of the footbridge outside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) crashed killing six persons and injuring 32 others, the civic authorities on Friday ordered demolition of the remaining structure.

A team of workers clambered up and started breaking the bridge apart. The work is expected to be completed later tonight.

Often referred to as the 'Kasab bridge', the footbridge connects the suburban and harbour line platforms of Central Railway with a narrow BT Lane exiting to the historic Azad Maidan.

This was the bridge the Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Amir Kasab and his fidayeen partner Ismail Khan climbed to go to the Madam Cama & Albless Hospital after killing 58 people in the CSMT on the night of November 26, 2008.

After killing five persons in the vicinity of the hospital, Kasab and Khan hijacked a vehicle and proceeded towards the VVIP Malabar Hill area for further attacks.

Their victims at the hospital complex included some of the finest police officers of the city, including then ATS chief Hemant Karkare.

On November 27, the Kasab-Khan duo was stopped by a police team at Girgaum Chowpatty. In the ensuing gunbattle, Khan and several policemen were killed but Kasab was caught alive.

He was tried and sentenced to death. Kasab was hanged secretly in Pune's Yerawada Central Jail on November 21, 2012 at sunrise.

After 11 years, the so-called 'Kasab bridge' also bit the dust as the workmen were in the final stages of demolishing it.

--IANS

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The third Namaste Thailand Festival was inaugurated by Thai envoy Chutintorn Gongsakdi, who reiterated peaceful Indo-Thai relations and the need to do more.

The three-day festival was inaugurated at Select Citywalk Mall here, and is celebrating 72 years of bilateral ties between the two countries.

It is organised by the Royal Thai Embassy.

"In terms of bilateral relationship, India has had a good, peaceful relationship with Thailand. But we are still in the early stages. Our trade has had an increase of 30 per cent year on year in 2017 and 2018, which is about 12 billion, but we have much more to achieve.

"What we do have is good people to people cultural relation and we want to build on that foundation and let it deliver political and economic dividends. So that trade and investment is much larger than this. Namaste Thailand Festival is an initiative in that direction," the envoy said in his opening address.

The envoy also mentioned Thai cuisine's popularity in India during a cooking demonstration he did. He cooked the green Thai curry in front of the audience.

The festival brings to the national capital Thai cuisine, arts, dance and a Thai marketplace with lifestyle products.

It ends on Sunday.

--IANS

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The DMK-led Secular Front in Tamil Nadu on Friday demanded a High Court monitored CBI probe into the Pollachi serial sexual assault and blackmailing case.

A resolution to this effect was adopted at a meeting of all the alliance partners headed by the DMK here.

It said the High Court should devote special attention as it is done in idol theft cases and ensure that none of the accused were allowed to go scot free.

Alleging that those belonging to the ruling AIADMK were involved in the crime, the resolution claimed that efforts were being made to hide the truth.

"The way Goondas Act was slapped on the four arrested accused, ordering of a CB-CID probe and then issuing a (order) transferring the case to CBI and subsequent steps only showed that efforts are being made to protect the accused," it alleged.

"If justice has to prevail, a High Court monitored probe by the CBI is a must to ensure that all those involved are given stringent punishment," it said.

Alleging that the crime had been on for the last seven years, the resolution also condemned the state government for releasing the name of the victim who had lodged a complaint and said it would prevent other victims from coming forward to lodge their complaints.

"Full justice will be ensured only if all those involved in this heinous crime are arrested and investigated," it said.

The Tamil Nadu government on Thursday issued an order transferring the probe in the case involving sexual assault and blackmailing of several women in Pollachi by a group of people to the CBI.

The order, transferring the case to the CBI, was issued two days after Director General of Police (DGP) T.K. Rajendran ordered a CB-CID probe after the incident created a furore.

The four accused, including mastermind Thirunavukarasu, were detained under the Goondas Act following a direction from Coimbatore District Collector K. Rajamani on recommendations from Coimbatore Rural Superintendent R. Pandiarajan.

The four, Thirunavukkarasu, Sathish, Sabarirajan, Vasanthakumar, all in their 20s, were accused of sexually assaulting many young women in Pollachi over a period of time and filming the act.

The mobile phones seized from the accused had videos of at least 40 women who the accused had allegedly blackmailed for money and sexual favours.

The Thursday order said that DGP Rajendran, on a complaint from a college student on February 24 that she was physically and sexually harassed by a group of men inside a car, cases were registered at Pollachi East Police Station under Sec 354-A, 354-B and 392 of IPC (Central Act XLV of 1860) and Sec 66-E of IT Act, 2000 and Sec 4 of Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act, 1998 (Tamil Nadu Act 44 of 1998) against the four accused who were later arrested and sent to judicial custody.

--IANS

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The Election Commission has imposed a blanket ban on the use or live demonstrations of animals during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, delighting animal lovers across the country.

In its Manual on the Model Code of Conduct, the EC has made it absolutely clear (on page 144 of chapter 22.5) that all animals, birds or reptiles of any type cannot be used while canvassing for votes by political parties or their candidates.

The manual states: "The EC has advised the political parties and candidates to refrain from using any animal for election campaign in any manner. Even a party, having reserved symbols depicting an animal should not make live demonstration of that animal in any election campaign of the party/any of its candidates."

Several Indian animal rights groups like PETA India, environmentalists and naturalists have wholeheartedly lauded the EC decision.

"EC and PETA India agree that using animals in election campaigns is unnecessary, archaic and cruel," said PETA CEO M. Valliyate.

He said political parties/candidates must stick to eye-catching and creative campaigns without subjecting the helpless animals to the frightening torture of frenetic crowds, loudspeakers and other campaign-related jamboree.

In the past, Valliyate said the PETA India had written to the EC, all State Election Commissions and political parties, expressing concern over how animals are forced into the middle of screaming crowds during election campaigns and poll rallies.

Even worse, these terrified animals were often beaten, whipped, kicked and terrorised while being paraded through streets and shoved into mobs of wildly shouting and pushing crowds, it pointed out.

The animals were compelled to carry heavy loads, much in excess of their physical capacity, denied sufficient food, water or rest and faced the prospects of severe injuries in the public mayhem.

Ganesh Nayak, Chairman of NGO Animals Matter To Me (AMTM) Mumbai, lauding the EC, told IANS: "Finally, we have become humane towards these silent creatures, who are tormented during the election gimmicks of us humans. The EC must strictly monitor implementation of its orders."

The colourful Indian elections have seen many animals and birds being allotted as symbols by the election authorities for various national state or local elections.

Some of the popular animals include: elephants, tigers, deer, camels, cows, bulls, donkeys, parrots, peacocks, doves, hens, cats, dogs and snakes et al.

The candidates, and occasionally even political parties, go to weird lengths to get the voters to identify with the animals allotted as their poll symbols.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) has an elephant as its symbol while the All India Forward Bloc (AIFB) has a tiger as its mascot, with many major political parties worldwide having animals as their symbols, most notably the US Democratic Party's donkey and the Republican Party's elephant.

In India, there are post-Independence records of a candidate in West Bengal hiring an elephant (his poll symbol) to accompany him on the campaign trail; another who was allotted a tiger, rented a caged tiger and took it around his constituency!

In the 1950s, a candidate allotted a chicken symbol, took a live hen out on the campaign trail but an eagle swooped on it and gobbled it up -- and the wannabe politician lost the polls.

Concurring with the EC, eivnornmentalist Bittu Sahgal said that using live animals "is not just cruelty but displays insensitivity", particularly with young voters.

"Politicians must understand that values have changed and (by using live animals) they would probably lose votes," Sahgal told IANS.

Following PETA India's appeal in 2012, the EC had issued a directive to all political parties and candidates to refrain from using animals during election rallies.

Later, PETA India followed this up and several like Maharashtra, Assam, Mizoram, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have decreed that the use of live animals representing the allotted symbols of political parties/candidates would not be permitted in the election campaign.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in)

--IANS

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Actor Rajkummar Rao feels that every young actor of his generation has the potential to become a superstar of the Hindi film industry as all of them are doing some very good work.

Rajkummar spoke to the media on the sidelines of Economic Times Edge - Femina 'Maharashtra Achievers Awards 2019' here on Thursday.

Actors like Varun Dhawan, Ranbir Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, Ayushmann Khurrana, Tiger Shroff and Sushant Singh Rajput, apart from Rajkummar himself are doing some great work in the Hindi film industry.

Asked which actor has the potential to become a superstar, he said: "Every young actor has the potential to become a superstar. Who am I to say which actor has or does not have the potential to become a superstar? I am really happy to see that we are doing some good work as an industry and because of that, we are able to see good performances from every other actor.

"When I see a good performance on-screen, it inspires me to do better work."

What's the status of his film "Mental Hai Kya"?

"We are going to announce release date of that film very soon," he said.

On his experience of working with Kangana Ranaut in the film, Rajkummar said: "I had a really good experience working with her. I think she is one of finest actresses of this country. Earlier, we have worked together in 'Queen' and now I worked with her in 'Mental Hai Kya'. It is always fun to work with her."

"Mental Hai Kya" is a black comedy crime thriller, produced by Ekta Kapoor and directed by Prakash Kovelamudi.

--IANS

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The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on a plea by Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo and former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad seeking bail in multi-million fodder scam cases.

The bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna gave the investigating agency two weeks' time to file its response to the bail plea by the former Chief Minister.

Appearing for Lalu Prasad, senior counsel Kapil Sibal told the court that Yadav had already been in jail for the last 22 months and was not in proper state of health.

A part of his continuing incarceration, following conviction in three fodder scam cases, Prasad has spent in hospital on account of his indifferent health.

Prasad moved the top court against January 10 Jharkhand High Court rejecting his plea for bail.

Prasad was convicted on December 23, 2017 in a case of fraudulent withdrawal from Deoghar treasury in Bihar. He was out on provisional bail in May last year for treatment but surrendered in August after the high court asked him to.

Prasad has been convicted in four fodder scam cases and awarded 14-year jail term.

--IANS

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A French couple who lost their way while trekking in the Garhwal Himalayas were rescued by a State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) team on Friday, police said.

Alexander, 28, and Kloyi, 29, had gone for a trek on the Chaubatta-Deoriatal route from Guptkashi in Rudraprayag district a few days ago but lost track of the route midway following the snowfall in the area. The couple sent a distress message to a guide who informed the police on Thursday.

A rescue team of the SDRF was sent to the route from Rudraprayag on Friday morning and managed to locate the couple near Deoriatal in the afternoon.

"The couple had lost the way and were very tired. We are bringing them back now," said Inspector General Sanjay Gunjyal, the head of the SDRF team.

--IANS

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Militants in Gaza fired two rockets towards Tel Aviv, the first such attack since the war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, the media reported on Friday.

Rocket sirens sounded in Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, alerting residents to rush to bomb shelters. Videos posted online by locals showed empty streets and captured the blare of "code red" sirens, used to warn of imminent attacks, the Guardian reported.

There were no reports of damage or casualties, the Israeli army said, and no group in Gaza immediately claimed the attack, but in a statement, Hamas's military wing denied responsibility for the attack.

Besides Hamas, other armed factions operate in the territory, including the Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed organisation that has launched rockets in the past.

In Gaza, explosions were heard in the north and south of the territory on Friday, according to Palestinian witnesses who said Israeli planes bombed two Hamas security positions.

Meanwhile, Gaza's Interior Ministry issued a statement saying the rocket firing from Gaza violated the factional and national consensus and pledged to take measures against the perpetrators.

Following the incident, the Egyptian delegation that has been negotiating for months a long-term truce agreement between Israel and Hamas left the strip.

--IANS

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After attacking a National Conference leader in Anantnag a day ago, unidentified gunmen struck again on Friday klling a civilian in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district, police said.

Manzoor Ahmad Lone, who was abducted from Dogripora village, was killed in Gulzarpora village of Awantipora, an officer said.

This was the second incident after Muhammad Ismail, block president of National Conference (NC) was shot at in Bijbehara town. He is undergoing treatment in a Srinagar hospital.

--IANS

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Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel led Formula One drivers in paying tribute to race director Charlie Whiting, who has died aged 66.

The Federation International de l'Automobile's F1 director suffered a pulmonary embolism three days before the inaugural race of the 2019 season in Melbourne, Formula One said in a statement on Thursday.

At a drivers' press conference at the circuit at Albert Lake Park, Hamilton and Vettel paid tribute to Whiting, who was responsible for driver safety and rule enforcement.

"I've known Charlie since I started in 2007", Hamilton said.

"Obviously incredibly shocked this morning to hear the sad news. My thoughts and prayers are with his family. What he did for the sport, his commitment, he really was a pillar Such an iconic figure within the sporting world, and he contributed so much to us. May he rest in peace."

Vettel, who is again expected to be leading the pack chasing reigning world champion Hamilton, said he was still in shock following the news.

"I was as shocked as we all are, still now, when I heard the news this morning, especially because I spoke to him yesterday and walked the track for the first couple of corners together with him. It's difficult to grasp when somebody's just not there anymore", the Ferrari driver said.

"I've known him for a long time and he was sort of our man, our drivers' man. Obviously there's regulations and all that and then there's us and he was the middle man. He was someone you could ask anything, at any time. He was open to everyone, any time his door was always open.

"All our thoughts are with him and especially his family in these difficult circumstances."

Whiting, who began his F1 career in 1977, had been Formula One's race director since 1997.

"It is with immense sadness that I learned of Charlie's sudden passing. I have known Charlie Whiting for many years and he has been a great Race Director, a central and inimitable figure in Formula One who embodied the ethics and spirit of this fantastic sport", FIA President Jean Todt said in a statement.

"Formula 1 has lost a faithful friend and a charismatic ambassador in Charlie. All my thoughts, those of the FIA and the entire motor sport community go out to his family, friends, and all Formula 1 lovers."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a public interest litigation (PIL) taken up on its own, the Delhi High Court on Friday asked the state government to file a speedy response in the cases of seven undertrials pending in various lower courts.

The order by a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A.J. Bhambani came on a PIL initiated on five letters sent by the undertrials -- facing trial for cases ranging from murder to drug possession and also under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

The court has posted the next hearing for August 13.

Ujair Ahmed, one of the undertrials who wrote to the court, was arrested in 2013 by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the UAPA. He is lodged in Rohini Jail.

Another undertrial Imran Khan, who is lodged in Tihar Jail, was arrested by the NIA in July 2016. He wrote to the court that there was no progress in his case since the filing of the charge sheet.

Shahjahan, Mohammad Sajid and Sattar are facing trial in a drug possession and trafficking case since 2014. They are lodged in Tihar Jail.

Shahabuddin is facing trial in a 2015 murder case, while the seventh, Shankar is facing trial in a 2014 rape case. He is also lodged in Tihar Jail.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a big relief to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the Patna High Court on Friday quashed criminal proceedings initiated against him by a lower court in a 28-year-old murder case, a government lawyer said.

Justice A. Amanullah passed the order on an application moved by Kumar.

Kumar had challenged the proceedings initiated against him by the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM), Barh, who took cognizance of an FIR lodged at the Pandarak police station in Patna district.

In the FIR lodged on November 16, 1991, Kumar, who was then the Samata Party MP from Barh, was named as an accused along with others for the killing of one Sitaram Singh, who was killed during the Lok Sabha elections that year.

The ACJM had initiated criminal proceedings against Kumar in 2009, which was challenged by the Janata Dal (United) leader before the Patna High Court the same year.

The court had reserved the order on the petition on January 31.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee in Uttarakhand on Friday said it tied up with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to set up a Space Technology Cell at its campus.

"The ISRO-IIT Roorkee Space Technology Cell shall pursue advanced research in the areas of relevance to the future technological and programmatic needs of the Indian space programme," a statement from IIT Roorkee said.

The cell shall ensure to maximise the use of research potential, infrastructure, expertise and experience that exist in ISRO and IIT Roorkee, the statement said.

The institute will be providing the infrastructure and administrative support in setting up of the cell.

The research facility will consist of faculty members, visiting scientists, experts, research personnel, technical, administrative and support staff.

Bengaluru-based ISRO has been undertaking several student outreach programmes over the past few months in order to develop scientific temper among the country's youth.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India on Friday welcomed France's decision to freeze the assets of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar.

"We welcome the decision taken by France to sanction Masood Azhar, Chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based & UN proscribed terrorist organisation; and responsible for the Pulwama terrorist attack," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar wrote on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, French Ambassador Alexandre Ziegler tweeted a press statement of the French government, which said, "France has decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code. A joint decree of the Ministries of the Interior, and Economy and Finance was published today in the Official Gazette."

Ziegler tweeted, "Based on this decree, we will raise with our European partners the issue of including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts."

"France has always been and always will be by India's side in the fight against terrorism..."

Pakistan, JeM's base, is under pressure from many countries to act against the terrorist group, which claimed responsibility for the February 14 suicide bombing in Jammu and Kashmir that killed 40 CRPF troopers.

The United Nations has deemed the JeM to be a terrorist organisation since 2001. However, defying global opposition to terrorism, China has repeatedly vetoed sanctions against Azhar. On Wednesday, China once again opposed designating Azhar as an international terrorist.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bollywood star Akshay Kumar, who features as Havildar Ishar Singh in "Kesari" -- a film on the historical Battle of Saragarhi -- has urged the youth to watch the film as he feels the heroic tale has got lost in the pages of history books.

At an event here on Friday, Akshay said: "It is sad that though the British celebrate Saragarhi Day, remembering the martyrs of the war, but we Indians do not know much about it. It is sad how an incident like this has got lost in the pages of history.

"It is hard to imagine how 21 Sikh soldiers stood strong inside a fort, knowing that 10,000 Afghan soldiers were waiting outside to kill them. Knowing that death is inevitable and continuing the fight requires a lot of bravery. That war was a pure example of that. They fought for our country, for our honour.

"So, I would like to urge all the parents to show the film to their children. Our youngsters should know about our war heroes. This is also an educational film. It is a true incident and based on real characters."

Actress Parineeti Chopra and "Kesari" director Anurag Singh, apart from producer Karan Johar were a part of it. The film is releasing on April 21.

---IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
YSR Congress Party president Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy on Friday demanded a CBI probe into the "murder" of party leader and his uncle Y. S. Vivekananda Reddy.

The leader of opposition blamed ruling Telugu Desam Party (TDP) for the killing of Vivekananda, brother of his late father and former Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy.

Vivekananda, a former state minister and a former MP, was found dead under suspicious circumstances at his residence in Pulivendula town in Kadapa district Friday morning. After preliminary investigations, police said the YSRCP leader was murdered.

Jagan said that TDP leadership was in power or the leadership was aware of the conspiracy whenever a death occurred in his family.

"When my grandfather Y.S. Raja Reddy was murdered, TDP was in power, when there was an attempt on my life at Vizag airport, TDP was in power and when this murder happened, TDP was again in power," he told reporters after paying tributes to Vivekananada Reddy.

"Two days before the helicopter crash in which my father Dr Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy died, Chandrababu Naidu told the assembly that you (YSR) will not return and his remarks were boldly published in his favored media," Jagan said.

Jagan said only probe by an independent agency could bring out the facts. He alleged that the police were trying to divert the attention with wrong leads and fabricated evidence. "They have brought out a letter purported to be written by my uncle before dying which defies all logic," he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge has refused the government's offer to attend the scheduled meeting of the Lokpal Selection Committee on Friday, saying there was no provision for a "Special Invitee" to attend the meet.

"Since there is no provision under Section 4 of the Lokpal Act, 2013 for a Special Invitee to be a part of the Selection Committee or attend these meetings, I am once again forced to respectfully decline this invitation," Kharge wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

His letter dated March 14 came following a letter by the Department of Training and Personnel inviting him to attend the meeting.

The Opposition leader also accused the government of using his refusal to attend the past meetings of the Selection Committee as a special invitee as an "excuse" to not appoint a Lokpal.

This is the seventh time Kharge has refused to attend the Selection Committee meeting.

"Since 2014, the government has not made any attempt to amend the relevant provisions of the Lokpal Act to include the leader of the single largest party in the Opposition to be a member of the Selection Committee," he wrote.

Kharge said a Special Invitee would not have any rights of participation in the process of selection of the Lokpal and that he cannot accept the Opposition being made voiceless in a critical manner.

"However, the fact remains that whatever tardy progress the government has made has only been under pressure from the Supreme Court," he said.

"By excluding the Opposition, this process is being vitiated and I would like to caution the government that anyone selected through this one-sided process may decline to accept this position," Kharge said.

The Supreme Court had on March 7 sought to know, within 10 days, the possible date for the Selection Committee's meeting to finalise names for the Lokpal -- a three-member, anti-corruption watchdog comprising a chairman, a judicial and non-judicial member.

A Search Committee was constituted under Section 4(3) of the Lokayuktas Act, 2013 for the purpose of recommending a panel of names for the appointment of the chairperson and members of the Lokpal.

The Committee comprises Chairperson Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai (former judge of Supreme Court) and members Justice Sakha Ram Singh Yadav (former judge of Allahabad High Court), Ranjit Kumar (former Solicitor General of India), Arundhati Bhattacharya (former CMD of SBI), Dr Lalit K. Panwar (former Secretary), Shabbirhusein S. Khandwawala (retired Director General of Gujarat), A. Surya Prakash (Chairman, Prasar Bharti) and Dr A.S. Kiran Kumar (former Chairman of ISRO).

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
LG Uplus Corp would expedite deployment of the 5G network and develop various services to create new business opportunities, CEO Ha Hyun-hoi said on Friday.

South Korea's No. 3 mobile carrier will offer a wide range of media services to gain a competitive edge in its 5G business, based on a wider customer base following its acquisition of the nation's No. 1 cable operator, CJ Hello, in February, he said.

"5G service will change the everyday lives of our customers, creating new business opportunities not only in the (business to customer) business but also in the (business to business) areas, including autonomous vehicles, smart factories and smart cities," Ha said in a shareholder meeting at the company's headquarters here, Yonhap news agency reported.

"We will pro-actively respond to the fast-changing business environment and concentrate on key services for sustainable growth."

The telecom company logged sales of 12.1 trillion Won ($10.6 billion) in 2018. It offered 400 Won in dividends for per share, the same as 2018.

LG Uplus has been teaming up with Chinese network manufacturer Huawei to deploy the next-generation cellular technology in the nation.

Huawei's gear is used in about 95 per cent of 15,000 5G base stations established in the nation so far, according to the firm.

LG Uplus earlier said it aims to complete building its 5G infrastructure in major cities by the end of 2019.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Finance Minister on Friday said the and AGP were going to the polls together with one agenda, to make the Prime Minister again.

Sarma, who is also the convener of the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA), made the remark while addressing the media at the headquarters here along with the state Presidents of the and Asom Gana Parishad, Ranjit Kumar Dass and Atul Bora, respectively.

The statement comes after the BJP, AGP and the Bodoland Peoples' Front on Wednesday decided to contest the polls together and finalised their seat-sharing plan.

"Neither the nor the AGP have diluted their stands on the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016. With regards to who will become the next Prime Minister? The BJP and AGP are going to the polls on a point of unity that Modi should become the Prime Minister again," Sarma said.

"We are not going to discuss the Bill during the polls. There are differences between the two parties on the issue. After the polls, through consultations and consensus, the BJP and AGP will discuss it."

Meanwhile, Bora cited another common issue which was to defeat the in the state, saying that there was nothing new in the BJP-AGP alliance.

"We did it in 2001, 2009 and 2016 and this time as well," he told the media, while refusing to answer questions on the Bill.

Although the AGP forged an alliance with the BJP in 2016 and became a part of the BJP-led government, the regional party walked out of the pact following the passing of the Bill at the on January 8.

Sarma added said that an AGP delegation will meet BJP National in on Saturday.

On Sunday, Shah will meet NEDA leaders in the national capital.

--IANS

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(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.)
The Congress will contest 11 out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar, said Bihar Congress campaign committee Chairman Akhilesh Prasad Singh here on Friday.

"The Congress will contest 11 seats in Bihar. The party will send a list of the candidates' names to party President Rahul Gandhi for final approval," Singh told the media after a meeting of the Congress state election committee.

Singh said the "grand alliance" has worked out its seat sharing details and a formal announcement will be made in the next two to three days.

As per the seat sharing formula, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) will contest 17 or 18 seats, the Congress 11 and the remaining seats will be contested by the other allies, including the Left parties.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Friday paid tribute to Dalit leader Kanshi Ram on his birth anniversary.

Paying floral tributes to Kanshi Ram, Mayawati said that the biggest tribute to him would be to get "good results" in the Lok Sabha elections.

"Different political parties are paying tribute to Kanshi Ram on his birth anniversary despite the model code of conduct," the former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister told reporters.

She thanked the other political parties for saluting Kanshi Ram.

"I also want to tell the people of our party that this time his birth anniversary has fallen at a time when the schedule of the Lok Sabha elections have been announced.

"If the workers of our party across the country work cautiously against the nefarious design of the opposition parties and bring a good result, then it will be the real rich tribute to Kanshi Ramji," she said.

Former Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav took to Twitter and wrote: "A tribute to the leader Kanshi Ramji, a great thinker, who raised the political and social consciousness, on his birth anniversary. On this occasion we shall fulfill his dreams of social justice."

The BSP, the SP and the Ajit Singh-led Rashtriya Lok Dal will fight the April-May Lok Sabha elections as allies.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Michael Firestone, who has gained popularity for impersonating Michael Jackson across the world with his live shows, has defended the late King of Pop against allegations of sexual abuse against him in controversial documentary "Leaving Neverland". He says money is a "great motivator" behind the claims.

Las Vegas-based Firestone believes MJ is innocent and it's wrong to discredit anyone's work until all claims are proven.

"My stance on the matter is that Michael Jackson is innocent. Money is a great motivator and that is what this is all about, so I am not surprised," Firestone told IANS in an email interview.

"Leaving Neverland", a four-hour long, two-part documentary is built around the testimony of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who have alleged that they were abused as children by Jackson.

A slew of radio stations around the world pulled out Jackson's songs after the claims. The makers of "The Simpsons" also pulled down from their archives their popular episode featuring Jackson's voice.

Firestone has termed this a wrong move.

"MJ is not even alive to defend himself. It is most definitely unfair to discredit anyone's work until all claims are proven," added Firestone, who is looking forward to paying MJ a musical tribute in India with "I AM KING: The Michael Jackson Experience".

After entertaining people across the world, "I AM KING - The Michael Jackson Experience" will be held in Bengaluru at St. John's on March 16-17, following a show in Mumbai. BookMyShow is bringing the concert to India.

Firestone met MJ in 2002 in Las Vegas. Did he come across as the person who would get involved in such acts?

"Never! MJ loved children, like all of us do, and did so much for young people all over the world," said Firestone, who has been portraying Jackson on stage since he was 12.

Recalling his meeting, he said: "We spoke then and a few weeks later he called and we talked for several hours on the phone. It was eye-opening and inspirational and of course, a dream come true to get such a phone call. He would call me a few weeks later and we spent several hours on the phone talking about everything - love, life, family, the stars, space and time travel."

The 40-year-old remembers Jackson as "very spiritual and caring about every single human on earth".

"He was one of the nicest, if not the nicest person I've ever met. I loved his music and performances. Then the more I heard about his charity and kindness the more I looked up to him. As a kid, it made an impact seeing someone write a million dollar check to children's hospitals."

How would he like to honour Jackson's memory?

"I have starred in various MJ tribute shows. However, 'I AM KING' is my show. I wrote it and I wrote it to flow in such a way that it brings you up. The show is named 'I AM KING' not because I think I am king... it is because Michael Jackson is king and I will continue bringing the magic and music of Michael Jackson to venues worldwide for as long as I possibly can. There will never be another MJ."

He plans to expand his MJ universe soon too.

"We are actually considering bringing a video crew onboard in the future to start on the documentary. I am writing a book about the business and my own experience."

(Sugandha Rawal can be contacted at sugandha.r@ians.in)

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A number of prominent Muslim bodies in India on Friday condemned the terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch in which at least 49 people were killed.

Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind General Secretary Maulana Mehmood Madni said that the incident was painful and condemnable.

"This is very painful and should be condemned in the strongest word. We, the Muslims, need to think as to why such incidents are happening. Of course, it is Islamophobia, but we need to look inwards as to what is wrong with the 'ummah' (community)," Madni told IANS.

Expressing shock over the incident, Navaid Hamid, President of All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, an umbrella body of various Muslim organisations, said: "No words to express shock and grief over the killing of peaceful worshipers at Christchurch mosque in New Zealand terror attack."

"My heart goes to the bereaved families who are victims of Islamophobia created by western policies in the last 20 years," he added.

He also questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi's silence over the incident. However, the Prime Minister has expressed his "shock" over the accident in a letter to his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern.

At least 49 people were killed when gunmen said to be whites opened indiscriminate fire at two mosques in Christchurch city on Friday in what a shocked Prime Minister Ardern said was a terror attack.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With Rahul Gandhi blaming the BJP for the release of Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar during the earlier National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, BJP President Amit Shah on Friday hit back saying before making such "insensitive remarks", the Congress President should think about the mistakes committed by his party and his great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru on China and Kashmir, which he said had "turned into cancer for the country".

The BJP Chief's remarks came after Gandhi, at a public rally in Gandhinagar, asked why Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not telling the nation that it was the earlier National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which had released Azhar -- the man behind the Pulwama suicide bombing.

Shah added that by raising such questions, the Congress President was not just "displaying his insensitivity" but also questioning the wisdom of senior leaders of his own party.

"This debate does not start nor end with the release of Masood Azhar. This list is long, and if discussed, the Congress will look like the guilty party," he wrote in a blog on Friday.

Shah said 10 years before the Kandahar flight hijack incident -- which forced the government to release Azhar in exchange for the safe return of over 170 passengers -- the Congress government released 10 terrorists in exchange for then Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed's daughter Rubaiya Sayeed.

He said while the decision to release Azhar was taken through consensus in an all-party meeting called by Vajpayee, the UPA government in 2010 unilaterally released 25 terrorists as a goodwill gesture to improve relations with Pakistan, including a terrorist who went on to become one of the main handlers of the Pathankot terror attack.

"The Congress, which is today raising questions on a decision taken through consensus during a very sensitive situation, how will it answer the question of why those terrorists were released during its governments?" Shah asked in his post.

The BJP Chief wrote that at a time when Pakistan was under pressure, such questions being raised by the Congress and its President were helping those aiding terror.

"Today, when the world is not only looking at a strong India but is also standing firmly beside it, the Congress with its statements is helping those countries that do not want to see a strong India," he said.

Shah said the Congress policy against terrorism, separatism and Naxalism had always been unsure and senior "Congress leader Sheila Dikshit had herself admitted that Manmohan Singh's policy on terrorism was weaker compared to the strict policies of the Modi government".

He also attacked Nehru for supporting China's case for inclusion in the United Nation's Security Council (UNSC) at India's cost and said the same China was now repeatedly using its position in the Security Council to protect terrorist Masood Azhar by blocking India's bid to designate him as a global terrorist.

"Nehru also made the mistake of taking Kashmir problem to the UN forum. Prior to insensitive comments on terrorism, Rahul Gandhi should consider these two mistakes of his party and Nehru. Both these mistakes have become cancer for the country," Shah said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With less than a month to go for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Congress General Secretary and eastern Uttar Pradesh in-charge Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will kick off a three-day poll campaign from her great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru's birthplace Prayagraj to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's parliamentary constituency Varanasi by a steamer on March 18.

According to Congress leaders, during her three-day programme, she will cover a distance of over 140 km through four districts of the state -- Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad), Bhadohi, Mirzapur and Varanasi -- by steamer as well as car.

Priyanka's journey will commence from Prayagraj on Monday and conclude at Varanasi's Assi Ghat and Dashashwamedh ghat on Wednesday evening.

She will take the steamer ride from Chhatnag in Prayagraj on March 18 and en route meet elderly citizens of Dumduma in Prayagraj and the family members of Mahesh Raj Yadav, who was killed in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama on February 14 in a suicide bombing.

Priyanka Gandhi, who is considered as second most important face in Congress after her brother and party President Rahul Gandhi, will be back to her steamer ride from Rampur ghat in Bhadohi. From there, she will also visit Vindhyachal temple in Mirzapur and meet the carpet weavers before a night halt there.

She will commence her journey on Tuesday from Vindhyachal and visit the Dargah of Maulana Ismail Chisti in Bhadohi's Kantit area and interact with people there.

The Congress leader will then again be back to steamer ride from Mirzapur. She will interact with advocates at Kachahri Ghat in the district and then visit Bhatauli village and meet people there.

Thereafter, the newly-appointed General Secretary will reach Chandrika Devi temple and interact with people after offering her prayers there.

After leaving Chandrika Devi temple, Priyanka will reach Devri in Mirzapur and interact with local villagers there before arriving at Chunar for the night halt.

In the last leg of her three-day journey on Wednesday, she will visit via road Varanasi's Sheetla Mandir and meet women groups there.

From Sheetla temple, Priyanka will again take the steamer ride till Ramnagar and interact with the fishermen community there.

She will also visit the house of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Varanasi's Ramnagar before arriving at Assi Ghat by the steamer. There she will interact with the local people, people from Jain communities and offer prayers at Vishwanath temple.

After performing rituals at the Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, she will again take the steamer ride to Dashashwamedh ghat.

After that, she will leave for the Congress office in Varanasi and interact with party workers during a Holi Milan programme.

She will then leave for Delhi on Wednesday evening from Varanasi airport.

The Congress is contesting the Lok Sabha polls alone in Uttar Pradesh which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal are contesting in alliance.

In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ally Apna Dal had won 73 seats while the Congress had managed to win only two. The Samajwadi Party had won five seats and the BSP had drawn a blank in the state.

The Congress has to date announced 26 candidates for Uttar Pradesh. However, the party has not announced Priyanka's candidature. Her brother is contesting from Amethi, while her mother will contest from Rae Bareli seat.

The seven-phased Lok Sabha elections is scheduled from April 11 to May 19. The counting of votes will take place on May 23.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Punjab Police's intelligence wing has busted an espionage ring in the state with the arrest of a Military Engineering Services employee posted in the crucial Jalandhar cantonment, a police spokesman said here on Friday.

"Acting on specific inputs provided by reliable sources and sister agencies, the State Special Operations Cell (SSOC) of the intelligence wing has arrested an espionage agent," the spokesman said.

The arrested agent was identified as Ram Kumar, who was working as an electrician with the MES in Jalandhar cantonment since 2013.

"He was befriended on social media by a Pakistan-based intelligence operative and asked to provide information of Indian Army units located along India-Pakistan border and even movement of army convoys in the area. He was also asked to provide details of specific army units," the spokesman said.

Kumar has confessed to having passed sensitive military information to his Pakistani handler over social media platforms, he added.

"Apart from providing information, he had provided mobile numbers of military officers to Pakistani intelligence operatives. In lieu of providing information, he has been paid money on more than one occasion," the spokesman said.

"Post the Pulwama (February 14 terror attack) incident, his handlers had become particularly inquisitive about the movement of army units," he added.

Two mobile phones and four SIM cards have been recovered from Kumar, who was produced in court on Friday "to seek police remand for unearthing the complete espionage racket active in the state", he said.

An FIR has been registered against the accused under various sections of the Official Secrets Act and the Indian Penal Code. Further investigations are on to check his social media contacts, he added.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Citing an Income Tax raid on a rural development department official and land grabbing charges against a Congress MP, BJP leader Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday said rampant corruption was thriving in Karnataka and 10-20 per per cent commission was being charged from contractors.

He demanded answers from Congress President Rahul Gandhi and Janata Dal (Secular) leader and state Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy.

Addressing a press conference here, Chandrasekhar said the official collected Rs 2 crore from a contractor, which was to be used for the election expenditure of politicians, and added his party would approach the Election Commission (EC).

The Rajya Sabha MP demanded the resignation of Karnataka Rural Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda along with making public the details of all contracts.

"Collection of this amount of cash is not possible unless there is support from the higher-ups. I challenge Rahul Gandhi and Kumaraswamy to come clean on it," he said.

Citing media reports about Congress MP K.H. Muniyappa reportedly acquiring 410 acres of land through illegal means in Kolar, Chandrasekhar said: "Rahul Gandhi owes a legitimate answer to this."

Asked if the party will approach the Election Commission, he said: "Our party will go to the EC."

During the Assembly election campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said the Karnataka government was "10 per cent sarkar", he said.

"Now, it looks like that commission charged by officers is 10-20 per cent now," said Chandrasekhar, who is the BJP's election management co-convener in the state.

He said the Congress wanted to stay in power "in any manner" and "collect money".

"People are aware that the Congress-JD(S) coalition is not bound by any common governance agenda, common economic agenda or a common care for the people of Karnataka. Rather, it is about how to stay in power, collect money and exploit the state and its people leading up to the election," he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
One of the key prongs for the welfare of ex-servicemen -- the Army Group Insurance Fund (AGIF) -- has exposure to toxic IL&FS bonds amounting close to Rs 210 crore. This means that crores worth of insurance premiums, covering all ranks from generals to JCOs and jawans, are at risk of being lost.

Recently, officials of the Indian Army met the new board of the IL&FS seeking a solution of this issue. There are no direct answers on who will pick up the liability.

IANS sent a questionnaire to IL&FS, asking whether the AGIF had any exposure to its bonds and what was the quantum involved.

Chief Communications Officer, IL&FS group, said, "Thanks for reaching out to us. We would like to decline comments on the same."

Similarly, a questionnaire was sent to the Army PRO Lt Col Mohit Vaishnava and he was also spoken to by IANS as well, but he failed to respond to both.

Here is a primer on the AGIF, from the Army's own literature on the subject and a construct of how it is funded.

Under the banner of Soldiers2ndLife, the AGIF explainer is succinct.

Maturity Benefits:

The benefit, which is the accumulation of the saving element of the amount contributed by members along with interest and bonus, is paid on discharge/release of a serviceman. The maturity amount is also paid along with death benefits to the next of kin in case of death of any member. A member can withdraw 50 per cent from the maturity benefit after 15 years of service for the purpose of education/marriage of wards. In addition, a member can withdraw up to 90 per cent of the maturity amount for repair/renovation of house or for the purpose of conveyance during the last two years of service before superannuation.

Insurance:

Insurance benefits to the families of those Army personnel who may die while in service is Rs 50 lakh for officers and Rs 25 lakh for JCOs/OR. The monthly subscription is Rs 5,000 and Rs 2,500 respectively.

Extended Insurance (EI):

The Army Group Insurance Fund Extended Insurance (EI) Scheme provides insurance cover to servicemen after leaving service. It provides Rs 6 lakh for officers and Rs 3 lakh for personnel below officer rank (PBOR) for a period of 26 years after retirement or 75 years of age, whichever is earlier. The amount is received by the family of the ex-serviceman in case of his death. The amount has been recently revised and is now Rs 10 lakh for officers and Rs 5 lakh for PBOR for all those who joined the scheme after January 1, 2014. For those who joined earlier, the amount will remain at the earlier rate of Rs 6 lakh and Rs 3 lakh for officers and PBOR respectively.

Disability Cover:

This concerns an individual who becomes disabled out of service prematurely due to injury or disease. The officers and JCOs/OR with 100 per cent disability will get an amount of Rs 25 lakh and Rs 12.5 lakh respectively. This amount gets proportionately reduced for lower element of disability upto 20 per cent. An ex gratia disability allowance is also granted by AGIF in case a member with 100% disability has been recommended a constant attendant.

AGIF Scholarship Scheme:

AGIF Scholarship Schemes for the sum of Rs 40,000 per annum are provided for wards of officers, JCOs and OR in 12 Army Welfare Educational Institutions (AWES) institutions.

While the Army chose to deny the earlier IANS story on how Army welfare funds may have been deployed in IL&FS bonds, saying, "It is informed that welfare funds of the Indian Army are invested only in nationalised; scheduled banks; PSUs as per existing policy. There is no investment from Army Battle Casualties Welfare Fund and Army Central Welfare Fund in IL&FS bonds as reported. This news article is rebutted for being false, infructuous and mala fide."

IANS has chosen to stick to its report. Here's how Army Group Insurance Fund (AGIF) is infected with this virus.

In its earlier story, now validated, IANS wrote: IANS learns that a few sections of the armed forces, primarily the army, have invested their corpus of funds in the once AAA-rated IL&FS bonds to secure their future. The Indian Army has three specific funds in which fellow countrymen can contribute - Army Welfare Fund Battle Casualties (set up in 2016 after the Siachen avalanche disaster and the Pathankot/Uri incidents), Army Central Welfare Fund and the Paraplegic Rehabilitation Centre Pune - towards the members/families of the armed forces who have made the supreme sacrifice for the nation. It is still not known whether these funds have invested in the virus-laden bonds.

The government does not fund the Army Group Insurance Fund scheme at all. A comparison of insurance cover and duration of cover provided to the generals and the jawans by the AGIF is as follows:

* Number of Generals: 350 (approximately)

* Monthly premium: Rs 5,000

* Annual premium: Rs 60,000

* Lt.-Generals insurance cover up to 60 years

* COAS insurance cover up to 62 years

* Annual contribution Rs 60,000

* Total annual contribution by the Generals is: Rs 60,000 multiplied by 350, which amounts to Rs 2 crore and 10 lakh.

Number of Jawans: 13,00,000 (approximately)

Annual contribution: Rs 30,000

Total annual contribution by jawans is: Rs 30,000 multiplied by 13,00,000, which amounts to Rs 3,900 crore.

These figures apply to just one year. The big question is: Who is tracking these funds? There are no answers to who will bear the liability if the huge amounts parked in toxic IL&FS bonds turn to junk. The first step will be taken if the army authorities begin by acknowledging there is a problem at hand.

-- IANS

am/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Supreme Court on Friday sought the Election Commission's response on a plea by 21 opposition parties seeking audit of at least 50 per cent of EVMs with corresponding Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs).

Issuing the notice to the poll panel, the bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna directed the election panel to depute an officer to assist the court on the next hearing of the matter on March 25.

"Matter will be heard on March 25, 2019. The Election Commission of India to be served through the Secretary. The competent authority of the Election Commission of India shall depute a suitable officer to assist the Court on the date fixed i.e. March 25, 2019," the court said in its order.

The plea was filed, among others, by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party, Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party, Farooq Abdullah of the National Conference, Sharad Yadav of the Loktantrik Janata Dal, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Derek O'Brien of the Trinamool Conference and M.K. Stalin of the DMK.

In the plea, they urged the court that 50 per cent of results of EVMs must be matched and cross-checked with VVPATs before the declaration of results in the general elections.

Earlier in February, the opposition parties approached the EC to audit at least 50 per cent of EVMs with corresponding VVPATs in all constituencies during the Lok Sabha polls.

The parties had said there are "serious doubts about the credibility of EVMs and the purity of the entire electoral process" and asked the EC to mandate physical countercheck of paper trail and match it with the electronic vote in at least 50 per cent of all EVMs, if not all.

The 21 opposition party leaders had challenged the Election Commission's decision to verify VVPAT of only one randomly selected booth of a constituency.

Speaking to media persons later, senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that verifying the VVPAT of just one randomly selected booth in a constituency would account for just 0.44 per cent of the votes polled and this would defeat the entire purpose of attaching VVPAT to EVMs for recording votes in printed form.

He described as "ornamental" and without substance the exercise of verifying the votes exercised through EVMs with VVPAT that is undertaken by the election panel at present.

The top court had on January 7 sought the poll panel's response on a PIL by a retired bureaucrat, a former army officer and a former diplomat seeking to increase the cross-verification of the VVPATs with EVMs from the current 10 per cent to 30 per cent for this year's general elections.

In their plea, retired Indian Army Officer and former IAS officer M.G. Devasahayam, former Indian Foreign Service Officer K.P. Fabian and retired banker and All India Bank Officers Confederation General Secretary Thomas Franco Rajendra Dev had described as "manifestly arbitrary, irrational, unreasonable and, inter alia, in violation of Article 14" of the Constitution, the Election Commission's decision to "confine such a cross-verification exercise to a statistically insignificant number of approximately only one polling station in each constituency, regardless of the number of polling stations in such a constituency".

The PIL is still pending.

--IANS

pk/vd

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With a rebellion by 12 Republicans, the US Senate has voted against President Donald Trump's national emergency that is criticised by his own party members as a presidential overreach.

Immediately after Thursday's vote in the Senate controlled by his own party, Trump tweeted his threat: "VETO!".

The veto would make the Congressional resolution against the emergency only symbolic as his opponents do not have the two-thirds majority to overturn the first veto of his presidency and he would be able to use the declaration to finance the Mexican border wall for which Congress had refused to allocate funds in the budget.

The House of Representatives had already voted for the resolution last month and it will go to Trump for his promised veto.

Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summing the opposition said: "President Trump's emergency declaration is an unlawful power grab that does violence to the Constitution and fundamentally alters the separation of powers."

Defying Trump's assertion that a vote for the resolution would be supporting "crime and open border Democrats", the 12 Republicans joined Democrats to vote for it for a tally of 59-41 signalling their disenchantment with some of his policies in a highly polarised nation.

Senator Mitt Romney, who had been the Republican Party candidate for President in 2012, said before the vote on the emergency that he was "seriously concerned" about the overreach that could lead to "abuse by future president". He clarified, as did many others, that he was not against increased border security.

In another act of defiance, the Senate had voted to end military support by the Trump administration to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

The setbacks for Trump came while the nation awaits the report of an inquiry into whether his election campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

His campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced on Wednesday to additional prison term on charges relating to his consulting work for a pro-Russian party in Ukraine.

The House voted with near unanimity on Thursday to demand the publication of the Russian inquiry report, which the attorney general is permitted my law to withhold. Some lawmakers fear that he may block the release of sensitive portions of the report.

Unlike in India, a national emergency in the US does not lead to suspension of civil liberties or similar restrictions but is used mostly for finance-related matters or to organise aid in natural disasters. Former President Barack Obama had invoked it about 10 times.

Trump is obsessed with the wall, which he has scaled back to a series of steel slats along some sections of the Mexican border, having made it a signature pledge of his election campaign.

He says it is required to keep out illegal immigrants, human traffickers, criminals and drug smugglers and it has gained urgency with over 7,000 Central Americans who came to the frontier in a convoy earlier this year hoping to crash through and are now camped on the Mexican side.

The nation went through 35 wrenching days of a government shutdown in December and January over the wall when he refused to sign the budget because it lacked funding for it. But finally he caved in to rising opposition and agreed to a budget that reopened the government, while declaring the emergency to allow him to divert $8.6 billion for the project from elsewhere.

Before the vote he told the media: "We are going to have a very strong border very soon... And we're going to have hundreds of miles of wall up fairly soon."

He used the interaction to plug his campaign for immigration reforms that would switch to a merit-based system, potentially helping Indian professionals waiting for as much as a decade for green cards, but it would come at the cost of those seeking to immigrate as relatives of citizens.

He said: "We also have to change the laws. Because whether it's visa lottery (for green cards), whether it's chain migration (by relatives), whether it's catch and release (of illegal immigrants), or anything else, they are horrible, horrible laws."

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis)

--IANS

al/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday expressed his deep shock and sadness at the "loss of scores of innocent lives" in the heinous terrorist attack at Muslim places of worship in New Zealand's Christchurch.

In a letter to his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern, he expressed his deepest condolences to the families bereaved in this dastardly attack, offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injured and underscored India's solidarity with the friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time.

Modi stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. Hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies, he said.

At least 49 people were killed when gunmen said to be whites opened indiscriminate fire at two mosques in Christchurch city on Friday in what Prime Minister Ardern said was a terror attack.

Nine Indian nationals/people of Indian origin were said to be missing after the attack, India's High Commissioner Sanjiv Kohli said.

--IANS

ps/vd

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Andhra Pradesh Police on Friday formed a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the death of YSR Congress leader and former state minister Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy, who was found dead at his home in Kadapa district under suspicious circumstances.

Vivekananda Reddy (68), also a former Lok Sabha member, was suspected to have died of cardiac arrest at his residence in Pulivendula town early on Friday.

However, on a complaint by his personal assistant, the police registered a case of unnatural death under section 174 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and took up investigations.

Vivekananda Reddy was younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and uncle of YSR Congress President Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy.

He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Kadapa district Superintendent of Police Rahul Dev Sharma announced the formation of a SIT headed by Additional Superintendent of Police Lakshminarayana.

Sharma said services of forensic experts were being used for the investigation. The investigators gathered clues from the scene with the help of the Clues Team and dog squad.

On a complaint by Vivekananda Reddy's personal assistant Krishna Reddy, a case was registered at Pulivendula police station. The body was shifted for autopsy at a local government hospital.

The former MP, who was alone at his house, was found dead in a pool of blood in the bathroom when Krishna Reddy along with the housemaid entered the house from the rear door after there was no response to the knocks on the main door.

The personal assistant said Vivekananda Reddy had head injuries. As the rear door was open, the family suspected foul play.

Leaders of YSR Congress expressed doubts over the cause of death and demanded a thorough probe. They said he was fine till Thursday and had participated in the election campaigning.

MP Vijay Sai Reddy said the party was demanding an impartial probe to find out if it was natural death or accidental death or there was some other cause.

Vivekananda Reddy was elected from Kadapa Lok Sabha constituency on a Congress party ticket in 1999 and 2004. He was twice elected to the Andhra Pradesh Assembly (1989, 1994) from Pulivendula, a family stronghold.

He was also elected to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council in 2009 and served as agriculture minister in the Kiran Kumar Reddy cabinet.

He remained loyal to the Congress when Jaganmohan Reddy raised a banner of revolt against the party for not picking him as the successor of his father and Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy following his death in a helicopter crash in 2009.

Jagan Reddy had alleged that Congress tried to engineer a split in the family by making Vivekananda a minister. The young leader subsequently floated the YSR Congress party.

Vivekananda Reddy contested 2011 by-election to Pulivendula constituency against his sister-in-law and Jagan's mother Y.S. Vijayamma, who contested as the YSR Congress candidate and won the seat with a huge majority.

Vivekananda later quit Congress party and joined YSR Congress. He lost the elections to the Legislative Council in 2017.

--IANS

ms/rs/bc

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Thousands of schoolchildren across the world, inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg who has been nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, abandoned their classrooms on Friday to demand action on climate change as part of a global youth campaign.

The protests in about 100 countries, including India, were a part of a movement started by Thunberg, who protests every Friday outside Sweden's Parliament. Scientists say that tougher measures are needed to cut global warming, the Guardian reported.

In India, several students joined the "Fridays for Future" movement seeking action on climate change. Pictures and videos shared by Greenpeace International on Twitter showed students in Delhi and Gurugram holding placards and posters urging action over climate change.

"We demand clean air, water and soils for our safe future," tweeted Greenpeace, sharing a photograph which shows a row of students in their uniforms holding placards with slogans against air pollution.

The Paris climate agreement of 2017 committed nearly 200 countries to keeping global temperatures "well below" 2.0 Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times and to striving for a maximum of 1.5 Celsius.

At one of the largest protests, in Sydney, the protesters held up banners with slogans such as "The seas are rising and so are we", "You're burning our future" and "There is no planet B".

The students ignored calls from authorities to stay in class.

A leader of the student movement, 15-year-old Vivienne Paduch, led the crowd of protesters in a chance of "the youth are rising, no more compromising".

"We really want everyone to know that the fight for climate justice and the fight for climate action really is a global fight and involves equity for everyone", Paduch said.

Hundreds of school students gathered in Stockholm's central square. Thunberg joined the crowd in the Swedish capital and said: "We have been born into this world and we have to live with this crisis, and our children and our grandchildren.

"We are facing the greatest existential crisis humanity has ever faced. And yet it has been ignored. You who have ignored it know who you are."

In New Zealand, Climate Change Minister James Shaw, who was assaulted on Thursday on his way to Parliament, came out in support for the strikers in Wellington, still sporting a black eye.

In London, thousands of schoolchildren poured into Parliament Square brandishing banners declaring "Coral not coal" and "Stop denying the earth is dying".

The big crowd in central London on its way to Whitehall blocked traffic and chanted slogans.

Hundreds of children converged on the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. Switzerland was another country that saw a large numbers of students striking for several months now, and thousands of students turned out to protest on Friday.

Students across Spain also joined the strike.

--IANS

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Sushant Divgikar, who won Mr Gay India 2014, features in a single "Love is love", a pride anthem by Swedish artiste Petter Wallenberg.

Wallenberg, founder of international LGBTQ organization Rainbow Riots, has been in Mumbai for over a year, collaborating with the country's queer pioneers. The result is the upcoming music and activist project Rainbow Riots India, part of the movement behind one of the greatest victories for human rights of our time.

"This isn't just music - it's the sound of India's rainbow revolution. When I first arrived in India just over a year ago, as a gay man - I was a criminal. But soon I was part of a revolution, right at the heart of the biggest victory for equality in our time," Wallenberg said in a statement, referring to the decriminalization of gay sex last year by the Supreme Court.

Wallenberg's single will be out on April 2. Apart from Sushant, it also features transgender dance group Dancing Queens and was filmed here last month.

"The single 'Love is Love' speaks about equal love and about being true to one's authentic self," Sushant said in a statement.

"This track is very close to my heart and spreads the message that love always wins. This is a great time for this to be introduced to the world and a new India that finally allows people to love freely and without fear," added the former "Bigg Boss" contestant.

--IANS

rb/vd

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External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Friday hit out at the Congress over its allegation that China blocking the bid to name Masood Azhar as a "global terrorist" was a diplomatic failure of the Narendra Modi government, saying the proposal was mooted four times but India could get worldwide support only in 2019.

She took to Twitter to counter the opposition's charge and said India secured unprecedented support from the international community for listing Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee.

"I wish to apprise you of the facts regarding listing of Masood Azhar under the United Nations Sanctions Committee. The proposal has been mooted four times. In 2009, India under the UPA Government was the lone proposer. In 2016, India's proposal was co-sponsored by USA, France and UK. In 2017, USA, UK and France moved the proposal," she said in a series of tweets.

Swaraj said in 2019, the proposal was moved by the USA, France and UK and supported by 14 of the 15 UN Security Council Members and also co-sponsored by Australia, Bangladesh, Italy and Japan - non members of the Security Council.

"Thus, we have secured an unprecedented support from the international community for listing of Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee.

"I have shared these facts with you so that leaders who describe this as our diplomatic failure may see for themselves that in 2009, India was alone. In 2019, India has the worldwide support," she said.

The opposition leaders including Congress President Rahul Gandhi had criticised the government after China blocked the naming of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist by the United Nations.

Gandhi had called Prime Minister Narendra Modi "weak" and "scared" of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"Weak Modi is scared of Xi. Not a word comes out of his mouth when China acts against India. NaMo's China Diplomacy: 1. Swing with Xi in Gujarat 2. Hug Xi in Delhi 3. Bow to Xi in China," Gandhi said on Twitter.

On Wednesday, the UN Sanctions Committee could not come to a decision on naming the JeM chief as a global terrorist after China put the proposal on hold. India expressed its disappointment at the outcome.

--IANS

ps-bns/oeb/bg

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When the nation's attention was focussed on the Balakot air strike, Indian Army in a joint operation with Myanmaerese Army destroyed 10 camps belonging to an insurgent group in Myanmar which had threatened the Kaladan multi-mode transit project.

Operation Sunrise was a mega task in which Arakan army, an insurgent outfit of Kachin Independent Army (KIA) backed by China, was targeted.

Sources said the camps were destroyed inside Myanmar with active support of the Indian Army in an intense operation lasting over 10 days.

The Army provided hardware and equipment to Myanmar for the operation while it mobilised massive forces on the border.

The operation was carried out on inputs that the insurgents were targeting the mega infrastructure project linking Kolkata with Sitwe in Myanmar through sea route. It would have provided another route to reach Mizoram from Kolkata through Sitwe.

The project is expected to be completed by 2020.

Camps of insuregnts all along the India-Myanmar border from Miizoram, Nagaland to Arunachal Pradesh were targeted in one of the biggest operstions of its kind, sources said.

--IANS

gd/prs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Three persons including a woman were arrested here with 44 kilograms of heroin worth Rs 180 crores in the international market, a police officer said on Friday.

"The kingpin of the syndicate is Shamuta Banu (54), a resident of Assam, while Dhanji Gupta (49) and Dheeraj Kumar (24) of Bihar are her associates in the crime," the official said.

Gupta and Kumar were arrested on Monday night when they reached near south Delhi's Indraprastha Park with 21 kilograms of heroin to supply it to some contacts.

"As per the information given by Gupta and Kumar, police team on Tuesday arrested Banu from Assam," Deputy Commissioner of Police P.S. Kushwah said.

"Interrogation revealed that Banu received crude heroin from her Manipur based contact who procures it from Myanmar," he said.

"Banu and her associates used to turn crude heroin into fine quality by using chemicals in Bihar. She than used to supply it to North India, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other states including Delhi with the help of her contacts," Kushwah said.

There is widespread illegal cultivation of opium in the bordering areas of Manipur. Drug manufacturers prepare heroin from opium and supply it to the clients, the investigation revealed.

"The quality, however, of heroin smuggled from Myanmar is much better than the one produced in Manipur and as it is cheaper in cost, it remains in high demand globally including in India," he added.

--IANS

sp/rs/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
UK MPs have voted in favour of delaying the Brexit process by at least three months, acknowledging that more time was needed to break the deadlock over Britain's departure from the European Union (EU), although a call for a second referendum was decisively rejected.

On Thursday night, the MPs voted 412 votes to 202 to approve of Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to delay Brexit, after the House of Commons earlier this week overwhelmingly rejected her withdrawal agreement by a large margin, for a second time, and then voted to reject a no-deal Brexit, CNN reported.

The votes were the last in a series of vital parliamentary decisions on Brexit over several days, mean that Britain's departure from the EU should not now take place before June 30 and gave May a window to resuscitate her plan.

May will now ask European leaders to grant an extension to Article 50, the mechanism taking the UK out of the EU on March 29.

Unless a delay is approved by all 27 remaining EU leaders, Britain is heading for a chaotic exit on March 29.

The MPs, earlier on Thursday, rejected an attempt to secure another Brexit referendum by 334 votes to 85, the BBC said.

They also rejected a cross-party plan to allow MPs to take control of the Brexit process to hold a series of votes on the next steps, by the narrow margin of two votes.

Meanwhile, most MPs from the ruling Conservative Party voted against delaying Brexit - including seven cabinet members - meaning May had to rely on Labour and other opposition votes to get it through.

But some opposition Labour frontbenchers resigned to defy party orders to abstain on a vote on holding another referendum.

Shadow housing minister Yvonne Fovargue, shadow education minister Emma Lewell-Buck, shadow business minister Justin Madders, Ruth Smeeth, a shadow ministerial aide, and Labour whip Stephanie Peacock, all resigned to oppose one.

Meanwhile May, who has long insisted that the UK will leave the EU on March 29 with or without a withdrawal deal, also voted to delay Brexit.

Downing Street said the government was still preparing for a no-deal Brexit.

May is planning to hold another "meaningful vote" on her withdrawal deal by March 20.

If she wins that vote, she will ask for a one-off extension to Brexit get the necessary legislation through Parliament at an EU summit on March 21 - if not she could ask for a longer extension.

In response to Thursday night's vote, a spokesman for the European Commission said extending Article 50, would need the "unanimous agreement" of 27 EU member states.

And it would be for the leaders of those states "to consider such a request, giving priority to the need to ensure the functioning of the EU institutions and taking into account the reasons for and duration of a possible extension".

European Council President Donald Tusk said that he would appeal to the EU leaders "to be open to a long extension if the UK finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy and build consensus around it".

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The UN has instructed its personnel not to fly on Boeing 737 Max 8 after an Ethiopian Airlines flight of the same model crashed, killing all 157 people on board earlier this week, a UN spokesperson said.

"Instructions have gone out to all our travel bureaus not to book any UN personnel on the type of aircraft that crashed in Ethiopia," UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said at a press briefing on Thursday.

He added the move is a standard safety procedure and follows the decisions taken by civil aviation authorities in many countries in the world, Xinhua news agency reported.

On Sunday, a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft of Ethiopian Airlines crashed shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa. All 157 people on board were killed in the crash, including 21 UN personnel.

Another Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed in Indonesia in October, killing all 189 people on board.

Following the second crash of the same model in less than five months, safety concerns mounted around the globe as the 737 Max is Boeing's most important aircraft type, generating about one third of the company's operating profit.

According to the US Federal Aviation Administration, there are 387 Boeing 737 Max 8 jets in operation at 59 airlines worldwide, 74 of which are registered in the US.

China was the first country in the world to suspend all Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes and over 40 countries including Singapore, Australia, and the European Union, Canada, and the US followed suit. In addition, some countries have closed their airspace to the plane.

--IANS

vin/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A US court in the state of California has dismissed lawsuit against and Infosys over allegations that it abused the visa system to save money.

The California federal judge nixed a whistleblower's suit accusing of bringing two trainers from India into the country using B-1 visas instead of the necessary and more expensive H1B, AppleInsider reported on Thursday.

The lawsuit claimed that and Infosys "conspired to have two Indian nationals enter the United States on a business B-1 visa to provide training at Apple in violation of immigration laws".

The suit, filed by Carl Krawitt who is a former contractor for Infosys, said the two trainers were brought in under the wrong visa and that Apple should have acquired the more expensive and numerically-capped H1-B visas for the pair.

A B-1 visa is used to allow non-immigrants enter the US for business purposes but on a temporary basis and with limitations.

The lawsuit claimed Infosys executives knew the company "lacked sufficient foreign nationals on H1-B visas to legally perform the classroom training sessions at Apple" that the company was contracted to provide, and that "only Indian foreign national workers on B-1 visas were available to perform services" for Apple at the time, said the report.

Apple, however, argued its trainer's activities were permissible under the B-1 visas.

"The court determined that the trainers' work under the B-1 visa was acceptable, and that neither Apple nor Infosys were attempting to commit fraud," the report noted.
The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that all US diplomats remaining in Venezuela have departed the South American country.

Calling the withdrawal "temporary departure," Pompeo said in a statement released by the State Department on Thursday that US diplomats will continue their work from other locations, Xinhua news agency reported.

The US diplomats' exit came after Pompeo announced on Monday night the decision of withdrawing all remaining US personnel from its embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, within this week.

On Tuesday, Venezuelan government ordered American diplomats to leave within 72 hours. The US recognised Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's "interim president" on Jan 23, days after Maduro was inaugurated for a second term as Venezuelan President.

In response to Washington's support for Guaido, Maduro announced that he was severing "diplomatic and political" ties with the US.

The Trump administration recently has kept piling up pressure on Maduro.

--IANS

vin/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
YSR Congress party leader and former state Minister Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy was murdered, police said after preliminary inquiry

Hours after the 68-year-old former MP was found dead at his home in Pulivendula town of Kadapa district, police said they were treating it as a murder case and investigating from all angles.

Kadapa Superintendent of Police Rahul Dev Sharma told reporters that there were seven injury marks including four on the head. The injuries were inflicted by a sharp object. He said the crime scene and the clues indicate that it was murder.

He constituted a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the case. "We have collected fingerprints from the scene and will match the same with those of the suspects," the SP said.

The police suspect that as the rear door was open, somebody entered the house and killed him on the intervening night of Thursday and Friday.

Earlier, it was believed that Vivekananda Reddy died of cardiac arrest. However, on a complaint by his personal assistant, the police registered a case of unnatural death under section 174 of Code of Criminal Procedure and took up investigation.

After an autopsy at a hospital, the body was handed over to the family.

Vivekananda Reddy was younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy and uncle of YSR Congress party president Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy. He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

The former MP, who was alone at his house, was found dead in a pool of blood in the bathroom when Krishna Reddy along with housemaid entered the house from the rear door after there was no response to the knocks on the main door.

The personal assistant said Vivekananda had head injuries. As the rear door was open, the family suspected foul play.

YSR Congress party has demanded probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the murder.

Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu held a meeting with Director General of Police R.P. Thakur and other top police officials in Amaravati. He directed them to conduct a thorough probe and ensure that the guilty were apprehended at the earliest.

Vivekananda Reddy was elected from Kadapa Lok Sabha constituency on Congress ticket in 1999 and 2004. He was twice elected to the Andhra Pradesh Assembly (1989, 1994) from Pulivendula, a family stronghold.

Vivekananda was also elected to Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council in 2009 and served as Agriculture Minister in Kiran Kumar Reddy cabinet.

He remained loyal to Congress when Jaganmohan Reddy raised a banner of revolt against the party for not picking him as the successor of his father and Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy following his death in a helicopter crash in 2009.

Jagan Reddy had alleged that the Congress tried to engineer split in the family by making Vivekananda a Minister. The young leader subsequently floated YSR Congress party.

Vivekananda contested the 2011 by-election to Pulivendula constituency against his sister-in-law and Jagan's mother Y. S. Vijayamma, who contested as YSR Congress candidate and won the seat with a huge majority.

Vivekananda later quit the Congress and joined YSR Congress. He lost elections to the Legislative Council in 2017.

--IANS

ms/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Delhi Police's Special Cell busted four gangs of drug suppliers and arrested twelve people, including a 54-year-old woman, while seizing heroin worth Rs 334 crore, officials said Friday.

In the first operation, led by Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) Pramod Singh Kushwah, three persons, including a 54-year-old woman, the kingpin of the gang, were arrested and 44.5 kg heroin worth Rs 180 crore was seized, they said.

They were identified as Shamuta Banu (54), a resident of Nagaon district in Assam, Dhanji Gupta (49) and Dheeraj Kumar (24), residents of Rohtas district in Bihar.

Police got information about an international narcotics cartel procuring heroin from Myanmar via Manipur. They would supply it to Delhi, Rajasthan, Assam, Bihar and West Bengal, Kushwah said.

The gang was active in Bihar, Manipur, UP, Rajasthan, West Bengal and parts of north India and drugs to north India were supplied through Delhi, he said.

Police received a tip-off that on March 7 Gupta and Kumar had collected a huge consignment of heroin from Nagaon in Assam and came to Delhi where they were about to deliver it to their contact, Kushwah said.

Thereafter, a trap was laid near Indraprastha Park, Ring Road. When the two men carrying bags stepped out of a rickshaw, they were apprehended and 21 kilograms of heroin was seized from their possession, he said.

During interrogation, both disclosed that they had bought the drug from Banu, the DCP said. On raiding Banu's residence in Assam on Tuesday, police recovered another cache of 23.5 kilograms of heroin.

Banu used to receive heroin from a Manipur-based person, who used to procure the narcotics from Myanmar, Kushwah said.

She, with the help of Gupta and other associates, processed crude heroin into fine quality with some chemicals in Bihar, The DCP said.

She supplied the refined heroin to various peddlers in north India, Siliguri in West Bengal, Bihar and UP, the officer added.

In the second operation, three Afghan nationals and one Nigerian were arrested for allegedly supplying drugs in the national capital and 2.5 kg heroin worth Rs 10 crore in the international market was recovered from their possession, Kushwah said.

They have been identified as Ehsanullah (28), Mohammad Amin (47) and Abdul Razzak (43), natives of Afghanistan and Nnadozie Emmanuel (32), a native of Nigeria, he said.

After receiving a tip-off on Tuesday, police arrested the three Afghan nationals from Lajpat Nagar.

The heroin was smuggled into India by swallowing capsules of it, which were later extracted from the excreted feces. Each capsules weighs about 20 grams and each carrier can carry a few dozen capsules at one go, the DCP said.

In another two operations, led by DCP (Special Cell) Sanjeev Kumar Yadav, police arrested five alleged drug peddlers and recovered 36 kilograms of heroin worth over Rs 144 crore in the international market, officials said.

In the first operation, two members of a Bareilly-based gang were arrested on March 8.

They have been identified as Mohammad Sikander (30) and Mohammad Umar (26).

The gang, being headed by one Tasleem alias Mamu, would procured heroin consignments from Myanmar, Afghanistan and other Middle-East countries.

Besides India, the drug was supplied to overseas contacts of Mamu in western countries, including the US, Yadav said.

In another case, police arrested three people and recovered six kilograms of heroin from the national capital on Wednesday, he said.

In 2018, the Special Cell had busted more than 25 narcotics cartels and recovered more than 275 kgs of heroin, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Tropical cyclone Idai battered central Mozambique on Friday killing at least 19 people and cutting off more than half a million people in one of the country's largest cities Beira.

State broadcaster Radio Mocambique, said "preliminary information points to 19 deaths and more than 70 injured in Sofala province as a result of cyclone Idai".

Most of the deaths occurred in Beira -- a port hub and capital of Sofala province -- a city which has virtually been cut off after power lines crashed, the airport was shut and roads swamped by flooding.

The flooding had already killed 66 people nationwide in days preceding the cyclone.

"The hardest moment was overnight and this morning," provincial governor Alberto Mondlane told state radio referring to the time the cyclone barrelled through the province.

"There has been a lot of damage. Many homes have been left without roofs," he added.

An official at the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) told AFP earlier that "houses and trees were destroyed and pylons downed".

Authorities were forced to close Beira international airport after the air traffic control tower, the navigation systems and the runways were damaged by the storm.

"Unfortunately there is extreme havoc," said the official.

"Some runway lights were damaged, the navigation system is damaged, the control tower antennas and the control tower itself are all damaged.

"The runway is full of obstacles and parked aircrafts are damaged." Late on Wednesday, the national carrier LAM cancelled all flights to Beira and Quelimane, which is also on the coast, as well as to Chomoio, which is inland.

Power utility Electricidade de Mocambique said in a statement that the provinces of Manica, Sofala and parts of Inhambane have been without power since Thursday.

Another official, Pedro Armando Alberto Virgula, in Chinde north of Beira, said a hospital, police station and seven schools there lost their roofs and several houses were destroyed.

Bonifacio Cebola, a spokesman for the Beira Central Hospital, said that the theatre at the country's second largest hospital was not spared and surgeries have been suspended. "Because of the cyclone, the (theatre) no longer has conditions for patients to be operated on," Cebola said to Radio Mo?ambique.

Local officials said that this week's heavy rains had already claimed 66 lives, injured 111 people and displaced 17,000 people.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it would move 20 tonnes of emergency food aid to the affected areas.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had warned that the storm could pack winds of up to 190 kilometres per hour (118 miles per hour).

At least 126 people were killed by the downpour that has struck parts of Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa over the past week, officials said.

Heavy rains in neighbouring Malawi have affected almost a million people and claimed 56 lives, according to the latest government toll.

Authorities there have opened emergency relief camps where malaria and shortages of supplies have led to dire conditions, according to AFP correspondents.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar has been using his "large political clout" to derail trial and influence witnesses in cases related to 1984 anti-Sikh riots, CBI told the Supreme Court Friday while seeking that life term given to him should be upheld.

73-year-old Kumar has challenged in the top court the Delhi High Court's December 17, 2018 verdict sentencing him to life term in a case related to killing of five Sikhs in Delhi Cantonment's Raj Nagar Part-I area of southwest Delhi on November 1 and 2, 1984, and burning down of a Gurudwara in Raj Nagar Part-II.

In response to Kumar's application seeking suspension of sentence and grant of bail, CBI has said that he is capable of "influencing/terrorising witnesses" and fair trial would not be possible in the case pending against him, if he is granted bail.

CBI has said brutal murders during the 1984 riots fall under the category of "crimes against humanity on parity with well known genocides worldwide like large scale killing of Armenians by Kurds and Turks, mass extermination of Jews by Nazis, mass killing of Bangladeshi citizens by the sympathisers of Pakistani Army and mass killing during various ethnic riots within India also".

Opposing Kumar's application, it said that in this case the minority community was targeted by "spearheaded attacks of dominant political actors like the applicant/convict (Kumar) and duly facilitated by law enforcement agencies".

In view of Kumar's conduct in "using his political clout to derail trial and influence witnesses", his sentence must be upheld and bail should not be granted, CBI said.

"It took 34 valuable years of legal battle and courage shown by fearless witnesses/victims, which has resulted in his conviction and no leniency, therefore, on the ground of age should be granted," it said.

The probe agency further said Kumar is a "political leader with a large political clout" and he has a "following in and around Delhi and is capable of influencing/terrorising witnesses".

The matter came up for hearing on Friday before a bench of Justices S A Bobde and S A Nazeer. It has fixed the case for further hearing on March 25.

CBI said that at the time of the incident, Kumar was a Member of Parliament of the then ruling party in India and killings in this case had taken place in pursuance to the provocative speeches made by him against the Sikh community.

"Considering the influence of the applicant/convict (Kumar) in the society, the fact that he belongs to one of the older political parties having substantial following, the gravity of the offence for which the trial is going on, the prosecution seriously apprehends that a fair trial in the aforementioned pending case would not be possible if the applicant/convict is enlarged on bail," the CBI said.

It said due to Kumar's powerful position and influence, several persons who had mustered courage to be witness against him have resiled from their earlier statements out of fear.

The CBI further said that in January this year, they have received a letter from three prime witnesses in the case who have apprehended that they "may be harmed" by Kumar.

"It is, therefore, most humbly prayed that in view of the above submissions (in the reply), the application filed by the applicant/convict seeking bail/suspension of sentence may kindly be dismissed in the interest of justice," it said.

Kumar, through his counsel Ajay Marwah, has approached the apex court against the high court's verdict convicting him in the case.

Anti-Sikh riots had broken out after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984 by her two Sikh bodyguards.

The top court earlier admitted Kumar's appeal for hearing and issued notice to the CBI on his bail plea.

Kumar surrendered before a trial court here on December 31, 2018, to serve the sentence in pursuance of the high court's judgment awarding him life imprisonment for the "remainder of his natural life".

After his conviction in the case, Kumar had resigned from the Congress party.

The high court had convicted and sentenced Kumar to spend the remainder of his life in jail for the offences of criminal conspiracy and abetment in commission of crimes of murder, promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of communal harmony and defiling and destruction of a Gurdwara.

It had also upheld the conviction and varying sentences awarded by a trial court to five others former Congress councillor Balwan Khokhar, retired naval officer Captain Bhagmal, Girdhari Lal and ex-MLAs Mahender Yadav and Kishan Khokhar.

In its judgment, the high court noted that over 2,700 Sikhs were killed in the national capital during the 1984 riots which was indeed a "carnage of unbelievable proportions".

It said the riots were a "crime against humanity" perpetrated by those who enjoyed "political patronage" and aided by an "indifferent" law enforcement agency.

The high court had set aside the trial court's 2010 verdict which had acquitted Kumar in the case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The AAP Friday claimed that the Election Commission has agreed to its demand to probe, without the involvement of the Delhi police, the allegations that a call centre hired by the party was making "misleading" calls to people about deletion of their names from electoral rolls.

Emerging out from the EC premises, after three rounds of meeting in the last 10 hours, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia told reporters that senior officials of the the commission listened "seriously" to AAP's complaints about the raids at the call centre, hired by the party to make people aware about the deletion of their names from voters' lists.

However, there was no immediate response from the Election Commission.

"The raids were conducted to harass call centre employees, including women who were made to stand," he alleged, adding, the EC, including the three election commissioners listened to the AAP delegation, the Delhi CEO and the police officials.

"And, the Election Commission has agreed to hold a probe into the call centre issue, without the involvement of the police, which was our demand earlier," Sisodia told reporters.

AAP workers led by Sisodia, sat on a protest outside the Election Commission on Friday alleging that "politically motivated and illegal" raids were being conducted on the call centre.

After sitting for over three hours at the protest outside the Election Commission, Sisodia and Lok Sabha candidates Atishi and Raghav Chadha were called by the Election Commission to hold a joint meeting with police officials.

After the meeting, Sisodia said, "We are responsible for making those calls to tell the public about their vote deletion. Telling people about their rights is not a crime."



Sisodia earlier alleged that a fourth raid on the call centre was conducted barely an hour after he met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on Friday.

His delegation met the CEC to lodge a complaint against the Delhi police which, he claimed, was acting at the BJP's behest to harass call centre employees.

Special Commissioner of Police (Crime and EOW) Satish Golcha said an FIR was filed following complaints regarding bogus calls about the Delhi's electoral rolls and investigations were underway.

"As far as the allegations against us (Delhi Police) are concerned, we have already responded about them to the Hon'ble Election Commission. Moreover, no call centre owners have filed a complaint regarding harassment by our investigating team members," he said.

"Relevant facts of the matter are being ascertained. The investigation is being conducted strictly in accordance with the law. Nobody has been arrested in the case so far. We are ascertaining facts from the call centre from where such calls have been made," he added.

Sources said the call centre employees are being questioned to ascertain who gave them the work of making the calls, how did they procure data of the callers and on what basis were they making claims about deletion of names of voters.

A BJP team had earlier met Arora and alleged that the AAP was making "misleading" phone calls about the city's electoral rolls.

Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to begin on April 11, the Election Commission had directed the police to take "necessary action" against people making such calls. An FIR was also filed in this matter.

The AAP leaders asserted that they were responsible for hiring the call centre employees to make people aware that names had been deleted from voters' lists and the police should question the leaders instead of the workers.

The AAP alleged that BJP got more than 30 lakh voters' names deleted in Delhi.

When the Aam Aadmi Party started talking about this issue and hired a call centre to inform voters about it, the BJP got rattled and ordered the Delhi police to harass the call centre employees, the party alleged.

During the earlier meeting with Arora, Sisodia urged the EC to direct Delhi police to stop the harassment of the call centre employees.

"The Delhi police is working like goons. We urged the EC to stop the Delhi police from doing it. They (Delhi police) are pressuring and harassing the call centre employees," Sisodia said.

Sisodia alleged that these raids by the Delhi police are "politically motivated and illegal" conducted at the behest of the BJP.

He said this is the fourth raid on the call centre in four consecutive days.

Delhi Chief Minister and AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal also questioned the CEC. "Why is CEC raiding our call centres and asking for our data? What is our crime? Pl tell our crime at least," he said in a tweet.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An Aam Aadmi Party delegation, led by Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, Friday met the chief election commissioner to lodge a complaint against the Delhi police which, it claimed, was acting at the BJP's behest to harass call centre employees hired by the party.

A BJP team had held a meeting with Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora and alleged that the AAP was making "misleading" phone calls about the city's electoral rolls.

Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to begin on April 11, the Election Commission had directed the police to take "necessary action" against the people making such calls. An FIR was also filed in this matter.

The AAP leaders asserted that they were responsible for hiring the call centre employees to make people aware that names had been deleted from voters' lists and the police should question the leaders instead of these workers.

The AAP alleged that BJP got more than 30 lakh voters' names were deleted in Delhi. When the Aam Aadmi Party started talking about this issue and hired a call centre to inform voters about it, the BJP got rattled and ordered the Delhi police to harass the call centre employees, it alleged.

To lodge a complaint against the Delhi police, the AAP delegation, including Sisodia, senior leader Sanjay Singh and Lok Sabha candidates Atishi and Raghav Chadha, met the chief election commissioner Friday.

Sisodia urged the EC to direct Delhi police to stop the harassment of the call centre employees.

"The Delhi police is working like goons. We urged the EC to stop the Delhi police from doing it. They (Delhi police) are pressuring and harassing the call centre employees. They are not making proxy calls, they have been hired by the Aam Aadmi Party, we have entered into an agreement with them to do it," he said.

"You talk to the AAP, talk to Arvind Kejriwal, talk to Manish Sisodia. We have demanded that the EC take action against police officials responsible for harassing the call centre employees at the behest of the BJP," he added.

Singh, a senior AAP leader, said if the Election Commission feels that a probe must be initiated against the AAP then they should go ahead with it but the ways used by Delhi police are "illegal and politically motivated".

In a letter to the Election Commission Friday, he called for strict action against the police officials involved in alleged harassment of the call centre employees.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
AAP workers led by Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, sat on a protest outside the Election Commission on Friday alleging that raids were being conducted on call centres hired by the party to make people aware that their names had been deleted from the voters' lists.

Sisodia, said barely an hour after he met the Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on Friday to lodge a complaint against the Delhi police which, he claimed, was acting at the BJP's behest to harass call centre employees, a fourth raid was conducted again.

"Demanding fair elections, we are sitting outside the Election Commission to protest against the raid on the call centre.

"After our meeting with the CEC (on Friday), we were assured that he will look into the matter but within an hour we see that a fourth raid is conducted on the call centre," he said outside the EC.

He said this is the fourth raid on the call centre in four consecutive days.

Delhi Chief Minister and AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal also questioned the CEC. "Why is CEC raiding our call centres and asking for our data? What is our crime? Pl tell our crime at least," he said in a tweet.

Kejriwal also urged all party MLAs to join the protest outside the Election Commission.

"Police has raided without any search warrant and is barging into server rooms and interrogating all call centre agents. What is going on? What is the crime?" he tweeted.

"We need an answer. What is our fault that we are being raided," he said in another tweet.

Sisodia was joined by other party members, including Lok Sabha candidates Atishi, Raghav Chadha and senior leader Sanjay Singh.

Atishi, AAP's Lok Sabha candidate, said they are waiting outside Election Commission till CEC meets them.

"It is responsibility of EC to ensure free and fair elections and not let BJP's Delhi police intimidate our call centres," Atishi said.

A BJP team had earlier met Arora and alleged that the AAP was making "misleading" phone calls about the city's electoral rolls.

Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to begin on April 11, the Election Commission had directed the police to take "necessary action" against people making such calls. An FIR was also filed in this matter.

The AAP leaders asserted that they were responsible for hiring the call centre employees to make people aware that names had been deleted from voters' lists and the police should question the leaders instead of the workers.

The AAP alleged that BJP got more than 30 lakh voters' names deleted in Delhi.

When the Aam Aadmi Party started talking about this issue and hired a call centre to inform voters about it, the BJP got rattled and ordered the Delhi police to harass the call centre employees, the party alleged.

During the earlier meeting with Arora, Sisodia urged the EC to direct Delhi police to stop the harassment of the call centre employees.

"The Delhi police is working like goons. We urged the EC to stop the Delhi police from doing it. They (Delhi police) are pressuring and harassing the call centre employees.

"They are not making proxy calls, they have been hired by the Aam Aadmi Party, we have entered into an agreement with them to do it," Sisodia said after meeting at the EC.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
AAP workers led by Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, sat on a protest outside the Election Commission on Friday, alleging "politically motivated and illegal" raids were being conducted on a call centre hired by the party to make people aware that their names had been deleted from voters' lists.

After sitting for over three hours outside the Election Commission in protest, Sisodia and Lok Sabha candidates Atishi and Raghav Chadha were called by the Election Commission to hold a joint meeting with police officials.

After the meeting, Sisodia said, "We are responsible for making these calls to tell the public about their vote deletion. Telling people about their rights is not a crime."



Sisodia has alleged that a fourth raid on the call centre, hired by the AAP, was conducted barely an hour after he met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora on Friday.

His delegation met the CEC to lodge a complaint against the Delhi police which, he claimed, was acting at the BJP's behest to harass call centre employees.

"After our meeting with the CEC, we were assured that he will look into the matter but within an hour we see that a fourth raid is conducted on the call centre," he said.

Special Commissioner of Police (Crime and EOW) Satish Golcha said an FIR was filed following complaints regarding bogus calls about the Delhi's electoral rolls and investigations are underway.

"As far as the allegations against us (Delhi Police) are concerned, we have already responded about them to the Hon'ble Election Commission. Moreover, no call centre owners have filed a complaint regarding harassment by our investigating team members," he said.

"Relevant facts of the matter are being ascertained. The investigation is being conducted strictly in accordance with law. Nobody has been arrested in the case so far. We are ascertaining facts from the call centres from where such calls have been made," he added.

Sources said the call centre employees are being questioned to ascertain who gave them the work of making the calls, how did they procure data of the callers and on what basis were they making claims about deletion of names of voters.

A BJP team had earlier met Arora and alleged that the AAP was making "misleading" phone calls about the city's electoral rolls.

Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to begin on April 11, the Election Commission had directed the police to take "necessary action" against people making such calls. An FIR was also filed in this matter.

The AAP leaders asserted that they were responsible for hiring the call centre employees to make people aware that names had been deleted from voters' lists and the police should question the leaders instead of the workers.

The AAP alleged that BJP got more than 30 lakh voters' names deleted in Delhi.

When the Aam Aadmi Party started talking about this issue and hired a call centre to inform voters about it, the BJP got rattled and ordered the Delhi police to harass the call centre employees, the party alleged.

During the earlier meeting with Arora, Sisodia urged the EC to direct Delhi police to stop the harassment of the call centre employees.

"The Delhi police is working like goons. We urged the EC to stop the Delhi police from doing it. They (Delhi police) are pressuring and harassing the call centre employees," Sisodia said.

He alleged that these raids by the Delhi police are politically motivated and illegal conducted at the behest of the BJP.

He said this is the fourth raid on the call centre in four consecutive days.

Delhi Chief Minister and AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal also questioned the CEC. "Why is CEC raiding our call centres and asking for our data? What is our crime? Pl tell our crime at least," he said in a tweet.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The NCP Friday demanded that the multi-billion dollar Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project be scrapped, a day after a foot overbridge connected to iconic CSMT station collapsed here, killing six persons and injuring 31.

Nationalist Congress Party MLA Jitendra Awhad said the money being spent on the high speed rail project, a joint venture between India and Japan, should be invested to upgrade suburban railway facilities in the metropolis and surrounding areas.

He said scrapping the bullet train project would be part of the NCP's manifesto and claimed it would be called off within one month of the party attaining power.

"The prime concern of the government should be improvement of railway facilities. A blame game by authorities is not the solution. We demand that the bullet train project be cancelled since it is merely a show-off project and a waste of tax-payers' money," he claimed.

"We will also include this point in our manifesto. Within one month of coming to power, we will scrap the bullet train project and use the money for suburban rail and its connecting services," Awhad added.

"Specialised audit and immediate maintenance is required of dilapidated bridges, several 50-70 years old, over railway tracks in Mumbai and suburban areas," he said against the backdrop of Thursday's bridge collapse.

He claimed over 200 railway-related accidents occur daily which either cause loss of lives or injuries to commuters.

Maharashtra Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant said an audit of the bridge, done a year ago, had recommended minor repairs but money for it was never sanctioned.

"This is a BMC-made disaster. Seeing the debris, the corrosion was clearly visible. The BMC is responsible for the loss of lives in this bridge collapse. Due to the corrupt practices of BJP and Shiv Sena, Mumbai has become a city of accidents," Sawant alleged.

He claimed the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena came to power on the back of votes of "Marathi people", but it was these very people who were getting killed in such accidents.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad Friday "welcomed" support of all parties, including the Congress, to defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Varanasi and appealed to the SP-BSP alliance to either back his candidature or field their top leaders from the constituency.

The Dalit leader's comment came two days after Congress general secretary in charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi Vadra met him at a hospital in Meerut.

The BJP is yet to announce the candidature of Modi from Varanasi, the eastern UP seat from where he had won in 2014.

Talking to PTI after he addressed a rally in Delhi along with BSP founder Kanshi Ram's sister Swarn Kaur, Chandrashekhar said, "The SP and the BSP should support my candidature from Varanasi to take on Modi. Else, my condition is, they should field any one among Mulayam Singh Yadav, Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati. We are supporting the SP-BSP alliance in 79 other constituencies from Uttar Pradesh, they should support us in one seat...I don't want Modi to win again from Varanasi."



The Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati have entered into an pre-poll alliance in the politically crucial state, which sends the maximum number of representatives (80) to Parliament.

Mulayam Singh Yadav is the SP patriarch.

Asked if he would also seek the support of the Congress, he said, "Whoever is ready to fight with us against the BJP is welcome."



At the rally organised to mark the 85th birth anniversary of BSP founder Kanshi Ram, Chandrashekhar said he would ensure that Modi was not reelected from Varanasi.

"I will challenge Narendra Modi in Varanasi... to protect the Constitution and the rights of Dalits. I do not want to become an MP or MLA. Had that been the case, I would have chosen a reserved seat," he said.

The Dalit leader's move is likely to upset the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh.

"After the prime minister came to know that we are going to challenge him in Varanasi, he started washing the feet of sanitation workers in Allahabad," the Bhim Army chief said, referring to Modi's gesture during the Kumbh Mela.

He also said the SP-BSP alliance should "send (Kanshi Ram's sister) Swarn Kaur to Parliament".

Bhim Army Vice President Manjeet Nautiyal told PTI that they will field a candidate against Union Minister Smriti Irani and also on the seats where the SP-BSP alliance is not strong enough to defeat the BJP.

Until now, the Bhim Army had been saying that it won't contest elections. It had welcomed the SP-BSP alliance in the state and said it would support anyone who's ready to take on the BJP and fight for Dalit rights.

The Chandrashekhar-led group shot to limelight during the May 2017 clashes between Dalits and upper caste Thakurs in Saharanpur.

Chandrashekhar was arrested after the clashes. Though he was granted bail by the Allahabad High Court, the UP Police arrested him under the stringent National Security Act. He was released in September 2018 after 16 months in jail.

Referring to incidents of violence and atrocities against the Dalits in different parts of the country, the young leader said, "A tyrant is a tyrant, he can never be a well wisher... That's why I said we can repeat (the Battle of) Bhima Koregaon...The need for it has not arisen yet, but we can do it if the Constitution comes under attack."



Chandrashekhar alleged that the Narendra Modi government's decision to give 10 per cent quota to the general category poor is an attack on the Constitution and is aimed at serving the BJP's interests.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The National People's Party Friday announced that former Union Minister Agatha K Sangma and T Kikkin will be the party candidates for the Tura Lok Sabha seat in Meghalaya and Outer Manipur parliamentary constituency respectively.

The NPP also announced that Ferlene C A Sangma will be the party candidate for the byelection of Selsella Assembly seat in Meghalaya's West Garo Hills district.

NPP national president and Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma chaired the meeting of the central election committee of the party in Delhi which was attended by party leaders from various states in the NE region.

"The central election committee of the NPP which had met today received applications from Tura and Outer Manipur seats. The committee has decided to declare the names of two candidates - former union minister Agatha K Sangma and former Manipur minister T Kipkin," the NPP president said in a video statement.

He said Kipkin is a former minister and is the NPP Manipur unit president.

The NPP national president also informed that the central election committee of the party has also decided to field Ferlene C A Sangma in the byelection for the Selsella seat.

Election to the Tura Lok Sabha seat and byelection to the Selsella Assembly constituency will be held on April 11.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The AGP, which returned to the NDA fold on Wednesday, and the BJP will not speak on the contentious Citizenship Bill while campaigning for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls in Assam, NEDA convenor Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Friday.

The two parties had decided to resume the talks on the bill after the election, he added.

The Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), which had walked out of the North-East Democratic Alliance (NEDA) remonstrating against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill brought by the Centre two months ago, returned to the grouping on Wednesday.

"During the campaign, we will not say anything about our differences (on the bill), but project our unity to the people," Sarma said.

Both the parties would sit together after the polls to find out a solution through "consultation and consensus", the senior BJP leader added.

The NEDA convenor was addressing a joint press conference with Assam BJP chief Ranjeet Kumar Dass and AGP president Atul Bora here.

The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, passed by the Lok Sabha on January 8, seeks to grant Indian citizenship to non-Muslims who fled religious persecution in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan and entered India before December 31, 2014.

"The sole aim of our campaign will be to make Narendra Modi the prime minister again for the development of Assam and the north-east.

"Our campaign will focus on the success of the prime minister and Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal's tenure," Sarma said.

There will not be a separate manifesto or common minimum programme for the constituents of the ruling coalition in Assam, he added.

A "common statement" approved by all the parties in the NEDA would be issued in the coming days, the BJP leader said.

Commenting on the issue, Bora said, "We have some issues of difference and it is very common between alliance partners.... We have decided to sort out those through discussion. We have joined the alliance in the greater interests of the state and country."



He claimed that Modi had done "lots" of development works in the country, while former prime minister Manmohan Singh "did nothing" for the north-east, despite being a parliamentarian from Assam for 10 years.

"We hope to win all the 14 seats and appeal to our workers to ensure that the votes fall in the right place. Narendra Modi should be the prime minister for the second term for the development of Assam and the region," Bora said.

Sarma further said the seat-sharing details between the AGP and the BJP would be formally announced on Saturday in New Delhi after a delegation of the regional party meets BJP president Amit Shah.

The BPF, the third NEDA partner in Assam, had announced state minister Pramila Rani Brahma as its only candidate for the Lok Sabha polls from the Kokrajhar seat on Tuesday.

On the prospects of the alliance in Assam, Dass said, "We had earlier said 9-10 seats will be won by the BJP and the BPF. But after the AGP coming back to us, our workers are enthused and now the alliance will win at least 12 seats."



Local, community-based parties of Mising, Rabha, Tiwa and other tribes had also extended their support to the BJP-led alliance and this would ensure a clear victory of the NEDA in Assam, he added.

In 2014, the BJP had won seven of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Assam, the Congress and the AIUDF had three MPs each and one member was an Independent. The two BJP allies, the BPF and the AGP, had no representation in the Lower House of Parliament.

Regarding other north-eastern states, Sarma, also the state's finance minister, said, "On March 17, there will be a meeting of all the NEDA parties' members with Amit Shah. After the meeting, the seat-sharing details for the rest of the region will be announced."



Voting in Assam will take place in three phases on April 11, 18 and 23.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad Friday addressed a rally with BSP founder Kanshi Ram's sister and announced that he will contest the Lok Sabha elections against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Varanasi seat, a move that is likely to upset the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh.

The Bhim Army, which has been trying to mobilise Dalits in Uttar Pradesh, also told PTI that it will field a candidate against Union minister Smriti Irani and "wherever there's a need of a strong nominee against the BJP".

At the rally organised to mark the 85th birth anniversary of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram, Chandrashekhar said he would ensure that PM Modi is not re-elected to the Lok Sabha from Varanasi.

"I will challenge Narendra Modi in Varanasi... to protect the Constitution and the rights of Dalits. I do not want to become an MP or MLA. Had that been the case, I would have chosen a reserved seat," he said.

"After the prime minister came to know that we are going to challenge him in Varanasi, he started washing the feet of sanitation workers in Allahabad," the Bhim Army chief said.

The BJP is yet to announce the constituency from where Modi will contest the upcoming election.

Chandrashekhar alleged that the Narendra Modi government's decision to give 10 per cent quota to the general category poor is an attack on the Constitution and is aimed at serving the BJP's interests.

Recalling that Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav's comment in Parliament that Modi should become prime minister again, he asked Akhilesh Yadav to answer if his party will protect the rights of Dalits if they voted for it.

The Dalit leader also said the SP-BSP alliance should "send (Kanshi Ram's sister) Swarn Kaur to Parliament".

Bhim Army Vice President Manjeet Nautiyal told PTI that they will field a candidate against Irani and "also on the seats where the SP-BSP alliance is not strong enough to defeat the BJP".

Asked if the Dalit group will support the Congress, he said the Rahul Gandhi-led party did not fight for Dalits for the last 70 years. "The Congress and the BJP are two sides of the same coin".

In what is being seen as a Dalit outreach move, Congress general secretary for eastern UP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Chandrashekhar at a Meerut hospital.

Until now, the Bhim Army had been saying that it won't contest elections. It had welcomed the SP-BSP alliance in the state and said it would support anyone who's ready to take on the BJP and fight for Dalit rights.

The Chandrashekhar-led group shot to limelight during the May 2017 clashes between Dalits and upper caste Thakurs in Saharanpur.

Chandrashekhar was arrested after the clashes. Though he was granted bail by the Allahabad High Court, the UP Police arrested him under the stringent National Security Act. He was released in September 2018 after 16 months in jail.

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With an Australia-born man emerging as the prime suspect in one of the two terror attacks in New Zealand, Australian Prime Minister on Friday said he cannot understand how anyone who would engage in such hate and violence can be called a "human".

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack against Muslims in a western country.

Witnesses said victims being shot at close range, with women and children believed to be among those killed.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

Morrison said an investigation has been launched into the Australian man's involvement in the attack.



"We are outraged and we stand here and condemn absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing violent terrorist who has taken the lives, stolen lives, in a vicious, murderous attack that has claimed so many New Zealanders," Morrison said from Kirribilli House.

Morrison said he had no information to suggest any Australians had been killed but noted it was "very early on" and the situation was unfolding.

Media reports identified Brenton Tarrant, an Australia-born man, as one of the suspects.

A manifesto posted to social media by a person claiming to be named Brenton Tarrant notes he was born in Australia and it is believed he spent time living in Grafton, in northern New South Wales.

"These people don't deserve names," Morrison later said.

"Names imply some sort of humanity and I struggle to see how anyone who would engage in this sort of hate and violence is human. He doesn't deserve a name."







The Prime Minister said the suspect was not known to Australian authorities.

"It is the work of hate," the Prime Minister said.

"That sort of hateful thinking has just reaped murder and misery on a peaceful people just going about their practice of faith on a Friday. It's disgusting."



Morrison met senior national security officials, and while noting authorities had "already put in place all the necessary responses and precautions" he did not go into details.

"This attack reminds us of the evil that is ever-present and would seek to strike out at any time and I particularly want to convey my heartfelt sympathies not only to all New Zealand people, but particularly my sincere prayers and thoughts for those New Zealanders and indeed Australians of Islamic faith who have been the subject of this callous right-wing extremist attack," he said.



Opposition Leader Bill Shorten declared the assault a "senseless, evil act of murder".

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) condemned the attack and urged governments in Australia at all levels to pay extra attention to anti-Muslim sentiment and extremism.

The AFIC president Rateb Jneid said in a statement that the victims and their families were in his prayers.

"It is with deep sorrow that we learn today of the terrorist attack committed against innocent worshippers at a Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand," Jneid said.

"We extend our prayers and thoughts to the victims and survivors, their families and the people of New Zealand during this terrible time," he said.
Police personnel in Uttar Pradesh have been directed to exercise restraint while posting on social media and avoid any "politically coloured" remarks that may call into question their impartiality in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.

"We have advised our personnel to avoid social media updates which might be controversial and show them favouring any political party. The message should not go that cops are for or against any political party," Director General of Police (DGP) OP Singh told PTI.

By showing "restraint" in their social media activities, police personnel can discharge their duties better and people can come to them with their grievances without any fear, he said.

The advisory to the police personnel also said that they "should avoid taking any gift from any political party or candidate, avoid posting politically coloured social media updates and remain impartial and non-partisan during the polls".

The police personnel have been asked not to get influenced by any political party or indulge in harassment of political workers, leaders or supporters.

"The policemen through their conduct should not express support for any political personality or group," he said, asking them to avoid discussing voting preferences for any party or leader.

The UP Police has around 1.85 lakh personnel.

The DGP had issued an advisory in October last year after the murder of Apple executive Vivek Tiwari in the state capital in which two constables were allegedly involved. The two cops were sacked after the incident.

The family members and friends of the two sacked constables had started a campaign on social media in their favour, even soliciting funds from people to fight their case.

After the media reports regarding this, the DGP had issued a 17-point charter for the police personnel on social media activities to prevent any "bad name to the force".

For polls, the UP DGP has asked the personnel to honestly discharge their duties before and during the polling process in the state, which accounts for 80 Lok Sabha seats.

The Election Commission has announced the schedule for polls, which will be held in seven phases in Uttar Pradesh between April 11 and May 19, with the counting of votes to be held on May 23.

Votes would be cast on April 11, 18, 23 and 29 and May 6, 12 and 19 in UP.

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Azerbaijan, located in the south Caucasus region of Eurasia, is keen to establish trade and investment exchanges with West Bengal.

Ambassador of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ashraf Shikhaliyev, said the dynamics has shifted all of the sudden to the eastern coast of India starting from West Bengal.

Though a small country, Azerbaijan has a huge potential, he said at a session organised by BNCCI here on Friday.

The envoy said language would not be a hurdle as English was spoken in Azerbaijan to some extent.

Some of the sectors which had good potential for exchanges were information and communication, transport, petrochemical and chemicals, hospitality, tourism, agriculture and food processing.

Shikhaliyev said Azerbaijan would also be a suitable destination for MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing, Exhibitions) tourism for Indian companies as it had the potential to bring it back to India.

Filming in Azerbaijan was also a feasible area as cost of shooting was much lower than Europe and the country was blessed with mountains, forests and the sea.

Direct flight from Baku, capital do Azerbaijan, to New Delhi would start shortly, he said.

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Friday said it has received no objection from the (RBI) for the proposed acquisition of

"The Reserve Bank has by its letter dated March 14, 2019, conveyed its no objection for the voluntary amalgamation of Ltd into and with Bandhan Bank, subject to compliance with the terms and conditions therein," the bank said in a regulatory filing.

Gruh Finance, the affordable housing arm of HDFC Ltd, was taken over in January by Kolkata-based in a share-swap deal.

As part of the deal, has to transfer 14.9 per cent stake to HDFC for merging Gruh with itself.

The deal will allow Bandhan Bank's promoter Bandhan Financial Holdings to come down to about 61 per cent from about 82 per cent, and HDFC to hold around 15 per cent in the merged entity from about 57 per cent in Gruh.

The swap ratio for the amalgamation will be 568 shares of Bandhan Bank for every 1,000 shares of

Stock of Bandhan Bank closed 0.45 per cent down at Rs 511.05 on the BSE.
With the Model Code of Conduct in place for the general elections, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security issued instructions Friday to strengthen security measures at airports to curb the movement of unauthorized arms, contraband goods, cash or bullion.

The BCAS circular asks the Air Traffic Control ro share records of commercial flights and private aircraft or helicopters with the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of the state and the District Electoral Officer of the district in which the airport is located.

It says the travel plan of chartered aircraft or helicopters should be shared as early as possible, preferably half an hour in advance.

Voting in the Lok Sabha elections will begin on April 11 and continue for over a month till May 19 across seven phases, followed by counting of votes on May 23, the Election Commission announced on March 10.

The Model Code of Conduct came in to effect with the announcement of poll dates.

The BCAS circular says that apart from measures to strengthen the security at regular commercial airports, special measures have been introduced to check flights from "uncontrolled or remote or unserved" airstrips, aerodromes helipads, private airstrips and waterdromes.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the Airports Authority of India and the ATC will inform state police, the BCAS and the Income Tax Department about these flights from remote airstrips in advance, the circular says.

"DGPs (Director Generals of Police) of states shall deploy police units to check these flights during Code of Conduct as per direction of Election Commission and extant rules and regulations of BCAS in this regards," the circular states.

It also says that the operators of all private aircraft and helicopters must declare the contents of the baggage, suitcases, etc, carried on these flights to the CEO of the states, DEOs of the districts, the state police and the Income Tax department.

With an aim to keep strict vigil over movement of cash through all airports, the Income Tax Department and Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) must be extended "all requisite cooperation" for checking and surveillance activities, according to the circular.

"This will be over and above what CISF is otherwise doing," the circular adds.

The officers of BCAS will be conducting surprise inspections of these airports to check the compliance of these instructions, it says.

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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday finalised the seat-sharing agreement with the Apna Dal (Sonelal), which will contest in two Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh.

BJP president Amit Shah announced the agreement on Twitter, saying that Apna Dal (S) leader and Union minister Anupriya Patel would again contest from Mirzapur.

Shah said the second seat would be finalised later after deliberations between leaders of both the parties.

With the resolve of again forming the Modi government at the Centre, the BJP and the Apna Dal (S) will contest the Lok Sabha election in Uttar Pradesh together, Shah said.

Apna Dal (S) was upset and has been expressing their apprehensions about staying in the National Democratic Alliance, but was finally convinced by the BJP for two seats.

In the 2014 general election, the Apna Dal had won two seats and the BJP had won 71 seats in UP, which has 80 Lok Sabha constituencies.

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Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis Friday said the alliance between the BJP and the Shiv Sena was very strong and impenetrable.

Fadnavis was addressing a rally in here ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, where Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray and other leaders of both the parties were present.

"The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance is joining of hands of the Hindutva parties, which share a common ideology. It has stood the ground so far and will do so in future as well. Yeh Fevicol ka majboot jod hai! (It is a strong bond like that of Fevicol)," he said at the launch of the poll campaign.

"The alliance is impenetrable...Some people tried to separate us as they wanted to be in power, but once the alliance was announced, they started retreating," he said.

Overcoming their strained ties, the BJP and Shiv Sena had last month announced a seat-sharing pact for the ensuing Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in Maharashtra. The BJP will contest 25 seats and Shiv Sena 23 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra.

Thackeray said he never allowed his party's differences with the BJP harm the interests of the state.

"BJP-Sena alliance has grown into a tall tree. In no case should we allow pests to eat into it. I don't believe in (poll) surveys. I trust more my self-confidence, which tells me that so overwhelming will be the victory that even 48 seats (in the state) would fall short."



In a lighter vein, Thackeray asked Fadanvis not to entertain Sharad Pawar if he wished to join BJP.

"The situation in the state is such that whenever BJP-Sena leaders criticise the opposition leaders, the next day they join the BJP-Sena. This makes me think if I should criticise or not? If I criticise Pawar today, he may join BJP tomorrow. But don't give him any room in the party," Thackeray said.

"We need to keep some people outside, else there would be no one left out for us to talk about," he added jokingly.

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Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis Friday said the alliance between the BJP and the Shiv Senais based on their commitment to a similar ideology.

Fadnavis said this is "New India" which is filled with nationalism.

This is not the "Old India" which could not take a firm stand on the issue of national security, he said, addressing a joint gathering of Sena-BJP workers here.

The BJP chief minister said the opposition cannot compete with the saffron allaince on the issue of development.

"I feel the way BJP-Sena alliance has prepared itself, I am confident our alliance will cross the 42-seat mark this time (out of the total 48) in the state.

"The country's atmosphere is different now, on one side is development, but what is much more dear to BJP-Shiv Senaworkers is India and nationalism," he said.

"We are the people who believe in country first," said Fadnavis.

Fadnavis said earlier governments only condemned terror attacks and approached world bodies like the United Nations with their grievances.

He said Pakistan and its terror outfits thought this government (the BJP-led NDA), too, will be the same, but this is not Old IndiabutNew India filled with nationalism.

This New India, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, gave the armed forces full liberty to take revenge for terror attacks and give a befitting reply, Fadnavis said.

"However, I feel sad when somepeople ask for proof from the armed forces. On one hand, they ask for proof from the armed forces and on the other they refer terrorist Masood Azhar as 'Azharji'.

"I know these people would never get elected, but I fear if by any chance they come into power tommorow they will change the history.

"They will call Aurangzeb as 'Auranzebji', Afzal Khan as 'Afzal Khan ji and General Dyer as General Dyer ji," Fadnavis said, in a sharp attack on the Congress.

Hitting out at opposition parties, he said they have no sense of national prestige and are only interested in politics of power.

"They can go to any extent for power," said Fadnavis.

He said the alliance of the BJP-Shiv-Sena is "an alliance of ideology".

"We are Hindutva (parties) and are proud of it. Hindutva is not a limited concept so whosoever, irrespective of caste, creed and religion, has nationalism in him is part of this Hindutva.

"This is the thread that binds the Sena and the BJP together," said Fadnavis.

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US aerospace giant said it was suspending deliveries of its top-selling 737 MAX as French investigators took delivery of the black boxes from the Ethiopian crash that killed all 157 passengers and crew.

The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disaster the second involving the model in five months and the fallout has left the company, regulators and scrambling to respond.

"We are pausing the delivery of the 737 MAX until we come up with a solution," a spokesman said Thursday, adding that "we are going to continue the production, but we are assessing our capacities."



France's BEA air safety agency confirmed it has received the black box recorders from the plane, which was just four months old and crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday.

Starting Friday, BEA investigators will try to retrieve information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster.

Thousands of kilometres away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.

Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyze the data.

The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to experts.

On Wednesday, US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between the Ethiopia crash and that of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October that claimed the lives of 189 people.

The Federal Administration said findings from the crash site near Addis Ababa and "newly refined satellite data" warranted "further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents."



An FAA emergency order grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 until further notice, effectively taking the out of the skies globally.

The move came after a growing number of and countries had already decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it was ascertained there are no safety issues.

US President Donald Trump told reporters the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern." FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency had been "working tirelessly" to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because of the damage to the flight data recorders.

The new information shows "the track of that airplane was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight... to warrant the grounding of the airplanes so we could get more information from the black boxes and determine if there's a link between the two, and if there is, find a fix to that link," Elwell said on CNBC.

Boeing's shares have fallen 12 per cent in the days after the crash in Ethiopia, wiping out nearly USD 30 billion in value.

The MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model, but it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service.

There are 74 registered in the United States and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA.

The accounts of the recent crashes were echoed in concerns registered by US pilots on how the MAX 8 behaves.

At least four American pilots complained following the Lion Air crash that the would suddenly pitch downward shortly after takeoff, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by NASA.

In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air disaster, pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane's trajectory.

It was unclear if US transport authorities review the database or investigated the incidents. However, the FAA said this week it had ordered to update its flight software and training.
Mumbai Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta on Friday suspended two civic engineers and ordered an inquiry against them in connection with the footover bridge collapse incident which claimed six lives.

He also ordered a departmental inquiry against the two engineers besides an executive engineer and two retired chief engineers of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

The official gave the directions following an inquiry conducted into the incident by the chief engineer (vigilance).

Executive engineer A R Patil, who had supervised the structural audit of the bridge in 2017-18, and assistant engineer S F Kakulte who had supervised its repair works in 2013-14, were suspended and a full-fledged departmental probe ordered against them, an official said.

Mehta also ordered a departmental inquiry against former chief engineer (bridges) S O Kori and former deputy chief engineer R B Tare--both retired.

The inquiry report said these four officers were responsible for poor supervision of the structural audit in 2017-18.

Charges will be framed against the officers accordingly, the official added.

Mehta also ordered that an FIR be lodged against structural auditor Prof D D Desai's Associated Engineering Consultants & Analysts Pvt Ltd for irresponsibly carrying out the structural audit "that led to the collapse of the bridge and loss of human lives".

He also directed that the auditor be removed from the empanelled list of structural auditors of the BMC with immediate effect.

"All payments pending to be made to this structural auditor be stopped and for any payments made earlier, due process of recovery be started," the order issued by Mehta said.

Mehta also asked the authorities to withdraw other ongoing works allotted to the firm with immediate effect and directed that prior auditing works done by the firm should again be audited through a different structural audit company.

The report submitted by the chief engineer (vigilance) mentioned that structural audit was not carried out correctly and major lapses were found.

"The audit was conducted in an irresponsible manner and the auditor did not raise any alarm for anticipated failure of structural members and not recommended any specific need for repairs," it said.

Six persons were killed and 31 injured after a section of the footover bridge near a busy train station in south Mumbai collapsed during evening rush hour on Thursday.

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Canadian investor Brookfield-led India Infrastructure Trust (InVIT) has agreed to buy billionaire Mukesh Ambani's loss-making East-West gas pipeline for Rs 13,000 crore.

The InVIT will acquire 100 per cent equity interest in Pipeline Infrastructure Pvt Ltd, owner and operators of the pipeline that transports Reliance Industries Ltd's eastern offshore KG-D6 gas to customers, according to a statement issued by Ambani's flagship company.

After this, the existing pipeline usage agreement has been reworked to reduce capacity reserved for RIL gas to 33 million standard cubic meters per day from 56 mmscmd currently.

RIL will have to transport at least 22 mmscmd of gas through the pipeline at the revised tariff, failing which it will be liable to pay the differential amount to Pipeline Infrastructure, the statement said.

The East West pipeline originates at Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh and travels 1,460-kilometers up to Bharuch in Gujarat. It commenced operations in 2009 with an original design capacity to transport 85 mmscmd of gas, including 21.25 mmscmd on common carrier basis.

The length of the main trunk pipeline is 1,385 km from Kakinada to Bharuch and 75 km is the length of the spur lines.

East-West pipeline operators in filings to oil regulator Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB) have claimed that the pipeline was built at a cost of Rs 16,347.96 crore.

The pipeline primarily transports KG-D6 gas, which has steadily dipped from 69.43 million standard cubic meters per day achieved in March 2010 to under 3 mmscmd.

RIL and its partner BP are investing USD 4-5 billion in developing three sets of gas fields in the flagging KG-D6 block. The three sets of discoveries are envisaged to produce 22-25 mmscmd of gas.

Also, the pipeline is seen as a natural vehicle for transporting gas to be imported in liquefied form (LNG) on terminals planned on the east coast. The pipeline is connected to pipelines of operators such as GAIL (India) Ltd and Gujarat State Petronet Ltd.

In the statement, the company said the amount payable for any unutilised capacity by RIL will be the difference between Rs 500 crore per quarter and the actual revenue earned by Pipeline Infrastructure.

"RIL will continue to be entitled to transport gas, either by itself or of any customers, free of cost against any outstanding unutilised capacity payments," it said.

"At the current approved final tariff of Rs 71.66 per million British thermal units, if the average volume of gas transported is 22 mmscmd, RIL will not be liable to make unutilised capacity payments," it added.

PNGRB had on March 12, approved a 37 per cent rise in tariff from April 1, for the pipeline to Rs 71.66 per million British thermal unit on a gross calorific value basis.

The next review of tariff in April 2020, will also consider upward revision to tariff arising from the determination of the lower revised capacity of the pipeline, the statement said.

"Considering the new investments in the upstream sector in the KG basin, and the growing LNG imports, ability to swap gas, the average volume expected to be transported through the pipeline is expected to be significantly higher compared to the current levels," it said.

"RIL will be entitled to significant participation in the net earnings of Pipeline Infrastructure Pvt Ltd (PIPL) under the mechanism specified in the pipeline usage agreement."



RIL's current investment in preference shares valued at Rs 4,000 crore to continue and will be converted into equity at the end of 20 years.

Further, at the end of 20 years, RIL has the right to acquire equity shares of PIPL held by the InvIT at an equity value of Rs 50 crore.

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Prosecutors in Bulgaria on Friday launched a probe into a recent visit to the country by an Australian man alleged to be the gunman who killed 49 people in attacks on two New Zealand mosques.

The suspected assailant visited Bulgaria from November 9-15 last year claiming he wanted "to visit historical sites and study the history of the Balkan country," Bulgaria's chief prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov said.

He said the inquiry would establish if this was "correct or if he had other objectives".

According to investigators, the man arrived in Sofia from Dubai on November 9 and hired a car the following day to visit historical sites in ten locations.

He left on November 15 on a flight bound for Bucharest where he hired a car to travel to Hungary, Tsatsarov said.

The Australian had also made a short visit to the Balkans from December 28-30, 2016, travelling by bus across Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Sofia said it was in contact with authorities in the US, New Zealand, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia and Montenegro over the matter.

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An Army porter was injured by a stray bullet fired from across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district on Friday, officials said.

According to them, Pakistani troops fired a few shots targeting Indian posts in Kalal area of Nowshera sector in the early hours Friday and one of the stray bullets hit a porter.

The injured, Surjeet Kumar, was immediately taken to hospital for treatment, they said.

Barring this incident, there was no report of ceasefire violation from anywhere along the LoC since Wednesday afternoon, an official said.

There has been a spurt in cross-border skirmishes after India's preemptive air strike on a Jaish-e-Mohammad terror camp in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26 following the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.

Four civilians, including three members of a family, were killed and several others injured as Pakistan targeted dozens of villages in over 100 incidents of ceasefire violations along the LoC in the state, especially in the twin districts of Poonch and Rajouri, since then.

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Chinese Premier Li Keqiang Friday denied the allegations that Beijing instructs its companies like Huawei, one the world's biggest tech firms, to spy on foreign countries and played down the impact of the current trade war with the US.

The Chinese government did not and will not tell its companies to spy on other countries, premier Li said during his annual press conference when asked about the spying allegations relating to Chinese giant Huawei which is facing stiff actions in the US and a number of other countries.

"Let me tell you explicitly that this is not consistent with Chinese law. This is not how China behaves. We did not do that and will not do that in the future," he said.

This was the first such comment on Huawei from the top Chinese leadership.

Li's remarks came after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo early this month said Huawei was owned by the Chinese government, has deep connections to their intelligence services and presents a national security threat.

Pompeo urged the countries to think twice before signing up with one the world's biggest tech firms.

"Huawei is owned by the state of China and has deep connections to their intelligence service. That should send off flares for everybody who understands what the Chinese military and Chinese intelligence services do. We have to take that threat seriously," Pompeo said.

More and more Western nations are reviewing doing business with the firm over spying concerns. Huawei has always maintained it acts independently.

Western countries have begun reviewing their relationship with Huawei, specifically with regards to its technology being used in new "fifth generation 5G" mobile internet networks.

Huawei, the largest global maker of network gear for phone and internet companies, has denied the allegations that it facilitates Chinese spying and has sued the US government.

Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei said that his company did not work under the Chinese government and could reject disclosure of any information if approached by the officials.

Huawei is locked in major legal battle with the US over the arrest of its chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou who is also the daughter of Ren over charges that the company violated US sanctions to supply equipment to Iran.

Wanzhou was detained in Canada and faced extradition to the US.

On the current trade talks with the US, Li said China hoped the talks will deliver win-win results and mutual benefits for both countries, world's two biggest economies.

"I believe this is also what the whole world would like to see," he said.

China and the US have become closely intertwined through years of development and cooperation, it is neither realistic nor possible to decouple the two economies, he said.

According to reports, after several rounds of talks, both countries are currently negotiating the draft text of a deal.

"I believe we need to continue to follow the principles of cooperation instead of confrontation, mutual respect, equality, and mutual benefits to advance bilateral relations, including economic and trade ties, to deliver concrete benefits to people of the countries," he said.

Despite twists and turns, the overall relationship between China and the US will forge ahead, as their shared interests far outweigh differences, Li said.

The US and China are engaged in a trade war that has seen both impose duties of billions of dollars on one another's goods, though they are currently in talks in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

US President Donald Trump, who last year declared a trade war, is demanding China reduce the USD 375 billion trade deficit, provide legal protection for intellectual property rights (IPR), technology transfer and more access to American goods to Chinese markets.

He has already increased the tariffs on over USD 250 billion Chinese exports to the US and threatened to extend tariffs on USD 200 billion Chinese imports to 25 per cent.

Trump has extended March 1 deadline to impose further tariffs on the rest of the Chinese goods.

Both countries are holding intense talks to end the deadlock.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
China wants to install its own Dalai Lama as it is astute enough to recognise power of his position as an instrument of great influence as long as he is amenable to their commands, an Indian-American journalist and biographer of the Tibetan spiritual leader has said.

Mayank Chhaya's remarks came as the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's escape to India from Tibet is marked this week.

Chicago-based Chhaya is the author of the critically-acclaimed 2007 biography of the spiritual leader titled Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic.'



The book has since been published in over 20 languages around the world as well as audio books. An updated new biography titled The Dnouement: The 14th Dalai Lama's Life of Persistence' has just been released and contains four new chapters and a new epilogue bringing up to date until January, 2019 the life and teachings of the Dalai Lama.

In the updated biography, Chhaya explains why he thinks Beijing is interested in the idea of retaining the figure of the Dalai Lama as long as the next one is of its own choosing and not the one through which the 14th reincarnates.

"The Chinese leadership is sharp enough to recognise the power of the figure of the Dalai Lama as an instrument of great influence as long as he is amenable to their commands," Chhaya told PTI in an interview.

In his book he mentions that "not willing or able or both to deal with the currently living Dalai Lama, China insists that he must reincarnate after his death, presumably as a pliable 15th Dalai Lama.

The 14th Dalai Lama, who is arguably the most popular and consequential in the tradition's history, is much more inclined to end his lineage and preempt reincarnation.

"In a bizarre believe-it-or-not twist to the question of whether the Dalai Lama should reincarnate, Beijing now seems to insist that he must but as a sort of made-to-order successor who could be shaped and conditioned to accept complete Chinese control over Tibet and Tibetans, he writes in the book.

"Even as the Chinese Communist Party does not accept the concept of Dalai Lamas as an old institution and is particularly contemptuous towards the current one, it is astute enough to recognize the political and cultural consequence of having a Dalai Lama in place as long as he is the kind they can run as their operative. It would not mind some return to Buddhism as long as it is this Dalai Lama-free," Chhaya writes in his book.

Chhaya has been engaged with the Tibetan issue, particularly from the standpoint of the Tibetan refugees in India and the Dalai Lama, since 1996. During the course of researching for his book, Chhaya has spent several hours in personal interviews with the Dalai Lama and over the years has kept up with his travels, engagements, speeches and pronouncements.

Since he left Tibet in 1959 to escape from the Chinese occupation, the Dalai Lama, 83, has been keeping China on tenterhooks about his successor.

China says that the successor to the Dalai Lama must be chosen according to the religious rituals and historical conventions as well as the backing from the ruling Communist Party.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
China will stay on the path of "peaceful development" and continue to be a "positive force" and contribute for regional and global peace, Premier Li Keqiang said here on Friday, amidst global concern over Beijing flexing its muscles in the region.

Li, who addressed over two-and-a-half-hour press conference at the end of the Chinese legislature the National People's Congress, mostly answered selected questions on China's economy and internal social issues as well as ties with the US, Russia and the EU.

However in his closing remarks, he said that China will continue to follow the principles of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness in developing relations with its neighbours.

"China will stay on the path of peaceful development and continue to be a positive force and contributor for regional and global peace," he said.

China asserts nearly all of the resource-rich South China Sea as its territory, while Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam have counter claims over the area.

The US has been conducting regular patrols in the South China Sea to assert the freedom of navigation in the area where Beijing has built up and militarised many of the islands and reefs it controls in the region.

When asked about China's priority regarding the conclusion of the China-Japan-South Korea Free Trade Agreement and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Li said it will depend on the efforts made by parties concerned.

"Whichever will be concluded first, China will take a welcome attitude to the development," Li added.

Though he did not comment on the current situation in South Asia, Foreign Minister Wang Yi in his annual press conference last week said that India and Pakistan should quickly turn the page after the Pulwama terror attack, meet each other halfway and transform the present crisis into an opportunity for a long term and fundamental improvement in their bilateral relations.

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A top Chinese diplomat claimed that detention centres for Muslims in China's western province of Xinjiang are "campuses, not camps" and said they are eventually going to be closed as a "training programme" for ethnic Uighurs is downsized.

At the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Executive Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng reiterated Friday China's insistence that the detention centres are designed to provide training and fight regional terrorism.

He also claimed that officials from around the world, including from the UN, had visited the region and that the detention centres in Xinjiang are "actually boarding schools or campuses, not camps" as reported by critics.

The US State Department said this week that China has "significantly intensified" a campaign of mass detentions of minority Uighurs over the last year, with between 800,000 and 2 million people from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region interned in camps.

The centres have drawn condemnation from across the world.

Le told reporters he had recently visited some Uighur centres in Xinjiang and played ping pong and ate halal food there. He didn't specify when the detention centers would be closed, other than telling reporters later that would happen "at the appropriate time."



He also took aim at a US-led event in Geneva on Xinjiang calling that "unacceptable" interference in Chinese sovereignty.

The envoy's comments came as China was responding to more than 200 recommendations by other countries on ways that Beijing could improve human rights as part of a Human Rights Council process known as the Universal Periodic Review.

All UN member-states undergo such screening, generally every four to five years.

Le said China had accepted 82 per cent of the recommendations presented during the review last November. The council formally adopted the review of China without a vote on Friday.

The United States, historically one of the few countries to confront China over its human rights records, pulled out of the 47-country Geneva-based U.N. body last year, alleging it has an anti-Israeli bias and other shortcomings.

Norway's ambassador in Geneva voiced the most criticism among diplomats at the council on Friday. Hans Brattskar said Norway regretted that China did not accept any recommendations related to the Uighur detention situation in Xinjiang.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An influential Christian group Friday made an appeal to the Election Commission to "either anticipate or postpone" the Lok Sabha elections scheduled for April 18 as the day 'Maundy Thursday' is a holy day which commemorates the Last Supper Jesus had with his disciples.

The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India (CBCI), the apex body of the Catholic Church in the country, made the plea in a letter to the Election Commission (EC).

It informed the EC that "with the important election date clashing with the Religious Services Maundy Thursday, Christians may find it very difficult to fulfil both the calls for worship and for electoral duties specially those called to be poll officers or are placed on other active polling duties."



Christians celebrate Easter with three intensive days of prayers--Maundy Thursday which commemorates the Last Supper Jesus had with his disciples after which he was arrested, Good Friday which observes the day of Crucifixion and death of Jesus and Easter Sunday which celebrates his resurrection.

Good Friday is a public holiday and Easter is on Sunday.

The EC has scheduled polling for these days.

In his letter to Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, the CBCI's secretary general Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, said"We know April 18, Maundy Thursday, is not a public holiday but most Christians either take leave from work or come back early to participate in the sacred worship."



It said the Church was not making the request to him on grounds of religious sentiments but rather in view of the difficulties of logistics as well as hardships that may be faced in view of the election date fixed for April 18 in some states.

During polls, a large number of booths are placed in the vicinity of Churches and in schools run by the Church, the CBCI said.

"Given the exigencies of the mode of conduct of Elections as well, as special security needs for polling, your office also may find difficult to conduct the election as I am sure you would not like to deprive millions of Christians the opportunity to worship in their stipulated and consecrated places of worship during days which they consider most holy," it said.

The letter said "a change in the announced date may cause inconvenience to you, your office and to your collaborators. But our apprehensions are that, not changing the date may create avoidable but much bigger difficulties for all in the conduct of the polls."



According to the letter, Lok Sabha elections are scheduled to be held on April 18 in Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, Odisha, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

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A delegation of Congress leaders Friday approached the Election Commission and sought its intervention in removing hoardings projecting achievements of the Narendra Modi government, claiming it as a violation of the model code of conduct.

"It has come to our notice that hoardings and advertisements featuring the prime minister and projecting his government's achievements are being displayed at public places and most notably petrol pump stations across the country despite the announcement of the schedule of the Lok Sabha elections.

"The said display is not only in violation of the model code of conduct but also represent misuse of public funds and official machinery for campaign purposes," the memorandum submitted by the party leaders said.

The Congress demanded that the Election Commission issue directions for immediate removal of all such hoardings and also seek a compliance report in the matter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress legislators fromBangalore North Lok Sabha constituency Friday said they would work for the victory of JD(S) supremo and former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda if he contests as the regional party's candidate.

"All of us five Congress MLAs have unanimously decided towork for Deve Gowda's victory if he contests as a candidate from BangaloreNorth," Rural Development Minister and Congress MLA Krishna Byre Gowda said.

Speaking to reporters after the joint meeting of Congress-JD(S) MLAs from Bangalore North Lok Sabha constituency, he said, "he (Gowda) is an elderly leader and formerPrime Minister. We are ready to send him victorious from here."



Two JD(S) MLAs and a Rajya Sabha member alsoparticipated in the meeting, he said, adding that "we informed them that we will work with them for Gowda's victory if he contests from here."



Union minister Sadananda Gowda is the sitting MP from Bangalore North.

Speculations are rife that Gowda, who has conceded his constituency Hassan to grandson Prajwal Revanna, will contest from either Bangalore North or Tumkurconstituency.

However, Gowda is yet to decide about the constituency that he will be contesting from.

A section of local JD(S) leaders are of the opinion that their party supremo contesting from Bangalore North would help the ruling coalition gain a hold in the city,sources said,



They said that Vokkaligas, the community to which Gowda belongs, have considerable presence in the constituency, along with minorities.

Gowda had earlier indicated that he may not contest polls, citing his age as the reason.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Uttar Pradesh minister and Mathura legislator Shrikant Sharma has alleged that a few countries and the Opposition were hampering the progress of India.

"Countries like Pakistan and China have virtually entered into an unholy alliance to check the growth of the country," the state power minister said at a public meeting here on Thursday evening.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader alleged that the same motive same was pursued by the Congress and the grand alliance.

The Congress, Pakistan and China "does not want a strong" prime minister like Narendra Modi, and, instead, they want a "majboor sarkar (weak government) and not majboot (strong) sarkar", the minister alleged.

Sharma claimed that under the leadership of Modi, sincere effort had been done for the first time to nip terrorism in the bud -- through airstrike and surgical strike.

Corruption and terrorism had been the greatest hurdle in the development of the country, the minister said.

To counter it, he said, the Modi government developed a system of transferring the amount, meant for various schemes, directly into the accounts of beneficiaries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Uttarakhand BJP on Friday accused the Congress of being a "lie-manufacturing machine" and said its stands on Rafale deal and the Balakot air strike were all set to cost it dearly in the Lok Sabha polls.

It also accused the Congress of lacking maturity and being irresponsible.

"The Congress has become a lie-manufacturing machine. It spoke one lie after another on Rafale deal to mislead the masses. It did not stop spreading lies on the issue even after the Supreme Court gave a clean chit to the government on the deal," state BJP president Ajay Bhatt told PTI in an interview.

Hes said this penchant for "spreading lies" is going to prove very costly for the party in elections.

"People can see through the party's lies and are in a mood to reject it completely at the hustings," Bhatt said.

Claiming that the people had made up their mind about electing Narendra Modi again as prime minister, he said the general feeling countrywide is that India is safe only in his hands.

"The way it (Congress) sided with Pakistan after the air strikes in the wake of the Pulwama terror attack reflects the lack of maturity of the Congress leadership. In times of war, no matter what its scale is, the country should speak in one voice and show a united face but the Congress chose to do the opposite," he said.

Bhatt said the Congress demand for a proof of the destruction of terror targets in Balakot was hailed by the Pakistani authorities as it suited their scheme of things.

He said he was confident of the BJP sweeping all the five seats in Uttarakhand which it holds at present.

"The BJP will not just get votes this time it will bask in a virtual shower of votes," he said.

Election to five Lok Sabha constituencies in the state will be held on April 11.

Bhatt also credited Modi with taking positive steps for all sections of the society regardless of caste or creed in the last five years.

"Be it women, farmers, the poor or the youth, Modi kept his promises to improve their lot," the BJP state president said.

"While self-employment generation schemes like stand up India, start up India opened up fresh avenues for employment of the jobless youth, Ujjwala, Jan Dhan, Kisan Samman Nidhi and Shram Man Dhan Yojana were big steps towards empowering women, farmers and labourers in the unorganised sector," he said.

Modi gave reservation to the poor in the unreserved categories to provide equal opportunity to all sections, Bhatt said.

When asked about speculations about some BJP leaders joining the Congress at Rahul Gandhi's rally here Saturday, Bhatt said it was "another lie" concocted by the party to pull the crowds.

"Let alone the party leaders, not even an ordinary BJP worker is going to join the Congress at Rahul Gandhi's rally. Who will join a sinking ship?" he asked.

He said on the five Lok Sabha seats in the state more than 36 aspirants have staked their claims.

All the names with those of the sitting MPs on top have been forwarded to the party's central poll committee which will take a final call on the matter anytime between March 16-18, Bhatt said.

"Once the BJP central poll committee puts its stamp of approval on a name as the party's official nominee for a seat everyone will have to work unitedly to ensure their victory. Any breach of party discipline in this regard will attract stern action," he warned.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Delhi court on Friday allowed the ED to question lobbyist Deepak Talwar in Tihar jail in a fresh money laundering case related to the purchase of 43 aircraft by erstwhile Indian Airlines from France's Airbus Industrie in 2005.

Special Judge Santosh Snehi Mann allowed the Enforcement Directorate to interrogate Talwar, who is currently in judicial custody in a separate case related to negotiations to allegedly favour foreign private airlines causing losses to national carrier Air India.

In the present case, special public prosecutors D P Singh and Nitesh Rana told the court that Talwar's interrogation was required to unearth the entire criminal conspiracy related to alleged money laundering in relation to the purchase.

Rana told the court, "He (Talwar) received Rs 92 crore from Airbus Industrie in one account and Rs 142 crore in another. He was directly linked with Airbus in these transactions and he was doing his own negotiations."



The court was hearing a plea moved by the ED seeking its nod to arrest Talwar in the Airbus case.

However, the court directed the agency to question Talwar in Tihar jail instead.

"He is in judicial custody in another case. What's stopping you (ED) from going there and questioning him. Is there any bar from going there and interrogating," the judge asked.

Following this, the ED requested the court to permit it to interrogate Talwar inside Tihar, which was allowed.

According to the ED, the case was filed against Indian Airlines officials and other unknown persons, "alleging that the officials, by abusing their official position as public servants in conspiracy with Airbus Industrie, caused undue pecuniary advantage to Airbus Industrie and caused corresponding undue loss to the government exchequer in carrying out the purchase of 43 aircraft by Indian Airlines from Airbus Industrie, France."



"The cabinet committee on economic affairs/empowered group of ministers had approved the purchase of 43 Airbus Aircraft in 2006 and the purchase price per aircraft was fixed with the condition that Airbus will establish training and MRO Centre worth USD 175 million (around Rs 1000 crore).

"However, purchase order was placed for supply of 43 aircraft by fraudulently deleting the said condition. Deletion of those conditions for establishing MRO and training centre resulted in undue benefit of Rs 1,000 crore to Airbus which should have been reduced from agreed purchase price of aircraft fixed by the government of India," the ED said.

It told the court that the conduct of Talwar was non-cooperative towards the investigation and he would not appear before investigating authority in the present probe unless he is compelled by law to do so.

In the first case, the ED alleged that Talwar acted as a middleman in negotiations to favour foreign private airlines causing loss to national carrier Air India.

It told the court that it was trying to find out the names of officials of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, National Aviation Company of India Ltd and Air India, who favoured foreign airlines, including Qatar Airways, Emirates and Air Arabia, by making national carrier give up profit making routes and profit making timings.

"It has been alleged that officials of Ministry of Civil Aviation, NACIL, Air India, by abusing their official positions as public servants and receiving illegal gratification, in conspiracy with other public servants, private domestic and foreign airlines, made the national carrier give up profit making routes and profit making timings of Air India in favour of national and international domestic and foreign private airlines.

"This resulted in a huge loss of market share to the national carrier and also led to pecuniary benefits to private domestic and foreign airlines," the ED had told the court.

Talwar was picked up by Dubai authorities in January in connection with the



Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland VVIP choppers money laundering case and deported to India.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The CPI is hopeful that the Left parties will perform well in the upcoming general election and end up with an impressive number of seats in the Lok Sabha, compared to the outgoing House.

"It will definitely be much better than in the previous parliament. It will be an impressive number (for the Left parties) I hope," Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary S Sudhakar Reddy told PTI here on Friday.

The CPI has one MP in the outgoing Lok Sabha.

Reddy said the party would do well in states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Bihar in the upcoming polls, besides putting up a keen fight in Odisha, West Bengal and a few other states.

"We hope we will improve our position in parliament. We have high hopes in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and we are hoping to give a very good fight in Odisha, Punjab, West Bengal and Manipur," he said.

Reddy added that the CPI had decided to contest around 55 seats in 24 states.

The party was trying to forge alliances or arrive at an understanding in as many constituencies as possible, he said.

Pointing out that the Left parties were contesting together in West Bengal and Kerala, Reddy said the CPI would have an understanding with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Punjab and the Congress in Odisha.

An understanding with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar was yet to be finalised, he said.

The CPI leader felt the Congress should have been more accommodative towards smaller parties in forging alliances.

"I feel the Congress should have taken things more liberally, with a broad mind. They should have accommodated more smaller parties. Many small parties' votes will add to the final tally. That is a very important thing. Unfortunately, in many states where the Congress is a dominating force, they are not going for this kind of an alliance," Reddy said.

"They (Congress) have not learnt any lesson from the BJP's understandings and alliances in various states. That is why an all-India understanding, which was expected, is yet to be arrived at.

"But still, because of the failures and wrong and anti-people policies of the BJP-led NDA, we are hoping that the secular, democratic, Left parties will get a majority in the coming parliament," he added.

The CPI wanted a broad understanding among all the anti-BJP parties for a post-poll alliance, Reddy said.

He felt the seven-phased Lok Sabha polls, starting April 11, would witness a tough fight, in spite of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allegedly trying to take advantage of the sacrifices of defence personnel.

Admitting that the CPI and the Left parties did not do too well in the last two general elections, Reddy said the strength of the Left parties was good up to 2004.

However, the support base of these parties had not withered, he added.

At the same time, the influence of the CPI had not increased proportionately to the rising number of voters, Reddy said.

"That is why we are unable to bag new seats. We are trying to get more downtrodden people, youth into our party," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Senior CPI leader D Raja Friday met Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) working president Hemant Soren and urged him to make the CPI a part of the proposed Mahagathbandhan and allot Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat to it.

According to a press statement issued by the JMM, Raja requested the JMM leader to make the CPI a part of the proposed Mahagathbandhan and give the left party Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat, which is going for poll on May 6.

Raja met Soren in New Delhi.

Soren said, "JMM wants the Left parties in Jharkhand to be a part of the Mahagathbandhan. But the Left parties should leave their claim on Koderma seat so that the matter could be discussed with Congress president Rahul Gandhi."



The former Jharkhand chief minister said, "The JMM is committed to defeat the BJP by taking the same ideological parties in the alliance. The JMM is ready to ally, and now the decision is for the Left parties."



Rajas request comes two days after the Left parties decided to contest three of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

The CPI(M) Jharkhand unit secretary G K Bakshi, had told reporters in Dhanbad on March 13 that the Left Front has decided to contest three seats---CPI(M) from Rajmahal (ST), CPI from Hazaribagh and CPI (ML-Liberation) from Kodarma.

The proposed grand alliance comprising Congress, JMM, Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) and RJD, has not yet officially announced candidates for the 14 Lok Sabha seats in Jharkhand.

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The CPI(M) and Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) Friday named their candidates for three Lok Sabha constituencies allotted to them as part of seat-sharing arrangement in the 'Secular Progressive Alliance,' led by DMK.

The CPI(M) has fielded former Lok Sabha MP P R Natarajan in Coimbatore consituency, which he represented in the 15th Lok Sabha, while Sahitya Akademi Award winner and Tamil writer S Venkatesan would contest in the Madurai constituency.

"Natarajan has been associated with the party since 1968 and has held various positions. The two candidates would be raising issues of Tamil Nadu in Parliament once elected," CPI(M) state secretary K Balakrishnan told reporters here.

The IUML, which was alloted the Ramanathapuram seat, has announced K Nawaz Kani, managing director of a courier company, as the candidate.

"Fishermen in Ramanathapuram are facing several issues, water scarcity and employment are also among those plaguing people here. I will address them if elected," Gani told reporters soon after the announcement.

Earlier in the day, the opposition DMK named the constituencies in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry from where the party and its allies would be contesting.

There are 39 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and one in neighbouring Puducherry, voting for all of which will be held in the second phase scheduled on April 18.

The Congress has been allotted the lion's share of 10 seats (nine in TN and one in Puducherry) among other parties in the alliance.

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The major gold miners are grinding higher in a solid upleg, fueling growing interest in this small contrarian sector. They've mostly finished reporting their fourth-quarter results, revealing how they are really faring fundamentally. Collectively the world's biggest gold miners continue to face serious challenges, which often stem from declining production. That makes stock picking more important than ever for investment success.

Four times a year publicly-traded companies release treasure troves of valuable information in the form of quarterly reports. Required by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, these 10-Qs and 10-Ks contain the best fundamental data available to traders. They dispel all the sentiment distortions inevitably surrounding prevailing stock-price levels, revealing corporations' underlying hard fundamental realities.

While 10-Qs with filing deadlines of 40 days after quarter-ends are required for normal quarters, 10-K annual reports are instead mandated after quarters ending fiscal years. Most gold miners logically run their accounting on calendar years, so they issue 10-Ks after Q4s. Since these annual reports are larger and must be audited by independent CPAs, their filing deadlines are extended to 60 days after quarter-ends.

The definitive list of major gold-mining stocks to analyze comes from the world's most-popular gold-stock investment vehicle, the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF. Launched way back in May 2006, it has an insurmountable first-mover lead. GDX's net assets running $10.6b this week were a staggering 47.1x larger than the next-biggest 1x-long major-gold-miners ETF! GDX is effectively this sector's blue-chip index.

It currently includes 45 component stocks, which are weighted in proportion to their market capitalizations. This list is dominated by the world's largest gold miners, and their collective importance to this industry cannot be overstated. Every quarter I dive into the latest operating and financial results from GDX's top 34 companies. That's simply an arbitrary number that fits neatly into the tables below, but a commanding sample.

As of this week these elite gold miners accounted for fully 94.1% of GDX's total weighting. Last quarter they combined to mine 300.8 metric tons of gold. That was 35.2% of the aggregate world total in Q4'18 according to the World Gold Council, which publishes comprehensive global gold supply-and-demand data quarterly. So for anyone deploying capital in gold or its miners' stocks, watching GDX miners is imperative.

The largest primary gold miners dominating GDX's ranks are scattered around the world. 21 of the top 34 mainly trade in US stock markets, 6 in Australia, 5 in Canada, and 1 each in China and the United Kingdom. GDX's geopolitical diversity is good for investors, but makes it more difficult to analyze and compare the biggest gold miners' results. Financial-reporting requirements really vary from country to country.

In Australia, South Africa, and the UK, companies report in half-year increments instead of quarterly. The big gold miners often publish quarterly updates, but their data is limited. In cases where half-year data is all that is made available, I split it in half for a Q4 approximation. While Canada has quarterly reporting, the deadlines are looser than in the States. Some Canadian gold miners drag their feet in getting results out.

While it is challenging bringing all the quarterly data together for the diverse GDX-top-34 gold miners, analyzing it in the aggregate to see how they are doing is essential. So each quarter I wade through all available operational and financial reports and dump the data into a big spreadsheet for analysis. The highlights make it into these tables. Blank fields mean a company hadn't reported that data as of this Wednesday.

The first couple columns of these tables show each GDX component's symbol and weighting within this ETF as of this week. While most of these stocks trade on US exchanges, some symbols are listings from companies' primary foreign stock exchanges. That's followed by each gold miner's Q4'18 production in ounces, which is mostly in pure-gold terms. That excludes byproduct metals often present in gold ore.

Those are usually silver and base metals like copper, which are valuable. They are sold to offset some of the considerable expenses of gold mining, lowering per-ounce costs and thus raising overall profitability. In cases where companies didn't separate out gold and lumped all production into gold-equivalent ounces, those GEOs are included instead. Then production's absolute year-over-year change from Q4'17 is shown.

Next comes gold miners' most-important fundamental data for investors, cash costs and all-in sustaining costs per ounce mined. The latter directly drives profitability which ultimately determines stock prices. These key costs are also followed by YoY changes. Last but not least the annual changes are shown in operating cash flows generated, hard GAAP earnings, revenues, and cash on hand with a couple exceptions.

Percentage changes aren't relevant or meaningful if data shifted from positive to negative or vice versa, or if derived from two negative numbers. So in those cases I included raw underlying data rather than weird or misleading percentage changes. Companies with symbols highlighted in light-blue have newly climbed into the elite ranks of GDX's top 34 over this past year. This entire dataset together is quite valuable.

It offers a fantastic high-level read on how the major gold miners are faring fundamentally as an industry. Unfortunately they were generally struggling on multiple fronts in Q4'18. The more quarterly reports I read and data I gathered, the more apparent it became that many if not most of the world's biggest gold miners continue to face serious challenges. That makes GDX itself way less attractive to gold-stock investors.

GDX's holdings grew much more concentrated over this past year, with the top 34's total weighting rising from 90.5% in Q4'17 to 94.1% in Q4'18. That is partially due to increased merger-and-acquisition activity driven by big gold miners trying to replace depleting production. For years many have proven unable to replenish mined gold organically, leaving buying other companies the only option to maintain mining tempos.

Production has always been the lifeblood of the gold-mining industry. Gold miners have no control over prevailing gold prices, their product sells for whatever the markets offer. Thus growing production is the only manageable way to boost revenues, leading to amplified gains in operating cash flows and profits. Higher production generates more capital to invest in expanding existing mines and building or buying new ones.

Gold-stock investors have long prized production growth above everything else, as it is inexorably linked to company growth and thus stock-price-appreciation potential. But for some years now the major gold miners have been struggling to grow production. Large economically-viable gold deposits are getting increasingly harder to find and more expensive to exploit, with the low-hanging fruit long since picked.

More and more gold-industry experts believe peak gold is nearing, after which global mine production will start declining. For many years now new deposit discoveries and mine builds have failed to keep pace with depletion at existing mines. So production growth is slowing. According to the World Gold Council's latest fundamental data, global mine production only edged 0.8% higher in 2018 compared to 5.3% in 2013!

GDX's major gold miners are the biggest in the world, with access to many billions of dollars of capital to expand their operations. Yet even with those vast resources by his sector's standards, the top 34 have still failed to grow their production. In Q4'18 they collectively produced 9.7m ounces of gold, plunging a colossal 7.5% YoY from Q4'17's 10.5m! That is shockingly bad, and the root of the major gold miners' problems.

Total world gold production per the WGC merely slipped 0.9% YoY last quarter. Incidentally that was just the second YoY quarterly decline in the past 32 quarters, adding more fuel to peak-gold theories. Across all of them growth averaged 2.5% YoY. Seeing the top 34 GDX gold miners' production plunge at 8.3x the world rate in Q4'18 is very concerning. Many major gold miners are stagnating, retarding GDX's potential.

Just over half of GDX's top 34 gold miners, fully 18 of them, suffered average production declines of 8.9% YoY! The worst in terms of impact came from GDX's largest component Barrick Gold. GOLD's gold mined fell 5.8% YoY in Q4'18, representing 1/10th of the total drop among the GDX top 34. Barrick is so desperate to buy production to offset its serious depletion that it recently purchased major gold miner Randgold.

That deal completed on January 1st, 2019, so GOLD's Q4'18 results don't yet reflect it. Randgold mined 374.6k ounces last quarter, which was actually up an impressive 9.9% YoY. That helps explain some of the big production drop among the GDX top 34. Randgold's production was included in the GDX top 34 in Q4'17, but of course its stock no longer exists this week when I downloaded GDX's current component list.

Adding Randgold's Q4'18 production in cuts the GDX top 34's production decline to 3.9% YoY. Going the other way and instead removing it from Q4'17's total leaves the top 34's mined gold down 4.4% YoY. But that's still much worse than that overall 0.9% YoY decline in global gold mine production last quarter. As I explained in depth in a mid-February essay, gold-stock mega-mergers won't solve this depletion problem.

Before Q4'18, Randgold suffered 4 quarters in a row of falling production averaging declines of 7.4% YoY. Barrick's quarterly production has fallen for 6 quarters in a row, averaging hefty 13.4% YoY drops! Merging depleting major gold miners together doesn't magically boost their collective production. It just masks production declines for a single year, the first 4 quarters comparing post-merger results with pre-merger ones.

Once those great cross-merger YoY comparisons pass, the relentless depletion in both companies' gold mines will quickly become apparent again. The larger any gold miner, the harder it is to grow and even just maintain production levels. Because exploration budgets largely collapsed since 2013 when gold plunged and crushed gold stocks, the global pipeline of bigger economic gold deposits to mine has mostly dried up.

GDX's top-two components have always been Barrick Gold and Newmont Gold. This week together they accounted for 19.5% of its total weighting and a whopping 28.0% of the top 34's total Q4'18 gold mined! Had Barrick's and Randgold's merger been consummated in Q4, GOLD's production would've soared over 1.8m ounces. Newmont didn't want Barrick to surpass it, so in January it announced it was buying Goldcorp.

GG produced 630k ounces of gold in Q4, which will be added onto Newmont's production going forward once this deal is done. Had Newmont and Goldcorp been together in Q4'18, this gold-mining behemoth would've produced nearly 2.1m ounces! Those levels are staggering, and will really increase these two mega-miners' dominanceover this sector and GDX. These mergers' pro-forma impact on GDX is massive.

Using Q4's numbers, Newmont and Barrick would've accounted for a colossal 38.8% of the GDX top 34's entire gold mined including Randgold. Their collective weighting in this leading gold-stock ETF would shoot over a quarter. So the overall GDX future performance will be more dominated by Newmont and Barrick than ever before. If they can't grow production from such stratospheric levels, they'll retard GDX's upside.

With gold deposits increasingly harder to discover, and taking even longer to get permitted and brought into production at ever-higher costs, the biggest gold miners are going to find it impossible to even maintain their outputs. Any production growth is going to come from smaller gold miners, and their stocks will soar to reflect it. Unfortunately the impact on GDX will be muted, since its weightings are tyrannized by the giants.

Kirkland Lake Gold has been one of the best-performing gold stocks over this past year. In 2018 its stock rocketed 69.9% higher as GDX fell 9.3%! The reason investors flocked to KL is it has rapidly grown its gold output, which soared 38.8% YoY in Q4'18. That greatly boosted its sales, operating cash flows, and profits. More gold produced spreads out the big fixed costs of mining across more ounces, amplifying earnings.

No matter how awesome KL's management has proved, such production growth was only possible from a relatively-low base. KL produced 167k ounces of gold in Q4'17, compared with around 8x that from each Newmont and Barrick. The biggest gains in gold-stock prices won't come from super-major-dominated GDX, but from smaller mid-tier gold miners. Investors will continue to prize and richly reward production growth.

Peak gold is likely bearish for the largest gold miners that drive GDX. Capital inflows from investors will wane along with their shrinking production. But lower gold mined supply on balance going forward is wildly bullishfor the mid-tier and junior gold miners growing their production! The resulting higher gold prices will catapult their profits and thus stock prices far higher, attracting investors fleeing the struggling majors.

The only way to reap these massive gains is directly investing in the best individual gold miners. Their fundamentals are far superior to their sector's as a whole. While buying GDX is easy, the lion's share of that capital is funneled into the major gold miners with slowing production. Their underperformance will dilute away any outperformance among mid-tier miners in this ETF, leading to way-inferior overall gains.

Given the sharply-lower gold production by the GDX top 34 in Q4'18, per-ounce mining costs should've risen proportionally. Gold-mining costs are largely fixed quarter after quarter, with actual mining requiring the same levels of infrastructure, equipment, and employees. So the lower production, the fewer ounces to spread mining's big fixed costs across. These elite gold miners indeed reported higher costslast quarter.

There are two major ways to measure gold-mining costs, classic cash costs per ounce and the superior all-in sustaining costs per ounce. Both are useful metrics. Cash costs are the acid test of gold-miner survivability in lower-gold-price environments, revealing the worst-case gold levels necessary to keep the mines running. All-in sustaining costs show where gold needs to trade to maintain current mining tempos indefinitely.

Cash costs naturally encompass all cash expenses necessary to produce each ounce of gold, including all direct production costs, mine-level administration, smelting, refining, transport, regulatory, royalty, and tax expenses. In Q4'18 these top 34 GDX-component gold miners that reported cash costs averaged $655 per ounce. That was up a sharp 9.1% YoY, among the highest quarterly cash costs seen in years.

That still shows the major gold miners face no existential threat as long as gold stays over $650, which is about half current levels. And Q4's cash costs are artificially high due to two anomalies. Buenaventura and Hecla both reported cash costs rocketing to extremes of $1627 and $1048! Excluding these outliers, the rest of the GDX top 34 averaged cash costs of $598, which was right in line with Q4'17's overall $600 read.

Way more important than cash costs are the far-superior all-in sustaining costs. They were introduced by the World Gold Council in June 2013 to give investors a much-better understanding of what it really costs to maintain gold mines as ongoing concerns. AISCs include all direct cash costs, but then add on everything else that is necessary to maintain and replenish operations at current gold-production levels.

These additional expenses include exploration for new gold to mine to replace depleting deposits, mine-development and construction expenses, remediation, and mine reclamation. They also include the corporate-level administration expenses necessary to oversee gold mines. All-in sustaining costs are the most-important gold-mining cost metric by far for investors, revealing gold miners' true operating profitability.

The GDX top 34 gold miners reported average AISCs of $889 in Q4'18, up 3.6% YoY. That is inversely proportional to the 4%ish YoY drop in their gold production when Randgold is accounted for. While $889 is the highest seen since at least Q2'16 when I started doing this quarterly research, it is still roughly in line with the past four quarters' averages of $858, $884, $856, and $877. And like cash costs this is skewed high.

Buenaventura and Hecla also reported anomalous super-high AISCs of $1485 and $1582. Excluding them, the rest of the GDX top 34 averaged much-lower all-in sustaining costs of $837 per ounce in Q4'18. So much to their credit, the major gold miners are ruthlessly managing their costs as their production slumps. That's bullish for their coming earnings growth as gold continues grinding higher in this bull market.

Gold-mining profits really leverage higher gold prices, and big earnings growth attracts in investors to bid up stock prices. In Q4'18 gold averaged about $1228 per ounce. At the GDX top 34's average AISC of $889, that implies the major gold miners as an industry were earning profits of $339 per ounce. Those are going to grow considerably this quarter. The almost-over Q1'19 has seen average gold prices near $1303.

AISCs are likely to decline from Q4's high levels in this current Q1, but let's assume they remain stable at $889. That implies the major gold miners are earning about $414 per ounce this quarter. In other words a mere 6.1% quarter-on-quarter rally in average gold prices could drive a major 22.1% QoQ jump in the major gold miners' profits! That's why major gold stocks tend to amplify gold uplegs by 2x to 3xor so.

It is encouraging the gold miners' costs remain well-positioned to fuel big profits growth in a higher-gold-price environment despite their intractable production slumps. Investors love chasing earnings growth, which is looking to be scarce in the general stock markets this year. The good gold miners' stocks are likely to see big capital inflows as gold continues climbing, driving them and to a lesser extent GDX higher.

Unfortunately the hard accounting results in Q4'18 were far worse than AISCs. Q4'18's average gold price was 3.8% lower year-over-year, which combined with the 4%ish-lower gold production including Randgold among the GDX top 34 to really weaken financial performance. Overall quarterly revenues among these elite major gold miners fell 10.3% YoY to $12.8b. Operating cash flows amplified that drop.

Total OCFs among these GDX stocks collapsed 30.4% YoY to $3.7b in Q4'18. That means less capital available to finance mine expansions and new mine builds, exacerbating the production struggles. Yet overall corporate treasuries fared relatively better with a 14.6% YoY decline to total cash balances near $12.1b for all these miners. All this was understandable, but hard GAAP accounting profits were a total disaster.

Warren Buffett once famously joked about airline stocks, saying he would've done investors a huge favor if he could've shot down the Wright brothers' maiden flight in 1903 killing that whole industry before it was born. His point was the airlines never earned profits over the long-term, so they weren't worth investors' time. The major gold stocks' Q4 losses made it look like they could never earn any money either, terrible.

Last quarter the top 34 GDX gold miners, the biggest and supposedly best in the world, lost a staggering $6.0b collectively! That compared to relatively-minor total losses under $0.1b in Q4'17. At $1228 gold the major gold miners should've been earning solid profits. Yet they were hemorrhaging money in an accounting sense fast enough to make drunken sailors blush. So what the heck happened in this sector?

The problem was colossal non-cash impairment charges, gold miners writing down the value of mines on their books for a variety of reasons. These were mainly lower forecast gold prices reducing the economic reserves at those mines. While an accounting fiction, these perceived losses must still be flushed through income statements when they are believed to happen. The list of impairments disclosed in quarterlies was long.

GOLD reported about $1.1b in impairment charges in Q4'18, AEM $390m, AUY $151m, AG $168m, and the list goes on. But the writeoff king last quarter was Goldcorp, reporting an inconceivable $4.7b in impairment charges across multiple mines! Newmont's offer for Goldcorp valued its mines much lower than their carried book value, forcing GG to write off the enormous differences in what may be its last solo quarter.

Together Barrick and Goldcorp wrote off $5.8b in assets in Q4'18, 97% of the GDX top 34's total GAAP losses last quarter! This is yet another reason gold-stock mega-mergers are bad news for this entire sector. They give the managements of these giant gold miners cover for flushing away what were likely poor past decisions in allocating capital. Smaller miners focused on fewer mines seem to suffer fewer impairments.

I've extensively studied and actively traded gold-mining stocks for decades now, and these latest writeoffs seem really fishy. Major impairments are understandable in years gold plunges sharply, like 2013 when it plummeted 27.9%. That really changes the economic assumptions underlying the value of gold mines on balance sheets. But 2018 saw nothing like that, with gold slumping a trivial 1.6%. Big impairments made no sense.

While the average gold price slumped 3.8% YoY in Q4'18, that isn't even material. And in full-year terms, 2018's average gold price was actually 0.8% higher YoY. Huge writedowns on a flat gold year don't look righteous at all. Gold-mining-company managements have a serious credibility problem with gold-stock investors, and pulling stunts like this worsen it. These guys need to start managing for their shareholders.

The major gold miners' Q4'18 results were disappointing overall. Huge sky-is-falling impairments along with sharply-lower production driving much-weaker sales and operating-cash-flow generation sure made GDX look like an iffy investment at best. Offsetting that negativity somewhat was good control over their all-in sustaining costs, which only moved modestly higher and would've fallen without a couple anomalous reads.

The key takeaway here is avoid GDX. The world's leading gold-stock ETF is increasingly burdened with giant gold miners struggling too much fundamentally. Their high weightings within this ETF are certain to retard its future performance. It's far better to deploy capital in great smaller individual gold miners with superior fundamentals. Plenty of these companies are included in GDX, but have relatively-low weightings.

GDX's little-brother ETF GDXJ is another option. While advertised as a "Junior Gold Miners ETF", it is really a mid-tier gold miners ETF. It includes most of the better GDX components, with higher weightings since the largest gold miners are excluded. I wrote an entire essay in mid-January explaining why GDXJ is superior to GDX, and my next essay a week from now will delve into the GDXJ gold miners' Q4'18 results.

Back in essentially the first half of 2016, GDXJ rocketed 202.5% higher on a 29.9% gold upleg in roughly the same span! While GDX somewhat kept pace then at +151.2%, it is lagging GDXJ more and more as its weightings are more concentrated in stagnant gold mega-miners. The recent big mergers are going to worsen that investor-hostile trend. Investors should buy better individual gold stocks, or GDXJ, instead of GDX.

One of my core missions at Zeal is relentlessly studying the gold-stock world to uncover the stocks with superior fundamentals and upside potential. The trading books in both our popular weeklyand monthlynewsletters are currently full of these better gold and silver miners. Mostly added in recent months as gold stocks recovered from deep lows, our unrealized gains are already running as high as 75%+ this week!

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The bottom line is the major gold miners are still struggling fundamentally. Their production shrinkage is accelerating, pushing costs proportionally higher. That led to weaker sales and operating cash flows in Q4. And accounting profits cratered into a dark abyss on enormous and suspicious impairment charges by big gold miners involved in mega-mergers. These poor results are retarding GDX's upside potential.

But smaller mid-tier and junior gold miners with superior fundamentals are bucking this trend to enjoy big stock-price gains. They are still able to grow production off way-smaller bases, boosting their earnings and attracting investment capital. They will continue amplifying gold's uplegs, multiplying wealth for their contrarian investors. Gold-stock upside potential remains huge outside of the increasingly-problematic majors.

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Central Railway officials Friday said they stood vindicated after Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation chief Ajoy Mehta instituted an inquiry into the collapse of the FOB connected to CSMT station, which killed six persons and injured 31.

The collapse of the foot overbridge, used by thousands of railway commuters daily to get into CSMT station, had given CR a steady stream of social media brickbats since Thursday evening despite the railwaymen claiming that the FOB belonged to the civic body.

"Top BMC officials have admitted that the bridge was under the civic body's jurisdiction and maintenance. CR had not role to play in building it or maintaining it. Therefore, the question of police booking railway officials for negligence in connection with the FOB collapse does not arise," a senior CR official told PTI.

The Mumbai police has taken a case at Azad Maidan police station under section 304A (negligence) and 338 (causing grievous hurt by act endangering life or personal safety of others) of the Indian Penal Code following the incident.

Speaking on the issue, Deputy Commissioner of Police Manjunath Singe, also Mumbai police spokesperson, said, "Firstly, we will verify what responsibility the BMC has and what responsibility Central Railway has (in connection with the collapsed FOB). Based on findings, we will take a call."



The CR official, meanwhile, said it was not the time for a blame game among government agencies, adding that the railways had deployed its resources like medical staff and RPF personnel for post-collapse relief and rescue work.

He claimed railway officials were ready to prove their innocence in case they were asked to do so by police during their probe.

Earlier in the day, in a meeting chaired by BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta, it was decided that the civic body's Chief Engineer (Vigilance) would conduct an inquiry into the causes that led the Thursday incident.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Tropical cyclone Idai battered Mozambican coastal city Beira Friday, leaving half a million people virtually cut off after power lines crashed, airport shut and roads were swamped by flooding that killed 66 people nationwide.

"There is no communication with Beira. Houses and trees were destroyed and pylons downed," an official at the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) told AFP.

Authorities had to close Beira international airport after the air traffic control tower, the navigation systems and the runways were damaged by the storm.

"Unfortunately there is extreme havoc," said the official.

"Some runway lights were damaged, the navigation system is damaged, the control tower antennas and the control tower itself are all damaged.

"The runway is full of obstacles and parked aircrafts are damaged." Late on Wednesday, the national carrier LAM cancelled all flights to Beira and Quelimane, which is also on the coast, as well as to Chomoio, which is inland.

Power utility Electricidade de Mocambique said in a statement that the provinces of Manica, Sofala and parts of Inhambane have been without power since Thursday.

Officials did not report any confirmed deaths, but local Beira station STV reported a child had died in Manica province west of the city, apparently the victim of a falling roof.

"There was no tsunami-type storm but Beira and Chinde (400 kilometres, 250 miles northeast of Beira on the coast) were badly hit," added the NIDM official.

Another official, Pedro Armando Alberto Virgula, in Chinde, said a hospital, police station and seven schools there lost their roofs and four houses were destroyed.

Virgula added that efforts were under way to assess the damage caused after Idai made landfall late on Thursday.

Local officials said that this week's heavy rains claimed 66 lives, injured 111 people and displaced 17,000 people.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it would move 20 tonnes of emergency food aid to the affected areas.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had warned that the storm could pack winds of up to 190 kilometres per hour (118 miles per hour).

At least 126 people were killed by the downpour that has struck parts of Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa over the past week, officials said.

Heavy rains in neighbouring Malawi have affected almost a million people and claimed 56 lives, according to the latest government toll.

Authorities there have opened emergency relief camps where malaria and shortages of supplies have led to dire conditions, according to AFP correspondents.

Malawian President Peter Mutharika this week declared a natural disaster. Mozambique's weather service has warned that heavy rain will continue to batter Beira and surrounding areas until Sunday.

The UN warned of damage to crops, "including about 168,000 hectares (415,000 acres) of crops already impacted by flooding in early March, which will undermine food security and nutrition".

Mozambique and Malawi, two of the poorest countries in the world, are prone to deadly flooding during the rainy season and chronic drought during the dry season.

In neighbouring Zimbabwe, weather services have warned that violent thunderstorms, lightning and strong winds will be experienced in the eastern regions of the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Young and restless, anxious and ambitious, first time voters in urban India are going into this election with a clear vision for the country's future and say they expect political leaders to focus on "real issues" such as jobs, women's safety and farmer distress.

They may be disparate in their life goals and choices of career but are one in reflecting the angst of the young and their hopes for a better tomorrow, many of them saying the country's resources and energies must not be spent on things like monuments and statues.

At the cusp of their careers, many youth, from Haryana to Karnataka, also express their apprehensions about expressing themselves freely in public or on social media and want future lawmakers to change the narrative.

According to the Election Commission, 1.5 crore "young voters" in the 18-19 age group will exercise their franchise for the first time in the upcoming elections being held from April 11 to May 19.

One debutant voter is 20-year-old Kanika, an English Honours student at Delhi University's Miranda House.

"As youth, we are all concerned about jobs. The political leaders and lawmakers we elect should work on improving the employment scenario."



"But, more than that, I am concerned about my freedom of speech and expression, especially at a time when hyper-nationalism and jingoism are running high My mother tells me I should not write so freely on social media as it may hamper my job prospects," she said.

Kanika, who belongs to Haryana, is one of the tens of thousands of young middle class women who have stepped out of their homes to study. She lives in a paying guest facility in DU's North Campus and alleges that safety of women is an issue that no political party has really addressed.

"As a woman, I still feel afraid to venture out," she said.

Hundreds of kilometres away, Madhumitha Priyadarshini, pursuing a bachelor's course at the Dayananda Sagar College of Architecture in Bengaluru, has similar concerns and considers women's safety and farmer distress priority issues.

"Every vote is valuable. I know the significance of elections. When I cast my vote, the farmers' issue will be the main deciding factor for me for electing the MP from my region," said the student who belongs to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

Madhumitha said cases of trolling and backlashes have made her hesitant about expressing her opinions on public issues on social media. "I am always half-afraid... fearful at the thought that there might be repercussions."



Many of these first-timers dream about making it big in life and hope the political leaders they vote for will focus on "real issues" not "unreal ones.

"As a youth, I feel the Statue of Unity was not needed at all, given the poverty in the country and the joblessness. That same Rs 3,000 crore could have been used for other projects that would have benefited the youth and the country," said Utkarsh Choubey, referring to the 182-metre statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat.

The Patna boy who is studying computer science at the RV College of Engineering in Bengaluru said many youngsters like him are "confused".

"We don't feel inspired by any particular party. All parties have their own issues," he said. Many other students echoed his sentiment about "monumental expenditures on monumental statues".

A good job, political stability and peaceful environment are on the wish-list of students from Jammu and Kashmir.

"The socio-economic conditions of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh are different so youths have different aspirations in these three regions. However, creation of well-paying jobs, political stability, and a peaceful, harmonious existence is certainly desirable for all of us," said Jammu girl Shreya Sharma, who is studying in Miranda House.

While many students across the country concurred that the aftermath of the February 14 Pulwama terror attack, in which 40 CRPF soldiers were killed, did weigh heavy on their minds, and had become part of their conversations, many said they were afraid to discuss the issue in public.

The backlash Kashmiri students faced after the incident is also a top of the mind issue.

A Kashmiri student from Pulwama, who studies at a leading university in Delhi, said on condition of anonymity, "We all want peace and harmony, as the youth of Kashmir and of this country. For me, education and healthcare are two main factors, because jobs come only if we are educated and healthy."



According to Bengaluru-resident Bilal Shariff, "Political leaders and lawmakers must focus on real issues instead of using caste and creed planks to trigger emotional frenzy among people to garner votes."



The 19-year-old alleged that the freedom of expression has been "compromised" in many ways today, and the issue of women safety has "not been really addressed" by any political party.

Representation of truth in the media is of concern too, said some first-timers.

"The nexus between knowledge and power has always been there. But the extent of this issue definitely gets intensified during election time," Shreya said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The mighty Brahmaputra and its multi-hued canvas are the focus of an art festival here explores the source, history and imagination of the river through art installations, video installations, poetry, dance, music and conversations.

The third edition of ArtEast Festival, which began Thursday, is curated by Kishalay Bhattacharjee.

The highlight of the festival will be an illustrated talk Visions of Paradise in the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra Gorge by Ian Baker, hailed as one of the seven 'Explorers of the Millenium' by National Geographic.

The festival is a visual and historical journey from the river's source at Mansarovar in Tibet to Siang in Arunachal Pradesh, Brahmaputra in Assam, Jamuna, Padma and Meghna in Bangladesh, Bhattacharjee said.

The festival is also attempting to imagine a 'new commons' and start a conversation on Brahmaputra and Ganga.

Dancer Surjit N from Manipur is choreographing a piece for ArtEast on migration and displacement, National Geographic explorer and author Arati Kumar Rao is exhibiting her artwork and photographs along with filmmakers Parashar Baruah and Apal Singh's video installations.

Amateur artist Ashima Sharma has conceived the imagination of Brahmaputra-Ganga through an installation and poet and author Sumana Roy has curated a wall of poetry on the 'seven stages of the river'.

Lalsawmliani Tochhawng has curated the history of exploration and discovery of the river through a fascinating inlay of maps, archival material and photographs in an exhibition, Brahmaputra: Red River Tales.

ArtEast is an initiative to raise pertinent questions through intersections in art, livelihood, social justice, climate change, communication, history - past and present, issues that have a far reaching impact on our everyday lives.

An underlying focus of the festival is on art, history, livelihood, migration, documentation and discussion. It began as an attempt to try present the Northeast region and its neighbourhood from a more contemporary perspective.

The project seeks to go beyond the region and the usual traditional dance/music extravaganza that has been the norm.

Launched in 2017 by National Foundation for India (NFI), Arteast is a fringe art festival presenting emerging and leading local and international artists in all genres of the performing and visual arts.

The festival highlight has always been the traditional tea-tasting sessions with Assam tea planter Dhurbajit Chaliha to highlight the river's tea story and will demonstrate how to brew the leaves for a perfect cup.

Presented by National Foundation for India (NFI), ArtEast is organised in collaboration with India International Centre (IIC) and supported by The Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) and in partnership with New Imaginations, Jindal School of Journalism and Communication.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Delhi court Friday summoned Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and others in a defamation case filed by BJP leader Rajeev Babbar.

Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal directed Kejriwal and other accused to appear on April 30.

Babbar has sought proceeding against Kejriwal, Rajya Sabha member Sushil Kumar Gupta, MLA Manoj Kumar and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) spokesperson Atishi Malena for harming the reputation of BJP by blaming it for the deletion of the names of "voters" from the electoral rolls in Delhi.

The court had earlier taken cognisance of the defamation complaint filed against Kejriwal and others by Babbar.

"All the accused made accusations against BJP in a calculated manner with the sole intention to portray a negative image of BJP in relation to the voters belonging to certain sections of society viz. Bania, Poorvanchalis, Muslims etc. The reputation of the complainant has been damaged beyond repair," Babbar had said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The director and producers of Bengali film 'Bhobishyoter Bhoot' on Friday hailed the Supreme Court's direction to the West Bengal government to ensure that no obstruction or restraint of any kind is imposed on the screening of the political satire film in the state.

Calling it a "victory of democracy", director Anik Dutta told reporters that the support of common people, many eminent personalities from the film industry, artistes and others has made this possible.

"Yes the SC has given a direction to bring the film back to screens. We hail the order of the apex court. The SC has ensured the fundamental right of a film maker to show his film to the audiences is safeguarded, " Dutta said.

One of the producers said that after the SC order reaches the production house office in Kolkata, the city theatres, where the screening had been stopped from February 16, would be given photocopies of the order soon.

An apex court bench comprising justices D Y Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta issued notice to the West Bengal government and others seeking their response before March 25 on a plea by the film producer which alleged that the movie has been taken down from a majority of theatres at the behest of the state authorities.

"We specifically direct the Chief Secretary and the Principal Secretary, Department of Home, Government of West Bengal to ensure that no obstruction or restraint of any kind whatsoever is imposed on the viewing of the film or on the film being screened in theatres," the bench said.

The top court also directed the chief secretary, principal secretary, Department of Home and the Director General of Police of West Bengal to ensure that adequate arrangements for security are made to facilitate the screening of the film.

It also asked them to ensure that the viewers and the audience are not endangered and "there is no danger to the property of the theatres where the film is being or will be screened".

The apex court was hearing a plea filed by Indibily Creative Private Limited and others seeking a direction to the West Bengal government and its departments including the Department of Home and the Police Commissioner to refrain from causing any obstruction to the unhindered exhibition of the film.

The petition said that that the film has been taken down from a majority of theatres, and out of 48 exhibitors, only two are presently displaying the film.

The film was released on February 15.

The film was allegedly withdrawn from single-screen theatres and multiplexes a day after its release on February 16.

The story of the film revolves around a group of ghosts, including a politician, who assemble at a refugee camp and try to be relevant in the contemporary times.

The film has Sabyasachi Chakraborty, Moon Moon Sen, Kaushik Sen and, veterans Barun Chanda and Paran Bandyopadhyay in leading roles.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The DMK Friday announced the names of constituencies in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry where the party and its allies will field their candidates for the second phase of the general elections to be held on April 18.

There are 39 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and one in neighbouring Puducherry, voting for all of which will be held in a single phase.

DMK president M K Stalin released the list of constituencies allotted to the allies in presence of coalition leaders, including Tamil Nadu Congress chief K S Alagiri and MDMK's Vaiko, at the party headquarters here.

Stalin also named his party-led coalition the "Secular Progressive Alliance."



Addressing a press conference, Stalin said the DMK's 20 seats include Chennai (North), Chennai (South), Chennai (Central), Tuticorin and Pollachi.

Hoping to extend its 2016 electoral success to the parliamentary polls also, the main opposition party in Tamil Nadu opted to field its candidates in 20 seats across the state including the three in Chennai where it has a sizeable number of MLAs.

Pollachi, a relatively quiet town near Coimbatore, is in the following a sexual harassment case which has created an outrage across the state.

The DMK's other seats are: Sriperumbudur, Kancheepram (SC), Arakkonam, Vellore, Dharmapuri, Tiruvannamalai, Kallakurichi, Salem, Nilgiris (SC), Dindigul, Cuddalore, Mayiladuthurai, Thanjavur, Thenkasi (SC) and Tirunelveli.

The Congress, which has been allotted the lion's share of seats (10) among the allies, will contest from nine constituencies in Tamil Nadu, and the lone seat in Puducherry.

It will also field its nominees in Tiruvallore (SC), Krishnagiri, Karur, Theni, Virudunagar and Kanniyakumari, Sivaganga, Tiruchirappally and Arani seats, Stalin said.

The CPI(M) has been allotted Coimbatore and Madurai seats, while the CPI will fight from Tirupur and Nagapattinam, a reserved constituency.

The pro-Dalit VCK has been given Villupuram and Chidambaram, both reserved segments. The Vaiko-led MDMK has been allotted the Erode constituency.

Recalling the seat-sharing agreement with Vaiko, the DMK chief said the MDMK will also be given a Rajya Sabha seat at an appropriate time.

The Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) and the Kongunadu Makkal Desia Katchi (KMDK) will field their nominees from Ramanathapuram and Namakkal, respectively, while the India Jananayaga Katchi (IJK) has been allotted Perambalur seats, he said.

Stalin said in the last couple of years, the coalition constituents had been taking forward various protests and struggles against the "follies" of the BJP-led government at the Centre and the ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu.

That friendship has now transformed into an alliance, he said, adding the coalition partners came together on ideology and the partnership was not based on any 'bargain.'



He claimed that the NDA in the state, headed by his party's archrival the AIADMK, will lose the polls and that coalition led by his party will secure a "grand victory."To a question, he said the DMK's candidate list will be announced soon.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The opposition DMK Friday announced the names of the constituencies the party and its allies will contest from in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry in the April 18 Lok Sabha elections.

DMK president MK Stalin released the list of constituencies allotted to the allies in the presence of coalition leaders, including TNCC chief KS Alagiri and MDMK's Vaiko, at the party headquarters here.

Stalin also described his party-led coalition as the "Secular Progressive Alliance."



There are 39 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and one in neighbouring Puducherry.

Addressing a press conference, Stalin said the DMK's 20 seats will include Chennai (North), Chennai (South), Chennai (Central), Tuticorin and Pollachi among others.

The Congress, which has been allotted the lion's share of seats among the allies, will contest from nine seats in the state, including Sivaganga, Tiruchirappally and Arani.

The national party will also fight from the lone seat in neighbouring Puducherry.

The CPI(M) has been allotted Coimbatore and Madurai, while the CPI will fight from Tirupur and Nagapattinam, a reserved constituency.

The pro-Dalit VCK has been given Villupuram and Chidambaram (SC) segments.

The Vaiko-led MDMK has been allotted the Erode constituency.

The IUML and The KMDK will field their nominees from Ramanathapuram and Namakkal, respectively, while the IJK has been allotted Perambalur, Stalin said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Dutch police have arrested two men in Amsterdam with suspected links to weapons used in deadly attacks in Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people, prosecutors said Friday.

"Police arrested two men on Tuesday in Amsterdam in an investigation into the origin of weapons used by Islamic State terrorists in the attacks in Paris in 2015," a statement said.

The two men, aged 29 and 31, "are suspected of in some way being involved in the delivery of weapons" to carry out France's worst terror attacks on November 13 that year.

Armed jihadists gunned down at the Bataclan concert hall and at several bars and restaurants around the French capital and at the Stade de France stadium.

They used automatic weapons including AK-47 assault rifles and explosives in the attacks.

"Some members of a jihadist suicide cell were possibly in the Netherlands in 2015 to collect the weapons," the Dutch public prosecution service said.

The Islamic State group, based in Syria and Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attacks, which were allegedly coordinated from Brussels.

The Dutch authorities, working together with their French and Belgian counterparts tracked down the two men. In all, police are looking for some 15 suspects in the case.

Police raided the suspect's homes, confiscating computers, documents, data carriers and mobile phones.

The 29-year-old suspect briefly appeared before a judge on Friday in connection with the case and was remanded in custody for two weeks under maximum security conditions.

Prosecutors however said "the second suspect's health does not allow him to be detained." "Because there was no other option, the man had to be released while the result of the investigation is awaited.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Deputy Election Commissioner Sudip Jain would visit Tripura on Sunday to review poll-preparedness, state Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Sriram Taranikanti said Friday.

Jain would hold meetings with officials of the state election department and top police officers.

"If time permits, he would also meet representatives of political parties," Taranikanti told PTI.

Asked about the requirement of central forces for the election, the CEO said, "We are not divulging now our demand for central security forces and how much we are getting from the Centre. May be we would be able to let you know it after a few days."



He said adequate number of forces would be deployed in the state and some of them are scheduled to arrive here Friday.

Elections for the two Lok Sabha seats of Tripura would be held on April 11 and 18.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Election Commission (EC) on Friday deployed seven companies of central para-military forces in as many districts of West Bengal, ahead of the seven-phase Lok Sabha elections beginning April 11.

Three more companies will also move in by late this evening for their deployment in South 24-Parganas district and Kolkata, Additional Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Basu said.

The seven companies have been deployed in the districts of North Dinajpur, Malda, Murshidabad, Birbhum, East Midnapore, West Midnapore and North 24-Parganas.

Personnel of these 10 companies of the BSF would carry out route marches in "certain vulnerable pockets" to instill confidence among the voters.

However, the number of vulnerable pockets, which are decided on several factors including past incidents of violence, is still being assessed, Basu said.

He said state Chief Electoral Officer Aariz Aftab and state government officials Friday reviewed poll preparedness through video conference.

The EC has already completed checking of EVMs in 11 out of 23 districts in the state, Basu said adding that the availability of the polling personnel was sufficient.

Deputy Election Commissioner Sudeep Jain will meet representatives of all recognised political parties of the state on Saturday.

Jain will also hold a meeting with district election officers, superintendents of police and police commissioners to review the poll-preparedness.

He will also meet other central government officials for election purpose.

Basu said the EC's 'cVIGIL' app, through which voters can lodge any poll-related complaints to the EC, has so far registered 510 complaints of violation of model code of conduct in the state and they were being looked into.

The complaints received from the portals of the ECI and Citizens at National Grievance Services (NGS) are 184 and 232 respectively and they were mainly on defacement issues.

"Most of these complaints are resolved," Basu said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Election Commission (EC) told the Bombay High Court on Friday that it is willing to prohibit any political advertisements on social media 48 hours before polling day, provided the high court issues such orders.

The EC also told a bench of Chief Justice Naresh Patil and Justice N M Jamdar that it was going to ensure implementation of all its previous notifications regulating political advertisements on social media, particularly around the time of elections.

The statement was made by the EC's counsel Pradeep Rajagopal.

He was responding to a query posed by the court on a previous hearing, asking why the EC was hesitant to issue specific directions prohibiting political advertisements on social media 48 hours before an election day.

Rajagopal submitted that the EC was aware that specific rules were required to govern advertisements on social media ahead of elections and that it was going to implement all safeguards to ensure that there were no obstructions to free and fair elections in the country.

"The EC will implement directions passed by it (sic) from time to time with respect to social media intermediaries," Rajagopal said.

"It will also issue directions keeping in view the submissions made by other parties in the PIL on the 48-hour period. If this court passes orders on prohibitory regulations for social media during this 48 hour period, it will implement them," he said.

The court was hearing a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by lawyer Sagar Suryavanshi seeking directions to the Election Commission to regulate fake news in the form of paid political ads on social media.

The PIL had also urged the court to direct the EC to prohibit all persons, whether politicians or private individuals, from posting advertisements related to or elections, or paid political content on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter 48 hours before election day.

On the previous hearing, Facebook had told the court that it had introduced strict "pre-verification processes" for all political ads and paid content of "national interest" on their websites in India ahead of the 2019 general elections.

The new system ensures that only bonafide individuals, who are citizens of India, and political organisations based in the country can place political ads.

Twitter and YouTube had told the bench that they already only permitted such political ads that had been verified by the EC.

The social media sites, however, told the court that they could not voluntarily impose a 48-hour ban as sought by the petitioner.

The counsels for Facebook, Google and YouTube said that they could prohibit display of political ads on their websites 48 hours before polling day, if they were directed by the EC to do so.

The Representation of the People's Act already prohibits political campaigning 48 hours before polling day and a notification of the EC regulating ads on TV and print media prohibits publication of political ads 48 hours before polling day.

The court, therefore, asked why the Election Commission could not formulate a similar direction for political ads on social media.

The HC is likely to take up the matter for further hearing on Monday.
IPO-bound Embassy REIT has allotted 5.81 crore shares in the upper band of Rs 300 per unit, aggregating to Rs 1,743 crore, as part of the anchor investor allotment.

The REIT (real estate investment trust) of Embassy Office Parks, the joint venture firm of Blackstone and Embassy, is India's first such investment trust.

Among the 59 anchor investors, Smallcap World Fund has been allotted 42.8 lakh shares, Fidelity Funds - Asian Special Situations Fund 44.16 lakh shares, Signature High Income Fund 29.05 lakh shares, and Prusik Umbrella Ucitis Fund 23.2 lakh shares.

The initial issue of REIT will open on March 18 with a price band of Rs 299-300 per unit and will close on March 20. The total issue size is 12,95,56,000 units.

The IPO is expected to raise up to Rs 4,750 crore, while it has already received Rs 876-crore commitment from strategic investors.

Embassy Office Parks, a leading player in commercial real estate, has put 33 million sq ft of office and hospitality assets under its REIT, comprising of seven business parks and four city-centric buildings spread across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune and Noida.

REIT is an investment tool that owns and operates rent-yielding real estate assets. It allows individual investors to make investment in this platform and earn income.

The Sebi had notified REIT's regulations in 2014, allowing setting up and listing of such trusts, which are popular in some advanced markets.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday condemned the deadly attack on two mosques in New Zealand, saying it illustrated the growing hostility towards Islam "idly" watched by the world.

The attacks on the Christchurch mosques left at least 49 dead, with one gunman -- identified as an Australian extremist -- apparently livestreaming the assault and publishing a manifesto online.

"With this attack, hostility towards Islam, that the world has been idly watching and even encouraging for some time, has gone beyond individual harassment to reach the level of mass killing," Erdogan said at the funeral of a former Turkish minister.

Turkish media reported the manifesto contained specific references to Turkey and ridding the famed Hagia Sophia in Istanbul of its minarets. Now a museum, the building was once a church before being turned into a mosque during the Ottoman empire.

"It is clear that the understanding represented by the killer that also targets our country, our people and myself, has started to take over Western societies like a cancer," Erdogan said.

The Turkish leader, who often criticises Islamophobic attitudes, called for the West to act to prevent similar attacks.

"If measures are not taken right away, of other disasters will follow this one... I am calling on the world, in particular the West, to take quick measures," he said.

After Friday prayers, dozens of people gathered outside Istanbul's Fatih Mosque -- one of the city's main mosques -- chanting condemnation of the attack and waving signs saying "Stop global terrorism" and "Crusader Savagery in New Zealand".

Erdogan had earlier condemned the attack on Twitter: "May Allah have mercy on the victims and grant a speedy recovery to the wounded." Speaking in Brussels, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also condemned the killing, blaming "irresponsible politicians who incite hatred against Muslims and propagate xenophobia".

"There are lessons that everybody needs to learn from this attack, especially in the EU, in the members of the EU," he said after meeting with EU officials.

"Hate language used against the Muslims should not be considered as a part of freedom of expression.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A group of European nations is urging Russia not to abandon a nuclear weapons treaty with the United States.

Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are also calling for new arms control agreements to address the rising power of China and other nations.

The US gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty a month ago, citing Russian violations.

The European countries opened an arms control conference in Berlin on Friday urging Moscow "to return to complete and verifiable compliance" to save the treaty.

But German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says it's also time for broader treaties, as nuclear weapons proliferate to countries such as China, North Korea, India and Pakistan.

He says treaties also need to address new technologies, such as drones and cyberattacks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress leader Devendra Chourasia, who had switched over from the BSP a few days ago, was killed and his son critically injured Friday in an attack by a group of people near here in Madhya Pradesh, police said.

Seven persons, including the husband of the sitting BSP MLA from Patharia seat in Damoh district, Ram Bai, were booked in the case, a senior police official said.

Chourasia and his son Somesh were attacked in Hata town in the district by the group whose members were armed with iron rods and wooden sticks, he said.

The incident led to tension in Hata where shops were shut as soon as the of his death spread, the official said.

Chourasia and his son were injured in the attack and rushed to Jabalpur in serious condition, but the 54-year-old politician died before reaching hospital, said Damoh district Superintendent of Police Raghvendra Singh Belvanshi.

His son Somesh Chourasia was seriously injured, the SP said.

As tension gripped the town, senior police officials and district collector Neeraj Kumar Singh reached the spot and tried to pacify agitating people.

Police have registered a case under relevant sections of the IPC against seven persons, including Govind Singh (the husband of MLA Ram Bai), his relatives and associates, said Belvanshi.

They were booked on charges like murder, attempt to murder, criminal intimidation and voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means, among others, the SP said.

The accused persons will be arrested soon, he said, adding heavy police force was deployed in the town to main law and order.

Chourasia, along with a large number of supporters, had joined the Congress in the presence of Chief Minister Kamal Nath on March 12, a party leader said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Materials meant for making improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were seized from a village in Bihar's Jehanabad district, police said Friday.

Acting on a tip off, personnel of the police and the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) raided Daulatpur village under Vishnuganj police station limits Thursday night and dug out the explosive materials from beneath the ground.

The materials included two gelatin sticks, 1 kg of sulphur, two detonators, 21 empty cartridges, electric wire, two steel cans, 600 grams of broken glass and 1 kg of small rocks, Jehanabad Superintendent of Police Manish Kumar said.

The explosive materials were detected during search with metal detectors by the bomb disposal squad of the SSB, he said.

No one has been arrested so far in this connection.

Police sources said the materials could belong to Naxalites.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
National carrier Air New Zealand has canceled at least 17 flights in and out of Christchurch, saying it couldn't screen customers and their baggage following deadly shootings at two mosques.

The airline said some smaller planes travelling on regional routes were canceled while larger jet planes would continue landing and taking off due to security screening processes already in place.

Typically, passengers on smaller turboprop aircraft traveling to or from Christchurch don't go through security screening and are able to walk right onto the plane.

Air New Zealand said the safety of its customers and employees was paramount and apologized for the inconvenience. Police say at least 49 people were killed in the shootings during Friday prayers at the mosques.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a strong show of support to India, France on Friday imposed financial sanctions on Pakistan-based Masood Azhar and said it will work with its European partners for putting the JeM chief's name on the EU list of persons and entities involved in terrorist acts.

The French announcement came two days after a bid, moved by it along with the US and the UK at the UN Security Council to designate the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief as a global terrorist, was blocked by China which put a technical hold. India was also a party to the proposal.

"A deadly attack took place in Pulwama on February 14, 2019, claiming over 40 victims from the Indian police forces. The JeM, which the United Nations has deemed to be a terrorist organisation since 2001, has claimed responsibility for this attack," said a joint statement by the French ministries of the interior, economy and finance, and foreign affairs.

"France has always been and always will be by India's side in the fight against terrorism," it said.

Reacting to the French decision, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said, "We welcome the decision taken by France to sanction Masood Azhar, Chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based & UN proscribed terrorist organisation; and responsible for the Pulwama terrorist attack."



The statement from the French ministries said the country has "decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets" in application of the Monetary and Financial Code.

A joint decree of the ministries of the interior, economy and finance was published on Friday in the Official Gazette, it said.

"We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree," the statement added.

Later, the MEA said ?French Foreign Minister Le Drian had a telephonic conversation with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and informed her about the action taken by France to sanction Azhar.

"France has sanctioned Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets. French Foreign Minister also informed that France has raised this issue with the European Union," it said.

China on Wednesday for a fourth time blocked the move for listing Azhar as a global terrorist.

The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UNSC was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a suicide bomber of the JeM killed 40 CRPF soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama.

The Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee members had 10 working days to raise any objections to the proposal. Just before the deadline, China put a "technical hold" on the proposal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a significant development, France, which had made a fresh bid at the UN to get Masood Azhar banned, has decided to impose financial sanctions on the JeM chief, asserting that it has always been by India's side in the fight against terrorism.

France along with the US and the UK had moved a proposal in the UN Security Council to designate the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed chief as a "global terrorist".

However, the bid was blocked by China which put a technical hold on the proposal.

"A deadly attack took place in Pulwama on February 14, 2019, claiming over 40 victims from the Indian police forces. The Jaish-e-Mohammed, which the United Nations has deemed to be a terrorist organisation since 2001, has claimed responsibility for this attack," said a joint statement by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the French Ministry of the Interior.

"France has always been and always will be by India's side in the fight against terrorism," it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


Half Year Report

Brisbane, Mar 15, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Your directors present their report on NOVONIX Limited ( ASX:NVX ) (referred to hereafter as the 'consolidated entity') for the half-year ended 31 December 2018.HALF-YEAR HIGHLIGHTS- PUREgraphite due diligence undertaken ahead of ownership increase to 75% in January 2019.- Completed manufacturing for first suite of commercial furnaces (acceptance January 2019)- Received first group of commercial milling equipment, and ordered balance of initial plant- Planned product trials with multiple global battery makers (trials commenced January 2019)- Continued product trials in Tennessee facility with US-based beachhead customers- Evaluated and short-listed industrial properties suitable for scaling the business above 1,000tpa- Commissioned the NOVONIX pilot battery cell manufacturing facility in Halifax, Canada- Commenced NOVONIX's internal electrolyte materials R&D program in Halifax- Continued growth in forward sales for BTS equipment and services, aiming for 30%+ YOY- R&D partnership signed with Dalhousie University and filed first patent application in December 2018- Filed US provisional patent for Silicon Infused Graphite for anode material (publication pending)- Awarded C$487,693 R&D support grant from Government of Canada (NRC IRAP)- Andrew Liveris AO formally appointed to the NVX Board in July 2018- A$5.5m raised through the issue of convertible loan notes in July 2018 to fund working capital as the business transitions into production- A$10.9m funding arranged for exercise of PUREgraphite call option (completed January 2019)To view the full report, please visit:About NOVONIX Ltd

NOVONIX Ltd (ASX:NVX) (FRA:GC3) (OTCMKTS:NVNXF) is an integrated developer and supplier of high-performance materials, equipment and services for the global lithium-ion battery industry with operations in the USA and Canada and sales in more than 14 countries. NOVONIX's mission is to support the global deployment of lithium-ion battery technologies for a cleaner energy future.


Germany on Friday said the ball remained in Britain's court to propose a viable exit plan from the European Union as the Brexit deadline looms.

Ahead of a crunch summit next week, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said Berlin welcomed the British parliament's vote on Wednesday against a no-deal Brexit.

"Nevertheless it is clear that the next steps, the next proposal on how to move forward must come from Britain," he told reporters. Seibert stressed it was in "no one's interest" for London to crash out of the EU on March 29 without an agreement on the future relationship with the bloc. He noted that the EU summit on March 21-22 in Brussels "will of course deal with the (Brexit) issue intensively".

But after British MPs on Thursday voted to ask the EU to delay Brexit, Seibert said any such request would have to be formally submitted to the other 27 member states, debated and decided on.

"I do not want to pre-empt those talks," he said.

EU leaders have repeatedly said they would consider any request from London.

But they also want to know how long the extension would be -- and what it would be used for -- before they gather in Brussels.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The BJP Jharkhand unit Friday authorised state president Laxman Gilua, Chief Minister Raghubar Das and Organisational secretary Dharampal Singh to look into names of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls before sending it to party's central election committee.

A party press statement quoting state units general secretary Dipak Prakash, the state election committee discussed the election strategy to win all the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

The meeting discussed on probable candidates for the 13 constituencies before authorizing Gilua, Das and Singh to look into the names before sending them to the partys central election committee.

The BJP has allotted one seat to its ally Ajsu party, which was announced by BJP General Secretary Bhupendra Yadav after the BJP parliamentary board meeting on March 8 in Delhi.

Yadav announced a tie-up with Ajsu party, which is already a partner in the BJP-led government in the state.

Yadav said the BJP will contest 13 of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the state and the Ajsu party one.

The BJP had contested all the 14 seats in the 2014 general elections and won 12 seats.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
/ -- Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Inc., USA (Glenmark) has been granted final approval by the United States Food & Drug Administration (U.S. FDA) for Clindamycin and Benzoyl Peroxide Gel, 1%|5%, a generic version of BenzaClin1 Gel, 1%|5%, of Valeant Bermuda.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/451507/PRNE_Glenmark_Logo.jpg )



According to IQVIA sales data for the 12 month period ending January 2019, the BenzaClin Gel, 1%|5% market2 achieved annual sales of approximately $99.4 million*.

Glenmark's current portfolio consists of 151 products authorized for distribution in the U.S. marketplace and 53 ANDA's pending approval with the U.S. FDA. In addition to these internal filings, Glenmark continues to identify and explore external development partnerships to supplement and accelerate the growth of its existing pipeline and portfolio.

1All brand names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

2Market includes brand and all available therapeutic equivalents



*IQVIATM National Sales Perspectives: Retail & Non-Retail, January 2019About Glenmark PharmaceuticalsGlenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (GPL) is a research-driven, global, integrated pharmaceutical organization. It is ranked among the top 75 Pharma & Biotech companies of the world in terms of revenue (SCRIP 100 Rankings published in the year 2018). Glenmark is a leading player in the discovery of new molecules both NCEs (new chemical entity) and NBEs (new biological entity). Glenmark has several molecules in various stages of clinical development and is focused in the areas of oncology, immunology and pain.

The company has a significant presence in the branded generics markets across emerging economies including India. Glenmark has 16 manufacturing facilities across five countries and has six R&D centers. The Generics business of Glenmark services the requirements of the US and Western European markets. The API business sells its products in over 80 countries, including the US, various countries in the EU, South America and India.

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Students in New Zealand launched a global wave of protests on Friday aimed at spurring world leaders into acting on climate change for the sake of future generations.

Hundreds gathered in Wellington carrying placards reading "Time's Melting Away" and "Act Now or Swim", part of a grassroots movement planning to stage 1,000 demonstrations in more than 100 countries on Friday.

The international student strike is set to see classrooms empty in cities across the globe, from Boston to Bogota, Dhaka to Durban and Lagos to London.

"This is young people taking the reins and realising that they do have people power, that's really awesome," Abigail O'Regan, 20, told AFP.

The protests were inspired by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who camped out in front of parliament in Stockholm last year to demand action from world leaders on global warming.

"We are only seeing the beginning," tweeted Thunberg, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism.

"I think that change is on the horizon and the people will stand up for their future." Some teachers and political leaders have tried to cajole or threaten students -- efforts that have mostly backfired.

In New Zealand, schools have warned absent students will be marked as truants, with Secondary Principals Association president Michael Williams saying their impact on climate change will be "probably zero".

"We're concerned that students are wasting good learning time," he said.

But the budding activists have received encouragement from Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern, who said it was important for the young generation to send a message.

"Don't underestimate the power of your voice," the 38-year-old leader told students at parliament this week.

"Too often we make this assessment that to make an impact we have to be of voting age. That is not the case."



Wellington university student Josie Mason, 20, said she was "excited by the fact that youth are being heard and are making a stand right now." "They call our generation the 'slacktivists' because it's really easy to say you're going to an event on a Facebook page or like something but not really do anything," she said.

Despite 30 years of warnings about dire impacts, carbon dioxide emissions hit record levels in 2017 and again last year.

Loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at current rates, scientists agree, will eventually lead to an unlivable planet.

"On climate change, we have to acknowledge that we have failed," Thunberg told the global ruling class in Davos in January.

The 2015 Paris climate treaty calls for capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius.

The planet is currently on track to heat up by double that figure.

The UN's climate science panel warned in October that only a wholesale transformation of the global economy and consumer habits could forestall climate catastrophe.

As she prepared to march through central Wellington to parliament, O'Regan said she was concerned that by the time she was raising a family the plant would be close to unlivable.

"I feel a lot of stress and anxiety about the climate situation, and fear for my future," she said.

"I have genuine fear that my future will not be what it should be.

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Sluggish demand from local jewellers pulled down gold prices by Rs 260 to Rs 33,110 per 10 gram in the national capital on Friday, All India Sarafa Association said.

Silver too dropped Rs 130 to Rs 39,170 per kg on low offtake by industrial units and coin makers.

Traders said gold faltered as buying by local jewellers



saw a dip, though a positive trend overseas capped the fall.

Globally, gold was trading higher at USD 1,303.18 per ounce while silver held steady at USD 15.35 an ounce in New York.

In the national capital, gold of 99.9 per cent and 99.5 per cent purity shed Rs 260 to Rs 33,110 and Rs 32,940 per 10 gram, respectively.

Sovereign gold, however, remained flat at Rs 26,400 per eight gram.

Silver ready saw a fall of Rs 130 to Rs 39,170 per kg and weekly-based delivery shed Rs 319 to Rs 38,342 per kg.

Price for a lot of 100 silver coins remained unchanged at Rs 80,000 for purchase and Rs 81,000 for sale.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Google is partnering with China, where the state-owned companies have a "direct pipeline" with the military, but the Internet search engine giant has shown a lack of willingness to work with the US Department of Defence, top Pentagon officials have told American lawmakers.

Acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan and General Joseph Dunford, chairman joint chiefs of staff, said this during a Congressional hearing as lawmakers expressed concern over increasing Chinese coerciveness with American companies.

"Correct," Shanahan said when Senator Josh Hawley said Google is doing business in China in a way that benefits US's Chinese competitors.

"The interesting thing and this is why China is this is such an important issue for our country. The fusion of commercial business with military is significant. USD 5 trillion of their economy is state-owned enterprises," he said.

"So, the technology that is developed in the civil world transfers to the military world. It's a direct pipeline. Not only is there a transfer, there's also systemic theft of US technology that facilitates even faster development of emerging technology," the acting defence secretary said.

Shanahan clarified that Google hasn't refused to work with the Department of Defence. "But there is a lack of willingness to support DOD programme," he said. Gen Dunford agreed.

"The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military, and I've been very public on this issue, as well," he said.

"In fact, the way I described it to our industry partners is, look, we're the good guys and the values that we represent, and the system that we represent is the one that will allow and has allowed you to thrive. And that's the way I've characterized it," Gen Dunford said.

"We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit. Frankly, maybe not a full characterisation of the way it really is. It's more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military, he said.

In his opening statement, Shanahan said China's defence spending approaches that of the United States, when one takes into account purchasing power and the portion of US budget going to military pay and benefits.

That, coupled with China's organised approach to steal foreign technology, has allowed China to modernize its missile, space, and cyber capabilities, as well as project power far beyond its borders," he said.

I think we've been ignoring the (China) problem too long, Shanahan said in response to a question.

The California-based Internet giant has long sought to expand in China, home of a "Great Firewall". It previously said it will keep looking for opportunities to invest in China.

But it's not clear if that would mean a return of Google Search to China after its exit over eight years ago following a showdown with the Chinese government over censorship.

The comments from top Pentagon officials on Thursday came amid a trade war simmering between the US and China.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said he is not in a rush to enter into a trade deal with China, the negotiations for which has been undergoing since December last year.

"I think things are going along very well. We'll just see what the date is. I'm in no rush. I want the deal to be right, much more importantly. Somebody said I'm in a rush. I'm not in a rush at all," Trump told reporters at the White House.

Media reports said Chinese President Xi Jinping has postponed his trip to the US president's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida later this month.

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Former Prime Minister and JDS supremo H D Deve Gowda Friday requested Congress chief Rahul Gandhi to cool the reported resentment of some partyMLAs over the coalition government's seat-sharing arrangment to avoid politicalacrimony ahead of the coming Lok Sabha elections.

Gowda also said that he had not made up his mind on contesting from North Bengaluru.

"I am totally satisfied with the seat-sharingarrangement between our party and the Congress. We haddemanded 10 seats, but got eight, considering that Congressis a major party.

All said and done, I do not want to create any political tension between our parties. Itold Rahul Gandhi to move ahead with whatever seat-sharingarrangments we have arrived at.

There is hardly any time leftfor us. Our main aim is to defeat BJP," he told PTI in atelephonic interview from Arunachal Pradesh.

The coalition partners on Wednesday had announced that the JDS would contest from eight Lok Sabha constituencies and Congress from remaining 20 constituencies in Karnataka.

The announcement has reportedly sparked resentment among some Congress leaders, who have demanded cancellation of the seat sharing arrangement on the grounds it was impractical and detrimental to the coalition's electoral prospects.

Gowda said the coalition partners would overcome these 'minor hiccups' on or before the March 19 coordination committee meeting andhoped workers of both parties would realise BJP is their main opponent.

The March 19 meeting would be attended by Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy, Coordination CommitteeChairman Siddaramaiah, KPCC President Dinesh Gundu Rao andDeputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara, he said.

The meeting would try to find solutions to minor problems, including the resentment in Congress aspirants and later chalkout dates and places of public rallies,Gowda said.

Asked if he was keen on contesting from NorthBengaluru, Gowda said "I have honestly not made up my mind.

Last night Dinesh Gundu Rao requested me to fight from North Bengaluru and promised all help in the election.

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The Delhi High Court Friday directed ED to clarify the status of purported Red Corner Notice (RCN) issued against arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari, who has sought the quashing of a money laundering case against him.

While ED submitted in an affidavit that Bhandari was a fugitive, proclaimed absconder and evading the process of law, his counsel said the probe agency has concealed information from the court which last July quashed an order declaring his client as a proclaimed offender.

Justice Mukta Gupta asked Enforcement Directorate to file an affidavit clarifying the facts, its stand and the status of the RCN. The court listed the matter for further hearing on April 1.

Bhandari and his wife Sonia Bhandari have move separate pleas seeking quashing of the money laundering case lodged against them by ED in February 2017.

Bhandari, who is also an accused in a 2016 case under the Official Secrets Act relating to the recovery of confidential documents of the Ministry of Defence from his residence during an Income Tax raid in 2016, was declared a proclaimed offender by a trial court here in January last year.

He is also facing prosecution under provisions of the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015.

In an affidavit filed in response to Bhandari's plea for quashing the case under Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), ED has said: "It is relevant to note that when the petitioner fled India, there already existed a Look Out Circular (LOC) against him as his presence was needed by various law enforcement agencies."



It added that because of the existence of LOC, Bhandari could not have travelled by air or sea and, therefore, he is believed to have fled by road through Indo-nepal Border.

"...a RCN has been issued by the Interpol declaring the petitioner as a fugitive wanted for prosecution," ED said in the affidavit filed through central government standing counsel Amit Mahajan. The RCN was issued on October 16, 2017.

ED raised the preliminary objection on Bhandari's petition and urged the court to first decide whether a person against whom RCN is issued, a declared absconder and evading process of law here, can be allowed to invoke the jurisdiction of the court.

Can such a person have the luxury of wasting the time of constitutional courts when large number of law abiding citizens are waiting justice, it said.

Bhandari, in an affidavit notarised in London, claimed that the ED's response was "motivated" and "based on incorrect and misleading information" and ought to be rejected by the court.

His counsel annexed media reports with the affidavit showing that the purported RCN issued against him was not in existence and in any case the documents enclosed by the agency showed they cannot be used in any proceedings.

The high court, in its July 2018 decision, set aside the order declaring Bhandari a proclaimed offender in the OSA case as he was not an accused under the IPC.

It had said this would not affect the status of Bhandari as a "proclaimed person" and would be without prejudice to the action initiated against him to appear in terms of the proclamation issued.

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Observing that the law was applicable to individuals as well as government establishments like TASMAC, the Madras High Court Friday ordered the immediate closure of 110 state-owned liquor shops across Tamil Nadu that were functioning from unauthorised buildings.

A division bench of Justices S Manikumar and Subramonium Prasad passed the order on a PIL by Nallaswamy seeking to close a Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation Limited (TASMAC) shop opened in an agricultural land in Erode district.

It also directed the authorities concerned to produce planning permission of 2,728 such shops located in village panchayats.

Noting that TASMAC opened shops in buildings, where there was no planning permission, solely for the purpose of revenue, the court said when an individual has to follow the provisions of the Tamil Nadu Town and Country Planning Act,it cannot be breached or diluted by the company.

Law is applicable to both, it said.

The advocate general made a submission that TASMAC would collect the planning permission from the land owners of the building within three weeks' time.

To this, the bench said it was not inclined to accept the request.

Authorities could have very well ascertained from the Town and Country Planning authorities/local bodies, where the buildings are located and not necessarily from the building owners, the judges said.

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The Patna High Court set aside the criminal proceedings initiated against Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar by a lower court in a 28-year-old murder case on Friday.

Justice A Amanullah passed the order on an application moved by Kumar, who heads the Janata Dal (United).

Kumar had challenged the proceedings initiated against him by the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM), Barh, who took cognizance of an FIR lodged at the Pandarak police station in Patna district.

In the FIR lodged on November 16, 1991, Kumar, who was then the Samata Party MP from Barh, was named as an accused, along with others, for the killing of one Sitaram Singh, who was killed during the Lok Sabha polls that year.

The ACJM, Barh had initiated criminal proceedings against Kumar in 2009, which was challenged by the chief minister before the Patna High Court the same year.

Justice Amanullah, who had reserved his order on the petition on January 31, quashed the proceedings on Friday.

It comes as a relief to the chief minister with the opposition parties, especially the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), targeting him over his name figuring in the murder case.

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Half Yearly Report

Sydney, Mar 15, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Your directors submit the interim financial report of the consolidated entity consisting of Hastings Technology Metals Ltd ( ASX:HAS ) (the "Company") and the entities it controlled during the period (the "Group") for the half year ended 31 December 2018.The following summary of events were significant milestones in the state of affairs of the Group during the year:- Signing of an Off-Take Contract for the supply of mixed rare earths carbonate with Sky Rock Rare Earth New Materials Co Ltd;- Increase in Yangibana JORC 2012 resources to 21 million tonnes;- Signing of the Design and Supply Contract for the Acid Bake Kiln with FLSmidth Pty Ltd;- EPA releases environmental review for public consultation- Raising $13.97 million (before costs) through the issue of 66,563,008 shares at 21 cents each;- Major aeromagnetic target identified at Yangibana; and- Signing of a Project Finance Mandate with KfW IPEX-Bank.To view the full report, please visit:About Hastings Technology Metals Ltd

Hastings Technology Metals Ltd (ASX:HAS) (FRA:5AM) is advancing its Yangibana Rare Earths Project in the Upper Gascoyne Region of Western Australia towards production. The proposed beneficiation and hydro metallurgy processing plant will treat rare earths deposits, predominantly monazite, hosting high neodymium and praseodymium contents to produce a mixed rare earths carbonate that will be further refined into individual rare earth oxides at processing plants overseas.

Neodymium and praseodymium are vital components in the manufacture of permanent magnets which is used in a wide and expanding range of advanced and high-tech products including electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, medical applications and others. Hastings aims to become the next significant producer of neodymium and praseodymium outside of China.

Hastings holds 100% interest in the most significant deposits within the overall project, and 70% interest in additional deposits that will be developed at a later date, all held under Mining Leases. Numerous prospects have been identified warranting detailed exploration to further extend the life of the project.

Brockman Project

The Brockman deposit, near Halls Creek in Western Australia, contains JORC Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources, estimated using the guidelines of JORC Code (2012 Edition).

The Company is also progressing a Mining Lease application over the Brockman Rare Earths and Rare Metals Project.

Hastings aims to capitalise on the strong demand for critical rare earths created by the expanding demand for new technology products.
The Bombay High Court Friday said it would take up for hearing on March 22 a petition on the issue of "poor" condition of foot overbridges in the metropolis.

One of the petitioners Pradeep Bhalekar's advocate Nitin Satpute approached the high court Friday seeking urgent hearing of the plea a day after a foot overbridge near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station in south Mumbai collapsed killing six people and injuring 31 others.

A division bench of Justice Ranjit More and Justice Bharati Dangre agreed to hear the matter on March 22.

Bhalekar had filed the petition in September 2017 after a stampede on a congested foot overbridges in Elphinstone Road suburban railway station (now renamed Prabhadevi) claimed 31 lives.

In his plea, Bhalekar had sought a direction to the authorities concerned to constitute a special committee to conduct survey of all foot overbridges in the city and carry out repair works if they are found in dilapidated or dangerous condition.

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The Kolkata Police (KP) has seized 700 gm heroin worth Rs 40 lakh from the city's Chitpur area and arrested a person for possessing the contraband, a senior police officer said Friday.

The person, identified as Adut Sheikh, is a resident of Sagardighi in Murshidabad district.

He was intercepted near Dum Dum Road under the jurisdiction of Chitpur police station on Thursday night when he was waiting for someone.

The heroin was seized from his backpack, the police officer said.

"The market value of the material is around Rs 35-40 lakh. The accused did not reveal much during interrogation. It seems that accused is a delivery man. He will be produced before the city's NDPS court Friday," the police officer said.

The Kolkata Police had arrested a drug dealer and her associate from Pragati Maidan police station area last week.

Asked whether Adut was a part of the same gang, the police officer said that he may have links to the racket.

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Income tax sleuths Friday seized unaccounted cash of Rs 1.5 crore from a lodge here in which a rural development department engineer was staying, sparking demands from the BJP for minister Krishna Byre Gowda's resignation.

Rural development and panchayat raj (RDPR) minister Byre Gowda has denied any involvement in the matter.

Acting on a tip, I.T officials raided the lodge at Anand Rao circle where the executive engineer from Haveri and his driver were staying, officials said.

While the engineer is at large, the driver, who was apprehended, admitted that both of them were engaged in collecting money from contractors at the rate of five per cent of each contract value, they said.

Besides cash, many documents were also found, officials added.

Following the seizure, the BJP alleged that extortion was done on behalf of their political masters to fund the coming Lok Sabha elections.

Since the engineer belonged to the rural development and panchayat raj (RDPR) department, the BJP demanded that Congress leader and RDPR minister Krishna Byre Gowda step down on moral grounds.

Asked for his reaction, Byre Gowda said "Let the I-T department conduct an inquiry and facts will be known. Fact of the matter is all these are baseless and concocted connections are being made."



"In this election season, the BJP is obviously making wild connections. What is the connection between me and the raids? Many raids happen everyday," he told PTI.

The minister said when the I-T officials conducted raids, a private individual, who was not related to government, was found in the room with cash. He has apparently, given the name of an official and that official is not even an engineer, Gowda added.

Lashing out the JDS-Congress coalition government, BJP state president B S Yeddyurappa told reporters, "It is now proved that this is a 20 per cent commission government.The 6.5 crore people of the state are waiting what Siddaramaiah and chief minister H D Kumaraswamy have to say on this.

When you come across such scams, it gives an impression that this government, which is involved in corruption and daylight robbery, does not want development."



BJP MLC and spokesperson N Ravikumar said, "Those arrested is believed to have confessed that the money was collected to pay Rural Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda for the election expenses.

We urge Gowda to immediately step down on moral grounds."



The BJP lodged a complaint with the chief electoral officer Sanjiv Kumar demanding that the election commission investigate the role of the minister besides checking on movement of free flow of illegal money in the state and effective vigil on non-compliance of the model code of conduct.

BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the I.T raids and seizure of about Rs 2 crore cash points to the fact that the Congress-JDS coalition was not bound by any governance or development agenda but it is about how to stay in power and collect money and exploit the state and its people leading up to the elections.

"I challenge the Congress party president and indeed the chief minister of Karnataka to come clean on the rampant corruption and money collection that is underway in Karnataka," he told reporters in New Delhi.

Referring to reports that the documents seized during the raid allegedly point to between 10 and 20 per cent commission being taken by the officials, he said, "for whom they are acting or whose protection they are acting, we can only surmise and guess."



Citing reports, he alleged that the contracts related to the Rural Development Ministry.

"How an executive officer in his department able to have documents of contracts and so much of cash without some sort of support and protection within the government.

Who is that somebody in Karnataka?"



Joining BJP colleagues in their demand for Byre Gowda's resignation, he said all the contracts issued by the Karnataka government must be made public as people should know "how much the coalition government is looting and exploiting.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shilpa Shetty believes rejections made her stronger and played a huge part in her success.

The actor-reality show judge said she faced a tough time in making her footing in the film industry, but that never stopped her from working hard.

"I always felt I am doing the right work. I am hard working. I hide under sofa when I see my old films. Back then in films I had blonde hair, used to wear blue lenses and red lipstick. I wonder how I got opportunities.

"I think it was all destiny. There is no successful person who hasn't faced failure. The more you get rejected you rise and give your best," Shilpa said during a session at the 20th FICCI Frames.

Shilpa, who started her Bollywood journey with "Baazigar", said the success of the Shah Rukh Khan-starrern did not help her much in getting good roles.

"I did not feel people were accepting me as an actor. Maybe I wasn't that good actor. Even after doing films like 'Phir Milenge' and 'Dhadkan', I never got an award. I felt rejected and bad.

"But I kept working hard. There was hunger in my belly... I feel if not for those rejections I wouldn't have lasted so long," she added.

Shilpa said her winning stint in international reality show "Big Brother" played an important role in her career.

"'Big Brother' was a beautiful moment...When I was offered 'Big Brother' I had no clue about the show. There was certain sense of rejection that I felt to cut away from here and do something away from the country.

"They were paying me well and I was like let's try. I was prepared to be rejected there also. But every week I got stronger. First time I won something and I was shocked. I feel there is poetic justice and I believe in it," she said.

Shilpa said she now feels content with whatever she has achieved in her life.

"I have completed 25 years and I feel the kind of love I am getting today is more as compared to then when I was actively working in films. I don't remember how I became an actress I have forgotten that journey. I feel we are born for a purpose."



After taking a sabbatical from films, Shilpa shifted her focus towards imparting knowledge on health and wellness.

"I am focusing on it. I am aware that maybe 40 per cent people cuss me and I am okay as there are some who wait for me to share things about health and wellness."



The 43-year-old actor, however, is willing to make a comeback to movies.

"I love acting. If I hadn't done TV then maybe I would have done films. After I had my son I consciously decided to be with him and so I did not do films. If I had to do a film then I had to be away for a longer period of time from my son so I did not want to do that.

"TV is gratifying. With TV I am able to connect and entertain. Due to TV, I like the fact that people like me as Shilpa Shetty and not some character of a film. The power of small screen is big as biggest of stars come to TV to promote their film," she said.

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Illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh have set up 16 villages in South Mizoram's Lunglei district, the Assembly was informed Friday.

There were nine more such villages set up illegally by people who had entered the state without valid documents, Local Administration Minister K Lalrinliana said.

Of the nine villages, four were set up in Aizawl district, followed by three in Champhai bordering Myanmar, and two in Mamit bordering Tripura, he said while replying to a query from C Lalsawivunga of the Zoram People's Movement.

Besides people from Bangladesh, illegal immigrants from Myanmar, Manipur and Tripura also reside in these nine villages, officials said.

Officials as well as student leaders, who had earlier conducted study of the border areas, claimed that those entered the state from Bangladesh belonged to the Chakma community.

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External Affairs Minister Friday said the leaders who term China's blocking of banning at the a "diplomatic failure" must see that India was alone when the move was first made in 2009 under the UPA rule, while it has worldwide support in 2019.

Her remarks came a day after Congress president Rahul Gandhi hit out at Prime Minster Narendra Modi over China's blocking of the resolution to designate Azhar a global terrorist, alleging that the PM was "weak" and "scared" of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Taking to Twitter, Swaraj said she wants to apprise the people of the facts regarding the listing of Azhar under the United Nations Sanctions Committee.

"The proposal has been mooted four times. In 2009, India under the UPA government was the lone proposer. In 2016, India's proposal was co-sponsored by US, France and UK. In 2017, US, UK and France moved the proposal.



"In 2019, the proposal was moved by US, France and UK and supported by 14 of the 15 Security Council members and also co-sponsored by Australia, Bangladesh, Italy and Japan -- non-members of the Security Council," she said in a series of tweets.

She asserted that India had secured "unprecedented support" from the international community for listing the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief under the UN Sanctions Committee.

"I have shared these facts with you so that leaders who describe this as our diplomatic failure may see for themselves that in 2009, India was alone. In 2019, India has the worldwide support," the external affairs minister said.

Gandhi had attacked the prime minister and said he has not spoken on China blocking the resolution in the UN Security Council (UNSC).



ALSO READ: Qureshi hints Pakistan may not oppose global terrorist tag for Jaish chief

Slamming the government, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala had said, "Sadly, Modiji's foreign policy has been a series of diplomatic disasters."



As Congress leaders, including Gandhi, had used the Chinese action to take a swipe at Modi, the BJP had hit back, saying they will be "happy" for giving headline news to Pakistani media.

"Why is Rahul Gandhi in a celebratory mood when the country stands pained with this attitude of China," BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad had said.

On Wednesday, China for the fourth time blocked the bid in the UN Security Council to designate the chief of the Pakistan-based terror group as a "global terrorist" by putting a technical hold on the proposal. The Chinese move was termed "disappointing" by India.
India on Friday said its High Commission in New Zealand was ascertaining more details about the possibility of Indians being affected by the terror attacks on two Christchurch mosques and urged the community to contact the mission for any assistance.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

In New Delhi, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said that India's High Commission in New Zealand is in touch with local authorities for more information.

"Our mission is in touch with local authorities to ascertain more details. It is a sensitive matter and therefore we can't give confirmed numbers/names till we are absolutely certain," he said.

Meanwhile, MP Asaduddin Owaisi, President of All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party, said that an Indian has been shot at in the incident.

"A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad & would like to go to NZ for Ahmed's family.

"I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family," he said in a tweet.

"These are Mr. Khursheed's passport details. His brother is serious & his family has little support. I'm only requesting the immediate support of your good offices in expediting his visa process. He'll make all arrangements to travel to NZ by himself," Owaisi said in a other tweet.

India's High Commission said that any Indian national affected by the attacks on two Christchurch mosques can contact the mission for assistance.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for providing assistance.

"We are shocked to hear about the shooting in Christchurch. Any Indians needing assistance should contact us at 021803899 or 021850033," the Twitter account of the Indian High Commission in New Zealand said.

"Our prayers go out to everyone who is affected. Help us spread the word. Stay safe!!" it said.

Witnesses said that victims being shot at close range, with women and children believed to be among those killed.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

Approximately 200,000 Indian and Indian-origin people live in New Zealand. There are over 30,000 Indian students in the country, according to the Indian High Commission's data on its website.

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The armies of India and Myanmar conducted a "coordinated operation" from February 17 to March 2 against insurgents in Myanmarese territory to avert a possible threat to the Kaladan multi-modal transit transport project, official sources said.

However, the Indian Army did not cross the border during the operation, they said.

The focus of the operation was to crack down on the members of the Arakan Army, an insurgent group in Myanmar, the sources said. The members of the Arakan Army had also moved close to the international border along Mizoram, they said.

The sources added that during the operation, the Indian Army beefed up the security along the border from Nagaland and Manipur to ensure that the insurgents do not cross over to the Indian side.

The Indian Army also helped the Myanmarese Army by providing them intelligence, they said. There were also inputs that some members of the Arakan Army were also planning to sneak into India.

The sources said setting up of camps by the insurgent groups was being viewed as a grave concern by armies of the two countries.

The operation was also undertaken keeping in view the safety of Indian workers engaged in the project.

After a series of meetings between personnel from both the countries, it was decided to carry out the coordinated operation. Additional troops were moved to the international border areas, besides deploying the Assam Rifles personnel.

The Assam Rifles has the responsibility to guard the international border with Myanmar.

The Kaladan multi-modal transit transport project is being viewed as India's gateway to the Southeast Asia.

India entered into a framework agreement with Myanmar in April 2008 to facilitate implementation of the project. On completion, the project will help connect Mizoram with the Sittwe Port in Rakhine State of Myanmar.

On the Indian side, work is on to extend the Aizawl-Saiha National Highway by 90 km to the international border at Zorinpui.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India's High Commission in New Zealand on Friday said that any Indian national affected by the attacks on two Christchurch mosques can contact the mission for assistance.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for providing assistance.

"We are shocked to hear about the shooting in Christchurch. Any Indians needing assistance should contact us at 021803899 or 021850033," the Twitter account of the Indian High Commission in New Zealand said.

"Our prayers go out to everyone who is affected. Help us spread the word. Stay safe!!" it said.

There was no immediate reports of any Indian affected in the incident.

Approximately 200,000 Indian and Indian-origin people live in New Zealand. There are over 30,000 Indian students in the country, according to the Indian High Commission's data on its website.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An Indian-origin man was injured in the Christchurch terror attacks, his relatives residing in Hyderabad said Friday.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Khursheed Jahangir, brother of Ahmed Iqbal Jahangir, said his brother was injured during the attack and is currently undergoing treatment at a local hospital in Christchurch.

"He is injured.He is recovering in a hospital now. The latest information we received is that he is undergoing a surgery. We have seen the video.

He has been shot in the chest and we are trying to reach Indian embassy people and local helpline numbers," Khursheed Jahangir said.

He said he spoke to AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi for help in reaching out to authorities for a visa and other formalities to go to New Zealand to see his brother.

Khursheed Jahangir said he has visited New Zealand twice and described it as one of the "safest" places in the world.

Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted requesting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and the Telangana Governments help to enable the family to go to New Zealand.

"I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family," Owaisi said in a tweet.

"These are Mr.Khursheed's passport details.

His brother is serious & his family has little support. I'm only requesting the immediate support of your good offices in expediting his visa process.

Hell make all arrangements to travel to NZ by himself," Owaisi said in another tweet.

Reacting to Owaisis request, TRS working President and former minister KT Rama Rao tweeted "Asad Saab, Will request our NRI department to assist."



Owaisi, in another tweet, said "Farhaj Ahsan, a person of Indian origin, was also reported to have gone to the same mosque and is currently missing.

His family is in Hyderabad, I request immediate assistance to his family as well.

His familys contact details are available with me & Ill share the same with you."



Farhaj Ahsan's parents could not be reached.

Suresh Kumar, a family friend of Ahmed Iqbal, said in a video footage they could see images of Iqbal, who runs a restaurant in New Zealand, at a mosque when the attack took place.

"Since then we (Iqbal's family in Hyderabad) have been trying to reach him. We could not reach him over phone. His wife is in a state of shock.

We have sought the state governments help to send one of the family members to New Zealand," Kumar said.

According to Suresh, Ahmed Iqbal has been living in New Zealand for over a decade and settled there.

He has two children and is said to have permanent residency of that country.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


Half Year Report

Perth, Mar 15, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - White Cliff Minerals Ltd ( ASX:WCN ) present their report for the half-year ended 31 December 2018.SummaryKyrgyz Republic Aucu Gold Project (90% owned)During the half year, an extensive geochemical survey identified that the core and alteration halo of the Chanach copper porphyry system extended over an 8 kilometre long zone. The survey also identified anomalous gold, copper, arsenic and base metal results to the north and east of the Aucu gold deposit. Follow up mapping and sampling identified new gold and copper zones 2-4 kilometres east of the Aucu gold deposit.The Company undertook a bulk sampling program along a 450 metre section of the Chanach river alluvial terraces 1 kilometre downstream from the Aucu Gold deposit to assess the placer gold potential of the 16km long river system. Visible gold was detected in 62 samples out of the 65 samples collected. The samples have been submitted to the laboratory for analysis with results expected in mid-March.In January 2019, the Company engaged a global corporate advisory firm to undertake a review of the options for advancing the project, either through joint-ventures or divestment. While this process is underway the Company continues to advance the project.Australian Cobalt-Nickel Projects (100% owned)During the half year the Company completed a 5,000 metre drilling program at the Coronation Dam cobalt and nickel project. The drilling highlighted shallow and wide intervals of cobalt and nickel mineralisation confirming the project's prospectivity and potential to host an economic resource. Results were announced during the reporting period and the Company is currently completing initial resource estimations at Coronation Dam and the Ghan Well nickel-cobalt projects.To view the full report, please visit:About White Cliff Minerals Ltd

White Cliff Minerals Ltd is a Gold, Copper, Cobalt, Nickel resources and mining company listed in Australia (ASX:WCN). The Company is focused on developing low cost high value mineral deposits that have near term cash flow potential.

Major projects include the Aucu gold deposit that contains 484,000 ounces of gold (3mt at 5.1 g/t) starting at surface and Chanach copper deposit that contains 64,000 tonnes of copper (17.2Mt at 0.37% copper). Both projects have substantial blue sky potential with drilling covering only 5% of the known structures. In Australia the company is developing the Coronation Dam cobaltnickel deposit where a maiden resource will be announced in the late 2018.
An Indian-origin man working as a driver for ride-sharing company Uber in the US has pleaded guilty to kidnapping a sleeping passenger and driving her more than 60 miles from her destination to boost his fare.

Harbir Parmar, 25 of New York pled guilty in White Plains federal court to kidnapping and wire fraud.

He was arrested in October last year. Parmar pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, and one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He will be sentenced in June.

US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said Parmar took advantage of a vulnerable woman who utilised a ridesharing service by kidnapping and terrorising her.

"In addition, he charged many of his ridesharing customers with fraudulent fees," he said adding that Parmar will now be held accountable for his brazen crimes.

According to the indictment and statements made during the plea proceedings, Parmar, who worked as a driver for Uber, picked up the woman passenger in February 2018 traveling from Manhattan to White Plains in upstate New York.

After the woman fell asleep in the backseat of the vehicle, Parmar changed her destination in Uber's mobile application to an address in Boston, Massachusetts, and proceeded to drive toward that location.

When the passenger woke up, the vehicle was in Connecticut. She asked Parmar that she be taken to White Plains or to the police station, but he refused. He instead dropped her off on the side of highway in Connecticut. The woman went to a nearby convenience store where she sought assistance.

In addition, from December 2016 through February 2018, Parmar sent false information about the destinations of Uber's customers through its mobile application on several occasions.

At times, he also sent false information about the application of a cleaning fee to be applied to the accounts of the company's customers.

In these instances, Uber customers filed complaints about being overcharged for their rides. These instances have resulted in thousands of dollars in improper charges to the accounts of Uber's customers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An Indian national has pleaded guilty to the charges of smuggling Indians as illegal immigrants into the United States.

Pleading guilty before a New Jersey court on Thursday, Bhavin Patel, 38, said he did this for private financial gain.

He faces a maximum potential sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to USD 250,000. Sentencing is scheduled for July 9.

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court, agents for the Department of Homeland Security Investigations received information that a smuggling operation run by Patel was attempting to find methods to bring foreign nationals from India into the US.

The investigation revealed that the smuggling organisation recruited Indian nationals and others to pay fees in exchange for passage to the US.

Beginning in October 2013, an undercover law enforcement officer posing as a smuggler began meeting with Patel in Bangkok. Patel told the undercover law enforcement officer that he wanted to smuggle Indian nationals into the US.

On three different occasions, Patel or his conspirator transported the Indian nationals to an airport in Thailand, at which point the undercover law enforcement officer would presumably use his contacts to smuggle them into the US via commercial airline flights, the Department of Justice said.

Patel agreed to wire down payments for each individual to be smuggled and to pay a balance of tens of thousands of dollars for each individual once the foreign nationals arrived in the US.

Over the ensuing months, Patel arranged for six Indian nationals to be brought to Thailand for smuggling into the US via Newark Liberty International Airport. He was arrested on December 7, 2018, upon his arrival at Newark Liberty.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
India's range of meat and fish dishes is diverse, even bewildering with its overtones of hot, sour, sweet and tangy. But what really got two-Michelin-star chef Julien Royer's tastebuds kicking during his visit to India is the vegetarian food.

The Singapore-based French chef was an absolute stranger to the flavours of India when he came to the country for the first time last year.

Royer, who visited Mumbai then, was in Delhi on Thursday to expand his flavour horizons.

"The spice, flavours and tastes were very impressive, specially the vegetarian dishes. I love the cuisine's diversity," Royer, who co-owns Odette, a modern French restaurant in Singapore, told PTI.

Recalling his visit to Mumbai last year, he said he discovered the joys of multi-layered, multi-cultural desi cuisine and was left "impressed".

He remembered being "blown away" by the exploding flavours of pani puri, pakoras and khandvi.

He also expressed a newly discovered fondness for the tandoor.

"Anything that's cooked in a tandoor is great for me," he said.

Royer was here as part of Masters of Marriott, an initiative by JW Marriott in Aerocity, that celebrates the culinary mavens of renowned international chefs.

On Thursday, he whipped up a five-course modern French meal comprising some of his signature dishes --- Rosemary Smoked Organic Egg, Heirloom Beetroot Variation and the Kegani crab -- from his menu at Odette.

Also on offer were recipes cooked with a "little Indian twist".

In the main course, Royer served lamb rack seasoned with Indian spices like cumin, coriander seeds, black pepper and star anise.

For dessert, he added a dash of home-grown ingredients -- saffron sourced from Kashmir, roses from Jaipur and locally grown strawberries.

"I think food is a universal language, but we all do have different habits. So I feel it was important for me as a chef to adapt myself to the country where I was, and the place and people I was cooking for," he said.

Royer's adaptability as a chef also came through when he was faced with an unexpected table of vegetarian guests.

He disposed of his pre-decided non vegetarian menu, and spontaneously rustled up an array of vegetarian delicacies like cauliflower and curry tartlets, quinoa crackers topped with salsa, cucumbers and coriander and celeriac with mushroom ketchup and truffle.

The 33-year-old said he was driven towards becoming a chef during his growing up years when he watched his grandmother create magic in the kitchen. He was inspired by how she conjured "the most remarkable dishes from the purest ingredients".

"She taught me the importance of adding that little something to create dishes that excite the palate and fill the heart," he said.

Professional encouragement in the kitchen came from mentors -- Michel Bras and Chef Bernard Andrieux -- at the various restaurants he went on to work for in France.

He then travelled from the French West Indies to London, where he was sous chef to Antonin Bonnet at Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurant, The Greenhouse, before moving to Singapore in 2008 to take on the role of Chef de Cuisine at JAAN at Swissotel the Stamford.

In 2015, he founded Odette, a 48-seater fine dining restaurant located in the National Gallery in Singapore, which featured in the 9th place on the Asia's 50 Best Restaurants 2017 list.

Royer's technique at hand to make any dish shine is to "showcase the produce".

He believes in treating every ingredient with the utmost care to highlight its purest flavours.

"I take pride in offering guests a unique opportunity to taste these exceptional ingredients at their peak. We celebrate and respect seasonality and terroir," he said.

With a large number of Indians visiting Odette, Royer expressed an interest in incorporating Indian flavours in some of his dishes at the restaurant.

"Indian cuisine is a perfect mix between spicy, sourness, and sweet... it is very difficult and complex to achieve but I would love to incorporate it.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Indian Newspaper Society, the apex body of the print media industry, has decided to implead itself as a party in the appeal of the editor and the publisher of The Shillong Times after the Meghalaya High Court sentenced them in a contempt case.

The Supreme Court Friday stayed the Meghalaya High Court judgment convicting The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim and publisher Shoba Chaudhuri in the case.

While pronouncing the judgement in the contempt case, the high court had on March 8 asked both of them to serve the sentence by sitting in the corner of the court room till the rising of the court.

The high court had also imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh each on them and said if they failed to deposit the amount, they will have to undergo six months simple imprisonment and the paper will be banned.

The editor and the publisher had filed an appeal in the Supreme Court.

The Executive Committee of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), which met here on Thursday, discussed at length the recent conviction of the publisher and the editor of The Shillong Times, the INS said in a statement.

The Society is concerned by several issues that arise from judgement as they "impinge" on the freedom of the press, it said.

"The Executive Committee unanimously decided that the society should implead itself as a party in any appeal that the Shillong Times may prefer and agitate its concern," the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani accused Western governments of encouraging Islamophobia, after the attacks on two mosques in New Zealand that killed 49 worshippers and wounded dozens.

In a statement carried by the official government website on Friday, Rouhani said the shootings showed the need for "all out confrontation against...the Islamophobia pervasive in the West which is unfortunately encouraged by some Western governments."



Rouhani promised Iran's foreign ministry would "diligently" follow the "arrest and trial of the perpetrators of this heinous act."



Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also blamed "Western democracies" for the attack.

"Western hypocrisy of defending demonisation of Muslims as 'freedom of expression' MUST end," Zarif tweeted.

"Impunity in Western 'democracies' to promote bigotry leads to this," the tweet read. In another tweet Zarif said that while Iranians were "deeply shocked and saddened", they were not surprised by the "Christchurch terror."



"Banned from travel to the US, and not allowed to abide by our faith if attending French schools, we Iranians know too well what bigotry and hatred of Islam augur," Zarif said referring to France's tradition of secular education.

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi earlier "strongly condemned the... inhuman and savage" attacks and urged New Zealand's government to punish "the perpetrators... without any reservations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Islamic State group Friday launched three coordinated suicide attacks targeting crowds leaving their embattled last redoubt in eastern Syria, killing six people, a spokesman for the force battling the jihadists said.

"A suicide bomber hid among those fleeing and blew himself up, killing at least six of those who wanted to get out" of the last redoubt in the village of Baghouz, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces told AFP.

Two others blew themselves up near SDF positions, causing light wounds, spokesman Jiaker Ahed said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Friday said that increasing "Islamophobia" after the 9/11 terror attacks in the US was responsible for the attack on two mosques in New Zealand that killed at least 49 worshippers.

"Strongly condemning" the terror attack on the mosques in New Zealand, Prime Minister Khan tweeted: This reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families."



At least 49 people were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Khan said that increasing Islamophobia after 9/11 was responsible for this act of terror and Muslims were demonised deliberately.

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim. This has been done deliberately to also demonise legitimate Muslim political struggles, he tweeted.

Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi also condemned the terrorist attack in New Zealand in the strongest terms.

He expressed condolences over loss of innocent lives in the heinous attack.

Foreign Office spokesperson Muhammad Faisal tweeted that Pakistan High Commission is in constant touch with the local authorities in New Zealand to ascertain further details on the attacks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Israel said Friday its aircraft hit around 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rocket fire from the Palestinian enclave, including toward its economic capital Tel Aviv.

"Fighter planes, attack helicopters and (other) IDF aircraft attacked overnight about 100 terror targets of the Hamas terror organisation in the Gaza Strip," Israel's military said in a statement.

It said targets included an office complex allegedly used by Hamas to coordinate militant operations in the occupied West Bank.

Another was a "the main manufacturing site of standard-grade rockets in the Gaza Strip," an underground location, it said.

A security source in Gaza said dozens of strikes targeted bases belonging to both Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad throughout Gaza.

More than 40 locations were targeted with about 100 strikes, the source said.

A couple was injured when their house was damaged in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, according to the source.

Residents reported a number of rockets being fired back at Israel in response.

Sirens rang out in southern Israel early Friday and the Israeli military said its missile defence system intercepted two rockets.

No Israelis had been reported wounded.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The pilots' union of crisis-hit Jet Airways has approached the government flagging concerns about salary arrears, saying that the situation is leading to extreme tension and frustration, according to a letter.

The cash-strapped full service airline has been making delayed salary payment for the last few months and has also defaulted on loan repayments.

Against this backdrop, the National Aviator's Guild (NAG) -- a grouping of over 1,000 pilots of Jet Airways -- has written to Labour Minister Santosh Gangwar.

In the letter, dated March 6, the grouping has raised concerns about persistent delay in salary payment of member pilots.

"This situation is leading to extreme tension and frustration amongst our members, hardly an ideal situation for pilots in the cockpit... All pleas to the management in this regard have fallen on deaf ears," the letter said.

A Jet Airways spokesperson said it has not received any such communication.

The response came to a query regarding the pilots' union approaching the labour ministry regarding salary arrears.

"The company remains committed to meet its salary obligations towards its employees and clearing all pending dues," the spokesperson said.

Jet Airways has been looking at various ways to raise funds amid acute liquidity crunch that has forced it to ground aircraft, cancel flights in large numbers, shutdown stations and delay salary payments to its pilots and engineers along with other senior staff.

On March 8, Jet Airways Chairman Naresh Goyal wrote to Etihad Airways Group CEO Tony Douglas seeking an urgent funding of Rs 750 crore.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh Friday urged Pakistan to be "more amenable and responsive" to India's demands, which include visa-free access for 5,000 pilgrims a day to a historic gurdwara in Kartarpur in the neighbouring nation.

He expressed disappointment at Pakistan's reported response to the issues raised by New Delhi during the first meeting on the Kartarpur corridor that took place on Thursday at the Attari-Wagah border.

In a statement issued here, the chief minister said the response of Islamabad to India's demands was "totally inadequate" and the neighbouring country needed to reconsider its stand if the corridor was to serve its purpose.

The governments of the two countries took a historic decision by agreeing to open the corridor to mark the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev, the Sikh faith's founder, in November this year, Singh said.

"It was good the two countries remained on track with the project deadlines, but Pakistan needs to go a step further to make the initiative truly meaningful for pilgrims, particularly the Sikh community, which has been deprived of 'darshan' at the Kartarpur gurdwara for over 70 years, he said.

"The limitation of 500 pilgrims a day, as proposed by Pakistan, is insufficient to cater to the aspirations of the large number of devotees desirous of paying obeisance at the gurdwara," Singh said, adding that curtailing the visits to a limited number of days would defeat the purpose even more.

"Pakistan's response to India's demands on Kartarpur corridor is totally inadequate. The corridor won't serve its true purpose with such limitations... It needs to allow more people everyday, including from overseas," he said in a tweet.

Singh reiterated his demand for a visa-free "khule darshan" (unhindered access) for Indians of all faiths, from India and overseas, seven days a week.

"Special permits should be good for identity and the visa requirement needs to be waived. Pakistan has to be more responsive on this issue," he further tweeted.

Highlighting the significance of the gurdwara, the chief minister said the occasion demanded a more universal approach from Pakistan.

He urged Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to show statesmanship in the true spirit of the sportsman that he was to ensure that no devotee wanting to pay obeisance at the gurdwara is deprived of the opportunity.

"Pakistan should show much more flexibility in this regard as a mark of respect to the Sikh community," hesaid.

India on Thursday had also sought to keep the corridor open for seven days a week and allow those pilgrims who want to travel on foot. It also sought allowing Indian nationals as well as persons of Indian origin to visit the shrine.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


Half Yearly Report

Brisbane, Mar 15, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Sayona Mining Ltd ( ASX:SYA ) ( OTCMKTS:DMNXF ) present their report of the Company and its controlled entities for the half-year ended 31 December 2018.AUTHIER LITHIUM PROJECT, CANADAThe Company's primary focus during the half-year has been on completing work required to commence the development of the project, including the definitive feasibility study, community consultation and permitting. Authier is a near-term development project and cash-flow generation opportunity. The Company believes it will create significant share value-uplift potential for shareholders as the project advances towards development.Authier is a hard rock spodumene lithium deposit scheduled for development as an open cut mine, initially producing a 6% spodumene concentrate. Production is planned to commence in 2020.Definitive Feasibility StudyOn 24 September 2018, the Company announced a positive DFS for the flagship Authier project. The DFS confirmed the project's potential to deliver a profitable and sustainable new lithium mine that will provide new jobs, investment and other benefits for all stakeholders.Key findings of the DFS include:- Pre-tax net present value (NPV) of C$184.8m (AUD $194.0m), pre-tax internal rate of return (IRR) of 33.7% and estimated payback of 2.6 years- Annual average concentrate production of 87,400 tonnes at 6% Li2O;- Average annual revenue of C$80 million;- Mine gate cash costs of C$416/t and FOB Port cash costs of C$482/t (US$366/t);- Initial capital expenditure of C$89.9 million;- Updated Ore Reserve of 12.10 Mt @ 1.00% Li2O (Proven Reserve 6.10Mt @ 0.99% Li2O and Probable Reserve 6.00 Mt @ 1.02% Li2O) delivers a mine life of 18 years.Permitting ProcessThe Authier project has been designed to access the permitting route under Section 22 of the Quebec Environmental Quality Act. This requires the project to remain under a maximum production threshold of 2,000 tonnes per day (tpd). Under this mechanism, environmental studies and public consultation is undertaken by the Company in accordance with Mining Act specifications.On 20 December 2018, Sayona lodged a mining lease application for the Authier deposit. A mining lease grants rights of access and use of the surface for mining purposes. Supporting documentation included:- rehabilitation plan;- definitive feasibility study; and- certified report describing the nature and extent of the deposit and its probable value.Sayona also filed an application to the Ministry of the Environment for initial overburden stripping and the construction of an overburden stockpile, water management facilities, an access road and other minor related infrastructure. The application included an updated Environmental and Social Evaluation (ESE) study. The update of the ESE reflects the company's commitment to comply with, or exceed, all Provincial and municipal regulatory requirements for the mine development. This application triggers the review process of the Authier project within the Ministry of the Environment.Subsequent to the end of the period, the Quebec Environment Minister advised that the Authier project would be subject to the environmental impact assessment and review procedures under the BAPE (bureau d'audiences publiques en environnement). This is an extended permitting process. The Company continues reviewing options to take the project forward to development.Community ConsultationOn 18 August 2018, the Company ended its three month consultation period. Sayona held three public consultation sessions with different stakeholders located near the Project (La Motte, Pikogan and Amos). The purpose of these meetings was to present the results of the environmental studies, the progress of the project and to take into account the concerns of people in relation to the project. Communication channels continue to be maintained with stakeholders to ensure full transparency with local partners.During the period, Sayona opened an office in La Motte, which is north-west of Montreal and the seat of the municipal council region where Authier is located. This will become the new head office for the Sayona team in Quebec. The office is also open to the community to access information about the Authier project.Subsequent to period end, the company also announced the appointment of Serge Rouillier as Manager for Sustainable Development. Serge is an experienced executive with a sound background in the mining industry.Marketing and FinanceThe Company's strategy is to initially develop Authier and sell lithium concentrate while it completes the test work and feasibility study for a downstream processing facility producing lithium carbonate and/or hydroxide. The strategy is analogous to other lithium developers in Quebec including Nemaska and North American Lithium.During the period, the Company has actively engaged with a number of potential product off-takers. Strong interest has been received from Chinese concentrate converters interested in purchasing Authier concentrates or value-adding in country. The Company has undertaken marketing roadshows in China and Asia. The Company plans on building on this work to secure binding off-take contracts for the Authier production.In addition, the Company is engaged with a number of parties interested in financing the Authier project. Potential financing strategies include royalties, concentrate pre-sales and convertible notes. The objective of the financing strategy it to minimise dilution to shareholders.Tansim Exploration ProjectTansim is situated 82 kilometres south-west of the Authier project in Quebec. It comprises 65 mineral claims of approximately 12,000 hectares, and is prospective for lithium, tantalum and beryllium.During the period large spodumene crystals were identified in an initial reconnaissance visit to the site. Mapping and sampling programs were undertaken to define drill targets.Selective sampling was undertaken at priority prospects, Viau-Dallaire, Viau and Gauthier with a total of 21 samples taken over exposed pegmatites.Encouraging assay results include:- Viau-Dallaire : 14 grab selective samples ranging from 0.96% Li20 to 2.47% Li2O- Viau: 4 grab selective samples ranging from 0.22% Li2O to 4.5% Li2O- Gauthier: 3 grab selective samples that did not return significant Li2O% gradeIn all cases high-grade lithium results were associated with albite-spodumene pegmatite with coarse grain spodumene crystals up to 30 centimetres in length. The assays reported were all very low in iron content (averaging 0.63%).A drilling program to follow up identified targets is scheduled to commence in February 2019. Exploration is being closely co-ordinated with the local First Nations Group, Long Point First Nation, who will provide support services for work programs.WESTERN AUSTRALIAN PROJECTSWestern Australia is a premium lithium province with world-class, high-grade lithium deposits associated with rare metal pegmatites.Sayona's leases In the Pilbara region cover some 1,898km2 and are centred in the world class Pilgangoora lithium district. Exploration during the half-year included RC drilling at the Mallina project, where three zones of spodumene pegmatite were targeted. Other work included the collection of 260 rock and 619 soil geochemical samples during reconnaissance over regional tenure as well as detailed soil geochemistry and pegmatite mapping at Tabba Tabba.At the Tabba Tabba project, new pegmatites were identified in the north of the project area. These are tantalum rich and returned up to 352ppm Li2O and 581ppm tantalum (not same sample). At Moolyella pegmatite in the southern project area returned up to 1.40% Li2O.These encouraging results require further systematic exploration.Great Sandy OptionIn December 2018, the Company made the final option payment to Great Sandy Pty Ltd ("Great Sandy") to acquire an 80% interest in a package of 6 tenements covering 694 km2 in the Pilgangoora lithium district of Western Australia.In January 2019, the Company entered into an agreement with Great Sandy to acquire the remaining 20% interest for $100,000. Settlement was made through the issue of new shares in Sayona. The Company now holds a 100% interest in the tenement package.To view the full report, please visit:About Sayona Mining Ltd

Sayona Mining Limited (ASX:SYA) (OTCMKTS:SYAXF) is an Australian, ASX-listed (SYA) company focused on sourcing and developing the raw materials required to construct lithium-ion batteries for use in the rapidly growing new and green technology sectors. The Company has lithium projects in Quebec, Canada and in Western Australia.

Please visit us as at www.sayonamining.com.au
The CPI(M)-led Left Front announced its first list of candidates for 25 seats in for the upcoming polls on Friday, leaving 17 constituencies for the

The list has four women and five Muslim candidates.

The Left Front has nominated former mayor and CPI(M) leader Bikas Ranjan Bhattacharya from the Jadavpur constituency. He will be pitted against Trinamool Congress's (TMC) Mimi Chakraborty, a popular film actress.

The state leadership, which was keen on contesting the Purulia and Barasat seats, said everyone should be flexible in an adjustment.

For the first time, the Left Front has opted for a seat-sharing deal with its once arch rival -- the -- for the polls in the state.

Earlier in 2016, against the wishes of its Left allies, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) had entered into a seat-sharing deal with the Congress for the state Assembly polls. Struck in a hurried manner, the deal had failed to evoke mass support.

In a press statement, Left Front chairman Biman Bose said the 25 Lok Sabha seats included Raiganj and Murshidabad, for which the candidates were declared earlier.

"For the remaining 17 seats, some will be contested by the Congress and some by the Left Front. In some seats, there might be candidates who would be jointly supported by the Congress and the Left Front," the statement added.

The state CPI(M) leadership is in a fix over choosing between the Congress and its Left Front allies, who are not willing to leave the Purulia and Barasat seats, which they have been contesting for decades.

The Congress is keen on contesting these two seats, leading to an impasse in the seat-sharing talks.

Bose said it was decided at the Left Front meeting that the CPI and the Forward Bloc would contest Purulia and Barasat respectively, but if the Congress wanted to field its candidates in these two seats, they could go ahead.

Reacting to the development, state Congress chief Somen Mitra said they would discuss the matter within the party and announce their list very soon.

"We will inform the party high-command about it. We will discuss the matter and announce our list. They (Left) did whatever they felt right and we will do whatever we feel right," he said.

The CPI(M) and the Congress have agreed on a seat-sharing adjustment to stop the march of the ruling TMC and a resurgent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bengal.

The Left Front has nominated and Badaruddoza Khan from Raiganj and Murshidabad respectively. Both of them had won these seats in 2014.

In Diamond Harbour, senior CPI(M) leader Fuad Halim will be pitted against sitting TMC MP and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's nephew

In the Dum Dum Lok Sabha seat, the Left Front has fielded CPI(M) leader Nepaldeb Bhattacharya against sitting TMC MP Sougata Roy.

The Left Front has also nominated Rejaul Karim, a medical practitioner, from the Birbhum seat. A doctor at a government hospital, Karim was suspended by the TMC government for participating in a rally against it in November last year.

The seven-phased Lok Sabha polls will be held from April 11 to May 19 and the counting of votes will be taken up on May 23. will go to the polls in all the seven phases.

(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.)
Former Army chief General (retired) Joginder Jaswant Singh said Friday he had left the Shiromani Akali Dal because they did not deserve him.

J J Singh had quit the SAD last year and recently joined the SAD (Taksali), a breakaway faction of the former.

"I left Akali Dal because they do not deserve me. It is not that they told me to go. I told them (Badals) that I cannot be with you," J J Singh told reporters here.

The former Army chief had joined the SAD in 2007 and had unsuccessfully contested against Chief Minister Amarinder Singh from Patiala seat.

J J Singh, who became the first Sikh to be appointed as the Army chief in 2005, accused both the SAD and the Congress of defeating him by hatching a conspiracy. "A political game was played against me."



"I joined an organisation (SAD Taksali) which has an agenda to revive Punjab, he said.

J J Singh described the Amarinder Singh-led Congress government as "incompetent".

"He (Amarinder) never goes out. He will go those places where chopper or car can take him. He is not capable of putting in effort which is required. You have to be fit (to serve people)," the SAD (Taksali) candidate from Khadoor Sahib said.

J J Singh accused the chief minister of repeatedly changing his statements on the Kartarpur corridor issue.

"First, he (Amarinder) raised security-risk issue (over Kartarpur corridor). Then, he said it should be made visa-free. Where is the security risk now? Why did you make waffling (statements)? the 73-year-old asked. "He keeps changing his statements and nobody is questioning him. I am going to ask him because I am a military man."



Asked about the airstrike by the Indian Air Force in Pakistan's Balakot, J J Singh said everyone should appreciate what the country's forces do.

"Everybody should appreciate what forces have done. That is the national strength. Have you seen in America where if its army does something, one party say something and other party says something else? Our parties should learn it. Nobody should question forces. Our forces are the role model," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
French fashion house Louis Vuitton has decided to no longer producer pieces from the autumn/winter 2019 menswear collection that directly reference Michael Jackson.

The decision was taken by brand after sexual abuse allegations against Jackson resurfaced post the January release of the HBO documentary "Leaving Neverland".

The label unveiled their collection in a show, which took place just over a week before "Leaving Neverland" premiered at Sundance. It featured several pieces that paid homage to Jackson that were then intended to go on sale in the summer.

"I am aware that in light of this documentary the show has caused emotional reactions. I strictly condemn any form of child abuse, violence or infringement against any human rights.

"My intention for this show was to refer to Michael Jackson as a pop culture artist. It referred only to his public life that we all know and to his legacy that has influenced a whole generation of artists and designers," Virgil Abloh, men's artistic director at LV, said in a statement to the fashion site WWD.

Representatives for the fashion house said the revelations had caused the label "the greatest pain" and the company was unaware of the documentary at the time of the show.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Northern Army Commander Lt Gen Ranbir Singh Friday arrived here to review the prevailing security situation in Kashmir.

"The Army Commander visited units/formations along the Line of Control and hinterland in north Kashmir," an Army official said.

The official said Lt Gen Singh was briefed by the commanders about the prevailing security situation.

The Army Commander complimented the troops for their relentless efforts in thwarting the adversary's designs, he said.

He also lauded the exemplary synergy among all the forces, appreciated the actions taken by the units in ensuring safety and well-being of people residing in vicinity of the Line of Control, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 4-year-old girl playing in a farm was killed by a leopard in Maharashtra's Nashik district, police said Friday.

The incident took place around 7pm on Thursday in Parmori village of Nashik's Dindori taluka, the Vani police station official informed.

"The leopard pounced on Gayatri Gangurde, killed her and dragged her into a sugarcane field nearby. Her mother Gitabai was working in the fields of one Deepak Salve when the incident happened," he said.

Forest department teams have been deployed in the area to trap the leopard, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A man has been arrested near Vitthalwadi railway station in Maharashtra's Thane district on a tip-off allegedly with 8.5 kilogrammes of ganja worth Rs 2.55 lakh, a police official said Friday.

Rohidas Gadge (46) was arrested on Wednesday by a patrolling Anti-Narcotics Cell team led by Inspector Vijay Pawar, said Thane police spokesperson Sukhada Narkar.

An official said Gadge has worked for the Ravi Pujari gang and has at least four cases of extortion against his name with Mumbai police.

Gadge has been charged under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act 1985 and remanded in police custody till March 19, an official said.

Vitthalwadi police is probing further, the official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A 30-year-old school teacher in Maharashtra's Thane district was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

Mohammad Musbir Alam Shaikh was accused of beating to death a man, identified as Firoz Abdul Shakur Shaikh, in Charnipada in the district's Kausa area on January 24, 2016, Additional Public Prosecutor Varsha Chandane said.

The victim was caught stealing a tyre of a motorcycle at a residential complex and was beaten with a wooden log and metal chains by Mohammad Musbir, Chandane said.

The victim died while being taken to hospital, she added.

The prosecutor said district judge SB Bahalakar, in an order on Thursday, convicted Mohammad Musbir Alam Shaikh and also fined him Rs 25,000.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Condemning the terror attack in Christchurch, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee Friday said 'terrorism in any form must be defeated.'



Banerjee said on her official twitter handle, "Terrorism in any form must be defeated. Humanity is about spreading peace and harmony. Strongly condemn the dastardly terror attack in New Zealand."



"Condolences to the grieving families and strength to the injured to recover," she tweeted.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

India's High Commission in New Zealand was ascertaining details about the possibility of Indians being affected in the Christchurch attacks amidst unconfirmed reports that nine Indian nationals were missing after the shootings.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Delhi Congress president Sheila Dikshit appeared to be isolated over the issue of alliance with AAP for Lok Sabha polls, as AICC in-charge PC Chacko on Friday claimed that "many" in the party were in favour of such up tie-up.

He, however, said that a final call on the issue of alliance with Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi will be taken by the Congress president Rahul Gandhi.

Dikshit, who has been opposing an alliance with AAP, refused to respond to questions on the development.

The differences in the party over the issue of alliance surfaced Thursday after Dikshit registered her protest over a phone survey covering over 52,000 Delhi Congress workers carried out by Chacko.

The workers were asked if they favoured alliance in Delhi with ruling AAP to defeat the BJP in Lok Sabha polls.

"There are many leaders and workers in Delhi Congress who are in favour of alliance with AAP. But a final call in this regard will be taken by party president Rahul Gandhi. We will submit our report on survey result to him," Chacko told PTI.

The All India Congress Committee(AICC) incharge of Delhi unit said that Dikshit may have her views about the alliance, but "everyone will have to follow the decision of party president Rahul Gandhi on it".

Many senior Delhi Congress leaders also expressed their views in favour of alliance citing the need to defeat the BJP in Lok Sabha elections.

Former Delhi Congress chief Subhash Chopra, who held the post during the Sheila Dikshit government, said that he will go by the decision of the party high command on the alliance issue.

"The party policy is that the BJP regime must be removed at any cost which is there for us to follow," Chopra told reporters.

Former Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken had asserted Thursday that the phone survey was conducted on the direction of Gandhi and it was "wrong" if anyone in the party questioned it.

Dikshit had said the move to conduct the survey was "overriding" the decision taken against the alliance by Rahul Gandhi.

"There should be no confusion. Our stand remains what it was," she had said referring to her meeting with Rahul Gandhi earlier this month after which she claimed there was unanimity in the party against an alliance with the AAP in Delhi.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Punjab Police Friday claimed to have arrested an electrician of the Military Engineer Services (MES) for allegedly passing on sensitive military information to a Pakistan-based intelligence operative.

Ram Kumar, presently living in Jalandhar, was arrested by the intelligence wing of the police, according to a statement issued by the police.

Police said Kumar, during questioning, revealed that he was befriended by the Pakistan-based intelligence operative on social media and was asked for information about Indian Army units located along the Indo-Pak border and also movement of Army convoys in the area.

He told police he had been working as an electrician with the MES in Jalandhar Cantt since 2013.

Kumar was also asked for details of specific Army units by the operative, police said.

He confessed to having passed sensitive military information to his Pakistani handler over social media platforms, they said.

He had also provided mobile numbers of military officers to the operative, they added.

In lieu of providing sensitive information, Kumar was paid money on more than one occasion, police said.

They said mobile phones and four sim cards have been recovered from his possession.

A case under relevant sections of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) and under section 120B of the IPC has been registered against him at a police station in Amritsar, police said.

After the Pulwama incident, his handlers had become more inquisitive about the movement of Army units, they said.

Further investigations are underway to check his social media contacts, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)


Award of Two Equipment Supply Packages

Sydney, Mar 15, 2019 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Hastings Technology Metals Limited ( ASX:HAS ) ("Hastings" or "the Company") is pleased to announce that, through its wholly owned subsidiary Yangibana Pty Ltd, it has awarded two significant equipment supply packages.- Design and Supply of Rotary Kiln Off Gas Scrubbing Plant awarded to Total Air Pollution Control Pty Ltd (TAPC)- TAPC has significant experience building plants of a similar nature including work on other rare earth processing plants- Gas Scrubbing Plant award allows significant additional engineering progress to be made to the Rotary Kiln package previously awarded to FLSmidth- Design and Supply of SAG Mill awarded to Outotec Pty Ltd- Outotec is a globally recognised supplier of engineering, equipment and service solutions- Award of the SAG Mill ensures Hastings has another of the long lead packages procured for the ProjectIntroductionThe equipment supply contracts are as follows:Design and Supply of Rotary Kiln Off Gas Scrubbing Plant awarded to Total Air Pollution Control Pty Ltd (TAPC)Key features of the Agreement:- Fixed price contract with staged commitments: stage 1 Design and stage 2 Manufacturing- Mechanical and process guarantees for Off-Gas Scrubbing Plant performance from TAPC- Delivery to site due Q3 2020 (subject to confirmation of commencement of phase 2)The Off-Gas Scrubbing Plant is a critical and significant component of the processing plant and manages the treatment of the waste gas generated by the Acid Baked Rotary Kiln (previously awarded to FLSmidth) to ensure environmental emission compliance.Award of the Off-Gas Scrubbing Plant facilitates both the progress of associated civil and structural design work as well as allowing commencement of the approvals associated with the Kiln/Scrubber system.Following the tender process, TAPC was selected as the preferred tenderer and has worked with Hastings to refine the unique Off-Gas Scrubber Plant design requirements. TAPC brings significant experience in developing similar facilities and has access to the experience in the design, supply and commissioning of similar facilities for rare earth producers.Design and Supply of SAG Mill awarded to Outotec Pty LtdKey features of the Agreement:- Contract with staged commitments: stage 1 Design and stage 2 Manufacturing- Mechanical and process guarantees for SAG Mill performance from Outotec- Delivery to site due Q1 2020 (subject to confirmation of commencement of phase 2)The SAG Mill is one of several long lead packages for the Project. Award of the package provides certainty to the schedule and allows further progress of the associated civil, mechanical and electrical design works.Outotec is an internationally recognised company with a well-established presence in Perth and Western Australia."Awarding these equipment packages represents another significant milestone in the development of the Yangibana Project. Partnering with TAPC and Outotec fits with our commitment to select only Tier 1 equipment suppliers capable of delivering the required performance guarantees and ongoing local support, said its Executive Chairman, Charles LewTERMINOLOGY USED IN THIS REPORTTotal Rare Earths Oxides, TREO, is the sum of the oxides of the light rare earth elements lanthanum (La), cerium (Ce), praseodymium (Pr), neodymium (Nd), and samarium (Sm) and the heavy rare earth elements europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), terbium (Tb), dysprosium (Dy), holmium (Ho), erbium (Er), thulium (Tm), ytterbium (Yb), lutetium (Lu), and yttrium (Y).To view the release, please visit:About Hastings Technology Metals Ltd

Hastings Technology Metals Ltd (ASX:HAS) (FRA:5AM) is advancing its Yangibana Rare Earths Project in the Upper Gascoyne Region of Western Australia towards production. The proposed beneficiation and hydro metallurgy processing plant will treat rare earths deposits, predominantly monazite, hosting high neodymium and praseodymium contents to produce a mixed rare earths carbonate that will be further refined into individual rare earth oxides at processing plants overseas.

Neodymium and praseodymium are vital components in the manufacture of permanent magnets which is used in a wide and expanding range of advanced and high-tech products including electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, medical applications and others. Hastings aims to become the next significant producer of neodymium and praseodymium outside of China.

Hastings holds 100% interest in the most significant deposits within the overall project, and 70% interest in additional deposits that will be developed at a later date, all held under Mining Leases. Numerous prospects have been identified warranting detailed exploration to further extend the life of the project.

Brockman Project

The Brockman deposit, near Halls Creek in Western Australia, contains JORC Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resources, estimated using the guidelines of JORC Code (2012 Edition).

The Company is also progressing a Mining Lease application over the Brockman Rare Earths and Rare Metals Project.

Hastings aims to capitalise on the strong demand for critical rare earths created by the expanding demand for new technology products.
A minor Dalit girl was abducted and killed allegedly by a person with whom her family had a land dispute here in Madhya Pradesh, a police official said Friday.

The incident took place in village Berkhedi under Banda tehsil of the district.

The body of the girl (13) and her severed head were found at different spots in an agriculture field Friday, said Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) Vikram Singh.

The Class 6 girl was abducted two days back when she was returning home after appearing in her school examination, the police said.

Later, her parents filed a missing person's complaint with the police.

"It is a case of kidnapping and murder in a cruel manner and we are probing it from all angles," Singh said.

During questioning, her uncle said they had a land dispute with a neighbour, Chotelal Patel, whom he suspected to be involved in the crime, the ASP said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The AAP Friday claimed the Election Commission agreed to its demand of keeping the



Delhi Police out of a probe into BJP allegations that the ruling party hired call centres for making "misleading" calls to voters.

A joint meeting between an AAP delegation, Delhi Police and EC was held after a party workers' protest outside the poll panel office here.

AAP members, led by Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, alleged that "politically motivated and illegal" raids were being conducted on call centres hired by the party to make people aware that their names had been deleted from voters' lists.

After over three hours of protest, Sisodia and AAP's Lok Sabha poll candidates Atishi and Raghav Chadha were called by the EC for the joint meeting.

Emerging from the EC premises after three rounds of meeting, Sisodia told reporters the commission "seriously" listened to AAP's complaints on the raids.

"The raids were conducted to harass call centre employees, including women who were made to stand," he alleged.

"The EC has agreed to hold a probe into the call centre issue without the involvement of the police, which was our demand earlier," Sisodia told reporters.

However, there was no immediate response from the EC.

During the meeting, the AAP delegation said the successive raids gave an indication "it was (a ploy) to help the BJP," Sisodia alleged.

The AAP has been alleging "deletion" of names of 30 lakh voters, particularly those from Purvanchali, Muslims and Bania communities, since the 2015 assembly election in Delhi and attacking the BJP claiming it was behind it.

Sisodia said they also informed the poll panel that the police take action on reports of such calls, but when voters raise issues about their names missing from the electoral list, no action is taken.

In Delhi, the polls are scheduled to be held on May 12.

"We are responsible for making those calls to tell the public about their name deletion. Telling people about their right is not a crime," Sisodia said after the meeting.

He alleged that a raid on a call centre was conducted barely an hour after he met Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora Friday.

His delegation met the CEC to lodge a complaint against the Delhi police which, he claimed, was acting on the behest of the BJP to harass call centre employees.

Satish Golcha, special commissioner of police (Crime and EOW), said an FIR following complaints regarding the "bogus calls" was registered and investigation is underway.

"As far as the allegations against us (Delhi Police) are concerned, we have already responded to the EC about them. Moreover, no call centre owners have filed a complaint regarding harassment by our team," he said.

"Relevant facts of the matter are being ascertained. The investigation is being conducted strictly in accordance with the law. Nobody has been arrested in the case so far. We are ascertaining facts from the call centres from where such calls have been made," he added.

Sources said call centre employees are being questioned to ascertain who gave them the work of making the calls, how did they procure data of the people and on what basis were they making claims about deletion of their names.

A BJP team had earlier met Arora and alleged the AAP was making these "misleading" phone calls.

The EC had directed the police to take "necessary action" against people making such calls.

The AAP leaders asserted as they hired the call centres, the police should question them not the workers.

During an earlier meeting with Arora, Sisodia had urged the EC to direct Delhi Police to stop the "harassment" of the call centre employees.

Sisodia alleged the Delhi Police raids were "politically motivated and illegal".

Delhi Chief Minister and AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal also questioned the CEC. "Why is CEC raiding our call centres and asking for our data? What is our crime? Pl tell our crime at least," he said in a tweet.

Meanwhile,AAP volunteers led by respective MLAs and Lok Sabha candidates on Friday burnt copies of the BJP's 2014 Lok Sabha manifesto for Delhi in all 70 assembly seats.

AAP Delhi convenor Gopal Rai said Friday's action has shown that people of Delhi are no longer ready to bear the injustice being meted out to them since last seven decades. Rai said if AAP wins all seven parliamentary seats in the upcoming elections then it will ensure that Delhi is granted full statehood.

AAP volunteers now plan to take the statehood movement to the next level by burning the BJP manifesto in all 272 wards of Delhi on Sunday, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Mizoram Assembly Friday adopted two private resolutions, one moved by an opposition member and another by a ruling party legislator.

The first resolution moved by Vanlalhlana of the opposition Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) sought to put "pressure" on the Centre to implement the "United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007".

Vanlalhlana said though India was a signatory to the declaration, it has never been implemented in the country.

Those who participated in the debate, cutting across party lines, stressed upon the importance of the declaration and that it would help in safeguarding the rights of the Mizos.

Another resolution moved by the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) MLA Lalrintluanga Sailo welcomed the decision of the Centre to shift the Assam Rifles battalion headquarters from the heart of the Aizawl city.

The Ministry of Home Affairs had recently issued an order instructing the Assam Rifles to shift from Aizawl to nearby Zokhawsang area by May 31.

The two private resolutions were adopted unanimously by the Assembly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The gunman behind at least one of the mosque shootings in that left 49 people dead on Friday tried to make a few things clear in the manifesto he left behind: He is a 28-year-old Australian white nationalist who hates immigrants. He was set off by attacks in Europe that were perpetrated by Muslims. He wanted revenge, and he wanted to create fear.

He also, quite clearly, wanted attention.

Though he claimed not to covet fame, the gunman whose name was not immediately released by police left behind a 74-page document posted on social media under the name Brenton Tarrant in which he said he hoped to survive the attack to better spread his ideas in the media.

And though he portrayed himself in his writings as quiet and introverted, he livestreamed to the world his assault on the worshippers at Christchurch's Al Noor Mosque.

That attack killed at least 41 people, while an assault on a second mosque in the city not long after killed several more. Police did not say whether the same person was responsible for both shootings.

While his manifesto and video were an obvious and contemptuous ploy for infamy, they do contain important clues for a public trying to understand why anyone would target dozens of innocent people who were simply spending an afternoon engaged in prayer.

There could be no more perplexing a setting for a mass slaughter than New Zealand, a nation so placid and so isolated from the mass shootings that plague the US that even police officers rarely carry guns.

Yet the gunman himself highlighted New Zealand's remoteness as a reason he chose it. He wrote that an attack in would show that no place on earth was safe and that even a country as far away as is subject to mass immigration.

He said he grew up in a working-class Australian family, had a typical childhood and was a poor student. A woman who said she was a colleague of his when he worked as a personal trainer in the Australian city of Grafton said she was shocked by the allegations against him.

"I can't ... believe that somebody I've probably had daily dealings with and had shared conversations and interacted with would be able of something to this extreme," Tracey Gray told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Beyond his white nationalistic ideals, he also considers himself an environmentalist and a fascist who believes China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values. He has contempt for the wealthiest 1 per cent. And he singled out American conservative commentator Candace Owens as the person who had influenced him the most.

In a tweet, Owens responded by saying that if the media portrayed her as the inspiration for the attack, it had better hire lawyers.

Throughout the manifesto, the theme he returns to most often is conflict between people of European descent and Muslims, often framing it in terms of the Crusades.

He wrote that the episode that pushed him toward violence took place in 2017 while he was touring through Western Europe. That was when an Uzbek man drove a truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm, killing five.

The Australian was particularly enraged by the death of an 11-year-old Swedish girl in the attack.

He said his desire for violence grew when he arrived in France, where he became enraged by the sight of immigrants in the cities and towns he visited.

And so he began to plot his attack. Three months ago, he started planning to target Christchurch. He claimed not to be a direct member of any organization or group, though he said he has donated to many nationalist groups.

He also claimed he contacted an anti-immigration group called the reborn Knights Templar and got the blessing of Anders Breivik for the attack.

Breivik is a right-wing Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in Oslo and a nearby island in 2011. Breivik's lawyer Oeystein Storrvik told Norway's VG newspaper that his client, who is in prison, has "very limited contacts with the surrounding world, so it seems very unlikely that he has had contact" with the New Zealand gunman.

The gunman had a long wish list for what he hoped the attack would achieve. He hoped it would reduce immigration by intimidating immigrants.

He hoped to drive a wedge between NATO and the Turkish people. He hoped to further polarize and destabilize the West. And he hoped to create more conflict over gun laws in the US, thus leading to a civil war that would ultimately result in a separation of races.

Though he claimed not to be a Nazi, in the video he livestreamed of the shooting the number 14 is seen on his rifle. That may be a reference to the "14 Words," a white supremacist slogan attributed in part to Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He also used the symbol of the Schwarze Sonne, or black sun, which "has become synonymous with myriad far-right groups who traffic in neo-Nazi," according to the center.

His victims, he wrote, were chosen because he saw them as invaders who would replace the white race. He predicted he would feel no remorse for their deaths. And in the video he livestreamed of his shooting, no remorse can be seen or heard. Instead, he simply says: "Let's get this party started."



Then he picks up his gun, storms into the mosque, and cuts down one innocent life after another. When it is over, he climbs back into his car, where he has left his music playing the song "Fire" by the English rock band The Crazy World of Arthur Brown.
The morning after the deck of a foot overbridge outside CSMT station collapsed, killing six people and leaving 31 injured, the Brihnamumbai Municipal Corporation chief will chair a meeting to decide on the future course of action for the structure.

A spokesperson said civic commissioner Ajoy Mehta will meet Road and Bride department officials Friday and then take a call on dismantling the entire FOB.

On Friday morning, the kept the busy DN Road blocked as part of the post-collapse safety stipulations and civic staff went about dismantling the entire deck of the FOB.

"DN Road (on which the FOB stood) has been blocked as a precautionary measure. commissioner Mehta has called a meeting on this to decide on its re-opening," another civic official said.

He added that the FOB was found structurally safe when it was audited in August 2016, soon after a British-era bridge over Savitri River got washed away in monsoon downpour in Mahad in Raigad district.

"During that audit, 354 bridges were checked for their structural soundness. The FOB that collapsed on Thursday was marked C2B. This means it needed minor repairs only. Tenders were floated for the repair but it got held up," the official said.

"We will investigate whether the tender was held up by the BMC Standing Committee or the Road and Bridge department," he said.

Among the deceased, Apoorva Prabhu, Ranjana Tambe and Bhakti Shinde were nurses working in GT Hospital about half a kilometre away from the FOB. Others who died in the collapse were Zahid Shiraj Khan (32), Tapendra Singh (28) and Mohan, officials said.

Among the injured was Atmaram Yedge (32) who sold bananas on the FOB. He has received injuries to his head, back and arms.

Activists, meanwhile, said strict action should be taken against errant officials and those who had audited the overbridge and found it "safe".

Subhash Gupta, president of Rail Yatri Parishad said, "The days of blame game should be over now. Action should be taken against the auditors who certified this FOB structurally safe."



He also said that Central Railway, which has said the FOB belongs to the civic body, cannot wash its hands off the episode as the bridge was used by railway passengers.

"If accountability is not fixed, such incidents will keep taking place. The average Mumbaikars does not care whose job it was to keep the bridge safe," Congress leader Milind Deora said.

Suhas Pandey, relative of a person injured in the incident, demanded fixing of accountability at the highest level.

"BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta must be booked for this incident," he said.

He also hit out at politicians visiting the injured in hospitals, alleging that they were doing it for publicity.

Criminal lawyer Tanveer Nizam called it a case of negligence and said the concerned officials should be held responsible for the deaths in the incident.

A case has been registered against officials of Central Railway and the BMC in connection with the incident, police said Thursday.

"We have registered an offence under section 304A (causing death by negligence) of the IPC at the Azad Maidan police station," Manjunath Singe, police spokesperson, had said hours after the incident.
NCL Industries Ltd has started the commercial production of its latest range of premium doors under the brand name of 'Duradoor,' in its new plant in Malkapur near here, a company official said Friday.

Spread across two lakh sq ft., the plant was built in technical collaboration with AGT, Turkey, with an installed capacity of 1000 doors in a single shift, with an investment of cost of Rs 50 crore, he said in a press conference.

"Duradoor from NCL Industries, in collaboration with AGT of Turkey, is coming to the market with a strategy to meet the rising consumer demand for world-class, robust door solutions in the housing and commercial buildings materials market.

We want to lead the market for serving top of the line products like Duradoor in India.

Our aim is to be the market leader and touch double-digit growth in this segment in the next few years," Ravi said.

Duradoor will be available in the market in a couple of days with a lifetime warranty, a unique feature that no other brand offers now, he said.

Kurtulus Topaloglu, Director, Technical Operations of AGT, Turkey, inaugurated the plant on March 13, a press release said.

A senior official of NCL said the Board of Directors of the company accepted a proposal for setting up "Waste Heat Recovery Power Project" to generate power through the heat energy released from the plant at Kodad in Telangana.

The company will be able to save about Rs 25 crore per annum towards power bill once the proposed plant becomes operational in a couple of years.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Nepal government has deported 51 foreign nationals, mostly Chinese and Bangladeshi citizens, on charges of over staying in the country, officials said Friday.

As per law, if a foreigner overstays without renewing tourist visa in excess of the period of 150 days, he or she will be expelled from the country.

The offender will have to pay a fine of USD 3 per day and an additional fine of up to Rs 50,000, officials said.

As per the recommendation of the Department of Immigration, the Ministry of Home Affairs deported 51 foreign nationals, mostly citizens from China and Bangladesh, on charges of overstaying in Nepal over the last three months, they said.

The deported foreigners are nationals from over three dozen countries, according to the Department of Immigration.

Some of those overstaying in Nepal were found to be working without permit or converting Hindus to Christians, officials said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Nepal on Friday issued a 35-day deadline to Nepalese to hand over firearms like rifles, revolvers and ammunition that they possess illegally as it cracked down on activities that can destabilise peace in the country.

"People who do not have a licence to carry weapons and ammunition should surrender those items at the nearest police station, district administration office or barracks of Nepali Army within 35-days, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Gokul Prasad Baskota told media.

The rule also applies for licensed arms and ammunitions if license owners have passed away without transferring the ownership of those items to their kin or others, he said.

People who give up weapons and ammunition will not face any action, Baskota said.

The government's latest announcement comes two days after it banned all activities of Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal and labelled it a terrorist outfit.

The government, according to the minister, had to take action against the Chand-led outfit, as it repeatedly refused to sit for talks when called by a high-level political dialogue team formed to talk to agitating and disgruntled groups.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A right-wing political party on Friday demanded the government to declare Nepal a Hindu state and hold a referendum to reinstate monarchy, which was abolished over a decade ago, in the country.

Nepal was declared a secular state in 2008 after the success of the people's movement of 2006 that saw the abolition of monarchy.

The Rastriya Prajatantra Party, led by former deputy premier Kamal Thapa, organised a two-week-long Rastrya Swabhiman Yatra from Mechi in the east to Mahakali in the west.

"The government should declare the country a Hindu state and we will start a campaign for establishing a democratic system with the inclusion of monarchy," Thapa said addressing his supporters at the conclusion of the 2800-km-long yatra which concluded here at Bhrikutimandap.

He said the march was organised by his party to preserve "national integrity and end corruption in the country".

Thapa accused both, the Nepal Communist Party-led government and main opposition Nepali Congress for the current "chaos" in the country.

He also criticised Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli for signing a pact with Madhesi leader C K Raut, who heads an Alliance for Free Madhes, last week.

Hinduism is the largest religion of Nepal.

According to the 2011 census, 81.3 per cent of the Nepalese population was Hindu, 9.0 per cent was Buddhist, 4.4 per cent was Muslim, 3.0 per cent was Kiratist (indigenous ethnic religion), 1.4 per cent was Christian, 0.2 per cent was Sikhs, 0.1 per cent was Jains and 0.6 per cent followed other religions or no religion.

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Netflix has said that it will be removing footage of a real-life Canadian rail disaster from its film "Bird Box".

The Sandra Bullock-starring film, directed by Susanne Bier, featured a stock footage from 2013 Lac-Megantic tragedy that claimed lives of over 40 people. It was used to depict a fictional story about an apocalyptic scenario.

In a brief statement to The Wrap, the streaming giant confirmed that it has decided to replace the clip.

"Netflix and the filmmakers of 'Bird Box' have decided to replace the clip. We're sorry for any pain caused to the Lac-Megantic community," the statement said.

Netflix had earlier refused to remove the footage from the film after the controversy happened in January.

The Canadian Parliament had also voted unanimously, criticising Netflix and demanding removal of the images from "its fiction catalogue".

The country's lawmakers also asked for compensation for the citizens of Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

The footage from the tragedy appeared in an episode of another Netflix show called "Travelers", but the production company behind that show swiftly removed and replaced the video.

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The National Green Tribunal has slammed the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) for delay in informing it whether sub-regional plans, prepared by states for protection of natural conservation zones (NCZs), were consistent with the regional plan prepared by the National Capital Region Planning Board.

A bench headed by NGT Chairperson Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel said the direction of the tribunal had not been carried out by the MoEF, without any valid reason.

The green panel also directed the Inspector General of Forests, MoEF dealing with the matter to remain present in person with the compliance report on the next date of hearing, failing which coercive action will be initiated.

"Only excuse given on behalf of the MoEF by way of an action taken report filed on February 25 is that response of the Delhi government and the Uttar Pradesh government was still awaited. It is not clear as to what steps have been taken in the last seven months for ensuring such response," the bench, also comprising Justices S P Wangdi and K Ramakrishnan, said.

The NGT said that if the report was not being furnished by the states, sufficient time was available to ask the chief secretaries of the these states to do the needful.

"MoEF was not expected to be just silent. We, thus, find the response to be not a responsible one and disapprove such attitude," the bench said while posting the matter for consideration of the compliance report on April 12.

The tribunal had on August 7 last year noted that some of the states had not completed the work of delineation of NCZ and directed preparation of such plans and a joint committee headed by the MoEF to examine the question whether the sub-regional plans are consistent with the regional plan prepared by NCRPB.

Earlier, in an affidavit filed before the tribunal, the National Capital Region Planning Board (NCRPB) had submitted that there was shrinkage in NCZs such as forests, water bodies and waste lands in Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.

It has said that NCRPRB after perusing the variations shown in analysis done by the National Remote Sensing Centre immediately acted upon the observations and sent letters to participating states of Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and NCT of Delhi and sought response for such shrinkage.

According to the NCRPB, the shrinkage of NCZ in Haryana sub-region is 25.97 per cent, 15.43 per cent in NCT of Delhi, 43.88 per cent in Uttar Pradesh sub-region and 11.18 per cent in Rajasthan sub-region.

The tribunal was hearing a petition filed by the Legal Aid Committee National Green Tribunal Bar Association against the alarming rate of depletion of NCZs in NCR.

It had sought directions to check alleged diversion of the area marked as NCZ by the National Capital Region Planning Board in the regional plan.

The plea had alleged that states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Rajasthan had diverted the NCZ area in violation of the original plan while preparing sub-regional plans and such diversion would adversely affect the environment.

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Tens of thousands of young people across Asia skipped school Friday to march through the streets, kicking off a global day of student protests aiming to spark world leaders into action on climate change.

Classrooms in capitals from Lagos to London were expected to be empty, as the ambitious organisers of the global student strike hoped to stage 1,000 demos in more than 100 countries.

Students flooded into the streets in Wellington, Sydney, Bangkok and Hong Kong carrying placards that read "There is no planet B", "You're destroying our future" and "If you don't act like adults, we will."



In Delhi, one of the world's most polluted cities, around 200 students took part in a colourful protest, waving ribbons, juggling and performing stunts with hoops.

In Sydney, 18-year-old Charles Rickwood, warned that if nothing is done, Australia's famous Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed.

"Especially if current trends in the continue, we'll see the one, two degrees increase in our ocean then it will simply become unsustainable and we could lose the entire Great Barrier Reef," he told AFP.

Parents of students in Christchurch in New Zealand were warned not to collect them with the city on lockdown after two crowded mosques were targeted in a mass shooting.

The worldwide protests were inspired by Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who camped out in front of parliament in Stockholm last year to demand action from world leaders on global warming.

"We are only seeing the beginning," tweeted Thunberg, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism.

However, the demos attracted mixed reactions from politicians.

In Australia, Education Minister Dan Tehan said the strike was "not something that we should encourage."



But the budding activists received encouragement from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who said it was important for the young generation to send a message.

"We hear you and we're getting on with setting a path for carbon neutrality," the 38-year-old leader said in a statement.

"Please keep bringing as many people as you can with you because we simply won't achieve our goals alone."



In famously hard-working South Korea, demonstrations only began once lessons finished for the day.

"It's hard for students to skip school in order to participate in this climate strike," said organiser Jeong Juwon, 25.

"In South Korea, exam results are very important and it's a big burden, and also the unemployment crisis is at its worst."



Wellington university student Josie Mason, 20, said she was "excited by the fact that youth are being heard and are making a stand right now."



"They call our generation the 'slacktivists' because it's really easy to say you're going to an event on a Facebook page or like something but not really do anything," she said.

Despite 30 years of warnings about dire impacts, carbon dioxide emissions hit record levels in 2017 and again last year.

Loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at current rates, scientists agree, will eventually lead to an uninhabitable planet.

The Paris treaty calls for capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius. The planet is currently on track to heat up by double that figure.

The UN's climate science panel warned in October that only a wholesale transformation of the global economy and consumer habits could forestall a catastrophe.

In Hong Kong, activists dressed up as polar bears and sharks to highlight the damage done to the by climate change.

"The main thing we want people to realise is that we are not only asking the Hong Kong government to do more, it is also people themselves who need to do more," said Zara Campion, 17, co-organiser of the strike.

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West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee Friday said the state will not have any problem if central forces are deployed in the state ahead of the 7-phase Lok Sabha elections beginning April 11.

The Election Commission Friday deployed seven companies of central para-military forces in as many districts of the state. Three more companies will join them late this evening.

"The state government was informed of the arrival of the (central) forces. Let them come, we don't have any problem," Banerjee, also Trinamool Congress supremo, said.

Banerjee was asked to comment on the statement of West Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh that the Trinamool Congress is averse to the deployment of central forces in the state.

Senior state minister and Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim later said the TMC had won the 2016 Assembly elections bagging 211 of the 294 seats, when central forces were on duty.

The party had won by huge margin in by-polls to a Lok Sabha seat and two Assembly constituencies when central forces had been deployed, the senior TMC leader said.

"Central forces guard the polling booths and provide security to voters. We have no issue if voters feel secure," Hakim said.

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The Congress on Friday said it was not facing any trouble in its alliance talks with other opposition parties in any state.

"There is no trouble, absolutely clear we are facing no trouble in any state as far as our alliance negotiations are concerned.

"The only thing in trouble is the country today and...our objective is to rid the country of the trouble called 'Narendra Modi'," Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said.

He said this on a day when the CPI-M declared 25 of its candidates in West Bengal.

The Congress is seeking to have a pre-poll tie-up in West Bengal with the CPI-M, but negotiations remained stuck over the number of seats each party would contest.

West Bengal has 42 parliamentary constituencies.

The Congress is also facing problems in Delhi, where a section of the party leadership wants to have a pre-poll alliance with the ruling AAP, but state unit chief Sheila Dikshit is against the tie-up. The Congress has already said there would be no tie-up in Delhi, but there is a rethink on the matter, it is learnt.

The Congress has also been left out of the grand alliance in Uttar Pradesh, where regional players SP, BSP and RLD have joined hands.

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Nobody has hurt India's global reputation and credibility more than the Modi government, the Congress alleged on Friday after over 100 economists and social scientists expressed concerns over "political interference" in statistical data in the country.

As many as 108 economists and social scientists Thursday called for restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity of statistical organisations.

Their appeal came against the backdrop of controversy over revision of gross domestic product (GDP) numbers and withholding employment data by the

"Nobody has hurt India's global reputation & credibility more than Modi government. 108 global economists and social scientists are concerned and you should be too!" Congress' chief spokesperson said in a tweet.

He urged people to vote out a party which, he alleged, "hides its massive failures by statistical jugglery and excel sheet management!"



The economists and social scientists have appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data" and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

The signatories include Rakesh Basant (IIM-A), James Boyce (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US), Emily Breza (Harvard University, US), Satish Deshpande (Delhi University), Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia, Canada), R Ramakumar (TISS, Mumbai), Hema Swaminathan (IIM-B) and Rohit Azad (JNU).
Congress president on Friday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of "trying stop the truth" about his "criminal failure" on employment from becoming public after over 100 economists and social scientists expressed concerns over "political interference" in statistical data in the country.

Gandhi's attack came a day after 108 economists and social scientists Thursday called for restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity of statistical organisations.

"NoMo trying to stop the truth about his criminal failure on employment from becoming public," Gandhi tweeted, tagging a media report on the appeal made by the economists and social scientists.

The appeal came against the backdrop of controversy over revision of gross domestic product (GDP) numbers and withholding employment data by the NSSO.

Earlier in the day, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala also hit out at the Modi government over the issue.

"Nobody has hurt India's global reputation & credibility more than Modi government. 108 global economists and social scientists are concerned and you should be too!" he said in a tweet.

Surjewala urged people to vote out a party which, he alleged, "hides its massive failures by statistical jugglery and excel sheet management!"



The economists and social scientists appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data" and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

The signatories include Rakesh Basant (IIM-A), James Boyce (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US), Emily Breza (Harvard University, US), Satish Deshpande (Delhi University), Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia, Canada), R Ramakumar (TISS, Mumbai), Hema Swaminathan (IIM-B) and Rohit Azad (JNU).
A former North Macedonia interior minister was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Friday for his part in orchestrating a mob attack on parliament in 2017, one of 16 people given jail terms over the violence.

Scores were injured in the bloody rioting that erupted on April 27, 2017 when around 100 nationalist demonstrators, including masked men, stormed the Skopje assembly at the culmination of a post-election political crisis.

Several lawmakers were beaten, including Social Democrat leader Zoran Zaev, who went on to become prime minister and pass the historic name deal with Greece that added "North" to former Macedonia's name, ending a long-running dispute.

A court in Skopje on Friday sentenced the 16 defendants, including some police officers, giving them prison terms ranging from seven to 18 years for "terrorist endangerment of the constitutional order and security".

The longest sentence was given to former Interior Minister and then-public security bureau chief Mitko Chavkov.

"The events were broadcast live, and citizens watched those terrible images with bleeding heads of lawmakers and journalists who were under attack, which undoubtedly caused insecurity and fear," judge Dobrila Kacarska said.

Fifteen others who were initially accused were earlier pardoned by an amnesty law passed by Zaev's government. One defendant was also acquitted on Friday.

The pardoned include five MPs from the opposition VRMO-DPMNE party who were key to passing the contentious name deal, which came into force last month.

The attack on the parliament followed months of protests by nationalists opposed to a coalition deal between Zaev's Social Democrats and minority ethnic Albanian parties.

The alliance eventually ousted the party of former PM Nikola Gruevski, who had held power for nearly a decade.

In November 2018 Gruevski fled to Hungary to escape a two-year prison sentence.

Last month North Macedonia authorities said Gruevksi and several other former senior officials are also being probed for allegedly plotting the parliament attack.

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The gunman who killed numerous worshippers in a New Zealand mosque on Friday was a right-wing "terrorist" with Australian citizenship, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.

"We stand here and condemn, absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist," Morrison told a press conference.

He confirmed media reports that the gunman who mowed down worshippers in the main mosque in the southern New Zealand city of Christchurch was an Australian-born citizen.

He said Australian security authorities were investigating any links between the country and the attack, but declined to provide further details about the Australian gunman.

An emotional Morrison offered his sympathies to Kiwis.

"We are not just allies, we are not just partners, we are family," he said. New Zealand police said they had detained three men and one woman after attacks on two Christchurch mosques, but they have not provided their identities.

"It is such a sad and devastating reminder of the evil that can be ever present about us," Morrison said of the attacks.

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Attacks on two mosques in New Zealand which left at least 49 people dead on Friday -- the Muslim day of prayer -- have sparked horror, revulsion and dismay around the world.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, describing it as "one of New Zealand's darkest days."



One of the gunmen -- believed to be an Australian extremist -- livestreamed the deadly assault, stoking outrage and fear that others may be targeted in copy-cat attacks.

"With this attack, hostility towards Islam that the world has been has been idly watching and even encouraging for some time, has gone beyond the boundaries of individual harassment to reach the level of mass killing," said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"If measures are not taken right away, of other disasters will follow this one... I am calling on the world, in particular the West, to take quick measures," he said.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg urged the international community to combat all forms of extremism after the Christchurch attacks, which revived painful memories of the 2011 mass killings in Norway by rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik.

"It's obviously very sad. It recalls painful memories of our own experience with July 22, the most difficult moment in the post-war period in Norway."



Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said he hoped New Zealand "will arrest these terrorists and do the necessary under the law of the country."Indonesian President Joko Widoyo, head of the world's largest Muslim country, said "we strongly condemn these kind of violent acts".

"Harrowing from New Zealand overnight" said EU Council president Donald Tusk.

"The brutal attack... will never diminish the tolerance and decency that New Zealand is famous for."



British Prime Minister Theresa May offered deepest condolences "after the horrifying terrorist attack in Christchurch. My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence."



London's police service said it was "stepping up reassurance patrols around mosques and increasing engagement with communities of all faith, giving advice on how people and places can protect themselves."



In Australia, police in New South Wales said there were increasing patrols around mosques as a precaution.

"There is no ongoing or specific threat to any mosque or place of worship," police said.

"An attack against peaceful people gathering for prayer is shocking in its cruelty and cynicism," Russian President Vladimir Putin said.

"I hope that those involved will be severely punished," he said in a message to Arden.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she mourned "with New Zealanders for their fellow citizens who were attacked and murdered out of racist hatred while peacefully praying in their mosques. We stand together against such acts of terrorism."



French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Merkel's message, condemning an "odious attack" and saying France "stands against any form of extremism".

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the US-led alliance "stands with our friend and partner New Zealand in defence of our open societies and shared values".

Spanish Premier Pedro Sanchez said his thoughts were with the victims, families and government of New Zealand after attacks by "fanatics and extremists who want to destroy our societies".

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"One failed. The other won't take-off", Finance Minister said as he took a jibe on the entry of Priyanka Gandhi into

Generation after generation, the Party's leadership berth is reserved for a member of the preferred family, he said as he traced the post-independence history of the party from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi to Sanjay Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi.

Continuing the series of his blogs on 'Agenda 2019', he said the tried to remove itself from the shackles of dynasty for a brief period after the unfortunate assassination of Rajiv Gandhi but could not get out of its clutches for long.

"Smt. Sonia Gandhi then took over as the longest serving President of the Indian and thereafter passed on the leadership baton of the Party to her son Rahul Gandhi.

"Thus, generation after generation, the Congress Party's leadership berth is reserved for a member of the preferred family. When the Party is now in doldrums, another member of the family has entered the scene," said the senior leader who is in-charge of party's publicity committee.

Jaitley was referring to Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who has been recently appointed as Congress general secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh.

The Finance Minister further said: "The key question is will the dynastic parties learn from their 2014 drubbing and a possible defeat in 2019?



"Possibly not. It is here that the people of India will have to bring about a change. India is not a monarchy. Neither is it a kingdom or dynastic democracy. Dynasts disapprove persons of talent and merit.

"The real strength of democracy will be realised when myth of dynasties is finally buried and these parties are taken over by men of competence and merit. That will provide Indians with a better choice, he said.

The another curious feature, he said, is that most families where a single dynast created the party, have moved into the next generation.

"In the next generation, there may be more than one heir. Both the heirs become aspirational and, therefore, the parent dynast distributes the largesse. But recent history has proved otherwise," Jaitley said.

He added that Chinese philosopher Confucius had rightly said that just as there can be only one sun in the sky, there can be only one emperor on the Earth.

"Where power sharing between successor dynasts takes place, who is the ultimate emperor?," he wondered as he highlighted instances of family-based political parties in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh.

In Karnataka, he said there is an experiment of sons sharing the state and the grandsons sharing the Centre, and in Maharashtra, the initial ripples have started.

"The Congress has undertaken the same experiment. It believes that two owners are better than one. Will Confucius be proved right and history record that one eventually prevailed over the other or will it be otherwise. One failed. The other won't take-off," Jaitley said.

On the other hand, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi grew from an extremely humble background.

He worked in the party organisation till he was inducted into the leadership and he had to work and struggle for the positions that he got.

"He earned them," Jaitley said, and exuded confidence that Modi and aspirational India would together demolish the concept of families.

"The real strength of democracy will be realised when myth of dynasties is finally buried and these parties are taken over by men of competence and merit. That will provide Indians with a choice," the minister remarked.

India will start voting to elect next Lok Sabha from April 11. The results would be announced on May 23.
"I can't breathe. Should I stop going to school?" "Kids need clean air". "No more excuses".

These were some of the phrases on placards Delhi-NCR students carried as they joined the global "Fridays for Future" protest against climate change, urging governments and authorities to tackle the problem.

The protests were started by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg in August 2018, becoming a regular event on the 15th of every month. Students from over 1,300 towns and cities went on planned strikes across the world Friday, a statement from the Global Strategic Communications Council (GSCC) said.

In the Delhi-NCR, over 500 students between age group of 10-16 years skipped their schools to be a part of the protest here.

"Climate change is the millenial cancer. It needs to be nipped in the bud. My teachers say we must cover our face when we go out in winters, but then I fell sick even in summers too. I can't play outside, and if I do I can't breathe," said Arya Gupta.

The 13-year-old student had a few questions for political leaders too.

"Last winter, politicians said they have a plan to clean the air but even now, my city's skyline is polluted. Does that mean I should stop going to school altogether? Even the United Nation's report says India is the world's most polluted country, clearly the government's plan is not working."



The students also raised voice against the passing of the Punjab Land Preservation Bill 2019, opening up the Aravalli Hills for mining and real estate sector.

Kriti Kakar, a class 12 student from Gurgaon's Heritage School who is also a member of the school's centre for active citizenship to help save the Aravallis, said climate change was majorly caused by greenhouse effect, and accelerated by human activities like deforestation.

"If the Aravallis are destroyed that would mean we lose a major carbon sink. Along with losing the home of our rich flora and fauna, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will significantly increase," she said.

The GSCC statement further said the campaign group 'Fridays For Future', tracking these protests across the world, reported that 186 strikes were planned in Germany, followed by the USA with 126, Italy with 123, covering all inhabited continents and featuring events in Brazil, Iran, Japan, India, Ukraine and Russia.

NGO Greenpeace lauded the children for coming forward for the cause of climate change and expressed hope that policy-makers would listen to the younger generation.

"Seeing school children come out in huge numbers and confront the policy makers across the world and now in India makes me both happy and sad," Greenpeace campaigner Sunil Dahiya said.

The need for such a protest, he said, tough underlines the inaction of "our generations to fight the global hazard of Climate Change", the new generation acknowledging the challenge and deciding to fight it gave him hope.

"The young (people) have power and energy and I am sure that our policy makers will wake up at least now on seeing these kids on streets confronting them and stop wasting time, resources and public money by further investing in fossil fuels like coal and diesel," Dahiya said.

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As Pakistan airspace continues to remain closed since February 27 in the wake of the IAF air strike in Balakot, IndiGo's Delhi-Istanbul plane may have to take a stop at Doha on its inaugural flight on March 20.

"The flights on Delhi-Istanbul-Delhi route will be through Doha in Qatar if Pakistan does not open its airspace by March 20," said a senior airline official.

On January 25, IndiGo, India's largest carrier in terms of domestic market share, announced it would operate daily non-stop planes between Delhi and Istanbul from March 20, with A321 aircraft.

IndiGo would be the first Indian airline to fly to Turkey, and Istanbul would be the 16th international destination for the budget carrier.

As Pakistan keeps its airspace closed since the Indian Air Force strikes on a terrorist camp in Balakot, on February 26, the operating cost for Air India, which flies to destinations in Europe and the US, have increased significantly as it has to take longer routes.

Air India on Thursday announced it would combine the Mumbai-New York flight with its Mumbai-Newark flight from March 16 to May 31.

On Wednesday, it had announced it is suspending its flights on the Delhi-Madrid and Delhi-Birmingham routes from March 16 "till further notice" due to "operational reasons".

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Pakistan has "surreptitiously usurped" lands belonging to the Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara in the name of developing a corridor for the convenience of pilgrims and objected to most of the Indian proposals for the project, reflecting its "double-speak", officials said on Friday.

The Indian delegation, which attended the first India-Pakistan meeting on Thursday to finalise the modalities for the proposed corridor linking Gurdaspur in Punjab with the Sikh shrine in Pakistan's Kartarpur, strongly protested against the "rampant encroachment" on the lands belonging to the holy Sikh shrine in utter disregard to the sentiments of devotees of Guru Nanak Dev in India.

"Pakistan has lived up to its old reputation of making false promises, making tall claims and delivering nothing. Its double-speak on the Kartarpur Sahib corridor has been exposed in the first meeting itself at Attari on Thursday," a government official, who attended the meeting, said.

The encroached lands were donated to the Kartarpur Sahib by devouts like late Maharaja Ranjeet Singh and others.

"Lands owned by the gurdwara have been surreptitiously usurped by the government of Pakistan in the name of developing the corridor. A strident demand was made by India for restoration of these lands to the holy gurdwara urgently, keeping in view the strong sentiments on the issue within India," the official said.

Pakistan wanted to restrict the duration of Kartarpur agreement to just two years, despite India making it clear that it is executing long-lasting and comprehensive facilities at the border by spending Rs 190 crore.

While India has made serious efforts to fulfil the long standing aspiration of the Indian pilgrims and devotees of Guru Nanak Dev for smooth, easy and hassle-free access of pilgrims to Kartarpur Sahib, Pakistan has scuttled the proposals made by New Delhi.

"Against the hype created by the Pakistan government and the Pakistan media, its actual offer during the talks turned out to be farcical and mere tokenism. There is a sea of difference between what Pakistan, including Prime Minister Imran Khan, had announced, and in what they offered at Attari meeting. Clearly, Pakistan is not interested in providing Indian pilgrims easy access to Kartarpur Sahib," the official said.

While India is executing a state-of-the-art passenger terminal building for visit of over 5,000 pilgrims daily and over 15,000 pilgrims on special occasions like Vaisakhi (falls in mid-April), Pakistan has limited it to mere 700 pilgrims per day.

Pakistan did not agree to the Indian demand of allowing daily visits of pilgrims and has restricted it to "visiting days" which will be specified by it. It did not agree to permit travel of devotees on foot or as individuals, and has insisted on movement of groups of 15 and by vehicle, another official said.

Despite having assured visa-free passage to Kartarpur Sahib, Pakistan has now brought in, through the back door, the requirement of issuance of special permits by them to pilgrims, that also at a fee, which is "outrageous and defeats" the very purpose of the corridor, the official said.

Pakistan has restricted the corridor facility to only Indian Passport holders to the exclusion of large number of Overseas Citizens of India card holder devotees. Pakistan is pretending to be blind to the fact that Guru Nanak Dev holds universal appeal, including the large Indian diaspora, the official said.

Interestingly, when India and Pakistan had signed a pact in 1974 to facilitate the visit of their pilgrims to the shrines located in each other's territories, Kartarpur Sahib was not included despite repeated Indian requests.

Pakistan has so far resisted all attempts to include Kartarpur in the 1974 MoU, the official said.

As per that agreement, there are 15 shrines in Pakistan and seven in India where each other's pilgrims can visit.

Kartarpur Sahib marks the place where Sikhism's founder, Guru Nanak Dev, spent the final years of his life.

It is located in Pakistan's Narowal district across the river Ravi, about four kilometres from the international border.

Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu and Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had on November 26, 2018 laid the corridor's foundation stone in Gurdaspur.

Two days later, Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan laid the foundation stone at Narowal, 125 km from Lahore.

India hopes that the special border crossing for pilgrims will open before Guru Nanak Dev's 550th birth anniversary in November 2019.

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owes its "all weather friend" at least $10 billion debt for the construction of the and other projects, the top general has said, as he underlined Beijing's "predatory economics" to expand its global influence.

The strategic in Balochistan province on the Arabian Sea is being built by under the multi-billion China- Economic Corridor (CPEC) and is considered to be a link between Beijing's ambitious One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and Maritime Silk Road projects.

"Let look at just a few examples. Saddled with predatory Chinese loans, Sri Lanka granted a 99-year lease and 70 per cent stake in its deep-water port," General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

The Maldives owes China roughly $1.5 billion in debt - about 30 per cent of its GDP - for construction costs, he said.

" owes China at least $10 billion in debt for the construction of and other projects," Dunford said.

"China is diligently building an network of coercion through predatory economics to expand its sphere of influence," he said, adding that nations around the globe are discovering the hard way that China's economic "friendship" via OBOR can come at "a steep cost" when promises of investment go unfulfilled and standards and safeguards are ignored.

In Africa, Djibouti owes China over 80 per cent of its GDP and in 2017, the country became host to China's first overseas military base. In Latin America, Ecuador agreed to sell 80 to 90 per cent of its exportable crude oil to China through 2024 in exchange for $6.5 billion in Chinese loans, he said.

And after leasing land tax-free to China for 50 years, Argentina is denied access and oversight to a Chinese satellite tracking station on its sovereign territory, unwittingly allowing the facility's use for military purposes, the US general said.

Dunford warned that if China's predatory debt tactics is left unaddressed, it will have serious implications on the US's military.

Alleging that China is extending its reach by increasing its overt military and coercive activities through its neighbours, Dunford said China's increasingly provocative behaviour in the Indo-Pacific, particularly the South China Sea (SCS), should concern all.

Between 2013 and 2018, China increased its air and sea incursions into the SCS twelve-fold. Within those five years, it also increased deployments of offensive and defensive weapons systems to the SCS by the same order of magnitude, he said.

China's land reclamation and militarisation far exceed that of other claimants combined in the South China Sea, he said.

Between 2013 and 2015 alone, China created more than 3,200 acres in the SCS, building features within its self-proclaimed 'nine dash line' - a claim the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled in 2016 has no legal basis, Dunford told the lawmakers.

Dunford also accused China of interfering in the freedom of navigation.

"China habitually threatens this freedom, using both conventional military force projection and 'gray zone' or irregular warfare activities," he said.

Citing an example, he said Chinese military vessels came dangerously close to the USS Decatur, a destroyer of the US Navy, off the coast of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.

"China's force projection inside and outside the SCS disrespects and undermines our rules-based order and threatens regional stability and security," Dunford said.
NCP chief Sharad Pawar Friday demanded a white paper on the condition of all the bridges in the megapolis.

His demand comes a day after six persons were killed and 31 others injured when a section of the foot overbridge near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) in south Mumbai collapsed.

Talking to reporters here, Pawar also expressed concerns over the "frequent mishaps" taking place in the city.

"A number of bridges, including the Eastern Express Highway, need immediate attention. The Public Works Department (PWD), the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the Railways need to carry out fresh audits of all the bridges and then they should be made public so that people know the condition of the bridges they are using," he said.

"There is a need for inspection of all foot overbridges (FOBs) and road overbridges (ROBs) and a white paper should be published on it," he said.

Pawar also demanded that the big ticket Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project be scrapped.

"There is no point spending millions of dollars on the bullet train, when 11 to 15 railway passengers are dying in railway mishaps in Mumbai daily. Instead, this huge money should be spent on strengthening the suburban railway services as almost one crore passengers travel by trains in the metropolis daily," he said.

"The Centre and the state should take this issue seriously to save the lives of commuters," the NCP chief added.

"We must never forget that Mumbai is the financial capital of the country and its population is on the rise. Therefore, such incidents mar the city's growth prospects," he further said.

Maharashtra Congress president Ashok Chavan and Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Council Dhananjay Munde held the government responsible for the incident.

"The government is insensitive. The state ignored my demand of audit of FOBs," Chavan said.

He demanded immediate sacking of BMC Commissioner and Mayor.

Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam accused BMC Chief Ajoy Mehta of "criminal negligence" and demanded his removal.

"Such incidents are increasing in Mumbai. Despite the deaths of innocent Mumbaikars no action is taken by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis against the guilty. People have to bear the brunt of the criminal negligence of the civic chief," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Punjab BJP chief Shwait Malik Friday lashed out at Pakistan for trying to put restrictions on number of pilgrims visiting the historic Sikh shrine inKartarpur.

India had on Thursday sought visa-free access for 5,000 pilgrims per day to the Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara in Pakistan during a meeting between officials of the two countries.

"Pakistan now seeks to impose too many restrictions on the proposed corridor facility which include capping the number of pilgrims to 500 per day and not allowing movement of devotees on foot and issue of special permits," Malik said in a statement issued here.

He said Pakistan should reciprocate to India's efforts of facilitating hassle-free visit of pilgrims to the Sikh shrine.

"Pakistan is oblivious to the fact that Guru Nanak Dev holds universal appeal among the people here and abroad. The government is India has made serious effort to fulfil the long pending aspiration of the pilgrims (by facilitating visit to the shrine) but Pakistan is trying to scuttle this move," alleged Malik, who is a Rajya Sabha MP.

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After the death of her husband and marriages of two daughters, 54-year-old Shamuta Banu entered the world of drugs for her livelihood and became the kingpin of an Assam-based narcotics gang, police said.

A resident of Nagaon district in Assam, Banu was in the throes of a financial crisis when she came in contact with a drug dealer from Manipur, who lured her into working for him, a senior police officer said.

Banu's husband died in 2014 after the marriages of their daughters. He was a labourer and had some land in his name, police said.

The daughters married in Assam and were residing close to their mother's home, they said.

Initially, Banu started supplying drugs on her own but later formed a gang. She was the alleged kingpin of the gang which was busted on Tuesday, the officer said.

Besides Delhi, Banu's gang was supplying drugs in Bihar, Manipur, UP, Rajasthan, West Bengal and parts of north India.

During Tuesday's raid two other persons were also arrested and 44.5 kg heroin worth Rs 180 crore was seized from them.

In her statement, Banu said she used to procure crude heroin from a Manipur-based person who brought the stuff from Myanmar.

In her initial years in the racket, Banu came in contact with one Dhanji Gupta, a resident of Rohtash district in Bihar, and started supplying heroin to him.

Banu, with the help of Gupta and her other associates, used chemical agents to process crude heroin into fine quality product.

Subsequently, she developed her own network for getting the heroin from Manipur and supplying it across the country.

When asked about her connection outside India, the officer said Banu used to supply majority of the drugs in India but some Afghan and Nigerian nationals transported the contraband to various countries, including the UK, the USA, South Africa and Canada.

Another senior police officer said the peddlers started procuring heroin from Myanmar due to its fine quality and cheap rates.

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Provident Fund deduction related litigations with the EPFO is likely to reduce after the Supreme Court ruling that special allowance paid by an employer is part of basic wages for EPF dues computation.

The apex court in its judgement has ruled that special allowance is part of the basic wages for computing the employees provident fund (EPF). The employer as well as the employee pay 12 per cent of basic wages each towards contribution for social security scheme run by the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO).

"The order just upheld the existing sections of the EPF Act. After this ruling, it is expected that litigations related to deductions toward provident fund will be reduced," RPFC Navendu Rai said on the sidelines of a seminar organised by the ICC on the EPF Act.

The apex court decision came when it was dealing with a question on whether special allowances paid by an establishment to its employees would fall within the expression "basic wages" under the provision of the Employees' Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 for computation of deduction towards provident fund.

Meanwhile, the Provident Fund (PF) balance transferred from one's ex-employer will become an automated process as the EPFO is doing away with the manual process in place now, Additional CPFC EPFO, S K Sangma said.

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Expressing "deep shock" over killings of scores of people in the Christchurch terror attack, Prime Minister Narendra on Friday said



hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies, and expressed India's solidarity with the people of New Zealand at this difficult time.

In a letter to Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, Modi also stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence, the External Affairs Ministry said in an official release.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's suburb, seen as one of the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

In the letter, Modi offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injured and underscored India's solidarity with the "friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time".

Prime Minister has expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch, the release said.

"The Prime Minister stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies," it added.

Modi also expressed his deepest condolences to the bereaved families in the dastardly attack.

Earlier, the MEA said its High Commission is in touch with local authorities for more information and was ascertaining more details about the possibility of Indians being affected by the terror attacks.

"Our mission is in touch with local authorities to ascertain more details. It is a sensitive matter and therefore we can't give confirmed numbers/names till we are absolutely certain," MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

Meanwhile, MP Asaduddin Owaisi, President of All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party, said an Indian has been shot at in the incident.

"A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad and would like to go to NZ for Ahmed's family. I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family," he said in a tweet.

India's High Commission said that any Indian national affected by the attacks can contact it for assistance.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for those affected.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh tweeted,"India stands with New Zealand in this hour of grief & sorrow and offers it's condolences to the bereaved families.The shootout in New Zealand underscores the importance of the global fight to counter Terrorism - the World needs to get together and defeat this demon.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday expressed "deep shock and sadness" over the death of scores of people in the heinous terrorist attack in New Zealand while stressing India's strong condemnation of terrorism and of all those who support such acts of violence.

In a letter to Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, Modi also underscored India's solidarity with the people of her country at this difficult time.

Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers killed at least 49 people in Christchurch, while several explosive devices were defused, in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack.

"Prime Minister has expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch," the External Affairs Ministry said in an official release.

"The Prime Minister stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies.

Modi also expressed his deepest condolences to the families bereaved in this dastardly attack, offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injuried and underscored India's solidarity with the friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Good outcomes are hoped to be delivered out of the economic and trade consultations between China and the United States, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang meets the press after the conclusion of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 15, 2019. [Photo: Xinhua/Xing Guangli]

China hopes the talks will deliver win-win results and mutual benefits, Li said at a press conference after the conclusion of the annual session of China's national legislature.

"I believe this is also what the whole world would like to see," he said.

China and the United States have become closely intertwined through years of development and cooperation, it is neither realistic nor possible to decouple the two economies, he said.

National flags of China and the U.S. [File photo: VCG]

"I believe we need to continue to follow the principles of cooperation instead of confrontation, mutual respect, equality, and mutual benefits to advance bilateral relations, including economic and trade ties, to deliver concrete benefits to people of the countries," he said.

China has confidence that the two peoples have the wisdom and capability to diffuse and manage their differences to pursue steady and sound development of China-U.S. relationship, he added.

Despite twists and turns, Li said the overall relationship between China and the United States will forge ahead, as their shared interests far outweigh differences.
A special court here Friday issued a non-bailable warrant (NBW) against the wife of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi, a key accused in the USD 2 billion Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case.

The warrant against Ami Modi was issued by Special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) Judge M S Azmi after he took cognisance of the supplementary chargesheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against Nirav Modi (48) and other accused a few days ago.

The financial crime probe agency has alleged that Ami Modi used an international bank account to move USD 30 million, suspected to be proceeds of the scam.

The funds were used to buy property located in New York's Central Park, the ED has said.

In its supplementary chargesheet, the agency has recorded additional evidences gathered in the case and attachments made.

It is understood that the ED has underlined the role of Ami Modi and funds routed by her in the supplementary chargesheet.

The ED had filed the first chargesheet in this case in May last year.

According to investigating agencies, Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, in connivance with certain bank officials, allegedly cheated PNB to the tune of Rs 14,000 crore through issuance of fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoUs).

These LoUs were allegedly issued in a fraudulent manner by a Mumbai branch of the PNB to the group of companies belonging to Nirav Modi since March 2011 till the fraud came to light in January 2018, the agencies have said.

Nirav Modi, Choksi and other accused are facing charges under the PMLA Act and the Indian Penal Code in the fraud case which is being probed by multiple agencies, including the ED.

According to a UK media report last week, Nirav Modi is currently living in a three-bedroom flat occupying half of a floor of the landmark Centre Point tower block in London, where rent is estimated to cost 17,000 pounds a month.

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Representatives of various political parties met the three-member team of special observers, appointed by the Election Commission (EC), here on Friday and reiterated the demand for holding Assembly elections and Lok Sabha polls simultaneously in Jammu and Kashmir.

The three observers -- Noor Mohammad, Vinod Zutshi and A S Gill, appointed to suggest when Assembly elections can be held in the northern state, reached Jammu from Srinagar on the second leg of their visit.

"Representatives of different political parties met the observers separately and discussed the timing of the Assembly elections," an official said.

He said the special observers will be holding a meeting with the district development commissioners and senior superintendents of police later in the day to get their feedback.

"We sought a review of the Election Commission's decision to defer the Assembly elections as all parties in the state are on the same page for simultaneous polls to provide an opportunity to the people to elect their own government," state Congress vice president and former minister Raman Bhalla said after meeting the observers.

He said the EC had conducted the panchayat and urban local bodies elections last year despite some parties boycotting them.

"Today when everyone is demanding simultaneous polls, there is no justification for delaying the state polls," Bhalla said.

BJP state general secretary Narinder Singh said his party favoured simultaneous polls and had conveyed its decision to the special observers.

"The Amarnath Yatra, Budha Amarnath Yatra, Eid and movement of nomads will take place in the coming months and therefore the EC should take a call in a way which ensures maximum participation of people in the exercise," he said.

The special observers also met a delegation of the National Panthers Party, the officials said.

The three-member team arrived in Srinagar on a two-day visit on Thursday to assess the situation in Jammu and Kashmir on realtime basis to enable the EC to take a call on holding the state Assembly elections.

While announcing the schedule for the Lok Sabha elections on Sunday, the poll panel had said the Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir cannot be held simultaneously due to security concerns flagged by the Centre.

The National Conference and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) did not meet the observers, saying they had nothing more to add to the demand for simultaneous polls.

Jammu and Kashmir has been under President's rule since December 19, 2018, which was necessitated after six months of Governor's rule ended in the state.

The Governor's rule was imposed after the PDP-BJP government in the state fell on June 19, 2018, following the national party's withdrawal from the coalition.

Since the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly has been dissolved, the EC is bound to hold fresh polls in the state within a six-month period, which will end in May.

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Tamil Nadu government has ordered an enquiry on how a college here gave its nod for Congress President Rahul Gandhi to interact with its students when the Model Code of Conduct is in force.

The top Congress leader, in his interaction with students of the Stella Maris College here on March 13, promised 33 per cent reservation in government jobs for women and answered several of their questions.

The Director of Collegiate Education, R Sarumathi directed a subordinate official to enquire "immediately" on the matter and submit a report, official sources told PTI.

In a communique (dated March 14) to the Regional Joint Director, Chennai Zone, the director pointed out that in view of the Lok Sabha elections the MCC was in force and under such circumstances sought to know "how permission was granted" by the college for the event.

Sources said Stella Maris is one of the 10 government aided colleges in Chennai. Such institutions are not only bound by State norms, but are also expected to follow the MCC.

According to the MCC,displayed in the Election Commission website, "use of educational institutions, including their grounds (whether government aided, private or government) for political campaigns and rallies is not allowed."



When contacted, the college authorities declined to say if any enquiry was made by the collegiate department officials.

The Chief Electoral Officer also did not comment.

In his interaction with the students, Rahul had brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process.

To a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, he had said that the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively.

"I will be the first person to say it... investigate Robert Vadra, but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.

Vadra is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district.

Gandhi also questioned whether the Prime Minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Tamil Nadu government has ordered an inquiry on how a college here gave its approval for Congress President Rahul Gandhi to interact with its students when the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) for elections is in force.

The top Congress leader, in his interaction with students of the Stella Maris College here on March 13, promised 33 per cent reservation in government jobs for women and answered several of their questions.

The Director of Collegiate Education, R Sarumathi directed a subordinate official to inquire "immediately" on the matter and submit a report, official sources told PTI.

In a communique (dated March 14) to the Regional Joint Director, Chennai Zone, the director said in view of the Lok Sabha elections the MCC was in force and under such circumstances, sought to know "how permission was granted" by the college for the event.

Sources said Stella Maris is one of the 10 government aided colleges in Chennai. Such institutions are not only bound by State norms, but are also expected to follow the MCC.

According to the MCC, displayed in the Election Commission website, "use of educational institutions, including their grounds (whether government aided, private or government) for political campaigns and rallies is not allowed."



When contacted, the college authorities declined to say if any inquiry was conducted by collegiate department officials.

The Chief Electoral Officer also did not comment.

Tamil Nadu Congress Committee President K S Alagiri dubbed the inquiry move as an act of "vendetta," by the BJP-led government at the Centre through the AIADMK regime in Tamil Nadu unable to tolerate the positive response especially from the youth to the event.

Political leaders taking part in college functions has been in vogue for a long time, he said.

The decision to invite Gandhi was taken a few months ago by the students association of the college.

Rahul Gandhi took part in the event only in his capacity as a Member of Parliament and not as the Congress president, he claimed, adding "the Model Code of Conduct is not a bar to participate in such events as an MP."



When Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Satyabrata Sahoo had said there was "no violation" of the MCC, what right does the Collegiate department have to pursue the matter, he asked.

"If the Tamil Nadu government came forward to take steps against the reputed Stella Maris College, I would like to warn that it will lead to severe consequences," he said.

The Congress leader demanded withdrawal of the official communication tasking an official to probe the matter.

In his interaction with the students, Gandhi had brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process.

To a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, he had said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively.

"I will be the first person to say it... investigate Robert Vadra, but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.

Vadra is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district.

Gandhi also questioned whether the Prime Minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions.

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The cross-LoC trade between Poonch-Rawalakot resumed on Friday, after remaining suspended for two days due to ceasefire violation by Pakistan along the Line of Control, officials said.

A total of 67 trucks, including 35 from India and 32 from Pakistan, crossed the border via Chakan-Da-Bagh, custodian of LoC trade centre, Poonch, Fareed Kohli told PTI.

The trade took place smoothly, he said.

The cross-LoC trade was suspended on Wednesday after five mortar shells hit the facilitation centre at Chakan-Da-Bagh in Poonch district. Though there were no casualties in the shelling, several sheds, including the one housing the X-Ray scanner, were damaged.

The cross-LoC trade between Poonch on this side and Rawalakot in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which started in October 2008, takes place four days a week, from Tuesday to Friday, on barter system.

Despite increased tensions between the neighbours in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack and India's subsequent air strike in Balakot, the cross-LoC trade and bus service remained largely unaffected, even as there was a spurt in cross-border skirmishes.

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Peoples' Party of Arunachal (PPA) chairman Kamen Ringu Friday said the party will fight the state Assembly and Lok Sabha elections alone and dismissed claims made by Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee president Takam Sanjoy of forging a pre-poll alliance with the PPA.

Ringu said the PPA president Kahfa Bengia and secretary general Kaling Jerang had casual discussions with the Congress which was not "endorsed" by the party.

"We have temporarily suspended them for hobnobbing with the Congress on seat sharing without the knowledge of the partys executive body. We will not forge any alliance with any national political parties but will contest the polls alone keeping our regional ideology intact," Ringu said.

Election to the 60-member Arunachal Pradesh Assembly and the two Lok Sabha seats in the state will be held on April 11.

He told reporters here that "the PPA with regional identity will go alone to contest in all the 60 Assembly and two Lok Sabha seats in the state and will soon announce the list of candidates."



Lashing out at the national political parties for neglecting the state, Ringu alleged that these parties were trying to lure potential PPA candidates.

On the partys agenda for the polls, Ringu said that it would be inclusive development for the interest of the indigenous people of the state.

"The people of the state are fed-up with the lip services of Congress as well as BJP government at the Centre," Ringu said.

The PPA had won four seats in the 2009 Assembly polls and in 2014 Assembly election it had won five seats.

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Former president Pranab Mukherjee Friday lauded the contribution of the Odia community in development of the country, saying Odisha has given many valiant heroes, marine activists and great patriarchs.

Organised by Odia Samaj, the third edition of this three-day event, would showcase the unique culture, heritage, tradition, ethnic cuisine and handlooms of the state in one spectrum.

The event was inaugurated by Mukherjee, who lauded the contribution of the Odia community in development of the country.

"The Odia community contributed in development of the country, Odisha has given many valiant heroes, marine activists and great patriarchs," he said.

Spreading over an area of 2,60,000 sq. ft this year, 'Odisha Parba' showcases the vision for a futuristic Odisha and how during ancient times Odisha was one of the most prominent states of the country with a rich maritime trade history, according to a statement by the organisers.

The entrance gate to the event will depict sunrise symbolising development of eastern India in general and Odisha in particular.

A grand stage has been set up with backdrop of a lotus flower to symbolise the vision of flourishing or blooming Odisha.

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Congress general secretary Vadra is expected to kick-off her campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from the political hotbed of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Prayagraj and Varanasi, taking the river route to establish a direct contact with people.

The Congress general secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh, who was earlier scheduled to arrive at the state capital on Friday, was now expected to launch her campaign on March 18, a senior party leader said here.

Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Raj Babbar had said Wednesday that Priyanka would be arriving here on Friday but hours later, he had informed that the programme was postponed.

According to a letter submitted to the Election Commission (EC), permission has been sought for the Congress leader's visit from Prayagraj to Varanasi from March 18 to March 20.



The letter also informs that Priyanka will use a motorboat, taking the river route to cover the distance of around 100 kms, and programmes to welcome her have been scheduled all along, for which permission was required in accordance with the Model Code of Conduct.

According to Congress leaders, the party will attempt to reach out to the people living in the riparian areas that are not easily accessible by road.

Priyanka is likely to arrive at the state capital on March 17 and proceed to Prayagraj to launch her campaign the next day.

A senior leader said she would launch her campaign from Prayagraj, the birth place of the first prime minister of independent India and her great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, from where she would take the river route till Varanasi.



When contacted, Congress spokesman Anshu Awasthi said permission from the EC for Priyanka's visit was awaited.

Meetings in preparation for the visit had started since Thursday and the details would be worked out soon, he added.

At Allahabad, Priyanka is expected to visit the historic Anand Bhawan, the erstwhile official residence of the Nehru family, now a museum housing the personal belongings of Nehru and his father Motilal Nehru.

Congress sources said Priyanka might offer prayers at the Vindhyavasini temple at Mirzapur and the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi -- the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Patna High Court Friday quashed criminal proceedings initiated against Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar by a lower court in a three-decades-old murder case, holding that "the prosecution is mala fide, untenable and solely intended to harass the petitioner".

Justice A Amanullah passed the order on an application moved by Kumar, who heads the Janata Dal (United).

The proceedings were initiated in 2009, 18 years after an FIR was lodged at the Pandarak police station in connection with the killing of one Sita Ram Singh, who died in violence at a polling booth in the Barh Lok Sabha constituency where bypoll was underway and Kumar was the candidate of the Janata Dal.

An FIR was lodged by Singh's brother Raja Ram Singh on November 16, 1991, wherein he had named Kumar alongside don-turned-politicians Dilip Singh and Dularchand Yadav and their associates who were believed to be close to the Janata Dal.

Upon learning that his name had figured in the FIR, Kumar filed an application before the investigating officer that at the time of the incident, he was with the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police of Nalanda district and not present when the attack took place.

Police submitted its final report two years later wherein "no evidence" was found with regard to the involvement of Kumar and 15 years afterwards, the ACJM on August 05, 2008 accepted the final report and issued NBWs against those accused who were prima facie found to be involved in the incident.

One Ashok Singh, who was injured in the firing but not the informant in the case, filed a "protest-cum-complaint petition" on January 20, 2009 before the ACJM court which "again took cognizance" against Kumar vide order dated July 20, 2009.

Appearing on behalf of the chief minister, senior Supreme Court lawyer Surendra Singh had argued that Kumar had occupied the post in "late 2005, and thus, due to political rivalry, such petition was filed to damage him personally and politically".

In his more than 100 pages long order, Justice Amanullah appear to concur with the petitioners counsel and remarked "the court has no hesitation to record a finding that the protest-cum-complaint petition itself was frivolous, mala fide, frivolous, mischievous, without any basis and in fact totally false and fabricated".

"The court inescapably finds that the prosecution is mala fide, untenable and solely intended to harass the petitioner," Justice Amanullah added as a parting note.

Hailing the judgement, JD(U) national general secretary and Chief Spokesman K C Tyagi issued a statement, "The decision proves that Nitish Kumar represents the moral ethos of Indian politics."



It comes as a relief to the chief minister with the opposition parties, especially the Rashtriya Janata Dal, targeting him over his name figuring in the murder case.

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Accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi of deceiving people, mainly farmers, with false promises, Congress president Rahul Gandhi Friday asserted his party always keeps its words after winning elections.

"We do whatever we say. We have always translated our words into action. Congress does not make false promises to people like Modi does," he told a Congress rally in this west Odisha town in the run up to the Lok Sabha and state assembly elections next month.

Gandhi said his party's track record in fulfilling election promises can be seen in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where it came to power recently.

While farm loans were waived soon after the party formed its governments in these states, the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for paddy was hiked to Rs 2,500 per quintal in Chhattisgarh.

"We wanted to give a message to farmers in these states that they are not alone and that the Congress is with them. The same message is also being sent out to the farmers of Odisha and they should back our party," he said.

This was Gandhi's first visit to Odisha after the announcement of the election schedule. He had earlier visited Bhubaneswar on January 25, Bhawanipatna and Rourkela on February 6 and Koraput on March 8 to bolster the poll prospects of the Congress, which has been out of power in the state since 2000.

"Modi is in the habit of telling lies and making false promises to deceive people. Farmers across the country are the worst victims of the BJP's hollow and deceptive words," he said.

Claiming that the country is witnessing farmer suicides every day, the Congress chief said distressed peasants are forced to take the extreme step as the Modi government failed to fulfil its promise of mitigating their plight.

"Farmer suicides are reported every day as the Modi government did not keep its promises. It made tall claims about welfare of farmers, but refused to waive their loans and hike the MSP of paddy," Gandhi said.

Though the BJP promised to provide remunerative prices for farm produce, no such step was taken after it came to power in 2014, he claimed.

"Modi speaks about farmers and their welfare in all his speeches. He makes tall claims about improving farmers' lives, but when it comes to action he helps only his industrialist friends," Gandhi said.

Attacking Modi, the Congress president said the prime minister had promised that his government would create at least two crore jobs annually, bring back black money stashed abroad and deposit Rs 15 lakh in everyone's bank account but nothing happened.

Though the BJP-led government readily decided to write off Rs 3.5 lakh crore debt of 15-20 industrialists, Finance Minister Arun Jaitly rejected the plea for farm loan waiver.

Describing Bargarh as the rice bowl of Odisha, the Congress leader said farmers are committing suicide here too as both the Centre and the BJD government in the state have failed to address their problems.

The Congress president accused the Modi government of attempting to snatch away the land of farmers and tribals, and hand them over to industrialists.

"The Modi government made at least three attempts to change the Land Acquisition Act to give shape to this evil designs," he alleged.

Asserting that no land can be taken from farmers and tribals without their consent, Gandhi said land acquired from them for setting up industries must be returned if no project comes up within five years of acquisition.

In Bastar district of Chhattisgarh, a piece of land was taken back from an industrial house as it was lying idle for more than five years, he said.

Maintaining that the Congress is keen on investing substantially in health and education, Gandhi accused Modi and Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik of trying to privatise both the sectors.

He said the Congress favours proper utilisation of public money, and if his party comes to power, steps will be taken to ensure affordable health care to all.

Gandhi once again raked up the Rafale fighter jet deal controversy, insisting the government "doled out" Rs 30,000 crore to industrialist Anil Ambani.

Assailing the Centre over the Goods and Services Tax regime, he said the "Gabbar Singh Tax" will be simplified to help small businessmen and traders.

The Congress leader said the Naveen Patnaik government has failed to keep its promise of building a network of cold storages, strengthening irrigation and setting up food processing industries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Congress President Rahul Gandhi will address an election rally here on March 19 in support of party candidates, a party leader said here Friday.

Election to the 60-member Arunachal Pradesh Assembly and the two Lok Sabha seats in the state will be held on April 11.

The Congress will announce the names of the candidates for the polls in the state before Gandhis visit, Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president Takam Sanjoy said.

Gandhi will address an election rally at Indira Gandhi Park here on March 19, the party leader said.

The Congress had won 42 seats in 2014 state Assembly election but now has only five MLAs as a large number of legislators left the party and joined other parties.

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Milos Raonic made sure Miomir Kecmanovic's good luck finally ran out at the BNP Paribas Open.

Raonic beat the 19-year-old Serb 6-4 6-3 on Thursday to reach the semifinals and improve to 19-4 at Indian Wells since 2014. Raonic fired 13 aces against no double faults in putting away Kecmanovic in 72 minutes on a sunny, windy and cool day in the Southern California desert.

Kecmanovic was the first lucky loser to reach the quarterfinals at the tournament since it became a Masters 1000 event in 1990. Ranked 130th in the world, the Serb lost in qualifying, but his fortune soon turned.

Three seeded players withdrew before the tournament began, clearing the way for Kecmanovic to become a lucky loser and receive a first-round bye.

The teenager certainly made the most of it. Kecmanovic got by three players, including 30th-seeded Laslo Djere, in straight sets to set up his second meeting with Raonic. That's where Kecmanovic's luck ended.

Raonic won 88 percent of his first-serve points and saved all three break chances against him. In January, Raonic beat Kecmanovic in straight sets on his way to the title at Brisbane in January. The string of upsets continued on the women's side.

Belinda Bencic beat fifth-seeded Karolina Pliskova 6-3, 4-6, 6-3 to reach the semis, ensuring her return to the top 20 in the rankings.

"I wouldn't believe I win today again," Bencic said. "I'm not going to the court with any expectation. I'm just trying to play. This is the mentality I have, and this is the mentality I'm going to keep having."



Bencic was pushed to three sets for the first time in four matches at the tournament. She was coming off a straight-set upset of defending champion and top-ranked Naomi Osaka in the fourth round.

Pliskova raced to 4-1 lead before wrapping up the second set. In the third, she overcame a break point to hold at 2-all but only won one more game the rest of the way.

"Physically, it was tough somehow, and the wind didn't help much," Pliskova said.

"So my serve was bad, my shots were bad." Bencic next plays the winner of Thursday's match between No. 8 Angelique Kerber and Venus Williams.

Bencic improved to 18-3 this year. She won her third career title at Dubai last month and her first since 2015. The 22-year-old Swiss player missed five months in 2017 after wrist surgery.

"When you're confident, you can really just trust your instincts and you don't have to think about it at all," Bencic said. "I'm definitely playing how I feel it, and it's going well so I'm not planning on changing that.

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The recent India-Pakistan conflict arose due to terrorists that departed from Pakistan, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday, asking Islamabad to stop "harbouring" terrorists.

He was referring to the recent escalation in tensions between the two nuclear states following the deadly February 14 attack carried out by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) on a CRPF convoy in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district that left 40 personnel dead.

"We saw what happened with India, the conflict that arose there as a result of terrorists that departed from Pakistan. We need the Pakistanis to step up. They need to stop harbouring terrorists," Pompeo told Fox and Friends in an interview.

He said the Trump administration has taken action against Pakistan that no other previous governments have taken.

However, he said, "We need Pakistan to do more. They have to stop harbouring these terrorists.

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Union Tourism Minister K J Alphons has written to the Union Home Secretary Friday demanding that Good Friday be restored as a compulsory holiday in the Union Territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, amidst protests by the Christian community against its removal from the list of holidays.

The change was made in the official district administration notification in November 2018 when Good Friday national public holiday was transferred from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 or restricted holiday category.

"Daman & Diu, Dadra Haveli have taken off Good Friday from the list of compulsory holidays as per yesterday's newspaper report. Please ensure that these Union Territories restore Good Friday as a Compulsory holiday. Kindly let me know," Alphons has said in his letter to Union Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba.

Good Friday is celebrated on April 19 and is considered one of the most sacred day for the Christian community after Christmas. The central government has declared it a gazetted national holiday.

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Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara Friday said he has requested the JD(S) to return Tumkur seat to the Congress if former prime minister H D Deve Gowda is not contesting from the constituency.

The development comes amid simmering discontent within the Congress's local leadership over ceding of Tumkur seat to the alliance partner.

Parameshwara, who has held a series of meetings with the Congress and JD(S) leaders, however, said his party was fine if the latter fields Gowda from the seat.

The seat is held by the Congress's S P Muddahanumegowda.

"We have a sitting MP. In principle, during our screening committee meeting, we had made a resolution that all the 10 sitting MPs should be given (tickets). After that, during meetings between Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and JD(S) supremo Deve Gowda, Tumkur was given to them," the deputy chief minister said.

Speaking to reporters here, Parameshwara said he had met Gowda and conveyed his request that the seat be given back to the Congress as it won't be right to deny a ticket to the Tumkur MP when all the other sitting lawmakers were getting one.

"I met Deve Gowda last night and requested him. I have also informed our leadership. Today morning I have also requested the chief minister (H D Kumaraswamy) to leave the seat for us. He (Kumaraswamy) said he will discuss (it with his party leaders)," he said.

According to a deal finalised between the coalition partners on Wednesday after much haggling, the Congress will contest 20 and the JD(S) will contest eight of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

The JD(S) will field its candidates from Uttara Kannada, Chikmagalur, Shimoga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bangalore North and Bijapur seats.

The deputy chief minister said if need be, he will even meet the party high command on the matter.

Parameshwara, who is also the Tumkur district in-charge minister, said, "If Gowda contests, we all will work together for his victory as he is a tall leader... if he doesn't contest, give the seat to us, (that) is our request," he said, after meeting senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge.

According to JD(S) sources, the party bagged Tumkur constituency, dominated by the Vokkaliga community -- a major vote bank, after a hard bargain as the Congress had decided not to cede the seats currently held by it.

There is simmering discontent within the Congress's Tumkur unit over the decision, with former legislator K N Rajanna reportedly threatening to contest as an independent if the party fails to renegotiate.

Meanwhile, state Congress Legislature Party leader Siddaramaiah told reporters that he will speak to party president Rahul Gandhi and general secretary K C Venugopal on the issue.

Muddahanumegowda said he has also requested that the seat be given back to the Congress.

"If Deve Gowda contests, there is no issue; it will be a matter of pride for us. Else, give it to me... I have made this request to Kharge, Gowda and the CM, I'm hopeful," he said.

Amid doubts about Gowda contesting polls, his constituency has not yet been finalised by JD(S).

Reports suggest that he may contest either from Tumkur or Bangalore North.

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A top Russian diplomat has lashed out at Western countries for refusing to take back foreign-born militants who have been fighting in Syria and Iraq.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova at a briefing on Friday accused Western nations of trying to "get rid" of their own citizens by refusing to repatriate their nationals who were fighting alongside the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.

The issue of foreign-born IS fighters has become acute as the once sprawling territory controlled by the extremists has shrunk to a small enclave and both Syria and Iraq face a post-war future.

Zakharova also said that the detention facilities where foreign-born fighters are held should be handed over to the Syrian government.

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The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear RJD chief Lalu Prasad's bail plea in three cases related to the multi-crore-rupee fodder scam, in which he has been convicted.

Prasad told the top court that he had been in jail for 22 months following his conviction in the three cases.

A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna issued notice to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and sought its response within two weeks.

Appearing for the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo, senior advocate Kapil Sibal told the bench that Prasad was sentenced to three-and-a-half years, 14 years and five years in prison in the three cases respectively.

"I was convicted in the three cases based on the same evidence and under the same offences. I have already served 22 months in jail.

"How can I be convicted three times for the same offence, based on the same evidence?," Sibal asked the court.

The bench asked Sibal about the offences for which Prasad was convicted.

"I have been convicted under sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 420 (cheating) of the IPC and section 13 of the Prevention of Corruption Act," the lawyer said.

The bench then asked the CBI to file its reply on Prasad's bail plea.

The RJD chief, currently lodged in the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi, has challenged the January 10 verdict of the Jharkhand High Court dismissing his bail plea.

The three cases in which Prasad has been convicted are related to the over-Rs 900-crore fodder scam, which pertains to fraudulent withdrawal of money from the treasuries in the Animal Husbandry department in the early 1990s, when Jharkhand was part of Bihar.

The RJD was in power in Bihar with Prasad as the chief minister when the scam had allegedly taken place.

In the high court, the RJD supremo had cited old age and poor health for grant of bail.

Prasad (71) had said he was suffering from diabetes, blood pressure and other ailments and that he had already obtained bail in one of the fodder scam cases.

He has been convicted for fraudulent withdrawal of money from the Deoghar, Dumka and two Chaibasa treasuries situated in Jharkhand.

He is currently facing trial in another fodder scam case pertaining to the Doranda treasury.

The RJD chief has been undergoing treatment at the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) at Ranchi for the last few months.

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The Supreme Court Friday asked the Centre to respond to a plea challenging the Constitutional validity of provisions in matrimonial laws empowering courts to ask estranged spouses to "cohabit" and "take part in sexual intercourse".

A three-judge bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna issued notice to the Centre on the petition which said that these laws treat women as "chattel" and are violative of fundamental rights including the right to privacy.

Ojaswa Pathak and Mayank Gupta, students of Gujarat National Law University at Gandhinagar, had challenged the validity of section 9 of the Hindu Marriage Act (HMA), Section 22 of the Special Marriage Act (SMA) and certain provisions of the Code of Civil Procedure (CPC). They empower courts to pass a decree of restitution of conjugal rights to an estranged couple.

The plea referred to the nine-judge verdict that held privacy as one of the fundamental rights and assailed the legal provisions of the HMA and the SMA, saying that they force mostly unwilling women to cohabit with their estranged husbands.

"Courts in India have understood 'Conjugal rights' to have two key ingredients: cohabitation and sexual intercourse.

"Under the legal scheme in India, a spouse is entitled to a decree directing his other spouse to cohabit and take part in sexual intercourse. He or she is also entitled to coercive measures in the form of attachment of property in case the spouses wilfully disobeys the decree of restitution," the plea said.

The legal framework is "facially neutral" and places a "disproportionate burden on women", the plea said, adding that it is "based on feudal English law which regarded a woman as 'chattel' of his husband".

It said: "The remedy of restitution of conjugal rights was not recognized by any of the personal law systems of India. The same has its origins in feudal English Law, which at that time considered a wife to be the chattel of the husband. The United Kingdom itself has abolished the remedy of restitution of conjugal rights in 1970."



It is steeped in a patriarchal gender stereotype and is violative of Article 15(1) (prohibition of discrimination on the ground of gender etc) of the Constitution, the plea said.

The provisions were also violative of the rights to privacy, individual autonomy and dignity of individuals guaranteed under Article 21 (protection of life and personal liberty) of the Constitution, it said.

"The provisions for restitution of conjugal rights are facially neutral in as much as they allow both the husband and the wife to move court. However, in effect, they are deeply discriminatory towards women. The direct and inevitable effect of the provision has to be seen in light of the deeply unequal familial power structures that prevail within Indian society," said the petition.

Asserting that the right to cohabit was an intimate personal choice, the plea said that the provision requiring a person to cohabit with another against their will are violative of the Right to Privacy of an individual.

The plea said that the validity of a law has to be tested according to the changing times.

It had also sought reconsideration of the 1984 apex court verdict by which it had set aside the Andhra Pradesh High Court's decision quashing section 9 of the Hindu Marriage Act.

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The Supreme Court Friday dismissed a plea seeking a direction to the Centre to send Muslims living in India to Pakistan.

The plea, which also sought a direction to the government to bring Hindus living in Pakistan to India, came up for hearing before a bench of Justices R F Nariman and Vineet Saran.

"What is this? Do you seriously want to argue this? Are you sure? We will hear you but we will pass strictures against you," the bench told the counsel representing the petitioner.

When the lawyer replied in the negative, the bench dismissed the petition.

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The Supreme Court Friday stayed the Meghalaya High Court judgment convicting The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim and publisher Shoba Chaudhuri in a contempt case.

The top court stayed the operation of the judgment by which the high court had also imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh each on the editor and the publisher.

The case relates to an article published by the paper on the perks and facilities for retired judges and their families.

The high court had also said that if the two persons failed to deposit the amount, they will have to undergo six months simple imprisonment and the paper will be banned.

A Supreme Court bench, headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, also issued notice to the high court registrar on the appeal filed by the editor and the publisher of newspaper.

The high court had on March 8 sentenced the editor and the publisher to sit in the corner of the court room till the rising of the court in the contempt case.

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Taking note of the "serious lapse" by a lower court judge in not abiding with its 2016 order to conclude trial in a murder case within six months, the Supreme Court Friday sought response from the judicial officer for frequent adjournments in the matter.

The lower court judge has sought additional time from to conclude the trial in the murder case of Deoria district in Uttar Pradesh which was lodged in 2012.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said that as per information obtained by the apex court registry, the dates for hearing in the murder case as given by the judicial officer were "not correct".

"That apart, the information obtained by the registry from the National Judicial Data Grid would go to show that from January 29, 2019, seven adjournments have been granted by the presiding officer on different grounds, details of which are available," said the bench, also comprising Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna.

"This would prima facie show serious lack of concern on the part of the presiding officer to adhere to the time bound schedule for conclusion of the case that this court had ordered," the bench said.

Besides the judicial officer, the apex court also issued notice to the Registrar General of the Allahabad High Court asking them to explain the "serious lapse" on the part of the trial judge.

"All that we would like to observe at this stage is that we do not understand what kind of inspections the presiding officer had carried out on as many as two occasions, which inhibited him from hearing the case," the bench said.

"We also fail to understand as to how inspite of specific directions of this court to complete the hearing of the case within a time bound manner, the presiding officer has granted as many as three adjournments to the accused," it said.

The bench also noted in its order that these three adjournments were granted after the case was fixed for arguments on January 29, 2019.

It posted the matter for hearing after four weeks.

In December 2016, a bench headed by Justice Gogoi had dealt with a plea related to the case and had directed the lower court to expedite the trial and conclude it within a period of six months.

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Security forces arrested seven militants and seized sophisticated weapons and ammunition from their possession in Manipur's Churachandpur district, police said Friday.

The militants belonging to the outfit Hear People Convention (Democracy) Manipur Region were arrested on Thursday by the Assam Rifles from Parbung area in Churanchandpur district, the police said.

They said security forces have also intensified operations to nab miscreants who torched two heavy machineries used for constructing railway tunnels at Kotlen area in Kangpokpi district on March 11.

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Renowned Kathak dancer Seema Mehta has been conferred the 'Nari Shakti Puraskar' award for her contribution towards women empowerment over the last 15 years.

She received the award from President Ram Nath Kovind at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi as part of the Women's Day celebrations, a press release said.

Mehta, who began her journey in Kathak set up her dance school in Mumbai in 2010.

She is also the Director of 'Chhandam Nritya Bharati' in Mumbai and was actively involved in promotion of Kathak dance form.

"I am extremely humbled and honoured to have received the Nari Shakti Puraskar award. I would like to dedicate it to my mother - a woman who stood by me through thick and thin. I would also like to extend my gratitude to my family who have been pillar of strength," she said.

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Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday condemned the mass shootings in New Zealand that killed 49 people and termed it "a despicable act of terrorism".

He said the world stands in need of compassion and understanding and not bigotry and hate-filled extremism.

"The New Zealand Shooting is a despicable act of terrorism, that must be condemned unequivocally. The world stands in need of compassion and understanding. Not bigotry and hate filled extremism. My condolences to the families of the victims. My prayers go out to those who were injured," he said on Twitter.

Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers killed 49 people in New Zealand.

Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel described the New Zealand incident as a "crime against humanity" as he called for a fight against bigotry and hatred.

"What happened in New Zealand is a crime against humanity. It is a dangerous reminder that hatred and bigotry must be fought at every turn. The families of the victims remain in our thoughts & prayers," he said.

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An activist of the SIMI, a banned outfit, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday by a special NIA court here on multiple counts, including for killing an Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) constable and injuring two other police officials in 2011, the prosecution said.

The activist, identified only as Farhat, was convicted and sentenced by special NIA judge Girish Dixit, district prosecution office media in-charge Yogesh Tiwari said.

Farhat and another accused Zakir, both activists of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), were accused of killing ATS constable Shivpratap and injuring two other policemen on June 3, 2011 in Ratlam, Tiwari said.

Both the assailants were caught on the spot and a pistol was seized from one of them, he added.

A case was registered against them under IPC sections 302 (murder) and 307 (attempt to murder), Tiwari said.

He said the case was later transferred to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in Bhopal for trial as the firing on the policemen was treated as a "terror attack".

The trial was conducted through video-conferencing, Tiwari said.

Zakir was among the eight SIMI activists who were killed by the police after they escaped from the high-security Bhopal Central Jail in 2016, he added.

After taking into account the evidence submitted by the prosecution, the court awarded life imprisonment to Farhat for killing Shivpratap and also imposed a fine of Rs 2,000 on him, Tiwari said.

Farhat was also sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to murder constable Jitendra and sub-inspector Manish Dube, he said, adding that a total fine of Rs 4,000 was imposed on him.

Farhat was awarded another life imprisonment under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, Tiwari said.

The third accused in the case, Nizamuddin, was acquitted by the court for lack of evidence, he added.

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The three special observers appointed by the Election Commission Friday held discussions with Jammu and Kashmir government officials as part of their exercise to determine when to hold assembly elections in the state.

The three observers, Noor Mohammed, Vinod Zutshi and A S Gill, held meetings with officials of the state government here this morning, officials said.

The special observers also met a delegation of state unit of the Janata Dal (United), the officials said.

They reached here Thursday to assess the situation in Jammu and Kashmir in a real-time basis to enable the poll panel to take a call on holding the state assembly elections.

They interacted with political parties soon after their arrival in the summer capital of the state. The observers later flew to Jammu, the winter capital of the state, for holding similar interactions with representatives of political parties and officials.

While announcing the schedule for the Lok Sabha elections on Sunday, the poll panel had said that the assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir cannot be held simultaneously due to security concerns flagged by the Centre.

While the representatives of the PDP, the Congress, the BJP and other parties met the observers, the National Conference (NC), CPI(M) leader Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami, Peoples Democratic Front (PDF) chairman Hakeem Mohamad Yaseen and Democratic Party Nationalist (DPN) president Ghulam Hassan Mir boycotted the meeting.

The NC decided not to meet the EC observers, saying the party has nothing more to add to its demand of having simultaneous Lok Sabha and assembly polls in the state.

Tarigami, Yaseen and Mir, in a joint statement, said they did not meet the special observers "as we have already put forth our position about holding the assembly polls in the state before the full Election Commission last week. There is nothing new to say about the issue".

Jammu and Kashmir is currently under President's Rule since December 19, 2018 which was necessitated at the end of the six-month period under the Governor's Rule imposed on June 19, 2018.

The PDP-BJP government in the state fell on June 19, 2018 after the national party pulled out of the coalition.

Since the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly has been dissolved, the Election Commission is bound to hold fresh polls there as well within a six-month period, which will end in May.

Almost all political parties in Kashmir have advocated holding the state assembly polls simultaneously with the Lok Sabha polls.

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday urged the international community to "stand united against anti-Muslim hatred" and all forms of bigotry and terror following the shootings at two mosques in New Zealand that left at least 49 dead and many others wounded.

"I'm saddened & strongly condemn the shooting of innocent people as they prayed peacefully in mosques in New Zealand. I express my deepest condolences to the victims' families. Today and every day, we must stand united against anti-Muslim hatred, & all forms of bigotry & terror," the UN Chief tweeted.

In a statement issued by his spokesman, the Secretary-General said he is "shocked and appalled" at the terrorist attack at the two mosques in Christchurch. He extended his deepest condolences to the families of the victims and to the Government and people of New Zealand.

"The Secretary General recalls the sanctity of mosques and all places of worship. He calls upon all people on this holy day for Muslims to show signs of solidarity with the bereaved Islamic community," his spokesman said.

Guterres reiterated the urgency of working better together globally to counter Islamophobia and eliminate intolerance and violent extremism in all its form.

The gunman, who police have described as being in his late 20s, has been arrested and charged with murder. According to reports, he live-streamed himself via a head-mounted camera online, firing at worshippers inside the Al Noor mosque in the largest city on the South Island of New Zealand, Christchurch. A second attack also took place at the city's Linwood Mosque.

Police have asked the public not to share the "extremely distressing" footage posted by the gunman online.

Meanwhile, Facebook has reportedly taken down the gunman's Facebook and Instagram accounts, which allegedly contained racist and anti-immigrant views.

Two other men and one woman were also detained in connection with the terror attacks, although one was subsequently released.

President of the General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa strongly condemned the terror attacks against two mosques, saying, "This heinous act of extreme violence against a house of worship is an abhorrent crime."



She stressed that more must be done to combat intolerance, hate speech and extremism for the sake of humanity, her spokesperson Monica Grayley told reporters.

Other senior UN officials took to Twitter on Friday to express their condolences and horror at the attacks in New Zealand.

Director General of the International Organization for Migration Antonio Vitorino extended his "sincere condolences" to victims' families and expressed deep sadness over "the terrible loss of life", pointing out that "it is believed that among the dead and injured were many refugees and migrants".

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi tweeted a picture of the New Zealand flag with a message saying the UNHCR stands "firmly with the people and government of New Zealand in mourning, prayer and solidarity.

"We grieve with children facing the profound shock that a parent is never coming home," tweeted Executive Director of the UN Children's Fund Henrietta Fore, calling the aggression "a senseless attack on a peaceful community and the universal right to freedom of worship".

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From the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, students mobilised by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments' failure to take thorough action against global warming.

The coordinated 'school strikes,' were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year.

Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fuelled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.

Thunberg, who was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, a rally in Stockholm that the world faces an "existential crisis, the biggest crisis humanity ever has faced and still it has been ignored for decades by those that have known about it.

"And you know who you are, you that have ignored this and are most guilty of this," she said, as protesters cheered her name.

Friday's rallies were one of the biggest international actions yet. Protests were underway or planned in cities in more than 100 countries, including Hong Kong; New Delhi; Wellington, New Zealand; and Oulu, Finland.

In Berlin, police said as many as 20,000 protesters, most of them young students, gathered in a downtown square, waving signs with slogans such as "March now or swim later" and "Climate Protection Report Card: F," before marching through the capital's government quarter with a stop in front of Chancellor Angela Merkel's office.

In Poland, thousands marched in rainy Warsaw and other cities to demand a ban on the burning of coal, which is a major source of carbon dioxide. Some wore face masks as they carried banners that read "Today's Air Smells Like the Planet's Last Days" and "Make Love Not CO2."



In India's capital New Delhi, schoolchildren protested inaction on climate change and rising air pollution levels that often far exceeds World Health Organization limits.

"Now or Never" was among signs brandished by enthusiastic teenagers thronging cobblestoned streets around the domed Pantheon building, which rises above the Left Bank in Paris.

Several thousand students gathered peacefully around the landmark. Some targeted President Emmanuel Macron, who sees himself as the guarantor of the Paris climate accord but is criticized by activists for being too business friendly and not ambitious enough in his efforts to reduce French emissions.

About 50 students protested in South Africa's capital, Pretoria, chanting "There's No Planet B." One protester held a sign reading "You'll Miss The Rains Down in Africa."



Experts say Africa, with its population of more than 1 billion people, is expected to be hardest hit by global warming even though it contributes least to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

Police in Vienna said about 10,000 students rallied in the Austrian capital, while in neighbouring Switzerland a similar number protested in the western city of Lausanne.

Last month, lawmakers in the northern Swiss canton of Basel symbolically declared a "climate emergency."



In Helsinki, police said about 3,000 students had gathered in front of Finland's Parliament sporting placards such as: "Dinosaurs thought they had time too!" A website used to coordinate the rallies listed events in over 2,000 cities.

Carla Reemtsma, a 20-year-old university student who helped organise the protest in Berlin, said she's part of about 50 WhatsApp groups devoted to discussing climate change.

"A lot happens on social media because you can reach a lot of young people very quickly and show them: look there's lot of us," she told The Associated Press. "There's a very low threshold so we reach a huge number of people."



"I think that's how we managed to get so big," said Reemtsma.

Many protesters in Berlin took aim at politicians such as the leader of Germany's pro-business Free Democratic Party, Christian Lindner, for suggesting that complicated issues such as climate change were "a matter for professionals" not students.

Others, including Germany's economy minister, Peter Altmaier, have urged students to stage the protests outside school hours.

By contrast, scientists have backed the protests, with thousands signing petitions in support of the students in Britain, Finland, Germany and the United States.

Volker Quaschning, a professor of engineering at Berlin's University of Applied Sciences, said it was easy for politicians to belittle students.

"That's why they need our support," he said. "If we do nothing then parts of this planet could become uninhabitable by the end of the century."



Scientists have warned for decades that current levels of greenhouse gas emissions are unsustainable, so far with little effect. In 2015, world leaders agreed in Paris to a goal of keeping the Earth's global temperature rise by the end of the century well below 2 degrees Celsius.

Yet at present, the world is on track for an increase of 4 degrees Celsius, which experts say would have far-reaching consequences for life on the planet.

In Germany, environmental groups and experts have attacked government plans to continue using coal and natural gas for decades to come.

Quaschning, who was one of more than 23,000 German-speaking scientists to sign a letter of support this week, said Germany should aim to fully "decarbonize" by 2040. This would give less-advanced nations a bit more time to wean themselves off fossil fuels while still meeting the Paris goal globally.

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Survivors of the Christchurch mosque shootings have recalled how elderly worshippers and children were mercilessly gunned down as a heavily armed attacker methodically targeted Muslims Friday in New Zealand's worst massacre.

At least 49 people died and another 48 were injured in the assault on two mosques in the South Island city, which Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said marked "one of New Zealand's darkest days."



Anwar Alsaleh was preparing for Friday prayers on the Muslim holy day at the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch -- where 41 victims were killed -- when a gunman walked in.

Anwar hid in a bathroom and tried to call emergency services as shots rang out, telling stuff.co.nz he heard the gunman say an expletive about Muslims and "We're going to kill you today." He said he heard people begging for their lives. "They shot them until they died," he said.

At least another seven people died at the Linwood Avenue mosque, about five kilometres away, where Syed Mazharuddin said a man wearing body armour and a helmet opened fire.

"Just around the entrance door there were elderly people sitting there praying and he just started shooting at them," he told the New Zealand Herald.

"There was a lady screaming and he shot her point blank in the face."



The attacker live-streamed the attack, with footage showing him firing repeatedly at worshippers as he moves from room to room.

Witnesses at the Masjid al Noor mosque said the shooter was a white male with magazines of ammunition strapped to his legs.

One told Radio New Zealand the gunman was "very calm" during the rampage.

Mirwaiz, an Afghan refugee who did not want to provide his surname, said he came close to death when a bullet grazed his head.

"He started shooting at our side of the room and I lay down on the floor as a bullet grazed my head. A couple of centimetres lower and I would be dead," he told stuff.co.nz, saying he fled from the mosque while the gunman's attention was elsewhere.

Others told of scrambling through broken windows and playing dead among the carnage in a bid to survive.

Carl Pomare was driving past the Masjid al Noor with an employee when he saw people running from the mosque and falling to the ground.

They pulled over and tried to help the injured, including a five-year-old girl.

"We managed to get her into the car of one of the people who was helping and got her to the hospital, she was critical," he told RNZ.

"The guy that my worker was nursing, he passed away in his arms sadly. It was surreal." There were tales of heroism at the Linwood mosque too, where Syed Mazharuddin said a man wrestled a weapon off the attacker, who cut short his killing spree and ran to a waiting car.

"The young guy who usually takes care of the mosque ... he saw an opportunity and pounced on him (the gunman) and grabbed his gun," Mazharuddin said.

"This guy, the hero, tried to chase but he couldn't find the trigger in the gun... he ran behind him but there were people waiting for (the shooter) in the car and he fled.

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Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi Friday asked the Election Commission to take note of jailed RJD chief Lalu Prasad who is being "politically active" through social media.

He also asked whether any convicted person should be given the liberty of using smartphones, laptops and modern facilities like video conferencing to render their conviction ineffective.

Sushil Modi said the RJD chief is using social media despite being disqualified from contesting elections following his convictions in fodder scam cases.

"Lalu Prasad has been disqualified from contesting elections following his convictions in four fodder scam cases. But despite this, if he has been politically active using social media, then the Election Commission should itself take note," Sushil Modi tweeted.

Lalu Prasad has been serving sentences in Ranchi jail for more than a year on account of convictions in four fodder scam cases.

The Chief Electoral Office (CEO) of Bihar categorically made it clear on Friday that the Election Commission has not ordered any inquiry into the use of social media by Prasad.

"The commission has not ordered any such inquiry," Additional Chief Electoral Office (ACEO) Sanjay Kumar Singh said when asked about media reports that the EC ordered a probe into Prasad's use of social media.

The RJD chief in a pinned tweet in December 2017 had said, "Dear friends! While in jail, My Twitter handle shall be operated by my office in consultation with family. I shall speak my mind through visitors. The fight to preserve the Constitution and protect the rights of vulnerable groups shall go on.

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French Foreign Minister Le Drian Friday held a telephonic conversation with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and informed her about France imposing sanctions on JeM chief Masood Azhar by freezing his assets.

The External Affairs Ministry said that Drian informed Swaraj about the action taken by Paris against the leader of the Jaish-e-Mohammed, which had claimed responsibility for the Pulwama attack.

France sanctioned Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets, the MEA said, days after China blocked a move to designate him as a global terrorist by the United Nations.

The MEA said the French foreign minister also informed Swaraj that France has raised the issue with the European Union.

"He reiterated that France has always been and will always be on India side in the fight against terrorism," the MEA said.

On her part, Swaraj thanked Drian for France's "steadfast support" and said that India looked forward to continuing this cooperation on the anti-terrorism front.

The action on the part of France was an expression of partnership with India and was in consonance with the global intent by responsible nations committed to fight against terror, including cross-border terrorism anywhere in the world, the MEA said.

France, the US and the UK had moved a proposal at the UN to designate Azhar as a global terrorist after the February 14 Pulwama attack, in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.

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The ED Friday moved a Delhi court seeking its nod to quiz separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani's son-in-law Altaf Shah in connection with a terror-funding case involving LeT chief and 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

The Enforcement Directorate also sought to question Zahoor Watali, an influential businessman allegedly having friendship with Pakistani leaders and Kashmiri separatists, and Naval Kishore Kapoor, a UAE-based businessman.

Shah, Watali and Kapoor were arrested by the NIA in the terror-funding case and are lodged in Tihar jail.

The court will hear the matter on March 19.

The NIA had earlier filed a charge sheet against the accused, including Hizbul Mujahideen head Syed Salahuddin, in the case accusing them of "conspiring to wage war against the government" and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir Valley.

The agency has charged Pakistan-based terrorists Hafiz Saeed and Salahuddin, besides 10 others with criminal conspiracy, sedition, and under stringent provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

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The ED moved a Delhi court on Friday, seeking its nod to quiz separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani's son-in-law Altaf Shah alias Altaf Fantoosh in connection with a terror-funding case involving (LeT) chief and 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

The central agency also sought to question Zahoor Watali, an influential businessman and allegedly a friend of Pakistani leaders and Kashmiri separatists, and Naval Kishore Kapoor, a UAE-based businessman.

Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana, who is representing the agency pro bono (without charging any money), told the court that the accused were required for "interrogation and recording of their statement to proceed further in the investigation".

The court will hear the matter on March 19.

The (ED) filed the case on the basis of an FIR lodged by the Investigation Agency (NIA) accusing Saeed and others, including Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin, of "conspiring to wage war against the government" and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir valley.

Fantoosh, Watali and Kapoor were arrested by the NIA in the terror-funding case and are currently lodged in Tihar Jail here.

The NIA had earlier filed a chargesheet against the accused, including Salahuddin, in the case.

The agency has charged Pakistan-based terrorists Saeed and Salahuddin, besides 10 others, with criminal conspiracy, sedition and under the stringent provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

The agency has charged the Hurriyat leaders with acting under the overall guidance of and instructions from Saeed, Salahuddin and their "Pakistani handlers". They have been accused of plotting strategies to launch violent protests.
Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi Friday termed terrorism the biggest enemy of both Islam and the entire humanity, and also the "biggest hurdle" for peace and prosperity in the world.

During a meeting with a delegation of members of Iranian Parliament's Committee on Culture, Naqvi said terrorism was not just a threat to a particular region or a country, but has become the biggest challenge for human values in the world.

The entire world will have to unite to defeat the evil of terrorism by isolating those who support it, Naqvi was quoted as saying in a statement from his office.

The organisations and people who are involved in terror activities by using Islam as their "security cover" are the biggest enemies of Islam, he said.

"Terrorism is the biggest enemy of both Islam and the entire humanity and we all have to come together to remove this biggest hurdle in the peace, progress and prosperity of the world," Naqvi said.

He said India is a role model of social and communal harmony for the whole world. "We will have to strengthen this fabric of social harmony and unity."



Naqvi said that constitutional, political and social rights of minorities are absolutely safe and secure in India.

India's centuries old culture and commitment to unity in diversity are key in strengthening social and communal harmony, he said.

The Iranian delegation included Ahmad Mazani, the Chairman of the committee, Asghar Masoudi, the vice-chairman.

Issues related to Waqf management, Haj and Ziyarat were also discussed during the meeting.

Naqvi also extended best wishes to the people of Iran on the upcoming festival of Nauroz, new year celebrations on March 21 every year for Parsis, followers of Zoroastrianism and various sects of Muslim.

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The gunman who killed numerous worshippers in a New Zealand mosque on Friday was a right-wing extremist with Australian citizenship, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.

Morrison said the shooting in Christchurch was carried out by "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist" who was an Australian-born citizen.

He declined to provide further details, saying the investigation was being led by New Zealand authorities.

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Three persons with suspected radical links were arrested on Friday for allegedly planning to carry out criminal activities in Punjab, officials said.

A state police spokesperson said Baljit Singh of Ajnala, Manjit Singh of Amritsar and Jagdev Singh of Gurdwara Baba Bakala were arrested from Amritsar and two .32 bore pistols, three magazines and 14 live cartridges were recovered from their possession.

The three allegedly have association with different radical organisations and actively participate in radical activities in Punjab, he said.

The trio were in touch through social media and were planning to target the persons responsible for incidents of sacrilege in Punjab and leaders of Shiv Sena, the spokesman said.

The accused allegedly procured the weapons from Indore in Madhya Pradesh. "The origin of the recovered weapons is being ascertained and the supplier will be identified," he added.

Baljit had worked as a 'granthi' (priest) at a gurudwara in Nagpur, Maharashtra for about four years and recently shifted to Ajnala in Amritsar district.

He was allegedly associated with different radical organisations and during the search of his residence at Ajnala, literature relating to different radical organisations was found and seized.

"It is also being ascertained if the accused were being funded and tasked by the radical organisations. Besides, the Indian and foreign contacts of the arrested accused are also being looked into," he added.

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Police in Canada stepped up security patrols at mosques around the country following attacks in New Zealand on Friday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned as "absolutely appalling."



The attacks on the two Christchurch mosques left at least 49 people dead, with one gunman -- identified as an Australian extremist -- apparently livestreaming the assault and publishing a manifesto online.

"Attacking people during prayers is absolutely appalling, and Canada strongly condemns today's shootings in New Zealand," Trudeau said on Twitter.

"Our thoughts and hearts go out to the victims and their families, and we join New Zealanders and Muslim communities around the world in grieving." The flag atop the Canadian parliament was lowered to half-staff in memory of the victims.

Police in Toronto and Montreal -- home to Canada's largest Muslim populations -- told AFP they have stepped up security around the more than 100 mosques in the two metropolitan regions.

"In response to the attacks in New Zealand, we will have a heightened police presence in the community, focusing on places of worship -- especially mosques," Toronto police Constable Allyson Douglas-Cook said.

Similar precautionary measures were taken by authorities in Montreal, Quebec City and elsewhere across the country.

However, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale insisted that "there is no known nexus to Canada and Canada's threat level remains unchanged at 'medium.'" Prior to the New Zealand mosques shootings, Canada had seen the worst ever attack on Muslims in the West.

A gunman in January 2017 opened fire on worshipers at a Quebec City mosque after evening prayers, killing six men and wounding 35 others. Both the defense and prosecution are currently appealing the 29-year-old shooter's 40-year prison sentence in that case.

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A Turkish court has convicted an Australian-born Islamic State militant of belonging to a terror group and sentenced him to more than seven years in prison.

Neil Prakash has been in a Turkish prison since 2016 when he was arrested near the Syrian border for attempting to cross with fake documents.

Delivering its verdict Friday, the court found Prakash guilty of IS membership and sentenced him to seven years and six months in prison.

The court said he could be released in two-and-a-half years under Turkish law, however.

Prakash expressed remorse, telling the court: "I used to be a member of Daesh but I am no longer."



Australia has stripped Prakash of his citizenship. It has also requested his extradition.

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Two persons, including a 32-year-old clerk who had won several beauty pageants, was arrested Friday in a case embezzlement of Rs 2 crore in Ajmer discom, police said.

Annapurna Sain and her aide Amit Verma were detained from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh on Thursday, they said.

They have been evading arrests after siphoning-off fund by forging salary sheets of the department employees during March 2017 to October last year.

A case was registered against her at the Christian Ganj police station of Ajmer in December last year.

Three persons, including father Virendra Sain, uncle Naresh Sain, were arrested two months ago and another accomplice Bhuvnesh alias Bhagwati Gurjar was arrested four days ago, police said.

Annapurna Sain and Verma were detained from Ghaziabad and were arrested following interrogation, Christian Ganj police station incharge Dinesh Kumar said.

She had participated in various beauty pageants and was adjudged Mrs Rajasthan and Mrs India Galaxy.

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The British government must offer a "clear" answer on its intentions for Brexit before a EU summit next week, the French presidency said Friday, after UK lawmakers voted to seek a delay if no withdrawal deal is reached soon.

"Without any clarity, no solution is possible," President Emmanuel Macron's office said, adding that if the current withdrawal deal is rejected, a "clear and new alternative plan" must be presented or else Britain will have to leave the EU with no deal.

The summit next week is seen as the last chance for Prime Minister Theresa May to secure unanimous approval from the other 27 EU members for any Brexit delay.

May is expected to again submit the withdrawal deal to lawmakers next week, though it has already been rejected twice.

"That's the best option," the French presidency said, in which case no EU state is expected to oppose a "technical extension" that would give Britain time to vote on a series of laws for ensuring a smooth Brexit.

But if the deal is again rejected, any request for a short delay would be "pointless" and as a result probably rejected by the EU, it said.

Only a longer delay request that puts "something new on the table: a referendum, an election, some other deal" would be likely to gain EU approval, Macron's office said.

"It's not up to EU countries to say what that is, but the United Kingdom," it said.

The comments dovetailed with those from Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, who was in Paris on Friday.

"We've always said in Ireland, if the UK asks for more time, for one to prevent no deal, a crash-out Brexit happening, but secondly to implement a clear plan and strategy to reflect on and perhaps change direction in regard to Brexit, well then Ireland certainly wouldn't be an obstacle to that," Coveney told a conference.

The deal May struck with the EU has remained deadlocked in the British parliament, chiefly by disagreement over the so-called Irish "backstop" -- a measure to keep trade flowing and avoid barriers at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Coveney was to hold talks later Friday with France's Europe Minister Nathalie Loiseau.

Ahead of the meeting he thanked France for its solidarity" with Ireland on the border issue, seen by Ireland as key to avoiding a return to violence in Northern Ireland.

"Many people see peace in Northern Ireland as something that was negotiated and agreed two decades ago, assuming it is done and we can move on. The truth is that peace needs to be worked for every week and every day," he said.

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The Delhi High Court initiated a PIL on Friday on letters sent by undertrials lodged in the jails here seeking a speedy disposal of their cases, which were pending in the lower courts for years.

A bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A J Bhambani issued notice to the Delhi government and sought its response on the plea by August 13.

The court initiated the public interest litigation (PIL) on its own by taking cognisance of five letters sent by seven undertrials facing trial for cases ranging from murder to drug possession and also under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

Ujair Ahmed, one of the undertrials who wrote to the court, was arrested in 2013 by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for various offences under the UAPA and is lodged in the Rohini jail here for over five years.

However, the case was yet to be put on charge, he has said in his letter, while claiming that he was falsely implicated in it.

Another undertrial, Imran Khan, who is lodged in Tihar Jail here since July 2016, when he was arrested by the NIA for offences under the UAPA, has said in his letter that the chargesheet in his case was filed in July 2016, but since then, there has been no progress.

Shahjahan, Mohammad Sajid and Sattar, lodged in Tihar Jail, are facing a drug possession and trafficking case lodged against them in 2014. They have written in their letter that the matter is pending trial in the lower court, which has till date examined only eight of the 26 witnesses.

They have also sought a speedy trial in their case.

Shahbuddin, an accused in a 2015 murder case and currently lodged in Tihar Jail, has prayed for a speedy trial of his case, in which the lower court has examined only eight of the 20 witnesses till date.

A similar plea has been made by Shankar, accused in a 2014 rape case, who is also lodged in Tihar Jail. He has contended that the trial court has examined only nine of the 17 witnesses in the case till date.

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President Donald Trump on Friday called the terror attacks on two mosque in New Zealand a "horrible massacre" and offered US assistance to its ally.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack against Muslims in a western country.

Condemning the attacks, President Trump tweeted, My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques."



49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The US stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all! Trump tweeted.

The White House also issued a statement condemning the attack.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed his condolences to the grieving families of the victims.

No one should have to fear such violence in their place of worship. The American people mourn this tragedy together with our friends in New Zealand, Pompeo said.

Horrified by the from Christchurch. America stands with our brothers and sisters in New Zealand today, Senator Chris Murphy said.

We have so much work to do, in our country and across the world, to stamp out the hate that lurks in too many hearts, he added.

Congressman Louie Gohmert described the shootings at the New Zealand mosques egregiously reprehensible.

The shooters need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law along with anyone who knowingly aided their efforts in any way, he said.

There are courts, dispute resolutions, and legislatures to resolve controversies there is no place for cold blooded murders. Though New Zealand does not have the death penalty, hopefully its people, through their justice system, will send the message loudly and clearly that such barbarity from anyone will not be tolerated, Gohmert said.

I am heartbroken for my Muslim friends & cannot imagine their sadness as they awake to this terrible The attacks in New Zealand remind us again that hate & radicalism have no boundaries. Americans stand united with New Zealand during this difficult time, Congressman Jim Banks said.

Devastated by the tragedy in New Zealand. No one should ever have to feel unsafe in the sanctuary of their house of worship. No one should ever fall victim to extremist bigotry, or feel targeted for their religion. The United States stands with it's ally on this darkened day, Congressman Gregory Meeks said.

Horrified to learn of the Christchurch massacre - sending love to the victims, their families, and the entire New Zealand community today, Senator Kyrsten Sinema said.

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Describing the deteriorating human rights situation in parts of China as appalling wherein over a million religious minorities have reportedly been detained, the United States said it is considering taking targeted measures against those responsible for this.

"We are committed to promoting accountability for those who are committing these violations and considering targeted measures as well," State Department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino told reporters at his biweekly conference.

Dismissing the Chinese criticism of the US making statements on internal affairs of China, Palladino asserted that the United States will continue to raise the issue.

"This is something that we're going to continue to speak out about. This really is an appalling situation that's ongoing and we're alarmed, frankly, that there's over a million people at least being detained: Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, other members of Muslim-minority groups in these internment camps," he said.

According to multiple media accounts, China is holding more than a million Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority, and other Muslims in "re-education camps" in Xinjiang. It has turned the far-western region bordering Central Asia into one the most policed areas of the country.

"We will continue to call on China to end these policies and to free these people that have been arbitrarily detained," Palladino said.

A day earlier US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China is in a "league of its own" when it comes to human rights violations.

In its annual report, the State Department alleged that in 2018, the Chinese government significantly intensified its campaign of mass detention of members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

"In just 2018, China intensified its campaign of detaining Muslim minority groups at record levels," Pompeo said as he released the annual Congressional-mandated country reports on human rights on Wednesday.

China, however, says the camps are vocational training centres. It described the charges as baseless.

"China's human rights cause has made great progress," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters in Beijing.

"We hope the US will remove the coloured lenses and discard the Cold War mentality ... and view China's human rights progress in an objective and just way and stop interfering in China's internal affairs with human rights as a pretext," he added.

Palladino said the US would continue to speak about human rights violations in China.

"Secretary Pompeo was certainly clear yesterday, and he was certainly clear on this issue when his Chinese counterpart visited Washington for the Diplomatic and Security Dialogue that we held a few months ago. We will echo the Government of Turkey's recent statement on this matter in which they called this a great shame for humanity. That's well said," he said.

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A leading American lawmaker has expressed disappointment that China has once again blocked at the UNSC the designation of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, saying Beijing has had "ample opportunity" to fulfil its international obligation.

The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a Jaish suicide bomber killed 40 CRPF soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama, leading to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan.

Other than Pulwama, Azhar-led JeM has been involved in several terror attacks in India over nearly two decades.

It was responsible for the attack on Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001 in which nine security personnel and officials were killed.

In January, 2016, a heavily armed group of JeM attacked the Pathankot airbase in which seven security personnel were killed. The terror group also carried out the attack on Uri brigade headquarters in September 2016, killing 17 soldiers and injuring 30 others.

"I am disappointed that China has decided yet again to block Masood Azhar's global terrorist designation at the UN Security Council," said Congressman Eliot Engel, chairman of the powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee, on Thursday.

"China & Pakistan have had ample opportunity to fulfil their international obligations," Engel said, a day after China for the fourth time in 10 years blocked a move in the UNSC to designate Azhar as a global terrorist.

India too has said it was "disappointed" by China placing a hold on Azhar's designation.

China has said its move would give it time for a "thorough and in-depth assessment" of the case against Azhar.

Eminent Indian-American attorney Ravi Batra said the failure of UN designation of Azhar is "a breakdown" of the UNSC's "core mission: enhance peace and security".

"Preventing UNSC to designate a self-professed proud terrorist chief Masood Azhar, as a 'global terrorist', when (Pakistan) Prime Minister Imran Khan honourably returned Indian pilot Abhinandan Varthaman, is beyond shameful. It is elevating the evil of state-sponsored terrorism to now becoming worthy of a Patron Saint's protection," he said.

"If P5 (permanent five) members become protectors of terror, it's only time before a new Thomas Jefferson will declare independence and create a new world body that renders UNSC useless at best, or hold a P5 member vicariously liable for the evil they nurtured and protected," he said.

Except for China, all other UNSC members had supported the proposal to list Azhar, who lives in Pakistan and operates his organisation from there, as a global terrorist.

"It is worth remembering that the UN Security Council has succeeded in preventing World War III; but that success has come at a very high price: eruption of regional wars all over the place and creating refugees and terrorists galore," Batra added.

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Parineeti Chopra, who plays Akshay Kumar's love interest in "Kesari, Friday said she wanted to be "authentic" to the character of a Punjabi woman in the film



"Kesari" is based on the Battle of Saragarhi fought between the British Indian army's Sikh Regiment comprising of 21 soldiers and 10,000 Afghan tribesmen in 1897.

Parineeti said she did not have any knowledge of that era and it was director Anurag Singh, whose research on the subject helped her in playing the part.

"I used to ask several questions to Anurag before doing a scene as I did not want to go out of the character. I did not want to improvise in this world. I wanted to be as authentic as possible.

"She is a Punjabi girl, so I knew an approximate world but I did not know about that kind of love story. It is the story of 1897 but we have an amazing friendship, there is no unequal relationship over here. This is a genius move by Anurag to not show the typical conservative side of husband and wife," Parineeti told reporters here at the song launch event of "Kesari"..

The makers today released the song "Teri Mitti" from the film.

Parineeti said she wanted to work in "Kesari" because of the team involved with the project and screen time was not her concern while signing the film.

"When I met Karan Johar (producer) he told me the one liner and he made me hear the love song and I immediately said yes to it, I did not even hear the full narration. I knew all these genius people were making an amazing film and I wanted to be a part of it."



Akshay plays the role of Havildar Ishar Singh who leads the group of soldiers to fight a war with bravery and valour. The actor said working on the film was an emotional experience for him.

"Looking at the subject who wouldn't want to be part of it. Not many people knew about Battle of Saragarhi and when I heard it I wanted to do it. The last 15-20 minutes of the film are very emotional. It has been an emotional journey on the film," he added.

Akshay said that this film should be shown to the kids and the youth.

"This is an educational film. I appeal to show it to children and youth should watch this film as there is lot of learning."



Director Anurag Singh said he was initially scared but the confidence the makers and the team had in him pushed him to do his best.

"I put my heart and soul into it. It has been amazing journey on this film. I am proud of this film. I couldn't have asked for a better subject than this to make a Hindi film," Anurag said.

Produced by Cape of Good Hope Films and Johar's Dharma Productions, the film releases on March 21.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As she led thousands of hungry, half-clad and angry farmers on the dusty streets of Singur and Nandigram over a decade ago, defying the mighty Communist regime of West Bengal, little did she know she was on the threshold of scripting history.

Mamata Banerjee, the tempestuous Trinamool Congress supremo, might well be at the doorstep of making history yet again, if the BJP-led NDA fails to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha polls, ending up becoming a kingmaker in national if not the king.

One of the bitterest critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, she firmly pitched herself as a leader who could act as the glue to unite disparate political parties seeking to oust the NDA from power when she mustered leaders of 23 parties at rally here in January this year.

"We would play an important role in the new government formation under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee. The people of this country are looking up to her and TMC to save them from the reign of fear of Narendra Modi," TMC leader in the outgoing Lok Sabha Sudip Bandopadhyay told PTI, indicating that the fiery West Bengal leader has set her sights on New Delhi.

For the 64-year-old spinster, the political journey from the restive streets of Nandigram and Singur in 2007-08, when she waged a relentless battle against the Left Front government, to 'Nabanna', the seat of power in Kolkata, was as captivating as it was punishing.

Though she cut her political teeth as a young Congress volunteer in her student days and rose to become a minister in UPA and NDA governments, it was in the crucible of Nandigram and Singur movements against forcible acquisition of farm land by the Communist government for industrialisation that her destiny and that of the TMC took shape.

She founded the TMC in January 1998 after parting ways with the Congress and it was through struggles, big and small, against the Communist dispensation that her party grew.

In 2001, when the state had its first assembly polls after the launch of the TMC, the party bagged an impressive 60 seats in the 294-member House, while the Left Front clinched a staggering 192.

In its second outing in the 2006 assembly elections, the TMC's strength came down by half as it could pocket only 30 seats, while the Left scored a resounding victory with 219 seats.

The four years that followed were the most momentous in the contemporary political history of West Bengal as she put up a spirited fight against the Left Front government over alleged excesses in Singur and Nandigram.

The assembly elections of 2011 were historic, as she decimated the Left in one of its longest-standing bastions. Banerjee's party ended the Left Front's 34-year unbroken stint in power, winning a whopping 184 seats riding the crest of massive public outrage against the Communists, who were restricted to just 60 seats.

The street fighter-politician further tightened her hold on the levers of power in West Bengal in the assembly elections of 2016, when she beat the Communists hollow winning 211 seats. The Left Front, with just 32 seats in its kitty, even lost its position as the main opposition party which went to the Congress that clinched 44 seats.

According to a senior party leader, it was time for the party to make a mark in the national political arena.

At a time when the Congress has lost much of its political heft and is not in a position to take on the BJP single-handedly, many in the TMC feel that regional players could call the shots in the corridors of power in New Delhi.

"And we would be one the most important players at the national level. If we are able to win most of the Lok Sabha seats from the state, we will play a major role in formation of the next government.

"The question of the PM candidate would be decided after the polls and we would be one of the main claimants. Our party supremo, who had been both a Union minister and chief minister, has acceptability across party lines," said a senior TMC MP who did not wish to be named.

The TMC had 34 MPs in the outgoing Lok Sabha.

Another party leader said the "faulty" policies of the Modi government and the "vacuum in the opposition space" has provided the TMC an opportunity to position itself firmly as a pre-eminent anti-BJP and anti-Modi force.

Banerjee's characteristic belligerence on issues like demonetization, implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST), the contentious National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and alleged politicisation of Pulwama terror strike and "destruction" of institutions like the CBI and Enforcement Directorate has found resonance with other opposition parties, he said.

However, power has many a pitfall. Infighting is one of them, and the TMC is no exception despite its strong-willed leader's iron fist.

It was due to the infighting and the slowly but surely growing clout of the BJP, that Banerjee dropped 10 of her sitting Lok Sabha MPs and brought in 18 new faces.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior TMC leader conceded as much.

"There is factionalism at various levels and some of the aspirants who didn't get tickets might cause problems in some areas. But we hope to remove such irritants soon," he said.

The BJP, which has been trying to occupy a substantial part of the opposition space in the state, feels that the TMC supremo is fast losing ground.

"Before eyeing to become the prime minister Mamata Banerjee should protect her own turf because she is fast losing ground and people of this state want to get rid of her misrule," BJP national general Kailash Vijayvargiya told PTI.

The Congress, a potential post-election ally of the TMC, is also not too happy with Banerjee as it feels she was more concerned about blocking Rahul Gandhi's chances of becoming the prime minister instead of fighting the BJP.

"When Congress recently won elections in three states, only TMC didn't congratulate Rahul ji. There are many other instances which show she is more averse to Rahul Gandhi becoming the prime minister than preventing Narendra Modi from occupying the post," West Bengal Congress president Somen Mitra said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Congress Friday accused the Modi government of not acting against fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi despite having evidence and asked what was stopping the NDA from initiating action.

Party spokesperson Pawan Khera said the country's watchman is asleep and is snoozing while Nirav Modi is globe-trotting and opening new companies in London and elsewhere after fleeing from the country.

"Today is 'world sleep day', as the Congress party shall expose how Prime Minister Modi i.e., 'desh ka chowkidar' and his government slept and snoozed while 'chhota Modi' i.e., Nirav Modi looted crores, fled the country, posed with the prime minister, globe trotted the world, opened a new diamond business in London which have a Panama Papers connection.

"Simple question is - If the Congress party can expose this entire chain of events trace this trail, why did the CBI, ED, SFIO and other investigative agencies of the Modi government could not do it after 14 months of his escape," he asked.

The Congress leader also alleged a clear cut case of criminal complacency, complicity and connivance by Modi government with economic offenders like Nirav Modi.

"If all these linkages, connection and nexuses could be traced by the Congress party based on information in public domain, then what prevents the Narendra Modi government to connect the dots and take action against India's most wanted - chhota Modi - Nirav Modi," he asked.

Khera alleged that since the time his passport was revoked, as claimed by the Ministry of External Affairs, Nirav Modi has travelled to at least six countries which includes the UK, the UAE, Hong Kong, France and Germany.

According to Interpol, India's 'most wanted economic offender' Nirav Modi travelled on March 15, March 28, March 30 and March 31. On March 31, after staying at Mayfair Hotel in London and took a flight to Paris.

One of the countries he visited between February and November 2018 was Belgium where he had applied for asylum, Khera said, and asked, "How could Nirav Modi travel the world after his Indian passport was revoked? On June 28, 2018, Modi government's MEA gave a lameduck excuse that Nirav Modi's passport was 'revoked' but not 'physically cancelled'."



He alleged that the red corner notice by Interpol against Rs 26,306 crore scam accused economic fugitive was only issued on July 2, 2018 - exactly seven months after his "great escape".

"Why did Modi government's CBI/ED/SFIO/Immigration agencies slept on the Interpol notice? Is it not a criminal delay," he asked.

Khera also alleged that fresh evidences now expose that Nirav Modi opened a new company called Diamond Holdings in the UK on May 24, 2018. Intriguingly, this carries the same address of Nirav Modi's chartered accountants, whose names appear in the Panama Papers investigation of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The wife of IPS officer Gaurav Chandra Dutt, who had allegedly committed suicide last month blaming West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Bannerjee for his death, has moved the Supreme Court seeking withdrawal of her plea for investigation.

The top court on Friday said it is not passing any order on the request for withdrawal of the plea.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi said, "We are not passing any order on the request of the petitioner to withdraw the writ petition at this stage, instead we direct the matter to be listed after two weeks."



The bench, also comprising Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna, said a request by the petitioner Sreyashi Dutt for withdrawal of the plea has been made in writing and on an affidavit.

"A request has been made in writing by the petitioner to withdraw this writ petition. There is an affidavit to the same effect filed by the petitioner. The letter as well as the affidavit is dated March 14, 2019 and has been sworn at Bidhannagar, Calcutta on March 14, 2019," the bench said in its order.

The retired 1986-batch IPS officer had blamed West Bengal Chief Minister for his death, a charge dismissed by the state's ruling Trinamool Congress as "baseless".

In a six-page letter to the chief minister, Gaurav Chandra Dutt, who retired earlier this year, had accused her of abetting his suicide by keeping him "compulsory waiting" for posting.

He had also alleged he was "harassed and tortured in devious ways" by various state institutions at the behest of the chief minister.

The officer allegedly had a chequered past. He was suspended for nine months in 2010 for "conduct unbecoming of an officer" after a constable's wife accused him of torturing her husband.

He also faced disciplinary action in 2012 over alleged financial irregularities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Superstar Aamir Khan says filmmaking does excites him, but currently he wants to focus on acting.

The 54-year-old actor, who made directorial debut with "Taare Zameen Par", said he will quit acting once he decides to turn full-fledged filmmaker.

"I am inclined towards filmmaking and I coincidentally directed 'Taare Zameen Par'. I have been in love with filmmaking and acting and I can't alienate the two but what I can say right now is that I began my career as an actor and it excites me.

"The moment I become a full-fledged filmmaker I will stop acting. Right now, I don't want to stop acting, that's why I am holding back the director inside me," Aamir told reporters here on Thursday.

As a producer, Aamir has backed films like "Lagaan", "Taare Zameen Par", "Jaane Tu Yaha Jaane Na", "Peepli Live", "Dhobi Ghat", "Delhi Belly", "Talaash", "Dangal" and "Secret Superstar". The actor said his aim is to support good scripts and making money is not his agenda.

"I had not thought at what pace I will make films. Usually, people make films with their production houses for business. That is not our first agenda. Creativity is our agenda. Till the time we don't get a good script, we don't make it into a film."



When asked if as an actor does he have any Hollywood aspirations, Aamir said he would work in any part of the world if he gets a good opportunity.

"For me, as an actor, what is important is what the film is all about and what it is trying to say. It should excite me as an actor. It is not important that it should have a social message.

"It does not matter which part of the world it originates from. If someone from Japan or Africa offers me something and if I get excited, I will do it. But I don't have a fascination for Hollywood," Aamir added.

The actor has announced his next project, "Lal Singh Chaddha", an official adaptation of Tom Hanks' 1994 film "Forrest Gump".

He was also in talks for Netflix series on spiritual leader Rajneesh, popularly known among his followers as Osho, but he said the script has not been finalised yet.

"Nothing is happening on Osho at the moment. I am not aware. The script is not ready," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Shatrughan Sinha Friday hinted he would not be working under Narendra Modi anymore, tweeting an Urdu verse that implied the Prime Minister may not have dearth of admirers but the dissident BJP leader would not be one of them.

Sinha has on multiple occasions expressed his unhappiness with the Prime Minister and the BJP leadership and his Friday tweet made it clear he might soon quit the party he has been associated with nearly two decades now.

"Mohabbat karne wale kam na honge, teri mehfil mein lekin ham na honge (you may perhaps have no dearth of admirers, but I would not be among them)," the Patna Sahib MP tweeted.

Though he did not mention Prime Minister Modi in his tweets, the wordings made it clear who he was referring too. In his tweets, Sinha often refers to the Prime Minister as "sir".

"Sir, the Nation respects you, but the only thing the leadership lacks is credibility & trust factor. Leadership jo kar rahi hai aur kah rahi hai kya log uspe vishwas kar rahe hain, shayad nahin (Do the people trust what the leadership is saying and doing? Perhaps not)," the actor-turned politician wrote.

He said, "Any way it all seems to be too little and too late. Promises made in the past are still to be fulfilled. Hope, wish and pray that- Mohabbat karne wale kam na honge (shayad), teri mehfil mein lekin ham na honge."



Associated with the BJP since the 1990s, Sinha fell out with the party's leadership in the recent past, complaining it has become a "one-man show and two-man army"-- a reference apparently to the Prime Minister and his trusted aide and party president Amit Shah.

Sinha has repeatedly asserted he would seek a re-election from the Patna Sahib seat though it may be as a candidate of a different party.

"Location will be the same, situation may be different," the 72-year-old leader has said in the past.

Sinha had served as a minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government and is serving his second consecutive term as MP from Patna Sahib.

He has also indicated that an announcement on which of the opposition parties he will be joining was likely next week.

Speculations are rife that the opposition "Mahagathbandhan" in the state, led by the RJD and the Congress, will field him from the Patna Sahib seat.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Y S Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and younger brother of former CM Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, was Friday found dead at his residence in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh, with family members alleging that the death was not natural.

Vivekananda Reddy's personal assistant M V Krishna Reddy has lodged a complaint with Pulivendula police expressing doubts over the nature of the death as blood clots were found in the bedroom and the bathroom.

The 68-year old leader is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Vivekananda Reddy's nephew and former MP Y S Avinash Reddy alleged that it was not a natural death and sought a thorough investigation.

"There were two injuries on his head, one each on the front and the back. So, a thorough probe is required to establish the cause of the death. There could possibly be a conspiracy angle as well that needs to be probed," Avinash Reddy said in Pulivendula.

A case under section 174 of CrPC (unnatural death) was registered and the body moved to the Pulivendula government hospital for postmortem, a local police inspector said.

YSR Congress president and his mother Vijayamma rushed to Pulivendula from Hyderabad on hearing the news.

Known as a down-to-earth and genial person, Vivekananda was elected as MLA in 1989 and 1994 from his hometown Pulivendula in Kadapa district.

He was elected to the Lok Sabha from the Kadapa constituency in 1999 and 2004 and to the Legislative Council in 2009.

He had served as the agriculture minister under N Kiran Kumar Reddy in the then united

He had a difference in opinions with his nephew, Y S Jaganmohan Reddy, after the latter quit the Congress and established the YSR Congress, and chose to stay back in the parent party.

Vivekananda even lost the by-election to his sister-in-law, Vijayamma, in 2011.

Subsequently, the family differences were sorted out and Vivekananda Reddy joined the YSRC.

Two days ago, he was seen at the Lotus Pond residence of Jagan in Hyderabad and on Thursday, Viveka, as he was known by, campaigned for the YSRC in Pulivendula constituency.

He was alone at his residence in Pulivendula on Thursday night.

"There was no response when I went to his house this morning. I called his wife in Hyderabad over phone and she asked me not to disturb him. Later, the cook and other household staff reached the house but they too did not get any response. I then went in through a side door and found Vivekananda's body in the bathroom, with blood clots in the bedroom and the bathroom," Krishna Reddy said.

YSRC MP V Vijayasai Reddy expressed shock over the former minister's death.

"He was such a humble person who always engaged himself in public service. It is a huge loss to the YSRC and also the state," the MP said in a message.
Y S Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, was Friday found dead at his house in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh.

Police initially registered a case under Section 174 Cr P C (unnatural death) when Reddy's body was found by his staff early in the morning.

After post-mortem in the local government hospital, police confirmed the case was altered to Section 302 IPC that relates to murder.

His party,YSR Congress, demanded a CBI investigation into the case even as the Andhra Pradesh government constituted a Special Investigation Team, headed by CID Additional Director General of Police Amit Garg, to probe the death.

YSR Congress president Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy alleged that chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu was responsible for the death of his uncle.

Terming the killing as a 'politically mean act," he told reporters in Pulivendula after visiting the spot that only a CBI investigation would bring out the truth.

Justice would be done only if a third party probed the case, he said, adding they had no faith in the state police.

He also alleged that the state government was fabricating evidence to portray Vivekananda's death as natural.

"They (government) came out with a letter purportedly written by my uncle, naming a driver (as the culprit). How could a person write a letter while being killed,?" he asked.

This was the third unnatural death in the YS family that has a powerful political hold in Kadapa district.

While the father Y S Raja Reddy was murdered in 1998, the eldest son M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was killed in a helicopter crash in 2009.

Vivekananda Reddy was a two-time MLA, two-time MP and a one-term MLC. He served as agriculture minister in the N Kiran Kumar Reddy government in united Andhra Pradesh.

The 68-year old YSR Congress leader is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Police said injuries were found on the forehead, head and its back, besides on the hand and thigh.

"We have gathered some clues in the case. We are questioning the former minister's household staff. Some fingerprints were also collected from the scene," Kadapa District Superintendent of Police Rahul Dev Sharma said.

"We have taken the case seriously and are investigating it from all angles," Sharma added.

The Chief Minister spoke with the DGP R P Thakur and other senior officials, asked them to conduct a thorough probe and not spare the guilty, said a CMO communique.

Naidu recalled Vivekananda's services as a public representative and extended sympathies to the bereaved family.

His death sparked a political row between TDP and YSRC.

"He actively took part in election campaign in Jammalamadugu yesterday. That he died suddenly gives rise to several suspicions. So we want a CBI investigation to bring out the facts," YSRC spokesperson Vasireddy Padma demanded.

State Animal Husbandry Minister C Adinarayana Reddy, who belongs to Jammalamadugu, took objection to YSRCs insinuation and said it has become a habit for the opposition to politicise everything.

"I also want to know the facts behind such a nice person's death. We too want an impartial inquiry, but YSRC leaders should stop mudslinging," he told reporters here.

Known to be a down-to-earth and genial person,Vivekananda was elected as MLA in 1989 and 1994 from his hometown Pulivendula in Kadapa district.

He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Kadapa constituency in 1999 and 2004 and to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council in 2009.

He had differences of opinion with his nephew Jagan Mohan Reddy after the latter quit Congress and established the YSR Congress and chose to stay back with the parent party.

Vivekananda lost the by-election to his sister-in-law, Vijayamma in 2011. Subsequently, the family differences were sorted out and Vivekananda Reddy joined the YSRC.

Two days ago, he was seen at the Lotus Pond residence of Jagan Mohan Reddy in Hyderabad and on Thursday campaigned for the YSRC in Kadapa district.

He was reportedly alone at his residence in Pulivendula on Thursday night.

"There was no response when I went to his house this morning. I called his wife in Hyderabad over phone and she asked me not to disturb him.Later,the cook and other household staff reached the house but they too did not get any response.

I then went in through a side door and found Vivekananda's body in the bathroom, with blood clots in the bedroom and the bathroom. There were several injuries on his body," Vivekananda's personal assistant M V Krishna Reddy said.

He lodged a complaint with police, based on which the FIR was registered.

YSRC MP V Vijayasai Reddy expressed shock over the former minister's death.

"He was such a humble person who always engaged himself in public service. It is a huge loss to the YSRC and also the state," the MP said in a message.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Unilever, world's second-largest consumer goods company Thursday announced the elevation of Nitin Paranjpe as its Chief Operating Officer (COO). He is the second Indian after Harish Manwani to make it to the global post.

Before this appointment, he was heading the company's foods & refreshments business.

The British-Dutch company also promoted Sanjiv Mehta, Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) of its Indian subsidiary Hindustan Unilever (HUL), to the post of the company's South Asia President and member, Unilever Leadership Executive (ULE). However, he will continue to head HUL as CMD. Changes to both the elevations will take effect from May 1.

Also Read: Baba Ramdev flays HUL for Brooke Bond Red Label ad fiasco

Paranjpe formerly served as the company's India Chief Executive since April 2008. In 2013, he was promoted to the position of President of Parent Unilever's home care category at HUL's international office.

"Today's increasingly fragmented consumer, channel and media environment requires us to operate with more speed and agility than ever before.

With his deep knowledge and experience of our markets, Nitin is ideally placed to work with me and the Unilever Leadership Executive to drive our performance and help deliver our growth ambitions," Unilever CEO Alan Jope said in a media statement.

Also Read: Hindustan Unilever faces backlash for calling Kumbh Mela 'place where old people get abandoned'

Harish Manwani who retired in 2018 as HUL's non-executive chairman had served as Unilever's COO between 2011 and 2014. Manwani was the second most powerful executive at the company after then CEO Paul Polman.

Paranjpe too will be second-in-command after current CEO Alan Jope and will be responsible for Unilever's go-to-market activities, apart from steering growth across countries.

The move manifests India's strategic importance to Unilever as the country is its second-largest market after US. The $57 billion Unilever Plc, has a presence across 190 countries and gets nearly 60 per cent of its revenue from emerging markets like India.
The ruling Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh on Thursday night released its first list of 126 candidates for the April 11 assembly election, amid unprecedented protests and rebellion in the party.

Name of Chief Minister and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu and his son Nara Lokesh figured in the list announced by Naidu himself at a late-night press conference.

He called it "Mission 150 Plus", as the party aimed to win at least 150 out of the total 175 seats in the assembly.

He said the first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha election, scheduled simultaneously, would be announced Friday.

The TDP chief, who released an audio song for the campaign, said he would kick start the campaign from Srikakulam district on March 16 after worshipping Lord Venkateswara atop the Tirumala Hills.

"We have balanced various equations and selected the candidates. It is now up to the people to bless these candidates as I take the responsibility of their future in my hands," Naidu said.

Despite strong opposition, the TDP re-nominated Assembly Speaker Kodela Sivaprasada Rao from Sattenapalli constituency in Guntur district. Deputy Chief Minister K E Krishna Murthy and Women Welfare Minister Paritala Sunitha opted out of the contest this time to enable their sons jump into the field.

Naidu's son Lokesh too will be fighting his first electoral battle from Mangalagiri constituency in the Amravati capital region.

Like his father, Lokesh chose a constituency that has a predominant backward class population.

Naidu will be contesting the assembly election for the seventh time from Kuppam in his native Chittoor district.

Meanwhile, former Union minister Panabaka Lakshmi and her husband Krishnaiah joined the TDP after midnight. The couple so far served the Congress party.
Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman is set to resume duty after the completion of two weeks of debriefing with the Indian Air Force (IAF) and other security officials. Wing Commander Abhinandan also underwent medical treatment after his release from Pakistan on March 1. The IAF officer will now go on a three-week sick leave before resuming duty. However, there's no clarity on when he'll be able to fly fighter planes. Reports suggest the IAF will first constitute a medical fitness board, which will examine his fitness level to fly fighter jets, following which a final decision will be taken.

As part of his cooling process, Abhinandan had apprised the security officials about his ordeal in Pakistan, where he underwent mental torture. Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who met Abhinandan after his return, said during the Aaj Tak Suraksha Sabha that though Wing Commander Ahinandan faced a lot of mental harassment in Pakistan, it had a little impact on his overall confidence and personality.

The IAF pilot was tasked with averting Pakistani F16 jets' intrusion into the Indian air space as they tried to target Indian military installations in the Rajouri sector of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), a day after the Indian Mirage-2000 jets struck and bombed Jaish-e-Mohammed's (JeM) terror den in Balakot, Pakistan. He was captured by the Pakistani Army on February 27 after his MiG-21 Bison jet was shot down following a dogfight with Pakistani jets during aerial combat.

Varthaman was not provided with any medical treatment during initial hours after he ejected from his MiG-21. He was released after India applied intense diplomatic pressure on Pakistan by courting support from major powers in the world, including the US, the UK and France.

Also read: 'If one wants tonic of motivation, he or she should meet Abhinandan', says defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman

Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman: Here's all you need to know about the IAF pilot in Pakistan's custody
Trinamool Congress' four-time legislator Arjun Singh Thursday joined the BJP, giving a boost to the party's prospects in the state ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.

Singh joined the BJP in presence of party general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya and senior state BJP leader Mukul Roy in the national capital.

However, the TMC refused to give much importance to Singh's switch-over and challenged him to seek a re-election from his Assembly seat Bhatpara in North 24 Parganas district on a BJP ticket.

Addressing the media at the BJP office in Delhi, Singh said he was shocked at West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's comments on the Pulwama terror attack.

"I gave 30 years to Mamata Banerjee. I was shocked at her comments on the Pulwama terror attack. Her statement has shaken the country.

"When the Indian Air Force carried out the strike, she demanded the body count of terrorists. If a leader does not have national interest in her mind then she cannot do any good to her voters," Singh said.

Singh is likely to contest the Lok Sabha polls from the Barrackpore seat against TMC heavyweight and former railway minister Dinesh Trivedi, sources said.

He was upset with Banerjee for not giving him a ticket from the seat, they said.

"Earlier the TMC used to stand for Maa, Mati, Manush, now it is only money, money and money," Singh said in a brazen attack on Banerjee.

Singh is the latest entry into the BJP from the TMC. Earlier, expelled TMC MP Anupam Hazra joined the saffron party.

The BJP is aiming to get a sizeable number of seats in West Bengal in the Lok Sabha polls and party chief Amit Shah had set a target of 22 of 42 constituencies in the state.

"Arjun Singh has been in touch with BJP leaders for quite some time. It hardly matters whether or not he is with us. What matters in the TMC is Mamata Banerjee," TMC's North 24 Parganas district president Jyotipriyo Mullick told PTI.

"If he has guts, he should resign and seek re-election from his Bhatpara Assembly seat. I can assure you, he will lose his deposits," he said.

The Bhatpara Assembly seat falls under the Barrackpore Lok Sabha constituency, which is currently held by Trivedi.

Mullick this evening held a meeting with TMC councillors of the Bhatpara Municipality, presently chaired by Singh, to ensure that they do not switch-over to the BJP.

Singh was at loggerheads with Trivedi, a two-time MP from Barrackpore. He had even told Banerjee that renominating Trivedi from Barrackpore would affect the party's prospects in the election. But the Trinamool Congress chief went ahead and re-nominated Trivedi.

Singh had expressed his anger against the TMC while speaking to reporters on Wednesday.

Singh, once considered to be close to former CPI(M) MP from Barrackpore Tarit Baran Topdar, has been game-changer for the TMC in several elections, from panchayat polls to parliamentary battles, due to his local connections and strong booth management skills.

Singh has influence over several Assembly seats in the North 24 Parganas district, which has a significant number of Hindi-speaking voters.

Reacting to Singh's defection, Trivedi said it will not have any impact as he is confident of winning the elections for the third time.

Senior Congress leader and MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury told PTI that the TMC is getting the "dose of its own medicine".

"It was the TMC which started this dirty game of poaching opposition MLAs in Bengal. Now, history is repeating itself. I would call it poetic justice," he said.

A total of 17 MLAs of the Congress and three of the Left Front had switched-over to the TMC since the 2016 state polls.

CPI (M) state secretary Surya Kanta Mishra said the TMC and the BJP are two sides of a same coin.

"There is no difference in the brand of politics both the parties practice," Mishra said.
Ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party has entered into an alliance with Apna Dal in Uttar Pradesh. The local party will contest on two seats. Ticket for one seat has been given to Apna Dal's Anupriya Patel, where the candidates for the second seat will be decided after later deliberations. Meanwhile, former Congress MP from Haryana Arvind Sharma has joined BJP.

The Lok Sabha elections 2019 have been scheduled to start from April 11 and will go on till May 19. With little time left to woo voters, parties have increased their political activities. From public rallies to workers' meetings, big leaders of the national as well as state parties are leaving no stone unturned to ensure victory in the polls.

BusinessToday.In brings you all the latest updates related to the General Elections 2019 through our live blog.

09:15pm: SP-BSP-RLD alliance to hold 11 joint rallies in Uttar Pradesh for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The rallies will start from March 7 and will contine till May 16. Below is the schedule of rallies:

Saharanpur - April 7

Budaun - April 13

Agra - April 16

Mainpuri - April 19

Rampur - April 20

Firozabad - April 20

Kannauj - April 25

Faizabad - May 1

Azamgarh - May 8

Gorakhpur - May 13

Varanasi - May 16

08:39pm: I had said earlier also that we should go for an alliance in Delhi, Congress leader PC Chacko tells ANI. "Best way to defeat BJP is to have an alliance with AAP in Delhi. When the party President takes a decision then everybody will follow that opinion," he further added.

PC Chacko,Congress: I had said earlier also that we should go for an alliance in Delhi. Best way to defeat BJP is to have an alliance with AAP in Delhi. I and many other people are of this opinion. When the party President takes a decision then everybody will follow that opinion. pic.twitter.com/JaFVrpJvih ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019 08:32pm: National People's Party (NPP) has declared the names of candidates for 2019 Lok Sabha elections for Manipur and Meghalaya constituencies, ANI reported. Former MP Agatha K Sangma will contest from Tura constituency, whereas former Manipur minister Thangminlien Kipgen has been fielded from Outer Manipur constituency. National Peoples Party (NPP) has declared the names of candidates for #LokSabhaElections2019 for Manipur & Meghalaya constituencies.Former MP Agatha K Sangma will contest from Tura constituency & former Minister in Manipur govt,Thangminlien Kipgen from Outer Manipur constituency ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019 07:55pm: National Congress Party has announced its second list of candidates for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Parth Ajit Pawar, grandson of party chief Sharad Pawar, will contest elections from the Maval seat in Pune district of Maharashtra. 06:30pm: The Left Front has announced its list of 25 candidates for 2019 Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal. 06:23pm: "Till date (since the imposition of Model Code of Conduct), a total of 63,449 hoardings,banners and posters have been removed in Delhi. A total of 137 FIR's have been registered under Excise Act and 44 FIR's have been registered under Arms Act," Chief Electoral Officer of Delhi was quoted by ANI. Chief Electoral Officer, Delhi: Till date (since the imposition of Model Code of Conduct), a total of 63449 hoardings/banners/posters have been removed in Delhi. A total number of 137 FIRs have been registered under Excise Act and 44 FIRs have been registered under Arms Act. ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

06.19pm: Mahagathbandhan in Bihar to release its list of candidates on March 17, says Congress's Ranjeet Ranjan.

06.07pm: BJP forms pre-poll alliance with Apna Dal in Uttar Pradesh for 2019 Lok Sabha Elections. Apna Dal will contest from two seats.

02.31pm: Congress president Rahul Gandhi Friday said his party was looking at including the promise of Healthcare Act in its manifesto for the April-May Lok Sabha polls. He said it was part of the Congress' commitment to ensure everybody has access to quality healthcare. The Congress chief said his party wanted to increase health expenditure to 3 per cent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and also increase the number of trained medical professionals.

02.28pm: Vehicles carrying reserved EVMs and VVPATs during the seven-phased Lok Sabha polls will be mandatorily equipped with GPS to track their movement, the Election Commission has said. The decision came in the backdrop of electronic voting machines (EVMs) and voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines being found in hotels, roads and even at the residence of an MLA during the assembly elections held in five states late last year, reported PTI.

12.06pm: The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Election Commission to respond to the DMK's plea seeking directions to the poll panel for holding by-elections in three vacant assembly constituencies in Tamil Nadu, reported PTI. A bench comprising Justices S A Bobde and S A Nazeer asked the EC to file its response within two weeks. The DMK has questioned the poll panel's move to not hold by-elections in Tiruparankundram, Ottapidaram and Aravakurichi.

9.20am: After meeting SP Chief Akhilesh Yadav, Mayawati gave clear message to its cadre: "To be one, fight like a one and no backstabbing to other partners". The BSP-SP also chalked out plan to hold joint rallies.

9.00am: The grand alliance in Bihar has ironed out all the differences over the seat sharing agreement with a formal announcement likely to take place on March 17 in Delhi.

8.30am: The ruling Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh has released its first list of 126 candidates for the April 11 Assembly election, amid unprecedented protests and rebellion in the party, reported PTI. Name of Chief Minister and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu and his son Nara Lokesh figured in the list announced by Naidu himself at a late-night press conference. He called it "Mission 150 Plus", as the party aimed to win at least 150 out of the total 175 seats in the assembly. He said the first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha election, scheduled simultaneously, would be announced on Friday.

Andhra Pradesh CM & TDP leader, N Chandrababu Naidu in Amravati: Tomorrow I'll go to Chittoor for Tirupati darshan, after it, in the next few days, I'll go to all the other districts to have meeting with the party cadre. From March 20, we'll go in full swing campaign mode.(14/3) pic.twitter.com/n8l2HZcIxu - ANI (@ANI) March 14, 2019

8.20am: Trinamool Congress' four-time legislator Arjun Singh has joined the BJP, giving a boost to the party's prospects in the state ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, reported PTI. The TMC refused to give much importance to Singh's switch-over and challenged him to seek a re-election from his Assembly seat Bhatpara in North 24 Parganas district on a BJP ticket.

8.00am: Congress president Rahul Gandhi will address a public meeting at Bargarh district of Odisha on Friday. Rahul may talk about farmers' issues during the rally.
The opposition "Mahagathbandhan" (Grand Alliance) in Bihar will announce its candidates for the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state on Sunday, a senior Congress leader said here on Thursday.

Bihar Congress campaign committee chairman Akhilesh Prasad Singh, however, did not reveal how many seats the respective constituents of the grouping are going to get.

"Our talks were held in New Delhi. Top leaders of the Congress and alliance partners were present. RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha and HAM president Jitan Ram Manjhi were there. Things are falling in place well. We will announce our candidates on March 17," Singh told reporters.

Singh dismissed reports that the HAM chief was sore over not getting a "respectable" share of seats and that was why he returned to the city a day ahead of schedule.

The Congress leader and Manjhi were in the same flight to reach here from Delhi.

It was speculated that Singh was rushed to Patna by the Congress high command to assuage Manjhi who has been blowing hot and cold for quite some time over the number of constituencies he wanted for his party.

"Nobody is angry. All have been taken on board and things are being settled amicably. All Grand Alliance constituents will fight as a team and we will win all the 40 seats in the state," Singh asserted.

He also dismissed reports that former Bollywood set designer Mukesh Sahni, whose Vikassheel Insaan Party is the latest entrant into the "Mahagathbandhan", was unhappy at being reportedly sidelined in the seat-sharing arrangements.

"When the seats are announced, you will see for yourself that nobody has been left behind," Singh said.

Meanwhile, when reporters approached Manjhi with queries, he said with a smile: "There is no anger or dissatisfaction. We will work together to ensure the defeat of the BJP-led NDA."

The former Bihar chief minister has convened a meeting of the parliamentary board of his party, which was founded in 2015 after he quit the JD(U) after being forced to step down and pave way for the return of Nitish Kumar.

Manjhi's son Santosh, also the HAM's national general secretary, issued a statement attacking JD(U) leader RCP Singh for his statement that there was "no entry" in the NDA for the former Bihar chief minister who had quit the BJP-led coalition a year ago.

"(RCP) Singh is talking rubbish. Nobody is interested in returning to the NDA. The JD(U) leader was once considered the number two in the party. Now he should worry about the diminution of his own stature following the entry of Prashant Kishor," Santosh said.
Tata, Reliance and Airtel were top Indian brands in 2019, revealed a recent report by brand consultancy Interbrand, a division of Omnicom Group. According to the report, TCS continues to help Tata stay India's most valuable brand, while Jio helped Reliance grow as the challenger, however, Airtel lost 13 per cent brand value last year.

"Ever since its inception, Tata has continued to hold the top position in the Best Indian Brands table. However, Tata's brand value grew by a modest 6.5 per cent - contributed significantly by its tech services business TCS. In the same vein, Reliance, which after taking over the No. 2 spot from Airtel last year, consolidated itself as a strong no 2 with a growth in brand value of 12 per cent. This performance was bolstered by the phenomenal growth of Jio," the report said.

Read More: Bharti Airtel share price rises over 6% on stake sale report in tower arm Bharti Infratel

HDFC Bank, LIC, SBI, Infosys, Mahindra, ICICI Bank and Godrej are the other brands in the top ten ranking.

"The future of brand, in terms of roles that brands play, begins with integrations and anchorage but it graduates to provide acceleration and there is one sector globally that has done it brilliantly. That sector is luxury. We are now seeing the principles of the luxury sector being embraced by non-luxury sectors. The luxury mindset and its adoption by all is the largest thematic that we found last year," Ashish Mishra, Managing Director, Interbrand India told Business Today.

"In simple language we can call it premiumisation and the best Indian brands are following this. Either by creating better experiences or creating innovation or creating products on the higher continuum of the price value creation," he added.

According to Mishra, Indian brands are mirroring top global brands. "The sectors have the same story to tell. IT with telecom is the largest, financial services sector is the second largest, then auto and retail. But it is retail and auto which is growing the fastest."

Royal Enfield, Bajaj Auto, Ashok Leyland, Hero, Maruti Suzuki and Mahindra are the auto brands featured in the top 40 list for 2018. Also this year's table features three new entrants. Big Bazaar joins at #33, DMart at #37 and Nerolac Paints enters the table at 39 for the first time.

Tanishq, Royal Enfield, Kotak, Bajaj Auto, Ashok Leyland and Britannia are the fastest growing brands in the list. On the other hand, Reliance Group and Canara Bank exited the list this year. The combined value of the Top 40 brands was Rs 5.03 lakh crore, which represented a 5.2 per cent growth in value over the previous year. Financial Services and Auto contributed the most to this year's Top 40, at 27 per cent and 13 per cent of value.

According to the company, the ranking is based on three key components that contribute to a brand's cumulative value: The financial performance of the branded products and services; the role the brand plays in influencing customer choice; and the strength the brand has, to command a premium price or secure earning for the company.

Also Read: Bharti Airtel appoints Nakul Sehgal as Corporate Chief Financial Officer

Tata Motors share price falls after Jaguar Land Rover recalls 44,000 cars in UK
The French government Friday said that it would freeze the assets of terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) founder Masood Azhar backing India's demand to designate Azhar as a global terrorist at United Nations.

French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the French Ministry of the Interior announced in a joint statement that apart from freezing the Pulwama attack mastermind's assets, Paris will also press for including JeM chief on the European Union (EU)'s list of persons suspected of being involved in terror activities.

Also Read: China blocks India's bid to declare JeM chief Masood Azhar global terrorist for fourth time

"We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree." the statement from the French government said.

"A deadly attack took place in Pulwama on 14th February 2019, claiming over 40 victims from the Indian police forces. The Jaish-e-Mohammed, which the United Nations has deemed to be a terrorist organisation since 2001, has claimed responsibility for this attack," the formal communication added.

Also Read: Attacks unleashed on India by JeM chief Masood Azhar

The French government further said in its declaration that France has always been and always will be by India's side in fighting against terrorism.

The move comes after China, for the fourth time, blocked India's efforts to designate Azhar as a "global terrorist" in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

JeM was behind the Parliament attack, Pathankot attack and the recent attack on a CRPF convoy of 44 troopers in Pulwama, Jammu & Kashmir (J&K).

Also Read: China blocks move to list Masood Azhar as global terrorist
Boeing Co confirmed suspension of deliveries of 737 MAX aircraft on Thursday but continues to produce its single-aisle jets at full speed while dealing with the worldwide 737 MAX fleet's grounding following a deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that deliveries were effectively halted as most airlines would avoid taking a jet banned from entering service in the wake of two crashes in five months.

Most countries have stopped the 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes from flying after an Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday that killed all 157 people on board. In October, a Lion Air 737 jet that crashed in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board, was the same type of relatively new Boeing model.

Boeing said it had paused deliveries of its fastest-selling 737 MAX jetliner built at its factory near Seattle because of the temporary grounding order by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), confirming a Reuters report from Wednesday.

"We continue to build 737 MAX airplanes while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system", Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers said.

Boeing would maintain its production rate of 52 aircraft per month, and its newest version, the MAX, represents the lion's share of production, although Boeing declined to break out exact numbers. Reuters has reported Boeing's goal of speeding up production again in June.

Manufacturers avoid halting and then speeding up production as this disrupts supply chains and can cause industrial snags. But having to hold planes in storage consumes extra cash in increased inventory.

Customers typically pay over the bulk of the money for a new jetliner on delivery.

A pause in deliveries while keeping production rates unchanged at its Renton, Washington factory raises the prospect of a new logistical headache: what to do when airplanes start cluttering up the tarmac outside the factory?

Industry sources said Boeing plans to make use of every inch of available space at Renton while exploring other options such as King County International Airport, unofficially called Boeing Field. It could also look at Grant County International Airport in central Washington where Boeing regularly tests aircraft.

The FAA order allows for special flight permits for testing and other scenarios, so Boeing could use this provision to fly its planes off-site.

The 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes will be grounded for weeks if not longer until a software upgrade can be tested and installed, U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday as officials in France prepare to begin analysing the black boxes from the crashed jet.

Each month of the grounding could cost Boeing around $1.8 billion to $2.5 billion in delayed revenue, according to analyst estimates, although that could be recouped once the ban is lifted and the planes are delivered.

Boeing in January provided guidance it would report $109.5 billion to $111.5 billion of revenue in 2019.

Boeing has already been working through supplier delays on engines from CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric Co and France's Safran SA, and fuselages from Spirit AeroSystems Holdings Inc that led to dozens of planes being parked outside the Renton factory last summer.

This week, at least three freshly built 737s were parked at or near the factory with yellow weights hanging in the place of engines, signs of lingering issues, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. "We are still a few weeks behind the requirement, but have a line of sight to be back on track in the second quarter of this year", CFM spokeswoman Jamie Jewell said.

Also read: Boeing 737 Max ban: Air fares rise over 100% as airlines face disruption in flight operations

Also read: Boeing suspends 737 MAX deliveries as France probes black boxes
The State Bank of India has launched the YONO Cash service for its customers which will allow them to withdraw cash from ATMs without their debit cards. A part of SBI's digital banking platform, You Only Need One (YONO), the cardless cash withdrawal service will be available across 16,500 ATMs of the bank in the country. Such SBI ATMs will be called YONO Cash Point.

"The initiative will address concern of using debit card at the ATMs for cash withdrawals by eliminating possible risk associated with it. Through YONO, our endeavour is to create a digital universe by integrating the entire transactions ecosystem under one platform in the next 2 years," said SBI Chairman Rajneesh Kumar after the launch of the service.

How to withdraw cash using YONO Cash service:

SBI customers can use the YONO app on their smartphones to withdraw cash from SBI ATMs, or YONO Cash Points, without using their debit and credit cards. After installing the YONO app on their phones, SBI account holders will have to set a 6-digit YONO PIN for withdrawing cash.

Once a request for withdrawing cash is placed, a 6-digit code will be sent to the user's phone via SMS, which will then have to be entered into a YONO Cash Point.

ALSO READ: Here are India's Best Banks
Paytm Payments Bank has unveiled a mobile banking app for both Android and iOS platforms. The Paytm payments bank was launched in the year 2017 and as many as 4.3 crore savings bank customers have registered with it in India. The new Payments Bank app will allow customers to have seamless and secure access to all basic banking services.

Part of Paytm Payments Bank's digital inclusion drive, the new app will enable customers to check balance, request for debit cards, access digital debit cards and get 24/7 support from the bank. Bank has issued over 20 lakh physical debit cards. The virtual debit cards have been issued to all 4.3 crore savings account holders.

Chief Executive Officer of Paytm Payments Bank, Satish Kumar Gupta said, "The purpose of a new app is to segregate its operations from the existing app which caters to customers of several group entities. However, PPBL will continue to serve its customers on its older app should they desire so. Both apps will co-exist".

The debit card issued by the Paytm Payments Bank has several inbuilt security features. One such feature allows the user to himself enable or disable the card just by a single click in the app to avoid misuse by any miscreant.

The new app can be downloaded from the Google Play store and will soon be available on the Apple app store as well.

Edited By: Udit Verma

Also Read: Relief for Paytm, Amazon Pay, other mobile wallets! RBI extends deadline for completion of KYC by 6 months
Apple is all set to host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) from June 3 to 7 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. One of the biggest tech event, WWDC is in its 30th year and will bring together a host of developers. At the event, we can expect Apple to talk about new versions of iOS, macOS, watchOS and everything else that is related to the developers.

Also Read: Google release first Android Q beta, here are some of the key features

"WWDC is Apple's biggest event of the year. It brings thousands of the most creative and dedicated developers from around the world together with over a thousand Apple engineers to learn about our latest platform innovations and to connect as a community," said Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. "Our developers are incredibly passionate about creating the next generation of mind-blowing experiences for the world through apps. We can't wait to get together with them and share what's next."

Apple would most likely introduce iOS 13 for iPhones and iPads. One big feature that people are expecting in iOS 13 is the 'Dark Mode'. The new mode is expected to make it easier for you to see your device screen at night. There are several iPad specific improvements expected with the new iOS. Apple could also make changes to the core user interface of iPads and iPhones.

One of the biggest things to look forward to at the WWDC would be the way Apple intends to unify both iOS and macOS. Apple had already started the work with macOS Mojave and this year it will open it up to more developers. Together with a new macOS 10.15, Apple is expected to preview watchOS 6 and tvOS 13. If you are interested in attending the WWDC then it will cost you $ 1,599. However, buying a ticket isn't a guarantee that you'll get to attend the event. Only the lucky winners selected by a lottery will get to go to the developers' conference.

Edited By: Udit Verma

Also Read: WhatsApp image search feature may help you find if the picture is fake or real
| World of Finance

Nomura to set up shop in Shanghai: Japanese investment bank Nomura Holdings Inc. will soon be approved to set up the first newly established foreign-controlled brokerage on the Chinese mainland, sources familiar with the matter told Caixin. Nomura will hold 51% of the new venture. State-owned enterprise Orient International (Holding) Co. Ltd. will hold the rest.

Yu Qing () and Sun Dongqing () will be named chair and general manager of the venture, respectively, according to the sources.

 Yu was previously a vice president of China Reinsurance (Group) Corp., and before that worked for the Ministry of Finance (MoF) for two decades. China Reinsurance, the countrys only state-owned reinsurance group, was set up by the MoF and Central Huijin Investment Ltd., the domestic arm of Chinas sovereign wealth fund. Yu left it in 2017.

 Sun was previously head of the wealth management division at investment bank China International Capital Corp. Ltd.

In November, the securities watchdog allowed UBS Group AG to become the first foreign firm to take control of a brokerage on the Chinese mainland.

Central banks finishing school: Wu Xiaoling (), chairwoman and dean of Tsinghua Universitys Peoples Bank of China School of Finance, one of Chinas most prestigious financial research faculties, is stepping down as dean. Shell be replaced as dean by Zhang Xiaohui (), but will remain as chairwoman.

Before returning to academia, Wu had previously served as a vice governor at the Peoples Bank of China (PBOC) and head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. Zhang was an assistant governor at the PBOC until 2017, and has focused on monetary policy for much of her career. Both Wu and Zhang are graduates of the schools predecessor  the Graduate School of the Peoples Bank of China.

Contact reporter Ke Baili (bailike@caixin.com)

Read more about Caixins Movers and Shakers.

If you think were missing important moves, or if you have any other comments on this newsletter, please let us know.
Governments of Canada and British Columbia Launch Expert Panel on the Future of Housing Supply and Affordability

News release

Every Canadian deserves a safe and affordable place to call home, yet finding affordable housing can be a challenge. While the Governments of Canada and British Columbia have made historic investments in building new housing, there is still more work to be done. Together with the Government of British Columbia, we are taking the next steps to help make housing more affordable for Canadians.

March 15, 2019  Ottawa, Ontario  Department of Finance Canada Every Canadian deserves a safe and affordable place to call home, yet finding affordable housing can be a challenge. While the Governments of Canada and British Columbia have made historic investments in building new housing, there is still more work to be done. Together with the Government of British Columbia, we are taking the next steps to help make housing more affordable for Canadians. Today, to build upon the steps that have already been taken in B.C. to address the housing crisis, federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau, British Columbia Finance Minister Carole James and British Columbia Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister Selina Robinson announced their intention to create an Expert Panel on the Future of Housing Supply and Affordability. The Expert Panel will examine housing trends for rental and homeownership, exploring what could be done so British Columbians can have further access to housing that they need and can afford. The Expert Panel will be comprised of leaders and specialists in a range of fields with relevant expertise who will be jointly selected by Canada and British Columbia in the coming months. The Expert Panel will consult with stakeholders to identify and evaluate measures that could build on recent investments and initiatives to increase the supply of housing in British Columbia to meet demand. The Panel will also identify additional measures that could be undertaken to deter unwarranted demand.

Quotes

"Canada's economy is growing, and a competitive housing market is a testament to that. Yet there's a problem when too many Canadians are priced out of buying a home or finding a good place to rent. To make the housing market more fair, affordable and accessible, we need new and innovative ideas to increase the supply of units. I am pleased to launch this expert panel with the Government of British Columbia in order to find those new approaches that meet the future housing needs of not only British Columbians, but all Canadians. I look forward to seeing the recommendations that come forward from the panel." - Bill Morneau, Minister of Finance

"B.C.'s housing crisis won't be solved overnight and it won't be solved alone. Through our 30-point housing plan we've taken action to increase supply, curb speculative demand and crack down on tax evasion and money laundering, but we know there is more to do. We welcome partnering with the federal government and look forward to exploring further innovative solutions that will bring balance back to our housing market. I look forward to seeing the panel's recommendations to make housing more affordable for the people who live and work in our province." - Carole James, Minister of Finance, British Columbia

"When people can't find a home they can afford, it can be difficult for them to take advantage of opportunities to build a prosperous future. Recognizing that an affordable home is key to a better life, our government has made it a priority to increase the supply of affordable homes, with more than 17,000 homes underway so far as a result of our investments. We are glad to have the federal government join our efforts to create opportunities for people, and a better future for British Columbia." - Selina Robinson, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing, British Columbia

Quick facts

To help more Canadians access affordable housing that meets their needs, the Government of Canada launched the National Housing Strategya 10-year, $40 billion plan that will build 100,000 new affordable housing units, repair 300,000 others, and reduce chronic homelessness by 50 per cent.

Since announcing the Strategy in 2017:

The new National Housing Co-Investment Fund has been launched, and is expected to help build 60,000 new units and repair or renew 240,000 existing units of affordable and community housing.

Seven provinces and territories have now signed bilateral agreements under the multilateral Housing Partnership Framework, which will see more than $7.7 billion in new federal funding flow to provinces and territories over the next decade to support the stock of community housing and address regional priorities.

To address the issue of housing affordability for British Columbians, the B.C. government is taking action to curb speculative demand in B.C.'s housing market and helping build 114,000 affordable market rental, non-profit, supported social housing and owner-purchase housing through partnerships.

The B.C. government is investing more than $7 billion over 10 years in housing affordabilitythe largest investment in B.C.'s history.

To stabilize the market the B.C. government has already increased the additional property transfer tax, introduced the speculation and vacancy tax, launched the Condo and Strata Assignment Integrity Register, and taken action to crack down on money laundering and increase transparency in real estate.



Contacts

Media may contact:

Pierre-Olivier Herbert

Acting Director of Communications

Office of the Minister of Finance

pierre-olivier.herbert@canada.ca

613-369-5696

Media Relations

Department of Finance Canada

fin.media-media.fin@canada.ca

613-369-4000

Melanie Kilpatrick

Media Relations

Municipal Affairs and Housing, British Columbia

778-698-9176

Melanie.Kilpatrick@gov.bc.ca

General Enquiries

Phone: 613-369-3710

Facsimile: 613-369-4065

TTY: 613-369-3230

E-mail: fin.financepublic-financepublique.fin@canada.ca
March 15, 2019 - Ottawa, Ontario - Global Affairs Canada

In coordination with the European Union and the United States, Canada is today announcing new sanctions in response to Russias aggressive actions in the Black Sea and Kerch Strait and Russias illegal annexation of Crimea.

The Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Foreign Affairs, is announcing these sanctions on 114 individuals and 15 entities, under the Special Economic Measures Act.

These sanctions are in response to Russias military actions against three Ukrainian vessels and the capture of Ukrainian sailors in the Black Sea in November 2018. Todays measures, coordinated with the European Union and the United States, underscore continued transatlantic unity in responding to Russias aggressive actions in Ukraine and its violation of international law.

Canada is also sanctioning a number of individuals and entities responsible for the illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine.
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More than a dozen dead pine trees are being removed from the Yarralumla Dog Park, to make way for new breeds and, hopefully, more sunlight. The park, on the edge of Westbourne Woods, was made up of Pinus radiata, a common, fast-growing pine with a relatively short life-span. ACT Urban Treescapes manager Rachael Dawes said the dead trees were being removed for both safety and aesthetic reasons, and she and her team had plans to replant them with different species. The tree removals are being staged over the next few months, with trainee arborists using the removals as an opportunity to practice dismantling trees that are already dead. The process of replanting could be less than straightforward, though, as the areas most prominent users - dogs - are less than friendly when it comes to keeping trees thriving. Ms Dawes said not only were dogs rambunctious, they also had particularly toxic urine. You're planting in a dog park, so it's a highly mobile site, there're dogs running around, so we have to protect against physical damage, she said. It's a very compacted site, so you'll have to do some soil improvement and protection against further compaction, and also you're dealing with dog urine, which is highly acidic and not a friend of any vegetation in high dosages, so when you've got lots of dogs in one area, it's not great." Another is that part of the park was is a designated heritage area Any replanting will have to be in consultation with ACT heritage. They generally don't like to change, Ms Dawes said. But Pinus radiata has been declared an invasive species, because of its rampant production, which means a case will have to be made to plant more. The trees were planted in Canberras early days, and were well-suited to Canberras harsh climate. Pinus radiata has got lots of valuable traits - it's actually a really good tree for many things, she said. Because it's a fast-growing tree, it's very tolerant of Canberra's conditions. Canberra is a really hard place to grow, it's hot, its dry, its cold, so it was a really successful early planting in the trials that they were doing in early ACT. She said Charles Weston, the horticulturalist responsible for the early afforestation of Canberra, had originally dreamed of filling the woods with Californian redwoods, but soon realised that they wouldnt survive. They like about 2000 mils of water a year, so we're never going to get that there, and the ones that we have of that species are struggling, she said. They don't look like they do in California, that's for sure. But Pinus radiata also comes from California, and they dont look anything like they do at home either, they look much better here. She said the pines were good for production, and had been developed in the ACT with selective breeding - breedings the good ones with the good ones to get a better one. They're still in use in production pine plantations, but outside of that, we could get a permit from EPS and replant this pine, that does happen, but there are some other species that are very similar that we could use, she said. But we'd also like to see some deciduous broad-leaf trees. "It's my dog park, it's where I go, and it's really cold in winter, so we'd like to see a bit more of a mix. The ACT government plans to begin replantings in the park in spring.

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A not-for-profit housing company has bought 20 apartments in two Geocon developments in Canberra so that young people with disabilities do not have to live in aged care facilities or other inappropriate housing. Victorian-based Summer Housing is moving into the ACT through the venture, with the modified apartments in Belconnen and Woden to cost it $10 million. Summer Housing chief executive Dan McLennan said there were more than 50 people with disabilities aged under 65 living in aged care facilities in Canberra. Others were living in the Canberra Hospital because they could not be accommodated elsewhere or were living with ageing parents. Other young people with disabilities had to live interstate away from their family in Canberra because there were no other housing options for them. Mr McLennan said 10 apartments were purchased in the Republic precinct in Belconnen and 10 in the Grand Central Towers project in Woden, both still under construction. With the help of National Disability Insurance Scheme funding, the tenants would pay about 25 per cent of their disability support pension to rent the apartments, which had been modified to include customised kitchens and bathrooms, wheelchair-accessible balconies, wider doorways and structural provision for ceiling joists. There would also be a separate apartment for on-call staff to be available when needed around the clock, with the help of technology, "So that if there is an issue, whether it's by hitting a button on the iPad, making a phone call or using voice communication, support can be there when it's needed. It enables that peace of mind for people to live independent, normal lives," Mr McLennan said. Summer Housing's preference was to house young people with disabilities in mainstream apartment projects close to infrastructure and public transport rather than in far-flung, purpose-built facilities. "That's the big thing, living in a normal, mainstream property, not being isolated in a more frontier location where land is cheap," Mr McLennan said. Summer Housing chose to team up with Geocon for the move into Canberra. "It was a pretty logical choice, we looked at the market and saw who had projects in locations we wanted to be and reached out [to Geocon] and was immediately embraced in terms of, 'This is a great idea. This is something we want to do'," Mr McLennan said. Geocon managing director Nick Georgalis met on Thursday with Mr McLennan on the $1 billion Republic site in Belconnen which will have 1250 apartments, a 180-room, hotel, 6000 square metres of retail including Canberra's first Woolworths Metro supermarket and a 500 public car parking spaces. The first residents of Republic were due to move in by Christmas. Mr Georgalis said he wanted to see more of supported housing in all Geocon's developments. "Often I hear people banging on the table, asking government to fix problems, and the reality is, government doesn't have the expertise sometimes to solve these problems," he said. "This is a very good example of collaboration of two private sector industries that actually understand the issues. We understand acquisition and delivery of precinct; Dan understands the needs and requirements of people in this particular sector." Geocon has been under fire recently for using what some see as sexist marketing. Mr Georgalis said the supported housing venture was not a response to the bad press Geocon had been receiving, but a project that had been in the works for at least nine months. "I think the reality is we're doing a lot of good things and this is one of the good things we are delivering for the ACT," he said. "We've got thick skin. I think one of the things we strive to do is stay professional and stay focused." Mr Georgalis, meanwhile, said the Republic precinct was "Australia's largest residential project". "It's underestimated the scale of this project," he said. He believed there was still unmet demand in Canberra for apartment buildings because of the growth of the city. Of the 950 apartments in the first stage of Republic, 800 had been sold. "I daresay they'll be all gone by Christmas, if not earlier," he said. Prospective tenants and their families can register their interest with Summer Housing at www.summerhousing.org.au/our-apartments/act

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Fanny Lumsden remembers the first song she ever wrote. She was in primary school in a small town in western NSW, a natural born show pony, she says, who decided to write a song about climbing trees. It was so terrible, she says, and the next few werent too much better. I wrote this pop song in high school and even now I'm amazed by teenaged songwriters who write great songs because mine were emotional dribble. No one needed to hear what I was writing at 14. Now its a different story. Her song Real Men Dont Cry (War on Pride) is a poignant exploration of mental health issues and how they especially touch those in the bush. She grew up in the Tallimba area, west of West Wyalong, through some bad drought. I definitely saw that take its toll on people around us, she said. You can read or hear about these issues on the news and it doesn't really sink in. Sometimes music is this universal language that can connect with people and maybe if its been hard to recognise it in yourself or hard to hear, maybe a song can help. She wrote the song after listening to a podcast about the 1980s and there was some discussion of Bob Hawkes habit of weeping on television screens (over his daughter's drug addiction, his unfaithfulness to his wife and the massacre of Chinese students at Tiananmen Square). Theres a line in the song that says Bob cried and we forgave him  and since then weve been battling that line. There was such a mixed response to Hawke crying, Lumsden said. It was the first time a person in power had really shown any emotion but it divided the public response. But it started a discussion and thats the important thing. Were doing all these show around Australia, 90 per cent of our shows are in regional areas, and if we can play this song and people go away and have a conversation, thats a good thing. Now shes on her way to Canberra for the National Folk Festival over Easter. Its her second appearance at The National and she loved it in 2017 when she was here before. Canberra audiences are fun and interactive and warm and that's always great. Coming to big festivals like this, theres always a diversity in the audience but also in the line-up of the artists. When youre touring as much as we are, were like little ships in the night that are moving around, we don't get to catch up with anyone and watch other artists and the quality of the artists at the folk festival is incredible. She finds it hard to define herself, her genre. I just write songs and out they come. I never say Im going to write a country song, or a folk song, a lot of people are a combination of genres these days. Festivals are a great way to bring a broad audience to all kinds of musical influences, to all kinds of messages. Its been a busy year for Lumsden. She and her husband Dan Stanley Freeman, whos also her bandmate and business partner, have been touring non-stop in their 1978 pop-top caravan with the Under Our Hills Hoist Tour. The video for her song Elastic Waistband won the Country Music Association of Australia Golden Guitar for CMC video clip of the year in January and her album Real Class Act was nominated for an Aria for best country album. Theyve also welcomed a son, Walter, now eight months old. He went to his first gig at three weeks and has pretty much toured non-stop, we even took him to the United States for a month. Elastic Waistband is a fun song about appreciating the little things. I wasnt even pregnant when I wrote that song  I had no idea how true it would become once I was a parent. The National Folk Festival is in Canberra from April 18-22. Tickets are on sale now at folkfestival.org.au. See the full 2019 line-up at folkfestival.org.au/2019-performers.

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Federal police are being "starved to death" of sufficient funds and capability to tackle growing and complex issues such as victim-based crime, national security threats, narcotics trafficking and counter-terrorism. The federal police association, which represents around 6500 members working across Australia, internationally and in contracted law enforcement within the ACT, wants the Australian Federal Police split from the giant Home Affairs mega-portfolio and a national firearms register established under a range of reforms to be put before the major parties in the lead-up to the forthcoming federal election. The association's national president Angela Smith said the steady leaching of funds away from the federal police is having a major impact on the morale and wellbeing of the members, with higher levels of psychological stress, depression and post-traumatic stress. "National crime is rising dramatically across a range of offence types," Ms Smith said. "The police commissioner has told us how illicit drug referrals have gone up by 300 per cent in the past three years, and victim-based crime is up by 200 per cent. "The overall AFP budget went up slightly for 2018-19 to fund new programs but in real terms is still $220 million down on 2013-14 levels. "Police are resilient by nature and well-practised at doing more with less. But what's happening is that as more programs are being added, such as aviation cargo security and child exploitation, others are being quietly shut down. You can only stretch people and resources so far." After last month's Budget estimate hearings, the AFP reported that among the measures due soon for termination are the $17.6 million Keeping Illegal Guns off Our Streets program to target gang violence; the $5.3 million national cybercrime program and enhanced national protective security which cost $80.1 million in 2018-19. Another key plank of the police reform package is the association's renewed push for a national firearms register. "It's a national disgrace that in the 22 years since the Port Arthur massacre and all the good work that was done at that time to uncover illegal firearms, we still don't have a national register," Ms Smith said. "Each state and territory has its own register and the sharing of information is clunky and problematic. We also need the tough NSW restrictions on the supply of ammunition to licence-holders adopted as a measure across the country. "There are an estimated 3 million legal and illegal firearms in civilian hands in Australia, and people can buy and import ammunition for weapons they don't own. By restricting the access to ammunition, we reduce the firearms threat to police, and to the public."

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The ACT government is considering introducing planning rules to stamp out sexualised advertising, amid a war of words with construction giant Geocon over its controversial marketing campaigns. The move comes despite the national advertising standards bureau last year finding Geocon's campaigns had not breached Australian guidelines, even finding some of its material depicted woman as confident, comfortable and aspirational. Planning Minister Mick Gentleman said the government was exploring how the development application process could be used to regulate commercial advertising, including on hoardings and site fencing, to "improve standards and prevent sexist advertising". Territory plan rules governing signage were also being reviewed, with an announcement on any changes expected within weeks. Mr Gentleman took aim at Geocon on Friday, saying the promotional material used for its housing projects - including the proposed Tryst development opposite Glebe Park- "did not meet community expectations and we don't condone it". He said the construction company appeared to have ignored complaints about its advertising, prompting the government to consider the new regulations. "Business and community leaders have an important role to play in driving cultural change on gender equality, particularly local businesses like Geocon," he said. "It is widely acknowledged that there is a strong connection between how girls and women are portrayed in society and gender based violence, harassment and sexual assault." Mr Gentleman would not be drawn on whether the new regulations would potentially influence the ACT Planning and Land Authority's assessment of Geocon's application for a $319 million redevelopment of land opposite Glebe Park, which includes the Tryst, Metropol and Envie projects. The Canberra Times understands the authority is in the final stages of evaluating the landmark city project. Geocon on Friday defended its marketing material, which it said had been developed by a predominantly female team and was compliant with national advertising standards and existing planning rules. The Advertising Standards Bureau has dismissed two separate complaints relating to alleged "sexualised and demeaning" advertisements at Geocon's Tryst and WOVA developments in the past 18 months. In rejecting the Tryst complaint in November last year, the bureau's panel "noted" concerns about sexualised imagery, before ruling the advertisement did "treat the issue of sex, sexuality and nudity with sensitivity to the relevant broad audience". The panel found the material depicted the woman as "confident and comfortable". ACT Minister for Women Yvette Berry wrote to the bureau's chief executive, Fiona Jolly, a month after the decision, saying the panel's views appeared "out of touch with members of the Canberra community". "Continuing to depict outdated gender stereotypes or to depict woman in these sexually exploitative ways is detrimental to us achieving gender equality in the ACT and Australia," Ms Berry's letter stated. Ms Berry last year wrote to Geocon managing director Nick Georgalis twice in relation to concerns about the company's advertisements. In a February 27 letter, obtained by The Canberra Times, Ms Berry said the ACT Office for Women would be "only too willing to work with the company to act as a sounding board for future campaigns". On Friday, the Geocon spokeswoman disputed claims the government had contacted the construction company about its grievances, as she described Mr Gentleman's statements as "untrue and inflammatory". Last week, Unions ACT protested against the developer after it held an International Women's Day event touted as a panel of well-known women sharing their property expertise. The event, which also saw attendees offered investment opportunities, was "an insult to every woman in Canberra", Labor backbencher Bec Cody said. Unions ACT has since launched a online petition calling for a ban on "sexist corporate advertising that objectifies women's bodies", which has received more than 400 signatures. "It is clear that companies like Geocon are out of step with Canberra's community expectations and have abused the privilege granted by the community to display massive public advertisements," the petition stated. The Geocon spokeswoman said the Unions ACT campaign had "nothing to do with advertising", claiming it was "another example of unions influencing commercial outcomes through political issues", with politicians "acting as their puppets". The company last week it was being challenged in the Fair Work Commission by the construction, forestry, maritime, mining and energy union in relation to its enterprise agreement application. Liberal planning spokesman Mark Parton said the ACT government should not be intervening in the regulation of advertising standards.

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The death toll from attacks on two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch rose to 49 and 48 others were wounded, New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said on Friday.

Speaking at a press conference in Wellington, Bush said a man has been charged with murder and will appear in court on Saturday. Three others were apprehended.

A number of fire arms were recovered from the two mosques, Bush added.

Police escort witnesses away from a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. [Photo: AP]

New Zealand's state-owned television network TVZ, citing Bush, reported that one of the attacks which happened at a mosque called Masjid Al Noor, took 41 lives. An attack at a mosque in a different part of the city killed seven people. One person died later in a hospital.

According to local media, at least two gunmen opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch on Friday.

Two explosive devices attached to cars have also been decommissioned by police.

The national security level in New Zealand has been raised from low to high.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told a press conference in Wellington, adding that the attack appeared to have been "well-planned."

Earlier, Ardern, while speaking to public, said "This is one of New Zealand's darkest days. My thoughts are with Christchurch."

"It is an unprecedented violence in New Zealand. There is no place for such extreme violence in New Zealand."
Late last month, Groupe PSA revealed its plans to bring the Citroen brand in India. The legendary automaker, known for its funky designs and pioneering technology is expected to be positioned as a premium brand and the company plans to introduce its first product before the end of 2021.

Now, the automaker has revealed that it will showcase its first car for India on April 3. It will host its first ever India press conference in Chennai where the top management from the French company will be present. More importantly, the automaker will showcase its first ever car that it will bring to India at the press meet.



We expect that this vehicle will be the C5 Aircross SUV which has already been spotted testing in India. Its a premium SUV embodying the French automakers latest design philosophy and is underpinned by their EMP2 platform. It is expected to be launched in India with both petrol and diesel engine options and will be produced at a new factory that PSA is building with the CK Birla group outside Chennai.

Citroen C5 Aircross  31.30 Lakh Onwards

Citroen | C5 Aircross | Citroen C5 Aircross
Photo: The Canadian Press Physical bitcoins are displayed next to a Bitcoin ATM in Hong Kong.

The regulatory bodies that oversee Canada's stock markets are seeking feedback on what requirements are appropriate for platforms that trade cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.

The provincial regulators represented by the Canadian Securities Administrators and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada published their proposed framework on Thursday.

"Regulators around the world are currently considering important issues surrounding the regulation of crypto assets including the appropriate regulation of platforms," the CSA-IIROC consultation paper said.

The paper adds that "at least some crypto assets, such as bitcoin, "are not currently in and of themselves, securities or derivatives."

"Instead, they have certain features that are analogous to existing commodities such as currencies and precious metals," the paper says.

It adds that there are no platforms currently recognized as a securities exchange or otherwise authorized to operate as a marketplace or dealer in Canada.

"As such, the CSA has urged Canadians to be cautious when buying crypto assets."

The consultation paper doesn't deal with any particular trading platform but its release follows the highly publicized problems at QuadrigaCX, formerly one of Canada's largest cryptocurrency trading platforms.

QuadrigaCX and its affiliates were granted creditor protection in Nova Scotia last month after the company's CEO and sole director, 30-year-old Gerald Cotten of Fall River, N.S., died suddenly in December while travelling in India.

According to court documents, Cotten was the only person who had the encrypted pass codes needed to access $190 million in missing Bitcoins and other cryptocurrency locked in QuadrigaCX's offline digital wallets.

According to the documents, another $70 million in cash is owed to QuadrigaCX users, much of it tied up in bank drafts held by third-party payment processors.

Pat Chaukos  an official with the Ontario Securities Commission, a CSA member  said she couldn't comment on whether QuadrigaCX would have been subject to the regulatory framework that's under consideration.

But she said an undisclosed number of companies approached the OSC and other CSA members for guidance last year.

"They've told us that a regulatory framework is welcome because they're seeking to build consumer confidence and expand their businesses across Canada and, in some cases, globally," Chaukos said.
Statement sent by Americas Cup media. AC web americascup.com



Arbitration Panel rules Late Challengers valid , 15th March 2019

The Americas Cup Arbitration Panel decision finding all three Late Entry challenges to be valid has been released today.

The Challenger of Record and the Defender had already reached a settlement agreement under which the validity of the Challenges was accepted and issued a Protocol amendment allowing for the Late Entry to be paid by deferred instalments. However, despite this collaborative agreement, the New York Yacht Club elected to continue to pursue the case. This anti-competitive action has caused further delays and uncertainty for the teams and frustrated the Challenger of Record and the Defender who have been working together in the best interests of the event.

As a result of the delay there are now concerns as to the likelihood of the Maltese Malta Altus Challenge being able to continue. However, the Challenger of Record and the Defender continue to work with DutchSail and Stars & Stripes to enable them to make the start line in Auckland in 2021.

The Panel also found that the payment of entry fees is a condition to their being able to race in the Americas Cup not a condition of their being an accepted Challenger meaning that Entry fees have only to be paid before the first race of the competition.

Arbitration Panel decisions:

Cases 02 and 03

Case 04


CDC advises consumers and retailers not to eat, serve, or sell recalled Butterball brand ground turkey, which is linked to a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Schwarzengrund infections. More information can be found at https://www.cdc.gov/salmonella/schwarzengrund-03-19/index.html .

Key Points

CDC, public health and regulatory officials in several states, and the U.S. Department of Agricultures Food Safety and Inspection Service are investigating a multistate outbreak of Salmonella infections linked to Butterball brand ground turkey.

There have been 6 ill people infected with the outbreak strain of Salmonella reported from three states: Minnesota, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

One person has been hospitalized. No deaths have been reported.

Illnesses started on dates ranging from December 19, 2018 to February 2, 2019.

On March 13, 2019, Butterball, LLC recalled external icon more than 78,000 pounds of ground turkey products that may be contaminated with the outbreak strain of Salmonella.

more than 78,000 pounds of ground turkey products that may be contaminated with the outbreak strain of Salmonella. Visit the USDA-FSIS website for a list of recalled products external icon .

. This investigation is ongoing, and CDC will provide updates when more information is available.

Advice to Consumers

Restaurants and retailers should not serve or sell recalled turkey products and should check food storage and freezers for them.

Consumers should check their homes for the recalled Butterball brand ground turkey, which is labeled with the establishment number EST. P-7345.

Do not eat recalled ground turkey. Return it to the store or throw it away.

Contact a healthcare provider if you think you got sick from eating recalled ground turkey.

Most people infected with Salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps 12-72 hours after eating contaminated food. The illness usually lasts 4 to 7 days, and most people recover without treatment.

If you have questions about cases in a particular state, please call that states health department.
Schwenk Zement to exit Namibia

15 March 2019

This week, ICR learned that the Namibian cement market was in the process of change with Schwenk Zement's 0.7Mta Ohorongo plant now expected to come under control of International Cement Group (ICG), a Singapore-based company owned by Compact Metal Industrial Plc.



ICG aims to acquire 69.83 per cent in Ohorongo Cement, subject to approval by the competition authorities. The remaining 30.17 per cent of shares are held by the Development Bank of Namibia and other South African shareholders. The acquisition could be approved as soon as 31 July 2019.



The German company's decision to leave the Namibian market may seem surprising at first, but the start-up of the 1.2Mta Chinese-backed Whale Rock Cement plant (Cheetah Cement brand), commissioned by Sinoma Tianjin Cement Industry Design & Research Institute Co Ltd of China last April, has changed the dynamics of Namibia's cement market.



Namibia's oversupply problem

Namibia's 0.6Mta cement market is hugely oversupplied since the entry of Whale Rock Cement, which together with imports have seen cement supply rise to around 2.5Mta, according to Ohorongo Cement's Managing Director, Hans-Wilhelm Schutte.



Meanwhile, demand has been under pressure: "Ohorongo sales volumes have been under pressure by the current state of the construction industry in Namibia since 2017," said Frankleen Alberts, Ohorongo Cement's customer relations and public affairs official. "Also for 2019, a continued downward trend of the industry is expected, mainly driven by the lack of construction projects in the public and private sectors."



Building a local industry for Namibians

In spite of sufficient local capacity, Whale Rock Cement has been criticised for importing large volumes of clinker from Egypt and China, rather than creating a value chain in Namibia and more jobs for the local population.



By comparison, Schwenk Zement has been proactive in supporting Namibians in the work place and in July 2018 Ohorongo Cement secured a contract with Kaptau Packaging for locally-produced cement bags. The company has been supplying 10,000 bags/day to the plant in Oshakati and employs 25 staff. The aim has been to integrate local Namibians into the industry.

Ohorongo Cement also appointed Estelle Alberts as plant manager in 2017, the first Namibian to hold the post. "It has always been the Schwenk family's intention to one day hand over the plant operations to Namibians," said Gerhard Hirth, who heads the Ohorongo Cement company board.



Schwenk Zement has tried to protect its workforce against foreign imports. It has provided local jobs and produced its own clinker as well as ground cement at its Ohorongo plant rather than import. However, Schwenk Zement's Infancy Industry Protection (IIP) period was challenged in the High Court by cement importers and the company's cement volumes have been gradually falling ever since.

Commenting on the entry of Whale Rock Cement, last July, Mr Schutte also expressed concern about what this could mean for Namibia's cement sector with job losses. "We have a 100 per cent Namibian workforce here. We also have a lot of downstream and upstream activities. Cement bags are now produced locally at Kaptau Packaging in Oshakati and all of that is at risk because if our volumes go down their volumes will also go down," said Mr Schutte



"We still need a lot of infrastructure, we need roads, bridges and airports, but my message to Namibia is that, we could have used the money for something else, whether its in the energy sector or anywhere else as long as it is on the interest of the country, because we are now sitting with an overcapacity," he added.



In April 2018 Mr Schutte declared that the company was looking at export markets such as Angola and Botswana but said that it could not compete. "We looked at west and east Africa and Egypt, and in terms of international markets, we cannot compete immediately," Mr Schutte added.

New owners to inherit state-of-the-art facility

Inspite of market conditions, ICG will inherit a world class facility, built by ThyssenKrupp in 2010 with finance from the European Investment Bank, which lent EUR82m towards the EUR250m project.



The Ohorongo plant is renowned for its use of biofuel and RDF, which provide 80 per cent of the plant's energy needs. It also operates a 5MW solar power plant, which opened in 2018.



Schwenk Zement looks to Europe

Meanwhile, last month Schwenk Group signed an agreement to acquire Cemex's Broceni cement plant in Latvia, along with the Akmenes Cementas plant in Lithuania, plus four aggregate quarries, six ready-mix plants and a land distribution terminal in the Nordic/Baltic region of Europe. The group's core emphasis is being placed in Europe, with its headquarters in Germany.

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Former INC president to head Cementos Concepcion

ICR Newsroom By 15 March 2019

The former president of Paraguayan state-run cement producer Industria Nacional del Cemento, Jorge Mendez, will be leading the new cement company Cementos Concepcion, according to Esmerk Latin American News.



The new 1Mta cement plant, announced earlier this week, is expected to come online in 2021. Equipment for the facility will be supplied by Denmark-based FLSmidth. When operational, the unit will produce two types of cement  for small and large construction projects.





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Pakistan cement production falls in 7MFY19

15 March 2019

The overall output of Pakstan's Large Scale Manufacturing Industries (LSMI) decreased by 2.3 per cent for July 2018-January 2019, compared to July 2017-January 2018, says data released by Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS).



The LSMI output decreased by 4.6 per cent for January 2019 compared to January 2018 and increased by 20.8 per cent, if compared to December 2018.



The production in July 2018-January 2019 as compared to July 2017-January 2018 has significantly decreased in food, beverages and tobacco, petcokeoke and petroleum products, pharmaceuticals, non-metallic mineral products, automobiles and iron and steel products, while it has increased in fertilisers and electronics. The cement production also during this period also contracted.



As a result, the overall LSMI has shown a decline of 2.3 per cent during July 2018-January 2019 when compared with the same period of last year.



Pakistan's cement industry recorded a negative growth of 2.72 per cent during first seven months of FY18-19, between July and January 2019, as production fell from 23.77Mt of cement to 23.12Mt, apparently due to fall in local demand and other factors, reports industry. While, in January 2019 alone, cement production decreased by 9.02 per cent to 3.31Mt from 3.64Mt in January 2018.



All Pakistan Cement Manufacturers Association (APCMA) spokesman attributes the continued decline in cement productio and sales to a reduction in government infrastructure spending.

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(ANSA) - Rome, March 15 - A dossier on buying F35 jets is in the hands of Premier Giuseppe Conte "and will be handled with the utmost responsibility", defence sources told ANSA Friday.

They were responding to Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini who said earlier that Italy could not drop longstanding alliances.

"We prefer not to comment but we ask for respect for roles and less confusion," the sources said.


Senator Lamar Alexander on Wednesday announced he will vote to disapprove the Feb. 15 national emergency declaration.

He said, I support the president on border security. I have urged him to build the 234 miles of border wall he has asked for in the fastest possible way by using $5.7 billion already approved by Congress. But his declaration to take an additional $3.6 billion that Congress has appropriated for military hospitals, barracks and schools is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution that I swore an oath to support and defend.

Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway. The problem with this is that after a Revolutionary War against a king, our nations founders gave to Congress the power to approve all spending so that the president would not have too much power. This check on the executive is a crucial source of our freedom.

This declaration is a dangerous precedent. Already, Democrat presidential candidates are saying they would declare emergencies to tear down the existing border wall, take away guns, stop oil exports, shut down offshore drilling and other left wing enterprisesall without the approval of Congress.

Senator Marsha Blackburn said, Since Congress gave emergency powers to the executive branch in 1976 under the National Emergencies Act, presidents from both political parties have declared national emergencies in the United States over situations far less dire than the security and humanitarian crisis that is currently plaguing the southern border.

"he President and Congress must take swift action to secure our border, protect our citizens, and defend our sovereignty. I support President Trumps declaration of a national emergency and I reject the resolution of disapproval."

Senator David Perdue (R-GA) said he supports President Trumps declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border:

He said, There is a five-alarm crisis at the southern border. Ive seen it firsthand. This is not just about illegal immigration or building the wall. Its about the explosion in illegal drug trafficking. We also need to close loopholes and get border patrol agents the resources they desperately need. President Trump knows that, and hes right to take action to protect the American people. It is criminal that Congress has made this a political issue when both parties should be working together to keep Americans safe.


Chattanooga Councilwoman Demetrus Coonrod joined more than 2,000 mayors, councilmembers and other delegates from cities, towns and villages across the country who convened in Washington for the National League of Cities annual Congressional City Conference. At the conference, delegates met with senior White House officials, members of Congress and other national experts to discuss how strong federal-local partnerships are critical to addressing top priorities for local leaders.



The Congressional City Conferences central theme is NLCs Rebuild With Us campaign, which urges Congress to develop and pass comprehensive legislation that rebuilds and reimagines Americas infrastructure in partnership with local governments that will serve local communities for the next 100 years.



Conference delegates took that message to Capitol Hill, calling for a long-term plan that "improves our nations water, broadband, and transportation systems, prepares our communities for extreme weather and natural disasters, and invests in the skills training and education that prepares our workforce to build and maintain our infrastructure."



In Chattanooga, we are blessed with some infrastructure strengths, like our celebrated community-wide fiber optic network that allows for 10 gigs of internet speed through EPB. says councilwoman Coonrod. But as our city grows, we also have some challenges - like the equitable accessibility of public transportation, upkeep of roadways and waterways, and navigating changing transportation trends such as bike lanes, car sharing, and electric scooters. Not to mention training and retaining a skilled workforce to help us solve for these infrastructure problems.
(ANSA) - Milan, March 15 - Brazilian police handed former terrorist Cesare Battisti over to Italian police after a "row" on the airplane staircase for a flight from Bolivia to Brazil last year, Battisti said in his first statement from Oristano jail.

Battisti, who is wanted to serve life terms for four murders in the Years of Lead, said he had gone to Bolivia "for a book project".

He said "the Italians didn't show me any kind of document".

Brazil agreed to extradite Battisti after years living there.

He had previously been a crime writer in France.


The Hamilton County WWTA is issuing a warning to the public to be aware of an person trying to gain entry into homes in the Snow Hill area under the premise of being an employee of the organization.

The WWTA also provides the following information to the community regarding its employees:



 The WWTA never asks customers to allow them to come into homes.

 Vehicles and uniforms of the WWTA are clearly marked.

 All WWTA employees have official Hamilton County photo identification badges that are clearly displayed.

The WWTA has reported this situation to the Hamilton County Sheriffs Office.


As Tennessee property owners recover from Februarys heavy flooding and severe weather, the Tennessee Motor Vehicle Commission, which is part of the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurances Regulatory Boards, reminds consumers to be on the lookout for flood-damaged vehicles that will likely be popping up for sale.



"After a flood or natural disaster, its a common practice for owners of flooded vehicles that have been declared total losses by insurance companies to be allowed to retain damaged vehicles," officials said, "Instead of sending the flooded car to the junkyard, scammers will attempt to sell flooded vehicles quickly, hoping to stay ahead of computer system updates so that title check systems dont have time to detect a cars history.

By the time a consumer discovers the vehicles history, the seller will be long gone."Operating a flooded vehicle that received non-repairable damage in a storm is dangerous for both the vehicles driver and other commuters, said TDCI Commissioner Julie Mix McPeak. We want Tennesseans to be aware of unscrupulous individuals who aim to make money by selling a defective vehicle thats been disguised as being perfectly good. I urge consumers, if flooding has left you in need of a new or used automobile, to be wary of vehicle scams and learn the law.The Motor Vehicle Anti-Theft Act of 1996 makes a clear distinction between a freshwater flood vehicle (which can be rebuilt) and a saltwater damaged vehicle (which cannot be rebuilt). Tennessee titling laws, administered by the Tennessee Department of Revenue, distinguish between non-repairable and salvage vehicles by the type and extent of the damage. (The determination about the type and extent of damage is made by the insurance company.)The Tennessee Motor Vehicle Commission provides the following post-flood consumer guidelines:Prior to the sale of a flood vehicle, any person selling a flood vehicle is required by law to disclose such history to the purchaser. Further, once titling that vehicle, the purchaser will receive a branded vehicle title indicating the vehicles salvage history. Having such a title will substantially impact the value of that vehicle for further resale.

Anyone attempting to purchase a vehicle in the near future should be on the lookout for indicators of a flood vehicle, such as a musty smell, damp carpets, or mud/silt under the seats, and should attempt to find the vehicle history prior to purchasing.



Use a reputable title check service, such as the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System, to check the vehicle history. If you find that it was last titled in a flood-damaged area, you should ask a lot of questions before making a decision. Keep in mind that title check companies are only as good as the information that they collect from other sources. Some of the sources that they collect data from may be delayed in pushing their data to the system.



Remember that a vehicles flood history may take up to 30 days or longer to post on traditional consumer reporting sites. As such, the Commission recommends that individuals purchase motor vehicles from a licensed motor vehicle dealer, which they can verify at http://verify.tn.gov/.



Because the vehicle could appear to be in very good shape, even if it has significant electrical and corrosion issues, its important to always have a trusted mechanic inspect a vehicle before purchasing it.



Be aware that there will be many recreational and powersport-type vehicles that have been damaged as a result of the recent storms as well. Look for the signs of flooding and saltwater damage before purchasing these units, too.



Keep in mind that there are lawful ways of reselling previously damaged vehicles. Salvaged vehicles can be repaired and sold as Rebuilt vehicles so long as they comply with the applicable laws. The Motor Vehicle Commission requires that licensed dealers provide a disclosure of the vehicles history as previously been a Salvaged vehicle on a Commission approved form.



If you suspect a licensed dealer* has sold you a vehicle with a salvage history and failed to disclose it, you may file a complaint here.



The Commission is not responsible for collecting or enforcing any refunds from unscrupulous sales but may take disciplinary action resulting in potential civil penalties or suspension or revocation of a dealers license.



Visit the Tennessee Motor Vehicle Commission online or by calling 615-741-2711.



*The Commission does not have authority over vehicle sales transactions between individuals. In those matters, consumers will need to contact their personal attorney for possible remedies.
The Division of Engineering & Information Technologies at Chattanooga State Community College recently hosted several STEM events for girls, Introduce a Girl to STEM and Branch Out With STEM. Utilizing its facilities for optimum fun and learning activities combined with presentations by STEM-specific speakers, the Engineering and Information Technology department collaborated with local partners The University of Tennessee Chattanooga and the STEM School to expose both middle and high school girls to the multifaceted pathways of STEM.

The week kicked off with over 100 middle school girls from Chilhowee, Whitwell, Jasper, Monteagle and Chattanooga Valley Middle Schools. Students chose a specific pathway which including three workshops, followed by lunch with a guest speaker sponsored by Associated General Contractors.

On March 6, high school girls from Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy, interested in programming and coding, participated in activities focused on becoming a software engineer led by Computer Information Systems faculty. The luncheon speaker for this pathway, sponsored by Kenco, was Kristi Montgomery, vice president of Innovation at Kenco.

The Chemical Engineering and Quality Assurance /Quality Control workshops on March 7 provided students from Brainerd, Rhea County High School, and Ivy Academy with hands-on experience through workshops given by ChattState and UTC faculty. Barge Design Solutions sponsored the luncheon and provided speaker Caitlin Moffitt from their team.

Concluding the week, students from Lafayette High School were led by UTC faculty and the Society of Women Engineers student chapter. Amanda Hodge from Denso Manufacturing was the lunch speaker.

It was a lot of fun and really encouraged me to consider a career in engineering, said one attending student. Another student stated, I appreciated talking about the unique qualities women bring to engineering.

Two more events are scheduled for April. Chattanooga State hosts events for middle school and high school annually geared toward showing girls various views of engineering and information technology. Please contact Breanne Kintz at breanne.kintz@chatttanoogastate.edu to learn more about participating in these future events.
Chattanooga Mocs Head Golf Coach Mark Guhne announced his retirement Thursday afternoon. He served 16+ seasons in the role building the program into a national power. - 1 NCAA Team Regionals Championship - 1 NCAA Team Regionals Individual Title - 1 U.S. Amateur Champ - 5 of the program's six Southern Conference Crowns - 3 All-Americans - 1 of the program's two SoCon ... (click for more)

Hayes Wood, former Boyd-Buchanan soccer player and a junior at Lipscomb University, has been named to the United Soccer Coaches All-South Region for NCAA soccer. Wood finished the season as the leading ASUN Conference scorer with 9 goals and second in points with 12. He was named to the All ASUN Conference team and the MVP of the ASUN Conference tournament. At Boyd-Buchanan, ... (click for more)
Cleveland State Community College was honored with 2018 Tree Campus USA recognition by the Arbor Day Foundation for its commitment to effective urban forest management.

Tree Campuses and their students set examples for not only their student bodies but the surrounding communities showcasing how trees create a healthier environment, said Dan Lambe, president of the Arbor Day Foundation. Because of your schools participation, air will be purer, water cleaner and your students and faculty will be surrounded by the shade and beauty the trees provide.

The Tree Campus USA program honors colleges and universities for effective campus forest management and for engaging staff and students in conservation goals. Cleveland State Community College achieved the title by meeting Tree Campus USAs five standards, which include maintaining a tree advisory committee, a campus tree-care plan, dedicated annual expenditures for its campus tree program, an Arbor Day observance and student service-learning project. Currently there are 364 campuses across the United States with this recognition.

Cleveland State Community College is proud to be recertified as a Tree Campus USA, said Dr. Bill Seymour, CSCC President. We are so fortunate to have such a beautiful campus in our community that is befitting of this award. Our continuing commitment to caring for our environment serves as a role model for our students and all community citizens.
I have never been an advocate of strikes, particularly in the public sector. Beginning last year, and in recent days, several media outlets have contacted our organization about teacher strikes in Tennessee. Members of our organization have always believed that educators have the right to teach without being forced to join any particular organization, and that strikes or work stoppages are detrimental to children, parents, the community, and the profession.

Strikes are rooted in the erroneous Machiavellian belief that the end justifies the means; they are also emphasized in the works of Saul Alinsky. Most educators understand the important role that our public schools play in society. In many cases, public schools offer the critical support necessary to maintain student health, nutrition and safety, including students with severe intellectual disabilities and serious health conditions. This includes many children living in poverty and those who are homeless. Professional activists and agitators that urge educators in our state to strike do not care about these children and, truth be told, have little concern for the professionals in our classrooms.

Former mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa, an ex-union organizer, wrote in a Washington Post editorial that a teacher strike hurts families and kids. He said: under todays circumstances, a strike isnt what we need to improve our schools. He is correct. A strike is a throwback to an archaic factory model of governance. More importantly, public servants usually have a higher expectation associated with their trusted role. Governing magazines Heather Kerrigan points out: Teachers, firefighters and police are the public workers who people feel a lot of empathy for because of the challenges of their job. She adds: I think that public opinion and tolerance level for public-employee strikes is probably fairly low.

So, as you read or hear buzzwords like collective action, sickout or strike, remember that it is critical we avoid alienating the public. The old expression rings true: dont bite the hand that feeds you. However, we can and must inform citizens through a more positive means about significant issues impacting our public schools and the children we serve. Educators do need to be more vocal about spending priorities at the federal, state, and local levels. It is why educator associations like ours are vital and why we have been engaged in the debate.

Tennessee has made tremendous investments in public education in the last decade. Not including new investments projected by Governor Bill Lee in his proposed budget, Tennessee added $1.5 billion in new dollars to public education from 2011 to 2019 under Governor Bill Haslam. There is still much more work to do. We must continue to invest in our educators and teacher assistants, and critical school staff, making sure those dollars reach their pockets. We must work to reduce testing and give districts other options to measure student achievement. We still need to work to create a simpler and more fair evaluation system. We must address student discipline issues that are spiraling out of control. We survey our members on a regular basis and these are issues of importance across the state according to educators in Tennessee.

However, it really does not matter our opinion about strikes: teacher strikes have been illegal in our state according to Tennessee Code Annotated (TCA) since 1978. In TCA 49-5-606., Unlawful Acts include that it is illegal for educators to engage in a strike. In addition, it is illegal to urge, coerce or encourage others to engage in unlawful acts as defined in this part. The next section of the law 49-5-60., Strikes  Remedies offers more clarity: When local boards of education have determined which employees have engaged in or participated in a strike, the employees may be subject to dismissal and, further, shall forfeit their claim to tenure status, if they have attained tenure, and shall revert to probationary status for the next five-year period. Any professional employee who engaged in, or participated in, a strike and who is not a tenured teacher may also be subject to dismissal.

Public education in Tennessee wins when we all work together through civil discourse to address our considerable issues. Education is the great equalizer for all children in the state. Passionate and effective teachers, principals, and superintendents must lead with creative solutions to problems, and not with outworn strategies from the industrial age. In the 21st-century, we must be policy driven and mindful of economic concerns, providing realistic answers to difficult challenges. Adversarial tactics spurred on by outside groups - with dubious agendas - simply will not benefit Tennessee educators or children.

JC Bowman

Executive Director of Professional Educators of Tennessee
Samuel Williams liked islands. At one time he owned four different ones in the Tennessee River in the vicinity of Chattanooga..

There was Oats Island that was near the present Haletown in Marion County. It is in Nickajack Lake. Oats Island has 64 acres.

Another Marion County island he owned was Lowry's Island near the mouth of Battle Creek. It includes 172 acres.

He also had the 21 acres in Ross's Landing Island very near where he and his brother, George, operated a store. It was later called Chattanooga Island, then Maclellan Island.

The island most associated with him was the 342 acres of Brown's Island just across from the Williams home place near the foot of Walden's Ridge. It was first called Brown's Island for John Brown, a very early settler at Lookout Valley, who also had a tavern and a ferry. Later this large island became known as Williams Island. It is now owned by the state of Tennessee.

Samuel Williams had cattle operations on all of these islands at one time. There was also farming on Williams Island and some of his slaves lived there.

He also had cattle and farm operations along South Chickamauga Creek near the river and at the home place.

One notation in the Williams lawsuit that was discovered last March mentions "cribs of corn from Brown's Island, from the south side of the Tennessee River, and from the mouth of Chickamauga Creek."

Samuel Williams noted in one of the papers, "Hargrove, Fort & Co. had an interest in Brown's Island, Lowry's Island and Oats Island. Brown's Island is now owned by Fort, Boyce, Whiteside and myself. I cultivated the island myself. In 1842, there were about 20 cleared acres on Brown's Island. In 1843, there were five or six acres cleared. Since then I have had cleared enough to make up 40 acres or more. I kept my cattle on the island during the winter."

John Godsey said in a deposition, "I lived with Williams in 1841 and until March 1842. I lived with Samuel Williams from February 1844 until December 1847. I helped cultivate Brown's Island every year I lived there. There were about 40 acres cleared at the time of the death of G.W. Williams. Samuel Williams cleared between 8-9 acres in the spring of 1846. George Evans cleared some upon a lease.

"The land was worth 12 bushels per acre. Corn was 10-15 cents per bushel. There was between 45-50 acres cleared at the home place at the death of G.W. Williams. About 30 acres is good bottom land worth about 12 bushels per acre. The rest would be worth about eight bushels per acre. The house is old and out of repair. The corn was all used on the farm and fed to the stock on the farm.

"Cattle were kept at Browns, Oats and Lowry's islands. Col. Anderson had some cattle at Lowry's Island in the winter of 1844. They were taken out in the spring of 1845. One yoke of oxen was bought of Samuel Sutton and another of Allen White. One yoke of oxen of Allen White died and the other was drowned in the high freshest of the spring of 1847. Samuel Williams built two large cribs and made a string of fence separating the cleared land from the woodland or cane on Brown's Island. The cribs were worth $10 each. Making the fence was worth $40.50.

"In the spring of 1845, Samuel Williams reset the fence around the home place. He made and put in some new rails.The resetting of the fence was worth at least $20. He had the portico to the house repaired to the amount of $10. In 1847, a cross fence was built containing 1,000 rails worth $7.50. Another was built containing 600 rails worth 70 cents per hundred. A fence was built on the fraction. I suppose it would take 3,500 rails to make the rail across the 15-acre field of the fraction.

"A fence was put on Brown's Island in 1848. There was no fence there before that except for a small hog lot. The cleared land is all on one side of the fence except for one small field. The stock are on occasion driven by dogs. The fence around the 15 acres was taken away by the freshet of the spring of 1847.

"A reasonable rent for Ross's Island opposite Chattanooga would be $20. Taking cattle on and off of the islands is a good deal of trouble. The expense of doing so would be $10 or $12 a year. I have seen several cattle kept on the islands drown. In the spring of 1847, 17 were drowned on Brown's Island and 16 were drowned on Lowry's Island."

William H. Stringer, for whom Stringer's Ridge was named, remembered, "I am acquainted with Brown's Island. I owned a preference in the island once. I leased a part of it to a Mr. Redman who was to clear 10 or 15 acres. He was also to build some cabins on it. I would suppose there were 20 or 30 acres cleared by 1838, including the Redman field. The rest has been cleared since that time. A portion was cleared by George Evans. Some 40 acres have been cleared since the death of G.W. Williams. Corn is considered to be worth 20 cents per bushel. I suppose to bring corn out of the island by boat and wagon it would be $2 per 100 bushels. In contests on corn justices normally settled at $1 per barrel."

Alexander Kelly, who lived in Marion County, said, "Oats Island is not in cultivation. It has about 64 acres - all in cane. It will winter about 50 head of cattle. Some charge a dollar a head and some $2 a head for wintering cattle. Samuel Williams uses it some. Col. Anderson kept stock on it one winter. He said he got permission from Col. Whiteside. Lowry's Island has 172 acres. The most of it is in cane. I suppose it would winter 130 or 140 head of cattle. It is difficult to get to Oats Island and attended with risk. You have to go through other people's land. There is a clear passage to Lowry's Island. There is a road and ferry to it. There is some risk to keeping cattle on it. There is a bridge across the Sequatchie River and a toll is charged in time of high water."

James C. Connor said, "I rented land from Samuel Williams 1839-1843 lying on the river above the mouth of South Chickamauga Creek. I rented about nine acres and paid about 30 bushels rent. Corn was selling about two cents per bushel from the heap. Thomas Connor rented the land in 1844 and since that time Mr. Cook. I cleared about 12 acres and it was of the first quality. I think he rented in the 5th District to Esquire Milliken and Henry Cornett and James Lea and in the 7th District to Samuel Green. I generally paid the rent on the heap. I do not believe there have been freshets in crop time since i quit leasing from Mr. Williams except this year (1850). There were unusually high freshets in March and December 1847. I always paid for first bottom, with the exception of one or two years, 15 bushels per acre. I never paid for second bottom, but I suppose they would be worth $10 to $12 per acre and upland from eight to 10 bushels per acre, and rented a part of the crop. A third of the corn was the usual rate."

Peter Sivley, a Williams neighbor, said, "Samuel Williams rents lands from the mouth of South Chickamauga Creek to the Wayland lands, and some lay above the Wayland lands. There was some lands below the mouth of the creek, and the Schod section, and the place where Shelly lives and the place called the Bruce farm. One tract was sold to Lewis Hall. Another piece was a 26-acre fraction lying above the mouth of the creek between Cook's and Latta's. In 1847 and 1848, he got about 600 bushels of corn. In 1849, he got near 800 bushels. Colonel Whiteside and myself collected the rents below the creek. There were several leases with terms of four years for clearing - Daniel McDaniel, William Cook, H. Cornett, E. Adcock, W. Cobb, Lewis Tyner, Samuel Green and J.C. Connor. I was agent for Park, Wofford and McAfee. They owned lands on the west side of Chickamauga Creek. Concerning the Duncan field, Hiram Tyner had it in corn in 1846 and Lewis Tyner in 1847. In 1849 it was in oats by John Black. This year it is rented to William Lattee at 10 bushels of corn per acre."

Squire Cornelius Milliken, who also lived nearby, said, "I rented and tended Williams lands on the west side of Chickamauga Creek from 1842 to 1848. I paid the rents to Col. Whiteside at 225 bushels per acre per year except one I paid part oats. James Lee paid 300 bushels per year. Henry Cornett paid 250 bushels per year. Samuel Williams himself received rents from Lewis Hall, John Lattee, William Cook, John Tyner and Lewis Tyner. Hall had 21 acres of river bottom worth 15 bushels of corn per acre. Hall has since purchased the land. Lattee cultivated 12 acres and paid 12 and 1/2 bushels per acre. Cook had 29 acres including 13 of bottom worth 12 and 1/2 bushels per acre. The other 16 were worth 10 bushels per acre. That was the fifth crop on the land. John Tyner had a few poles over seven acres at 10 bushels per acre. This was his fourth crop. Lewis Tyner had what was known as the Duncan field. It was a few poles over 13 acres and was valued at 10 bushels per acre. All the bottom lands have overflowed and the fencing removed from it several times."

Samuel Hamill said, "John L. Divine farm has at least 70 acres of cleared land. It possesses near an equal quantity of first bottom and second bottom with the upland. It is on average worth 12 bushels per acre. The fences on the first bottom and second bottom have been removed, but there is little problem with fences on the upland. It takes much labor to keep the farm in repair. The land would be worth $2 per acre after paying repairs."

Henry Daughtry stated, "I rented from Samuel Williams one year and from Joseph G. Smith. I paid 330 bushels of corn the first year and 400 bushels the second year. Smith hauled off a portion of the rent the second year. This land was in the 7th District on the southeast side of the Tennessee River opposite Dallas Island. It went by the name of the Smith and Williams Farm."

Asahel Rawlings, whose family once was a store competitor of the Williams brothers, said, "I rented some land from Col. Whiteside for two years that was said to belong to G.W. Williams and Samuel Williams. I agreed to pay a standing rent. The fencing was all out of fix and they paid me for the repairs and cleaning up the land. I do not recollect how much I paid him in corn after taking out the repairs. I would think about $30 a year after taking out the repairs. The land lies below Chattanooga on the river and adjoining Chattanooga. I understood it belonged to a company that included Ker Boyce, Carter, Whiteside, Williams and others."

William Varnell said, "I am acquainted with the land known as the Bruce farm. I don't think if I was going to rent this farm I could give more than $40 a year for it. I rented the Bruce farm in 1843 from Samuel Williams and held it for three years. I paid a third of what was made for the rent. I don't think corn sold for any of those years more than 20 cents if that high. The first year there was about 15 acres sowed in oats. The other two years it was about 20 acres. The first two years it was about $30 for repairs. The last year was about $10. The oats averaged about 20 bushels to the acre and were worth about 20 cents a bushel."

Other notations relating to the farm and cattle operation included:

Received from Samuel Williams $1.15 for boarding hands for G&S Williams. Henry Cornett. January 11, 1843. Promise to pay Henry Long $50 for value received of him. July 23, 1839. G&S Williams. Samuel Williams account with James Eaton. March 1840. Wagons and hands stacking oats. $2. April Two days wagon and hands. $7. April 6. Half day wagon and hands. $1.37. July. Two days wagon and hands. $3. Three and a half hands finding themselves and shucking corn. $2.37 and 1/2. 180 bushels of corn shucked. $4.50. March 1842. Larkin Johnson. James Eaton.

Accounts of G&S Williams with John S. Godsey for one year labor. April 11, 1841 to April 11, 1842. $134. 1841. S. Williams to Absalom Sivley for hauling corn for three and a half days at $3 per day. 1841 for hauling boat gunnels. For one bushel of corn by John Godsey. For one new meal bag and two and 1/2 bushels of corn.

Dogwood, Ga., July 2, 1842. Bought of R.A. Ramsey this day 30 head of hogs for which S.W. is to pay $75.

Account with Henry Long. Feb. 6, 1842. 250 bushels of corn at 25 cents per bushel. Total $62.50. Received full payment of Samuel Williams. June 1844. Aug. 23, 1840 promise to pay Martin Reece 400 bushels of good sound corn.

George W. Williams to John Boydston for wintering cattle, calf and one young steer. Sept. 17, 1842. Sworn before Elisha Parker, justice of the peace. Cornelius Milliken, justice of the peace 1843. To Catherine Vann for six head of beef cattle at $8 each, $48. 1 head of beef cattle at $9.50. Dec. 18, 1842. J.G. Blackwell witness. 1841 and 1842. George W. Williams to John Boydston for wintering cattle, calf and one young steer. Sept. 17, 1842. Sworn before Elisha Parker, justice of the peace.

To A. Beason for keeping horse. Promise to pay Thomas McCallie $31 to be paid in Georgia state script April 16, 1842. Paid in settlement of rent corn except for half the rent on a piece of land attended by Peter Sivley in 1840.

* * *

The links to the Williams papers on Sam Hall's website are here.

.




(Editors Note: Dr. Wayne Shearer, 94, is a retired optometrist and retired colonel from the U.S. Air Force Reserve now living in Hixson. In his early 90s, he decided to sit down and write from memory and a few records he still possesses his recollections of going through Army Air Corps pilot training at several bases in the United States during World War II. A lifelong writer, he wanted to pen them as he remembered them happening at the time. He also recreates now-lost letters as best as he recalls writing them and references newspaper articles he collected at the time and still possesses. This is the 12th in a series of regular excerpts from his as yet unpublished book, Under This Arch.)

* * * * *

Setting: Testing and training at the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Classification Center.

The San Antonio Express in San Antonio, Texas, on Thursday morning, September 9, 1943, said: NORTH ITALY INVADED. AMERICANS LAND AT NAPLES, SEEK TO CUT OFF FLEEING NAZIS. Allied troops landed early Thursday in the Naples area, a third of the way up the Italian boot, a few hours after the surrender of Italy was announced.

Another headline added: MANY STOLEN RATION BOOKS REPORTED. San Antonians hold onto that ration book. An average of 40 ration books a day are reported missing or stolen to police headquarters.

September 9, 1943:

Great victory in Italy with successful invasion! This week weve marched pretty much all over the base, thinking we were going to get the important Flight Physical 6-4 behind us, and this Thursday morning we went to the hospital for these exams that can wash us out or continue our training as aviation cadets. These will be in-depth physical examinations.

Forms were filled out by us prospective cadets. We were given a piece of paper with various stations listed to stop at for the exams.

My first station was the dental. The dental captain had me open my mouth wide to count the fillings to be charted. He asked about the fillings in my two front teeth and I told him that when in the sixth grade, I was running and drinking a soft drink and fell with the bottle chipping them. He remarked that the filling cosmetics were good. I didnt tell him that I had always been self-conscious regarding these two fillings in my front teeth.

The next stop was to check the eyes. As I mentioned, as a fifth-grader playing during recess, I had fallen into a large, thorny rose bush and one of the thorns had cut the front of my right eye, but it left no visible scar. Ever since the principal rushed me to the local eye doctor, its been a slight worry, though my vision was not affected by the thorn.

The eye exam was of concern to me. This exam was a lot more than reading the 20/20 line on the eye chart. I did not say anything about the thorn bush. The captain eye doctor with his bright light carefully looked into my eyes and made no comment. He tested my vision at near and far and said 20/20. Last he handed me a book, turning to a page, asking me, What do you see in the middle of these colors. I told him it looks like a 58. He said passed as he made notations on my slip of paper. I felt better!

As each candidate finished his test, he moved down the hospital corridor to the next testing station room. When I entered the next station with arrows pointing the way taped to the wall, I was told to strip naked and to lie on the floor. This I did for about five minutes. I was then told to get up and I handed the slip of paper to the doctor, as he took my pulse and blood pressure, first on the floor and then standing. Then the same thing happened after running in place. He said, Youve now passed the Schneider Test. I recognized the name since it had been spoken of in several Hollywood aviation movies I had seen. It was the test that always washed out several prospective cadets and I found out that several failed when I got back to the barracks. They are supposed to pack up and go elsewhere in the enlisted training ranks by tomorrow morning.

The last station in the large room  while we were still minus our clothes  was the area where they tested your hearing and looked into our ears with an instrument. The doctor said mine was OK and wrote a number on my slip. As I got into the hall, one of the guys in my flight grabbed at my slip of paper saying, Let me see what the doctor wrote about your ears because he told me Ive got busted eardrums.  He produced a small short pencil with an eraser proceeding to erase his slip ear notations, writing in what was on my slip. He said he had to do this because he didnt want to be washed out. I told him theyll find your busted eardrum later and youre just hurting your future chances to be a ground officer. Im wondering where he had the pencil hid, since we didnt have any clothes on!

Those of us who had passed, or thought we had, were now ready to wait for the results in another week or so. These classification results will determine if we are eliminated (washed-out), or classified as pilot, navigator or bombardier. Several blocks from my barracks is a centrally located bulletin message board where the results will be posted. Well all be eagerly checking it out every day. Our future will be posted on it.

September 10, 1943:

Today (Friday) as we were lining up in formation for the usual morning roll call and being called to tenshun by our sergeant, I noted that a 1st lieutenant and another sergeant, whom I had never seen before, were present. We were told parade rest for roll call. At completion of roll call, we again were called to attention. The lieutenant called names and for them to step forward and return to the barracks. The candidate with the busted eardrums was one of the four.

Our sergeant shouted, Fill in the ranks and no talking, and off we marched to the mess hall for breakfast. The conversations ranged from What did they do wrong? to They must have failed the 6-4. We were all apprehensive during the meal. Truly, silence was in the ranks and a visible sigh of relief that it wasnt one of us. Upon returning to the barracks to change into gym clothes, we, sadly noted that four beds had been stripped, with the mattresses minus the cover bent double for airing on each bed. We would, probably, never see our friends again, as they had been eliminated (washed out) from the cadet program and would go into another Army Air Corps training program.

The Sunday San Antonio Light in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday, September 12, 1943, stated: JAPS AT SALAMAUA IN FULL FLIGHT. Allied jungle fighters have broken through the Jap defensive at Salamaua and the enemy is now in full retreat, General MacArthurs communique announced today. The enemy defenses cracked at their vital New Guinea air base.

Anther headline from that days paper added: 5TH PUSHES ON BEYOND SALERNO. The heaviest battles raged in the vicinity at Naples, Italys chief port. There Lt. Gen. Mark W. Clarks Fifth Army broke up successive German armored and infantry counter-strikes, seizing several hundred Nazi prisoners.

Another headline under local news: A local master sergeant, whos been on active duty in the Aviation branch of the Army Signal Corps, forerunner of the Army Air Forces, received a direct promotion to captain at Stinson Field. His home is on West Magnolia Avenue. Most of his 25 years of active service have been spent at Brooks, Kelly, Randolph and Stinson Army Air Fields.





Letter home:

Sept. 12, 1943

Dear Mother and Dad,

This has been a busy, tough week of tests, both mental and physical. I think your son barely struggled through them. Several fellows in my flight have been eliminated as a result. Im happy to have them behind me. I am waiting to see if Im classified as a pilot. We should know next week. The Army says to sweat it out.

One interesting test was depth perception. This is important to have because in landing a plane, you must have good depth perception to determine how high above the runway you are as you throttle back the engine. My flight instructor at Cleveland discussed it several times.

Dad, in the paper today, a local master sergeant who was in World War I, like yourself, received a field promotion to captain. Hes been on active duty since WWI. Hows your Georgia Home Guard duty coming along? Give my sister a hug!

Your loving son, Wayne

September 13, 1943:

After roll call this Monday morning, our sergeant told us that for the next several weeks, we could go to the PX during the day as well as in the evening. There would still be no open post for us until we entered Pre-Flight School. He said wed be more on our own to go to the mess hall, except the morning roll call formation and march as a flight to breakfast. In the afternoons, we would pick up cigarette butts as the butt patrol. We are to work out on our own at the gym. Further, he said, look twice a day at our orderly room bulletin/message board as well as the large centrally located board, which would this week let us know how we were classified.

After he marched us to the mess hall and broke ranks, I told him the gym sergeant said he could use me and a friend to clean up the gym in the afternoons. Sarge said go ahead, but bring a signed statement every afternoon stating we were there. I thanked him knowing it will be cooler in the gym than on butt patrol.

One of our barracks mates shared a letter with another of those primary flying stories, this one from Corsicana, Texas, from a college friend. Jacks friend had his first routine check ride and it, of course, was with the civilian flight instructor with the meanest and roughest reputation.

They took off in the PT-19 in a normal manner. He thought he was doing fine with the first series of maneuvers when, suddenly, through the gosport came a stream of curses with a waving of his arms like he was going to jump out and last held the gosport in the wind almost blowing his eardrums out. The check ride instructor then said take me back to the field. He was very derogatory to him upon landing, telling him, Ill give you another check ride at 8 a.m. tomorrow. Again, the next day it was a repeat, but this time upon landing the cadet was told that he would never be a pilot. Tomorrow, be here again at 8 a.m. for our final wash-out check ride by the military check pilot at the field, he said. He didnt tell him what he had done wrong and the friend still didnt know.

That afternoon, he again told his regular instructor what had happened for the second day. His instructor went up with him and they practiced everything in the check-out procedure for two hours. The next morning, the AAF captain check ride pilot told him before take-off to show him everything hed learned thus far. They came back, landed with the captain telling him that it was a good ride. He wrote that he doesnt want to ever get that close to washing out again!.

My day is ending as were all listening and singing along with Bings Deep in the Heart of Texas. The words of the first verse, which we all know, are: The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas. Then we clap, clap, clap, with the music before the next verse. Its a favorite for us under the big sky of Texas. We are feeling more relaxed now that the testing of last week is behind us.

* * * * *

To see the previous entry in this series, read here.

https://www.chattanoogan.com/ 2019/3/1/385670/Wayne- Shearers-World-War-II-Memoir. aspx

* * * * *

Dr. Shearer can be contacted at docshearer@epbfi.com.
At its Annual Member Meeting, the Associated General Contractors of East Tennessee installed a new slate of board officers and directors to lead the 250-member organization trade association focused on construction.

New officers include Chair Nic Cornelison (vice president with P&C Construction); Vice Chair Jason Medeiros (vice president with Pointe General Contractors); Secretary / Treasurer Jerod Gilley (project manager with Construction Consultants).

Jimmy Lail with Raines Brothers Construction remains on the Executive Committee as immediate past chair. Jennifer Summerlin, operations manager with Inline Electric, joins the board as a new associate director.

Other board members include Todd Mayse (Mayse Construction), Ty Edwards (T. Gene Edwards), Jamie Thomas (Thomas Brothers Construction), Will Tutton (Southeast Painters), and Randy Wilson (Miller & Martin). Arch Willingham with T.U. Parks Construction rolls off the board after having served 16 years on the AGC board.

This year, AGC of East Tennessee honored two members with special awards. Mike Davis with P&C Construction received the chapters Legends Award for his long-time contributions towards workforce development and industry advancements. Bruce Case, president of Construction Consultants, received the coveted S.I.R. Award, an award that honors high level industry leaders across the nation who exemplify the AGC of Americas motto of Service, Integrity and Responsibility.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation is teaming with local grocers and cleanup partners to promote litter prevention and feature Great American Cleanup events happening in Tennessee communities this spring. On Friday, free reusable bags will be distributed to the public at 483 Tennessee grocery stores, one per person, while supplies last. The bags will feature the logo of TDOTs Nobody Trashes Tennessee litter prevention campaign, as well as campaign partners Keep Tennessee Beautiful and the Tennessee Grocers and Convenience Store Association.



In addition to distributing reusable bags, grocery stores in each of Tennessees 95 counties will host booths or displays of local governments and non-profits conducting Great American Cleanup events this spring. The public is encouraged to visit those organizations and volunteer for an upcoming cleanup.



Hosting reusable bags events such as this is an excellent way for our grocers to connect to the public and their communities, Rob Ikard, president of the Tennessee Grocers and Convenience Store Association, said.



Participating grocers include all Tennessee locations of: Kroger, Food City, Food Lion, Associated Wholesale Grocers, Publix, Mitchell Grocery and Piggly Wiggly.



"Rigorous research was done prior to the launch of the 'Nobody Trashes Tennessee' campaign," officials said. "It showed roadside trash is down 53 percent. However, litter is still a big problem for the state."



This research showed:

- There are still an estimated 100 million pieces of trash on Tennessee roadways;

- 30 percent of the states litter is deliberate  meaning trash is tossed right out of vehicle windows;

- Increase in litter among females age 16 to 34; and

- TDOT spends more than $15 million annually cleaning up litter.



The good news is the research showed that nine out of 10 Tennesseans are more likely to properly dispose of their trash after learning about the statewide litter problem, Commissioner Clay Bright added. We believe this campaign can make a difference and potentially save highway maintenance funds for other needed road projects.



For more information about the Nobody Trashes Tennessee campaign , visit: www.nobodytrashestennessee.com. For more about Great American Cleanup events in your community, visit the Keep Tennessee Beautiful website at http://www.keeptnbeautiful.org/ of connect on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/KeepTennesseeBeautiful/.
(ANSA) - Rome, March 15 - Deputy Premier and Labour and Industry Minister Luigi Di Maio said Friday that signing up for China's infrastructure initiative to create a sort of modern Silk Road will boost Italy's sovereignty rather than reduce it.

"Today the Made in Italy brand wins," Di Maio said after a meeting with Premier Giuseppe Conte and other senior government figures.

"Italy has decided to be more sovereign with the Belt and Road Initiative.

"It is not a political agreement with China but a trade opportunity.

"Indeed, the United States remains our main ally and NATO is our natural home.

"This is a surge forward by Italy, a change of pace towards the future".


The University of Tennessee Extension is offering free classes for adults to improve their balance, strength and endurance on Tuesdays and Thursdays in April. The goal is to prevent falls.

"More than 4,500 adults in Hamilton County visit the emergency room each year due to a fall," officials said.



The classes are eight sessions each and are beginner level Tai Chi and A Matter of Balance. Both classes involve exercises, which can be done while seated.



Tai Chi classes will be held at two locations:

 St. John United Methodist Church at 3921 Murray Hills Drive (enter gym from Murray Hills Dr. entrance) from 9:30-10:30

 John A Patten Recreation Center at 3202 Kellys Ferry Road in Tiftonia from 4:30-5:30



A Matter of Balance will be held at three locations:

 St. John United Methodist Church from 11 a.m.-1 p.m.

 John Patten Youth & Family Development Center from 2-4 p.m.

 Warner Park Fitness Center, 1254 E. 3rd St. (corner of Holtzclaw) from 10 a.m.-noon



Class size is limited, so registering asap is encouraged. Register one of two ways: call UT Extension at 423- 855-6113 or sign up online (click on Tai Chi and/or Matter of Balance).
The Lee University Symphony Orchestra will present its spring concert on Monday at 7:30 p.m. in Pangle Hall.

The program, conducted by Artist-In-Residence Robert Bernhardt, will feature the six winners of Lees Student Concerto Competition: Kyle Dykes on trombone, Timothy Ferguson on alto saxophone, soprano Gabrielle Flannery, Soyoung Lim on piano, Chiaoyu Lin on piano, and Lawrence Wong on piano.

The remainder of the program will include works by Bourgeois, Poulenc, Puccini, and Rachmaninoff, among others.

Mr. Bernhardt joined Lee's School of Music in the fall of 2011. Mr. Bernhardt also serves as music director emeritus and principal pops conductor of the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera and principal pops conductor of the Louisville Orchestra and Grand Rapids Symphony. He was formerly the music director and conductor for 19 seasons with the CSO, and he is the first to hold the title emeritus. He is also a frequent guest conductor for the Boston Pops and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.

The Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble of select instrumentalists, performs one major concert each semester. Its musicians frequently perform in opera, choral, and other concerts on campus.

The concert is free, non-ticketed, and open to the public.

For more information, contact the School of Music by phone at 614-8240 or email at music@leeuniversity.edu.
For months now, rumors have been swirling about an apparent feud between Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle. Fans have been speculating that a rift between the two is a possible reason that Meghan and Harry are moving outside of London to the quaint town of Windsor, and have also been wondering if Prince Charles will step in and require the two duchesses to make amends.

In recent weeks, the rumors seemed to have been fading. However, due to the behavior of the two women at a recent event, a body language expert feels there may still be extreme tension between the pair. So, what was it about the interaction between Meghan and Kate that leads people to feel they may still be feuding?

The party for Prince Charles

Kate and Meghan, along with their husbands Princes William and Harry, recently attended a fancy party at Buckingham Palace that was held in honor of Prince Charles. It was said to be the first time the royal four were together since they attended the queens Christmas celebration at her Sandringham Estate. Apparently, there was extreme tension all during the event, with Kate turning her back to Meghan and blatantly ignoring her sister-in-law as well. Meghan sat by herself and didnt interact with Kate at the party.

Kate seemed to be having a much better time than Meghan

As can be seen in the many pictures that were taken at the party, Meghan does not seem to be socializing nearly as much as Kate does. Meghan seemed to be isolating herself from the other members of the party, while Kate was smiling, talking and having a wonderful time. It is possible that Meghan felt uncomfortable in Kates presence, leading fans to believe that all is not good between the two royals.

Their body language

According to a body language expert, the Duchess behavior at the event strongly indicates they are still feuding. They clearly were not happy to see each other, and their behavior indicates there are feelings of animosity for reasons that are still unknown. To make matters even more concerning, Harry and William did not seem to be as friendly as they usually are. The two brothers are famously very close, and can often be seen laughing and enjoying each others company. However, given that the event was mainly focused on their father, Prince Charles, it is hard to know what was truly going on behind the scenes.

Was this an attempt to put the focus on Prince Charles?

Royal fans are still unclear as to if there actually is a rift going on between the Duchess of Sussex and the Duchess of Cambridge. The event at Buckingham Palace was held in honor of the 50th anniversary of the investiture of Prince Charles, and it is certainly a possibility that William and Harry, and maybe even Meghan and Kate, did not want to steal the focus. Perhaps this was the case, and fans are reading too much into the situation!

Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton at Buckingham Palace | Dominic Lipinski  WPA Pool/Getty Images

What are some other possible reasons for the unusual behavior?

The usually friendly and talkative Meghan was quiet at the event and seemed a little disconnected from the other royal family members. While some think that she and Kate were simply not happy to see each other, it could be that Meghan was not feeling well at the late stage of her pregnancy. She has been keeping quite the busy schedule ever since she announced that she and Harry were expecting their first child, and it very well may be that she was a bit tired that day. Lets hope that there is a valid explanation and that all is well with Meghan and Kate!
Come As You Are is a comedy that tells the story of three men with disabilities going on a road trip to a brothel in Montreal to lose their virginities. They hire a nurse to drive them on the adventure.

The movie stars Grant Rosenmeyer, Hayden Szeto and Ravi Patel who play the three men going on the mission. Gabourey Sidibe plays Sam, the nurse.

(Back row L-R) Ravi Patel, Richard Wong, Gabourey Sidibe, (front row L-R) Hayden Szeto, and Grant Rosenmeyer of the film Come As You Are | Getty Images/Robby Klein

The Cheat Sheet talked to Grant Rosenmeyer, Hayden Szeto, director Richard Wong, and the man who inspired the whole story, Asta Philpot at SXSW on March 10. This is what they had to say about their groundbreaking road trip sex comedy.

Come As You Are is based on Asta Philpots trip to Spain

The movie is based on a real persons journey named Asta Philpot. He lives with arthrogryposis, a condition limiting physical movement, and has been open about an important sexual experience.

I spent time with my parents on a holiday in Spain where I lost my virginity, said Philpot. And f rom that moment on really I decided that every person with a disability needed to see this but also the whole world because it sends a message across that every human being has needs. Every human being deserves love and I also want to experience sex so thank God I was able to do it.

Asta Philpot | Getty Images/David M. Benett

His story was told several ways before Come As You Are. It got made into an incredible BBC documentary and then a Belgian film and then some random dude called Grant Rosenmeyer emailed me and yeah the rest is a beautiful history, said Philpot.

Grant Rosenmeyer is a producer of the movie but also stars in it. His character, Scotty is mostly based on Philpot.

Scotty is based on Philpot, but also other comedic performances

The character of Scotty feels familiar if youre a fan of sex comedies given hes a wildcard. He says exactly what hes thinking and it doesnt matter if other people will like it or not. Scotty also pushes the quieter, Mo (Ravi Patel) who is legally blind, and Matt (Hayden Szeto), who is still adjusting to being in a wheelchair, to join him. Rosenmeyer talked about having Philpot as a resource and another inspiration for the role.

Honestly this was simultaneously the most challenging role of my career and the easiest because Ive never had a lifeline like this to a character and to a condition also, said Rosenmeyer. He added, It was amazing.

The actor went on to reveal another influence he had for the role. I grew up on Vince Vaughn so I think theres definitely some shades of Vince Vaughn in there.

He later added, Thats such a great archetype. Its been played well so many times so its just how do you make it different? This in particular is inherently different so what a joy!

Rosenmeyer, Szeto, and Patel are actors who are able-bodied playing characters living with disabilities. Philpot talked about getting a person without a disability to play him in the movie.

 Theres two sides to it really, said Philpot. Do we portray an incredible message thats gonna not only help myself but help other people with disabilities across the planet? Or do we stay under this kind of rock that weve been in the dark shadows? He also asked, Are we gonna carry on battling and just because the person is portraying a disability he needs to be with [a] disability?

He continued, Its not always the case. So I think we need to have a reality check and Im saying that myself as a disabled actor. Id love to be in Avatar or be the next freakin Tarzan. But I know its not a reality. Its called acting for a reason.

Philpot said the movie gets a lot of his life right

Come As You Are does take the time of showing what life is like for Scotty and his mother, Liz (Janeane Garofalo.) They have a close relationship due to the situation. She bathes and feeds him, which makes Scotty eventually crave freedom through the road trip.

The star said the point of the movie is to shine a light on something that maybe is new to the general population, said Rosenmeyer before adding, Working with Janeane was just the best. She is the most generous actor.

When asked if there was a moment Philpot felt like the movie got things right he said, Probably everything. It is so beautifully right from the writing to the directing to the acting just so sensitively beautifully accurately done.

Director, Richard Wong had a rule about not mentioning race for the diverse cast

The storys focus on people with disabilities isnt the only thing that sets the movie apart. Two of the leads are also of Asian descent, and Richard Wong made sure race wasnt mentioned for a reason.

We have had ad-lib moments where it would come up and like Rule number eight! No, lets not talk about race,' revealed Wong. Because its the same thing, we dont need to make a point of it.

Hayden Szeto agreed and said, I was lucky enough to witness a speech by one of my favorite actors, John Cho. He did a movie called Searching and in that movie there was an Asian family in it and it was never addressed.

The actor continued with, And he said this quote that Ill never forget he said, Its like looking into the future where you dont need to any more and it just is like you said.

Come As You Are is a movie that is pushing toward the future in multiple ways and keeps an audience laughing while doing so. Wong revealed what he believes the movie is about in the end.

I think the movie is about [the] human experience, said Wong. He added, I hope that people can relate to these guys the way I really relate to these guys.

Philpot said he hopes the movie makes people stop whatever were all doing just to stop, consider, and then move forward again because we just dont you know. He went on to say he wants people to stop and actually live in the moment again and see everyone in our broken system as beautiful human beings.

Read more: Why People With Disabilities Want Starbucks to Keep Offering Plastic Straws

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Joe Giudice was released from prison on March 14 after serving his 41 month sentence in a federal prison. Joe and his wife, Teresa from The Real Housewives of New Jersey were convicted of a slew of charges, including bank and bankruptcy fraud.

When Teresa was released from prison, she returned home to resume life with her family. However, Joes release is not as cut and dry. Originally from Italy, Joes family moved to the United States when he was a child. Although Joe asserts his parents and brothers obtained citizenship, he never considered making his citizen status legal.

Joe Giudice | Photo by Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

I was a year old when I came here, he said during The Real Housewives of New Jersey: Teresa Checks In, People recounts. My parents are citizens. My brother and sister are citizens  they were born here. I just never thought to file for citizenship. As a result, he can be deported since he committed a crime. Now that he has been released from prison, did he go home or does it truly look like Joe will be deported to Italy?

How did he feel about possibly being deported?

If Joe arrived in the U.S. today as a child with his parents, he would have automatically been granted citizenship, People reports. He considers himself an American and doesnt have an inkling about what it would be like to live in Italy.

I dont really know the laws there. I dont know s there. In order for me to go there it would be like an immigrant coming here and not knowing anything here, he said. Besides eating pasta and making the sauce, I dont know anything in Italy. He added he has plenty of family in his home country and would probably find something to do if he were deported.

Would the family stay together?

Teresa waffled about whether or not the family would move if Joe was deported. Initially, she said shed deal with it should it ever come to fruition. But when it looked possible, she expressed sadness and despair. She posted a picture of the Statue of Liberty with her face in her hands on Instagram in October when she learned Joe would be deported.

Although Teresa seemed to lean toward considering a move, shes changed her tune when deportation became more of a reality. During the RHONJ reunion, she said she would not move to Italy if Joe was deported. I mean, unless my kids say, Mommy, I want to move to Italy, Teresa said, US Weekly recounts. Gias going to college next year; I havent spoken to Milania or Audriana about it, we havent gotten there yet; and Gabriella already voiced her opinion to me. She was like, That would be so hard for me, Mommy. She doesnt speak the language. Shes like, That would kill me even more.

Plus she added, Im not doing a long-distance relationship. Im not doing it. You know, I want somebody with me every day. I know exactly what happens. You know, Im sure hell be with other women. It happens. We do the long-distance thing, its not going to work. Id be like, Bye, bye.

Where did Joe go when he was released from prison?

Joe was immediately transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) upon release from prison, US Weekly reports.

Despite his release directly to ICE, Teresa remained hopeful. Her attorney provided this statement. Mr. Giudice has finished serving his federal prison sentence and was transferred early this morning from the Bureau of Prisons to a facility in western Pennsylvania which houses immigration detainees, US Weekly reports. His lawyers and his family are hopeful that justice will prevail and Mr. Guidice will return home to his wife and four daughters who love him and miss him.

Joe is appealing his deportation, which could take up to a year, where he would remain detained, according to Page Six. We are optimistic that once his appeal is heard, he will receive the appropriate relief and will be able to come home and remain there with his family, Joes attorney said, Page Six reports. They love him, they support him and they miss him tremendously.

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Lori Loughlin (Aunt Becky on Full House) has two daughters with her husband fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli. Both their daughters, Isabella Rose Giannulli and Olivia Jade Giannulli attend the University of Southern California.



The FBI arrested 50 people across six states in alleged connection with a college admission fraud scandal involving faked ACT and SAT test scores, bribes, and false claims stating students would be college athletes to increase their chances of admission. Loughlin and her husband along with actress Felicity Huffman were two celebrities named in the scandal.



Where was Olivia Jade at the time of her moms arrest?



Like many college students at this time of year, Olivia Jade was on Spring Break. However, unlike other college students, Olivia Jade was spending her break from school on a yacht. It was there that she learned of her mothers arrest in the alleged college admission scandal.



The 19-year-old was vacationing with Gianna Caruso, a fellow USC student. Where the optics go from bad to worse for Olivia Jade is that Carusos dad is Rick Caruso, the Chairman of USCs Board of Trustees.



Lori Loughlin, Olivia Jade Giannulli, and Isabella Rose Giannulli |Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images for Sephora Collection

My daughter and a group of students left for spring break prior to the governments announcement yesterday, Caruso told TMZ, according to Refinery29. Once we became aware of the investigation, the young woman decided it would be in her best interests to return home.



As Refinery29 stated, they literally had to turn the yacht around. Not good optics for someone who is in the middle of a college admission scandal involving hefty bribes made by the wealthy to get their kids into college.



Parents out on bail



At the time the FBI was making arrests, Loughlin was in Vancouver, Canada, filming a Hallmark movie. Shes appeared in a number of Hallmark movies and taken on the role of producer on some occasions.

When she returned to the U.S., she was arrested for her alleged involvement in the scandal along with her husband. They were charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, according to E! News. Both Loughlin and Giannulli posted bail for $1 million each to be released.



Will Loughlins daughters get kicked out of USC?



The FBI is further investigating the students involvement in the scandal. USC, where Loughlins daughters go to school, is evaluating each student and their involvement on a case-by-case basis.



Reportedly, if a student knew any part of their application was faked, expulsion would be the next step. Students who were unaware that their application was doctored would be also be dealt with by the schools administration.



Olivia Jade has amassed quite a following on YouTube and Instagram. Shes got practically 2 million YouTube subscribers and can be seen posting sponsored content on her Instagram page.



She was in hot water with her YouTube viewers when she said in a video that she was starting college at USC but didnt want to attend class much. She said shed speak to her deans and professors about which brought on tons of viewers to say she was entitled. She later apologized for her remarks.



She launched a makeup palette with Sephora last year and had her mom and sister and the product launch to support her. However, amid the scandal, Sephora has decided to part ways with Olivia Jade.



After careful review of recent developments, we have made the decision to end the Sephora Collection partnership with Olivia Jade, effective immediately, the companys statement read.


Meghan Markles pregnancy is unlike any other royal. Not only did the Duchess of Sussex celebrate her firstborn with a star-studded, $200,000 baby shower in New York City, but her maternity wardrobe costs a fortune, too. According to reports, the mother-to-be has spent over half a million dollars  AKA, seven times more than Kate Middleton spent in her pregnancy  on 75 maternity looks.



We take a closer look at Meghan Markles maternity wardrobe, including her most expensive ensemble  ahead.



Meghan Markles maternity wardrobe



Meghan Markles maternity wardrobe is worth over half a million dollars. | Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage

Throughout her pregnancy, the Duchess of Sussex has wowed in a variety of maternity ensembles, including some that are on the more affordable end of the spectrum. However, when added up, Her Royal Highness has racked up quite the bill (though, we imagine some of these items were borrowed from designers). Love the Sales reports that the Duchess of Sussexs 75 maternity looks add up to a whopping 478,920, which is around $636,679, or $8,485 per outfit.



Like her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton, Meghan Markles style choices have helped brands gain a tremendous amount of financial success in the last couple of years. And, her maternity wardrobe is no different. According to Love the Saless report, the mother-to-bes Meghan Maternity Effect has caused an influx of fashion searches over the past eight months with some styles and brands gaining over a 5,000% increase in search volume.



Heres a look back at some of the most-searched items, plus Meghan Markles most expensive maternity look.



Veja V-10 Sneakers



Meghan Markle in Veja V-10 Sneakers. | Pool/Samir Hussein/WireImage

While in Australia for the Invictus Games, Meghan Markle dressed down for a sailing competition, which caused a frenzy of searches  particularly around the Veja V-10 Sneakers. Thanks to the duchess, the sustainable sneaker brand saw a 300% increase in overnight search volume.



Karen Gee shift dress



During her Australian royal tour, the Duchess of Sussex used her trip as an opportunity to highlight some Aussie designers. Meghan Markle wore a white shift dress from Karen Gee and everyone went wild for it. The search volume grew by over 5,800% and caused the brands website to crash.



Oscar de la Renta dress



Meghan Markles most expensive maternity look so far? The Oscar de la Renta dress she wore to the Geographic Society Awards in October 2018. The laser cut black bird dress reportedly cost around 10,000 ($13,000) and the Duchess of Sussex paired it with 490 ($650) Aquazzura black bow heels.



Meghan Markle in Oscar de la Renta. | Pool/Samir Hussein/WireImage

Victoria Beckham double-breasted coat



On Christmas Day, parents-to-be Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped out for their last service as a family of two. The duchess wore a 2,250 ($3,000) double-breasted coat by Victoria Beckham.



In addition to the outfits detailed above, the Duchess of Sussex has worn a variety of incredible  read: expensive  designer garments throughout her first pregnancy. While visiting Fiji in October 2018, Meghan Markle stepped out in a stunning white Zimmerman dress. She also wore Jason Wu, Self Portrait, and Hugo Boss during her first trip Down Under.



Additionally, Meghan Markle has stepped out in Karen Walker, Burberry, Givenchy, and some more affordable options from H&M and Aritzia throughout her pregnancy.



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Buckingham Palace announced today that Prince William and Prince Harry are officially splitting their royal courts and that Queen Elizabeth II formally agreed. But what does this mean? And why are they doing it now? We break it down ahead.



The split has been in the works



A rumor about the princes splitting their royal courts has been circulating for some time. We reported on the topic back in October 2018. Behind closed doors, the royal family has been working on the split for months now.



What is a royal court?



A royal court is an office often referred to as a household. Until now, Prince William and Prince Harry shared a joint royal household at their childhood home of Kensington Palace. Essentially, the split means that the Sussex household and the Cambridge household will have different offices.



Who will run the courts?



Now that the royal courts are being split, Prince Harry (the Duke of Sussex) and Meghan Markle (the Duchess of Sussex) will be based at Buckingham Palace, according to The Cut.

Prince William (the Duke of Cambridge) and Kate Middleton (the Duchess of Cambridge) will have a royal court based out of Kensington Palace.



Sarah Latham, a former campaign adviser to Hillary Clinton, will head up communications for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

Since his engagement to Markle, Prince Harry has reportedly kept a private office. Again, this makes sense because how can one office be expected to run Prince Harry and Prince Williams royal lives as well as handle one of the biggest royal engagements.

Kate Middleton, Prince William, Prince Harry, Meghan Markle | RICHARD POHLE/AFP/Getty Images

Staff members who previously worked for the Sussex household at Kensington Palace will remain there under the Cambridge household. Even though their households will be separate, the dukes and duchesses will continue on as patrons of their royal foundation.



The entire splitting process will take time. It will be a step-by-step process, Omid Scobie, a royal reporter, told Harpers Bazaar, according to The Cut.



Why now?



Prince Harry and Prince William have both struck out on their own. Theyve both got families of their own with Baby Sussex due in late April.

The timing makes sense because one day Prince William will become king and hes got to soak up as much knowledge from Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, and Prince Charles to prepare.



As for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, they have more leeway than the Cambridge household on certain matters. They dont have to follow the same strict rules William and Kate have to in their day-to-day lives and working royal lives.



Are the princes growing apart?



When the splitting of the royal courts was first discussed, royal watchers feared it meant there was a rift between Prince William and Prince Harry.

Publicly, the princes and their other halves presented a united front in an attempt to squash the rumor.

Prince William and Prince Harry | Toby Melville  WPA Pool/Getty Images

The princes may not be growing apart, it may be that theyre growing up, and simply, that it makes more sense to have two offices, one for each family.



A report said that the brother have leant [sic] on each other and looked after each other since their mother died. But now they have their own families, they no longer rely on each other as before.



There you have it.
We all know the story of how Camilla Parker Bowles and Prince Charles dated in the 70s and years later rekindled their relationship when they were both married to other people. Their affair made headlines around the globe for what is known as Camillagate or tampongate and all the details Princess Diana revealed about what she knew.

After the princess tragic death, Charles and Camilla tried to slowly gain acceptance from the public. But there were also reports that some members of Camillas family were not fond of the prince or their relationship. Her father, Bruce Shand, in particular, was against it.

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall | Samir Hussein/Samir Hussein/WireImage

Heres more about Camillas dad and why he didnt want the future king of England to marry his daughter.

Who was Bruce Shand?

Major Bruce Shand was an officer in the British Army and fought in World War II. In 1942, he was captured by Nazis while in Egypt and was held as a prisoner of war until the battle ended three years later.

Once he returned home to England, he married Rosalind Cubitt. Together, the pair had three children including Camilla.

After having kids, he got into the wine business and ended up becoming a partner at a wine merchants firm. In 1974, he was named Deputy Lieutenant of Sussex and Vice-Lieutenant of East Sussex. Part of his responsibilities were to look after the royal family whenever they visited the area.





Why he didnt want Camilla to marry Prince Charles

Camilla Parker Bowles and her father Bruce Shand | HAYHOW/AFP/Getty Images

Shand was a fan of one of his daughters love interests, Andrew Bowles. However, after he and Camilla dated for some time Shand grew impatient that he did not ask for her hand in marriage.

Sally Bedell Smith, author of Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, claimed that Shand and Andrews brother worked together to publish an engagement notice in a newspaper in order to pressure Andrew to propose. He did, and the couple tied the knot in 1973.

Several years later though Camillas affair with Charles became public and Shand had a strong opinion of the prince. According to the Guardian, Shand called for a private meeting with the royal in which he accused the heir of ruining his daughters life. Charles was reportedly left in tears following the meeting and there were rumors that the two had multiple confrontations after that.

I think [Shand] was completely frank with him, but they never came to blows, a source expl ained.

Did Shand have a change of heart?

Prince Charles and Camilla Wedding photo | Pool Photograph/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images

Eventually, Shand put his ill feelings towards the prince aside so his daughter could be happy.

He attended their wedding in 2005 after Queen Elizabeth II granted them permission to marry and even sang Charles praises calling him very fair-minded and sincere.

He also said that the royal would make a perfect king.

Shand died in 2006 from cancer surrounded by his family. He was 89 years old.

Read more: Why Camilla Parker Bowles Said She Was a Prisoner After Her Affair With Prince Charles Was Revealed

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Contrition in Hollywood has been a complicated process for decades when celebrities have such a heavy burden of always being good role models to millions. When they screw up and do something bad, weve seen a lot of variance on the public either forgiving or disowning them.

While we still forgive celebrities for problems like alcoholism or drug addiction, its not so easy when they do something willfully awful.

What will the public think of Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman now that theyve been caught up in the recent college admissions scandal? Can they work in Hollywood again, or will they be branded as criminals in a likely decades-old scheme?

This is new territory for forgiveness

Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman Named in College Admissions Class Action Suit https://t.co/IYBQj6D72r  Variety (@Variety) March 14, 2019

One thing the public has done is drawn lines on what they forgive and dont forgive celebrities doing. When it comes to crimes like sexual abuse or assault, were far less forgiving nowadays for good reason. Various careers have already been ruined as a result of celebrities thinking they could get a pass with sexual crimes.

For addictions, were still forgiving. Yet, when it comes to committing willful fraud, what will the public think? Most importantly, what will powerful people in Hollywood think in wanting to employ Loughlin and Huffman again?

Because weve never seen anything like this before from a celebrity, its probably going to be a long waiting period until the public and Hollywood makes up their minds about Loughlin and Huffman.

If both of them end up going to prison, it may also put their careers in an undecided state until we hear from them directly. Hallmark isnt waiting and already cut ties from Loughlin.

Is there a middle-ground on this the public could relate to?

Federal authorities arrested dozens of people for a $25 million scheme to help wealthy Americans, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin and some CEOs, cheat their childrens way into elite universities https://t.co/A2ilS7FmyU pic.twitter.com/mNAZdD6nUb  Reuters Top News (@Reuters) March 12, 2019

From the outset, the evidence looks very damning against Loughlin, Huffman, and possibly their husbands. The worst of it is knowing how the scheme prevented other possibly more worthy students from getting into prestigious universities. On top of it, its possible similar schemes have gone on for years.

Taking advantage of wealth and privilege is a hard thing to forgive today when greed is looked down upon as the worst trait of millionaires and billionaires. Nevertheless, when you see the details of how damaging this case is, time is going to play a major factor in what happens to Loughlin and Huffmans careers.

Take into consideration this makes up a big picture in not only committing fraud, but also shades of racism and perhaps willful elitism. Then again, just how willful was this scheme?

Loughlin and Huffman were possibly caught up in gifting their children

Lori Loughlin's social media influencer daughter, Olivia Jade, loses Sephora partnership in wake of college admission scandal. https://t.co/qwUIExTEKU  NBC News (@NBCNews) March 14, 2019

Both Loughlin and Huffman have been defended by their friends as being good family people who wouldnt do anything illegal willfully. While the public backlash is strong, can we finally look at this as parents being blinded by doing whatever it takes to give their children a good life?

Reportedly, they didnt have the college educations like their kids now have. When youre willing to do anything to make sure your kids dont repeat the same mistakes, even worse mistakes are likely going to be made.

Plus, when you have the power and money to make the dream possible, a lot of people go forth with the thought its still ethical. They become blind to criminal realities and not realize what its doing to destroy the American Dream of other children with fewer financial means.

Maybe this will become the official explanation once Loughlin and Huffman are ever interviewed. Whether their kids will agree with the assessment is another thing when you realize theyve just sullied their lives as well. Two or three years may have to go by until we can write on what Hollywood and the public thinks by then.
(ANSA) - Naples, march 15 - Italy can't fall behind in alliances it has had for years, Deputy Premier and League leader Matteo Salvini said in relation to the purchase of F35 fighters on Friday.

"As far as defence is concerned, I say Italy cannot remain behind," he said.

"Italy cannot remain excluded from alliances it has belonged to for many years. Also because if Italy doesn't do it, England and France do it".

The other deputy premier, 5-Star (M5S) leader Luigi Di Maio on Friday again ruled out any "exchange" between the F35s and the Chinese Belt and Road (BRI) Initiative.

The M5S is keen on the BRI but not keen on the F35s, while the League has the opposite stance.


Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are gearing up to welcome their first child. The couple has made several changes in their lives since they wed, but one thing that hasnt changed is their dedication to the royal family. However, with a little one on the way, Meghan has to take maternity leave at some point  but how does it work in the royal family, when your boss is another one of your relatives?

Meghan Markle is due in just a few weeks. | Samir Hussein/WireImage/Getty Images

Meghan and Harry are expecting their first child in late April

Meghan and Harry announced back in October that they were expecting their first child. The couple had been eager to start a family, and even while they were still engaged, they discussed wanting children. However, nobody expected Meghan to get pregnant so quickly. But just five months after the wedding, the couple had announced that a baby was already on the way. Since the announcement, Meghan and Harry have kept most details under wraps. Meghan did let it slip that the baby is due in late April, but the couple has been quiet about the babys gender, claiming they dont know what theyre having.

Meghan hasnt let her pregnancy slow her down

Despite being pregnant for the first time, Meghan hasnt let anything slow her down. The duchess has continued to look flawless at every public engagement, and she walks into a room all smiles whenever shes doing work for the royal family. She and Harry constantly remain affectionate in public, showing theyre still overjoyed that theyre finally married. The couple has traveled all over the world, including New Zealand, Australia, and Africa, all while Meghans baby bump has been growing.

Meghan just made her last official public engagement, but shell still continue working behind the scenes

As Meghans bump continues to grow, we cant help but wonder what the royal protocol is for her maternity leave. And its a bit complicated. When it comes to public engagements, Meghan does take a break. The duchess recently attended her last scheduled event prior to giving birth. (She is reportedly due in about six weeks.) However, it doesnt mean that she has stopped working altogether. According to Harpers Bazaar, Meghan will continue to do work for the royal family behind the scenes. A source close to the duchess reports that shell still attend meetings and meet with those involved in all things related to her patronages.

Its important that Meghan gets all of the rest needed to keep her baby as healthy as possible, which is why we might not see her around town much more. However, duty calls, and Meghan will still be involved in royal family endeavors probably right up until she gives birth. The couple is also in the midst of moving into their new home, Frogmore Cottage at Windsor Castle. The time off from public engagements gives them a chance to get settled into their new life so that they can be as prepared as possible to welcome Baby Sussex.

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The Case of Jussie Smollett and the 'Antihero' Culture Christian Examiner Contributor | 14 March, 2019 by Dr. Carla Cornelius

The often-sanitized image of those in the public eye can often lead to disillusionment when other facts come to light which call into question this image. We want those in the public eye to show us what it's like to be a "hero" exuding courage, self-sacrifice and honor and putting the good of others above their own perceived needs and well-being.

In just 22 days from January 29 when he filed his assault claim, up to February 20 when he was charged, Smollett went from being the sympathetic victim of a racist, homophobic attack  a victim who resisted courageously his intended lynching  to an alleged criminal who masterminded a terrible fraud on the Chicago police and the American public. How quickly the pendulum can swing from being someone who is highly esteemed in the public eye to someone who loses their social standing, career and reputation. The court of public opinion is very fickle. Jesus said, "woe unto you when all mean speak well of you, for so did their fathers to the false prophets" (Luke 6:26, NKJV). The false prophets were very skilled in telling the people what they wanted to hear because they did not want to fall out of favor. They failed to realize that they were only delaying their inevitable judgment when the truth would eventually come to light.

This article does not aim to throw stones at the beleaguered Smollett. God knows he has had enough of that, and there is no doubt much more to come. We can all learn from this unfolding scandal; it has much to teach us about ourselves and our culture. If indeed recent reports are true that he fabricated his story about being attacked by a couple of racist, homophobic, MAGA-hat wearing thugs, then it begs the question why someone with this level of Hollywood prestige would stoop so low. If indeed the attack was scripted, staged and paid for, it was clearly done with the intention of worsening the already heightened political and racial tensions in America.

Smollett is charged with disorderly conduct by filing a false police report  a class four felony charge which could result in a prison sentence of one to three years. He pled not guilty in court today.

We live in a culture whereby acts of genuine heroism do not garner the media attention or attract the limelight the way that acts of selfish, malicious intent seem to do. What is evil and salacious seems to attract more attention than what is virtuous and admirable. Although the outcome of Smollett's case is yet to be determined in a court of law, in recent times there has been such an upturn in the number of people who file inaccurate reports with the police that computer software is now being rolled out which will be able to spot from the voice of the claimed victim whether or not they are telling the truth.

An antihero may be defined as someone who puts the good and well-being of others first at his or her personal expense or sacrifice. According to Merriam Webster dictionary, it refers to "a protagonist or notable figure who is conspicuously lacking in heroic qualities." Part of the antihero typology is a victim mentality. He or she craves sympathy or attention, and may lie or exaggerate to get it. On the contrary, honor is the hallmark of a hero. Wikipedia defines honor as, "the idea of a bond between an individual and a society as a quality of a person that is both of social teaching and of personal ethos, that manifests itself as a code of conduct, and has various elements such as valor, chivalry, honesty, and compassion." It involves taking responsibility for one's actions. If indeed Smollett is guilty, the most honorable thing to do would be to plead guilty. The longer he were to maintain his plea of innocence, the worse it will be for him in the end, for not only will his conscience become hardened but his sentencing will be more severe, and his many supporters will end up more disillusioned.

Our culture is desperately in need of heroes. Jesus Christ is the ultimate hero to whom we can all look for inspiration. After teaching his disciples the truth that, "greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends" (John 15:13, NKJV), he does just what he has taught them by laying down his own life. But he goes further, and lays down his life for the sins of the whole world, including those who do not believe in him or think nothing of blaspheming his name. He did not shrink from his earthly mission  which was to make a way for all humanity's sins to be expiated. He did this at great personal cost to himself  standing in our place to feel what it is to have our sins separate us from Father God. For that brief but agonizing moment on the cross, he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34, NKJV). The awesome power of God resurrected him from the dead, and God promises to do the same for all those who simply welcome his plan of salvation into their hearts and lives.

The antihero may invite pity or ridicule, but the real heroes are few and challenge us to a higher standard of thinking and living, for the good of all. We are left with the choice  we can be pitiful or powerful, and we can pass on our wounds or our wisdom.

Dr. Carla Cornelius is a Director and Editor at Jesus Joy Publishing. Her Ph.D. in Biblical Counseling has equipped her to trace humanity's problems back to faulty thinking and values which fly in the face of the Maker's instructions. She has a passion for exposing the distortions of truth spun by the media and popular culture which leave sick souls in their wake, souls desperately in need of spiritual detoxification. She is the author of five books including Culture Detox: Cleansing our minds from toxic thinking, Captive Daughters: Breaking the chains and No Way Out: Keys to avoiding suicide.
A Chinese official says the country is vowing to eliminate Christianity in China, according to The Christian Post.

Xu Xiaohong, head of the National Committee of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement of the Protestant Churches in China, says there are problems with Christianity in the country, calling the religion an infiltration.

[We] must recognize that Chinese churches are surnamed China, not the West, Xu told delegates to the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

The actions by anti-China forces that attempt to affect our social stability or even subvert the regime of our country are doomed to fail, he added.

He said he is worried that Christianity is a western influence that isnt best for the country.

Therefore, people often say: "One more Christian, one less Chinese, Xu said, according to Xinhua News Agency.

For individual black sheep who, under the banner of Christianity, participate in subverting national security, we firmly support the country to bring them to justice, he added.

China already has a sinicization campaign that works to bring religions under the countrys official atheists party control.

Part of that campaign includes trying to make the countrys religions more Chinese and even rewriting the New Testament with Buddhist and Confucian teaching.

The government must approve any Christian churches in China and religious activities are strictly monitored and regulated. Christians who do not adhere to the laws are sometimes arrested.

Somehow, men and women of faith are viewed as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party, he said. It is clear that Chinas misguided and cruel policies in Xinjiang are creating resentment, hatred, division, poverty, and anger.

Photo courtesy: Pixabay
(RNS)  A Southern Baptist publishing executive recently revealed that she was a victim of alleged abuse for more than a decade from another Baptist leader.

In an online statement posted Friday (March 8), Jennifer Lyell, director of the books ministry at LifeWay Christian Resources, alleged that she was the victim of a now-resigned professor at the flagship seminary of the nations largest Protestant denomination.

The alleged sexual misconduct and abuse of power started during a mission trip when Lyell was a seminary student and continued for years. She said that she feared coming forward out of concern that revealing what happened would cause collateral damage.

That collateral damage was the reason that the abuse had continued for so long, she wrote. The reason that a professor was able to continue grooming and taking advantage of his student was because I became like part of his family.

After coming forward last year to her boss and the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., she said, both took swift action to address her allegations and to provide care for her. Her alleged abuser resigned from the seminary as well as from a nonprofit ministry he had founded and from a trustee role with the Southern Baptist Conventions International Mission Board.

Lyell said she experienced the best of what advocates of sexual abuse response reform are calling for in the Southern Baptist Convention. Still, she said that churches need to do more to address abuse.

Lyell discussed the issue in a recent podcast released by another SBC agency, saying she thinks there are key factors churches should understand about sex abuse.

Im going to say two things that the church needs to realize and understand and that is, first of all, that sexual abuse does not only happen to children, she told Trillia Newbell, host of the Better Together podcast produced by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. And second, is that sexual assault is not only rape.

As the SBC confronts allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct in its ranks, leaders of some of its affiliated organizations as well as other denominations are seeking to educate clergy and other staffers about appropriate boundaries as they relate to adults in their congregations, classrooms and counseling sessions.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. confirmed that Lyell spoke to him in May 2018 about her allegations of inappropriate sexual contact and abuse of power in a relationship with David Sills, then-professor of missions and cultural anthropology. Mohler also affirmed Lyell for being right and courageous in speaking up about the heartbreaking situation and making him aware of it.

We followed the best procedures available and responded to Jennifer by arranging a conversation with the professor at the earliest opportunity, Mohler told Religion News Service on Tuesday. He was out of the country so within hours of his return we had a face-to-face conversation and as a result of that conversation he was no longer on the faculty of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The lead and executive pastors of a Louisville church where Sills was a member told RNS that Sills also is no longer affiliated with it.

Although he was not on church staff, upon hearing of these allegations concerning David Sills, our church acted swiftly by publicly condemning his behavior and by removing him from any position of service, said Bill Cook and Jeff Elieff. He is no longer a member of Ninth and O Baptist Church.

Sills also resigned last year as president of Reaching and Teaching International Ministries, a Louisville-based missions group he had founded. Attempts by RNS to reach Sills were unsuccessful.

Asked if he thought Sills should be a professor elsewhere or otherwise involved in ministry, Mohler said: I would say that the behavior indicated in this charge is clearly incompatible with Christian ministry.

Mohler said his institution has extremely clear policies about boundaries between faculty and seminarians.

The secular world looks at negotiating all the boundaries, he said. Our boundaries are that we uphold a biblical standard of sexual morality, a biblical definition of marriage, and we do not allow for any kind of romantic, much less sexual, relationship between faculty and students, period.

Mohler said that perspective is taught in classes on ethics and pastoral practice, and students and faculty are trained on how to prevent and respond to sex abuse allegations. Late last year, the seminary appointed its first womens support coordinator to receive complaints about sexual harassment or other misconduct.

Some faith groups have specific policies that ban sexual or romantic relationships between clergy and congregation members as an abuse of power. Others do not address the topic, experts say.

Margo M.R. Stone, executive director of the Midwest Ministry Development Service near Chicago, said the Catholic Church and major Protestant denominations have policies about sexual misconduct that can be adapted by regional organizations such as dioceses, presbyteries and synods. Most also require periodic attendance at a boundaries workshop.

But autonomous and nondenominational congregations may or may not have them. And rules about consensual relationships also will vary.

The point that we make in talking with pastors and denominations is that once a personal relationship begins, the pastoral relationship is lost, i.e., one cannot pastor and date the same person, said Stone, a clinical psychologist whose office is part of the Ministry Development Network that serves churches from the Rocky Mountains to West Virginia.

It behooves the pastor to ensure that the members spiritual needs are met through another pastor or group, said Stone, whose organization often works with pastors who are being disciplined for misconduct.

Stone said ministers always need to be aware that there is an inherent power differential between pastor and parishioner and its their responsibility to not abuse that power.

Personal needs should be met in personal relationships, not pastoral relationships, she said.

Thomas Plante, an expert on clergy sex offenders, said review boards addressing Catholic sex abuse policies have concentrated on children and vulnerable adults, such as the elderly and people with cognitive disabilities. But that has changed in the wake of charges against now-defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, whom Vatican officials found guilty of sexual crimes against adults as well as minors.

Thats kind of exploded, I think, in the past six months, said Plante, a former vice chair of the U.S. Catholic bishops national review board. Now were saying: What about all adults where you have any kind of power or control or authority?

But the Santa Clara University psychology professor said even as boundary issues related to adults are given more attention, there can be particular dilemmas for clergy that professionals like psychologists and psychiatrists do not often face.

The clerics are out there in the real world with real people and theyre at the bedside, theyre having dinner at their homes, theyre visiting them in jail or in hospitals, said Plante, past president of the American Psychological Associations Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

Its a balancing act because on one hand you want people to be able to do ministry, but you want to make sure they do it in such a way that they avoid potential exploitative dual relationships.

The board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals adopted a resolution at its March 7 meeting saying it laments the tragic violation of trust by ministers of the gospel who have sexually abused church members, and particularly children.

The organization reiterated its pastoral code of ethics and called for investigations without defensiveness, decisive disciplinary action for corroborated violations and support for those affected by abuse.

The NAE also hailed those who speak up about sexual abuse.

Whistleblowers who bring these violations to light perform an important service to the church and to our society, it said.

Many evangelical churches and ministries already have systems in place addressing sexual misconduct and abuse, NAE President Leith Anderson said in a Tuesday statement, but this resolution reminds us to do all we can to prevent these horrors and to protect and support victims.

Lyell declined an interview with RNS. But she said in an email message that she was 26 when Sills first abused her and 38 when the relationship and the alleged abuse ended. In her statement, she said more adults need to have their voices heard.

There are plenty of reasons to stay silent in a situation such as this, said Lyell, now 41. But we must not be silent. We must clearly tell the truth so that our churches and ministries are safe and as pure as they can be.

READ THIS STORY AT RELIGIONNEWS.COM

Article originally published by Morning Star News. Used with permission.

Photo courtesy: RNS/Adelle M. Banks
Maines Democratic governor, Janet Mills, proposed a bill Thursday that would let physician assistants and nurses perform abortions, saying such a change in law is needed to broaden the access to reproductive health care.

The bill, LD 1261, would allow an advanced practice registered nurse or a physician assistant perform abortions. Under current Maine law, only doctors can perform abortions.

The law would increase the number of abortion clinics in the state from three to 18, according to supporters.

Every woman in Maine should be able to access reproductive health care when and where she needs it, regardless of her zip code, Gov. Janet Mills said. Allowing advanced nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform medication-administered abortions, which are already permitted in other states, will ensure Maine women, especially in rural areas of our state, can access reproductive health care services. It is time to remedy this inequity that negatively impacts too many Maine women.

The ACLU and Planned Parenthood have pushed for such a change to the law, according to the Bangor Daily News.

Already, eight states permit medical personnel other than doctors to perform abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Carroll Conley, executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine, opposes the bill.

We just feel that health care and any expansion of it should be life-affirming and not life-ending, Conley told the Portland Press Herald. Making health care more accessible is not contrary to our mission as long as its life-affirming.

Michael Foust is a freelance writer. Visit his blog, MichaelFoust.com.

Photo courtesy: Getty Images
Yes, its beginning to look a lot like Christmaswhich, for many of us, feels like a rush into chaos. Celebrating Advent during this season slows us down and helps our hearts and minds be reoriented around the coming of Christ.Yes, its beginning to look a lot like Christmaswhich, for many of us, feels like a rush into chaos. Celebrating Advent during this season slows us down and helps our hearts and minds be reoriented around the coming of Christ.
With 90,000 students online and on campus, Grand Canyon University (GCU) now ranks as the biggest Christian college in America.

After a decade growing its bottom line and its enrollment as a for-profit entity, GCU transitioned to nonprofit status in July 2018. Meanwhile, the for-profit college industry that GCU tried for years to leave behind continues to crash.

The Pentecostal Dream Center in Los Angeles has lost $38 million since buying a group of schools that used to be run by the second-largest for-profit operator in the country, the Education Management Corporation, The New York Times recently reported.

Last week, the US government cut off its student loan funds after finding that one of the acquired schools, Argosy University, used loans owed to students for its own expenses, and several of the campuses owned by Dream Center Education Holdings closed, as the US Department of Education recommends bankruptcy.

While GCU has been clear about trying to get away from the for-profit stigma, ...

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James MacDonald used church funds for African safari, lavish vacations, says former staff

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The recently ousted pastor of Harvest Bible Chapel James MacDonald took a lavish African safari vacation on the church's dime, a move the elders supported, a letter from his former bodyguard says.

The pricey excursion is but one example of misappropriation of ministry resources, other similar letters from previous and present church staff say, which were submitted to the elders several weeks ago.

Such allegations are but the latest controversy at the Chicago-area multi-campus megachurch, which continues to navigate changes in leadership as more top officials step down amid the fallout. Over the weekend, elder Steve Huston, who formerly chaired the HBC executive committee, resigned from his leadership post and apologized at a Saturday service for "ungodly" spending.

In a Saturday post on her blog, journalist and former Moody Radio host Julie Roys noted that in a January letter  which was leaked to Roys  Jacob Ross, MacDonald's former bodyguard, sent to church leadership it was explained that MacDonald was not satisfied with a $5,000 budget for a vacation the church had allotted for him to take after a missions trip the longtime pastor said was stressful.

The $5,000 vacation was for an African safari in 2015 and MacDonald reportedly thought the amount was too small as he wanted to shoot a high-value animal, a sable to be specific, which cost $15,000 to $20,000, Ross noted in the letter.

MacDonald, who was fired last month after profane comments he made on a hot mic were played on the air by local radio personality Mancow Muller, reportedly called the former chief financial officer of the church to wire him the extra funds. The letter explains that the church also footed the bill for MacDonald, Ross and HBC Executive Pastor Jeff Donaldson  who is still on staff  for a three- to four-day stay at a resort in the Dominican Republic, in addition to flying each of their wives out to join them. MacDonald justified these expenses because of the "extreme stress" he experienced during the trip.

Roys also noted that another church employee penned a letter alleging that MacDonald green-lighted a $40,000 expense for a fence for a deer herd at Camp Harvest in Michigan, as "austerity measures such as removing the coffee and water dispensers, were being implemented at the church.

"These expenditures were in addition to MacDonalds salary, which the church continues to keep private. However, Dave Corning, a founding elder who chaired the elder board for 21 years, told me that in 2009, MacDonald was making a combined $550,000 from both the church and Walk in the Word, MacDonalds broadcast ministry," Roys reported Saturday.

Other letters by both current and former staff that were submitted to the elders five weeks ago also outlined various kinds of financial malfeasance and referenced numerous instances where MacDonald's temper exploded and how he mistreated church employees, contractors and other Christian leaders.

Former executive director of business operations at HBC Dean Butters explained in his letter that the church had paid $50,000 to help MacDonald move and store his personal belongings, that MacDonald used church funds to purchase over $500 worth of cigars, and gave a waitress a $400 tip with church funds. Butters also explained in his letter to the elders that MacDonald demanded his office be renovated in 2013, which cost $150,000, while all senior and middle management, and their direct reports, had their pay reduced by 10 percent.

Harvest Bible Chapel is currently accredited by ministry watchdog group the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

ECFA President Dan Busby told CP that they will be reviewing the allegations.

The new information alleging financial impropriety at Harvest Bible Chapel is obviously a cause for significant concern," he said. "We will be addressing the implications of these allegations immediately and expect to have more information about ECFAs response in the coming days.

Ross told Roys he left his bodyguard position because MacDonald kept verbally abusing him; he was called stupid, incompetent, worthless, and of no use to him and he could not take it any longer. Until now, Ross said he had kept quiet about everything that has been transpiring out of both fear and a desire to not harm his church.

Those who are seeking to make the correct decision regarding the future of Harvest Bible Chapel simply cant without the correct information," he said of his decision to speak. Ross also indicated that he thinks most of the elders, staff and parishioners are not aware of the multiple situations he documented in his letter.

Likewise, Butters explained that he left the church because he could no longer trust the leadership, adding that the things I was seeing with my eyes, hearing with my ears, and feeling in my soul became more convincing than the narrative that was continually being spun.

Roys spent eight months investigating Harvest and published her findings in World magazine in December. Prior to publication, the church sued her as well as two bloggers, along with their wives, who were former members and had been writing critically of MacDonald and HBC for several years, alleging illegal activity. When a judge denied the church two motions in January, HBC ultimately dropped the lawsuit.

The Christian Post reached out to Harvest Bible Church for comment on this article but did not receive a response by press time.

A March 10 team update posted on the church's website states that the church is committed to providing up-to-date information. The church notes that in the past 25 days they have seen the firing of the founding pastor, seen many staff resign in addition to the entire HBC Elder board, a "significant strain" in their finances with tithes and offerings falling 40 percent, and uncertainty of church-affiliated ministries such as Walk in the Word, MacDonald's teaching ministry.

The church is at present reviewing past business and personnel practices, answering questions church members are asking, identifying interim speakers for weekend services and fielding media inquiries, among other things.

A group of independent advisors is working with Plante Moran, a certified CPA firm, "to conduct a thorough, comprehensive review of the past financial affairs of our church," the church said.

"As our Harvest 2020 team is charged with reviewing all finances within the church, we have found that there was a lack of financial control and oversight as well as questionable spending practices made by the Senior Pastors office. In addition, we have identified there was a separate budget for the Senior Pastors office over which there was not sufficient controls and oversight. This review will certainly include, but not be limited to, the Senior Pastors office. We expect the results to provide information to guide new leadership in policy improvements and greater financial accountability."

The church also said it will ensure that every dollar from tithes will go toward "existing ministry expenses, banking obligations, and staff salaries" and will not be used for the senior pastor's office or past budgets. It also plans to reduce weekly operating expenses (not including mortgages) from $409,000 to $289,000. Additionally, a new department is being created to control how money is spent.

"We know trust is earned over time, and we are working diligently to take actions and to communicate in ways that begin restoring trust. We hope all that we have shared above shows a step in that direction. We also face the reality of our expenses and declined giving. If you call Harvest your church home, if this is where God is calling you to be, yet you have stopped giving your tithes, we are asking you to seek the Lord about restarting your giving. Above all else though, we are trusting the Lord in all things," the team update reads.

MacDonald founded the church over 30 years ago, starting with 18 people.
NAE passes resolution on pastor sex abuse, calls on churches to thoroughly vet all hires

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The National Association of Evangelicals released a resolution advising churches to take greater measures to screen and vet staff and volunteers in light of numerous reports of sexual abuses committed by pastors and staff nationwide.

The NAE board of directors approved a resolution at its semiannual meeting on March 7 called A Call to Sexual Purity and Child Protection. The statement laments the violation of trust by pastors who have sexually abused church members, in particular children.

The resolution comes over a month after the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News released a detailed report outlining how there have been about 700 victims of alleged sexual abuse by 380 Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers nationwide since 1998.

The resolution also comes as one of the largest megachurches in the nation is facing scrutiny over the fact that four former volunteers were charged with sex crimes against minors, including one daycare volunteer who assaulted at least 14 children in a church daycare bathroom.

NAE is an association of over 40 evangelical denominations, and 45,000 churches, schools and organizations worldwide.

Jesus spoke in graphic terms about how God views such offenses: If anyone causes one of these little ones  those who believe in me  to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea, the resolution states, quoting Matthew 18:6.

Whistleblowers who bring these violations to light perform an important service to the church and to our society.

According to outgoing NAE President Leith Anderson, many churches and ministries already have systems in place to address sexual misconduct and abuse.

[B]ut this resolution reminds us to do all we can to prevent these horrors and to protect and support victims, he said in a statement.

The NAE board of directors is calling on all church leaders affiliated with the network to do multiple things. Among those is a call for churches to thoroughly vet all staff hires through rigorous background and reference checks.

Church leaders should also screen and provide child protection training to all volunteers that have access to children. Church leaders should also establish a confidential third party mechanism for receiving reports of sexual abuse in their church and ensure that all members of the church community know how to properly report a concern.

Once concerns are reported, NAE is calling on church leaders to investigate reports promptly and thoroughly without any defensiveness.

Along with taking decisive disciplinary action when sexual abuse allegations have been corroborated, the NAE resolution urges church leaders to offer pastoral care and support the victims that have been affected.

The resolution also calls for every congregational leadership body to adopt its Code of Ethics for Congregations and their Leadership Teams. The code calls on leadership teams to train pastors, staff, and volunteers on methods of preventing abuse, especially to children.

The code presses churches to establish a system of church discipline to punish members who continue to engage in sinful behavior after attempts at restoration have failed.

NAEs new resolution also calls on every pastor to sign and follow the NAE Code of Ethics for Pastors. That code calls on pastors to avoid sinful sexual behavior, resist temptation and identify a personal counselor who can minister to the pastor when needed.

As well, the code calls for pastors to address misconduct of other clergy members directly or by contacting appropriate supervisors to whom that pastor is accountable.

According to the resolution, complacency is not an option for pastors and churches when faced with such evil.

No leader should assume that sexual misconduct and child abuse occurs only in other churches or denominations, the resolution argues. Every church needs clear policies that are consistently implemented to prevent abuses and to deal decisively with any violations of trust in full cooperation with the legal authorities.

In light of the #MeToo movement, there has been a concentrated effort to expose the sexual abuse crimes committed by pastors and clergy.

Last year, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released a report outlining how leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania covered up sexual abuse committed against children by more than 300 priests throughout a 70-year span.

That report led to other states investigating Catholic clergy sex abuse that has taken place in their borders.

In May 2017, Pope Francis acknowledged that the Vatican had about 2,000 cases of sex abuse on backlog.

A Gallup poll released this week finds that more than one-third of American Catholics have questioned whether to remain in the Catholic Church as a result of the sex abuse scandal. However, support for the church was greater among Catholics who attend mass weekly.

As for evangelicals facing their own sex abuse crisis, a summit was held last December at the evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois to talk about sex abuse in the church.

The one-day event featured a number of prominent faces within evangelicalism. Among those to speak at the conference was Nancy Beach, the first female teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church.

Last year, the Chicago-area megachurch saw the resignation of its longtime pastor, Bill Hybels, after he was accused of decades of sexual misconduct.

Beach warned attendees about unchecked power in their church hierarchies. She admitted that she was part of Hybels inner circle.

"The irony is that I knew that this leader was responsible in many ways for opening up doors of opportunity for me and I was benefiting from the refracted light," Beach said, according to the Daily Herald. "So I ask you if you're in the inner circle of a leader, are you in any way complicit in allowing a pattern of abuse or abuse of power to continue?"

Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention, which is not part of the NAE, passed a new resolution on abuse at its annual meeting in Dallas, Texas.

Last month, the president of the convention called for an evaluation of 10 churches highlighted by the newspapers' investigation in Texas. But days later, six of those 10 churches were cleared of acting indifferently toward abuse.

Pastor Rodney Brown, who leads Trinity Baptist Church in Ashburn, Georgia, one of the six churches cleared of wrongdoing, apologized and repented. He admits that he failed his duty as pastor by "not taking action against an individual who had been accused of child abuse in the past at another church."

"This was because of my longstanding friendship with the accused, Brown said in a statement to The Christian Index last Thursday.
(ANSA) - Rome, March 15 - Premier Giuseppe Conte on Friday confirmed that his government intends to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese government for its Belt and Road Initiative. The huge infrastructure plan aims to create a sort of modern Silk Road, with rail, road and port projects.

"Yes, the memorandum will be signed," Conte said. "The memorandum is a non-binding framework agreement. It is not an international accord".


Covenant Seminary distances itself from Revoice conference

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A theologically conservative seminary affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America recently stated that it will not be supporting the Revoice conference.

The first annual Revoice conference, which centered on giving support to gay Christians who want to adhere to biblical sexual ethics, was held in St. Louis, Missouri, last year and drew criticism from some conservative Christians who argued that it was advancing an LGBT agenda and promoting the idea that sexual orientation is fixed.

Jay Sklar, vice president of Academics at Covenant Theological Seminary and a professor of Old Testament, was one of the speakers at the 2018 Revoice gathering.

Clarifying the seminary's stance in a video released last week, Covenant President Mark Dalbey stated that his school will neither support this years Revoice conference nor will any of its staff take part.

As to the Revoice conference, Covenant Seminary does not endorse, promote, or have a role in the Revoice conference. We do not agree with all of the views that were shared or taught at the Revoice conference, Dalbey said.

Covenant Seminary does not advocate for queer theology, Covenant Seminary does not teach that a person should identify as a gay Christian, and Covenant Seminary will not have any of our faculty speaking at the 2019 Revoice conference.

Dalbey took issue with individuals he did not name who had, as he put it, engaged in slanderous attacks against his seminary over the Revoice controversy.

Much of what is being said about Covenant Seminary is sinful, slanderous, violation of the ninth commandment which teaches in the Larger Catechism that we should promote and preserve the good name of our neighbor and ourselves when necessary, he stated.

Denny Burk, professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College and a critic of Revoice, celebrated the Dalbey statement.

I was really grateful to read a strong and clear statement about human sexuality from the President of Covenant Theological Seminary, wrote Burk.

Last year, Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis hosted the Revoice conference, a gathering of a few hundred LGBT individuals in churches who adhere to biblical standards of sexual ethics.

Revoices official mission statement was to "encourage, support, and empower gay, lesbian, and other same-sex-attracted Christians so they can experience the life-giving character of the historic, Christian sexual ethic."

While Revoice organizers supported the traditional biblical teaching of marriage and sexual ethics, some argued that the conference pushed an LGBT agenda in churches at the expense of sound Christian teaching.

Covenant found itself in the crosshairs of the debate when Sklar agreed to be a speaker. Last year, Dalbey released a statement defending Sklars decision to speak at Revoice, while reaffirming his seminarys stance on biblical sexual ethics.

To say, I am a Christian who struggles with 'x' kind of ongoing temptation to certain kinds of sin, is part of the testimony of ones sanctification but is not the foundation of who we are in Christ, stated Dalbey last year.

In all of life, we must hold faithfully to the Bibles teaching as we reach those who do not yet know Jesus and as we help those who do to remain faithful to him.

Pushing back against Revoice, a conference called "God's Voice" was held in February with speakers such as Stephen Black opposing the label "LGBT Christian."

Revoice is scheduled to have its second conference in St. Louis on June 5-8.
John Gray addresses cheating rumors on 'The Real,' says he only had an 'emotional affair'

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Pastor John Gray set the record straight on the daytime talk show The Real on Monday with his wife, Aventer, rejecting rumors that he was unfaithful to his wife but admitting he had an "emotional affair" with someone.

Co-host Adrienne Bailon asked Gray directly if he stepped out of his marriage and had an affair.

"The answer is no, I didn't," Gray responded. His wife, who sat next to him, immediately applauded.

Gray recently became pastor of Relentless Church in Greenville, South Carolina, after years of preaching at Joel Osteens Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. He had come under much criticism for gifting his wife with a $200,000 Lamborghini for their eight-year anniversary just months after he confessed to listening to voices that lured him away and almost caused the couple to get a divorce.

He explained on Monday, "Over a year ago, my wife and I were in a very difficult place in our marriage, and in that time, I began to converse with someone  other than a counselor, other than a pastoral leader, which is where I should have taken my issues and challenges  and began to converse, and I was even in the presence of that person one time. But being in the presence of someone is not the same as sleeping with them. I did not sleep with anyone."

The charismatic minister said it was wrong and is taking responsibility for sharing things about his marriage with anyone other than his wife or counselor. He also went on to address rumors of an alleged love child.

"There's no baby, none of that," he said. "It's important for me to take responsibility for the areas where I did come up short. Sharing things about my marriage, outside of my wife and outside of trusted counselors, is an emotional affair. It was wrong. I take responsibility for that. But I will not take responsibility for that which I did not do."

Last summer, Gray opened up to his church, explaining that for about two years he and his wife had been contemplating divorce. Aventer also addressed the congregation explaining why she chose not to leave her husband despite his unspecified actions. The wife later alluded to a "strange woman," sparking rumors.

"People act like this is something brand new," Gray told The Real host. "But we've walked through this. We have peace. But people don't."

Then in January, Gray told his congregation that the only children he had were the two with his wife. A spokesperson for Gray confirmed to The Christian Post that "officially, Pastor John was speaking on the topic of an alleged child outside of his marriage during that sermon.

He does not have one," the church told CP of the claimed lovechild.

While on "The Real," Gray also defended his lavish gift to his wife and addressed his controversial visit with President Donald Trump at the White House.

He assured that "not one cent" of his church's money was used for the purchase of the Lamborghini and that it all came from his personal life savings. He gave the gift after they dealt with significant health challenges and realized that "nothing is promised."

Aventer Gray noted that their journey as a couple began over their connection over music, love for people, love for God and cars. She also recognized why many who don't know the couple would be surprised and confused by the gift.
Church raises money to help furloughed federal workers during gov't shutdown

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As the partial federal government shutdown moves toward a fourth week, a historic church in Memphis, Tennessee, has stepped in to help their affected members weather an uncertain period of missed paychecks.

Pastor Donald Johnson of Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church told News Channel 3 that a few of his members work for government agencies such as the IRS. So when he first heard about the shutdown he began proactively looking at ways to help.

I just realized people were going to be affected by it, and we didnt want to spend any time just arguing and fighting about what the president is doing," Johnson said.

He combed through the churchs database and found eight members who were federal workers. He then collected an offering and had the churchs financial board match what was collected and was able to raise $8,000.

The affected workers were asked to stand in church on Sunday and were given nearly $1,000 each.

We didnt want to look at them as a handout or people that were asking, but we wanted to be kind of proactive in that area," Johnson said.

Church member Janice Bankston who has worked for the IRS for nearly 35 years, told Fox 13 that she survived being furloughed before but this shutdown feels a bit different. She added that the past few weeks have been stressful.

The uncertainty of whats going to happen, how soon we can return, dont know how youre going to pay your bills, Bankston told Fox 13.

Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Kimberly Strassel noted that unlike other shutdowns  like Obama's 16-day shutdown in 2013 in which "the administration immediately furloughed workers and cut pay for private contractors," and shut down Head Start and placed barricades around the World War II memorial  President Trump told the Office of Management and Budget to make "this event as painless as possible."

"Yet there are no legal fixes for some truly painful effects  including Fridays missed paycheck for 800,000 federal workers," Strassel added.

While there will be no further payments for food stamps or for the Coast Guard, she noted that under the partial federal shutdown some agencies can continue to function to protect safety and human life and property, "as well as in aid of the presidents fulfilling constitutional duties."

As a result, programs such as Social Security and Medicare fall under indefinite appropriations and must continue during the shutdown. For example, even though the Social Security Administration and Treasury Department are both technically shut down, they have to process Social Security checks that operate under continuous appropriations as well as tax refunds.

Bankston received her pay two weeks ago and expects to be paid on Friday but said it wouldnt be her full paycheck and she wouldnt have much left after taxes are deducted.

Its very scary, Ive been able to get some creditors to put off receiving a payment and some are saying no you have to bring the payment on in, Bankston explained. Its very scary to know youre not going to have any income coming in.

Reacting to the assistance from her church, she said: I didnt see it coming, but I am grateful, very grateful.

Johnson told Fox 13 that he's hoping other churches will mobilize and help their affected members, and noted that if they have to help affected members financially again, they will. He's praying, however, that the shutdown will end.

Well do it again if it goes on. Were praying that things change but if it doesnt, were not going to let them go without, how about that! Johnson said.
120 people killed, 140 homes destroyed by Nigeria Fulani since February

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At least 120 people have been killed by alleged Fulani militant attacks since February in the Kaduna state of Nigeria with the latest attacks on Monday resulting in the deaths of over 50 and the destruction of more than 140 homes.

The governor of Kaduna state, Nasir El-Rufai, imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew this week in the troubled Kajuru Local Government Area as thousands have been displaced from their homes by violence caused by militant Fulani herdsmen.

The curfew comes as there have been a string of recent attacks against communities within the predominantly Christian Adara chiefdom of southern Kaduna.

On Monday, 52 people were killed, dozens injured and around 143 homes were destroyed in attacks on the villages of Inkirimi, Dogonnoma and Ungwan Gora in the Maro district of the Kajuru Local Government Area, according to Christian Solidarity Worldwide.

The Monday attack followed an attack on Sunday in the Ungwan Barde village in Kajuru in which 17 people were killed and dozens of homes were burned.

In late February, there was another attack in Maro that resulted in the deaths of about 38 Christians and saw homes and a church burned. On Feb. 10, 10 people were killed in an attack in Ungwan Barde as six others were killed in isolated attacks the day before.

CSW, a United Nations-recognized NGO that advocates for persecuted Christians worldwide, reports that victims in the attacks on Monday included women and children. Survivors told the nonprofit that the attackers were separated into three groups. One group shot and killed people, the second set fire to buildings, and a third ran after people fleeing the scene.

According to CSW, one victim of the attack who suffered a deep cut delivered a stillborn baby shortly after.

We are deeply disturbed by the resurgence of militia attacks in southern Kaduna, and extend our deepest condolences to the Adara people, CSW Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas said in a statement.

CSW believes that the recent violence could have been incited by Kaduna Governor el Rufais claims on the eve of Nigerias presidential elections that 66, mostly Fulani, people were killed in Kajuru.

The claim was refuted by the Nigerian Emergency Management Agency. The Kaduna State Chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria accused the governor of delivering false information.

Nonetheless, Rufai didnt back down from the claim and later raised the death toll to 133 killed, according to CSW. Rufai also ordered the arrest of nine Adara elders and village chiefs.

The Adara community is still reeling from the death of Adara chiefdom leader Raphael Maiwada Galadima, a Catholic man who was abducted and killed last October.

In December 2018, the Kaduna government divided the Adara chiefdom into two emirates.

We echo the appeal for the immediate and unconditional release of the Adara elders, who have been detained arbitrarily. In the interests of justice and equity, we call for the restoration of the Adara Chiefdom, Thomas said. [We] urge all who are in positions of authority to refrain from making unsubstantiated accusations capable of inciting violence and damaging fragile community relations even further.

Nigeria ranks as the 12th worst country in the world when it comes to Christian persecution, according to Open Doors USAs 2019 World Watch List.

In 2018 alone, thousands of Christians were killed by militant Fulani herdsmen, leaving some to say that genocide is occurring in the Middle Belt of Nigeria.

Kaduna state is not alone in suffering from Fulani violence as other states in the Middle Belt have faced it too.

On March 4, Fulani militants in the Benue state reportedly attacked three villages, killing 23 people with bullets and machetes, according to International Christian Concern.

CSW is calling on the Nigerian federal government to address the spike in violence in a decisive and unbiased manner.

The relentless death and destruction is a sad indictment of the continuing failure by both levels of government to fulfill the primary mandate of protecting all its citizens impartially, Thomas argued.
After 56 years of marriage, couple dies hours apart holding hands

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A Michigan couple whose family described as inseparable in life died hours apart while holding hands earlier this month.

The daughters of the storybook couple, Will and Judy Webb, who died on March 6, told Fox 2 that their parents who met when they were just 14, wouldnt have wanted to die any other way.

"At 14 they met and were friends, they dated other people, they were engaged to other people," Marybeth Webb, one of the late couples daughters explained. "And then they were both single when he went to [the] Army. So she was like, I didn't have anyone to write, so I started writing your dad.'"

The couple forged a friendship through letters. Judy wrote Will when he served in Korea and they soon fell in love. On Feb. 16, 1963, they eventually got married and moved to Melvindale where they raised their children.

And their daughters grew up understanding the strong bond between their parents.

"They always had their arms on each other. If she was away five minutes, he would say, 'Where's mama, have you seen mama?'" another daughter, Lori Thomas, said.

It wasnt until several months ago the daughters, who are all nurses, said that the bond between their parents was first threatened by sickness. Judy suffered complications from what was supposed to be a routine surgery and things started going downhill from there and they watched their father go down with her.

"It went bad," Lori explained. "She ended up coding from it. My father watched it and broke."

Will, who was 77, collapsed the morning after his wife coded. Even though he and his wife were being treated in separate hospitals, the couple still maintained a physical and emotional bond that medical experts couldnt explain.

"She would get a fever from her infection; he would get a fever. Couldn't figure out where his was coming from because there was no source," Marybeth said. "She ended up with encephalopathy as a complication from the antibiotic she was on; he ended up with encephalopathy. Both ended up unresponsive at the same time, ended up back in the ICU."

It was soon clear that Will was dying.

"I put him in hospice and let God take it from there, and my mom just started declining so bad we said we have to get them back together, we can't do this, they can't die without one another," Ann Warren, another daughter, told Fox 2.

"We said 'Mom, you want to see dad?' She said 'Yes.' (She was) all excited and they brought mom through the door in dad's room and he looked over and saw her and said 'Mama!' And that was like the last thing he said," Warren added.

About four days before the couple died they were brought together in the same hospice where their daughters put their beds together so they could hold hands.

"They were holding hands and when my dad took his last breath, my mom went like this rubbing his hand," Lori said. "She wasn't responding but she knew he died, so she rubbed his hand, like I'll be there soon  and she was."

Even though their parents are gone, the sisters described the gift of love their parents left them as a treasure.

"We all have this long line of love we just treasure," Warren said. "That's why no one should ever settle. If you have someone you truly love you should fight for it. They fought for their love every day."
Calling same-sex attraction sinful makes LGBT individuals 'more like the rest of us,' says evangelical leader

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Saying that same-sex sexual attraction is sinful means that LGBT individuals are more like the rest of us not less so, according to a conservative evangelical leader.

Denny Burk, professor at Boyce College and president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, gave a lecture last week on the debate over whether having same-sex attraction was itself sinful.

Speaking before an audience on Mar. 7 at the Chapel Banquet Hall at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary of Kansas City, Missouri, Burk analyzed how the Bible approached defining sin when it came to desires and temptation.

Insofar as same-sex orientation designates the experience of sexual desire for a person of the same sex, yes, it is sinful. Insofar as same-sex orientation indicates emotional attractions that brim with erotic possibility, yes, those attractions too are sinful, concluded Burk.

Insofar as sexual orientation designates an identity, yes that identity too is a sinful fiction that contradicts Gods design for His creation. All of it is sinful.

When examining how this applied to the debate over LGBT acceptance in the church, Burk stated that to call same-sex attraction sinful does not make gay people less like the rest of us. On the contrary, it makes them more like the rest of us.

We are not singling out gay people as if their experience is somehow more repugnant than everybody elses, said Burk. All of us bear the marks of our connection to Adam.

All of us are crooked deep down. All of us have thoughts and inclinations and attitudes that are deeply antithetical to Gods intentions for us. All of us need renewal from the inside out and that can only come from the grace of Christ.

Burk added that he was not arguing that all sin has the same consequence, but he was stating that all sins have the same source and that source is in every single one of us.

The odd thing about what you see in debates among the Christians about this is that were seeing some people wanting to treat same-sex sin as different from all other kinds of sins, continued Burk.

People are usually okay saying if you desire something sinful thats a bad desire, you should repent of it, except when it comes for this. What I am saying is that we are in this predicament together.

Burk drew upon Matthew 5:27-28, which Jesus spoke of adultery including thoughts, and Jesus temptation in the wilderness to argue that while temptation is not always inherently sinful, it can be.

Burk also took issue with the claim of some, including Matthew Vines in his book God and the Gay Christian, that the Bible does not address sexual orientation.

These concepts of attraction and desire and orientation are altogether in the literature, argued Burk, noting that the Bible has much to say about desire and attraction. In fact, orientation is defined by those terms.

So this is the common way that the terms are used. Sexual orientation is defined by the direction of ones sexual desire over time. Sexual attraction and sexual desire are essentially the same thing.

Last year, Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri hosted the Revoice conference, a gathering of a few hundred LGBT individuals in churches who adhere to biblical standards of sexual ethics.

Revoice garnered controversy over claims that the conference was pushing pro-LGBT ideology into conservative churches. Critics included Michael Brown, host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program.

In a column published last year by The Christian Post, Brown noted that at certain times "the terminology used by Revoice speakers and presenters affirms LGBTQ+ talking points in unhelpful and even dangerous ways."

Brown cited one of the workshops being titled "Redeeming Queer Culture: An Adventure," arguing that a Christian should never self-identify as "queer."

"Even the concept of LGBTQ+ individuals as being part of a 'sexual minority' raises all kinds of red flags, as if sinful temptations and disordered desires grant someone a 'minority' status," he added.

Greg Johnson, lead pastor of Memorial Presbyterian, defended Revoice in an interview with CP last year, noting that gays are part of our mission field.

They are broken people just like us who need Jesus just like us. Jesus didn't come to call the righteous but sinners, said Johnson.

The reality is that the Gospel has power, and Jesus saves sinners. Straight sinners and gay sinners and rich sinners and poor sinners. He saves them and calls them to a life of self-sacrificial discipleship.

For his part, Burk has been critical of Revoice, arguing that the 2018 conference failed to add any tangibly new content to the debate on celibate gay Christianity.

I don't think anything new has been added to our knowledge about the celibate gay identity movement that we didn't already know, wrote Burk in a column last year.

In short, the conference was of a piece with what has come before in books and articles and other conferences. Perhaps the only new wrinkle is the involvement of a PCA church and the questions that raises for that denomination.

Last month, around 300 people attended God's Voice, a conference organized in response to Revoice that was held at Fairview Baptist Church of Edmond, Oklahoma.

Our desire is to bring the clarity of the Word of God, explained Stephen Black, executive director with First Stone Ministries and part of the Gods Voice Committee in an earlier interview with CP.

Gods Word promises Gods grace which has the power to bring souls to a sincere, born again experience and to Gods transforming power.
Charlotte Pence: Abortion must be an important social justice cause for millennials

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The daughter of Vice President Mike Pence is urging millennials to channel their passion for social justice to include advocacy against abortion because it is a massive injustice.

In an Tuesday editorial in the Washington Times, Charlotte Pence, who is now a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, opined that if her generation is to care for people who are marginalized and oppressed, they must be concerned with the plight of unborn children.

"Yes, abortion is a violation of providing life to a human being  but it should also be acknowledged as oppression in its barest form. It ostracizes the weaker members of society, and it places a particular burden on minority communities," she wrote.

She noted that abortion rates continue to vary by factors like ethnicity, race, and income level, and compared the fight to save unborn lives to the abolitionist movement, which worked to end slavery and give meaning to every life.

"In the same way, we must accept the hard reality that in allowing the celebration of abortion, we are committing injustice against human beings. The families that deal with the ramifications of an abortion also experience trauma, which, in turn, impacts the communities in which they live, creating a destructive cycle," Pence said.

"Abortion is also a womens issue, but not in the way in which the progressive left has used it. The pro-choice message tells a woman the way in which she should live. The narrative is not one of empowerment and self-sufficiency; it is of fear."

And women who have had abortions are not to be blamed, she stressed, because society has failed them.

"I refuse to preserve the lie we tell girls from the time they are young: That the child they carry is an inconvenience, that they are not capable of rising above unforeseen life circumstances, that we will not reach out to help them," she said.

Pence does not believe that an abortion-free world will begin with government, noting how the U.S. Senate recently blocked consideration of legislation that would provide medical care to children born alive following botched abortions.

"We are in a pivotal time in our culture that will decide the moral ground we stand upon. This has to be a grass-roots movement of kindness, love and a sincere demand that the weakest in our society no longer be silenced and removed," she said.

"Only then will we see a cultural shift where we start to right the wrongs of the past and move toward a better future for our children  the ultimate desired outcome for social justice. Policy change is not the only response here, but rather a coming together should be our fight."

Charlotte Pence is the author of Where You Go: Life Lessons from My Father and co-author of the children's book Marlon Bundo's Day in the Life of the Vice President. Pence's mother, second lady Karen Pence, a trained watercolorist and art teacher, did the illustrations.

"I have always wanted to be a writer. I want to be a storyteller. I want to connect people. I also want to help facilitate conversations about religion and faith," Charlotte Pence said in an interview with The Christian Post last fall.

"I am not sure exactly what it is going to look like but often in our millennial generation, topics of faith are not necessarily talked about as much. I would love to start that conversation because I think a lot of people are very curious about religion and faith even though it's not talked about."
Christchurch terror attack: 5 things you need to know

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Gunmen struck two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, leaving 49 dead and 48 with serious injuries in attacks that were likely motivated by anti-immigrant animus.

The acts of violence were committed as worshipers gathered for prayers around lunchtime at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque in Central Christchurch, the largest city on New Zealands South Island.

Prime Minister Jacinda Arder described the mass shootings as a terrorist attack and one of the Pacific nation's "darkest days."

Here's a list of five important things you need to know about Fridays attacks.

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A Christian Genocide on the World's Most Christian Continent: Searching for Truth Amid the Bloodshed

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Thousands of Christians have been killed in the past year alone. Families have lost their loved ones, their churches, their houses, and everything they have in an instant.

Some are calling it an all-out genocide in the most Christian country in the world's most Christian continent in terms of numbers.

The truth of what is happening in the Fulani conflict in Nigeria remains muddled by politics, misreporting, and misinformation. But one group is saying that there is deliberate deception taking place, one that seeks to portray the Fulani attackers simply as "herdsmen," and the conflict as strictly a clash between farmers and cattle herders.

The truth, according to the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule of Law, a nonprofit, nongovernment organization headquartered in Nigeria, is that radical Islamists have taken over the Fulani, spreading jihad by deliberately slaughtering Christians and burning their churches.

At the same time, they are said to be using the narrative of agriculture as a cover to claim that the clashes are of a nonreligious nature.

The Nigerian government, and much of reporting in Western media, takes that line of thinking, and refuses to characterize the ongoing slaughter by the Islamic Fulani against the largely Christian farmers as a religious war.

Emeka Umeagbalasi, Board Chairman of Intersociety, told The Christian Post in a series of phone and email interviews on Aug. 2 that there is strong evidence, when analyzing the patterns and trends, to suggest that the conflict is far from just about cattle grazing, but is a deliberate jihad aimed at rooting out Christianity.

Still, there are a number of different actors in the crisis on Africa's most populous nation, which is roughly divided in half between its Muslim and Christian inhabitants.

Organizations representing Fulani herdsmen are distancing themselves from the radicals carrying out violence in their name. Several reports have documented that the attackers are using AK-47 rifles and sophisticated weapons to kill as many people as possible, suggesting they are being funded and supplied by others.

So who precisely is killing thousands of Christians, converting churches to mosques, and displacing multitudes of families, leaving them with nothing?

Families Losing Everything

Everything they have, they have lost in a moment. Their houses, churches, communities, any stability they might have known, even their loved ones and relatives. And then they are forced to run for their lives.

That is the reality for so many Christian families, according to Open Doors USA, a leading persecution watchdog group that has been assisting victims of Fulani violence in Nigeria.

Chris Summers, senior writer at the relief group, told CP in an August 3 phone interview that such stories are happening all over rural towns in Nigeria's Middle Belt.

"Just the idea of being trapped with your family in some of these villages and knowing that your village is about to get raided, and essentially having to run, leave everything behind, and knowing that you are about to become an internally displaced person," he said of the circumstances that really stand out amid the suffering.

"You're not sure what you're going to do, because your entire village is forced to leave, so any kind of community you had is stripped away. Your church is gone, which for many of these Christians in the Middle Belt, their church is the center of their community and the center of their social structure. So the church is gone, it is burned, and they may not ever see it again."

Summers continued:

"From one moment living in a town, and in the next moment you have nothing. And not only do you have nothing, but all of your friends and neighbors that have not been killed, they also have nothing."

Open Doors said that it delivered aid to those in need following large raids near Jos in June, where over 3,000 Christians were displaced, and over 200 were slaughtered.

A worker with the watchdog group said that the survivors were left in a "pathetic situation."

"Life has become a living hell for them. They have lost loved ones, houses, and all they labored for in the twinkling of an eye. The agony they are going through is hard to describe," the worker, Kerrie, said at the time.

"We saw people who were still in a haze over what they have just gone through. Children were crying hysterically, perhaps because of hunger or perhaps because of hunger and the trauma."

Summers explained that Open Doors, which has been active in Nigeria for decades, was able to help with critical relief in Jos and other areas by assisting local churches in setting up informal camps for the people.

"We help the church provide discipleship tools and Bibles to churches that may have been burned down, or it can be more immediate and practical relief aid," he explained, such as assisting children and families that have experienced traumatic abuse.

The Scope of the Slaughter

With the attacks widespread and ongoing, different numbers have emerged as to how many Christians have been killed by the Fulani this year, and in preceding years.

Umeagbalasi, who has authored advocacy publications, spearheaded campaigns and been awarded numerous human rights certificates and merit awards, said that according to Intersociety's latest investigative check on July 11, as many as 1,870 rural Christians have been killed by the Fulani since January 2018.

The killings, many of which have taken place in the old Middle Belt region of northern Nigeria, have also forced over 1.7 million people to flee their homes following years of violence and threats by various Islamic jihadists, including Boko Haram.

Some of the worst Fulani attacks included the raids on villages in Taraba and Adamawa states on July 8 and 9, where no less than 100 Christians were killed, with their homes and churches burnt to ashes.

An even more devastating raid happened in June on 11 villages in Plateau State, where jihadists hacked to death 250 rural Christians, with 238 of their bodies recovered and buried in mass graves.

In terms of statistics, Umeagbalasi explained that they are "easily and unassailably generated through circumstantial evidence, including crime scenes; survivors, victims' relatives and eyewitnesses' accounts; documentations done by local branches of the Christian Association of Nigeria; media; human rights groups; activists; intergovernmental organizations, and victims' indigenous associations."

Intersociety, which says it has consistently followed, documented and advocated against the killings, explained that it has been monitoring casualty rates for the past 10 years, especially since 2015.

The statistics Umeagbalasi shared break down the killings of the past few years, and highlight the most violent periods. No fewer than 1,300 Christians were killed between February and December 2016, with another 1,700 Christian deaths occurring in 2017. All in, all, he says that since June 2015, over 5,400 Christians have been killed in radical Fulani attacks  and this is not including deaths at the hands of Boko Haram and other factions.

The impact of the Fulani has been examined in a number of major studies. The 2017 Global Terrorism Index reported that between 2012 and 2016, when the attacks where less frequent, Fulani herdsmen still killed over 2,500 people in Nigeria.

The Index points out that it is difficult to determine whether Fulani extremists operate as a single nonstate actor and are working together like a typical terrorist organization, or whether there are different Fulani groups independent from one another but fueled by the same cause.

Most recently, The International Crisis Group released its own research on July 26, finding that over 1,300 people were killed in attacks this year in Benue, Plateau, Adamawa, Nasarawa and Taraba states.

Although labeling it as a "farmer-herder conflict," ICG positioned that the attacks have become Nigeria's gravest security challenge, claiming more lives than the Boko Haram insurgency. The report blamed the federal government for failing to protect citizens and to prosecute attackers, warning that the nation's stability is being undermined.

Such numbers are conservative, however. Other groups, such as the Christian Association of Nigeria and church denominational heads in Plateau State, claimed at the end of June that over 6,000 people, mostly women, children, and the elderly, have been killed in night raids by the Fulani in 2018.

A press release said that the 6,000 deaths have been recorded in the northern and Middle Belt states of Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Adamawa, Kaduna, Kwara, Borno, Zamfara, and others.

"What is happening in Plateau state and other select states in Nigeria is pure genocide and must be stopped immediately," read a joint statement at the time.

The Christian leaders called the Nigerian government "to stop this senseless and blood shedding in the land and avoid a state of complete anarchy where the people are forced to defend themselves."

Bosun Emmanuel, the secretary of the National Christian Elders Forum, issued one of the strongest warnings at a conference of Catholic Men's Guild in Lagos, also in June.

"Realistically speaking, Christianity is on the brink of extinction in Nigeria. The ascendancy of Sharia ideology in Nigeria rings the death toll for the Nigerian Church," Emmanuel said.

"In 2018, we can say in 25 years from now, we are facing the risk of being the last Christians in Nigeria. Therefore, Christians should be in the frontline of defending democracy in Nigeria," he added.

Why Are the Fulani Doing This?

According to Umeagbalasi, a crucial understanding is missing in media reporting about the crisis.

Namely that the Fulani have been taken over by a radical jihadist element which is very much intent on burning down churches, killing Christians, and driving them out en masse.

"How many Muslim farmers are being killed by Fulani herdsmen? How many Muslim homes have been destroyed or burned? The answer is in the negative. It has nothing to do with herdsmen-farmer clashes. It is false," he said of the latter argument.

"We don't like to use the [term] 'Fulani herdsmen', we like to use "Fulani jihadists," who are under the guise of herdsmen."

The Intersociety board chairman explained that when it comes to violence, to how many Christians have been killed in comparison to Muslims, "there is no proportionality."

"How many times have you heard or read that the indigenous Christian communities in Nigeria started the violence  where they have been looking for Fulani people and started killing Fulani people?" he asked rhetorically.

He said that when Christians are killed, reprisals from their communities are rare, and cannot be compared to what is being inflicted upon them.

"Killing of Christians is everywhere. Over 500 churches have been lost by Fulani jihadists since 2011 in Benue state alone. There is no proportionality, there is no balance of terror, there is no balance in violence," he continued.

"It is the case of a group hiding under cattle herding to unleash violence on innocent Christian indigenous communities. They destroy the farmlands and convert their churches to mosques."

He argued that the "cardinal intent of the Fulani jihadists and their patrons is to drive out all Christians, not only from the Middle Belt of Nigeria, but possibly from all parts of Nigeria's rain forest regions. The jihadists have in memory what happened to the ancient Christians of Turkey and North Africa, and they are bent on replicating the same in Nigeria."

Umeagbalasi said that such jihadist take-overs have happened in the past as well, such as in the case of Boko Haram, the more infamous terror group known for raiding towns, kidnapping schoolgirls, and bombing government buildings and churches.

He explained that Boko Haram began as a "rag-tag street urchin group" back in 2002, but they were also "infiltrated by fundamentalist Islamists in northern Nigeria's religious, political and security establishments."

One difference is that in their attacks on the government and anyone who stands in their way, Boko Haram has gone on to attack mosques and kill scores of Muslims, along with many Christians.

Umeagbalasi pointed out that the Fulani have so far been attacking Christians exclusively, and said that there have been numerous instances where they have renamed rural Christian lands with Arabic or Islamic names.

He noted that it is true that Fulani herdsmen have lived long in the primitive pastoral realities of cattle herding. From time to time over the years this has led to violence against farmers, with farmlands and crops being burned down, while the herders have accused the farmers of killing their cattle.

He argued that times have changed significantly, however, and that the Fulani need not rely on ancient cattle herding methods any longer.

Looking at the largest cattle grazing nations in the world today, Nigeria is not even in the top 10, he pointed out.

"When you look at the methodology of cattle producing nations, you find that they are using the sedentary method of animal husbandry," he said, referring to the method which allows herders to raise their cattle in one place rather than moving them back and forth across the land.

"Science has revolutionized everything through the act of irrigation," he positioned, which is a process that grows agricultural crops by applying controlled amounts of water to dry areas.

"In this country, out of 930,000 square kilometers (359,000 square miles) of the landmass in Nigeria, over 70 percent of them are located in the north. Which means that there is enough land in the north to be acquired, and use the science and technology to turn the issue of animal husbandry around. In the north, irrigation technology is now very common."

He said that there is little stopping the Fulani from abolishing primitive animal husbandry and replacing it with the globally compatible sedentary method.

The reason why they don't switch over, he insisted, is because their goal "is to continue this kind of crude methodology, so that they can hide under it to propagate their Islamization project."

"They don't want to do that, because they want to Islamacize the whole place, they want to hide under agri-jihadism," he claimed.

Referring back to the news reports, Umeagbalasi accused much of Nigeria's traditional media of not reporting on the crisis accurately. He added that foreign correspondents who may want to come to investigate the situation are fed the Nigerian government's narrative.

"If you want to come to Nigeria to investigate what is happening, your port of call is Lagos," he noted, where journalists meet media representatives who show them what the government wants to be shown, and talk to people who take the government's position.

"The lopsided architecture of media ownership and practice in the country may also be a major contributing factor to unfavorable western media coverage of persecution of Christians in Nigeria," he explained.

Is Climate Change Really to Blame?

Another consistent narrative that has been pushed by some studies, reports, and government officials, has been that that climate change can be partly blamed for what is happening.

The narrative positions that climate change has been leading to desertification, drought and deforestation, forcing cattle herders to seek greener pastures and expand their grazing lands, which leads to the clashes and violence.

Some major Christian leaders who have spoken out against the Fulani attacks, such as Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, have suggested that international efforts need to tackle the harmful effects of climate change, which he accused of "exacerbating ancient rivalries."

Umeagbalasi said that he strongly disagrees with the Church of England leader's thoughts on the issue, however.

"The climate change mantra is the newest among over a dozen false excuses or lies cooked up by the central government of Nigeria to escape responsibility or divert world attention over the butchery. The climate change theorists have again failed just as they failed in all their previous concoctions," he argued.

"The raging anti-Christian violence in Nigeria is premeditated and has nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called 'climate change.' They want to use the cover of pastoralist cattle herding to Islamize Nigeria's rain forest regions," he repeated, insisting that the globally popular sedentary grazing and scientific animal husbandry method is available for livestock management.

"They are chronically being economical with the truth," he added.

Umeagbalasi argued that Welby's meetings with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari have hardly been a positive development, given that the latter is "widely accused of either not doing enough to protect Christians, or being complicit in the butchery."

He accused Buhari's government of using climate change as just another excuse in its search "for an escape route to escape responsibility and accountability, to escape the attention of the international community."

He said that in 2018, Buhari's federal government provided as much as N179 Billion, or close to $500 million USD, to the Fulani to "expand their agro-jihadist operations" under the guise of "national grazing routes and ranching." At the same time, it gave only N10 billion, or $27.7 million USD, for farmers to rebuild their homes, and for victims to be rehabilitated.

"This government wants to cunningly seize or procure communal Christian lands in the Middle Belt and the old eastern region and hand them over to the MACBAN (Miyatti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria)-led Fulani jihadists in the guise of 'national grazing and ranching' policy, after which the areas shall be renamed and Islamized with emirate councils and Islamic caliphates put in place for eternity," he warned.

The Fulani Response; The Government Response

In some respects, the statements from various organizations representing the Fulani have also claimed that the gangs carrying out the attacks are radicals that are masquerading as herders.

Sa'idu Baso, a senior Fulani leader in eastern Nigeria, told BBC News back in May that the attacks are being carried out by militants.

"It is not fair to blame us for every incident because in most cases we are the victims," Baso claimed, stating that herdsmen have had their cattle stolen by bandits.

"Nigerian authorities need to do more to protect our people and their cattle," he added.

Alhaji Bello Abdullahi Bodejo, the national chairman of a Fulani socio-cultural association, Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, has insisted that those carrying AK-47 rifles are not Fulani.

"First and foremost I am condemning the killings, we Fulani socio-cultural association we are not part of any killing, we are not supporting any killing not only in Benue, we are not supporting any killing in Nigeria as a whole. If you see anybody carrying AK-47, maybe that person is an armed robber from another group or bandit or whatever you can call it wearing Fulani cloth," Bodejo stated in January.

In June, following the killing of at least 100 citizens in Plateau state, the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, mentioned by Umeagbalasi, claimed that an earlier statement taking responsibility for the killings did not originate from its association.

"We don't encourage violence; we don't accept it, support it, or condone it in any way and by whosoever. We don't like violence," said the association's national secretary, Usman Baba-Ngelzarma, according to Pulse Nigeria.

As such, the central government of Nigeria has faced accusations from many different sides  from the Christian associations, persecution watchdog groups, independent international reports, and some of the Fulani leaders, stating that it is either complicit, or failing in its duties to protect the people from harm.

For his part, Buhari has strongly denied that his administration is not taking the violence seriously enough, or that he is afraid to speak out because he is of a Fulani background himself.

In June, he claimed that he should not be blamed just because he "looks like one of them," referring to the Fulani.

''... The present herder, I am told, carries AK-47 and people are even blaming me for not talking to them because maybe (they say) I look like one of them. There is some injustice in these aspersions," Buhari said in a statement at the time, as reported by CNN.

"It is noteworthy that many Nigerians still acknowledge that despite the security challenges, this administration has made notable successes in the security sector," he added.

The president has continuously insisted that the military has been successfully dealing with Boko Haram, driving it out of the towns it once occupied, and hampering the terror group's operations.

What is more, Buhari has claimed that the latest attacks are an "evil design" meant to pit Nigerians against each other.

"Repeated acts of mass killings and destruction in parts of the country and Benue State in particular, point to the evil design of enemies of peace and unity who have desperately been trying to bring the country to this sorry point: a brother killing brother, a neighbor killing a neighbor and a community attacking and killing members of another community," the president said in April through his assistant, Garba Shehu.

Though he did not portray the killers as Islamic radicals, he said that those taking life are "hideously evil people who have no iota of respect for humanity, decency and civilization."

What the West, Christians Can Do

Umeagbalasi said that the scaling down of the killings at the end of July and the start of August "most likely arose as a result of rising western concerns and the attention the butchery is beginning to receive from western media and political circles."

He pointed to various efforts, such as a recent debate at the House of Lords in the U.K. on the crisis in Nigeria, for playing a part.

He called on the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution ordering a comprehensive investigation into the killings as a way to step up the pressure and focus.

"[The] Western world, including U.K., EU and USA can tie further development assistance and sale of military hardware to Nigeria to stoppage of the killings and bringing [down the] book on those behind them," he added.

"The perpetrators can also be prosecuted in foreign courts, such as U.K. criminal courts, for crimes against humanity."

The Intersociety chairman added that Christian leaders, especially those in the western world, can add their voices to government representatives and human rights groups and push diplomatic sanctions against the Nigerian government and its political actors "until the killings [are] stopped and discontinued."

Summers of Open Doors pointed to U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with Buhari at the White House in April, where Trump touched upon the killings of Christians, by urging for such matters to continue being discussed by the two governments.

"We would encourage (Americans) to contact their local government representative and ask those questions that need to be asked. We don't want the religious freedom question to be pushed to the back," and behind talk on trade and foreign relations, he added.

"The biggest thing is to pray. We are praying for the victims, and for the victims' families in these most recent attacks, as well as the attacks that have taken the lives of Christians in Nigeria's Middle Belt," he said.

"We are praying for God to intervene, that He would bring an end to the violence, and even work in the heart of these militants" for change, he continued.

"We are praying for peace and for Christians in Nigeria to have a supernatural peace and be able to forgive."

Summers said that one important aspect is "letting yourself find out about these things, and letting it break your heart a little bit."

"The Christians in Nigeria are part of the same family of God that you would go to church with, they are worshiping the same God that we do. Whenever they are under attack, or whenever they are in mourning, we are given the opportunity to mourn with them."
Duke Divinity School student-pastor fighting for life after being shot in Costco parking lot

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Ryan Ware, a 24-year-old graduate student at Duke Divinity School who serves as pastor of two churches in Virginia, is now fighting for his life after he was shot in a Costco parking lot in Durham, North Carolina, Saturday.

The Duke Divinity School community is deeply saddened and troubled by the shooting of one of our students, Divinity School Dean Greg Jones said in a statement to The Chronicle Wednesday. We have been surrounding the victim and his family with love, support and prayers ever since, and we will continue to do so in the coming days."

Ware, who became a licensed pastor last summer, serves as pastor at Wesley Chapel United Methodist in Danville, and Rock Springs United Methodist Church.

Police say, just after 1:30 p.m. on Saturday while he was at the 1500 block of North Pointe Drive, Ware was shot in the stomach while inside his SUV. No arrests have yet been made but a grey or silver sedan was seen speeding from the scene after the shooting.

Police searched Wares SUV, and took a wallet and a cellphone before swabbing for DNA and gunshot residue. Officials also said Ware had been hospitalized with possibly serious and life-threatening injuries.

Wares parents urged people on their social networks to pray for their son on Saturday night as those who were at the Durham Costco at the time of the shooting wished the family well.

My heart goes out to them, I cant even imagine how they feel. It must be just a horrible thing just to have something like that happen to your son, one woman who asked not to be identified said in an interview with ABC 11. She was inside Costco when the shooting happened and witnesses say he was found slumped over in the drivers seat.

The fact that someone would target someone like that, just an innocent person with their life ahead of them, the woman added.

Authorities said Ware remained hospitalized on Thursday. Calls to the two churches Ware pastors were not immediately answered on Friday.

The Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church called for prayers for Ware in a statement on the shooting.

This past weekend, one of our clergy members in the Danville District, and student at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, was the victim of a shooting in North Carolina. We, the Virginia Conference of The United Methodist Church, join together with the Duke Divinity School community in offering prayers for him, the statement said. We ask that our clergy and laity pray for his healing and for strength for his family and friends.

Anyone with information on the shooting is being urged to call Crimestoppers at 919-683-1200.
Education Department Protects Religious Freedom

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Liberty Counsel

March 14, 2019



WASHINGTON, March 14, 2019 /Christian Newswire/ -- The U.S. Department of Education will no longer enforce a restriction that previously prohibited school districts from contracting with faith-based organizations to provide equitable services to vulnerable children solely due to their religious affiliation.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which governs the nation's elementary, middle and high schools, requires that school districts offer low-income or vulnerable students who attend private schools the same services, such as special education, tutoring or mentoring, that public school students receive. The federal law also requires that organizations contracting for those services be independent of "any religious organization."

However, this restriction barring religious organizations from serving as contractors runs counter to the 2017 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, that held that under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, otherwise eligible recipients cannot be disqualified from a public benefit solely because of their religious character.

Liberty Counsel filed an amicus brief in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer. In that case, the High Court found the state of Missouri had unconstitutionally engaged in religious discrimination when it denied publicly funded recycled tire playground surfaces for a church-run preschool and day care center's playground.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said, "The Trinity Lutheran decision reaffirmed the long-understood intent of the First Amendment to not restrict the free exercise of religion. Those seeking to provide high-quality educational services to students and teachers should not be discriminated against simply based on the religious character of their organization."

"I commend the Trump administration and the Department of Education for no longer discriminating against religious organizations that can provide the same high-quality educational services to students and teachers as allowed by others," said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. "The religious freedom of individuals and organizations is protected under federal law and the U.S. Constitution. It is past time to end discrimination against churches and Christian viewpoints," said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics. Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.



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CONTACT: Mat Staver, 407-875-1776, Liberty@LC.org



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Feminists, conservatives, lesbians urge Congress to scrap 'gender identity' from Equality Act

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A coalition of radical feminists, lesbians, and politically conservative women are petitioning the government to scrap "gender identity" in federal civil rights legislation that's being considered in Congress.

The inclusion of this into the Equality Act, these women say, erases sex-based protections feminists and others have fought for in previous decades, and women as a category are essentially scrubbed from the law. Women and girls face increased risk of exploitation by predatory males who will use gender identity to invade their private spaces, they maintain.

The Equality Act is an update to the 1964 civil rights law guaranteeing freedoms previously denied to African-Americans, and is considered by many to be one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacies.

Both the radical feminist organization Women's Liberation Front, a left-wing radical feminist organization, and the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, a bipartisan group of women resisting transgender activism and ideology together despite profound differences on other issues, issued statements denouncing the Equality Act as a "full-frontal assault" on women and girls. The bill, which was introduced Wednesday, has the support of 161 major corporations.

"In the era of #MeToo, its hard to understand why these companies are willing to endanger women and girls by acting so deliberately to undermine the nations indecent exposure and voyeurism restrictions, in what are supposed to be single-sex accommodations. Is it any wonder that many of them have recently faced significant sexual harassment allegations, or had large bias or sexual harassment claims brought against them?" the HATAC statement reads.

The statement cites a report from WalesOnline which notes that in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, where mixed-sex toilets were recently installed in schools, girls are skipping school because boys are shaming them over their periods and the fear being sexually harassed.

"This is no different than what happens in developing nations when menstruating girls have inadequate toilet facilities, or facilities that they must share with boys. To think that this wouldnt occur in developed nations smacks of chauvinistic notions of progress that use per capita income as a proxy for moral development," the bipartisan coalition asserted.

"We ask that these major brands and multinational corporations, and the nonprofit virtue signalers who represent their interests, stand down this full-frontal assault on the privacy and dignity of women and girls. We ask that they act instead to encourage respect for everyones right to single-sex accommodations, as originally guaranteed in all previous civil rights laws recognizing the states interest in discouraging sex-based discrimination against women and girls."

Likewise, board directors of WoLF noted it their statement that "the gender identity provisions of the Equality Act will forbid the law to see sex while legitimizing sex stereotypes, and by doing so, they will destroy the laws ability to fight sexism, or protect women from male harassment and violence. The concept of gender identity is not only unrelated to sexual orientation, in some respects it is directly contrary and undermines the ability to prevent discrimination and harassment against same-sex attracted individuals."

The legislation is being considered largely at the behest of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's leading LGBT activist organization.

"People across the spectrum oppose gender identity ideology because no one really believes in human sex change. Everyone knows you cant change sex, but out of either a desire to be kind, or social pressure, some people are willing to act as though its possible," said Natasha Chart, board chair of Women's Liberation Front, in an email to The Christian Post Thursday.

"This is, and always has been, a polite social fiction. It was introduced to ease both the discomfort of people, primarily men at first, who didnt like the sex stereotyped roles expected of them, and of other people who were upset at seeing others reject sex-stereotyped behavior. But its anachronistic," she continued.

While most of the views of the women of WoLF are decidedly left-of-center, the political left at-large appears to think that they need a new social justice cause, along with an opportunity to present themselves as allies to a marginalized group of people and offer an "everything you know is wrong" kind of critique, she said.

"The irony that theyre mainly doing this on behalf of men, and many very wealthy, white men, seems lost on most of them," she said of the left.

"After so many years of 'RuPauls Drag Race,' is anyone still that bothered by seeing men in dresses and lipstick? Women of every description, especially as we get older, are very likely to wear pants, have short hair, go out without makeup, and most people dont think anything of it."

Thus, those on the left backing the inclusion of gender identity in the Equality Act are attempting to frame this topic to cohere with their standard narrative and enemies, she said, adding that they would otherwise have to engage feminist arguments against gender ideology, which they seem afraid of doing and is harder.

"What they should be concerned about is the inevitable fallout from whats going to be a medical child abuse scandal like nothing theyve ever seen. They think Twitter is judgmental? Wait until they have to face detransitioners and their families, asking why they didnt do anything to stop this," Chart added.

Meg Kilgannon, a conservative Catholic member of the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, believes it is important for people to put aside their differences and deal with the present threats to women and girls. Conservatives and Christians who think transgender ideology and the concept of a self-determined gender identity other than biological sex is so ridiculous it will never be enacted in law are misinformed.

"Conservatives largely don't think we need to say that men can't be women and women can't be men. That's obvious. We don't think we need to talk about that. But we absolutely must say that and we must keep saying it," Kilgannon said in a CP phone interview Thursday afternoon.

The right to even speak those obvious truths is under assault in the proposed legislation, she stressed.

"To say that out loud you could face fines, you could be accused of a hate crime for simply stating the fact that a man is a man. Even if he wears a dress, that does not make him a woman."

Kilgannon told CP that although she might not agree with left-wing women in HATAC and others on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, conservatives should table those differences and fight together because being a women means something.

"And if anyone can claim to be a woman, then it doesn't mean anything to be one," she said.

"I'm willing to work with anyone on this issue, because it is the defining issue of our time."
'Five Feet Apart' film reminds teens love isn't contingent on human touch, director Justin Baldoni says

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Justin Baldoni's directorial debut, the romantic film Five Feet Apart, stars Cole Sprouse and Haley Lu Richardson as two 17-year-olds who have cystic fibrosis  a chronic genetic respiratory disorder with a short life expectancy.

The CFers, as the characters refer to themselves, are both in the hospital for various treatment sessions. But they couldnt be more different: Sprouses Will, the combat boot-wearing artistic type, doesnt take his medical regimen seriously, as hes all but given up the idea of ever beating the illness. Its just life, itll be over before you know it, he says. In turn, Richardsons Stella is a bright and energetic YouTuber who lives according to the rules, determined to get better in hopes of receiving a lung transplant.

Despite their differences, it doesnt take Will and Stella long to fall in love shortly after meeting in the hospitals neonatal wing. However, their relationship is complicated by the fact that they must maintain at least five feet of distance from each other to avoid dangerous cross-infection.

Human touch, Richardson says in the films intro, We need that touch from the one we love almost as much as we need air to breathe. I never understood that until I couldnt have it.

With themes of love, sacrifice, and hope, Five Feet Apart reminds viewers that life is worth living, every breath, no matter how difficult, is precious, and that love isnt contingent on physical touch.

Baldoni, who's best known for his role as Rafael Solano on The CWs "Jane the Virgin," is an actor, director, and entrepreneur whose efforts are focused on creating impactful media. He spoke to The Christian Post about the inspiration behind Five Feet Apart and its poignant yet hopeful message, and why he believes death can be a messenger of joy.

CP: Congratulations on your directorial debut! What inspired this story?

JB: It all started seven years ago when I gave up acting to start telling stories of amazing individuals who were living with terminal illness and choosing joy, hope, and love in the face of tremendous adversity. I gave up the material life I was living to use my skills and talents to lift others up and to tell their stories, which I did in a documentary called "My Last Days."

In the process, I realized that I was the one being lifted up; many of these people living in these conditions were happier than I was, and I knew that if I could take a piece of that, I would have lived a life I was proud of.

During this time, I met a young woman named Claire who had CF. She was the one who told me that people living with that disease cant get closer than five feet, and I knew it was a movie I had to make and a story I had to tell. I wish that Id had a movie like that growing up, learning about myself and the material and physical temptations that exist in the world. So for me, telling a story without physical touch where intimacy couldnt be explored was a challenge I was willing to take on.

I also wanted to honor the 300,000 people who live with CF every year. These people have never been represented in a sincere way. Claire passed away just before I was able to show her the film; she never got to see it finished. But theres no doubt in my mind she will continue to impact millions with her resilience and love for life.

CP: This film is, in many ways, a beautiful tragedy  its heartbreaking yet uplifting. I love how it shows the importance of making every moment count in this life.

JB: We live in such a dark time, and its easy to lose faith and hope. I wanted to create a movie that shows love is worth fighting for. We live in a time where everything is on demand and we have so many choices and its easy to quit when theres a bump in the road. We can confuse that with thinking were not with the right person, and I wanted to explore what it means to fight for someone you love when giving up isnt an option.

Theres a beautiful tragedy to this story; these young adults make difficult choices. The themes of this film  love, sacrifice, and hope  are desperately needed today.

CP: I worked for hospice for years, and it was such an honor, yet so sobering to be with people in their final moments. Did you feel a sense of sacredness and spirituality when approaching the subject of death?

JB: Absolutely. If you bring it all the way back, it was inspired by a quote I once heard: I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?"

Its something that always struck me: How can death be joyful? But reflecting on our mortality can actually inform our lives. For me, this was all rooted in service and also in the belief that there isnt an end, and that in the journey of life there are so many lessons to be gleaned from death. Its a sacred space.

The documentaries werent just for the audience, but for the subjects themselves. They trusted me with telling their stories. Im a filmmaker with a mission to help those facing the end of their lives leave a legacy. Thats the sacredness of the film for me, handling those issues delicately but not turning off an audience.

Theres a large sector of the population that doesnt want to be fed any spiritual themes or serious matters; they just want to see a film with a compelling story. But I dont believe those things are mutually exclusive, and I hope this film shows that.

CP: You make films and documentaries about topics that matter. What drives that passion?

JB: Faith. Faith drives it. It all starts with faith. I have a very strong faith and a belief that our purpose here on Earth is to know God and to love God, and through that love of God, to love humanity and be of service.

All of us have a unique opportunity to be of service. For some, it might be grandiose and big and large, like me  I get to use my specific gifts to serve in kind of a large-scale way. But even small, everyday things need to be celebrated. In the eyes of God, I believe that what Im doing isnt any different than someone who is janitor putting love into every piece of dirt that they pick up, or someone who cleans toilets in church.

Its about intention and purity. It all comes back to faith and the feeling of responsibility with my platform, to use it in a way that doesnt just serve myself, but to serve others. We live, we die: What did you do when you were here? How did you spend your time? Were you focused on yourself or others? I try to infuse into my films and work the importance of living a life of service.

CP: These are two teens who are continually reminded that life is short and time is elusive. What message do you want to send to teens and young people with this film?

Justin Baldoni's directorial debut, the romantic film Five Feet Apart, stars Cole Sprouse and Haley Lu Richardson as two 17-year-olds who have cystic fibrosis  a chronic genetic respiratory disorder with a short life expectancy.

The CFers, as the characters refer to themselves, are both in the hospital for various treatment sessions. But they couldnt be more different: Sprouses Will, the combat boot-wearing artistic type, doesnt take his medical regimen seriously, as hes all but given up the idea of ever beating the illness. Its just life, itll be over before you know it, he says. In turn, Richardsons Stella is a bright and energetic YouTuber who lives according to the rules, determined to get better in hopes of receiving a lung transplant.

Despite their differences, it doesnt take Will and Stella long to fall in love shortly after meeting in the hospitals neonatal wing. However, their relationship is complicated by the fact that they must maintain at least 6 feet of distance from each other to avoid dangerous cross-infection.

Human touch, Richardson says in the films intro, We need that touch from the one we love almost as much as we need air to breathe. I never understood that until I couldnt have it.

With themes of love, sacrifice, and hope, Five Feet Apart reminds viewers that life is worth living, every breath, no matter how difficult, is precious, and that love isnt contingent on physical touch.

Baldoni, who's best known for his role as Rafael Solano on The CWs "Jane the Virgin," is an actor, director, and entrepreneur whose efforts are focused on creating impactful media. He spoke to The Christian Post about the inspiration behind Five Feet Apart and its poignant yet hopeful message, and why he believes death can be a messenger of joy.

CP: Congratulations on your directorial debut! What inspired this story?

JB: It all started seven years ago when I gave up acting to start telling stories of amazing individuals who were living with terminal illness and choosing joy, hope, and love in the face of tremendous adversity. I gave up the material life I was living to use my skills and talents to lift others up and to tell their stories, which I did in a documentary called "My Last Days."

In the process, I realized that I was the one being lifted up; many of these people living in these conditions were happier than I was, and I knew that if I could take a piece of that, I would have lived a life I was proud of.

During this time, I met a young woman named Claire who had CF. She was the one who told me that people living with that disease cant get closer than six feet, and I knew it was a movie I had to make and a story I had to tell. I wish that Id had a movie like that growing up, learning about myself and the material and physical temptations that exist in the world. So for me, telling a story without physical touch where intimacy couldnt be explored was a challenge I was willing to take on.

I also wanted to honor the 300,000 people who live with CF every year. These people have never been represented in a sincere way. Claire passed away just before I was able to show her the film; she never got to see it finished. But theres no doubt in my mind she will continue to impact millions with her resilience and love for life.

CP: This film is, in many ways, a beautiful tragedy  its heartbreaking yet uplifting. I love how it shows the importance of making every moment count in this life.

JB: We live in such a dark time, and its easy to lose faith and hope. I wanted to create a movie that shows love is worth fighting for. We live in a time where everything is on demand and we have so many choices and its easy to quit when theres a bump in the road. We can confuse that with thinking were not with the right person, and I wanted to explore what it means to fight for someone you love when giving up isnt an option.

Theres a beautiful tragedy to this story; these young adults make difficult choices. The themes of this film  love, sacrifice, and hope  are desperately needed today.

CP: I worked for hospice for years, and it was such an honor, yet so sobering to be with people in their final moments. Did you feel a sense of sacredness and spirituality when approaching the subject of death?

JB: Absolutely. If you bring it all the way back, it was inspired by a quote I once heard: I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?"

Its something that always struck me: How can death be joyful? But reflecting on our mortality can actually inform our lives. For me, this was all rooted in service and also in the belief that there isnt an end, and that in the journey of life there are so many lessons to be gleaned from death. Its a sacred space.

The documentaries werent just for the audience, but for the subjects themselves. They trusted me with telling their stories. Im a filmmaker with a mission to help those facing the end of their lives leave a legacy. Thats the sacredness of the film for me, handling those issues delicately but not turning off an audience.

Theres a large sector of the population that doesnt want to be fed any spiritual themes or serious matters; they just want to see a film with a compelling story. But I dont believe those things are mutually exclusive, and I hope this film shows that.

CP: You make films and documentaries about topics that matter. What drives that passion?

JB: Faith. Faith drives it. It all starts with faith. I have a very strong faith and a belief that our purpose here on Earth is to know God and to love God, and through that love of God, to love humanity and be of service.

All of us have a unique opportunity to be of service. For some, it might be grandiose and big and large, like me  I get to use my specific gifts to serve in kind of a large-scale way. But even small, everyday things need to be celebrated. In the eyes of God, I believe that what Im doing isnt any different than someone who is janitor putting love into every piece of dirt that they pick up, or someone who cleans toilets in church.

Its about intention and purity. It all comes back to faith and the feeling of responsibility with my platform, to use it in a way that doesnt just serve myself, but to serve others. We live, we die: What did you do when you were here? How did you spend your time? Were you focused on yourself or others? I try to infuse into my films and work the importance of living a life of service.

CP: These are two teens who are continually reminded that life is short and time is elusive. What message do you want to send to teens and young people with this film?

JB: I want young people to appreciate their lives. I want young people to take a second and realize that theyre alive, that theyre breathing, that theyre privileged and blessed, that life is beautiful, and that love looks like a lot of different things and its worth fighting for.

At the end of the day, theres a lot to be hopeful about. And most importantly, that love isnt contingent on human touch, its not physical, its not something you can put into a box and say, It looks like this. And, not to confuse love with intimacy, because I think thats an easy mistake to make.

I want young people to appreciate their lives. I want young people to take a second and realize that theyre alive, that theyre breathing, that theyre privileged and blessed, that life is beautiful, and that love looks like a lot of different things and its worth fighting for.

At the end of the day, theres a lot to be hopeful about. And most importantly, that love isnt contingent on human touch, its not physical, its not something you can put into a box and say, It looks like this. And, not to confuse love with intimacy, because I think thats an easy mistake to make.
SPLC fires co-founder Morris Dees over alleged misconduct

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The Southern Poverty Law Center, a controversial organization that's known for labeling conservative groups as hate groups, fired its co-founder Morris Dees.

SPLC President Richard Cohen released a statement Thursday announcing that the 82-year-old Dees was no longer with the Montgomery, Alabama-based organization.

Morris has made incredible contributions to the fight against racial injustice in our country. But our work is about the cause, not the person. Were committed to ensuring that our workplace embodies the values we espouse  truth, justice, equity, and inclusion, stated Cohen.

When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.

In comments published by the Montgomery Advertiser, Cohen declined to provide further details of the decision, though he mentioned concerns over workplace practices.

Cohen explained that the SPLC was taking concrete next steps following the firing, which included bringing in an outside organization to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices in order to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 to help with legal battles against groups like the Ku Klux Klan. More recently, the far-left group has garnered controversy for labeling many conservative groups and individuals as hateful.

Critics have accused the SPLC of inciting violence against conservatives. For example, in 2012 a gay rights activist named Floyd Lee Corkins attempted to murder members of the Family Research Center. Corkins cited SPLCs designation of the FRC as a hate group.

In 2017, violent student protests against conservative intellectual Charles Murray took place at Middlebury College of Vermont, with protesters being inspired by the SPLCs attacks on Murray.

The SPLC denounced Corkins attempted mass shooting, and Cohen testified before Congress to state that he believed Murray has the right to speak on college campuses, including Middlebury.

"No matter how repugnant one may find a speaker's views, as long as the college has a policy of allowing student groups to invite people from outside their campus to speak, they cannot pick and choose based on the views the speaker holds," said Cohen in written testimony submitted to United States Senate Committee of the Judiciary in 2017.

"This is why Middlebury's student chapter of the conservative American Enterprise Institute had a right to invite Charles Murray to speak to them on campus. And it is why neither other students nor college administrators can stop someone from speaking merely because they dislike the speaker's ideas."

Last June, the SPLC issued a formal apology to an ex-Muslim activist named Maajid Nawaz and paid him $3.3 million as part of a legal settlement after wrongfully including him in a report on anti-Muslim activity.

"This settlement is another example that the Southern Poverty Law Center is incapable at monitoring the very thing it claims to track," Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a socially conservative group that the SPLC labeled hateful, said in a statement last year.

"No credible journalist should ever rely on the SPLC. The SPLC reeks with hateful, false, and defamatory rhetoric."
UMC found improper voting at General Conference that affirmed stance against homosexuality

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The United Methodist Church released a statement explaining that there was a level of improper voting at the special session of General Conference last month in which the denomination reaffirmed its official position against homosexuality.

Delegates at the special session voted in favor of a proposal called The Traditional Plan that reaffirmed the UMCs official position labeling homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching and promised stricter enforcement of its ban on same-sex marriage and the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals.

The UMC Executive Committee of the Commission on the General Conference reported Thursday that a very limited number of people who were not allowed to vote nevertheless got to cast ballots at the special session.

 an in-depth review was initiated to prepare the delegate attendance records as required by the rules of the General Conference. The secretary, along with the business manager, General Conference staff and an independent auditing firm, cross-checked credential cards, name badge bar code scans, attendance forms, reserve delegate seating forms and other resources, reported the executive committee.

Upon completion of the review, it appears possible that a very limited number of ineligible persons who were correctly denied credentials by General Conference staff were later able to procure them.

While the specific number of ineligible voters has not been released, Secretary of the General Conference, the Rev. Gary W. Graves, told the United Methodist News Service that the improper votes were not large enough to change the results.

However, the very close vote of 402-400 to substitute a minority report for Petition 90066, which regarded allowing churches to disaffiliate from the UMC with minimal cost, is a point of concern.

The parliamentarian who served at the Special Session is being consulted regarding any potential impact this situation may have on the legislative action which resulted in the substitution of the minority report for the legislative committees report in the processing of petition 90066 since the vote to substitute was a two-vote difference of 402-400, continued the executive committee.

Over the past several years, the UMC has endured an intense debate over whether to change its Book of Disciplines biblically-based stance that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.

Delegates at the UMC special session of General Conference, representing all of the global denomination, voted to reject a measure called the One Church Plan, which would have allowed regional bodies of the denomination to determine their position on homosexuality.

In an official vote of 438-384, the General Conference approved The Traditional Plan, prompting outrage from pro-LGBT United Methodist groups and congregations.

Adam Hamilton, senior pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, which is the largest UMC congregation in the United States, openly entertained the idea of leaving the UMC.

I think it would not be hard, said Hamilton in an interview with The Kansas City Star that was published days after the special session ended.

I think our folks here love the United Methodist Church  they love the kind of church we have created and so we could start a new United Methodist Church and thousands of churches would join us.

However, other leaders, including Pastor Talbot Davis of Good Shepherd UMC of Charlotte, North Carolina, celebrated the special session vote result.

I am delighted that the Special General Conference of the United Methodist Church adopted the Traditional Plan as we believe in the beautiful picture of celibacy in singleness and faithfulness in heterosexual marriage that is woven throughout the pages of Scripture as well as church teaching for since its inception, said Davis in an earlier interview with The Christian Post.

We gladly join with our global brothers and sisters in teaching this truth with as much love and winsomeness as we can.
Ark. senator's viral speech on racism and gun laws draws praise from Thabiti Anyabwile

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Thabiti Anyabwile praised an Arkansas state senator's passionate speech on racism and gun laws.

Prominent Washington, D.C. Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile of Anacostia River Church was among many who praised Sen. Stephanie Flowers for rebuking her colleagues in the senate judiciary committee in an impassioned speech when they voted to limit public debate on a proposed Stand Your Ground law last Wednesday.

Flowers, who is the only black member of the committee, spoke against the proposal, and refused to curtail her comments due to what she argued is the fear of how gun violence would impact her son as well as members of the black community.

It doesn't take much to look on the local news every night and see how many black kids, black boys, black men are being killed with these Stand Your Ground defenses that these people raise, and they get off. So I take issue with that. I'm the only person here of color. I am a mother, too. And I have a son. And I care as much for my son as y'all care for y'all's. But my son doesn't walk the same path as yours does. So this debate deserves more time, she told her white colleagues.

I'm in Pine Bluff. We have killings regularly down there. ... I don't know where Mr. Ballinger is from. But I can tell you for a long time since I've been back here in Arkansas, I have feared for my son's life. Now he's 27 and he's out of Arkansas, and I thank God he is when you're bringing up crap like this. It offends me. And then to limit the debate, too? This is crazy, she said addressing Two Republican Sen. Bob Ballinger.

OMG. I want to give this woman, Arkansas State Senator Stephanie Flowers, the biggest hug. I wish more people were as fired up and passionate as she is about gun violence prevention. Shes not afraid of the @NRA; shes afraid of more gun deaths. https://t.co/BrGAKRBMENpic.twitter.com/hmR2UJNjTz  Khary Penebaker, Fx (@kharyp) March 8, 2019

A dramatic clip of Flowers extended comments on the issue has since gone viral on social media, racking up more than 10 million views along with praise.

Reacting to the video in a series of tweets last Friday, Anyabwile said Flowers speech captured how many African Americans feel about gun laws.

This [Arkansas] state senator speaks with a lot of raw passion. She captures the angst of many. She's (a) generally scared for her son; (b) threatened by violence in her community; (c) threatened by gun carriers; (d) trying to be heard vs senate rules that silence, Anyabwile began.

Think what you will about gun laws. What I'm trying to point out is the incredible helplessness and chronic sense of threat and dread so typical to our people and communities. It comes from inside and outside the community and there appears to be no allies in the system, he continued.

For this senator and many AAs, the issue isn't intellectual. It's existential. If you think the senator's display is out of bounds or too intense, I would suggest to you that We Wear the Mask and far more people feel this internally than would ever display it publicly, he ended.

Flowers told the Associated Press Monday that she has received dozens of phone calls and emails from people all over the South who supported her opposition and she had no plans to apologize for her comments.

"They were glad to have and see somebody speak what they could not speak, and to express it the way they could not express it," Flowers said. "So I won't apologize for my expression and my passion and my emotion."

Flowers, who is a Democrat, maintained her stance during remarks in the senate on Monday and revealed she is a follower of Christ who hopes God approved of her opposition to the Stand Your Ground bill which failed.

"My outburst and the words I used? God will judge me and I will accept his judgment. I hope he's well pleased, she said.
Evangelicals voice concerns with Trump's Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at White House

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Evangelical leaders gathered last week at the White House to offer their concerns as the Trump administration will soon unveil its Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal that reportedly could give the Palestinians a capital in parts of East Jerusalem.

Last Thursday, a group of conservative evangelical leaders met with Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trumps adviser on Israel and special representative for international negotiations, for a listening session about what has been coined the deal of the century.

Greenblatt is regarded as a chief architect of Trumps Middle East peace plan along with Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

During the session, Greenblatt fielded questions and concerns the leaders had with the Middle East peace plan, which is expected to be released in April.

The group of evangelicals, many of whom have interacted informally with the Trump White House in the past, included Pastor John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel; Georgia megachurch pastor Jentezen Franklin; New York Times best-selling author Joel Rosenburg, and Florida pastor Paula White.

While Im not at liberty to share what Greenblatt told us, I was encouraged by the conversation and by the Administrations desire to answer Evangelicals questions and address our concerns, Rosenberg, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen who has been involved in high-profile meetings with Arab leaders in the past several months, wrote on his blog.

One source who attended the meeting told Axios that several evangelical leaders in the room raised concerns about reports that the plan could include a provision to give Palestine a capital in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.

Israeli media had previously reported that the U.S. Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal would provide for a Palestinian state in 85 to 90 percent of the West Bank.

As one of Trumps most loyal voting bases, white evangelicals are also one of the political demographics most supportive of the state of Israel.

"Our topic of discussion was discussing the forthcoming peace plan concerning Israel. Israel and the Jewish people need our prayers and our advocacy like never before," Hagee says in a video posted to Twitter by CUFI. "The Bible gives the command, 'For Zion's sake, I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake, I will not keep my peace.' I urge you tonight to pray for the peace of Jerusalem."

Greenblatt reportedly told the group the peace plan will be fair and beneficial to both sides. However, both sides will have to make compromises.

In a blog post, Rosenberg said that following the meeting with Greenblatt, he went on to have a private lunch with Vice President Mike Pence. Later, he would meet with Trump in the Oval Office.

The VP and I have been friends for many years, going back to his days as a member of Congress. This was our first opportunity to sit down and debrief on the evangelical delegations I led to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last fall, he wrote. I was glad to be able to share with him what my colleagues and I saw and heard and how this may factor into the prospects for peace in the Middle East.

Pence asked Rosenberg if he has ever met President Trump. When he Rosenberg said, No, Pence said, "Follow me."

The next thing I knew, the VP led me into the Oval Office and introduced me to Americas Commander-in-Chief, Rosenberg said. The President then invited me to sit down with him and the VP around the Resolute Desk, joined by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Rosenberg said that it was a fascinating meeting. Rosenberg told the president that he was a NeverTrumper until a few days before the 2016 election and went on thank him for fulfilling many of his campaign promises to white evangelicals.

Many commentators have claimed that Trumps Israel-Palestinian peace proposal is dead-on-arrival. The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations even said so himself last year.

Kushner, a senior adviser to his father-in-law, said last month that he hopes people will look at the peace plan with a fresh perspective when it is released next month.

[T]his is the right package of compromises for both sides to take, in order to leave the past behind and try to start a new chapter where there can be tremendous hope and opportunity in the region, Kushner told Sky News Arabia.

Rosenberg wrote in an op-ed that he believes that the Trump team could stun everyone by including provisions that Palestinians would find too attractive to dismiss. He believes it could bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table despite all their trash talk.

Last August, Trump contended that the Palestinians will get something very good in peace negotiations because of the decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Trump suggested that Israel would have to pay a higher price because of the moving of the embassy.

The Palestinians will get something very good, because its their turn next, Trump said at the time.

As Rosenberg noted, such a prospect is concerning for Israeli leaders. He added, though, that the Trump team may actually be counting on Palestinian leaders to reject the proposal.

Indeed, it may actually be counting on it and hoping that one Gulf Arab state after another will become so fed up with perennial Palestinian rejectionism that they will decide to finally take bold steps toward full peace with Israel, Rosenberg wrote.
Most evangelicals favor LGBT nondiscrimination protections: poll

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A majority of white evangelical Americans support laws providing legal protections for gays, lesbians and transgenders so that they cant be discriminated against for jobs, public accommodations and housing, newly released polling data shows.

As Democrats in Congress reintroduced the Equality Act on Wednesday, the Public Religion Research Institute released data Tuesday showing that majorities from every state favor nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people.

The data was taken from PRRIs 2018 American Values Atlas, a research project in which over 54,000 Americans across 50 states were surveyed last year about a number of critical issues facing the country.

While 79 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents said that they favor legislation that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from discrimination, a majority of Republicans (56 percent) said they also favor such laws.

While support among Democrats and independents has remained relatively constant, Republican support for these provisions has fallen five percentage points over the past few years, down from 61 percent in 2015, a PRRI analysis of the data reads.

When broken down by religious affiliation, white evangelical Protestants and Jehovahs Witnesses were the least likely to support LGBT nondiscrimination protections.

But even though white evangelicals are largely seen as theologically opposed to homosexuality and transgender identity, 54 percent of white evangelical Protestants surveyed said they support LGBT nondiscrimination protections.

Sizable majorities of white mainline Protestants (71 percent), black Protestants (65 percent), other non-white Protestants (61 percent), Hispanic Protestants (60 percent), and Orthodox Christians (59 percent) expressed support.

Among other religious groups, most also supported legal protections, including Muslims (60 percent), Mormons (70 percent) and Jews (80 percent).

The data released by PRRI did not include results for a question on whether or not respondents support religious exemptions for individuals and religious institutions who oppose the LGBT lifestyle over theological reasons.

A PRRI representative told The Christian Post that data on that type of question would not be released until March 26.

The survey comes as there has been much debate over the last several years when it comes to the intersection of religious freedom rights and LGBT discrimination laws. Several business owners have faced lengthy court battles and punishments because they refused to provide services for same-sex weddings in order to uphold their religious convictions.

Evangelical leaders have long called for religious freedom exemptions for Christian institutions and business owners that hold a traditional Christian belief on sexuality and gender.

All Americans should be treated with dignity and respect and our laws should protect the freedoms of speech, religion and conscience of every citizen, no matter who they are, Greg Baylor, a senior counsel with the conservative Christian legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom and director of its Center for Religious Schools, said in a statement provided to CP.

Unfortunately, the polling presented by PRRI fails to accurately portray the views of conservative evangelicals and fails to reveal the implications of so-called nondiscrimination laws.

In 2017, PRRIs American Values Atlas found that 53 percent of white evangelical protestants supported allowing business owners to refuse service based on religious beliefs. White evangelicals joined believers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in being the only religious groups to have a majority supporting a business owners right to refuse based on religious belief in that survey.

Also in 2017, LifeWay Research found through a survey of over 1,000 Americans that when issues of sexual freedom rights and religious freedom come under conflict, about 90 percent of white evangelicals believe religious freedom is more important. In total, 68 percent of Protestants and 48 percent of Americans said the same.

A Marist poll commissioned by the Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus that was released in early 2017 found that 60 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of moderates support protecting religious freedom even it goes against laws and ordinances.

In his statement to CP, Baylor noted that a recent poll conducted by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation found that a majority of Americans do not support forcing transgender ideology on others, including parents, doctors, nurses, business owners, charities, and women.

PRRI released its data on Americans views of nondiscrimination policies the day before Democrat lawmakers reintroduced the Equality Act in the House and Senate. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi previously vowed to pass the Equality Act in the Democrat-controlled House.

The legislation would ensure federal civil rights protections for members of the LGBT community. Although LGBT rights groups have praised the legislation, critics say that the bill does not include exemptions for religious objectors.

According to Andrew Walker, senior fellow in Christian ethics at the Southern Baptist Conventions Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Equality Act represents the most invasive threat to religious liberty ever proposed in America.

Given that it touches areas of education, public accommodation, employment, and federal funding, were it to pass, its sweeping effects on religious liberty, free speech, and freedom of conscience would be both historic and also chilling, Walker wrote in an op-ed posted by The Gospel Coalition.

Its passage would sound the death knell for hopes of detente in the culture wars that pit conservative Christians against their LGBT neighbors. For progressives, it would be winner-takes-all. Virtually no area of American life would emerge unscathed from the Equality Acts reach. No less significant would be the long-term effects of how the law would shape the moral imagination of future generations.

While Walkers argument may sound a bit exaggerated to some, Denny Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce College in Kentucky, tweeted that Walker is not engaging in alarmism. Burk called Walkers claim that the Equality Act represents the most invasive threat to religious freedom a fact.

Baylor told CP that the more Americans learn about coercive pieces of legislation like the Equality Act, the more they will see them as threats to the fairness and freedom for all Americans.

Last year, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities gave their public support to a legislative proposal called the Fairness for All compromise.

In theory, the compromise would see the enshrinement of sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under civil rights law in exchange for religious exemptions for traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality.

Although some evangelical leaders have spoken out against Fairness for All, others support the plan because it puts down markers in an important conversation.

There is a risk to Fairness for All, Shirley Mullen, vice chair of the board of directors for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, said in February. [T]here is also a huge risk to not being in this dialogue. It's not just the risk of losing legal protection for our freedom of beliefs. It is also, I would say, losing that capacity to have the Christian community viewed as people who are respectful and who want to treat [with respect] human beings who differ from them in fundamental ways.

The debate is not about the importance about the traditional view of marriage. The debate is about the best strategy for preserving this.
American Muslims more likely to have evangelical friends, family than vice versa, poll finds

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Muslims living in the United States are more likely to have a friend or family member who identifies as evangelical Christian than the other way around, according to a newly released survey.

The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding of New York released a study on Monday titled Evangelical Christian and Muslim Relations in the U.S., which analyzed several points of comparison between the two faith communities.

According to the research, 38 percent of Muslim respondents reported having any family members or close friends who are evangelical and 53 percent reported interacting with evangelicals either very frequently or somewhat frequently.

By contrast, 18 percent of evangelical respondents reported having any family members or close friends who are Muslim and 22 percent reported interacting with Muslims either very frequently or somewhat frequently.

When asked to describe the relationship between evangelicals and Muslims in the United States, each faith group was more likely to rate it "fair" (37 percent of evangelicals, 31 percent of Muslims) than "poor" (24 percent of evangelicals, 26 percent of Muslims) or "good" (21 percent of evangelicals and Muslims). Only 5 percent of evangelicals and 9 percent of Muslims rated it excellent.

Data for the study was based off of an online survey conducted Jan. 3-15, with a sample space of 500 self-identified American evangelical Christians and 500 self-identified American Muslims, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.38 percentage points.

The study showed some similarities between the two faith groups, as both evangelical and Muslim respondents ranked Daily Prayer, Family, and Making the world a better place for everyone in their top three most important aspects of their religious tradition.

Further, majorities of both evangelical (61 percent) and Muslim (59 percent) respondents reported praying more than once a day.

There were also telling disparities. For example, 56 percent of evangelical respondents voted for Donald Trump in 2016, while only 12 percent of Muslim respondents did the same.

Also, 61 percent of evangelicals either strongly support or somewhat support the Trump administrations travel ban on Muslim-majority countries; by contrast, only 20 percent of Muslims reported the same.

Evangelical Christian-Muslim relations is todays largest interreligious challenge and the poll shows that there are causes for concern and elements of hope and optimism on both sides to narrow the divide between the two faith communities, said FFEU President Rabbi Marc Schneier in a statement released Monday.

Earlier this year, evangelical and Muslim leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., for a symposium on bridge building between the two religious groups.

Organized by the Unity Productions Foundation, the Kingdom Mission Society, and the Vienna-based International Dialogue Centre, the event included a screening of a documentary about St. Francis of Assisis communication with Sultan Al-Kamil in the Middle Ages.

I think when you see St. Francis and you see examples of missionaries in the Evangelical movement what you will often see is the spirit of Christ to reach everyone, because we believe everyone has human dignity, stated Alexei Laushkin, executive director of the Kingdom Mission Society.

Throughout the scriptures Old Testament and New Testament you see the prophets and you see Jesus encountering people as they are and we try and use that spirit as our means for dialogue and conversation.
Iowan taxpayers must fund transgender surgeries through Medicaid, rules court

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Iowa taxpayers will be forced to fund gender reassignment surgery through Medicaid after the state Supreme Court ruled that such procedures are medically necessary for transgender individuals.

On Friday, Iowas Supreme Court ruled that transgender people can now use Medicaid for gender-affirming surgeries, overturning the states previously held administrative code regarding Medicaid, which classifies transition-related surgeries as "cosmetic, reconstructive or plastic surgery" and explicitly bans "surgeries for the purpose of sex reassignment, the Des Moines Register reports.

The justices agreed with a district judge's ruling that the rules contradicted protections in the Iowa Civil Rights Act, which added gender identity to the state's list of protected classes.

That law's "gender identity classification encompasses transgender individuals  especially those who have gender dysphoria  because discrimination against these individuals is based on the nonconformity between their gender identity and biological sex," Justice Susan Christensen wrote for the court.

The ruling ends a two-year legal battle between EerieAnna Good and Carol Ann Beal, transgender individuals backed by the ACLU, and the Iowa Department of Human Services. The two individuals had sued the DHS for its policy against funding transition surgeries, calling it discriminatory and claiming the surgery was medically necessary to treat their gender dysphoria.

The record evidence shows that this surgery is medically necessary, John Knight, an attorney with the ACLU representing Beal and Good, told justices when the case was argued. Its really lifesaving treatment for a number of individuals.

However, Iowa Assistant Attorney General Matthew Gillespie, who represented the DHS, had argued that the ACLU attorneys could not prove that the measure was discriminatory in nature. He said the case was really about whether the state denied coverage for surgeries meant to treat psychological problems rather than those that are medically necessary.

The DHS also resisted on the grounds of the high cost of transition-related care, explaining that its regulation against such coverage "serves the purpose of conserving limited state resources." The Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery prices the full suite of procedures for transgender individuals at more than $100,000.

The Supreme Court's decision upheld a lower court ruling to undo the ban, which had been appealed by the state. According to USA Today, the decision is the first by a state's highest court holding that transgender people have the right to use public money for transition-related surgeries.

While the ACLU praised Fridays ruling as a landmark win, Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for Policy Studies at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., told The Christian Post that political correctness, not the law or medicine, dictated the ruling forcing taxpayers to fund gender reassignment surgery through Medicaid.

Iowas regulatory exclusion of procedures which are performed primarily for psychological purposes rather than for restoring bodily function fully justified the exclusion of such surgery from Medicaid coverage, Sprigg argued. All such cosmetic procedures were excluded from coveragegender reassignment surgery is merely one example that falls under that more general exclusion. There was no discrimination based on gender identityit was the nature of the procedure, not the identity of the person, that was at issue.

Sprigg told CP it is unfortunate that the court did not even consider the 2016 decision by the federal Centers from Medicare and Medicaid Services, which concluded that there is not enough high-quality evidence to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes.
More Catholics question leaving faith after sex abuse scandal: study

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A growing number of Catholics are now questioning their commitment to the church body in the wake of the recent sexual abuse scandal involving young people and priests, a new Gallup poll has found.

The poll, which was published on Tuesday, shows that 37 percent of U.S. Catholics, a 15 percent increase since the last sexual abuse scandal in 2002, are currently questioning whether they should stay with the church body.

The results of the poll are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 581 Catholics conducted January 21-February 28 and has a margin of sampling error of 5 percentage points.

While many more Catholics are questioning their commitment to the church since the 2002 scandal, there was no clear data to suggest whether or not the recent revelations of widespread abuse will cause them to ultimately leave the church.

Jeff Jones, Gallup Poll senior editor, told The Washington Post that the recent polling results are a clear indication of the frustration many Catholics are currently dealing with in the wake of the latest scandal.

As an indication of frustration, it seems like a pretty significant step, said Jones about Catholics who are thinking of leaving. Leaving is another one, and we dont have good data on that. But it does give a sense of the impact [the scandal] is having. And that the impact is greater than it was in 2002.

Last summer, the Pennsylvania Attorney Generals Office released the results of a two-year grand jury investigation into widespread sexual abuse of children within six dioceses of the Catholic Church in that state that also showed systemic cover-up by senior church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican.

Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun from Erie, Pennsylvania, who has authored several books about the turmoil caused by sex abuse scandals, suggested in a recent NPR interview that Catholics can use Lent to help them recenter their faith in the wake of the recent revelations.

She also suggested that even though people are angry, people shouldnt allow their anger to harm others.

It doesn't bother me that people are angry, as long as their anger does not harm other people, but works for good in society, then I consider that anger the grace of God. Anger is a holy fuel. If you use it right, and you don't let it get out of control in your life, anger is what can drive you to do good in the face of evil, she said.

John Capparelli, 70, a former New Jersey priest who had been "credibly accused" of sexually abusing minors, was found shot dead in his Nevada home on Saturday, NBC News reported.

His name had appeared on a list in February with 187 other clergy the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark said had been "credibly accused" of abusing minors the report said. While he was never convicted of a crime, he was laicized and permanently removed from ministry. Capparelli reportedly groped teenage boys and made them wrestle in swimwear while he took photos of them. He also allegedly ran a fetish website from his home.

People are dismayed by their institutions, are broken-hearted about what they see happening in the structures of the church. That's a holy concern. But what they must also do, what we must also do, starting with me, is we have to separate the concerns of the institution from the spiritual life and the following of Jesus. We have to get back to the center of the faith, Sister Chittister warned.

The Gallup poll showed that while substantial minorities of both practicing and non-practicing Catholics say they are questioning their commitment to the church, those less committed to the religion are more likely to be questioning it. A similar pattern existed in 2002 but both practicing and non-practicing Catholics are more likely now than in 2002 to be questioning their place in the church.

Catholics are also less confident in priests in the U.S. more generally, and in U.S. bishops and other Catholic leaders. Approximately one in four U.S. Catholics say they have very little or no confidence in those two groups. One in eight has little or no confidence in Pope Francis or their own priests.
ROME - The pavilion that will represent Italy at the next Universal Exposition in Dubai in 2020 under the theme "Connecting Minds, Creating the Future'' uses creativity and innovation to focus on the "beauty that connects people'', said a press release issued on Friday.



Italian beauty has long brought together populations and is a key part of shared Mediterranean cultural heritage. The pavilion sees it as a possible bridge towards the future, as well, it noted. The international competition for the design of the pavilion attracted 19 proposals. The winning proposal was submitted by a group including CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Italo Rota Building Office, F&M Ingegneria and Matteo Gatto & Associati.



The design centers on the hulls of three Italian ships, turned over and raised on pillars to form the cover of the pavilion. Each will be painted in a different manner and the hulls will be appear from above like three petals in the colors of the Italian flag. The architectural project pays homage to Italian explorers who sailed the seas to distant lands for centuries, weaving together relations around the world.



It also tells of the beauty of Italy, which is the result of cross-cultural fertilization and knowledge bred of exchanges, talent, and art. The overturned hulls are meant to symbolize sustainability and a link to the ancient tradition of seafaring populations and fishermen from Europe and the world.



The Italian pavilion will cover around 3,500 square meters, be over 25 meters tall, and be located in an area of high visibility within the site of Expo 2020.



"The project of Ratti, Rota, Gatto and F&M," says Paolo Glisenti, General Commissioner for Italy at Expo 2020 Dubai, "allows us to realize not only an exhibition space, but a space that represents the best of Italian ingenuity, offering a memorable experience to visitors, and showing the world multidisciplinary competences, talents and intelligences that can become promoters of new educational, professional and entrepreneurial opportunities.'' He added that the ''Italian pavilion will be realized with the contributions of partner companies - large, medium and small - called to provide the best structural, engineering, technological and scenographic components, that are able to demonstrate the most innovative competences committed today to sustainability, to the circular economy, to digital architecture." "Turning over and reusing the ships was an act that had a profound appeal to us: not only because it is laden with historical value, but because it represents the realization of a circular architecture from the project's beginning. The ships that become part of the Pavilion can continue to be used in different ways even after the end of the Expo," explains Carlo Ratti, founding partner of CRA design practice and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).



"The exhibition path will be marked by a gradual ascent until a point where it becomes possible, with some help from the imagination, to observe Italy from the sky," explains architect Italo Rota, founding partner of Italo Rota Building Office: "There will be a 'Prologue' with large spaces inspired by the forms of important Italian piazze, and a Grand Finale that will be almost like a cathedral to nature, to light, to the music of the universe, like the sky over the Mediterranean and the Desert." Technical partners for Italian Pavilion will be selected on the basis of how well they embody Italian skills using the most advanced and sustainable technological innovation and how well they can participate directly in the realization of the pavilion through different forms of contribution.



Applications should be submitted by responding to the "Request for Proposals" that will be published shortly by the General Commissioner for Italy at the Expo 2020 Dubai on the website https://italyexpo2020.it/documenti/bandi-e-gare/ and by Invitalia at https://gareappalti.invitalia.it. (ANSAmed).


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In II Chronicles Chapter 6, King Solomon prayed seven prayers, anticipating seven sins of the nation of Israel and the subsequent seven judgments of God. These prayers were fervent and the impending judgments severe, and Solomon was intent on seeking Gods involvement in a nation falling far from Him.

Yes, his prayers were for the nation of Israel during a time of blessing and a newly constructed temple, but knowing the sinfulness of man, Solomon sought Gods promise of mercy. Is his concern really so far removed from where we are in America today?

1. Removal of Gods Blessing

Solomon identified in his first prayer the first national judgment of Godthe removal of Gods blessing. God promises blessing for obedience but removes His blessing as He did from King Saul, Samson and the entire nation of Israel when they forgot God and sinned. Its a frightening thing when God turns blessing to judgment with resulting military defeat, violent weather, sickness and societal decay. Sin always breaks fellowship and turns Gods favor to wrath.

2. Governmentally Sanctioned Injustice

The second evidence of judgment is governmentally sanctioned injustice. Solomon asked God if He would defend the innocent and punish the wicked when national justice fails.

Isnt it obvious that truth in our nation has fallen and justice has been subverted? When the righteous are marginalized and doing evil is rewarded, when abortion and same sex marriage are embraced, while simultaneously Christian businesses are penalized, and when the rule of law is rejected but socialism embraced and the Constitution marginalizedGods judgment happens. God is not mocked. Whatever a nation sows, it reaps, including America.

3. Military Defeat

Solomon prayed again, identifying Gods third of seven progressive judgments on nations who forget Godmilitary defeat. Since World War II, our nation has suffered repeated defeats in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and in the War on Terror. Now Iran, Russia and China threaten us from abroad and Venezuela to our south. Enemies reside within. Defeat is happening at the hands of the enemies of freedom, biblical truth, the rule of law and those who desire that America and Christians in America would disappear from the earth.

Do we recognize Gods judgment already upon us and do we ever consider that military defeat is Gods judgment? God does.

4. Drought

In II Chronicles 6:26, Solomon prayed about the fourth of Gods progressive judgmentsdrought. While much of the West Coasts drought has turned to flooding, recent enduring drought remains real. Food prices have climbed higher, farmers have been decimated, thousands of cattle have been slaughtered and meat prices have increased. Over half a million acres of prime farmland in California will sit idle beyond our lifetimes.

But when is the last time weve heard anyoneincluding most preacherssay that drought or floods are warning signs from God? Rejecting Gods warnings conditions to the culture to substitute truth with the lies of manmade climate change.

5. Severe Weather and Enemy Attacks from Within

Solomon goes on to pray, identifying the fifth judgment in II Chronicles 6:28severe weather and enemy attacks from within. Extreme weather is all about usrecord tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, drought, earthquakes, floods, snow and cold. Likewise, the judgment of internal enemy attacks is very real as well. September 11, 2001, was Americas wake-up call but sleep cells abound. Yet we continue to refuse Gods warnings. How sad. We seek answers but refuse to repent or consider that our sin brings Gods judgment.

6. Abused Immigrants

The sixth judgment found in II Chronicles 6:32-33 certainly has parallels to todays global headlinesabuse of immigrants. From our nations beginning, weve welcomed people to our Shining City on the Hill, in part, so they could know our God who is the Light. Today, immigrants are mere players in a political game of chess, introduced first to the god of government with social benefits offered as bribes for votes.

Solomon perceived this horrendous government injustice to the stranger and knew that it would tarnish the testimony of God. Instead of pointing people to God, the immigrant was pointed to some other manmade god.

7. War and National Collapse

Finally, Solomon prayed and anticipated the final judgmentwar and national collapse. War within is the ultimate destroyer of life, property and freedom. It collapses economies and replaces peace with terror. A few short years after Solomons prayer, God destroyed Israel as a nation. Its sad that our own nation, having once known the blessings of God, now sees no need for Him. Weve been warned repeatedly, yet we still dont hear. Unless Gods people pray and repent, we will also collapse.

As we look at these prayers and judgments, can we come to the conclusion that Americas turned her back on God? That Gods judgments already evident? That, sadly, most Americans seem not to care? This is why the American Pastors Network is urging pastors to warn people that Gods judgment happens when we turn our back on Him.

While God is patient, His judgment is certain.
4 Christian aid workers among those killed in Ethiopian Airlines crash

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Four Christian aid workers on their way to attend training were among the 157 people killed in the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash last weekend.

Sara Chalachew, Getnet Alemayehu, Sintayehu Aymeku and Mulusew Alemu, employees of Catholic Relief Services, were on board the fallen Boeing 737 MAX 8 that was en route to Nairobi, Kenya. The airliner crashed just minutes after taking off from Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Sunday.

CRS is the official international humanitarian arm of the Catholic community in the United States and provides much-needed assistance to some of the worlds most vulnerable people in over 100 countries.

CRS has worked for nearly 60 years in Ethiopia to respond to natural and man-made disasters that have affected the East African nation. It has led recovery projects for drought and food-prone areas and has rebuilt individual and community assets through aid programs.

It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that four members of our staff were killed when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed just after take-off Sunday morning, a CRS statement reads. All four individuals were Ethiopian nationals traveling to Nairobi to attend a training on our behalf.

According to the charity, Aymeku served in Ethiopia for over a year as a senior procurement officer and is survived by his wife and three daughters.

Alemayehu worked for CRS in Ethiopia since 2009. Until 2018, Alemayehu served as a procurement officer and later as a senior procurement officer. In December 2018, he began serving as a senior project officer of procurement and compliance. He is survived by a wife and one daughter.

Chalachew served at the aid agency in Ethiopia since 2010. She began working as a commodity accountant and senior commodity accounts officer in the logistics department. Last December, she began serving as a senior project officer for grants.

Alemu has worked for CRS in Ethiopia since May 2015 as a finance officer, project grant accountant and senior finance officer.

Although we are in mourning, we celebrate the lives of these colleagues and the selfless contributions they made to our mission, despite the risks and sacrifices that humanitarian work can often entail, the Catholic agency said. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families and all of those who lost loved ones as a result of this tragedy."

The Ethiopian Airlines flight was the second Boeing 737 Max 8 jet to have crashed in the last five months following a Lion Air crash that occurred 12 minutes after taking off in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed 189 people.

The pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines crash plane reported a problem to flight control shortly after takeoff and asked to return to the airport. But the plane would not make it back and crashed near the town of Bishoftu, about 40 miles away from Bole International Airport.

As dozens upon dozens of families are now faced with living the reality of life without their loved ones, CRS is also feeling the pain of losing their co-workers.

Al Jazeera reports that flowers and candles have been placed at the entrance of CRS offices in memory of Chalachew, Alemayehu, Aymeku and Alemu.

"We are shocked," Felicity Loowe, CRS' head of operations in Ethiopia, told the Arabic news outlet. "We are thinking about our colleagues and we miss them."

Loowe added that the four aid workers were incredibly well-respected and valued within the charity.

They were well-known and well-loved by everyone, she said. They were very strong, dedicated and committed individuals. We will really miss them.

Since the Ethiopian Airlines crash, at least 40 countries, including the United States, and multiple airlines have grounded Boeing 737 Max 8 jets.

As reported Wednesday, American pilots had issued complaints to federal authorities about perceived safety problems with how the aircraft performed in flight.

According to CNN, one captain reported an autopilot anomaly that led to a brief nose-down situation. Another pilot reported that the aircraft pitched nose down after the autopilot was engaged during departure.

According to USA Today, one captain of a November 2018 flight called the aircrafts manual inadequate and almost criminally insufficient.

The U.S. federal government is ordering Boeing to make safety-related software updates for its 737 Max 8 planes. According to the Wall Street Journal, updates to the software were already in the works prior to last weekends crash.
Ex-Vatican official, adviser to Pope Francis, sentenced to 6 years for assaulting 2 choirboys

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A former Vatican City treasurer and former senior adviser to Pope Francis was sentenced to 6 years in prison after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two choirboys.

Cardinal George Pell was sentenced Wednesday by a court in Australia after being found guilty, making him the highest ranking Vatican official ever convicted of sex abuse.

Your conduct was permeated by staggering arrogance, stated Judge Peter Kidd to Pell at the sentencing, as reported by the New York Times, adding I would characterize these breaches and abuses as grave.

A prominent leader in the Australian Catholic Church, in 2017 Pell was charged with multiple counts of sexually assaulting minors. Pell denied the accusations.

I'm looking forward finally to having my day in court. I'm innocent of these charges, they are false. The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me, stated Pell at the time.

These matters have been under investigation now for two years. There have been leaks to the media, there's been relentless character assassination and for more than a month, claims that a decision on whether to lay charges was imminent.

Last December, a 12-member jury in the County Court of the State of Victoria in Melbourne found Pell guilty on five counts of sex abuse.

The Jesuit publication America Magazine described the guilty verdict as a grave blow not only to the church in Australia but also to the Vatican and to Pope Francis, due to Pells prominence.

Pells sentencing comes as a growing number of Catholics are seriously considering leaving the Catholic Church due to the ongoing fallout from its sex abuse scandal.

According to a newly released Gallup Poll, 37 percent of U.S. Catholics, a 15 percent increase since the last sexual abuse scandal in 2002, are currently questioning whether they should stay with the church body.

The poll results were based on telephone interviews with a sample of 581 Catholics conducted Jan. 21-Feb. 28 that had a margin of error of 5 percentage points.

As an indication of frustration, it seems like a pretty significant step, said Jeff Jones, Gallup Poll senior editor, to the Washington Post regarding those thinking of leaving.

Leaving is another one, and we dont have good data on that. But it does give a sense of the impact [the scandal] is having. And that the impact is greater than it was in 2002."
Kenyan pastor who ministers to ex-Muslims beaten with clubs, hospitalized

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A pastor in Kenya who disciples former Muslims in their walks with Christ was beaten unconscious by a group of angry Muslims and hospitalized last week.

Morning Star News reports that a pastor on the outskirts of Garissa near the border of Somalia suffered a broken femur (thighbone) and other injuries last Friday night when he was attacked by a group of men while on his way home from a prayer gathering in Garissa.

The pastor, only referred to by the first name Abdul, claims to have been beaten by men with wooden clubs and essentially left for dead. Although he didnt recognize his attackers, they are reported as being several Somali Muslims.

The pastor, who came to Christ about seven years ago, is 30 years old and is a father of three children ages 8, 5 and 3.

According to Morning Star News, an independent nonprofit news organization that covers Christian persecution across the globe, Abdul is the leader of an underground church made up of 30 former Muslims whom he disciples in small groups.

He explained that even though he tried to keep his missionary movements secret, Muslim extremists were still able to find out about his ministry.

The pastor claims one of the attackers told him: We have been following your movements and your evil plans of changing Muslims to Christianity.

Immediately several assailants began hitting me with wooden clubs, and I became unconscious, the pastor recalled. I woke up and found myself surrounded by neighbors. I was rescued by the neighbors who found me in a pool of blood.

Abdul was taken to the hospital in Garissa, the capital city of Garissa County in the eastern part of the country. Since it is near the border of Somalia, the city is predominantly ethnic Somali.

Abdul said that in addition to the pain in his thigh, he has pain in his waist, back and near the ankle of his left leg.

Im almost unable to bear the pain. My family is in great fear, and Christians have located us to another place, he was quoted as saying. Our prayer, for now, is to get a safe place for my family. My life and that of my family is at stake.

While Kenya is ranked 40th on the Open Doors USAs 2019 World Watch List of countries with the greatest levels of Christian persecution, Somalia is ranked third.

An estimated 99 percent of Somalis are Muslim and the country is home to one of the worlds most brutal Islamic extremist groups: al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab has carried out a number of deadly attacks against Christians in eastern Kenya.

In 2015, the terrorist group killed at least 147 people, most of whom were Christians, in an early April massacre at Garissa University. Survivors have said that the militants let some Muslims live but killed those who were Christian.

The group also made headlines in 2014 when it killed 28 Christians riding on a bus in Kenya. A similar bus attack occurred in 2015.

In 2017, the group was reported to have killed seven Christians when it went door-to-door in Kenya checking the identification of residents.

Last February, al-Shabaab killed three Christians during a raid on a primary school about 100 miles from Kenyas border with Somalia.

Last September, al-Shabaab executed two Christians riding on a bus headed to Garissa. As they did in previous attacks, the group forced bus passengers to show their identity cards to prove whether or not they had a Muslim or Christian name.

Al-Shabab regards Christians with a Muslim background as high-value targets, an Open Doors factsheet explains. Believers who left Islam to follow Jesus are often killed on the spot when discovered. Al-Shabab has continuously expressed its desire to eradicate Christians from the country.

In Kenya, Open Doors explains, those who convert to Christianity face a constant threat of attack from their closest relatives as al-Shabaab has infiltrated some locales to spy on Christians.
Christchurch and Genesis 4: The pathway to evil

Genesis 4 contains the story of Cain and Abel. In the light of world history, it is a foundational text when it comes to understanding the nature of human beings. It sheds a cold light on what happened yesterday in New Zealand, when at least 49 Muslims were gunned down by a terrorist who appears to have been a right-wing extremist.

In the story, God looks with favour on Abel's offering, but not on Cain's. No reason is given; that's just how things are.

Very often there is no apparent reason why one person succeeds in life and another fails. The question is what we do with our failures. God says to Cain: 'Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door; it desires to have you, but you must master it' (6-7).

We don't know what led the Christchurch killer to do what he did. At one level it's important to find out; at another, not so much. Because the Bible lays out the path to murder very precisely. There is a movement towards evil, an opening of the self to wrongdoing. Then 'sin'  personified as a sort of beast, waiting in ambush  pounces, and there is a struggle between the desire to do right and the desire to do wrong. 'You must master it', God says, but by then it is often too late. It was for Cain; it was for yesterday's murderer too. It mastered him.

What, for him, was the equivalent of a rejected sacrifice? A grudge against others he thought were more successful than him? A fear of those he saw as 'other'? A twisted loyalty to his own race or religion?

What led him to walk towards the doorway into hell, where sin was crouching? Hate groups on social media, far-right conspiracy theories, drugs, bad company?

We might find out one day. But what's more important than satisfying our curiosity is recognising the power of sin. It draws us where we don't want to go, until we find we do want to go there, and then it has mastered us.

Anyone with a heart is grieved at what happened in Christchurch. But if we take from it the thought that there are a few unpredictable aggressors who will break out and kill, and that there's nothing to be done about it because they are such outliers, we've learned the wrong lesson. The ancient story of Cain and Abel tells us that murder is the ultimate consequence of a movement towards evil, and that this movement is one we're all capable of making. Islamophobia, racism and resentment are the claws of the beast. The beast will be there whatever we do, but its claws can be blunted. We all have a part to play in this: we can challenge the throwaway comment, move towards our Muslim neighbour, speak words of peace.

It is too late for those who died yesterday. But we're called to do what we can, and most of us should probably do more than we do.

Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
Our priests abused hundreds of children, admits Polish Catholic Church

As many as 382 children were sexually abused by clergy in Poland between 1990 and 2018, according to findings presented on Thursday by the Polish Catholic Church in one of the most devout countries in Europe.

The report follows investigations into widespread abuse of minors by clergy in other countries  notably in Chile, the United States, Australia and Ireland  that have shaken the Roman Catholic Church to its foundations.

'This is an especially painful, tragic issue as it is connected with consecrated people, who devoted themselves to serving the church, other human beings. They have social trust and this social trust was so tragically violated,' Archbishop Marek Jedraszewski said at a news conference.

Polish bishops last year asked victims of past clerical abuse for forgiveness and began collecting data to 'identify the causes of these deeds and assess their scale'.

The report said as many as 198 of the victims were below the age of 15.

Last month the Polish charity Have no fear, which supports abuse victims, delivered its own report to Pope Francis in which it calculated  purely on the basis of media reports collated since the mid-1950s  that at least 384 minors had been sexually abused by clergy in Poland.

Activists say the real figure is probably much greater.

The charity has called for the creation of a panel to investigate the real scale of the problem, securing access to Church documents regarding the abuse of minors, and dismissing bishops found responsible for covering up sexual crimes.

In Poland, Catholic priests enjoy high social prestige and victims of sexual abuse by clergy are often suspected by devout Poles of making up false accusations, even long after the offender in question has been jailed.

Poland remains one of Europe's most devout countries. Nearly 85 per cent of Poland's 38 million-strong population identify as Roman Catholics and around 12 million attend mass every Sunday.

But Polish Church authorities have yet to reach a consensus on how to address the issue of sexual abuse.

An arm of the Church has filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court seeking to annul a 1 million zloty ($263,000) payment ordered by a lower court to a woman who, as a 13-year old child, was repeatedly raped by her local priest.

The case was a landmark ruling in granting compensation and an annuity to a victim of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest in Poland.
'Words cannot convey our distress': New Zealand church leaders respond to mosque killings

Church leaders in Christchurch have responded with horror to the terrorist attack that saw at least 49 Muslims murdered yesterday and expressed their support for the Muslim community.

The Anglican Bishop of Christchurch, Rt Rev Peter Carrell, issued a statement saying: 'Church leaders are absolutely devastated at the unprecedented situation in Christchurch this afternoon and our hearts and prayers go to all involved. No religious organisation or group deserves to be the target of someone's hate  regardless of beliefs.

'We stand for an Aotearoa New Zealand which will never condone such violence. So across the churches of Christchurch and Canterbury, we are praying for our Muslim brothers and sisters, for those injured and those who have lost loved ones, for the police, ambulance and other emergency services, and for all in the city of Christchurch who are feeling distress and fear due to this event. We are upholding you all in our prayers.

'We pray too for the shooter and their supporters, because for any person to do this, they must have such hatred in their hearts, such misalignment of the value of human life, that they too, need our prayer. We thank many others from around our nation and the world who are praying for peace in Christchurch.'

The Catholic Bishop of Christchurch, Rt Rev Paul Martin, said: 'We are horrified at the violence that has been inflicted on people of our city this afternoon. Words cannot convey our distress. Our prayers are with those who are suffering.'

Profound sympathy for the victims and relatives of the New Zealand terrorism. Let all Christians pray for healing of people, interfaith relations and New Zealand itself. Jesus calls us to welcome strangers and love our neighbour however different.  Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) March 15, 2019

He pointed Catholics to the prayer of St Francis of Assisi which begins, 'Lord, make us instruments of your peace: where there is hatred, let us sow love, where there is injury, pardon.'

An ecumenical grouping of churches comprising Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, Salvation Army, Catholic and independent churches, the Christchurch Inner-City Christian Ministers' Association, wrote to the city's Muslim community saying: 'In the face of today's horrific shooting, the combined inner-city Christian ministers and their congregations wish to extend our love to the wider Muslim Community of Christchurch and assure them of our friendship and support at this time of great loss.

'Be assured of our continuing prayers as our joint city community and people struggle to understand what has happened in the wake of this unconscionable act.

'As members of two faith traditions, born out of a shared Abrahamic inheritance, we stand in solidarity with you, looking, and crying, to God, the source of all.'
The coming 5G networks will revolutionize our lives in ways we know  20 times faster data transmission speeds, an explosion in machine-to-machine communication, autonomous cars, augmented and virtual realities, smart cities  and in ways we have yet to imagine.

Jay Brown, is CEO Crown Castle International Corp., a company with a role in deploying this fifth generation of wireless technology. He spoke with Texas Inc. about his progress.

Q. Could you tell us a little about Crown Castle?

A. Crown Castle International Corp., headquartered in Houston, was founded over 25 years ago. We started by providing cell phone towers to wireless operators and grew our portfolio through a number of acquisitions. We would acquire cell towers from wireless operators and then lease space on those towers back to them. Then we would share the assets with other carriers so they could build out their networks.

About eight years ago, we got into the small cell space and began constructing and building fiberoptic cables to deploy small cells for the wireless operators.

Over the last couple of years, weve made a significant number of acquisitions  a little over $9 billion of acquisitions since 2017. These have enabled us to provide fiberoptic cable across a number of markets. We have over 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 route miles of fiberoptic cable in many of the top metro markets in the US, and we use that to provide services to large enterprises  such as hospitals, schools and large financial institutions. We use the same fiber as the backbone for the deployment of small cells for the wireless carriers.

Q. Why is 5G so exciting?

A. It does primarily two things. 5G significantly reduces the amount of latency in a wireless network. Latency is the amount time it takes from when either a human or a computer requests information over the network. The significant reduction in latency has applications for things like virtual reality and augmented reality. Latency with 5G is likely to decrease about 10 times compared to 4G.

Things to know about Jay Brown School: Baylor University. Favorite food: Creme Brulee. Hobbies: Hunting and reading. Favorite books: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't, by Jim C. Collins. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, by Kim Scott. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg. Favorite quote: "To whom much is given, much is required" - John F Kennedy, from Luke 12.48. See More Collapse

Secondly, 5G significantly increases the number of connections or users that can be on a given site at one point  it improves the number of devices that can be connected to the network by about 10-fold. That creates a lot more capacity in the wireless network. On a like-for-like basis, 5G can be as much as 10,000 times greater in terms of capacity than the existing 4G network.

The transformative nature of 5G is illustrated by the 10,000-fold increase in data traffic capacity it will support, while delivering more instantaneous and real-time access.

Q. How is the 5G infrastructure rollout going in Houston and other cities?

A. In Houston and other large cities, were focused on deploying 5G for all of the wireless carriers. As in any deployment cycle, carriers tend to focus on areas with the greatest population density (the greatest population where people live, work and/or shop). This activity is happening across the country in all the top 25-30 markets.

Theres significant investment currently to build networks that are 5G-ready. The equipment for 5G is not quite ready for mass deployment. We will most likely see significant amounts of equipment and devices that are 5G-enabled at the end of this year and in 2020. But right now we are getting the networks ready, which means were building fiber, making sites ready, and working with cities in order to gain access rights so that we can deploy small cells across the country.

Q. What equipment is not quite ready?

A. The combination of the base stations and antennas that will be used in most cases for 5G. The base station is the electronics that go in the base of the tower or the hub-sites connecting multiple small cells. Our devices are also not ready  the iPhone or Galaxy device that we have in our hands today is not yet 5G-enabled. So even if the equipment at the sites was ready for 5G, our devices are not.

Companies like Alcatel, Lucent, Nokia, Semens and Huawei make the equipment at the base of the tower. Were an owner of infrastructure assets, a real estate provider, so our company owns the real estate infrastructure, which is necessary in order to deploy the wireless networks.

Q. So you are waiting for these other companies to be ready for you to install their equipment?

A. Yes.

Q. What companies are competing with you in Houston?

A. The biggest deployers of this infrastructure are the carriers deploying infrastructure directly, and Crown Castle. Were deploying infrastructure in a way that can be shared across multiple carriers. The most active participants in the market are Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and us.

Our business model is to share the infrastructure across multiple providers. We want to share our assets with Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile and put all of them on the system. This lowers the costs for our carrier customers. It also has the benefit of reducing the amount of infrastructure that has to be deployed.

There are two other large companies that are in our space, American Tower, which owns cell phone towers worldwide, and SBA Communications which owns towers in the U.S. and Latin America. Unlike these two companies, were focused entirely in the U.S. and we own a significant amount of fiberoptic cable and small cells.

Q. Is there anything unique about Houston that affects your putting up towers and laying fiber in the area?

A. Houston has a terrific, business-friendly environment, and it has been a great partner. Weve deployed 2G, 3G and 4G and are now in the process of preparing to deploy 5G deployment. The city has played a leadership role in enabling our company and the wireless carriers to smartly and efficiently deploy infrastructure. I would put Houston at the top of the list in terms of long-term thinking and ensuring that companies like Crown Castle have the ability to deploy leading edge technology.

Q. Will 5G find its way into rural areas that are currently underserved by 4G?

A. I think its likely that, in the early stages of the deployment, well see the focus of capital investment in major metropolitan areas where there are the most consumers and a greater opportunity for the wireless operators to get a return on their capital investment. But over time, just like with 4G, investment and deployment will move from the more densely populated areas to the less densely populated areas. Wireless technologies are the cheapest, most cost-efficient way to deploy access to data networks. So while initial deployment will likely be centered around more densely populated areas, in time, I think 5G will be in less densely populated areas as well.

Q. Since becoming CEO, in July 2016, what are your goals and have you been successful in achieving them?

A. Our No. 1 goal is to be able to grow our dividend between 7 percent and 8 percent on an annual basis. Weve accomplished that goal.

Secondly, we want to be a great place to work and our engagement scores and employee satisfaction scores are extraordinarily high. Well over 90 percent of our employees are satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs. Weve become a great place to work and have been recognized by a number of different organizations which study that.

Lastly, we want to be a good corporate citizen and give back to the community, so a couple of years ago we launched an initiative called Connected by Good which is a company-initiative that involves our improving and enhancing parks across the nation. Parks are a place where people connect normally, reinforcing our business model  connecting people. We believe making sure parks are the best they can be in the communities in which we operate shows our commitment to connecting people and businesses with infrastructure.

Q. What advice would you give to other CEOs?

A. Focus on your customers, be obsessed about delivering for your customers, and make sure that your employees have a great place to work. Shareholder returns follow from delivering for your customers and being thoughtful about whats best for them. We take that same approach with employees. Focusing on customers and employees personal development and career development work together to deliver great results for shareholders.

Q. Would you like to add anything?

A. In closing, were really excited about our position in the market, at the leading edge of deployment technology and 5G, and our position relative to the growing need for wireless infrastructure.
Colvill Office Properties closed on 117,000 square feet of lease deals at Five Post Oak Park, a 28-story office tower at 4400 Post Oak Parkway, in 2018. The transactions, which represent new leases, renewals and extensions, follow a renovation by San Francisco-based Shorenstein Properties that included upgrades to the lobbies, elevators, new fitness and conference centers. The building, inside Loop 610 near San Felipe, is between the River Oaks, West University, and Tanglewood neighborhoods. Vince Strake and Damon Thames handle leasing on behalf of Shorenstein.

Kitchen Cabinet Distributors has opened a 180,000-square-foot distribution center and showroom at 600 Fallbrook Drive in Pinto Park in north Houston. The center, which provides ready-to-assemble cabinets to contractors, builders and cabinet dealers, represents the companys first facility outside of its Raleigh, N.C., headquarters. The center will serve Texas housing markets, including Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas.

Gulf BK has purchased Brookhollow West Business Park, a 251,569-square-foot business park on 15.5 acres at 9777 West Gulf Bank at North Gessner Road. Abco Industrial Properties represented the buyer. Walter Menuet and Judd Harrison of Colliers International represented the seller, CUNA Mutual Investment Corp.

Third Palm Capital has hired NAI Partners to handle office leasing for Republic Square at 13501 Katy Freeway next to Terry Hershey Park in Energy Corridor. The 35-acre campus, which has frontage along Memorial Drive on the south, consists of a renovated 324,000-square-foot office building and sites for potential office, retail, hospitality and multifamily developments. Republic Square, which can accommodate both small and large tenants, is 12 percent leased. Randy Nerren, Jacob Aldridge and Zach Leger are handling the assignment.

Randall Davis Co. has acquired a near half-acre site at 3723 Westheimer for a proposed condo project. JLLs Mark Raines and Matt Parsons represented the seller, Ascot Meadow LLC, and Chip Nash represented the buyer.

SI Granite has leased 16,000 square feet of office/warehouse space at 4849 Cranswick in northwest Houston. Patrick McKiernan with First Houston Properties represented both the landlord, FHS Investments, and the tenant.

Miami-based Eagle Property Capital has acquired three suburban apartment complexes in the Houston area: the 312-unit Landmark at Barker Cypress, 192-unit Champions Centre Apartments and 246-unit Champions Park Apartments. Berkadia arranged acquisition financing.

Gorham Export Packing has renewed a lease for 13,860 square feet at 1020 Fennell at Lawndale. David Gerber of Gerber Realty negotiated the renewal with ACC 2320 Congress.

Cole Rehabilitation has expanded and extended its 6,030-square-foot office lease at 17200 Texas 249. Denise Ksiazek of Cypressbrook Co. represented the tenant. Will McGrath of LandPark Commercial represented the landlord, DenBoer Texas Properties, LLC.

Iberia Insulation has leased 2,700 square feet of warehouse space at 10486 Commerce Road. Tracey Kerr of Top Guns of Lake Conroe represented the landlord, KT Motors. George Montes of Cypressbrook Co. represented the tenant.

Mercury Associates has leased 1,500 square feet at 26009 Budde Road, Spring, from Windswood Corp. Kimberly DeVos of Cypressbrook Co. handled the deal.

Veliz Duno Co. has leased 3,813 square feet of office space at 13831 Northwest Freeway. Andy Parrish and Lesley Rice of NAI Partners represented the landlord.

Maldonado-Burkett has leased 1,205 square feet at 14200 Gulf Freeway. Dani Allison of Office Solutions represented the landlord.

katherine.feser@chron.com

twitter.com/kfeser
Hamas-Israel ceasefire achieved through Egyptian mediation 100 'Hamas targets' hit after 2 rockets at Tel Aviv

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, MARCH 15 - Hamas and Israel on Friday reported reached a ceasefire 12 hours after the first rockets were launched against Tel Aviv and southern Israel thanks to Egyptian mediation. Reports were from the Israeli television station Kan, reported the Times of Israel, as well as Palestinian news sources. There has not yet been any confirmation from Israeli official sources. After two rockets shot at Tel Aviv, ''over 100 Hamas terrorist targets were hit'' in Gaza over the night between Thursday and Friday in Gaza by Israeli warplanes, a military spokesman said. He added that some of the targets were the Hamas headquarters in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, a naval position that served for weapons manufacturing, and an underground workshop used to build rockets. Four people were injured in Gaza from the airstrikes conducted by the Israeli air force over the night, local sources quoted the Gaza healthcare ministry as saying. (ANSAmed).




Texas Senator John Cornyn warned Friday that getting the revised North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress will be "one of the heaviest lifts we have this year."

The veteran Republican expressed concern about how the agreement would look when it came out of the House, as free trade deals get tougher scrutiny from both parties.

"Trade has gotten a little bit of a black eye. There's people like the president who are more populist, not necessarily free traders," he said, speaking at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit. "I'm hopeful we'll be able to get that trade agreement across the floor. It's going to be tough."

TRADE LOOK: As Congress weighs new NAFTA, signs of support emerge

Three months after President Donald Trump signed on to an updated trade deal - which he's calling the United States Mexico Canada Agreement - pro-trade leaders in the House and Senate are working to build support.

Hurdles have already emerged, with both parties demanding the White House lift tariffs on steel and aluminum tariffs from Canada and Mexico and some Democrats calling for stricter labor provisions to protect American workers.

But with labor unions and environmental groups taking a softer line than on past trade deals, a potential pathway for Congress to approve the deal is beginning to emerge.

"It's a different atmosphere this time," Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said earlier this month.

Cornyn also had tough words for the Green New Deal, a proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., to rapidly expand carbon-free energy sources to counter climate change.

He described plans by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to hold a vote on the proposal as an effort to determine, "how serious the proponents are or whether this is a matter of political messaging."

"It really is so radical," Cornyn said of the Green New Deal. "So much of the rhetoric is not about finding solutions, it's about staking out your position and fighting it out in the next election. I think the answer is coming up with consensus actions."
Federal regulators gave the proposed Texas LNG export terminal at the Port of Brownsville a green light in an environmental report alongside a warning about habitat fragmentation for the endangered ocelot, jaguarundi and aplomado falcon, if other similar projects are also approved.

In a final environmental impact statement issued Friday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission concluded that the Texas LNG project would have adverse environmental impacts, but they could be mitigated through proper planning, design, engineering and training during construction and operations. Among the recommendations are using electric motors to reduce noise and emissions, installing barriers to control erosion, planting native vegetation and limiting construction activities during breeding periods.

Located along the Brownsville Ship Channel and next to the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, the proposed liquefied natural gas export terminal is inside a migratory corridor between the United States and Mexico for the ocelot, jaguarundi and aplomado falcon.

Although the effects can be mitigated for Texas LNG as a single project, FERC officials warned that the combined impact of traffic, light and noise created by Texas LNG, two similar export terminals, pipelines and wind farms in the area would fragment habitat for the three endangered species and put them at further risk for fatal accidents with vehicles and equipment.

We have determined that cumulative impacts on ocelots and jaguarundis would be permanent and significant, FERC officials wrote about combined impacts of all the projects.

LNG Debate: Enviros granted legal status to fight proposed Texas LNG project

Headquartered in Houston, Texas LNG has sought permission from FERC to build a liquefied natural gas plant along the Brownsville Ship Channel since March 2016. The completion of the environmental review is an important step toward final approval of the project

A final permit decision is not expected until June, but if approved, the facility would export up to 4 million metric tons of LNG per year.

In a statement, Texas LNG Founder and Chief Operating Officer Langtry Meyer said the report is favorable to the company. Texas LNG was the first of three proposed liquefied natural gas projects to file federal permit applications to build a export terminal in the Rio Grande Valley waterway.

The receipt of the FERC approval is one of the important steps to allow the project to begin construction and commence LNG production by 2024, Meyer said. This project will bring jobs and investment to Cameron County and deliver clean, safe, abundant Texas natural gas energy to the world."

Growing Industry: Top 10 destinations for U.S. LNG exports in 2018

Texas LNG and the other liquefied natural gas export terminals face stiff opposition from a coalition of shrimpers, fishermen, environmentalists, neighbors and communities working under the banner Save RGV From LNG.

Coalition members filed more than 900 comments against Texas LNG while more than four dozen of them spoke against the project during a November public hearing in Port Isabel. In January, FERC officials granted Save RGV From LNG legal status to challenge Texas LNGs application in the federal permitting process.

If permitted and built, the Texas LNG and the two other proposed LNG export terminals would be an environmental disaster for the Rio Grande Valley, Sierra Club organizer Rebekah Hinojosa said in a statement. The LNG terminals would turn our pristine coastline into a network of industrial processing plants with flammable pipelines, towering storage tanks, flare stacks, and massive tanker ships.

Fuel Fix: Get energy news sent directly to your inbox

FERC officials estimate that if approved, the Texas LNG export terminal would receive 74 liquefied natural gas tankers a year. If all three LNG projects at the Port of Brownsville are approved, the agency estimates that they would bring a combined 511 tankers a year.

With the United States poised to become a net energy exporter next year, Steve Everley, a spokesman for the industry-financed group Texans For Natural Gas, said that if approved and built, the Brownsville projects and others would ensure that the U.S. remains a global energy superpower for decades to come.

FERCs conclusions on Texas LNG demonstrate that we dont have to make a choice between the environment and energy development, Everley said. Natural gas exported from Texas will help countries around the world reduce air pollution and deliver power to people who desperately need access.

sergio.chapa@chron.com

@SergioChapa on Twitter
The liquefied natural gas industry wants to become an outlet for the record amount of methane being produced in the Permian Basin, where much of it is being burned off due a lack of pipelines to move it out of the West Texas shale play.

Methane is the main component of natural gas. During a discussion of Permian Basin pipelines at CERAWeek by IHS Markit, Matt Schatzman, CEO of the Houston LNG terminal developer NextDecade, said flaring is not a long-term option for handling the natural gas produced as a byproduct oil

LNG export terminals proposed along the Gulf Coast, he said, could become an outlet for much of the volume.

NextDecade is one of several liquefied natural gas companies seeking to build export terminals along the Gulf Coast. The company is seeking permission to build Rio Grande LNG in the Port of Brownsville and Galveston LNG in Texas City.

"LNG is going to be a major part of helping to resolve this gas issue so producers can attain flow assurances so they can produce the much more valuable oil, which is driving the economics of the entire development in the Permian," Schatzman said.

Natural Gas: Big Oil aims to kick its dirty methane habit

Houston pipeline operator Kinder Morgan is already building two pipelines to move natural gas from the Permian to the Gulf Coast. The company's Gulf Coast Express Pipeline is expected to begin moving 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day in October while its Permian Highway Pipeline would move another 2 billion cubic feet per day starting in October 2020.

Some of that natural gas would be shipped on Kinder Morgan pipelines to markets in Mexico. Kinder Morgan Natural Gas Pipelines Gas Group President Tom Martin said exports to Mexico are expected to grow by 2 billion cubic feet per day over the two or three years.

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The San Diego company Sempra Energy is developing the Costa Azul LNG export terminal near Ensenada, Baja California that will receive natural gas from the Permian Basin and export it to customers around the world.

The Houston office of Mexico Pacific Limited recently awarded service contracts to move forward with plans to build a pipeline that will move natural gas from the Permian Basin to an LNG export terminal the company is developing in Puerto Libertad, Sonora.
Lunch meeting. 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., Amegy Bank, 1717 W. Loop South, 9th floor. Speaker: Ron Abbott, sustainability technical manager, Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. Cost: $35-$55. Information: info@transclubhou.org or 713-510-3445.

Strategies for Financing Your Business:

9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., UH Bauer College SBDC, 2302 Fannin, Suite 200. Cost: Free. Information: www.sbdc.uh.edu.

Job Search Action Plan:

Part 1 of a Job Search 101 workshop. 10 a.m.-1 p.m., 3300 Chimney Rock, Suite 102. Cost: Free. Registration is not required. Information: http://js101.org or js101info@gmail.com.

Launch Your Small Business on Facebook:

Hosted by SCORE Houston. 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.,, Houston Community College Southeast Campus, 6815 Rustic, Workforce Building, 3rd floor. Registration: www.houston.score.org.

Business Resources at Your Library:

Class hosted by Fort Bend County Libraries Sienna Branch Library. 2-3 p.m., 8411 Sienna Springs Blvd., Missouri City. Cost: Free and open to the public. Registration: www.fortbend.lib.tx.us or call 281-238-2900.

Wednesday

Small Business Development Center Day:

9 a.m.-1 p.m., UH Bauer College SBDC, 2302 Fannin, Suite 200. Cost: $29. Information: www.sbdc.uh.edu.

Sharpen Your Marketing Message & Access to Capital:

Hosted by SCORE Houston. 9:30 a.m.- 12:30 p.m., The Kingdom Builders Center, 6011 W. Orem. Registration: www.houston.score.org.

Facebook for Business:

Class hosted by Fort Bend County Libraries Sienna Branch Library. 10:30-11:30 a.m., 8411 Sienna Springs Blvd., Missouri City. Cost: Free and open to the public. Registration: www.fortbend.lib.tx.us or call 281-238-2900.

Resume  Are You a Fit?:

Job Search 101 workshop. 10 a.m.-1 p.m., 3300 Chimney Rock, Suite 102. Cost: Free. Information: http://js101.org or js101info@gmail.com.

Worldwide Employee Benefits:

Houston Chapter meeting. 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., Maggianos, 2019 Post Oak Blvd. Speaker: Mariela Smith, director of human resources for Gallagher, South Central Region. Program: Traditional performance reviews: Are they helping or hurting your employees? Cost: $30-$55. Registration: www.webnetwork.org.

Thursday

Houston Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators:

Meeting. 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m., Mortons Steakhouse, 1001 McKinney Street. Speaker: Chris Ritter, Texas State Bar. Topic: Substance abuse in law firms. Cost: $40 for non-members. Reservations: chaptermanager@alahou.org.

USAEE (United States Association of Energy Economics):

Monthly meeting. 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m., Federal Reserve Bank, Houston Branch, 1801 Allen Parkway. Speakers: Siddhartha Sen and David Vaucher of IHS Markit. Topic: Upstream investment and cost trends in the North and Latin America. Cost: $40. Information: Houston.iaee@gmail.com. Online: www.usaee.org.

LinkedIn for the Job Seeker:

Job Search 101 workshop. 10:15 a.m.-1 p.m., 3300 Chimney Rock, Suite 102. Cost: Free. Information: http://js101.org or js101info@gmail.com.

Small Business Marketing:

9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., UH Bauer College SBDC, 2302 Fannin, Suite 200. Cost: $29. Information: www.sbdc.uh.edu.

Building a Budget:

9:30 a.m.-noon, UH Bauer College SBDC, 2302 Fannin, Suite 200. Cost: $29. Information: www.sbdc.uh.edu.

Business Model Canvas:

10 a.m.-12:30 p.m., UH Bauer College SBDC, 2302 Fannin, Suite 200. Cost: $29. Information: www.sbdc.uh.edu.

Friday

Online Branding:

Job Search 101 workshop. 10 a.m.-1 p.m., 3300 Chimney Rock, Suite 102. Cost: Free. Information: http://js101.org or js101info@gmail.com.

Saturday

U.S. Small Business Administration 8(a) Certification:

Hosted by SCORE Houston. 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., Parker Williams Branch Library, 10851 Scarsdale Blvd., Suite. 510. Information: www.houston.score.org.

March 26

Houston Entrepreneurs Forum:

Monthly breakfast meeting. 7-8:30 a.m., Ouisies Table, 3939 San Felipe. Speaker: Jacky Noons, CEO of 3-Men Movers. Cost $27 members, $35 non-members, $40 walk-ins. Reservations: Tracy Park at 713-822-7260 or Tracyspark@aol.com.

katherine.feser@chron.com

twitter.com/kfeser
Two cutting-edge technology firms have claimed the creative office space in downtown's historic Main&Co redevelopment, developer NewForm Real Estate announced.

Ruths.ai relocated its downtown Houston office to 8,457 square feet. The company provides an integrated analytics platform for oil and gas clients. UiPath, a global robotics process automation firm, leased 5,187 square feet to house a Houston team. The companies moved in last month.

The offices, on Main Street near Commerce along the Metro Rail line, have original exposed brick walls and ceiling beams, refinished hardwood floors, stainless-steel kitchens and private bathrooms.

RENOVATION: Rice University unveils plans for former Sears building, only at HoustonChronicle.com

"Restoring these iconic historic buildings and leasing the office space to cutting-edge tech firms is a testament that landmark real estate has a place in the future landscape of our city," NewForm Real Estate President Dan Zimmerman said in an announcement.

The Main&Co project, which transformed a collection of buildings into office space, street-level retail and a contemporary art gallery, was completed in June. The five-story Dorrance Building, 114 Main, was built in 1903 by John M. Dorrance, a vice president of the Houston Cotton Exchange. The Raphael Building, 110 Main, was built in the late 1800s.

Other tenants at Main&Co are Cottonmouth Club, ETRO Nightclub and Lilly&Bloom cocktail lounges on Main Street, and LCD Gallery on the fifth level.

A 1,136-square-foot street-level retail space remains for lease near the Produce Row mural completed by local artist Dual last year.

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John Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor turned Democratic presidential candidate, told a crowd of oil executives Thursday climate change required that society move "hard and fast."

Asked whether he supported the so-called Green New Deal as proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., he said he supported its "urgency."

"Obviously it's a very ambitious and maybe excessively ambitious goal," he said, speaking at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference in Houston. "I understand this room is probably divided, but I have come down more and more a sense of urgency is required."

OIL POLITICS: Oil sector's climate pledges fall short of science

Since declaring his candidacy via Twitter last week, Hickenlooper has sought to define himself as the moderate, pragmatic alternative to liberal candidates like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

He has pledged to work with Republicans. While in the governor's office, he fought off ballot measures that would have restricted oil and gas drilling near residential areas.At the same time he has pledged to commit to the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions laid out in the 2015 Paris accord on climate change.

"The reason I'm running for president is I think we're divided. We're in a crisis," he said. "I don't think we've been this divided since the civil rights movement."

Hickenlooper is no stranger to the oil and gas business. In the 1980s he worked as a geologist for an oil company in Colorado before getting laid off and going on to open a series of brewpubs and restaurants. He was elected to the Denver mayor's office in the early 2000s before moving into the governor's office in 2011.

He discussed that combination of business and political experience as unique, commenting "President Trump has certainly proven how hard it is to go from one to the other."

Hickenlooper also had tough words for the other 15 Democratic candidates for president, who he described as career politicians.

"They're dreamers. They create visions. They debate," he said. "I have dreams too, but I'm a doer, and that's where I'm going to try and hang my hat."

Looking ahead to next year's presidential primaries, the former governor described himself as a "dark horse," admitting he lacked the fundraising network of some other Democrats in the race.

He said he'd focus on his experience bringing coalitions together, recounting how he'd won over conservatives while the mayor of Denver by agreeing to restore the term "Merry Christmas" to a holiday display.

"The truth is to admit when you screwed up enhances the power of the office," he said. "For the next week or two people talked about how I wasn't a typical politician."
Houston's economy needs to diversify beyond the energy industry, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told oil executives Friday.

"This will always be an energy town. I try not to say we are the energy capital ," he told the audience at CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference in Houston. "But in order to wear the crown, we need to diversify."

The city's dependence on the oil and gas market has been a longstanding concern among civic leader since the financial devastation that struck following a crash in oil prices in the 1980s. Since that time multiple mayors have pressed to diversify the economy, and nowadays only 40 percent of the economy stems from oil and gas, Turner said.

COUNTER POINT: Houston's economic diversity isn't so diverse

He cited efforts to attract technology companies and build up the city's medical sector, while at the same time keeping the oil companies and other energy firms that have long been attracted to Houston.

"We can remain true and appreciative to companies that have helped make this city what it is," he said. "At the same time we can be elevative and creative and expand the definition of energy."

Eighteen months after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston and the surrounding region, Turner said rebuilding a city more resilient to flooding and storms was critical. But he also said leaders needed to focus on addressing the root cause of climate change itself, which he said left low-lying cities like Houston imperiled.

"We had three 500-year storms in three consecutive years," he said. "The storms are coming with greater frequency and intensity. We all recognize there are certain things we can not ignore."
Months before the end of his term as Jersey Village mayor, Justin Ray has kicked off his campaign for representative of Texas House District 135. His announcement comes more than a year prior to the election in November 2020.

On Feb. 18, Ray announced he was running as a Republican for Texas House District 135 with a video and a link to his campaign website on Facebook. Texas House District 135 only recently received a new representative in November 2018, Democrat Jon Rosenthal, who ousted 24-year Republican incumbent Gary Elkins.

Ray, who has been mayor of Jersey Village since 2015, said he chose to run for the office because of his connection to the district, including growing up in the Cy-Fair ISD school district and holding a position on Jersey Village City Council as a councilman and mayor. Ray will end his term as mayor on May 4.

I knew the district, I represent the district, I'm a firm believer in a lot of our positive, optimistic Republican views and I felt that I could do my part to rebuild the Republican brand here in northwest Harris County, Ray said. It's an area in which voters respond to Republican values because they are timeless.

Since beginning his campaign, Ray said he has personally knocked on more than 500 doors in the district in order to discuss the needs of the district and his intentions, and wanted to get started early. Ray said his priorities for the district include public education, businesses and flood mitigation for the district.

I support all of the governor's efforts to increase the state's activity with public education, he said. The only way Texas is going to continue to be a successful engine of economic prosperity is if we have educated people in Texas.

Ray said Harris County needs someone representing Republican core values in the community following the flipping of Texas House districts from Republican to Democrat in the 2018 election. Ray said he has been a Republican since he was 18 and recalled voting for Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential election, and said the party needs districts to have representatives with these values.

Gary (Elkins) is a neighbor of mine and I've worked with Gary and there was of course some change in this last November election but I don't believe the change was a repudiation of Republican, conservative values, Ray said. When you start talking about the things I believe in, that I'm talking to the voters about, our principles of opportunity, freedom and family values and personal responsibility, all of the important attributes and core fundamentals of the Republican party.

Cy-Fair AFT, a teacher union and support group, has shown support for Rosenthal early in his campaign for the November 2018 election. Nikki Cowart, president of Cy-Fair AFT, said the union supports candidates who know the community.

Jon came to AFT union early, before his campaign really ramped up, and he didn't excessively talk about his ideas, yet truly listened, she said. Jon wanted to fully understand the concerns of current CFISD educators, retired teachers, school bus drivers and food service workers. Stark comparison to his two-decade predecessor, Rosenthal has attended each CFISD school board meeting, open union meetings and Jersey Village [City] Council meetings.

Cowart said Cy-Fair AFT is not a partisan organization.

Cy-Fair ISD is nearly a 50/50 split district of both Republicans and Democrats, and our Local Cy-Fair AFT union is evenly split as well, she said. To date, Cy-Fair AFT has not been contacted by any potential politicians for any future races. But a word of advice to anyone wanting to run for any office: Know your community, know the issues and engage constantly with constituents.

Rosenthal and his staff offered a statement in response to a request for comment concerning Rays run for office.

We are energized and focused on getting our legislative agenda passed this session, the statement said. It's really comprehensive and has an emphasis on school safety, education, veterans, gun safety, housing and equity justice. All issues pertaining to House District 135, a diverse and growing area. We thank the great people of House District 135 for electing me to serve and represent them for the 86th Legislative Session and look forward to serving many more terms.

chevall.pryce@chron.com
Israeli warplanes hit over 100 Hamas targets After rockets shot at Tel Aviv

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, MARCH 15 - After two rockets shot at Tel Aviv, ''more than 100 Hamas terrorist targets were hit'' in Gaza over the night between Thursday and Friday in Gaza by Israeli warplanes, a military spokesman said. He added that some of the targets were the Hamas headquarters in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, a naval position that served for weapons manufacturing, and an underground workshop used to build rockets. The Gaza healthcare ministry has not yet released any statement on casualties from the attacks.



Both Hamas and the Islamic Jihad withdrew their men from many bases after the rocket attacks, as they expected retaliation from Israel, local media say. The military spokesman said that Hamas had been behind the rocket attacks.



The announcement came over the night after an emergency meeting chaired by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu.



Neither Hamas nor the Islamic Jihad or other factions in Gaza have claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks.



Other rockets were shot during the night at the Israeli town of Sderot, near the Gaza Strip. (ANSAmed).




Phase II of the Northpark Drive expansion is in position to receive federal dollars, bringing the entire project a step closer to fruition.

TIRZ 10 Chairman Stan Sarman said the Technical Advisory Committee had placed the 47.4 million Phase II, which spans from Russell Palmer Road to Woodland Hills Drive, at 28th out of 34 on the Houston-Galveston Area Councils 2018 Call For Projects.

This position made the board recommendable to receive more than $34 million in the requested fiscal year of 2023, he said during the boards monthly meeting on Thursday.

TACs final verdict will be presented to the Transportation Policy Council next Friday, Sarman added, which will determine whether the money is within reach.

(TPC members) are the top dogs, he said.

The $38.8 million Phase I of the Northpark expansion adds an overpass over the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and Loop 494 and ends at Russell Palmer Road. It will be funded through the City of Houstons $15.4 million contribution and bond funds incurred by the TIRZ.

Both phases of the $86 million project also increase the number of lanes from four to six.

Right rank

In previous meetings, Houston Councilmember Dave Martin said that the project needed a top-10 ranking to advance, but Sarman said this was no longer the case since projects were redistributed and the available money was recalculated.

The dominoes are now starting to fall, Sarman said. Im sure that some of the board members on the TPC will have questions thatll come up at the meeting on March 22, but hopefully by the end of that day they will have approved the recommendation of the TAC.

As with other TIRZ 10 members, Sarman was pleased with the ranking, which he said was achievable thanks to residents sending their comments about the expansion to the H-GAC. He said that, out of the 1,078 comments H-GAC received about all the projects, 485 of them  nearly half  were about Northpark.

Sarman said the number hadnt factored those sent over the phone or by mail.

In the February meeting, whoever had submitted a comment was advised to notify Lisa Regan, account manager of Elmore Public Relations. She thought the community was very supportive about the project and that TIRZ 10 members got to spread the word out.

Jim Webb of The Goodman Corporation, a consultant for the TIRZ, credited Martin in particular.

If it wasnt for him this project would not be on this funded list, he said. Through the council members coordination with H-GAC, we were able to submit additional benefits over which the entire project corridor was listed. That really made the difference between unfunded and funded.

Ralph de Leon, a TIRZ consultant, also expressed optimism at the projects current momentum and believes that the TPC will approve it.

Intersections and Herons

Rachel Ray-Welsh of Walter P. Moore said that the Willow Terrace and Woodland Hills intersections with West Lake Houston Parkway will move forward with some designs in that area.

She also expected a mast arm for the intersection of Northpark and West Lake Houston, which had already been ordered, wont be installed until the end of May.

At the end of the meeting, Jessica Beemer, Martin's chief of staff, provided attendees with information about a Q&A session with the developer of the controversial The Herons Kingwood Marina this coming Monday and a Capital Improvement Project town hall in the Kingwood area next Thursday.

The TIRZ will reconvene 8 a.m. on April 11 at Kingwood Community Center. Members of the public may also attend.

nguyen.le@chron.com
In 1980s Houston, Renee and Stan Wallace  the parents of a child with severe intellectual and development disabilities (I/DD)  had exhausted all care options. Their son, Rick, had been in and out of several private institutions, and time and time again, the Wallaces had been told he was an impossible case.

Renee and Stan refused to accept this, and instead, took it upon themselves to create a group home model that provided the care and services Rick and others like him deserve.

Today, Im proud to serve as the CEO of what the Wallace family built from the ground up three decades ago. In my role with Vita Living, I have seen firsthand how stagnant, below market wages for I/DD caregivers have negatively impacted the families who rely on this critical support for their loved ones.

I/DD caregivers  also known as Direct Support Professionals or DSPs  are responsible for the health, safety, and well-being of some of Texas most vulnerable. Yet, the Medicaid reimbursement rate for DSPs has not changed for more than ten years, leading to hourly wages well below the national average and inconsistent with todays cost of living.

The work of a DSP is tireless and challenging, and without a doubt, takes a lot of dedication and passion. Thats why, in the absence of competitive pay, its so difficult for us to attract and retain qualified and reliable DSPs.

In fact, some of our DSPs have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. They stick with us because they care so deeply about the people theyre helping. I am incredibly grateful for these long-term employees, and we desperately need more of them. But until Texas gives DSPs the compensation they deserve, our hands will remain tied and high turnover rates will persist.

The Texas state legislature is currently considering legislation to increase funding in the Medicaid budget for I/DD caregivers. A small increase would go a long way in alleviating the hiring and retention problems currently facing our industry.

This doesnt just better serve caregivers, though. It also benefits the individuals for whom theyre providing care. While DSPs do help their patients with everyday tasks like bathing, getting dressed, and eating meals, they also play a major role in helping an often overlooked population develop meaningful, long-term relationships and important social skills. We want individuals with disabilities to have these opportunities, but we can only do that if we are able to retain our caregiver staff. And that starts with paying them a livable wage.

As our waitlists get longer, families are stuck trying to figure out an alternative solution for their loved ones. Usually these families have sought assistance from a group home because they cannot provide the necessary level of care at home  and understandably so. Caring for an individual with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities is an around the clock job thats just not feasible for everyone. But if group homes dont have the DSPs to take on more patients and home care isnt an option, families sometimes must make the difficult decision to institutionalize as a last resort.

Over 30 years ago, the Wallaces began our nonprofit so that Houstonians with even the severest disabilities would have a loving support community to call home. It breaks my heart to have to turn anyone away, not because we dont have room for them, but because we dont have the Medicaid funding to pay staff to care for them.

Individuals with disabilities and the DSPs who care for them deserve better, and I urge the Texas legislature to increase Medicaid funding for I/DD caregivers during the 2019 session. Ten years without an increase is long enough.

Joseph Cooper is the CEO of Vita Living, Inc.
Cruise ship travelers will have some exciting new perks to check out whenever sailing out of Galveston soon.

Royal Caribbean International recently announced its 2020-2021 winter season with some big news for Texans looking for a tropical escape. The global cruise line's largest ship sailing short getaways, Adventure of the Seas, will homeport in Galveston for the first time in 2020, according to a release.
RYLA - Rotary Youth Leadership Awards - is a January weekend in the Piney Woods of East Texas, filled with excitement and challenges for some of the most enterprising and delightful high school juniors in our Rotary District 5910 each year. Two weeks ago at the luncheon meeting of The Rotary Club of Conroe, we had a chance to meet four of them.

Courtney Stoutes, Melanie Nguyen, Aeronn Sarmiento and Elena Nikolaychuk, all students at Conroe High School, were sponsored by RCC and recapped their retreat weekend for us. Some things at RYLA stay the same - lots of food, not much sleep, and an endless supply of Blue Bell Ice Cream. We smile when we hear that each and every year from the teens; its nice to know that traditions continue and are appreciated.

All of these students are leaders on their home campuses, and part of RYLA is learning to work with other strong willed and determined peers you dont know, a life skill needed on a daily basis. These young adults gain experience in team work, compromising, and learning to speak your truth and ideas in a way that helps one accomplish goals in a positive and rewarding way.

Ive watched RYLA presentations for 20 years now and they are always meetings we look forward to. Each student has their unique experiences to present and watching these teens, listening to them, never gets old. Each of our local Rotary Clubs sends students to RYLA each year and each set aside a weekly meeting to honor the teens and their attendance - we hope to shine a spotlight on them soon also.

At last weeks meeting of The Rotary Club of Lake Conroe, Event Chair Sheri McBride presented members and guests with a sample of the fun everyone will have at the upcoming Midnight at the Masquerade 2019 murder mystery dinner and auction, to be held on Friday, April 26, at the newly opened Event Center at Cedar Lodge Restaurant and Bar on Texas 105 in Conroe. Various club members were given cue cards and a roll to play for the meeting as guests pondered the question of who killed the butler. There was lots of laughter and more than a few impromptu funny comments from the group - great fun, and a nice look into what will be in store for us in April.

Tickets are 100 per person and the club is hoping for 200 people in attendance. How will all those folks participate? More on that next week. And, newsflash, the ever popular Wine Raffle will be returning, thanks to the continued generosity of Tommy and Mary Ann Metcalf. Details coming on that too. For now, check out the clubs website and facebook page for more information or to purchase tickets.

To learn more about Rotary contact Kris via email at KrisCommService@aol.com or text 713-825-0141. Also see the website and Facebook pages of any of our local clubs, or the Rotary District 5910 website at www.rotary5910.org .
Four people were arrested Wednesday as part of a Precinct 4 Constables Office sting operation targeting businesses where authorities say employees were willing to sell alcohol to kids.

Joel Isaac Gomez, 17, of Conroe, Manuel Anthony Marroquin, 23, of New Caney and Azhar Siddiq, 45, of Conroe are being charged with selling alcohol to minors, a Class B misdemeanor. A fourth person, identified as Tina Owens, was also arrested but was not in custody Thursday.

This is to keep the establishments in compliance, Constable Rowdy Hayden said.

The sting ran from around 5 p.m. through about midnight and included 88 restaurants, super markets and convenience stores within Precinct 4s jurisdiction.

JANUARY 2019: Officials arrest 45 on felony DWI charges in Montgomery County

Im happy with those statistics, Hayen said. To do it at that many locations and to only have four (arrests) shows that our businesses are being conscious and mindful of who they sell alcohol to.

In the sting, six teens younger than 18 whose parents authorized their participation and who were observed by law enforcement at all times, approached employees posing as customers trying to purchase alcohol, according to Roman Forest Police Department Chief Stephen Carlyle.

The teens are not put in danger, Carlyle said.

None of the minors soliciting alcohol had facial hair or were made to appear older, Hayden pointed out. If the teens were asked to show identification then they would show their actual ID, he added.

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We want it to be (appear) 100 percent that this is a kid, Hayden said.

The operation was carried out in conjunction with the Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission.

Hayden said Precinct 4 on social media notified businesses about the sting. He said Precinct 4 conducts this kind of operation during periods where children are out of school such as spring break or in the summer.

When I was elected in 2009 and took office, one of my commitments was to keep the youth safe in this precinct and I believe this is one of those efforts, Hayden said.

Gomez, Marroquin and Siddiq were in custody at the Montgomery County Jail. Gomez and Marroquin were being held on a $750 bond set. Siddiqs was being held with no bond listed, according to jail records.

jose.gonzalez@chron.com

twitter.com/jrgzztx
Four people are in jail on capital murder charges after allegedly burglarizing a Mount Houston-area house and killing the homeowner last year.

Donnie P. Loring, 19, is the latest person to be arrested in the death of 25-year-old Jessie Renteria on Aug. 9.

Renterias girlfriend told investigators that she awoke to gunfire around 11:35 p.m. that night at the home in the 11000 block of United.

BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: Get your Houston breaking news alerts delivered to you

Three masked men had broken in and fired several shots, killing Renteria, deputies said. He died in the kitchen of the home.

The robbers ransacked the house as one of the attackers held the girlfriend at gunpoint, according to the Harris County Sheriffs Office.

RELATED: Harris County Precinct 5 Constable's Office seeks brazen daytime burglar

Loring was charged and arrested with capital murder on Wednesday. Arthur Sanders, 26; Qwadrean Barnes, 30; and Frank Garcia, 35, had already been booked in the Harris County Jail.

Garcia is being held in lieu of posting $200,000 bond, and the other three suspects are being held without bond.

Garcia has at least two prior convictions in Harris County, including robbery in 2005 and aggravated assault of a family member in 2012. At the time of the deadly shooting last year, Garcia was wanted after forfeiting bond on a marijuana possession charge.

Sanders, of Pasadena, has two prior misdemeanor convictions, including burglary of a vehicle in 2014.

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ANSAmed - Weekly diary from March 18 to March 24

(ANSAmed) - ROME, MARCH 15 - Weekly diary of the main events scheduled in the Euro-Mediterranean area from March 18 to March 24: MONDAY, MARCH 18 BRUSSELS - EU, High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini presides over the Foreign Affairs Council.



BRUSSELS - EU, Agriculture and Fisheries Council.



ROME - Culture ministry - Seminar by Massimo Osanna, professor of archaeology at Federico II University of Naples, on the Pompeii archaeological park and the relationship between protection and promotion.



TUESDAY, MARCH 19 BRUSSELS - EU, Commissioners Andrus Ansip, Vera Jourova, Julian King and Mariya Gabriel participate in a round table discussion with online platforms Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to continue implementation of the Code of Conduct on Disinformation.



BRUSSELS - EU, Commissioner Tibor Navracsics receives Alfonso Pallavicini, new president of European Historic Houses, and vice president Wenceslas de Lobcowicz.



ROME - Sala Dali - meeting between Spanish researcher Miguel Berganza and internationally renowned psychiatrist Alfonso Troisi on the topic 'The Painted Mind', as part of the 'Dialogos' cycle of seminars sponsored by the Cervantes Institute of Rome. WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20 BRUSSELS - Tripartite Social Summit.



TUNIS - Celebrations kick off for Tunis Capital of Islamic Culture 2019, with a visit to the Medina and a show in the City of Culture (also 21/3). THURSDAY, MARCH 21 BRUSSELS - EU, Commissioner Pierre Moscovici meets Mohamed Benchaaboun, Moroccan finance and economy minister.



FRIDAY, MARCH 22 VARIOUS CITIES - World Water Day.



NAPLES - EU, visit by Commissioner Christos Stylianides to participate in a dialogue for citizens and the "EU Saves Lives" roadshow.



EL JEM (TUNISIA) - The 4th edition of 'Thysdrus, Roman Days of El Jem' kicks off. The cultural and tourism event will be hosted in the Roman amphitheatre of El Jem to showcase the heritage left in the region by the Roman Empire (until 24/3). SATURDAY, MARCH 23 UDINE - EU, visit by Commissioner Christos Stylianides to participate in an event on civil protection together with local authorities.



SUNDAY, MARCH 24 BELGRADE - Anniversary of NATO bombing on Serbia. (ANSAmed).




At 101 years old, William Fly, a World War II veteran, is this years grand marshal for the 41st annual FM 1960 St. Patricks Parade on Sunday, March 17.

For Fly, 2019 is a much better year than 2017.

In May 2017, his wife, Mary Beth died after 69 years of marriage and in August, Hurricane Harvey flooded his home in northwest Houston with nearly four feet of water  high enough to warrant a water rescue by first responders.

They carried me. I didnt walk in the water. I didnt get wet at all. That was just the start of people helping me, Fly said.

Born in Gonzales, Texas on November, 13, 1917, Fly was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942 and was deployed to England and France.

While he didnt fight during the war, his duties as a first lieutenant in the 8th Air Force Air Transport group included supplying the troops on the front lines that were flown on C-47 cargo planes.

We were right behind them as they took over air fields and we brought in supplies to the people who were doing the fighting. That was our jobto send the materials in or get things out, Fly said.

After the war, Fly worked for Essair Airways, a local commuter airline that flew to cities in Texas like Austin and Amarillo before landing a job as a financial analyst for Shell Oil for 33 years.

In 1971, he and his wife, Mary Beth, purchased their home in Houston in 1971 where hes been living for nearly 50 years.

When the high floodwaters entered his home in August 2017, Fly wasnt sure if would be able to return after being rescued on a boat by volunteer police and firefighters from Indiana.

The streets looked like rivers, said Kathy Walker, Flys daughter.

During Harvey, Walker evacuated her home, which was located two blocks away from Flys house.

After the floodwaters receded, Walker said everythingfrom furniture to family photos to important documentsin both homes had been damaged.

When we came in, the furniturethe wood and everythingit was just like it had exploded. It was just all swollen. We cherish the few things that we found, that we were able to keep, Walker said.

Fly also did not have flood insurance on the house because the neighborhood had never flooded before Harvey. Fly thought he was financially ruined, she said.

Instead, the volunteer first responders from Indiana helped toss out furniture and removed the damaged drywall from Flys house.

Among the volunteers was Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL who was the only survivor of a military operation in Afghanistan.

Luttrells Team Never Quit Foundation then worked to collect donations to help rebuild Flys home and allowed him to live at his ranch while the house was being repaired.

During the renovation, volunteers also managed to save a few family photos from being thrown away which were framed and hung on the living room wall.

About three months after the flood struck, Flys home had been rebuilt and furnished in time for his 100th birthday in November 2017.

Everything was done. It just completely turned around for me, Fly said.

The Cypress Creek Emergency Medical Services learned about Fly from the volunteer group of first responders from Indiana who had rescued him.

The St. Patricks Day Parade presented Gallery Furniture owner Jim Mattress Mack MacIngvale as the grand marshal for the 2018 parade after providing furniture to residents affected by Harvey, including Fly.

This year, Fly was chosen as a way to highlight his contributions during the war.

This year the 1960 Parade Committee decided to honor his service and that of the entire Greatest Generation who weathered the great depression and came together to defeat Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. We are losing the members of this generation daily, so we need to learn from them and honor them while they are still here, said Norm Uhl, spokesperson for Cypress Creek EMS.

Once he returned to his renovated home, Fly said he expected to live quietly by himself.

Instead, Walker and her husband, Bob, moved in to take care of him when they were unable to repair their own home.

While he still works on spreadsheets on his computer everyday, Fly plays poker with Walker, takes long walks and goes out to restaurants. He remains grateful to those who helped him through his challenges.

I just cant help believe that it was ordained by somebody. How could all that happen to me? he said.

mayra.cruz@chron.com
When Sam Gregson moved to Texas in 1995, one of the most important things he considered before settling down in a neighborhood were the schools where his three daughters would attend.

As part of the Tomball ISD board of trustees for nearly 18 years, schools remained important to him.

Where you live in a house is not nearly as critical as the community that you move into, he said.

Gregson resigned from the Tomball ISD school board in February because he was moving away from Tomball.

He first ran for position 6 on the school board and won during the November 2001 election.

In 2016, Gregson retired as a property tax manager with BP before working as a senior consultant at Cummings Westlake, LLC, which began to limit his involvement on the board.

Looking back at nearly two decades as a trustee, he said he first ran because he wanted to get more involved with the schools where his three daughters were attending and took a chance when a seat was available.

I stayed on the board while all three of my kids were in school because I had a vested interest in the district, so that was a large part of it. You get a certain amount of satisfaction when we had presentations come through and you know that youve taken a part in giving them the vision and direction. You see the kids and we recognize their success. I thought it was a good way to give (back) to the community, he said.

Among other duties, trustees approve budgets, major projects and select superintendents to guide the district.

During Gregsons tenure, the board chose replacements for former superintendents John Neubauer, who resigned in 2013, and Huey Kinchen, who retired in 2017. Martha Salazar-Zamora was then chosen by the board to lead the district after Kinchens departure.

The board also approved major projects after the passage of bonds in 2013 and 2017 for new facilities, safety and infrastructure improvements.

Its been significant growth since I first got on the board and thats not always easy to deal with. I would say that the financial stability that weve maintained and in the way weve managed the district and its growth will be two things most important to me, he said.

According to the Texas Education Agency, the district had about 11,000 students in 2011 and about 15,000 in 2017.

The district estimates it may have up to 20,000 students enrolled by 2021.

Since accepting his resignation, the Tomball ISD board of trustees voted to appoint a replacement during its regular meeting on March 5.

Tomball ISD board president Mark Lewandowski said Gregson had fulfilled his role as an elected trustee and he hoped the board would continue to work well together while a replacement is found.

Nothing but district in his heart, he said.

mayra.cruz@chron.com
The number of crime incidents in Houston saw an overall decrease last week, after a previous rise, according to data from SpotCrime, which collects data from police agencies and validated sources. Incidents fell to 1,722 for the week of March 4, down from 1,823 the week before.

The specific offenses that decreased the most were theft and burglary. Theft fell to 1,138 incidents last week, from 1,203 the week before. Burglary went from 229 to 220.

There were eight reported shooting incidents last week. That represents a steady state from the previous week. There were also 108 incidents of robbery, down from 117 the week before.

Among the few types of offenses that saw an uptick last week, reports of assault went from 191 to 201, and vandalism rose from zero to one.

There were 46 reports of "other" crimes, a decrease of 29 from the previous week. SpotCrime's broad "other" category includes a variety of offenses like fraud, trespassing, public disturbance and traffic violations. Of those incidents, 20 involved arrests, such as for drug possession, down from 26 reported arrests the week before.

As far as where crime is concentrated in the city, Northside/Northline, Alief and Downtown had the most reported incidents last week. Alief was at the top of the list the previous week as well.

Crime in Greater Uptown decreased the most. Crime reports in Alief also fell, after increasing the week before, and incidents in Spring Branch East are down considerably as well.

Regarding when crime most often occurs, Saturdays, Thursdays and Wednesdays witnessed the most reported crimes last week. The largest decrease from the previous week occurred on Sundays, Fridays and Tuesdays, while incidents on Thursdays and Saturdays went up. Comparing times of day, late afternoon, early afternoon and midday saw the most crime last week.

To report a crime in progress or life-threatening emergency, call 911. To report a non-urgent crime or complaint, contact your local police department.

Head to SpotCrime to get free local crime alerts in your area.

This story was created automatically using local crime data, then reviewed by an editor. Click here for more about our data sources and local crime methodology. Got thoughts about what we're doing? Go here to share your feedback.

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AirAsia currently operates to 19 domestic destinations with a fleet of 20 Airbus A320 planes.

his new route is a manifestation of our future growth plan in these key and important business markets, said Sunil Bhaskaran, managing director and chief executive officer, AirAsia India. (Photo: File)

Mumbai: Low-cost carrier, AirAsia India on Friday announced the launch of its flight services to Kolkata from the city next month. This would be airline's second destination from Mumbai after it started operating daily services to Bengaluru from the country's financial capital.

AirAsia India will now fly connecting Kolkata and Mumbai, with one daily flight, effective April 15, the airline said in a release on Friday. The introduction of Mumbai-Kolkata route comes close on the heels of AirAsia India adding eighth additional flights to its network of 19 destinations.

"We recently introduced the first connection between Bengaluru and Mumbai and are now adding a new connection between Mumbai and Kolkata. It's a key market for AirAsia and this flight will strengthen our operations in the East". This new route is a manifestation of our future growth plan in these key and important business markets, said Sunil Bhaskaran, managing director and chief executive officer, AirAsia India.

AirAsia India, a joint venture between Tata Sons and Malaysian airlines' group AirAsia, currently operates to 19 domestic destinations with a fleet of 20 Airbus A320 planes.

The group had made its first entry in the Mumbai market with the launch of AirAsia Berhad services to here from Kuala Lumpur in May 2010. However, in 2012 it withdrew the route citing high airport charges. But came back again with its subsidiary Indonesian AirAsia X in May 2017, which was again discontinued in April last year.
For years, for-profit colleges have portrayed themselves as champions of non-traditional, first-generation and low-income students. Its true that they cater to many of these students, but that doesnt mean they serve them well. For-profits have mastered the art of selling snake oil, convincing even many lawmakers that these schools give access to higher education to students who otherwise would not.

The truth, however, is that for-profit colleges disproportionately overcharge, underperform and foreclose the futures of far too many students. The problem isnt isolated to the most egregious for-profit schools, as horrifying as the stories are of sham degrees sold by deceptive recruiters at Corinthian Colleges, worthless credits that employers laugh at from schools like ITT Tech, and sudden closures at schools like Technical Career Institute, Ridley Lowell, and the Art Institute of NYC. Its a problem endemic to the sector as a whole, including here in New York.

In the Empire State, nearly half of all students (47 percent), and almost three-quarters of black students, who attended for-profit schools defaulted on their student loans within 12 years  nearly fivetimes the rate at nonprofit and public colleges. Only 29 percent of for-profit schools spend at least half of tuition revenue on student instruction, compared to 78 percent of nonprofit schools.

When it comes to student earnings, the outcomes at for-profits are equally dismal. According to the Center for an Urban Future, graduates at 73 percent of for-profit college programs in the state earn less than $25,000 on average, the equivalent of a high-school degree holder between the ages of 25 and 32. Whats more, the for-profit sector accounts for 98 percent of all student fraud claims and 41 percent of student loan defaults, despite enrolling only 6 percent of undergraduate students in New York.

Faced with these realities  many of which were brought to light by courageous students and whistleblowers following the 2015 collapse of Corinthian Colleges  the Obama administration took steps to hold for-profit colleges accountable and protect students. But as important as such policies were, they have not curbed many of the abuses of the for-profit sector, and have done little to improve the value of a for-profit degree.

The risks to students posed by for-profit colleges today have grown, as the Trump administration indulges the industrys profiteering. At Secretary Betsy DeVoss direction, the federal Department of Education has sought to dismantle Obama-era protections against for-profit fraud and abuse, and worked to weaken instructional quality standards and repeal debt relief programs for defrauded students.

Its not just students who pay the price. Taxpayers subsidize all types of colleges, in the form of student aid and scholarship funds to schools. In 2015, New Yorkers delivered $68 million in state tuition aid to for-profit colleges, the highest in the country. More than half of that investment went to programs that failed or nearly failed to meet the federal gainful employment requirement  a standard that compares graduates debt against their earnings. All 170 career-oriented programs at New Yorks CUNY and SUNY schools were evaluated under the same standard and passed.

Fortunately, New York has a chance to respond differently and protect students. Gov. Andrew Cuomos proposed For-Profit Accountability Act would do just that, by ensuring that for-profit colleges spend at least half of tuition revenue on student instruction and receive no more than 80 percent of their funding from government sources. The proposed legislation also would prohibit for-profit colleges from taking away students legal rights by sneaking forced arbitration into enrollment contracts.

Unsurprisingly, New Yorks for-profit lobby, which includes the Association of Proprietary Colleges, has reacted by calling attempts to regulate them as an assault on educational choices. Why should for-profits be treated any differently than public and nonprofit institutions, they ask. The answer is simple: because they are different.

As leaders of two of our states public colleges, we know firsthand the differences in incentives facing for-profit colleges, which exist by definition to generate a profit, and nonprofit private and public colleges, which are already subject to government scrutiny. Our schools boards are accountable to the public, not private shareholders, and our leaders must invest students tuition dollars and state aid into educational purposes, not pocket that revenue as profit. At for-profit colleges, on the other hand, there are no internal checks on conflicts of interest and no requirements to prioritize the education of students over the returns to shareholders.

As New Yorkers, we should take pride in our national leadership in making college more affordable and accessible. To see the transformative power of higher education, one needs to look no further than the City University of New York system, which in the last three decades has propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League schools combined.

CUNY schools catalyze social mobility by expanding access to diverse student bodies, providing high-quality educational resources and keeping college costs affordable for students and their families. A similar picture can be painted for the value of our sister institutions in the State University of New York. It cannot be said of many of the for-profit colleges currently operating in the state.

We should no longer accept that. We need to treat education  and an educated citizenry  like the public good it is. That means investing in institutions that truly advance knowledge, equity and social mobility, not those that trick and trap students with mountains of debt and worthless degrees.
On Thursday, foot overbridge outside Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) collapsed during rush hour.

Mumbai: On Thursday, foot overbridge outside Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) collapsed during rush hour. In this incident, six persons have lost their lives while 32 people got injured. The injured have been admitted to nearby hospitals.

Well, Mumbai bridge collapse incident has indeed shocked the entire city as well as Indian celebrities. Amid the reactions of commoners on the internet, Indian celebs express their grief and shock on social media.

Here are the tweets:

Amitabh Bachchan tweeted, "T 3118 - In grief and in silent prayer .. !! Mumbai city"

T 3118 - In grief and in silent prayer .. !! Mumbai city  Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) March 14, 2019

Hema Malini wrote, "Tragedy- this time in the heart of Mumbai! The foot overbridge at the CST suddenly collapsed killing 5 people & injuring at least 36. I pray for those who have lost their lives & for those now in hospital for treatment"

Tragedy- this time in the heart of Mumbai! The foot overbridge at the CST suddenly collapsed killing 5 people & injuring at least 36. I pray for those who have lost their lives & for those now in hospital for treatment  Hema Malini (@dreamgirlhema) March 14, 2019

Riteish Deshmukh expressed, "What a horrible tragedy.. so sad to know that many have lost lives. My deepest condolences to the families who lost their loved ones & prayers for the injured. This #MumbaiBridgeCollapse should have been avoided. This negligence is unpardonable."

What a horrible tragedy.. so sad to know that many have lost lives. My deepest condolences to the families who lost their loved ones & prayers for the injured. This #MumbaiBridgeCollapse should have been avoided. This negligence is unpardonable.  Riteish Deshmukh (@Riteishd) March 14, 2019

Sachin Tendulkar tweeted, "Distressed at the news of the fall of part of the overbridge at CST. Praying for the injured. Commuter safety needs attention and hoping that authorities act to prevent such incidents."

Distressed at the news of the fall of part of the overbridge at CST. Praying for the injured.

Commuter safety needs attention and hoping that authorities act to prevent such incidents.  Sachin Tendulkar (@sachin_rt) March 14, 2019

Vivek Oberoi said, "Perturbed to hear about the #MumbaiBridgeCollapse. So disturbing to see images and videos of the scene. Prayers for the victims and their families"
A pair of armed suspects opened fire during an armored truck robbery Friday in southwest Houston, according to police.

The duo allegedly held up an armored truck employee while he was inside a check-cashing business in the 6100 block of Glenmont Drive around 12:50 p.m., according to Houston Police Department Lt. Alisa Smith.

In security video being reviewed by robbery detectives, the suspects followed the employee from his armored truck to the inside of the business, Smith said. One suspect reportedly had a handgun while the other had an AK-47.

During the holdup, one suspect allegedly opened fire twice. The armored truck employee fell back but did not appear to be hit, Smith said.

During their investigation, the employee started to complain about an unexplained injury on the back of his head. It was not immediately clear if he suffered that injury from shrapnel or from the fall, Smith said.

He was not wearing a bullet-proof vest, Smith said. Another employee was waiting for him inside the armored truck at the time of the robbery.

The suspects fled the scene in a dark pickup truck. Police did not immediately have a detailed description.

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
Latin American cities dominate the list of the most violent municipalities in the world, but a few U.S. cities remain neck-and-neck with those that regularly deal with gang wars and cartel violence, according to an annual study by Mexico's Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice.

St. Louis, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, were the only two U.S. cities in the top 25. Only two other U.S. cities  Detroit, Michigan (No. 46), and New Orleans, Louisiana (No. 50) made the top 50 list.

The Citizens' Council tracked homicide totals and rates per 100,000 people in cities with more than 300,000 residents. The purpose of the study is partly to apply pressure to leaders in those urban areas, according to a summary on the group's website.

Despite the political objective, the group said it didn't twist the data to produce a desired outcome.

"Our interest is just to know the truth," according to a translation of their methodology.

The list also isn't immune to error, according to the methodology. Some municipalities don't provide accurate homicide statistics. It those cases, the researchers used conservative estimates to arrive at annual figures.

Most of the cities on the list have been ravaged by cartel violence or gang wars or both, including the Mexican cities of Juarez (No. 5) and Acapulco (No. 2).

A March 2017 report from The Journal Times indicated that Mexico's murder total had been rising from 2014 to the first months of 2017. Another article from Time said Mexico was on track to surpass the grim 2017 homicide numbers (26,168) in 2018.

Brazil and Venezuela also accounted for large portion of the most violent cities.

The list did not include cities that suffer open war conflicts, such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

>>> Chron.com compiled a slideshow of the top 25 most violent cities on the list. To view the full list, visit the council's website.

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 | 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.
Photographer Lee McMullen, a former professor of microbiology, now spends his days looking through a lens, capturing the breathtaking landscapes at Big Bend National Park in west Texas.

McMullen, 69, captured what he claims is the largest bloom of bluebonnets at Big Bend in more than three decades. Originally from Fort Worth, McMullen is a retired professor, fellow, and cell & molecular biology researcher with a PhD in biology.

Around 2009, he moved to far Terlingua, Texas, a town cradled near the north part of the park, to pursue his passion for photography.

ANALYSIS: Texas could see the best wildflower season in 10 years

"If I had to pick one thought as to how to live one's life it would be to do whatever you do with quality," McMullen said.

He now spends his days backpacking the expansive 1,250 square miles of Big Bend in search of scenes that showcase one of the most beautiful parts of Texas.

"I wanted my work to be unique," McMullen said. "I wanted to capture an aesthetically pleasing view of this area, to photograph this area of Texas as never seen before."

McMullen captured breathtaking portraits of a recent bluebonnet bloom in the southern part of the park that he says stretches on for miles. During last year's bloom, McMullen captured a patch of bluebonnets that appear glowing underneath the Milky Way.

"Mocking birds were singing, and the frogs were serenading me all night long," McMullen said recalling when he captured the photo. "The slight ripple of creek the smell of the water and the beauty of it all made me realize how lucky I was."

To learn more about McMullen and his photos, he can be reached at leemcmter@gmail.com.

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
Texas U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus want the Homeland Security Department to explain why it keeps a database for tracking journalists, lawyers and advocates related to a migrant caravan that traveled to the border with Mexico last year.

In a letter today to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the members of Congress demanded details on the information the agency collected and under what authority the program - called Operation Secure Line - was initiated.

The fact that DHS would track U.S. journalists, attorneys and volunteers attempting to do their jobs when they have committed no crime is deeply concerning, the letter read.

The letter referred to a March 6 report by an NBC affiliate in San Diego, based on leaked documents, about a secret database of targets.

Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

NBC 7 said documents, obtained from an unnamed government source, listed people identified for screening at the border and that some of them had been temporarily detained. In some cases, alerts were placed on passports, preventing at least two photojournalists and a lawyer from crossing the border, the report said.

In response, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said that caravans traveling through Mexico to the U.S. border present increased and new challenges to an already complicated and dangerous mission  It is protocol following these incidents to collect evidence that might be needed for future legal actions and to determine if the event was orchestrated.

Castro, who chairs the Hispanic Caucus, and Rep. Veronica Escobar, of El Paso, were the two Texans who signed the letter.

Reports that journalists have been held for 13-plus hours for questioning, have been stopped or returned from traveling to do their work, and that lawyers have had sensitive legal documents reviewed by CBP officials is likewise troubling, the letter read.

It suggests that the government may be using its power at the border to suppress reporting on issues it would prefer to shield from the public eye.
The story revolves around a struggling street photographer.

Siddiqui suits the role and gives it his best, though at times, one does feel he is holding himself back from coming into his own.

Rating:

Cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Sanya Malhotra, Farukh Jaffer

Director: Ritesh Batra

Can two people who are diametrically opposite fall for each other? Of course they could. Even if the two seem to have nothing in common: their cultural upbringings, their surroundings and their religious beliefs. But there has to be something brewing between them for sure. What that something might be is perhaps the mysterious allure that enchants two people, and its difficult to recognise and identify.

After its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and the European premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, Ritesh Batras Photograph releases in India, the UK, the US, Spain, France and Australia. That this coming-of-age romantic saga was much awaited would be understated ever since Batras directorial debut, The Lunchbox, made waves internationally and won the Rail dOr (Grand Golden Rail) at Cannes as well as the Toronto Film Critics Association Award for Best First Feature Film in 2014, besides being the highest-grossing foreign film in North America, Europe and Australia for the year 2014 with over $25 million/Rs 180 crore.

In his fourth film, Photograph, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra play the lead roles of Rafi and Miloni who meet accidentally at the Gateway of India where Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui ) hovers around while trying hard to make a living as a street photographer. The story revolves around a struggling street photographer, Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) in Mumbai, whose meagre income is not enough to pay off an old family debt. An orphan, he has a set of close buddies to share his joys and sorrows with and has a grandmother (Farrukh Jaffar) whose wishes to see him married  a desire that she persists with and constantly pressurises him to find a suitable match.

On the other hand, there is Miloni (Sanya Malhotra) who is studying hard to complete her chartered accountancy exams, and is forever immersed in books, lectures and preparations. Once on an outing, at the crowded Gateway of India, she runs into Rafi, who convinces her to get herself clicked in an instant. As the hesitant Miloni dilly dallies, Rafi clicks her picture just when she hears her family calling her and she vanishes leaving poor Rafi quite disappointed.

But Milonis picture, which he has clicked, captivates his mind. And his heart too. He is floored by the innocence that Miloni exudes, and even starts dreaming of her though he neither knows her name nor her whereabouts. When his grandmother keeps pestering him to look for a girl, he sends her Milonis picture and introduces her as his fiancee. Soon, he is forced to track down Miloni, and makes her agree to pretend to be his fiancee too.

From then on, the stark contrasting backgrounds that the two characters come from fade as their differences which are not merely in their financial status, but also in their religion take a backseat and the two develop a fondness for each other. For Rafi, it is perhaps the beautiful looks of Miloni and her understated charm that enchants him, and for Miloni, it is his complete honesty and ordinariness that fascinate her. As the two form a unique bond, we also see the distinctions and differences that the city of Mumbai offers. Their remarkable and exceptional journey of togetherness is also possible  to a large extent  in a city like Mumbai where they do get noticed, but no one seems to bother about the differing attributes to their personalities.

The two-hour film has no physical romance that one is so used to seeing in films. The quiet and reserved love that blossoms between the two is that of comfort, and a deep understanding and trust. The relationship that develops gently, almost silently, is serene and the two dont feel the need to rub it in. Ever.

Even the grandmother, the garrulous and affectionate woman who finds out about her grandsons fiancee being a non-Muslim, is not perturbed but rather happy to have a girl in her grandsons life.

Mohammed Rafis voice that plays in the background soothes the scenes more than it does to the characters who seem to be looking for something concrete to latch on to, to get going.

Batras Lunchbox was set to a fast lane and recounts with uncertainty the romance between a couple belonging to differing backgrounds. Its slow pace is thoughtfully calculate, and should not let the viewer drift away from its basic premise  the monotonous sameness of some peoples lives and their constant yearning for something that must be a welcome relief that could lead to fulfilling their innermost desires.

Siddiqui suits the role and gives it his best, though at times, one does feel he is holding himself back from coming into his own. Malhotra is saddled with a role that looks a tad incomplete. As an educated and far more refined and urbane girl she does look like a perfect foil to his commonplace looks and behaviour; it is the unsure graph of her characters growth in the film that never quite gives her any strength to sink her teeth into. What also looks forced, is the deliberate use of unspoken bonding between characters; be it romance, friendship of just sheer love. Doesnt it require an irrational reason we may not be able to put a finger on?
Randeep Surjewala also slammed the government for the setback in the UNSC, and said it was a sad day in the global fight against terrorism.

New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday hit out at Prime Minster Narendra Modi after China again blocked a UN resolution to designate JeM chief Masood Azhar a global terrorist, alleging that the PM is weak and scared of Chinese President Xi Jinping. The BJP retorted by asking the Congress president why he is in a celebratory mood when India is in pain.

Weak Modi is scared of Xi. Not a word comes out of his mouth when China acts against India. NoMos China diplomacy: 1. Swing with Xi in Gujarat. 2. Hug Xi in Delhi. 3. Bow to Xi in China, Mr Gandhi said on Twitter, referring to the unprecedented welcome given to Mr Xi by Mr Modi to in 2014.

As Congress leaders, including Mr Gandhi, used the Chinese action to take a swipe at Mr Modi, the BJP asked, Why is Rahul Gandhi in a celebratory mood when the country stands pained with this attitude of China?

Senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said that Mr Gandhi, with his comments, is seen to be in close proximity with Azhar Masood.

Mr Prasad asked why Mr Gandhi had not made any comment when China had blocked a bid on the same grounds in 2009 when the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government was in power. Rahul Gandhis tweets must be headline news in Pakistan and will be circulated in JeM office with much merry, the Union minister said.

The Union minister said Mr Gandhi had spoken about meeting Chinese ministers and that the Chinese embassy in India had wanted to see him off when he flew for his Mansarovar pilgrimage last year. However, the permission for this was denied by the government.

Taking a swipe at Mr Gandhi, Mr Prasad said, If you enjoy such good relations with China, then you should have used your proximity to persuade that country to back the proposal at the UN.

Earlier, Congress chief spokeserson Randeep Surjewala also slammed the government for the setback in the UNSC, and said it was a sad day in the global fight against terrorism.

China blocking Masood Azhars designation as global terrorist reaffirms Chinese position of being an inseparable ally of terrorisms breeding ground-Pakistan, he said.

Mr Surjewala asked whether the Prime Minister will answer to the nation why he became maun Modi (silent Modi) as Indias interests were repeatedly compromised.

The current situation is an outcome of the weak-kneed Modi government, bending over backwards before China over the last five years, the Congress leader claimed.

In his press conference, Mt Prasad blamed the Congress for China becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council which gives it the power to veto any move in the global body.

Quoting from a book, Nehru  The invention of India, written by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, the BJP leader said it has been written that Indias first Prime Minister played a role in China becoming a permanent member of the UNSC.

India under Modi will continue to fight a decisive battle against terrorism, he asserted, adding that the BJP is pained if the Congress and Mr Gandhi are happy with the Chinese action.
Business is booming at Ergonet, an IT-services provider based in odz, a scenic and historic city in central Poland. With more than 20 years of experience serving companies in the region, its experts  which include cloud solution and networking engineers, security professionals and specialists in backup and replication  provide a wide range of managed cloud services.

Ergonets customers include large global companies that benefit from the firms experience working in complex IT environments. This includes leaders in the consulting, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and software development sectors.

The company is also seeing growth with mature, medium-sized businesses within Poland that either want to augment their existing infrastructure with cloud services that enable them to be nimbler and more efficient, or completely revolutionize how they approach IT.

Many enterprises in Poland have fairly new on-premises data centers and look to our virtualized environment and cloud services as a way to back up their own infrastructure and gain additional capacity and computing power, said Przemysaw Skowronski, co-owner of Ergonet.

Were also increasingly working with clients that simply want IT as a service. These organizations know IT is not their core business, but they want full technical support in Polish at any time. And they want their businesses to benefit from the most up-to-date solutions without having to invest in IT infrastructure and specialists.

This is particularly evident in the security arena. Skowronski points to the importance that VMware places on having a stable and secure IT environment and the need to build security directly into all of its products. In this way, VMware is working to radically reduce the attack surface rather than chasing threats that continually change.

Skowronski agrees with this approach.

Being VMware Cloud Verified enables us to deliver the interoperability and flexibility that fast-growing companies in Poland demand and provides them with the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the services we offer from data centers right here in Poland are based on the best technology available, says Skowronski. By basing our cloud on VMwares technology, including NSX, vSan and vRealize, and using software from other proven providers like Veeam, were able to address our customers most demanding requirements for data protection.

Notably, Ergonet offers services in private and hybrid cloud deployments, as well as through public clouds from AWS, Microsoft, and others. The company even offers a business continuity guarantee for customers that have current VMware licensing if random events or cybercrimes impact their cloud applications or databases.

All this and yet Skowronski feels the best is still ahead.

We pioneered the hosting market in Poland when we offered the first business email, he says. Now we are the vanguard that enables businesses in Poland to take advantage of the unlimited capacity, elasticity, and inherent resiliency of the cloud. This wouldnt be possible without the strong partnership we have with VMware.

Learn more about VMwares partnership with Ergonet here.
Centre pentru copii, servicii pentru persoane cu dizabilitati, oamenii strazii, varstnici si servicii medicale la domiciliu vor fi create cu sprijinul Uniunii Europene si Fundatiei Soros Moldova
On Wednesday, First Look Media delivered the latest in a flurry of bad news for digital media: the company, which includes The Intercept and was founded by a tech billionaire turned Twitter critic of Donald Trump, said it could no longer afford its research team, and was eliminating those jobs as part of a 4 percent cut in its workforce. I am sickened, Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras wrote in a March 13 email reported by The Daily Beast. The beating heart of the newsroom, she said, had been torn out.

That a billionaire is laying off employees is not a shock, except in this case the billionaires company was said to be in the public interest. Specifically, The Intercept is classified as a public charity. For nearly two years it has been soliciting donations from its readers for fearless, independent journalism.

On the simplest level, Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald wrote in a May 2017 appeal, reader support will increase our funding, enable us to hire more great reporters, editors, designers, researchers, and others who make our journalism possible, ensuring that we continue to thrive and grow.

ICYMI: WSJ reporter explains why he was fired

But a review of tax filings shows that, despite a belated effort to diversify its funding stream, both The Intercept and its parent company are still almost entirely dependent on one billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, and his gifts of stock in eBay and PayPal. Omidyars funding of First Look Media, totaling almost $90 million between 2013 and 2017, has helped cover the cost of salaries at The Intercept that dwarf those at other center-left, nonprofit outlets. While its unclear how much of Omidyars funding is benchmarked for The Intercept, its largesse may force the non-profit side of the company to abandon its IRS charitable status and reclassify itself as a private foundation. This, in turn, would mean stricter oversight, more charitable donations from the company, and more taxes on Omidyars remaining pledge to First Look of some $160 million. Following the layoffs, a spokesperson for the First Look affirmed that Pierre continues to be a supporter of FLM, and that no reporters or editors were impacted by the layoffs.

In 2013, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, announced he was investing $250 million in the dying industry of journalism. And he was hiring an all-star cast for the resurrectionjournalists with Academy Award nominations to go with their reputations for fierce reporting and unsparing commentary. For a time, it was a beacon of hope. Soon, however, the budding newsroom was generating the wrong kind of content.

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The Unmanageables, was the Vanity Fair headline a little over a year later. Can First Look Media make headlines that arent about itself? By that point there was turmoil: Matt Taibbi, one of its star writers, had returned to Rolling Stone, complaining of bureaucracy and micromanagement while himself facing a complaint of misogyny and unprofessionalism from another First Look employee. John Cook, editor in chief of The Intercept, also left, with apparently little love lost. And another staffer, former Harpers reporter Ken Silverstein, had already written a tell-all for Politico entitled, Where Journalism Goes to Die.

ICYMI: Newspaper upgrades CEOs housing stipend to $35K a month amid buyouts

After that, things pretty much steadied. The Intercept produced the sort of reporting on crime, the border and Americas wars at home and abroad that had always been hoped for, much of it by writers unknown when it launched. There were still the unfortunate headlinesReality Winner was imprisoned after giving The Intercept an intelligence report on Russian government hacking of state voting systems, and a former Intercept staffer was convicted of making hoax bomb threats at Jewish Community Centersbut the straight reporting often was and is top-notch.

But it remains curious, and especially so in the wake of layoffs: with a billionaire for a founder, why does The Intercept need to solicit donations from its readers? And now, with cuts being made from the bottom of the organization, eyes are on its salaries at the top. First Look Media Works, Inc.the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) side of FLM, and parent of The Interceptpaid Greenwald more than $1.6 million from 2014 to 2017, the last year for which there is a financial disclosure. In Donald Trumps first year in office, his salary dipped to $369,847, during which time he produced a weekly columnover 50 pieces. The recipient of Edward Snowdens NSA leak also composes more than 40 tweets a day, on average.

Greenwalds salary peaked in 2015, hauling in more than $518,000, money that supports an envious life in a gated community on the edge of Rio de Janeiro. Betsy Reed, editor in chief of The Intercept, earned $309,243 in 2016 and $368,249 the year after. Overall, The Intercept spent $9.3 million in salaries in 2017, up $1.4 million from the year before. (Jeremy Scahill, an Intercept cofounder, earned $349,826 in 2015, the last time his compensation was included in a disclosure.)

While the salaries at the top may not be unheard of in media, they are large for digital media and noteworthy in the world of progressive, nonprofit journalism. In 2017, Mother Jones, another left-of-center news outlet, paid its DC bureau chief David Corn $171,298 in reportable compensation; Clara Jeffery, vice president and editor-in-chief of the magazine, earned just under $200,000. At The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news site focused on criminal justice reform, the highest paid employee is managing editor Kristen Danis, who earned $198,850, according to its latest 990 filing; Bill Keller, a former executive editor at The New York Times, made $178,675 as the sites editor-in-chief. (Keller is retiring, a spokesperson noted.)

At the Omidyar-funded news organization, salaries have been an issue even before there were layoffs.

I was recruited to work with First Look before it was publicly announced, Marcy Wheeler, a national security journalist best known for her coverage of Robert Muellers investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, wrote in a January 2018 essay. The initial discussions pertained to a full-time job, with a generous salary. But along the wayafter Glenn and Jeremy Scahill had already gotten a number of other people hired and as Pierre Omidyar started hearing from friends that the effort was out of controlthe outlet decided that they were going to go in a different direction. Theyd have journalistsGlenn and Jeremy counted as that. And theyd have bloggers, who would get paid less. That discrepancy, and the indignity of being treated as a less-than-full journalist, led to her resignation. (The base salary at First Look is $55,000, according to its contract with WGAE.)

Omidyar, with a net worth of $11.2 billion, does not seem inclined to cut salary costs at the top. In a statement provided to CJR prior to the cutbacks in staff, a First Look spokesperson says the company would be fine. We are grateful for the ongoing financial support of Pierre Omidyar, the statement said. The company also disputed the notion that a lack of support from others beside him would affect either its output or First Look Media Workssand hence, the Interceptstax status. We anticipate that it will continue to qualify as a public charity in the coming years, the statement said, adding that any future change to our public charity status would have no impact on our public operations or activities, our commitment to independent journalism or the type of work we support.

In order to maintain its status as a public charity, First Look Media Works must receive a substantial part of its support from a government unit or from the general public, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Specifically, it must receive 33.3 percent of its support this way over five years; barring that, 10 percent, with a good enough explanation (facts and circumstances). If it were to lose this status, First Look Media Works would become a private foundation, and subject to rigorous scrutiny from the IRS.

Private foundations also are required to distribute 5 percent of their assets every year for charitable purposes; in 2017, First Look gave away 3.6 percent of its $25.9 million, and it could conceivably claim its salaries are part of its charitable giving. Foundations must also pay a 1 to 2 percent excise tax on investment income.

Of the $90 million in total disclosed support it has received, $87 million has come from Omidyar, meaning just 2.7 percent of its revenue can be characterized as public support. The level of non-Omidyar money to the non-profit side is indeed rising6 percent in 2017but First Look Media Works will require there to have been a lot more in 2018 if it wishes to reach the IRSs more charitable 10 percent threshold.

Omidyar primarily supports First Look Media Workss operations with transfers of stock, a common method of supporting non-profit organizations that allows the donor to avoid capital gains taxes while deducting the transfer as a charitable donation. A charity that receives stock as a gift can sell it without paying taxes, either. In 2017, two such donations were made, worth $12.7 million at the time. The names of those companies are whited out on that years financial disclosure, along with the name of the donor, but previous years filings show Omidyar donated hundreds of thousands of shares in eBay and PayPal. Including 2017, those gifts were worth just under $58 million at the time they were transferred.

It will be difficult, but not impossible, for the math to work here. If Omidyar withheld all financial support in 2018, as he did in 2014, and public support increased by 400 percentfrom about $1 million a year to $4 millionthe company might be able to hold on to its status as a charity, if just barely. First Look Media declined to say how much its patron or the public gave last year, though layoffs, anywhere, are a clue that not everything has gone according to plan.

ICYMI: The FBIs secret investigation of a journalist

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Charles R. Davis is a journalist in Los Angeles. He has reported on Congress for public radio and his writing has been published by outlets such as The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Intercept and The New Republic.
Yesterday, in New Zealand, an Australian man in his late twenties logged on Twitter and 8chan, an online message board, to post photos of ammunition and a far-right manifesto. He also linked to a Facebook page, where he promised that he would livestream an impending mass shooting. The man then relayed video, lasting 17 minutes, as he entered a mosque and opened fire. It was one of two simultaneous mosque attacks in Christchurch, a city on the east coast of New Zealands south island. The attackers killed 49 worshippers and wounded at least 48, some of whom are in a critical condition. Scott Morrison, the prime minister of Australia, confirmed that a citizen of his country had been arrested. Morrison described the suspect as an extremist right-wing terrorist.

In the hours after the attacks, the video and manifesto spread widely across social media: as The Washington Posts Drew Harwell tweeted, the massacre was livestreamed on Facebook, announced on 8chan, reposted on YouTube, commentated about on Reddit, and mirrored around the world before the tech companies could even react. Harwell noted that, on Reddit, users narrated the video in a forum called watchpeopledie. When the platforms did start to take the content downfor example, by deleting accounts thought to be linked to the gunmanit swiftly appeared elsewhere. YouTube and Twitter told BuzzFeeds Ryan Mac that they were working to remove the video. Mac reported that it was still easy to find the video, or versions of it, on both those platformsincluding in a post by a verified Twitter account with nearly 700,000 followers. According to Sheera Frenkel and Daniel Victor, of The New York Times, some users cropped the video and screenshotted the manifesto, edits known to circumnavigate platforms automated moderation systems.

ICYMI: The FBIs secret investigation of a journalist

It is highly concerning that these materials were able to spread so quickly on social media. Some news organizations chose to boost the signal of the hateful messages. In Australia, several outlets published (non-graphic) parts of the videoSky News Australia looped footage from it on televisiondespite the police and Jacinda Ardern, New Zealands prime minister, asking them not to. In the UK, the websites of The Sun and The Daily Mail embedded gifs made from the video at the tops of their homepages. And major outlets around the world summarized, quoted from, and even hosted the manifesto.

Seeking to understand the motives of a mass murderer seems a legitimate journalistic enterprise, particularly when the killer claims to have been motivated by ideology. As J.M. Berger wrote recently for The Atlantic, however, sharing far-right manifestos can amplify their impact and inspire copycats. (Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist discussed by Berger, was cited in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter.) Several prominent journalists who cover internet culture warned that the political references in the Christchurch manifesto are easy to misinterpret. I would encourage my colleagues to be extraordinarily cautious in tying the Christchurch shooter to a narrative of online radicalization, BuzzFeeds Joe Bernstein tweeted. Some of the claims in his manifesto are obviously sarcastic and seem if anything aimed at contradicting such an interpretation. Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the Times, called the manifesto a minefield. I am Very Online and I dont feel 100 percent certain about whats genuine and whats just trolling/posting/media-baiting.

Clearly, there is much to be said about Islamophobia, online radicalization, white supremacy, far-right terrorism, and the links between them. Particularly since Charlottesville, that nexus has spawned an entire beat in the US; the New Zealand attacks are a tragic reminder that its interest crosses borders. Rather than sensationalize or spread misinformation, however, news outlets would do well, for now, to center the victims of this appalling massacre.

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ICYMI: BuzzFeed reporter discusses controversial scoop

Below, more on Christchurch and extremism:

The developing situation: The Guardian has live updates on the continuing fallout from the mosque attacks, including reactions from survivors, as well as from politicians and security forces as police around the world step up mosque security.

The Guardian has live updates on the continuing fallout from the mosque attacks, including reactions from survivors, as well as from politicians and security forces as police around the world step up mosque security. PewDiePie: In his video livestream, the Christchurch attacker told viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie, a controversial YouTube star whose past performances of anti-Semitic gestures, which he said were satirical, were co-opted on the far right. Felix Kjellberg, the Swedish man behind PewDiePie, said he was absolutely sickened to have been mentioned in the Christchurch video.

In his video livestream, the Christchurch attacker told viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie, a controversial YouTube star whose past performances of anti-Semitic gestures, which he said were satirical, were co-opted on the far right. Felix Kjellberg, the Swedish man behind PewDiePie, said he was absolutely sickened to have been mentioned in the Christchurch video. A dangerous spread: Bergers Atlantic piece on the dangers of spreading far-right manifestos is worth reading in full. Writing in response to the case of Christopher Hasson, a US Coast Guard lieutenant who was recently charged with conspiring to murder journalists and politicians, Berger wrote that journalists should report on manifestos, but they should mediate their propagandistic intent instead of blindly amplifying it.

Bergers Atlantic piece on the dangers of spreading far-right manifestos is worth reading in full. Writing in response to the case of Christopher Hasson, a US Coast Guard lieutenant who was recently charged with conspiring to murder journalists and politicians, Berger wrote that journalists should report on manifestos, but they should mediate their propagandistic intent instead of blindly amplifying it. The Trauma Floor: Its not just algorithms that moderate content on social media: real people do, too. In his Twitter thread on the Christchurch attacks, BuzzFeeds Mac noted: there are moderators sitting in some nondescript office building right now having to relive this incident over and over and over again for shit wages. Last month, Casey Newton tracked the traumatic work of Facebook moderators in a piece for The Verge.



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: Media Matters protests as Fox News makes pitch to advertisers

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
Mass shootings have a way of making the theoretical talk about Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and their role in spreading hate all too real. Thursday brought yet another horrific example of this depressingly frequent phenomenon, when a white supremacist shot and killed 49 people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. The killer took things to a new and even more disturbing level by live-streaming the entire thing on Facebook Live, part of what appeared to be a co-ordinated media strategy involving multiple posts of his rambling, 74-page screed and video clips to social platforms like 8chan, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. As quickly as the videos were pulled down by the platforms (which wasnt very quickly in many cases), new copies were posted and shared, in a terrible game of deplatforming Whack-A-Mole.

As the video copies and links to his writing continued to spread, journalists and experts in misinformation and online behavior debated a key question in these incidents: how much should journalists write about the details of the killings, and, in particular, about the killers delusional ideology?

The shooter posted that manifesto precisely for you to share, condemn, analyse, and mock it. Dont link to it, dont screengrabs it, dont precis it, dont do a long thinkpiece on what it means it was tied to 8chan. The acts and their victims say far, far more than enough.  James Ball (@jamesrbuk) March 15, 2019

There are two very distinct parts of my feed this morning. One from researchers and some journalists saying do not spread material from the NZ attack, it serves as recruitment . The other saying a level of context is required and reporters need to do their job 1/  emily bell (@emilybell) March 15, 2019

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From archives: Reporters shouldnt profile mass shooters, say experts

Almost everyone agreed that posting the actual video of the killings was beyond the pale (The Mirror in Britain included edited footage from the video and later apologized, but the Daily Mail had a video clip that auto-played on its site). Whether to report on the killers writing about his deed was another matter. Sociologists who study the way information spreads onlineincluding Joan Donovan of Harvards Shorenstein Center and Whitney Phillips, who wrote a report for Data & Society last year titled, The Oxygen of Amplificationadvised journalists not to quote from the killers writing.

We wrote up a short thread for reporters. Violence is being used to cause attention to these ideas. Dont share or decode the manifesto. Pressure Facebook to be accountable for allowing islamophobic and murderous content. The platform is the story. https://t.co/s1Unmcw6oz  Joan Donovan, PhD (@BostonJoan) March 15, 2019

The argument made by these and other experts is that the shooters essay appears to have been deliberately written to generate as much publicity as possible for his racist beliefs, including by mentioning of internet celebrities (such as YouTube creator Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie) and alt-right figures such as Candace Owens of Turning Point USA. The risk in publishing these kinds of things, Donovan and others argue, is similar to the risk in publicizing suicides: the details of the killers motivation may steer others toward acting on extreme beliefs, especially if they think they will receive the same kind of public attention. Just as the Parkland, Fla. shooter mentioned the Sandy Hook killer, the Christchurch shooter also referenced other killings driven by white supremacist views, including a 2011 massacre in Norway by Anders Breivik.

remembering how almost no one knew what an "incel" was until the media included the term in its toronto van attack coverage. then any disillusioned young man could start googling his way down a rabbit hole just by using that search term https://t.co/Mczwwy5Sfk  Becca Lewis (@beccalew) March 15, 2019

As Charlie Warzel noted in a New York Times piece, this latest shooting seems like an entirely too predictable outgrowth of a social-media powered world in which seemingly harmless threads on 4chan and 8chan and Reddit can spread instantaneously and metastasize, via YouTube and Facebook, to the point where they affect gullible and disturbed people. The platforms all say that they want to do something about this kind of content, but in almost every case they are left scrambling after the fact, sometimes for hours, to clean up the videos and links. Despite renewed pressure from governmentsincluding laws against hate speech in countries like Germany and Francethey seem almost completely unprepared and ineffective.

The spread of hate obviously needs to be reported on: the ways in which misinformation leading to hate can be shared and become viral, the pathways that take these kinds of views from the dark corners of the internet and redistribute them, the actors and news outlets that profit from doing so. But how do we do this without giving them more oxygen and publicity? There are some easy steps, including not writing celebrity-style profiles of the shooters involved in these kinds of killings. But how much should we go into the details about specific incidents? Thats not an easy question to answer. Some journalists argue, as media outlets did in Norway after the Breivik shootings, that we have a duty to show the public that such views exist.

Chris Anderson, a professor at the University of Leeds, took issue on Twitter with the advice not to report any of the mans writings or ideology. To advance a blanket point of view about reporting and contextualizing these currents is misguided, he said. Its a fair point: how can we defuse or even identify and be aware of this kind of radicalization and the links to different communities if we dont report on them? Its not as simple as just declining to mention the specific method someone chose to use when they died by suicide. If we dont look at the details of things like the Christchurch killers essay, how can we help peopleincluding the mediaunderstand where these kinds of killers come from and how they move from harmless Reddit threads to shooting Muslims in a mosque?

Its a problem thats particular to the 21st centuryinformation is everywhere instantaneously, and the media no longer has the kind of gatekeeper role it used to have. At the same time, the press has a clear responsibility not to pour gasoline on a roaring internet blaze of racism that seems to be sweeping the globe. Finding a route between those two things is no simple task, but it is something that becomes more and more important every day.

ICYMI: An odd trend being adopted by CNN, NYT, and Politico

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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.
The EgyptAir flight to Cairo had barely cleared the New York coast when it mysteriously dove into the ocean. Cockpit recordings eventually made clear what happened: A copilot being summoned to Egypt to be reprimanded had killed himself and the other 216 people aboard.

That conclusion, couched in diplomatic language in a report by U.S. accident investigators, didnt satisfy the Egyptian authorities. Assisted by a team of Washington-based advisers, the Egyptians wrote a separate accident report concluding that flaws with the Boeing Co. 767 were to blame for the 1999 crash.

Signs of international tension have also emerged in the high-stakes investigation of the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max on Sunday. More than 50 countries grounded the plane in a rebuke to American authorities who counseled waiting for more evidence. And Ethiopian officials pointedly sought experts from anywhere but the U.S. to analyze the black-box voice and data recorders recovered from the wreckage of the 737 Max.

Work to download the data is expected to begin Friday  five days after the jet went down.

Air crashes can be hugely sensitive for governments and safety agencies, not just airlines, said Paul Hayes, safety director at the Ascend aviation-analytics arm of London-based Cirium. Thats partly because of national cultural differences in areas such as suicide, but regulators can be very defensive if they think their decisions or competency is being called into question.

Under international treaty, the country where an airplane crash occurs typically oversees an investigation. Other nations may participate as representatives of the manufacturer of the plane, as the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is doing in Ethiopia. Yet that hasnt kept politics and national sensitivities from intruding in the forensic work of sifting debris and interpreting data to figure out what went wrong.

You get false theories, said Roger Cox, a former investigator with the NTSB whose work took him to many nations to assist after crashes. You get grandstanding. You get national pride.

Sundays crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 has transfixed the world as nation after nation grounded Boeing Co.s best-selling jet model despite reassurances from the manufacturer and American authorities. On Wednesday the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration relented and ordered a halt to Max flights, citing new flight-track information.

Strategic Decision

Instead of sending the planes flight-data and cockpit-voice recorders directly to the NTSBs Washington lab, Ethiopian authorities held onto them for several days and finally sent them to France for analysis.

Ethiopian Airlines says the decision was a strategic one after the FAA was left isolated in arguing that the American-made Max should continue flying.

This isnt unusual, said Ronald Schleede, another former NTSB investigator who worked on dozens of foreign investigations. But it is unfortunate that the recorders havent already been read out.

Schleede recalled the 1996 case of an Aeroperu flight that crashed shortly after takeoff from Lima, Peru, killing all 70 people aboard. Because the plane was a relatively new Boeing 757, it was critical that investigators determine whether there was a safety issue. Once the boxes were retrieved from the seabed, Schleede said the NTSB arranged to fly them directly to Washington.

Twelve hours from when we got them out of the water, we had them read out and we knew the cause of the accident, he said. It turned out tape had been left covering a port on the plane used to help calculate altitude and speed, leaving the pilots with confusing instrument readings and they lost control in the darkness.

Similarly, if the Ethiopian black boxes had been read earlier it could have prompted a faster grounding of the Max if a systemic problem was revealed, Schleede said. Conversely, if the data end up showing that the Boeing plane wasnt to blame, it could have spared millions of dollars in economic disruptions.

China Airlines

Schleede said he often had to rely on diplomacy and compromise in figuring out where to send black boxes. After a China Airlines plane crashed in 1998 in Taiwan, killing 203 people, he received a call from a local investigator. Would the U.S. agree to read out the black boxes, he was asked. The Taiwanese didnt trust the French to read them out because the plane was an Airbus SE A300.

Schleede thought that if the NTSB took the boxes, the French might be upset, and that could interfere with future investigations. He said he arranged to have them shipped to Canada.

The nations with formalized crash investigation agencies  including the U.S., U.K., France, Australia, Canada and others  cooperate frequently and trust each other, Schleede added.

We all get along really well, he said. We know each other.

Inevitably though, suspicions arise when American investigators are called upon to investigate U.S. pilots or equipment. Cox, Schleede and several other current and former investigators said the NTSB doesnt go easy on Boeing.

In fact, we are very hard on them, Cox said.

Related: Clue Linking Mysterious Boeing 737 Max Disasters Came From Space

Even when final reports arent released, investigators have almost always been able to discover the cause of a crash and take necessary action to ensure that flying is safe.

One of the most notorious cases creating diplomatic rifts occurred after the 1997 crash of a Silkair 737 in Indonesia. The plane had been flying from Jakarta to Singapore when it dove from cruise altitude into a river, killing all 104 aboard.

In that case, the black boxes werent very helpful. Both had mysteriously stopped recording before the crash. Eventually, suspicion turned to the captain, who had heavy trading losses and had recently obtained a life insurance policy.

But when Indonesias National Transportation Safety Committee released its report in 2000, it concluded there wasnt enough evidence to say what caused the crash. The NTSB, which normally goes out of its way not to comment on other nations work, issued its own conclusions in 2000, saying that the pilot had most likely committed murder-suicide.

Related: Two 737 Max Crashes Put Boeings Reputation on the Line

Ethiopian Airlines disputed Lebanon investigators who found that a series of pilot mistakes caused a 737-800 that departed from Beirut to plunge into the sea in 2010, killing 90 people. An airline press release accused Lebanon of speculating on the cause. The Ethiopian government, which filed a dissenting report, said the crash was due to an explosion triggered by a bomb or lightning.

After a 2016 EgyptAir crash in the Mediterranean that killed 66 people, Egyptian investigators said they discovered explosive residue on human remains. That meant the inquiry had become a criminal investigation. The French Office of Investigation and Analysis contradicted the conclusion, saying the evidence pointed strongly to a fire.

The dispute has held up a final report that could address the dangers of in-flight fires. French investigators last July issued an unusual rebuke of Egypt, saying work to continue examining evidence had been blocked.

Sometimes, leads emerge that local authorities would rather not pursue.

Cox was once sent to a Latin American country to assist an inquiry into the crash of a U.S.-registered corporate jet. Yet the host authorities seemed to have no resources to investigate and it soon become clear that the plane had been owned by a criminal organization.

We just met that invisible wall where people werent cooperating very well, he said. The investigation just ground to a halt. We eventually just went home.
Speculation is rife that BJD MP Balabhadra Majhi and former state minister Damodar Raut could also join the saffron fold soon.

Senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad and former Congress leader Tom Vadakkan after the latter joined the BJP in New Delhi on Thursday. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Once considered a key aide of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Congress spokesperson Tom Vadakkan on Thursday joined the BJP, amid speculation that he could contest the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections from Kerala.

Wishing him luck, the Congress reminded its former leader that till now he used to abuse Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Another leader to join the saffron fold on the same day over his party supremos comments on the Pulwama terror attack was TMC heavyweight and four-time MLA from West Bengal Arjun Singh.

Speculation is rife that BJD MP Balabhadra Majhi and former state minister Damodar Raut could also join the saffron fold soon.

In an apparent attack on Congress president Rahul Gandhis leadership, Mr Vadakkan said he gave the party two decades of his life but it has now resorted to a practice of use and throw.

I am deeply hurt and that is why I am here... The attack by Pakistan on our land and the reaction from my party was sad indeed..I left the party with a heavy heart. If a party is working against national interest, there is no other option but to leave it, said the former Congress leader. He said dynastic politics has reached its zenith in the Congress and said that he believed in Mr Modis development narrative. He joined the saffron fold in the presence of Ravi Shankar Prasad and later met its president Amit Shah.

I am deeply hurt and that is why I am here... The attack by Pakistan on our land and the reaction from my party was sad indeed..I left the party with a heavy heart. If a party is working against national interest, there is no other option but to leave it, said the former Congress leader.

Reacting to Mr Vadakkan joining the saffron fold, Congresss chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, Our best wishes to him.

Asked about Mr Vadakkan citing dynastic politics and the Congresss stand on the Pulwama terror attack and Indias retaliatory strikes as his reasons for quitting the party, Mr Surjewala said every person who leaves a party to join another party searching for a better future, has to say something.

Till now he used to abuse Prime Minister Narendra Modi, so what is the opinion of Modi ji and Ravi Shankar ji on that, he said.

Joining the saffron fold in the presence of BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya and West Bengal BJP leader Mukul Roy, Mr Arjun Singh said, I gave 30 years to Mamata Banerjee. I was shocked at her comments on the Pulwama terror attack. Her statement has shaken the country... When the Indian Air Force carried out the strike, she demanded the body count of terrorists. If a leader does not have the national interest in her mind, then she cannot do any good to her voters.

Sources disclosed the four-time MLA from Barrackpore is likely to contest on a BJP ticket against TMC heavyweight Dinesh Trivedi and was miffed over the denial of a ticket by his former party.

Earlier the TMC used to stand for Maa, Mati, Manush, now it is only money, money and money, Mr Singh said attacking Ms Banerjee.
A Cleveland-area man was sentenced to seven months in prison Wednesday and ordered to repay nearly $246,000 in disability benefits he fraudulently received from the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation and the Social Security Administration, the BWC said Friday.

Louis C. Cooper, 57, of North Royalton, previously pleaded guilty to wire fraud and theft of government property after investigators discovered him concealing his work as a general contractor. He was sentenced Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio in Cleveland.

Acting on an anonymous tip, our investigators discovered Mr. Cooper earned at least $185,000 over the last eight years as a general contractor while telling BWC and Social Security he was too injured to work, said BWC Administrator/CEO Stephanie McCloud.

Cooper was injured on the job in 1996. Investigators from BWC and Social Security found he had developed a scheme dating back to at least 2010 to conceal his income as a general contractor by asking his clients to not pay him directly. While reporting to both agencies numerous times that he was too injured to work, Cooper collected nearly $168,000 from BWC and nearly $78,000 from Social Security.

According to court documents, Cooper must surrender to the U.S. Marshals Service on April 18 for transfer to a federal prison. He must serve three years of probation following his release. This case was prosecuted by the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of Ohio.

Source: Ohio BWC
Some physicians are pushing back against widespread misapplication of the 2016 federal opioid prescribing guidelines, while a new report from Harvard Medical School researchers gives some credence to their claims.

Some 300 health professionals signed a joint letter to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue a bold clarification of the CDCs policy on tapering long-term users of pain medications off of the drugs. The letter says that after the guidelines were adopted, many doctors and regulators incorrectly believed that the CDC had established a daily dose limit of 90 mg of morphine equivalent and imposed payment barriers and explicit taper plans as a condition for authorizing refills.

Taken in combination, these actions have led many health care providers to perceive a significant category of vulnerable patients as institutional and professional liabilities to be contained or eliminated, rather than as people needing care, the letter states.

The long-awaited federal opioid guidelines were lauded by workers compensation carriers as a means of curtailing opioid abuse and addiction. Increased attention to opioid over prescribing is credited with reducing carriers spending on pharmaceuticals. A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 30% of workers comp claimants who were treated with opioid continued to use them beyond 90 days after injury. Other research has shown persistent opioid use is associated with poor claim outcomes.

But the physicians who wrote the CDC said insurers and other payers have invoked the guidelines dose thresholds as binding for purposes of payment, determinations of quality of care, and professional and legal liability for physicians. As a result, patients on stable opioid dosages have faced draconian and often rapid involuntary dose reductions, often resulting in grave harms according to a press release from the University of Alabama.

Professor Stefan Kertesz, a physician and addiction specialist who teaches at the university, said he endorses the guidelines message that opioids should rarely be a first option for chronic pain.

We know the harm wrought by reckless promotion and prescribing of opioids for the last 20 years, and we are still compelled to respond to the loss of human life, as medications are cut off and patients abandoned, Kertesz said in a prepared statement. Since all the parties involved cite the CDC as justification, it comes down to whether the CDC will merely whisper about this problem or take clear action to protect patients who are increasingly at risk The letters 321 signatories include 126 medical school faculty.

Signatories to the letter include three former U.S. drug czars: Jerome Jaffe (1971-73), Gen. Barry McCaffrey (1996-2001), and Michael Botticelli (2014-2017).

A study released by the Harvard Medical School on Wednesday showed that the nationwide effort to curtail opioid prescribing has shown dramatic results. An analysis of more than 86 million privately insured patients across the United States between 2012 and 2017, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, found a 54 percent decrease in the rate of monthly opioid prescriptions to patients who have never previously used the drugs or had been off them for at least six months. The number of providers who prescribed opioids for any opioid-naive patient decreased by nearly 30 percent, according the study.

The researchers found their findings both reassuring and alarming, according to a press release from Harvard Medical School. The report found that some doctors have ceased any new prescriptions for opioid pain relief, raising the question of whether some patients might be getting less-than-adequate treatment for their pain.

The challenge we have in front of us is nothing short of intricate: Curbing the opioid epidemic while ensuring that we appropriately treat pain, stated Nicole Maestas, senior investigator on the study and associate professor of health care policy in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. Its a question of balancing the justified use of potent pain medications against the risk for opioid misuse and abuse.

For its part, the CDC says it is well aware that its guidelines are not hard and fast dosage limits and it has communicated that message to health care providers.

The CDC Guideline does not endorse mandated or abrupt dose reduction or discontinuation, said Courtney N. Lenard, senior press officer for the CDCs National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, in an email to the Claims Journal.

Lenard said the guideline asks physicians to avoid or carefully justify increasing dosages above the threshold. The document also offers different guidance for patients already above the stated threshold, including reviewing risks and benefits of continuing high-dosage therapy, offering to taper, and for patients who agree to taper, collaborating with the patient on an individualized that is slow enough to minimize opioid withdrawal, she said.

The CDC published a pocket guide after release of the guideline emphasizing those principles. The agency is also conducting research to ensure that it can continually improve the guideline. It has ommissioned a chronic pain systematic review by the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality to determine what new scientific evidence has been released since the guideline was released in March 2016, Lenard said.
Newswise  When Hawaiians received a false alarm text message that said Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill, in January 2018, the result was not panic, according to new research from the University of Georgia.

A team of researchers analyzed the unprecedented eventa text that was announced as a false alarm 38 minutes laterto better understand how people react in the face ofa potentially catastrophic event. What they found was that people sought information that could verify their risk and help them decide what to do next.

They asked island residents to respond to questions about their perceived level of risk, what actions they took after seeing the warning, and whether the false alarm affected their trust in future warnings.

Most respondents, they found, didnt seek immediate shelter, but instead spent time looking for more information about the incoming attack. This behavior is known among disaster researchers as social milling.

Its getting a sense of what other people are doing, said Sarah DeYoung, an assistant professor in the Institute for Disaster Management at UGAs College of Public Health. Social milling means, lets see whats going on, observing the scene but also checking in with others.

Social media

When people are milling, she said, they are more likely to find the information they need to make the best decision about what to do. Respondents said they looked to major news outlets and social media to corroborate the alert message.

Social media played a key role in helping to spread the word about the false alarm. Hawaiian congressional leader Tulsi Gabbard was quick to tweet the warning was an error, and 16 percent of respondents said they saw and shared the tweet.

There was a spillover effect of social media that went beyond people who follow it, said DeYoung, the study author. And it also speaks to the value of following social media because those people who did were able to deliver that message to their immediate network of people.

In the days following the false alarm, respondents reported feeling a mix of emotions. Among feelings of trauma and anger, some respondents also said they didnt trust their local government to handle future emergencies.

The good news for emergency managers and local government, said DeYoung, is that broader findings from disaster research says that false alarms generally dont cause people to disregard future alarms, but she added that respondents in her study said theyd be more likely to trust future tsunami warnings than future missile warnings.

DeYoung said the way to overcome doubt about future emergencies is to send out official warning messages across more platforms than the wireless emergency alert system.

People wanted multiple cues to validate the warning, she said, so in order to increase belief and trust in the warning, it should go across multiple channels.

The paper, Death was not in the agenda for the day: Emotions, behavioral reactions, and perceptions in response to the 2018 Hawaii Wireless Emergency Alert, recently appeared in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. Its available online here.

Co-authors include Jeannette N. Sutton with University of Kentucky, Ashley K. Farmer with Illinois State University, David Neal with Indiana University  South Bend, and Katherine A. Nichols, a recent graduate of UGA.
The grounding of Boeing 737 Max airplanes is likely to cause a spike in travel insurance claims, InsureMyTrip said in a press release.

This is a very rare occurrence and we anticipate that travelers affected by this will be filing claims to see whether travel insurance will kick in, said Gail Mangiante, claims advocate with the Anytime Advocates program at InsureMyTrip, a travel insurance brokerage based in Warwick, Rhode Island.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday ordered the jets grounded in the United States after two Boeing 737 Max 8 jets crashed less than six months apart. More than 40 countries have grounded the planes or banned them in their airspace, according to the Associated Press.

InsureMyTrip said whether consumers actually have coverage for cancelled flights depends on the claims policies of each travel insurance carrier.

Travelers stranded at airports may be able to claim expenses for meals and accommodations caused by canceled or delayed flights. Policyholders may be eligible for reimbursement of a portion of their pre-paid travel costs if they miss more than 50% of their trip because of the grounding, but that depends on the policy and how insurers respond. A missed connecting flight may trigger coverage if the policy has a common carrier delay clause.

Consumers who cancel a trip because of fear may have coverage if they purchased a policy with a Cancel For Any Reason benefit.

InsureMyTrip said flight cancellation policies vary by airline and circumstance. When an airline cancels a flight, most will try to rebook passengers on the next available flight.

Airlines are not required to reimburse travelers for losses incurred as a result of a canceled flight, the company said.
A volunteer fire chief in North Carolina was ordered to repay $23,000 that he took form insurance carriers after filing fraudulent claims for fire department equipment, Insurance Commissioner Mike Causeys office said.

Kenan Wayne Kearney of Four Oaks, pleaded guilty in Johnston County Superior Court to six felony counts of insurance fraud, seven counts of felony embezzlement, and 12 counts of felony obtaining property by false pretense. Kearney, 45, was the former chief of the Blackmans Crossroads Volunteer Fire Department.

Superior Court Judge Tanya T. Wallace gave Kearney a six to 17-month suspended sentence on the condition that he pay $23,841.31 in restitution, court costs, and submit to 36 months of supervised probation. Kearney was also ordered not to hold a position of trust or a position to handle funds and to notify the state fire marshal within 14 days of being employed with a fire department, the department said.

According to court documents, Kearney turned in claims for four portable radios, a portable air pack, and a thermal imaging device, falsely saying that they were either lost or damaged between 2013 and 2017.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  The federal governments approval today of Ohios Medicaid work requirement leaves a lot of questions for healthcare providers on how exactly the waiver will affect their patients.

Were very, very concerned about it, said Elizabeth Newman, president and CEO of The Centers and Circle Health Services, a community health center.

Newman said the center is still getting a handle on the new work requirements and how the exemptions in the waiver will work, but she expects a number of the centers patients could be affected.

The state estimates about 36,000 people will not be eligible for Medicaid under the work requirements. Critics say that number is too low. Kevin Gowan, the director at Cuyahoga County Job and Family Services, said its too soon to estimate how many people in the county will be affected.

Ohios waiver, which was submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in April 2018, requires most able-bodied adults to work or participate in a sanctioned community engagement activity, like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) education and training activities, for 80 hours monthly to be eligible for Medicaid.

The work requirement includes exemptions for people with severe disabilities, pregnant women, parents, caretakers and Ohio Works First recipients of cash assistance, as well as able-bodied adults living in counties with high unemployment rates.

Scott S. Osiecki, CEO of the ADAMHS Board of Cuyahoga County, said the board wont truly understand the waiver until the rules are fully defined.

That is why we are working with our partners in Cuyahoga County, as well as at the state level, to ensure this work requirement wont place additional burdens on people seeking treatment for mental illness and addictions, Osiecki said.

Understanding exactly how the requirement will be rolled out will take time, according to Loren Anthes, public policy fellow for The Center for Community Solutions, a Cleveland-based think tank.

Its not like the waiver comes along and is operational on Day 1. There is a lot of work the state has to do to set everything up, Anthes said.

The work requirements are not expected to go into effect until Jan. 1, 2021, CMS said in a letter to Ohio Medicaid Director Maureen Corcoran.

Anthes said there is a lot of complexity to the work requirements and how they will be rolled out. For example, the waiver exempts the counties with the highest unemployment rates. Right now, that would include Cuyahoga County, he said. However, that could change by the time the requirement is implemented.

When the state submitted its application for this waiver, Cuyahoga County would be essentially affected. That changed in September. It may change again next September, Loren said. The federal fiscal year begins in October.

A requirement to force recipients to work highlights a debate between whether Medicaid should be a temporary welfare program for those facing stints of unemployment or a means to provide long-term healthcare coverage to the country's most vulnerable. The waivers roll back some provisions of the Affordable Care Act, namely that the same number of people must be enrolled in healthcare plans, under which Medicaid was expanded in more than 30 states, including Ohio.

In January 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services issued guidance to state Medicaid directors encouraging them to apply for waivers to establish work or community engagement requirements for Medicaid.

This policy will erode the Medicaid expansion, hurting low-wage and seasonal workers in construction, retail, food service and hospitality, Wendy Patton, senior project director for Policy Matters Ohio, a left-leaning think tank, said in a prepared statement. Research shows that additional reporting or administrative burdens create barriers to eligible people retaining coverage. Many working and even disabled people who are supposed to be exempted will lose coverage because of reporting requirements.

Rea Hederman, executive director of the Economic Research Center and vice president of policy at The Buckeye Institute, a right-leaning think tank, called the work requirements an important step in reforming the state's health care system.

"With the approval of Ohios waiver, it is now the responsibility of the state to develop a system that allows Medicaid enrollees to easily report their time working and that ensures no one deserving of services is kicked-off the roles due to an overly cumbersome reporting process, Hederman said in a prepared statement.

Gowan said that creating a system for the work requirements will be fairly monumental to do.

Plain Dealer Reporter Rachel Dissell contributed to this story.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  The MetroHealth System today announced its decision to raise the minimum wage for all of its employees to $15 per hour, effective immediately, according to a news release. MetroHealth also will begin covering employee in-house healthcare costs in 2020.

MetroHealths mission is to care for everyone and that includes our employees, Dr. Akram Boutros, president and CEO of MetroHealth, said in a prepared statement. Its important, at every level of the organization, that the 7,800 people here who spend their days caring for others know how important they are, feel valued and are able to support their families. Their financial health is just as important as their physical health.

The hourly wage increase affects 928 employees, including the unionized workers of the AFSCME Local 3360.

We dont treat union employees any different than nonunion employees, Boutros said during an interview Friday.

Of those affected, 203 will have their wages increased to $15 per hour and 725 will see their hourly rate raised above $15 per hour, the release said. Overall, the average increase in wages is 12.1 percent.

The base-level hourly wage increase affects those with entry-level positions, including patient transport, environmental services, laundry services, facilities maintenance and food services, among others.

The change in pay will be reflected in employees April paycheck. Employees will receive backdated pay at the increased rate through Feb. 3, which is the date of the new three-year contract with AFSCME, the system said. Boutros said the company approached the union about increasing wages.

Since Dr. Boutros has been the CEO of The MetroHealth System, the union and administration have enjoyed a collaborative relationship, Julie Albers, president of AFSCME Local 3360 at MetroHealth, said in a prepared statement. The increase of our minimum wage to $15 per hour reflects that collaborative effort and the generosity of this administration. Our members will be able to have a greater work-life balance, live healthier lives and earn a living wage for their work.

The new union contract also includes plans to cover in-house healthcare costs for employees, starting in January 2020, Boutros said. That coverage will extend to all employees, not just unionized workers.

For anything from open-heart surgery to a stubbed toe, employees will not ever have to reach into their pockets, Boutros said.

MetroHealths decision follows the Cleveland Clinics December announcement that it would raise the minimum wage for hourly employees to $15 by 2020. The Clinic in January increased the hourly rate for 1,900 employees $14 per hour. In 2020, the hourly wage will increase to $15 per hour for all of the Clinics hourly employees, which totals 2,900.

Locally, University Hospitals has not announced plans to increase its minimum wage. In a statement released by the health system, UH said it has consistently awarded annual merit pay increases, implemented new clinical career ladders, expanded benefit options and enhanced tuition assistance.

We are continually evaluating and refreshing our programs for competitiveness and for alignment with the desires and preferences of our employees, the statement said.

Nationwide, there has been a push to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, including in the healthcare industry. Allegheny Health Network and UPMC in Pittsburgh both will raise their minimum wage to $15 by 2021, and Duke University Health System in North Carolina will increase its minimum wage to $15 by July 2019.

MetroHealth first started looking at sustainable wages in 2016, Boutros said. At that time, the system increased its minimum wage to $12.48 per hour.

The decision to raise its hourly rate was based on information from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which calculates living wage. For Cuyahoga County, a two-parent, two-child family household would need to make $61,734, or $14.84 per hour per adult.

We wanted people to have enough money so theyre not constantly in crisis mode and require multiple jobs to support their family, Boutros said. We needed to take care of those who were struggling."

Boutros said he wants MetroHealth to serve as an example for other local organizations in how employees are treated.

We think Cleveland would be better off if everyone can do that," Boutros said.

This story was updated to include comments from University Hospitals.
UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, Ohio -- After spending the last 23 years with the Chicago Public Schools, the new superintendent for the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District looks forward to returning home to Northeast Ohio.

Elizabeth Kirby -- currently the chief of school strategy and planning overseeing 656 district, charter and contract schools in Chicago -- grew up in the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood and graduated from the Hawken School.

Following lengthy meetings with four finalists last week, the CH-UH school board voted unanimously Thursday (March 14) to hire Kirby to succeed Talisa Dixon, who left this month after nearly five years to run the Columbus City Schools.

And after negotiations on a contract advertised as starting at $165,000 a year, Kirby is expected to lead the district into the 2019-2020 school year, with an unofficial start date of Aug. 1.

I am excited about the opportunity to return home to Northeast Ohio and lead a district that is rich in diversity and in opportunities for students, Kirby said in a press release following the school boards announcement.

Kirby added that during her visit to the district last Friday (March 8), she truly felt at home when meeting students, staff and community members.

She also plans to carry forward the momentum created through the district's strategic plan and guiding mission.

CH-UH Board of Education President Jodi Sourini outlined some of those key values in the current strategic plan, including equity, engagement and enhancing relationships with staff, families and community.

"We believe Ms. Kirby will build upon this foundation, without starting over, to move our district to the next level in improving student outcomes, Sourini said. "She brings a proven track record of raising student achievement and closing learning gaps in a diverse community similar to ours. "

Sourini added that this was accomplished by aligning assessments with curriculum and streamlining the number of assessments being used, "providing teachers and staff with useful and actionable information while reducing the amount of instructional time lost due to testing."

Kirby was also one of two finalists announced last week by the Shaker Heights City School District for its superintendents vacancy, which was also filled March 14. The Shaker Heights school board later in the evening announced its selection of David Glasner.

Sourini also thanked staff and the public for participating in meet-and-greet" sessions for each finalist last week, with each session attended by at least 50 community members.

Earlier this week, Cleveland Heights Mayor Carol Roe and City Manager Tanisha Briley noted that they attended all four meetings and came away impressed with all of the candidates.

Prior to the Kirbys contract being negotiated and signed, longtime CH-UH administrator Dr. Brian Williams will continue to serve as the interim superintendent until she begins, district spokesman Scott Wortman noted.
Sources in the EC said that the chief electoral officer of West Bengal has also been asked to file a report on the actual ground situation.

While Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal are spread across all the seven phases, they will be held in two phases each in Tripura and Manipur and three in Assam. (Representational image)

New Delhi: A high-level team of the Election Commission of India led by a deputy election commissioner will be in West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and Manipur in the coming days to assess poll preparedness, official sources said Thursday.

The decision to send Deputy Election Commissioner Sudip Jain comes a day after the BJP urged the poll watchdog to declare West Bengal a super sensitive state.

Mr Jain will lead the team to West Bengal on Saturday, Tripura on Sunday, Assam on Monday and Manipur on Tuesday to assess election preparedness in the four states.

While Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal are spread across all the seven phases, they will be held in two phases each in Tripura and Manipur and three in Assam.

Sources in the EC said that the chief electoral officer of West Bengal has also been asked to file a report on the actual ground situation.

The BJP had on Wednesday also demanded that central forces be deployed at all polling stations in the TMC ruled state.

Briefing the media after meeting EC officials, Law Minister and BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad had said, We have requested the Election Commission that the state of West Bengal should be declared as super-sensitive. And have also demanded that central forces should be deployed at all polling booths in the state.

He said the party also requested the poll panel to transfer those police officers whose electoral impartiality is questionable as well as the withdrawal of former Kolkata Police Commissioner Rajeev Kumar from election duty.

The BJP is trying to make inroads into Trinamool Congress bastion of West Bengal which has 42 Lok Sabha seats. In 2014, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) won 34 seats, the Congress four, while the BJP and CPI(M) bagged two seats each in the state.

Slamming the BJP for moving the poll panel, Chief Minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee alleged the saffron party was trying to hide behind central forces as it cant win any seat in the state.
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio -- The Shaker Heights City Schools Board of Education went with a proven commodity in the job performance and leadership of David Glasner, selecting him Thursday (March 14) as the next superintendent for the school district.

Glasner was appointed last summer to the post of executive director of durriculum and Instruction for the district, after serving nearly four years as the principal at Shaker Heights Middle School.

In November, he was named interim principal at Shaker Heights High School after Jonathan Kuehnle was placed on administrative leave pending the conclusion of a review into a number of controversial staffing decisions in the district.

Effective July 1, Glasner will succeed interim Superintendent Stephen Wilkins, who will have served one year in that capacity.

Wilkins, formerly the assistant superintendent of business operations and human resources, was appointed after the departure of Gregory Hutchings when he returned to Alexandria, Va., to take over as superintendent there.

I am truly grateful and humbled by the confidence the school board and the Shaker community have placed in me, Glasner stated in a March 14 press release. I look forward to working together toward our common goal of providing a high-quality education for all of our students.

Glasners appointment as curriculum and instruction director also coincided with the devastating July 10 fire at Fernway Elementary School, and he was involved from the outset in the recovery plans there.

Dr. Glasner possesses the passion, intellect and vision to lead our district to new levels of excellence, said school board President Jeffrey Isaacs. Time and again, he has stepped up and shown a willingness to take on big challenges."

Glasner holds bachelors and masters degrees in history from the University of Pennsylvania and another masters degree in social studies education from Teacher College at Columbia University.

Starting out as a teacher and administrator with the New York City Department of Education, Glasner later earned a Ph.D. in urban education from Cleveland State University.

District officials noted that Glasner is also an International Baccalaureate Diploma graduate of Richmond Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md. The IB Programme is a big part of Shakers curriculum.

"We know the entire community will join us in committing to make his tenure a success," Isaacs added.

After a national search with a hiring consultant, as well substantial community input, Glasner was one of two finalists announced earlier this month by the school board.

The other finalist was Elizabeth Kirby from the Chicago Public Schools, and originally from the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood. Kirby was hired Thursday (March 14) as the next superintendent for the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District.

"This week alone, close to 500 students, parents, teachers, administrators, support staff and members of the community participated in small group sessions or public forums with the two finalists," Shaker school district spokesman Scott Stephens noted.

Many more viewed the finalists presentations via video and filled out online feedback forms.

We thank the hundreds of community members who participated in focus groups, attended public forums or called or emailed board members, Isaacs said. Together, we as a community have come up with a leader who will be an outstanding superintendent.
BEREA, Ohio -- Area residents who have attended Bereas Christmas Parades over the years are likely to recall Santas arrival as among the annual events most eagerly awaited highlights.

For the past 40 years, longtime Berea resident Dave Gibson captivated those along the parade route with his likeness to the Jolly Old Elf, and charmed the children who recited their Christmas wish lists to him at the Coe Lake Gazebo.

Sadly, Gibson, 83, died March 1, a victim of pancreatic cancer.

A lot of kids in Berea grew up sitting on his lap and telling him what they wanted for Christmas, said his son, David Gibson Jr.

He had a great white beard, all his own, he, said, adding that in addition to his yearly Christmas Parade appearances, the elder Gibson would dress up as Santa and visit area nursing homes and the Berea Childrens Home (now Guidestone), passing out candy canes with the goal of spreading holiday cheer.

Dave Sr. was also a consummate blood donor, with a 20-gallon donor pin to show for it.

And he donated (blood) platelets, Dave Jr. said. He was big about giving things like that. He got me to be an organ donor and a blood donor at a young age.

That Dave Sr. and his Santa portrayal will be missed by many is certain, Mayor Cyril Kleem said.

To Bereans, Dave was Santa, not just some guy who played Santa at Christmas, Kleem said. He was Santa all year round. He was a kind, loving and generous man, just like Santa.

Gibson is also survived by a twin brother, Danny, of Indian Hills, Colo., and a sister, Julie, of Connifer, Colo.

Gold medalist: Holly Peterka, a senior at Berea-Midpark High School, is among a trio of Polaris Career Center Baking & Pastry Arts students who captured a gold medal after competing in the Family, Career and Community Leader of America regional culinary competition.

The Polaris team, which also included Jacquelyn Twardzik of Olmsted Falls High School and Taylor Sloan of Fairview High School, prepared a three-course meal featuring winter white vegetable soup, Hungarian chicken and rice pilaf, and anjou pear galette with chantilly cream.

The FCCLA sponsors competitions at the regional, state and national levels for students enrolled in family and consumer sciences programs. The competitions give students the opportunity to showcase their career-technical talents and skills.

The event was at the Tri-C Hospitality Management Center on Public Square in downtown Cleveland.

Pride luncheon: The Brook Park Beautification & Pride Committee will host its 11th annual Spring Luncheon at noon March 23.

Tickets, at $20 each, include a hot entree buffet, 50/50 raffle, Chinese raffle and door prizes.

Brook Park Police Chief Tom Dickel will speak on home safety concerns.

For tickets or more information, call Barbara Warny at 216-676-0211, Marilyn Cordiak at 216-676-8873 or Carol Henninger at 216-676-8902.

Veterans event: Bereas Office of Veterans Outreach invites Vietnam veterans to mingle and meet Cleveland Browns alumni from 3 to 6 p.m. March 27 at Mikes Bar & Grille, 130 Front St.

The event will feature free appetizers for Vietnam veterans, donated by Mikes Bar & Grille.

RSVP by March 25 to Willie Springer, veterans outreach coordinator, at 440-973-4567.

Renacci to speak: Former Congressman Jim Renacci, chairman of Ohios Future Foundation, will speak to the Southwest Republican Women at 11:30 a.m. March 28 at Strosacker Hall (Student Union) Colony Room, at 120 E. Grand St. (on the Baldwin Wallace University campus).

For more information, call 440-243-7173.

Berea pantry hours: The Berea Community Outreach Food Pantry, 535 Wyleswood Drive (at front of Smith School), is open from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursdays. For more information, call 440-826-4891.

Middleburg Heights pantry: The Middleburg Heights Food Pantry at 7000 Paula Drive is open to serve clients from 10 a.m. to noon Tuesdays and 5 to 7 p.m. Thursdays.

SCAN sets hours: The SCAN Hunger Pantry, 398 W. Bagley Road, Suite 7, in Bereas hours of operation are from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the second Friday of the month and from 4 to 7 p.m. on the fourth Friday of the month.
CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Shaker Heights native and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Jim Wolpaw is returning home for a showing of his latest work, a documentary on the life of late Cleveland Heights poet Daniel Thompson.

The film 'Daniel Thompson: One Tough Poet' will be screened for the first time locally at 6:30 p.m. March 26 at the Lee Road Library branch, 2345 Lee Road in Cleveland Heights.

The 50-minute film, titled Daniel Thompson: One Tough Poet, took more than 10 years to complete and tells the story of a man who was a poet, social activist and, to some, a cultural hero.

It will be presented in a free showing at 6:30 p.m. March 26 at the Lee Road branch of the Heights Libraries, 2345 Lee Road in Cleveland Heights. The film will also be screened the following night at 6:30 p.m. at the Lakewood Public Library, 15425 Detroit Ave.

It ended up taking a long time to make, Wolpaw said from his home in Rhode Island. Not that I was working on it the whole time; I was doing a lot of different things at once and got sidetracked. It took 10 years, and I came up with three different cuts (of the film), and used parts of all three. The fourth cut is the final film.

Wolpaw said it was a friend hes known since his middle school days at Woodbury School in Shaker Heights who brought Thompson to his attention. Fans and friends of Thompson, Eric and Gail Buchbinder made an amateur film about Thompson. Wolpaw saw that film, Famous in the Neighborhood, in 2008.

Moved by the film, Wolpaw sought to expand on the story and gained the Buchbinders approval in doing so. With the help of people like Michael Bradley, a South Euclid musician and marionette maker, Wolpaw re-edited the original film and further developed the story.

Part of the problem in making the film was that the only film we had of (Thompson) was pretty much from the last two years of his life, when he did two European tours with the percussion group Drumplay, Wolpaw said.

Bradley worked with Thompson several times at poetry readings, including at both libraries where the film will be shown.

When I think of (Thompson), I think of humor," said Bradley, who met Thompson in Cleveland Heights in the 1970s. He was very funny. He came over my daughters birthday party once when she was young and she asked him if he could jump rope. He said, I cant jump, but I can fly.' My daughter and her friends just loved him.

A big man, Bradley said Thompson was a wrestler in his youth, and had sought to be a minister. Thompson was many things to many people, including a civil rights Freedom Rider in the 1960s.

Theres a book called The Book of Daniel that has a lot of his poetry," Bradley said. A lot of it is about politics and things that were going on around Cleveland at the time. He wrote about Cleveland a lot.

Shaker Heights native Jim Wolpaw is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker now living in Rhode Island.

Bradley made a marionette likeness of Thompson when the poet was once asked who would take his place after he was gone. Thompson liked the marionette and took it with him to readings, along with soundtrack music Bradley created. Bradley formerly played with the bands The Cost and Oroboros.

Its sad people are forgetting him, Bradley said of Thompson, so its good that this film is coming out so people can get to know him again.

Wolpaw said the film is unusual in that it also documents the difficulties of its making.

Wolpaw, 70, has taught film production at Emerson College in Boston, the University of Rhode Island, and the Rhode Island School of Design, from which he retired about five years ago.

His Academy Award nomination came in 1985 for the documentary "Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date," a take on Keats' famous poem "Ode to a Nightingale."

In 1978, Wolpaw made Cobra Snake for a Necktie, a portrait of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Bo Diddley, which went on to air on Showtime. He also made the 1991 feature comedy Complex World and the 2003 movie Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson.

Wolpaw said he no longer has family in the area and doesn't make it home frequently, but is looking forward to doing so for the screening of his latest work.

Speaking of Thompson, whom Wolpaw never met and only learned about through those who knew the poet, the director said: He was definitely an extraordinary character who was difficult to characterize. He was one of a kind.
CANTON, Ohio -- A 40-year-old man was found dead Thursday in Nimishillen Creek, according to Canton police.

George Edward Hudak, of Canton, had been reported missing on Monday, Canton police Lt. Dennis Garren said in a news release. His cause of death is under investigation by detectives and the Stark County Coroners Office.

The Stark County Sheriffs Office had been notified about a body in the creek near the 3500 block of Central Ave SE, Garren said.

Sheriffs deputies responded to the scene and called Canton police. The Canton Township Fire Department retrieved the body from the creek.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Canton Police Detective Bureau at 330-489-3144.

To comment on this story, visit Fridays crime and courts comment section.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A Cleveland-based U.S. Marshals task force on Friday arrested two suspects wanted in a deadly Florida home invasion.

The Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task arrested Cordarin Simmons, 32, and Jesse Square, 31, near the intersection of West 98th Street and Zimmer Avenue in Cleveland, in the citys Cudell neighborhood, marshals said in a news release.

The news release identifies Simmons and Square as suspects in a beating death that occurred Feb. 14 in Pensacola, a city on the Florida Panhandle.

Three attackers pistol-whipped Willie Lemond Wilson, 40, to death inside his Pensacola home, according to the Pensacola News Journal.

Florida investigators previously arrested Leroy Benjamin, 19, in connection with the homicide, the Pensacola News Journal reported.

The Escambia County Sheriffs Office in Florida announced Feb. 16 that it was seeking Simmons and Square in connection with the homicide.

Authorities did not say why Simmons and Square were in Cleveland. They will be detained locally while awaiting extradition to Florida, marshals said.

To comment on this story, visit Fridays crime and courts comments page.
EUCLID, Ohio  A suspect in an aggravated menacing case has been captured after he escaped from a Euclid patrol car on Thursday, according to police.

Jonathan Alexander Lamun, 24, is being held in the Cuyahoga County Jail in Euclid.

Lamun escaped about 3 p.m. Thursday while being taken to the Euclid City Jail after being arrested, police said. He reportedly kicked out the back window of the cruiser and jumped out.

Police did not say where Lamun was captured Thursday but he reportedly had been seen in the Steelyard Commons area in Cleveland.

If youd like to comment on this story, visit Thursdays crime and courts comments section.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland will house Venture for Americas business accelerator this year after a bid process against Cincinnati and Columbus.

The program offers fledgling entrepreneurs co-working space, housing and a network of people and funders to help them in the early stages of building their business. The accelerator will attract 8 to 10 new entrepreneurs to Cleveland, Venture for America Northeast Ohio director Carrie Murphy said.

Applicants come from all over the country. Venture for America began the accelerator four years ago, in Philadelphia. Two years later, it moved to Detroit.

Though the accelerator program lasts only four months, some entrepreneurs stay in the city after it ends to build their business and raise funding. Just under half of the company founders stayed in Philadelphia after the accelerator. About 30 percent of founders stayed in Detroit.

Since the accelerator started, graduates have raised a combined total of $13.3 million in seed capital and have created more than 60 jobs.

Ohios Third Frontier program underwrote the cost of bringing the program to the state, but Cleveland had to submit a proposal to house it in Northeast Ohio.

Cleveland submitted a bid with more than 30 letters of support from business community members, including JumpStart, the City Club, the Cleveland Leadership Center, BioEnterprise and more, Murphy said. The Cleveland Foundation awarded a $50,000 grant to help shoulder additional costs of the program like the salary for a full-time accelerator coordinator.

Venture for America partners college graduates interested in entrepreneurship with economically-challenged cities with growing startup cultures. This fall, 13 fellows arrived for a two-year stint working with Cleveland-area companies, according to Freshwater Cleveland. The Cleveland VFA program has welcomed 63 fellows since 2013.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Women are the most vulnerable refugees, immigrants and displaced people. They are disproportionately more likely to be targeted by criminals, and to become victims of violence, abuse, rape and human trafficking.

So why do so many women, often mothers with small children in tow, flee their home countries to try to come to the United States?

Because, according to panelists at Thursdays City Club Youth Forum on Womens Immigration Rights, what they are running away from is so much worse than what they might face here.

Understanding why thousands of people are streaming to the southwest U.S. border starts with looking at whats happening in their counties of origin, said Chrissy Stonebraker Martinez, co-director of the InterReligious Task Force on Central America. Honduras and El Salvador have the highest rates of femicide in the world, on top of extreme poverty, organized crime and sexual violence.

These women dont have the luxury of waiting for permission to immigrate legally, because they need immediate refuge and safety, Stonebraker Martinez said. Her aunt who applied for a visa to come to the U.S. from Colombia waited 15 years to get approved.

Can you imagine living in a really difficult situation for your entire life and not being able to leave that situation? Can you imagine that? she asked the audience. More than half of the 87 people at Thursdays forum were 16 or younger. If you cant imagine staying in a horrible situation for your entire life, why would you imagine that for anyone else?

Lisa Splawinski, an immigration attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, said that her clients would rather have stayed in their home countries than walk thousands of miles fleeing with their children. But they couldnt stay because it wasnt safe or economically possible for them or their families.

A lot of my clients have suffered really horrific abuse in their lives, for decades even," she said. "One woman who was seeking asylum had been raped, abused and stalked by her husband for 20 years before she came to the U.S.

Women and families are just trying to live normal, safe, happy lives. Unfortunately, they really are not able to in their home countries, which is why they come here. In the past several years, that goal is becoming harder and harder to achieve based on decisions the U.S. government has made about immigrants," she said.

Splawinski said that although undocumented immigrants may have initially crossed the U.S. border without authorization, being here without legal permission isnt a crime. Although the wording of asylum laws hasnt changed, the way immigration policy is enforced has become increasingly restrictive and punitive. They sometimes are portrayed as lawbreakers or criminals, for coming here without permission, when theres no way for them to enter legally because of the way our immigration laws work, she said.

People have the right to present themselves at the U.S. border and apply for asylum, if its too dangerous for them to go home, she said. But theres evidence that border agents are turning people away before theyve had a chance to make their case before a judge. Its just become harder to seek asylum.

On top of that, families are being split at the border, sometimes with parents and children being sent to separate facilities. Thousands of detained children are waiting in immigration detention facilities run like prisons by for-profit companies, Stonebraker Martinez said.

One of those companies, CoreCivic Inc., formerly called Corrections Corporation of America, is one of the nations largest owners and operators of private prisons, including the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown that houses hundreds of detained adult immigrants.

CoreCivic spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist said via email that We do not and have not ever provided housing for any children who arent under the supervision of a parent. We do not and have not ever operated shelters for unaccompanied minors, and we dont operate border patrol facilities.

Splawinski said on Thursday that when her ancestors came to the U.S., they didnt have to provide their fingerprints, show that they were employable, or prove they spoke English. If people like her clients were allowed to remain in the U.S. legally, they wouldnt be afraid to call the police if they became victims of crime.

Sister Anne Victory of the Sisters of the Humility of Mary, director of education for the nonprofit Collaborative to End Human Trafficking, said women looking for a way out of poverty are tricked into thinking that theyre going to have a wonderful job in the U.S. but find themselves forced into unpaid work or prostitution when they arrive here.

She said nobody knows how many people are trafficked, because many victims dont report it. They may have been threatened that something bad will happen to their families, or are told that youll just get deported, so why would they tell a police officer? Many are so traumatized that they dont even know what to call whats happened to them, she said.

According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, Ohio ranks No. 4 in the nation for the number of calls to its hotline, which she interprets as a sign that people are aware of the hotline. On Wednesday, the Cuyahoga County Regional Human Trafficking Task Force reported that it has rescued 85 victims of human trafficking, ranging from age 12 to 66, since it began in December 2016.
WILLOWICK, Ohio -- A mysterious package from an Oregon-based Leonardo Dicappio showed up on the front porch of a Willowick woman Thursday morning. It wasnt from a movie star without a firm grasp on how to spell his own last name, it was marijuana, and possibly heroin, according to police.

The package arrived at the home Thursday afternoon, and the woman contacted police. She told officers that she wasnt expecting a package and hadnt ordered anything through the mail in some time, the report says.

She also didnt recognize any of the other names on the package.

Willowick police called investigators at the Corvallis police department in Oregon who said the return address on the package wasnt an actual address in their city, the report says.

The Lake County Bomb Squad inspected the package with a portable x-ray machine and determined it was probably marijuana, the report says.

Officers used a drug-sniffing to confirm it was drugs, the report says. A member of the bomb squad opened the package and found marijuana and possibly heroin, the report says.

The incident is under investigation and no arrests have been made.

If youd like to comment on this story, visit Fridays crime and courts comments section.
SHAKER HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Shaker Heights released an audio recording of a 911 phone call of a woman who called the police on a boy celebrating the Browns signing of Odell Beckham Jr.

The woman, who had children in her car when she drove home and discovered the boy in her yard, waited until police before she got out of her car.

You can listen to the audio in the above YouTube link. The audio has been edited to remove the name, address and phone number of the woman.
Malkhan settled down in district headquarters of Shivpuri in Madhya Pradesh after his surrender before former MP CM late Arjun Singh in 1982.

Bhopal: Thirty seven years after he bade farewell to arms, ex-Chambal bandit Malkhan Singh is now toying with the idea of fighting the Lok Sabha elections with a mission to combat dacoit menace in Chitrakoot region comprising Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

The redoubtable emperor of dacoits of Chambal of 1970s, Malkhan (74) has approached Congress for ticket for Banda Lok Sabha constituency, which falls under dacoit-infested Chitrakoot region, in Uttar Pradesh in the upcoming polls.

I have applied for Congress ticket for Banda LS constituency. I have a vote base comprising my community, Khangar Rajput, in the constituency. The entire region is battling dacoit menace causing untold miseries to local people. I promise to crush the terror industry being run by some dreaded bandits in the area if I am elected from the constituency, the mustachioed Malkhan told this newspaper on Thursday.

Malkhan settled down in district headquarters of Shivpuri in Madhya Pra-desh after his surrender before former MP chief minister late Arjun Singh in 1982. According to him, Banda has 2.33 lakh Khangar Rajput voters.

Besides, the community has a population of around 55 lakhs spread over several LS constituencies in UP. I can influence the voters of my community in favour of Congress in other constituencies if I am given ticket for Banda by the party, he said.

The ex-bandit who had amassed 94 cases, including 17 cases of murder, 19 cases of attempt to murder, 28 cases of kidnapping and 18 cases of robbery by the time he surrendered, was currently leading a religious life.

He had earlier been associated with BJP for over two decades.

I ant ticket from frontline political parties like Congress or BJP, not from other small parties. I hardly bother if I am not considered by them, Malkhan, in his characteristically care a hoot style, observed.
COLUMBUS, Ohio  The federal government approved a request from Ohio to require Medicaid expansion enrollees to prove theyve worked 20 hours a week to receive health care, the state announced Friday afternoon.

Lt. Gov. Jon Husted said in an interview Friday afternoon that there isnt a specific timeframe yet for when Medicaid expansion enrollees must begin demonstrating to the state that theyre working, going to school, or exempted from the requirement, since the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services just OKd the states request, which is known in the federal government as a waiver.

Husted said the state will build a technology that Medicaid expansion enrollees will use to show theyre fulfilling the work requirement.

We also want the same system to match you with a job and job training if thats what you need, he said.

Details

If people arent working 20 hours a week, they need to show theyre engaged in other activities, including a job search, education, job training or community service.

There are exceptions to the work requirement:

People age 50 and older

People who are caregivers

Individuals with chronic conditions

People who qualify for other programs  specifically the for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Able-bodied Adults without Dependents (ABAWD) programs.

The federal government notes Ohio is the ninth state to receive approval to require Medicaid enrollees work. The administration of President Donald Trump has been more receptive to the idea than that of former President Barack Obama.

According to the Ohio Department of Medicaid, 58 percent of expansion enrollees already work, but they are low-wage jobs that dont offer health care.

As of November, 2.8 million people were enrolled in Medicaid. About 690,000 were part of the Medicaid expansion group.

Controversial

The work requirements are controversial.

Many critics predict people will get kicked off Medicaid for not complying with the eligibility requirement.

With these new restrictions, tens of thousands of Ohioans stand to lose their health care, some when they need it the most, said Rep. Emilia Sykes, the House Democratic leader from Akron. We all want better lives and brighter futures for ourselves and our families, but restricting access to health care makes it harder for our state to live up to its full promise.

According to the State of Ohios own extensive, independently conducted research, Ohios Medicaid program enabled hundreds of thousands of Ohioans to get and stay healthy," said John Corlett, executive director of Cleveland-based health care think tank the Center for Community Solutions.

Corlett, a former state Medicaid director, also is concerned that a drop in Medicaid rolls will hit safety-net hospitals, community health centers and community mental health centers that serve a large population of Medicaid patients.

Wendy Patton of the left-leaning Policy Matters Ohio estimates 318,000 people are at risk of losing their health care. They make up two groups,: People who dont properly dot their is and cross their ts when theyre trying to demonstrate theyve worked, and people who are in low-wage jobs with unstable scheduling.

The result is people could constantly be on and off Medicaid.

What this means is inconsistent health coverage, which is very dangerous for people with chronic health conditions, Patton said.

Defenders of work requirements

The right-leaning Buckeye Institutes Rea S. Hederman Jr. has a brighter outlook for Medicaid work requirements.

Todays announcement is good news for Ohio and Ohioans, and is an important step in reforming the states health care system, he said. The Buckeye Institutes research shows that with these work requirements many Ohioans will see higher earnings over their lifetimes and they will gain valuable work experience by remaining connected to the workforce.

Hederman added that the state needs to develop an easy-to-use system, ensuring that no one deserving of services gets kicked off because of an overly cumbersome process.

The Republican supermajority in the Ohio legislature added a provision about 18 months ago in a budget bill that Ohio Medicaid needed to implement work requirements.

Husted, who is also a Republican, said that the ultimate goal of work requirements is to give people a pathway to better lives.

We want for everybody is to live up to their God-given potential and to live secure, independent and free, he said. We want to help people achieve that. Both for their sake and for the taxpayers of Ohio.

Husted said the system thats going to be built will do that.

You cant say you can have access to Medicaid coverage free of charge for the rest of your life without doing anything in return, he said. "You have to have the work requirement in there to force the process to begin.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Today could mark a new day for the relationship between state government and Ohios villages and cities. Gov. Mike DeWine will release his first budget, promising - in targeted ways - to restore some of the money taken away when the local government fund was cut under his predecessor, John Kasich.

Details will come Friday, but DeWine says he wants to:

Direct more resources to multi-jurisdictional drug task forces, which would help local law enforcement.

Double the money going to local childrens services.

Provide more local road money, through the gas tax increase he has already introduced.

As to how much the cities were cut previously, see a rundown here for every village and city in Ohio.
Gov. Mike DeWine is proposing to increase the minimum age to purchase cigarettes in Ohio from age 18 to 21, according to budget documents released Friday.

The budget documents said the administrations proposal is part of a health policy initiative.

Ohio law on the the age limit would change with approval of the budget, applying to cigarettes and cigarette papers, other tobacco products, and alternative nicotine products, the budget proposal said.

Cleveland.com is looking at various aspects of Gov. Mike DeWines budget. You can find all of our coverage here.

Separately, several cities such as Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland Heights and Stow have taken up the same issue in recent months.

DeWines budget proposal projects the change would reduce sales and tobacco tax collections by $17 million in the first year of the two-year budget, and $22.7 million less in the second year .

Ohio taxes cigarettes at a rate of $1.60 per pack of 20 cigarettes.

Lawmakers have until the end of June to approve the next two-year state budget.

I truly believe that this is the start of a new day for public health in Ohio with Gov. DeWine making the health and well-being of all Ohioans a high-priority on his agenda," said Dr. Amy Acton. head of the Ohio Department of Health. "His budget proposals advancing public health in Ohio are evidence of this strong commitment, and we look forward to working collaboratively with our public and private partners at the state and local levels to help realize his vision.

The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network issued a statement praising DeWine for his proposal to increase the age for purchasing cigarettes but criticizing him for not doing more.

By not increasing the states cigarette tax, the other tobacco products tax including e-cigarettes or properly funding the states Tobacco Use Prevention and Cessation Program, the governor has missed an opportunity to keep kids from starting tobacco and help those already using tobacco to quit, said Jeff Stephens, director of government relations in Ohio for the group.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Hunters and anglers in Ohio will likely have to pay a little more next year in fees for permits and licenses.

GOP Gov. Mike DeWine said Friday during his budget unveiling that fees would increase in the next fiscal year at the request of several sportsman groups. Jason Fallon, spokesman for the Department of Natural Resources, said the increases are slated to bring in about $4 million each year.

Specifically, this revenue will allow for renovations and equipment upgrades to Ohios state fish hatcheries so they can continue to stock Ohios public lakes with over 44 million fish annually and the addition of new public archery ranges, Fallon said. It will also allow us to increase staff to make sure we have at least one wildlife officer in every county.

Cleveland.com is looking at various aspects of Gov. Mike DeWines budget. You can find all of our coverage here.

Ohio requires licensing for both hunting and fishing. Permits are also required for hunting deer and turkey and fur trapping.

Here are a list of the proposed increases:

Type of License or Permit Current Proposed Annual Fishing License $18 $24 Non-resident 3-day Fishing License $18 $24 One-day Fishing License $10 $13 Deer Permit $23 $30 Youth Deer Permit $11.50 $15 Turkey Permit $23 $30 Non-resident Turkey Permit $28 $37 Youth Turkey Permit $11.50 $15

The fee increases wouldnt take effect until the budget is passed, but with support from outdoors groups, resistance will likely be minimal.

DeWine also announced he would propose increasing funding for state parks by $43 million. Most of that money would go to improvements and upgrades, such as renovating cabins, trails and campgrounds.
TOLEDO, Ohio  Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said his budget will include a proposal for a $900 million fund for water protection across the state, with a specific focus on Lake Erie.

The Republican governor made the announcement Thursday during a policy conference in Toledo. Protections for Lake Erie and other waterways eluded his predecessor, former Gov. John Kasich, because of infighting from the legislature, the farm lobby and regulatory boards.

Candidly, we cannot lurch from water crisis to water crisis, DeWine said. This fund will give us the ability to march to long-lasting solutions.

The money for the fund  called H2Ohio  will come out of leftover money from this fiscal year as well as the next two fiscal years, DeWine said. He did not provide details on from where he was shifting money to fund the new account, or if it would come in one lump sum.

The new fund would be solvent for 10 years, he said.

Lake Erie has been plagued by harmful algae blooms for years, mostly as a result from phosphorous runoff from fertilizers.

Kasich, a Republican, attempted to institute protections for Lake Erie late into his second term by declaring through executive order eight watersheds that flow into the lake as distressed. Lawmakers and the Ohio Soil and Water Conservation Commission stymied those efforts and blocked his designation.

DeWine said during his successful campaign for governor last year that he supported a bond issuance for Lake Erie cleanup, but decided against that route to save money. By issuing the funds upfront, the governor said the state would save about $475 million in interest payments.

The governor did not provide exact details on all of the programs his budget proposal would fund, but said there would be a particular focus on farm runoff and sediment from bleeding into waterways. Land management and wetlands creation would also be a target, he said.

There also has to be incentives that are built in to help farmers so they dont bear the entire burden of doing this, DeWine said to reporters after his announcement. I would envision incentives for them to make sure they are farming in a manner which does not cause as much of the nutrients to flow into the lake as are currently happening.

Past Republican opposition doesnt mean DeWines proposal is dead on arrival, though. Senate President Larry Obhof listed a statewide plan for water protection and agriculture as one of his top priorities earlier this year.

A representative for House Speaker Larry Householder, a Republican, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. John Fortney, an Obhof spokesman, said Republicans in the state senate havent had a chance to see the details of DeWines proposal.

Euclid State Rep. Kent Smith, who serves in state House Democratic leadership, said in an interview in Columbus that he likes the little that hes heard about DeWines Lake Erie proposal.

It depends on what the details are. I think we need to invest in the lake and the water systems that affect the lake. Initially, my reaction is favorable. But weve got to see where the moneys going to go, he said.

DeWine is scheduled to unveil his budget 10 a.m. Friday.

Cleveland.com statehouse reporter Andrew Tobias contributed to this story.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Members of a House oversight committee on Thursday sparred over whether the 2020 census should ask citizenship questions and whether Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross should have to answer questions about the matter because it is the subject of an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case.

Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform said the citizenship question was proposed to reduce immigrant response rates, so areas where they live will be short-changed on measures allotted by population such as congressional representation and federal funding.

Republicans on the committee noted the census contained citizenship questions for years before it dropped off the form several decades ago. Champaign County GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said the Democrats drumbeat against a legitimate question about citizenship status will diminish census response rates, and detract from other census-related issues the committee should be probing, like the cyber-security of the first Census that households can respond to online.

The purpose of the data collected by the citizenship questionnaire is, after all, to ensure everyones vote is counted fairly and no one suffers discrimination at the ballot box, said Jordan. Surely, the majority does not object to robust enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

Why don't they want to know? pic.twitter.com/s3bjzfyQvK  Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) March 14, 2019

Another Republican member of the committee, Holmes County Rep. Bob Gibbs, said the census asks many detailed personal questions about race, nationality and income for statistical purposes, and it makes sense to include citizenship.

We ought to know how many citizens are in this country, Gibbs said, noting the survey wouldnt inquire about the legal status of non-citizens.

Ross told the committee that all but one decennial census conducted between 1820 and 2000 contained questions about citizenship or country of birth, and many other democracies around the world collect citizenship information in their census inquiries. He said that the Department of Justice had asked the Census Bureau to reinstate the citizenship question to help it enforce the Voting Rights Act. All individual information collected by the census is confidential, he said, and the data is used for statistical purposes.

Obtaining complete and accurate information for use in determining citizen voting populations to enforce the Voting Rights Act is a legitimate government purpose, said Ross. And I determined that the importance of that goal outweighed any potential decrease in self-response rates that may result from people violating their legal duty to respond to the decennial census.

The committees Democratic chairman, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, said he disbelieved the pretext that the information is needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the Trump administration has done everything in its power to suppress the vote and that past enforcement of the Voting Rights Act never used citizenship information.

Cummings maintained that Ross was hiding the Trump administrations actual reason for restoring the question, and that he was not legally justified in withholding some documents requested by the committee because the citizenship question is the subject of federal litigation that the U.S. Supreme Court will consider next month. He threatened to subpoena requested documents if they arent supplied in the next week.

Jordan and other Republicans alleged that the hearing was an improper effort to interfere with the pending federal court battle. In a column posted on the Fox News website, Jordan and North Carolina GOP Rep. Mark Meadows alleged that Democrats dont care about Census integrity and believe asking the citizenship question will cause them to lose power in Washington.

This is because the census is used to reapportion Congressional seats, and Democrats know that Congressional apportionment according to the population of citizens, rather than total population, will cause them to lose seats in Congress, the column said, alleging that Democrats need the votes of non-citizens, who are not currently allowed to vote, to survive as a party.
CLEVELAND -- About a dozen years ago, after decades of being unchurched, as they say, I stood in front of our local congregation and officially became a member of the United Methodist Church.

The reasons are personal and uninteresting to you, but one thing that has resonated through my experience with this countrys second-largest Protestant denomination (after the Baptists) was that the UMC seemed strikingly inclusive.

As with all denominations, there were certain core beliefs and practices that bind Methodists together. But the pastors I have known and loved were not aggressively dogmatic, and left us seekers plenty of room to find our theological way as we perceived it. I have sat between someone who believed every word of the Bible and that the universe is 8,000 years old, and someone else who had profound doubts about Gods very existence, and we could all find a measure of common ground for civil conversation.

Thats why the events of the last few weeks have been so heartbreaking, as our denomination ran headlong into a deep and seemingly irreconcilable divide that threatens to rip the United right off the front of our name.

Its a divide that is actually not new  one that has been discussed since Methodists first reunited in 1968: How should the church address the issue of homosexuality?

But there is now a finality to it that has not existed before.

Every four years, at the UMCs worldwide General Conference, the topic was debated but left largely unchanged, repeatedly acknowledging that LGBTQ persons were of sacred worth and welcome in UMC churches, but that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.

After that position was reaffirmed but not resolved at the most recent General Conference in 2016, the UMC leadership decided to hold a special conference at which sexuality would be the only topic, and at the end of which a vote of the delegates would settle the following questions once and for all: Should self-avowed, practicing homosexuals be ordained as clergy? And, should marriages of same-sex couples be sanctified by UMC clergy, in a United Methodist church?

The meeting convened in St. Louis Feb. 23. The decision devolved into a choice between the One Church Plan, which would allow individual churches and regional conferences to decide the issues for themselves while remaining under the general tent of the UMC; and the Traditional Plan, which would keep things as they were.

The One Church Plan was devised and supported by the international Council of Bishops. The Traditional Plan added disciplinary teeth to the ban on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex weddings, which had been routinely flouted by the more progressive clergy and congregations.

The vote was taken Feb. 26, as Methodists around the world held their collective breath, and extremists on each side made plans to withdraw from the denomination should things go the other way.

The final tally was 438-384 in favor of the Traditional Plan. And the United Methodist Church was united no more.

All hell, if I may use the term, broke loose.

I didnt really care which side won, because I can understand how and why both sides reach their conclusions. The most important thing for me was that the church stay together.

That hope is a pipe dream, of course, because there is no middle ground on this issue.

The pro-LGBTQ people are correct that gay people are not gay by choice. It is hurtful to exclude them from full participation in the church, and it seems wrong to deny them the joy and peace that marrying their same-sex partner has brought to so many. It is also true that much of the younger generation are of the whats-the-big-deal? approach, and full acceptance is only a generation or two away, regardless of what we do now.

The people on the other side are not, at least in my experience, anti-LGBTQ. They are earnest, committed Christians whose reading of scripture, and thousands of years of culture and teaching, tell them that homosexuality is against the word of God. A close reading of the Bible makes it difficult to reach any other conclusion than defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Allowing each church to make its own decision on the issue would make the definition of Methodist meaningless.

Observers said that the vote of U.S. delegates was heavily weighted toward the One Church Plan, while African and Asian delegates were near-unanimous in the Traditionalist camp. That is not difficult to understand, given the way the HIV/AIDS epidemic has ravaged Africa and the cultural aversion to homosexuality. One African pastor said that if the vote had gone the other way, Our churches would be empty.

In the wake of the decision, there has been plenty of finger-pointing, with most of the opinion pieces in newspapers and online, not surprisingly, sympathetic to the LGBTQ side. The Plain Dealer has reprinted two such op-eds, one of which expressed the pain wrought by the queer-phobic decision.

Reactions from those disappointed in the decision were replete with accusations of hatred toward gays. Pastors quoted in the Page One Plain Dealer story about the vote spoke of hate and bigotry.

In a Washington Post op-ed, a subhead read, Traditionalists rejected same-sex marriage and gay clergy  and splintered our church.

In a recent post, Adam Hamilton, pastor of the Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, the nations largest United Methodist church, called the decision regressive and punitive, and threatened darkly of taking his 22,000 members (and the annual $2.5 million apportionment) out of the denomination.

I understand the pain, but I have seen no hatred; only a sincere struggle for understanding. The church is indeed splintered, but both sides bear responsibility  the people who wanted to change the church and those who were unwilling to do so.

There are no villains in this drama  only survivors who will mourn the disintegration of a body of souls that has given so many seekers a place to gather, forge friendships and try to make sense of it all.

People like me.

Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

To reach Ted Diadiun: tdiadiun@cleveland.com

Have something to say about this topic? Use the comments to share your thoughts. Then, stay informed when readers reply to your comments by using the Follow option at the top of the comments, and look for updates via the small blue bell in the lower right as you look at more stories on cleveland.com.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  Presidential hopeful Beto ORourke will visit Northeast Ohio on Monday to hold a rally, according to sources close to the campaign.

ORourke, a Democratic former Texas congressman, will visit the Buckeye State as part of a swing through the industrial Midwest, with stops planned in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as well. Exact details on the Ohio visit are still to come.

ORourke, 46, gained national recognition for his slim loss in his 2018 attempt to unseat Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. His 2.6-percentage point loss was the closest Senate race in Texas since 1978.

He amassed a dedicated following during the campaign on social media and shattered fundraising records, leading to speculation he might enter the presidential contest.

He officially declared his candidacy for president Thursday.
New Delhi also asked Islamabad to allow another 10,000 pilgrims to visit the holy shrine on festivals like Baisakhi and Gurupurab.

The India and Pakistan officials held the first meeting on Thursday to discuss the modalities and the draft agreement for facilitation of pilgrims to visit Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib using the Kartarpur Corridor at Attari, India in a cordial environment. (Photo: Twitter/ANI)

New Delhi/Attari (Punjab): India sought visa-free access from Pakistan for 5,000 pilgrims per day to visit the historic Kartarpur Gurdwara across the border as the two neighbours held a cordial meeting in Punjabs Attari on Thursday to work out modalities for the Sikh pilgrimage, just weeks after soaring tensions brought the two to the brink of war following the IAF airstrike on JeM training camp in Balakot.

An Indian official categorically told reporters in Attari that the meeting did not mark the resumption of the bilateral dialogue with Pakistan that has been suspended by New Delhi in the wake of Islamabads failure to check terror emerging from its soil.

At the meeting between the two sides in Attari, Indian officials conveyed to the Pakistani delegation that access to the Sikh shrine should be given to not just Indian nationals but people of Indian origin as well.

New Delhi also asked Islamabad to allow another 10,000 pilgrims to visit the holy shrine on festivals like Baisakhi and Gurupurab.

From our side, we have pressed for at least 5,000 pilgrims per day to be allowed to visit the holy Sikh shrine in the initial phase, Union home ministrys joint secretary S.C.L. Das told reporters.

Mr Das said, We have also strongly urged them to allow the visit of pilgrims on all seven days.

The Kartarpur corridor involves a road link for Sikh pilgrims to visit the famous Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara in Pakistan, which is around three-four km from the International Border. The 16th century Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur in Pakistans Narowal district important for Sikhs as Guru Nanak Dev spent 18 years here. The gurdwara was established by the first Sikh guru in 1522.

For visa-free travel of pilgrims, India insisted that there should not be any additional encumbrances in the form of any documentation or procedure, Mr Das said, adding that New Delhi also wants Pakistan to allow devotees who want to travel on foot to the shrine across the border.

The two neighbours also agreed to hold the next meeting at Wagah (in Pakistani Punjab) on April 2, adding that this would be preceded by a meeting of the technical experts on March 19 at the proposed zero points to finalise the alignment of the corridor.

The 20-member Pakistani team was headed by Mohammad Faisal, director general (South Asia and Saarc) of Pakistans ministry of foreign affairs. On his return, Mr Faisal tweeted, Pakistan Kartarpur delegation returns after constructive discussion in a cordial environment.
A hotel in Delhi's posh Chanakyapuri area, which houses the diplomatic enclave, was the first stop of Masood Azhar.

'I hired a taxi and asked (the driver) for a good hotel. I was taken to the Ashok hotel in Chanakyapuri where I stayed,' according to the interrogation report. (File Photo)

New Delhi: A hotel in Delhi's posh Chanakyapuri area, which houses the diplomatic enclave, was the first stop of Masood Azhar, the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief, when he first arrived in India in January 1994 and dodged immigration officials'' queries about his Portugese passport by claiming he was a "Gujarati by birth".

The Pakistan-based terrorist, who was arrested in Jammu and Kashmir within the next two weeks, had also stayed in capital's hotel Janpath and visited Lucknow, Shahranpur and Islamic seminary Darul-uloom Deoband, according to his interrogation report.

Masood Azhar, whose JeM was responsible for a series of terror strikes in India including the attack on Parliament in 2001 and a CRPF convoy in Pulwama last month, had arrived in India on a fake Portuguese passport after visiting Bangladesh.

"I spent two days in Dhaka and thereafter travelled to Delhi by Bangladesh Airlines (Biman), reaching the IGI Airport in early hours of January 29, 1994. The Immigration officials at IGI commented that I did not look like a Portuguese but when I replied that that I was a Gujarati by birth, he did not hesitate to stamp my passport.

"I hired a taxi and asked (the driver) for a good hotel. I was taken to the Ashok hotel in Chanakyapuri where I stayed," according to the interrogation report available with the security agencies in New Delhi.

During the night, Azhar told his interrogators, that he rang one Ashraf Dar, a Kashmiri, who came to the Ashok hotel along with Abu Mehmood, a member of terrorist group Harakat ul-Ansar.

"I expressed my desired to visit Deoband to pay obeisance at the graves of Deobandi intellectuals. As such Ashraf Dar escorted me in his Maruti car, accompanied by Abu Mehmood to Deoband. We stayed in Darul-uloom Deoband for the night. After offering prayers at Deoband, next morning we went to Gungoh and then proceeded to Saharanpur," the report said.

At Saharanpur, Azhar stayed for the night at a mosque of Tabliq-ul-Jamat and at none of these places, he had revealed his true identity. On January 31, 1994, he came back to Delhi by the same car after staying overnight at Khan Ji of Maulana Masir-ul-ullah Khan at Jalalabad.

On reaching Delhi, Azhar stayed at hotel Janpath located near Connaught Place. Since his flight to Srinanagr was booked for February 9, he decided to visit one Maulana Abu Hassan Nadvi alias Ali Mian at his madrassa in Lucknow.

Accordingly, Azhar went to Lucknow in a bus on February 6 or 7, 1994, where again he did did not disclose his identity.

As he could not meet Ali Mian and another another person whom he intended to meet, Azhar returned to Delhi by bus. This time, he stayed at hotel Sheesh Mahal in Karol Bagh. In all Delhi hotels, Azhar registered himself in the assumed identity of Portuguese national Vali Adam Issa.

"In Delhi, on February 8, 1994, I visited the Centre of Tablig-ul-Jamat at Nizamuddin but did not meet any particular person. I had also purchased 12 compasses (to give direction of Mecca) from Nizammudin to offer them as gift to militants in the Kashmir valley," he told the interrogators.

After his arrival in Srinagar on February 9, 1994, Ashraf Dar escorted him to Madrasa Qasmian in Lal Bazar where a room was arranged for him.

Later in the evening a militant, Sajjad Afghani, came to meet him along with his deputy named Amjad Bilal of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, who was armed.

Next morning, on February 10, he was escorted by Afghani to a place called Matigund where all Pakistan/PoK terrorists gathered.

"They (the terrorists) were happy about my visit and merger of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami. I had taken their addresses and letters so that I can communicate their welfare to their families on return to Pakistan," he told the interrogators.

While returning from Matigund, accompanied by Afghani and one Farooq, a militant of Matigund area, who was armed and had a wireless set, the car developed some trouble and stopped.

Then Azhar and his accomplice boarded a three-wheeler and proceeded to Anantnag. After travelling for about 2-3 km, the auto rickshaw was stopped by the Army personnel, according to the report.

"Farooq started running and opened fire which was returned by the Army men.

Farooq managed to escape but I along with Afghani was arrested," he told the interrogators.

Azhar was freed from an Indian prison in 1999 along with two other terrorists in exchange for passengers of an Indian Airlines aircraft which was hijacked and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
UP is one of the important states, where the BJP is likely to change more than 40 percent of its sitting MPs.

New Delhi: The SP-BSP-RLD alliance could force the BJP to change the parliamentary seats of some of its heavyweights to overpass the electoral tides in politically crucial Uttar Pradesh. Speculation is rife that Union home minister Rajnath Singh could be asked to contest from Gautambuddh Nagar seat, currently represented by Union culture minister Mahesh Sharma .

The latter could be shifted to Alwar in Rajasthan as the caste arithmetic of the BJP in Gautambuddh Nagar has been disturbed by the SP-BSP-RLD alliance.

Sources disclosed that Mr Singh, who represents the prestigious Lucknow seat, has bettered the BJPs position in his parliamentary constituency because of the development works undertaken by him and the party can easily tide over the opposition in this constituency. UP is one of the important states, where the BJP is likely to change more than 40 percent of its sitting MPs.

The BJP is abuzz that actor-turned-politician and Mathura MP Hema Malini could contest from Fatehpur Sikri as there is a major anti-incumbency against sitting MP Chowdhary Babulal.

Though Ms Malini, it was learnt, is not in favour of shifting her parliamentary seat, the party leadership is trying to convince her.

Another parliamentary seat in the state that could see a change is Unnao, currently held by controversial leader Sakshi Maharaj. Specul-ation is rife that Union minister Uma Bharti could be asked to contest from here, though she had announced last year that she will not contest the Lok Sabha polls. Ms Bharti represents Jhansi parliamentary seat.

The first meeting of the BJP central election committee could meet on March 16, followed by two other meetings next week before Holi.
Chris Cox Asa Mathat | Re/code

When new Facebook employees start at the company, there's always been one person to publicly greet them: Chris Cox. Every Monday, Cox has welcomed new hires at the headquarters in Menlo Park, California, as part of their orientation. He would talk to them for half an hour or more, explaining Facebook's mission to connect every human in the world, according to former employees. Cox's resignation from Facebook, which the company announced on Thursday, marks the departure of not just its chief product officer but also one of its most popular executives. One ex-employee, who asked not to be named, said Cox was viewed by many as "the heart and soul of the Facebook mission at the company." "He was an incredible story teller and could bring you to tears when talking about new features and how important they were," a former Facebook executive told CNBC.

Cox joined Facebook in 2005, a year after the company was founded, and was one of the first 15 engineers. He's played a key role on many of its products, including News Feed, and at one point served as the company head of human resources. Facebook made him awfully rich, too. He currently owns shares worth $62.6 million, according to FactSet. "For the average Facebook employee, Facebook without Chris Cox is almost unimaginable," the former employee said. He also had a reputation as one of the company's big thinkers and best speakers  key reasons why he was trusted to share the Facebook ethos with its newest employees every week. "Chris is one of the people that everybody in the company respected the most," said Henry Liu, a former strategic account manager at Facebook who left the company in 2017. "His charisma, passion for the future of communication and how he tells the story of Facebook's products really invigorated all the employees at company meetings." Cox's departure comes just days after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a drastic change in strategy, saying the future of Facebook lays in private communication. The shift is notable for a company that's built one of the world's most valuable businesses on the backs of billions of users sharing their data publicly and allowing marketers to use that information to target them with advertisements.
General Electric will be open about its struggles and the goals it expects to achieve in the company's turnaround plan, CEO Larry Culp told CNBC Thursday.

"I think what we're gonna try to do, frankly, is to share with people in as transparent a way as we possibly can, what those issues are ... and the plan that we have," he said in a sit-down interview with "Mad Money's" Jim Cramer. "But it will take-- time. And we don't wanna sugarcoat this."

The industrial conglomerate, which once donned the title of America's most valuable company, has faced debt and management problems for some time. Culp, who became head of the company last September, said he studied the company for years and the top priority is to strengthen its balance sheet.

GE has made moves to sell off $25 billion worth of assets in GE Capital.

"We want to strengthen the balance sheet and set our businesses up to play and win," Culp said. "We've been very clear about our intent to reduce both the leverage on our industrial balance sheet and at GE Capital."

The chief said his company will have access to "the better part of $40 billion of proceeds" after Danaher's $21.4 billion acquisition of GE's biopharmaceutical business goes through. Culp also said he anticipates monetizing GE's stake in Baker Hughes and other deals.

"There's a lot of capital there that we're gonna be able to put to use to bring down the leverage on the industrial balance sheet," he said. "Will it work on the capital side in a similar fashion? We have $10 billion of dispositions planned this year to continue to bring the leverage down."
Toyota may already be one of the world's biggest manufacturers of Earth-bound vehicles, but the Japanese automaker is looking to expand its horizons.

The auto company is working with Japan's space agency to develop a manned lunar rover that will run on fuel cell technology and provide transport for people and cargo on the moon, Toyota Motor and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced in 2019.

Now, a new partnership between JAXA and NASA, signed July 9, could see the two government space agencies developing Toyota's pressurized lunar rover for manned moon missions by the end of this decade as part of NASA's Artemis program, Mark Kirasich, acting director of the Advanced Exploration Systems division at NASA, said in a recent interview.

"It's like a space station habitat, holding two people for 14 days, but it's on wheels," Kirasich said. "It's like an RV for the moon."

This is what the moon vehicle could eventually look like:

TWEETVID

The planned rover would be nearly 20 feet long, 17 feet wide and about 12 feet tall, and its 459 cubic feet of living space would provide enough room for two passengers (four people would fit "in an emergency," Toyota says).

It would also have a deployable solar panel to provide an additional energy source.
Tesla just introduced its latest electric vehicle, the Model Y, a crossover SUV that will cost from $39,000 to $60,000 depending on configuration.

The Model Y is about 10 percent bigger than the Model 3, seats seven, features a panoramic glass roof and 66 cubic feet of cargo space, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, showing off a Model Y prototype at the Tesla Design Center in Hawthorne, California on Thursday night.

The company plans to produce four different versions of the new SUV including:

A standard-range Y, which gets up to 230 miles of range, has a top-speed of 120 miles per hour and costs $39,000 (to be delivered in the spring of 2021)

The long-range Model Y which gets up to 300 miles of range, has a top-speed of 130 miles per hour and costs $47,000 (to be delivered fall of 2020)

The dual-motor all wheel drive Model Y which gets up to 280 miles of range, has a top-speed of 135 miles per hour and costs $51,000 (to be delivered in the fall of 2020)

And the performance Model Y which gets up to 280 miles of range, has a top speed of 150 miles per hour and costs $60,000 (to be delivered in the fall of 2020)

Demand for sport utility vehicles in the United States has been high over the past few years. New models have flooded the market, looking to unseat best-sellers like the Toyota RAV 4, Nissan Rogue or Honda CR-V.

Tesla hasn't offered a new SUV to tap into that demand since it began producing its Model X vehicles in 2015. The X features falcon-wing doors, which delighted some drivers but repelled others. The Model Y ditches this feature.

According to Musk, however, the Model Y will share about 75 percent of its components with the company's Model 3 electric sedans, allowing Tesla to start manufacturing the new SUV for far less money that it spent to begin producing the Model 3.

Auto-makers typically share parts across new models, and sometimes build different models on shared assembly lines. This helps them control costs and get new vehicles to the market relatively quickly.
Swaraj said Indo-Pak ties can become normal only when Pakistan acts against terrorists operating from its soil and stops terrorism aimed at India.

New Delhi: Accusing Pakistan of attacking India on behalf of the JeM after the February 26 airstrike, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj lashed out at Pakistan for double-speak on ties with India and said Prime Minister Imran Khan should hand over Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar to India if he genuinely wants peace.

In remarks made at an event organised by a think tank on the eve of the crucial talks on the Kartarpur pilgrimage corridor in Punjab on Thursday, Ms Swaraj said Indo-Pak ties can become normal only when Pakistan acts against terrorists operating from its soil and stops terrorism aimed at India.

Some voices in India say that Pakistan PM Imran Khan is a statesman and he is showing generosity, that he wants peace. I want to say that if Imran Khan is so generous, then why doesnt he hand over Masood Azhar to India. Let him do it. Then we will see his generosity, Ms Swaraj said, in comments dripping with sarcasm.

She also accused Pakistan of retaliating militarily against India on February 27 on behalf of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) despite the fact that the IAF strike on February 26 was aimed at the JeM and not the Pakistan forces or civilians. The minister also asked Pakistan to stop lying repeatedly.

Ms Swarajs aggressive remarks against Pakistan were made during her speech at a thinktank just hours before China blocked a move at the UN Security Council to get Azhar designated as a global terrorist.

Talks and terror cannot go together. We are ready to engage with Pakistan in an atmosphere free from terror and violence. Why dont you (Pakistan) create that environment? You say you want peace and dialogue but your (Pakistan-based) terrorist JeM kills 40 of our (paramilitary CRPF) soldiers in Pulwama. Within minutes, they take responsibility. Your foreign minister (Shah Mahmood Qureshi) says Masood Azhar is in Pakistan and he is unwell. Then your Army spokesperson says he (Azhar) is not in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden was also not supposed to be in Pakistan. You say terrorists are not in Pakistan. But they are then found there. How much will you lie and till when? said Ms Swaraj.

Hoping for better ties, she said, There can be normal ties with Pakistan, why not? But the condition is that action should be taken against terrorists in your country (Pakistan) and stop terror activities aimed at India.

We waited for 10 days after Pulwama (terror attack) but you took no action against terrorists. What was the mandate of (Indias) airstrike on February 26? That no Pakistan civilian or military personnel should be hurt. (It was) to go with the limited target of destroying a JeM terror camp. No Pakistani civilian or military personnel was hurt. On February 27, Pakistan retaliated. I want to ask  on behalf of whom did you (Pakistan) retaliate? The attack was not aimed at you. You attacked India on behalf of JeM. You give refuge to terror organisations, fund them and when they carry out terror attacks against other countries, instead of taking action against them, you attack those countries on behalf of these terror organisations? said Ms Swaraj.
President Donald Trump listens to a question as he meets with former hostage Danny Burch, an oil engineer who was taken hostage in Yemen in September 2017, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, March 6, 2019.

President Donald Trump said Thursday the U.S. will probably know in the next three or four weeks about a possible trade deal with China.

"We'll have news on China. Probably one way or the other, we're going to know over the next three to four weeks," Trump said during a St. Patrick's Day reception from the White House's East Room.

The president remarked that China has been "very responsible and very reasonable."

The world's two largest economies have been embroiled in a trade war the past year, hitting each other with retaliatory tariffs. There have been signs of progress to end the trade dispute, but protection for intellectual property and other structural factors in the Chinese market remain sticking points between Beijing and Washington.

"If that one gets done, it will be something that people will be talking about for a long time," Trump said.

Last month, the Trump administration postponed imposing an additional round of tariffs on Chinese goods. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said earlier this month the U.S. and China were "on the cusp" of a possible deal.

On Wednesday, Trump said he was in "no rush" to complete a trade deal with Beijing.
American Airlines pilots' union told its members not fly to Venezuela after the State Department warned about crime and unrest there and pulled its diplomatic staff from the country, threatening to further isolate the South American nation that is mired in a humanitarian crisis.

Most U.S. airlines halted service to Venezuela amid political and economic turmoil there. American is the last major U.S. airline to fly to Venezuela and sells flights from Miami to Caracas and to Maracaibo.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro cut ties with the U.S. in January after Washington recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country's president. More than 50 other countries have recognized Guaido as the country's president.

The U.S. State Department on Tuesday said it suspended operations of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. The warning instructed U.S. citizens in Venezuela to leave the country. It has previously told U.S. citizens not to travel there.

"Do not travel to Venezuela due to crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure, and arbitrary arrest and detention of U.S. citizens," the State Department said in its warning.

"Until further notice, if you are scheduled, assigned, or reassigned a pairing into Venezuela, refuse the assignment" and call chief pilots, the Allied Pilots Association, which represents about 15,000 American Airlines pilots, said in a note to its members late Thursday.

American Airlines did not immediately respond to request for comment. The airline's two flights from Miami to Caracas were canceled on Friday, the airline's website showed, but flights scheduled for Saturday appeared as scheduled.

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants that represents American's 25,000 flight attendants said it supported the pilot union's decision "100%."

"Of course without the pilots, the flight's not operating," said Lori Bassani, APFA's president.

United Airlines and Delta Air Lines ceased service to Venezuela in 2017.
American Airlines on Friday suspended flights to and from Venezuela amid unrest, further isolating the South American country.

American's pilot union earlier on Friday said it told its members to refuse any trips to the country after the State Department told U.S. citizens to leave the country. It also pulled its diplomats from Venezuela.

Most U.S. airlines already halted service to Venezuela amid political and economic turmoil there. American was the last major U.S. airline to fly to Venezuela and sells flights from Miami to Caracas and to Maracaibo. The move threatens to further isolate the South American nation that is mired in a humanitarian crisis.

"The safety and security of our team members and customers is always number one and American will not operate to countries we don't consider safe," American said in a statement.
Activision "is down nearly 50% in the past six months and we believe investors should be 'kicking the tires,' given an improving setup in late '19 and 2020," Piper Jaffray analyst Michael Olson said.

CNBC combed through company research to find analysts discussing buying opportunities for stocks. Other names cited as possible values include: Newell Brands , Dollar General , Marvell , and Anthem

Activision Blizzard and Spotify were among the stocks Wall Street analysts recommended to clients as undervalued this week.

Last month, on the heels of the wildly successful Epic Games' 'Fortnite', Activision issued a weak forecast and announced it was cutting 8 percent of its staff. But Olson is betting on a rebound.

"Newell shares continue to fade following a disappointing Q4 earnings report on 2/15. At this point, we believe expectations have been sufficiently rebased and that investor sentiment is now 'so bad, it's actually good'," wrote Wells Fargo analyst Bonnie Herzog.

On Thursday, Newell reported weak sales and announced that CEO Michael Polk will leave the company at the end of June. Shares of Newell Brands are about unchanged over the last week to $15.33.

If Spotify shares fall leading up to Apple's March 25th event, where the iPhone is expected to unveil streaming TV and subscription news services, it could be a reason to buy, noted Rosenblatt Securities analyst Mark Zgutowicz. "Net-net, we are buyers on any weakness in front of Apple's event," Zgutowicz said.

Earlier this week, the music-streaming service filed a complaint in Europe saying Apple Music has an unfair advantage.

The stock is down 0.2 percent over the last month.

Analysts finding cheap stocks this week:
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich told CNBC on Friday he is prepared to go after big tech companies.

And he's not alone.

"When you have these tech companies dominate the market share, they essentially are akin to the monopolies of old," Brnovich said on "Closing Bell."

"We as state AGs we are taking a look at maybe whether we should do something and if so what should be done."

Brnovich is one of several state attorneys general who spoke recently to the Washington Post about their willingness to take action against Facebook, Google and other tech giants, which they say have grown too powerful.

Brnovich said they are "worried about this massive amount of data that is being collected, manipulated. Sometimes it's misleading and maybe ends up maybe compromising some of our privacy rights."

The states are stepping up because the federal government isn't, said Brnovich. "Washington D.C. has been  at least in the last decade  where good ideas go to die."

What's being seen is the "inaction or inability of the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. to do anything about protecting individual Americans, their privacy rights, how they are being manipulated when it comes to news feeds and news coverage," he said.

Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

However, in a statement to the Washington Post, Facebook's vice president of state and local public policy, said the company has had "productive conversations" with state AGs. "Many officials have approached us in a constructive manner, focused on solutions that ensure all companies are protecting people's information, and we look forward to working with them," he said.

Google also gave the paper a statement that said, "Privacy and security are built into all of our products, and we will continue to engage constructively with state attorneys general on policy issues."

Brnovich wouldn't comment on individual companies.

"I will assure you that no matter how big the company is that if they are violating the rights of Arizonians, we are going to take a look at them and we are going to come after them hard in the courtroom if that is appropriate."
Shares of Boeing rebounded Friday after a report that the plane manufacturer plans to roll out a software upgrade for its 737 Max aircraft in 10 days.

The Federal Aviation Administration is expected to sign off on Boeing's planned changes to its anti-stall software on March 25, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. Lawmakers have been informed of the timeline, the person said.

The approval of the software change does not necessarily mean that the FAA's order to ground the planes will be lifted, added the person.

French news agency Agence France-Presse, citing sources, earlier reported the time-frame for the fix. Boeing told CNBC the overall timeline has not changed.

The FAA on Wednesday followed dozens of other countries in grounding Boeing 737 Max planes, citing possible links between two fatal crashes in the past nine months. On Sunday, an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board. That came less than five months after the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 flight from Jakarta, Indonesia, which killed all 189 people on board. Both planes were new, delivered from Boeing just months before those flights.

Boeing's stock fell more 10 percent this week in the aftermath of the Ethiopia crash.

The plane manufacturer's shares rose roughly 3 percent Friday afternoon following the AFP report, and closed up 1.5 percent at $378.99.

Investigators have indicated that the Lion Air pilots battled an automatic anti-stall system that comes with the 737 Max planes that wasn't included in older models.

Before it grounded the Boeing 737 Max planes, the FAA had said it would mandate a software fix by April and said Boeing was developing other updates to pilot training and manuals.

A weeks-long turnaround for Boeing would come much sooner than some on Wall Street had estimated. Bank of America predicted this week that it would take the aircraft manufacturer three to six months to "certify the fix."

Of the more than 350 Boeing 737 Max jets in global fleets, 72 are flown by U.S. airlines United Airlines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines.

 CNBC's Meghan Reeder and J.R. Reed contributed reporting.
A Chinese national flag flies in front of a building under construction in the central business district of Beijing, China, on February 1, 2019.

Companies in China are increasingly having difficulty getting paid.

The country's slowing economic growth, tighter credit conditions and rising bond defaults are putting pressure on corporate cash flows, according to a survey by French trade insurer Coface.

Growth in the world's second-largest economy slowed to 6.6 percent in 2018, the worst showing since 1990. Efforts by authorities to rein in high debt levels by constricting credit were a factor behind record corporate bond defaults, while the trade war with the United States also weighed on businesses and consumer spending.

"This context has led to pressure for Chinese companies, who have resorted to using longer payment terms to sustain business," Carlos Casanova, Coface's Hong Kong-based economist for Asia Pacific, said in his firm's China Payment Survey 2019, released Thursday.

The longest payment terms were seen in the automotive and broader transportation sector as well as the construction and energy sectors, according to Casanova's report.

Coface queried 1,500 Chinese companies and found that 62 percent reported delays in getting paid last year.

Many companies have complex supply relationships. Automobile manufacturers, for example, need to procure steel, plastic and electronic components and numerous transactions occur along the supply chain. That dynamic is also at play in other industries, such as construction.

A total of 40 percent of respondents said payment delays increased last year, higher than the 29 percent recorded in 2017.

Coface said 90 percent of the surveyed companies are privately owned while 10 percent are state owned.

Pressure from the slowing economy and the trade war eventually caused authorities to pause last year in their efforts to pare down total debt, estimated at more than three times the size of China's GDP, in order to try and support overall growth.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Friday that the government will remain supportive of the economy in the face of new pressures on growth.

"It is true that China's economy has encountered new, downward pressure," Li said in Mandarin, according to an official translation of his remarks at a press conference. He also pointed out that the slowdown in the world's second-largest economy came as global growth was also under pressure.

"We are not going for monetary easing but trying to provide effective support to the real economy," he added.

Li was speaking with reporters Friday following the closing ceremony of the annual National People's Congress. The meeting of roughly 3,000 delegates in Beijing is typically symbolic in nature as the real power lies with the Communist Party and its Politburo Standing Committee, headed now by President Xi Jinping.

This year's National People's Congress also takes place as the international legal battle over Chinese telecom giant Huawei intensifies, and U.S.-China trade negotiations reach a critical point.

Li on Friday did not disclose details on the latest progress of the trade talks. He emphasized that the two sides remained in close discussions, and expressed confidence that both sides had enough wisdom to diffuse tensions.

In response to a question about whether China forces its technology companies to spy on other countries  a prominent argument from the U.S. and others against the use of Huawei hardware  Li maintained that the government would never require such behavior.

"Let me tell you explicitly that this is not consistent with Chinese law," he said, through an official translator. "This is not how China behaves. We did not do that and will not do that in the future."

On Friday, the gathering of Chinese delegates endorsed a new foreign investment law that added new language at the last minute that added further protection of foreign company commercial and trade secrets, according to a final draft reviewed by the U.S.-China Business Council.

The new law, which is set to take effect Jan. 1, 2020, could help Beijing show U.S. President Donald Trump's administration that it's serious about reaching a deal on trade. State media reported Friday that leaders of both the American and Chinese delegation held a phone call early in the morning Beijing time.

During the opening of the congress last week, Li laid out a bleak picture for China's economy. He stressed the need to prepare for a "tough struggle" and set a lower growth target range of between 6 to 6.5 percent growth. Official government figures showed the world's second-largest economy grew at 6.6 percent last year, its slowest pace since 1990.
Bottles of Clos du Bois wine, distributed by Constellation Brands, are displayed for sale on a shelf at a BevMo! store in San Francisco, California.

Constellation Brands is in advanced talks to sell its some of its low-end wine brands to E. & J. Gallo Winery, people familiar with the situation tell CNBC.

Constellation, which also sells Corona and Modelo beers, had hoped its wine business would fetch $3 billion. However, the sale is expected to be around $2 billion or less, said one of the people. Talks, however, are still ongoing and could fall apart. Among the points being discussed are which brands will be part of the sale.

Constellation put its U.S. wine business, which includes brands like Clos du Bois, Mark West, Arbor Mist, up for sale last year as part of its push to move further into cannabis. Constellation is the third largest beer company in the United States, behind Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. In November, it closed a $4 billion investment in the Canadian marijuana company Canopy Growth.

Sales of non-premium wine have slowed, as millennials focus increasingly on health and alternative indulgences like cannabis. When millennials do drink, they increasingly turn to premium wine or other drinks like spirits and craft beer. In the year leading up to this past November, sales of wines below $9 at retail dropped by 9 percent, according a closely watched report by Silicon Valley Bank.

"Millennials aren't engaging with wine as hoped. They lack financial capacity, currently prefer premium spirits and craft beers, and have been slow getting into careers," the report noted.

In January, Constellation acknowledged to analysts the company has been "challenged by the lower end of [its wine] business, which in totality has been flat or down."

By contrast, its beer business has shown growth, with its Modelo brand over the past five years turning in compound annual growth of more than 20 percent.

Constellation's premium wine lines, which are priced at more than $11 per bottle, are still performing well. Those brands include Kim Crawford, Meiomi and Prisoner. New products like Meiomi Rose and Svedka Blue Raspberry are "exceeding our expectations," said Bill Newlands, who became CEO on March 1, in a recent earning call.

For privately held Gallo, the largest exporter of California wines, the deal could add to its scale

Shares of Constellation, which have a market value of $32 billion, are down 25 percent over the past year.

The people asked not to be named because the information is confidential. Both Constellation and Gallo declined to comment, citing company policies not to comment on rumors or speculation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging Volkswagen and former CEO Martin Winterkorn with defrauding American investors during an emissions scandal, The Associated Press reported Friday.

The complaint claims Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance and the company's financial standing, which gave Volkswagen a financial benefit when it issued securities at more attractive rates for the company.

Volkswagen did not immediately respond to The Associated Press early Friday.

On Thursday, the SEC alleged in a court filing that Volkswagen "perpetrated a massive fraud" and repeatedly lied to U.S. investors in connection with the so-called dieselgate scandal.

The regulator is suing Volkswagen and Winterkorn over the German automaker's diesel emissions scandal. The suit seeks to bar Winterkorn from serving as an officer or director of a public U.S. company and recover "ill-gotten gains." Winterkorn was charged by U.S. prosecutors in 2018 and accused of conspiring to cover up the German automaker's diesel emissions cheating.

The SEC said in its complaint filed in San Francisco that from April 2014 to May 2015, Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets at a time when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 U.S. diesel vehicles grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

"By concealing the emissions scheme, Volkswagen reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by issuing the securities at more attractive rates for the company," the SEC said in a summary of its filing.

Volkswagen said the SEC complaint "is legally and factually flawed." Reuters reported that a lawyer for Winterkorn could not immediately be reached early Friday.

VW had said in its annual report that the SEC could take enforcement action against the company over the German automaker's involvement in the emissions scandal.

The automaker said the agency is "piling on" and that the agency's complaint is without merit.

The SEC has asked Volkswagen for information on potential securities law violations over certain investments the company may have sold to investors. The agency is looking for evidence determining whether the automaker failed to disclose information about vehicles that didn't comply with U.S. emissions standards when it issued certain securities to investors.

One of the world's largest carmakers, Volkswagen was rocked by reports first surfacing in 2015 that it had been caught cheating on emissions tests in the United States. The subsequent scandal cost Volkswagen billions of dollars to settle and forced the automakers to recall millions of vehicles.

Here is Volkswagen's full statement to CNBC:

The SEC's complaint is legally and factually flawed, and Volkswagen will contest it vigorously. The SEC has brought an unprecedented complaint over securities sold only to sophisticated investors who were not harmed and received all payments of interest and principal in full and on time. The SEC does not charge that any person involved in the bond issuance knew that Volkswagen diesel vehicles did not comply with U.S. emissions rules when these securities were sold, but simply repeats unproven claims about Volkswagen AG's former CEO, who played no part in the sales. Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company.

 The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
When hundreds of thousands of revelers flood Fifth Avenue to commemorate St. Patricks Day on March 16, one could view the spectacle through emerald-tinted glasses of nostalgia.

New York has the most Irish-Americans of any major city in the country, but their political clout reached an unheralded nadir last year after state Sen. Marty Golden and Reps. Joe Crowley and Dan Donovan were swept from power by challengers half their age. The trio of lawmakers losses were followed by the deaths this winter of two of the citys last Irish-American power brokers, former Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes and former Hells Kitchen Democratic District Leader Jimmy McManus, marking the passing of an epoch when the Irish once ruled the five boroughs.

For over a century, Irish-Americans were the backbone of New York Citys political and civil service class. Candidates for judge, district attorney or state Assembly were chosen by Irish-dominated machines descended from Tammany Hall, and the police and fire departments were dominated by Irishmen from the commissioners down to the rank-and-file.

But demographic change has reduced the citys Irish political contingent to a shadow of its former self, as newer immigrant groups and a declining white share of the electorate  along, in some cases, with gentrification  push New York City politics leftward. In fact, the few remaining elected officials in the city with Irish heritage are as likely to be liberal representatives of gentrified Manhattan who grew up outside the city and moved in like any other young professional as they are to be natives to a historically Irish neighborhood.

Republican state Sen. Marty Goldens narrow 51-49 percent defeat to Democrat Andrew Gounardes was one of several seat flips last November that ushered in Democratic rule in Albany. Since 2003, Golden had represented a swath of southern Brooklyn white ethnic enclaves, such as Marine Park, Bensonhurst and Gerritsen Beach. But even these neighborhoods have changed. Goldens own Bay Ridge, which was 78 percent white in 2000, had become only 56 percent white by 2016. The newer immigrant groups from East Asia and the Middle East tend to be more Democratic than the Irish-American and Italian-American voters they are replacing. (One notable exception is right-leaning immigrants from the former Soviet Union.) Even the white candidates tend to hail from countries with more recent immigration surges, such as Greece or Albania. Gounardes, for example, is a 33-year-old Greek-American Democrat, and Bay Ridge voters backed him with 64 percent of the vote to Goldens 36 percent.

The winds of change were so strong in southern Brooklyn that they knocked Staten Island Republican Dan Donovan out of office as well. The 62-year-old half-Irish congressman was upset by Democrat Max Rose, a 32-year-old veteran of the war in Afghanistan, by a 53 to 47 percent margin. Rose, who grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, trounced the two-term incumbent by 8,700 votes in southern Brooklyn and edged him by 1,200 votes in Staten Island with support from the solidly blue (and racially diverse for Staten Island) North Shore.

But the clearest sign of a citywide Irish power outage was the stunning fall of House Democratic Caucus Chairman and Queens Democratic boss Joe Crowley to a 28-year-old first-time candidate in last Junes congressional primary. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ousted the erstwhile rising star 57 to 43 percent thanks to especially heavy turnout in Astoria, Jackson Heights and Sunnyside  formerly Irish-Americans bastions that have become a polyethnic patch of recent immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe and young professionals priced out of Manhattan and the trendier parts of Brooklyn. On the campaign trail, Crowley acknowledged the changes but revealed how he had become out of touch with his district, pointing to a popular Mexican restaurant but butchering its pronunciation.

The results shocked Congress and the nation, but some Queens pols saw the upset coming after a 2010 redistricting added majority-Latino parts of the east Bronx to Crowleys district.

We knew the handwriting was on the wall that he would eventually get a challenge, said New York Councilman Robert Holden, a Democrat from Maspeth, Queens.

Crowley voluntarily resigned as Queens Democratic chairman in February and Democratic district leaders replaced him a month later with Rep. Gregory Meeks, the first African-American to lead the party in the borough.

Crowleys abrupt downfall can be seen as the end of the line of a succession of Irish-American political bosses that stretches across boroughs and through time back to to the second Industrial Revolution. It took only a generation for Irish immigrants who fled their homeland in the mid-19th century during the Great Famine to gain a foothold in New York politics. By 1850, there were 130,000 Irish immigrants living in New York City, and a decade later there were 200,000, or one-quarter of the citys population. The new immigrants needed jobs and social services, which the citys Democratic political machine, known as Tammany Hall, provided in exchange for their votes.

After Boss Tweeds embezzlement arrest and conviction in 1872, John Kelly, an Irish-American, took over Tammany Hall, and the Irish remained the machines base for decades thereafter. New Yorks most successful Irish-American politician was Democrat Alfred Smith, the trailblazing machine pol became the states first Irish Catholic governor and the first Catholic to receive a major party nomination for president, in 1928.

The Irish were so prevalent in New York that they were also among the most successful anti-machine elected officials in town. William Russell Grace, a Democrat and independently wealthy entrepreneur who made his fortune shipping bat guano and other resources from South America, ran against Tammany Halls failure to maintain the city's infrastructure and became the citys first Irish Catholic mayor in 1880, one of a dozen who would serve in City Hall over the century. Mayor Robert Wagner Jr., another Tammany product who was half-Irish, broke from Tammany Hall by 1961, in his third term, which led to the machines eventual dissolution by the mid-1960s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an Irish-American raised in Hells Kitchen, represented New York in the U.S. Senate for 24 years.

Between the 1960s and 1980s, Irish-Americans joined other whites in leaving the city in droves for the suburbs and other parts of the country. Historically Irish neighborhoods such as Wakefield in the Bronx and Bay Ridge and Marine Park in Brooklyn became predominantly African-American, Caribbean-American, Middle Eastern or Latino.

But Irish-American politicians continued to wield influence in City Hall and Albany from outer borough enclaves in which their families had settled for generations. Edward Flynn and Patrick Cunningham controlled the Bronx Democratic Party for more than a half century, helping bring the Democratic National Convention to New York in 1976 and 1980. Irishmen such as Tom Manton and Crowley played a prominent role in the Queens Democratic Party for a half century, anointing City Council and state Assembly speakers and assembling coalitions with other county delegations to back mayors and governors.

Their slippage has been gradual, and it didnt just come all at once this year. Marty Connor, a Brooklyn state senator since 1978, lost his seat to Daniel Squadron in a 2008 primary challenge. Hynes, the boroughs district attorney since 1973, squandered his seat in a 2013 primary to Ken Thompson and failed a second time in the general election when he ran on the Republican and Conservative Party lines.

The traditional blue-collar Irish Democrat is under pressure from two sides: On the one hand, white Catholics have become more Republican, while Democrats have become less white and more liberal. So, for example, Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley, the former Democratic boss cousin, couldnt survive a general election challenge from Holden, who ran on the Republican, Conservative and Reform party lines after coming up short in the Democratic primary.

Today, a few young progressive Irish-Americans who grew up in Irish neighborhoods have recently won office by keeping up with their districts transformation. In the New York City Council, Justin Brannan represents Bay Ridge and Jimmy Van Bramer, who is part Irish, represents Queens Sunnyside, Astoria and Long Island City. Robert Carroll, whose grandfather founded the Brooklyn St. Patricks Day parade, represents Brooklyns Windsor Terrace, Park Slope and Kensington in the state Assembly, while Brian Barnwell represents parts of Woodside, Sunnyside, Maspeth and Middle Village.

The slow exodus of tens of thousands of Irish Catholic families to New Yorks suburbs and exurbs has meant their power is now greater in Long Island, the northern suburbs and parts of upstate than it is in New York City. Republican Rep. Peter King, an outspoken proponent of Irish causes, was raised in Sunnyside, but he represents the South Shore of Long Island. State Senate Minority Leader John Flanagan is from Suffolk County. And Irish-Americans MaryEllen Odell and Laura Curran have found success as county executives in Putnam and Nassau counties.

In neighborhoods dominated by mostly white affluent professionals who come from all over the country, representatives may happen to be part Irish, including City Councilman Keith Powers from Manhattans East Side and Council Speaker Corey Johnson, whose district includes Chelsea and the western half of Midtown.

Yet the Irish-American grip on New York City has loosened as its population growth stalled. Between the years of 2007 and 2017, the number of people with Irish ancestry in the city fell 14 percent, from 434,142 to 371,354, according to American Community Survey estimates. The percentage of New Yorkers with Irish ancestry made up a paltry 5 percent of the citys population in 2017, compared to 22 percent in 1900.

Irish Americans havent left the halls of power entirely. The City Councils Irish Caucus and the American-Irish Legislators Society combined still count more than a dozen members from New York City. Our presence in politics and government will always be there, said Staten Island Assemblyman and AILS president Michael Cusick, a Democrat.

Some lawmakers in Queens may be the last Irish-Americans to represent their neighborhoods. One of them is Daniel Dromm, the City Councils Irish Caucus chairman whose Heights-Elmhurst district contains a burgeoning South Asian and Central American population. Dromm, who is gay, has been able to build a career in politics by serving the needs of the citys most diverse neighborhoods and reaching out to LGBTQ voters, union members and the Democratic machine that was originally skeptical of him. Even before I ran for the Council, it was hard for me to get my foot in the door in the Queens county organization as the first gay person (seeking support), but being Irish helped me with them more than being gay, Dromm said.

Van Bramers northwest Queens district used to contain the citys most concentrated pocket of Irish-American voters, but he doesnt think of it as an Irish district anymore. We have a lot of new immigrants in Sunnyside and Woodside, but we also have a lot of new residents moving in  some folks will call them hipsters or gentrifiers  a lot of new families, and a lot of newer arrivals dont even know necessarily or care that it was once a heavily Irish American neighborhood, Van Bramer said. The younger generation is less wed to some of the identity politics of the past. Right now, in my district progressive ideas and policy positions matter a lot more than identity.

Correction: This article referred to Councilman Robert Holden as a Republican and wrote that he switched parties to join the GOP after losing the Democratic primary. Although he was elected on the Republican line, he is a Democrat who received the Republican nomination through a Wilson-Pakula authorization.

Correction: This article originally incorrectly stated that Donald Manes was Irish.

Correction: This article originally incorrectly stated that the St. Patrick's Day parade will be on March 17. Although St. Patrick's Day is on March 17, the parade will be held on Saturday, March 16.
China has blocked four bids in 10 years to get Azhar, a blue-eyed boy of Pakistans spy agency ISI, listed as a UN-designated global terrorist.

Washington/New Delhi: Responsible member-states of the UN Security Council may be forced to take other actions if China continues to block moves to designate Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, diplomats at the UNs principal organ have warned.

The senior diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity to give a sense of the frustration of the other members of the Security Council after China on Wednesday put a technical hold on the proposal to designate Azhar as a global terrorist.

China has blocked four bids in 10 years to get Azhar, a blue-eyed boy of Pakistans spy agency ISI, listed as a UN-designated global terrorist.

If China continues to block this designation, responsible member-states may be forced to pursue other actions at the Security Council. It shouldnt have to come to that, a Security Council diplomat said in an unusual tough warning to China, a close ally of Pakistan.

Chinas move to hold the listing is inconsistent with its own stated goals of combating terrorism and furthering regional stability in South Asia, said the diplomat, requesting not to be named.

India expressed disappointment over Chinas decision but said it will pursue all available avenues to bring to justice terrorist leaders involved in attack on Indians. Azhar masterminded many audacious attacks on India, including the 2001 Parliament strike and the recent Pulwama carnage in February that pushed both India and Pakistan to the brink of war.

The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a suicide bomber of the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) killed over 40 CRPF soldiers in Jammu and Kashmirs Pulwama, leading to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan.

Another diplomat also slammed Pakistan for depending on China to protect terrorist groups and leaders that operate from its soil.

Pakistan has quite often depended on China to protect it from the listing of Pakistan-based terrorist groups and individuals in the UN 1267 sanctions committee, the diplomat noted.

The case for designating Azhar  the leader of a group the UN already calls an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organisation  is undeniable, the diplomat said.

On Tuesday, the Donald Trump administration said that Azhar meets the criteria to be designated as a global terrorist by the UN.

State department deputy spokesperson Robert Palladino said, I would say that the US and China share a mutual interest in achieving regional stability and peace, and that a failure to designate Azhar would run counter to this goal,

Meanwhile, observers in India said that despite China once again blocking the UNSC proposal to ban Azhar there are indications that New Delhi does not want to sour ties with its larger eastern neighbour. India, apparently, does not want to wash away the gains made in Sino-Indian relations after the Doklam border flare up.

Sources said this was the reason why India did not name China while expressing disappointment over the UNSCs inability to ban Azhar. Observers noticed that the statement was relatively mildly-worded and did not lash out at China.

Also, the second edition of the informal summit between the Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Indian Prime Minister is scheduled to take place later this year in India.

Observers point out that China does not want to spoil its relations with its all-weather friend Pakistan and Islamic hardline organisations within that country as it wants to protect its huge financial investments in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

On Thursday, social media was abuzz with calls to boycott Chinese goods but it may be recalled that the Chinese government itself had stated a few years ago that such a move would have little impact on the Chinese economy.
The far-left policy proposals from freshman firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some of the candidates seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are wrong for America, former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told CNBC on Friday.

"I worry as an American about the direction of one of our two major parties going toward socialist," said Cantor, a Republican who was a congressman from Virginia from 2001 to 2015.

New York's Ocasio-Cortez  a self-described democratic socialist, often referred to by her initials AOC  has become a leading voice in the liberal movement that shook up Congress.

In excoriating AOC's platform, which includes the proposed Green New Deal and a push get the rich to pay more taxes, Cantor quipped, "I've heard a new acronym, a new meaning for that acronym, 'absolutely out of control,' if you think about what she's putting out there."

While criticizing the Democratic Party for moving too far left, Cantor, ironically, saw his re-election hopes dashed more than four years ago because he didn't move far enough to the right. He left Congress after losing the 2014 Republican primary to David Brat, a tea party-affiliated economics professor. In turn, Brat, an ally of President Donald Trump, lost his bid for a third, two-year term in the 2018 November midterm election, which flipped the House majority from the GOP to the Democrats.

Cantor also levied criticism at some of the Democrats running for president against Trump, singling out Sen. Elizabeth Warren's push to nationalize corporate governance and Sen. Bernie Sanders' proposal aimed at discouraging companies from buying back their stocks.

Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who announced his 2020 run on Thursday, will find out how hard it is to get broad Democratic support in a crowded field, said Cantor, now vice chairman and managing director at investment bank Moelis & Co.

O'Rourke had "unanimity in the Democratic base when he ran against Cruz because it was somebody Democrats reviled holistically," Cantor contended, referring to how O'Rourke nearly unseated Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the midterms, two years after the senator ran unsuccessfully for the GOP presidential nomination.

There's one potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who Cantor has good things to say about: Joe Biden. While the former Obama vice president is widely expected to to run, Cantor said, "I don't think the Democratic Party is going to be smart enough to nominate Joe Biden." He added, Biden is "way too reasonable for the Democratic activist base."

On the Republican side, Cantor said Trump will not and should not face any real primary competition. "The president is not going to be legitimately 'primaried,'" pointing to Trump's widespread support among the GOP base. Cantor said that support comes from the president's policies designed to boost the economy, such as passing tax reform and cutting business regulations.
The Democratic Party's lurch to the left is much like the disruption Republicans felt about decade ago with the rise of the tea party on the far right, former House Speaker John Boehner told CNBC on Friday.

"It's their turn in the barrel," said Boehner, a Republican who had served for 24 years as a congressman from Ohio. "What Democrats are going through in 2016 and 2018, with the progressive movement, Republicans went through in 2010 and 2012 with the tea party movement."

The austerity-minded tea party, aimed at reducing the size of government, started after CNBC commentator Rick Santelli went on a tirade in February 2009, criticizing then-President Barack Obama's mortgage bailout plan. The rant came about a month before the financial crisis bottom in the stock market.

The staunchly conservative wing of the Republican Party, which has basically shed the tea party moniker but remains powerful to this day, targeted the more moderate Boehner in the months leading up to his abrupt resignation from Congress in 2015. He said at the time, "Prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable damage to the institution."
Facebook stock fell Friday, the day after Chief Product Officer Chris Cox announced he was leaving the company in light of its recent pivot to privacy.

Shares fell as much as 4.5 percent in early trading, sinking below $163 at its lowest point. The stock eased off by mid-morning and ended the day 2.5 percent down.

Insiders told CNBC that Cox was the "heart and soul" of Facebook. He was among the earlier employees and reported directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. His departure hangs uncertainty on Facebook's recent announcement to integrate its family of apps and prioritize private communication.

Separately Friday, Facebook drew criticism related to a terrorist incident in New Zealand in which a shooter live-streamed his attack on Facebook. The shootings claimed at least 49 lives.

The company was alerted to the post by New Zealand police and said it has been taking down re-postings of the video and messages praising the shooter as it becomes aware of them.

On top of that, Facebook suffered its longest outage ever this week. The service was reinstated Thursday after a widespread outage that last nearly a day.

In a statement Thursday, the company blamed a "server configuration change that triggered a cascading series of issues" for the outage.

The stock shed 1.8 percent by the end of trading Thursday.
North Rhine-Westphalia, Koln: An employee installs a door in a Ford Fiesta at the Ford plant. The US car manufacturer Ford wants to cut 5000 jobs in Germany.

Ford is cutting 5,000 jobs in Germany and more in the U.K. as part of an effort to reduce costs in Europe, the company said Friday.

The automaker offered voluntary separation packages for employees in Germany and the U.K. to help accelerate its plan to improve performance in the region, where Ford has struggled. The total number of jobs affected in the U.K. have yet to be determined.

The automaker is undergoing a larger plan to restructure its operations worldwide, which it's said will cost $11 billion. Ford is reshaping its European business into three different business groups that focus on commercial vehicles, passenger vehicles, and imports. The carmaker plans to simplify its product lines and focus on the most profitable vehicles.

Ford said in January it plans to partner with German carmaker Volkswagen on a number of initiatives, including trucks and commercial vans for markets around the world.

Europe has also been difficult for Ford's Detroit rival General Motors sold off its European business entirely in 2017, to French automaker Groupe PSA and French banking groun BNP Paribas.
Former House Speaker John Boehner told CNBC on Friday that U.S. lawmakers are behind the times on cannabis legalization.

"It's clear this market is going to expand. And as it does, lawmakers in Washington have to look up and realize that the federal government is way out of step," Boehner said from the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. "It's time for the federal government to get out of the way."

Since leaving national politics in 2015, the former Republican leader has joined the board of Acreage Holdings, a publicly traded, multistate cannabis company based in New York. Acreage, though small when compared with major Canadian growers, reported last week fourth-quarter revenue of $10.5 million and full-year sales of $21.1 million, up 173 percent over the last 12 months.

Boehner was joined Friday by Acreage founder and CEO Kevin Murphy, who added that he's optimistic both Republicans and Democrats will pass the STATES Act in 2019. The act, proposed by Sens. Cory Gardner and Elizabeth Warren, would grant individual states the power to decide whether their residents can legally possess, manufacture and sell cannabis without federal intervention.

"We're hopeful that we can appeal to both the left and the right," Murphy said. "Ninety-five percent of this country would like to be using cannabis or believe it should be used for medical use. And with those types of numbers, we think we appeal to both the right and the left. From our vantage point, it's just a matter of time."

Marijuana remains illegal on a federal level in the United States, but 10 states and the District of Columbia have allowed its use for recreational purposes. Michigan in November became one of the latest states to OK recreational marijuana. New Jersey officials on Tuesday outlined plans to legalize adult use of recreational marijuana in the state.

Sixty-six percent of survey respondents now support legalizing marijuana, according to the latest Gallup poll. That's a record high and was the third consecutive year that support for legalization has increased to record levels.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed an $867 billion farm bill, which included a provision for industrial hemp legalization that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had introduced. Hemp and marijuana are both classified in the cannabis family, though hemp lacks psychoactive chemical compound THC.

But of interest to public cannabis companies is the bill's implications for the U.S. market for cannabidiol, a "non-psychoactive" chemical found in hemp and marijuana. CBD proponents say the compound doesn't produce a high like marijuana but produces benefits such as anxiety relief and inflammation reduction.
More than 100 New Yorkers gathered in Brooklyn on February 26, 2019, to support the Green New Deal resolution.

Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn called New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal a "solution in search of a problem."

The proposal by the freshman Congress member aims to mitigate the impacts of climate change. Those impacts could have catastrophic effects in the coming years if the world does not take immediate and ambitious steps to address them, UN and U.S. government agencies warn. Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal calls for a massive spending program that would overhaul the U.S. economy, energy system and transportation sector to slash planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

"In some ways, it's a proposed solution in search of a problem," Cornyn said on Friday at CERAWeek by IHS Markit, an annual energy conference in Houston. He compared Ocasio-Cortez's aggressive approach to climate change to Paul Ehrlich's warnings in the 1968 book "The Population Bomb." Ehrlich predicted that overpopulation would cause mass starvation in the following decades. To be sure, warnings about the potential impacts of global warming are not based on the predictions of a single author, but on scientific conclusions by scores of climate scientists.

Agencies like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association say climate change is already intensifying natural disasters and costing the United States billions of dollars in damage.

Cornyn said he is concerned about the environment, but disagrees that climate change is the single most urgent issue.

"I could think of more urgent issues, like the nuclear weapons," Cornyn said. Like potential food shortages in the 70s, climate change can be addressed with intellectual firepower, innovation, hard work and good science, he said.

"I think, really, to me it's a question of are we going to turn over control of the economy to Washington and the political class in a sort of command and control form, or we going to rely on what has brought us to where we are today, which is a country of innovators?" he said.

Cornyn said he would not support a resolution in support of the Green New Deal that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to advance after lawmakers return from next week's recess.

"I think Sen. McConnell thought it would be good for this proposal to be voted on to see how sincere and how serious the proponents were or whether this is more a matter of political messaging than policy solutions."

Energy Secretary Rick Perry told CNBC during CERAWeek that he would be willing to meet with Ocasio-Cortez to discuss the Green New Deal. The plan faced significant skepticism from energy executives and thought leaders at the conference.
Albert Einstein didn't speak until he was three, but by age 12, he was already studying calculus. So it comes as no surprise that he would go on to revolutionize the world of science. Yet the question still remains: How did he become such a genius? For years, researchers have been trying to find the answer. A 1999 study in the Lancet that analyzed 14 photographs of Einstein's brain found that one brain region was completely absent, allowing his parietal lobe (which holds several areas that are important in language processing) to take up more space. Other studies of his brain found that it was larger than most others. But in a new book, "The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children," award-winning journalist Tatsha Robertson and Harvard economist Ronald F. Ferguson explore the how parents of successful children contributed to their achievements and the actionable insights we can glean about their child-rearing.

The 'Formula' for successful parenting

Over the course of 15 years, Robertson and Ferguson analyzed 200 high-achieving adults and their parents. They also studied the childhoods of well-known figures, from Anne, Susan and Janet Wojcicki (who have been called the "Silicon Valley sisters") to Albert Einstein. In the research, a clear pattern emerged: "The approaches that parents of high achievers adopted, beginning in the earliest years of life, bore real and striking similarities, despite those parents' widely divergent backgrounds and life circumstances. That pattern, which Robertson and Ferguson call the "Formula," consists of eight roles: The Early Learning Partner, the Flight Engineer, the Fixer, the Revealer, the Philosopher, the Model, the Negotiator and the GPS Navigational Voice. Einstein's parents, Pauline and Hermann, were very supportive in all eight roles, Robertson tells CNBC Make It, but they were particularly skilled at being Negotiators and Revealers.

The Negotiator

Negotiators nurture and encourage their children's independence, but they also intervene when necessary. For negotiators, quitting is never an option. "Once the choice is made, sticking with it for a while becomes a non-negotiable requirement. The child isn't allowed to go back on the agreement," writes Robertson and Ferguson. Pauline was very strict on this rule. In 1884, a frisky young Einstein decided to throw a tantrum  and then a chair  at his violin tutor. Instead of scolding him or having him quit violin altogether, Pauline decided to hire a new tutor. She had discovered early on that her son often struggled to concentrate, and as an accomplished pianist herself, she understood that instrumental learning was helpful in developing discipline and focus. The new tutor was effective, and Albert's concentration improved. "He mastered the violin and it ended up being a lifelong passion for him," Ferguson tells CNBC Make It. In fact, "[Einstein] said that some of his best theoretical physics ideas came during periods when he was playing the violin. We might not have had the theory of relativity if Pauline wasn't persistent in making her son play the violin."

The Revealer

Revealers introduce new ideas and possibilities to their children  things they can learn about, places they can go and people they can be. They encourage their children to be persistent in finding solutions to problems  and, when doing so, to be "curious, disciplined and and self-reliant." Even though Einstein hated school, his parents knew that it wasn't because he had a learning disability  it was simply because he wasn't learning much at school. Their solution was to create a stimulating learning environment at home, where they provided him with books and toys that supplemented his interests. As Einstein grew older, his curiosity was further fueled by Thursday lunches at home, where his parents allowed him to sit at the table with family members and scientist friends. "His uncle would be at the table, throwing tricky algebra questions to Einstein," says Robertson. "Einstein would hoot every time he got a correct answer." These lunchtime seminars allowed him to interact with worldly adults who challenged him with new ideas and concepts in math, science and technology. "One young man, in particular, ended up becoming a math tutor for Albert," says Ferguson. "And by the time [Albert] was 12 or 13, the tutor said that he was having a hard time keeping up because Albert's skills had surpassed his own."

Child-rearing is an art
Israeli military aircraft bombed Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip on Friday, hours after two rockets were launched from the Palestinian enclave at Tel Aviv in the first such attack since a 2014 war.

There was no immediate word of casualties in the air strikes that hit six buildings used by the dominant Islamist group's security forces, and which had been evacuated as a precaution.

Witnesses said powerful explosions from the air strikes rocked buildings in Gaza and lit the skies over targeted sites.

The Israeli military said it was targeting "terror sites" in Gaza. In a possible sign of further escalation, it said rocket sirens were sounded in Israeli communities near the Gaza border.

On Thursday night, the sirens howled farther north, in Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial capital, set off by what the military said were two incoming, longer-range rockets from Gaza.

That salvo caused no casualties or damage, missing built-up areas. But it rattled Israeli nerves ahead of an April 9 election in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking a fifth term on the strength of his national security credentials.

Explosions were heard in Tel Aviv and witnesses said Iron Dome interceptor missiles were fired skyward and detonated although the military said no rockets were shot down.

It was the first such attack on the city since the 2014 Gaza war between Hamas and Israel. There have been several smaller rounds of fighting since, reined in by Egyptian and U.N. mediations.

"This was basically a surprise," military spokesman Brigadier-General Ronen Manelis told Israel Radio on Thursday.

In that interview, Manelis said Israel did not yet know who had carried out the rocket launches. But another Israeli military spokesman laid the blame with Hamas on Friday.

"Hamas carried out the rocket fire against Tel Aviv yesterday evening," Lieutenant-Colonel Avichay Adraee said.

Hamas denied involvement, saying the launches took place as its leaders met Egyptian delegates about efforts to secure a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, two smaller Gaza armed factions, also denied responsibility.

Israeli analysts speculated that Palestinian militants opposed to any deal between Hamas and Israel were behind the launchings.

The flare-up of Thursday and Friday drew a U.S. statement of support for Israel. "Hamas and other terror orgs in Gaza continue to fail their people day after day & drag Gaza further & further down by constantly choosing violence," tweeted Jason Greenblatt, the White House's Middle East envoy. "This method will never work. Ever!"

Naftali Bennett, a member of Netanyahu's security Cabinet who is vying against him for rightist votes in the looming election, demanded the assassination of Hamas chiefs. "The time has come to defeat Hamas once and for all," he said on Thursday.

Netanyahu also faced pressure from the center-left opposition, whose leading candidate, former General Benny Gantz, said: "Only aggressive, harsh action will restore the deterrence that has eroded" under the prime minister's watch.

Tensions have been high for the past year along the Israel-Gaza frontier since Palestinians began violent protests near Israel's border fence that have often drawn a lethal response from the Israeli military.

About 200 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations and about 60 more Palestinians have died in other incidents, including exchanges of fire across the border. Two Israeli soldiers have been killed by Palestinian fire.
Europe should look beyond the influence of member states and start to recognize the value of regional authorities, according to the president of one of Italy's most economically powerful regions.

It comes at a time when the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is at loggerheads with the euro zone's third-largest economy.

"I am worried by the way Europe is solving issues," Attilio Fontana, president of the Lombardy region in northern Italy, told CNBC's Julianna Tatelbaum on Thursday.

"Europe has a big value and it can become a big resource and it is fundamental for our region. But, it needs to be pay more attention to the needs of regions, it needs to look more carefully at the changes in the world and it needs to be less bureaucratic and less oriented to the needs of a single part."

Late last month, the European Commission warned that Italy was facing excessive economic imbalances, with the policies of its euroskeptic and populist coalition government posing a threat to other euro zone countries.

In an unprecedented standoff, the Commission rejected Italy's initial 2019 draft budget in October, arguing the proposals would have increased borrowing in order to cover election promises.

Rome and the Commission eventually reached a compromise over the deficit but it was based on an economic growth projection of 1.2 percent. Last month, the executive arm revised that down to 0.2 percent.

Speaking to CNBC on Thursday, Lombardy's Fontana  a Lega lawmaker, known for his hard-line anti-migrant views  said: "Europe should in future focus more on regions than on member states."

"Europe should give more powers to local authorities," he added.
Former FBI Director James Comey talks backstage before a panel discussion about his book 'A Higher Loyalty' on June 19, 2018 in Berlin, Germany.

WILLIAMSBURG, Va.  Former FBI Director James Comey on Friday said that he did not know if Democrats could obtain an unredacted copy of the Mueller report with a subpoena if the Department of Justice declined to release it.

"I'm sure they can subpoena. They definitely can issue subpoenas for anything they want to the Department of Justice. Whether the department will compel, will abide an order to compel, if they resist that, I don't know where that ends up," he said.

But Comey said he hoped that a subpoena would not be necessary.

"There is a lot of transparency that is possible under the law. And so, that's my answer. I'm not sure about the can. I hope they don't get to that," he said.

House Democrats, including the chairs of the powerful Intelligence and Judiciary committees, have said they will subpoena the Department of Justice if the report is not made public.

Comey, whose ouster by President Donald Trump in 2017 precipitated the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, was responding to a question from a student during a rare hour-long question-and-answer session at his alma mater William & Mary. The talk came nearly a year after his CNN town hall here.

The college last year tapped the erstwhile government official to teach a class on ethical leadership. On Friday, he said he hoped the little-advertised forum, which he jokingly dubbed a "secret lecture series," would open up the lessons of that class to a wider audience.

He said that with regard to the Mueller report, his hope "is that the attorney general will try to draw upon the precedents of the Department of Justice, which are extensive, that in a case with intensive public interest, that the Department of Justice will share details with the American people."

He expanded on the arguments that he made in an article published earlier this month in The Washington Post. He wrote in the article that Republicans were incorrect in saying that transparency about Mueller's conclusions was impossible.

His comments came during a moment of particularly intense public interest in the special counsel, who is investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Earlier in the day, Trump said "there should be no" report. On Thursday, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a symbolic resolution calling for the document's public release.

Comey said the House vote was "good news."

"I don't think I've seen the House of Representatives vote unanimously for anything in my entire life," Comey said Friday. "But they voted unanimously yesterday, the sense of the House, that there ought to be transparency around the Mueller report consistent with the law."

@realDonaldTrump: ....should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report. This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win.....

The former FBI director has faced intense public scrutiny for his actions in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. In June, a government watchdog slammed Comey for being "insubordinate."

Much of the focus has been on a letter Comey sent to Congress shortly before Election Day saying that he had uncovered new information that could be significant to the investigation into Democrat Hillary Clinton's handling of classified material. Clinton's lead in the polls sank decisively after Comey's announcement, and some have blamed him for her defeat.

But Comey on Friday offered a stern defense of his decisions at the time, including the decision to not disclose a concurrent investigation into Russian meddling that began that summer.

Failing to tell Congress about the new information about Clinton "would have caused catastrophic damage to the administration of justice at least in our lives, probably forever," Comey said.
Sources said the Prime Minister is likely to hold more than two dozen rallies in UP alone, where the BJP had won 71 parliamentary seats in 2014.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, meanwhile, likely to launch his election campaign after March 25 and is expected to hold a few roadshows in some states as well.

New Delhi: The first meeting of the BJPs central election committee for the coming Lok Sabha polls is likely to be held here on Saturday. The CEC will announce the names of most of the candidates for the first phase of polling, which will be held on April 11 in 91 seats.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, meanwhile, likely to launch his election campaign after March 25 and is expected to hold a few roadshows in some states as well.

Sources said the Prime Minister is likely to hold more than two dozen rallies in Uttar Pradesh alone, where the BJP had won 71 parliamentary seats in 2014. Mr Modi, sources said, may hold one rally either in Muzaffarnagar, Kairana or Saharanpur in western UP, which will go to the polls in the first phase of polling. The election for 543 parliamentary seats will be held in seven phases till May 19 and the counting of votes will be taken up on May 23. Other than BJP president Amit Shah and senior leaders, Mr Modi will also attend the CEC meeting at the party headquarters. Speculation is rife that the BJP will replace many candidates in states, including in UP, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Mr Modi had sought feedback from the people through a survey, including on the most popular candidate from their constituency, on his NaMo app. The BJP leadership had also sought feedback from its cadre for the candidates.

All 42 seats in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana will go to the polls in the first phase with a fraction of constituencies in many other states, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha and Assam also to see polling on April 11.

The Assembly polls in Telangana and Odisha will be held simultaneously with the general election.
Richard Gates, former associate to Paul Manafort, leaves the Prettyman Federal Courthouse after a hearing February 23, 2018 in Washington, DC.

Former Trump campaign official Rick Gates "continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations," special counsel Robert Mueller said in a court filing Friday.

"Accordingly the parties do not believe it is appropriate" to move on to Gates' sentencing phase, the filing in Washington, D.C., federal court said.

The joint report from Mueller and Gates' attorney, which asks a federal judge for 60 more days before providing the next update on Gates' status, comes amid increasing speculation that the special counsel's Russia probe is coming to an end.

The filing also arrives two days after Gates' longtime business partner and former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, received his final prison sentence on charges lodged by Mueller in federal court.

Gates, alongside Manafort, had initially been charged by Mueller's prosecutors with money laundering, misleading investigators and other crimes.

In February 2018, Gates struck a deal with prosecutors, pleading guilty to two criminal counts including conspiracy and lying to FBI agents.

Since then, Gates appears to have cooperated extensively with Mueller's team. His most visible role as a cooperating witness came in August, when he testified against Manafort in his tax and bank fraud trial in Virginia federal court.

Manafort was convicted on eight of the 18 counts lodged against him in that case. He struck his own plea deal on the eve of a second Mueller trial in Washington, D.C., federal court.

Mueller is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and possible collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. Trump has denied collusion or any other wrongdoing.

Some lawmakers on Capitol hill have predicted that the Mueller probe is in its final stages, and that a summary report of its findings could be submitted to the Justice Department within days or weeks.

Recent moves by the special counsel appear to lend credence to some of those predictions. Top officials on Mueller's team, including lead investigator David Archey and top prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, have recently concluded their work for the probe.

New developments in other Mueller-related cases have fanned further speculation. Trump's first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, is virtually done cooperating with the probe, prosecutors said in a Tuesday court filing.

Yet Gates' continued participation in "several" investigations suggests that, despite growing impatience on both sides of the aisle, Mueller may not be so close to finishing his much-scrutinized and much-hidden report.

In January, Mueller said in a court filing that Gates "continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations, and accordingly the parties do not believe it is appropriate to commence the sentencing process at this time."

"The status of this matter has not changed substantially since the January report," Mueller and Gates' lawyer, Thomas Green, said in the court document Friday morning.

Gates has not yet received a sentencing date.

Read Gates' status report below:
North Korea is considering suspending nuclear talks with the United States and its leader may rethink a ban on missile tests, news reports from the North's capital on Friday quoted a senior official as saying.

After the failure of last month's summit of U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the North's top nuclear envoy said its leadership was considering dropping denuclearization talks, Russia's TASS news agency said.

"We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," the agency quoted North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui as saying.

Kim is set to make an official announcement soon on his position regarding talks with the United States and the North's further actions, it added, citing Choe, who was addressing a news conference in the North Korean capital.

Choe also said Washington threw away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches, the Associated Press news agency added.

The comments run counter to optimism displayed by a U.S. negotiator this week, despite the collapse of last month's talks in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
In 2016 New Jersey raised its gasoline tax by 23 cents per gallon.

The world's appetite for oil and gasoline is growing faster than many forecasters expected, putting Brent crude on pace to top $70 a barrel, Goldman Sachs says.

The investment bank says oil demand grew by 1.55 million barrels per day in January alone, a strong result despite a tough comparison with high consumption last year. For the first quarter, Goldman expects global oil demand to grow by nearly 2 million bpd, trouncing its earlier forecast for 1.1 million bpd and driven by consumption in emerging markets.

"We continue to believe that ongoing macro and oil demand concerns are overdone," Goldman analysts said in a research note on Thursday.

The strong demand will likely push Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, above $70 per barrel. The rally has already outstripped Goldman's prior view that Brent would peak at $67.50 in the second quarter. Brent hit a 2019 high above $68 on Thursday.

It will also keep growth for the full year on pace for Goldman's target of 1.45 million bpd, making the bank more bullish than most forecasters.

In China, a key engine for oil demand, oil consumption grew by 340,000 bpd in January and February, according to Goldman. The Chinese also stocked away 360,000 bpd, a buildup that runs counter to seasonal trends, the bank says.

Gasoline demand in particular is surprisingly strong. Over the last three months, Goldman's subsample of consumers shows gasoline consumption growing by 510,000 bpd, the highest reading since May 2016.

Goldman sees catalysts around the world, including the move away from diesel engines in Europe, a value-added tax cut in South Korea and a drop in gasoline prices relative to biofuel in Brazil.

The bank warns that strong demand does create one key risk to the oil price rally: Rising prices could prompt one of President Donald Trump's now infamous OPEC tweets.

"Any further meaningful rally in oil prices will likely lead to further US pressure to ease" output cuts by OPEC and its allies, Goldman said. "So far, however, the ongoing OPEC 'shock and awe' strategy has shown no signs of wavering after the latest US presidential oil tweet."
Oleg Deripaska, Russian billionaire and president of United Co. Rusal. Simon Dawson | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Businessman Oleg Deripaska, who is known as an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is suing the U.S. Treasury Department to lift sanctions imposed on him, a court filing revealed Friday. Deripaska's lawsuit demands that his name be removed from a list of sanctioned individuals, and that the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, cancel their decision to label him an "oligarch" and disclose records related to him. He claims that his net worth has fallen by more than $7.5 billion, or about 81 percent, since the sanctions on him were imposed.

The legal complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., names Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and OFAC Director Andrea Gacki as defendants. Deripaska is described in the court filing as a "victim of this country's political infighting and ongoing reaction to Russia's purported interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections." Deripaska was added by OFAC on April 6, 2018, to a list of "Designated Russian Oligarchs" for allegedly acting on behalf of "a senior official of the Government of the Russian Federation," and for his operation in the Russian energy sector. "Deripaska has been investigated for money laundering, and has been accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official, and taking part in extortion and racketeering," said a Treasury press release at the time. "There are also allegations that Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman, and had links to a Russian organized crime group." The Treasury also sanctioned businesses in which Deripaska owns stakes, including aluminum giant Rusal and En+. But the Trump administration lifted sanctions on those companies in January over Democrats' objections. Deripaska's personal designation under those sanctions remained, however. Later Friday, Deripaska said in an Instagram post that he was filing the suit "to clear my name and remove the sanctions that have been arbitrarily imposed on me for political reasons." He challenged OFAC to produce any evidence it has "to back up the unfounded rumours and innuendo it likes cite."
Citing examples of rising number of atrocities, Dr Rout said in many cases the victims who knocked the doors of police did not get justice.

Bhubaneswar: Dr Damodar Rout, ex-colleague of Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik, on Friday dubbed the latter the most corrupt politician and vowed to oust him from power in the coming elections.

Dr Rout, who arrived here from New Delhi where he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party on Thursday evening, said the state had witnessed rampant corruption and nepotism, and rising atrocities against women under the ruling BJD and hence it needed to be freed from the clutches of the party.

While the people of Odisha struggling with myriad issues from farmer suicides, corruption, and insecurity of women to plight of tribals and ill-governance, the Naveen Patnaik-led government is busy spending crores of rupees for the party, its leaders and workers that has led to rise of the debt burden on the state close to Rs 1 lakh crore, Mr Rout said.

The veteran politician who also served as a minister in the council of ministers of Biju Patnaik, father of the present CM, said the BJD had dumped its ideals and had become the party of a few corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

The present BJD is no longer the same party when it was founded in 1997 to remove the Congress from power, he said.

It is not only thoroughly corrupt, but also anti-women and quite inefficient to provide a clean governance," he said.

Citing examples of rising number of atrocities, Dr Rout said in many cases the victims who knocked the doors of police did not get justice. Instead, they were harassed.

He alleged that the 14-year-old girl student of Kunduli in Koraput district who was raped by a constable committed suicide when the police, instead of giving her justice, harassed her.
The move comes within two days of China vetoing a proposal at the UN Security Council to designate Masood Azhar as a global terrorist.

New Delhi: In a major diplomatic success for India, France on Friday decided to impose sanctions on Pakistan-based terrorist and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code.

Pointing out that a joint decree of the (French) ministries of the interior, and economy and finance was published today in the Official Gazette, France also declared that it would raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree. Proclaiming that it always been and always will be by Indias side in the fight against terrorism, France made it clear that it had undertaken the action after the Pulwama terror attack last month that was carried out by the JeM.

The move comes within two days of China vetoing a proposal at the UN Security Council to designate Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. That proposal had been moved by France, along with the United States and Britain. Fridays action by France is also being seen as a clear snub to China, which is Pakistans all-weather benefactor.

In a joint statement put out by its foreign, finance and interior ministries, the French government said: A deadly attack took place in Pulwama on 14th February 2019, claiming over 40 victims from the Indian police forces. The Jaish-e-Mohammed, which the United Nations has deemed to be a terrorist organisation since 2001, has claimed responsibility for this attack. France has always been and always will be by Indias side in the fight against terrorism.

The statement added: France has decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code. A joint decree of the ministries of the interior, and economy and finance was published today in the Official Gazette. We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree.
Signify Health, a health-tech company that helps monitor patients outside of the hospital, has acquired TAV Health, a start-up that builds cloud-based tools to connect health providers to community health services.

CNBC has learned that the deal was in the high double-digit millions, but the companies declined to comment further on the financial terms. Signify has a multi-billion dollar valuation, the company said.

Signify works on a space that has become an increasingly hot topic for health tech companies  and has drawn the attention of tech giants like Facebook  as medical companies look for new ways to factor in "social determinants" to keep patients healthy after they leave the hospital or doctor's office.

To keep people healthy, sometimes providing great access to doctors, surgeries and tests isn't enough. What also matters is whether a patient has secure housing, fresh produce and a network of caregivers. Otherwise, they could relapse after a surgery or procedure and end up back in the hospital.

The convergence of these health and social factors is often referred to as the "social determinants of health," and it's increasingly a big trend in the investing world.

"Our biggest problem is that there are a ton of social factors that stand in the way of us making an impact," said Signify CEO Kyle Armbrester

Signify tracks how patients with chronic conditions are faring in nursing facilities and in the home on behalf of its health plan customers. Signify does that by sending over a care team to check in on the patient's environment at home, where they look at things like how much food is in the fridge or if the carpet is smooth to prevent accidental trips and falls. With that data, it's building a more robust health record for each patient.

The privately held company was formed in December 2017 after a merger of CenseoHealth and Advance Health, which was managed by the private equity firm New Mountain Capital. It's run by a former executive of electronic medical record company AthenaHealth.

Armbrester said the company is acquiring TAV, which connects community health organizations like Meals on Wheels with health providers, as it looks to focus more deeply on those social factors.

San Antonio, Texas-based TAV Health was founded by Jamo Rubin, a doctor and serial entrepreneur, who said he started the company because in the medical world, "it's so clear to me now that in the hospital environment or clinic environment, what's really going on with patients is hidden from clinicians."

Companies like TAV and Signify Health can afford to take a more active role in monitoring people's health because hospitals and insurers are increasingly looking for ways to avoid expensive health outcomes, including readmissions to the hospital after a procedure. The federal government in the U.S. is increasingly penalizing hospitals for excessive readmissions, in a goal to better link payment to the quality of care.

These companies are also taking advantage of a big trend that involves taking on risk for a patient population, and making money by keeping those people as healthy as possible.

"We see this as an investment in preventative health," said Matthew Holt of New Mountain Capital, which invested in Signify Health. Holt described the goal for Signify as building a longitudinal record of patient health, including their social and environmental factors, which will be securely stored and shared with plans, doctors, caregivers, employers and also the patients themselves.

He described this as the "single most important element that will enable bending of the U.S. health care cost curve."

WATCH: I tried the ketogenic diet with help from a gadget that tracks your progress
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from historic launch pad 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., February 6, 2018.

The second flight of the most powerful rocket in operation is about three weeks away, people familiar with the plans told CNBC on Friday.

SpaceX's massive Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled for its next launch no earlier than April 7 at 6:36 pm ET (22:36 UTC), the people said, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The mission, called Arabsat 6A, will launch a large communications satellite for Saudi Arabian corporation Arabsat. Built by Lockheed Martin, the satellite is described by Lockheed vice president Lisa Callahan as one of "the most advanced commercial communications satellites we've ever built."

Arabsat 6A was previously targeting as early as the third quarter of last year but has slipped several months, one of the people noted. SpaceX has not conducted a test fire of the rocket on its launchpad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, which is typically done one or two weeks before.

This will be the first flight of Falcon Heavy since its nearly flawless maiden launch in February 2018. With a price tag between $90 million and $150 million per launch, Falcon Heavy has racked up a valuable manifest of future launches, even though it's only flown once. Additionally, the U.S. Air Force certified Falcon Heavy for national security launches last year, as well as gave SpaceX a $130 million contract to launch an Air Force Space Command satellite.

SpaceX built Falcon Heavy out of three of the company's Falcon 9 rockets  a system that has now completed dozens of successful launches over the last few years. The three cores stand side by side to create a 27-engine colossus. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said the central core needed "to be buffed up a lot" but the Falcon 9 cores on each side "use most of the same airframe."

SpaceX did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
Steven Spielberg, a film industry titan with 58 directorial credits to his name, has long been vocal about the differences between theatrical and streaming releases.

As the governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences directors branch he has said that he would like films to have a longer theatrical run in order to qualify for an Academy Award. Those comments have led some to believe that Spielberg was ready to wage war on platforms like Netflix, especially after the streaming service's film "Roma" took home three Oscars last month.

However, Spielberg reportedly met with Netflix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos earlier this week, a sign that, perhaps, these rumors of discord are just that, rumors.

The two were seen dining together at the San Vincente Bungalows, a private club in West Hollywood, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

It's unclear what was discussed during their meeting. Representatives for Spielberg and Sarandos were not immediately available to comment.

Earlier this week, media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg said that Spielberg had no plan to campaign against Netflix, saying at the South By Southwest conference in Texas that "he is not going to the academy in April with some sort of plan," according to a report by the Hollywood Reporter.

Read the full report by The Hollywood Reporter.
Like a boxer who won't go down, the U.K. leader Theresa May is still hoping to get her proposed Brexit agreement through Parliament despite having massively failed with the same deal on two previous occasions.

It is now expected that a third vote on the PM's "Withdrawal Deal" will take place in the House of Commons on Tuesday March 19. The two previous votes saw her draft proposal defeated by a record margin of 230 at the first attempt and then 149 votes in the second.

May's huge defeats came after large numbers of her own Conservative Party lawmakers voted against her. The prime minister is now banking that these euroskeptic lawmakers will now return to the fold, rather than risk a much longer delay to Britain's departure.

Lawmakers on Thursday have already backed an extension until June 30 if Parliament approves the government's Brexit deal by March 20. Legally, Britain is still due to leave the European Union on March 29 and European heads of state will need to approve any extension.

A lengthier delay is viewed as a real risk to Brexit supporters as it may allow momentum for a much "softer" departure and even raises the prospect of no Brexit at all. This avenue is seen as more likely should May lose again as Parliament would then seize more control over the Brexit process.
The Florida man who was arrested late last year and charged with sending a series of mail bombs to prominent Democrats and other critics of President Donald Trump will plead guilty next week in federal court.

Cesar Sayoc is accused of sending homemade pipe bombs to former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the New York headquarters of CNN and others.

At least a dozen suspected mail bombs were intercepted before Sayoc was arrested in Plantation, Fla., in late October.

Sayoc is slated to plead guilty Thursday afternoon in U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan. It was not immediately clear which charges Sayoc specifically planned to plead guilty to.

His lawyer in the case did not immediately respond to CNBC's outreach.

In November, Sayoc pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, which carry a potential life sentence behind bars. A recent entry to Sayoc's court docket shows that a pre-trial conference scheduled for Thursday was changed to a plea hearing.
President Donald J. Trump speaks during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday, March 14, 2019 in Washington, DC.

The former FBI director is looking into the Kremlin's efforts to influence the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Mueller is reportedly winding down the probe, which has dogged Trump at every turn since the special counsel's appointment in May 2017.

His comments come a day after the House unanimously passed a symbolic resolution calling for public release of the report Mueller gives to the Justice Department about his probe. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tried to bring the measure up in his chamber on Thursday, but Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., blocked it.

President Donald Trump said Friday that "there should be no" report from special counsel Robert Mueller on his Russia investigation.

Mueller has to send his confidential conclusions to the Justice Department. Then, Attorney General William Barr will send his own report to Congress. He can decide what information to give to lawmakers or the public.

In a series of tweets, Trump said the special counsel "should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report." He also claimed Mueller's investigation was "an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime."

"THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!" he added.

Donald Trump tweet 1

Donald Trump tweet 2

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Trump has repeatedly railed against the investigation, which he has called an illegal "witch hunt," as it moves closer to him. The probe has contributed to guilty pleas from several former members of Trump's inner circle and charges against numerous Russian nationals and companies.

For instance, federal prosecutors have said Trump directed his ex-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to commit campaign finance violations ahead of the 2016 election. They say Cohen paid off two women who claimed to have affairs with Trump in order to influence the election's result. Cohen pleaded guilty to those charges and others after Mueller's team referred the case to U.S. attorneys.

Still, the charges against some in the president's orbit, such as his former campaign chief Paul Manafort, did not directly relate to work for the Trump campaign. The president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

During Barr's confirmation process, Democratic lawmakers worried about how he would handle the Mueller investigation. In January, he told senators that he does not believe the special counsel would be "involved in a witch hunt."

Last month, Trump said whether to release the report would be "totally up to" Barr.

WATCH: Trump budget 'harsh and partisan,' says expert
Traders and financial professionals work ahead of the closing bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Stubborn politicians could have a destructive influence on the U.S. economy later this year, a UBS economist told CNBC this week.

Seth Carpenter, U.S. chief economist at UBS, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" that "toxic" and "intractable" politics were already weighing on markets, and posed a threat to the U.S. economy.

"The biggest concern for all of us is luckily not in the near-term, but to the extent that there's doubling down on the desire for the border wall," he said. "If that continues until late summer, early autumn  where the debt ceiling is really going to be a binding constraint  I think that's where we could start to worry. People become dug in, and if the administration doesn't take responsibility for ensuring that the debt limit gets raised  especially when Republicans control one of the Houses of Congress  then I think we could have markets truly on edge as it comes down to the wire."
The U.S. expects North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to continue his moratorium on nuclear and missile testing, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday.

Pompeo's comments come after North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said early Friday that Kim is considering suspending nuclear talks with the U.S. Choe said that the North was disappointed by the U.S. and North Korea's inability to reach an agreement at the February summit in Vietnam between Kim and President Donald Trump.

Choe, who delivered her comments at a meeting of diplomats and journalists, wouldn't say whether Kim would prepare another missile launch.

"Whether to maintain this moratorium or not is the decision of our chairman of the state affairs commission," she said. "He will make his decision in a short period of time."

Pompeo said, however, that Kim told Trump "on multiple occasions" he would not resume nuclear or missile testing.

"That's Chairman Kim's word," Pompeo said. "We have every expectation that he will live up to that commitment."

He added the U.S. is "hopeful" it can continue to negotiate with North Korea on denuclearization.

At last month's failed summit, Trump pushed for the complete denuclearization of North Korea, while Kim sought an easing of sanctions. The summit was set to end with both leaders signing some form of agreement, but they could not reach a deal.

After the summit, Trump said that "basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn't do that."

North Korea denied Trump's assertion. The North said it only wanted a removal of sanctions directed at its civilian economy, which the State Department confirmed was true. The State Department added, though, that easing those sanctions would basically finance North Korea's continued nuclear activity.

Japanese and South Korean defense stocks spiked more than 20 percent, while shares of South Korean firms with ties to North Korea sank following Choe's statements.

She said the U.S. threw away a "golden opportunity" by walking away from a deal at the summit.
Robert Palladino, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State, speaks during a press briefing on March 5, 2019.

The United States is considering measures against those responsible for human rights violations against Muslims in China's Xinjiang region, a U.S. State Department spokesman said on Thursday, calling it a "great shame for humanity."

"We are committed to promoting accountability for those who are committing these violations and considering targeted sanctions as well, targeted measures, as well," spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters at a regular briefing.

Palladino later said he misspoke when he said sanctions. He did not elaborate on what he meant by targeted measures.

"We will continue to call on China to end these policies and to free these people who have been arbitrarily detained," he said.

Palladino said he echoed Turkey's description of the Xinjiang situation, in calling it a "great shame for humanity."

Palladino spoke after China hit back on Thursday in unusually strong terms at U.S. State Department criticisms of its Xinjiang policies.

In announcing the U.S. State Department's annual "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" on Wednesday, its top human rights official said the abuses in Xinjiang were of a kind not seen since the 1930s and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China was "in a league of its own when it comes to human rights violations."

U.S. officials have said the Trump administration was considering sanctions targeting companies and officials linked to China's crackdown, including Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, who, as a member of the powerful politburo, is in the upper echelons of China's leadership.

China has roundly rejected concern about its policies in Xinjiang, where rights groups say the government is operating internment camps holding a million or more Muslims. China says they are vocational training centers aimed at de-radicalization.

It has warned of retaliation if Washington were to target Chen and the U.S. administration has yet to act despite complaints about its lack of action from U.S. lawmakers.

Any sanctions decision against so senior an official as Chen would be a rare move on human rights grounds against China by the Trump administration, which is engaged in closely-watched talks with Beijing to try to resolve a trade war.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said earlier on Thursday that the U.S. human rights report was as usual filled with "ideological prejudice" and groundless accusations. He said China had lodged a complaint with Washington about it.

Lu said China fully safeguards human rights and that the United States should take a hard look at its own domestic human rights record.
Vivekananda Reddys body found in washroom, with injuries on head, hands.

Kurnool: Y.S. Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and paternal uncle of Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, was brutally murdered at his residence in Pulivendula at around 5 am on Friday. Vivekananda Reddy was a brother of late former chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy.

Vivekananda Reddys body was found in a pool of blood in the washroom attached to his bedroom, with injuries on his head and hands. Kadapa superintendent of police Rahul Dev Sharma said that a post-mortem revealed that it was a clear case of murder. Director General of Police R.P. Thakur constituted a Special Investigation Team with five teams to investigate the murder. Additional director-general, CID, Amit Garg, will supervise the investigation.

Mr Sharma said that there was a deep cut to the forehead, hand and thigh. The report revealed seven injuries.

The SP said that a door was left ajar which allowed the assailants entry into the house. Born on August 8, 1950, Vivekananda Reddy represented Pulivendula in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly in 1989 and 1994. He was got elected to the Kadapa Lok Sabha seat in 1999 and 2004.

In 2009, Vivekananda Reddy became a Member of the Legislative Council and was agriculture minister in the cabinet of Kiran Kumar Reddy. He remained loyal to the Congress even after his nephew Jagan Mohan Reddy severed ties with the party. Under pressure from associates and family members, he resigned from the Congress and joined the YSRC.
HOOVER DAM, AZ - MARCH 30: A 'bathtub ring' surrounds Lake Mead near Hoover Dam, which impounds the Colorado River at the Arizona-Nevada border, on March 30, 2016. The white ring shows the effects of a drought which has caused the level of the lake to drop to an historic low. The ring is white because of the minerals which were deposited on the previously submerged surfaces. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)

LOS ANGELES  California remains a holdout on a drought emergency plan for the Colorado River that is due next Tuesday by all seven river states. Holding up the plan has been a fight between two powerful water agencies in Southern California.

The drought contingency plan is designed to produce voluntary cuts that would keep the river and Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels. If the plan doesn't get finalized, the federal government could step in and force mandatory cutbacks instead of voluntary ones for a river that serves 40 million people and some 5 million acres of farmland.

Drought in the past decade has stressed the Colorado River to the limits and contributed to Lake Mead reaching perilously low levels. Lake Mead, located by Hoover Dam and a vital water source for California, Nevada and Arizona, had dismal levels last year that raised alarm.

"We have a supply crisis that has been developing due to drought on the Colorado River," said Jeffrey Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a water wholesaler serving 19 million in six counties, including Los Angeles and San Diego.

The need for water led Metropolitan last year to approve funding to help pay some of the costs for a delta water-delivery tunnel project in Northern California that would bring more water to Southern California. But Gov. Gavin Newsom last month said he would scale back the $10 billion plan championed by his predecessor.

Newsom appoints members to an agency's board that represents the state in discussions and negotiations on river issues: the Colorado River Board of California.

Earlier this month, Imperial Irrigation District, a water district in California's southeastern Imperial County with senior rights to the Colorado River, announced a plan with water cutbacks. But it required that the federal government pay $200 million for restoring the dwindling Salton Sea, California's largest lake.

"Our job here is to protect the people and the environment of the Imperial Valley," said Robert Schettler, a spokesman for the Imperial district. He said the Salton Sea has become a health and environmental concern due to dust exposed by the receding lake.

However, the Imperial County agency's demand for federal funds as part of its plan didn't go over well with Metropolitan. The Los Angeles-based agency contends Imperial's condition for money would be unlikely to be met before the federal deadline.

"We gave [Imperial Irrigation District] time and space to continue to work on their Salton Sea issue, but at some point we felt we needed to move on," said Kightlinger.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation asked governors or their representatives of the river states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming to turn in the emergency drought plan for the Colorado River no later than March 19. Approvals from a handful of water agencies in California and Congress are what's left for the plan to become fully implemented.

The Colorado River typically accounts for about 25 percent of the water needs of Southern California, but during periods of severe drought the river can represent more than 50 percent of the region's water supply. The Las Vegas area gets nearly 90 percent of its water needs from the river system, and Arizona roughly 40 percent.

On Tuesday, Metropolitan's board of directors agreed to bear most of the state's water cutbacks as a way to prevent Lake Mead from reaching critically low levels. The agency could contribute as much as 700,000 acre-feet of water, or the equivalent of enough water for 2.1 million households for a year.

California is only required to make contributions if Lake Mead's elevation drops to 1,045 feet above sea level, or 44 feet below its current level of 1,089 feet.

Lake Mead, which supplies water to cities and agriculture areas, has a more than 50 percent chance of reaching dangerously low elevations in the next few years, according to Metropolitan. If that happens, it said "severe delivery cuts could be triggered, hydropower generation would be threatened and Metropolitan could be prevented from accessing conserved water it has stored in the lake."

"The key part for California is that once a shortage is declared, they still have some access to taking water out of Lake Mead," said Michael Cohen, senior researcher at the Pacific Institute, an Oakland-based think tank that studies water issues.

Added Cohen, "If Metropolitan didn't sign on to the agreement, when a shortage is declared (which could happen next year), Metropolitan could not access that water. So by signing on, they still have the ability to withdraw water that they've stored previously."
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The high court rejected the plea for bail after noting that there was no urgent medical ground warranting the same.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the CBI in an appeal filed by Lalu Prasad Yadav seeking bail in the fodder scam cases in which he has been convicted to undergo seven years imprisonment.

A Bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna issued notice to the CBI seeking its response in two weeks after hearing senior counsel Kail Sibal pleading for grant of bail to Lalu Prasad on the ground that he was unwell and had already spent 13 months in prison.

The Jharkhand high court had rejected Lalus plea for releasing him on bail. He had argued that he was wrongfully convicted by the trial court and should be enlarged on bail due to his poor health. Further, the upcoming general elections were also quoted as an additional ground to seek the grant of bail.

It was contended that being the founder of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, his presence was essential for the party in view of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. However, the High Court had held that there was enough evidence on record to show the involvement of Prasad in the fodder scam in question.

The high court rejected the plea for bail after noting that there was no urgent medical ground warranting the same. It was also observed that his medical conditions would continue to be assessed by doctors at Ranchi Institute of Medical Sciences.

The high court had also turned down the argument that Lalus presence would be required for the Lok Sabha polls.In March, last year, a Special CBI Court awarded seven years imprisonment for his role in the fraudulent transfer of money to the tune of Rs. 3.76 crores from the Dumka Treasury between 1989 and 1995, during which time Lalu had served as the Chief Minister and Finance Minister. In December, he was also convicted for his role in the embezzlement of Rs. 89 lakh from the Deoghar Treasury between 1991 and 1994. The present appeals are against the High Court orders.
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Swarajs statement is seen as a jibe at the Congress and other Opposition parties in India ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.

New Delhi: Reacting directly for the first time after China vetoed the UN Security Councils proposal to designate Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist and rejecting claims it was a diplomatic failure by India, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Friday that the proposal had been supported by a whopping 14 of the 15 UN Security Council members, and that the situation now was in total contrast to 2009, when under the UPA government, India was alone. Ms Swaraj noted that the proposal was first moved in 2009 by India, then under the UPA government, as a lone proposer, adding that in 2019, under the current NDA government, India now had worldwide support.

Ms Swarajs statement is seen as a jibe at the Congress and other Opposition parties in India ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. National security and a tough posture on terrorism are among the key poll planks of the NDA.

In a series of tweets, Ms Swaraj said: I wish to apprise you of the facts regarding (the) listing of Masood Azhar under the United Nations Sanctions Committee. The proposal has been mooted four times. In 2009, India under the UPA government was the lone proposer. In 2016, India proposal was co-sponsored by USA, France and UK. In 2017, USA, UK and France moved the proposal. In 2019, the proposal was moved by USA, France and UK and supported by 14 of the 15 UN Security Council members and also co-sponsored by Australia, Bangladesh, Italy and Japan  non-members of the Security Council.

Ms Swaraj added: Thus we have secured unprecedented support from the international community for listing of Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee. I have shared these facts with you so that leaders who describe this as our diplomatic failure may see for themselves that in 2009, India was alone. In 2019, India has worldwide support.

Despite Indias efforts to convince it, China has been steadfast in blocking the proposal at the UNSC in an action that is seen as support for its all-weather friend Pakistan.
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
A Chinese man has been indicted for allegedly directing two China-based hackers to infiltrate Boeing and other defense contractors to steal gigabytes of documents describing U.S. military aircraft.

Su Bin, a Chinese national in his late 40s, was indicted in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on charges of unauthorized computer access, conspiracy, conspiracy to commit theft of trade secrets and aiding and abetting. He was arrested in Canada in June.

Su allegedly worked with two unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators between 2009 and 2013 to obtain documents related to planes such as the C-17, a cargo aircraft, and the F-22 and F-35 fighter jets, according to the indictment.

Su, who ran a China-based aviation company called Lode Technology, is accused of trying to sell the information to state-owned companies in China and other entities.

Curiously, Su and the co-conspirators in part used free email accounts such as Gmail to communicate, which likely gave law enforcement a broad view into their alleged actions. U.S. prosecutors can obtain such communications with a court order.

Excerpts of the emails were included in an affidavit from FBI Special Agent Noel A. Neeman, which is contained in Su's court file.

An August 2012 email from one of the China-based hackers to the other one describes a painstaking, year-long 439,000 effort that successfully stole 85 GB of information about the C-17, including electronic cable wiring documents and detailed schematics.

Boeing's network is "extremely complex," the hacker wrote, adding the company has layers of security equipment including firewalls and intrusion detection and prevention systems.

The emails also provided insight into general methods the hackers used. To avoid diplomatic and legal problems, stolen documents were sent to servers in other countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, before being moved to Hong Kong or Macao, according to another email sent from co-conspirator #1 to co-conspirator #2.

From those locales, "the intelligence is always picked up and transferred to China in person," the email said.

Neeman's affidavit said that while the "success and scope" of the operation could have been exaggerated, there was evidence that it was successful "to some degree." His affidavit does not speculate if the co-conspirators are Chinese government employees.

The U.S. and China have traded sharp accusations over hacking in recent months, with each accusing the other of government-sanctioned intrusions.

In May, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a criminal indictment against five members of Chinese Army signal intelligence Unit 61398 with stealing nuclear, solar power and steel trade secrets from six U.S. organizations over eight years. China vehemently denied the accusations.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk
May sees off Benns latest bid to seize control of the negotiations

Hammond warns that Brussels may insist on long delay  FT

Ireland push for 21-month pause so UK can reconsider  Daily Express

MPs could be given indicative votes if theres a long delay  The Guardian

EU says no extension in the dark  Daily Mail

How the voting split  The Times

The prime minister narrowly survived an attempt by MPs to seize control of the Brexit process after an amendment that would have passed control of the legislative agenda to the Commons next Wednesday was rejected by 314 votes to 312. The amendment was tabled by Hilary Benn, the Labour chairman of the Brexit committee. It would in effect have allowed parliament to dictate what Mrs May should ask the 27 other EU countries for in terms of a Brexit delay. Instead the overwhelming majority of MPs backed the governments motion to ask the EU for an extension to the Article 50 process, with 413 MPs in favour and 202 against. Labour MPs were whipped to vote with the government but the Tories had a free vote. The remaining Conservative opponents of Mrs Mays withdrawal agreement now face a weekend of intense demands to come into line.  The Times

More:

Speaker sparks fresh bias row over second referendum amendments  The Sun

Constitutional questions MPs are struggling to answer  FT

Comment:

Is Bercow seizing his moment to decisively kill off Brexit?  Nikki da Costa, Daily Telegraph

>Today:

>Yesterday: Video: WATCH: Lidington promises indicative votes if theres a long extension

as the Cabinet split over bid to extend Article 50

More than half of Theresa Mays own MPs voted against her plan to delay Brexit as seven Cabinet ministers also defied the Prime Minister. Mrs Mays proposal to seek an extension to Article 50 was backed by 413 votes to 202 but the overwhelming majority of those who opposed her came from her own benches. Some 188 Conservative MPs voted against Mrs Mays plan amid growing fears that delaying the UKs departure from the European Union could ultimately lead to Britain remaining in the bloc. Ultimately, the Prime Minister was reliant on the votes of Labour MPs to emerge victorious as she was largely abandoned by Tory Eurosceptics. Mrs May suffered a Cabinet revolt for a second day in a row as seven of her top team voted against her.  Daily Telegraph

EU will agree to extra time if theres a second referendum  The Times

>Today:

May tears into Secretaries of State who abstained on three-line whip (but doesnt sack them)

that there could be no excuses for breaking collective responsibility. He praised Sarah Newton, a junior minister, for doing the honourable thing and resigning so that she could vote against the government.   The Times

Whips told Justice Secretary to quit  The Sun

Rudd explains herself to her constituents  Daily Telegraph

Theresa May tore into rebel members of her cabinet yesterday at a hastily called meeting in Downing Street. Tempers became frayed during the political cabinet, with a source saying that the prime minister went batshit. Mrs May rebuked Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, Greg Clark, the business secretary, David Gauke, the justice secretary, and David Mundell, the Scottish secretary. They had defied a government whip on Wednesday and abstained instead of voting against a motion on a no-deal Brexit. The quartet were among 17 rebel ministers. The cabinet source added that Mr Clarks effort to justify his actions ended badly as Mrs May shut him down. Julian Smith, the chief whip, also lost his cool, according to. He told the room

>Today: Iain Dales column: Rudd, Clark, Gauke. After all their bluster about resigning, abstaining ministers took the cowardly way out

>Yesterday:

Prime Minister bringing back her deal for a third meaningful vote

Theresa May will hold a third meaningful vote on Brexit after MPs authorised her to ask for a lengthy delay if no deal has been agreed by next Wednesday. Huge pressure is now being put on the DUP and Brexiteers to fall in behind the Prime Ministers deal to avoid the risk of Article 50 having to be extended by up to two years On Thursday night, MPs voted by 413 votes to 202 in favour of delaying Brexit by at least three months, but Mrs May had to rely on Labour votes for a mandate after more than half of Conservative MPs opposed a delay. In an extraordinary turn of events, 188 Tories voted against the Government motion to delay Brexit, including Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay and six other Cabinet ministers. Only 112 Tories backed the motion.  Daily Telegraph

Hardliners start threatening to topple the Government  Daily Mail

Eurosceptic Tories split in the face of Mays latest push  FT

Rebels warn May shell have to quit to win their support  Daily Mail

>Yesterday: Video: WATCH: Chope  I would seriously consider voting for a Commons motion of No Confidence in the Prime Minister

amidst signs the DUP may support it this time

Foster hints her party is getting closer to agreeing  The Sun

but May warned that tweaks wont cut it  Daily Express

Party will not sell its soul for deal that threatens Union  News Letter

Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist party signalled it was seeking a deal with the UK government on Thursday as local business pressure mounted on it to swing behind Theresa Mays Brexit accord. One senior business figure with direct involvement in Brexit preparations said business was turning the screws on the DUP through every possible channel with all sorts of threats to press the party to reverse its opposition to the exit accord. Alarm grew among companies in the province after the government published plans on Wednesday for a customs regime for Northern Ireland in a no-deal Brexit that business leaders said would put them at a competitive disadvantage. Arlene Foster, DUP leader, said her party was working very hard with the government. Nobody wants to leave without a deal and we want to make sure we get there, she added.  FT

>Yesterday: Henry Hills Red, White, and Blue column: Hunt squares off with Sturgeon over prospect of second independence referendum

Cox attempts to win round rebels with fresh reassurances

Geoffrey Cox is attempting to win over Eurosceptic Tory MPs and the DUP with new legal advice stating that Britain will be able to break off from the Irish backstop under the terms of the Vienna Convention, The Telegraph can disclose. In the advice the Attorney General states that Britain will be able to end the backstop if it having a socially destabilising effect on Northern Ireland, which would be considered a fundamental change of circumstances under the terms of the treaty. However, the so-called star chamber of Eurosceptic Tory lawyers, which includes the DUPs deputy leader Nigel Dodds, has produced a five-page analysis of the advice and concluded that it is erroneous and badly misconceived.  Daily Telegraph

Star Chamber rejects new advice  The Times

Attorney General warned Vienna plan a complete non-starter  Evening Standard

Comment:

Eurosceptic jurists over Brexiteers the excuse they need  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph

May finally has the Leavers where she wants them  Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian

Its politics, not economics, thats failing on Brexit  Chris Giles, FT

Fraser Nelson: With no-deal off the table, May could yet triumph

Three steps to pass the Withdrawal Agreement  Matt Bevington and Alan Wager, Times Red Box

May is still fighting for her deal  Robert Shrimsley, FT

A delayed Brexit will be disastrous for the EU  Liam Halligan, Daily Telegraph

Lumping all leavers together does debate no favours  Ben Gartside, Times Red Box

The only option left is compromise  Simon Jenkins, The Guardian

Dont knock the magnificent spectacle of our democracy  Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph

At last, the Tories win some votes  Henry Deedes, Daily Mail

This is political anarchy. And the only way to end it might be to vote through Theresa Mays deal. Given that it has been defeated twice, by fairly epic margins, it ought to be dead. But these are not normal times. Last night, an attempt to stop her calling a third-time-lucky vote was abandoned, once it became clear that MPs would quite like that option. It had been voted down when Brexiteers still held out for a better deal  but this was only ever possible with the plausible threat of the UK leaving with no deal. This option has now gone, removed by a rebel vote on Wednesday. Thats when our goose was cooked, one ERG member told me. Now, it has all changed.  Daily Telegraph

Editorial:

MPs have handed our fate to the EU  Daily Telegraph

Defeating the deal was an act of self-harm  The Sun

Mays position remains desperately weak  The Times

Labour splits again as second referendum amendment rejected

MPs comprehensively rejected an attempt to secure a second referendum on Brexit yesterday as fresh Labour divisions were exposed by the vote with the resignation of five frontbenchers. The Commons voted by 334 to 85 votes, a majority of 249, to reject a cross-party motion calling for a second referendum which had been tabled by Independent MP Sarah Wollaston. Labours leadership ordered MPs to abstain, arguing now was a time focus on trying to find a compromise solution and extending article 50 rather than pushing for a second referendum. However, five frontbenchers were among 18 Labour MPs who voted against the referendum motion including Ruth Smeeth, who resigned as parliamentary private secretary to deputy leader Tom Watson.  Daily Telegraph

Comment:

A second referendum could break our democracy  Lisa Nandy MP, The Guardian

Labour MPs may yet hold the key to Brexit  Philip Collins, The Times

>Today:

>Yesterday: WATCH: Starmer  Give me a second referendumbut not yet

Cable to stand down as Liberal Democrat leader

Steel suspended from party over Smith admission  Daily Telegraph

One British soldier charged over Bloody Sunday

Sir Vince Cable will resign as Liberal Democrat leader this year. The former business secretary took over from Tim Farron after the 2017 general election but has failed to propel the party to success in the polls. He plans to remain an MP. Party staffers were told yesterday that Sir Vince will call a leadership election in May after the local elections, assuming a general election is not called beforehand. I set considerable store by having an orderly, business-like, succession unlike the power struggles in the other parties, he said in a message to party members Possible candidates to succeed him as leader include Jo Swinson, the deputy leader, who was a minister in the coalition government, Norman Lamb, a former health minister, and Layla Moran, who was first elected to the Commons in the 2017 election.  The Times

One former British army soldier has been charged with murder by prosecutors in Northern Ireland over the killing of two people during Bloody Sunday  the incident in 1972 when UK soldiers opened fire on civilians in Londonderry  in a move that was met with disappointment from the victims families and the UKs Ministry of Defence But the PPS concluded that, in the cases of 16 other former British soldiers and two members of the Official IRA, the evidence was insufficient to bring charges in relation to the events.  FT

Fury as veteran faces trial  The Sun

Comment:

Insult to put soldiers in the dock whilst IRA killers go free  Ruth Dudley-Edwards, Daily Telegraph

Almost 50 killed in apparent far-right terrorist attack in New Zealand

Manifesto of a madman  Daily Mail

News in Brief:

MPs must choose  Withdrawal Agreement or a general election  George Bridges, Reaction

Were still on course for a clean Brexit on 29th March  Christopher Howarth, Brexit Central

Will the EU let Britain delay Brexit?  Kai Weiss, CapX

Extending Brexit could revive Mays deal  James Forsyth, The Spectator

Where would the Left be without Brexit?  James Bloodworth, UnHerd

Forty-nine people were killed and more than 20 seriously injured in shootings at two mosques, in what Prime Minister Jacinta Arden said was a terrorist attack. The massacre by at least one gunman during Friday prayers in the city of Christchurch is the countrys worst ever mass shooting. Video footage widely circulated on social media, apparently taken by a gunman and posted online live as the attack unfolded, showed him driving to one mosque, before entering it and shooting random people. Worshippers can be seen huddled on the floor of the mosque. Reuters has been unable to confirm the authenticity of the footage.  Daily Express
Cllr Stephanos Ioannou is a councillor in Enfield. He is studying Public Policy at Kings College London.

Forget which side of the argument you reside on now is the time to start asking yourself what impact Brexit will have financially on local authorities.

Everyone has seems to have been caught up in the national funding problems post-Brexit. Whilst the NHS, national infrastructure, policing and all other major services are important, why havent we spared a serious thought for the impact on local authorities? People have forgetten about the importance of maintained pavements, keeping our areas clean, and the need for improving local services.

It is likely that most council leaders across the UK believe Brexit will damage their local economies, putting them under greater pressure to push up council taxes and cut more services. In a survey last year by the Local Government Network, only 12 per cent of 185 respondents believed it would have a positive impact on their economies, while 26 per cent felt the impact of leaving the EU would be neutral. Thus a majority believe that council services and funding will suffer due to the impact of Brexit.

Its hard enough for us councillors to fight for funding in our wards, and even more difficult when the budget is being reduced and efficiencies are being made. In light of these problems, logically, we must be prepared for the issues ahead.

The first problem we must tackle is the funding-match by UK government to replace prior funding from the EU. This according to the Local Government Association amounts to around 8.4bn, and government are yet to confirm they will step in on this. But why so important? To put it into perspective, structural funds have become increasingly important to local governments around the UK as central government has reduced their funding. Councils have used EU funds to help new business start-ups, create thousands of new jobs, roll out broadband, and build new roads and bridges. Although government has promised to honour all agreements made for EU funded projects before we leave, this does not go far enough, and Im sure many councillors would feel more assured with a long-term commitment to at least match funding.

Local authorities have also greatly benefitted from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the EU, which concerns the establishment of businesses or acquisition of business assets by foreign investors. Under current estimates, nearly half of the FDI stock in the UK originates from the EU, while many European firms that have operations within the UK pay substantial sums to local authorities via business rates. FDI also brings other benefits to regions within the UK, including increased productivity, increased wages, employment opportunities, and new technologies.

After Brexit, there is a good possibility that European firms will be deterred from investing in the UK. The UK could be perceived as more isolated and less open to foreign investment. This development will be worsened when the UK leaves the Single European Market. In the face of this future uncertainty, local councils in conjunction with Local Enterprise Partnerships will have to double their efforts to attract and support businesses from the EU. This may require re-evaluating policies and tools to attract international businesses. This point is especially important considering the proposed changes to business rates. Under current plans, local government is to become more economically self-sufficient, with the government planning to terminate local authorities Revenue Support Grant by 2020 and implement 100 per cent business rates retention. This will mean that local councils will directly rely on the business rates from local businesses.

There is the prospect of increased council borrowing in order to increase investment spending, and to continue to provide services to the current levels at which they operate. Im confident in saying that no Conservative would want to jeopardise their councils financial discipline, and break the ethos of value for money by being led to the temptation of increased borrowing.

We need to lobby the Government for reassurances of our local authority funding, and that it must match current EU funding. That way we have the ability to continue to provide for our local communities, and look forward to a less bureaucratic and more organised local authority funding structure. We must also look for new markets, and reach out beyond the EU, so that we secure long-term funding and investment in our communities that generate the vital income.

We must remain committed to financial discipline and not let the temptation of increased spending dominate us should Brexit give a hit to local coffers.
With talk rising of a general election, the thorny issue of deselection arises. Could the Party plausibly contest a Brexit election with all of its current MPs as candidates? Would victory in such circumstances resolve anything?

To test the waters, our survey asked the panel their views on deselection in two circumstances: Conservative MPs who voted against the Governments revised Brexit deal; and ministers who threatened to vote against Government policy on a no-deal exit without resigning.

For the former group, the result was as overwhelmingly negative as we might expect: 83 per cent of respondents opposed deselecting the scores of rebels on the second meaningful vote, against just 12 per cent who supported such a move.

On the second question, however, it was pretty much an even split: 46 vs 44 per cent each way. Given the leanings of our panellists, this means that a substantial share of party members who support Brexit nonetheless dont support taking such decisive action against those who are, in one view, threatening to prevent it.

As this survey was taken before Wednesdays extraordinary abstentions by Greg Clark, David Gauke, Amber Rudd, and David Mundell the number favouring action might now be higher. Deselection is also a big step when a much less controversial one  sacking them  remains on the table.

Nonetheless, it suggests that maintaining the unity of the Tory Party remains a top priority for much of the grassroots.
Buckle up, folks. The online travel agency business is about to experience some possible turbulence.

Anyone whos surfed the web looking for vacation ideas knows all too well that theres plenty of companies waiting for the consumers mouse-click to go in their favor. Airlines, hotels, bed and breakfasts, cruise lines, automobile rental companies, and others are at each others throats trying to lure their share of the nearly 600 million consumers who book some sort of travel-related aspect online.

Why? Because the grass is very green on the travel playing field. Expedia -- which owns Hotels.com, Orbitz, CheapTickets, Travelocity, Hotwire and others -- pulled in $11 billion in 2018. Bookings.com -- the umbrella for Kayak, Priceline, and others -- also posted $11 billion last year.

Now, the most feared elephant in any online business room -- Google -- has entered the vacation rental fray. On Wednesday, the company announced that it, too, is launching a platform where consumers can see and book vacation rentals as part of Google Hotel Search.

You can narrow your search with price and amenity filters, plus browse photos, read reviews and see rates and availability of the vacation rental property, wrote Pratip Banerji, Googles Travel Product Manager.

Here we go!

It's game-on in the alternative accommodations market, Dennis Schaal, the executive editor at travel news and research site Skift told ConsumerAffairs.

Google will certainly be on the rise in the sector, and because of its footprint, could definitely take market share away from Airbnb, which is apparently seeing its growth already slow in some of its biggest markets.

If Schaal is right, Googles entrance will either make Airbnb stronger or force it to find a vacation rental pocket that Google doesnt have its hand in, yet. Nonetheless, the goal of taking market share away from Airbnb can have a handsome payoff for Google. Since Airbnb started up some 10 years ago, its notched 500 million guest arrivals and a market valuation of over $30 billion.

Going for the win-win

If youre asking if Airbnb will take a hit, wont others in the sector like HomeAway and VRBO take one, too?

Yes and no. Google knows it could be foolhardy to take this on solo, so its setting its sights on being a friendly elephant in the room by taking the aggregator route, where it will partner with other travel planning stalwarts like Expedia, HomeAway, Hotels.com, NextPax, RedAwning, Rentals United, TripAdvisor, and VRBO.

As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats. Google will make a tidy commission off of getting consumers to those sites and, in turn, those sites will presumably be happy about cutting Google in on the action for doing that.

Plus, on the marketing end, Googles partners arent really losing much, if anything. When a traveler clicks Book, theyre transported to the travel partners page to complete their transaction, and all property information and bookings are provided and done by those travel partners.

Schaal says not to rush to judgment on Airbnbs place in the food chain.

Although Airbnb isn't participating yet in Google's new vacation rentals' offering, Airbnb certainly could choose to participate in the future, bidding for placement like (Googles other partners) in Google's vacation rentals' product, he said.

Preparing for a shakeout

A shift this seismic will certainly produce changes and adjustments consumers will notice when making travel plans.

Expedia, for another, also had a big announcement on Wednesday. Its VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner) brand rolled out two sizeable changes. One is that the company wants to now be known as Vrbo -- as if its ver-boh.

The second is a new collaborative tool that allows travelers to create their own Trip Boards to like and save their favorite properties in one place. This will let consumers share travel plans with others in their travel group, ask for feedback, and vote on the ones they like best.

Seems like a smart move. According to Vrbo data, 86 percent of U.S. travelers ask others for advice when planning a trip.

With app push notifications, each person can choose to be notified about votes or comments right away, making it easier and faster to choose the best place for everyone, the company said in a news release. Virtual tours are another way technology helps Vrbo customers find a perfect match. Currently,15,000 360-degree virtual walkthroughs bring homes to life for travelers before they book, with more tours quickly being added.

Schaal predicts consumers might also see some movement from Booking.com as it maneuvers the playing field, trying to maintain its connection with 1,334,878 active properties in 225 countries.

Don't count out Booking.com in this discussion of Google versus Airbnb, he said. Booking.com is a very capable company and offers nearly as many alternative accommodations as Airbnb although Booking.com, which is the dominant online travel agency player in Europe, often gets left out of the conversation. You will be hearing a lot more about Booking.com in this sector.
Chandrababu Naidu also extended condolences to Vivekananda's family and lauded the services by the deceased as an MP, MLA and MLC.

Responding to suspicions on Vivekananda's sudden death, Naidu immediately discussed the matter with police officials and spoke to the Director General of Police (DGP), intelligence officials and Kadapa district police. (Photo: File)

Amaravati: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Friday expressed grief over the sudden demise of YSR Congress Party leader and former state minister YS Vivekananda Reddy and ordered the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the matter.

YSR Congress Party also demanded a CBI probe into the death of YSR leader, YS Vivekananda Reddy who passed away earlier on Friday.

Responding to suspicions on Vivekananda's sudden death, Naidu immediately discussed the matter with police officials and spoke to the Director General of Police (DGP), intelligence officials and Kadapa district police.

Naidu ordered to constitute an SIT immediately to investigate the case and to immediately arrest the accused in the matter. He said, "No accused should be spared whatever may be their stature."

The Chief Minister also extended condolences to the family members of Vivekananda and lauded the services by the deceased as an MP, MLA and MLC.

Read: YSR Congress leader YS Vivekananda Reddy passes away

Reddy, also a former Lok Sabha member suffered a cardiac arrest at his residence in Pulivendula town of Kadapa district in the wee hours of Friday. He was the younger brother of late Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Rajasekhar Reddy and uncle of YSR Congress Party president YS Jaganmohan Reddy. He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Reddy was elected as an MLA from Pulivendula constituency in 1989 and 1994. He became a Member of Parliament from Kadapa Lok Sabha seat in 1999 and 2004. In 2009, he was elected as MLC. He also served as Agriculture Minister of Andhra Pradesh and later resigned from Congress party and joined YSRCP.

Following Reddy's death, his personal assistant Krishna Reddy lodged a complaint with the police expressing suspicions on his death.

Krishna claimed that Viveka's body was found in a pool of blood with injuries on his head and hand. Based on the complaint, police has filed a case of suspicious death and are investigating.
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Website pik.bg uses latest and advanced technologies. It is very popular on the web, it's within the 1 million most visited websites of the world at position 35709 by Alexa. It supports HTTPS. The main html page has a size of 11732 bytes (11.46 kb uncompressed).

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Kamal Haasan attacks Chief Minister E Palaniswami over Pollachi sex abuse case.

However, Hassan was the first one to flag the massive sex abuse case last week. (Photo: File)

Chennai: Actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan attacked the ruling AIADMK government of Tamil Nadu and questioned the silence of the ministers and top leaders in the Pollachi sex abuse case.

In a video posted on his Twitter, Haasan said, This is a country where gods lived and fought if something happened to their wives. How are you going to wipe the insult made to your Amma Mr Edappadi K Palaniswami." Haasan was referring to ex Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalitha.

"When Nirbaya incident happened, Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha released a statement that sexual incidents against women should be considered as rarest of rare case and will be investigated by high-level police officers. How does this government who ruled in name of Amma remain silent?" Haasan said.

He further questioned the police administration for its careless handling of the case by revealing the name of the survivor. The SP who is investigating the case has admitted that he revealed the name of the survivor by mistake in a press conference. Don't you think he went against the law but the government is also silent about it."

The survivor's video is leaked. But, how is it leaked when the police are saying that the accused have deleted the videos? Who released these videos and for what reason? he asked Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu Palaniswami adding that there is a "limit" for everything.

"You carry Jayalalithaa's picture in your pocket but what have you done for safety of women? Why is the government silent on the Coimbatore Superintendent of Police naming the woman, who had filed a complaint? How were the videos leaked?" Kamal Haasan said.

Stressing that he is questioning the government as a politician but as a father of two daughters, Haasan said: "I want to know as what you're going to do to correct all these missteps? How will you assure all those women who are scared that their video will be released, if they file a complaint? Why and what are you waiting for? Are you waiting for the elections to be over?"

Opposition parties have also slammed the police officer and the home secretary for naming the sole complainant during a press conference.

However, Hassan was the first one to flag the massive sex abuse case last week.

As opposition DMK and Kamal Hasaan's Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) continued to question and attack the ruling government, the AIADMK expelled a party worker, A Nagaraj, earlier this week for allegedly being linked to the case.

AIADMK claimed that no leader was linked to the scandal and the opposition was trying to tarnish the image of the party before the elections.

Chief Minister E Palaniswami is yet to comment on the case.

Eight men were arrested in Coimbatore for sexually harassing women in their twenties. The men targeted the college students. They would first sent messages on social media and later invite them for dinners and long drives.

According to police, the men would "first win their confidence" and later lure them to secluded spots and molest them. The accused allegedly filmed the women being molested and used the videos to blackmail them for money.

In Pollachi sex scandal, more than fifty women were lured and sexually harassed by a gang of four and the acts were video-graphed.

Four accused persons identified as Sabarirajan, Sathish, Thirunavukarasu, and Vasan Kumar were arrested in the case. The expelled AIADMK functionary, Nagaraj, who is one of the accused in the assault case.

The Crime Branch of Chennai Police on Thursday registered an FIR against DMK president MK Stalins son-in-law Sabareesan, is one of the accused in the assault case.

Meanwhile, students of Madurai government medical college on Thursday protested against the Pollachi sexual assault case and demanded a special tribunal consisting of a female judge for crimes against women.
Thousands of train commuters use the structure every day to enter Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus.

Passers-by look at a pedestrian bridge after a part of it collapsed on Thursday. (Photo: Shripad Naik)

Mumbai: Six people were killed and at least 35 others were injured after a overbridge (FOB) collapsed outside Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT). The bridge was widely used by the public to cross the road outside the station.

The bridge was commonly known as Kasab bridge as the 26/11 Mumbai attack terrorist passed through it during the terror strike. Thousands of Central and Harbour line commuters use the bridge daily to enter CSMT.

Eyewitnesses reported a loud sound around 7.30 pm after which several people were seen trapped under debris. Some 25 fire engines with around 250 firemen, a National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) team and around 150 Mumbai policemen were immediately pressed into service.

DN Road outside CSMT was shut to vehicular traffic and pedestrians and the injured were rushed to the state-run GT Hospital and St George Hospital.

Laxman Bhatia, an eyewitness, said, I was travelling by bus towards Colaba when the bridge collapsed. We were lucky as the bus was just a few metres away from the structure and the driver suddenly applied the brakes. We all rushed to help the people trapped under the debris.

A red signal at a traffic junction near the FOB proved lucky for a large number of motorists who were waiting for it to turn green. Without the red signal, the motorists would have passed under the illfated bridge, witnesses said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed deep anguish over the loss of lives in the incident.

Deeply anguished by the loss of lives due to the foot overbridge accident in Mumbai. My thoughts are with the bereaved families. Wishing that the injured recover at the earliest, the Prime Minister tweeted.

After the rescue operation was completed by 9 pm, the fire department cleared the debris and the NDRF demolished the dangerous part of the bridge before the road was opened for vehicular traffic.
American Queen Steamboat Company (AQSC) has announced the completion of a major milestone in the construction of its 245-passenger American Countess, the fourth vessel in its fleet, which is slated to enter service April 5, 2020.

The stern was stubbed to the bow and mid-body section at the Gulf Island Shipyard in Houma, LA-- a pivotal construction step completed 13 months before the vessels christening. Built using the existing hull of the Kanesville Queen, a former gaming vessel built in 1995, the American Countess was originally cut in two as part of her planned lengthening, with the addition of a 60-foot mid-body section. The American Countess will offer many of the same heartland and deep South itineraries as her sisters- the American Queen and American Duchess.

Friday was a milestone day in the history of our company, commented AQSC Executive Vice President of Hotel Operations and New Construction David William Kelly. We are thankful to our dedicated team of over 150 employees who have been working around the clock to ready the Countess for its big debut next spring.

American Queen Steamboat Company has led the market in a reignited interest in American riving cruising, added Gulf Island President and CEO Kirk Meche. We are proud of this monumental milestone and look forward to continuing to provide the best in marine manufacturing and construction for the American Countess.

With four decks including a Sun Deck, and 123 staterooms in four categories, the American Countess will offer six- to 15-day itineraries, including her own Mighty Mississippi cruise. The company said that cabins will feature a modern design that will offer guests the perfect place to relax and recharge in between dining, shore excursions, Broadway-caliber performances and more.

The American Countess will raise the bar on U.S. river cruising, said AQSC President and CEO John Waggoner. We are one step closer to debuting our fourth gem and cant wait to share more news on dates, itineraries and more in the coming months.

The Victory I and Victory II recently joined the companys fleet under the Victory Cruise Lines name, alongside the flagship American Queen, the American Duchess, a 166-guest paddlewheeler sailing the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers and the American Empress in the Pacific Northwest.
BRIDGEPORT  A Bridgeport Police lieutenant and sergeant who discovered the body of a colleague who committed suicide were suspended this week for not following orders, Chief Armando Perez confirmed Friday.

Lt. Ronald Mercado and Sgt. James Geremiah were suspended without pay for not following orders, Perez said. He did not specify what those orders were, but the chief said he expected the two cops work status to be switched during the next few days from suspended to on administrative leave with pay.

Mercado and Geremiah could not be reached Friday for comment. They discovered the body of Sgt. Mark Belinkie at his home in Milford on March 2. Police said Belinkie committed suicide.

(Belinkies suicide) was a critical incident, Perez said. It has saddened and shaken all the members of the Bridgeport Police Department.

Perez said that disciplining Mercado and Geremiah was not necessarily related to them finding Belinkie, but that they were suspended for recently not following the chiefs orders.

But the chief also said, Ive mandated that they see a psychologist through the Employee Assistance Program offered to police officers in Bridgeport, he said.

Theres things that we have available to us, and were trying to do whatever can to support them, said Sgt. Chuck Paris, head of the police union, on Friday.

Geremiah and Mercado were home during their suspensions, Perez said.

Belinkie was the second of two members of the Bridgeport Police Department to commit suicide within a 15-month period. Officer Thomas Lattanzio killed himself on Dec. 4, 2017. Both men were among 17 city officers cited for wrongdoing in a recently released Office of Internal Affairs report about police intervention at a 2017 party. There has been no direct evidence linking thir deaths to the incident or the investigation.

Paris declined Friday to discuss specifics of the suspensions.

I believe the suspension is going to be reversed and put into administrative status, Paris said.

He said the suspensions had not yet affected pay for the two men, and that if the status change were made during the current pay period, Mercado nor Geremiah would not lose money.

The decision to suspend them had not been made lightly, Perez said.

I needed to send a message that we all need to follow the guidelines of this department to keep everyone safe, he said.

The chief said his actions were not meant to demean Mercado and Geremiah.

Theyre not bad cops, he said.
BRIDGEPORT  De-escalation tactics should have kicked into high gear, Bridgeports police chief said, when 46 officers responded to a 2017 house party that ended up erupting into a violent confrontation.

The call came in for a noise complaint  loud music  that October Saturday evening.

This was a nothing incident, Police Chief Armando Perez said Friday. Its not an unusual call.

But this specific noise complaint quickly turned chaotic, according to a report by the Office of Internal Affairs that cited 17 officers and two civilian detention officers for violating department policies and procedures that night.

Youve got to have strong supervision, Perez said. The supervisors should have been more aware of what was going on. When they got there, they shouldve pulled everyone back.

Doing so, he said, possibly could have helped relieve some of the chaos after a call went out for all available officers to respond.

Calming influence

De-escalation is something police academies and departments teach. Tone of voice and keeping distance between an officer and member of the public are things that matter, according to Louise Pyers, founder and executive director of Connecticut Alliance to Benefit Law Enforcement, which offers training to police on de-escalation and crisis intervention.

Its important officers learn tools to be able to slow things down with a person, being able to talk softly, being able to calm the person, Pyers said.

A lieutenant and a sergeant who went to the Colorado Avenue party were found to not have supervised the officers as they made their arrests, according to the OIA report, which details the timeline of events, including use of excessive force and various other violations.

The internal investigation began at the request of the chief, following two civilian complaints. During the investigation, which was completed on Nov. 13, 2018, 54 police officers were interviewed and several sources of video footage were examined.

Ten officers were found to have been untruthful about that night, according to the report. The investigation also found that six officers had used excessive force.

Two of the 19 people named in the report to have violated department policies and procedures were Officer Thomas Lattanzio and Sgt. Mark Belinkie. Lattanzio killed himself on Dec. 4, 2017, and Belinkie was found dead from suicide on March 2. There has been no link established between their deaths and the investigation.

The other 17 officers listed in the OIA report will now undergo hearings before the Police Commission, which Perez said are expected to begin later this month and would be open to the public.

Send all officers

Tensions that October night escalated quickly  from a routine noise complaint to which two officers responded, to a cop calling for a 10-32  code for an officer in need of immediate assistance.

Its one of the scariest, hazardous, dangerous situations a police officer can respond to, Perez said. It means there is a police officer in fear of his or her life, in imminent danger. Its one of the most serious calls.

The chief said officers often dont know what theyre walking into when they respond for those types of calls. Sgt. Chuck Paris, president of the police union, said a 10-32 call is made when all hell breaks loose.

Initial backup was called within minutes of the two officers being on scene. Soon after, another officer that responded as backup got on the radio waves.

Bring them, 10-32, send all officers over here, we have non-compliant individuals over here who are threatening police officers, send more officers now, the officer told the police dispatcher, the report said.

The internal affairs report said the officer who called the 10-32 was threatened by one of the partygoers. When that code rings out, every available officer in the city responds.

Its all hands on deck, Perez said. Everybody drops what theyre doing.

Forty-six officers responded to the party, which had about 25 people in attendance, according to testimony from one of the two civilians who filed complaints about police conduct that night. Perez confirmed the number Friday.

More training

Months before the Colorado Avenue house party, the fatal police-involved shooting of 15-year-old Jayson Negron on May 9, 2017, drove the public to push for the department to have additional de-escalation training.

Every member is trained in de-escalation, Perez said. Since implementing the additional training it has yielded positive results.

The chief recalled an incident in September 2018 when two officers used their de-escalation training in what could have been a fatal outcome.

Two officers on the midnight shift are in a parking lot near Rosedale (Street) and theres someone with a gun, Perez said. They chased him and caught up and he says, One of us is going to die here tonight. Its either going to be me or you. 

Perez said one of the officers was able to calm things down, disarm the gun and they were able to safely arrest the suspect.

Thats de-escalation at its best, he said.
MILFORD  Sheltons Planning and Zoning Commission might have been within its rights to reject an application from a speakeasy to open off Old Bridgeport Avenue.

But a judge said the commission still acted shabbily at a 2017 hearing when it denied a request for a continuance from the business owner to address concerns about the application.

Ive never seen that. Never, Superior Court Judge Trial Referee Arthur Hiller said. That was a little disappointing as I looked at it.

Hillers remarks came at the end of an hourlong March 7 hearing in an appeal of the PZCs rejection of a proposal from Hush, which planned to open on the first floor of 303 Old Bridgeport Ave., under the former location of Hunan Pan restaurant.

No decision has been made, and at the end of the hearing, Hiller asked lawyers representing both sides to file more briefs in the case.

The planned business has been the subject of online speculation since becoming public in October 2017. An initial description including references to burlesque performances riled residents who worried that Hush would be a gentlemens club by another name.

City officials initially signed off on the business  which allowed it to obtain a liquor license  before the public outcry.

In December 2017, the commission unanimously rejected an application to open the business from its owner, Randi-Lee England, who has been paying $2,500 a month rent for the space.

The application said the bar would operate as a speakeasy  a trend in the bar business hearkening back to the days of Prohibition in the Roaring 20s  complete with waitresses dressed as flapper girls.

The judge spent most of the March 7 hearing quizzing the lawyers about the case  and wondering why the two sides havent compromised already. He suggested they talk more in the next few weeks.

The commissions lawyer, Francis Teodosio, repeatedly noted the secretiveness of the speakeasy proposal.

The argument is about the use, Teodosio said, saying the proposal was a themed theatrical presentation masquerading as a cafe.

Englands lawyer, Jonathan Klein, said the PZC was getting hung up on the theme of the business, instead of the fact that the proposal is an allowable use in the propertys zoning.

The theme is not the use, Klein said.

Shelton Planning and Zoning Commission Chairwoman Virginia Harger attended the hearing but declined to comment afterward.

Klein said his client was open to settlement talks. The PZC had rejected a settlement proposal in the case last July.

Were certainly willing to explore that, he said.

ethan.fry@hearstmediact.com
STAMFORD  The last time Stamford played host to a comic book storyline, a school was destroyed and hundreds lost their lives.

So far, the City That Works is fully intact after one issue of Marvels new Meet The Skrulls series, but a family of shape-shifting aliens now call the city home.

It is pretty cool, said Dave Kruseski, owner of Heroes Comics & Cards in Norwalk. Its always cool when something like that is a little more local.

On page six of the first issue, released this month, one of the main characters who has transformed into a butterfly is shown flying back home over a Welcome to Stamford sign.

The sign is not based on any in the city, and certainly bears no resemblance to the Welcome to Stamford signs near Interstate 95. The landscape behind it, however, suggests North Stamford, with its residential homes and trees, and no hint of the downtown skyline.

Stamford readers of the comic book will recognize one landmark in a future issue.

Robbie Thompson, the writer of Meet The Skrulls, said Avon Theatre will be featured in an upcoming issue.

We do have a scene that takes place outside a movie theater, he said, in an emailed message. When artist Niko Henrichon was laying out that issue, (editor) Nick (Lowe) and assistant editor Kathleen Wisneski suggested using the beautiful Avon theater, which was perfect for the scene we have.

Thompson said Stamford was selected as the Skrull familys home mostly due to its proximity to New York .

In the original pitch for the series, we knew we wanted to set (it) in the suburbs, he wrote. And because we were going to include Tony Stark (Iron Man) and his company, we wanted the suburbs to be close to New York City. There was some talk of creating a small town, but the editor, Nick Lowe, suggested Stamford due to its connections to Civil War and it was the perfect fit. It evokes a clear sense of Marvels stories history and helps establish that the story has huge stakes.

The Skrulls, who first appeared in 1962, have historically been portrayed as villains, and their inclusion in the new Captain Marvel movie has provided them a bit of a renaissance.

I think theres a reason they brought the Skrulls out now, and it all kind of ties into (Captain Marvel), Kruseski said.

The inaugural issue focuses mostly on the family dynamics of the protagonist Skrull family  father Carl, mother Gloria, and daughters Madison and Alice  who appear in public as humans but revert to their green-skinned Skrull form once sitting around a dinner table at home.

During dinner, each member divulges what they accomplished during the day to thwart a top-secret initiative called Project Blossom, and everything seems to be going to plan until the youngest, Alice, reveals she broke one of the groups main rules. (If you want to know what it is, however, youll have to pick up a copy of the comic.)

Stamfords biggest claim to fame in the comic book world is being the location of the incident that kicked off Marvels epic Civil War storyline in 2006, which was later adapted for the big screen as the blockbuster hit Captain America: Civil War in 2014, which changed many of the details, including the Stamford setting.

Civil War, a major crossover narrative that included practically every major character in the Marvel Universe, and many of the companys comic book lines, was a 9/11 allegory that began with a faceoff between superheroes and villains that lead to a giant explosion, leveling much of Stamford and killing hundreds of innocent civilians, including children. The incident leads to a push to register and regulate superheroes, which divided heroes into two factions, those opposed and those in favor.

One issue even depicted a sign from A Timeless Journey, a now-defunct comic book store that was in Stamford at the time, amid the post-explosion rubble.

The suggestion to use Stamford in the Civil War story came from Marvel writer Jeph Loeb, who grew up near Riverbank Road and attended Riverbank Elementary School in the mid-1990s. A fictional school, Stamford Elementary School, is blown up in the story. The school was modeled after Loebs alma mater, now known as Mead School.

Thompson said the new Skrulls-focused story wont be tied into the events of Civil War.

Nonetheless, the city will seemingly have its hands full as the homebase for a family of shape-shifting intergalactic visitors. Thompson shared advice for Stamford residents who may come face-to-face with a Skrull next door.

The Skrulls have a history of alien invasion so I would proceed with caution if they find one in the wild, he said.

ignacio.laguarda@stamfordadvocate.com
(CNN)  Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are struggling to halt the spread of horrific footage that appears to show a massacre at a mosque in New Zealand as it was taking place.

Dozens of people were killed Friday in shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch.

One of the shooters appears to have livestreamed the attack on Facebook. The disturbing video, which has not been verified by CNN, purportedly shows a gunman walking into a mosque and opening fire.

"New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video," Mia Garlick, Facebook's director of policy for Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement.

What we know

Hours after the attack, however, copies of the gruesome video continued to appear on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, raising new questions about the companies' ability to manage harmful content on their platforms.

Facebook is "removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we're aware," Garlick said.

Twitter said it suspended an account related to the shooting and is working to remove the video from its platform.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, removes "shocking, violent and graphic content" as soon as it is made aware of it, according to a Google spokesperson.

New Zealand police asked social media users to stop sharing the purported shooting footage and said they were seeking to have it taken down.

CNN is choosing not to publish additional information regarding the video until more details are available.

Tech firms 'don't see this as a priority'

This is the latest case of social media companies being caught off guard by killers posting videos of their crimes, and other users then sharing the disturbing footage. It has happened in the United States, Thailand, Denmark and other countries.

Friday's video reignites questions about how social media platforms handle offensive content: Are the companies doing enough to try to catch this type of content? How quickly should they be expected to remove it?

"While Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all say that they're cooperating and acting in the best interest of citizens to remove this content, they're actually not because they're allowing these videos to reappear all the time," said Lucinda Creighton, a senior adviser at the Counter Extremism Project, an international policy organization.

Facebook's artificial intelligence tools and human moderators were apparently unable to detect the livestream of the shooting. The company says it was alerted to it by New Zealand police.

"The tech companies basically don't see this as a priority, they wring their hands, they say this is terrible," Creighton said. "But what they're not doing is preventing this from reappearing."

John Battersby, a counter-terrorism expert at Massey University of New Zealand, said the country had been spared mass terrorist attacks, partly because of its isolation. Social media had changed that.

"This fellow live streamed the shooting and his supporters have cheered him on, and most of them are not in New Zealand," he said. "Unfortunately once it's out there and it's downloaded, it can still be (online)," he added.

The spread of the video could inspire copycats, said CNN legal enforcement analyst Steve Moore, a retired supervisory special agent for the FBI.

"What I would tell the public is this: Do you want to help terrorists? Because if you do, sharing this video is exactly how you do it," Moore said.

"Do not share the video or you are part of this," he added.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Facebook, YouTube and Twitter struggle to deal with New Zealand shooting video."
The BMC has now appointed private consultants to audit the rest of the structure.

The collapse of the bridge outside CSMT came as a surprise to many as it seemed sturdy and was not found to be dangerous by an audit team of the BMC.

Mumbai: The collapse of the bridge outside CSMT came as a surprise to many as it seemed sturdy and was not found to be dangerous by an audit team of the BMC.

The BMC has now appointed private consultants to audit the rest of the structure. After the audit report, the BMC will decide if the entire bridge should be demolished or if is in a repairable condition.

However, the bridge will remain shut until the consultants report comes and the road divider outside CSMT has been removed for pedestrians to cross the road until then.

Senior BMC officials, including additional municipal commissioner Vijay Singhal and deputy municipal commissioner Harshad Kale, inspected the spot late Thursday night.

Mr Kale said, A structural audit was carried in 2016, which suggests some repairs were done including that of the stairs and the use of antierosion paint. The bridge was fit for usage and it is unfortunate that it collapsed.

He added, Due to the sudden collapse, we have appointed three private consultants and structural engineers are carrying out an inspection. It will take a few days for their report, which will decide if the entire bridge needs to be demolished. We will have to build a new bridge. However, this procedure will take time and till then we have removed part of the divider outside CST.
MILFORD  A judge sentenced a Torrington man to more than five years in prison Friday for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in Shelton he had enticed over the internet while pretending to be a teenager.

Christopher Galvin, 45, had pleaded guilty in January to second-degree sexual assault, risk of injury to a minor, and enticing a minor by computer.

Shelton police began investigating the case in March 2017, when the victim complained that Galvin had sexually assaulted her after she had fallen asleep in his car.

By that point she was 17  though the relationship between Galvin and the victim in the case began over the internet years before.

At first, the girl thought she was talking to a boy who who was in his late teens. But instead it was Galvin, who was pushing 40.

The victim told police Galvin eventually pressured her into having sex with him in the back of his Subaru when she was 13, and that she felt terrible afterwards.

Eventually, Shelton police obtained search warrants for his emails with the victim, which revealed mentions of sexual encounters the two had and also included messages where Galvin pressured the girl to send dirty pictures of herself.

In court Friday, Assistant States Attorney Amy Bepko read a letter from the victim, who is now in college, and said that she cant go to a party without getting paranoid or worrying about one of her friends being raped.

By the grace of God, none of my injuries were physical, she said, while noting that the actions of Mr. Galvin caused me extreme emotional distress.

Despite help through therapy, the victim said, she still feels the effects.

I lost my spirit to defend myself against anyone, she said. Instead, I just break down and cry, wishing that I was someone else or somewhere else. Im terrified of confrontation. I hurt my relationships because I cant communicate.

I just want him to go away for as long as possible, and want him to be a registered sex offender for as long as possible, the victim said. Anything to make sure that he wont and cant continue being a child predator will be amazing to me, because I want no one else to suffer at the hands of a monster.

Galvins lawyer, George Boath, said his Galvins criminal behavior began after his father died by suicide in 2013 and his marriage fell apart. He said Galvin has since accepted responsibility.

He blames no one else but himself, Boath said.

After his mother asked the judge for lenience, Galvin apologized to the victim when given the opportunity to speak.

I recognize this was wholly my fault and I accept full responsibility for my actions, he said. I want to wish her the best and (to) have a wonderful life.

Judge Peter Brown said he hopes Galvin can find a way to deal with the issues that led to these offenses  before noting the consequences continue to affect the victim.

The actions of Mr. Galvin are not excusable, the judge said. I understand the circumstances. I understand the fact that he apologizes now for what happened and is willing to take full responsibility for it. Nonetheless, the victim in this matter has suffered psychologically. Shes made that quite clear. Certain things you can never take back.

The judge then sentenced Galvin to 20 years in prison to be suspended after he serves five and a half years, followed by 10 years of probation.

While on probation, Galvin will have to be a registered sex offender and have no contact with minors without prior approval.

The judge also issued a protective order barring Galvin from contacting the victim for the next 50 years.

ethan.fry@hearstmediact.com
A phone reportedly left at a Walmart may help police find a suspect.

Police posted a photo of the alleged shoplifter, thanks to a selfie saved on the phone, news outlets report.

According to KDVR-TV and KUSA-TV, the photo showed a man who police said left his phone behind while shoplifting Thursday in Walmart near Denver.

"While Shoplifting at the Walmart today you left your Cell Phone," police said in a statement. "Please contact the Lakeside Police Department for your cellphone and (your) Shoplifting Charge. Hope to see you soon."

It was not immediately clear what items were allegedly stolen.
Welcome to Green Entrepreneur's video recap of the cannabis news you might have missed this week, hosted by our cannabis correspondent, Conrad Martin.

The Southern Vermont Wellness dispensary became the first medical cannabis drive thru in New England. Patients can pick up pre-ordered prescriptions, but they can't place new orders at the window. Locals say it's the best thing to happen to the region since Tom Brady.

Related: These 3 Companies Are Finding Creative Ways to Connect With Their Customers

The NYMCIA gives MedMen the boot

The New York Medical Cannabis Industry association has expelled MedMen from its organization. This comes on the heels of a Papa John's style lawsuit against CEO Adam Bierman who's accused of using racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs.

Related: Spike Jonze Directed a MedMen Commercial

Man with caught with 17 pounds of weed walks free

Finally, my mind's still blown - Dwight Chinyee was released from Baltimore jail after being arrested for possession of 17 pounds of weed. Earlier this year Baltimore City State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby changed policy to no longer prosecuting cannabis possession cases regardless of weight.

Related: Maryland Marijuana Sales Double the Forecast

Be sure to keep up with all things cannabiz by checking out GreenEntrepreneur.com

If you missed the last episode, check it out here: Whole Foods Will Sell Weed! (One Day...)

Related:

This Week in Weed: You Won't Believe Our Last Story!

This Week in Weed: Whole Foods Will Sell Weed! (One Day...)

This Week in Weed: California May Experience a Drought!



Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
First workers meet to be conducted at Amravati and Nagpur today.

Mumbai/Nagpur: To weed out differences among the party workers of both the alliance parties, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray will hold joint poll meetings of party workers in the state. The first of such meetings will be held in the Vidarbha region at Amravati and Nagpur on Friday.

According to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) sources, Union minister for transport and shipping Nitin Gadkari will also attend the meeting. Mr Fadanvis and Mr Thackeray will be addressing the allian-ces selected workers during the meetings. The Amravati meeting is for the Western Vidar-bha region, while Nagpur meeting is for Eastern Vidarbha partymen.

The meetings have been organised as a part of election campaign for the general elections. About 100 selected party workers of both parties in each assembly segment will participate in the meetings, which will be held mainly to guide the workers on campaigning, said Nagpur BJP chief Sudhakar Kolhe.

According to sources, the main purpose of these joint meetings will be to eliminate the differences between workers of both the parties, who have been at loggerheads for a long time.

In Shiv Sena, whi-le majority of party MPs and MLAs were in favour of an alliance, organisational office-bearers like Sampark Pramukhs were staunchly against the idea of joining hands with the estranged ally. They kept on insisting that the party leadership should abide by its January 2018 resolution that it will contest all future elections on its own.

During the meetings, the workers of both parties will be asked to work together for the victory of BJP-Sena alliance. They will be told not to hold any grudges against each other and work co-ordially to ensure the win, said a party insider.
The Modi government needs to retaliate, though perhaps now unwilling to risk provoking China before the Lok Sabha polls.

On March 13, China blocked, for the fourth time over the past decade, the listing of Masood Azhar, head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, by the UN Security Councils 1267 Committee. The resolution this time was not moved by India but by a dozen-odd members, including veto-wielding permanent members France, Britain and the United States, but regrettably not Russia. Notably, Australia and Japan were among them, who along with the US and India form the Quadrilateral, perceived by China as an antithetical grouping of democracies in the Indo-Pacific. However, missing from it were the current two Asian UNSC non-permanent members, Kuwait and Indonesia. Thus, the governments spin that the entire global community was aligned with India against Pakistan and China might be hyperbolic.

It may be recalled China did not veto the listing of the top leadership of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba on December 10, 2008 by the 1267 Committee, including Hafiz Saeed, two weeks after the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai that traumatised India and its financial capital. It is possible the immensity of the attack, the loss of Indian and foreign lives, including those of citizens of major powers, made it impossible for China to defy the emerging consensus. Its also possible that the Pakistan Peoples Party government, elected a year earlier after the dastardly assassination of Benazir Bhutto, didnt push China. Then foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon, writing recently, argues while instinctively he felt the military punishment of LeT was necessary, in retrospect US actions like giving India access to arch spy-cum-facilitator David Coleman Headley justified restraint.

Why then is China acting differently on the listing of JeMs founder Masood Azhar? First, it is a more assertive and less risk-averse China under Xi Jinping. Domestically he has ruthlessly consolidated power, even jailing possible rivals, creating a personality cult rivalling that of Mao Zedong. He has put China on a path to be a global power. India, which China has sought to contain since the 1962 Sino-Indian war, is seen as an obstacle to be countered with greater vigour while keeping open useful doors of trade and commerce. Thus, the relationship has cooperation, friction and even possible conflict conflated in even measure. Pakistan as an ally in this venture was elevated from a mere strategic military asset to a military-economic pawn with the unfurling of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in 2017. The intrusion by Chinese military forces at Doklam two years ago was to test Indias close treaty ties with Bhutan. While the Indian military, by timely intervention, stalled that incursion, the issue lingered as reports indicate Chinese forces have bivouacked for the winter rather than withdraw to their winter quarters in Tibet, as in the past.

The Indian diplomatic strategy rested, besides rustling up members co-sponsoring the resolution listed above, on using the Saudi and UAE Crown Princes to bring pressure on Pakistan. The Saudis and Emiratis are the key nations financially bailing out Pakistan with handouts of over $12 billion. Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke protocol to receive the much-berated Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at Delhi airport to lure a Pakistani ally into his corner. The return of downed Indian pilot Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman in literally 72 hours by Pakistan seemed to confirm the clout of the US-Saudi-Emirati grouping in conditioning Pakistani conduct. There were two flaws in this assessment. One, Pakistan has counter leverages in dealing with the Gulf powers, being their last resource for nuclear weapons were Iran to move in that direction. Two, to obtain more than cosmetic concessions and, in particular, to have them begin dismantling Pakistani militarys core relationship with jihadi outfits. Pakistan must have demanded a resumption of the dialogue and a discussion of Kashmir, which the Narendra Modi government has avoided. It has instead resorted to a solution to the Kashmir imbroglio using brute force. The Saudi foreign minister probably carried that message. He returned empty-handed as Mr Modi cannot concede on a dialogue weeks before the Lok Sabha elections, when jingoism prevails in the aftermath of the Balakot airstrikes. A Chinese veto thereafter was inevitable as Pakistan would not want its terror machine to be degraded before getting India to the negotiating table. Listing by the 1267 Committee would have made it mandatory for Pakistan and other nations to disrupt the ability of the group to travel, acquire weapons, raise funds, etc. The Financial Action Task Force, which is keeping Pakistan on the Grey List, could punish Pakistan for non-compliance with the resolution.

At that stage, it was clear China would not abandon Pakistan. President Xi Jinping additionally would hardly wish to give Prime Minister Modi a win before the crucial election as a weakened Mr Modi, even if re-elected, or a less aggressive new leader would be preferable. The Modi government also erred in assuming that the April 2018 informal summit at Wuhan had provided enough ballast to Sino-Indian relations to override the Chinese geo-political imperatives. In fact, Mr Modis personal diplomacy to defuse the post-Doklam friction may have been seen by China as kowtowing by the Indian government. The subsequent distancing by the government from the 60th anniversary celebrations of the Dalai Lamas arrival in India in 1959 would have supplemented the Chinese belief of India being an appeasing power.

The Modi government needs to retaliate, though perhaps now unwilling to risk provoking China before the Lok Sabha polls. This could be through smart moves to convey to China that it has breached Indias core concerns about terrorism emanating from Pakistan. It could include a more open engagement with the Dalai Lama and participation in the 60th anniversary celebrations. Imbalanced trade is another element, although India must not breach WTO rules when imposing duties on Chinese products. Chinese phones have captured 71.2 per cent of imported phones share. But in pharmaceuticals, fertilisers and transistors the Indian market is important for China. The BJP government erred in not creating local capacity to counter these dependencies. India should join the US and the West in blocking Huaweis ingress into 5G technology transition in India. Indian lobbies will resist this but national interests and not crony capitalists must prevail. Former British statesman Harold Wilson had said a week is a long time in politics. China proved that by literally evaporating the impact of Balakot in the public discourse. The present Indian government has badly misread Mr Xis China; it is back to basics from May onwards.
In his words: "I am just a professional writer, which means I don't do blogs and try and get money for whatever I write."

Theresa May put her withdrawal deal from the European Union to a vote for the second time and last Tuesday, lost overwhelmingly.

The Critic says there are seven plots

The Reaper says there is one

The Dawn says heres another day

The Twilight says its done.

From Dont You Humsay Aagey Jao by Bachchoo

If the earth were flat, we could still draw longitudes and latitudes across it, but there would be no time difference between, say, Greenwich and Andheri West in Mumbai. So, IST would be the same as GMT.

But the earth being round, I stayed awake way past my bedtime in Mumbai on several crucial nights this week, watching the BBC for news of the votes on Brexit in the Westminster Parliament.

Theresa May put her withdrawal deal from the European Union to a vote for the second time and last Tuesday, lost overwhelmingly. The next day she proposed keeping a no-deal on leaving the EU option on the table. This, her government argued, is a bargaining tool. It means that the UK leaves the European Union on March 29, negating all the mutual trade arrangements, obligations, etc that membership entails.

There are several opinions in Parliament concerning no-deal. The hard Brexiteers are in favour of ditching the obligations to pay the EU the membership fee and abandon its rules protecting standards of goods, the environment, human rights and labour laws. They argue that the loss of more than 40 per cent of the UKs trade  the share of the total which it does with the EU today  would be more than compensated for by fresh trade agreements with the rest of the world.

Its whistling in the approaching dark. Liam Fox, the minister entrusted with the task of forging these trade links with countries outside the EU, has for the last two years been struggling to get even one significant deal signed. The tarot card predictions on which these Brexiteers seem to rely may bring them comfort. Economists are unequivocally nervous.

Ms Mays attempt to retain it as a possibility is based on the assumption that a no-deal withdrawal would hurt the economies of EU countries and hence the threat makes it a bargaining chip. Parliament didnt buy the argument and voted against the government with several Cabinet ministers defying the party whip and abstaining.

The vote to take no-deal off the table was indicative but not binding. What it did demonstrate is that Ms May has lost all authority as a Prime Minister. Even lame ducks can swim, but her party has drained the pond and left her high and dry.

The two votes on Tuesday and Wednesday leave the Brexit process in utter confusion. Some in Parliament are in favour of extending the date for withdrawal, moving it forward by a few months or even a year in the hope that further negotiations may result in a deal which the Parliament will pass. This is also a bit of wishful thinking as the EU negotiators have made it plain that the deal they agreed with Ms May is the final drink in the last chance saloon.

There then remains the prospect of a vote in Parliament, which several MPs  though not by any means a majority yet  to hold a second referendum. The choices that such a referendum would offer the voters are being debated. They may be asked to choose between leaving with no-deal, leaving with the deal that the EU says is its final offer  the one that Parliament has twice rejected  or remaining a member of the European Union.

Public opinion polls indicate that a majority would now vote to remain, though public polls preceding the last two elections have produced the wrong result.

This poses a dilemma for the leadership of Labour, the main Opposition party. Its annual conference, where members vote on policy issues that the party must adopt, voted to keep both a demand for a general election and a second referendum as party policy. The leadership doesnt want such a referendum as it could and probably would result in a vote to remain in the EU.

This is not what Jeremy Corbyn or those close to him want. They are Brexiteers who want to quit the regulations of the EU but remain in the customs union and some aspects of the single market. They argue that this would safeguard the jobs of workers while allowing a future Labour government to re-nationalise the railways and energy companies. This argument ignores the fact that many railways of countries in the EU are nationalised.

Even within the Labour leadership and among its supporters, there are factional differences. Tom Watson, the elected deputy leader of the party, has recently gathered MPs who are in favour of Social-Democratic rather than Marxist policies around himself. In the Corbyn-supporting faction there is the Mickey Marxist phalanx which is desperately in favour of leaving the European Union arguing that it will leave the UK free to join with other countries in an anti-capitalist or at least an anti-American alliance.

Asked to name the countries which would join such an alliance, the answer comes to none  no, hang on, one: Venezuela. Russia and China may be anti-American but calling them socialist would cause a grave in Highgate cemetery to suffer a small earthquake. Perhaps a revived ISIS would join the UK in such an alliance  that is if the country didnt vote again for a Tory government which wouldnt be subject to persuasion from Trotskyist fantasy outfits.

We live, as Confucius or someone said, in interesting times. If there is a second referendum, I shall certainly vote remain. I dont think the threatened rise in food prices and the cost of Ibuprofen will affect me deeply. Unlike millions of workers in the UK I shant lose my job and a fall in house prices wont affect me as I dont own a house. However, if the UK leaves the continent, the colour of my passport will change from red to blue which would be tragic. I prefer red.
This appeared in Friday's Washington Post.

- - -

Following his failed summit in Hanoi with Kim Jong Un, President Donald Trump announced that the North Korean ruler had tried to sell him on a blatantly one-sided deal. But since then, it has emerged that the president arrived in Hanoi with his own nonstarter proposal.

In the initial account, North Korea was demanding that five U.N. resolutions containing the most potent sanctions be lifted in exchange for the closing of one nuclear facility - which would have left the regime's arsenal of nuclear warheads and intercontinental missiles untouched, along with other production sites. Trump seemingly had no choice but to walk away.

But we have since learned that Trump, for his part, tried to persuade Kim to commit to the complete dismantlement of his arsenal and production facilities for all weapons of mass destruction, in exchange for the end of sanctions. As top U.S. intelligence officials publicly warned before the summit, North Korea is not prepared now to undertake full disarmament, and may never be.

The vast disconnect between the two proposals explains why the summit ended so abruptly, and it points to the illusions that were cherished by the leaders. Both appeared to believe the other was desperate for a deal and could be induced to accept terms their aides might otherwise dismiss. The result is a dangerous impasse, as North Korea takes steps to refurbish a missile testing and launch site that Kim promised Trump would be dismantled. Some experts believe the regime may be preparing to stage a satellite launch - a step that could rekindle the crisis that preceded the first Trump-Kim summit last June.

The diplomatic failure should have prompted the Trump administration to reconsider its strategy. Instead, it seems to be doubling down. The State Department's North Korea envoy, Stephen Biegun, on Monday rejected the idea of seeking a partial or staged deal. "We are not going to do denuclearization incrementally," he declared. "The missing variable is North Korea itself has to also fully commit to the elimination of its weapons of mass destruction and affiliated programs," he said.

The administration is right to seek an unambiguous North Korean acceptance of denuclearization as a goal; the statement Trump agreed to at his summit with Kim last June was less than clear. But it's unlikely to make progress toward that end, or even preserve the fragile detente under which North Korea has suspended warhead and missile testing, unless it is willing to move in stages.

The administration is understandably anxious to avoid repeating previous deals in which North Korea has obtained sanctions relief for partial steps and then reneged. Yet there could be ways to make progress while avoiding past pitfalls. Before Hanoi, there were suggestions the United States could agree to noneconomic steps, such as a declaration ending the state of war between the two countries, in exchange for the shutdown of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. South Korea might be allowed to pursue limited economic initiatives with the North while broad sanctions remain in place. Rather than discuss such possibilities, Trump "challenged Chairman Kim to go big," as Biegun put it. In light of Trump's failure, the logical course would be to send lower-level negotiators back to the table to work on smaller steps.
Lets be honest, if we want Connecticut to grow  to be a place that attracts new jobs, new opportunities, higher home values and talented workers  we need to upgrade our outdated transportation network. We cannot seriously expect to achieve our states full potential with aging bridges and highways that are clogged with cars, and trains that dont arrive or depart on time.

When it comes to moving people and goods across our state we must be smarter and more efficient so that we can drive down costs and remove barriers to growth.

Every minute youre sitting in traffic is a minute lost spending time at dinner table or making a sale or in the boardroom. It is costing us time, productivity and raising costs. Connecticut residents and businesses are surrendering nearly $1 billion a year in lost time due to traffic on our roadways. Every year, Connecticuts budget dedicates hundreds of millions of dollars for simple upkeep to our transportation system, which is well short of what is needed for true structural improvements that will ensure people and goods can move across our state easily and seamlessly.

It doesnt have to be this way; we can do something about this.

How do we fix this and rebuild Connecticuts transportation network in a way that maximizes our states potential for economic growth?

For starters, Gov. Lamont has directed the Department of Transportation to streamline administrative costs per mile making road repairs more affordable.

Additionally, our administration believes that Connecticut must also take a bold and creative approach to developing a 21st century transportation system. It is well past time for Connecticut to explore public-private partnerships as another way to save the states taxpayers money to finance and build projects, leveraging private-sector resources and investments while retaining public ownership of public assets.

Northern Virginia, one of the most heavily congested areas of the United States, provides a good example of how a public-private partnership can help alleviate traffic. Faced with a similar transportation issues as Connecticut, Virginia leveraged private sector resources to complete two significant highway improvement projects.

Of course, any plan to transform Connecticuts roads, bridges and rail requires a predictable sustainable funding stream that doesnt mortgage our kids and grandkids future. Connecticut remains the only state in the region that doesnt charge user fees for wear-and-tear on its highways and it is killing our economic competitiveness. In essence, Connecticut is currently running a multistate charity for out-of-state car and truck drivers that dont pay to use our roads.

One out-of-state tractor trailer puts the equivalent wear and tear on our roads of 9,600 cars. According to U.S. News and World Reports, Connecticut is ranked 41st among the states in terms of quality of our infrastructure. We have more than 300 structurally deficient bridges.

Its time we change that and the governor has presented a sensible and sustainable plan to the General Assembly that protects the revenues with a constitutional lockbox and federal law.

Under the governors plan, it is estimated that 40 percent of all revenue collected will come from out-of-state drivers. Connecticut residents will receive deep discounts, in addition to a frequent driver discount for those people who commute often. Our administration is also examining ways to minimize the impact on low-income individuals and families.

Connecticut has an opportunity to remake our transportation system, to get people out of traffic and to where they want to go. Its time for Connecticut to get growing again.

Susan Bysiewicz is lieutenant governor of Connecticut.
Last November, the United States saw record turnout for a midterm election. While this result is on its face a significant achievement, it seems decidedly less so when we recognize that still only half of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot  an estimated 50.3 percent, according to the United States Election Project.

To be sure, this represents a marked improvement over the last midterm election in 2014, when only 36.7 percent of eligible voters participated. Connecticut has fared just slightly better than the country as a whole, with 54.4 percent turnout in 2018 and 42.3 percent in 2014. Still, as a nation whose constitutional system is based on representative democracy, we can and must increase participation in the work of self-governance. Connecticut should help lead the way by expanding access to the ballot right here in the Constitution State.

Already before the General Assembly are many pieces of legislation whose purpose is to expand access to the ballot, and legislators should move quickly to send these bills to Governor Lamonts desk for signing. Among these bills is a S.J. 14, a measure that, subject to ratification by state voters in 2020, would amend the state constitution to allow early voting. Connecticut could then join the 39 states that currently provide for some form of early voting.

According to a 2008 political science study, early voting can increase turnout by 2 to 4 percent. And in a 2018 survey of 900 New York voters, 79 percent said they would be more likely to vote if the state offered early voting, which New York passed this year. The citizens of Connecticut should have that same opportunity.

Moreover, aside from the prospects for expanding participation, allowing even consistent voters to cast a ballot early would provide tremendous flexibility and convenience that our current system in which we vote on a single Tuesday in November cannot possibly offer. The desirability of this reform is reflected by the fact that at least 42 million people voted early nationwide in the 2016 election. Early voting would make participating easier and provide incentives for new voters to go to the polls.

Another measure the General Assembly is considering, H.B. 5818, would improve Connecticuts current same-day registration system, which is desperately in need of repair. Under current law, individuals who are in line to vote by 8 p.m. on Election Day may vote after the polls close, but those who are still in line to register at 8 p.m. may not then proceed to vote after polls have closed.

Consequently, in New Haven, where I live, hundreds of prospective voters were at risk of being unable to register and vote before the polls closed last November. Many of the affected individuals were young people, new to Connecticut, who were hoping to vote here for the first time. Although inadequate staffing contributed to the problem, administrative failures should never prevent anyone from voting.

Finally, the General Assembly should pass S.B. 479, which would make Election Day a state holiday. This bill would promote the importance of voting by clearly identifying one day annually as an occasion for participating in democratic self-governance. Because this idea would be good for working people and good for democracy, it already has broad bipartisan support. According to a Pew poll about making Election Day a national holiday, 71 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Republicans support the proposal. A state holiday would be a good start.

Connecticut would join more than a dozen other states in recognizing Election Day as a state holiday. According to the Council of State Governments, as of 2018, 13 states have established Election Day as a paid holiday for state workers. Although New York is among those states, Connecticut would be the first in New England to make Election Day a state holiday and could set an example for our region.

Together, these measures  allowing early voting, improving same-day registration and making Election Day a state holiday  would expand access to the ballot and increase voter participation. Lets empower Connecticut voters and send a message to the nation that the Constitution State is ready to lead the fight to strengthen our democracy.

Sean Foley is a first-year student at Yale Law School.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) speaks with South Carolina credit union leaders Wednesday at the Capitol Visitors Center. Frivolous lawsuits exploiting the ADA were a chief issue the credit unions raised with Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Credit unions could be spotted in every single Congressional building on Capitol Hill Wednesday as more than 5,200 credit union leaders visited with elected officials to tell stories about the credit union difference. The visits are an annual tradition that is part of the CUNA Governmental Affairs Conference (GAC).

Credit unions from across America spent the day discussing the numerous issues and concerns. Specific issues raised in nearly every meeting included data security and privacy, the current expected credit loss (CECL) standard, Telephone Consumer Protection Act reform and the Consumer Financial Protection Financial Bureau.

Data breaches at retailers is a major concern, especially because there are a lot of companies out there that collect our data and then just hold onto it, said Dennis Tanimoto, president of the Hawaii Credit Union League.
This is Thomson TVs 4th new product launch in the smart TV category over the last year.

French consumer brand Thomson has introduced Indias only 40-inch 4K smart TV. Part of Thomsons promise to deliver Friendly Technology at affordable prices, this TV, priced at Rs 20,999 will be available for purchase online on Flipkarts platform starting 16th March at 12 AM.

Last year, Thomson re-entered the Indian market after an almost 15-year gap and since then has witnessed significant growth in demand from online consumers, who are savvy and informed about choices. Having set an ambitious target of 6-7 per cent market share by 2020, Thomson is banking on e-commerce as a tool to firm up its foothold in India and further establish the brand. Research suggests that the potential for sales in India is around 14 million sets a year, with Smart TVs accounting for about 65 per cent of this.

This is Thomson TVs 4th new product launch in the smart TV category over the last year and will further cement the brands position as the frontrunner in the online TV sale. With this launch, the brand continues to push the envelope and live up to its promise of giving the consumer a new and unique experience.

The TV plays 4K YouTube videos, has 6 pre-loaded apps, runs on Android 7.1, has support for 18 languages and a lot more. The TV supports both Netflix and Amazon Prime and has the Easy Share cast feature. Lastly, the brand uses a Samsung display panel.
STORY LINK Pound to New Zealand Dollar Exchange Rate: GBP/NZD Firms Significant Gains despite Friday Slip

GBP Exchange Rates Slip from Best as Upcoming Brexit Developments Take Focus

Once again, businesses are left waiting for Parliament to reach a consensus on the way forward and are losing faith that they will achieve this.



In the meantime, firms are continuing to enact their contingency plans, anxiety amongst many businesses is rising, and customers are being lost.

NZD Exchange Rates Edge Higher amid Weakness in Rivals

GBP/NZD Exchange Rate Forecast: Next Brexit Developments and New Zealand Growth Ahead

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A slight flare up in Brexit uncertainty towards the end of the week ultimately had little impact on the British Pound to New Zealand Dollar (GBP/NZD) exchange rate, as fading concerns that a no-deal Brexit was possible helped the Pound to sustain major gains.Still, the New Zealand Dollar was able to push GBP/NZD back slightly from its best levels due to these uncertainties as well as weakness in NZD rivals.After opening this week at the level of 1.9126, GBP/NZD spent most of the week surging as no-deal Brexit bets were doused. GBP/NZD briefly touched a high of 1.9483 on Thursday, which was the best level for the pair since early March.While GBP/NZD has slipped slightly since then, it has still sustained most of its weekly gains and trended closely to the level of 1.9375 at the time of writing.Investors were hesitant to keep buying the Pound, as uncertainties about next weeks Brexit events came into focus following the past weeks major Brexit votes.The past week has been a highly bullish week for the Pound, as major Brexit votes in UK Parliament have finally started to forge some kind of path for the process after months of uncertainty since the beginning of 2019.While the governments Brexit plan was blocked by Parliament yet again, since then Parliament also voted to hugely reject the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, as well as vote for Article 50 and the formal Brexit date to be delayed.The biggest jump in demand for the Pound came after Parliament unexpectedly voted in favour of an amendment saying that the UK should not seek a no-deal Brexit under any circumstances.However, towards the end of the week the Pounds rally slowed as markets became a little more anxious about how Brexit would unfold from next week onwards.The UK government aims to hold a third meaningful vote on its Brexit plan next week, and depending on how it goes will negotiate a delay to Brexit with the EU.Uncertainty over how far Brexit will be delayed, as well as whether or not the EU will allow it, is limiting the Pounds demand today.There is also concern about how late things have been left, with UK businesses and economic activity suffering as a result. According to Adam Marshall, Director General at the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC):Investors sold the US Dollar (USD) last week, and the typically resilient and safe haven currency continued to weaken on Friday due to numerous factors.The US currency was weaker on the past weeks mixed or underwhelming US ecostats.Towards the end of the week, concerns that US-North Korea denuclearisation talks could fall through also limited demand for the US Dollar and left riskier currencies like the New Zealand Dollar more appealing by comparison.Demand for the New Zealand Dollar was also slightly supported by Februarys New Zealand business PMI, which beat forecasts and rose from 53.0 to 53.7.Still, the New Zealand Dollars strength was limited due to mixed risk-sentiment and the Pounds broadly strong performance throughout the week.Another week of volatility looks set for the Pound outlook, as the UK government will rush to further its Brexit plans ahead of March the 29th  which is still set as the formal Brexit date.The government aims to hold another meaningful Brexit vote in Parliament on Tuesday. As hard Brexit supporters believe Brexit should not be delayed, there is a possibility that the government Brexit deal will see a surge in demand during its third vote.If the plan does manage to pass, it will cause a surge in Sterling as a soft Brexit will have been confirmed.If it fails though, market attention will turn towards UK-EU negotiations over delaying the Brexit process.Signs that the Brexit process will be delayed for a long time would offer the Pound some relief, but attention would quickly turn to how exactly the UK wishes to proceed with Brexit once the delay is in place.Brexit developments are likely to be the primary cause of GBP/NZD movement next week, but the upcoming Bank of England (BoE) policy decision and New Zealand growth data could prove influential as well.Thursdays New Zealand growth rate stats from Q4 could cause notable movement in the Kiwi and the Pound to New Zealand Dollar exchange rate if they surprise investors.

International Money Transfer? Ask our resident FX expert a money transfer question or try John's new, free, no-obligation personal service! ,where he helps every step of the way, ensuring you get the best exchange rates on your currency requirements.

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Patients say they lost thousands of dollars after their dentist died

Dozens of patients say they're out thousands of dollars after their dentist died and their dental work is unfinished.
The EUs consideration of probe of Apple comes after Spotify filed a complaint against the iPhone maker.

Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, told German newspaper Tagesspiegel her watchdog would examine if there were parallels with Google, which in 2017 was fined over 2 billion euros for unfairly disadvantaging rivals on its platform.

The European Unions competition watchdog is considering opening a probe of Apple over allegations that it uses its app store to gain an advantage on its own services over rivals, the authoritys chief said on Thursday.

Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, told German newspaper Tagesspiegel her watchdog would examine if there were parallels with Google, which in 2017 was fined over 2 billion euros for unfairly disadvantaging rivals on its platform.

We have to examine the role of Apple and Apples app store, she was quoted as saying. If we conclude that they have a market-dominating position, then the case would be comparable to our proceedings against Google.

The EUs consideration of a possible probe of Apple comes after music streaming service Spotify filed a complaint against the iPhone maker, saying it was unfairly limiting rivals to its own Apple Music streaming service.
Google said it has no plans to relaunch a search engine in China, though it is continuing to study the idea.

Last year Google said it was no longer vying for a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the US Defense Department, in part because the companys new ethical guidelines do not align with the project.

The United States top general said on Thursday that the Chinese military was benefiting from the work Alphabet Incs Google was doing in China, where the technology giant has long sought to have a bigger presence.

The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military, Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit, he said. Frankly, indirect may be not a full characterization of the way it really is, it is more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.

Last year Google said it was no longer vying for a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the US Defense Department, in part because the companys new ethical guidelines do not align with the project.

In June, Google said it would not renew a contract to help the US military analyze aerial drone imagery when it expires, as the company sought to defuse an internal uproar over the deal.

At the same time, Google said it has no plans to relaunch a search engine in China, though it is continuing to study the idea.

During the hearing, Republican Senator Josh Hawley sharply criticized the tech company, referring to it as a supposedly American company.

Technology companies have recently been a favorite target of many members of the US Congress, who have criticized them over a wide range of issues such as privacy, work in China and allowing foreign meddling in US elections.

Lawmakers and Google employees have raised concerns the company would comply with Chinas internet censorship and surveillance policies if it re-enters the Asian nations search engine market.

Asked about Dunfords comments, Google referred to previous statements.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has previously said the company has invested in China for years and plans to continue to do so, but that the company also was continuing to work with the US government on projects in healthcare, cybersecurity and other fields.
NK Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last month's summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un.

North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a ban on missile and nuclear tests. (Photo:AP)

Seoul: North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a ban on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, news reports from the North's capital on Friday quoted a senior diplomat as saying.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last month's summit in Hanoi between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Russia's Tass news agency and the Associated Press said.

"We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton "created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States", Tass quoted Choe as saying.

Kim is set to make an official announcement soon on his position on the denuclearisation talks with the United States and the North's further actions, it added, citing Choe.

Choe said Washington threw away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, the Associated Press news agency said.

"I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger," AP quoted her as saying. But she added: "Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful."

South Korea, which has an ambitious agenda of engagement with North Korea that is dependent on Pyongyang and Washington resolving at least some of their differences, said it was too early to tell what Choe's comments might mean.

"We cannot judge the current situation based solely on Vice Minister Choe Son Hui's statements. We are watching the situation closely. In any situation, our government will endeavour for the restart of North Korea-U.S. negotiations," South Korea's presidential Blue House said in a statement.

Choe's comments echoed the North's usual rhetoric at tense points in its dealings with Washington. North Korea expert Joshua Pollack said North Korea may be delivering an ultimatum.

"They're putting down a marker, saying which way things are headed if nothing changes," Pollack, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said.

The second Trump-Kim summit broke down over differences about U.S. demands for Pyongyang to denuclearise and North Korea's demand for dramatic relief from international sanctions imposed for its nuclear and missile tests, which it pursued for years in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Choe had said after the Hanoi talks that Kim might lose his commitment to pursue a deal with the United States after seeing it reject a request to lift some sanctions in return for the North destroying its main known nuclear complex.

In Washington this week, the U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, said the United States expected to be able to continue its close engagement, though he offered no specifics on when new talks might be held.

"Diplomacy is still very much alive," Biegun said on Monday, but stopped short of saying if there had been any talks since the summit.

Bolton, who has argued for a tough approach to North Korea, said last week that Trump was open to more talks but also warned of tougher sanctions if the North did not denuclearise.

In Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang urged patience and further dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

"The peninsula problem can be said to be complicated and long-standing, and it cannot be solved overnight," Li told an annual news conference on Friday, although his remarks were not made in response to the TASS report.

Earlier on Friday, a spokeswoman for South Korea's Ministry of Unification told a press briefing that the weekly inter-Korean meeting scheduled at a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, had been cancelled after the North Koreans said they would not be sending senior officials.

The spokeswoman said the ministry had not confirmed why the North Korean officials decided not to attend.

The South Korean won fell to its weakest intraday level in four months soon after the report, whereas the stock market's KOSPI was muted in its reaction.

South Korean and Japanese defence-related shares surged following the reports.
The entire political class have taken leave of their senses. Both during the referendum campaign and since the result was announced, their behaviour has bordered on the clinically insane.

Of course, you should never underestimate their uncanny ability to make everything about them. But the unedifying orgy of self-indulgence we have seen over the past week has plumbed new depths of cynicism and opportunism . . .

No, not this past week. The paragraphs above are taken from my column on July 1, 2016, a few days after the result was declared. I warned you back then that the fix was already in, that embittered Remainers would do everything in their power to stop Brexit, either by holding a second referendum or forcing a General Election.

For the past almost three years weve been living in a Looking Glass World where, like Lewis Carrolls Humpty Dumpty, words mean whatever the politicians say they mean

Getting on for three years later, and a few days before we were due to escape, thats exactly where we are right now. As the Tory leadership candidates jockeyed for position to succeed Call Me Dave, I also said that Theresa May, a Remainer who spent the referendum campaign hiding behind the sofa, shouldnt be allowed within a mile of No 10.

Then again, what do I know?

It gives me no pleasure to have been proved horribly right. By now, I had hoped we would be free of the shackles of the EU, forging a brilliant future as a freebooting, independent nation once more.

Fat chance of that happening any time soon. If ever.

Believe me, this is a column I didnt want to have to write. Like you, Im thoroughly sick of the whole Brexit circus, which is what the political class have been banking on all along.

The heart sinks whenever someone asks: Whats going to happen over Brexit, Rich?

I can only reply: Ask me one on sport.

As I wrote some time ago, Ive run out of invective. The bile mine is exhausted. Fury has given way to resignation and despair. We can only watch this slow-motion car crash unfold with impotent frustration.

Id always believed there would probably be some kind of 11th-hour form of words stitched up. It wouldnt be ideal, but wed have to swallow some watered down, marshmallow soft form of Brexit, which would allow us to leave with a modicum of dignity.

Sadly, Mrs Mays dismal, defeatist deal doesnt even reach that threshold. Nor will it, no matter how many times she brings it back to the Commons.

But I suppose it was always on the cards that the Remain headbangers were never going to rest until theyd halted Brexit altogether.

As of now, it looks as if theyve won. Theyre certainly well ahead on away goals. Ruling out No Deal effectively means No Brexit.

Be in no doubt that what we are witnessing is a coup against the people. There may not be tanks on the streets, but its a coup all the same. A few hundred MPs have decided to defy the will of the 17,410,742 British citizens who voted to leave the EU. It was the largest number of people to have voted for anything in our proud history.

But the majority of Hon members have been determined to overturn the referendum result, despite repeatedly promising to respect it. The electorate is being treated with undisguised contempt. If they get away with it  which they probably will  Britain will have ceased to be a proper democracy.

Any chance of securing a dignified exit from the EU was scuppered on Wednesday night, when MPs voted to take No Deal off the table.

Whats the point of entering any kind of negotiation when your opponents know theres no chance of you walking away without a deal, no matter how derisory?

About the same as agreeing to pay a 39 billion bill up front, I guess, without knowing what youre going to get in return. If youre not prepared to walk away empty-handed, youre going to get taken to the cleaners.

Curiously, one of the proposers of the No Deal motion was Labour MP Jack Dromey, a former trades union official and husband of Harriet Harman.

Jack used to be a national officer with the TGWU, now Unite. Somehow I cant ever imagine him going into talks with an employer, on his hands and knees, promising that hed take whatever pathetic pay rise they decided to offer and guaranteeing there was no danger that his members would go on strike. Hed have been lynched as a class traitor.

A lighter moment: Mrs May sees the funny side during yesterdays debate as she sits in the Commons with Steve Barclay and Michael Gove

So why does he think thats an appropriate way to approach negotiations with the EU?

Still, when it comes to Brexit, the usual rules dont seem to apply. For the past almost three years weve been living in a Looking Glass World where, like Lewis Carrolls Humpty Dumpty, words mean whatever the politicians say they mean.

Promises to respect the referendum result turn out not to be worth the manifestos they are written on.

No Deal is better than a bad deal, was just another meaningless, insincere pledge.

Brexit means Brexit. Dont make me laugh. We will leave on March 29, 2019. In your dreams.

On Monday night, we were asked to believe that May had secured a famous victory in Strasbourg. Anyone who watched her humiliated, hollowed-out husk sitting alongside a bombastic Jean-Claude Drunker at their press conference would have had no problem working out that she had achieved absolutely nothing of significance.

In the interests of gallantry, it is almost de rigueur to acknowledge that the Prime Minister has worked hard, done her best in difficult circumstances.

But, as I wrote in July 2016, she was never up to the job. Nor was her heart in it. She capitulated to the EUs demands from the off, drove Leave campaigners from her Cabinet, and relied on unelected civil servants resolutely opposed to Brexit to construct her deal.

Worst of all, she deceived the British public, for which she deserves never to be forgiven. Shes entitled to humiliate herself, but shes not entitled to humiliate her country.

May is by no means the only culprit, though. The 17.4 million Leave voters have been comprehensively betrayed by an unholy, cross-party alliance of MPs, big business, the judiciary and most of the media.

You can trace this weeks events back to the court case brought by that strange woman Gina Miller. Remember her?

Mrs Miller, married to a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager, and bankrolled by wealthy Remainers, many of whom lived abroad, managed to persuade the Supreme Court to give Parliament  not the Prime Minister  the power to determine when, and if, Brexit might happen.

It was, you might say, the ultimate backstop. Since then, MPs have gleefully seized even more control of the process, finally allowing them to stop Brexit in its tracks this week.

Theresa May, a Remainer who spent the referendum campaign hiding behind the sofa, shouldnt be allowed within a mile of No 10, Richard Littlejohn writes

Meanwhile, Tony Blair, a former Prime Minister, has been encouraging EU leaders to stand firm against Britain.

Traitor is a highly-charged word, but how else to describe an ex-PM conspiring with foreign powers to thwart the will of his own people? Maybe Blair still hankers to be President of Europe some day.

Ultimately, however, this is about much more than just Brexit. Its about how we are governed and whether we live in a functioning democracy. Right now, we dont.

Why bother with a second referendum or, even, a General Election? Weve had both in the past three years and the politicians have simply ignored promises they made at the time.

The referendum gave a clear instruction to Leave. At the election, 85 per cent of people voted for parties who promised to respect the referendum result.

Yet the overwhelming majority of MPs no longer feel it necessary to honour their manifesto commitments. Once inside the Westminster bubble, they think they can behave as they like, and to blazes with the people who pay their wages.

This isnt representative government, its revolution. Parliament has rebelled against the people.

And for what? Theyve taken back control so they can sub-contract it out to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

Whatever happens now, our democracy is broken. Like Humpty Dumpty, its going to be a hell of a job to put it back together again.
The Indian High Commission in New Zealand also offered help to Indians via social media.

At least 49 were killed and 20 were injured after a gunman opened fire on Friday prayers at a mosque in New Zealand killing many worshippers and forcing the city of Christchurch into lockdown as police launched a massive manhunt. (Photo: File)

New Zealand: At least nine Indian origin were listed missing from Friday mornings Christchurch shootings at two New Zealand mosques in which 49 people died, Indian envoy to New Zealand Sanjiv Kohli tweeted, citing updates received from multiple sources.

"As per updates received from multiple sources there are 9 missing persons of indian nationality/ origin. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families," High Commissioner Sanjiv Kohli tweeted.

As per updates received from multiple sources there are 9 missing persons of indian nationality/ origin. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families  sanjiv kohli (@kohli_sanjiv) March 15, 2019

Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly condemned such terror attacks in a letter to the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who stated this day as the darkest in the country.

The Foreign Ministry on Friday evening issued a statement stating, "The Prime Minister stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He also expressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies".

The Indian High Commission in New Zealand also offered help to Indians via social media.

AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi put out two tweets in which he tagged External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj saying that a video from Christchurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir from Hyderabad who was shot.

Indian shot in New Zealand mosque attack, his Hyderabad family seeks urgent visa https://t.co/2Q8EYFnZ6F  Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) March 15, 2019

In another tweet, he urged a request for immediate support from the government in expediting his visa process.

A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad & would like to go to NZ for Ahmeds family.



I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family  Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) March 15, 2019

At least 49 were killed and 20 were injured after a gunman opened fire on Friday prayers at a mosque in New Zealand killing many worshippers and forcing the city of Christchurch into lockdown as police launched a massive manhunt.

Read: Darkest day: 49 dead in NZ mosque shootings, gunman an Australian

Australian gunman Brenton Tarrant, who shot dead at least 49 people in two Christchurch mosques in New Zealand, live-streamed himself in the act. Along with the video, Tarrant also posted a manifesto online explaining why he committed the attack. He attacked the mosques at 1.40 pm local time.

Read: Brenton Tarrant: A regular white man who wanted to rid Europe of immigrants
Icing on the cake: Alex is rumoured to be replacing her estranged husband Paul on the BBCs Good Food Show, alongside his former Bake Off co-star Mary Berry

Living the dream? Being married to a celebrity is a dearly held fantasy for millions, who imagine a life filled with champagne and roses, first class all the way and having the Beckhams around for kitchen suppers.

When the going is good there is a chance it just might be like that, now and again. But what about when the going gets rough?

Alex Hollywood has had to suffer being publicly humiliated not once but twice by her husband Paul Hollywood. Bad enough that everyone in their Kent village knew of the TV stars affairs with other women, but how do you cope when the whole nation knows?

For Alex, that was the crushing downside of a fame that she had never sought for herself.

Yet up she popped on the This Morning show this week, quietly but determinedly relaunching herself as a television cook. Thats right! A cook.

Just like master baker Paul, but without the handshake, the icy blue stare and the grubby past, which included his 2013 affair with Marcela Valladolid, his co-host on an American cooking show. Four years later he was at it again, with the then 22-year-old local barmaid, Summer Monteys-Fullam.

On the programme, the glamorous Alex, 54, made a chicken dish with squash and pecan nuts, denied that she had recently shouted at Summer in a local supermarket and generally came across as a dignified and rather lovely person with some good ideas about food.

She has already published two books, has thousands who follow the recipes she posts on Instagram and smoulders with the kind of slow, backburner star quality that might find her eclipsing her husband one day. And wouldnt that be the most delicious course of all?

Alex Hollywood has filed from divorce from husband Paul, who is now dating local barmaid, Summer Monteys-Fullam

If the best revenge is living well, how do you describe a wife who not only bounces back from her husbands infidelity, but goes on to steal his freshly baked thunder? It would be like Coleen Rooney pulling on a No 9 jersey and scoring the winning goal against Tarts United. Standing by your man may have its good points, but trampling him into the dust is exhilarating, too.

Now there are rumours that Alex will be replacing her husband on the BBCs Good Food Show, and will be appearing onstage with his former Bake Off co-star Mary Berry. If so, Im buying tickets for this sweet and sugar-coated display of real girl power.

Some wives of famous cheating husbands go quietly, broken women who shuffle back into the shadows. Some wives, like Coleen Rooney, cling on with every perfectly manicured talon in the face of regular humiliations, determined not to let the endless indignities of Waynes world finally shatter her cracked marriage.

I dont judge Coleen  she has four small children to consider; boys who would desperately miss their daddy from their daily lives.

Then there is Alex Hollywood, who has not only decided that enough is enough, she believes that this is her moment, too.

Mrs Hollywood forgave her husband the first time he was unfaithful. Everyone deserves a mistake, she said at the time. Perhaps she thought that 20 years of marriage, the life they had made together and their family unit with their teenage son, were all things worth fighting for. Meanwhile, Hollywood has always claimed his relationship with Monteys-Fullam started after his marriage ended, but Alex has filed for divorce nonetheless.

Nobody ever thinks they are going to end up divorced, but you just have to get on with it, she said this week. I need to move on. I want to live my life.

I love that this new life includes an elegant trespass onto her husbands professional territory.

Paul Hollywood and chef Marcela Valladolid, with whom he had an affair in 2013

Former chalet girl Alexs engaging Instagram account shows a lifelong interest in food and her culinary smarts: an aubergine and coconut curry; a walnut loaf cake and  yes  a selection of her fabulous homemade breads which include a crustily perfect multigrain; an ale, maple and poppy seed loaf; Italian baguettes studded with olives and garlic, and the fresh ciabatta loaves she makes for her lunches at home with the girls.

I love that she dares. And that she has seized this opportunity to reinvent herself in a bold and brilliant way.

For a long time, her husband was a housewives favourite, the thinking womans crumpet.

Now, I cant bear to look at him. It might be fun for Hollywood running around with women less than half his age, but his reputation has crumbled like an overbaked biscuit base.

And from the ashes of their marriage an unlikely new phoenix has risen. Watch out for the rise and rise of Alex Hollywood, the old wife with a new life. She is the real star baker, in more ways than one.

DO leave Dad out of this conversation

Pads4Dads is a social enterprise charity supported by actor Michael Sheen. The aim is to encourage dads and daughters to talk about their monthly periods. Lets Not Leave Dads out of the Bloody Conversation, is their slogan. One word  lets.

You might imagine teenage girls have enough to suffer without the embarrassment of cosy chats with daddy about their period problems over a nice, calming hot drink.

The Pads4Dads kit includes a 20-page booklet and sachets of hot chocolate to encourage bonding. All together now, cringe.Of course, there are cases where it might help. Single dads with pubescent daughters will surely be grateful for this well-meaning intervention. However, call me old-fashioned, but some things that are part of the female condition dont always lend themselves to big conversations with the opposite sex.

I didnt have a single chat with my father about periods, and I think both of us are entirely grateful for that. Sharing, caring and understanding are important, but Im not ready for this sudden wild enthusiasm to put the men into menstruation.

Eva's right on this gender agenda

Bond Girl Eva Green has said the character of 007 should not be played by a woman

At last! Some wisdom from Bond Girl Eva Green. Im for women, but I really think James Bond should remain a man, she said.

It doesnt make sense for him to be a woman.

It doesnt. It never will. And it is becoming tiresome that every time some actor or actress does something half-decent in a drama, they are immediately hailed as the next Bond. Richard Madden in Bodyguard.

Olivia Colman in The Favourite. Patrick Star in SpongeBob SquarePants. We are years away from the new Bond.

He is probably not even on the radar. So lets just focus on Daniel Craig for the moment. I certainly do.

Don't cock a snood at Andy

Never mind what the women were (almost) wearing on Ladies Day  Andy Murray turned up in a snood at Cheltenham. A snood, forsooth!

The last time a man was seen wearing one of these woolly cowls was about 30 years ago, during that brief moment in the Eighties when male snoods were fashionable.

Nik Kershaw was a big fan. Limahl from Kajagoogoo? Possibly. Bee Gee Barry Gibb regularly sported a chunky number  or was that just his beard? Whoever, whenever, all these men bowed down to the superior snood power of Sean Connery playing William of Baskerville in the 1986 film The Name Of The Rose.

Maybe it takes a Scotsman to wear a snood with style? After all, they are no strangers to the silliness of the sporran or garters on their socks. I think Andy wears it best, but I am biased.

Stylish Scotsman? Sir Andy Murray wore a snood to Day 2 of Cheltenham Festival on March 13

Emily OConnor of Birmingham flew to Tenerife in a crop top (pictured) and was asked to cover up

First-class failure!

Emily OConnor of Birmingham flew to Tenerife in a crop top  an item of clothing that had a top so cropped that it looked like a bra.

Should we call it a bralet? A bra-zen? A traditional Spanish receptacle in which to store her patatas bra-vas?

As we now know, staff on the Thomas Cook flight told Emily to cover up.

The rights and wrongs of this dressing-down are being debated elsewhere, but here is the real puzzle. Why did cabin crew leap so hastily into action?

When most of us complain on flights, we can expect the standard in-cabin service: being completely ignored.

This seat is tiny. The oaf in front has reclined his seat while I am eating my meal.

The toilets smell. My screen isnt working. The steward is rude and unhelpful. This chicken tastes like wet cardboard.

Where are the nice sandwiches you used to do? This ghastly wrap is no substitute.

When you think of all the offensive behaviour by others that happens on the average plane journey, the complaint about Emily seems so tiny, doesnt it?

Almost as tiny as her bra.

In the midst of the Brexit frenzy this week, one man stood out for buffoonery above and beyond the call of public duty.

I was in the Army, I wasnt trained to lose, boasted Mark Francois from the European Research Group. This was before one crucial vote, which his side then promptly lost. Listen, Mark. I was in the Brownies, and I wasnt trained to sit around when there were sausages to sizzle, old ladies to help across the road and dib dib dibs to be dob dob dobbed.

So get a grip. We can all tell when someones military career, like yours, was five minutes in the Territorial Army before your mum called you in for your tea.

Real soldiers who actually fought and proper veterans who went to war dont talk like that. Unless they happen to be Corporal Jones from Dads Army.

Despite objections from Gerry and Kate McCann, Netflix releases its controversial documentary series about their daughter today.

The Disappearance Of Madeleine McCann features archival news footage, re-enactments of the night the three-year-old vanished, interviews with investigators from the case, and other key figures.

However, it wont feature her parents, who refused to take part.

They have condemned the series, claiming that it could potentially hinder the ongoing police investigation, which received another 150,000 of Government funding last November.

Yet surely it might actually help? In the 12 years since Madeleine vanished, the mystery around her disappearance has only deepened.

Somebody, somewhere knows something. One might have thought that the McCanns would welcome such a high-profile documentary, which will be watched by millions who will then make up their own minds.

Good luck to Eleanor Tomlinson, the Poldark actress going off to seek fame and fortune in Tinseltown. Meanwhile Line Of Duty star Vicky McClure is reluctant to try to forge a Hollywood career. Why? Of the two talents, Vicky is the one who could end up, just like Olivia Colman, clutching an Oscar to her chest.

My mum would love to see me in a Hollywood movie, she said. But there is nothing nicer than chilling in a nice, clean house. I like normality and stability.

So many stars ask so much of fame. Others are happy with their lot. Eleanor and Vicky must choose their own paths, the one right for them and nobody else.
There's been a turnaround in what 'beauty' actually means in recent years; from body-confidence to skin positivity, we are all more open to celebrating the real us.

So, whether you want to step out au naturel or opt for a flawless look for the day, the choice really is all yours.

And when it comes to choosing your cover, Vichy have the answer: Dermablend. This make-up range is recommended by dermatologists and loved by make-up artists - but how does it work?

Here, we speak to beauty influencer Danny Defreitas about why Dermablend is the easiest way to achieve an Insta-ready look in real life - whenever the mood takes you...

Beauty influencer Danny Defreitas (above, before and after) loves the flawless finish Vichy's Dermablend gives him when he wants to look Insta-ready for his 213k followers

The science bit: how does it work?

Found in the Expert Aisle in Boots stores, Dermablend is the pioneer in high coverage buildable make-up which you can tailor to your needs.

With it's transformative powers, it's ideal for people with all types of skin, ranging from clear complexions to severe skin concerns such as acne, scarring, rosacea, vitiligo. In fact, it's so good at coverage, it can even help with tattoo coverage. Now, thats hard-working!

Close-up on make-up through the years... Make-ups come a long way. The Egyptians used crushed beetles for lippy while the ancient Greeks painted their faces with powders made from ground-up minerals. But it wasn't until the 1800s that the love affair with cosmetics really began. At the very end of the 1800s, portrait photography became popular. While today we can snap as many selfies as we like to achieve the perfect shot, back then people would save up for just one picture, and applying make-up beforehand became standard practise.

While it's suitable for sensitive skin and recommended by dermatologists, the beauty experts are also head-over-heels for this high coverage foundation - which can be used whether you want a natural look or high drama.

Danny explains: 'Make-up can really transform your skin. If you have blemishes, Dermablend [3D Correction] Foundation is great as it has salicylic acid. These acids help you exfoliate your skin in a non-abrasive way and help you get some really nice radiance back in the skin.

'I love the Dermablend foundation because it gives you such amazing coverage. It really helps cover scarring, acne, pigmentation, rosacea - even tattoos! And, the best bit is that it's recommended by dermatologists.

'You can use this to create a flawless look or build it up for high coverage, depending on your needs, and gives you complete coverage on what you want to achieve.

'Even for me, sometimes I wake up and want something really natural; when I'm just going to do some errands. Or, sometimes I am going to an event and want full coverage and really nice, flawless skin. You have the power - you can choose your cover and what products you want to use.

'This foundation is really buildable and you can tailor it for what you're looking for and how you want your skin to look.

'Dermablend also contains 25% pigment - which is insane!'

Dermablend is the ultimate high-coverage, long hold foundation that provides a natural flawless finish

Power of choice: Choose your cover! Your face is the ultimate blank canvas and its up to you how you cover it. Whether youre in the mood for contouring, metallic eye shadow, or bronzer-galore its your skin, your rules. And that means you can also choose to ditch the make-up completely. Daring to bare the natural you is the ultimate freedom of choice. And the next day, you may be in the mood or need some full coverage with the help of Dermablend, the beauty of beauty is that its all about you. #ChooseYourCover

How to get Insta-ready skin:

Influencer Danny Defreitas has plenty of top tips to get the most out of your make-up. With 12 years working in the beauty industry alongside A-listers and high-end brands, he's no stranger to cosmetics. Now boasting a huge social media following, Danny knows all about getting ready for the Gram - so what is his advice for getting ready for our close-ups?

- Choose your toolkit. Dermablend Corrective Foundation provides a natural finish perfect for all skin types with up to 16-hour wear.

Dermablend [3D Correction] Foundation is a corrective base to cover, smooth and improve the look of oily or blemish-prone skin.

- Take control of your product. Whatever your skin type, Danny advises you can achieve the finish you want by controlling your use of foundation. He explains: You can really choose your coverage. Using a smaller amount of product, literally three dots on the face and blending it right out gives you something more natural. If you want more coverage, just use more product and build up the layers.

- Blend with a sponge. I really love using a sponge and just layering it up, really thin layers bit by bit and focusing on the areas where you might need a tiny bit more coverage, says Danny. 'Blend the foundation from the centre, then outwards.'

- Tackle problem areas with the Dermablend SOS Cover Concealer Stick. Dont go overboard with product, says Danny. For instance if youre trying to cover those tell-tell signs of a late night, dark circles, use your foundation to cover 50% then go in with less concealer, so youre not left with a heavy finish.

- Finish with a dusting of setting powder. A looser powder like Dermablend Make-up Transluscent Setting Powder is perfect for that flawless finish. The thin, soft consistency works with your base products, setting and extending foundation and concealer for up to 16 hours. Simply dust over the face with a powder puff before removing any surplus powder with a large soft brush.

Complete your Insta-ready routine with the SOS Cover Concealer Stick (left) and the Setting Powder (right)
An ice cream vendor with a sultry stare and provocative moves has divided opinion online.

Rob Huysinga, 24, from Berkshire, is CEO and co-founder of the ice cream chain Pan 'n' Ice, which has stalls in shopping centres in London and Manchester.

The entrepreneur won praise - and dozens of admirers - after sharing TikTok videos of himself thrusting, smiling and gazing at the camera. 'I actually think that ice cream man is sexy,' one posted.

However others insisted he was more 'cringe' than smooth, with one writing: 'suddenly I'm lactose intolerant'.

Ice cream entrepreneur Rob Huysinga, 24, from Berkshire, is CEO and co-founder of the ice cream chain Pan 'n' Ice, which has stalls in shopping centres in London and Manchester. He has gone viral with videos of himself TikTok thrusting, smiling and gazing at the camera

The entrepreneur won praise - and dozens of admirers - after sharing TikTok videos. However others insisted he was 'cringe', with one writing: 'suddenly I'm lactose intolerant'

Videos shared by Rob show him creating ice creams on an 'ice pan' in front of customers.

Paint scrapers or metal spatulas are then used to chop toppings into the base and scrape it around to create air.

The videos now have millions of views online, with thousands responding with their thoughts.

One particular clip, shared on International Women's Day, has proved particularly provocative and has received more than 6.8 million views on Twitter and thousands of responses.

Fans praised Rob for his performance after a video of him whipping up dessert was shared online

Speaking in the clip, Rob said 'this is for all the beautiful ladies out there' before pouring the ingredients onto the ice pan plate.

As he mixed the ingredients together, he repeated his catch phrase, 'ice cream makes you sexy guys' and maintaining intense eye contact with the camera.

Thousands are unsure about how they feel about his intense eye contact and thrusting moves.

One tweeted: '#Icecream man would be cute if he just shut up and made the ice cream.'

People are divided over Rob Huysinga's sexy moves, with some videos now having millions of views

Another posted: 'This was difficult to watch. I couldnt make eye contact with a phone without cringing. THIS MAN SAID "Ice cream makes you sexy guuuuuuyyyyssss" kill me. One commented simply: 'Why is he thrusting'.

However Rob, who wears a t-shirt saying 'hey gorgeous' in some videos, insisted he was simply try to reflect the 'fun and playful' brand and to bring 'energy' into the parlours.

He said: 'Upon reflection, with this particular video I have allowed myself to be misinterpreted and misconstrued.

Rob Huysinga with his colleague and co-founder Henry Milroy. The pair came up with the idea to launch an ice cream business while travelling in Thailand

The entrepreneur, whose catchphrase 'ice cream makes you sexy guys' often features in his videos, regularly posts topless photographs on Instagram

'The eccentric manor upon which I make the ice cream, right through to the introduction; the whole thing has been completely blown up and taken out of context. I would like to sincerely apologise to anyone who may have been offended by the video.'

He goes on to say that he feels frustated that other videos, including those of him having fun with customers or at children's hospitals, do not receive the same attention.

He continued: 'Instead, individuals look at where they can hate and just jump on the band wagon and ride it. This is something I have had to learn abruptly, and going forward I will ensure I am more aware of what I am doing in my videos and how they'll be perceived.'
She found out that only unmarried women under 26 were called spinsters

Sophia Benoit, 26, shared her discovery of the word 'thornback' on Twitter

Have you always thought that unmarried women of a certain age were traditionally called spinsters? Well, it's time to think again.

Thousands of people have been left re-evaluating their knowledge after a post on Twitter went viral this week, revealing that women over a certain age were no longer classed as spinsters.

Sophia Benoit, 26, from Los Angeles, California, shared her discovery on Twitter, and the funny post quickly received more than 80,000 likes in just one day.

Sophia Benoit, from Los Angeles, tweeted about the word 'thornback' and explained that it was used to describe unmarried women over the age of 26

She wrote: 'Omg I just found out that spinster used to be reserved for women 23-26 and that after you turned 26 if you were unmarried you became a... THORNBACK. How f*****g great is that name!?'

Sophia joked it was time for her to open a bar named Thornback where 'we only play Rom coms and the bachelor on TV.'

Dozens of people joined her in wonder and wholeheartedly embraced the term.

One person wrote: 'Thornback sounds like a type of predatory dinosaur and that's bada**.'

Another added: 'I was a thornback for a full 10 months! I feel like I missed out on using my superpower.

Sophia, pictured, received thousands of responses to her tweet saying the term was 'bada**'

Another Twitter user agreed, writing: 'It sounds like unmarried women evolve from spiders into dragons, and I dig it.'

A thornback is a ray that has a row of spines along the back and tail, so the dragon link is quite fitting.

Another commented: 'I have been looking for a great name of a girls band since college....JUST found it 40 years later ....The Thornbacks...freakin marvelous!'

Thousands of people said they were shocked they hadn't heard of the term before

Some people couldn't believe that they'd never heard of the word before.

One wrote: 'I'm 54 and no-one HAS EVER TOLD ME THIS. Why? I love that name.'

One woman completely embraced the term saying: 'My single friends and I made and bottled our own wine named Spin Vin. We would get together and sip it during our Spinster Flix evenings. Maybe time for some Thornback Malbec'

Author Rebecca Traister, writes about the term thornback in her book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.

She explains: 'At twenty-six, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment.'

Author Kate Bolick of a book entitled Spinster detailed the history of words associated with women prior to marriage and how they differed from what men have and are labeled within society.

She revealed the use of both spinster and thornback when using it to define an unmarried woman started in colonial America in the 1600s. But how the term thornback was first created remains unclear.

The Cambridge Dictionary describes a spinster as, 'A woman who is not married, especially a woman who is no longer young and seems unlikely ever to marry.'

The words spinster and bachelor to describe unmarried women and men on official documents were used in the UK until 2005, before it was replaced with the catch all 'single,' reports the Smithsonian Mag.
Prince Charles' bond with his grandmother is well documented, but now a new programme has shed further light on just why they were so close.

A Channel 5 documentary claims that the Queen Mother saw in young Prince of Wales the same insecurities she'd observed in her late husband King George VI.

In the documentary, historian Hugo Vickers, who wrote extensively on the late royal's life, says: 'I think the Queen Mother saw in Prince Charles somebody that needed the same sort of support she had given George VI.'

He explained that the Queen mother saw similarities between Charles and her husband who was 'a man who was probably rather insecure in some way, especially when he was little, and possibly even a bit lost'.

In the documentary, royal biographer Penny Junor describes Queen Elizabeth II as 'a standoffish mother' with her heart focused on the monarchy, saying: 'There wasn't a real mother-son bond.'

The Queen Mother had a well-known fondness for her grandson Charles (pictured together on her 101st birthday at Clarence House in 2001 with William and Harry), and it was all down to his similarities with his grandfather George VI, a new documentary claims

The Duke of York pictured with his wife in 1935, a year before he became King George VI

'Her focus was on the Monarchy, on doing the job.' Junor claims.

Historian Robert Lacey also claims: 'Prince Charles obviously found with the Queen Mother the softness that he didn't get from either his own mother or Prince Philip.

'And we know from his own authorised biography he found his mother and his parenting "distant".

'I think he got from his grandmother the warmth that his parents never gave him.'

Childhood days: A young Prince Charles with the Queen Mother and her dog, Pippin

Vickers adds that while courtiers would say the Queen Mother had respect for the important position Charles would one day hold, their relationship was base don 'much more than that'.

'It was a sort of natural friendship across generations,' he says.

In his own official biography, which was published in 1997, Charles, now 70, said he found his parents 'remote.'

He recalled a childhood during which the nursery staff, not his 'emotionally reserved' parents, were the people who 'taught him to play, witnessed his first steps, punished and rewarded him, helped him put his first thoughts into words'.

Charles has spoken openly of his affection for his 'magical' grandmother, with who he once said he enjoyed his closest family relationship.

The documentary also reveals that the Queen Mother was the one who handled 'overexcited' Prince Charles and Princess Anne, then five and three, on their mother's televised coronation.

The Royal Family photographed in August 1951. Left to right: Charles, his grandmother, Princess Margaret, Prince Philip, Kind George VI and the then Princess Elizabeth with Princess Anne

It was Prince Philip who had the idea of broadcasting the historical event, which took place on 2 June 1953 and was watched by 27 million people.

Netflix documentary House of Windsor also revealed that the Queen Mother was protective of Charles and resented Philip.

'She thought he bullied his son and failed to appreciate how sensitive he was,' says the narrator.

The Channel 5 documentary, which airs this Saturday, also dives deeper into the Queen mother's tumultuous relationship with her son-in-law.

An insider reveals that the Queen's mother 'never got along' with the Duke of Edinburgh, now 97, as the two battled over his decision to install telephones in Buckingham Palace.

The Prince of Wales keeping a look out on his fourth birthday, as he leans from a window from Buckingham Palace with his mother, Queen Elizabeth II on 14 November 1952. The Prince of Wales described his mother as 'remote' in his 1994 authorised biography

Philip apparently clashed with his mother-in-law in the 1950s after he removed the footmen who used to take messages from one royal to another.

The Queen Mother disliked Prince Philip's attitude towards technology and stuck with her traditional values, another insider reveals.

Princess Margaret also had a complex relationship with her mother.

It is believed that Queen Elizabeth's only sister, who passed in 2002, never forgave the Queen Mother for keeping her from marrying army veteran and dashing divorcee Peter Townsend.

Yet, the Countess of Snowdon lived with her mother at Clarence House.

The documentary claims that the Queen Mother 'conspired with powers that be' in order to keep the pair apart, as she was still haunted by King Edward's abdication.

The Queen Mother: The Lost Year airs at 9:30pm on Saturday 16th March on Channel 5.




Buying a new home is a daunting prospect, which is why one property expert has devised a 'streetwise' guide to navigating the market.

Georgina Burnett, the UK-based guru known as The Home Genie on Instagram, has shared her tried and tested tips on everything from how to secure the best mortgage to how to add value to your bathroom.

In just nine years, Georgina has gone from a one-bedroom flat Folkestone, Kent, to a stunning seven-bedroom house in Sevenoaks, one of the UK's most expensive areas, and she believes many people are also able to realise their property dreams.

In The Street-wise Guide to Buying, Improving, and Selling Your Home, Georgina highlights key questions to ask and consider when viewing a property for the first time.

Here, we share an extract from the illuminating chapter on savvy house hunting...

Georgina Burnett, pictured, known as The Home Genie on Instagram, has shared her tried and tested tips on everything from how to secure the best mortgage to how to add value to your bathroom. Here, we share her tips on how to be a savvy house hunter

Know your particulars inside out

Really study the details sent by the agent. But be warned that the photos may not be true to life  expect to be a little disappointed.

Note what is missing from the particulars. If there are certain rooms not included, it usually means they would put people off if shown.

If you have studied the particulars you are more likely to notice the important points not included.

Come armed with questions and don't let the agent shy away from answering them. Sometimes you may be shown around by a 'viewing assistant'. You can certainly ask them your questions, but it's worth double-checking with the actual agent as they should be more knowledgeable.

Make a viewings spreadsheet You don't necessarily need to put together a spreadsheet. What you don't want though, are scraps of paper here and there, scattered notes on your phone, or even worse in your head! We need to be organised, as it may be the biggest investment we ever make in our lifetime. If you're a bit more old school and want to write things down, get yourself a notebook to dedicate to the cause so everything is in one place. Rate the properties you find out of 10 so you have your prioritised list. You want to make sure you're seeing the ones you're really keen on first. I like viewing as many as possible in a day, so I can do a like-for-like comparison. In my opinion it's worth taking a day or two off work to do this. Advertisement

Do a drive-by

If it's a property you are really keen on, your appointment shouldn't be the first time you view it. Have a little drive by at different times of the day. Get out and walk around.

Definitely talk to neighbours. It's a legal requirement to give details of a neighbour dispute, but some may slip through the net. You are more likely to get an honest picture of the road from Doris who lives opposite.

If the main selling point is the location, test out the time it takes to get to the station or the local school. Do this at different times of the day so you can get a true feel for the area  is it always quiet? If it's near a school is it like Piccadilly Circus at pick up time? These are important factors that might not be apparent at just a single viewing.

Poker face

Never show excitement to either the vendor or the agent. You don't want to be too negative though either.

These days, particularly with the rise of online agents, it's more common than it used to be for the vendor to show you around the house and if there's a chance to meet them it's always a good thing.

Ask directly why are they selling? If you know the answer to that it can help you to understand their situation. If they're in a hurry you might get away with a cheeky offer, if not you will have to come to terms with the fact they may hold out for a higher price.

Really study the details sent by the agent. But be warned that the photos may not be true to life  expect to be a little disappointed. Stock image

Damp

Damp is a really important thing to check for. There's good and bad damp though.

You could go as far as to buy, borrow or rent a damp meter. Look out for hotspots (or soggy spots as they should be known!) like chimneybreasts  particularly if there is a loft conversion.

Rising damp is another issue though and one that is likely to be costly, if not impossible to fix. There are also things like dry rot and wet rot that you may not be able to uncover as they are below floorboards. Look out for bouncy floorboards, salt deposits and flaky paint at low levels on the ground floor. It could be a minor issue though like flowerbeds above the damp course or broken guttering or downpipes.

Is it a crack den? Hairline cracks are to be expected, but major cracks can be a sign of subsidence. If you spot the latter you must get a structural survey done. The time you want to worry is when they are over 15mm, but even then there are solutions, they are just likely to be costly so should affect the price you pay. Also look out for vegetation around the building. If you use the height of a tree as a guide, imagine its roots could be three times as long and sucking out water from the ground. Anything closer than 20 feet is a potential problem. Advertisement

Condensation is one of the most common issues.

If you buy the property with damp issues you would get an expert in to fix them, but for now it's enough to recognise the warning signs. Look out for mould, flaking plaster, bubbling wallpaper and watermarks on walls and ceilings. It's not necessarily a reason not to buy, but should be a big consideration when negotiating.

Does it suit your needs?

By this I mean, think about the furniture you have, the rooms you tend to spend most of your time in. Is there enough storage? This may not be your forever home, but you do need to live fairly comfortably there for a short while.

Do the stamp and knock

If you're looking to improve a property, sometimes opening it up can modernise and make it seem larger and lighter. It's also desirable for the bulk of today's homebuyers to have an open-plan style. A really easy and cost effective way of doing this is by simply knocking down stud walls, usually added by previous generations.

Tapping the wall to hear if there's a hollow sound will tell you if the wall is weight bearing or not.

I also go around stamping my feet  not so that I can get my own way (although that does happen) but so I can work out if there might be some original floorboards under the carpet, which could save me money.

Come armed with questions and don't let the agent shy away from answering. Stock image

New kitchen needed?

If the kitchen looks like it needs to be replaced because it's shabby or out-dated, check inside the cupboards as you may find that if the layout and the carcasses are good, you only need to replace or paint the doors and get a new worktop.

See through the smoke and mirrors

When you're buying you need to be able to see through certain techniques that may be creating a red herring to divert your eye from something they don't want you to notice.

If it comes down to comparing that feeling of space with another property, make a note of any strategically placed mirrors, and look at what the actual measurements are telling you.

Watch out for clever use of lighting as well. Light can also make a room feel bigger or smaller. If a place feels dingy because they haven't been clever about the lighting it can be an easy fix, so worth bearing in mind if that's putting you off an otherwise desirable property.

Talking of light you need to know which direction the property faces as well so you understand when, if at all, it will have sunlight. Daylight can have a big impact on the appeal of a

The Street-wise Guide to Buying, Improving and Selling Your Home by Georgina Burnett

The roof

Have as close a look at the roof as you can. This can be a very expensive thing to correct. Whether it's a tiled or a flat roof it will have a shelf life, so you need to be aware if that is a consideration.

Sometimes a roof has been retiled with cement ones which used to be fashionable. These are incredibly heavy and can actually cause sagging, so watch out for them.

Windows

If the property doesn't have double-glazing it could cost a fortune to heat. Also if it's not double-glazed the frames could very well be old and potentially rotting as well. Even if it is double-glazed, how good are the windows, and do they come with the appropriate certificates?

Electrics and plumbing

How old are the sockets? Ask to see the fuse box  if that's old it's an indication you may well need to have the whole place rewired, which again will cost you a pretty penny. The same goes for the plumbing situation. Trust your instincts. If it feels wrong, it most likely is. Try running taps and showers to see the pressure.

Get a builder's opinion

It's worth finding a builder you feel you can trust to help identify warning signs and how much any problems are likely to cost to fix. They will often give you half an hour of their time for free as there is potential work for them in the near future. Even a small fee is worth paying if it helps you to understand the cost of doing up the property before you make your offer.

Questions to ask the agent If the homeowner is present at the viewing, ask them as many questions as you can as it's always best to hear it from the horse's mouth. Although, don't always just take their answers as gospel. I once asked the owner of a house I was viewing what the metal jack was for (when it was clearly holding up the dilapidated porch). As his nose grew he replied that it was just somewhere to store it. Agents are there to sell the house though. So although you aren't directly their client, they want things to move as quickly as possible so will want to answer your questions. Or good agents will anyway. There are a number of questions you should absolutely ask as well. Here's a handy list: How long has it been on the market?

Is this the first time to market by this particular vendor?!

Have they had any sales fall through, and if so what was the reason?

Why are they selling?

Are there any management fees?

If its leasehold, how long is the lease on it?

Have there been any neighbour disputes?

Have they ever been refused planning permission?

Do they have the planning permission for any extensions or a loft conversion?

If it's rented out what is the monthly income? Advertisement

The Street-wise Guide to Buying, Improving and Selling Your Home is available at Ideal Home Show, where Georgina will be doing book signings, on or 14.99 on Amazon. For signed copies and more information visit www.GeorginaBurnett.com
The Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex are no strangers to high-end labels, but there does appear to be one key difference in their approaches to famous designers - and that's how branded their looks are.

While Kate loves to mix it up with different designers, Meghan, 37, is more likely to wear one designer from head-to-toe, including accessories.

For instance, on Commonwealth Day earlier this week, the Duchess attended the Westminster Abbey service wearing bespoke all-white ensemble by Victoria Beckham, complete with a chain-print dress, coat, bag and shoes, believed to have cost 9,000.

And Meghan's love of championing a particular designer with a head-to-toe look, it could be all down to her best friend and brand consultant stylist Jessica Mulroney.

Celebrity stylist Lucas Armitage told MailOnline: 'A stylist such as Jessica will be sent lavish look books from brands outlining their key looks. This may be why we see her optioning exact catwalk looks rather than mixing and matching brands like Kate.'

'The reason Kate's looks feature pieces from different designers could be due to the fact that she just shops for herself, rather than have stylist busying at finding her what to wear.

'A stylist who works with designers will often be at events and dinners with them and will be more likely to pay homage to their vision by taking a whole runway look and not altering it.'

Brand it like Beckham: The Duchess of Sussex wore a Victoria Beckham chain-print dress with matching coat and shoes from the same designer. Meghan, 37, has made a habit of sporting the same designer from head-to-toe

Meghan wore all Givenchy in Cheshire this summer when she opened the new Mersey Gateway Bridge with none other than the Queen. The two royals giggled their way through their first joint royal engagement like two old friends

A vision in red! Meghan wore a Valentino dress and carried a cream clutch by the same designer for her arrival in Casablanca on her royal tour of Morocco last month

And while the Duchess of Sussex has made her love of designers well known, it shouldn't ruffle the feathers of her grandmother-in-law.

Etiquette expert William Hanson told Mailonline that: 'There is no etiquette or dictum as to what a royal person can or cannot wear in terms of designers.'

He pointed out that Queen Elizabeth was also a fan of designer coordination: 'Her Majesty often wears a dress by one designer and a hat by another - although sometimes the entire outfit is by the same designer.'

'Fashion, as we all know, is so subjective and certain royalty prefer to wear the same fashion label from head to toe, whereas others like to mix and match.

Dior from head-to-toe. The Duchess, who is believed to be eight months pregnant, wore a kaftan-inspired dress by Dior with a matching clutch and shoes by the French designer while attending a reception hosted by the British ambassador to Morocco in Rabat

A possible reason behind Meghan's solo-designer choices could be her best friend and unofficial stylist Jessica Mulroney

'What is more important is to be modestly and appropriately dressed for the right occasion.'

During a recent trip to Morocco, Meghan showed her love for Valentino and Dior with two outfits featuring only these brands.

Pregnant Meghan wore a bold red cape from the high-end designer and carried a statement cross-body bag, which had a pale pink front and gold V on the front.

On the second day of the three-day trip, she shone in Dior at a reception hosted by British ambassador Thomas Reilly and his wife Leah at their official residence in the capital of Rabat.

Meghan wore a sweeping kaftan-inspired custom Dior gown, which she teamed with metallic heels, a favourite pair of 6,950 diamond earrings and a satin clutch, also by Dior.

The Duchess of Sussex adores Dior and will gladly sport the brand from head-to-toe on several occasions, like on 10 July last year for the centenary of the Royal Air Force in London

In July she also wore a bespoke Dior navy midi dress with a matching clutch bag at the centenary of the Royal Air Force. She paired the outfit with heels also from Dior only branching out to another designer for her statement swirl fascinator, which was made by Stephen Jones.

A possible reason behind Meghan's solo-designer choices could be her best friend and unofficial stylist Jessica Mulroney.

In an interview with Harper's Bazaar the Canadian fashion star discussed the power of getting a brand's item on someone famous.

She said: 'Sometimes all you need is that onetime break and it'll change your life. If you get your item on a celebrity, that's almost like the top of the topa new way of creating business.'

The mother-of-three, whose children were pageboys and bridesmaids at the Royal wedding last summer, even revealed that when the Duchess of Sussex wore a trench dress from Calagary-based House of Nonie in July 2018, she saved them from shutting down.
A mother-of-two battling an aggressive blood cancer is appealing for potential donors so 'she can live to see her five-year-old twins grow up'.

Meena Kumari-Sharma, 41, originally from Hertfordshire, was recently unable to walk or talk, was on oxygen and in intensive care due to acute myeloid leukaemia.

She last saw her twins for two days over Christmas  a period cut short by her deteriorating health.

Forced to undergo gruelling cancer treatment an hour and a half drive away from young Mia and Krish, she relocated to where her mother lives in Leicester, to be looked after as she recovers.

Meena Kumari-Sharma, 41, with her twins Mia and Krish. The mother-of-two was diagnosed with an aggressive form of blood cancer and is hoping for a life-saving stem cell transplant

People from ethnic minorities are less likely to find a match for stem cell transplants. Meena has only 20 percent changes of finding a donor. Pictured, Meena in hospital

She's now looking for her perfect stem cell match, of which she only has a 20 per cent chance of finding, and is using social media to build awareness of her plea, using the hashtag #Match4Meena.

Meena put her career as a successful recruitment consultant in London on hold and mounted her own global stem cell search for a donor.

Her children live with their dad in Hertfordshire, as Mia needs to be close to Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she receives treatment for an unrelated serious medical condition.

Meena, a business management graduate of King's College, video messages her children every day and longs to be reunited with them to do the school run and help with homework.

But if a perfect stem cell match is not found her acute myeloid leukaemia will keep coming back and kill her. And there is no time to waste.

Forced to undergo gruelling cancer treatment an hour and a half drive away from young Mia and Krish, Meena relocated to where her mother lives in Leicester, to be looked after as she recovers. Pictured, on a day out with her children

Meena loves spending time with Krish and Mia, but her poor health means their moments together are far apart and limited

The mother will often video chat to with her kids when she can't see them. Her children live with their dad in Hertfordshire

She was told in October last year that she would need a lifesaving stem cell transplant this month but because she became very ill in December she won't be well enough to have any transplant until June.

Meena said: 'My consultant was really worried and he thought I might die last month.

'Because I was so unwell, I can't receive healthy stem cells for three or four more months now, because they have to make sure all the cancer is out of my blood before they put in any new stem cells.

'So luckily it's bought us more time to find a perfect match. I've not been well enough to see my children and I have had to put all my affairs in order because I don't know what will happen. I just want to get better so I can watch them grow up.'

Meena, pictured with her children, was told in October last year that she would need a lifesaving stem cell transplant this month but because she became very ill in December she won't be well enough to have any transplant until June

Stem cell matches are hard to find. If a full match does not exist within the family - as in Meena's case - a patient is reliant on the kindness of a stranger to give their stem cells for the best hope of recovery.

For white northern European leukaemia sufferers there is a 69 per cent chance of finding a stem cell match from a stranger. But this drops to just 20 per cent for those of black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.

This means her British-Indian heritage makes her less likely to survive the deadly disease, as her chance of finding a perfect stem cell match is reduced.

Mia kissing her mother's head. 'Obviously there is a reason I am alive. Someone or something out there wants me to ' in the world,' the mother said

Meena stays with her mother (right) in Leicester in order to be looked after. If Meena does not find a match, she is unlikely to survive her cancer

Faced with such tricky statistics, how is brave Meena able to stay so upbeat, hopeful and positive?

'My mum is really positive and strong person and I have always been an optimist. I try not to worry. Plus I have been in a few sticky situations in the past and always got through.

'When I was young I worked in Debenhams in the Arndale shopping centre in Manchester, when it was bombed by the IRA.

'Then when I was at university I did an internship on Wall Street and I passed through the World Trade Centre on 9/11.

Meena on a day out with her five-year-old twins Mia and Krish. She said she wants to be alive to see her children grow up

'So I think I'm lucky to have survived both of those massive devastating incidents. Obviously there is a reason I am alive. Someone or something out there wants me in the world.

'There's obviously a point to me being alive. I am not particularly religious but I am spiritual and I believe that there must be a reason I am still here.'

Meena's campaign uses the hashtag Match4Meena across all social platforms. She is supported by two charities that help blood cancer patients find stem cell matches. But despite extensive appeals no perfect match has been found.

Anyone of any ethnicity is encouraged to send away for a free cheek swab testing kit as part of the first stage of donor screening - or attend a donor drive for a simple painless test, involving a cotton bud being rubbed on the inside of your mouth.

Meena has to stay close to her hospital for her treatment and away from her kids. She last saw them for two days over Christmas  a period cut short by her deteriorating health. This is Mia, Krish and Meena on another Christmas Day, before she was diagnosed

She added: 'It might not help me. I happen to have a very specific type of tissue and my stem cell match would be from someone of the same cultural background as me.

'But even if no match is found for me, you could still save a life by becoming a potential stem cell donor.

'I don't know what will happen to me. I don't know if I will still be here in six months. If I can leave a legacy of helping save lives, then it will be worth it.'

More information is available at DKMS and Anthony Nolan websites.
A mother has shared a heart warming open letter to a woman at the chemist who helped her while she was struggling with her kids and screaming baby.

Laura Mazza, from Melbourne, who blogs at Mum on the Run, took to Facebook to thank the woman who helped her out while other parents simply 'stared' and judged her from afar.

'To the woman at the chemist, not the one who stared at me and my children like I was a disgusting pile of filth, the other woman, with only kindness in her eyes. Thank you,' she wrote.

'While I was trying to fill a script and my children who, over tired, started tipping the boxes of cold and flu tablets over while my baby was screaming in my arms, you saved me.'

Laura Mazza from Melbourne, who blogs at Mum on the Run, took to Facebook to share a heart warming open letter to a woman at the chemist who helped her when she was struggling with her children

Laura recounted how the stranger distracted her children and took her baby from her arms.

'You gave them lollipops and told them a funny story. They were captivated by you,' she said.

The unknown woman didn't know it but Laura and her children had been waiting for 45 minutes.

This was despite the fact that Laura had called ahead and thought the script would be ready by the time she arrived.

'To the woman at the chemist, not the one who stared at me and my children like I was a disgusting pile of filth, the other woman, with only kindness in her eyes. Thank you,' she wrote

'While I was trying to fill a script and my children who, over tired, started tipping the boxes of cold and flu tablets over while my baby was screaming in my arms, you saved me'

Laura was hoping that the trip to the chemist would be a quick one so that she could use the day as an opportunity for the kids to get outside and be given a treat.

'You didnt know they stuffed up my script, twice. I was there to fill scripts for ADHD medication and anti-depressants,' the busy mother said.

'You didnt know it, but my anxiety was through the roof and I was ready to burst into tears.

'I gave them ice cream and their sugar high was meant to be worn out at the playground, but because it took so long, they used that energy in the chemist.'

The unknown woman didn't know it but Laura and her children had been waiting for 45 minutes

Laura detailed how she was trying to talk to the pharmacist and listen because she said 'being on your last week of pills is like standing on the edge of a cliff'.

She said everyone in the building could hear her panic and the apparent quivering of her voice.

'You didnt know it but its a mammoth effort for me to get out confidently with all three,' she said.

'I regretted it as soon as they started screaming and the head shakes and annoyed glances came my way.

'You told me you had three kids too, but they were all at your mothers that day, you told me you understood and I felt in my heart you did.'

She said everyone in the building could hear her panic and the apparent quivering of her voice

Although the women didn't know each other, Laura said the stranger saved her from her feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt.

Laura said she never would have gone back to the chemist and it would have taken her a long time to take all three of her children out together in fear of the same thing happening again.

'Ive been on the other side so many times and have been you, and Ive been thanked profusely, and I never understood how much it meant to them until today,' she said.

'You didnt know it, but you saved me. So thank you. Mama village-ing done right.'
A pretty young woman boards a plane bound for Tenerife wearing a skimpy crop top . . . It may sound like the opening line of a bad joke, but Emily OConnors humiliating experience on board a Thomas Cook flight recently was no laughing matter. The 21-year-old trainee accountant was nearly thrown off the aircraft because her crocheted, bra-like top  teamed with a pair of high-waisted baggy trousers  breached the airlines rules on offensive clothing. But was it really offensive? We asked as selection of FEMAIL writers, from Millennials to pensioners, for their very opposing views.

The outfit that left Thomas Cook Airline staff threatening Emily with being thrown off the plane on the tarmac on Birmingham on March 2nd

Emily said that she wore the same outfit on the journey back from Tenerife to Birmingham (pictured boarding the flight home) and had 'no complaints' from Thomas Cook staff, who she described as 'friendly'

SAM TAYLOR: Its selfish and embarrassing

Ive left my passport behind, lost my suitcase and even dropped my ticket down a drain. But would I forget to put on my clothes before leaving for the airport? No. Not even if I was as young and slender as Emily OConnor.

And heres the rub. Emily knows that she has a great figure and was keen to show it off when she boarded a packed plane wearing little more than a starter bra.

Her decision to saunter down the aisle almost naked revealed a lack of social awareness almost as stark as her lack of clothing.

It smacks of a young woman who just doesnt care about others and social mores.

She didnt stop to consider that it would have almost certainly embarrassed other, older passengers and possibly those with strict religious beliefs.

Perhaps she thinks they shouldnt be looking at her  in which case, why not cover up?

Yes, we fought for the right to dress as we please  in fact, I went on marches in the Eighties where we chanted: Yes means yes, no means no, however we dress, wherever we go  but we didnt fight for women to ignore basic codes of public decency and complain when challenged about it.

Sam Taylor: 'Ive left my passport behind, lost my suitcase and even dropped my ticket down a drain. But would I forget to put on my clothes before leaving for the airport? No. Not even if I was as young and slender as Emily OConnor'

Brewer told This Morning: 'This is not a crop top, this is a bra', trying to physically show viewers the back of Emily's garment

JULIE BURCHILL: bah! she looks positively prim

In what strange, warped, dystopian parallel world does a slender 21-year-old  male or female  cause offence by showing their arms, shoulders, upper chest and 2 in of perfectly toned stomach?

One which only Thomas Cook Airlines flies to, thankfully.

Emily OConnor was told her outfit was causing offence to other passengers. I can only suppose that these easily offended types were envious and/or pathologically religious, but in either case it was their responsibility to avert their eyes rather than initiate the public humiliation of a young woman who was allegedly the subject of staff comments over the Tannoy before being forced to wear a jacket over her entirely vacation-appropriate outfit.

If Emily was told to cover up, as she claims, and if the airline had four flight staff around me to get my luggage and take me off the plane, and if it allowed a man to hurl abuse at me while the flight manager and four air staff said nothing, then this situation becomes sinister as well as silly. There are some places where a crop top might not be appropriate  in church or if indulging in a little light prison-visiting in an all-male jail, perhaps.

But for a twentysomething on her way to Tenerife? Honestly, its positively prim.

JULIE BURCHILL: 'In what strange, warped, dystopian parallel world does a slender 21-year-old  male or female  cause offence by showing their arms, shoulders, upper chest and 2 in of perfectly toned stomach?'

ESTHER RANTZEN: Ive seen so much worse on planes

An attractive young woman in holiday gear with not a piercing or tattoo on view: whats not to like?

I cant understand why Thomas Cook made such a fuss about Emily OConnors clothes.

My only anxiety for her is that, in my experience, all planes are bitterly cold and in a crop top she might get goose pimples.

But apart from that, if she sat next to me Id never complain.

It would be far better than the manspreading businessman drinking too much, falling asleep and snoring, who was my last flying companion.

The problem with flying is that it brings you in very close contact with strangers.

All too often, the leaky headphones, pungent Duty Free perfume, and teetering food trays make clothes the last thing I ever worry about.

Next time Emily flies, I would recommend that she takes a raincoat. I have a favourite scarlet version by Burberry which is at least 30 years old and has flown with me around the world.

The only problem is that when I fly with Virgin, where the crew wear a bright red uniform, people ask me to bring them more peanuts.

Thomas Cook should remember that beautiful young people like Emily, with their golden tans, shorts and T-shirts, parading through arrivals, are a perfect advertisement for its holidays.

So rather than insulting and scolding them, its staff should smile, thank them and say it hopes to see them again.

Not that they are likely to see Emily OConnor again any time soon.

ESTHER RANTZEN: 'An attractive young woman in holiday gear with not a piercing or tattoo on view: whats not to like? I cant understand why Thomas Cook made such a fuss about Emily OConnors clothes'

CRISTINA ODONE: Ban the holiday exhibitionists

Emily OConnor looks pretty, young, and feisty. But I suspect she is something else, too. That teensy weensy bikini top is the give-away: Miss OConnor belongs to the growing band of exhibitionist holidaymakers.

OK, so Thomas Cook was a bit heavy-handed (did it really need four crew members, plus a flight manager, to persuade her to slip on a jacket?!), but I dont think it was guilty of wicked sexism or ageism. It was simply striking a blow for the rest of us, ordinary passengers, who are fed up with being a captive audience to todays vacation exhibitionists.

Being sealed in an airborne metal tube with this tribe is agony. From the second they board, theyre taking selfies, posturing for their Instagram feed, issuing foul-mouthed greetings to their friends back home.

Usually well-refreshed, they take on the role of in-flight entertainers, trading quips with fellow passengers and crew members.

They want everyone to know how much they plan to partyyyyyy when they get there.

We have to endure this in silence (theres nowhere to go)  or risk being attacked and labelled snobs. They dress the part  or undress, in the case of Miss OConnor. The men, too, with their hairy legs and miles of tattoos.

Weve seen it all, but, oh, we so didnt want to!

Finally, heres someone who says: Enough!

We, the passengers, are hugely grateful to Thomas Cook for sparing us an embarrassing floor show. If it wants to champion the ordinary flyer, great.

Our requests are modest. No nuts for those who suffer from nut allergies; no aggressive drunks who traumatise the toddlers, as well as everyone else on board; no exhibitionist holidaymakers who want us to look at them.

CRISTINA ODONE: 'Emily OConnor looks pretty, young, and feisty. But I suspect she is something else, too. That teensy weensy bikini top is the give-away: Miss OConnor belongs to the growing band of exhibitionist holidaymakers'

HENRY DEEDES: If youve got it, flaunt it

Causing offence. That was the killer phrase in this ridiculous carry-on. Thomas Cook staff were worried that Emily OConnors cropped top might cause offence to other passengers.

Who were these prune-cheeked puritans so perplexed by a bit of exposed shoulder? No one, apparently. None of Emilys fellow passengers gave her outfit as much as a second glance. Well, I suspect thats not strictly true.

Doesnt Thomas Cooks stance just encapsulate this barmy, snowflake era in which we live? Well let our passengers drink until perpendicular, shout bawdy insults across the aisles and turn a blind eye when couples lock themselves away in the lavs.

But raise a few eyebrows with their choice of clothing? Ohhhh . . . cant have that.

Look, aeroplanes are hot, horrible places. Dry, stale air turns your nasal passages to corrugated cardboard.

Invariably theres an overweight passenger spilling over their arm rest into your personal space. Comfortable togs are key.

Whenever I take a flight more than two hours long, I take a pair of pyjama bottoms with me to change into.

As such, Emily looked pretty sensibly dressed to me. And besides, just look at the delightful dear.

As impresario Max Bialystock declares in Mel Brookss movie The Producers: When youve got it, flaunt it! Flaunt it!

HENRY DEEDES: Causing offence. That was the killer phrase in this ridiculous carry-on. Thomas Cook staff were worried that Emily OConnors cropped top might cause offence to other passengers'

CAROL SARLER: she gives Brits a bad name

Thomas Cook and Emily OConnor were both wrong. She demonstrated not a shred of dignity by choosing to fly in what looks like her underwear. Im trying to imagine what she was thinking when she got, uh, dressed that morning.

Afraid of being too hot on the plane? In March? Really?

No. The fact is she wanted to be looked at by strangers, and in a sexual way. And by dressing this way she showed a complete lack of self-respect. Worse, she showed no respect, either, for the people of Tenerife, for Im assuming she must have worn this outfit over there.

Spain is still a very Catholic country and when yet another semi-naked young woman lands on their soil, all it does is reinforce the dim view so many Spanish people already  and, sadly, correctly  have of British tourists.

But Thomas Cook is wrong, too. It is not in the contract between airline and passenger that it should police anyones choice of outfit, and nor should it be.

Some of its crew claimed that Miss OConnor was causing offence to fellow travellers.

If that is really a concern of theirs then, as a very frequent flyer, may I suggest the airline starts by policing the people who really do cause offence, such as those with smelly feet.

Or those who bring airport fast-food with them and eat it 18 in from the noses of their nauseated neighbours.

Yet is there ever even the mildest rebuke from the crew? Never a peep.

CAROL SARLER: 'Thomas Cook and Emily OConnor were both wrong. She demonstrated not a shred of dignity by choosing to fly in what looks like her underwear. Im trying to imagine what she was thinking when she got, uh, dressed that morning'

ALEXANDRIA DALE: stop picking on us millennials

Emily is dressed perfectly appropriately for her age and destination. I am 24 and, like her, own a number of similar crop tops, as do my sisters and all of my friends.

Theyre seen as totally appropriate for a casual daytime look, or dressed up with a high-waisted skirt and heels for a night out.

I once wore a crop top to work with a sliver of my stomach on show, and no one said anything.

As for the question why do millennials dress like this  well, why shouldnt we?

Television shows such as Love Island have changed what is deemed appropriate to wear.

For at least one hour every night for eight weeks, many of us watched young men and women spend their days dressed in bikinis and tiny trunks. And they looked good!

Fashionable millennials can also no longer place comfort over style as a travel priority, thanks to social media.

A holiday now starts the second we arrive at the airport, giving rise to the online trend of the airport outfit, with #airportstyle tagged 171,000 times on Instagram.

As Victoria Beckham tweeted: The airport is my runway.

Personally, I dont care that Emily wore a crop top on a plane. What I do care about is the way she was treated. Once again, millennials are attacked by older generations because were seen as easy targets.

ALEXANDRIA DALE: 'Emily is dressed perfectly appropriately for her age and destination. I am 24 and, like her, own a number of similar crop tops, as do my sisters and all of my friends'

RACHEL JOHNSON: her loon pants are far worse!

Its either a bralet or a summer top from Zara, but either way, I dont find the outfit worn by Emily OConnor for her trip from Birmingham to Tenerife for some winter sun remotely offensive.

I just find it bonkers in a mad dogs and Englishmen kind of way instead.

I have often made a study, while transiting British airports, of the clothes we wear either when heading off to or returning from hotter climes.

Even if it is freezing here, you will find us wearing beachwear airside. And on our return to the UK, I can always count a few Brits in shorts and flipflops at baggage reclaim, even though its sub-zero outside.

Emilys outfit was in this sunny-side-up vein  lets get this holiday started!

Admittedly, if Emily were my daughter, I might have remarked neutrally that it could be cold on board and she might need another layer, but then again, I might have left it.

Emily  an adult and a trainee accountant, after all  looks lovely in her summer top and seems to have recovered sufficiently from her ordeal to mount a noisy social media campaign against the airline.

What is undoubtedly inappropriate is that a young woman was humiliated and made to feel so upset by the actions of the airline crew, and it is right that Thomas Cook has since apologised to her.

The bralet was fine. Even cute. My secret theory is that the airline was really objecting to Emilys ridiculous orange loon pants. In which case, Thomas Cook has my full support.

RACHEL JOHNSON: 'Its either a bralet or a summer top from Zara, but either way, I dont find the outfit worn by Emily OConnor for her trip from Birmingham to Tenerife for some winter sun remotely offensive'

PAUL CONNOLLY: it's a mortifying overreaction

There can be few things more embarrassing about being British than our tendency to extreme prudishness.

Emily OConnor nearly being thrown off a Thomas Cook flight for wearing an inappropriate crop top is such a mortifying overreaction you cant help but wonder whether the whole story has been fabricated.

A woman, in 2019, baring a little (but not a lot of) flesh, is deemed improperly dressed.

The fact it was even commented upon is frankly batty.

The worrying thing is that such prissiness is often the sign of an infantile  or repressive  society, where we have to be protected from bare flesh (but usually only of the female kind), naughty scenes on TV and swearing.

But this flight crews silly reaction seems, thankfully, to be an anomaly.

The most heartening episode of this farrago has been the reaction of the media.

The uproar from most of the grown-ups has been robust  the sheer stupidity of the flight staff has been rightly vilified.

I really do hope for the sake of their health, that the flight attendants who threatened to bundle Emily off the flight to Tenerife never go out on the town in a British city centre on a Friday night.

The poor, prissy dears would surely have conniptions.
Rightwing terrorist and prime attacker Brenton Tarrant, apparently, livestreamed the assault that triggered a lockdown of the New Zealand city.

This image taken from the alleged shooters video, which was filmed on Friday, shows him as he drives and he looks over to three guns on the passenger side of his vehicle in New Zealand. (Photo: AP)

Christchurch: Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers killed 49 people in New Zealand as authorities charged an Australian man in his late 20s, arrested three others and defused two explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack.

Rightwing terrorist and prime attacker Brenton Tarrant, apparently, livestreamed the assault that triggered a lockdown of the New Zealand city.

In what appeared to be the worst attack against Muslims in a western country, witnesses spoke of victims being shot at close range, with women and children believed to be among those killed. The gunmen struck close to 2 pm during the Friday prayers, barging into the mosques and shooting at will.

The carnage also continued outside where passers-by were targeted.

A video showed that a gunman spent more than two minutes inside one of the mosques spraying terrified worshippers with bullets again and again, sometimes re-firing at people he has already cut down. At least 41 people were killed at Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch and seven died at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Another person died in hospital.

Police is treating the incident as terrorism and motive racial. Tarrant was charged with murder and is likely to appear in a Christchurch court on Saturday. Apart from Tarrant, three others, including a woman, were arrested. Two of these were taken into custody at the scene with guns while the fourth person may have had nothing to do with the attack. Several guns were recovered from both mosques. Two IEDs on a vehicle were disabled by the police later.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the events in Christchurch represented an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence and acknowledged many of those affected may be migrants and refugees. In addition to the dead, she said more than 20 people were seriously wounded. It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, Ms Ardern said, adding that national security threat level was being raised to the second-highest level.

Without naming Tarrant, Christchurch police commissioner Mike Bush said that a man had been charged with murder. He did not mention the other three suspects and did not say whether the same shooter was responsible for both attacks.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed that one of the four people arrested in Christchurch was an Australian-born citizen.

According to Australian media reports, Tarrant worked as a personal trainer at Big River Gym in the northern New South Wales city of Grafton between 2009 and 2011, before he left to go travelling overseas in Asia and in Europe.

The victims of the shooting also included people of Indian origin. As per updates received from multiple sources there are nine missing persons of Indian nationality/ origin. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families, tweeted Indian high commissioner Sanjiv Kohli.

According to media reports, Tarrant allegedly claimed responsibility for the shootings and left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack. He said he was a 28-year-old white Australian and a racist. The 74-page document The Great Replacement starts off quoting a Dylan Thomas poem, Do not go gentle into that good night, and then moves onto a rant about white genocide.

On a now-deleted Twitter account, Tarrant had posted photos of machine gun magazines and a link to his manifesto for his actions, The Great Replacement.

Shooting survivor Anwar Alsaleh was preparing for Friday prayers on the Muslim holy day at the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch when the gunman walked in.

Mr Alsaleh hid in a bathroom and tried to call emergency services as shots rang out, he told a reporters, adding that he heard the gunman say an expletive about Muslims and Were going to kill you today.

He said he heard people begging for their lives. They shot them until they died, he said.

At the Linwood Avenue mosque, about five kilometres away, Syed Mazharuddin said a man wearing body armour and a helmet opened fire.

Just around the entrance door there were elderly people sitting there praying and he just started shooting at them, he told the New Zealand Herald.

Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter the mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

Mr Peneha, who lives next door to the mosque, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in his driveway, and fled.

Mr Peneha said he then went into the mosque to try and help. I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said.

US President Donald Trump called the terror attacks on two mosques in New Zealand a horrible massacre and offered US assistance to its ally.

Queen Elizabeth-II, in a message, said, I have been deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch... At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders.

New Zealand is generally considered to be a welcoming country for immigrants and refugees. Last year, the Prime Minister announced the country would boost its annual refugee quota from 1,000 to 1,500 starting in 2020.
A man who was deliberately infected with HIV has bravely waived his right to anonymity to share his story.

Lenny, an American man living in Brighton, discovered he was HIV positive in February 2016 after Daryll Rowe secretly ripped the condom they were using.

Dubbed the 'HIV hairdresser' Rowe, from Edinburgh, became the first person to be convicted in the UK for deliberately infecting others with the virus and was jailed for life in April 2018.

He is said to have embarked on a 'revenge' campaign on the gay community after he was diagnosed with HIV himself, and met his victims on gay dating app Grindr.

Lenny is one of five men who tell their stories in new BBC documentary The Man Who Used HIV As a Weapon.

He told how Rowe was 'adamant' about having unprotected sex after the pair met online, and didn't tell him about the sabotaged condom until several weeks after they had slept together.

Rowe, pictured, is said to have given the men the virus in a 'revenge' campaign on the gay community after he was diagnosed with HIV, and met his victims on gay dating app Grindr

Daryll Rowe, a hairdresser from Edinburgh, became the first person to be convicted in the UK for deliberately infecting others with the virus and was jailed for life in April 2018 (pictured in handcuffs at Brighton Crown Court in October 2017)

After they slept together 'things got a little weird', according to Lenny, who says Rowe quickly became 'possessive' and 'insulting' in a string of abusive WhatsApp messages.

It was only after Lenny tried to block the Scotsman that he received the chilling phone call that caused his world to come crashing down.

'He said, "You're gonna burn... you're stupid. I ripped the condom, I got you,"' says Lenny, who recalls feeling a 'rush of fear' come over him.

Initially he didn't take Rowe's threat seriously, but after he became sick two weeks later he visited a clinic where he tested positive for HIV.

'I remember saying to myself, how can I be so stupid,' says Lenny, who 'felt like his life was over'.

Victim Lenny, pictured, discovered he was HIV positive in February 2016 after Daryll Rowe secretly ripped the condom they were using. He has bravely waived his right to anonymity in a new BBC documentary exploring Rowe's 'dangerous, nationwide campaign'

Lenny, pictured, explains that initially he didn't take Rowe's threat seriously, but after he became sick two weeks later he visited a clinic where he tested positive for HIV

Lenny went straight to Sussex Police after learning he was HIV positive (pictured in police footage), which helped officers link Rowe to a string of cases in the North East

When the nurse revealed she'd seen four men with identical cases, all relating to an unnamed Scotsman, Lenny went straight to Sussex Police who immediately linked his ordeal to a string of similar reports in the North East.

Police arrested Rowe and handed him into the custody of Police Scotland, who discovered he had targeted hundreds of other men on dating apps and were forced to issue a public health warning.

After briefly going into hiding, Rowe was charged and handed a life sentence in April 2018 and ordered a serve at least 12 years following the landmark case, which was the first of its kind.

Rowe had successfully infected five men from the Brighton area and the North East with HIV, while at least five others narrowly escaped contracting the life-changing virus.

Producers also spoke to Rowes foster parents, pictured, who took him in at the age of eight, as they try to come to terms with and to understand their sons crimes

Daryll Rowe as a young boy on holiday with his foster parents. The couple described him as 'very loving' and told of their shock on discovering his crimes

WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF HIV? Most people who are infected with HIV experience a short, flu-like illness about two to six weeks after infection. The symptoms usually last for between one or two weeks. After the initial symptoms, those with HIV may not have any more symptoms for several years. Later on, other symptoms that may present themselves include weight loss, chronic diarrhoea, night sweats and recurrent infections. Source: NHS Advertisement

The harrowing BBC documentary tells the intimate and shocking accounts of the five victims, some of whom have never told their families, as they speak publicly for the first time.

It explores how, over 18 months, Daryll Rowe set out on a 'dangerous, nationwide campaign' to trick unsuspecting men into having unprotected sex with him.

Victims tell how Rowe would lie about his HIV status, sabotage condoms and later send abusive text messages taunting them with the virus, such as: You have HIV. Lol.

A total of 24 men reported Rowe to the police, but nobody knows how many others he may have slept with.

The victims' candid and revealing testimonies, read out in court, revealed the devastating effect of psychological abuse they suffered.

Producers also spoke to Rowes foster mother, Jacqui, as she tries to come to terms with and to understand her sons crimes.

A psychiatric report concluded Rowe's crimes showed a high level of sadism and violence and as such he was a high risk or causing serious harm to gay men through similar offences

Rowe's mugshot. The Scotsman was sentenced in April 2018 and Judge Christine Henson QC, sentencing, referred to his crimes as a 'determined hateful campaign of sly violence'

Rowe in handcuffs. He was handed a life sentence in April 2018 and ordered a serve at least 12 years following the landmark case, which was the first of its kind

Rowe was handed a life sentence in April 2018 and Judge Christine Henson QC, sentencing, called the crimes a 'determined hateful campaign of sly violence'.

'You are the first individual to be sentenced for Section 18 offences in the context of infecting others with HIV,' she said

Rowe made contact with men on the dating app, Grindr, before infecting them with HIV

'With the full knowledge of the risk you posed to others and the legal implications of engaging in risky sexual practices, you embarked on a deliberate campaign to infect other men with the HIV virus.

'Unfortunately for five of the men you met your campaign was successful.'

The judge added: 'They describe living with a life sentence as a result of your cruel and senseless acts. Many of those men were young men in their twenties at the time they had the misfortune to meet you.'

The judge told Rowe he poses a significant risk to the public, adding: 'You will potentially remain a danger to others for the rest of your life.'

In a victim impact statement read out ahead of his sentencing, one of Rowe's victims told of the lasting impact of the crimes.

A psychiatric report read to the court concluded Rowe's crimes showed a high level of sadism and violence and as such he was a high risk or causing serious harm to gay men through similar offences.

The Man Who Used HIV As A Weapon is available on iPlayer now
Royal occasions tend to have an air of formality, but Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf certainly livened things up as he performed an impressive dance move while waiting to greet guests at an official dinner.

The royal showed he's still twinkle-toed at 72 as he shuffled across the floor while waiting to welcome guests for an official government dinner at the Royal Palace in Stockholm last night.

In a clip showing the line ups, six members of the Swedish Royal family were seen dressed in formal elegant outfits as they smile and talk before guests arrived.

The Swedish Royal family hosted an official government dinner at the Royal Palace in Stockholm last night. Pictured left to right are Princess Sofia, Prince Carl Philip, Queen Silvia, King Carl XVI Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel

The grandfather-of-seven kept a straight face as he hilariously moved his feet and danced across the room, closer to where the guests later appeared from.

As he grooved across the wooden floor, the King looked at his wife but did not break a smile or laugh at his unusual action.

Crown Princess Victoria did appear to smile after her father's dance move but was ever the professional by keeping her eyes on the incoming guests.

King Carl, Queen Silvia, Crown Princess Victoria, her husband Prince Daniel, Duke of Vastergotland, Prince Carl Philip, Duke of Varmland and his wife Princess Sofia were all present at the Official Government dinner.

Before starting to greet the guests King Carl XVI Gustaf, left, shuffled his feet across the floor

The 72-year-old monarch looked towards his family as he danced but did not laugh or smile

The Queen and Princess Sofia both opted for fitted ball gowns, with the Queen wearing a beautiful lace red dress.

Crown Princess Victoria wore a floor-length black and white dress with a detailed skirt, covered in tiny flowers for the occasion.

Princess Madeleine, the King and Queen's youngest daughter, was not seen at the gala last night.

Earlier this week Princess Victoria was presented with beautiful bouquets of colourful flowers outside Stockholm's Royal Palace, in honour of her name day.

The women all wore floor-length gowns with long sleeves to the dinner while the men wore smart suits and bow ties. Pictured left to right is Princess Sofia, Prince Carl Philip, Queen Silvia and the King

King Carl XVI Gustaf spoke to his wife and daughter before the event started. Crown Princess Victoria, right, wore a detailed black and white dress with delicate flowers on the skirt

Many names are associated with certain dates in Sweden - March 12 in the case of the name Victoria - and the occasion is often celebrated as if it is a birthday.

Victoria, who is the eldest child of King Carl and heir apparent to the Swedish throne, smiled for the cameras as she stood in the centre of the courtyard alongside her family.

Her two children were bundled up in winter coats and hats to protect them from the cold during the ceremony.

Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden attended her Name Day ceremony outside Stockholm's Royal Palace on Tuesday. Pictured, Victoria of Sweden, Prince Oscar, Princess Estelle and Prince Daniel

Looking pretty in pink, Princess Estelle of Sweden showed off her baby teeth as she smiled for the cameras alongside her mother

Like father like son! Prince Daniel of Sweden and his son, Prince Oscar, looked a mirror image as they opted for matching smart navy coats and pinstripe trousers

Prince Oscar was dressed in a navy duffle coat, complete with woolly hat and smart pinstriped trousers in an outfit which was almost identical to his father's.

While little Princess Estelle looked pretty in pink with her hair styled in two cute side plaits and was wrapped head-to-toe in the soft pastel colour.

The family were in high spirits, but three-year-old Oscar looked overwhelmed by the celebrations.
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It's Gold Cup day at Cheltenham, and eager revellers were determined not to let the wet weather rain on their parade, donning extravagant headgear and high heels to witness the festival's spectacular grand finale.

Feathers and florals were the order of the day, with many opting for chic tartan suits and fur-lined coats to keep out the early Spring chill.

The heavens well and truly opened at lunchtime, causing havoc as racegoers pulled their coats and scarves over their heads to shield themselves from the downpour.



The Gold Cup is the jewel in the crown of jump racing, with reigning champion Native River in with a strong chance of doing the double if he can fend off hotly tipped rival Presenting Percy.

Foxtrot: Cheltenham Gold Cup revellers get into the party spirit as the final day of racing draws to a close

The paddock became a makeshift dance floor as revellers kick-started their weekends early on Friday afternoon

A Michelle Keegan lookalike (left) is clearly enjoying herself as the party gets going at Cheltenham, while a happy duo celebrate a win

Sitting pretty: Two female racegoers take shelter under a brolly and rest their feet after walking around the paddock in heels all day

Tipping it down: Racegoers use their coats to shelter from the hevay downpours at Cheltenham today

Ladies got on the Champagne early, sipping from miniature bottles of Moet as they watched the races take place

Two ladies (left) squeeze under one brolly as they arrive in the rain while another (right) clings onto her hat as the rain lashes down in Cheltenham. And one practical racegoer remembered to pack some disposable overshoes

Brolly good: Two female racegoers take shelter under a yellow check umbrella as they made their way into the grounds of Prestbury Park

Hats off to them! Cheltenham racegoers filter into the paddock for the Gold Cup - with these two ladies going the extra mile with their head gear

Punters give the event a big thumbs up despite the inclement weather which didn't put a dampener on the final day

Carol Vorderman was one of the first celebrities to arrive, making a statement with a monochrome look set off by bright red gloves and a large waisted belt with a gold buckle.

Zara and Mike Tindall made it four days in a row, with Zara sporting a bespoke Claire Mischevani coat dress with a black and white cocktail hat by Scottish milliner Sally Ann Provan.

The Guinness was flowing at Cheltenham yesterday as St Patrick's Thursday saw racegoers well and truly get into the Irish party spirit.

It was a magical day of racing, with jockey Bryony Frost riding into the history books to become the first female to ride a Grade One winner at the meet.

Just over an hour later jockey Lizzie Kelly followed suit, winning the Brown Advisory & Merriebelle Stable Plate Handicap Chase aboard Siruh Du Lac.

Zara and Mike Tindall geared up for the final day of the festival, with Zara sporting a bespoke Claire Mischevani coat dress with a black and white cocktail hat by Scottish milliner Sally Ann Provan

Zara Tindall, Natalie Pinkham, Autumn Phillips and friends cheer on the Gold Cup racing at Cheltenham this afternoon

Princess Anne opted for a bright turquoise wool coat for the final day of the festival, featuring the infamous Gold Cup

Princess Anne presents winning jockey Pete Townsend with the Magners Cheltenham Gold Cup Chase

Carol Vorderman looks keen to make an impact with this striking monochrome look, perfectly set off by a pair of bright red leather gloves and an eye-catching waisted belt

Richard Hammond battles against the elements with his family as they arrive at a rain-lashed Cheltenham this morning

Lily Allen arrives draped in designer gear for the final day of the festival in Cheltenham, and just about managed to dodge the rain showers

Lily had a prime spot on the balcony along with actor Luke Evans as the races got underway this afternoon

There were wild celebrations in the paddock after Paisley Park romped to victory in the Sun Racing Stayers' Hurdle.

Two years ago the race horse, owned by former shop steward Andrew Gemmell, who has been blind since birth, nearly died from a serious illness.

But the seven-year-old made a miraculous recovery, going on to win all four of his races this season, including Grade One successes at Ascot and Cheltenham.

Tears were shed as Gemmell, who relies on radio commentaries and tannoys for racing updates, and trainer Emma Lavelle lifted the trophy following jockey Aidan Coleman's spectacular ride.

British jockey and former track cyclist Victoria Pendleton looked chic in a grey check suit, set off with a navy felt hat and Le Chameau scarf

Autumn Phillips (middle) hung onto her Camilla rose fedora hat as she entered the paddock, wearing a navy Guinea London coat

The weather was better in Chelsea! Made in Chelsea stars Liv Bentley and Digby Edgley (left) and Ollie and Gareth Locke make their way into the grounds

Willie Mullins finally takes home the Gold Cup... It was another victory for trainer Willie Mullins today, but this one was extra sweet. His horse Al Boum Photo romped to glory in the Gold Cup - his first ever victory in the race, having been runner-up six times. Jockey Paul Townend said: 'I can't believe it. It's a Gold Cup, there's only one a year. I'm privileged to be riding for him (Mullins).' Pentland Hills took gold in the opener after making a mistake at the first flight of the JCB Triumph Hurdle. But the race was tinged with sadness as Sir Erec suffered a fatal injury. Favourite Ch'tibello went on to win the Randox Health County Handicap Hurdle, with winning jockey Harry Skelton telling ITV Racing his horse put on a 'masterclass training performance'. The third race - the Albert Bartlett Novices' Hurdle - was won by Minella Indo, ridden by jockey Rachael Blackmore. She said: 'I can't believe it. We always knew he was a really nice horse.' Paul Townend celebrates on Al Boum Photo after winning the 3.30 Magners Cheltenham Gold Cup Chase Advertisement

A Cheltenham reveller opts for a bright red tartan jacket to attend the final day of the festival (right), while another goes for a chic wool suit and silk scarf (left)

A gang of female revellers pose for a snap as they prepare for the first race of the day to get underway

Scarves and coats doubled up as rain shields as visitors battled against the grueling elements earlier today

Rain, rain, go away! These ladies defied the wet weather as they turned out wearing smart hats, coats and fur stoles

Looks like they've backed a winner! Two male friends celebrate after one of their horses rode to victory at Cheltenham

Let's get this party started! One group of friends were clearly in a festive mood as they popped open a bottle of fizz

Bring on the glamour! Three female friends kick off the celebrations with drinks sipped from plastic cups this afternoon

Cheers! Two friends toasted a somewhat wet and windy day with mini bottles of Moet champagne sipped from foil flutes

No one's raining on their parade! These two women remained in high spirits despite the cold and gloomy weather on Friday

Feeling furbulous: Fur was very much on-trend, with revellers sporting cosy coats, fuzzy boot toppers and warm scarves

A brightly coloured pair grab a coffee as they make their way into Prestbury Park for an action-packed day of racing

These two fine fillies (left) opted for a black and white theme to their outfits - with one braving the chilly weather with bare legs and a light jacket - while another opted for a vintage pink ensemble topped off with a stunning floral and feathered hat

Selfie queen: A racegoer pauses to get a snap of her best side as she marches into the paddock for the final day of the meet

A reveller clings onto her shoes and draws her coat above her head as the heavens opened this morning

A racegoer can't bring herself to watch the final few hurdles as the action gets underway on Gold Cup Day at Cheltenham

Comedian Dom Joly also came prepared for the wet weather, and donned a smart green tartan check wool suit - a nod to the surrounding Gloucestershire countryside

The skies might not be bright overhead, but these racegoers made sure their outfits more than made up for it

No raining on their parade! Revellers refuse to let the wet weather dampen their spirits as they arrive ready to party

Family affair: Gillian (left), Patrick and Raymond Gilborne returned to Cheltenham today, and their chic outfits were yet again impressively coordinated

The wet weather played havoc with the field, as one unfortunate stiletto-wearing racegoer discovered
A mother-of-four has posted an inspirational photo to Facebook that shows the reality of family life and being a mother raising a number of children.

Jazmyne Futrell, 31, from Victorville, California, shared the photo to her Facebook page Mixed Mom Brown Babies on Monday, February 18.

The photograph sees the busy mom cooking dinner, holding and breastfeeding her youngest child, and helping another with homework while her other two children play games at her feet on the kitchen floor.

Multitasking: Jazmyne Futrell shared a photo to Facebook that sees her cooking, breastfeeding one child, helping another with homework, while her other two kids play on the kitchen floor

Family: The 'exhausted' mom-of-four said she shared the photo to her Facebook page to show the reality of family life, as she said 'there's not enough realness on social media'

Happy: The 31-year-old said of the photo: 'I shouldnt be cooking while holding my baby, my son has a ponytail because I didnt have time to braid his hair, and my kids are on the floor'

Captioning the photo, Jazmyne wrote: 'Friends with no kids: "You go to bed at 9pm? Girl I cant fall asleep before 11pm."

'Mom friends: "You go to bed at 9am? Girl I cant seem to stay up past 8:30."

She added: 'With four kids I'm way too exhausted to even think about having a life after dark and way to busy to go to bed at a decent hour.

Lifestyle: The busy mother began blogging about family life and motherhood after she had her youngest child, Koehen

'What's your bedtime? Do you have a night life or are you in the bed before the sun?' she asked her followers on the page.

The image sees Jazmyne cooking chicken noodle soup at the same time that she is breastfeeding her seven-month-old son Koehn.

Her seven-year-old son Karson can be seen tugging at her shirt, trying to get his mother's attention so she will help him with his homework.

Meanwhile, her daughter Kinley, five, and and three-year-old son Karter can be seen playing with a toy on the kitchen floor.

Speaking to Yahoo Lifestyle, she explained the context of the photo, which was taken by her husband - who Jazmyne has been married to for approximately seven years.

She said: 'There's so much to say about this photo.'

Jazmyne, who started her blog after she had her fourth child Koehen, added: 'I shouldnt be cooking while holding my baby, my son has a ponytail because I didnt have time to braid his hair, and my kids are on the floor.

Help: Jazmyne said she was also eager to post the photo online because she thought it would help other mothers realize that they're not going through their battles alone

Thoughts: Jazmyne said there was 'so much to say' about the photograph, which was taken by her loving husband Desmond (pictured)

Questioned: She revealed that she is often asked questions when out in public with her kids, as she said one woman once looked relieved at Jazmyne's age when she told her she was 31

Tired: Jazmyne also said that, while she was in labor with her son Koehn, a nurse asked her husband if he was the father of the child, because there are 'a lot of single moms' nowadays

'That's why I posted it - there's not enough realness on social media,' she added.

Jazmyne said she wanted to post the photo online because such photos can help other mothers realize that they're not fighting their battles alone.

The mother-of-four began blogging about motherhood after suffering postpartum depression.

Contrast: In comparison, the mom-of-four said her husband is often praised for doing things that mothers would naturally be expected to do

She explained: 'I had postpartum depression and all the other moms looked amazing on social media.

'Many times I thought, "Can I do this?" I hope showing photos like this lets mothers know they're not fighting their battles alone,' she added.

The 31-year-old told the publication that people have often made comments to her when they see her out and about with her four children.

She said: 'A woman asked me, "How old you?" and was relieved to learn I was older than expected.

'While in labor with Koehn, the nurse asked my husband if he was a father to my unborn child or [of] my kids because she [said there are] "a lot of single moms",' Jazmyne added.

However, Jazmyne explained, in comparison, her loving husband Desmond is often praised for doing things that are naturally expected of a mother.

She said one day while she was out shopping with her family, Desmond took the children to another section of a store so Jazmyne could try on clothes without any distractions.

Unfair: A woman once praised Desmond for 'babysitting' the kids while Jazmyne shopped for clothes. However, Jazmyne said: 'He's required by law to care for them'

Expectations: Jazmyne (pictured with husband Desmond) said 'the bar is set so low for fathers' in terms of what is expected from them in comparison of what is expected of mothers

Blog: The mother-of-four's blog - Mixed Mom Brown Babies - features different posts about motherhood, travel, children, and her own 'random thoughts'

She said: 'A woman told me, "I just want to compliment you for your awesome husband. He's babysitting so you can shop."

'He wasn't babysitting his own children - he's required by law to care for them.

'The bar is set so low for fathers,' she said.

Jazmyne regularly posts baby and mother-related posts on her blog, Mixed Mom Brown Babies.

Some topics covered on her blog include 'mommyhood', travel, kids, 'must haves' and 'random thoughts'.
NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel has described the emotional moment his three-year-old son, who lives with a rare neurological disorder, called him 'Dada' for the first time.

The 45-year-old journalist's son Henry was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome, a genetic mutation that leads to severe cognitive deficits and physical impairment. The condition is rare, even more so in boys, and there is no cure.

Engel opened up about Henry's milestone on the Today show Friday after penning a touching essay about the significance of hearing his son say 'Dada,' explaining it was something he has been waiting to hear for years.

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Major milestone: Richard Engel, 45, has opened up about the touching moment his three-year-old son Henry called him 'Dada' for the first time

Diagnosis: Henry is living with Rett Syndrome, a rare genetic neurological disorder that leads to severe cognitive deficits and physical impairment

'I finally got a Dada. It was a long time coming, which made it all the sweeter  an unexpected reward,' he began his essay. 'Our son Henry is three and a half years old and has special needs.

'His physical and mental development arent on pace with other children. So when I got the Dada from him, I went a little wild.'

The war correspondent explained that he had been away on a reporting trip, covering the fall of the Islamic State in Syria. While he was gone, his wife Mary Forrest would tell their little boy that he was coming home soon.

Engel said his son 'struggles with basic things like picking up a ball with both hands,' so it is hard to tell how much Henry understands.

Over the moon: The NBC correspondent discussed Henry's milestone moment on the Today show Friday. He said it has been something he has been waiting for for years

Moment: Engel said Henry made eye contact with him and called him 'Dada' a few days ago after he returned home from a reporting trip in Syria

Hopes: Engel also discussed how a team of experts are trying to find a cure for his condition

When he arrived home from his trip, Henry was already sleeping, so he waited until the next morning to greet his son.

'As I was singing good morning to Henry and reconnecting after a long trip away, he looked at me, locked eye-contact and said, clear as any word, "Dada,"' Engel explained.

'He didnt just say it once, but two or three times. There was an urgency and excitement to it,' he added.

'Henry had made the sound before. Da-Da, or Ga-Da, and even vaguely made it about me, when I was in the room with him or holding him close to my face.

'But this time it was stronger and more decisive. Dada was a single word and he was clearly looking at me, talking to me, addressing me.'

Expert: The family is working with Dr. Huda Zoghbi, director of the Duncan Neurological Research Institute at the Texas Childrens Hospital

Progress: The doctor discovered the genetic cause of Rett Syndrome a few years ago and is now working specifically on Henry's case

Explanation: Henry's neurological disorder is caused by the mutation of a gene called MECP2

Engel said he thanked his son by giving him 'a big cuddle.'

'To parents with typically developing children, a little Dada may not seem like a big deal,' he said. 'But for me it was a validation, an acknowledgement that hes in there, knows me, knows that his mother and I are forces for good in his life, and above all, that he loves us.'

The correspondent said that his wife Mary hasn't gotten a 'clear "Mama" yet,' but he hopes she will one day because 'she deserves it.'

Engel also spoke about the moment while appearing on the Today show Friday morning.

'It was something Id been waiting for for years,' he said. 'A lot of parents, it happens naturally; it happens early on. Henrys situation is different.'

Goal: Dr. Zoghbi has never seen a mutation like Henry's, and she believes that the little boy can help her find a treatment for MECP2 disorders such as Rett Syndrome

Family: Engel and his wife Mary Forrest (left and right) are dedicated to finding a cure for their son. The journalist said that Henry calling him 'Dada' was validation that he loves them

Devoted mother: The correspondent said that his wife Mary hasn't gotten a 'clear "Mama" yet,' but he hopes she will one day because 'she deserves it'

Heartbreaking: Henry's condition means he cannot walk or really talk. He will likely face more health problems as time goes on

'My world lit up,' he added.

The family is working with Dr. Huda Zoghbi, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and director of the Duncan Neurological Research Institute at the Texas Childrens Hospital.

The doctor discovered the genetic cause of Rett Syndrome a few years ago and is now working specifically on Henry's case, which is slightly different from the standard variation of the condition.

Dr. Zoghbi has never seen a mutation like Henry's, and she believes that the little boy can help her find a treatment for MECP2 disorders such as Rett Syndrome.

In his essay, Engel explained that Henry's neurological disorder is caused by the mutation of a gene called MECP2. The gene produces a protein, which is also called MECP2.

Life-chaning moment: Henry was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome nearly two years ago

What is Rett Syndrome? The rare neurological disorder that leaves kids unable to speak, eat, walk, talk, and breathe One child in 12,000 is born with Rett Syndrome, yet few people have heard of it. The genetic disorder affects almost exclusively females, causing them to regress neurologically and physically. The progression of the disease can be roughly divided into four stages. During the first stage, from about the age of six to 18 months, a baby slows in development, loses interest in play, stops making eye contact, starts walking awkwardly and makes repetitive hand movements. The second stage, known as rapid destruction,' begins between the ages of one and four. The child finds it increasingly difficult to communicate and learn and there is often a deterioration in other brain functions. Symptoms include an inability to control the hands, sudden distress teamed with screaming, unsteadiness, breathing problems, difficulty sleeping, slow head growth and digestive problems. The third stage, the plateau,' begins between age three and ten. Limbs become floppy, epilepsy may develop and there may be weight loss and teeth-grinding. However, many parents say children are less distressed and show more interest in their surroundings. The final stage can last for decades. Usually severe bending of the spine  scoliosis  develops, as well as losing the ability to walk. Almost all cases are caused by a mutation in the MECP2 gene that prevents nerve cells in the brain from working properly. Currently there is no cure and only the symptoms are treated. Sufferers can live to their 40s but most die before 25. Advertisement

The mutation causes Rett Syndrome, a brain development disorder that typically affects girls. In boys, the mutation is called MECP2, However, people usually call it Rett Syndrome as well.

MECP2 mutations in boys cause more severe problems and often premature death.

With their research, Dr. Zoghbi and her team are trying to find a way to boost the amount of MECP2 Henry produces. She thinks that she will have some sort of breakthrough in the next few years.

At the end of his essay, Engel described how Henry's condition has helped him be grateful for the little things in life.

'Having a special needs child makes you savor the patches of sunshine you cross on the hard, and often lonely, road toward a cure: the doctors visits that dont go as badly as expected, a solid nights sleep, or a Dada three and a half years in the making,' he wrote.
A New York City couple celebrated their love in just about the cheesiest way possible this week: They got married at a pizza restaurant.

Gamaliel Vallego, 42, and Estela Valerio, 37, said 'I do' on Thursday after two and a half years of dating, and their wedding was anything but traditional.

The newlyweds exchanged vows just feet away from several restaurant-grade pizza ovens, with a ceremony conducted by a restaurant manager and enough slices to go around for every guest.

Cheesily ever after! A New York City couple celebrated their wedding at an &pizza restaurant on Thursday

The mozzarella to her marinara! Gamaliel Vallego, 42, and Estela Valerio, 37, said 'I do' at one of the chain's Manhattan locations

A piece of the pie! &pizza held several weddings in their stores in honor of Pi Day, March 14

Super appropriate! The groom joked that pizza was his first love

Mom's certainly unique! The bride said her 11-year-old son and 17-year-old both thought the locale was funny

All the toppings! The couple even designed their own signature pie for the party

Gamaliel and Estela got married on March 14, a date many people call Pi Day. The faux holiday celebrates the math symbol Pi (), which is often rounded to 3.14.

People like to acknowledged the date by eating different types of pie, including of the pizza variety  but &pizza, a pizza chain with locations up and down the East Coast, raised the bar and host weddings for the big day.

At one of their New York locations, Gamaliel and Estela were eager for the opportunity for a free wedding  and a way to incorporate Gamaliel's love of pizza into one of the most important days of their lives.

'Pizza is my life,' he told DailyMail.com 'I think I have eaten some form of pizza on average one slice a day since I was eight. &pizza gave me the opportunity to combine the two things I love the most in life.

'I always say, my first love is pizza,' he added.

The wedding was certainly pizza-centric. The store's 'Head of People' Andy Hooper was ordained for the occasion and officiated the ceremony in front of 25 guests.

'Pizza is my life,' the groom told DailyMail.com 'I think I have eaten some form of pizza on average one slice a day since I was eight.

Fun couple! The bride wore a short white dress with cobalt heels, which matched her husband's tie

Outside the box: The bride also had a bright blue manicure

Legit: The store's 'Head of People' Andy Hooper was ordained for the occasion and officiated the ceremony in front of 25 guests

Score! The couple also got a one-year supply of pizza for free

Sweet! The wedding included pizza, sparkling wine, flowers, and balloons, all provided for free

And guests ate plenty of pizza, including a signature pie that the couple designed for the occasion that was topped with peppers and feta.

During the taste test, the groom said, 'She made hers and I made mines and then we tasted each others pizza. I liked some of the stuff on hers more than mine and she liked some of mine more than her and boom, we made our signature pizza and we were thinking master piece.'

There were also black and white balloons from BASHESDC, flowers from 1-800-Flowers.com, and bottles of Chandon Sparkling Rose.

Gamaliel, who works as a director of financial aid at Columbia University School of Nursing, and Estela, who is an Administrative Coordinator at the college's School of Public Health, said their family and friends loved the idea of a pizza party wedding.

'They all thought it was a joke at first,' said Gamaliel. 'And then they were like, "Yeah this is so Pito [his nickname] and Estela." But they are excited and happy for us.'

And now for dessert! There was also a tasty cake  to a pie  from Milk Bar

Romantic! The newlyweds are pictured feeding each other wedding cake

Something new: The groom and a few guests wore pizza socks. The bride also got him pizza cufflinks, while he got her a pizza Pandora charm

Gamaliel said friends and family 'all thought it was a joke at first... and then they were like, "Yeah this is so Pito [his nickname] and Estela"'

Special day: The pizza shop was closed and decked out for the occasion

Looks like fun! There was also a digital photobooth where guests and &pizza staff took pictures

Estela, who has a 17-year-old son and a 10-year-old son, said her kids found it hilarious and weird.

'They thought it was funny and odd to have a wedding at a pizzeria,' she said. 'My youngest said 'Who thinks of having a wedding in a pizzeria?"'

Given the size of their family, the date  3/14  was also significant: Estela was excited to notice that 3 + 1 = 4 signified her and her two children coming together with Gamaliel.

Going forward, they plan to incorporate Pi and pizza into their lives. In fact, pizza has already made quite a few appearances.

'I got her a Pandora pizza charm to wear as her something new and be able to wear it always. She got me pizza cufflinks to wear with any of my suits,' the groom said. The groom and several guests also wore pizza-patterned socks on the big day.

Kiss the bride! In Philly, Kalista Werman and Lenin Cruz said 'I do' two years after they met while working at a Starbucks

Tasty! They also designed a signature pizza for the reception

The first Pi Day wedding held at &pizza was in 2006, and now the chain has opened up the opportunity to other customers

This is actually not the first wedding to be held at an &pizza restaurant on Pi Day: That honor went to a couple who wed in D.C. in 2016. Over the past two years, though, the chain has opened up the opportunity to other customers.

This year, they hosted 14 ceremonies in total, including weddings, commitment ceremonies, and vow renewals.

While a pizza place may seem like an unconventional spot for a wedding, the brand says it makes a lot of sense for them.

'The ampersand in &pizza stands for connectedness, and there is no stronger connection than that of a marriage,' they said in a press release. 'Playing off the pun of pi vs. pie, the company wanted to offer couples a unique way to say "I do" that speaks to the brands commitment to celebrating unity and standing up for love.'

This year, weddings were also held in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Happily ever after... In Boston, Keiara Moore and Tiffany Wooten married at another store

Something to remember: The couple is seen cutting into their pizza together

They were engaged for a year ahead of their &pizza wedding on Thursday

In Boston, Keiara Moore and Tiffany Wooten were engaged for a year ahead of their &pizza wedding on Thursday.

In Philly, Kalista Werman and Lenin Cruz said 'I do' two years after they met while working at a Starbucks.

And in D.C., five couples tied the knot over the course of the day, starting with Jordan Monroe & Adonis Miller  who got married ten years after meeting and not long after welcoming a baby girl.

They were followed by Alisha Benjamin and Tormaine Stewart, who made it official five years after meeting on Facebook; do-gooders Kortney Hall and Jermar Green, who married after meeting while working with kids with AmeriCorps; and Tinder matches Amanda Mesa and Rosemary Kim.

Finally, Traci Flemons and Chimemezue Anyanwu Traci chose the venue after Traci, a federal government employee, felt grateful to the company for offering free pizza to furloughed workers during the shutdown.
Big Tobacco companies bought up sugary drink companies - and they used the same tactics that made cigarettes appeal to children to get them to want soda and juice, a new study reveals.

The same additives used in cigarettes to control their color and flavor work in beverages, tobacco executives realized.

A new University of California, San Francisco, study uses secret documents bequeathed to the school as part of lawsuit to follow the insidious marketing plans Big Tobacco used to sell children fattening drinks.

The study serves as evidence that Big Tobacco plays an out-sized role in not one but two of the biggest health epidemics in the US: smoking and obesity.

Big Tobacco companies RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris bought up sweet drink companies, realizing they could use flavor, color and mascot strategies from their cigarettes to hook kids on sugary beverages like Kool-Aid

Growing scientific evidence suggests that the earlier children start drinking sugary beverages, the more likely they are to become overweight and/or diabetic.

Over 18 percent of American youth are estimated to be obese, raising their risks of chronic disease and premature death.

That isn't much less than the 29 percent of high school seniors that reported smoking daily in 1976.

And new research suggests that might not be entirely a coincidence.

'Once you see the world through the eyes of a tobacco executive you start to see that a sweet beverage is not that different from a cigarette,' explains lead study author Dr Laura Schmidt, a UCSF health policy professor.

'It's very few ingredients, they're highly processed and there can be a lot of variability in the product lines that comes down to colors and flavors.

'And who likes those? Little kids.'

Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds realized that the substances they used to make cigarettes appeal to kids and adults alike would also enhance drinks.

So the tobacco giants bought up food and beverage companies and started experimenting with adding sugar and colors (just like in cigarettes) to various beverages.

RJ Reynolds purchased Hawaiian Punch and market tested the red drink as a cocktail mixer for moms. But it didn't go over that well.

So, they tried testing it on children, too, to see if it was the right sweetness. Children were much bigger fans, so the company switched gears.

And, conveniently, the company had already been using a cartoon character to advertise its Camel cigarettes - 'building brand loyalty from a young age,' says Dr Schmidt - so it just retooled that for the punch line.

Philip Morris followed a similar trajectory, buying Kool-Aid from General Foods in 1985.

Well-versed in 'aspirational marketing,' says Dr Schmidt, Philip Morris dyed the the juice bright red and paired it with the Kool-Aid Man mascot.

'It's insidious they're inserting themselves into the minds of the children. They get into your head and think, "what do they want to become?"' explains Dr Schmidt.

'Kids want to be like the the Kool-Aid Man. He creates chaos and the parents are running around after him.

'It's children's aspiration to be big and important and to scare all the adults.'

Later, market testing would teach the tobacco giant that kids really, really like blue, so it went on to make a blue version of its popular punch, plus pick up Tang and Capri Sun.

'The industry claims that these tobacco-inspired marketing strategies are not actually targeting children and should be excluded from these industry-led agreements,' said Schmidt.

'But the evidence cited in our research shows that these product lines and marketing techniques were specifically designed for and tested on children.'

By now, the tobacco companies have sold off these sweet drink companies, but the cigarette-inspired marketing campaigns have remained with the sugary drinks, and their health effects have remained with children who get hooked on the beverages.

And e-cigarettes companies are only continuing the destructive tradition, Dr Schmidt says.

'That's the current tobacco industry strategy to market e-cigs to children and teens,' she says.

'That's why you can buy e-cigs in bubble gum flavor, chicken and waffles...those are probably targeting African American teens or hipsters.'
Nearly two thirds of NHS hospitals are breaching strict time targets for patients to receive planned treatment, damning figures show.

Under the NHS's own rule book  the 'NHS Constitution'  patients have a right to undergo planned hospital treatment within 18 weeks.

But the NHS tells its hospitals the target is to ensure at least 92 per cent of patients start consultant-led treatment in the same time frame.

Yet only 75 trusts  which run hospitals in England  met the NHS target in January, according to official statistics.

MailOnline has today sifted through the figures to name and shame the 106 trusts that failed to treat 552,000 patients within 18 weeks.

Map reveals the ten trusts with the highest percentages of patients waiting longer than 18 weeks for planned NHS treatments

The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust was the worst offender, with 26.1 per cent of its patients enduring the lengthy waits.

Seventeen other trusts also scored higher than 20 per cent, meaning one in five patients were not receiving treatment as quickly as they should.

Cliff Shearman, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, told MailOnline: 'The NHS is under mounting pressure with record demand for services.

'These figures show just how many NHS trusts are struggling to meet the 18-week target for planned treatment, as well as the variation in waiting times across England.

'There will be multiple reasons some trusts have longer waiting times, including some areas having a larger population of older patients.

'For the patients served by the worst performing trusts it means waiting unacceptably long in pain and discomfort, possibly unable to carry out day-to-day tasks or work. There is also the mental anguish of waiting for an operation.'

MailOnline excluded a handful of trusts that recorded less than 200 patients being treated in January.

It comes after NHS figures yesterday revealed the number of patients waiting longer than the 18-week time target has jumped by 100,000 in a year.

The national average of patients seen within 18 weeks was just 86.7 per cent for January (graph shows percentage for January of every year since 2012)

Some 441,000 patients endured the waits during January 2018, considered to be the worst ever winter for the NHS by former health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

This rose to 552,219 in January 2019 - meaning the national average of patients being seen within 18 weeks was just 86.7 per cent.

The NHS England figures also revealed the Government's 92 per cent target has not been met for three years, since February 2016.

Of the patients, 227,569 waited more than six months  a rise of 31 per cent on the same period last year. Some 36,857 waited more than nine months.

Experts yesterday said the latest figures suggest hospitals are still struggling to deal with a backlog from last winter.

In a desperate intervention, Mr Hunt last year made the controversial decision to cancel tens of thousands of operations to free up beds.

Professor Derek Alderson, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said action was needed to tackle the backlog, which 'continues to grow'.

He said: 'There are now over 100,000 more patients waiting longer than 18 weeks to start treatment when compared with the same time last year.

'With the worst of winter now hopefully behind us, there is an urgent need for a plan to deal with the increasing backlog of patients on the planned care waiting list.'

Professor Alderson added: 'Part of this plan must be a commitment to increase hospital bed capacity.'

An NHS England spokesperson said: 'Despite significant increases in demand, tens of thousands more people are benefiting from timely tests or treatment, including for cancer and mental health.'

NHS figures yesterday revealed the number of patients waiting longer than the 18-week time target has jumped by 100,000 in a year

FEBRUARY WAS THE 'TOUGHEST MONTH TO DATE' FOR THE NHS A&E waiting times have hit a new all-time low as the NHS posted its worst ever figures for the second month in a row, figures yesterday revealed. February was the 'toughest month to date' for the 'overwhelmed' health service, NHS bodies admitted as figures showed the dire state of waiting times in England. Only 84.2 per cent of A&E patients were seen within the NHS's four-hour waiting limit in February  a further drop from the lowest ever 84.4 per cent in January. The falling figure came in the same week as the health service announced plans it could use to replace the four-hour benchmark it has failed to meet since 2015. Other 'shameful' statistics showed waits for cancer treatment are longer than ever, with record numbers of people waiting more than a month to start therapy. And the NHS missed its target to treat people within two months of a doctor's referral for the 37th month in a row. NHS A&E departments try to see 95 per cent of their patients within four hours but the figure is now at its lowest ever level  just 84.2 per cent Advertisement
French doctors have been accused of taking women hostage after they threatened to stop performing abortions in a protest against the government.

The Syngof gynaecologists' union said in an email to its 1,600 members they should 'be ready to stop carrying out terminations to make ourselves heard'.

The union is angry because, it claims, its members are being denied insurance coverage by the government because its fund is 'too fragile' to support them.

The country's health minister, Agnes Buzyn, said: 'In no case should taking women hostage in this way be used as a lever for negotiations.

And she added the union's threat was out of keeping with France's 'unconditional respect for the right to abortion'.

Medical council the French Order of Doctors also condemned the move and France's equality minister, Marlene Schiappa called it 'unacceptable blackmail'.

France's health minister Agnes Buzyn has accused the Syngof gynaecologists' union of 'taking women hostage' over its demands to be heard on insurance for its members

Syngof  the Syndicat National des Gynecologues et Obstetriciens de France  said medics are working in fear of 'ruin' because the government's insurance fund won't cover them if they're sued.

The government claims a state-run medical insurance scheme is 'too fragile' to support them. Syngof said this means gynaecologists, anaesthetists and surgeons in the field have been 'denied' coverage for years.

Jean Marty, a board member and former president of the union, made the controversial remarks in an email sent to around 2,000 Syngof members.

There was backlash against Mr Marty after the email was leaked on social media. But he later said the controversy was deliberate and they would carry on performing abortions.

According to French newspaper Le Monde, he said: 'I'm sorry to have to pose a threat.

'But touching a taboo is the only way to be taken into consideration when a significant problem is not taken into account.'

In a statement Syngof admitted: 'The only way today to be heard is to generate a false controversy over social networks.'

The union is demanding to hold talks with the government, The Guardian reported. But it has now been accused of holding women's rights to ransom until it succeeds.

The controversy has erupted just months after the president of Syngof himself, Dr Bertrand de Rochambeau, said he refuses to do abortions because they are a form of murder.

Abortion is legal in France and women can have one out of choice within the first 12 weeks  in the UK pregnant women must have a health-related reason to terminate.

Ms Schiappa said: 'Everywhere in the world, womens rights are threatened, sometimes by governments, sometimes by interest groups, non-governmental organisations, unions... the mere existence of these threats is shameful,' The Guardian reported.

President of the country's Family Planning Association, Caroline Rebhi, added: 'This new incident shows us that even if the right to abortion is written in the law, it cannot yet be taken for granted.'

Syngof represents around a quarter of gynaecologists and obstetricians in France.
Opt-out organ donation will become law from 2020 after a Government bill was finally approved today.

The Queen has given royal assent for the bill - also known as Max and Keira's law after the donated heart of Keira Bell, nine, saved the life of Max Johnson, 10, in 2017.

This means The Organ Donation Act's changes to consent will come into effect next year.

Expected to save hundreds of lives every year, the change will mean all adults' organs can be taken after they die unless they specifically tell the NHS otherwise.

Schoolboy Max Johnson said: 'Even if it saves just one life, it will be worth it.'

Max and Keira's Law, named after a boy who received a heart transplant from a girl who donated it, cleared the House of Commons last year. Max Johnson (left) was saved by a heart given to him by the family of nine-year-old donor Keira Ball (right) following her death in 2017

Prime Minister Theresa May has praised the bill, saying: 'I'm delighted Max and Keira's law has passed today.

'It marks a momentous step for thousands of people in need of a life-saving transplant, and could save as many as 700 lives a year.'

At the last count there were 6,013 people on the organ donation waiting list in the UK  last year at least 400 people died before a suitable donor could be found.

Only around one per cent of people's organs are useable after they die.

They must be used quickly and still in suitable condition, and the NHS Blood and Transplant service says intensive care patients tend to be the only ones who can donate.

Mrs May added: 'With significantly more people willing to consider organ donation than are actually registered as donors, this vital step will presume consent unless people choose to opt out of being a donor.

'It's important that everyone takes the time to discuss their choices on donation with their families and register their wishes, whatever their preference may be.

'I also want to thank those who have campaigned tirelessly to raise awareness of this issue, and pay particular tribute to Max, Keira and their families for making this historic change happen.'

Research has found some 80 per cent of people in the UK support the concept of organ donation after death but only 38 per cent of adults have actually signed up.

The law change began last year and passed through the House of Commons and House of Lords with ease.

This left only Royal Assent  the approval of the Crown for any new laws  before it could come into effect, and that was given today.

As well as people who record a decision to not donate, organs will not be taken from those who have lived in the UK for less than a year, under-18s, or people without the mental capacity to understand the change.

Organs which can be donated after someone dies include the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, corneas and pancreas.

Max Johnson, the 10-year-old heart recipient whose name  along with that of his young donor, Keira Ball is given to the law said today: 'Thank you to everyone who has supported this law change. Even if it saves just one life, it will be worth it.

'I know what it is like to wait for an organ, so I hope the change in law will mean people won't have to wait as long in the future.

'I feel happy because I think the law change will make a difference.'

The new law will not make a difference to children's organ donation, which is based on the consent of the child's parents or guardians.

NHS Blood and Transplant this month announced a new strategy to try and increase the rates of crucial organ donation among the families of children and babies.

NHS Blood and Transplant spokesman Anthony Clarkson said: 'We hope that once this new law is implemented in Spring 2020, we will see more people and families agreeing to donation.'

Before the law comes into effect there will be a public health campaign explaining to people how it will affect them.

It will mean people have to register for their organs to be left inside their body after they die, rather than register for them to be donated.

Wales already has an opt-out system but Scotland and Northern Ireland have opt-in systems like England.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  More water can be sourced from Angat dam to alleviate the water shortage in Metro Manila, according to a diversified conglomerate.

San Miguel Corporation announced in a statement Friday that it has sought approval from the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) to approve its proposal to deliver 140 million liters of clean, treated water to areas affected by the water shortage.

The water will be sourced from its untapped capacity from Angat dam, through SMC's Bulacan Bulk Water Treatment Plant.

SMC listed the following areas as those affected by the water shortage: Mandaluyong, San Juan and Pasig in Metro Manila, and Angono, Antipolo, Taytay and Binangonan in Rizal province.

SMC President and Chief Operating Officer Ramon Ang said they will need to coordinate with MWSS and local government units (LGUs) to deliver water.

"We need to acquire several container trucks to deliver water. Again, we will work and coordinate with the MWSS and LGUs on this. We hope to be able to implement this plan at the soonest possible time," Ang said in the statement.

He added that the Bulacan plant must also be opened to allow third party suppliers as a source of potable water, which would require the approval of the MWSS.

Ang said phase 1 of the water treatment project has a production capacity of 200 million liters per day. However, he said many water districts have yet to upgrade and prepare their facilities to receive water from the Bulacan Bulk Water Supply Project (BBSWP) so only about 60 million liters per day are currently being tapped.

"This leaves an excess capacity of about 140 million liters per day, which is enough to serve the average daily requirements of two million people or about 455,000 households," he said.

According to SMC, BBSWP stage 1 was operationalized in January. Upon completion, the company is required to supply water to 24 Bulacan water districts at P8.50 per cubic meter.
The archbishop: "Almsgiving helps us to recognize the Lord Jesus in the poor and needy. It is a path that can lead to true conversion ". In Lent, a second collection is scheduled for Sunday Masses: the collected offerings will be used as emergency funds for disasters.

Manila (AsiaNews) - Lent is a special moment for renewal and conversion, a time to return to God: card. Luis Antonio G. Tagle (photo), metropolitan archbishop of Manila and president of Caritas Internationalis, in his last pastoral letter.

In the document, the cardinal urges the faithful to be more generous and support the humanitarian effort of Alay Kapwa, an annual program of evangelization and fundraising that for decades the archdiocese has dedicated to the most needy, especially during times of calamity.

"The practice of almsgiving helps us to grow in charity and generosity. It helps us, too, to recognize the Lord Jesus in the poor and needy. It is a path that can lead to true conversion: in drawing close to our brothers and sisters, we draw close to God Himself, Cardinal Tagle said.

The Philippines is one of the countries most affected by natural disasters in the world. Every year, an average of 20 storms and typhoons hit the nation. Caritas Manila responds to crises and calamities through Caritas Damayan. The offerings collected for Alay Kapwa during Lent will be used as emergency funds for natural and man-made disasters such as typhoons, floods, fires, earthquakes and other tragedies and crises, as well as disaster prevention and mitigation programs.

In all the parishes and for each of the six Sundays of Lent (10 March - 14 April 2019), during the masses the Church encourages the faithful to participate in a second collection.

"The funds raised will be remitted to Caritas Manila for our Damayan program," explains the cardinal. "Last year - he adds - Caritas Damayan has extended aid to the victims of the typhoons Agaton, Josie and Ompong, as well as to the victims of the numerous disasters caused by the fire in Metro Manila. We have also provided assistance to the rehabilitation of Marawi, the tribal Lumad of Tandag and the families affected by the eruption

With the increasing number and magnitude of disasters and calamities being responded to by Caritas Damayan, our Alay Kapwa funds get immediately depleted, Cardinal Tagle said.
A mother spent six weeks in hospital fighting for her life when back pain turned out to be deadly sepsis.

Jo Tucker, 45, of Bedworth, Warwickshire, thought she had slept awkwardly when she woke up in pain one morning in October 2018.

But the next morning, she was vomiting with the pain, had a fever and was disorientated.

Discovered in agony in the early hours of the morning by her daughter, Ms Tucker was raced to hospital where medics carried out tests.

She was eventually diagnosed with sepsis, a killer reaction to an infection, where the body attacks its own organs and tissues. But the cause of her sepsis is still unknown.

Ms Tucker spent six weeks in hospital getting treatment, fearing she would die.

But even months after her ordeal, she is suffering with post-sepsis syndrome (PSS), causing exhaustion, memory issues and hair loss.

Jo Tucker, 45, of Bedworth, Warwickshire, thought she had slept awkwardly when she woke up with back pain one morning in October 2018

The mother ended up battling life-threatening sepsis for six weeks in hospital

Ms Tucker, who does not work, but whose partner Paul Kelly, 50, is an IT consultant, said: 'Going from being absolutely fine to nearly dying was a huge shock, so now my body is just trying to piece itself back together.

'I've been left a wreck -there's no other word for it.

'The panic and anxiety has hit from nowhere, but I think it stems from the shock of being fine one minute, then almost dying the next.

'Nobody knows what caused my sepsis, so it could happen again. I'm trying to get on with it and not be a hypochondriac, panicking over every pain I feel, but this has been so traumatic.'

Leading up to her nightmare, Ms Tucker was healthy and walking between four and five miles (6.4km-8km) a day with her pet Labradoodle dog Austin.

But, on the morning of October 2 last year, she woke with an agonising twinge in her back.

She said: 'I thought I'd just slept funny, so made sure I rested up that day. People kept telling me to sleep on the floor, as apparently a hard surface is good for pain.

'The next morning, though, it was even worse. I was literally vomiting with the pain.'

Heading to an out-of-hours doctor, Ms Tucker was told she had likely pulled a muscle, and was given naproxen, a medicine that reduces inflammation.

As the day wore on though, the tablets were not working and she started getting feverish.

Then, in the early hours of October 4, her daughter Danielle, 22, woke at around 4am to get ready for her job at a warehouse to find her mum almost delirious with pain.

Ms Tucker said: 'I told her to get Paul and to ring an ambulance. It isn't like me to be dramatic, so she knew I was serious.

Ms Tucker is suffering with Post-Sepsis Syndrome (PSS), causing exhaustion, memory issues and hair loss, which could last up to 18 months

Ms Tucker was initially told by a doctor that she had likely pulled a muscle, and was given Naproxen, a medicine that reduces inflammation

Ms Tucker was terrified and thought she was going to die when medics transferred her to a specialist unit at University Hospital Coventry

'The paramedics came and I was told that, if it was just back pain, there was little that could be done for me at hospital.

'But a voice inside me was urging me to go, telling me something more sinister was happening.'

At George Eliot (COR) Hospital in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, Ms Tucker had a series of tests, including two lumbar punctures, a procedure where a hollow needle is inserted into the spinal canal to test the fluid, which she described as 'traumatic.'

She was diagnosed with sepsis - a life-threatening condition that arises when the body's response to an infection injures its own tissues and organs.

It leads to shock, multiple organ failure and, potentially, death especially if not recognised early and treated promptly.

Medics transferred Ms Tucker to the specialist University Hospital Coventry, who by that point was gravely ill and fearing the worst.

Ms Tucker said: 'I thought I was going to die. I took some photos during those two weeks and when I look back now, it's like seeing a different person. I was so close to death.

'I don't remember much about the first two weeks I spent in hospital, as I was so full of drugs, but it must have been awful for Paul and Danielle too.'

Slowly, Ms Tucker began to get better  but faced another setback when doctors found an abscess on her spine, causing her agonising pain.

In total, she spent six weeks in hospital, during which time she had to learn to walk again due to muscle wastage.

Ms Tucker said: 'I'd no idea that could happen so quickly. I was like a toddler, finding my feet all over again.

After being discharged with a drip Ms Tucker was visited every day by a nurse until December.

Ms Tucker is still battling the lasting damage now, taking medication such as that pictured

PSS has caused Ms Tucker's hair to fall out. She said she 'feels 90 years old' due to exhaustion

But it became clear that her ordeal was far from over, as she was soon struck down by PSS, a condition that affects up to 50 per cent of sepsis survivors.

According to the charity The UK Sepsis Trust, which estimates that five people are killed by sepsis every hour in the UK, PSS has no specific treatment.

It usually gets better with time, but can last between six and 18 months.

Symptoms include lethargy, hair loss, poor appetite, reduced kidney function, anxiety and short-term memory loss  all of which Ms Tucker has experienced.

She said: 'It's awful how suddenly sepsis can take hold. I'm still battling the lasting damage now.

'Because I look well and I'm no longer in hospital, people assume I am fine but, in reality, I will never be the same again, physically or emotionally.

'My arms still ache to the point where I can't brush my hair, and it took a month of building up strength to even be able to walk to the shop. I feel like I'm about 90 years old.'

Ms Tucker - who continues to be monitored by medics - has no choice but to simply wait and see how long her symptoms will last.

Sadly, with few specific treatments available to her, she said she feels as if she has been left on her own to deal with the aftermath of her near-death experience.

Leading up to her nightmare, Ms Tucker, who now cannot work, was healthy and walking between four and five miles a day with her pet Labradoodle dog Austin

'I know the NHS is overstretched, but I do feel as if I've just been left to wait and see what happens,' she said. 'I understand I'm no longer an emergency, but I'm still dealing with a lot.

'People don't understand the huge after-effects that sepsis can have.'

Ms Tucker hopes to raise awareness of PSS and urge others to seek help right away if they are feeling unwell.

She said: 'You know your own body, so if you don't feel right, don't take no for an answer and fight for tests and treatment.

'I am trying my best to get on with things, and know it does no good to keep looking back, but life will never be the same again for me after this.'
You may think the white specks on your nails come from a lack of calcium or shutting your finger in a drawer.

But one 27-year-old man was left with matching lines across all his fingernails  because he climbed a mountain.

The unnamed climber, from Newcastle, visited a doctor because he was worried about the mysterious lines which appeared after his trip.

And he was told the harmless condition had be caused by oxygen deprivation during his mountaineering holiday.

The unnamed climber, 27, was left with matching white lines running horizontally across all his fingernails. His doctor told him the condition  called Mees' lines  was caused by a lack of oxygen while he was climbing a mountain

He was diagnosed with Mees' lines, which are lines of white discoloration that run horizontally across nails.

He had no other injuries or medical conditions which could have explained them, and his doctor realised they had been caused by the altitude.

The man had climbed almost to the summit of the mountain Spantik, in Pakistan, which is 7,031metres high  80 per cent of the height of Mount Everest (8,850m).

And spending three weeks at altitudes of 4,000m or more is what triggered the strange-looking occurrence, according to an article in BMJ Case Reports.

Unfortunately, he never made it to the summit, turning back after 6,900m because of exhaustion and hypothermia.

But spending so long at altitude deprived his fingers of the oxygen needed to grow healthy nails, his physician Dr Avinash Aujayeb said.

He said being at high altitude could starve the body of minerals and reduce blood flow to the extremeties.

'A wide variety of nail changes are associated with high altitude mountaineering,' Dr Aujayeb wrote.

'[They] have been attributed to a reduction in iron stores, local trauma, cold exposure... and a hypobaric environment.

'By definition, extreme altitude was reached at 6900m, where the [pressure of oxygen in the blood] is about 39 per cent compared with sea level.'

The man climbed the Spantik mountain (pictured) in Pakistan. He made it to 6,900m altitude, just 131m from the summit, before he had to turn back because of exhaustion and hypothermia

He said the nail changes were because of a 'temporary cessation of nail growth'.

This was likely caused by the body  under the stress of struggling to breathe and the effort of climbing the mountain  sent less blood and oxygen to the fingers, meaning their ability to grow nails normally was interrupted.

Nails grow at approximately 3mm per month. If part of the growth is interrupted or damaged it can pass along the nail as a white spot when normal growth continues.

The man also lost 1st 3lbs (8kg) during his three week adventure but quickly put the weight back on.

Dr Aujayeb confirmed the lines were nothing to worry about, adding: 'They are more of a cosmetic than a medical issue.'

They grew out and eventually disappeared, the report concluded.
Women whose frozen eggs are set to be destroyed because of a government-imposed time limit have launched a legal challenge to change the law.

Under the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Act, the maximum length of time eggs can remain frozen is ten years. The time limit was set over concerns the eggs would deteriorate after this time.

After ten years, IVF clinics have to destroy the eggs, use them to create embryos, or move them out of the UK to another country.

Women who are diagnosed as being prematurely infertile are exempt from the rule and are allowed to access frozen eggs until the age of 55.

A time limit on frozen eggs in the UK is ten years but women have launched a campaign to change the law

But lawyers for a group of women claim the rules are arbitrary or outdated  and in breach of human rights laws.

One of the women involved in the legal challenge, whose name has been given only as Andi, said yesterday: My frozen eggs represent my last chance of having a child that is biologically my own, and the clinic has told me they will be destroyed in a matter of months.

It is hard to describe the sense of bereavement and turmoil that comes with being told that your eggs will be destroyed.

The women involved in the challenge want the right to be able to keep their eggs frozen until they reach 55

I believe that women should have the right to choose when to have children, not be scared into having them before they are ready because they are worried about future infertility.

The women involved in the challenge want the right to be able to keep their eggs frozen until they reach 55.

Salima Budhani, a solicitor at Bindmans LLP who is acting for the women, said: There have been significant medical advances and social progress since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 passed through Parliament but the rules relating to non-medical egg freezing have not changed.

A Department of Health spokesman said: The Government has no plans to reconsider this legislation at this time.
THE BRAID by Laetitia Colombani (Picador 12.99, 224 pp)

THE BRAID

by Laetitia Colombani (Picador 12.99, 224 pp)

From India to Sicily to Canada, the fates of three very different women are plaited together in this elegant and engaging novel.

Smita, an Indian untouchable, dreams of a better life for her six-year-old daughter Lalita. When her husband refuses to risk escaping from their village, Smita takes Lalitas future into her own hands.

In Palermo, Giulia takes charge of the family business, which washes, bleaches and dyes hair for wig-makers. But can she save it from the financial mess her father has left it in?

Diagnosed with cancer, Sarah, a top-flight lawyer who puts her work before everything else, realises that her perfectly curated life is now under serious threat.

What stood out for me was the colour and authenticity the author gives to each characters background as they face life-changing challenges and search for the courage to confront and overcome them.

THE GHOST FACTORY

THE GHOST FACTORY by Jenny McCartney (4th Estate 12.99, 272 pp)

by Jenny McCartney (4th Estate 12.99, 272 pp)

In the late 20th century, the Troubles turned Belfast into the ghost factory of the title.

After the sudden death of his father, Jacky loses his way in life. When severe reprisals are taken after his 20 st friend Titch steals a packet of Jaffa Cakes, Jacky decides he has to leave Northern Ireland to find a better life.

London offers him a new job and a new love, but he cant escape the past  its hand stretches out to draw him back home to settle old scores.

Friendship, loyalty, love and retribution are the stuff of this violent but emotional and touching novel with a cautionary sting in the tail. Jacky is a well-rounded character, torn between his future and what has gone before. He is given an authentic, engaging voice which pulls in the reader, with well-judged flashes of humour.

MAKE ME A CITY

MAKE ME A CITY by Jonathan Carr (Scribe 16.99, 512 pp)

by Jonathan Carr (Scribe 16.99, 512 pp)

Between 1800 and the end of that century, Chicago grew from a single settlement on a site by Lake Michigan  known as Echicagou  to an astounding city which hosted a world fair and became the trading hub for Americas gigantic agricultural production.

This novel tells that story in a series of fragmentary episodes from the lives and loves of assorted individual Chicagoans  a Native American boy, a Frenchman, a storeholder, a land speculator, a couple of doctors, the citys first schoolmarm and a family of Irish immigrants.

There is much of the panache of David Mitchells Cloud Atlas here: it is an epic story that sweeps the reader from a single log-house to a mass of steel-frame skyscrapers. It moves from bloody tragedy to financial skulduggery and farce, all through a subtle variety of narrative voices and perspectives.

A notably rich, rewarding read.
BIRD SUMMONS by Leila Aboulela (W&N 16.99, 304 pp)

BIRD SUMMONS

by Leila Aboulela (W&N 16.99, 304 pp)

The experience of women navigating cultural differences has been a regular theme for Leila Aboulela, who grew up in Khartoum and has lived in Aberdeen for nearly 30 years.

Her latest book follows a road trip through the Highlands in search of the grave of Lady Evelyn Cobbold, a real-life Scottish noble raised in colonial Africa, who converted to Islam.

Along for the ride are three pals: Iman, three times married, from Syria; Moni, who normally looks after her disabled son while her husband works in Saudi Arabia; and Salma, happily wed, yet riskily renewing contact with an old flame who has a shocking tale from life as a doctor in Egypt.

Intercut with the womens tender, but unsentimental, conversation is a more mystical strand, involving a bird that tells the women stories from the Koran and from Celtic mythology.

Rooted in everyday experience without forsaking the spiritual, its a counterpoint to lurid headlines about British Muslims, told in effortlessly enjoyable style.

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre 18.99, 336 pp)

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre 18.99, 336 pp)

Appalled by Donald Trumps rise to power, an author, strongly resembling Siri Hustvedt herself, sits down to recall 1978, the year she left her Minnesota hometown to try life as a writer in New York.

Thats more or less the premise of this novel, a scattershot collage of excerpts from the diary her narrator kept, as well as the book she tried to write, and the rants of her troubled neighbour  she transcribed the muttering through her apartment wall.

While her memories of nightclubs and poetry readings are partly a way to resurrect youthful hope amid the disillusionment she feels now, shes also looking anew at the shocking behaviour she put up with from would-be lovers.

As the brainy tale of a writers sexual and intellectual formation, its always interesting, if sometimes windy, in style.

Theres a strong whiff of Hustvedt getting her digs in first, with remarks about irritable readers objecting to narrative experiment.

THE PARADE by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton 14.99, 192 pp)

THE PARADE

by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton 14.99, 192 pp)

U.S. writer Dave Eggers has long since given up the postmodern pyrotechnics of his 2000 debut, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, in favour of consciousness-raising political parables.

On form, as in 2013s dystopia The Circle, hes superb, yet he can feel increasingly preachy  a pitfall his slimline new novel doesnt entirely sidestep.

Two contractors, known to each other only as Nine and Four for security reasons, have arrived in an unspecified foreign country in order to pave a new north-south highway in the wake of a war they know nothing about.

Nine is keen to sample the nightlife, but Four just wants to get on with the job, which proves impossible when he finds he can no longer ignore the bloody history of his new workplace.

Even sub-par Eggers warrants your time, but I cant help feeling that this too-neat morality tale, bleached of specifics a la Kafka, is just a bit smug.
THE COW BOOK by John Connell (Granta 9.99, 288 pp)

THE COW BOOK

by John Connell (Granta 9.99, 288 pp)

After working as a journalist and film producer in Australia and Canada, and following a broken engagement, John Connell returned to his parents cattle and sheep farm in Ireland, where he succumbed to depression.

As his mood began to lift, he joined his father in farm work. He recounts the hardest months of the farming year, from January to April, when the weather is foul, and lambing and calving make for long and sometimes heartbreaking nights of life-and-death drama.

In lyrical prose, Connell describes the timeless rhythms of farming, the ancient relationship between man and beast, the fellowship that binds the rural communities of Ireland, and the fierce generational struggle between father and son.

THE RACE TO SAVE THE ROMANOVS by Helen Rappaport (Windmill 9.99, 400 pp)

THE RACE TO SAVE THE ROMANOVS

by Helen Rappaport (Windmill 9.99, 400 pp)

July 2018 marked the 100th anniversary of the brutal murders of the Russian Imperial Family by their Bolshevik captors.

Why, the historian Helen Rappaport wonders, did the Imperial Familys many royal cousins in Europe collectively fail them?

And why did George V, whose resemblance to his cousin Nicholas II was so striking that people referred to them as the heavenly twins, apparently block an offer of sanctuary from the Foreign Office?

Rappaport has written much on the Romanovs. She reflects that, while the Tsar and his wife were in many respects the masters of their own violent destiny, it is the children who inspire a continuing sense of regret and of longing for a different outcome.

Her finely researched history is a devastating account of the missed and bungled opportunities to save the Romanovs.

ELISABETH'S LISTS

ELISABETH'S LISTS by Lulah Ellender (Granta 9.99, 336 pp)

by Lulah Ellender (Granta 9.99, 336 pp)

For many of us, lists are a way of making the chaos of life seem more manageable. For Lulah Ellender, lists were a precious link to her grandmother, Elisabeth, who died before Lulah was born.

The story of her grandmother was passed down in the sepia photographs, scrawled letters and dramatic anecdotes that constitute a family history.

But it was a small journal that proved her most poignant link with Elisabeth. It contained lists written between 1939 and 1957, the year of her death.

The chronicles of household items or numbers of eggs laid by her chickens offered vivid snapshots of Elisabeths restless life as the daughter and wife of diplomats who were constantly on the move.

Written during the final illness of Lulahs mother, this is a moving memoir of love and loss across the generations.
Shares in Just Group tumbled after the pensions provider swung into the red, cancelled its dividend and sought 380million of fresh funding.

The group said it made 86million of losses in 2018 having notched up a profit of 181million the previous year.

At the same time, Just Group said it had decided to scrap its annual dividend and went to investors with a call for cash.

It said it needed the extra money to cope with changes to mortgage regulations made by the Prudential Regulation Authority.

Life insurer Just Group said it made 86m of losses in 2018 having notched up a profit of 181m the previous year

The fundraising included a 300million debt offering and an 80million stock placing, with shares sold at 80p each. The move sent the shares down 12.5 per cent, or 12.2p, yesterday to 85.3p.

On another day of Brexit turmoil in Westminster, the FTSE 100 edged up 0.4 per cent, or 26.24 points, to 7185.43 while the FTSE 250 was rose 0.5 per cent, or 102.97 points, to 19,283.06.

Oil also hit a four-month high amid signs production cartel Opec could extend production cuts beyond June. Brent crude hit a 2019 peak of $68.14 a barrel before edging lower.

Back on the stock market, Capita shares dipped 0.6 per cent, or 0.75p, to 119p after chief executive Jon Lewis said his turnaround plan was on track despite having 'some way to go'.

The group  Britain's biggest outsourcer  reported a 26 per cent fall in profits to 282.1million for 2018 after revenues fell 5 per cent to 3.9billion.

Stock Watch - Capital & Regional Property investment trust Capital & Regional saw shares plunge after it swung to a loss of 25.5million. The blow came after the company, which owns seven shopping centres, took a 52.5million writedown on the value of its properties in the year to December 30. Capital & Regional previously made a 22.4million profit in 2017. The businesss shares fell 11.6 per cent, or 3.7p, to 28.2p following the announcement. They have fallen 25 per cent in the past year.

Capita said it was expecting broadly flat profits in 2019, predicting between 265million and 295million. It said the successful delivery of its ongoing overhaul was 'critical to the future performance' of the group.

Lewis said: 'We've successfully completed year one of our multi-year transformation, fixed the basics and are firmly on track.

'Our transformation still has some way to go. But I am very pleased with our progress.'

The chief executive, who joined the business in December 2017, was handed a 2million pay package last year. His pay was made up of a 725,000 salary and 1.2million bonus, with the remainder made up of benefits and pensions payments.

Meanwhile, a contract win for British construction group Balfour Beatty failed to lift its shares.

An alliance led by the firm was chosen by Network Rail to carry out major work on tracks and crossings. But its shares dipped 0.6 per cent, or 1.6p to 283.6p.

Savills shares fell 3.8 per cent, or 35p, to 888.5p after the property giant warned it had a tough year ahead due to economic and political uncertainty. Revenues rose 10 per cent to 1.8billion last year but profits dipped 3 per cent to 112.4million.

Chief executive Mark Ridley said: 'We have made a solid start to 2019; however, the year ahead is overshadowed by macro-economic and political uncertainties across the world. It is difficult accurately to predict the impact of these issues on corporate expansionary activity and investor demand for real estate.

'At this stage, we expect to see declines in transaction volumes in a number of markets and growth in our less transactional business lines,' he said.

Furniture chain DFS also warned of a 'challenging' year ahead as it prepares for Brexit. It reported strong like-for-like sales growth of 6.6 per cent in the 22 weeks to December 30.

Group revenue in the period was up 29.1 Furniture chain DFS also warned of a 'challenging' year ahead as it prepares for Brexit.

It reported strong like-for-like sales growth of 6.6 per cent in the 22 weeks to December 30. Group revenue in the period was up 29.1 Furniture chain DFS also warned of a 'challenging' year ahead as it prepares for Brexit.

It reported strong like-for-like sales growth of 6.6 per cent in the 22 weeks to December 30.

Group revenue in the period was up 29.1 to 422.3m, while underlying earnings climbed 23.8 per cent to 32.8million to 422.3million,

However, chief executive Tim Stacey said recent trading had been softer amid poor consumer confidence levels.

'Although identifying underlying growth rates over short-term periods is extremely difficult, we note that year-on-year order intake in the second half of the financial year to date has been lower than the first half,' he said.

Shares fell 0.6 per cent, or 1.5p, to 234p.
In a victory for This is Money's campaign against private parking sharks, a bill that could potentially stop motorists' details from being flogged to private firms has today become law.

The new Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019 creates a single code of practice and independent appeals service that applies across the whole industry.

The MP behind the act, Greg Knight, called it 'overdue', and said it would 'bring fairness and transparency.'

Meanwhile, Local Government Minister Rishi Sunak MP, has written for us below, stating: 'The rogue operators are on their way out for good.'

Net closing in: A new act passed into law today is designed to create a new code of practice and appeals process designed to clamp down on unfair charges

There are currently two different parking trade associations with their own individual codes of practice.

Both the British Parking Association and the International Parking Community require members to abide by their codes, but the Government said the industry was largely self-regulating, and that a new single code would make parking 'consistent, transparent and easier to understand.'

The code will be drafted later this year.

It added that the new appeals service would make it easier for drivers to challenge unfair parking charges.

Drivers can currently appeal through the Parking on Private Land Appeals (POPLA) service, provided the issuer of the charge is a member of the BPA.

This is Money launched a campaign against private parking firms last autumn, following a deluge of responses to an article written by assistant editor Lee Boyce about how he beat an unfair charge.

Hundreds of readers responded with tales of their own unfair charges, and we also reported on the Basildon car park which led to so many shoppers being landed with fines that it spawned its own dedicated Facebook group with 5,000 members.

Our campaign has since been backed by AA president Edmund King, who wrote to Transport Secretary Chris Grayling calling for government intervention to 'restore the principle of deterrence in the enforcement of parking and moving traffic offences  instead of the harvesting of charges at every opportunity.'

This is Money has called for three changes, all of which could partially be met by the introduction of this act:

- To give drivers the option to stop the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency allowing private firms to buy their details for 2.50 a pop.

- For the independent appeal process to be made fairer.

- For the DVLA to investigate when large numbers of applications are made for a specific location frequently to see if the charge is fair.

The Government said that if private parking firms broke the new code they could be barred from asking for motorists' information from the DVLA.

A recent Freedom of Information request found the body, which looks after the records of more than 48million motorists, made 16.3million from handing out driver details to third parties last year.

Separate data analysed by the RAC Foundation predicted 6.8million drivers would have their keeper records sold to car parking firms in the 12 months to April 2019, which would be a 20 per cent increase on the year before.

Additionally, there could be an audit of car parks which see much higher numbers of charges issued compared to normal.

Conservative MP Sir Greg Knight, whose private members' bill became law today, said: 'My bill will bring fairness and transparency and is a good consumer protection measure, and I am honoured to have been able to steer it through parliament.

'I think the fact that it had all party support is evidence in itself that the policy was needed and overdue.

Almost all MPs have had an item in their postbag featuring someone who had been affected, and complaints were very widespread.

'My bill mandates the introduction of a single code of practice and single appeals process, and would cap the level of penalties companies could charge.

'It will also mandate the DVLA not to sell details to companies who don't play by the rules.'

Motoring groups, as well as the BPA, backed the changes.

Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said: 'Sir Greg is to be congratulated for his success in uniting MPs and peers alike to deliver the Parking (Code of Practice) Act the private parking industry so clearly needs.

'The Act will tackle an issue which our figures show affects millions of motorists each year.'

Andrew Pester, the BPA's chief executive, said: 'We are delighted that Sir Greg Knight's bill has achieved Royal Assent which will deliver our call for a single standard setting body, single code of practice and a single independent appeals service.

'This framework will enable greater consistency and consumer confidence.

'As a not-for-profit association we will continue to work closely with Government and others, including consumer groups, to help develop a single Code of Practice that provides a fair outcome for motorists, landowners and parking operators alike.'

Nicholas Lyes, the head of roads policy at the RAC, said: 'Motorists will warmly welcome this new Act.

'For too long, some unscrupulous private parking operators have made drivers' lives a misery with some questionable practices which has sent levels of trust in the sector plummeting.

'The code will create more consistent standards across the board which should eliminate dubious practices and create a single, independent appeals process.

'The RAC has long called for changes to the way the private parking sector is regulated and this new code will undoubtedly make the lives of drivers easier.'
Angry: Superdry co-founder Julian Dunkerton urged shareholders to vote in favour of his return to the company

Superdry co-founder Julian Dunkerton has accused the company's management of presiding over a 'catastrophic' decline in the share price over the past year.

In his latest broadside against the fashion chain, the 54-year-old urged shareholders to vote in favour of his return to the company so he can 'restore Superdry to its former glory'.

Dunkerton also criticised chief executive Euan Sutherland's decision to slash as many as 200 jobs in a bid to save 20million.

He said the job cuts were taking place after Sutherland, 42, pocketed 3.2million in pay last year.

In the letter to shareholders, Dunkerton said: 'Superdry's share price has had a catastrophic decline over the past 12 months, driven by the company's dismal financial performance, reflecting a failed strategy.'

He argued the firm 'must return to its design-led roots'.

'Let's turn this business back around and restore the Superdry brand to its former glory,' he wrote.

Bosses at Superdry dismissed Dunkerton's latest attack, saying the board's position remains unchanged.

They urged on investors to vote against Dunkerton's proposal to return as a board member when they meet on April 2.

Shares grew 3.2 per cent, or 16.5p, to 532p.
Shell sparked a fresh row over fat-cat pay after its chief executive was handed 17.8million last year.

As the rising oil price hit drivers in the pocket, Ben van Beurden saw his pay more than double from 7.8million in 2017 thanks to a generous bonus scheme.

It means the Dutchman, who joined the oil group in 1983, has been paid nearly 60million since becoming boss in 2014.

'Warped culture': As the rising oil price hit drivers in the pocket, Shell boss Ben van Beurden saw his pay more than double from 7.8m in 2017 thanks to a generous bonus scheme

Critics attacked Shells warped culture and said motorists hit by price rises at petrol pumps would be infuriated by the payout.

Blue-chip firms have been rocked by shareholder rebellions over staggering bonuses handed to bosses, with Astrazeneca, WPP and Unilever all attracting investors ire in the past year.

Luke Hildyard, of the High Pay Centre, said: Shell epitomises the flawed governance model and warped culture of modern big business.

Its ludicrous to think that chief executives who have climbed to the top of huge organisations need the lure of enormous bonuses to motivate them to do their jobs properly  and it would be deeply troubling if they did.

Pay awards hundreds of times the size of those experienced by the average worker reflect the dim view that business leaders have of the rest of us.

Howard Cox of campaign group Fair Fuel UK said: Motorists will be seething that Shells boss is wallowing in such a huge pay check.

It is an undeserved and obscene level of remuneration, generated from the pockets of hard-working drivers and small firms every time they fill up their vehicles.

Van Beurdens pay emerged in Shells latest annual report, published yesterday. It revealed the package handed to the 60-year-old included a 1.3million salary and 15.6million in bonuses.

Overall his remuneration soared by 128 per cent, up from a total of 7.8million in 2017. Shell claimed directors had spent significant time discussing the payout.

A spokesman added: We believe our ratio is consistent with those seen in other companies, although it is challenging to draw a meaningful comparison given the different markets and industries in which they operate.

Shells board will have to face shareholders at the annual general meeting in May, when investors will be asked to vote on its pay report.

The staggering payout handed to van Beurden comes after the group revealed profits last year had soared to their highest level in four years.

Shell raked in 16.3billion in 2018, up by more than a third from the 12billion it made the previous year.
by Mathias Hariyadi

In just over a month, Indonesians will pick a new president, vice president and members of parliament. The election will be crucial for the future of the young democracy. The Archbishop of Jakarta urges Catholics to choose political programmes that respect pluralistic values. The Bishops Commission for the Laity warns against not voting or blank ballots.

Jakarta (AsiaNews)  Against the backdrop of a hot election campaign, the Catholic Church of Indonesia calls on Catholics to vote responsibly and in an informed manner exercising their moral conscience.

In two videos released yesterday, the Archbishop of Jakarta (picture from video 1) and the Bishops Commission for the Laity (picture from video 2) illustrate the criteria for choosing qualified and honest representatives, ready to work for the good and unity of the country.

For the first time in Indonesian history, 190 million eligible voters will elect the president, vice-president, and members of the bicameral parliament on the same day, 17 April 2019.

For many observers, it will be "a critical day" for the future of the young democracy, which is threatened by divisive ideologies.

In his video message entitled Elect good leaders, Archbishop Ignatius Suharyo Hardjoatmodjo, archbishop of the capital, urges the faithful to be "good and responsible citizens", reminding them of "the moral obligation to go to the polls".

Voters, he notes, are called to look at candidates and "consider what they have done so far, what they are doing and what they will do for the nation".

Political programmes and electoral promises must also be evaluated. "These must be in line with Pancasila, the state ideology that underlies the Constitution of 1945, and the national principle of unity in diversity (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika).

The Commission for the Laity (Komisi Kerawam) of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Indonesia (KWI) has also released its own "moral address".

The Commissions executive secretary, Fr Paulus Christian Siswantoko, warns Catholics against not voting or casting a blank ballot (golongan putih or golput).

"In doing so, you would deliver the country to bad leaders. Voting means determining the nation's immediate future," he explains.

"Let us elect leaders who know how to defend Pancasila, and who would never let themselves be involved in actions or deeds of intolerance, fundamentalism and violence".
The Footsie ended the week 0.6 per cent higher, while the pound had its best week since January as Brexit got delayed.

Sterling rose 0.3 per cent against the dollar to $1.33 today, while it was up 0.2 per cent against the euro at 1.17. Over the week, the pound rallied 1.7 per cent against the dollar.

In company news, Interserve said it is set to fall into administration and into the hands of its lenders after it failed to secure investor backing for a controversial rescue plan.

Meanwhile, profits at JD Wetherspoon tumbled in the first half of the year as rising sales failed to offset an increase in costs at the pub group. And its Brexiteer chairman Tim Martin had a go at 'the establishment' over Brexit.

The Restaurant Group's annual profits declined as it booked higher costs relating to store closures and the recent 559million acquisition of Wagamama.

To view on the This is Money app, click here >>>
Interserve is set to fall into administration and into the hands of its lenders after it failed to secure investor backing for a controversial rescue plan.

It comes just over a year after industry counterpart Carillon went bust, causing numerous project shutdowns and thousands of job losses.

Interserve, which employs 45,000 people and holds crucial Government contracts for a range of services in prisons, schools and hospitals, will be immediately sold to its lenders after the administration in a process known as a pre-pack.

This means the firm will avoid a Carillion-style of collapse.

Shares in Interserve have been frozen as administrators at EY handle the process

The business will continue to operate 'as normal for customers and suppliers', it said, but shares will be suspended from trading on the London Stock Exchange immediately.

The pre-pack will be managed by accountancy giant EY and is expected to be completed on Friday evening.

Interserve investors include RBS, HSBC and BNP Paribas - together with Emerald Asset Management and Davidson Kempner Capital.

Interserve said: 'The board of directors of the company is convening an urgent board meeting to consider its options.

'In the absence of any viable alternative, it expects to implement an alternative deleveraging transaction, which is likely to involve the company making an application for administration and, if the order is granted, the immediate sale of the company's business and assets (i.e. the entire group) to a newly-incorporated company, to be owned by the existing lenders.'

At a meeting on Friday, 59 per cent of Interserve's shareholders voted against a proposed debt-for-equity swap, aimed at slashing the firm's near-650 million debt mountain.

It would have resulted in existing investors seeing their holding slashed to just 5 per cent. But New York hedge fund Coltrane, the largest shareholder with more than 27 per cent, dismissed the plan.

Another outsourcing firm, Carillion, went bust in January 2018 leaving thousands out of work

Interserve has been hampered by high debts, construction delays and a failed foray into the energy-from-waste market.

The collapse has sparked anger from the unions.

Kevin Brandstatter, GMB national officer, said: 'Ministers have learnt absolutely nothing from the Carillion fiasco and are hell-bent on outsourcing public-sector contracts.

'Shambolic mismanagement is putting jobs on the line and services in jeopardy. Our public services can't go on like this.'

Meanwhile, Unite has demanded an immediate meeting with the firm's administrators. It said: 'By being forced into administration the entire workforce is facing an uncertain future. Workers will be expected to continue working normally unless specifically told otherwise.'

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: 'This announcement will not affect jobs or the provision of public services delivered by Interserve.

'We are in close contact with the company and we are confident a positive way forward will be found.'
A Texas mother, so convinced her son was murdered that she launched her own investigation, is one step closer to uncovering the truth after compelling local cops to hand over key evidence for a forensic test that could crack the case they have failed to close.

It's been five years since somebody put a bullet through Jonathan Crews' heart. He was shot with his own SIG Sauer 9mm in his apartment in the quiet Dallas suburb of Coppell on February 2 - Super Bowl Sunday - 2014.

When paramedics arrived at his apartment they found him in bed lying on his back. He was under the covers up to his waist with both arms extended by his sides and the gun next to him on top of his blanket. He was 27 years old.

His girlfriend of three months, Brenda Lazaro, was on the scene. She claimed that Jonathan shot himself in a bizarre attempt to 'prove' how much he loved her.

But to the family who knew and loved the 'exuberant' young man, the idea that he would end the life he was excited to embrace every day is inconceivable.

Today, in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Jonathan's mother Pam, 57, told of the family's fight for justice after cops failed to close the case they once described as 'easily solvable.'

Jonathan Crews was found dead aged 27 with a bullet through his heart inside his apartment in Coppell, Texas on February 2, 2014. To his family who knew and loved the 'exuberant' young man, the idea that he would end the life he was excited to embrace every day is inconceivable

Brenda Lazaro, Jonathan's girlfriend of three months, was on the scene and claimed Jonathan shot himself in attempt to 'prove' how much he loved her

Today, in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Jonathan's mother Pam, 57, (pictured) has told of the family's fight for justice after cops failed to close the case they once described as 'easily solvable'

The Crews family filed a wrongful death suit in 2016 against Brenda alleging that she had shot and killed their son.

Pam has revealed the shocking details uncovered by the family's own investigation and the litany of failures which led cops to conclude that there was 'not enough evidence' to charge Brenda; the vital information withheld from the Medical Examiner who ruled Jonathan's death 'undetermined;' the witnesses never interviewed and forensic tests deemed 'too expensive' to conduct.

Perhaps most shocking of all, is what they have learned about Brenda's past, the numerous conflicting accounts she gave about what happened that night, the cops' own belief that, 'she will do it again' and how she posed in a wedding dress splattered with blood just months after Jonathan's violent death.

Pam said: 'We want to have the truth come out for Jonathan who can't speak for himself anymore. It's bad enough that he's gone but then to have lies about how it happened swirling around himit just doesn't seem fair.'

Pam was getting ready to go to bed in February, 2014 after an evening watching television with her daughter, Danielle, 25, when Danielle's phone rang.

At the time Danielle considered Brenda, who was an instructor at the Kung Fu school she attended, to be her best friend.

Pam recalled: 'When she answered it I heard Brenda scream, ''He's dead.'' I immediately started asking questions and was making so much noise Danielle got up and left the room.

'When she came back in she said: ''Brenda says Jonathan shot himself.'''

Jonathan's father John, 59, was out the door and in his car almost before the sentence was finished. As she followed on in her own car, Pam frantically turned over scenarios that could explain the devastating news - a burglary gone wrong perhaps, or an accident, but her son was so fastidious with gun safety.

She said: 'When we to there the police officer told us we couldn't go into the apartment and I said, ''Can you just tell me where he was shot? I need to know was he shot in the head or the body?''

'He said: ''The body.'' And I said, ''I knew it. He didn't do this. Somebody else shot him.''

Brenda was good friends with Jonathan's sister Danielle (pictured together), with Pam adding that she 'stayed in Danielle's bed for three nights and then one night, in the middle of the night she just disappeared and we never talked to her again'

It was a narrative that made no sense. Jonathan had so much to live for. He had just got a new apartment (pictured) and a new car. He loved his job as Director of an Urgent Care clinic and had done so well he had just been awarded $400,000 to invest in it

When she discovered that Brenda had been in the apartment with Jonathan, Pam admitted, her first thought was, 'She must have done it.' And when she learned that Brenda had been taken to the police station she assumed the police thought the same.

Early indications seemed to back that up. The search warrant issued at 3.14am the morning after Jonathan's death, stated the belief that: 'Brenda Lazaro has committed Murder.'

Later that night Pam received a phone call from Henry Su - the owner of the Kung Fu school at which Brenda taught and she and her daughter practiced.

Pam said: 'He said he had gone to the police station to pick Brenda up and would I like to know what had happened because she had explained it all to him?'

According to Su, Brenda told him that she and Jonathan had been arguing on and off all that day. Things had calmed down a bit but then the argument resurfaced later.

In the middle of the night she just disappeared and we never talked to her again.

She was mad so she'd gone into the bathroom and when she came out she didn't want to see Jonathan so she went and sat in the living room.

She said she sat there for a little while and then heard Jonathan shout, 'cover your ears' and heard a shot. When she ran into the room, she told Su, Jonathan was 'already shot.'

Pam recalled: 'She used those words, ''He was already shot.''

It was a narrative that made no sense. Jonathan had so much to live for. He had just got a new apartment and a new car. He loved his job as Director of an Urgent Care clinic and had done so well he had just been awarded $400,000 to invest in it.

But, overcome with grief and Valium in those first few days after her son's death, nothing made any sense to Pam anymore.

So when Brenda arrived at their house the day after Jonathan's death she welcomed her. She even comforted her in her apparent grief.

Pam said: 'She came to our house acting very upset although visitors to our house later said it was odd because she wouldn't look anyone in the eye.

'She always was looking at the floor. I remember one time I wanted to talk to her. I took her face in my hands... I had her look at me and I was trying to comfort and take care of her. She never voluntarily looked me in the eye.

'She stayed in Danielle's bed for three nights and then in the middle of the night she just disappeared and we never talked to her again.'

One of the family's many unanswered questions is whether or not it would even be physically possible for right-handed Jonathan to have shot himself in his left side with such heavy weapon while laying down

Pam said: 'Our family is extraordinarily close and somebody is missing and the rest of us are going to stand up for him until we've done every last thing we can possibly do'. Pictured: Jonathan with his brother Christian as children

Brenda did not attend Jonathan's funeral but on the very day she sent Danielle a barrage of what they considered cruel texts. She wanted to know why the family hadn't mentioned 'how happy' Jonathan was with her and why they didn't ask her to say anything at the service.

This was a side of Brenda that Pam had never seen and her mind cast back to a conversation with her son in which he had commented that he was still 'in the decision process' as far as Brenda was concerned.

She said: 'He said, ''There's a bit of crazy and I'm not sure how deep it runs. I need to know before I can fully commit.'''

Much to her regret Pam urged her son to give Brenda a chance to trust him. Back then Brenda presented herself as a sort of broken bird, a victim with a troubled past who needed nurturing.

But by the beginning of February, Jonathan had decided to end the relationship.

The day before he was shot Jonathan had visited the family home. He was close to his sister and conscious that Brenda was her friend and, out of deference to that friendship, he told Danielle about his decision.

One of Jonathan's closest friends was a girl named Emily who went on to marry Jonathan's best friend Jacob.

All his girlfriends had to pass what was laughingly described as the 'Jacob and Emily Test.'

Three months earlier Brenda and Jonathan had gone to dinner with Jacob and Emily. Jonathan had hugged Emily. It was a gesture that sent Brenda into such a spiral of jealous rage that, all those weeks later, she was still upset about it.

Pam said: 'Brenda was forcing him to choose between her and Emily and I believe for the last week or two she'd really been putting pressure on him.'

Brenda did not attend Jonathan's funeral but on the very day she sent Danielle a barrage of cruel and abusive texts. She wanted to know why the family hadn't mentioned 'how happy' Jonathan was with her and why they didn't ask her to say anything at the service

Three months earlier Brenda and Jonathan had gone to dinner with Jacob and Emily. Jonathan had hugged Emily. It was a gesture that sent Brenda into such a spiral of jealous rage that, all those weeks later, she was still upset about it

Pam continued: 'He'd been thinking about it and he decided his options were to stay with Brenda and give up Emily. He said if he did that he would eventually resent Brenda so much that they would end up breaking up. Or he could choose Emily which would result in them breaking up or he could try to kind of wait it out and see if he could make Brenda understand that he and Emily were good friends.

'But no matter what it seemed all of the options ended with Brenda and Jonathan eventually breaking up and so [he decided] to just break up immediately was the best because it limited the damage.'

Barely 24 hours after he shared that decision with his sister, Jonathan was dead.

Pam shared everything she knew with police who told her that forensic tests had found traces of gun primer on the palms and backs of both Brenda's hands and the front of the hooded sweatshirt she had been wearing when Jonathan was shot.

It seemed only a matter of time before Brenda would be arrested and charged. An investigating officer had gone so far as to tell Pam that 'nobody shoots themselves in the flank.'

By not completing the investigation the city has allowed a killer to walk the streets.

Then, inexplicably, the investigation stalled.

Pam recalled, 'It was like a wall came down. They said there's nothing more we can do. We don't have enough evidence.'

A year after Jonathan was shot, a new team of investigators took over the case. The move gave the family new hope.

Pam said: 'My husband and other son (Christian, 28) and I went over there and there were four or five police officers sitting there and they said they'd been in the file and they were very confused because it seemed like an easily solvable case.

'They said, ''We don't understand why it's still sitting here so give us six weeks and we're going to test some evidence that wasn't tested, interview some witnesses that weren't interviewed and we'll be back to you with something.'''

According to Pam, Brenda is manipulative and 'wicked,' but, with remarkable grace, she said she does not harbor hatred toward her nor does she want vengeance. Because for Pam, a woman of faith who prays outside Coppell Police Department each night, none of this fight has been about Brenda

Six weeks later the family returned to Coppell Police Department to be told there was nothing more that could be done.

She said, 'The sergeant said, ''There's not enough evidence. You just need to go live your lives.'''

The family decided it was time to take things into their own hands and retained Dallas attorney, Tom Shaw.

Speaking to DailyMail.com Shaw said, 'The police in their mind had given up the investigation and they wanted to be vindicated through the civil court system. I told them the best person to talk to was a private investigator called Sheila Wysocki.'

In January 2016 they filed a wrongful death suit against Brenda alleging that she had shot and killed their son. The suit meant that their attorney could depose witnesses.

Brenda's ex-boyfriend said that she had all but ruined his life with her jealousy, threatened to kill his mother and cut herself during uncontrollable, violent rages

Among them was Brenda's ex-boyfriend who said that she had all but ruined his life with her jealousy, threatened to kill his mother and cut herself during uncontrollable, violent rages.

911 audio and an interview with a neighbor helped the team construct a disturbing timeline that showed Brenda waited approximately 30 minutes after Jonathan was shot before she made the call.

Jonathan's neighbor noted both the gunshot and Brenda's calm demeanor when she knocked on her door 30 minutes later supposedly unable to recall the address of Jonathan's apartment.

Wysocki's investigation involved consulting with a plethora of experts. They interviewed the Medical Examiner who revealed that Coppell cops had not provided him with any information regarding the investigation despite multiple requests.

He hadn't even known it was a homicide investigation. In the absence of that information and convinced it was not suicide he was forced to rule 'undetermined.'

It is a ruling he has told the family he is open to changing if presented with evidence.

They have also uncovered the fact that Brenda had given at least six different conflicting accounts of what happened that night. Some put her in the room when the gun went off, some did not.

According to ballistics expert, Michael Martinez who consulted on the case, the gun primer present on Brenda's hands and clothes is absolute proof that she was in the room when the gun was fired and very probably facing the victim.

Shaw noted, 'One would think that those contradictory statements would be very interesting to police and yet they don't seem to want to follow up on anything.'

According to ballistics expert, Michael Martinez (pictured) who consulted on the case, the gun primer present on Brenda's hands and clothes is absolute proof that she was in the room when the gun was fired and very probably facing the victim

Neither Pam nor Shaw, nor Wysocki can understand why the police who complained of lack of evidence showed no interest in their findings though they have been offered.

Instead they stopped investigating and left the case 'Open but Inactive.'

And in an extraordinary turn of events, when the family requested the shirt Jonathan was wearing to carry out a Distance Determination test, law enforcement and Brenda's council actively blocked it.

The test is so important because it alone can show how far Jonathan was from the muzzle when it was fired.

It has taken months of fighting and the threat of a court order for the City to finally cave and hand the garment over.

According to Shaw, 'This investigation hasn't been completed until they've done this test. My question [to the city attorney and Lazaro's] was, 'Why wouldn't you want this done?' It could resolve the case.

Our family is extraordinarily close and somebody is missing and the rest of us are going to stand up for him until we've done every last thing we can possibly do.

'What is unusual to me is that there's so much evidence piling up that points the finger away from this being a self-inflicted death that I'm surprised the city isn't more actively involved in trying to resolve the inconsistencies.

'The kind of proof of the pudding for me is that Brenda Lazaro's council wasn't supporting the investigation. If he thought his client was innocent wouldn't he be sitting next to me demanding that the city conduct the investigation? Instead he's trying to block the very thing that could absolve his client.'

As far as Shaw is concerned, 'By not completing the investigation the city has allowed a killer to walk the streets.'

He and the family are, he said, confident that when the results of the Distance Determination test come back they will prove once and for all that Jonathan could not have shot himself.

One of the family's many unanswered questions is whether or not it would even be physically possible for right-handed Jonathan to have shot himself in his left side with such heavy weapon while laying down.

They are convinced that the shirt, which is now in their possession, holds the proof that it was Brenda, furious at losing Jonathan and jealous of his friendship with Emily, who killed him.

He broke her heart, they allege, so she took aim and broke his.

One of the family's many unanswered questions is whether or not it would even be physically possible for right-handed Jonathan (pictured right with his brother Christian) to have shot himself in his left side with such heavy weapon while laying down

Brenda, now 31, is married and expecting her second child. She still lives in the area but the family have had no contact with her.

Brenda has pled the fifth and has never commented on any of this. DailyMail.com's attempted to reach her for comment on this story were unsuccessful.

According to Pam, Brenda is manipulative and 'wicked,' but, with remarkable grace, she said she does not harbor hatred toward her nor does she want vengeance.

Because for Pam, a woman of faith who prays outside Coppell Police Department each night, none of this fight has been about Brenda.

This is about Jonathan. It has always been about Jonathan - who never lost his joy in life, still sometimes bouncing on his toes as he had as a little child when excited.

Pam said, 'I always told him be who you want to be because you have one name and one reputation and one life and the way you are remembered is up to you.

'But now it's really not up to him. I guess that's what's really hard. He wanted to be like his dad. He wanted to be a respectable guy, working and raising a family and he was most of the way there and that's how he should have been remembered - not some guy who was willing to give up everything he'd achieved and all the people he loved for some girl he'd been dating for ten weeks or whatever it was.

'He worked so hard to achieve all those things and just when his life had started to blossom it was over.'

She added, 'If somebody had done this to one of us he would have sold every last thing in the world to get it squared away.

'Our family is extraordinarily close and somebody is missing and the rest of us are going to stand up for him until we've done every last thing we can possibly do.'
The company that has made billions selling the prescription painkiller OxyContin said Wednesday that it is considering legal options including bankruptcy, a move that could upend hundreds of lawsuits claiming it had a major role in causing the U.S. opioid drug crisis.

'As the company has stated, it is exploring and preparing for any number of eventualities and options, given the amount of litigation the company currently faces,' Purdue Pharma spokesman Robert Josephson said in an email to The Associated Press. 'A decision has not been made to file for bankruptcy, nor is there a timetable.'

Such a move has been seen as a strong possibility as the privately held company hired an executive and consultants that specialize in helping companies restructure in the past year.

Family and friends who have lost loved ones to OxyContin and opioid overdoses leave pill bottles in protest outside the headquarters of Purdue Pharma last year. The company that has made billions selling the prescription painkiller OxyContin says it is considering bankruptcy

The company is owned by members of the Sackler family, who have given money to museums around the world, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art and London's Tate Modern.

A court filing made public in Massachusetts earlier this year asserts that members of the family were paid more than $4 billion from Purdue from 2007 to 2018.

The first trial date is nearing in hundreds of lawsuits aiming to hold the company and others in the drug industry accountable for the nationwide opioid crisis.

Bankruptcy proceedings would likely pause that litigation, at least for Purdue.

A federal bankruptcy judge would have wide discretion on how to proceed, which could impact the claims of hundreds of local and state governments that have sued.

The judge could let claims against other drugmakers and distributors move ahead while Purdue is handled separately, consolidate all of them or let the other claims continue without Purdue involved. Another possibility is that the bankruptcy filing includes a settlement with plaintiffs in the suits.

The lawsuits assert the Stamford, Connecticut-based company aggressively sold OxyContin as a drug with a low chance of triggering addictions despite knowing that wasn't true.

Since OxyContin, a time-released opioid, was introduced in 1996, addiction and overdoses to opioids have surged. In 2017, opioids were involved in nearly 48,000 deaths - a record, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Raymond Sackler, left, and Mortimer Sackler, right, were at the helm of the business when the drug was created. They died in 2017 and 2010 respectively

In recent years, there have been more deaths involving illicit opioids, including heroin and fentanyl, than the prescription forms of the drugs. That change has happened as awareness of the dangers of prescription opioids has increased and prescribers have become more cautious.

Purdue's drugs are just a slice of the opioids prescribed, but critics assign a lot of the blame to the company because of it developed both the drug and an aggressive marketing strategy.

According to a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts attorney general, the company pushed big sales of OxyContin from the start. Doing so meant persuading doctors who had been reluctant to prescribe such strong painkillers that this one was safe.

In court filings, Purdue has pointed out that its products were approved by federal regulators and prescribed by doctors.

A federal judge overseeing more than 1,300 of the cases against Purdue and other companies has been pushing the parties to reach a grand settlement that would make a difference in the opioid crisis. The judge, Cleveland-based Dan Polster, has scheduled a trial for the claims brought by Ohio's Cuyahoga and Summit Counties for October.

The Purdue Pharma logo at their offices in Stamford, Connecticut in a file photo

An Oklahoma state court has scheduled a trial in a case brought by that state for May. If it goes to trial, it would be the first of the wave of recent claims against opioid companies to do so.

Purdue's statement to the AP came the same day The Washington Post published a story in which company president and CEO Craig Landau acknowledged bankruptcy is under consideration.

One lawyer who is suing Purdue on behalf of clients including the city of Albuquerque and the state of Utah said it's long been thought that Purdue couldn't afford to pay the massive amounts being sought in the lawsuits.

'I don't think there's enough money in that company to pay for the damages that are claimed,' said Jonathan Novak.

Abbe Gluck, a Yale Law School professor who has followed the case, said even if the Oklahoma trial moved ahead 'nobody is going to get paid ... without coming to the bankruptcy court, once Purdue files.'

Hypodermic needles litter the ground in the South Bronx on Wednesday in New York City. America's drug makers are finding themselves under increased legal scrutiny

There's a history of bankruptcy claims by organizations facing big lawsuits. Dozens of asbestos companies have done so since the 1980s. Last year, USA Gymnastics filed for protection as it faced lawsuits over sexual abuse by team doctor Larry Nassar. Earlier this year, Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. sought bankruptcy protection because it faces billions of dollars in potential damages from lawsuits over catastrophic wildfires in California.

Vincent Buccola, a lawyer and professor of business ethics, said Purdue may be trying to avoid going to court in states that have been heavily impacted by the opioid epidemic.

'That's not the jury you want to face,' said Buccola, who teaches at University of Pennsylvania. 'So you might try to stop that litigation from happening and consolidate it in front of bankruptcy judge who you hope will be more favorable.'

A bankruptcy judge could pressure plaintiffs to settle with the company if they want to get any damages at all, Buccola said.
Seven people brutally murdered at a school in southern Brazil were mourned by family, friends and former classmates at an open-casket memorial one day after the horrific massacre.

Thousands of people gathered at a volleyball arena in Suzano, a Sao Paulo suburb, for the mass wake on Thursday as rain soaked the streets outside.

Heartbreaking photographs show loved ones standing over the victim's caskets shrouded in white netting and adorned with roses as they said their goodbyes.

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Thousands of people gathered Thursday at a mass wake for the seven people massacred at a school in southern Brazil one day after the gruesome attack

A relative rests her head on the open casket of 15-year-old Caio Oliveira, a victim of a mass shooting on Wednesday at the Raul Brasil State School in Suzano, Brazil

Cemetery employees carry the coffin that contains the remains of 15-year-old Kaio Lucas da Costa Limeira as rain soaked mourners in the Sao Paolo suburb on Thursday

The family of Eliana Regina de Oliveira Xavier surround her coffin, as one dressed in a scouts uniform places his hand on the victim

Classmates, friends and families began saying goodbye on Thursday, with thousands attending a wake in the Sao Paulo suburb while authorities worked to understand what drove two former students to attack the school with a gun, crossbows and small axes

A woman stands weeping in the rain during the burial of Kaio Lucas da Costa Limeira

Five students, one teacher and one administrator were killed and nine others were injured when two young men stormed their former school armed with a gun, crossbows and axes on Wednesday.

At a news conference Thursday, Sao Paulo civil police director Ruy Ferraz revealed that 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro and 25-year-old Henrique de Castro were trying to emulate the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Those who knew the assailants, who committed suicide, told investigators they were obsessed with the attack on Columbine High School and had been planning their own version since at least November.

Ferraz said the acquaintances said they didn't believe the attack would actually happen, or feared that telling anyone would make them targets.

The Colombine attack, also undertaken by two heavily armed young men, left 13 dead. And as in Wednesday's rampage, the Columbine assailants took their own lives.

Monteiro and de Castro 'wanted to prove they could act like in Columbine High School with cruelty and with a tragic character so they could be more recognized than' even the Columbine killers, Ferraz said

Ferraz said a third person, a 17-year-old former student at the school, had been involved in planning but was not present at the school when the attack happened.

He did not identify the accomplice but said police have asked a judge to issue a warrant for the teen's arrest.

Disturbing footage shows Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17, pulling out the .38 caliber pistol on a huddle of victims at the foyer of the Raul Brasil school on Wednesday morning

Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25, enters behind his accomplice and viciously hacks at the bodies of the fallen

Investigators say 17-year-old Guilherme Taucci Monteiro (left) and 25-year-old Henrique de Castro (right) were trying to emulate the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado and had been planning their own version for months

Before launching the school assault, police said the assailants shot and killed Monteiro's uncle, who owned a used-car dealership nearby. Monteiro had worked at the dealership, but had been fired by his uncle for petty crimes.

What happened next at the K-12 school, partially caught on surveillance camera footage at the building's entrance and widely distributed in Brazil, was stomach-churning.

It showed Monteiro entering and shooting several people in the head as they tried to run away. De Castro followed, first striking wounded people with an ax and then swinging it wildly while scores of students ran past him. De Castro then armed his crossbow and walked farther into the school.

'I couldn't sleep. I have two children in school and they are about the age of the victims,' said Wanda Augusta, a 46-year-old homemaker attending the wake.

'If only we could have identified the difficulties of these boys' before the attack, said Rossieli Soares, the state education secretary, who attended the wake at a volleyball arena. 'This is a problem in our society.'

Police seized computers and notebooks from the homes of the two attackers, who were neighbors and lived less than a mile from the school. They also took computers from an arcade near the school that the attackers frequented.

CCTV images show children running for their lives from Professor Raul Brasil State College in the Suzano, Sao Paulo, which has more than 1,600 students from elementary through secondary school grades

The Prof. Raul Brasil elementary school is located in the eastern suburbs of sprawling Sao Paulo - Brazil's second largest city

While Latin America's largest nation has deep problems with violence - it's the world leader in annual homicides - school shootings like those in the US are rare.

Wednesday's attack reminded many Brazilians of an attack in 2011, when a gunman roamed the halls of a Rio de Janeiro school and killed 12 students.

Joao Camilo Pires de Campos, Sao Paulo state's public security secretary, summed up what was on the minds of many Brazilians.

'The big question is: What was the motivation of these former students?' he told reporters Wednesday.

Monteiro's mother, Tatiana Taucci, offered a possible partial answer, saying that her son had been bullied at the school.

'Bullying, they call it. ... He stopped going to school ... because of this,' she told the Band News TV network.

Still, she said she was as surprised as anyone by her son's involvement in the attack, which she said she heard about on television like everyone else.

Ferraz, the police director, said that while bullying had been mentioned in some testimony from acquaintances, they did not believe it to be meaningful to the investigation.

Minutes before the school rampage, Monteiro posted 26 photos on his Facebook page, including several with a gun and one that showed him giving the middle finger as he looked into the camera.

In some of the photos, he wore a black scarf with a white imprint of a skull and cross bones. No text accompanied the posts.

Luiz Henrique de Castro was one of the killer that carried out a deadly attack at a school in Brazil on Wednesday. He would have turned 26 on Saturday

Monteiro posted up to 30 images of himself online holding the pistol allegedly used in the massacre and wearing a skull mask which was reportedly found at the scene

During the attack, Monteiro opened fire with a .38 caliber handgun and de Castro used a crossbow, de Campos said.

The attackers were also carrying Molotov cocktails, knives and small axes, authorities said.

One of the wounded, Jose Vitor, ran to a hospital close to the school with an ax still lodged in his right shoulder.

'He is an agile adolescent,' his mother, Sandra Regina Ramos, told reporters outside the hospital. 'He reacted quickly.'

The assailants were trying to force their way inside a room at the back of the school where many students were hiding when police arrived. Instead of facing the officers, Monteiro shot de Castro in the head and then shot himself, authorities said.

Katia Sastre, a police officer who was elected to Congress after a video showed her gunning down an armed robber outside her daughter's school went viral last year, called on authorities to provide better security at schools.

'This could have been prevented if upstanding citizens were able to defend themselves and bear arms,' said Sastre, who is a former student at the school attacked Wednesday.

The debate over whether to expand access to guns, a priority of President Jair Bolsonaro's administration, was present in many of the public statements by politicians.

Soon after his January 1 inauguration, Bolsonaro issued a decree making it easier to buy a gun. His party plans to put forward legislation that would go even further, loosening restrictions on carrying and the number and types of firearms Brazilians can own.

Students, relatives and neighborhood residents joined hands to create a human chain as they prayed outside the Raul Brasil State School one day after a mass shooting
Princess Beatrice's loved up appearance with controversial boyfriend Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi at a red carpet bash this week suggests an engagement may soon be on the cards, senior royal sources have told MailOnline.

The couple put on a very public display of devotion at a A-lister gala fundraiser at the National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday evening - attended by the Duchess of Cambridge as well as Earl Snowdon, the late Princess Margaret's son.

Now many in palace circles are tipping a wedding announcement before Christmas ahead of a Spring wedding.

Princess Beatrice's loved up appearance with controversial boyfriend Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi at a red carpet bash this week suggests an engagement may soon be on the cards, senior royal sources have told MailOnline

The couple put on a very public display of devotion at a A-lister gala fundraiser at the National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday evening - attended by the Duchess of Cambridge as well as Earl Snowdon, the late Princess Margaret's son

With a royal source describing Beatrice and her 34-year-old beau as 'totally head-over-heels in love and happy for everyone to see it', talk of an engagement has been tipped for the autumn

Beatrice, daughter of The Duke and the Duchess of York, and her beau were guests of Philippe Ghanem and Sabine Getty, a socialite and Swiss jewellery designer.

Throughout the night the couple were in an animated mood as they mingled with stars such as David and Victoria Beckham, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Liam Payne.

The source said it was no co-incidence that Beatrice and Edoardo chose such a high profile event as the National Portrait Gala, attended by Victoria and David Beckham to make a public appearance

One insider told the MailOnline. 'It was all very sweet to see. They are clearly very much in love with each other and Beatrice seems smitten.

'The fact that they sat looking gooey eyed at each other and cuddled most of the evening has raised expectations that an engagement is near.'

Beatrice, currently eighth in line to throne, and Edoardo, a divorce and father to a two-year-old son, are said to be 'totally head-over-heels in love and now happy for everyone to see it' said a royal source.

The inside source confirmed: 'Nothing the royals do happens by accident. With such senior members of the family such as the Duchess of Cambridge and the Earl of Snowdon present, Beatrice was well aware they knew that their show of love and togetherness would draw a great deal of attention.

'It is fair to say that the relationship is now on a solid footage and they are now more than happy to be seen together than before. Their love has blossomed.'

Beatrice, 30, is said to be keen to settle down with the man she loves and think about starting a family after seeing her younger sister Princess Eugenie, who is 29 this month, find happiness with husband Jack Brooksbank.

The NPG gala is not the first time the pair has been seen together as they were spotted on a rare outing back in February as they left Chiltern Firehouse in London

Beatrice, 30, is said to be keen to settle down with the man she loves and think about starting a family after seeing her younger sister Princess Eugenie, who is 29 this month, find happiness with husband Jack Brooksbank

The source told the MailOnline: 'Edoardo is as affectionate about her as she is about him and they make a very handsome couple indeed.

'The members of her royal family who have met him or know him are very fond of him.

'He has been introduced as her boyfriend to her parents the Duke and Duchess of York.

'I expect there could be an announcement of an engagement by the Autumn with a wedding at St George's Chapel in spring next year.

'There will be an awful lot of planning that will be needed to be carried out.'

Beatrice had been single since her breakup from American boyfriend Dave Clark in 2016, after 10 years together.

Edoardo, 34, and a multi-millionaire property magnate, had been friends with the Princess and her family for many years, but they had kept their romance out of the spotlight when they started dating in October 2018.

Beatrice had been single since her breakup from American boyfriend Dave Clark (above) in 2016, after 10 years together. Edoardo had been friends with the Princess and her family for many years, but they had kept their romance quiet when they started dating in October 2018

In 2011, both Beatrice and the Duchess of York were among the 700 mourners at the funeral of Edoardo's stepfather, Christopher Shale, who died at Glastonbury and was a close friend of former Prime Minister David Cameron.

Their appearance at this week's gala is not the first time the pair has been seen together as they were spotted on a rare outing back in February as they left Chiltern Firehouse in London in the early hours of the morning.

The couple first went public when they attended the annual gala for the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture in New York in December.
A huge tornado ripped through parts of Kentucky yesterday leaving at least one person injured as a state of emergency was declared.

The storm spread damage across five square miles and knocked down power lines as it moved across the west of the state.

Police said at least one person had been injured in McCracken County and emergency crews were going door-to-door to check on residents.

Debris litters a field after the tornado hit McCracken County, Kentucky, as a farmer assesses the damage

Power lines are down in Paducah, Kentucky after a tornado ripped through western areas in the state

A cow in McCracken County returns after the storm passes to find her calf was killed by the devastating tornado

As many as 40 preschool children were forced to shelter in their building - but were reportedly unharmed.

The storm has been given a preliminary rating of EF2 by the National Weather Service due to wind speeds of up to 125mph causing considerable damage.

The tornados path was 17 miles long and 300 yards wide when it hit Blandville Road, west of Lovelaceville.

Forecasters said the tornados track started a mile northwest of Cunningham, Carlisle County, at 9.18am and finished at 9.34am near Paducah.

State trooper Rob Austin said dozens of homes were damaged and high winds were continuing in the area.

He said: 'Things are still flying.'

Wilbert Vault Co, in West Paducah, was hit by the huge tornado which started in Lovelaceville. Keith Todd, a spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. He said the public is asked to avoid the area while utility crews, area fire departments, and rescue squads worked to clear utility lines, downed trees and other debris

Farm equipment was left heavily damaged and covered in debris after a tornado hit a barn in McCracken County yesterday

Power lines were battered by the storm and are left snapped off from their bases in Paducah

Tornado in Union County. Video courtesy JoshDossett pic.twitter.com/BdpCHUXiXO  Beth Sweeney (@Beth14News) March 14, 2019

Even weather officials in Paducah were affected as the tornado blew past their office.

The National Weather Service tweeted at 9.30am: 'TORNADO JUST MISSED OUR OFFICE IN WEST PADUCAH. TAKE SHELTER NOW IF YOU'RE IN PADUCAH!!!!'

Dramatic footage of the tornado was posted on social media.

Debris scatters across the ground after the tornado touched down near this house in McCracken County

Mount Zion Church in West Paducah is attended to by emergency services after its roof was ripped off by the tornado yesterday

The roof of Wilbert Vault Co. in West Paducah, caved in under the pressure of the storm

Jared Borum filmed the twister forming as it moved over a field of trees in Paducah.

Mr Borum and a room full of others watched the funnel grow and whip across the trees as it stretched towards the ground.

During the recording, he said: 'It's amazing. See the debris? You can see it hitting the trees.'

Crews begin work on damaged power lines on Hinkleville Road in Paducah, Kentucky after the tornado uprooted them

The wall of this home off Hamburg Road in McCracken County was blown out by the devastating tornado

Others in the room can be heard saying 'you can see the tornado right here,' 'oh my God,' 'what in tarnation' and 'It's a legit tornado'.

The twister plowed through parts of West Paducah, according to Keith Todd, a spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet.

He said the public have been asked to avoid the area while utility crews, area fire departments and rescue squads worked to clear utility lines, downed trees and other debris.

Weather forecasters have said numerous severe storms could be on the way to the Tennessee Valley region and as far south as northern Birmingham.

Officials said schools were closing early in north Alabama because of the chances of severe weather.

Forecasters said winds up to 60mph are possible along with isolated tornadoes and hail.

The state is on the southern end of the storm system that has pummeled the central United States.
A Greens candidate who has joked about necrophilia and the coward-punch death of an innocent teenager has also revealed he is anti-police and wants jails abolished.

Tom Raue is campaigning to represent Summer Hill in Sydney's inner-west ahead of this month's New South Wales state election.

Mr Raue has attracted controversy for his statements in the past, which have included a 'joking' endorsement of having sex with corpses and arguing punching strangers in the head was 'brave'.

Social media posts have now emerged showing Mr Raue's beliefs in abolishing the police, enforcing anarchy and scrapping jails.

Tom Raue (pictured) is campaigning to represent Summer Hill in Sydney's inner-west ahead of this month's New South Wales state election

Mr Raue (pictured with a friend) has attracted controversy for his statements in the past, which have included a 'joking' endorsement of having sex with corpses

In 2015, Mr Raue tweeted 'there are no good cops', and in November 2018 he said 'fewer' police were needed

In 2015, Mr Raue tweeted 'there are no good cops', and in November 2018 he said 'fewer' police were needed, news.com.au reported.

'The main function of police has always been to enforce property relations - keeping the rich rich and the poor poor,' he posted to Facebook.

'Their day-to-day work is to enforce the failed war on drugs, and harass Aboriginal people and people experiencing homelessness.

'More money poured into the police force means less for healthcare, education and other social services that actually reduce crime.'

He has argued for prisons to be abolished, saying they 'increase recidivism, destroy communities and are increasingly filled with Aboriginal people'.

Mr Raue wrote a student newspaper column criticising the role of government, saying it 'hindered freedom'.

He has also called for homes to be 'seized back from the landlords' and for infrastructure to be taken back 'from the corporations'

'For the individual to flourish and society to prosper, we must do away with the government and the market together,' he wrote.

He has also called for homes to be 'seized back from the landlords' and for infrastructure to be taken back 'from the corporations'.

In response to questions about the newly-surfaced comments, Mr Raue said he had 'long been an activist for social change'.

'I am running for parliament to try and bring about significant change to address inequality in all its forms,' he said.

He also took to Twitter to criticise those resurfacing his old social media posts.

'To think people are spending their time digging up old posts while living standards are falling, an entire generation is locked out of the housing market, our broken social welfare system is driving people to suicide,' Mr Raue tweeted.

Mr Raue argued that fewer police were needed as they keep 'the rich rich and the poor poor'

'Migrants having to wait four years for social security, pensioners crushing up food because they can't afford the dentist, refugees dying in offshore detention. All of this is ok but a post on social media isn't?

'These kind of stories, ''digging up dirt'' are discouraging an entire generation from running for political office, which is very sad because we are the ones who have the most at stake.'

Mr Raue said he stood by his criticism of the police and of prisons.

'Over [the] last three days there have been articles about a dumb tweet I made five years ago, one about protests I attended and this one about police and prisons,' he tweeted.

'Im happy to defend the latter two but they all came out of any opposition putting resources into a dirt unit instead of ideas.'

Mr Raue said he stood by his criticism of the police and of prisons in a series of tweets

In a 2013 article in Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit, Mr Raue argued that necrophilia was 'harmless'.

In 2014, Mr Raue took to Twitter after Daniel Christie, 18, died after being randomly struck from behind by a thug while out with friends in Kings Cross.

'Going to punch somebody out of the blue is stupid and awful but it takes a lot of guts. I'd call it a brave punch,' Mr Raue wrote in a since-deleted tweet.

'If a person gives permission for their corpse to be used for sex, and the family has no issue with it, then what's the harm? F*** it,' Mr Raue wrote.

Mr Raue described necrophilia as 'one of the most taboo sexualities in almost every society' and while he noted it was illegal in Australia, he wanted that changed.

'Although it may not be everyone's cup of tea, necrophilia in and of itself is harmless and should be allowed,' he wrote.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Tom Raue for comment.
One Nation politician Mark Latham has criticised tens of thousands of Australian students wagging school to attend a climate change protest.

Mr Latham - One Nation's New South Wales leader - told Daily Mail Australia young people skipping class on Friday for the School Strike 4 Climate march are limiting their career pursuits.

The global protest, inspired by young activist Greta Thunberg in Sweden, aims to encourage politicians to do more to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

The students have three demands: stop the Adani coal mine in central Queensland, no new coal or gas, and 100 per cent renewables by 2030.

But Mr Latham says the students are being misled at the expense of their education.

One Nation politician Mark Latham (pictured) has criticised tens of thousands of Australian students wagging school to attend a climate change protest

Mr Latham said he does not dispute the students' knowledge on climate change, but fears they are being politicised and used by 'left-wing activism'.

'School is compulsory,' Mr Latham said while questioning why the protest is not held on Saturday or Sunday.

'I'm afraid Friday is a day lost in the classroom.'

Students should be spending their time in class working hard, Mr Latham said.

'There are no careers in becoming a climate change protester,' he said.

'You can get a job by studying hard and getting your qualifications, going onto Tafe and university, so I always say, I told my kids to put their head down and study hard.'

'These students are distracted by left-wing activists.'

Mr Latham - One Nation's New South Wales leader - told Daily Mail Australia young people skipping class on Friday for the School Strike 4 Climate march are limiting their career pursuits

The global protest, inspired by young activist Greta Thunberg in Sweden, aims to encourage politicians to do more to reduce fossil fuel emissions (pictured: students protest in Sydney in November for coordinated rally demanding action on climate change)

Mr Latham said protesters should be looking into nuclear power, which he claims is 'affordable' and 'reliable'.

He shared the same sentiments on Sunrise on Friday morning, saying: 'If the lefties were fair dinkum about their concern about climate change wouldn't they be advocating nuclear power'.

'I don't take the protest seriously because they don't have a serious public policy, I think it's a bit sad the kids get used this way, obviously they could protest tomorrow or Sunday and make their point.'

Senior cabinet minister Christopher Pyne has also voiced his disapproval of the protest.

Senior cabinet minister Christopher Pyne has also voiced his disapproval of the protest

'Usually strikes are when employees withdraw their labour from an employee so I'm not sure why the students are withdrawing themselves from school. It only damages their education,' Mr Pyne told Nine's Today on Friday.

He said the students should be in school, and if they wanted to engage in political activism it should be on their own time.

Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon defended student activism, saying children should be encouraged to express their opinions.

'I don't think any student is going to miss out on their career because they missed a few hours of school today,' he said.

'As long as they are safe and their parents know where they are and they are marching or protesting in a respectful way, in a responsible way, I think that is fine.'
A woman who fell asleep at the wheel killing her father and a two-year-old child faces a jail term because she was driving while disqualified.

Penina Nauer, 22, had not told her family she had been disqualified and did not want to offend her strict Samoan father Antonio when he asked her to share the driving on a long car journey.

Nauer was driving a Toyota Hiace with nine passengers, when she veered onto the wrong side of Mamre Road in Kemps Creek in Sydney's west in 2017.

She crashed head-on into a van killing Mr Nauer and the toddler, 9News reported.

Nauer had been disqualified around two months before the incident.

Penina Nauer (pictured), 22, was driving a Toyota Hiace with nine passengers, when she veered onto the wrong side of Mamre Road in Kemps Creek in Sydney's west in 2017

The court heard if an elder instructs you to do something in Samoan culture, you must do it out of respect for them

The family had been travelling to Sydney Airport from Griffith in western New South Wales when Nauer's father asked her to share the driving.

In Samoan culture, if an elder instructs you to do something you must do it out of respect for them, Campbelltown Court heard.

Nauer, who is the mother to a three-month-old child, was supported by her large family at court.

The judge will take a week to determine Nauer's sentence.

Nauer faces a jail term and being separated from her young child.

She pleaded guilty to the act in November 2017.
In a letter open to the people a group of 16 jurists speaks of a sentence that violates the commitments enshrined in the Constitution in terms of human rights and due process. The sentence is "a source of shame" and shows "lack of tolerance" in dealing with the voices that are "critical" of the system. Sign of "weakness" of the judiciary.

Tehran (AsiaNews) - A group of Iranian lawyers has joined the criticism of the international community for the sentence of 38 years in prison and 148 lashes imposed in recent days on Nasrin Sotoudeh, leader of the fight against the mandatory veil.

In an open letter to the Iranian people, and sent by one of the authors to VOA Persia for publication, the group of 16 jurists emphasizes that the sentence violates the commitments enshrined in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic on the subject of human rights and due process.

In the letter, posted online by the Iranian Human Rights Activist News Agency, the signatories claim that the sentence is "a source of shame" and "shows a lack of tolerance in dealing with" lawyers "critical of the system". Furthermore, it is "a sign of weakness in the judiciary".

"We praise Sotoudeh's integrity, passion and independence in fighting for justice and human rights, and call for her unjust sentence to be overturned," added the lawyers.

On March 11, judge Mohammad Moghiseh spoke of a sentence of seven years in prison: five years for "crimes against national security" and two additional years for "insults" to the supreme leader, the great ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, there are conflicting versions of the verdict with the family that speaks of 38 years and almost 150 lashes.

At the time of the arrest, last year, the Iranian authorities had informed the leader of the fight against the mandatory veil that she had received a sentence in absentia of five years in prison for espionage.

Nasrin Sotoudeh is one of seven lawyers and human rights activists arrested in Iran last year. Before her detention, last June she defended a group of women imprisoned for appearing in public without the mandatory veil, a legacy norm of the 1979 Islamic revolution and punishable by prison under the penal code. Between 2010 and 2013 she was arrested and imprisoned for her political activity (propaganda against the state and attack on national security).

The condemnation of the lawyer and activist has raised an indignant response from most of the international community, including human rights NGOs and various Western chancelleries. A movement of general indignation against which, so far, the leadership of Tehran has opposed an obstinate silence.
A Hawaiian mixed martial arts fighter pleaded no contest Thursday to assaulting his wife, a fellow fighter who said he left her with a fractured eye socket.

Arnold Berdon is expected to be sentenced to probation, but Judge Trisha Morikawa told the 28-year-old that he will likely avoid jail time if he does well in a domestic violence intervention program.

'I'm going to do well,' he told the judge.

His wife, Rachael Ostovich Berdon, filed for a temporary restraining order in November, alleging her husband punched her in the head, face and ribs. He punched her after a night out with family and she fell to the ground, gasped for air and escaped through a balcony, according to her petition for an order of protection. She said she coughed up blood and threw up several times.

Police arrested Berdon on a charge of second-degree attempted murder. Prosecutors later charged him with second-degree assault.

The maximum sentence is five years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for May 16.

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A Hawaiian mixed martial arts fighter pleaded no contest Thursday to assaulting his wife, a fellow fighter who said he left her with a fractured eye socket. Arnold Berdon is expected to be sentenced to probation, but Judge Trisha Morikawa told the 28-year-old that he will likely avoid jail time if he does well in a domestic violence intervention program. His wife, Rachael Ostovich Berdon (left), filed for a temporary restraining order in November, alleging Berdon punched her in the head, face and ribs

Mixed martial arts fighter Arnold Berdon (right) and his attorney Myles Breiner stand outside a courtroom in Honolulu on Thursday. Berdon is expected to be sentenced to probation, but Judge Trisha Morikawa told the 28-year-old that he will likely avoid jail time if he does well in a domestic violence intervention program

Ostovich suffered a broken bone near her eye and was heavily bruised after the altercation

Berdon said after the hearing that he decided to plead no contest to spare his family from a legal battle. He said he and his wife are divorcing. They have a daughter.

When asked about his future as an MMA fighter he said, 'I'll do whatever God wants me to do.'

Ostovich Berdon initially canceled a fight against Paige VanZant but later decided to go through with it, saying she was healing.

Rachael Ostovich (right) initially cancelled her next fight after the attack, but ultimately changed her mind and fought Paige VanZant at Brooklyn's Barclays Center in January

'I'm satisfied that Arnold is accepting responsibility for his actions and getting the needed help so that he can be the best father to our daughter,' Ostovich Berdon said in a statement through her attorney, Lanson Kupau.

Horrifying audio secretly recorded by a witness who heard Ostovich's screams as she was beaten by Berdon.

In December Hawaii News Now shared a fraction of the 10-minute long recording, which was cut and censored because of its extreme violent nature.

Berdon can be heard yelling: 'You're so f*****g pretty... you can get anybody you like.'

The 27-year-old victim is heard weeping in the background as she says during the assault: 'Arnold stop!'

At one point Berdon seemingly threatens to kill her: 'I'm going to murder you... I'm going to f*****g murder you.'

The incident happened around 2am November 18 at the couple's residence in the Waianae section of Honolulu County.

The physical abuse can be heard in the clip. At one point, Ostovich becomes silent, when she is believed to have fallen unconscious.
A group of Welsh tourists were left holding their breath as they watched an Australian attempt to cross a river in 4WD.

Footage uploaded by ViralHog captured the Toyota Hilux slowly backing up on land, before fearlessly driving through a creek on Blacksmiths beach in Lake Macquarie in New South Wales' east.

At one point, the front half of the 4WD was seen plunging into the water and only the top half of the vehicle could be seen.

'Crazy Australians,' one of the tourists said.

Footage captured the Toyota Hilux slowly backing up on land, before fearlessly driving through a creek on Blacksmiths beach

At one point, the front half of the 4WD was seen plunging into the water and only the top half of the vehicle could be seen

The 4WD eventually pushed through the waters and onto the sand, as the Welsh tourists and two other Australian friends of the driver cheered on his incredible effort.

'You are joking,' the tourist said in disbelief.

The reckless driver walked out of his car soaked on the bottom half of his body.

Parts of the 4WD were covered in seaweed as water poured out.

Blacksmith's Beach is at the southern end of a 14km stretch of sand popular with 4WDs.
A teenage jihadi bride who fled Melbourne to fight with the Islamic State in Syria boasted at the height of the bloodthirsty group's reign of terror about how she would only come home to Australia when it was 'part of the Islamic State'.

Now, four years later, with her husband dead and the so-called Islamic caliphate in ruins, Zehra Duman, 24, is begging to come home, claiming her two children have the right to be treated like any other 'normal kids' in Australia.

But in 2015, ISIS fanatic Duman, then just 19 and married to a terrorist known as 'the Playboy jihadi', was so sure of the Islamic State's success she directly threatened Australia - and a Daily Mail Australia reporter's family.

Duman was a key ISIS recruiter on social media, posing with machine guns and on the bonnets of luxury cars stolen by the terrorists as she urged other Westerners to leave civilisation and join their murderous and twisted Islamic regime.

Duman left Melbourne aged 19 to join the terror group in 201. She was recently believed to be in a Syrian refugee camp, desperate to come home. Pictured: the woman thought to be Duman alongside aid workers

At the time Duman told Daily Mail Australia: 'All you have to know is that the next time I will ever step into Australia, is when we come and make it a part of the Islamic State bi'thnillah.

'Oh and do I miss my family?

'Well I think you will miss yours soon (sic).

'Thank you and have a great day mate!'

Duman startled her own relatives when she fled Victoria to join the terrorist group, then known as ISIS, in 2014.

At the time, ISIS had launched a terrifying propaganda campaign largely focused on beheading Westerners.

Duman, prior to fleeing Australia for Syria

But the situation in Syria has changed dramatically over the past five years with the so-called Islamic State a shadow of its former self.

Duman's husband and friends have been killed and she is thought to be trapped in a refugee camp in Syria.

Despite her threat, Australia has not become part of the Islamic State, and has only experienced terrorist attacks on a few occasions since her departure.

And Duman is believed to have told an American humanitarian worker she is desperate to come home.

'I want to go back to my country,' the woman, who was thought to be Duman but refused to confirm her identity.

'I think everybody's asking for that because I'm an Australian citizen.'

Menacing words from jihadi bride Zehra Duman: The Australian extremist sent this threatening message to a Daily Mail Australia journalist on January 22, 2015

The mother-of-two young children said she understood Australians would be angry with her.

But, in the video obtained by the ABC, she insisted: 'My kids have a right to be treated like normal kids.

The next time I will ever step into Australia, is when we come and make it a part of the Islamic State bi'thnillah Jihadi bride Zehra Duman, in a Facebook message to Daily Mail Australia, in January 2015

'I understand the anger that they have towards a lot of us here, but the kids don't need to suffer.'

The defeat of ISIS last year has displaced thousands of jihadi brides, many of whom are now in refugee camps in Syria.

Hundreds of babies have died and the woman said her two-year-old son and six-month-old daughter are sick and malnourished.



Duman said: 'I have no money, I'm not allowed to have money, they don't give us food here and they don't let us contact our families.'

The woman, 24, claimed she has been trying to leave ISIS for two years but could not because she had no money and would get killed if she were caught.

Zehra's Islamic State propaganda

Upon arriving in Syria, Duman, a former student at Isik College Keysborough, began to spruik vile Islamic State propaganda on social media.

Her relatives watched on, with her father, Davut Duman, despairing that his daughter had been 'brainwashed'.

In 2015, a Twitter account believed to be run by Duman posted pictures of ISIS women carrying assault rifles and standing next to luxury cars, head to toe in Islamic dress.

In one tweet, Duman said: 'US + Australia, how does it feel that all 5 of us were born n raised in your lands, & now here thirsty for ur blood?'

In other tweets, Duman called for violence against 'kuffars' or non-Muslims.

'Stab them and poison them. Poison your teachers, go to haram restaurants and poison the food in large quantities,' she wrote.

In an interview (pictured) with an American humanitarian worker, a woman who refused to confirm her identity but is believed to be Duman said: 'I want to go back to my country'

Zehra's propaganda: In 2015, she posted a series of pictures of Islamic State women carrying assault rifles and standing beside a luxury car

The propaganda pictures featured a series of extremist women standing underneath an Islamic State flag

In one photo, women reclined against a clean white BMW M5, apparently driven from France

In one of her tweets, Duman boasted about her and American jihadi brides being thirty for Australian and American blood

Using social media to recruit other brides, Duman boasted about having a BMW M5 in the land of Sham (Syria)

In other tweets (above), Duman called for violence against 'kuffars', or non-Muslims

Shortly after arriving in the Middle East, she married fellow Melbourne extremist Mahmoud Abdullatif, known as the 'playboy jihadi'

When Abullatif died in battle five weeks after their wedding, Duman celebrated his death.

'You won the race!' she tweeted, describing him as a 'green bird' - the term used to describe a so-called martyr.

It was not long before Duman permanently disappeared from social media.

She has not been heard from in the press until the aid workers discovered her at the refugee camp recently.

Duman married Mahmoud Abdullatif, a former Melbourne party boy-turned Muslim extremist

Not having it: Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pushed back against the Australian ISIS bride's pleas for help

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pushed back against the Australian ISIS bride's pleas for help.

Mr Morrison declared he would not put any Australians at risk by helping home-grown extremists wanting to come home from the Middle East.

Mr Morrison said it was a 'great tragedy' Islamic State sympathisers had dragged their children into war zones.

'They have placed their children in this horrendous position,' he told reporters in Melbourne on Thursday.

'They have to take responsibility for those decisions to join up with terrorists who are fighting Australia.

'I think the children are innocent victims in the terrorist acts of their parents,' Mr Morrison said.

'If you're coming home, you're coming home to face the full force of the law. The great tragedy is how children get caught up in the crimes against Australia of their parents.'
A Massachusetts lawyer is thought to have killed his high school sweetheart wife and their three children, then set their Berkshire home alight before taking his own life, authorities say.

High flying attorney Justine Wilber and her husband Luke Karpinski, both 41, died on Wednesday in the Sheffield, Massachusetts home along with their seven-year-old twins Alex and Zoe and a three-year-old Marek, officials said.

The case is being investigated as a murder-suicide by police. CBS Boston reports Karpinski stabbed his wife Justine, who was found on the first floor of the home.

Karpinski was found on the second floor along with their three young children after reportedly using gasoline to start the blaze. The two family dogs also died.

District Attorney Andrea Harrington said Thursday: 'At this time, the evidence indicates that Luke Karpinski was the assailant. 'The scene is secure and there is no reason to believe that the public is endangered at this time.'

Wilber was a patent attorney working for a law firm in Albany, New York, while her husband was believed to be a patent analyst for the federal government.

Justine Wilber (right) and her husband Luke Karpinski, (left) both 41, died on Wednesday in the Sheffield, Massachusetts home along with their seven-year-old twins and a three-year-old child,

The couple were high school sweethearts who started dating as seniors in 1996

Investigators works at the scene of a fatal fire in Sheffield, Massachusetts on Thursday. Police responded to the fire at 7.50am on Wednesday and found five bodies inside

Berkshire County District Attorney Andrea Harrington gave a brief press conference on Thursday to identify the deceased adults and confirm a suspected murder-suicide

The couple were high school sweethearts, attending Wahconah Regional High. Teachers there described them as 'two outstanding student citizens'.

Retired Principal Tom Callahan told The Berkshire Eagle: 'I remember them very well. My memory of them is just two outstanding student citizens. It was a heck of a group of kids in that graduating class.

'That was a happy class. We had a good time with them. It's just, obviously, a tragedy. I feel just awful for them, their whole family.'

They started dating as seniors in 1996 and were high achievers who went off to college after graduating. Wilbur's sister, Kristen said they started their careers in Alexandria, Virginia before returning to Massachusetts around seven years later.

'It is with grief and immeasurable sorrow that we learned of the death of our friend and colleague Justine M. Wilbur, who died with her family yesterday,' the law firm of Hoffman Warnick said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

'Justine was a talented attorney who joined our team in 2017 after having built a reputation both domestically and internationally as a patent expert. Her work was both meaningful and challenging having encompassed topics ranging from cancer treatment and nanotechnology to advanced materials.

'Justine was smart, knowledgeable, dedicated and hardworking. She was a devoted mother to her wonderful children, and a true friend to everyone in our firm.

'We are each devastated by loss and extraordinary sadness, but are comforted and grateful for having shared Justine's infectious spirit and energy.

'We pray for her family and those who loved her.'

Before becoming an attorney, Justine was a scientist focusing on cancer research, reports say.

Fire crews arrived around 7.50am on Wednesday to find the home fully involved. After putting out the blaze they found one body initially and four others during a secondary search

Karpinski was a federal chemical patent examiner who worked from home, relatives say

Karpinski and Wilbur purchased the lot that the home was later built on in June 2016 for $105,000, records show.

Federal records show that a Luke E. Karpinski was employed as a Patent Examiner at the Patent and Trademark Office in Sheffield, with a salary of $109,116 in 2017.

Fire crews responded to reports of the house fire at around 7.50am on Wednesday, finding one body initially and then four others during a secondary search.

On Thursday, Harrington said that Wilbur's body was the first to be found, on the ground floor, and that the other four bodies were found together on the upper floor.

The home was fully engulfed when fire crews arrived, taking nearly an hour to extinguish and allow for the searches.

Speaking Wednesday Wilbur's sister Kristen said: 'They were smart, intelligent, good people  and good parents. And the kids were so cute. 'It's very sad. My father passed away five years ago, so that just leaves me and my mother.'

Berkshire County Sheriff Department officers close off the road on Wednesday in Sheffield to a home where investigators work at the scene of a house fire that killed five people

DA Harrington would not specify the causes of death or answer reporters' questions at an initial press conference, saying only that the investigation was 'complicated.'

'This is an ongoing, extensive investigation with multiple local and state agencies, including the State Police,' Harrington said, according to the Berkshire Edge.

In addition to local fire crews, spotted at the scene were several specialized criminal forensic units with the Massachusetts State Police.

They included the Crime Scene Services Section, forensic scientists assigned to the Crime Laboratory, and the Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Section.

The fire occurred on the 1300 block of Home Road, a thinly settled country route.
The father of missing chef Claudia Lawrence has said it is 'difficult' to believe she is still alive, almost 10 years to the day since she vanished.

Ms Lawrence went missing on her way to work at the University of York in March 2009 and no trace of her has ever been found.

Speaking at home in York her father Peter Lawrence said that not knowing what happened to Claudia was the 'worst part about it'.

He said the decade since her disappearance could feel like both an 'eternity' and no time at all, the Mirror reported.

Peter Lawrence (right), the father of missing chef Claudia Lawrence (father) has said it is 'difficult' to believe she is still alive, almost 10 years to the day since she vanished

Losing hope that his daughter is still alive, the 72-year-old said: 'It's getting more difficult to believe that as time goes on. It's very difficult now.

'It just keeps going on and on, of course, because of not knowing what happened and it is the not knowing which has always been the worst part about it.

'Sometimes it seems an eternity and other times it just seems as though it wasn't very long ago at all.'

Ms Lawrence went missing on March 18, 2009, when she was reported missing after failing to turn up for her 6am shift at York University.

Police have said they believe the 35-year-old was murdered, although no body has ever been discovered.

Police search a pub in York in 2009 after the disappearance of Claudia Lawrence.

Arrests were made after a review of the initial investigation but no charges have ever been brought.

Last year Mr Lawrence received an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to the families of missing persons.

He said last year: 'She was relatively young. She was 35 when she went missing. So she would now be a completely different person anyway, so we've missed all that time.'

'Whatever that closure is, you always hope for closure. Good or bad. You need closure.'

The retired solicitor campaigned for the Guardianship (Missing Persons) Bill, also known as Claudia's Law, which was passed in April 2017.

The law, which applies to England and Wales, allows families of people missing for more than 90 days to deal with their affairs.
The Trump administration has not built any walls to protect previously unbarricaded sections of America's southern border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed exclusively to DailyMail.com on Thursday.

President Donald Trump has boasted in the past that '[w]e have already built large new sections' during his time in the White House.

Border barriers erected between the U.S. and Mexico since Inauguration Day 2017 have consisted of supplements to existing walls and replacements for outmoded or decreipt barriers.

But '[t]he first new wall project, where no barrier currently exists, is anticipated to start in April,' CBP spokesman Roger Maier said in an email. He identified Hidalgo County as the construction project's location, a border zone along a meandering 50-mile stretch of the Rio Grande.

CBP said last year that it was 'designing and constructing approximately 25 miles of levee wall system' in that county, whose anchor is the the border city of McAllen.

The documented border wall construction the Trump administration has engaged in so far has consisted of replacing some existing barriers and reinforcing others with secondary fencing; U.S. Customs and Border Protection said on Thursday that the 'first' new section won't go up until April

President Donald Trump has claimed that his administration has erected 'new' sections of border wall separating the U.S. and Mexico, a claim that his own border agency disagrees with

Trump's base continues to go wild for his wall as his re-election campaign frames the issue in terms of 'finishing' the project, not getting it off the ground

President Trump visited McAllen on January 11, boasting of wall renovations that he framed as 'new' construction. 'I will say, we've done a lot of renovation. And we have a lot of new wall going up where we took down wall because it was in such bad shape, and we put new wall up,' he said.

The president has been less ambiguous on other occasions. He wrote on Twitter that 'newly built walls' were stopping caravans of Central American migrants from entering the U.S., and that '[w]e have already built large new sections' in addition to ongoing renovations.

That appears to be untrue.

Maier said that 'CBP has constructed approximately 38 of 40 miles of wall in place of outdated designs,' using funds Congress appropriatedfor fiscal 2017.

Those replacements are up in San Diego and El Centro, California; Santa Teresa, New Mexico; and El Paso, Texas.

Utilizing Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 funds, CBP has constructed approximately 38 of 40 miles of wall in place o f outdated designs in San Diego and El Centro, California, Santa Teresa, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, providing new capability for the U.S. Border Patrol. This barrier replaced dilapidated infrastructure , half of which was Normandy-style vehicle barrier. Construction has also started on the San Diego Secondary replacement , the first project funded in FY 2018. The first new wall project, where no barrier currently exists, is anticipated to start in April in Hidalgo County of the Rio Grande Valley Sector.  U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Roger Maier (emphasis added by DailyMail.com)

'This barrier replaced dilapidated infrastructure, half of which was Normandy-style vehicle barrier,' he said.

'Construction has also started on the San Diego Secondary replacement, the first project funded in [fiscal] 2018. The first new wall project, where no barrier currently exists, is anticipated to start in April in Hidalgo County of the Rio Grande Valley Sector.'

Trump has rediirected billions of dollars to his wall project through a national emergency declaration, claiming at the same time that the project is well underway.

Both houses of Congress voted this week to rescind that declaration with a resolution that the president vetoed on Friday.

Some of Trump's claims about his construction described sections of border wall where none existed before, something CBP now says doesn't exist.

In January he tweeted a complaint that '[t]he Fake News Media keeps saying we havent built any NEW WALL.'

He provided a photograph of a section of border wall, saying: 'Below is a section just completed on the Border. Anti-climbing feature included. Very high, strong and beautiful! Also, many miles already renovated and in service!'

Trump didn't say where the photo was taken, but a date-stamp indicated it was created in October.

Trump drew applause and chants of 'Build the wall!' in 2015 and 2016 as he campaigned for the White House, promising to physically separate the U.S. from its southern neighbor with an impenetrable barrier and force Mexico to pay the bill.

President Trump tweeted on December 11 that 'newly built Walls' were keeping migrant caravans out, and said his admininstration has 'already built large new sections' along with ongoing renovations

Customs and Border Protection said about half of the 'dilapidated' border barriers it has replaced with walls consisted of Normandy-style vehicle barriers like these, shown in April 2018 between Santa Teresa, New Mexico and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico

The first 'new' section of border wall, where none at all existed before Trump became president, will start going up nexgt month in Hidalgo County, Texas (pictured)

That financial pledge morphed into a promise to recoup the cost of a wall by re-engineering America's trade relationship with Mexico in a way that would benefit taxpayers.

As president he first began to claim limited success with his ambitious project in the fall of 2017, tweeting that construction to date consisted of 'new renovation of old and existing fences and walls.'

More recently his campaign-style rallies as president have featured supporters waving 'Finish the wall!' signs  not 'Build the wall!'  along with placards that read, 'Promises made, promises kept.'

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter once praised Trump's immigration policies but blasted him Monday night as a 'shallow, narcissistic, lying conman,' and dared him on Tuesday to prove he had built any new sections of border wall since becoming president

Trump posted a pair of tweets criticizing Ann Coulter on Saturday that also touted border wall progress, saying sections were being 'built and renovated'

Trump claimed Saturday on Twitter that '[m]ajor sections of Wall are being built.' He tweeted a day earlier that his long-promised border wall 'is being built and is well under construction.'

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. After this story was published, a spokesman emailed to say 'we have the data for new walls,' and promised it Friday morning. That information never came.

CBP's disclosure came as a result of a request for information on Tuesday after conservative pundit Ann Coulter challenged the president to identify exactly where his administration had erected new border barriers.

'The Presidents tweet says hes already building the Wall. Could he give me the precise latitude and longitude of its location?' she asked. 'Also, how many miles long is it?'

'I want to throw a party there and need the exact coordinates,' she told DailyMail.com.

The president has boasted construction projects like the one in this photograph that bears an October 2018 date stamp, but the White House has never said where 'new' border barriers had been installed; it likely was a replacement for existing barriers, not a wall in a previously unprotected location

Trump claimed last Friday that '[t]he Wall is being built and is well under construction'; Coulter trolled him on Tuesday, asking for information about exactly where that's happening

Trump's public statements about his project this year have boasted of new wall construction  not renovation of older structures. 'The Wall is being built and will be a great achievement,' he tweeted February 12.

A week later his Twitter feed published a time-lapse video appearing to show a section of steel-slatted bollard wall being erected 'in New Mexico.' The tweet said it was '[c]ompleted on January 30, 2019  47 days ahead of schedule! Many miles more now under construction!'

The footage bore the logo of the Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency that serves as general contractor for large federal public-works projects.

An Army Corps spokesman told a military blog the following day that the video was shot on Sep. 18, 2018. It consisted of 'a replacement project,' pre-approved repair work, and not a new wall where no barrier previously stood.

The New York Times reported in January that 'no new miles of barriers had been built' during the Trump administration, although [s]ome existing barriers have been replaced.'

CBP's statement on Thursday marks the first time the Trump administration has confirmed this is true.

The president tweeted this on February 20, including video (below) of what he claimed was three-week-old construction of a new section of wall in New Mexico; it turned out to be September 2018 repair work to replace walls that had been up for years

The agency's website indicates that about 654 miles of physical barriers block portions of the 1.954-mile southern U.S. border.

That includes 280 miles of vehicle fencing, including 'Normandy-style' barriers that can stop a car but not a person on foot. Pedestrian fencing, designed to prevent people from climbing onto American soil, covers another 374 miles.

Trump insisted on Saturday that he's still serious about physically separating the U.S. and Mexico, and claimed in a tweet that '[m]ajor sections of Wall are being built and renovated, with MUCH MORE to follow shortly.'

'Tens of thousands of illegals are being apprehended (captured) at the Border and NOT allowed into our Country,' he wrote.

'With another President, millions would be pouring in. I am stopping an invasion as the Wall gets built. #MAGA.'
The rise of social media has seen an influx of deaths among young people who are risking their lives to capture the perfect selfie.

From performing the Gangnam Style dance routine on the top of the Wedding Cake Rock in New South Wales' Royal National Park, to taking pictures of whales at Cape Solander in Sydney's Sutherland Shire - users are increasingly willing to flirt with danger to ensure they get a flawless shot.

A 2018 report revealed more than 250 people - an average of 43 people per year - had died since 2011 by trying to take risky pictures.

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Rise of social media has seen an influx of deaths among young people who are risking their lives to capture the perfect selfie (Pictured, woman on Wedding Cake Rock)

A 19-year-old American tourist plunged to his death at Cape Solander after he tried to take a selfie on the cliff before losing his balance and falling ten metres into the sea in July 2018.

One month earlier, another man fell to his death while taking photos in the same location, which is popular for watching migrating whales.

Mayor of Sutherland Shire Carmelo Pesce said people taking pictures in risky areas are unaware of the potential harm they could cause.

'What about the people you're leaving behind, your family and your friends, you know what the impact is going to cause for them,' he told A Current Affair.

The image shows a group of women dancing on top of Wedding Cake Rock in New South Wales' Royal National Park

Mayor of Sutherland Shire Carmelo Pesce said people taking pictures in risky areas are unaware of the potential harm they could cause (Pictured, a woman on Wedding Cake Rock)

'I'd hate to get to a point where we have to fence the coastline.'

'Some of the areas which are quite popular are fenced with signage and some people just disregard those signs.'

This is the case for Instagram hotspot Wedding Cake Rock, which attracts thousands of tourists.

A 2018 report revealed more than 250 people had died since 2011 by trying to take risky pictures (Pictured, a man on Wedding Cake Rock)

A 19-year-old American tourist plunged to his death at Cape Solander (lookout point pictured) after he tried to take a selfie on the cliff

The fragile rock is currently fenced off from the public but the physical barrier and the threat of a $3,300 fine has not deterred those keen to get the perfect shot.

The NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service has warned the sandstone layers of the rock are dangerously soft and there is a high risk of collapse.

'This is a beautiful location and we encourage people to come and look at the spectacular rock formations and take photosbut the key is to enjoy the views from a safe distance,' NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service said.

Cape Solander (pictured) in Sydney's Sutherland Shire is a popular spot for watching migrating whales

Another incident, which occurred last Saturday, saw a woman need hospital treatment after she attempted to take a risky photo.

The woman identified as Leanne, had a frightening encounter with a black jaguar at the Wildlife World Zoo, near Phoenix,in Arizona, after she leaned over a security barrier to get a picture.

Leanne, in her 30s, said she saw the jungle cat pressed up against the cage of its enclosure and spotted an opportunity to 'get some good pictures'.

The woman identified as Leanne (pictured) had a frightening encounter with a black jaguar at the Wildlife World Zoo, near Phoenix

Leaning over a security barrier, Leanne positioned her camera in front of the animal, prompting it to reach a paw through the cage wire and swipe at her arm.

'The black jaguar was up against the fence we happened to be walking by and said 'hey, let's get some good pictures',' Leanne recalled to CBS News.

'I was in the wrong for leaning over the barrier, but I think the zoo should consider moving their fence back.'

She was rushed to the hospital and treated for 'stable, non-life threatening injuries', requiring only stitches.

She was released the same day.
The grisly murder of Gambino crime family boss Frank Cali has stoked fears that the Mafia may be returning to the streets of New York City after more than three decades of peace.

Cali, 53, was shot six times and run over by a pickup truck outside his redbrick house in the upscale Todt Hill neigborhood of Staten Island just after 9.15pm on Wednesday evening, sending shockwaves throughout the community.

Authorities, including the FBI, are looking into whether the hit was authorized by one of New York's five Mafia families, or whether it was carried out by a 'cowboy' gunman.

One former NYPD detective who investigated the mafia for years, Tommy Hyland, told Inside Edition that this murder feels personal.

Cali's murder is the first hit on a Mafia boss since John Gotti arranged the assassination of then-Gambino head Paul Castellano in 1985.

'We thought those days were over,' Mayor Bill de Blasio said of the slaying. 'Very surprising, but I guess old habits die hard.'

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The murder of Gambino crime family boss Frank Cali has stoked fears that the Mafia may be returning to New York City after more than three decades of peace. Cali, 53, was shot six times and run over by a pickup truck outside his house in the upscale Todt Hill neigborhood of Staten Island just after 9.15pm on Wednesday evening, sending shockwaves through the community

Authorities, including the FBI, are looking into whether the hit was authorized by one of New York's five Mafia families, or whether it was carried out by a 'cowboy' gunman

Cali's murder is the first hit on a Mafia boss since John Gotti arranged the assassination of then-Gambino head Paul Castellano outside a Manhattan steakhouse in 1985

Aggressive federal prosecutions in the past 25 years decimated the ranks of New York's five Mafia families.

The cases resulted in long prison terms for their bosses - Gotti included - and encouraged their successors to keep a lower profile.

But the new generation still engages in old-school crimes - loansharking, gambling, extortion - that can make enemies and spark violence.

This week, prosecutors in Brooklyn announced a case against a long-time Gambino associate accused of killing a suspected loanshark affiliated with the Lucchese crime family.

THE GAMBINO CRIME FAMILY The Gambino crime family is one of what is widely referred to as 'The Five Families' of Italian organized crime operations in New York City and other parts of the United States. The Gambinos' rise to become one of the most powerful mafia families in America started in 1957, when the family's namesake, Carlos Gambino - an Italian immigrant - orchestrated the murder of Albert Anastasia, who had organized a collection of Italian gangs into what now would be considered a 'crime family.' Gambino headed the organization until 1976, when he handed power over to his brother-in-law Paul Castellano. Like other mafia families, the Gambinos took their methods from the crime families in Italy - La Cosa Nostra - and were involved in illegal activities like loan-sharking, extortion, prostitution, gambling and money laundering - as well as the frequent assaults and murders associated with those types of business ventures. In 1985, Gambino 'capo' John Gotti orchestrated the murder of Castellano to become the most publicized boss of the family. Gotti's reign came to an end when his underboss, Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano agreed to testify against him and other members of the family in a 1992 RICO trial. Since Gotti's downfall, the Gambinos - and other mafia families - have lost much of the power they once had over politicians, judges and labor unions. The family was headed by Domenico Cefalu until 2015, when Frank Cali took over as capo. Advertisement

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said on Thursday there has been a slight uptick in alleged mob-related violence in New York within the last year. But he said it is too soon to say whether that had anything to do with Cali's slaying.

Shea said the mob boss emerged from his home around 9.15pm after the gunman backed his pickup into Cali's Cadillac SUV, damaging it. 'With what we know at this point in time, it's quite possible that was part of a plan,' Shea said.

Video showed the assailant pulling a 9mm handgun and opening fire on Cali about a minute after they started talking, according to Shea. At least 12 shots were fired. After getting shot several times, Cali tried to crawl under his SUV to hide, Shea said.

Federal prosecutors referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the quiet underboss of the Mafia's Gambino family, once one of the most powerful and feared crime organizations in the country. News accounts since 2015 said he had ascended to the top spot.

Among law enforcement officials, Cali was known as a 'real quiet old-school boss' - one police source told the New York Post.

He was considered to be a foil of his former boss John Gotti because 'no one ever sees him'.

The organization reportedly focused its efforts on heroin and Oxycontin trafficking under his leadership.

Cali only had one criminal conviction, having spent 16 months for a 2008 federal extortion charge in connection with a failed bit to build a NASCAR race track in Staten Island.

The hit on Cali comes just six months after John Gottis brother Gene, 71, was released after spending 29 years in prison for dealing heroin.

It was reported that mob bosses have been 'living in fear' since his release, wondering whether the heir apparent would 'demand that he resume his role or even insist on a higher rank'.

A source told the New York Daily News on Thursday that cops were eyeing ties to Gene Gotti for Cali's murder, saying he may have orchestrated the hit to get back some of the clout in the family business.

The source admitted the claims could be 'total speculation', but is 'something to look out for'.

Investigators are seen with forensic equipment outside the Cali's home on Thursday

Cali's home in the Todt Hill neighborhood of Staten Island is pictured

Mayor Bill de Blasio (center) told reporters of Cali's slaying: 'We thought those days were over. Very surprising, but I guess old habits die hard'

Jerry Capeci, a mob expert who writes for the ganglandnews.com website, said Thursday that Cali is part of a Siclian faction now in control of the Gambino family.

Capeci said the killing 'doesn't have the feel' of a Mafia-sanctioned hit.

'Frank Cali was a pretty likable guy, and also this is not a way the mob would kill one of their own,' he said. 'There are exceptions, but that's not the case with his guy.'

Cali kept a much lower profile than Gotti and was killed in far less spectacular fashion than Castellano. He was shot on a tree-lined street in one of New York City's less-glamorous outer boroughs, a short walk from ball fields, a country club and a day camp.

Gotti, with his expensive double-breasted suits and overcoats and silvery swept-back hair, became known as the Dapper Don, his smiling face all over the tabloids. As prosecutors tried and failed to bring him down, he came to be called the Teflon Don.

Cali kept a much lower profile than John Gotti (above) and was killed in far less spectacular fashion than Paul Castellano, who was gunned down outside a Manhattan steakhouse in 1085

Gotti was convicted in Castellano's murder and a multitude of other crimes in 1992

In 1992, Gotti was convicted in Castellano's murder and a multitude of other crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison and died of cancer in 2002.

On Wednesday, hours before Cali was killed, the reputed boss and consigliere of the Bonanno crime family were acquitted in a Brooklyn racketeering and extortion case.

In October, reputed Bonanno associate Sylvester Zottola was fatally shot while waiting for a cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-thru in the Bronx.

Last week, the longtime boss of the Colombo crime family, 85-year-old Carmine 'the Snake' Persico, died at a North Carolina hospital near the federal prison where he had been serving what was effectively a life sentence. Persico was convicted in a 1986 case overseen by then-US Attorney Rudy Giuliani.
The decision to deny enrollment to the young child of a gay couple to a Catholic school in Kansas has received support from more than 7,000 people. Archbishop Joseph Naumann backed the controversial decision

The decision to deny enrollment to the young child of a gay couple to a Catholic school in Kansas has received support from more than 7,000 people.

The petition, created by 'pro-life and pro-family communities', runs counter to an earlier one signed by 2,000 urging the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas to allow the child entrance to Prairie Village Catholic school.

The latest petition does not make clear how many of its signatures are from local Catholics, but does state it was written by 'concerned faithful' in the archdiocese.

'It is clear that the rapid secularization of our society is increasingly causing hostility to the practice of the Catholic faith,' the petition reads.

'Unfortunately, the lack of sound catechesis can leave many Catholics to form their consciences on these issues based on the opinions of the world rather than the immutable truths of the Gospel.'

A spokesperson for the archdiocese said on Thursday that they were aware of at least one petition in support of the church's decision but did not know its provenance.

Local parishioners say they learned the kindergartner was blocked from attending the school when Reverend Craig J. Maxim of St. Ann Catholic Church wrote a letter to parents last month.

He wrote in the letter than he had sought guidance from the archdiocese, which told him the child's parents cannot 'model behaviors and attitudes consistent with the Church's teachings.'

Courtesy: WTKR

The petition, created by 'pro-life and pro-family communities', runs counter to an earlier one signed by 2,000 urging the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas to allow the child entrance to Prairie Village Catholic school (pictured)

'This creates a conflict for those children and what is experienced at home,' Maxim wrote in the letter, dated February 27. 'It also could become a source of confusion for other school children.'

More than 1,800 people signed a petition calling for the church to reconsider the decision, which they argued 'lacks the compassion and mercy of Christ's message.'

While some 650 people said they are part of St. Ann's parish, and most other signatures were from local parishes.

That petition was addressed to Archbishop Joseph Naumann and school Superintendent Kathy O'Hara.

The most recent petition, started on March 12, backs Naumann directly.

'Especially given the activity of many pressure groups in the Church today, we are all the more encouraged by your steadfast decision to uphold the perennial truths of the moral law  for everyone's good,' the petition reads.

One parishioner from the area who signed the petition denied it was because the parents are gay but said: 'It's about whether they are living their lives in a state of grace in accordance with the mandates of the church... that goes for anybody, whether they are gay, straight, married or single.'

The controversy comes amid a deepening divide within the Catholic church, and other religious groups, about whether to offer a more inclusive version of the faith and those who argue compassion shouldn't mean the compromising of traditional values.

Others have attacked the archdiocese for hypocrisy, with the petition arguing that Catholic schools accept children of parents who are not practicing Catholicism.

This view is backed by Rev. James Martin, a secretariat of communications for the pope, who has written about how the church can be more welcoming to LGBTQ people.

On Twitter, he called the archdiocese's decision 'unjust discrimination.'

'In this case, these rules are being applied selectively and used to target LGBT people specifically, as well as punishing the child,' Martin said in a tweet.

In defending Naumann, the petition read: 'We are saddened to witness such attacks directed against our Mother the Church, and against you personally, in the aftermath of the decision of Saint Ann Catholic School not to admit as a student the child of a same sex 'couple.'

'Although we are all sinners, and we cannot judge the intentions of the persons involved as faith-filled Catholics striving to raise all Catholic children in a hostile world, we know the grave damage that can be done by scandal.'
A dead gray whale washed up in a city bay this week after it died from severe malnutrition.

Marine experts said they found a lack of blubber and body fat on the whale in San Francisco Bay on Tuesday and its stomach was empty.

The 23ft female whale was seen floating between Tiburon and Angel Island on Sunday night and it washed up near Belvedere Cove.

A gray whale carcass that washed up on a shoreline in San Francisco Bay on Sunday night is examined by experts from The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito on Tuesday. The Center said on Thursday that the whale had died from severe malnutrition

Another was spotted by the Army near Bay Bridge on Monday - but tests had to be abandoned on the second due to unsafe conditions.

The team from Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito conducted necropsies on the one-year-old whales at Angel Island State Park.

Padraig Duignan, the center's chief research pathologist, says it's likely the malnourished whale had not eaten enough over the winter.

He said: 'It's likely that after not feeding this winter, she didn't have enough reserves built up to survive her journey north.'

The center have found the number of gray whales entering San Francisco Bay this year has been 'abnormally high.'

It says the animals are staying in the bay much longer than usual during their annual northward migration from Mexico to Alaska.

A second whale washed up on Monday but experts had to abandon their examinations due to unsafe conditions

Experts have also seen a migratory behavior change with gray whales entering the Bay in the late winter and early spring months.

In the past one or two gray whales have passed under the Golden Gate Bridge during this period.

But last week alone five were counted entering the bay.

Bill Keener, a whale expert at Golden Gate Cetacean Research, told The Mercury News: 'The number of gray whales entering the San Francisco Bay this year has been abnormally high, and they're staying much longer than in years past.'

He added: 'There's likely a few factors at play here, including food source availability and a relatively sheltered habitat for juvenile whales that are in weaker body condition.'

Whales commonly die from blunt force trauma - often caused by being hit by a ship.

They can also die from entanglement and infectious disease but there is no evidence of this with these whales.

The Marine Mammal Center has seen more than 70 gray whales in distress in its 44-year history.

But this week's incident was the first two whale necropsies they have done this year.
We are keeping an eye on them, said Malaysias counter-terrorism chief. An estimated 102 Malaysians joined the Islamic State group. Some 51 are still in Syria, 40 have died, nine as suicide bombers. Fighters are now turning their attention to the Philippines.

Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Whilst countries like the United States and the United Kingdom refuse to take back their citizens who joined the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, Malaysia accepts them with caution, provided they submit to a month-long programme of rehabilitation and de-radicalisation.

Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, head of counterterrorism at Special Branch, the intelligence arm of the Malaysian police, said that thorough checks were being conducted on all returnees.

We bring in clerics and psychologists to evaluate their ideology and psychological make-up, he said.

We will compare intelligence which we received from friendly foreign services. If there is evidence that a returnee was involved in [IS] militant activities, he or she would be charged in court.

In total, 102 Malaysians are thought to have travelled to Syria to join IS, 11 of whom have since returned. Eight of these, all men, were convicted and jailed, whilst the remaining three  a woman and two children  are free.

Ayob said that the government is currently attempting to repatriate 13 of the 51 Malaysians still believed to be in Syria, adding that the latter had reached out to family members in their home country, who then contacted the police.

Of the 51 Malaysians still thought to be in Syria, 17 are believed to be children. Since 2013, 40 Malaysians have died in IS-controlled territory, nine of whom were suicide bombers.

Malaysian police said there were still citizens who wanted to fight for IS. We are keeping an eye on them, Ayob said. Those who cannot go to Syria are now setting their sights on Mindanao in southern Philippines where militant groups have links to IS.
A former youth worker has been charged for allegedly sexual abusing a ten-year-old boy over a period of four years.

The child was aged between six and nine when the alleged abuse took place.

Police allege the 27-year-old man assaulted the boy multiple times from 2015 to 2018 in the Riverina area, south-western New South Wales.

The man was arrested at about 12pm on March 14 and has been charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault of a victim under the age of 16 years.

Police allege that the 27-year-old man assaulted the boy, who was aged between six and nine, multiple times from 2015 to 2018 in the Riverina area, south-western New South Wales (Stock Photo)

Detectives from the Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Squad started an investigation after they received reports that the boy had been sexually assaulted several times by a man known to him and his family.

Police identified the alleged man who was a youth worker at the time of the sexual assaults but is no longer employed as one.

He was taken to the Griffith Police Station where he was charged.

The man appeared at Griffith Local Court today and was refused bail while the investigation continues.
A woman who was recovering from surgery in hospital was raped by a man as she prepared the take a shower.

Robert Matti Neho was jailed for eight years on Thursday for the assault on the unnamed woman at Southland Hospital, New Zealand, on July 16, 2017.

Invercargill District Court heard how the woman was naked when Neho approached her from behind and grabbed her breast.

The woman was naked when Neho approached her from behind and grabbed her breast at Southland Hospital on July 16, 2017 (pictured)

The 49-year-old told the woman to be quiet when she told him 'no' and he continued to make advances on her, the NZ Herald reported.

Judge Mark Callaghan said the victim was unable to move after she was pushed into the toilet area and forced against the sink.

Neho had a criminal history of assaulting females.

'[His criminal history] indicates a consistently violent approach towards women,' Crown Prosecutor Mike Brownlie said.

Neho's sentencing comes after he was found guilty by a jury on January 28.

Judge Mark Callaghan said the victim was unable to move after she was pushed into the toilet area and forced against the sink (stock image)

He was acquitted on two other violation charges, two of kidnapping, assault with intent to injure and assaulting a female.

Judge Callaghan said the woman clearly did not consent to the man's act.

'She said very clearly ''no'' for him during all intercourse,' he said.
A father and son are lucky to be alive after a driver allegedly swerved towards their car at 100km/h in a 'road rage hit-and-run'.

Ray Cupit, 47, and Josh Hale, 26, were driving in a Holden Coommodore sedan on the Mitchell Freeway in Perth about 2pm on Tuesday when their car slammed into a barrier and rolled several times.

Police are hunting the driver of a green Jeep Grand Cherokee involved in the crash that witnesses said drove off afterwards 'like nothing happened'.

Josh Hale, 26, was almost killed when he broke the C2 vertebrae in his neck, almost severing his spinal cord which would have been fatal

He and his father Ray Cupit, 47, were driving on the Mitchell Freeway in Perth about 2pm on Tuesday when their car slammed into a barrier and rolled several times

Mr Hale was almost killed when he broke the C2 vertebrae in his neck, almost severing his spinal cord which would have been fatal.

The injury is know as a 'hangman's fracture' as it is the part of the spine that breaks in a hanging execution, cutting off vital body functions and causing rapid death.

The young man also shattered his left wrist and suffered a concussion that wiped his memory of the crash, and had numerous cuts and bruises.

His sister Kirrilly Hale, 21, said he was due to have surgery on his neck at Royal Perth Hospital to repair his neck and protect the spinal cord.

'Josh is really scared that if he even chews the wrong way he could die. He's completely traumatised,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'If the bone had pushed on his spinal cord just a little more he would be dead.'

Mr Cupit broke his back at the L3 vertebrae, almost paralysing him, and suffered a serious wound to his right elbow that needed nine stitches

Mr Hale's sister Kirrilly Hale, 21, (pictured) said he was due to have surgery on his neck at Royal Perth Hospital to repair his neck and protect the spinal cord

Mr Cupit broke his back at the L3 vertebrae, almost paralysing him, and suffered a serious wound to his right elbow that needed nine stitches.

'Dad is very emotional and cries every time I see him because even though it wasn't his fault he feels bad about hurting his son,' Ms Hale said.

'My mum is really struggling. I'm just happy they survived.'

Ms Hale said the pair were on their way to see her and she heard the sirens from her mother's house nearby after they didn't show up.

Witnesses said the jeep was driving erratically along the freeway and cut in front of a white van before the driver extended his middle finger.

The van driver changed lanes and Mr Cupit, who was, travelling behind it, came up to behind the jeep.

Witnesses said Mr Cupit overcorrected to the right and lost control of the car after swerving to avoid the jeep, crashing into the barrier and rolling the car several times

Other motorists rush to help the pair before paramedics arrive, unlike the jeep driver who allegedly kept driving after being involved in the crash

Soon after the jeep is believed to have suddenly braked and after exchanging rude gestures, Mr Cupit changed into the left lane to overtake.

Multiple witnesses claimed the jeep then swerved without warning, almost crashing into Mr Cupit and causing him to swerve left to avoid impact.

He then overcorrected to the right and lost control of the car, crashing into the barrier and rolling the car several times.

The jeep driver allegedly braked to avoid hitting the car, then drove around the wreck and continued on without stopping 'like nothing happened'.

Ms Hale said her brother (pictured together) was scared he could die in hospital if his spinal cord was cut

Ms Hale said her mother was 'really struggling' with the news of the crash

Ms Hale said her father had a dashcam but it and the SD card were destroyed in the crash. Police were searching nearby Clarkson train station for CCTV footage.

She appealed for anyone who may have footage of the crash about 2-2.30pm on Tuesday between the Hester Avenue and Neerabup Road exits to come forward.

'Yes they were both annoyed but I don't know why the jeep driver would swerve into him at 100km/h. You can't be that self-centred,' she said.

'Someone needs to be held accountable.'
The United States' top general has claimed that Google's work in China is 'indirectly benefiting the Chinese military'.

Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hit out at the search engine giant as he spoke during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday.

'We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit,' he said.

'Frankly, "indirect" may be not a full characterization of the way it really is, it is more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.'

Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hit out at Google on Thursday and said the company's work in China was 'indirectly benefiting the Chinese military'

Dunford has long been critical of US tech firms that work with geopolitical competitors, including China, but don't help the Department of Defense.

Last year Google said it was no longer vying for a $10billion cloud computing contract with the Defense Department, in part because the company's new ethical guidelines do not align with the project.

And in June Google said it would not renew a contract to help the US military analyze aerial drone imagery when it expires, as the company sought to defuse an internal uproar over the deal.

Meanwhile, Google came under fire last year after it was revealed the company was studying the possibility of launching a censored search engine in China with the Chinese government.

The search giant dropped the plans following backlash, but CEO Sundar Pichai said the company has invested in China for years and plans to continue to do so.

Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan also hit out at Google on Thursday, saying it had a 'lack of willingness to support DoD program'

Dunford and Shanahan appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. The committee heard testimony regarding the Department of Defense Budget posture

'The way I described it to our industry partners is: Look, we're the good guys,' Dunford said at the hearing, which was regarding the Defense Department's budget posture.

'The values that we represent and the system we represent is the one that will allow and has allowed you to thrive.'

Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan also hit out at Google on Thursday, saying it had a 'lack of willingness to support DoD program'.

'$5 trillion of [China's] economy is state-owned enterprises,' he continued. 'So the technology that has developed in the civil world transfers to the military world, it's a direct pipeline.'

'Not only is there a transfer, there is systemic theft of US technology that facilitates even faster development of emerging technology.'

Last year Google said it was no longer vying for a $10billion cloud computing contract with the Defense Department,and in June Google said it would not renew a contract to help the US military analyze aerial drone imagery when it expires

'The talent is in this country. We need to use the talent in this country and the talent in this country needs to support our great power competition.'

Republican Sen Josh Hawley also sharply criticized the tech company during the hearing, referring to it as 'a supposedly American company'.

'We are in a struggle with the Chinese government over whether or not they're going to become a regional and maybe global hegemon with values very different from ours, certainly values that do not favor freedom in the world' he said.

'We have an American company that does not want to do work with our defense department which is one thing, but they're happy to help the Chinese.'

'At least the Chinese government that is, the Chinese military, at least indirectly,' he added. 'I think that's just extraordinary.'
The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday condemned the British Empire and dismissed its legacy as un-Christian.

It was driven by a sense of superiority but was really based on abuse and exploitation, said the Most Reverend Justin Welby.

He accused Christians who served the empire of carrying out many murderous atrocities and advised their modern successors to take seriously the abuses of our history.

Archbishop Welby's latest remarks put him at odds with those in his church who believe the empire was a force for good as well as bad. He accused Christians who served the empire of carrying out many murderous atrocities [File photo]

His criticism amounts to a repudiation of much of the history of the Anglican Communion, of which he is the worldwide leader.

The comments follow the Archbishops controversial expressions of regret in 2015 for British actions during World War Two.

On the 70th anniversary of the RAF attack on Dresden, he told worshippers in the German city of his profound regret and deep sorrow over its destruction.

His latest remarks put him at odds with those in his church who believe the empire was a force for good as well as bad.

They include the Archbishop of York John Sentamu, second in the CofE hierarchy, who has praised the English culture in which he grew up in Uganda.

The English are somehow embarrassed about some of the good things they have done, he has said.

Archbishop Welby warned Anglicans to be aware of their own history in a lecture on how to spread the Christian faith at Lambeth Palace.

He asked: How are British Christians heard when we talk of the claims of Christ by diaspora communities who have experienced abuse and exploitation by an empire that has seemed to hold the Christian story at the heart of its project?

'The ideology underlying the British Empire was largely predicated on the superiority of the British. The Church often colluded with that, and it was a thoroughly un-Christian worldview.

He cited the Amritsar massacre in April 1919 when a British officer ordered troops to fire on a crowd of Sikhs in the Indian city, killing as many as 1,000.

They died, he said, after publicly and peaceably gathering to celebrate a local festival.

Archbishop Welby accused Christians who served the empire of carrying out many murderous atrocities and advised their modern successors to take seriously the abuses of our history [File photo]

The Archbishop continued: The machine gun magazines emptied on innocent men, women and children have left indelible marks on the site of the massacre and on the consciousness of Indian Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims.

This atrocity, and so many others, were perpetrated by Christians and done in the name of Christian society. Its not good news; its not of God; its not Christ-like.

He also accused Christian evangelists in Africa of responsibility for large numbers of deaths in religious riots.

Archbishop Welby, who worked in the oil industry in West Africa in the 1980s, said some time ago evangelists had ignored local advice to launch a crusade in a mixed Christian and Muslim area.

Hundreds were killed in subsequent riots, he said. The errors and sins of our past are part and parcel of our present.

We need to take seriously the abuses of our history and engage other faiths with humility and empathy.

He added: Our mandate to witness will otherwise be disowned by a younger generation much more attuned to necessary demands for respect and cultural diversity.

As well as heading the CofE, the Archbishop leads the Anglican Communion of more than 70 million people worldwide whose allegiance springs from the history of empire.
Currys PC World could face prosecution for a scam that cons customers into paying an unnecessary 40 fee for laptops that have software pre-installed.

It tempts online customers with low prices for new devices and then demands an installation charge when people collect their laptops from a store, a watchdog claims.

The fee for the chains Team Knowhow service covers the cost of setting up a Microsoft Windows account, essential apps, configuring software updates and creating a recovery system in case the computer crashes.

Currys PC World could be prosecuted after its staff were found to have been demanding unnecessary installation fees for laptops

This charge should be optional, allowing some people to set up their computers themselves, but investigators from the consumer group Which? found some staff insisted that customers paid it, saying they only had laptops in stock that had already been set up and claiming this made the 40 charge mandatory.

Which? said it identified the scam four years ago and Currys PC World repeatedly promised to end it.

However, the consumer group said some Currys staff continued to use the discredited tactic.

Which? has warned the retailer that this could breach British and EU consumer law, and is demanding action to stamp it out and reimburse customers.

It believes the practice could amount to bait advertising  when a retailer tempts a customer with the promise of a deal that is not really available.

This is deemed an unfair practice under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.

The retailer could also be in breach of Consumer Contracts Regulations, which require retailers to make the full price of a product clear to consumers for products bought online. Which? said that if Currys continues to charge the fees it could refer the firm to Trading Standards, which can prosecute breaches of consumer law through the courts.

The consumer group has had more than 100 complaints from members. In one, made in January, a customer said he was hit with a hard sell to buy extra software with a new laptop.

He ended up paying 20 for the set-up of a recovery drive, which had not actually been installed. He said: I feel I have been taken for a right mug. My only consolation is I see Im not alone.

The company, which is part of the Dixons Carphone group, could be breaching UK and EU law by demanding a fee for the cost of a staff member setting up new laptop software, but this could be done at home

Eleanor Snow, consumer rights editor at Which?, said: It is very concerning that Currys PC World has allowed this unscrupulous practice to carry on for four years, despite repeated warnings and overwhelming evidence that it may be in breach of consumer law.

Previous efforts from the company to resolve the issue have been woefully insufficient. We now want to see it tackle the issue head on so no more customers are left out of pocket unnecessarily.

Currys PC World, which is part of the Dixons Carphone group, claims to be the UKs largest specialist electrical retailer, with more than 350 outlets and 10,000 staff. Its sister company Carphone Warehouse was fined nearly 30million by the Financial Conduct Authority this week for mis-selling mobile insurance.

Referring to the laptop set-up fees, Currys PC World said: Where a colleague only has a pre-set-up laptop in stock, our policy is absolutely clear that customers should not be charged for the service.

If any colleague is found to be charging customers for a pre-set-up laptop in the absence of any other available stock, we will investigate and would ask customers to get in touch at whichsupport@dixonscarphone.com to arrange a refund.
A third minor earthquake has hit the Florida-Alabama panhandle in less than a week, prompting fears that a larger, more devastating disaster could soon occur.

Seismologists say the earthquake took place in the early hours of Wednesday morning across the state line from the Panhandle area and registered a magnitude of 2.3 with a depth of about three miles.

It came amid an ongoing mysterious rumble that rattled homes across the Space Coast on Friday, while 3.1 magnitude earthquake was detected in the same Alabama town on Monday and a 2.7 tremor hit Century just a few days prior.

A third minor earthquake has hit the Florida-Alabama panhandle in less than a week, prompting fears that a larger, more devastating disaster could soon occur. Seismologists say the earthquake took place in the early hours of Wednesday morning across the state line from the Panhandle area and registered a magnitude of 2.3 with a depth of about three miles

It came amid an ongoing mysterious rumble that rattled homes across the Space Coast on Friday, while 3.1 magnitude earthquake was detected in the same Alabama town on Monday and a 2.7 tremor hit Century just a few days prior

Despite the tremors, earthquakes remain a rare occurrence in Florida, according to seismologists who say the state sits on a cushion of porous limestone and bedrock.

However, they are not totally unprecedented, and in 2016 a 3.7 magnitude earthquake was registered off the coast of Daytona Beach.

Authorities later determined the tremor was not natural but instead triggered by U.S. Navy testing.

Nonetheless, Space Coast residents, who just last month witnessed a large, green meteor streak which exploded over the Atlantic, remain concerned about Friday's occurrence.

Valerie Citta was working at the Brevard County government complex in Viera when she felt the rumbling begin.

She and her colleagues initially thought that NASA - which has its base nearby - had launched a rocket, however were concerned when they learned no mission was scheduled.

But we knew there was no launch. It didnt last for more than 20 seconds, Citta said.

All I could think was maybe there was some activity far away, she told TCPalm.
MPs and former military chiefs last night savaged probes into Northern Ireland veterans, saying they were a stain on the nation.

The decision to prosecute Soldier F over Bloody Sunday nearly 50 years ago sparked a bitter row over investigations into the Troubles, which lawyers warn could continue for years to come.

Former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon warned of a new witch-hunt against ex-troops as terrorists walk free, while a retired general said the veterans were being persecuted.

Tory MP Johnny Mercer, a member of the defence select committee, said: It is a genuine disgrace and stain on this nation that this process continues.

Families of those who died on Bloody Sunday march through the Bogside in Londonderry, Northern Ireland

He said the murder charges being brought were an abject failure to govern and legislate, on our watch as a Conservative administration, adding: When I speak of a chasm between those who serve and their political masters in this country, I mean this.

Former paratroopers also expressed their outrage last night, saying that veterans  many of whom are now in their 60s and 70s  had been hung out to dry. One soldier of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, who took part in Bloody Sunday but is not facing charges, said: I think it is a disgrace for the Government to sell us down the river.

He added: In the early seventies, Northern Ireland was like any other warzone... I have heard people talk about soldiers being let loose. We were very professional in what we did and were highly trained to do it.

Linda Nash, whose youngest brother William Nash died on Bloody Sunday, wept and hugged campaigner Eamonn McCann after it was announced that a British soldier will be prosecuted over the shootings. But critics have hit out at the decision

Following the announcement that Soldier F was facing charges, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson confirmed the Ministry of Defence would pay his legal costs. He said: The Ministry of Defence is working across government to drive through a new package of safeguards to ensure our armed forces are not unfairly treated.

And the Government will urgently reform the system for dealing with legacy issues.

The Prime Ministers official spokesman added: We recognise the suffering of anyone who lost loved ones during the Troubles.

But Mr Mercer rubbished the claims and accused the Government of doing absolutely nothing, adding: This is utterly meaningless. He said the processes were abhorrent and unfair, adding: The Governments meaningless platitudes are genuinely contemptuous for those affected.

Sir Michael Fallon added: Why arent IRA terrorists being prosecuted for their murdering and maiming?

Soldiers should never be above the law but the Government must not allow a new witch-hunt against our troops or old cases to be re-opened after so many years without new evidence.

He said any further prosecutions should require the consent of the Attorney General, who could consider the wider context in which the Army was operating.

Former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon warned of a new witch-hunt against ex-troops as terrorists walk free

General Sir Richard Barrons, a former head of the Joint Forces Command, said: I think charging a former soldier now after 47 years is wrong. Gen Barrons, who served as a brigade commander in Northern Ireland in 2003, questioned how Soldier F can have a fair trial when most of his superiors are dead and the context around the killings has been lost.

He said: I am absolutely against soldiers claiming some form of immunity from prosecution for doing wrong, but after 47 years the chances of a fair trial in the public interest are slim.

Two children hold pictures of Bloody Sunday victims James Wray and William McKinney during a vigil in West Belfast Northern Ireland

Colonel Richard Kemp, who served in Afghanistan, added: We have terrorists who are being treated better over their despicable actions. Other ex-servicemen who served with Soldier F on Bloody Sunday spoke yesterday of their anger that he had been sacrificed, but relief that others had not been charged.

One said: I am furious, one prosecution is one too many. The soldier, in his 70s, added: Where is the protection for British soldiers? [Tony] Blair gave the IRA immunity and handed the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland] the green light to hunt down soldiers. Many of us have asked time and time again why we have not seen members of the IRA prosecuted for the murder of innocent civilians and unarmed soldiers.

Now, 47 years after the event, the defence secretary says he wants to see a review of the legacy process. Too little, too late.

Another ex-paratrooper said he had been living under the shadow of possible charges.

This was feared because we have been let down so many times by those who should have supported us, he said. I feel disgust that this is happening to a good soldier.

The issue of a future amnesty for veterans remains an issue of intense controversy in Northern Ireland. Michelle ONeill, the deputy leader of Sinn Fein, said there was huge disappointment that only one soldier had been charged.

Mr Williamson is fighting for a ten-year limit on the prosecution of soldiers, which could be announced in the Queens speech later this year. Under current proposals, a new Historical Investigations Unit will be set up to probe incidents during the Troubles. It would have a caseload of about 1,700 deaths and aim to complete its work in five years.
The lawyer for a former US Marine who has been jailed in Moscow on espionage charges says his client is being set up by Russia's security services.

Paul Whelan, of Michigan, was arrested in a hotel room in the Russian capital in late December and accused of 'unspecified spying activity' amid claims he was caught with a 'USB stick containing names of Russian agents'.

Defense attorney Vladimir Zherebenkov has said Whelan was given the memory stick by a Russian acquaintance and believed that it contained holiday photographs - not the 'state secrets' that Russian intelligence officials say was on it.

The Moscow City Court on Thursday upheld the ruling that ordered keeping Whelan in jail at least until the end of May.

Outside the courtroom, Zherebenkov for the first time directly accused the Russian friend of taking part in a sting operation to frame the 48-year-old.

'I believe that it was a joint provocation from the side of his acquaintance and Russias security services,' the attorney told ABC News.

Zherebenkov said that the allegations of Whelan spying 'in the interests of the US' seem to be based largely on the fact that he'd travelled to Russia on an American passport. Whelan also holds British, Irish and Canadian citizenship.

Former US Marine Paul Whelan, of Michigan, is being held in a Moscow jail on charges of spying on the Russian government to benefit the US. He is seen entering court on Thursday

Whelan's lawyer Vladimir Zherebenkov (right with his client in February) says the 48-year-old is being set up by Russia's security services

During his appeal hearing on Thursday, Whelan appeared agitated as he stood inside a glass cage guarded by a masked officer.

At one point during the hearing for his alleged espionage, reporters shouted questions at Whelan, who hasn't been seen in public since his last court appearance in January.

One journalist asked the 49-year-old Michigan native if he was being framed.

'What do you think?' Whelan replied, before deferring questions to Zherebenkov.

Moments later, Whelan shouted angrily at courtroom officials, demanding his legally-mandated translator when the judge began reading a ruling in Russian.

A second Russian attorney, Olga Karlova, rushed over and began translating the judge's remarks to her client.

'This is a kangaroo court,' he told reporters after the judge rejected his appeal and sent him back to the notorious Lefortovo jail, a former KGB prison in Moscow.

Whelan is seen in court on Thursday as a judge upheld an earlier ruling to keep him in a Moscow jail for three more months as he faces espionage charges

Whelan was arrested in a hotel room in the Russian capital at the end of last December amid claims he was caught with a 'USB stick containing names of Russian agents'

Whelan, head of global security for a US car parts firm, has been living a tourist's nightmare since he traveled to Moscow in December to attend the wedding of a fellow Marine veteran, according to his twin brother David.

Zherebenkov said his client told him he met up with an unidentified friend in a unit inside the Hotel Metropol on December 28 to receive what Whelan thought was a flash drive containing pictures of tourist destinations.

Suddenly, agents from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) stormed into the hotel room and took Whelan into custody. They claimed that the flash drive he was seeking contained 'state secrets,' including a list of secret Russian operatives.

Zherebenkov said Whelan has denied knowing what was on the drive and that Whelan's 'friend' may have set him up to advance his career. Whelan's twin, David, tweeted that his brother had been 'entrapped by the FSB'.

The Hill reports US officials have speculated Whelan's arrest was the Kremlin's payback for the arrest and conviction of Russian foreign agent Maria Butina, a supposed gun rights activist who has pleaded guilty to trying to infiltrate the US conservative movement.

Whelan's arrest came 15 days after Butina pleaded guilty in court on December 13.

'It's clearly a provocation,' Zherebenkov told ABC News of his client's arrest. 'Paul claims that and the investigation for now cannot refute that. In the words of Paul, it is a fantasy of the FSB.'

Whelan is being detained in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, a former KGB jail known for housing accused spies, political dissidents and high-profile suspects.

If convicted of spying, Whelan could face up to 20 years in prison.

Whelan's lawyer Vladimir Zherebenkov said he visited the jail in early January and found him in a 'very hopeful' mood. The ex-marine is seen above in a courtroom cage in Moscow in February after an initial ruling regarding the extension of his detention

It is speculated Whelan is being used as a bargaining chip in the case of Maria Butina (above), who is due to be sentenced in the US after admitting she acted as an illegal Russian agent

US diplomats and Whelan's family have said they are worried he is being deliberately isolated to keep him from communicating with his loved ones back home or hiring his own lawyer.

President Donald Trump has mentioned that the White House is keeping an eye on Whelan's case, but the Commander and Chief still hasn't made a formal comment on the matter. Neither has the US State Department.

Foreign policy analysts have theorized Russia may want to negotiate a prisoner exchange for Whelan, but the Kremlin has denied this, saying the alleged espionage case against him is not politically motivated.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have expressed growing concern. US Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), who serves as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, joined a group of US Senators last week in demanding Russia release Whelan immediately, saying the foreign country's ongoing treatment of the 48-year-old violates international law.

Diplomats from Russia's US embassy are scheduled to visit with Whelan again on Friday, ABC News reported.

Whelan was kicked out of the marines about 10 years ago for attempted larceny and dereliction of duty.

An unidentified Russian security source told Rosbalt that he started making Russian friends on the internet a decade ago.

After two years, he visited Moscow 'pretending' to want to socialize with his new friends.

Rosbalt said: 'What stood out was that Whelan was not at all interested in pretty Russian girls, preferring instead to spend his time drinking with his male internet friends.'

US diplomats and Whelan's family have said they are worried he is being deliberately isolated to keep him from communicating with his loved ones back home or hiring his own lawyer
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An estimated 150,000 students and teachers in more than 60 cities and towns across Australia have ditched school to rally against climate change in the School Strike 4 Climate march on Friday.

Multiple streets in Sydney's CBD have been shut due to the mass of people who have gathered in the city for the cause.

Transport Management Centre has warned commuters of street closures and bus route diversions saying roads will be closed from 1pm to 3pm.

Park St, George St, Elizabeth St, Castlereagh St, Pitt St, and Druitt St will remain closed for the protests.

The global protest, inspired by young activist Greta Thunberg in Sweden, aims to encourage politicians to do more to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

The students have three demands: stop the Adani coal mine in central Queensland, no new coal or gas, and 100 per cent renewables by 2030.

Thousands of students and teachers across Australia have ditched school to rally against climate change in the School Strike 4 Climate march on Friday

Hundreds of school children descended on Sydney's CBD to encourage politicians to do more to reduce fossil fuel emissions

The students have three demands: stop the Adani coal mine in central Queensland, no new coal or gas, and 100 per cent renewables by 2030

One young protester gathers in front of Town Hall in Sydney's CBD for the School Strike 4 Climate protest

Colourful poster boards and signage have hit out at Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has been criticised for not taking action on the issue.

'I think it's really important to show our views in what needs to be changed. We need to gather a big audience,' high school student Adele told Daily Mail Australia at the rally in Sydney.

Nine-year-old Lachlan said he felt 'disappointed' by Mr Morrison and said he would vote the prime minister out if he was of age.

The protest has been largely criticised by right-wing politicians who say the cause is not worth missing out on day's worth of education.

In the hours before the protest, Mr Latham - One Nation's New South Wales leader - told Daily Mail Australia young people skipping class are limiting their career pursuits.

'School is compulsory,' Mr Latham said while questioning why the protest is not held on Saturday or Sunday.

'I'm afraid Friday is a day lost in the classroom.'

Students should be spending their time in class working hard, Mr Latham said.

But some students admitted their teachers are supporting the cause and even encouraged them to take part in the action.

'My science teacher [supported my choice]. I have a test today but she told me to come,' Burwood Girls High School Year 9 students Jessica, Renee and Kayla said.

Colourful poster boards and signage have hit out at Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has been criticised for not taking action on the issue

'The climate is changing, why can't we?' read one sign at Sydney's protest on Friday afternoon

Students march King William Street after the rally at South Australia's Parliament House in Adelaide

Among the sea of posters, protesters in Sydney chanted about the change they wanted to introduce in parliament

A group of friends from Dulwich High School of Visual Arts and Design gathered together after missing out on the rally in November last year.

'Me and my friends are here to add to the crowd of people to hopefully get someone's attention to get someone to change,' student Cleopatra said.

She said the school signed them out of class after recess if their parents sent a note to the school giving permission to attend the rally.

The student protesters braced temperamental weather in Sydney's CBD and were told by speakers 'our cause is stronger than the weather' when rain lingered.

Among the sea of posters, the protesters chanted about the change they wanted to introduce in parliament.

Colourful poster boards and signage have hit out at Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who has been criticised for not taking action on the issue

The protest has been largely criticised by right-wing politicians who say the cause is not worth skipping out on day's worth of education

'When we say student, you say power,' the presenters screamed for the students to follow.

'Stop Adani, stop stop Adani,' the protesters chanted in reference to the Adani coal mine.

After a number of speeches, the crowd sung along to a performance of John Lennon's Imagine and This Is Me from The Greatest Showman.

'We want your biggest smiles, your signs up in the air and we want you to make some noise,' the students were told.

Thousands of students, their parents and supporters then spilled from Town Hall Square and began their march along Park Street to Hyde Park where they gathered in congregation.

Protesters demanding action on climate change gather in Melbourne on Friday as rallies are held across the nation

Thousands of students, their parents and supports then spilled from Town Hall Square (pictured) and began their march along Park Street to Hyde Park where they gathered in congregation

Mr Latham said he does not dispute the students' knowledge on climate change, but fears they are being politicised and used by 'left-wing activism'.

'There are no careers in becoming a climate change protester,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'You can get a job by studying hard and getting your qualifications, going onto Tafe and university, so I always say, I told my kids to put their head down and study hard.'

'These students are distracted by left-wing activists.'

Senior cabinet minister Christopher Pyne has also voiced his disapproval of the protest.

'Usually strikes are when employees withdraw their labour from an employee so I'm not sure why the students are withdrawing themselves from school. It only damages their education,' Mr Pyne told Nine's Today on Friday.

He said the students should be in school, and if they wanted to engage in political activism it should be on their own time.

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters on Friday the rally should have been held over the weekend to allow greater participation.

'In relation to the science on climate change, I think it's wonderful that children and families are accepting the science of climate change,' she said.

'Secondly, I honestly don't know why that this rally could not have been held on a weekend so families could participate together.'

'I don't support children leaving school for this rally. I think it could have been held after school hours or it could have been held on a weekend.'

Mark Latham (pictured) - One Nation's New South Wales leader - told Daily Mail Australia young people skipping class on Friday for the School Strike 4 Climate march are limiting their career pursuits

'We strike because we don't have a spare,' one witty sign read with drawings of bowling pins

'Stop Adani, stop stop Adani,' the protesters chanted in reference to the Adani coal mine

Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon defended student activism, saying children should be encouraged to express their opinions.

'I don't think any student is going to miss out on their career because they missed a few hours of school today,' he said.

'As long as they are safe and their parents know where they are and they are marching or protesting in a respectful way, in a responsible way, I think that is fine.'

Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, who spoke to Daily Mail Australia from the Sydney event, praised the students who protested on Friday.

'I'm proud to be supporting students who walked out of school today to stand up for their future and for action on climate change,' she said.

'Any politician who does not support them is completely out of touch and doesn't deserve to be in parliament.'

'Thousands of students have turned out in Sydney and I'm sure tens of thousands across Australia and across the world and this is giving a massive message to governments and politicians everywhere that they need to act now on climate change.'

Protesters dressed as Barnaby Joyce and Scott Morrison greeted protesters in Sydney when they descended on Hyde Park

This is the second climate change school strike in recent months in Australia - following November's rally an estimated 15,000 students attended

Sydney is one of 55 locations across the country where protests were planned, with rural locations like Orange, Tamworth, Bendigo, Mackay, Port Macquarie, Alice Springs welcoming the strike.

There are over 100 countries were students are demonstrating to take action.

In Melbourne, thousands of students rallied at Melbourne's Old Treasury building to deliver their message on climate change.

Police were forced to remove at least 12 young people who climbed the roof of two high-rise buildings above the chanting protesters at about 1pm, The Herald Sun reported.

Authorities warned residents to allow for extra of plenty time when travelling through the CBD as the intersection of Spring Street, Collins Street and Macarthur Street were currently closed from all directions due to the protest.

This is the second climate change school strike in recent months in Australia. In November 2018, an estimated 15,000 students across the country attended a climate change protest.

Friday's event was ten times the size of last years strikes.

Nosrat Fareha, 16, from western Sydney said the turn out across Australia on Friday 'was nothing short of amazing'.

'Politicians have responded with indifference to our crippling summer of record heat, bushfires and floods. It's no wonder so many came out in support today,' she said.

'There's no time to stand by and wait for the bold action we need. We will keep organising, building our movement and riding the wave of community frustration until Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten step up to the job.'
The verdict is at the end of February, but the news emerged only in these hours. Defendants will have to serve sentences from one year to a maximum of 10 years in prison. Guilty of "kidnapping and torture of innocent citizens". The arrests took place during a protest rally against the extradition of the Ayatollah Isa Qassim.

Manama (AsiaNews / Agencies) - A Bahrain court sentenced 167 people to prison in 2017, during a protest in front of the house of a leading Shiite leader. The judge issued the verdict at the end of February, but the news only emerged today; defendants received sentences ranging from six months to a maximum of 10 years.

At the time, a group of demonstrators had gathered outside the home of the Ayatollah Isa Qassim to protest his possible extradition, following the revocation of citizenship decided by Manama. In the context of a raid against supporters of the Shiite leader, security forces killed five people and made hundreds of arrests.

According to court documents published by Reuters, the High Criminal Court issued 56 sentences at 10 years in prison on February 27th. The majority of the defendants will have to serve one year in prison. The judges have acquitted four people of all charges.

The papers do not specify the charges, but a government spokesman said in a statement that the convicts were found guilty of "kidnapping and torture of innocent citizens and attacking police officers".

Two defense lawyers have already anticipated the intention to appeal. The defendants, who have already served six months in custody in prison before the trial and were released on bail at the end of 2017, were not present in the courtroom to read the sentence.

Many Shiite citizens denounce a campaign of persecution by the authorities, characterized by dismissals from government or public offices and by a general treatment as second-class citizens. In response, the Manama authorities deny wanting to hit Shiite activists, stressing that individual rights are guaranteed and "ethnic origins are never taken into consideration under any circumstances in Bahrain".

Bahrain is a Gulf monarchy ruled by a Sunni dynasty in a country where the majority of the population (at least 60-70%) is Shia and want constitutional changes and social and economic rights. In 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, riots broke out that the king of Bahrain  a US ally supported by Riyadh  put down with Saudi military aid.

In recent years, authorities authorities arrested and sentenced Shia activists and religious leaders and suspended the activities of Al-Wefaq, the main Shia opposition group, on charges of terrorism, extremism and violence as well as ties to a foreign power (i.e. Iran).In this context, at the end of January the Supreme Court - the highest judicial body - confirmed with sentence the sentence to life imprisonment for the Shiite opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman.
These shameful images highlight how plastic litter is blighting the lives of wild animals in our waterways.

Campaigners say bottles, tubs and wrappers are almost as common as willows and reeds in parts of some rivers.

On the Trent, a swan was photographed diving beneath the water  as a white plastic bag floated past like a ghost.

In Norfolk, an old bottle lay in the path of an otter as it patrolled its territory on the Little Ouse.

Young female Otter taken on the little ouse in Norfolk, the rubbish had collected in fallen trees by the bank creating a heap for her to hunt through

And trout were photographed swimming past rubbish in the rivers Derwent and Wye, both in Derbyshire.

All of these pictures were taken in the last month to document the damage being done to British rivers and their inhabitants.

The problem of plastic litter has been consistently highlighted by the Daily Mail, which is now supporting the Great British Spring Clean, organised by Keep Britain Tidy.

A Rainbow Trout (foreground fish) seen swimming with litter photographed in the River Wye, Derbyshire

A brown trout swims next to a plastic bottle in the river Derwent in Derbyshire a tributary of the river Trent

Between March 22 and April 23, we hope to enlist half a million people to pick up litter in their local areas.

So far 240,113 have signed up to the campaign, which has been backed by Prince William, Prime Minister Theresa May and environmentalist Chris Packham, among others.

Photographer Jack Perks was asked to document plastic pollution by Greenpeace at various sites around the UK.

He said: The otter was a young female taken on the Little Ouse in Norfolk, the rubbish had collected in fallen trees by the bank creating a heart dropping sight watching this fantastic creature having to hunt in a sea of plastic.

Describing his pictures of brown trout, Mr Perks said: The river Trent is my local river and it goes through the city of Nottingham, lots of litter gets blown in and even thrown into the river by the public, meaning the local wildlife have to feed around the rubbish, in fact it hardly fazes them as they are so used to the sight of litter. As well as the large pieces of plastic we can see, all rivers in the UK are thought to be polluted by microplastics.

These come from disintegrating pieces of large plastic, such as carrier bags, as well as synthetic fabrics as they are washed.

Greenpeace said it is launching a survey of rivers to assess the levels of microplastics.

Fiona Nicholls, of Greenpeace, said BBC TVs Blue Planet programmes had raised awareness of the devastating impact plastic is having on marine life.

These pictures now show that our plastic crisis is also affecting our wildlife much closer to home, she added. Its a heartbreaking thought, but plastic is gradually becoming as much a feature of British rivers as willows and reeds. And this is just the plastic pollution thats visible to the naked eye.

This project has been made possible thanks to support received from the players of People's Postcode Lottery.

A mute swan is photographed next to a plastic bag in the river Trent, the third longest in the UK

Over 68,000 people have already signed a petition asking the Government to set and properly enforce targets to reduce throwaway plastic which would help to restore our nature.

Our investigation into plastic pollution in Britains major rivers will gather scientific and photographic evidence to make sure the Government listens.

It is easy to sign up to the Great British Spring Clean. To get involved, on your own or in a group, sign up at gbspringclean.org.
When I was researching my biography of paedophile MP Cyril Smith, which I co-wrote with former Labour MP Simon Danczuk, I spent a lot of time getting to know some of Smiths victims.

The stories they told me were deeply disturbing. Smiths monstrous abuse of teenage boys at the Cambridge House Hostel and Knowl View school in Rochdale caused lifelong damage. There is no hope of justice for these people.

Lives have been ruined and Lord Steels admission to the Westminster child sex abuse inquiry adds insult to injury. Incredibly, he admitted that Smith had casually confessed his crimes in 1979, and nothing had been done about it.

Former Liberal Leader Sir David Steel (left) with paedophile Cyril Smith, the MP for Rochdale who died in 2010

Then leader of the Liberal Party, David Steel had a fairly brief conversation in the Commons with Smith, during which the allegations were admitted, though Smith said the matter had been investigated by the police and no further action was taken.

Steel said that obviously I disapproved but it was, as far as I was concerned, past history.

It wasnt past history for the children Smith would continue to abuse over many years. If this perverted brute had been confronted, his crimes might have been prevented  and who better to confront him than the leader of his party?

Angry as I was at Steels offhand dismissal, I wasnt surprised. I had my own encounter with the man four years ago. Our book had come out and the publisher wanted an expanded edition so we arranged to interview the Liberal grandee in his office at the House of Lords.

Former MP Cyril Smithwho remained a popular political figure despite rumours of child sex abuse allegations against him during his lifetime

I expected him to be in denial mode but tone was regretful and reflective. He seemed appalled at what Cyril had done and told me the allegations had made him sick.

A few years after that interview, he went on BBC2s Newsnight  and reverted to denial mode, saying any claims about Smith and child abuse at the time were merely uncorroborated rumours. The word he used was tittle-tattle.

That staggered me. I felt frankly disgusted. It seemed Steel had very little compassion for the boys who were abused, and no interest in seeing justice done. Instead, it appeared that he acted for reasons of political expediency  when surely any decent person would feel that allegations of child abuse went beyond all political considerations.

Even though I would disagree strongly, I might at least understand if Steel argued that times have changed. In 1979, many people held a double standard that seemed normal for the era: they deplored child abuse, but they did not pry behind closed doors. Its no defence today, but it would provide some sort of explanation for why a party leader, on being told by an MP of these crimes, would shrug them off.

Steel makes no use of such a defence. He simply seems uninterested in what happened, even when testifying before such a crucial inquiry.

Throughout his career, he was so obviously concerned with the fortunes of his party that it appears he failed to act on sickening behaviour that has no place in public life. I find that very sad  and most unworthy of a political leader. When Cyril Smith became a Liberal MP in 1972, he provided a lifeline for the party. The Liberals had been reduced to just six MPs at Westminster, three of them in highly marginal seats.

Lives have been ruined by Smith (left) and the admission of Lord Steel (right) to the Westminster child sex abuse inquiry that he knew about Smith's crimes adds insult to injury

Smith brought terrific clout. A former Labour councillor, he ruled the Rochdale political scene with an iron fist  which is how he was able to commit blatant sexual abuse for so long with impunity.

By the late Seventies, following the trial of Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe who was accused of trying to have an ex-lover murdered by a hitman, the party was in an even more fragile state. Another scandal might have finished it. David Steel seemed to feel there was nothing to investigate.

In another failing, he said Smith claimed the abuse happened when he was a counsellor at the boys hostel  as if that somehow explained or excused it.

Lord Steel (centre) even nominated Smith (left) for a knighthood in the late 1980s, despite knowing about his abuse of young boys

He ALSO told me that he had never liked Smith, that they were never friends, that he regarded the man as small-minded and difficult, and that they were politically opposed on many issues. I came away with the impression that Smith had bullied his leader.

In the late Eighties, Steel nominated Smith for a knighthood, yet did not tell the honours committee what he had been told by Smith. Those allegations were common knowledge at the time: many people in the media had heard rumours, and it seems inconceivable that the Liberal whips were ignorant of it all. This was a small party, and secrets are hard to keep in Westminster.

Lord Steel is wrong to continue acting as if nothing of significance happened. He needs to acknowledge that he showed an appalling lack of judgment, and that Smith was utterly unfit to be an MP. Sadly, I suspect he will carry on protecting his own political interests.
Families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre have successfully filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers of AR-15 rifles, in a ruling that could have far-reaching implications for the gun industry.

The Connecticut Supreme Court accepted a lawsuit against Remington Outdoor Co on Thursday, giving families of nine victims the chance to hold the gun makers liable for the horrifying mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut seven years ago.

The lawsuit claims Remington's marketing 'glorified' the AR-15 Bushmaster rifle using slogans such as 'consider your man card reissued', in a direct appeal to troubled young men like Adam Lanza.

Families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre have successfully filed a lawsuit against the manufacturers of AR-15 rifles (pictured) , in a ruling that could have far-reaching implications for the gun industry

The Connecticut Supreme Court accepted a lawsuit against Remington Outdoor Co on Thursday, giving the families of nine of the victims the chance to hold gun makers liable for the horrifying mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut seven years ago. The lawsuit claims Remington's marketing 'glorified' the AR-15 Bushmaster rifle using slogans such as 'consider your man card reissued', in a direct appeal to troubled young men like Adam Lanza

Lanza, 20, used the rifle to murder 20 children aged between six and seven, along with six adult members of staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, before turning the gun on himself.

Josh Koskoff, one of the lawyers for the victims' families, said in a statement outside of the court today that the families were grateful for the court's rejection of the gun industry's bid for complete immunity.

'The families' goal has always been to shed light on Remington's calculated and profit-driven strategy to expand the AR-15 market and court high-risk users, all at the expense of Americans' safety.

'Today's decision is a critical step toward achieving that goal,' Koskoff said.

The state high court ruled 4-3 that part of a lawsuit alleging wrongful marketing can proceed, despite a 2005 federal law that shields gun-makers from liability in most cases when their products are used in such crimes.

Justices agreed with a lower court judge's decision to dismiss most of the claims brought forward, but crucially ruled that the sweeping federal protections do not apply to wrongful marketing claims - representing a significant development in the ongoing battle between gun control advocates and the gun lobby.

The ruling potentially opens the door for a swathe of similar lawsuits from those affected by mass shootings, with the possible ramifications within the industry unprecedented.

Josh Koskoff (pictured speaking), one of the lawyers for the victims' families, said in a statement outside of the court today that the families were grateful for the court's rejection of the gun industry's bid for complete immunity

Lanza, 20, (pictured above) used the rifle to murder 20 children aged between six and seven, along with six adult members of staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, before turning the gun on himself

The court ruled that the case can move ahead based on a state law regarding unfair trade practice, although legal experts predict any appeal of the ruling by the gun maker would likely be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.

'I am thrilled and tremendously grateful,' Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son Dylan was killed in his first-grade classroom, told the NY Times.

Welcoming the ruling as a victory, she added: 'No one has blanket immunity. There are consequences. We want our day in court to see why they do this this way, and what needs to change.'

In the aftermath of the shooting, which rocked America and led to a fevered national debate, President Barack Obama pushed forward federal gun control legislation but it was shot down on Capitol Hill.

The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, has so far shielded the U.S. firearms industry from lawsuits by victims of gun violence, including major players such as Remington, Sturm Ruger and Co and Vista Outdoor Inc from bearing any liability.

The Dailymail.com has contacted Remington for comment.
Toyota Motor Corp. on Thursday announced it is investing an additional $750 million at five U.S. plants that will bring nearly 600 new jobs, including the production of two hybrid vehicles for the first time at its Kentucky facility.

It marks yet another expansion of the Japanese automaker's U.S. presence, bringing to nearly $13 billion the amount it will spend by 2021.

The latest investments are at facilities in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia. Those same facilities were part of a 2017 announcement by Toyota for a $374 million investment to support production of its first American-made hybrid powertrain.

President Donald Trump congratulated Toyota on Twitter and tried to tie the announcement to his efforts on trade.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia President Leah Curry (right) announces a building expansion at the plant in Buffalo, West Virginia on March 14, 2019

Toyota said it plans to spend $13 billion on U.S. growth by 2021

Referring to an agreement with Canada and Mexico that would replace the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, Trump said: "BIG NEWS for U.S. Auto Workers! The USMCA is already fixing the broken NAFTA deal."

The revised version of NAFTA negotiated by the Trump administration, regarded by many as a modest recasting of the original agreement, has not been approved by Congress.

The president made no mention when a Chevrolet Cruze factory in Ohio recently closed, the first of five North American plants that GM intends to shut down by early next year.

Toyota Motor North America executive Chris Reynolds said the investments represent yet more examples of the company's long-term commitment to build where it sells, irrespective of trade uncertainty due to tariffs.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin addresses the crowd after they unveiled the new 2019 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant on March 14, 2019 in Georgetown, Kentucky.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky President Susan Elkington (L) and Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin (R) addresses the media on March 14, 2019 in Georgetown, Kentucky

"Our overarching manufacturing principle is if we can sell it here we need to make it here. That's been true before any tariff uncertainty, it's true during tariff uncertainty and it will be true after. Our investment cycles go beyond any particular political cycle," he said during a conference call with reporters.

Toyota Motor North America CEO Jim Lentz said the driving force behind the overall investment has been consumers' "insatiable appetite" for light trucks over passenger cars, pointing to Highlander and RAV4 production and past pickup truck production.

"But I'd be disingenuous if I didn't say we also have an eye on trade," Lentz said. "USMCA is part of that. But these decisions we're making today are really driven by consumers and our product portfolio going forward, for the most part."

The automaker is spreading the additional investments among several plants.

Toyota's Georgetown, Kentucky, facility will get a $238 million infusion to produce hybrid versions of Lexus ES 300 sedans starting in May and the RAV4 SUV starting in January 2020, the company announced.

The Toyota 2019 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid was unveiled at the company's Georgetown plant on March 14, 2019 in Georgetown, Kentucky

Toyota leaders announced on Thursday that they will create new jobs at the company's manufacturing plant in Huntsville, Alabama (pictured)

The RAV4 production doesn't signal a shift away from sedan production at the sprawling Kentucky plant, Toyota executives said. Instead, it reflects Toyota's plan to build multiple vehicles at its plants to better insulate each facility from downturns in market cycles.

"Unlike some of our competitors, we think there's value in the sedan market, while it may not be as big as it was," Reynolds said.

The announcement also includes $288 million to increase annual engine capacity at Toyota's Huntsville, Alabama, facility. The plant will add 450 jobs to accommodate new four-cylinder and V6 engine production lines. Last year Toyota and Mazda announced plans to build a $1.6 billion joint-venture plant in Huntsville that will eventually employ about 4,000 people.

Toyota also is spending $62 million on equipment to boost production of Toyota and Lexus cylinder heads at its Bodine Aluminum facility in Troy, Missouri, as part of its cost-saving New Global Architecture production strategy to share common parts and components among different vehicles.

A $50 million expansion and equipment upgrade at a Bodine plant in Jackson, Tennessee, will add 13 jobs and produce engine blocks while doubling the capacity of hybrid transaxle cases and housings.

And Toyota will add 123 jobs and spent $111 million to expand its plant and purchase equipment in Buffalo, West Virginia, to double the capacity of hybrid transaxles.

Previously, Toyota also announced a $600 million investment at its Princeton, Indiana, plant to increase the capacity of its Highlander SUV and to incorporate the new production strategy, and $170 million to launch the 2020 Corolla on a new production line in Blue Springs, Mississippi.
Rep Ilhan Omar is only two months into her first term in Congress, but some Minnesota Democrats are already looking to replacing her in 2020.

The freshman congresswoman has already made a splash with her controversial comments about Israel, leading the House to pass an anti-hate resolution.

Leaders among the Minnesota Democrats have since revealed there have been discussions about finding someone who could challenge Omar in the 2020 primary, when she will be up for re-election.

'There's definitely some buzz going around about it,' state Sen Ron Latz, who represents part of Omar's district, told The Hill.

Rep Ilhan Omar is only two months into her first term in Congress, but some Minnesota Democrats are already looking to replacing her in 2020

'But it's more a buzz of is anyone talking about finding someone to run against her than it is anyone saying they're going to run against her or contemplate it,' he added. 'There's definitely talk about people wanting someone to run against her.'

'I'd be pretty uncomfortable supporting Rep Omar right now, given what I've learned about her since the election and given her apparent inability to stop insulting Jews.'

Omar, who is one of the first Muslim women in Congress, came under fire last month for suggesting that supporters of Israel were urging lawmakers to have 'allegiance to a foreign country'.

Just weeks before that, the congresswoman faced widespread backlash for suggesting that pro-Israel lobbyist group AIPAC was buying political support from members in Congress.

'It's all about the Benjamins baby,' read her controversial tweet, which referenced $100 bills. Omar later apologized.

Leaders among the Minnesota Democrats revealed there have been discussions about finding someone who can challenge Omar in the 2020 primary following her recent tweets

The congresswoman has come under fire for suggesting that pro-Israel lobbyist group AIPAC buys political support from members in Congress

Steve Hunegs, the executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said the community was losing trust in Omar.

'Our community is exasperated by Rep Omar's unfulfilled promises to listen and learn from Jewish constituents while seemingly simultaneously finding another opportunity to make an anti-Semitic remark and insult our community,' he said in a statement.

'Unfortunately, having the opportunity to speak with her about that point didn't dissuade her making that statement. We were appalled.'

State senator Bobby Joe Champion and Minneapolis City Councilwoman Andrea Jenkins, the first openly transgender African-American woman elected to US public office, have both been eyed by as potential contenders by party leaders.

Jenkins said she has no plans to run for Congress and that she will support Omar's reelection bid.

'Support is really strong for Congresswoman Omar, but certainly there is some acrimony,' Jenkins said. 'I think people feel like she's being unfairly targeted.'

'I love my job,' she added. 'I'm really close to the people I represent. I do not want to spend all my time fundraising.'

State senator Bobby Joe Champion (right) has been named as a potential contender by party leaders, although he has not commented on whether he would challenge Omar

Minnesota Democrats were also eyeing Andrea Jenkins, the first openly transgender African-American woman elected to US public office. Jenkins said she will not run against Omar

Champion has not commented on whether he would consider running against Omar.

And while Latz had strong words for the congresswoman, he said he considered running against her for 'all of a half a second' before deciding against it.

While tensions may be high between Omar and Democrat leaders in her home state, history is on her side.

Only two House members from Minnesota have ever lost a primary - and the last time was more than a century ago.

And Omar will likely once again win the endorsement of the state's powerful Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, which helped propel her to success in 2018.

'The DFL endorsement is a huge advantage,' said Corey Day, a former executive director of the Minnesota DFL. 'The real fight is usually for the DFL endorsement or to block it.'

A representative from Omar's campaign said the congresswoman isn't afraid of a primary challenge in 2020.

'Ilhan entered a 10 week six-way primary and she believes you get what you organize for,' a spokesman said.

'She organized her district to win and shes really excited to do that again over the next two years.'
Recruiters have taken aim at millenials and slammed an 'age-of-entitlement' culture they say is to blame for their poor work ethic.

Perth publicans joined recruiters to aim criticism at the young workers amid concerning statistics the state has the second-highest youth unemployment rate in the country.

Frontline Hospitality Recruitment owner Martin Smith noted many newcomers to the workforce simply weren't prepared to start from the bottom, The West Australian reported.

Recruiters have taken aim at millenials and slammed an 'age-of-entitlement' culture they say is to blame for their poor work ethic (stock image)

Perth publicans joined recruiters to aim criticism at the young workers amid concerning statistics the state has the second-highest youth unemployment rate in the country (stock image)

'There are some amazing younger people out there and we do come across them, but there's also the fickle ones ... they don't turn up to interviews and aren't willing to do the hard yards to start with,' Mr Smith said.

Tim McLernon - who runs venues The Camfield, The Reveley and The Stables - picked up the thread and said some bartenders couldn't cope with the stress.

'There's a lot of kids who say, 'f*** this, I'm not doing it, I thought this was going to be easy or I'd look cool in front of girls working at a bar'.'

Mr McLernon pointed out he had lost patience with the flakiness of workers during the interview stages.

'You might get six head chefs asking for an interview and three of them just don't turn up.'

He openly admitted backpackers were reliable and hardworking, preferable traits for candidates.

Scarborough pub owner Ben Randall said he was 'disappointed' he had been driven to choose foreign workers over locals because he had been let down too many times.

Kalgoorlie Hotel owner Craig Alderdice noted one downfall, which was that it was difficult to have consistent staff amid the constant flow of backpackers.

Hospoworld Resourcing senior account manager Radi Stulic blamed the poor work ethic on a gap between perception and reality.

She said many new starters failed to grasp the serious nature of a profession and work hopefuls who applied for roles simply lacked the experience, tenure or appropriate training.
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First Lady Melania and President Donald Trump have participated in a traditional ceremony with the Irish Prime Minister to mark St. Patrick's Day, receiving a bowl of shamrock from the Irish leader.

Taoiseach Leo Vadakar, as the Irish premier is properly titled, attended the ceremony in the East Room of the White House on Thursday evening.

The tradition dates back to 1952, when Irish Ambassador John Joseph Hearne delivered a box of shamrocks to Harry Truman's White House on the feast day of Ireland's patron saint, which this year falls on Sunday.

The bowl presented to Trump was made at Kilkenny Crystal in Callan, the home town of Irish-American architect James Hoban.

President Donald J. Trump and Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar participate in the Shamrock Bowl Presentation in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on Thursday

Trump was flanked by First Lady Melania and Vice President Mike Pence for the ceremony, which dates back to 1952

The bowl presented to Trump was made at Kilkenny Crystal in Callan, the home town of Irish-American architect James Hoban, who designed both the White House and Ireland's house of parliament, Leinster House

Hoban designed both Leinster House in Dublin, the seat of the Irish parliament, and the White House.

Trump, who was joined on stage by Vice President Mike Pence, said that millions of Americans across the country celebrate the 'inspiring' Irish people on St Patrick's Day.

He also welcomed the Taoiseach's boyfriend Matt Barrett, who also attended the event.

Vadakar made history as Ireland's first gay prime minister, as well as the first of Indian descent.

Trump delivers remarks as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Ireland, First Lady Melania, and Vice President Mike Pence look on

In his remarks, Trump said that millions across the US celebrate the 'inspiring' Irish people on St Patrick's Day

Trump also called the Irish 'brutal enemies' adding 'You don't want to fight with the Irish, it's too tough, it's too bloody'

Trump said: 'I know many Irish people and they are inspiring, they're sharp, they're smart, they're great and they are brutal enemies so you have to keep them as your friend. Always keep them as your friend.

'You don't want to fight with the Irish, it's too tough, it's too bloody.'

He reminded the crowd that the shamrock tradition began almost 70 years ago when Ireland's first ambassador to the United States, John Hearne, gave then US president Harry Truman a small box of it.

He added that he accepted the gift as a symbol of America's 'enduring friendship' with Ireland.

'The Irish are confident and fearless. They never give up, they never give in,' he added.

Trump and Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar participate in the Shamrock Bowl Presentation in the East Room of the White House

Varadkar praised America for 'your people, your values, a new nation conceived in liberty'

Following the ceremony, Pence, known for his opposition to gay marriage, was spotted shaking hands with Matt Barrett, the boyfriend of Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, Ireland's first gay premier

Matthew Barrett (left) also posed for a photo Trump, Pence, Varadkar, Nancy Pelosi, Republican Representative from New York Peter King (second from left), and Democratic Representative from Massachusetts Richard Neal (third from left)

For his part, Varadkar described US military power as 'unrivalled'.

Varadkar said: 'The American economy is booming. More jobs. Rising incomes. Exactly what you said you'd do.

'However, I believe the greatness of America is about more than economic prowess and military might.

'It is rooted in the things that make us love America  your people, your values, a new nation conceived in liberty. The land and the home of the brave and the free.'

In 2013, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny presents a bowl of shamrock to US President Barack Obama

In 2006, President George W. Bush accepted a ceremonial bowl of shamrock from Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern

The Taoiseach added that the futures of the US and Ireland were entwined.

'I believe that future generations of our citizens should have the same opportunity to enrich one another's societies as past generations have,' he said.

The event marked the end of Varadkar's trip to Washington DC before he travels to Chicago on Friday for the second part of his St Patrick's trip.

Earlier in the day, Trump said that he plans to visit Ireland later this year.
A white supremacist shooter filmed himself gunning down dozens of worshippers at a mosque in New Zealand while streaming the massacre online.

Brenton Tarrant allegedly entered the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch about 1.30pm on Friday during afternoon prayers and opened fire.

The horrifying 17-minute video streamed live on his Facebook shows the 28-year-old Australian firing more than 100 shots from multiple rifles at those inside.

Fifty people were killed and another 50 seriously injured during the rampage through two mosques.

Many were shot at point blank range in the building as they huddled together in corners while a woman was heard begging for help before he shot her in the head.

A white supremacist shooter filmed himself gunning down dozens of worshippers at a mosque in New Zealand while streaming the massacre online. At one point he stopped his car and aimed the camera at his face

The shooter's rampage began when he got into his car wearing military-style body armour and a helmet saying 'let's get this party started'

Tarrant's rampage began when he got into his car wearing military-style body armour and a helmet with a series of rifles on the passenger seat.

The weapons, including a semi-automatic shotgun he used, are scrawled with the names of past mass killers and cities where the shootings occurred.

After adjusting items of clothing, he says: 'Remember lads, subscribe to PewDiePie' and drives off with a sat nav giving him instructions on how to reach the mosque.

According to Bellingcat, the shooter listens to a folk song called 'Remove Kebab' - originally a propaganda video made by Serbian soldiers as a tribute to war criminal Radovan Karadzic.

Three minutes into the video, the attacker stops the car and directs the camera at himself and says 'hello lads' before he sets off again.

The first song stops and a military-style song starts but moments later the sat nav announces he has reached his destination.

As he drives up an alley, someone steps out in front of him and he calmly gives him the thumbs up and signals for him to cross the road.

He then parks up and opens his door before retrieving a gun from the boot of his car - one of at least six weapons in the vehicle.

After calmly walking to the entrance of the mosque, he sees an individual at the entrance and opens fire with nine quick shots.

Discarding that gun, he then produces another as he walks past a man sprawled out on the ground.

The gunman storms inside and fires quick bursts at anyone he can see. One wounded man tries to crawl away but is shot again.

After retrieving one of at least six assault rifles stored in his car, he walked up to the front door and began firing at the first person he saw

The shooter entered the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch about 1.30pm on Friday during afternoon prayers and opened fire

The gunman stormed inside and fired quick bursts and anyone he saw. One wounded man tried to crawl away but was shot again

Amid scenes of unimaginable horror, the gunman turns right and sees a worshipper running for their life and opens fire again.

In the minutes that follow, he fires into people huddled in corners, sometimes not even looking where he is shooting, reloading numerous times.

When the sound of his gun stops between magazines, the moaning of wounded people can be heard until the shots begin again.

Several times he stands over wounded men, calmly reloading his gun, then shooting them multiple times to make sure they are dead.

At one point a man sprints towards him in a bid to flee to safety only to be gunned down as well.

Just over eight minutes in to the video, he sees a worshipper running towards the exit and opens fire again.

The shooter's weapons were marked with the names of other people who have carried out past attacks

A minute later, he exits the mosque before firing several rounds left and right along a pavement. Children's screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get what appears to be a scoped rifle.

He momentarily picks up a jerry can before deciding to leave it in the boot of his car.

The gunman returns to the grounds of the mosque and opens fire again, saying: 'Were not going to get the badge today boys.'

He then runs back into the mosque past blood-soaked worshippers and once again starts shooting. At least two dozen people can be seen lying on the ground.

Seconds later, he moves closer and starts shooting individual worshippers in the head in an apparent effort to ensure they are dead.

He repeats this on the other side of the room, stopping to shoot another fallen victim in the head on the way.

Seemingly satisfied that everyone has been killed, the gunman sprints outside. Here, he shoots another person on the mosque's front lawn.

The woman stumbles on to the street and can be seen lying face down yelling 'help me, help me' as the shooter walks up to her.

Dozens of people have reportedly been killed at Al Noor Mosque (interior pictured)

A man was seen with bloodstains on his trousers near the mosque after the shooting

Tarrant calmly leans over her and shoots her twice in the head.

Returning to his car once more, just yards away from the body, he slams the car boot shut.

Fire by English rock band The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown can be heard blasting from the speakers. The singer bellows 'I am the god of hellfire!'.

Back in the car, and after apparently driving over the woman he had just killed, he laughs as he says the attack 'did not go as planned  f*****g Christ' before adjusting his sat nav.

Seconds later he stops to unleash shotgun rounds through his windscreen and then aims another shot through his window at a man on the pavement.

He then speeds off, waiting for two women to cross the road before sounding his horn and roaring across an interchange.

Analysing his slaughter, he says he was 'too quick, I should have stayed longer. There was time for the fuel.'

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots and police are responding to the incident at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island

At least one gunman has opened fire at a mosque in New Zealand , shooting at children and reportedly killing dozens of people

He expressed regret for not 'burning that f*****g mosque to the ground'.

But, s**t happens,' he said. 'I left one full magazine back there, I know for sure, possibly more. I had to run along in the middle of the firefight and pick up the mags that fell and pretty much f**king instantly.

'There wasn't even time to aim there were so many targets. There were so many people, the car park was full, so there's no real chance of improvement.'

Moments later, the sound of a police car's siren can be heard as the music in the car gets louder and louder.

He continues to discuss the attack, noting, as he drives at high speeds, that 'the women weren't in yet I guess the men came in... earlier.'

As the video draws to a close, his car is held up in traffic. Through the shattered passenger window, he jokingly says 'hi' to the driver on his left.

The gunman posted a 73-page manifesto to Twitter before the killings, foreshadowing a 'terrorist attack'.

In the shooter's manifesto he mentions being inspired by other shooters including Anders Breivik who killed 77 people in Oslo, Norway in 2011.

He said he 'disliked' Muslims and hated those who had converted to the religion, calling them 'blood traitors'.

'I have read the writings of Dylan Roof and many others, but only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik,' he wrote.

Tarrant published an online manifesto detailing his plans to carry out a massacre hours before the attack

Detailing his plans for a massacre, the shooter wrote: 'To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.

'By the definition, then yes. It is a terrorist attack. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.'

The man said he initially planned to target a mosque in Dunedin, but changed to the Al Noor Mosque because it had 'far more invaders'.

He also claimed to be inspired by Candace Owens, an outspoken backer of United States president Donald Trump.

'The person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens, each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights.'
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has addressed media following a terrifying mass shooting across Christchurch as the CBD remains in lockdown and residents have been told to not go outdoors.

'I cannot give any confirmation at this stage around fatalities and casualties, what I can say is that it is clear that this is one of New Zealand's darkest days,' Ms Ardern said at a press conference.

'Clearly, what has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.'

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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has addressed media following a terrifying mass shooting across Christchurch as parts of the city have been taken into lockdown and residents told not to go outdoors

'I cannot give any confirmation at this stage around fatalities and casualties, what I can say is that it is clear that this is one of New Zealand's darkest days,' Ms Ardern said at a press conference

A gunman - believed to be a 28-year-old Australian - entered the Al Noor Mosque at Christchurch at about 1.30pm as Friday prayers were underway, before he opened fire and live-streamed the mass shooting.

A video seen by Daily Mail Australia shows the man firing multiple shots at dozens of people as they try to flee.

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots from weapons including a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle.

People were also reportedly shot at the nearby Linwood Masjid mosque and a second gunman reportedly seen around the area.

There are also reports of another shooting outside Christchurch Hospital and that a bomb was found in a grey Subaru Legacy three kilometres from the scene of the shooting on Strickland Street, The Guardian reported.

Up to 49 people are feared dead and four people are in custody - including three men and one woman, Stuff reported.

'There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme and unprecedented violence,' Ms Ardern told media.

'Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here.

'They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home.

'They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand.'

At the time of the media conference, Ms Ardern confirmed that police had one suspect in custody, but has warned there could be more involved with schools across the city in lockdown - including central city buildings.

'We are potentially still dealing with an evolving situation,' Ms Ardern said.

'And again, as I say, across multiple sites. Please be assured, though, the police are actively managing the situation.

'The advice from police continues to be that people remain indoors.

A gunman - believed to be a 28-year-old Australian - entered the Al Noor Mosque at Christchurch at about 1.30pm as Friday prayers were underway, before he opened fire and live-streamed the mass shooting

A video seen by Daily Mail Australia shows the man firing multiple shots at dozens of people as they try to flee

People were also reportedly shot at the nearby Linwood Masjid mosque and a second gunman reportedly seen around the area

There are also reports of another shooting outside Christchurch Hospital and that a bomb was found in grey Subaru Legacy three kilometres from the scene of the shooting on Strickland Street

'I acknowledge that that may mean that some families are separated, but please continue to listen out for information as it comes to light.

'For now, my thoughts, and Im sure the thoughts of all New Zealanders, are with those who have been affected, and also with their families.'

Police Commissioner Mike Bush noted the shooting was a 'serious and evolving situation with an active shooter.'

'Police are responding with its full capability to manage the situation, but the risk environment remains extremely high,' he said.

'Police thanks the public for their cooperation and will provide further updates to keep residents informed.'

New Zealand police urged mosques to close their doors out of safety as the police operation continues.

'We are still working to resolve this incident and we continue to urge Christchurch residents to stay inside,' it said in a tweet.

'We ask all mosques nationally to shut their doors and advise that people refrain from visiting these premises until further notice.'

Christchurch is the biggest city on New Zealand's South Island. The last mass shooting in New Zealand was back in 1990, after a man killed 13 people in the seaside town of Aramoana.

Tightened gun laws came as a result of the tragic incident and since 2007 gun homicides remained below two digit figures - except in 2009 when 11 were reported.

'Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here,' Ms Ardern said at the press conference

Police Commissioner Mike Bush noted the shooting was a 'serious and evolving situation with an active shooter'

'Police thanks the public for their cooperation and will provide further updates to keep residents informed,' Commissioner Mike Bush said.
A Melbourne man who instigated the fatal bashing of an Airbnb guest had previously served jail time in Norway for assaulting a housemate.

Jason Colton, 42, and two other men have pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Ramis Jonuzi, killing him after a minor dispute arose over a $210 unpaid accommodation bill in October 2017.

Colton played a leading role in the three-on-one assault at the Brighton East home, putting Mr Jonuzi in a choke hold and punching him in the head until he was unconscious.

The 42-year-old served three months in a prison in Norway in 2013, after he punched his housemate in the face and grabbed his throat while he was asleep.

Jason Colton (pictured), who instigated the fatal bashing of an Airbnb guest had previously served jail time in Norway for assaulting a housemate

Ramis Jonuzi (pictured), 36, was punched and choked to death when he didn't have the money to pay a $210 Airbnb bill

Mr Jonuzi rented a room at the Melbourne home (pictured) for three nights on Airbnb but agreed with head tenant Craig Levy that he'd stay another week for $210

Prosecutor Mark Gibson SC said Colton became unnecessarily involved after there was a 'minor' dispute between another housemate, Craig Levy, and Mr Jonuzi.

'He initiated the physical contact. He was the aggressor,' Mr Gibson told a pre-sentence hearing in the Supreme Court on Friday.

He said Mr Jonuzi, 36, was entitled to feel safe in his temporary accommodation.

Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth said the victim was crying out for the assault to stop as he was restrained and bashed by the trio.

'It was a cowardly, brutal attack on someone who was unable to defend himself,' the judge said.

This wasn't the first time Colton had been violent towards a housemate, the court was told.

Colton, who married a Norwegian woman in 2008 and moved to her home country, was jailed by the Drammen District Court in Norway's south in 2013.

'He got violently stuck into his housemate,' Justice Hollingworth said.

Colton attacked that housemate while he was asleep in bed, punching his face and grabbing his throat.

After serving about three months' jail in Norway, he was sent back to Melbourne, where he worked mainly in hospitality until the fatal assault.

Colton played a leading role in the three-on-one assault at the Brighton East home, putting Mr Jonuzi in a choke hold and punching him in the head until he was unconscious

Mr Jonuzi's three sisters made tearful statements to the court, describing their brother as a kind man who had never been in a fight

Mr Jonuzi's three sisters made tearful statements to the court, describing their brother as a kind man who had never been in a fight.

'He had a heart of gold and a kind soul. He had a laugh you could hear from a mile away,' sibling Naime Balla said.

'He didn't need to have his life taken in such a horrific, brutal and degrading way.

'My brother meant nothing to you (Colton) but he meant the world to us.'

Colton had been on trial for murder until Tuesday, when his guilty plea to the lesser charge of manslaughter was accepted.

The other housemates, Levy and Ryan Smart, are already in prison after confessing to manslaughter last year.

Colton is scheduled to be sentenced on Tuesday.
Hamas military posts in the Strip hit. The Islamic movement denies any involvement in the attack. Analysts and experts speak of disturbing action to prevent ceasefire agreements between the two fronts. Weekly demonstrations scheduled for today on the border between Israel and Gaza cancelled.

Gaza (AsiaNews) - A rain of Israeli missiles poured down on Gaza in the early morning today, in response to the launch yesterday of two rockets from the Strip and directed towards the coastal city of Tel Aviv for the first time since the war of 2014.

The targets were structures of the Islamic Hamas movement. "Combat aircraft, attack helicopters and the Israeli air force have launched a joint attack against a hundred positions of the terrorist organization Hamas in the Gaza Strip" read a military command statement said -.

Israeli defense sources report that the Iron Dome defense system intercepted some of the missiles launched towards the country. The first two rockets to Tel Aviv, which caused no casualties or material damage, were followed by another six missiles all intercepted except one by the defensive system. The Israeli military has released images of targets hit by over a hundred missiles launched towards the Strip. Targest include what is considered the headquarters of Hamas for operations in the West Bank, a weapons depot and a shipyard.

The military's response injured two people in Gaza, a man and a woman from Rafah hit by some debris from their home.

In these hours the Islamic movement that controls the Strip has strongly denied the involvement in yesterday's rocket launch towards Israel. Some Israeli media, citing defense sources, say that the rockets were fired "by mistake" during maintenance work.

The attack took place while a meeting was taking place between Hamas leaders and Egyptian delegates, who have been mediating for some time in an attempt to reach an agreement for a ceasefire with Israel. Analysts and experts in Middle Eastern politics say that the rockets would be an attempt to raise the tension and prevent any kind of agreement between Hamas and Israel.

During the night the alarm sirens continued to resound through the streets of Tel Aviv, fueling tension and concern among the civilian population. A possible escalation of violence represents a further element of crisis for a country that is heading for political elections on April 9, in a context of uncertainty and confusion with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in search of the fifth mandate but risking a corruption trial.

Following the ongoing military escalation, organizers of weekly protests on the border between Gaza and Israel decided to suspend any form of demonstration for today. A choice, they specify, dictated "by the public interest".

From March 30, 2018 to coincide with the beginning of the "March of return", the border that separates the Strip from Israel was the scene of repeated demonstrations by the Palestinians. The population protests against the Israeli blockade of goods into Gaza [now described as an open-air prison] and for the recognition of Palestinian refugees right to return to their homes.

In the context of the protests, in recent months there have been numerous episodes of violence termed "shameful" by Israeli activists, during which at least 251 Palestinians (and two Israeli soldiers) were killed.

The army has always claimed to have opened fire to protect the border from raids and attacks by armed militiamen. The UN does not exclude that the Israeli military is committing "war crimes".
A terrorist who opened fire on a New Zealand mosque full of worshippers published an online manifesto detailing his plans to carry out the massacre just hours before the attack.

Australian man Brenton Tarrant, 28, published 'The Great Replacement' the morning before opening fire at two mosques in Christchurch, on New Zealand's south island.

Tarrant live streamed his attack on the Al Noor mosque on Facebook.

At least 49 people are believed to have been killed in the attack, with more than 40 also in hospital suffering from gunshot wounds.

Four arrests were made, including Tarrant, two men and a woman. Bombs attached to a pair of cars owned by the suspects were disarmed.

The chilling 73-page manifesto details his twisted grievances, why he picked the mosques in Christchurch and how he was inspired by Norway mass killer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 in 2011.

Scroll down for video

Australian man Brenton Tarrant (pictured), 28, opened fire on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday and live streamed video of the attack through his Facebook account

Tarrant published an online manifesto detailing his plans to carry out a massacre hours before the attack. He called the 73-page document: 'The Great Replacement'

'I have read the writings of Dylan Roof and many others, but only really took true inspiration from Knight Justiciar Breivik,' he wrote.

Tarrant's reference to Breivik as a 'Knight' relates to the Norwegian's support for the Knights Templar - an extremist Christian group of specialist fighters from the 12th century.

Tarrant also claimed he had been inspired to carry out the attacks as 'revenge' for a terror attack in Sweden that claimed a young girl among its victims.

'There was a period of time two years prior to the attack that dramatically changed my views. The period of time was from April 2017 to May 2017,' he wrote.

'The first event that begun the change was the terror attack in Stockholm on 7 April, 2017.

'I could no longer turn my back on the violence. Something this time was different.

'That difference was Ebba Akerlund... Ebba was walking to meet her mother after school when she was murdered by an Islamic attacker.'

Tarrant described himself as an 'ordinary white man born in Australia to a working class, low-income family.'

'I am just a regular white man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people,' he wrote.

Tarrant grew up in Grafton, in northern New South Wales, where much of his family still lives.

In the manifesto Tarrant said he had 'little interest in education' and 'did not attend University as I had no great interest in anything offered in the Universities to study'.

The man said he initially planned to target a mosque in Dunedin, but changed to the Al Noor and Masjid Mosques because they had 'far more invaders'.

SHOOTER IS A WELL-TRAVELLED GYM FANATIC WHO GREW UP IN SMALL-TOWN AUSTRALIA Brenton Tarrant, 28, grew up in Grafton, a small town in northern New South Wales. Tarrant's father, who was a competitive athlete and completed 75 triathlons, died of cancer in 2010 aged just 49. His mother still lives in the area. Tarrant attended a local high school and then worked as a personal trainer at the local Big River Squash and Fitness Centre from 2010. A woman who knew Tarrant through the gym said he had always followed a strict dietary and exercise regime. 'He was very dedicated to his own training and to training others,' she said. 'He threw himself into his own personal training and then qualified as a trainer and trained others. He was very good.' 'When I say he was dedicated, he was dedicated more than most people would be. 'He was in the gym for long periods of time, lifting heaving weights. He pretty much transformed his body.' The woman said she had not spoken to him or heard him talk about his political or religious beliefs. 'From the conversations we had about life he didn't strike me as someone who had any interest in that or extremist views,' she said. 'But I know he's been travelling since he left Grafton. He has been travelling overseas, anywhere and everywhere. 'I would say it's something in the nature of his travels, something he's been around. 'I know he's been to lots of different countries trying to experience lots of different things in life and I would say something's happened in that time in his travels.' Advertisement

The manifesto reveals in chilling details his grievances, why he picked the mosque and reveals why he was inspired by Norway mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik (pictured)

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots and police are responding to the incident at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island. Pictured is a still from a live-stream of the shooting

The shooter's weapons were marked with the names of other people who have carried out attacks

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots from his weapons including a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island (Pictured)

'I am unsure as of this time of writing whether I will reach that target, it is a bonus objective,' he wrote.

Explaining his plans the massacre, the shooter wrote that: 'To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people.

'By the definition, then yes. It is a terrorist attack. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force.'

He also revealed he did not initially plan to carry out the attack in New Zealand at all.

'I only arrived in New Zealand to live temporarily while I planned and trained, but I soon found out that New Zealand was as target rich of an environment as anywhere else in the West,' Tarrant wrote.

'Secondly an attack in New Zealand would bring to attention the truth of the assault on our civilisation.'

AOS (Armed Offenders Squad) push back members of the public following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots and police are responding to the incident at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island

A man who escaped the mosque during the shooting said he saw his wife lying dead on the footpath

Witnesses inside the mosque reported seeing 15 people being shot, including children

He also claimed to be inspired by Candace Owens, an outspoken right-wing commentator in the US.

'The person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens, each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights.'

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots from his weapons including a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island.

The gunman live-streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque, which happened about 1.30pm (11.30am AEDT) as Friday prayers were underway.

A video seen by Daily Mail Australia shows the man firing multiple shots at dozens of people as they try to flee.

Mohammed Jama, the former president of the Muslim Association of Canterbury, said a man with a gun entered the Christchurch Mosque about 1.40pm local time on Friday.

A man inside the mosque at the time of the shooting said there 'bodies all over me'.

Witnesses inside the mosque reported seeing 15 people being shot, including children

A man who escaped the mosque during the shooting said he saw his wife lying dead on the footpath.

'My wife is dead,' he said while wailing.

Shooters rampage began when he got into his car wearing military-style body armour and a helmet saying 'let's get this party started'

After retrieving one of at least six assault rifles stored in his car, he walked up to the front door and began firing at the first person he saw

Witness Ahmad Al-Mahmoud described one of the shooters as being white, with blond hair and wearing a helmet and bulletproof vest.

'The guy was wearing like an army [suit]. He had a big gun and lots of bullets. He came through and started shooting everyone in the mosque, everywhere,' Ahmad Al-Mahmoud told Stuff.

'They had to smash the door - the glass from the window and the door - to get everyone out.

'We were trying to get everyone to run away from this area. I ran away from the car park, jumping through the back [yard] of houses.'

Al-Mahmoud said the man was 'wearing a helmet' and must have fired 'hundreds' of gunshots.

Another witness said he ran behind the mosque to call the police after hearing the gun go off.

'I heard the sound of the gun. And the second one I heard, I ran. Lots of people were sitting on the floor. I ran behind the mosque, rang the police.

'I saw one gun on the floor. Lots of people died and injured.'

WHAT DO WE KNOW SO FAR ABOUT THE CHRISTCHURCH TERROR ATTACK? 49 people have been killed and at least 48 injured at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. A shooting has also happened at Christchurch Hospital. Armed police have locked down all three locations. One of the gunmen is believed to have live-streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque, which happened about 1.30pm as Friday prayers were underway. The second shooting happened almost simultaneously at the Masjid Mosques in Linwood, which is about 10km away. The only person identified so far is Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Grafton, Australia. The Bangladesh cricket team were inside the Al Noor Mosque just before the shooting. Another shooting has reportedly taken place at nearby Linwood Mosque. Gunmen reportedly opened fire across the city on Friday afternoon. At least 30 people have reportedly been killed. Several bombs were found attached to vehicles across Christchurch. Advertisement

TIMELINE OF TERROR A 28-year-old Australian man entered a mosque in central Christchurch on Friday afternoon and opened fire on people gathered inside the building - killing at least 49 people and leaving more than 20 seriously injured. This is how the incident unfolded in local New Zealand Time. 1.40pm: First reports of a shooting at a mosque in central Christchurch. A man entered the mosque with an automatic weapon and opened fire on people inside. 2.11pm: Police confirmed they were attending an 'evolving situation' in Christchruch. Gunshots are heard in the area outside Masid Al Noor Mosque on Deans Avenue. Witnesses reported hearing multiple gunshots, with one saying she attempted to give CPR to an injured person but they died. 2.17pm: Multiple schools went into lockdown in Christchurch. People who were in the mosque began to leave covered in blood and with gunshot wounds. 2.47pm: First reports of six people dead, three in a critical condition and three with serious injuries. 2.54pm: Police Commissioner Mike Bush said the situation is 'serious and evolving' and told people to remain indoors and stay off the streets. The Canterbury District Health Board activated its mass casualty plan. 3.12pm: New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern cancelled her afternoon arrangements. 3.21pm: Christchurch City Council locked down many of their central city buildings. 3.33pm: First reports of a bomb in a beige Subaru that crashed on Strickland Street, three kilometres from the shootings. 3.40pm: Police confirmed there were multiple simultaneous attacks on mosques in Christchurch. 3.45pm: Reports of multiple shots fired at the shootings, which are ongoing. 3.59pm: 300 people were reported to be inside the moque. 4.00pm: One person is confirmed to be in custody but there are warnings there may be others out there. Police commissioner Mike Bush urges Muslims across New Zealand to stay away from their local mosque. 4.10pm: Jacinda Ardern calls Friday 'one of New Zealand's darkest days'. 5.27pm: First reports of a second shooting. A witness said a Muslim local chased the shooters at the mosque in Linwood, firing in 'self defence'. 5.31pm: Four people are confirmed to be in custody. including one woman. Multiple fatalities were reported. 7.07pm: It was confirmed an AR15 rifle was used in the attack. 7.20pm: Dunedin Street was cordoned off. Reports the attackers planned to also target the Al Huda Mosque. 7.26pm: At least 40 people were confirmed dead, Jacinda Ardern confirmed. 7.34pm: Confirmed that 48 people were being treated in hospital. 7.46pm: Britomart train station in central Auckland was evacuated after bags were found unattended. The bags were deemed not suspicious. 8.35pm: New Zealand's Government confirmed this is the first time ever the terror level has been lifted from low to high. 9.03pm: Police Commissioner Mike Bush confirms that the death toll has risen to 49. He also confirmed that a man in his late twenties was charged with murder. Advertisement
The CEO of Apple has said he is 'devastated' by the mass shooting in Christchurch, after dozens of worshipers in a mosque were horrifically gunned down.

Tim Cook evoked the words on Martin Luther King, in a message of support to the victims in New Zealand.

He said: 'Devastated by the reports out of New Zealand. The community in Christchurch is in our hearts, as are all affected by this horrific attack. I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. - MLK'

The CEO of Apple has said he is 'devastated' by the mass shooting in Christchurch, after dozens of worshipers in a mosque were gunned down.Tim Cook evoked the words on Martin Luther King, in a message of support to the victims in New Zealand

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots from his weapons including a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed solidarity with the murdered victims, writing powerfully that 'we must come together' in the time of tragedy.

She wrote: 'This is a time of great vulnerability for our communities. We must come together, fight for each other, & stand up for neighbors. Isolation, dehumanizing stereotypes, hysterical conspiracy theories, & hatred ultimately lead to the anarchy of violence. We cannot stand for it.'

Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert Kennedy, wrote a heartfelt message to the victims, writing on Twitter: 'To those affected by the act of white supremacist terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand, know this: my family holds you closest in our prayers tonight. Millions mourn for your loss.

'Millions more are prepared to take action and end the moral cancer of white supremacy.'

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez expressed solidarity with the murdered victims, writing powerfully that 'we must come together' in the time of tragedy

Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of Robert Kennedy, wrote a heartfelt message to the victims, writing on Twitter: 'To those affected by the act of white supremacist terrorism in Christchurch, New Zealand, know this: my family holds you closest in our prayers tonight. Millions mourn for your loss

Adding that her father Robert Kennedy and her uncle John. F. Kennedy were victims of gun violence, she called for the end of Islamophobia and of white supremacy.

She wrote: 'My father suffered the unspeakable tragedy of losing a brother to gun violence. He was a victim of gun violence himself. These moments leave us speechless, but together we have a voice: a voice that can call for an end to Islamophobia and white supremacy. Now is a time to act.'

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots from his weapons including a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island.

The gunman - who identified himself on Twitter as Brenton Tarrant - live-streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque, which happened about 1.30pm (11.30am AEDT) as Friday prayers were underway.

A video seen by Daily Mail Australia shows the man firing multiple shots at dozens of people as they try to flee. A suspect is in custody but it is unclear whether it is the gunman.

The suspected gunman posted a 87-page manifesto to Twitter before the killings, describing them as a 'terrorist attack'.

Actor Steve Blum also sent his support, calling for an end to hatred in society.

While the author Neil Gaiman called the attack 'monstrous'

People were also reportedly shot at the nearby Linwood Masjid mosque.

Actor Steve Blum also sent his support, calling for an end to hatred in society.

He wrote: 'Oh my God. New Zealand my heart is with you. Devastating. This has to stop. This emboldened culture of hatred must be rooted out, fully exposed and brought to justice. Starting with our president.'

While the author Neil Gaiman called the attack 'monstrous'.
Suspected Christchurch terrorist Bernton Tarrant apparently vowed to kill Muslims a day before the attack - and was praised after the heinous act by his followers on social media.

An anonymous user thought to be Tarrant wrote on notorious right-wing blogging website 8Chan on Thursday: 'I will carry out an attack against the invaders, and will even live stream the attack via Facebook.'

He shared a link to a video so his supporters in other timezones could watch the massacre and said: 'By the time you read this I should be going live.'

In a reference to the Viking version of heaven, Tarrant added: 'If I don't survive the attack, goodbye, godbless and I will see you in Valhalla'.

Tarrant also posted images of his ammunition and weapons on social media before his attack.

But he was not picked up by police because he was not on the terror watchlist.

Suspected Christchurch terrorist Bernton Tarrant vowed to kill Muslims a day before the attack - and was praised after the heinous act by his followers on social media. Pictured: His sick post

Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year-old White Supremacist from Australia walked into mosques in New Zealand during Friday prayer and opened fire, killing up to 40 people in total

The shooter's weapons were marked with the names of other people who have carried out attacks

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed in a press conference: 'Those, as far as I am advised, currently in custody were not on security watchlist.

'It is a question if they were known from a security perspective. They were not on any active watchlist.'

Tarrant also told his followers to read his 73-page manifesto that he posted online so that he could be remembered.

The post was written under an anonymous name but was widely circulated on social media by Tarrant's fans.

Once the attack began, fans cheered him with statements such as 'HEIL BRENTON TARRANT.'

After the news broke on social media and television, his followers began making threads about the attack and praising him for his role in the massacre.

One user said 'Haha m*****s got f*****g rekt lol.'

Another said 'Holy f***, this is amazing.'

Tarrant and three other people have killed up to 40 people after opening fire at several mosques in New Zealand

One user praised Tarrant for his crimes with a Nazi phrase

Another user was found it funny that Muslims had been shot and killed in a mosque

Another user thought the death of up to 40 people was 'amazing'

Other users went into far more detail with their support for the Christchurch shooter.

One praised him as a hero and went so far as to elude that they wish to commit a similar atrocity to that of Brenton.

'This man had a great body, good life, ability to settle down and live calm life, but he chose to be a f*****g hero,' a user said.

'God bless you Brenton, you were one of us and we shall drink one together if I die death of an hero.'

Another user said they were 'sad' that only up to 40 Muslims had been killed by Tarrant.

'Sadly he didn't get nearly enough of them,' the user said.

Another user thought that every man should go into a mosque and mercilessly kill innocent people.

'If every man had his dedication and determination, we'd be living in a much better place,' the user said.

'And for that alone, I salute him.'

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots and police are responding to the incident at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island. Pictured is a still from a live-stream of the shooting

Four people have been arrested over dual mosque attacks which left 49 dead and 48 injured on New Zealands 'darkest day'.

A gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton in New South Wales, stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island about 1.30pm, opening fire with a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle on hundreds of defenceless worshippers attending Friday prayers.

A sickening 17-minute video of the unfolding horror shows the self-confessed white supremacist dressed in army fatigues firing mercilessly at people scrambling to flee, and calmly re-loading when he runs out of bullets.

At least 40 people were reported dead as a result of the twin massacres on Friday, with the total rising to 49 within an hour

A man wearing military fatigues (pictured) was arrested outside Papanui High School

At about the same time, there was a second shooting at Masjid mosque in Linwood, where seven more were killed.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder. He will face court Saturday.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself. A 49th died in hospital.

A further 48 people were rushed to Christchurch Hospital with gunshot wounds, 20 in a critical condition.

New Zealand was placed on 'high alert' following the attacks.
A senior North Korean official has said that the U.S. threw away a golden opportunity for peace at the recent summit in Vietnam, and that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is considering suspending all nuclear talks.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, addressing an urgent meeting Friday of diplomats and foreign media in Pyongyang, said the North was deeply disappointed by the failure of the two sides to reach any agreements at the Hanoi summit between Kim and President Donald Trump.

She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States takes measures that are commensurate to the changes it has taken - such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests - and changes its 'political calculation.'

Choe, who attended the February 27-28 talks in Hanoi, said Kim was puzzled by what she called the 'eccentric' negotiation position of the U.S.

North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un salutes on March 5 in Pyongyang upon his return after the Vietnam summit. Kim is now considering abandoning nuclear talks, a top envoy says

Trump and Kim are seen walking together during a break in talks at the second US-North Korea summit at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi on February 28

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui (center) speaks at an urgent gathering for diplomats in Pyongyang, North Korea on Friday. She said that U.S. threw away a golden opportunity for peace and that Kim Jon Un is considering ending nuclear talks

She suggested that while Trump was more willing to talk, the U.S. position was hardened by the uncompromising demands of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton.

'Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful,' she added.

She said it was entirely up to Kim whether to continue the launch and test moratorium, and said she expects he will 'clarify his position' within a short period of time.

'On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission [Kim] said, 'For what reason do we have to make this train trip again?'' she said.

'I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger. We have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation.'

Choe suggested that Trump had been reasonable at the talks, but that National Security Advisor John Bolton (far left) and Sec. of State Mike Pompeo (second left) derailed things

Choe questioned the claim by Trump at a news conference after the talks in Hanoi broke down that the North was seeking the lifting of all sanctions against it, and said it was seeking only the ones that are directed at its civilian economy.

After the summit had ended, State Department officials clarified that was indeed the North's position, but said the lifting of economic sanctions was such a big demand that it would essentially subsidize the North's continued nuclear activity.

Choe said it was the U.S. that was being too demanding and inflexible.

'What is clear is that the U.S. has thrown away a golden opportunity this time,' she said. 'I'm not sure why the U.S. came out with this different description. We never asked for the removal of sanctions in their entirety.'

'This time we understood very clearly that the United States has a very different calculation to ours,' she added.

An aerial view of the Sanum-dong site, a missile and space launcher production facility, in North Korea. According to reports, recent activities that have been observed from satellites at the Sanum-dong facility suggest that North Korea may be preparing for a new round of testing

She refused to comment directly when asked by one of the ambassadors about news reports the North may be preparing for another missile launch or satellite launch.

'Whether to maintain this moratorium or not is the decision of our chairman of the state affairs commission,' she said, using one of Kim's titles. 'He will make his decision in a short period of time.'

Journalists were not allowed to ask questions during the briefing, which lasted nearly an hour.
New Zealand's gun massacre death toll has overtaken the Port Arthur tragedy and rivals Florida's Orlando nightclub shooting.

The death toll in Christchurch stands at 49 but could climb higher, after a 28-year-old Australian white supremacist opened fire at a mosque during the lunch hour.

The terrorist gunman - who identified himself on Twitter as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton in northern New South Wales - live-streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque, as Friday prayers were underway.

New Zealand 's gun massacre (social media video pictured) death toll has overtaken the Port Arthur tragedy and rivals Florida 's Orlando nightclub shooting

The death toll in Christchurch stands at 49 but could climb higher, after a 28-year-old Australian white supremacist opened fire at a mosque during the lunch hour

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the death toll was 40.

The official death toll rose by nine just two hours after her press conference.

Of the 49 killed, 41 of them died at the Al Noor Mosque while another 7 were murdered at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three of those victims were outside the mosque itself.

A further 28 people are critically injured at the Christchurch Hospital emergency room.

This is a scale that is worse than Australia's Port Arthur tragedy, in April 1996, which saw 35 people, including two young girls, shot dead in cold blood in Tasmania.

The gunman - who identified himself on Twitter as Brenton Tarrant (pictured) from Grafton in northern New South Wales - live-streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque, as Friday prayers were underway

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed on Friday night that at least 40 people had been killed and another 20 critically injured in the South Island's biggest city

That is when Martin Bryant, another 28-year-old gunman, opened fire at the historic tourist attraction, after killing two people at the nearby Seascape Guesthouse.

The unemployed killer then drove to the historic Port Arthur gaol, a popular tourist site, and began his Sunday rampage, which turned the since-demolished Broad Arrow Cafe into a scene of carnage.

At the time, it was the world's worst peacetime shooting and the worst in Australia's history.

John Howard, who was sworn in as Prime Minister only eight weeks earlier, used the massacre to spearhead national gun laws, which included a ban on automatic and semi-automatic firearms.

Of the 49 killed, 30 of them died at the Al Noor Mosque while another 10 were murdered at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three of those victims were outside the mosque itself (pictured is a suspect being arrested)

This is a scale that is worse than Australia's Port Arthur tragedy, in April 1996, which saw 35 people, including two young girls, shot dead in cold blood (pictured is the nearby Seascape Guesthouse where two people were killed)

The Port Arthur massacre occurred just seven weeks after Scotland's Dunblane massacre, which saw 16 children and one teacher shot dead near the town of Stirling.

Port Arthur was also the world's worst peacetime massacre until June 2016, when a 29-year-old security guard killed 49 people at the American Pulse gay nightclub at Orlando, Florida.

Just over a year later, in October 2017, a gunman opened fire killing 58 people at the Route 91 music festival in Las Vegas.

The United States has been home to a spate of gun massacres, defined as the death of four or more people.

In April 2007, 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech when a student opened fire at Blacksburg.

That is when Martin Bryant (pictured), another 28-year-old gunman, opened fire at the historic tourist attraction

Port Arthur was also the world's worst peacetime massacre until June 2016, when a 29-year-old security guard killed 49 people at the American Pulse gay nightclub (pictured) at Orlando, Florida

In December 2012, a gunman shot and killed 20 children aged between six and seven years old at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

In November 2017, a gunman opened fire at the First Baptist Church at Sutherland Springs in Texas, killing 27 people, including the 14-year-old daughter of the church pastor.

Until now, New Zealand had not had a mass shooting since June 1994, when David Bain, 22, killed his father Robin, mother Margaret, his sisters Arawa and Laniet , and his brother Stephen.

New Zealand tightened gun laws after the Aramoana massacre of November 1990, which saw 13 people shot dead in a small township near Dunedin, following a neighbourhood dispute.

In 1992, new laws were passed in New Zealand requiring a special permit and background checks to possess a semi-automatic military-style weapon.

Compared to Christchurch and Las Vegas, far-right Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik killed more people in 2011, but he had also used an explosive device before killing 69 participants of a Workers Youth League summer camp on the island of Utoya.
This is the moment a police officer pulled the suspected Christchurch mosque shooter from a car after officers apparently rammed him off the road after he killed at least 49 people.

Footage filmed by a passing motorist shows the gunman's white station wagon wedged between the gutter and another police car, with its front wheels spinning in the air.

The suspect is still inside the car as the two officer's approached the car with their weapons drawn - knowing the suspect would have been carrying multiple high-powered weapons.

Footage showed the moment hero police took a suspect into custody after the horror massacre at a Christchurch mosque

Police were able to stop one suspect by wedging their station wagon between a cop car and a gutter in a residential street

They were seen approaching with their weapons drawn before pulling a person in dark clothing out of the vehicle

One officer reached inside the vehicle and dragged the driver out.

The footage also shows the officer hit the man, who is wearing dark clothing.

The arrest came after a police car smashed into the gunman's station-wagon and into they kerb.

Three men and one woman are been arrested over the horrific shooting that's left 49 dead and 48 injured.

One gunman, who identified himself as Australian man Brenton Tarrant, 28, used a GoPro to film himself driving to the mosque listening to folk music with at least six weapons on the floor of his car.

Tarrant also posted a 73-page manifesto to Twitter before the killings, describing them as a 'terrorist attack'.

In the manifesto, where he also identifies himself as a white supremacist, he claims he's of 'British stock'.

An Australian man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant, 28, live streamed the attack on Friday afternoon

The armed offenders squad was called in to help after the horror attack

People were also reportedly shot at the nearby Linwood Masjid mosque on Friday afternoon, and there were reports of another shooting outside Christchurch Hospital and a bomb found in a car three kilometres from the mosque.

Police have urged people near the area to stay indoors and report suspicious behaviour, describing the incident as 'critical'.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush told reporters on Friday there had been 'huge acts of bravery' to make the arrests, but warned anyone against assuming the threat was over.

He said there had been bombs found on cars in Christchurch, but the Defence Force had 'taken care of that'.

Without going into detail, the Commissioner also said: 'There was a claim, and that person is safe.'

He urged Muslims in New Zealand not to go to mosques today.

Police said officers had also found bombs attached to cars

Up to 30 people are reported to have died in Friday's attack, with many more injured
A request by media organizations to have cameras allowed in the courtroom for the case of R&B star R. Kelly is about to come before a judge.

The issue is expected to be the focus of a hearing Friday where Cook County Associate Judge Lawrence Flood will preside.

The reporters who filed the request want to film the court proceedings leading up to R. Kelly's looming trial.

Kelly is charged with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving a minor.

One of his alleged victims, who has been identified only as H.W. in court documents, has already objected to being filmed in court, saying cameras would 'trigger me', according to the Chicago Tribune.

On Friday Cook County Associate Judge Lawrence Flood is set to review a media request to allow cameras in court for the trial of R.Kelly (pictured) in Chicago

'Being that he was found innocent before, I have no interest in being a media spectacle,' the alleged victim wrote in a filing that was recently made public. 'My dignity matters most to me.'

Prosecutors say Kelly met H.W. at a restaurant where she was celebrating her 16th birthday in the late 1990s.

Cook county judges didn't allow cameras in the courtroom prior to 2015.

Kelly (center) is charged with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving a minor

More recently, however, they've permitted journalists to bring cameras in to cover high profile cases, including the murder trial of former Chicago officer Jason Van Dyke, who fatally shot Laquan McDonald in 2014.

R. Kelly has had no objections to being on camera lately.

His shocking interview with CBS This Morning host Gayle King was watched by 6.6 million people on March 15.

Millions more viewed clips of the interview online earlier last week.

Kelly's interview with King remained a top trending topic on Twitter throughout the week as well.

Another judge in the same courthouse has yet to decide if he'll let cameras in court in 'Empire' actor Jussie Smollett's case.

Smollett is charged with 16 counts of felony disorderly conduct after authorities say he lied about being the victim of a racist and homophobic attack.

Kelly has adamantly denied the charges against him. He is due back in court next week, the Chicago Tribune reported.
A Pennsylvania prosecutor has called for a man to be put to death after he killed and dismembered his girlfriend's daughter as part of a rape-murder fantasy the couple shared.

Jacob Sullivan, 46, pleaded guilty last week to raping, drugging, gagging and eventually strangling 14-year-old Grace Packer in the attic of a Philadelphia home, back in 2016.

Grace's adoptive mother, Sara Packer, 44, was found to have plotted the crime along with Sullivan - watching him violate and then kill her daughter in a heinous 12-hours of torture.

Sara, a former foster parent and county adoptions supervisor, pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence. She is scheduled to testify at Sullivan's penalty hearing, which commenced on Friday.

Jacob Sullivan (left), 46, pleaded guilty last week to raping, drugging, gagging and eventually strangling 14-year-old Grace Packer. Grace's adoptive mother, Sara Packer, 44, was found to have plotted the crime along with Sullivan

Grace, 14, was adopted by Sara Packer in 2007. Sara's ex-husband David was jailed for sexually assaulted Grace in 2010

In his opening statement, Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub asked the jury to try and put themselves in Grace's shoes, and imagine the last 12 hours of her life.

'She is thinking, will she live, will she die? Will she be murdered,' Weintraub said. 'So she fought to break the ties that bound her. She was fighting for her very life.'

Weintraub summarized to the jury how Grace managed to free herself from some of the zip ties binding her wrists and feet, even spitting out the gag over her mouth.

Sullivan then returned to the basement with Sara and strangled her.

'Her reward for breaking her bounds...was death,' Weintraub said.

Describing the couple's crimes as 'awful, unspeakable and heinous', the DA told the jury he will asking them to impose the death penalty on Sullivan.

'They decided together that Grace was not worth the air she breathed,' Weintraub said, and 'Sullivan made Grace Packer's last 24 hours of life a hell on earth.'

Sullivan's lawyer, Jack Fagan, asked jurors to spare Sullivan's life, saying he should get the same sentence as Sara Packer, as she was an equal party to the crimes.

Fagan said Packer was controlling and manipulative, hated Grace long before she met Sullivan online in 2013, and masterminded the plot to rape and kill her.

'Sara Packer was the driving factor in the intent, the planning and the execution of what happened to her daughter,' he said.

The defense plans to call Packer as a witness.

Sullivan's lawyer, Jack Fagan, asked jurors to spare Sullivan's life, saying he should get the same sentence as Sara Packer (pictured: Sullivan's arrest, 2016)

Sullivan and Sara Packer brought Grace to a home they were renting in July 2016 to indulge in a murder-rape fantasy they shared and had meticulously planned

After strangling her, the couple stored her remains in a box filled with cat litter, and hid it in the attic (pictureD)

In a case that raised serious question of the state's child protection services, Sullivan pleaded guilty last month to first-degree murder, rape of a child, kidnapping, abuse of a corpse and other crimes.

He and Sara Packer brought Grace to a home they were renting in July 2016 to indulge in a murder-rape fantasy they shared and had meticulously planned.

Sara watched on as her boyfriend punched Grace in the face, stripped her of her pajamas and raped her.

They then fed the helpless teenager a cocktail of sleeping pills, before tying her up and leaving her in a sweltering, airless attic to die.

Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub (pictured) asked the jury to try and put themselves in Grace's shoes, and imagine the last 12 hours of her life, when considering Sullivan's sentence

After strangling her, the couple stored her remains in a box filled with cat litter, and hid it in the attic.

Three days later, Sara reported Grace missing to Abington Police, telling officers she'd stolen $300 from her purse and ran away.

Police say she promised to drop a photo of Grace off at the station to help with their search, but never did.

When they arrived at the rented address Sara had given her, they found the home empty.

Detective Cindy Pettinato told the court how she left the 44-year-old an angry voice message, demanding to know why she hadn't told police she was moving.

Spooked by the visit, Weintraub says the couple scrambled desperately to dispose of Grace's body.

The couple hacked off her limbs and drove her dismembered remains to Luzerne County, where they poured drain cleaner over her face and dumped her in the woods.

'This defendant treated 14-year-old Grace as a disposable child,' Weintraub said, according to the Morning Call. 'He did what he wanted with her, when he wanted, and then he ultimately crumpled her up and threw her on the side of the road like trash.'

Grace managed to free herself from some of the zip ties binding her wrists and feet, even spitting out the gag over her mouth. But when Sullivan discovered her partial-escape, he strangled her to death

The couple dismembered her limbs and dumped her in a wooded area, in Luzerne County

Sara (pictured in 2017) pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence. She is scheduled to testify at Sullivan's penalty hearing, which commenced on Friday

Friday marked the first day of a two-week hearing, where the jury will decide on Sullivan's sentence.

For Weintraub's demand of the death sentence to be met, the jury must vote unanimously.

Even if he's sentenced to death, it's unclear whether the punishment would ever be carried out. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf declared a moratorium on capital punishment shortly after taking office in 2015.

Pennsylvania last carried out an execution in 1999.

Sara and her former husband, David Packer, adopted Grace and her brother in 2007.

The couple cared for dozens of foster children before David Packer was arrested in 2010 and sent to prison for sexually assaulting Grace and a 15-year-old foster daughter at their home in Allentown.

Sara Packer lost her job as a Northampton County adoptions supervisor in 2010 and was barred from taking in any more foster children.

The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services launched an investigation after Grace Packer's murder but its findings have not been made public.

On Friday, Weintraub said Grace's short life was a series of terrible misfortunes, culminating in her agonizing death.

'What is the worst thing you can think of you can do to a child?' he asked the jury. 'Because in this courtroom, we are going to check all of those boxes.'
Portuguese police released a faceless e-fit of the Madeleine McCann kidnap suspect.

A new Netflix documentary reveals how detectives showed locals an e-fit of a man without a nose, eyes or mouth in the week after the youngster vanished.

The controversial show about Madeleine McCann, available on the streaming service today, promises viewers a 'detailed look' at the disappearance of the three-year-old and the subsequent police investigation.

Detectives showed locals an e-fit of a man without a nose, eyes or mouth (left) in the week after Madeleine (right) vanished

This is the man a witness claims she saw carrying a child away from the McCann family's holiday apartment on the night Madeleine disappeared. The artist's impression was commissioned by the McCanns in an attempt to kickstart the hunt for their daughter

The documentary to be released today is set to broadcast new photographs said to show Maddie happily playing at Praia da Luz children's club in 2007

The second episode of The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann reveals how officers showed the featureless e-fit drawing to those living in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May, 2007.

Simon Russell, who owned an internet cafe in the resort town, said: 'I smiled when they showed it to me. What else could you do?'

Another businessman described the e-fit as an 'egg with a side-parting'.

The youngster's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, have previously criticised the programme, saying it 'could potentially hinder' the search for their daughter.

Madeleine vanished from the resort of Praia da Luz in Portugal in May 2007, while on holiday with her family.

Netflix said the series had access to 'never-before-heard testimonies from those at the heart of the story, including friends of the McCann family, investigators working the case and from those who became the subject of media speculation and rumour'.

A still from the new documentary that has promised fresh theories into the disappearance

The youngster's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, have previously criticised the programme, saying it 'could potentially hinder' the search for their daughter

Apartment 5A in Praia Da Luz in Portugal, where Madeline McCann went missing from in 2007

The youngster the day she went missing from the family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz

Mr and Mrs McCann previously said in a statement: 'The production company told us that they were making the documentary and asked us to participate.

'We did not see - and still do not see - how this programme will help the search for Madeleine and, particularly given there is an active police investigation, it could potentially hinder it.

'Consequently, our views and preferences are not reflected in the programme.'

Scotland Yard launched an investigation, Operation Grange, after a Portuguese inquiry failed to make any headway on Madeleine's disappearance.

In November last year, a further 150,000 was granted to the investigation to allow it to continue until March 31.

Force bosses have been applying for funding from the Home Office every six months to continue the inquiry, which has cost about 11.75 million so far.

Scotland Yard launched an investigation, Operation Grange, after a Portuguese inquiry failed to make any headway on Madeleine's disappearance

A Christmas video made by Gerry and Kate McCann making appeal for the return of Madeleine
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern comdemned white supremacist ideology after New Zealand's worst ever terror attack kills 49 at two mosques.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday afternoon Ms Ardern said: 'It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack.'

She said that New Zealand was targeted because it 'represents the values of diversity, kindness, compassion.'

'We a home for those who share our values and a refuge for those who need it. And those values I can assure you will not and cannot be shaken by this attack,' she said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern comdemned white supremacist ideology after New Zealand's worst ever terror attack kills 40 at two mosques

Ms Adern went on to issue 'the strongest possible condemnation of the ideology of the people who did this.'

'You may have chosen us, but we are utterly reject and condemn you,' she said.

Ms Ardern confirmed four people are in custody over the attack - one offender, two associates, and another person not directly connected to the attacks.

Earlier on Friday a fearless police officer was hailed a hero after dramatically pulling the suspected Christchurch mosque shooter from a car during a dramatic roadside arrest.

Footage filmed by a passing motorist shows the gunman's white station wagon wedged between the gutter and another police car, with its front wheels in the air spinning.

The suspect appeared to still be inside, as officers approached the vehicle with their weapons drawn.

Footage showed the moment hero police took a suspect into custody after the horror massacre at a Christchurch mosque

Police said officers had also found bombs attached to cars

One officer reached inside the vehicle and dragged the driver out, as a second stood guard with their weapon drawn.

The footage also shows the officer hit the man, who is wearing dark clothing.

The arrest came after a police car pushed the gunman's vehicle into the kerb.

Four people, one woman and three men, have been arrested over the horrific shooting so far, which has killed 40 people and injured more than 20.

A gunman who identified himself as Australian man Brenton Tarrant, 28, filmed himself driving to the mosque listening to folk music with half-a-dozen weapons on the floor of his vehicle.

Tarrant also posted a 73-page manifesto to Twitter before the killings, describing them as a 'terrorist attack'.

In the manifesto, where he also identifies as a white supremacist, the man says he is of 'British stock'.

The armed offenders squad was called in to help after the horror attack

As Tarrant drove to the mosque, he had at least three rifles on the floor of the passenger side of his car

Police were able to stop one suspect by wedging their station wagon between a cop car and a gutter in a residential street

They were seen approaching with their weapons drawn before pulling a person in dark clothing out of the vehicle

People were also reportedly shot at the nearby Linwood Masjid mosque on Friday afternoon, and there were reports of another shooting outside Christchurch Hospital and a bomb found in a car three kilometres from the mosque.

Police have urged people near the area to stay indoors and report suspicious behaviour, describing the incident as 'critical'.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush told reporters on Friday there had been 'huge acts of bravery' to make the arrests, but warned anyone against assuming the threat was over.

He said there had been bombs found on cars in Christchurch, but the Defence Force had 'taken care of that'.

Without going into detail, the Commissioner also said: 'There was a claim, and that person is safe.'

He urged Muslims in New Zealand not to go to mosques today.

Up to 30 people are reported to have died in Friday's attack, with many more injured
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The DUP's top MP smiled today as he denied Chancellor Philip Hammond offered the party cash to back Theresa May's Brexit divorce in the Commons next week but said: 'We want to get a deal'.

Deputy leader Nigel Dodds also revealed the party remains 'very disappointed' with Geoffrey Cox's legal advice on the Irish backstop as pressure was heaped on the Attorney General to tweak it.

Mr Hammond is leading negotiations with the Unionist party who previously grabbed an extra 1billion of funding for Northern Ireland in exchange for its 10 MPs propping up the Government for two years until this summer.

But Mr Dodds insisted they were not talking money and said the Chancellor was there to discuss tax issues for Northern Ireland, calling the talks 'constructive'.

He said: 'We are not discussing cash. From day one, our focus has been on the red line of how Northern Ireland is treated separately from the rest of the UK.

He added: 'For us the key problem with the Withdrawal Agreement is the Irish backstop. We have had good discussion today. Those discussions will continue'.

He said the Government was now 'very focused' on addressing the issue of the backstop, adding: 'There is a renewed focus in Government on ensuring those issues are addressed'.

There is also growing pressure on Attorney General Geoffrey Cox to change his legal advice to ease fears that Britain would be trapped 'indefinitely' in the Irish backstop - and Mrs May's top lawyer was also at today's talks with Environment Secretary Michael Gove, Cabinet Secretary David Lidington and Tory Chief Whip Julian Smith.

Despite the DUP's denial, insiders suggested that the Government could promise to pump more money into Northern Ireland. The party negotiated an extra 1billion of funding in exchange for supporting Theresa May in a 'supply and confidence' deal struck in 2017.

DUP MP Nigel Dodds denied cash was being talked about in discussions with the Government but insisted his party was keen to support the PM's deal if they can

Theresa May (pictured last night) appears to have a final shot to get her Brexit deal through Parliament with the EU demanding a major 'rethink' on Brexit by Britain if they are to offer an extension and Philip Hammond has been in talks with the DUP today

Powerbrokers DUP leader Arlene Foster and Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke at a Washington DC gala dinner last night with Ms Foster hinting she could back Mrs May's deal

European Council President Donald Tusk is greeted by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in The Hague as the EU pushes for a longer delay to Brexit

Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, pictured leaving the Commons last night, is said to be 'updating' his legal advice to include his view that the UK could withdraw unilaterally from the Irish backstop

Amber Rudd arrived at No 10 Downing Street with Greg Clark and David Gauke together after they abstained in a Commons vote that saw Theresa May defeated and Mr Gauke was apparently told to resign but didn't

'If they want Brexit - they'll have to hold their nose and vote for May's deal': Esther McVey hints she - and other hardline Brexiteers - will back PM's deal in third vote Esther McVey quit over Theresa May's deal but has admitted she and other Brexiteers could change their minds this time Brexiteer opposition to Theresa May's EU deal is softening today as leading Tory MP Esther McVey she and other rebels could now 'hold their noses' and back it. The Cheshire MP, who resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary over the deal four months ago, said Leaver MPs will 'have to think a different way' when the Prime Minister's EU divorce returns to the Commons for a third time next week. Mrs May's deal lost by 149 votes last time and 75 rebels from her own party, including Ms McVey, voted against her. But now the Tory Brexiteer, who is a member of the hardline ERG group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, has hinted she and other Conservatives have changed their minds. Speaking to the BBC she said: 'The [situation] now is people will have to take a bad deal rather than no deal. People are going to have to think a different way next week'. When asked if if 'MPs like her would hold their noses and vote' she replied: 'Yes. They will. I don't know what the number is, but they will have to do that if they want Brexit'. Advertisement

The DUP is said to be getting closer to ordering its 10 MPs to back Mrs May's deal, and would bring a large number of Brexiteers with them including high-profile members of the Tory ERG group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Speaking in Washington DUP leader Arlene Foster, who met Donald Trump yesterday, said she was 'working very hard' with Mrs May, adding: 'We want to make sure we get there.'

One source suggested that she is under pressure from party backers and one told The Sun: 'The donors have turned off the taps. They want a deal'.

As she scrambles for votes Mrs May will also have to set out a timetable for her resignation in order to get her deal through Parliament, her own Brexiteer MPs have warned.

Geoffrey Cox is said to be concentrating on Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, which allows countries to exit treaties if there are 'fundamental change of circumstances not foreseen by the parties'.

He is also looking if he can strengthen UK legislation to protect Britain from being trapped taking EU rules 'indefinitely'.

But member of the Tory ERG Brexiteer group are said to have called Mr Cox's work on this 'badly misconceived' and have given him a deadline of Sunday to come up with a solution that would convince them to vote through Mrs May's deal next week.

Lawyers have also said Article 62 is a 'red herring' because a war is considered one of the only ways to invoke it.

But in a boost for the PM, Lord Pannick QC, one of Britain's most senior lawyers, said his opinion is that 'as a matter of law' the UK would not be trapped permanently in the backstop whatever the Attorney General has said.

EU Council President Donald Tusk has said he will urge EU leaders to agree a 'long extension' to Article 50 - delaying Brexit by up to two years to give the UK time to 'rethink' - if Mrs May's deal is voted down a third time.

At home Mrs May's authority is being severely tested by Remainers in her Cabinet and the PM apparently exploded with rage at her rebel ministers during a hastily organised summit in No 10 yesterday.

She is said to have gone 'bats**t' and accused them of 'disloyalty' for defying orders over a key vote in a complete breakdown of party discipline.

Justice Secretary David Gauke was asked to resign after he defied Government orders to reject a motion ruling out a No Deal Brexit on Wednesday - but his Remainer colleagues apparently hit back: You'll have to sack us all, it was claimed last night.

As she fights to save her deal and premiership, it emerged:

Theresa May is trying to convince MPs to change their minds on her deal - but aides also want her to rest her voice for next week;

DUP said to be softening resistance and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox urged to tweak his legal advice to help convince Arlene Foster and Brexiteers;

After a week of setbacks, the Prime Minister last night won a series of tense Commons votes that could decide the fate of Brexit - but also confirmed that Britain will not leave the EU on March 29.

People's Vote campaign refuses to back second referendum bid The People's Vote campaign came out against a bid for a second referendum today. MPs will vote directly on a new public vote for the first time tonight after Independent Group MP Sarah Wollaston tabled an amendment to Theresa May's motion on delaying Brexit. But People's Vote admitted its supporters would divide in favour, against and abstention tonight. A spokesman said: 'We do not think today is the right time to test the will of the House on the case for a new public vote. 'Instead, this is the time for Parliament to declare it wants an extension of Article 50 so that, after two-and-a-half years of vexed negotiations, our political leaders can finally decide on what Brexit means.' Advertisement

Donald Tusk's intervention on Twitter yesterday will bolster claims that the UK would not leave the EU until 2021 unless Mrs May can persuade the DUP and Brexiteers to back her divorce deal - because some in the EU want to play 'hardball' and push for a delay of two years.

Ireland's Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said today the EU is likely to offer Britain a 21-month delay to Brexit while Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said: 'What I hope now is things that had been ruled out can be reconsidered such as the customs union and the single market'.

The words from Ireland are considered to be a nod towards a second referendum.

Yesterday Mrs May saw off a bid by Remainer MPs to seize control of the process by just two votes. Supporters of a second referendum were also routed, with the idea crushed by 334 votes to 85.

And MPs backed the Prime Minister's reluctant call to delay Brexit to avoid a No Deal departure on March 29. The vote, which means Brexit will be delayed until at least June 30, was won by 413 votes to 202.

But it sparked a massive Tory split and only passed with the help of Labour votes.

Seven Cabinet ministers voted against the delay, including Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay. In total, 188 Conservatives voted against any delay, with only 112, including the Prime Minister, voting for it.

Theresa May laughs on the Government benches on Thursday as she finally found herself on the winning side of a Commons vote after bruising defeats on her Brexit deal and a possible cliff-edge exit this week

Donald Tusk today revealed he will urge EU leaders to agree a 'long extension' to Article 50 as Tory MPs have said Theresa May setting out she will quit could convince them to vote for her deal

Mrs May had granted her MPs a free vote so it did not technically represent a rebellion against her authority.

But the scale of the opposition to delay is embarrassing for the Prime Minister at a time when she is trying to unite the party ahead of a third attempt next week at passing her Brexit deal.

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster David Lidington - Theresa May's effective deputy - denied that the Government was falling apart after seven Cabinet ministers including Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay voted against the Prime Minister's motion on delaying EU withdrawal.

Mr Lidington told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'It was a free vote in that division yesterday. Now, what happens this morning is that the entire Cabinet has accepted the position that Parliament voted for last night.

Brexit Secretary fuels quit rumours by saying a no-deal Brexit is better than a long delay to leaving the EU Stephen Barclay urged MPs to vote for Theresa May's plan for a Brexit delay last night - and then voted against it himself Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay has fuelled speculation he could quit after just months in the key post if Theresa May backs a long extension to Article 50, saying 'we shouldn't be afraid to leave with no deal'. The North East Cambridgeshire MP said that while he backed a short 'technical extension' to allow Theresa May's Brexit deal to be implemented the UK should otherwise quit the bloc without one. His comments to the BBC on Friday came the day after he spent 10 minutes speaking in the Commons telling MPs they should a Government plan seeking an extension to Article 50 - before then voting against it. The interview and vote appear to put him on a potential collision course with Theresa May if she fails to get a deal through at the third time of asking before meeting EU leaders on March 21. Asked about how he voted Mr Barclay today said: 'There are two parts of the motion, a short technical extension which we need with the deal, and we are pushing that, that's separate from whether you have a long extension rather than no deal. 'My view is  I support Brexit. This constituency voted in very large numbers for Brexit. 'We need a deal, we need to get that over the line. But if we don't have a deal then we should leave with no deal.' Advertisement

'I've been working very constructively with Steve Barclay since his appointment a couple of months ago despite the fact that he and I were vigorously on opposite sides of the debate during the referendum, and we are continuing to work very constructively together today and in the days to come.'

Mr Lidington said he believed that Leave-backing ministers had used the free vote as 'an opportunity to register how unhappy they were with being in the position where we don't really have an option as a country except to seek an extension of our time in the European Union'.

Mr Lidington said that leaving on March 29 with no deal remains the 'legal default position' but the likelihood of it happening had 'diminished' after this week's votes.

He said he was still hoping that the UK will 'leave as soon as possible in an orderly fashion' by MPs backing Mrs May's Withdrawal Agreement next week.

Asked if defeat for the PM's deal might mean an extension of a year or more, Mr Lidington said: 'Those are the indications which the Brussels institutions of the EU - the Commission, the Council secretariat and certain member state governments - have been giving to us.'

He added: 'I hope that MPs of all parties will be over this weekend just reflecting on the way forward.'

Tory whips asked both David Gauke and business minister Richard Harrington to resign over the rebellion on Wednesday night, sources said.

But both were said to be standing their ground amid fears their departure would lead to a mass walkout by more than a dozen other 'Remain' ministers.

One senior source told The Sun: 'It was all of us  or none of us. And there were other Ministers who voted with the Government on No Deal who would have gone too. The whips realised it wouldn't work.'

Hours later she wrested back control of the Brexit process from Parliament last night, despite a huge Tory split over plans to delay Britain's departure by three months.

Earlier the Prime Minister gave a dressing down to Amber Rudd, Mr Gauke, Greg Clark and David Mundell after they helped Labour rule out a No Deal Brexit in all circumstances.

Mrs May tore into the group for undermining her plan to confront MPs with a choice between her deal and a long delay to Brexit.

One Cabinet source said Mrs May accused Miss Rudd and other Remainer rebels of 'disloyalty' for abstaining in the vote. Another told The Times: 'She went bat****.'

During the meeting, Chancellor Philip Hammond is said to have tried to explain the open rebellion by ministers, saying there was 'confusion' around Wednesday night's votes.

He had been seen rowing with Chief Whip Julian Smith ahead of the division. But Mr Smith told those assembled there was no excuse to break collective responsibility.

He praised Sarah Newton for doing the honourable thing in resigning as a junior DWP minister so she could vote against, according to The Spectator.

When Mr Clark attempted to explain his actions by saying he was 'confused', Mr Smith is said to have walked out of the meeting. Mr Clark's efforts to justify himself were said to have 'ended badly' after Mrs May shut him down. Later, Remainer ministers described the criticism of their conduct as unfair.

One source said: 'They challenged the Chief Whip and the PM over the handling of the vote. They never had the chance to discuss the whipping of the final vote  if they had, it would not have happened.'

Amber Rudd (left) and David Gauke (right) were among the Cabinet ministers who abstained on the No Deal motion, ignoring a three-line Conservative whip

Business Secretary Greg Clark (left) and Scotland Secretary David Mundell (right) also abstained on the No Deal motion which passed

Meanwhile a row broke out after reports circulated that the rebels had been told by a Number 10 aide that they could abstain.

Mrs May's Parliamentary Private Secretary, Andrew Bowie, is said to have told ministers they would not be fired as a result.

But Nigel Evans, joint executive secretary of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, said that all MPs had received a text telling them they were on a three-line whip.

Mrs May's chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, was also accused of overruling whips by suggesting Cabinet ministers could abstain. Furious MPs called for him to be sacked after the vote was lost. But it was unclear whether he had told them to abstain.

Another MP said 30 rebels had held a pre-vote caucus, where they are said to have decided to abstain, undermining reports they were told they could.

Yesterday members of the 'gang of four' Remainer ministers who defied the Prime Minister over No Deal arrived in Downing Street together to face her for the first time.

Brexiteers are furious Scottish Secretary David Mundell, Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, Justice Secretary David Gauke and Business Secretary Greg Clark have not been sacked after they helped inflict a humiliating defeat on Theresa May in the Commons on Wednesday night.

It came as Mrs May's chief of staff Gavin Barwell was also urged to quit over claims he went 'rogue' and told Remainer Cabinet ministers they could abstain without any fear of being axed.

Ms Rudd arrived at No 10 with Mr Gauke and Mr Clark minutes before she said she abstained because of the 'generational damage' she claims a No Deal Brexit would cause Britain.

She added: 'If Brexit is delayed it is because many of my colleagues in Commons have refused to join those of us who have consistently voted for PM's good deal'.

In a comical moment Ms Rudd's dramatic entrance to Downing Street was scuppered by under-fire Transport Secretary Chris Grayling who sidled over and scuppered the photo opportunity.

The rebel cabinet members are said to have used the code word 'tally-ho!' before they helped inflict a humiliating defeat on the Prime Minister.

So how long WILL Brexit be delayed, can it be cancelled and will there be a second referendum? YOUR guide to what happens next after May won a vote on extending Article 50

Theresa May finally gave up on Brexit happening on time tonight after MPs backed her plan to seek delay.

With just 15 days until Britain was supposed to leave the European Union postponement appears to be almost inevitable.

But the Prime Minister now faces two immediate new battles that will be played out over the next seven days - one in Westminster and then another in Brussels.

How they go will determine whether Britain can still Brexit within weeks or will be forced to stay an EU member for months, years - or maybe even for good.

Theresa May finally gave up on Brexit happening on time tonight after MPs backed her plan to seek delay

Mrs May's first task is to have a third and possibly final attempt at getting her deal agreed by MPs.

The stage is set for a new 'meaningful vote' on the plan - probably on Tuesday or Wednesday, just a week after it was crushed a second time.

The Prime Minister must find 75 votes to over turn this week's 149 drubbing. Talks are ongoing with her DUP allies, who have 10 MPs, while Brexit hardliners - amounting about 68 MPs - show signs of splitting.

If Mrs May can pull off an unlikely victory, she will go to Brussels to seek a delay of up to three months to get the deal into law.

If she fails, the Prime Minister will still have to appear at the EU headquarters next Thursday afternoon - but has already accepted she will be asking for a much longer delay.

Failure will make the mission to Brussels a much harder task. The EU has demanded a clear outline of what delay is for and assurances Mrs May can deliver on what she says.

Worse still, all 27 EU states must agree unanimously on the terms of any delay - and there are clear splits inside the bloc on what could and should be agreed.

Mrs May will be excluded from the decision process as Britain does not get a vote on Brexit matters.

The EU is likely to offer an extension of some kind as few in Brussels want a No Deal on March 29 but the Government is likely to have to accept conditions.

This is likely to include continuing to pay 10billion a year in membership fees and taking part in European Parliament elections on May 22.

If she secures a delay Mrs May will then need to pilot Britain to a new form of Brexit - knowing a delay of years gives time for her enemies to circle and oust her.

A two year delay would give time for a General Election and even a referendum before the Government even tried to negotiate a new form of Brexit in time for whatever the new deadline is.

Could Brexit be stopped?

Mrs May has warned this is a possibility. While she will not revoke Article 50 herself, she has warned political chaos could see the Government replaced by Jeremy Corbyn or another pro-Remain administration.

If Article 50 is not revoked or extended on March 29, and UK law changed accordingly, Britain will leave the EU without a deal, despite the votes this week to block it.

Could there be a third meaningful vote?

Downing Street says yes but has not scheduled it. In practice, the new vote will be held on Tuesday or Wednesday next week Mrs May attends the EU Council on Thursday.

The EU will not negotiate further on the deal so it would seem it is likely to be a rerun rather than a different deal to that which failed on Tuesday.

But the events of this week could see Brexiteers swing in behind Mrs May's deal, little more than a week after overwhelmingly rejecting it.

That will be what Mrs May will be hoping in any case.

So it's a clear choice between June 30 or a much longer deal?

Broadly. If MPs endorse the deal next week, the PM can negotiate the short term extension. If they don't it will be a longer delay - but with string attached the Commons will have to endorse.

Will there be a second referendum?

MPs voted against a second referendum by 334 to 85 today - the first time a direct vote has been called.

But the vote was not binding and it is unlikely the question has been answered forever. If there is a long delay to Brexit, new referendum campaigners will move again.

Organising a referendum will take about a year - to pass the laws, agree the question, appoint campaigns and have the actual battle.

Michel Barnier is among senior EU figures who have warned that Britain will only get an extension if it has a clear idea of what it would be used for

What will the EU tell Mrs May?

EU leaders have already spelled out that an extension will not be granted just because British politics is bitterly divided.

They want to see clear reasoning for extending Article 50. If she arrives with a deal that has been agreed between now and then it seems likely that a shorter extension could be agreed.

If MPs still have not agreed a deal, they will want to see evidence that another plan is in place, like a second refrendum or a general election. But all of the EU's 27 other nations have to agree.

Are there any other reasons they could refuse an extension?

The EU has hinted at a two year delay, although some prominent figures have pushed for a short delay.

Another key date is May 23. Mrs May's own motion points out that any extension beyond June 30 'would require the UK to hold European Parliament elections' due to take place on that day.

This would raise the prospect of Brexiteer MEPs like Nigel Farage running for office again.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said that Brexit should be completed before the European elections which take place between May 23 and 26.

'If the UK has not left the EU by then, it will be legally required to hold these elections,' he said.

What happens if the EU27 do not agree to a delay to Brexit?

A refusal to get an extension would most likely be because there was no deal in place and no alternative prospect.

Despite last night's votes, it could see the UK leave without a deal on March 29 or try to force through a new deal in a matter of days.

Theresa Mays says Britain stands with New Zealand as she sends her 'deepest condolences' to the families of the dozens killed in the Christchurch Mosque massacres

Theresa May today expressed her grief after one or more white supremacists stormed mosques in New Zealand to murder dozens of Muslims during Friday prayers.

The horrifying attacks in Christchurch today have taken the lives of 49 people causing grief and consternation across the world.

Today Theresa May led the messages of condolence from Britain with the Queen expected to respond later.

Mrs May tweeted: 'On behalf of the UK, my deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand after the horrifying terrorist attack in Christchurch. My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence.'

The House of Commons held a minute's silence at 11am in solidarity with the victims.

Theresa May has sent a message of support from Britain today in the wake of the New Zealand terror attacks

Mrs May and her ministers have been tweeting about the horrifying attacks as the UK woke up to the news

Her ministers have also reacted with shock.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: 'Our hearts go out to the people of New Zealand following the news of this terrible act in Christchurch.

'NZ is one of the most peaceful, peace-loving and generous nations in the world.

'Your friends in the UK stand with you today in deepest sympathy.'

Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted he was 'absolutely heartbroken to hear about this attack on peaceful worshippers'.

Mr Javid added: 'We stand with New Zealand and Muslims across the world against all forms of racism and anti-Muslim hatred. We will not let extremists divide us #ChristchurchAttack.

'A horrific terror attack. We will never let the terrorists win and divide our communities. My thoughts and prayers with the victims and families of all those affected.'

European Council President Donald Tusk described the attack as 'harrowing news' and said New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern can 'count on our solidarity'.

He tweeted: 'Harrowing news from New Zealand overnight.

'The brutal attack in Christchurch will never diminish the tolerance and decency that New Zealand is famous for.

'Our thoughts in Europe are with the victims and their families. PM @jacindaardern can count on our solidarity.'

A man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant (pictured) live-streamed the massacre of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand

Three shootings have taken place in Christchurch on Friday afternoon, two at mosques and another at Christchurch Hospital

The gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, NSW, Australia, stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island about 1.30pm, opening fire with a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle on hundreds of worshippers attending Friday prayers.

A sickening 17-minute video of the unfolding horror shows the self-confessed white supremacist dressed in army fatigues firing mercilessly at people scrambling to flee, and calmly re-loading when he runs out of bullets.

At about the same time, there was a second shooting at Masjid mosque in Linwood, where seven more were killed.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder.

One of them was arrested while wearing a suicide vest, while a man wearing military fatigues was arrested outside Papanui High School.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself. A 49th died in hospital.

A further 48 people were rushed to Christchurch Hospital with gunshot wounds, 20 in a critical condition. New Zealand was placed on 'high alert' following the attacks.
Social media giants are battling to remove the New Zealand massacre footage from their sites, as Facebook insist the accused killer's account was removed as soon as possible.

A man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant, 28, used Facebook to broadcast his slaughter of 49 worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch as Friday prayers were underway.

New Zealand police alerted the social media giant to the livestream soon after it began, Facebook confirmed as they offered their condolences to the victims and their families.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are facing a monumental task in purging the sickening footage, as well as other content originally from Tarrant.

Facebook said they were alerted to the terrorist's attack at the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, by the police soon after it began

Brenton Tarrant (pictured) live-streamed the massacre of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand

Facebook said: 'Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the community affected by this horrendous act' (file photo)

'Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the community affected by this horrendous act,' Facebook's boss in Australia and New Zealand, Mia Garlick, said in an email seen by Business Insider.

'New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced, and we quickly removed both the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video,' Ms Garlick added.

'We're also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we're aware. We will continue working directly with New Zealand Police as their response and investigation continues.'

The gunman spread his hate across multiple social media platforms, including posting a 73-page manifesto of hate to Twitter - they have since deleted it.

The media have shown the moments leading up to the attack, with most choosing to cut the footage when the violence begins.

However, social media users are plaguing the sites with a mass of disturbing content, unedited and totally unfiltered for anyone to see.

The sites which use a combination of human and artificial intelligence are struggling to cope with their users' appetite for the content.

The alleged terrorist's footage showed the weapons being placed in the boot of a silver vehicle and then unloaded at the mosque.

The suspect wears a body camera to give a first-person view as he walks towards the door of the mosque as he takes aim and starts firing on innocent worshippers.

Police cordon off Deans Avenue in front of the Al Noor Mosque after the attack on Friday

Police guard the area around the mosque as they carry out their investigation after the attacks left 49 dead

A total of 49 people have been reported dead after attacks at two mosques in Christchurch (pictured: police outside the Al Noor Mosque)

The gunfire began at about 1.45pm as the mosque was packed with devotees for its Friday prayer ceremonies.

Shortly afterwards there was a second shooting at a mosque on Linwood Avenue, within a few miles of the first attack.

Four suspects - who were not known to counter-terror authorities - are being questioned in custody.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder. He will face court on Saturday.

Two others remain in police custody, with the fourth person arrested deemed not to have been involved in the attacks.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque, with another dying in hospital.
A North Carolina thrift store has sold two pieces of 'haunted' furniture for $1,000 (750).

Habitat for Humanity ReStore of Rowan County warned perspective customers that the previous owner reported he and his wife had 'continuous nightmares' when the furniture was in their bedroom.

The store put a chest of drawers and a queen canopy bed on sale.

The previous owners said their dogs 'would not stop barking' at the highboy chest of drawers.

The furniture sold by the store, which is said to be haunted, included a 1950s highboy chest and a canopy bed (pictured left and right)

Both pieces of furniture were handcarved in the 1950s.

Elizabeth Brady, the store's director of operations, said two regular customers were intrigued by the furniture and paid the full price for it.

She said they did not believe the furniture was actually haunted.

As a Christian housing ministry, officials decided to make a full disclosure to buyers that the furniture was said to be haunted.

The store published an announcement (pictured), making it clear that the previous owners believed the furniture to be haunted, reporting 'continuous nightmares'

Habitat for Humanity ReStore of Rowan County, pictured, put the furniture on sale for $1,000

The announcement published by the store reads: 'Please note: previous owner reports that the highboy is haunted.'

'He reports continuous nightmares for he and his wife while it was in their room.'

'He also reports that the dogs would not stop barking at it.'
Haunting footage emerged today of Madeleine McCann with a rucksack getting on board the plane that took her on holiday to Portugal where she vanished.

The mobile phone videos of the three-year-old girl walking onto a flight at East Midlands Airport and on an airport bus in the Algarve were taken in April 2007.

The clips were first released by Madeleine's parents Kate and Gerry McCann, of Rothley, Leicestershire, four weeks after she went missing in Praia da Luz.

But they were not widely circulated and have since reappeared in a new eight-part Netflix documentary about the girl filmed without the co-operation of the McCanns.

Another video also taken in April 2007 shows Madeleine on an airport bus in the Algarve

The clips taken on April 28 show Madeleine clutching her Barbie rucksack and holding hands with another girl as she gets on board the flight to Faro Airport.

The McCanns travelled to the Algarve with Madeleine, her brother Sean, sister Amelie, and a group of friends. Madeleine disappeared five days later.

The documentary looks at theories about the case, including the idea that she was snatched to order by a people-trafficking gang and smuggled to another country.

Investigator Julian Peribanez, who worked for the McCanns as a private detective, said that a white, middle-class child would have been valuable to such a gang.

Netflix said its show included 'never-before-heard testimonies from those at the heart of the story', including the McCanns' friends, and former investigators.

Madeleine McCann is pictured in a still from a mobile phone video walking onto a flight at East Midlands Airport in April 2007. Five days later she disappeared and has never been found

Kate McCann from Leicestershire is pictured with her daughter Madeleine as a baby

Several people reported possible sightings of a child being carried through the streets on the night she vanished, but none have ever been confirmed as her.

Several people reported possible sightings of a child being carried through the streets on the night Madeleine vanished

A friend of Kate and Gerry McCann, Jane Tanner, described seeing a man carrying a child wrapped in a blanket near the family's rented apartment.

Businessman George Burke also recalled a 'vicious-looking' couple carrying a child in nearby Lagos, hours after Madeleine vanished.

Her parents, now 51, have endured almost 12 years of speculation since Madeleine's disappearance, and refused to take part in the documentary.

They did not believe it would help their hunt for Madeleine, and 'could potentially hinder' the UK investigation.

Programme-makers took two years to interview key figures, including the first Briton quizzed over the disappearance.

The Portuguese detective in charge, Goncalo Amaral, has told the documentary he still doubts the McCanns.

Madeleine's parents Kate and Gerry McCann, both now 51, leave a court in Lisbon after giving statements in their case against Portuguese police officer Goncalo Amaral in July 2014

He and the family have been locked in a legal row over his extraordinary claims that Madeleine died in her family's apartment and that her abduction was faked.

Portuguese police put out this bizarre sketch of Madeleine kidnap suspect with no FACE Portuguese police released this faceless e-fit of the Madeleine McCann kidnap suspect. The Netflix documentary reveals how detectives showed locals in Praia da Luz an e-fit of a man without a nose, eyes or mouth after the girl vanished. Simon Russell, who owned an internet cafe in the resort town, said: 'I smiled when they showed it to me. What else could you do?' Advertisement

Mr and Mrs McCann deny his allegations and sued him in the Portuguese courts. The programme also raises questions about the Portuguese investigation.

Robert Murat, the British expat first named by police in Portugal as a suspect or 'arguido'  but is no longer being probed  feared he had been 'set up'.

Madeleine's parents were also named as arguidos but cleared when the probe ended.

Mr and Mrs McCann said: 'We did not see  and still do not see  how this programme will help the search for Madeleine and, particularly given there is an active police investigation, it could potentially hinder it.'

Scotland Yard's 11.75million investigation, Operation Grange, was launched after the Portuguese inquiry ended.

Last year it was given 150,000 to allow it to continue until the end of this month.

Clarence Mitchell, spokesman for the McCann family, told ITV's This Morning that the McCanns had been 'assured' that the documentary would be balanced.

Police investigating the disappearance of Madeleine work in Praia da Luz in June 2014

Scotland Yard's 11.75million investigation, Operation Grange, was launched after the Portuguese inquiry ended. The Madeleine McCann incident room is pictured in October 2013

He told how the filmmakers began approaching anybody who had a 'direct association' with the case nearly two years ago  including the McCanns.

Mr Mitchell said: 'Whenever I go to Kate and Gerry with any programme bid or proposals, they say to me: How is this going to help the search for Madeline?

'They will engage with media when it's valuable to the search. In this case, they didn't ask for this documentary they think it won't help. There's nothing new in this at all. What's it going to say?

He added that it 'fuels conspiracy theorists' if disproven allegations are broadcast again and 'possibly verges on the entertainment side of things'.

Mr Mitchell said the McCanns still believe Madeleine is alive - and there is 'no evidence' that she has come to any physical harm. He continued: 'I've always said this could end with one phone call, and that is still very much the case.'

The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann is available on Netflix from today
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has defended President Trump's comments invoking his support from 'tough people'.

President Donald Trump made the remarks during an interview with Breitbart News when asked about the House Democrats' investigation tactics.

'You know, the left plays a tougher game, it's very funny.

'I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don't play it tougher. Okay?' he said.

Kellyanne Conway (right) defended Donald Trump during an interview with CNN's journalist Chris Cuomo (left)

'I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump  I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough  until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,' Trump added.

Defending the President during an interview with CNN, Ms Conway said: 'He was talking about how peaceful and gentle many people are who are otherwise tough.'

'He is going on to say how they (the Democrats) go and investigate,' she added.

CNN journalist Chris Cuomo tried to read the quote from Trump's interview with Breitbart News but Ms Conway interrupted him to defend Donald Trump.

'Christopher, he didnt threaten and hes not threatening violence,' she said.

Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to President Donald Trump, defended his recent comments

Ms Conway pictured with Donald Trump during the White House State Leadership Day conference in Washington DC, US

Bikers for Trump, which claims to have nearly 100,000 members across the US, is an organization supporting the President's administration agenda.

Donald Trump also says he has strong support among military veterans.

His comments came after the Senate voted to end his declaration of national emergency on the border between the US and Mexico.

President Donald Trump said he has the support of 'tough people' such as the military and the grassroot organisation Bikers for Trump

The 59-41 vote included 12 Republicans who supported the measure.

If put in place, the resolution would stop Trump using the National Emergencies Act to get funds to build a border wall.

President Trump said he will veto the decision.

After the Senate voted to end Trump's declaration of national emergency on the border, he announced he will veto the resolution

This will be the first veto of his presidency.

Since taking power in the House in January, Democrats have started investigating many aspects of Trump's administration.

Last month, the House Oversight Committee called Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen to deliver his testimony.

Kellyanne Conway's husband, George Conway, blasted Trump as a 'pathological' liar for refusing to admit saying 'Tim Apple' instead of 'Tim Cook' during an interview on Wednesday.
Gambino's family boss Francesco 'Franky Boy' Cali, pictured, was shot dead in front of his house in a quiet neighborhood in New York City

A reputed Gambino crime boss who was shot dead in New York City on Wednesday tried dodging bullets by hiding under his SUV, police say.

Francesco 'Franky Boy' Cali, 53, was shot in front of his redbrick house in the Todt Hill district of Staten Island on Wednesday evening.

Doctors arrived at the scene and transported Cali to Staten Island University Hospital North, where he was pronounced dead.

The unidentified shooter went away in a truck and no immediate arrests were made, police said.

Investigations are being carried out to establish whether the murder was authorized by one of New York's five mafia families or whether it was carried out by a 'cowboy' gunman unrelated to the organisations.

'What I believe happened was Mr Cali was struck several times by gunfire,' Chief of Detectives Dermott Shea said.

'In trying to elude additional gunfire, fled to the rear area of his private vehicle and somebody probably thought he was run over, but it was more he was trying to get underneath the truck to elude gunfire,' he added.

The mob boss tried to hide under his SUV to dodge bullets after being shot several times

Investigators work at the scene where mafia boss Cali was killed in the Staten Island borough of New York City, US

New York media said this is the first targeted killing of a mafia boss in the city since 1985, when Gambino family's Paul Castellano was shot dead outside a restaurant.

The assassination was arranged by John Gotti, head of the Gambino family in the late 1980s and early 1980s.

After Cali's murder, New York's Mayor Bill de Blasio said: 'We thought those days were over.

New York Police Department responded to reports of shots fired on Wednesday night

'Very surprising, but I guess old habits die hard.'

Cali left his house around 9:15pm on Wednesday when the gunman backed his pickup into the mobster's SUV, damaging it, police said.

'With what we know at this point in time, its quite possible that was part of a plan,' Shea added.

Police said the attacker pulled a 9 mm handgun and opened fire on Cali shortly after they started talking.

At least 12 shots were fired.

After being shot several times, the mobster tried to hide under his SUV to dodge bullets.

Federal prosecutors referred to Cali as the underboss of Gambino family, one of the 'Five Families' that dominate the crime scene in New York City.

Police stand along the street where reputed mobster Cali lived and was shot dead by an unidentified gunman on Wednesday evening

The other families are Bonanno, Colombo, Genovese and Lucchese.

Francesco 'Franky Boy' Cali is said to have taken over the control of the Gambino family in 2015.

It is believed he only had one conviction for trying to extort money for which he spent 16 months in prison.

Among low enforcement officials, Cali was known as a 'real quiet old-school boss', one source told The New York Post.

Under his leadership, the Gambino family reportedly focused on heroin and Oxycontin trafficking.

Gambino's murder happened six months after John Gottis brother Gene, 71, was released after spending 29 years in prison for heroin trafficking.

A source told the New York Daily News that cops were considering whether there could be any connection to Gene Gotti for Cali's murder.

Mafia boss John Gotti (left) arranged the assassination of Paul Castellano (right) in 1985

However, the source admitted the claims were unconfirmed and could be 'total speculation'.

Jerry Capeci, a mob expert, said: 'Frank Cali was a pretty likable guy, and also this is not a way the mob would kill one of their own.'

'There are exceptions, but that's not the case with his guy,' he added.

Cali is said to have kept a much lower profile than Gotti and was killed in a less spectacular way than Paul Castellano.

Gotti was convicted in Castellano's murder and was then released in 1990.

Gotti, with his expensive suits, became known as the Dapper Don. He was released in 1990

With his expensive suits and coats, he became known as the Dapper Don.

As prosecutors failed to bring him down, he started to be called the Teflon Don.

Hours before Cali was killed on Wednesday, the boss and advisor of the Bonanno family were acquitted in a racketeering and extortion case in Brooklyn.

In October, Bonanno associate Sylvester Zottola was fatally shot at a McDonald's drive-thru in the Bronx.

Last week, the boss of the Colombo family, Carmine 'the Snake' Persico, died at the age 85 at a North Carolina hospital near the prison where he had been spending his life sentence.

In 1986, Persico was convicted in a case overseen by then-US Attorney Rudy Giuliani.
The Trump-supporting white supremacist who launched a massacre at a New Zealand mosque revealed that he hoped to spark a 'civil war in the U.S.' in his sick manifesto and described the American president as a 'symbol of renewed white identity'.

The gunman, who identified himself on Twitter as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, livestreamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque.

Tarrant posted a 74-page manifesto explaining the reasons behind the shooting, which is New Zealand's worst ever terrorist attack, leaving 49 dead and 48 injured.

In the document, Tarrant said that he supported President Donald Trump as a 'symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose' but not as a 'policy maker'.

The 28-year-old terrorist claimed he chose to use a gun over other weapons because it would spark a debate around the second amendment.

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In the document, he said he supported President Donald Trump as a 'symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose' but not as a 'policy maker'

Tarrant, 28, also said that he chose firearms to provoke a debate about the second amendment that he hoped would lead to a 'fracturing of the U.S. along cultural and racial lines'

Tarrant added: 'With enough pressure the left wing within the United States will seek to abolish the second amendment, and the right wing within the U.S. will see this as an attack on their very freedom and liberty.

'This attempted abolishment (sic) of rights by the left will result in a dramatic polarization of the people in the United States and eventually a fracturing of the US along cultural and racial lines.'

He made repeated reference to being European throughout and said that his plan -which he said was two years in the making - was inspired by the Stockholm truck attack in April 2017.

He said he wanted to avenge those killed in that attack which was carried out by Uzbek asylum seeker Rakhmat Akilov.

Tarrant wrote that by using guns to commit the attack, it would fuel the debate over firearms in the US and lead to them being banned.

His other heroes include the right wing commentator Candace Owens.'Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness.

His hope was that this in turn would spark a civil war and that 'eventually', it would lead to 'the balkanization of the US'.

Trump tweeted on Friday morning that it was a 'horrible massacre'. He has extended the US's full support to New Zealand as it reels from the atrocity.

President Trump decried the attack as a 'horrible massacre' in a tweet on Friday morning

Owens is yet to make a sympathetic remark about the atrocity and responded 'LOL!' with a crying face emoji when Twitter users pointed out she had been mentioned in his manifesto.

The manifesto also included photographs of white children and poems.

Tarrant launched the attack at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island at about 1.30pm as Friday prayers were underway.

At about the same time, what appears to be a second shooter opened fire at at mosque in Linwood, which is within 10km of the first attack.

Early reports indicated a shooting at Christchurch Hospital. However, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the mosques were the lone targets.

She did confirm multiple bombs were attached to two cars belonging to the suspects near the mosque.

The explosives were disarmed before they could detonate.
A bungling burglar can be seen smashing the side window of a parked car before desperately rifling through the contents to find something to steal - unaware the whole robbery is being caught on dashcam.

Prolific burglar James Quarton frantically searches through the contents of the black Ford Cougar's inside car door and centre console for anything he can steal to fund his drug addiction.

After setting the car alarm off the haphazard thief makes off with only an iPhone, a lighter and some loose change from the Delta private hire vehicle parked in School Lane in Liverpool city centre.

The whole 'smash and grab' operation lasts less than 30 seconds with Quarton removing his hat and piling handfuls of loose change into the baseball cap before carrying it away like a bag.

Prolific burglar James Quarton, 30, was sentenced to 14 months' imprisonment

Quarton, 30, of no fixed address, was already awaiting sentence for an identical offence at the time, where he broke into a parked car belonging to a 20-year-old female student and stole a laptop.

Yesterday at Liverpool Crown Court , Quarton was sentenced to 14 months in prison for these offences, plus another of production of cannabis.

The court heard that drug addiction had become a 'way of life' and prison a 'second home' to Quarton.

The owner of the car with the dashcam footage, private hire driver Gavin Rowlands, said: 'The police arrested him very quickly after the video was posted on social media because he was well known to them.

Quarton can be seen leaning in through the window of the black Ford Cougar that he has just smashed, triggering the car's alarm

'It could have been a lot worse - replacing the car window only cost me 30 as I bought it second-hand.'

Quarton has previously appeared in court for a string of burglary offences - in 2017, he was jailed for 28 weeks for his role in an 'epidemic' of break-ins at Liverpool city centre bars and restaurants.

In 2014, he was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison after he ransacked a man's Kensington flat and took all his possessions .
A Tate Gallery security guard who fell on his backside at work is now suing for more than 1m compensation.

Fiaz-Ur-Rehman Butt says he has been left 'virtually housebound' because of injuries he suffered when he slipped in a puddle, fell down some stairs at the Tate Modern Gallery, and 'ended up on his bottom'.

Although the 54-year-old was able to return to 'sedentary' work after the August 2014 accident, he says he found himself racked by pain, and left his job in January 2016.

Fiaz-Ur-Rehman Butt claims he suffered major injuries after slipping and falling while working as a security guard at the Tate Gallery, left, in August 2014. Central London County Court heard Mr Butt was left in constant pain and was unable to return to his former role

The court heard liability for the accident is not an issue, however the Tate Gallery are contesting the level of compensation being sought by Mr Butt's legal team

Mr Butt is now suing the Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery over the effects of his fall.

Liability for the accident is 'not in issue', Central London County Court heard, but the Tate Gallery is disputing the amount of compensation claimed, with its lawyers challenging the scale and nature of Mr Butt's injuries.

Mr Butt's lawyer Melanie Neale told Judge Janet Lambert: 'Our case is that here is a person who before the accident was a hard-working gentleman who worked as a security guard.

'But he now finds himself unable to work; he is looked after by carers and is no longer able to enjoy life,' she added.

He came to grief when he slipped on a patch of liquid and toppled down some steel steps, said Miss Reade, adding: 'He ended up on his bottom'.

Mr Butt was left with acute back and bladder problems, as well as chronic pain in his legs, the court heard.

He was employed by the security firm Wilson James at the time, but worked at the Tate.

The once fit and dynamic man says he now barely leaves his home due to his condition, which his lawyers say may have a physical or psychological cause.

But Perry Hill, the Tate Gallery's lawyer, highlighted a report from a surgeon who 'could not identify any evidence that Mr Butt had suffered a significant spinal injury'.

'His own medical experts pose serious questions about whether his claim has any physical cause,' he added.

Mr Hill said the gallery had left 'no stone unturned' in investigating the cause of his disability - even considering 'the possibility that he may be a malingerer'.

'This accident has rendered him completely unable to work and, on his own evidence, virtually unable to leave the house - completely housebound,' remarked Mr Hill.

At a pre-trial hearing Judge Lambert, declined the Tate Gallery's bid to call fresh evidence from some of Mr Butt's work colleagues.

'His credibility is plainly in issue,' she said.

'But whether he suffers from some physical or recognised psychiatric disorder as a result of his fall down the stairs is a matter for medical opinion, and for the trial judge to decide on the basis of medical opinion.

'The matters in issue are whether he suffers from a physical or psychiatric injury. None of these witnesses can give any relevant evidence on these matters.'

The case is now set to return to court at a later date.
There was a sombre mood at one of Australia's biggest mosques tonight as more than 1000 Muslims prayed for the victims of New Zealand's worst terror attack which killed 49 - most of whom followed the same faith.

Emotional scenes were captured as a defiant stream of Muslims ignored increased terror threats to Lakemba mosque in Sydney's south-west to attend Friday evening prayers.

Dozens of police surrounded the mosque before the prayers began at 7.17pm to ensure everyone was safe.

The prayers come just hours after the horrific Christchurch terrorist attack. The mood at the Lakemba mosque was sombre yet resilient.

There was a sombre mood at one of Australia's biggest mosques tonight as more than 1000 Muslims prayed for the victims of New Zealand 's worst terror attack

Dozens of police surrounded the mosque before the prayers began at 7.17pm to ensure everyone was safe

Vigilante Australians attended prayers at one of the country's biggest mosques, Lakemba in Sydney's south-west on Friday evening

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Leader of the Opposition Michael Daley were among multiple politicians in attendance to pay their respect.

Just before 6pm one marked police car was seen circling the mosque, while another was parked outside.

Minutes before the prayers were set to commence more police arrived, with some patrolling the premises on foot while at least six surveyed the area in their cruisers.

A young woman outside the mosque told Daily Mail Australia: 'I'm confused as to how and why someone would do this [terrorist attack].'

'It's more important than ever for us to attend prayers. Now is the most important time. It's always been an issue but nothing's been done. It's the most important time to stand together.'

A male worshipper planning to attend the evening prayers said he was at a loss for words.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian (pictured middle) was among multiple politicians in attendance to pay their respect

Emotional scenes were captured as a defiant stream of Muslims ignored increased terror threats to Lakemba mosque in Sydney's south-west to attend Friday evening prayers

The prayers come just hours after the horrific Christchurch terrorist attack, yet the mood at the Lakemba mosque was sombre yet resilient

A male worshipper planning to attend the evening prayers said he was at a loss for words over what happened in Christchurch

'My blood has gone cold the only thing that will calm me down is the head of that person,' he said.

A young female worshipper watched the horrific video and warned others not to open it if it's sent to them.

'Don't watch it. I was studying at university and my friends sent it to me. I thought it was a call of duty game. I was worried about coming today but I thought I should,' she said.

A speaker at Lakemba mosque during the evening prayers said those who attended Friday prayers in Christchurch were 'the most innocent people' but were targeted by the young Australian man.

Leader of the Opposition Michael Daley (pictured middle) were among multiple politicians in attendance to pay their respect

An increased police presence were seen surrounding the mosque before the prayers were set to begin at 7.17pm

A speaker at Lakemba mosque during the evening prayers said those who attended Friday prayers in Christchurch were 'the most innocent people'

'What is the crime they're doing? Nothing,' he said, following the prayers.

'People are very extremist in their thinking. They want revenge from nothing. They think by doing something like that is revenge.'

He warned those who attended the prayers not to be afraid.

'We need our government to take some action. We need to see our politicians and police doing their job in a good way. We put our hands with our politicians especially the good ones,' he said.

'This is an act of terror targeted towards Muslims at the time of their prayers.

'Not going to close the doors of our mosques and we'll continue our daily prayers. We'll stand in solidarity.'

A young woman outside the mosque told Daily Mail Australia: 'I'm confused as to how and why someone would do this [terrorist attack]'

The prayers come just hours after the horrific Christchurch terrorist attack. The mood at the Lakemba mosque was sombre yet resilient

When asked if they were scared of something similar happening in Australia, one young female said she was 'concerned' but refused to be intimidated.

'We're actually strengthened. We'll continue to go about our daily routine. It's heartwarming to see everyone here today from all walks of life and religions standing in solidarity,' she said.

Another young female worshipper said the attack was targeting Muslim people, and called it a 'Muslim phobic attack'.

'This was a terrorist attack. We stand strong as a community. We won't be intimated by that.'

Australian Muslims have been warned to be extra vigilant following the 'terrorist' shooting massacre of worshippers in New Zealand.

The 49 deaths at two mosques in Christchurch are the horrific consequence of hate, Muslims Australia president Rateb Jneid said on Friday.

Minutes before the prayers were set to commence more police arrived (pictured), with some patrolling the premises on foot while at least six surveyed the area in their cruisers

A heightened police presence was seen at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney's south-west on Friday evening

The 49 deaths at two mosques in Christchurch are the horrific consequence of hate, Muslims Australia president Rateb Jneid said on Friday

'This act of terror on innocent worshippers is an atrocity and we grieve with the victims and their families,' Dr Jneid said in a statement.

One shooter has been identified as Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Grafton in NSW.

He live-streamed the massacre of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots and police are responding to the incident at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island.

NSW Police moved to assure the public 'there is no ongoing or specific threat to any mosque or place of worship in Sydney or across NSW'.

'However, police have increased patrols and senior officers have also reached out to community and religious leaders across the state to provide support and reassurance,' a spokesperson said in a statement.

When asked if they were scared of something similar happening in Australia, one young female said she was 'concerned' but refused to be intimidated

A man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant (pictured) live-streamed the massacre of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand

Dr Jneid argues the New Zealand massacre is a product of ever-increasing Islamophobia and marginalisation of Muslims.

He said the atrocity was a reminder to all concerned, including political leaders and media commentators, 'of the horrific consequences that an atmosphere of hate and division can lead to'.

He urged all governments to give extra attention to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment and extremism.

Dr Jneid also encouraged all mosques and places of worship in Australia to be extra vigilant - and for members of the Muslim community to be particularly mindful of their safety in the coming days.

At least 40 people were reported dead as a result of the twin massacres on Friday, with the total rising to 49 within an hour

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots and police are responding to the incident at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island. Pictured is a still from a live-stream of the shooting
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A white supremacist identifying himself as Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, has killed at least 49 people and wounded 48 more after carrying out a far-right terror attack at mosques in New Zealand.

During the massacre, which he live-streamed online, Tarrant could be seen using weapons scrawled with white text. He also posted images of the weapons to Twitter before the feed was taken down.

An examination of the text reveals and obsession with historical figures who fought against the Ottoman Empire - the Islamic superpower of its day - other far-right attackers, and the Rotherham sex abuse scandal.

They paint a disturbing picture of the mind behind New Zealand's deadliest terror attack...

1. David Soslan  A Georgian king of the 12th and 13th centuries, known for his military success in wars against neighbouring Muslim nations

2. David IV of Georgia  Also known as David The Builder, he is considered the greatest ruler in Georgian history. He drove Turkish forces out of the country at the Battle of Didgori in 1121 before bringing most of the Caucasus under his control, ushering in the Georgian Golden Age

3. Dmitry Senyavin  Russian admiral, fought campaigns against the Turks including the Russo-Turkish War (178792) and Russo-Turkish War (180612)

4. Serban Cantacuzino  Former Romanian prince who planned to attack and sack Constantinople and drive the Ottomans (Turks) out of Europe

5. Marko Miljanov (misspelled on weapon)  A Montenegrin general who fought several campaigns against the Ottomans and distinguished himself as an able leader

6. Stefan Lazarevic  Serbian prince who served as a vassal for the Ottomans before later freeing his country from their rule and establishing an independent state

7. Edward Codrington  British admiral and later Commander-in-Chief who fought in Napoleonic Wars. He also fought against the Turks and Egyptians during the Greek War of Independence, helping Greeks gain independence from the Ottomans

8. Marco Antonio Bragadin  Officer for the Republic of Venice, led the Venetian resistance when the Turks attacked Cyprus. He was killed by the Turkish general after surrendering along with all Christians remaining in the city

9. Ernst Rudiger von Starhemberg  A military governor from Vienna who defended the city from the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. References to this battle are scrawled in multiple places on the killer's weapons

1. For Rotherham  A reference to the Rotherham child abuse scandal, in which a gang of British Pakistani Muslim men sexually abused vulnerable white British girls for decades and went largely ignored by police

2. Alexandre Bissonnette  Perpetrator of the Quebec mosque shooting in January 2017. Six were killed and 19 injured after he opened fire at the end of Friday prayers. Bissonnette is currently serving life in prison

3. Luca Traini  Italian extremist who shot six African migrants in the city of Macerata in February 2017. He was arrested while making a Hitler salute with an Italian flag draped around his shoulders. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and later apologised for his actions

4. Battle of Kagul 1770 - The pivotal battle of the Russo-Turkish War, 1768-1774, it saw around 40,000 Russian troops clash with 75,000 Ottomans. The Russians were victorious, losing only around 1,000 troops compared to 20,000 of their opposition

5. Bajo Pivljanin  Born under Ottoman rule he switched sides during the Fifth Venetian-Ottoman War (1645-1669) to fight against his former rulers and was ultimately killed in battle. He was regarded as one of the greatest hajduks  a type of peasant infantry

6. Battle of Bulair, 1913  The battle pitted Bulgarian forces against a much larger Turkish force, attempting to break the Bulgarian blockade of one of their fortresses. The Bulgarians were victorious, losing only a few hundred troops compared to thousands killed on the Turkish side

7. Prince Fruzhin  A Bulgarian noble who fought against the Ottoman conquest of the Second Bulgarian Empire

8. Sebastiano Venier  Doge of Venice who fought against the Turks during the Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War (1570-1573). As part of the Christian League, he decisively defeated the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto

9. Shipka pass  Reference to battle that was fought as part of the Russo-Ottoman War (1877-1878). In August 1877, a group of 5,000 Bulgarians and 2,500 Russians defeated a 40,000 strong Turkish army

10. Novak Vujosevic  Fought in the Battle of Fundina for the Principality of Montenegro against the Ottoman Turks. He killed 28 fighters and was later given an award by the Russian emperor

1. Konstantin II Asen - Constantine II of Bulgaria, a Bulgarian noble and ally of Stefan Lazarevic, who is mentioned on another of Tarrants weapons. He led a rebellion against the Ottomans which lasted for half a decade but ultimately ended in defeat

2. Horogszegi Szilagyi Mihaly - Micheal Szilagyi, Hungarian general who was captain of the Belgrade fortress when it came under siege by the Ottomans in 1456. The battle ended in victory for the Hungarians

3. Bohemond I of Antioch  Founded the Norman monarchy in Antioch and led the First Crusade ordered by Pope Urban II to retake the Holy Land from Turkish forces between 1095 and 1099. It led to the re-capture of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem

4. Gaston IV of Bearn  A participant of the First Crusade who was the first to enter Jerusalem after the defensive walls were breached

5. Pelayu - Pelagius of Asturias, a Visigoth nobleman who founded the Kingdom of Asturias. He is credited with beginning the Reconquista which lasted from 711 until 1491, and saw Christians retake the Iberian peninsula from the Moors

6. Charles Martel  A Frankish statesman who defeated crusading Moorish forces at the Battle of Tours in 732AD and is credited with ending the last Arab invasion of France

7. 14  A likely reference to the 14 Words, a white supremacist slogan derived from Hitler's Mein Kampf

1. Josue Estebanez  A Spanish neo-Nazi who fatally stabbed 16-year-old anti-fascist protester Carlos Palomino in the heart while on his way to take part in an anti-immigration protest in Madrid in 2007. He is currently serving 26 years in prison

2. Milos Obilic  A knight in the service of Prince Lazar, mentioned elsewhere on Tarrants weapons, who fought against the Ottomans during the Invasion of the Ottoman Empire. He is credited with assassinating Sultan Murad I during the Battle of Kosovo, 1389

3. Sigismund of Luxembourg  A European nobleman who rose to be Holy Roman Emperor, he led the Crusade of Nicopolis against the Ottomans in 1396. The campaign was a disaster and ended in defeat, along with the collapse of the Second Bulgarian Empire

4. Feliks Kazimierz Potocki  A Polish nobleman and military leader known for leading numerous campaigns against the Turks and Tatars, including fighting in the Great Turkish War. In 1698, he defeated a force of 14,000 Tatars with 6,000 men at the Battle of Podhajce

5. Iosif Gurko  A Russian field marshal who fought against the Turks as part of the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878). He led troops at the Battle of Shipka Pass, which is mentioned elsewhere on Tarrants weapons

6. Vienna 1683 - A reference to the Battle of Vienna which marked the first time the Holy Roman Empire cooperated militarily against the Ottomans. They were victorious, marking the beginning of the end of Ottoman conquests in Europe

7. Acre 1189  A reference to the Siege of Acre which lasted from 1189 until 1191, and pitted King Guy of Jerusalem against Ottoman ruler Saladin, who was attempting to retake the Holy Land from crusaders. It ended in victory for King Guy, and formed part of the Third Crusade

1. Black Sun  A symbol that originated in Old Norse and Old Celtic cultures as the sonnenrad, or sunwheel, but was adopted by the Nazis and then neo-Nazis as the symbol of a pure white race

2. Dog tags  One tag (left) features the white supremacist version of the Celtic Cross, and is one of the most commonly used white supremacist symbols. The other (right) features a Viking sun wheel design. Celtic and Viking symbols have been adopted by white supremacist groups who believe they represent a pure white race

3. Sebastiano Venier  Doge of Venice who fought against the Turks during the Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War. He is mentioned on another of Tarrants weapons

4. Marcantonio Colonna  An Italian aristocrat who was admiral of the Papal fleet at the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571. The battle saw a fleet of the Holy League  an alliance of Christian nations  inflict a major defeat on the Ottomans

1. Heres your migration compact!  A reference to the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration brought forward by the UN after millions of Middle Eastern migrants arrived in Europe in 2016. Among other things, it commits signatories to fighting discrimination against migrants. The compact was bitterly opposed by the far-right

2. John Hunyadi  A leading 15th century Hungarian military figure, he was responsible for guarding the countrys southern borderlands against attacks by the Ottomans

3. 14 Words  A reference to a white supremacist slogan derived from Hitlers Mein Kampf. The number 14 appears in multiple places on Tarrants weapons

4. Tours 732  A reference to the Battle of Tours in 732AD which ended the last Arab invasion of France. It was won by Charles Mantel, who is mentioned elsewhere on Tarrants weapons

5. Turkofagos  A phrase which means Turk-eater in Greek, it was the nickname of Nikitas Stamatelopoulos, a revolutionary in the Greek War of Independence which was fought against the Ottomans between 1784-1849
Controversial right-wing commentator Candace Owens has been slammed for using a laughing emoji in a tweet about the New Zealand mosque massacre after being named in the terrorist's manifesto.

The gunman Brenton Tarrant from New South Wales, Australia, named the conservative activist as his biggest influence in his 74-page manifesto.

In the sick document, Tarrant said that Owens helped 'push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness' - but claimed some of the 'extreme actions' she calls for are 'too much, even for my tastes'.

Shortly after posting the manifesto on Twitter, Tarrant, 28, live streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch at around 1.30pm. The terror attack, and another at a nearby mosque, left 49 people dead and another 48 injured.

Owens, whose controversial views include that the Democratic party is racist and oppresses black Americans, was quickly inundated with tweets about the gunman's admiration of her comments about white birth rates in the US and Europe.

She has spoken in the past of her opinion that Europe will be a Muslim majority continent by 2050 but has never condoned violence against any groups.

But rather than distance herself from his views or even condemn his violence, she tweeted 'LOL!' followed by the emoji.

She went on to argue that she was not responsible for inspiring the attack and fumed that 'racist white liberals' were trying to blame her for it.

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Conservative commentator Candace Owens, pictured, has been slammed for using a laughing emoji on a tweet about the New Zealand mosque massacre after being named in the terrorist's manifesto

But she was eviscerated by other users for using a laughing emoji and repeatedly saying 'laugh out loud' as she denied inspiring the terrorist's murderous Islamophobia

'Ive never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam.

'The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government hand outs is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!' she said.

Owens is known for her controversial remarks on both the second amendment and Islam in addition to her view that the Democratic party is racist.

She has come under fire in the past for making questionably complimentary remarks about Hitler.

On Thursday night and Friday, she continued to tweet that she refused to be blamed for the massacre.

When followers pointed out the impropriety of her response, she was indignant and argued back with them but failed to make a single solemn or sympathetic remark about the shooting or its dozens of victims.

'Laughter is not the response one would expect after these murders,' one follower said.

Owens shot back: 'No. But a bunch of racist white liberals flooding my mentions is almost exactly what one would expect. You guys will never de-platform me.'

Gunman Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, described her as his biggest influence, and said she helped 'push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness'

But Tarrant claimed some of the 'extreme actions' she calls for are 'too much, even for my tastes'. The terror attack, which was the deadliest in New Zealand's history, killed 49 people and left another 48 injured

Owen was eviscerated by followers for her 'tone deaf' posts. She argued back with them afterward and claimed she was the victim of a 'bunch of racist white liberals' but failed to make a single solemn or sympathetic post about the shooting itself

John Iadarola wrote: 'Maybe a little less laughing considering the death toll?'

Aaron Rupar added: 'This is a disgustingly callous response.'

Another user tweeted: 'Yes. A violent massacre is so funny. Hysterical.'

Others pointed out that she had in fact shared her views on the second amendment and Islam in the past, sharing screenshots of recent tweets.

One of her previous tweets was directed towards Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, in which she claimed 'Europe will fall and become a Muslim majority continent by 2050'.

Another, aimed at French president Emmanuel Macron, again warned against the declining birth rate.

When questioned what she was laughing about in the tweet, Owens replied: 'White liberals attempting to beat black conservatives into submission with absurdity... again.'

Owens is best known for her outspoken, anti-Democratic views.

She believes the Democratic party is racist, and has formed an alliance with Kanye West in their shared support of Donald Trump.

She has in the past described Black Lives Matters protesters as a 'bunch of whiny toddlers' and has said that Hitler would have been 'OK' if he'd contained his plans to Germany and not tried to take over the world.

'I actually don't have any problems with the word nationalism. Globalism is what I don't want.

Owens is pictured in the Oval Office with President Trump

WHO IS CANDACE OWENS? Owens, 29, is the communications director for Turning Points USA, a conservative youth organization. She has made a name for herself by making controversial claims about race relations in the US and through an alliance with Kanye West. Owens extreme views include her belief that the Democratic party is racist and oppressive Owens' beliefs include that former president Barack Obama is to blame for disintegrating race relations in America and that Kanye West is one of the 'bravest men' in the country for lodging his support with Trump. She has appeared in the past on Fox and Friends where she shared her extreme belief that black Americans are being held down by the Democratic party. The young activist gained attention when Kanye West tweeted that he 'liked the way she thinks' last year. Owens grabbed attention last April when Kanye West tweeted his support of her Earlier this year she was condemned for saying Hitler would have been 'fine' if he had contained his plans to Germany She is an active Republican who regularly attends party events . Above, with Donald Trump Jr. She replied desperately asking him for a meeting and telling him how much he inspired her. In addition to working for Turning Points, she runs a YouTube channel and show where she interviews guests and discusses national issues. The 29-year-old is shown with her British fiance George Farmer Owens notoriously dislikes Black Lives Matter, which she labels as a group of 'whiny toddlers'. Among her recent guests was Roseanne Barr who was fired by ABC last year for writing a racist tweet about Valerie Jarrett. Owens gave her a sympathetic ear as the pair discussed the #MeToo movement and Barr labeled some of the women who have come forward to say they have been the victims of sexual harassment and assault in work as 'hoes'. She is engaged to Turning Point UK operative George Farmer and is understood to live in New York City. Advertisement

'Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think of at least in America is Hitler.

'He was a national socialist but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK fine.

'The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize, he wanted everybody to be speaking German,' she said.

She was condemned for her comments and later clarified her stance that Hitler's massacring of millions of Jews was not 'OK'.

Tarrant launched the attack at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island at about 1.30pm as Friday prayers were underway.

At about the same time, there was a second shooting at a mosque in Linwood, which is within 10km of the first attack.

Early reports indicated a shooting at Christchurch Hospital. However, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the mosques were the lone targets.

She did confirm multiple bombs were attached to two cars belonging to the suspects near the mosque. The explosives were disarmed before they could detonate.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself. A 49th died in hospital.
The terror attack in New Zealand claiming 49 lives has equalled the number of victims in the 2016 Orlando nightclub slaughter and is more than the ISIS Tunisia incident.

The accused terrorist Brenton Tarrant, 28, stormed two mosques in Christchurch on the country's South Island, leaving 49 dead attending Friday prayers.

On a grisly ranking table the Christchurch Mosque shootings equal Florida's Orlando nightclub shooting of 2016 and rank above the Sousse resort massacre in Tunisia in 2015, where 38 were killed.

The heinous act has surpassed the Australian Port Arthur atrocity of 1996, when 35 were killed on the island - a former prison colony - as Martin Bryant fired rounds at tourists with an assault rifle.

The killer who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant, livestreamed his attack as he stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island on Friday

People run from the Route 91 Harvest country music festival as Steven Paddock fires thousands of rounds in October, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada

Flowers are tied to a fence outside the Bataclan venue in November, 2016, one of the targets of the 2015 attacks during which 130 people were killed and another 413 were wounded in Paris

Victims lie on the banks following terror shootings at a summer youth camp on July 22, 2011 on Utoya Island, Norway

Martin Bryant is serving 35 life sentences without the possibility of parole for his massacre at Port Arthur

A victim is taken to hospital by air ambulance after the shooting spree at Port Arthur

A shooter stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island around 1.45pm, opening fire with a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle on devotees.

A sickening 17-minute video of the horror shows the self-professed white supremacist dressed in army fatigues firing mercilessly at people scrambling on the floor as he calmly reloads.

Deadliest shootings in world history: Garissa University College Attack, Garissa, Kenya, 2015 - 149 Peshawar School, Peshawar, Pakistan, 2014 - 148 Paris Attacks, France, 2015 - 130 Norway Attacks, 2011 - 77 Westgate Shopping Mall, Nairobi, Kenya 2013 - 67 Las Vegas, USA, 2017 - 58 Uiryeong County, South Korea 1982 - 56 Orlando Nightclub, USA, 2016 - 49 Christchurch Mosques, New Zealand, 2019 - 49 Sousse Beach, Tunisia 2015 - 38 Advertisement

Shortly afterwards shooting began at the the Linwood Avenue Mosque in the eastern area of the city where seven more were killed - a 49th died in hospital.

It was the deadliest mass shooting in New Zealand's history and is in ninth place as the world's deadliest.

The worst in Europe was the Paris attack of November 2015 perpetrated by Islamic terrorists, who deployed bombs and guns to claim 130 victims.

Though explosives were also used in these attacks, the primary weapons were Kalashnikov assault rifles, most infamously at the Bataclan venue during a heavy metal concert where 90 were killed.

The United States's worst attacks were two of the most recent, the Las Vegas country music shooting and the Orlando nightclub shooting.

Steven Paddock let off more than 1,000 rounds as he murdered 58 people and injured hundreds more when he used his Mandalay Bay hotel suite as a vantage point against crowds at a country music show in 2017.

People join hands as they observe a minute's silence in memory of those killed in a recent attack by an Islamist gunman, at a beach in Sousse in 2015

An injured man is carried out of the Bataclan following fatal shootings in Paris, France in November 2015

Broken windows are seen on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino after Steven Paddock opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest country music in 2017

Eric Paddock holds a photo of himself (left) and his brother, Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock

Terrified country music fans scramble to cover as Paddock rained down terror from his Mandalay Bay room in Las Vegas

Paddock's attack showed the level of deadly technology available to citizens - with multiple assault rifles and thousands of bullets on hand - proving one man was able to make Las Vegas look like a war-zone.

The Orlando attack on the Pulse gay nightclub of the year before was the deadliest terror attack on US soil since 2001 and perpetrated by 29-year-old Omar Mateen who had pledged allegiance to ISIS.

The fanatic killed 49 people after he had written on Facebook about his sympathies with IS fighters being shelled in Syria and Iraq.

The deadliest shooting on the list not affiliated with Islamic terror was perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik, a white supremacist whose attack on a children's youth camp on a remote island sickened the world.

Breivik's assault began on the streets of Oslo with a car-bomb outside the Prime Minister's offices - killing eight.

It was mercilessly followed by a rampage across the remote island of Utoya where around 600 teenagers of the Norwegian Labour Party's youth camp were targeted.

Law enforcement officials investigate at the Pulse gay nightclub where Omar Mateen killed 49 people in June 2016

Bullet holes through windows outside the Bataclan concert venue where three gunmen killed 90 people at a rock music concert

Memorial flowers covered by a ribbon with the message, 'Never Again' is seen near the Bataclan concert hall the day after a series of deadly attacks in Paris

The neo-Nazi fired hundreds of rounds as he killed 67 people, one more died falling off a cliff, while another died of hypothermia trying to swim off the island.

The targeting of children is a disturbing theme in the depravity shown by mass shooters.

The Sandy Hook shooting of 2012 in Connecticut in the States and the Dunblane Massacre of 1996 in Stirling in Scotland, are seared into our memories.

At Sandy Hook, 20-year-old Adam Lanza cut down 20 children between the ages of six and seven, as well as six members of staff.

At Dunblane Primary School, Thomas Hamilton entered with pistols as he shot 16 children, a teacher and then himself. It was the UK's worst attack of its kind.

And it prompted British legislators to outlaw the possession of handguns.

Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik attends his fourth and last day in court in Skien prison, March 18, 2016

A police officer stands guard at Dunblane primary school in Stirling, Scotland, shortly after the shooting incident on 13 March 1996

People being evacuated on rue Oberkampf near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris, in 2015

The Bataclan cafe near the Bataclan concert hall in central Paris, following a series of terror attacks in and around Paris in November, 2015

The worst in history are claimed by Al-Shabaab gunmen at the Garissa University College in Kenya in 2015. Shooters stormed the campus and slaughtered 148 people.

They took some 700 hostages and used AK-47s to kill those who could not recite the Koran, beheading others with blades.

The massive scale of this terrorism is followed closely by the Peshawar School Massacre in Pakistan in 2014. Taliban shooters killed 141 people - mostly students - in a horrific siege.
The Royal Family today expressed their grief after white supremacists stormed mosques in New Zealand to murder dozens of Muslims.

The horrifying attacks in Christchurch today which were live-streamed online left at least 49 people dead, causing grief and consternation across the world.

The Queen - head of state for the Commonwealth of Nations, which includes New Zealand - has today led the outpouring of grief in the wake of the sickening attacks.

She was joined by the Prince of Wales, Prince William, the Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex, who all rallied to express their support.

Prince Charles said he and Camilla were 'utterly horrified' by the 'barbaric attacks', adding that it was 'beyond belief that so many should have been killed and injured.'

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex during a visit to Abel Tasman in New Zealand last October

Prince Charles and Camilla meet with locals in New Plymouth, New Zealand in November 2015

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge meet people in Christchurch, New Zealand, in April 2014

The Queen wears a kiwi feather korowai cloak while visiting Christchurch in February 2002

In a message to the Governor-General of New Zealand, the Queen said she was 'deeply saddened by the appalling events'.

She also wrote: 'Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives.

'I also pay tribute to the emergency services and volunteers who are providing support to those who have been injured. At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders.'

In a message to the people of New Zealand, the Prince of Wales today said the 'appalling atrocity is an assault on all of us who cherish religious freedom.'

In a letter, he wrote: 'Both my wife and I were utterly horrified to hear of the most barbaric attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, which resulted in the cruel and tragic loss of so many people's lives.

The Dukes and Duchesses of Sussex and Cambridge expressed their sadness at the deaths

The Queen said she had been 'deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch today'

The Prince of Wales said it was 'beyond belief that so many should have been killed and injured'

'It is beyond all belief that so many should have been killed and injured at their place of worship and our most special and heartfelt sympathy goes out to all the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives.

What did the royals say in their tributes today? The Queen 'I have been deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch today. Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives. 'I also pay tribute to the emergency services and volunteers who are providing support to those who have been injured. 'At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders.' Prince of Wales 'Both my wife and I were utterly horrified to hear of the most barbaric attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, which resulted in the cruel and tragic loss of so many people's lives. 'It is beyond all belief that so many should have been killed and injured at their place of worship and our most special and heartfelt sympathy goes out to all the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives. 'This appalling atrocity is an assault on all of us who cherish religious freedom, tolerance, compassion and community. I know that the people of New Zealand will never allow hate and division to triumph over these things they hold dear. 'Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims' families, the first responders, the people of Christchurch and all New Zealanders at this most heartbreaking of times.' Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex 'Our hearts go out to the families and friends of the people who lost their lives in the devastating attack in Christchurch. 'We have all been fortunate to spend time in Christchurch and have felt the warm, open-hearted and generous spirit that is core to its remarkable people. 'No person should ever have to fear attending a sacred place of worship. 'This senseless attack is an affront to the people of Christchurch and New Zealand, and the broader Muslim community. It is a horrifying assault on a way of life that embodies decency, community and friendship. 'We know that, from this devastation and deep mourning, the people of New Zealand will unite to show that such evil can never defeat compassion and tolerance. 'We send our thoughts and prayers to everyone in New Zealand today.' Advertisement

'This appalling atrocity is an assault on all of us who cherish religious freedom, tolerance, compassion and community. I know that the people of New Zealand will never allow hate and division to triumph over these things they hold dear.

'Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims' families, the first responders, the people of Christchurch and all New Zealanders at this most heartbreaking of times.'

Meanwhile Prime Minister Theresa May tweeted: 'On behalf of the UK, my deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand after the horrifying terrorist attack in Christchurch.

'My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence.'

The House of Commons held a minute's silence at 11am in solidarity with the victims. Mrs May's ministers have also reacted with shock.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said: 'Our hearts go out to the people of New Zealand following the news of this terrible act in Christchurch.

'New Zealand is one of the most peaceful, peace-loving and generous nations in the world. Your friends in the UK stand with you today in deepest sympathy.'

Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted he was 'absolutely heartbroken to hear about this attack on peaceful worshippers'.

Mr Javid added: 'We stand with New Zealand and Muslims across the world against all forms of racism and anti-Muslim hatred. We will not let extremists divide us.'

European Council President Donald Tusk described the attack as 'harrowing news' and said New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern can 'count on our solidarity'.

He tweeted: 'Harrowing news from New Zealand overnight. The brutal attack in Christchurch will never diminish the tolerance and decency that New Zealand is famous for.

'Our thoughts in Europe are with the victims and their families. PM @jacindaardern can count on our solidarity.'

British police are providing 'reassurance patrols' around mosques following the deadly gun rampage in New Zealand.

London's Mayor Sadiq Khan and Britain's top counter-terror officer said the police presence would be stepped up as people went to Friday prayers.

Mr Khan said: 'I want to reassure the Muslim communities in London. I have been in touch with the Met Police. There will be highly visible policing around mosques today, as well as armed response officers, as Londoners go to pray.'

Prime Minister Theresa May described the New Zealand attack as a 'sickening act of violence'

The Prime Minister is pictured leaving the Houses of Parliament in London yesterday evening

Neil Basu, the Met's national policing chief for counter-terrorism, added: 'We will be stepping up reassurance patrols around mosques and increasing engagement with communities of all faith, giving advice on how people and places can protect themselves.

'Together with our intelligence partners we continually monitor the varied threats we face, including to and around places of worship and specific communities across the country,' he said.

Harun Khan, head of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said British Muslims preparing for Friday prayers 'do so with the anxiety as to whether our mosques and communities are safe in the face of unabated Islamophobia and hostility against Muslims'.

The MCB said two mosques in Newcastle and Manchester had been targeted by vandals who spray-painted Nazi swastika symbols in the past two months.

Police officers outside Finsbury Park Mosque in North London today, ahead of the Friday prayer service, following the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand

A man collects flowers left outside Finsbury Park Mosque in North London today

Worshipers take part in Friday Prayers at the Makkah Mosque in Leeds today after the attacks

Muslims take part in Friday Prayers in Leeds today after the Christchurch mosque attacks

London has previously heightened security measures around mosques following terror attacks.

Extra patrols were deployed after the Finsbury Park attack on June 19, 2017 which saw Darren Osborne drive a van into pedestrians leaving a Muslim welfare centre near the well-known Finsbury Park Mosque in north London.

One person was killed and several others were injured. Osborne was arrested at the scene and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, NSW, Australia, stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island about 1.30pm, opening fire with a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle on hundreds of worshippers attending Friday prayers.

A sickening 17-minute video of the unfolding horror shows the self-confessed white supremacist dressed in army fatigues firing mercilessly at people scrambling to flee, and calmly re-loading when he runs out of bullets.

At about the same time, there was a second shooting at Masjid mosque in Linwood, where seven more were killed.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder.

One of them was arrested while wearing a suicide vest, while a man wearing military fatigues was arrested outside Papanui High School.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself. A 49th died in hospital.

A further 48 people were rushed to Christchurch Hospital with gunshot wounds, 20 in a critical condition. New Zealand was placed on 'high alert' following the attacks.
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The digging of the Manchester Ship Canal was one of the most grueling tasks a Victorian labourer could have the misfortune of working on.

If the men survived their punishing shifts - 130 were killed in the waterway's construction - they would almost certainly suffer from lifelong disfigurements and disabilities.

While the city's 'Big Ditch' is still used by boats to breeze effortlessly through to port to this day, a collection of antique photographs reveals the seven-year grind endured by the men who dredged the canal by hand.

This slog began in November 1887 and was finally completed in 1894 when it was officially opened by Queen Victoria.

During this time, scores of men sweated over the build, with 16,000 workers employed at the projects peak to operate 124 steam-powered cranes and 80 locomotives.

In the beating sun or the pouring rain, they broke their backs hand-shoveling millions of tonnes of rock and soil to create the waterway.

The scale of the project is illustrated by the sheer volume of soil removed during the work which had to be transported off site. The photograph shows a temporary railway track to allow the dug-up dirt to be carted away. Most of this excavation was done by hand, with only spades to assist the men. Clothes had to be practical and workers wore heavy boots with thick hob-nailed soles

Some 16,000 workers - known as 'navvies' - sweated over Canal's build at its peak to help shift the millions of tonnes of soil from the soon-to-be waterway. At the time the canal cost 15 million, equivalent to over 1.6 billion in modern terms.

Thomas Walker, the project engineer contracted to build the canal, thought of the idea to build the temporary tracks to transport the soil from the site and also to carry workers to different sections. When Walker died on 25 November, 1889 the build suffered numerous setbacks such as flooding

Labourers are seen building one of the many bridges which span the Manchester Ship Canal. These include the Mersey Gateway Bridge, the Warburton Toll Bridge and the iconic Barton Swing Aquaduct. The 'navvies' are seen wearing traditional Victorian working-man clothes including flat caps and waist coats

The canal runs for 36 miles from Eastham on the Mersey estuary to Salford in Greater Manchester and it enables ocean-going vessels to navigate their way from the Irish Sea into the industrial heart of Manchester. Coupled with Liverpool which sits on the River Mersey, the canal allowed the North West to become an industrial powerhouse

A diver prepares to carry out underwater checks in 1890. His crew would use the long hose to pump oxygen to him. The old diving suit would also be equipped with a lifeline, to tug on in case of trouble, and a copper and brass helmet with a small eye hole. Even on the water the crew would wear their normal clothes. These were often made from wool or cotton in dark colours as this was cheaper and the dirt didn't show as much.

Home and dry: Back on land, the diving crew pose for a photograph with the suit hanging up to dry. In the latter stages of the construction, divers would frequently go underwater to check the depth of the waterway and ensure there had been no erosion

Once the waterway had been carved out by hand, a dredger would redirect the area's rivers to the canal to flood the newly constructed canal. Large buckets placed on a belt would scoop up soil from the canal's bed and then tip it into a holding section on the vessel

The navvies worked for long hours in very difficult conditions. They had to contend with all weathers, including heavy rain and severe frosts. The work was also dangerous, with risk of serious injury or even death, as the workers removed millions of tonnes of rock and soil

The navvies were paid the equivalent of 16 for a ten-hour working day. But the payment came at a price - over 130 men were killed and hundreds more were disfigured or disabled due to the backbreaking work during the build

Crane operators work during the final stages of the construction in 1892. In addition to the 124 steam-powered cranes used during the seven-year build, 80 locomotives and over 6,000 trucks and wagons were brought in to assist the labourers

The yacht, Norseman, was the flagship vessel at the canal's opening ceremony in 1894. The ceremony was the last three royal visits Queen Victoria made to Manchester. She knighted the Mayor of Salford, William Henry Bailey, and the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Anthony Marshall

A ship passes through the Barton Swing bridge in 1910, six years after the canal became operational. A Roman Catholic school on the south bank had to be demolished to make way for the bridge. And the River Irwell had to be temporarily diverted around the site so navvies could build the central island

The Ship Canal allowed the Port of Manchester to become the third busiest in the country despite it being located 40 miles inland. At its peak in 1958, the canal carried over 18 million tonnes of cargo
A passenger has been ordered to pay more than 50,000 yuan (5,600) to an airline after throwing coins into a plane engine before takeoff to pray for good luck.

The air traveller, known by his surname Li, tossed two small coins towards the engine from the stairs while boarding the domestic flight in central China.

His action caused the flight to be cancelled due to safety concerns and a large number of passengers to be stranded at the airport late at night, a court said.

The man tossed two coins towards a plane operated by China's Shenzhen Airlines (file photo)

He wanted to pray for a safe flight after being inspired by a conversation he had had with other people at the boarding area. He threw two one jiao coins (pictured in file photo) at the plane

The incident took place in July, 2017, at the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport, one of the busiest air hubs in central China.

A regional court handed him the decision this week.

Li was flying from Nanjing to Shenyang with China's Shenzhen Airlines, and was transferring in the provincial capital of Wuhan.

Li claimed he was praying for a safe journey after being inspired by a conversation he had had with other people at the boarding area.

He threw two one jiao coins in the Chinese currency while walking up to the cabin at about 10:20pm. Other passengers reported his behaviour to the cabin crew.

The airline immediately arranged workers to look for the coins. They also cancelled the flight and organised a thorough safety check.

Li was detained at the airport by police.

The passenger was sued by the airline which claimed to sustain a financial loss of more than 70,000 yuan (7,900) due to his action.

The Wuhan Intermediate People's Court ruled in airline's favour and demanded Li cover the entire bill in the first trial. Li appealed against the decision.

In a recent second trial, Li was ordered to pay more than 50,000 yuan to the firm.

Last week, two passengers were detained by police at Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport in eastern China after throwing coins at a plane from Lucky Air for good luck (pictured)

Many Chinese people believe that chucking coins at a specific target could bring them good luck. This could range from a statue in a park to a bell in a temple.

On the other hand, the majority of Chinese citizens have never travelled by air despite the fact that the country is set to overtake the United States to be the largest air travel market in the work in 2022.

Most air passengers in China are repeated travellers from big cities.

It has been estimated that more than 70 per cent of Chinese - or more than one billion people - have never flown in their life; therefore they are oblivious of the etiquette and safety regulations of travelling by air.

Just last week, two passengers were detained by police at Jinan Yaoqiang International Airport in eastern China after throwing coins at a plane operated by Lucky Air for good luck while boarding.

The domestic flight was delayed for two hours as a result, affecting 260 passengers.
A bride who claimed a 100 refund for wedding flowers that supposedly never arrived in time for her wedding has been caught with the bouquet after photos emerged on social media.

Sarah Weatherill, 34, and Lisa Husband, 46, who run wedding decor business Forever To Hold in Whitby, North Yorkshire, spotted wedding photos of bride Jordanne McLaughlin with the flowers on Facebook, last week.

Mrs McLaughlin from Port Glasgow, Scotland, offered to repay the balance by 20 per week but eventually returned the refund in full after the mother and daughter-in-law ran business threatened police action against her.

'We said no and mentioned that we contact the police. Then she paid us back in full two days later,' Mrs Weatherill said.

Sarah Weatherill, 34, (right) and Lisa Husband, 46, (left) who run wedding decor business Forever To Hold, have caught bride Jordanne McLaughlin with the bouquet she claimed never arrived for her wedding

Wedding photos of Mrs McLaughlin emerged on Facebook showing her with the bouquet on her wedding. Mrs Weatherill confronted the bride about the images and threatened police action, forcing the bride to return the 100 refund

The florist added: 'I bet she thought she'd never be found out but you can't hide anything anymore [with social media].

'To us 100 is a lot of money. But we refunded her because we wanted to keep our customer services reputation.

'There's so much out there in the news about businesses scamming brides, but I've never heard of a bride who scams a business,' she added.

Back in 2018, Mrs McLaughlin from Port Glasgow, Scotland, complained to Forever To Hold claiming that she had not received her flowers in time for her wedding.

After five months of back and forth about the missing bouquet, they offered a 100 refund - despite the company having proof of postage in January, eight months before her big day.

Immediately after receiving she received the refund, the business partners say all contact with the bride ceased and that she had blocked them on Facebook.

Last week, Mrs Weatherill was left in disbelief when she spotted Mrs McLaughlin's wedding photos online, showing her holding what looked like the exact artificial flower bouquet.

Mrs Weatherill said: 'I bet she thought she'd never be found out but you can't hide anything anymore [with social media]. She added: 'To us 100 is a lot of money. But we refunded her because we wanted to keep our customer services reputation.'

'I wasn't 100 per cent sure they were ours and needed more clarification... I did a bit of investigation and messaged the photographer.

'The photographer sent some pictures over - they were 110 per cent our flowers. I've looked back and they've got exactly the same hessian wrapping on, exactly the same flowers, exactly the same style, exactly where we placed them.

'They are our flowers, because we keep photos of all the bouquets we send. I thought it was bizarre when she blocked us as soon as she got her money.'

Mrs McLaughlin, a mother-of-three, claimed that the flowers miraculously turned up at her neighbours in July - seven months after they were sent.

The bride was contacted for comment and declined to comment. She also appears to have since removed or deactivated her Facebook account.
Mito Kaur, 63, died in the hospital yesterday after catching a fungal lung infection when she came there for treatment for her flu

A grandmother has died after catching a fungal lung infection at a 1billion hospital  sparking a police investigation.

Mito Kaur, 63, was left on life support after picking up the mucor fungus at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH) in Glasgow.

It was at the centre of controversy earlier this year after a 10-year-old boy and 73-year-old woman died in the hospital after catching an infection found in pigeon droppings, said the Scottish Health Secretary Jeane Freeman.

Mrs Kaur died at 2am yesterday after her life support machine was switched off.

Relatives of the shop worker have criticised hospital staff, claiming they only found out about her condition from reports of a fungal outbreak in a press release on the hospitals website last month.

Aamer Anwar, the Kaur familys lawyer, said he had contacted prosecutors to advise them of the familys concerns, and their desire for a fully independent investigation to take place.

He said: I understand that the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal have instructed the police to obtain a full report, following which an independent post-mortem will be carried out.

The case comes after a ten-year-old boy and a 73-year-old woman died from an infection linked to pigeon droppings at the same hospital. Pictured: A filthy chair that was left in a hospital smoking area for three months

Pigeons roost on top of the neurology building at the 842million hospital in Glasgow

In recent days an unannounced inspectorate report into the management of infection and control following two previous deaths was published; this was a devastating indictment of the culture that existed at the QEUH.

The family remain highly concerned at the role of senior management and demand a full and independent inquiry.

Mrs Kaur was taken to hospital after contracting flu which then developed into pneumonia. She subsequently picked up a mucor fungus, and the family was told it was potentially fatal.

The infection caused Mrs Kaurs brain to swell and her heart became inflamed.

Mrs Kaurs son Bobby said the mother of four and grandmother-of-nine was the heart of the family.

A Scottish Government spokesman called for the Health Secretary to take 'swift action' after the deaths of 'five' people at the hospital in recent months

An investigation is currently underway into conditions at the 1billion flagship hospital in Glasgow

One of the patients who died at the hospital in December was a ten-year-old boy who had contracted cryptococcus.

A 73-year-old woman who had the same infection died the following month, but the hospital said cryptococcus was not a factor in her death.

Scottish Labours health spokesman, Monica Lennon, said: Ms Kaur is now the fifth person die in the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde after contracting an infection in hospitals in recent months.

The Health Secretary must take swift action to ensure no other family is left grieving the loss of a loved one because of hospital-based infections.

A spokesman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: We do not have any permission to comment on this patient.

A Crown Office spokesman said police had been instructed to carry out inquiries.
A young student nurse was mistaken for a foreign student and told to 'go home' in a 'vile' note left next to her while she dozed in a sleeping pod in her university library

Charlotte Brien, 21, a student at Manchester University, was taking a short break from studying yesterday when she woke to find the bizarre handwritten note on the table next to her.

The note said: 'First you took our jobs, now you're taking our pods. Brexit means Brexit. P.s go home and sleep'.

Student nurse Charlotte Brien, 21, from Manchester, was 'incensed' after finding a 'vile' note left next to her while she dozed in a sleeping pod in her university library. The third-year Manchester University student was told to 'go home' in the note, despite being from the city

The third-year student, who is from Manchester, was appalled by the hateful note and says there are 'a lot of international students' at the university who would be offended by it.

'I was really angry and everyone who's seen it has been incensed about it too,' she said.

'I don't know if it was specifically sent to me because I'm quite clearly Mancunian.

'But I am in uniform because I'm a student nurse and they mentioned about stealing jobs.

'If they want to work for 80 a month they can go ahead.

'There are a lot of international students here so I'm just glad it was me who found it and not them.

The note left next to Charlotte Brien as she slept in a sleeping pod in her university library read: 'First you took our jobs, now you're taking our pods. #Brexit means Brexit

On the other side of the notte, it read, 'P.s. go home and sleep'. Ms Brien said 'a lot of international students' at the university who would be offended by it.

'You would hope students might be a bit more educated than that.

The sleeping pod installed by Manchester University in their library allows tired students to rest their eyes for up to 20 minutes at a time.

Ms Brien said: 'I was lying in the sleeping pod which is like a chair that plays ambient music and has a screen.

'I use it very occasionally when I'm in the library. I was only in there for around 15 minutes.

'When I got out I saw a note on the table next to me.

'I thought someone might have left it with something important written on it so I went over to look what it said.

'I had no idea anyone was even around me while I was in there.

The sleeping pods at Manchester University's library. They can be used for up to 20 minutes at a time. Ms Brien said: 'I was lying in the sleeping pod which is like a chair that plays ambient music and has a screen. When I got out I saw a note on the table next to me'

'If someone really wanted to use the pod, they would have been welcome to just ask me.

'I didn't expect to get a passive aggressive note.'

A University of Manchester spokesman said: 'Library customer services are aware of this incident and will be checking for any further activity.'
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has apologized after he claimed he has spent more time with veterans than other presidential candidates - which include two soldiers.

Schultz, 65, who is a potential independent candidate for the 2020 election, made the gaffe on a radio show without realizing other presidential hopefuls Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard had served in the armed forces.

In an apology on Twitter, he wrote: 'Yesterday I gave a speech on failed political leadership in this country.

Haward Schultz was forced to apologize on Twitter after he said on Hugh Hewitt's radio show he had spent more time with veterans than other presidential candidates

'A point I tried to make is that leaders must take responsibility and own their mistakes.

'Today I said I spent more time with the military than any candidate running for president. That was wrong.'

Schultz had been speaking on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt's radio show on Thursday.

When asked about his ability to run the military, he said: 'I probably have spent more time in the last decade certainly than anyone running for president with the military.

Schultz made the comments but quickly apologized on Twitter after realizing Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard had served in the armed forces

'Ive been to Okinawa, Ive been to Kuwait. ... Ive been to the national training center in the Mojave Desert.'

He added that he was friends with retired Adm William McRaven and retired Gen Stanley McChrystal.

But Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was an officer in the Naval Reserve and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 for seven months.

Democrat hopeful Pete Buttigeig, who is the mayor of South Bend in Indiana, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2014 and is a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve

The 37-year-old is still a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve.

Buttigieg tweeted hours after Schultz's comments: 'I remember a Green Beans Coffee at the exchange at Bagram, and a decent espresso machine run by the Italian NATO element at ISAF HQ. But I don't recall seeing any Starbucks over there...'

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, 37, who launched her campaign for the presidency in January, is also a major in Hawaii Army National Guard and served in Iraq and Kuwait.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard served in Iraq and Kuwait and is a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard

Schultz later added in a tweet: 'I apologize to @PeteButtigieg and @TulsiGabbard who served our country honorably.

'In that moment I made something that should unite us all, about me. I made a mistake and I apologize.'

Schultz has not formally declared his intention to run for president but has said he would 'do nothing whatsoever' to help President Donald Trump back into the White House.
Bizarre footage shows a woman's trousers falling down as four police officers struggle to restrain two rowdy friends.

The clip, filmed in the Central Working Men's Club in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, on Wednesday, shows officers being dragged to the floor as they try to arrest the young women.

One police officer attempts to handcuff one of the disorderly suspects who yanks her hands back violently causing them both to go tumbling through a doorway.

One police officer attempts to handcuff one of the disruptive suspects who yanks her hands back violently causing them both to go tumbling through a doorway in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria

She can be heard screaming 'Who the f*** do you think you're dragging' in the officer's face.

Another officer tries to restrain a second woman as she lies on the ground and refuses to stand up causing her purple leggings to fall down.

As the officer desperately tries to restrain her, the four end up tumbling to the floor before the suspect's bare bottom is exposed.

Police back-up arrives and it takes four officers into total to arrest the pair who continue to wildly protest.

The four end up tumbling to the floor before one of the suspect's bare bottom is exposed

One woman, who is finally handcuffed, is led out of the hotel by three officers as she screams at the top of her lungs.

Onlookers can be heard laughing as they watch on in the clip which was posted on Facebook.

The one minute long clip has attracted 2,500 comments and shares.

Cumbria Police said they were called on reports of people were refusing to leaving the working mens club.

A spokesman said: 'Cumbria Police were called at 9.39pm on March 13 following a report of person refusing to leave the Central Working Men's Club on Preston Street, Barrow.

'A 20-year-old female, from Barrow, was arrested on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly and two counts of assault by beating.

'A 27-year-old female, from Barrow, was arrested on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly, assault by beating and assaulting an emergency services worker.

'Both women were subsequently released under investigation. Enquiries continue'.
A survivor of the New Zealand terror attack has slammed police for taking '20 minutes' to attend Al Noor Mosque after a gunman opened fire inside.

Khaled Al-Nobani escaped by fleeing through a door and 'breaking a gate' during the terror attacks in which at least one gunman killed 49 worshipers from 1.30pm on Friday.

Speaking outside Christchurch Hospital, Mr Al-Nobani slammed police, saying they should have take just 'two minutes' to respond.

Scroll down for video

Khaled Al-Nobani (right), who escaped by fleeing through a door and 'breaking a gate', said it should have taken officials just 'two minutes' to respond to attack at 1.30pm on Friday

The picture shows the Armed Offenders Squad pushing back members of the public following the shooting

'The police took 20 minutes to come. We are in the middle of the city,' he told The New Zealand Herald.

'The middle of Christchurch - 20 minutes the police took to come. There was no traffic about. You need two minute [maximum] response,' he added.

Police have not confirmed how long they took to arrive at the mosque but Commissioner Mike Bush said he was proud of how quick officers were.

Mr Al-Nobani said he witnessed the gunman storm into the religious building and 'start shooting everyone'.

He managed to get away through a back door alongside some children with the help of his friend.

The image shows a man being put into an ambulance on a stretcher by medical staff after the shooting

Another horrified survivor of the attack has told how a man tackled the gunman and stole one of his weapons before running away.

Syed Mazharuddin was praying on Friday at the Linwood Masjid mosque in Christchurch when he heard gunshots right in front of him.

He said he saw the shooter wearing protective gear and firing wildly before a young man attempted to tackle the gunman.

'He saw an opportunity and pounced and took his gun,' Mr Mazharuddin told The NZ Herald.

The young hero took the gun out of the shooter's hands and attempted to defend people in the mosque but couldn't figure out how to use the weapon, he said.

'The hero tried to chase and he couldn't find the trigger in the gun... he ran behind him but there were people waiting for him in the car and he fled,' Mr Mazharuddin added.

A member of the Armed Offenders Squad is pictured following the shooting at the mosque in Christchurch

The image shows police attempting to clear people from outside the mosque in central Christchurch

At least 49 people are dead and 48 have been injured on what the New Zealand Prime Minister called New Zealand's 'darkest day'.

The gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, NSW, Australia, stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island about 1.30pm.

He opened fire with a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle on about 100 defenceless worshippers attending Friday prayers.

A man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant (pictured) live-streamed the massacre of dozens of people in Christchurch, New Zealand

A sickening 17-minute video of the unfolding horror shows the self-confessed white supremacist dressed in army fatigues firing mercilessly at people scrambling to flee, and calmly reloading when he runs out of bullets.

At about the same time, there was a second shooting at Masjid mosque in Linwood, where seven more were killed.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder.

He is expected to face court on Saturday.

Three of the arrests are believed to be directly related to the attacks, with the fourth's involvement still being determined.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself.

A 49th died in hospital.
Yared Getachew (pictured) was the main pilot on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302

The pilot of the doomed Ethiopian Airlines jet requested permission 'in a panicky voice' to return to the airport shortly after takeoff, it has emerged.

Within a minute of departure, Captain Yared Getachew reported a 'flight control' problem because the aircraft was well below the minimum safe height during a climb, it is claimed.

After being cleared by the control room to turn back, Flight 302 climbed to an unusually high altitude and disappeared from radar over a restricted military zone, a source told the New York Times.

All contact between air controllers and the Nairobi-bound Boeing 737 MAX 8 was lost five minutes after it took off, a person who reviewed air traffic communications told the newspaper.

The report said air traffic controllers observed the jet 'oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet' prior to the crash which killed 157 on Sunday morning.

Speaking in a 'panicky voice,' the doomed aircraft's captain is said to have requested permission to return to the airport almost immediately after takeoff as the plane 'accelerated to abnormal speed.'

'Break break, request back to home,' the Times quoted the pilot as saying just prior to the crash. 'Request vector (direction) for landing.'

Boeing was criticised after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the stall prevention system.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said the doomed flight's captain was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours.

Meanwhile, a French investigation into the crash opened today as US aerospace giant Boeing stopped delivering the top-selling Max 8 aircraft.

The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disaster - the second involving the model in five months - and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond.

The pilot of the doomed Ethiopian Airlines jet requested permission 'in a panicky voice' to return to the airport shortly after takeoff, it has emerged

Meanwhile, a French investigation into the crash opened today as US aerospace giant Boeing stopped delivering the top-selling Max 8 aircraft. Pictured: The plane's black boxes arrive in the French capital

'We are pausing the delivery of the 737 MAX until we come up with a solution,' a Boeing spokesman said Thursday, adding: 'We are going to continue the production but we are assessing our capacities.'

An Ethiopian delegation delivered the black boxes to France's BEA air safety agency 'and the investigation process has started in Paris', Ethiopian Airlines said Friday on Twitter.

The BEA confirmed it had received the black box recorders from the plane, which was just four months old and crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday.

BEA investigators will now try to retrieve information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster.

Thousands of miles away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.

Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyze the data.

The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts.

Investigation: One of the black box flight recorders from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet

Devastated relatives of crash victims have been visiting the site in recent days as investigations continue into the cause of the disaster

On Wednesday, US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between the Ethiopia crash and that of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October that killed 189 people.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said findings from the crash site and 'newly refined satellite data' warranted 'further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents.'

An FAA emergency order grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice, effectively taking the aircraft out of the skies globally.

The move came after a growing number of airlines and countries decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it is determined there are no safety issues.

US President Donald Trump told reporters the 'safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern'.

FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency had been 'working tirelessly' to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because of the damage to the flight data recorders.

The new information shows 'the track of that airplane was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight' to warrant the grounding of the airplanes so more information can be gathered to determine if there is a link, Elwell said Wednesday on CNBC.

The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disaster - the second involving the model in five months - and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond

Boeing's shares have fallen 12 percent in the days after the crash in Ethiopia, wiping out nearly $30 billion in value.

The 737 MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model and it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service.

There are 74 registered in the United States and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA.

The accounts of the recent crashes were echoed in concerns registered by US pilots on how the 737 MAX 8 behaves.

At least four American pilots complained following the Lion Air crash that the aircraft would suddenly pitch downward shortly after takeoff, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by NASA.

In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air disaster, pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane's trajectory in response.

It was unclear if US transport authorities review the database or investigated the incidents.

However, the FAA said this week it had ordered Boeing to update its flight software and training.

Questions about the Lion Air crash have honed in on a stall prevention system, the MCAS, designed to automatically point the plane's nose downwards if it is in danger of stalling.

According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the MCAS repeatedly pushed the nose down after takeoff.

The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged to the ground.
Armed police shot dead a suspect during a dawn raid on a property in Birmingham this morning.

Six officers raided the fourth-floor apartment on the Westside area of the city shortly before 5am today.

The man, who has been named locally as father-of-two Trevor Smith, had appeared in a football hooliganism documentary presented by Danny Dyer.

Police were acting on intelligence reports that a man in the flat had been seen with a firearm.

One of the officers fired a single round at the man who died a short time later at the scene.

The dead man has been named locally as Trevor Smith, pictured, who was a Birmingham City fan and a former member of the club's 'firm' the 'Zulu Warriors'

Six armed officers raided Mr Smith's apartment, which was on the fourth floor of the city centre flat, after receiving intelligence reports the father-of-two had threatened someone with a suspected firearm

Mr Smith, right, appeared in a documentary about football hooliganism featuring Danny Dyer

One of the officers fired a single round which hit Mr Smith, who died a short time later. It is understood the shooting has been captured on bodyworn cameras carried by the police

Footage of the incident was captured on the officer's body worn camera and has been downloaded.

The dead man was named on social media by close friends as father-of-two Trevor Smith, who lived alone at the flat.

Online, friends also paid tribute to the Birmingham City Football Club supporter and member of renowned Blues' firm the Zulu Warriors, posting 'RIP Trevor'.

One post read: 'Awful News, one of Birmingham's Finest Trevor Smith Big T ?? RIP mate', while another posted 'Trevor Smith, rip my friend'.

It is understood six officers raided the city centre flat after receiving reports that a man had been threatening people with a gun.

One of the officers fired a single shot at the man who died at the scene.

According to West Midlands Police: 'Enquiries are under way after a man was shot dead by armed police during an operation at an address in Birmingham.

'A warrant was executed as part of an intelligence-led operation in Wheeleys Lane in Lee Bank just before 5am today.

Police shot dead a man in his 50s during a dawn raid on a property on Wheelys Lane, Birmingham, shortly before 5am today

The shooting happened inside this apartment complex on Wheeleys Lane, Birmingham

The Independent Office for Police Conduct has launched an investigation into today's shooting

'A man, in his 50s, was shot and died a short time later at the scene.

'The area is currently cordoned off.

'Officers' body worn video has been downloaded.

'The matter has been referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.'

Armed officers continued to patrol the scene several hours after this morning's shooting

Forensics officers were busy at the scene examining the evidence

The IOPC said it was unable to comment on whether the dead man was armed.

'A man in his 50s was shot and died a short time later at the scene,' West Midlands Police said.

Speaking at the scene, IOPC commissioner Derrick Campbell said body-worn video footage from the officers which captured the incident - including the gunshot - was being reviewed.

He added that the area was being forensically examined as part of the inquiry and that the officers involved had been taken to a 'neutral police station' for debriefing.

Mr Campbell said: 'This morning, police were carrying out the execution of a warrant to try and arrest the individual.

'They notified my office just before 6am that an officer had discharged their weapon and someone had been shot.

'My team deployed to the scene.

'By that time the person had died at the scene.'

He added: 'My team of investigators are inside.

'I've just been upstairs to have a look at what is going on and the forensics are going on at the moment.'

Friends of Mr Smith, pictured, paid tribute to him on social media after hearing about his death

The Independent Office for Police Complaints is investigating Mr Smith's death

Giving further details, Mr Campbell said: 'We know the individual was in his 50s, we know so far one round was fired.

'As we speak, my investigators have downloaded the body-worn footage.

'My understanding at this stage is it has captured everything that took place during the incident - including the shot - that's my understanding.

'We are viewing the footage to see what takes place.'

He said: 'There were, within close proximity, in region of six police officers.

'We know from early indications there were two officers standing in front of the door.

'That's as much as I can say at this moment in time.'

He was unable to confirm whether the shooting happened within a flat or a communal area, given what stage the investigation was at, but said it had been contained 'inside the block'.

West Midlands Ambulance Service said it was called to reports of a gunshot incident at the address at 5.04am today.

The service sent an ambulance, two paramedic officers and a trauma doctor to the scene.

A spokesman said: 'On arrival, crews discovered a man in cardiac arrest.

'CPR was already being performed, which ambulance staff took over and also administered advanced life support.

'However, despite everyone's best efforts it sadly became apparent nothing could be done to save him and he was confirmed dead at the scene.'

One local resident, who did not wish to be named, said: 'There were about five police vans parked up at either end of the street when I got up this morning.

'Its terribly sad that someone has lost their life. The police will have some questions to answer, you can't just go around shooting people.

'It will be interesting to learn what the circumstances are. I'm just shocked by it all. The place has been swarming with cops all morning.'

A student, who did not want to be named, said: 'If I go out at night there are sometimes people, tall people around who I think smoke drugs. I generally don't go out at night around here.

'Once when I was going to Tesco I got hit by an egg, it is not so safe here sometimes. I'm not surprised about what happened today, the police are always coming around here looking for drug dealers.'

Another resident said: 'I haven't heard anything really, I've been here a couple of years now and it seems a lot goes on a night around here, a lot of things seem to happen which are drug related.

'A few nights ago there were loads of cars driving fast up and down the street outside and when I looked outside I could see light signalling coming from one of the flats and a car parked in the car park. I've worked in Moss Side in Manchester and recognise that as a sign of drug dealing.

'I don't know if its connected to the man getting shot but there was a cannabis farm on the fourth floor which was busted by cops a while ago and this guy who died lived on the fourth floor.'

This is the fourth time since 2017 that West Midlands Police has discharged a firearm on operations.

It is the second fatal shooting this year involving the force's armed officers after 31-year-old Sean Fitzgerald was shot once in the chest during an incident in Coventry in January.

Before 2017, nobody had been shot by West Midlands Police since 2000.
A middle-aged man yesterday attacked more than a dozen pupils outside a primary school in northern China.

The suspect, 54, was captured at the scene after the bloody attack during lunch time in Tangshan, Hebei Province.

No fatalities have been reported. At least 17 children were 'harmed' and they are now in stable condition, according to the local government.

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Footage circulating online shows a man, believed to be the perpetrator, lying on a street with blood stains next to him. Schoolchildren were wounded in an attack in China yesterday

Another video clip shows the man, thought to be the suspect, being tackled at the scene

The incident took place at 13:26pm yesterday outside the Guanghua Avenue Primary School in the city's Fengrun District, the district's press office said in a social media statement.

The children were going back to school after the lunch break when they were assaulted, the statement said.

Police were dispatched to the scene at once, and the injured pupils were immediately taken to the hospital, the authority said.

One video shows schoolchildren crying in a classroom after the shocking incident as their teacher console them. At least 17 children were 'harmed', according to the local government

Authorities said the wounded youngsters were immediately taken to the hospital and are now in stable condition. Social media footage appears to show medics treating the pupils

The culprit has been identified as a local resident named Cui Zhengjiang. Police are yet to reveal his motives.

The Tangshan authority did not explain how the children were attacked. The official statement only said they were 'harmed'.

But according to Hong Kong-based news outlet HK01, boys and girls were slashed and the suspect had chosen his targets randomly.

Footage circulating on social media shows a man, believed to be the perpetrator, being arrested by police on a blood-stained street.

Other clips show a teacher consoling crying pupils and hospital staff treating wounded children.

Tangshan is a major city in the province of Hebei near Beijing and has nearly eight million residents.

Police are carrying out further investigation into the case.

It appears news reports and social media posts related to the incident have been censored in mainland China.

The attack occurred yesterday in Tangshan (pictured) in northern China's Hebei Province

Tangshan is a major city in Hebei Province near Beijing and has nearly eight million residents

Violent crime is rare in China but there has been a series of knife and axe attacks in recent years, many targeting children.

Last month, a 49-year-old school worker injured 20 children with a hammer inside a primary school in Beijing. Three children suffered serious injuries.

Also last month, a Chinese court executed a farmer who attacked 12 children with a kitchen knife at a kindergarten in southern China two years ago.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been criticized after she appeared to slam New Zealand's PM Jacinda Ardern for offering 'thoughts & prayers' to the victims of today's massacre.

Sharing a clip of Ardern speaking about the deadly terror attack, she asked: 'What good are your thoughts & prayers when they don't even keep the pews safe?'

The New York congresswoman also said she did not need to 'imagine being told your house of faith isn't safe anymore' because it had happened so many times before.

She then referenced the 2015 Charleston church shooting, in which nine people were killed, the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue attack, where eleven died, and the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting where 26 lost their lives.

Although she later clarified that she was criticizing the National Rifle Association rather than Ardern, her comments were widely condemned.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been criticized after she appeared to slam New Zealand's PM Jacinda Ardern for offering 'thoughts & prayers' to the victims of today's massacre

Sharing a clip of Ardern speaking about the deadly terror attack, AOC asked: 'What good are your thoughts & prayers when they don't even keep the pews safe?'

Tim Young said: 'If one of your first 1000 thoughts after a horrific mass shooting is to go dunk on a person, a religious belief or an organization on Twitter, you should delete your account.'

Chet Cannon added: 'These poor, innocent people were murdered by a despicable terrorist in their house of prayer, and you choose to denigrate prayer in the aftermath? What is wrong with you?'

Maria Pia tweeted: 'Just wow. Incredible nasty thing to say after a tragedy.'

Ardern had said in the clip that 'my thoughts, and I'm sure the thoughts of all New Zealanders are with those who have been affected, and also with the families'.

Following the backlash, Ocasio-Cortez added: '("Thoughts and prayers" is reference to the NRAs phrase used to deflect conversation away from policy change during tragedies. Not directed to PM Ardern, who I greatly admire.)'

She later clarified that the she was criticizing the National Rifle Association, rather than Ardern (pictured). She said: '("Thoughts and prayers" is reference to the NRAs phrase used to deflect conversation away from policy change during tragedies)'

Her comments were widely condemned, with some accusing her of 'denigrating prayer'

She also said that the community must 'come together, fight for each other, & stand up for neighbors' while tackling 'dehumanizing stereotypes'.

Gunman Brenton Tarrant stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island about 1.30pm, killing 41 people inside.

A second attack at another mosque nearby claimed the lives of seven more, while the 49th died in hospital.

Ahead of the attack, Tarrant shared a 74-page manifesto on Twitter in which he declared himself to be a white supremacist Trump supporter.

The 28-year-old terrorist claimed he chose to use a gun over other weapons because it would spark a debate around the second amendment, which he hoped would in turn spark a civil war in the U.S.

The Democrat also said that the community must 'come together, fight for each other, & stand up for neighbors' while tackling 'dehumanizing stereotypes'
A horrified survivor of the New Zealand terror attack has told how a man tackled the gunman and stole one of his weapons before running away.

Syed Mazharuddin was praying on Friday at the Linwood Masjid mosque in Christchurch when he heard gunshots right in front of him.

He said he saw the shooter wearing protective gear and firing wildly before a young man attempted to tackle the gunman.

Syed Mazharuddin (pictured) was praying on Friday at the Linwood Masjid mosque in Christchurch when he heard gunshots right in front of him

'He saw an opportunity and pounced and took his gun,' Mr Mazharuddin told The NZ Herald.

The young hero took the gun out of the shooter's hands and attempted to defend people in the mosque but couldn't figure out how to use the weapon, he said.

'The hero tried to chase and he couldn't find the trigger in the gun... he ran behind him but there were people waiting for him in the car and he fled,' Mr Mazharuddin added.

A white supremacist shooter is believed to have filmed himself (pictured) gunning down dozens of worshippers as he stormed through a mosque

The shooter's weapons were marked with the names of other people who have carried out attacks

The alleged gunman taking for his Facebook livestream before the Christchurch mosque shooting

Mr Mazharuddin said he tried to take cover when he noticed the gunman come in through the main entrance door where 60 to 70 people were praying.

He said the gunman then opened fire on elderly people who were praying inside the mosque.

Mr Mazharuddin witnessed one of his friends die in the brazen attack after they were shot in the chest and head.

A white Australian right-wing terrorist who livestreamed his sickening shooting spree on Facebook is one of three people arrested over dual mosque attacks which left 49 dead and 48 injured on New Zealands 'darkest day'.

Three shootings have taken place in Christchurch on Friday afternoon, two at mosques and another at Christchurch Hospital

Witnesses inside the mosque reported seeing 15 people being shot, including children

The shooter, who identified himself on Twitter as 'Brenton Tarrant' from Grafton, New South Wales, stormed into Masjid Noor Mosque in Christchurch around 1.40pm local time, gunning down dozens while hundreds of worshipers took part in Friday prayer.

'The guy was wearing like an army [suit]. He had a big gun and lots of bullets. He came through and started shooting everyone in the mosque, everywhere,' Ahmad Al-Mahmoud told Stuff.

'They had to smash the door - the glass from the window and the door - to get everyone out.

'We were trying to get everyone to run away from this area. I ran away from the car park, jumping through the back [yard] of houses.'

Al-Mahmoud said the man was 'wearing a helmet' and must have fired 'hundreds' of gunshots.

After retrieving one of at least six assault rifles stored in his car, he walked up to the front door and began firing at the first person he saw

Shooters rampage began when he got into his car wearing military-style body armour and a helmet saying 'let's get this party started'

A man dressed in 'army' gear entered Noor Mosque in Christchurch around 1.40pm local time opening fire while hundreds of people were taking part in Friday prayer

Another survivor, identified only as Nour, said the gunman shot multiple worshipers outside before carrying out his rampage inside the mosque where he shot people indiscriminately.

Nour said he was able to flee the carnage by jumping through a broken window.

A sickening 17-minute video of the unfolding horror shows the self-confessed white supremacist dressed in army fatigues firing mercilessly at people scrambling to flee, and calmly reloading when he runs out of bullets.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder. He is expected to face court on Saturday.

Three of the arrests are believed to be directly related to the attacks, with the fourth's involvement still being determined.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself. A 49th died in hospital.

A further 48 people were rushed to Christchurch Hospital with gunshot wounds, 20 in a critical condition. A dozen operating theatres were opened, with many victims requiring multiple life-saving surgeries

FACT BOX TITLE A 28-year-old Australian man entered a mosque in central Christchurch on Friday afternoon and opened fire on people gathered inside the building - killing at least 49 people and leaving more than 20 seriously injured. This is how the incident unfolded in local New Zealand Time. 1.40pm: First reports of a shooting at a mosque in central Christchurch. A man entered the mosque with an automatic weapon and opened fire on people inside. 2.11pm: Police confirmed they were attending an 'evolving situation' in Christchruch. Gunshots are heard in the area outside Masid Al Noor Mosque on Deans Avenue. Witnesses reported hearing multiple gunshots, with one saying she attempted to give CPR to an injured person but they died. 2.17pm: Multiple schools went into lockdown in Christchurch. People who were in the mosque began to leave covered in blood and with gunshot wounds. 2.47pm: First reports of six people dead, three in a critical condition and three with serious injuries. 2.54pm: Police Commissioner Mike Bush said the situation is 'serious and evolving' and told people to remain indoors and stay off the streets. The Canterbury District Health Board activated its mass casualty plan. 3.12pm: New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern cancelled her afternoon arrangements. 3.21pm: Christchurch City Council locked down many of their central city buildings. 3.33pm: First reports of a bomb in a beige Subaru that crashed on Strickland Street, three kilometres from the shootings. 3.40pm: Police confirmed there were multiple simultaneous attacks on mosques in Christchurch. 3.45pm: Reports of multiple shots fired at the shootings, which are ongoing. 3.59pm: 300 people were reported to be inside the moque. 4.00pm: One person is confirmed to be in custody but there are warnings there may be others out there. Police commissioner Mike Bush urges Muslims across New Zealand to stay away from their local mosque. 4.10pm: Jacinda Ardern calls Friday 'one of New Zealand's darkest days'. 5.27pm: First reports of a second shooting. A witness said a Muslim local chased the shooters at the mosque in Linwood, firing in 'self defence'. 5.31pm: Four people are confirmed to be in custody. including one woman. Multiple fatalities were reported. 7.07pm: It was confirmed an AR15 rifle was used in the attack. 7.20pm: Dunedin Street was cordoned off. Reports the attackers planned to also target the Al Huda Mosque. 7.26pm: At least 40 people were confirmed dead, Jacinda Ardern confirmed. 7.34pm: Confirmed that 48 people were being treated in hospital. 7.46pm: Britomart train station in central Auckland was evacuated after bags were found unattended. The bags were deemed not suspicious. 8.35pm: New Zealand's Government confirmed this is the first time ever the terror level has been lifted from low to high. 9.03pm: Police Commissioner Mike Bush confirms that the death toll has risen to 49. He also confirmed that a man in his late twenties was charged with murder. Advertisement

Pictured: Grieving members of the public after the shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand
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Police have made eight arrests at a student protest in London as thousands of students trooped on to the streets for a second time to demand that politicians take action on climate change.

Hundreds of placard-waving youngsters ditched their lessons and flocked to London's Parliament Square this morning to try to grab the attention of MPs.

They chanted 'this is what democracy looks like' while primary school children, who were at the protest with their parents and holding handmade placards, shouted 'climate change, boo!'

Protesters were pictured blocking the traffic across London's busy Westminster Bridge this afternoon. They gathered in the road while three teenagers laid down wearing surgical masks

A boy, aged 17, was arrested at the Parliamentary estate at around 2pm on suspicion of trespass into a protected site. Security at Westminster has been heightened this week due to protests against the potential delay to the UK's withdrawal from the EU

The walkouts took place in more than 100 UK towns and cities, including Kent, Edinburgh and Bristol, as part of a global day of action inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg who protests every Friday outside Sweden's parliament.

Police confirmed a total of eight people were arrested, with seven arrested for highway obstruction.

An eighth protester, a boy aged 17, was arrested at the Parliamentary estate at around 2pm on suspicion of trespass into a protected site.

The protests drew immediate criticism from Education Secretary Damian Hinds.

I want children in school, and I want children learning to be the engineers, the climate scientists, the geographers of the future, he said.

Im delighted those children are taking a keen interest. But I would rather they were in school.

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One protester refused to walk to a police van after being arrested following a sit down protest. Hundreds of placard-waving youngsters ditched their lessons for the climate protests this afternoon

Another protester is carried to a police van in London. An Opinium poll suggested that a majority of the public backed the walkout

One protester is carried to a police van after being arrested for blocking a bridge. Education secretary Damian Hinds disapproved of the children missing school

Hundreds of placard-waving youngsters ditched their lessons and flocked to London's Parliament Square this morning to try to grab the attention of MPs. Placards read 'denial is not a policy' and 'system change not climate change'

This young woman holds up a protest sign complete with a quote from the play An Inspector Calls, often studied for GCSE English. Scores of schoolchildren around the world have walked out of their classrooms to protest

The young protesters were pictured in London's Trafalgar Square holding up protest placards, with one reading 'socialist change, not climate change'. The global day of action was inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg

Officers from London's Met Police are pictured supervising the protest. Although climate change is the cause which unites the protesters, some placards in London were emblazoned with socialism endorsements

The students walked out of their classrooms and took to the streets across the world. Some 2,000 rallies are expected to happen globally including 100 events in UK towns and cities (Parliament Square pictured)

Some students were pictured standing on the Victoria & Albert memorial at Buckingham Palace, while others held signs. One protester's sign read: 'I'd be in school if the [Earth] was cool'

The young protesters are pictured on the Victoria & Albert memorial at Buckingham Palace this afternoon. They trooped on to the streets for a second time to demand that politicians take action on climate change

Strikes are taking place in over 120 countries around the world. Here, a massive demonstration is taking place in Milan outside the iconic Duomo gothic cathedral

And thousands of students took to the streets in Lisbon this morning in protest. The global action day is inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg who protests every Friday outside Sweden's parliament

Who is Greta Thunberg? Pig-tailed Swedish schoolgirl, 16, who skips classes every Friday in personal war on climate change Greta Thunberg is seen on stage as she takes part in a protest calling for urgent measures to combat climate change, in Hamburg, Germany earlier this month Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old pig-tailed Swedish schoolgirl who has been obsessively researching climate change for seven years. Since last summer, she has been skipping school every Friday to sit on the steps of the Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, with a home-made sign that reads 'Skolstrejk for Klimatet' (School strike for the climate). She grows her own vegetables, refuses air travel and luxury hotels, even if the only option is a 32-hour train journey and a tent. She accused the attendees at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poland in December 2018 of leaving the burden of climate change with future generations. Advertisement

Many politicians, including environment secretary Michael Gove and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn backed the 'inspirational strikers'.

Greta Breveglieri, 21, a political science student at Univesita Statale Di Milano, travelled from Italy for the London demonstration.

She said: 'The protest in February was really big, but today is way more important and has been way more publicised. There's been a lot of momentum, so I think it's going to be big.

'To put it bluntly, we're here because our world is going to be destroyed. We have to change the pace of our culture, our society, our politics, our economics.

'We have been silent for too long. There have been singular voices or movements that have always struggled against climate change, and for the environment and against pollution.

'But this kind of global and coordinated and spontaneous, and especially youth movement, I've never seen this movement before.'

Thousands of students defied warnings from teachers and politicians when they bunked off on February 15 and the organisers predict that even more will skip classes to protest today.

While the youngsters may not have the support of Downing Street and education secretary Damian Hinds, who disapproves of the children missing school, an Opinium poll suggested that a majority of the public backed the walkout.

Although climate change is the cause which unites the protesters, some placards in London were emblazoned with socialism endorsements and some are campaigning for the voting age to be lowered to 16.

Their calls come after a UN report last year which warned that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate impacts become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action.

That includes cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12 years, and to zero by mid-century.

One young climate striker even climbed on top of a London traffic light. Many politicians, including environment secretary Michael Gove and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have already backed the 'inspirational strikers'

This is the second time students have defied warnings from teachers and politicians to skip class and take to the streets to protest about the climate change cause (Parliament Square pictured)

The protesters are pictured blocking a pedestrian crossing when the lights turned red in London this afternoon. The walkouts are taking place in more than 100 UK towns and cities

A large crowd gathered on Bristol's College Green as part of the worldwide walkout. Students in Japan, Australia and New Zealand are also expected to take part

The students' calls come after a UN report last year which warned that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels (Buckingham Palace pictured)

In London Joe Crabtree, 15, from south-west London, who is missing his GCSE mocks for the protest, said: 'I'm here today to send a clear message to Government that I'm fed up with inaction on climate change.

'I think they're not doing enough to curb the problem that is climate change, leaving it to the side like us with homework, hoping it will get done, but it's not being dealt with.'

In a video released ahead of Friday's strikes, Mr Gove tells students walking out of lessons and lectures to call for urgent action on cutting emissions: 'Dear school climate strikers, we agree.

'Collective action of the kind you're championing can make a difference, and a profound one.'

Mr Corbyn has also backed the strikers, tweeting: 'Thank you for standing up against climate change. You shouldn't have to pay the price for the mistakes of previous generations.'

The demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament soon marched the short walk to the Mall where they descended outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. One protester climbed up the Queen Victoria Memorial outside the palace

Students have had to wrap up warm to brave the chilly conditions in London today (Buckingham Palace pictured)

In Edinburgh, protesters demonstrate outside the Holyrood Scottish Parliament where temperatures sat at a biting 5C

Cat Smith, shadow minister for youth affairs, said Labour stands 'in solidarity' with young people across the UK taking action over the Government's lack of leadership on climate change.

She said: 'Today's strike demonstrates that young people care deeply about environmental issues and will use their collective power to bring about meaningful change.

'This should serve as a wake-up call to the political establishment that young people's views can no longer be ignored, and urgent action is needed to tackle the escalating ecological crisis.'

Anna Taylor, 17, from north London, co-founder of the UK Student Climate Network and one of the organisers of the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement, said the Government was failing to recognise the severity of the crisis.

'We're here because we feel betrayed and we don't feel we can trust them to protect our future, which is why we're having to go on strike to make our voices heard, and let them know that unless they change something we will keep striking until they consider our demands.

Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Canterbury, Kent. One boy in school uniform appears to have walked straight out of school

'They're failing to make environmental reform and environmental policy a priority, they focusing on economic policy and Brexit and failing to address the climate crisis facing us.

'Young people feel empowered by other young people, this is very much a student-led movement.

'It's something we all feel very passionate about, because it's personal to us, it's about our future. This is a broad movement and we are all striking in solidarity.

And United Nations climate change chief Patricia Espinosa said: 'What we're seeing is a clear message from youth throughout the world that nations must significantly increase their efforts to address climate change.

'Given the urgency the world faces, it's vital nations come up with more ambitious plans both this year and in 2020 as stated in the Paris Agreement.

'This is how we will not only reach our collective climate goals, but how we will build a cleaner, greener and more prosperous future for all people.'

Young demonstrators hold placards and shout slogans as they participate in a protest against climate change in Athens, regarded as the birthplace of democracy

In Warsaw, Poland, more youngsters wave placards on the day of environmental action, dubbed #FridayForFuture
Mathieu Biselx, the sole survivor of the Ben Nevis avalanche on Tuesday, has paid tribute to his three friends following their tragic death on the Scottish peak.

The 30-year-old took to Facebook on Thursday to share a photo of himself with Raphael Aymon, Cedric Ravimet and Adrien Robez-Masson at what appears to be a pub near Ben Nevis, ahead of their climb.

He also shared a heartfelt message: 'Thank you for your friendship! Have a nice trip to your new mountains.'

'Thank you for everything you have been for our community, for your inspiration. We will miss you.'

The Swiss climber concluded in his post: 'Thank you for accompanying me so far. My thoughts turn especially to your families.. We are all here for you! I'm wearing you in my heart forever!'

'Bon voyage for your new mountains': Sole survivor of Ben Nevis avalanche Mathieu Biselx, 30, (left) has paid tribute his friends, Raphael Aymon (second right), Cedric Ravimet (left) and Adrien Robez-Masson (second left), after their expedition on the mountain turned to tragedy

Mathieu (centre) took to Facebook on Thursday to share a photo of himself with his friends at what appears to be a pub near Ben Nevis, ahead of their climb. Pictured: Mr Biselx with Raphael Aymon (left), Cedric Ravimet (second left) and Adrien Robez-Masson (right)

Mr Biselx also shared a photo of himself with his friends at the top of a peak and in their climbing gear, before the tragic accident.

Mr Biselx is still in Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow where he is in a stable condition in intensive care

He is still in Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow where he is in a stable condition in intensive care.

Speaking from his hospital bed, the father-of-one said it was a 'miracle I am still alive' but said: 'My three closest friends are dead'.

Police confirmed one of the dead climbers, aged 43, was also Swiss and the others, aged 41 and 32, were French. The victims names have not yet been formally released, but Mr Biselx has named them in his post. Their next of kin have been informed.

The group were caught by the river of snow and ice in a gully on Ben Nevis as Storm Gareth blew in with strong winds on Tuesday morning, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in 'brutal conditions', a rescuer said.

Mr Biselx, father of a little girl, said the group arrived in Scotland on Sunday evening and the climb on Tuesday was their first excursion on the mountain.

The group were caught by the river of snow and ice in a gully on Ben Nevis as Storm Gareth blew in with strong winds on Tuesday morning, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in 'brutal conditions', a rescuer said (stock image of Ben Nevis)

Speaking from his hospital bed, Mathieu (pictured with his wife and daughter) said it was a 'miracle I am still alive' but said: 'My three closest friends are dead'

Talking to Swiss newspapers Le Nouvelliste and Tribune De Geneve, he said: 'We were not very high and all of a sudden we heard a noise. One of us yelled: 'Avalanche'.

'We got into a safe position but in two seconds we were swept away by heavy, compact snow. I felt myself fly through the rocks.'

Describing how he freed his head from the mass of snow, he said: 'I called my friends, I shouted. No response. Then I realised the magnitude of the drama.'

The friends, who lived near each other in the canton of Valais in Switzerland and were members of the same mountain club, were on a climbing holiday in Scotland.

Mr Biselx, President of the Club Alpin Suisse (CAS), in Sion, said: 'This trip was not organized by the CAS.

'My three friends proposed this trip because I have been going through a difficult time on a personal level. I finally agreed and we organized this trip around Christmas time.

Donald Paterson, deputy team leader of Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team (MRT) points to gully five on the north ridge of Ben Nevis where an avalanche took place

A diagram showing Number 5 Gully on Ben Nevis, where the avalanche struck on Tuesday

Mathieu Biselx, left, said the group's climb on Tuesday was their first excursion on the mountain. Pictured right: a climber on Ben Nevis prior to the avalanche

'We had dreamed of this trip for weeks. My three closest friends are deadIt's horrible. 'We arrived Sunday evening in Scotland. Our first trip into the mountains was on Tuesday.

'We knew the dangers. We consulted guides but it wasn't sufficient. We clearly had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a miracle I am still alive.

'I think of my friends and their families. It goes round and round in my head.'

Mr Biselx said: 'It's a terrible drama. Two died instantly, the third soon after. They were great people.

A police vehicle seen on standby at the Nevis Range Mountain Resort, where Britain's highest peak is located, following the tragic three deaths on the peak

He continued: 'Both my legs are seriously injured. 'My back, one shoulder and one arm are affected, but I'll get through it. While my friends... It's a terrible drama. 'It's terrible, they are no longer here. They will not see their family again.'

Club Alpin Suisse said in a statement: 'The Swiss Alpine Club is deeply saddened by the terrible news of the three members of the Sion Monte Rosa branch who died on Ben Nevis on Tuesday.

'We send all our sympathy and our most sincere condolences to the families and those close to those who died.

'Our thoughts are with Mathieu who survived the avalanche and who lost his three climbing companions.'

A climber walking on Ben Nevis on Tuesday prior to the avalanche which killed three people

Ben Nevis, near Fort William in the western Highlands, is a popular destination for experienced climbers, attracting 125,000 visitors each year.

Tuesday's incident follows two recent fatal accidents on the mountain, which at 1,345m is the UK's highest.

On New Year's Day, a 21-year-old German woman, who was a student at Bristol University, died after she fell from a ridge she had been climbing with three other people.

She had been hiking on what is known as the 'ledge route' when she fell around 500ft.

In December, Patrick Boothroyd, 21, from West Yorkshire, died after falling in the Tower Gully area.
Adorable footage shows the three-month-old polar bear cub take her first official swim and public outing since her birth at the The Berlin Tierpark zoo on December 1.

The cub, who remains unnamed, splashed around in the outdoor enclosure at the German zoo for the first time as the world watched through social media.

Footage shows the cub gaining confidence as her mother encourages her, and swimming farther at every attempt.

The bear is developing well, according to zoo keepers, who deemed the cub strong enough to venture to the outdoor area.

Venturing out of her indoor cage for the first time she enjoyed romping around with her mother Tonja and swimming in the enclosure's chilly pond.

The zoo says the cub will be now be allowed out daily with her mother for all to see, but that the cub may choose to remain inside the litter cave for long stretches if it is tired.

The female polar bear baby walks through enclosure at the Tierpark zoo in Berlin today as she is presented to the public for the first time

They said: 'From Saturday you also have the opportunity to see the two in the outdoor area.

'However, as such discovery tours are quite exhausting for small polar bears, the two may initially rest in the litter cave at regular intervals.'

The Tierpark has the same management as Berlin's other zoo, which was home to celebrity polar bear, Knut, whose fame landed him a Vanity Fair cover.

Running ahead: Tonja's baby clambers on in front of her keen to explore the bounds of her enclosure

Knut died prematurely from illness in 2011 at age 4.

The little polar bear was confirmed to be female after her first examination by the vets at the zoo in Berlin, Germany on February 14.

Berlin Tierpark zoo previously described the bear cub as having a 'loud voice and sharp claws.'

Tonja walks her baby through their outdoor enclosure, watching her every move as she encounters new dangers

The still unnamed bear, born December 1, 2018 at the Tierpark, looks delighted to be soaked through with the chilly water of her outdoor enclosure

Polar bears are natural swimmers and can swim for several hours at a time in the wild with their big paws helping them push their way through the water

Mum lends an encouraging nudge as the female cub attempts a longer swim without her help

On an adventure together: Tonja refuses to let the little one out of her sight during the time outside

Tonja has previously had two cubs who both died to ill health despite her caring approach

Like mother like daughter: The yet to be named cub follows in her mother Tonja's footsteps

Looking towards the water the cub contemplates making the leap into the unknown

The cub pokes its tongue out at her mother Tonja in an adorable moment in the outdoor enclosure

Emerged in the water the cub seems to be enjoying her first experience swimming while creating a splash

Thirsty cub returns to the water for a drink and appears to be looking at her own reflection

Teddy-bear-like cub plans her next move from a high rock as her mother hovers anxiously nearby

Although the wet fur may appear to be holding the cub back as it swims the thick coat is essential in keeping the animal warm while it swims in the icy waters of the Arctic Circle

Gleefully splashing the female polar bear baby swims with its mother Tonja through their enclosure at the Tierpark zoo in Berlin today

The cub dries off after a swim once again returning to her fluffy state as she stays close to her mum

Still needs a hug from mum: After an adventurous afternoon the cub returns to the safety of its mother to keep warm and feed

Shake it off: The female polar bear baby stands in the water, acclimatising to its outdoor enclosure

Adorable moment the bears almost touch noses as mother Tonja reassures her cub

The adventurous cub climbs rocks twice its size with sharp claws and large paws helping maintain its balance

Ferocious mother Tonja throws a warning stare at the photographer as he snaps long awaited pics of her baby

Zoo director Andreas Knieriem (pictured) said the as yet unnamed bear is 'cheery and strong' and that vets are satisfied with her development so far
John Ferdinand Thompson, 23, was charged with extortion, fraud, stalking and sexual cyber harassment

An Ohio man has been charged with extortion and sexual cyber harassment after a University of Central Florida student complained explicit images of herself were being shared online and used to bribe her.

John Ferdinand Thompson, 23, turned himself into police Wednesday when law enforcement on the college campus got in contact.

The suspect is the ex-boyfriend of the college student's sister and said he targeted her via Snapchat because his former girlfriend refused to share similar content.

Law enforcement claims Thompson posted on 4chan.org looking for a hacker last May.

Investigators said the hacker got the female victim's Snapchat information by saying she had his old number and he needed her login details because he was unable to access his own account.

Snapchat recommends in their Safety Centre tips that under no circumstances should someone share their login details with another person - especially a stranger.

They also advise not to share it with applications or websites and suggest using a different password for every service.

After the victim shared the private information, she was blocked from her account and started to receive messages demanding sexually explicit photographs and video in exchange for the new password.

He got a hacker to obtain Snapchat login details of a University of Central Florida (pictured in Orlando) student whose sister he used to date

Hacker said he needed her private information because she had his old phone number and he was blocked from his Snapchat account. She was then blocked from her account and received messages demanding sexually explicit photos and video in exchange for the new password

Friends told her they had received some of the pictures and the victim learned months after that how they had also been shared on a website.

The victim told police sexually explicit images from her Snapchat account were being uploaded online.

Although Snapchat images are designed to disappear, memories is an in-app gallery backs up to servers and can be accessed by swiping up from the camera screen. They can then be downloaded or shared at any time.

There's also nothing to stop people who view the content from screen grabbing it.

Thompson allegedly threatened to send pics to her parents if she didn't continue and campus police got in contact with him

A day after the victim's complaint to cops, someone who was later identified as Thompson texted her a photograph and proof he had identified her father's Facebook account and her mother's phone number.

An affidavit states he threatened to send the image to the victim's family.

UCF police got in contact with Thompson via text messages after receiving a complaint from the victim. The charging document states the suspect called his ex's sibling to confess what he'd done once law enforcement revealed he had been talking to them and was caught out.

Police tracked him down and he turned himself in in Orlando but later bailed out of Orange County Jail (pictured). He allegedly said he did it because he ex never sent him explicit content

Thompson turned himself into police in Orlando and was detained at Orange County Jail but has since bailed out.

Cops said the content had garnered 2,000 views from 720 users on the website and claimed Thompson told them he made it public because he enjoyed seeing the viewing figures rise.

He was also charged with stalking and fraud  computer crime.

The university's law enforcement unit said it wasn't the only case they'd seen like this.

'Increasingly, we're hearing about overly trusting and sometimes reckless interactions among strangers via texts, apps and social media,' UCF Police Chief Carl Metzger told Orlando Sentinel. 'The unfortunate reality is that there are bad people out there seeking to prey on victims for personal gain or satisfaction.'

Snapchat declined to comment.
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As the nation slowly recovers from the devastating 'bomb cyclone' that has wreaked havoc in 25 states and killed a state patrol officer in Colorado this week, the vicious storm is now pushing eastwards where it'll bring heavy rain, thunderstorms, floods, and an arctic cold front.

By Friday afternoon 2,500 people were urged to evacuate along the eastern Nebraska rivers including the Missouri, Platte, and Elkhorn, that swelled and washed over communities with muddy water.

Douglas County Commissioner Mary Ann Borgeson said 'Things are moving and changing at a rapid pace,' and residents need to follow instructions before the fast-rising waters get to them.

The Missouri river reached a moderate flood stage at nearly 32 feet on Friday in Omaha and is expected to crest at nearly 34 feet on Monday, as per the National Weather Service.

Flooding isn't the only problem the low pressure storm is behind, the 'bomb cyclone' also created nine tornadoes that ripped through Ohio, Kentucky, Alabama and Michigan on Thursday, in addition to hurricane-force gusting winds and 49 reports of hail stretching from the Midwest to the Gulf Coast.

On Wednesday into Thursday it propelled Winter Storm Ulmer to dump snow and ice in Wyoming, Colorado and Western Nebraska, crippling the states by closing roads and schools and killing one.

The National Weather Service says the system is pushing eastwards and is swirling over the Midwest where it'll impact southern Minnesota and parts of Illinois, including Chicago, on Friday, with rain and snow.

But meteorologist Paul Fajman in Omaha says the effects aren't expected to be as bad as what was seen farther west and south and will bring heavy rain and a dip in temperatures from Friday through Sunday.

The cold blast will stretch from the East through the Gulf Coast and Florida.

The 'bomb cyclone' late winter storm is headed to the East Coast after impacting 70million in 25 states. By Friday it created massive flooding and high waters in Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. A man works his way through a flooded Galena Street as the Pecatonica River continues to rise in Darlington, Wisconsin on Thursday

A semi truck and trailer are swept off the road by floodwaters Thursday, March 13, 2019, in Arlington, Nebraska as a result of the bomb cyclone storm that's spiraling eastwards

The swollen Pecatonica River drowned communities and roads in downtown Darlington, Wisconsin on Thursday. The National Weather Service has issued a flood warning or flood watch for about two-thirds of the state

The swollen Pecatonica River inundated the city of Darlington, Wisconsin Thursday, drowning the town in muddy water

Locals were evacuated from their homes in the dangerous fast-rising floodwaters on Thursday in Ashland, Nebraska. The eastern part of the state struggled with snow while the western area froze in blizzard-like conditions

Rising waters in the Elkhorn River south of Arlington, Nebraska flooded cabins in the eastern part of the state on Thursday

The National Weather Service shared this map showing the massive river flooding caused by the bomb cyclone storm, inundating the Midwest including the Missouri and Mississippi River basins

This map shows the rain and thunderstorms that will impact the East Coast and the Gulf Coast from Friday to Saturday as the bomb cyclone swirls eastwards

The storm is currently above the Midwest, drenching the states in rain and leading to massive flooding, including in the Mississippi River.

In Nebraska and Iowa, residents were forced to evacuate their homes and their roads were inundated with muddy water. Local farmers worried the water would drown their livestock and ruin their crop and streets were lost underwater.

In Missouri the Platte, Elkhorn and Missouri rivers flooded by Friday creating high waters.

Flooding also drowned the state of Wisconsin, making several highways unpassable. In Fond du Lac, rescuers were on the scene to move residents to higher ground after the Lac River flooded due to an ice jam.

The National Weather Service has issued a flood warning or flood watch for about two-thirds of Wisconsin.

Further west snow persisted and crippled North Dakota, where no travel was advised Friday morning in areas near Fargo, prompting the closure of two interstates.

In South Dakota, schools in Rapid City are closed as authorities dig out from a blizzard. Flooding on the other side of the state prompted officials in Sioux Falls to go door-to-door and evacuate residents from homes.

As the late winter storm heads east, western states are still reeling from the blizzard left in its wake. South Dakota residents pictured above trying to free a vehicle from a snow drift in north Rapid City on Thursday

A pair of North Dakota Department of Transportation snowplows clear the westbound lane of I-94 on Thursday after North Dakota transportation officials closed sections of major interstates due to poor visibility caused by blowing snow

City of Scottsbluff, Nebraska plows work to clear snow from Broadway on Wednesday as the community was forced to evacuate

The blowing snow was so strong Mount Rushmore was barely visible on Wednesday in Keystone, South Dakota thanks to the bomb cyclone's rattling storm that created blizzards, floods and tornadoes impacting more than 25 states

A string of wrecked vehicles sit on an overpass over Interstate 70 as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over Aurora, Colorado as the bomb cyclone passed through

Trucks pictured above lined up and paralyzed when the blizzard blasted through Colorado (above) and Wyoming

In Illinois dark clouds took over the skies along as officials warned of 40mph winds, leading to the cancellation of 400 flights at O'hare and Midway international airports. A tornado warning was set in Illinois and Indiana on Thursday but were cancelled by evening.

The massive storm left 25,500 people without power in Colorado by Friday morning after about 400,000 people across the state lost power on Thursday. The blizzard dumped up from seven inches of snow to a whopping 20 inches recorded in Nederland.

The storm turned deadly in Colorado, killing a Colorado State Patrol corporal Daniel Groves, 52, who was struck and killed be a vehicle that slipped off a highway road.

By Friday the Midwest was preparing for massive flood warnings from snow melt and rain.

'Flooding of small streams and poor drainage urban areas continued over far southeast South Dakota, northeast Nebraska and northwest Iowa. Frozen ground and high water levels in main river systems was slowing the decrease in floodwaters in many locations,' the National Weather Service said.

'Excessive runoff from previous rainfall (and) snow melt will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other drainage areas and low lying spots,' the service added.

Power lines were downed in Paducah, Kentucky on Thursday March 14 after a tornado ripped through the rural town

The vicious twister wreaked havoc along a five-square-mile radius, swirling along a 17 miles long and 300 yards wide path

Debris litters a field after the tornado hit McCracken County, Kentucky, as a farmer assesses the damage

Homes and farms were destroyed when the twister spiraled through rural McCracken County on Thursday

Several trailers were damaged when the powerful storm hit a mobile home park in Genesee township, Michigan as well on Thursday, one of the nine tornadoes that ripped through the U.S. within 24 hours

There were no injuries reported in the Michigan twister that moved at 60mph and stopped swirling at 7.04pm on Thursday, a trailer home destroyed by the tornado pictured above

In Kentucky the storm created a devastating tornado in McCracken County where one person was injured and five square miles were heavily damaged after the 145mph winds whipped through.

A state of emergency was declared in the state as police went door to door to check on residents after the twister disappeared.

The storm has been given a preliminary rating of EF2 by the National Weather Service due to wind speeds of up to 125mph causing considerable damage as it ripped through from 9.18am to 9.34am near Paducah.

The tornados path was 17 miles long and 300 yards wide when it hit Blandville Road, west of Lovelaceville.

As the low pressure storm heads eastwards it brings with it an arctic cold front, lowering temperatures as it swirls towards Canada

The storm will create some breaks in the Midwest and East coast. While New York will enjoy high temperatures on Friday, it'll dip again as the storm nears

Yet another tornado ripped through Shiawassee County, Michigan. There were no injuries reported in the twister that moved at 60mph and stopped swirling at 7.04pm.

A bomb cyclone occurs when there is a rapid pressure drop of at least 24 millibars (which means atmospheric pressure) over the course of 24 hours. This is known as bombogenesis.

The storm, dropped 33 millibars since Tuesday morning and continued to strengthen.

The National Weather service says the powerful 'bomb cyclone' will scatter showers and thunderstorms in the east from Friday to Saturday. At the same time it's causing 'major to historic' flooding throughout the Missouri and Mississippi River basins.
A newborn baby has been saved after being abandoned in a rubbish dump with her umbilical cord still attached in southern China.

The baby, a girl, was found wrapped in a red plastic bag by a passerby who went to chuck garbage.

The passerby heard cries from the waste and initially thought it was a kitten. After searching through a pile of rubbish with a torch, she was shocked to find a baby.

The girl was thrown away by her parents right after being born in a rubbish dump in China. She was wrapped in a red plastic bag (circled) before being discovered by a passerby in Foshan

Police are currently looking for the baby's parents.

The incident took place on Sunday night in the city of Foshan in Guangdong Province, according to the police.

The girl was found in the rubbish dump next to a park in the city's Ronggui area, the police said in an online statement.

After finding the crying newborn, the resident, known by his surname Li, carried the baby out of the rubbish dump with the help of several other passersby.

She also took off her coat and put it around the baby to keep her warm.

The eyewitnesses then called the police.

After finding the crying newborn, the passerby carried the baby out of the rubbish dump with the help of several others. She took off her coat and put it around the baby to keep her warm.

Police officers rushed to the scene and called for an ambulance.

The girl was taken to the Qirong Hospital for treatment.

Doctors at the hospital said the baby was in shock and had an unstable heart rate when she was sent in, according to Guangzhou Daily.

She was also said to have an excess of acid in her blood after being trapped in a plastic bag.

Doctors gave overnight emergency treatment to the girl and she is said to be in stable condition now.

The baby is under hospital observation, it is reported.

Police are investigating the case. They have asked the public to provide leads on the baby's parents in a social media post.
The parents of a five-week-old baby have been arrested in connection with the girl's death earlier this year, police said Wednesday.

Gregory Brandt and Jasmine Rugga brought their daughter from the family's home to a California hospital on January 26, the Menifee Police Department said.

Despite medical staff's efforts to resuscitate the girl, she was pronounced dead at the hospital.

Gregory Brandt, 33, and Jasmine Rugga, 27, brought their daughter from the family's home to a local hospital on January 26

Evidence led authorities to believe foul play may have been involved in the child's death and an investigation was starte

Evidence led authorities to believe foul play may have been the cause of the child's death and an investigation was begun.

Brandt, 33, was arrested on suspicion of homicide on March 11 while Rugga, 27, was arrested on suspicion of child endangerment the same day according to KTLA.

Brandt is being held on $1,000,000 bail, according to Menifee Police. Rugga's bail was set at $35,000.

No further details about the evidence or the injuries to the child were released.

Brandt is being held on $1,000,000 bail. He posted on Facebook about his devastation at the death of his daughter

Gregory Brandt, 33, and Jasmine Rugga, 27, and pictured with their baby girl who was born at the end of December

Ruggas bail was set at $35,000 and she too found time to post at her grief on her baby's death

Despite the medical staff's efforts to resuscitate the girl, she was pronounced dead at the hospital

Brandt posted on Facebook last week where he told of his feelings of loss at his daughter's death.

'Every single morning I wake up, I miss my daughter so much that i wake up in tears. Everyday gets harder to go through and just live when I've lost a part of me. Its amazing how much support we have gotten from people we never expected, and yet the people we expected to stick with us through this tragedy have gone ghost.

'I want to say thank you to those who have stuck by my girl and mines side to lift up our spirits despite me asking for privacy because in reality, the real ones go beyond what you say and do what they need to make sure their family is ok. We've accepted any and all support with open arms during this time. Jasmine and I have been overwhelmed with emotions that are still very much in shambles, but were trying to reach a better tomorrow. Time is the master, time can be a disaster,' he wrote.

Wife, Rugga, also posted her thoughts on Facebook last month: 'Its 3 in the morning and I cant sleep. Im just wide awake remembering what I have lost. She was so tiny and so innocent, I really dont understand why this happened to my little family.... I miss her cries. I miss her smile. I miss all the serious faces she use to make. I miss holding her. I miss sleeping with her. I truly miss my daughter everyday.'
An Indiana homeowner has told how he found a dead intruder trapped underneath his 900lb antique safe.

George Hollingsworth of Marion called local authorities on March 12 to tell them that he believed someone had broken into his garage as its door frame was damaged.

The next day, while cleaning to see if anything was stolen, Hollingsworth noticed that his huge antique floor safe had been knocked over.

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George Hollingsworth of Marion called local authorities on March 12 to tell them that he believed someone had broken into his garage

The homeowner soon noticed the body lying underneath it.

Police identified the man as 28-year-old Jeremiah A. Disney of Marion (pictured in 2011)

'My mind couldn't comprehend it. This can't be real. It's like some strange tale,' Hollingsworth explained to Fox 59.

He continued: 'I came in and told my wife, "I think we've got a dead body out there." She thought I was kidding.'

Hollingsworth's wife called 911 and police arrived at the scene around 8.20pm on March 13. They initially believed that the man was still alive.

'The officer walked in and said, 'Buddy. Hey buddy,'" added Hollingsworth. 'Im was thinking hes dead. Come on now.'

Fire crews then arrived and were able to pull the disfigured corpse from under the safe.

Hollingsworth is still trying to understand why the man was adamant on trying to steal from the safe, which he said was empty at the time.

Fire crews arrived and were able to pull the disfigured corpse from under the safe (seen above) on March 13

Jeremiah A. Disney (pictured) is a father-of-one who has a history of offenses, having been charged with domestic battery, criminal confinement and interference with the reporting of a crime in 2011

Hollingsworth noticed that his huge antique floor safe had been knocked over. He then saw the body underneath the safe

He said: 'I dont know. I dont understand why they would do that. Theres nothing in it. Its empty. Its just one my dad had.'

The homeowner shared that he did not know the man but wishes that he had been able to get out alive.

'I would have rather seen him steal stuff and get out than die like that. What a horrible way to die,' Hollingsworth asserted.

Police identified the man as 28-year-old Jeremiah A. Disney of Marion. The father-of-one has a history of offenses, having been charged with domestic battery, criminal confinement and interference with the reporting of a crime in 2011, Kokomo Perspective reports.

His Facebook lists him as being a former lead programmer at Crossroads.
The cold case of a female Navy recruit's vicious murder in 1984 has finally been cracked three decades later thanks to a match found on a genealogy database.

Minnesota woman Pamela Cahanes was just 25 when she was beaten and strangled to death, two days after graduating from Orlando Naval Training Center in August of 1984. Her white uniform was found strewn inches away from her body.

Her killer went free for 34 years after investigators failed to find a match for her assailant's DNA found on her body despite exhaustive testing.

Finally, on Wednesday Thomas Lewis Garner, 59, a dental hygienist from Jacksonville, Florida, was arrested for her murder after investigators tracked him down using genealogy service Parabon Nanolabs.

Garner and Cahanes had been stationed at the Orlando Naval training center at the same time. Authorities are not sure on how the two encountered each other.

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The cold case murder of Navy recruit Pamela Cahanes, 25, (left) who was found beaten and strangled to death in August 1984 has finally been solved after her alleged killer Thomas Lewis Garner, 59, (right) was identified using genealogy service Parabon Nanolabs

Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma pictured above announcing the breakthrough arrest on Thursday after Cahanes' killer went free for 34 years. Garner with jailed without bond on murder charges on Wednesday

Investigators waited for DNA technology to advance and finally worked with Parabon NanoLabs to create Garner's family tree and later narrow him down as a suspect.

Authorities then trailed after Garner until he dropped a 'personal item' and they tested it for DNA and found it matched the evidence found on Cahanes' body.

The odds of the DNA belonging to anyone other than Garner is 700 billion to one.

'We were certain that he was the person responsible for the murder. Actually, it was scientific confirmation,' Seminole County Sheriff Dennis Lemma said on Thursday, announcing the breakthrough arrest.

Garner was arrested Wednesday at his Jacksonville home and was taken to Seminole County Jail where he's being held without bond on a first-degree murder charge, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

However, he has not admitted to killing Cahanes on August 5, 1984.

She was found face-down in her underwear a yard of a vacant home covered in blood near the academy. She did not appear to be sexually assaulted.

Cahanes was found strangled and beaten to death two days after she had graduated from the Orlando Naval Training Center in Florida (Cahanes second left with peers at her graduation) . She and Garner were both at the training center at the same time though it's not clear how they ran into each other

Garner was traced after investigators used genealogy service Parabon Nanolabs to create a family tree using DNA found on Cahanes' body and named him a suspect. They tested a personal item he dropped and found it to be a DNA match

Local police set up this billboard to raise awareness about Cahanes' unsolved murder in Florida, hoping to receive helpful tips

He has a clean record other than a battery charge during his time serving in the navy.

Investigators had found DNA on Cahanes' body and tested it for years to no avail. Thanks to advances in technology, they were able to create a family based off the DNA and narrow down Garner as a suspect

'Its extremely bizarre to think that somebody could commit a crime like this, then go on and lead a normal life,' Sheriff Lemma said.

Prior to the DNA family tree testing he was not considered a suspect.

'If you think about his perspective, quite literally he was probably under the belief that he was getting away with murder,' Lemma said.

Retired SCSO Investigator Bob Jaynes admantly worked on Cahanes' case for over 20 years, keeping a picture of her on his desk.

He had hoped to find her killer before Cahanes' mother Alice Cahanes passed away. Unfortunately she died in 2016.

'It is extremely sad to know that our victims mom had passed away, and never had the opportunity to see this. Im convinced shes looking down from heaven right now, knowing this is a day of relief as this person is held accountable and responsible for what hes done,' Lemma said at a press conference Thursday.

Cahanes was one of eight children from Minnesota. Some of her siblings gathered at a home there to hear the news.

'Pam was a loving, charming farm girl at heart who wanted to continue to explore by going into the Navy,' her sister Eileen Bergmann, 69, said to the local peper.

'I guess (we) didnt think this day would come. It was 1984. They didnt have DNA in those days and it went on and on,' she added to Click Orlando.

Linda's murder joins a number of cold cases that have been potentially solved through the use of modern DNA technology.

In August, Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo was arrested for a dozen murders and 50 rapes that took place back in the late 70s and 80s, after investigators utilized the online genealogical sites Ancenstry.com and 23andMe.
An Oregon elementary school facing financial woes has turned to a controversial fundraising gimmick by allowing parents to bid on the privilege of picking their child's next teacher.

The unconventional idea emerged during the annual auction hosted by Markham Elementary Schools Parent Teacher Association in Portland on March 2.

Of the $52,000 raised in the auction, $1,300 came from six parents who bid on a teacher.

Markham Elementary School in Portland has stirred up a controversy by allowing parents to bid on the privilege of picking their child's next teacher during a fundraising auction

According to a statement released by the PTA in the wake of the scandal, last year Markham Elementary was stripped of its Title I status reserved for schools with a high percentage of low-income students, which resulted in the institution losing some of its state and federal funding, reported Fox 12.

The school, where half the students come from economically underprivileged communities, and where more than 46 per cent are entitled to free of reduced-cost lunches, has been forced to cut education programs due to its money troubles.

The March PTA auction was meant to fill that financial gap.

Principal Shawn Garnett (pictured) later apologized to her staff for allowing parents to place bids on certain teachers

The letter from the PTA states that the auction was organized by parents, one of whom came up with a spur-of-the-moment proposal right before the start of the event to include the choose your teacher item, giving parents the opportunity to pick their childs teacher for the following year.

Principal Shawn Garnett, who was in attendance, green-lit the plan.

However, at the conclusion of the event, teachers began expressing concerns to the principal about the auction, including whether it was equitable,' the letter reads.

Garnett then went to the PTA, saying that her teachers were convinced that allowing a small group of parents to pick their desired educators in exchange for cash could create a perception of inequality among students, reported OregonLive.com.

Cari Carr, one of the parents who bid $150 to pick a teacher, told Fox 12 she did it only to help the school raise funds, not to favor one teacher over another.

Some teachers asked the PTA to cancel the sale of the choose your teacher item and refund the money, which the PTA did 'promptly and apologized.'

In the aftermath of the backlash, Garnett has issued an apology to her staff for allowing parents to place bids on certain teachers.
Leaders from around the would have condemned the deadly attack at two New Zealand mosques that left 49 people dead.

United States President Donald Trump took to Twitter to express his condolences and pledge that the US would do 'anything we can' to help New Zealand.

In the UK, the Queen said she was 'deeply saddened' by the attack while Prince Charles said he and his wife were 'utterly horrified' to hear about the 'barbaric' attacks.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex also shared their horror at the news.

Pope Francis denounced the 'senseless acts of violence' in the shootings and said that he is praying for the Muslim community and all New Zealanders.

US President Donald Trump tweeted his best wishes to the people of New Zealand, and said the US would do anything they could to help

People who survived the attack standing outside the mosque, with some of them still covered in blood

The gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, NSW, Australia, stormed the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island at about 1.30pm, opening fire with a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle on about 100 defenceless worshippers attending Friday prayers.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself. A 49th died in hospital.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder. He is expected to face court on Saturday.

Two of the others remain in police custody, with a fourth person arrested deemed not to have been involved in the attacks.

President Donald Trump has tweeted to say he has spoken to New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern about the mosque shootings in Christchurch, adding: 'We love you, New Zealand!'

Trump offered his 'warmest sympathy and best wishes' for the 'horrible massacre in the Mosques'. He added that 'innocent people have so senselessly died. 'The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!'

The United States called the deadly attack a 'vicious act of hate.'

The Queen (pictured at the Commonwealth Day Service at Westminster Abbey on March 11) expressed her condolences and said she was 'saddened by the appalling events'

In a message to the Governor-General of New Zealand, the Queen said: 'I have been deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch today. Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives'

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said: 'The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate.'

In a message to the Governor-General of New Zealand, the Queen said: 'I have been deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch today. Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives.

'I also pay tribute to the emergency services and volunteers who are providing support to those who have been injured.

'At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders.

'Elizabeth R.'

In a message to the people of New Zealand, Prince Charles wrote: 'Both my wife and I were utterly horrified to hear of the most barbaric attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, which resulted in the cruel and tragic loss of so many people's lives.

'It is beyond all belief that so many should have been killed and injured at their place of worship and our most special and heartfelt sympathy goes out to all the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives.

Prince Charles (pictured with the Duchess of Cornwall in November), said he and his wife were 'utterly horrified to hear of the most barbaric attacks'

The Prince of Wales said it was 'beyond belief that so many should have been killed and injured'

'This appalling atrocity is an assault on all of us who cherish religious freedom, tolerance, compassion and community. I know that the people of New Zealand will never allow hate and division to triumph over these things they hold dear.

'Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims' families, the first responders, the people of Christchurch and all New Zealanders at this most heartbreaking of times.'

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex wrote in their letter: 'Our hearts go out to the families and friends of the people who lost their lives in the devastating attack in Christchurch.

'We have all been fortunate to spend time in Christchurch and have felt the warm, open-hearted and generous spirit that is core to its remarkable people.

'No person should ever have to fear attending a sacred place of worship.

'This senseless attack is an affront to the people of Christchurch and New Zealand, and the broader Muslim community. It is a horrifying assault on a way of life that embodies decency, community, and friendship.

'We know that from this devastation and deep mourning, the people of New Zealand will unite to show that such evil can never defeat compassion and tolerance.

'We send our thoughts and prayers to everyone in New Zealand today.

'Kia Kaha.'

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have all expressed their sadness at the terror attack

In a telegram of condolences on Friday, Pope Francis offered his solidarity and prayers to the injured and those who are mourning lost loved ones, and noted that it was a particularly difficult time for security and emergency personnel.

He said he was 'deeply saddened to learn of the injury and loss of life cause by the senseless acts of violence at two mosques in Christchurch, and he assures all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his heartfelt solidarity in the wake of these attacks.'

The message sent by the Vatican secretary of state ended by saying: 'Commending those who have died to the loving mercy of Almighty God, Pope Francis invokes the divine blessings of comfort and strength upon the nation.'

British Prime Minister Theresa May tweeted: 'On behalf of the UK, my deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand after the horrifying terrorist attack in Christchurch. My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence.'

Speaking in front of Finsbury Park mosque, Britain's opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn also offered condolences. He said: 'An attack on a mosque, an attack on a synagogue, an attack on a church, an attack on a temple - is an attack on all of us'.

Mr Corbyn earlier laid a wreath at New Zealand House to honour the victims of the terror attack.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who visited Glasgow mosque today, called the attack 'horrific and cowardly'.

'New Zealand may be on the other side of the world but I know that for Muslims here, what has happened will feel very personal and close to home,' she said.

Pope Francis offered his solidarity and prayers to those who had been affected by the shootings in New Zealand

The rest of the world also reacted with shock to the attacks, which appear to have been carried out by a right-wing terrorist and white supremacist.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sent a telegram to the prime minister of New Zealand, expressing her condolences after the attack on two mosques in Christchurch.

'It is a perfidious attack on worshippers and their houses of prayer,' Merkel said Friday. 'The attack on Muslim citizens is also an attack on New Zealand's democracy and its open and tolerant society. We share these values and thus also the horror of the New Zealanders.'

Merkel says she sends her condolences to the relatives of the victims and is wishing the wounded speedy recoveries.

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte sent his condolences and called the attacks 'dreadful'.

He added that the victims were 'hit while they were in a place of prayer. All forms of intolerance, hatred and violence are inacceptable.'

Theresa May has sent a message of support from Britain today in the wake of the New Zealand terror attacks

Mrs May and her ministers have been tweeting about the horrifying attacks as the UK woke up to the news

The prime minister of Norway, which saw 77 people killed in a far-right attack eight years ago, has expressed solidarity with New Zealand.

Erna Solberg told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that 'although it is across the globe, this is a strong reminder of how important it is for all of us to help bring down tensions, work against extremism, and that we show solidarity with each other when something like that happens.'

In July 2011, confessed Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people. Like the presumed New Zealand attacker, he posted a manifesto online before the attacks.

'This looks like it is a terrorist attack from the extreme right against immigrants and refugees,' Solberg said, adding it is 'a reminder that we have to fight extremism in all forms.'

French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the 'odious crimes against the mosques in New Zealand'

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sent a telegram to the prime minister of New Zealand, expressing her condolences after the attack

France is increasing security measures at mosques and other religious sites after the deadly attack against the two mosques in New Zealand.

French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner tweeted Friday that he ordered regional prefects to send patrols and reinforce surveillance of places of worship 'as a precaution.'

French President Emmanuel Macron, also in a tweet, denounced the 'odious crimes against the mosques in New Zealand' and said that France will work with international partners to fight terrorism.

The New Zealand ambassador to the EU became visibly 'choked up' while giving a statement on the shooting in Christchurch.

David Taylor became emotional when he was talking about the incident, reiterating Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's statement that New Zealand 'represents diversity, kindness, compassion... we are a home for those who share our values and a place of refuge for those in need, and that will not change.'

Pakistan's prime minister has condemned attacks on two mosques in New Zealand, saying he blames rising Islamophobia.

Imran Khan wrote Friday on Twitter that 'terrorism does not have a religion.'

He added: 'I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 billion Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim.'

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded the attacks the 'latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia'

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote Friday on Twitter that 'terrorism does not have a religion'

Pakistani officials say there are no Pakistani citizens among the dead.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned the attacks on mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch calling it the 'latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.'

Tweeting in English and Turkish on Friday, Erdogan said: 'On behalf of my country, I offer my condolences to the Islamic world and the people of New Zealand, who have been targeted by this deplorable act.'

He is also calling on Western nations to rapidly take measures to curb rising racism against Islam and Muslims, saying new attacks such as the mass shootings in New Zealand would otherwise be 'inevitable.'

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister on Friday, Erdogan renewed his condemnation of the attack on two mosques in Christchurch.

Erdogan said: 'It is clear that the understanding that the murderer - who also targeted our country, our people and my person - represented, has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer.'

Erdogan continued: 'I call on Western countries especially to rapidly take measures against this dangerous turn that threatens the whole of humanity.'

Witnesses reported hearing 50 shots and police are responding to the incident at Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on the country's South Island

Police escort distraught witnesses away from a mosque in central Christchurch following twin massacres

Gulf Arab states are condemning an attack on mosques in New Zealand that killed at least 49 people.

Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all offered their sympathies Friday over the attack.

Saudi Arabia said one of its citizens was lightly wounded in the attack, but survived.

Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, tweeted his condolences, noting that 'on a day of peace like Friday and at a place of worship like the mosque, we witnessed the most heinous crime of religious hatred.'

Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, in a regular news conference Friday, expressed 'heartfelt condolences' to the shooting victims and their families, while extending sympathy for the injured.

A man wearing military fatigues (pictured) was arrested outside Papanui High School

Malaysia's government has slammed the attack as an act of terror.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said he regretted the incident and urged the New Zealand government to do its best to 'arrest these terrorists.'

Sweden's Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom has tweeted that she was 'shocked by the attack in Christchurch,' saying 'we condemn terrorism in all forms.'

Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen also commented that 'extremism has again shown its ugly face.'

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says he's shocked at the 'terrible attacks'.

'We emphatically condemn violence and the lack of reason of fanatics and extremists who want to break our societies,' Sanchez has written.
President Trump tweeted his support on Friday for what he suggested should be a mass exodus of American Jews from the Democratic Party, citing a group of Jewish millennials run by a fashion model who used to be on his staff.

'The "Jexodus" movement encourages Jewish people to leave the Democrat Party,' he wrote, saying Democrats have shown '[t]otal disrespect' to Jews.

'Republicans are waiting with open arms. Remember Jerusalem (U.S. Embassy) and the horrible Iran Nuclear Deal!'

The president had already called Democrats 'anti-Jewish' and 'anti-Israel' in the wake of a congressional scandal that followed Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar's public use of anti-Semitic language.

Former Trump aide and model Elizabeth Pipko, 23, who revealed this year she secretly worked on the president's 2016 campaign, appeared on 'Fox & Friends' this week to talk about the 'Jexodus' movement and excoriate Democrats for policies she says hurt Jewish Americans.

President Donald Trump tweeted encouragement on Friday to American Jews who want to flee the Democratic Party

Trump cited the 'Jexodus' movement started by former aide Elizabeth Pipko, who is also a model She appeared in Maxim  and, this week, on 'Fox & Friends'

The president has used issues like the Iran nuclear deal and his decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to attempt to drive a wedge between Democrats and Jews in the U.S.

'Obviously, we saw a lot of anti-Israel policies kind of start under the Obama administration, and it got worse and worse,' Pipko said this week on 'Fox & Friends.'

'There's antisemitism in the Democratic Party,' she said. 'They can hide it, they can do whatever they want. They failed to condemn it, and now it's there. It's time.'

The president escalated her claims in a tweet on Tuesday that quoted that part of her appearance.

The interview provided Trump with a new opportunity to smack Democrats for a House resolution they passed last week on hate speech  one that was exclusively a slam on Omar's anti-Semitism until Democrats camouflaged it with a kitchen-sink approach.

Pipkin, a model who has appeared in Maxim, said Democrats 'failed' to properly condemn the growing anti-Jewish sentiment in their party with the vote that has its origins in comments Rep. Ilhan Omar made that were panned as anti-Semitic.

'The scariest party, obviously was not the original antisemitism. It was the lack of leadership coming into play,' she said. 'so not only did the antisemitism that started with Ilhan Omar get worse and worse...but when the leadership fails to condemn that, it shows that they are a party of antisemitism.'

Pipko appeared on 'Fox & Friends' this week, playing to an audience of one on the show Trump watches most

Trump blasted Democrats as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish a week ago after they declined to formally reprimand Rep. Ilhan Omar for making allegedly anti-Semitic comments

Rep. Omar still has a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee after saying that moneyed Jews control much of Washington with their pocketbooks

The Jexodus movement took hold following a call from black, conservative activist Candace Owens for African-American voters to 'Blexit' the Democratic Party.

Pipkin told Fox & Friends of Jexodus: 'Obviously it's a play on Exodus, but we left Egypt and now we're leaving the Democratic Party.'

Trump openly called the House vote last week on a resolution condemning hate language a 'disgrace' after Democrats expanded it.

'The Democrats have become an anti-Israel party, they have become an anti-Jewish party,' he said as he left the White House for Alabama. 'And I thought that vote was a disgrace. And so does everybody else, if you get an honest answer.'
Shattered New Zealanders whose relatives are still missing after the terror shooting in Christchurch have gathered outside hospital, anxiously waiting for good news.

About 200 friends and family of missing victims are reportedly at Christchurch hospital - either by the bedside or waiting for news of loved ones being operated on.

Many people have been heard wailing and crying in the hospital's corridors as they learn their friends and family won't be coming home.

Devastated relatives are reportedly wailing and crying in the hospital's corridors as they learn their friends and family won't be coming home

Shattered New Zealanders whose relatives are still missing after the terror shooting in Christchurch have gathered outside hospital, anxiously waiting for good news

Canterbury District Health Board chief executive David Meates said on Friday the hospital is struggling to cope with the large number of wounded people.

'What we have been dealing with today is 48 gunshot wounds that were presented at Christchurch Hospital,' Mr Meates told the told New Zealand Herald.

The chief executive said the victims' injuries, which ranged from critical through to minor, placed an increased burden on the hospital's 12 operating theaters.

He said the operating suite had been working non-stop all afternoon following the tragedy, but it was expected surgeries would continue well into the night.

With the scale of the operations, many people are likely to need several surgeries over the coming days and weeks due to the nature of the wounds, Mr Meates said.

'That involves us pulling in surgeons, nurses, doctors, support staff to enable us to respond, and we start deferring non-critical surgeries.'

One man desperate for answers is Mahdi Zougub, 22, who told the publication he was on the way to the Deans Ave mosque, when he learned of the shooting.

He described how shocked he was to see the dead bodies, and how he is is now nervously waiting to find out whether his friends and family survived.

With the scale of the operations, many people are likely to need several surgeries over the coming days and weeks due to the nature of the wounds

'We think our friend... we think he's gone. There's a lot of emotion,' Mr Zougub said.

Some of the victims have already been discharged from the hospital.

One man, who suffered a hand and leg wound, told the publication he couldn't believe it but was relieved he chose to not take his children to prayer this morning.

Mr Meates said the hospital was working closely with the Muslim community and authorities to ensure support services were in place for victims and relatives.

Armed police officers remain outside the hospital.

About 200 friends and family of missing victims are reportedly at Christchurch hospital (pictured) - either by the bedside or waiting for news of loved ones being operated on
Hong Kong: Patrick Nip to visit Shanghai

Secretary for Constitutional & Mainland Affairs Patrick Nip will visit Shanghai on March 17 and 18.

Mr Nip will meet officials of the Hong Kong & Macao Affairs Office of the Shanghai Municipal Peoples Government to exchange views on issues relating to co-operation between the two cities.

He will also discuss arrangements for the Legislative Council joint-panel duty visit to the major cities in the Yangtze River Delta Region in April and attend a dinner organised by the University of Hong Kong's Shanghai Alumni Network.

In his absence, Under Secretary for Constitutional & Mainland Affairs Andy Chan will be Acting Secretary.

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
(CNN)  "One Day at a Time" won't be returning to Netflix.

The streaming giant announced the show's cancellation on Thursday after three seasons.

Based on the hit show created by Normal Lear that premiered in 1975, the reboot featured a Cuban-American family and touched on topical themes.

"It's been a great honor to work with the legendary Norman Lear on One Day at a Time. I've personally spoken with Norman and co-creators Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce to express my gratitude to them, all the writers, the dedicated crew and the cast, including the brilliant Justina Machado and dazzling Rita Moreno, for creating a series with such humor, heart and humanity," Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in a statement.

"This was a very difficult decision, and we're thankful to all the fans who've supported the series, our partners at Sony and all the critics who embraced it. While it's disappointing that more viewers didn't discover One Day at a Time, I believe the series will stand the test of time," Sarandos added.

The show starred Machado as an Iraq veteran, raising her children with her mother, played by Moreno.

"I don't even know how to begin to express my gratitude to everyone. Truly, I am so honored that we got to tell our stories. Yes it was a Latinx family but it was a universal story about family and love. An American Familia," Machado tweeted.

"One Day at a Time" is among several shows recently canceled by Netflix, including "Friends From College," "Jessica Jones" and "The Punisher."
Two heroic teenagers have been praised after saving a homeless man from jumping off a 20ft bridge by clinging onto him until the police arrived.

Casey Price and Sanchez Richards, both 15, were walking home from the funeral of a school friend in Macclesfield, Cheshire, when they shot into action on the town's Silk Road bridge on February 28.

The unnamed man, in his 60s, was intoxicated and threatening to jump but the quick-thinking pair held onto him and refused to let go, telling him they were not ready to see another person needlessly die.

Heroic schoolchildren Casey Price and Sanchez Richards, both 15, have been praised after saving a homeless man from jumping off a 20ft bridge by clinging onto him until police arrived

Inspired by the experience, Casey is now determined to find the homeless man permanent accommodation while Sanchez wants to become a paramedic.

Casey said: 'Some of the kids we had been with stayed on the other side of the road because they were quite scared and they didn't want to get involved but I just grabbed him and then another guy got out of his car and helped.

'One woman got out of her car and told us just to leave him and let him do what he wanted, but we ignored her and I told Sanchez to ring the police.

'I had hold of him but the man was saying "if you don't get off me now I'm going to jump" and that is literally all he kept saying.

'He even started trying to unzip his coat to get us off.'

The pair had been to the funeral of fellow Macclesfield Academy pupil, 13-year-old Tyler Wolstenholme, who died when he was hit by a car while riding his bike in January.

Casey and Sanchez were walking home from the funeral of a school friend in Macclesfield, Cheshire, when they saw an intoxicated man in his 60s threatening to jump from the town's Silk Road bridge (pictured) on February 28. The pair held on to him and refused to let go

Casey added: 'I said to the man "I'm not just going to let go".

'I told him we had just been to one of our friends funeral's and I said to him "if anything happens to you now then we will have to go to another one".

'We would have had to live the rest of our lives thinking it was our fault that we didn't hold on tight enough.

'Some of the kids were still underneath the bridge too so if he had thrown himself off they would have just seen someone drop and would have that image for the rest of their lives.'

Noticing that the man had suffered a cut to his hand and his face, Sanchez called both police and paramedics to the scene.

Sanchez said: 'I wasn't really feeling anything, all I thought about was what would happen if he was to use all of his force.

Casey said: 'I told him we had just been to one of our friends funeral's and I said to him "if anything happens to you now then we will have to go to another one"

'I was just trying to blank out everything else and focus on what I had to do.

'When my friend Tyler passed away, I got there 20 seconds after he had been hit and just to see the paramedics come and see how quickly they reacted was pretty inspirational.

'It's made me think that I'd like to do something like that..'

The man, who had cuts on his hand and face, even threatened to unzip his coat to get Casey and Sanchez to let go. Sanchez's mum Jules Frances said she was 'so proud' of her son, while Casey's mum Sarah Price-Wood added: 'I'm really proud of her'

The mothers of the two teens have expressed great pride in their kids for using their initiative and helping another person in need.

Sanchez's mum, Jules Frances said: 'I'm so proud, he's such a kind and considerate person, he always puts others first.

'People often assume that because Sanchez is mixed race he is causing trouble.

'Teenagers do have a negative reputation but they're not like that when you get to know them.'

Casey's mum, Sarah Price-Wood added: 'Casey is very sensitive, she always has been.

'She's so caring with her little brother but she would help anybody.

'I'm just really proud of her, I know that all of our kids would have got involved and tried to help, none of them would have just walked away, it's what we have instilled in them.'

Police have thanked the teenagers for their courageous actions and also thanked another man who assisted at the scene.

Inspector Chris Adkins of Cheshire Police said: 'The man is now safe and well and receiving the support he needs.'
A driver who sent his girlfriend romantic text messages moments before he crashed into two police officers has been jailed for two years.

Jakob Thornton, 23, exchanged 29 messages with his girlfriend as he was driving along the Hume highway, south of Sydney, in February last year.

While he was looking down at his phone for 10 to 20 seconds, Thornton smashed headfirst into two senior constables at a random breath test station.

The crash broke Senior Constable Matthew Foley's leg and critically damaged Senior Constable Jonathan Wright's right leg.

Wright's injuries were so severe that 15cm of his leg below the knee had to be amputated.

Jakob Thornton (pictured), 23, exchanged 29 messages with his girlfriend as he was driving along the Hume highway, south of Sydney, on February 16, 2018

On Friday, 23-year-old Thornton was sentenced to three years and eight months behind bars, with a non-parole period of two years.

Among the texts he sent his girlfriend while he was behind the wheel were messages saying 'I love you' with several heart emojis, as well as references to spending the night together and exchanging 'snuggles'.

Prior to the horrific crash, the 23-year-old had his provisional license suspended three times, and had previously been fined for using his mobile phone while driving three years earlier.

The pair of injured officers were at Campbelltown District Court on Friday for Thornton's sentencing hearing, flanked by their wives and a large showing of police and family.

Senior Constable and father-of-three Jonathan Wright (right) had to have his leg amputated

Thornton (pictured) later admitted to 'pretty well' not looking at the road when he crashed

Sen Const Wright wrote a victim impact statement that said losing his leg left him with 'constant chronic phantom and actual limb pain' and he'd spent 'scores of hours' learning to walk.

He can only work 16 hours per week and since the horrific accident he says he is 'never pain free'.

Following the collision, Thornton admitted in court he was 'pretty well' not looking at the road and was 'assuming' where the sides and middle of the road were.

He also said he 'couldn't remember' whether he had applied the brakes before he hit the breath testing station.

The 23-year-old admitted to sending three texts while travelling on the Hume Highway moments before the police officers were pinned between a police car and a van.

Thornton told investigators at the time he did not see the police car's flashing lights.

Judge Hatzistergos dismissed the claim, saying the collision had 'nothing to do with any obscurity of the victims but rather the inattentiveness of the offender.'

'This was not an instance of momentary inattention or misjudgement,' he said.

'It was an irresponsible abdication of responsibility ... from someone who selfishly prioritised communications with his girlfriend, disregarding the need for vigilance when driving a motor vehicle.'

Wright (right) appeared in court for Thornton's sentencing on Tuesday, hugging his wife (left) as victim impact statements were read out

The judge took into account Thornton's genuine remorse, noting a letter the 23-year-old wrote to his victims.

'Causing that much damage for such a stupid mistake has weighed very heavily on myself and I am sure that it will follow me for the rest of my life,' Thornton's letter read.

Speaking on behalf of the officers, NSW Police Commander Greg Rolph said they were satisfied with the outcome.

'It's now time for both these officers to move forward and focus on their longer-term rehabilitation,' he told reporters outside court.

Taking into account two months already served in jail, Thornton will be eligible for parole from January 2021.

Thornton was remanded in custody after the crash.

After two months, he was granted bail after his lawyer argued he was suffering trauma at the hands of other inmates.

He wrote a letter of apology while in custody, which was tendered to the court along with an apology written by his mother Katja.

Thorton was granted bail and released from custody in April and has been in-and-out of court since.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm in August last year.
Spain's Government is planning to dig up the remains of former dictator Francisco Franco to appeal to left-wing voters ahead of elections in April.

It plans to move the former General from a mausoleum - seen by many as a monument to fascism - to a public cemetery in Madrid on June 10.

Spain's Supreme Court will vote in the coming days on whether to allow the exhumation.

Spain's Government is planning to dig up the remains of former dictator Francisco Franco (pictured) to appeal to left-wing voters ahead of elections in April

It plans to move the former General from the Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen) mausoleum - seen by many as a monument to fascism

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who is trying to remain in power in the country's April 28 election, had promised to exhume Franco's embalmed body from the Valley of the Fallen by the end of 2018 to appeal to left-wing voters.

However, his call has been hampered by opposition from Franco's relatives and the abbot of the basilica where the dictator was buried in 1975.

Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo said Friday that the government would comply with whatever the judges decide.

The planned move has divided opinion in a country conflicted about the dictatorship that ended with his death in 1975.

Franco will be taken from the Valley of the Fallen mausoleum to be reburied next to his wife, Carmen Polo, in the family tomb at Mingorrubio El Pardo, a state cemetery where various political figures are buried, in a ceremony without media coverage, Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo said.

His family opposes the exhumation and has taken the issue to courts, but the Supreme Court has been silent so far.

Flowers on the tomb of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco inside the basilica at the the Valley of the Fallen monument near El Escorial, outside Madrid

'The dictator's family and those around them have made use of every available legal instrument ... forcing delays in the process,' Calvo said after cabinet agreed to push ahead.

She added that if a new government emerging from next month's election were to try to cancel the reburial, it would first have to change the so-called historical memory law, approved in 2007, that condemns the Franco regime

El Independiente newspaper quoted Luis Felipe Utrera-Molina, a lawyer for the Franco family, as dismissing the decision as 'fireworks' and saying the government could not legally access Franco's burial place to exhume the remains.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who is trying to remain in power in the country's April 28 election, promised to exhume Franco's remains

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez promised to remove Franco's remains before the end of his term, one of several high-profile measures intended to appeal to left-wing voters.

The Socialists have long sought to transform the Valley of the Fallen into a memorial to victims of the civil war in which 500,000 combatants and civilians were killed.

The party is ahead in opinion polls but well short of parliament majority.

Support for far-right party Vox, which wants Franco's remains to stay where they are, has been growing since it won seats in an Andalusian election in 2018  in the first electoral success for a far-right party since Spain's return to democracy.

Franco's family had said if his remains are removed, he should be reinterred at the Almudena Roman Catholic Cathedral in central Madrid, where his daughter is buried.
Police forces around the US stepped up security at mosques on Friday after 49 people were slaughtered in a terrorist attack in New Zealand.

In New York City, NYPD officers were seen patrolling outside mosques with sniffer dogs and offering support inside before morning prayers commenced.

There was a similar increase in Los Angeles and Chicago.

Dozens of people were killed at the Al Noor mosque and another nearby mosque on Friday by 28-year-old white Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant.

There was an increased NYPD presence outside an Upper East Side mosque for Friday prayers after the terror attack at a mosque in New Zealand which claimed 49 lives

NYPD officer also used sniffer dogs to search the buildings before worshipers were allowed inside

In this photograph shared by the NYPD, an officer is shown inside watching over worshipers while they pray

As he committed mass murder, another attack unfolded at the nearby Masjid in Linwood mosque.

In total, 49 people were killed and 48 were injured. It is the deadliest mass shooting in the country's history.

An NYPD spokesman told DailyMail.com on Friday morning: 'The NYPD, in conjunction with our law enforcement partners, is closely monitoring events in New Zealand, and out of an abundance of caution is assessing security at locations around the city.'

LAPD tweeted: 'The LAPD is monitoring the horrific events unfolding in Christchurch, New Zealand.

NYPD patrols were seen outside mosques before dawn on Friday to offe extra protection

'While this attack appears to be an isolated incident with no nexus to LA, out of an abundance of caution were providing extra patrols around mosques.

'Our thoughts & prayers are with all affected.'

President Trump, who is named in the shooter's sickening manifesto as a 'symbol of renewed white identity', denounced it on Friday as a 'horrible massacre'.

The gunman, Tarrant, said that he wanted to create a civil war in America by reigniting the debate surrounding guns.

He is now in custody along with two other men and a woman.

An LAPD vehicle was stationed outside the Islamic Center in Los Angeles on Friday morning

The LAPD also said it had boosted its security around the city's mosques on Friday as a precaution
Barack Obama has sent his condolences to the victims of the multiple Christchurch mosque massacres after at least 49 people were killed when a Trump-supporting white supremacist opened fire.

The former president tweeted: 'Michelle and I send our condolences to the people of New Zealand. We grieve with you and the Muslim community. All of us must stand against hatred in all its forms.'

The gunman, who identified himself on Twitter as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, live-streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque.

Tarrant posted a 74-page manifesto explaining the reasons behind the shooting, which is New Zealand's worst ever terrorist attack, leaving 49 dead and 48 injured.

In the document, Tarrant said that he supported President Donald Trump as a 'symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose' but not as a 'policy maker'.

Barack Obama has sent his condolences to the victims of the Christchurch mosque massacres

The former president tweeted: 'Michelle and I send our condolences to the people of New Zealand . We grieve with you and the Muslim community. People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday, right

Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor on Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand

The 28-year-old terrorist claimed he chose to use a gun over other weapons because it would spark a debate around the second amendment.

Tarrant wrote in his sickening manifesto that by using guns to commit the attack, it would fuel the debate over firearms in the US and lead to them being banned.

His other heroes include the right wing commentator Candace Owens. He said: 'Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness.'

Trump tweeted on Friday morning that it was a 'horrible massacre'. He has extended the US's full support to New Zealand as it reels from the atrocity.

He wrote: 'My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured.

'The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!' \

A sickening 17-minute video of the unfolding horror shows the self-confessed white supremacist dressed in army fatigues firing mercilessly at people scrambling to flee, and calmly reloading when he runs out of bullets.

At about the same time, there was a second shooting at Masjid mosque in Linwood, where seven more were killed.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder. He will face court on Saturday.

Two others remain in police custody, with the fourth person arrested deemed not to have been involved in the attacks.

President Trump decried the attack as a 'horrible massacre' in a tweet on Friday morning

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three of the seven were slain on the streets. A 49th died in hospital.

A further 48 people were rushed to Christchurch Hospital with gunshot wounds, 20 of which were in a critical condition. A dozen operating theatres were used, with many victims requiring multiple life-saving surgeries.

New Zealand Police later evacuated families from a street in Dunedin as they investigated a home 'of interest' to the shootings. The address is believed to be the home the gunman's car is registered to.

Tarrant, 28, also said that he chose firearms to provoke a debate about the second amendment that he hoped would lead to a 'fracturing of the U.S. along cultural and racial lines'
Melbourne schoolboy turned ISIS terrorist Neil Prakash has been sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in a Turkish prison.

Appearing before the Kilis Criminal Court via video link from jail on Friday, Prakash, 27, was found guilty of being a 'pivotal' member of Islamic State.

His sentence was reduced from nine years after Prakash offered information about the ISIS faction he'd served under in Syria for the three years before his 2016 arrest.

Australian-born ISIS terrorist Neil Prakash has been sentenced to more than seven years jail

Prakash appeared in court via video-link from a maximum-security jail cell (pictured)

Prakash had been held in a maximum-security jail cell in Gaziantep, southern Turkey, since he was caught trying to sneak across the border from Syria in October, 2016.

With good behaviour, he may be eligible for parole just three to four years into his sentence.

Accounting for time already served, he could be freed within two years.

Turning down a translator, Prakash spoke to the judge in fluent Turkish.

He admitted to conspiring with ISIS, but 'regretted' that he was forced to, according to The Herald Sun.

'They (Islamic State) forced me to do it. I didn't do it under my own free will.'

Judge Ismail Deniz told Prakash he would also be able to appeal the verdict.

Prakash (pictured in a still from an ISIS propaganda video) could be freed in less than two years

Prakash had appeared in several propaganda videos for ISIS, repeatedly encouraging attacks against Australia.

However, what happens when he is released from prison remains to be seen, with the Australian government renouncing him and Fiji claiming they're not obligated to take him in.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton stripped Prakash of his Australian citizenship because of his affiliation with ISIS in January.

It remains to be seen whether Australia will have to take in Prakash (left) at the end of his sentence

The Federal Government said the Melbourne-born terrorist, who has a Fijian father, was entitled to Fijian citizenship and therefore could be removed of his Australian citizenship.

But Fiji's immigration director Nemani Vuniwaqa told the ABC there was no evidence of Prakash or his parents ever being citizens of the Fiji.

There was, however, an unsuccessful attempt to have Prakash extradited so he could be tried in Australia.
Police in South Carolina have released dramatic dash-cam footage showing a violent stand-off between a deputy and a suspect, who was later shot dead.

On February 26, a routine traffic stop turned into near two-hour long deadly shoot-out, after Joseph Hart, 51, opened fire at an officer in the driveway of his home, in Berkeley County.

A local Huger resident had dialed 911 complaining that he'd seen Hart's Jeep speeding along a gravel road sometime in the afternoon.

Spotting the vehicle, a deputy followed Hart into his driveway on Waterfowl Lane, but as soon as the officer goes to approach the suspect, he can be seen emerging from the front of his vehicle with a rifle drawn.

Shards of glass can be seen scattering into the air as a series of shots strike the officer's windshield.

'He's got a high powered rifle, he's shooting at me,' the deputy can be heard in the video.

Joseph Hart, 51, opened fire at an officer in the driveway of his home, in Berkeley County on February 26. The deputy had been conducting a traffic stop when the first shot was fired (pictured: Hart in 2013 following his arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia)

Berkeley County Sheriff Duane Lewis described Hart as being a 'highly agitated' man during the exchange.

'I said get the f*** out,' Hart can be heard screaming in the video, before once again pulling the trigger of his rifle.

For over 17 minutes, Hart and the deputy continue to exchange fire.

Pinned down behind the back of his SUV with nowhere to go, the officer pleads with Hart to stop shooting and 'Let me get out of here'.

Hart responds by firing several more shots, while continuing to demand the officer leaves.

'Will you let me run away, please? Will you let me run out of here?I will not shoot at you if you let me run. Heres my gun, see?I got it pointed straight in the air,' the deputy says.

As the officer approaches Hart, he disappears around the front of his vehicle and returns with a rifle

Hart fires several times at the officer, as he takes shelter behind the police vehicle

The car's windshield is struck several times by the gunfire, as the officer desperately calls for back-up

Repeatedly, the officer can be heard asking Hart to let him leave but shots continue to ring out

Back-up for the officer was still another five minutes away.

'I'm gonna kill ya, boy,' Hart says, before repeatedly saying 'I'm going to finish you off.'

Eventually, more deputies, an armored vehicle and a SWAT team come to the pinned deputy's aid.

Hart continues to shoot at authorities as they attempt to set up a perimeter around his home.

Law enforcement says at one stage Hart offered to surrender, but as officers approached, he changed his mind and opened fire once again.

Three final shots can be heard ringing out as a group of 10 officers, with bulletproof shields drawn, begin to swarm Hart's jeep.

Shortly afterwards, Hart is shot dead. No officers were injured in the 90 minute ordeal.

After nearly 20 minutes, back-up finally arrives in the form of a squadron of deputies, a SWAT team and an armored vehicle

Law enforcement say at one stage Hart offered to surrender, but as officers approached, he changed his mind and opened fire once again. He was then shot dead

The officers' car was struck several times in the frightening 90-minute ordeal

County Sheriff Duane Lewis (second from left) said Hart was determined to kill that day

'We had a dialogue with him at one point,' Lewis said. 'He was going to surrender, but refused.

'[Hart] had made up his mind he was gonna kill that deputy and anybody else.'

Lewis also revealed that Hart had shot at law enforcement officers with an arsenal of different weapons, including a shotgun, a rifle and handguns.

The shoot-out became the eighth involving the Berkeley County Sheriff's Department since 2014. Three of which have involved officers being shot, according to the Post and Courier.

The State Law Enforcement Division are currently conducting an investigation into the incident, but they released the footage on Wednesday.

All four of the deputies who fire their weapons in the exchange remain on administrative leave.

None of the officers have been identified but they are said to be receiving counseling.

Hart had previously been arrested in January 2013 for possessing drug paraphernalia.

Police have not yet released information on Hart's toxicology report.
A gang of 28 yobs that terrorised motorists during an illegal 'ride out' have been convicted in Britain's largest ever prosecution for anti-social biking.

The thugs caused carnage after they took to the streets of Birmingham on scramblers, quad-bikes and mopeds for the lawless bike rally on June 26, 2016.

For five hours they blocked junctions and rode recklessly, popping wheelies and intimidating other road users.

Ringleader Andrew 'Dru' Tomlinson, 29, was caught after he filmed footage which was later stupidly uploaded to social media.

And none of the louts will be zooming the roads on their bikes anymore as police have vowed to destroy them.

The group of louts caused chaos after they took to the streets of Birmingham on scramblers, quad-bikes and mopeds for the lawless bike rally on June 26, 2016

Cameras on board a police helicopter also filmed them running red lights, churning up parkland, driving over large grassed roundabouts and weaving between cars

The video shows the men causing havoc by driving at speed and pulling dangerous wheelies along residential roads.

Cameras on board a police helicopter also filmed them running red lights, churning up parkland, driving over large grassed roundabouts and weaving between cars.

Today Tomlinson, of Hodge Hill, Birmingham, was jailed for two years alongside Matthew Sidwell, 30, of Chelmsley Wood, Birmingham, who was caged for a year.

A total of 26 other men, aged between 19 and 33, were given suspended prison sentences and community orders at Birmingham Crown Court.

They were all convicted for causing a public nuisance in what is believed to be the largest ever such group prosecution for anti-social biking.

West Midlands Police are now now warning people that the force will not tolerate drivers who use the streets as race tracks.

Chief Superintendent Dave Sturman, said: 'There is no justification for this type of behaviour: they risk serious injury to themselves, other road users and members of the public.

'We have footage from this and other 'ride outs' showing bikers ramping up kerbs and speeding along pavements close to pedestrians including a line of school children and it's scary to think of the injuries they could inflict.

Video shows the men causing havoc by driving at speed and pulling dangerous wheelies along residential roads

The gang ran amok for five hours by blocking junctions, riding recklessly, performing dangerous stunts and intimidating other road users

Investigators made dozens of arrests, seized more than 20 off-road bikes and charged 48 men with causing a public nuisance, with 28 being convicted this week

'They acted as though they owned the road: holding up traffic and aggressively surrounding motorists who didn't obey their commands.

'We hear bikers saying 'we're just having fun' * but if these riders are law-abiding why do they wear face coverings and masks and ride around with no registration plates? It's because they know they are doing wrong and are trying to stay anonymous.

'However, this operation shows that we will find and prosecute offenders.

'For them it means a criminal record, fines or a community order and the risk of a prison sentence plus we'll seize their bike and destroy it.

'We are now much more experienced in going after these types of offenders. We will use tyre-deflating stinger devices to contain groups of illegal bikers that pose a danger to road users and to disable their motorbikes bikes.

'And some officers are now equipped with a DNA spray which they can use to 'tag' offenders and their bikes.

'This is an invisible liquid, each can with its own unique DNA, which shows up under UV light * so should we seize the offender's bike or clothing in future we can link it to a specific incident and provides great evidence.

'The public have told us they are fed up of bikers who behave in this way and who risk causing serious road collisions and we are determined to rid them from the streets of the West Midlands.'

Chief Superintendent Dave Sturman, said: 'There is no justification for this type of behaviour: they risk serious injury to themselves, other road users and members of the public'

The officer added: 'They acted as though they owned the road: holding up traffic and aggressively surrounding motorists who didn't obey their commands'

Tomlinson had led the group from a rendezvous point in Stechford, Birmingham at around 1pm before setting off on their Take Back the Streets' ride-out

Police were inundated with complaints from members of the public and launched an investigation, trawling through social media and police video footage.

Investigators made dozens of arrests, seized more than 20 off-road bikes and charged 48 men with causing a public nuisance, with 28 being convicted this week.

All but one of the men admitted the charge, with only Jack Bentley, 24, of Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, denying the offence.

But footage showed him among a massed rank of riders causing carnage in Broad Street in Birmingham city centre and at another point is seen riding along a footpath.

He was found guilty by a jury and given an eight-month suspended prison sentence and ordered to carry or 50 hours of unpaid work in the community.

The other men convicted men are:

Kenny Nguyen, 21, from Willow Drive, Handsworth, and Michael Morton, 26, from Dulverton Road, Leicester, both given 18-month suspended jail terms and ordered to carry out 200 hours of unpaid community work

Bradley Bateman, 24, from Lockin Croft in Castle Vale; Nicholas Dore, 27, of Wardlow Road in Nechells; Kaine Fattha, 22, from Wetherfield Road, Tyseley and brothers Geordie, 27, and Keanu West, 21, from Frankley Beeches Road, Northfield, all given 12-month suspended jail terms and told to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work.

Joshua Birchall, 19, from Chantry Crescent in Great Barr; Luke Fox, 18, from Dagnell Road in Birmingham; Jermaine Saa, 27, from Marksbury Close, Wolverhampton, and Ryan Wilson, 24, from Uttoxeter given eight-month suspended jail terms and ordered to carry out 100 hours of unpaid work.

Adam Ballanger, 24, from Partridge Road in Yardley; Kenny Kington, 32, from Curley Green Way in Sheldon; John Mcdonald, 27, from Ridfield Road in Birmingham; Robert Roye, 25, from Livingstone Road, Handsworth; Jason Phillips, 33, from Fifth Avenue, Lowhill, Wolverhampton; and Thomas Aston, 25, from Plane Tree Road, Sutton Coldfield were given eight-month suspended prison sentences and ordered to carry or 50 hours of unpaid work in the community.

Lewis Smith, 19, from Nightingale Avenue, Smiths Wood, was given a 12-month community order including 75 hours of unpaid work.

Daniel Birch, 24, from Riddfield Road, Bromford, and James Ford, 21, from George William House, Stoke on Trent, were given 12-months community orders and 50 hours' unpaid community work.

Daniel Draper, 27, from Bringewood Grove, Bartley Green, was given a 12-month community order including a 15-day rehabilitation course.

James Tyler, 20, from Keats Drive, Swadlincote, Derbys., Kieron Frater, 30, from Greenaleigh, Yardley Wood; and Daniel Jones, 30, from Blackcat Close, Chelmsley Wood, were given 12-month conditional discharges.

Samuel Ward and Shaqeel Karim will be sentenced separately on March 29. Another 19 men were charged but were found not guilty.

The thugs: 'Ringleader' Andrew Tomlinson and (from top left clockwise) Ballanger, Bateman, Birch, Draper, Jones, Geordie West, Bentley, Ford, Tyler, Phillips, Saa and McDonald

Convicted: (top row) Sidwell, Birchall, Fattha, (bottom row) Keanue West, Kington, Nguyen

Top row: Frater, Smith, Fox. Bottom row: Morton, Dore, Roye. They were all convicted for causing a public nuisance in what is believed to be the largest ever such group prosecution for anti-social biking
An exiled former Attorney General has released never-before-seen photographs of the body of a slain police officer which she says proves he was executed by forces loyal to Nicolas Maduro's regime during a 2018 raid.

Luisa Ortega Diaz shared the images, which were taken by medical examiners moments after Oscar Perez died last year, on her Twitter account.

One of the gruesome photos shows two bullets holes, one slightly beneath the helicopter pilot's left ear and another on the left side of his neck.

Another photograph shows several bullet wounds to his left arm.

Ortega Diaz insisted in her tweet that the forces executed Perez despite the pilot and his men wanting to surrender to the National Police and Special Action Forces acting under orders of the embattled Chavism leader.

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Oscar Perez (front center) was killed during a January 2018 raid after he led a June 2017 helicopter assault on two government buildings in Caracas, Venezuela, to protest Nicolas Maduro

Luisa Ortega Diaz, exiled former Attorney General of Venezuela, tweeted alleging the Maduro regime is responsible of executing Perez (pictured) during a mission to capture him

The former Attorney General also said she has more than 300 photos and a forensic report that implicates the Maduro regime in the execution of a former cop and six other men

Luisa Ortega Diaz, Venezuela's former Attorney General, says Nicolas Maduro and his regime should be held responsible for the execution of a former cop and six others during a 2018 raid

In the coming days she will submit a collection of more than 300 photographs of the former law enforcement agent's bullet-riddled body to the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague.

'That evidence leaves no doubt that what happened with Oscar Perez and his group is a crime against humanity,' Ortega Diaz wrote Thursday afternoon on her social media account.

'This log of more than 300 photos will be accompanied by a forensic report certifying the execution of this group of Venezuelans at the hands of officials and paramilitaries who serve the tyranny.'

Perez, a photogenic former cop who starred in a 2015 action film, Muerte Suspendida [Suspended Death], used a stolen helicopter to attack government buildings in capital city of Caracas and stole weapons from a military base in what he called a rebellion against Maduro in 2017.

Oscar Perez (pictured) died when he was shot multiple times during a raid. Luisa Ortega Diaz shared this image of his body

The 36-year-old appeared with a bloody face in nearly a dozen Instagram videos, saying he was surrounded by authorities shooting at him with grenade launchers even though he was promising to surrender

A nationwide manhunt was launched for Perez after he targeted a government building in Caracas in protest at dictator Nicolas Maduro's government.

He served under Venezuela's criminal investigations and forensic services unit and for years witnessed the corruption that took place between high-ranking members of the state and gangs allied to the Maduro-regime that were known as 'colectivos', who carried out robberies and extortion.

In mid-June 2017, his brother was murdered after an assailant stabbed him to death over a cell phone.

His brother's death prompted him to take the government to task with a video statement on June 27, 2017: 'We are nationalists, patriots and institutionalists. This fight is not with the rest of the state forces, it is against the tyranny of this government.'

Later that day, Perez orchestrated a grenade attack against the Supreme Tribunal of Justice. Blank firearm cartridges were then fired at the Interior Ministry building.

Perez does have an acting past - having produced and starred in a 2015 film called Suspended Death in which he plays a cop rescuing a wealthy hostage from a vicious gang

Perez went all out, playing a James Bond or Rambo-like figure willing to take on a regime that has sunken the oil-rich nation into chaos.

In December 2017, he broke into a National Guard unit to steal weapons.

Perez spent several months on the run until he was cornered and killed during a raid led by the National Police and the Special Action Forces on January 15, 2018.

The 36-year-old appeared with a bloody face in nearly a dozen Instagram videos, saying he was surrounded by authorities shooting at him with grenade launchers even though he was promising to surrender.

'They are firing at us with grenade launchers. We said we are going to surrender but they do not want to let us surrender,' he said.

'They want to kill us,' added Perez, seemingly wearing a bulletproof vest, as he crouched down in what appeared to be a small house and gunshots were heard in the background.

Oscar Perez (pictured right) led an assault on Venezuela's Supreme Tribunal of Justice and Interior Ministry building in June 2017

Oscar Perez intended to turn himself in before he was killed during a raid carried out by the National Police and the Special Action Forces on January 15, 2018

The agents stormed the hideout in the poor hillside neighborhood of El Junquito outside Caracas, killing Perez and six of his men.

Six others were arrested and accused of being members of terror group by Maduro and his regime.

Ortega Diaz, who along with her husband fled Venezuela on a speedboat to Aruba before flying to Colombia in August 2017 after Maduro's government dismissed her at the head prosecutor on the National Constitutional Assembly, contacted the family members of the deceased before sharing the shocking pictures.

Maduro, and his right-hand man Diosdado Cabello, who is known to be the second-most powerful man crisis-stricken oil-rich nation, have been mum about Ortega Diaz's report despite their daily constant rants on social media against anyone that opposes their socialist ideals.
Donald Trump launched a three-tweet frontal attack at Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday, saying his entire inquiry into allegations of 2016 campaign collusion with the Kremlin is 'illegal' and never should have begun.

Mueller 'should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report,' the president said.

That's a view that four federal judges, including one he appointed, shot down last year.

Mueller is expected to wind down his probe soon and deliver his findings to Attorney General William Barr, who has the authority to decide how much of it to share with Congress and the American public.

Trump's argument hinges on recent revelations that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had no information that a crime had been committed when he hired Mueller, a former FBI director, to open his investigation.

The president also claimed Friday that a 'Fake Dossier' of unproven and sometimes lurid accusations against him, which was funded by Hillary Clinton's rival campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was the flame that lit Mueller's torch.

President Donald Trump claimed Friday that Special Counsel Robrt Mueller's Russia probe is 'illegal' and should never have been permitted by the Justice Department

Mueller is investigating unproven claims that Trump's 2016 campaign operation colluded with Russian agents to tilt the election in his favor

And he accused Democrats of using 'Russian Collusion' as a jumping-off point to distance themselves from the loss of a winnable presidential campaign.

Trump has made similar assertions ad nauseam during the past two years.

'If there was knowingly & acknowledged to be zero crime when the Special Counsel was appointed, and if the appointment was made based on the Fake Dossier (paid for by Crooked Hillary) and now disgraced Andrew McCabe (he & all stated no crime),' he wrote Friday, 'then the Special Counsel should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report.'

'This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime,' he added.

'Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win. THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!'

At least four federal judges have publicly disagreed with most of Trump's assessment about Mueller's legitimacy.

His main contention on Friday, however, was that the Justice Department lacked the legal authority to open a special counsel probe without having evidence of a crime.

DailyMail.com was unable to find an example of a federal court ruling contradicting that theory.

U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, ruled in August that Mueller's probe is consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

A Russian company facing a federal indictment for its alleged financial backing of an enormous U.S. political influence operation had claimed the investigation was illegitimate.

Concord Management had argued that Mueller's power is so vast, and in some ways immune from Justice Department oversight, that his position should have been subject to Senate confirmation.

That's a distinction made between so-called 'senior' and 'junior' federal officers. Mueller is legally considered the latter.

As the day is thought to draw near when Mueller will send his final report to the Justice Department, Trump unleashed a three-tweet attack directly at his quiet nemesis

Friedrich acknowledged that federal laws 'do not explicitly authorize' the appointment of a special counsel.

But she determined that while regulations that apply to his operation are vague enough to give him broad authority, the attorney general has the power to rescind them at will.

D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Beryl Howell issued a lengthy ruling days earlier, rejecting similar arguments from Andrew Miller, an associate of longtime Trumpworld insider Roger Stone, who had asked her to quash a subpoena for testimony before Mueller's federal grand jury.

And both jurists who sentenced onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort this month  D.C. Judge Amy Berman Jackson and Eastern Virginia District Judge T.S. Ellis  ruled during his criminal trials against efforts to invalidate the special counsel's mandate.
A Muslim victim who greeted an alleged terrorist gunman as his 'brother' as the killer marched towards the mosque in New Zealand with a shotgun has been hailed as a hero.

A white supremacist - named in local media as Brenton Tarrant - entered the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch to kill 41 people as worshippers made their Friday afternoon prayers - another eight were killed at a mosque on Linwood Avenue.

His sickening livestream of the event on Facebook captured one of his first victim's - who is perhaps now dead - welcoming him with the words, 'Hello brother.'

He has been a hailed for his incredible act of brave devotion as he showed Islamic compassion even when faced with the barrel of a semi-automatic shotgun.

People stand across the road from the mosque in central Christchurch in New Zealand - one man has blood covering his leg

An exhausted and emotional man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone outside the mosque

Many reacted to the video on social media, taking strength from the fact that hatred was overcome as the twisted killer sought to end the victim's life.

One Twitter user called Farrukh wrote: 'How many more lives Muslims need to give to prove that their faith is not violent?'

While another called Yasin said: 'Love in the face of hate. Allah help us.'

The white supremacist alleged terrorist who filmed the bloodbath is one of four people arrested over dual mosque attacks which left 49 dead and 48 injured on New Zealands 'darkest day'.

The suspect stormed the Al Noor Mosque at around 1.45pm, opening fire with a semi-automatic shotgun and a rifle on some 100 defenceless worshippers attending prayers.

Members of the public react in front of the Masjd Al Noor Mosque as they fear for their relatives

A police officer secures the area in front of the Masjid Al Noor mosque after the terror attack

A wretched 17-minute video of the horror shows the self-professed racist firing mercilessly on people scrambling on the floor as he coldly loads more bullets into his rifle.

Shortly afterwards there was another shooting at the mosque in Linwood, on the eastern side of the city, where seven more were killed. Another later died in hospital.

In the aftermath of the bloody attacks, three men and one woman were arrested, with police charging 'one man in his late 20s' with murder. He will face court on Saturday.

Ambulance staff rush to take a stricken man to the hospital after he was injured in the attack

Two others remain in police custody, with the fourth person arrested deemed not to have been involved in the attacks.

As well as the dead, 48 people were rushed to Christchurch Hospital with gunshot wounds, 20 of whom were in critical conditions.

A dozen operating theatres were used, with many victims requiring multiple life-saving surgeries.
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The crew of HMS Argyll have received a hero's welcome from friends and family after nine months at sea, and rescue mission off the coast of France on their way back to Plymouth.

Service personnel proudly stood on the deck of the vessel as they sailed into the harbour, greeted by crowds waving waving flags and holding up welcome banners, on Friday.

All 230 officers on the ship were seen waving out to well-wishers as they docked into the Devonport Naval Base.

Crew members descending off the vessel were reunited with loved ones, sharing warm embraces.

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A hero's welcome! The crew of HMS Argyll have received a hero's welcome from friends and family after nine months at sea, and rescue mission off the coast of France on their way back to Plymouth, on Friday. Officers on the ship were seen waving out to well-wishers as they docked into the Devonport Naval Base

Service personnel proudly stood on the deck of the vessel as they sailed into the harbour, greeted by crowds waving waving flags and holding up welcome banners

First sailor off the ship was Reece Baldry who was greeted by his family with a big hug (pictured)

The ship had spent after nine months at sea and took part in the Bersama Lima joint naval exercise with Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and New Zealand as part of the Five Powers Defence Arrangement

First sailor off the ship was Reece Baldry who was greeted by his family with a big hug.

Children who had been separated from their parents who were away on deployment greeted them with big hugs and kisses.

Captain of HMS Argyll Toby Shaughnessy was seen being greeted by his daughter Libby, and later his wife Sophie, with open arms as he stepped off the vessel.

During it's nine month tour of duty, HMS Argyll took part in the Bersama Lima joint naval exercise with Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and New Zealand as part of the Five Powers Defence Arrangement.

Children who had been separated from their parents who were away on deployment greeted them with big hugs and kisses

This officer was welcomed by his two children with big hugs at the Devonport Naval Base

Captain of HMS Argyll Toby Shaughnessy was seen being greeted by his daughter Libby (pictured) with open arms as he stepped off the vessel

Another proud officer was greeted by his young son as he disembarked off the ship. HMS Argyll's return comes after the vessel's heroic efforts saving a burning Italian merchant ship, the Grande America, in the Bay of Biscay off the east coast of France on Sunday

HMS Argyll's return comes after the vessel's heroic efforts saving a burning Italian merchant ship, the Grande America, in the Bay of Biscay off the east coast of France on Sunday.

Footage shared by the official Twitter account of HMS Argyll shows the ship up in flames in the dark of night.

The crew of the burning vessel were forced to abandon ship and board a lifeboat which was then battered by terrible conditions and strong winds.

'Not what we expected to find on our way home. But the affinity between all mariners at sea meant we could save all 27 lives onboard,' the tweet read.

A tweet posted by HMS Argyll's official account, on Tuesday, read: 'Not what we expected to find on our way home. But the affinity between all mariners at sea meant we could save all 27 lives onboard'

The message continued: 'Through close co-operation with @MarineNationale and @SGMer. Exceptional effort by all the team onboard. #savinglivesatsea #teamwork'.

Fortunately all 27 sailors of the Grande America crew were rescued, some needed hospital care but there were no life-threatening injuries reported.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson commended the crew, in a statement: 'HMS Argyll's swift and selfless response to very dangerous situation in difficult conditions undoubtedly saved 27 lives. I commend her crew.'

Footage shared by the HMS Argyll shows the ship up in flames in the dark of night

The crew of the burning vessel were forced to abandon ship and board a lifeboat which was then battered by terrible conditions and strong winds. Fortunately all 27 sailors of the Grande America crew were rescued

'This recue demonstrates that even on the final leg of a challenging nine month deployment to the Far East, the Royal Navy's sailors remain vigilant and professional at all times.'

Speaking of the conditions Lieutenant Commander Dave Tetchner, HMS Argyll's Weapon Engineer Officer said: 'The conditions were horrendous  the vessels were rolling at 30 degrees which made it extremely hairy getting the sailors safely on board.'

'Royal Marines were on the ropes hauling people up, the sea boat was pushing the lifeboat against Argyll.'
The last thing jaywalkers want is for everybody on that street to stare at them.

A man who tried to take a shortcut while crossing a busy road in China was caught in one such awkward moment when he caused a massive traffic barrier to collapse.

The railing comprised 30 separate traffic barrier which were tied together, according to local traffic police.

The pedestrian climbs onto the railing as he tries to take a shortcut across the road in China

Seconds later, he loses balances and fall backwards while one of his legs gets stuck in a gap

As a result, the entire railing, comprising 30 separate barriers, collapse to the ground

The road user was attempting to go to the other side of the road by climbing over the railing between traffic lanes.

But as he mounted the temporary fence, he lost balance and fell backwards.

One of his legs was stuck in a gap, which caused the entire railing to collapse from the middle. He tried to lift up the railing and put it back to place, but failed.

The incident took place last month on Yuehua Road, a thoroughfare in the city of Shenzhen in southern China.

The police said the pedestrian walked away after the failed jaywalk attempt.

The police released footage of the incident today on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, to warn the public of the danger of disobeying traffic regulations.

Shenzhen traffic police have released footage of a similar incident in the same location

The video also featured another similar incident, which occurred in the same location the day before.

The earlier event saw one man pushing over the railing in order to cross the road quickly in the wee hours.

Zhuhai Traffic Police said they had identified the two men using facial-recognition cameras. They are now searching for them.

The police said the two jaywalkers had been blacklisted and would be penalised.
Tanesha Melbourne-Blake was shot dead in Tottenham, north London on April 2 last year. She had been planning to begin a youth work course in the autumn

Two men have been arrested over the death of a 17-year-old girl in a drive-by shooting in London.

Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, who mentored younger teenagers to keep them off the streets, was gunned down in Tottenham, north London, on April 2 last year.

The Metropolitan Police said two men, aged 18 and 22, were arrested on suspicion of murder on Thursday and taken into custody for questioning.

Tanesha, who had seven siblings, died during a spate of bloodshed in London last year.

The teenager, who was killed 13 weeks before her 18th birthday, had planned to travel to Jamaica to visit her father and was due to start a youth work course last autumn.

In a fresh appeal for information last month, her mother said in a statement: 'Myself and Tanesha were best friends as well as mother and daughter.

'The impact of her death is long lasting and still doesn't feel real. It feels as if I'm living in a dream and she'll be coming back.

'The impact on her dad and siblings has been indescribable too. There is a huge hole in our family that will never be filled.'

Detectives revealed during the appeal that they believe her killer was the passenger in a silver or grey Vauxhall Meriva which was found burned out in Barnet five days later.

A 31-year-old man who was arrested on suspicion of murder on April 6 2018 was released under investigation pending further inquiries, the Met said.

Tanesha was just 13 weeks from her 18th birthday when she was murdered in Tottenham
The New Zealand terrorist compared himself to Nelson Mandela and said he would win a Nobel Peace Prize in a manifesto posted online before the attack started.

Brenton Tarrant, 28, from Australia, bragged that he would be released from jail after 27 years - just like Mandela - in a 73-page document he penned.

Magnus Ranstorp, of the Swedish National Defense College, analysed the manifesto and said it had similarities with Norwegian far-right killer Anders Behring Breivik.

Brenton Tarrant, the man behind the New Zealand terror attack, compared himself to Mandela in his manifesto and claimed he would win the Nobel Peace Prize after being freed from jail

Ranstorp said Tarrant's document is shorter and 'more sloppy' than the one written by the Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011.

But Ranstorp said Tarrant shares traits with Breivik. He is against mass immigration and 'has to some extent the same themes as Breivik,' who posted his 1,500-page manifesto online before carrying out his deadly attacks.

Ranstorp told Swedish radio Friday that the New Zealand shooter, who killed at least 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch on Friday, claims to 'have been in contact with Breivik's sympathizers.'

Magnus Ranstorp, a Swedish terror expert, analysed the document and said it was similar to the one posted by Anders Behring Breivik

On July 22, 2011, Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo and then opened fire at an island summer camp run by the left-wing Labor Party's youth wing, killing 69. He is serving a 21-year prison sentence.

Breivik's lawyer, Oeystein Storrvik, told Norway's VG newspaper that his client has 'very limited contacts with the surrounding world so it seems very unlikely that he has had contact.' Storrvik was not immediately available for comment.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the shooter's manifesto 'unfortunately gives associations to a situation in Norway' that she described as 'one of the worst in our time.'

On Twitter, Ranstorp noted that the New Zealand shooter claimed he would leave prison after 27 years and likened himself to late South African President Nelson Mandela, saying he would get the Nobel Peace Prize.

'Yet another narcissistic right-wing extremist terrorist who has a distorted fantasy world,' Ranstorp wrote.
GUILTY: MICHAEL FLYNN

Pleaded guilty to making false statements in December 2017. Awaiting sentence

Flynn was President Trump's former National Security Advisor and Robert Mueller's most senior scalp to date. He previously served when he was a three star general as President Obama's director of the Defense Intelligence Agency but was fired.

He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about his conversations with a Russian ambassador in December 2016. He has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel investigation.

GUILTY AND JAILED: MICHAEL COHEN

Pleaded guilty to eight counts including fraud and two campaign finance violations in August 2018. Pleaded guilty to further count of lying to Congress in November 2018. Sentenced to three years in prison and $2 million in fines and forfeitures in December 2018

Cohen was investigated by Mueller but the case was handed off to the Southern District of New York,leaving Manhattan's ferocious and fiercely independent federal prosecutors to run his case.

Cohen was Trump's longtime personal attorney, starting working for him and the Trump Organization in 2007. He is the longest-serving member of Trump's inner circle to be implicated by Mueller. Cohen professed unswerving devotion to Trump - and organized payments to silence two women who alleged they had sex with the-then candidate: porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. He admitted that payments to both women were felony campaign finance violations - and admitted that he acted at the 'direction' of 'Candidate-1': Donald Trump.

He also admitted tax fraud by lying about his income from loans he made, money from taxi medallions he owned, and other sources of income, at a cost to the Treasury of $1.3 million.

And he admitted lying to Congress in a rare use of the offense. The judge in his case let him report for prison on March 6 and recommended he serve it in a medium-security facility close to New York City.

GUILTY AND JAILED: PAUL MANAFORT

Found guilty of eight charges of bank and tax fraud in August 2018. Sentenced to 47 months in March 2019. Pleaded guilty to two further charges - witness tampering and conspiracy against the United States. Jailed for total of seven and a half years in two separate sentences. Additionally indicted for mortgage fraud by Manhattan District Attorney, using evidence previously presented by Mueller

Manafort worked for Trump's campaign from March 2016 and chaired it from June to August 2016, overseeing Trump being adopted as Republican candidate at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He is the most senior campaign official to be implicated by Mueller. Manafort was one of Washington D.C.'s longest-term and most influential lobbyists but in 2015, his money dried up and the next year he turned to Trump for help, offering to be his campaign chairman for free - in the hope of making more money afterwards. But Mueller unwound his previous finances and discovered years of tax and bank fraud as he coined in cash from pro-Russia political parties and oligarchs in Ukraine.

Manafort pleaded not guilty to 18 charges of tax and bank fraud but was convicted of eight counts in August 2018. The jury was deadlocked on the other 10 charges. A second trial on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent due in September did not happen when he pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and witness tampering in a plea bargain. He was supposed to co-operate with Mueller but failed to.

Minutes after his second sentencing hearing in March 2019, he was indicted on 16 counts of fraud and conspiracy by the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., using evidence which included documents previously presented at his first federal trial. The president has no pardon power over charges by district and state attorneys.

GUILTY AND GOING TO WEEKEND JAIL: RICK GATES

Pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and making false statements in February 2018. Sentenced to 45 days weekend jail and three years probation, December 17, 2018

Gates was Manafort's former deputy at political consulting firm DMP International. He admitted to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government on financial activity, and to lying to investigators about a meeting Manafort had with a member of congress in 2013. As a result of his guilty plea and promise of cooperation, prosecutors vacated charges against Gates on bank fraud, bank fraud conspiracy, failure to disclose foreign bank accounts, filing false tax returns, helping prepare false tax filings, and falsely amending tax returns.

GUILTY AND JAILED: GEORGE PAPADOPOLOUS

Pleaded guilty to making false statements in October 2017. Sentenced to 14 days in September 2018, and reported to prison in November. Served 12 days and released on December 7, 2018

Papadopoulos was a member of Donald Trump's campaign foreign policy advisory committee. He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about his contacts with London professor Josef Mifsud and Ivan Timofeev, the director of a Russian government-funded think tank.

GUILTY AND JAILED: RICHARD PINEDO

Pleaded guilty to identity fraud in February 2018. Sentenced to a year in prison

Pinedo is a 28-year-old computer specialist from Santa Paula, California. He admitted to selling bank account numbers to Russian nationals over the internet that he had obtained using stolen identities.

GUILTY AND JAILED: ALEX VAN DER ZWAAN

Pleaded guilty to making false statements in February 2018. He served a 30-day prison sentence and was deported to the Netherlands on his release

Van der Zwaan was a Dutch attorney for Skadden Arps who worked on a Ukrainian political analysis report for Paul Manafort in 2012.

He admitted to lying to special counsel investigators about when he last spoke with Rick Gates and Konstantin Kilimnik. His law firm say he was fired.

GUILTY: W. SAMUEL PATTEN

Pleaded guilty in August 2018 to failing to register as a lobbyist while doing work for a Ukrainian political party. Sentenced to three years probation April 2019

Patten, a long-time D.C. lobbyist was a business partner of Paul Manafort. He pleaded guilty to admitting to arranging an illegal $50,000 donation to Trump's inauguration.

He arranged for an American 'straw donor' to pay $50,000 to the inaugural committee, knowing that it was actually for a Ukrainian businessman.

Neither the American or the Ukrainian have been named.

CHARGED: KONSTANTIN KILIMNIK

Indicted for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice. At large, probably in Russia

Kilimnik is a former employee of Manafort's political consulting firm and helped him with lobbying work in Ukraine. He is accused of witness tampering, after he allegedly contacted individuals who had worked with Manafort to remind them that Manafort only performed lobbying work for them outside of the U.S.

He has been linked to Russian intelligence and is currently thought to be in Russia - effectively beyond the reach of extradition by Mueller's team.

INDICTED: THE RUSSIANS

Twenty-five Russian nationals and three Russian entities have been indicted for conspiracy to defraud the United States. They remain at large in Russia

Two of these Russian nationals were also indicted for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and 11 were indicted for conspiracy to launder money. Fifteen of them were also indicted for identity fraud.

Vladimir Putin has ridiculed the charges. Russia effectively bars extradition of its nationals. The only prospect Mueller has of bringing any in front of a U.S. jury is if Interpol has their names on an international stop list - which is not made public - and they set foot in a territory which extradites to the U.S.

INDICTED: MICHAEL FLYNN'S BUSINESS PARTNERS

Bijan Kian (left), number two in now disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn's lobbying company, and the two's business partner Ekim Alptekin (right) were indicted for conspiracy to lobby illegally.

Kian, an Iranian-American was arrested and appeared in court charged with a conspiracy to illegally lobby the U.S government without registering as a foreign agent. Their co-conspirator was Flynn, who is called 'Person A' in the indictment and is not charged, offering some insight into what charges he escaped with his plea deal.

Kian, vice-president of Flynn's former lobbying firm, is alleged to have plotted with Alptekin to try to change U.S. policy on an exiled Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania and who is accused by Turkey's strongman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of trying to depose him.

Erdogan's government wanted him extradited from the U.S. and paid Flynn's firm through Alptekin for lobbying, including an op-ed in The Hill calling for Gulen to be ejected. Flynn and Kian both lied that the op-ed was not paid for by the Turkish government.

The indictment is a sign of how Mueller is taking an interest in more than just Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

GUILTY AND AWAITING SENTENCE: ROGER STONE

Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign official and longtime informal advisor to Trump, was indited on seven counts including obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and lying to Congress about his communications with WikiLeaks in January 2019. Convicted on all counts November 15, 2019, awaiting sentence

Stone was a person of interest to Mueller's investigators long before his January indictment, thanks in part due to his public pronouncements as well as internal emails about his contacts with WikiLeks.

In campaign texts and emails, many of which had already been publicly revealed before showing up in Mueller's indictment, Stone communicated with associates about WikiLeaks following reports the organization had obtained a cache of Clinton-related emails.

Stone, a former Nixon campaign adviser who has the disgraced former president's face permanently tattooed on his back, has long been portrayed as a central figure in the election interference scandal.

'They got nothing,' he said of the special counsel's investigation.

Stone gave 'false and misleading' testimony about his requests for information from WikiLeaks. He then pressured a witness, comedian Randy Credico, to take the Fifth Amendment rather than testify, and pressured him in a series of emails. Following a prolonged dispute over testimony, he called him a 'rat' and threatened to 'take that dog away from you', in reference to Credico's pet, Bianca. Stone warned him: 'Let's get it on. Prepare to die.'

CLEARED: GREG CRAIG

Greg Craig, President Barack Obama's White House counsel, was indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent. Mueller's investigators uncovered Craig's work on behalf the government of Ukraine while probing Manafort, who did business with Craig.

Prosecutors released a grand jury indictment of Craig in April 2019, after Craig's law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP agreed to pay more than $4.6 million as part of a settlement. The prominent firm also acknowledged it had failed to register, and placed much of the blame on Craig, a senior partner there.

Craig's lawyer blasted the decision as an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, and prepared to argue that omission of information during an interview is not tantamount to making false statements.

The charges stem from a 2012 report Craig and the firm produced on behalf of the Ukrainian government on opposition figure and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She was an opponent of Manafort's client , former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Craig was cleared on September 9 2019.
The Maryland man who was filmed jumping on a pelican in Florida's Key West and wanted on animal cruelty charges has been detained back in his home state.

William Hunter Hardesty was arrested at a hotel in Ocean City, Maryland, on Friday. He will be extradited to Florida.

William Hunter Hardesty from Davidsonville, Maryland, posted footage on his Facebook page with many people condemning him for his actions. He had two failed attempts to grab hold of the bird, spending 12 minutes antagonizing it.

'The third and only successful attempt Mr. Hardesty makes to capture a brown pelican is the one posted on his Facebook page,' a warrant for his arrest states, according to the Miami Herald.

Hardesty faces charges of animal cruelty, illegally feeding a pelican and capturing a protected migratory bird. His total bond is set at $80,000.

Scroll down for video

William Hunter Hardesty was arrested at a hotel in Ocean City, Maryland, on Friday

William Hunter Hardesty posted footage on his Facebook page on March 7 after jumping into water in Key West and appearing to attack a federally protected pelican

'He'll be arrested on the charges in the warrant and he'll be formally charged at an arraignment when he comes before the court,' Monroe State Attorney Dennis Ward said.

The video, posted on March 7, shows Hardesty leaning over a harbor's edge holding out something in his hand.

Hardesty will be extradited to Florida

The brown pelican floats closer and Hardesty jumps into the water on top of the pelican, causing both to sink beneath the water's surface.

Hardesty then grabs the large bird with two hands while others not pictured on camera can be heard laughing.

A woman in the background yells at him: 'If you don't get out of there right now I'm going to call security. Knock this party off right now.'

The bird is visibly distressed and as Hardesty holds onto it, his friends continue laughing at the spectacle.

The pelican then snaps at the man with its beak before flying off.

Social media users blasted the stunt on Hardesty's Facebook page, branding it cruel and stating they had reported him to Florida law enforcement.

March 7 footage shows Hardesty, (left) , first reaching into the water with something in his hand before jumping in and landing on top of the bird, (right)

Hardesty, (left), is seen laughing as he holds the pelican while it tries to flee from his grasp

The pelican then snaps at the man's face in a bid to escape and is eventually able to fly away

A post from Hardesty on Friday read: 'The book blowin up on a Friday !! Sheesh.'

Dennis John Deevy Jr wrote: 'We need to get a petition to have this MF charged.'

Another person claimed: 'Can you spell J-A-I-L ????.

Sherry Zmmerland Frolich wrote: 'Idiot!! I do hope you serve time. I also hope that smack in the face left a mark ... a BIG one.'

Hardesty was wanted for animal cruelty charges, illegally feeding a pelican and capturing a protected migratory bird. His total bond is set at $80,000

The investigative department of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is investigating the incident.

'We never want to harm wildlife, and that's what he was doing,' said Officer Bobby Dube, a spokesman for the commission's Florida Keys division. 'He was enticing the pelican and then jumped on it.'

'The third and only successful attempt Mr. Hardesty makes to capture a brown pelican is the one posted on his Facebook page,' a warrant for his arrest states

Dube said the footage appeared to take place at the Key West Seaport and features a brown pelican.

That species is protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Florida state law, which prohibit people from feeding or molesting the bird, he said.

Fox Baltimore reported that Hardesty was previously arrested along with one other for assaulting and robbing a person outside a bar in 2016.

Police responded to the robbery incident at a bar called in Crofton, Maryland.

Police found two men hiding behind a dumpster and the victim identified them as his attackers.

Hardesty and Eugene George Morris III, 24 at the time, of Edgewater, were later arrested.

Hardesty was charged with robbery, second-degree assault, theft, destruction of property and resisting arrest.
Homeless psychiatric patients need hundreds more beds to recover in after they leave a city's hospital, it has been claimed.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani from San Francisco's Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee claimed up to 400 more short stay beds were needed for homeless people with substance and mental health issues in the city.

Stefani made the claims to Mark Leary, director of San Francisco General Hospital's Psychiatric Emergency Services (PES), and asked whether homeless people leaving the hospital would accept temporary shelter rather than going back on the streets.

A man in San Francisco holds a sign which reads: 'Homeless not hopeless, anything helps, God bless'. A meeting of the city's Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee heard how homeless people with mental health problems should be given sheltered accommodation when released from hospital. The people pictured may not have mental health problems

A man begs on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. It is not known if he has mental health problems or if he would use the proposed shelter beds

Questions over whether San Francisco General Hospital (pictured) should have beds for homeless people with mental health and substance abuse issues when leaving the hospital were discussed yesterday

She claimed Leary had previously told her he estimated around 200 to 400 beds would be needed.

But Leary would not reveal the true number at Thursday's meeting of the committee and said detailed analysis would be needed to confirm the numbers.

Leary said: 'There is a range of people that are seen in PES.

A homeless man accepts the leftovers from an unnamed woman in the city. Supervisor Catherine Stefani said she was told 200-400 beds may be needed for homeless people leaving hospital

Four homeless men in San Francisco lie on a sidewalk last year. A man (second from left) uses a syringe to inject drugs

'I think that most people, once their psychiatric crisis has resolved in PES and they no longer meet the criteria to be held against their will and they are homeless, most of them would want to be able to accept a shelter.

'I mean that in the most generic of terms, a place where they could stay, a bed.'

Stefani replied: 'I want that space for those individuals.'

Supervisors Catherine Stefani and Hillary Ronen heard director of San Francisco General Hospital's Psychiatric Emergency Services Mark Leary's comments at the city's Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee meeting

She continued: 'I feel like that's what we are lacking right now.'

Supervisor Hillary Ronen was unhappy with the response from Leary.

She said it had been a factor throughout her time in office and dubbed it a 'broken system'.

She said: 'I don't feel we have a system that makes sense.

A homeless man opens a door for a patron while begging for change in the city center. Leary said he believes most homeless people on release from hospital would be likely to accept shelter

An unnamed homeless man sleeps with one shoe off near the cable cars in San Francisco

A homeless woman rests near the cable cars in San Francisco in July last year. Supervisor Stefani said the conversation on the extra beds was not over and she pledged to look into it

'What we are all trying to understand and we've all been trying to understand for a really long time is, where does the system break down?'

'Because we have a broken system.'

At the end of the meeting, Stefani said it was not the end of the discussion and pledged that she would investigate the numbers.

She added: 'If we don't look at those investments, we are just going to keep doing this over and over again.

'We are going to keep at this. This is not the end of the discussion for me. I am going to keep at it . I am going to keep asking questions. I am going to keep demanding answers.'

Stefani said: 'If we don't look at those investments, we are just going to keep doing this over and over again.' A homeless woman smokes next to her sunbathing dog in San Francisco

It comes as the committee will debate a proposal outlining more power for The City in holding homeless people who have substance abuse and mental health illness.

If Senate Bill 1045 is passed, homeless people with these problems could be forced into treatment.

The Bill was thought to affect as many as 50 people but that has fallen to as few as two due to the way it has been written, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

Sam Lew, policy director for the Coalition on Homelessness, told the newspaper: 'There are so many gaps in the system and it is inadequately serving the homeless population.

Homeless people rest on a sidewalk in the sun in San Francisco last year. Sam Lew, policy director for the Coalition on Homelessness, said: 'There are so many gaps in the system and it is inadequately serving the homeless population'

A sign reads: 'Broke and hungry. Please help, need weed.' It lies next to a homeless man in San Francisco's Union Square district

'Thousands of people are waiting for voluntary treatment and housing that don't exist and homeless people really haven't had the chance to receive services voluntarily.'

Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, added: 'We have so many people out there on the streets that are suffering from untreated mental illness.

'I think what we do, when see that, and often as a city and policymakers, is often times we look at the person and not ask 'What happened to them?' maybe think what's wrong with them, but most often blame them for being out there.

'Very rarely do we say our system is failing, and the reason that they are out there is that our system failed them.'

San Francisco Mayor London Breed recently unveiled plans to appoint a person to oversee and reform the city's mental health system.
I wish Id never watched it.

But before I understood the full horror of the Christchurch terrorists disgusting live-streamed footage, I clicked on a Twitter link and saw his murderous rampage unfurl in real time, from his own body-camera, like some gruesomely graphic video war-game.

Only this was real life, with real people being shot dead  men, women, children.

As a journalist its what Im paid to do but it was one of the most appalling, disgusting, gut-wrenching and terrifying things Ive ever seen.

To witness an act of such sickening depravity is something I sadly cannot now un-see.

But what it did show me is just how dark and dangerous a human mind can be twisted.

I clicked on a Twitter link and saw his murderous rampage unfurl in real time, from his own body-camera, like some gruesomely graphic video war-game. Only this was real life, with real people being shot dead  men, women, children

The motivation for Tarrants murderous intent lay in very old-fashioned white supremacist values. He is seen left in the live stream and right in a picture from social media

I dont know how someone can calmly walk towards a child lying on the floor riddled with bullets, and then fire more into their tiny bodies.

Yet that is what this monster did.

In doing so, he proved himself to be just as sub-human as the ISIS terrorists he professes to detest, the barbarians who throw gay people off roofs, stone women to death and set fire to enemies in cages so they burn alive.

By the time the Christchurch assassin, an Australian named Brenton Tarrant, was finished shooting up the Al Noor Mosque, at least 41 people were dead and scores more wounded, 20 critically.

At a second location, the Masjid Mosque in Linwood across the other side of city, seven more were killed as part of a carefully planned and co-ordinated attack.

The joint attacks represented one of the bloodiest, most deadly mass shootings in modern history.

And unlike the Las Vegas atrocity a year ago, for which killer Stephen Paddocks motives remain a mystery, this time we know exactly why Tarrant did it.

He posted an extensive 74-page manifesto detailing his reasons.

It was a rambling, incoherent litany of shockingly deluded nonsense that can be edited down to only one significant word: hate.

This was an act of terrorism by a white supremacist that hates people not like him. Especially Muslims.

And he hates them so much he felt compelled to kill them.

Specifically, Tarrant said he had to murder these poor defenceless Muslims because he wanted to ensure the existence of our people, and a future for white children and to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands.

He chose New Zealand because it would show nowhere in the world was safe.

In its execution, this was a very modern massacre.

Tarrant cited the hugely popular violent video game Fortnite, saying it trained me to be a killer.

He said he got the idea to target a mosque after watching a video on Facebook.

And he then put cameras on himself so he could live-stream himself killing people.

But the motivation for Tarrants murderous intent lay in very old-fashioned white supremacist values.

His real hope was to spark a race war in America.

Thats why he chose to carry out a mass shooting - believing that using a semi-automatic assault rifle would fire up renewed debate in the U.S. about gun laws.

With enough pressure, he wrote, the left wing within the United States will seek to abolish the second amendment, and the right wing within the U.S. will see this as an attack on their very freedom and liberty. This attempted abolishment of rights by the left will result in a dramatic polarisation of the people in the United States and eventually a fracturing of the U.S. along cultural and racial lines.

Tarrant also said he was a supporter of US President Donald Trump who he described as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.

Now let me be very clear: I dont hold President Trump personally responsible for what happened in Christchurch.

Today, President Trump had another opportunity to firmly and equivocally denounce white supremacists and the far-right ideology they stand for. But he couldnt do it

This attack happened because a deranged lunatic filled with raging hate perpetrated a wicked act of evil.

But what I do hold President Trump responsible for is his abject failure to properly denounce these kind of white supremacists and make it crystal clear that he holds them in nothing but absolute contempt.

He had a chance to do this after the appalling attack in Charlottesville in 2017 when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people, killing civil rights activist Heather Heyer.

But instead, Trump absurdly tried to draw some moral equivalence between the far right marchers and counter-demonstrators.

You had people that were very fine people on both sides he said, in one of the most tone-deaf statements by any President in US history.

What Trump SHOULD have done that day is denounce all far-right white supremacists as a shameful blight on America.

He should have understood that his words, as the most powerful man on earth, have huge impact around the world, and that every far-right white supremacist will have taken succour from his failure to properly denounce them that day.

As Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal said today: Words do have consequences and we know that at the very pinnacle of power in our own country, people are talking about good people on both sides.

Trump tweeted after this mornings attack: My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

These are perfectly fine words in themselves but nowhere near enough.

President Trump repeatedly insists hes neither a racist nor someone who courts the support of white supremacists, and as someone who has known him a long time I believe him.

But he IS guilty of allowing racists and white supremacists to think hes our guy with his inflammatory comments about Mexicans or casual good people on both sides nonsense after white supremacist attacks.

I was appalled when Trump retweeted a series of provocative and misleading Islamaphobic videos posted by a British far-right group Britain First in 2017.

And despite telling me in an interview for Good Morning Britain that if I wanted an apology for his retweets then hed give one, he never actually undid the retweets, even when Britain First was banned from Twitter.

What kind of message does that send other than that he doesnt care enough to stop emboldening these hideous people?

Trumps often violent rhetoric also disturbs me.

Who knows what effect it has on disturbed, potentially violent minds?

Last night, Trump promoted on Twitter an interview hed given to Breitbart News in which he boasted how tough his supporters could get.

I have the support of the police, he said, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have tough people, but they dont play it tough, until they have go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

Today, very unusually, he deleted that tweet, presumably realising how awful it looked in the context of the events in Christchurch.

A wounded man is seen being helped from the scene of the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand

The joint attacks represented one of the bloodiest, most deadly mass shootings in modern history

But he should never have used those aggressive words in the first place.

They sound like a call to arms, like hes endorsing violence by his own supporters.

Today, President Trump had another opportunity to firmly and equivocally denounce white supremacists and the far-right ideology they stand for.

But he couldnt do it.

Instead, he just issued standard lame presidential condolences.

This is not good enough, Mr President.

When a far-right white supremacist names you as one of his inspirations for one of the worst terrorist attacks ever perpetrated, you need to come out and denounce him with the full force of your presidency.

You need to show the world that you want nothing to do with these people or what they represent.

More importantly, you need these people to know that and to hear it loudly and clearly from your lips.

You have been very vocal about ISIS and how important it is to crush such an evil, violent terrorist cult.

Well, far-right white supremacist terrorists like Brendon Tarrant are just as evil and violent and it is just as important to crush them too.

Speak up against them, Mr President, or be rightly damned by your silence.
One of the masterminds behind an attack on Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro claims to have used an online-bought drone fitted with hand grenades in a plot planned at a rural farmhouse in Colombia, according to reports.

The organizer of the attack spoke anonymously to CNN, telling the network: 'We have tried every peaceful and democratic way to bring an end to this tyranny that dresses itself as democracy.

'We have friends who are in custody, tortured. This was a hard decision.'

Footage appears to show those behind the attack taking the drones - bought over the web from the United States - on test runs in rural Colombia.

Video provided by the perpetrator shows the group flying the drones at green gazebo targets during the day and night.

It also shows them trying to read instructions in Chinese on the drone packaging and building the bomb.

Amid an idyllic backdrop, the group try to fly the drones high before sending them down low. The devices would later be dismantled and taken into Venezuela.

Footage appears to show those behind the attack aiming the drones at gazebo targets

The perpetrators prepared by flying the drone day and night, according to the footage

The online bought devices would later be 'dismantled and taken into Venezuela for the attack'

One of the organizers of the attack said the device was armed by hand with military grade explosives. The man provided phone footage of the drones, explosives, and practice flights

The group are said to have rented a rural farmhouse in Colombia and planned the attack there

The attacker, who says Colombia was not involved in the assault, also claims to have met with US officials three times after the failed assassination attempt.

He said: 'After, they set up three meetings which I imagine was to collect information to study the case, but it didn't go past that.

'They wanted to get information and then we asked for things in return. They took notes on this, and we asked if they would be able to help. Then they simply left with their notes, and they never appeared again.'

There is no proof of the meetings, CNN reports, and a US State Department spokesman declined to comment on the allegation.

In the aftermath of the attack questions were raised about whether it was faked.

Maduro had been addressing a military parade in Caracas on live TV, when he suddenly halted and looked to the sky after hearing an explosion.

He and his wife Cilia Flores were swamped with aides carrying bulletproof shields but both escaped uninjured.

Video showed hundreds of soldiers who were assembled in neat formation on a wide road scatter in all directions amid the sound of screaming.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores react following the explosion

Venezuelan National Guard soldiers run after the attack on August 4 last year

Opposition leader Juan Guaido is the first viable challenge in years to Maduro's hold on power

In the months following Venezuela plunged into deeper political chaos triggered by the U.S. demand that Maduro step down a month into a second term that the U.S. and its allies in Latin America consider illegitimate.

His opponent, the 35-year-old Juan Guaido, burst onto the political stage in January in the first viable challenge in years to Maduro's hold on power.

As head of the Congress, Guaido declared himself interim president on Jan. 23, saying he had a constitutional right to assume presidential powers from the 'tyrant' Maduro.

The escalating crisis is taking place against a backdrop of economic and social turmoil that has led to severe shortages of food and medicine that have forced millions to flee the once-prosperous OPEC nation.
A GOP congressman claimed the Green New Deal is 'tantamount to genocide' and insisted it would kill westerners like himself if it's fully implemented.

Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, the ranking Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, made the comparison to 'genocide' at a news conference on Thursday.

Pressed to explain afterward, he insisted: 'I'm an ethnic. I'm a Westerner.'

It was only after fellow lawmakers and Jewish groups blasted him that Bishop recanted, claiming in a statement that his comments were not meant literally.

A GOP congressman claimed the Green New Deal is 'tantamount to genocide' and insisted it would kill westerners like himself if it's fully implemented

Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, the ranking Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee, made the comparison to 'genocide' at a news conference on Thursday

The ambitious plan to combat climate change has become the stuff of lore in GOP circles, with conservatives sinking their teeth into the most radical aspects of the resolution and claiming that Democrats want to get rid of hamburgers and airplanes.

President Trump has added complaints about the Green New Deal to his campaign rally repertoire on the evils of socialism and the opposing party's alleged desire to remodel America after Venezuela.

Bishop insinuated Thursday the proposal to combat global warming would lead to an atrocity with the scope of the Holocaust.

'For many people who live in the West, but also in rural and urban areas, the ideas behind the Green New Deal are tantamount to genocide,' the congressman said at a news conference beside other GOP lawmakers. 'That may be an overstatement, but not by a whole lot.'

A genocide is, by definition, the 'deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group,' according to Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Bishop is a retired history teacher who's spent nearly two decades in Congress. He also said at the news conference, according to the Washington Post, that the deal would 'judge distance not in miles but in subway stops,' as he took a slap at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

'The genesis of this concept is really coming from Easterners who live in an urban setting and have no view of what it's like in the rest of America,' he said of the freshman lawmaker who co-authored the bill.

An Axios reporter noted at the news conference that the term 'genocide' typically describes an atrocity such as mass murder, at which point Bishop claimed it applies to him because he's 'ethnic' and a 'Westerner.'

He affirmed his belief that the Green New Deal poses a mortal threat to Americans.

'If you actually implement everything they want to,' Bishop said. 'Killing would be positive if you implement everything the Green New Deal actually wants to.'

J-Street, a Jewish advocacy group, slammed Bishop's remarks in a statement.

'This is just disgusting. To compare environmental protections to the targeted decimation of a population is disturbing and dangerous,' the group said.

Natural Resources Committee Chairman and Democratic congressman Raul Grijalva noted that Congress had just voted to condemn hate speech, including comments that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.

'My friend, Mr. Bishop, is usually a little more circumspect than that and usually doesnt make those kinds of declarations,' he said, according to the Post. 'So what does that tell me? Theres a little bit of desperation in the tone.'

Later, in a statement to the Salt Lake Tribune, he said his comments were ballooning in a way they weren't meant to.

'My comments were obviously not meant literally, and should not detract from the fact that the so-called Green New Deal is born of attitudes that show no respect for the lives and livelihoods of the American people,' he said.
Bob McCaffrey, 47, was convicted of obstruction of Justice last week

A South Carolina husband whose wife disappeared nearly seven years ago has been jailed after he was found guilty of forging a farewell letter to mislead police.

Bob McCaffrey, 47, was convicted of obstruction of justice last week, having told investigators in 2012 that he'd returned home from visiting his mistress and found a note from his wife, Gayle, saying she'd left him for another man.

The jury deliberated for just 15 minutes to convict McCaffrey of the obstruction charge, and on Thursday a Charleston County Judge issued him the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

McCaffrey had previously been jailed in 2018 accused of her murder, but the charge was dismissed by the court after two weeks, citing insufficient evidence.

Gayle's body has never been found. She was officially declared dead in 2018.

'Next to losing you, everything else is unimportant,' Gayle McCaffrey (above) wrote to Bob just 10 days before she went missing. Bob tried to claim it was her that left him, when she vanished

The jury deliberated for just 15 minutes to convict McCaffrey of the obstruction charge. He was lead away in handcuffs after a judge sentenced him to 10 years behind bars

'We are so pleased and so grateful the jury came back with a guilty verdict,' Debbie Pearson, Gayle's sister, said outside the courtroom.

'We've waited so long for this,' added Gayle's other sister, Helen Banach, to ABC4. 'Just to know he's not on the street anymore is such a joy.'

In March 2012, the McCaffreys hit a roadblock in their 14-year-marriage when Gayle, then 36, discovered text messages from another woman in her husband's phone.

Though difficult news for Gayle to stomach, her family and friends say she was determined to make the marriage work for the sake of her children, then 10 and four.

'Next to losing you, everything else is unimportant,' Gayle wrote in a letter to Bob, dated March 7.

However, when her husband called police 10 days later on St. Patrick's day to report her missing, Bob insisted it was Gayle who'd walked away from their marriage and their two children, claiming she'd left a note to explain why.

He'd been visiting his mistress in North Caroline, Bob told police, when he returned home to find an angry letter from Gayle, telling him she had run off with another man.

Bob McCaffrey (seen left in 2012) says he returned home on March 17, 2012 to find a note from his wife Gayle (right) telling him she was leaving him for another man

The father-of-two also said she'd left behind her wedding ring and keys. His children were still asleep in their bed at the home in West Ashley (pictured)

Seven years on from her disappearance, and without a single sighting of Gayle since, prosecutors used the letter as a key piece of evidence to show Bob as an obstructing witness in their search for his wife.

Over the four-day trial, jurors heard from a number of witinesses who testified that Gayle was working tirelessly to hold her marriage together, not hatching a hasty exit plan.

Friends and family recalled Gayle planning a romantic getaway for the pair and even enquiring about couples' counseling.

Described as timid and caring, Gayle, a financial director, was also said to be the family's primary bredwinner, as Bob often found himself between construction jobs.

The jury also heard from Brandy Lee, Bob's mistress whom he met on Valentine's Day, 2012, just a month before Gayle vanished.

Falsely telling Lee he was going through a divorce, the pair quickly embarked on a romantic affair.

But when Gayle discovered the lovers' text messages, she contacted Lee and told her to stop seeing her husband.

According to Lee, after a phone call from Bob tearfully asking to 'give him time', the affair stopped in early March.

'She was excited,' testified Gayle's friend, Mary Game. 'She stood there and looked right at me and said, "I want to make this work."'

On March 16, 2012, just one day before the fateful St. Patrick's Day disappearance, Bob texted Lee saying 'I want nothing more than 2 b in your arms. Being away really hurts.'

The next day, her drove to Traverlers Rest, North Carolina in a last-ditch attempt to win Lee over.

But when he arrived at 1am, she says she didn't pay him much attention and denied his advances.

He is said to have spent the evening standing against a wall and staring at her.

Bob reported his wife missing 11 hours after he returned home, which police called strange. They also claim he never took part in any of the searches to try and find her body

Brandy Lee (pictured) had a brief one-month affair with Bob leading up to Gayle's disappearance. The night before she was reported missing, Bob drove to North Carolina to make one last effort to win Brandy over

Bob then drove home, where en-route he was pulled over by a police officer for speeding, who he told he had 'been blown off' by his girlfriend, the Post and Courier reported.

Arriving at his West Ashley home around 6.30am, Bob told police 11 hours later that he opened the door to find Gayle's wedding ring, the note and her keys on a table, with his children sleeping upstairs.

The distance of time between his alleged discovery of the note and when Bob contacted police was said to be strange, according to police.

But investigators found no signs of a struggle and no trace of Gayle's blood was found in the home or in Bob's car.

'I wish I had a freaking clue where to look,' Bob said to police in a taped interview. 'Hope she'll freaking come back.'

Investigators and volunteers scoured wooded areas around the McCaffrey's homes but found no trace of Gayle.

Bob never participated in any of the search parties, prosecutors say.

Gayle and Bob had two children together: a daughter, now 17, and a son, 11

Her sisters Debbie Pearson (left) and Helen Banach (right) shared their relief at Bob's conviction, but say informing Gayle's (middle) children will be difficult

Six-weeks later, Bob was identified as the key suspect in their murder investigation, but they lacked evidence to charge him.

But after consulting with a linguist, who determined the note Bob supposedly found to be a red-herring, he was charged with obstruction of Justice in 2014.

The charges remained pending until last year, when a probate judge declared Gayle dead and prosecutors made an unsuccessfull bid to charge him with murder.

A 15 minute jury deliberation confirmed a guilty verdict on Friday.

Gayle's sisters say they now have the difficult task of telling her children - now 17 and 11 - that their father is in prison.

The two children haven't seen Bob for three years, the Post and Courier reported.
Former village postmasters today scored an 'emphatic' victory after winning one of the trials in their High Court battle against the Post Office which had accused them of fiddling finances.

When millions went missing from local branch accounts, the finger was pointed at subpostmasters who were subsequently made bankrupt and even jailed.

But more than 550 of these local post office bosses claimed that the blame lay with the central Post Office and their glitch-ridden IT system.

And fresh legal action brought against the Post Office has overturned 'a serious miscarriage of justice', it has been claimed.

In today's ruling, Mr Justice Fraser determined a number of key issues about the legal relationship between the subpostmasters and the Post Office, resolving most of them in favour of the subpostmasters.

Bosses have always denied the computer system could be faulty, even though pillars of their communities like Mrs Misra, of West Byfleet, Surrey, were mystified by their terminals declaring shortfalls of tens of thousands of pounds [File photo]

Represented by a group of six lead claimants, the ex-subpostmasters allege the Horizon IT system introduced between 1999 and 2000 contained a large number of software defects - which they say caused shortfalls in their accounts.

Alan Bates, one of the lead claimants in the case and a Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance representative, said: 'This is a major step forward to achieving justice and getting to the truth of the matter.

'This judgment is consistent with the incredibly serious miscarriage of justice that we believe has taken place.

'The judge has found in the claimants' favour on all the important issues in this trial.

'This goes to the heart of the relationship between Post Office and the postmasters.'

Mr Bates added: 'Whatever happens from now on, this is the victory we've been fighting for - postmasters have won and Post Office will never again be able to behave as they have in the past with impunity.'

Karen Wilson (left) and Jo Hamilton, at the High Court, London. Former Subpostmasters are at the court to tell how problem software installed on their computers in village Post Office branches led to them being accused of being thieves. Karen Wilson is carrying the ashes and holding a picture of her late subpostmaster husband, Julian Wilson

One sub-postmistress, Seema Misra, 43, was jailed for theft when she was four months' pregnant with her second son.

Overcome with shame, she considered suicide and her conviction means she is still struggling to find work more than eight years later.

At her 2010 trial, the Post Office claimed that although one IT bug was known about, it only affected 'one branch' 600 miles away in Scotland.

But this week, the High Court heard that the problem in the Horizon computer system had actually affected 30 branches.

During a trial in November - before which legal fees in the case had already reached more than 10 million - Mr Justice Fraser was asked to look at the contractual relationship between the claimants and the Post Office.

The judge found in his ruling that the contract was a 'relational' one which he said means the Post Office could not act in a way 'considered commercially unacceptable by reasonable and honest people'.

He said this implied duty of 'good faith' also applied to the subpostmasters.

He also said the Post Office occupied a 'potentially unique position in terms of strength' and that the two parties were 'almost uniquely unequal'.

The six lead claimants are Alan Bates, Pamela Stubbs, Mohammad Sabir, Naushad Abdulla, Elizabeth Stockdale and Louise Dar - who all ran branches of the Post Office when the system was introduced.

The claimants allege the Horizon system caused shortfalls in their financial accounts, which led to some being made bankrupt, while others were prosecuted and even jailed for offences including false accounting, fraud and theft.

They accuse the Post Office of failing to provide adequate training in the use of Horizon, for failing to investigate the cause of alleged shortfalls and also of misleading them about the reliability of the system.

The Post Office is rigorously defending the case and says Horizon worked perfectly adequately.

It argues the burden is on the claimants to prove that any of their shortfalls were generated by flaws with Horizon.

I want justice for husband driven to an early grave Widow Karen Wilson went to the High Court yesterday bearing a small box containing some of her husband Julian's ashes. The former sub-postmaster, 67  was named as a claimant in the case Widow Karen Wilson went to the High Court yesterday bearing a small box containing some of her husband Julian's ashes to fulfil a promise to seek justice for him. The former sub-postmaster, 67  named as a claimant in the case  died three years ago from cancer as a convicted criminal despite fighting to restore his reputation for over a decade. Mrs Wilson, 64, of Redditch, Worcestershire, said: 'The doctor said all of this did contribute to his early death. I promised him, 'You will have your day in court, your name will be cleared'. 'Julian was a well-educated, meticulous, honest and fabulous man. He was a businessman and had run companies for 30 years. 'I am an ex-policewoman and in 2002 we decided to settle down and buy the local post office and shop where I grew up. We paid 100,000 and went to work 5am to 8pm every day. 'We had eight fantastic years. But then Horizon kept saying there was money 'missing'. 'No matter who Julian spoke to at the Post Office, nobody wanted to know. We started making up shortfalls from the shop takings. 'But it grew to thousands. I sold every piece of jewellery we had, including my engagement ring, to make up the losses. 'It broke his heart. In the end, they confiscated our house, the car, the business and they told Julian he could go to prison for six years for theft or plead guilty to 27,000 of false accounting. 'He was sentenced to 300 hours' community service. He was 56 and ended up with a gang of criminals cleaning a graveyard. Before that, he had never even got a parking ticket.' Advertisement

The judge said: 'The Post Office describes itself on its own website as 'the nation's most trusted brand'.

'So far as these claimants, and the subject matter of this Group Litigation, are concerned, this might be thought to be wholly wishful thinking.

'Trust is an element of an obligation of good faith, a concept which I find is to be implied into the contracts between the Post Office and the subpostmasters because they are relational contracts.

'The Post Office asserts that its brand is trusted by the nation, but the subpostmasters who are claimants do not trust it very far, based on their individual and collective experience of Horizon.'

Mr Justice Fraser is currently hearing a second trial, to determine issues relating to the Horizon computer system.

Other issues, including whether the Post Office breached the terms of its contracts with the subpostmasters and compensation, will be dealt with at future hearings.

The judge added: 'Much hinges on the outcome of this litigation as a whole, both in terms of the individual claimants and the effects upon them of the events over a number of years, as well as the potential effect upon the Post Office, both financial and reputational.

Now the Post Office could be forced to pay millions of pounds in compensation if it loses at the High Court

'This judgment is the first substantive step in resolving the group litigation, but it does not dispose of all the issues between the parties.'

The judge said he intends to hold hearings in every judicial term from November of this year until the litigation is resolved.

James Hartley of Freeths law firm, who is acting for the claimants, said: 'This is a substantial and complex case and we shall continue to drive it forward to a final conclusion in the interests of the claimant group - this case is of profound importance to them.'

Post Office chairman Tim Parker said: 'We take this judgment and its criticisms of Post Office very seriously.

'While the culture and practices of the business have improved in many ways over the years, the judge's comments are a forceful reminder to us that we must always continue to do better.

'We have taken his criticisms on board and will take action throughout our organisation.

'Our postmasters are the backbone of our business and our first priority will be to consider the points raised about the management of our contractual relationships and how we could improve them.

'We will make sure that problems brought to our attention by postmasters are investigated even more quickly and transparently.

'In addition, we will further improve communications with postmasters, as well as the training and support they receive.' Mr Parker said the Post Office is considering appealing aspects of the ruling.

He added: 'We note that the judgment highlights the ways our Network Transformation Programme improved procedures for incoming postmasters since 2011.

'The vast majority of those running post offices do so without problems and we can reassure the millions of customers who use our services every week that this judgment, focusing as it does on the interpretation of contracts with postmasters, will not affect their ability to do so.

'Post Office will continue to defend the overall litigation, which has been under way since April 2016 and is scheduled to continue through four trials until at least March 2020.

'This judgment from the first trial is long and detailed, and we will take time to consider it fully.

'There are, however, areas around the interpretation of our contracts where the judge's conclusions differ from what we expected from a legal standpoint and we are therefore seriously considering an appeal on certain legal interpretations.'
A new documentary film shows US Marines getting high, playing with sex dolls and defecating outside the homes of locals during a tour of Afghanistan.

Combat Obscura was filmed in Helmand Province between 2011 and 2012 by former lance corporal Mike Lagoze.

He used government cameras to film the men as they behaved questionably after capturing shots that the government wanted to use as publicity.

Now, the unflattering footage, which critics are calling the documentary 'the Corps does not want you to see,' has been released as part of an effort by Lagoze to demystify what really happens in war zones.

The Marine Corps has hit out at the film and the filmmaker but says it is powerless to stop its release or take action against any of the people involved because so much time has passed.

It says it was never made aware of the criminal behavior shown in the film when it was happening and that the Marines involved put themselves as well as their comrades in danger with their 'selfish' behavior.

Some of the men's faces are obscured in some scenes whereas others are easily identifiable.

Scroll down for video

Two Marines share a joint in Helmand Province in a scene from the controversial new documentary film, Combat Obscura, which is made entirely of raw footage taken in 2011 and 2012 that the Marine Corps has not sanctioned to be released

In another scene, a Marine flips off the camera while saying he is 'so f****d up' from smoking. The Marines called Afghanistan 'hash farm'

The Marine Corps said it was unaware of what was happening during the men's tour and would have investigated it if they had known

In a scene from Combat Obscura, a soldier smokes out of make-shift bong made from a Pringles can during deployment in Afghanistan

Another frame shows a deflated sex doll which they had been playing with. The film offers a behind-the-scenes look at life in a war zone that has not been sanctioned for release by the military

Mike Lazbone (pictured) was hired to film scenes for the Marine Corps to use in publicity campaigns but decided to film everything they were doing

In one scene, a Marine smokes a joint as they described themselves as 'squared away killers'.

'You think the Marine Corps is a bunch of perfect people who don't do anything bad, don't curse, and they're just really squared-away killers.

'The Marine Corps is filled with the most f***** up individuals I've ever met. Just like me, you know?' he said.

At the start of the clip, his comrade describes the country as a 'hash farm' and asks Lagoze to interview him while he is 'f****d up.'

In other scenes, the men are shown defecating outside the homes of locals and talking off-handedly about killing people.

They are filmed cursing at local children and in one distressing scene from its trailer, the small red light of a laser scope can be seen dancing across a young boy's chest.

In the opening of the trailer, the message: 'We filmed what they wanted then kept shooting,' is shown.

In one scene, an injured Marine tells the camera he 'just' got a 'booboo' but did not want to 'do any more combat'

'Lucky us', says a Marine as he stumbles on to a marijuana farm during one mission

A Marine shows off his tattoo while he is interviewed by Lagoze. He appears to be holding a roll-up cigarette

Lagoze said he did not plan on using the footage until he enrolled in Columbia after leaving the military and realized what he had.

'Stop looking at these boys as heroes,' he told Stars and Stripes in an interview about the footage.

A spokesman for the Marine Corps gave a lengthy statement condemning the actions of the men in the film and the film itself.

'The behavior and actions depicted in this film do not live up to the high standards we expect of our Marines and do not represent the experience or attitudes of the vast majority of Marines who deployed and served with honor and distinction in Afghanistan,' it reads.

'We place a tremendous amount of emphasis on ensuring individual Marines are both physically and mentally ready for the challenges they may face in combat. Marines are provided extensive personal and professional training as well as access to multiple resources to prepare and safeguard them for the uncertainty of battle.

In addition to scenes showing the young men behaving inappropriately are distressing clips of battle and how they try to save one another

In the above scene, an unidentified Marine is heard saying 'now is the time to blow everything up'. The cameras had been sent by the military to capture scenes it could use for publicity but combat cameraman Mike Lagoze 'kept shooting'

A marine leads another in battle with a blood-soaked jacket and helmet. The Marines corps resisted the film initially but is powerless to stop its release

The film also lays bare some of the Marines' tactics i the war zone. The Corps condemned its release

In another scene, a Marine points to a 'high value target' on a list of local people

'The actions depicted in the film of these few betrayed the trust and safety of their fellow Marines; they selfishly put their own self-interests over their unit, and by doing so put their entire team at risk,' it said in part.

It said the Corps tried to contact Lagoze and his team but that he ignored them.

'While we contend that at least some of the content of the film - produced with Marine Corps equipment, during a Marine Corps deployment, and not cleared for public release by any official release authority - is rightly the property of the U.S. government, we do not plan to pursue any legal action against Mr. Lagoze at this time,' they added.

The film was released in movie theaters on Friday.

Lagoze did not reveal whether or not he sought permission from the men depicted before releasing the footage publicly.
UK police are stepping up patrols around mosques following the attack in New Zealand.

Officers will be deployed to provide reassurance and advice on protective security as Muslims attend Friday prayers around the country today.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan visited the East London Mosque today and said the British capital 'stood in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in New Zealand'.

Londoners stand in solidarity with Christchurch as they attend a vigil at the East London Mosque with placards saying they attack won't divide them

Police stepped out their patrols outside mosques around the country today, including Finsbury Park Mosque in London, pictured

Aahil Ashraf, four, from Birmingham, with his father Mohamed Ashraf, holds a yellow flower outside Birmingham Central Mosque following prayers for the victims in New Zealand

Jabiral Abdi, two, with his father Said Abdi holds a yellow flower given to him by Christian James Lynch, from Riverside Church, who is handing out flowers to Muslims as they leave Birmingham Central Mosque

At least 49 people have been killed in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand, in an attack broadcast in horrifying live video by an heavily-armed white nationalist.

Mr Khan, who was himself named in a twisted document posted online by the shooter Brenton Tarrant, said Muslims in London feeling 'vulnerable' and frightened.

He said: 'We may be more than 11,000 miles away from Christchurch in New Zealand but we feel the ripples of hatred, we feel the ripples of fear and we feel the ripples of sorrow of our brothers and sisters in Christchurch.'

He added he wanted to reassure all Muslims and everyone going to a place of worship today, and over the course of the next few days, that they will be seeing increased policing.

People stand in solidarity outside Birmingham Central Mosque and tell refugees they're still welcome

Met Police officers stand outside the East London Mosque as security was ramped up in the capital following the New Zealand attack

Two Met Police officers shake hands with a guard outside the Whitechapel Mosque in east London

Security and police stand guard near the Finsbury Mosque during prayers in the capital today

The Met Police said it is stepping up patrols outside the capital's mosques today

'The thoughts and prayers of every decent Londoner are with those in Christchurch in New Zealand who have lost their lives.

'We stand in solidarity with the people of Christchurch. And we want to be a beacon to the rest of the world to show that whether you're a Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, whether you're a member of an organised faith or not. Here in London you are welcome. London is open,' he said.

Mohammed Khozbar, chairman of Finsbury Park Mosque, said: 'From the Muslim community itself, I can say we are resilient and we will not be intimidated by what happened and we will continue with our lives as normal.

'Of course we will take extra precaution and safety, but we will not let these people make us live in fear - like we are not safe in our country.'

Home Secretary Sajid Javid will hold talks with anti-terrorism chiefs and security officials to discuss possible further measures to protect mosques in the UK.

Religious leaders of all faiths came together as Chief Imam Abdul Qayum spoke at the event

A vigil was held at the mosque in Whitechapel following the atrocity in New Zealand

London mayor Sadiq Khan attends a vigil at East London Mosque this afternoon

The Met's Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, head of national counter-terror policing, said: 'Today we will be stepping up reassurance patrols around mosques and increasing engagement with communities of all faith, giving advice on how people and places can protect themselves.'

Security minister Ben Wallace told the House of Commons that later that he and the Home Secretary would be speaking with police counter-terrorism leaders and security services 'to discuss what further measures we can take to protect our mosques and our communities from any threats here in the United Kingdom'.

West Midlands Assistant Chief Constable Matt Ward said his officers will also be at key religious buildings to reassure local people.




Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay has fuelled speculation he could quit after just months in the key post if Theresa May backs a long extension to Article 50, saying 'we shouldn't be afraid to leave with no deal'.

The North East Cambridgeshire MP said that while he backed a short 'technical extension' to allow Theresa May's Brexit deal to be implemented the UK should otherwise quit the bloc without one.

His comments to the BBC on Friday came the day after he spent 10 minutes speaking in the Commons telling MPs they should a Government plan seeking an extension to Article 50 - before then voting against it.

The interview and vote appear to put him on a potential collision course with Theresa May if she fails to get a deal through at the third time of asking before meeting EU leaders on March 21.

The motion passed last night said that if a deal is agreed next week Mrs May would seek to leave by the end of June, to allow time for the delay to be implemented and ratified by EU member states.

But it also says that without one the UK faces staying in the EU for months and potentially years.

The EU is reportedly considering demanding a second referendum as the price of an extension if Mrs May does not arrive in Brussels with a deal.

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay leaving the House of Commons last night after he used a free vote to oppose a Government motion setting out the possible length of a delay to Brexit

Mr Barclay, pictured sitting next to Theresa May last night, had urged MPs to back the deal minutes before he voted against it. The motion was passed by 413 to 202

Asked about how he voted Mr Barclay today suggested that he was voting only against the latter part of the motion, saying: 'There are two parts of the motion, a short technical extension which we need with the deal, and we are pushing that, that's separate from whether you have a long extension rather than no deal.

'My view is  I support Brexit. This constituency voted in very large numbers for Brexit.

'We need a deal, we need to get that over the line. But if we don't have a deal then we should leave with no deal.

'That has always been my position and I voted as my constituency would expect me to do last night.'

He added: 'If we get the deal through, as I hope we still will do, we will need a short technical extension, but if we don't we shouldn't be afraid to leave with no deal.'

If Mr Barclay was to quit he would be the third Brexit secretary to step down since last July, following Dominic Raab and David Davis out the door.

He has only been in the role since November, when the 46-year-old became the surprise name to be unveiled, having previously been a junior health minister.

Theresa May (pictured last night) appears to have a final shot to get her Brexit deal through Parliament with the EU demanding a major 'rethink' on Brexit by Britain if they are to offer an extension and Philip Hammond has been in talks with the DUP today

Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, pictured leaving the Commons last night, is said to be updating his legal advice to include his view that the UK could withdraw unilaterally from the Irish backstop

'If they want Brexit - they'll have to hold their nose and vote for May's deal': Esther McVey hints she - and other hardline Brexiteers - will back PM's deal in third vote Esther McVey quit over Theresa May's deal but has admitted she and other Brexiteers could change their minds this time Brexiteer opposition to Theresa Mays EU deal is softening today as leading Tory MP Esther McVey she and other rebels could now 'hold their noses' and back it. The Cheshire MP, who resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary over the deal four months ago, said Leaver MPs will 'have to think a different way' when the Prime Minister's EU divorce returns to the Commons for a third time next week. Mrs May's deal lost by 149 votes last time and 75 rebels from her own party, including Ms McVey, voted against her. But now the Tory Brexiteer, who is a member of the hardline ERG group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, has hinted she and other Conservatives have changed their minds. Speaking to the BBC she said: 'The [situation] now is people will have to take a bad deal rather than no deal. People are going to have to think a different way next week'. When asked if if 'MPs like her would hold their noses and vote' she replied: 'Yes. They will. I don't know what the number is, but they will have to do that if they want Brexit'. Advertisement

His comments today came as the DUP edged towards backing Theresa May's Brexit deal when MPs vote for the third time next week as the Chancellor Philip Hammond was brought in as emergency talks turned to money.

Mr Hammond is leading negotiations with the Unionist party who previously grabbed an extra 1billion of funding for Northern Ireland in exchange for propping up the Government for two years until this summer.

Earlier today, in a significant boost to the Prime Minister, a DUP representative admitted it was 'involved in ongoing and significant discussions with the Government today' over her EU divorce.

There is also growing pressure on Attorney General Geoffrey Cox to change his legal advice to ease fears that Britain would be trapped 'indefinitely' in the Irish backstop - and Mrs May's top lawyer is also at today's talks.

Other insiders suggested that the Government could promise to pump more money into Northern Ireland. The party negotiated an extra 1billion of funding in exchange for supporting Theresa May in a 'supply and confidence' deal struck in 2017.

The DUP is said to be getting closer to ordering its 10 MPs to back Mrs May's deal, and would bring a large number of Brexiteers with them including high-profile members of the Tory ERG group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Speaking in Washington DUP leader Arlene Foster, who met Donald Trump yesterday, said she was 'working very hard' with Mrs May, adding: 'We want to make sure we get there.'

One source suggested that she is under pressure from party backers and one told The Sun: 'The donors have turned off the taps. They want a deal'.

As she scrambles for votes Mrs May will also have to set out a timetable for her resignation in order to get her deal through Parliament, her own Brexiteer MPs have warned.
A Puerto Rico woman found guilty of hiring a hit man to kill her wealthy Canadian husband more than a decade ago was sentenced to life in prison on Friday.

Aurea Vazquez Rijos cried as a federal judge issued the sentence and ordered that she be transferred to a prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Judge Daniel Dominguez said he believed the jury's guilty verdict over Vazquez's statement that she is innocent.

Her defense attorneys plan to appeal in a case that led to an international manhunt.

Aurea Vazquez Rijos was found guilty of hiring a hit man to kill her husband more than a decade ago and has been sentenced to life in prison

Aurea Vazquez Rijos (right), who was accused in 2008 for the murder of her husband, Canadian Adam Anhang (left) in 2005, was jailed for life on Friday

Vazquez had been charged with offering a man, Alex Pabon-Colon, $3 million to kill real estate developer Adam Anhang.

He was stabbed repeatedly and hit in the head with an object while walking with Vazquez through the historic part of Puerto Rico's capital in September 2005, just 12 hours after prosecutors said Anhang had asked for a divorce.

Vazquez and Anhang had signed a prenup just one day before getting married, with Anhang's value estimated at more than $24 million and Vazquez's at nearly $62,300.

If Anhang died, it was agreed his wife would receive $8million.

The Canadian developer and Puerto Rican pageant winning wife split up just six months after getting married.

Canadian businessman Adam Anhang, pictured with his wife Aurea Vazquez-Rijos, was assassinated in 2005 after the couple met at a San Juan restaurant to discuss their divorce

In 2013, Spanish law enforcement agents acted on the FBI's wanted notice of fugitive beauty queen Aurea Vazquez-Rijos (pictured above) and arrested her as she got off a plane in Madrid

Up until this point, generous Anhang showered Vazquez-Rijos with lavish gifts including a car, an apartment and a business in Old San Juan called 'The Pink Skirt.'

Six months after Anhang's death, Vazquez sued his parents seeking $1 million in damages and $8 million from his estate.

She later left for Florence, Italy and was arrested in June 2013 after flying from Italy to Spain.

She and her one-month-old baby were extradited to Puerto Rico two years later, leaving behind twin daughters she had with a man in Italy.

Also sentenced to life Friday was Vazquez's sister, Marcia Vazquez Rijos. Still pending is the sentencing for an ex-boyfriend of hers, Jose Ferrer Sosa.

The main suspect, Alex Pabon Colon, pleaded guilty 10 years ago to killing Anhang and cooperated with prosecutors.

Marcia Vazquez-Rios was also sentenced to life for her involvement in the 2005 assassination of Adam Anhang, her sister's millionaire husband

Investigators were able to crack the 2005 case of murdered Canadian millionaire Adam Anhang when Dereck Osterman Kim (pictured) told police who the real killer was

Among those who also testified during the trial last year was a man who sued for wrongful conviction after he was found guilty of killing Anhang and spent eight months in jail. He was released when Pabon was charged as federal authorities took over the case.

Aurea Vazquez-Rijos, who in 1997 was a finalist for Miss Puerto Rico Petite orchestrated the whole killing by setting a trap for her husband.

She arranged to meet him at a restaurant located in the vibrant, historical Old San Juan neighborhood.

Pabon-Colon then received the green light from Ferrer-Sosa and was given the restaurant location where he lay in wait for the young millionaire.

After the married couple had finished their meal at the restaurant called Dragonfly, Aurea Vazquez-Rijos accompanied Anhang to a nearby parking garage before Pabon-Colon repeatedly stabbed and bashed the victim's head with a cobblestone at the corner of San Justo and Luna streets.

Aurea Vasque- Rijos is pictured with Adam Joel Anhang, who was her husband of six months before she allegedly conspired to murder him

Anhang tried in vain to fight off the hired assailant shouting 'run, baby, run' to his beauty queen wife, thinking that both their lives were in grave danger.

Little did he know that she was the one who had ordered his death and used $3million of his money to pay a hit man to stab him death.

On October 12, 2005, Jonathan Roman-Rivera was arrested at the Pink Skirt Club after a witness picked him out.

He was found guilty on or about October 2007, and sentenced to 105 years in prison.

However, another witness later came forward and pointed out Pabon-Colon as Anhang's real killer.

Jonathan Roman-Rivera spent eight months in jail for the murder of Canadian millionaire Adam Anhang, a crime he did not commit

In June 2008, Roman-Rivera was released from prison and Pabon-Colon was arrested and confessed to investigators. On June 4, 2008, a Federal Grand Jury in the District of Puerto Rico indicted Aurea Vazquez-Rijos and Pabon-Colon, who pleaded guilty on June 13, 2008.

Jose Ferrer-Sosa also participated in setting up the 2005 murder of Adam Anhang, a Canadian businessman who was married to his girlfriend's sister

Aurea Vazquez-Rijos did not comply with the investigation into her husband's death, instead she filed a $1million civil lawsuit seeking damages against Anhang's family, as well as millions more from his estate.

Charged by a United States grand jury for her millionaire husband's death, Aurea Vazquez-Rijos fled to Italy in 2008, where she sought residency that would have protected her because Italy does not extradite suspects who face the death penalty.

Her relationship with an air-conditioner contractor in Florence resulted in the August 18, 2008 birth of her now 10-year-old twin girls.

She would lose custody of her twin daughters once their father and his family got news that she was wanted to the murder of her husband.

In 2013, Aurea Vazquez-Rijos flew to Madrid where she was arrested by Spanish law enforcement agents.

As part of the extradition process, a spokesperson with the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Puerto Rico told the DailyMail.com that the Spanish government agreed to turn the Puerto Rican beauty queen on the condition that she wouldn't be subjected to the death penalty.

Police in San Juan, Puerto Rico, survey the 2005 murder scene where Adam Anhang, a Canadian businessman, lay dead after he was brutally assassinated

Prosecutors solidified their case based on the key testimony of Dereck Osterman-Kim, Pabon-Colon's best friend, who tearfully said in court that his buddy called in for a favor, asking him to pick him up before he confessed to the murder.

'He told me he had killed a person. I kept driving around. It is not easy because it caught me by surprise. He told me he was going to be rich,' Osterman-Kim said in court during a September 13 hearing, according to a statement published by El Vocero de Puerto Rico.

'He wanted to make sure that person would be dead  He wanted me to see what happened on San Justo street.'

After a two year wait, Aurea Vazquez-Rijos was handed over and she will now spend the rest of her life behind bars.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has branded the suspected New Zealand mosque shooter as 'scum' and said Islamophobia 'is taking over the West like cancer'.

Erdogan made the comments at an election rally on Friday where he revealed three Turkish citizens were injured in the attacks - and he had spoken to one of them.

The 65-year-old politician said the suspect was 'impertinent, immoral, vile and scum' and said he had chosen innocent worshippers as an easy target.

Turkey's President Erdogan said the New Zealand mosque shooter was 'scum' after he left three Turkish nationals injured in the attack on Friday

He said: 'As Muslims, we will never bow our heads, but we will never fall to the level of these vile people.'

He went on to label the attacks the 'latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.'

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister, Erdogan said the Islamophobia that motivated the attacks 'has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer.'

Speaking at an address to the supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party during a rally in Gaziantep, Turkey, Erdogan called on Western nations to rapidly take measures to curb rising racism against Islam and Muslims

Police console a man outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, after people were killed in a mass shooting in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. Police urge people to stay indoors

Ramzan Ali is thought to be the last man to get out of the Masjd Al Noor Mosque alive. He waits in front of the mosque as he waits for news about his brother who was with him

The Masjid Al Noor Mosque on Deans Avenue was the scene of the mass shooting, in Christchurch. At least one gunman opened fire at around 1:40pm local time after walking into the mosque

Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa in Auckland. Four people are in custody following the shootings at two mosques in Christchurch

World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation following the deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent Islamophobia.

In a tweet, U.S. President Donald Trump sent 'warmest sympathy and best wishes' to the people of New Zealand.

He wrote that '49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!'

Police speak to witnesses following the shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch. The deaths happened at Al Noor mosque and the Linwood Masjid

A parent waits at the front of at Beckenham Te Kura o Puroto primary school in Christchurch. Schools across Christchurch were put in lockdown following shooting attacks on two mosques in the city

New Zealand police said at least 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city of Christchurch.

More than 20 were seriously wounded in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a 'terrorist attack.'

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack.

Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Witnesses are escorted away from a mosque in central Christchurch. New Zealand police have warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved

Shocked family members of men thought to be in the mosque at the time of the shooting stand outside the Masjid Al Noor

And two other people were being held in custody and police were trying to determine how they might be involved.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed Erdogan's comments.

He tweeted: 'I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim.'

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement that the attack 'served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia.'

Armed Offenders Squad push back members of the public following the shooting at the Masjid Al Noor

Police cordon off Deans Avenue in front of the Masjd Al Noor Mosque after 49 people were confirmed dead in the shooting

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealand's head of state, said in a message to the country she was 'deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch' and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

'At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders,' she said.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack 'with horror and profound sadness.'

He wrote: 'The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life.'

In France, home to western Europe's largest Muslim community, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner ordered regional authorities to bolster security at mosques as a precaution.

People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch after a terrorist entered Al Noor mosque and the Linwood Masjid and opened fire

The area in front of the Masjid al Noor mosque was cordoned off by police after the shooting by an Australian extremist

London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the city's Metropolitan Police force would be visible outside mosques.

'London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack,' he said. 'London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy.'

Mayor Bill de Blasio said New York City is providing extra security for Muslim community centers and mosques. He said he wants the city's Muslims to know that New Yorkers 'truly embrace' them and 'have their backs.'

Indonesia's president Joko Widodo condemned the attacks, in which an Indonesian father and son were among those wounded.

An injured person is loaded in an ambulance following the shooting which caused multiple fatalities and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor on Deans Avenue

A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone near a mosque in central Christchurch. Multiple people were killed at the two mosques which were full of people attending Friday prayers

Indonesian Muslim leaders expressed anger at the shooting rampage while urging Muslims to show restraint.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said bigotry in Western countries contributed to the attacks on Muslims in New Zealand.

In a tweet on Friday, he also criticized the West for 'defending demonization of Muslims as `freedom of expression.''

Afghanistan's Taliban movement - Islamic militants who carry out near-daily attacks on Afghan security forces - also condemned the shooting rampage, labeling it an 'unforgivable crime.'

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yusuf called on the New Zealand government to investigate 'the root cause of such terrorism and hand a hefty punishment to the attackers.'

Police cordon off the area in front of the Masjid al Noor mosque after the attack in Christchurch. The culprit livestreamed the assault online

Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Western countries, condemned the 'policy of hatred that the United States is feeding around the world instead of prevailing religious values that call for forgiveness.'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks a 'brazen act of terror.' His office said on Twitter that Israel mourns the murder of innocent worshippers, condemns the assault and sends its condolences to bereaved families.

Jordan's King Abdullah II tweeted that 'the heinous massacre against Muslims praying in peace in New Zealand is an appalling terrorist crime.

It unites us against extremism, hatred and terrorism, which knows no religion.' Jordan's Foreign Ministry confirmed that one Jordanian was killed and five wounded in the attack.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas extended his country's sympathies to those who lost loved ones, saying 'if people are murdered solely because of their religion, that is an attack on all of us.'

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the 'dastardly terrorist attack' and offered his condolences, as did several other world leaders.

A telegram of condolences sent by the Vatican on behalf of Pope Francis said he was 'deeply saddened to learn of the injury and loss of life' caused by the 'senseless acts of violence' in Christchurch.

He assured all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his 'heartfelt solidarity'.
Theresa May faces an enormous uphill struggle to get a Brexit deal through the House Commons even with the support of the DUP, a MailOnline analysis suggests.

Mrs May will reportedly attempt to get MPs to back her withdrawal agreement for a third time next week.

She was defeated by 149 votes on Tuesday, which was a vast improvement on the 230-vote defeat in January.

So she needs 75 MPs to switch sides. But where might they be found?

Theresa May (pictured last night) appears to have a final shot to get her Brexit deal through Parliament with the EU demanding a major 'rethink' on Brexit by Britain if they are to offer an extension and Philip Hammond has been in talks with the DUP today

DUP MP Nigel Dodds denied cash was being talked about in discussions with the Government but insisted his party was keen to support the PM's deal if they can

Senior ministers are expected to spend a large chunk of the weekend in talk with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

Deputy leader Nigel Dodds smiled today as he denied Chancellor Philip Hammond offered the party cash to back Theresa May's Brexit divorce in the Commons next week but said: 'We want to get a deal'.

'If they want Brexit - they'll have to hold their nose and vote for May's deal': Esther McVey hints she - and other hardline Brexiteers - will back PM's deal in third vote Esther McVey quit over Theresa May's deal but has admitted she and other Brexiteers could change their minds this time Brexiteer opposition to Theresa Mays EU deal is softening today as leading Tory MP Esther McVey she and other rebels could now 'hold their noses' and back it. The Cheshire MP, who resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary over the deal four months ago, said Leaver MPs will 'have to think a different way' when the Prime Minister's EU divorce returns to the Commons for a third time next week. Mrs May's deal lost by 149 votes last time and 75 rebels from her own party, including Ms McVey, voted against her. But now the Tory Brexiteer, who is a member of the hardline ERG group led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, has hinted she and other Conservatives have changed their minds. Speaking to the BBC she said: 'The [situation] now is people will have to take a bad deal rather than no deal. People are going to have to think a different way next week'. When asked if if 'MPs like her would hold their noses and vote' she replied: 'Yes. They will. I don't know what the number is, but they will have to do that if they want Brexit'. Advertisement

The party's leader in Westminster also revealed the party remains 'very disappointed' with Geoffrey Cox's legal advice on the Irish backstop as pressure was heaped on the Attorney General to tweak it.

Mr Hammond is leading negotiations with the Unionist party who previously grabbed an extra 1billion of funding for Northern Ireland in exchange for its 10 MPs propping up the Government for two years until this summer.

But Mr Dodds insisted they were not talking money and said the Chancellor was there to discuss tax issues for Northern Ireland, calling the talks 'constructive'.

He said: 'We are not discussing cash. From day one, our focus has been on the red line of how Northern Ireland is treated separately from the rest of the UK.

He added: 'For us the key problem with the Withdrawal Agreement is the Irish backstop. We have had good discussion today. Those discussions will continue'.

He said the Government was now 'very focused' on addressing the issue of the backstop, adding: 'There is a renewed focus in Government on ensuring those issues are addressed'.

There is also growing pressure on Attorney General Geoffrey Cox to change his legal advice to ease fears that Britain would be trapped 'indefinitely' in the Irish backstop - and Mrs May's top lawyer was also at today's talks with Environment Secretary Michael Gove, Cabinet Secretary David Lidington and Tory Chief Whip Julian Smith.

Despite the DUP's denial, insiders suggested that the Government could promise to pump more money into Northern Ireland. The party negotiated an extra 1billion of funding in exchange for supporting Theresa May in a 'supply and confidence' deal struck in 2017.

The Northern Ireland unionist party has only 10 of its own MPs but it is important because of the parliamentary mathematics.

Overall Mrs May needs 318 votes to get her deal through, with the vast majority of Labour, plus all the the SNP, Lib Dems and the Independent Group (TIG) lined up against it

If all the Tories and DUP backed the deal she would get 324. If all 10 DUP dont back her she falls four short at 314.

But almost as importantas their 10 votes is the DUP's soft power and Mrs May will be seeking their backing as a way of wooing back some members of the European Research Group (ERG) of hardcore Tory Brexiteers.

A fair number of ERG MPs including Jacob Rees-Mogg hinted said before the second meaningful vote that they could support a deal if the DUP did.

This is because the main point of contention is the Irish border backstop and they did not feel they could oppose something that representatives of that nation would back.

The same is likely to be true the next time round.

There are likely to be around 58 ERG and other Brexiteer votes in play come the next meaningful vote so if the DUP can be persuaded it would b a huge boost for the PM's chances of getting a deal through.

However there could be a spanner in the works.

There could be a number of ERG members who are so opposed to doing a deal that they cannot be reconciled, even if the alternative is no Brexit or an even softer Brexit.

Those thought to be nigh on impossible to convert include deputy chairman Steve Baker and Essex MP Mark Francois.

Combined with Tory Remainers like Dominic Grieve who oppose her deal they could leave her reliant on Labour rebels.

Jeremy Corbyn is certain to whip his MPs against Mrs May's deal without wholesale changes she is not prepared to make.

Just three backbenchers defied him on Tuesday, despite Mrs May having previously unveiled a 1.6billion Smaller Towns Fund that was widely regarded as a bribe armed as opposition MPs from poor norther towns which voted to Leave.

However, Thursday's votes on a Brexit delay may have highlighted a group who might be prepared to change their vote and back a deal.

Eight Labour MPs from northern Leave constituencies broke the whip to vote against an amendment that would have allowed a second referendum.

There is no guarantee they would come across but they would appear to be Mrs May's best bet.

If she was able to get all of them onside she might, just might, sneak a deal through next week.
They come seeking insights on love, money and lost loved ones.

Some find answers and relief. Others find a reason to keep coming back, paying each time for the answers they crave.

Whether it's palm readers or astrologers, experts in tarot, or mediums who connect with the dead  the psychic industry is booming, according to a new report.

Revenues have grown 52 percent since 2005 to reach nearly $2.2 billion in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, according to an IBISWorld industry report obtained by DailyMail.com.

This graph illustrates revenue growth in the psychic services industry from 2005-2024 projections. Source: IBISWorld

The industry has rebounded along with the post-recession economy and a growing acceptance of the metaphysical or supernatural.

The industry's growth comes as personal religious beliefs in the U.S. have become more flexible and accepting: more than a quarter of Americans have left the faith they were raised in and 16.1 percent consider themselves unaffiliated, according to Pew.

'I don't think the susceptibility or gullibility of Americans has changed over the decades,' said Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a teacher of critical thinking at Chapman University.

'What we're witnessing is probably more internet access for promoters of psychics to spread their business more,' he told DailyMail.com.

At the same time, the industry is contending with escalating local regulations, as a growing number of states pass ordinances requiring background checks, registration fees, random inspections and limits on how many psychics can work within a given area, according to IBISWorld.

This graph shows the steady uptick in the number of psychics working in the industry. Source: IBISWorld

Shermer believes that the entire industry is bunk  even if the self-proclaimed psychics believe in what they are selling.

'I think most of them believe that they can do what they claim they can do  It's easier to deceive people if you yourself believe it,' he said.

Some 15 percent of Americans have consulted psychics or fortune tellers  and women are twice as likely to visit one, according to Pew Research Center.

'I keep an open mind,' said Lynn Dolan, a 58-year-old from Mendham, New Jersey who visits psychics, mediums or tarot card readers two or three times a year.

'What I primarily get from these visits is a new perspective that gives me an 'aha' moment, or a new idea, from what my train of thought had been,' she told DailyMail.com. 'That gives me something to reflect on, and I appreciate that.'

The psychic industry has a handful of major players  the Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo, and John Edwards, for instance  who are known for channeling dead loved ones seeking to communicate with people from beyond.

But the majority of the industry is dominated by small players, who made less than $44,000 per capita in 2018, according to IBISWorld.

At the same time, there are more of those players  the number of psychic services professions rose to 89,394 in 2018, compared to 78,874 in 2005.

This chart breaks down the psychic industry by specialty, with palm reader being the most common profession in the industry. Source: IBISWorld

This graph shows the per-capita income among psychics from 2005-2024 projections. Source: IBISWOrld

The highest concentration of psychics is in Florida, where 14.4 percent of the entire industry works. California came in second (12.5 percent), followed by New York (7.2 percent) and Texas (6.9 percent).

Palm readers narrowly account for the biggest share of psychic workers (23 percent), followed by tarot card readers (21 percent) and mediums (18 percent).

Aura readers account for 15 percent of the industry, while astrologists make up another 12 percent, and 11 percent fall into none of those categories.

The challenge going forward will be attracting younger clients  adults younger than 30 account for just 11 percent of people who visit psychics, Pew reported. However, more psychics are looking to incorporate apps or video and other technology into the way they provide their services, which could appeal to a younger clientele.

Nora Herold, 52, is an Ojai, California-based worker in the metaphysical space  she calls herself a 'direct-voice channel' who connects with a 'collective conscious identity that exists on a higher dimension' on behalf of her clients.

Herold said her connection to beings in the fifth dimension can help provide clients with a shift in consciousness and a deeper understanding of the greater truths in life  though she doesn't peddle hard predictions.

This map illustrates the percentage of psychics that live in each state. Source: IBISWorld

She laughs off skeptics and acknowledges that many people may not be able to wrap their head around the spiritual, metaphysical world, but maintains that what she does is real.

'This is becoming more mainstream,' she said. 'We are all capable of these abilities. Every single one of us.'

She's grown her business a number of ways  including through promoting her work on Facebook and offering her services to more people via video-conferencing.

'I absolutely access third dimensional marketing tools while coupling it with this fifth dimensional energy (to grow my business),' Herold said.

While most people can't predict the future, the economic crystal ball suggests good fortune for psychics going forward.

Over the next five years, industry revenue is expected to continue rising, growing 0.9 percent each year to total $2.3 billion by 2024.
An Omani businessman worth more than 300million has been ordered to give his ex 25million after she argued she needed a 400,000-a-year for holidays and a further 60k for pocket money.

Talal Al Zawawi owned about 15% of an Omani business worth more than the 2billion, the Family Division of the High Court in London heard.

The 48-year-old's ex-wife Leila Hammoud, 36, who grew up in Lebanon but now lives in London wanted more than 50million following their divorce after becoming accustomed to high-end living.

Prior to their separation Mr Al Zawawi had cancelled his wife's 'transactions and loans'.

The case was heard at the Family Division of the High Court in London (stock image pictured)

Ms Hammoud said she had shared a 'palace' in Oman with Mr Al Zawawi and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle during a 12-year marriage.

She said she needed 400,000 a year for holidays for her and their three children, more than 60,000 a year to buy jewellery, more than 60,000 a year 'pocket money', 60,000 a year for 'spectator events' and 24,000 a year to buy shoes.

However Mr Justice Holman concluded that about 21 million would meet her needs and about 3 million would be suitable for the children's needs.

He said his calculations included more than 5million for a house and 75,000 for a car.

The judge outlined his decision in a ruling on Friday after analysing evidence at a hearing in the Family Division of the High Court in London.

He said Mr Al Zawawi and Ms Hammoud could be named in media reports but he said their children should not be named.

Mr Justice Holman (pictured) said he had been critical of Mr Al Zawawi, who resides in Oman

Mr Justice Holman said Mr Al Zawawi had divorced Ms Hammoud in Oman two years ago - when they had a home in London.

He highlighted that under Omani law Ms Hammoud would get no financial provision. The judge said it was right that she should make a cash claim in England.

He said Mr Al Zawawi owned about a sixth of the Zawawi Group, which is involved in businesses including banking, construction and tourism.

Mr Al Zawawi had inherited his share from his late father, Omani politician and businessman Qais Bin Abdulmunim Al Zawawi.

Mr Justice Holman was critical of Mr Al Zawawi, who lives in Oman.

The judge said Mr Al Zawawi not engaged in the proceedings, had not provided detail of his wealth, had not paid money he owed Ms Hammoud and left her in debt.

He had also 'tragically' not seen his children for more than a year, said the judge.

Mr Justice Holman told how Ms Hammoud had been sent an email by Mr Al Zawawi's personal assistant shortly before they separated in 2017.

It began, 'Dear Madam, Greetings!!!' was marked 'FYI'.

'Mr Talal Al Zawawi has instructed us to cancel all your transactions/loans from next month onwards until further notification,' it said. 'Thanks and warm regards.'
A transgender woman, 18, has sexually assaulted a ten-year-old girl in a Morrisons toilet just weeks after using her phone to spy on another girl in an Asda female toilet.

Katie Dolatowski admitted grabbing the young girl in Morrisons by her face and forcing her into a cubicle in Fife, Scotland.

Dolatowski, who identifies as a woman but was believed by the victim's family to be a man, threatened to stab the girl's mother and made her take off her trousers in the Kirkcaldy supermarket.

Katie Dolatowski has admitted grabbing a young girl in Morrisons in Kirkcaldy and forcing her into a female toilet cubicle to sexually assault her

Just over three weeks prior to the sexual assault, the 18-year-old held a phone over a girl in a toilet cubicle in Asda, Halbeath.

The young victim shouted at Dolatowski who was later identified as the assailant, who ran from the scene, according to The Sun.

Dolatowski avoided jail at sentencing in January and was handed a three-year community order, banned from having contact with children and placed on the sex offenders register.

She was also ordered to perform 100 hours of unpaid work.

But a blunder by the court meant a ban from her deleting her online history was not attached to her order when she was sentenced.

A social worker has since raised concerns that Dolatowski has been deleting her internet message history.

Weeks earlier, Dolatowski used her phone to spy on another young girl in a toilet cubicle in Asda, Halbeath

Sheriff James Williamson said: 'One of the worrying features in the report suggests that you have been accessing the internet and then trying to hide who you have been in contact with.'

The condition has now been attached to the order, meaning she can no longer delete her internet history on any device.

Sheriff Williamson threatened her with a prison sentence if she was found to have interfered with her online history.

Dolatowski is also on an electronic tag and has twice breached her community order by not attending appointments.

She will appear before the court on April 9 for a review of her sentence.
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Men begrudgingly left to look after the children and wash the family's clothes, a humiliated little boy pushing a girly doll around in a pram and a group of disorderly women knocking back cocktails at the bar.

These are the anti-suffrage postcards which were produced to warn and scare men against giving women the vote in the early twentieth century.

Between 1893 and 1918, an estimated 4,500 different postcard designs were produced on the subject of women's suffrage - the bulk of which were commercial propaganda images used to oppose women's right to vote and stop the movement gaining momentum.

It's election day and a miserable man looking after children sits beneath a sign that reads: 'What is a fuffragette without a suffering household?', circa 1910. Between 1893 and 1918, an estimated 4,500 different postcards designs were produced on the subject of women's suffrage. Most of them were propaganda aimed to convince men that women's right to vote would lead to a horrible future

A mock declaration of defeat for men in an anti-suffragette poster, circa 1910. It wasn't until 1918 that women over the age of 30, and with certain property qualifications, were allowed to vote

Two drunken women appear in an anti-suffragette postcard while a ruffled barman looks down his nose at them, circa 1910. Emmeline Pankhurst was one of the best-known founding members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), she oversaw the group from its non-violent beginnings but later advocated for direct action as a tactic for gaining the vote

An anti-suffragette postcard suggesting how bad a gender role reversal would be, circa 1910. The public dubbed the WSPU suffragists 'suffragettes' and they immediately adopted the name and called their journal The Suffragette. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word suffragette was first published by The Daily Mail in 1906

A cowering man hides in the kitchen as his dominant wife shouts at him, the caption reads 'Puzzle - find the head of the house' circa 1910. Emmeline Pankhurst was arrested several times and after being convicted of conspiracy to commit property damage, she used a common suffragist prison tactic - a hunger strike - to secure better conditions for her fellow suffragettes

In the fascinating collection of British and U.S, postcards, exhausted and emasculated men are seen performing 'feminine' roles in the houses like cooking and caring for children whilst women go out for a night on the town.

The propaganda pictures mock the feature slogans like 'What is a suffragette without a suffering household?' and downtrodden husbands bemoaning how 'I wish I was single again'.

The once popular postcards show terrified men hiding away from their now domineering and abusive wives - whilst another image shows a suffragette activist trying to grow a beard in a bid to be more masculine.

An anti-suffragette postcard showing a miserable man dealing with home chores as his indifferent wife heads out for the night, the caption reads 'Just by way of a change', circa 1910. Emily Davison was the first suffragette to lose her life in the plight for equal rights. At the Epsom Derby in June 1913, she threw herself in front of the kings horse and was trampled to death

An emasculated man wonders where his wife is in an anti-suffragette poster, circa 1910. The Suffragettes battle saw them get arrested and put in prison often. They were known for going on hunger strikes while in prison in an attempt to get better treatment for future Suffragettes that would be arrested and in protest of not being given the status of political prisoner

'I Wish I Was Single Again' An anti-suffragette postcard showing a woman ordering her exhausted husband to do more housework, circa 1910. The first Suffragette to go on hunger strike in prison was Marion Wallace Dunlop, a militant suffragette who was sentenced to a month in Holloway for vandalism in July 1909

An anti-suffragette postcard seemingly suggesting that women want beards, circa 1910. The women were repeatedly accused of wanting to be men - rather than being women who expected the same rights in the campaign to humiliate them. Suffragettes were suffering violent punishment at the same time as they stepped up their campaign to get the vote

A miserable man features on an anti-suffragette picture postcard looking with three children clinging to him, circa 1910. The women were constantly accused of abandoning their families. The sexist images are from the Palczewski Suffrage Postcard Archive - a collection of visual images associated with the struggle for woman suffrage in both the United States and Great Britain

During the Victorian era, clearly defined roles for men and women emerged which characterised women as the submissive and domesticated caregivers in the home.

So when the women's suffrage movement gained momentum in the early twentieth century, it challenged these traditional family values and notions of womanhood.

Organized campaigns against women's suffrage began in earnest in 1905, around the same time that the suffragettes started turning to more militant tactics in Britain and the US. At the time, postage cost pennies and postcards were cheap to mass produce. Commercial publishers started producing thousands of these satirical postcards to shame these feminist activists.

An emasculated man appears on an anti-suffragette cooking, cleaning and looking after the children while his wife sits and smokes a cigarette while reading a magazine, circa 1910

An emboldened woman is seen shouting at her husband who is emasculated in an anti-suffragette postcard, the caption reads 'Results of Suffrage victory', circa 1910. During the Victorian era, clearly defined roles for men and women emerged which characterised women as the submissive and domesticated caregivers in the home. The Suffragette movement opposed these society-given gender roles and came under fire as a result

A haggard man is seen cleaning boots whilst his wife sits and drinks tea in an anti-suffragette postcard, circa 1910. The campaign against the suffrage movement ultimately failed when in 1928, the Equal Franchise gave British women full suffrage whilst American women were given the same voting rights as men eight years earlier with the 19th Amendment

The caption 'The worst is yet to come' alongside the image of a haggard man looking after children with a discarded book called 'how to take care of children' claims that granting women the right to vote would lead to men having to take care of their young ones. It suggests that this would be an awful future to be heading towards

The campaign against the suffrage movement ultimately failed when in 1928, the Equal Franchise gave British women full suffrage whilst American women were given the same voting rights as men eight years earlier with the 19th Amendment.

These now rare postcards serve as important records of history from a time when there was a deep-rooted societal fear of women gaining the same rights as men and becoming 'masculinised' by their entry into political life.

The incredible images are from the Palczewski Suffrage Postcard Archive - a collection of visual images associated with the struggle for woman suffrage in both the United States and Great Britain. The postcards were collected by Catherine Helen Palczewski and Arnie Madsen over a period of 15 years.

A miserable man features on an anti-suffragette postcard looking after many children, the captions reads 'It's the little things that count' - possibly a reference to the belief that men would have to swap all of their small pleasures in favour of looking after their children - circa 1910

This anti-suffrage postcard shows a woman threatening to beat her husband with a rolling pin. The caption reads 'If you love your wife and much less, your life. Get out and get under' - implying that by giving women anything close to equal rights, men would suffer

An emasculated man appears on an anti-suffragette postcard with the slogan 'Just by way of a Change', circa 1910. After a few years of Suffragettes being allowed to go on hunger strike in prison, by 1905 they were force-fed using painful and heavy handed techniques which left many with long-term health problems

This postcard shows a man doing housework and being left to look after two children while his wife goes out. The caption reads 'Once I get my liberty, no more wedding bells for me!' - implying that women who were given the right to vote would enslave their husbands and force them to do all of the housework and childcare
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A nature photographer witnessed an unexpected upset in the animal kingdom on Monday, when a squirrel emerged victorious in a fearsome battle with a huge eagle.

Roger Stevens Jr. was driving past a Rite Aide store in Lincoln, Maine, when he glanced out the window and spotted a bald eagle perched atop a tree.

Believing the bird to be acting strangely, Stevens - who says he never leaves home without his camera - pulled over his car to snap some pictures.

As he got closer, he spotted another creature, a small gray squirrel, sat on a parallel branch staring back at the looming bird.

For the next 10 minutes, the unlikely opponents squared-off in an epic staring battle, with the squirrel seemingly unfazed by the prolific predator's menacing gaze.

Are you looking at me? For 10 minutes the two creatures stared one-another down, atop a tree in Lincoln Maine

Photographer Roger Stevens described how the cunning squirrel goaded the eagle by darting up and down the branches but staying far enough away so that it couldn't be eaten

The rodent appeared to lose ground in the battle at one stage, and it sought shelter in a hollow after the eagle spread its wings

'The squirrel just kept seeing how close it could get to the eagle. [It] would come up and just taunt him, dare him,' Stevens told the Bangor Daily News.

'That squirrel seemed to know just how close it could get to the eagle to really make him mad.'

Scurrying back and forth in front of the eagle, the brazen squirrel seemed determined to drive the bird away from its territory.

At one stage, the rodent appeared to lose ground in the duel when it sought shelter in a hollow of the tree after the eagle flared its wings in warning.

But remarkably, the stubborn creature emerged once more and increased its effort to taunt and confront the eagle.

But remarkably, the stubborn creature emerged once more and increased its effort to taunt and confront the eagle

Steven likened the squirrel's battle with the eagle to David and Goliath, calling it a 'once in a lifetime' encounter

The photographer watched in awe as the eagle flew away, crowning the squirrel victorious in the unlikely duel

'The squirrel went right up the tree three of four times and got in his face,' Stevens said.

And incredibly, the persistence of the small creature paid off, as the bird of prey submitted to the squirrel's goading and eventually flew away.

Believing the exchange to be nature's version of David and Goliath, Stevens shared a series of images to Facebook.

'It's like the little guy gets the big guy,' he told CBS. 'That's behavior you just don't see.'

Stevens added that the squirrel was actually working to protect its den from the bird.

A photographer for 21 years, Stevens described the event as a 'once in a lifetime' encounter. He has seven books published and an eighth about eagles, which will feature these images, out soon.
ISIS suicide bombers have attacked crowds fleeing the terror group's last bastion as US-backed forces have moved in, an SDF spokesperson has said.

A witness told Reuters that the terror group had sent three women suicide bombers to the area to target the families who were leaving.

Six civilians are said to have been killed with three US-backed troops having been injured by the blast.

Throughout the week civilians have been moving out of the area with their families, walking over the rocky conditions in Baghouz. With the elderly and children often having to climb up difficult paths.

A smoke plume billows from the remains of an Islamic State group jihadists' camp near the village of Baghouz in the eastern Syrian province of Deir Ezzor, on March 15

This picture shows the battered riverside camp after US-backed SDF soldiers fought with ISIS group jihadists near the village of Baghouz

SDF fighters armed with guns stand in the village of Baghouz as they continue to fight ISIS

ISIS launched three suicide attacks outside their last redoubt in eastern Syria. Pictured SDF fighters

An official with the Syrian Democratic Forces, who goes by the name Ciyager, said IS militants are still holding 300 prisoners, both civilians and SDF fighters, adding that their fate is unknown.

The campaign to uproot the militants from the eastern banks of the Euphrates River began in September, pushing them down towards a last corner in the village of Baghouz, near the Iraqi border.

The operation to uproot the militants has been halted several times since February 12 as the SDF said a large number of civilians and hostages were in the territory.

Earlier this week the SDF resumed its final push in the area before reducing pressure after strong resistance from the extremists.

Mortars have been being launched throughout the week by the SDF on the frontline fighting to expel ISIS

The US-backed SDF having pushed militants further out of Syria and they now remain in Baghouz

This is while hundreds of IS fights and family members surrendered.

Ciyager said there are no negotiations under way to secure the prisoners' release.

An SDF statement said hundreds of IS fighters and their families surrendered on Thursday.

Today SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali tweeted that a new group of IS fighters had surrendered.

Another SDF official said an IS suicide bomber apparently approaching to surrender blew himself up at the checkpoint where they search evacuees. The official refused to say if there were casualties.

A fighter of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) looks on at the remains of an Islamic State (IS) group jihadists' camp near the village of Baghouz

Explosions were seen at the beginning of the week in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor

The incident underscores how risky the operation is, and how it can be difficult for forces to tell civilians from combatants.

Some fighters have surrendered in recent weeks, but hardcore militants, including many foreigners, are still holed up in the shrinking space along the eastern bank of the Euphrates River.

SDF commanders have stopped speculating when the battle may finally be over. Already 25,000 people have left Baghouz, thousands more than were originally believed inside.

Commanders say they do not know how many more may be left, hiding in tunnels beneath the war-scarred village.

On Friday the situation was quiet as aircraft flew over the area controlled by IS.
William H Macy and Felicity Huffman were seen heading back to federal court on Friday, three days after the pair found themselves embroiled in Operation Varsity Blues.

The Oscar-nominated couple were not accompanied by their attorney as they headed into the courthouse, three days after Huffman was indicted on a single charge of mail fraud in Operation Varsity Blues.

It seemed that the two were likely checking in on the conditions of Huffman's bond, with the court not showing any appearance for either, although there was a 10am hearing that was closed to the public.

Macy was not indicted in the college admission scheme, but he could still find himself in hot water with prosecutors since he was aware of the plan according to phone conversations detailed in the complaint.

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Linked: Felicity Huffman and her husband William H Macy (above) held hands as they walked into the federal courthouse in Los Angeles on Friday

Checking things out: The couple were not accompanied by their lawyer and appeared to be there to review Huffman's bail conditions or for a closed 10am hearing

A civil action: Macy has yet to be indicted in the case dubbed Operation Varsity Blues, but court documents allege he was aware of his wife's plot

Support system: Huffman had allegedly facilitated where and when her older daughter would be taking an SAT that would then be falsified

Legal woes: Huffman paid a $15,000 'charitable contribution 'to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter,' states the complaint

Federal documents show that while Huffman worked alone to iron out the details when the couple's first daughter had her SAT changed by a proctor to improve her score, Macy was aware of the situation and the payment came from the couple's joint account.

He in turn took a more active role in organizing the younger daughter's fradulent SAT, agreeing to the money and a set place and time much like his wife had done one year prior with their other child.

In that case however, the couple's daughter achieved the results she had hoped for on her own and the mastermind behind the operation was informed that she would not be needing to submit a fraudulent score.

This does not mean Macy will not be charged down the line in the case.

That would explain why Macy was not identified by name in court documents filed Tuesday and instead referred to as Huffman's spouse.

Huffman paid a $15,000 'charitable contribution 'to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme on behalf of her eldest daughter,' states the complaint.

'Huffman later made arrangements to pursue the scheme a second time, for her younger daughter, before deciding not to do so,' according to the documents.

The charging documents state that Huffman had the site where he daughter took the SATs moved from her own high school to a test center West Hollywood.

United front: Huffman brought along a notebook for her trip to court (above)

The pair looked glum as they drove home later after the court appearance

Desperate housewife: Huffman (above on Tuesday) also sent a $15,000 wire payment to a charity to pay off the proctor, according to court documents

That was to avoid a teacher who knew the girl, who had also applied for and received extended time to take the test, from being present.

The girl's test was then administered by a proctor who had flown in from Tampa and told investigators that he 'facilitated cheating, either by correcting the student's answers after the test or by actively assisting the student during the exam.'

That proctor, Mark Ridell, has also been charged.

In this case, Huffman's daughter scored a 1420, which was a 400 point improvement from her PSAT results just one year prior.

Soon after the proctor was paid $40,000 by Key Worldwide Foundation, the same organization that Huffman would later give a $15,000 donation to, according to the documents.

The way they were: Macy was involved in the younger daughter's test, and agreed to a plan similar to the one his wife employed with their other daughter

Macy is seen driving his wife Huffman home from the court appearance in Los Angeles

Huffman paid a $15,000 'charitable contribution 'to participate in the college entrance exam cheating scheme, according to the complaint

The documents also include the transcript of a phone call between Huffman and the individual who facilitated the test in which she admits that her older daughter had assistance and expresses her desire for her younger daughter to get similar help.

In a follow up call just this past December, Huffman and her unnamed spouse spoke about their daughter wanting to get into Georgetown.

It was then decided that the young girl would take the exam twice, once on her own and once with help, to ensure she got the score necessary to get her into Georgetown, it is claimed.

Then, at the last second, the couple decided not to have their daughter take the test with assistance.

Macy appeared in court on Tuesday afternoon to support his wife, and was seen arriving with a lawyer.
Former New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies centerfielder Lenny Dykstra pleaded guilty to reduced disorderly conduct charges in a New Jersey court on Friday

Former New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies centerfielder Lenny Dykstra pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct charges in a New Jersey court on Friday, but avoided any jail time as the judge dropped drug charges connected to the 56-year-old's May arrest for allegedly threatening to shoot and kill an Uber driver.

Dykstra, who was originally charged with cocaine and methamphetamine possession, was given a $125 fine and ordered to have no contact with the driver.

'The fact that the charges are dropped is something that I'm very happy with,' Dykstra told reporters on Friday, as quoted by MyCentralJersey.com.

Superior Court Judge Lisa Miralles Walsh reduced a terroristic threat charge to a petty disorderly persons offense, according to NJ.com.

'I hope you have learned a lesson from this,' Judge Walsh said. 'I wish you the best of luck.'

The drug charges were dropped because Dykstra's attorney David Bahuriak successfully argued that the Linden, New Jersey police had no right to search his client's belongings at the time of the arrest.

'My lawyer did a great job of presenting the facts,' Dykstra said after the hearing. 'I'm happy this chapter of my life is behind me.'

The drug charges were dropped because Dykstra's attorney David Bahuriak (left) successfully argued that police had no right to search his client's belongings at the time of the arrest

In February, Dykstra told the Daily Mail he was confident the charges would be dropped: 'We have this thing called the constitution, where you're supposed to follow it - like fair and balanced.'

The arrest took place at a Linden parking garage in May after Dykstra and the driver began arguing.

At one point during the car ride, Dykstra called 911 saying the driver was kidnapping him.

The Uber driver, Brian Lutty, told police Dykstra said he had a gun and that he would kill him, although no gun was ever found.

Dykstra told police he can't have a gun because he is a convicted felon.

'I'm a convicted felon  I can't own a firearm,' he can be heard saying in a police body-cam recording.

Police ultimately searched Dykstra's belongings and found cocaine and methamphetamine.
The MAGAbomber suspect charged with sending pipe bombs to Trump critics including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and CNN, is expected to plead guilty next week.

A notice entered in the case file of Cesar Sayoc, 56, shows a plea hearing has been scheduled for next Thursday in New York.

Sayoc, who has been locked up since October 26, faces charges carrying a potential penalty of life in prison. It was not known which charge or charges the plea would involve.

Authorities say the former stripper sent 14 mail bombs to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor Robert De Niro and philanthropist George Soros, as well as to the CNN headquarters in New York.

He was set to go to trial in July on charges that he sent 16 improvised explosive devices through the U.S. mail to victims across the country. None exploded.

Prosecutors said in court papers the explosives were packed with glass intended to 'maximize harm to the defendant's victims'.

The former male stripper and part-time pizza delivery man was arrested in Florida last October.

Comment was requested Friday in an email to defense lawyers and a call to prosecutors.

Cesar Sayoc is charged with sending pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Donald Trump and is expected to plead guilty at a hearing in New York on Thursday

Cesar Sayoc's van is seen in Boca Raton, Florida, covered in Donald Trump stickers

A package addressed to former CIA head John Brennan and an explosive device that was sent to CNN's New York office in October 2018

In the indictment, prosecutors noted that an improvised explosive mailed to former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in Chappaqua, New York, contained a picture of her and members of her family marked with a red 'X'.

The indictment said others targeted by the mailings received similarly marked pictures of themselves along with the explosives.

The charges said he aimed to 'kill, injure and intimidate an individual and unlawfully to damage and destroy a building, vehicle, and other real and person property.'

New York-born Sayoc is accused of sending bubble-wrapped manila envelopes to other elite Democrats such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The packages were intercepted from Delaware to California. At least some listed a return address of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Wasserman Schultz represents the Florida district where Sayoc, a former strip club DJ, lived in a van covered with bumper stickers praising President Donald Trump, disparaging Democrats and CNN and showing rifle crosshairs superimposed over leading liberals such as Mrs Clinton and filmmaker Michael Moore.

Former stripper Sayoc was set to go to trial in July on charges that he sent 16 improvised explosive devices through the U.S. mail to victims across the country. The New York-born Sayoc has been held without bail since his late-October arrest

In this courtroom sketch, Cesar Sayoc, left, appears in federal court in October, 2018, in Miami

Authorities said Sayoc faced more than 50 years in prison if convicted on all charges. None of the bombs exploded and no-one was injured.

It is alleged Sayoc was putting explosives together in his van, which was impounded as Twitter users shared photos of the vehicle, which was covered in stickers supporting Trump.

He has been held without bail since his late-October arrest outside a South Florida auto parts store.
While politicians and media place a heavy emphasis on winning over independent voters, their numbers are fewer and their impact is more minimal than previously thought, according to a new survey.

Less than 10 percent of Americans are truly independent voters, according to a survey by Pew Research Center.

That's despite the fact that 38 percent of Americans identify as independent. A large share (81 percent) of those so-called independents tend to lean toward one party or the other.

Ultimately, this means the truly on-the-fence independent can be tough to find  and fairly indifferent to politics and voting.

Truly independent constituents (in grey) are few in number and less likely to vote, according to Pew Research Center. The majority of self-identified independents lean Republican or Democrat

'Independents often are portrayed as political free agents with the potential to alleviate the nation's rigid partisan divisions,' according to the Pew report. 'Yet the reality is that most independents are not all that 'independent' politically.'

'And the small share of Americans who are truly independent  less than 10 percent of the public has no partisan leaning  stand out for their low level of interest in politics,' the report said.

In fact, just about a third of surveyed respondents who truly didn't lean toward a political party actually voted in the midterms. By comparison, 48 percent of Democratic-leaning independents voted, as did 54 percent of Republican-leaners.

Americans are more likely to identify as 'Independent' than either of the two major political parties in America: 31 percent of Americans describe themselves as Democrats and 26 percent as Republicans.

Men make up more than half (55 percent) of true independents  a higher share of men than is found among Republicans (51 percent) and Democrats (40 percent).

Independents who don't lean toward any particular party are the least likely to vote in elections, a new survey finds

Republican-leaning independents are predominately men (64 percent), while Democrat-leaners are evenly split between the two genders.

Independents also tend to be younger than their more politically devoted counterparts.

Donald Trump's job rating among independents was lower than that of his recent predecessors, coming in at 34 percent in 2017 and 2018.

By comparison, Obama's approval rating among independents was 50 percent in 2009 and 42 percent in 2010.

Trumps rating among non-leaning independents was about 25 percent, while 58 percent disapproved of the job he did in his first two years.

Independents disapprove of Trump's proposal for a wall to stem immigration at the Southern U.S. border (62 percent, compared to 36 percent who approve.

However, the picture is more complicated when leaners are broken out. Three-quarters of Republican-leaning independents favor the wall, while 95 percent of Democrat-leaning independents oppose the project.
A North Carolina father and his friend have been arrested by police after they live-streamed themselves smoking cannabis while his son was in the room.

Donta Dewayne Blue, 23, and 20-year-old Tyreek Jordan Carpenter were charged with misdemeanor child abuse after being arrested Sunday.

Blue - who lives in Raleigh - acknowledges that he was smoking in front of his son for Wednesday's live-stream but admits that he wasn't aware of the boy being in the room at first.

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Donta Dewayne Blue, 23, (right) and 20-year-old Tyreek Jordan Carpenter (left) were charged with misdemeanor child abuse after the Sunday arrest

'I mean I was smoking weed, I'm not going to lie,' he declared to CBS 17. 'We were on the live video and he was basically in the back of us.

'He was so quiet I didn't notice, and when I did notice I told him to go upstairs. It is wrong because he's still around us while smoking. I own up to that. It was my fault.'

The footage shows the two rolling and smoking a blunt as the little boy sits in the background and eats a bowl of cereal.

The March 7 Facebook Live footage shows the two rolling and smoking a blunt as the little boy sits in the background and eats a bowl of cereal

He comes to the camera but is told to go sit down by his father.

The boy's mother, Lyvette Caldwell, called police once she saw the video. She currently resides in New York.

'I'm like. I have to do something about this. This is my child,' she asserted.

The mother was irate with the footage because her son suffers from asthma.

'I hope everything goes how it's supposed to go and I get a second chance to do better and try to be the father I'm supposed to be,' Blue said

'My child doesn't have to deal with that,' said Caldwell.

Blue hopes that he can redeem himself with his son.

'I hope everything goes how it's supposed to go and I get a second chance to do better and try to be the father I'm supposed to be,' he added.

He was issued a bond of $1000 and is scheduled to appear in court on April 9. Carpenter received a $2500 bond and will appear in court on Tuesday.
The French writer who popularised a theory that European populations are being supplanted by immigration, alluded to by the gunman who killed 49 at two New Zealand mosques on Friday, denounced an 'appalling' act by someone who had failed to understand his work.

Renaud Camus published in 2011 The Great Replacement, which the Christchurch gunman used as the title of a 74-page 'manifesto' uploaded to the web before storming the mosques.

'I am totally non-violent,' the 72-year-old Camus told AFP, saying the arrested 28-year-old Australian suspect had committed 'appalling, criminal, disastrous and idiotic terrorist acts'.

French writer Renaud Camus has denounced the New Zealand white supremacist terrorist who was inspired by his work, calling him 'idiotic'

'If he wrote a pamphlet titled "The Great Replacement" it's blatant plagiarism... of a phrase that doesn't belong to him and he doesn't understand,' said Camus.

The writer, who is also a gay rights activist, lives in a 14th-century chateau in southwest France.

In 2015 he was convicted of inciting hatred and violence against Muslims.

A range of far-right groups have seized on his ideas to promote a conspiracy theory that native populations in the West are being replaced by political and corporate leaders, robbing a country of its cultural heritage in the process.

Many white supremacists have promoted violent resistance to the so-called 'invasion' by non-whites, a term used repeatedly by the New Zealand gunman in his manifesto.

It is said to have been one of the ideas that drove the Pittsburgh Synagogue killer, who shot 11 Jewish worshippers in the US city in October.

But Camus, while defending the theory, rejected suggestions that his writings could have encouraged the gunman.

'What worries me the most in what I call "The Great Replacement" is precisely the extent to which it encourages violence, all kinds of violence, either in everyday life or, obviously, in terrorist attacks,' he said.

'At the centre of my work is the concept of innocence, which is to say, of non-aggravation, non-violence,' he added.

Camus suggested instead that the killer might have taken inspiration from the wave of attacks carried out by self-proclaimed Islamic jihadists in France over recent years.

'His crime most resembles the terrorist attacks committed in France,' he said.

'I don't see why he would be more inspired by me than by the attacks which directly resemble the one he committed,' he said.
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Thousands of people across the globe came together to take part in vigils to pay tribute to the victims of the New Zealand terror attack.

Tributes in places such as London, Helsinki and Brussels lead the way with moving services where mourners gathered to pay their respects to the 49 worshippers killed at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Masjid Mosque on Friday.

As the police cordon lifted at 5.00pm local time mourners brought floral tributes closer to the two Christchurch mosques, just 5km apart, where 49 worshippers lost their lives after the shooting.

Those who brought floral tributes brought them closer to the sight of the shootings after the police cordon was lifted at 5.00pm local time

Bouquets of flowers, tributes and notes were gathered by those paying their respects and brought closer to the mosques to allow a vigil to be set up after the police cordon was lifted

At the site of the killings there was a fierce determination to show kindness to a community in pain as Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian supremacist accused of carrying out the attack, stood silently by a judge.

Notes left alongside floral tributes read 'This is not NZ' and 'we are one' and 'you are my friends, I will keep watch while you pray'.

Those at the vigil last night echoed New Zealand's Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who said: 'These are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand and, in fact, have no place in the world'.

Floral tributes were laid to honour the dead with mourners carrying signs that said 'this is not NZ' echoing Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand's prime minister, who said: 'These are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand and, in fact, have no place in the world'

Thousands of people descended on the New Zealand city of Christchurch to pay their respects to those who lost their lives following the shooting

Pictures and notes left at the scene all reflect a message of love and community as one note reads: 'You are my friends. I will keep watch while you pray'

While vigils took place last night a remembrance service is planned for Monday to mourn those who lost their lives

In London's Hyde Park, flowers and candles were laid as night fell on the peaceful gathering at the New Zealand memorial.

This is while a vigil was also held at Finsbury Park where supporters held signs which read 'Solidarity with Christchurch - say no to Islamophobia'. While others held plaques which read 'Unite against the far fight'.

In Brussels people gathered outside the New Zealander embassy where they penned heartfelt messages on a long sheet of paper, as well as lighting candles.

People lay flowers at the vigil at the New Zealand memorial on Hyde Park Corner this evening - as events continue to take place all over the world

The Eiffel Tower in the French city of Paris switched out its lights on Friday evening in tribute to those killed in New Zealand

The 'Finlandia Hall' congress and event venue in the centre of Helsinki is illuminated in dark blue lights to pay tribute and commemorate the victims of the New Zealand terror attack

In Toronto a woman stands with a lit candle while others around her hold signs that ready 'United Against Islamophobia'

People write messages on a sheet of paper during a gathering at the New Zealander Embassy in Brussels this evening

In Helsinki the 'Finlandia Hall' congress and event venue in the centre of the city was illuminated in dark blue lights.

The organiser of thee Hyde Park vigil, Zaharan Sofi, said she spent Friday, her 30th birthday, feeling 'very emotional', at the event which was set up to bring those affected by the tragedy together.

Ms Sofi, a corporate accountant of Brixton, south London, said: 'I am a British Muslim and I wanted to make sure that people come together.

People looked solemn as they gathered at Hyde Park to pay their respects to those who had died in the attack in New Zealand

People held up anti Islamophobia signs

People gather at a vigil for Christchurch shootings victims at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney, Australia. Brenton Tarrant opened fire on over 100 defenseless worshipers on Friday

'It is a very important time to bring people together and not to try and divide.

'Bringing people together is how you deal with terrorism. In this sensitive time and in our society, it is important that we all know we are human beings first.'

The event was aimed at showing solidarity and to provide comfort after the horror of the Christchurch shootings in which at least 49 people were killed at two New Zealand mosques.

A minute's-silence and traditional Moari music were part of the moments of reflection.

Hundreds of people, of nationalities including British-based New Zealanders, attended and stood in respectful silence.

New Zealand couple Blair Godby, 25, originally of Invercargill, and Amy Louise Mill, 24, originally of Nelson, both said that waking up to hear that terror had struck their homeland was a 'shock'.

Mr Godby said: 'It is just hurtful and just plain shocking.

'New Zealand is very small, and now so far away.

'I have always taken such pride in these sorts of things not happening.

A man in Brussels leans down and pens a tribute to the victims at the site near the New Zealander Embassy, where white roses had also been left

'It feels like a betrayal.

'Coming here and knowing that we are around New Zealanders brings a feeling that we are together and can send some if that support back to the communities at home.'

Ms Mill, who said she had always felt New Zealand was 'a safe haven', added: 'Being here makes you feel a little connected to you community in a way.

'It is a little thing we can do to help acknowledge the 49 people who were murdered and the communities who are mourning them.'
The family of right-wing firebrand Candace Owens told DailyMail.com today that laughing at the massacre of 49 people at a New Zealand mosque was 'not proper' and 'not how she was raised.'

Her grandfather, Robert Owens, told DailyMail.com: 'This is the first time I'm hearing about this but this is not my granddaughter's behavior.

'Why would she be laughing at it? That doesn't seem proper. She is a religious person and we taught her. She has family all over the world. Members of our family and her grandmother's family are all over the world in many nations. We just don't do that. We're not that type of people.

'I know how she was raised and the things we taught her. And no, that's not our character. We had a lot of influence on her life as a child and we try to be close to our grandchildren.'

The black Republican activist was unwittingly embroiled in the tragedy when terrorist Brenton Tarrant named the conservative activist as his biggest influence in a rambling 74-page manifesto, 'The Great Replacement', which one blogger referred to as 'sh*t-posting': '[t]he act of throwing out huge amounts of content, most of it ironic, low-quality trolling, for the purpose of provoking an emotional reaction in less Internet-savvy viewers. The ultimate goal is to derail productive discussion and distract readers'

In the document, the white supremacist said that Owens helped 'push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness'  but claimed some of the 'extreme actions' she called for are 'too much, even for my tastes'.

Candace Owens, was slammed on social media for using a laughing emoji on a tweet about the New Zealand mosque massacre after being named in the terrorist's manifesto

Candace Owen's grandfather Robert Owens (pictured together in a childhood photo) tells DailyMail.com that laughing at the New Zealand mosque massacre was 'not proper' and 'not how she was raised'

The black Republican Trump supporter (pictured with the president) was unwittingly embroiled in the tragedy when the terrorist named her as his biggest influence in a rambling 74-page manifest

Shortly after posting the manifesto on Twitter, Tarrant, 28, live-streamed the mass shooting inside the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch at 1.30pm on Friday. The terror attack, and another at a nearby mosque, left 49 people dead and another 48 injured.

But it was Owens' apparent callous reaction to the news that led many to question her response.

'LOL! [Laughing emoji]. FACT: I've never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam. The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government hand outs is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!'

Candace Owens was eviscerated by other Twitter users for using the laughing emoji and repeatedly saying 'laugh out loud' as she denied inspiring the terrorist's murderous Islamophobia

Sleeping Giants, a campaign established to fight bigotry and sexism, immediately replied: 'Yes. A violent massacre is so funny. Hysterical.'

Mr Owens said he believed his granddaughter to be accepting of many viewpoints and that people can often 'misinterpret' the way things come across but admits that he wasn't aware of all his granddaughter's political positions.

'I don't know too much about it because I don't follow the news as closely. From time to time when I find that that she's on, I try to listen,' he said.'But if people know her way of living, it tells you that she is very flexible in her views. Sometimes you can say things and be taken the wrong way.

'I was a very good follower of Martin Luther King. I listened to him and some of the things he said, I disagree with and then some things he said, it brought tears to my eyes because I knew it was so true.

'Sometimes she might come over to some people one way in some of the things she's saying. I've listened to Donald Trump and some people hate what he says and I listen, and dig out the history of America, and say, you know what? Donald Trump was right.

'But I loved JFK and Bobby K, I loved those Kennedy boys. It brings tears to my eyes that they're dead.'

He added: 'I want to emphasize to you, Candace is not that type of an individual. She was brought up with all kinds of people and they were all in my yard playing with her.'

Mr Owens recently returned to North Carolina, where he was raised, after selling his home in Connecticut where he ran a dry-cleaning business for 35 years with his wife, Nola, who passed away in 2013.

'I sharecropped on this farm and I bought the land. That's the difference in life. I bought it from the man that I sharecropped with,' he said.

Mr Owens said that his family and his wife's family had connections all over the world and had mixed heritage. 'A lot of my family is American-Indian, black-Americans, white Americans, Koreans and Chinese,' he said. 'My wife's brother spent many years in Nigeria and many different countries preaching.

'Candace herself is international. Candace is in the middle and she can accept everybody, that's the way she was brought up from a child. She was brought up in a predominantly white neighborhood and people told us not to move up there because we weren't going to be accepted.

'I'm from the South and I was born and mostly raised in North Carolina and I know how it was. My father was attacked by the Ku Klux Klan back in the day and he put me under the bed because of all the bullets that were coming into the house. When I peeped out, I saw was people in black clothes and riding horses. Naturally, I grew up wondering who those people were that were riding those horses and shooting at us.

'It happened but it didn't make me try to teach my kids to be that way. They are just like Candace - they have white friends, black friends.'

Gunman Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia, described Owens as his biggest influence, and said she helped 'push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness'

But Tarrant claimed some of the 'extreme actions' she calls for are 'too much, even for my tastes'. The terror attack, which was the deadliest in New Zealand's history, killed 49 people and left another 48 injured

Mr Owens said he was on the fence when it came to politics.

'I'm very split when it comes to voting,' he said. 'Sometimes I listen to the Republican guy and I don't disagree with him and sometimes I listen to the Democrat and I might disagree.'

He said that when he was starting his business, he had attended an event in New York where Donald Trump was the speaker. 'I'm a very liberal person and there's a lot of people say bad things about President Trump. I met him 40 years ago. He came into the place and he said something that didn't go over too well but at the end of the day, we were all shaking hands, laughing and talking.

'Some look at him as a very serious conservative and some look at him as a very serious racist but that's not him.

'I'm not an average Democrat and I'm not an average Republican. I'm more neutral. I can see the good side of some things and I agree with him, and some things I don't agree with him.'

Mr Owens said that he was proud of his granddaughter but worried about her work.

'I'm scared of the work that she does. We have a very intelligent world in America but we also have a lot of sick people out there. Some of them are so conservative they can't accept the liberals and vice-versa.'

Owens, whose controversial views include that the Democratic party is racist and oppresses black Americans, was quickly inundated with tweets about the gunman's admiration of her comments about white birth rates in the US and Europe.

She has spoken in the past of her opinion that Europe will be a Muslim majority continent by 2050 but has never condoned violence against any groups.

Owens (center) is a vocal Trump supporter, pictured with Donald Trump Jr (right) and has spoken in the past of her opinions that Europe will be a Muslim majority continent

But rather than distance herself from his views or even condemn his violence, she tweeted 'LOL!' followed by the emoji.

She went on to argue that she was not responsible for inspiring the attack and fumed that 'racist white liberals' were trying to blame her for it.

'I've never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam.

'The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government hand outs is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!' she said.

Owens is known for her controversial remarks on both the second amendment and Islam in addition to her view that the Democratic party is racist.

She has come under fire in the past for making questionably complimentary remarks about Hitler.

On Thursday night and Friday, she continued to tweet that she refused to be blamed for the massacre.

When followers pointed out the impropriety of her response, she was indignant and argued back with them but failed to make a single solemn or sympathetic remark about the shooting or its dozens of victims.

'Laughter is not the response one would expect after these murders,' one follower said.

Owens shot back: 'No. But a bunch of racist white liberals flooding my mentions is almost exactly what one would expect. You guys will never de-platform me.'

Owen was eviscerated by followers for her 'tone deaf' posts. She argued back with them afterward and claimed she was the victim of a 'bunch of racist white liberals' but failed to make a single solemn or sympathetic post about the shooting itself

Others pointed out that she had in fact shared her views on the second amendment and Islam in the past, sharing screenshots of recent tweets.

One of her previous tweets was directed towards Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, in which she claimed 'Europe will fall and become a Muslim majority continent by 2050'.

Another, aimed at French president Emmanuel Macron, again warned against the declining birth rate.

When questioned what she was laughing about in the tweet, Owens replied: 'White liberals attempting to beat black conservatives into submission with absurdity... again.'

Owens has in the past described Black Lives Matters protesters as a 'bunch of whiny toddlers' and has said that Hitler would have been 'OK' if he'd contained his plans to Germany and not tried to take over the world.

'I actually don't have any problems with the word nationalism. Globalism is what I don't want.

'Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think of at least in America is Hitler.

'He was a national socialist but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK fine.

'The problem is he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize, he wanted everybody to be speaking German,' she said.

She was condemned for her comments and later clarified her stance that Hitler's massacring of millions of Jews was not 'OK'.

Of the 49 fatalities, 41 were killed at the Al Noor Mosque and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque. Three were outside the mosque itself. A 49th died in hospital.
Carlos Carranza, 24, is accused of stalking 59-year-old Bambi Larson then stabbing and beating her to death inside her home

Newly released documents reportedly prove that a California county's sanctuary policy saved a homeless illegal immigrant from being deported mere months before he allegedly murdered a 59-year-old mother.

The October 9, 2018 detainer notice from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), obtained by Fox News states that Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza, 24, was to be deported.

But the following day, another document was stamped with a notice that stated that the request was 'NOT HONORED PER COUNTY POLICY.'

That document was sent to Santa Clara County.

Four months later, Carranza, 24, stalked Bambi Larson before beating and stabbing her to death in her home, police say.

The immigrant from El Salvador had been on the radar of Immigration and Customs Enforcement since 2013, when he failed to show up in immigration court.

The county's policy on detainer requests states that it will 'exercise its discretion to honor the request' if it finds that the detainee is convicted of a serious or violent felony offense.

Officials in the Northern California city of San Jose have since criticized such so-called 'sanctuary policies' they say prevented federal authorities from detaining a gang member in the country illegally before he allegedly killed the woman.

Arevalo Carranza, who was homeless and had several convictions for felony offenses, was arrested Monday night in the February 28 killing of Larson, 59, a manager at medical testing company Roche Sequencing Solutions in San Jose.

A self-admitted gang member, he has a long criminal history in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles spanning five years. He was on probation for the possession of methamphetamine, paraphernalia, false imprisonment and burglary, Garcia said.

Police say Carranza was arrested at least ten times before he killed Ms Larson (pictured), but San Jose county officials ignored requests from ICE to investigate his immigration status

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said Wednesday it's time for Santa Clara County officials to reconsider a policy that ignores federal hold requests for predatory felons.

He said he has been urging county officials to treat violent criminals in the country illegally differently from the rest of those who entered the U.S. without legal permission.

'We're not asking the county to detain anyone a minute longer than the law and the constitution allow,' Liccardo said. 'We simply want them to pick up the phone and tell ICE so that the violent felon is not released back into our streets,' he added.

Garcia revealed that ICE had applied nine times for a detainer on Carranza, a move which allows suspects to be held longer than their prison term so their immigration status can be investigated by federal officials.

All nine requests had been ignored by county officials, ICE field director Erik Bonnar said, allowing Carranza to be freed so he could offend again.

Carranza was asked to be detained by immigration officials, documents provided to Fox News suggest but the request was denied citing county policies

The county's policy on detainer requests states that it will 'exercise its discretion to honor the request' if it finds that the detainee is convicted of a serious or violent felony offense

ICE applied for a tenth detainer on Tuesday, following Carranza's latest arrest.

Bonnar told CBS San Francisco: 'How many more people have to be killed or injured before California lawmakers will open discussions to revise the state policy prohibiting local law enforcement agencies from working with ICE to apprehend dangerous criminal aliens?

'It's unfortunate that our communities face dangerous consequences because of inflexible state laws that protect criminal aliens.

'These sanctuary policies have unintended, but very real, and often tragic consequences to public safety.'

San Jose Police Officers' Association echoed those remarks, saying: 'When it comes to policing, there's a distinct difference between a Dreamer who commits a victimless crime and a violent serial sexual predator with multiple offenses.

'Our society must recognize there's a difference between someone who is trying to make ends meet for their family, and a self-admitted gang member, a monster who brutally murders an innocent woman in her own home.'

Garcia, the police chief, also criticized Santa Clara County's policy during the news conference announcing Arevalo Carranza's arrest.

'We're not here, nor should we be here, to shield admitted gangsters and violent criminals regardless of their immigration status,' Garcia said.

Garcia also revealed Carranza's lengthy criminal history, which began in 2013 when he was arrested crossing the border illegally in Texas and deported back to Mexico.

Larson was found dead on February 28 by her son, who she worked with, after she failed to turn up to her job as a systems manager

That was followed by ten arrests and at least three convictions for offences ranging from drug possession to battery, false imprisonment and burglary.

Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese said in a statement that the county cannot hold immigration suspects for ICE without a warrant or a judicial order unless the person is currently charged with a crime.

He said the county has for many years provided ICE with real-time local and state-level data on who is in custody and when they will be released.

'Despite having this information, ICE does not show up to take custody in a timely manner to avoid release into the community,' Cortese said.

Cortese didn't address the Arevalo Carranza case in his statement, saying he had little information on him.

Larson was found dead on February 28 by her son, who she worked with, after she failed to turn up to her job as a systems manager.

The son went over to her house around 1.45pm and discovered her body in her bedroom, suffering from multiple lacerations and blunt force trauma.

CCTV led them to a t-shirt outside the home which had both her blood and DNA from her attacker on it.

Carranza was arrested on unrelated drug charges on March 10 and a DNA sample was taken, which matched the DNA on the t-shirt.

He was rearrested the following day when police say they found Larson's cellphone and e-reader in his possession.
Stacey Dooley received an outpouring of support by Comic Relief viewers tonight as her controversial charity trip to Africa was aired.

The documentary-maker, 31, had come under fire from MP David Lammy among others who branded her a 'white saviour' for sharing a picture of herself cradling a black child during the Red Nose Day appeal in Uganda.

But social media users rallied behind the Strictly Come Dancing winner tonight as she asked viewers to donate to a project helping pregnant women and malaria-sufferers.

Stacey Dooley received an outpouring of support by Comic Relief viewers tonight as her controversial charity trip to Africa was aired

The documentary-maker, 31, visited clinics in Uganda for pregnant women and malaria sufferers

One person wrote: 'Thank you for helping the children you are doing good ignore the haters and the stupid everything you are doing is awesome!'

Another said: 'I love Stacey Dooley so much. Her work is honestly so admirable and inspiring, such an amazing woman who deserves the world.'

A third heaped praise on Dooley, saying 'she tells the story as it is' and 'never makes herself the focus'.

Others tweeted that they 'adored' the filmmaker and called her their 'leader'.

There was speculation that the entire appeal may have been scrapped, but Comic Relief bosses made the decision to air the film without showing footage of Dooley holding African children.

Social media users rallied behind the Strictly Come Dancing winner tonight on Twitter

A Comic Relief spokesperson said: 'The boy in the photo was never part of the film, he was just present during filming and therefore he has not been edited out.'

Strictly Come Dancing winner Dooley said during her short appeal: 'Please, please keep donating. It's saving lives, there's no question.'

Mr Lammy had criticised Dooley and the BBC publicly, saying they were reinforcing unhelpful stereotypes about Africa.

He said: 'As I've said before, this just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes.

BBC bosses edited out footage of Dooley cradling children (pictured) after she was branded a 'white saviour' by MP David Lammy

The Tottenham MP said images like this were fueling unhelpful, 'colonial-era' stereotypes

'Let's instead promote voices from across the continent of Africa and have serious debate.'

Lammy said the images 'convey an age old trope that's her as the heroine, the black child as victim and we've got to stop it'

Pointing to the image of Dooley holding the child, he added: 'The image that she wants to tweet conveys an age old trope that's her as the heroine, the black child as victim and we've got to stop it.

'The image is a perpetual image of people who are impoverished who need white celebrities who are largely uneducated about the context (in Africa).

'That image evokes for lots of ethnic minorities in Britain a white beautiful heroine holding a black child with no agency, no parents in sight, finger in the mouth. Its supine.'

He added: 'We've got to change the formula of sending mostly white celebrities out to Africa.'
hild protection expert Jim Gamble even tried to get father Gerry to 'confess'

A senior British police officer initially believed Gerry McCann might have been involved in his daughter Madeleine's disappearance, it was revealed yesterday.

Child protection expert Jim Gamble said he suspected Mr McCann and wife Kate 'from the very outset'  and even tried to get the father to 'do the right thing' and confess.

But the former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre said he is now convinced the couple were innocent and devastated over their daughter.

Child protection expert Jim Gamble said his initial suspicion of the McCanns (above) was based on his experience as a police officer

But the former officer (pictured in the documentary) said he is now convinced the couple were innocent and devastated over their daughter

Photo of missing Madeleine McCann who vanished from Praia da Luz in Portugal in May 2007

In a new documentary about the three-year-old's disappearance during a family holiday in Portugal, the former officer described how he helped Mr McCann write an appeal to Madeleine's abductor, urging them to let the child go and hand themselves in.

He said he hoped his words might prompt Mr McCann to act if he had been involved.

Mr Gamble said he advised Mr McCann write his appeal 'along the lines that sometimes people make terrible mistakes in life they never intended, but ultimately it's never too late to do the right thing'.

'But in shaping that I was actually talking to Gerry. I think it was the only way of delivering that message or reflecting that thought  if something had happened, if it was a mistake, it's never too late to come out and stop all of this.'

Madeleine is pictured in a still from a mobile phone video walking onto a flight at East Midlands Airport in April 2007. Five days later she disappeared and has never been found

The documentary - released today - broadcasts new photographs said to show Maddie happily playing at Praia da Luz children's club in 2007

The youngster the day she went missing from the family's holiday apartment in Praia da Luz

Still from the new documentary that has promised fresh theories into the girl's dissapearance

Christmas video made by Gerry and Kate McCann making appeal for the return of Madeleine

The appeal was published on the McCanns' website in August 2007, three months after Madeleine vanished in May.

Mr Gamble said his initial suspicion of the McCanns was based on his experience as a police officer. He said: 'Statistically it's likely to be the parents or somebody who's in close proximity with the child.'

But later knowledge of the case convinced him they were innocent, and he described Portuguese detectives' decision to name them as formal suspects in September 2007  a decision later lifted  as 'clutching at straws'.

Apartment 5A in Praia Da Luz in Portugal, where Madeline McCann went missing from in 2007

Mr Gamble told the new Netflix documentary: 'Now I don't believe that Kate or Gerry McCann had anything to do with the fact their daughter has gone missing and potentially had been abducted.'

The McCanns, from Rothley in Leicestershire, were asked to take part in the eight-part documentary but refused as they believed it 'could potentially hinder' the British police investigation.

The series scrutinises the Portuguese inquiry, and includes an admission from the detective who led the hunt that the police's initial response was 'inadequate'.

Parents of the missing girl, Kate and Gerry McCann, present their new book at a hotel in Hamburg

Goncalo Amaral said the failure to secure the holiday apartment in Praia de Luz after Madeleine vanished meant evidence was lost or destroyed.

The documentary also features haunting images of Madeleine in the days before she went missing, including mobile phone footage of her boarding a flight to Portugal at East Midlands Airport.

A Scotland Yard probe into Madeleine's disappearance continues and her parents say they will never lose hope they will find her.

The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann is available on streaming service Netflix.
A smart meter campaign that uses TV stars, actors and models to promote the gadget is adding about 50million a year to energy bills.

Celebrities such as Ainsley Harriott, Maxine Peake and Twiggy have appeared in TV, radio and magazine adverts boasting of the benefits of new digital smart meters.

Under an upgrade scheme energy firms must offer a smart meter to every home and small business by 2020 or face fines  although households are not obliged to have one.

The new digital meters can automatically send readings to suppliers as often as every half an hour, putting an end to estimated bills.

Celebrities like Twiggy starred in smart meter adverts in 2017

Ainsley Harriott has featured in the adverts which have added an estimated 50million to energy bills

Customers can also see how much power they are using on a screen.

Smart Energy GB was set up by the Government in 2013 to encourage households to get a smart meter.

It claims it is an independent body but is funded by energy companies, which pass costs on to customers.

The Government initially estimated that a national awareness campaign would cost about 87million.

Now, industry insiders have told Money Mail that by the end of 2021 Smart Energy GB will have spent upwards of 220million. Its budget for this year is 48.4million.

The National Audit Office has warned that the group may need extra funding to take it beyond 2021 as the rollout is unlikely to be complete on time.

Last year Smart Energy GB spent 683,000 paying celebrities to be its spokesmen and feature in adverts.

But an industry source claimed the campaign group was not doing enough to boost the number of households actually installing meters.

He added that eyebrows had been raised over stunts such as arranging for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to perform A Requiem for Meters on instruments made from old gas and electricity meters.

One advert featured TV cook Harriott preparing food for bodybuilders.

Twiggy, who was made a dame this week, has even taken part in a photoshoot posing among giant smart meters. Speaking in a YouTube video in 2017, she said: When I was discovered in the 1960s it was an amazing time for the country economically and culturally... Im here today to tell you about smart meters  another big change that affects every single household in Great Britain.

Phil Spencer posed with a Smart Energy bus as part of the campaign encouraging the nation to install the gadget

Smart meters measure real time use of gas and electricity and give the details to the householder and their energy company via a system similar to the mobile phone network

Location, Location, Location presenting duo Kirstie Allsopp and Phil Spencer also promoted the devices, as well as former Great British Bake Off contestant Ian Cumming.

Tory MP Grant Shapps said: I cannot see how this unchecked spending could be considered a sensible or effective use of money. Consumer expert Martyn James said: Expensive ad campaigns can go horribly off track if they dont tackle the underlying problems. With smart meters, the problem is the public doesnt believe they work.

Smart meters have been beset by problems since their introduction. Customers may find their meter goes dumb when they try to switch supplier.

Critics have also warned they give firms access to a honeypot of private customer data.

This month, the advertising watchdog banned a Smart Energy GB ad featuring actress Miss Peake for misleading listeners about savings.

The Advertising Standards Authority said the advert had failed to make it clear that listeners had to change their energy use in order to save. Smart Energy GB said it was appealing the ruling.

Sacha Deshmukh, head of Smart Energy GB, said: We are guided by the best practice in marketing and communications in designing and delivering our campaign. It is this that helps us create an effective, value for money and thoroughly evaluated campaign.
He's nicknamed the Red Reverend for his devotion to both Jeremy Corbyn and Christ.

But it would seem the Rev Steven Saxby has been spreading a little too much of the gospel of love.

The 48-year-old has apologised to his wife of 20 years after she accused him of repeated affairs  including one with a church organist.

Apology: Steven Saxby with trans model Talulah-Eve at a Gay Times award ceremony in London

Momentum supporter Mr Saxby is hoping to become an MP for Labour in Cities of London and Westminster, one of the partys key target seats.

Last night he announced he was taking a break from campaigning and was on leave from his duties at Saint Barnabas in Walthamstow, East London, while church officials investigate the claims.

His wife, Christine, has told friends their marriage is struggling to survive after she discovered he not only had a brief affair in October, but she suspected he had been in a secret four-year relationship with an international pianist, who was a member of their congregation and who she counted a friend.

Mrs Saxby told friends of her great pain and sadness at finding out about his infidelity. The suspected other woman is a trained pianist and conductor who came to London to study for a Masters at the Royal College of Music.

After a brief spell working at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Berlin Opera Academy, she has now left the country.

Support: Mr Saxby campaigning with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn

The accomplished musician, who has performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, has played at venues across the world, including in London at the Royal Festival Hall.

In 2016, she took part in a concert at Mr Saxbys church and wrote on her social media account that she was glad to serve as an occasional organist there.

Mr Saxby won a hotly-contested selection to become Labours parliamentary candidate in Cities of London and Westminster in February last year after getting support from union Unite and the endorsement of shadow chancellor John McDonnell, who described him as a good socialist comrade.

The central London seat, which includes the Houses of Parliament, was put on Labours target list for the next election, after Foreign Office minister Mark Field, who has been the Tory MP since 2001, saw his majority slashed from 9,671 to 3,148 in 2017.

Critics, however, questioned Mr Saxbys suitability after a YouTube clip emerged showing him speaking alongside firebrand ex-MP George Galloway at a mosque in East London.

In the 2015 film, Mr Saxby accused the Government of extremism by bombing Syria, and claiming it was stigmatising Muslim children with its anti-radicalisation Prevent strategy.

Mr Corbyn last year appeared at a campaign rally alongside Mr Saxby and posed with him holding a placard that said: Stevens Team.

On his Instagram account, Mr Saxby has posted a series of pictures of himself with other high-profile party figures, including shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry and Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite.

In 2017 he was pictured with his arm around transgender model Talulah-Eve Brown, 23, at a Gay Times award ceremony in London.

Mr Saxby has been aiming for political office for years  telling a reporter in 2015 that he aimed to become the first churchman since 1801 to remain a vicar after being elected to Parliament.

There has traditionally been nervousness about clergymen exerting pressure on congregations to support a particular political party. To that end Mr Saxby sought to stand in a constituency away from his parish.

The clergyman intends to remain the Labour candidate for Cities of London and Westminster and is hoping to return to work as a vicar in May following a two-month break if the church allows it.

It is understood he is currently living away from the Edwardian vicarage where his wife and their four children have remained.

In a statement, Mr Saxby said: I am immensely sorry for the hurt I have caused my wife and family and will be working to address the mistakes I have made over the coming months. My family need space and patience during this tough time.

Labour said: This is a personal matter for Steven and his family. The Diocese of Chelmsford said it was investigating the allegations against Mr Saxby. His wife declined to comment.
Inspector Mitch Corfield described crime scene as 'quite confronting'

A man is behind bars after he was charged with murder in Sydney's west on Thursday night.

Thanh Tran, 75, was arrested after allegedly killing his ex-wife's new partner, Pok Min Fah.

Daily Mail Australia understands Tran struck the victim with his car before attacking him with an axe in an altercation described as 'violent.'

Officers found the 59-year-old alleged victim nursing a head wound on Sydney Luker Rd in Cabramatta west about 8.45pm on Thursday. He later died at the scene.

The confronting scene in Cabramatta west, (pictured) where a man died after he was attacked by another man wielding an axe

Police will allege Tran deliberately hit the younger man with his vehicle before repeatedly striking him with an axe in a frenzied attack.

Police seized the axe and arrested Tran, who was then transported to a nearby hospital for an unrelated medical condition.

Acting Inspector Mitch Corfield described the crime scene as 'quite confronting' for police and others witnesses.

'It was a violent attack,' Inspector Corfield told reporters on Friday.

A resident who witnessed the incident said he saw the alleged attacker try to run away, so he tackled him and called police.

'He had an axe on his side ... when I tackled him I saw the axe and I just threw it away,' the man told 2GB radio.

The 75-year-old was eventually released from hospital and taken to Liverpool Police Station where he was charged with murder.

Tran did not appear in Liverpool Local Court on Friday, with the matter adjourned until May 13, where he will appear in court via video link.

Thanh Tran (pictured) was charged with murder following an altercation with his ex-wife's new partner, Pok Min Fah
Crystal Stephens, 42, of Las Vegas, Nevada, is facing the death penalty in the brutal torture death of a four-year-old autistic boy left in her care last summer

A woman indicted on 27 charges in the brutal torture death a four-year-old autistic boy last July could face the death penalty.

Prosecutors announced Thursday that they will pursue capital punishment against Crystal Stephens, 42, of Las Vegas, Nevada, after Brandon Steckler Jr. was found with a litany of injuries and wounds in her home last year before dying at the hospital, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

If convicted and sentenced, Stephens would be the only woman on Nevada's death row, according to Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Jacqueline Bluth.

Along with the capital murder charge, Stephens has also been charged with one count of first-degree kidnapping, one count of sexual assault on a minor and 24 counts of child abuse, neglect or endangerment.

Even months after the nonverbal Brandon Jr. was left in the care of family friend Stephens the medical examiner has not determined the exact cause of death because his injuries were so numerous, according to the prosecutor.

The boy was with Stephens, who the mom Ariel Watts claims refused to return him, for three weeks before his death.

The medical examiner's grand jury transcript stated that it was 'fair to say that pretty much every inch of this child had some type of injury,' according to KLAS.

Ariel Watts (left) left her son Brandon Steckler Jr. (right) along with his sister in the care of Crystal Stephens while she was allegedly in a domestic violence shelter. Brandon would be dead weeks later

Brandon Steckler Jr. seen in an earlier photo, was so severely injured, the medical examiner's office has yet to determine an exact cause of death

Photographs and the transcript paint the graphic picture of what happened to Steckler Jr.: Bruises, burns, injuries (including burns) inside the mouth and on the arms, 27 rib fractures and trauma to his private parts.

Meth was found in the boy's system and he suffered from a broken collarbone, a lacerated liver, a collapsed lung, malnutrition, sepsis and pneumonia.

'I didn't even know it was the same child,' said DA Bluth. 'I was blown away.'

Stephens allegedly told police that Brandon and his sister had been with her for the two weeks while Brandon's mother was living in a domestic violence shelter.

Crystal Stephens, seen here, who was caring for Brandon Steckler Jr. and his sister, is charged with capital murder, one count of first-degree kidnapping, one count of sexual assault on a minor and 24 counts of child abuse, neglect or endangerment

Brandon Rico Steckler, shown, was the father of Brandon Steckler Jr. He raised money along with his fellow Naval veterans for his son's burial in August, but had no comment on the case

The prosecutor's office says it does not intend to charge Watts because it is believed she was unaware the child was being harmed. According to the mother, she only learned Brandon was in the hospital from an email sent by Child Protective Services.

The father, Brandon Steckler, held a fundraiser with fellow veterans for his son's burial last August, where the Navy veteran told the Review-Journal that his late son loved professional wrestling.

'He would jump off the back of the couch and hit you with (an) elbow drop that 'Macho Man' Randy Savage himself would be proud of,' Steckler said.

However, he would not comment on the case itself on the advice of his lawyer, and it is unclear what the custody situation was between Steckler Sr. and Watts when their son died.

'No parent, no father, expects to bury their child,' the grieving father did say.

Brandon Sr. here with Brandon Jr. said his son would watch professional wrestling with him
Mexican authorities have discovered the butchered remains of 19 people inside plastic bags floating in a sewage canal.

The bags were found floating in the canal in Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos, a town east of Guadalajara, on Thursday, Diario de Yucatan, reports.

Octavio Solis, the Jalisco State Attorney, said in a Friday press conference that there were 18 men and 1 woman in the bags.

Mexican authorities report that at least 19 bags containing body parts were found floating on a canal in the western state of Jalisco

Mexican officials report the bodies of 18 men and 1 woman were chopped and placed in the bags

Solis said that ten of the victims have been identified, including one with a criminal record.

He also added that they would not rule out the possibility of more bodies in the area. He couldn't not determine if all of the victims were involved in criminal activities.

The police were tipped off by an anonymous 911 call.

The Jalisco Prosecutor's Office believes that the New Jalisco Generation Cartel, led by Nemesio 'El Mencho' Oseguera Cervantes, a former ally of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, could be behind the gruesome discovery.

Forensic experts, firefighters and police officers have been working since Thursday to locate additional bags of bodies that could have been dumped near a canal

At least 19 bags with body parts were found at a sewage canal in the western Mexican city of Ixtlahuacan de los Membrillos

Jalisco is home to the Jalisco is home to the New Jalisco Generation Cartel, which is led by Nemesio 'El Mencho' Oseguera Cervantes, a former ally of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman.

El Mencho is the most-wanted man in Mexico and one of the most-sought after by the United States Department of Justice

Gangs often hack up their victims in order to try and disguise the body count.

Officials recovered the bags of remains and searched the area sealed off area, believing that more remains could have been dumped.

The horrible discovery took place a week after seven the bodies of seven assassinated victims were found in Los Altos de Jalisco.

The city also reported seven more assassinations Thursday. Authorities found the person of one headless body.

The Prosecutor's Office is now working with the Special Prosecutor's Office for Missing Persons to try and identify the bodies.

El Mencho is the most-wanted man in Mexico and one of the most-sought after by the United States Department of Justice, who is offering a $10 million bounty after agency originally offered $5 million.
Prince William called the Duke of Edinburgh for advice over the decision to split his household from Prince Harrys, it emerged yesterday.

He telephoned Philip, 97, at Sandringham several weeks ago because he values his wise counsel, it is understood.

The prince knew the parting of ways from his younger brother was inevitable, but was concerned about how it might look and wanted to be reassured that Harry would be well supported by Buckingham Palace.

Prince William telephoned Philip, 97, at Sandringham several weeks ago because he values his wise counsel

To Williams mind, no one knows the set-up at the palace better than his grandfather  or would give him a more unbiased opinion of the brothers plans. It is not known what was discussed between the pair but clearly the future kings mind was put at rest.

On Thursday night it was announced that Harry and Meghan are to split from William and Kate in one of the biggest royal shake-ups in recent years.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will move their entire staff and offices to be with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, cutting all ties with Kensington Palace, where William and Kate live and work.

Harry and Meghan have also appointed their own taxpayer-funded PR supremo, former Clinton adviser Sara Latham, with the rest of their new household funded by the Queen and Prince Charles privately.

William and Kate's split from Harry and Meghan was announced on Thursday night and William wanted reassurance that Harry would be looked after at Buckingham Palace

Aides have moved to quash rumours that the change is due to a rift between the two brothers and their wives after reports that there have been difficulties between them.

They insist the changes were always due to take place because of Williams future role as Prince of Wales and, eventually, king.

Both the Queen and Charles made clear to the brothers it would be better for all that the shift was made sooner rather than later, it is understood.

A source said: Its about placing the two dukes on a permanent footing that ensures changes arent needed again [when Charles accedes to the throne and William becomes Prince of Wales].

Aides have moved to quash rumours that the change is due to a rift between the two brothers and their wives after reports that there have been difficulties between them

The Cambridges have made clear they will keep their court at Kensington Palace, rather than follow in Charless footsteps and move into Clarence House.

Harry and Meghan have also turned down the mansion, saying they see their new Windsor residence, Frogmore Cottage, as their forever home.

The Sussexes will join the Queens other children in having offices at Buckingham Palace.

In the future, they may also take over a suite of rooms for when they are staying in London.
Harry and Meghan have hired a new communications director, Sara Latham, 48

Public relations is not a job for the faint-hearted, but even seasoned practitioners of the spin-doctoring arts might hesitate to take on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

The royal couple are, after all, taking a step into the unknown as they and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge divide their respective households.

And Harry and Meghans recent public utterances suggest they have a radically different vision of their future to the royal tradition.

Those who foresaw Meghan forging a more star-studded, international and high-profile role for her and her husband than merely opening libraries and handing out bravery awards may be starting to think they are right.

For the Sussexes have now recruited a high-powered and impeccably well-connected communications director who has worked not only for Bill and Hillary Clinton but also Tony Blair.

Like the Duchess, Sara Latham is an American who has acquired dual US-UK citizenship. She also enjoys a reputation as a wily political operator with deep roots in the Democrat and New Labour camps.

Ms Latham is an American with duel citizenship and has her roots in the Democrat party and New Labour. She has worked with Tony Blair,

She was brought in to help choreograph Bill Clintons re-election campaign in 1996, helped to sneak in Barack Obamas proposed Cabinet nominations for secret interviews after his election in 2008, and helped prepare Hillary Clinton for the White House as part of what was described as her covert operations team.

There may have been an added attraction for what appears to have been a selection made by the duchess, rather than Prince Harry.

She hasnt hidden her loathing of Donald Trump, describing him on US TV as misogynistic and publicly supporting Mrs Clintons rival presidential campaign.

Appointing a PR chief with a long-standing link to the Clintons  who of course Mr Trump hates  may be seen as a snub to the president.

Sources say the couple met Miss Latham, 48, only this year and were immediately drawn to her firm but fair approach. It is possible they were introduced via the duchesss Hollywood friend George Clooney, whose wife Amal attended Meghans recent  and lavish  baby shower festivities in New York.

Clooney was involved in raising funds for the Hillary campaign.

A former colleague yesterday described Miss Latham as very smart and very good at dealing with difficult characters. She is, he added, very diplomatically adept and not in it for the money.

It is estimated she is on a salary of 140,000 which is relatively modest for what she could be earning in the corporate sector. Miss Latham had recently rejoined the London PR firm, Freuds, as its managing partner.

Ms Latham was brought in to help choreograph Bill Clintons re-election campaign in 1996, helped to sneak in Barack Obamas proposed Cabinet nominations for secret interviews after his election in 2008, and helped prepare Hillary Clinton for the White House as part of what was described as her covert operations team

Reporting to the Queens press secretary Donal McCabe, Miss Latham will start her new job in the spring; the couples baby is rumoured to be expected next month.

Miss Latham will no doubt be paid as much as the palace could afford but spinning for the Sussexes would be no job for an amateur.

She seems to have risen effortlessly through the political and corporate worlds in a career that has seen her repeatedly assist global figures including allies of the Clintons and Tony Blair.

After being brought in for Bill Clintons successful 1996 re-election campaign, she worked as special assistant to Mr Clintons chief of staff, John Podesta.

Between 1996 and 2000, Miss Latham held other White House roles including deputy assistant to the president and, until 2000, deputy director of presidential scheduling. That position brought her close to the then-first lady.

After George W Bush won the 2000 presidential election, she moved to Brussels as a government affairs adviser for software giant Microsoft.

The next year, she moved again, this time to London to become managing director of Philip Gould Associates, the PR firm set up by the late Lord Gould, the former Labour strategy and polling adviser who was close to Tony Blair.

The Blair connection must have helped her move to Freud Communications in 2002. Its founder, Matthew Freud, was not only an ally of Mr Blair, but also had strong Democrat links.

In 2005, she was seconded to work for Labours general election campaign, after which she was appointed as special adviser to Tessa Jowell, Mr Blairs culture secretary  just as the department learned London would host the 2012 Olympics.

Miss Latham left the Government in 2006 to set up her own consultancy. Naturally, her clients reflected her high-level contacts and included the Clinton Foundation and Tony Blair Associates as well as Coca-Cola and the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

The shake-up comes as Harry and Meghan prepare for their move away from Kensington Palace to Frogmore Cottage (pictured) on the Windsor Castle estate

In 2008, she returned to Washington DC  after a farewell party at a trendy Mayfair bar  to work again for the Democrats.

This time she was employed by Barack Obama as he prepared to enter the White House. He had, of course, defeated her old boss Hillary Clinton in a heated battle for the Democrat nomination.

But the Clintons endorsed Mr Obama at the partys 2008 convention, urging supporters to vote for him.

An expert, it appears, at helping politicians transition into power, Miss Latham doesnt hang around long in government  nor anywhere else, it seems.

By 2011 she had returned to the corporate world as non-executive chairman of iEnergizer, a supplier of back-office services to banks which is run by multimillionaire Anil Agarwal.

Even in business, she did not allow her political links to wither, and was described in a 2012 report as the go-to girl for top Democrats visiting London. Miss Latham reportedly advised Michelle Obama on which restaurants to visit in the UK.

The year after it was back to politics to join Hillary Clintons campaign for president. Miss Latham was appointed chief of staff to John Podesta, now chairman of Mrs Clintons campaign.

A presidential candidates selection of running mate is an enormously sensitive operation. John McCain discovered this when he disastrously chose Sarah Palin in 2009 and internal staff tensions were leaked to the media.

Mrs Clinton was determined that shouldnt happen again and Miss Latham was asked to oversee a VP selection process that was shrouded in secrecy.

As part of a covert operations team, Miss Latham marshalled reports drawn up by 15 law firms asked to vet candidates. She then printed them out in secret and posted them to Mrs Clinton.

As Mrs Clinton flew with Senator Tim Kaine  her eventual choice  to the Florida rally where she would break the news, Miss Latham lightened the mood by persuading him to pull out his harmonica. He obliged, playing a Beatles tune.

Confident she would win comfortably, Mrs Clinton appointed Miss Latham one of three aides to oversee transition planning for her new administration.

That particular transition, of course, was never to happen.

Sara Latham likes to move on regularly in her career. One hopes for the duke and duchesss sake she hangs around long enough to handle their often shifting public image.
Another week, another parliamentary spectacle of almost mind-boggling irresponsibility.

To recap for readers who have better things to do than pore over the continuing Westminster car crash, Theresa May returned from Strasbourg on Monday with a tweak to her EU Withdrawal Agreement, which her own Attorney General promptly torpedoed with his opinion that it made no legal difference.

On Tuesday, MPs rejected her deal by a colossal 149-vote majority. On Wednesday they voted to reject a No Deal exit, with 13 ministers defying the Tory whips to abstain.

Then on Thursday, to compound the general sense of shambolic ungovernability, MPs rejected a measure to take control of the process from the Government, rejected a proposal for a second referendum and finally voted to extend the Brexit process beyond March 29, the date when we were supposed to be leaving the EU.

MPs (pictured above) voted down Theresa May's plan after she returned from Strasbourg earlier this week

To give you some sense of the chaos on Thursday, the Brexit Secretary voted against the very plan for which he had just been arguing in the Commons. The chief whip, who had been in charge of getting MPs to back the Government, abstained.

And to cap it all, the risible second referendum campaign put out a statement urging MPs to vote against such a vote, claiming the time was not right.

Not even the cruellest satirist could make up this sort of stuff.

You might, I suppose, argue that this is how politics is supposed to work. Britains departure from the EU is a hugely difficult and complicated endeavour, so MPs should not necessarily be pilloried for taking their time and getting it right.

But surely no one could claim that our political class have covered themselves in glory. For in recent months it has become painfully clear that most MPs are completely out of their depth.

Prime Minister Theresa May (pictured above) has had her previous deals rejected

Many are simply too dim to understand the issues. They are not intellectually capable of grasping the complexity of the challenge, the importance of dealing honestly with our neighbours or the urgency of showing the public that they respect the result of the referendum.

There is, of course, plenty of blame to go around. Like many Mail readers, I have long since tired of seeing the likes of Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry draping themselves in the tattered EU flag and congratulating themselves on their so-called principles, while doing all in their power to frustrate the democratic verdict of the British people.

Yet at the same time I find it physically painful to listen to card-carrying fools such as the Tory hardliner Andrew Bridgen, who wrongly told a radio interviewer that all Englishmen were automatically entitled to Irish passports, or his fellow Brexiteer Mark Francois, who announced that he would not back Mrs Mays deal because I was in the Army. I wasnt trained to lose.

Perhaps some readers will think I am being harsh, but this sort of behaviour would be beneath the dignity of a sixth-former standing for the school council, let alone a Member of Parliament.

Andrew Bridgen (pictured above) wrongly told a radio show that all Englishmen were entitled to Irish passports

It is true that, as the great conservative thinker Edmund Burke wrote in 1774, our MPs are not delegates, and are free to think and vote as they like.

Yet in a mature democracy, our political representatives ought to show an ounce of respect for the views of the men and women who sent them to Westminster. And it is hardly unreasonable to expect them to inform themselves about the issues, to speak and act with seriousness and responsibility, and to put the national interest ahead of their own narcissistic posturing.

Whatever you think of Brexit, it is the greatest political challenge we have faced since World War II.

Yet when the Attorney General, Geoffrey Cox, develops an elaborate sub-Les Dawson routine, gleefully likening his legal advice to a codpiece, and finds time to tweet the word b******s to the journalist Jon Snow, you wonder whether he is taking his job seriously.

According to Dominic Sandbrook, Commons Speaker John Bercow (above) has used the whole situation to show off

There is more, of course.

What about all those Labour MPs merrily tweeting photos of themselves in the voting lobbies, in flagrant defiance of Westminster rules?

What about the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, who treats the whole thing as an opportunity to show off?

What about Jeremy Corbyn, who rants and raves at the despatch box without showing the slightest scintilla of intelligence or integrity?

What about that clown Boris Johnson, who sees all this as a vehicle for his leadership ambitions, and blithely tells a radio interviewer that police investigations into historic child sex abuse were spaffing money up the wall  using a street-slang word meaning ejaculation? And what about the aforementioned Mark Francois, jousting with novelist Will Self on TV about the size of his penis?

Boris Johnson (pictured above) told a radio show that police investigations into historic sex abuse were 'spaffing money up the wall'

It almost went unnoticed that Labour MP Fiona Onasanya turned up to vote this week wearing an electronic tag, having just been released from prison after lying when she was caught speeding.

So much for the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments!

There are, of course, serious issues behind this shambles.First, I find it utterly baffling that the hardliners in the Tory European Research Group (ERG) would prefer to risk having no Brexit at all rather than vote for Mrs Mays deal.

Steve Baker (pictured above) is part of the hardliner ERG group

To cut a long story short, they have invented their own elaborate fantasy of the perfect deal (which the EU would never accept), and are determined to veto anything that does not tick all their little boxes.

This is the very definition of political irresponsibility.

Yes, Mrs Mays deal isnt perfect. But what did they expect? Did they seriously think Britain would get everything its own way?

It is curious that the hardliners often talk of their great love for Margaret Thatcher, because she was nothing if not a pragmatist. When she negotiated her budget rebate from the EU in the early 1980s, for example, she had to settle for less than she initially wanted.

Did she throw her toys out of the pram? No. But she was a serious politician.

There is no doubt that some ERG hardliners have become addicted to the sound of their own voices. Would their chief shop steward, Steve Baker, be on television quite so often if Brexit were done and dusted? No wonder he and his friends keep voting against the deal. They dont want to lose their place in the limelight.

The other great villains are the hardliners on the other side, the slavering Peoples Vote fanatics who never miss a chance, their bottom lips wobbling, to tell us how wonderfully principled they are.

Once again, it amazes me that these sanctimonious prigs cannot see how arrogant, graceless and irresponsible they appear. If they got their way, and a second referendum overturned the first, what do they think would happen?

How do they think people would react in the great swathes of the North and Midlands that voted Leave? Doesnt it occur to them, in the smug fastnesses of their conceited little minds, that the reaction would be bedlam?

Dont they care that this would create a lasting narrative of betrayal, with the common people cheated by an arrogant elite? Dont they care that this would hand a gift-wrapped present to the far Right and far Left?

Doesnt it occur to them to this would play directly into the hands of extremists like the lunatics who massacred 49 people in mosques in New Zealand yesterday, pouring fuel on the flames of their exaggerated resentments?

Theresa May (pictured above) has proposed the deal several times to MPs in parliament

The great Cambridge historian Robert Tombs, a Brexiteer, has argued that the current Parliament is the most unrepresentative and undemocratic since before the Great Reform Act of 1832, when the vast majority of British men and women could not even vote.

I dont agree with him about everything, but hes right about Parliament. As I have written in the Mail for years, the fact that our MPs have become a narrow, gilded political class, with little experience of the outside world and little sense of how ordinary people think and behave, has undermined our sense of democratic legitimacy.

Whatever you think about Brexit, Parliament is not reflecting the views of the British people. And if our MPs continue to reject a deal, leaving us trapped in the limbo of a permanent extension, millions will not forgive them.

I was struck by the tumultuous applause on Thursday night when, on BBC1s Question Time, one member of the West London audience said MPs betrayal of the Leave vote means he will never, ever again vote in an election. There must be many, many more who feel the same.

The grim irony of all this, though, is that it is all so unnecessary.

Even back in June 2016, when Britain voted to leave the EU, it was blindingly obvious that we would end up with some kind of pragmatic compromise, leaving the formal structures of the EU without torpedoing our economy.

That is precisely what Mrs Mays deal does. No such deal could be perfect, because it represents an accommodation between ideals and reality.

What also strikes me as bizarre about so many MPs opposition to Mrs Mays deal is the glaring fact that no other deal is available. The EU have made it crystal clear that they are not going to renegotiate.

We can rant and rave about that as much as we like  and believe me, I enjoy shaking my fist across the Channel as much as anybody  but what good would that do?

The most likely alternative to Mrs Mays deal, in fact, is that we extend the deadline before slouching disconsolately back into the EU, whether as part of a so-called Norway-plus deal or as formal members once again.

That would be a disaster, not just for our national pride but for our sense of democratic integrity.

The other irony is that if only we could stop quarrelling and get on with it, we might notice Britain is in far better shape than we often think. The underlying principles of our society are strong.

Our economy has performed much better since 2016 than many people expected, including me. Employment is at a record high. Austerity is coming to an end. The threat of Scottish secession has receded for the time being.

And despite all the cliches about a divided country, usually from hysterical Remainers, most ordinary people are not divided at all. Whatever their feelings about Brexit, most dont want a long extension, dont want a second referendum and just want our MPs to get on with it.

The problem is not the people. It is the political class, who insist on behaving as if they were showing off at the student union, not managing the affairs of a great country.

It doesnt seem to occur to the hard-Brexiteers that, for all the bluster about taking back control and regaining sovereignty, they have shown themselves manifestly incapable of exerting control or wielding sovereignty.

Nor has it occurred to the Remainers that for all their pious cant about the sanctity of Parliament and the rights of MPs, they have been revealed as utterly unfit to sit on the benches once adorned by Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.

Still, with Mrs Mays deal likely to return to the Commons next week, our MPs will have one last chance to redeem themselves. One last chance for the Tories to remember that Conservatism is the political expression of reasoned pragmatism, and for Labour to remember what millions of working-class men and women voted for back in 2016.

But if they continue to put posturing self-interest ahead of a national compromise, and to treat our Parliament as a circus, they can hardly blame the rest of us for concluding that Westminster politics is broken beyond repair.

Three hundred and sixty-six years ago, Oliver Cromwell marched into Parliament, seized the Mace and ordered his troops to clear the building.

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice, roared Cromwell. Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation... In the name of God, go!

For the next five years, Cromwell effectively ran England himself. And he did it extremely well, dying peacefully in his bed with the nation prosperous, strong and respected across the world.

I dont know about you, but I cant help wishing old Oliver was still around.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders cut his head on a glass shower door Friday and received seven stitches at a walk-in clinic before keeping up with his scheduled presidential campaign events.

The 77-year-old senator, the oldest candidate in the Democratic race to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020, was given a 'clean bill of health' after his bathroom run-in, his spokeswoman Arianna Jones said in a statement.

Sanders, a democratic socialist who advocates for a single-payer, government-run health care system, received seven stitches and showed up at a health care event with a sizable bandage over part of his forehead.

77-year-old Bernie Sanders showed up at a health care roundtable on Friday with a bandage covering seven stitches on his head

Sanders' spokeswoman said he cut himself on a glass shower door and went to a walk-in clinic where a doctor stitched him up and gave him a 'clean bill of health'

'The senator has proceeded with all of his scheduled events' including a breakfast with about 20 local clergy and then a health care roundtable in Charleston, South Carolina, said Jones.

Sanders would be 79 on Inauguration Day in 2021 if he were elected president next year, making him by far the oldest American leader to move into the White House.

Trump currently holds that record. He was 70 years old on Inauguration Day in 2017, just edging out Ronald Reagan, who was a few days shy of his 70th birthday.

The incident is likely to fuel questions about the liberal icon's physical condition as he gears up for what will undoubtedly be a gruelling campaign against 14 other Democrats currently in the race.

Sanders was the oldest candidate in the 2016 (pictured) presidential field, and has that distinction again this time; he would be 79 when he takes office if he wins

President Donald Trump was the oldest U.S. president to take over the White House; he was 70 on Inauguration Day in 2017

Two of them, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, are less than half his age.

Trump attacked Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who was 68 at the time, as suffering from 'low energy' when she came down with pneumonia during the 2016 presidential campaign, claiming she lacked the stamina to be president.

The president will be 74 on Election Day next year. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who is a polling front-runner despite not yet announcing his candidacy, will be 77.

Sanders will travel to Nevada ahead of his first rally in the early-voting state since launching his presidential bid. That event will be held Saturday
Robert Murgatroyd (pictured above) has been jailed for three-and-a-half years after being convicted of endangering the safety of a person and an aircraft, flying without the relevant licence, failing to comply with insurance regulations plus three other charges under the Air Navigation Order 2016

A cavalier pilot with a 22-year history of flouting aviation laws was jailed today for overloading his plane with customers in pursuit of an 800 profit, causing it to 'fall out of the sky'.

Robert Murgatroyd received a three-and-a-half year sentence after being found culpable for the 2017 crash, in which three people were injured.

The 52-year-old had previously been convicted for flying an unsafe plane which crashed killing two men, as well as for illegally operating public transport flights.

He had also run a commercial airline which went bust owing 1 million and was criticised over another double fatal light aircraft crash.

But despite his background, Murgatroyd was free to fly three birdwatchers on an 800-mile round trip to the Scottish island of Barra on the Outer Hebrides on September 17 2017.

The 1972 Piper Cherokee four-seater aircraft was overloaded by 29 stone and 20% above its maximum capacity due to the size of the men plus luggage and excess fuel.

It subsequently 'fell out of the sky' as it tried in vain to clear a row of 300-foot pylons shortly after take-off in bad weather from City Airport formerly known as Barton Aerodrome near Eccles, Greater Manchester.

The aircraft twice flew over the neighbouring M62 motorway as it made a mid-air U turn in an attempt to fly back to the airport. But it clipped a tree and crash landed in a potato field 160 yards from the motorway causing its left wing and undercarriage to be ripped away and its fuel tanks to rupture.

The Piper Cherokee (pictured above) after the crash which injured three passengers in September 2017

Robert Murgatroyd (pictured above) had tried to claim he was a 'hero' and should be featured in a Hollywood movie

One passenger suffered a serious cut to his forehead whilst another was left with fractured ribs. In the moments before the impact, Murgatroyd was overheard saying: 'There's not enough power - we're not going to make it.'

Police arrested and quizzed Murgatroyd about the 9.30am accident near the Manchester Ship Canal but he claimed he was a 'hero' for avoiding any deaths.

He also joked Warner Brothers film studios had contacted him about a 'remake' of the Tom Hanks movie Sully about the 2009 landing of a US Airways passenger jet on the Hudson River in New York - and rename it 'Miracle on the Ship Canal.'

Murgatroyd, from Garstang, Lancs who usually operated from an air strip at Blackpool told police: 'Without blowing my own trumpet, if it hadn't been for me on that fight that day you'd have been collecting four dead people out of that field.'

The light aircraft (pictured above) was 50 per cent above its maximum capacity of 55 stone

The wreckage of the plane (pictured above) which was over capacity by 29 stone, and crashed shortly after take-off dangerously close to the M62 motorway

But inquiries revealed Murgatroyd had been prosecuted in 2014 after an unairworthy Piper PA plane he owned crashed in the Swiss Alps killing the pilot and a passenger.

The plane's equivalent of a car's MoT certificate had expired 44 days before the crash on the Jura mountainside in October 2011, and during the days before the tragedy it had been on 28 separate flights.

A Swiss inquiry blamed a pilot error for the crash but condemned the lack of an airworthiness certificate and Murgatroyd was later fined 333.

The businessman, who once owned 20 aircraft and two helicopters was also fined 1,500 in 1997 for false representation.

Murgatroyd had a history of severe aviation misconduct spanning two decades and had run a commercial airline which went bust owing 1.15 million

His business Comed Aviation collapsed in 2001 owing 1.15 million, but it is thought he set up another aviation firm.

In 2008 he was once again accused of wrongdoing after another plane he owned crashed off the coast of Blackpool killing the inexperienced pilot and 81-year old co-pilot.

At an inquest it was claimed Murgatroyd had said the elderly co-pilot was a qualified instructor when in fact the pensioner did not hold an instructors licence due to him being 'medically unfit'.

Now, Murgatroyd has been convicted at Manchester Crown Court of endangering the safety of a person and an aircraft, flying without the relevant licence, failing to comply with insurance regulations plus three other charges under the Air Navigation Order 2016.

It is the first time a pilot has been prosecuted at a a crown court for such offences.

Sentencing Judge Michael Leeming told him: 'You were prepared to put your own life at risk and the lives of your three passengers as they put their lives in your hands. There were risks to the motorists below if you had crash landed on the runway and as the aircraft was fully laden with fuel it would have ensured a scene of carnage.

'The author of a pre-sentence report described you as a calculated risk taker with a limited responsibility even now for what occurred and a lack of understanding of the seriousness of what happens.

The plane took off from City Airport in Greater Manchester (pictured above)

'They describe you as having no victim empathy and said you seemed to blame your victims for not pointing it to out to you that the aircraft was overweight. But that was your responsibility.

'Somebody might easily have been killed. There was a high degree of recklessness. Even now you seek to portray yourself as the hero of the hour, you are arrogant and wholly unfit to hold any further license of an aircraft.

'You are a cavalier operator and an air accident waiting to happen. Pilots are trusted to abide by their licenses. Only an immediate custodial sentence can be justified.'

The accident occurred after Murgatroyd, who obtained his pilot's licence in 1986 and who had 15,000 hours of flying experience, was asked to fly the bird watchers to Scotland so they could join 110 other 'Twitchers' to see the American Red Start which had been spotted on Barra - the first time it had seen in the UK since 1985.

Murgatroyd claimed he had allowed the bird watchers on his aircraft under a 'cost sharing' scheme and described the overloading of the aircraft as an 'oversight'

He quoted 500 per passenger for the Piper PA-28 aircraft which can carry a maximum weight of 55 stone including fuel, but the court heard the three bird watchers Alan Whitehead, Adam Archer and Ray Harrington had a combined weight of 45 stone and arrived with luggage including cameras and binoculars which they had to keep on their knees.

Murgatroyd, who himself weighed 14 stone, then filled the plane with 100 litres of highly flammable petrol-type fuel which was above the recommended level of a half-full tank for four passengers.

He initially attempted a 'practice takeoff' along the 641m grass runway which had puddles along it but despite the plane showing no signs of lifting off the ground during the acceleration test, he taxi-ed the aircraft into rough grass at the start of the runway and then went for actual take-off.

Firefighters at the airport were so concerned they put on their protective clothing in anticipation of an emergency.

One of the passengers Alan Whitehead who was sat in the front passenger seat said: 'The pilot pulled the throttle and off we went. He didn't say what to do in an emergency or in a crash, no life jackets or procedures were given. Visibility was very poor, it was raining heavily and it was a small tiny windscreen.

The crashed Piper PA28 aircraft piloted by Robert Murgatroyd who has been jailed for three and a half years at at Manchester Crown Court after he crashed the plane with three birdwatchers on board

'We were in the air and all of a sudden the plan banked to the left, it tilted, I looked below and I could see the motorway. I few more seconds went in and then I heard the comment: "not enough power". It wasn't very reassuring.

'Then I heard it hit something which sounded like the top of a tree then we crashed in the field. I banged my head. At first I didn't know where the blood was coming from and I was panicking. I was covered in blood and I could then smell petrol. It was all a bit of a blur.'

Adam Archer who was in the back said: 'When the plane was in the air, it wasn't too long before it sounded like when a car goes up a hill on a low gear and it's making a lot of noise, there seemed to be a loss of power on the aircraft - but there was no discussion or talking about it.

The plane took off from City Airport in Manchester (pictured) before having to make a U turn on the M62

'We just seemed to lose power and I remember seeing pylons in the distance and I thought if we didn't get anymore power we're not going to make this. The plane banked sharply and we hit the top of the trees going over the motorway then we landed with a sudden jolt. There was a really strong smell of fuel and a lot of blood from Alan's injuries.

'As we hit the deck Alan and the pilot hit their heads on the dashboard of the plane. Alan was in quite a bad way and he was shouting: "you have killed us! What have you done to us?!" When I smelt the fuel, I thought there was a chance it could burst into flames.'

Murgatroyd claimed he had allowed the bird watchers on his aircraft under a 'cost sharing' scheme despite rules saying the pilot cannot own the plane. He described the overloading of the aircraft as an 'oversight.'

His lawyer Hugh O'Donohue said: 'He is unlikely to be involved in flying again.'
We've all dreamed while stuck in traffic jams of being able to just lift off and fly over the gridlock.

According to experts gathered this week at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that is likely to happen sooner than later, with flying taxis expected to take to the skies by 2025.

'People have been dreaming about it for decades on paper, and now the technology is here,' said Michael Thacker, executive vice-president for technology and innovation at Bell.

'The only question is, what are we going to do with it?'

Experts expect flying taxis, a model of which is pictured here, to take to the skies by 2025

Thacker said his company has joined with ride-hailing app Uber and several aeronautics firms, including France's Safran, to create a fleet of flying taxis that are called vertical take-off and landing vehicles (VTOL).

The Nexus, as this hybrid electric propulsion aircraft is named, was first unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Between 20 and 30 other firms are working on similar concepts, among them start-ups or major companies such as Airbus, which recently presented its electric aircraft CityAirbus.

Uber plans to launch its air taxis first in Los Angeles and Dallas, two major traffic-congested American cities.

Asked about using helicopters as an alternative, Thacker said the taxis are financially sounder and quieter.

'The noise has to blend in with the background noise of the city,' he said.

He predicted the vehicles could start to be commercially used around 2025.

'It's not going to replace ground transport, it will augment it in another dimension,' he said. 'And it's not going to jump overnight with thousands of aircraft.

'There will rather be a few dozens of them in a few cities... at first using helipads and helicopter routes.'

Bell executives said drones transporting goods, such as emergency medical products, should take to the skies well before taxis given lesser restrictions imposed on such aircraft.

'Transport of goods don't have so many requirements in terms of safety and acceptability by people,' he said.

Jaiwon Shin, associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate at NASA, said although 2025 appears like a reasonable date for a limited launch of flying vehicles, it will take longer for the market to fully expand.

'For this market to really flourish... I think we really need to mature the market at scale and that may take a decade,' he said.

Also, experts say, several barriers still need to be overcome before flying vehicles get the green light.

One of the biggest technological hurdles for flying car concepts to overcome is the battery: most of the prototypes designed use electric propulsion and batteries currently don't have enough power to fly a car for a long distance

You have to see 'if you can actually test the vehicle in an urban space without having visual line of sight over people with buildings,' said Shivika Sahdev, with the consulting firm McKinsey.

One of the biggest technological hurdles to overcome is the battery. Most of the prototypes designed use electric propulsion and batteries currently don't have enough power to fly a car for a long distance.

Still, industry experts are optimistic about the new technology.

In a report entitled 'Vision 2050' presented at SXSW, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) predicts that by 2050, the use of flying taxis and other autonomous drones will be widespread, mainly thanks to artificial intelligence.

'For me, artificial intelligence is easier in the air,' said Scott Drennan, director of innovation at Bell. 'There's a lot of space up there and so we have a lot of room, we have a third dimension to maneuver in.

'It's not the Wild Wild West up there,' he added. 'I think the rules of the sky are more defined than the rules of the road.'

Another advantage to flying cars is their GPS, said Anil Nanduri, vice president of Drone Group at Intel.

'GPS precision today is a couple of meters plus minus,' he said. 'For ground-based vehicles... it's not accurate enough to have the precision you need. But once you go up to third dimension, it's enough.'

For those still skeptical about driving in the skies, tech reporter Aarti Shahani has only this to say: 'If you had told me 10 years ago that I would open something called an app to order a car driven by a stranger for my mom who lived 3,000 miles away, I'd tell you you were crazy.

'And actually, that's what I do now all the time for her.'
WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton urged people to 'delete' their Facebook accounts now, during an address made to students.

Mr Acton, now the head of non-profit WhatsApp rival Signal, blasted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for trading privacy for revenue by allowing ads on his platform.

He has now called for people to 'reject' Facebook by deleting its family of apps from their smartphones and other devices.

It comes after the world's largest social network has been beset by a string of privacy scandals.

Mr Acton has been openly critical of Silicon Valley firms like Facebook and Google in the past for their seemingly profit-driven approach at the expense of people's data.

It is the second time that Mr Acton has made the comment publicly. Last year he posted on Twitter 'It is time. #delete facebook' following Facebook's failings involving a political consultancy firm.

The data of 87 million users was improperly accessed by Cambridge Analytica, linked to the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

Facebook is also facing a slew of lawsuits and regulatory inquiries over its privacy practices, including ongoing investigations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and two state agencies in New York.

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Brian Acton, pictured right with his WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, has called on everyone to 'delete' their Facebook in an address to students at Stanford. In 2014, Acton sold the instant messaging service to the company for $19 billion (15bn) and left in 2017

In 2014, Acton sold the instant messaging service to Mark Zuckerberg for $19 billion (15bn) and left in 2017 over its plans to introduce ads to the app.

Mr Acton defended his decision to sell saying that he wanted his employees and investors to profit and he didn't have the power, or 'clout' to say no.

Speaking at Stanford University in California, Mr Acton said: 'I had 50 employees, and I had to think about them and the money they would make from this sale.'

'I had to think about our investors and I had to think about my minority stake. I didn't have the full clout to say no if I wanted to.'

The former CEO said that he did not agree with Facebook's monetising strategy on WhatsApp.

Jan Koum, WhatsApp's co-founder, also left Facebook a year later in 2018 because he reportedly didn't agree with their approach to user data and privacy.

Both Mr Acton and Mr Koum had tried to find a way to monetise WhatsApp without bombarding users with adverts.

He said that he pushed for a business model that would charge WhatsApp users $1 a year to use the app, as the company did in its early days.

WhatsApp founder Brian Acton has called on everyone to 'delete' their Facebook accounts in an address to students at Stanford yesterday. It is the second time that Mr Acton has made the comment publicly. Last year he posted on Twitter 'It is time. #delete facebook'

The pair hoped a service model could align their interests with the users need for privacy and security to counter Facebooks data harvesting to help advertisers target users.

'It was not extraordinarily money-making, and if you have a billion users  you're going to have $1 billion in revenue per year,' Mr Acton said.

'That's not what Google and Facebook want. They want multibillions of dollars.'

In an interview with Forbes, Mr Acton described how Facebook had set goals for WhatsApp to hit a revenue run rate of $10 billion within five years by pushing ads.

He also spoke about the company plans to offer businesses ways to directly communicate with users.

'The capitalistic profit motive, or answering to Wall Street, is what's driving the expansion of invasion of data privacy and driving the expansion of a lot of negative outcomes that we're just not happy with,' he said.

'I wish there were guardrails there. I wish there was ways to rein it in. I have yet to see that manifest, and that scares me.'

Jan Koum, WhatsApp's co-founder, also left Facebook a year later in 2018 because he reportedly didn't agree with their approach to user data and privacy. Both Mr Acton and Mr Koum had tried to find a way to monetise WhatsApp without bombarding users with adverts (file photo)
Wolves reared by humans can learn to cooperate with their handlers just as well as domesticated dogs, a new study has found.

Wild wolves work together to hunt, rear their offspring and defend their territory, traits which have been passed down to modern dogs - their closest relatives.

Experts tested the extent to which dogs and grey wolves collaborate with humans in order to solve a range of tasks.

They found that both dogs and wolves cooperate intensively and equally successfully, but wolves show more initiative where dogs follow a human's lead.

The experiment, conducted at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, looked at how wolves and dogs cooperated with humans to solve specific tests.

The study tested 15 young grey wolves, aged from two to eight years old, and 12 mixed-breed dogs, from two to seven years old, at the Wolf Science Center in Austria.

All the animals in the study had been raised in similar conditions and had been exposed to humans early in their lives.

Wolves are dogs' closest undomesticated relative but have a more aggressive image due to their 'wild' nature. But scientists have shown that the theory dogs cooperate better with humans than wolves because of domestication may be nothing but a myth

In a written statement Dr Friederike Range, who led the study, said: 'The detailed analysis of the cooperative interactions revealed interesting differences between wolves and dogs.

'It shows that, while wolves tend to initiate behaviour and take the lead, dogs are more likely to wait and see what the human partner does and follow that behaviour'.

The results showed that while both dogs and wolves cooperate with humans, wolves were more 'proactive' at initiating cooperation than dogs.

The experiment, from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, looked at how wolves and dogs cooperated with humans in solving specific tests. The results showed that while both species cooperated with humans, wolves were more 'proactive' at initiating cooperative

The wolves were more likely to initiate movement with humans and 'lead' the cooperation, while dogs would wait for humans to initiate and follow with movements as a result.

The researchers suggest that the 'timidness' they observed in dogs may have been due to the more submissive personalities being bred into modern species.

Dogs and wolves diverged between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago years ago, when canines were first thought to have been domesticated.

The full findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The latest findings are in line with previous study from the same Vienna research group which found that wolves are much better at collaborating with each other than are dogs, indicating that domestication weakened dogs' ability to collaborate amongst themselves

The latest findings are in line with previous study from the same Vienna research group which found that wolves are much better at collaborating with each other than are dogs, indicating that domestication weakened dogs' ability to collaborate amongst themselves.

The results called into question the traditionally held thought that domestication caused dogs to evolve greater cooperation abilities.
People could one day have the ability to grow back parts of their bodies after a 'DNA switch' that could reactivate the genes that control regeneration were found.

Animals like salamanders and geckos can shed parts of their bodies to escape predators and grow new ones that have been cut off in just a couple of months.

Planarian worms and jellyfish go one step further by regenerating their whole bodies after being cut in half.

Now a team of scientists have examined genes of three-banded panther worms to shed light on how they accomplish this.

They found that a 'master' control gene called early growth response (EGR), which is also found in humans and other animals, is responsible.

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Scientists have uncovered a DNA switch that could give humans the ability to grow back their limbs. Animals like salamanders or geckos can shed parts of their bodies to escape predators and form new parts. The study examined the genetic switches in three-banded panther worms

Researchers from Harvard University discovered that a section of non-coding DNA - controversially labelled by some as 'junk' DNA - controls the activation of EGR which acts like a power switch for the regeneration process.

Non-coding sections of DNA are not directly involved in the process of creating the proteins that trigger a whole host of biological processes.

This led some to believe that these sections of our genes and those of other animals serve no useful purpose.

More recent research has suggested that the picture is far more complicated, including Harvard's study.

Humans already have the EGR 'switch' that repairs cells yet it does not seem to trigger large scale regeneration.

Scientists now think that the gene is wired differently in humans and are now trying to find a way to change this to reap so that we too can 'regenerate'.

'What we found is that this one master gene comes onand that's activating genes that are turning on during regeneration,' said Dr Andrew Gehrke, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard and lead author on the study.

'Basically, what's going on is the non-coding regions are telling the coding regions to turn on or off, so a good way to think of it is as though they are switches.'

Animals like salamanders or geckos can shed parts of their bodies to escape predators and form new parts in just a couple of months. Planarian worms and jellyfish, here, can go one step further by regenerating their whole bodies after being cut in half

WHAT CAUSES SPECIES TO REGENERATE? All organisms, including humans, have the ability to regenerate to a degree, but the process is much more developed in many invertebrates such as earthworms and starfish. These animals can grow new heads, tails and other body parts when injured. Scientists don't know why mammals don't have the same ability, but they do regenerate skin, muscle and blood. Every multicellular organism is built from a single cell, which divides into two identical cells, then four, and so on. Each of these cells contains the exact same twisted strands of DNA, and is considered pluripotent - meaning it can give rise to all possible cell types in the body. But somewhere along the way, those starter cells - known as embryonic stem cells - resign themselves to a different fate and become skin cells, heart cells, muscle cells, or another cell type. Advertisement

For that process to work the DNA in the worms' cells, which is normally tightly folded and compacted, has to change, making new areas available for activation.

Portions of these very tightly packed portions of the genome - the full genetic code of the worms studied - physically become more open, experts say.

They act as regulatory switches to turn genes on or off, suggesting their genomes is dynamic and rapidly changing, as different parts open and close.

While the study reveals new information about how the process works in worms, it also may help explain why it doesn't work in humans.

Dr Mansi Srivastava, an assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology who led the study, said: 'The question is: If humans can turn on EGR, and not only turn it on, but do it when our cells are injured, why can't we regenerate?'

'The answer may be that if EGR is the power switch, we think the wiring is different.

'What EGR is talking to in human cells may be different than what it is talking to in the three-banded panther worm.

'What Andrew has done with this study is come up with a way to get at this wiring.

'So we want to figure out what those connections are, and then apply that to other animals, including vertebrates that can only do more limited regeneration.'

The full findings of the study were published in Science.
The International Space Station's crew has been boosted back up to six members after the safe arrival of three astronauts aboard the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft.

A new video shared by NASA captures the touching moment when the U.S. and Russian astronauts successfully entered the ISS and were met with hugs, smiles and kind words from the three-person crew awaiting them there.

Rookie astronaut Christina Koch led the way onto the ISS, followed by colleague Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

The trio blasted off from Kazakhstan yesterday at 3:14 pm (ET) and docked with the space station's Rassvet module more than 249 miles above the Earth, just shy of six hours later at 9:01 pm (ET).

It was a particularly remarkable moment for Hague and Ovchinin, who were due to join the station last October, but their space journey was cut short when a technical problem with their Soyuz rocket triggered a launch abort two minutes into the flight.

Both men escaped unharmed. It was the first such accident in Russia's post-Soviet history and a major setback for its once proud space industry.

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The International Space Station's crew has been boosted back to six members after the arrival of three astronauts aboard the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft. Pictured is the crew following docking

PLANS FOR EXPEDITION 59 Hague, Koch, McClain and Saint Jacques soon will begin final preparations to venture outside the stations Quest airlock for three planned spacewalks. On March 22 and 29, pairs of spacewalkers will replace nickel-hydrogen batteries with newer, more powerful lithium-ion batteries for power channels on one pair of the stations solar arrays. On April 8, spacewalkers will lay out jumper cables between the Unity module and the midpoint of the stations backbone to establish a redundant power path to the Canadian-built robotic arm, known as Canadarm2, and enhance computer network capabilities. The March 29 spacewalk with McClain and Koch is scheduled to be the first-ever spacewalk with all-female spacewalkers. As with all spacewalks, crew member assignments are subject to change due to real-time operations. Advertisement

Their mission, Expedition 59, officially began at the time of docking and restores the station's crew complement to six.

They join Anne McClain of NASA, David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency and Expedition 59 Commander Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos.

'Everything is nominal on board and the crew is feeling very well,' an announcer said on a NASA livestream of the launch.

The crew members will spend more than six months conducting about 250 science investigations in fields such as biology, Earth science, human research, physical sciences, and technology development.

Seventy-five of the investigations are new and have never been performed in space.

Some of the investigations are sponsored by the US National Laboratory on the space station, which Congress designated in 2005 to maximise its use for improving quality of life on Earth.

Highlights of upcoming investigations include devices that mimic the structure and function of human organs, free-flying robots, and an instrument to measure Earths distribution of carbon dioxide.

Three resupply spacecraft - a Russian Progress, Northrop Grumman Cygnus and SpaceX Dragon - are scheduled to arrive with science to support those investigations and additional supplies for the crew.

US astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch, as well as their Russian colleague Alexey Ovchinin launched at 3:14pm (ET) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, with NASA officials reporting the rocket experienced 'a textbook ascent'

Hague, Koch, McClain and Saint Jacques soon will begin final preparations to venture outside the stations Quest airlock for three planned spacewalks.

On March 22 and 29, pairs of spacewalkers will replace nickel-hydrogen batteries with newer, more powerful lithium-ion batteries for power channels on one pair of the stations solar arrays.

On April 8, spacewalkers will lay out jumper cables between the Unity module and the midpoint of the stations backbone to establish a redundant power path to the Canadian-built robotic arm, known as Canadarm2, and enhance computer network capabilities.

The March 29 spacewalk with McClain and Koch is scheduled to be the first-ever spacewalk with all-female spacewalkers.

As with all spacewalks, crew member assignments are subject to change due to real-time operations.

The crew also is scheduled to be onboard during test flights of NASAs Commercial Crew Program, which will return human spaceflight launches for space station missions to U.S. soil.

McClain, Saint-Jacques and Kononenko are scheduled to remain aboard the station until June, while Hague, Koch and Ovchinin are set to return to Earth early this fall.

Astronauts from America and Russia were successfully blasted into space yesterday aboard a Soyuz rocket after a failed launch last October. It took off at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

Hague and Ovchinin now have completed a journey to the station that initially was planned for Oct. 11, when a booster separation problem with their Soyuz rockets first stage triggered an abort two minutes after launch, resulting in a safe return to Earth.

They were reassigned to fly again after McClain, Kononenko and Saint-Jacques launched for Expedition 58 in early December.

This is Ovchinins third flight into space, the second for Hague and the first for Koch.

NASA selected all three astronauts in the Expedition 59 crew in the 2013 astronaut class.

For more than 18 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space, including the Moon and Mars.

A global endeavour, 236 people from 18 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 2,500 investigations from researchers in 106 countries.

Investigations conducted on the International Space Station impact the daily lives of people on Earth and prepare the way for humans to venture farther into space.

US astronauts Christina Hammock Koch (left) and Nick Hague (right) together with Russian colleague Alexey Ovchinin successfully blasted off Thursday on a mission to the ISS. The two men were on a Soyuz that was forced to abort in October two minutes after lift-off

A Soyuz-FG rocket booster carrying the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft with Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin, NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina H. Koch of the ISS Expedition 59/60 prime crew aboard lifts off to the International Space Station (ISS)

Speaking to reporters ahead of their six-month mission, flight commander Ovchinin said that some faulty components in the launch vehicle had been found and replaced this week.

'Yesterday they found some minor malfunctions,' the 47-year-old said on Wednesday.

As the time, they insisted that the launch vehicle was in good shape. 'There are no problems,' Ovchinin said.

Hague, 43, said he was looking forward to the flight - his second attempt to get into space.

'I'm 100 percent confident in the rocket and the spaceship,' he said. The October abort was caused by a sensor damaged during the rocket's assembly.

Space expert Vadim Lukashevich said last-minute replacements were nothing out of the ordinary.

'The Soyuz is an old but reliable machine,' he told AFP.

Russia's space industry has in recent years suffered a lot of mishaps including the loss of cargo spacecraft and numerous satellites.

Ovchinin, who spent six months at the ISS during a previous mission in 2016, has been keen to play down the drama of the October emergency landing.

The abort was 'a little disappointing' after preparations that lasted a year-and-a-half but also 'an interesting and needed experience' that tested the depth of the space programme's preparedness, he said.

Koch, Hague and Ovchinin's six-hour flight Thursday be closely watched for another reason too.

SpaceX's successful test launch to the ISS of its Dragon vehicle has challenged an eight-year monopoly on travel to the space station enjoyed by Russia ever since NASA stopped launches of the Space Shuttle.

The Soyuz rocket is seen at dawn on launch site 1 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome

Speaking to reporters, the trio and their three-man backup crew stressed cooperation rather than competition following the Dragon mission, seen by some as the dawn of an era of commercial space travel driven by businessmen such as Elon Musk who owns SpaceX.

Koch, a 40-year-old space rookie, called the SpaceX success a 'great example of what we've been doing for a very long time.'

'And that is cooperating among partners and making things that are very difficult look easy,' she said.

There has already been one successful manned launch to the ISS since the failed Soyuz mission.

The trio's arrival will return the orbiting laboratory's crew to six in all.

Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency blasted off to the orbiting outpost in December and are expected to greet their new crewmates early on Friday.

Duruing their mission McClain, Saint-Jacques, Hague and Koch are set to perform the first spacewalks of their careers.

This week in a lighter moment Hague offered an insight into the specifics of personal grooming aboard the ISS.

'In space, we'll use clippers attached to a vacuum device so that the hair particles don't float around or get stuck in our vent systems,' he wrote on Twitter.

The International Space Station -- a rare area of cooperation between Moscow and Washington -- has been orbiting the Earth at roughly 28,000 kilometres per hour since 1998.
Men in Spain were almost totally wiped out and replaced by a mass movement of people from the Russian steppe, genetic analysis has revealed.

Transformation of the Iberian peninsula, which includes modern day Portugal and Spain, happened between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago during the Bronze Age.

Experts made the finding by studying the unique Y chromosome of males in the region, taken from fossils dating back over the past 8,000 years.

The same shift was not observed for women whose DNA remained relatively 'local' , with scientists unclear exactly why such dramatic change was 'male specific'.

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Men in Spain were almost totally wiped out and replaced by a mass movement of people from the Russian steppe, genetic analysis has revealed. Pictured is one of the sites where excavation work took place at Balma Guilanya on the Iberian peninsula

Researchers from the University of Hudersfield sequenced the genome of 403 Iberians who lived between 6,000 BC and AD 1,600.

The study shows in detail how Iberia's population has changed drastically over time, from its hunter-gatherer origins before the arrival of farming 7,500 years ago, through to the medieval period and modern times.

Most striking was an influx of new people during the later Copper Age, otherwise known as the Beaker period because of the ubiquitous presence in burials of large drinking vessels, from about 4,500 years ago.

By the Early Bronze Age, 500 years later, these newcomers represented about 40% of Iberia's genetic pool  but virtually 100% of their male lineages.

This suggests that the newcomers were mainly men, and that  somehow  they all but replaced the men living there previously, whilst the local women survived the takeover.

Tracing the Y chromosome let scientists trace the male line from father to son, as this genetic material is not present in women

The researchers said: 'We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by 2500 BC and, by 2000 BC, the replacement of 40% of Iberia's ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry.'

Some of the finds the archaeologists found in the Iberian peninsula. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers found to be brothers. The same shift in genetic material was not observed for women, who remained relatively 'local'

Bell Beaker culture spread throughout Europe bringing new ideas and language Between 4,700 and 4,400 years ago, a new bell-shaped pottery style spread across western and central Europe, and this period is called the 'Bell Beaker'. The period received its name due to the pottery's distinctive bell-shaped beakers, decorated in horizontal zones by finely toothed stamps. The decorated pots are almost ubiquitous across Europe, and could have been used as drinking vessels or ceremonious urns. Believed to be originally from Spain, the Beaker folk soon spread into central and western Europe in their search for metals. But the sheer variety of beaker artifacts across Europe has made the pottery difficult to define as coming from one distinctive culture. A new study published in Nature suggests that the Beaker culture spread through Europe via two different mechanisms - the spread of ideas and migration. Beaker-complex grave goods from La Sima III barrow, Soria, Spain. The set includes Beaker pots of the so-called 'Maritime style' Advertisement

What is even more striking now is that both Iberia and India had a similar source  a population of early metal-using stock breeders, who lived to the north of the Black Sea on Russian steppe lands, 5,000 years ago.

They fanned out in both directions, west across Europe and east into Asia, their based economy, domesticated horses and wheeled wagons giving them a crucial advantage over the indigenous farming populations.

Moreover, they are also thought to have brought the Indo-European languages spoken across Europe and India today.

Around 2,500 BC, the researchers found, Iberians began living alongside newcomers from central Europe who carried recent ancestry from those people on the Russian steppe.

Within a few hundred years, the two groups had extensively interbred.

One alternative possibility is that local Iberian women preferred the central European newcomers in a context of 'strong social stratification,' said Dr Lalueza-Fox

Transformation of the Iberian peninsula, which includes modern day Portugal and Spain, happened between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago during the Bronze Age. Pictured is another archeological burial site at Cueva de Chaves

This was beautifully exemplified at a Bronze Age site known as the Castillejo de Bonete in Spain, where a woman and man were found buried side by side.

Analyses revealed that the woman's ancestry was entirely local, while the man had very recent ancestors from central Europe.

'This is one of the strongest pieces of evidence in ancient-DNA research of sex bias in the prehistoric period,' said Inigo Olalde, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of David Reich at Harvard Medical School and first author of the study.

Marina Silva added: 'It's an intriguing situation, because the Beaker culture originated in Portugal and spread across Europe from there  but at the same time, or shortly after, men who probably spoke Indo-European languages were moving in the opposite direction

'Resolving the population dynamics in western Europe during the Copper and Bronze Ages is a big step towards understanding the origins of the Celtic languages, which were spoken across western Europe before the rise of the Roman Empire.'
Even emissions cuts outlined in the Paris Agreement won't be enough to prevent an uptick in Arctic temperatures set to raise sea levels across the globe, says a report released by the United Nations this week.

According to the report, even if the world were to meet these benchmarks, temperatures in the Arctic would continue to rise by another 3-5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

'What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic,' said Joyce Msuya, UN Environments Acting Executive Director.

'We have the science; now more urgent climate action is needed to steer away from tipping points that could be even worse for our planet than we first thought.'

According to the U.N. a drastic temperature shift further imperiling Arctic ice is 'locked in"

The results of that temperature change could spell out drastic reductions in already rapidly waning sea ice and result in changing landscapes across the world.

According to the report, an estimated 4 million people are set to be affected by the thaw worldwide.

'The urgency to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement is clearly manifested in the Arctic, because it is one of the most vulnerable and rapidly changing regions in the world,' said the Finnish Minister of the Environment, Energy and Housing, Kimmo Tiilikainen in a statement.

'We need to make substantial near-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, black carbon and other so-called short-lived climate pollutants all over the world.'

Even if global emissions were to stop overnight, the Earth would continue to warm due to gases trapped in the atmosphere and oceans

Since 1979, the world's sea ice has declined by 40 percent and if emissions rates continue, researchers say the arctic could be completely ice free by some time in the 2030's.

Further compounding the danger of rapidly melting Arctic ice, is the a phenomenon known as 'positive feedback.'

As the sea ice melts, according to scientists, carbon that is trapped in the permafrost is released into the atmosphere, further accelerating the warming process.

Scientists say there is an estimated 1.67 billion metric tons of carbon currently trapped in the Arctic's frozen soil and ice.

If that carbon were to be released, the report says it could imperil the Paris Accord's benchmark of limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.
The novelty of having a private swimming pool does not wear off for young children.

With not one but two doors leading to our own blue oasis, there was repeated clamouring to be allowed to jump in, whether it was sunny or cloudy, first thing in the morning or late at night.

This was our half-term break, staying on the Greek island of Rhodes, where there is a bay named after actor Anthony Quinn, Pink Floyd's David Gilmour once built a villa, and Madonna and Naomi Campbell have put in wellpublicised appearances. With four young children in tow, we were not up for the party isle of Mykonos, but wanted simpler fare - sun, swimming, good food, some exploring and, maybe, just maybe, a little time to relax.

Ancient beauty: The acropolis overlooking Lindos village dates from 300BC

We thought it was time to bite the bullet and take our sons, aged seven and five, and our three-year-old twin girls on a plane. This was a risky experiment, as pretty much every holiday has been underpinned by a vehicle big enough to carry everything we might need.

This time was different: no car, no pram. Just two (large) bags of clothes accompanied us on our four-hour evening flight.

A 50-minute drive to the southeast of the island took us to the new eco-friendly, all-inclusive Gennadi Grand Resort. The hotel recycles 20,000 litres of clean water every hour and offers only watersaving showers.

We booked two spacious double bedrooms connected by a 10ft sliding door. One had a large pullout sofa bed, so all the children could sleep together.

The connected double rooms at the Grennadi Resort meant the children could share a room

The view over Ippokratou Square at dusk. Rhodes Town is a Unesco world heritage site

The resort is in a lovely setting overlooking the Mediterranean (Rhodes, the largest of the Dodecanese islands, divides the Med from the Aegean), with a short walk to a pebbled beach.

Kyriakos, the young maitre'd, charmed us all, as did so many of the staff, including Vernados, who talked us through ouzo versus eau de vie during a Greek meze meal.

This led to a long discussion about the Colossus of Rhodes, a towering bronze statue of the sun god Helios. It was said to be 105ft tall and stood grandly astride the harbour from 282BC, until it was destroyed in an earthquake.

As no remains have ever been found, some question its existence, which prompted us to visit the walled Old Town of Rhodes.

As the oldest inhabited medieval city in Europe, the town has rightly been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Walking in via one of the seven enormous gates which lead through the fortified walls - built and rebuilt by 14th century Christian knights to fend off the Ottoman Turks - you are taken into a warren of winding streets.

Rosy: The view from the acropolis at Lindos over the coastline 558ft below

It is a real joy to get lost and browse the tourist trinkets, leather goods and food stalls vying for your attention.

A highlight is the almost perfectly preserved Street of the Knights, which slopes away from the port towards the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes.

Down the coast lies the village of Lindos, where even the twins thought it worth clambering up the many steps to the ruins of the 300BC acropolis for the superb view. As the children played, we gazed down at the plunging coastline 558ft below, and realised we had enjoyed a lot more than a sunshine break - a breathtaking change of scenery on an historically vibrant island. Experiment over, mission accomplished.
Ryanair has insisted its schedules will not be affected by the global grounding of the Boeing 737 Max jet.

The aircraft has been ordered not to fly by the plane manufacturer following a fatal crash in Ethiopia on Sunday.

Dublin-based low cost airline Ryanair has ordered 135 737 Max 200s, a modified version of the Max 8, and has options on 75 more.

Ryanair has insisted its schedules will not be affected by the global grounding of the Boeing 737 Max jet, which it is due to take delivery of next month. Pictured are the airline's current Boeing 737s

It is due to take delivery of the first in April, two in May, two in June and then 50 more before the 2020 summer season.

But Juliusz Komorek, the no-frills airline's chief legal and regulatory officer told a press conference in Warsaw: 'There is no risk for Ryanair's summer programme.

'Our fleet of 450 planes includes a lot of emergency planes, which are located strategically.'

He also said it was too early to say if Ryanair would try to cancel its order.

Ryanair currently operates a fleet of 400 Boeing 737-800 series aircraft. With new orders, its fleet will grow to 585 planes by 2024.

The Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed on Sunday saw 157 people killed shortly after it took off from Addis Ababa en-route to Nairobi.

A Lion Air flight on a 737 Max 8 also crashed in October in Indonesia, taking the lives of its 189 passengers and crew.

A Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft takes off from La Paz airport during a test flight. The entire global fleet has been grounded

Both planes struggled to maintain altitude in the minutes after takeoff.

More than 40 countries, including the U.S., have now grounded the planes or refused to let them into their airspace. Boeing has also told airlines to stop flying the planes.

It was announced yesterday by the American Federal Aviation Administration that the aircraft would be grounded until at least May.

This would give time for a software update to be tested and installed on the 737 Max.

In a statement, president, CEO and chairman of the Boeing Company, Dennis Muilenburg, said of the grounding: 'We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be.

'There is no greater priority for our company and our industry. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again.'
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These stunning images capture the sheer beauty and diversity of British wildlife.

And they might prove to be inspiration for budding photographers wanting to enter this year's prestigious British Wildlife Photography Awards, now in its 10th year.

That's because the fascinating photos were all entered into the contest last year and received commendations from the judging panel. As you can see, the standard is exceptional.

There are just a matter of weeks before the 2019 competition closes on April 6. The top prize is 5,000 and there are 17 categories.

This year, to help raise awareness of the British coast, its biodiversity and the threats it is facing, the awards has expanded the coast and marine category to include British and Irish coastlines within four separate categories - Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland and the coast of Ireland.

To see the calibre of photography that the British Wildlife Photography Awards attracts you can buy a superb coffee table book called British Wildlife Photography Awards 9 (Ammonite Press), which showcases the best 2018 entries. And you can simply scroll down to see an eye-catching selection the publisher has released to MailOnline Travel. Prepared to be wowed...

This hilarious image of a startled red squirrel was taken in the Cairngorms National Park by Neil McIntyre. It was highly commended in the animal portrait category

Alan Seymour was highly commended in the urban wildlife category for the starry image he snapped of an inquisitive badger in Elstead in Surrey

Photographer Alex Mustard managed to shoot this fascinating image of a basking shark off the Isle of Coll in Argyll and Bute

This stunning image of an otter was snapped by Keith Thorburn on the River Stour in Dorset. It was highly commended in the coast and marine category

Phil Selby's image of this mute swan taking flight was highly commended in the animal portrait category. He took the snap in Swindon, Wiltshire

Photographer Darren Moston was highly commended in the animal portrait category for his shot of this cute mallard, which was snapped in Stockton Heath in Cheshire

A grey seal stares straight at the camera in a shot taken by Kirsty Andrews close to the Farne Islands in Northumberland. It was highly commended in the coast and marine category

In the category for 12 to 18-year-olds, Gideon Knight, 18, was highly commended for his shot of a red fox, which he captured in Ilford, East London

A pair of mallard ducks do battle in a shot captured by Craig Churchill in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which was entered into the animal behaviour category

Two white barn owls swoop down together as they try to catch prey at RSPB Titchwell Marsh in Norfolk. The image was taken by Phil Gwilliam for the animal behaviour category

An artistic shot of a mountain hare in the Peak District National Park earned Nick Hurst a highly commended mention in the animal portrait category

Ian Todd was highly commended in the animal portrait category for this close-up of a common kingfisher that was captured close to the River Ayr in Scotland, left. While right, photographer Lesley Gooding captured this sweet image of two young wild boars embracing their mother. It was taken in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and was entered in the animal behaviour category

Josh Clark, 18, entered this image in the 12 to 18-year-old category showing a pair of mute swans on the River Stour in Dorset

This underwater shot taken at Loch Carron in the Scottish Highlands was snapped by Trevor Rees. It was highly commended in the habitat category

A northern goshawk bird pecks at its prey in a highly commended image taken by Chas Moonie in Galloway Forest in Ayrshire

These images all appear in British Wildlife Photography Awards 9, published by Ammonite Press, RRP 25. The book is available online and from all good bookshops
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The first fully assembled Boeing 777X - the world's longest passenger jetliner - has been unveiled.

The aircraft had expected to be presented with much fanfare in a ceremonial debut at the plane manufacturer's plant in Everett, near Seattle, on Wednesday.

But as a mark of respect for those who died in the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crash, it was instead unveiled in a low-key event that was only attended by Boeing employees.

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Boeing employees gather around the first fully assembled 777X aircraft at the plane manufacturer's plant near Seattle. The jet was unveiled at a low key ceremony attended by Boeing staff only

The aircraft that was unveiled is a 777-9, the larger of two 777X models. The 777-9 variant is 77 meters (252ft) long. The current longest passenger jet is the 747-8, which is 76.3 meters (250ft 2in) long

The 777-8 will be able to seat between 350 and 375 passengers and the 777-9 between 400 and 425, depending on the buyer's layout requirements

This graphic shows the size difference between the new Boeing model and its predecessors

Pictures posted to Twitter show the huge jet, which has foldable wing tips, inside a hangar at the Boeing plant surrounded by hundreds of people.

In one image, uploaded by the account Dj's Aviation, Boeing staff can be seen snapping photos of it - and its enormous engines - on their phones.

Other pictures posted by aviation enthusiast Katie Bailey show the wheels and one of the engines up close.

The aircraft that was unveiled is a 777-9, the larger of two 777X models. It is expected to make its maiden test flight later in the spring.

Boeing claims that the 777X will be the largest and most efficient twin engine jet in the world, with 12 per cent lower fuel consumption and 10 per cent lower operating costs than the competition.

The 777-9 variant is 77 meters (252ft) long. The current longest passenger jet is the 747-8, which is 76.3 meters (250ft 2in) long.

As well as the folding wing-tips  the 235ft wings are the biggest Boeing has ever made, over 30ft longer than the current model's wingspan  it also has bigger windows and overhead bins compared to the current 777 and 'advanced LED lighting'.

The two versions of the 777X - the 777-8 and 777-9 - cost $360.5million and $388.7million respectively.

Staff were eager to snap pictures of the huge plane. It will make its maiden test flight in the spring

Boeing claims that the 777X will be the largest and most efficient twin engine jet in the world. The image on the left was taken at the ceremony by Katie Bailey and posted to Twitter. On the right is another of her pictures taken at the ceremony, which shows the jet's huge wheels

The 777-8 will be able to seat between 350 and 375 passengers and the 777-9 between 400 and 425, depending on the buyer's layout requirements. In comparison the current family of 777s offer capacities of between 300 and 370.

There is also an improvement with range. The 777X can fly for 16,110km (10,010 miles), compared to the 777's maximum range of 15,800km (9,817miles).

Deliveries to customers are expected to begin in 2020.

Carriers that have placed orders are British Airways, All Nippon Airways, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Etihad Airways, Lufthansa, Qatar Airways and Singapore Airlines.

Last year, Boeing released a video and pictures of a 'static' 777X rolling off the production line at the Everett factory.

Carriers that have placed orders for the 777X are British Airways, All Nippon Airways, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Etihad Airways, Lufthansa, Qatar Airways and Singapore Airlines

Last year, Boeing released a video and pictures of a 'static' 777X, pictured, rolling off the production line at the Everett factory. It was built for testing and is not destined for the skies

However, as it was a static model, it wasn't destined for the skies, but instead built for a series of year-long tests.

The unveiling of the 777X comes at a troubling time for Boeing as its entire 737 Max 8 fleet has been grounded in the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that claimed the lives of all 157 on board.

The Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft en-route to Nairobi from Addis Ababa plunged to the ground just minutes after take off.

Data has shown that the movements from the flight were similar to those of a Lion Air service on a 737 Max 8 that crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

In a statement, president, CEO and chairman of the Boeing Company, Dennis Muilenburg, said of the grounding: 'We are supporting this proactive step out of an abundance of caution. Safety is a core value at Boeing for as long as we have been building airplanes; and it always will be.

'There is no greater priority for our company and our industry. We are doing everything we can to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again.'
It's a brave tourism board that plumps for a slogan to promote its country as a holiday venue which references a film about it featuring kidnapping and sex trafficking.

But that's what Albania has done with its new offering 'Be taken by Albania'.

Although it's intended to convey 'taken' in the sense of 'captivated', the strapline inevitably draws associations with the 2008 Liam Neeson film Taken, which is about an Albanian sex trafficking ring.

Taken the Mickey: New slogan 'Be taken by Albania' draws unfortunate associations with Liam Neeson film Taken with its stereotypical Albanian 'thugs, criminals and gangsters'

Albania mania: Tourism board encourages Northern Irish star of violent movie to visit the country and 'be taken by its beautiful nature, hospitality and eternal traditions'

And it's an association that's not lost on the tourism board which, on its website, refers to its reputation for criminal activity and invites the Northern Irish actor to visit.

The country concedes: 'In popular culture, Albania has been coloured as a haven for thugs, criminals, and gangsters.

'While we understand that perception might make for good movies, like Taken (2008), its wholly untrue!

Trip to the seaside: Sarande, Albania, on the Adriatic coast is among the sights that Liam Neeson could see if he takes up an invitation to visit and bows to pressure from a petition to go

Sunny place, shady people: Ksamil beach, near the archaeological city of Butrint is an example of the beautiful places that the Albanian tourism board say belie its fictional reputation

'In reality, Albania is a beautiful and incredibly safe place to visit and live.'

The website goes on to invite Neeson to come to Albania to 'be taken by its beautiful nature, hospitality and eternal traditions'.

It continues by encouraging visitors to the website to sign a petition to encourage him to visit - a move which also might seem misjudged.

The actor, only last month, sparked controversy by telling a journalist how he prepared for his latest violent role in Cold Pursuit, out now.

Unorthodox promotion: Albania's latest campaign to encourage tourism links to a film about gangsters which it says is just stereotyping because the country is 'a beautiful and incredibly safe place to visit and live' with Tirana's orthodox cathedral (above) among the draws

In an interview with The Guardian, he explained how a friend's rape, 40 years ago, had led him, in a moment of madness, to contemplate revenge against any black person he encountered that night, drawing allegations of racism.

That, Neeson said, had informed how he played a man avenging his son's murder in his latest release.

The Albanian tourism board may be hoping that the associations its campaign makes with the disgraced actor and a film he made about the country's gangsters gets people talking, adopting the mantra that 'there is no such thing as bad publicity'.


Vinny Guadagnino and DJ Pauly D of Jersey Shore fame are capitalizing on their single status with a new reality show.

A Double Shot At Love With DJ Pauly D And Vinny will see 20 women competing to land a reality star boyfriend, with the show out April 11.

Each woman gets to select whether she wants to vie for Vinny, 31, or Pauly, 38, MTV revealed Thursday to E! News.

Use it or lose it: Vinny Guadagnino (left) and DJ Pauly D (right) of Jersey Shore fame are capitalizing on being two of the most eligible bachelors in reality TV

The dashing gentlemen are self-aware about their show's similarity to The Bachelor, and send up the ABC dating juggernaut in the new trailer for Double Shot At Love.

Both of them are seen holding up roses with the Italian tricolor painted on the petals, and Vinny, modeling a sleeveless suit, asks: 'Will you accept these bros?'

Three contestants are from New Jersey - Holly Gurbisz of Matawan, Maria Elizondo of West New York and Derynn Paige of Franklin Lakes.

Incoming: A grand total of 20 women will compete for their affections on MTV's upcoming reality show A Double Shot At Love With DJ Pauly D And Vinny, out April 11

Hunks: The dashing gentlemen are self-aware about their show's similarity to The Bachelor, and send up the ABC dating juggernaut in the new trailer for Double Shot At Love

Ready to go: Revealed: Each woman - such as Susan 'Suzi' Baidya (pictured) - gets to select whether she wants to vie for Vinny, 31, or Pauly, 38, MTV revealed in a first look provided to E!

Consistency: Three contestants are from New Jersey - (from left) Holly Gurbisz of Matawan, Maria Elizondo of West New York and Derynn Paige of Franklin Lakes

Nationwide: The contenders range in age from 22 to 37-year-old Arizonan Deseree Flores, and are selected from a wide spread of locales in the United States

The contenders range in age from 22 to 37, and are selected from a wide spread of locales in the United States, with four drawn from California.

Although none of them is from Pauly D's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, one of them - 27-year-old Cate Lapera - is from Vinny's native Staten Island.

Two of the women are from Los Angeles - Christina Lawrence, 29, and Nikki Hall, 26 - and three from New York City - Cate, Ashley Lands, 24, and Alysse Joyner, 24.

West coasters: Two of the women are from Los Angeles - Christina Lawrence, 29 (left), and Nikki Hall, 26 (right)

Lovely in leopard print: Although none of them is from Pauly D's hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, one of them - 27-year-old Cate Lapera - is from Vinny's native Staten Island

Pretty in pink: Three of the women are from New York City - Cate, Ashley Lands, 24 (left), and Alysse Joyner, 24 (right)

Pauly D has a five-year-old daughter called Amabella by one Amanda Markert, with whom he reportedly had a one-night stand in Las Vegas.

This will not be his first attempt to sort out his love life on reality TV - he starred on the 2016 E! series Famously Single with such names as Aubrey O'Day.

Aubrey, who is rumored to have had an affair with Donald Trump Jr., appeared on Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars with Pauly last year.

Something in common: Green Bay, Wisconsin's 28-year-old Alli Adams showed off the fact that like Vinny and Pauly D, she has sprawls of arm tattoos

Snakesin sensation: Long Island's Marissa Lucchese and Waverly, Pennsylvania's Elle Wilson both modeled scaly reptile print outfits in their publicity shots

Corporate glamour: Marissa's fellow Long Islander Brittani 'B-lashes' Schwartz rocked a business chic ensemble for her MTV contestant photo

When you got it: Pomona, California's 29-year-old Nadya Erazo smoldered in her publicity snap in a scarlet dress that played up her cleavage

Pauly and Vinny shot to fame from 2009 to 2012 on the original run of MTV's Jersey Shore with pals including Nicole 'Snooki' Polizzi and Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino.

Jersey Shore was revived last year with the subtitle Family Vacation and has aired two seasons since, with the third due for broadcast this year.

MTV have described their upcoming project A Double Shot At Love With DJ Pauly D And Vinny as a 'reality-dating show unlike any other.'

Radiant smiles: Long Beach's 25-year-old Victoria Fryer (left) modeled a red midriff-flashing look and 33-year-old Nebraskan Brittnay Dawson (right) glowed in green

Golden stater: Michele Gao is a Tustin, California girl of 22 years who goes by the nickname 'Mish'
NeNe Leakes has had it with Cynthia Bailey.

The Real Housewives Of Atlanta star announced Wednesday she was ending her friendship with Cynthia after her co-star allegedly exhibited some shady behavior during the upcoming season finale of RHOA.

NeNe, 51, has already unfollowed many of her RHOA co-stars after taping what promises to be an explosive finale, and the reality star was not holding back as she slammed Cynthia's allegedly 'sneaky' behavior via Instagram Live.

'She's done a lot of f***ed up stuff': NeNe Leakes (L) announced Wednesday she was ending her friendship with Cynthia Bailey (R) after her co-star allegedly exhibited some shady behavior during the upcoming season finale of RHOA

The former Glee actress had a bone to pick with the way Cynthia apparently acted during the upcoming season finale of RHOA.

Viewers won't be able to 'see everything' that Cynthia allegedly did, according to NeNe, but she said the finale would expose her co-star's 'sneaky, underhanded' side.

NeNe also confirmed she had also followed half of her cast, after it was reported she had stopped following all but two of her co-stars on Instagram.

'Cynthia's done a lot of stuff in my opinion, on the down low and very sneaky and underhanded,' she said. 'I'm just telling you the truth. I always just tell it like it is. You don't like it, you don't like it, and you can figure it out when you figure it out.

Friends no more: Bailey and Leakes were in high spirits in February 4, 2017 in Houston, Texas

'She has done a lot of stuff that you all just don't get to see on the show that's just underhanded, and I always come out looking like the bad guy. She's done a lot of f***ed up stuff, and that's just for real.'

Though NeNe said she didn't harbor any 'hate' for Cynthia, she drew the line at being anything more than coworkers with her.

'I don't have no hate in my heart for Cynthia, we are coworkers from this day forward. I don't have any reason to not speak to her, I'm happy to speak to her. But anything else further than that, no. It's not going to happen. We are coworkers. And after 11 seasons, I finally realized that these girls are my coworkers.'

'We are coworkers': Though NeNe said she didn't harbor any 'hate' for Cynthia, she drew the line at being anything more than coworkers with her (pictured February 2017 in Beverly Hills)

She also claimed her co-stars targeted her while taping the finale in order to secure their spots in the next season.

'I don't mind being the villain because my check gets bigger when I become the villain,' she said.

'Cynthia did something in the finale that just doesn't work for me. You won't see everything but I think you will get the point. There were some other things I asked her a lot of stuff and she lied and lied and lied and lied. 'Til finally, this finale really shows the sneaky, underhanded, Cynthia Bailey,' she said in the rant, according to People.

Un-friend! NeNe recently unfollowed all but two of her RHOA co-stars, and admitted during her Instagram Live stream that was indeed true

A source told the website NeNe was irked Cynthia brought along her nemesis Kenya Moore to the finale taping.

The star has been allegedly bothered Cynthia has remained friends with Kenya.

Cynthia, meanwhile, responded to NeNe's un-friending while at the WE tv Bridezilla event.

'I've always been a friend to her, and if she's really my girl like she's claimed to be my girl then we could get past this,' she told Page Six.

Cutting ties: NeNe recently unfollowed all but two of her RHOA co-stars, and admitted during her Instagram Live stream that was indeed true

She also pointed out NeNe was wearing a pair of sunglasses from her line of shades, Cynthia Bailey Eyewear, during her rant.

'It just got a little bit tricky for me, but I just own my truth, and said what I had to say,' Cynthia remarked further of NeNe's comments, but promised the upcoming finale would be a 'good reunion.'

It has been a difficult season for NeNe, who has been struggling with the emotional fallout of her husband Gregg's colon cancer.

A Radar Online report claimed that at the reunion, the other women criticized Nene for telling her cancer patient husband Gregg on Instagram: 'This mean, grouchy, evil stuff u pulling these days are NOT cool,' and for her general attitude to him.

The upcoming, three-part season finale will begin airing on Bravo on March 24.
Mick Gould is clearly enjoying the single life after things didn't work out with Jessika Power on Married At First Sight.

The 31-year-old farmer was spotted cuddling up to Jennifer Evans, a contestant from this year's season of MKR, after a night out in Melbourne on Thursday.

They were seen leaving Melbourne's Most Influential People Party at Waterman Business Centre together, before taking an Uber ride to Mick's hotel.

Married At First Sight EXCLUSIVE: Mick Gould (left) was busted hooking up with MKR 'cougar' Jennifer Evans (right) in Melbourne on Thursday night

Jennifer, 47, lived up to her 'cougar' reputation as she cuddled up to Mick in the hotel elevator before they both headed upstairs - presumably to his room.

Earlier that evening, Mick had been pictured with several other MAFS participants at the Most Influential People cocktail party held at Chadstone.

He stuck close to co-star Melissa Lucarelli at the event, and she later joined Jennifer and Mick on their 25-minute Uber ride to the Aura on Flinders hotel.

It is understood that Jennifer did not have a reserved room at the hotel, which strongly suggests she was spending the night with Mick.

That looks cosy! Jennifer, 47, lived up to her 'cougar' reputation as she cuddled up to Mick in the hotel elevator before they both headed upstairs

Big night? It is understood that Jennifer did not have a reserved room at the Aura on Flinders hotel, which strongly suggests she was spending the night with Mick

Love in an elevator! Mick placed his arm around Jennifer, who is 16 years his senior, as they walked into the elevator together

Spotted! Mick and Jennifer were joined at the hotel by his MAFS co-star Melissa Lucarelli (far right, in the white dress)

Making friends? Earlier on Thursday, Mick and Jennifer were seen chatting outside the party held at Chadstone Shopping Centre, before taking a 25-minute Uber ride to his hotel

Big night, guys? As they waited for an Uber, Jennifer smoked a cigarette while Mick leaned on a sign and Melissa scrolled through her iPhone

Jennifer, who is 16 years older than Mick, proudly describes herself as a 'cougar' on Channel Seven's My Kitchen Rules.

A 'cougar' refers to an older woman with a sexual appetite for younger men.

Jennifer was identifiable at the hotel by her distinctive metallic print dress, which she had worn during an episode of MKR that aired in February.

What a gentleman! Mick let Jennifer, 47, in the Uber first and even held the door open for her

When approached for comment on Friday morning, Mick bizarrely tried to deny he was the man in the photographs.

'Nope, that's not me!' he said, before signing off with, 'No wokkas!', and hanging up.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Jennifer Evans for comment via Channel Seven's publicity department.

'Nope, that's not me!' When approached for comment on Friday morning, Mick bizarrely tried to deny he was the man in the photographs

Frisky! Jennifer, who is 16 years older than Mick, proudly describes herself as a 'cougar' on My Kitchen Rules. She is pictured on MKR wearing the same dress she wore on Thursday night

Mick is currently 'married' to administrative assistant Jessika Power, 27, on MAFS.

However, Jessika is having an affair on the show with fellow groom Dan Webb, and it is believed her break-up with Mick will be aired on Sunday night.

Married At First Sight continues on Sunday from 7pm on Channel Nine
They welcomed daughter Vaeda Luma last month.

But Catelynn Lowell, and Tyler Baltierra - both 27 - revealed that they changed their minds about her name at the last minute.

The Teen Mom stars told Us on Thursday that they had originally planned to call their third child together Tezlee, but then opted for Vaeda after Anna Chlumsky's character in the movie My Girl.

New inspiration: Catelynn Lowell, and Tyler Baltierra - both 27 - revealed that they changed their minds about her name at the last minute

Family: Teen Mom OG's Catelynn Lowell revealed the first photos of her adorable baby girl Vaeda Luma being cradled by big sister Novalee in a heartwarming Instagram post last month

They'd earlier revealed their plans to name their unexpected baby Tezlee, during a December episode of Teen Mom OG.

However, Catelynn admitted that she soured on the name after a time.

'Every time someone would say Tezlee, we would cringe! It just wasnt sitting with us like it did at first. Tyler told me about the name Vaeda and I fell in love with it! Its from the movie My Girl, which is a movie that Tyler showed me years ago,' she revealed.

They appear to have modified the spelling of the name, as the character from the 1991 coming of age comedy-drama is Vada (Sultenfuss).

Dad: Tyler joined in on the announcements as he shared a black-and-white image holding his new daughter - who was intended to be called Tezlee

The couple welcomed their newest family member on February 23, and revealed to Us Weekly that they are already talking about trying for another baby soon.

'We want more children. We really want to try for a boy, but we are going to wait until Vaeda is a little older  like six months to a year,' she told them.

The high school sweethearts - who also share 3-year-old daughter Novalee Reign - explained that they got lucky with a 'chill' baby in Vaeda.

'Shes such a good baby - very chill and easy going...so far,' Catelynn revealed, adding that daughter Nova, 4, 'loves being a big sister and loves "her baby."'

The Conquering Chaos author divulged that her labor was, in fact, pretty swift and straight-forward.

Her waters didn't break and she began having contractions at 5am, she told the publication.

Over the moon: Catelynn shared a picture on her account with the caption: 'Our babygirl has arrived!! Link is in my bio for ALL the details'

Happy families: They just had their daughter but Catelynn revealed she already wants to have another child

'We got everything in the car and woke Nova up at about 6:30 and headed for the hospital. It took us about 25 minutes to get there. Once at the hospital, I was in labor for 2 and a half hours. Im honestly blessed because I have very easy and fast labors! So every one of them have been very similar.'

The star added that it was so quick that she almost didn't have time for pain relief.

'The hardest part was almost not getting an epidural!, she told the publication. 'I almost didnt have a chance to get one and that freaked me out. The easiest [part] was the pushing itself  only two times and she was out!'

Caitlyn and Tyler married in August 2015, after first getting pregnant in 2008.

They gave their first daughter, Carly, up for adoption as seen on MTV's 16 and Pregnant in 2009; they remain actively involved in Carlys life.

They shared the happy news of Vaeda's safe arrival on social media.

'She's here and I'm in love,' Tyler wrote on his Instagram. Vauda weighed in at 6 pounds and 4 oz and measured at 19 and 3/4ths inches.

Teen mom: They gave their first daughter, Carly (right) up for adoption as seen on MTV's 16 and Pregnant in 2009; they remain actively involved in Carlys life and introduced daughter Novalee to her in 2015

And Catelynn shared a picture of the couple on her account with the caption: 'Our babygirl has arrived!! Link is in my bio for ALL the details!'

The couple had announced their pregnancy in September.

'It was a huge shock at first. We were not planning it, especially after the miscarriage and how I went downhill with my mental illness,' Lowell told US Weekly.

'The big news is that we are expecting our rainbow baby. This baby is our rainbow after the storm. Im super excited.

'We were going to wait a really long time. We were using protection and everything and still got pregnant. This baby just wanted to be here. It was very unexpected.'

In January 2017, the couple announced they were pregnant, but a couple months later they revealed a miscarriage.

Catelynn went for treatment to deal with suicidal thoughts after the loss.
They got together after being paired up on the 2013 series of Strictly Come Dancing.

And Kristina Rihanoff and Ben Cohen looked more loved-up than ever as they turned out for Champneys Charity Gala Ball in aid of Cancer Research UK's Stand Up To Cancer campaign at The London Marriott Grosvenor Square Hotel on Thursday.

The dancer, 41, cut a glamorous figure at the evening, donning an off the shoulder navy jumpsuit with a plunging neckline.

Couple: Kristina Rihanoff and Ben Cohen turned out for Champneys Charity Gala Ball at The London Marriott Grosvenor Square Hotel on Thursday

She added height to her frame with a pair of black heels and accessorised with a silver wristwatch and matching earrings.

Styling her blonde locks into loose curls, Kristina cosied up to Ben, 40, who looked dapper in a velvet blazer and black trousers which he paired with a white shirt and black tie.

Ben was married to Abby Blayney when he took part on Strictly Come Dancing with the couple becoming estranged in 2014 and divorcing in 2016.

Kristina previously opened up about getting together with the rugby player after their time together on the show.

Style: Kristin cut a glamorous figure at the evening, donning an off the shoulder navy jumpsuit with a plunging neckline

She told Weekend Magazine: Couples get together and couples break up on those shows. Its because youre with each other for quite a long period of time, 24/7, and its quite intense so you get to know another person quite quickly.

'And because of the extreme situation on shows like that, you see people for what they are. Theyre vulnerable. Theyre worried. Theyre stressed. Sometimes they unravel and you see not very pleasant things about them. Of course youre building a friendship'.

'You learn to trust each other and protect each other because if one person is having a bad day you try to make it easier.

Fashion: She added height to her frame with a pair of black heels and accessorised with a silver wristwatch and matching earrings

Ben was very kind and supportive. He felt there was a lot of heat with everybody wanting to know what was happening. He was saying to everybody, Leave her alone.

Kristina has insisted there are no plans for her and Ben to tie the knot, as they celebrated his 40th birthday with a lavish Florida getaway.

The dancer told OK! magazine there's 'no need' for her and the former rugby player to marry, but said they may do it when they're 'less busy.'

The couple welcomed their first child together in July, 2016 when Kristina gave birth to a daughter named Milena.
She famously moved her now-ex-boyfriend Adam Collard into her family home in Essex when they left the Love Island villa as a couple last summer.

And despite that romance coming to an untimely end last month, Zara McDermott appeared on Celebs Go Dating on Thursday night, encouraging Georgia Steel to move at the same rapid speed with her own potential new beau.

Georgia - who has enjoyed three successful dates with hunky Nathan - was seen catching up with Zara over coffee.

After gushing about how 'fit' Nathan is, Zara decided it was time he meet the folks.

'Do you think you're going to invite him over to meet your parents?' she said, dishing out somewhat premature advice. 'I think it will solidify it for you and make you realise, "yeah I do actually like him"'. He sounds really nice.'

A smiling Georgia said: 'He's lovely and he's really fit.'

Whether she plans to take him to meet the parents remains to be seen.

Bad idea: Zara McDermott appeared on Celebs Go Dating on Thursday night, encouraging Georgia Steel to introduce her new man to meet her parents after only three dates

Bad advice: Georgia - who has enjoyed three successful dates with hunky Nathan - was seen catching up with Zara over coffee

How about, no: Zara, who recently split from Adam Collard, said - 'Do you think you're going to invite him over to meet your parents?'

It was recently revealed that newly-single Zara and pop star Olly Murs have been 'liking' one another's Instagram posts for the last few weeks.

Olly showed his appreciation for a selection of Zara's sexy posts, including one in which she wore a neon green bandeau top.

Another saw her wearing a black crop top and trousers and in a third, she posed in a brown crop top with jeans as she posed against the wall.

And Zara was quick to return the favour, by liking a clip of Olly and Tom Jones together.

Flirty: Olly Murs and newly single Love Island's Zara have 'liked' each other's sexy Instagram posts

The pretty brunette confirmed she had split from Adam last month, taking to Instagram with a statement.

She wrote: 'I am heartbroken to announce that Adam and I have parted ways. I love him very much and will always have a special place in my heart for him & out time spent together.

'I have tried so hard to be the best person I can possibly be and to make it work. Sometimes in life, you just aren't enough for someone; no matter what you do for them or how much you try to be.

Crop it like it's hot: Zara looked incredible in a brown crop top and jeans and Olly thought so too

She's a fan! Zara in return liked this clip of Olly with Tom Jones, as did Vicky Pattison

'For everyone asking if I'm ok, I don't know what I am. But I know that soon I will be. I will be strong and prove to myself that I can get through this. Love, always Zara x'

Olly hinted in November last year that he is just having fun right now, while searching for The One.

He told The Sun: 'Im hoping with the next person I meet its instant and moves in the right direction and it feels amazing.

'Thats what Id love. Whoever I meet its gonna be a moment of us both looking for that.'

Celebs Go Dating airs Sunday-Thursday at 9pm on E4.
The Kyle and Jackie O Show was unexpectedly pulled from the airwaves at around 10:15am on Friday morning due to a fire emergency.

During a live broadcast, which had been running significantly overtime, an alarm began sounding in the studio and the building had to be evacuated.

KIIS FM executive producer Sonia Jahshan interrupted the show to tell hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson they had to immediately leave.

What's going on? The Kyle and Jackie O Show was unexpectedly pulled from the airwaves at around 10:15am on Friday morning due to a fire emergency. Pictured: Host Kyle Sandilands (centre) and newsreader Brooklyn Ross (left)

Kyle and Jackie O is broadcast from KIIS 106.5's headquarters in North Ryde, Sydney.

It is believed the whole office was evacuated as a precautionary measure after the fire alarm was set off.

Footage shared to Instagram by a KIIS FM staffer several hours after the evacuation showed a fire truck outside the building.

Emergency: During a live broadcast, which had been running significantly overtime, an alarm began sounding in the studio and the building had to be evacuated. Pictured: Jackie 'O'

Emergency: Footage of the evacuation was later shared to the Kyle and Jackie O Instagram account. Pictured: Kyle with KIIS FM producer 'Shivering' Adam Price (right)

Mystery solved! It is believed the whole office was evacuated as a precautionary measure after the building's fire alarm was set off

Kyle, 47, appeared to take the calamity in his stride, casually telling listeners: 'I have to walk down the stairs? Is there a slide?'

'If we don't burn to death, we'll be back on Monday,' he added.

After evacuating the studio, the Kyle and Jackie O broadcast cut to music and commercials and was not resumed.

When programming started again on KIIS FM, mid-morning presenter Gordie Waters was on the air.

Incident: Kyle and Jackie O is broadcast from KIIS 106.5's headquarters in North Ryde, Sydney

'Perfect excuse to start the weekend early': Hours after the evacuation, KIIS FM released video of Kyle and Jackie O walking through the parking lot after being kicked out of their studio

The in-studio emergency comes after Kyle and Jackie O topped the Sydney radio ratings with a 10.1 per cent market share.

Despite dipping slightly by 0.4 per cent since the last survey, the program remained ahead of Nova FM's Fitzy & Wippa and 2DayFM's Grant, Ed & Ash.

The survey period was from Sunday, January 20 to Saturday, March 2.
Director Ralph Fiennes and Oleg Ivenko (pictured above)

Ralph Fiennes pulled off a stunning cultural feat by winning access to the hallowed Rembrandt Room at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg for his sublime film about Rudolf Nureyev's defection to the West.

Fiennes, who directed The White Crow  starring Russian ballet dancer Oleg Ivenko  wanted a scene of Nureyev captivated by Rembrandt's masterpieces to represent his voracious hunger to absorb art. But the Hermitage bans feature-film shoots.

Using a wiliness worthy of his spy chief, M, in the Bond films, Fiennes and producer Gabrielle Tana put together a string of reasons as to why they should be allowed in.

'We put a lot of energy into the mission. The director listened and said we could shoot because we're making a film about a great artist and because, thankfully, we were interested in one particular painting.'

It's a beautiful moment in the film, written by David Hare, which goes on release next Friday. Hare observed that Nureyev commanded the stage in the way Fiennes commands the stage, as he did in Antony And Cleopatra at the National Theatre.

Oleg Ivenko at 'The White Crow' UK Premiere at The Curzon Mayfair, London on 12 March 2019 Copy to caption PMS transfer info

Ralph Fiennes attends 'The White Crow' special screening in partnership with The Dorchester at Curzon Cinema Mayfair

Helena Bonham Carter

From Film The White Crow directed by Ralph Fiennes and starring Oleg Ivenko as Nureyev

On set of the film The White Crow (pictured above) as director Ralph Fiennes works structuring a scene

Fiennes never saw Nureyev dance live. 'I remember a girlfriend went to see him and I asked what he was like and she said: 'Honestly, some people were booing him.' He insisted on dancing until he was, arguably, too old and couldn't do the jumps.

'He was loved for his determination not to leave the stage, but it was clear the magic he had in the early Sixties wasn't there in the early Eighties.'

Fiennes is in the film as Nureyev's teacher, Alexander Pushkin.

I've seen it three times and, for me, it's a terrific thriller about art.

Ralph Fiennes directed The White Crow  starring Russian ballet dancer Oleg Ivenko

The pair laughed and joked with each other before and after the London premiere event

Ivenko (left) was one of the four candidates who reached the final stage of screen-testing for the film directed by Fiennes

Fiennes is currently filming the Kingsman prequel, The Great Game, before doing Bond 25, followed by The Dig with Nicole Kidman. He plans to devote next year to theatre roles.

Ivenko was one of four candidates who reached the final screen-test stage. Fiennes said: 'He hadn't acted before, but could take direction.

'I told him I wanted him to convey a mixture of arrogance and flirtatiousness. When I looked at the test, I knew he was the boy I was looking for.'

Ian raises 2m for theatres

Ian McKellen (pictured above) have foregone their usual fees

The Ian McKellen stage tour, 80 performances around the country to celebrate his 80th birthday, will raise millions for UK theatres.

McKellen and his small team  including director Sean Mathias and producers at the Ambassadors Theatre Group  are taking expenses, but have foregone their usual fees, meaning more than 2 million will collectively stay with the venues the actor visits.

There are a handful of London venues such as the Donmar, the Duke of York's (where Sir Ian made his London debut), Young Vic and the National, but the majority of venues are in the regions.

Tonight, his solo show is at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, and from now to his final date (on September 15 at the National's Olivier Theatre), he will visit Bath, Bristol, Windsor, Nottingham, Sheffield, Jersey, Aberdeen and the tiny Orkney Arts Theatre on August 28.

In between, McKellen will do post-production work on Tom Hooper's film of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. The actor plays Gus the Theatre Cat. I'm told it's a feline delight. It opens in December.

A promotional poster for the Ian McKellen on stage tour (pictured above) which features McKellen standing among falling leaves

Betrayal trio lay bare tale of infidelity

Director Jamie Lloyd says that because he set Harold Pinter's Betrayal, about a trio engaged in infidelity, on an almost bare stage, there's a sensual force field around the actors  Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox, pictured above right.

Designer Soutra Gilmour's stripped-back set (two chairs, a small table, bottles of wine and beer and a few glasses) allows the cast to be, as Lloyd put it, 'front and centre'.

He added: 'There's nothing in their way, so there's a heat between them because you feel, palpably, the electricity.

Cast members Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox pose backstage following the press night performance of 'Betrayal' at The Harold Pinter Theatre

The three famous faces laugh together as they pose for a photograph in the dressing room

'You've got to believe they're all having sex. You can't be prudish about it. Harold wasn't a prude.'

Lloyd curated the six-month Pinter season at the Harold Pinter Theatre that included 30 pieces. It was a mammoth undertaking, produced by Emily Vaughan-Barratt and overseen by executive Adam Speers.

On many visits, I've been struck by the generational mix of the audience. It was also great to see the Pinter's four levels packed for Betrayal.

The creative team from hit Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen arrive in London next month to cast the show that starts previews at the Noel Coward Theatre on October 29. The Tony-Award winning musical is about a 17-year-old student with an unspecified anxiety disorder who becomes caught up in another family's tragedy when the son commits suicide.
Dan Osborne has insisted he 'did not kiss absolutely anyone' in a defiant Instagram video, after reports surfaced that he cheated on wife Jacqueline Jossa with Love Island's Alexandra Cane.

The former TOWIE hunk posted the video on Thursday, in which he said: 'There's a story going round, it's a load of rubbish!

'Yes I was out in Manchester, yes I was having a drink, yes I was having a little dance with friends.

Denied: Dan Osborne has insisted he 'did not kiss absolutely anyone' in a defiant Instagram video, after reports surfaced that he cheated on wife Jacqueline Jossa with Alexandra Cane

'No I did not kiss absolutely anyone. Even though we both denied it, it's out there, all I can say is it's not true, I did not kiss anyone.'

Images emerged of married Dan leaving a Manchester nightclub last week with Alexandra amid claims they locked lips.

Since then, it has been claimed that Jacqueline dumped the reality star and threw him out of the family home after he was accused of the kissing.

Despite Dan's proclamations of innocence, a source told The Sun: '[Jacqueline] feels embarrassed and very angry that he would put her through the stress and decided enough was enough so kicked him out.

No no no! 'No I did not kiss absolutely anyone. Even though we both denied it, it's out there, all I can say is it's not true, I did not kiss anyone,' he said

OH NO! Images have emerged of married Dan (head shielded) leaving a Manchester nightclub last week with Love Island star Alexandra (back) amid claims they locked lips

'Dan is truly gutted that Jacqueline is saying it's over. He's really hopeful he will be able to talk her round once she calms down. He's really angry about it all and telling friends he will do whatever he can to save his marriage.'

A rep for Dan, 27, told the site that he has just temporarily moved out to help his nan clean out her house.

MailOnline has contacted a rep for Dan Osborne and Jacqueline Jossa, 26, for comment.

Denied: Hours earlier, Dan and Alexandra 27, had hit back at claims they kissed openly in a nightclub, behind Jacqueline's back

Over? While the TOWIE hunk lashes out at the claims on Thursday morning, it has been claimed that his wife Jacqueline Jossa dumped the star and threw him out of the family home after he was accused of kissing Alexandra

This latest development comes amid reports that Alexandra's real estate boyfriend Adam Theobald has forgiven her for the alleged kissing.

A source close to the couple told The Sun Online: They're still together. It hasn't affected their relationship at all.

The Sun had claimed the pair were grinding and thrusting on one another as well as kissing on the dancefloor at Manchesters Neighbourhood bar on Thursday night.

Home alone: Jacqueline was spotted arriving home alone

Out and about: The group were feeling giddy as they left the bash with Love Island alum Olivia Attwood

Something to say: Dan, pictured on the night in question has denied doing anything other than dancing with Alexandra and said they have been friends for a while

The pair had both attended the U S E App Launch and were pictured leaving in a car together, with friends, although there is no suggestion that anything further happened.

Dan and Alexandra's spokespersons released a joint statement to MailOnline hours earlier, saying: 'Absolutely nothing happened with Alex.

'Dan has been friends with her for a while after working together. They all met up with friends and enjoyed a great night out like friends do.'

Oh dear: The Sun had claimed the pair were openly grinding and thrusting on one another as well as kissing on the dancefloor before leaving in a car with other people (stock photo), but they had denied these claims

Work trip: Jacqueline was away at the time in New York with the couple's eldest child, Ella, four, visiting Barbie World but has since posted this snap, writing: 'I need a long a** holiday'

The father-of-three only added Alexandra on Instagram the morning after.

Dan had been invited to the party along with Christine McGuinness, 30, James Argent, 31, Olivia Attwood, 27, Jess Shears, 28, and Megan Barton Hanson, 25.

A source had told The Sun that as soon as the pair hit the dancefloor, Dan made a beeline for Alexandra, who looks rather like Jacqueline, leaving all the other partygoers stunned.

Home and away: The former EastEnders star has been sharing pictures from her trip away after recently admitting that while she and Dan have issues, their marriage feels stronger than ever

They added that he was all over her and at one point, grabbed her and kissed her.

Another onlooker said that he was putting his hands all on her, grinding and thrusting and that Alexandra seemed to be laughing it off.

While there were lots of women there on the night, the site reported that he only seemed interested in Alexandra, who looks a lot like Jacqueline.

Going wild: Dan and Alexandra were on a night out with a host of other famous faces including, (L-R) Christine McGuinness, Olivia Attwood, Megan Barton Hanson and Jess Shears

Night out: Alexandra is currently single (pictured on the night in question)

Letting loose: Dan was pictured posing with his fellow former TOWIE co-star James Argent

Meanwhile, on social media earlier on, Jacqueline who has been in New York for work with their eldest daughter appeared to hint at a feeling down.

She posted a picture of herself looking pensive, writing: 'I need a holiday. A long a** holiday. I have major brainache.'

Jacqueline recently admitted that she and husband Dan 'havent had the best relationship this year' but said 'things are definitely looking better.'

The actress was candid as she gave fans an update on her life with Dan and their daughters Ella, four, and Mia, eight months, on her YouTube channel Jacqueline's World on Tuesday.

Family life: The couple have two children together Ella and Mia (pictured), and Dan also has a son called Teddy, five, from a past relationship with Megan Tomlin

She explained: 'Things are amazing with my relationship again, I do believe you have to take the rough with the smooth.

'Everything happens for a reason and a lot of things happen that you don't know about, and a lot happens that you do know about.'

Adding that she wanted to 'keep things private' in her life, and saying it's 'out of her control' when 'b*****s want to sell stories' she continued: 'Me and Daniel have been getting on more than ever, obviously we still have issues to go through.

'But actually its kind of better in a way, because now we're talking and getting on so well its nice to speak about our issues, it makes us get on better. I feel like we're on a good wavelength right now, so all is well.'

Dan and Jacqueline married in 2017 but split in May last year after enduring constant rows.

He had been pictured looking cosy with another Love Island star Gabby Allen, 26, on a trip to The Holistic Bootcamp in Marbella back in April last year.

In June, Jacqueline quizzed a mystery woman over an alleged drunken one-night stand with Dan just weeks after their wedding.

Troubles: In June, Jacqueline quizzed a mystery woman over an alleged drunken one-night stand with Dan just weeks after their wedding

Jacqueline, who was pregnant at the time, was said to have contacted the woman on social media as she 'felt threatened' and to quiz her over an alleged one-night stand the woman reportedly had with Dan.

A friend said: 'Jacqueline just asked for the absolute truth, every cough and spit of their drunken one-night stand.'

Jacqueline wrote: 'Hi, I've just been told something and I need to hear it from you really. I'm not the type of girl to blame the girl etc and all I want is the truth.

'Did you sleep with Dan Osborne after a night in Brickyard? I don't want things to get ugly... so I am just giving you a chance to tell me so that things don't get that far.

Something to say: Dan hit back at claims that he was romantically linked to Gabby Allen last April

'Again I'm not going to blame you it's just a simple yes or no, I really need to know. Thanks x [sic].'

Speaking to MailOnline, the woman claims she had a one-night stand with Dan last August after being mutual friends for a while, and meeting by chance in an Essex bar.

She alleges the former TOWIE star told her that he was 'on a break from Jacqueline and things weren't working out' when they met.

She revealed: 'At the time I didn't want to split them up and felt sorry for Jacqueline so stayed quiet. I thought no one wants to hear that about the person they love and it's not worth them separating over especially as they have a family

'I felt guilty as they were obviously in a relationship, but my friends reminded me that I was told otherwise by him and I was single.

'I felt awful for Jacqueline but didn't want to be the reason they split up. Now they already have, and she has asked me directly I can't lie to her.'

Candid: Jacqueline has admitted that she and Dan have had a difficult year but said she felt her marriage was stronger than ever (pictured at the NTAs in January)

The woman said she felt 'surprised, shocked, and awful' when she heard that Dan was still with Jacqueline and had been consumed by guilt, so felt compelled to tell her story after Jacqueline messaged her.

She said: 'Yes I felt guilty as they were obviously in a relationship, but my friends reminded me that I was told otherwise by him and I was single. I felt awful for Jacqueline but didn't want to be the reason they split up.'

Meanwhile, Dan and Gabby both then appeared in Celebrity Big Brother that August, and Dan credited the show with helping him to realise that he wanted to work on his marriage.

Dan also has a son called Teddy, five, from a previous relationship with Megan Tomlin.
As the old saying goes: 'Anything you can do, I can do better'.

And that certainly seems to be Tammy Hembrow's philosophy over the past few months, especially when it comes to her Instagram photos.

The 24-year-old has been taking perhaps a little too much inspiration from her friend Kylie Jenner lately, even copying her outfits and poses.

Copycat! Tammy Hembrow has been taking perhaps a little too much inspiration from her friend Kylie Jenner lately, even copying her outfits and poses. Pictured left: Kylie in Santa Monica on March 12, and right: Tammy in West Hollywood on March 13

The similarities between both women, who first crossed paths in 2017, begin with their impressive personal fortunes.

Kylie was recently named by Forbes as the youngest billionaire in history, with an estimated $900million net worth thanks to her cosmetics empire.

Tammy, meanwhile, is a self-made businesswoman believed to be worth millions. She owns the clothing clothing label Saski Collection as well as the Tammy Fit app.

The two women also balance their professional lives with raising children.

Kylie has a one-year-old daughter, Stormi Webster, and Tammy has a four-year-old son Wolf and two-year-old daughter Saskia.

Black to basics! As the old saying goes: 'Anything you can do, I can do better'. And that certainly seems to be Tammy's philosophy over the past few months, especially when it comes to her Instagram photos. Pictured left: Kylie in August 2018, and right Tammy in February 2019

Twinning! When it comes to Instagram, Tammy appears to take most of her cues from the Keeping Up with the Kardashians star. Pictured left: Kylie in September 2018, and right: Tammy in February 2019

When it comes to Instagram, Tammy appears to take most of her cues from the Keeping Up with the Kardashians star.

From posing in activewear to flaunting her bikini body by the pool or chilling around the house, Tammy's posts are often remarkably similar Kylie's.

In some cases, she seems to wait a few weeks after Kylie has shared an Instagram snap before uploading her own version.

Coincidence or copycat? From posing in activewear to flaunting her bikini body by the pool or chilling around the house, Tammy's posts are often remarkably similar Kylie's. Pictured left: Kylie in June 2018, and right: Tammy in December 2018

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! In some cases, Tammy seems to wait a few weeks after Kylie has shared an Instagram snap before uploading her own version. Pictured left: Kylie on January 6, 2019, and right: Tammy on February 14, 2019

Last year, Tammy spoke about her surprising connection to Hollywood's most famous family.

She told E! News that the Kardashians first reached out to her about a possible collaboration with Khloe's fashion label, Good American.

'They reached out to me via email and asked for a phone call and they said that Khloe had seen me online, and she really liked me,' she explained.

'I was more than happy to go to America and shoot for them.

'I met Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kylie and Kendall. They're super down to earth, like nice girls. They're just normal people like everyone else.'

Beauty and brains! The similarities between both women, who first crossed paths in 2017, begin with their impressive personal fortunes. Kylie (pictured in August 2018) is a billionaire cosmetics queen, while Tammy is a self-made fitness entrepreneur

The Gold Coast-based model, who is friends with Khloe and Kylie, has already discussed plans to move to Los Angeles full-time.

Back in January, her sister Emilee Hembrow revealed that Tammy had mentioned the idea of relocating the whole family overseas.

'I'm happy here [in Australia] for now, but Tammy's trying to make us all move to LA or America,' Emilee said in a YouTube video.

Same, same! Both Tammy and Kylie like wearing skintight white dresses. Pictured left: Kylie in September 2018, and right: Tammy and her children earlier this month

As of March, Tammy boasts 9.3 million Instagram followers and 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube.

She is the daughter of Australian director, screenwriter and musician Mark Hembrow and has four sisters: Amy, Emilee, Starlette and Ava.

Tammy shares her two children, Wolf and Saskia, with her ex-fiance, streetwear designer Reece Hawkins.
She's a powerful international lawyer who brings added glamour to proceedings as the wife of a Hollywood star.

Now Amal Clooney has added another string to her bow, joining Prince Charles to launch an initiative for the global arm of his Prince's Trust charity.

Charles, who dined with the human rights barrister and her husband George, 57, at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, is said to find Amal, 41, 'deeply impressive'.

Impressive: Amal Clooney has added another string to her bow, joining Prince Charles to launch an initiative for the global arm of his Prince's Trust charity

It is understood that she is set to be the figurehead for the first global youth campaign for Princes Trust International  which may even be named after her.

A source told the Daily Mail: 'Amal is seen as a real role model.'

On Thursday, the mother-of-two dazzled in an off-the-shoulder satin blue gown  nipped in with a sash  at the Peoples Postcode Lottery Charity Gala in Edinburgh, as the Clooneys collected an award for their humanitarian work.

It comes after Amal and George were the guests of honour as Prince Charles hosted a dinner at Buckingham Palace to celebrate his Prince's Trust on Tuesday night.

Royal connections: Charles, who dined with the human rights barrister and her husband George, 57, at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, is said to find Amal, 41, 'deeply impressive'

Human rights lawyer Amal dazzled in a draped white gown as she joined her Hollywood actor husband alongside other donors, supporters and ambassadors of Prince's Trust International.

It comes weeks after Mrs Clooney helped celebrate close friend Meghan's baby shower in New York City - and paid for her private jet back to the UK.

The Duchess of Sussex was flown home in a $43million private Gulfstream G450 private jet laid on by George and Amal hours after she was thrown a lavish baby shower by her closest friends.

Wow: It is understood that she is set to be the figurehead for the first global youth campaign for Princes Trust International  which may even be named after her

Amal was every inch the star in her strapless white silk dress, with sash detail to highlight her trim waist.

A flowing one-shouldered cape added a dramatic twist to the elegant design, while a pop of sparkle came from a glittering gold sleeve.

She accessorised with a chic gold box clutch, and side-swept her long locks into voluminous curls.

Joining her dapper husband, who looked smart in a tuxedo, Amal shared an animated conversation with HRH Prince Charles.

Amal and George are of course well affiliated with the royals, with the lawyer a close friend of the Duchess of Sussex.

Both Amal and George attended the royal wedding last year, while Amal co-hosted Meghan's baby shower in New York last month.

Looking good: Joining the pair was American actor Josh Hartnett, 40, who cut a dapper figure in a red velvet blazer as he posed next to his partner St Trinian's actress, Tamsin Egerton, 30

Famous faces: The stylish couple were joined at the event by actors Benedict Cumberbatch (left of Amal), Chiwetel Ejiofor (far right), and Luke Evans (pictured next to Tamsin)

Her American actor husband ensured he kept up with his glamorous wife, looking effortlessly charming in a double-breasted black formal tuxedo, teamed with a matching bow tie.

The stylish couple were joined at the event by actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Luke Evans, who both appeared in their finery for the royal event.

Joining the pair was American actor Josh Hartnett, 40, who cut a dapper figure in a red velvet blazer as he posed next to his partner St Trinian's actress, Tamsin Egerton, 30.

The blonde bombshell stunned in a midnight blue dress and shimmering gold heels while at the star-studded event.

Beaming: Luke Evans shared a laugh and a smile with the royal as they spoke at the event

Listening to every word! Benedict Cumberbatch spoke with Prince Charles, Prince of Wales
They've been married since September 2012 and are parents to three-year-old Jonathan.

And Anne Hathaway, 36, and her husband Adam Shulman, 37, were enjoying a date night on Thursday, at the Watches of Switzerland Hudson Yards VIP opening event in NYC.

The actress was looking radiant in cream, as she stepped out with her beloved hubby.

Looking good: Anne Hathaway, 36, looked radiant in cream, as she stepped out with her beloved hubby on Thursday in New York City

She chose a pale maxi, which would delight many as it featured an elasticated waist.

The Les Miserables beauty's number featured pockets.

A stylish tweed blazer added a chic twist to her look.

Stepping out: Anne joined her husband Adam Shulman, 37, for a date night on Thursday, at the Watches of Switzerland Hudson Yards VIP opening event in NYC

The brunette beauty looked the epitome of classic Hollywood glamour, as always, with her glossy tresses framing her flawless features.

She added bright red lipstick, and just a little blush to warm her porcelain skin tone.

Adam looked delighted to be with his stunning wife, as he chose skinny black jeans for their night out.

Relaxed: She chose a pale maxi, which would delight many as it featured an elasticated waist

Practical: The Les Miserables beauty slid a hand into the pocket of her outfit

Stunning: The brunette beauty looked the epitome of classic Hollywood glamour, as always, with her glossy tresses framing her flawless features

Sartorial twist: A stylish tweed blazer added a chic twist to her look

The star poked fun at herself last month when she reminded her fans of her difficult time hosting the Oscars in 2011, with James Franco.

'No matter what happens with today's show, just remember, it's already been worse,' the New York City native wrote. 'Happy Oscars!'

Hathaway spoke with People last month about the difficulty of hosting the Oscars, which will go without the traditional host after Kevin Hart in December withdrew from the gig amid blowback for a number of his homophobic tweets from 2009-2011 that resurfaced.

Leggy display: Also at the Watches of Switzerland event was former The Real Housewives of New York City star Kelly Bensimon, 50

Prints charming: Fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg was also there

Stylish: Helen Lee Schifter and Nicole Miller joined in the VIP party

'It's just a no-win situation,' Hathaway said. 'You're not trained at this, how is this going to enhance your life? All of the reasons why. Even the people who do it spectacularly well - like Hugh Jackman, Jimmy Kimmel, Ellen DeGeneres - usually just get a 'meh' from everyone. It's a really hard gig to stick the landing on.'

Also at the Watches of Switzerland event was former The Real Housewives of New York City star Kelly Bensimon, 50.

The pretty socialite showcased her tanned and toned legs, in a classic LBD.

Fashion designers Diane von Furstenberg and Nicole Miller were also in attendance.

A look back: Anne Hathaway, 36, recently reminded her fans of her panned stint hosting the 83rd Academy Awards in 2011 with James Franco

Beauty: Maggie Gyllenhaal donned an all-black ensemble that highlighted her cleavage

Fierce: Coco Rocha, 30, looked fierce ina patterned purple skirt and a tight yellow turtleneck

Dapper dad: Andy Cohen cut a dapper figure in a grey suit
Teresa Giudice made an appearance at her brother Joe Gorga's book release party in New York City Thursday night.

The family affair came just hours after Teresa's husband, Joe Giudice, was released from a Pennsylvania prison and immediately transferred to an immigration detention center.

Joe, 46, served about 36 months of a 41 month sentence for mail, wire and bankruptcy fraud. But now he faces deportation to Italy because he reportedly 'never obtained an official U.S. citizenship,' according to Radar Online.

Family affair: Teresa Giudice, 46, attended her brother Joe Gorga's book release party in New York City Thursday night

Teresa, who spent just over 11 months in prison herself for similar crimes in 2015, flashed a smile when she arrived for the book release party dressed in an all-black suit and a white t-shirt.

The 46-year old reality star looked newly tanned and tone as she walked towards the venue wearing a pair of flashy open-toed heels and her brown tresses flowing past the middle of her back with loose waves.

At one point she greeted her father, Giacinto Gorga, on the sidewalk and then the two locked arms and walked side-by-side to the party.

Stylish: The Real Housewives Of New Jersey star wore a black suit with a white t-shirt

Fatherly love: Teresa Giudice locked arms with her father Giacinto Gorga outside the event

Joe Gorga has been out in force promoting the release of his first book, The Gorga Guide To Success.

In it, the real estate developer talks about how to succeed in business, marriage and in life.

'If you want to flip houses, know how to keep the sparks alive in your marriage or just hear what it means to keep two feet in one boot, you should get this,' Joe shared in an Instagram post last week.

Teresa also showed her love for her brother, and his new venture, by asking her 1.6 million fans to pick up a copy of the book.

Real life: Joe and Melissa Gorga posed outside of the book release party

Family support: The RHONJ stars brought their three children -- sons Joey and Gino and daughter Antonia to the event

Joe arrived for the book release party with his wife, Melissa Gorga, and their three children -- sons Joey and Gino and daughter Antonia.

Melissa, who has appeared on The Real Housewives Of New Jersey since 2011, showed off her tanned and toned figure in a black mini dress.

For a blast of color and style, she also wore a red leather jacket and a pair of beige spiked heels.

Making a statement: Melissa, who has appeared on The Real Housewives Of New Jersey since 2011, showed off her tanned and toned figure in a black mini dress

Earlier in the week, Joe Gorga admitted on Fox 5's Good Day New York that his sister 'has to be prepared' for divorce if her husband Joe is deported to Italy.

'If he goes to Italy, they're not coming,' Gorga said.

When asked if that meant divorce was imminent for the 46-year-old mother, Gorga answered 'yes' without hesitation.

Joe Giudice is reportedly at an unknown location and will remain there at least until he gets his day in court to appeal his deportation.

Teresa and Joe have four children together: Gia, 18, Gabriella, 15, Milania, 13, and Audriana, 10.
Most people are concerned about getting the dreaded 'Bali belly' when they travel over to the luxurious destination.

But not Victoria's Secret model Kelly Gale.

The stunning 23-year-old took to Instagram to flaunt her sensational physique on Thursday while on holiday in Bali, Indonesia.

Simply stunning: Victoria's Secret model Kelly Gale flaunted her sensational figure on Instagram while on holiday in Bali this week

Wearing a soft pink bikini, Kelly posed with pointed toes to emphasize her trim pins and pulled her bikini strings up to showcase her washboard stomach.

The background, a stunning backdrop of crystal-clear Indonesian water, palm trees and a yellowy-pink sunset, perfectly matched her choice of swimwear.

She captioned the image: 'Cotton candy skies.'

The jet-setting model arrived in Bali for a much-needed retreat earlier this week and hasn't shied away from taking her fans along with her.

Sand angel: The 23-year-old stunner has taken her fans along with her during her Bali holiday, taking various pictures of her relaxing on the beach

Casual: The stunner has also embarked in morning yoga - looking stunning in grey matching activewear

While many Bali-goers tend to indulge in boozy lunches, nightclub hopping and lazy days on the beach, Kelly is doing things differently.

'Good morning from me and my little friends, now off to sunrise yoga' she wrote alongside an image of her in grey tights, matching crop top and white sneakers standing on a cliff overlooking a beach.

In another image, the raven-haired stunner is dressed in a pink rain jacket as she overlooks a giant mountain.

'Got up at 1:30am to hike this volcano at night.. Was so worth it!,' she said in a caption.

Volcanic beauty: Kelly also trekked up a volcano during her stay, telling her fans on Instagram that she had an early 1.30am rise, but it 'was so worth it'

Kelly works hard to stay in such great shape, admitting last year she exercises six times a week and walks up to 30km per day.

She told Vogue Australia: 'To be honest my exercise regimen doesn't change that much leading up to a [Victoria's Secret] show.'

'I work out six days per week all year round and usually work out [for] two hours per day. On top of that, I like power walking 15-30km each day.

'In the lead up to the show itself, I walk closer to 30 km every day, and work out [for] two hours per day.'
Susan Lucci will forever be known for playing Erica Kane on the ABC daytime drama All My Children from 1970 to 2011.

The actress has also made it a priority to give her time and support to a slew of charities and foundations over the years.

And on Thursday, the 72-year old put her philanthropy and her ageless figure on full display at The 2nd Annual ADAPT Leadership Awards Gala in New York City.

TV legend: Susan Lucci attended The 2019 2nd Annual ADAPT Leadership Awards at Cipriani 42nd Street on March 14, 2019 in New York City Thursday night

The Scarsdale, New York native looked timeless in an animal print sequin mini dress that included black and hints of navy blue.

The flashy number hugged her petite 5ft 1in figure and showcased her lean and toned legs.

She rounded out the ensemble with a pair of navy blue pumps and wore her dark brown tresses long and flowing with some loose waves and a part in the middle.

Forever young: The Scarsdale, New York native looked timeless in an animal print sequin mini dress that included black and hints of navy blue

TV icons: Tony Danza and Susan Lucci shared the spotlight on the red carpet

Lucci, who also served as an honorary gala co-chair, strutted her age-defying figure on the red carpet both solo and alongside some of the honorees, which included television sitcom legend Tony Danza.

The two posed side-by-side as photographers snapped away.

Danza starred in the smash hits Taxi (1978-1983) and Who's The Boss? (1984-1992)

The other 2019 honorees were former Today show host Tamron Hall; ABC news anchor John Muir; market president at TD Bank Peter Meyer; and the founders of John's Crazy Socks, John Cronin and Mark Cronin.

Sharing the night: Danza starred in TV hits Taxi (1978-1983) and Who's The Boss? (1984-1992)

Big city lights: Lucci also stopped for some photos outside the event

Showing support: Lucci also snuggled up to Reality Check actress Abigail Hawk

Actress Cara Buono played gala host; Al Roker and his wife Deborah Roberts were honorary gala chairs.

ADAPT Community Network, formerly known as United Cerebral Palsy of New York City, is the leading human not-for-profit and a pioneer in providing cutting edge programs and services for people with disabilities.

'Every day, we build a more inclusive world for thousands of New Yorkers through education, technology, health, residential and recreational programs in all five boroughs,' the organization declared on its website adaptcommunitynetwork.org.

ADAPT supporters: Lucci chatted it up with gala chairs Al Roker, his wife Deborah Roberts and their son Nicholas Albert Roker

A very pregnant Tamron Hall was among the honorees on the night; she posed with her former Today show colleague Al Roker and his wife Deborah Roberts

Revelation: Hall revealed she was pregnant at age 48 and got secretly married to a man called Steven earlier this month
She was just announced as a regular guest on Studio Ten.

So it's no surprise that Cassandra Thorburn looked like she was on top of the world at a Formula One even in Melbourne on Friday.

The 47-year-old brunette slipped her slender figure into a floral mini-dress that highlighted her toned legs.

Radiant: Cassandra Thorburn (center) was all smiles at a Formula One event in Melbourne on Friday with actor Kevin Hofbauer (L) and Dancing With the Stars dancer Jeremy Garner (R)

'F1 Friday race day,' Cass wrote, tagging Dancing with the Stars dancer Jeremy Garner and actor Kevin Hofbauer in the snap.

On Tuesday Cassandra, who is the ex wife of former Today show host Karl Stefanovic, announced she would be joining Studio 10 as a regular guest.

'I'll be working with Studio 10 on a more regular guest basis so that will be great,' the mother-of-three told Yahoo Lifestyle.

New role: 'I'll be working with Studio 10 on a more regular guest basis so that will be great' Cassandra let fans know on Tuesday she would star appearing on Ten's breakfast show

'It's great and opens the opinions of more experienced women, I guess, that are around my ilk,' the journalist added.

Viewers will no doubt be very keen to see what Cassandra brings to the small screen, given her acrimonious split from Karl, 44.

It's been a big week for Cass, who was booted from Dancing With the Stars on Monday, making her the third celebrity cut from the competition.

Stage exit: Cass and partner Marco de Angelis (R) were booted from Dancing With the Stars on Monday, making her the third celebrity cut from the competition

Shortly before the elimination on the show, Cass appeared to take a swipe at her former spouse.

She thanked the public for their support 'after a troublesome couple of years,' which was taken as a reference to her high-profile ex.

Gold Logie winner Karl was unceremoniously kicked off Today in late 2018 after 14 years with the program.
She is one of Australia's most celebrated actresses, with a wide array of roles under her belt.

But Nicole Kidman has revealed her latest role, that of battle-weary detective, Erin Bell, in crime drama Destroyer, was one of her toughest yet.

In an interview published in TV Week magazine this week, the 51-year-old told the publication that she struggled to 'let go' of the gritty role.

Revealing: In an interview published on Friday, Nicole Kidman revealed it was 'very difficult' to let go of her gritty character in drama Destroyer. Nicole is pictured as Erin Bell in Destroyer

'I've let go of other roles easily, but found it very difficult with her,' Nicole told the publication at the Australian premiere of the film in February.

The thriller, with it's scenes of violence and painful emotions, stayed with the actress long after filming ended.

However, Nicole believes it is part of the process and lets her characters take over when they need to for the sake of her performance.

The violent thriller stayed with the actress long after filming: 'I've let go of other roles easily, but found it very difficult with her,' Nicole said. Nicole is pictured as Erin Bell in Destroyer

Hard to move on: 'I just never know how much of a hold the character's going to take on me' the actress said. Nicole is pictured as Erin Bell in Destroyer

She added: 'I just never know how much of a hold the character's going to take on me, but I'm always open  and always trying to stay open so that I can access emotions and access truth.'

In the R-rated movie, Nicole plays the anti-heroine who is pulled into an old case after the ringleader of a gang she had tried to infiltrate re-emerges.

In January, the Academy Award winner told Daily Mail Australia that her character had 'an enormous amount of self-loathing' and 'is a great cop but not functioning'.

Dramatic: She also underwent a significant makeover, wearing prosthetics to age her famous face and transform her into the wold-weary cop. Nicole is pictured as Erin Bell in Destroyer

Not her usual look: Nicole was far from her usually glamorous self in the film. Pictured at the Golden Globe Awards in 2019

The star added that she turned to watching footage of wild coyotes in a bid to get inside Erin's predatory mind.

She also underwent a significant makeover, wearing prosthetics to age her famous face and transform her into the wold-weary cop.

The Aussie beauty has now moved onto her next project, and was seen shooting a scene for her new HBO mini-series The Undoing in New York on Thursday.

Destroyer opens in Australian cinemas on March 21
She's no stranger to true crime, having starred in the modern classic Zodiac.

Chloe Sevigny, 44, was fittingly dressed in all-black for the Thursday premiere of Hulu's true crime series The Act in New York.

The series is based on Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who murdered her mother Dee Dee Blanchard in 2015 after years of being forced to pretend she suffered from chronic illnesses.

Vintage glamour: Chloe Sevigny, 44, was fittingly dressed in all-black for the Thursday premiere of Hulu's true crime series The Act in New York

The 5ft8in actress wore a lacy black dress to the all-star premiere.

The outfit featured a sheer top and frilly skirt that looked a bit like an old-fashioned mourning outfit.

She wore a black sequined crown that matched with the color-coordinated outfits of her young co-stars, Joey King, 19, and AnnaSophia Robb, 25.

Dark material: The series is based on Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who murdered her mother Dee Dee Blanchard in 2015 after years of being forced to pretend she suffered from chronic illnesses

Pretty in pink: Joey King, 19, was ready for spring with her pink gown with flower-shaped sequins

Royal look: The 5ft4in Conjuring star had a white pearl crown that matched the straps of her dress

Joey King was ready for spring with her pink gown with flower-shaped sequins.

The 5ft4in Conjuring star had a white pearl crown that matched the straps of her dress.

Her co-star AnnaSophia Robb opted for a fiery red sleeveless dress with floral stitching.

The 5ft tall star of The Carrie Diaries went with a red headband scarlet heels to complete the outfit.

Sultry look: Her co-star AnnaSophia Robb, 25, opted for a fiery red sleeveless dress with floral stitching

Fiery look: The 5ft tall star of The Carrie Diaries went with a red headband scarlet heels to complete the outfit

Though he wasn't involved in the series, actor and director Ben Stiller, 53, made an appearance black overcoat, charcoal sweater and dark blue jeans.

The Zoolander star previously worked with Hulu and The Act star Patricia Arquette for the limited series Escape At Dannemora, a prison break thriller.

Patricia, 50, went with a classy green velvet double-breasted suit for the big night. She stars as Dee Dee Blanchard, the controlling and duplicitous mother afflicted with Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Casual evening: Though he wasn't involved in the series, actor and director Ben Stiller, 53, made an appearance black overcoat, charcoal sweater and dark blue jeans

Previous projects: The Zoolander star previously worked with Hulu and The Act star Patricia Arquette, 50, for the limited series Escape At Dannemora, a prison break thriller

Elegant suit: Patricia went with a classy green velvet double-breasted suit for the big night. She stars as Dee Dee Blanchard, the controlling and duplicitous mother afflicted with Munchausen syndrome by proxy

She was joined by her boyfriend, Eric White, in a sleek charcoal suit.

American Vandal star Calum Worthy, 28, went all-paisley for the special event, wearing a black suit with paisley patterns and a matching dark green turtleneck.

Character actress extraordinaire Margot Martindale, 67, was dressed in black slacks and a black top, with a spiral-patterned jacket on top.

Loving couple: She was joined by her boyfriend, Eric White, in a sleek charcoal suit

Making a statement: American Vandal star Calum Worthy, 28, went all-paisley for the special event, wearing a black suit with paisley patterns and a matching dark green turtleneck
She found fame as part of the cast of The CW's popular show Gossip Girl.

And on Thursday night, Jessica Szohr, 33, walked the red carpet at the iHeartRadio Awards in Los Angeles.

She opted for a very low-cut black bodysuit with sheer patterned flared trousers.

Posed: She found fame as part of the cast of The CW's popular show Gossip Girl. And on Thursday night, Jessica Szohr walked the red carpet at the iHeartRadio Awards in LA

The actress flashed plenty of skin in her chosen outfit.

She added platform-soled black heels and carried a small black purse.

Szohr wore her brunette hair ticked back behind her ears to show off her statement earrings, and she also added several Hearts on Fire rings to her look.

On trend: The actress, 33, opted for a very low-cut black bodysuit with sheer patterned flared trousers

Red carpet ready: Szohr flashed plenty of skin in her chosen outfit. She added platform-soled black heels and carried a small black purse

Earlier this month, Access confirmed that Szohr is dating Arizona Coyotes center Brad Richardson.

The outlet reported that the pair have been together 'for months' after meeting at a concert through mutual friends.

Meanwhile, the actress has most recently been seen on the small screen in the second season of the Fox show The Orville.
She's considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.

And Angelina Jolie proved worthy of the title as she commanded attention during an outing in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The 43-year-old Oscar winner draped her famous figure in an all-black ensemble as she headed into a meeting in the tony neighborhood of Beverly Hills.

Stunner: Angelina Jolie, 43, commanded attention in Los Angeles on Thursday

Daring to impress, the Girl, Interrupted star rocked a skimpy black camisole under a matching cardigan.

Meanwhile, Angelina showed off her myriad of tattoos at the premiere of Dumbo earlier in the week.

Angelina's designs include a Tennessee Williams quote, a Buddhist prayer and geographical coordinates of where her children were born.

The Oscar-winning actresss whirlwind marriage to actor Billy Bob Thornton in 2000 after a two-month courtship prompted her to have his name and a dragon tattooed on her shoulder. By 2002, the ink had been erased by laser.

Back in black: The Oscar winner draped her famous figure in an all-black ensemble as she headed into a meeting in the tony neighborhood of Beverly Hills

She said at the time: Ive moved on  thats why its going. It was replaced with the coordinates of her childrens and Pitts birthplaces.

Although Angelina looked breathtaking on the red carpet, it was her children who stole the show as she joined by her four youngest kids; twins Vivienne and Knox, 10, Shiloh, 12, and Zahara, 14.

Angelina and Brad are also parents to Maddox, 17, and Pax, 15.

Show off: Meanwhile, Angelina showed off her myriad of tattoos at the premiere of Dumbo earlier in the week

Whilst Angelina does not star in Dumbo, Disney fans can see her next in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, which is slated for release next year.

Meanwhile, the live-action Dumbo remake stars Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito.

The film follows two children who care for a young elephant with huge ears - before they discover he can fly.

The movie, directed by Tim Burton, is set for release on March 29.
She's a Hollywood legend who earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for 1970's Cactus Flower.

And Goldie Hawn showcased her sartorial prowess as she stepped out for lunch at Palm Restaurant in Los Angeles, California, on Thursday.

The actress, 73, looked chic in a tailored blue suit which she paired with a low-cut black T-Shirt for a glamorous flourish.

Stylish: Goldie Hawn, 73, showcased her sartorial prowess in a tailored blue suit as she enjoyed lunch in Los Angeles at Palm Restaurant on Thursday

Styling her blonde locks in a tousled sleek waves, the Death Becomes Her star opted not to wear make-up to to embrace her clear complexion.

Goldie shielded her eyes in a pair of stylish white shades, while she gave her look a glamorous touch by wearing gold hoop earrings and a colourful pocket square.

The actress boosted her height in a pair of black heels, while she offset her dark ensemble by carrying her items in a white handbag.

Not seen was Goldie's partner of over 35 years Kurt Russell. The The Thing alum spoke to Dailymail.com recently about how the two kept a successful family life while being working actors.

Gorgeous: Styling her blonde locks in a tousled sleek waves, the Death Becomes Her star opted not to wear make-up to to embrace her clear complexion

He explained: We were very aware of what would happen had we both pursued our careers full-on.

I very rarely worked when I knew Goldie was going to be working. And vice-versa. Which meant we could be together. I never thought that what the business could provide would ever take precedence over us. Money is great, but youve got to say no. You really do.

Indeed, he claims there was at least one occasion when he turned down the chance to star in a major Hollywood production.

There was a movie I was going to be paid a lot of money for. Id rather not say what it was, but it came when Id just done two pictures in a row and Goldie was about to go to work, so I had to turn it down.

Goldie's 42-year-old son Oliver Hudson  from her marriage to musician Bill Hudson  also starred in The Christmas Chronicles.

Kurt and Goldie share 32-year-old son Wyatt from their relationship.

Oliver's younger sister Kate Hudson considers Kurt her father, while Goldie is also de facto stepmom to Kurt's oldest son Boston, 38, whom he shares with ex wife Season Hubley.

'Certainly, as a mother, Ive made mistakes,' Goldie admitted recently to People.

'We all do, we all will. But the most important thing is to stay authentic and true to yourself and hope that you show by example, not by what you say but by what you do.'
Famke Janssen put on a glamorous display when she headed to a Neiman Marcus fashion party in New York on Thursday night.

The 54-year-old X-Men star wore a red mini satin wrap dress which showed off her long legs as she joined a series of A-listers at the Hudson Yards Grand Opening.

The outing comes just weeks after Famke was branded 'unrecognisable' with her wrinkle-free skin and plumped-up cheeks.

A leggy display: Famke Janssen, 54, wore a red mini dress to a Neiman Marcus fashion bash in New York on Thursday night

But Famke appeared to be taking it all in her stride as she posed up a storm at the event, which celebrated the grand opening of the shops and restaurants.

The shopping destination has more than 100 stores on three levels.

Famke kept her look simple with a pair of black heels and a matching giant clutch bag.

Something changed? The outing comes just weeks after Famke was branded 'unrecognisable' when she stepped out looking wrinkle-free and with plumped-up cheeks

A step back in time: Famke pictured with Liam Neeson back in January looking like her usual self

Her raven tresses were styled into curls which tumbled down past her shoulders.

Audiences can currently catch Famke as Sophie in Michael Caton-Jones' hitman drama Asher which hit US theaters on December 7.

She stars alongside Ron Perlman, Richard Dreyfuss, Peter Facinelli, and Jacqueline Bisset.

The All I Wish actress is currently filming her role as prosecutor Nancy Ryan in Ava Duvernay's four-episode Central Park Five, which starts streaming later this year on Netflix.

Marvel magic: As Jean Grey in 2006's X-Men The Last Stand

Clearly still in demand, she is also in pre-production for a project named American Undercover. And she can be seen later this year in Dutch film The Poison Rose, out in July.

Former Bondgirl Famke previously played Susan 'Scottie' Hargrave in The Blacklist and then spin-off show Redemption, which has now been cancelled.

The Columbia University grad has been single since divorcing writer and director Kip Williams, the son of architect Tod Williams, in 2000 after five years of marriage.
Luke Perry has reportedly been cremated and his remains have been scattered on his beloved Tennessee farm.

According to TMZ, the ashes of the former Beverly Hills, 90210 star, who passed away at the age of 52 from a stroke on March 4, now lay in the 380 acres of land owned by him, in Vanleer, Tennessee - where he lived on and off for more than twenty years.

The publication also reports that the late actor's death certificate listed his official cause of death as ischemic cerebrovascular accident (stroke) and that his body was taken to a funeral home in Dickson, Tennessee.

Tragic: Luke Perry has reportedly been cremated and his remains have been scattered on his beloved Tennessee farm

The reports come after Don Carter, owner of the Taylor Funeral Home in Dickson, told the site that Perry was not buried there to The Blast.

And he added he has 'no idea' why his facility is listed on Perrys death certificate.

The site also called the Cemetery Office for the City of Dickson and it was relayed that Luke was not buried at the citys other cemetery, Dickson Union Cemetery.

And TMZ have now appeared to confirm that Luke's family received his ashes in Dickson and drove 13 miles north to scatter them on his farm.

Remains: The ashes of the former Beverly Hills, 90210 star, who passed away at the age of 52 from a stroke on March 4, reportedly now lay in the 380 acres of land owned by him, in Vanleer, Tennessee - where he lived on and off for more than twenty years

Reports: The publication also reports that the late actor's death certificate listed his official cause of death as ischemic cerebrovascular accident (stroke) and that his body was taken to a funeral home in Dickson, Tennessee

Luke bought the farm in 1995 during the height of his 90210 fame. At the time he had also starred in the movie 8 Seconds where he took on the role of a rodeo player to had a passion for cattle raising.

The star's the time of death is noted as 12:44 PM on March 4.

His fiancee Wendy Madison Bauer, 44, is listed as his next of kin, or 'informant'.

News of his death sent shockwaves across the rural Tennessee town and residents recalled fond memories of the TV heartthrob who became a familiar face in Dickson county.

'He acted like we were part of his family. He would always give you a hug,' business owner Janet Grimes told News Channel 3.

Devastating: TMZ have now appeared to confirm that Luke's family received his ashes in Dickson and drove 13 miles north to scatter them on his farm

Connection: Luke bought the farm in 1995 during the height of his 90210 fame.

Grimes said Perry would often bring his family in to the restaurant for breakfast.

'I found him to be just a nice person,' she added. 'I enjoyed talking to him. He always knew you.'

Meanwhile, it was also revealed that Perry had planned to marry Wendy in LA on August 17.

TMZ reported that the couple had already sent out art-deco themed 'save the date' cards to their friends and family.
Jacqueline Jossa was showing husband Dan Osborne what he was missing on Thursday night, as she took to Instagram to post a sexy snap amid claims she's 'dumped' him.

The ex-EastEnders star, 26, looked amazing in a black lace suit as she posed in her bathroom, after Dan furiously slammed reports he kissed Love Island star Alexandra Cane.

It was reported on Thursday that Jacqueline furiously 'dumped' Dan after it was claimed he kissed Alexandra on a night out, though a representative for the TOWIE star told The Sun that he has only temporarily moved out.

Defiant: Jacqueline Jossa was showing husband Dan Osborne what he was missing on Thursday night, as she took to Instagram to post a sexy snap amid claims she's 'dumped' him

Jacqueline looked amazing in the revealing ensemble as she donned the black and nude lace two-piece, accompanying the look with sleek straight tresses and a dramatic smoky eye.

While she had foregone any other jewellery with her ensemble, the mother-of-two had her wedding ring on full display in the snaps.

The caption read: 'Selfie with the casual essentials. Do we like the suit?'

Shocking: It comes following reports that Jacqueline 'dumped' her husband Dan (seen here under the green hoodie) after it was claimed he kissed Alexandra Cane

Jacqueline's post comes amid claims that she furiously dumped husband Dan, after it was claimed he kissed Love Island star Alexandra on a night out.

Sources told The Sun she kicked him out of the home they share with daughters Ella, four and Mia, nine months.

They said: '[Jacqueline] feels embarrassed and very angry that he would put her through the stress and decided enough was enough so kicked him out.

'Dan is truly gutted that Jacqueline is saying it's over. He's really hopeful he will be able to talk her round once she calms down. He's really angry about it all and telling friends he will do whatever he can to save his marriage.'

Denied: Dan took to Instagram after the claims to furiously slam reports, saying in a video he 'did not kiss anyone'

No no no! 'No I did not kiss absolutely anyone. Even though we both denied it, it's out there, all I can say is it's not true, I did not kiss anyone,' he said

A rep for Dan, 27, told the site that he has just temporarily moved out to help his nan clean out her house.

MailOnline contacted representatives for Jacqueline Jossa and Dan Osborne for comment at the time.

Hours later, Dan also took to social media to furiously deny claims he kissed Alexandra, saying in a video: 'There's a story going round, it's a load of rubbish!

'Yes I was out in Manchester, yes I was having a drink, yes I was having a little dance with friends.

'No I did not kiss absolutely anyone. Even though we both denied it, it's out there, all I can say is it's not true, I did not kiss anyone.'

Over? While Dan lashed out at the claims, it has been claimed that his wife Jacqueline dumped the star and threw him out of the family home after he was accused of kissing Alexandra

This latest development also comes amid reports that Alexandra's real estate boyfriend Adam Theobald has forgiven her for the alleged kissing.

A source close to the couple told The Sun Online: They're still together. It hasn't affected their relationship at all.

The Sun had claimed the pair were grinding and thrusting on one another as well as kissing on the dancefloor at Manchesters Neighbourhood bar on Thursday night.

Cosy? Both Dan and Alexandra attended the U S E App Launch earlier this week, and were seen leaving in a car together. There is no suggestion that anything further happened.

Dan and Alexandra had both attended the U S E App Launch and were pictured leaving in a car together, with friends, although there is no suggestion that anything further happened.

Both stars spokespersons released a joint statement to MailOnline hours earlier, saying: 'Absolutely nothing happened with Alex.

'Dan has been friends with her for a while after working together. They all met up with friends and enjoyed a great night out like friends do.'
Nicki Minaj's criminal boyfriend Kenneth Petty has pleaded guilty to driving on a suspended license reports TMZ.

According to court documents viewed by the website, Petty, 41 - who started dating Starships rapper Nicki, 36, in December - pled guilty in New York to aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle.

The offence reportedly occurred when a police officer saw Petty run a stop sign at around 1.30am on September 13 in Long Island.

Convict: Nicki Minaj's criminal boyfriend Kenneth Petty has pleaded guilty to driving on a suspended license reports TMZ

Police are then said to have pulled Petty over and discovered he was driving on a suspended license.

It was alleged that Kenneth will have to pay $88 in fines and clear his license.

MailOnline has contacted Nicki's representatives for comment.

The rapper raised eyebrows when she confirmed her romance with Kenneth - who has reportedly been slapped with two violent conduct violations in 2010 for threats and fighting.

Claim: According to court documents viewed by the website, Petty, 41 - who started dating Starships rapper Nicki, 36, in December - pled guilty in New York to aggravated unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle

According to TMZ, Kenneth spent seven years behind bars for first degree manslaughter, which he pleaded guilty to after being charged with second degree murder.

Citing insiders in law enforcement, the website claimed that Kenneth shot one Lamont Robinson three times on a street corner in Queens in April 2002.

Kenneth and some associates allegedly drove to a point across the street from Lamont, whereupon Kenneth emerged from the vehicle and walked over to his victim before firing into his stomach.

Couple: The offence reportedly occurred when a police officer saw Petty run a stop sign at around 1.30am on September 13 in Long Island, whereupon his lack of license was discovered

Petty was also convicted of first degree attempted rape in 1995, after a 1994 incident with a 16-year-old girl, according to public records from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services.

According to records, Petty used a 'knife/cutting instrument' during the attempted assault.

He was sentenced to 18 to 54 months in state prison, but the records did not contain any information about how much time he served.

However, soon after making their romance official, Nicki defended her new beau as she replied to a fan who was sticking up for her.

'He was 15, she was 16  in a relationship. But go awf, Internet. Yall cant run my life. Yall cant even run yall own life. Thank you boo,' she replied.
She made her pregnancy announcement in style when she revealed she was expecting her first child with boyfriend Adam Granduciel last month.

And Krysten Ritter showed off her baby bump in a pretty polka dot monochrome mini-dress as she headed out to lunch with her musician beau, 40, at Belcampo in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The actress, 37, teamed the eye-catching garment with black leather cowboy boots and an oversize denim jacket as she protectively cradled her tummy.

Mom on the run: Krysten Ritter showed off her baby bump in a polka dot mini-dress as she headed out to lunch at Belcampo in Los Angeles on Thursday

The Jessica Jones star sheltered her eyes from the sun with a pair of dark shades and injected a bolt of colour to her ensemble with a slick of cherry red lipstick.

Krysten wore her raven locks in loose waves and looked happy and relaxed as she went about her day.

The former model seemed to be enjoying indulging her pregnancy cravings as she tucked into an al fresco lunch with her boyfriend.

Krysten shared a mirror selfie before heading out the day as she showed off her new dress to her followers.

Bumping along: The actress, 37, teamed the eye-catching garment with black leather cowboy boots and an oversize denim jacket as she grabbed a takeout coffee

A bite to eat: The Jessica Jones star seemed to be enjoying indulging her pregnancy cravings as she tucked into an al fresco lunch with her musician boyfriend Adam Granduciel, 40

Alongside the snap, she wrote: 'New dress and ready to rock.'

The actress announced she was pregnant with her first child in a spectacular style last month when she debuted her baby bump on the red carpet at the 91st Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood.

Krysten was accompanied at the ceremony by Adam, her boyfriend of four years, who is the frontman of indie rock band The War on Drugs.

Although the star is no doubt celebrating her baby news, she is likely to be mourning the loss of her Netflix show Jessica Jones after three years on air.

The streaming service announced the Marvel series had been cancelled via a statement to Deadline last month.

Going dotty: The former model shared a mirror selfie before heading out the day as she showed off her new dress to her followers

The third and final season of Jessica Jones will air later this year.

Krysten wrote on her Instagram page alongside a cast shot: 'I love these people to the moon and back. It has been a dream to play Jessica alongside my amazing cast and the best crew in the business for these past five years.

'I am so grateful for every second of it. We have THE BEST fans. You guys mean the world to me and I appreciate you beyond words.

'The final season of Jessica Jones is coming later this year and I am proud of how we complete JJ's journey.

'I can't wait for you all to see it. Stay tuned and more to come.'
Val Kilmer emerged on Thursday sporting his now-trademark scarf to mask the remnants left over from the trachea procedure he underwent four years ago.

The Top Gun star, 59, looked happy and healthy as he headed out in the neckerchief which masked his breathing apparatus at a screening of Cinema Twain in San Diego.

At the event, held at Theatre Box and Sugar Factory, he could not stop beaming as he larked around before grabbing some sweets.

Wrapped up: Val Kilmer emerged on Thursday sporting his now-trademark scarf to mask the remnants left over from the trachea procedure he underwent four years ago

Val overcame a two-year battle with throat cancer, with procedures on his trachea reducing his voice to a rasp and rendered him short of breath.

Having overcome his woes, Val looked laid back and happy for the screening as he tied up the neckerchief yet gave a glimpse of the breathing apparatus.

In 2015, he was first pictured with what appeared to be a breathing aid around his neck as he visited a grocery store in Malibu, California.

The actor was seen wearing the medical device - thought to be a tracheostomy tube.

Heading out: The Top Gun star, 59, looked happy and healthy as he headed out in the neckerchief which masked his breathing apparatus at a screening of Cinema Twain in San Diego

Sweet sensation: At the event, held at Theatre Box and Sugar Factory, he could not stop beaming as he larked around before grabbing some sweets

Fighting back: The outing follows Val's denial in October 2015 that he is battling throat cancer after rumours of ill health, although he did admit an undisclosed procedure had left him with a 'swelling'

The outing follows Val's denial in October 2015 that he was battling throat cancer after rumours of ill health, although he did admit an undisclosed procedure had left him with a 'swelling'.

According to the UK's National Health Service website, a tracheostomy is a surgical opening in the anterior wall of the trachea to facilitate ventilation - the opening is usually maintained by use of a tracheostomy tube.

The post came following reports on Radar that he was admitted to UCLA's intensive care unit and could 'barely speak'.

Shocker: The post came following reports on Radar that he was admitted to UCLA's intensive care unit and could 'barely speak'

He wrote on Facebook: 'Thank you all for your love and support. There's a rumor I'm unwell again and in hospital which is totally untrue.

'I was in to verify I have no tumor or infection of any kind which was verified by the very caring experts at UCLA.'

As he fights fit, the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang actor will be joining Tom Cruise, 56, in the recently-confirmed Top Gun sequel, as it was revealed he will be reprising his role as Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky.

He's back! As he fights fit, the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang actor will be joining Tom Cruise, 56, in the recently- confirmed Top Gun sequel, as it was revealed he will be reprising his role as Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

Happy days: 'I was in to verify I have no tumor or infection of any kind which was verified by the very caring experts at UCLA'

Back in 2015, Val 'jumped the topgun,' when he revealed on Facebook that he was offered a role in Top Gun: Maverick. 'Offered #topgun2  not often you get to say 'yes' without reading the script' he said.

He then added: 'This is a long way off so calm down. This has been talked about for a long long time and being offered a role is very different from doing a role.

'I jumped the gun with my post. I jumped the topgun an innocent mistake. It was just such a wonderful phone call with my agent.'

The sequel, titled Top Gun: Maverick, is currently filming for a 2019 release.
She's been no stranger to making stylish appearances since shooting to fame in teen drama One Tree Hill back in 2003.

And Sophia Bush looked effortlessly glamorous as she headed to dinner at West Hollywood hotspot, Craig's, on Thursday night.

The actress, 36, proved the key was in the accessories as she jazzed up a low-key ensemble with the addition of a $5,000 Fendi Kan I bag and white leather heeled boots.

Stylish: Sophia Bush looked effortlessly glamorous as she headed to dinner at West Hollywood hotspot, Craig's, on Thursday night

The Chicago P.D. star teamed her eye-catching pieces with a black, red and white knitted midi-dress and wore a camel wool coat draped over her shoulders.

Sophia wore her brunette locks scraped back from her face in a elegant up-do and accentuated her naturally striking features with low-key make-up.

The television personality wore dramatic silver art deco-style earrings, paired with matching bangles on her wrists.

Sophia seemed happy and relaxed as she posed for snaps with fans outside the eatery.

Dinner date: The actress, 36, proved the key was in the accessories as she jazzed up a low-key ensemble with the addition of a $5,000 Fendi Kan I bag and white leather heeled boots

The actress was enjoying a well-earned break from shooting her lead role in upcoming CBS spy drama series, Surveillance.

In the complex thriller, Sophia plays a charming NSA operative who finds her loyalties torn between protecting the government's secrets and her own.

The screen favourite will also appear alongside Patriot star Michael Dorman in the upcoming indie flick Hard Luck Love Song, which is due for release later this year.

Sophia shot to fame starring as Brooke Davis on teen drama One Tree Hill from 2003 to 2012.

Elegant: The Chicago P.D. star teamed her eye-catching pieces with a black, red and white knitted midi-dress and wore a camel wool coat draped over her shoulders

She recently spoke out about how the show's 'opportunistic' producers exploited her break-up from One Tree Hill co-star Chad Michael Murray, 37, following their split back in 2005.

The pair met when they played screen loves in the show in 2003 and soon developed a relationship off-camera.

The couple got engaged in 2004 and married in Santa Monica, California, in April 2005.

By September 2005, the union was all over and they separated after just four months of marriage, finalising their divorce in December 2006 after Sophia's request for an annulment on the grounds of fraud was denied.

Stepping out in style: Sophia wore her brunette locks scraped back from her face in a elegant up-do and accentuated her naturally striking features with low-key make-up

Snap happy: Sophia seemed happy and relaxed as she posed for photographs with fans outside the high-profile West Hollywood eatery

Speaking on Dax Shephard's Armchair Expert podcast in December 2018, Sophia said One Tree Hill producers were 'really deeply inappropriate' following the split.

'They ran TV ads about it. It was really ugly,' she explained.

'They made practice of taking advantage of people's personal lives and not just for me and for my ex - for other actors on the show who would share... deeply personal things that were happening in their lives and they would wind up in storylines.

'It wasn't OK. It was opportunistic and ugly. When you run a show, you're like a parent. You're supposed to protect your flock and it was the opposite of that.

'It was a very ugly situation on their part. I think they kind of lived for the drama.'
They are set to portray paleontologist Mary Anning and her supposed lover Frances Bell for new period drama Ammonite.

And Saoirse Ronan, 24, filmed in the sea for intense scenes as she got to work on the Beach at Eype near Bridport, Dorset, with co-star Kate Winslet, 43, for the upcoming lesbian romance on Thursday.

Production on the film continues even after the family of dinosaur pioneer Anning hit out at the filmmakers for 'inventing' the fact that she was gay.

Braving the cold weather: Saoirse Ronan got hit by massive waves as she filmed in the sea for lesbian drama Ammonite on the Beach at Eype on Thursday

The Hanna star could be seen getting hit by massive waves as she walked up to a small caravan for the short scene.

Saoirse was dressed in a loose-fitting grey robe, while she styled her blonde hair up into a bun which she covered with a bonnet.

Whilst filming, Saoirse had to be rescued by one of the crew members as she was being washed up the beach, but she quickly brushed herself off to carry on filming.

There were also a number of extras dressed up in Victorian-era costumes who were also on hand to act alongside Saoirse.

Slipping: The Hanna star could be seen falling down when it was hit by massive waves as she walked up to a small caravan for the short scene

In costume: Saoirse was dressed in a loose-fitting grey robe, while she styled her blonde hair up into a bun which she covered with a bonnet

Helping hand: Whilst filming, Saoirse had to be rescued by one of the crew members as she was being washed up the beach, but she quickly brushed herself off to carry on filming

Struggling: Saoirse made her way into the wooden caravan with the help of the crew member

Working hard: A number of film crew members braved the waves too as a team with a camera stood their ground further into the ocean

Standing strong: Saoirse quickly got up to carry on after she fell down

And, cut! The crew were quick to prepare to film the scenes despite the adverse weather

Falling down: When a particularly strong wave hit, Saoirse could be seen falling into the water

Strong: Saoirse was the picture of professionalism as she filmed the tough scenes

Standing by: There were also a number of extras dressed up in Victorian-era costumes who were also on hand to act alongside Saoirse

In another scene, the pair filmed scenes with each other where they walked along the beach side-by-side and chatted quietly to one another.

Kate looked demure as she was clad in a plaid skirt and navy coat, a brown scarf knotted around her neck and a leather satchel slung over one shoulder.

The Titanic star wore gloves to protect herself from the winter chill, while she wore her brunette locks in a loose pinned-back style.

Saoirse transformed into her character by wearing a heavy black gown, typical of the Victorian era, with white lace detailing around the collar.

Aftermath: Following her scenes in the sea, Saoirse wrapped up in a grey hoodie and also put on a pair of light-coloured shorts

Busy schedule: Several crew members walked around the actress as she prepared

Top-up: Saoirse was given more make-up after frolicking in the sea

Easy does it: The actress was careful as she stepped out of the wooden caravan

Ready to go: Saoirse seemed to be keen for the next scene to start

Running around: The star ran along the beach as she made her way to the next location

Full team: Saoirse was followed around by several crew members who helped her out

Heading out: The actress made her way to the crew as she carried her dress in her hands

Prepared for anything: The crew had rain coats and warm clothes on hand

Need a hand? The film's extras stood by the door of the caravan to help Saoirse

Props to them: Saoirse and the cast seemed to be using the props to their advantage

Chilly: Despite the cold weather, the actress held her dress in her hands

Stepping out: The actress was seen wearing her shoes in between takes

Beaming: Although the weather was bad, Saoirse was beaming as she walked off the set

On her way: Kate was seen driving down the cliffs of Charmouth to film more scenes

In good spirits: Kate seemed to be in great spirits as she stepped out of the car

Small yet mighty: The tiny car was perfectly suited for getting around the windy sets

Completing her period costume by wearing a large bonnet that had bow detailing, the Hanna star styled her blonde locks into tiny ringlets.

The pair filmed scenes which saw them walking along the beach as they conversed quietly to one another, while in another Kate ate a pasty as she joined Saoirse.

And during a break from filming, Kate and Saoirse spent time chatting with the crew and the Hanna star wrapped a rain coat around her chest to stay warm, while the Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind star drank from a flask.

Getting to work: In another scene, Saourse and Kate Winslet filmed scenes with each other where they walked along the beach side-by-side and chatted quietly to one another

Powering through: Production on the film continues even after the family of dinosaur pioneer Anning hit out at the filmmakers for 'inventing' the fact that she was gay

Victorian era ensemble: Kate looked demure as she was clad in a plaid skirt and navy coat, a brown scarf knotted around her neck and a leather satchel slung over one shoulder

Getting into character: The Titanic star wore gloves to protect herself from the winter chill, while she wore her brunette locks in a loose pinned-back style

Dressed up: Saoirse transformed into her character by wearing a heavy black gown, typical of the Victorian era, with white lace detailing around the collar

Cosy: During a break from filming, Kate and Saoirse spent time chatting with the crew and the Hanna star wrapped a rain coat around her chest to stay warm

Preparation: Kate spent time chatting with director Francis Lee before shooting began again

Barbara Anning, a distant niece who still lives near the Jurassic Coast where the fossil hunter made many discoveries, said there was no proof she was ever in a same-sex relationship.

Ms Anning, of Axminster, said: 'The lesbian storyline is pure Hollywood as far as I know and there was no suggestion that she was a lesbian at all. That's just what they do I suppose.'

The plot centres around the famous paleontologist, who becomes involved with a young woman sent to convalesce by the sea.

Saoirse plays her love interest in the film, 'a London woman of means to whom she must unexpectedly play nursemaid.'

Action! The pair filmed scenes which saw them walking along the beach as they conversed quietly to one another, while in another Kate ate a pasty as she joined Saoirse

In character: Kate walked along the beach as Saoirse sat on the sidelines in one scene

Drama: The plot centres around the famous paleontologist, who becomes involved with a young woman sent to convalesce by the sea

It is directed by Francis Lee, who was recognised at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 for God's Own Country.

Lyme Regis, famously depicted by novelist Jane Austen, has undergone a makeover ahead of the Hollywood duo descending upon the town.

The project marks Kate and Mary Queen Of Scots star Saorise's first collaboration on the big screen.

Anning's niece had previously written on an online forum: 'I do not believe there is any evidence to back up portraying her as a gay woman... I believe Mary Anning was abused because she was poor, uneducated and a woman. Is that not enough?'

Complaint: Barbara Anning, a distant niece to the fossil hunter, said there was no proof she was ever in a same-sex relationship

Getting ready: Crew members were seen carrying a large rock to a certain spot on the beach

Experts and fans of her work are also upset, claiming Miss Anning, who never married or had children, was 'interesting enough' without needing her life to be spiced up.

A fan society dedicated to the fossil finder called Mary Anning Rocks also objected to the plotline, including Harvard University geologist Bretton Carter, who said: 'I have mixed feelings about this movie.

'Being gay, I'm all about the inclusion of LGBTQ characters, but I feel like Mary Anning is an interesting enough person as she is, they didn't have to throw in same-sex affair with her (as it has no known historical basis).'

False? There is apparently no evidence that Anning, pictured, ever had a same-sex relationship

A spokesperson for the society added they would 'love Mary even more' if there was evidence she was gay, but hoped the director Francis Lee would treat her story with respect

The spokesperson said: 'We are all hoping the press has exaggerated the Mary being gay part! Francis Lee is an amazing writer/director, I doubt contrived gay scenes are his thing! I hope that wouldn't wash with a straight-talking, gay pig farmer from the Pennines!

'But don't get us wrong, if there was proof Mary, a working class, Victorian, self-educated powerhouse was also a lesbian we'd love her, even more.'

Slammed: Some on Facebook, including Harvard geologist Bretton Carter, pictured, have also criticised the film for adding the plot without historical basis

Anning is known for making major discoveries in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs at Lyme Regis and Charmouth.

Her work contributed to important changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life.

However, due to being a woman, she was prevented form joining the Geological Society of London and did not receive full credit for her findings.

It is also thought she was the inspiration for the 1908 tongue-twister 'She sells seashells on the seashore' by Terry Sullivan.
She has been enjoying a romantic break in Thailand with her beau Kris Boyson.

And Katie Price shared a glimpse into their trip with her Instagram followers, as she posted cosy selfies to her social media page on Friday morning.

The glamour model, 40, put on an amorous display with her toyboy lover, 30, as they frolicked by the pool during their sun-drenched break.

Loved-up! Katie Price shared a glimpse into their trip with her Instagram followers, as she posted cosy selfies to her social media page on Friday morning

In the snap, Katie put on a very busty display as she risked a wardrobe malfunction in the tiny mismatched orange and black bikini, which boasted a tiger print.

The mother-of-five boasted a full face of glamorous make-up despite her relaxed holiday attire, and swept her wavy blonde looks up into a ponytail.

Katie's boyfriend Kris went shirtless in the cosy snap, where he flashed a beaming white smile as he leaned in for the romantic picture.

Glowing: Katie also posted a sizzling clip of herself flaunting her sun-kissed tan, revealing her vibrant yellow bikini bottoms and showing off her bow inking

Katie also posted a sizzling clip of herself flaunting her sun-kissed tan, revealing her vibrant yellow bikini bottoms and showing off her bow inking.

The TV personality filmed down her body past her ample cleavage to reveal her trim midriff, as she enjoyed lunch with Kris at their Thai resort.

Katie and Kris' trip comes as she failed to turn up to court on March 13 over an alleged row with her ex Kieran Hayler's girlfriend Michelle Penticost.

Pout it out: The TV personality filmed down her body past her ample cleavage to reveal her trim midriff, as she enjoyed lunch with Kris at their Thai resort

Crawley Magistrates' Court has been forced to delay Katie's hearing because she is busy holidaying with Kris, who is rumoured to be proposing to her during the trip.

The former model was facing her third court case of the year after confronting Michelle at the school where she works as a teacher, allegedly asking her: 'Are you enjoying f***ing my husband?'

Judge Kelly, who was residing over the trial, said it would be 'tempting' to consider issuing an arrest warrant but she decided not to as the penalty for the offence was a fine.

The judge adjourned the hearing to March 20 as Price said she will not be available until March 18, presumably when she returns from her trip abroad.

Absent: Katie and Kris' trip comes as she failed to turn up to court on March 13 over an alleged row with her ex Kieran Hayler's girlfriend Michelle Penticost

A source close to Katie said she was 'unaware' of Wednesday's hearing but was 'fully prepared' for next week's date.

However it's not all bad news for Katie, as Kris is said to have brought an engagement ring with him on the trip and is waiting for the perfect moment to get down on one knee - but only when the camera is rolling.

Katie, who is still legally married to third husband Kieran Hayler, previously told her beau that if the proposal wasn't filmed for her reality show, then she'd say no.

Delayed: Crawley Magistrates' Court has been forced to delay Katie's hearing because she is busy holidaying with Kris, who is rumoured to be proposing to her during the trip

Now an insider has told The Sun that a proposal is imminent, revealing: 'Kris told all of Katie's friends that he's really serious about marrying her.

'Katie loves to get things filmed so she can watch them back  and of course, it'll make great telly.'

MailOnline previously contacted Katie and Kris' representatives for comment.
Keira Knightley has revealed that her favourite sex scene was in 2007's Atonement.

Speaking to Vulture, the British actress, 33, admitted that her favourite racy on-screen scene was with co-star James McAvoy, because the drama's director Joe Wright made her feel 'comfortable' and not at all 'exposed'.

Despite her lesbian sex scene in last year's Colette and another saucy scene in this year's The Aftermath, Keira admitted her scene alongside McAvoy was 'choreographed within an inch of its life.'

Racy confession: Keira Knightley, 33, has revealed that her favourite sex scene was in 2007's Atonement

'The best sex scene Ive done on-screen is the one in Atonement. It was both the best sex scene, but also [the best] to shoot,' she spoke of the intimate moment atop a bookshelf.

'It was absolutely, "Foot goes up there, hand goes up there". So both me and James [McAvoy] felt utterly comfortable and not exposed, and like we could deal with it. Its never gonna be fun, but we could deal with it.'

She has even used her experience shooting the scene over a decade to guide her current sex scenes as she explained The Aftermath's director James Kent assumed she and Alexander Skarsgard 'knew what they were doing'.

'So with James [Kent], I was like, "Youre the director, you know what you want from this, so you have to just tell us. And everyone will feel comfortable."'

Saucy: The actress admitted that her favourite racy scene was with co-star James McAvoy, because the drama's director Joe Wright made her feel 'comfortable' and not at all 'exposed'

'Foot goes there, hand goes there': Keira admitted her scene alongside McAvoy was 'choreographed within an inch of its life'

James has since admitted that he now approaches all sex scenes in the same way, stating: 'Keira asked me to narrate - [she said] otherwise, youre too conscious that were doing it. But if you narrate, it takes the awkwardness out of it, it becomes.'

Meanwhile, Keira absolutely stunned in a chartreuse-coloured dress as she headed down the red carpet for The Aftermath's special screening in New York on Wednesday.

The Pride & Prejudice star's floor-length frock featured sleeves and clung tightly around her neck.

Gorgeous: Keira absolutely stunned in a chartreuse-coloured dress as she headed down the red carpet for The Aftermath's special screening in New York on Wednesday

Keira stars as Rachel Morgan alongside Alexander Skarsgard in the post World War II period piece.

The flick follows Rachael Morgan as she arrives in the ruins of Hamburg to be reunited with her husband, Lewis, who is a British colonel charged with rebuilding the city.

As they set off for their new home in 1946, Rachael discovers that Lewis has made an unexpected decision to take over a German widower Stefan Lubert's home.
Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  In June 2018, desperate for income in Cordova, Cebu, a 22 year-old mother of two coerced young girls from her barangay to perform live sex shows online. In exchange for 3,000, she agreed to sexually abuse them in whatever way her foreign customer wanted  offering to do it all.

Authorities barged in the house where she lived, rescuing two 12-year-olds and one 15-year-old, just as they were to be stripped naked and exploited.

Five months later, a 45-year-old DJ was caught after a car chase with the police in Iloilo City. The man speeding off was accused of sending nude photos and videos of his 22-year-old ex-girlfriend to her family and friends after she ended their relationship.

When his car engine finally blew out and he was forced to pull over, the police confiscated his phone, laptop, and hard drive. He was later charged with the Anti-Violence Against Women and their Children Act and the Anti Photo and Video Voyeurism Act.

Earlier in 2018, a Manila-based reporter covering and critical of President Rodrigo Duterte revealed on a video posted by Rappler that she constantly receives threats of rape, violence and murder on social media.

Forced to be strong and brave in public, she has learned to take these intimidations as part of the job.

The online mapping of Take Back the Tech reports cases and tracks the trends and places where violence is saturated. Photo courtesy of TAKE BACK THE TECH

Fighting against online VAW

On November 23, 2018, two days before the launch of an 18-day campaign to end violence against women (VAW), these words were posted on the Facebook page of Take Back the Tech Philippines:

Gender-based violence is alive and well in digital spaces. It impacts women who express their thoughts, identities and sexualities on the Internet, as well as human rights defenders who are willing to challenge misogyny online.

Highlighting the pervading threats to women and children in the dark and sinister depths of the digital world, a group of feminists refuses to tolerate this violence. The women behind the Take Back the Tech campaign are reclaiming technology to fight against misogyny and create safe online spaces  actively educating the public on how online and offline VAW can be recognized, reported, and ultimately, ended.

In 2006, Jac sm Kee, leader of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) Women's Rights Programme, wrote a research paper investigating the connections between VAW and information and communications technologies (ICT). The paper opened up the critical dangers that women face in todays digital age  from blackmail, online harassment, cyberstalking, to hate speech. This research sparked the birth of the Take Back the Tech campaign.

Take Back the Tech has since gained momentum across the globe, spreading to countries like India, Cambodia, and South Africa. It has also won prestigious awards for its innovative awareness efforts. In 2010, the campaign finally reached the Philippines  where online violence plagues across classes and communities.

Case of Katrina Halili and the rise of legal action against online VAW

Lisa Garcia, executive director of the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA)  the nonprofit NGO that brought Take Back the Tech to the Philippines  recalls one of the first high-profile stories her team investigated in the country.

In 2010, Filipina actress Katrina Halili filed a case against cosmetic surgeon Hayden Kho, Jr. after their sex video circulated online  eventually leaking to a porn site and spreading worldwide. Halili claimed that she never consented to the video to be shared publicly. But because of a lack of evidence on who posted the video online, the judge dismissed the case.

The effects of public scrutiny and backlash on Halili left permanent psychological damages.

Lisa Garcia (pictured above) is the executive director of the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA)  the nonprofit NGO that brought Take Back the Tech to the Philippines  recalls one of the first high-profile stories her team investigated in the country. Photo courtesy of TAKE BACK THE TECH

We interviewed her, and she told us that when shes old, the video will still be there. Its in the digital world  it cant be erased, everything leaves a footprint, reveals Garcia. If you read the comment threads of the news back then, she was being vilified online. They called her a pokpok, a prostitute. Ang sama-sama daw niya.

Since she was a public figure, Halili dreaded leaving her home out of fear that people would look down on and condemn her  consequently affecting her ability to work. Kho, however, did not receive the same level of public criticism, recalls Garcia.

Nonetheless, Garcia applauded Halili for her bravery in speaking out and fighting for herself. After her case, the passage of the Anti Photo and Video Voyeurism Act was fast-tracked  protecting victims of sextortion and the non-consensual sharing of sex videos today.

Garcia, however, urges people to look beyond high-profile cases and at marginalized victims: What about those who do not know people who can help them? Those who do not have the capacity to file cases?

Understanding the damages of online violence

After an explosion of cyberporn cases in Cordova, Cebu a few years back, Garcia shares that their team flew there to meet the children under the protective custody of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). In many cases, poverty-stricken parents had exploited their children, selling their sexually explicit photos to foreigners online. In addition to suffering the wounds of the abuse, the children were agonized by the separation from their parents after they were caught and imprisoned.

Oftentimes, victims of online VAW do not consider their experiences as violence, because they have no evidence to show that they were hurt. Likewise, perpetrators think that because they hide behind screens and leave no physical scars or bruises, their words and actions do not harm.

Kawawa ang mga bata. Their parents were already in jail, yet the kids wanted them out of jail because they missed their parents. The parents claim that they dont have jobs, that they need to feed their families.

Garcia says many Filipinos still lack a proper grasp on online violence  causing victims to downplay their pain. And meeting with victims of online VAW has made their team understand the real and urgent damages that they suffer through.

Oftentimes, victims of online VAW do not consider their experiences as violence, because they have no evidence to show that they were hurt. Likewise, perpetrators think that because they hide behind screens and leave no physical scars or bruises, their words and actions do not harm.

Garcia believes that it is crucial for people to understand the gravity of online violence  that even though it occurs in the virtual space and no visible marks are seen, the damages it inflicts on victims are just as deep and disturbing.

Female journalists and activists, for instance, are constantly threatened and harassed online, especially during election season. These threats can easily move from online to offline  causing the women to perpetually live in fear.

Pag tinatakot ka na, it does something to you. You wouldnt know whether someone is stalking you in the offline world, and it might lead to something physical, says Garcia.

Garcia and her team thus aim to move beyond exposing the crimes and violations of online VAW, and onto stressing the aftermath of their physical or psychological harms.

Some cases lead to suicide, reveals Garcia.

The Aksyon-VAW is an app that shows true cases of identity theft, cyber-bullying, and harassment, which then gives users a chance to make step-by-step decisions if they were the victims. Photo courtesy of TAKE BACK THE TECH

Campaigning and educating the public

After listening to the harrowing stories and silenced cries of victims, the Take Back the Tech Philippines team has grown active on social media, amplifying the voices of survivors and partnering with other womens organizations to get their simple yet vital message across to the general public: its time for women to take control of technology to end VAW.

The FMA maps reported cases and tracks the trends and places where violence is saturated  using this data to brainstorm campaigns for Take Back the Tech.

Recognizing the privacy risks in sharing personal information online, they produced digital postcards on basic online safety and security. Understanding the power of sharing narratives, they created an interactive application called Aksyon-VAW, where they show true cases of identity theft, cyber-bullying, and harassment  giving users a chance to make step-by-step decisions if they were the victims.

The team is also active offline. They hold talks and trainings around the country to educate students, government workers, and members of other NGOs on both the risks and benefits for women online. The team actively joins rallies and mass actions against VAW, where they are unafraid to call out influential men in power  denouncing public officials and the president himself for their misogynistic remarks or actions, refusing to let them perpetuate a patriarchal culture that dehumanizes women.

On their Facebook page, they revisited history and featured the brave women leaders and organizations responsible for paving the way in fighting misogyny in the country: from the Women of Malolos (1888), who lobbied for education reforms at the end of the Spanish era, to the MAKIBAKA (Free Movement of New Women) (1970), who picketed against the commercialization of sex and degradation of women during a beauty pageant.

Almost a decade since they began campaigning in the Philippines, it may not be far-fetched to say that the feminists behind Take Back the Tech have rightfully earned their place among the ranks of these revolutionary women.
Cheat viewers were left furious on Thursday night as they spotted a gaping plot hole in the shocking finale of the four-piece drama.

The ITV1 drama, starring Katherine Kelly and Molly Windsor as Leah and Rose, follows the story of uni student Rose who is accused of cheating on an essay by professor Leah, leading to a campaign of terrorism and Leah's husband's death.

As it was revealed that Rose was Adam's murderer - after a captivating 'Whodunnit?' scenario - the wicked student told her sister that she had murdered Adam in cold blood rather than self-defense, which she had been originally charged with.

Uh oh! Cheat viewers were left furious on Thursday night as they spotted a gaping plot hole in the shocking finale of the four-piece drama

Since hitting screens on Monday, Cheat has left viewers captivated as the story plays out of Leah accusing student Rose of plagiarising on an essay - leading to Rose's revenge mission which led to steamy moments with Adam.

Flash-forward scenes showed the student and professor chatting through a prison plexiglass over Adam's death however it was revealed on Thursday that it was Rose who had committed the murder, yet only got two years for self-defense.

After she is visited by Leah - who turned out to be her half sister - she divulges that she lied to the police and she was not defending herself but killing in cold blood.

Rose gave the details of the lie she told to Leah during the visit however fans pointed out that police must have been recording the exchange.

Oh no: The ITV1 drama, starring Katherine Kelly and Molly Windsor as Leah and Rose, follows the story of uni student Rose who is accused of cheating on an essay by professor Leah, leading to a campaign of terrorism and Leah's husband's death

Users penned: 'So many unanswered questions. Why did the porter do everything Rose asked unquestioningly? Are prison visits not supervised? Why kill another pet? And most importantly DID SHE CHEAT?! #Cheat...

'Strange ending to #cheat. Surely the prison staff listened to Roses conversation admitting she actually murdered him? Plus such a short sentence for manslaughter. Oh well, watchable nevertheless!...

'Do the prison staff not listen to this girls conversation admitting shes actually murdered him... What type of unrealistic prison visiting room was that #cheat... Sooooooo the prison staff not gonna be monitoring this conversation no?'

Another point was made that Rose only served two years in prison for her crime, which many insisted was implausible for a murder.

Shocker: 'Strange ending to #cheat. Surely the prison staff listened to Roses conversation admitting she actually murdered him? Plus such a short sentence for manslaughter. Oh well, watchable nevertheless!'

While fans were wild for the show, bosses have confirmed there has been "no talk" of extending its success with another run of episodes in the future.

An ITV spokesperson told The Sun newspaper's Bizarre TV column: 'Cheat was conceived as a self-contained four part drama. There's been no talk of another season as it was only ever planned as a standalone series.'

The confirmation comes after Katherine previously admitted she didn't think another series was likely. Speaking about the possibility, she said: "It's never even been mentioned...

Shocker: While fans were wild for the show, bosses have confirmed there has been "no talk" of extending its success with another run of episodes in the future

'As you'll see on Thursday night, we don't hold anything back... So it would be the first I've ever heard of it.

The 39-year-old actress previously insisted she wasn't worried about the success of the show because she knows ratings are impossible to predict.

She said: 'You can never predict the popularity of a show and I actually feel like it's none of my business how well it does.'
They have been loving life in the Maldives following their idyllic wedding last week and romantic honeymoon.

Yet Billie Faiers and her new husband Greg Shepherd proved all good things must come to an end on Friday as they were spotted touching down at Gatwick Airport.

The 29-year-old former TOWIE star had her eyes on the prize as she arrived, by heading straight to a newsagent to grab a copy of OK! Magazine, where their raucous nuptials were featured in a vast spread.

The happy couple: Billie Faiers and her new husband Greg Shepherd proved all good things must come to an end on Friday as they were spotted touching down at Gatwick Airport

Billie and Greg, who share Nelly, four, and Arthur, two, wed in an idyllic ceremony last Tuesday on the island of Kuramathi after a five-year engagement.

Their nuptials have been marred with controversy after they were accused of ruining a host of fellow holidaymakers' trips due to their guests' raucous behaviour.

And while they remained defiant about the antics, the couple shirked their woes to enjoy their honeymoon with a prolonged and child-free stay in the Maldives.

Yet on Friday they were back on home land, as Billie touched down while sporting a peach tracksuit with a snakeskin insert at the top.

Here she goes: The 29-year-old former TOWIE star had her eyes on the prize as she arrived, by heading straight to a newsagent to grab a copy of OK! Magazine, where their raucous nuptials were featured in a vast spread

Starring role: Billie was checking out her magazine cover as she headed through the airport

Having a read? Billie was undoubtedly preparing to leaf through the copy to check out the stunning shots

While the couple were no doubt hoping for a chilled-out return home, they were in fact interrupted by Billie's sister Sam and her family.

Taking to Instagram, Sam filmed her sister, who was reclining next to Greg while they were surrounded by Sam, her boyfriend Paul Knightley and their two toddlers.

Writing over the top of the shot, Sam wrote: 'Just when they thought they had a peaceful flight home from their honeymoon... hey sis!'

Uh oh! Writing over the top of the shot, Sam wrote: 'Just when they thought they had a peaceful flight home from their honeymoon... hey sis!'

Reading up: Yet on Friday they were back on home land, as Billie touched down while sporting a peach tracksuit with a snakeskin insert at the top

Happy days: The stunner looked overjoyed to be Mrs Shepherd at last

Billie and Greg idyllic nuptials have been sending fans wild over the past week, with devoted followers keen to know the ins and outs. The happy newlyweds gave delighted fans an insight into the stunning festivities in their OK! Magazine spread.

After streams of reports about the big day, the couple set the record straight as they revealed hilarious details, including the fact that Greg's three best men performed a spoof of their show The Mummy Diaries and Billie's annoyance at Greg's 'epic fail'.

One of the highlights was undoubtedly when Greg's three best men created a Mummy Diaries spoof as Greg revealed: 'They had some help from The Mummy Diaries crew so they created a spoof episode...

Hometime! Billie and Greg, who share Nelly, four, and Arthur, two, wed in an idyllic ceremony last Tuesday on the island of Kuramathi after a five-year engagement

Packed up: While Billie treated Greg to a Cartier belt and cufflinks, the groom did not realise wedding gifts were 'a thing' to which she responded: 'Epic fail, Greg!'

Happy days: Billie and Greg, who share Nelly, four, and Arthur, two, wed in an idyllic ceremony last Tuesday on the island of Kuramathi after a five-year engagement

'They were taking the mick out of how long it took to get my Instagram verification.'

While Billie treated Greg to a Cartier belt and cufflinks, the groom did not realise wedding gifts were 'a thing' to which she responded: 'Epic fail, Greg!'

Clearly disheartened, she pushed: 'Every time the door went on my wedding day I was thinking that will be my present but it never arrived!'

Check it out! She could not wait to get her hands on a copy following the trip

Yay! She was catching up on her reading as she hit the airport

You're in trouble! Clearly disheartened, she pushed: 'Every time the door went on my wedding day I was thinking that will be my present but it never arrived!'
They braved the elements at the Chelthenham Festival on Tuesday.

But it appears the wet whether wasn't enough to deter Richard Hammond and his wife Mindy, as they returned to the racecourse with their two daughters, Willow, 15, and Isabella, 18, on Friday.

The Grand Tour host, 49, arrived at Cheltenham Racecourse wearing a plaid green three-piece suit, which he teamed with a pale blue shirt and a moss green tie.

Family outing: Richard Hammond and his wife Mindy arrived at Cheltenham Racecourse with their two daughters, Willow, 15, (R) and Isabella, 18, (L) on Friday

His glamorous wife opted for traditional racing dress, as she rocked a pair tweed waist coat, tartan coat and a fedora adorned with feathers.

Underneath her striking jacket, Mindy wore a pair of form-fitting white jeans with a white blouse, while draping a slouchy brown leather bag over her shoulder.

The heavy winds and rain proved challenging for the former Top Gear host, as he grappled with an umbrella in a bid to keep his family dry.

Dapper: The Grand Tour host, 49, arrived at Cheltenham Racecourse wearing a plaid green three-piece suit, which he teamed with a pale blue shirt and a moss green tie

Glam: His glamorous wife opted for traditional racing dress, as she rocked a pair tweed waist coat, tartan coat and a fedora adorned with feathers

Richard has a passion for horse racing and owns several horses on his farm, which he shares with Mindy and his two daughters.

Speaking of how riding horses compares to driving cars, he told the Racing Post last month: 'I've tried riding horses and know only which way to sit  looking at the sharp-end and not the round backend  and point them, looking through their ears.'

Richard has recently ditched his walking aid, 20 months on from his near-fatal crash in the Swiss countryside.

The television presenter was airlifted to hospital after flipping a 2million electric supercar, which then burst into flames as he filmed The Grand Tour in June 2017.

All smiles: Underneath her striking jacket, Mindy wore a pair of form-fitting white jeans with a white blouse, while draping a slouchy brown leather bag over her shoulder

Struggling: The heavy winds and rain proved challenging for the former Top Gear host, as he grappled with an umbrella in a bid to keep his family dry

The car burned at temperatures of 1200 to 1500 degrees. It was hosed with cold water for eight hours before a tow truck could safely remove it.

Hammond miraculously escaped the fireball with little more than a fractured knee and was 'conscious and talking' after freeing himself from the vehicle.

After his crash, Mindy revealed she had told him: 'I did say three strikes and youre out. Youve had two goes.

'He has one of these every ten years so Ive marked the next one in my diary.

Passionate: Richard has a passion for horse racing and owns several horses on his farm, which he shares with Mindy and his two daughters
Barbara Palvin says becoming Victoria's Secret's newest Angel is the 'ultimate career high'.

The 25-year-old model - who has worked with the lingerie giant intermittently for over six years - will be joining the brand as their first-ever Hungarian model, and the star admitted that the new move came at a perfect time because she is 'finally' happy in herself and her body.

Speaking to PEOPLE, she said: 'I've been keeping this a secret for three months.It's the ultimate career high!'

Her dream: Barbara Palvin says becoming Victoria's Secret's newest Angel is the 'ultimate career high'

He approves: Her actor beau Dylan Sprouse said he was proud of his girlfriend

She added, 'When I was 13, I saw the VS Fashion Show and said, "One day I will get there." Three or four years later, I shot with Victoria's Secret PINK for the first time.

'Now, I feel like I was destined to do this. Victoria's Secret caught me at the perfect time, because I'm finally happy with myself and my body.'

The model first walked in the legendary Victoria's Secret Fashion show in 2012 and modelled in multiple campaigns before returning to the catwalk for 2018's iconic New York show.

Her strut: Palvin walks the runway during the 2012 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show at the Lexington Avenue Armory in New York City in 2012

And now Palvin will be joining the likes of resident Angels Elsa Hosk, Romee Strijd, Jasmine Tookes and Stella Maxwell.

Palvin - who is in a relationship with actor Dylan Sprouse - has revealed that her beau 'couldn't believe' the news but always 'knew' she would make it as a permanent angel for the prestigious label.

She added: 'He couldn't believe it. Then he was like, "I told you. I knew it."'

He also said on Instagram, 'The missus has a big announcement, officially a VS angel! Proud of all the work you've done leading up to this and here's to more years of success and a little less Ben and Jerry's ice cream.'

Palvin then ran downstairs at 5:30 a.m. to tell her parents the happy news.

She said: 'They were half-asleep, but they were freaking out. First they thought something was wrong, but then I repeated myself and they were so happy. My mom cried a little bit, and my dad fist-bumped my shoulder, like he usually does.'

Another walk down the catwalk: Here the beauty is seen at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in New York in November

The brunette beauty posted a video on Instagram announcing the much-anticipated news on Thursday where she shared a clip showcasing her previous work with lingerie brand.

She wrote: 'OFFICIALLY A @victoriassecret ANGEL ! I don't know where to begin but I'll try : I never thought it would happen and it has exceeded all my expectations. I'm very excited to announce that I'm officially a @victoriassecret ANGEL ! Thank you for believing in me.

'There were times where I let my own thoughts hold me back and it was a hard climb away from those but my family , my team, Ed, and everyone at VS they were always there to support me and uplift me. I am proud to represent Hungary, and most importantly, all of you in this new chapter of my life! Thank you all so much again.'
Jason Sudeikis is stepping in for Ellen Friday's episode of her show.

And the comic, 43, admitted he was a very, very big fan of the comedienne during his college days during his time.

'I had a crush on her, a full blown crush on her' Jason revealed, 'I thought she was hilarious, beautiful blue eyes.'

Smitten: Jason Sudeikis admitted to having a crush on Ellen during his college days while guest hosting her talk show for Friday's episode

'At this point I didn't have any idea that she might not be... interested in me. Or someone like me, with my physical make up,' he bumbled.

'You know, having some things. Lacking others.'

'So then once I found out Ellen was gay, that wasn't easy for me. But I moved on. There's other fish in the sea,' joked the husband of Olivia Wilde, who later called the Booksmart director his 'true love.'

Before dishing about his crush he explained why the stand-up meant so much to him, saying: 'I grew up idolizing Ellen, she was actually a big hero of mine...'

Object of his affection: 'I had a crush on her, a full blown crush on her' Jason revealed, 'I thought she was hilarious, beautiful blue eyes' he dished

She's just not that into you: 'At this point I didn't have any idea that she might not be... interested in me. Or someone like me, with my physical make up,' he bumbled

Honored guest: During his hosting gig, the SNL alum was visited by actor Max Greenfield

Chit-chat: Max and Jason talked about being parents and his show The Neighborhood

'When I was in college, community college to be specific... I used to write this newsletter and I would talk about what a fan of hers I was. And I covered all the important Ellen stories of the day.'

Comedic timing was Jason's buddy as he told audiences: 'At that point this was in the 90s, [so I wrote] about the big rumor that she was coming out - to our college.

During his hosting gig, the SNL alum was visited by actor Max Greenfield and inspiring Do-Gooder Andre McDonnell of Brooklyn, New York.

Fun and games: The duo celebrated St. Patrick's Day with a game of Head's Up

The luck of the Irish: Jason was sassy while sporting all green and getting on his knees to be a

Max and Jason chatted about being parents and his show The Neighborhood before celebrating St. Patrick's Day with a game of Head's Up.

After that, Jason spoke with the inspiring Andre McDonnell, who has given over 25k pairs of shoes to the underprivileged via his non-profit It's From The Sole.

The Horrible Bosses star gave Andrew a check for $10k for the cause, courtesy of Shutterfly.

Ellen airs weekdays. Check local listings for channels and time.

Heart and sole: Jason spoke with the inspiring Andre McDonnell, who has given over 25k pairs of shoes to the underprivileged via his non-profit It's From The Sole
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This 5ft9in bombshell was a lingerie model for Victoria's Secret for many years.

And now Alessandra Ambrosio, along with her best her sister and one of her best friends, has launched her own lifestyle brand called GAL Floripa which has the tagline, 'Created in the Magic Island.' And the line offers plenty playful swimwear.

The Brazilian beauty shared a look at the bikinis and one pieces on Instagram on Friday.

Mogul: This 5ft9in bombshell was a lingerie model for Victoria's Secret for many years. And now Alessandra Ambrosio, along with her best her sister and one of her best friends, has launched her own lifestyle brand

Magic indeed: The brand, which features plenty of swimwear, is called GAL Floripa; the tagline, 'Created in the Magic Island'

Take a good look: The Brazilian beauty shared a look at the bikinis and one pieces on Instagram on Friday

Alessandra worked with her sister Aline Ambrosio and best friend Gisele Coria and they are manufacturing the product in Brazil.

'We always had this dream. We grew up in Florianopolis, which is an island south of Brazil, and swim was always like our second skin,' the model told People.

'We were always in a swimsuit going from one beach to another and always wanted to have a bikini shop there one day.

'That was our dream when we were 18.'

And it's for all shapes: 'Everyone should feel good wearing a swimsuit because it shows your body,' she said. 'You shouldn't be self-conscious about it. We all have different shapes and need to embrace that. We need to love who we are because that's all we have anyway. If we don't love who we are, who are we going to love?'

Model logic: 'Everyone should feel good wearing a swimsuit because it shows your body,' she said

Dreamy: 'You shouldn't be self-conscious about it. We all have different shapes and need to embrace that,' said the very slender supermodel

She also said it's important to be happy in your suit.

'We work all year long to take those vacations and we take those vacations and we go somewhere nice and warm and we need to feel as good as it gets.'

The name of their brand is a combination of the letters in their names (Gisele+ALessandra+ALine) and a tribute to their favorite beach spot they told the site.

Sitting pretty: The mother of two added, 'We need to love who we are because that's all we have anyway. If we don't love who we are, who are we going to love?'

Not a lot of material on this outfit: One of the bikinis is very skimpy with shells on the strings in front and on the sides

Their Galactic Sun collection features one-piece and two-piece swimsuits.

There is a '70s-inspired 'out of this world' feel.

Alessandra's last swimwear line is Ale by Alessandra.

'It was so much fun to create the collection. We chose our favorite cuts for the swimwear and from there chose colors and fabrics,' said Alessandra.

Dream big: Alessandra worked with her sister Aline Ambrosio and best friend Gisele Coria and they are manufacturing the product in Brazil. 'We always had this dream. We grew up in Florianopolis, which is an island south of Brazil, and swim was always like our second skin,' the model told People

'We chose comfortable fabrics that had a little bit of shimmer and they're a little bit iridescent,' she said.

'We have four different types of bottoms and five different types of tops that you can kind of mix and match and just whatever makes your body feel comfortable and gives the nice shape that you're looking for'.

And she revealed the inspiration for the name of the swim line. 'I was like re-watching one of my favorite movies, Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, and this song came up [on the soundtrack]. And there's this part where it says "the galactic sun" and I was like "Oh my God!" So I called them  it was super late  and I was like "I got the name for the collection!" And they were so excited and loved it,' she said.

Prices ranging from $88 to 228.

The trio: 'We were always in a swimsuit going from one beach to another and always wanted to have a bikini shop there one day. 'That was our dream when we were 18'
They shared a cheeky kiss during filming in Thailand after months of flirting.

But Shelby Tribble has revealed she has been left disrespected and disappointed by her close friend Sam Mucklow following their fling, making filming for the 24th series of TOWIE extremely awkward.

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Shelby, 26, confessed things had become extremely tense between them  and it seems Sam even gave the press day a miss so they wouldnt have to come face-to-face.

Upsetting: Shelby Tribble has revealed she has been left disrespected and disappointed by her close friend Sam Mucklow following their fling, making filming for the 24th series of TOWIE extremely awkward

Feeling a little jetlagged, the cast are fresh from their Thailand getaway where they enjoyed some sun, sand and the usual dose of drama.

It had been reported that Shelby and Sam  who is the younger brother of former cast member Billi Mucklow  had enjoyed a night of passion in Thailand, and the brunette admitted he had snogged her 'so passionately' that he 'ripped off her lip'.

It seems there was trouble in paradise since the Miss England finalist has now revealed their friendship has been left in tatters by the hook up.

Discussing how things had changed, she said: Its very awkward. Its just sad because I counted him as one of my very close friends.

I feel a bit disrespected and disappointed in him as a friend. Forget the romantic side of it or whatever that was, I never saw it as that.

Obviously I fancy him, of course I do, I was always scared that we would ruin the friendship. Things have happened and I just felt very disrespected by him.

It isnt nice, you wouldnt expect that from a friend. Were not speaking at the minute.

Clash: Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Shelby, 26, confessed things had become extremely tense between them following their holiday romance

She said: It isnt nice, you wouldnt expect that from a friend. Were not speaking at the minute'. Shelby and Sam, who is Billi Mucklow's brother, had been close for years

Shelby admitted his reluctance to make amends had hurt her due to the years of friendship they have shared.

Its so weird because, especially me and Clelia [Theodorou], we spent so much time outside of filming as friends. Weve had so many good times, Ive been to his sisters wedding, she said.

Weve done so many fun things together. Its just sad. Hes always the one to give good advice and support, hes gone and ruined that.

I dont think we can get back to the place we were before. I dont really trust him anymore, you should be able to trust your friends.

Fans of the ITVBe show might be surprised to learn that when things were going down in Thailand, it was none other than her ex Pete Wicks who came to her rescue.

Back in the UK: Feeling a little jetlagged, the cast are fresh from their Thailand getaway where they enjoyed some sun, sand and the usual dose of drama

Its safe to say Shelby and Pete left things on frosty terms when their relationship ended in September last year, with the reality star telling him to 'grow the f**k up' after she caught him sexting another girl.

The stunning model has put her heartbreak firmly behind her, describing Pete as a real gentleman who offered support and advice in her time of need.

Shelby explained: Hes been incredible. Apart from the girls, he has been my next biggest support. Hes been a complete gentleman to me as well.

He knows my insecurities, he knows everything about me. Hes been so supportive because Ive had quite a bit of drama. I cant fault him at all.

The star revealed she was delighted they had managed to salvage their friendship, and has missed his sense of humour.

'He's been a gentleman': Fans of the ITVBe show might be surprised to learn that when things were going down in Thailand, it was none other than her ex Pete Wicks who came to her rescue

Seeing double: Shelby has even been tuning in to Celebs Go Dating to watch Petes antics, including a date with a swimsuit model who looked just like her

Its such a nice feeling, working with your ex isnt an ideal situation, youre forced to be together. Im glad weve got the friendship back, she said.

Her pals  Chloe Meadows, Courtney Green and Clelia  were in agreement, branding the tattooed star a whole new Pete.

Revealing he had been a bit frosty in the past, Chloe Meadows said: My opinion on Pete has really, really changed. Not that we didnt see eye to eye, but we never really spoke. He has been so nice, hes giving us the time of day.

Shelby has even been tuning in to Celebs Go Dating to watch Petes antics, but says she wasnt surprised to see him hit it off with a swimsuit model who looked just like her.

Ive been watching him on Celebs Go Dating  brunette, blue eyes hes certainly got a type!, she smiled coyly.

The Only Way Is Essex returns on Sunday night at 9pm on ITVBe.
Her husband Mauricio Umansky is being sued for fraud in federal court.

But Kyle Richards put on a happy face when she was seen emerging from a private event at Balmain on Melrose Place in West Hollywood on Thursday evening.

Accompanied by pretty female pals, the 50-year-old Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills star cut a stylish figure as she was seen dripping in diamonds.

Lap of luxury: Kyle Richards put on a happy face when she was glimpsed this Thursday emerging from the Balmain on Melrose Place in West Hollywood

Kyle modeled a black and gold outfit with open toe heels.

Wearing her dark hair down, the TV star accentuated her unmistakable features with makeup and added a splash of color to the look with a scarlet purse.

Mauricio is the founder and CEO of the real estate brokerage firm The Agency, and he and his company are now facing down a federal fraud lawsuit.

Plaintiff Sweetwater Malibu LLC owned a mansion in Malibu that Mauricio sold for $32.5 million to real estate developer Mauricio Oberfeld, The Blast reports.

Place to be: Accompanied by female pals, the 50-year-old Real Housewife Of Beverly Hills cut a snappy figure in a gleaming black trouser suit and pleated pale gold top

The two Mauricios had allegedly partnered up to buy the mansion, which was then resold a year on for a grand total of $69.9 million.

Sweetwater Malibu LLC claim they were never told the Mauricios were in cahoots to purchase the home, which shares a gated community with Dick Van Dyke's house.

They also say that when they were selling the property, Mauricio never told them about competing offers much more generous than the $32.5 million they got.

The suit slated Mauricio for alleged 'blatant acts of self-dealing, earning secret profits, and both failing to disclose and outright misrepresenting material facts.'

Swell: Kyle, whose former child star sister Kim Richards has struggled with alcoholism and also used to be a Real Housewife, balanced on open-toed black heels

Sweetwater Malibu LLC got their hands on the house after the government took it from Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, vice president of Equatorial Guinea.

Teodoro, whose father happens to be the president of the country, was suspected of having plundered Equatorial Guinea's finances to buy the mansion.

He ultimately fell afoul of U.S. Justice Department's 'Kleptocracy Initiative' and gave his house to the government as part of his settlement.

The 2014 deal also saw Teodoro relinquish a Ferrari and some Michael Jackson memorabilia, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Contrast: Wearing her dark hair down, Kyle accentuated her unmistakable features with makeup and added a splash of color to the look with a scarlet purse

Kyle shares three daughters with Mauricio, who is her second husband and with whom she rang in her 22nd wedding anniversary last year.

Along with 11-year-old Portia, the dynamic duo also share Alexia, 22, and Sophia, 19, who respectively graduated and started college over the past year.

Kyle also has 30-year-old daughter Farrah Aldjufrie, whom she welcomed with her first husband Guraish Aldjufrie, a real estate developer.

Family matters: Kyle shares three daughters with Mauricio Umansky, who is her second husband and with whom she rang in her 22nd wedding anniversary last year
After spending 41 months in prison for mail, wire and bankruptcy fraud, Joe Giudice is facing possible deportation to Italy.

During the Thursday launch of Joe Gorga's book The Gorga Guide to Success, Melissa Gorga said her sister-in-law and Real Housewives Of New Jersey co-star Teresa Giudice is 'being strong.'

Teresa's husband Joe was taken to an immigration detention center after his release from Allenwood Low Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania on Thursday.

Being strong: Teresa Giudice' sister in law Melissa Gorga says Teresa is 'being strong' after husband Joe was released from prison as he faces deportation; seen in NYC on Thursday

She made the party too: Teresa was also at the book event wearing a black suit

Joe Gorga, Teresa's brother, added, 'She's hanging in there, what else can she do?

'At least he is out and he has a 50/50 shot. Well see what happens,' Joe added in his interview with Extra.

Extra also caught up with Teresa at her brother's book launch, but she would not discuss the release of her husband.

Husband's release: Extra also caught up with Teresa at her brother's book launch, but she would not discuss the release of her husband

Pointers: When asked if she gave her brother any pointers when it came to his book, The Gorga Guide to Success, the Real Housewives of New Jersey star said she did

When asked if she gave her brother any pointers when it came to his book, The Gorga Guide to Success, the Real Housewives of New Jersey star said she did.

'Of course I did, I am a New York Times best-selling author,' Teresa said. 'What do you think?'

She also added that she was doing yoga on the day her husband was released, adding, 'I need it, I need it.'

Teresa and Joe Giudice will celebrate their 20th anniversary this year, but if Joe is ultimately deported to Italy, their marriage may be over.

Five years ago: The Giudices outside a federal criminal court in 2014 in Newark, New Jersey

While Teresa had said in previous interviews that she would move her kids Gia, 18, Gabriella, 15, Milania, 14 and Audirana, 10, to Italy to be with Joe, she backtracked.

Teresa admitted during the Real Housewives of New Jersey reunion that a long-distance relationship would not work.

'I'm not doing a long distance relationship. I'm not doing it,' Teresa told RHONJ reunion host Andy Cohen. 'I want somebody with me every day.'

As for moving her family to Italy to be with Joe, she said they wouldn't go, unless her kids say, 'Mommy, we want to move to Italy.'

College bound: 'Gia's going to college next year; I haven't spoken to Milania or Audriana about it, we haven't gotten there yet; and Gabriella already voiced her opinion to me,' Giudice said

'Gia's going to college next year; I haven't spoken to Milania or Audriana about it, we haven't gotten there yet; and Gabriella already voiced her opinion to me,' Giudice said.

'She was like, "That would be so hard for me, Mommy." She doesn't speak the language. She's like, "That would kill me even more."'

Giudice admitted that she's sure 'he'll be with other women,' though she didn't comment about her being spotted with a much younger man, Blake Schreck, in Miami last month.
Ice-T and Coco Austin were seen on Thursday afternoon in New Jersey pampering themselves by stopping by a nail salon.

The 39-year-old beauty got her nails painted a bright pink color while her 61-year-old actor husband had his toes taken care of.

The couple that wed 14 years ago must have left their daughter Chanel, aged three, at home with a nanny.

Quality time: Ice-T and Coco Austin were glimpsed this Thursday pampering themselves by stopping by a nail salon in New Jersey

Coco slipped into a black, white and bubblegum pink pair of fitted trousers that clashed against her simple black V-neck top. She added a bright pink pair of sneakers that matched her lipstick, accessorizing with a large black leather handbag.

Her blonde hair was in a ponytail.

Adding a splash of glitz with hoop earrings, Coco shielded her eyes from the rays with a pair of purple-tinted sunglasses that featured pink temples.

What an outfit: Coco, 39, slipped into a black, white and bubblegum pink pair of fitted trousers that clashed against her simple black V-neck top

Family history: She has been married since 2002 to Ice-T, who is 22 years her senior and with whom she shares a two-year-old daughter called Chanel

Legging it: She slipped into a bright pink pair of sneakers that matched her lipstick, accessorizing with a large black leather handbag

Looking fab: Her blonde hair, which drew predictable claims of cultural appropriation last year when she wore cornrows she called 'Da Coco Swoop,' was in a ponytail

Tres chic: Adding a splash of glitz with hoop earrings, Coco shielded her eyes from the rays with a pair of purple-tinted sunglasses that featured pink temples

While out with his wife Thursday, Ice-T could be seen wearing a Black Lives Matter hoodie and a pair of black trousers with glinting matching sneakers.

Last month, the family of three jetted off to the Dominican Republic for a seaside holiday, staying at the Hard Rock Hotel And Casino in Punta Cana.

Mrs. Ice-T dished to Life And Style late in 2017 that she suspects Coco's Chanel will be 'my one and only' offspring, as 'I only wanted one child.'

Dashing: While out with his wife Thursday, Ice-T could be seen wearing a Black Lives Matter hoodie and a pair of black trousers with glinting matching sneakers

Jet set: Last month, the family of three traveled to the Dominican Republic for a seaside holiday, staying at the Hard Rock Hotel And Casino in Punta Cana

She explained: 'The fact that we travel so much, its already hard with one kid and a dog, so Im good for now. Id much rather have a lot of dogs! They fill my heart.'

Coco told Life And Style: 'I call Chanel my human liposuction! I was a lot bigger, then when I got pregnant with her she sucked the fat out of me.'

She recalled: 'I was like: "What the heck? I need to be pregnant my whole life!" Then when I had her, that's when the weight came back on. It easily came on faster - but now that I'm a mom I don't [worry] so much about being in shape.'

Happy with the status quo: Mrs. Ice-T dished to Life And Style late in 2017 that she suspects Coco's Chanel will be 'my one and only' offspring, as 'I only wanted one child'
Emily Ratajkowski appeared in new images for Inamorata on Friday.

The 27-year-old I Feel Pretty actress wore white, beige and black lingerie in several photos shared to Instagram. The brunette bombshell was in a bedroom as she wore little makeup and seemed ready for bed.

This is a stark contrast from earlier ads that saw the wife of Sebastian Bear-McClard wearing lingerie while in a convenience store.

Model time: Emily Ratajkowski appeared in new images for Inamorata on Friday. The 27-year-old I Feel Pretty actress wore lingerie in several photos shared to Instagram

In February Emily said, 'A little over a year of @inamoratawoman and Im so thrilled to finally share what Ive been working on for you guys.

'Introducing BODY, a category that is so much more than lingerie. I hope you guys love it as much as I do,' said the Vogue model.

The word 'inamorata' is borrowed from Italian language and means 'a woman someone is in love with.'

New campaign: In February Emily said, 'A little over a year of @inamoratawoman and Im so thrilled to finally share what Ive been working on for you guys'

In late 2017, Harper's Bazaar UK published a story about Ratajkowski's impending release of her own swimwear brand after Emrata Holdings LLC acquired the trademark to Inamorata in 2017.

The website for the bathing suit line, inamorataswim.com, went live on November 16, 2017 with three bikini separates and three one-pieces.

The initial bathing suit line debuted at prices ranging from $75 to $160.

This week Emily was attacked on Instagram for what some considered an unfair comparison to her fuller-figured friend.

Amor: The word 'inamorata' is borrowed from Italian language and means 'a woman someone is in love with'

In the comments section, the Gone Girl actress reportedly countered: 'All these haters are crazy. Just because youre used to seeing one body type on the internet doesnt mean that thats the only kind that should be considered "beautiful."'

'Why would she subject her friend to this humiliation and online bullying by posting this?' one user asked of the model in the photo's comments section.

Another person wrote, 'You specifically posted a photo so that it was clear your body is better than the body of your friend.'

Yet another added: 'Being fat is not beautiful nor healthy: let's not be hypocrite please.'

Oh hi there: In this image the star showed off her bottom in a black lace outfit

Emily was using the post to advertise her own Inamorata swimwear range.

The brunette beauty often referred to as 'Emrata' then lashed out via her popular Instagram Stories.

Referring to her friend Caitlin King, with whom she appeared in the picture, Ratajkowski wrote, 'I love my girl's body and her and I both think she looks great here and that this is a very cute pic of us getting severe sunburns.'

Just sitting around all made up: Here she wore a beige top an old leather chair was seen in the background

'I'm proud she wears my suits,' she continued.

'Different bodies are beautiful and I hope y'all learn that soon.'

This is a stark contrast from earlier ads that saw her in a convenience store

Emily and Sebastian have been married since at least February 2018.

The beauty took to Instagram at the time to announce that she and her new husband wed in a courthouse.

The news came as a surprise to fans of the star, as she was in a long-term relationship with Jeff Magid from 2014 to 2017.

Emily began her career at 14, when she signed with Ford as a model.

Since her early modeling beginnings, the beauty has branded herself also as an 'actress, feminist, designer.'

Next up, the London-born star will appear in the TV movie, Bright Futures, alongside Lisa Kudrow.

She'll also star in the crime drama, Lying and Stealing, with Theo James.
As Michael Gandolfini gets ready to step into his late father James Gandolfini's footsteps, the actor has visited a landmark from The Sopranos.

The 19-year-old actor was pictured in the now-famed 'Sopranos booth' at Holsten's ice cream parlor in Bloomfield, New Jersey, where the iconic final scene was filmed.

Gandolfini was announced in January to play his late father's beloved mobster character Tony Soprano in a new prequel, which, according to Deadline, has been given the new title The Many Saints of Newark, and a September 25, 2020 release.

Famous booth: James Gandolfini's son Michael visits the famous booth where The Sopranos finale was filmed

The photo of Michael Gandolfini was shared by Holsten's Facebook page, which was captioned, 'Wow look who stopped by, it's Michael Gandolfini, James Gandolfini's son.'

The young actor was smiling while sitting in the booth, with a sign visible that reads, 'This booth is reserved for the Soprano family.'

He was sitting in the same spot as his father when the final scene of The Sopranos finale was filmed, which was, and still is, considered quite controversial.

Sopranos finale: He was sitting in the same spot as his father when the final scene of The Sopranos finale was filmed, which was, and still is, considered quite controversial

In the show's final scene, Gandolfini's Tony Soprano visits Holsten's with his wife Carmela (Edie Falco) and his son Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler) after an investigation was launched into his ties with the mafia.

As other patrons enter the ice cream parlor, Tony keeps looking to the door, checking to see who enters the diner, as Journey's Don't Stop Believing plays on the jukebox.

As Tony's daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) runs up to the diner, the bell over the door dings, as Tony looks up and the series cuts to black, leaving fans with an ambiguous ending that was rather controversial.

Mafia ties: In the show's final scene, Gandolfini's Tony Soprano visits a local diner with his wife Carmela (Edie Falco) and his son Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler) after an investigation was launched into his ties with the mafia

The Sopranos prequel movie was previously known as Newark, but Deadline reports that the original title The Many Saints of Newark is now being used.

The Sopranos creator David Chase wrote the script with Lawrence Konner, with Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) directing.

Joining Gandolfini is Alesandro Nivola as Dickie Moltisanti, the father of Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) from the original series.

Sopranos prequel: Joining Gandolfini is Alesandro Nivola as Dickie Moltisanti, the father of Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) from the original series

The cast also includes Vera Farmiga, Ray Liotta, Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen and John Magaro in unspecified roles.

The Many Saints of Newark will be set in the 1960s, during the Newark Riots, when African-American and Italian-American gangs waged war in the streets.

There is no word yet on when production may begin on The Many Saints of Newark.
With her husband Joe Giudice released from prison and sent to an immigration detention center on Thursday, Teresa Giudice is turning to her father for support.

The 46 year old Real Housewives of New Jersey star posted the sweet snap on Instagram on Friday afternoon with her 75-year-old father Giacinto Gorga.

'Always by my side,' Giudice said in the caption of the photo with her father, along with a heart emoji.

Father and daughter: Teresa Giudice shares a sweet snap of her father Giacinto, who is 'always by her side,' on Instagram Friday

Giudice was wearing a slim black pantsuit with heels with a white low-cut top underneath.

Her father was wearing a tie-less black suit with a charcoal great shirt while posing with his daughter

Giudice still hasn't spoken publicly about her husband Joe Giudice's release from prison on mail, wire and bankruptcy fraud charges, with her husband being transferred to an immigration detention center on Thursday.

No husband talk: Giudice still hasn't spoken publicly about her husband Joe Giudice's release from prison on mail, wire and bankruptcy fraud charges, with her husband being transferred to an immigration detention center on Thursday

While Teresa hasn't spoken about her husband's transfer from the Allenwood Low Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, her sister in law Melissa Gorga has offered her support.

During the Thursday launch of Joe Gorga's book The Gorga Guide to Success, Melissa Gorga said her sister-in-law and Real Housewives Of New Jersey co-star Teresa Giudice is 'being strong.'

Joe Gorga, Teresa's brother, added, 'She's hanging in there, what else can she do?'

Being strong: Teresa's sister in law Melissa Gorga says Teresa is 'being strong' after husband Joe was released from prison as he faces deportation; seen in NYC on Thursday

She made the party too: Teresa was also at the book event wearing a black suit

'At least he is out and he has a 50/50 shot. Well see what happens,' Joe added in his interview with Extra.

Extra also caught up with Teresa at her brother's book launch, but she would not discuss the release of her husband.

When asked if she gave her brother any pointers when it came to his book, The Gorga Guide to Success, the Real Housewives of New Jersey star said she did.

Husband's release: Extra also caught up with Teresa at her brother's book launch, but she would not discuss the release of her husband

'Of course I did, I am a New York Times best-selling author,' Teresa said. 'What do you think?'

She also added that she was doing yoga on the day her husband was released, adding, 'I need it, I need it.'

Teresa and Joe Giudice will celebrate their 20th anniversary this year, but if Joe is ultimately deported to Italy, their marriage may be over.

Five years ago: The Giudices outside a federal criminal court in 2014 in Newark, New Jersey

While Teresa had said in previous interviews that she would move her kids Gia, 18, Gabriella, 15, Milania, 14 and Audirana, 10, to Italy to be with Joe, she backtracked.

Teresa admitted during the Real Housewives of New Jersey reunion that a long-distance relationship would not work.

'I'm not doing a long distance relationship. I'm not doing it,' Teresa told RHONJ reunion host Andy Cohen. 'I want somebody with me every day.'

As for moving her family to Italy to be with Joe, she said they wouldn't go, unless her kids say, 'Mommy, we want to move to Italy.'

College bound: 'Gia's going to college next year; I haven't spoken to Milania or Audriana about it, we haven't gotten there yet; and Gabriella already voiced her opinion to me,' Giudice said

'Gia's going to college next year; I haven't spoken to Milania or Audriana about it, we haven't gotten there yet; and Gabriella already voiced her opinion to me,' Giudice said.

'She was like, "That would be so hard for me, Mommy." She doesn't speak the language. She's like, "That would kill me even more."'

Giudice admitted that she's sure 'he'll be with other women,' though she didn't comment about her being spotted with a much younger man, Blake Schreck, in Miami last month.
Fired Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has been reinstated by Disney to direct the third film in the hit franchise.

The shock move comes after Disney fired Gunn, 52, in July last year after offensive tweets he wrote between 2008-2012 joking about rape, child abuse, and pedophilia resurfaced in the #MeToo movement.

The family-friendly studio publicly refused to be swayed, despite the Guardians cast - including Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana - signing a joint statement 'fully supporting' James that same month.

At the helm? Guardians Of The Galaxy's sacked director James Gunn has been rehired by Disney to helm the third film

Revealing the re-hire, Variety added that the move comes after a series of meetings between Gunn and Walt Disney Pictures boss Alan Horn.

Indeed according to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney never even met with other potential directors, instead returning to Gunn to secretly sign the new deal.

Along with directing, Gunn will be writing the screenplay for the project, now expected to be released in 2020.

Following his firing last year, Gunn was snapped up by Warner Bros to write and direct The Suicide Squad sequel, starring Idris Elba, out in 2021. He will now juggle both projects.

Humble: Taking to Instagram on Friday, Gunn thanked his supporters and said he 'deeply appreciated' Disney's decision

Support: Among those responding to Gunn's reinstatement was Mexican actress Eiza Gonzalez, who wrote 'You are a sweet amazingly talented person'

Taking to Instagram on Friday, Gunn thanked his supporters and said he 'deeply appreciated' Disney's decision.

'I am tremendously grateful to every person out there who has supported me over the past few months,' he wrote. 'I am always learning and will continue to work at being the best human being I can be.

'I deeply appreciate Disney's decision and I am excited to continue making films that investigate the ties of love that bind us all. I have been, and continue to be incredibly humbled by your love and support. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Love to you all.'

#MeToo movement: Disney fired Gunn in July after offensive tweets he wrote between 2008-2012 joking about rape, child abuse, and pedophilia resurfaced (pictured in 2015)

'We fully support James': The family-friendly studio was not at all swayed when the Guardians cast signed a joint statement of support over social media on July 30

Support: The Guardians cast - including Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana, seen here in the first film - signing a joint statement 'fully supporting' James

When Gunn was first fired, he issued a statement apologizing for his controversial tweets.

'My words of nearly a decade ago were, at the time, totally failed and unfortunate efforts to be provocative,' he wrote.

'I have regretted them for many years since  not just because they were stupid, not at all funny, wildly insensitive, and certainly not provocative like I had hoped, but also because they don't reflect the person I am today or have been for some time.'
A teenage girl and a 65-year-old woman have been arrested after allegedly ramming a police vehicle in a stolen car in Melbourne.

Police tried to intercept the allegedly stolen coupe in Rowville about 11.45pm on Thursday, before it reversed into the police vehicle and drove off.

The officers were uninjured and the car had minor damage.

Police again tried to intercept the coupe in Wantirna before it stopped and the 17-year-old girl and her 65-year-old female passenger were arrested.

A teenager, from The Basin, is charged with motor vehicle theft, aggravated intentional exposure of an emergency worker to risk by driving, evading police and other traffic offences and was remanded appear at Ringwood Magistrates Court on Friday.

The woman, from Rowville, was released and is expected to be charged on summons with vehicle theft.
Donald Trump's trade chief Rob Lighthizer has admitted American farmers face a "real problem" competing with Australia and other Trans-Pacific Partnership member nations selling beef, wheat and other products to the key market of Japan.

The US president, who made pulling out of the 12-nation TPP a key pre-election promise, lived up to it by nixing US involvement in the massive trade pact on just his third day in the White House.

A US Senate hearing in Washington DC involving US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer this week painted a grim picture for American farmers struggling because they face higher tariffs selling to Japan compared to TPP member countries including Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

US farmers will also suffer after Japan, a TPP member, struck a major trade agreement with the European Union.

"As you know it's not just what's happening in the market now it's what is going to happen when TPP is fully implemented because we have a whole variety of competitors there, but also the European agreement," Lighthizer told Tuesday's Finance Committee hearing.

"We have a real problem.

"We have a situation that is not good now and it is going to get bad very quickly."

Trump has vowed to pursue bilateral trade agreements rather than TPP-like multi-country pacts.

Lighthizer said a US-Japan free-trade agreement was a "very high priority", although it could "take a while".

Lighthizer, noting the urgent need to attempt to level the trade playing field, floated the prospect of striking a deal on agriculture with Japan before sealing the entire free trade agreement.

Montana Senator Steve Daines told Lighthizer that barley growers from his agricultural-focused state visited his office to show him contracts they lost in Japan.

"We are now behind in Japan because our other allies here have signed agreements and are moving forward and are going to receive the benefits of the tariff reductions," Daines said.

"It is going to put US producers at a significant disadvantage.

"My barley folks were in talking to me yesterday and literally showed me contracts they lost in Japan."

US Wheat Associates warned in December America's 53 per cent market share in Japan faced "an imminent collapse" from the TPP and the US National Cattlemen's Beef Association said its exports to Japan were under threat with Australian beef producers benefiting from TPP tariff cuts.

After Trump pulled out of the TPP, Japan and Australia refused to let it die and rallied the other member nations to form the TPP-11, known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The C-word is one of the most taboo words in the English language. And this week it had everybody in talking.

The Northern Territory's unofficial tourism slogan "CU in the NT" - now adorning tee-shirts and car stickers across Darwin - has caused a furore in the Top End.

The slogan's passing nod to the deeply offensive swear word has divided the community.

Some people love it, some people hate it. And while the C-word might be a frequent part of Darwin's common vernacular, many city dwellers don't want it shoved in their and their children's faces.

So Darwin Council this week used its bylaws to ban "CU in the NT" products from tropical markets held on public lands at Mindil beach and Nightcliff.

Lord Mayor Kon Vatskalis, who finds the slogan offensive, used his casting vote in favour of the ban - after councillors were deadlocked in a first-round ballot - following numerous complaints, including to police.

But Mr Vatskalis admitted he felt uncomfortable because the council was not the morals police.

"I've got my reservations about banning or not banning offensive material because what's next? The NT News with a naked person on the front page, vegans complaining about selling meat at the markets?

"I think [the slogan's] immature. Some people find it funny, I don't and I find it absolutely very childish."

Fellow council alderman Robin Knox proposed the ban after receiving a lot of complaints, including from NT Attorney General and local MP Natasha Fyles, about an "offensive stall" selling products with wording that was degrading to women at Nightcliff market.

"I've had a very big number of complaints about this being displayed the last few weeks at the Sunday market at Nightcliff, which is a very family-friendly event," she said. "There is a great big playground there."

Many Darwin locals seem fine with "CU in the NT" and resent the council's interference, judging by social media and talkback radio responses.

The slogan arguably has greater recognition than the NT's official tourism advertising campaign at a time when the hordes of backpackers that used to travel to Darwin and Alice Springs have greatly diminished.

"I have a friend who is leaving Darwin and wants to get a tee-shirt. You have got to have that sense of humour," Ben's Bakehouse owner Susannah Vong told AAP.

"It's a very savvy way of grabbing people's attention, it has put us on the map."

Marketing and advertising expert and social commentator Jane Caro considers herself a feminist but did not find it offensive and even admires the marketing skills of those behind the slogan.

The company behind the slogan, NT Unofficial, said their intention was to promote territory and it was ridiculous to suggest it offended women.

"We've never said any bad words, only ever provided an invitation to the Northern Territory, one of the greatest places on earth," the company said on the CU in the NT Facebook page.

"If anyone is offended by our simple slogan, they might have trouble reading."

The products will still be available online and in Northern Territory shops.
Two men are behind bars over a violent home invasion in Sydney's west involving a gun and an axe that left three people in hospital.

Police were called to the house in Blacktown before dawn on Thursday and found a 35-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his thigh and another 21-year-old with head injuries caused by an axe.

Both were taken to Westmead Hospital for treatment.

Police later confronted a man - who was armed with a gun - as he was running from the back of the home and shot him in the wrist.

The 33-year-old was taken to hospital in a stable condition. He remains there under police guard.

A second man, aged 28, was arrested nearby.

The pair have both been charged with multiple offences, with police alleging they broke into the home and assaulted the two occupants.

They have been refused bail with their matters due at Blacktown Local Court on Friday.

A critical incident investigation is underway into the incident and the discharge of a police firearm.
Matt Lodge will miss the next two NRL rounds for Brisbane unless he can beat a dangerous contact charge.

The prop was hit with a grade-two offence for taking out the legs of Melbourne five-eighth Cameron Munster after the No.6 kicked at the end of first set of Thursday night's season opener at AAMI Park.

With prior non-similar offences, Lodge's sanction carries 280 demerit points, meaning he will miss two matches regardless of whether he pleads guilty or fights the charge at the judiciary and loses.

The loss of the controversial forward against North Queensland and St George Illawarra would be a harsh blow for the Broncos after the Melbourne loss.

They'e already without up-and-coming forward Payne Haas who is serving an off-field suspension until round five, while fellow middle man Tevita Pangai Junior is struggling with a hamstring injury and limited to coming off the bench.
Coca-Cola Amatil says it won't be buying Lion Dairy & Drinks from Japanese beer giant Kirin.

Kirin is selling the Australian drinks portfolio, which includes brands such as Pura milk, Big M flavoured milk, Yoplait yoghurt, Berri juice and Farmers Union iced coffee and yoghurt.

"Coca-Cola Amatil is not pursuing a bid for the LDD portfolio," the company said on Friday, responding to media speculation.

Coca-Cola Amatil said it "is comfortable with, and remains focused on, its current outstanding portfolio of beverages".

Coca-Cola Amatil last month reported a 37 per cent fall in first-half profit following a $146.9 million writedown of fruit and vegetable canning business SPC.
Melbourne Victory will return centre-half Georg Niedermeier to the starting line-up for Saturday's crunch A-League meeting with Brisbane Roar.

The German stopper hasn't played for three weeks after his costly red card in the Melbourne derby but, with James Donachie suspended and Thomas Deng on international duty, will join Leigh Broxham in the heart of defence.

Ola Toivonen should be fit after shaking off a stomach bug that impacted his midweek Asian Champions League outing, but Terry Antonis is unlikely to start as he nurses a knee issue.
Human remains discovered near Port Lincoln in South Australia could be those of a man who went missing in 1999, police say.

Two men discovered the skeleton in scrubland off Western Approach Rd on Wednesday morning.

Police say the circumstances of the death are not believed to be suspicious.

Superintendent Paul Bahr said it would be some time before the identity of the remains could be confirmed, but the missing man's family have been informed.

"Forensic response have attended the area yesterday and a report will be prepared for the Coroner," he said on Friday.
School students across Victoria have skipped class for a lesson in climate change activism.

Thousands of school-aged children packed the steps of Melbourne's Old Treasury Building and a nearby intersection.

Lewis, eight, and his friends said they were happy to be at the protest.

"We're here to support all of us and to save our future," he told AAP.

The primary school boy carried a sign saying "please save our reefs".

His mate Ethan, 11, was excited by the protest.

"I'm happy to be here," he said.

Schoolgirl Isobel Gilbert, 13, said she was protesting against Adani, the Indian-based company with substantial mining plans in Queensland.

"I don't want our north coast to be full of oil," she said.

At regional Ballarat there were reports of hundreds of students gathered for a similar protest.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has rejected suggestions his government would consider resurrecting the dumped East West Link if Canberra offers to fully fund the project.

The premier's comments on Friday follow unconfirmed reports the federal government is thinking about fully bankrolling the East West Link in a bid to help embattled Victorian colleagues.

Mr Andrews said Victorian voters have "resoundingly rejected" the East West Link project.

"This notion that if the Commonwealth pays for it, then a dud project becomes a good one - no. It remains a dud," he told reporters.

The premier said the state government is already working to build major infrastructure projects that Victorians support.

The coalition should be using taxpayers' money on projects that voters want, he added.

"Rather than playing political games about projects that don't stack up and have been rejected, I think Morrison should fund the Waurn Ponds rail project, which is critically important and does stack up," Mr Andrews said.

On Friday federal Education Minister Dan Teehan said the East West Link is important for addressing Melbourne's congestion problems.

"The East West Link is something that the government has supported for many years," he told reporters in Melbourne.

"The great shame is the road hasn't been built by the Andrews government."

Contracts for the controversial 18-kilometre toll road project were signed under the Liberal Napthine government in 2014, but torn up when Labor took power.

The East West Link would have connected the Eastern Freeway and CityLink through a tunnel underneath Melbourne's congested inner northern suburbs.

Not building the road has cost the Victorian government more than $1.2 billion.
Severe thunderstorms with damaging winds and large hail stones are forecast to hit southeast Queensland.

The Bureau of Meteorology is warning that severe thunderstorms have been detected near Beaudesert, the area south of Toowoomba, Mount Nebo, Jondaryan and the area east of Dalby.

They are forecast to affect Laidley, Gatton and Caboolture by 4.20 pm and Strathpine, Beerburrum and Mount Beerwah by 4.50 pm on Friday.

The bureau warned heavy rainfall may lead to flash flooding in some areas.

There are warnings for the Ipswich, Logan, Scenic Rim, Lockyer Valley, Moreton Bay and parts of Somerset, Southern Downs, Toowoomba, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast and Brisbane council areas.
NEW ZEALAND KILLINGS OF MORE THAN THREE PEOPLE SINCE 1990:

* March 15, 2019 - At least 40 people killed when a gunman opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch.

* February 8, 1997 - Stephen Anderson shot dead six people, including his father, and wounded four others in and near the family's central North Island ski lodge. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

* June 20, 1994 - Five members of the Bain family - the two parents and three children - were shot dead in their Dunedin home. Surviving son David Bain was jailed for the murders but acquitted after a re-trial.

* June 26, 1992 - Unemployed shearer Raymond Ratima, 25, killed seven members of his own family with a hammer and knife in the North Island town of Masterton.

* May 20, 1992 - Farmer Brian Schlaepfer, 64, shot or stabbed six members of his family to death before killing himself with a shotgun in the Pukekohe area, south of Auckland.

* November 13, 1990 - David Gray, armed with eight weapons, one of them an assault rifle, killed 13 people, including four children and a police officer in the South Island hamlet of Aramoana, before police fatally shot the gunman.
The decision to base the Australian Space Agency headquarters in Adelaide helped South Australia shake off its "inferiority complex", Premier Steven Marshall says.

Approaching his one-year anniversary in the role, Mr Marshall said the space announcement and Lot Fourteen innovation precinct were major achievements since taking government.

"Securing the space agency showed just what can be achieved with an ambitious focus on the future," he said on Friday.

"We didn't win that bid because we were owed it. We won it because we were committed and we were convincing."

Mr Marshall said landing the space agency was also an important psychological milestone for the state.

"South Australia threw off its inferiority complex, rediscovered our own self-respect and started to feel better about ourselves again," he told guests at a lunch in Adelaide.

The premier said much of his first year in office had been spent laying the foundation for a better government.

"As we begin our second year, we commit to building quickly and creatively on those foundations," he said.

But his optimism was not shared by the state opposition, who says South Australians have the right to feel let down by Mr Marshall.

"Steven Marshall promised more jobs, but unemployment has increased from 5.6 per cent to 6.3 per cent," he said.

"Steven Marshall promised lower costs, but he's cutting the free Footy Express and jacking up housing trust rents for our most vulnerable.

"Steven Marshall promised better services, but he's closing Service SA branches, cutting bus routes, closing hospital beds and shutting down TAFE campuses."
A years-long investigation into a gangland lawyer-turned secret police informant, which sparked a royal commission, has taken out Victoria's top journalistic gong at the annual Quill Awards.

Herald Sun journalists AnthonyDowsleyand PatrickCarlyon won the 2018 Gold Quill and Grant Hattam Quill for Investigative Journalism, and shared a third award with colleague Chris Tinkler for their coverage of Lawyer X and exposing Nicola Gobbo as the supergrass.

Dowsley also won the The Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award.

"Thisstoryrevealedapatternofdeeplyunethicalcollusionthathasshakenthefoundationsof Victoria'scriminaljusticesystem," awards judges noted.

"Doggedlypursuedovermanyyears,andinthefaceofstrongpolice opposition,ithasledtoa royal commissionandpotentiallyplacedinjeopardydozensofcriminal convictions."

The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Barrie Cassidy who in his acceptance speech acknowledged a career with ABC spanning 34 years and a stint as an advisor to former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke.

He also announced he would be leaving popular Sunday political program Insiders in June.

Other winners across more than 30 categories include reporters from The Age, ABC and Guardian Australia for coverage including investigations into the disappearance of an Aboriginal couple in WA's Kimberley, sexual assault and indigenous deaths in custody.
Frank Cali, thought to have headed the Gambino crime family since 2015, was shot and killed in Staten Island on March 13, 2019

The reputed boss of New York Mafia family the Gambinos, Francesco "Frank" Cali, has been shot dead outside his home on Staten Island, police said Thursday.

The 53-year-old, thought to have been de facto godfather of the Italian crime family since 2015, suffered "multiple gunshot wounds to the torso" in the attack on Wednesday evening, police said.

The New York Daily News reported Cali, also known as "Franky Boy," was shot six times then hit by a blue truck in which the suspects fled.

Police added he was taken to Staten Island University North hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

"There are no arrests and the investigation is ongoing," police said.

The Gambino family is one of New York's five historic Italian Mafia families -- along with the Genovese, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonanno families.

US media reported that his death marked the first murder of a New York mob boss in 34 years, since the death of Paul Castellano -- another Gambino family boss -- by order of John Gotti.

Following Castellano's murder, Gotti headed the Gambino family until his incarceration for conspiracy and murder in 1992. Gotti died in prison in 2002.

Last October, 71-year-old Sylvester Zottola of the Bonanno family was shot dead while waiting in his car for an order from a Bronx McDonald's. His son Salvatore had been shot three months earlier outside the family home, but survived.

Cali had served 16 months in prison following a 2008 extortion conviction.

According to local media in New York, he took the helm of the Gambino family in 2015, replacing Domenico Cefalu.

- 'A certain type of evil' -

Also on Wednesday night, a Gambino family associate of over a decade, Anthony Pandrella, was arrested for robbing and murdering his friend Vincent Zito, 78, the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn announced Thursday.

Pandrella, 59, is accusing of shooting Zito in his own home and stealing money from him -- before returning to the scene of the crime hours later to grieve with the older man's family.

But he had been caught on CCTV cameras leaving and entering the house at the time of the murder, and his DNA was discovered from the trigger of the gun used to commit the crime.

"It takes a certain type of evil to murder a friend in their own home, and then console the grieving relatives," said FBI assistant director in charge William Sweeney.

Pandrella was set to appear before Brooklyn federal judge Ramon Reyes Wednesday afternoon to enter a plea.
People wait in line to board a bus in Caracas, Venezuela on March 14, 2019

Venezuelans resumed work Thursday after a weeklong hiatus forced by an unprecedented nationwide blackout, but President Nicolas Maduro's government faced fresh problems including a "terrorist attack" on an oil facility.

Three storage tanks at the Petro San Felix heavy oil processing plant in eastern Venezuela caught fire late Wednesday, Oil Minister Manuel Quevedo told state television. There were no reports of casualties.

Quevedo blamed Guaido, the head of Venezuela's opposition-ruled congress and self-proclaimed interim president backed by 50 countries, accusing him of collusion with the United States.

"There was a terrorist act that we denounce at an international level," Quevedo told the VTV network.

On Twitter, the minister said Guaido and the opposition were "intensifying terrorist incursions" against the state-owned oil company PDVSA to impact Venezuela's vital crude exports.

A woman sells fish in a street market in Caracas, where Venezuelans returned to work after a week-long blackout

"Traitors!" he wrote, adding "the US has decided to rob Venezuela of its oil resources... (and) wants blood to flow."

Oil accounts for 90 percent of Venezuela's export revenues. Production has long slid, crimped by years of underinvestment and mismanagement. Stepped-up US sanctions have further trimmed exports.

There was no immediate US reaction to the Caracas accusations.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that all American diplomats had departed Venezuela on Thursday after being ordered out early this week.

He also told Venezuelans in a video posted on Twitter: "We're with you, we're with interim president Juan Guaido. If you all stay the course, and I know that you will, the American people will too."

The US State Department meanwhile announced that Washington has revoked the visas of an additional 340 people close to Maduro, bringing the total to more than 600 since late 2018.

- Lines in Caracas -

A man pushes a cart with coolers as Bolivarian National policemen are deployed to a subway station in Caracas, where long lines formed in the capital for the few buses running

In Caracas and other cities, Venezuelans who had been prevented from working for a week because of the blackout returned to their activities as best they could after power was restored.

The government called all public sector employees back to their offices, but state schools remained closed for another day.

Long lines formed in the capital for the few buses running, and in front of banks. The city's subway, which usually transports two million people daily, was partly operating, and extremely crowded.

The resumption marked a degree of relief after the lack of electricity, which deepened Venezuela's long economic crisis.

But things were far from normal, with many shops remaining shuttered. The national industry federation Conindustria said it would take several days for some activities to come back.

"During the blackout, we didn't open," Carlos Zuniga, a 23-year-old employee in a shoe store, told AFP.

In Caracas, people began resuming normal life -- but the shuttered shops and long lines demonstrated that the recovery from a devastating blackout would take some time

"Business is bad. In a crisis on this scale, people don't buy shoes when they are looking for water and food," he said.

According to an economic analysis firm, Ecoanalitica, the blackout cost Venezuela $875 million and paralyzed industry, including the all-important oil sector.

Maduro accused the US of causing the power outage. Experts said that was unlikely and years of infrastructure neglect and a persistent brain drain of qualified engineers was more probable.

- Fraying diplomacy -

The United States, Latin American countries and many European Union states recognize Guaido as the caretaker leader of Venezuela, and urge Maduro to call early presidential elections.

Maduro refuses to do so. He has backing from Russia and China, which have invested tens of billions of dollars in Venezuela, as well as Cuba and Iran.

In a sign of the fraying diplomacy concerning Venezuela, dozens of officials from Latin America, as well as the US, Canada and some European countries, walked out of a UN convention in Austria on the issue of drugs as Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza took the podium.

A spokesperson for the US delegation said Arreaza and his team "represent the illegitimate government of Nicolas Maduro, and thus cannot be considered as speaking on behalf of the Venezuelan people."

Arreaza said in his speech that the US "has threatened our people with a military aggression" and was taking "unilateral economic steps" in the form of sanctions costing Venezuela billions of dollars.

Those sanctions have impacted other buyers of Venezuelan crude.

India's biggest private oil refiner, Reliance Industries, told AFP on Thursday it had capped oil imports from Venezuela following pressure from the United States.

"Our US subsidiary has completely stopped all business with Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and its global parent has not increased crude purchases," Reliance said in an emailed statement.

"Reliance has halted all supply of diluent to PDVSA and will not resume such sales until sanctions are lifted," added the company, which is owned by India's richest man Mukesh Ambani.
Grief: Relatives arrive at the site

From a quiet farmland at the base of rolling hills outside Ethiopia's capital, the sound of wailing rang through the air.

Devastated mourners flung themselves onto a ground littered with business cards, seat covers and shards of aluminium.

They cried the names of loved ones who had been aboard the jetliner that nose-dived into the field, leaving a dark scar in the soil but barely a trace of their existence.

"You were to be married soon! Why would you die?" one woman cried into the void.

Only the rumble of bulldozers digging for remains deep into the soil, and the pop of flares fired by police to disperse circling crows, punctuated the sobbing.

Some mourners carried pictures of their loved-ones

All 157 people on Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 died when their Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed just six minutes after departing Addis Ababa on Sunday, heading for Nairobi.

Families from 35 countries were bereaved.

Relatives began trickling to the site of the obliterated jet on Wednesday, some bussed in by Ethiopian Airlines, others on their own steam.

The melting pot of mourners all grieved in their own way, some praying, others scooping soil from the ground, while some offered fruit or flowers.

"Nobody expected this could happen to her. She loved her life," said Ethiopian Micky Kassa, whose cousin Mygenet Worku, 28, was flying to attend a UN environment conference in Nairobi.

"She has an old mother who raised her as a single parent. It's very sad news," he told AFP.

For Ethiopians, the crash is a national tragedy, and even people untouched by the disaster made the trek to the remote site to pay their respects.

Ethiopian Airlines is Africa's largest carrier and in many ways the international face of the country.

The country lost nine passengers and eight crew in the disaster.

"Every Ethiopian has to be here," said Genanaw Dibekulu, a bank branch manager who took the day off to visit the site. "It's tragic. If it had been my relative, I'd have gone mad."

- 'My brother!' -

As weeping filled the air, officials from the World Food Programme and other UN agencies that lost staff in the crash stood silently in a semi-circle, their heads bowed before a spread of white flowers set up to honour the victims.

Nairobi and the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa both host large regional offices of the UN, which lost 22 staffers on the ill-fated plane.

Buses at the site near Hama Qutushele village unloaded relatives, who walked over to chairs set up under a tent, many howling inconsolably.

Some needed support as they staggered forward, while others carried framed portraits of their lost loved ones.

Colleagues of victims of the UN's World Food Programme office in Addis Ababa hugged in grief as they visited the crash site. The UN lost 22 staffers on the flight

Funeral rites from different religions played off next to each other, as one man yelled "My brother!" in agony, and others repeated the same name over and over.

Investigators from the United States, Britain, plane manufacturer Boeing, Interpol, and the Ethiopian government are combing the site for clues as to what caused the crash -- the second by a Boeing 737 MAX 8 in less than six months.

Relatives of one Israeli killed in the crash demanded access to a cordoned off area where excavators are working.

"They don't allow us to access the site," complained Sahan Biton, whose uncle Shimon Reem, a security expert consulting for a Nairobi mall, was among the dead.

Under Jewish custom, Reem cannot be buried until at least some remains had been found, Biton said.

He complained that the Ethiopian government was refusing to hand over remains or to let an Israeli search team into the impact site to find more.

- 'Can't bury our uncle' -

"Until we... have a remain, we can't bury our uncle," Biton said, standing with five other Israelis holding a flag as they sang their national anthem and recited funeral rites to honour the dead.

Witnesses have said the plane plunged nose-first into the earth, and on Thursday there were few identifiable pieces of the plane left, apart from a wheel and some tattered pieces of metal that appeared as they came from an engine.

Ethiopian Airlines crash

"Yesterday, I found a leg," said Zhang Jun, a Chinese construction worker whose excavator was diverted to the crash site from working on an expansion to the Addis Ababa airport.

He estimated the remains were buried as deep as 20 meters (66 feet).

Whatever belongings he has found were so damaged that when he discovered a credit card and passport, he could not decipher who they had belonged to.

"Everything is by piece, nothing in big size," he said.
Connecticut's supreme court has ruled that the families of victims killed in the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School can sue gunmaker Remington

Connecticut's supreme court ruled Thursday that US gunmaker Remington can be sued over the 2012 massacre at the Sandy Hook elementary school in which one of its weapons was used.

The narrow 4-3 ruling raised the hopes of the families of the 20 schoolchildren and six school staff killed in the December 14, 2012 attack of punishing the marketers of the powerful Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle used by shooter Adam Lanza.

It also sets a precedent that could lead to more lawsuit against manufacturers whose guns are used in mass shootings.

The ruling Thursday overturned a lower court's judgment that rejected the lawsuit, which charged that Remington Outdoor Co., arms distributor Camfour, and the Connecticut store which sold the gun, could be held liable in a wrongful death lawsuit.

Lanza was a 20-year-old with known developmental disabilities who lived at home with his mother when he undertook the attack.

His mother, a gun enthusiast, had bought him the AR-15-style Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle more than two years before the shooting. Lanza killed his mother before assaulting the school, and then killed himself afterward.

The lawsuit alleged that Remington and the other two defendants are culpable because they knowingly marketed a military grade weapon that is "grossly unsuited" for civilian use yet had become the gun most used in mass shootings.

They alleged that the gun was marketed immorally and unscrupulously, sold on its warfighting capabilities to civilians who would never experience combat.

- 'Used to kill' -

That included, they alleged, popularizing the AR-15 in combat and mass shooting-type situations through the type of violent video games that Lanza was known to play.

People gather at a makeshift memorial in December 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut near the Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 children and six adults were shot dead

They specifically cited Remington's marketing of high-capacity magazines, which have only combat utility, for use with the gun.

They noted that video games feature shooters using multiple high capacity magazines, and that Lanza attacked the school with ten 30-round magazines.

"Prior to December 14, 2012, assault rifles like the Bushmaster XM15-E2S had been used to kill in department stores and fast food chains, at offices and homecoming parties, on courthouse steps, and in schools," the suit said.

"Despite the unreasonable risks associated with selling assault rifles under these circumstances, defendants continued to market, promote and sell AR-15s to consumers."

The court ruled that, even though the US Congress passed a law in 2005 that explicitly immunized gunmakers when their products are used in crimes, Remington could still be sued on the grounds that its marketing violated Connecticut's unfair trade practice laws.

Congress did not seek to fully protect gunmakers and dealers from practices that promote criminal conduct, the judges said in their ruling.

Hence, they said, "it falls to a jury to decide whether the promotional schemes alleged in the present case rise to the level of illegal trade practices and whether fault for the tragedy can be laid at their feet."
The sky above Gaza City glows orange during an Israeli air strike late on March 14

Israel said Friday its aircraft had struck dozens of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rockets from the Palestinian enclave, including rare fire toward its economic capital Tel Aviv.

The escalation followed weeks of growing tensions and came at an especially sensitive time ahead of Israel's April 9 elections.

As the polls approach, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is widely believed to want to avoid a fourth war in the Gaza Strip since 2008 -- but the exchange of fire again showed the risks.

Quiet returned to Gaza and Israel on Friday morning.

UN and Egyptian officials were in contact with both sides "to prevent the situation from spinning out of control", a source with knowledge of the discussions said.

Organisers of weekly Friday protests along the Gaza border fence, which have been accompanied by violence, announced they would be cancelled -- the first such move since they began nearly a year ago.

Four Palestinians were wounded in the Gaza strikes, the enclave's health ministry said, while no Israelis were reported injured.

Explosions could be heard throughout the night in Gaza and fireballs lit the sky.

In the bustling coastal city of Tel Aviv, sirens wailed late Thursday in scenes reminiscent of the 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants.

Rocket fire toward Israel's southern communities near the blockaded coastal territory is common, but Tel Aviv is rarely targeted.

Police said Friday they found remains of one rocket in an uninhabited area "in central Israel", with media reports saying the second fell into the Mediterranean.

- Hamas denies responsibility -

Both Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, and its ally Islamic Jihad denied they were behind the rocket fire towards Tel Aviv.

But Israel's military said they were launched by Hamas.

Israel has long said it holds Hamas responsible for all violence from Gaza, controlled by the group since 2007.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday the Gaza militants attacking Israel were "armed and financed by their puppet masters in Tehran".

"We stand by our ally. Israel has the right to protect its citizens," tweeted Pompeo, who is due to travel soon to the Jewish state.

On Friday, Israeli media reported the military's preliminary assessment was that the rockets were fired by mistake during maintenance work -- a sign Israel was seeking to calm tensions.

A military spokesman declined to comment.

Islamic Jihad said Friday that Palestinian militants would hold fire if Israel did the same.

Israel said Friday that its missile defence system had intercepted three rockets

A delegation from Egypt, which has acted as mediator between Israel and Hamas, was in Gaza before the strikes and reportedly left after warnings.

Israel said its aircraft hit around 100 Hamas targets, including a complex allegedly used by the group to coordinate militant operations in the occupied West Bank.

Another was "the main manufacturing site of standard-grade rockets in the Gaza Strip", an underground location, it said.

A security source in Gaza said dozens of strikes targeted bases belonging to both Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

A position belonging to Hamas's military wing, near its leader Ismail Haniya's family home on the outskirts of Gaza City, was damaged, with rubble strewn across the road, an AFP journalist said.

Hamdi, 22, who works in a bakery in Gaza, said "since the morning very few people have come compared to normal Friday mornings. People are afraid of bombs -- like in a war."

- Rocket interceptions -

Gaza residents reported a number of rockets fired back at Israel in response.

Sirens rang out in southern Israel early Friday and the Israeli military said it identified four "launches" from Gaza.

Three were intercepted by missile defence systems, it said.

Since Thursday night, around 10 rockets were fired from Gaza.

Almost daily exchanges between Israel and the Palestinian territory have threatened a wider escalation in hostilities over the past few weeks.

It comes as the one-year anniversary of mass protests and clashes along the Gaza-Israel border fence approaches on March 30.

An informal truce between Hamas and Israel had led to relative calm, but recent weeks have seen another uptick in violence.

Netanyahu warned Sunday that Israel would not hesitate to launch a "large-scale operation" in Gaza if provoked.

His main election rival, former military chief Benny Gantz, accused Netanyahu of letting Hamas and other Gaza militants dictate "the agenda".

"We have to regain the initiative, implement a harsh and consistent policy against Hamas," he said at the Gaza border.
Afghan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib -- seen here in November 2018 in Geneva -- was summoned to the State Department after his disparaging comments about US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad

A close aide to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Thursday sparked a diplomatic spat with the United States by offering tough criticism of Washington's talks with the Taliban.

The advisor, Hamdullah Mohib, took particular aim at US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and his personal "ambitions" in Afghanistan.

"We don't know what's going on. We don't have the kind of transparency that we should have," Mohib, Afghanistan's national security advisor, told media during a visit to Washington.

"The last people to find out are us."

Mohib was "summoned" by the US undersecretary for political affairs, David Hale, who rejected the comments made by the Afghan official "criticizing the US approach to reconciliation," State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said.

At issue are the direct talks between the US government and Taliban negotiators that began last summer in Doha. The latest round wrapped up Tuesday.

After previous rounds of talks, Khalilzad typically traveled to Kabul to brief Afghan officials -- but not this time. On Tuesday, he came straight back to Washington.

That raised hackles in the Afghan capital.

Afghan officials are not taking part in the talks, as the Taliban insurgents have consistently refused to sit across the table from members of a government they consider to be a US puppet regime.

- 'Viceroy' -

Beyond Khalilzad's possible lapse in diplomatic decorum by not briefing Kabul, Mohib lambasted US intentions, in a rare outburst.

"We like to hear that progress is made. But what is it?" Mohib said. "Our understanding is if there is a deal, it's a bad deal."

Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Special Envoy for Afghanistan Reconciliation, has come under criticism from a top aide to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani after the most recent US-Taliban talks in Doha

On Tuesday, Khalilzad said "real strides" had been made but no agreement was reached on a timetable for a troop withdrawal.

He spoke of an agreement "in draft" on the issues of counter-terrorism assurances from the Taliban and troop withdrawal, but stressed that nothing was finalized.

For his part, Mohib said it was possible that the Taliban were simply trying to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Americans after more than 17 years of war.

As for Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan, Mohib recalled that the US envoy "wanted to run for president twice, in 2009 and 2014."

"Knowing Ambassador Khalilzad's own history, personal history, he has ambitions in Afghanistan," he said.

"The perception in Afghanistan, people in the government think that perhaps, perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government of which he will then become the viceroy," Mohib charged.

"He is ostracizing, alienating a very trusted ally and partner."

According to Palladino, the US government warned Mohib that "attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are attacks on the (State) Department and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process."

Palladino nevertheless told reporters that Washington maintains its confidence in Ghani, and admitted there could be more coordination and regular contacts between the two capitals.

"An intra-Afghan dialogue must be a part of any final package," the spokesman said.

He reiterated what Khalilzad said about any eventual agreement with the Taliban: once the components on counter-terrorism and troop withdrawal are finalized, the next phases would be intra-Afghan dialogue and a "comprehensive ceasefire."

Asked if these latter stages had been addressed in Doha, even in principle, Palladino avoided the question.

"There's no agreement until we have a full agreement," he said.

Taliban representatives have so far denied giving the green light to any intra-Afghan negotiations.
Frank Cali, thought to have headed the Gambino crime family since 2015, was shot and killed in Staten Island on March 13, 2019

The reputed boss of New York's Gambino crime family was left riddled with bullets outside his home on Staten Island, an old-school hit akin to the storied executions of 20th-century mafia dons.

The grisly scene saw Francesco "Frank" Cali shot dead outside his colonial-style red-brick home on Staten Island, police said Thursday.

The 53-year-old with deep ties to Sicilian organized crime factions -- thought to have been leading the Gambinos since 2015, wielding influence both stateside and in Italy -- suffered "multiple gunshot wounds to the torso" in the attack on Wednesday evening, police said.

Cali, also known as "Franky Boy," was shot six times, then hit by a blue truck in which the suspects fled. He was pronounced dead at Staten Island University North hospital, according to police.

"There are no arrests and the investigation is ongoing," police said.

The Gambino family is one of New York's five historic Italian Mafia families -- along with the Genoveses, Luccheses, Colombos and Bonannos.

US media reported that Cali's death marked the first murder of a New York mob boss in 34 years, since the death of Paul Castellano -- another Gambino family boss -- by order of the infamous John Gotti, also known as Teflon Don.

Following Castellano's murder, which saw the boss dramatically gunned down outside a Manhattan steakhouse after stepping out of a black limo, Gotti took over as the Gambino family don.

A paparazzi darling who sported flashy suits with his signature slick pompadour, police ultimately toppled Gotti and incarcerated him for conspiracy and murder in 1992.

He died in prison in 2002, leaving a notorious legacy that cemented New York's place in mob lore.

- Ruling from the shadows -

Cali is thought to have taken the helm of the Gambino family in 2015, replacing Domenico Cefalu.

His power and rise within the Gambino clan was owed in large part to his family connections in Palermo, Sicily; Cali reportedly married Rosaria Inzerillo, the daughter of a prominent Sicilian mob faction that was once one of the island's most powerful.

He began ascending within the ranks under capo John D'Amico, who went by Jackie and became the family's acting boss in 2005 -- after which Cali became an acting captain, according to court documents.

Cali faced just one arrest over his career, over an extortion plot linked to a failed bid to build a Nascar race track. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

But federal prosecutors held that Cali was involved in a number of other crime schemes, including operating illegal gambling machines in Brooklyn establishments and snatching profits from an annual Italian Feast festival in the borough.

Cali shunned the limelight even after becoming don, ruling from the top while lying low in his affluent Todt Hill neighborhood in Staten Island, where Castellano also held court.

Situated on top of a hill with curving streets and large, shady trees, the district offered an ideal cover -- one of its Tudor-style homes was even featured in "The Godfather" film.

- 'Old habits die hard' -

The post-Gotti chapter saw the mob's influence on the US eastern seaboard wane -- but Wednesday's hit threw New York back to its golden years of organized crime.

"We thought those days were over," the city's mayor Bill de Blasio told journalists. "But I guess old habits die hard."

It wasn't the first such spattering of gore in recent years, however.

Last October, 71-year-old Sylvester Zottola of the Bonanno family was shot dead while waiting in his car for an order from a Bronx McDonald's. His son Salvatore had been shot three months earlier outside the family home, but survived.

In another burst of mob drama, authorities announced Thursday that a Gambino family associate of over a decade, Anthony Pandrella, was arrested for robbing and murdering his friend Vincent Zito.

After prosecutors called him "a danger to the community" Pandrella, 59, pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn federal court to accusations of shooting Zito in his own home and stealing money from him.

He then allegedly returned to the scene of the crime hours later to grieve with the older man's family.

But he had been caught on CCTV cameras leaving and entering the house at the time of the murder, and his DNA was discovered from the trigger of the gun used to commit the crime.

"It takes a certain type of evil to murder a friend in their own home, and then console the grieving relatives," said FBI assistant director in charge William Sweeney.
Siraj Ibn Wahhaj after his arrest

Five people arrested at a squalid encampment in the southwestern United States have been charged in a conspiracy to carry out jihadist attacks on American soil.

Officers discovered the five during a raid in the desert of New Mexico last August while investigating the disappearance of a three-year-old child several months earlier.

Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 40, his girlfriend Jany Leveille, 36, a Haitian woman allegedly in the US illegally, her two sisters and her brother-in-law, were indicted on Wednesday by a grand jury.

The indictment identified the other accused as Hujrah Wahhaj, Subhanah Wahhaj and Lucas Morton.

The charges relate to terrorism, kidnapping, and conspiracy to provide resources, training and other support for "attacks to kill officers and employees of the United States," the Department of Justice said.

According to the indictment, the five adults had, from October 2017, "maintained a training compound to prepare for attacks on government, military and other institutions."

Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and his girlfriend "instructed persons, including other occupants of the training compound, to be prepared to engage in jihad, to die as martyrs and to engage in violent acts," including the killing of FBI employees and military personnel, the document alleges.

Siraj Ibn Wahhaj was the father of the missing child, whose body officers allegedly discovered buried under rubbish. They also found 11 other minors, alive but dirty and wearing rags.

The "training compound," entrenched in the ground and built from plastic tarps and tires, contained about a dozen firearms, munitions, a firing range, and a tunnel leading outward.

An aerial view of the compound in the desert of New Mexico, which allegedly contained a shooting range

But there was allegedly no water, food or electricity.

The adults are also charged with kidnapping the child, identified only as "John Doe," and hiding him "resulting in his death."

According to other court documents, the boy had a brain injury and suffered seizures.

Leveille, who believed in "black magic," allegedly wanted to "exorcise" him.

The other minors were the children of the three women.

Authorities said last year that the raid was carried out after the discovery of a web posting from one of the women inside the compound who said the group was starving.
Mark Karpeles, former head of the collapsed bitcoin exchange MtGox, is accused of faking digital data and embezzling millions of dollars

A Japanese court Friday hands down a verdict in the embezzlement trial of Mark Karpeles, the former high-flying creator of the MtGox bitcoin exchange, whose collapse sparked a crisis for the cryptocurrency.

Karpeles could be sentenced to as much as 10 years behind bars on charges of pocketing 341 million yen ($3 million) of clients' money and falsifying computer data over a period of several years.

Prosecutors claim the high-rolling Frenchman, 33, splashed the ill-gotten proceeds on a luxury lifestyle, as well as on overseas trips for his estranged wife.

MtGox was shut down in 2014 after 850,000 bitcoins (worth half a billion dollars at that time) disappeared from its virtual vaults, a mystery that remains unsolved.

The disappearance left a trail of angry investors, rocked the virtual currency community, and dented confidence in the security of bitcoin.

At one point, MtGox claimed to be handling around 80 percent of all global bitcoin transactions.

However, the charges faced by Karpeles, a self-confessed computer "geek", do not relate directly to the exchange's dramatic collapse.

During his trial, Karpeles apologised to customers for the company's bankruptcy but denied both data falsification and embezzlement.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are big in Japan

Karpeles says the bitcoins were lost due to an external "hacking attack" and later claimed to have found some 200,000 coins in a "cold wallet" -- a storage device not connected to other computers.

"Most people will not believe what I say. The only solution I have is to actually find the real culprits," he told reporters after the hearing.

The odds are stacked against Karpeles as the vast majority of cases that come to trial in Japan end in a conviction.

The Frenchman was first arrested in August 2015 and, in an echo of another high-profile case against former Nissan chief and compatriot Carlos Ghosn, was re-arrested several times on different charges.

Karpeles eventually won bail in July 2016 -- nearly a year after his arrest -- paying 10 million yen to secure his freedom pending a trial, which began in July 2017.

During his time on bail, Karpeles has been active on social media -- notably voicing doubts about bitcoin and replying to some media questions about conditions in Japanese detention centres.

However, he has largely avoided commenting on his case in detail.
Italy's Riccardo Corradini smiles at the Islamic University of Gaza where he has become its first European student under an exchange programme

Seated with other students on the steps at the Islamic University of Gaza with his backpack, the young Italian doctor-to-be draws looks from passersby.

Riccardo Corradini is the first exchange student in the Gaza Strip under a popular European programme known as Erasmus and hopes to gain a unique experience in emergency surgery.

When his university in Siena, a city in central Italy's Tuscany region, announced a year ago that a spot was open to spend a semester studying in the impoverished Palestinian enclave, he didn't have to think long.

Still, he was the only one to apply.

The sixth-year medical student had already studied in the occupied West Bank two years earlier, but the blockaded Gaza Strip is a different atmosphere.

The strip of some two million people has endured three wars with Israel since 2008 and suffers from shortages of electricity and other infrastructure, like clean water.

But Corradini, 25, says he has been welcomed warmly at the university in Gaza City and is glad to receive hands-on experience in his chosen speciality.

"I came here for many reasons," said the young Italian who receives training at three Gaza hospitals.

"The first reason is because I want to specialise in emergency surgery, so coming here, I can see with my own eyes unfortunately how emergency surgery is really," he added, giving the example of a 16-year-old who underwent an amputation.

The past year has flooded hospitals in the Gaza Strip with wounded patients.

In March 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began mass protests along the border fence with Israel.

Since then, at least 255 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire, the majority shot during weekly border demonstrations and clashes.

Others have been hit by tank fire or air strikes in response to violence from Israeli-blockaded Gaza.

Two Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period.

Israel accuses Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, of orchestrating the violence and protests.

Palestinians and rights groups say protesters have been shot while posing no real threat.

A UN probe has said Israel may have committed crimes against humanity in its response to the unrest, which Israel firmly rejected, saying its actions are necessary to defend its border.

More than 7,000 Palestinians have been wounded by gunfire since the start of the protests, according to the Gazan rights group Al-Mizan, while around 100 of those have undergone amputations.

- 'Like a novel' -

For now, Corradini does not work on Fridays, when the protests peak and the atmosphere can become too stressful for a trainee.

"Of course, it's not easy... to live here," he said, pointing to shortages of medicines and medical equipment on top of the insecurity of daily life.

"Maybe you cannot have some medical tools that you need for therapy or stuff."

But he said he had been warmly welcomed.

"I really love how Gaza is," he said. "It can look like a novel."

One of his friends, Saadi al-Nakhala, said: "It's brave of him to make the decision to come to an area under blockade."

But, the 23-year-old Palestinian student said, "Gaza is a place with people like everywhere else."

In his office overlooking the campus, Ahmed Muhaisen, in charge of external affairs for the university, said he "hopes that other students from other universities will follow".

The university has formed several hundred partnerships worldwide, particularly in Europe.

Three Gazans are currently studying abroad in Siena.

Italian student Riccardo Corradini (R) speaks with a friend at the Islamic University of Gaza

Muhaisen said it is "a way of showing the world that there is an excellent level of academia" in Gaza.

Corradini had become a form of "ambassador".

Since he arrived in February, at least four Italian universities have applied to the Erasmus programme in Gaza, said Meri Calvelli of Italian NGO ACS, which helps facilitate the exchanges.

She says it is important that the rest of the world see Gaza beyond the conflict-stricken zone it appears as in news stories.

Erasmus began in 1987 and was first limited to students in European countries. It has since been expanded to other regions under the name Erasmus Plus.

The partnerships are formed between universities.

The Italian government, which like other European countries and the United States considers Hamas a terrorist organisation, is not involved.

Corradini hopes that his four months there will, at least in a small way, help "the population of Gaza to live in a better way to create a path of peace".

As for his family, he said: "At the beginning they were saying, 'What are you doing?' But then they were very proud of me."
Rocky, 59, has been homeless for three years and suffers from depression -- she lives in a tent in a public park in the Van Nuys neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles

Rocky was 56 years old when she found herself living on the streets for the first time in her life, penniless and hungry, feeling that the rest of the world had left her behind.

She quickly slid into a deep depression, a mental state common among people experiencing such a traumatic change in their lives.

At that time, three years ago, her fragile psyche sapped her energy as she sought a place to pitch her tent in a park in Los Angeles county, which has the highest rate of homelessness in the United States.

The county has about 53,000 homeless residents, 27 percent of whom suffer from some kind of mental illness, be it schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression like Rocky's.

"It hasn't been easy," said Rocky, now 59, her hair graying and wrinkles forming on her face.

"Never been homeless before," she adds, almost whispering the word out of shame.

Rocky is the name she adopted when she hit the streets.

She has forgotten what it is like to have a truly good night's rest: she sleeps with a camping lantern that lights up at the least sound, and says she carries a firearm that she uses to scare off anyone who tries to rob or attack her in the night.

"Living out on the street, you know, is a stressful situation that can in and of itself exacerbate a mental health condition or symptoms of mental illness," said Benjamin Henwood, a social worker who carries out research for the University of Southern California.

Rocky talks about her homelessness as she unlocks her bike at her campsite in a public park in Van Nuys -- she suffers from depression

California boasts the fifth-largest economy in the world, but has the highest poverty rate in the United States, if the cost of living is taken into account.

There is no part of Los Angeles that doesn't have its own homeless community: from the tourist-filled Hollywood Walk of Fame to the city center, there are pockets of down-and-outs clustered in squares, parks and along highways.

Dirty and dressed in rags, they can often be seen talking to themselves, screaming or swaying to and fro -- all things that experts say indicate a mental condition or possibly drug abuse.

- 'Energy to survive' -

Eric Montoya, an outreach coordinator from LA Family Housing, try to help the homeless find low-cost apartments

Experts agree that the first step towards addressing mental illness among the homeless is simply finding them a place to live.

"Housing should be the foundation for recovery, not the culmination of recovery," said Todd Lipka, head of the NGO Step by Step, which helps homeless people with mental illness find places to live.

"If you have a mental illness, recovery in the street is almost impossible because you're spending all your energy simply surviving," he said.

Other groups such as LA Family Housing -- which services the area where Rocky lives -- also look for apartments for people on the street in an area that has sky-high costs of living.

"We need more permanent supportive housing to be built and we need it now," says Eric Montoya, an outreach coordinator with LA Family Housing who is looking for a place for Rocky.

Both LA county and the city itself are passing measures to spend billions of dollars on building social housing, but the projects have not been completed yet.

The legislative measures also aim to improve social services that are currently overwhelmed.

Rocky hugs LA Family Housing Outreach Coordinator Eric Montoya -- he is trying to help find her somewhere to live

Rocky received the green light for accommodation six months ago through another group that specializes in helping people with mental illness find homes, as well as getting them access to therapy.

"I was very depressed, wanting to use drugs. Everybody is using," she said with tears in her eyes, recalling that in her youth, she was an addict but has been clean for almost 30 years.

"How much lower you can get?"

- 'Hot water!' -

Rocky ended up on the streets after a boyfriend took everything she had and her ill former husband refused to see her when she tried to care for him -- he suffered from dementia

Rocky's story is full of tragic twists and turns, and she is not keen to relive them.

Her husband earned a good salary, but she left him to get away from his drug and alcohol abuse.

Then she had a boyfriend in San Diego who took everything she had and forced her to move far away from California.

She says she was in Idaho for a while, working on ranches where she looked after horses, before returning to Los Angeles to look after her former husband, who was extremely ill with cirrhosis.

But she says he was also suffering from dementia and did not know who she was. He refused to see her.

Rocky has tried to make her tent home as welcoming as possible -- this sign is posted at the entrance when she is gone

Then she ended up on the streets, with only her three suitcases and the grief of being rejected multiple times.

After drifting through several shelters, she wound up in the park in Van Nuys, where she pitched her tent under some trees.

Rocky keeps the inside of the tent tidy, her bed neatly made, and has a cooking area and even an ingeniously improvised shower.

She shows off her campsite with pride, even if she can't help thinking of a future she has lost.

"I want to be able to close the door and lock it," she said dreamily.

"I'll have running water, hot water! And I'll be secure, safe, when I go to bed."
Tunisia's uprising quickly spread to Egypt, where mass demonstrations toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak and triggered revolutions across the Arab world

From Syria's devastating conflict to unprecedented mass protests in Algeria, the Arab world has seen eight years of turmoil. Only Tunisia pursues democratisation, while other countries are marred by war, repression and chaos.

A panorama:

- Tunisia: spark of Arab Spring -

In December 2010 the self-immolation of a young street vendor, frustrated by police harassment, triggers protests against poverty and unemployment.

Unprecedented protests in Tunisia toppled dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and sparked the Arab Spring uprisings

Less than a month later, popular pressure forces long-time president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country.

Tunisia wins international plaudits for its peaceful transition.

In 2014 it adopts a new constitution that limits presidential power. General elections are won by Nidaa Tounes, an anti-Islamist party, tailed by the moderate Islamist Ennahda party.

In December, Beji Caid Essebsi becomes the country's first democratically elected head of state.

Since three major attacks by the jihadist Islamic State in 2015, the security situation has greatly improved. Legislative and presidential elections are planned in late 2019.

- Egypt: repression -

After a mass 18-day revolt which costs almost 850 lives, Hosni Mubarak steps down from the presidency on February 11, 2011 ending almost three decades in power and handing power to the army.

In June 2012, Islamist Mohamed Morsi becomes the first civilian, freely elected head of the Arab world's most populous state.

Mass demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square produced some of the Arab Spring's most iconic images

The following year is marked by crises and political dissent, resulting in the ouster of Morsi by the armed forces led by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi following vast protests.

The new regime launches a bloody crackdown on Morsi supporters. Rights group Amnesty International says 1,400 people are killed in seven months, the majority being Islamist protesters.

Rights groups accuse Sisi, elected president in 2014 and again in 2018, of running an ultra-repressive regime.

- Yemen: famine -

In February 2012 after more than three decades in power and a year of popular revolt, Ali Abdullah Saleh is ousted and his deputy Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi takes over.

In 2014 Huthi Shiite rebels launch an offensive from which they seize vast swathes of the country including the capital Sanaa. The following year Saudi Arabia leads an Arab coalition to halt the Huthi advance.

Some 10,000 people have died in the conflict, according to the World Health Organization. Ten million are on the brink of famine.

- Bahrain: dissent -

Tiny Gulf state Bahrain, ruled by the Sunni Khalifa dynasty and backed by powerful neighbour Saudi Arabia, has been rocked by sporadic unrest since 2011 when authorities clamped down on Shiite protests calling for political reforms.

Since then opposition has grown and hundreds of demonstrators have been jailed or stripped of their nationality.

- Libya: chaos -

On February 15, 2011, protests break out against the regime of Moamer Kadhafi, in power for 42 years.

The demonstrations are violently repressed and the unrest turns into armed revolt which wins backing from NATO. On October 20, Kadhafi is captured and killed during a battle for his hometown Sirte, east of the capital Tripoli.

NATO conducted an aerial bombing campaign in support of rebels battling Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi, leaving a country in chaos

Two rival authorities now lead Libya: from its base in Tripoli an internationally-backed government headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, and a parallel administration operating out of the east, supported by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

A multitude of militias also vie for control.

The Islamic State occupied Sirte for months before being ousted at the end of 2016. Amid the insecurity and political chaos, Libya has become a major transit hub for hundreds of thousands of African migrants trying to reach Europe by sea.

- Syria: ninth year of war -

Syria has been shattered by eight years of conflict that have killed more than 370,000 people dead and uprooted more than 13 million.

The Free Syrian Army, made up largely of fighters who defected from regime forces, gradually lost ground to extremists including the Islamic State group

Peaceful protests that begin on March 15, 2011, are crushed and transformed into an armed insurrection against President Bashar al-Assad, before degenerating into all-out war in 2012.

In 2013-2014, lightly armed rebel groups are pushed aside by Islamic militias such as the Al-Nusra Front, an Al-Qaeda affiliate, then the IS.

With military backing from its allies Russia, Iran and Lebanese Shiite organisation Hezbollah, the regime wins back territory it had lost. Today it controls nearly two thirds of the country.

- Algeria: massive protests -

Algeria is rocked from February 22, 2019, by a wave of unprecedented demonstrations, sparked when ailing President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in power since 1999, says he will stand for a fifth term.

On March 11, Bouteflika pulls out of the presidential race but postpones the election planned for April 18, effectively extending his term.

Protests continue.
Al-Azhar's Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb (L) joined Pope Francis on his visit to the Emirates last month to call for peace between religions

The grand imam of Egypt's famed Al-Azhar mosque and university has condemned a mass shooting targeting mosques in New Zealand on Friday as a "horrific terrorist attack".

Attacks on two mosques in Christchurch left at least 49 dead.

One gunman armed with semi-automatic weapons -- identified as an Australian citizen -- live-streamed the assault and published a manifesto online.

"This horrific terrorist attack is a serious indicator of the consequences of rising rhetoric of hatred and xenophobia and the spread of Islamophobia" in countries "known for the coexistence of their inhabitants", said Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb.

The grand imam, who heads Egypt's most revered centre of Sunni Islamic learning, joined Pope Francis last month in the United Arab Emirates to call for peaceful coexistence among religions.

The Sunni leader urged Western states to "increase efforts to support the values of tolerance and coexistence" within their societies.

The Christchurch attacks have sparked global revulsion, with leaders around the world calling for solidarity with Muslim communities.

During afternoon prayers on Friday -- Islam's holy day -- a gunman opened fire inside the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch, killing forty-one.

Another seven were slain at a second mosque five kilometres away in suburban Linwood, three of them outside the building.

It is unclear where the remaining victim died.

None of the victims has yet been publicly identified.
US President Donald Trump, pictured in Jerusalem's Old City in 2017, touted his controversial decision to move the US embassy to the city from Tel Aviv

A fringe "Jexodus" movement seeking to weaken US Jews' support for the Democratic party got a boost Friday from President Donald Trump, who said Republicans "are waiting with open arms."

The Jewish vote has long leaned solidly left but Trump puts major emphasis on his support for Israel's right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and allies cast him as the most pro-Israeli US leader in history.

Trump's latest gambit is to promote a tiny, newly-created group called "Jexodus," which wants to lure Jewish voters to the Republicans.

In a tweet supporting the bid to encourage "Jewish people to leave the Democrat Party," Trump touted his controversial decisions to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed city of Jerusalem and to withdraw from a carefully crafted deal over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

In an earlier tweet this week, Trump quoted the spokeswoman for "Jexodus," Elizabeth Pipko, who said that Democrats "don't care about Israel or the Jewish people."

Trump's decision to give the fledgling group so much publicity comes as Republicans try and take advantage of turmoil in the Democratic Party over recent comments by a congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, that some saw as anti-Semitic.

But in the 2016 presidential elections, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton scored 71 percent of the Jewish vote to Trump's 24 percent.

Even Pipko, who is reported to be a former Trump White House staffer, seemed to question whether "Jexodus" will have much success.

Speaking on the "FOX & Friends" morning news show, a favorite of Trump's, she said her Jewish friends "never changed their minds" over supporting Democrats and "I don't think they're going to change."

The timing of Trump's latest foray into Jewish-American politics raised eyebrows.

His tweet calling for Jews to abandon the Democratic party came just after he tweeted an expression of sympathy for victims of mass shootings at two New Zealand mosques that killed 49 people.

One of the alleged perpetrators posted a lengthy statement expressing deep hatred for Islam.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - A police officer in Somalia says a car bomb blast near a security checkpoint at the presidential palace in the capital killed at least two people.

Capt. Mohamed Hussein said that a car exploded by the rear entrance of the hilltop presidential palace and appeared to have been targeting security forces stationed at a nearby security checkpoint.

He said one person has also been injured. He said the car appeared to have been parked and was detonated remotely, adding that security forces arrested a man suspected to have been the driver of the car.

A Somali soldier walks near the wreckage of car in Mogadishu, Somalia, Thursday March 7, 2019. A Somali police officer says a car bomb blast near a security checkpoint near the presidential palace in the Somali capital killed at least two people. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)

A Somali soldier walks near wreckage of car in Mogadishu, Somalia, Thursday March 7, 2019. A Somali police officer says a car bomb blast near a security checkpoint near the presidential palace in the Somali capital killed at least two people.(AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - The Copenhagen Zoo says two giant black-and-white visitors are heading to Denmark as part of China's so-called "panda diplomacy."

Park manager Joergen Nielsen says the arrival of the pandas April 4 "is going be one of the biggest moments in the zoo's 160-year-long history."

Nielsen says the public will see the panda couple, from the zoo in China's southwestern city of Chengdu, in the newly built, 160 million-kroner ($24.2 million) Panda House from April 11.

Nielsen said Wednesday Danish officials will officially open the enclosure a day earlier.

Denmark is latest country to receive the Chinese diplomatic gifts. Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen visited China in May and saw the pandas, considered to be symbols of Chinese cultural and political power.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Republican-run Senate firmly rejected President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border on Thursday, setting up a veto fight and dealing him a conspicuous rebuke as he tested how boldly he could ignore Congress in pursuit of his highest-profile goal.

The Senate voted 59-41 to cancel Trump's February proclamation of a border emergency, which he invoked to spend $3.6 billion more for border barriers than Congress had approved. Twelve Republicans joined Democrats in defying Trump in a showdown many GOP senators had hoped to avoid because he commands die-hard loyalty from millions of conservative voters who could punish defecting lawmakers in next year's elections.

With the Democratic-controlled House's approval of the same resolution last month, Senate passage sends it to Trump. He has shown no reluctance to casting his first veto to advance his campaign exhortation, "Build the Wall," which has prompted roars at countless Trump rallies. Approval votes in both the Senate and House fell short of the two-thirds majorities needed to override.

"VETO!" Trump tweeted minutes after the vote.

Though Trump seems sure to prevail in that battle, it remains noteworthy that lawmakers of both parties resisted him in a fight directly tied to his cherished campaign theme of erecting a border wall. The roll call came just a day after the Senate took a step toward a veto fight with Trump on another issue, voting to end U.S. support for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition's war in Yemen.

In a measure of how remarkable the confrontation was, Thursday was the first time Congress has voted to block a presidential emergency since the National Emergency Act became law in 1976.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, arrives in the Senate where she has said she will vote for a resolution to annul President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Even before Thursday's vote, there were warnings that GOP senators resisting Trump could face political consequences. A White House official said Trump won't forget when senators who oppose him want him to attend fundraisers or provide other help. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on internal deliberations.

At the White House, Trump did not answer when reporters asked if there would be consequences for Republicans who voted against him.

"I'm sure he will not be happy with my vote," said moderate Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a GOP defector who faces re-election next year in a state that reveres independent streaks in its politicians. "But I'm a United State senator and feel my job to stand up for the Constitution. So let the chips fall where they may."

Underscoring the political pressures in play, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who was one of the first Republicans to say he'd oppose Trump's border emergency, said Thursday he'd vote to support it.

Tillis, who faces a potentially difficult re-election race next year, cited talks with the White House that suggest Trump could be open to restricting presidential emergency powers in the future. Tillis wrote in a Washington Post opinion column last month that there'd be "no intellectual honesty" in backing Trump after his repeated objections about executive overreach by President Barack Obama,

Still, the breadth of opposition among Republicans suggested how concern about his declaration had spread to all corners of the GOP. Republican senators voting for the resolution blocking Trump included Mitt Romney of Utah, the party's 2012 presidential candidate; Mike Lee of Utah, a solid conservative; the libertarian-leaning Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a respected centrist.

Republicans control the Senate 53-47. Democrats solidly opposed Trump's declaration.

Presidents have declared 58 national emergencies since the 1976 law, but this was the first aimed at accessing money that Congress had explicitly denied, according to Elizabeth Goitein, co-director for national security at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice.

Trump and Republicans backing him said there is a legitimate security and humanitarian crisis at the border with Mexico. They also said Trump was merely exercising his powers under the law, which largely leaves it to presidents to decide what a national emergency is.

"The president is operating within existing law, and the crisis on our border is all too real," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Opponents said Trump's assertion of an emergency was overblown. They said he issued his declaration only because Congress agreed to provide less than $1.4 billion for barriers and he was desperate to fulfill his campaign promise on the wall. They said the Constitution gives Congress, not presidents, control over spending and said Trump's stretching of emergency powers would invite future presidents to do the same for their own concerns.

"He's obsessed with showing strength, and he couldn't just abandon his pursuit of the border wall, so he had to trample on the Constitution to continue his fight," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Republicans had hoped that Trump would endorse a separate bill by Utah's Sen. Lee constraining emergency declarations in the future and that would win over enough GOP senators to reject Thursday's resolution.

But Trump told Lee on Wednesday that he opposed Lee's legislation, prompting Lee himself to say he would back the resolution.

The strongest chance of blocking Trump remains several lawsuits filed by Democratic state attorneys general, environmental groups and others. Those cases could effectively block Trump from diverting extra money to barrier construction for months or longer.

On Twitter, Trump called on Republicans to oppose the resolution, which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., helped drive through the House last month.

"Today's issue is BORDER SECURITY and Crime!!! Don't vote with Pelosi!" he tweeted, invoking the name of a Democrat who boatloads of GOP ads have villainized in recent campaign cycles.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who is backing Trump, went to the White House late Wednesday with other senators to see if some compromise could be reached that would help reduce the number of GOP senators opposing Trump, according to a person familiar with the visit who described it on condition of anonymity. The effort fell short.

The National Emergency Act gives presidents wide leeway in declaring an emergency. Congress can vote to block a declaration, but the two-thirds majorities required to overcome presidential vetoes make it hard for lawmakers to prevail.

Lee had proposed letting a presidential emergency declaration last 30 days unless Congress voted to extend it. That would have applied to future emergencies but not Trump's current order unless he sought to renew it next year.

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Padmananda Rama and Andrew Taylor in Washington and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed.

Sen.Thom Tillis, R-N.C., attends a Senate Armed Services hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Tillis has said he will vote to block President Donald Trump's border emergency as some GOP senators plan to join Democrats in a rebuke of Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

IN this March 13, 2019, photo, reporters pose questions to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The Republican-led Senate is set to deal President Donald Trump a rebuke on his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, with the only remaining question how many GOP senators will join Democrats in defying him. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks at an Economic Club of Washington luncheon gathering in Washington, Friday, March 8, 2019. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Construction crews replace a section of the primary wall separating San Diego, above right, and Tijuana, Mexico, below left, Monday, March 11, 2019, seen from Tijuana, Mexico. President Donald Trump is reviving his border wall fight, preparing a new budget that will seek $8.6 billion for the U.S-Mexico barrier while imposing steep spending cuts to other domestic programs and setting the stage for another fiscal battle. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him.

The Vermont senator has spent months working to deepen his ties with the black community in South Carolina, where minority voters make up the majority of the Democratic primary electorate. He returned to South Carolina on Thursday for the first time as a 2020 candidate, eager to prove that those efforts put him in a more competitive position in a state he lost by a staggering 47 points.

Before a mostly white crowd of more than 1,500, Sanders recounted the ways in which his 2016 campaign has influenced the current sprawling Democratic field, including pushes to expand the minimum wage and revamp health care options.

"Well, a funny thing happened over the last several years," Sanders said.

Many of the themes Sanders hit on Thursday night, such as tuition-free higher education and reducing the influence of corporations in politics, echoed his campaign in 2016, when his loss in South Carolina to Hillary Clinton blunted the momentum he generated in the opening primary contests and exposed his weakness with black voters. Rather than skip South Carolina this time around, Sanders plans to make a serious bid in the first-in-the-South primary state.

Senior adviser Jeff Weaver told reporters this week that Sanders will be in South Carolina much more frequently than during his first campaign and is putting together a "much stronger team on the ground, much earlier in the process."

Sen. Bernie Sanders greets supporters in North Charleston, S.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard )

Some of that work has been done by Our Revolution, the organizing offshoot of Sanders' 2016 campaign. The South Carolina branch is among the group's strongest, holding regular meetings and conferences throughout the state. Sanders addressed the group last year.

But some of Sanders' top South Carolina staffers from 2016 aren't rejoining his team, including Christale Spain, Sanders' 2016 political outreach director for South Carolina who is now working for Sen. Cory Booker's presidential campaign. Sanders has yet to announce any hires in South Carolina.

Sanders has been open about his challenges in the critical Southern state.

"I lost badly here in South Carolina," Sanders said during a meeting earlier this year with the Legislative Black Caucus.

Appealing to minority voters is an area Sanders' 2020 campaign has worked to address overall, focusing pieces of his rollout on reminders of his civil rights past. One of his first official stops as a declared candidate was at the University of Chicago, where, as a student, he participated in the movement. Hours earlier, he was in Selma, Alabama, participating in ceremonies marking the anniversary of Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of one of the most galvanizing moments in support of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In January, Sanders traveled to South Carolina for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day rally. He marched from a prayer service to a rally at the Statehouse, arms linked with NAACP leaders and other activists. In the afternoon, Sanders returned to the church for a roundtable discussion on race.

As part of that trip, Sanders also met with students at a historically black college in Columbia. He huddled with state lawmakers, attending a meeting of the Legislative Black Caucus.

On Thursday, Sanders said his campaign will address issues pertinent to minority communities and combat what he called "institutional racism."

"Whether it is a broken criminal justice system, or massive disparities in the availability of financial services, or health disparities, or environmental disparities, or educational disparities, or racist voting laws - our job is to create a nation in which all people are treated equally," Sanders said. "That is what we must do, and that is what we will do."

Some Democrats say Sanders - a self-proclaimed democratic socialist who advocates for sweeping government-backed programs - still faces an uphill climb in conservative-leaning South Carolina. Boyd Brown, a former state lawmaker and Democratic National Committee member, characterized Sanders as too extreme for South Carolina and said he's doing "greater damage to the party overall."

Sanders pushed back against the notion, telling The Associated Press that he felt his campaign has helped broaden minds, even in conservative states like South Carolina. On Thursday, Sanders told the crowd that he's not worried about detractors who say he can't win in South Carolina.

"I've got some bad news for them," Sanders said. "Based on what I'm seeing tonight, we're doing just fine in South Carolina."

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Associated Press writers Christina L. Myers in Columbia, S.C., and Juana Summers in Washington contributed to this report.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

Sen. Bernie Sanders addresses a rally in North Charleston, S.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

Sen. Bernie Sanders greets supporters in North Charleston, S.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard )

Bernie Sanders greets supporters at a rally in North Charleston, S.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him. (Lauren Petracca/The Post And Courier via AP)

Bernie Sanders addresses a rally in North Charleston, S.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him. (Lauren Petracca/The Post And Courier via AP)

Sen. Bernie Sanders addresses a rally in North Charleston, S.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him. (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)

Bernie Sanders addresses a rally in North Charleston, S.C., Thursday, March 14, 2019. South Carolina gave Bernie Sanders the cold shoulder in 2016. Four years and several visits later, Sanders hopes the state is ready to warm to him. (Lauren Petracca/The Post And Courier via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) - Changing his vote from the public stance he took last month, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis voted Thursday to support President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency to pay for his border wall.

Tillis announced his change of heart on the Senate floor, minutes before the Senate voted to disapprove Trump's declaration.

"A lot has changed over the last three weeks," when he laid out his objections to the president's action in an op-ed in The Washington Post, Tillis said.

After discussing the issue with Vice President Mike Pence and other senior administration officials, as well as Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Tillis said he is optimistic lawmakers can change the way national emergencies are declared.

"The concerns I've raised were never about what President Trump is trying to accomplish but rather with setting a precedent that a future Democratic president would exploit to bypass Congress," he said, adding that he is "incredibly encouraged by the historic commitment from the president to restore proper balance between the executive and legislative branches."

In the meantime, Tillis said, "I think we have to recognize that we have a crisis at the border."

Sen.Thom Tillis, R-N.C., attends a Senate Armed Services hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Tillis has said he will vote to block President Donald Trump's border emergency as some GOP senators plan to join Democrats in a rebuke of Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

More than 76,000 people crossed the southern border illegally last month alone, he said. "We have narcotics flooding our country, poisoning our children and adults of all ages, and a lot of it has to do with the porous border and the seemingly out of control crossings."

Tillis, a Republican who is facing re-election in 2020, has been facing public pressure from Trump and local Republicans, who have indicated they'd be open to a primary challenger.

In the end, Tillis decided to back the president.

The decision placed him at odds with 12 Republicans who sided with Democrats to reject Trump's emergency declaration. The vote set up a veto fight and dealt Trump a conspicuous rebuke as he tested how boldly he could ignore Congress in pursuit of his highest-profile goal.

Tillis was among a group of GOP senators who had wavered on the high-profile vote amid concerns that Trump's die-hard loyalty from millions of conservative voters could lead them to punish defecting lawmakers in next year's elections.

A White House official said Tillis had been in regular touch with Pence and other officials as he weighed his vote. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said the consistent message from the White House was that a vote in favor of the resolution was a vote against border security - an action that would be hard to explain to his state.

A person familiar with Tillis' thinking said he and other GOP senators needed a public signal from Trump that he would work to fix law on emergency declarations. Trump tweeted Thursday, "If at a later date, Congress wants to update the law, I will support those efforts, but today's issue is BORDER SECURITY and Crime!!!"

Tillis' initial strong statements of opposition to Trump's use of executive power were not the first time the former IBM consultant and state House speaker had defied the president, who often views other Republicans in terms of their loyalty to him. Tillis partnered with Democrats earlier this year on legislation to protect special counsel Robert Mueller's job investigating the president's campaign and Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

For Tillis, 58, decisions on how and when to support or oppose Trump are clearly shaded by his expected bid for a second Senate term next year - and the drive to hold off any strong challengers. In a floor speech and the Post op-ed, Tillis made clear that he shares Trump's concerns about border security.

But he firmly declared that Trump's effort to go around Congress to pay for his wall overstepped the Constitution's separation of powers. "As a U.S. senator, I cannot justify providing the executive with more ways to bypass Congress," he wrote last month.

Voting against the emergency declaration would have planted Tillis firmly among the Senate's influential centrists, such as Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Both Collins and Murkowski voted to end the national emergency.

Tillis' change of heart seemed aimed at appeasing the GOP base back home as well as independents.

"He needs both an enthusiastic party base as well as at least some unaffiliated voters to win," said Eric Heberlig, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "To appeal to one is basically to shut out support for the other."

While Tillis has been a reliable conservative vote during his first term, he's also pressed for bipartisanship, hardly letting a few days go by this year without news releases highlighting bills he's introduced with Democrats.

Republicans back home had questioned Tillis' support for Trump when he co-sponsored the legislation to protect Mueller's job. Tillis said in January he didn't believe Trump would fire the special prosecutor but called that bipartisan bill "good government policy with enduring value across the current and future administrations."

Diane Parnell, chairwoman of the Rockingham County Republican Party, said now is not the time for Tillis to reach across the aisle. "We want him to support our president," she said.

State Democrats jumped on his flip-flop on Trump's emergency declaration.

"Sen. Tillis made a big show about how he'd stand up for North Carolina but caved under pressure," said Democratic Party spokesman Robert Howard. "Tillis again reminded the entire state who he is: a spineless politician who won't keep his promises and looks out for himself instead of North Carolina."

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Robertson reported from Raleigh, N.C. Associated Press writers Laurie Kellman, Lisa Mascaro and Catherine Lucey and researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.

In this March 6, 2019, photo, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., questions U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on oversight of Customs and Border Protection's response to the smuggling of persons at the southern border in Washington. Republicans from the White House to Congress to North Carolina are watching whether Tillis stands with Trump. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
NEW YORK (AP) - The reputed boss of New York's Gambino crime family was gunned down outside his home, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular John Gotti.

Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at a hospital.

Witnesses reported seeing a blue pickup truck speeding away, police said. No immediate arrests were made.

Federal prosecutors had referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Gambino organization. News accounts since 2015 said he had ascended to the top spot.

The Gambino family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent Gotti and other top leaders to prison, diminishing its reach.

The last Mafia boss to be shot to death in New York City was Gambino don Paul Castellano, assassinated on Gotti's direction while getting out of a black limousine outside a high-end midtown Manhattan steakhouse in 1985. Gotti then took control of the family.

FILE - In this Feb. 9, 1990 file photo, John Gotti, right, arrives at court in New York. The Gambino family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent Gotti and other top leaders to prison, diminishing its reach. The last Mafia boss to be shot to death in New York City was Gambino don Paul Castellano, assassinated outside a Manhattan steakhouse in 1985 at the direction of Gotti, who then took over the organization. On Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, the reputed boss of New York's Gambino crime family was gunned down outside his home, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular Gotti. (AP Photo/David Cantor, File)

"We thought those days were over," Mayor Bill de Blasio said of Cali's slaying. "Very surprising, but I guess old habits die hard."

Cali kept a much lower profile than Gotti and was killed in far less spectacular fashion than Castellano. He was shot in the chest at least six times on a tree-lined street in a quiet neighborhood a short walk from ball fields, a country club and a day camp.

Gotti, with his expensive double-breasted suits and overcoats and silvery swept-back hair, became known as the Dapper Don, his smiling face all over the tabloids. As prosecutors tried and failed to bring him down, he came to be called the Teflon Don.

In 1992, Gotti was convicted in Castellano's murder and a multitude of other crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison and died of cancer in 2002.

The Mafia's notoriety and influence have waned in New York City since then, but there have been flare-ups.

On Wednesday, hours before Cali was killed, the reputed boss and consigliere of the Bonanno crime family were acquitted in a Brooklyn racketeering and extortion case. In October, reputed Bonanno associate Sylvester Zottola was fatally shot while waiting for a cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-thru in the Bronx.

Last week, the longtime boss of the Colombo crime family, 85-year-old Carmine "the Snake" Persico, died at a North Carolina hospital near the federal prison where he had been serving what was effectively a life sentence. Persico was convicted in a 1986 case overseen by then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Cali's only mob-related criminal conviction came a decade ago, when he pleaded guilty in an extortion scheme involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island. He was sentenced to 16 months behind bars and was released in 2009.

In that case, authorities intercepted conversations shedding light on his quiet underworld influence and popularity at home and abroad. An Italian mobster said Cali was "everything over there" in New York and referred to him as "a friend of ours."

A prosecutor echoed those sentiments at a 2008 bail hearing, saying Cali was seen "as a man of influence and power by organized crime members in Italy."

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Karen Matthews contributed to this report.

FILE - In this Dec. 16, 1985 file photo, the body of mafia crime boss Paul Castellano lies on a stretcher outside the Sparks Steak House in New York after he and his bodyguards were gunned down at the direction of John Gotti, who then took over as boss. On Wednesday, March 13, 2019, the reputed boss of New York's Gambino crime family, Frank Cali, was gunned down outside his home in Staten Island, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular Gotti. The Gambino family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent Gotti and other top leaders to prison, diminishing its reach. The last Mafia boss to be shot to death in New York City was Castellano, assassinated on Gotti's direction. (AP Photo/Mario Suriani, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 25, 1957 file photo, the body of Mafia boss Albert Anastasia lies on the floor of the barbershop at New York's Park Sheraton Hotel after his murder. Anastasia's crime family was taken over by Carlo Gambino. While mob executions are a blast from the past; the last boss executed was Paul Castellano in 1985, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Francesco, "Franky Boy" Cali was gunned down outside his home in Staten Island, dying a virtual unknown, compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular John Gotti. (AP Photo/FILE)

FILE - In this Oct. 25, 1957 file photo, the body of gangster Albert Anastasia is carried by stretcher from the A. Grasso barber shop in New York's Park Sheraton Hotel where he was slain by two masked gunmen in New York. While mob executions are a blast from the past; the last boss executed was Paul Castellano in 1985, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Francesco, "Franky Boy" Cali was gunned down outside his home in Staten Island, dying a virtual unknown, compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular John Gotti. (AP Photo/File)

Police work near the scene where an alleged leader of the Gambino crime family was shot and killed in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home Wednesday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Crime scene investigators load a car that appears to have been checked for fingerprints onto a flatbed truck in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at a hospital. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Police work near the scene where an alleged leader of the Gambino crime family was shot and killed in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home Wednesday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Crime scene investigators load a car that appears to have been checked for fingerprints onto a flatbed truck in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at a hospital. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Police work near the scene where an alleged leader of the Gambino crime family was shot and killed in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home Wednesday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

New York Police Department and New York City Fire Department units respond to a report of shots fired Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in the Todt Hill section of the Staten Island borough of New York. A man said by federal prosecutors to have been a top leader of New York's notorious Gambino crime family was shot and killed Wednesday on Staten Island. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home just after 9 p.m. (Joseph Ostapiuk/Staten Island Advance via AP)
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - A blizzard that paralyzed parts of Colorado and Wyoming barreled into the Midwest on Thursday, bringing whiteout conditions to western Nebraska and dumping heavy rain that prompted evacuations in communities farther east.

Emergency crews responded after a vehicle was swept off a road in Norfolk, Nebraska, and rising water along the Elkhorn River prompted evacuations in the city of 24,000 people. The missing individual had not been found by midday Thursday.

Evacuations also occurred in several other eastern Nebraska communities and at least one Iowa town. Cara Jamison and her neighbors had to leave their homes in Fremont, Nebraska, after water and ice chunks from a flooding Platte River blocked their street. She and her husband moved photo albums to the second floor of their home.

"Photos are the important things," she said. "Furniture can be replaced."

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem closed all state offices Thursday as the blizzard conditions moved in, and later in the day ordered the opening of the state's Emergency Operations Center to handle the response to the blizzard and flooding. The state was preparing an emergency declaration, Noem said. The Red Cross opened shelters in Sioux Falls and Yankton.

Wind, blowing snow and snow-packed roadways also made travel treacherous in western Nebraska.

Mary Roncka and her husband Gene Roncka, right, accompanied by neighbor Kevin Mandina are evacuated as floodwaters rise Thursday, March 13, 2019, in Ashland, Neb. Evacuations forced by flooding have occurred in several eastern Nebraska communities, as western Nebraska residents struggled with blizzardlike conditions. (Brendan Sullivan/Omaha World-Herald via AP)

Heavy rain caused flooding in eastern parts of South Dakota and Nebraska, as well as in Iowa, where all or part of nine state parks were closed due to rising flood waters. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed an emergency disaster proclamation Thursday and activated the state emergency operations center.

Several cities in the region have been hit by rain this week, with records set Wednesday in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Sioux City, Iowa.

"We've got a lot of water, and it's got to find a way to get out of here," said Tracy West, mayor of Lennox, South Dakota.

The system was moving out of the central Plains on Thursday, but National Weather Service meteorologist Peter Rogers said flooding is likely to persist into the weekend in parts of South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa, with deeply frozen ground preventing rain and snowmelt from soaking into the soil.

The massive late-winter storm hit Colorado on Wednesday, causing widespread power outages, forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights and wreaking havoc on roadways. A wind gust clocked in at 97 mph (156 kph) in Colorado Springs.

Xcel Energy said it had restored power to some 360,000 customers in Colorado but that thousands remained without electricity Thursday. Some may have no power into the weekend.

In the Texas Panhandle, a utility worker was killed while working to restore power amid strong winds pushed in by the storm. And in New Mexico, 36 miners at a nuclear waste repository were trapped underground in an elevator for about three hours because of a power outage caused by the extreme weather. Outages also were reported from North Dakota to Nebraska.

The storm also contributed to the death of Daniel Groves, a Colorado State Patrol officer who was hit and killed by a car as he helped another driver who had slid off Interstate 76 near Denver.

About 50 National Guard soldiers and airmen used specialized vehicles with tank-like treads to rescue 75 people stranded in their cars during the storm. The total number of people rescued statewide is likely higher, as local law enforcement ran separate rescue efforts.

The Red Cross reported Thursday that 620 people had stayed in shelters overnight in Colorado and in Wyoming, where the state Transportation Department reported snow drifts on Interstate 80 that were as high as 10 feet (3 meters).

Jackie Ratcliff stayed in a hotel and on Thursday was waiting in Wellington, Colorado, for Interstate 25 to reopen so she could return to her home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She had tried to make the trip Wednesday but the interstate was shut down due to a pileup - one she thinks she narrowly avoided.

"I'm feeling pretty lucky," she said, despite her dog at home needing to be fed.

The window-rattling storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond.

Five people were hurt and 150 dairy cows had to be euthanized when a tornado hit the small town of Dexter, New Mexico. A tornado also touched down Thursday in western Kentucky , damaging utility lines and trees. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The culprit was a sudden and severe drop in ground-level air pressure in Colorado, the most pronounced dive since 1950 and something "that will go down in the history books," said Greg Carbin, chief of forecast operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Weather Prediction Center.

It was caused by a combination of the jet stream and normal conditions in the wind shadow of the Rockies. Air rushed into the low-pressure area and then rose into the atmosphere, causing severe weather.

Meteorologists call the rapid change in pressure a "bomb cyclone" or "bombogenesis."

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Nicholson reported from Bismarck, North Dakota. Also contributing were Associated Press reporters Dan Elliott in Longmont, Colorado; David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa; Bob Moen and Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Gretchen Ehlke in Milwaukee; James Anderson and Thomas Peipert in Denver; Jeff Baenen in Minneapolis; Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Seth Borenstein in Washington; David Warren in Dallas; Kathleen Foody in Denver.

A semi truck and trailer are swept off the road by floodwaters Thursday, March 13, 2019, in Arlington, Neb. Evacuations forced by flooding have occurred in several eastern Nebraska communities, as western Nebraska residents struggled with blizzardlike conditions. (Ryan Soderlin/Omaha World-Herald via AP)

City of Scottsbluff, Neb. plows work to clear snow from Broadway on Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Evacuations forced by flooding have occurred in several eastern Nebraska communities, as western Nebraska residents struggled with blizzardlike conditions. (Spike Jordan/The Star-Herald via AP)

Blowing snow reduces visibility at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial near Keystone, S.D., Wednesday, March 13, 2019. A window-rattling storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Ryan Hermens/Rapid City Journal via AP)

A string of wrecked vehicles sit on an overpass over Interstate 70 as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Aurora, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

This undated photo provided by the Colorado State Patrol shows Cpl. Daniel Groves. The state patrol officer was hit and killed by a car as he was helping another driver who had slid off of Interstate 76 northeast of Denver. A window-rattling late winter storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, March 13 , 2019, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Colorado State Patrol via AP)

Canada geese battle choppy water as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Bobby Larson drops into the bowl on a snowboard in Edora Park on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Fort Collins, Colo. A winter storm hit the western U.S., with blizzard conditions expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Timothy Hurst/The Coloradoan via AP)

A cross country skier travels in the snow on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Fort Collins, Colo. A winter storm hit the western U.S., with blizzard conditions expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Timothy Hurst/The Coloradoan via AP)

People walk a dog in the snow on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Fort Collins, Colo. Low air pressure is how meteorologists measure the strength of a storm, and this is the strongest in Colorado since at least 1950. (Timothy Hurst/The Coloradoan via AP)

Vehicles stack up on the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70 near Tower Road as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Aurora, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

A lone pedestrian struggles along Broadway as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

White-out conditions along Happy Jack Road during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne. White-out conditions closed I-80, I-25, and U.S. 85, effectively closing off the state capital from Nebraska, Colorado and the rest of Wyoming. (Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)

A traveller drags a suitcase as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Traffic comes to a halt on eastbound Interstate 70 near Tower Road as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Aurora, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

High water floods a street Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Hooper, Neb. A window-rattling late winter storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Ryan Soderlin/Omaha World-Herald via AP)
Aviation regulators worldwide laid down a stark challenge for Boeing to prove that its grounded 737 Max jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

In a key step toward unearthing the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, flight recorders from the shattered plane arrived Thursday in France for analysis, although the agency in charge of the review said it was unclear whether the data could be retrieved. The decision to send the recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the United States, which held out longer than most other countries in grounding the jets.

Boeing executives announced that they had paused delivery of the Max, although the company planned to continue building the jets while it weighs the effect of the grounding on production.

In Addis Ababa, about 200 angry family members of crash victims left a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials, saying that the carrier has not given them adequate information. Officials said they have opened a call-in center that is available 18 hours a day to respond to questions. There were 157 people from 35 countries who died in the crash.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration grounded the planes Wednesday, saying regulators had new satellite evidence that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610. That flight crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

The Max jets are likely to be idle for weeks while Boeing tries to assure regulators around the world that the planes are safe.

An Ethiopian relative of a crash victim throws dirt in her own face after realising that there is nothing physical left of her loved one, as she mourns at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

At a minimum, aviation experts say, the plane maker will need to finish updating software that might have played a role in the Lion Air crash. Regulators will wait for more definitive evidence of what caused both crashes. Some industry officials think the plane maker and U.S. regulators may be forced to answer questions about the plane's design.

Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step, while reiterating its "full confidence" in the safety of the 737 Max. The company has previously characterized the software upgrades as an effort to make a safe plane even safer. Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jet's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Satellite-based data showed that both the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport but crashed, killing everyone on board.

How long the planes stay grounded depends largely on what investigators find on the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director for the National Transportation Safety Board.

If the recorders indicate a manufacturing problem or a software glitch in the anti-stall system, the planes could stay on the tarmac for a long time. But if the crash was caused by pilot error, then the problem could be corrected by training, and the grounding could be short, Goelz said.

Ethiopian Airlines says its pilots received special training on how to deal with the Max's anti-stall software.

The French air accident investigation authority, known by its acronym BEA, said Thursday that it will handle the analysis of the flight recorders, often referred to as a plane's black boxes. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board sent three investigators to help.

Ethiopian investigators likely avoided sending the data to the U.S. because the FAA certified the airworthiness of the Max and has a relationship with manufacturer Boeing, said Goelz, who is now an aviation consultant.

"I think Ethiopia wanted to choose an investigative partner that clearly didn't have a dog in the fight," Goelz said.

Key congressmen say they will investigate why the FAA approved the Max without requiring more training for pilots.

At the crash scene in Hejere, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from Addis Ababa, growing numbers of family members arrived, some wailing or beating their chests as a bulldozer navigated piles of debris. Blue plastic sheeting covered the wreckage of the plane.

Moshi Biton, brother of Israeli victim Shimon Daniel Re'em Biton, asked Ethiopia's prime minister to allow Israeli investigators to help recover remains. Two Israelis were killed in the crash, and members of an emergency response team from the country said they are frustrated because they have not been able to access the crash site.

"Big families, a lot of people and the full Israeli nation is waiting for these remains, and we will not go out of Ethiopia until we find the remains to bury them," Biton said.

The Max is the latest upgrade to the Boeing 737, which has been flying since the late 1960s. Because its engines were larger and heavier than on previous 737s, they were placed higher and farther forward on the wings. That created concern that the plane might be slightly more prone to an aerodynamic stall if not flown properly, so Boeing developed software to prevent that.

Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether the software automatically pushed the plane's nose down repeatedly, and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem by throwing toggle switches and canceling the automated nose-down commands.

The grounding was expected to cause minimal disruption for travelers, in part because the Max is so new that that it accounts for a small percentage of flights.

In the U.S., Southwest is likely to be most affected. The airline, which has 34 of the 72 U.S.-based Max planes that were in operation, canceled 39 flights Thursday due to the grounding.

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Koenig reported from Houston. Krisher reported from Detroit. Associated Press writers Elias Meseret and Yidneck Kirubel in Hereje, Ethiopia, and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed to this story.

An Ethiopian relative of a crash victim throws dirt in her own face after realising that there is nothing physical left of her loved one, as she mourns at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

This photo provided by by the French air accident investigation authority BEA on Thursday, March 14, 2019, shows one of the black box flight recorder from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet, in le Bourget, north of Paris. The French air accident investigation agency has released a photo of the data recorder from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet. The agency, known by its French acronym BEA, received the flight's data recorder and voice recorder Thursday. (BEA via AP)

Boeing 737 Max jets are grounded at Sky Harbor International Airport, Thursday, March 14, 2019 in Phoenix. The U.S. issued an immediate emergency order Wednesday, grounding all 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Five Boeing 737 Max jets are grounded at Sky Harbor International Airport, Thursday, March 14, 2019 in Phoenix. The U.S. issued an immediate emergency order Wednesday, grounding all 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of the crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Matt York)

Israeli relatives hold their national flag at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. Flight recorders from the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight arrived in France for analysis Thursday as frustrated relatives of the 157 people killed stormed out of a meeting with airline officials in Addis Ababa. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)
HEJERE, Ethiopia (AP) - The Latest on the Ethiopian Airlines crash (all times local):

7:45 p.m.

The French air accident investigation agency has released a photo of the data recorder from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet.

The agency, known by its French acronym BEA, received the plane's data recorder and voice recorder Thursday. They're also known as black boxes, even though they are in fact orange.

The central part of the data recorder appears intact though the edge appears somewhat mangled in the photo.

BEA spokesman Sebastien Barthe told The Associated Press that it is unclear whether its data is retrievable.

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn as a mechanical digger operates at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. The French air accident investigation authority said Thursday that it will handle the analysis of the black boxes retrieved from the crash site and they have already arrived in France but gave no time frame on how long the analysis could take. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

The BEA says technical work on the recorders will begin Friday.

Ethiopian authorities brought the recorders to France because the BEA has the software required to decode them and extensive experience studying plane crashes. U.S. investigators are joining the process.

All 157 people aboard the Boeing 737 Max 8 plane died when it crashed Sunday. The reason for the crash is unclear.

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7:05 p.m.

The United Nations has said that no U.N. staff should travel on the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes.

The U.N. department of safety and security issued a communique said that the "horrific" crash of an Ethiopian Airlines jet on Sunday took the lives of 21 U.N. staff members among the 157 killed.

"This is the second aircraft crash, on the same aircraft type, the Boeing 737 Max 8, in less than 6 months," said the statement. The statement said that until the causes of the crashes are established, U.N. staff members should not travel on the Boeing planes.

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3:22 p.m.

Japan is following other countries on multiple continents in banning the Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft from its airspace following an Ethiopian Airlines' crash on Sunday that killed all 157 people on board.

The decision Thursday comes a day after the U.S., where Boeing is based, issued an emergency order grounding the 737 Max 8.

Japan's transport ministry said its decision is due to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's announcement Wednesday that new satellite data showed similarities to an earlier crash of an Indonesian Lion Air flight accident in October.

Japanese airlines do not use the aircraft.

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2:50 p.m.

An emergency response team from Israel, dispatched to Ethiopia to search for remains of victims of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, said they are frustrated because they have not been able to access the site where the plane crashed. Members of the ZAKA team were seen at the site earlier this week, but they were not permitted to extract material. An Israeli official said the team in Ethiopia is frustrated. Two Israelis were among the 157 killed in the plane crash.

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1:05 p.m.

About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet have stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. The airline officials said they have opened a call-in center that is open 18 hours a day to respond to questions by family members. But angry family members left the meeting at a hotel in Addis Ababa, saying that they are frustrated by a lack of answers to their questions.

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11:20 a.m.

Relatives have been wailing and beating their chests at the site of the Ethiopian Airlines crash as others picked through the rubble for any sign of the 157 people who died.

Some family members have expressed frustration with the pace of the investigation and release of information.

While a bulldozer navigates the dusty scene with piles of debris, investigators, searchers and others wander the ground, some with large clear plastic bags. Blue plastic sheeting covers the wreckage of the plane.

People from 35 countries died in Sunday's crash. More families are expected to arrive on Thursday.

France says it will analyze the data from the plane's black box.

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10:40 a.m.

The French air accident investigation authority, known by its French acronym BEA, says it will handle the analysis of the black boxes retrieved from the crash site of the Ethiopian Airlines jet that left 157 people dead.

A BEA official told The Associated Press that they have already arrived in France but gave no time frame on how long the analysis could take.

The BEA has experience with global air crashes, and its expertise is often sought whenever an Airbus plane crashes because the manufacturer is based in France.

Ethiopian Airlines says an Ethiopian delegation led by its accident investigation bureau had flown the flight data and cockpit voice recorders to Paris.

More than 40 countries, including the U.S., which had been one of the last holdouts, have grounded the 737 Max 8 after the second fatal crash involving the jet in recent months.

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. The French air accident investigation authority said Thursday that it will handle the analysis of the black boxes retrieved from the crash site and they have already arrived in France but gave no time frame on how long the analysis could take. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

In this image from video taken on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, officials make inspection inside the cockpit of a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft is in hangar at Garuda Maintenance Facility at Soekarno Hatta airport, Jakarta. The Indonesian Transport Ministry on Tuesday conducted inspections of 737 Max 8 aircraft owned by Garuda Indonesia and Lion Air. (AP Photo)

In this image from video taken on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft is in hangar before the inspection at Garuda Maintenance Facility at Soekarno Hatta airport, Jakarta. The Indonesian Transport Ministry on Tuesday, March 13, conducted inspections of 737 Max 8 aircraft owned by Garuda Indonesia and Lion Air. (AP Photo)

In this image from video taken on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft is in hangar before the inspection at Garuda Maintenance Facility at Soekarno Hatta airport, Jakarta. The Indonesian Transport Ministry on Tuesday conducted inspections of 737 Max 8 aircraft owned by Garuda Indonesia and Lion Air. (AP Photo)

A worker walks up steps to the right of an avionics truck parked next to a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Renton, Wash. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

People work in the flight deck of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group parked next to another MAX 8 also designated for TUI at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Renton, Wash. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Relatives react at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The black box from the Boeing jet that crashed will be sent overseas for analysis but no country has been chosen yet, an Ethiopian Airlines spokesman said Wednesday, as much of the world grounded or barred the plane model and grieving families arrived at the disaster site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

A grieving relative who lost his wife in the crash is helped by a member of security forces and others at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Wreaths and floral installations stand next to piles of wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Flowers are left at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 plane crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The black box from the Boeing jet that crashed will be sent overseas for analysis but no country has been chosen yet, an Ethiopian Airlines spokesman said Wednesday, as much of the world grounded or barred the plane model and grieving families arrived at the disaster site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Workers walk past flowers laid at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Chinese relatives of victims who died in the crash visit and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Workers erect floral installations at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Wreaths and floral installations are placed near wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 plane crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Chinese relatives of victims who died in the crash visit and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Chinese relatives of victims who died in the crash visit and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

A grieving relative is held back by others at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Much of the world, including the entire European Union, has grounded the Boeing jetliner involved in the Ethiopian Airlines crash or banned it from their airspace, leaving the United States as one of the few remaining operators of the plane involved in two deadly accidents in just five months. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

An Air Canada Boeing 737 Max aircraft arriving from Toronto prepares to land at Vancouver International Airport in Richmond, British Columbia on Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau says "all options are on the table" with regard to the country's fleet of Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft but says the government currently has no plans to order the grounding of the plane. (Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press via AP)

Foreign investigators examine wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Officials from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) pray next to an offering of fruit, bread rolls, and a plastic container of Ethiopian Injera, a fermented sourdough flatbread, placed next to incense sticks, at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

An offering of fruit, bread rolls, and a plastic container of Ethiopian Injera, a fermented sourdough flatbread, sit next to incense sticks, placed by officials from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) as they prayed at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Investigators from Israel examine wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Foreign investigators examine wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Foreign investigators examine wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Foreign investigators examine wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ethiopian Airlines had issued no new updates on the crash as of late afternoon Tuesday as families around the world waited for answers, while a global team of investigators began picking through the rural crash site. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

In this photo taken Monday, March 11, 2019, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for Air Canada sits parked at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant in Renton, Wash. Britain, France and Germany on Tuesday joined a rapidly growing number of countries grounding the new Boeing plane involved in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster or turning it back from their airspace, while investigators in Ethiopia looked for parallels with a similar crash just five months ago. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

In this photo taken Monday, March 11, 2019, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group sits parked at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant in Renton, Wash. Britain, France and Germany on Tuesday joined a rapidly growing number of countries grounding the new Boeing plane involved in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster or turning it back from their airspace, while investigators in Ethiopia looked for parallels with a similar crash just five months ago. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

A worker stands on a platform near a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Renton, Wash. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Workers walk past a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Renton, Wash. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

A worker walks past an avionics truck parked next to a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Renton, Wash. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

A flock of birds flies past a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane being built for TUI Group at Boeing Co.'s Renton Assembly Plant Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Renton, Wash. President Donald Trump says the U.S. is issuing an emergency order grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 aircraft in the wake of a crash of an Ethiopian Airliner. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
MOSCOW (AP) - A prominent activist from Kazakhstan who is campaigning for the release of ethnic Kazakhs in China says he was forced to sign blank documents while under house arrest.

Serikzhan Bilash, head of the advocacy group Atajurt, was accused of "inciting ethnic hatred" and placed under house arrest in the Kazakh capital of Astana earlier this week, although the charges against him have not been officially announced.

The detention of possibly over a million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities in Chinese internment camps has raised acute concerns in Kazakhstan, which heavily relies on trade with neighboring China. Bilash's group has been actively supporting relatives of those detained.

Bilash said in an audio message relayed by his lawyer, Aiman Umarova, that unknown officials visited his place late on Wednesday and pressured him into signing blank documents.

"They told me that if you want a lenient verdict, we can help you," Bilash said in the recording. "I had to sign several documents they wanted me to, some of them were blank."

Bilash did not specify what exactly he was forced to sign but said he signed an application to take a state-appointed attorney to replace Umarova.

In this March 29, 2018, photo, Serikzhan Bilash, a prominent activist campaigning against Chinese internment camps, gestures as he speaks to The Associated Press at a restaurant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Bilash was arrested by Kazakh police at an Almaty hotel on Sunday, March 10, 2019 and taken to Astana, Kazakhstan's capital. The detention of hundreds of thousands and possibly over a million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities in China's far west has been a touchy issue in neighboring Kazakhstan. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Umarova told The Associated Press on Thursday she is expected to be granted a visit with Bilash next week.

A leading voice campaigning for ethnics Kazakhs in China, Bilash has tried to steer clear of any public protests that could be construed as criticism of the Kazakh government, focusing instead on helping the Kazakhs trapped in the Chinese internment camps.

But the activist, who is originally from China's far western region of Xinjiang, has come under pressure from authorities in recent months. A court last month found Bilash guilty of illegally leading an unregistered organization and fined him the equivalent of $666. Shortly before being placed under house arrest, he reported being followed by unknown men.

Bilash and his group's vigorous campaign to shed the light on the plight of ethnic minorities in China have been "a thorn in the side of Kazakhstan's government since it began operating," said Sean Roberts, director of the International Development Studies Program at the George Washington University.

Most of Atajurt's members are ethnic Kazakhs from China who were encouraged to repatriate to Kazakhstan decades ago by President Nursultan Nazarbayev's government.

Official pressure on Bilash and his group could backfire at a time when the nation faces economic problems.

"This is all the more politically dangerous at a time when domestic dissatisfaction about economic progress and social services in Kazakhstan is on the rise and there is on-going discussion in the country about presidential succession as Nazarbayev ages," Roberts said.

Kazakhstan has accommodated Beijing on sensitive ethnic issues in the past when it extradited ethnic Uighurs to China, but going after ethnic Kazakhs under pressure from China could potentially put the government in a fraught position.

"For many ethnic Kazakh nationalists, suppressing the voices of Kazakhs at the bequest of the Chinese could be portrayed as tantamount to treason," Roberts said.

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Altynai Sagydykova contributed to this report from Kyrgyzstan.
BURLINGTON, Iowa (AP) - Democrat Beto O'Rourke jumped into the 2020 presidential race Thursday, shaking up the already packed field and pledging to win over voters from across the political spectrum as he tries to translate his sudden celebrity into a formidable White House bid.

The former Texas congressman began his campaign by taking his first ever trip to Iowa, the state that kicks off the presidential primary voting. In tiny Burlington, in southeast Iowa, he scaled a counter to be heard during an afternoon stop at a coffee shop.

"Let us not allow our differences to define us as at this moment," O'Rourke told a whooping crowd, his heels perched at the countertop's edge. "History calls for us to come together."

Earlier in the day, O'Rourke popped into a coffee shop in Keokuk while many cable networks aired live coverage. He took questions about his support of federal legalization of marijuana as well as the possibility of a universal basic income, all while characteristically waving his arms and gesticulating fervently.

"I could care less about your party persuasion," O'Rourke said.

It was the kind of high-energy, off-the-cuff style that made him a sensation in Texas and a monster fundraiser nationwide, but O'Rourke also was clear that he doesn't believe in strict immigration rules - drawing a distinction that could allow him to clash openly with President Donald Trump on the issue.

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Trump took more note of O'Rourke's gyrations than his policy plans.

"Well, I think he's got a lot of hand movement," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "Is he crazy or is that just how he acts?"

After weeks of gleefully teasing an announcement, O'Rourke now must prove whether his zeal for personal contact with voters will resonate beyond Texas. He hasn't demonstrated much skill in domestic or foreign policy, and as a white man, he's entering a field that has been celebrated for its diverse roster of women and people of color.

Asked in Burlington how he'd contrast himself with other presidential hopefuls, O'Rourke said that he wasn't sure but that he'd never been afraid to work with congressional Republicans. That may not be enough for Democrats anxious to angrily oppose Trump, however, and some other White House candidates draw shaper contrasts.

"The reason why I think I'm the best candidate for the presidency is very different than his," New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said of O'Rourke on Thursday. "I think we need a leader who's going to fight for other people's kids as hard as you'd fight for your own."

In an email to supporters, California Sen. Kamala Harris noted that a "record number of women and people of color" are running and added that she was looking forward to "substantive debates" with candidates including O'Rourke. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren also sent a fundraising email, saying, "I'm sure you've seen" O'Rourke's launch.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, O'Rourke said he was "just born to be in" the presidential race. Asked about that after a Washington conference, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker noted that he is dedicated to working with "communities that are really being left out and left behind."

"I've got decades of showing people where my heart is, where my dedication is," Booker said.

Still, he picked up several congressional endorsements on Thursday, as well as the backing of Iowa state Rep. Brian Meyer, who serves as an assistant minority leader in the state House of Representatives.

Until O'Rourke challenged Republican Sen. Ted Cruz last year, he was little known outside his hometown of El Paso, on Texas' border with Mexico. But the Spanish-speaking, 46-year-old former punk rocker used grassroots organizing and social media savvy to mobilize young voters and minorities and get within 3 percentage points of winning in the nation's largest red state.

In Burlington, O'Rourke distinguished himself from much of the rest of the field by saying he'd be open to remaking the structure of the Supreme Court so that it reflects modern U.S. diversity, even saying he'd be open to justice term limits.

O'Rourke's record in Congress has drawn criticism from some for being too moderate, but he also spoke at length on Thursday about combating climate change and supporting the Green New Deal, a sweeping environmental plan backed by liberal Democrats.

Alice Davis, a retired teacher from Burlington, said O'Rourke "seems to be kind of a centrist, which I think we need."

She said, "He's not too far left, as some people are, and I think he could appeal to a lot of voters."

At a house party in Muscatine on Thursday night, O'Rourke spoke about institutionalized racism, the harm done to African-Americans after emancipation and the failures of the Civil Rights movement but did not come down on either side of the reparations debate. He said only that, in speaking to others "who are much smarter on this issue," he's been told that the country needs to address its grim history with respect to racism before any repair can take place.

"I want to make sure that we have leadership that reflects that need, that is able to reflect and share the truth and bring a reckoning to this country that is hundreds of years in the making," O'Rourke said. He offered no further clarification on his stance on monetary or other forms of reparation, which a number of his Democratic opponents have embraced.

O'Rourke started the race in southeast Iowa, where none of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have gone so far. Bordering the Mississippi River and featuring unemployment rates exceeding the state and national average, the area traditionally leans Democratic but supported Trump in 2016. Voters there helped elect Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds but also supported Democrat Abby Finenauer of Dubuque, who unseated Republican Rep. Rod Blum.

"These communities have slowly been hollowed out by the failure to transition from the extraction economy to a sustainable one," said former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who got his political start in the region.

At the house party in Muscatine, O'Rourke stood on a chair to address the dozens of curious Democratic voters who arrived to see him, taking questions from the crowd as he had all day.

Sharee Byrne and Alexis Huscko, both stay-at-home-moms from Muscatine, Iowa, said they had heard about O'Rourke from his Texas Senate run and were excited to see him in person. Both were concerned about rising health care costs and access to affordable education. Byrne said she was still open to choosing a candidate, while Huscko felt strongly in Bernie Sanders' camp.

But both acknowledged O'Rourke's charisma and looks were part of his appeal, while Huscko was less than complimentary about Trump.

"I think people are more interested in having a cougar-style, GQ kind of guy, instead of the frumpy cheeto," Huscko said.

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Weissert reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Elana Schor in Washington contributed to this report.

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke greets employees during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to reporters after a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke talks with a local resident during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke poses for a photo with a local resident during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to reporters after a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke talks to a local resident during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke greets a local resident after a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke greets employees before speaking at a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke greets employees before speaking at a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

An audience members asks a question to former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Audience members listen to former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speak at a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke speaks to local residents during a meet and greet at the Beancounter Coffeehouse & Drinkery, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Burlington, Iowa. O'Rourke announced Thursday that he'll seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
LONDON (AP) - British lawmakers are trying to put the brakes on Brexit - at least for now.

The U.K. Parliament voted Thursday 413 to 202 to ask the European Union to delay the U.K.'s exit from the bloc beyond the scheduled date of March 29.

The vote comes a day after U.K. lawmakers committed Britain to staying in the EU unless a divorce deal is ratified. With the approaching deadline intensifying fears that Britain could leave the bloc without a deal - a move that economists say could spark economic turmoil - the U.K. Parliament voted Wednesday to rule out the possibility of a no-deal Brexit.

However, the final say on whether to grant Britain a delay rests with leaders of the 27 remaining EU nations.

A look at what might happen next:

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Anti-Brexit, remain in the European Union supporters hold an EU and British union flag outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Britain's Parliament will vote later Wednesday on whether to rule out leaving the EU on March 29 without a deal. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

DELAY, DELAY, DELAY

After a series of Parliamentary defeats, British Prime Minister Theresa May grudgingly gave lawmakers a chance to delay Brexit. This option proved popular, since politicians on both sides of the Brexit debate fear that time is running out to secure an orderly withdrawal by March 29.

May wants to get an extension until June 30 - but only if she can get Parliament to back her Brexit deal in a third vote by March 20. May's proposed Brexit deal has been defeated twice already by lawmakers.

If it is defeated again, May says Britain will have to seek a long extension, with the risk that opponents of Brexit will use that time to soften the terms of departure or even overturn Britain's decision to leave.

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WHAT'S THE EU'S PART IN THIS?

A Brexit extension requires approval from all 27 remaining EU member countries. They have an opportunity to grant such a request at a March 21-22 summit in Brussels.

But the rest of the EU is reluctant to postpone Brexit beyond the May 23-26 election for the EU's legislature. The U.K. won't be represented in the European Parliament after it quits the EU; its seats already have been given to other countries to fill in the May election.

The bloc may be open to a long delay, however, to allow Britain to radically change course. European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted Thursday he will appeal to EU leaders "to be open to a long extension if the U.K. finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy and build consensus about it."

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NO CLEAR ROUTE OUT OF BRITAIN'S POLITICAL CRISIS

Parliament's votes this week won't end Britain's Brexit crisis. Both lawmakers and the public remain split between backers of a clean break from the EU and those who favor continuing a close relationship, either through a post-Brexit trade deal or by reversing the June 2016 decision to leave.

May is unwilling to abandon her hard-won divorce deal with the EU, which sets out the terms of Britain's withdrawal and the outline of future relations with the bloc.

Her Conservative government is holding talks with its Northern Irish political allies and pro-Brexit backbench lawmakers to see if they will abandon their opposition to a deal they fear keeps Britain too closely tied to the bloc.

If May's Brexit deal is defeated in a vote next week, the government says lawmakers will get to vote on several different options for Brexit to see if there is a majority for any of them.

Opposition politicians think the only way forward is an early election that could rearrange Parliament and break the political deadlock. May has ruled that out, but could come to see it as her only option.

And anti-Brexit campaigners haven't abandoned the idea of a new referendum on remaining in the EU. There's currently no majority for that in Parliament. A motion calling for a second referendum was defeated by a thumping 334-85 vote on Thursday.

However, the political calculus could change if the paralysis drags on. The opposition Labour Party has said it would support a second referendum if other options were exhausted. Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said after Thursday's votes that a new Brexit referendum might offer a realistic way to break the deadlock.

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Gregory Katz in London contributed.

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Follow AP's full coverage of Brexit at: https://www.apnews.com/Brexit

Effigies of British politicians from right, Prime Minister Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Give are driven on a truck by anti-Brexit, remain in the European Union supporters outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Britain's Parliament will vote later Wednesday on whether to rule out leaving the EU on March 29 without a deal. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

A pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporter takes part in a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. European Union officials on Wednesday criticized the U.K. Parliament for rejecting a Brexit deal for a second time as the bloc prepared for a chaotic, cliff-edge departure. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Anti-Brexit remain in the European Union supporters, hang British and EU flags during a protest outside the House of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. European Union officials on Wednesday criticized the U.K. Parliament for rejecting a Brexit deal for a second time as the bloc prepared for a chaotic, cliff-edge departure. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

A pro-Brexit leave the European Union supporter takes part in a protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. European Union officials on Wednesday criticized the U.K. Parliament for rejecting a Brexit deal for a second time as the bloc prepared for a chaotic, cliff-edge departure. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Pro and anti-Brexit supporters gather outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Britain's Parliament will vote later Wednesday on whether to rule out leaving the EU on March 29 without a deal. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

Pro and anti-Brexit supporters gather outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. Britain's Parliament will vote later Wednesday on whether to rule out leaving the EU on March 29 without a deal. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May at center right front row, speaks to lawmakers in the House of Commons, London, Wednesday March 13, 2019. Political crisis in Britain is sparking anxiety across the European Union, as fears rise that Britain will crash out of the bloc on March 29 without a withdrawal agreement to smooth the way. (Mark Duffy/UK Parliament via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May in the House of Commons, London, Wednesday March 13, 2019. Political crisis in Britain is sparking anxiety across the European Union, as fears rise that Britain will crash out of the bloc on March 29 without a withdrawal agreement to smooth the way. (Mark Duffy/UK Parliament via AP)

Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond delivers his Spring Statement to lawmakers in the House of Commons, London, Wednesday March 13, 2019. Political crisis in Britain is sparking anxiety across the European Union, as fears rise that Britain will crash out of the bloc on March 29 without a withdrawal agreement to smooth the way. (Mark Duffy/UK Parliament via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on Congress and President Donald Trump's proposed border wall (all times local):

7:55 p.m.

A dozen defecting Republicans have joined Senate Democrats to block the national emergency that President Donald Trump declared so he could build his border wall with Mexico.

The rejection caps a week of confrontation with the White House as both parties in Congress strain to exert their power in new ways.

The 59-41 tally, following the Senate's vote a day earlier to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, promises to force Trump into the first vetoes of his presidency. Trump had warned against both actions. Moments after Thursday's vote, the president tweeted a single word of warning: "VETO!"

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President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

3:25 p.m.

President Donald Trump has one thing to say after the Republican-led Senate voted to block his national emergency declaration for border wall funding: "VETO!"

Trump tweeted the one-word response Thursday after the Senate voted 59-41 in favor of a resolution to block the measure. A total of 12 Republicans voted with Democrats to rebuke the president.

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2:50 p.m.

In a stunning rebuke, the Republican-controlled Senate has voted to terminate President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Senate voted 59-41 for a resolution to halt Trump's emergency order. Trump has promised to veto it, and it is unlikely that Congress will have the votes to override him.

Yet the vote represents a remarkable break between Trump and Senate Republicans. It's the first time Congress has used its power to reject a presidential emergency order.

Trump wants to use his declaration to steer $3.6 billion more to border barriers than lawmakers approved. He had warned Republicans to stick with him on the vote. He said doing otherwise would be siding with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But several Republicans defied that warning.

Trump wants to steer $3.6 billion more to border barriers than lawmakers approved. The move is also being challenged in court.

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2:44 p.m.

The Senate is poised to reject President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, with several Republicans joining Democrats in opposing Trump's use of executive power.

Enough senators have voted "yes" to pass a resolution Thursday terminating Trump's emergency order. The vote is still ongoing.

The resolution has already cleared the House, so it will soon head to Trump's desk. He has promised to reject it by issuing what will likely be his first veto. It is unlikely that Congress will have the votes to override him.

Thursday's vote would be the first time Congress has rejected a presidential emergency under the 1976 National Emergency Act.

Trump wants to use his declaration to steer $3.6 billion more to border barriers than lawmakers approved.

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10:55 a.m.

Republican Sens. Mitt Romney and Sen. Lamar Alexander have endorsed a resolution passed by the Democratic-controlled House to block President Donald Trump from using emergency powers to fund his long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall.

That brings to seven the number of Republicans who have announced they will cross Trump on a vote expected for Thursday afternoon, ensuring the measure will pass.

Romney was the GOP's 2012 presidential nominee and a sometimes critic of Trump; Alexander is among the senior guardians of the Senate as an institution. Lawmakers oppose Trump's action because they see the power of the purse as Congress' prerogative.

Romney said that "this is a vote for the Constitution and for the balance of powers that is at its core."

Trump has promised to veto the measure and is sure to be sustained by his House GOP allies.

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10:35 a.m.

President Donald Trump is urging Republican senators to support his emergency declaration for border funding, and says any efforts to change the national emergency law should come later.

Trump tweeted Thursday as the GOP-led Senate appeared set to approve a resolution blocking the border emergency he declared to steer more money to his border wall.

Trump stressed that he will not immediately take up proposals to amend the national emergencies law, which some Republicans have been pitching as a way to limit defections in Thursday's Senate vote.

Said Trump: "If, at a later date, Congress wants to update the law, I will support those efforts, but today's issue is BORDER SECURITY and Crime!!! Don't vote with Pelosi!"

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7 a.m.

President Donald Trump is renewing his threat to veto a congressional resolution revoking his declaration of an emergency at the southern border. Trump had declared an emergency to try to circumvent Congress to access more money for his promised border wall.

The Senate is scheduled to vote Thursday on the resolution, with many Republicans expected to join Democrats in disapproving the declaration.

Trump tweeted early Thursday about "the big National Emergency vote today" in the Senate. He said, "I am prepared to veto, if necessary," and called the situation at the border "a National Security and Humanitarian Nightmare."

Trump has not yet vetoed a bill. Overturning a presidential veto requires a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate, but there aren't enough votes to do so on the border resolution.

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12:12 a.m.

The Republican-led Senate is set to deal President Donald Trump a rebuke on his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border. The only remaining question is how many GOP senators will join Democrats in defying him.

Republicans say Thursday's showdown vote will result in Congress sending Trump a resolution blocking the border emergency he proclaimed last month to steer an extra $3.6 billion to building barriers. The Democratic-controlled House approved the measure last month.

Senate approval would force Trump to use a veto to protect his "Build the Wall" mantra over objections from his own party.

The vote also forces many GOP senators into a difficult box: defy Trump or assent to an emergency declaration that many lawmakers think goes too far.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., walks to the chamber as the Republican-led Senate is set to deal President Donald Trump a rebuke on his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, with the only remaining question how many GOP senators will join Democrats in defying him, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

IN this March 13, 2019, photo, reporters pose questions to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The Republican-led Senate is set to deal President Donald Trump a rebuke on his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, with the only remaining question how many GOP senators will join Democrats in defying him. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
PIERRE, S.D. (AP) - The Latest on a winter storm hitting the West and Midwest (all times local):

3:35 p.m.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has signed an emergency disaster proclamation that allows state resources to be used in response to flooding in the state.

Reynolds on Thursday also activated the state emergency operations center to coordinate the flood response and help monitor rapidly evolving conditions.

The National Weather Service has issued flood warnings and a wind advisory for Thursday afternoon and evening in portions of Iowa, and says river flooding will continue through the weekend due to excessive runoff from recent rainfall and snowmelt.

The governor's action allows people in 21 counties to qualify for grants to cover flood-related expenses.

Blowing snow reduces visibility at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial near Keystone, S.D., Wednesday, March 13, 2019. A window-rattling storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Ryan Hermens/Rapid City Journal via AP)

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources says it has closed all or part of nine state parks due to rising flood waters.

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1:15 p.m.

A massive late-winter storm has produced record rainfall in parts of the Midwest, with flooding happening in several states.

The National Weather Service reports several cities in eastern South Dakota and northwestern Iowa set rainfall records for the date Wednesday.

Flooding is occurring in those states and it's forced the 200 residents of Hornick, Iowa, to evacuate. Evacuations also are occurring in several eastern Nebraska communities.

Authorities say a hydroelectric power dam failed on the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska, damaging a highway. No one was hurt.

Weather service meteorologist Peter Rogers says flooding is likely to persist into the weekend.

Lennox, South Dakota, Mayor Tracy West says there's a lot of water around and "it's got to find a way to get out of here."

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11:45 a.m.

A utility worker in the Texas Panhandle was killed while working to restore power amid powerful winds pushed in by a storm system that's pummeling parts of the Midwest .

Amarillo-based Xcel Energy says the man died Wednesday evening while working in Hereford, near the New Mexico border. Wind gusts in the area exceeded 80 mph (128.74 kph).

The utility says 121,000 customers in Texas and New Mexico were without power Wednesday, but that number had dropped significantly by Thursday morning.

A powerful storm barreled into the Midwest after causing widespread power outages in Colorado, where a blizzard forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and wreaked havoc on roadways.

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11:15 a.m.

Flooding caused by a massive late-winter storm prompted evacuations in eastern Nebraska communities as authorities searched for one person whose vehicle was swept away by floodwaters.

Norfolk Public Safety Director Shane Weidner says emergency crews responded early Thursday when a vehicle was swept off a local road. The missing individual had not been found by midmorning Thursday.

Rising water on the Elkhorn River prompted an evacuation of the eastern side of Norfolk. Evacuations also occurred in several other eastern Nebraska communities.

On the other side of the state, western Nebraska residents were struggling with blizzard-like conditions with wind gusts approaching 90 mph (144.8 kph). The weather moved in after causing widespread power outages in Colorado, where a blizzard forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and wreaked havoc on roadways.

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10 a.m.

Parts of Colorado and Wyoming remain paralyzed in the wake of a massive late-winter blizzard that swept through the two states before barreling into the Midwest.

The storm knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses, closed hundreds of miles of highway, stranded thousands of motorists and shut down airports. A Colorado State Patrol officer was hit and killed by a car while helping another driver.

Major highways in the two states remained closed Thursday morning as blizzard conditions persisted in some areas. Crews were searching for stranded motorists and worked to clear the roads.

Denver Airport reopened but more than 600 incoming and outgoing flights were canceled early Thursday before operations could resume. Schools and government offices remained closed or delayed reopening.

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8:10 a.m.

All state offices are now closed in South Dakota as blizzard conditions barrel into the Midwest.

Gov. Kristi Noem says only essential personnel should go to work at state offices Thursday, as the National Weather Service warns of blizzard and winter-storm conditions across several states.

North Dakota transportation officials closed sections of major interstates after blowing snow reduced visibility to nearly zero. Blizzard conditions also hit western Nebraska, while heavy rain has caused flooding elsewhere in Nebraska and South Dakota, and in Iowa.

The weather is moving into the Midwest after causing widespread power outages in Colorado, where a blizzard forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and wreaked havoc on roadways. A Colorado State Patrol officer was hit and killed by a car as he helped a driver who'd slid off an interstate near Denver.

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6:50 a.m.

South Dakota's governor has closed state offices across much of the state as blizzard conditions move in from the West.

Offices in 49 of South Dakota's 66 counties are closed Thursday as the National Weather Service warns of blizzard and winter-storm conditions a day after a massive late-winter storm hit Colorado.

Gov. Kristi Noem says only essential personnel in the affected state offices should go to work.

Heavy rain has caused flooding in southern and eastern South Dakota, with water covering some roads and highways. Rain and melting snow have caused similar conditions in Iowa.

The weather is barreling into the Midwest after causing widespread power outages Wednesday in Colorado, where a blizzard forced the cancellation of hundreds of flights and wreaked havoc on roadways as drivers became overwhelmed by blinding snow.

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12 a.m.

National Guard troops were using specialized vehicles with tank-like treads to rescue stranded drivers in Colorado in the wake of a massive late-winter storm that's expected to unleash heavy rain and snow on the Midwest plains Thursday.

Wednesday's blizzard cut power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses, caused hundreds of flights to be canceled and wreaked havoc on roadways. A wind gust clocked in at 97 mph (156 kph) in Colorado Springs.

The storm also contributed to the death of Corporal Daniel Groves, a Colorado State Patrol officer who was hit and killed by a car as he was helping another driver who slid off Interstate 76 near Denver.

Blizzards, floods and a tornado were reported across more than 25 states, stretching from the northern Rockies to Texas and beyond.

Francis Rotenberger, of Rapid City, S.D., walks home through Memorial Park in the snow in downtown Rapid City Wednesday, March 13, 2019. A window-rattling storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Ryan Hermens/Rapid City Journal via AP)

A string of wrecked vehicles sit on an overpass over Interstate 70 as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Aurora, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Traffic stops in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70 near Tower Road as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Auora, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

This undated photo provided by the Colorado State Patrol shows Cpl. Daniel Groves. The state patrol officer was hit and killed by a car as he was helping another driver who had slid off of Interstate 76 northeast of Denver. A window-rattling late winter storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, March 13 , 2019, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Colorado State Patrol via AP)

Canada geese battle choppy water as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Bobby Larson drops into the bowl on a snowboard in Edora Park on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Fort Collins, Colo. A winter storm hit the western U.S., with blizzard conditions expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Timothy Hurst/The Coloradoan via AP)

A cross country skier travels in the snow on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Fort Collins, Colo. A winter storm hit the western U.S., with blizzard conditions expected to engulf parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota. (Timothy Hurst/The Coloradoan via AP)

People walk a dog in the snow on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Fort Collins, Colo. Low air pressure is how meteorologists measure the strength of a storm, and this is the strongest in Colorado since at least 1950. (Timothy Hurst/The Coloradoan via AP)

Vehicles stack up on the eastbound lanes of Interstate 70 near Tower Road as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Aurora, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

A lone pedestrian struggles along Broadway as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

White-out conditions along Happy Jack Road during a blizzard on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Cheyenne. White-out conditions closed I-80, I-25, and U.S. 85, effectively closing off the state capital from Nebraska, Colorado and the rest of Wyoming. (Jacob Byk/The Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP)

A traveller drags a suitcase as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

Traffic comes to a halt on eastbound Interstate 70 near Tower Road as a late winter storm packing hurricane-force winds and snow sweeps over the intermountain West Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Aurora, Colo. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)

High water floods a street Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Hooper, Neb. A window-rattling late winter storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Ryan Soderlin/Omaha World-Herald via AP)

A corn field is flooded with water Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Ashland, Neb. A window-rattling late winter storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Ryan Soderlin/Omaha World-Herald via AP)

The junction of Highway 275 and Highway 91 is flooded on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in Scribner, Neb. A window-rattling late winter storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond. (Ryan Soderlin/Omaha World-Herald via AP)
MANILA, Philippines (AP) - About 6.8 million people have been affected by a water shortage in and around the Philippine capital, with long lines forming for rationed water and businesses and some hospitals struggling to cope after faucets ran dry.

Water supplies will be cut for at least six hours a day for more than a million households until the rainy season fills dams and reservoirs in May or June, a spokesman for Manila Water Co. Inc., Jeric Sevilla, said Thursday.

The company, one of two government-authorized water suppliers in the densely populated Manila metropolis and nearby Rizal province, said a spike in demand and reduced water levels in a dam and smaller reservoirs in the sweltering summer are the culprit, exacerbated by El Nino weather conditions.

Manila Water, which supplies water to the eastern half of the capital, initially tried to cope with the limited supply by reducing pressure but it did not work since some communities in hilly areas complained of not getting water for long hours. The company then decided to schedule water supply interruptions starting Thursday, Sevilla said.

"The concept is for everybody to share the burden," Sevilla said by phone. "Nobody wants this to happen. The welfare of our customers is foremost in our mind and we're taking steps to mitigate the situation."

A company advisory said residents in more than a dozen cities and towns would lose their water supply from six to 21 hours a day through the summer months and appealed for public understanding.

A man sits beside rows of pails as he waits for water trucks return to their area after several days without water in Mandaluyong, metropolitan Manila, Philippines on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Aside from the daily line of residents waiting for water rations from trucks, many businesses like laundry shops, carwash and water purifying stations in some parts of metropolitan Manila have been affected by a water shortage from the Manila Water Company due to low levels at the La Mesa dam and the onset of El Nino which causes below normal rainfall conditions. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

In the city of Mandaluyong, residents lined up for hours with pails and water jugs to get water from firetrucks. "We have no water. It has been one week, not a drop in our faucet," said resident Richie Baloyo. "There are children going to school, people need to work, how do you expect them to collect water like this?"

Many water-dependent businesses, such as car washes and laundries, have closed temporarily. Some restaurants are using paper plates or porcelain plates covered with disposable plastic sheets to conserve water. Health Secretary Francisco Duque III made an urgent appeal to relatives of hospital patients to "limit the watchers of your patients to one" to reduce water use.

Congress is to hold inquiries next week into the cause of the crisis.

The government has been blamed for decades of delay in constructing another dam and other related infrastructure. Manila Water has been criticized for not adequately preparing for contingencies.

"El Nino is not really the culprit," Sevilla said. "It's actually supply and demand."

A couple carries empty containers looking for places to collect water in Mandaluyong, metropolitan Manila, Philippines on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Aside from the daily line of residents waiting for water rations from trucks, many businesses like laundry shops, carwash and water-purifying stations in Manila have been affected by a water shortage from the Manila Water Company due to low levels at the La Mesa dam and the onset of El Nino which causes below normal rainfall conditions. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Workers prepare to filter water at a purifying station while they wait for the water supply to return at their area in Mandaluyong, metropolitan Manila, Philippines on Thursday, March 14, 2019. Aside from the daily line of residents waiting for water rations from trucks, many businesses like laundry shops, carwash and water purifying stations in some parts of metropolitan Manila have been affected by a water shortage from the Manila Water Company due to low levels at the La Mesa dam and the onset of El Nino which causes below normal rainfall conditions. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
WASHINGTON (AP) - The House voted unanimously Thursday for a resolution calling for any final report in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation to be made public, a symbolic action designed to pressure Attorney General William Barr into releasing as much information as possible when the probe is concluded.

The Democratic-backed resolution, which passed 420-0, comes as Mueller appears to be nearing an end to his investigation. Lawmakers in both parties have maintained there will have to be some sort of public resolution when the report is done - and privately hope that a report shows conclusions that are favorable to their own side.

Four Republicans voted present: Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie.

The resolution is unlikely to be passed in the Senate, where Democratic Leader Charles Schumer tried to bring it up hours after House passage. He was rebuffed when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham objected. But the House vote shows that lawmakers from both parties are eager to have a look at Mueller's findings after almost two years of speculation about what it might reveal.

Though Mueller's office has said nothing publicly about the timing of a report, several prosecutors detailed to Mueller's team have left in recent months, suggesting that the investigation is winding down. On Thursday, Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement that Andrew Weissmann, one of the most prominent prosecutors on the team, would be concluding his work "in the near future."

The nonbinding House resolution calls for the public release of any report Mueller provides to Barr, with an exception for classified material. The resolution also calls for the full report to be released to Congress.

FILE - In this June 21, 2017 file photo, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, the special counsel probing Russian interference in the 2016 election, arrives on Capitol Hill for a closed door meeting before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington. U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller has yet to release his report about alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but Moscow has already rehearsed its response, dismissing Mueller's investigation as part of the U.S. political infighting. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

"This resolution is critical because of the many questions and criticisms of the investigation raised by the president and his administration," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called the probe a "hoax" and a "witch hunt."

It's unclear exactly what documentation will be produced at the end of the probe into possible coordination between Trump associates and Russia, and how much of that the Justice Department will allow people to see. Mueller is required to submit a report to Barr, and then Barr can decide how much of that is released publicly.

Barr said at his confirmation hearing in January that he takes seriously the department regulations that say Mueller's report should be confidential. Those regulations require only that the report explain decisions to pursue or to decline prosecutions, which could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

"I don't know what, at the end of the day, what will be releasable. I don't know what Bob Mueller is writing," Barr said at the hearing.

Democrats have said they are unsatisfied with Barr's answers and want a stronger commitment to releasing the full report, along with interview transcripts and other underlying evidence.

Republicans agree - to a point. In making an argument for transparency, Republican leaders have pointed to Barr's comments and the existing regulations, without explicitly pressing for the underlying evidence.

The top Republican on the House Judiciary panel, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, voted for the resolution but said it was unnecessary. He defended Barr, saying he "understands the questions, the turmoil this has caused."

Collins also had a warning for Democrats: "What happens when it comes back and none of this is true, the president did not do anything wrong? Then the meltdown will occur."

At least one Republican is siding with Democrats. Texas Rep. Will Hurd, a member of the House intelligence committee, said he believes the resolution should have been even broader.

"I want the American people to know as much as they can and see as much as they can," said Hurd, a former CIA officer. He added that "full transparency is the only way to prevent future innuendo."

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley called the resolution "ridiculous."

"They came in and so many of them said they wanted to work with the president and get things done for infrastructure and health care and instead they're moving on all these radical ideas," Gidley said of Democrats in an interview on Fox News.

Gidley said he hadn't spoken with Trump about whether the report should be made public.

If a full report isn't released, House Democrats have made clear they will do whatever they can to get hold of it. Nadler has said he would subpoena the final report and invite - or even subpoena - Mueller to talk about it.

The Senate has been less eager to push Barr on the release of the report, despite some in the GOP caucus who have said they want to ensure transparency. Graham, a close ally of Trump's, said he would only allow the Mueller resolution from the House to move forward if it were amended to call for a new special counsel to investigate misconduct at the Justice Department surrounding the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the abuse of the secret surveillance warrant process.

Schumer objected to those additions, and the bill did not get a vote.

Afterward, Graham was equivocal on whether the full report should be released.

"We'll see," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - Tearful friends, family and admirers gathered Thursday to pay homage to a city councilwoman who was gunned down one year ago in a brazen slaying that sparked outrage across Brazil.

Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were killed in central Rio de Janeiro on the evening of March 14, 2018, while returning from an event focused on empowering young black women.

Authorities this week arrested two former police officers in the slayings, but the case continues to highlight deep corruption in Brazil and there are unanswered questions about who ordered the attack and why.

"One year since Marielle's execution. One year that the state has not given us a response to who ordered Marielle's killing," Monica Benicio, Marielle's partner, said in a video posted to social media. She said that while finding out who pulled the trigger was an important step, the true assassin is the person who ordered the killing.

"We can't accept this as the end of this investigation, as the solution ... for one of the most important political crimes in the history of this country. ... We need to demand real justice," she said.

Franco was an outspoken critic of Rio's violent police force, and her party has long gone after paramilitary groups of former police and soldiers that run extortion rings in poor neighborhoods. Prosecutors said that they suspect the alleged shooter was involved in paramilitary activity and that his name had "come up" in other homicide investigations.

A man lights a candle in front of a row of vases filled with flowers and a poster with a message that reads in Portuguese: "Justice for Marielle and Anderson," at the site where Rio councilwoman Marielle Franco was gunned down, during a demonstration marking the one year anniversary of her death, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Authorities arrested two former police officers Tuesday in the killing of Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/ Silvia Izquierdo)

Elected in 2016, Franco was a member of the left-leaning Socialism and Liberty Party and was known for her work in shantytowns and her outspokenness against police violence, which disproportionately affects black residents in a country where more than 50 percent of people identify as black or mixed-race.

The arrests came just two days before the anniversary of her slaying and was the first significant movement in the investigation.

Thursday morning, people placed flowers in a line of vases and lit candles in front of a banner demanding "Justice for Marielle and Anderson." On Rio's iconic Lapa Aqueduct, activists hung another banner with Marielle's portrait that read, "Who ordered Marielle's killing?" On the steps leading to the city council, colleagues taped dozens of signs with sunflowers that asked the same question.

Commemorations continued with a service at a Roman Catholic church in downtown Rio, where followers of Afro-Brazilian religions wore traditional white garb, sang chants and held up signs reading "Marielle is present" and "For black mothers."

Franco's mother, Marinete da Silva, said her daughter had "become a symbol of resistance all over the world."

Franco's father, Antonio Francisco da Silva Neto, said at a commemoration service, "It is my worst nightmare to be participating in the Mass paying homage to my assassinated daughter."

The day ended with a protest in downtown at which over 1,000 people gathered around a stage as Franco's former colleagues gave speeches and feminist groups performed live samba.

Vigils, lectures and protests for Franco were held around the globe, including in Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Bogota, Lisbon, Berlin, London and several cities in the United States.

Many Brazilians also took to the streets to celebrate black, female politicians who won seats in the October elections. Several of them had been on Franco's staff.

Lawmaker's paid homage to Franco in Congress in the morning, but were interrupted by a group of rightist lawmakers who staged their own protest against the mistreatment of animals. Smiling, they held up a sign that read, "Prison for abusers," with the outline of a dog.

A woman clasps her hands in prayer during a memorial Mass to mark the one-year anniversary of the death of councilwoman Marielle Franco, at the Candelaria Catholic Church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were gunned down in Central Rio, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

Posters showing councilwoman Marielle Franco with messages that read in Portuguese: "Who ordered the killing of Marielle," and "We will not be stopped," are displayed at the site where Franco was gunned down, during a demonstration marking the one year anniversary of her death, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Authorities arrested two former police officers Tuesday in the killing of Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/ Silvia Izquierdo)

A woman wipes away tears during a memorial Mass to mark the one-year death anniversary of slain councilwoman Marielle Franco, at the Candelaria Catholic Church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were gunned down in Central Rio, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

A woman shouts in front of a poster with a message that reads in Portuguese: "Justice for Marielle and Anderson," at the site where Rio councilwoman Marielle Franco was gunned down, during a demonstration marking the one year anniversary of her death, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Authorities arrested two former police officers Tuesday in the killing of Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/ Silvia Izquierdo)

Followers of African-Brazilian religions dance outside the Candelaria Catholic Church where people gathered for a Mass in remembrance of slain councilwoman Marielle Franco to mark the one-year anniversary of her death, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were gunned down in Central Rio, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

Women embrace at the site where Rio councilwoman Marielle Franco was gunned down, during a demonstration marking the one year anniversary of her death, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Authorities arrested two former police officers Tuesday in the killing of Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/ Silvia Izquierdo)

Antonio Francisco da Silva, left, and Marinete Silva, the parents of slain councilwoman Marielle Franco, attend a memorial Mass to mark the one-year anniversary of Franco's death, at the Candelaria Catholic Church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Authorities arrested two former police officers Tuesday in the killing of Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/ Silvia Izquierdo)

Suspect Alexandre Motta, who police say is responsible for an apartment where they seized rifles connected to the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco, is escorted in handcuffs to a prison in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Authorities arrested two former police officers Ronnie Lessa and Elcio Vieira de Queiroz on Tuesday, March 12, 2019, in Franco's killing and her driver, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

Suspect and former police officer Elcio Vieira de Queiroz, who is under arrest for the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver, is escorted by police officers, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, March 14, 2019. Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were gunned down in central Rio on the evening of March 14, 2018. De Queiroz allegedly drove a car involved in the shooting. (AP Photo/Bruna Prado)

Marinete Silva, mother of slain councilwoman Marielle Franco is embraced before the start a memorial Mass to mark the one-year anniversary of Franco's death, at the Candelaria Catholic Church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes, were gunned down in Central Rio, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)

People attend a memorial Mass to mark the one-year death anniversary of slain councilwoman Marielle Franco, at the Candelaria Catholic Church in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Authorities arrested two former police officers Tuesday in the killing of Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes, a brazen assassination that shocked Brazilians and sparked protests in several countries. (AP Photo/ Silvia Izquierdo)
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump on Thursday sharply criticized Britain's handling of negotiations over leaving the European Union, saying the talks have been bungled and that the debate was dividing the country.

"I'm surprised at how badly it's all gone from the standpoint of a negotiation," he said.

Trump, who holds himself up as a master deal-maker, said he had given Prime Minister Theresa May his ideas on how she could negotiate a successful deal for leaving the 28-member group of nations. But "she didn't listen to that and that's fine. I mean she's got to do what she's got to do," he said at the White House as he welcomed Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar for an early St. Patrick's Day celebration.

"I think it could have been negotiated in a different manner, frankly," Trump said. "I hate to see it being, everything being ripped apart right now."

Trump spoke hours before British lawmakers voted to delay Brexit for at least three months. Britain's exit from the EU had been scheduled for March 29. The motion commits May's government to seek an extension until June 30 if Parliament approves a U.K.-EU withdrawal deal next week.

Trump predicted later Thursday that the situation eventually would work itself out. The president said he and Varadkar discussed the issue during their Oval Office meeting. Varadkar opposes Britain's EU exit and expressed concern about how such a move would affect Northern Ireland.

President Donald Trump, second from right, talks with, from left, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., and Rep. Peter King, D-N.Y., as he arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019, to have lunch. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

"We talked about Brexit, something that's turning out to be a little more complex than they thought it would be," Trump said at an annual Capitol Hill luncheon for the Irish hosted by the House speaker. "But it'll all work out. Everything does. One way or the other, it's going to work out."

Varadkar was returning to the White House for an evening reception and the presentation of a bowl of shamrocks to Trump. The openly gay prime minister and his partner, Matthew Barrett, started the day as the breakfast guests of Vice President Mike Pence, a conservative Christian who opposes gay rights.

Trump was at the Capitol just hours before 12 GOP senators broke ranks and voted to reject his declaration of a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump had taken that step so he could spend money that lawmakers refused to give the administration specifically to build a wall there.

The Democratic-run House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, voted last month to block the declaration.

Pelosi used the luncheon to make a pointed plug for immigration after just she had just described the annual event as "a tradition where we dispense with our differences, whether they're political or whether they're competitive in any other way."

Speaking about the contributions of Irish-Americans, Pelosi quoted Republican President Ronald Reagan as saying U.S. leadership would be lost "if we ever close the door to new Americans." Then she told the bipartisan luncheon: "You can applaud if you want."

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Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

President Donald Trump meets with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing street in London, Thursday, March 14, 2019. British lawmakers faced another tumultuous day Thursday, as Parliament prepared to vote on whether to request a delay to the country's scheduled departure from the European Union and Prime Minister Theresa May struggled to shore up her shattered authority. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland)

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar speaks during a Friends of Ireland Luncheon on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
WASHINGTON (AP) - One of the most prominent prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller is leaving the team soon, a likely indication that the investigation is close to wrapping up.

More than any other member of Mueller's team, Andrew Weissmann has been a target of President Donald Trump's outrage and singled out for attacks, including by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, as an overly aggressive prosecutor.

Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement Thursday that Weissmann would be concluding his work with the special counsel's office "in the near future." He did not give a date, but the looming departure is not surprising given that the principal case Weissmann has worked on - the prosecution of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort - came to a close Wednesday with a sentencing in federal court in Washington.

Several other prosecutors detailed to Mueller's team have also left in recent months, suggesting the investigation is winding down and that Mueller may soon turn in a report to Attorney General William Barr. In addition, David Archey, the senior FBI official involved in the Mueller investigation, was named to a new job this month as the top agent in the FBI's field office in Richmond, Virginia.

Weissmann, who worked as an FBI general counsel under Mueller, most recently led the Justice Department's fraud section. He achieved prominence for his work as a prosecutor while investigating organized crime in New York City and for his leadership of a task force that investigated the Enron scandal. He has developed a reputation as an aggressive and experienced prosecutor skilled in developing cooperating witnesses.

Since Weissmann joined Mueller's team in 2017, Trump has occasionally singled him out for criticism, using his name as a kind of shorthand for what he maintains is an illegitimate effort to bring him down. Republicans eager to paint the Mueller team as biased against Trump have seized on a January 2017 email Weissmann wrote complimenting former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama administration holdover, for refusing to have the Justice Department defend the Trump administration's travel ban.

FILE - In this Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2002 file photo, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann talks with the media outside the federal courthouse in Houston. Weissmann, one of the most prominent prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller is leaving the team soon, a likely indication that the investigation is close to wrapping up.(AP Photo/Pat Sullivan, File)

Weissmann's expected departure was first reported by NPR, which said he would study and teach at New York University and work on public service projects.

"Andrew has been involved with NYU Law in the past and we have been talking with him about returning to the Law School following his current commitments," said Michael Orey, a spokesman for the Law School.

Weissmann was also part of the team that prosecuted Manafort's business associate, Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty last year and agreed to cooperate, and that investigated unregistered foreign lobbying efforts in Washington.

____

Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
WASHINGTON (AP) - Trump confidant Roger Stone will go on trial Nov. 5 on charges he lied to Congress, engaged in witness tampering and obstructed a congressional investigation into possible coordination between Russia and Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, a federal judge said Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Stone's trial will take about two weeks. She is still considering whether the self-described dirty trickster violated a court order that prohibits him from discussing his criminal case with an introduction to his new book that criticizes special counsel Robert Mueller, whose office is prosecuting Stone.

Stone appeared stoic as his attorneys discussed timing for filing motions in the case.

Unlike at previous hearings, prosecutor Jeannie Rhee from Mueller's office handled arguments for the prosecution on Thursday. At other court appearances, prosecutors from the U.S. attorney's office had spoken on behalf of the government.

He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which stem from conversations he had during the campaign about WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group that released material stolen from Democratic groups, including Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Stone has maintained his innocence and blasted the special counsel's investigation as politically motivated.

Roger Stone, an associate of President Donald Trump, leaves the U.S. District Court, after a court status conference on his seven charges: one count of obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering, in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Stone has pleaded not guilty to the charges. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

Rhee said the government has turned over about nine terabytes of documents and other evidence to the defense team. The judge also set deadlines for Stone's lawyers to file any possible motions seeking to dismiss the case.

As he left after Thursday's hearing, Stone rebuffed attempts to get him to discuss his case.

"No fireworks," he said as he made his way through a crush of television cameras outside the courthouse.
MEXICO CITY (AP) - The environmentalist group Sea Shepherd said Thursday that it found the body of what appeared to be a vaquita porpoise, one of perhaps only 10 that remain in the world.

The group said the remains were too badly decomposed for immediate identification and had been turned over to authorities for further study.

Two Sea Shepherd patrol boats found the animal in a net Tuesday in the Gulf of California, the only place the critically endangered tiny porpoises live. The group patrols the gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez, removing illegal fishing nets. The vaquitas get caught in nets set illegally for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in China.

In a report issued earlier this week, an international commission of experts estimated only six to 22 vaquitas remain alive.

The lower figure was the number of vaquitas actually seen on the surface during a trip by researchers last fall. The higher estimate was the number of the animals that may have been heard over a system of floating acoustic monitors making distinctive, dolphin-like "clicks."

The commission said the most likely number of remaining vaquitas was somewhere around 10.

In this March 12, 2019 photo released by the Sea Shepherd organization, the body of a dead animal believed to be a vaquita, a critically endangered species of porpoise, floats in the ocean after being found in an illegal totoaba net recovered by Sea Shepherd in the Gulf of California off of Mexico. The environmentalist group Sea Shepherd said Thursday, March 14, 2019 that it found the badly decomposed body of what appeared to be a vaquita porpoise, one of perhaps only 10 that remain in the world. (Sea Shepherd via AP)

And the vaquitas are concentrated in an increasingly small area of about 15 miles by 7 miles, its report said.

"The few remaining vaquitas inhabit a very small area, approximately 24 by 12 kilometers, most of which lies within the Vaquita Refuge. However, high levels of illegal fishing for totoaba occur in this area," the report said.

Defending the vaquitas in the small area should not be "an impossible task, as the area to be protected is not large," the report added.

But Sea Shepherd's vessels have come under increasing harassment and attacks in the gulf in recent months, and the totoaba season - in which the big fish gather to breed - will reach its peak between now and May.

The boldness of illegal fishermen, the small number of remaining vaquitas and the inability of the Mexican navy and authorities to stop poaching has raised alarms among environmentalists, who fear the marine mammal could go extinct soon.

"Reports from the region suggest that the illegal fishery is growing, and there have been several recent episodes of violence by illegal fishermen directed at net removal vessels and their crews, legal fishermen, and even the Mexican Navy," the commission's report said. "These events illustrate the continued failure of enforcement efforts and the lack of respect for Mexican law by illegal fishermen."

In a last-stand bid to save the vaquita, the commission urged the Mexican government to provide 24-hour surveillance and patrols of the small remaining habitat area, and "take all necessary measures to protect net removal teams."

"There is only the tiniest sliver of hope remaining for the vaquita," said Kate O'Connell, a marine wildlife consultant with the Animal Welfare Institute. "Mexico must act decisively to ensure that all gillnet fishing is brought to an end throughout the upper gulf."

In this March 12, 2019 photo released by the Sea Shepherd organization, the body of a dead animal believed to be a vaquita, a critically endangered species of porpoise, floats in the ocean after being found in an illegal totoaba net recovered by Sea Shepherd in the Gulf of California, Mexico. The environmentalist group Sea Shepherd said Thursday, March 14, 2019 that it found the badly decomposed body of what appeared to be a vaquita porpoise, one of perhaps only 10 that remain in the world. (Sea Shepherd via AP)
RENO, Nev. (AP) - Prosecutors said Thursday they will seek the death penalty against a 20-year-old Salvadoran immigrant in the U.S. illegally who has been charged with killing four people in Nevada, including an elderly couple.

Wilber Ernesto Martinez-Guzman is being prosecuted in Reno after authorities said he fatally shot the couple in their Reno home and two women in their homes south of Carson City during a 10-day crime rampage in January.

The case has drawn the attention of President Donald Trump, who says it shows the need for his proposed border wall.

Immigration status had nothing to do with the decision to pursue capital punishment in the case, according to district attorneys Chris Hicks of Washoe County and Mark Jackson of Douglas County, co-prosecutors in the case.

"His immigration status was not even discussed at all," Jackson said.

Hicks said Martinez-Guzman would be eligible for the death penalty because of aggravating circumstances that include the killing of more than one person during the commission of felonies aimed at obtaining money and other property.

FILE - In this Jan. 24, 2019 file photo, Wilber Ernesto Martinez-Guzman, 19, of El Salvador, is escorted into the courtroom for his initial appearance in Carson City Justice Court in Carson City, Nev. A grand jury has indicted Martinez-Guzman on murder charges in the killing of four northern Nevadans in January. The district attorneys for Washoe and Douglas counties scheduled a news conference in Reno Thursday, March 14, 2019, to provide an update on the case, including their decision on whether to seek the death penalty for Martinez-Guzman.(AP Photo/Scott Sonner, File)

His young age and absence of any prior criminal history in the U.S. and El Salvador were also considered, the prosecutor said.

A grand jury indicted Martinez-Guzman on Wednesday on murder, burglary and weapon charges. He could enter a plea to those counts at his first appearance in state court, scheduled April 11.

He has been held without bail in the county jail in Reno after being charged in previous criminal complaints. He was arrested Jan. 19.

His public defense attorney, John Arrascada, did not immediately respond Thursday to messages seeking comment.

Federal officials have said Martinez-Guzman is in the U.S. illegally but they don't know how or when he crossed the border.

The four slaying victims include Gerald David, 81, and his 80-year-old wife, Sharon David, a prominent Reno Rodeo Association couple who had employed Martinez-Guzman as a landscaper at their house last summer.

Police say they were shot with a .22-caliber handgun that Martinez-Guzman stole from them less than two weeks earlier.

Court documents allege that Martinez-Guzman's DNA was found on the same gun that was also used to kill Connie Koontz and Sophia Renken in their homes.

Martinez-Guzman was arrested in Carson City, where he also faces a series of weapons and burglary charges.

Hicks said prosecutors presented witnesses and an "extraordinary amount of evidence" during the grand jury proceeding Wednesday aimed at bypassing a preliminary hearing.

"We believe we cut off several months of time that would have been spent in Justice Court," Hicks said, noting the victims' families supported the strategy.

Jackson said it's the first time he has sought the death penalty in the 12 years he's been the district attorney in Douglas County. Hicks said it's the fourth time it's been sought in more than 10 years in Washoe County.

"We reserve the death penalty for the worst of the worst," Hicks said.

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Associated Press writer Ken Ritter contributed to this report from Las Vegas.

Douglas County District Attorney Mark Jackson answers a reporter's question as Washoe County District Attorney Chris Hicks, right, looks on at a news conference Thursday, March, 14, 2019 in Reno, Nev. The two announced they will seek the death penalty for a Salvadoran immigrant accused of murdering four northern Nevadans during a week-long killing spree in January. A grand jury handed up a 10-count indictment late Wednesday charging Wilber Ernesto Martinez-Guzman with four counts of murder with a deadly weapon as well as burglary and weapons charges. (AP Photo/Scott Sonner)
HEJERE, Ethiopia (AP) - It was too much to bear. She feared she would have nothing of her loved one, no body, no remains to bury.

She took handfuls of dirt and flung it in her own face, overcome.

More families arrived on Thursday at the site of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people. They came with the hope that they could bring some trace of their loved ones home.

Some fell to their knees in grief when they learned there was nothing left. Others hurled themselves forward, wailing, or staggered in relatives' arms.

The mourning was mixed with frustration. For some, their beliefs dictated they must have something to bury.

"Big families, a lot of people and the full Israeli nation is waiting for these remains and we will not go out of Ethiopia until we find the remains to bury them," said Moshi Biton of Israel, who lost his brother, Shimon Daniel Re'em Biton.

An Ethiopian relative of a crash victim throws dirt in her own face after realising that there is nothing physical left of her loved one, as she mourns at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

"Because if not, they will stay missing for the rest of the life and we cannot do that in our religion."

Some Muslim families fretted. A body must be buried as soon as possible.

In the Ethiopian Orthodox religion, bodies are buried a day after death.

On Wednesday the family of a young crew member on the doomed flight, Sara Gebremichael, held a religious ceremony for her photograph. They had nothing more.

Many of the grieving gathered at the rural, dusty crash site outside Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. The dead came from 35 countries.

Some families, including that of the flight's senior pilot, Capt. Yared Getachew, came bearing large framed photographs of the dead. In one, a victim wore a graduate's cap and gown, a source of immense pride.

Others arriving wore black T-shirts printed with a photo in remembrance. They held sticks of incense, the flames flaring in the wind.

One man held a tiny, torn scrap of document showing a photo of one of the dead.

In the background, searchers carrying large clear plastic bags continued to move slowly through the rubble, looking for more.

Some relatives at the scene expressed frustration, saying authorities were not sharing the information they badly needed.

An airline spokesman on Wednesday said some remains had been found and were in a freezer awaiting the forensic DNA work needed for identifications.

On Thursday it was no longer clear how long that work, once estimated at five days or more, would take. Israel's consul to Ethiopia, Opher Dach, suggested the remains would be sent to a laboratory Britain.

The airline, overwhelmed with requests, announced it would take no more questions from reporters and would post any developments on social media and its website.

Even at an airline briefing for families in Addis Ababa some tearful relatives stormed out, demanding more.

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AP journalist Yidnek Kirubel in Hejere contributed. AP writer Elias Meseret in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia contributed.

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Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. The French air accident investigation authority said Thursday that it will handle the analysis of the black boxes retrieved from the crash site and they have already arrived in France but gave no time frame on how long the analysis could take. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Family members of the flight's main pilot, Captain Yared Getachew, carry photographs of him as they mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

An Ethiopian relative of a crash victim throws dirt in her own face after realising that there is nothing physical left of her loved one, as she mourns at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Ethiopian relatives of crash victims mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Thursday, March 14, 2019. About 200 family members of people who died on the crashed jet stormed out of a briefing with Ethiopian Airlines officials in Addis Ababa on Thursday, complaining that the airline has not given them adequate information. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)
ATLANTA (AP) - Former Vice President Joe Biden and Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams met privately Thursday in Washington, bringing together two starkly different faces of their party as they both weigh their political futures.

Biden, 76, who served as President Barack Obama's closest adviser, is on the cusp of deciding whether he'll make his third run for the presidency. Abrams, 45, narrowly lost the Georgia governor's race last November. She is being heavily recruited to run for the Senate in 2020, but she's not ruled out making a presidential bid herself. She also could be considered as a vice presidential running mate.

A person close to Abrams confirmed the meeting, saying it was set at Biden's request. The person wasn't authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Aides for Abrams and Biden each declined to comment following the lunchtime session.

The meeting stands out among the high-powered political huddles that are common as a presidential election season takes shape.

Biden and Abrams represent starkly different identities for a Democratic Party in flux, with one an aging white man who is the consummate Washington politician and the other an up-and-coming black woman from Generation X who has become a national political celebrity even in defeat. Her star climbed higher when she delivered the Democratic response to President Donald Trump's State of the Union address last month.

Former Vice President Joe Biden takes a photograph with members of the audience after speaking to the International Association of Firefighters at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 12, 2019, amid growing expectations he'll soon announce he's running for president. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

If Abrams doesn't run or doesn't win the Democratic nomination, she could be a vice presidential pick, especially if Biden or another white candidate won the nomination. There is wide agreement across the Democratic spectrum that the party will require a 2020 ticket with some racial and gender balance.

Biden endorsed Abrams' 2018 campaign but did not come to Georgia to campaign, as did now-presidential candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California.

Abrams had breakfast Thursday with another Democratic senator running for president, New York's Kirsten Gillibrand, who tweeted a picture of the pair.

In an interview with The Associated Press this week, Abrams largely avoided the 2020 speculation, saying she must decide first whether she wants to challenge Republican Sen. David Perdue, a freshman who has emerged as one of Trump's most vocal supporters on Capitol Hill.

"There certainly is a connectivity between that and other 2020 opportunities," she said, referring to "ephemeral" options like the vice presidency, something that "requires other people to make decisions about what they would like" versus deciding whether to run herself.

After meeting with Biden, Abrams was coy during remarks at the Roosevelt Institute's and Economic Security Project's "Bold vs. Old Conference" on economic policy. After mentioning the Senate, she continued with a jab toward the White House: "And then there's this other job that ... I would argue is currently vacant."

Abrams told the AP that she's sticking to her previous commitment to announce her Senate plans in early April.

She said she's had a series of conversations with other current and former elected officials about her options, with a key question being the practical ability of a senator to make a difference. Biden spent 36 years representing Delaware in the Senate before becoming vice president in 2009.

"My objective is to make sure I want to do that job. ... I'd not thought about the Senate before," she said, an allusion to her still-strong ambition to be governor after already having served as minority leader in the state House.

"The Senate is a different way to tackle the issues I see. It is a continuation of my legislative work, which I appreciated, but it's an indirect solution to some of the challenges I see," Abrams said, explaining a potential downside.

But she also said she sees plenty of opportunities.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Abrams said, has been "very thoughtful" in addressing her questions as he recruits her to challenge Perdue. Schumer, D-N.Y., has said himself that Abrams would be a leading Democratic voice on voting rights.

Abrams' race last fall was defined by her assertions that now-Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, paved the way for his own victory by using his previous post as secretary of state to make it harder for poor and nonwhite Georgians to vote. Kemp denies any wrongdoing.

The Biden-Abrams meeting came the same day that 2018 Senate candidate and former congressman Beto O'Rourke of Texas entered the presidential race. O'Rourke, 46, is sometimes compared to both Abrams and Biden. Like Abrams, O'Rourke became a celebrity candidate who ran a surprisingly close race in a Republican-run state. Like Biden, O'Rourke is a white man whom some moderates see as the antidote to Trump. But O'Rourke's youth offers a contrast to the former vice president, who would turn 80 during a first presidential term.

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Associated Press writer Elana Schor contributed to this report from Washington.

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Follow Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP

Former Vice President Joe Biden greets members of the audience after speaking to the International Association of Firefighters at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 12, 2019, amid growing expectations he'll soon announce he's running for president. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
PADUCAH, Ky. (AP) - The Latest on severe weather in the South (all times local):

7:15 p.m.

Severe weather moving through Alabama caused heavy damage in parts of Cullman and Lawrence counties and moderate damage in Blount County, but no injuries have been reported.

The National Weather Service reports a possible tornado Thursday downed trees and threw debris from Cullman to northeast of Holly Pond but meteorologist Chelly Amin says it's too early to confirm whether a twister actually touched down. She says teams will assess the areas Friday before making an official notification.

Amin says there were reports of moderate roof damage to a few structures in Cullman and reports of several trees down in the Bankhead National Forest in southern Lawrence County.

Several central and north Alabama counties remain under a tornado watch.

This Thursday, March 14, 2019 photo shows damage to the Wilbert Vault Co., in West Paducah, Ky. A tornado left a path in western Kentucky from Lovelaceville through the West Paducah area, according to Keith Todd, a spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. He said the public was being asked to avoid the area while utility crews, area fire departments, and rescue squads worked to clear utility lines, downed trees and other debris. (Dave Thompson/The Paducah Sun via AP)

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1:30 p.m.

Kentucky State Police say a state of emergency has been declared in an extreme western county where a tornado spread damage around a 5-square-mile (13-square kilometer) area, knocking down power lines and covering roadways in debris.

A statement from police says one injury has been reported in McCracken County from the storm. Emergency crews are going door-to-door in the area to check on residents.

Authorities said buildings were damaged, including a preschool. Forty students were inside but none were reported hurt.

Several roadways are shut down due to debris and down power lines including portions of U.S. 62 and Kentucky 286.

The American Red Cross has opened an evacuation center for those hit by the storm.

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11:30 am

State transportation officials are asking motorists to avoid traveling in some areas of western Kentucky due to damage from a reported tornado.

A statement from Kentucky Transportation Cabinet spokesman Keith Todd says motorists should avoid traveling in western McCracken County and southeastern Ballard County for at least the remainder of Thursday.

Todd says storm debris has blocked areas along U.S. 62 from Kentucky 305 to Kentucky 286 in McCracken County. Todd said there are report of pieces of grain bins, barns, homes and other debris in the roadway and some of it can't be cleared until utility crews arrive to cut power. He said there are additional areas of downed trees and power lines reported in the West Paducah area.

Todd says motorists should avoid US 62 and KY 286 to allow emergency responders to work in the area unimpeded.

Earlier, officials at the National Weather Service in Paducah tweeted that a tornado blew past their office.

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11 am

Weather officials in Kentucky say a tornado has blown past their office.

The National Weather Service in Paducah tweeted Thursday morning, "TORNADO JUST MISSED OUR OFFICE IN WEST PADUCAH. TAKE SHELTER NOW IF YOU'RE IN PADUCAH!!!!" The tweet was posted at 9:30 a.m., Central Daylight Time.

There was no immediate word on any damage.

Weather forecasters say numerous severe storms are possible beginning Thursday afternoon in the Tennessee Valley region and as far south as the northern Birmingham area.

Officials said schools are closing early in north Alabama because of the severe weather possibility.

Forecasters say winds up to 60 mph are possible along with isolated tornadoes and hail.

The state is on the southern end of a storm system that pummeled the central United States.

A mother cow mourns the death of her calf after a devastating tornado touched down on a farm in McCracken County, Ky., on Thursday, March 14, 2019. (Ellen O'Nan/The Paducah Sun via AP)

This Thursday, March 14, 2019 photo shows damage to Mount Zion Church in West Paducah, Ky. The twister left a path in western Kentucky from Lovelaceville through the West Paducah area, according to Keith Todd, a spokesman for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. He said the public was being asked to avoid the area while utility crews, area fire departments, and rescue squads worked to clear utility lines, downed trees and other debris (Dave Thompson/The Paducah Sun via AP)
EDMOND, Okla. (AP) - An attorney plans to seek a competency hearing for a 19-year-old Oklahoma murder suspect whose brother told investigators he said he killed their parents because he thought they were Satan worshippers communicating with him telepathically.

Michael Elijah "Eli" Walker was arraigned Wednesday on first-degree murder charges in the March 4 shooting deaths of Michael Logan Walker, 50, and Rachel Walker, 44, at their home in the Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond.

Walker's attorney, Derek Chance, who entered a not guilty plea on his client's behalf, said he would expect to seek a not guilty by reason of insanity defense if he isn't found incompetent for trial. Chance acknowledged such defenses have rarely succeeded in Oklahoma murder trials.

"He's very mentally ill, and even at this point it's difficult even for us to get through to him in any of our meetings," Chance said.

Michael Logan Walker's sister, Maya Walker, made a brief statement to reporters Tuesday following funeral services for the slain couple, alluding to her nephew's mental difficulties.

"Please see it soon enough before it happens to your family because all of us now in hindsight are realizing the pieces we're putting together now, we didn't recognize," she said.

FILE--This March 4, 2019 booking photo released by the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office shows Michael Elijah Walker. Police say the 19-year-old Oklahoma man told his younger brother that he fatally shot their parents because they were communicating with him telepathically and were Satan worshippers. Walker has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in his parents deaths and his attorney Derek Chance says he will seek to have Eli Walker declared mentally incompetent. (Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office via AP)

"We hope and pray for the best possible outcome (and) for Eli, my nephew, to get the best care possible," Walker said.

It has not been revealed whether Walker had been diagnosed with, or was undergoing treatment for, a mental illness.

"We have not confirmed that yet as an official medical diagnosis, not saying it isn't true," police spokeswoman Jenny Wagnon said. "That's something we will likely be asked to do by the DA's office."

Wagnon said two pistols and an AR-15 rifle found in the home shortly after the slayings were purchased by one of the parents but declined to say which parent.

Easy access to guns only slightly increases the risk by the mentally ill of gun violence compared to the overall population, said Dr. William Carpenter Jr., a psychiatric professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

"Sure, violence can be a problem ... gun violence, but with the amount of gun violence in this country it just sticks out a little bit," Carpenter said of violent acts committed by the mentally ill. "Most of the increase relates to before they're diagnosed or treated, or they're not taking their medication at the time the violence occurs."

Wagnon said police were also trying to determine where materials were acquired for four small homemade bombs found in the home and later detonated by a bomb squad.

"We'll be going through phones and computers, looking for receipts to try to find out how they were purchased ... that's part of our investigation," Wagnon said.

Meredith Davis, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the agency is aware of the case and available to assist if asked.

The insanity defense was successful for Christian Costello, 30, who a judge ruled in April 2018 was not guilty by reason of insanity in the 2015 stabbing death of his father, state Labor Commissioner Mark Costello.

In that case, prosecutors agreed with defense attorneys that Christian Costello was incompetent and both said it was unlikely he would ever be released.
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) - A Russian-American crew arrived at the International Space Station on Friday, five months after a botched launch led to an emergency landing for two of the three astronauts.

This time, the Russian Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch along with Roscosmos' Alexei Ovchinin lifted off precisely as planned from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:14 a.m. Friday (1914 GMT Thursday).

Six hours later, their capsule docked at the orbiting outpost.

On Oct. 11, a Soyuz carrying Hague and Ovchinin failed two minutes into flight, activating a rescue system that allowed their capsule to land safely. That accident was the first aborted crew launch for the Russian space program since 1983, when two Soviet cosmonauts safely jettisoned after a launch pad explosion.

On Friday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated the crew on a successful launch. "So proud of Nick Hague for persevering through last October's launch that didn't go as planned," he tweeted.

Speaking at a pre-launch news conference at Baikonur, the astronauts said they trusted the rocket and fully believed in the success of their mission.

The Soyuz-FG rocket booster with Soyuz MS-12 space ship carrying a new crew to the International Space Station, ISS, blasts off at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, early Friday, March 15, 2019. The Russian rocket carries U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Nick Hague, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

"I'm 100 percent confident in the rocket and the spacecraft," Hague said. "The events from October only helped to solidify that and boost confidence in the vehicle to do its job."

The trio will join NASA's Anne McClain, Roscosmos' Oleg Kononenko and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency who are already on the space station. They will conduct work on hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science.

When one of the four strap-on boosters for their Soyuz failed to separate properly two minutes after their launch in October, Hague and Ovchinin were jettisoned from the rocket. Their rescue capsule plunged steeply back to Earth with its lights flashing and alarms screaming, subjecting the crew to seven times the force of gravity.

Hague emphasized Wednesday that they were well-trained for the emergency.

"The nature of our profession is we spend 90-95 percent of our time practicing what to do when things go wrong," he said. "And so we spend all that time training, running through all those scenarios. And because we do train that way, like in October when things like that happened, we were ready to do what we need to do to come out successfully."

The October failure was the first aborted launch for the Russian space program in 35 years and only the third in history. Each time, the rocket's automatic rescue system kept the crew safe.

A Russian investigation attributed October's launch failure to a sensor that was damaged during the rocket's final assembly. The next crew launch to the space station in December went on without a hitch.

Ovchinin recalled that they felt "more annoyed than stressed" when their rescue capsule touched down in the barren steppes of Kazakhstan. "It was disappointing and a bit frustrating that we didn't make it to the International Space Station," he said.

NASA and Roscosmos praised the crew's valor and composure in the aborted launch and promised to quickly give them a second chance into space.

"We don't accept the risk blindly, we have mitigated it as much as we can, and we always plan to be successful," Hague said.

Ovchinin stressed that the aborted launch in October was an "interesting and very useful experience" that "proved the reliability of the emergency rescue system."

Since the 2011 retirement of the U.S. shuttle fleet, Russia's Soyuz spacecraft have been the only vehicles that ferry crews to the space station.

NASA, however, is counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start launching astronauts later this year. The SpaceX ship Dragon returned Friday from a six-day test flight to the space station and could take astronauts there on its next flight as early as this summer.

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Isachenkov reported from Moscow.

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, centre, Nick Hague, above, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, crew members of the mission to the International Space Station, ISS, wave as they board to the rocket prior the launch of Soyuz-FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Kyrill Kudryavtsev, Pool)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew to the International Space Station (ISS), pose near a bus prior to the launch of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March. 14. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

An Orthodox priest conducts a blessing service in front of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March 14 with U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Nick Hague, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

The Soyuz rocket is seen at dawn on launch site 1 of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Expedition 59's astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch of NASA, along with Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos will launch later in the day, U.S. time, on the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome for a six-and-a-half month mission on the International Space Station.(Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)

An Orthodox priest walks after a blessing service in front of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March 14 with U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Nick Hague, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

An Orthodox priest conducts a blessing service in front of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March 14 with U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Nick Hague, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew to the International Space Station (ISS), pose near a bus prior to the launch of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March. 14. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew to the International Space Station (ISS), pose near a bus prior to the launch of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March. 14. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronauts Nick Hague, a members of the main crew to the International Space Station (ISS), interacts with his relatives from a bus prior to the launch launch of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March. 14. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, a members of the main crew to the International Space Station (ISS), interacts with his relatives from a bus prior to the launch of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March. 14. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, a members of the main crew to the International Space Station (ISS), interacts with his relative from a bus prior to the launch of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March. 14. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, a members of the main crew to the International Space Station (ISS), interacts with his relatives from a bus prior to the launch of the Soyuz FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Wednesday, March 13, 2019. The new Soyuz mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled on Thursday, March. 14. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Russian Space Agency experts help U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), to stand up after inspecting his space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Russian Space Agency experts help Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), to stand up after inspecting his space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, crew member of the mission to the International Space Station, ISS, waves near the rocket prior the launch of Soyuz-FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Kyrill Kudryavtsev, Pool)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch and Nick Hague, crew members of the mission to the International Space Station, ISS, wave as they board to the rocket prior the launch of Soyuz-FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Kyrill Kudryavtsev, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, crew members of the mission to the International Space Station, ISS, waves near the rocket prior the launch of Soyuz-FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Kyrill Kudryavtsev, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), gestures to his relatives from a bus prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), gestures to her relatives from a bus prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), walk prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), walk prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), speaks with their relatives through a safety glass prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), speaks with his relatives through a safety glass prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), speaks with her relatives through a safety glass prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

Russian Space Agency experts help U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), to stand up after inspecting her space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), speaks with her relatives through a safety glass prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), looks on during inspecting her space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), looks on during inspecting her space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), looks on prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), looks on during inspecting his space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Russian Space Agency experts help Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), to stand up after inspecting his space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, right, and Nick Hague, members of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), wave prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Russian Space Agency experts help U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), to stand up after inspecting his space suit prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague Russian, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), gestures prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), walk prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, left, Nick Hague, right, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, members of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), walk prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, crew members of the mission to the International Space Station, ISS, waves near the rocket prior the launch of Soyuz-FG rocket at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Kyrill Kudryavtsev, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Nick Hague, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), gestures to his relatives from a bus prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)

U.S. astronaut Christina Hammock Koch, member of the main crew of the expedition to the International Space Station (ISS), gestures to her relatives from a bus prior the launch of Soyuz MS-12 space ship at the Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky, Pool)
NEW YORK (AP) - New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan Thursday to meet the "existential threat" of climate change by extending a section of the lower Manhattan coastline as much as 500 feet (152 meters) into the East River.

The Democratic mayor said the $10 billion effort to protect lower Manhattan from flooding by extending the shoreline between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Battery will be funded partly by private development if federal funds are not available.

"If there's federal money in play it probably looks one way," de Blasio said. "If there's not federal money in play, we have to get some private money into it and there has to be some development."

Officials have been developing schemes to fortify New York City's waterfront since Superstorm Sandy destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in 2012.

De Blasio said it will cost about $500 million to fortify most of lower Manhattan from future effects of climate change, including rising sea levels and intense precipitation, with grassy berms and removable barriers.

But planners determined that protecting the lowest-lying area, including South Street Seaport and the financial district, will require adding more land over several years.

FILE - In this Oct. 19, 2017 file photo, a boat crosses New York Harbor in front of the Manhattan skyline. Mayor Bill de Blasio is announcing a plan, Thursday, March 14, 2019, to protect lower Manhattan from rising sea levels by surrounding it with earthen berms and extending its shoreline by as much as 500 feet. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

De Blasio, who is contemplating joining the crowded field of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, said the $10 billion landfill project should be supported by federal funds, but that's unlikely to happen during the administration of Republican President Donald Trump.

"Lower Manhattan is one of the core centers of the American economy," he said. "It's where the financial capital of the United states is. The security of lower Manhattan should be a national priority. The fact is it is not. And it's incomprehensible to me that there's no sense of urgency from the federal government."

He added, "We can't afford to bury our head in the sand and that's right now what our federal government is doing."

The plan to extend the coastline will go through the city's environmental review process, de Blasio said, but he hopes to avoid "the endless dragging on that usually accompanies something of this scale."

But the prospect of private development on the newly built land is sure to meet resistance from downtown Manhattan community members.

City Council member Margaret Chin, who represents the area, said the more resilient future "cannot be paid for by private real estate development that would destroy the waterfront neighborhoods that we are trying to protect."

De Blasio announced the climate resilience plan at a news conference after previewing it in New York magazine .

He said a study undertaken by his office and others has determined that if the city does not prepare for climate change, rising seas will expose 20 percent of lower Manhattan to daily flooding by 2100.

"This is the existential threat," de Blasiko said. "This is the core issue we all must face as aggressively as humanly possible."

FILE - In this Oct. 29, 2012 file photo, seawater floods the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel during Superstorm Sandy in New York. Mayor Bill de Blasio is announcing a plan, Thursday, March 14, 2019, to protect lower Manhattan from rising sea levels by surrounding it with earthen berms and extending its shoreline by as much as 500 feet. Officials have been developing schemes to fortify New York City's waterfront ever since Superstorm Sandy destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in 2012. (AP Photo/ John Minchillo, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 29, 2012 file photo, sea water floods the Ground Zero construction site during Superstorm Sandy in New York. Mayor Bill de Blasio is announcing a plan, Thursday, March 14, 2019, to protect lower Manhattan from rising sea levels by surrounding it with earthen berms and extending its shoreline by as much as 500 feet. Officials have been developing schemes to fortify New York City's waterfront ever since Superstorm Sandy destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in 2012.(AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - The sponsor of a North Carolina law limiting LGBT rights that led businesses, entertainers and others to boycott the state is running for Congress.

State Sen. Dan Bishop of Charlotte filed on Thursday to run in the 9th Congressional District re-do election. He faces at least two others in May's Republican primary.

The business lawyer co-sponsored a 2016 law that prevented local anti-discrimination ordinances expanding LGBT protections. It also required transgender people to use public bathrooms and showers matching their birth gender.

New primary and general elections were ordered last month for the 9th District after evidence that a political operative working for GOP candidate Mark Harris collected and potentially altered mail-in ballots. Harris' seemingly narrow victory over Democrat Dan McCready in November was scrapped.

Harris isn't running again. McCready is.

FILE - In this Jan. 22, 2018 file photo, N.C. Sen. Dan Bishop speaks during a joint N.C. House-Senate committee meeting on judicial reform and redistricting held at the Legislative Office Building in downtown Raleigh, N.C. Bishop of Charlotte filed on Thursday, March 14, 2019 to run in the 9th Congressional District re-do election. He faces at least two others in May's Republican primary. (Chris Seward/The News & Observer via AP)

FILE - In this Feb. 21, 2019, file photo, Mark Harris, Republican candidate in North Carolina's 9th Congressional race, prepares to testify during the fourth day of a public evidentiary hearing on the 9th Congressional District voting irregularities investigation at the North Carolina State Bar in Raleigh, N.C. North Carolina's elections board is expected to decide Monday, March 4 when to hold new party primaries and the general election for the 9th congressional district, where a seat still remains vacant after November's result was tainted by ballot fraud concerns. Democrat Dan McCready is running again in the new election. Harris will not. (Travis Long/The News & Observer via AP, Pool, File)
NEW YORK (AP) - The Latest on the fatal shooting of reputed Gambino crime boss Francesco Cali (all times local):

3:35 p.m.

New York City police say the man who fatally shot the reputed boss of the Gambino crime family may have staged a car accident to lure him out of his home.

Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said Thursday police are reviewing surveillance footage that captured the events surrounding Frank Cali's death Wednesday night in Staten Island.

She described the shooter as an adult male who sped off in a pickup truck.

No arrests have been made.

Shea says Cali emerged from his home around 9:15 p.m. after the suspect backed his pickup truck into Cali's Cadillac SUV.

Video shows the suspect pulling a 9 mm handgun and opening fire on Cali about a minute after they started talking.

At least 12 shots were fired.

____

12:01 a.m.

A man with reported ties to organized crime has been shot and killed in New York City.

Police say 53-year-old Francesco Cali was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home in the Todt Hill section of Staten Island just after 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Cali was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. There have been no arrests.

No other information was provided by police.

The last crime family boss to be shot in New York City was Paul Castellano. The Gambino crime boss was assassinated outside Sparks Steakhouse in Manhattan in 1985.
NEW YORK (AP) - The reputed boss of New York's Gambino crime family was shot to death in front of his home by a gunman who may have staged a car accident to lure him outside, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, John Gotti.

Police said Thursday they were reviewing surveillance-camera video of the attack on Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, who was gunned down Wednesday night at his red-brick colonial-style house in a quiet Staten Island neighborhood. The assailant sped off in a pickup truck, police said. No immediate arrests were made.

The motive for the attack was under investigation, police said. Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said it was still an open question whether it was a mob hit.

Aggressive federal prosecutions in the past 25 years decimated the ranks of New York's five Mafia families. The cases resulted in long prison terms for their bosses - Gotti included - and encouraged their successors to keep a lower profile.

But the new generation still engages in old-school crimes - loansharking, gambling, extortion - that can make enemies and spark bloodshed.

Shea said there has been a slight uptick in alleged mob-related violence in New York within the last year. But he said it is too soon to say whether that had anything to do with Cali's slaying.

Police work near the scene where an alleged leader of the Gambino crime family was shot and killed in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home Wednesday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

The mobster emerged from his home around 9:15 p.m. after the gunman backed his pickup into Cali's Cadillac SUV, damaging it, according to police. "With what we know at this point in time, it's quite possible that was part of a plan," Shea said.

Video showed the assailant pulling a 9 mm handgun and opening fire on Cali about a minute after they started talking, according to Shea. At least 12 shots were fired. After getting shot several times, Cali tried to crawl under his SUV to hide, Shea said.

Federal prosecutors referred to Cali in court filings in recent years as the underboss of the Mafia's Gambino family, once one of the most powerful and feared crime organizations in the country. News accounts since 2015 said he had ascended to the top spot.

The last Mafia boss to be rubbed out in New York City was Gambino don "Big Paul" Castellano, assassinated at Gotti's direction while getting out of a black limousine outside a high-end Manhattan steakhouse in 1985. Gotti then took control of the family.

"We thought those days were over," Mayor Bill de Blasio said of Cali's slaying. "Very surprising, but I guess old habits die hard."

Cali kept a much lower profile than Gotti and was killed in far less spectacular fashion than Castellano. He was shot on a tree-lined street in one of New York City's less-glamorous outer boroughs, a short walk from ball fields, a country club and a day camp.

Gotti, with his expensive double-breasted suits and overcoats and silvery swept-back hair, became known as the Dapper Don, his smiling face all over the tabloids. As prosecutors tried and failed to bring him down, he came to be called the Teflon Don.

In 1992, Gotti was convicted in Castellano's murder and a multitude of other crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison and died of cancer in 2002.

On Wednesday, hours before Cali was killed, the reputed boss and consigliere of the Bonanno crime family were acquitted in a Brooklyn racketeering and extortion case. In October, reputed Bonanno associate Sylvester Zottola was fatally shot while waiting for a cup of coffee at a McDonald's drive-thru in the Bronx.

Also this week, prosecutors in Brooklyn announced a case against a Gambino associate accused of killing a suspected loanshark affiliated with the Lucchese crime family.

Last week, the longtime boss of the Colombo crime family, 85-year-old Carmine "the Snake" Persico, died at a North Carolina hospital near the federal prison where he had been serving what was effectively a life sentence. Persico was convicted in a 1986 case overseen by then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Cali's only mob-related criminal conviction came a decade ago, when he pleaded guilty in an extortion scheme involving a failed attempt to build a NASCAR track on Staten Island. He was sentenced to 16 months behind bars and was released in 2009.

In that case, authorities intercepted conversations shedding light on his quiet underworld command. At a 2008 bail hearing, a prosecutor said Cali was seen "as a man of influence and power by organized crime members in Italy."

__

Karen Matthews contributed to this report.

FILE - In this Feb. 9, 1990 file photo, John Gotti, right, arrives at court in New York. The Gambino family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent Gotti and other top leaders to prison, diminishing its reach. The last Mafia boss to be shot to death in New York City was Gambino don Paul Castellano, assassinated outside a Manhattan steakhouse in 1985 at the direction of Gotti, who then took over the organization. On Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, the reputed boss of New York's Gambino crime family was gunned down outside his home, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular Gotti. (AP Photo/David Cantor, File)

FILE - In this Dec. 16, 1985 file photo, the body of mafia crime boss Paul Castellano lies on a stretcher outside the Sparks Steak House in New York after he and his bodyguards were gunned down at the direction of John Gotti, who then took over as boss. On Wednesday, March 13, 2019, the reputed boss of New York's Gambino crime family, Frank Cali, was gunned down outside his home in Staten Island, dying a virtual unknown compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular Gotti. The Gambino family was once among the most powerful criminal organizations in the U.S., but federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s sent Gotti and other top leaders to prison, diminishing its reach. The last Mafia boss to be shot to death in New York City was Castellano, assassinated on Gotti's direction. (AP Photo/Mario Suriani, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 25, 1957 file photo, the body of Mafia boss Albert Anastasia lies on the floor of the barbershop at New York's Park Sheraton Hotel after his murder. Anastasia's crime family was taken over by Carlo Gambino. While mob executions are a blast from the past; the last boss executed was Paul Castellano in 1985, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Francesco, "Franky Boy" Cali was gunned down outside his home in Staten Island, dying a virtual unknown, compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular John Gotti. (AP Photo/FILE)

FILE - In this Oct. 25, 1957 file photo, the body of gangster Albert Anastasia is carried by stretcher from the A. Grasso barber shop in New York's Park Sheraton Hotel where he was slain by two masked gunmen in New York. While mob executions are a blast from the past; the last boss executed was Paul Castellano in 1985, on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, Francesco, "Franky Boy" Cali was gunned down outside his home in Staten Island, dying a virtual unknown, compared with his swaggering 1980s-era predecessor, the custom-tailored tabloid regular John Gotti. (AP Photo/File)

Crime scene investigators load a car that appears to have been checked for fingerprints onto a flatbed truck in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at a hospital. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Police work near the scene where an alleged leader of the Gambino crime family was shot and killed in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home Wednesday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Crime scene investigators load a car that appears to have been checked for fingerprints onto a flatbed truck in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at a hospital. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Police work near the scene where an alleged leader of the Gambino crime family was shot and killed in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home Wednesday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

New York Police Department and New York City Fire Department units respond to a report of shots fired Wednesday, March 13, 2019, in the Todt Hill section of the Staten Island borough of New York. A man said by federal prosecutors to have been a top leader of New York's notorious Gambino crime family was shot and killed Wednesday on Staten Island. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, 53, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his body at his home just after 9 p.m. (Joseph Ostapiuk/Staten Island Advance via AP)
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) - Air raid sirens wailed late Thursday throughout Tel Aviv, Israel's densely populated commercial capital, after an apparent rocket attack from the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military said "it appears" that two rockets were launched from Gaza. It would be the first time that Tel Aviv has been targeted by rocket fire since a 2014 war against Gaza militants.

Israel's Channel 10 news, citing anonymous military officials, said the rockets were Iranian-made Fajr rockets. It said one of the rockets landed in an uninhabited area, and that there were no reports of injuries.

In Gaza, there was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamic militant group that seeks Israel's destruction. The territory is home to other militant groups, including Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed armed organization that also has a formidable rocket arsenal.
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli warplanes attacked militant targets in the southern Gaza Strip early Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, as the sides appeared to be hurtling toward a new round of violence.

The rocket attack Thursday night caught the Israeli military off guard and marked the first time that Tel Aviv, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Gaza, has been targeted since a 2014 war. Though the attack caused no damage or injuries, it was a significant escalation and set the stage for a tough Israeli reprisal.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting with his military chief and other top security officials. Shortly after, Israeli warplanes attacked targets in southern and central Gaza.

The blasts were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 25 kilometers (15 miles) away from some of the strikes. The Israeli warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

The Israeli military said it was targeting "terror sites" in Gaza, but gave no further details. Palestinian media said naval bases belonging to the ruling Hamas group had been struck. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Minutes later, the Israeli military reported air raid sirens in southern Israel. It said it had identified a launch attempt out of Gaza, but the rocket misfired and landed inside Palestinian territory.

An explosion caused by Israeli airstrikes is seen on Gaza City, early Friday, March 15, 2019. Israeli warplanes attacked militant targets in the southern Gaza Strip early Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, as the sides appeared to be hurtling toward a new round of violence. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since Israel and Hamas fought their last war, in 2014.

The sudden outburst of fighting comes at a sensitive time for both sides. Israel is holding national elections in less than a month. Netanyahu is locked in a tight fight for re-election and could face heavy criticism from his opponents if he is seen as ineffective against the militants.

Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett, a hardline rival of Netanyahu's, called on the prime minister to convene a gathering of his Security Cabinet and demand the army "present a plan to defeat Hamas."

Likewise, Hamas has come under rare public criticism in Gaza for the harsh conditions in the territory. An Israel-Egyptian blockade, combined with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and mismanagement by the Hamas government, have fueled an economic crisis in the territory. Residents have little desire for another war with Israel.

Earlier Thursday, Hamas police violently broke up a small protest over the harsh living conditions.

Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said the army had been caught off guard by Thursday night's rocket barrage. He said officials were still trying to determine who had fired the rocket.

Israel holds Hamas responsible for all fire coming out of the territory. Hamas possesses a large arsenal of rockets and missiles capable of striking deep inside Israel.

But with Gaza's economy in tatters, the group has been seeking to preserve calm.

Hamas denied responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, saying the rockets were launched when the group's military wing was meeting with Egyptian mediators to try to strengthen a cease-fire with Israel.

In an unusual step that indicated Hamas was attempting to prevent further escalation, the Hamas Interior Ministry said the rocket fire went "against the national consensus" and promised to take action against the perpetrators.

But Israeli's military concluded that Hamas did fire two rockets toward Tel Aviv. In a statement early Friday, the army said "we can confirm" that Hamas carried out the rocket attack.

Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed militant group that also has a large rocket arsenal, also denied firing the rockets. Smaller factions inspired by the Islamic State group also sometimes fire rockets, though it is unclear whether they possess projectiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border. Late Thursday, local media said that Egyptian mediators left the territory.

At the time, Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

"I suggest to Hamas, don't count on it," he told his Cabinet. "We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general."

___

Akram reported from Gaza City, Gaza Strip.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) - Authorities say a police officer fatally shot a man with a knife at a Florida gas station.

Jacksonville Sheriff's Office Chief Chris Butler said at a news conference that a veteran officer shot 38-year-old Jerry Marrero on Thursday.

Officials say a gas station employee called 911 reporting an aggressive man with a knife. Butler says Officer R.C. Santoro arrived, found the armed man behind a counter and repeatedly told him to get on the ground.

Butler says Santoro fired six times when the man moved toward the officer. Marrero died at a hospital.

Records show Marrero has a history of assault and kidnapping charges, as well as being placed on an involuntary psychological hold.

Officials didn't report the races of the officer or suspect. Santoro was placed on administrative leave.
ATLANTA (AP) - A federal judge says police cannot ban demonstrators from wearing Planned Parenthood buttons that include profanity in public areas of the Georgia Capitol.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia had filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Capitol police officers. The suit said two women who oppose legislation that would ban some abortions wore pink buttons last week that included profanity in a slogan.

The lawsuit says Capitol police ordered them to remove the buttons and that officers said items with "curse words" weren't allowed because children were present.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones on Thursday ordered police not to ban the buttons pending the outcome of the case. He said the ACLU had demonstrated that the wearing of the buttons is likely covered by First Amendment protections for free speech.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - The Sanders Institute, a think tank founded by Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders' wife and son, is shutting down, at least for now, amid criticism that the nonprofit has blurred the lines between family, fundraising and campaigning.

The Vermont-based institute has stopped accepting donations and plans to suspend all operations by the end of May "so there could not even be an appearance of impropriety," Jane Sanders told The Associated Press.

The unexpected move by the institute's board of directors comes as Bernie Sanders, a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination, prepares for a wave of intense scrutiny into his political network and his family's role in its operation.

As a candidate in 2016, Sanders criticized Hillary Clinton over her family's nonprofit, saying the foundation run by Clinton's husband and daughter amounted to a back door for foreign leaders and others seeking to buy access and influence. The Sanders Institute could open the Vermont senator to charges of hypocrisy.

The institute was founded to promote liberal policies less than two years ago by Sanders' family with the backing of pro-Sanders celebrities and advocates- though Sanders himself had no formal role. While it operates at a fraction of the scale of the Clinton Foundation, it has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars during its brief existence and has declined to disclose its donors.

Jane Sanders, who also serves as a chief adviser to her husband's presidential campaign, is not compensated for her role at the institute. Her son, David Driscoll, is paid $100,000 a year as co-founder and executive director. Driscoll previously was an executive for Nike and the Vermont snowboarding firm Burton, but had no previous nonprofit experience, according to his LinkedIn profile.

FILE - In this April 19, 2016, file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his wife Jane take a walk in State College, Pa. The Sanders Institute, a think tank founded by Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders' wife and son, has stopped accepting donations and plans to suspend all operations by the end of May. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)

The lack of transparency and the family ties have drawn criticism from good-government advocates.

"For a politician who runs on fairness and socialist principles, this looks like the old political games," said Lawrence R. Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. "It's a product of running a political operation in which family rules the roost."

Jane Sanders said the institute will not accept more money so long as her husband is a presidential candidate. Driscoll and the organization's two other employees would be laid off with no severance by the end of May, and its Burlington, Vermont, office would be closed, she said. Sanders said questions of nepotism have no merit because the senator himself played no role in the organization, which was led by an independent board of directors.

"I think that was the most important thing to do - to not accept donations, because nobody should think that they're giving money to an organization and that gains them access or favor to anybody else and anybody running for office," she said in an interview this week. She added: "It just seemed the responsible thing to do."

In her own founding role at the institute, Jane Sanders acted as the organization's curator, both online and in person. She was the star of the organization's December "Gathering" in Burlington, an assemblage of progressive speakers that included her husband as well as environmentalist Bill McKibben and actor Danny Glover.

Her continued involvement with the institute and her active role in her husband's campaign could have raised questions about the nonprofit's tax status under federal law. The institute was founded under Section 501c3 of the U.S. tax code, which prohibits it from substantial involvement in influencing legislation or participating "in any campaign activity for or against political candidates."

The institute's only available federal tax return showed it raised $459,000 in 2017. Jane Sanders told the AP that the group raised about $730,000 last year, much of it in "small donations from about 10,000 donors."

When she unveiled the think tank in June 2017, Jane Sanders said she and her husband had donated $25,000. The institute also received a $105,000 loan from the Sanders-affiliated political action nonprofit, Our Revolution, which was repaid last summer.

"We haven't disclosed names and contribution amounts because we've relied mainly on small donor contributions from thousands of people. The bulk of our donations come from donors that contribute less than $100," Driscoll said. "Some of our biggest contributors were organizations that came on to partner with us for the Sanders Institute Gathering, such as National Nurses United, Healthy Housing Foundation and Our Revolution."

Sanders' Senate campaign has stressed that both Our Revolution and the Sanders Institute have independent boards and are not directed either by his presidential campaign or his Senate office. But some figures have crossed easily between the groups. Institute fellow and Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner recently resigned as president of Our Revolution to be co-chairwoman of Sanders' presidential campaign. Turner could not be immediately reached for comment.

Some in the Sanderses' orbit expressed disappointment at the shutdown, suggesting concerns about nonprofits and disclosure were unfair and unnecessary.

Glover, a founding board member, defended the Sanders family's involvement but acknowledged that critics within the Democratic Party would question the legitimacy of the institute whether the criticism was fair or not.

"It's sometimes important to play it safe," Glover said in an interview. "This is a very dangerous moment."

One of the many fellows at the institute, the former public policy director for the California Nurses Association, Michael Lighty, said he was proud of the policy work the institute spearheaded. As a fellow he worked on an exhaustive report examining the cost of Sanders' "Medicare for All" plan that was later presented to members of Congress.

The report was one of several accomplishments highlighted by the institute, which also produced a six-video series about climate change, a video series on threats to voting rights and additional content on student loan forgiveness and federal budget priorities.

"From my point of view, we went very far in terms of policy development and promotion," Lighty said in an interview. "In this political environment, the optics sometimes come to the fore in ways I wish they didn't. ... The dissolution will be seen by good-government people as a good thing."

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Braun reported from Washington.
SEATTLE (AP) - Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who is considering an independent bid for president, is apologizing for saying he had likely spent more time with the military than the other candidates.

Schultz made the comments during an interview Thursday with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. Two Democratic candidates are veterans, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (BOO'-tuh-juhj).

Afterward, Schultz tweeted that leaders must accept responsibility for mistakes and his comment "was wrong."

Gabbard served in Iraq with the Hawaii Army National Guard, and Buttigieg is a veteran of the Afghanistan War, having served a tour with the Navy Reserve.

Buttigieg tweeted that he didn't "recall seeing any Starbucks over there."

During his time at Starbucks, the company pledged to hire more veterans and last year said it had hired 21,000 over five years.
MIAMI (AP) - Mixed martial artist and boxer Conor McGregor is facing a civil lawsuit after being charged in South Florida with stealing the cellphone of someone who was trying to take his photo.

Miami-Dade County court records show that 22-year-old Ahmed Abdirzak filed a lawsuit seeking more than $15,000 on Thursday, accusing 30-year-old McCregor of battery, assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Miami Beach police say McGregor was leaving the Fontainebleau Miami Beach early Monday morning when Abdirzak attempted to take a picture of McGregor. Police say McGregor slapped the phone out of Abdirzak's hand and then stomped on it several times. Investigators say McGregor then grabbed the phone and left the area. McGregor was later arrested on robbery and criminal mischief charges.

McGregor's criminal defense attorney called the lawsuit "a quick effort seeking a payday."

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Twelve Republican senators sided with Democrats Thursday and voted to block President Donald Trump's declaration of an emergency on the southwest border. Trump has vowed to veto the Democratic measure, which the House passed last month in a bid to stymie Trump's efforts to spend billions of extra dollars on a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

Of the dozen GOP senators who went against Trump, just one - Maine Sen. Susan Collins - faces re-election next year.

A look at what the Republican defectors said about their votes:

- Lamar Alexander of Tennessee: "After a Revolutionary War against a king, our nation's founders gave to Congress the power to approve all spending so that the president would not have too much power. This check on the executive is a crucial source of our freedom."

- Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the GOP leadership: "I was aggressively opposed to the Obama administration's attempts to circumvent Congress's appropriating authority to prop up" the health-care law known as Obamacare. "The same principle should apply regardless of which party occupies the White House."

- Collins: "I'm sure (the president) will not be happy with my vote, but I'm a United States senator and feel my job is to stand up for the Constitution. So let the chips fall where they may."

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, leaves a Republican lunch meeting and heads to the chamber where he voted to reject President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Twelve Republicans joined Democrats in defying Trump. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

- Mike Lee of Utah: "Congress is supposed to be the first among the federal government's three co-equal branches. For decades, Congress has been giving far too much legislative power to the executive branch."

- Jerry Moran of Kansas: "I aggressively opposed the overreach of past presidents and believe that I cannot pick and choose to now look the other way. How we do things - even good things - matter. We were raised that the ends don't justify the means."

- Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: "When the executive branch goes around the express intention of Congress on matters within its jurisdiction, we must speak up or legislative acquiescence will erode our constitutional authority."

- Rand Paul of Kentucky: "I stand with President Trump on the need for a border wall and stronger border security, but the Constitution clearly states that money cannot be spent unless Congress has passed a law to do so."

- Rob Portman of Ohio: "There is no question we need stronger border security. Erecting more barriers and fencing in key areas along the border will help stem the tide. But we have to do that in the right way. Congress, not the president, has sole authority to determine how to spend taxpayer money. Declaring a national emergency to access different funds sets a dangerous new precedent."

- Mitt Romney of Utah: "This is a vote for the Constitution and for the balance of powers that is at its core. For the executive branch to override a law passed by Congress would make it the ultimate power rather than a balancing power. I am seriously concerned that overreach by the executive branch is an invitation to further expansion and abuse by future presidents."

- Marco Rubio of Florida: "We have an emergency at our border, which is why I support the president's use of forfeiture funds and counter-drug money to build a wall. However, I cannot support moving funds that Congress explicitly appropriated for construction and upgrades of our military bases. This would create a precedent a future president may abuse to jumpstart programs like the Green New Deal" or other liberal ideas.

- Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania: "I support what the president is trying to do. I don't support the way the president is going about it, and to me that's an important distinction." Trump's emergency declaration "set a troubling precedent" regarding the president's ability to go around Congress and redirect tax dollars for other purposes, Toomey said.

- Roger Wicker of Mississippi: "I strongly support (Trump's) plan to build walls on our southern border, but an emergency declaration (is) the wrong approach. The president already has almost $6 billion available that can be used to build border walls. I am concerned about the precedent an emergency declaration sets, which might empower a future liberal president to declare emergencies to enact gun control, address 'climate emergencies' or even tear down the wall we are building today."

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., walks through the Senate subway on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019, as the Senate rejects President Donald Trump's emergency border declaration. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
WASHINGTON (AP) - In a stunning rebuke, a dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats Thursday to block the national emergency that President Donald Trump declared so he could build his border wall with Mexico. The rejection capped a week of confrontation with the White House as both parties in Congress strained to exert their power in new ways.

The 59-41 tally, following the Senate's vote a day earlier to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, promised to force Trump into the first vetoes of his presidency. Trump had warned against both actions. Moments after Thursday's vote, the president tweeted a single word of warning: "VETO!"

Two years into the Trump era, a defecting dozen Republicans, pushed along by Democrats, showed a willingness to take that political risk. Twelve GOP senators, including the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney of Utah, joined the dissent over the emergency declaration order that would enable the president to seize for the wall billions of dollars Congress intended elsewhere.

"The Senate's waking up a little bit to our responsibilities," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who said the chamber had become "a little lazy" as an equal branch of government. "I think the value of these last few weeks is to remind the Senate of our constitutional place."

Many senators said the vote was not necessarily a rejection of the president or the wall, but protections against future presidents -- namely a Democrat who might want to declare an emergency on climate change, gun control or any number of other issues.

"This is constitutional question, it's a question about the balance of power that is core to our constitution," Romney said. "This is not about the president," he added. "The president can certainly express his views as he has and individual senators can express theirs."

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, arrives in the Senate where she has said she will vote for a resolution to annul President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency at the southwest border, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Thursday's vote was the first direct challenge to the 1976 National Emergencies Act, just as Wednesday's on Yemen was the first time Congress invoked the decades-old War Powers Act to try to rein in a president. Seven Republicans joined Democrats in halting U.S. backing for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in the aftermath of the kingdom's role in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Even though there's not likely to be enough numbers to override a veto, the votes nevertheless sent a message from Capitol Hill.

"Today's votes cap a week of something the American people haven't seen enough of in the last two years," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, "both parties in the United States Congress standing up to Donald Trump."

The result is a role-reversal for Republicans who have been reluctant to take on Trump, bracing against his high-profile tweets and public attacks of reprimand. But now they are facing challenges from voters - in some states where senators face stiff elections -- who are expecting more from Congress.

Centrist Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who's among those most vulnerable in 2020, said she's sure the president "will not be happy with my vote. But I'm a United States senator and I feel my job is to stand up for the Constitution, so let the chips fall where they may."

Trump's grip on the party, though, remains strong and the White House made it clear that Republicans resisting Trump could face political consequences. Ahead of the voting, Trump framed the issue as with-him-or-against-him on border security, a powerful argument with many.

"A vote for today's resolution by Republican Senators is a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats!" Trump tweeted. "Don't vote with Pelosi!" he said in another, referring to the speaker of the House.

A White House official said Trump won't forget when senators who oppose him want him to attend fundraisers or provide other help. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on internal deliberations.

"I don't think anybody's sending the president a message," said Jim Risch of Idaho, the GOP chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He blamed the media for "reaching" to view every action "through the prism of the presidency, and that isn't necessarily the way it works here."

Trump brought on the challenge months ago when he all but dared Congress not to give him the $5.7 billion he was demanding to build the U.S.-Mexico wall or risk a federal government shutdown.

Congress declined and the result was the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Against the advice of GOP leaders, Trump invoked the national emergency declaration last month, allowing him to try to tap some $3.6 billion for the wall by shuffling money from military projects, and that drew outrage from many lawmakers. Trump had campaigned for president promising Mexico would pay for the wall.

The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, and lawmakers seethed as they worried about losing money for military projects that had already been approved for bases at home and abroad. The Democratic-led House swiftly voted to terminate Trump's order.

Senate Republicans spent weeks trying to avoid this outcome, up until the night before the vote, in a script that was familiar -- up until the gavel.

The most promising was an effort from Sen. Mike Lee of Utah for legislation that would impose limits on future presidential actions. That would give senators some solace as they allowed Trump's order to stand. GOP senators huddled with Vice President Mike Pence and seemed optimistic the White House might support their plan. Then Trump called Lee in the middle of a private Republican lunch meeting and, in the time it took the senator to step out of the room to take the call, it was over. Trump was opposed.

Lee and other senators were peeling off against the president. In a last-ditch effort the night before the vote, Lindsey Graham and other senators dashed to the White House to try once again for Trump's support to broker an alternative plan. Trump was frustrated by their arrival. They mostly failed.

Trump did tweet ahead of the vote that he would be willing to consider legislation to adjust the 1976 law at some later time.

That was enough of a signal for GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, who faces a potentially tough re-election in North Carolina, to flip his vote, according to a person unauthorized to discuss the private thinking and granted anonymity.

Tillis had been one of the first senators to say he would oppose the declaration, writing in a Washington Post opinion column last month that there'd be "no intellectual honesty" in backing Trump after his repeated objections about executive overreach by President Barack Obama. But on Thursday, he did.

Trump's public support in that tweet also helped bring on board several other Republicans, including Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse, who had been part of the private huddles, the person said.

For some, said Sen. John Thune, the GOP whip, "the emergency declaration was just a bridge too far."

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Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Jill Colvin, Padmananda Rama and Andrew Taylor in Washington and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., signs H.J. Res 46, a disapproval resolution that blocks President Trump's National Emergency declaration, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019. However, the resolution is expected to be vetoed by President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., joined at left by Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, attends a Senate Armed Services hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, prior to the vote on President Donald Trump's national emergency at the border, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Changing his vote from the public stance he took last month, Tillis voted to support President Donald Trump's declaration of a national emergency to pay for his border wall. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

Construction crews replace a section of the primary wall separating San Diego, above right, and Tijuana, Mexico, below left, Monday, March 11, 2019, seen from Tijuana, Mexico. President Donald Trump is reviving his border wall fight, preparing a new budget that will seek $8.6 billion for the U.S-Mexico barrier while imposing steep spending cuts to other domestic programs and setting the stage for another fiscal battle. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., walks through the Senate subway on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 14, 2019, as the Senate rejects President Donald Trump's emergency border declaration. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
JERUSALEM (AP) - The campaign of a former Israeli military chief who is a leading challenger to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his tight race for re-election says the candidate has been targeted by an Iranian hacking attack.

Israeli media reported Thursday that the Shin Bet internal security service warned Benny Gantz that Iranian intelligence hacked his cellphone, putting "his personal details and addresses in hostile hands."

A statement from Gantz's campaign insinuated his opponents leaked the news to damage his political bid, saying the timing of the report just weeks before Israel's April 9 elections "raises important questions."

A campaign official says the security breach happened several months ago, before Gantz entered politics. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to media.
NEW YORK (AP) - In an era of unprecedented airline safety, Boeing's newest version of its best-selling airliner has crashed twice in less than six months, killing 346 people and delivering a massive blow to the company's reputation.

More than 40 countries either grounded the planes or refused to let them into their airspace after determining that Sunday's crash of a 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia bore enough similarities to Indonesia's Lion Air crash of the same model in October. After holding out for several days, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order grounding the planes.

Boeing's reputation is damaged not only because of the crashes, but also its decision not to voluntarily ground the planes itself as country after country pulled them from the sky.

The company's finances will take a hit as it faces lawsuits from victims' families, compensation claims from airlines, delayed revenue from missed plane deliveries and the expense of figuring out what went wrong and then fixing its planes.

But the airline industry has a long history of recovering from tragedy, and experts say the disaster is unlikely to have a lasting impact on Boeing's brand or finances.

John McDonald, founder of crisis management firm Caeli Communications, was a former flight attendant in charge of communications for TWA when an airliner - also a Boeing - exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island in 1996. McDonald lost colleagues in that crash, which killed 230 people.

A worker walks next to a Boeing 737 MAX 8 airplane parked at Boeing Field, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Seattle. The fatal crash Sunday of a 737 MAX 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines was the second fatal flight for a Boeing 737 Max 8 in less than six months, and more than 40 countries, including the U.S., have now grounded the planes or refused to let them into their airspace. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

"If you look at past history of when they've had any issues with aircraft, they fix the problem and they move on," McDonald said. "It's very, very traumatic, but aviation safety is built on the blood of victims, and that's how you learn these lessons. The real challenge is to make sure you understand what the problem is before you start putting in fixes."

The groundings will have a far-reaching financial impact on Boeing, at least in the short term. There are more than 4,600 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes on backlog, and they won't be delivered until Boeing has fixed any problems and the ban is lifted.

Boeing paused deliveries of the 737 Max, but continues to build the airplanes, said company spokesman Charles Bickers. It is assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints such as where to park the planes while they wait to be delivered, will impact its production system.

Boeing shares were down more than 11 percent this week through Thursday, and had lost about $29 billion in market value. The shares still have outpaced the market in 2019.

In grounding the planes in the U.S., President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the decision "didn't have to be made, but we thought it was the right decision."

"Boeing is an incredible company," Trump said. "They are working very, very hard right now and hopefully they'll quickly come up with an answer."

Boeing says it recommended to the FAA to temporarily suspend operations of the entire global fleet out of an abundance of caution and to reassure the public of the aircraft's safety.

In an internal memo, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg told employees he understands "this is difficult for our teams, especially all those who directly support the 737 program," but added, "we continue to have full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX and our teams who design, build and support it. This decision doesn't change that."

Some analysts say airline customers are unlikely to cancel orders of the plane, which are long-term agreements that can take a decade to fulfill, because those financial agreements are already in place and, other than Airbus, there aren't competitors offering an alternative to the Boeing 737 Max.

"The bigger and more reputational issue for them is, how do you sell more of those planes in the future?" said Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communications at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "The Lion Air crash puts in motion that something's wrong, what are we going to do about it, and by the time the Ethiopian plane goes down, it should have been resolved."

Norwegian Air's CEO says he will seek compensation from Boeing for the disruption caused by the groundings, and other airlines may follow suit. Whether airlines would be successful with such claims depends on the details of the contracts those carriers have with Boeing, said Dan Rose, partner at Kreindler & Kreindler, an aviation law firm that has represented victims' families in other crashes.

Southwest has a long history with the 737 and the airliner has a stellar safety record, the airline's CEO Gary Kelly said Thursday. He said the company's history with the Max has been phenomenal, and nothing has presented any flight concerns.

While countries around the world grounded the Max 8 ahead of the U.S., some fliers frantically tried to figure out whether they were going to be flying on a Max 8, and if so, how they could switch.

It was Boeing's job to restore confidence among travelers but by waiting for others to ground the planes, it created the perception that it wasn't putting the passengers' safety first, said Joshua Kroon, vice president of Levick Strategic Communications, a crisis communications firm.

"The natural conclusion is they only care about making money, they don't care about my safety," Kroon said.

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AP Writer Alex Olson contributed to this report.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - Graciela Garcia Romero says she was in her 20s when a former navy captain turned her into a sex slave in Buenos Aires.

Ex-Navy Capt. Jorge Acosta, who is now serving life in prison for numerous human rights crimes, would take her to apartments and rape her during Argentina's 1976-1983 military dictatorship, said Garcia, now 69.

"They would leave me the whole weekend until Acosta arrived... then, they would bring me back here," she added, referring to the detention center at the former Naval Mechanics School, or ESMA, where she was held. "They would put me in handcuffs and shackles and put a hood over my head."

Her testimony is now part of a new exhibit titled "Being women at the ESMA, a testimony to look back," in which 28 women recount harrowing stories of dictatorship-era gender-based violence. The exhibit was inaugurated Thursday.

ESMA museum director Alejandra Naftal said that since the former secret prison re-opened as a museum in 2015, "women and young people began telling us that we had forgotten about the gender perspective when recounting the acts that happened here."

The latest exhibit is a response to their demands and comes as tens of thousands of people across the country have mobilized to fight violence against women.

Graciela Garcia, who was turned into a sex slave when she was in her 20's by a former navy captain during Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, poses for a portrait inside what was once the Naval Mechanics School, ESMA, where she was jailed, as she attends the inauguration of an exhibit at the detention center, now a museum, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Garcia's testimony is part of a new exhibit where 28 women recount harrowing stories of dictatorship-era gender-based violence. (AP Photo/Daniel Jayo)

Museum officials said when they researched women who had been held captive at the center, they realized that they not only suffered violence because they were seen by the dictatorship as suspected leftists dissidents, but simply because they were women.

Miriam Lewin, a journalist who was kidnapped in the late 1970s, said in testimony on display that women at the ESMA were groped, tortured with electric shocks to their vaginas and breasts, and forced to shower naked in front of people watching.

"The women were their war trophy," said additional testimony by Silvia Labayru, who was five months pregnant when she was also kidnapped. "Our bodies were their war trophy ... that's pretty common in sexual violence."

Labayru's daughter, Vera, was born in 1977 and given to family members while she was held prisoner.

Both of their stories now form part of the exhibit, which includes photos and videos and runs until June.

The ESMA was once the era's biggest clandestine detention and torture center with an estimated 5,000 prisoners. During the country's dictatorship, human rights group estimate that more than 30,000 people were jailed, tortured and killed, or forcibly disappeared.

Curator Alejandra Dandan, right, speaks during the inauguration of an exhibit that recounts harrowing stories of dictatorship-era gender-based violence, at the former Naval Mechanics School, ESMA, once the era's biggest clandestine detention and torture center, now the Buenos Aires ESMA museum and memorial, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The exhibit comes at a time when a grassroots movement of tens of thousands of people across Argentina has mobilized people around the world to fight violence against women. (AP Photo/Daniel Jayo)

A woman attends the inauguration of an exhibit that recounts harrowing stories of dictatorship-era gender-based violence, at the former Naval Mechanics School, ESMA, once the era's biggest clandestine detention and torture center, now the Buenos Aires ESMA museum and memorial, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, March 14, 2019. The sign above reads in Spanish "Being a woman inside ESMA." (AP Photo/Daniel Jayo)

Photographed through a glass window that features a photograph, ESMA museum director Alejandra Naftal, right, kisses torture victim Ana Testa during the inauguration of an exhibit that recounts harrowing stories of dictatorship-era gender-based violence, at the former Naval Mechanics School, ESMA, once the era's biggest clandestine detention and torture center, now the Buenos Aires ESMA museum and memorial, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Naftal said that since the former secret prison re-opened as a museum in 2015, "women and young people began telling us that we had forgotten about the gender perspective when recounting the acts that happened here. (AP Photo/Daniel Jayo)

People attend the inauguration of an exhibit that recounts harrowing stories of dictatorship-era gender-based violence, at the former Naval Mechanics School, ESMA, once the era's biggest clandestine detention and torture center, now the Buenos Aires ESMA museum and memorial, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Miriam Lewin, a journalist who was kidnapped in the late 1970's said women at the ESMA were groped, tortured with electric shocks to their vaginas and breasts and forced to shower naked in front of people watching.(AP Photo/Daniel Jayo)
WASHINGTON (AP) - Afghanistan's national security adviser on Thursday blasted the U.S. talks with the Taliban, saying the Trump administration has alienated the Afghan government, legitimized the militant network and is crafting a deal that will never lead to peace.

"If we are to make peace, it cannot be just a mere deal out somewhere far away where were not in the loop," Hamdullah Mohib said at a blunt and candid briefing with reporters that prompted a scolding by State Department officials.

Mohib, the former Afghan ambassador to the United States, also took aim at Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. point man negotiating with the Taliban. He suggested that the negotiations conducted by Khalilzad, a veteran American diplomat who was born in Afghanistan, are clouded by Khalilzad's political ambitions to lead his native country.

"The perception in Afghanistan and people in the government think that perhaps - perhaps - all this talk (with the Taliban) is to create a caretaker government of which he will become the viceroy," Mohib said, adding that Khalilzad had eyes on the Afghan presidency in both 2009 and 2014 when Ghani was elected.

He said more transparency about what the U.S. and the Taliban have discussed would help to quell misinformation and rumors. He said the Afghan government is the last to find out what has transpired at the negotiating table and has resorted to getting information by tracking tweets from the foreign minister in neighboring Pakistan, or brief readouts from U.S. officials involved.

"We are told that Ambassador Khalilzad is a great diplomat," Mohib said. "Well, I'm not sure I buy that because he is ostracizing and alienating a very trusted ally and partner."

FILE - In this Jan. 10, 2019, file photo, Afghanistan national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib, left, shakes hands with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi before proceeding to their meeting at the Zhongnanhai Leadership Compound in Beijing. Hamdullah Mohib is blasting U.S. talks with the Taliban, saying the Trump administration has alienated the Afghan government, legitimized the militant network and is crafting a deal that will never lead to peace. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, Pool)

"We think either Ambassador Khalilzad doesn't know how to negotiate or there are other reasons behind what he's doing. But what he's doing is not getting a deal that would result in peace."

State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino dismissed Mohib's comments. He said David Hale, undersecretary of political affairs, summoned Mohib Thursday afternoon to reject his criticism about the U.S. talks with the Taliban.

"Hale underscored the longstanding U.S. assistance and support to Afghanistan, and expressed our commitment to the Afghan government's stability and full participation in the peace process," Palladino said.

He said Khalilzad represents Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and that "attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are attacks on the department and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process."

Mohib insists that the U.S. is keeping the Afghan government in the dark. He said he has no information to share with Afghanistan's 350,000 police and soldiers, who have taken heavy casualties from the Taliban. He said in the past five years, 45,000 Afghans have been killed in the fighting - 36,000 security forces and 9,000 civilians.

"What are they fighting for? How am I supposed to convince them that they are not being sold out?" Mohib asked.

"As national security adviser, I have no information to share with those who are fighting for Afghanistan on the front line."

The longest session between the U.S. and the Taliban, lasting 13 days, ended this week with both sides citing progress toward ending the 17-year war in Afghanistan, but many questions remain unanswered.

The Taliban are negotiating from a position of strength: They effectively control half the country, and President Donald Trump has made clear he is frustrated with America's longest war, wants to see a peace deal and is determined to bring at least some U.S. troops home.

The two sides have reached a draft agreement on the withdrawal of U.S. troops - a longtime Taliban demand - and the insurgents have rebuffed U.S. efforts to get them to negotiate with the Kabul government. Khalilzad has said that when the draft agreement about a withdrawal timeline and effective counterterrorism measures is finalized, the Taliban and other Afghans, including the government, will begin intra-Afghan negotiations on a political settlement and comprehensive ceasefire.

Mohib said the Taliban are planning a "full-on" spring fighting offensive, emboldened by their sit-downs with American negotiators and have no inclination to negotiate with the Afghan government.

"There is no reason for them to do so," he said, adding that the legitimacy they've won from the talks has prompted them to boast that foreign ministers from around the world are seeking to meet with them.

In the talks, the Taliban have said they will prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for launching terror attacks, as it was prior to 9/11. But the insurgents have provided no specifics on what that would entail, and it remains unclear whether they are willing or able to confront other militant groups, some of which are longtime allies.

"Our understanding is even if there is a deal, it's a bad deal," Mohib said, adding that any Taliban guarantees that Afghan soil will not be used again as a launching pad for terror attacks amounts to "having cats guard the milk."
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Netflix is canceling "One Day at a Time" after three seasons.

In a statement Thursday, the streaming service's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, called it "disappointing" that more viewers didn't discover the sitcom.

A tweet on a Netflix company account said not enough people watched to justify renewing it, and called the cancellation a difficult step.

Created by Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce, it was among the few TV series with Latinos as the lead characters.

Justina Machado played a single Cuban-American mom and military veteran, with Rita Moreno as her mother.

It was a reboot of the original "One Day at a Time," which was co-created by Norman Lear and aired from 1975-84 with stars Valerie Bertinelli and Bonnie Franklin.

FILE - In this Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2018 file photo, Justina Machado attends the Los Angeles premiere of "One Day at a Time" Season 2 at ArcLight Hollywood, in Los Angeles. Netflix is cancelling "One Day at a Time" after three seasons. In a statement Thursday, March 14, 2019, the streaming service's chief content office, Ted Sarandos, called it "disappointing" that more viewers didn't discover the sitcom. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

Lear was among the Netflix series' executive producers.
BANGKOK (AP) - You could call it the 7 million-voter question: Will young people like the ones who turned out on a recent Saturday night to listen to politically hip rappers also make it to the polls for Thailand's upcoming general election? And do they share the anger at the established order being sung and shouted about onstage?

The country in which this year's 7 million eligible first-time voters have grown up has experienced two army coups since 2006, violent political polarization and a nasty crackdown on freedom of expression by the military clique that has held the reins since a 2014 takeover.

Topping the recent concert bill was the group Rap Against Dictatorship, whose surprise hit, "My Country's Got That," lambasts the hypocrisy of Thai society. Some of the song's milder lyrics describe Thailand as "the country whose Parliament is a parlor."

The breakthrough song has garnered almost 59 million views since its release on YouTube last October. Judging by the crowd at the concert, most of its fans hail from the 18-to-35-year-old demographic that makes up roughly a quarter of Thailand's 51 million-strong electorate.

This generation is too young to hold many memories of a Thailand that was not politically troubled.

If it is unsympathetic to army rule, it also does not harbor any nostalgic affection for former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire populist whose 2006 overthrow ushered in a political dark age in what had been one of Southeast Asia's most promising democracies.

In this Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019, photo, the popular leader of the Future Forward Party, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, takes selfies with students during his election campaign rally at the Siam University in Bangkok, Thailand. Ahead of the March general election, Thailand has 7 million first-time eligible voters who have grown up has since 2006 experienced two army coups, violent political polarization and a nasty crackdown on freedom of expression by the military clique that has held the reins since a 2014 takeover. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Unlike Thaksin's hardcore "red shirt" followers and his rabid "yellow shirt" opponents - groups whose violent street protests helped derail electoral politics - their allegiances are up for grabs.

Political parties are taking notice, mostly by showcasing their younger candidates.

The Democrat Party, the country's oldest, has its "New Dem" group of 21 young politicians led by 26-year-old Parit Wacharasindhu, a nephew of party leader Abhisit Vejajjiva, a former prime minister who himself once capitalized on his youthful image. Another of its members is Surabot Leekpai, the 30-year-old son of another former Democrat prime minister, Chuan Leekpai.

Another group, Bhumjaithai, previously known as an old-fashioned patronage-driven regional party, has been rebranding with campaign posters hitting hot-button issues close to urban millennials' hearts - liberalization of marijuana laws, clear legalization of ride-sharing services and the easing of repayment terms for student loans.

Even the Palang Prachatrath Party, more or less a proxy for the military that supports returning the current army-installed prime minister to office, showed off 30 young members at a news conference, many contesting parliamentary seats in the capital, Bangkok.

But it's the Future Forward Party, founded last March, that seems to have captured the imagination of many young voters.

Party chief Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, who can tap into a family fortune from the auto parts industry, projects an image similar to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Tall and trim, and favoring casual dress, the 40-year-old is tech-savvy and practices extreme sports. He also has a low-profile history of supporting progressive organizations, while most of his core team is younger and directly involved in activist groups promoting causes such as rights for the disabled, the LGBT community and the #MeToo movement.

"My idea is to make this party stand for democratic principles," Thanathorn said at the party's debut last year. "We will make democracy a part of every decision-making process from the choosing of party members, the determining of party direction and strategy, to the developing of party policies."

The party's broad-stroke policies are a response to Thailand's political impasse: radically reforming the coup-inclined military and rewriting the military-imposed constitution to restore democracy.

"I think the conflict over the last 12 years has educated the people that politics is important to their lives," Thanathorn said in an interview at a campaign event at Siam University in Bangkok. "Political awareness in this country has never been higher."

Boonyanuch Prachasingh, a 20-year-old student at the university, said she is looking for a party with strong policies on education, democratization and transparency, and capable of change. She said Future Forward sounds interesting "because they are making a point of encouraging us to pay attention to politics."

A fellow student, 21-year-old Kittiphum Pannadermitri, believes the economy is the most pressing issue.

"I think Thanathorn is from a new generation and has new ideas. I think he could help improve the economy, help Thai farmers, and tackle pollution problems," he said.

Concertgoer Sawitree Puangngern, 23, said interest in the election is high among her peers, and she has already decided to vote for Future Forward.

"I am interested in the party that says they want change," she said. "I want the military out from politics and I want people to have their rights back."

Although Future Forward is hoping it can pick up as many as 50 to 70 parliamentary seats, it faces substantial hurdles as a newly established grass-roots party facing experienced opponents.

It also has drawn scurrilous attacks online from conservative elements of Thai society, who paint Thanathorn as a stalking horse for Thaksin because he espouses progressive policies that also are supported by Thaksin's supporters. That his uncle was a top member of Thaksin's party and served in one of his Cabinets heightens their suspicions.

Still, the party's prospects for capturing the youth vote look good, said Prajak Kongkirati, a lecturer in political science at Bangkok's Thammasat University.

"They are popular and their policies are popular," he said. "They advocate change and radical reforms. So the youth who are frustrated with the stagnation of the country, they want to see a real change. And Thanathorn is kind of their hope, represents something new, speaks their own language and can connect to the youth."

___

Associated Press writers Kaweewit Kaewjinda and Grant Peck contributed to this report.

In this Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019, photo, youth band Rap Against Dictatorship, who's songs have condemned the military's involvement in government, perform in Bangkok, Thailand. You could call it the 7 million-voter question: will young people like the ones who turned out on a recent Saturday night to listen to politically hip rappers also make it to the polls for Thailand's upcoming general election. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2019, photo, the popular leader of Future Forward Party, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, distributes pamphlets to introduce his party during his election campaign rally at Siam University in Bangkok, Thailand. Ahead of the March general election, Thailand has 7 million first-time eligible voters who have grown up has since 2006 experienced two army coups, violent political polarization and a nasty crackdown on freedom of expression by the military clique that has held the reins since a 2014 takeover. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019, members of Rap Against Dictatorship, who's songs have condemned the military's involvement in government, perform in Bangkok, Thailand. You could call it the 7 million-voter question: will young people like the ones who turned out on a recent Saturday night to listen to politically hip rappers also make it to the polls for Thailand's upcoming general election. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Tuesday, March 12, 2019, photo, students from Chulalongkorn University wait at a bus station in Bangkok, Thailand, Tuesday, March 12, 2019. Ahead of the March general election, Thailand has 7 million first-time eligible voters who have grown up has since 2006 experienced two army coups, violent political polarization and a nasty crackdown on freedom of expression by the military clique that has held the reins since a 2014 takeover. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019, a young audience attends a Rap Against Dictatorship, who's songs have condemned the military's involvement in government, concert in Bangkok, Thailand. You could call it the 7 million-voter question: will young people like the ones who turned out on a recent Saturday night to listen to politically hip rappers also make it to the polls for Thailand's upcoming general election. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In this Saturday, Feb. 23, 2019, young Thais enjoy a concert by Rap Against Dictatorship, who's songs have condemned the military's involvement in government, in Bangkok, Thailand. You could call it the 7 million-voter question: will young people like the ones who turned out on a recent Saturday night to listen to politically hip rappers also make it to the polls for Thailand's upcoming general election. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)
ATLANTA (AP) - A Georgia Senate committee listened to emotional testimony Thursday over a proposal that would ban most abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. The committee did not take a vote, and it was unclear when they might.

Women in Georgia can currently seek an abortion during the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy. A fetal heartbeat is generally detectable at around six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant - especially women who aren't trying to conceive.

Abortion opponents across the country are hopeful the U.S. Supreme Court - with new Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh - will either reverse Roe v. Wade, or uphold specific state laws that could undermine the court's 1973 ruling establishing the right of women to abort a fetus that can't survive outside the womb.

Similar "heartbeat" legislation passed the GOP-controlled Ohio Senate on Wednesday and was approved by the Tennessee House last week. Several other states including Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina are also considering similar legislation.

The Georgia bill makes exceptions in the case of rape and incest, but only when the woman files a police report first, and to save the life of the mother. It also allows for abortions when a fetus is determined to be not compatible with life due to serious medical issues.

Some changes have been made since House passage, including to allow a pregnant woman to pursue child support from the father for direct medical and pregnancy expenses.

FILE - In this Feb. 13, 2018 file photo, Rep. Ed Setzler presents his bill to the Governmental Affairs Special Subcommittee in Atlanta. Amid tears, gasps and handshakes, a Georgia House committee has approved legislation that would outlaw abortion after a heartbeat can be detected. (Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)

The Senate committee room was packed, mostly by people against the bill. A crowd outside the doors frequently cheered as pro-abortion advocates and medical professionals testified against it.

Republican Rep. Ed Setzler of Acworth, the bill's author, said that the government's paramount duty under the state constitution is to protect "the fundamental right to life of our citizens, particularly those that are most defenseless among us."

Jody Duffy, director of Post Abortion Treatment and Healing, a Christian nonprofit, testified in favor of the bill and spoke about her own abortion after being raped.

"The pain and the grief was so profound that all I could do was think about that horrific day on that table and that abortion," Duffy said. "The trauma of that rape was just expounded by the trauma of that abortion."

Several obstetrician-gynecologists spoke against the bill, saying that it is riddled with inaccuracies and would worsen health care for women in Georgia, a state that already has the worst maternal mortality rate in the country.

Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN from Atlanta, testified that the legislation was "built on a foundation of misleading and false statements and ... enormous amounts of scientific inaccuracies."

John Walraven, a lobbyist representing Georgia Reproductive Endocrinologists, took issue with the very idea that the standard contemplated in the bill was actually a "human heartbeat."

"Six weeks from fertilization, a human heart has not formed. What has not formed, cannot beat," Walraven said.

Setzler disputed that testimony.

Women protested on the steps of Georgia's Capitol while dressed as characters from "The Handmaid's Tale," which depicts a dystopian future where women are controlled by the government and forced to breed - an almost daily occurrence since the House passed the measure.

Democratic lawmakers have also pushed back with legislation of their own, though the proposals are largely symbolic and stand practically no chance of passing this late in the session with no Republican support.

Democratic Rep. Dar'shun Kendrick from Lithonia said she's drafting a "Testicular Bill of Rights" that would ban vasectomies, make it an aggravated assault for men to have sex without a condom and require them to get permission from their sex partner before obtaining erectile dysfunction medication.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has come out in favor of the anti-abortion proposal.

Restrictive abortion laws in several states have been ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

In January, a state judge in Iowa struck down a "heartbeat" law there after finding it to be unconstitutional.

Georgia members of the Handmaid Coalition protest the passage of HB 481 outside the Capitol, Friday, March 8, 2019, in Atlanta. Now that the House has passed HB 481, the Senate is now tasked with tackling legislation that would ban most abortions after 6 weeks. The House approved the legislation late Thursday and advocates on both sides of the issues have already begun pushing senators to vote their way. (Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

Georgia members of the Handmaid Coalition protest the passage of HB 481 outside the Capitol, Friday, March 8, 2019, in Atlanta. Now that the House has passed HB 481, the Senate is now tasked with tackling legislation that would ban most abortions after 6 weeks. The House approved the legislation late Thursday and advocates on both sides of the issues have already begun pushing senators to vote their way. (Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - NBC is shaking up late-night TV, giving Carson Daly's slot to a woman of color who's a star on YouTube.

The network said Thursday that a new show, titled "A Little Late with Lilly Singh," will air at 1:35 a.m. EDT beginning in September.

Singh will be the only woman to host a daily late-night show on a major broadcast network.

Her half-hour program will include in-studio interviews and pre-taped comedy sketches, NBC said.

In a statement, Singh called the prospect of being an Indian-Canadian woman with her own late-night show "a dream come true."

Her acting credits include HBO's movie "Fahrenheit?451," ''Bad Moms" and "Ice Age: Collision Course."?

FILE - In this April 19, 2018 file photo, Lilly Singh arrives at WE Day California at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif. NBC is shaking up late-night TV, giving Carson Daly's slot to a woman of color who's a star on YouTube. The network said Thursday, March 14, 2019, that a new show, titled "A Little Late with Lilly Singh," will air at 1:35 a.m. EDT beginning in September. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)

Singh's YouTube channel, in which she creates comedic and other videos, has more than 14 million subscribers, NBC said.

Last month, Daly said he's decided it's time to bring his "Last Call" show to an end as he focuses on new and continuing projects, as host and producer of NBC's "The Voice."

FILE - In this Monday, Nov. 13, 2017 file photo, Lilly Singh attends the 2017 Glamour Women of the Year Awards at Kings Theatre in New York. NBC is shaking up late-night TV, giving Carson Daly's slot to a woman of color who's a star on YouTube. The network said Thursday, March 14, 2019, that a new show, titled "A Little Late with Lilly Singh," will air at 1:35 a.m. EDT beginning in September. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands (AP) - Seven Chinese men allege in a lawsuit that they were victims of a forced labor scheme while constructing a Saipan casino.

The casino and its contractors violated U.S. trafficking laws by exploiting the workers, the lawsuit said. Saipan is part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The lawsuit was filed in December. It was amended Friday to add trafficking claims and to include casino owner Imperial Pacific as a defendant.

Representatives for Hong Kong-based Imperial Pacific and the contractors named in the lawsuit couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

According to the lawsuit, the men were subjected to 12-hour workdays, dormitories without showers or air-conditioning and a dangerous construction site.

"Their supervisors yelled and cursed at them, and forced them to pay fines if they did not work hard enough or arrived late," the lawsuit said. Imperial Pacific knew about, or "recklessly disregarded" the exploitation by their contractors, the lawsuit said: "However, rushing to complete the project, rather than remedy the situation, Imperial Pacific and its contractors sought to conceal their illegal scheme from government authorities, medical providers, and any party that might hold them accountable."

FILE - This Sept. 9, 2017 file photo, shows the Imperial Pacific Resort and Hotel under construction in Saipan, the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific. Seven Chinese men allege in a lawsuit that they were victims of a forced labor scheme while constructing a Saipan casino.(Mark Flaherty/The Pacific Daily via AP)

U.S. officials announced $14 million in settlements last year with Chinese construction firms building the casino after finding workers were paid less than required.

"Many foreign migrant workers suffer injuries and endure abuse, but have no access to a remedy," said Aaron Halegua, a New York attorney helping represent the construction workers. "Fortunately, because these events occurred in a U.S. Commonwealth, the plaintiffs are protected under U.S. law."
BEIJING (AP) - China's No. 2 leader on Friday denied Beijing tells its companies to spy abroad, refuting U.S. warnings that Chinese technology suppliers might be a security risk.

Premier Li Keqiang's comment at a news conference was the communist government's highest-level rejection of accusations Chinese companies might spy on foreign customers.

Asked whether Beijing told Chinese companies to spy, Li said, "Let me tell you explicitly that this is not consistent with Chinese law. This is not how China behaves. We did not do that and will not do that in the future."

The United States and some other governments have imposed curbs on use of technology from Chinese vendors including Huawei Technologies Ltd. as possible security risks.

Huawei, the biggest global maker of network gear for phone and internet companies, has denied accusations it facilitates Chinese spying.

Huawei's founder told reporters this year he would reject government requests to disclose confidential information about foreign customers.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during a press conference after the closing session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang arrives for a press conference after the closing session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during a press conference after the closing session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, right, speaks during a press conference held after the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

A military band plays the national anthem during the closing session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

A Xinjiang delegate walks among the delegates as they leave the Great Hall of the People after attending the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Delegates leave the Great Hall of the People after attending the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Female delegates leave the Great Hall of the People after attending the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

A soldier in usher uniform stands guard as delegates leave the Great Hall of the People after the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

An ethnic minority delegate leaves the Great Hall of the People after attending the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Soldiers in usher uniforms push a barricade as they prepare to close off the Great Hall of the People after the closing session of China's National People's Congress (NPC) in Beijing, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)
NEW DELHI (AP) - A standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan appears to have given Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, head of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, a boost ahead of national elections set to begin in April.

After a suicide bombing killed 40 soldiers in Indian-controlled Kashmir, India's air force launched a strike on an alleged terrorist training camp inside Pakistan.

Although India has refused to produce evidence of the damage it says was caused by the strike, BJP and Modi supporters immediately branded it a decisive victory.

The crisis managed to turn attention away from Modi's economic record.

Modi swept 2014 elections promising to reform India's economy, but his signature demonetization policy, intended to reduce money laundering, choke terrorist financing and boost digital payments, has been largely deemed a failure.

And a small scandal erupted earlier this year when a respected financial newspaper reported that the government was suppressing jobs data that showed India's unemployment rate at its highest level in 45 years.

FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2019, file photo, Indians offer sweets to each other as they celebrate reports of Indian aircrafts bombing Pakistan territory in Mumbai, India. A standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan appears to have given Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the head of India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, a boost ahead of national elections set to begin in April. Making the most of the confrontation with Pakistan and his party's efforts to project him as a strong leader, Modi has been crisscrossing India addressing rallies and claiming that his government's response to the suicide bombing shows that a "New India" is emerging. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

But Modi, 68, seems to have regained ground after taking a tough stance in brinkmanship with Pakistan, even though violence and massive protests continue to rock Indian-controlled Kashmir, where insurgent groups have been fighting for independence or a merger with Pakistan since 1989.

Making the most of the confrontation with Pakistan and his party's efforts to project him as a strong leader, Modi has been crisscrossing India addressing rallies and claiming that his government's response to the suicide bombing shows that a "New India" is emerging.

Boasting of his "muscular" policy, Modi said at one recent rally that India "will go and hit people inside their homes who try to harm" the country.

At rallies, he has been comparing his policies with those of earlier governments, denouncing the Congress party-led government for not retaliating after attacks in Mumbai in 2008. India blamed a Pakistan-based militant group for the attacks that killed 166 people.

His fiery speeches are a clear indication that national security will be a key issue in his campaign and that the BJP believes it will help swing enough votes to win him a second term.

His supporters are using social media and several television news channels to fan nationalist sentiment and label anyone who questions Modi as unpatriotic, particularly during television debates where hysteria reigns.

The inflammatory rhetoric is brushing aside key economic issues that affect the nearly 70 percent of India's 1.3 billion people who live in rural areas.

"I wouldn't say the BJP leaders will completely abandon economic issues. But they definitely are going for a mix of Hindu nationalism, terrorism and a very strong pitch against Pakistan. What was missing was so far was a national threat to bind the BJP campaign," said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a political analyst who has written a biography of Modi.

Modi became prime minister in 2014 promising inclusive economic development, the creation of 10 million jobs every year, double-digit economic growth, and an end to farmers' distress caused by low prices for their produce.

But the opportunity was missed owing to the demonetization and the haphazard implementation of a Goods and Services Tax. To make matters worse, the unemployment rate hit a 45-year high of 6.1 percent in the last fiscal year.

Modi's party suffered defeats in three major state elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in December at the hands of the Congress party, led by 48-year-old Rahul Gandhi.

Buoyed by these wins, Gandhi's style became more aggressive. His criticisms of Modi over farmers' continued distress and unemployment were gaining some traction before tensions broke out with Pakistan. He also had been making efforts to rally various opposition parties into a united anti-Modi front.

The Congress party is in no position to win the election on its own. Polls suggest Gandhi's party can hope to win seats in between eight and 10 out of India's 29 states. In the others, it will have to depend on the support of regional groups.

But things changed after India's strike into Pakistan territory. Modi's claims of victory allowed him to take back control of the narrative from Gandhi, leaving the latter and other opposition leaders slightly uncertain about how to deal with Modi.

First they supported the government action against Pakistan and praised the actions of security forces.

Within days, however, they started criticizing Modi for not calling an all-party meeting to discuss security issues. Soon, conflicting government accounts of the damage caused in Pakistan by the Indian strike gave them more ammunition to attack Modi.

But Modi used their doubts about the strike to polish his own "strongman" credentials.

While his current position looks quite strong, the latest surveys say he might have to settle for a thinner majority this time. A survey by C-Voter predicts that Modi and his allies could win 265 seats, just seven short of the halfway mark, while an India TV-CNX survey gives them a clear majority with 285 seats.

FILE - In this Aug. 28, 2014, file photo, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks at the launch of a campaign aimed at opening millions of bank accounts for poor Indians in New Delhi, India. Modi swept 2014 elections promising to reform India's economy, but his signature demonetization policy, intended to reduce money laundering, choke terrorist financing and boost digital payments, has been largely deemed a failure. But a standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan appears to have given Modi, the head of India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, a boost ahead of national elections set to begin in April, 2019. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 14, 2019 file photo, Indian paramilitary soldiers carry the remains of colleagues at the site of a suicide bombing in Pampore, Indian-controlled Kashmir. After the suicide bombing that killed 40 soldiers, India's air force conducted a cross border strike on a terrorist training camp within Pakistan. Although India has refused to produce evidence of the damage it claims was caused by the strike, BJP and Modi supporters immediately branded it a decisive victory. The standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan appears to have given Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the head of India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, a boost ahead of national elections set to begin in April, 2019. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin, File)

FILE - In this Feb. 15, 2019, file photo, Indian muslims burn posters of Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, center, and Jaish-e-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar, during a protest against Thursday's attack on a paramilitary convoy in Kashmir that killed at least 40, in Mumbai, India. A standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan appears to have given Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the head of India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, a boost ahead of national elections set to begin in April. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 1, 2016, file photo, Indian Border Security Force soldiers patrol near the India-Pakistan international border area at Gakhrial boder post in Akhnoor sector, about 48 kilometers from Jammu, India. A standoff with nuclear rival Pakistan appears to have given Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the head of India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, a boost ahead of national elections set to begin in April. (AP Photo/Channi Anand, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 12, 2016, file photo, Indian policemen stand guard during a curfew in Srinagar, Indian-controlled Kashmir. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept 2014 elections promising to reform India's economy, but his signature demonetization policy, intended to reduce money laundering, choke terrorist financing and boost digital payments, has been largely deemed a failure. But he seems to have regained ground after taking a tough stance in brinkmanship with Pakistan after a suicide bombing on Feb. 14, 2019, even though violence and massive protests continue to rock Indian-controlled Kashmir, where insurgent groups have been fighting for independence or a merger with Pakistan since 1989. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin, File)
BEIJING (AP) - China will introduce more "preferential policies" for Taiwan so the self-governed island's residents can enjoy the same treatment as mainland Chinese citizens, Premier Li Keqiang said Friday.

Li said new initiatives will be implemented to invite people from Taiwan to "work hand-in-hand to realize our shared dream for the nation." They follow 31 incentives recently introduced to bolster China's argument that political unification should follow increasingly close economic ties.

Such appeals form the carrot in China's strategy toward Taiwan in contrast with the stick of threatened military attack.

China has used increasingly aggressive rhetoric toward Taiwan, which split from the mainland amid a civil war 70 years ago, but has sought to balance the two approaches to try to avoid alienating those in the island republic who are wary of Beijing.

The ruling Communist Party maintains that Taiwan is part of China. It opposes Taiwan independence and formally says it seeks a "peaceful reunification."

President Xi Jinping did not rule out the use of force during a January speech on cross-strait relations, when he proposed a "one country, two systems" approach akin to China's current arrangement with the former British colony of Hong Kong. That would enable Taiwan to keep its own economic and legal system.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during a press conference after the closing session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

The suggestion has been rejected by Taiwan's independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen, who said China must accept the continued existence of the Republic of China, the formal name of the former mainland government that fled to Taiwan in 1949. The U.S. switched recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but remains a key Taiwanese bulwark against China's threats.

China appears pleased with the impact of last year's "31 Measures," and Li held open the possibility of even greater advantages, while offering no details.

"When people on both sides of the strait enjoy the same development opportunities, they will become closer and closer," Li said at a news conference held on the closing day of the ceremonial legislature's annual session.

A military band plays the national anthem during the closing session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
HEJERE, Ethiopia (AP) - Analysis of the flight recorders of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane has begun, the airline said Friday, and The New York Times reported that the pilot requested permission "in a panicky voice" to return shortly after takeoff as the plane dipped up and down and appeared to gain startling speed.

President Donald Trump in a phone call with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed praised the state-owned airline "as a strong institution" and affirmed U.S. support after Sunday's plane crash killed 157 people, Abiy's office said. The two shared condolences in a rare public outreach by Trump to an African leader.

Forensic DNA work began in identifying remains, and Muslim families held prayers for the dead, anxious to have something to bury as soon as possible. The dead came from 35 countries.

The New York Times report cited "a person who reviewed air traffic communications" from the flight as saying controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by hundreds of feet.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return to the Addis Ababa airport. But the plane crashed minutes later.

French authorities now have the plane's flight data and voice recorders for analysis. They have said it was unclear whether data could be retrieved. An Ethiopian delegation led by its chief accident investigator was in Paris.

Students from Hama elementary school, who walked an hour and a half from their school in the surrounding area to pay their respects, stand next to floral tributes at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

The United States and many other countries have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 as the U.S.-based company faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said regulators had new data from satellite-based tracking that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610, which crashed off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

Both planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport.

Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step, while reiterating "full confidence" in their safety. Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jet's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether the software automatically pushed the plane's nose down repeatedly, and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem. Ethiopian Airlines says its pilots received special training on the software.

At the rural crash site outside Addis Ababa, searchers picked through the debris. Members of Israel's ZAKA emergency response team were granted access for forensic work.

"The next steps will take some time," Canada's ambassador to Ethiopia, Antione Chevrier, told The Associated Press, saying discussions on repatriating victims' remains would begin once the identification process begins to yield results. Canada lost 18 people.

One relative collected soil in a plastic bag, perhaps for lack of anything else .

After prayers for the dead at a mosque in Addis Ababa, impatience flashed over the lack of information.

"We need the remains of our children," said Ibrahim Mohammed from Kenya. "And they are saying that it can take six months or more."

"We came here for nothing," said Nejmedin Gazi, a Yemeni brother of a victim. "They told us the bodies were small pieces, more than 5,000 pieces, 5,000 to 10,000 pieces."

Another Kenyan citizen, Pauline Gathu, lost a brother. Thirty-two Kenyans were killed in all.

"We were expecting that we will have our body well-kept but we are amazed to hear that there is nothing, totally nothing," she said. "And people are waiting for us to give them reports of what we have found but we don't have words, we don't know what to do."

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Meseret reported from Addis Ababa. Associated Press writers Isabel DeBre in Jerusalem, Dave Koenig in Houston and Tom Krisher in Detroit and video journalists Josphat Kasire and Desmond Tiro contributed.

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Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa

This aerial image made from video shows recovery work continuing at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Yidnek Kirubel)

An Ethiopian relative of a crash victim mourns and grieves next to a floral tribute at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Chinese relatives of a crash victim mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

A Rwandan relative of a crash victim mourns at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Rwandan relatives of a crash victim mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Kenyan relatives of a crash victim mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Recovery work continues at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Relatives of a crash victim mourn at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

A photograph of a Chinese crash victim is placed next to incense and an offering of fruit, as relatives mourn and grieve at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)

Investigators continue recovery work at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sunday killing all 157 on board, near Bishoftu, south-east of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, Friday, March 15, 2019. Analysis of the flight recorders has begun in France, the airline said Friday, while in Ethiopia officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. (AP Photo/Mulugeta Ayene)
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) - The Latest on Ethiopian Airlines crash (all times local):

8:55 p.m.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has laid a wreath in memory of the 157 victims of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, including the many staff members and partners who support the world body's work.

Several hundred diplomats and staff members joined him in paying silent tribute Friday. The victims came from 35 countries and included at least 21 U.N. staffers from different agencies.

Guterres said they were "a mirror of the United Nations ... each on an individual mission, but at the same time together, representing our larger quest - doing their part, in solidarity with all of us, to build a better world."

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Two United Nations security officers stand beside a memorial wreath during a ceremony at United Nations headquarters, Friday March 15, 2019, for U.N. personnel that were aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302. At least 21 U.N. personnel were among the 157 people from 35 countries who died Sunday morning when an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, Kenya. (United Nations Photo by Manuel Elias via AP)

7:40 p.m.

Ethiopia's prime minister says President Donald Trump in a phone call has hailed Ethiopian Airlines "as a strong institution" and affirmed the provision of technical support after Sunday's plane crash.

The office of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in a Twitter post says the two leaders "shared condolences" for the crash victims. Americans and Ethiopians were among the 157 people killed in the crash.

The post also says Trump "expressed support for the holistic reforms that have been taking place in Ethiopia over the past months." Abiy took office a year ago and quickly launched a series of whirlwind political and economic changes.

Trump has had little public contact with African leaders. Ethiopia has long been a key regional security ally for the U.S. in East Africa.

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12:45 p.m.

Iran says it has banned from its airspace Boeing 737 Max 8 planes alongside other nations.

The transportation ministry announced the ban on Friday. The decision comes after two fatal crashes involving the model in the past six months.

An Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed Sunday and killed all 157 people aboard. A previous crash involving the Boeing model killed 189 people in Indonesia last year.

Iran has no Boeing 737 Max 8 planes due to decades-long U.S. sanctions on the country.

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11:05 a.m.

Ethiopian Airlines says the investigation in France has begun into the flight data and voice recorders of the plane that crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 on board.

The airline says in a Twitter post that an Ethiopian delegation led by the chief investigator of its accident investigation bureau has arrived at the facilities of the French air accident investigation authority.

The French agency has said it was unclear whether the data could be retrieved. It shared a photo of the data recorder, which appeared intact though the edge appeared somewhat mangled.

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10:30 a.m.

The pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed requested permission "in a panicky voice" to return to the airport shortly after takeoff, The New York Times reports.

Friday's report cites "a person who reviewed air traffic communications" from Sunday's flight saying controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by hundreds of feet, with its speed appearing unusually fast.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return. But the plane crashed minutes later outside Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board.

French authorities now have the plane's flight data and voice recorders for analysis.

In Ethiopia, officials have started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains.

Countries including the United States have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, left, pays his respects during a wreath laying ceremony at United Nations headquarters, Friday March 15, 2019, for U.N. personnel that were aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302. At least 21 U.N. personnel were among the 157 people from 35 countries who died Sunday morning when an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 jetliner crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi, Kenya. (United Nations Photo by Manuel Elias via AP)

This photo provided by by the French air accident investigation authority BEA on Thursday, March 14, 2019, shows one of the black box flight recorder from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet, in le Bourget, north of Paris. The French air accident investigation agency has released a photo of the data recorder from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet. The agency, known by its French acronym BEA, received the flight's data recorder and voice recorder Thursday. (BEA via AP)
A coalition of more than a dozen global news organizations, including The Associated Press, The Financial Times and Reuters, will spotlight the world's most threatened journalists in a new freedom of speech initiative, the group announced Friday in New York.

Members of the One Free Press Coalition will publish on their platforms each month a "10 Most Urgent" list of journalists who have been jailed, threatened or attacked for their work.

The group's mission is to use the voices of its members to "stand up for journalists under attack for pursuing the truth," the organization said.

Among the first group of journalists the coalition is spotlighting are the late Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in October 2018 by Saudi agents at the country's consulate in Istanbul, and Maria Ressa, the founder of the news site Rappler who has faced arrest and legal threats in the Philippines.

AP Executive Editor Sally Buzbee praised the effort as a way to bring attention to "the vital cause of reporting without harassment or threat."

"Journalism is under attack around the world," Buzbee said. "We believe journalists must be permitted to pursue facts fearlessly for the greater good of society and democracy, and we are happy that the One Free Press Coalition will join us in that fight."

FILE - In this Dec. 15, 2014, file photo, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi speaks during a press conference in Manama, Bahrain. More than a dozen global news organizations including The Associated Press have formed a coalition to spotlight the world's most threatened journalists. Member editors and publishers of the One Free Press Coalition will publish across platforms each month a "10 Most Urgent" list of journalists whose press freedoms are being abused. (AP Photo/Hasan Jamali, File)

Other coalition members include EURACTIV, Forbes, HuffPost, Le Temps, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Time, Wired and Yahoo News.

The importance of a free press is seen daily around the world, especially in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes, said Wolfgang Krach, Sueddeutsche Zeitung editor-in-chief.

"Intimidation, violence, incendiary speech against journalists and preventing reporters from doing their jobs are crucial issues for our profession in these times," Krach said.

The group's reach, including online and on social media, will allow it to signal its solidarity for journalism colleagues and simultaneously tell those who threaten free speech that they are being watched, said Randall Lane, Forbes' chief content officer who championed the concept of the coalition at a meeting of the International Media Council at the World Economic Forum.

"With the One Free Press Coalition, we are shining an enduring light from all corners of the globe on our fellow journalists who are being persecuted, punished or worse in the pursuit of truth," Lane said.

Other coalition partners include the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Women's Media Foundation.

The other journalists whose stories are being highlighted Friday are:

- Eman Al Nafjan, a women's rights blogger who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia.

- Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, journalists for Reuters who have been imprisoned in Myanmar.

- Claudia Duque, a Colombian investigative reporter who has been attacked and harassed for her work.

- Mohamed Cheikh Ould Mohamed, a blogger who has been imprisoned in Mauritania.

- Anna Nimiriano, the editor of the Juba Monitor newspaper in South Sudan who has faced repeated threats of arrest.

- Pelin Unker, a Turkish journalist who wrote about the Paradise Papers investigation who has been jailed.

- Thomas Awah Junior, a correspondent for Afrik 2 Radio and publisher of Aghem Messenger magazine who has been imprisoned in Cameroon.

- Tran Thi Nga, a Vietnamese human rights blogger who has been sentenced on charges of "spreading propaganda."

FILE - In this Feb. 14, 2019 file photo Maria Ressa, the award-winning head of a Philippine online news site Rappler, talks to the media after posting bail at a Regional Trial Court following an overnight arrest by National Bureau of Investigation agents on a libel case in Manila, Philippines. More than a dozen global news organizations including The Associated Press have formed a coalition to spotlight the world's most threatened journalists. Member editors and publishers of the One Free Press Coalition will publish across platforms each month a "10 Most Urgent" list of journalists whose press freedoms are being abused. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez)

FILE - In this Sept. 3, 2018 file photo, Reuters journalist Kyaw Soe Oo, center, talks to journalists while he is escorted by police as he leaves the court in Yangon, Myanmar. More than a dozen global news organizations including The Associated Press have formed a coalition to spotlight the world's most threatened journalists. Member editors and publishers of the One Free Press Coalition will publish across platforms each month a "10 Most Urgent" list of journalists whose press freedoms are being abused. (AP Photo/Thein Zaw)
BERLIN (AP) - A group of European nations is urging Russia not to abandon a nuclear weapons treaty with the United States.

Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are also calling for new arms control agreements to address the rising power of China and other nations.

The U.S. gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty a month ago, citing Russian violations.

The European countries opened an arms control conference in Berlin on Friday urging Moscow "to return to complete and verifiable compliance" to save the treaty.

But German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says it's also time for broader treaties, as nuclear weapons proliferate to countries such as China, North Korea, India and Pakistan.

He says treaties also need to address new technologies, such as drones and cyberattacks.
JERUSALEM (AP) - The Latest on Israel-Gaza (all times local):

12:30 p.m.

Israeli defense officials said after a preliminary investigation that the Gaza rockets that hit the Tel Aviv area were apparently fired by mistake.

The officials were quoted Friday in Israeli media. The Israeli military declined to comment on the reports.

It was not immediately clear if the rocket fire was a result of human error or technical malfunction. The Israeli daily Haaretz quoted the officials as saying the two rockets were fired during maintenance work.

The apparent misfire came as Gaza's Hamas rulers were in negotiations with Egyptian mediators about a truce deal with Israel. The assessment indicated that Hamas had no intention of escalating violence with Israel.

An explosion caused by Israeli airstrikes is seen on Gaza City, early Friday, Friday, March 15, 2019. Israeli warplanes attacked militant targets in the southern Gaza Strip early Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, as the sides appeared to be hurtling toward a new round of violence. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Earlier, the military had held Hamas responsible for the rocket fire at Tel Aviv, the first such attack in five years.

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12:10 p.m.

A Hamas official says an agreement to restore calm between Gaza militants and Israel has been reached.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity Friday because the Islamic militant group is yet to announce, said Egypt led meditation efforts "that have apparently paid off."

After about 7:30 a.m. Friday, there were no reports of outgoing Palestinian rocket attacks or Israeli airstrikes.

In what appeared to be a step to bolster the Egyptian efforts, organizers announced the cancellation of the weekly protests along the Gaza-Israel frontier, an activity that has been going on for a year and has often led to a violence flare-up.

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8:00 a.m.

The Israeli military says it struck 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip overnight in response to rocket fire.

The army said early Friday that targets included an office complex in Gaza City, an underground complex that served as Hamas' main rocket-manufacturing site, and a center used for a Hamas drone program.

The airstrikes followed a rare rocket attack on the Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv late Thursday. Israel says Hamas fired the rockets, though Hamas and a smaller militant group, Islamic Jihad, both denied involvement.

The fighting broke out amid Egyptian efforts to broker an expanded cease-fire deal between the bitter enemies, who last fought a war in 2014.

Several barrages of rocket fire continued during the night.

Palestinians inspect the damage of destroyed building belongs to Hamas ministry of prisoners hit by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, early Friday, Friday, March 15, 2019. Israeli warplanes attacked militant targets in the southern Gaza Strip early Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, as the sides appeared to be hurtling toward a new round of violence. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Palestinians check the damage of destroyed building belongs to Hamas ministry of prisoners hit by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, early Friday, Friday, March 15, 2019. Israeli warplanes attacked militant targets in the southern Gaza Strip early Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, as the sides appeared to be hurtling toward a new round of violence. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. regulators charged Volkswagen and former CEO Martin Winterkorn with defrauding investors during its massive diesel emissions scandal.

The charges from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission come two years after the German automaker settled with the U.S. over criminal and civil charges, as the company tries to distance itself from one if its darkest eras.

The SEC said that between April 2014 and May 2015, Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the country grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance, and the company's financial standing, which gave Volkswagen a financial benefit when it issued securities at more attractive rates for the company, according to the SEC.

"Volkswagen hid its decade-long emissions scheme while it was selling billions of dollars of its bonds to investors at inflated prices," said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC's enforcement division.

In September 2015 Volkswagen installed software on more than 475,000 cars that enabled them to cheat on emissions tests, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The software reduced nitrogen oxide emissions when the cars were placed on a test machine but allowed higher emissions and improved engine performance during normal driving.

FILE - In this Jan. 19, 2017 file photo Martin Winterkorn, former CEO of the German car manufacturer 'Volkswagen', arrives for a questioning at an investigation committee of the German federal parliament in Berlin, Germany. The Securities and Exchange Commission is charging Volkswagen and former CEO Martin Winterkorn with defrauding American investors during an emissions scandal. The SEC said that between April 2014 and May 2015 Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the country grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, file)

In 2016 the Justice Department sued Volkswagen over the emissions-cheating software and the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, saying it made false claims in commercials promoting its "Clean Diesel" vehicles as environmentally friendly.

Winterkorn resigned saying he took responsibility for the fraud, but insisted he personally did nothing wrong.

Volkswagen said Friday that the SEC is simply repeating unproven claims about Winterkorn.

"Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company," the company said in a prepared release.

The company has paid some $20 billion in fines and civil settlements. It has also pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the United States and several managers, including Winterkorn, were charged there.

The surprise charges from the SEC arrive as the German company attempts to distance itself from the scandal. On Tuesday the automaker said that it planned to ramp up production of electric vehicles over the next ten years, to 22 million, and reduce its carbon footprint over vehicle life cycles by 30 percent.

Volkswagen's pivot to electric vehicles comes as it seeks to comply with new limits on carbon dioxide emissions in Europe, and a push by China for more low-emission vehicles.

The SEC's complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges Volkswagen AG, its subsidiaries Volkswagen Group of America Finance, LLC and VW Credit, Inc., and Winterkorn with violating the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws.

The SEC seeks permanent injunctions, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest and civil penalties. It also wants to bar Winterkorn from holding any corporate officer or director positions.
(CNN)  A Google employee has broken the world record for calculating pi just in time for the mind-bogglingly long number's special day.

Emma Haruka Iwao spent four months working on the project in which she calculated pi to 31.4 trillion digits.

Pi holds a special place in the realm of math. It's an irrational number that continues infinitely without repetition. You calculate it by dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter.

Iwao did her number crunching primarily from Google's office in Seattle, where she works at as a developer and advocate for Google Cloud. Fittingly, she used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to generate the enormously long number. It's the first pi record calculated on the cloud.

Her milestone was certified by Guinness World Records on Wednesday, making her the third woman to set a world record for calculating the number. Iwao broke the record for pi set by Peter Trueb in 2016, which was 22.4 trillion digits long.

Google made the announcement on March 14 (3.14), which is known as Pi Day. The semi-official holiday for the unique number is celebrated by eating actual pies.

"It was my childhood dream, a longtime dream, to break the world record for pi," Iwao told CNN Business. She has been working toward this moment since she was 12, when she first downloaded software to calculate pi on her personal computer in Japan.

Iwao said she had help with the final calculation from Alexander Yee, who invented a program called "y-cruncher" for computing pi and other constants. Her former professor and one time world record holder for pi, Daisuke Takahashi, helped her with advice and technical strategies.

Beyond being a convenient way to promote Google's own cloud products, Iwao's new record shows how far cloud computing technology has come.

All 31,415,926,535,897 digits of her pi calculation can be downloaded by anyone who wants to experiment with the data. In the past, if you wanted to share the longest known version of pi, you had to put it on a hard drive and mail it.

"We keep investing in the cloud and it gets even better over time," said Iwao. "Hopefully we can do an even bigger computation in the future."

This story was first published on CNN.com, "A Google employee just broke the world record for calculating pi."
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - In a story March 15 about a murder for hire, The Associated Press reported erroneously that a man who was wrongfully convicted in the case testified at the trial. He was on the list of witnesses but did not testify.

A corrected version of the story is below:

Puerto Rico woman faces life in murder-for-hire of Canadian

A Puerto Rico woman found guilty of hiring a hit man to kill her wealthy Canadian husband more than a decade ago has been sentenced to life in prison

By DANICA COTO

Associated Press

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - A Puerto Rico woman found guilty of hiring a hit man to kill her wealthy Canadian husband more than a decade ago was sentenced to life in prison on Friday.

Aurea Vazquez Rijos cried as a federal judge issued the sentence and ordered that she be transferred to a prison in Fort Worth, Texas. Judge Daniel Dominguez said he believed the jury's guilty verdict over Vazquez's statement that she is innocent.

Her defense attorneys plan to appeal in a case that sparked an international manhunt.

Vazquez had been charged with offering a man $3 million to kill real estate developer Adam Anhang. The 32-year-old was stabbed repeatedly and hit in the head with a cobblestone while walking with Vazquez through the historic part of Puerto Rico's capital in September 2005, just 12 hours after prosecutors said Anhang had asked for a divorce.

During the sentencing, which was held at a federal courthouse near where Anhang was killed, his mother and younger sister read statements.

"It certainly helps to put it behind us, but you can't forget your own child who dies before you do," the victim's father, Abraham Anhang, told The Associated Press. "If you lose a child, there's never closure."

As Abraham Anhang left the courtroom, Vazquez asked him, "Are you happy now?" to which he replied, "Shut up."

Vazquez and Anhang had signed a prenup one day before getting married, with Anhang's value estimated at more than $24 million and Vazquez's at nearly $62,300. Six months after Anhang's death, Vazquez sued his parents seeking $1 million in damages and $8 million from his estate.

She then left for Florence, Italy in 2008 and was arrested in June 2013 after flying from Italy to Spain. She and her one-month-old baby were extradited to Puerto Rico two years later, leaving behind twin daughters she had with a man in Italy.

Also sentenced to life Friday was Vazquez's sister, Marcia Vazquez Rijos and an ex-boyfriend of hers, Jose Ferrer Sosa. All three had been found guilty in October last year.

"Today's sentence concludes a process which required a lot of effort and perseverance. Justice was finally served for the victim and his family," U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez said in a statement.

The main suspect, Alex Pabon Colon, pleaded guilty 10 years ago to killing Anhang and cooperated with prosecutors.

Another man was initially convicted in the killing and spent eight months in jail before being released as Pabon was charged when federal authorities took over the case.
The Bloody Sunday families have vowed to continue their campaign for justice after it was announced that only one former paratrooper is to be prosecuted over the shootings.

The veteran, known as Soldier F, will face charges for the murders of James Wray and William McKinney and the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick ODonnell in Londonderry in 1972, Northern Irelands Public Prosecution Service said.

However, the PPS said 16 other former soldiers and two suspected ex-members of the Official IRA, all of whom were also investigated as part of a major police murder probe, will not face prosecution.

Thirteen civil rights demonstrators were shot dead on January 30 1972, on one of the most notorious days of the Northern Ireland Troubles.

Relatives of those who died reacted with a mix of vindication, disappointment and defiance.

James Wray (left) and William McKinney, who died on Bloody Sunday (PA/Bloody Sunday Trust)

While welcoming the news for the six families directly impacted by the decision to prosecute Soldier F  declaring that a victory  the campaigners said they would keep fighting for the other dead and injured.

John Kelly, whose 17-year-old brother Michael was shot dead, said: The dead cannot cry out for justice, it is the duty of the living to do so for them. We have cried out for them for many years, and now we have succeeded for them. Do not deny us justice any longer.

Mickey McKinney, who is set to see Soldier F in court over the murder of his brother Willie, said: For us here today it is important to point out that justice for one family is justice for all of us.

John Kelly whose brother Michael was killed on Bloody Sunday (Niall Carson/PA)

The families had marched together from the scene of the shootings in Derrys Bogside neighbourhood to a city centre hotel on Thursday morning to be informed of the PPSs long-awaited decisions.

Afterwards, many of them visibly upset, they walked the short distance to the Guildhall civic building to give their reaction.

Mr Kelly highlighted there were legal means of challenging the decisions not to prosecute.

The Bloody Sunday families are not finished yet, he said.

Families march through the Bogside in Derry (Liam McBurney/PA)

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson confirmed the Ministry of Defence would support Soldier F and pay his legal costs.

We are indebted to those soldiers who served with courage and distinction to bring peace to Northern Ireland, he said.

The welfare of our former service personnel is of the utmost importance and we will offer full legal and pastoral support to the individual affected by todays decision.

The Prime Ministers official spokesman echoed Mr Williamsons words, adding: We recognise the suffering of anyone who lost loved ones during the Troubles.

(PA Graphics)

Mr Kelly heavily criticised Mr Williamson for his support for measures to potentially protect veterans from historic prosecutions, calling on the authorities to investigate whether his past remarks, and similar comments by other politicians, broke the law.

If they have, they should be charged, he said. They cannot attempt to interfere in a judicial process just because they dont like it, or because their voters dont like it.

As well as the 13 who died on the day, 15 others were shot and injured. One of the injured died months later from an inoperable tumour and some consider him the 14th fatality.

Prosecutors had been considering evidence in relation to potential counts of murder, attempted murder and causing grievous injury with intent.

Bloody Sunday helped galvanise support for the Provisional IRA early in the Troubles. An image of a Catholic priest waving a bloodstained handkerchief as he tried to help a victim to safety went around the world.

Relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday after hearing the prosecution decision (Niall Carson/PA)

A public inquiry conducted by a senior judge shortly after the deaths was branded a whitewash by victims families and a campaign was launched for a new public inquiry.

Relatives sought to right the wrongs of false claims that their loved ones had been armed. A fresh probe was eventually ordered by then prime minister Tony Blair in 1998.

A decade-long investigation by Lord Saville concluded that the troops killed protesters who posed no threat.

Following the inquirys conclusion in 2010, then prime minister David Cameron said the killings were unjustified and unjustifiable.

A murder investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) followed the 195 million inquiry and files on 18 soldiers were submitted to prosecutors in 2016 and 2017 for consideration. One has since died. Four other soldiers included in the Saville Report died before police had completed their investigation.

Papers before prosecutors included 668 witness statements and numerous photos, video and audio evidence.

Irish premier Leo Varadkar said the families of the victims are the most important people in this matter.

I know that the department of foreign affairs is in contact with them on behalf of the government, he added.

All of our thoughts are with the families on what must be a very emotional day.
Solicitors for one of the Bloody Sunday families have contacted the Attorney General for Northern Ireland claiming Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson may have jeopardised the chances of a fair trial of a soldier due to be charged with murder.

Lawyers acting for the family of William Nash, who were told on Thursday that no soldier will face prosecution over his death, argued Mr Williamsons comments may be in contempt of court.

One soldier, known only as F, is to be charged with two murders and four attempted murders on Bloody Sunday.

We have now referred Gavin Williamsons comments in respect of the #BloodySunday prosecution to the Attorney General of Northern Ireland. @darraghmackin is instructed pic.twitter.com/ja7vwuLyiB  Phoenix Law Belfast (@PhoenixLawHR) March 14, 2019

Following the decision announced by the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland on Thursday, Mr Williamson confirmed the Ministry of Defence would support Soldier F and pay all legal costs.

He said: We are indebted to those soldiers who served with courage and distinction to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

The welfare of our former service personnel is of the utmost importance and we will offer full legal and pastoral support to the individual affected by todays decision.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said recently he was saddened that protection against `spurious prosecutions would not be given to service personnel in time for Thursdays proceedings in Londonderry (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

This includes funding all his legal costs and providing welfare support.

The Ministry of Defence is working across Government to drive through a new package of safeguards to ensure our Armed Forces are not unfairly treated.

And the Government will urgently reform the system for dealing with legacy issues. Our serving and former personnel cannot live in constant fear of prosecution.

Lawyers have taken issue with the phrase referring to efforts to ensure members of the armed forces are not unfairly treated.

In their letter to the attorney general they say it appears Mr Williamson seeks to assert that the decision to prosecute, and the subsequent prosecution, is in some way unfair or that the accused has been, or is being, unfairly treated.

Solicitor Darragh Mackin, of Phoenix Law, said: Not only has the Secretary of State threatened the fairness of the judicial process, he has also shown a blatant disregard for our client and the other families affected by the events of Bloody Sunday.

Mr Williamson seems to have forgotten that as an MP he has responsibilities to all citizens and not just the armed forces.

Many lives in Derry were destroyed on Bloody Sunday and he would do well to be mindful of that.

It is vital the legal process be allowed to function without attempts to influence it.

MPs have campaigned for a statute of limitations which would prevent troops from being prosecuted for serving their country, including in Northern Ireland.

Speaking recently in a BBC interview, Mr Williamson was asked whether there should be a time limit on prosecutions of service personnel.

He said: Absolutely, to ensure that we dont have spurious prosecutions.

Mr Williamson told Political Thinking With Nick Robinsons BBC Radio 4 podcast: No-one in the Armed Forces wants to be above the law, but what we did need to do is ensure that they do have the protection so that they dont feel under threat.

Its not just about Northern Ireland, but about Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts before that and in the future.

In response to a question about whether that would make a difference to Bloody Sunday, he continued: Sadly, I dont think that will come in time.

I think we have to ask a real question as to Northern Ireland has moved on. Theres been so much progress  weve got to look to the future, not at the past.

John Kelly, whose 17-year-old brother Michael was killed, told reporters at a press conference at the Guildhall after families learned of news of Soldier Fs prosecution, that the attorney general should decide if the Defence Secretary or other politicians have broken the law in their comments.

Mr Kelly said: If they have, they should be charged.

They cannot attempt to interfere in a judicial process just because they dont like it, or because their voters dont like it.

Grainne Teggart, from Amnesty International, also accused Mr Williamson of being disrespectful by not mentioning the Bloody Sunday families in Thursdays statement.

She said: The comments from Gavin Williamson are deeply concerning, and the absence in his statement of any reference to the Bloody Sunday families for the unjustified and unjustifiable killings of 1972 is disrespectful.

We call on the UK Government to ensure there are no barriers to justice and make clear there will be no de facto amnesty for human rights abuses, including those committed by security forces.

A Government spokesman said the safeguards referred to are for how we deal with wider legacy issues, not specific legal cases, which it would be inappropriate to comment on.
Theresa May has resisted calls to sack rebel Cabinet ministers after the no-deal Brexit vote left her authority in shreds.

The Prime Minister is understood to have made clear her displeasure at the actions of senior ministers around the Cabinet table and demanded more loyalty after Wednesday nights chaotic scenes in the Commons.

But backbench Tory MPs  including former ministers  called for heads to roll and urged Mrs May to restore discipline within the Government.

I support the Brexit Deal proposed by the Prime Minister and will continue to vote for it, so we can make a success of Brexit.



Read my message to Hastings and Rye. pic.twitter.com/bA1KQtR9pS  Amber Rudd (@AmberRuddUK) March 14, 2019

Among those who abstained on the vote to reject a no-deal Brexit were Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, Scottish Secretary David Mundell, Justice Secretary David Gauke and Business Secretary Greg Clark.

Energy Minister Claire Perry, who attends Cabinet, and other junior ministers also abstained.

At a meeting of senior ministers on Thursday, a Cabinet source said Mrs May made clear she was less than impressed with (the) Remainers and demanded more loyalty.

But Downing Street sources denied a suggestion circulating at Westminster that the Prime Minister went batshit at the rebels during the Cabinet meeting.

Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd, Business Secretary Greg Clark, Justice Secretary David Gauke and Transport Secretary Chris Grayling arrive for a meeting at 10 Downing Street (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Ms Rudd used a letter to constituents to defend her decision  and appeared to blame hardliners in the European Research Group for derailing the Prime Ministers Brexit plans.

The Work and Pensions Secretary said a no-deal Brexit would do generational damage to our economy and security.

She added that if Brexit is delayed it is because many of my colleagues in the Commons have refused to join those of us who have consistently voted for the Prime Ministers good deal.

Ive always opposed a no deal Brexit. The House made its view clear by agreeing the Spelman amendment, I didnt think it was right for me to oppose that.The PM has my full support in her objective of leaving the EU with a Deal to deliver an orderly Brexit  David Mundell MP (@DavidMundellDCT) March 13, 2019

Sarah Newton quit her ministerial role at the Department for Work and Pensions after defying the three-line whip by voting to reject crashing out of the European Union without a deal under any circumstances.

Paul Masterton resigned as a Home Office ministerial aide in order to vote for the motion rejecting a no-deal Brexit.

Today, I resigned from the Government so that I could vote for a motion that honours my commitment to my constituents, to leave the EU with a deal. Full statement here:https://t.co/UtjbXQxaof  Sarah Newton (@SNewtonUK) March 13, 2019

Short statement on my vote last night:

https://t.co/Su9Sdo3dFt  Paul Masterton (@pmasterton1985) March 14, 2019

Mrs Newton said she resigned from the Government so that I could vote for a motion that honours my commitment to my constituents, to leave the EU with a deal.

Twelve other ministers abstained in the vote on the Government motion, including four members of Theresa Mays Cabinet.

The Commons voted 312 to 308  a majority of four  in favour of a cross-party amendment, tabled by Dame Caroline Spelman, rejecting a no-deal Brexit.

The vote was later confirmed by a more emphatic 321 votes to 278, overriding a Government motion tabled by Mrs May which would have rejected no-deal on the scheduled date of March 29 but left it on the table for other times.

Other minsters who abstained included Robert Buckland, Alistair Burt, Tobias Ellwood, Richard Harrington, Margot James, Anne Milton and Stephen Hammond.

Asked if he was given assurances that he would keep his job if he abstained, Mr Hammond told Today: I personally hadnt, but I believe some colleagues may have been.

Another rebel told the Press Association they were not told anything other than to vote against the amended motion but abstained anyway because we were promised free votes and didnt get them.

But Nigel Evans, joint executive secretary of the backbench 1922 Committee, said Mrs May must regain control of her party.

Her authority was openly defied by Cabinet ministers and other ministers, he said.

She needs to reassert her authority. We have to have collective responsibility in government, otherwise it just simply doesnt work.

Crispin Blunt said: They should have resigned. If youre not going to support the Governments position then fair enough, but theres a deal.

If youre in the Government, then you vote the Governments position.
Essex Police has apologised to victims after two rogue police officers were convicted of sabotaging child abuse investigations.

Detective constables Sharon Patterson, 49, and Lee Pollard, 47, forged documents, concealed evidence and lied about investigations out of laziness and cynical disdain for victims, the Old Bailey heard.

Patterson was even accused of ditching work to get a manicure and have a four-hour-long lunch at a Chinese restaurant with her married lover Pollard.

When she forged a document to shut down one investigation, Pollard described her as his deceptive partner in crime in flirtatious emails, jurors heard.

The pair denied wrongdoing, citing administrative chaos at the child abuse unit in north Essex where they both worked.

But prosecutor Alexandra Healy QC said their behaviour went beyond incompetence and could not be put down to insufficient manpower or resources.

The couple, who live together in Colchester, Essex, denied misconduct in a public office each between 2011 and 2014.

Patterson was found guilty of one charge and cleared of a second, while Pollard was convicted of two charges of misconduct.

Following todays verdict, Essex Polices Assistant Chief Constable Andy Prophet issued an apology saying the force let victims and their families down.

He said: Nothing is more important than protecting children. Todays trial has highlighted that between 2011 and 2014 we let a number of victims and their families down.

Those victims had suffered child abuse, one of the most heinous crimes imaginable.

At the conclusion of these court proceedings, on behalf of the force, I would like to reiterate our apologies to those affected  we are sorry.

He said the force acted swiftly as soon as concerns were identified and investigations were reviewed and, where possible, perpetrators brought to justice.

He said: The individual failings, and ultimately my organisations responsibility therefore, is something that really did shock the organisation.

We took immediate steps to improve the way we were looking after these complex and vulnerable victims.

One former and one serving Essex Police officer found guilty of misconduct in public office. More here: https://t.co/yAV1SLIV8E pic.twitter.com/EmnPVvI6JU  Essex Police (@EssexPoliceUK) March 14, 2019

The convictions bring to a close a four-year corruption probe into the Essex Police unit by the neighbouring Norfolk force and the police watchdog.

Some 30 officers, some now retired, were investigated and 296 Essex child abuse cases looked at, of which 55 were referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

The defendants were the only ones to face criminal charges, but a third officer was sacked for gross misconduct last year, it can now be reported.

The misconduct came to light in 2014 after a victim complained her signature had been forged, and misspelled, on a statement taken by Patterson.

While the defendant was on long-term sick leave, the case was reassigned and resulted in a conviction in 2015.

Pollard destroyed four indecent photographs of a complainant in another case while it was still being investigated, the court heard.

But giving evidence, he said: I believe I would only have destroyed them once a decision had been taken that the investigation was closed.

Verbal authorisations were given all the time ahead of being written down.

That happened more and more in the office. The gap between being told verbally and written down got wider and wider.

In another instance, Pollard failed to investigate an allegation of sexual touching by a teenager then lied by claiming no further action was to be taken, on CPS advice.

Judge Nigel Lickley QC adjourned sentencing until May 3.

It can now be reported that in September 2015, Pollard was dismissed for gross misconduct.

According to a report at the time, he accessed, copied and disclosed another officers computerised application for a job promotion without the individuals permission and then disclosed it to another officer who was considering applying for the same post.

It was described as a deliberate and flagrant breach of honesty and integrity.

Following the conclusion of the trial, Patterson will be subject to consideration for internal gross misconduct proceedings.

In October last year, Detective constable Peter Wood, who worked at the same unit, was dismissed for gross misconduct for lying during a child abuse case.

A panel found that between June 2013 and August 2014, he failed to take appropriate steps to trace a suspect, he was also found to have made a dishonest entry on a force recording system and lied about a witness not being willing to provide a statement.

Busola Johnson, from the CPS, said: The two officers convicted today showed complete contempt for the positions they held.

Through a mixture of dishonesty and laziness, Patterson and Pollard chose not to do their jobs to the standards the public is entitled to expect, and then lied repeatedly to cover up their failings.

The crimes that they committed had the potential to undermine the trust of some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

Patterson and Pollard had a responsibility to protect the public, and they failed in that duty.

Essex Police said 30 officers were subject to investigation and of those, eight were subject to management action and seven officers were found to have no case to answer.

Five officers attended a formal misconduct meeting and of those, three were found to be proven and two were not proven. Five officers retired or resigned when the investigation began.

Five officers were found to have a case to answer for gross misconduct, of those, two left the force prior to action being taken, one officer was dismissed and two were found to have criminal cases to answer.

The Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Essex Roger Hirst said: I wholeheartedly echo the statements of Assistant Chief Constable Andy Prophet that nothing is more important than protecting children.

Victims are at the heart of what we do and for these two officers, it is clear that this was not the case.

As Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Essex, it is my job to hold Essex Police to account on behalf of the people of Essex.

I scrutinise the force and its performance. I am confident that the procedures in place and the increased investment to improving the Child Abuse Investigation Teams means that the force has improved greatly, with efforts being recognised by Her Majestys Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services.

This year, we have provided funding which will enable the force to recruit an additional 215 officers on top of the 150 recruited following the 2018/19 budget.

This will mean an extra 20 officers for the Crime and Public Protection Command, which investigates child abuse.

However, we must not be complacent and we must ensure that the most vulnerable people in our society are never let down in this way again.

One of the convicted officers has already been dismissed for other unrelated matters and the other is suspended from duty and will now face internal gross misconduct proceedings, according to Mr Prophet.

He said: On a personal level it strikes at your core as a police officer.

I am a dad. I have two children. I come to work and my colleagues come to work to help people, to protect the vulnerable and catch those who break the law.

Quite clearly, when we identified that on occasions we were not always getting that right  that was really impactful on my organisation.

That is why we had a root-and-branch review to transform how we protect and investigate in these really complex cases.

The public can, in my point of view, be confident that my organisation now is very different to where it was five years ago.

He said internal reviews had identified concerns at one of the forces specialist investigation centres.

He said: Some of our investigative officers were not thoroughly and effectively investigating some allegations of child sexual abuse.

It found that some supervisors were not following the right processes in terms of supporting and directing those investigations and managing workloads between individuals and teams.

It also found that some frontline officers and staff when they were responding did not always identify risk and vulnerability and make proper referrals.

Mr Prophet said immediate action was taken to tackle the problems, including more specialist training, more support and clearer guidance for supervisors.

He said the concerns that were uncovered related to 55 separate allegations of crime and within those 55 allegations there were 59 victims and there were 30 officers who were the subject of misconduct consideration.

He said: A number were found to have no case to answer, a number were given very clear management advice, a number of those officers were the subject of a misconduct investigation and formal outcome.

A small number, as exemplified by the outcome at the Old Bailey today, were the subject of gross misconduct and/or a criminal investigation.
The leader of Sinn Fein and Northern Irelands police chief have held a frank and constructive meeting.

Mary Lou McDonald and George Hamilton had a conversation in Washington DC on Thursday to discuss their dispute over the Chief Constables potential successor.

It comes after Mrs McDonald said she would not have confidence in any current member of the PSNI senior command team replacing Mr Hamilton when he retires in the summer.

A spokesman for Sinn Fein said Mrs McDonald raised the issue of the failure of the PSNI to disclose information about historical killings to Northern Irelands Police Ombudsman.

He said the Sinn Fein president had raised her concerns about the matter to Mr Hamilton.

It was a frank meeting but it was a constructive meeting as well, the spokesman said.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has met George Hamilton (Brian Lawless/PA)

The big issue and where there is agreement here is that we need to remove legacy policing from contemporary policing.

The PSNI confirmed the meeting took place.

Speaking ahead of their meeting, Mrs McDonald said: We are going to meet to discuss primarily issues around dealing with legacy, the PSNI disclosing and co-operating with the police and the ombudsman and other bodies, and I think we will have a frank conversation.

My interactions with George Hamilton have always been open and direct and I imagine that tomorrow (Thursday) will be no different.

The Sinn Fein spokesman said Mrs McDonald also raised her concerns about a police probe into Belfast journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffery at the meeting.

The award winning journalists were arrested last year ago over the alleged theft of confidential material from the offices of the Ombudsman, Dr Michael Maguire.

The material relates to a police investigation into the murder of six men in Loughinisland.

The Sinn Fein presidents remarks about the next chief constable triggered a furore last month.

Mr Hamilton responded in robust terms, accusing her of poor leadership and suggesting she had contaminated and interfered with the selection process.

Mrs McDonalds assertion, from which she has not resiled, came after she met bereaved families caught up in a controversy involving the PSNIs failure to disclose documents about killings to the Ombudsman.

The PSNIs oversight body  the Northern Ireland Policing Board  is responsible for appointing the chief constable.

Ordinarily, a Sinn Fein appointee would be on a board panel  made up of party political and independent board members  which makes the decision.

That practice was thrown into doubt following Mrs McDonalds remarks, for a time raising the prospect of a panel without Sinn Fein representation, or without any political appointees at all.

But, after taking legal advice, the Policing Board ultimately decided to press ahead with a panel featuring political representatives, including Sinn Fein.
A Catholic priest has been jailed for nine years and 11 months after abusing six children in the 1970s, leaving one of his victims in fractured pieces.

Francis McDermott, 75, abused six victims, some as young as 10, in London, Norwich, and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, between 1971 and 1978, Aylesbury Crown Court heard.

One victim said on Thursday he had a devastating impact on her life, adding: I look in the mirror and see myself in fractured pieces.

She said that since September 3  when McDermott was charged  she cant tell people if its relief, sadness, anger or hate when asked how she felt.

Addressing her abuser, she said: My dad died on Christmas eve. A year later you were putting your hands down my knickers and snogging me.

My first experience should not have been with a Roman Catholic priest 17 years older than me.

Catholic priest Francis McDermott who has been jailed (Thames Valley Police/PA)

She told the court how she had to stop intimacy with partners because when she closed her eyes, all she could see was his face.

She accused McDermott of using her mothers Catholic faith to get close to her, and described the difficulty of picking out Mothers Day cards, telling the court: I tried to understand why my mother had let me down.

Even though people knew, they still had him in their house, she said.

I hate you. There is no one to blame but you.

The victim added she could no longer look at her reflection in mirrors and took medication for the depression which the abuse caused.

A second victim said she did not tell anyone what happened for years because: I felt important to him.

She said she had come to realise it was an abusive manipulative relationship and that he had used my parents trust and religious indoctrination to abuse her.

Years later, after telling her family, she recalled how they realised that they had all been married and baptised by a disgusting monster.

As a result, she told the court that her brother and his wife had cut out McDermotts face from all of their wedding photos and had decided to renew their wedding vows.

She told the court she no longer has a relationship with the Catholic Church, saying: I have lost all faith. I have no religion.

The offences were reported to the church on two separate occasions but were not passed on to police after McDermott denied the allegations, the court heard.

Judge Catherine Tulk told McDermott he had turned down so many opportunities to admit your wrongdoing.

She noted the irony that one of the central tenets of the Catholic Church was confession.

In my view it is an aggravated delay in the victims receiving justice, the judge said.

You abused the trust of those six children and their parents in a callous fashion.

McDermott, of Bideford, Devon, was found guilty of 18 counts of historic child sex offences following a trial.

Trevor Burke QC, defending McDermott, said the defendant had been a Catholic priest all his adult life but said for a period of seven years where he had completely lost his way.

He told the court McDermott plainly cannot be the man he was then.
George and Amal Clooney have been presented with an award in Scotland in recognition of their work to safeguard human rights.

The actor and his wife, an international human rights lawyer, were handed the honour by Scotlands First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, at the Peoples Postcode Lottery Charity Gala in Edinburgh.

The couple, representing the Clooney Foundation for Justice, also received a cheque for 1 million, raised by the players of Peoples Postcode Lottery, during the event at the University of Edinburghs McEwan Hall.

It is understood the money will help fund TrialWatch, a project run by the foundation, which now plans to increase its monitoring of trials in countries where human rights are at risk.

During the gala event, the pair were interviewed by broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky and spoke about the need to protect and enhance human rights.

Amal Clooney said: The scale of the problem can seem enormous, and the stories you hear unfathomable, and you think: how do you begin to confront something like that.

Its individuals who can make a difference in even the most grim circumstances.

George Clooney said: This is a spectacular organisation. This is a really special thing. You look around the room and see a hundred people who are doing amazing things  its an honour to be part of this.

He added: If you end up getting lucky, then you should share that luck. Ive always felt that.

The Clooneys were interviewed about their work at the event (Chris Watt/PA)

Following the interview, the Clooneys were presented with their awards by the First Minister.

Ms Sturgeon said: Amal and George Clooney are worthy recipients of these Postcode Hero Awards which recognise their outstanding commitment to improving peoples lives and ensuring some of the most vulnerable people in our world get the justice, opportunities and support that they need.

This funding from Peoples Postcode Lottery will support the Clooney Foundation for Justices powerful work to advance justice for marginalised or persecuted groups, refugees and displaced children.

Womens rights campaigner, Nice Nailantei Lengete, was also presented with a Postcode Hero award in recognition of her work to end female genital mutilation among Maasai communities in Kenya.

Arriving at the event earlier, George Clooney posed for photographs and signed autographs for fans before heading into the gala.

The event marked a return to Edinburgh for the actor (Andrew Milligan/PA)

Asked how it felt to be in the Scottish capital, Clooney declared: Its great. Thanks for the weather, its nice out.

Asked about the award for their humanitarian work, the filmmaker told reporters: Weve got a lot of work to do, you know.

Were constantly trying to succeed. Its a long, long process, so wish us luck.

The Gravity stars return to the city comes after hundreds of people turned out to welcome him when he visited homelessness campaigners Social Bite and the headquarters of the Peoples Postcode Lottery in Edinburgh in November 2015.

The annual Peoples Postcode Lottery Charity Gala is a celebration of the work done by the charities which are supported by the lotterys players.

In total, players have raised more than 400 million for charities and good causes since 2005.
The United States and Ireland are bound together with ties of kinship and friendship, US president Donald Trump has said.

Mr Trump described the relationship between the two countries as strong and resilient during an event in Washington DC attended by Irish and Northern Ireland politicians.

During the Speakers Lunch at the Capitol Building, Mr Trump also reassured Irish premier Leo Varadkar on the ongoing Brexit debate saying it will all work out.

The annual lunch was hosted by House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Capitol Hill and included a number of Irish political representatives as well as Garda Commissioner Drew Harris.

Today, we welcome Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar to the U.S. Capitol for the annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon. https://t.co/XeB6SybNka  Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) March 14, 2019

US vice-president Mike Pence, DUP leader Arlene Foster and Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald was also in attendance.

Speaking about his earlier private meeting with Mr Varadkar, the US president said: We discussed a lot of things, in particular we talked about Brexit, something that turned out to be a little more complex than they thought it be.

But it will all work out, everything does, one way or the other.

Youve got a very interesting view on it, and I appreciate you letting me know whats going on over there.

(Its) a very tough situation.

Mr Trump spoke during the lunch (Brains Lawson/PA)

He added: The United States and Ireland are bound together with ties of both kinship and friendship, a really great friendship.

Today, our relationship is as strong and resilient as the great Irish people are strong and resilient.

Mr Varadkar thanked the Friends of Ireland caucus in Congress for the vital help in protecting the Good Friday Agreement.

The organisation was founded by Irish-American politicians to support peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

Mr Varadkar added: The Irish people have always had a dialogue with the American people. It is genuine, it is warm, and it has stood the test of time.

Mr Varadkar presents Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi with a copy of a letter signed by more than 300 congressman written in 1937 to congratulate Ireland on its new constitution (Brian Lawless/PA)

Your political and civic leaders  of all parties and backgrounds  helped shape the country that Ireland is today.

And I want to say on behalf of the Irish government and behalf of the Irish people, that we thank the Friends of Ireland caucus in Congress for their vital help at this critical time to protect the provisions of the Good Friday Agreement and ensure there is no return to a hard border on the island of Ireland, whatever happens with Brexit.

Madam Speaker, President Reagan once said that a people free to choose will always choose peace. He was right, and I know the land of liberty will continue to protect that fundamental freedom.

Great opportunity to speak with @realDonaldTrump & @VP Mike Pence during a lunch hosted by @SpeakerPelosi on Capitol Hill. Great commitment amongst the US administration to help Northern Ireland. . . Also invited them to @royalportrush for The Open 2019. pic.twitter.com/HhsbtDA5Yk  Arlene Foster #WeWillMeetAgain (@ArleneFosterUK) March 14, 2019

Mrs Pelosi praised the bond the two countries share.

This has been a tradition where we dispense from our differences, whether it is political or whether they are competitive in any other way, and where we come together and celebrate, she said.

Here in America we take great pride in Irish heritage that millions in our country claim.

As we celebrate our common heritage we also look to the future and work to continue peace in Northern Ireland.
The Irish premier has told US President Donald Trump that he can see the results of his ambitions to make America great again.

Speaking at the traditional shamrock presentation at the White House, Leo Varadkar described US military power as unrivalled.

During the annual event, the Taoiseach presented the US president with a bowl of shamrock to mark his St Patricks visit to Washington DC.

The bowl presented to Mr Trump, in the company of his wife, Melania, was made at Kilkenny Crystal in Callan, the home town of Irish-American architect James Hoban.

LIVE: President Trump Participates in the Shamrock Bowl Presentation by the Prime Minister of Ireland https://t.co/CU2S1osAlU  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) March 14, 2019

Mr Hoban designed both Leinster House in Dublin and the presidents official residence, the White House.

Mr Varadkar said: The American economy is booming. More jobs. Rising incomes. Exactly what you said youd do.

Leo Varadkar presents Donald Trump with a bowl of shamrock (Brian Lawless/PA)

However, I believe the greatness of America is about more than economic prowess and military might.

It is rooted in the things that make us love America  your people, your values, a new nation conceived in liberty. The land and the home of the brave and the free.

The Taoiseach added that the futures of the US and Ireland were entwined.

I believe that future generations of our citizens should have the same opportunity to enrich one anothers societies as past generations have, he said.

Mr Trump, who was joined on stage by US vice president Mike Pence, said that millions of Americans across the country celebrate the inspiring Irish people on St Patricks Day.

He also welcomed the Taoiseachs partner Matt Barrett, who also attended the event.

Mr Trump added: I know many Irish people and they are inspiring, theyre sharp, theyre smart, theyre great and they are brutal enemies so you have to keep them as your friend. Always keep them as your friend.

You dont want to fight with the Irish, its too tough, its too bloody.

He reminded the crowd that the shamrock tradition began almost 70 years ago when Irelands first ambassador to the United States, John Hearne, gave then US president Harry Truman a small box of it.

He added that he accepted the gift as a symbol of Americas enduring friendship with Ireland.

The Irish are confident and fearless. They never give up, they never give in, he added.

The event marked the end of Mr Varadkars trip to Washington DC before he travels to Chicago on Friday for the second part of his St Patricks trip.
Europes leaders are considering whether to agree to UK calls for Brexit to be delayed as Theresa Mays efforts to build support for her deal at Westminster suffered a fresh setback.

MPs backed a delay to Brexit beyond the scheduled date of March 29 in dramatic parliamentary scenes which saw a majority of the Conservative party in the opposite lobby from the Prime Minister.

But any delay will require the agreement of the other 27 European Union members, with talks about any conditions for an extension set to begin before leaders gather at a summit next week.

European Council president Donald Tusk met Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in The Hague on Friday before talks with the blocs key power brokers Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on Monday.

Following the talks, Mr Rutte said the current Withdrawal Agreement is the only deal on the table.

On Tuesday Mr Tusk will travel to Dublin to meet Leo Varadkar before the summit in Brussels on Thursday.

Mr Tusk said: I will appeal to the EU27 to be open to a long extension if the UK finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy and build consensus around it.

But European Parliament Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt questioned why the leaders of the 27 should grant an extension if Mrs May was not ready for a cross-party approach to break the current deadlock in the Commons.

Why EUCO should allow an extension, if the UK gov and her majority in the House of Commons are not ready for a cross-party approach to break the current deadlock ? https://t.co/lj1Tm4kmIg  Guy Verhofstadt (@guyverhofstadt) March 14, 2019

The Prime Minister is set to bring her Brexit deal back to the Commons for a third meaningful vote next week, and Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has sought to provide further legal assurances about the Irish backstop.

But Mrs Mays hopes of persuading Eurosceptics and the DUP to back the deal were dealt a blow after the Star Chamber of Brexiteer lawyers rejected Mr Coxs latest assessment.

The group of lawyers, led by veteran Tory Sir Bill Cash, said a suggestion that the UK could use the Vienna Convention  the international agreement that lays down the rules about treaties  to unilaterally pull out of the backstop was badly misconceived.

The panel of lawyers, which significantly also includes DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds, rejected the supplementary legal advice from Mr Cox.

The Attorney Generals advice hinges on Article 62 of the Vienna Convention, which says that if there has been a fundamental change of circumstances following the conclusion of a treaty which was not foreseen by the parties, then the countries involved would be allowed to withdraw from it.

Mr Cox said: It is in my view clear and undoubted in those exceptional circumstances that international law provides the (UK) with the right to terminate the Withdrawal Agreement.

But the Brexit-backing lawyers said given the high burden that a state must meet to use it, and given the extreme reluctance of international courts and tribunals to accept it the Vienna Convention route supplies no assurance whatsoever that the UK could terminate the Withdrawal Agreement in a lawful manner.

After a chaotic week in the Commons, the Tory party appears deeply divided from the top down.

More than half of Tory MPs  including seven Cabinet ministers  voted against Mrs Mays motion to put back the date when Britain leaves the EU.

Chief Whip Julian Smith abstained, with sources suggesting he did so in order to be able to broker peace going forward by appearing impartial.

Mrs Mays de facto deputy David Lidington denied the Government was falling apart and said the entire Cabinet has accepted the position that Parliament voted for last night.

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster also told BBC Radio 4s Today programme that leaving on March 29 with no deal remains the legal default position but the likelihood of it happening had diminished after this weeks votes.

He said he was still hoping that the UK will leave as soon as possible in an orderly fashion by MPs backing Mrs Mays Withdrawal Agreement next week.

Asked if defeat for the PMs deal might mean an extension of a year or more, Mr Lidington said: Those are the indications which the Brussels institutions of the EU  the Commission, the Council secretariat and certain member state governments  have been giving to us.

(PA Graphics)

He added: I hope that MPs of all parties will be over this weekend just reflecting on the way forward.

Among those in the opposite lobby from the Prime Minister was Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay, who closed debate on the motion on behalf of the Government with a plea to act in the national interest and put forward an extension that is realistic before voting against it.

Others taking advantage of the free vote to oppose the Prime Minister included Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom, Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt and Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss.

Downing Street sources denied that Mrs May had lost control of her Cabinet or her party, insisting that the results were a natural consequence of the decision to offer a free vote on an issue where many hold strong views.

The motion authorising the Prime Minister to request an extension to the two-year Article 50 negotiation process, was passed by 413 votes to 202  a majority of 211.

Only a refusal by the leaders of the 27 remaining EU states to grant the UK an extension at a Brussels summit next week could now preserve the totemic date of March 29 as Brexit Day.

Mrs May has made clear that she hopes to bring her Agreement back to the Commons by March 20 in the hope of securing the support of MPs who rejected it by 230 votes in January and 149 earlier this week.

If she succeeds, she will go to the Brussels summit to request a short delay to a date no later than June 30, to give herself time to pass legislative changes necessary for a smooth and orderly Brexit.

But if her deal is rejected for a third time, she believes any extension would have to be far longer and would involve the UK taking part in European Parliament elections in May.

Irelands Taoiseach Mr Varadkar said: I think we need to be open to any request they make, listen attentively and be generous in our response.

A spokesman for the European Commission said it takes note of tonights votes, adding that president Jean-Claude Juncker was in constant contact with all leaders.
Israeli warplanes struck some 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.

Rocket fire persisted into the morning, setting the stage for additional possible reprisals.

The army said its targets included an office complex in Gaza City used to plan and command Hamas militant activities, an underground complex that served as Hamass main rocket-manufacturing site, and a centre used for Hamas drone development.

In Gaza, health officials reported four people wounded, including a husband and wife in the southern town of Rafah. There were no further details.

The office building struck by Israel had been used by Hamass office of prisoner affairs.

The sudden outbreak of violence comes at a sensitive time for both sides, and it appeared that Israel and Gazas Hamas rulers had incentives to end the fighting.

An explosion is seen on Gaza City (Adel Hana/AP)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the middle of a tight re-election battle.

A tough response would draw international criticism and domestic accusations that he is acting out of political motivations ahead of the April 9 vote. But a restrained response would attract criticism from his fellow hardline rivals.

Hamas, meanwhile, is coping with its own domestic problems.

Israel and Egypt have maintained a crippling blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over the territory in 2007. The blockade, along with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and Hamass own mismanagement, have fueled an economic crisis that has driven unemployment to more than 50%.

Shortly before the rocket attack, Hamas police on Thursday violently broke up a rare protest by demonstrators angry about the dire living conditions in Gaza.

The crackdown triggered heavy criticism on social media, raising the possibility that the rocket fire was a diversionary tactic.

Palestinian media in Gaza said a weekly protest along the Israeli border would take place as usual.

The fighting came as Egyptian mediators were trying to extend a ceasefire between the bitter enemies, which last fought a war in 2014. The Egyptians left Gaza late on Thursday.

Hamas, which typically claims responsibility for its military actions, denied involvement in the rocket attack on Tel Aviv and even said it had undermined its interests. But Israels military said it had concluded the group was behind the attack.

The IDF holds the Hamas terror organisation responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip and emanating from it, the military said in a statement.

The late-night attack on Thursday on Tel Aviv, Israels densely populated commercial and cultural capital, marked a dramatic escalation in hostilities. It was the first time the city had been targeted since a 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants.

Following the first Israeli air strikes, several additional rounds of rocket fire were launched into Israel. The military said several rockets were intercepted by its air defence systems, and there were no reports of injuries.

The initial blasts from the Israeli air strikes in southern Gaza were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 15 miles (25km) to the north. The Israeli warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

A Palestinian inspects the damage of destroyed building belonging to the Hamas ministry of prisoners which was hit by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City (Adel Hana/AP)

Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Despite its denial, Hamas is one of the only groups in Gaza with the means to strike Tel Aviv. A smaller militant group, the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, also possesses a large arsenal of rockets, though it too denied involvement.

Smaller Salafi groups inspired by Islamic State also operate in Gaza, though it is unclear whether they have powerful rockets capable of striking so deep inside Israel.

Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said the army had been caught off guard by Thursday nights rocket barrage and had no advance intelligence.

Israeli Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett, a hardline rival of Mr Netanyahu, called on the prime minister to convene a gathering of his Security Cabinet and demand the army present a plan to defeat Hamas.

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border. Late on Thursday, local media said Egyptian mediators had left the territory.

At the time, Mr Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

I suggest to Hamas, dont count on it, he told his Cabinet. We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general.
The survivor of an avalanche on the UKs highest peak has paid tribute to his fellow climbers who died, telling them you will forever be in my heart.

Swiss national Mathieu Biselx, 30, lost three members of his group on Ben Nevis in the Highlands on Tuesday.

They were caught by a deluge of snow and ice, triggering a huge search and recovery operation in treacherous conditions.

The men were members of the Swiss Alpine Club in the town of Sion in the southwestern canton of Valais.

Mr Biselx, who has been receiving treatment for leg injuries at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, said in a Facebook post: Raph, Cedric and Adrien, thank you for your friendship.

Have a good trip to your new mountains.

Thank you for all you have done for our community, and for your inspiration. You are going to be missed.

Thank you for having come so far with me. My thoughts are with your families. We are all there for you.

You will be forever in my heart.

Two of the avalanche victims were French, aged 41 and 32, and the third was a Swiss 43-year-old.

The mens mountaineering club said in a statement: The Swiss Alpine Club is deeply saddened by the terrible news of the three members of the Sion Monte Rosa branch who died on Ben Nevis on Tuesday.

We send all our sympathy and our most sincere condolences to the families and those close to those who died.

Our thoughts are with Mathieu who survived the avalanche and who lost his three climbing companions.

Mr Biselx said his companions were experienced climbers who took advice from local guides.

He said they had been given two routes to take on the mountain, and upon reaching the second route in the afternoon they saw there had already been an avalanche.

They had barely reached the area when they were swept away.

Mr Biselx, who has a young daughter, said he was amazingly lucky.

He told Valais newspaper Le Nouvelliste: We werent very high up and suddenly we heard a noise. We looked round and two seconds later we were carried away by heavy, compact snow.

When I regained consciousness only my head and an arm were sticking out of the snow.

He described his companions as wonderful people who were also fathers.

Inspector Isla Campbell updates members of the media in Fort William (Andrew Milligan/PA)

The men were recovered by members of the Lochaber and Glencoe Mountain Rescue teams with assistance from volunteer rescuers training in the area.

It is the third fatal accident on 1,345m Ben Nevis in recent months.

On January 1 a 21-year-old Bristol University student from Germany died after falling from a ridge.

In December, Patrick Boothroyd, 21, from West Yorkshire, died after falling in the Tower Gully area.
MPs have gathered in the House of Commons for a minutes silence in memory of those killed in the New Zealand terror attack.

Speaker John Bercow led tributes to the victims of the Christchurch mosque shootings, telling the chamber the pause in proceedings at 11am was in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and Muslims around the world.

He said: This barbarity, this evil, this depravity will not prevail.

We will stand up to it and it will be defeated.

Security Minister Ben Wallace confirmed the UK was offering whatever assistance New Zealand required in the wake of the repugnant attack, adding both he and Home Secretary Sajid Javid were meeting police and security services to look at ways to protect British mosques.

He also said: The UK stands shoulder to shoulder with New Zealand against terrorism and we will not falter in our commitment to uphold the values of tolerance, religious freedom and democracy that we both hold so dear.

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow presided over the minutes silence (Commons/PA)

Labour MP Wes Streeting, co-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on British Muslims, said what had happened in Christchurch would be felt deeply by UK communities.

In the wake of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice not just in this country but right across the world, he said on behalf of the whole House, you are not alone in confronting prejudice and hatred.

The MP for Ilford North said people must never be a bystander in the face of hatred and prejudice because, as we have painfully seen in Christchurch, this is where it leads  but this isnt how it necessarily needs to end.

Conservative former minister Sir Christopher Chope, MP for Christchurch in Dorset which is twinned with its namesake in New Zealand, said: This grotesque manifestation of religious hatred is beyond comprehension.

But, as the minister has intimated, it requires us all to redouble our efforts to promote the virtues of tolerance and religious freedom as the best weapons against the outrage of terror.

Thangam Debbonaire, Labour MP for Bristol West, paid an emotional tribute and told the Commons: The thought that people could walk into a place of prayer and face this is really quite unbearable.

Peers also observed a minutes silence in the House of Lords.

The Lord Speaker Lord Fowler said: Our thoughts and prayers are with their families, and their friends, and with the whole people of New Zealand at this particular time.
Angry SNP voters have written to Scottish ministers complaining about unfair plans to introduce a car park tax.

The workplace parking levy was one of the key parts of a deal between the SNP and the Greens, enabling the minority administration to get its tax and spending plans through Holyrood in January.

Councils will be given the power to impose the tax through an amendment to current proposed transport legislation going through the Scottish Parliament.

The Scottish Conservatives claim the tax could cost workers up to 500 a year.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon was among those to receive letters from angry SNP members vowing to pull support for the party over the planned tax.

The letters were revealed following a Freedom of Information request from the Scottish Conservatives.

One wrote: Ive voted for the SNP for the last 44 years but this ridiculous tax on workers driving to work is totally wrong.

They said driving to their workplace takes 15-20 minutes but would take an hour and a half and two buses to reach by public transport.

The person vowed to resign their party membership if the tax goes ahead.

Another wrote: I have always been an SNP supporter and voter, a quick check would also confirm I was a party member.

I do appreciate the Scottish Government say its up to local authorities to action the tax or not.

However, I have absolutely no shadow of doubt that [SNP-run] Glasgow City Council and others will seize the opportunity to raise revenue via this unfair tax and it will fall on people like me to just stump up because employers wont take the cost, for the simple reason  why would they?

The shift worker said using buses to get work would add two hours to his commute.

A lifelong SNP supporter wrote to Transport Secretary Michael Matheson expressing disgust at the tax and vowing never to vote SNP again, saying the party comes across as flippant and smirky.

One charity worker said the charge would be game over for them as they cannot afford to pay.

She told Mr Matheson: How could I and many like me consider voting SNP ever again?

Another voter wrote: This appears to have been added to the budget late, to get it through parliament, without really considering how it will affect employers and their employees.

More than a dozen employees of airline Loganair working at Glasgow Airport wrote to Mr Mackay opposing the levy, saying: It is unfair and unreasonable to impose a workplace car park tax when I have no realistic alternative to using my car.

The GMB union also wrote opposing the tax, while the Scottish Association of Social Workers called for the NHS exemption to be extended to their staff.

Friends of the Earth Scotland and other environmental organisations wrote backing the tax, saying it will cut emissions and congestion.

Tory finance spokesman Murdo Fraser called for the levy to be scrapped.

Tory MSP Murdo Fraser wants car park tax plans to be dropped (Andrew Milligan/PA)

He said: After being inundated with views from members of the public, the SNP should be left in no doubt about just how unpopular this plan is.

Hardworking people are outraged that they should be charged even more just for driving to work, and many simply cannot afford it.

SNP MSP George Adam said: The Tories hypocrisy and misinformation campaign on this issue has been brazen and, frankly, pathetic.

The workplace parking levy is about empowering councils  allowing them to decide upon which policies work best for them.

Local authorities already have such powers in Tory-run England and Tory councillors in Edinburgh voted for such powers only last year  showing their recent faux outrage up for the hypocrisy that it is.
Donald Trump has been urged to denounce white supremacists after a far-right terrorist who killed 49 people in New Zealand cited his support for the US President.

Australian gunman Brenton Tarrant described Mr Trump as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose in a 74-page document posted online shortly before the attack on mosques on Friday.

TV presenter Piers Morgan, who has previously referred to the president as a friend, implored Mr Trump to speak out.

He tweeted: This is the time, Mr President @realDonaldTrump. You must now denounce all white supremacists without equivocation. They are using your name to justify their racist barbarism.

You got it wrong after Charlottesville, please get it right today. The world is watching & waiting.

This is the time, Mr President @realDonaldTrump.

You must now denounce all white supremacists without equivocation.

They are using your name to justify their racist barbarism.

You got it wrong after Charlottesville, please get it right today.

The world is watching & waiting.  Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 15, 2019

Mr Trump was criticised for saying there was blame on both sides after clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist demonstrator drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring many more.

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, March 14, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

The US president sent a tweet on Friday offering warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand and described the incident as a horrible massacre in which people senselessly died.

The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all! he added.

But 20 minutes later he was tweeting about Jewish people allegedly leaving the Democrat Party and sharing claims Barack Obama had conspired with US authorities against him.

Fewer than two hours later he sent a string of tweets railing against the Mueller investigation and allegations of collusion between his election campaign and Russian agents.

One tweet for New Zealand victims, four tweets for victim in chief, wrote the Washington Posts national security correspondent Greg Miller.

Typically in the past, when youve seen a terrorist attack or a tragedy on this scale, what you see world leaders doing is putting out statements of condolence and then giving them some time to breathe, said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at progressive non-profit organisation Media Matters For America, which monitors Mr Trumps Twitter activity.

Trump doesnt do that. He moves immediately back into his typical patterns.

His typical patterns on a weekday morning, said Mr Gertz, involve watching the TV panel show Fox and Friends and tweeting about the subject matter.

His routine does not break, he said.

No matter what is going on in the world he is going to move on immediately to what he does, and he spends his morning live tweeting.

After tweeting "warmest sympathies and best wishes" to NZ, Trump is now hyping rw media segments about the purported "Jexodus" movement (no evidence Jewish millenials actually leaving Dems at scale). F&F segment was Tues, OAN last night.



Left, OAN, 9:19 pm

Right, Trump, 8:03 am pic.twitter.com/aQZ17ERou3  Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) March 15, 2019

Mr Gertz also said the US presidents reaction to such attacks will differ depending on whether he can use the tragedy to support his own political objectives.

This is different because its not useful for him, he said.

This is a massacre of Muslims by reportedly a white supremacist.

This isnt something he can use to bolster his political platform in a way that he can take a Christmas market bombing and turn it into his core message of we need to keep out immigrants, we need to prevent them getting into the country.

In December 2018, a gunman  French national and convicted criminal Cherif Chekatt  killed three and injured 12 by shooting into a Christmas market in Strasbourg.

After the attack, Mr Trump responded: Another very bad terror attack in France. We are going to strengthen our borders even more. Chuck and Nancy must give us the votes to get additional Border Security!

Similarly, after an Uzbek immigrant drove a truck into pedestrians in New York City in October 2017, he tweeted: In NYC, looks like another attack by a very sick and deranged person. Law enforcement is following this closely. NOT IN THE U.S.A.!

He continued to tweet about security, immigration and extreme vetting in the following days.

If he can create the sense of fear and if its in his worldview hell just run with it, Mr Gertz claimed.

Straight for the fear-mongering is often the direction that he moves.
Cenovus Energy Inc., together with its subsidiaries, develops, produces, and markets crude oil, natural gas liquids, and natural gas in Canada, the United States and the Asia Pacific region. The company operates through Oil Sands, Conventional, and Refining and Marketing segments. The Oil Sands segment develops and produces bitumen in northeast Alberta. Its bitumen assets include Foster Creek, Christina Lake, and Narrows Lake, as well as other projects in the early stages of development. The Conventional segment holds assets primarily located in Elmworth-Wapiti, Kaybob-Edson, and Clearwater operating areas of British Columbia and Alberta, as well as various interests in natural gas processing facilities. The Refining and Marketing segment transports and sells crude oil, natural gas, and NGLs. This segment owns a 50% ownership in Wood River and Borger refineries located in the United States; and owns and operates a crude-by-rail terminal in Alberta. Cenovus Energy Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

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MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Delphi Energy Corp. (DEE.TO) and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe DEE will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe DEE will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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Ltd., Procter & Gamble International Operations SA, Procter & Gamble International Operations SA-ROHQ, Procter & Gamble International S.a.r.l., Procter & Gamble Investment Company (UK) Ltd., Procter & Gamble Investment GmbH, Procter & Gamble Italia, Procter & Gamble Japan K.K., Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan Distribution LLP, Procter & Gamble Kazakhstan LLP, Procter & Gamble Korea, Procter & Gamble Korea S&D Co., Procter & Gamble Lanka Private Ltd. Sri Lanka, Procter & Gamble Leasing LLC, Procter & Gamble Levant S.A.L., Procter & Gamble Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Belgium N.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Berlin GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing GmbH, Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Procter & Gamble Manufacturing SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Marketing Romania SRL, Procter & Gamble Marketing and Services doo, Procter & Gamble Maroc SA, Procter & Gamble Mataro, Procter & Gamble Mexico Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Mexico Inc., Procter & Gamble Middle East FZE, Procter & Gamble Nederland B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Investments B.V., Procter & Gamble Netherlands Services B.V., Procter & Gamble Nigeria Limited, Procter & Gamble Nordic, Procter & Gamble Norge AS, Procter & Gamble Operations Polska Sp. z o.o., Procter & Gamble Overseas India B.V., Procter & Gamble Overseas Ltd., Procter & Gamble Pakistan (Private) Limited, Procter & Gamble Partnership LLP, Procter & Gamble Peru S.R.L., Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals France SAS, Procter & Gamble Philippines, Procter & Gamble Polska Sp. z o.o, Procter & Gamble Portugal - Produtos De Consumo, Procter & Gamble Product Supply (U.K.) Limited U.K., Procter & Gamble Production GmbH, Procter & Gamble Productions, Procter & Gamble Productos de Consumo, Procter & Gamble RHD, Procter & Gamble RSC Regional Service Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Retail Services BVBA, Procter & Gamble S.r.l., Procter & Gamble SA (Pty) Ltd, Procter & Gamble Satis ve Dagitim Ltd. Sti., Procter & Gamble Seine S.A.S., Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Procter & Gamble Services (Switzerland) SA, Procter & Gamble Services Company N.V., Procter & Gamble Services Ltd., Procter & Gamble Share Incentive Plan Trustee Ltd., Procter & Gamble South America Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Spol. s.r.o. (Ltd.), Procter & Gamble Sports and Social Club Ltd., Procter & Gamble Sverige AB, Procter & Gamble Switzerland SARL, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Limited, Procter & Gamble Taiwan Sales Company Limited, Procter & Gamble Technical Centres Limited, Procter & Gamble Technology (Beijing) Co., Procter & Gamble Trading (Thailand) Limited, Procter & Gamble Tuketim Mallari Sanayii A.S., Procter & Gamble UK, Procter & Gamble UK Group Holdings Ltd, Procter & Gamble UK Parent Company Ltd., Procter & Gamble Universal Holding B.V., Procter & Gamble Verwaltungs GmbH, Procter & Gamble Vietnam, Procter & Gamble d.o.o. za trgovinu, Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.C.A., Procter & Gamble de Venezuela S.R.L., Procter & Gamble do Brasil S/A, Procter & Gamble do Brazil, Procter & Gamble do Nordeste S/A, Procter & Gamble-Rakona s.r.o., Progam Realty & Development Corporation, Redmond Products, Richardson-Vicks Real Estate Inc., Richardson-Vicks do Brasil Quimica e Farmaceutica Ltda, Riverfront Music Publishing Co., Rosemount LLC, SPD Development Company Limited, SPD Swiss Precision Diagnostics GmbH, Scannon S.A.S., Series Acquisition B.V., Shulton, Surfac S.R.L., Sycamore Productions, TAOS - FL, TAOS Retail, Tambrands Inc., Temple Trees Impex & Investment Private Limited, The Art of Shaving - FL, The Dover Wipes Company, The Gillette Company, The Gillette Company LLC, The Gillette co., The Procter & Gamble Distributing LLC, The Procter & Gamble GBS Company, The Procter & Gamble Global Finance Company, The Procter & Gamble Manufacturing Company, The Procter & Gamble Paper Products Company, The Procter & Gamble U.S. Business Services Company, This is L., US CD LLC, Vidal Sassoon (Shanghai) Academy, Vidal Sassoon Co., WEBA Betriebsrenten-Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Walker & Company Brands, and iMFLUX Inc..
Invesco Income Growth Trust plc is a close-ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Invesco Fund Managers Limited. It is co-managed by INVESCO Asset Management Limited. The fund invests in the public equity markets of the United Kingdom. It seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. The fund primarily invests in dividend paying growth stocks of companies. It employs fundamental analysis with a bottom-up stock picking approach, focusing on such factors as business model, sales growth, pricing power, market position, margins, management strategy, and financial characteristics to create its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolios against the FTSE All-Share Index. It was formerly known as GT Income Growth Trust plc. Invesco Income Growth Trust plc was formed on March 31, 1996 is domiciled in the United Kingdom.

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The following companies are subsidiares of SAP: Abakus, Abakus Europe Limited, Abakus Ukraine Limited Liability Company, Adatfeldolgozasban Informatikai Kft., Altiscale, Ambin Properties Proprietary Limited, AppGyver, Ariba, Ariba Czech s.r.o., Ariba Inc. Palo Alto, Ariba India Private Limited, Ariba International, Ariba International Holdings, Ariba International Singapore Pte Ltd, Ariba Slovak Republic s.r.o., Ariba Software Technology Services (Shanghai) Co., Ariba Technologies India Private Limited, Ariba Technologies Netherlands B.V., Beijing Zhang Zhong Hu Dong Information Technology, Business Objects, Business Objects Holding B.V., Business Objects Option LLC, Business Objects Software Limited, CNQR Operations Mexico S. de. R.L. de. C.V., Callidus Software, CallidusCloud, Christie Partners Holding C.V., Clear Standards, ClearTrip Inc., ClearTrip Inc. (Mauritius), Cleartrip MEA FZ LLC, Cleartrip Private Limited, Coghead, ConTgo Consulting Limited, ConTgo Pty. Ltd., Concur (Austria) GmbH, Concur (Canada), Concur (France) SAS, Concur (Germany) GmbH, Concur (Japan) Ltd., Concur (New Zealand) Limited, Concur (Philippines) Inc., Concur (Switzerland) GmbH, Concur Czech (s.r.o.), Concur Holdings (France) SAS, Concur Holdings (Netherlands) B.V., Concur Technologies (Australia) Pty. Limited, Concur Technologies (Hong Kong) Limited, Concur Technologies (India) Private Limited, Concur Technologies (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Concur Technologies (UK) Limited, Concur Technologies Inc. Bellevue, Contextor, Coresystems, Crystal Decisions (Ireland) Limited, Crystal Decisions Holdings Limited, Crystal Decisions UK Limited, Emarsys, EssCubed Procurement Pty. Ltd., Extended Systems, Factory Logic, Fedem Technology AS, Fieldglass Europe Limited, Financial Fusion, FreeMarkets Ltda., Frictionless Commerce, Gigya, Gigya Australia Pty Ltd, Gigya Ltd., Gigya UK Ltd, GlobalExpense Limited, Highdeal, Hipmunk, Hybris (US) Corp., Hybris GmbH, Inxight Federal Systems Group, KXEN, Khimetrics, LLC "SAP Labs", LLC "SAP Ukraine", LLC SAP CIS, MaXware, Merlin Systems Oy, Multiposting Sp.z o.o., Nihon Ariba K.K., OpTier, OutlookSoft, OutlookSoft Deutschland GmbH, PLAT.ONE, PT SAP Indonesia, PT Sybase 365 Indonesia, Pilot Software Inc., Plat.One Inc., Plat.One Lab Srl, Plateau Systems LLC, Quadrem Africa Pty. Ltd., Quadrem Brazil Ltda., Quadrem Chile Ltda., Quadrem Colombia SAS, Quadrem International Ltd., Quadrem Netherlands B.V., Quadrem Overseas Cooperatief U.A., Quadrem Peru S.A.C., Qualtrics, Recast.AI, Right Hemisphere, Roambi, Ruan Lian Technologies (Beijing) Co., SAF, SAP (Beijing) Software System Co., SAP (Schweiz) AG, SAP (Schweiz) AG Biel, SAP (UK) Limited, SAP (UK) Limited Feltham, SAP AZ LLC, SAP America, SAP America Inc. Newtown Square, SAP Andina y del Caribe, SAP Argentina S.A., SAP Asia (Vietnam) Co., SAP Asia Pte Ltd, SAP Australia Pty Ltd, SAP Australia Pty Ltd. Sydney, SAP Belgium NV/SA, SAP Beteiligungs GmbH, SAP Brasil Ltda, SAP Brasil Ltda Sao Paulo, SAP Bulgaria EOOD, SAP Business Compliance Services GmbH, SAP Business Services Center Nederland B.V., SAP CR, SAP Canada, SAP Chile Limitada, SAP China Co., SAP China Co. Ltd. Shanghai, SAP China Holding Co., SAP Colombia S.A.S., SAP Commercial Services Ltd., SAP Concur, SAP Costa Rica, SAP Customer Experience, SAP Cyprus Limited, SAP Danmark A/S, SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG, SAP Deutschland SE & Co. KG Walldorf, SAP Dritte Beteiligungs- und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, SAP EMEA Inside Sales S.L., SAP East Africa Limited, SAP Egypt LLC, SAP Erste Beteiligungs- und Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, SAP Espana - Sistemas Informatica, SAP Estonia OU, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Financial, SAP Finland Oy, SAP Foreign Holdings GmbH, SAP France, SAP France Holding, SAP France Levallois Perret, SAP Global Marketing, SAP Hellas S.A., SAP Holdings (UK) Limited, SAP Hong Kong Co., SAP Hosting Beteiligungs GmbH, SAP Hungary Rendszerek, SAP India (Holding) Pte Ltd, SAP India Private Limited, SAP India Private Limited Bangalore, SAP Industries, SAP Industries Inc. Newtown Square, SAP International, SAP International Panama, SAP Investments, SAP Ireland Limited, SAP Ireland US - Financial Services Designated Activity Company, SAP Israel Ltd., SAP Italia Sistemi Applicazioni Prodotti in Data Processing S.p.A., SAP Italia Sistemi Applicazioni Prodotti in Data Processing S.p.A. Vimercate, SAP Japan Co., SAP Japan Co. Ltd. Tokyo, SAP Kazakhstan LLP, SAP Korea Ltd., SAP Labs, SAP Labs Bulgaria EOOD, SAP Labs Finland Oy, SAP Labs France SAS, SAP Labs India Private Limited, SAP Labs Israel Ltd., SAP Labs Korea, SAP Latvia SIA, SAP MENA FZ L.L.C., SAP Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., SAP Malta Investments Ltd., SAP Mxico S.A. de C.V., SAP National Security Services PA, SAP Nederland B.V., SAP Nederland B.V. s-Hertogenbosch, SAP Service and Support Centre (Ireland) Limited, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP d.o.o., SeeWhy, Signavio, SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors Inc. South San Francisco, Sybase, Syclo, TopTier Software, Triversity, Vimercate, Virsa Systems, Visiprise, Wicom Communications, and conTgo limited.
Village Farms International, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, produces, markets, and distributes greenhouse-grown tomatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers in North America. It operates through three segments: Produce Business, Energy Business, and Cannabis and Hemp Business. The company also owns and operates a 7.0 megawatt power plant that generates and sells electricity to British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority; and produces and supplies cannabis products. It markets and distributes its products under the Village Farms brand name to retail supermarkets and fresh food distribution companies, as well as products produced under exclusive arrangements with other greenhouse producers. The company was formerly known as Village Farms Canada Inc. and changed its name to Village Farms International, Inc. in December 2009. Village Farms International, Inc. was founded in 1989 and is headquartered in Delta, Canada.

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4.4 Community Rank

Outperform Votes Ares Acquisition has received 298 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes Ares Acquisition has received 148 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment Ares Acquisition has received 66.82% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Ares Acquisition and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe AAC will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe AAC will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Exxon Mobil: AKG Marketing Company Limited, Aera Energy LLC, Al-Jubail Petrochemical Company, Ampolex (Cepu) Pte Ltd, Ancon Insurance Company Inc., Barnett Gathering LLC, Barzan Gas Company Limited, Caspian Pipeline Consortium, Celtic Exploration Ltd., Coral FLNG S.A., Cross Timbers Energy LLC, Ellora Energy Inc., Esmeroon Oil Transporta Imperial Oil Limited, Esso (Thailand) Public Company Limited, Esso Australia Resources Pty Ltd, Esso Deutschland GmbH, Esso Erdgas Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 15) Limited, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 17) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Angola (Overseas) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc., Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Deepwater) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Offshore East) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited, Esso Exploration and Production UK Limited, Esso Global Investments Ltd., Esso Italiana S.r.l., Esso Nederland B.V., Esso Norge AS, Esso Petroleum Company Limited, Esso Raffinage, Esso Societe Anonyme Francaise, Exxo Holdings Inc., Exxon Azerbaijan Limited, Exxon Chemical Arabia Inc., Exxon International Finance Company, Exxon Luxembourg Holdings LLC, Exxon Mobile Bay Limited Partnership, Exxon Neftegas Limited, Exxon Overseas Corporation, Exxon Overseas Investment Corporation, ExxonMobil (China) Investment Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil (Taicang) Petroleum Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil Abu Dhabi Offshore Petroleum Company Limited, ExxonMobil Alaska Production Inc., ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., ExxonMobil Australia Pty Ltd, ExxonMobil B Resources Company, ExxonMobil Capital Finance Company, ExxonMobil Capital Netherlands B.V., ExxonMobil Central Europe Holding GmbH, ExxonMobil Cepu Limited, ExxonMobil Chemical France, ExxonMobil Chemical Gulf Coast Investments LLC, ExxonMobil Chemical Holland B.V., ExxonMobil Chemical Services (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil China Petroleum & Petrochemical Company Limited, ExxonMobil Development Africa B.V., ExxonMobil Development Company, ExxonMobil Egypt (S.A.E.), ExxonMobil Exploracao Brasil Ltda., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Malaysia Inc., ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Norway AS, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Romania Limited, ExxonMobil Exploration and Production Tanzania Limited, ExxonMobil Finance Company Limited, ExxonMobil Financial Investment Company Limited, ExxonMobil France Holding SAS, ExxonMobil Gas Marketing Europe Limited, ExxonMobil General Finance Company, ExxonMobil Global Services Company, ExxonMobil Golden Pass Surety LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Company Holland LLC, ExxonMobil Holding Norway AS, ExxonMobil Hong Kong Limited, ExxonMobil International Services SARL, ExxonMobil Iraq Limited, ExxonMobil Italiana Gas S.r.l., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Inc., ExxonMobil Kazakhstan Ventures Inc., ExxonMobil LNG Services B.V., ExxonMobil Lubricants Trading Company, ExxonMobil Oil Corporation, ExxonMobil PNG Limited, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical BVBA, ExxonMobil Petroleum & Chemical Holdings Inc., ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, ExxonMobil Production Deutschland GmbH, ExxonMobil Production Norway Inc., ExxonMobil Qatargas (II) Limited, ExxonMobil Qatargas Inc., ExxonMobil Ras Laffan (III) Limited, ExxonMobil Rasgas Inc., ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company, ExxonMobil Russia Kara Sea Holdings B.V., ExxonMobil Sales and Supply LLC, ExxonMobil Technology Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Finance Company, ExxonMobil Ventures Funding Ltd., Fujian Refining & Petrochemical Co. Ltd., Golden Pass LNG Terminal Investments LLC, Golden Pass LNG Terminal LLC, Gulf Coast Growth Ventures LLC, Imperial Oil Limited, Imperial Oil Resources Limited, Imperial Oil Resources N.W.T. Limited, Imperial Oil/Petroliere Imperiale, Infineum Italia s.r.I., Infineum Singapore Pte. Ltd., InterOil Corporation, Jurong Aromatics Corporation Pte Ltd, MPM Lubricants, Marine Well Containment Company LLC, Mobil Australia Resources Company Pty Limited, Mobil California Exploration & Producing Asset Company, Mobil Caspian Pipeline Company, Mobil Chemical Products International Inc., Mobil Corporation, Mobil Equatorial Guinea Inc., Mobil Erdgas Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Mobil Exploration & Producing Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil International Petroleum Corporation, Mobil Oil Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil Oil Exploration & Producing Southeast Inc., Mobil Oil New Zealand Limited, Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited, Mobil Producing Texas & New Mexico Inc., Mobil SerLimited, Mobil Venezolana De Petroleos Inc., Mobil Yanbu Petrochemical Company Inc., Mobil Yanbu Refining Company Inc., Mountain Gathering LLC, Mozambique Rovuma Venture S.p.A., Palmetto Transoceanic LLC, Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas Global Company LDC, Permian Express Partners LLC, Phillips Exploration LLC, Qatar Liquefied Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited (II), SPI Limited, Saudi Aramco Mobil Refinery Company Ltd., Saudi Yanbu Petrochemical Co., SeaRiver Maritime Inc., South Hook LNG Terminal Company Limited, Tengizchevroil LLP, Terminale GNL Adriatico S.r.l, Trend Gathering & Treating LLC, Wolverine Pipe Line Company, XH LLC, XTO Delaware Basin LLC, XTO ENERGY, XTO Energy Canada, and XTO Holdings LLC.
The following companies are subsidiares of Accenture: (Accenture Endustriyel Yazlm Cozumleri Limited Sirketi), 2nd Road, ?What If!, ?What If! China Holdings Limited, ?What If! Holdings Limited, ?What If! Limited, ACN Consulting Co Ltd, AD.Dialeto (Digital Agency acquired by Accenture), AGS Business and Technology Services Limited, AIG Shared Services Business Processing Inc, ASM Research Inc., ASM Research LLC, ATAN, Accenture (Botswana) (Proprietary) Limited, Accenture (China) Co. Ltd., Accenture (Shenzhen) Technology Co. Ltd., Accenture (South Africa) Pty Ltd, Accenture (UK) Limited, Accenture 2 Business Process Services S.A., Accenture 2 LLC, Accenture A/S, Accenture AB, Accenture AG, Accenture AS, Accenture Africa Pty Ltd, Accenture Agencia Interativa Ltda, Accenture Australia Holding B.V., Accenture Australia Holdings Pty Ltd, Accenture Australia Pty Ltd, Accenture B.V., Accenture BPM Operations Support Services S.A., Accenture BPM S.C.R.L., Accenture BPS Services S.p. z o.o., 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 Canada Holdings Inc, Accenture Capital Designated Activity Company, Accenture Capital Inc, Accenture Central Europe B.V., Accenture Chile Asesorias y Servicios Ltda, Accenture Cloud Services GmbH, Accenture Cloud Software Solutions Limited, Accenture Cloud Solutions Australia Pty Ltd, Accenture Cloud Solutions LLC, Accenture Cloud Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Co Ltd, Accenture Co. Ltd, Accenture Communications Infrastructure Solutions Ltd, Accenture Company Ltd, Accenture Consulting Pty 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 SASU, Accenture Customer Services Ltd, Accenture Danismanlik Limited Sirketi, Accenture Defined Benefit Pension Plan Trustees Limited, Accenture Defined Contribution Pension Plan Trustees Limited, Accenture Delivery Poland S.p. z o.o., Accenture Dienstleistungen GmbH, 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 II Limited, Accenture Finance Limited, Accenture Finance and Accounting BPO Services S.p.A., Accenture Finance and Accounting Services S.r.l., Accenture Financial Advanced Solution & Technology S.r.l., Accenture Flex LLC, Accenture GP LLC, Accenture Global Capital Designated Activity Company, Accenture Global Engagements Limited, Accenture Global Holdings Limited, Accenture Global Services Limited, Accenture Global Solutions Limited, Accenture GmbH, Accenture HR Services S.p.A., Accenture Healthcare Processing Inc, Accenture Holding Brasil Ltda, Accenture Holding GmbH & Co. KG, Accenture Holdings (Iberia) S.L., Accenture Holdings B.V., Accenture Holdings France SASU, Accenture Hungary Holdings Kft, Accenture Inc, Accenture Industrial Software Limited Liability Company, Accenture Industrial Software Solutions Kft, Accenture Industrial Software Solutions SA, Accenture Insurance Services B.V., Accenture Insurance Services LLC, Accenture International B.V., Accenture International LLC, Accenture International Limited, Accenture Japan Ltd, Accenture Korea B.V., Accenture LLC, Accenture LLP, Accenture Lanka (Private) Ltd, Accenture Limited, Accenture Lithuania UAB, Accenture Ltd, Accenture Ltda, Accenture Maghreb S.a.r.l., Accenture Managed Services SRL, Accenture Management GmbH, Accenture Marketing Services LLC, Accenture Marketing Services Limited, Accenture Middle East B.V., Accenture Minority I B.V., Accenture Mozambique Limitada, Accenture Mzansi Pty Ltd, Accenture NV/SA, Accenture NZ Limited, Accenture Nova Scotia Unlimited Liability Co., Accenture OOO, Accenture Operations GmbH, Accenture Operations S.p. z o.o., Accenture Operations Services Private Limited, Accenture Operations Services Sdn Bhd, Accenture Outsourcing S.r.l., Accenture Outsourcing Services S.A., Accenture Oy, Accenture Panama Inc, Accenture Participations B.V., Accenture Participations II Limited, Accenture Peru SRL, Accenture Post Trade Processing SASU, Accenture Post-Trade Processing Limited, Accenture Process (Mauritius) Ltd, Accenture Pte Ltd, Accenture Puerto Rico LLC, Accenture Qiyun Technology (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd, Accenture S.C., Accenture S.L., Accenture S.R.L., Accenture S.p. z o.o., Accenture S.p.A., Accenture SASU, Accenture SG Services Pte Ltd, Accenture SRL, Accenture Saudi Arabia Limited, Accenture Sdn Bhd, Accenture Service Center SRL, Accenture Services (Mauritius) Ltd, Accenture Services AB, Accenture Services AG, Accenture Services AS, Accenture Services GmbH, Accenture Services Morocco SA, Accenture Services Oy, Accenture Services Pty Ltd, Accenture Services S.p. z o.o., Accenture Services SRL, Accenture Services and Technology S.r.l., Accenture Services s.r.o., Accenture Single Member S.A. Organization Information Technology & Business Development, Accenture Solutions Co. Ltd, Accenture Solutions Private Limited, Accenture Solutions Pte Ltd, Accenture Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Solutions S.p. z o.o, Accenture Solutions Sdn Bhd, Accenture State Healthcare Services LLC, Accenture Sub II Inc, Accenture Sub III Inc, Accenture Sub LLC, Accenture Systems Integration Limited, Accenture Sarl, Accenture Tanacsado Kolatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Accenture Technology Solutions (Dalian) Co. Ltd., Accenture Technology Solutions (HK) Co. Ltd., Accenture Technology Solutions (Thailand) Co. Ltd, 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 S.r.l., Accenture Technology Solutions SASU, Accenture Technology Solutions SRL, Accenture Technology Solutions Sdn Bhd, Accenture Technology Solutions Slovakia s.r.o., Accenture Technology Ventures B.V., Accenture Technology Ventures SPRL, Accenture Tecnologia Consultoria y Outsourcing S.A., Accenture Uruguay SRL, Accenture Vietnam Co. Limited, Accenture Zambia Limited, Accenture do Brasil Ltda, Accenture plc, Accenture s.r.o., Acceria, Acquity Group, Adaptly LLC, Adaptly UK Limited, AddVal Technology, Adqptly, Advantium Inc., Advoco, Agilex Technologies Inc., Allen International, AlphaBeta Advisors, Altevie Technologies S.r.l., Altima, Altima (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Altima Asia Ltd, Altitude, Altitude LLC, Altius Consulting Limited, Altius Data Solutions Private Limited, Analytics 8 LP, Analytics 8 Pty Ltd, Analytics8, Aorui Advertising (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Apis, Apis Group Pty Ltd, Appaloosa Technology SASU, AppsPro, Arca, Arca Ingenieros y Consultoria S.L., Arca Telecom S.L., Ariba - BPO, Arismore, Artio People (Payroll) Pty Ltd, Artio People Pty Ltd, Aspiro Solutions (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Automation Partners Pty Ltd, Avanade (Guangzhou) Computer Technology Development Co. Ltd., Avanade Asia Pte Ltd, Avanade Australia Pty Ltd, Avanade Belgium SPRL, Avanade Canada Inc, Avanade Consulting Poland S.p. z o.o., Avanade Denmark A/S, Avanade Deutschland GmbH, Avanade Europe Holdings Limited, Avanade Europe Services Limited, Avanade Finland Oy, Avanade France SASU, Avanade Holdings LLC, Avanade Hong Kong Ltd, Avanade Inc, Avanade International Corporation, Avanade Ireland Limited, Avanade Italy S.r.l., Avanade Japan KK, Avanade Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Avanade Middle East Limited, Avanade Netherlands B.V., Avanade Norway AS, Avanade Poland S.p. z o.o., Avanade Schweiz GmbH, Avanade South Africa Pty Ltd, Avanade Spain S.L., Avanade Sweden AB, Avanade UK Limited, Avanade do Brasil Ltda, Avanade Osterreich GmbH, Avenai, Axia Ltd., BABCN LLC, BCS Consulting, BCT Solutions, BCT Solutions Pty Ltd, BENEXT, BPO Servicos Administrativos Ltda, BRIDGE Energy Group, Beacon Consulting Group Inc., Beijing Genesis Interactive Technology Co. Ltd., Beijing Zhidao Future Consulting Co. Ltd, Benext, Berico Technologies LLC, Bionic, Bionic Solution LLC, Blue Horseshoe, Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications, Bow & Arrow, Bow & Arrow Limited, Brand Learning, Brand Learning Group Limited, Brightstep AB, Byte Prophecy, Byte Prophecy Private Limited, CAS, CRMWaypoint, CS Technology (Australia) Pty Ltd, CS Technology (UK) Limited, CS Technology Group LLC, CS Technology LLC, CadenceQuest Inc., Callisto Integration Europe B.V., Callisto Integration Europe Limited, Callisto Integration LLC, Callisto Integration Ltd, Capgemini - North American health practice, Capital Consultancy Services Inc, Certus Solutions Consulting Services Limited, Certus Solutions Ltd, ChangeTrack Research Pty Ltd., Chaotic Moon Studios, Chengdu Mensa Advertising Co. Ltd., Cimation, Cirrus Connect Australia Pty Ltd, Cirrus Connect Limited, Cirruseo, Clarity Insights, Clearhead, Clearhead Group LLC, ClientHouse GmbH, Cloud Sherpas, Cloud Sherpas (GA) LLC, Cloud Sherpas Japan G.K., Cloud Sherpas New Zealand Limited, Cloudeasier SAS, Cloudpoint Limited, Cloudsherpas Inc, Cloudworks, Cloudworks Consulting Services Inc, Cloudworks Technology LLC, Computer Research and Telecommunications LLC, Concrete Desenvolvimento de Sistemas Ltda, Concrete Solutions, Concrete Solutions Ltda, Context Information Security, Context Information Security LLC, Context Information Security Limited, CoreCompete LLC, CoreCompete Limited, CoreCompete Private Limited, Corliant Inc., Creative Drive LLC, Creative Drive US LLC, CreativeDrive, CreativeDrive Digital Content Services (Shenzhen) Co Ltd., CreativeDrive EMEA Limited, CreativeDrive Singapore Pte Ltd, CreativeDrive UK Group Limited, Cutting Edge Solutions Limited, Cygni AB, Cygni Norrsken AB, Cygni Stockholm AB, Cygni Syd AB, Cygni Vast AB, Cygni Ost AB, Cygni Ostersund AB, DAZ Systems Inc, DAZ Systems LLC, DAZSI Systems (India) Pvt. Limited, DI Futures Corporation, Data Essential SARL, Davies Consulting, DayNine Consulting, DayNine Consulting (New Zealand) Limited, DayNine Consulting LLC, Declarative Holdings LLC, Decora Marketplace LLC, Decorado Marketplace Ltda-EPP, Defense Point Security, Deja vu Security, Design Strategy and Research de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Designaffairs LLC, Digiplug S.A.S., Digital Results Group LLC, Double Digit Limitada, Double Digit Pty SA, Droga5, Droga5 LLC, Droga5 Studios LLC, Droga5 UK Limited, Duck Creek Technologies, ESR Labs, ESR Labs AG, EdenOne Solutions Limited, Edenhouse ERP Holdings Limited, Edenhouse Solutions Limited, Enaxis Consulting, Enaxis Consulting LP, End to End Analytics LLC, End-to-End Analytics, Endorphin Medici (M) Sdn Bhd, Energuia Web S.A., Energy Management Brokers Limited, EnergyQuote JHA, Enimbos, Enimbos Global Services S.L., Enkitec, Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions LLC, 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, Enthusian Pty Ltd, Entropia, Entropia (M) Sdn Bhd, Entropia Holdings Pte Ltd, Entropia Intercraft Sdn Bhd, Epylon, Espedia S.r.l., Ethica Consulting Group, Ethica Consulting S.p.A., Evopro Group, Exactside Limited, Experity, Exton Consulting, Exton Consulting Spain Strategy&Management S.L., Exton Germany GmbH, Exton International SAS, Exton Italia S.r.l., Exton SAS, FGM LLC, Fairway Technologies Inc, Farah BidCo Limited, Farah MidCo Limited, Farah Topco Limited, Filmproduction ApS, First Annapolis Consulting Inc., First Annapolis Consulting LLC, Fjord, Focus Group Europe, Formicary, Fruendo S.r.l., FusionX, Future State Consulting LLC, FutureMove (Beijing) Automotive Technology Co. Ltd., FutureMove Automotive, FutureMove Automotive Co. Ltd., GRA Supply Chain Pty Ltd, Gagel Group S de R.L. de C.V., Gapso Servicos de Informatica Ltda, Gapso Servicos de Informatica Ltda., Genfour, George Group Consulting L.P., Gestalt LLC, Gevity, Gren utvikling AS, H.B. Maynard and Co. Inc., HRC Retail Advisory, Hagberg Consulting Group, Hahntel Ltda, Halo Partners LLC, Hamilton Holding Company S.A, Hangzhou Aiyunzhe Technology Co. Ltd., Happen, Happen GP Limited, Happen Limited, Hjaltelin Stahl, Hjaltelin Stahl A/S, Hjaltelin Stahl K/S, Hytracc Consulting AS, Hytracc Consulting Malaysia Sdn Bhd, IBB Consulting, ICM.S S.r.l., IMJ Corp, IMJ Corporation, INSITUM, IQSP Consulting LLC, IT One Company Limited, ITBS Servicios Bancarios de Tecnologia de la Informacion SL, Icon Integration, Icon Integration (NZ) Limited, Icon Integration Pty Ltd, Imagine Broadband (USA) Limited, Imagine Broadband USA LLC, Imaginea Inc, Imaginea Technologies LLC, Industrie IT (Hong Kong) Ltd, Industrie IT (Singapore) Pte Ltd, Industrie IT Group Pty Ltd, Industrie IT Pty Ltd, Industrie&Co, Infinity Works Consulting Limited, Infinity Works Holdings Limited, Infinity Works Management Limited, Infinity Works Midco Limited, Informatica de Euskadi S.L., Innotec International EAD, Innotec International S.p. z.o.o., Innotec Marketing GmbH, Innotec Marketing International Ireland Limited, Innotec- Marketing Spain S.L, Insitum Consultoria Argentina SRL, Insitum Consultoria S.A. de C.V., International Biometric Group LLC, International Biometric Group UK Limited, Intrepid, Intrepid Futureworks Sdn Bhd, Intrigo Systems Inc, Intrigo Systems India Pvt. Limited, Intrigo Systems LLC, Inventor Technology Ltd, InvestTech, Investtech Systems Consulting LLC, ItSafer Continuity Services S.L., JKD Consulting LLC, Javelin Group, K Comms Group Limited, KSC Studio LLC, 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 Limited, Kogentix Singapore Pte Ltd, Kogentix Technologies Private Limited, Kolle Rebbe, Kolle Rebbe GmbH, Kream Comms Limited, Kunstmaan, Kurt Salmon, Kurt Salmon Canada LTD, Kurt Salmon US LLC, LEXTA, LINKBYNET, LINKBYNET Indian Ocean (L.I.O) Ltd, LabAnswer, Lexta GmbH, Lexta UK Limited, Lien par le reseau Inc, Lien par le reseau infrastructures Inc, Lin Bo (Shanghai) Network Technology Co. Ltd., Link By Net SAS, Link By Net SRL, Link By Net Vietnam Company Limited, Linkbynet East Asia Ltd, Linkbynet Singapore Pte Ltd., Loud & Clear Creative Pty Ltd, Lumenup S.A., MAXIM Systems Inc., MCG US Holdings LLC, Mackevision CG Technology and Service (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Mackevision Japan Co. Ltd., Mackevision Korea Ltd, Mackevision Medien Design, Mackevision Medien Design GmbH, Mackevision Singapore Pte Ltd, Mackevision UK Limited, Maglan, Maglan Information Defense Technologies Research Ltd, Maihiro, Matter, Maud Corp Pty Ltd, Maxamine International, Measuretek LLC, Media Audits Ltd., Media Hive, Mediasenz Pty Ltd., Meredith Specialty LLC, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing LLC, Meridian Informed Purchasing Ltd., Mindtribe, Mistral Wind Operations  Servicos Empresariais Unipessoal Lda., MobGen, Mortgage Cadence LLC, Mortgage Cadence an Accenture Company, Most Champion Ltd, Mudano, Mudano Limited, Myrtle Consulting Group LLC, N3 (Dalian) Business Consulting Co. Ltd., N3 Brazil Consultoria em Marketing Ltda, N3 Germany GmbH, N3 LLC, N3 North America LLC, N3 Results Australia Pty Ltd, N3 Results Ireland Limited, N3 Results Japan G.K., N3 Results Limited, N3 Results Malaysia Sdn Bhd, N3 Results Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., N3 Results S.A.S., N3 Results Singapore Pte Ltd, N3 Results Unipessoal Lda, NYTEC, Nanjing Demeng Advertising Co. Ltd., Nashco Consulting, NaviSys Inc., Nell'Armonia Israel Ltd, Nell'Armonia SAS, Nell'Participation SAS, NellArmonia, Neo Metrics Analytics S.L., Neo Metrics Chile S.A., New Content, New Content Editora e Produtora Ltda, New Energy Group, News Imaging LLC, NewsPage, NewsPage (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, NewsPage Pte Ltd, Northstream, Novetta Holdings LLC, Novetta LLC, Novetta Solutions LLC, Novetta Topco LLC, OCTO Technology, OPS Rules Management Consultants, Octagon Research Solutions Inc., Octo Technology Pty Ltd, Octo Technology SA, Odgaard ApS, Olikka, Olikka Pty Ltd, Openmind, Openmind S.r..l., Openminded, Openminded SAS, Operaciones Accenture S.A. de C.V., OpusLine, Orbium, Orbium AG, Orbium Consulting Limited, Orbium Inc., Orbium Ltd, Orbium Pte Ltd, Orbium Pty Ltd, Origin Digital, PCO Innovation, PLM Systems S.r.l, PRION GmbH, PT Accenture, PT Asta Catur Indra, PT Kogentix Teknologi Indonesia, PacificLink Group, Paja Finanssipalvelut Oy, Parker Fitzgerald Inc, Parker Fitzgerald International Limited, Parker Fitzgerald Limited, Parker Fitzgerald PTY Ltd, Parker Fitzgerald Services Limited, Parker Fitzgerald Solutions Limited, Pecaso Ltd., Pegasus Production A/S, Pegasus Production K/S, Phase One Consulting Group, Pillar Technology, Pollux, Pollux Automation Mexico S.A. de C.V., Pollux Canada Inc, Pollux S.A.S., Pollux USA LLC, Pragsis Bidoop, Pragsis Bidoop UK Limited, Pramati Technologies Europe Limited, Pramati Technologies Private Limited, Presence of IT Workforce Management North America LLC, PrimeQ, PrimeQ Australia Pty Ltd, PrimeQ Ltd, PrimeQ NZ Pty Limited, Procurian Inc., Prof. Homburg GmbH, Proquire LLC, PureApps Ltd., Qi Jie Beijing Information Technologies Co. Ltd., RBCP Fund 1-A Vapor Blocker LLC, RBCP Platform Vapor Blocker I LLC, REPL Consulting LLC, REPL Consulting Limited, REPL Digital Limited, REPL Group K.K., REPL Group Pty Ltd, REPL Group Worldwide Limited, REPL Pte Ltd, REPL Software Limited, REPL Technology Limited, Radiant Services LLC, Random Walk Computing Inc., Reactive Media Pty Ltd., Real Protect, Realworld OO Systems Ltd., Redcore, Redcore (New Zealand) Limited, Redcore Group Holdings Pty Ltd, Redcore Pty Ltd, Revolutionary Security, RiskControl, Root LLC, Rothco, Rothco Limited, S3 TV Technology Ltd., SALT Solutions GmbH, SEC Servizi, SOPIA Corp., Sagacious Consultants, Salt Solutions, Sandbox Studio LLC, Sapling Bidco Limited, Sapling Midco Limited, Sapling Topco Limited, Schlumberger Business Consulting, Seabury Aviation & Aerospace (UK) Limited, Seabury Consulting, Seabury Corporate Advisors LLC, Seabury Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Search Technologies BPO Inc, Search Technologies International LLC, Search Technologies LLC, Search Technologies Limited, Securiview SAS, Sentelis, Sentor Managed Secuirty Services AB, Servicios Tecnicos de Programacion Accenture S.C., Seven Seas Business Ventures LLC, Shackleton, Shackleton Chile S.A., Shackleton S.L.U., Shanghai Baiyue Advertising Co. Ltd., Shun Zhe Technology Development Co. Ltd., SigInt Technologies LLC, Silveo, Silveo Consulting India Private Limited, Simian Pty Ltd, SinnerSchrader, SinnerSchrader AG, SinnerSchrader Content GmbH, SinnerSchrader Deutschland GmbH, Sirvart S.A., Sistemes Consulting S.L., Skylink SAS, Soltians Limited, Solutions IQ LLC, SolutionsIQ, SolutionsIQ India Consulting Services Private Limited, Somers Ventures Ireland Limited, Somers Ventures LLC, Spacelink SAS, Storm Digital, Structure Consulting Group LLC, Sutter Mills, Synership LLC, Systor AG, TXF LLC, TargetST8, Tech - Avanade Portugal Unipessoal Lda, Tecnilogica Ecosistemas S.A., Tecnilogica, The Brand Learning Partners Limited, The Callisto Integration Corporation, The Monkeys, The Monkeys Pty Ltd, The Myrtle Group, Total Logistics, Tquila, Trivadis, Trivadis Austria GmbH, Trivadis Denmark AS, Trivadis Germany GmbH, Trivadis Holding AG, Trivadis Partner AG, Trivadis Services AG, Trivadis Services SRL, Troop Studios Pty Ltd, VanBerlo, Vector Acquisition Company LLC, Vector Topco LLC, Verax Solutions, Vertical Retail Consulting (Shanghai) Ltd, Vertical Retail Consulting Ltd, Vivere Brasil Servicos e Solucoes SA, Vivere Brasil Solucoes De Credito Ltda., Wabion GmbH, WaveStrike LLC, White Cliffs Consulting LLC, Wire Stone, Wire Stone LLC, Wise Partners SAS, Wolox, Wolox Colombia S.A.S, Wolox LLC, Wolox Mexico S.R.L de C.V., Wolox S.A., Wolox SpA, Workforce Insight, Workforce Insight LLC, Yesler, Yesler LLC, Yesler Limited, Yesler Singapore Pte Ltd, Zag, Zag Australia Pty Ltd, Zag Limited, Zag USA LLC, Zebra Worldwide Australia Pty Ltd, Zebra Worldwide Group Limited, Zebra Worldwide Media Pty Ltd, Zenta, 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, solid-serVision.com GmbH, and umlaut.
Aguia Resources Limited engages in the exploration and development of mineral resource projects in Brazil. The company primarily explores for phosphate and copper deposits. Its principal project is the TrAs Estradas property located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul State, Southern Brazil. The company controls approximately 1,573 square kilometers of land in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Paraiba, and Minas Gerais containing phosphate mineralization through exploration permits. It also invests in the resources sector. Aguia Resources Limited was incorporated in 2007 and is based in Sydney, Australia.

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Allied Minds plc is a private equity and venture capital firm specializing in pre-seed, seed, start-up, and early stage technology investments. The firm prefers to invest across all products, services, and industries with a focus on the life science and technology sector including medical devices, diagnostics, biopharmaceuticals, big data, cyber security, communications, semiconductors, and food safety. It primarily invests in companies based in the United States, but depending on opportunities this could be expanded to a global network of partners and investments. The firm typically invests between $0.25 million and $1 million in seed investments and from $5 million to $10 million in Series A investments. The firm focuses on commercializing technologies from leading United States Universities and national labs. It seeks to take majority equity positions in its portfolio companies. The firm partners with universities to fund licensing deals and corporate spin-outs. It prefers to continue to invest alongside a syndicate for larger Series A and follow-on rounds. Allied Minds plc is based in Boston, Massachusetts with additional offices in London, United Kingdom; Los Angeles, California; Seattle, Washington; New York; New York and Washington, DC.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Archer-Daniels-Midland: ADM (Shanghai) Management Co. LTD, ADM (Thailand) Ltd, ADM Ag Holdings Ltd, ADM Agri-Industries Company, ADM Agriculture Limited, ADM Agro Iberica S. L. U., ADM Agro Indust Latur and Vizag Pvt Ltd, ADM Agro Industries India Private Limited, ADM Agro Industries KOTA and AKOLA Pvt. Ltd., ADM Agro SRL, ADM Agroinvestimentos LTDA, ADM Alliance Nutrition of Puerto Rico LLC, ADM Americas S de RL, ADM Andina Peru SRL, ADM Antwerp NV, ADM Arkady Ireland Limited, ADM Asia-Pacific Trading Pte. Ltd., ADM Australia Holdings I PTY Limited, ADM Bio Science And Technology (Tianjin) Co Ltd, ADM Bioproductos SA DE CV, ADM CZERNIN SA, ADM Caribbean Inc, ADM Chile Comercial LTDA, ADM Clinton Bioprocessing Inc, ADM DO Brasil LTDA, ADM Direct Polska SP. ZO.O, ADM Dominican Holdings Inc., ADM Dominicana SA, ADM Edible Bean Specialties Inc, ADM Europe HoldCo SL, ADM European Holdings LLC, ADM European Management Holding GMBH, ADM Export Co, ADM Food Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., ADM France, ADM Germany GmbH, ADM Grain River System Inc., ADM Hamburg Aktiengesesllschaft, ADM Holding (Thailand) LTD, ADM Holdings LLC, ADM Hungary Agro Trading LLC, ADM Industries Centers Ltd, ADM International Holdings Inc, ADM International SARL, ADM Interoceanic LTD, ADM Investments LTD, ADM Investor Services Inc, ADM Investor Services International LTD, ADM Ireland Receivables Company Limited, ADM Israel, ADM Japan Ltd, ADM MALBORK SA, ADM Mainz GMBH, ADM Medsofts Sarl, ADM Mexico Inc, ADM Mexico SA DE CV, ADM Milling Co, ADM Milling LTD, ADM New Zealand Limited, ADM Olomouc S.R.O., ADM Paraguay SRL, ADM Protexin Limited, ADM Pura Limited, ADM Receivables LLC, ADM Rice Inc, ADM Ringaskiddy Unlimited Company, ADM Romania Logistics SRL, ADM Romania Trading SRL, ADM Specialty Ingredients - Europe BV, ADM Spyck GMBH, ADM Szamotuly SP Z O.O, ADM Trading Australia Pty. Ltd., ADM Trading Co, ADM Transportation Company, ADM Trucking Inc, ADM Vietnam CO. LTD, ADM WILD Europe GmbH and Co. KG, ADM WILD Ingredients GmbH, ADM WILD Nauen GmbH, ADM WILD Valencia S.A., ADM Wild Netherlands BV, ADM Worldwide Holdings LP, ADMIS Holding Co Inc., ADMIS Hong Kong LTD, ADMIS Singapore Pte Limited, AOR, AT Holdings II Company, Agri Port Services Investments Ltd., Agri Port Services LLC, Agricolas Madagascar SARLU, Agrinational Insurance Co, Agriserve, Agrograin LTD, Alfrebro LLC, Alfred C Toepfer International Netherlands BV, Alimenta USA, American River Transportation Company LLC, Ameriseed, Amylum Bulgaria EAD, Amylum Nisasta Sanayi Ve Ticarek Anonim Sirketi, Archer Daniels Midland (UK) Limited, Archer Daniels Midland Asia Pacific Ltd., Archer Daniels Midland Erith LTD, Archer Daniels Midland Europe BV, Archer Daniels Midland Europoort BV, Archer Daniels Midland Nederland BV, Archer Daniels Midland Singapore PTE LTD, Arinos Unlimited, Aston Foods & Food Ingredients, Balanceados Nova SA Balnova, Barbados Mills Limited, Bela Vista Bio Etanol Participacoes LTDA, Bern Aqua, BioPolis SL, Biopolis, Campa Sued GmbH & Co KG, Cattleman's Choice Loomix LLC, Chamtor, Ci ADM Colombia Ltda., Controladora ADM Sa De Cv, Crosswind Petfoods Inc., Daavision BV, Eaststarch, Eatem Corporation, Eatem Foods, Elstar Oils, English River Pellets Inc., Epicore Bionetworks INC, Epicore Networks (USA) INC, Erich Ziegler GmbH, Evialis France, Fasco Mills Co., Filozoo SRL, Florida Chemical, Florida Chemical Company LLC, GP Blanching Inc., Global Cocoa Holdings LTD, Golden Peanut Company LLC, Golden Peanut and Tree Nut Seed SA (PTY) LTD, Golden Peanut and Tree Nuts SA, Group Lysac, Guyomarc'h - VCN Company Limited, Guyomarc'h Vietnam CO LTD, HFR Shipping Company Ltd, HRA Shipping Company Ltd, HTI Shipping Company Ltd, Harvest Innovations, Hilltop Grain and Feed, Holding P and A Asia Company Limited, Hubei Meiweiyuan Biotechnology, Ilitchevskiy Maslo Extractionniy Zavod (IMEZ), Invivo NSA Asia PTE LTD, Invivo NSA Philippines Inc, Jamaica Flour Mills Limited, Julius Meijer-Alpharma BV, LLC ADM Ukraine, Liquid Feed Commodities, Malta Industries SA de CV, Malta-Texo De Mexico SA de CV, Master Mix of Trinidad LTD, Medsofts Investment Co, Medsofts L.L.C., Medsofts Trading Co, Mepla Comercio e Navegacao Ltda, NRG Inc, Naviera Chaco SRL, Neovia, Neovia Latina SL, Neovia Nutricao E Saude Animal LTDA, North Star Shipping S.R.L., P and A Marketing SA, PJSC ADM Illichivsk, PT Wirifa Sakti, Pancosma (Shanghai) Feed Additives CO LTD, Pancosma France SAS, Pancosma SA, Premiere Agri Technologies of Mexico Inc, Pura Foods LTD, Rodelle Inc., Schokinag-Schokolade-Industrie Herrmann, Sermix, Setna Nutricion SA, Societe Industrielle Des Oleagineux, Southern Cellulose Products Inc, Soy Investors LLC, Specialty Commodities, Specialty Commodities LLC, Sul Mineira Alimentos LTDA, SzSzV Kft, Toepfer International, Toepfer International Trading (Shanghai) Co. LTD., Vantage Corn Processors LLC, WILD Amazon Flavors Ltda, WILD Flavors, Wild Flavors Inc., Wild Flavors International GmbH, Wild Flavors Singapore Pte. Ltd., Wild Intermare GmbH, Wild Russia LLC, and Wisium SA (PTY) LTD.
Scout Security Limited provides home security systems and services in the United States. The company's products include hub that connects sensors and Scout's integrations; door panel, which monitors the opening and closing of door, houses a loud siren to deter intruders, and equipped with an RFID reader so one can arm and disarm system without a phone; and motion sensor that monitors room with one sensor for monitoring critical paths through a house; and access sensor, which detects opening and closing of windows, doors, cabinets, and safes. It also offers indoor cameras, video doorbells, keypads, water sensors, glass break sensors, smoke alarm, and door locks, as well as refurbished products; and accessories, such as yard sign, panic button, remote control, siren and zigbee repeater, window sticker, key fobs, and RFID sticker. The company provides monitoring services. It sells its products and services directly through its Website, as well as through Amazon and Zego partners. The company was founded in 2013 and is based in Leederville, Australia.

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There is not enough analysis data for BlueRock Diamonds.

4.8 Community Rank

Outperform Votes BlueRock Diamonds has received 123 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes BlueRock Diamonds has received 46 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment BlueRock Diamonds has received 72.78% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about BlueRock Diamonds and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe BRD will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe BRD will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Sherwin-Williams: Acquire Sourcing LLC, CTS National Corporation, Comex North America Inc., Compania Sherwin-Williams S.A. de C.V., Contract Transportation Systems Co., Dongguan Lilly Paint Industries Ltd, Duron, EPS (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., EPS B.V., Geocel Holdings, Geocel Limited, Guangdong Valspar Paints Manufacturing Co Ltd., Inver East Med S.A., Inver France SAS, Inver GmbH, Inver Industrial Coating SRL, Inver Polska Spoka Z O.O, Inver Spa, Invercolor Bologna Srl, Invercolor Ltd, Invercolor Roma Srl, Invercolor Torino Srl, Invercolor Toscana Srl, Isocoat Tintas e Vernizes Ltda, Isva Vernici Srl, Leighs Paints, M.A. Bruder & Sons, Omega Specialty Products & Services LLC, Oy Sherwin-Williams Finland Ab, PT Sherwin-Williams Indonesia, PT Valspar Indonesia, Paint Sundry Brands, Pinturas Condor S.A., Pinturas Industriales S.A., Piton Paints Limited, Plasti-Kote Co. Inc., Plasti-kote Limited, Productos Quimicos y Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Quest Automotive Products UK Limited, Quetzal Pinturas S.A. de C.V., Ronseal (Ireland) Limited, SWIMC LLC, SWIPCO  Sherwin Williams do Brasil Propriedade Intelectual Ltda, Sherwin Williams Colombia S.A.S., Sherwin-Williams (Australia) Pty. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Belize) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (Caribbean) N.V., Sherwin-Williams (Ireland) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Sherwin-Williams (Nantong) Coatings Technology Co. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Nantong) Company Limited, Sherwin-Williams (S) Pte. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Shanghai) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Sherwin-Williams (Vietnam) Limited, Sherwin-Williams (West Indies) Limited, Sherwin-Williams Argentina I.y C.S.A., Sherwin-Williams Aruba VBA, Sherwin-Williams Automotive Mexico S.de R.L.de C.V., Sherwin-Williams Balkan S.R.L., Sherwin-Williams Bel Unitary Enterprise, Sherwin-Williams Benelux NV, Sherwin-Williams Canada Inc., Sherwin-Williams Cayman Islands Limited, Sherwin-Williams Chile S.A., Sherwin-Williams Coatings India Private Limited, Sherwin-Williams Coatings S.a r.l., Sherwin-Williams Czech Republic spol. s r.o, Sherwin-Williams Denmark A/S, Sherwin-Williams Deutschland GmbH, Sherwin-Williams Diversified Brands Limited, Sherwin-Williams France Finishes SAS, Sherwin-Williams Italy S.r.l., Sherwin-Williams Norway AS, Sherwin-Williams Paints Limited Liability Company, Sherwin-Williams Peru S.R.L., Sherwin-Williams Pinturas de Venezuela S.A., Sherwin-Williams Poland Sp. z o.o, Sherwin-Williams Protective & Marine Coatings, Sherwin-Williams Realty Holdings Inc., Sherwin-Williams Services (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Sherwin-Williams Spain Coatings S.L., Sherwin-Williams Sweden AB, Sherwin-Williams UK Coatings Limited, Sherwin-Williams do Brasil Industria e Comercio Ltda., Spanyc Paints Joint Stock Company, Syntema I Vaggeryd AB, Taiwan Valspar Co. Ltd., The Sherwin-Williams Acceptance Corporation, The Sherwin-Williams Headquarters Company, The Sherwin-Williams Manufacturing Company, The Sherwin-Williams US Licensing Company, The Valspar (Asia) Corporation Limited, The Valspar (Australia) Corporation Pty. Ltd., The Valspar (Finland) Corporation Oy, The Valspar (France) Corporation S.A.S., The Valspar (France) Research Corporation SAS, The Valspar (Malaysia) Corporation Sdn Bhd, The Valspar (Nantes) Corporation S.A.S., The Valspar (Singapore) Corporation Pte. Ltd, The Valspar (South Africa) Corporation (Pty) Ltd, The Valspar (Spain) Corporation S.R.L., The Valspar (Switzerland) Corporation AG, The Valspar (Thailand) Corporation Ltd., The Valspar (UK) Corporation Limited, The Valspar (Vietnam) Corporation Ltd., The Valspar Corporation, The Valspar Corporation Limitada, UAB Sherwin-Williams Baltic, Valspar (India) Coatings Corporation Private Limited, Valspar (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd., Valspar (Uruguay) Corporation S.A., Valspar (WPC) Pty Ltd, Valspar Aries Coatings S. de R.L. de C.V., Valspar Automotive (UK) Corporation Limited, Valspar Automotive Australia Pty Limited, Valspar B.V., Valspar Coatings (Guangdong) Co. Ltd., Valspar Coatings (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Valspar Coatings (Tianjin) Co. Ltd, Valspar D.o.o Beograd, Valspar Industries (Ireland) Ltd., Valspar Industries (Italy) S.r.l., Valspar Industries GmbH, Valspar LLC, Valspar Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Valspar Paint (Australia) Pty Ltd, Valspar Paint (NZ) Limited, Valspar Powder Coatings Limited, Valspar Rock Company Limited (Japan), Valspar Specialty Paints LLC, and ZAO Sherwin-Williams.
Suncor Energy Inc. operates as an integrated energy company. The company primarily focuses on developing petroleum resource basins in Canada's Athabasca oil sands; explores, acquires, develops, produces, transports, refines, and markets crude oil in Canada and internationally; markets petroleum and petrochemical products under the Petro-Canada name primarily in Canada. It operates in Oil Sands; Exploration and Production; Refining and Marketing; and Corporate and Eliminations segments. The Oil Sands segment recovers bitumen from mining and in situ operations, and upgrades it into refinery feedstock and diesel fuel, or blends the bitumen with diluent for direct sale to market. The Exploration and Production segment is involved in offshore operations off the east coast of Canada and in the North Sea; and operating onshore assets in Libya and Syria. The Refining and Marketing segment refines crude oil and intermediate feedstock into various petroleum and petrochemical products; and markets refined petroleum products to retail, commercial, and industrial customers through its other retail sellers. The Corporate and Eliminations segment operates four wind farm operations in Ontario and Western Canada. The company also markets and trades in crude oil, natural gas, byproducts, refined products, and power. The company was formerly known as Suncor Inc. and changed its name to Suncor Energy Inc. in April 1997. Suncor Energy Inc. was founded in 1917 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

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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.

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Close Brothers Group plc, a merchant banking company, provides financial services to small businesses and individuals in the United Kingdom. It operates through five segments: Commercial, Retail, Property, Asset Management, and Securities. The company offers various deposit products, including fixed term deposits and notice accounts. It also provides asset finance, asset-based lending, commercial vehicle hire, short-term bridging finance, insurance premium finance, invoice discounting and factoring, and property finance products. In addition, the company offers funding services for general aviation aircraft, and various leisure and commercial vessels; sale and rent back services for the brewing sector; broker finance services to agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and transport industries; leasing services for construction, manufacturing, IT equipment, and specialist assets; and loan, hire purchase, leasing, and refinancing services to the professional service sector, including dental, medical, pharmacy, and veterinary sectors. Further, it provides financial education, investment management, and financial planning and advice services; self-directed services that help investors to manage their portfolio online; and services for financial advisers. Additionally, the company offers liquidity and flexible execution services to retail stockbrokers, wealth managers, and institutional investors; market making, sales, research, and corporate broking services; and dealing, custody, and settlement services to the institutional, wealth management, and brokerage clients. Close Brothers Group plc was founded in 1878 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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There is not enough analysis data for Curzon Energy.

4.7 Community Rank

Outperform Votes Curzon Energy has received 36 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes Curzon Energy has received 16 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment Curzon Energy has received 69.23% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Curzon Energy and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe CZN will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe CZN will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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Interfor has only been the subject of 4 research reports in the past 90 days.

According to analysts' consensus price target of $45.17, Interfor has a forecasted upside of 61.0% from its current price of $28.06.

Interfor has received a consensus rating of Buy. The company's average rating score is 3.00, and is based on 4 buy ratings, 1 hold rating, and no sell ratings.

5.0 Community Rank

Outperform Votes Interfor has received 63 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes Interfor has received 9 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment Interfor has received 87.50% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about Interfor and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe IFSPF will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe IFSPF will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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Crawford & Company provides claims management and outsourcing solutions to the risk management and insurance industry, and self-insured entities. The company's Crawford Claims Solutions segment offers claims management services related to property, casualty, and catastrophe losses caused by physical damage to commercial and residential real properties, and personal properties, as well as marine losses. It also offers services in the areas of field investigation, catastrophe, evaluation, and resolution of property and casualty insurance claims; and various on-demand inspection, verification, and other task specific field services for businesses and consumers through a mobile platform. Its Crawford TPA Solutions segment provides claims and risk management services; desktop claim adjusting and claims evaluation services; initial loss reporting services for claimants; loss mitigation services, such as medical bill review and case management, and vocational rehabilitation services; and risk management information services, as well as administers trust funds established to pay claims. It offers services for workers' compensation, auto and liability, disability absence and medical management, and accident and health markets. The company's Crawford Specialty Solutions segment offers claims management services related to large and complex losses in various industries, such as commercial property, aviation, forensic accounting, marine and transportation, retail, building and construction, cyber, and energy. It also provides a customer-centric solution for various loss types comprising high-frequency and low-complexity claims, and large complex repairs; and outsourced contractor management services to personal and commercial insurance carriers, and consumer markets. The company operates in the United States, the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, Canada, Australia, and internationally. Crawford & Company was founded in 1941 and is based in Peachtree Corners, Georgia.

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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.

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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.

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There is not enough analysis data for San Leon Energy.

3.9 Community Rank

Outperform Votes San Leon Energy has received 198 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes San Leon Energy has received 145 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment San Leon Energy has received 57.73% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about San Leon Energy and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe SLE will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe SLE will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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Mexico's FICG Animation Competitions Go Global

Guadalajara, Jalisco - In a year of change and growth for Mexico's Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG), the revamped animation competitions, godfathered by Guadalajara native Guillermo del Toro, stood out as key examples of ambitions shared by the event's new leadership, headed by Vendo Cine co-founder and longtime FICG Industria head Estrella Araiza.

Where many animation-focused festivals and awards programs in Latin America tend to celebrate domestic or Ibero-American productions  think Mexico's Pixelatl, Spain's Quirino Awards  this year's selected films at Guadalajara demonstrate a global inclusion with less peers  France's Annecy Festival and Los Angeles' Annie Awards are good examples.

"I think it's important that every festival has its idiosyncrasies," explained Carolina Lopez, FICG's animation section curator. "FICG is a festival with a specific DNA and we have adding to that DNA with what will be almost a festival within a festival."

Previously FICG did have a dedicated prize for the best Mexican animated short, but nothing dedicated to features. 2019 saw the addition of a feature section while the Rigo Mora shorts competition has gone international.

"This year's selections, with the sponsorship of Guillermo del Toro, have given the animation section a more global vision and desire to inspire creation that already exists in the Mexican industry," Lopez said of the changes.

"The section defends the values that FICG has always stood for: the creativity of auteur cinema, promoting Ibero-American productions, diversity in cinema and building bridges between Mexico and the world," she continued. "The long-term idea is to generate collaboration flows between not just other Latin American countries, but the rest of the world." Read the full article on variety.com
There is not enough analysis data for ThinkSmart.

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Outperform Votes ThinkSmart has received 30 outperform votes. (Add your outperform vote.)

Underperform Votes ThinkSmart has received 18 underperform votes. (Add your underperform vote.)

Community Sentiment ThinkSmart has received 62.50% outperform votes from our community.

MarketBeat's community ratings are surveys of what our community members think about ThinkSmart and other stocks. Vote Outperform if you believe TSL will outperform the S&P 500 over the long term. Vote Underperform if you believe TSL will underperform the S&P 500 over the long term. You may vote once every thirty days.

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United Technologies Corporation provides technology products and services to building systems and aerospace industries worldwide. Its Otis segment designs, manufactures, sells, and installs passenger and freight elevators, escalators, and moving walkways; and offers modernization products to upgrade elevators and escalators, as well as maintenance and repair services. The company's Carrier segment provides heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration, fire, security, and building automation products, solutions, and services for commercial, government, infrastructure, residential, and refrigeration and transportation applications. This segment also offers building services, including audit, design, installation, system integration, repair, maintenance, and monitoring. Its Pratt & Whitney segment supplies aircraft engines for commercial, military, business jet, and general aviation markets; and provides aftermarket maintenance, repair, and overhaul, as well as fleet management services. The company's Collins Aerospace Systems segment provides electric power generation, power management, and distribution systems; air data and aircraft sensing systems; engine control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems; engine components; environmental control systems; fire and ice detection, and protection systems; propeller systems; engine nacelle systems; aircraft lighting, seating, and cargo systems; actuation and landing systems; space products and subsystems; avionics systems; flight controls, communications, navigation, oxygen, and training systems; food and beverage preparation, and storage and galley systems; and lavatory and wastewater management systems. The company offers its services through manufacturers' representatives, distributors, wholesalers, dealers, retail outlets, and sales representatives, as well as directly to customers. United Technologies Corporation was founded in 1934 and is headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut.

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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.

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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.

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March 18 a Mexican Holiday Celebrating Benito Juarez

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico - March 18 is a National Holiday, with banks, government offices and many businesses closed as Mexico celebrates Benito Juarez, who rose from humble origins to occupy the Presidency of the Republic on several occasions during the turbulent second half of the 19th century.

Though Juarez's birthday is actually March 21, the national holiday is celebrated every year on the third Monday of March (which this year falls on the 18th), to make a three-day weekend out of it.

One of Mexico's most renowned Presidents, often referred to as "the Lincoln of Mexico," Juarez is remembered for resisting the French occupation, overthrowing the Empire, and restoring the Republic, as well as for his liberal efforts to modernize the country. He was also the first indigenous man to be elected president of the United States of Mexico.





Born in the small Oaxacan village of San Pablo Guelatao in 1806, his is the classic folk-tale of the underdog who makes good; of an orphaned shepherd-boy who walked the 35 rugged miles to Oaxaca, speaking only Zapotec; of a liberal whose perseverance and unswerving vision won him an education, a career and a place in history as a reformer and statesman of note.

Juarez's life story is fascinating, a real example of determination. Young Benito was orphaned at four, labored as a shepherd, and didn't even speak Spanish or read and write any language until after moving to Oaxaca City at age 13. There he learned to speak, read and write Spanish, studied law, married, and entered politics.

Upon entering politics in 1834, Juarez served as a city councilman in Oaxaca, judge, a congressman, a senator, the governor of Oaxaca, as well as Mexico's justice minister and chief justice, until he was finally elected President in 1858.

Between 1858-1872 Benito Juarez served five terms as president, which included turbulent times for Mexico. In fact, he was president during two civil wars.

The first was the bloody "War of the Reform" (1858-1861), between Juarez' "liberals" and the "conservatives" who occupied Mexico City for most of the war. During this conflict, Juarez himself was captured, barely escaping a firing squad in Guadalajara.

That war was followed shortly after by the "French Intervention" of 1862-1867, in which the Mexican monarchists, the French Foreign Legion, and the Austrian Emperor Maximilian ruled from Mexico City, doggedly opposed by President Benito Juarez, who ran his Republic from the north of the country. After the Republican victory and Juarez's return to Mexico City, he continued as president (re-elected in 1867 and 1871) until 1872, when he died of a heart attack working at his desk in Mexico City.

The period of his leadership is known in Mexican history as La Reforma del Norte (The Reform of the North), and constituted a liberal political and social revolution with major institutional consequences: the expropriation of church lands, the subordination of army to civilian control, liquidation of peasant communal land holdings, and the separation of church and state in public affairs.

For these accomplishments he is often regarded as one of Mexico's greatest and most beloved leaders whose influence is still felt today.
Mexico Ships Inmates Out of Last Island Penal Colony

Mexico City - Mexico said Monday it has transferred all the inmates from the infamous Isla Marias prison, the last island penal colony in a hemisphere once dotted with remote island jails like the one depicted in the movie "Papillon."

About 584 of the prisoners have been moved to mainland jails in the northern border state of Coahuila, and 68 were taken elsewhere or released.

The federal government said Monday that 88 visitors - 16 of whom lived there - were also flown out aboard 21 flights starting Friday. The wives of six inmates and 10 of their children had lived on the island for years.

Families were allowed to live with some of the mostly low-risk inmates at the some of the five camps scattered throughout the main island.

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said the islands will be turned into a cultural and environmental education center. The four islands - only one of which is inhabited - are located 70 miles (110 kilometers) off the Pacific coast of Nayarit state.

Lopez Obrador celebrated the closure as one of the main achievements of his first 100 days in office. "I chose the closing of the Islas Marias penal colony as a symbolic act to commemorate these 100 days," he said Monday.

Ramon Ojeda Mestre, who headed a campaign to recover the islands' environment 15 years ago, said Monday "Finally. At last. A disastrous stage has ended."

"Now what we need is a slow recovery, in which environmental rationality should prevail."

Inmates, for example, had trapped native parrots to sell, and caught boa constrictors to make into belts.

The prison, founded in 1905 by the then president Porfirio Diaz, passed through periods of infamous brutality. When Panama closed its Isla Coiba penal colony in 2004, Isla Marias became the last one remaining in the Americas.

Lopez Obrador said the new Islas Marias cultural center will be named after Jose Revueltas, a novelist who was imprisoned there and wrote the novel "Walls of Water."

"Jose Revueltas must be happy, wherever he is, because this site, these islands will become camps for young people to visit these islands and get to know and protect nature," Lopez Obrador said Monday.

As recently as 2013 the colony had held 8,000 inmates.

Far from the bloody reputation of places like Devil's Island - the French Guiana penal colony shuttered in 1946 - toward the end, the Islas Marias harbored many lower-risk or well-behaved inmates and the colony was viewed as step toward release or rehabilitation.

While the prison kept mass tourism at bay, the islands suffered severe environmental degradation from over a century of use as a penal colony.

Island penal colonies were used around the world starting in the 1700s as remote, escape-proof places to "rehabilitate" inmates through hard labor.

Often known as "prisons without bars," with the ocean serving as the most effective barrier to escape, the penal colonies were also known for being at least in part self-supporting and a way to settle remote islands.

But in the end, the Islas Marias wound up costing Mexico far more per prisoner than did mainland jails.

Chile closed its Santa Maria prison island in the late 1980s, Costa Rica's Isla San Lucas penal colony closed in 1991 and Brazil's Isla Grande in 1994. Peru dramatically ended its El Fronton island prison in 1986: Gunboats blew up most of the buildings to put down a riot, killing more than 100 inmates.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  The Justice Department on Friday ordered the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to conduct a probe and case build-up on the controversial murder of a 16-year-old student in Lapu, Lapu, Cebu.

Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra issued the directive through Department Order No. 117.

The victim, who sustained numerous stab wounds to her neck and body, was found in a vacant lot Monday with her skull exposed and without undergarments.

Initial medico-legal report bared the victim, who was identified as Christine Silawan, was also missing a number of body organs including the neck, trachea, esophagus, and tongue.

Authorities added the victim may have been dead for 12 hours when they found her on the scene.

The Philippine National Police (PNP) on Friday meanwhile refused to give details on the identity of the suspect as the manhunt operation is still on-going.

A name and photo of the alleged suspect in the brutal killing surfaced online Thursday night, but the PNP refused to confirm the development.

Lapu-Lapu City Police Chief Senior Supt. Limuel Obon said reports identifying the suspect were "fake news." The victim's mother was also not convinced that the man in the viral photo is the suspect of the killing.

The bounty for the murder has hit 2 million, PNP also confirmed.

CNN Philippines Correspondents Anjo Alimario and Gerg Cahiles, and Cebu-based stringer Dale Israel contributed to this report.
by Kristina Knight

PSD2 uses multifactor authentication for all electronic payments an also implements third party access to payment accounts. Stronger authentication is a boon for merchants who are prepared to make customer authentication seamless for consumers, but many brands aren't ready for these changes. And, fraudsters moving in to regions where there are fewer consumer protections in place, because they can no longer steal from businesses or consumers with better protections, could leave these less-protected businesses with large targets.

"The merchants that succeed post PSD2 will be those that make consumer authentication as effortless as possible through methods like 'invisible' device-based authentication and biometrics. And with the likes of Facebook and Google becoming payment processors, merchants are going to have to compete with an ever widening marketplace," said Mark Weston, Compliance Manager, iovation.

More data from the iovation report can be accessed here.

Meanwhile, Forter has release their latest Fraud Attack Index, and among the more interesting findings is this: fraud rings have increased by about 26% YoY. Fraud rings are groups of fraudsters that band together to hack businesses or steal consumer and business data. Forter's report also found that because more fraudsters are using bots for mass logins, they can attempt nearly 100 attacks per second.

The report further found:

 Both Food/Beverage and Electronics industries have seen fraud increases of more than 70% YoY

 Policy Abuse has increase 170% since 2017 Q4 - policy abuse includes consumers cheating merchants by using coupons and discount codes

 Account takeovers have increased 45% YoY

 Returns abuse has decreased 90% YoY

"The shift in fraud attack methods shows that the online criminal community is continuing to increase in sophistication. Where once the point of transaction was the only point on the website a merchant had to worry about, now fraudsters strike at accounts which they can exploit in numerous ways including stealing gift card or coupon credit, stealing loyalty points and stealing personal information such as physical address or phone number," write the report authors.

Forter's Fraud Attack Index report can be accessed here.

Tags: ad fraud, advertising, ecommerce, ecommerce fraud, Forter, iovation, online payment trends
his new route is a manifestation of our future growth plan in these key and important business markets, said Sunil Bhaskaran, managing director and chief executive officer, AirAsia India. (Photo: File)

Mumbai: Low-cost carrier, AirAsia India on Friday announced the launch of its flight services to Kolkata from the city next month. This would be airline's second destination from Mumbai after it started operating daily services to Bengaluru from the country's financial capital.

AirAsia India will now fly connecting Kolkata and Mumbai, with one daily flight, effective April 15, the airline said in a release on Friday. The introduction of Mumbai-Kolkata route comes close on the heels of AirAsia India adding eighth additional flights to its network of 19 destinations.

"We recently introduced the first connection between Bengaluru and Mumbai and are now adding a new connection between Mumbai and Kolkata. It's a key market for AirAsia and this flight will strengthen our operations in the East". This new route is a manifestation of our future growth plan in these key and important business markets, said Sunil Bhaskaran, managing director and chief executive officer, AirAsia India.

AirAsia India, a joint venture between Tata Sons and Malaysian airlines' group AirAsia, currently operates to 19 domestic destinations with a fleet of 20 Airbus A320 planes.

The group had made its first entry in the Mumbai market with the launch of AirAsia Berhad services to here from Kuala Lumpur in May 2010. However, in 2012 it withdrew the route citing high airport charges. But came back again with its subsidiary Indonesian AirAsia X in May 2017, which was again discontinued in April last year.
Apex court in its judgement has ruled that special allowance is part of the basic wages for computing the EPF.

Kolkata: Provident Fund deduction related litigations with the EPFO is likely to reduce after the Supreme Court ruling that special allowance paid by an employer is part of basic wages for EPF dues computation.

The apex court in its judgement has ruled that special allowance is part of the basic wages for computing the employees provident fund (EPF).

The employer as well as the employee pay 12 per cent of basic wages each towards contribution for social security scheme run by the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO).

"The order just upheld the existing sections of the EPF Act. After this ruling, it is expected that litigations related to deductions toward provident fund will be reduced," RPFC Navendu Rai said on the sidelines of a seminar organised by the ICC on the EPF Act.

The apex court decision came when it was dealing with a question on whether special allowances paid by an establishment to its employees would fall within the expression "basic wages" under the provision of the Employees' Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 for computation of deduction towards provident fund.

Meanwhile, the Provident Fund (PF) balance transferred from one's ex-employer will become an automated process as the EPFO is doing away with the manual process in place now, Additional CPFC EPFO, S K Sangma said.
New York: Shares of Boeing have plunged more than 10 per cent since an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 jet crashed on Sunday, wiping more than 25 billion dollars off the company's market value.

The latest bad news for Boeing arrived on Wednesday afternoon when the United States joined other countries and grounded its 737 Max planes.

The shares fell 3 per cent immediately after US President Donald Trump announced the move from the White House, CNN reported.

The shares then rebounded in a sign that the grounding had been largely priced into Boeing's stock. But even after ending Wednesday slightly higher, the stock is still down more than 10 per cent since the crash, wiping more than 25 billion dollars off the company's market value.

The US grounding comes after two fatal crashes in the last five months involving the 737 Max 8 jet. A Lion Air flight crashed in Indonesia in October, and an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed on Sunday. Neither of the crashes left any survivors.

Investigators are still looking into the cause of both crashes, said CNN.

A preliminary investigation shows that pilots in the Lion Air crash struggled to get control of the plane after the nose was forced down by an automatic safety feature. The CEO of Ethiopian Airlines said his pilots also were reporting problems controlling the plane before the crash.

American Airlines, Southwest and United saw their shares briefly shoot lower on the news, and then quickly rebound to positive territory. It is very possible that Boeing will compensate the three carriers for lost revenue. There are 67 737 Max planes that operate between them.

Aviation authorities around the world have been ordering the planes to be grounded for the last three days. The United States was essentially the last country allowing the planes to fly.

Boeing said it remains confident in the safety of the jets, but that it recommended the shutdown itself "out of an abundance of caution and in order to reassure the flying public of the aircraft's safety," according to a statement from the company.
New Delhi: Aamir Khan, during an interactive session with media on Thursday, reacted on Kangana Ranaut's accusation that Aamir did not support her recent release Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi."

Soon after her first movie as a filmmaker hit the theatres across the country, Ranaut launched open attacks on B-town celebrities for not getting what she described as support for her films and allegedly ganging up against her. Apart from directly attacking actors like Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor, the actor also reportedly expressed her displeasure over Aamir not attending the trials of her films.

When asked to comment, the Thugs of Hindostan actor in his signature calm demeanour said, Oh she was upset with me? Why? She didnt say anything to me. I will ask her when I meet her

Aamir Khan said this during a press meet especially organised to celebrate his birthday with the media. It has become a ritual for the actor to start his birthday, every year, by cutting a cake with wife Kiran Rao and media at his residence in Mumbai's Bandra.
Thiruvananthapuram: Ilze Skomane, sister of a Latvian national who went missing at Kovalam Beach on March 14, 2018 and was found brutally murdered on April 20, 2018, has written a letter to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan urging him to speed up the case relating to her sisters murder on the first anniversary of her missing.

I am aware court proceedings can take a long time and have been patiently waiting and fallowing up by doing enquiries with Mr Manoj Abraham and the advocate assigned for my sisters case, Mr Mohan Raj. It has been hard to bear the thought that the accused who took my sisters life are walking free. It has come to my attention that it was due to inefficiency of police that the charge sheet was not filed on time. The court would have never granted them freedom for bail and the trial would have started long ago, she pointed out.

She urged the chief minister to put end to this long suffering and constitute a special court for justice to be severed to my Sister and give peace to my heartbroken family, in the almighty court the culprits should get their punishment in this life itself.
After visiting the injured people, Fadnavis said one is in the ICU while nine others are being treated in the wards and all of them are out of danger. (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Friday said that he has directed the municipal commissioner to do an initial investigation into the latest bridge collapse near CST in Mumbai. He has also asked to "fix primary responsibility by the evening".

After visiting the injured people, Fadnavis said one is in the ICU while nine others are being treated in the wards and all of them are out of danger.

Fadnavis said, The structural audit done recently is questionable and the person who gave the safety certificate after suggesting minor repairs has a "big responsibility".

Fadnavis said the he has instructed the Mumbai police not to spare anyone responsible for the collapse of the foot overbridge.

A First Information Report (FIR) has been registered and a high-level probe ordered into the incident the Chief Minister said.

Six people were killed and 33 injured after a portion of a foot overbridge near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus railway station collapsed on Thursday evening. The bridge connects the railway station to the Azad Maidan police station and the Times of India building in south Mumbai.

Meanwhile, the Railway ministry has blamed Brihanmumbai Corporation, the Mumbai civic body under the Shiv Sena, for the bridge collapse but Sena lawmaker, Anil Desai has denied the allegation.
Her family members filed a missing report in Banda police station late on Thursday evening when all their efforts to trace her did not yield results.

Bhopal: A dalit minor girl in a Madhya Pradesh village was kidnapped and later beheaded, police said on Friday.

The gory incident took place in Berkheda village under Sagar district in Bundelkhand region of the state.

According to the police, the victim, student of class six, was abducted when she was on her way from home to school in the village to appear her annual examination on Wednesday morning.

Her family members filed a missing report in Banda police station late on Thursday evening when all their efforts to trace her did not yield results.

The girls beheaded body was later spotted on the outskirt of the village by some locals. The severed head was lying a few meters away from the body.

We suspect that she might have been raped. However, postmortem report will only confirm it, Banda police station officer S. Singh said.

The victims family members suspected hand of one Chote Patel, a local, in the gruesome crime. Chote Patel was absconding, police said.
On February 7 around 8.30 pm, two employees Devaraj (35) and Murali (30) - of a private cash management service - were refilling cash in a Canara bank ATM kiosk near Moovendar Nagar in Iyyapanthangal. (Representational Image)

Chennai: The city police on Friday claimed to have cracked the Rs 10 lakh robbery belonging to Canara Bank and meant for ATMs, by arresting three people including a city-based woman college student. Sources said the other two are from Nigeria.

On February 7 around 8.30 pm, two employees Devaraj (35) and Murali (30) - of a private cash management service - were refilling cash in a Canara bank ATM kiosk near Moovendar Nagar in Iyyapanthangal.

When a gang of three members wearing helmets followed them and attacked them with an axe, both employees were heavily wounded. The gang fled with the cash boxes in seconds.. A case has been registered with the Maduravoyal police station.

Three special teams of police carried out investigations with clues from CCTV cameras in the area and mobile phone signals.

The police traced phone calls and took Akkyo Maya(27) and Aamu(26) into custody and based on the information provided by them, arrested a girl identified as Greya, 21, city-based college student, living in Manimangalam. She allegedly let the men stay at her residence and knew of the heist.

A special team of police has left for Mangalore to arrest the main accusedin the case who is allegedly in possession of the stolen cash. Investigations revealed that AkkyoMaya and Aamu hatched a conspiracy to loot the money.

Police said there is one more involved in the robbery and a manhunt had been launched to nab him.
New Delhi: In a major diplomatic success for India, France on Friday decided to impose sanctions on Pakistan-based terrorist and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code.

Pointing out that a joint decree of the (French) ministries of the interior, and economy and finance was published on Friday in the Official Gazette, France also declared that it would raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree.

Proclaiming that it always been and always will be by Indias side in the fight against terrorism, France made it clear that it had undertaken the action after the Pulwama terror attack last month that was carried out by the JeM.

The move comes within two days of China vetoing a proposal at the UN Security Council to designate Masood Azhar as a global terrorist. That proposal had been moved by France, along with the United States and Britain. Fridays action by France is also being seen as a clear snub to China, which is Pakistans all-weather benefactor.

In a joint statement put out by its foreign, finance and interior ministries, the French government said, France has decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code. We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree.
Tirupati: After announcing the first list of candidates for the Assembly elections, Telugu Desam Chief N. Chandrababu Naidu will kickstart his election campaign from the temple city of Tirupati on Saturday.

The TD national president will visit Tirupati to offer special pujas to Lord Venkateswara Swamy at Tirumala on Saturday.

Mr Naidu is set to reach Tirupati airport at around 9.55 am and will take the road to Tirumala, where he will arrive at the Padmavathi guest house by 11.00 am.

After having darshan of the Lord between 11.15 am to 11.45 am, Mr Naidu will go back to the guest house. He will start the campaign by addressing a public meeting between 1 pm and 3 pm at Tirupati.

It was earlier stated that the TD chief would attend an election campaign public meeting in Srikakulam district.

Later on Sunday, he will participate in the public meetings to be organised in four districts including Vizianagaram, Visakhapatnam and East & West Godavari districts.

On March 18, Mr. Naidu will cover Nellore, Guntur, Prakasam, Krishna districts. Following this, on March 19 he will attend public meetings in Kurnool, Anantapur, Kadapa districts.
Chennai: The Director of Collegiate Education has ordered an inquiry on how Stella Maris College allowed Congress president Rahul Gandhis interaction with their students when the model code of conduct is in force.

During his interaction with students of the prestigious college in Chennai on March 13, Rahul Gandhi spoke about various issues, including Rafale and why he hugged Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament last July.

The interaction became an instant hit among the youth as he was able to connect with them.

In her letter to the Chennai regional joint director on March 14, R. Sarumathi, director of collegiate education, ordered the regional director to conduct an enquiry in the college as to how the event was permitted when the model code of conduct was in place for upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

Further, she said that she came to know about the participation of the political leaders interaction on March 13 at the college through newspaper reports. However, the letter avoided mentioning the name of Rahul Gandhi.

Despite the repeated attempts, the director of collegiate education was not available for comment.

But, an official from the higher education department, who requested anonymity, said, We did not issue any to notice to the college. We only sought a report about the event from the directorate of collegiate education.

BJP leaders including partys state president Tamilisai Soundararajan have alleged Rahuls event at Stella Maris College was a violation of model code of conduct which came to effect with the announcement of Parliament poll dates.

But, Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Satyabrata Sahoo had clarified on the same day (March 13) that it was not a violation of the code of conduct.

The college has invited Rahul Gandhi as the Member of Parliament to speak among students. It was not a violation. If the political party conducts a meeting or a political event on the college premises it amounts to the violation, he had told reporters.

Meanwhile, TNCC president K.S. Azhagiri questioned the authority of the director of collegiate education when CEO himself clarified that it was not a violation of the code of conduct.

He accused the ruling AIADMK government of being the puppet of BJP and vindictive. If Tamil Nadu government takes any vindictive action against the Stella Maris College they have to face consequences in future, he warned while urging the state government to withdraw the order.
The public can call the citizen police vigil at 94979 75000 for giving information about them.

Thiruvananthapuram: In view of the murder of two young men by drug mafia within a span of two days, the city police on Friday launched a new action plan codenamed Operation Bolt under action plan, Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention Task (ADAPT), to reduce the demand and supply of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances through focused legal action and flawless surveillance.

The drive is directly under the supervision of ADGP Manoj Abraham. To begin with, the police had prepared a list of 210 antisocials.

The public can call the citizen police vigil at 94979 75000 for giving information about them.

City police commissioner Kori Sanjay Kumar Gurudin will monitor the calls as well as drug cases registered in city limits.

The police also identified 150 drug peddlers in city limits. To track the inflow of drugs into the city, the police would monitor the borders.

The police will intensify the night searches in problem areas and slums as part of the operation.

Police arrested 12 out of the 13 who allegedly kidnapped and tortured to death Konchiravila native Ananthu Gireesh on Wednesday. As per the autopsy report, he died of excessive bleeding from a skull injury.

The arrested include Arun Babu (22), Abhilash (29), Karthik (21), Vishnu Raj (23), Harilal (23), Vinish Raj (20), Aneesh (24), Akhil (21) and Vijay Raj (18), Balu (19 and Roshan (21) The police registered cases under 120 (B) (criminal conspiracy), 364 (kidnapping or abducting in order to murder), 302 (murder), 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence), 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention).

In another drug-induced murder, a person identified as Shyam was hacked on Thursday midnight. Two others, Vimal and Unnikrishnan, were injured in the incident.

Arjun who hacked Shyam went into hiding. Two of his associates, Manoj and Ranjith, were arrested.

Both the suspects and the deceased have criminal records. Arjun who was in Mumbai returned to the city only recently.
'I hired a taxi and asked (the driver) for a good hotel. I was taken to the Ashok hotel in Chanakyapuri where I stayed,' according to the interrogation report. (File Photo)

New Delhi: A hotel in Delhi's posh Chanakyapuri area, which houses the diplomatic enclave, was the first stop of Masood Azhar, the Jaish-e-Mohammed chief, when he first arrived in India in January 1994 and dodged immigration officials'' queries about his Portugese passport by claiming he was a "Gujarati by birth".

The Pakistan-based terrorist, who was arrested in Jammu and Kashmir within the next two weeks, had also stayed in capital's hotel Janpath and visited Lucknow, Shahranpur and Islamic seminary Darul-uloom Deoband, according to his interrogation report.

Masood Azhar, whose JeM was responsible for a series of terror strikes in India including the attack on Parliament in 2001 and a CRPF convoy in Pulwama last month, had arrived in India on a fake Portuguese passport after visiting Bangladesh.

"I spent two days in Dhaka and thereafter travelled to Delhi by Bangladesh Airlines (Biman), reaching the IGI Airport in early hours of January 29, 1994. The Immigration officials at IGI commented that I did not look like a Portuguese but when I replied that that I was a Gujarati by birth, he did not hesitate to stamp my passport.

"I hired a taxi and asked (the driver) for a good hotel. I was taken to the Ashok hotel in Chanakyapuri where I stayed," according to the interrogation report available with the security agencies in New Delhi.

During the night, Azhar told his interrogators, that he rang one Ashraf Dar, a Kashmiri, who came to the Ashok hotel along with Abu Mehmood, a member of terrorist group Harakat ul-Ansar.

"I expressed my desired to visit Deoband to pay obeisance at the graves of Deobandi intellectuals. As such Ashraf Dar escorted me in his Maruti car, accompanied by Abu Mehmood to Deoband. We stayed in Darul-uloom Deoband for the night. After offering prayers at Deoband, next morning we went to Gungoh and then proceeded to Saharanpur," the report said.

At Saharanpur, Azhar stayed for the night at a mosque of Tabliq-ul-Jamat and at none of these places, he had revealed his true identity. On January 31, 1994, he came back to Delhi by the same car after staying overnight at Khan Ji of Maulana Masir-ul-ullah Khan at Jalalabad.

On reaching Delhi, Azhar stayed at hotel Janpath located near Connaught Place. Since his flight to Srinanagr was booked for February 9, he decided to visit one Maulana Abu Hassan Nadvi alias Ali Mian at his madrassa in Lucknow.

Accordingly, Azhar went to Lucknow in a bus on February 6 or 7, 1994, where again he did did not disclose his identity.

As he could not meet Ali Mian and another another person whom he intended to meet, Azhar returned to Delhi by bus. This time, he stayed at hotel Sheesh Mahal in Karol Bagh. In all Delhi hotels, Azhar registered himself in the assumed identity of Portuguese national Vali Adam Issa.

"In Delhi, on February 8, 1994, I visited the Centre of Tablig-ul-Jamat at Nizamuddin but did not meet any particular person. I had also purchased 12 compasses (to give direction of Mecca) from Nizammudin to offer them as gift to militants in the Kashmir valley," he told the interrogators.

After his arrival in Srinagar on February 9, 1994, Ashraf Dar escorted him to Madrasa Qasmian in Lal Bazar where a room was arranged for him.

Later in the evening a militant, Sajjad Afghani, came to meet him along with his deputy named Amjad Bilal of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, who was armed.

Next morning, on February 10, he was escorted by Afghani to a place called Matigund where all Pakistan/PoK terrorists gathered.

"They (the terrorists) were happy about my visit and merger of Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami. I had taken their addresses and letters so that I can communicate their welfare to their families on return to Pakistan," he told the interrogators.

While returning from Matigund, accompanied by Afghani and one Farooq, a militant of Matigund area, who was armed and had a wireless set, the car developed some trouble and stopped.

Then Azhar and his accomplice boarded a three-wheeler and proceeded to Anantnag. After travelling for about 2-3 km, the auto rickshaw was stopped by the Army personnel, according to the report.

"Farooq started running and opened fire which was returned by the Army men.

Farooq managed to escape but I along with Afghani was arrested," he told the interrogators.

Azhar was freed from an Indian prison in 1999 along with two other terrorists in exchange for passengers of an Indian Airlines aircraft which was hijacked and taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan.
Western Tamil Nadu's rendezvous with elephants, sloth bears and bisons has been dangerous and even dramatic leaving people on tenterhooks.

One such case was that of a wild elephant fondly named Chinnathambi by locals. Chinnathambi had been found trampling on crops and causing damage for the last one year. In the last week of January, Chinnathambi was captured by the forest department and released into Annamalai forest range near Top Slip. But very soon, the jumbo was back in villages near Pollachi and began roaming in the area.

Chinnathambi became the talk of the town and when a state minister said they had no option but to capture him and tame him to be used as kumki, people staged protests against domesticating the jumbo.

With animal activists also voicing their opinion, the matter reached the court. The Madras high court passed an interim order directing the TN government to capture the wild elephant. It, however, directed the government not to torture or hurt the animal in any manner. Amid high drama, Chinnathambi was finally captured at Kannadipudur near Udumalpet and put in a kraal at Varagaliar elephant camp near Top Slip. For almost a month, Chinnathambi grabbed the attention of people and hogged the limelight on TV and social media.

Chinnathambi story may have had a dramatic climax without loss of lives, but it has not been so in human-animal conflicts in the hills.

This week, a sloth bear which strayed into the central part of Ooty town brought life to near standstill. It was captured after a 10-hour struggle as the hills lacked veterinary expertise in dealing with such wild animals. And this was one among the rising cases of sloth bear movement in the area. Similarly, there has also been instances of bison attacking residents and tourists in Ooty and Coonoor. Several lives have been lost in attacks by elephants, sloth bears and bisons.

Residents say the surge in the movement of wild animals in residential areas has turned out to be a nightmare for them.

With the line dividing man-animal borders blurring amid rapid urbanisation, such cases will continue to rise leaving people hold their breath with anxiety. Unless we realize animals have as much right to live as human beings and look for sensible and feasible solutions, the conflict will never end.
New Delhi: Former Congress MP from Haryana Arvind Sharma joined the Bharatiya Janta Party(BJP) on Friday.

Sharma, who won Sonepat Lok Sabha seat in 1996 as an independent candidate and joined the Congress in 1999, was inducted into the BJP in the presence of Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar.

"I am proud that I am joining the BJP party under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah, Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar and Dr Anil Jain. I have thoughtfully taken this decision after observing that BJP has done a lot of work for poor, Dalits, farmers, youths, unemployed people, women, old age person and in every sector. Today, I am whole-heartedly joining the BJP," Sharma told media here.

Meanwhile, Khattar said, "The former Congress MP Arvind Sharma who was three times Member of the parliament had expressed his feelings to work for the nation with BJP's ideologies and we have also welcomed him."
New Delhi: Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday rejected to attend the Lokpal Selection Committee meeting for the seventh time since February last year.

In a letter to PM, he said, A special invitee would not have rights of participation in process of Lokpal and I cannot accept the opposition being made voiceless in this critical matter of the selection of the anti-corruption ombudsman.

Kharge also mentioned that the BJP government in the past five years could have amended the Lokpal Act but used his refusal to attend as a special invitee as an excuse for not appointing the Lokpal.

However, Kharge also alleged that the governments intentions were to exclude the opposition from this crucial process as the meeting was scheduled and formed a committee by shortlisting the names.

He also noted that nothing stops the government from appointing the Lokpal even in the absence of the leader of the opposition and Section 4(2) of the Lokpal Act.

Since 2014, the government has not made any attempts to amend the relevant provisions of the Lokpal Act to include the Leader of the single largest party in the Opposition to be a member of the committee, Kharge said.

By excluding the opposition, the selection process is being vitiated and anyone selected through this one-sided process may decline to accept this position, Kharge stated.

This comes after a Supreme Court direction to the Centre on March 7 granting 10 days to inform it about the possible dates when the selection panel will meet for the appointment of the countrys first Lokpal.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday slammed Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for 'failing' to provide jobs for the youth in the state. (Photo: Twitter/ANI)

Bargarh: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday slammed Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for 'failing' to provide jobs for the youth in the state.

"What has Naveen Patnaik done for the unemployed youth of Odisha? Is there anyone here who can say Naveen Patnaik or Narendra Modi gave them employment? But Modi ji indulged in corruption and gave Rs 30,000 crore to Anil Ambani," he said while addressing a gathering here.

Continuing his tirade against the Prime Minister, Rahul said that Prime Minister Modi talks about farmers in every meeting but does not waive off farm loans. He only waives off loans of rich businessmen, the Gandhi scion alleged.

Rahul asserted that his party not only makes promises but also keeps them, with regards to loan waivers implemented in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh a few hours after forming the government in these states.

"We waived off loans in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. We will do the same in Odisha. We promised farm loan waiver if the Congress won the assembly elections in Chhattisgarh. I told Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel that we must announce farm loan waiver within ten days of coming to power and I am proud to say that he did it within six hours of assuming office," Rahul said at the rally.

Within hours of being sworn-in as Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel announced to waive off farm loans amounting to Rs 6,100 crore. The new government also decided to raise the minimum support price of paddy to Rs 2,500 per quintal.

In his first decision, taken within two hours of assuming office as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Kamal Nath waived the outstanding short term crop loans of farmers up to Rs 2 lakh as on March 31, 2018, taken from nationalised and the cooperative banks.

Rahul's campaign is a part of the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections which is scheduled to start from April 11 and will go on till May 19. Counting of polls will take place on May 23.
Hyderabad: Chief Minister Mr. K. Chandrasekhar Raos Congress Mukt Telangana campaign is gradually whittling down the main opposition party. This is partly the TPCCs own making due to their internal squabbles and sulking leaders, if some Congress leaders are to be believed.

The TRS and Congress circles indicate that there could be more desertions ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Eight Congress MLAs have jumped ship, the latest being the Mahesharam MLA Ms. Sabitha Indra Reddy, the L. B. Nagar MLA Mr. D. Sudhir Reddy, and Mr. Vamana Nageswara Rao from Kothagudem.

There are rumours that claim that the Yellareddy MLA Mr Jajula Surender would join the TRS bandwagon, though senior Congress leader Mohd Ali Shabbir denies it.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Sudhir Reddy had told this newspaper that he hadnt taken any decision on quitting the party. Two days ago, somebody called me and wanted to meet me. I told them I am busy. Thats all. Right now I am in Apollo hospital for a checkup with family, Sudhir Reddy said. However, Mr. Shabbir Ali said, Its a mind game played by Mr. K. Chandrasekhar Rao. They(Mr. Sudhir Reddy and Mr. Surender) are not quitting the party. Later in the day, Mr. Sudhir Reddy met the TRS Working President Mr. K. T. Rama Rao, and jumped ship.

Every turncoat into the TRS asserts that they were impressed by Mr K. Chandrasekhar Raos development strides and want to develop their own constituencies. Chief Minister Mr. K. Chandrasekhar Rao and Mr Rama Rao have formed a potent combination and are sending shivers into the opposition camp.

Its Mr. Chandrasekhar Raos gameplan to deny the Congress the opposition status in the Assembly. The rule states that 12 MLAs are required to obtain the opposition status. He is successful thanks partly to our own shortcomings, a senior Congress leader said.

Congress has lost the opposition status in the Legislative Council after defections to the TRS.

Party sources claim that Ms Sabitha Indra Reddy, Mr Sudhir Reddy, and several other leaders, especially those from the Reddy community, are upset with the party leadership. Some claim that the spirit of Mr. Y S. Rajasekhar Reddy is back and is playing his old games, and this time, he is helping the TRS.

Danam Nagender would have stayed back if he was made the TPCC Working President. Sabita is upset over the denial of funds, over the denial of ticket to her son, and over being ignored after the entry of the Chevella MP Mr Konda Vishweshwara Reddy. Sudhir Reddy did not get any credit for organising Rahul Gandhis public meeting, Mohd Azharuddin had to seek Priyanka Gandhis help to get Rahul Gandhis appointment. The list is long, said another senior leader.

The appointment of weak AICC secretaries caused another problem. Is it a national party or galli party? Somebody is misleading the AICC President Rahul Gandhi a great deal, he added.
Mysuru: Launching the party's campaign in Chamarajanagar, former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Friday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of using the Ram Mandir issue and the surgical strike on a terror camp in Pakistan for his political ends with the Lok Sabha poll approaching.

Addressing the Parivarthana Yatre of the Congress in Chamarajanagar to kick off the campaign for its sitting MP, R Dhruvanarayan, Mr Siddaramaiah said that he was not against building the Ram Mandir, but it had been 27 years since the Babri Masjid was demolished and it had still not been built.

What happened to the money raised by the people for it? It is only during elections that they say they will build the Ram Mandir, he charged. As for the air strikes against Pakistan, he said that when the Congress was in power at the Centre, it had carried out 15 surgical strikes against it and defeated it in two wars.

But the BJP, which has done only two surgical strikes, is now trying to gain political mileage from them, he claimed, adding, I have not seen a politician who lies as much as Mr Modi does. The acchhe din have came only for him, Amit Shah, Nirav Modi and Mallya. The BJP has tried to change the Indian Constitution and if democracy has to be saved, no one should vote for it.

Targeting state BJP chief B.S. Yeddyurappa next, he recalled that when he was Chief Minister he had refused to waive farm loans. Now what moral right does he have to comment on our government waiving these loans. What has Mr Narendra Modi done? He has not waived farm loans given by nationalised banks despite appeals," he said.

KPCC president Dinesh Gundurao accused Mr Modi of merely giving speeches and seeking publicity, while the unemployment in the country stood at seven per cent.

They are trying to win by attacking Pakistan. Let Mr Rahul Gandhi contest from even the south and we will get him elected to make him Prime Minister, like we did with Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi in the past, he said
Jana Sena president Pawan Kalyan and BSP chief Mayawati at a press meet on Friday.

Hyderabad: In a significant political development in view of the ensuing general elections, Bahujan Samaj party chief Mayawati and Jana Sena founder Pawan Kalyan announced on Friday their alliance for the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in Andhra Pradesh and the general elections in Telangana state.

Ms Mayawati and Mr Kalyan held talks in Lucknow and announced that they would fight the polls together in the Telugu states.

Their seat sharing agreement has almost been finalised.

The alliance between the BSP and Jana Sena came as a surprise to the ruling parties in the two Telugu states.
Bengaluru: Actress Sumalatha Ambareesh, an aspirant for the Mandya Lok Sabha seat once represented by her husband, the late actor and MP Ambareesh, on Friday met veteran BJP leader, S.M. Krishna and sought his blessings before making a formal debut in electoral politics.

This has triggered huge speculation that Ms Sumalatha, could well fight the Mandya poll as an Independent candidate with BJP support or even as a full fledged BJP candidate with the actress announcing that she would make known her final decision on March 18.

Ms Sumalatha widow of former Union Minister late Ambareesh who was seen as close to Mr Krishna when he was in the Congress party, drove down to the Sadashiva nagar residence of Mr Krishna where their meeting lasted for over half an hour. Today I have come here because Mr Krishna is our senior leader. With his blessings I want to contest from Mandya as he is Mandyas pride. I tried for many days and today finally I've met him," she said.

" Since the Congress has given up Mandya (to the JD-S), the question of me contesting on that partys ticket does not arise, she said, addressing a joint press conference with Mr Krishna.

Mr Krishna on his part said he would discuss the matter with party central leaders.

In the recent Mandya Lok Sabha byelection, our candidate Dr Siddaramaiah bagged a huge 2.5 lakh votes though we did not expect it. I will speak to the Bharatiya Janata Partys national leaders on whether we should put up our candidate or support her. Sumalatha has already said that instead of discussing personal issues, we must talk about the district (Mandya) and what has to happen there.

But, let her first announce her decision on March 18 and we will then take a call.

In a veiled attack on the 'family centric' politics of the Deve Gowda family which has put up Nikhil Kumaraswamy, son of the Chief Minister as the JD(S) candidate in Mandya, Mr Krishna said I have always opposed it.
After its surprise victories in the three North Indian states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in December, the Congress should have dominated the political narrative. It could have flaunted the alternative policies pursued by its newly-minted state governments to address agrarian distress, youth unemployment, the closure of small businesses and the communal polarisation created by the BJP.

None of that has happened so far. With barely a month left before polling begins in the Lok Sabha elections, it is hard to say whether the Congress Party has improved its electoral prospects for the Lok Sabha even in these three states.

On the other hand, the ruling BJP appears to have gained an edge over it. Aware that its revolutionary initiatives such demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST) would not win any votes, the BJP decided to contest the 2019 polls on a platform of ultra-nationalism after the Pulwama terrorist attack and the airstrikes on Balakot deep inside Pakistan.

The Congress Party instead of questioning the security failures of the Narendra Modi government and its disastrous Kashmir policy, found itself precisely where the BJP wanted it to be, at the tail end  waving the tricolour and singing hosannas to the armed forces. By the time it had recovered its act, the public mood had already been hijacked.

Earlier on, the Congress had tried to create a narrative of party renewal with Priyanka Gandhi Vadras debut in politics. However, that initiative seems to be have been frittered away. There is no evidence of a Priyanka wave in Uttar Pradesh. Her first rally scheduled for Lucknow was bombed out by the airstrikes on Pakistan. It was cancelled as a gesture of giving priority to national security over partisan interests. However, it was never rescheduled and Priyankas public appearance remained in abeyance till her somewhat underwhelming speech in Gujarat, where the party is bleeding MLAs.

Now it is being said that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will neither contest a Lok Sabha seat nor campaign outside Uttar Pradesh. This sends out the signal that the Congress is playing a defensive game. Given the caste combinations in UP, the partys gains there can only be marginal. Priyanka Gandhi will undoubtedly be given credit for any gains the party makes in UP over and above the two pocket boroughs of Amethi and Rae Bareli. However, one wonders whether this is the most effective use of her charismatic and fresh political persona.

If the Congress were to use her for campaigning in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh as well, she would pose much more of a challenge to the BJP. As it is there is no way that the BJP can retain the 62 out of 65 seats in these three states, a vigorous campaign by the Congress by playing its trump card would ensure that the BJP is virtually decimated there.

There is every danger that Priyanka Gandhi Vadra may then turn out to be a wasted bullet by a party short on ammunition. The Congress is woefully short on nationally recognisable campaigners. Besides Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and now Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, it hardly has any effective campaigners. One could argue that the BJPs sole effective campaigner is Narendra Modi. But then the party has a largish bench strength of excellent campaigners who can be brought forward in an emergency. Lacking a similar bench strength, to take on the BJP the Congress ought to make strategic use of campaigners like Priyanka Gandhi.

While the BJP meticulously stitched together its alliances by cajoling and persuading its estranged allies, the negotiations of the Congress with potential allies verge on brinkmanship. The Congress wasted the advantage it had in the Northeast where almost all the political parties were ranged against the BJP on the Citizenship Amendment Bill. Now all of them are back with the BJP!

The failure of the Congress high command to prevent the division of anti-BJP votes in Delhi by forging an alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party points to the lack of political acumen in the party. After a series of flip-flops, now the party cadre is being asked to vote on whether to reopen alliance talks through the specially designed Shakti Android App.

The shortsightedness of the Congress is astounding in the face of sure annihilation if the BJP returns to power. Why else would the party in Maharashtra not accommodate Prakash Ambedkars Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh and Raju Shettys Swabhimani Paksha? It knows that their candidates will cut into the Congress vote.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi should have taken a few lessons out of his mother Sonia Gandhis book. In 2004, she went to the homes of all major Opposition leaders, even walking on foot as she did when she visited Ram Vilas Paswan, and persuaded them to contest in alliance with the Congress. It is true that in 2019, the failure to form an Opposition alliance cannott be blamed on the Congress alone. The obduracy of Mayawati may be due to factors other than the Congress. But Congress leaders also failed to demonstrate that they were willing to subordinate their egos and interests to enable an alliance with her as well as other leaders.

However, alliances are not the only problem for the Congress. Surely it needs slogans other than Chowkidar chor hai and it does it seem to have a media plan and is yet to hire a media agency. Like Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah have been doing, its leaders should have fanned out across the country holding rallies to mobilise support even before the election schedule was announced. So far only Rahul Gandhis rallies are being scheduled, but just one leader cannot help it win the elections.

The Congress Party has clearly been slow off the block in preparing for the coming general election. It has not displayed even a small fragment of the political energy that the ruling BJP has summoned despite the public mood being critical of its governments performance. The Congress is mistaken if its feels that voters will bestow victory on it because of anti-incumbency. They need to be persuaded.
AS the tension between India and Pakistan eases, it is time to reflect on the great folly and the horrible catastrophe even a short war between them would have been. It is also necessary to realise that peace cannot be taken for granted; it will have to be secured through a properly planned campaign.

When the two South Asian neighbours embarked on a collision course, the international community became afraid of a nuclear conflict perhaps to a greater extent than the people of the two countries, especially their rulers. This was because the danger of nuclear weapons being used is greater in South Asia than anywhere else in the world. The reason is, firstly, that unlike older nuclear powers, who could fight with conventional weapons for considerably long periods, the South Asian rivals might exhaust their conventional war capacity soon after the beginning of hostilities and come under pressure to use the ultimate weapon in their respective arsenals. Secondly, old scenarios of nuclear war involved countries situated long distances away from each other and neither side was likely to be affected by the fallout from its use of nuclear devices. But in South Asia, whoever uses a nuclear bomb against its next-door neighbour will cause its own people almost as much loss and suffering as it might inflict on the rival party. Thus, while extolling the value of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to external aggression, the hazards of possessing them must not be ignored.

The world cannot ignore the verdict of history that wars do not solve any problem. Instead, they often create problems more intractable than the ones they are supposed to solve. Fortunately, both countries realise not only the unaffordable cost of a full-scale war but also the fact that neither side is in a position to obliterate the other. This is a more effective insurance against war than anything else. Therefore, the present Indian government is relying on the theory of surgical strikes to force Pakistan into submission. An extension of the doctrine of hot pursuit that has considerably subverted the laws of warfare, this theory keeps the danger of war alive.

Even if surgical strikes do not escalate into a wider conflict, they ought to be rejected on moral grounds because of the possible harm to innocent human beings. A surgical strike imposes no additional costs on the aggressor while the cost of the preparedness the victim country must maintain is quite substantial.

The one positive result of the latest spell of tension in relations with India is the beginning of action against the already proscribed militant outfits that should have accompanied the launch of the National Action Plan in 2014, if not earlier. This should reduce Prime Minister Narendra Modis ability to act on the surgical strike theory because he derives strength for his bellicose posturing from the international communitys uneasiness with Islamabads reluctance to deal firmly with militant organisations. This is particularly true about groups that defy restrictions on them by operating under new banners and continue their anti-Pakistan activities without camouflage. The policy of taking the initiative for building peace without wailing for reciprocity by India that the Pakistani Prime Minister has adopted must be supported.

The campaign against all organisations suspected of any links with terrorist activities will need to be carried to its logical conclusion. In this regard, it is wrong to attribute the international communitys criticism of Pakistans odd relationship with jihadist outfits wholly to Indian instigation. Above all, the people of this country must satisfy their own conscience that they are firmly opposed to every form of terrorism.

The latest round of heightened confrontation between Pakistan and India has again confirmed the view that neither country can pay the cost of suspended hostilities, that is, absence of conflict without peace. Perhaps Pakistan is more vulnerable in this regard than India. There is no doubt that Pakistan will have to meet the cost of the recent vigil by curtailing development and social welfare projects. This drain on the countrys resources can be stopped only by pushing for peace with all the neighbours.

An extremely important lesson from the recent confrontation is that the media in both countries fostered blind jingoism. Unfortunately, the media is no longer strong and honest enough to defy the slogan my country right or wrong. Yet it should not be unmindful of the disservice it does to its own people by beating the drums of war louder than the national propagandists. At least media persons should not forget that neither Pakistan nor India can alter the fact of geography, and that the peoples of the two countries cannot forever live in mutual hatred and acrimony. National causes can be upheld by journalists without playing second fiddle to warmongers.

By arrangement with Dawn
China once again blocked the listing of specifically anti-India terrorist outfit Jaish-e-Mohammeds founding chief Masood Azhar as an international terrorist in the UN Security Council on Wednesday. Earlier, it had done so in 2009, 2016 and 2017.

The difference this time is that the move in the UN against Azhar came immediately after the JeM attack in Pulwama in which over 40 CRPF jawans were killed. JeM had flagrantly claimed credit for the assault, which led to a limited military exchange between India and Pakistan as India dropped bombs on a Jaish facility inside Pakistan, attracting in response intrusion into its airspace by its revanchist western neighbour.

This has underlined the risk of regional peace and stability being threatened by actions initiated by Pakistan-based terror organisations which are widely seen as being nurtured by Pakistans military machine.

Beijing has shown yet again by vetoing the anti-Azhar move in the UNSC that it is not especially worried about the possibility of regional peace being jeopardised, or even about the free run that terrorists enjoy with Pakistans blessings provided that terrorists do not pose threats within its own territory. Pakistan goes out of its way to ensure this.

In the light of the present goings-on, it is hard not to see Beijings action in the wider dynamics of regional affairs. From Beijings perspective, this involves continuing with its objective of the containment of India in the company of Pakistan, which of course hosts the JeM and its top leaders and looks to their political comforts.

There is another factor in addition. Lately, Chinas burgeoning infrastructure investments in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor  which culminates in a military port for China in Gwadar  has cemented the Islamabad-Beijing axis against India.

The JeM has already been proscribed as an international terrorist group by the UN. As such, it is logical that Azhar, its founder and leader, also be brought under restraint by the UN. This would have happened 10 years ago if China had cooperated at that time. It is the only holdout in the entire UN system which has given succour to a terrorist, and is prepared to earn the opprobrium of the world community in doing so. The resolution against Azhar in the UNSC was led by France, the United States and Britain, and was co-sponsored by as many as 13 nations, among them key European powers as well as Saarc members Bhutan, Bangladesh and the Maldives. But Beijing remained unmoved. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinas President Xi Jinping had held an informal summit at Wuhan in China in April 2018 in which they had agreed to be mindful of one anothers core concerns. For India, this expectation has clearly not been met. After Beijings latest intervention in favour of a an international terrorist, New Delhi has rightly asserted that it would seek to use all means available to bring Azhar to justice.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  The bill strengthening the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) takes a backseat as President Rodrigo Duterte rejected the provision to increase its employees' benefits.

In his letter to both houses of Congress released Friday, Duterte said he was "contrained to veto" the bill as one of its provisions -- granting benefits beyond the current compensation framework -- would be "too onerous" for the government.

The President said this "would erode the national government's thrust to standardize and rationalize the current compensation framework in the bureaucracy, create "too much disparity and inequality" among public servants in the executive branch, and "undermine the principle of 'equal pay for work of equal value'."

"I thus urge Congress to prioritize reviewing this measure once again so that our shared objective of strengthening the OSG would be realized without undermining other equally vital fiscal and policy considerations," Duterte said.

He stressed that he is for strengthening the OSG, the office of the government's top lawyer, currently led by Jose Calida. Earlier, the House of Representatives' version wanted the OSG to replace and effectively abolish the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the agency tasked to recover alleged ill-gotten wealth of the late President Ferdinand Marcos.

The bicameral conference committee, however rejected the provision, along with the proposal to also abolish the Office of the Government Corporate Counsel, which is "the principal and statutory law office" of government-owned-and-controlled corporations, their subsidiaries and government financial institutions, among others.

Meanwhile, critics fear the proposed measure will only make the OSG more powerful, following the ouster Maria Lourdes Sereno as Chief Justice. It was Calida who filed the quo warranto petition to remove Sereno from office. This was approved by the Supreme Court in a historic 2018 ruling, making Sereno the first impeachable official to be removed from office without a Senate trial.
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A host of people ranging from Robert Fisk to Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi have confirmed an Indo-Israeli plan to teach Pakistan a post-Pulwama lesson. This on the eve of key elections. But there is no evidence of a revised electoral strategy on the part of the Opposition. Should Rahul Gandhi not be raising an alarm in unison with all other coalition partners: "Jaw for jaw but only if war is imposed on us by the enemy; a resounding no to a war an Indian militant may trigger by a horrendous act of terrorism." The latter is the case for the home minister to handle. In any case, what were the militant's intentions: To draw attention to his cause or drag the nation into war?

Indeed, there should be plan in place to protect the nation as well as our armed forces from Machiavellian plots. If the nation is not taken into confidence, it will easily be misled. Even otherwise, there is not much bite in the Opposition's election campaign so far.

By announcing her own candidature from Rae Bareli, has Sonia Gandhi grounded Priyanka Gandhi quite as abruptly as she had taken off? Or, is it a function of post-Pulwama demoralisation that is causing the leadership to scale down aspirations? Are the Robert Vadra investigations beginning to tell?

Pulwama or no Pulwama, my impression is that the Congress was never in the fight full throttle. Basically, the Congress is all at sea, balancing its self-interest against the larger interest - that of the coalition and the nation.

The Congress president is failing Guru Dronacharya's fish eye test. Unlike Arjuna who focused on the fish eye, Rahul is diffusing his vision. He is not focusing on the only target the coalition had set for itself  the removal of Narendra Modi. Rahul's cohorts have burdened him with the task of ensuring Congress gains while waging battle against Narendra Modi. Sonia Gandhi and Priyanka are even more direct: They would go flat out if, at the end of the day, the prime ministerial crown were Rahul's and not someone else's.

Coalition partners would exert every muscle in the regions of their strength for a unified gameplan. But they will not buy into any guarantees for the Congress. Balance of forces, after votes have been counted, must determine the next phase. Surely, Congress numbers will matter. But bereft of a coherent leadership, the party is creating confusion by pulling its horses in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and West Bengal. It is not focused on the eye of the fish; it is contemplating its navel.

By a singular lack of leadership, is Rahul helping Narendra Modi once again? The state units of the Congress are being allowed to get away with their caprice, provided they throw a ginger fit. Exactly as Sheila Dikshit has done in Delhi.

In Congress culture, regional leaders were always cut down to size. Is Sheila Dikshit in the process of reversing the trend? Is she cutting the leadership down to size? The Congress will come third in all seven seats, if that indeed is what she wants in Delhi. Is she piqued that the AAP has fielded its strongest candidate, Atishi Marlena, the education whizkid, from East Delhi which Sheila's son, Sandeep Dikshit, had been salivating on?

Since it is universally accepted by folks in the Congress that the results in Delhi are not likely to flatter, why is this adventure being permitted? Because Ms. Dikshit has been able to persuade Sonia Gandhi, Rahul and Priyanka that for the party to "revive" it cannot afford to be a cypher in the capital city? In brief, defeating Narendra Modi has been deprioritised. Not for the first time, the Congress is thinking "long term", exactly as it thought in 2013-14. In April 2013, Rahul told the Confederation of Indian Industry that he would first build grassroots democracy in the party. Remember, election commissioner K.J. Rao was brought in to set up a system of primaries?

The muddled thinking on show today was available then too. The then party general secretary, Janardan Dwivedi, volunteered the thought just before the 2014 elections that the Congress should have occupied the Opposition benches after the 2009 elections. What kind of thinking did the statement represent? Since 1991, the Congress had never won more seats than the 209 it won in 2009. Why should it then have sat on the Opposition benches? Because the party had not won an absolute majority. Mr Dwivedi was trying to place a premium on aahuti (sacrifice) which he persuaded Rahul was the trick for an absolute majority.

In other words, had the Congress shunned power because it was short of numbers, the electorate would have rewarded the party with an absolute majority in 2014. Full marks for Mr Dwivedi's electoral anticipation. The Congress won 44 seats, a tally so low that it would require courage of a very high order to even dream of meaningful revival. At the moment the Congress is neither ekla chalo, nor wholeheartedly in the coalition, but in between, clearly not the posture of potential victors.

If in Delhi it was Ms Dikshit's soaring vision to be accommodated, in Kolkata, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury's yen to rediscover Jyoti Basu's golden period for the Left is being indulged. Mamata Banerjee, focused on the fish eye, has been quite sporting about the combine. By remaining in play, the Congress may cushion some anti-incumbency vote, which may have drifted towards the BJP. She is politically sound.

The Congress understanding of Mayawati in UP deserves to be spelt out. "With the Enforcement Directorate constantly hovering over her, there is no certainty on her future behaviour."

By placing its money both ways in three states the Congress may well have forfeited some of its claim, should the cookie crumble the coalition's way after the vote is counted. But there will be no cookie for the Opposition if war is imposed before the elections.
The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) said on Thursday they are considering a set of tailored regulatory requirements to address the "novel features and risks" of crypto platforms.

Canadian regulators are looking to create new rules for crypto trading platforms, months after the death of the founder of digital platform Quadriga CX that led to about C$180 million ($135 million) in frozen cryptocurrencies.

The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) said on Thursday they are considering a set of tailored regulatory requirements to address the "novel features and risks" of crypto platforms.

We must adapt to innovation, and provide clarity to the market about how regulatory requirements might best be tailored and applied to these unique business models, while maintaining investor protection, IIROC Chief Executive Officer Andrew Kriegler said in a statement.

The Quadriga situation highlighted a regulatory vacuum for the cryptocurrency industry in Canada and raised questions about who would be held accountable for any potential losses. The cryptocurrencies have been frozen in Quadrigas user accounts since its founder Gerald Cotten, the only person with the password to gain access, died suddenly in December.

Canadas biggest securities regulator, the Ontario Securities Commission, said in February it was looking into the platform given the potential harm to Ontario investors.

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Microsoft is enabling public and private organizations to apply Microsoft AI technologies to address pressing societal challenges.

Microsoft has been working towards enhancing the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for over 25 years. In its mission to empower every organization and individual on the planet to achieve more, it is deploying its AI solutions in areas ranging across healthcare, education, agriculture, retail, e-commerce, manufacturing and financial services.

The companys AI strategy in India is based on the following pillars:

Enabling Digital Transformation: Microsoft is committed to using its Cloud and AI technologies to create breakthrough innovations and accelerate the digital transformation of the nation, focusing on core industries that are critical to economic growth. Over 700 business and government organizations have adopted it's Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to drive breakthroughs in their digital transformation. Over 60% of these AI customers come from large businesses in manufacturing, financial services. In addition, Microsoft is working with new-age organizations that are leapfrogging and disrupting industries. 715 partners are working with Microsoft in India to help customers design and implement a comprehensive AI strategy, aimed to boost employee productivity, increase business agility, improve customer engagement and jumpstart new product innovation.

Building coalitions for responsible innovation: Microsoft works with government, industry, academic and civil society stakeholders to create a collective approach to AI and build solutions that meet the needs and expectations of citizens. Microsoft India is partnering with NITI Aayog to combine the cloud, AI, research and its vertical expertise for new initiatives and solutions across several core areas including agriculture and healthcare and the environment. We are also an active participant along with CII in looking at building solution frameworks for application in AI across areas such as Education, skills, health and agriculture.

Bridging the skills gap and enhancing employability: Microsoft believes the development of talent pipelines vital for economic growth and is working to empower individuals across all demographics with the skills needed to succeed in an AI-enabled world. In India, Microsoft aims to skill over 10,000 developers; set up AI labs in 10 universities, and train 500,000 youth across the country over the next three years. Microsoft also recently announced the Intelligent Cloud Hub Program to equip research and higher education institutions with AI infrastructure, build curriculum and help both faculty and students to build their skills and expertise in cloud computing, data sciences, AI and IoT.

Creating sustained social impact: Microsoft is enabling public and private organizations to apply Microsoft AI technologies to address pressing societal challenges. This includes healthcare, education, agriculture, local language computing environmental sustainability, accessibility opportunities, and supporting humanitarian action. 2018 saw Microsoft roll out several new projects across healthcare, including a partnership with Apollo Hospitals to use AI for early detection of cardiac diseases. SRL Diagnostics is applying Microsoft AI for more accurate diagnosis in digital pathology and early detection of diseases such as cancer.

Here are the various ways in which Microsoft India is leveraging the power of AI to benefit all:

AI in Healthcare- Microsoft has its AI Network for Healthcare that aims to maximize the ability of AI and cloud computing to accelerate innovation in the healthcare industry. Partnering with some of the top healthcare institutes, the company is helping in preventive care in ophthalmology and cardiology.

In partnership with Apollo Hospitals, Microsoft is working to predict cardiovascular diseases early through AI-powered Cardiovascular Disease Risk Score API (application program interface). The company is also helping in the early detection of diabetic retinopathy to prevent blindness through its partnership with Forus Health. Additionally, in collaboration with SRL Diagnostics, it is working towards a quicker and more accurate analysis of tissue samples in digital pathology to help faster diagnosis of chronic illnesses such as cancer.

AI for Agriculture- Microsoft, in collaboration with International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), is leveraging new technologies such as AI, Cloud Machine Learning, Satellite Imagery and advanced analytics to help the farmers arrive at the best sowing date for crops helping crop yields increase by 10-30%. The company has also developed a Pest Risk Prediction API in partnership with United Phosphorous Limited (UPL) by leveraging AI and ML to indicate risks of pest attack in advance. As part of the FarmBeats project, the company is also building several unique solutions to solve these problems using low-cost sensors, drones, and vision and machine learning algorithms.

AI in Local Language Computing- To enable more people to be able to use the powerful benefits of computing in their native language, Microsoft through offering AI-powered features is helping millions of users in India become more productive with powerful digital tools that support Hindi across Windows 10 and Office 365. The Dictate feature in Windows 10 enables users to express thoughts simply by dictating which can then be translated into more than 60 languages, including Hindi using the Microsoft AI-powered Translate feature. The Microsoft Translator live feature on PowerPoint allows one to display subtitles directly on PowerPoint presentation in any one of more than 60 supported text languages, including Hindi. Additionally, virtual assistant Cortana also helps translate requests in real time, serving as a virtual translation assistant.

Microsoft also made available the Indian language Speech Corpus to offer speech training and test data for Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati. This is the largest publicly available Indian language speech dataset which includes audio and corresponding transcripts to help researchers and academia build Indian language speech recognition for all applications where speech is used.

AI for Accessibility- Its AI for Accessibility program is a $25 million, a five-year programme from Microsoft for developers globally, including in India to accelerate the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions to help the 1 billion plus people with disabilities around the world. Leveraging technology for all, the company offers Seeing AI, an app designed for people with visual disabilities to help them describe people, text, currency, colour, and objects. MSR has developed the AI-powered Interactive Cane to aid people with visual impairment to navigate.

AI for Earth- Microsofts USD 50M 5-year program- AI for Earth is dedicated to deploying Microsofts deep investments in AI research and technology in climate change, agriculture, biodiversity and water. Empowering people and organizations to solve global environmental challenges through the power of AI, the company had recently announced seven Indian grant recipients from India to deepen commitment to sustainability in the country.

AI for HR- Microsoft aims to enable better merging of digital expertise and human interaction, thereby enhancing the recruitment process for candidates and the company. AI can help HR professionals make smart hiring decisions. Microsoft is building tools to automate the identification of bias in a range of different AI algorithms to ensure and fix biases that creep in because of human biases. The Microsoft tool has the potential to help businesses make use of AI without inadvertently discriminating against certain groups of people, it will help AI researchers catch more instances of unfairness.

Qton, a Talent Assistant Chatbot, built on top of Microsofts Bot Framework & Luis NLP aims to make a significant impact in recruitment automation by improving the hiring process and enhancing the experience for the candidates. Qtons platform uses AI and cloud services to harness the power of advanced data science and machine learning algorithms to help the company expedite hiring and reduce turnaround time.

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Meng and Huawei are accused of conspiring to defraud HSBC and other banks by misrepresenting Huaweis relationship with Skycom Tech Co Ltd, a suspected front company that operated in Iran.

Chinas Huawei Technologies Co Ltd on Thursday pleaded not guilty to a 13-count indictment filed in a New York federal court against the company, as tensions have ratcheted up between the US and Beijing.

Huawei, the worlds largest telecommunications equipment maker, was charged with bank and wire fraud, violating sanctions against Iran and obstructing justice.

The companys chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in December in Canada on charges in the indictment, which was not unsealed until January. She has said she is innocent of the charges and is fighting extradition.

At the arraignment in US District Court in Brooklyn, James Cole, a US lawyer for Huawei, entered the plea on behalf of the company and its US subsidiary.

Meng and Huawei are accused of conspiring to defraud HSBC and other banks by misrepresenting Huaweis relationship with Skycom Tech Co Ltd, a suspected front company that operated in Iran.

Huawei has said Skycom was a local business partner, while the United States maintains it was an unofficial subsidiary used to conceal Huaweis Iran business.

Assistant US Attorney David Kessler said at the arraignment that prosecutors were in the process of serving Skycom with the charges, and that the company was not yet scheduled for an arraignment.

US authorities claim Huawei used Skycom to obtain embargoed US goods, technology and services in Iran, and to move money via the international banking system.

Reuters exclusively reported last month on how an internal HSBC probe helped lead to the US charges against Huawei and its CFO.

Last week, Reuters also detailed how US authorities secretly tracked Huaweis activities, including by collecting information copied from electronic devices carried by Chinese telecom executives traveling through airports.

The indictment references reporting by Reuters from six years ago that Skycom offered to sell embargoed Hewlett-Packard computer equipment to Irans largest mobile phone operator. The reporting detailed links between Huawei and Skycom, including that Meng had served on Skycoms board of directors between February 2008 and April 2009.

Trump told Reuters in December that he would intervene in the case if it would help secure a trade deal with Beijing. Mengs lawyers have expressed concerns that she is a pawn or hostage and that the allegations have a political character.

The next court date is set for April 4.

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The company notes that while creating a full-screen smartphone wont be possible in the next 1-2 years, the idea is to develop the technology to a point where the camera hole is invisible. (Concept: dbsdesigning)

The obsession with thinner bezels and more screen is taking a new shape in Samsungs laboratory which is reportedly working on a device that will boast a perfect screen on the front with a camera that is hidden.

As reported by Yonhap, Samsung is developing cameras and sensors that can be inserted beneath the screens of smartphones to create a perfect full-screen device.

The said technology will build on the Infinity-O Display, used on the Samsung Galaxy S10 with a hole-punch camera on the front, to deliver a full-screen experience.

The company notes that while creating a full-screen smartphone wont be possible in the next 1-2 years, the idea is to develop the technology to a point where the camera hole is invisible.

Samsung is looking at developing Crystal Sound OLED display which allows the screen to double up as a speaker. The technology has been used by LG for its G8 ThinQ.

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The investigation revealed that the smuggling organisation recruited Indian nationals and others to pay fees in exchange for passage to the US. (Representational Image)

Washington: An Indian national has pleaded guilty to the charges of smuggling Indians as illegal immigrants into the United States.

Pleading guilty before a New Jersey court on Thursday, Bhavin Patel, 38, said he did this for private financial gain.

He faces a maximum potential sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to USD 250,000. Sentencing is scheduled for July 9.

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court, agents for the Department of Homeland Security Investigations received information that a smuggling operation run by Patel was attempting to find methods to bring foreign nationals from India into the US.

The investigation revealed that the smuggling organisation recruited Indian nationals and others to pay fees in exchange for passage to the US.

Beginning in October 2013, an undercover law enforcement officer posing as a smuggler began meeting with Patel in Bangkok. Patel told the undercover law enforcement officer that he wanted to smuggle Indian nationals into the US.

On three different occasions, Patel or his conspirator transported the Indian nationals to an airport in Thailand, at which point the undercover law enforcement officer would presumably use his contacts to smuggle them into the US via commercial airline flights, the Department of Justice said.

Patel agreed to wire down payments for each individual to be smuggled and to pay a balance of tens of thousands of dollars for each individual once the foreign nationals arrived in the US.

Over the ensuing months, Patel arranged for six Indian nationals to be brought to Thailand for smuggling into the US via Newark Liberty International Airport. He was arrested on December 7, 2018, upon his arrival at Newark Liberty.
This image taken from the shooters video, which was filmed Friday, March 15, 2019, shows him as he drives and he looks over to three guns on the passenger side of his vehicle in New Zealand. (Photo: AP)

Wellington: Australian gunman Brenton Tarrant, who shot dead at least 49 people in two Christchurch mosques in New Zealand, live-streamed himself in the act.

Along with the video, Tarrant also posted a manifesto online explaining why he committed the attack. He attacked the mosques at 1.40 pm local time.

Tarrant posted photos to his now-suspended Twitter account of what appears to be guns, ammunition and a military-style vest.

The weaponry is scribbled with references to ancient battles and more recent attacks against Muslims.

This image taken from the shooters video, which was filmed Friday, March 15, 2019, shows a gun in his vehicle in New Zealand. (Photo: AP)

In the Facebook video, the gunman walked around the corner and up the path into the Al Noor Mosque. He walks through the front door and opens fire indiscriminately.

The video shows him firing into many rooms with a semi-automatic rifle, leaving bodies strewn on the floor as others ran for their lives.

This image taken from the shooters video, which was filmed Friday, March 15, 2019, guns on the passenger side of his vehicle in New Zealand. (Photo: AP)

The video was apparently taken by the account Brenton Tarrant 9, according to the visible URL. A screengrab shows the credit Brenton Tarrant was live.

The disturbing 17-minute video shows the attack, from the end till he fled in his car.

Four people, among them a woman, have been arrested after the incident. It was not immediately clear if Tarrant was among them.

Read: 4 people in custody after shooters target 2 Christchurch mosques

Later, Tarrants Facebook and Twitter accounts were suspended.

In the 74-page manifesto posted online, he described himself as just a regular White man.

The 28-year-old noted he was born to a working class, low-income family who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.

He was born in Australia to Scottish, Irish and English parents.

According to his manifesto, he tried to answer some questions that everyone wants an answer for.

What does Brenton Tarrants manifesto say?

The manifesto published on Brenton Tarrants Facebook page begins with a poem about rage.

The poem ends with, Do not go gentle into that good night.

If theres one thing I want you to remember from these writings, introduction reads, its [sic] that birthrates must change.

The rambling text talks about deporting all Non-Europeans, and the supremacy of the European people.

He has also cited a number of Wikipedia pages, but the words themselves are nonsensical and heavily racist, referring to something he calls The White Genocide.

Why did he carry out the attack?

Tarrant writes, To most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, before citing revenge.

He said the attacks were to take revenge for Ebba Akerlund, a 12-year-old Swedish girl who was murdered in the Stockholm lorry attack which took place in April, 2017.

Later in the manifesto, Tarrant identifies the 12-year-old girl as the catalyst for his own violent attack.

Tarrant adds that his motivation was, To directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves.

Why did he target those people?

He said they was an obvious, visible and large group of invaders, from a culture with higher fertility rates, higher social trust and strong, robust traditions that seek to occupy my peoples lands and ethnically replace my own people.

For how long did he plan this attack?

He said he began planning an attack roughly two years ago and zoomed in on the mosques in the last three months.

Why did he choose this time to attack?

According to Tarrant, the best time to attack was yesterday, and the next best time today. The attack was planned to allow enough time to train, form a plan, settle his affairs, write down his views and enact the attack.

Why did he choose New Zealand as a place to attack?

In his manifesto, Tarrant states that New Zealand was not the original choice for the attack as he only arrived to New Zealand to live temporarily while he planned and trained, but soon found that New Zealand was as target rich of an environment as anywhere else in the West.

He also added that an attack in New Zealand would bring to attention the truth of the assault on our civilization, that no where in the world was safe, the invaders were in all of our lands, even in the remotest areas of the world and that there was no where left to go that was safe and free from mass immigration.

Does he consider it a terrorist attack?

By the definition, then yes. It is a terrorist attack. But I believe it is a partisan action against an occupying force, Tarrant said in his document.

Does he feel any remorse for the attack?

Tarrant in his manifesto said, No, I only wish I could have killed more invaders, and more traitors as well.

Was the attack racist in origin?

According to Tarrant, the fertility rates are innately tied to race and yes there was a racial component to the attack.

If he survives, does he intend to go on trial?

He confidently in his manifesto states that he does intend to go on trial and will plead not guilty.

Read: Darkest day: 49 dead in NZ mosque shootings, gunman an Australian

49 people have been killed after a gunman opened fire at two mosques in the New Zealand city. New Zealand Police urged anyone in Christchurch to stay indoors and report any suspicious behaviour.
'Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours - including India after the end of their elections.' (Photo:AP)

Islamabad: Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours including India after the upcoming general elections, Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Thursday, claiming that Islamabad has taken the first step on a new path to peace and progress.

Recently, tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir''s Pulwama district in February 14.

Mr Khan, who announced visa reforms at a ceremony in Islamabad, said that Pakistan is confident today that it has taken the first step on a new path to peace and progress.

"Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours - including India after the end of their elections.

"We will have good relations with all our neighbours and a peaceful Pakistan will be a prosperous Pakistan," he said as he announced major visa reforms, including online visa issuance facility, to attract tourists and investors.

The elections in India will begin on April 11 and polling would be held over seven phases through May 19, followed by counting of votes on May 23.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party tweeted that the new e-visa scheme will available to visitors from 175 countries.

"This is the first step to open up the country, the Naya (new) Pakistan," Mr Khan said, adding that it would revive the confidence of 60s when Pakistan was making fast progress

The Prime Minister said that Pakistan would attract religious tourism from all over the world.

"Taxila was the centre of Buddhism. We have discovered a 40ft Buddha - the world''s largest sleeping Buddha - which we have yet to share with the world.

"Sikhs'' holiest places like Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur were also in Pakistan. We also have very old sites for Hinduism in Pakistan, including Katas Raj," Mr Khan said.

He also announced that the next season of the Pakistan Super League will be organised in Pakistan instead of Dubai.

Officials said that initially, the e-visa facility will be available to nationals of Turkey, China, Malaysia, the UK and the UAE and later extended to other 170 countries.

Business visas will be given to 90 countries, while 55 countries will be granted visa-on-arrival.
The archipelago of Bahrain sits pretty in the Arabian Gulf. Its history dates back 5,000 years to the ancient Dilmun era. But the Kingdom of Bahrain also has its feet firmly in the future  with a booming economy and a more liberal culture than its Middle Eastern neighbours, the country is fast becoming an attractive destination. Add to this a burgeoning art and food scene and the annual Formula 1 Grand Prix, it is Bahrains time to shine like the pearl its best known for.



Bab Al Bahrain



Culture trail

Bahrain has a rich cultural history, which is wonderfully showcased in the Bahrain National Museum. The building itself is a sprawling post-modern complex surrounded by contemporary art sculptures and installations. Inside, youre transported straight into the Dilmun era, circa 3000 BC, where you can see the ancient artefacts, coins, jewellery, and seals, stone burial mounds, grave goods etc. The exhibition also takes you through the short-lived Greek influence on Bahrain, and eventually to the Islamic period that prevails till today. The museum also houses a reproduction souq and depictions of Bahraini life in the years gone by. To get some glimpses of old Bahrain, head to Muharraq, the erstwhile capital of the kingdom. Here, many houses still stand in the traditional style of architecture with a large central courtyard surrounded by living quarters, guest rooms, and servants quarters; the Shaikh Isa Bin Ali House is particularly well restored. Other houses worth exploring are along the so-called pearl trail  houses of former pearl merchants that have been restored into design and exhibition spaces; the House of Art, part of the Shaikh Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa Centre is quite interesting, especially the photography exhibit that presents striking black-and-white photos of old houses in various stages of disrepair.

Another major attraction that you shouldnt miss is Qalat al-Bahrain or Bahrain Fort, the fortified Portuguese fort that stands over layers of Bahrains history. Archaeological excavations have revealed a Dilmun-era city, parts of which are visible on the periphery of the fort. The current fort dates to the 16th century and was built by the Portuguese who controlled the islands for trade purposes. The entire complex is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Finally, dont miss the Al Fateh Grand Mosque, the largest place of worship in Bahrain and one of the largest mosques in the world with a capacity of more than 7,000 worshippers at a time. Especially noteworthy is the grand, Austrian-made chandelier in the main hall, the Italian marble floors, and the carved doors made of Indian teakwood.



A pottery shop.



Art & craft

Bahrain has a long legacy of arts and crafts ranging from ceramics and basket weaving to dhow making and metalwork. Visit the Al Jasra Handicrafts Centre to watch artisans at work and even buy handcrafted items. The centre was established in 1990 to preserve and promote traditional arts and crafts. Another place worth visiting is Aali village, which has been known for its pottery since Dilmun times when pots were routinely buried along with the dead. From a thriving craft, pottery has dwindled down to just 4-5 workshops in the village now. Drop in at Alshugel Pottery to watch the potters in action creating pots of various sizes and shapes, lamps, decorative seals, and even some Halloween pumpkins. Buy your souvenirs next door at Delmon Pottery where you can get your hands dirty by learning how to work the wheel and create your own clay masterpiece.

For contemporary art, take a walk around Block 338 in the Adliya neighbourhood, where you can spot colourful street art. This bohemian quarter is also home to a few private art galleries like Ella Art Gallery and Albareh Art Gallery. Another place to soak in the art is La Fontaine Centre of Contemporary Art in Manama. This sprawling private-house-turned-art-gallery showcases several international artists in a rotating calendar of events. It also houses a spa and a chic cafe-restaurant that is quite the place to be seen in Bahrain.



Bahrain Fort.



Adventure calling

The Bahrain International Circuit is amongst the newest Formula 1 racetracks in the world and a popular Grand Prix event. The high-adrenaline race is accompanied by lots of peripheral events like concerts, parties, and fireworks. The 2019 race will be held from March 28-31. If your visit doesnt coincide with the race, you can still be part of the adventure by signing up for the Land Rover Experience (bahraingp.com/-landroverexperience-.html). This 3.5 km off-road track is packed with twists and turns, obstacles, and watercourses  you can either drive yourself or strap in as a passenger as you negotiate 32 obstacles on a track next to the Grand Prix circuit. Other adventure activities include Gravity Indoor Skydiving (gravitybah.com), scuba, snorkelling, and diving tours, and horseback riding tours. Another water sport is pearl diving in the warm waters of the Arabian Gulf where you can collect up to 60 oysters and try your luck at finding a pearl (pearldiving.bh).

Food fiesta

Bahrain has a range of international cuisines and restaurant chains to feast at. But its the local Bahraini food that really shines. Immigrant influences from Persia to India have shaped the food here, so you will find dishes that remind you of home. Like the samboosa, a cousin of our samosa but with fillings that range from vegetables to meat to plain cheese (Bahrainis love their cheese). Then theres machboos, fish or chicken served over fragrant rice cooked in meat broth. The piece de resistance is qouzi, slow-cooked lamb served over saffron-flecked rice, a celebratory dish thats common during weddings and other feasts. Try these at local specialty restaurants like Naseef at Bab Al Bahrain or Seef Mall or at Hala Cafe at Amwaj Islands.

Breakfast is also an elaborate affair. Tucked away in an alley at Manama Souq is Hajis Cafe that has been around since 1950. Servers scurry around with huge trays laden with all kinds of delicacies  balaleet (mildly sweetened vermicelli with a fried egg on top, strange but it works somehow), hamsat nikhi (fried chickpeas), foule (mashed beans), luba (a kidney bean preparation reminiscent of rajma), kebab roll (similar to our dabeli), zinjibari (fried pastry pockets stuffed with cheese), and more. To accompany, theres khubz, an unleavened flatbread that the cafe churns out by the hundreds from its tandoor. And of course, no meal is complete without the qahwa, saffron and cardamom flavoured Arabic coffee that is served from a copper dalla (a delicate, elaborately decorated coffeepot) into small cups barely larger than a thimble. Apart from Hajis, Saffron by Jena in Muharraq is also a great place for breakfast; the cafe is set inside a 200-year-old restored traditional Bahraini house.

Market watch

Like all the Emirates, Bahrain has some great shopping options whether youre looking for luxury brands or high street. These include Seef Mall, City Centre, Moda Mall, and the recently opened Dragon City Mall (a sprawling complex choc-a-bloc with Chinese-made goods). For a more local shopping experience, head to Bab Al Bahrain, a historical building in Manama where you can buy local products like carpets, lamps, perfumes, incense, handicrafts, and souvenirs. Through Bab Al Bahrain, you can make your way into the busy alleys of Manama Souq where you will find all manners of knickknacks, spices, and sweets  try the halwa (a sticky dessert made with corn-starch, sugar, and nuts) and rangeena (date and nuts dessert).
In a significant development, the United Nations has rejected an appeal of JuD chief Hafiz Saeed, the 2008 Mumbai terror attack mastermind, to remove his name from its list of banned terrorists, government sources said on Thursday.

Notably, the decision comes at a time when the UN's 1267 Sanctions Committee has received a new request to ban Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar after the Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed. Pakistan-based JeM has claimed responsibility for the strike.

The UN decision to reject the appeal of Saeed, also a co-founder of terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), came after India provided detailed evidence including "highly confidential information" about his activities, sources told PTI, adding that the verdict of the global body was conveyed to his lawyer Haider Rasul Mirza earlier this week.

Saeed, chief of UN-designated terrorist organisation Jammat--ud-Dawa (JuD), was banned on December 10, 2008 by the United Nations Security Council after the horrific Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed.

Saeed had filed an appeal with the UN through Lahore-based law firm Mirza and Mirza in 2017, while he was still under house arrest in Pakistan, for removal of the ban.

Independent Ombudsperson Daniel Kipfer Fasciati, appointed by the UN to examine all such requests, has informed Saeed's lawyer that it has been decided following examination of his request that he will "continue as a listed individual", sources said.

The Ombudsperson recommended that after gathering all information, it has been decided to continue with the ban as "there was sufficient information to provide a reasonable and credible basis for continuing the listing," sources said, adding the recommendation was endorsed by the UN's Sanctions Committee.

The 1267 Committee measures include three major areas of sanctions --assets freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo, which need to be mandatorily applied by all UN member states.

The Committee oversees implementation of these three sanctions measures, besides considering the names submitted for listing and de-listing, as well as any additional information on the listed individuals and entities.

Saeed's request was opposed by India as well as other countries that had originally listed him - US, UK and France, sources said.

Significantly, Pakistan did not oppose the appeal despite claims by the new Imran Khan-led government there that it was taking action against the banned terrorists and their organisations in what they call a 'Naya Pakistan' (new Pakistan).

Last month, the US, the UK and France made a fresh bid at the UN to ban JeM head Masood Azhar, who is also residing in Pakistan as per Pakistani foreign minister's admission. JeM is already a UN-designated terrorist organisation.

Asked about the delay in deciding on Saeed's appeal, which normally takes six months from the time it is registered with the UN, sources said the delay happened because the Ombudsperson got changed before completion of the time period and then some time was taken to appoint a new one.

Under the 1267 committee rules, the UN member states are required to freeze without delay the funds and other financial assets or economic resources of designated individuals and entities as also required to prevent the entry into or transit through their territories by designated individuals.

All states are also required to prevent any direct or indirect supply, sale and transfer from their territories or by their nationals outside their territories, or using their flag vessels or aircraft, of arms and related material of all types, spare parts, and technical advice, assistance, or training related to military activities, to designated individuals and entities.
Pakistan, wary of being blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force, has urged it to remove India from the co-chair of a body that is reviewing Islamabad's progress on the implementation of an action plan to combat terrorism.

The Paris-based global body is working to curb terrorism financing and money laundering and has asked Pakistan to reassess the operation of banned terrorist outfits in the country. Pakistan is under intense international pressure to rein in terror groups like the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) after the Pulwama terror attack.

In June last year, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) had placed Pakistan on the grey list of countries whose domestic laws are considered weak to tackle the challenges of money laundering and terrorism financing.

Pakistan Finance Minister Asad Umar wrote to FATF President Marshall Billingslea to appoint any other member as co-chair of the Asia-Pacific's Joint Group, in place of India, to ensure that the FATF review process is fair, unbiased and objective, said the Ministry of Finance on Saturday.

The Joint Group is a sub-body of the International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG) of the Asia Pacific Group (APG). Pakistan is a member of the APG and its case is being presented before the FATF by the APG. India's Financial Intelligence Unit's (FIU) director general is the co-chair of the Joint Group, the Express Tribune reported.

"India's animosity towards Pakistan is well known and the recent violation of Pakistan's airspace and dropping of bombs inside Pakistani territory is another manifestation of India's hostile attitude," it quoted Umar as writing to Billingslea while seeking removal of India.

"Pakistan will also lobby with the friendly countries to get India removed from the co-chair of the Joint Group after New Delhi abused its position in the last FATF meeting," Umar told the newspaper.

"India submitted a separate dossier against Pakistan that undermined the FATF's neutrality," he said.

India recently submitted a dossier to Pakistan on the role of JeM in the Pulwama terror attack.

On Saturday, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said that India will remain resolute in its determination to persuade the international community of the necessity of compelling Pakistan to move beyond mere words and to show credible, verifiable and sustained actions against terror groups in the country.

The finance minister said Pakistan would not boycott the FATF process but will use every available avenue to make sure that India no more politicises the global body.

Because of India's move, the FATF did not express satisfaction on the implementation of the action plan.

In his letter, Umar referred to a statement regarding the efforts for global isolation of Pakistan and India's call for the blacklisting of Pakistan during the ICRG meeting on February 18, which demonstrated Indian intentions to hurt Pakistans economic interests.

The FATF has asked Pakistan to properly demonstrate that it has a better understanding of risks posed by proscribed organisations operating from its soil.

Umar has written the letter about two months before the Joint Group would review implementation on over 15 points of the agreed Action Plan. The Joint Group meeting is scheduled to take place in May in Sri Lanka. After that, the FATF Plenary meeting will be held in the United States in June this year, the report said.

Pakistan is again anticipating tough Indian opposition during May and June meetings, the report said.

"Given the clear Indian motivation to hurt Pakistan's economic interests, Indian presence among the evaluators and as co-chair of the Joint Group would undermine the impartiality and spirit of the peer review process, which lies at the heart of FATFs methodology and objective assessment," Umar wrote.

The minister said Pakistan firmly believes that India's involvement in the ICRG process will not be fair towards Pakistan and urged that FATF appoint another country as co-chair of the Joint Group instead of India to ensure an impartial assessment of Pakistan's progress in regard to the FATF action plan.

The minister assured the FATF president that "Pakistan remains firm in its commitment to work with FATF/ICRG and the Joint Group and to implement the action plan" and demanded that "FATF must take steps to ensure that the ICRG process is fair, unbiased and impartial towards Pakistan".

Although Pakistan has taken up the issue of Indian attempts to politicise the FATF, it also needs to strengthen the National Counter Terrorism Authority and the Financial Monitoring Unit to present a strong case in the next FATF and ICRG meetings, the report said.

There is also a need to strengthen the institutional capacity of the FMU by appointing people who have a background in handling the AML and Counter-Terrorism Financing issues.

So far, most of the staff comprises people who have come on deputation from the State Bank of Pakistan, the country's central bank. The FMU also needs to be equipped to tackle challenges posed by the flow of black money from the non-banking financial sector, the report said.
Congress leaders are pushing party president Rahul Gandhi to contest from a second seat in either Tamil Nadu or Karnataka in the Lok Sabha elections to boost the partys prospects in South India.

Highly-placed sources told DH that several leaders, including those holding plum positions in the party, want Rahul to choose a seat from Tamil Nadu to milk the visible anti-Modi sentiment in the state or from Karnataka where the party has stitched up an alliance with the JD(S).

The Congress has already announced that Rahul Gandhi would contest from Amethi for the fourth time  he won the seat in 2004, 2009 and 2014.

On Friday, Karnataka Congress leaders started tweeting their invitation to Rahul with the hashtag #RaGaFromKarnataka. Their argument is that Rahuls grandmother, Indira Gandhi, and mother, Sonia Gandhi, have tasted electoral success in the state.

Karnataka has always supported and encouraged Congress leaders. It has been proved in case of Smt Indira ji & Smt Sonia ji. We also want our next Prime Minister of India Shri Rahul Gandhi to contest from Karnataka & herald new developmental paradigm, former chief minister Siddaramaiah tweeted. Siddaramaiah was joined by other top state leaders in welcoming Rahul.

In Tamil Nadu, Karti, son of former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, also tweeted his wish that Rahul contest from there. AICC secretary and former Virudhunagar MP Manicka Tagore also joined the call. He should also be Prime Minister from South India and where the change is already happening, Tagore tweeted.

Among the southern states, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are good choices as Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are too risky, with the party losing much of its ground to the YSRCP and the TRS respectively, party sources said.

According to sources, party leaders strongly feel that Rahul should contest from the south to cash in on the BJPs perceived Hindi and North Indian image.

There are several state units who want Rahul Gandhi to contest from their state. Now, it is for the party to decide where would Mr. Rahul Gandhi contest from, AICC spokesperson Pawan Khera said in Delhi.

Sources said family of Chidambaram would also be keen on Rahul contesting from Sivaganga in Tamil Nadu. In Karnataka, it is speculated that Bidar would be apt for Rahul.
India on Saturday dismissed Pakistans claim of acting against terrorists and terror organisations in its territory, stating that the neighbouring country was just replaying the same script that had played out in the past in the aftermath of the cross-border terror attacks launched from its territory.

Indias envoy to Pakistan, Ajay Bisaria, and his Pakistan counterpart, Sohail Mahmood, on Saturday returned to Islamabad and New Delhi respectively, signalling a semblance of thaw after more than three weeks of escalating tension following the Pulwama attack.

They were called back to New Delhi and Islamabad for consultation by the respective governments soon after the terror attack, which was carried out by the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM).

New Delhi, however, made it clear that Indias armed forces would continue to maintain strict vigil and would remain determined in the defence of the nation and its citizens against any act of aggression by Pakistan.

If Pakistan claims to be a Naya Pakistan (New Pakistan) with Nayi Soch (New Thoughts), it should show Naya Action (New Action) against terrorist groups and terror infrastructure on its soil and end cross border terrorism in support of its claims, Raveesh Kumar, spokesperson of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told journalists in New Delhi. He was apparently referring to claim by Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan that a new Pakistan had been born after his government had taken over in August 2018.

Same script

Imran Khans government launched a crackdown on some proscribed organizations, mostly terror outfits under United Nations sanctions. The federal and provincial authorities also took over control of several seminaries, which were run by charity organisations affiliated to the terrorist organisations placed under global sanctions.

The Pakistan government also claimed to have arrested a large number of individuals across the country.

We are seeing the same script that has been played out earlier after the terrorist attacks on our Parliament in December 2001, the Mumbai terrorist attack in November 2008 and the attack on Pathankot airbase in January 2016, said Kumar.

Action only on paper

He said the Pakistan government claimed to have proscribed groups and individuals, but its action was only on paper.

Actually, terrorist groups and individuals continue their activities without hindrance. Pakistan has not shown any serious intent to address

the legitimate concerns of India and the global community, the MEA spokesperson said.

He pointed out that Pakistans Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and former President Pervez Musharraf had acknowledged the presence of the Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan in recent interviews to media organisations. But Pakistan army spokesperson Maj Gen Ashif Ghafoor openly denied the presence of the outfit in Pakistan in another media interview.

This statement is a sufficient proof that Pakistan still remains in a state of denial.
A Mysuru-based business which has traditionally been involved in the manufacture of incense sticks, has come forward to cure depression in India using advanced technology even as medical experts predict that the country could be the suicide capital of the world in a decade.

Dr Vijay Mehtry, a consultant psychiatrist based in Bengaluru, said that an estimated 300 million people around the world suffer from depression, among them 56 million Indians. This latter figure constitutes nearly 4.50% of the population - considering this percentage is set to increase because of the demands on mental health placed by urbanisation, he said.

Mental health professionals blame rapid urbanisation for isolation of individuals and the increase in suicidal tendencies. According to Dr Ajit Bhide, the former president of the Indian Psychiatric Society, industrialised Japan, which has some of the highest suicide rates in the world, can be compared against agrarian Bhutan, where people are not exposed to expectations and are therefore generally satisfied.

The problem in India is that we have extraordinary proportions of anomie in the country, Dr Bhide said. Psychologists describe anomie as a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals.

People in urban areas have a high degree of comforts and are usually paid fat salaries, but with little time to spend that money, Dr Bhide added. Reversing the rising trend of urban mental deterioration means enforcing a value-based education, strengthening family values and other social relationships.

For Pavan Ranga, a Mysuru-based businessman, advanced technology offers another way.

Recognising the human brain as an elaborate and three-dimensional electrical circuit where faulty sectors cause mental disorders, Ranga said that he sought a means to stimulate the neural network to fix disorders.

In a depressed patient or a patient, we can see neuron sets which show subdued activity. By using a technology called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), which uses large wand emitting magnetic waves, we can actually trigger or light up darkened neuron areas to effectively cure depression, he said.

Ranga expressed confidence that patients with depression can be cured following 25 to 30 sessions over a one-month period. Each session would last for 19 minutes.

Other medical professionals, however, are cautious. Bhide clarified that depression is a recurring illness that would need repeat treatments. In addition, TMS cannot directly address suicide yet  but it can help to address mild and medium forms of disorders, he said. A 25 to 30 session treatment plan would cost Rs 1 to 1.5 lakh.
The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has announced that PECO Energy will implement lane restrictions from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on three state highways in Delaware County between March 18-22 for gas line installations.

The work locations are:

*Landover Road between Gaynor Road and Haverford Road in Haverford;

*Brinton Lake Road between Denise Drive and Elaine Drive in Thornbury; and

*Sproul Road between Kirk Avenue and Summit Avenue in Marple.

*

Motorists should also keep these new and ongoing road projects in mind this week:

Chester

* Northbound I-95, right lane closure at the Edgemont Avenue/Avenue of the States Interchange from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. March 18 for bridge inspection.

* Southbound I-95, right lane closure at the Edgemont Avenue/Avenue of the States Interchange from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. March 21 for bridge inspection.

Marple

* Lawrence Road, weekday lane closures with flagging at the intersection of Sussex Boulevard, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. March 18 through March 29 for water main improvement.

* West Chester Pike, weeknight lane restrictions westbound between the Interstate 476 Interchange and Mather Avenue, 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. March 19 through March 26 for water main installation.

Radnor

*Newtown Road, closures between Radnor-Chester Road and Darby-Paoli Road, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. through March 29 for gas main work. Motorists will be directed to use Darby-Paoli Road, Bryn Mawr Avenue and Sproul Road.

Upper Providence and Marple

* Palmers Mill Road, continued bridge work between Lakeview Drive and Newtown Street Road from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. through the summer as crews continue work to expand a bridge over the Springton Reservoir.

Haverford

* Ardmore Avenue, weekday lane restrictions with flagging between Morris Road and Lancaster Avenue, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. through early May for utility installation.

Upper Chichester

* Bethel Avenue, weekday closures between Conchester Highway and Dutton Street, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. through the end of April for utility installation.

*

For information on projects occurring or being bid this year, those made possible by or accelerated by Act 89, or those on the departments Four and Twelve Year Plans, visit www.projects.penndot.gov

Motorists can check conditions on more than 40,000 roadway miles by visiting www.511PA.com. 511PA, which is free and available 24 hours a day, provides traffic delay warnings, weather forecasts, traffic speed information and access to more than 860 traffic cameras.

511PA is also available through a smartphone application for iPhone and Android devices, by calling 5-1-1, or by following regional Twitter alerts accessible on the 511PA website.

For PennDOT information, visit www.penndot.gov. Follow local PennDOT information on Twitter at www.twitter.com/511PAPhilly, and follow the department on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pennsylvaniadepartmentoftransportation and Instagram at www.instagram.com/pennsylvaniadot.
Delaware County Common Pleas Court Judge Richard M. Cappelli has denied a motion from a former Delaware state death row inmate to dismiss charges stemming from a 2001 shooting in Chester on Sixth Amendment grounds.

Cappelli said Monday that he had reviewed the record and relevant case law in denying Chauncey Starlings motion, premised on his right to a speedy trial.

Starling, 44, of Wilmington, is accused of shooting Alfred Gaines on April 7, 2001, in the area of Second and Flower streets, according to an affidavit of probable cause. Gaines later served as a key witness in convicting Starling for the March 9, 2001, shooting deaths of Damon J. DJ Gist Jr., 5, and Darnell Evans, 28, at the Made 4 Men barbershop in Wilmington.

Chester Police Officer William Murphy responded to the area of Second and Flower for a report of shots fired at about 11:16 p.m. April 7 and discovered Gaines covered in blood on the ground behind a silver Toyota 4Runner with its lights on and drivers-side door open, according to the affidavit. He was transported to Crozer-Cheste Medical Center and treated for gunshots to his neck, face and head.

Gaines later told detectives that Starling and two other men lured him to Chester that night. He identified Starling as the gunman and also testified against him at trial in the Delaware barbershop shooting.

Starling was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Gist and Evans, for which he was sentenced to death in 2004. He appealed and the death sentence was vacated, but later reinstated by the Delaware Superior Court in 2005.

The Delaware Supreme Court granted Starling a retrial in 2015, which was expected to begin in May 2017. Starling instead entered a no contest plea to second-degree murder and was resentenced to 18 years in prison in March 2017, with time served. His probation in that case ends in July.

Starling was transferred to Delaware County in June 2017 for the Gaines shooting under the Interstate Agreement on Detainers Act and was granted unsecured bail of $20,000 in October 2017 by Delaware County Common Pleas Court Judge Barry Dozor.

Defense attorney Michael Lehr moved to dismiss the Gaines case for failure to provide his client with a speedy trial under state and federal law. Dozor ruled on the state law claim in favor of the commonwealth, but did not rule on the Sixth Amendment issue.

Assistant District Attorney Matt DeNucci noted at the last hearing in January that Dozor granted Starling the right to appeal in 2017. The Superior Court agreed with the commonwealth that interlocutory appeal (one that comes before a case is fully settled) was inappropriate, however, and remanded the case to the Common Pleas Court. Starling also applied to have the case heard by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which denied his request, according to DeNucci.

Cappellis ruling Monday now puts the federal question to rest and allows the case to proceed, but the judge said he would be receptive to a motion for reconsideration if Lehr felt there was some factor that had not been considered.

Lehr and DeNucci indicated Monday that significant discovery in the case is ongoing, including communications between Delaware County and the Delaware Attorney Generals office. Lehr said that information could be determinative on whether he files a motion for reconsideration.

Cappelli has set an April 22 status date.
By the Times Staff

SPRINGFIELD  Authorities are asking for help to identify individuals on All Terrain Vehicles who tore up the ball field and recess yard at Scenic Hills Elementary School earlier this month.

School was in session when the incident occurred about 2:15 p.m. on March 1, causing what police described as quite a disturbance inside of the school, according to post by Springfield Delco Police Department on Facebook.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Detective Robert Nutley at 610-554-5506. Anonymous tips can also be sent on Facebook or on the police department website.

The March 13 Facebook post includes photographs, along with this message: If you are one of the subjects on these ATVs and you come forward soon, we might take it easy on the charges. Just throwing it out there.
Vincent Phologo has been reinstated as kgosi of Makopong village. The reinstatement which was done this week Tuesday follows a case in which Phologo, who was removed from the chieftainship through a court order, sought rescission of Judge Michael Leburus judgment which stripped him of bogosi which he argued in court papers that it rightly belongs to him.

Judge Jennifer Dube of the Lobatse High Court in a ruling which she also castigated the Attorney General for lack of professionalism ruled in favour of Phologo. In the matter, Phologo argued that he is entitled to rescission of the judgment so that the real issues in dispute between the parties can be fully ventilated. Phologo was in April last year relieved of his duties as Sub-chief for Makopong village following a court order by Justice Leburu that his appointment to the position back in 2016 was unprocedural and should be set aside.

The judgment followed a successful bid by some members of the Makopong community who challenged in court his appointment without elections being held. However, in her ruling Justice Dube rescinded and set aside Leburus judgment saying for the sake of fairness and justice, the rescission should be granted and real issues between the warring parties be ventilated in an open court. She noted in her ruling that Justice Leburu decided the review application without the benefit of an answering affidavit from the applicant, hence his conclusion that the matter was unopposed.

However a court may, upon a rescission application, rescind its own judgment upon the discovery of vital documents or information, she said. Justice Dube argued that based on the evidence before her, Makopong chieftaincy issues are sensitive and important in that they cannot be resolved on paper or on technicalities. The judge said on the initial matter before Judge Leburu, Phologo was hard done by the Attorney General, which was representing him at the time. According to the judge Phologo trusted that the attorney handling his case at the Attorney General as instructed by the Ministry of Lands could handle his case in a professional and satisfactory manner.

After the Attorney General was instructed he did not personally receive court notices, therefore he did not know that his case would be heard, argued Judge Dube, further saying, in her view, it was incumbent upon the attorney at the Attorney Generals Chambers to inform him of court sessions as court notices were received by the said attorney on behalf of the client. The attorney representing the applicant failed to demonstrate professionalism and sensitivity towards the applicants case, she said. Following the ruling the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development moved swiftly to reinstate Phologo as Kgosi for Makopong.

In a letter signed by Minister Frans Solomon Van Der Westhuizen, the ministry stated in part that the consequence of Justice Dubes judgment is that by operation of law your earlier removal has been set aside and I herewith reinstate youThis is with immediate effect and retrospective. On Tuesday assistant minister Kgotla Autlwetse was in Makopong to reinstate Phologo. However, respondents on the rescission case led by Dixon Dijeng are intending to appeal Justice Dubes ruling, as they believe the judge has made an error when she ruled in favour of Phologo.

The main contention in the Makopong chieftaincy dispute is whether the bogosi in the village is hereditary or is determined through a vote. Phologo argues bogosi in Makopong is hereditary while some community members who launched the court case following Phologos appointment argue that the Kgosi in that village is selected through a vote.

Meanwhile community members are also questioning why Phologo has been reinstated because according to them Phologo should have made an application before court for reinstatement following Judge Dubes ruling. They also say there was no court order that compelled the minister to reinstate Phologo.
SALT LAKE CITY  If youre a big Parks and Recreation fan, you probably remember the scene where Patton Oswalt attempts to block a Pawnee city council vote by filibustering the council with an epic "Star Wars" and "Avengers" rant.

This week, a woman from Livingston County, Michigan, followed Oswalts lead and delivered a portion of his nine-minute filibuster during a Livingston County Board of Commissioners meeting to make a point about the boards decision to stop publicly broadcasting meetings.

Bridgett McDowell took time during Mondays meeting to participate in a peoples filibuster and delay action that would limit government transparency in Livingston County, according to Michigan Live.

In her first time slot, McDowell talked about the finer points of hand-lettering, displaying signs saying things like, Hello! We are watching you!

During the second call for public comment, McDowell stood and began quoting Oswalts epic Parks and Rec filibuster, according to Michigan Live.

Oswalts filibuster, which aired in 2013, was entirely improvised and imagines the Star Wars universe crossing over with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, according to ComicBook.com.

You can listen to part of it here:

At a county board meeting in Michigan, resident quotes @pattonoswalt's Star Wars filibuster from @parksandrecnbc until her three minutes is up. pic.twitter.com/K5cQvMesRD  Lauren Gibbons (@LaurenMGibbons) February 26, 2019

According to Michigan Live, many citizens who spoke in the meeting just wanted the option to watch public meetings from home again. The Board of Commissioners began recording and posting meetings online in 2017. The first six-month contract for the recording service was renewed in April 2018, but was dropped by a three-commissioner panel vote of 2-1 when the contract expired.

Board chairman Donald Parker said the move to end broadcasts was more to address the question of whether $8,000 spent on the taping was worth the low viewership than it was a transparency issue.

We are a county of around 190,000 people, Parker said. If you take a look at the viewership on a monthly basis, it averaged to just slightly over 100 people per month.
SALT LAKE CITY  A Millcreek man accused of loaning the gun to the man who killed University of Utah student Lauren McCluskey was arrested in California on Thursday.

Nathan Daniel Vogel, 21, appeared in federal court in San Diego where a judge set bail at $15,000. He will remain in custody until a March 28 hearing on returning him to Utah.

Federal prosecutors believe Vogel was working in the San Diego area when Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents took him into custody, said U.S. Attorney's Office spokeswoman Melodie Rydalch.

Vogel and Sarah Emily Lady, 24, of Mapleton, allegedly made a "straw" purchase of a Beretta PX4 Storm .40-caliber handgun from a federal firearms dealer last September, according to an indictment filed in U.S. District Court on Wednesday.

Vogel loaned the gun to Melvin Rowland who used it to shoot McCluskey in a parking lot outside her dorm last October, federal prosecutors say. McCluskey had dated Rowland before learning he was a sex offender and more than a decade older than her. Rowland fatally shot himself as police pursued him off campus.

Prosecutors says Vogel asked Lady to buy the gun for him because he didn't want to wait for the background check. They allege she lied to the seller that the gun was for her.

Both are charged with making a false statement during the acquisition of a firearm and conspiracy.

Agents arrested Lady on Tuesday and she pleaded not guilty during an initial court appearance Wednesday in Salt Lake City. She was placed on supervised release with several restrictions, including prohibiting her from having contact with Vogel and prohibiting her from possessing guns or weapons.
SALT LAKE CITY  For McKay Lenker, hanging small-scale art outside a Provo restaurant was a gateway into another  or perhaps, many  tiny worlds.

I took an art and business class, and our professor gave us an assignment to curate and install our art somewhere in public, Lenker, an art teacher and passionate exhibitionist of tiny art, told the Deseret News. People in the class went to galleries and coffee shops to hang their work,  but since I had been painting some tiny paintings on tiny canvases, I thought, 'What if I just hung these really low to the ground and gave them tiny labels and tiny titles, and I put little magnifying glasses by them?'

Well, what if?

Lenker's first exhibit went so well that she decided to host and curate more bitty shows, inspiring her to create Tiny Art Show, a "community art project bringing teeny tiny art shows to unexpected places," the group's Instagram account states.

Tiny Art Shows next exhibit  Rachel Crockett Smiths 16-piece Here and There, an abstract show that explores the connection between heaven and earth  runs March 15-23 at Provo's Heirloom Art and Co.

But theres more to these "little shows than one might expect. While Lenker ultimately aims to showcase the artists she invites, her display style is tiny art in its own right.

Tiny food, tiny forks, tiny lights, tiny stanchions, a tiny mop  so I can clean  and many other magical small-scale artifacts can be found at each show. Most importantly, all pieces  no more than 3 inches by 3 inches  are hung 12 inches above the ground  Im very serious about that, Lenker said.

The idea is, imagine you were shrunk down to be a tiny person, Lenker continued. And this is your universe.

Additionally, Lenker is building a periscope, she said, so that elderly or otherwise non-floorgoing visitors can see the paintings without having to get on the ground.

While Lenkers magical displays move far from miniature art tradition  miniatures initially served as pragmatic, portable images before photography was invented, tiny art historian Wes Siegrist told the Deseret News  modern miniatures have provided artists with the opportunity to play with the creative aspects inherent in the small-scale format.

I love the idea that people will be up close, on their knees viewing the paintings in order to get the whole picture, said Smith, who will be presenting her first tiny art show in Lenkers upcoming exhibit. You cant see all the details from far away, and it takes that extra insight to sort of get it. I really like that idea. I felt like that applied really well to the theme I was working in.

Siegrist, an artist himself, agreed that intimacy is a major creative draw for modern artists working in the small-scale format.

Its an intimate object, it draws you close, it keeps your attention.  This is something that you pick up and look at, and you might say fondle  something you really admire compared to something that's hanging on a wall, or that you're observing from across the room, he said.

And the magnifying glasses at Lenkers first exhibit, she said, draw viewers farther in.

I ask kids what their favorite piece was, and they can tell me straight away without having to look back at the show, Lenker explained.

From a consumer standpoint, there are quite a few pragmatic advantages. Low price points  in Lenkers shows, pieces that range from about $30-$100  make art curation less intimidating. Anyone is welcome.  Plus, I really like the idea that a tiny show can make collecting art more affordable, Lenker said.

Additionally, space  or, wall space  is a major benefit for those collecting or exhibiting small pieces. Michael Dandley, the manager of the traveling "Enormous Tiny Art" exhibit base at Nahcotta Gallery in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, has found that tiny art is the ideal fit for old buildings and tight spaces.

In New England  we have a lot of old constructed houses in this area and they don't often have huge open wall spaces  often walls are at strange angles under staircases, Dandley said. We also have a lot of brick in this region which can be challenging for hanging in a residential. So, all our work allows us to fit in those nooks and crannies.

Unfortunately, lower earning potential, obscurity and limited exhibition opportunities tend to deter artists from focusing on miniatures  Siegrist encourages artists interested in this area to look for ways to make it more lucrative.

The amount of time and effort it takes to put into a miniature, you can put that same thing into a larger scale work and make a lot more money, Siegrist said. You have to do it because you love it.

As an exhibitioner, Lenker seems to be on the same page.

My goal is to have people feel the wonder and childhood excitement that we forget about sometimes," she said. "Especially for people who see them, and theyre not planning to see them  if theyre just going to try on some clothes in a clothing store and theres one in a dressing room. Its something that brings magic into peoples lives.

If you go 

What: Tiny Art Show featuring Rachel Crockett Smith

When: March 15-23, Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Opening reception Friday, March 15, 6 p.m.

Where: Heirloom Art & Co., 4801 N. University Ave, Suite 350, Provo

Web: facebook.com
SALT LAKE CITY  When Milo Benton was born four months ago, there was a small crisis with his breathing. It was quickly resolved, but the hospital staff wanted to check him over more thoroughly. So Stephanie and Adam Benton gave their new baby a quick squeeze and off he was whisked to the newborn intensive care unit.

You worry your whole pregnancy about your baby being healthy, said Stephanie Benton, 34. When he was born, he had all his limbs and he looked just fine. I thought they were just being extra careful.

The baby was soon back in Stephanies arms and while Adam videotaped, she did a meet-our-new-miracle commentary on Milos features: Look at this nose. Ive never seen this nose before, she remembers saying. Look at this ear; its kind of folded over.  My goodness!" Milo was content, dozing through the narrative, eyes closed.

For two hours, I was the most happy, calm person. I was just so grateful to be done with the pregnancy. I had a healthy baby. Then we received news that hit us between the eyes, Stephanie said.

Doctors said Milo had Down syndrome, the most common chromosome disorder affecting babies. About 6,000 Americans are born each year with the condition, caused by a full or partial extra copy of chromosome 21. The name Trisomy 21 may explain why World Down Syndrome Day is marked on March 21  "3/21"  each year around the globe, with activities ranging from celebration of those with the condition to a push for policies that improve their lives.

In recent years, several state legislatures have proposed bans on abortions sought only because a child might have Down syndrome, and cases are working their way through the courts in some jurisdictions. Meanwhile, those providing care are emphasizing attention to individual challenges like hearing loss so that prompt treatment can minimize harmful effects.

People with Down syndrome attend school, work, participate in decisions that affect them, have meaningful relationships, vote and contribute to society in many wonderful ways, the National Down Syndrome Society says. Cognitive delays are usually mild to moderate.

Over several days at the hospital, the Bentons would learn a lot about the condition, the available resources and what to watch for. Theyd change some expectations, mourn those changes and celebrate the cuddly bundle that is Milo. Not unexpectedly, their emotions have been swinging back and forth a bit as they adapt to the unexpected.

I think that every child is going to have problems in life and every kid is going to have obstacles and things theyre going to have to overcome. You just usually dont learn what they are within the first two hours of your kids life. In some ways, we know more about him than our other children, said Stephanie, referring to Pippa, 2, and Wade, 4.

In the moment

Parents comment that children with Down syndrome live in the present  something kids generally do well and adults do poorly as their thoughts bounce between past, present and future and the worries that populate each realm.

These kids' focus on the present is reminiscent of mindfulness, the process of clearing ones mind and focusing on whats happening right now. Advocates of mindful practices claim they bring calm and increase happiness.

Thats something Stephanie Benton relates to Milo, noting that living in the present is infectious. I think parents so often are just worried about how their kids are going to turn out and worried about the future and worried about the decisions their children are making and the decisions they are making to help their children.

One cant look too far down the road with Down syndrome, she said. Despite commonalities, each child is different in capability and challenges. I think too often we put emphasis on the future self and dont validate right now  and I think Down syndrome has a way of pushing back on that. Since we dont know what this means for our future, I am constantly trying to live in the present, said Stephanie.

Right now, that feels pretty wonderful, she said. Hes the easiest baby Ive had. He hardly cries. I guess thats fairly typical of kids with Down syndrome as long as theyre fairly healthy.  You put him down, he falls asleep. You pick him up, he smiles.

Milo doesnt have heart anomalies that up to half of children with Down syndrome do. Hes been screened for hearing loss, common with Down syndrome and so far, his hearing's fine. If undetected, that could exacerbate cognitive processing issues. Children with Down syndrome are vulnerable to many things: sleep apnea, ear infections, vision problems and to a lesser extent issues like thyroid disease or hip dislocation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They are also far more likely than other children to have leukemia by age 5. Early dementia is typical with Down syndrome, but average lifespan is increasing. In 1983, people with Down syndrome seldom lived past 25; now they live into their 60s. Watching for problems and intervening early has changed lives.

Milo and other children with Down syndrome grow more slowly, but at their own pace. They are developmentally delayed and intellectually challenged to different degrees.

People with Down syndrome should not be underestimated, according to research led by Dr. Brian Skotko, director of the Down Syndrome Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where researchers examined milestones in 2,600 affected families in the United States and the Netherlands.

Contrary to some public beliefs, people with Down syndrome never stop learning, and functional skills can still be attained and improved well into adulthood, he said in a news release.

The study found people with Down syndrome walk by 25 months, speak reasonably well by age 13 and take care of their own hygiene by 13 years. By age 20, they can work independently. Half read reasonably well by 31 years, just slightly fewer write pretty well and more than a third lived on their own by that age, while a slightly smaller number could travel alone. The report was recently published in American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A.

Still, some with Down syndrome are more challenged than others. Mikey Craynor's level of disability is severe and is coupled with sensory processing issues. Now 16, the Salt Lake teen cannot speak, but communicates fairly well through actions and use of picture cards. Mikey is in diapers, though Cody and Emily Craynor continue to work on potty training.

To meet his needs, the Craynors have learned and modified and learned some more, said his mother, Emily Craynor. When they shop, for instance, Mikey's in a large stroller because hes prone to trying to run off. Parents must adapt to meet the needs of the child.

His is not a sad life, Emily Craynor said. Hes social and loves to be around people. And people just love him. He has a talent for making other people love him.

Mikeys mom describes joyful moments playing with his best pal Bozzly, his Shih Tzu dog. His mom loves watching him thrill to leaves buffeted by wind in trees. That makes him really happy and hell laugh. It kind of shifts the way you think about everything."

Legislative mandates

Down syndrome has been in the news in part because several states have considered or passed legislation to keep people from getting an abortion solely because prenatal testing indicates a baby could have Down syndrome.

The Utah Legislature just joined other states approving such a measure, which is awaiting Gov. Gary Herberts decision on whether to sign it. The bill would delay enactment until a court rules on whether similar laws in other states are legal, to prevent costly litigation.

Proponents of such laws point to Iceland and Denmark to show why they think protection is needed. In those countries, pregnancy is terminated in about 98 percent of cases if testing indicates a child might have Down syndrome, although thats just among pregnancies where genetic screening is done. In the United States, about 68 percent of women who learn through genetic testing that their fetus has Down syndrome terminate the pregnancy.

The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute outlines the state of legislation around the United States. Ohio and Indiana both have cases winding through the courts, challenging laws that prohibit an abortion sought solely because the child has Down syndrome. In North Dakota, the law prohibits abortion solely for a genetic abnormality. A law in Louisiana, now being challenged, prohibits abortion after 20 weeks if desired solely because the unborn child has been diagnosed with either a genetic abnormality or a potential for a genetic abnormality.

Several other states have introduced bills, but the institute suggest legislatures are watching to see what the courts do with challenges to the Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana laws.

Making life better

No one knows more about changes that could make life better for those with Down syndrome than those deeply affected by the condition.

Several things would help, said Adrian Forsythe, an advocacy programs specialist with the National Down Syndrome Society, who describes himself as a motivational speaker and an advocate for equality. One is competitive and inclusive employment opportunities, for people with Down syndrome find it hard to find employment, especially when out of school.

He should know. Forsythe, 30, has Down syndrome and spent more than a year doing nothing because he couldnt find a job. He believes many potential employers decided what they thought he could  or couldnt  do, rather than giving him a chance. And when people do have jobs, they get held back because of stereotypes, he said. People assume we can only do factory work.

Forsythe longs to see more opportunity for education. He attended college through a program at George Mason University that enrolled what he calls advocates for those with disabilities. He studied acting, communications and womens studies.

Medicaid often covers cost of medical care for individuals with Down syndrome, he said. While it cares for challenges like the common heart problems, it also inadvertently breaks hearts: Sometimes, he said, people with Down syndrome forego marriage because couples may earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but dont have the kind of jobs that let them afford insurance.

A huge challenge for the Craynors  for anyone with an adult-size person who wears diapers  is finding a private place to change them away from home. Emily Craynor said England has full-size changing tables, but American stores and restaurants have baby-sized tables.

I didnt realize that I was sort of already in this community before I knew I needed it.  Stephanie Benton

They recently started to receive respite services from the Utah Division of Services for People with Disabilities, which has made a huge difference. They were on a waiting list for years and know other families desperate for help are still waiting.

Its life-changing to receive services, said Emily Craynor. When you have a child that big, who wears diapers and cant speak, its not easy to call the girl down the street to come baby-sit.

Help already in place

Stephanie Benton said it feels in some ways like their universe was being prepared for Milo. It was on World Down Syndrome Day 2018 that she learned she was pregnant. This year, they enrolled their oldest son, Wade, in a new school where they've gotten to know a couple of families with children with Down syndrome.

I didnt realize that I was sort of already in this community before I knew I needed it, she said.

Wade has friends with Down syndrome, as a result. He doesnt see them as different.

Stephanie likes how Milo was treated at the hospital. It was really beautiful," she said. Expectations were erased, and the attitude was, Just let him do what hes going to do. Just let him be the person hes going to become, no strings attached. Nothing was rushed as hospital staff made sure Milo was in shape to go home thriving, said Stephanie. It was a really compassionate way to start out with him.

Her mom arrived to help Stephanie and Adam with the baby the day before Milo was born. While she was there, her husband called to tell her The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was calling them as service mission leader coordinators in Ohio, where they live. They will help people with special needs, like their newest grandson, Stephanie said.

And the Bentons had picked a different name before Milo was born, but changed it to one that he would be able to pronounce himself, easily. Then they added his middle name: Bond, also a family name on Adams side.

Sitting in the hospital about four days after he was born, I realized weve had a family motto for years: The Bentons are bonded in love, service and faith. And I realized Milo is going to bond our family."

Shed felt angst over how to keep her family close as the kids grew up, worried about what she called forces pulling us that threaten family. That concern left with Milo's birth, she said.

I see Milo at the center of our family, and everybody is going to gravitate toward each other because of him. We really love this guy, and we are taking it one day at a time.
Thursdays Republican rebuke of President Donald Trump had nothing to do with border security and everything to do with clawing back the powers Congress has relinquished. And lawmakers are finding out the hard way how difficult that is.

Despite warnings from Trump that a vote for the House-passed resolution to end his emergency declaration would be a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats, 12 Republican senators, including Utahs Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, joined the 47 Senate Democrats to pass the measure.

Given the magnitude of the situation, its disappointing not more joined in. Were certain those who voted no have read the Constitution, but its less certain they regard its framework.

The vote was a chance to send a message that lawmakers are willing to pare back an executive branch that has slowly amassed undelegated powers  a process that began long before Trump entered the Oval Office. At stake is an opportunity to stop any president from acting like a king, as Lee put it in a recent tweet.

Lees concern is real. Unilateral actions, long established as a legitimate form of executive privilege, have become a different animal in a post-9/11 America. President George W. Bush used executive power to act swiftly in the face of emergency, and Congress acquiesced given the fear of the unknown. President Barack Obama inherited that legacy in addition to an uncompromising Congress. Ive got a pen and Ive got a phone, he quipped in 2014.

Trump has assumed that mantle and used executive orders to issue a ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority nations, to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and to now build a wall along the southern border in an effort address what many question is an actual emergency.

This trend consolidates power, which is hardly a good thing for a democratic society, and it creates more uncertainty than it resolves.

When Congress failed to act on immigration concerns under Obamas tenure, the president unilaterally signed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA created a temporary legal status for children brought to the U.S., but it gave no clear path to citizenship. Six-and-half years later, legal battles and failed attempts to end the program have not brought recipients any closer to a sense of certainty in their future. Its unfair to them, and it costs the nation.

To continue on this path is reckless. We join Lee and Romney in their concern that current executive overreach is an invitation for abuse by future presidents of any party.

We join Lee and Romney in their concern that current executive overreach is an invitation for abuse by future presidents of any party.

They, along with the rest of Washington, should use Thursdays vote to begin a long conversation on Article I and the constitutionally mandated separation of powers. Utahs delegation has a good start  Lees Article I Act would, among other things, curb the presidents ability to declare national emergencies, and Utah Rep. John Curtis has signed onto similar legislation in the House  but the long game needs to focus on more than emergencies.

Abdicating authority is easy, and getting it back can be tremendously difficult. We hope that conversation proves productive before the country pays an unnecessary price for Congress negligence.

Correction: An earlier version of this editorial misstated that the Senate vote was one short of a veto-proof majority. The Senate needs 67 votes to override a veto, not 60.
SALT LAKE CITY  Building an inclusive workplace goes beyond race or gender, a Utah industry expert told some of the state's business professionals Thursday. It should be an effort to invite the best work from all involved.

Speaking to an audience of business professionals at the Salt Lake Chamber offices in downtown Salt Lake City, Sara Jones, CEO of Utah-based InclusionPro  a consulting firm that develops diversity and inclusion plans for executives  said leaders need to understand the importance of building effective inclusion strategies that every employee can learn and implement.

"Culture is built from changing your behaviors," she said. "Everybody has inclusive skills. It's just that when they work with people that are different than them, a different set of behaviors start to kick in."

She said that people should be intentional in wanting to change their behavior to promote a more inclusive environment by recognizing when new people are coming onto their teams and proactively engaging them at their highest (intellectual) levels. She noted that unconscious biases often prevent people from working and interacting as effectively as they could.

"Inclusion is a way to think about how to overcome those unconscious bias behaviors," Jones explained. "How do I get my team to understand when that is happening and be intentional about it?"

She defined inclusion as "asking people to contribute at their highest levels," which don't necessarily have to focus on diversity characteristics. People want to be valued most for their talents and capabilities in the workplace, she said, not for their minority or gender status.

"I just want my thinking to be appreciated and I want to be able to give you my best thinking and my best work," Jones explained.

Adopted from Korea as a child by an American family, she said her firsthand experience has helped her learn to understand the impact of implicit bias and how to deal with it in the professional workspace.

She also noted that people aren't always aware of their bias and sometimes need help in recognizing it and the unintended consequences such behavior can pose to workplace productivity.

"Inclusion is thinking very intentionally about how (leaders) are actively engaging everyone to contribute," she said. "To help us problem solve, to help us build our teams (and) to help us do the work of building our companies."

Jones told the audience that diverse teams offer a broader scope of life experiences and professional viewpoints. Those attributes can be valuable to an employer as they work to grow and prosper, she said.

When companies are going about the business of solving daily issues, inclusivity from a diverse team offers a greater base of knowledge to pull from and tackle critical issues, she said. Building an inclusive culture through smart, thoughtful leadership is the best way to make it happen, she added, but leaders have to avoid the unconscious barriers that often prevent enhanced productivity.

"There is a very performance-driven aspect to inclusion," Jones said. Sometimes people feel uncomfortable interacting with people who are different than themselves  such as race, ethnicity or gender identification, she noted.

"When those barriers happen, we tend to have exclusion," she explained. "That's when you have people say they don't want to spend as much them with (that co-worker)."

She said inclusive leaders inspire better organizational performance, more innovation and greater job satisfaction from team members. Effective inclusion programs help make for better work environments, she said.

For some in the audience  like Melanie Jordan of Zions Bank, a Hispanic woman with a physical disability  the workplace can sometimes be a challenging place to find an inclusive culture.

"My experience is that there are a lot of unconscious biases and people get really defensive when you say, 'You've benefited from a system that was designed for you,'" she explained. "This (seminar) helps me have hope that next time I speak up I'll have allies that are going to have my back."

She said having people understand the difference between diversity and inclusion and the hard work that needs to happen to turn diversity into inclusion, resulting in better business returns. When that happens, the better the work environment will become.

Dustin Allen, consumer deposits manager for Zions Bank, said the training was valuable because it acknowledged the existence of bias and offered ways to help breed a more inclusive work culture.

"It's one step to be conscious of (your bias), it's another step to make an effort to include other people," he said. "Start with the person first. That's been one of my core values that I've been able to adopt more and more over the years as I've had more experiences."
SALT LAKE CITY  A Utah doctor is suing conservative news outlets, arguing they amplified false claims she has performed illegal abortions.

The 2018 online coverage cost abortion provider Leah Torres her job and incited death threats against her, she alleges in the defamation suit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City.

Attorneys for Torres argue she "endured a massive campaign of mob harassment" last year that forced her to leave Utah to find work.

The federal lawsuit names the Daily Caller, plus the Western Journal and its parent company, Liftable Media. It alleges the companies "published the false and malicious lie that Dr. Torres had admitted to cutting babies' throats or vocal cords" in March 2018.

Daily Caller co-founder Neil Patel said Friday that "when the doctor ambiguously referred to 'cutting the cord,'" many on Twitter took it to mean the vocal cord.

"Our reporter reported accurately in his piece what Ben Shapiro and others on Twitter were saying," Patel said in a statement. "The doctor then tweeted again well after our publication that she was referring to cutting an umbilical cord and not a vocal cord. Upon learning of this clarification from the doctor, to be as fair as possible, we have now updated the piece in question to include the doctors contention."

The reports followed Twitter interactions between Torres and an abortion opponent who asked, "Do you hear their screams?" The doctor reported fetuses are not able to scream and mentioned cutting a cord as part of an abortion procedure. She later clarified on March 14 she was speaking about the umbilical cord, her attorneys noted, but several Twitter users alleged she had been referring to the vocal cord.

A Daily Caller article the same day reported she had tweeted about "cutting the throats of fetuses so they can't scream," the suit alleges. Her foes posted fake online patient reviews and she received death threats that she then reported to the FBI, according her attorneys.

Torres has suffered emotional distress and fears for the safety of her family and friends, the 21-page civil complaint says. She seeks damages be determined at trial.

Torres has testified in the past against a Utah law that requires doctors to tell women that drug-induced abortions can be halted, saying science does not support the move. She has also publicly stated that a 2016 Utah law requiring fetal anesthesia or painkillers for elective abortions after 20 weeks lacks guidance on how doctors should give the treatment.
SALT LAKE CITY  Creating flexible and adaptable buildings gives people more housing choices and breaks the mold of one-size-fits-all development, according to John Anderson, founding member of national nonprofit Incremental Development Alliance.

Small development is all about fourth-grade math and fifth-grade English, Anderson told the crowd. Youre not looking to change the scale of the whole city."

Anderson spoke to a group of about 60 Salt Lake community members about small-scale development at a workshop Thursday.

The workshop is part of an educational series sponsored in part by the Salt Lake City Mayor's Office, the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City and Deseret First Credit Union to help educate people on incremental development.

He emphasized that people don't have to be experts to become small-scale developers.

Brandon Dayton, a neighborhood advocate who helped organize the event, agreed.

"You don't have to be a specialist to do this kind of work," Dayton said.

Anyone interested in improving their neighborhood is the perfect fit for the job, he said.

Large development projects from outside developers can gentrify locations and push people out of their neighborhoods while raising prices, Dayton explained.

Whereas designing smaller one- to three-story buildings with no more than 20 residential units can help provide more housing options for people and address the affordable housing crisis.

"It doesn't necessarily have to be large projects, it doesn't have to be  a CVS or a Walmart, but it can be neighborhood scale, it can be owned by the neighborhood, it can be your neighbors, other members of the community that are kind of building wealth and benefiting from the work," he said.

Increasing the number of local small developers can also help keep wealth in the community and increase the quality of life, Dayton added.

"When you invest in your own neighborhood, then it's not just about the revenue that you get from that development, it's also about the benefit you're getting from making your neighborhood better," he said.

Anderson said he hoped attendees of the workshop felt their vision was achievable.

"More than anything, I'm hoping that there was something in what I said that resonated with them about the scale of what is possible in a place that they care about," he said. "Because what you really want to do as a small developer is find a place that you care about that needs you and that will make the effort sustainable."

One big goal of the series is educating people and helping them become comfortable with confusing language, according to Elaine Navar, community liaison with the mayor's office for districts 1 and 2.

"So it empowers community members to understand the language of development and financing and zoning  because there's so many ideas floating around right now that people in the community want to do but we don't know where to start and how to go about it," she said. "It really gives people the tools to understand how they can move forward with this great idea that they've been sitting on for such a long time."

The workshops help further a major goal for the mayor, Navar said.

"It goes along with the themes of the mayor's vision of creating a thriving city and opportunity for everyone," she said.

Anderson said outside developers think of affordable housing in terms of numbers and in the abstract, whereas small, local developers think of affordable housing on a personal level, for people they know.

"How can Jim afford to live in my neighborhood because I went to high school with Jim and I'm trying to make this work," Anderson cited as an example of how a small-scale developer might think.

Anderson explained how this type of development impacts a neighborhood.

"Typically, the best parts of a community were built at a small scale," Anderson said. "So some of the most valuable parts of the community for a long time have been  a paying member of the tax base for a long time. So, economically those small projects are often the bedrock of the city's general fund budget."

Giving people the tools they need to succeed in development is crucial, Dayton said.

"They can make the change that they want to see in their neighborhood that they don't have to ask permission or beg for someone else to come in and save their neighborhood  they can take that on themselves and make it happen," he said.

Another free workshop led by Anderson is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday at the Salt Lake Main Library, 210 E. 400 South.

A more intensive and hands-on workshop will be held April 24 at the Leonardo.
MONTICELLO  A Colorado woman died Thursday morning in a crash near Monticello, troopers said.

At 7:17 a.m., a sedan with two occupants was driving south on state Route 191 when it lost control and slid sideways into a northbound sedan that also had two occupants, the Utah Highway Patrol said.

All four people were injured and taken to San Juan Hospital.

Christine A. Sours, 69, of Grand Junction, was later flown to St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction where she died later Thursday.

Additional information about the other victims or their conditions was not immediately available.
HYDE PARK, Cache County  Two city employees quit their jobs after their manager was demoted and subsequently reinstated to his position after allegedly pointing a gun at them during a meeting months ago.

On Nov. 14, Mike Grunig, Hyde Park's public works director, called a regular meeting in his office. But that meeting took a strange turn when employees say he stated, "Don't you think Justin would look better with a green dot on his forehead?"

"Mike then pulled a 9 mm Smith & Wesson handgun out of his pocket that had not been in a holster, open(ed) the slide, turn(ed) on the green laser and pointed it" at employee Justin Bodrero, a North Park police memo states.

Employees said Grunig then pointed the gun's laser at Bodrero's crotch before moving the laser onto the chests of the other two men.

The series of events is painted in documents obtained by the Deseret News Thursday through a public records request.

Grunig told the men that "he had a friend that does this to him and he hates it," the investigative memo written by North Park Police Chief Steve Milne states.

"It was like the oxygen was sucked out of the room," public works employee Kolby Christiansen told police.

Christiansen said he didn't know whether there was ammunition in the gun at the time and Grunig did not make any threatening statements while pointing the weapon, Milne wrote.

In statements to the police chief, Christiansen and Bodrero described strange behavior they noticed in Grunig and their fear of retaliation if they reported the incidents, which they said led them to wait months.

"I asked Justin why he did not report this sooner. He said at the time he was more taken back, but after hearing of other incidents he is worried about Mike and worried about other people's safety. He stated that Mike has lots of friends and sees him getting away with a lot of things. He was also worried about hurting Mike's career and didn't want to be responsible for that," Milne wrote.

Christiansen and Bodrero also mentioned Grunig's friendships with members of the Hyde Park City Council and what they described as his ability to talk his way out of trouble, according to the memo.

The men said they are all experienced with guns but that they had never experienced something like that before. "We all have grown up with guns and know you don't point them at people," Bodrero wrote in his statement.

On Jan. 30, Hyde Park Mayor Sharidean Flint contacted the police chief about the incident, prompting him to interview the men. The mayor determined that Grunig had violated city policies. She demoted him from his position as public works director and decreased his wages.

"I conclude that the drawing and pointing of a gun at a city employee during work hours constitutes offensive, deliberate, careless and negligent conduct that endangers the safety of your fellow city employees. I find this conduct is especially egregious as it came from a supervisor towards an employee under him," Flint wrote.

But after Grunig appealed the demotion, the City Council voted to reinstate him as public works director and give him back pay for the time he had worked at a reduced rate.

"While the City Council has determined that you did not act in such a way that jeopardized the safety of the other city employees, it has determined that you did act in such a way that was offensive to the recipients and witnesses of your actions," Mayor Pro Tem Charles Wheeler wrote in a memo to Grunnig.

Grunig was instead suspended without pay for six days and returned to work on Monday. He did not respond to messages seeking comment on Thursday.

Two of the employees whom Grunig allegedly pointed a gun at recently quit, the mayor confirmed Thursday.

"I absolutely loved my job. I loved my co-workers," Bodrero said in a prepared statement to the Deseret News. "Like most people I know, I relied on this job to support my family and planned to continue until retirement. This was my career and one of the best jobs I've ever had.

"As most people would be, I was shocked when my superior called a meeting with me and two other co-workers and, during that meeting, pointed a gun at me in two different places. I was even more shocked when the Hyde Park City Council voted to retain him in his position as my supervisor. I think his actions call into question his judgment and the subsequent vote by the Hyde Park City Council to reinstate him as my boss has resulted in a loss of confidence on my end that the safety and well-being of myself and my co-workers is a priority," Bodrero said.

In a letter from the mayor to Grunig, Flint referred to Grunig's version of the incident.

"You acknowledged  you wanted to show off your new gun with its laser, you drew the gun with an opened slide and no magazine, and pointed the gun/laser around the room before pointing it briefly at Justin's crotch. You denied making a comment about a green dot or pointing the gun at Justin's chest or at any of the other employees present. You stated that this was a mistake that you deeply regret and have been humbled over," Flint wrote.

The mayor called the incident an example of "growing pains" experienced by a quickly expanding city.

"Our policies and our procedures from the past are not adequate for the situations that we find ourselves in sometimes. And legally, we are required to follow our policies," Flint told the Deseret News.

She said she believes the City Council made its decision "based on what they thought was right, and I certainly tried to do that.  But you know, legality is always tricky. You can get two attorneys to look at the same position, and they're going to come up with two different answers. And so we're all just trying to figure out what's best for our city and change our policies and try to go forward and make it better, so hopefully this kind of thing won't come up in the future," Flint explained.

"Because you know, we're a small community, a rural community. We've always been very gun friendly. But the times are changing and that's not gonna be possible anymore," the mayor said.

Multiple members of the City Council did not respond to voicemails and emails requesting comment Thursday.

Contributing: Mike Anderson

Correction: A previous version incorrectly stated the City Council did not respond to requests for comment, and that the mayor confirmed two city employees quitting, on Wednesday. It was Thursday.
SALT LAKE CITY  Bills addressing daylight saving time are proposed at the Utah Legislature each year, but rarely make it to the floor for a vote.

This year lawmakers were able to pass a resolution they hope will lead to Utah being one step closer to staying on the same time year round.

HJR15 does not end the need to change clocks twice a year, it supports the Daylight Act proposed by U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, to allow states to choose to stay on daylight saving time. Currently states can only choose to participate in daylight saving and change their clocks or stay on standard time.

"This is something dealing with states rights and supporting one of our members of Congress," said Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, the bill's Senate sponsor.

According to the resolution, 27 states this year have introduced bills to address a change in daylight saving.

The resolution passed in the Senate on Thursday with a vote of 24-1.
The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people, says the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

This history, of course, is related in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament and, as even many Jews would acknowledge, in the New Testament. However, a new phase of Jewish life  a long and difficult one  commenced after the close of the Bible.

The First Jewish Revolt against Rome (A.D. 66-70) culminated in the fall of Jerusalem and the catastrophic destruction of the center of Jewish religious life, its temple  although Roman troops required three more years to subdue the spectacular fortress of Masada, beside the Dead Sea. The Jewish historian Josephus, a participant in the revolt and an eyewitness, recorded that Jerusalem "was so thoroughly razed to the ground by those that demolished it to its foundations, that nothing was left that could ever persuade visitors that it had once been a place of habitation."

The Bar Kokhba Revolt (A.D. 132-135), named after its leader Simon Bar Kokhba, provoked the Emperor Hadrian to combine the province of Judea with adjacent provinces under the title of Syria Palaestina  thus effectively abolishing Judahs memory and, instead, honoring the Hebrews ancient enemies, the Philistines (from whom the names Palaestina and Palestine are derived). Hadrian also rebuilt Jerusalem, but in Roman style and  in honor of his own family name (Aelius) and of the chief Roman god, Jupiter, whose principal temple sat on the Capitoline Hill in Rome  under the name of Aelia Capitolina. Further, Hadrian constructed a temple to Jupiter on the site of the former Jewish temple and, under penalty of death, banned Jews from entering his new city  except on Tisha BAv, the ninth day of the month of Av, which falls in either July or August. The saddest date on the Jewish calendar, Tisha BAv is dedicated to lamenting both the Babylonians destruction of Solomons Temple and the Romans razing of the Second Temple.

Large Jewish populations already existed in major cities of the ancient world such as Alexandria and Rome. Now, gradually and by degrees, the residents of historic Judea itself joined them in exile or, as it is often called, the Jewish diaspora.

In the next words of the Israeli Declaration, After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Since the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70, formal petitions for the construction of a Third Temple have been a mandatory part of thrice-daily Jewish prayer services. Since at least the 15th century, the phrase Next year in Jerusalem" has been included in Jewish services on Passover (which falls in March or April) and on the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur (in September or October).

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, continues the Israeli Declaration, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades, they returned in their masses.

Although, clearly, the dream of returning to the territory of their biblical ancestors never entirely died, it was generally sublimated into a far distant future until modern Zionism arose in the mid-to-late 19th century. The Israeli Declaration of Independence officially describes the Austrian journalist and Zionist activist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) as the spiritual father of the Jewish State.

Herzl didnt live to see his dream realized of an independent Jewish state centered in Jerusalem. But its not clear that his dream has been achieved even now.

The Jews who will it shall achieve their State, he had predicted. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and in our own homes peacefully die. The world will be liberated by our freedom, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.

Peace still eludes Israeli Jews, and the biblical prophecy that Israel would be a light to the Gentiles or a light to the nations (Isaiah 49:6)  a prophecy beloved of many Zionists since the 19th century  remains, at least in part, to be fulfilled.

See also this previous column Theodor Herzl, from integration to segregation, online at deseretnews.com.

Daniel Peterson founded the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, chairs The Interpreter Foundation and blogs on Patheos. William Hamblin is the author of several books on premodern history. They speak only for themselves.
SALT LAKE CITY  From $5 million appropriated to further university researchers' study of an elephant protein's role in cancer resistance to a new K-12 program intended to boost student achievement, fresh initiatives to enhance knowledge and learning got a boost from state lawmakers during the 2019 legislative session.

As it came to a close Thursday, lawmakers approved funding to pay for enrollment growth in public schools and state colleges and universities, approved a new process to develop and fund buildings on state college campuses, and appropriated $17.2 million for a rebuild of the Utah State Board of Education's outdated and fragmented information technology infrastructure.

Another $17.2 million will expand an initiative that provides matching grants to schools to hire counselors, including psychologists, social workers or nurses. The funding can also be used to contract for community mental health services and appropriate ongoing funds to the Safe UT Crisis Line.

The Legislature also appropriated $2 million for an initiative to cover low-income students' tuition and fees not covered by financial aid. The original request was for $30 million.

But lawmakers appropriated $50 million each for university buildings at Utah Valley University, Weber State University and Dixie State University.

Lawmakers, educators and system leaders agree: Both public school and the state's colleges and universities fared well during the 2019 session.

"Education did very, very well," said Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, addressing the Utah Senate after it had completed its business, said the state budget reflected the state's priorities and "how we in fact funded education  another $280 million in new ongoing money to public education, $236 million approximately to higher education, three new buildings. We're over $1.1 billion in the last four years in public ed."

It was unclear toward the end of the session whether state lawmakers would reach a budget agreement. They eventually did, but it temporarily stirred concern that schools and colleges would only receive maintenance budgets, which would complicate colleges setting tuition recommendations and public school boards' contract negotiations with employee associations.

"Overall, it turned out better than we thought it might at one point. We were able to get growth funded, 4 percent on the (weighted pupil unit) and attention was paid to our strategic board goals, early learning, effective educators and leaders, personalized teaching and safe and healthy schools and personalized learning," said State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson.

Utah Commissioner of Higher Education David Buhler said it was "a very good year for higher education" both in terms of funding and legislation.

Lawmakers provided $27 million for performance outcomes, a 2.5 percent pay raise for higher education employees and upped the state contribution toward their health insurance coverage.

The Legislature also passed what Buhler described as "landmark pieces of legislation," SB102, which substantially alters how state-financed buildings on college campuses are developed and funded, and HB260, which created the Access Utah Promise Scholarship program. That program will cover costs of tuition and general student fees where federal financial aid falls short for low-income students who take full academic loads.

Lawmakers appropriated no new money for the Utah College Advising Corps, which helps high school students make successful transitions to higher education under the guidance of "near peer" advisers who work in high schools. The Utah System of Higher Education reallocated $1 million in its current budget to expand the number of schools served by advisers but wants to scale the program statewide.

"We would have like to see that funded this year but using money previously appropriated, we are expanding it to over 30 schools and we'll move forward with that and be back next year with even more success to show the Legislature why this is worthy of their investment in 2020," Buhler said.

Heidi Matthews, president of the Utah Education Association, said in the context of tax reform discussions and disagreement between the legislative houses on the state budget, "public education clearly prioritized."

Both UEA and the State School Board recommended that more money be applied to the value of the weighted pupil unit, with the teacher association asking for a "historic investment," calling for a 6.5 percent increase.

The increase was set at 4 percent, but additional funding for schools was appropriated through the Teacher and Student Success Act, which was largely funded with $65 million placed in an account last year under a compromise with the citizen initiative Our Schools Now.

The citizen group backed a ballot initiative to raise $700 million-plus for education through increases in income tax and sales taxes. The group agreed not to place the question before voters.

SB149, sponsored by Sen. Ann Millner, R-Ogden, creates a mechanism to send millions of dollars directly to Utah schools to create and execute local plans intended to improve student achievement.

Funding will go to local school boards or charter boards for distribution to schools. Local boards must approve and monitor school-level plans.

Although UEA backed the citizen initiative, Matthews said they would have preferred that funding to go into the weighted pupil unit. "We didn't want another funding mechanism. We just need more money," she said.

Millner said constituents frequently tell lawmakers "give us some funds that really have local control, that can go directly to schools and allow the schools to determine based on the school's needs, how they want to use those funds to help improve student learning in their school. We know every school is different."

The program requires local control and local accountability and will create opportunities to learn what works to improve student achievement, she said.

"I'm very excited about this," Millner said.
SALT LAKE CITY  The Utah House of Representatives gave final passage to SB245Thursday, which would require school districts or charter boards to give students' parents at least 120 days notice before closing a school or changing school boundaries.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Karen Mayne, D-West Valley City, was introduced in response to the Granite School Board's vote to close Oquirrh Hills Elementary School in Kearns less than a month after district officials informed the school community of the plan. The board conducted a public hearing before taking the vote to close the school, which had not made sufficient progress to exit school turnaround status. The school is housed in an aging building and had a shrinking enrollment.

The legislation also requires school boards to hear public comment on a proposed school closure or boundary change during "at least two public local school board meetings."

Under SB245, the notice would also apply to surrounding schools that would be affected by boundary changes resulting from a school closure. In addition, school districts and charter school administrators would need to give the area's governing council and mayor notice.

"There are no specific deadlines or timetables in statute specific to informing a school community or citizens about the final determination or plans of a failed school. So what happens is, there's no clarity at the end," Mayne said in a committee hearing.

SB245 also requires school districts or charter school boards to give annual notice to school communities, including municipal leaders, when a school is in turnaround status.
SALT LAKE CITY  While the spending does not add up to the $100 million Utah Gov. Gary Herbert requested, millions in one-time money will flow toward air pollution busting strategies along the Wasatch Front  nearly $29 million.

Lawmakers directed money toward a wood stove exchange program, electric vehicle charging stations for both government workers and the public, and a teleworking program.

On days when the air is starting to fill with pollutants, there will be a pool of money in a pilot program to encourage motorists to abandon their vehicles and ride transit.

In addition, the state's fleet of pre-2007 vehicles, a large percentage of which are snowplows, will be retired from the Wasatch Front and replaced.

"If you look at this holistically, $29 million is a lot of money," said Thom Carter, executive director of UCAIR. "It is a big increase over the past."

The wood stove exchange program, which Carter said is extremely popular with the public, will have a direct impact on cutting harmful pollutants during the winter.

"The state has empowered people to make better choices," Carter said.

Utah lawmakers, however, endured the glare of negative publicity for their passage of a bill critics say will make it easier for the storage of depleted uranium at EnergySolutions' Clive facility in Tooele County.

Depleted uranium, while classified as low-level radioactive waste at disposal, becomes more radioactive over time. It is derived from the uranium enrichment process and used in medical and military applications because of its density.

Under the measure, the material cannot be stored in Utah unless the U.S. Department of Energy says it will assume site responsibility in perpetuity and EnergySolutions completes a site specific performance assessment that receives the approval of the radiation control director.

Herbert has indicated he's not likely to veto the measure.

Lawmakers also took up multiple bills dealing with water and instituted significant reforms.

A proposal by Sen. Jacob Anderegg, R-Lehi, will require secondary water providers that begin new design work for certain users after April 1, 2020, to meter that water.

In addition, secondary water providers will have to develop metering plans to submit to the state by the end of this year that include costs. A task force on secondary water metering will be established within the Utah Department of Natural Resources to help identify the hurdles, and systems can tap into $10 million in loans from the state Board of Water Resources.

A couple of measures that passed deal with transparency and accountability for ratepayers. Water systems will have to post service maps and provide accountability on rates that may be different for customers who live outside those boundaries.

Voters also will be asked in 2020 to amend the Utah Constitution to allow cities greater flexibility on how that "surplus" water is handled.

Provided the promised $45 million comes through from other sources, Utah lawmakers say they will pony up $5 million to help the ailing Bonneville Salt Flats.

As Utah's farmlands are increasingly surrounded by new homes, lawmakers acted to protect those farmers who remain by passing a measure that tightens the threshold for bringing a nuisance lawsuit due to smells, noise or flies.
SALT LAKE CITY  State lawmakers fiddled with the citizen initiative process on the heels of Utah voters passing an unprecedented number of ballot measures last fall.

The Legislature passed three bills in all, and some say they make the ability to get an issue on the ballot more cumbersome.

Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said there needs to be a balance between the Legislature and ballot initiatives. He said it would be "really impossible for 3 million people to spend the time and effort that we have to to be able to deal with the issues we have.

"I believe in the legislative process," Adams said. "We need to make sure the initiative process is available but that it doesnt become the norm."

Sen. Derek Kitchen, D-Salt Lake City, said growth is changing Utah's demographics and its politics are shifting.

"It's up to us as a Legislature to keep up with the desires and the sentiments of the general public, and if we don't do that, then we need to have a pathway to address that," he said.

HB145 pushes back the effective date of a successful initiative to the same date as bills passed during the next general legislative session, or to the beginning of the year after the session if it involves a tax change.

"It would have been nice had we had some negotiation, transparency (and) ability to make changes in a transparent way," bill sponsor Rep. Brad Daw, R-Orem, said about the initiatives passed in the last election.

Initiatives on medical marijuana, Medicaid expansion and creating an independent redistricting commission all qualified for the ballot  the most ever in the state for a single election  and all three passed last November. Another initiative on Utah's candidate nomination process also qualified for the ballot but was bumped off after 3,000 petition signers removed their names.

HB133, sponsored by Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, aims to ensure voters know what the initiative is before signing a petition and have the ability to remove their names. It also requires signatures to be submitted every 14 days and for county clerks to post the list of signers online.

"It makes it a fair issue to the voter that the voter knows what theyre signing," Thurston said during floor debate on the bill.

HB195 bases the percentage of required signatures on the number of "active" voters rather than on the number of voters in the previous presidential election. Signatures would be required from 26 of the Utah's 29 senate districts equal to 4 percent of the number of active voters in that district on Jan. 1 immediately following the last general election.

The bill also prohibits running the same initiative in two consecutive election cycles.

"This is in no way about stifling the initiative process," said Rep. Steve Handy, R-Layton, the bill's sponsor.

Lauren Simpson, policy director at the Alliance for a Better Utah, said taken together the three "bad" bills mean to hamper the initiative process.

"The people of Utah sent a message to the Legislature last year that they want action on important issues long ignored by legislators. And this session the Utah Legislature sent a message back: What you want is secondary to what we want, she said.

Delaying implementation for over a year of an initiative that increases revenue is a punitive way to obstruct the will of the voters, she said. Publicly posting voter signatures and adding criminal consequences would chill participation in citizen initiatives, Simpson said.
SALT LAKE CITY  Utahns with nonviolent misdemeanor records could automatically have convictions expunged under one of several criminal justice measures that have won approval in this year's legislative session.

Proponents say the existing process to clear criminal records is expensive and overcomplicated, and the paperwork burdens Utah's courts. As a result, too many Utahns have public criminal histories that have prevented them from getting jobs and have caused them to lose hope, according to Rep. Eric Hutchings, R-Kearns, who sponsored HB431. The proposal would allow certain criminal records to be wiped clean in five to seven years.

Here's a look at several crime-related bills that have also advanced to Gov. Gary Herbert's desk.

 Attorneys for kids and teens: The proposal aims to ensure that children and teens navigating the juvenile court system in rural Utah have the same access to an attorney as they would in more urban counties. The bill directs judges to appoint a public defender for each juvenile, allowing them to later hire their own attorney or forego one. Under SB32, courts can send an invoice if they later determine a child's family could afford the lawyer. Critics have warned the bill could overburden defenders and require them to be present at more hearings than necessary.

 Campus safety: A proposal inspired by the October slaying of University of Utah student Lauren McCluskey would require the state's public colleges to clarify how students can report stalking, sexual assault and relationship violence, whether the crimes happen on or off campus. SB134 also requires bystander training of each student in an officially recognized club or team.

 Justice for victims: Lawmakers have also backed proposals with victims in mind, including a measure that would give survivors of rape and sexual assault a second chance to pursue criminal charges after a prosecutor declines their case. HB281 would grant the Utah Attorney Generals Office the authority to file charges after a county attorney declines or waits more than six months to review the case.

 Protective orders: HB100 would allow Utahns to apply for protective orders against acquaintances and co-workers  not just romantic partners. In a similar vein, HB19 would clarify that a judge can issue no-contact orders against suspected sexual and domestic violence offenders that still allow for limited interactions to pick up or drop off children.

Lawmakers also took aim at human trafficking with HB20, which stipulates that anyone who knowingly benefits from the smuggling of a child for forced labor or sexual exploitation can be criminally charged.

And for those who have been abused in polygamous communities and seek to leave, HB214 would make compensation available through a state reparations fund.
SALT LAKE CITY  Lawmakers took on tough tasks during a legislative session that ended an hour earlier than expected Thursday night, and racked up results on big issues, including limiting Medicaid expansion and enshrining hate crime penalties.

By the start of the third week of the 45-day session, a scaled-back replacement for the full Medicaid expansion approved by voters last November had been signed into law by Gov. Gary Herbert despite protests from faith leaders and others.

Under the direction of new leaders in the House and Senate, the Legislature's Republican supermajority shifted its focus to tax reform, but the bill that surfaced late in the session ended up being scrapped in favor of a tax task force.

HB441 would have extended sales taxes to a wide variety of services while lowering both the sales and income tax rates, options that will be on the table for a possible special session this summer, along with restoring the full sales tax on food.

Republican legislative leaders also wanted a $75 million tax cut as part of the tax reform legislation and have set aside that amount for an as-yet unspecified cut in the $19 billion budget for the spending year that begins July 1.

But Thursday, the governor told the Deseret News that a $75 million tax cut isn't enough.

"I think there is an opportunity to still have tax reform, better tax policy, which will provide the revenues necessary to run the core services of government and still have the best environment for business," Herbert said.

"I think if we do all that, there still can be a healthy $150 million to $200 million tax cut to the public. I think that's possible," said the governor, who proposed a $200 million sales tax rate cut as part of the tax reform plan in his own budget.

Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said the size of the tax cut will depend on what a new plan to shore up lagging sales tax revenues looks like.

"If we get a really good tax reform, I think we can afford a larger tax cut. If we don't, then I think we probably shouldn't do a larger tax cut. It's all relational," Adams said.

For House Speaker Brad Wilson, R-Kaysville, not being able to deliver a tax cut this session was a disappointment. He said he would "definitely hope" Utahns will see a reduction in their taxes coming out of the task force efforts.

"I think we would like to do a meaningful tax cut and Id love to do something more than $75 million," Wilson said. "But $75 million is enough of a tax cut that it can have a really meaningful difference on a typical household."

The failure to find a tax fix led to a budget impasse until the House speaker and the Senate president agreed to only temporary funding for $320 million of the $19 billion budget.

The purpose behind not promising future funding for budget items like expanding the disability services waiting list and substance abuse treatment for the homeless is to prod action on tax reform, Adams said.

"There'll be urgency, 300 million reasons for urgency," he said. But he stressed that lawmakers had many significant accomplishments. "Sessions are always hard, and I think this is no exception. It's 45 hard days. But it's been very productive."

All the budget concerns didn't hurt funding for education, although the $1.3 billion surplus announced late last year sparked expectations there would be even more for public schools and higher education.

READ MORE: How did education fare in the 2019 Legislature? 'Very, very well,' Utah Senate president says

When state revenue estimates were revised midsession, the surplus had dropped about $200 million. Lawmakers still found money for air quality improvements, affordable housing programs and boosting the technology economy.

READ MORE: A look at some of the top air, water, land bills that got passed during the session

READ MORE: Despite big push to address housing crunch, Utah Legislature strips $24 million from affordable housing bill

READ MORE: Lawmakers boosted tech economy and embraced new modes in '19 session

But after House Democrats raised concerns, a decision was made not to spend $1.5 million to help the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute house the temporary offices of a planned library for former Sen. Orrin Hatch.

This session also saw the passage of long-sought hate crime legislation that enhances penalties for criminals who target their victims based on race, sexual orientation, religion or other personal characteristics.

READ MORE: Bill to easily expunge nonviolent convictions among several criminal justice bills passed by Utah lawmakers

SB103 initially struggled to gain support, but it's sponsor, Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City, kept adding to the list of characteristics that could be targeted to include where victims attended college and their "political expressions."

Other high-profile efforts included reaching a compromise to raise the allowable alcohol content by weight from 3.2 percent to 4 percent instead of 4.8 percent for beer sold in retail outlets rather that state liquor stores.

What attracted the most attention this session was the fast-paced replacement for the full Medicaid expansion backed by Utah voters after lawmakers repeatedly failed to accept the federal health care coverage available under the Affordable Care Act.

Limiting Medicaid to only a portion of the more than 150,000 Utahns eligible was opposed by some 40 faith leaders as well as backers of Proposition 3, but SB96 was signed by the governor shortly after final passage.

The bill had to be amended to secure enough House votes to prevent a ballot referendum on the issue and now has a fallback plan reverting back to full coverage if a series of needed waivers don't come through from the federal government.

An initial program is set to start April 1 offering Medicaid only to Utahns earning up to 100 percent of the approximately $12,000 federal poverty rate at a lower federal-to-state funding match than full expansion, 70 percent to 30 percent.

But there's still no word from Washington on the first round of waivers, let alone the permission needed to offer the same program at a higher federal-to-state funding match, 90 percent to 10 percent, according to the Utah Department of Health.

Adams said he's been assured those waivers are "on track" but if they aren't in place by April 1, lawmakers now have the power to call themselves into a special legislative session.

"We'll want to make it happen," the Senate president said. "I think we have a commitment to the voters and I think to our constituents."

The governor said the state's Medicaid expansion is "going to absolutely happen" on schedule and praised the program as ensuring Utahns have access to health care "one way or the other."

READ MORE: Utah lawmakers make changes to initiative process on heels of successful ballot measures
Students participate in a climate protest, at Stortorget in Lund, Sweden, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide skipped classes Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Johan Nilsson /TT News Agency via AP) Johan Nilsson/TT

A girl holds up a fishing trap with a toy baby seal, in front of the Portuguese parliament in Lisbon as thousands of Portuguese high school students stage a protest while taking part in a global school strike for climate change Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (AP Photo/Armando Franca) Armando Franca

Activist Greta Thunberg, foreground, participates in a climate protest, in central Stockholm Sweden, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide skipped classes Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Pontus Lundahl/TT News Agency via AP) Pontus Lundahl/TT

FILE - In this Friday, Jan. 25, 2019 file photo, climate activist Greta Thunberg delivers her speech during a session of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Three Norwegian lawmakers have on Thursday, March 14 nominated Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who has become a prominent voice in campaigns against climate change, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Freddy Andre Oevstegaard and two other members of the Socialist Left Party said they believe "the massive movement Greta has set in motion is a very important peace contribution."(AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file) Markus Schreiber

Young demonstrators gather at the Finnish Parliament during a protest march of Finnish youth calling for climate protection, in Helsinki, Finland, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. (Heikki Saukkomaa/Lehtikuva via AP) Heikki Saukkomaa

Students hold signs during a rally for global climate strike for future in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, March 15, 2019. About 150 students and other protesters attended a rally to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against climate change. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man) Lee Jin-man

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Students take part in a protest against climate change, in Aarhus, Denmark, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. (Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix via AP) Henning Bagger

Several thousand schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Bergen, Norway, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Students in more than 1,000 cities worldwide are planning to skip class Friday in protest over their governments failure to act against global warming. The coordinated school strike was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (Marit Hommedal/ NTB scanpix via AP) Hommedal, Marit

Students attend a protest ralley of the 'Friday For Future Movement' in Magdeburg, eastern Germany, Friday, March 15, 2019. (Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert/dpa via AP) Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert

Students march along Market Street during a protest against climate change Friday, March 15, 2019, in San Francisco. Students are skipping classes to protest what they see as the failures of their governments to take tough action against global warming. The 'school strikes' on Friday were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and are taking place in over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) Ben Margot

A student holds a banner during a demonstration against climate change in Pamplona, northern Spain, Friday March 15, 2019. Students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments failure to take though action against global warming. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos) Alvaro Barrientos

High school students demonstrate outside the Pantheon monument in Paris, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. Poster at center right reads "Utopians are not us". (AP Photo/Francois Mori) Francois Mori

Youngsters take part in a student climate protest in Parliament Square in London, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham) Matt Dunham

Students gather in front of the monument of the Unknown Soldier to demand action on climate change, in Rome, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming.(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini) Andrew Medichini

Youngsters lay down as they take part in a student climate protest at the bottom of Westminster Bridge in London, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham) Matt Dunham

High school students demonstrate outside the Pantheon monument in Paris, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (AP Photo/Francois Mori) Francois Mori

Indian students from different institutions participate in a climate protest in Hyderabad, India, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A.) Mahesh Kumar A.

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Thousands of students march from St Stephens Green to Leinster House, Dublin, Friday March 15, 2019. Students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments failure to take though action against global warming. (Niall Carson//PA via AP) Niall Carson

Activist Greta Thunberg, foreground, participates in a climate protest, in central Stockholm Sweden, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide skipped classes Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Pontus Lundahl/TT News Agency via AP) Pontus Lundahl/TT

Activist Greta Thunberg, foreground, participates in a climate protest, in central Stockholm Sweden, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide skipped classes Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Pontus Lundahl/TT News Agency via AP) Pontus Lundahl/TT

Havana Chapman-Edwards, 8, of Washington, sits by a chalkboard with her age in 2030, the point where the globe would be stuck on a path toward what scientists call planet-changing dangerous warming, Friday, March 15, 2019, during a climate change rally of students in Washington. "Borders, languages and religions do not separate us," Chapman-Edwards, who calls herself the tiny diplomat, said at the U.S. Capitol. "Today we are telling the truth and we do not take no for an answer." From the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, students are skipping classes to protest what they see as the failures of their governments to take tough action against global warming. The 'school strikes' on Friday were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and are taking place in over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Jacquelyn Martin

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Students attend a demonstrate during a "Climate strike" protest in Lausanne, Switzerland, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students from several countries worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. (Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone via AP) JEAN-CHRISTOPHE BOTT

Several thousand schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Bergen, Norway, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Students in more than 1,000 cities worldwide are planning to skip class Friday in protest over their governments failure to act against global warming. The coordinated school strike was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (Marit Hommedal/ NTB scanpix via AP) Hommedal, Marit

A young student takes part in a global school strike for climate change in Canterbury, south east England, Friday March 15, 2019. Students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments failure to take though action against global warming. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP) Gareth Fuller

Students march onto Market Street during a protest against climate change Friday, March 15, 2019, in San Francisco. From the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, students are skipping classes to protest what they see as the failures of their governments to take tough action against global warming. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) Ben Margot

Students shout pro-environment slogans during a rally in Madrid, Spain, Friday March 15, 2019. Students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments' failure to take tough action against global warming. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue) Bernat Armangue

Students march to Market Street during a protest against climate change Friday, March 15, 2019, in San Francisco. From the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, students are skipping classes to protest what they see as the failures of their governments to take tough action against global warming. The 'school strikes' on Friday were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and are taking place in over 100 countries. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) Ben Margot

Students take part in a protest against climate change, in Aarhus, Denmark, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. (Henning Bagger/Ritzau Scanpix via AP) Henning Bagger

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

A participant holds a sign during a rally for global climate strike for future in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, March 15, 2019. About 150 students and other protesters attended a rally to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against climate change. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man) Lee Jin-man

A boy wearing a mask sits behind a banner during a rally for global climate strike for future in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, March 15, 2019. About 150 students and other protesters attended a rally to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against climate change. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man) Lee Jin-man

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Several thousand schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Bergen, Norway, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Students in more than 1,000 cities worldwide are planning to skip class Friday in protest over their governments failure to act against global warming. The coordinated school strike was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (Marit Hommedal/ NTB scanpix via AP) Hommedal, Marit

A girl holds up a poster as thousands of protesting high school students gather outside the Portuguese parliament in Lisbon while taking part in a global school strike for climate change Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. Words on the poster read in Portuguese "Do it for the climate". (AP Photo/Armando Franca) Armando Franca

Students stand outside the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a protest against climate change Friday, March 15, 2019, in San Francisco. Friday's rallies were one of the biggest international climate change actions yet, involving hundreds of thousands of students in more than 100 countries around the globe. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) Ben Margot

Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Canterbury, south east England, Friday March 15, 2019. Students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments failure to take though action against global warming. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP) Gareth Fuller

Students in Cape Town, South Africa take part in a protest, Friday, March 15, 2019 as part of a global student strike against government inaction on climate change. Students in cities worldwide skipped classes to protest their governments' failure to act against global warming. (AP Photo/Nasief Manie) Nasief Manie

Students protest with a large EU flag on Westminster Bridge, London, Friday March 15, 2019. Students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments failure to take though action against global warming. (Kirsty O'Connor/PA via AP) Kirsty O'Connor

A young student takes part in a global school strike for climate change in Canterbury, south east England, Friday March 15, 2019. Students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments failure to take though action against global warming. (Gareth Fuller/PA via AP) Gareth Fuller

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, right, speaks during a climate change demonstration, in central Stockholm, Sweden, Friday March 15, 2019. Friday's rallies by students around the world were one of the biggest international actions yet to demand more government action to fight climate change. The coordinated 'school strikes,' were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (Henrik Montgomery/TT via AP) Henrik Montgomery/TT

Participants march during a rally for global climate strike for future in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, March 15, 2019. About 150 students and other protesters attended a rally to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against climate change. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man) Lee Jin-man

Hundreds of schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Hong Kong, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide plan to skip class Friday in protest over their governments' failure to act against global warming. The coordinated 'school strike' was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung) Kin Cheung

Students take part in a global protest for climate change in Cambridge city centre, England, Friday March 15, 2019. Angry students mobilized by word of mouth and social media skipped class Friday to protest what they believe are their governments' failure to take though action against global warming. (Stefan Rousseau/PA via AP) Stefan Rousseau

Several thousand schoolchildren take part in a climate protest in Bergen, Norway, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Students in more than 1,000 cities worldwide are planning to skip class Friday in protest over their governments failure to act against global warming. The coordinated school strike was inspired by 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. The banner reads in Norwegian "Stop climate change for the youth." (Marit Hommedal/ NTB scanpix via AP) Hommedal, Marit

Students hold up signs outside the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during a protest against climate change Friday, March 15, 2019, in San Francisco. Friday's rallies were one of the biggest international climate change actions yet, involving hundreds of thousands of students in more than 100 countries around the globe. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) Ben Margot

Students play with an inflatable globe as they march to demand action on climate change, in Rome, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (Alessandro Di Meo/ANSA via AP) ALESSANDRO DI MEO

A student holds up a sign with writing reading in Italian "Lets save the planet", during a demonstration outside the Castello Sforzesco castle, in Milan, Italy, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide are skipping class Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno) Luca Bruno
CENTERVILLE  A 5-year-old girl was injured in an auto-pedestrian accident Friday in Centerville.

The incident was reported about 8:40 a.m. in a residential area near 2025 N. 560 West, said Centerville Police Chief Paul Child. Charlotte Healey was walking to school with her sister when she darted into the street for an unknown reason, he said.

Charlotte ran in front of a Suburban that was traveling about 20 mph, the chief said. The driver did not have time to stop prior to hitting the girl.

"The driver of the Suburban did not see the child but heard a thud upon hitting the child. The accident was witnessed by the older sister who ran home to tell her mom," according to Child.

Child said the girl suffered an "obvious fractured femur" and was taken by medical helicopter to Primary Children's Hospital. She was conscious but not alert when she was taken the hospital, he said.

The girls were walking to Reading Elementary School, 360 W. 2025 North, according to police.
PROVO  With funding from the Utah Legislature approved late Thursday, Provo Municipal Airport's new terminal project is now fully funded.

Building the four-gate terminal is estimated to cost about $41 million, and now that all funds are secured, the city could break ground this fall and cut the ribbon as early as 2020.

Provo Mayor Michelle Kaufusi said she was "beyond excited" about the Legislature's approval.

This landmark decision stands to impact our region in a positive way for decades to come," she said in a news release. "A number of legislators were key on this, but none so much as (House Majority Leader) Francis Gibson, who really championed this effort from its early stages through the final hours of the session when the funding came through."

The state money came through SB268, which authorized existing bond money to be used for a number of transportation projects across the state, including $9 million for the Provo airport. It was introduced late in the session on March 8 and sponsored by Gibson, R-Mapleton.

The Legislature was at an impasse over the budget earlier this week due to tax reform, raising worries that the money might not be approved. The initial bill asked for $1.6 billion in new bonds, but was amended in the Legislature's final hours to remove that request.

"We could get caught up with a lot of other funding requests in that battle," Isaac Paxman, Provo deputy mayor, said earlier in the week.

He added that most lawmakers support the project.

"There's great support from everyone that we've been able to talk to, there's a lot of hope and a lot of momentum for this project especially now that we've got the county funding piece in place," Paxman said. "That to us seems to signal that the legislators recognize this is a rare opportunity to boost the economy and the convenience and quality of life by helping us get a four-gate terminal in Provo."

Utah County commissioners approved $4.3 million in funding Tuesday.

Im thrilled that the county commissioners have thrown their enthusiasm and their financial support behind this project, Kaufusi said after that vote. The decision to fund this terminal is the kind of forward-looking action we need."

The remaining funds come from an estimated $8 million grant from the Federal Aviation Administration and about $19 million in dedicated funds from the city.

Days before the legislative session ended, Provo officials were keeping their fingers crossed the money would come through.

"We think all signals are that this could still happen in these last couple of days, so we're very hopeful for it," Paxman said Tuesday. "The good news for us is that in every proposal we've heard of that includes discretionary funding, the airport money is included."

The new terminal would bring in an annual economic impact equivalent to $15 million, according to a news release from the city.

The influx of flights, hotel stays, car rentals and jobs will boost the economy, the release continued.

Paxman noted the benefits aren't just for Utah County.

"This would have a statewide impact  it would help keep cars off of I-15 around Point of the Mountain, it would boost tourism to the state and boost the economy," he said.

He also said the city will accelerate construction in any way it can within budget restraints.

"As airlines have been showing an increase of interest, we really sense that this is the type of project you don't want to drag out over three years, you want to get moving," he noted.

The amount of governmental support the project received is relatively rare, Paxman said.

"It's not often you see a city, a county, a state and the federal government all contributing toward one project in this kind of a way," he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the airport was part of a bill that would issue $1.6 billion in new bonds. The bill was amended to fund the projects with existing bond money.
SALT LAKE CITY  More than 200 students filled the steps of the state Capitol Friday joining many across the country in a global movement of youth activists striking for action on climate change.

Kate De Groote, a high school senior who helped organize the Salt Lake event, spoke to the crowd about the need for all political parties to work together to address climate change, saying it is a human issue.

"We are the generation that will help bring this movement, that started generations ago, to the national stage. We can make a change and I know that we can protect our future if we choose to act now," she said.

De Groote said she was surprised at the number of people who came to take part in the strike, and grateful to see so many young people care about climate change. She said the movement began with just one girl, Greta Thunburg, who started Friday climate strikes in Sweden, and has spread to over 100 countries.

"Its spread so far, I think its absolutely incredible, and it just shows how much climate change does need to be addressed and how unsatisfied we are with whats currently going on," she said.

The sound system at the strike was powered by volunteers from the crowd pedaling bicycles.

A youth climate strike was also planned Friday afternoon in Provo.

Andie Madsen, a junior at West High School, talked to the students about spreading awareness, saying that the youth voice on the issue is louder than older generations.

"Youth have the most powerful voice in this conversation because it affects us the most. This is our future that were talking about, and we need to protect it," Madsen said.

Jolie Cox, Karoline Bushe and Marley Allen missed school Friday morning to participate in the strike, saying they were probably the only ones attending from Davis High School. Friday was the last day of the term, and they planned to return to school in the afternoon to take a test.

"Getting out and making your voice heard is so important," Cox said.

The girls said they plan to take part in more climate events and try to live more sustainably.

Lexus Gill, a senior at Viewmont High, said this is the first time she has participated in an event like this. She heard about the girl who started the strikes and has also seen a lot on social media to make her more aware of climate issues.

"If everyone starts small, it will start to make a difference," Gill said.

The speakers addressed issues specific to Utah, many mentioning air quality problems and the plans for an inland port.

"This port is being built under the guise of economic opportunities when it only really helps the rich get richer, we will not fall for it," said Mishka Banuri, co-founder of Utah Youth Environmental Solutions,.

Banuri said the port will bring in fumes that will increase the risk of lung cancer and ruin wetlands and bird migration patterns.

"Compromise is not an option. We are not young and naive, we are young and unstoppable, we have our eyes and ears on you, we will not be manipulated. The oceans are rising and so are we," Banuri told the crowd.
SALT LAKE CITY  Utah Rep. Rob Bishop said the ideas of the Green New Deal are "tantamount to genocide, according to multiple reports.

For many people who live in the West, but also in rural and urban areas, the ideas behind the Green New Deal are tantamount to genocide, he said, according to The Washington Post.

That may be an overstatement but not by a whole lot," Bishop said at a news conference Thursday morning on Capitol Hill.

Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, the top Republican on the Natural Resources Committee, said the components of the Green New Deal are tantamount to genocide for rural residents in the country https://t.co/a7e5xbQr1g pic.twitter.com/Rp1Kf0hJNH  POLITICO (@politico) March 14, 2019

The Green New Deal, which has been proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., is a set of progressive policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as implement a number of other policies, including Medicare for all, free higher education and a federal jobs guarantee. There is a lot to this policy, and its raised controversy on both sides of Congress. You can read our explainer here.

Axios reporter Amy Harder interviewed Bishop after the comments. When asked how the Green New Deal is like genocide, which Axios defines as "the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation," Bishop said, Im an ethnic. Im a westerner.

Harder then asked if Bishop thinks the Green Deal will kill people. Bishop replied, If you actually implement everything they want to. Killing would be positive if you implement everything the Green New Deal actually wants to. Thats why the Green New Deal is not ready for prime time.

Critics on the left condemned Bishops comments. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told The Hill that the remarks were misleading and offensive. The Utah Democratic Party called the comments "not only baseless but also incredibly insensitive.
SALT LAKE CITY  A retired Army officer from Utah admitted Friday to spying and selling classified national defense information to China for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ron Rockwell Hansen, 59, of Syracuse, pleaded guilty to attempting to gather or deliver defense information as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors. The charge carries a term of life in prison, but prosecutors agreed to recommend a 15-year sentence.

"Today, a Utahn was convicted for spying on behalf of a foreign nation. Those are words that we've never uttered here on the courthouse plaza," Utah U.S. Attorney John Huber said after the hearing. "What should be sacrosanct in our character as Americans is this: We do not betray our country."

U.S. District Judge Dee Benson scheduled a sentencing hearing for Sept. 24. Hansen remains behind bars in the Salt Lake County Jail.

Hansen was originally charged with attempting to gather or deliver defense information; being an unregistered agent of a foreign government; three counts of bulk cash smuggling; eight counts of structuring money transactions and two counts of smuggling goods from the United States.

The charge he pleaded to stems from his arrest in Seattle as he was preparing to board a flight to China last June with classified information. But Hansen admitted to much more in the plea agreement.

Hansen retired from the Army as a warrant officer with a background in signals intelligence and human intelligence. The Defense Intelligence Agency hired him as a civilian intelligence case officer in 2006. He held a top secret clearance for many years, and signed several non-disclosure agreements during his time at the agency and as a government contractor. He speaks fluent Mandarin-Chinese and Russian

Authorities say Hansen was motivated by money.

"There were some debts on Mr. Hansens behalf that ultimately probably prodded him into this life," said Tyler Hatcher, IRS Criminal Investigations assistant special agent in charge.

Court records show Hansen had built up about $200,000 in personal debt since 2012, the charges state. And his business, Nuvestack  a company that provided cloud computing information technology services  reported more than $1 million in losses in 2014, and failed to file taxes in 2015 and 2016, the charges state.

Hatcher described Hansen as a "soft target" for recruitment by the Chinese and that they often go after someone in debt.

"He was not someone that was recruited in a hard environment. He was recruited while he was working and he decided to go down the wrong path, and thats unfortunate," said Paul Haertel, FBI special agent in charge in Salt Lake City.

Huber said China is making a sophisticated effort to steal U.S. secrets, and Hansen's case "shows us surprisingly in Utah the extend of their reach."

Hansen admitted in the plea agreement that agents of a Chinese intelligence agency targeted him in 2014 and began meeting regularly in China to find out what kind of information the agency wanted.

"During the course of my relationship with Chinese intelligence, I received hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for information I provided them, including information I gathered at various industry conferences," Hansen said.

Court documents show Hansen was paid at least $800,000 over the years, including a $300,000 "consulting" fee.

Hatcher said Hansen carried cash back from China and also used a "sophisticated" means to transmit money to businesses he owned using credit cards. Agents were able to use Hansen's tax information to "push the case along," he said.

Hansen said he solicited national defense information from a Defense Intelligence Agency case worker that he knew the Chinese intelligence services would find valuable and agreed to be a "conduit" to sell it to the Chinese.

"I advised the DIA case officer how to record and transmit classified information without detection, and I explained how to hide and launder any funds received as payment for classified information," he said.

Hansen said he now understands the officer reported that information to the Defense Intelligence Agency and then acted as a confidential informant for the FBI.

On June 2, 2018, the officer gave Hansen the information he asked for, which was classified at the "SECRET/AIOFORN" level and contained classification markings, Hansen says in the plea agreement.

"The information related to the national defense of the United States in that it related to United States military readiness in a particular region and was closely held by the United States government," Hansen said.

Hansen said he reviewed the information, took written notes and told the officer he would remember most of the details "and that I would conceal some notes about the material in the text of an electronic document that I would prepare at the airport before leaving for China."

It was at that point in Seattle that agents arrested Hansen.

Hansen admitted in open court that he intended to sell and sold secrets to China, Huber said, adding, "He knew that was to the betrayal and detriment to our country and to the benefit of a foreign power."
The device will be available on Flipkart, Amazon, Paytm, Snapdeal and all Oppo stores, and the phone will be offered in two Thunder black and Aurora Green colours.

Highlights:

Oppo F11 Pro goes on sale today

The phone will be available on Flipkart, Amazon Paytm,Snapdeal and all Oppo stores

The device has flagship Sony IMX586 48MP primary half-inch sensor



Oppo F11 Pro will go on sale today on Flipkart, Amazon, Paytm, Snapdeal and it will also be available across all Oppo stores. Priced at Rs 24,990, the phone will be offered in Thunder black and Aurora Green colours. The USPs of the phone are the 48MP+5MP sensor in the dual-camera system and the pop-up or 'rising' camera that has a 16MP Sony sensor to shoot portrait selfies using the software.

Oppo F11 Pro first sale offers:

HDFC debit/credit card holders can avail 5 percent cashback on EMI transactions and consumer durable loans. The company is also offering full accidental damage protection for 180 days, and Rs 1000 off for flights as well as Rs 175 off for bus tickets on ixigo. If you are into content consumption, you can also get three months free Hungama subscription worth Rs 169. Those who buy the phone using PayTM, can avail a cashback voucher upto Rs 3400. Jio customers can get up to 3.2TB data and benefits upto Rs 4900. Noteworthy is that these offer are valid from March 15 to 17.

We are glad to have carved a niche in the Indian smartphone market for bringing in smartphones with exceptional photo and video capturing capabilities. With the launch of the OPPO F11 Pro, we aim to enhance the power and style quotient of our Indian customers enabling them to explore and master the low light photography experience. Today, we are delighted to announce the exciting first sale of OPPO F11 pro and we are hopeful that the device too will receive the same love and appreciation that we have received for the rest of our devices so far, Will Yang, CMO OPPO South Asia, said in a statement.

Oppo F11 Pro specifications:

The Oppo F11 Pro has a 6.5-inch IPS LCD display that delivers a screen-to-body ratio of 90.9 percent. There's no in-display fingerprint sensor but there is a rear-mounted capacitive fingerprint sensor and pop-up camera equipped with face-unlock feature. Under the hood, the Oppo F11 Pro has a MediaTek Helio P70 chipset and it is paired with 6GB RAM and 64GB of storage. The phone comes with a 4,000mAh battery with VOOC 3.0 support. Oppo claims the phone charges 20 percent faster than the Oppo F9 Pro and can do 49 percent in 30 minutes and full charge in 80 minutes.

The company has also done some tweaking and included a Hyper Boost that is claimed to improve app launch speed times by 20 percent while making games like PUBG Mobile run smoother. The phone runs on ColorOS 6 based on Android 9 Pie. The UI incorporates an app drawer for the first time, and this time, the company is offering 5GB of free Oppo Cloud storage for users to store their data.

In the camera department, the phone shoots 12MP photos by default but an Ultra-HD mode can be turned on to shoot at native 48MP. The 12MP default resolution is achieved by Pixel Binning technology that is claimed to give more details and sharpness to the photos, as well as shoot better better low-light photos. With a wide f/1.7 aperture lens, the F11 Pro can reportedly take clear portraits in low-light. In the Oppo F11 Pro, the 48MP sensor is paired with another 5MP depth sensor to offer portrait photos. There is a pop-up selfie camera which rises from the top center, giving the phone an all-screen design.

Related Read:

Oppo F11 Pro first impressions: Something to offer for everyone
India-China tensions are at an all time high after China blocked UN Security Councils bid to blacklist Jaish-e-Mohammad Chief Masood Azhar and declare him a global terrorist. Our poll aims to understand if this will impact your gadget buying decisions in

In the wake of Chinas latest hard-headed stance against terrorist Masood Azhars global ban, it has become clear to the millions of people following the developments in India, that China is shielding terrorists because of its strong security alliance with Pakistan, Azhars active homeground. Citizens have taken to Twitter, starting a nation-wide movement with the hashtag #BoycottChineseProducts, including smartphones, laptops and apps.

I am changing my phone from @oneplus to @SamsungMobile only because it's a Chinese company. #BoycottChineseProducts  Sumat (@sumat_patel) March 15, 2019

I never used Chinese product and phones and I will make sure will never use #BoycottChineseProducts  Sam (@secular_x) March 15, 2019

Yes, i will no more buying Chinese products #BoycottChineseProducts  Mohini Girish (@MohiniGirish) March 15, 2019

@Micromax_mobile Develop your infrastructure to manufacture all mobile parts in INDIA. So we proudly purchase a full made in India phone.#BoycottChineseProducts  Nikhil sangle (@Nikhilsangle96) March 15, 2019

Indians on Twitter are calling for a ban on Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi, Huawei, OnePlus, Vivo and Oppo, all of which constitute the top-selling smartphone brands in the country. In fact, Chinese smartphones command more than 60% market share in India and a majority of Indias imports from China consist of electronic goods.

How will Indian policy makers react to imports from China now, is something we will have to wait watch. However, in light of Chinas stance against Azhars ban and the growing social media movement to ban goods from our East Asian neighbour, we at Digit want to know from you, How will this impact your future gadget purchases with respect to Chinese brands like Xiaomi, OnePlus, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Honor Lenovo, Nubia, Meizu and more. Take our quick poll on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and let us know your thoughts.

#BoycottChineseProducts: Will Chinas decision to block blacklisting of JeM Chief Masood Azhar affect your smartphone purchase decisions with respect to Chinese brands?  Digit (@digitindia) March 15, 2019

What Did China Do?

On February 14, terrorists belonging to the Jaish-e-Mohammad outfit killed 44 Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Indias Jammu and Kashmir area, in what is now dubbed the deadly and unfortunate Pulwama attack. The orchestrator of this heinous crime, JeM, is a terror group whose sole purpose is to separate Kashmir from India, and the leader of this outfit, Masood Azhar has masterminded not only the Pulwama attack, but also the Uri Attack, the 2001 attack on Jammu and Kashmir legislative assembly, the 2001 Indian Parliament attack, the 2016 Pathankot airbase attack, and many others.

Because of JeMs growing terror activities, India, US, UK and France moved the United Nations Security Council to blacklist Masood Azhar and deem him a global terrorist under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee, which has 15 members. The committee takes decisions via a consensus and on Wednesday, China blocked the UN Security Councils bid to impose sanctions on Azhar, freeze his assets, ban his travel and put him under an arms embargo. As China is a permanent member of the UNSC, the proposal to declare Azhar a global terrorist did not go through because a consensus could not be achieved. Most other countries, including many co-sponsors voted in favour of Azhar's ban, but China remained relentless. This is the fourth time in 10 years that China has blocked the same proposal, while all other member and co-sponsors have expressed their support for the same.
After managing to drill a hole through an OLED display to install the front camera within the display, Samsung is working on removing the hole altogether and make the camera invisible when not in use.

The Infinity-O display on the Samsung Galaxy S10 and the S10+ is presently as close as it gets to getting a bezel-less, all-screen smartphone without using mechanical parts like a pop-up camera. Theres no notch or a waterdrop, just a cheerio-shaped hole tucked to the corner housing the front camera. Its done by putting the sensor and the lenses under the display.

However, Samsung is not done yet. The company is already working on the next evolution where the hole-punch will be invisible.

Though it wouldnt be possible to make (a full-screen smartphone) in the next 1-2 years, the technology can move forward to the point where the camera hole will be invisible, while not affecting the cameras function in any way, said Yang Byung-duk, vice-president of Samsungs Mobile Communication R&D Group Display.

While the Honor View 20 (review) would want to take credit for introducing the punch-hole camera, the camera essentially looks through the LCD display. Samsung, on the other hand, managed to drill a hole in the OLED on the Samsung Galaxy S10 and the S10+.

"Galaxy S10 is the only smartphone that has a hole in OLED display itself," Yang said. "Hole display is not one of the design options, but it is a noteworthy achievement in terms of the display technological advances."

Samsung is also deliberating on using the display as the speaker, similar to what LG did with its Crystal Sound OLED technology in the LG G8 ThinQ.

Related Reads:

Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus Review
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By DAVID KOENIG and TOM KRISHER

Associated Press

Aviation regulators worldwide laid down a stark challenge for Boeing to prove that its grounded 737 Max jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

In a key step toward unearthing the cause of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, flight recorders from the shattered plane arrived Thursday in France for analysis, although the agency in charge of the review said it was unclear whether the data could be retrieved. The decision to send the recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the United States, which held out longer than most other countries in grounding the jets.





. . .
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By KATHERINE ROTH

Associated Press

Bruce Schwarz/The Metropolitan Museum of Art This headress frontlet was made in British Columbia between 1820 and 1840. It is on display at the Met's exhibit "Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection," which runs through Oct. 6.





NEW YORK  For the first time, a major Native American art exhibit is being shown in the American Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, rather than in Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.





. . .
If the best kind of nap is the one where you wake up unsure what year it is, the best kind of sleep is the one where you wake up actually feeling prepared to throw off the coversa rare sensation for most of us. As a double espresso connoisseur and an early adopter of the zombie chic look, I thought I would consult a professional to see if my tardy ways could be countered.

Fortunately for my self-esteem (but rather unfortunately for Australia), Im not alone: recent statistics show that an estimated 1.5 million Australians aged 20 years and over have sleep disorders.

And as sleep medicine specialist and national spokesperson, Dr Justin Hundloe, told me, with life getting increasingly busier for the modern-day Aussie, its ever more important that we get enough sleepand have the tools to do it.

According to Justin, many sleep disorders are also strongly connected to cardiovascular disease (CVD), with poor sleep quality potentially causing or contributing to CVD, and CVD also potentially disturbing sleepa vicious, yawn-inducing cycle.

More than 50% of patients with heart failure have sleep abnormalities.

Suffice to say: getting enough quality zs is crucial. But you cant just decide to get a good nights sleepyou have to set yourself up for it. Luckily for you (and me) Justin was kind enough to spill his top 13 tips for getting a better nights sleep, in honour of World Sleep Day.

Have at em.

Go To Sleep At The Same Time Each Night (& Get Up At The Same Time Each Morning)

As a passionate weekend lie-in advocate, I was quick to pull the doc up on this claim. Surely its better to catch up on the sleep you missed Monday to Friday than not do it at all?, I asked. However Justina medical professionalhad different ideas: Yes, this does include the weekend. A regular sleep schedule needs to be consistent for the bodys internal clock to work at its best.

Hows that? As Justin explains, A consistent sleep schedule is required to promote melatonin production and release, a hormone which regulates the sleep cycle. Thus, although the ideal sleep and wake times vary depending on the persons age, level of daily activity and overall health, the one constant is that the schedule should be constant.

As we cannot suggest a one size, fits all sleep schedule, it is best to set a schedule that works best for the individual and promote consistency.

Oh and before you go radically changing your nocturnal patterns, remember this: if the sleep schedule needs to be adjusted, it is best to be done slowly: When the sleep pattern is disrupted, it may result in increased daytime tiredness or difficulty getting to sleep.

Dont Take Naps During The Day

Although you may have seen the recent study, which suggested napping can be beneficial for your health (potentially even lowering your blood pressure), Doctor Hundloe says that further research is required to validate these findings, and that you should treat napping as an occasional indulgence (or avoid it altogether) rather than rely on it to get you through the day.

It is not that we encourage people not to nap; rather, we emphasise that if overnight sleep is regular and without interruption, there should be no need for a daytime nap.

When daytime tiredness resulting in the need for a nap becomes a regular occurrence, Doctor Hundloe recommends you consult your GP.

Go To Bed Only When You Are Drowsy

According to the doc, one of the best things you can do to help get a good nights sleep is to wait until you are drowsy to go to bed. You should also avoid spending too much time on your phone, computer or TV in the hour before bed, As this can have a negative effect.

However, if it is getting late and you still arent feeling drowsy, there are a number of things you can do to help yourself relax before hitting the sheets: Try reading a book, listening to calming music, taking a bath or making a to-do list, this will take away any lingering stresses you have about the next day and prevent worry time.'

Avoid Caffeine & Alcohol Within Six Hours Of Bedtime

To help ensure you are in the optimal condition to get a good sleep, Justin says you should avoid caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and strenuous exercise in the hours leading up to bedtime. So preheat the decafs and chuck that dark chocolate out, quick smart

It takes about six hours for one half of the caffeine intake to be eliminated from the body.

How do you determine if you are a heavy caffeine user? Heavy use of caffeine is classed as approximately four or more cups of coffee a day, says Justin, So determining when to stop drinking coffee would depend on a number of factors, such as how much caffeine has been consumed from all sourcesnot just the obvious caffeine intake in your daily cup of coffee.

Avoid The Use Of Nicotine Close To Bedtime Or During The Night

Forget your lungsnicotine is not a smart option for your sleep cycle, either.

Obtain Regular Exercise, But Avoid Strenuous Exercise Four Hours Before Bedtime

Start hitting up the gym in the morning, and who knowsthe bags under your eyes could just disappear.

Avoid Eating A Heavy Meal Late In The Day

Unless youre on holiday in Spain (and have had a lengthy siesta to process that seven-course lunch), try and have an easily digestible meal before bedtime, and keep the sirloin steaks for lunchtime.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Tasteless Gentlemen Show (@thetastelessgentlemen) on Feb 22, 2019 at 6:17am PST

Minimise Light, Noise & Extreme Temperatures In The Bedroom

Unless youre one of those weirdos that can only fall asleep to the tune of a top volume TV and vacuum cleaner (if you are; seek help immediately), try to make your sleep cave as conducive to sleep as possible.

Follow A Routine To Help You Relax Before Sleep

Read a book, listen to music, or take a bath.

Avoid Using Your Bed For Anything Other Than Sleep Or Sex

Whats not to love?

Try Making A To-Do List Before You Go To Bed

This will prevent what the doc calls, Worry Time.

Avoid Clock Watching

If youre not sleeping, dont make it worse by stressing over the fact youre not sleeping (granted, this is easier said than done). Maybe try taking another bath?

If You Have Ongoing Sleep Issues Seek Professional Medical Advice

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, its necessary to call in the big guns. After all: a quick consultation could save you oodles of time (and sleep) in the long run.

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Mahindra launches new 83 hp utility vehicle in US market

Mahindras US arm Mahindra North America has come up with a new utility vehicle, the Retriever 1000c, which boasts if an industry-leading 83-horsepower 1000cc gas engine. The new UTV reaches up to 60 mph and delivers best-in-class 2,500 lbs of towing capacity.

This sportier version of the Retriever began shipping to Mahindra dealers this month and provides a new option for customers requiring more speed and power. This new model is available in signature Mahindra red, olive green and authentic RealTree AP camo and offers a choice of black or aluminum wheels.

Our dealers are enjoying great success with the Retriever line-up and we are pleased to add the 83-horsepower model to fill the needs for an expanded customer group. With more colors and engine options, there is a model to fit the many different uses for utility vehicles on farms, multi-acre properties and for outdoor sports, said Matt Glendon, director of utility vehicles at Mahindra NA.

While delivering outstanding performance, these vehicles are also built for outstanding comfort with deluxe bucket style seats and plenty of leg room to provide a great driving experience for our customers. We are pleased with initial reaction to the Retriever 1000 gas model, it began selling as soon as it hit the floor at National Farm Machinery Show last week, he added.

The utility vehicle product line, rebranded as Retriever and expanded with 24 new models in 2017, was introduced at Mahindras National Dealer Meeting last Fall. Since debuting in 2015, Mahindra is now the fastest-growing brand in the utility vehicle category.

The Retriever utility vehicle offers great performance at any altitude and a comfortable ride through a continuously variable transmission providing seamless shifting, a smooth take-off and low vibration. The Retriever 1000 gas engine UTV carries Mahindras category-leading three-year limited powertrain warranty.

The Mahindra Retriever comes in single-row, crew and long-bed models in both gas and diesel powertrains with a standard cargo box with electric dump or Mahindras industry-exclusive `Flexhauler cargo box. While all the work capabilities of the past Mahindra utility vehicles remain, there are several styling enhancements in the new Retriever models:

New dash with 4.3 digital gauge

Automotive style LED headlights

Front brushguard with bull bar

Deluxe bucket-style seating

Redesigned steering wheel & shifter knob

New wheel design

The Mahindra Retriever 1000cc gas utility vehicle offers rugged, work-ready features, including:

1,000 lbs hauling capacity

2,500 lbs towing capacity

12 ground clearance

19 of cab entry space

Standard electric cargo box dump

Standard front & rear receiver hitches

Mahindra, like some other Asian peers, is looking to get a foothold in the US market, which auntomakers believe, will add strength to their brands.

Prospective entrants to the US market include Chinas Zotye and GAC and Frances PSA.

South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Co is perhaps the last foreign automaker to successfully enter the US car market, which is now the worlds most crowded with over 40 automotive brands and 300-plus models on sale.

Carmakers have been depending on new models to boost auto sales. However, finding a niche product has become difficult for automakers as by the time they bring out a new model, the product must have already found its way to the market thanks to consultants and analysts.
Sensex ends 269 points higher, Nifty above 11,400; IT stocks outshine

Market at close: Benchmark indices ended higher but off day's high on the back of last hour selling pressure.

The Sensex was up 269.43 points at 38024.32, while Nifty was up 83.60 points at 11,426.90. About 1172 shares have advanced, 1452 shares declined, and 162 shares are unchanged.

Among the gainers, Kotak Mahindra Bank rose 4%, followed by Power Grid Corp, TCS, ICICI Bank and SBI, while on the other hand HUL shed 2 percent, followed by Yes Bank, RIL, Bharti Airtel and ITC on the Sensex.

On the sectoral front, IT index has outperformed the other indices with nearly 2 percent gain followed by auto, infra, metal and pharma, while selling was seen in the FMCG space.

Nifty Bank continued its upward momentum as it ended 1.6 percent higher at 29381.50.

Bharti Airtel top loser: Share price of Bharti Airtel fell 3.3 percent after Jefferies downgraded the stock to underperform from hold rating.

The stock is the top losers on the Sensex. Jefferies also cut its price target to Rs 270 from Rs 280.

Market Update: Benchmark indices continued to trade higher on Friday with Sensex gained over 400 points and Nifty crossed 11,450 mark with the help of bank and IT stocks.

At 14:38 hrs IST, the Sensex is up 420.67 points at 38,175.56, while Nifty is up 124.40 points at 11,467.70. About 1224 shares have advanced, 1255 shares declined, and 152 shares are unchanged.

Aarti Drugs approves buyback: The company board approved the buyback up to 2,82,100 fully paid-up equity shares of face value of Rs 10 each representing up to 1.2 percent of the total number of equity shares at a price of Rs 900 per equity share for an aggregate amount of up to Rs 25,38,90,000

Buzzing: Prestige Estates Projects shares gained more than 4 percent after Deutsche Bank initiated coverage with a buy call on the stock, citing attractive valuations.

Rupee at day's high: The Indian rupee extended the gains after a flat start on Friday morning on the back foreign fund inflows and strong domestic market. It is trading at day's high around 69.05 per US dollar

Deutsche Bank on HUL: Foreign research house maintained buy call on the stock with a target at Rs 2,100 per share.

It feels that moderation in volume growth is visible in Q4 and expect company to report volume growth of 7.5% YoY in Q4. It forecast sales/EBITDA / PAT growth of 11/15/16 percent for Q4.

HCC Rallies 5%

Sources told CNBC-TV18 that HCC is close to securitising receivables related to arbitration claims.

A PE player is likely to buy out HCC's arbitration exposure for Rs 1,800 crore, sources said.

HCCs arbitration exposure stood at around Rs 3,800 crore. Its gross debt was at Rs 3,490 crore as of December 2018, which was down by Rs 235 crore in nine-month period of FY19.

While asking above PE deal, HCC told CNBC-TV18 that the company does not comment on market speculation.

Ujjivan Financial, Coal India slip: Shares of Ujjivan Financial Services and Coal India fell 1.2 percent after announcement of interim dividend.

Buzzing: Share price of CMI rose 9 percent after company received vendor approval from prestigious companies.

Buzzing: Shares of Tech Mahindra gained 1.4 percent after company approved to acquire 100 percent stake in Japanese company.

The investment committee of the board of directors of the company has approved the proposal to acquire 100% shareholding in K-Vision Co through its wholly owned subsidiary i.e. Mahindra Engineering Services (Europe).

One-Time Settlement

A2Z Infra Engineering said as per books and accounts, outstanding of Edelweiss as on March 2018 was Rs 177.69 crore (including interest) and the same is settled for a total settlement consideration of Rs 41 crore.

The company had availed financial assistance as term loan from ICICI Bank and ICICI Bank has assigned all the rights, title and interests in the financial assistance granted by it to the company, in favour of Edelweiss Asset Reconstruction Company Limited (the 'Lender'), acting in its capacity as trustee of EARC Trust SC 217 vide Assignment Agreement executed in favour of EARC on June 29, 2016.

Bank Nifty hits life high, jumps 10% in March

Banking and financials services have been a key driver of the current rally, which lifted benchmark indices Sensex and Nifty to fresh six-month high. Key reasons behind this spike are hope of stable government at Centre and consistent FII inflow.

Bank Nifty rallied 10 percent in March against more than 5 percent gains in Nifty50.

Index constituents Punjab National Bank, Bank Of Baroda, IndusInd Bank, IDFC First Bank, ICICI Bank, RBL Bank and SBI rallied 10-20 percent during current month. Kotak Mahindra Bank, Federal Bank, HDFC Bank, Yes Bank and Axis Bank gained 5-9 percent.

Buzzing: Shares of Glenmark Pharma rose nearly 2 percent after it recieved final approval from USFDA for Clindamycin and Benzoyl Peroxide Gel.

According to company release on BSE, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Inc., USA has been granted final approval by the United States Food & Drug Administration (USFDA) for Clindamycin and Benzoyl Peroxide Gel, 1%|5%, a generic version of BenzaClin Gel, 1%|5%, of Valeant Bermuda.

Market Opens: It is a strong start for the Indian indices on the last day of the week with Nifty around 11,400 level.

The Sensex is up 165.79 points at 37920.68, while Nifty is up 51.10 points at 11394.40. About 528 shares have advanced, 171 shares declined, and 33 shares are unchanged.

Tech Mahindra, Indiabulls Housing, Gail, Eicher Motors, Dr Reddy's Lab, Kotak Mahindra, JSW Steel are the gainers on the indices, while losers led by Coal India, Bajaj Auro and UltraTEch Cement.

Among the sectors, auto, IT, energy, bank, infra and pharma indices are witnessing buying, while FMCG and metal stocks are under pressure.

Market at pre-open: Benchmark indices are flat with positive bias in the pre-opening trade.

The Sensex is up 136.69 points at 37891.58, while Nifty is up 35.90 points at 11379.20.

Jubilant Foodworks, Jet Airways and Reliance Industries are trading marginally higher in the pre-opening session.

Crude Update: Oil prices were steady on Friday, supported as production cuts led by OPEC and US sanctions against Venezuela and Iran likely created a slight deficit in global supply in the first quarter of 2019.

Wall Street ends flat: The S&P 500 slipped on Thursday, snapping a three-day streak of gains, as uncertainty over when a trade deal between the United States and China would be reached left investors on edge

SGX Nifty: Trends on SGX Nifty indicate a flat opening for the broader indices in India, a fall of 2 points or 0.02 percent. Nifty futures were trading around 11,383-level on the Singaporean Exchange.

Asian markets trade higher: Asian stocks made modest gains on Friday, tracking improved global sentiment after UK lawmakers voted to delay Brexit and as a weaker yen supported Japanese shares, but a fresh flare up in U.S.-China trade concerns is expected to cap gains.
Two new candidates have been confirmed on the Fianna Fail ticket in different municipal districts in Donegal this morning.

It has been confirmed that Enda Bonner has been added to the Fianna Fail ticket after having after lost to Noreen McGarvey at the party's selection convention in Burtonport last Friday.

Mr Bonner said: "I live to fight another day."

A further addition has been made to the Fianna Fail ticket in the Donegal Municipal District where Emer McGuinness has now been confirmed as the fourth candidate on the Fianna Fail ticket.

The popular Donegal Mart manager will join Roger Meehan, Philip McGlynn and sitting councillor Micheal Naughton in hopes that the party will gain a further seat in the Donegal area.

Bernie Moran, who has been linked with Fianna Fail after an interview with this paper is now strongly predicted to be added onto the Fine Gael ticket in the local election. This comes as quite a surprise to many as she had attended the recent Fianna Fail Ard Fheis in Dublin.

Rally driver and popular businessman Manus Kelly is also on the Fianna Fail ticket in the Letterkenny Municipal District following James Pat McDaid's withdrawal from local politics.
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An Post is set to roll out a new initiative to provide homeless people with a postal address so that they can avail of services such as applying for jobs and making medical appointments.

The Irish postal service has said that it "knows how difficult it can be for individuals and families to arrange medical appointments, correspond with their childrens schools and making job applications if they dont have permanent accommodation or a regular address."

The company says they are now working with homeless charities and service providers such as Address Point before the launch in the next few weeks.

An Post says people who have "no fixed abode" will be able to avail of the service through a post office of their choosing.

Welcoming the news for homeless people across Louth local election candidate Eugene Garvey said: "I have worked with the homeless and know some of the difficulties that they face. If you dont have an address, you have nothing.

The Sinn Fein hopeful explained: "Things that we take for granted like registering for a doctor, seeking medical advice, accessing social welfare, opening or operating a bank account or applying for a job, almost anything we do day to day, is almost impossible for someone who is homeless. Think about it, the first thing you are asked for is your address so they can correspond with you.

That is why this service by An Post is going to be a lifeline to those who find themselves homeless. The idea is to provide an Address Point which will allow homeless persons to have an address which will be their chosen Post Office. This service will be a major game changer for people and will give some structure to what is usually a very chaotic way of life.

Mr Garvey who has been very vocal on the issue added: In January 2016 there were 54 homeless people in Louth, three years later there were 156 and that figure is growing because of the failed policies of the government. That is an increase of 189% which is staggering.

"There is so much that needs to be done to address the homeless issue and it will take time but at least this An Post service can start immediately it is rolled out which is expected to be in the coming weeks."
Large crowds of local children and teens staged a walkout from their respective schools from 11.30am this morning to attend a protest at Dundalk market square calling for the Irish Government to take urgent action on climate change.

Pupils from Ardee Community School (who organised the protest), the Grammar school, the Bush, the Louis, St.Vincents and Colaiste Lu will gather at Market Square, Dundalk were all in attendance as were a number of politicians including Mark Dearey, Ruairi O Murchu, Peter Fitzpatrick and The Dundalk For Change group.

The Irish SchoolStrike4ClimateIreland strikes took place across Dublin and Cork this morning. The strike also saw local teens stand in solidarity with youths from across the globe to call for Governments to act now on global warming under the banner of Fridays For Future. So far, these strikes have taken place in over 100 countries, concentrated in well over 270 major cities.

The Louth protest organisers Conor Bailey and Donal McKenny from Ardee Community School said: "We will be under the umbrella of the FridaysForFuture protests as well as the  SchoolStrike4ClimateChangeIreland.

"This is a global movement, not simply a day off for the students. We are heading for a crisis and our government simply isnt doing enough to stop it. County-wide awareness of this issue is urgently needed. Not only will the strikes achieve this, but they will act as a catalyst to further activism in bringing about governmental action.

Attending the event with her fourth class pupils Kilkerley NS teacher Aoife Curran said: "Naoise Harris and Eoin Larkin, both aged 10, spoke passionately for the pupils of Kilkerley National School asking the government to hear their voices and take action now for their generation. Their speeches blasted out through lashing rain and hailstone to a cheering and motivating teenage crowd."

Also attending the event, Sinn Fein Councillor Ruairi O Murchu praised the students for their rousing speeches saying: I am delighted to be present here with the young activists from across Louth.

Their action of leaving their classrooms to protest on the streets is an example of the seriousness with which they view climate change.

The reality is that the planet is dying and unless all governments take radical action our children will inherit a ticking time bomb of climate disaster. These young people through their activism are sending a powerful message to An Taoiseach.

He is not doing enough by paying lip service with meaningless words, he needs to call for rapid and immediate change. The climate hypocrisy of Fine Gael is breath-taking.

"In the Dail, they refuse to support the Climate Emergency Bill which would keep fossil fuels in the ground; they support building new fossil fuel infrastructure in Ireland; they have not committed to a phase-out date for fossil fuels, and they are playing a negative role in the EU's climate negotiations.

"I'm with the striking youth on this one  they are striking because the government will not listen. I want these young peoples voices to be heard in LCC, they should not be silenced like Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg."
Over two-thirds (71 per cent) of small business owners say the federal government is not doing enough to support them, in a new study by accounting software provider Reckon (ASX:RKN). Government red tape is considered the biggest obstacle to creating a start-up in Australia, with over half (52 per cent) of SMBs agreeing.

The survey, which includes over 1,000 Australian SMB owners, reveals which policies would appeal to them in the run-up to the federal election. Small business tax concessions are the most in-demand, with over half (54 per cent) agreeing, followed by a reduction in tax process and compliance (41 per cent) and reduced electricity costs (32 per cent).

Small business grants (29 per cent), infrastructure spending (23 per cent) and legislation to stop late contractor payments (20 per cent) are the fourth, fifth and sixth most important factors.

Despite dissatisfaction with the current government, over four in ten SMB owners (43 per cent) place greater trust in the Liberal Party with the economy, compared to only one in nine that favour Labor. Close to half (49 per cent) trust neither major party.

Although current sentiment is low, over two-fifths (43 per cent) say their business was more successful in 2018 than 2017, compared to a quarter (24 per cent) that saw less success.

Sam Allert CEO of Reckon said, Most SMBs have seen growth but remain frustrated by extensive compliance requirements. Regulation is important, but overly complex and time-consuming processes limit time for SMB owners to grow revenue. While we have seen many businesses automate processes and reduce their admin burden, further change is still needed in this regard.

SMBs are a powerful voting force, and parties are keen to win their support at the ballot box. Whichever party gets elected in the coming months, a focus on digitising and automating regulatory procedures will help make business activities easier. he added.

Barriers to raising finance

Over two fifths (42 per cent) agree that access to finance is a barrier to doing business, and 63 per cent of those who took out a loan last year say the process is becoming more difficult. 68 per cent of respondents that sourced loans last year did so from traditional banks, while just 18 per cent used an online non-bank lender.

This comes as The Banking Royal Commission has seen banks tighten their lending checks. In 2019, only 56 per cent plan to source their loans from large banks.

37 per cent of SMB owners say the current fall in house prices could create a barrier to securing loans, while a further 33 per cent are undecided on how this may affect them. Over two-thirds (43 per cent) say the government is not doing enough to address the strain of tighter mortgage assessments imposed by banks.

Interestingly, personal credit cards are a more popular option for raising finance than non-bank lenders for the year ahead, with 14 per cent of respondents planning to use this method.

Allert continued, Financial uncertainty has made securing loans increasingly difficult and led to prolonged approval times. Alternative lenders provide fast and reliable loans that can help rapidly fill unforeseen gaps in cashflow or quickly get a deal over the line. Government policies that help small businesses to raise finance would be welcomed in 2019.

Cashless payments booming

The study also reveals how digital payments continue to overtake cash. 43 per cent of respondents say their receipt of cashless payments increased in 2018, and 47 per cent expect them to increase further in 2019. Six in ten businesses say over 90 per cent of their payments are now cashless.

Digital payment provider fees are the biggest barrier to accepting cashless payments for small businesses, with almost half (46 per cent) agreeing. Only a fifth say customer preferences for cash are a barrier to cashless payments, and just one tenth see the technology investment as a barrier.

Allert added: Customers are increasingly moving from cash to more convenient digital payments. ATO stats show that only one in five Australians now prefer cash payments, meaning businesses that reject this trend could miss out on sales. Digital payment devices can now be used through a smartphone and point of sales systems can be set up easily. With the barriers to accepting digital payments being so low, it makes sense for businesses to accept them.
Students at Melbournes Swinburne University of Technology have an opportunity to participate in Microsofts pilot employability skills program, designed to equip students with the skills and talent required for high-demand technical roles.

The pilot program seeks to address projected workforce shortages in new technologies, including AI, cybersecurity, data science and computer science, as the gig economy continues to grow and expand, changing the face of the modern workforce.

Swinburne University Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Professor Duncan Bentley, said graduates must be prepared for the future of work and lifelong learning.

The world of work in the future will look very different from today. With growing global shortages of experts in digital technologies, new ways to meet upcoming workforce needs are required, said Professor Bentley.

Graduates need new skill sets to participate in future work, and individuals need to retrain, upskill and maintain skills through a process of lifelong learning that is adaptable and responds to industry needs. Skills shortages have negative impacts on businesses and the students of today will do jobs that dont yet exist.

By fostering industry connections and embedding industry experience in students study, Swinburne is uniquely placed to contribute to workforce transformation and ensure that students are prepared to fulfil their professional purpose. Working with Microsoft will further enhance our students capabilities.

Microsofts Global General Manager, 21stCentury Jobs, Skills and Employability, Karen Kocher said Microsoft aimed to move people and technology forward together.

We are proud to work with Swinburne University of Technology as the university provides extensive industry engagement and technological innovation in Australia, she said.

At Microsoft, we want to empower everyone to achieve their career aspirations and make sure they can succeed in a technology-driven society.

Swinburne University, which has campuses in Melbourne, Australia and Sarawak, Malaysia, is part of a select group of universities involved in the pilot program, which will contribute to the development of Microsofts employability platform. The online platform will allow students to match their interests and aptitude to discover potential skills and career paths.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  A House leader said the entire House of Representatives would need to sign off on the suggestion of the Senate to revert the budget version approved by the bicameral conference committee to break the deadlock among lawmakers.

"Withdrawing what was submitted to the Senate by simply the decision of one person, we will have to get the approval of the plenary to withdraw that. Nobody can decide that except the plenary," House Majority Leader Fredenil Castro told CNN Philippines on Friday.

Senators have proposed that the House withdraw the budget bill it transmitted to them and revert to the version approved by the bicameral conference committee and ratified by Congress. This does not contain the itemized appropriation introduced by congressmen to lump sum funds.

Once it reaches Malacanang, President Rodrigo Duterte will veto the lump sum funds, then Congress, in a special session, will just pass a supplemental budget that would break down the lump sum appropriation.

Senate President Vicente "Tito" Sotto III told CNN Philippines in a text message that he is open to any compromise on the budget "as long as it conforms to what the Constitution says."

However, Castro warned that taking the Senate proposal would further delay the budget as Congress would not resume sessions until after the elections in May.

"We are trying to hammer options short of going back. Kasi [Because] that would already be kilometric. Tagal na 'yan [Too long,]" he said.

But Sotto said that the House could just resend the budget bill to them without the questioned realignments.

Sotto has vowed not to sign the budget bill transmitted by the House, saying that he may be charged with falsification of legislative documents by certifying the bill which contains provisions which were not ratified by Congress, effectively blocking its transmittal to Malacanang for Duterte's signature.

Senators have assailed these post-ratification itemizations, and even alleged realignments, as illegal and unconstitutional, but House members assert that these are aboveboard.

Castro even said that it would not be possible for lawmakers in the bicameral conference committee tasked to reconcile conflicting provisions in the Senate and House versions of the budget bill to scrutinize its four volumes.

"In the bicameral conference, there are no details there. They are only talking of lump sum. It is only after the ratification of the bicameral conference report that details are supplied to the Senate and the House of Representatives for the purpose of printing the enrolled bill," he said.

He added that senators should have "cool minds" and reconsider their view that the House's itemization of lump sums in the budget is illegal.

Senators have denied itemizing lump sums in the budget after its ratification, but House Appropriations committee chair Camarines Sur 1st District Rep. Rolando Andaya have presented documents which supposedly show that the Senate submitted itemizations to the budget after its ratification.

'Senators also realigned funds'

This latest impasse between the House and the Senate is a stumbling block to the enactment of the 2019 budget, causing the government to continue operating under a reenacted budget for three months in, which has impacted some government projects, including the rehabilitation of the MRT-3 and the construction of the Metro Manila subway.

Despite having met with Duterte and floating suggestions to break the budget impasse, there is still no clear path to finally have fresh funding for the government, with the Senate insisting that the House stick to what was ratified by Congress and the House standing pat on its itemizations.

Congressmen and senators have also traded accusations that they shaved off funding from government agencies and transferred them somewhere else, particularly to their own congressional districts or bailiwicks.

Castro told CNN Philippines' The Source that some senators, whom he did not name, removed around 75 billion worth of funds originally allocated for the Environment department's greening program, right-of-way acquisition, scholarships for rehabilitated drug addicts and former rebels, and foreign-funded projects after the ratification of the budget.

"It disappeared like a puff of air. It's there but it was placed somewhere," Castro said.

Senators, on the other hand, have said that congressmen removed some 100 billion in funds originally allocated for the administration's ambitious Build, Build, Build infrastructure project, but was supposedly transferred to their own congressional districts after the ratification of the budget.

But Castro denied this, saying that funds for Build, Build, Build are intact in the budget.

However, he admitted that right now, it is just the senators' words against congressmen's. "It's a question of evidence. It's a question of contention. It's a question of whom to believe," he said.

Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said yesterday that Duterte has not imposed a deadline for the enactment of the budget and is allowing senators and congressmen to settle among themselves issues surrounding the budget.

Panelo added that the government is prepared in the event that no new spending bill is passed and it would be forced to operate under a reenacted budget for the entire year.

The National Economic and Development Authority has warned that if the budget is only passed in August, the country's economic growth will only be around 4.9 to 5.1 percent, while growth can further stunt to 4.2 to 4.9 percent if the budget is reenacted for the entire year.

Economic managers also slashed the country's growth forecast from seven to eight percent to six to seven percent due to the delay of the 2019 budget.
EBRD lends Turkish-lira equivalent of 150 million to global consumer durables firm owned by Koc Holding

Loan to finance development and manufacturing of more energy-saving home appliances

Financing to further strengthen companys exports

Consumers in Turkey and foreign markets will benefit from more energy efficient appliances developed by Turkeys leading white goods manufacturer Arcelik A.S. with the help of almost 1 billion Turkish lira (150 million) loan from the EBRD.

Arcelik, majority owned by Koc Holding, manufactures and sells home appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, cooking appliances, vacuum cleaners as well as refrigeration compressors, electric motors and consumer electronics products under 12 brands, including Arcelik and Beko. It sells its products in Turkey and exports to 145 countries on five continents.

With the help of the EBRDs financing, the company will invest in new manufacturing lines at its Eskisehir and Cayirova plants to produce more energy efficient and low-noise refrigerators and washing machines that are in high demand especially in foreign markets. The investments will ensure that the appliances as well as the manufacturing processes will consume less energy and resources, raising the bar for environmental sustainability.

In addition, Arcelik is planning to bring all research and development activities under one roof in a new state-of-the-art R&D centre. It will strengthen Arceliks capacity to develop new products and facilitate partnerships with local universities and engineers. Progress in this field will strengthen the companys export potential.

Polat Sen, Arceliks Chief Financial Officer, said: At Arcelik, our priority is to invest in advanced production technologies and to develop innovative and more energy efficient products. We are pleased to start collaboration with EBRD for the financing of these investments. The support of an international financial institution such as the EBRD is a sign of recognition of our strong and sustainable business in Turkey as well as of our global ambitions.

Arvid Tuerkner, EBRD Managing Director for Turkey, added: Consumers in Turkey and globally want to see home appliances that are smart, efficient and quiet. They also want to support brands with high environmental sustainability standards. As Arcelik continues to innovate to make that possible, the EBRD is delighted to provide financing and become part of the companys success.

Supporting Turkish firms such as Arcelik to become more environmentally friendly and competitive at home and abroad is a priority for the EBRD in Turkey.

The Bank is also committed to further expanding access to long-term lira funding for Turkish companies, making them more resilient to macro-economic vulnerabilities.

Last year the EBRD increased its support for local currency financing in Turkey to a third of its total investment in the country as an economic slowdown and a dramatic currency depreciation affected many private sector companies.

The Bank is a leading institutional investor in Turkey and has invested over 11 billion in 283 projects in Turkey since 2009. The overwhelming majority of EBRD investments in Turkey are in the private sector.
The U.S. Senate voted 59 to 41 Thursday to overturn President Donald Trump's emergency declaration to fund a border wall that would threaten 93 endangered species and devastate the environment and communities of the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

The Senate vote comes a little over two weeks after a similar vote by the House of Representatives. Trump announced his intention to "VETO!" the resolution on Twitter Thursday, and Congress needs a two-thirds majority to override a veto, which is seen as unlikely. Nevertheless, the Senate vote will be seen as an embarrassment for the president, BBC News reported.

Twelve Republicans broke ranks to vote with Senate Democrats against the emergency declaration. They were Mitt Romney and Mike Lee of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Rob Portman of Ohio, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

The Sierra Club, which has filed a lawsuit against the emergency declaration, celebrated the Senate's bipartisan rebuke. "Today, 59 Senators put party aside, and put our democracy first. Senators on both sides of the aisle rejected the President Trump's attempt to violate the Constitution and circumvent Congress in order to drive his unpopular, hateful agenda," Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce said in a statement. "Sierra Club applauds the Senate for pushing back against the militarization of safe towns and more destructive border walls in communities."

However, many of the Republican rebels were not motivated by opposition to the border wall itself. Rather, they expressed concerns about what a future Democratic president would do with a precedent that allows the president to declare emergencies to fund favored political projects. Portman voiced fears similar methods would be used to take future environmental actions in particular, CNN reported. "[A] future President may well say that climate change is a national emergency and use emergency authorities to implement the Green New Deal," Portman said, referring to a 10-year plan championed by progressive Democrats and climate activists to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels while creating jobs and tackling inequality.
By Sue Branford and Mauricio Torres

For many years, international and Brazilian mining companies have dreamed of getting access to the mineral wealth lying beneath indigenous lands. And finally, the government of Jair Bolsonaro seems determined to give them that opportunity. On March 4, while Brazilians were distracted by Carnival celebrations, the new Minister of Mines and Energy Admiral Bento Albuquerque announced plans to permit mining on indigenous land.







Speaking at the annual convention of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), a major event in the mining world that attracts tens-of-thousands of attendees, the Minister said that Brazil's indigenous people would be given a voice but not a veto in the matter. The opening of indigenous ancestral territories to mining, he predicted, would "bring benefits to these communities and to the country."

He also said that he intends to allow mining right up to Brazil's borders, abolishing the current 150-kilometer (93-mile) wide mining buffer zone at the frontier. The minister said that current mining restrictions are outdated. The long-restricted indigenous and border areas "have become centers of conflict and illegal activities, that in no way contribute to sustainable development or to sovereignty and national security." The administration will shortly be holding a nationwide consultation to discuss how the changes should be made, he concluded.

He also said that he intends to allow mining right up to Brazil's borders, abolishing the current 150-kilometer (93-mile) wide mining buffer zone at the frontier. The minister said that current mining restrictions are outdated. The long-restricted indigenous and border areas "have become centers of conflict and illegal activities, that in no way contribute to sustainable development or to sovereignty and national security." The administration will shortly be holding a nationwide consultation to discuss how the changes should be made, he concluded.

An industrial mining operation in Brazil. Note the forest at the edge of the open pit mine. Norsk Hydro ASA via VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Bolsonaro's Indigenous Land Development Agenda

The minister's announcement was not unexpected. President Jair Bolsonaro, an ex-army captain, has said that he admires the 1964-85 military dictatorship, and some are drawing parallels between Bolsonaro's policies and theirs regarding indigenous and quilombola communities. Bolsonaro recently wrote on Twitter: "Over 15 percent of national territory is demarcated as indigenous and quilombola land. Less than a million people live in these isolated areas, exploited and manipulated by NGOs. We are going to integrate these citizens." Back in 1976, Mauricio Rangel Reis, interior minister in the military government of General Ernesto Geisel, expressed harsh views toward indigenous peoples: "We plan to reduce the number of Indians from 220,000 to 20,000 in ten years," he declared. But the military didn't achieve this goal. Far from being eliminated, Brazil's indigenous numbers increased to their current 900,000 population. Indigenous groups achieved real gains after the military government passed into history, and its dictatorial rule was supplanted by the progressive 1988 Brazilian constitution, which brought two important innovations. It abandoned the goal of assimilating indigenous people into the dominant culture (a goal Bolsonaro wants to reinstate), and it affirmed the concept of "original rights," recognizing indigenous peoples as Brazil's first inhabitants, with the right to remain on ancestral lands. Article 231 of the Constitution states: "Indians have the right to the permanent occupation of their traditional land and to enjoy the exclusive use of the wealth in the soil, rivers and lakes." Moreover, their land rights are "inalienable." The Constitution allows for mining on indigenous land, but only after the Indians have been consulted and specific procedures for doing so, approved by them, have been ratified by Congress.

Mining industry and individual prospecting requests on indigenous land as filed with the federal government. Mauricio Torres using data provided by the Departamento Nacional de Producao Mineral

Admiral Albuquerque's recent announcement provided no clue as to how the Bolsonaro government could legally give indigenous groups a voice but no veto regarding use of their lands, while somehow staying within the letter of constitutional law. The Ministry of Mines and Energy has, however, confirmed to Mongabay that it plans to authorize mining on indigenous areas. Though, as to the legal mechanisms for doing so, it would only say that "the specific regulatory model will be discussed with Congress and other involved parties." Though its reports are unconfirmed, analysts suggest Bolsonaro will probably issue a presidential decree to allow mining, which is the approach he plans to use to permit agribusiness to lease land within indigenous reserves  a move that faces a similar constitutional roadblock. If it goes forward with these presidential decrees, the administration will very likely face opposition from powerful figures in the judiciary, including the country's top prosecutor. Speaking at a conference attended by representatives of some of Brazil's 305 indigenous tribes, advocacy groups and a dozen European nations, Prosecutor General Raquel Dodge noted that indigenous land rights are guaranteed in Brazil's Constitution and warned: "There can be no backsliding on public policies toward the indigenous people." The Amazonas branch of the Federal Public Ministry (MPF), an independent group of federal and state litigators, is so concerned at Bolsonaro's mining plan that in February it went to court to ask the National Mining Agency (Agencia Nacional de Mineracao, ANM), the federal body that administers the mining sector, to turn down all requests by international and Brazilian mining companies to prospect or mine on indigenous land.

The mining industry has not only made prospecting requests (red) within indigenous reserves (yellow), but also on other conserved lands (green). Mauricio Torres using data provided by the Departamento Nacional de Producao Mineral

According to the MPF, mining companies and individuals have altogether lodged 4,073 requests with the ANM for mining-related activities on indigenous land since 1969, seemingly in preparation for an eventual land rush. The companies say that they are only registering their interest, but MPF argues that, until the required constitutional amendments have been written and approved by Congress, such requests should not even be permitted. Brazil's indigenous peoples have clearly indicated that if the mining plan goes forward they will fight back. Most don't want mining on their land. Munduruku female warrior Maria Leuza Munduruku told Mongabay: "We've had a lot of outsiders coming onto our land to mine. Many fish disappear and the ones that remain we can't eat, as they're dirty." Joenia Wapichana, Brazil's only indigenous female federal deputy, said that Indians don't want the money mining might bring in: "For us indigenous people wealth is having health, land to live on without receiving threats, a stable climate, demarcated land, a preserved culture and respect for our community." Brazil's mining environmental and safety record is marred by frequent waterway contamination and land pollution, and includes two deadly tailings dam collapses in the past three years, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, one of Brazil's best-known indigenous leaders, says that large-scale mining by big companies is particularly harmful: "This kind of mining requires roads to transport the mineral, large areas to store production, big dormitories where workers can sleep," he said. "It will transform our forest." A 2017 study found that mining and its auxiliary activities caused 10 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2005 and 2015. How much Amazon deforestation might skyrocket if indigenous reserves are opened to mining now is anyone's guess; indigenous groups are currently the Amazon's best land stewards.

Federal Deputy Leonardo Quintao, a major backer of the mining industry. Vinicius Loures / Agencia Brasil

Mining Companies in the Driver's Seat After last year's election, the pro-mining lobby in Congress, known by some as the "mud lobby," is stronger than ever. Their main spokesperson, federal deputy Leonardo Quintao, is a member of Bolsonaro's Civil Office. He openly admits to receiving money from mining companies: "I am a parliamentarian legally financed by mining companies," he said. Quintao was the first rapporteur for Brazil's new Mining Code, presented to the National Congress in 2013, which mining companies helped him formulate. He is proud of his work: "Our Code is modern  outlawing all kind of speculation in the mining sector." But others complain of Congress's failure to talk to potentially impacted communities when planning the new code. According to anthropologist Maria Julia Zanon, who coordinates the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (Movimento pela Soberania Popular na Mineracao), "The companies' economic interests, evident in the elections, help explain the lack of democracy in the [congressional approval] process." As of now, the new Mining Code has yet to be signed into law, and the horrific Vale mining disaster in Brumadinho this January, with 193 people dead and another 115 missing, might further delay approval. Andrea Zhouri, at the University of Minas Gerais, said the disaster stemmed from "politico-institutional failures," particularly a lack in regular monitoring of hazardous mining operations. "The [value of] ore is above everything and everyone," Zhouri said. There has been little indication so far that the government intends to significantly toughen environmental controls in the new Code. Some fear that, once the Brumadinho hue and cry dies down, it will be business as usual and the Mining Code will be approved. Prosecutor Guilherme de Sa Meneghin, who led the investigation into the earlier Mariana mining disaster, said: "What we clearly see is that Brazil doesn't learn the lessons of history." Today, mining companies chomp at the bit, having registered many prospecting requests within indigenous reserves. Minister Albuquerque  an admiral with a long, illustrious military career, and known for getting what he wants  has signaled readiness to help those firms translate their plans into action. However, Brazil's indigenous people, with a history of batting away threats, often against bad odds, are ready to fiercely resist. The lines are drawn for battle, likely in the courts, and potentially all across Brazil.

Forest and topsoil must first be removed before ore can be accessed at Brazil's Norsk Hydro ASA Paragominas open pit mine. Such industrial processes would be highly destructive of Brazil's forests, indigenous reserves and cultures. Norsk Hydro ASA via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-SA

Reposted with permission from our media associate Mongabay.


Butterball, LLC is recalling approximately 78,164 pounds of ground turkey due to possible Salmonella Schwarzengrund contamination, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced Wednesday.

The turkey has been linked to an outbreak of Salmonella Schwarzengrund that has sickened six people in three states, according to the most recent information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One person has been hospitalized.

The recall comes as the CDC continues to investigate an outbreak of Salmonella Reading linked to various raw turkey products that sickened 279 people in 41 states, killing one.

The recalled Butterball turkey was produced on July 7, 2018 and should no longer be in stores, Consumer Reports noted. However, FSiS warned anyone who had stored the recalled turkey in their freezers to throw it away or return it to the store where they bought it.

"It's possible, though, that people who bought ground turkey back in July took it out of its original packaging and rewrapped it before freezing it and won't remember the brand or when they bought it," Manager of Food Safety Testing at Consumer Reports Sana Mujahid, Ph.D, acknowledged. "If that's the case, it would be best to not eat the turkey, or, if you do, to be especially careful to cook it to 165 F and to wash your hands, utensils, and prep areas thoroughly after handling the turkey."

The connection was discovered as part of an investigation by FSIS, CDC and state authorities into an outbreak that began Dec. 19, 2018. Wisconsin officials found samples of Butterball turkey in the home shared by four patients. Researchers found bacteria in the turkey genetically related to what had sickened the patients, FSIS said. The other two cases occurred in Minnesota and North Carolina, where Butterball is based.
From wildfires to more extreme storms, the effects of climate change are already devastating communities around the globe. But the effects would be even worse if it weren't for the oceans, new research has confirmed.

That is because the world's oceans absorb carbon dioxide that would otherwise stay in the atmosphere. Between 1994 and 2007, oceans absorbed 34 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, or 31 percent of what humans put into the atmosphere during that time, a study published Friday in Science concluded. That means oceans absorbed the weight of 2.6 billion Volkswagen Beetle cars in carbon on average each year during the study period, study author and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle Richard Feely told The Seattle Times.

"[It's] a huge service the oceans are doing that significantly reduces global temperature," Feely said. The ocean is able to absorb carbon dioxide in two steps, a press release from ETH Zurich, one of the institutions involved in the study, explained: Carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean's surface water Ocean circulation distributes and sinks it into deeper waters, where it builds up. Scientists had long thought this was the case, but the study, which looked at more than 100,000 seawater samples from all parts and depths of the ocean, confirmed their models.

"The oceans have been taking up carbon dioxide recently in exactly the way we thought they would," University of Washington associate oceanography professor Curtis Deutsch, who was not involved with the research, told The Seattle Times. "There's nothing really surprising about the results, but they are super important in confirming that we really do understand the system and the way it operates." So far, the researchers found, oceans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide they absorb as atmospheric levels have increased. However, there will come a point when this will no longer be the case. "At some point the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon will start to diminish," study author and NOAA climate scientist Jeremy Mathis told Mashable. "It means atmospheric CO2 levels could go up faster than they already are."

The ocean sink should continue to work as it does now for the next 50 years, however, Mashable reported. But it does so at a cost. An increase in carbon dioxide in the ocean leads to ocean acidification, which can dissolve the calcium carbonate that makes up mussel shells and coral skeletons, and interrupt processes like fish breathing. "Documenting the chemical changes imparted on the ocean as a result of human activity is crucial, not least to understand the impact of these changes on marine life," research team leader and ETH Zurich environmental physics professor Nicolas Gruber said. This is already harming the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest, where Feely works. "The increasing load of carbon dioxide in the ocean interior is already having an impact on the shellfish industry, particularly along the U.S. West Coast," Feely told "The increasing load of carbon dioxide in the ocean interior is already having an impact on the shellfish industry, particularly along the U.S. West Coast," Feely told USA Today.




Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company's second mass-market electric vehicle at its Southern California design studio Thursday night: the Model Y.

The car is a compact SUV that will have a range of 300 miles, The Verge reported. Three versions will be available for sale in fall of 2020: a $47,000 long-range version, a $51,000 all-wheel drive dual-motor version and a $60,000 performance version. A cheaper standard version with a 230 mile range will sell for $39,000, but won't be available until 2021.



The Model Y looks essentially like a larger version of the Model 3, the company's first mast-market car, according to The Verge. The Model 3 just became available for its target $35,000 price two weeks ago, three years after the car was first announced.

The announcement comes at a difficult time for Tesla, BBC News reported. Musk was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2018 after tweeting about Tesla going private. The launch in 2019 of the $35,000 Model 3 came with a decision to lower prices across the board, at the expense of closing the majority of the company's retail outlets. But customers, employees and landlords complained, so the company reversed course and raise prices again, except for on the Model 3s, according to The Verge and BBC News.
Superintendents sometimes find themselves the targets of angry calls for their firing even when theres been no official finding of misconduct or wrongdoing.

Such a scenario has been playing out in the Broward County, Fla., district where a vocal contingent of critics has been calling for the dismissal of Superintendent Robert Runcie over his handling of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in which 17 students and staff members were killed.

But are there times when a schools chief should walk away from a job? How can a leader subjectively judge when such demands are valid and when his or her presence is a lightning rod?

The answer is not so clear-cut, said Lance Fusarelli, a professor in the college of education at NC State University.

While superintendents cant ignore detractors or those calling for their dismissal, they also cant lead effectively if they are preoccupied with whether a segment of their many constituencies will be angered by an initiative or action. They also cant dwell on whether a school board memberwho, with a majority of the board has the power to fire the superintendent or not renew a contractwould not support them on an issue, said Fusarelli, who conducts research on school and district leadership including the relationships between superintendents and school boards.

I dont think effective leaders obsess about that, because then its just taking time away from doing what they believe needs to be done, he said.

The best superintendents come in with an idea of what needs to be done, they have a planthey are adaptable, because things dont always go according to plan. But I dont think the best superintendents spend hours agonizing about or trying to read the politics of a board or the community. They deal with conflicts all the time.

But a clear sign that a superintendent should start thinking about whether to stay or leave is if the detractors are succeeding in converting previously supportive groups and board members to their position. That could spell trouble for the district leaders ability to accomplish his or her agenda and for overall effectiveness.

Other things to consider: Are the complaints or problems widespread? Are they indicative of a larger problem with the superintendents leadership? How widespread is the dissatisfaction with the district leader?

Whats more likely to prompt superintendents to leave in such a situation is the personal toll the discord is taking on them and their families.

But at some point, a self-aware superintendent has to ask whether his or her presence is the distraction and is inhibiting the ability of other educatorsprincipals, teachersto effectively do their jobs and clear the way for someone else to step in, Fusarelli said.

Then I think they can recognize that maybe its time to turn over the reins and move on, he said.

Always an Unhappy Faction

Leading a district in the face of turmoil is nothing new.

Superintendents, especially in urban districts, often face rocky tenuresits one of the reasons why their longevity in the job is short: about 5  years, according to a 2018 analysis by the Broad Center .

Parents and activists routinely lambaste school boards and superintendents over budget cuts, turnaround plans, school consolidations and closures, low test scores, and perceived and actual corruption to name a few hot-button issues that lead some school communities to demand the superintendents exit.

There is always a faction that is unhappy, no matter what, said Meredith Mountford, a professor of education leadership at Florida Atlantic University and a former superintendent in Lake Geneva, Wis.

But few of the reasons that often put superintendents in the hot seat are as sensitive and emotional as whats driving the most recentand divisivecalls for a district leaders ouster.

And experts like Fusarelli and Mountford say they understand the deep grief and strong and immediate need for accountability among the Parkland families.

In the year since the mass shooting in Parkland, some parents and family members of the deceased victims and survivors have led a high-profile campaign for Superintendent Runcie to resign or be fired. They blame Runcie and other leaders in the district for failing to take steps to prevent the shooting.

The families have also raised tough questions about Runcies leadership and pace of enacting school safety measures since the tragedy.

And they have found a powerful ally in Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who asked forand was granteda statewide grand jury investigation into school safety.

Their push culminated in a school board vote this month on a resolution to fire Runcie.

That effort was led by Lori Alhadeff, a board member whose daughter was killed in the shooting and who ran for her seat largely on Runcies performance before and after the shooting. She said the superintendent had exhibited willful neglect in his handling of safety.

The resolution failed in a 6-3 vote, following a four-hour long stretch of public testimony during which the vast majority of speakers voiced support for keeping Runcie in the job hes held for eight years.

Some supportersmany from Browards business communityspoke about the need to keep stable leadership for the other 270,000 students in the district. Other allies cited academic gains during Runcies tenure and his advocacy and support for black, Latino, and LGBTQ students as a reason for him to stay. A number of Runcies supporters in the black community accused those pushing for his ouster of being motivated by racism, a charge that Parkland parents vehemently rejected.

Beware the Snowball Effect

Still, a vocal, sympathetic, and insistent group of detractors could galvanize support and arrest the superintendents agenda, said Fusarelli of North Carolina State University.

That can have a snowball effect.

If detractors expand their message from one issue to include others, they can widen opposition and the number of stakeholders calling for the superintendent to leave. As the coalition grows, the calls would become harder to ignore and the crisis more difficult to contain.

What may begin as criticism on school safety, may lead to questioning of district academic progress, management of a district bond, to full-fledged questioning of the superintendents overall leadershipa move already pursued by Runcies most ardent critics.

In those cases, its incumbent upon the school board and superintendent to engage and work with the disaffected group, said Mountford of Florida Atlantic University.

In Broward, for example, they can be an integral part of the school and district safety plans, she said. It has to go beyond serving on a committee, to deeply engaging parents on a school-by-school level on how to make schools safer.

In instances where trust is broken, the superintendent has to be honest and transparenta difficult undertaking for some schools chiefs because state and federal laws that protect the privacy of staff and students can limit transparency.

In the cases where superintendents cant share information, they also have to say why thats the case, Fusarelli said.

The only way to repair that trust is through constant, open, and active communicationbeing as honest and transparent as possible and doing as much as possible as quickly as possible, Fusarelli said.

And in some cases, repairing the trust is simply not possible, he said.

No matter what you do, it will never be enough, he said.
This week, the FBI arrested parents who broke the law by committing fraud and bribery to get their kids into elite colleges. The vast majority of students applying to college dont have parents who commit admission-related federal crimes. But, there are myriad subtle and often undetectable ways that money buys advantage and leads to college admission.

Ive seen firsthand the legal but inequitable ways parents can buy access and opportunity in the college-application process. As an administrator of programs for the San Francisco school district, Ive spent my career working with and on behalf of students who will be the first in their family to attend college. As a side gig on the weekends, Ive also spent the past decade consulting with upper-middle-class families who pay me upwards of $5,000 for private college counseling.

The college-preparation industry, from which I benefit financially through my side gig, sells advantage every step of the way. Need to boost your SAT scores? Hire a private tutor. Does your childs activity list look anemic? Sign up for a month-long volunteer program in Tanzania for thousands of dollars.

The only difference between the two applicants is one had the money to hire me."

The first thing I say to a prospective parent in my private college counselor role is, I want to let you know that I wont write your childs essay, and I dont have any special access to elite college-admission offices. A not insignificant percentage of parents decide to look elsewhere after I set these boundaries.

I spend more than 30 hours in total with each of the students whose parents do hire me. I help them select their schools, pick appropriate and compelling essay topics, refine their essays through multiple rounds of editing, and make sure all applications and financial-aid paperwork are completed on time.

Many of the first-generation students in the programs I manage, on the other hand, often go to schools where the average student-to-counselor ratio makes such personalized attention impossible. Nationwide, the student-counselor ratio is 482 to 1 . High school counselors are professional, well-intentioned, and hardworking but they are typically unable to offer individualized college selection advice and application management to a cohort of hundreds of students.

When my private-client students send me the first draft of their essays the writing is a similar caliber as the first-generation student essays. Yet, I provide my clients multiple rounds of edits and comments. The final versions of their essays are not a true reflection of the quality of writing the students can produce on command by themselves. Instead, the submitted essays reflect the quality of writing that comes from having access to a paid editor.

The first-generation high school seniors in the programs I lead in my day job get lucky when they end up with an English teacher who assigns college essays as a class assignment. The English teachers often have class loads of 120 students and their edits, by necessity, arent as in-depth as those I give my private clients.

While it is true that I dont complete a students application or write his essays, it is also true that I am paid to hold the students hand and make sure every deadline is met, each typo is cleaned up, and all final writing is college-ready. When all is said and done, my private-client students submit vetted and polished applications. These students may appear to be more highly qualified than their first-generation counterparts, but this is an illusion. The only difference between the two applicants is one had the money to hire me.

I dont begrudge the parents who hire me or who pay for these advantages in the college-application process. The process is unnecessarily complicated, and many parents feel they need support. What they are doing is legal and baked into the culture of so many upper-middle-class communities. The majority of parents I work with are equity-minded liberals who think they are just doing right by their children.

Most of the first-generation students and their families enrolled in the programs that I lead have come to believe college can be a ticket to economic mobility. They get brochures in the mail from colleges proclaiming a simple but alluring promise of meritocracy. Work hard, play by the rules, and there just might be a spot for you on our campus.

But, it is high time we were honest about the inequity of the college-application process and that we accept the reality of who gets into elite colleges and why. The admitted are not always the best and the brightest, and they arent always the most deserving. Instead, many admitted students are simply the fortunate beneficiaries of access and opportunity purchased by their parents during the application process.
To build the largest and most complete Amateur Radio community site on the Internet - a "portal" that hams think of as the first place to go for information, to exchange ideas, and be part of whats happening with ham radio on the Internet. eHam.net provides recognition and enjoyment to the people who use, contribute, and build the site. This project involves a management team of volunteers who each take a topic of interest and manage it with passion. The site will stand above all other ham radio sites by employing the latest technology and professional design/programming standards, developed by a team of community programmers who contribute their skills to the effort. The site will be something of which everyone involved can be proud to say they were a part. We welcome your comments. The eHam.net Team, Revision 07/2020.
La Paz, Mar 15 (efe-epa).- Worker, union organizer, broadcaster, blogger and YouTuber Yola Mamani is speaking out for Bolivia's "cholas," women of mixed indigenous and European descent identifiable by their distinctive costume of bowler hat, layered skirt and shawl.

The self-proclaimed Chola Bocona (Big-mouth chola), denounces discrimination against cholas as well as a tendency to see them as performers in a folklore theme park and their traditional garb as fashion.

Born in the highland province of Omasuyos, Mamani told EFE that she moved to La Paz at the age of 9 to work as a nanny for some relatives and that mistreatment at their hands led her to abandon their home and become a domestic worker.

She attributes her strength to that early experience of learning to stand up to employers and demand respect for her rights to fair pay and schooling.

"Those things taught me to be strong, to talk back, to question myself about the place I occupied in the house where I was working, the place I occupied in this society," Mamani said in an interview with EFE.

Her confidence grew when she joined the domestic workers union, which in turn led her to the feminist organization Mujeres Creando (Women Creating).

In 2009, Mamani and colleagues in Mujeres Creando launched a radio program, "I am a domestic worker with pride and dignity."

The program aired on Deseo radio for seven years, by which point most of the participants had left domestic work, whether for marriage or other careers.

Mamani, however, remains in radio as the producer of Women's News - Warminyatiawinakapa in Aymara, the most widely spoken of Bolivia's indigenous languages.

The program features interviews with women who are usually not represented in the media.

"It is a space where we are not decoration, where we don't end up in a pretty painting because we are indigenous or because we are cholas, where we are not news only when we have been raped or killed, but rather in those moments when we are producing, when we are working," she said.

Mamani said she noticed a few years ago that companies and other institutions were hiring cholas to fill high-visibility positions as receptionists or secretaries.

Later, she saw women from distinctly non-chola backgrounds "disguise" themselves as cholas "to enter politics, to be models."

"They would have never done it before, but they do it now because being a chola is fashionable. That was my rage, my questioning of this society of double standards, racism, classism," Mamani said.

That anger was the origin of her blog, "Ser chola esta de moda" (Being a chola is trendy).

"Seeing them (cholas) as decoration has bothered me a lot because I think that cholas think, that we have our opinion on various topics. It's just that the media, or other intellectuals, have never seen us as thinking beings," she said.

To expand the audience for her critique, Mamani created her YouTube channel, Chola Bocona.

"I think that I wouldn't be here right now telling this story if I hadn't been a big-mouth. Maybe I'd still be a domestic worker, enslaved," she said.

On her channel, Mamani criticizes the "opportunism" of white women who dress as cholas, intellectuals who reduce Aymara women to their traditional clothing and media that depicts cholas only in the contexts of cooking, folklore and fashion.
Santiago Montoya Palacios '19 wants to know: 'Will this help make a positive change in the world?'

Photo/Mike Lovett Santiago Montoya Palacios

Santiago Montoya Palacios '19 has tried many different areas of study and career paths through experiences at Brandeis. To name a few: He's gone to the Hague for an internship at the International Criminal Court; he's participated in clubs like the Brandeis Immigration Education Initiative ; and he's worked the Sillerman Center for the Advancement of Philanthropy

During all these experiences, he has had one central question in mind.

"I always ask myself, 'Will this help make a positive change in the world?'" he said. "I feel that's a core ingredient in any Brandeisian. This is place full of overachievers, in a good way. Everyone is passionate about social justice and so ambitious."

These days he's most interested in journalism, thanks to writing for both student newspapers on campus and his work as a translator for an investigative journalism project in Costa Rica that examined fraud in the organic fruit industry.

Montoya, a double-major in sociology and Hispanic studies with a minor in social justice and social policy, took some time to answer questions with BrandeisNOW.

When I started thinking about colleges, I knew I wanted to go to a smaller school. I had actually thought Brandeis was way bigger than it was, because so much research happens here. My parents encouraged me to look at it more closely and I discovered that its a lot smaller than I had thought, but there are still opportunities to take in an interdisciplinary approach and dig deeper into subjects. And then I visited and I loved it.

When I found my core group of friends. They are like my second family. We've lived together for the last two years and have formed such a strong bond. Our relationship has been based on honesty and learning from each other. I met one of them through my roommate, and then one thing led to another. It was like a chain reaction, all of us coming together.

Professor Fernando Rosenberg in Hispanic studies. He made me dig further into my roots. My family moved from Colombia to New York City when I was young. Growing up in New York, I didn't really know a lot about the history of Latin America. Professor Rosenberg has made me more aware of where the continent stands, and how the problems in the region come back to colonization. He especially taught me, using Latin America as a case, how different forms of art can intersect with social justice and have an effect.
Im still smiling! was Professor Jane Memmotts reply to being asked her feelings about becoming the newly-elected president of the British Ecological Society. In an office filled with shelves of books, a case of preserved butterflies, feathers from various species and a plant collection to rival the rest of the life sciences building, I interviewed Professor Jane Memmott on her career, interests and her journey towards the prestigious position she holds today.

Like so many of us, Janes lifelong fascination with nature began at an early age. It was during her childhood camping trips to County Clare in Ireland that Jane, inspired by her surroundings, developed an interest in ecology. In 1981, Jane began studying zoology at the University of Leeds. She described herself as a keen and enthusiastic student but mentioned that she still has a horror of a few areas of biology from not liking them as a student!. Jane went on to explain that it wasnt until her third year at Leeds, when she really enjoyed everything she was studying, that she truly excelled as a student.

Professor Memmott took a year out after her BSc at Leeds, during which she took her first flight to Peru, where she worked as a tour guide in the Amazon rainforest for three months. This was Janes first taste of the tropics, and she became captivated by rainforests, leading her to write a PhD to be based in Costa Rica. Jane described one of her most memorable moments during her PhD in Costa Rica, when she encountered a sloth crossing the bridge of the field station. Theyre quite difficult things to catch- you cant just unhook them from the handrail. We got it into a large dustbin and had the cutlery tray from the dishwasher over the top! Once captured, the sloth was safely transported to a tree buttress to see what effect it would have on Janes experimental phlebotomine sandflies. Professor Memmott explained how shed spent a lot of her life in tree buttresses, describing them as being like a series of rooms around a big tropical tree. The tropics can be a paradise for entomologists, and Jane recalled iridescent Morpho butterflies the size of dinner plates and giant damselflies that fly like helicopters.

"Jane described her endless fascination with understanding how the architecture of the network can affect pollination interactions and the robustness of the system to species loss."

After her PhD in Costa Rica, Jane returned to the tropics for her first post doc. The project was to create the first food web to come out of the tropics, putting together a picture of the trophic interactions between the plants, leaf-miners and parasitoids of the rainforest community. This project got Jane hooked on studying ecological networks as a way of sampling whole communities. She explained, rather than homing in on species x or species y, you kind of look at the whole alphabet at once. Jane described her endless fascination with understanding how the architecture of the network can affect pollination interactions and the robustness of the system to species loss. Jane spent her second post doc working on the biological control of invasive plants. During this project, Jane spent time in New Zealand, which proved to be a contrast to the hot, sometimes gruelling nature of her project in Costa Rica. She spoke of her time in New Zealand, describing it as one of her favourite places in the world: I lived a life of eternal summer - it was easy to live in a little house in paradise and travel round the country doing experiments.

After ten years travelling the world and living out of a rucksack, Jane returned to the UK, where in 1996 she obtained her lectureship at Bristol. Jane stressed that returning to the UK did not mean forfeiting amazing wildlife encounters, mentioning the amazing views of peregrines that can liven up staff meetings in the sky lounge. From 2012 to 2016, she became Head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol. This position came with some challenges, including leading the movement of the school to the new Life Sciences Building that we know and love today. Nowadays, one of her favourite parts of the job is teaching - especially first year lectures. Jane also enjoys seeing students from all around the world progress through university to do PhDs, and she loves to see the effect that the publishing of a big research paper can have on the young scientists leading the project.

"I asked Jane what advice she would give to students interested in getting into academia. Her reply was its absolutely worth it!."

Outside of her work, Jane enjoys gardening, dog walks and getting out and about in nature with her family; having recently been searching for short-eared owls on the Severn estuary. Professor Memmott describes herself as always reading- she enjoys novels, adventure books and books related to ecology. She also mentioned that her two teenagers take up a lot of her attention. I asked Jane what advice she would give to students interested in getting into academia. Her reply was its absolutely worth it!. She spoke of the tremendous freedom associated with being able to do your own research but warned to be prepared to put up with lots of rejection. You can learn a lot from your rejections - its not wasted time.

The British Ecological Society is the oldest ecological society in the world. The society has six journals including the Journal of Ecology and Ecology and Evolution, and it provides research grants and supports ecologists in their early careers. Jane joined the British Ecological Society as a PhD student and has been a member ever since. She described the society as having been very supportive over the years; providing her with a grant that enabled her to employ a field assistant to help carry out the field work that began all of her pollination research. I asked Jane what it meant to her to be elected as the president of the British Ecological society. She replied, Im very honoured - Im still smiling!.
Muslims in New Zealand in the state of shock

New Zealand-based Arab journalist speaks to Anadolu Agency.

Muslims in New Zealand are in a state of shock after Friday's terror attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, a city on the country's east coast.

"LOCAL MEDIA OUTLETS ARE IN STATE OF SHOCK TOO"

New Zealand-based Arab journalist Asma Shukr told Anadolu Agency the tragedy has not yet sunk in for Muslims in the country.

"[They] still do not believe what has happened and how these mass shootings took place, as New Zealand is a quiet country where Muslims go about their daily lives and worship in peace," she said. To quote an example, she said she goes to university every day using public transport and faces no problem at all although she wears a hijab, unlike Muslims living in Europe and the US who face racism. "Local media outlets are in a state of shock too" and "It is a major incident given the large number of victims in a small country with only 5 million inhabitants," she said.

She praised Turkey's strong condemnation of the attack and slammed the lack of reactions from the West. "I have only noticed that the strong and rapid reaction came from Turkey and the New Zealand governments," she added.

49 killed in terrorist attacks on New Zealand mosques WATCH

THE ATTACK CAME RIGHT AFTER EU'S REPORT

In a social media post just before the attack, an account that is believed to belong to one of the attackers posted a link to an 87-page manifesto that was filled with anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim ideas and explanations for an attack. You can live your own homeland in peace, no one will hurt you. Right at the east side of the Bosphorus. But if you try to live beyond the west side of the Bosphorus, we would come to get your lives. We will come to Constantinople and destroy your mosques and minarets. By that, Hagia Sophia can be free all of its minarets and Constantinople can be a Christian city once and for all.

Earlier this week, members of the European Parliament had rejected a request of a possible conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

At least 49 people were reportedly killed in mass shootings at the two mosques, New Zealand Police said.
President Erdogan: No U-turn on Russian S-400 deal

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Turkey will receive Russian S-400 missiles this July.

President Erdogan said Thursday his country would not make a U-turn on its deal to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems.

"WE HAVE LEFT CRISES BEHIND US"



"We finished this business. For us, taking a step back here is out of the question," President Erdogan told news channel Haberturk about the purchase. He said Russia will deliver the missiles in July. He added Turkey is also not closed to offers from the US on purchasing the Patriot air defense systems. US officials suggested Turkey should buy US Patriot missiles rather than the Russian system, arguing the S-400 is incompatible with NATO systems.

But Turkish officials countered that Ankara would not go back on its agreement with Russia, even if it were to also buy Patriots, and also complained that up to now its allies have been unwilling to sell it missile defense. Patriot missiles are used for defense purposes to shoot down incoming missiles and attack planes.



On the economy, President Erdogan said despite rising challenges in the global economy, Turkey has the capacity to show "positive growth rates" beginning in the second quarter. "We have left crises behind us," he stressed. President Erdogan said this year will see development move to a "much better place" for Turkey.

Responding to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Erdogan said that Israeli premier was accused of corruption and bribery ahead of the coming elections in Israel. "You are cruel enough to persecute woman and children there [Palestine]," President Erdogan said and criticized Israeli soldiers who he said disturbed Muslim holy grounds with their boots.
Top Turkish diplomat slams terror attack in New Zealand

Politicians, media fueling Islamophobia also responsible for the heinous terror attack, says Mevlut Cavusoglu.

Turkey's foreign minister on Friday condemned terrorist attacks targeting two mosques in New Zealand.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS

"I condemn the barbaric terrorist attacks perpetrated against two mosques in #Christchurch in #NewZealand," Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Twitter. Cavusoglu wished Gods mercy to those who lost their lives and speedy recovery to the wounded. "Not only the perpetrators but also politicians & media, that fuel the already escalated Islamophobia and hate in the West, are equally responsible for this heinous terror attack," he added.

At least 49 people were reportedly killed in twin terror attacks at two mosques in Christchurch, according to New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

New Zealand Police earlier reported that at least four people were taken into custody after the armed terror attacks.
The increasing proportion of the elderly population calls for proper planning and implementation of institutionalised care services for them. In this context, the distribution of geriatric care services across time, region, economic class, gender, and ownership of the old age homes operating in the National Capital Region are surveyed.

The elderly population in India is the second largest in the world with its share increasing over time from 5.6% in 1961 to 8% in 2011 (GoI 2016). This is further proposed to rise to a whopping 20% by 2050 (HelpAge India 2015). This implies that in another 40 years, the usual pyramidal configuration of the Indian population will take the form of a cylindrical structure, with almost as many old persons as the young. The rising proportion of the elderly in the total population, along with growing levels of urbanisation and modernisation, evoke the need to understand and assess if institutionalisation of care services for the aged could act as a reasonable substitute for the necessary support to be provided to them in the future.

The present study surveys all the existing old age homes operating in the National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCT) and looks at the distribution of geriatric care services across time, region, economic class, gender and ownership.
One of the main constraints to development in North East India is the lack of connectivity. How the existing EastWest Corridor and the proposed transboundary corridors such as the Trilateral Highway, the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport Project, and the BangladeshChinaIndiaMyanmar Economic Corridor connecting India with neighbouring countries in the eastern neighbourhood would stimulate economic activities in the North East is examined. It is found that the corridor-based development projects may generate economic activities and regional development, which, in turn, would influence economic growth through higher production and consumption.

Empirical studies reveal that infrastructure, such as corridor-based development, promotes economic growth and regional development through easing the demand for infrastructure, reducing time and cost of the transaction due to increase of transportation activities, encourages fragmentation of production in a region, creates employment opportunities, and also contributes to poverty reduction (ADB 2008; Kumagai et al 2009; Brooks and Hummels 2009; Ghosh and De 2005; De et al 2013). Therefore, infrastructure endowment along with geographical location and agglomerative sectoral structure is the potential determinant for a regional development (Capello 2007).

In the case of Indias infrastructure development, activities on upgrading and creating new roads and highways, railways, airports, inland waterways, and ports, etc, are expected to provide cost-effective and efficient logistic services to promote trade and development. In addition, Indias focus on the North East Region (NER) by developing deeper connectivity would enhance the scope of intra- and cross-border trade and socio-economic benefits in that region. Especially, the existing EastWest Corridor (EWC)1 connecting North East India with Gujarat improves the connectivity of the NER with the rest of the country. There are also other ongoing and proposed corridors connecting the NER with the neighbouring countries of India, namely the Trilateral Highway (TH), the Kaladan Multimodal Transit Transport Project (KMTTP), and the BangladeshChinaIndiaMyanmar Economic Corridor (BCIM-EC), which are expected to bring potential benefits to the region. These corridors are significant for India and the NER in particular in view of the ambitious Act East Policy (AEP) that aims to strengthen connectivity between India and South East Asia.
HARRISBURG >> State Rep. Wendi Thomas (R-Bucks) will soon introduce legislation to crack down on home delivery theft. With the ongoing pandemic, online purchases have skyrocketed, said Thomas, who is crafting the legislation with input from Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub. With the continuing COVID-19 health crisis, many packages are being left unattended on porches to avoid unnecessary interactions....
Gum disease (gingivitis) that goes untreated can become periodontitis. When this happens, the infection that affected your gums causes loss in the bone that supports your teeth. Periodontitis is the main cause of tooth loss in adults.Interestingly, periodontitis is also a risk factor for developing dementia, one of the leading causes for disability in older adults. A United Nations forecast estimates that 1 in 85 individuals will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, a form of dementia, by the year 2050. Reducing the risk factors that lead to dementia and Alzheimer's disease could potentially lower older adults' chances of developing those conditions.

Recently, researchers in South Korea studied the connection between chronic periodontitis and dementia. They published their findings in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The research team examined information from the National Health Insurance Service-Health Screening Cohort (NHIS-HEALS). In South Korea, the NHIS provides mandatory health insurance covering nearly all forms of health care for all Korean citizens. The agency also provides health screening examinations twice a year for all enrollees aged 40 years or older and maintains detailed health records for all enrollees.

The researchers looked at health information from 262,349 people aged 50 or older. All of the participants were grouped either as being healthy (meaning they had no chronic periodontitis) or as having been diagnosed with chronic periodontitis. The researchers followed the participants from January 1, 2005 until they were diagnosed with dementia, died, or until the end of December 2015, whichever came first.

The researchers learned that people with chronic periodontitis had a 6 percent higher risk for dementia than did people without periodontitis. This connection was true despite behaviors such as smoking, consuming alcohol, and remaining physically active. The researchers said that to their knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate that chronic periodontitis could be linked to a higher risk for dementia even after taking lifestyle behaviors into account.

The researchers suggested that future studies be conducted to investigate whether preventing and treating chronic periodontitis could lead to a reduced risk of dementia.

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This summary is from "Association of Chronic Periodontitis on Alzheimer's Disease or Vascular Dementia" It appears online ahead of print in the February 2019 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The study authors are Seulggie Choi, MD; Kyuwoong Kim, BSc; Jooyoung Chang, MD; Sung Min Kim, BSc; Seon Jip Kim, RDH; Hyun-Jae Cho, DDS, PhD; and Sang Min Park, MD, PhD, MPH.

About the Health in Aging Foundation

This research summary was developed as a public education tool by the Health in Aging Foundation. The Foundation is a national non-profit established in 1999 by the American Geriatrics Society to bring the knowledge and expertise of geriatrics healthcare professionals to the public. We are committed to ensuring that people are empowered to advocate for high-quality care by providing them with trustworthy information and reliable resources. Last year, we reached nearly 1 million people with our resources through HealthinAging.org. We also help nurture current and future geriatrics leaders by supporting opportunities to attend educational events and increase exposure to principles of excellence on caring for older adults. For more information or to support the Foundation's work, visit http://www.HealthinAgingFoundation.org.

About the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society

Included in more than 9,000 library collections around the world, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) highlights emerging insights on principles of aging, approaches to older patients, geriatric syndromes, geriatric psychiatry, and geriatric diseases and disorders. First published in 1953, JAGS is now one of the oldest and most impactful publications on gerontology and geriatrics, according to ISI Journal Citation Reports. Visit wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/JGS for more details.

About the American Geriatrics Society

Founded in 1942, the American Geriatrics Society (AGS) is a nationwide, not-for-profit society of geriatrics healthcare professionals that has--for 75 years--worked to improve the health, independence, and quality of life of older people. Its nearly 6,000 members include geriatricians, geriatric nurses, social workers, family practitioners, physician assistants, pharmacists, and internists. The Society provides leadership to healthcare professionals, policymakers, and the public by implementing and advocating for programs in patient care, research, professional and public education, and public policy. For more information, visit AmericanGeriatrics.org.
Bottom Line: Some patients seek care at Catholic hospitals but others may not because aspects of reproductive and end-of-life care can be limited by ethical and religious directives for Catholic hospitals based on the church's moral teachings. This research letter analyzed the websites of 646 hospitals listed in the Catholic Health Care Directory to see whether the hospitals described their religious identity and associated health care practices.

Authors: Maryam Guiahi, M.D., M.Sc., University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, and coauthors.

(doi:10.1001/jama.2019.0133)

Editor's Note: The article contains conflict of interest disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

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This full-text link will be live at the embargo time: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2728476?guestAccessKey=accdea9c-1b47-4553-a28e-3890d9c76990&utm_source=JAMA_Network&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=031519

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Selection of an optimum structure from approximately eight billion candidates may make society more energy efficient

NIMS, the University of Tokyo, Niigata University and RIKEN jointly designed a multilayered metamaterial that realizes ultra-narrowband wavelength-selective thermal emission by combining the machine learning (Bayesian optimization) and thermal emission properties calculations (electromagnetic calculation). The joint team then experimentally fabricated the designed metamaterial and verified the performance. These results may facilitate the development of highly efficient energy devices.

Thermal radiation, a phenomenon that an object emits heat as electromagnetic waves, is potentially applicable to a variety of energy devices, such as wavelength-selective heaters, infrared sensors and thermophotovoltaic generators. Highly efficient thermal emitters need to exhibit emission spectrum with narrow bands in practically usable wavelength range.. The development of such efficient thermal emitters has been targeted by many researches using metamaterials that can manipulate electromagnetic waves. However, most of them have taken an approach of characterizing the material structures selected empirically. , it has been difficult to identify the optimum structure from a vast number of candidates.

The joint research group developed a method of designing metamaterial structures with optimum thermal radiation performance using a combination of machine learning and the calculation of thermal emission properties. This project focused on easy-to-fabricate multilayered metamaterial structures composed of three types of materials in 18 layers of varying thickness. Application of this method to about eight billion candidate structures led to the prediction that a nanostructure composed of non-periodically arranged semiconductor and dielectric materials would have superior thermal radiation performance, which was contrary to the conventional knowledge. Then the research group actually fabricated the metamaterial structure and measured its thermal emission spectrum, and consequently demonstrated an extremely narrow thermal emission band. Measured in terms of the Q-factor (a parameter used to measure the width of thermal emission spectral bands), the newly designed nanostructure produced a Q-factor close to 200, when 100 had been considered the upper limit for conventional materials?an exceptionally narrow thermal emission spectral band.

This research demonstrated the effectiveness of machine learning in developing highly efficient thermal emission metamaterials. The development of metamaterials with desirable thermal emission spectra is expected to facilitate more efficient energy use throughout the society. Because the nanostructure design method developed is applicable to all kinds of materials, it may serve as an effective tool for the design of high-performance materials in the future.

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This research project was carried out by a research group led by Junichiro Shiomi (Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Tokyo) Atsushi Sakurai (Associated Professor, Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Niigata University) and Koji Tsuda (Professor, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo). The part of this project conducted at the CMI2 (Center for Materials Research by Information Integration) was supported by the JST "Materials Research by Information Integration" Initiative (MI2I), while the remainder of this project, conducted at the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP), was supported by funding from MEXT.

This study was published in ACS Central Science, an online U.S. journal, as an "ASAP article" on January 22, 2019, Eastern Standard Time.

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(Regarding this research)

Junichiro Shiomi

Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Tokyo;

Special Researcher, Center for Materials Research by Information Integration (CMI2), National Institute for Materials Science;

Visiting Scientist, RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project

7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

Tel: +81-3-5841-6283, Fax: +81-3-5841-0440

Email: shiomi@photon.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Atsushi Sakurai

Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Niigata University;

Special Researcher, Center for Materials Research by Information Integration (CMI2), National Institute for Materials Science

2-8050 Ikarashi, Nishi-ku, Niigata 950-2181, Japan

Tel: +81-25-262-7004, Fax: +81-25-262-7004

Email: sakurai@eng.niigata-u.ac.jp

(Regarding JST projects)

COI Group

Department of Innovation Platform

Japan Science and Technology Agency

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Email: ihub@jst.go.jp

(For general inquiries)

Public Relations Office

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Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection can convert a harmless, inhaled protein antigen into an allergen, according to a study published March 7 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Rafaela Holtappels from the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, and colleagues. According to the authors, the findings suggest that CMV airway infection significantly enlarges the spectrum of potential environmental inducers of allergic airway disease.

CMV infection of the fetus causes birth defects, and in immunocompromised patients, CMV infection of the lung can result in life-threatening pneumonia. Holtappels and colleagues add a novel aspect of how CMV can contribute to airway disease. Primary infection with CMV occurs in early childhood and involves the airway mucosa, where CMV and inhaled environmental allergens can meet. This medically relevant situation was studied experimentally by using a mouse model of airway co-exposure to CMV and ovalbumin -- a protein antigen with inherently low allergenic potential.

Ovalbumin exposure or CMV infection alone failed to sensitize for allergic airway disease. By contrast, airway infection with CMV at the time of ovalbumin sensitization predisposed for allergic airway disease. This effect was mediated by activation of airway dendritic cells. The results show that even a protein antigen that has low-to-no allergenic potential on its own can sensitize for allergic airway disease when CMV activates airway dendritic cells for more efficient antigen uptake. According to the authors, future research should focus on defining the conditions under which CMV airway infection could possibly contribute to the development of full-blown asthma.

The authors add, "CMV infection of the airways activates dendritic cells for a more efficient uptake of inhaled environmental antigens of otherwise low-to-no intrinsic allergenic potential. This mechanism sensitizes detrimental immune cells that can cause allergic airway disease after antigen re-exposure."

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Research Article

Funding: RH was supported by the IFF-I program of the University Medical Center, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Collaborative Research Center SFB 1292, TP 14. NAWL and MJR were supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Collaborative Research Center SFB 1292, TP 11. JM was supported by the Asthma Core Facility of the Research Center for Immunotherapy (FZI) of the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Citation: Reuter S, Lemmermann NAW, Maxeiner J, Podlech J, Beckert H, Freitag K, et al. (2019) Coincident airway exposure to low-potency allergen and cytomegalovirus sensitizes for allergic airway disease by viral activation of migratory dendritic cells. PLoS Pathog 15(3): e1007595. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1007595

Author Affiliations:

Department of Pulmonary Medicine, University Medical Center Essen-Ruhrlandklinik, Essen, Germany

Institute for Virology and Research Center for Immunotherapy (FZI), University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany

Asthma Core Facility and Research Center for Immunotherapy (FZI), University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany

Department of Pulmonary Medicine, University Medical Center Essen-Ruhrlandklinik, Essen, Germany

Department of Hematology, Medical Oncology and Pneumonology, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper: http://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1007595
Published in the journal Science, it analysed the genomes of 271 inhabitants of the peninsula from different historical periods and has contrasted them with data collected in previous studies of 1,107 ancient and 2,862 modern subjects. The results show an unprecedented image of the transformation of the Iberian population along different historical and prehistoric stages.

Replacement of the male population in the Bronze Age

The arrival of groups descended from shepherds of the steppes of Eastern Europe between 4,000 and 4,500 years ago involved the replacement of approximately 40% of the local population and almost 100% of men. "The genetic results are very clear in this regard. Progressively over a period that may have lasted some 400 years, the lineages of the Y chromosome present until then in Copper Age Iberia were almost entirely replaced by a lineage, R1b-M269, of steppe ascendency", says researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (CSIC and Universitat Pompeu Fabra joint centre).

"While this was clearly a dramatic process, the genetic data alone cannot tell us what prompted it", says David Reich, principal investigator at Harvard Medical School, jointly in charge of the study.

"It would be wrong to state that the local population was displaced, since there is no evidence of violence in that period", adds Inigo Olalde, a Harvard University researcher.

"An alternative explanation would be that the local Iberian women preferred the newcomers from Central Europe in a context of "strong social stratification", states Lalueza-Fox.

The research team highlights that the genetic data alone cannot reveal the whole story. "The evidence from other fields, such as archaeology and anthropology, must be combined with these results to better understand what prompted this genetic pattern", concludes Reich.

As an example of this replacement phenomenon, the study documents a tomb found at a Bronze Age site (after the Copper Age) in the town of Castillejo del Bonete (Ciudad Real). Of the two individuals found at the burial site, the man descends from the steppe while the woman is genetically similar to the Iberian population prior to the Copper Age.

Basque genetics

Another major finding of the study is that the genetics of today's Basques has hardly changed since the Iron Age (about 3,000 years ago). Contrary to some theories that placed the Basques as the descendants of Mesolithic hunters or of the first farmers who lived in the Iberian Peninsula, the results of this work show that the genetic influence of the steppes also reached the Basque Country (in fact they have one of the highest frequencies of the Y chromosome R1b). By contrast, they show hardly any influences of later migrations such as the Romans, Greeks or Muslims, from which they were isolated.

"It is now thought that Indo-European languages spread across Europe thanks to the descendants of the peoples of the steppes. In this study we recompose the complex genetic mosaic of the Iberian Peninsula, where we find Indo-European-type paleolanguages, such as Celtiberian, and non-Indo-European ones, such as Euskera, which is the only pre-Indo-European language still spoken. Our results indicate a greater genetic component of the steppes in Celtiberians than in Iberians, but in any case there is some dissociation between language and ancestry", adds Lalueza-Fox.

African contacts

The distribution of the genetic flow from Africa to the peninsula is much older than hitherto documented. The study confirms the presence in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula, at the site of Camino de las Yeseras (Madrid), of an individual from North Africa who lived about 4,000 years ago, and a grandson of an African emigrant at a site in Cadiz from the same era. Both men bore considerable proportions of sub-Saharan ancestry. However, they were sporadic contacts that left a scarce genetic mark on the Iberian populations of the Copper and the Bronze Ages.

Moreover, the results indicate that there was a North African flow of genes in the southeast of the Peninsula in Punic and Roman times, long before the arrival in the Peninsula of the Muslims in the eighth century.

Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Visigoths and Muslims

The analysis of the genetic map shows profound changes in population in the Iberian Peninsula in more recent historical periods. "For the first time, we document the genetic impact of the major events in the history of the peninsula. The results show that by the start of the Middle Ages at least a quarter of the Iberian ancestry had been replaced by new population flows coming from the eastern Mediterranean (Romans, Greeks and Phoenicians), which reveals that migrations during this period still had a major influence on the formation of the Mediterranean population", explains Inigo Olalde.

One example of this phenomenon cited in the work is the Greek colony of Empuries, in north-eastern Spain, founded between 600 BC and the late Roman period. The 24 individuals analysed are divided into two groups of different genetic heritage: one composed of individuals with typical Greek ancestry and another composed of a population that is genetically indistinguishable from the Iberians of the nearby village of Ullastret.

"The article also discusses the arrival in the Peninsula of the Visigoths and the Muslims. Among the former, two individuals have been located at the site of Pla de l'Horta (Girona) with clear Eastern European ancestry and mitochondrial DNA typical of Asia. From the Islamic period, individuals of Granada, Valencia, Castellon and Vinaros have been analysed showing a North African component of close to 50%, far higher than the residual 5% observed in the current Iberian population. This ancestry was practically eliminated during the Reconquista and the subsequent expulsion of the Moors", comments Lalueza-Fox.

Population structure of Mesolithic Iberia

This study, together with other one published the same day on Current Biology, identifies for the first time the presence of a spatial and temporal genetic structure among the hunter-gatherers of the Iberian Peninsula during the Mesolithic (about 8,000 years ago). In the northwest, the Mesolithic hunters who lived a few centuries before the arrival of the first farmers show a genetic affinity with central European hunter-gatherers. This ancestry was not present in the previous hunter-gatherers from the same region or in the contemporary hunter-gatherers in south-eastern Iberia in the late Mesolithic.

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The research has been funded by "La Caixa", FEDER-MINECO (BFU2015-64699-1118P), the National Institute of Health (grant GM100233), the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others.
A U.S. Navy research team has discovered an alloy for making better, cheaper underwater anodes with the potential for shifting the global business of maintaining ships and piers.

A patent application was published by the federal government on Thursday for the new aluminum anode alloy containing a "very small addition of tin." It was invented by Craig Matzdorf and Alan Grieve of the Naval Air Warfare Center's Aircraft Division in Maryland.

Sacrificial anodes are attached to marine vessels and structures to protect them from corrosion caused by the flow of electrons between metal surfaces like iron, steel, and aluminum. When submerged in seawater, these metals form a battery.

Many anodes are made of alloys consisting mostly of zinc, a metal that can easily absorb the electrons flowing from the other metals, which is why mariners call anodes "zincs."

But zinc is relatively heavy, expensive, and toxic to aquatic life. In 1988, an aluminum-centric alternative became commercially available but was still dependent on zinc for anti-corrosive properties.

"The alloy compositions described herein are designed to have high operating efficiencies to make the alloy as cost-practical as possible, high current output to enable high and long-lasting performance for a given weight of anode (energy density), and optimized operating potential, which will vary depending on the application, states the Navy patent filing.

"An important added benefit is that the alloys of this invention do not contain zinc."

The Navy lab cast half-inch pucks and 1-inch cubes of the new alloy. Electrochemical testing revealed its superior current capacity compared to commercially available zinc alloys.

"With lower cost per Amp-hour due to the high current capacity and current commodity cost of the elements used in the various anodes, the subject invention has a superior cost per Amp-hour, which is a key factor for users and suppliers," the Navy lab said in the patent application.

In coordination with the Navy's technology transfer office, TechLink, the Department of Defense's partnership intermediary, is helping private companies understand how they can turn the invention into new products.

Through licensing agreements, foreign and domestic businesses can obtain the intellectual property rights to make and sell the new anode to military and commercial customers.

Dan Swanson, senior technology manager at TechLink, has been helping the Navy license Matzdorf's sizeable invention portfolio to capable industry partners for several years. He said the aluminum alloy was an "outstanding" invention with multiple uses.

"It's a multi-functional invention," Swanson said. "It has three main applications, in aluminum-rich coatings, bulk sacrificial anodes for ships and infrastructure, and in cold spray, which is still being tested."

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Licensing-related inquiries can be directed to Swanson at dss@montana.edu or by telephone at 406-994-7736.
Young people's awareness of alcohol marketing - and their ownership of alcohol-branded merchandise - is associated with increased and higher-risk consumption, a landmark study has found.

Published in BMJ Open, the research - led by the University of Stirling and the Cancer Policy Research Centre at Cancer Research UK - revealed that 11 to 19-year-old current drinkers, who report high alcohol marketing awareness, are one-and-a-half-times more likely to be higher risk drinkers, compared to those who have low or medium awareness.

In young people who have never consumed alcohol, those who own alcohol-branded merchandise are twice as likely to be susceptible to drink in the next year, the research found.

Significantly, the paper reports that 82 per cent of young people recalled seeing at least one form of alcohol marketing in the month preceding the survey, with at least half estimated to have seen 32 or more instances - equating to one per day. Meanwhile, one fifth reported owning alcohol-branded merchandise.

The study - led by Dr Nathan Critchlow, of the University's Institute of Social Marketing (ISM) - is the first to examine awareness of alcohol marketing and ownership of branded merchandise in a demographically representative sample of young people across the UK, including those both above and below the legal purchase age for alcohol.

Dr Critchlow said: "Alcohol marketing is more than advertising; it exists in many different forms - more commonly known as the marketing mix - and we found this was reflected in what young people recalled. More than a third of young people recalled seeing alcohol advertising through television, celebrity endorsement, and special offers in the week before they participated in the survey, while more than a fifth recalled seeing outdoors adverts or adverts on social media.

"Although alcohol consumption can be influenced by a variety of factors, we found that the association between alcohol marketing and increased consumption and higher-risk drinking in current drinkers, remained even after controlling for a range of demographic and confounders, such as parental and peer drinking. This was also true for the association between owning branded merchandise and susceptibility in never-drinkers."

The study used data from the 2017 Youth Alcohol Policy Survey - a cross-sectional, YouGov-conducted survey with 11 to 19-year-olds across the UK. The weighted sample - of 3,399 young people - had an average age of 15.18 years old, an even distribution for gender, and 76 per cent were below the legal purchasing age. Of the weighted sample, 1,590 were current drinkers - with 44 per cent of those classified as being at higher risk - and 1,623 were never drinkers, with half of those classified as susceptible to drink in the next year.

The team measured how frequently young people recalled seeing nine different forms of alcohol marketing in the month preceding the study, ranging from traditional advertising - for example, in the press and on television; alternative marketing - such as sponsorship and competitions; and retail marketing - including price promotions.

Awareness was also estimated across the past month, and young people were categorised as reporting either low awareness (approximately every other day or less), medium awareness (approximately every day), and high awareness (almost twice a day or more).

Dr Critchlow said: "The new study provides insight into the forms of alcohol marketing that young people are aware of, how frequently they recall seeing alcohol marketing, and what factors are associated with higher awareness of alcohol marketing and ownership of alcohol branded merchandise.

"The influence that alcohol marketing has on young people, and how it is self-regulated in the UK, continues to be a topic of debate. The Scottish Government's latest alcohol strategy includes plans to consult on alternative controls for alcohol marketing, and Ireland have recently passed legislation to this effect. Our findings lend support to these steps to examine further feasible, appropriate, and effective ways of reducing exposure in young people."

Dr Jyotsna Vohra, Cancer Research UK's head of cancer policy research, said: "Alcohol can cause seven different types of cancer: mouth, breast, bowel, liver, pharyngeal, oesophageal, and laryngeal. It's responsible for almost 12,000 cancer cases annually in the UK, and worryingly only 1 in 10 people know its link to cancer.

"The more you drink the greater the risk and this is why the Chief Medical Officers' guidelines recommend no more than 14 units per week as a safer level of drinking. We know that not everyone who drinks will develop cancer but it doesn't hurt to cut down."

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The research, Alcohol marketing and consumption in young people in the UK, was funded by the Cancer Policy Research Centre at Cancer Research UK. Dr Jyotsna Vohra, Chris Thomas and Lucie Hooper, all from the centre, and Anne Marie MacKintosh, from the ISM, are co-authors on the work.
Researchers from Virginia Tech were part of a collaborative $958,415 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study the host-microbiome-parasite interactions in the honey bee gut, with $750,000 coming to Virginia Tech.

Researchers Lisa Belden, David Haak, T.M. Murali, and Richard Fell from Virginia Tech and Jenifer Walke from Eastern Washington University are collaborating to study the critical role of the honey bee gut microbiome in health and defense against parasites using a systems biology framework.

"Using the honey bee gut microbiome as a model to study host defense against parasites could have implications for understanding the human microbiome and host defense, as well," said Belden, the lead investigator on the grant and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.

A microbiome is a complex community of bacteria and other microbes that inhabit a specific environment; in this case, the honey bee gut.

"We know that gut microbiomes change in response to various stressors in the environment. What we don't yet understand are the intricate interactions that happen between the host, the microbiome, and parasites," said Haak, assistant professor of plant and microbial genomics in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences and affiliated faculty of the Global Change Center, housed within the Fralin Life Science Institute.

Walke, now an assistant professor at Eastern Washington University, completed her Ph.D. under Belden in 2014 and returned as a postdoctoral fellow from 2015 to 2017, when she studied the microbiomes of amphibian skin and honey bees. Her postdoctoral work led her to Fell, professor emeritus in apiculture, the practice of beekeeping, in the Department of Entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

"There has been a tremendous loss in the honey bee population since the 1990s that continues to afflict U.S. beekeepers and agricultural producers. Virginia beekeepers lost almost 60 percent of their colonies over the winter of 2017-2018 -- the highest percentage in state history, and almost twice the national average," said Fell, who has studied honey bees for over 40 years.

Belden, Fell, and Walke worked together on a grant to study the effect of pesticides on honey bee gut microbiomes funded by the Virginia Department of Agriculture.

"During our research funded by this previous grant, we found that the pesticides weren't producing any acute toxicity in the honey bee populations but there seemed to be chronic, longer-term effects on the honey bee gut microbiome. This was a spring board for our new grant, as we found that disruptions in the bacterial communities of the honey bee gut microbiome seem to make it easier for pathogens and parasites to invade," said Fell.

Honey bees were also chosen as the model for this current grant because of their reduced gut microbiome, making it easier to test the roles of the interacting genes from the host, the microbes, and the parasites. Researchers have identified approximately 10 key components of the honey bee gut microbiome, in comparison to the thousands found in humans.

Haak will focus on sequencing the genomes of the microbes in the honey bee gut microbiome to look at the true impact of genetic variation within the microbial community and how that reflects its function. He is also working to determine which genes are actively involved in the interactions between the gut microbiome and the host using a tool called metatranscriptomics.

By starting with a simpler model, the team hopes to extrapolate the findings to advance the understanding of wildlife and human health.

"The host-microbiome-parasite interactions can be mathematically modeled as a network where, for instance, the biochemical products produced by genes from host cells directly affect the bacteria and vice versa," said Belden, also an affiliated faculty member of the Global Change Center.

The Belden Lab at Virginia Tech studies community ecology and how species interactions influence disease dynamics. The lab focuses primarily on symbiotic microbial communities on amphibian skin and freshwater trematode parasites but has also expanded to study honey bees, songbirds, and wheat.

One goal of the newly funded study is to develop a network of the genes from the parasite, microbiome, and host to determine their interactions with each other and to develop an idea of the key points where they interact.

"We will develop computational tools that can compare the parasite-microbiome-host gene networks in different conditions (for example, between infected bees and normal bees or between a bee strain that is infected and another that is resistant to infection) to identify modules of genes that might be important for resistance to the parasite. These changes in interconnections might help in identifying focal nodes that can be tested experimentally in honey bees," said Murali, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering and co-director of the ICTAS Center for Systems Biology of Engineered Tissues.

The researchers expect that this approach can then be applied to other systems.

Part of the grant funding allows for Haak, with the support of the team, to develop a biology and computer science-based outreach module for local elementary school students. Students and teachers will be guided through building Raspberry Pi clusters, a small computer to teach programming to beginners. Students will be doing microbiome analysis on their mini computers and develop computer science skills at a young age.

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Navigator to further hike prices for woodfree uncoated papers as of January
- Pound Sterling exchange rates steadied "after significant politically induced volatility this week."

- The Pound to Euro exchange rate is -0.44% lower @ 1.16741 today

- The Pound to US Dollar exchange rate is -0.27% lower @ $1.32225 today

- BREAKING BREXIT NEWS: According to Reuters, Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has new legal advice stating that Britain will be able to break off from the Irish backstop under the terms of the Vienna Convention.

OVERNIGHT

There was little movement in FX markets overnight, with the British Pound apparently taking a breather after a few hectic night sessions for the UK currency.

The US Dollar was flat, moving essentially sideways against nearly all of its G10 partners.

The Nikkei 225 was surging in Japan after an extremely positive day for global stocks, up nearly 1% in the Asian session.

Analyst View: Marshall Gittler, ACLS Global

"The Bank of Japan met overnight and kept policy unchanged, as was uniformly expected. It downgraded its view on exports, industrial production and overseas economies somewhat, in line with what many other central banks have done. USD/JPY traded in a narrow range despite the meeting."

The EU commissioner was on the newswires stressing that the delay which was approved in the UK Parliament on Thursday was by no means a guarantee, and the European Union would have to consider its own interests before making any decisions.

They have stressed in the past that they would be open to a delay, but the upcoming EU-wide elections could throw a spanner in the works.

THE DAY AHEAD

It is a relatively quiet day of data ahead with no UK data on the schedule.

Elsewhere, European CPI is the biggest risk event with the EUR likely facing some volatility if the reading differs from the anticipated forecast.

Analyst View: Lloyds Bank

"In the Eurozone, the final CPI figures for February are expected to confirm the preliminary flash estimates, although they will provide more information on the component breakdown. The flash release showed headline CPI edged up to 1.5% from 1.4%, the first rise since October, reflecting higher food and energy prices. Core CPI, however, fell to 1.0% from 1.1%, and remains subdued despite signs of higher wage growth."

In the US there is some high-profile data, with Industrial Production and Michigan Consumer Sentiment headlining for the US Dollar.

Job Openings from January are also seen alongside the NY Manufacturing Index.

In Canada, Manufacturing Sales is the only data of note for the CAD.

Data Releases on 15/3/2019:

10:00 EUR Italian CPI (MoM) (Feb), Core CPI (YoY) (Feb), CPI (MoM) (Feb), CPI (YoY) (Feb)

12:30 USD NY Empire State Manufacturing Index (Mar)

12:30 CAD Manufacturing Sales (MoM) (Jan)

13:15 USD Industrial Production (MoM) (Feb), Industrial Production (YoY)

14:00 USD JOLTs Job Openings (Jan), Michigan Consumer Expectations (Mar), Michigan Consumer Sentiment (Mar)

FOREIGN EXCHANGE MARKETS

With volatility rising in the British Pound to Dollar exchange rate (GBP/USD) it was no surprise that Cable briefly soared above 1.33 on Thursday before whipping lower below 1.3250.

Analyst View: Lloyds Bank

"The pound has steadied after significant politically induced volatility this week. Overall, the currency was one of the strongest performers, as the markets assessed that the risk of a no deal Brexit has lessened. GBPUSD was trading just above 1.32, up from last weeks close of 1.3015, although it has been as high as 1.3381."

The Euro to Dollar exchange rate trended sideways, hovering around 1.13. In their report Thursday, analysts at Scotiabank re-iterated their lack of conviction in the short term direction of the British Pound,

The pound has had a strong week and a firm close tomorrow would suggest some positive momentum on the longer run charts. But short-term trends remain volatile, however, and there are signs from intraday price action that Cable could ease more in the short run in order to consolidate this weeks squeeze higher from sub-1.30 levels.

With some strong resistance overhead in the charts, Scotiabank have a bearish bias, seeing GBP/USD dropping as low as 1.31 in the near term,

We see intraday resistance around 1.3330 and support near current levels around 1.3220/30. Weakness below the low 1.32s might see losses extend to 1.31.

Brexit is proving to be a considerable burden on the UK, and the prospect of a delay is not very appetising to anyone.

The Pound has taken this weeks developments as a positive, but there hasnt really been much meaningful progress.

Markets still appear to be optimistic that the Bank Of England may be able to raise rates when the storm clouds clear.

If the EU approve a significant delay, this could possibly be the case, but why would they?

Analyst View: Marshall Gittler, ACLS Global

"Despite the seeming progress, GBP fell anyway because Parliament voted down another amendment proposing a second referendum. Labour failed to back the measure. That option was seen as offering the best possibility of ending all the chaos once and for all and perhaps even ending Brexit (although a recent Economist poll showed the nation hasnt changed its mind since the 2016 referendum, much to my astonishment). In any event, I remain bearish GBP until further notice."

Latest Exchange Rates 15.03.2019
March 19th: Meaningful Vote 3

March 21st  22n: EU Verdict on Brexit Delay

Late March / Early April: Indicative Brexit Votes

The British Pound (GBP) exchange rates continued to trim gains into the weekend following a Brexit-spurred mid-week rally which saw the Sterling post substantial gains against a basket of peers and hit multi-month and in some cases multi-year highs.

Despite these late-week losses, GBP remained on track to see out its largest weekly gains in almost two months.

Its been a big week in terms of Brexit with UK lawmakers undertaking a series of votes to determine how to proceed with the currently gridlocked process.

March 12th saw the government defeated in a second meaningful vote on the Prime Ministers EU withdrawal agreement.

Although not as overwhelming as the January meaningful vote, the PM lost by a margin of 149 votes with both the European Research Group (ERG) and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) voting against the deal due to concerns over the Irish backstop arrangements.

MPs rejection of the deal prompted a second House of Commons (HoC) vote on whether to allow the UK to slide into a no-deal by default outcome at the end of the month.

As expected MPs rejected the potentially economically devastating prospect.

Thursdays session saw a third HoC ballot on whether or not to pursue a formal extension to the March 29th deadline.

Given MPs had already voted against no-deal, the outcome of the vote was something of a foregone conclusion and in-line with expectations MPs massively backed the push for a Brexit delay.

Despite the two latter votes, a no-deal Brexit technically remains a possibility given it will be the default outcome following March 29th should the EU not vote unanimously to approve an extension.

Danske Bank chief analyst, Jens Peter Srensen, wrote After another dramatic night in the House of Commons, a majority voted to postpone Brexit Remember that the EU27 has to grant the extension unanimously, so the response by the EU leaders will be interesting. The EU summit takes place on Thursday-Friday next week.

While the British  rallied sharply in response to Wednesdays indicative vote against no-deal, the market response to the vote to pursue a Brexit delay was largely muted given market pricing had largely anticipated the outcome.

Commenting, director of forex at Societe Generale, Kyosuke Suzuki, said There has been a soft consensus in the market that the Brexit will be delayed. Things have been moving in line with that, adding But tail risk has not completely disappeared yet. The next weeks EU summit will probably be the climax.

Looking at the next key steps in the Brexit process in light of recent developments, ING developed markets economist James Smith wrote It has been another rollercoaster week in Westminster, but the key development is that lawmakers have voted to ask the EU for a delay to the 29 March Brexit deadline Brussels will decide how long this should last at the European Council meeting on 21/22 March.

With the EU summit in focus, the question now comes down to whether any extension is likely to be short (2-3 months) or longer with the answer to be determined over coming days as the PM makes a last-ditch attempt to push her deal through Parliament.

Above: Key Brexit Dates

Tuesday March 19th: Meaningful Vote 3.0

Prime Minister Theresa May will be hoping for a case of third times the charm if as expected, she re-tables her EU withdrawal agreement for a third (and most likely final) meaningful vote early next week ahead of the EU summit.

The outcome on this front is expected to determine whether the UK seeks a short, tehcnical extension, to finalise legislation relating to the EU withdrawal agreement or whether a longer extension to explore alternative options is required.

The spectre of a longer Brexit delay and the assumed indicative votes which would follow could potentially see the door opened to softer Brexit options, which the PM will be hoping can push hard-line Brexit factions within the Conservative Party to reconsider their position on the PMs deal.

The PM will also need to win over the DUP if her deal is to pass. UK Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has reportedly been in talks with the DUP on what, if any, changes to the legal advice given on the Irish backstop arrangements need to be made to win over the minority party. INGs Smith summarised the situations, To recap, the DUP and others want there to be a legal mechanism for the UK to extract itself from the backstop at a future date, but so far the Attorney General has been unable to give this assurance... the EU has made it pretty clear that the UK has extracted all the reassurances it is going to get on the contentious Irish backstop. Given the above, the outcome of meaningful vote 3 (MV3) is expected to come down to a) whether the Brexiteers think there is a real chance of a long Brexit delay and b) whether they think Parliament is likely to rally around a softer Brexit alternative.

March 21st/22nd: European Union Council Verdict on Brexit Delay

While commentary from EU officials has lacked consistency in terms of the length of the delay most favoured by the bloc, they have been clear that any delay should be justified with pressure on the UK government to provide evidence that a delay should break the current Brexit impasse. Some, like European Council President Donald Tuskbelieve a longer delay would be in both the UK and EUs best interests whilst retaining the highest likelihood of yielding a brexit under negotiated terms (or potentially no Brexit at all).

During my consultations ahead of #EUCO, I will appeal to the EU27 to be open to a long extension if the UK finds it necessary to rethink its #Brexit strategy and build consensus around it.  Donald Tusk (@eucopresident) 14 March 2019

Others however have expressed dismay over a potential delay of any sort without a clear end-goal.

Speaking following the HoC vote to delay Brexit, Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, said Whats the point of whining on for months on end while we have been going around in circles for two years? When Theresa May comes asking us for an extension, our response will be: For what? To what end?

Nevertheless, it seems a shorter (2-3 month delay) is the most likely. INGs Smith wrote The default option looks most like a short, two-three month delay. That avoids many of the logistical headaches surrounding the European Parliamentary elections, which the UK is not scheduled to take part in.

In terms of a valid reason to delay Brexit, the passing of the PMs deal would represent such a case  with extra time needed to finalise legislation relating thereto.

According to INGs Smith, the higher perceived probability of a short delay could prompt hard-line Brexiteerds and the DUP to maintain their opposition to the PMs deal.

Smith wrote While we're unlikely to know for sure what the EU's thinking is on an extension until next week, it seems that at this stage, all of this means a shorter extension looks more likely than a longer one.

This implies that when it comes to backing May's deal, the Brexiteers & DUP may be less inclined to budge.

Late March/Early April: UK Parliament Indicative Votes

Despite MPs narrowly rejecting the proposed amendment tabled by Labour MP Hilary Benn, which would have directed the government to hold indicative votes ahead of the EU council summit, Prime Minister May has said that such votes will take place in the weeks following the EU summit.

On the one hand, this opens the door to softer Brexit options which should appease pro-EU MPs who wish to retain close post-Brexit ties with the European Union while on the other hand piles further pressure on anti-EU factions such as the ERG to back the PMs deal next week, lest face the possibility of softer Brexit options or even no Brexit at all.

Above: Brexit Indicative Votes

In terms of potential market impact, ABN Amro senior economist, Bill Diviney suggested that either of the most likely outcomes ahead are likely to be benign for the British Pound.

Given recent developments, Diviney sees one of the following two scenarios unfolding, 1) MPs approve Mays deal in a potential third vote over the coming days, with only a short Brexit delay of 2-3 months necessary; 2) the government requests a much longer Brexit delay of 1-2 years in order to formulate a new approach.

For markets, Either scenario is a benign one for markets and the macro outlook. With no-deal clearly rejected by parliament, and government policy now coalescing around these two options, a no deal Brexit now looks even less likely than the 15% probability we had ascribed to it in recent months.
Bevdeforges said: Don't dismiss your undergraduate degree, though. Finding a job with an MBA is largely a matter of proper marketing. Visual Arts in combination with business has many possibilities: arts management of some variety, the "business end" of website development, being an agent for performers or artists.



I've got an MBA with undergrad degree in German and Theatre. While the German definitely helped get me to Europe, the theater stuff is something I use every day - for interviews, negotiations and general presentation skills. Click to expand...

DejW said: Re Dalf...I did it 2002 -3. It's a very good course...for me very hard work....1 1/2 days a week for 2 years. I got a deep understanding of French and French culture, government etc. However, I've found it's not well known in France outside academia.....example at an apero 3 days ago my neighbours had not heard of it! But then I don't know much about English competence exams!



You will probably find your mba takes up all your days, nights, meal times, dreams etc....so I would not do the dalf unless necessary. When I taught on the Rouen MBA it was a wonderful mixture of people, languages, culltures..etc..very stimulating for both students and profs. When I taught BSc level courses the students took notes, in the MBA courses they argued "that's not my experience etc"......hard work but good fun.



DejW Click to expand...

ToulouseRob said:



It seems very likely to me - but as I said: check with UoL - that the status of your degree will be unchanged. Officially. Whether that filters down to the individual behind a desk who may not have a complete grasp of international agreements is anyone's guess.



(I include most of the UK government in that category, by the way). I think (!) this is relevant, but you can almost certainly check it with Leicester University - they will have an Alumni Office. The 'Bologna Process' is an initiative dating back to 1998/9 to establish common standards and mutual recognition for higher education qualifications. The key point is that it is not limited to EU members. It covers the " European Higher Education Area ". I don't know if Brexit might break some arcane rule of membership but I doubt it. England has been a member since 1999 (Scotland is a member in its own right).It seems very likely to me - but as I said: check with UoL - that the status of your degree will be unchanged. Officially. Whether that filters down to the individual behind a desk who may not have a complete grasp of international agreements is anyone's guess.(I include most of the UK government in that category, by the way). Click to expand...

You're right to point out that I shouldn't be dismissive of my undergrad degree. I'd be thrilled to be able to incorporate what I learnt during my undergrad degree into my post MBA career, I'll look into my options for doing this.Thanks for sharing your experience with the DALF. The depth of understanding it demands is what makes it appealing, however as you say that means a lot of work needs to go into it! There are French lessons on offer as part of the MBA programme, which I will take advantage of as my French (particularly my written French) is still far from perfect. Perhaps it's best to hold off on the DALF for now though.I'm incredibly excited to start the programme. The cohort at EDHEC is very diverse, so I'm really looking forward to the exchange of ideas and experiences.Thanks for this info, I will get in touch will UoL!
Friday, March 15, 2019

Do you recycle and seek to minimize your carbon footprint? If you live in the Washington, D.C. area, learn how to make your final disposition more environmentally friendly by greening your final arrangements.

Historic Congressional Cemetery, 1801 E Street SE, Washington, D.C. 20003, is hosting No Fooling: You CAN Have a Green Burial at Congressional Cemetery. Taking place the evening of April 1, the presentation will be preceded at 5:30 by a 60-minute tour of Congressional Cemeterys green burial options and new solar panel project. Wine, beer and cheese will be provided! FREE, but pre-registration is required. Register through this link.

Gail Rubin, CT, with Albuquerque Death Cafe mascot Lola in a biodegradable bamboo coffin.

Pioneering death educator Gail Rubin, Certified Thanatologist and The Doyenne of Death, uses film clips and humor to teach about evolving death care trends. Shell talk about green burial, alkaline hydrolysis, the carbon footprint of cremation, and related end-of-life topics. Youll leave saying We can do that? I had no idea.." Lets face it, funerals are the parties no one wants to plan.



Gail Rubin is author of the award-winning books A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Dont Plan to Die, Kicking the Bucket List: 100 Downsizing and Organizing Things to Do Before You Die, and Hail and Farewell: Cremation Ceremonies, Templates and Tips. She is the coordinator of the Before I Die New Mexico Festival.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Gail used to be a producer at C-SPAN. She worked there during the time Tip ONeill was Speaker of the House, from 1980 to 1985 (His cenotaph is at Congressional). Gail grew up in Silver Spring, MD, graduated from Springbrook High School, Montgomery College, and the University of Maryland. She lived in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. before moving to New Mexico in 1990.

A doyenne is a woman whos considered senior in a group who knows a lot about a particular subject. Gail is a Certified Thanatologist (a death educator) and speaker who uses humor and films to get end-of-life conversations started. Her TEDx talk A Good Goodbye focuses on the importance of starting end-of-life conversations before theres a death in the family.

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Mark Anthony grew up cutting grass and putting up fences for neighbors.

He often tagged along on his fathers painting gigs. The self-described numbers person also learned to work with wood, drawn to the measurements and angles involved.

As a child, Brenden Mesch dreamed of becoming an inventor. He loves putting things together, whether its pieces in a kit or something he can create from scratch, and builds furniture for his kids.

Both have found a market for their skills.

Roughly a year ago, they joined Thumbtack and a few other websites that connect professionals with people looking for someone to build their Ikea furniture, mow their lawn or repair their roof. People started reaching out, and theyve since been hired to do dozens of tasks, from replacing facets to putting together treadmills to building bookshelves.

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For both men  who have full-time jobs, Mesch is a college educator and Anthony works for a software consulting company  the side hustle is a way to earn extra cash while doing work they enjoy.

The tasks can be a stress reliever, Mesch said. People are paying me money to relax.

Anthony said many of his customers are elderly folks worried about scrambling up a ladder or 20-somethings who dont know how to install their new dishwasher. The convenience also is appealing, he said.

Its a different age, Anthony said.

Online marketplaces such as Thumbtack, Handy and TaskRabbit have garnered a following for that very reason, said Jan Kniffen, a New York-based retail analyst. Theres a clear need, he said, and the internet has made it quick and easy to peruse reviews and find someone to get the job done.

Nobody knows how to do anything anymore, he said. If they do, they dont want to.

Ikea saw the need among its customers. In 2017, it bought TaskRabbit, which matches service providers with customers needing help with tasks  such as assembling furniture.

In a fast changing retail environment, we continuously strive to develop new and improved products and services to make our customers lives a little bit easier. Entering the on-demand, sharing economy enables us to support that, Jesper Brodin, CEO and president of Ikea Group, said in a statement at the time.

On ExpressNews.com: Except for cars backed up at 3:30 a.m., San Antonio area Ikea store opened smoothly

Other retailers also are tapping into the home services market. Amazon connects customers with professionals who can assemble furniture, clean homes and gutters, and handle plumbing and wiring. Handy has deals with Walmart and Crate and Barrel to offer similar services.

Partnering with these sites are a way for retailers to build loyalty and credibility with customers, Kniffen said.

Everybody wants their consumers now to be a big club, he said. Successful retailers are trying to offer you more services to keep clients coming back.

But the so-called gig economy has drawn scrutiny recently. Workers dont have access to traditional benefits packages, namely health care, said Thomas Tunstall, senior research director at the Institute for Economic Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

For people stringing temporary jobs together or taking on the work in addition to a low-paying full-time job, thats not enough to pay bills, Tunstall said.

The gig economy and the issues surrounding it are going to have to be addressed by policymakers, he added.

On ExpressNews.com: Flexibility of new-style jobs comes with a cost

But for others, its a good way to augment income, Tunstall said.

Thats the case with Brad Repka, a writer who lives in San Antonio. He signed up for TaskRabbit about a year ago because it was a chance to make extra cash on the side, he said.

Getting to know people around town is really interesting, Repka said. Its also interesting to see what people are willing to pay for.

Most of the requests he gets are for hanging mirrors and curtain rods, though he was once asked to deliver cookies and balloons in a clown suit. The customer wasnt planning to provide the supplies. (Repka turned them down.)

With the opening of the new Live Oak store, many recent jobs have involved at least one Ikea item. Though hes now well-versed in the picture-based instructions, the furniture still takes a while to build, he said.

It literally is like a puzzle, and not an easy one, Repka said.

Requests tend to follow a pattern: Theres an uptick in inquiries about television installations after Black Friday and treadmill assembly after New Years Day, Mesch said. His favorite job is upscaling Ikea furniture with new trim.

When he visits customers, Mesch said he encourages them to learn how to handle the work on their own, through YouTube or other means.

Its well within everybodys ability  if they can follow instructions, he said.

madison.iszler@express-news.net
Restaurant chain Steak n Shake, the largest subsidiary of San Antonios Biglari Holdings Inc., is trying to get its sizzle back.

Under the command of Sardar Biglari, chairman and CEO of his eponymous holding company, Steak n Shake was overhauled and went from a near-bankrupt brand losing $100,000 a day in the casual-dining segment in 2008 to a cash cow in the quick-serve restaurant business.

Steak n Shake  best known for its burgers and shakes  racked up industry-leading gains in customer traffic in its first seven years under Biglari, he boasted in a letter to the holding companys shareholders last month.

All that seems like ancient history now, though.

Customer visits at Steak n Shakes corporately owned restaurants have tumbled by 15 million, or almost 13 percent, since peaking at 118 million in 2015. Just as disconcerting for the chain, same-store sales  comparing sales at stores open at least 18 months  have declined over the same period. Last year, same-store sales sank 5.1 percent.

Michael Fisher

Steak n Shakes troubles have unfolded as it has been fending off legal fights from franchisees and employees over its operating practices. Its been accused of barring franchisees from raising prices and not paying managers overtime, allegations the chain has disputed. Nevertheless, it recently was on the losing end of a nearly $3 million jury verdict in an overtime case.

Biglaris plan for pulling Steak n Shake out of its doldrums includes revamping its kitchen operations, while franchising all of its roughly 400 company-operated restaurants.

Biglari, 41, didnt respond to a request for comment, but he generally does not speak to the media. Tom Murray, Steak n Shakes chief financial officer, franchise operations, also did not return a call.

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When Biglari first targeted the Steak n Shake Co. in 2007, he already had a history of buying stock in restaurant chains and then pressuring their management and board for change. His previous investments included Friendly Ice Cream Corp. and Western Sizzlin Corp., the latter now part of Biglari Holdings.

To win seats on the Indianapolis-based Steak n Shake Co.s board, Biglari lobbied shareholders with billboards to vote him and his former professor at Trinity University, Philip Cooley, to the board.

Biglari ultimately was appointed to the companys board in June 2008. He was all of 30 years old.

Some Steak n Shake executives soon departed. Within two months, Biglari became Steak n Shake Co.s CEO.

The chain was swiftly resuscitated by a simplified menu, improved food quality, expense reductions and its low prices, Biglari has said. Burgers and fries, and shakes/drinks comprised nearly 80 percent of its sales, he told shareholders in a 2016 letter.

We operate Steak n Shake on a basic principle: If we take care of our customers, our customers will take care of us, Biglari added. Our formula is simple: Provide the highest quality burgers and shakes at the lowest possible profit per customer from an ever-increasing number of customers.

The strategy worked for 29 straight quarters, with rising same-store sales and customer traffic. The restaurants paid about $300 million in cash to Biglari Holdings, which Biglari has said fueled the parent companys growth.

The streak ends

Then, in 2016, same-store sales and customer traffic both dipped for the first time under Biglaris watch.

Biglari refused to blame economic conditions or weather, which he described as two industry favorites and frequently cited alibis. Rather, he attributed the performance to our own lack of execution.

To improve our operating performance henceforth we must outthink, outwork and outexecute the competition, Biglari said in a 2017 letter to shareholders. We have the drive and the determination to improve performance through the combination of our pricing philosophy, unwavering devotion to quality, plus expense control policies  all necessary to provide excellent value to customers and thereby gain more of them on a same-store basis, he added.

When results worsened in 2017, Biglari repeated the mantra that Steak n Shake failed to execute on delivering a superior value proposition vis-a-vis our competition.

Following last years poor performance, when customer visits at corporate stores fell to an eight-year low and the chain posted an operating loss for the first time since Biglari took the helm, he offered a different reason for the declines.

We failed customers by not being fast and friendly, he said in his latest shareholder letter last month. Whereas we adopted Henry Fords pricing philosophy  lower price, higher volume  we failed to implement his highly efficient assembly line methods. We should have paid greater heed to becoming, well, fast.

On ExpressNews.com: Steak n Shake failed customers, Biglari says

Steak n Shake has been relying on equipment and kitchen design that was ill-suited for volume production, Biglari said. The result has been high-cost, labor-intensive slow service.

The chain is now developing a sophisticated operating and delivery system  in order to gain volume through speed, he added.

Jonathan Heller, a Newtown, Pa., financial adviser and a Biglari Holdings investor for more than 10 years, said the latest reason Biglari offers for Steak n Shakes troubles is a bit of a head-scratcher.

Its kind of like, all of a sudden, out of the blue, we now realize what the problem is. Very, very odd, Heller said. Biglari Holdings is not a company that often admits that things have gone wrong. So it was kind of funny to see that in (Biglaris shareholder) letter this year.

Heller described himself as a long-term embittered Biglari Holdings shareholder, given the stock price trades at what he said was a massive discount. He attributed that to the companys confusing operating structure  it has two classes of stock  and Biglaris compensation.

On ExpressNews.com: Biglari Holdings shareholders approve dual stock classes

Heller loves Steak n Shake, so he eagerly anticipated the January opening of a restaurant in the nearby town of Warminster. Just a day after its opening, though, a fire forced it to close. It has yet to reopen, he said.

Its a good quality product, he said. But Steak n Shake needs to do more to differentiate itself from the crowded restaurant landscape, Heller said.

In my view, its probably more awareness than anything.

In last months shareholder letter, Biglari offered no details on what it will cost to modernize the chains kitchens and equipment, or what Steak n Shake franchisees might have to pay.

Steak n Shake is attempting to map a turnaround at a time when the restaurant industry is challenged, according to Kim McLynn, a spokeswoman for the NPD Group Inc., a New York-based information company. Competition also is stiff.

Customer traffic has been relatively flat in recent years for restaurants, gaining only 1 percent last year over 2017, noted McLynn, who doesnt comment on individual restaurants.

People are opting for eating less expensive meals at home, where some feel they have more control over the healthiness of the food they eat, she said. Some are blending their meals  picking up a pizza from a restaurant but preparing a salad at home, for instance.

Franchising is the future

Steak n Shake has long maintained that its future is in franchising. Its gone from 73 franchise locations in 2010 to 213 at the end of last year.

Six years ago, Biglari told shareholders at Biglari Holdings annual meeting that the chain would add a thousand franchise locations but offered no timetable for achieving that goal.

Last summer, Steak n Shake announced it would franchise its more than 400 company-operated restaurants.

Steak n Shake pitched it as an opportunity for would-be entrepreneurs to achieve the American Dream.

I started my company with $15,000 and built a thriving enterprise, Biglari said in a statement in August. I want to provide an opportunity to other entrepreneurs who are highly motivated to excel but lack the financial means. What will be important to become a franchisee is not great capital but great ability.

Biglari has always been a fan of franchising because rather than consuming capital, it produces a steady stream of cash from franchise fees and royalties while reducing operating risk.

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Franchisees must make an upfront $10,000 investment, in addition to paying a fee of up to 15 percent of sales and half of the profits. Franchisees also are limited to just one location.

Steak n Shake will continue to own the stores and foot the bill for the restaurants operational costs, according to a November report in the Louisville Business Journal.

Franchise consultant Joel Libava said Steak n Shakes franchise opportunity sounds similar to one rolled out by Chick-fil-A. For a $10,000 fee, selected franchisees, which Chick-fil-A calls operators, are granted rights to operate a franchised restaurant, according to its website, but they dont own the restaurant or real estate.

I like the brand, but Im not feeling it on this one, Libava said of the Steak n Shake opportunity. I would say buyer beware. Not because theyre going to get scammed; just because they might not be able to get enough information on what theyre going to be able to make and what theyre going to have to do as an owner  if theyre even owners.

Giving up half of the profits is massive for a franchisee, Libava said, but he couldnt address the fee Steak n Shake charges without knowing store sales.

If we knew that someone could invest $10,000 and make $150,000 to $200,000 a year (in income) as an owner, that would be a great deal, he added.

Steak n Shakes website says franchisees are guaranteed $100,000 in the first year.

From Steak n Shakes perspective, Libava was skeptical that such low initial investment would attract the kind of franchisees it wants.

The franchise opportunity stands in stark contrast with Steak n Shakes classic restaurant franchise agreement. It requires an initial investment of more than $1.3 million. Franchisees also pay royalties of about 5 percent of sales, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal.

Legal battles

Over the years, some franchisees have clashed with Steak n Shake over its menu pricing.

Three franchisees alleged in 2013 in Indianapolis federal court that the chain had implemented a policy that took away their right to set menu pricing, contrary to the terms of their franchise documents. The cases were eventually settled, though terms were never filed with the court.

That same year, Steak n Shake terminated a franchise agreement with two Colorado franchisees that it accused of failing to implement the chains $4 menu.

On ExpressNews.com: Steak 'n Shake vs. franchisees

A Virginia franchisee with nine restaurants alleges in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed last year in Indianapolis that Steak n Shake refuses to allow the franchisee to raise menu prices. All nine restaurants lost money in 2017, the suit says.

In January, Steak n Shake accused the franchisee in a counterlawsuit of breaching the franchise agreement when it closed three restaurants.

Steak n Shake, meanwhile, lost a federal class-action lawsuit last month in St. Louis, where 286 area managers alleged they had to work 50 to 70 hours a week  without receiving overtime  while performing the work of hourly employees. The managers were salaried, but below the stores general managers and restaurant managers.

At trial, we presented very strong evidence that all of the restaurants are grossly understaffed for the hourly workers, and theyre all part time, said Kansas City attorney Brendan Donelon, who represented the managers.

The managers annual salaries ranged from $32,000 to $38,000, but Donelon said they actually earned roughly minimum wage to $13 an hour after counting the hours of unpaid overtime they worked.

Steak n Shake argued the managers went through extensive training to manage employees, Donelon said.

Jurors werent swayed, awarding almost $2.9 million in lost overtime pay to the managers on Feb 27. Donelon filed a motion Wednesday asking the court to to double the award and add in damages, attorneys fees and costs. In total, the plaintiffs are asking for almost $8 million.

Rodney Harrison, a lawyer for Steak n Shake, said he wasnt authorized to comment and therefore couldnt say whether the chain will appeal the case.

Donelon had sought to depose Biglari in the case, but the judge denied the request.

Donelon filed a similar class-action for managers in Steak n Shakes St. Louis group market who are based outside of Missouri. About 430 managers have joined that lawsuit, but he said that number could increase to 1,400.

Just before the first case went to trial last month, Steak n Shake temporarily closed eight restaurants in the St. Louis region. A sign posted at one said the closure was for remodeling, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Last month, though, St. Louis television station KTVI reported Steak n Shake is looking for franchisees to take over the restaurants operations.

They were not extremely well-run from a cleanliness or a customer-service perspective, Steak n Shake CFO Murray told the station.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
No right to know? Texas public records get harder and harder to acquire

No right to know? Texas public records get harder and harder to acquire

Published March 14, 2019

Sunshine Week This is Sunshine Week, when advocates of open government celebrate the value of the First Amendment and assess the state of freedom of information. Look for more coverage Friday on houstonchronicle.com and Sunday on page A1. See ABC13's report on public records on Thursday evening's newscast at 6:30 and 10 p.m. --- Each year, the attorney general's office receives hundreds of thousands of requests to keep records private. They come from municipalities, agencies and other public bodies across the state. Officials in Harris County are routinely among the most prolific. In 2009, county officials submitted 116 denial requests. By 2016, the most recent year for which the attorney general's office has complete data, the number had ballooned to 890. That far outpaced the growth of requests statewide, and was behind only San Antonio, Fort Worth and El Paso for the highest number submitted that year. In 2018, the county received one of the biggest number of complaints about alleged records law violations. Complaints like this often include missed deadlines and overcharging. The Houston Independent School District is also sending in more appeals than ever before. It submitted 104 in 2016, up from just 21 in 2009. The school district's trustees are currently under investigation for potentially having violated Texas' Open Meetings Act when a majority of them engaged in private discussions that led to an abrupt  and ultimately temporary  ouster of Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan in October 2018. HISD has turned over only a few records about the communications between trustees more than four months after the Chronicle began requesting them.

Kathryn Green just wanted to know what had happened to her son.

It had been more than two months since 27-year-old Patrick died of bacterial meningitis while incarcerated at the Harris County jail, and still there were so many questions. How long had he been sick? Had he shown symptoms? What had been done to help him?

So in early June 2015, Green, a Houston lawyer, did what thousands of Texans do every year: She asked for the records. She requested Patrick's autopsy report and the investigative report into his death. She demanded the video surveillance from inside the jail, and any other public clues that might help piece together his final hours.

One by one, she was turned down.

"Anybody would be devastated by the loss of their child," Green said in an interview last week. "But then to have to go through dealing with your grief, trying to return to work, trying to keep your home intact, and fighting to get information. It was so difficult for us."

The Greens' plight is all too common in Texas, where records that might have once been public are increasingly difficult to obtain, according to an analysis of 10 years worth of attorney general's decisions by ABC13 in collaboration with the Houston Chronicle. The review found that the number of appeals from state and local agencies to withhold information has nearly doubled in the last decade, up to about 32,000 in 2018.

Nearly all of those efforts to withhold records are granted, at least in part. Only about 5 percent  fewer than 2,000 requests  end in a full release of information. That's down from 8 percent five years ago.

It's not just that there are more records requests overall. Since Attorney General Ken Paxton assumed office in 2015, the proportion of requests sent to his office that end in the withholding of documents has jumped six percentage points on average over the previous five years, according to the analysis.

Agencies such as Harris County, where Green had sought information, are increasingly turning to a small list of exceptions in the open records law that allow them to conceal information. In 2018, officials across Texas asked the attorney general to withhold police and investigative records  like those Green requested  16,739 times, making it by far the most-used exception. The attorney general approved the decisions 98 percent of the time, the analysis shows.

The Boeing effect

In Texas, unlike in other states, public officials who want to withhold or redact records have to appeal to the attorney general. The only way to contest an outcome from there is to sue, which can be costly and take years.

The attorney general's office publishes its records opinions online, but the documents are difficult to search; there's no way to track how many requests involve certain kinds of information. ABC13 was able to make that possible by digitizing every decision going back 10 years, then running keyword queries.

The review sheds new light on the impact of a series of contentious court decisions, chief among them the 2015 state Supreme Court ruling in Boeing v. Paxton, which allowed companies with government contracts to argue against the release of information on their deals if it could cause competitive harm. Before Boeing, businesses could only ask to block information if it was a trade secret, such as a product design or formula.

Critics warned the ruling would set off a major shift toward secrecy.

They were right. Since 2015, nearly 4,000 appeals to the attorney general's office have invoked Boeing, 95 percent of them allowing the denial of records. The number of appeals claiming competitive harm last year was up five-fold from 2009.

In McAllen, the Boeing ruling stopped taxpayers from learning how much the city paid a pop star to sing at its holiday parade. In Houston, it blocked the release of data on permits issued to Uber. The bar has dropped so low, a lawyer at the attorney general's office warned lawmakers last year, that companies have even asked to withhold their names from the public record.

"This ruling from the Supreme Court has tentacles everywhere," said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. "It's being stretched and twisted to prevent all kinds of information from being released."

Proponents of the ruling have argued that information about a company's operation should always be protected, even if their contract is funded by tax dollars.

A bipartisan response to strengthen the law after the Boeing decision failed last session. Lawmakers are trying again this year.

"Texas used to be one of the top states in terms of freedom of information," said Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, a Republican from suburban Fort Worth who is sponsoring one of the pieces of legislation. "I don't think it's there anymore. This bill will go a long way toward fixing that."

'I dare you'

The Texas open records law is often described as stronger than those in other states because of its built-in appeals process. Transparency advocates such as Joe Larsen, a Houston lawyer who specializes in records cases, say the structure is flawed.

Agencies are only required to send the attorney general's office a sample of the records they want to withhold, and there's no oversight to ensure it's representative. Officials can draw out the response process by asking for clarifications and lumping requests together when assessing fees, which might tie up smaller requests with those that are more costly and take more time.

Even if a record is clearly public, officials can send it to the attorney general as a way to delay its release. The attorney general's office has 45 business days to respond.

In 2015, the company that owns the Fort Bend Herald sued the Fort Bend County sheriff after he appealed to the attorney general to withhold the names of complainants in a local school bribery scandal. The name of complainants and other basic information about an investigation are considered public under the law. Soon after the lawsuit was filed, the sheriff turned over the information. By then, the newspaper had already incurred substantial legal fees.

Larsen, who filed a brief on the newspaper's behalf, said often the only practical way to get records, and get them quickly, is to sue and force the government's hand. That's not feasible for many who request information.

"It's basically, 'I dare you to sue me,' " Larsen said of agencies' responses.

There are dozens of exceptions now carved into the Texas records law, and many of them have become more expansive over the years. Under the law, officials can withhold records such as internal emails and memos if they contain advice or opinions on "policymaking" decisions.

The rule was designed to help employees speak freely when crafting rules and other lasting policy measures. It's not a blanket protection, however, as the state Supreme Court clarified in a pivotal 2000 decision.

"We recognize that public disclosure of agency communications reflecting deliberative processes on any subject, even non-policy communications, could have a chilling effect on agency employees' communications in the future," the court wrote. "But the exception's purpose is not to prevent all disclosures that would chill all frank and open discussions."

Today, though, the attorney general's office believes that only "routine" personnel and administrative discussions are public.

That was the interpretation used earlier this year to block the Chronicle from obtaining email discussions among employees at the Health and Human Services Commission on how much to award the Heidi Group. The anti-abortion group was eventually awarded millions in family planning funding, then went on to serve far fewer low-income women than expected.

"A governmental body's policymaking functions do include administrative and personnel matters of broad scope that affect the governmental body's policy mission," the attorney general's office wrote in a February opinion on the request.

The use of the policymaking exception has more than doubled over the past decade, according to ABC13's analysis. It's up 14 percent since Paxton took office.

Agencies are also failing more frequently to meet deadlines under the law, the analysis found. Complaints about officials not responding to requests in time reached a record high last year, at nearly 2,000. Most were allowed to withhold records anyway.

A push for reform

Green was eventually able to get records on her son's death, but only after a year of intense research and consultations with friends in the legal community. She has since sued the sheriff's office, which runs the jail, claiming it failed to give Patrick the care he was constitutionally afforded.

Green's attorney in the suit, Randall Kallinen, has litigated civil rights cases in Texas for decades. He said most of the complaints he hears never move to a courtroom because he's unable to get the records he needs. Or when he finally does get them, a two-year statute of limitations has passed.

"We may never know what really happened," he said. "And these governments know that. They know the Texas public records law is weak."

Others believe the law has a strong foundation, and just needs some long-overdue maintenance.

"It's pretty simple," Rep. Terry Canales, a Democrat from Hidalgo County, told lawmakers in a hearing last month, explaining a bill that would require cities to disclose how much they pay for public events. "I would say, put yourself in my shoes. Put yourself in McAllen's shoes, the residents of that city. Your city holds an event and they don't have to tell you what they spent with your tax dollars."

"If you stand for public transparency, accountability; if you believe sunshine is the best disinfectant," he said, "then this is the bill for you."

Nobody showed up to speak against the legislation.

Jeremy Blackman is an investigative reporter in Austin, where he covers public health and other statewide issues. His previous work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Star, Concord Monitor, PBS NewsHour and Point Reyes Light. He is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley. You can follow him on Twitter @jblackmanChron or reach him by email at Jeremy.Blackman@chron.com

Steve Gonzales is a senior staff photographer at the Chronicle. He came to the Chronicle as the Director of Photography in 2005. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter, or reach him by email at steve.gonzales@chron.com.

Design by Jordan Rubio and Jasmine Goldband

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Natural Cement has become a supplier member of the Builders Merchants Federation.

The company manufactures a range of mortars and grouts based on a unique natural binder which has been in use for over 200 years. The products are used for Concrete Repairs, Waterproofing, Damp Proofing, Screeding and Grouting in the Construction, Rail, Civil Engineering and Utilities industries throughout the UK.

Sales Manager Jack Edwards said: We are really pleased to have been allowed to join the Builders Merchant Federation.

Our company has supplied materials through several builders merchants for many years and this will hopefully enable us to work more closely with the members in the future and build new relationships within the industry.
An incumbent known for his verbal flair, a woman trying to make history and a former presidential hopeful are vying to represent one of San Antonios most diverse City Council districts.

Freshman Councilman Manny Pelaez, who won a runoff for the seat two years ago, is facing two challengers in his re-election bid on the Northwest Side: Frankie-Gonzales Wolfe, a political consultant trying to become the first transgender person elected in Texas, and Tony Valdivia, a USAA analyst who made a quixotic run for president in 2016.

On ExpressNews.com: In District 1, incumbent Trevino faces most challengers of any San Antonio City Council member

District 8 starts at Callaghan Road just outside Loop 410 and runs northwest past Loop 1604. It includes the University of Texas at San Antonios main campus and the Medical District, and it has an unusually diverse population with thousands of refugees.

Here are the candidates in the order they will appear on the ballot.

District 8 candidates Manny Pelaez, incumbent Age: 45 Occupation: Attorney Family: Married, two children Education: Bachelor's, Trinity University; law degree, St. Mary's University In his own words: "Neither of (my opponents) will be able to claim that they have the experience I bring to the table." Tony Valdivia Age: 41 Occupation: Senior reporting analyst, USAA Family: Married, two children Education: Bachelor's, University of Houston In his own words: Running for president "really opened my eyes for what I could do in public office." Frankie Gonzales-Wolfe Age: 42 Occupation: Precinct chair, Bexar County Democratic Party Family: Married Education: Brackenridge High School; studying psychology at the University of the Incarnate Word In her own words: "This time around, I felt like I didn't need to help someone else be my voice." See More Collapse

Manny Pelaez, the 45-year-old incumbent, is a labor attorney who previously chaired the Brooks City Base Development Authority and was also a trustee for VIA Metropolitan Transit.

The councilman said he tackled a variety of issues in his first term, ranging from taxes to stray dogs.

Pelaez has advocated for a study on how the Bexar County Appraisal Districts methods differ from others across the state. The council is set to vote on that effort April 4, and he hopes it will lead to new answers on how to alleviate tax burdens here.

Another program Pelaez spearheaded helps stray dogs become service animals for veterans. That ordinance passed in January.

If re-elected, Pelaez said, he would continue addressing some of those issues. Hes also working on an ordinance that is aimed at boosting development of middle-class housing, among others.

Pelaez, who used to do stand-up comedy, is known for his verbal flourish on the dais. When the city was conducting its search for a new city manager, Pelaez equated the process to trying to select his favorite hero from Marvels The Avengers.

And when asked where he currently lives  the councilman faced scrutiny last election about whether he lived in District 8  Pelaez quipped: In a state of bliss. He added later that he moved to a new house that is still, he said, within district boundaries.

On ExpressNews.com: Mayoral duel will predictably take center stage in municipal elections

Tony Valdivia, 41, is a financial analyst for USAA making his second consecutive run for the District 8 seat. He received 10.69 percent of the vote in 2017 and finished fourth.

But it was his presidential campaign a year before that raised more eyebrows. After hearing complaints from his parents and their friends about the tenor of the race, Valdivia officially registered as a write-in candidate in 19 states and Washington, D.C., gleaning roughly 500 votes.

That experience really opened my eyes for what I could do in public service, he said.

Valdivia hopes to leverage his business experience in the citys budget process if hes elected. He wants the city to offer a $10,000 homestead exemption for property taxpayers.

He also wants to ease traffic congestion and the districts transit issues. He mentioned a railless train system in China, and he said its somewhat similar to the citys preliminary proposal to use rubber-wheeled, trackless trams as a rail alternative.

Its a whole lot more convenient than for me to try to take a bus to get to a lot of areas, Valdivia said.

The financial analyst also took issue with Pelaezs verbal style. He specifically mentioned the councilmans comments during a hearing on a proposal to demolish the old Beacon Hill Elementary building. Pelaez called school officials tacky and said they were using students as props. He said the superintendent was peddling exaggerations and hyperbole.

Thats not the type of representation I want, Valdivia said.

Pelaez said he thinks people are hungry for plainspoken politicians.

I think what Im known for on the dais is speaking hard truths, he said. Im keenly aware that Im known for saying uncomfortable things.

Frankie Gonzales-Wolfe, 42, is a political consultant and precinct chair for the Bexar County Democratic Party. She ran Monica Alcantaras campaign for chair of the party and has worked on numerous campaigns since 1996.

But this time, she said, shes not staying behind the scenes.

For the past 23 years, (I have) really been devoted to helping candidates who I thought were going to be the right voice for me at the table, Gonzales-Wolfe said. This time around, I felt like I didnt need to help someone else be my voice.

The consultant brings a historic nature to the campaign: Shes trying to become the first transgender person elected to office in Texas.

As a very proud trans woman, I just felt that representation was important, Gonzales-Wolfe said, adding later: There is a lot of pressure that comes with that.  Somebody has to be first.

Gonzales previously worked in financial services. She rose to become an assistant vice president in human resources at Wells Fargo before retiring in 2017.

If elected, one of her top priorities would be to offer more incentives to locally owned small businesses. Gonzales-Wolfe said the city offers incentives to large corporations to lure them here, but that help often isnt afforded to smaller companies eyeing expansion within the city.

Dylan McGuiness covers City Hall and local politics in San Antonio. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | dylan.mcguinness@express-news.net | Twitter: @DylMcGuinness
When Marion Thomas learned that the nonprofit she directs, Blessed Angels Emergency Food Pantry, had received a $1 million donation from local philanthropist Kym Rapier, her thoughts immediately went to those served by the pantry.

It was so exciting, Thomas said of the gift from the Blake, Kymberly and George Rapier Charitable Trust. I was thinking of all of the people we could help and the mouths we could feed.

The announcement coincided with the nonprofits Spring Break Giveaway this week that benefited more than 800 families, including grandparents raising grandchildren.

From 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday, more than 75 volunteers, including Judson High School students, distributed food to the long lines of people at the pantry located on Nacogdoches Road.

An official said the pantry, which serves the homeless, families in need and low-income veterans, helped a total of 17,000 people in 2018.

She said the spring break initiative began over concerns for low-income students who wouldnt be getting the one sure hot meal they have at school when campuses close for the week-long break.

in addition to the annual initiative, Blessed Angels distributes food to seniors every third Wednesday of the month at Alamo United Methodist Church, 4071 N. Foster Rd. The group also offers clothing to those they serve and emergency help throughout the year when possible.

Blessed Angels blossomed from a church pantry Thomas ran in 2007. To reach the people it serves, the 501(c)3 nonprofit partners with the San Antonio Food Bank, American GI Forum and the National Veteran Outreach Program.

Recently the nonprofit helped 15 Coast Guard personnel. Thomas bought $500 worth of diapers and $250 in debit cards to buy gas for the military members, many young parents.

According to the nonprofits website, volunteers from Blessed Angels have provided food to more than 300,000 people over the last 12 years.

The Rapiers charitable trust has helped numerous local entities. In 2018, four grants totaling $800,000 went to Gods Dogs, The 100 Club of San Antonio, San Antonio Threads and the Southside Independent School District.

Vincent T. Davis is a reporter in the Greater San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | vtdavis@express-news.net | Twitter: @vincentdavis
A community coalition fighting to preserve land next to the historic Hays Street Bridge as a public park scored a victory Friday when the Texas Supreme Court ruled against the city, sending the case back to a lower court.

The city of San Antonio and the Hays Street Bridge Restoration Group are engaged in a complex, hotly contested legal battle over a 1.7 acre tract of vacant land near the Union Pacific railroad tracks, where the city envisions a bustling residential-retail complex and the restoration group wants a garden-like oasis for the community with great views of the city skyline.

The dispute continued Friday after the high courts ruling was announced, putting the two sides at odds on whether the ruling affects plans for the commercial complex next to the 1880s bridge  a symbol of hope to many who live on the East Side.

Attorneys on opposing sides in the case accused each other of putting out misleading information.

Amy Kastely, an attorney for the restoration group, said the City Council should terminate the 2014 sale of land by the bridge and dedicate it for public use, as she said has been the intent for 17 years.

Now Playing: Hays Street Bridge has an extensive history in San Antonio that dates back to 1910. Land use near the bridge is currently at the center of an ongoing controversy. Video: San Antonio Express-News

Im astounded and shocked and angered by their continuing to try to support this deal that had no merit from the beginning. I hope that they will be willing to just put an end to it so we dont have to spend more money on lawyers fees and postponement to go to the court of appeals, Kastely said.

The city, in a two-paragraph news release, downplayed the courts opinion as a narrow and technical ruling addressing a contract issue related to the Hays Street Bridge restoration project.

In its ruling, the states high court found that under the Local Government Contract Claims Act, the city cannot be given immunity from litigation in the case as the city claimed because the community group suing the city is not seeking monetary damages, but is pursuing claims related to specific performance of contractual terms regarding property near the bridge.

The city had lost the case in a state district court, but received a favorable ruling from the 4th Court.

We therefore reverse the court of appeals judgment and remand the case to that court for consideration of the citys remaining arguments, Chief Justice Nathan Hecht wrote.

On ExpressNews.com: Hays Street Bridge fight goes to states high court

After Fridays ruling, city officials said the planned mixed-use development next to the bridge, called the Bridge Apartments, still can move forward.

The ruling does not impact current or future development in the area, the city said in a statement. The Texas Supreme Court sent the case back to the 4th Court of Appeals for consideration of several other issues raised by the city in the appeal.

But Kastely said the city, with the high court ruling and recent retirement of City Manager Sheryl Sculley, who supported the development, is on solid legal ground to terminate the land deal that has drawn community opposition.

Theres been no court at any level that has agreed with the city in its assertion that this litigation has nothing to do with the land, she told reporters in a teleconference. Now is a good time for the city to do the right thing.

City officials have said the project will bring housing and economic stimulation to a historic neighborhood.

Some preservationists and others worry that the complex, up to five stories tall, would hinder views of and from the bridge, diminishing the areas ambience and long-term economic potential.

The 1.7-acre at 803 N. Cherry St. was donated to the city in 2007 by beer distributor BudCo. The city arranged to sell the land to Alamo Beer for a brewery. But the restoration group sued the city in 2012 to block the sale, saying the land was donated with the understanding that it would be used for a park.

City officials have said a jury found in 2014 that the city never committed to using the land as a park. But the jury did determine the city failed to comply with a 2002 memorandum of understanding between the city and the restoration group.

City attorneys have said the city, in accordance with an order from the trial, applied the $295,000 in proceeds from the land sale to a bridge restoration fund.

Texas 4th Court of Appeals later ruled that the city couldnt be sued on the contract because it enjoys governmental immunity. The restoration group then asked the Texas Supreme Court to review the 4th Court ruling.

During oral arguments before the Supreme Court in September, city lawyers cited a document from 2001 declaring an intent to foster residential development next to the bridge.

For its part, Kastely challenged the city to explain why it had pursued an appeal if it had already complied with the 2014 decision. Michael Truesdale, an Austin attorney representing the city, countered that the city was fighting the case because it wanted a decision on the governmental immunity issue.

On ExpressNews.com: City manager gives controversial Hays Street Bridge project the OK

As the dispute has made its way through the legal system, development plans around the bridge have proceeded.

Alamo Beer owner Eugene Simor, who built the brewery on the south side of the bridge, deeded the land on the north side to developer Mitch Meyer. The citys Historic and Design Review Commission, an advisory board, has twice denied approval of Meyers multiuse project.

But Sculley administratively approved the development a year ago, with the stipulation that Meyer meet with the neighborhood to address design concerns.

The plan was later supported by the Dignowity Hill Neighborhood Associations architectural review committee.

Kastely insisted that use of the land near the bridge remains an open legal question.

We dont have an injunction against their proceeding, but there is the very real possibility that they will be ordered to remove anything they put on that land eventually. So if they want to build a building that they later tear down, thats up to them, she said.

Scott Huddleston covers Bexar County government and the Alamo for the San Antonio Express-News. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | shuddleston@express-news.net | Twitter: @shuddlestonSA
Early Thursday morning, Beto ORourke officially announced his presidential candidacy with a three-and-a-half-minute video promising the greatest grassroots campaign this country has ever seen.

Two hours later, Julian Castro released a list of 30 prominent Texas Democrats  most of them Latinos  who have endorsed his presidential campaign.

Castro was staking out his turf, on the same day that a fellow Texan had seized the attention of the political world.

Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and housing secretary, had anticipated that ORourke, the former El Paso congressman, would enter the 2020 Democratic scrum.

After all, ORourkes long tease, which began shortly after his remarkably close loss to Ted Cruz in Novembers U.S. Senate election, was so clearly moving toward a presidential announcement that even his enthusiasts had begun to feel exasperation more than suspense.

In one sense, ORourkes big news shouldnt alter the campaign calculus much for Castro.

Castro remains the only Latino candidate in the crowded Democratic field, with a chance to be the first viable Mexican American presidential hopeful in U.S. history.

Castros credentials and personal story dont overlap all that much with ORourkes either.

As the former mayor of the seventh-largest city in the nation, Castro can take credit for creating a program which expanded access to high-quality pre-K. As the former secretary of housing and urban development, he can claim subject-matter expertise on the critical issue of housing affordability.

ORourke served six years on the El Paso City Council and three terms in the U.S. House, but cant really hold himself up as an authority on any pressing policy concern, apart from the conditions along this countrys southern border, where ORourke has lived most of his life.

Both men grew up in political families: Castros mother, Rosie, helped to lead the Chicano empowerment movement in this city and ORourkes late father, Pat, served as an El Paso county judge. But Castro is the overachieving, blue-collar product of San Antonios West Side, while ORourke is the prep-school rebel who rode a punk-rock, do-it-yourself ethos to national celebrity.

With or without ORourke in the race, Castros path to the Democratic nomination is narrow. It depends on his ability to catch fire in Iowa and/or New Hampshire and convince grassroots Democrats that hes a serious contender and not merely an earnest long-shot auditioning for a vice-presidential nod.

Also, by launching his campaign three months ago, Castro was able to preempt ORourke and cop some of the greatest hits from ORourkes 2018 Senate bid.

For example, ORourke built his Senate candidacy on a promise to visit all 254 Texas counties  a move that made little practical or logistical sense, but carried great symbolic value.

It signified that ORourke wanted to communicate with people in every part of the state. It quantified, in car miles, the defining assertion of ORourkes 2018 crusade: Were taking nobody for granted. Writing nobody off.

Four weeks ago, Castro went national with the same idea, promising to visit all 50 states. Castro explained that he wanted to send an important message: When Im president, everyone will count.

Castro also launched his campaign with a promise to refuse any donations from political action committees, just as ORourke did during his Senate run.

And while ORourke comes into the race with a rock-star aura, he also carries the weight of a backlash which festered during his four months of existential brooding after the loss to Cruz.

Hardcore progressives, who favor Bernie Sanders, suggested that ORourkes congressional votes too often aligned with Republicans.

Conservatives ridiculed him as a self-absorbed lightweight, while detractors on both ends of the political spectrum questioned whether his use of a Latino-sounding nickname (albeit one hes had for most of his life) amounted to cultural appropriation.

ORourke also did himself no favors with a January Washington Post interview in which he struggled to answer basic questions about issues sure to land on his desk as president.

For all the question marks about ORourke, however, his star power represents a serious impediment to the growth of Castros campaign.

Castro cant match the experience of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. He cant claim the policy chops of Elizabeth Warren. And for all his attempts to court progressive activists, hell never successfully outflank Bernie Sanders on the left.

Castros most compelling argument is the need for generational change. ORourke steals that argument and wraps it in a more dynamic, charismatic package. He also threatens to reduce Castro to the other Texan in the race.

Imagine if Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin had meticulously planned for two years to enter the 2008 presidential contest, only to have Barack Obama, his fellow Illinoisan, drop into the race with little warning.

In a field of approximately 20 candidates, Castro will have to fight for attention. ORourke, if anything, may end up getting too much of it for his own good.

@gilgamesh470

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
For the last two decades, employers and entrepreneurs have fled California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, and other high-tax states to seek the American dream in Texas. And were happy to welcome them and the career opportunities they create.

But one challenge to the Texas economy seriously risks our growth and threatens to put the Lone Star State into the same category as these other states  rapidly escalating property taxes.

At our 2018 Republican Party of Texas convention, thousands of delegates from across the state adopted a legislative priority calling for relief from these skyrocketing taxes. Our Republican legislators have done a tremendous job on legislation such as Senate Bill 2 and House Bill 2, which seek to put a 2.5 percent cap on the property tax rate. House Bill 3, in addition to proposing sweeping school finance reform, will provide not just relief from future taxes, but a tax cut right now for Texas families. These are meaningful and important steps toward ensuring Texans arent taxed out of their homes, and important steps toward replacing financing of the school maintenance and operations costs with a state consumption tax instead of property tax.

Moving away from property taxes towards a consumption tax is a realistic way to provide meaningful relief for hard working taxpayers while enabling the state to pay a higher share of public education at the same time. Republican legislators have already begun to move the state in this positive direction. The important thing is that  when this legislative session ends  Texans see real action to both reduce property taxes and limit the rate of growth in the future.

Meanwhile, the Democrats and various school administrator lobby groups are trying to pull a bait-and-switch on Texas property taxpayers. Texas House Democrats recently released a school finance plan that offers no tax relief to employers. Thats right, the job creators that have fueled the economy and brought a record number of new career opportunities to Texans get no relief from Texas Democrats. To make matters worse, the Democrat plan involves $14.5 billion in new spending, with no suggestion on how to pay for it. If youre curious to find out how that works in practice just ask someone from Detroit or Chicago.

The school lobby groups are equally disingenuous. They frequently say that the solution to spiraling property taxes is for the state to pay a larger share of public school costs. But when you read the bills these organizations support, they involve a lot of new spending with either no or token property tax relief.

This is an issue that the taxpayers have called upon  Republicans and Democrats  to find a solution. That is why both the Republican and Democrat platforms include true property tax relief. We encourage our elected officials to work toward meaningful change for the hardworking taxpayers of Texas.

Republican leadership and responsible policies have made our state the economic powerhouse it is. Texans should be encouraged by the progress that is being made and the Republican Party of Texas, our leadership and our activists, look forward to working with our elected leaders towards meaningful property tax relief.

James Dickey is chairman of the Republican Party of Texas.
If I was President Donald Trump, Id send Kim Jong Un the following tweet:

Dear Kim, we had a couple good meetings in the past to help North Korea prosper, settle past differences and put you on a path to join the world team. I thought all was going well. However, our intelligence community has just shown photos that you are ramping up the refurbishing of a missile site you promised would be destroyed. That truly upsets me and the citizens of our country.

Yes, we can ramp up sanctions and all that stuff. However, we could also give you a date and time when we will destroy that site with lethal precision to show what you may be up against if you wish to continue the path you have chosen. Please join the world team, give your citizens an opportunity to enjoy their lives, or pay the consequences for not keeping up with past commitments.

Your buddy, Donald.

John Gretz, Windcrest

Good idea, but 

Julian Castro is endorsing the idea of giving monetary reparations to the descendants of former slaves.

This sounds like a good plan to correct a great injustice until one thinks about the Native Americans who are still at the bottom of the American totem pole.

It is flagrantly hypocritical of Castro and Elizabeth Warren, among others, that Native American tribes are not a large enough voting bloc to be concerned about.

Robert Hausser Jr.

Little or no trust

Lets see, virtually all the Democratic hopefuls to be president, as well as most of the Democratic Party, are in favor of things like the green initiative, free health care and free college tuition.

All these things require more spending by government. Yet, according to the Gallup organization, 48 percent of the public trusts Congress little or not at all, while only 11 percent trust it a great deal or quite a lot.

Now, why would you give more spending money to people you dont trust?

William F. Malec, Fredericksburg

Teflon Don

With so many of Donald Trumps associates facing legal problems and prison sentences, if he escapes their fate, will he then become the new Teflon Don?

Judy Peterson, Beorne
One of the nations most influential artists of the last 30 years is coming to the Grace Farms center in New Canaan.

She is Carrie Mae Weems and if the name rings a bell but doesnt conjure a clear image, that is because Weems is multi-dimensional. At first a dancer, she gained breakout fame as a photographer, most notably for her Kitchen Table Series, a collection of 20 staged photos with text first exhibited in 1990.

But her repertoire also embraces video art, performance art, public art projects and public speaking. She has been described as a crossover figure, bridging the gap between art and politics. A recent New York Times profile summed up the unsummable, asserting that Weems has entered the cultural mythosphere.

The winner of a MacArthur genius Fellowship, in 2014 she was the first African-American woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. She appeared as herself in Spike Lees Netflix series, Shes Gotta Have it, and has been cited as an influence on Beyonces storytelling Lemonade videos.

A hallmark of Weems own photography is to insert herself as a viewer into her pictures as she did in Scenes & Take, a recent series shot of the sets of hit television shows like Empire and Scandal. Many of Weems videos can be seen on her YouTube channel.

At Grace Farms Sanctuary on Saturday, March 23, Weems will appear as the narrator in Past Tense, her retelling in music, video and text of Antigone, Sophocles tragedy about a woman who sacrifices herself for the right to bury her slain brother.

First performed at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York in 2016, it is her response to the police shootings that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. It was a companion of sorts to Grace Notes: Reflections for Now, a performance piece inspired by President Obamas singing of Amazing Grace at the memorial service for victims of the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.

Weems visit to Grace F arms will not be limited to the two evenings of lecture and performance. She also will use it as a base to create a new work that may debut next year at the Park Avenue Armory.

She wont be living in New Canaan as a true artist in residence would. Instead, Weems who resides in Syracuse and Brooklyn, will return often to work with as yet unidentified co-creators, says Pamela Ruggio, the arts initiative cu rator at Grace Farms.

The very landscape and architecture of Grace Farms is designed to encourage collaboration, or convenings, that bring together many minds, Ruggio says. She and Kenyon Victor Adams, founding arts initiative director and consulting co-curator, first approached Weems in mid-2017. She is an artist we had on our minds. Shes asking complex and difficult questions, Ruggio says.

In a blog post, Adams, who in February was named executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, wrote that Weems' methods and concerns align with those of Grace Farms. In fact, her residency is part of new round of initiatives that will address issues of modern slavery, wildlife poaching and trauma recovery.

Ruggio says that whatever work emerges from Weems residency will likely flow from her continuing exploration of the history of violence in the U.S. and a mass project that concluded her 2017 residency at the Park Avenue Armory. Titled The Shape of Things, the day-long event featured talks and performances by dozens of artists and thinkers.

Weems visit will not be accompanied by a traditional exhibit. But Ruggio expects to put a collection of books related to Weems and her collaborators in the Grace Farms library. There may also be a link to Weems own website, carriemaeweems.net, which has an illustrated timeline of her life and work.

She was born in Portland, Ore., in 1953, had her first and only child at age 16, and got her first camera in 1973. She was living in Northampton, Mass., and teaching at Hampshire College when she made her Kitchen Table Series, according to an article about the 2016 publication of the series as a stand alone book.

Considered a major work of American art, it can be read almost like a book even in a museum gallery, where the viewer walks past the mostly wordless chapters. Last year it was on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In the black and white photos, Weems casts herself as the protagonist of the story, acting a womans part. It is at once intimate and detached, specific and universal.

Joel Lang is a frequent contributor to Sunday Arts & Style.
ANSONIA-From corned beef to paczkis with some flag rising and high stepping in between, Main Street will be celebrating St. Patricks Day Saturday.

Mayor David Cassetti is expected to raise the Irish Flag outside City Hall at 11 a.m. In the street there will be Irish dancers kicking off the event to traditional Irish music.

Copper City Bar and Grill, 82-84 Main Street, will have a traditional corned beef and cabbage meal waiting for those who are hungry.

Then at 12:30 p.m. Cassetti will blow the whistle to start a Paczki eating contest at Eddys Bake Shop, 317 Main Street.

The winner will be the one who eats the most in five minutes, said Luisa Lievano, the bake shops manager.

She said a plate of eight paczkis, which have been described as a jelly doughnut on steroids, will be placed before each contestant. On the plate will be one each of apple, blueberry, cherry, custard, jelly, lemon, prune and strawberry. The record is 13 1/2.

This marks the 19th time Eddys has conducted the contest. It began in 1998 after Paul Ciocca, the bakerys former owner read about a paczki celebration in Wisconsin which includes a Paczki Parade, Paczki Ball and Paczki Eating Contest.

We couldnt have a parade or a ball so we settled on the eating contest, Cioffi told Hearst Connecticut Media in 2016.

There was no contest last year because Arlene Cardenas, Eddys new owner, was still working on the menu and interior. Cardenas also owns Marjolaines on New Haven State Street.

Paczkis (pronounced poonch-key) are a Polish tradition eaten before the fasting season of Lent. Legend has it that all the remaining eggs, butter, starch, sugar and jelly had to be used before the fasting season so these huge jelly doughnuts were created and eaten by the end of Ash Wednesday.
BRIDGEPORT  An individual was shot near Terrace Circle Thursday afternoon.

Police spokesman Terron Jones said the department received a report of shots fired near Terrace Circle.

A victim was reportedly transported to the hospital with what appeared to be a non-life-threatening wound, Jones said.

No further information was immediately available.

The matter remains under investigation, Jones said.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
FAIRFIELD  Karen Maizincho, a junior at Fairfield University, is busy. Shes sporting a white suit, a black coat for the snow and a backpack that is packed to the brim.

Maizincho has just arrived from the student career fair, and will head back as soon as she can. Nearing her final year of college, shes one of the many moving and hustling for a career opportunity.

And for Maizincho, her career plans are personal  she wants to help others through her language and interpreting skills.

I want to give back to people here, in my country and everywhere else, said Maizincho, whose family hails from Ecuador. The 20-year-old has recently returned from a four-week trip to Brazil where she helped local farmers with sustainable agricultural practices.

Maizincho spoke about her experiences and how they have shaped her educational and career aspirations.

Q: What are you studying and what got you interested in it?

A: Im a major in psychology and Spanish and my minors are in Latin and Caribbean studies and health studies, too.

More Information To learn more about Caroline House, visit: http://www.thecarolinehouse.org/ See More Collapse

I came in undecided and was all over the place, but then I took a course which was medical Spanish and we had a lot of trips about interpreting and learning about health access. It was all very interesting.

We saw a movie about psychologists and doctors helping people who are undocumented and then I took a psychology course and that tied everything up.

I also wanted to know about the history of where Im from  Ecuador. I just came back from Brazil and I took history classes before going to know what I was going to experience.

Q: How was your trip to Brazil?

A: It was part of a Global Scholars Program. I wanted to go to Guatemala, but then I opted for Brazil because I wanted to learn a new language.

Q: What career are you planning to pursue?

A: Right now, Im really interested in interpreting because I have a lot of background in it and I just want to give back to people here, in my country and everywhere else. I suffered with my mother in that she never had help.

When she had me, she went to a doctors appointment just like she does now. She doesnt understand anything and thats something I want to change because I know theres still a lack of resources for people who are undocumented or dont speak both languages.

When my mother came to Brooklyn in 1995, she had had a miscarriage before me and after that she had trauma. She wanted to know what was going on with me, but when she went to see the doctor, she came out now knowing any more.

I know theres a lot of women here who go through the same thing and thats something I want to help change that. Not just with pregnancies but anything.

Q: How did you get involved with Caroline House?

A: My father came to Connecticut a month before us, found a job and brought us over here. My mom went to St. Charles and heard about a school that taught in Spanish and English. Caroline House (in Bridgeport) was just down the road and my mom saw it as a great opportunity. She went to Caroline House and thats where I went until I was 2 years old, and my mother went back when my brother was born.

Caroline House was a big part for my family. It shaped my mom with the little English she learned and pushed her to push me. She was the type of mom that bothered me every day. I wasnt the best student ever but my brother has gotten honor rolls ever since.

Q: What are your plans for senior year?

A: More opportunities. Im going to California for spring break with the campus ministry to the border. Were going to help out families in San Diego. Ill be there for a week from March 16-23. Were staying at a church and raising awareness about the program.

humberto.juarez@

hearstmediact.com
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  The government agency in charge of water privatization denied on Friday viral claims that the Manila Water bypass is shuttered to create an artificial water shortage.

Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) Chief Regulator Patrick Ty addressed the claims of a a certain Angel Salazar, a supposed former long-time MWSS employee. Salazar replied to Ty's Facebook post on Thursday regarding the water crisis experienced by millions of Filipinos.

Salazar called on the MWSS Chief Regulator to open the bypass to solve the water crisis. He also claimed that Ty ordered the closure of the bypass that allows water from Angat Dam to flow to Manila Water's treatment plant. He said the MWSS Regulatory Board ordered its closure so that all the allocated water from Angat Dam will go to water concessionaire Maynilad.

"Kaya natuyo La Mesa Dam. Kung bakit inutos ng MWSS ito, your guess is as good as mine," Salazar said in a Facebook comment.

This conversation prompted irate netizens to call on MWSS to open the bypass, using #OpenTheBypass.

Ty addressed all the allegations of the supposed former MWSS employee.

"The portal, with regard to the bypass, hindi po totoo iyon. Fake news po iyong sinasabi nila na, 'You just open it and the problem will be solved.' It is already open," he said in a media briefing.

The MWSS regulatory official said the bypass has never been closed in the first place and he never ordered its closure.

He said it is not possible for Manila Water to bring water to its 1.2 million households in eastern Metro Manila and Rizal Province if the said bypass is closed. He said Manila Water's allocation flows from Angat Dam to its aqueduct, then through a portal, then the bypass. From the bypass, it will go to Manila Water. The water concessionaire confirmed it has been receiving its allocation.

"I never ordered the closure. I made sure it was open to ensure Manila Water will get its 1600 million liters per day (mld)... If it's closed, Manila Water will not get water at all," Ty said.

He added the MWSS Regulatory Office has no control over the bypass.

The government is investigating the possible "mismanagement" and "inefficiency" of water distribution by Manila Water, even as water levels in Angat Dam - the main water source of Metro Manila - are still within normal ranges. Presidential Spokesperson Sal Panelo said the government is not discounting the possibility of an "artificial" water shortage.

On March 7, customers of Manila Water were surprised by an unannounced water interruption. Since then, its 1.2 million customers have been experiencing no water supply or low water pressure. The water concessionaire attributes the shortage to the lowering level of water at the La Mesa reservoir in Quezon City due to the dry spell. However, the National Water Resources Board, which manages Angat Dam, said the current supply can last for the whole summer, but Manila Water's infrastructure can only take in a limited volume of water.
Soldats du BIR Archives

Elements of the Rapid Intervention Batallion(BIR) ,were in Kumbo, Bui Division of the North West, on Wednesday, where they offered assistance to some underprivileged persons in the area.

The ongoing war in the Anglophone regions has greatly affected the people of Kumbo with some of them, going for months without basic necessities. Internally displaced persons, physically challenged and under privileged were of interest to the BIRS as they handed over basic household needs, amongst others to the Director of the Banso Baptist Hospital, who received on behalf of the concerned. The BIR carries out humanitarian assistance yearly as part of its relief program to assist underprivileged persons in any community in the country and build cordial ties with civilians.

Due to the escalating crisis, some of these persons listed above, found refuge at the hospital premises. Hospital officials expressed gratitude following the donation and regretted that the ongoing conflict had killed several people and rendered others homeless. He regretted that following the series of gun battles, most patients die on their way to the hospital.

Some patients havent been able to leave Kumbo for Bamenda, the regional capital, where they receive their treatment. Families have not been able to go home to bury their loved ones, just because of the growing insecurity.

Military has been accused of burning down houses at the centre of the town as well as inflicting pains on civilians and killing some. The separatist group (Amba boys), on its part, had stopped people from moving, forcing series of ghost towns on them, as well as conducting illegal executions. People are torn between respecting the military or the Amba boys.
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.

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Gilla Inc. engages in the manufacture, marketing, and distribution of generic and premium branded e-liquid used in vaporizers, electronic cigarettes, and other vaping hardware and accessories in Europe, Canada, and the United States. The company offers its products under the brand names of Spectrum Concentrates, Coil Glaze, Craft Vapes, Siren, The Drip Factory, Shake It, Surf Sauce, Ohana, Moshi, Crisp, Just Fruit, Vinto Vape, Vapor's Dozen, Enriched Vapor, and Crown E-liquid. Gilla Inc. sells its products through market channels, including vape shops, retail and wholesale distributors, convenience stores, and e-commerce Websites. The company is headquartered in Daytona Beach, Florida.

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BHP Group engages in the natural resources business in Australia, Europe, China, Japan, India, South Korea, rest of Asia, North America, South America, and internationally. It operates through Petroleum, Copper, Iron Ore, and Coal segments. The company engages in the exploration, development, and production of oil and gas properties; and mining of copper, silver, zinc, molybdenum, uranium, gold, iron ore, and metallurgical and energy coal. It is also involved in mining, smelting, and refining of nickel; the provision of towing, freight, marketing and trading, marketing support, finance, administrative, and other services; and potash development activities. The company was founded in 1851 and is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.

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Un homme marche devant des magasins detruits d'un quartier de Buea, theatre d'un conflit avec la minorite anglophone AFP/Archives/MARCO LONGARI

Continuous cries from the population of crisis-hit Anglophone regions, concerning the new tactic employed by soldiers to scout for separatist fighters has seen some homes of civilians in Wum, Kumbo and Chup villages burnt down to ashes, while several people have been reported dead.

Despite several calls made by both human rights actors and the international community on the unprofessional actions of soldiers within the Cameroonian military, these calls have seemingly fallen on deaf ears. Gun battles between the military and separatist fighters have always resulted to a series of killings and burning on the part of the military, often frustrated on how to pick out their targets.

Reports from Wum, Menchum Division of the North West region, say several people suspected to work with separatist fighters were killed on Thursday. The military allegedly raided a palace at a village in that area, shooting two aged wives of the local chief on their legs, and finally setting up the palace ton fire. Chief Achuo Eric of Kooh Kesughu and family have been rendered homeless, due to the attacks. Farmers were also targeted with a total number of over 8 persons shot.

A residence was also attacked and four victims killed and burnt along in the said house. Reports from Kumbo in Bui Division states that at least eight houses in Bamngoy and Firkov have been reduced to ashes this morning, and many people have ran into the bushes.

The military on several occasions have accused the population of working in collaboration with separatist fighters also known as Amba boys to get some of them killed. The burnings to many , is another way for the military retaliate the killings of one of theirs as well as a means to push civilians to sell out whereabouts of the said secessionists. A similar action is taking place in Chup, a village in Donga/Mantung Division of the North West. Government on several outings had indicated that it will do all it takes to bring order in the Anglophone regions.

However, the European Union and the United States have recently shown interest in the human rights violations perpetrated in the Anglophone crisis, which leaves the neutral civilian at risk. Many calls have been made to the Cameroonian government to stop the war by calling for an inclusive, political dialogue.
According to the Roman calendar, the Ides of March was the ancient empires traditional day to settle debts.

In 44 B.C., Brutus and Cassius, two of Romes elite senators, settled a political debt with Julius Caesar, their emperor, by stabbing him to death in the Senate on the Ides, or March 15.

Little blood is spilled on democracys great debating floors today. Still, political careers do die on them regularly.

An unwise alliance here, a loose tongue there and, thud, another public career is as dead as, well, Caesar.

Cohen

That thud might soon ring in Great Britains House of Commons, says Roger Cohen, an astute observer of British politics.

It will be, predicts Cohen, who grew up in England, the sound of Prime Minister Theresa Mays career hitting rock bottom somewhere around March 15 as she retreatsasks for an extensionto the March 29 deadline for the U.K. to leave, or Brexit, the European Union.

But that doesnt mean Brexit will die, suspects Cohen in his March 2 New York Times column.

Anything is possible, he says, because Britains politics, like Americas, now operate from either the left or the right, not the center where leaders once met to arbitrate policy.

That middle ground is now career quicksand.

The bilateral comparison isnt perfect, but Mays loyalty to her political right and its anti-EU push has parallels in the United States and to President Donald J. Trumps devotion to the right wing of his political party.

For example, both May and Trump preside over deeply divided governments.

Both use nationalism to recharge their power if it begins to fade.

And while both nations are deeply embedded in the global economy, each believes they can stand alone  get better deals  in contentious issues like trade and nuclear weapons.

After three years of Brexit maneuvering and two years of unpredictable Trumpism, however, two realities are beginning to surface with the political left, right, and center in each nation.

First, going it alone may not be achievable and, second, its probably not what either nation needs anyway.

That means, Cohen surmises, recent seat-of-the-pants policymaking by novices and neo-whatevers needs to yield to people who have the knowledge and experience to bridge todays growing gaps in trade, finance, and diplomacy.

Few know this better than U.S. farmers and ranchers who have held their collective tongue while the White House used the last two years to level the playing field in multilateral trade, explains the Global Trade and Analysis Project (GTAP) at Purdue University.

Those trade tactics, however, says the Purdue group, have done more burying than leveling.

The White Houses first move, pulling out of the almost-done Trans-Pacific Partnership, now reduces agricultural and food exports by $1.8 billion a year.

Worse, If the current U.S. trade policy were to continue toward protectionism, GTAP surmises, U.S. agricultural exports would drop by $21.8 billion (which) would result in an aggregate welfare loss of $42.5 billion to the U.S. economy

Keep in mind that this forecast didnt originate with some Trump-scorned news network or liberal think tank.

Its the analysis of trade experts at Purdue University, the intellectual home to American agricultures patron saint of free markets, Earl Fencerow Butz.

What does all this mean? GTAP asks in its final analysis. It suggests that U.S. agriculture is entering a volatile period in international trade.

The data suggests the sector currently risks losing much of the trade achieved over the past three decades.

Times columnist Cohen expresses the same thought differently; he quotes Pascal Lamy, the former head of the World Trade Organization who, when asked to comment on whether Brexit would succeed, wryly noted, Its not easy making an egg out of an omelet.

No, its not.

But that doesnt mean this White House  or Ms. May  wont continue to try.
The government must not waste the opportunity afforded by Brexit to put in better policies for food, farming and the countryside, a farm group has said.

As the UK moves away from the European Union, the Tenant Farmers' Association (TFA) said that it is 'vital' that it does so in a way which builds a 'positive future' for farming.

Since the EU referendum, the TFA has been working with the government to call for sustainable policies which creates 'resilient and profitable' businesses, working to high standards of food quality, environmental management and animal welfare.

TFA National Chairman, James Gray told the group's AGM on Thursday (14 March): Not all the UK's woes can be placed at the door of the Common Agricultural Policy.

It is often the case that it is the way domestic governments have decided to implement aspects of the CAP that have caused the most problems rather than the parent policy itself.

We need to use the current opportunity to develop bespoke policies which better fit our national circumstances and priorities, said Mr Gray

However, he warned that many farm businesses are currently working hard, for whom the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) represents the difference between financial security and bankruptcy.

Simply removing direct payments without significantly adjusting other policy areas will be a recipe for disaster, he said.

It is essential that the government takes a systems approach to policy and does not consider individual aspects in separate silos.

The Basic Payment Scheme may be a blunt instrument, but it is not without its merits in providing much-needed support for businesses who are unable to attract a sufficient return from the marketplace which is stacked against them, added Mr Gray.

The TFA supports the governments intention to bring forward a new policy framework which bolsters farm productivity whilst providing support for farmers to deliver public goods but stresses that this must be focused on active farmers.

But any new financial assistance must only be made available to individuals who are operating units which are predominantly agricultural in nature, the group said.
The Farmers' Union of Wales has called on MPs to revoke Article 50 and set a 'realistic and safe' timetable for the UK to withdraw from the European Union.

Following another day of political theatrics in parliament on Thursday (14 March), MPs voted to delay Brexit by at least three months.

Parliament overwhelmingly backed the extension of Article 50, which means Brexit won't take place before 30 June. The original date of withdrawal was set for 29 March.

The vote gives Prime Minister Theresa May an opportunity to resuscitate her twice-defeated Brexit plan.

Amid growing political uncertainty, the Farmers' Union of Wales (FUW) has now called for Article 50 to be cancelled outright in order to reflect parliaments rejection of a no-deal Brexit.

The union calls for the 2018 European Union (Withdrawal) Act to be amended to reflect this view and cater for 'all possible eventualities'.

'Cliff edge date'

FUW Head of Policy, Nick Fenwick said that replacing March 29 with another cliff edge date in a few months time would be 'short sighted' and wouldn't 'reflect the dangers'.

So long as the Withdrawal Act stands we are set to leave the European Union, so claims that this would go against the vote to leave the EU are false, he said.

Those who have persuaded the general public that the Brexit process that can be gone through in a couple of years without major risks to jobs, businesses and the economy have been unrealistic and misled Brexiteers about the reality of a safe timetable.

We now need the Act to be amended to restore us to a realistic and safe timetable, he added.

'No knowledge'

The farming union also said that the vote to leave the European Union didn't equate to a vote to leaving the customs union and single market.

Leaving the customs union and the single market were not on the ballot paper - in fact, the overwhelming majority of those who voted, whether in favour or against Brexit, had no knowledge of the customs union, Dr Fenwick said.

Those who voted to leave the EU did so on a variety of grounds; yes, for many that included free movement, but for many others it was to do with other issues, including being a protest vote.

The FUW is now pleading with MPs to amend the Withdrawal Act to allow agreements to be reached and for Brexit to take place over a 'safe and realistic' timetable.

Four farming unions, NFU, NFU Cymru, NFU Scotland and Ulster Farmers Union (UFU), have also called on the government not to delay the prospect of no-deal.
A London primary school has been named NFU's Farmvention Champion for their ingenious 'tractor of the future' design.

Ronald Ross Primary School's idea is an eco-friendly drone zip line that protects soil structure by sowing, maintaining and picking the crop from above, removing the need for heavy machinery.

Eight-year-old Afeefa Haroon, the mastermind behind the entry, explained that the zip line is good because it can do the farmers work without squashing the soil.

The final of the competition, which was first announced last year, took place in the House of Commons on Wednesday (13 March) where nine winners, which were chosen from over 1,000 entries, showcased their designs.

The event crowned Ronald Ross Primary as the winner of the grand prize of having their school turned into a farm for a day.

The competition challenged primary school children to use Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects to design a tractor of the future, create a healthy British snack product or create an environment for laying hens.

NFU President Minette Batters said: The level of detail, ingenuity and resourcefulness in each design was truly staggering, and the pupils scientific and technological knowledge really shone though as they talked about their projects.

Ronald Ross Primary Schools entry identified some of the biggest challenges farmers face on a day-to-day basis, such as worker shortages, soil compaction and energy usage, and provided solutions.

She added: Im so glad that this competition has not only bridged the gap between children and their food, but opened the eyes of young people to the opportunities the farming industry offers.

Ms Bains, a teacher at the school, said pupils didn't know much about farming before the project.

She said: It was great to see their knowledge develop over the process. Afeefas entry was so impressive because she really thought about the problems farmers face, and then she came up with solutions.

Its so important that children, especially those who grow up in urban areas, are in touch with the countryside. One of my highlights was the farm visit and seeing the children running on this great open green field  it was amazing to see.
Farmers in Northern Ireland have been encouraged to buy local grain as it makes 'good business sense' to have a shorter supply chain.

The Ulster Farmers Union (UFU) have highlighted the message to spur on Northern Irish livestock farmers to buy local grain.

From a marketing perspective, the union said it adds provenance to a product when a farmer can say his or her animals are fed with locally sourced NI Farm Quality Assured grain.

Not only is it good for business, it also benefits the environment, as buying locally grown grain will help to reduce a farm businesses carbon footprint and also boost its environmental credentials.

It comes as the issue of climate change and the environment are seen as major concerns at the moment for the farming industry.

UFU beef and lamb chairman, Sam Chesney said: Buying local means you can deal directly with local businesses and growers, I encourage those with grain and those who need grain to do business over the coming weeks and furthermore put in place plans for longer-term supply chain arrangements.

I would encourage beef and lamb farmers who are looking to purchase grain to support their arable neighbours and buy direct from them. Talk to local grain growers and discuss your needs and possible options, he said.

The UFU also said that buying local grain is a 'win-win' for both livestock and arable farmers, and it injects cash into the rural economy.
Two farms have been selected in Scotland to develop their food tourism business and encourage other farmers to follow their example.

Working with other farms, the two new agri-tourism monitor farms, located in East Lothian and Dunbartonshire, aim to help the farming industry improve profitability, productivity and sustainability.

Shantron and Castleton Farms are examples of farmers developing agri-tourism, which has driven new income streams and generated thousands of visitors on to farms to learn about food and how it is produced.

Shantron Farm is a 1,500ha hill sheep farm in Dunbartonshire run by the Lennox family. They wanted to become a monitor farm to teach others how to sell the 'farm experience'.

The Lennox family said being agri-tourism farms 'offers a unique day out for the tourist and is financially lucrative.'

They said: We have been in both farming and tourism for a long time but we feel that by combining the two much more smartly, we can develop a distinctive and innovative agri-tourism product in the Scottish tourism market.

As monitor farmers we hope that other farmers can also learn alongside us on how to tell and sell their farming story much more effectively.

Castleton Farm, run by farm couple Stuart and Jo McNicol, is a cereals farm and an existing events business running weddings and events on site.

They are now hoping to further develop their agri-tourism business to create a 'year-round destination'.

The McNicols said: Part of this development is our new venture of running a cafe  Drift  so we applied to become monitor farmers to gain support, ideas and knowledge from our peers to help maximise the potential of this new business.

Scottish government's Rural Economy Secretary, Fergus Ewing said the industry must become more 'profitable and sustainable' to 'secure business viability'.

I hope others will follow their lead, helping to improve the sectors overall sustainability and profitability for the next generation, he said.

This investment in skills and knowledge sharing will contribute to the continued growth of the vibrant agri-tourism sector in Scotland, which is a key part of the new Food Tourism Strategy.
Paul Atanga Nji Minat

The Minister of Territorial Administration, Paul Atanga Nji has reiterated President Paul Biya's commitment to see an end to the ongoing Anglophone crisis by promising not to lock up secessionist fighters (Amba boys), if they drop their weapons

He made this statement in Yaounde on Thursday, during the launching ceremony of the Coordination Centre for Humanitarian Assistance to the North West and South West Regions.tt

It was an occasion for him to update diplomats on the NW/SW Humanitarian Assistance Plan, where he briefed them, on the stakes of the ongoing crisis in the two regions and what government, other actors, have been doing to assist those affected so far.

Members of the Humanitarian Assistance committee agreed to scrupulously respect the code of conduct governing field work in order to assist the increasingly suffering masses. Representatives of the United Nation, the USA, Germany, France, and the European Union were all in attendance. The Humanitarian Assistance Plan was created by the President of the Republic, and launched by the Prime Minister on 20th June 2018. Government says about 75000 families, affected by the crisis, have received humanitarian aid.

It was on this occasion that the MINAT boss, in an interview with the press, called on all Amba boys to drop their weapons, reassuring them that they would not go to jail.

" Let me make it very clear, those who lay down their weapons will not go to jail. That is the instruction from the Head of State, stated the minister.

He further guaranteed these fighters safety and protection, if they truly repent and register with the National Committee for Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration, a commission created by Mr Paul Biya to reconcile these Amba boys to the laws of the land.
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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 --

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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.
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When SRK Was All Praises For Himself

While talking to The Hindu, SRK was quoted as saying, "I'll be honest with you. I believe whichever film I do is the best in the world. Because I'm the best in the world. And I'm not being pompous."

SRK Had Said That He Makes Sure That His Films Work

"It's something I really believe. I'm never surprised when my films do well. I'm surprised when other people's films do well (laughs). The success of my films is a foregone conclusion. I've been around for 11 years. And every time I make sure my film works."

SRK: You Cant Fool Audiences Hearts

"I choose my directors very carefully. There's something that I believe about the audience: you can fool their eyes and minds. But you can never fool their hearts. And my films and performances are always from the heart."

SRK On Rating Himself On A Scale Of 1- 10.

"There's a certain amount of goodwill that some actors accumulate over the years as an actor and human being. I'm luckily one of them. The audience no longer responds to my performances per se.

As an actor I rate myself as three or four on a scale of 1-10. But they rate me as eight because they react to me as a person."

Cut To Present

Shahrukh Khan was last seen in Aanand L Rai's Zero and the film failed to impress the critics and the audiences. He is expected to do Don 3 next but the actor hasn't confirmed anything yet!
Salman Opens Up About Dabangg 3's Release Date

According to Bollywood Hungama, at a press conference earlier on Thursday in Dubai for Dabangg Tour Reloaded, Salman confirmed, "We will start #Dabangg3 on 1st of April and release the film in December this year."

The Shooting Locations For Dabangg 3

Arbaaz Khan had earlier revealed, "We start shooting in the first week of April in Maheshwar and later move to Wai and Mumbai."

Speaking About Dabangg 3, This Is What Prabhudheva Had To Say

"I know it is a big film, and there is a challenge before me, but I am not one to succumb under pressure. I feel the pressure only when the film has hit screens, while noticing how viewers react to it."

Kiccha Sudeep To Play The Main Antagonist

Reportedly, the Kannada superstar has been roped in to play Salman's nemesis in Dabangg 3. Earlier, Sonu Sood and Prakash Raj had starred as the main antagonist in Dabangg and Dabangg 2 respectively.

Sonakshi Sinha On Teaming Up With Salman For Dabangg 3

"It feels like I am back home because that's where I started my career. My life changed completely after that film, it's how I found my calling. Dabangg will always be the most special to me," the actress was previously quoted by a leading daily.
| BY Ricki Green |

BCM has announced that highly awarded creative leader, Christy Peacock has been appointed to the role of executive creative director.

Peacock joins the Brisbane-based independent creative, digital and media agency after a 3-year stint in the same role at TBWA/NZ, where he helped drive key client, ANZ Bank to the number 1 preferred brand in the market.

Prior to TBWA, Peacock was ECD at Sydney independent Joy, producing high profile work for Nike, SBS and Subaru. Before that he was CD at Fallon USA, working as head of art and Creative Lead on Cadillac North America and The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, among others.

On his new role at BCM Peacock said: BCM are on a clear trajectory. They understand the importance of data and how it can leverage great creative thinking for truly engaging outcomes. They already have a great team around them and when you combine this with the fact that they are one of Australias largest independent creative companies thats run by a couple of really nice chaps, joining the team was a no brainer.

Im looking forward to a long and successful future partnering with the guys at BCM.

Says Phil McDonald, agency partner, BCM: Paul and I have known Christy for a while now and have many mutual mates, so when we knew he was on his way back to Brisbane we thought it was only fitting that he joined us. He is a world-class creative leader and we have no doubt he will drive our creative product to another level and add real value to our clients and their brands.

Peacock arrives on the back of the appointment of Chris Platt in December last year, as director of media and engagement from his MD role at Universal McCann. As well as the arrival of McDonald who joined as a shareholder and partner in July, from the position of regional CEO of WPP agency, Y&R.
Ram Gopal Varma, one of the most talented filmmakers in Telugu cinema, is currently gearing up for the release of his highly controversial Lakshmi's NTR, which revolves around the relationship between former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister NTR and his second wife Lakshmi Parvathy. The film, touted to be the 'real story' of the mass leader, has ruffled a few feathers owing to its gripping and politically charged trailer.

Shortly after the film became the talk of the town, a Telugu Desam Party (TDP) activist approached the Election Commission and demanded a ban on it for showing Chandrababu Naidu in 'bad light'. The activist also urged the EC to take the matter seriously as it could affect the Andhra Pradesh elections.

Now, the EC has responded to the controversy. In his statement, the Chief Electoral Officer said that the body is set to examine the film and decide whether it violates the 'Model Code Of Conduct'.

"Will check if the content influences the voters or election result, whether if it violates Model Code of Conduct? A decision will be taken only after reaching a conclusion," he added.

The statement clearly indicates that the EC has not taken a decision about the film yet. As such, this development might make RGV a bit nervous.

While the fate of Lakshmi's NTR still hangs in balance, RGV is pretty confident that things will work out fine as he has shown 'facts'. In fact, during the pre-release function, he had said that the film would reach the audience even if he is killed.

In case you did not know, Lakshmi's NTR features theatre artiste P Vijay Kumar as NTR while Kannada beauty Yagna Shetty plays Lakshmi Parvathy. Actor Sritej too is a part of the cast.

So, will Lakshmi's NTR be able to keep its date with fans? Comments, please!
No one doubts that last year was an extremely tough one for Chinese private equity investors And Cautious is the word that most investors mention when talking about their investment strategy for the Year of Pig There are still many uncertainties ahead, they say

The whole private equity market has embraced a capital winter as fundraising slows, both for startups and for funds For the latter, only those with a proven track record are able to get enough money while the rest find it hard to attract limited partners

Capital is concentrating on China's leading players The number of PE and VC firms raising money declined almost 12% to 941 last year, while the total...
The Medicalbit Foundation, which is currently undergoing an initial virtual currency coin offering (ICO) in Estonia, has decided to make its ASCA tokens publicly available as the first step in the Asclepius Network project.

The goal of Asclepius Network is to make leading-edge medical treatment available to all peoples of the world, and Japan has been chosen for the first location in Asia to expand business.

The project's mission is to accumulate the world's cutting-edge medical treatment knowledge and medical records within a blockchain system. This would form a mechanism that would enable anyone in the world to receive the benefits of leading-edge medical treatments anywhere in the world. To further that end, the project is forming a network of leading-edge medical researchers from Japan, as well as from Europe and the United States.

In practical terms, the project is engaged in the development of next-generation electronic medical records as well as the development of smart device apps to gather existing medical records. At this point, the project has already been approved for six patents in Japan.

Plans call for the establishment of blood and cancer screening facilities in 2019, using state of the art technologies from Japan, in conjunction with major diagnostic centers that are already involved in health screenings for millions of persons annually within China, as well as with the major hospital groups that manage dozens of hospitals within China.

In addition, proof-of-concept testing has already begun for a service to deliver Japanese pharmaceuticals to patients suffering from chronic illnesses.

This effort within China is initially estimated, based on preliminary calculations made with project partners, to reach an annual scope ranging from several tens of billions of yen to several hundreds of billions of yen.

Furthermore, a monetary fund has been established to allow participation within the sustainable development goals project set forth by the United Nations as a means to realize the project's ideal of offering the benefits of leading-edge medical treatment to the peoples of the world. Plans call for the fund to be used predominantly for fields that include the free provision of treatment to areas of the world currently beyond the reach of such treatment.

Participation in the Asclepius Network project for these efforts will require ASCA tokens, and the project seeks investors and business partners interested in bringing leading-edge medical treatment to all the peoples of the world.

Description of Offering: Thursday, March 21st, 10:00 AM JST

Offering Trader: TopForce

URL: www.top-force.com/

Moving forward, plans call for global development based on joint work with partners in the countries of Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, and India, following a model similar to that used for China. There will also be incremental increases to the number of offering traders from April of 2019 onward.

ICO Implementation Company: MEDICALBIT FOUNDATION OU

Harju maakond, Tallinn, Kesklinna linnaosa, Narva mnt 5, 10117

MBC URL: https://www.medicalbit.ee/

ASCA URL: https://www.asclepius.network/

Project Management Company: Japan Medical Solutions Co., Ltd.

9F Nihonbashi Ningyocho Ishii Building, 3-1-17 Ningyo-cho Nihonbashi, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo

JPM URL: http://www.jpmedsn.com/

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190314005032/en/

Contacts:

Inquiries:

Medicalbit Foundation

Hiroo Uchiyama

info@medicalbit.io
TOKYO, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Shimadzu's new Nexera UHPLC series with AI and IoT enhancements sets industry standard for intelligence, efficiency and design. The Nexera series makes lab management simple by integrating IoT and device networking, enabling users to easily review instrument status, optimize resource allocation, and achieve higher throughput.

The Nexera UHPLC series maximizes reliability and uptime with fully unattended workflows that span from startup to shut-down. Operators can set the Nexera to start up at a specified time, so that it can complete auto-purge, equilibration, baseline checks and system suitability in advance, and be ready for analysis before they arrive at the lab. In addition, FlowPilot ramps up the flow rate gradually, reducing the possibility of damage to columns. The Nexera also has auto-diagnostics and auto-recovery capabilities that allow it to monitor pressure fluctuations to check for anomalies.

With remote mobile phase monitoring and integrated consumables management, the system maximizes uptime and reliability. Real-time monitoring of mobile phase levels allows lab personnel to efficiently run batches and respond accordingly if there isn't enough mobile phase before starting a run. In addition, Nexera tracks consumable usage and sends alerts when parts need replacing, allowing users to keep the system running at peak performance. The Nexera UHPLC series allows analysts to confirm parameters and monitor chromatograms in real time directly from a web browser on their smart device.

The Nexera UHPLC increases efficiency by automating workflows and maximizing throughput analysis. The SIL-40 autosampler can process the entire injection cycle time in as little as seven seconds, and continuous analysis can be carried out on up to 44 MTPs (using 3 plate changers). The SIL-40's plate changers enable non-stop temperature-controlled analysis of thousands of samples. The Nexera automatically blends mobile phases at any set ratio, which speeds up the preparation of buffer solutions and the dilution of solvents. Because it prepares the exact amounts required for analysis, the Nexera reduces waste and labor.

The Nexera's elegant and compact design saves valuable bench space. Notably, the Nexera UHPLC uses over 80% less electricity in standby mode, thereby significantly reducing running costs and supports an environmentally-friendly lab.

Key components of the Nexera UHPLC series include:

Mobile Phase Monitor MPM-40

System Controller SCL-40, CBM-40

Absorbance Detector SPD-40 / SPD-40V and Photodiode Detector SPD-M40

Solvent Delivery Unit LC-40 series

Autosampler SIL-40 series / PLATE CHANGER

Column Oven CTO-40 series

More details

https://www.shimadzu.com/an/hplc/nexeraseries/newbenchmark.html

About Shimadzu Corporation

Founded in 1875, Shimadzu Corporation, a leader in the development of advanced technologies, has a distinguished history of innovation built on the foundation. Shimadzu maintains a global network of sales, service, technical support and applications centers on six continents, and has established long-term relationships with a host of highly trained distributors located in over 100 countries. For more information, visit www.shimadzu.com

Contact

Shimadzu Corporation

Global Marketing Dept.

Analytical & Measuring Instruments Division

Address: 3, Kanda-Nishikicho 1-chome, Chiyoda-ku, Japan 101-8448

Tel: (+81)-3-3219-5633

E-mail: an_press@group.shimadzu.co.jp

Image: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/835817/Shimadzu_Nexera.jpg
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 14, 2019) - Carl Data Solutions Inc. (CSE: CRL) (FSE: 7C5) (OTCQB: CDTAF) ("Carl Data" or the "Company"), has been requested by OTC Markets Group ("OTC Markets") to comment on certain recent promotional activity encouraging investors to purchase the Company's common shares. The Company first became aware of certain promotional third-party newsletter activities through a notification by OTC Markets on March 12, 2019, which were not commissioned by or paid for by the Company.

The Company engaged one third-party firm in February 2019, CK Marketing Group, LLC, to launch a marketing editorial campaign involving certain editorial materials to be posted on the CK Marketing Group, LLC website, beginning in March 2019. The campaign is designed to bring the awareness of the investment community to the Company's progress and data market opportunity but in no event did the Company authorize any recommendation or encouragement to purchase its stock. The Company reviewed the materials that have been disseminated and all information is from the Company web site and filings. All information provided by the Company in respect to this marketing campaign has already been disseminated to the market via press releases, regulatory filings, its public-facing financial landing page and its corporate presentation available on its website.

The Company confirms that it and its officers and directors were not, directly or indirectly, involved in any way with the creation or distribution of promotional third party newsletter materials encouraging investors to buy the Company's stock. The Company confirms that it was indirectly involved with the creation and distribution of marketing material associated with its investor awareness campaign and had limited editorial control over such content, such as to the factual aspects about the company's operations and activities.

Trading volume in Carl's common shares on March 11, 2019 was approximately 500,000 shares and volume on March 12, 2019 was approximately 2,000,000 shares, both days being well above the average trading volume of the past 12 months. The Company attributes the majority of any increased trading volumes on the OTCQB to investors who may for the first time be reviewing the many past news releases disseminated by the Company discussing its new business agreements and new investments in technology.

CK Marketing Group, LLC is the only third-party service provider engaged by the Company to provide investor relations services and is paid $3,000 per month on a month to month basis. In the past 12 months, other service providers included Howe Street Media Inc. for a 15 month period that ended March 1, 2019, Ubika Corporation for a 12 month period that ended March 15, 2018, and Torrey Hills Capital Inc. for a 4 month period that ended August 31, 2018.

Further, after inquiry, the company confirms that none of its management, its officers, directors, any controlling shareholders (defined as shareholders owning 10 per cent or more of the Company's securities) or any third party service providers have, directly or indirectly, been involved in any way (including payment of a third party) with the creation, distribution or payment of promotional materials recommending the purchase of the Company's common stock. Additionally, none of the Company's officers, directors, and, to the knowledge of the company, controlling shareholders or third party service providers sold or purchased shares of common shares of the Company within the last 90 days except for one controlling shareholder who purchased a total of 210,000 shares and sold a total of 200,000 shares in several separate transactions from January 10, 2019 to March 13, 2019 and one director of the Company who sold a total of 330,000 shares in several separate transactions from March 12, 2019 to March 13, 2019. The Company has also not at any point issued common shares or convertible instruments at prices constituting a discount to the current market rate at the time of issuance.

About Carl Data Solutions Inc.

Carl Data Solutions Inc. is an Industrial IoT (IIoT) company that provides next generation collection, storage and analytics solutions for data-centric companies. Building on its recent acquisitions, Carl Data helps clients analyze and model environmental data through a powerful technology agnostic end-to-end platform of smart sensors combined with web-based monitoring, reporting, and predictive analytics applications

Carl Data continues to develop applications that extract value from new cloud-based mass storage services and machine learning (AI) analytics tools to provide the scalability needed to effectively monitor smart cities, utilities and other industrial verticals. This software suite saves clients time and money by amassing information from any sensor or source to create a real-time decision support system with deep insights into how to protect infrastructure and assets. More information can be found at www.CarlSolutions.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors:

Greg Johnston

President, Chief Executive Officer, Director

Carl Data Solutions Inc.

For further information please contact:

Kimberly Bruce

Corporate Communications

Carl Data Solutions Inc.

Telephone: (778) 379-0275

Email: kimberly@carlsolutions.com

The Canadian Securities Exchange (operated by CNSX Markets Inc.) has neither approved nor disapproved of the contents of this press release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43433
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 14, 2019 /Glenbriar Technologies Inc. (CSE:GTI.X) (the "Company") wishes to announce that it has entered into an arms length agreement to acquire all of the shares of private BC based Eleos Robotics Inc. ("Eleos"). The agreement contemplates that the Company will issue 100% of the issued and outstanding shares of the Company, at a deemed value of approximately $4.75 million, to the shareholders of Eleos, but only upon certain development milestones being met, which could take up to a year to achieve. In the interim, the Company will fund technology development in the amount of $1 million under a license agreement that will see the Company own an undivided one half of the technology developed. In the event the transactions does not close without any malfeasance on behalf of Eleos, Eleos will receive full ownership of the technology.

Arm-lengths finders' fees totalling $10,000 in cash and 200,000 common shares of the Company are payable at closing.

The Company is undertaking a private placement of up to $1,500,000 by the sale of units at $0.05, each unit consisting of one common share and one warrant exercisable into one common share at a price of $0.10 in the first year and $0.15 in the second year. This private placement will not close until after the shareholder meeting referred to below, at which time a 2 for 1 share consolidation is expected to be approved.

The transaction is subject to exchange approval, further due diligence and shareholder approval at a shareholder meeting to be called for a date in May. The transaction will be considered a Fundamental Change pursuant to the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange, subject to shareholder and CSE review. Trading in the shares of the Company will be halted pending review and approval of the transaction.

About Eleos

Eleos plans to design a fully autonomous, eco-friendly, and sustainable weeding technology for growers. Once built, the RoboWeeder is anticipated to be sold fully maintained and monitored remotely. The technology better reflects consumer demand for organic produce and uses cutting-edge technology in robotics and artificial intelligence. There are several patents pending surrounding this technology.

Once completed the RoboWeeder is expected to be a technology driven solution to a farm process that is time-consuming, laborious, and expensive and currently has no sustainable alternatives. It proposes to reduces labour and make herbicides obsolete. Unlike pulling or hoeing weeds, it is fully automated, and unlike herbicides, is sustainable and eco-friendly. The RoboWeeder is expected to save time, increase productivity, and is fully organic.

RoboWeeder is anticipated to be able to detect, identify, and then eliminate weeds that destroy growers' crops. It is anticipated that it will autonomously patrol crops searching for weeds, and then eliminate them with a high-precision directed microwave. The target goal will be to create a 10-acre "weed-free zone". It is proposed to be self-charging with an autonomous station and be able to operate day and night without supervision.

Eleos has an experienced multi-disciplinary, international and multi-cultural business and product development team. They account for decades of experience in machine learning/vision, automation, horticulture, data science, system engineering/robotics, and business development.

Pursuant to the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange, trading in the shares of the Company will be halted pending review and approval of this transaction by the exchange.

For further information, please contact:

Doug Taylor, CEO

Investor Relations

Telephone: 1 (604) 343-2977

E-mail: irglenbriartech@gmail.com

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Certain statements contained in this release may constitute "forward-looking statements" or "forward-looking information" (collectively "forward-looking information") as those terms are used in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and similar Canadian laws. These statements relate to future events or future performance. The use of any of the words "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated", "anticipates" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. In particular, this release contains forward-looking information relating to the business of the Company, financing and certain corporate changes. The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof and the Company is not obligated 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 laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein.

SOURCE: Glenbriar Technologies Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/539127/Glenbriar-Announces-Agreement-to-Acquire-Eleos-Robotics-Inc
Press Release



Lausanne, 15 March 2019



Growth of adjusted* revenue by 10.4% in constant



currencies to CHF 971.7m

Increase of adjusted operating profit before exceptional items



by 24.7% to CHF 101.1m

Net profit Group share up 10.5% to CHF 50.8m

Cash dividend of CHF 5.00 per share; exceptional distribution of treasury shares (1:35) for the 60 years of



Compagnie Financiere Tradition











CHF m



2018 2017 Variation in current currencies Variation in constant currencies Reported (IFRS) Revenue 884.7 802.5 +10.2% +9.5% Operating profit 57.9 63.1 -8.2% -7.9% Operating margin 6.5% 7.9% Net profit Group share 50.8 46.4 +9.4% +10.5% Adjusted* Revenue 971.7 873.5 +11.2% +10.4% Operating profit before exceptional items 101.1 80.8 +25.2% +24.7% Operating margin before exceptional items 10.4% 9.3%

* with proportionate consolidation method for joint ventures

Overview

The Group's overall activity improved during the year, growing compared with 2017, benefiting in particular from a positive market environment. Moreover, the interdealer broking business (IDB) benefited from recruitment efforts of specialised brokers to reinforce the Group's presence in a number of regions and asset classes.

Against this backdrop, the Group's adjusted consolidated revenue reached CHF 971.7m compared with CHF 873.5m in 2017, a rise of 11.2% at current exchange rates, or 10.4% in constant currencies. Adjusted revenue from IDB business rose 9.7% in constant currencies to CHF 935.0m while the forex trading business for retail investors in Japan, Gaitame.com, was up 31.9% to CHF 36.7m.

The Group's performance in 2018 helped generate a substantial increase in its direct contribution, up by nearly CHF 40m, however impacted by an increase in exceptional costs. Thus adjusted operating profit before exceptional items was CHF 101.1m against CHF 80.8m in 2017, a rise of 25.2% at current exchange rates and 24.7% in constant currencies, for an operating margin of 10.4% and 9.3% respectively. Exceptional costs represented CHF 23.5m against CHF 9.4m during the previous year.

Reported revenue and operating profit

The Group reported consolidated revenue (IFRS) of CHF 884.7m against CHF 802.5m in 2017, up 9.5% in constant currencies.

Reported operating profit for the year was down 7.9% in constant currencies to CHF 57.9m compared with CHF 63.1m in 2017, for an operating margin of 6.5% and 7.9% respectively.

Net profit

The financial result represented a net expense of CHF 5.1m in 2018 against CHF 4.4m for the previous year. Net financial result mainly included interest expense on bank borrowings and bonds, net of interest income from the investment of short-term cash as well as net foreign exchange differences due to exchange rate fluctuations.

The share in the results of associates and joint ventures was CHF 17.5m against CHF 6.3m in 2017, a rise of 177.7% at current exchange rates and 175.8% in constant currencies, thanks to the Group's good performance in Mainland China and that of Gaitame.com.

The consolidated tax charge for the year was CHF 15.3m against CHF 16.4m in 2017, for an effective tax rate of 29% against 28% respectively.

Consolidated net profit was CHF 55.0m compared with CHF 48.6m in 2017 with a Group share of CHF 50.8m against CHF 46.4m in 2017, an increase of 10.5% in constant currencies.

Balance sheet

The Group maintained its focus on a sound balance sheet with a strong capital position while keeping a low level of intangible assets and a strong net cash position. Before deduction of treasury shares of CHF 34.1m, consolidated equity amounted to CHF 435.4m at 31 December 2018 with an adjusted cash of CHF 189.1m, including Group share of net cash held by joint ventures.

At 31 December 2018, consolidated equity stood at CHF 401.3m (31 December 2017: CHF 398.4m) of which CHF 383.3m was attributable to shareholders of the parent (31 December 2017: CHF 382.9m). Total adjusted cash, including financial assets at fair value, net of financial debt, was CHF 96.7m at 31 December 2018 against CHF 137.9m at 31 December 2017.

Dividend

At the Annual General Meeting to be held on 23 May 2019, the Board will be seeking shareholders' approval to pay a cash dividend of CHF 5.0 per share (yield of 4.7%1). In addition, an exceptional distribution of treasury shares will also be proposed for the 60 years of Compagnie Financiere Tradition with one share distributed for each 35 shares held (yield of 3.0%1).

Outlook

The Group will remain focused on external and organic growth opportunities in order to further enhance its product portfolio, against a backdrop of advanced consolidation in the industry around three global players, including Compagnie Financiere Tradition.

Annual report

The 2018 annual report of Compagnie Financiere Tradition SA will be available on 26 April 2019 on the Company's website at http://tradition.com/financials/reports.aspx

1 Indicative value based on 14 March 2019 closing share price of CHF 105.50 per share

ABOUT COMPAGNIE FINANCIERE TRADITION SA





Compagnie Financiere Tradition SA is one of the world's largest interdealer brokers in over-the-counter financial and commodity related products. Represented in 29 countries, Compagnie Financiere Tradition SA employs more than 2,300 people globally and provides broking services for a complete range of financial products.





MEDIA CONTACTS



Patrick Combes, President

Compagnie Financiere Tradition SA

+41



Rohan Sant

Voxia communication

+41

Attachment
OUTOTEC OYJ PRESS RELEASE MARCH 15, 2019 9:00 AM

Invitation to a Q&A teleconference with Outotec

The Q&A teleconference with CEO Markku Terasvasara will be held on Friday, March 22, 2019 at 2:00 PM (Finnish time).

JOINING THE TELECONFERENCE AND PRESENTING QUESTIONS

Dial in 5-10 minutes prior to the start time using the number below.

Conference code: 26131918#

FI: +358 981 710 310

SE: +46 856 642 651

UK: +44 333 300 08 04

US: +1 631 913 14 22

Questions may be sent also in advance via email to riitta.lind(at)outotec.com by March 22 at 10:00 AM. The recording of the teleconference and transcript will be published and stored on Outotec's website for on demand listening.

The contact information is gathered for registration purposes only and it is not used for commercial purposes.

The aim of the CEO's Q&A teleconferences is to give further clarity on information, which has been made public already earlier. Therefore, the company does not intend to publish separate announcements in connection with these sessions. In order to serve the capital market efficiently, and ensure equal access to company-related information, the teleconference is recorded and it is available on demand for future references.

OUTOTEC OYJ

Rita Uotila, Vice President - Investor Relations

tel. +358 20 529 2003

e-mail: rita.uotila(at)outotec.com

DISTRIBUTION:

Main media

www.outotec.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: Outotec Oyj via Globenewswire


The acquisition is the latest step in growing the Experience Agency's programmatic advertising capabilities in Europe

Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has acquired Storm Digital, a full service digital marketing agency specializing in search, social and programmatic advertising services that transforms customer experiences through strategic, technological, analytical and creative solutions.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005051/en/

Storm troopers just got Interactive (Photo: Business Wire)

The acquisition expands the presence of Accenture Interactive in the Dutch market and supports the Experience Agency's ability to create enhanced experiences from start to finish, through creative strategy, content creation, activation, measurement and optimization of media and campaigns across multiple platforms. Along with recently acquired US based Adaptly Storm's digital marketing and media services will strengthen the capabilities of Accenture Interactive Programmatic Services.

Founded in 2006, Storm Digital specializes in creating impactful digital customer experiences for leading Dutch companies and brands, including ABN AMRO, Exact, KLM, Rituals and Transavia. Its capabilities include data collection, audience analytics, search, social and programmatic advertising services, media planning and buying, content creation, dynamic creative services and digital business services.

"Accenture Interactive has continued to scale programmatic services for global brands; with the addition of Storm Digital, we can move faster and further in terms of scale and expertise, and help to drive strong results for our clients," said Anatoly Roytman, head of Accenture Interactive Europe, Africa and Latin America.

Storm Digital CEO Viktor van der Wijk states: "We're very proud to have attracted the attention of the world's largest digital agency. Storm Digital is well respected in digital marketing and Accenture Interactive has acknowledged that. Joining Accenture Interactive enriches our team and clients with international scalable digital solutions that are essential to win in an increasingly demanding environment."

"The Storm Digital team and their robust capabilities will complement and enhance our presence in the Netherlands and inject a greater level of data-driven media experiences that we can deliver to our clients," said Ron Vrijmoet, head of Accenture Interactive, Netherlands.

Storm Digital has approximately 90 employees located in Amsterdam and Groningen, who will become part of Accenture Interactive. Storm Digital serves clients across a wide range of industries with specific focus on financial services, automotive, retail and travel.

This is the second investment Accenture Interactive has made to strengthen its presence in the Netherlands. Storm Digital follows the 2016 acquisition of Amsterdam-based mobile specialist, Mobgen. Recently Accenture Interactive also appointed three creative industry leaders to its team in the Netherlands.

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions underpinned by the world's largest delivery network Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With 469,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

Accenture Interactive helps the world's leading brands transform their customer experiences across the entire customer journey. Through our connected offerings in design, marketing, content and commerce, we create new ways to win in today's experience-led economy. Accenture Interactive is ranked the world's largest digital agency in the latest Ad Age Agency Report, for the third year in a row, and was named a 2019 Most Innovative Company in advertising by Fast Company. To learn more, follow us @AccentureACTIVE and visit www.accentureinteractive.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements in this news release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "may," "will," "should," "likely," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "projects," "believes," "estimates," "positioned," "outlook" and similar expressions are used to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. These include, without limitation, risks that: the transaction might not achieve the anticipated benefits for Accenture; Accenture's results of operations could be adversely affected by volatile, negative or uncertain economic and political conditions and the effects of these conditions on the company's clients' businesses and levels of business activity; Accenture's business depends on generating and maintaining ongoing, profitable client demand for the company's services and solutions including through the adaptation and expansion of its services and solutions in response to ongoing changes in technology and offerings, and a significant reduction in such demand or an inability to respond to the changing technological environment could materially affect the company's results of operations; if Accenture is unable to keep its supply of skills and resources in balance with client demand around the world and attract and retain professionals with strong leadership skills, the company's business, the utilization rate of the company's professionals and the company's results of operations may be materially adversely affected; Accenture could face legal, reputational and financial risks if the company fails to protect client and/or company data from security breaches or cyberattacks; the markets in which Accenture operates are highly competitive, and Accenture might not be able to compete effectively; changes in Accenture's level of taxes, as well as audits, investigations and tax proceedings, or changes in tax laws or in their interpretation or enforcement, could have a material adverse effect on the company's effective tax rate, results of operations, cash flows and financial condition; Accenture's profitability could materially suffer if the company is unable to obtain favorable pricing for its services and solutions, if the company is unable to remain competitive, if its cost-management strategies are unsuccessful or if it experiences delivery inefficiencies; Accenture's results of operations could be materially adversely affected by fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates; as a result of Accenture's geographically diverse operations and its growth strategy to continue geographic expansion, the company is more susceptible to certain risks; Accenture's business could be materially adversely affected if the company incurs legal liability; Accenture's work with government clients exposes the company to additional risks inherent in the government contracting environment; if Accenture is unable to manage the organizational challenges associated with its size, the company might be unable to achieve its business objectives; if Accenture does not successfully manage and develop its relationships with key alliance partners or fails to anticipate and establish new alliances in new technologies, the company's results of operations could be adversely affected; Accenture's ability to attract and retain business and employees may depend on its reputation in the marketplace; Accenture might not be successful at acquiring, investing in or integrating businesses, entering into joint ventures or divesting businesses; if Accenture is unable to protect its intellectual property rights or if Accenture's services or solutions infringe upon the intellectual property rights of others or the company loses its ability to utilize the intellectual property of others, its business could be adversely affected; changes to accounting standards or in the estimates and assumptions Accenture makes in connection with the preparation of its consolidated financial statements could adversely affect its financial results; many of Accenture's contracts include payments that link some of its fees to the attainment of performance or business targets and/or require the company to meet specific service levels, which could increase the variability of the company's revenues and impact its margins; Accenture's results of operations and share price could be adversely affected if it is unable to maintain effective internal controls; Accenture might be unable to access additional capital on favorable terms or at all and if the company raises equity capital, it may dilute its shareholders' ownership interest in the company; Accenture may be subject to criticism and negative publicity related to its incorporation in Ireland; as well as the risks, uncertainties and other factors discussed under the "Risk Factors" heading in Accenture plc's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and other documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Statements in this news release speak only as of the date they were made, and Accenture undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements made in this news release or to conform such statements to actual results or changes in Accenture's expectations.

Copyright 2019 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005051/en/

Contacts:

Anja van Beijnum

Accenture

+31 6 133 00 503

anja.van.beijnum@accenture.com



Alexandra Annable

Accenture Interactive

+44 7918780916

alexandra.annable@accenture.com
LONDON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Recent reports by US-based broadcaster NBC and Karger , a Swiss-based medical and scientific publishing company, highlight that some CBD brands have very poor quality standards or appear to be intentionally deceiving consumers. Shocking findings from several independent reports into the CBD market reveal:

Some products claiming to contain CBD actually contain zero CBD

Many products contain less than the claimed quantity of CBD

Some products contain unacceptable levels of lead, pesticides, contaminants or other poisonous materials

Satipharm welcome such revealing reporting into CBD products in order to make consumers think twice about what is being bought and from where.

Jonathan Hartshorn, CEO of Satipharm commented:

"These reports highlight the need for consumers to beware of buying poor quality, untested, incorrectly labelled products that may contain little or no CBD. Insisting on a CBD product that is GMP certified will ensure that the product contains the right level of CBD."

Satipharm suggest that the answer to this problem lies in choosing a CBD product that adheres to Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) as a mark of guaranteed quality and safety.

Experts such as Dr. Peter Widdess-Walsh, a consultant neurologist at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin, advise that:

"Medicinal cannabis products [have] variable and unregulated production unless GMP certified."

Satipharm CEO Jonathan Hartshorn goes on to highlight that:

"Providing consumers with quality, reliable CBD products to support their health and wellness is paramount, which is why we adhere to the stringent quality standards required under Good Manufacturing Practice. This is very closely regulated and monitored in order to ensure our end-to-end manufacturing practices meet or exceed these demanding measures, to ensure quality, safety and consistency of dose."

In addition to GMP status, Satipharm products are manufactured in Switzerland to pharmaceutical specifications, despite being classified as a food supplement in the EU. Every production run is subject to batch testing against strict specifications, which comply with European pharmaceutical level limits for impurities, including heavy metals, toxins, bacteria, solvents, pesticides and more.

Satipharm also test for various cannabinoids, to ensure every capsule has the specified quantity of CBD, and to guarantee that contents are within the European limits for psychoactive cannabinoids such as THC. The legal limit for THC is 0.2%, however Satipharm 10mg capsules are manufactured with a reduced level of less than 0.05%.

For more information about what to look for when considering CBD brands and products, Satipharm have produced a free buying guide, which is available for download now.

About Satipharm

Satipharm is a health and wellness company which specialises in the development and manufacture of the highest quality cannabinoid-based products, manufactured in a regulated, safe environment in line with Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP).
SXSW 2019 has been and gone. Another five days of trying to drink from a fire hydrant of knowledge, powered by some of the worlds most inspiring leaders across tech, design, brand, sports, health and politics.

In the moment, its a constant frenzy of note scribbling and rushing between sessions. By day five, my memories of individual talks seem to have smushed together into a single mega-presentation of tweetable quotes, beautifully designed slides and standing ovations.

But a day or two afterwards, as things settle down, I start to notice the snippets still floating around in my mind. The half thoughts, the different perspectives, the new ideas still nagging for my attention.

Rather than a detailed account of what happened in every session on every day, heres whats still swirling around in my post SXSW haze.

1. Nick Law on who should lead

Nick Law is undoubtedly one of the best thinkers in agency land. Hes had a huge impact on the way Ive thought about strategy, creativity and the role of agencies over the last decade. Amongst other things, Law was the Creative Lead at RGA over the period where they effectively taught the rest of the marketing world how to use the internet (Nike+, Nike ID and much much more).

Law, now Global Chief Creative Officer at Publicis Groupe, spoke about the importance of having creative leadership at the very highest levels of agencies and holding groups. He referenced an old Steve Jobs interview in which Jobs discusses the importance of promoting product people over sales people.

The thinking goes that in stable, monopolistic environments, the people who can have the biggest impact on a business are those in sales and marketing. These are the guys and girls who win deals, drive growth, get promoted and end up in leadership positions. Unfortunately, the byproduct of this, is that the underlying product culture, the innovation that grew the company in the first place, withers and dies (eg Xerox, IBM and many FMCG businesses). The companies forget what it means to make great products.

Conversely, in dynamic, highly competitive environments, the people who can have the biggest impact on a companys success are product people. Those obsessed with pushing the boundaries, inventing new things, creating better outcomes for customers. In our world, these are the creatives and strategists, who Law believes should be operating at an agencys highest levels (in contrast to finance or account people), shaping the work, the organisational structure and the processes for bringing greatness to life.

2. Where growth curves intersect: Podcasts and Loneliness

Every year there are unofficial themes that permeate the hundreds of talks across SXSW. In years gone by, it was impossible to go an hour without hearing about virtual reality, diversity and inclusion, Mars or artificial intelligence. This year, it was all about loneliness.

Whether you were in a session about tech trends, the role of brands, the need for courage, our polarised political environment or the inevitability of robot overlords, the rise of loneliness was on the agenda. London has officially been recognised as the loneliest city in the world. I guess it makes sense then, that in January this year Prime Minister Theresa May officially appointed a Minister of Loneliness to help reverse the curve.

Across the pond, weve seen another meteoric rise. Dubbed as the second golden age of audio, podcasts are officially exploding. This year, 90 million Americans will listen to a podcast. Thats 20 million more than last year.

Gimlet Media, founded in 2014, has been one of the biggest drivers and beneficiaries of this growth (they were purchased by Spotify for $230m earlier this year). Cofounder Matt Lieber took the stage with leaders from Spotify and Anchor (another recent Spotify acquisition) to talk about the current state of audio.

Within this, he outlined the three reasons people listen to podcasts, at least two of which any new Gimlet show needs to hit;

For the enjoyment of being told a story

For the chance to learn something new

For the companionship that comes from feeling like youre part of the conversation between hosts

While point three has been a truism of radio (especially talkback radio) since the dawn of time, I couldnt help but think that podcasts are helping to scratch a rising loneliness itch thats being felt around the world.

3. The Instagram founders on expediting the inevitable

Sometimes you need to make sacrifices for the greater good. At SXSW, this can mean sitting through a session you have absolutely no interest in, just to ensure you have a seat for the next session happening in the same room. Such was the case as I endured a vacuous one hour interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, eagerly awaiting Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who were doing their first interview since leaving Facebook late last year.

In addition to being equal parts brilliant and humble, the guys left me with plenty to think about. One such pearl was their take on adding advertisements to Instagram following the $1b acquisition by Facebook. They said that while people outside assumed Facebook was pushing their ad model onto the newly purchased (still ad-free) platform, there was, in fact, lots of pull coming from the other side.

For a start, they maintain that they wanted to be able to contribute to the (financial) success of the organisation that had just given them a billion dollars (fair enough).

But more interesting was their view that every person who joined the platform before there were ads, would be an additional person theyd need to introduce ads to at some point down the track. Surely it was better for ads to have always just been there, right?
The European Investment Trust Plc - Transaction in Own Shares

The European Investment Trust plc ("the Company")

The Company announces that on 14 March 2019 it purchased the following number of its ordinary shares of 25 pence each on the main market of the London Stock Exchange.

Ordinary Shares:

Date of purchase: 14 March 2019 Number of ordinary shares purchased: 40,000 Lowest price per share 800p Highest price per share 800p

The Company intends to cancel the purchased shares.

Following the above transaction, the Company has 40,546,769 ordinary shares in issue. Each of the Company's shares carries one vote. Accordingly, the total number of voting rights of the Company is 40,546,769.

15 March 2019

LEI: 213800QNN9EHZ4SC1R12

Enquiries:

Kenneth J Greig

Edinburgh Partners AIFM Limited

Tel: 0131 270 3800

The Company's registered office address is:

Beaufort House

51 New North Road

Exeter

EX4 4EP
ROCKVILLE, Maryland, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --Fiducial markers are basically objects that are positioned in the vicinity of an imaging system structure, which even appears in the produced image. Looking at its prominent application, fiducial markers are placed close to the tumor in order to assist in the placement of radiation beams at the time of radiation treatment. Presently, the adoption of fiducial markers concerned with prostate cancer treatment is witnessing a persistent increase. This growth has been carefully analyzed and presented through a smart research study published by Fact.MR. The report is titled "Fiducial Markers Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking - Global Market Insights 2018 to 2028", which delivers exclusive insights associated to the fiducial markers market behavior during the forecast period until 2028. Furthermore, this assessment offers actionable perceptions and intelligence on upcoming performance of fiducial markers market in relation to expected opportunities across the global market scenario.

As per research specifics, fiducial markers sales are likely to surpass 100 Mn by 2019, thereby, registering an improvement from 93.9 Mn in 2018. The report also highlights that the target market is anticipated to expand at 9% CAGR through 2028, since demand for fiducial markers gain traction due to rising incidences of several cancer forms influencing lung, abdomen, prostate and kidney.

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Radiotherapy Centers Deliver Topmost End-User Valuation

Considering all the end-users comprising of hospitals, cancer research centers and radiotherapy centers, the sales of fiducial markers are projected to experience remarkable growth in the radiotherapy centers. To be precise, this end-user is anticipated to deliver a valuation exceeding US$ 39 Mn in 2019. One of the major drivers motivating this growth includes escalating implementation to treat different forms of malignant tumor or cancer, thus, nurturing sales of fiducial markers in radiotherapy centers.

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Working to raise its profile among U.S. investors, the Company has also retained KCSA Strategic Communications as its investor relations counsel

Vernon, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 15, 2019) - True Leaf Medicine International Ltd. (CSE: MJ) (OTCQX: TRLFF) (FSE: TLA) ("True Leaf" or the "Company"), a leading global cannabis and hemp wellness brand for pets, today announced that Tenzin Khangsar, the Company's Executive Vice President, and Kerry Biggs, Chief Financial Officer, are scheduled to participate in the 31st Annual ROTH Capital Conference to be held March 17-19, 2019, at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Orange County, CA.

Management will be available for one-on-one meetings with investors throughout the conference. To schedule a one-on-one meeting, please contact KCSA Strategic Communications at Trueleaf@KCSA.com or your ROTH Conference representative directly.

Management will also share the Company's newly launched brand identity, redesigned logo and product innovations that reflect its commitment to be the most trusted cannabis-for-pets brand world-wide.

The Company also announced that it has retained KCSA Strategic Communications ("KCSA"), a leading New York-based communications firm, to support the Company's investor relations efforts in the United States. KCSA will employ a comprehensive communications program designed to increase awareness of True Leaf across the investment community. Since KCSA's inception nearly fifty years ago, the firm has developed a reputation for its innovative and dedicated work representing public companies, and, most recently, has become one of the leading communications firms within the emerging cannabis industry.

"True Leaf has pioneered a fully legal route-to-market with its hemp-seed products," said Phil Carlson, Managing Director of KCSA Strategic Communications. "With its seasoned leadership, growing global retail distribution network, and innovative products, the Company is well positioned to establish itself as the most trusted cannabis-for-pets brand. We look forward to sharing the True Leaf story to a broader audience of institutional and retail investors."

About True Leaf

True Leaf is a leading global cannabis and hemp wellness brand for pets. Inspired by the unconditional love our pets give us every day, we return that love through our wellness pet products which help maintain and protect the natural vitality of our pet companions. "Return the Love" is the purpose that drives our business and is at the heart of our values to bring happiness to pets and their owners.

www.trueleaf.com

About the 31st Annual ROTH Conference

Following the success of the previous year's events, the ROTH Conference, with close to 550 participating companies and over 4,700 attendees, will feature presentations from public and private companies in a variety of sectors.

This gathering of institutional investors, private equity investors, VCs and executives, and service providers has become a must-attend event for anyone working in the small and mid-cap space.

For more information:

Media Contact

Paul Sullivan

Director, Public Relations

Paul@trueleaf.com

O: 604-685-4742

M: 604-603-7358

Investor Contact

Kevin Bottomley (Canada)

Director and Corporate Relations

Kevin@trueleaf.com

M: 778-389-9933

Phil Carlson (US)

KCSA Strategic Communications

pcarlson@kcsa.com

O: 212-896-1233

Scott Eckstein (US)

KCSA Strategic Communications

seckstein@kcsa.com

O: 212-896-1210

Follow True Leaf

Twitter: @trueleafpet

Facebook: True Leaf Pet

Instagram: @trueleafpet

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains forward-looking statements and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. Such written and oral disclosures are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and True Leaf hereby claims such safe harbour protection for all forward-looking statements. True Leaf believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions; however, True Leaf's actual results and performance and the value of its securities could differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements due to the impact of many factors summarized in the "Risk Factors" section of True Leaf's Offering Circular Form 1-A filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Canadian securities regulatory authorities and other discussions of risk factors contained in True Leaf's periodic filings or supplements to the offering circular. True Leaf's Offering Circular Form 1-A can be found at ir.trueleaf.com. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. True Leaf undertakes no obligation to update or revise any such information for any reason after the date of this presentation unless required by law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43438
Washington, D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - March 15, 2019) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Volkswagen AG, two of its subsidiaries, and its former CEO, Martin Winterkorn, for defrauding U.S. investors, raising billions of dollars through the corporate bond and fixed income markets while making a series of deceptive claims about the environmental impact of the company's "clean diesel" fleet.

According to the SEC's complaint, from April 2014 to May 2015, Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in the U.S. markets at a time when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the United States grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits, exposing the company to massive financial and reputational harm. The complaint alleges that Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance, and VW's financial standing. By concealing the emissions scheme, Volkswagen reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by issuing the securities at more attractive rates for the company, according to the complaint.

"Issuers availing themselves of American capital markets must provide investors with accurate and complete information," said Stephanie Avakian, Co-Director of the Division of Enforcement. "As we allege, Volkswagen hid its decade-long emissions scheme while it was selling billions of dollars of its bonds to investors at inflated prices."

The SEC's complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges Volkswagen AG, its subsidiaries Volkswagen Group of America Finance, LLC and VW Credit, Inc., and Winterkorn with violating the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws. The SEC complaint seeks permanent injunctions, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest, and civil penalties. The complaint also seeks an officer and director bar against Winterkorn.

The SEC's investigation was conducted by Kevin Wisniewski, Jake Schmidt, Amy Flaherty Hartman, and Daniel Nigro of the Complex Financial Instruments Unit and the Chicago Regional Office, under the supervision of Jeffrey Shank and Daniel Michael, Chief of the Enforcement Division's Complex Financial Instruments Unit. The litigation is being led by Daniel Hayes.
SHENZHEN, China, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- PUNK RAVE, the fashion brand founded by Chinese designer ZHI YI KIM 12 years ago, held a fashion catwalk show during Shenzhen Fashion Week on March 15. With designs that drew heavily from European goth and punk cultures, the brand has been distributed in Europe and other regions through a well-established network of national and regional agents since 2012. PUNK RAVE is well recognized in the gothic and punk worlds and has a large number of customers.

At the show in Shenzhen, designer ZHI YI KIM updated her original design style through the addition of Chinese elements and cyberpunk mixed in with a diversified panoply of design styles. According to the designer herself, the new design at the Chinese show will focus on the idea of "please stop doing something wrong and begin to do something right," with the goal of guiding and promoting a future-oriented consumption model that achieves a cultural, environmental, scientific and technological balance. For example, people were, once upon a time, infatuated by genuine animal furs, but later realized the negative impact on the future natural ecology, and most have given up real fur products and promoted the use of artificial fur as a substitute. In a move to recognize this awakening of the mind, the designer selected a scene full of animal specimens in the latest LOOK BOOK, representing what had been done before and refusing to repeat those actions as a way of supporting a better future. This show is divided into two parts: the past and the future. By comparing the expression on the faces and in the body language of the LOOK BOOK models and the designer, the audience will see that the models are expressing a lot of confidence in the future-oriented photos, but are full of pain and compassion when confronted with the scene full of animal specimens.

PUNK RAVE, one of the more interesting brands as well as one with a strong sense of social responsibility, comes from China, the birthplace of Oriental civilization.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836295/PUNK_RAVE.jpg
LONDON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Webnovel, the global e-publishing arm of China Literature (0772.HK), China's leading online literature and IP incubator company, brought its original and translated publications to the London Book Fair ("the Fair"). The company also organized a speech by Liu Yuren, Content Director of Webnovel, where he talked about new trends in the field of online publishing. What's more, Webnovel launched its branded cartoon during the Fair and received enthusiastic feedback from many fans.

Webnovel organized a discussion at the London Book Fair to exchange ideas with more overseas publishers, content developers and readers about new trends and online publishing business models. Yuren Liu, Content Director of Webnovel, talked about how micro-transactions and an in-game-purchase model can be utilized in the online publishing industry, and Webnovel's strategy to push ahead with such models.

In addition, the company also brought to the Fair the Pocket Reader - an e-book reader that China Literature developed that can easily fit in a pocket. The product features a voice feature, enabling readers to listen to the books. It can also support SIM cards and is equipped with an E-Ink display.

Founded in 2017 as an overseas portal of China Literature, Webnovel offers a comprehensive platform for online literature. It has gathered more than 16,000 international authors and more than 200 individual translators and groups, who have published over 23,000 original novels, 300 translated novels and some translated Chinese and Korean webtoons. Recent trending publications on Webnovel include Reborn: Evolving from Nothing, Library of Heaven's Path, The King's Avatar, and more.

Webnovel has developed a unique business model and ecosystem where authors, platforms and readers can work together to reshape the online publishing industry. Webnovel offers support from story creation to publishing with professional writing advice from the company's editorial team. Also, its excellent royalty payment and Contracted Works Guarantee systems ensure authors' earnings. What's more, authors on the platform also have the chance to commercialize their works. They can bring their characters and stories beyond the page, developing their works into movies, TV series, cartoons, and video games.

Webnovel offers users an interesting and diversified interactive community service, where they can follow updates from the author, post comments, and learn about the culture behind a work. They can also share their reading and writing experiences in various online communities.

About Webnovel

Webnovel, a global fictional stories hub, was launched in 2017 as the overseas portal of China Literature, which is China's leading online literature and IP incubator. With a comprehensive platform, both on a website and in an app, it is committed to the global dissemination of web novels, bringing more value to authors worldwide and delivering high-quality web novels and an excellent reading experience to global readers. Download the Webnovel app on Android and iOS.

About China Literature

China Literature (0772.HK) was founded in March, 2015. A leading authorized digital reading platform and literature intellectual property (IP) incubator, China Literature has a renowned collection of content brands of Chinese digital reading including QQ Reading and qidian.com. The company has reserved more than 10 million digital works, hosts 7.3 million writers, and covers more than 200 content categories. With hundreds of millions of users in China, China Literature has become a leader in the market in terms of quality and quantity of content, influence of authors, and value of IP. The Company's shares were listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on November 8, 2017.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836257/CHINA_LITERATURE_book_fair.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836259/CHINA_LITERATURE_speech.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836258/CHINA_LITERATURE_homepage.jpg

Video - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836292/Webnovel_video.mp4
MUNICH, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (Zoomlion) will attend bauma 2019 with new construction machinery products designed to meet the needs of European clients. The world's largest construction trade fair will be held from April 8 to 14 in Munich, Germany.

A total of 43 products from six major categories of concrete machinery, cranes, tower cranes, dry-mixed mortar equipment, aerial working platform and forklifts will be exhibited at the trade show, highlighting Zoomlion's digitalized, networked and smart development as well as a globalization strategy that accentuates localized operation.

Among the exhibition, over 70% of the products are manufactured in Europe with functions, technological innovations and style designs that fully meet the demands of European clients. Zoomlion's subsidiary brands in Europe, CIFA, m-tec and Wilbert, will be showing their latest products as well.

Here are some highlights from Zoomlion's exhibition at the upcoming bauma 2019:

The unveiling of a high-performance, cost-effective pump truck built with carbon fiber technology.

The Energya series green mixer truck, which adopts both electric and diesel power, will reflect Zoomlion's cutting-edge technological achievements and sustainable development philosophy.

The debut of a new all-terrain crane product series with CE marking jointly developed by CIFA and Zoomlion's R&D team.

The ZRT850 all-terrain crane, which is designed specifically for oil field projects.

The debut of Wilbert's flat-top tower crane, the WT260.

The T7020 flat-top tower crane that's optimized to achieve a maximum lifting weight of 10-12 tons.

12 products from m-tec and four scissors lift platforms from Zoomlion.

Themed "Local Presence, Better Life," Zoomlion's exhibition at the upcoming bauma 2019 trade show will be at booth FS905/2 and cover an area of 3,840 square meters (41,333 square feet).

About Zoomlion

Founded in 1992, Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., Ltd. (Zoomlion) is a high-end equipment manufacturing enterprise that integrates engineering machinery, agricultural machinery and financial services. The company now sells nearly 800 cutting-edge products from 49 product lines covering nine major categories. Zoomlion is China's first construction machinery company to be listed on both the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

For more information, please visit http://en.zoomlion.com/.
Vycellix, Inc. today announced that the Company, founded by leading medical researchers at Sweden's world renowned Karolinska Institutet, will present at the Innate Killer Summit 2019 to be held in San Diego, March 20-21.

On Wednesday, March 20th at 4:20pm PT, Vycellix's founding CEO, Evren Alici, M.D., Ph.D. will present the session titled, "Utilizing Ex Vivo Expanded Natural Killer Cells for Both Allogeneic and Autologous Uses." Dr. Alici's talk will cover:

Strategies to combine adoptive NK cell therapies with monoclonal antibody therapies

Examining bottlenecks and strategies to overcome them in NK cell-based immunotherapy clinical trials

For more information and to register to attend this event, please visit: https://innate-killer.com/

About Vycellix, Inc.:

Headquartered on the campus of the Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, Florida, Vycellix is a closely-held immunotherapy-focused, discovery company with the mission to fundamentally impact the challenges that currently prevail in the area of cell gene based-therapies. The Company is engaged in the development of proprietary approaches for cell-based immunotherapeutic products and to improve patient outcomes.

Vycellix's scientific discoveries coupled with a portfolio of small molecule RNA modulators address current limitations for cell gene therapies, including the need to accelerate speed of production, lower costs, ensure end-cell viability and persistence, and improve patient outcomes.

The Company's innovative solutions offer the potential to significantly optimize processes for: cell reprogramming; enhancing cell potency; and improving cell expansion. Additionally, the Company is leveraging its assets to develop an early-stage pipeline of multifaceted, next-generation NK cell therapies targeting hematological malignancies and solid tumors, including its RONK (Retargeted Optimized NK cell) therapy.

The Company's products were all discovered by scientists at the world renowned Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. KI is globally recognized for its Nobel Assembly, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

For more information, please visit the Company's website at: www.Vycellix.com and follow its Twitter feed at: @Vycellix

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005062/en/

Contacts:

Vycellix Corporate Contact:

Douglas W. Calder, President

Phone: (772)-418-6302

Email: dcalder@vycellix.com
Addition follows Florida Chemical acquisition, creating a global leader in citrus flavors

Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE: ADM) announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire the Ziegler Group, a leading European provider of natural citrus flavor ingredients. The agreement comes shortly after ADM completed its addition of U.S.-based citrus flavor provider Florida Chemical.

"Ziegler is highly respected as a cutting-edge leader in citrus, and we're excited to welcome their outstanding leadership and talent to ADM," said Vince Macciocchi, president of ADM's Nutrition business. "The combination of Ziegler and Florida Chemical will immediately position ADM for growth as a global leader in natural citrus ingredients, with a complete range of innovative citrus solutions and systems for food, beverage and fragrance customers."

Founded in 1963, Ziegler uses proprietary cold concentration technologies to produce natural high-quality citrus oils, extracts, concentrates and compounds for flavor, food, and beverage industry customers, focusing on Europe, the U.S. and Japan. The company is privately held and headquartered in Aufsess, in southern Germany.

"We are delighted that we found a strong home at ADM where both our business and our people can grow," said Gunter Ziegler. "The integration of more than 50 years of citrus expertise into the ADM group will secure our top priority: successful long-term growth for our business and our employees. Our family members will be staying with the company to help ensure a smooth transition. We're excited to join ADM and strongly believe that the combination of our technology and citrus capabilities, coupled with the portfolio of ingredients and global reach of ADM, will accelerate growth opportunities while creating benefits for our customers."

"Citrus is one of the fastest-growing, highest-demand flavors for food and beverages, which is why the creation of a global citrus platform offering a complete product line for our customers is such an important capability for our growth strategy," Macciocchi continued. "We're continuing the most ambitious portfolio transformation in our company's long history, and as we build the world's leading nutrition company, the beneficiaries will be our customers and our shareholders."

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close in the second quarter of 2019.

Forward-Looking Statements

Some of the above statements constitute forward-looking statements. ADM's filings with the SEC provide detailed information on such statements and risks, and should be consulted along with this release. To the extent permitted under applicable law, ADM assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

About ADM Nutrition

ADM is a world-leading nutrition company with the widest range of specialty ingredients, blends, systems and experience. We move customers from concept to launch faster with sustainable, differentiated products that address their evolving needs. ADM helps our customers create consumer-preferred nutritional solutions through our on-trend and customizable portfolio of natural flavors and colors; an unmatched range of plant-based proteins; industry-leading, science-backed bioactives; as well as specialty ingredients such as hydrocolloids, lecithin, Omega-3 solutions, probiotics, polyols, texturants, soluble fibers and much more. Our talented team also provides consumer insights and intelligence; sensory expertise; culinary creativity; and full product-development services.

About ADM

For more than a century, the people of Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE: ADM) have transformed crops into products that serve the vital needs of a growing world. At the end of 2018, we were one of the world's largest agricultural processors and food ingredient providers, with approximately 32,000 employees serving customers in more than 170 countries. With a global value chain that includes approximately 450 crop procurement locations, 270 food and feed ingredient manufacturing facilities, 46 innovation centers and the world's premier crop transportation network, we connect the harvest to the home, making products for food, animal feed, industrial and energy uses. Learn more at www.adm.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005193/en/

Contacts:

Archer Daniels Midland Company

Media Relations

Jackie Anderson

media@adm.com

312-634-8484
Niagara Falls, Ontario and Maryland, USA--(Newsfile Corp. - March 15, 2019) - EnerDynamic Hybrid Technologies Corp. (TSXV: EHT) ("EHT") is pleased to announce that it has entered into a Distribution Agreement with Energia Power Solutions LLC ("Energia"), based in Maryland USA, with offices in Jersey, Channel Islands.

The agreement will give Energia the right to sell the ENERTEC family of products. Energia has been in the renewable energy field for a number of years and has supply contracts currently that will be able to utilize all the EHT products.

CEO of Energia, Christy Spencer, commented, "We look forward to working with EHT and we are very proud to include ENERTEC's products in our solutions."

CEO of EHT, John Gamble, commented, "We are very pleased that Energia has selected EHT as their supplier; this again shows the versatility of our ENERTEC suite of products."

Ghana Update

EHT would like to update our progress on the Ghana company's loan application with Elevate Finance and EDC. At this time after the requesting of further documents from both Elevate and EDC the Ghana company, it has been determined that the company needs to improve its balance sheet by partnering with a larger company. EHT is working with the company to make this happen over next the few weeks and will resubmit to Elevate and EDC at that time.

About EnerDynamic Hybrid Technologies

EHT delivers proprietary, turn-key energy solutions which are intelligent, bankable and sustainable. EHT's expertise includes the development of its ENERTEC module structures with full integration of smart energy solutions. Using a proprietary skin and foam core that is stronger than traditional wood or steel structural insulated panels, EHT provides exceptional thermal energy efficiency in modular homes, cold storage facilities, residential/commercial out buildings and emergency/temporary shelters. EHT works with its partners worldwide to erect the buildings on-site utilizing EHT staff and local crews. In addition to traditional support to established electrical networks, ENERTEC buildings excel where no electrical grid exists.

About Energia Power Solutions

Energia is a solutions group providing creative and customizable solutions for disaster affected regions worldwide. Through renewable energy and water purification products and services, Energia is focused on meeting needs in those areas through a wide range of applications. Our solutions include: Distributed power generation and emergency power backup, temporary power for remote operations/sites, and emergency power and water purification for disaster areas. Our products include: Mobile Power Unit with Solar & Battery Storage), Mobile Power Unit with Water Purification System, Mobile Solar Panel and Racking Systems, Power Shelter with Solar and Battery Storage. Our services include: Rental Fleet Services for emergency power supply and water purification for disaster areas.

About ENERTEC

The EHT advanced ENERTEC Modular Wall and Roof System uses a proprietary skin and foam core that is stronger and more energy efficient than traditional wood or steel structures providing the highest ratings for energy efficiency. EHT works with its partners worldwide to erect the buildings on-site utilizing EHT staff and local crews. After installation, each structure can be furnished and finished to meet the customer's requirements including siding, tile, kitchens and bathrooms or segregated commercial rooms. The finished wall product can be shipped on pallets and delivered via rail, truck or water in standard formats.

At the core of the ENERTEC product line is the ENERTEC Embedded Solar Roof Module. Solar cells can be embedded in a proprietary fire proof skin resulting in substantial cost savings by eliminating heavy glass panels and aluminum racking required for traditional solar panels. Two barriers to greater adoption of solar energy are weight limitations of the roof on which solar panels could be deployed and onerous shipping and labour costs. A lighter product at a better price point will open a larger market for solar due to the faster return of capital investment especially for rural and remote users looking to go off-grid. Furthermore, the entire EHT embedded solar roof becomes a massive solar panel capable of producing significantly more energy than the home requires, allowing the structure to then become an important source of power for the local micro grid or large battery storage systems.

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.

The statements herein that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking information relating to sales of the products (the "Opportunities") involves risk, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events, results, performance, prospects, for the Opportunities to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Although EHT believes that the assumptions used in preparing the forward-looking information on the Opportunities outlined in this news release are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information, which only applies as of the date of this news release, and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed time frames or at all. EHT disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether a result of new information, future events or otherwise, other than as required by applicable securities laws.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

John Gamble

CEO & Director

(289) 488-1699

jgamble@ehthybrid.com

info@ehthybrid.com|

Website: www.ehthybrid.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43445
| BY Ricki Green |

Sweetshop has signed highly-acclaimed director Liz Murphy for global representation.

Murphys passion is to make stuff that gives people the feels. Her work has been recognised around the globe by the likes of Adfest and BADC, and in 2017, Murphy was named in Campaigns 10 female directors you should know on account of her ability to elicit stunning, emotional glimpses of life in all its peculiarities.

With numerous award-winning campaigns under her belt, the Australian-born director moved to London in 2010 with a focus on creating beautifully shot, emotive and observational films and narrative. As a highly sought-after director she has worked with brands such as Alpen, Kinder, McDonalds and The National Trust. Her deeply moving spot Bear for the charity Grief Encounter featured in the prestigious APA show in 2014.

Llew Griffiths, Sweetshops recently promoted executive producer and Edward Pontifex, Sweetshops managing director will be working closely with Murphy and agencies across Australia on script and creative opportunities.

Says Pontifex: Liz has a truly amazing eye for capturing the emotion from little moments of real life. Were delighted to have her join us and Im really excited about what she can offer our creative agencies here in Australia.

Says Murphy: I have admired Sweetshop since I was a little baby director back in Brisbane making coffee. The passion and enthusiasm of everyone there is inspiring and contagious. Im really excited to be joining the gang.

Says Wilf Sweetland, CEO and partner of Sweetshop: Liz is a wonderful person. Her work demonstrates an emphasis on sublime craft and emotional intelligence throughout her story telling  were honoured that someone with her talent has chosen to be represented by us globally.

To work with Liz, contact Edward Pontifex at epontifex@thesweetshop.tv

or Llew Griffiths at llew@thesweetshop.tv.
Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced the availability of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Wipro's AI-enabled, on-demand solutions on AWS will govern critical supply chain processes, and drive enhanced operational efficiency, productivity and superior customer experience for enterprise clients.

As part of this collaboration, Wipro's solutions such as Wipro HOLMES Machine Learning for Accounts Payable Auditor, Wipro HOLMES E-KYC and Wipro HOLMES Machine Learning for Contract solutions will be powered by AWS. Clients will benefit from the combined strengths of the AI and automation platform Wipro HOLMES and AWS AI and ML services. In addition, clients will be able to access Wipro HOLMES E-KYC Controller Extractor and Wipro HOLMES E-KYC Financials Extractor on AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning.

Wipro is a Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN).

"At AWS, our mission is to put machine learning in the hands of every developer. With AWS Marketplace, you can navigate, discover and deploy the ML models needed to build intelligent applications to fuel innovation. The AI and ML solutions leveraging Wipro HOLMES and AWS SageMaker help customers in applying AI to procurement, supply chain, compliance and other domains," said Garth Fort, Director, AWS Marketplace, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Wipro has implemented its Wipro HOLMES Machine Learning for Accounts Payable Auditor solution, powered by AWS, for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA). The solution audits vendor payment transactions to proactively detect process anomalies, identify outliers and prevent payment leakage in the company's procure to pay process.

Pierre Lanthier, Director of Innovation and Transformation, The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) said, "GTAA has embarked on a transformation journey with Wipro to achieve operational efficiencies and improve traveler experience. As part of this endeavor and given increasing business complexity, we were looking to apply innovative thinking in our procure to pay process. The Wipro HOLMES artificial intelligence and automation platform along with AWS have helped us adopt a preventive and proactive strategy to mitigate rising operational and compliance risks in our procure to pay process."

Rohit Adlakha, Vice President and Global Head Wipro HOLMES and Automation Ecosystem, Wipro Limited said, "We have leveraged the Wipro HOLMES AI and Automation platform and AWS AI and ML services to build several outcome-driven solutions. In addition, we have published some of our machine learning models on AWS Marketplace for Machine Learnings. Our relationship with AWS allows us to leverage the combined might of Wipro HOLMES and AWS to solve complex business problems for our clients in areas such as procure to pay, contract management, and customer onboarding, across industry sectors."

Wipro's AI and Automation platform, Wipro HOLMES represents Wipro's integrated automation capabilities across infrastructure, applications and business process services, delivered through a comprehensive blend of tasks, processes, and cognitive technologies. These capabilities have been deployed for over 350 clients across industries.

About Wipro Limited

Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. A company recognized globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship, we have over 175,000 dedicated employees serving clients across six continents. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future.

Forward-looking and Cautionary Statements

Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in our earnings, revenue and profits, our ability to generate and manage growth, intense competition in IT services, our ability to maintain our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which we make strategic investments, withdrawal of fiscal governmental incentives, political instability, war, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property, and general economic conditions affecting our business and industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. We may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005268/en/

Contacts:

Shraboni Banerjee

Wipro Limited

shraboni.banerjee@wipro.com
Cardston, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - March 15, 2019) - American Creek Resources Ltd. (TSXV: AMK) ("American Creek") is pleased to report on drilling results from the late fall exploration program conducted on its 100% owned Gold Hill property located in the Boulder Creek drainage, a tributary of the Wildhorse River east of Fort Steele, British Columbia. The preliminary program included four diamond drill holes on two sections totaling 2,087 meters of drilling. Nine hundred and twenty nine (929) drill core samples were analyzed.

The management and professionals that guided the exploration program are pleased and very encouraged by the results. There were multiple gold intersections in all 4 preliminary drill holes. A summary of the significant intersections and gold values is contained herein.

The 2018 drill program was conducted to test a Cretaceous age swarm of syenite porphyry dykes intruded into lower and middle Cambrian sediments. This is the first time that this package of rocks has ever been drilled. The drill program successfully intersected multiple zones of gold associated with several syenite dike targets as well as significant intervals of highly altered, silicified rock. In addition, there were several intersections of highly altered and, in some cases, calcareous sediments, some of which contained elevated gold values. These altered sediments will be further explored for gold content. They will also be useful as marker horizons guiding future drilling.

A high grade intersection in hole NS18-01 contained 66.4 g/t gold over 0.2 meters (true width unknown). This intersection correlates with prior historic gold values obtained in the area. Car samples and face samples from a drift (small tunnel) driven partially along the hanging wall of a syenite porphyry dyke in 1937 were assayed over a width of 1.5 feet (~0.5m). The car samples averaged 0.43 oz. Au per ton (13.4 g/t), 0.48 oz. (14.9g/t) Ag per ton and 2.3% Pb per ton over 40 feet (12.2m). The face samples along 22 feet (6.7m) averaged at 2.4 oz. Au per ton (74.6 g/t) 2.17 oz. (67.5 g/t) Ag per ton and 5.51% Pb.

The Gold Hill property covers approximately 836 hectares and is located along the eastern edge of the Kimberly Gold Trend. The property is road accessible by paved highway to Fort Steele and then by main logging roads to (and through) the property. Driving time from Cranbrook to the center of the property is less than one hour.

The property contains a significant portion of the Boulder Creek drainage, a tributary of the Wild Horse River which is considered to be one of the greatest placer gold rivers in the entire province. Gold rushes have taken place there since the 1860's that have yielded over 48 tonnes of reported gold, making it Canada's 4th largest placer producer. The majority of the gold recovered from the Wild Horse was located along a 6 km stretch between Boulder Creek (upstream) and Brewery Creek (downstream). From the point where Boulder Creek enters the Wild Horse River for a distance of 6 kilometers downstream, a minimum of 1.5 million ounces (45,655,215 grams) of placer gold was recovered between 1864 and the 1930's. In addition, an undetermined amount of placer gold was sold in the United States during this period but no records of the amount are available. The Boulder Creek drainage is the logical source of the placer gold recovered from the Wildhorse River below.

Early efforts by prospectors to locate the source of the Wild Horse placer gold led explorers up Boulder Creek to what is now called the Gold Hill property. Although lode gold was first found in the area by prospectors in the late 1800's, the Gold Hill property has not been the subject of any systematic modern exploration and prior to this program, the property has never been drill tested.

Significant Intercepts from Preliminary 2018 Drill Program





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Analysis of Results and Total Metal Discussion

Gold values, as tested by initial ICP analysis, range from slightly less than 0.5 g/t to 5.68 g/t. With reference to sample 043174 in hole NS18-01, where the initial analysis placed gold at >30,000 ppb (30.0 g/t), total metal analysis of the same sample returned a value of 66.4 g/t. To date, this is the only sample that has been analyzed for total metal. It was originally selected because of the proximal galena and visible gold.

Historical work on the property has noted the presence of metallic gold in samples that is not detected by conventional ICP analysis. A skilled, well trained and experienced Prospector discusses this phenom in Assessment Report 27,173 (Dec. 29, 2004). Again, in AR 34,920, (July 2015) a P. Geo. explained the presence of metallic gold. The following is a direct quote from AR 34,920 by the highly experienced P. Geo. who mapped the property: "work by the original prospectors and miners on the property from 1898 to 1957 did a good job of exposing gold-bearing structures and the related sulphides and gangue minerals. This work demonstrated the course nature of the gold which is commonly visible to the naked eye."

In light of the strong possibility that metallic gold was missed by the initial assaying, further assay work including advanced testing for metallics will be conducted. As a first step, 12 samples, all of which indicate significant gold values, have been selected for total metal analysis. The company is looking forward to receiving the total metal gold value for the 12 samples selected for this purpose. The results will be available when the additional assay analysis is completed.

There is some correlation between anomalous Pb in the samples with higher gold values however, they do not always correlate.

Frank O'Grady, P. Eng. and QP for the project stated: "This first look at the underground geological structure in the Big Chief area of the property is very encouraging. Not only are we seeing gold associated with multiple syenite dyke contacts, but we are also seeing gold showing up in the highly altered sediments. To have intersected gold in every hole, especially since we had no prior drill holes on the property to guide us, indicates the potential scope and scale of the property's potential going forward. We clearly have a large gold system we are dealing with here."

Darren Blaney, CEO of American Creek stated: "This is a significant first step in unravelling the mystery of the potential source of the large quantity of Wild Horse river placer gold collected downstream. Not only are we seeing widespread gold mineralization on surface, but we now also have our first glimpse at what is going on underneath a portion of the property. This preliminary program will be a tremendous aid in guiding future work on the project."





To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

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More pictures of the drill program can be viewed here in the Gold Hill Project photo gallery: https://americancreek.com/index.php/media-page/gallery/category/14-office

There are two main highly prospective targets on the property:

1. The Midas / Gold Hill prospect which is situated on the southern part of the property. The Midas is in an area of steep topography and is structurally controlled.

2. The Big Chief prospect which is situated on the northern portion of the property. The Big Chief is located on an area of moderate relief and is formed by hydrothermal activity from intruded syenite dikes of Cretaceous age.

The property is nominally divided into north and south portions by Boulder Creek which flows westerly through the property. This phase of the exploration program focused solely on a portion of the Big Chief prospect. The highly prospective area of the property situated south of Boulder Creek was not explored during 2018. This southern area, which includes high grade gold values in grab samples including 25.14 g/t from the Guggenheim showing, will be included in 2019 exploration.





Drill Hole Locations

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Further Analysis

Initial logging of the core combined with sample results has provided a basic understanding of the underground geological structure as well as the gold and accompanying metals present in the previously undrilled package or rocks underlying the Big Chief showings.

Sections containing increased Au, sometimes Ag and in several cases increased base metals which include Pb, Cu and Zn are contained in sections of intense alteration. This alteration includes, but may not be limited to, silicification, sericitization, carbonatization (in some places) and increased epidote.

The core will be carefully re-examined during 2019 with key sections being relogged. The initial logging was done under inclement conditions including low temperatures and poor light and without the benefit of any prior drill core assays for reference.

Qualified Person

Frank O'Grady, P.Eng., is the Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 for the Gold Hill Project and for this news release.

Important Links

A summary of the Gold Hill project can be found here:

https://americancreek.com/images/Gold_Hill_Summary_2018.pdf

About American Creek

American Creek holds a strong portfolio of gold and silver properties in British Columbia.

Three of those properties are located in the prolific "Golden Triangle"; the Treaty Creek and Electrum joint venture projects with Tudor Gold (Walter Storm) as well as the 100% owned past producing Dunwell Mine.

The Corporation also holds the Austruck-Bonanza, Ample Goldmax, Silver Side, and Glitter King properties located in other prospective areas of the province.

For further information please contact Kelvin Burton at: Phone: 403 752-4040 or Email: info@americancreek.com. Information relating to the Corporation is available on its website at www.americancreek.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43440
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 15, 2019) -STILLCANNA INC. (CSE: STIL) (FORMERLY EVI GLOBAL GROUP DEVELOPMENTS CORP.) ("StillCanna" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the Company's joint venture partner and anchor customer, UK based Dragonfly BioSciences, LLC, has increased its minimum monthly order of 50 kilos of CBD per month to over 170 kilos per month for the next quarter.

"This increase in extraction volume from Dragonfly is a testament to their success, our business timing and the demand for CBD in Europe," suggested Jason Dussault, CEO of StillCanna. "Dragonfly's minimum contract for 50 kilos a month made our Romanian extraction facility cash flow positive and profitable. This new order accelerates the Company's goal of meeting its 2019 revenue targets. Once again, I would like to thank our team for doing an amazing job!"

About StillCanna Inc.

StillCanna Inc. (CSE: STIL) www.stillcanna.com is a Canadian early-stage life sciences company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is focused on large scale CBD extraction in Europe. The Company feels its proprietary intellectual property allows it to extract CBD at a lower cost. The Company has signed an initial extraction contract in Europe to be the exclusive extractor for Dragonfly BioSciences LLC, a UK based supplier of CBD. The Company continues to look for other industry acquisitions that will enhance shareholder value.

For further information please contact: Joel Leonard, CFO, Director, StillCanna Inc.

E-mail: joel@stillcanna.com

Telephone: (778) 838-3692

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE or CNSX Markets), nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the CSE), accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43447
LEI: 213800T2PJTPVF1UGW53

From: Capital Gearing Trust P.l.c.

Date: 15 March 2019

Capital Gearing Trust P.l.c.

Publication of Circular and General Meeting

Since its approval at the annual general meeting in 2015, Capital Gearing Trust P.l.c. (the "Company") has successfully operated a discount and premium control policy. The Board remains committed to this policy which has been an important and constructive feature of the Company's operation over the last four years, not least in stabilising the pricing in the secondary market and whilst demand is found, growing the Company's capital base. In addition, the Company's continuing ability to issue ordinary shares at a premium to net asset value increases liquidity, spreads the fixed costs of the Company over a larger asset base and reduces volatility by preventing the build up of excessive demand for ordinary shares.

In order to meet the continuing demand for the Company's ordinary shares resulting from the operation of this policy, the Board is seeking the renewal of its shareholder authorities to issue further ordinary shares on a non pre-emptive basis. Accordingly, the Company has today published a circular convening a general meeting to be held at 11.00 a.m. on 2 April 2019 at the offices of Dickson Minto W.S., 16 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DF (the "General Meeting").

At the General Meeting, two resolutions will be put to shareholders. An ordinary resolution, to give the Board authority to allot up to 775,258 ordinary shares which represents approximately 10 per cent. of the Company's current issued share capital as at 14 March 2019 (the last practicable date prior to the date of the notice convening the General Meeting) and a special resolution, to give the Board authority to disapply rights of pre-emption in respect of the issue of such shares.

The Board will only issue new shares at a premium to net asset value, to meet demand from investors and when the Board believes it is in the best interests of the Company and its shareholders to do so.

The circular will shortly be available for inspection on the National Storage Mechanism which is located at http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/nsm.do.

All enquiries:

PATAC Limited

Company Secretary

Tel: 0131 538 6610

Email: company.secretary@capitalgearingtrust.com
Florida House Ends Ban on Smoking Medical MarijuanaAgainst the wishes of the Federal government, a growing number of states are legalizing medical and recreational marijuana. Florida is the latest state to greenlight the smoking of medical marijuana.In a landslide vote (101-11), the House passed the proposal on March 13. Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the bill into law by March 15. This will obviously be a boon for cannabis companies with operations in Florida. (Source: "In landslide vote, Florida House agrees to end ban on smoking medical marijuana," Miami Herald, March.

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
LONDON, March 15, 2019 In response to the historic House of Commons vote this week, some British entrepreneurs have launched an initiative to crowd-source ideas, to solve the challenges faced by UK and European Politicians.

12RPrizes are offering a token cash prize of 500 for the best solution to the problems presented by Brexit and will present the winning solution to the Government.

12RPrizes are being launched by the Twelve Ronnies. Twelve Ronnies was set up to encourage innovators, entrepreneurs, students, designers, tech enthusiasts, educators, doers and makers to solve some of the UK's problems. They do this by building partnerships between inventors and those with the business acumen to make their ideas a reality.

Twelve Ronnies Director and Co-Founder, Simon Krystman (who voted remain) explained why they were launching the competition: "The UK is renowned for being the home of innovation. Many of the greatest ideas, thinkers and innovators have come from these islands. This is a chance for anyone who believes they have a solution to the challenges posed by Brexit, to share it with the nation. Instead of simply moaning at the mess, we feel it's time that the people got involved again."

The challenges that face the politicians are well documented and include:

How do we manage the Northern Irish border?





How do we manage trade with the EU and ensure that lorry drivers aren't queuing for days at Dover?

Entries to solve the challenges will be available for public scrutiny at IdeasNest. The winning entry will provide a workable solution, within the time constraints, to one of the key Brexit issues. The recipient of the 500 cash prize will be chosen by a panel and the popular vote will be taken into consideration. This will then be presented to the Government.

Entries should be submitted through the 12R Prizes website. They should be around 500 words and will be shown on IdeasNest.co.uk. The deadline is 22nd March 2019.

Co-Founder Jake Shaw (who voted leave) summarised; "This is the chance for innovators to tell us their solution to a national challenge that is impacting on everyone."
The terms and timing of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union (EU) remain uncertain following the vote in the House of Commons on March 12, 2019 rejecting the deal agreed with the EU by Prime Minister Theresa May's government, and the subsequent vote in favour of requesting an extension of Article 50. If an extension is granted by the EU, Brexit will be delayed beyond March 29, 2019.

In a week of significant activity, the U.K. Parliament also voted to reject a no-deal Brexit under any circumstances. Although U.K. insurers have welcomed this outcome, the industry is frustrated that the terms of an orderly withdrawal are still not agreed. Nevertheless, AM Best notes in a new briefing, "U.K. Insurers Rated by AM Best Well Prepared for Brexit", that regardless of when or under what terms the U.K. leaves the EU, rated U.K.-domiciled insurers are generally well prepared.

When the U.K. withdraws from the EU, and at the end of any transition period, passporting rights that currently exist between the U.K. and the European Economic Area (EEA) are expected to cease, and U.K.-domiciled insurers will no longer be able to issue insurance contracts in the EEA. It is also possible that if there is no trade deal encompassing financial services, U.K. insurers will not be able to service existing contracts in certain EEA countries by settling and paying claims. Companies domiciled in other EU countries that conduct insurance business in the U.K. also will be affected by a loss of passporting rights. However, the impact will be cushioned by the U.K. government's Temporary Permissions Regime, which will allow EEA insurers to operate in the U.K. for a maximum of three years post Brexit while they seek authorisation from U.K. regulators.

Catherine Thomas, senior director, analytics, said: "Companies have welcomed announcements by HM Treasury in the U.K. and the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA), which support the orderly run-off of insurance business if there is no withdrawal agreement between the U.K. and the EU.

"In further support of the orderly run-off of existing EU business by U.K. insurers, AM Best notes the announcements made this year by a number of European countries, including France and Germany, that new rules will be put in place to allow claims to be paid by U.K. insurers post-Brexit. AM Best will continue to monitor closely political developments in the U.K. and the EU, and the ability of rated insurers to fulfill their contractual commitments, irrespective of the terms on which the U.K. leaves the EU."

To access the full copy of this briefing, please visit http://www3.ambest.com/bestweek/purchase.asp?record_code=283758.

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 2019 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/20190315005382/en/

Contacts:

Catherine Thomas, CFA

Senior Director, Analytics

+44 20 7397 0281

catherine.thomas@ambest.com

Yvette Essen

Director, Research, Communications

& Media - Europe, Middle East Africa

+44 20 7397 0322

yvette.essen@ambest.com

Edem Kuenyehia

Director, Market Development Communications

+44 20 7397 0280

edem.kuenyehia@ambest.com
15 March, 2019

U.S. Oil & Gas Plc.



("U.S. Oil" or the "Company")



OPERATIONS UPDATE

U.S. Oil & Gas plc, (the Company) the oil and gas exploration company with its main asset in Nevada, USA, makes the following statement:

Eblana-3 hydraulic fracturing permit application

The Company wishes to inform shareholders that dialogue with regulatory agencies regarding its permit application for the hydraulic fracturing of the Eblana-3 well are ongoing. The permit application is in process and issues raised are being addressed, including water sources and local hydrogeology.

The Company has undertaken a comprehensive study of local water resources, requiring multiple samples be collected over an extended period and be independently analysed. The resulting report was submitted to authorities. Further required data is now being collected. The Company wishes to emphasise that the implementation of the fracking plan and the associated operational timetable is contingent on regulatory approvals. Every effort is being made by the Company to satisfy requirements, but no timescale can be offered for the completion of the process.

Additional exploration activities

The large volumes of high quality data collected during the Eblana-3 drill are currently being integrated with all other data, including geochemical, VSP, geomagnetic and geophysical data, to generate targets for the next drilling campaign. Additional geophysical surveys are also planned. The Company views the results of these latest studies as highly encouraging, supporting the belief that its Hot Creek Valley lease area features a major oil system analogous to that in Railroad Valley. Highly prospective targets are clearly emerging from these studies and will form the basis of a multi-well development proposal now being prepared.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

The statements in this communication reflect the current thinking of the Board and the Company's present plans. The Company reserves the right to alter plans in the light of developing knowledge and circumstances. Shareholders' attention is drawn to the note below concerning Forward-looking Statements.

This press release contains certain "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information". Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to: business plans and strategies of US Oil and Gas; operating or technical difficulties in connection with drilling or development activities; availability and costs associated with inputs and labour; drilling and exploration costs; the speculative nature of oil exploration and development; diminishing quantities or quality of reserves; synergies and financial impact of completed acquisitions; the benefits of the acquisitions and the development potential of properties of US Oil and Gas; the future price of oil; supply and demand for oil; the estimation of reserves; the realization of reserve estimates; costs of production and projections of costs; success of exploration activities; capital expenditure programs and the timing and method of financing thereof; the ability of US Oil and Gas to achieve drilling success consistent with management's expectations; net present values of future net revenues from reserves; expected levels of royalty rates, operating costs, general and administrative costs, costs of services and other costs and expenses; expectations regarding the ability to raise capital and to add to reserves through acquisitions, assessments of the value of acquisitions and exploration and development programs; geological, technical, drilling and processing problems; treatment under governmental regulatory regimes and tax laws.

All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements

THE DIRECTORS OF THE COMPANY ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENTS OF THIS ANNOUNCEMENT

Neither this announcement nor the information contained herein constitutes an offer or solicitation by U.S. Oil and Gas Plc for the purchase or sale of any securities nor does it constitute a solicitation to any person in any jurisdiction where solicitation would be unlawful.

For further information contact:

Brian McDonnell, Chief Executive Officer +353 (1) 631 9022



About U.S. Oil & Gas:

U.S. Oil & Gas plc is an oil and gas exploration company with a strategy to identify and acquire oil and gas assets in the early phase of the upstream life-cycle and mature them. The Company's

main asset is in Nye County, Nevada where it holds the entire share capital of US-based company, Major Oil International LLC ("Major Oil"). Major Oil has acquired rights to exploration and development acreage in Hot Creek Valley, Nye County, adjacent to the oil and gas rich Railroad Valley area of Nevada, both of which are part of the Sevier Thrust of central Nevada and western Utah, USA.
BOSTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / March 15, 2019 / Technology has disrupted virtually every industry today, yet the process of purchasing a home and obtaining and closing on a mortgage looks very much the same as it did back in 1999. Real estate as an industry has been especially resistant to change.

"And therein lies the problem," writes Kosta Ligris Esq., CEO and Founder of The Ligris Companies, in the March edition of MReport. No industry he explains should get too comfortable lest they tempt a Blockbuster fate, adding that investors are well aware of this real estate innovation gap. Many are therefore rushing to become the next big disruptor.

"Technology companies and start-ups are drooling over the countless opportunities to disrupt our massive multi-hundred-trillion-dollar industry," Ligris says, "and as legacy companies now recognize the impending threat of these trailblazers, we enter a new generation of hyperactive need to innovate. It is a scramble to beat out the competition, whether it's the competitor we know and have wrestled with for years or the Kendall Square start-up that wants to change the way consumers buy a home."

Ligris points out there are many ways that technology could potentially disrupt the real estate industry and disrupt the status quo. For instance, "Big Data can be utilized in real estate to predict valuations, neighborhood development, and the overall trend and health of the housing market. Big data can also be used to accomplish an appraisal of a property by using thousands of 'comparables' rather than a select few."

In what he notes is a non-exhaustive list, Ligris's article also provides an overview on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), New Software, Virtual Reality, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Smart Contracts, and Drones, Robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT), all hot areas in real estate innovation and technology. He also discusses the rise of electronic and remote notarization legislation, a necessary precursor to a fully digital online closing (sometimes referred to as an eClosing).

Stressing the difference between technology and innovation, Ligris asserts that this difference is something that has become apparent within the very nature of real estate. "The bottom line is that residential real estate is inherently a personal business. There are still plenty of customers that want to talk to a human, meet their loan officer, and sit with their broker to review deal terms," he writes. So listening to what clients actually want and adapting is key.

"These are exciting times for the real estate, title, settlement, and mortgage banking industries," concludes Ligris's article. "Small ideas and little changes sometimes have the power to shift your mindset and the way you look at your business."

The article can be accessed in the print edition of March 2019's MReport, as well as online: https://tinyurl.com/ligrismreport. It was also included in MDaily, MReport's daily email blast.

Kosta Ligris @kligris is an experienced entrepreneur and the CEO/Founder of the Ligris Companies, a collection of professional services, real estate, consulting, and tech companies. Ligris has represented and consulted for some of the nation's largest banks and real estate companies. He also mentors, advises, and invests in startups in fintech, proptech, and blockchain, disrupting the real estate and title insurance verticals. Kosta Ligris himself is a mentor for MIT's Innovation Initiative and a visiting Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT's Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship. https://ligris.com

For more information or to arrange a media interview with Kosta Ligris, contact his PR Rep Ken Lizotte via ken@thoughtleading.com or by calling 978-371-0442.

SOURCE: Ligris Companies

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/539187/The-Real-Estate-and-Mortgage-Industries-Are-Scrambling-to-Innovate-To-Stay-Ahead-Of-Competition-Writes-Real-Estate-Disruption-Expert-Kosta-Ligris-in-MReport
Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - March 15, 2019) - Antioquia Gold Inc. (TSXV: AGD) (OTC Pink: AGDXF) ("Antioquia Gold" or the "Company") announces the resignation of Michael Cannock as member of the Board of Directors of the Company. The Company would like to thank Mr. Cannock for his dedication and service to the Company.

On behalf of the Antioquia Gold Board of Directors



Mr. Gonzalo de Losada, President and Chief Executive Officer



Antioquia Gold Inc.

For further information on Antioquia Gold Inc. contact:

Antioquia Gold Inc.

1-800-348-9657

www.antioquiagoldinc.com



Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release, and its overall ability to continue as a going concern.

Reader Advisory Forward-Looking Statements:



This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. This information and these statements, referred to herein as "forward-looking statements", are made as of the date of this press release and the Corporation does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.



Forward-looking statements relate to future events or future performance and reflect current expectations or beliefs regarding future events and include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to operation of the process plant, achievement of design parameters and recovery rates and achievement of head grades. Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as "expects", "anticipates", "plans", "projects", "estimates", "assumes", "intends", "strategy", "goals", "objectives", "schedule" or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements.



Forward-looking statements are made based upon certain assumptions by the Corporation and other important factors that, if untrue, could cause the actual results, performances or achievements of Antioquia to be materially different from future results, performances or achievements expressed or implied by such statements. Such statements and information are based on numerous assumptions regarding present and future business prospects and strategies and the environment in which Antioquia will operate in the future, including the accuracy of any resource estimations, the price of gold, anticipated costs and Antioquia's ability to achieve its goals, anticipated financial performance, regulatory developments, development plans, exploration, development and mining activities and commitments, operation of the process plant, achievement of design parameters and recovery rates and achievement of head grades. Although management considers its assumptions on such matters to be reasonable based on information currently available to it, they may prove to be incorrect. Additional risks are described in Antioquia's most recently filed Annual Information Form, annual and interim MD&A and other disclosure documents available under the Corporation's profile at: www.sedar.com.



By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and risks exist that estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved or that assumptions do not reflect future experience. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important risk factors could cause the actual outcomes to differ materially from the beliefs, plans, objectives, expectations, anticipations, estimates, assumptions and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements.



Readers should also be cautioned that the Corporation's decision to move forward with the construction and production of the Cisnero Mine is not based on the results of any pre-feasibility study or feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating economic or technical viability. Readers are referred to the Cisneros Report for details on independently verified mineral resources on the Cisneros Project. Since 2013, the Corporation has undertaken exploration and development activities; and after taking into consideration various factors, including but not limited to: the exploration and development results to date, technical information developed internally, the availability of funding, the low starting costs as estimated internally by the Corporation's management, the Corporation is of the view that the establishment of mineral reserves, the commissioning of a pre-feasibility study or feasibility study at this stage is not necessary, and that the most responsible utilization of the Corporation's resources is to proceed with the development and construction of the mine. Readers are cautioned that due to the lack of pre-feasibility study or feasibility study, there is increased uncertainty and higher risk of economic and technical failure associated with the Corporation's decision. In particular, there is additional risk that mineral grades will be lower than expected, the risk that construction or ongoing mining operations will be more difficult or more expensive than management expected. Production and economic variables may vary considerably, due to the absence of a detailed economic and technical analysis in accordance with NI 43-101. Project failure may materially adversely impact the Corporation's future profitability, its ability to repay existing loans, and its overall ability to continue as a going concern.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/43450
| BY Ricki Green |

Visit Victoria has joined Destination Gippsland in unveiling a new brand for an upcoming marketing campaign via Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, that will encourage people to put Gippsland at the top of their list for their next getaway.

The new brand, GIPPS all kinds of wonder LAND, highlights the regions hidden attractions, food and wine experiences and lesser known areas from historic towns and lush vineyards to pristine beaches and alpine forests.

Targeted at people living in Melbourne and regional Victoria, it aims to change consumer perceptions of Gippsland via its brand pillars of:

 Paddock to plate

 Water lovers paradise

 Alpine inspired adventure

 Intimate local towns

 World class sanctuaries

Importantly, the campaign will also remind visitors that although parts of the region have been affected by bushfires in recent months, visitors should not be deterred from planning a Gippsland adventure.

Says Peter Bingeman chief executive officer, Visit Victoria: Gippsland is safe to visit, open for business, and welcoming visitors, so put it on top of your list of places to visit now.

With the new brand unveiled today, the campaign will be ready to kick off in April and run through to June 2020.

GIPPS all kinds of wonder LAND is part of a long-term strategy aimed at growing Victorias visitor economy to $36.5 billion by 2025. It will build on the momentum achieved by current and previous intrastate campaigns and continue to compel Melburnians to explore their own state.

Says Bingeman: Weve worked hand in hand with Destination Gippsland to develop this upcoming campaign and I encourage people to explore the great diversity of Gippsland that makes it a true wonderland.

From pristine coasts, to inland lakes, mountains and winter snow, forests, deserted sandy beaches, and lush vineyards, Gippsland is truly breath-taking.

Says Sue Smethurst, chair, Destination Gippsland: This campaign brings a fresh face to Gippsland. It is our biggest brand campaign in more than a decade and we look forward to even more people choosing to eat, play and stay in Gippsland.

The Victorian Government has provided $3.2 million towards the campaign in recognition of the role tourism can play in the regions transitioning economy, particularly now as it recovers from bushfires and drought.

Says Martin Pakula, Victorian Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events: The Gippsland community has faced many challenges including bushfires over summer and its vital that we give them all the support we can.

There are so many great experiences waiting to be discovered in Gippsland. Thats why were investing in this new campaign to showcase all that the region has to offer.
Washington, D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - March 15, 2019) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Talimco LLC, a registered investment adviser, and Grant Gardner Rogers, the former chief operating officer of the firm, with manipulating the auction of a commercial real estate asset on behalf of one client for the benefit of another.

According to the SEC's order, in or about April 2015 while selling a commercial real estate asset on behalf of a collateralized debt obligation client, Talimco and Rogers were aiming to acquire the asset for another client, a private fund. Talimco and Rogers owed its selling client a fiduciary duty, which included an obligation to take steps to use its best efforts to maximize the price obtained for the asset by identifying willing bidders. However, rather than seek out multiple bona fide bidders, the order finds that Rogers used the firm's affiliated private fund client for one bid and convinced two unwilling bidders to participate in the auction by giving assurances that the bidders would not win the auction. As a result of this manipulation, Talimco's private fund client was the highest bidder and acquired the asset, only to then later sell it for a substantial profit. Talimco and Rogers's conduct deprived the selling client of the opportunity to obtain multiple bona fide bids for the asset and maximize their profit.

"By rigging the auction, Talimco and Rogers failed to fulfill their fiduciary duty to their client," said Daniel Michael, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division's Complex Financial Instruments Unit. "Investment adviser firms are expected to have controls in place to detect and disclose conflicts of interest. This action evidences the vigilance of the SEC's exam and enforcement staff in identifying investments advisers that exploit client relationships and harm investors."

The settled orders find that Talimco and Rogers violated Section 206(2) of the Investment Advisers Act. Without admitting or denying the findings in the order, Talimco consented to a cease-and-desist order, a censure, disgorgement of its fees of $74,000 plus prejudgment interest of $8,758.80 and a penalty of $325,000. Rogers, who also did not admit nor deny the findings, consented to a cease-and-desist order, a 12-month industry suspension, and a $65,000 fine.

The SEC's investigation was conducted by Philip A. Fortino, Sharon Bryant, and Osman Nawaz of the Complex Financial Instruments Unit and Haimavathi Marlier and Thomas P. Smith Jr. of the New York Regional Office, and was supervised by Mr. Michael and Lara S. Mehraban. An examination that led to the investigation was conducted by the Private Funds Unit.
Turnover of the storied Italian leather goods brand increased to 513 million euros. Over the course of the fiscal year, the company made significant investments to strengthen its supply chain and technology and began 2019 with the launch of its new sneaker collection

Furla Group continues to grow: over the past four fiscal years, it has doubled its turnover, hitting 513 million euros in 2018, a 5.2% increase at constant exchange over 2017 (or a 2.8% increase at current exchange).

Analyzing sales by geographic area and at constant exchange, the Asia Pacific region shines, with an 18.2% year-on-year increase in 2018; it now accounts for 26% of total turnover. The United States, meanwhile, saw an increase of 13.2%, and now accounts for 8% of total turnover. Japan remains the brand's leading market (22% of total sales), and sales there were up 3.6% compared to 2017. The EMEA region, which represents 44% of global turnover, maintains its market position.

Furla Group continues to seek direct control of its brand distribution through a strengthening of its mono-brand stores, which produced 70% of turnover in 2018. Direct distribution, combined with multi-brand sales points and franchising, allows Furla to have a far-reaching presence in 98 countries worldwide: its 490 mono-brands (285 directly owned, 163 franchisees and 42 travel retail doors) are in the most prestigious international shopping locations. Over 1,200 select multi-brands and department store corners complete the company's distribution network.

Of particular note is the travel retail sector, which is in continuous evolution and in 2018 registered a 16.2% increase over 2017, accounting for 7.3% of the Group's turnover through its sales at 293 doors, from boutiques, corners, shop-in-shops, aircraft and cruise ships, across 64 countries.

The company paid special attention to its direct e-commerce platform, where, thanks to repeated investments, there was a substantial turnover increase in 2018: 45.7% over the previous year, at constant exchange.

Furla Group is focused on solidifying the wild growth it has experienced over the past several years. The company has directed major resources toward strengthening the supply chain, as well as systemically integrating countries with direct and indirect distribution networks into Furla's corporate culture and technology.

The supply chain, which is key to guaranteeing the quality and timeliness of manufacturing, has recently benefited from the company's adoption of a more evolved and high-performing computer system, as well as financial tools that free up resources so that suppliers can invest in bettering the manufacturing cycle.

After years of geographic expansion across the globe, the Group is now focused on a more selective development and on categories of merchandise that are complementary to its core business: in February of this year, during Milan fashion week, Furla introduced its new sneaker collection, supported by a series of important 360 marketing activities.

Furla has further strengthened investment in its marketing operations, underlining its particular attention to digital communication and social channels, which have shown an important increase of followers (+64% versus 2017 on Instagram and WeChat), while maintaining one of the highest engagement rates (1,59%) within the fashion luxury category.

Furla Group's continuing investments in human resources have long allowed it not only to add jobs, but also to provide a better quality work life at the company and incentivize employees through its corporate welfare system "Furla for You." This initiative has been recognized two years in a row for its excellence, with Furla listed among Italy's Top Employers

"We are highly satisfied with these financial results, which we achieved at a challenging time for the international market," said Alberto Camerlengo, Chief Executive Officer of Furla Group. "We've invested significant financial resources in managing the unrestrained growth the company has experienced over the last several years, from acquiring total control of our retail distribution network in China, Hong Kong,Macau and Singapore, to strengthening our supply chain. Our single, fundamental goal has always been to guarantee continuity and excellence in all of Furla's creations."

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005564/en/

Contacts:

Alberto Junco

Alberto.junco@furla.com

+1 646 762 2230

furla.com
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / March 15, 2019 / Kontrol Energy Corp. ( CSE: KNR , OTCQB: KNRLF , FSE:1K8 ) ("Kontrol" or "Company") announces that the board of directors has approved the grant of 145,000 stock options to directors, officers, and employees (the "Options", individually an "Option") related to 2018 performance compensation.

The Options are governed by the stock option plan of the Company, dated October 6, 2016 as currently in force.

Each Option is vested immediately and entitles the holder to purchase one common share of the Company at a price of $0.80 per common share until March 15, 2022. The Options are subject to applicable regulatory filings and approval.

All securities issuances contemplated herein shall be subject to any statutory or regulatory requirements with respect to hold period and compliance with all rules and policies of the CSE.

About Kontrol Energy

Kontrol Energy Corp. (CSE: KNR) (OTCQB: KNRLF) (FSE: 1K8) is a leader in the energy efficiency sector through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology. With a disciplined mergers and acquisition strategy, combined with organic growth, Kontrol Energy Corp. provides market-based energy solutions to our customers designed to reduce their overall cost of energy while providing a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Kontrol Energy was recently announced as the 7th fastest growing Startup in Canada by Canadian Business and Maclean's.

Additional information about Kontrol Energy Corp. can be found on its website at www.kontrolenergy.com and by reviewing its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com







For further information, contact us at admin@kontrolenergy.com Kontrol Energy Corp., 180 Jardin Drive, Unit 9, Vaughan, ON L4K 1X8 Tel: 905.766.0400, Toll free: 1.844.566.8123

Neither IIROC nor any stock exchange or other securities regulatory authority accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Information

Certain information included in this press release, including information relating to future financial or operating performance and other statements that express the expectations of management or estimates of future performance constitute "forward-looking statements". Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding the Offering, possible future acquisitions and/or investments in operating businesses and/or technologies, accelerated organic growth, the provision of solutions to customers and greenhouse gas emissions reductions, proposed financial savings and sustainable energy benefits and energy monitoring. Where the Company expresses or implies an expectation or belief as to future events or results, such expectation or belief are based on assumptions made in good faith and believed to have a reasonable basis. Such assumptions include, without limitation, that the Offering will be successful, that suitable businesses and technologies for acquisition and/or investment will be available, that such acquisitions and or investment transactions will be concluded, that sufficient capital will be available to the Company, that technology will be as effective as anticipated, that organic growth will occur, and others. However, forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks include, but are not limited to, lack of acquisition and investment opportunities or that such opportunities may not be concluded on reasonable terms, or at all, that sufficient capital and financing cannot be obtained on reasonable terms, or at all, that technologies will not prove as effective as expected that customers and potential customers will not be as accepting of the Company's product and service offering as expected, and government and regulatory factors impacting the energy conservation industry. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements and the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained herein are made as at the date hereof and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or revise any such forward-looking statements or any forward-looking statements contained in any other documents whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable securities law.



SOURCE: Kontrol Energy Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/539228/Kontrol-Energy-Corp-Announces-the-Grant-of-Stock-Options-to-Directors-Officers-and-Employees
The experts also called for impressing upon the government authorities, current and future, and at all levels, to restore access and integrity to public statistics,

New Delhi: Expressing concerns over "political interference" in statistical data in India, as many as 108 economists and social scientists Thursday called for restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity of statistical organisations.

Their appeal comes against the backdrop of controversy over revision of gross domestic product (GDP) numbers and withholding employment data by the NSSO. They said that for decades, India's statistical machinery enjoyed a high-level of reputation for the integrity of the data it produced on a range of economic and social parameters.

"It (statistical machinery) was often criticised for the quality of its estimates, but never were allegations made of political interference influencing decisions and the estimates themselves," they said in an appeal.

They have appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data" and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

The signatories include Rakesh Basant (IIM-A), James Boyce (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US), Emily Breza (Harvard University, US), Satish Deshpande (Delhi University), Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia, Canada), R Ramakumar (TISS, Mumbai), Hema Swaminathan (IIM-B) and Rohit Azad (JNU).

Commenting on the statement, P C Mohanan, who resigned as acting chairperson of the National Statistical Commission, said that it is a timely message and political parties should take notice of sentiments expressed by the economists.

"The message is very timely and relevant in the backdrop of the recent issues and the concerns expressed by these eminent people...It is important that political parties take notice of this," Mohanan told PTI.

The economists and social scientists said it is imperative that the agencies associated with collection and dissemination of statistics like the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) are not subject to political interference and their work, therefore, enjoys total credibility.

"Lately, the Indian statistics and the institutions associated with it have, however, come under a cloud for being influenced and indeed even controlled by political considerations," the statement said.

Citing an instance wherein the CSO revised upward GDP growth estimates for 2016-17 (the year of demonetisation) by 1.1 percentage points to 8.2 per cent, the highest in a decade, they said: "This seems to be at variance with the evidence marshalled by many economists".

The statement also expressed concern over withholding of Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) of NSSO and news reports that the PLFS of 2017-18 will be scrapped altogether by the government.

Two members of the National Statistical Commission (NSC), including the acting chairman, subsequently resigned because they felt the NSSO was delaying the release of the report, though the NSC itself had officially cleared it, they added.

The 108 experts, from across the globe, further said that in fact, any statistics that cast an iota of doubt on the achievement of the government seem to get revised or suppressed on the basis of some questionable methodology. "This is the time for all professional economists, statisticians, independent researchers in policy regardless of their political and ideological leanings to come together to raise their voice against the tendency to suppress uncomfortable data..." they said.

The experts also called for impressing upon the government authorities, current and future, and at all levels, to restore access and integrity to public statistics, and re-establish institutional independence and integrity to the statistical organisations.

The reputation of India's statistical bodies in the country and globally is at stake, they added.
AirAsia India will now fly connecting Kolkata and Mumbai, with one daily flight, effective 15 April, the airline said in a release Friday

Mumbai: Low-cost carrier, AirAsia India Friday announced the launch of its flight services to Kolkata from the city next month.

This would be airline's second destination from Mumbai after it started operating daily services to Bengaluru from the country's financial capital.

AirAsia India will now fly connecting Kolkata and Mumbai, with one daily flight, effective 15 April, the airline said in a release Friday.

The introduction of Mumbai-Kolkata route comes close on the heels of AirAsia India adding eighth additional flights to its network of 19 destinations.

"We recently introduced the first connection between Bengaluru and Mumbai and are now adding a new connection between Mumbai and Kolkata. It's a key market for AirAsia and this flight will strengthen our operations in the East. This new route is a manifestation of our future growth plan in these key and important business markets, said Sunil Bhaskaran, managing director and chief executive officer, AirAsia India.

AirAsia India, a joint venture between Tata Sons and Malaysian airlines' group AirAsia, currently operates to 19 domestic destinations with a fleet of 20 Airbus A320 planes.

The group made its first entry in the Mumbai market with the launch of AirAsia Berhad services to here from Kuala Lumpur in May 2010.

However, in 2012 it withdrew the route citing high airport charges. But came back again with its subsidiary Indonesian AirAsia X in May 2017, which was again discontinued in April last year.
Allahabad Bank and others like Indian Overseas Bank, Karnataka Bank and Dabur which had formed the non-life insurance company Universal Sompo had already appointed a consultant for the valuation of the JV.

Kolkata: City-based Allahabad Bank, which had recently come out from the prompt and corrective action (PCA) after RBI removed it from the weak bank watch list in February, is looking ways to raise capital in the next financial year, an official said.

The bank would be weighing the options of dilution of stake in the general insurance joint venture (JV) Universal Sompo and sell off non-core assets like properties in places like Mumbai, MD and CEO of Allahabad Bank S S Mallikarjuna Rao told reporters here on Friday.

"Allahabad Bank has come out of the PCA. It is only the starting point", Rao said, adding that this had happened due to infusion of capital by the government as some conditions relating to net non-performing asset (NPA) and CRAR were breached", he said.

Rao said that net NPA of the bank had fallen below six percent, adding that recovery would be the mainstay for further lowering of NPA.

"Expecting that the bank would book profits in 2019, the capital infusion by the government was for meeting regulatory

requirements. However, some growth capital is also needed but we are not worried about that", Rao said.

As per Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) requirement, there was still headroom for the government to dilute stake in the bank, Rao said.

He said that the bank was having 12 properties which were identified, adding that the bank was targeting to raise Rs 250 crore to Rs 300 crore by selling the non-core assets, like properties.

Allahabad Bank and others like Indian Overseas Bank, Karnataka Bank and Dabur which had formed the non-life insurance company Universal Sompo had already appointed a consultant for the valuation of the JV.

"Efforts will continue to get capital out of Universal Sompo and also from selling off non-core assets like properties", Rao said.

On the whole, he said that the bank would be looking at raising Rs 500 crore probably in the next fiscal by way of Universal Sompo stake dilution and sale of non-core assets.

Chairman of Universal Sompo O N Singh said that the insurance JV stated with an initial capital of Rs 150 crore and was making profits.

The JV launched a co-branded health insurance product exclusively for Allahabad Bank customers. Singh said that the exclusive co-branded product would help Allahabad Bank to raise its savings accounts deposit base.
New Delhi: Bandhan Bank on Friday said it has received no objection from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for the proposed acquisition of Gruh Finance.

"The Reserve Bank has by its letter dated 14 March, 2019, conveyed its no objection for the voluntary amalgamation of Gruh Finance Ltd into and with Bandhan Bank, subject to compliance with the terms and conditions therein," the bank said in a regulatory filing.

Gruh Finance, the affordable housing finance arm of HDFC Ltd, was taken over in January by Kolkata-based Bandhan Bank in a share-swap deal.

As part of the deal, Bandhan Bank has to transfer 14.9 percent stake to HDFC for merging Gruh with itself.

The deal will allow Bandhan Bank's promoter Bandhan Financial Holdings to come down to about 61 percent from about 82 percent, and HDFC to hold around 15 percent in the merged entity from about 57 percent in Gruh.

The swap ratio for the amalgamation will be 568 shares of Bandhan Bank for every 1,000 shares of Gruh Finance.

The stock of Bandhan Bank closed 0.45 percent down at Rs 511.05 on the BSE.
Public sector telecom firm BSNL will clear salaries of all employees for February month by Friday, its Chairman and Managing Director Anupam Shrivastava said on Thursday

New Delhi: Public sector telecom firm BSNL will clear salaries of all employees for February month by Friday, its Chairman and Managing Director Anupam Shrivastava said on Thursday.

"BSNL will pay the salary of all employees by tomorrow. We are thankful to telecom minister Manoj Sinha for his timely intervention to ensure that salaries of employees are paid at the earliest," the BSNL CMD said.

He said that revenue receipt of BSNL is usually higher in March and internal accruals have started flowing in.

"We expect total accruals of Rs 2,700 crore in March of which Rs 850 crore will be used for salary disbursement," Shrivastava said.

He said that BSNL is the only player, apart from Reliance Jio, which is adding new subscribers that has lead to higher revenue accruals.

"Minister took lead and directly monitored the situation to resolve the crisis. I am also thankful to BSNL employees who ensured that the services are running," Shrivastava said.

He said that DoT helped BSNL with Presidential Sanction to meet working capital of the company and a letter of comfort for the same was issued to the company on Wednesday.

"We will serve the letter of comfort to the bank tomorrow following which they will start processing amount of Rs 3,500 crore to the working capital requirement of BSNL," Shrivastava said.

He said that with the support of DoT there will be no delay in salary disbursement in the coming months.

Telecom PSUs BSNL and MTNL are facing troubles in clearing workers' salaries for February month.

An official had told PTI on Wednesday that the DOT had released pending dues of Rs 171 crore to cash-strapped MTNL for paying February salaries to employees.

BSNL has 1.76 lakh employees across India and MTNL has around 22,000. It is estimated that 16,000 MTNL employees and 50 percent of BSNL employees will retire in the next 5-6 years.
Imports declined by 5.4 percent to $36.26 billion in the last month, narrowing the trade deficit to $9.6 billion. The gap between imports and exports was $12.3 billion in February 2018.

New Delhi: Marginal 2.44 percent increase in exports, as well as lower imports of gold and petroleum products in February significantly narrowed the country's trade deficit to $9.6 billion, according to data released by the commerce ministry on Friday.

India's merchandise exports rose to $26.67 billion in February from $26.03 percent in the year-ago month mainly on account of higher shipments in sectors such as pharmaceutical, engineering and electronics.

Imports declined by 5.4 percent to $36.26 billion in the last month, narrowing the trade deficit to $9.6 billion. The gap between imports and exports was $12.3 billion in February 2018, and $14.73 billion in January 2019.

As per the data, the decline in imports was mainly on account of sharp decline in inward shipments of gold and petroleum products.

While the import of gold fell by about 11 percent to $2.58 billion in February as against $2.89 billion in the corresponding month last fiscal, inward shipments of petroleum products were down by nearly 8 percent to $9.37 billion.

During the April-February period of the current fiscal year, exports grew 8.85 percent to $298.47 billion, while imports rose by 9.75 percent to $464 billion.

The trade deficit has widened to $165.52 billion during the 11 months of the current fiscal from $148.55 billion compared to the year-ago period, the data said.

Non-petroleum and non-gems and jewellery exports in February 2019 stood at $19.87 billion, as compared to $18.90 billion in the year-ago month. Non-petroleum and non-gems and jewellery exports in April-February 2018-19 were $217.43 billion, as against $201.95 billion in the comparative period last fiscal.

Oil imports in April-February 2018-19 were $128.72 billion, which was 31.98 percent higher over the same period last fiscal.

The global Brent price (USD/bbl) decreased by 1.97 percent in February 2019 compared to the same month the previous year.

Commenting on the trade data, President of exporters' body FIEO Ganesh Kumar Gupta said that exporters have managed to do well despite increasing protectionism, tough global conditions and constraints on the domestic front.

He said economies across Asia specially China and South East Asian nations have been showing signs of sluggishness with contraction in manufacturing due to a slowdown in the global trade and fragile world economy.

Gupta said 18 out of 30 major product groups were in positive territory, with most of them with marginal growth during the month.

"However, with this trend, we will be able to achieve merchandise exports of about USD 330 billion, the highest ever exports for a fiscal," he added.

Meanwhile, the RBI said services exports in January 2019 were USD 17.75 billion, registering a negative growth of 1.02 percent over December 2018. The imports stood at USD 11.03 billion, down 3.07 percent over December 2018.

Taking merchandise and services together, the overall trade deficit for April-February 2018-19 is estimated at USD 93.32 billion as compared to USD 82.46 billion in year-ago period.
By Munsif Vengattil and Paresh Dave SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc's chief product officer and one of its earliest employees, Chris Cox, said on Thursday he is leaving the company just days after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed a plan to transform the world's biggest social network into an encryption-focused messaging company.

By Munsif Vengattil and Paresh Dave

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc's chief product officer and one of its earliest employees, Chris Cox, said on Thursday he is leaving the company just days after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed a plan to transform the world's biggest social network into an encryption-focused messaging company.

Cox, the 36-year-old Zuckerberg lieutenant who would have managed the CEO's vision to bring Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp closer together, said in a blog post that his departure came "with great sadness." He had left a graduate programme at Stanford University to join Facebook in 2005 as a software engineer and helped developed its original news feed feature.

"As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction, focussed on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network ... This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through," Cox said in a Facebook post.

Cox's departure removes a layer of management, bringing Zuckerberg closer to a family of apps that he wants to make compatible, in what technology analysts expect will be a complicated engineering task.

Shares of Facebook were down 1.7 percent in extended trading following the announcement.

Cox informed the company of his intention to resign on Monday, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.

Also departing is WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels, adding to a string of recent high-profile exits from Facebook's product and communications teams. The shakeup is the second major management restructuring in as many years as the company also faces numerous government investigations across the world related to user privacy and fake news on its services.

Daniels had informed the company several months ago of his intention to leave and will stay on through a leadership transition, a person familiar with the matter said.

Zuckerberg told Wired magazine on March 6 that "there will be a bunch of work inside the company to make sure that we have the right folks in the right roles" to bring Facebook's apps together and introduce more privacy features.

EMarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg said that "whenever there is a shift in strategy, it's not unusual to see some personnel changes."

NEW STRUCTURE

Will Cathcart, vice president of product management, will now lead WhatsApp, and Head of Video, Games and Monetization Fidji Simo will be the new head of the Facebook app, Zuckerberg said.

Cathcart and Simo worked closely to bring video uploading tools and professional video content to Facebook. And growing viewership and advertising on videos are of growing importance to both the Facebook and WhatsApp apps.

The company does not immediately plan to fill Cox's role, Zuckerberg said, adding that Cathcart, Simo and the heads of Instagram and Messenger will now report directly to him.

Facebook's family of apps strategy has so far been led jointly by Cox and Javier Olivan, vice president of growth.

Zuckerberg said on Thursday that Olivan will now lead the effort to integrate Facebook apps, a key move as the company encrypts conversations on more of its messaging services and makes them compatible.

Cox gained greater oversight of WhatsApp and Instagram following the exits of their founders over the last two years. He also remained a key figure at Facebook, where for years until Monday he spoke at the orientations for new employees.

Daniels, who had worked on Facebook initiatives in developing countries, had moved a year ago to WhatsApp, which is more popular than Facebook in many big emerging markets.

A WhatsApp spokesman declined to comment on Daniels' departure or make him available for comment.

Zuckerberg still has a number of long-time product and engineering lieutenants. They include hardware Vice President Andrew Bosworth, who joined shortly after Cox, as well as decade-long veterans Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer and engineering Vice President Jay Parikh.

(Reporting Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru and Paresh Dave in San Francisco; Additional reporting by by Tamara Mathias in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Cynthia Osterman)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
| BY Kim Shaw |

Asia Sweetshop has signed highly-acclaimed Director Liz Murphy (pictured) for global representation.

Murphys passion is to make stuff that gives people the feels. Her work has been recognised around the globe by the likes of Adfest and BADC, and in 2017, Murphy was named in Campaigns 10 female directors you should know on account of her ability to elicit stunning, emotional glimpses of life in all its peculiarities.

With numerous award-winning campaigns under her belt, the Australian-born Director moved to London in 2010 with a focus on creating beautifully shot, emotive and observational films and narrative. As a highly sought-after Director she has worked with brands such as Alpen, Kinder, McDonalds and The National Trust. Her deeply moving spot Bear for the charity Grief Encounter featured in the prestigious APA show in 2014.

Laura Geagea, Managing Director and Executive Producer of Sweetshop China, Asia and MENA will be working closely with Liz and agencies across Asia MENA on script and creative opportunities

Geagea said, Liz is a real asset to our roster. She has an amazing eye and makes beautiful films filled with warmth and character. I cant wait to see her bring her magic touch to the Asian market.

Murphy said, I have admired Sweetshop since I was a little baby director back in Brisbane making coffee. The passion and enthusiasm of everyone there is inspiring and contagious. Im really excited to be joining the gang.

Wilf Sweetland, CEO and Partner of Sweetshop added, Liz is a wonderful person. Her work demonstrates an emphasis on sublime craft and emotional intelligence throughout her story telling  were honoured that someone with her talent has chosen to be represented by us globally.
France-based FM Logistic plans to expand to five cities including four metropolitan cities, he added.

New Delhi: France-based FM Logistic on Friday said it plans to invest $150 million (a little over Rs 1,000 crore) over the next five years to set up new warehouses in India.

This amount will be used to focus on multi-client warehouses, the company said.

CEO Jean-Christophe Machet said: "I am impressed by the dynamics of India, and planning to make strategic investments here to support long-term growth.

"We are confident about our growth and development so we decided at the board level to invest this significant amount of $150 million for next five years to develop our own facilities."

The company plans to expand to five cities including four metropolitan cities, he added.

When asked how will the funds be arranged, he said the company is in the process of negotiating with local and international finance partners for funding and will also use its own equity.

In 2016, the company entered India through the acquisition of Pune-based Spear Logistics.

"We see a huge untapped potential in India....The GST reform provides a huge opportunity. Thanks to the new positive policies in India, our operations have become even more streamlined and efficient," the CEO said.

The company expects a very strong double-digit growth in India in the next fiscal, he added.

"FM Logistic plans to strengthen its position in India by delivering on its post GST strategy of focusing on developing multi-client warehouses in the most important Indian Economic Zones," Machet said.

The opening of the company's first multi-client warehouse in Mumbai (with extension in progress) will be followed by another in Delhi NCR, which is expected to commence operations next month, the company said.

It has also acquired 31 acre land in Jhajjar, near Gurugram.

"With these new projects we aim to create 500 jobs in next 12 months," it said.

FM Logistic specialises in warehousing, transportation and co-packing.

FM Logistic also announced appointment of Alexandre Amine Soufiani as its new Managing Director of India operations.
The Mundle series showed that the GDP growth had actually touched the double-digit mark, India has been desperately hoping for, in 2006-07.

Perhaps more than the concerns of slowing growth, what is probably hurting the Indian economy even more now is the widening trust deficit on countrys official data, particularly on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and employment/unemployment.

The loss of faith on key data published by the government has been there for a while, but Indias failing data credibility is now no longer confined to the local press but a subject the world has taken note of.

Thats what reflects in a letter released on Thursday by 108 economists and social scientists calling for restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity to the statistical organisations in India freeing critical data releases from the clutch of damaging political interference.

The group has appealed to economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data" and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

Now, whats the significance of this letter? It tells us that the world has already formed an opinion that something is amiss on the way India presents its statistics. As the economists have pointed out in the letter, in the past too, there have been questions on Indias official numbers  but that was on the quality of estimates not for political interference that seeks to change the whole estimates itself to suit one's narrative. India, internationally, was respected for its data credibility.

Where did the trust deficit begin exactly? The first instance was in 2015 when the GDP base year was changed to a new base year 2011-12 from 2004-05 and the gross value added (GVA) methodology was introduced.

The sudden spike in growth under the new base year and methodology for the years of 2012-13 and 2013-14 compared with growth under the earlier series raised many eyebrows, also due to the fact that the GDP figures began to stand in isolation with a host of crucial high-frequency economic data.

Since then, during every quarter when GDP numbers came, questions were raised on this disconnect and the underlying signal the new GDP numbers intends to convey.

Then came the GDP back series data in 2018. In one go, the growth under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) years, which were till then seen as high-growth years, were lowered under the changed methodology used for the new back series.

The new back series may put the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) at an advantageous position since the average growth for FY06 to FY12 now comes to 6.9 percent (new series) from 8.2 percent (old series) and inferior to the 7.4 percent under the Narendra Modi-led NDA rule.

In FY 2011, the growth figure has been sliced by 180 basis points to 8.5 percent from 10.3 percent. Remember, these figures were also criticised the figures that were sharply different from the findings of an expert panel set up by the National Statistical Commission under Sudipto Mundle.

The Mundle series showed that the GDP growth had actually touched the double-digit mark, India has been desperately hoping for, in 2006-07. That year, the growth touched 10.08 percent against 9.57 percent when calculated under the old methodology, it said. Congress loved and BJP discarded the Mundle series. Indias data credibility once again came under attack.

Citing an instance wherein the Central Statistics Office (CSO) revised upward the GDP growth estimates for 2016-17 (the year of demonetisation) by 1.1 percentage points to 8.2 percent, the highest in a decade, the letter said: "This seems to be at variance with the evidence marshalled by many economists".

That being the GDP story, the next round of attack on Indias data came when the Narendra Modi government refused to release the results of the latest surveys on the employment count in the country.

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) which conducts household surveys on employment situation wasnt given permission to release job data that showed the country's unemployment rate at a 45-year-high of 6.1 per cent in 2017-18, a Business Standard report said adding that to speculation that the government is either delaying or hiding data that isnt favourable to its performance record.

It is a fact and even the NDAs ardent supporters would agree, that these three instances have severely damaged Indias data credibility. How can Narendra Modi government regain the lost credibility of Indias official data on growth and jobs?

The answer is simple. First, the government should, at least now, show the political courage to withdraw the controversial GDP back series that has no link with the reality on the ground and let the CSO rework the back series numbers independently from the NITI Aayog which shouldnt be in data compilation in the first place.

Second, the government should immediately release the NSSO survey on jobs and admit the outcome. Of course, these wont be easy for the government in an election year but thats the only way to restore Indias data credibility problem.
Jet Airways has a debt of over Rs 8,200 crore and needs to make repayments of up to Rs 1,700 crore by the end of March.

Mumbai: Amidst increasing differences between Jet Airways and Etihad Airways, the only party that can bail out the beleaguered airline, over the equity cap that its founder chairman Naresh Goyal can hold after his forced exit,bankers on Friday exuded confidence of reaching a resolution plan as early as next week.

After agreeing to cap his shareholding at 22 percent for perpetuity and completely exit the airline's management as a precondition for a bailout that Etihad and bankers demanded, Goyal had on last Friday wrote to Etihad to remove the perpetuity clause from the resolution plan and also the Gulf carrier immediately offer a lifeline of Rs 750 crore failing which the airline may get grounded.

This, according to media reports, has put off the Gulf carrier which already owns 24 percent in the airline which has

grounded 42 percent of its 119 aircraft, most of them due to non-payment lease rentals to the aircraft lessors.

According to the draft resolution plan submitted to the lenders led by the lead lender SBI, Etihad will bring in around Rs 1,800 crore as fresh equity and increases its stake to 24.9 percent, while Goyal will chip in with Rs 750 crore and the rest of the Rs 3,800 crore come from other investors.

Founder chairman Goyal and his family own 52 percent in the airline now which he had agreed to pare down to 22 percent to secure a financial bailout.

"It is a work in progress. Very soon, say by next week, we will have a solution plan in place," a senior SBI official said here Friday. The official said the resolution plans had started on 1 November last year. "Any resolution plan for a corporate is a very complex process. Things don't happen in a day or two or in even 15 days.

"There are various stakeholders, who have to be aligned; there are promoters and joint venture partners, so when the situation is so complex, it takes time," SBI explained the reason for the delay.

"We are making every effort and SBI is leading that effort. We are clear on one thing: to ensure that the airline runs and not get grounded and not to stave off our accounts becoming NPAs. That's the fundamental difference between any other NPA and Jet Airways," he added.

Jet Airways has a debt of over Rs 8,200 crore and needs to make repayments of up to Rs 1,700 crore by the end of March.

It has already defaulted on an ECB payment earlier this week but is servicing its domestic debt.

The acute liquidity crunch has forced it to ground aircraft, shut down stations and delay salary payments to its pilots and engineers along with other senior staff. Since last July the airline has been trying to raise funds as cash crunch mounted leading to salary delays since then.

On 8 March, Goyal wrote to Etihad chief executive Tony Douglas seeking an urgent funding of Rs 750 crore under an agreement signed between various stakeholders.

On 14 February, Jet Airways board approved a bank-led resolution plan whereby lenders would become the largest

shareholders in the airline. Following approval from the shareholders, part of debt would be converted into 11.4 crore

shares at a consideration of Re 1 apiece as per the RBI norms.
Financial sector regulators on Thursday discussed ways to address challenges pertaining to the quality of credit ratings and other issues concerning the economy, the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement

Mumbai: Financial sector regulators on Thursday discussed ways to address challenges pertaining to the quality of credit ratings and other issues concerning the economy, the Reserve Bank of India said in a statement.

Markets regulator Sebi, insurance regulator IRDAI, and pension fund regulator PFRDA, along with senior officials of the finance ministry, brainstormed key issues facing the economy at the meeting of the sub-committee of the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) chaired by RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das.

"The sub-committee reviewed the major developments on the global and domestic fronts that impinge on the financial stability of the country," the central bank said after the meeting.

The panel discussed ways to address challenges pertaining to the quality of credit ratings; and inter-linkages between housing finance companies and housing developers.

It also deliberated on the interlinking of various regulatory databases and the National Strategy for Financial Inclusion.

Further, the sub-committee reviewed the functioning of state-level coordination committee (SLCCs) in various states and Union territories, activities of its various technical groups, and a thematic study on financial inclusion and financial stability.
A US district court in California has reportedly dismissed lawsuit filed against Apple and Infosys alleging visa fraud by both the companies

New York: A US district court in California has reportedly dismissed lawsuit filed against Apple and Infosys alleging visa fraud by both the companies.

The lawsuit was filed in 2016 by a whistleblower alleging that the iPhone maker Apple and Indian IT company Infosys conspired to bring two Indian nationals for training on B-1 visa instead of more expensive H1-B visa.

According to a report published on website Apple Insider, Apple and Infosys had both asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit brought by contractor Carl Krawitt for the US government, under the False Claims Act and the court on Tuesday approved appeal of Apple by dismissing the case, while Infosys motion was denied as moot -- meaning no impact on the case.

The court accepted Apple's appeal that the trainers' work under the B-1 visa was acceptable, and that neither Apple nor Infosys were attempting to commit fraud, the report said.
The Ayodhya dispute revolves around faith and dignity of faith for all parties involved, regardless of their faith.

On March 8, 2019, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court led by the Chief Justice of India directed that the batch of appeals in the Ramjanmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute be sent to a three-member mediation panel to explore the possibility of an amicable resolution.

The panel shall be headed by a former judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla, with spiritual and humanitarian leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and senior advocate Sriram Panchu its other members.

The mediation proceedings, to be held in Faizabad, are expected to commence by March 15, 2019 and the panel has been directed to send a report of the progress of the mediation within four weeks from that date. It is interesting to note that the order directing mediation in the matter also records the objections raised by the litigants to the legality of a mediation in a case which is representative in nature i.e. a case whose outcome affects not just the litigants but also those who the litigants claim to represent. This objection, perhaps, captures the essence of the "dispute."

While legally the dispute is in the nature of a conventional title dispute, nothing about the case is conventional. The case is a veritable crucible where history, religion, politics and law meet, and in the absence of a formal institutionalised mechanism in this country for truth and reconciliation, it falls upon courts of law to determine the truth and dispense justice.

And yet, the Supreme Court has directed mediation in a dispute which has a recorded legal history of 164 years at the very least and has been pending before the Supreme Court since 2010. Ironically, the Courts approach in this case is in stark contrast to its approach to intervening in religious practices and traditions which have been preserved by communities and institutions for centuries, the Sabarimala judgment being a case in point.

Further, given the tumultuous history of the Ayodhya dispute and the deep fissures it has caused and continues to cause because it is yet to be put to bed, it would not be out of place to assume that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the litigating parties which too is perhaps representative in nature. This means that to hope for an amicable resolution of the dispute through mediation is at best judicial optimism at work  which may not yield much particularly when this is not the first attempt at mediation in the dispute.

In this case, it is only proper that the issue be decided objectively by the highest court of the land on the rigorous anvils of evidence and civilised jurisprudence so that neither party can play victim and claim that it was shortchanged either by majoritarian coercion or minority appeasement, as the case may be.

After all, this is the very reason that people repose faith in courts because they believe, and rightly so, that the institution which dispenses justice is duty-bound to approach a dispute in the most objective, fair, reasonable and expeditious manner possible, uninfluenced by any other consideration.

Simply put, in modern India, a country with a complex history, a court of law is perhaps the best forum to resolve such disputes which come with the heavy baggage of history instead of these issues being resolved elsewhere through unconstitutional means.

Importantly, the use of such disputes in the plural is not inaccurate since Ayodhya represents the beginning of a long-due process in addressing one of the root causes of communal discord which keeps rearing its head with alarming periodicity. The continued attempts by vested interests to brush history under the carpet to keep their hearths burning at the expense of communal harmony and social integration is all the more reason to expedite the resolution of such disputes through a neutral forum in which all parties firmly repose their faith.

Viewed from a practical standpoint, the 4,300-page 2:1 verdict of the three-judge Bench of the Allahabad High Court which decided the dispute in favour of the Ramjanmabhoomi has already reduced the workload of the Supreme Court to a significant extent by performing the most onerous and arduous of exercises in such disputes, namely identifying the specific issues of disagreement between the parties, receiving and examining evidence, including archaeological and historical, and distilling the principles of law which apply to the case.

In other words, the legal contours of the dispute have already been fleshed out in sufficient detail by the high court. Therefore, the Supreme Court need not reinvent the wheel and go through the rigmarole of trial, but has to primarily examine the high courts judgement for patent perversity, or gross misappreciation or non-appreciation of material evidence. Clearly, the Supreme Court has to only evaluate a well-prepared and digested brief authored by the high court. Given this limited mandate, and given the fact that all procedural formalities in the Supreme Court were nearly complete in December 2017 when the case was ripe for final arguments, there was little left to do except to commence hearings in the matter.

And then the red-herring of Ismail Faruqui v. Union of India was raised by one of the parties to the case. This red-herring too was addressed in September 2018, when a three-judge Bench led by then Chief Justice of India Dipak Mishra, concluded that there was no need to refer the matter to a constitution bench since it held that Ismail Faruqui did not come in the way of adjudication of the title dispute. Therefore, as of September 2018, there were no further procedural or substantive hurdles left to the commencement of hearings in the case.

Despite having arrived at the conclusion that there was no need to refer the case to a larger bench, the court then constituted a larger bench. Once again, the matter was ripe for final arguments. Now, it has been referred to mediation.

Notwithstanding the yellow-bellied attempts of some sections of so-called intelligentsia at sugar-coating the nature of the dispute and what it represents, it would be ignorant and offensive to deny that the dispute revolves around faith and dignity of faith for all parties involved, regardless of their faith. And since faith is the lifeblood of India according to Swami Vivekananda, delay in dispensation of justice in matters of faith is verily its denial.

Therefore, as self-serving as it may be, as an ardent believer in justice delivery through constitutional means, especially through courts of law, one sincerely hopes that the Supreme Court does not let go of this opportunity to open a new chapter in the history of the Indian republic by deciding the dispute one way or the other with expedition.

J Sai Deepak is an engineer-turned-litigator who practises in the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court
Hailed in ancient Sanskrit texts, offered to deities, consumed during festivities, the countrys association with cannabis has been a long standing one

In 1598, the great explorer John Hugen Van Linschoten published an account of his great findings in the East Indies: there was the elephant, and the rhinocerous, and cajjoos and bettele and stones used against poysons and a certyn fruit called annanas  and this: They take about an ounce & at first are merie talking much & singing pleasant songs, laughing without measure and using many foolish toyes: which continueth with them almost an houre. After that they are in a manner furious, which continueth likewise a little space that done they are possessed with heavynesse and [a certein kind] of feare that many tymes they creye out. In the end when they have played all these partes, theye fall asleep.

Bangue, he called it.

According to legends, it was Goddess Parvati who first recommended bhang (a narcotic drink made with the leaves of the female cannabis plant) to Lord Shiva after he sucked up the poison that came up along with the nectar, as gods churned the primordial ocean (the amrit manthan of our myths). The poison turned Shivas throat blue, earning him the name Neelkanth, and the pain killer turned the god into a cross-generational poster boy for the narcotic. His image today is the reigning motif of the Goa trance scene.

The antithesis of Brahminical morality, Shiva  in popular imagination  is the ageless rebel forever on a bhang (or ganja)-induced high. But Vishnu the Preserver, is not far behind in his love for cannabis. As contemporary mythologist Devdutt Patnaik has pointed out, bhang is an important part of offerings in Vishnu temples: from the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha, to the one dedicated to Srinathji at Nathdwara, Rajasthan. The image of Lord Krishnas elder brother Balarama is bathed with bhang daily at Puri. It was not coincidental, therefore, that the home of Krishna  Mathura  has surpassed Lord Shivas Varanasi as the highest consumer of bhang (known locally as siddhi, or enlightenment).

These divine associations may be responsible for Holi and Maha Shivaratri being the most-popular occasions for people imbibing bhang in two popular ways: as a thandai or in a pakoda, or even as a goli. Holi accounts for 30 per cent of the cannabis consumption in the country, marking the culmination of the auspicious period, starting from Basant Panchami, for serving bhang to Lord Shiva. Not many of us can claim not to have experienced the somewhat-disturbing hallucinogenic effects of bhang, but we seem to be locked in a romantic embrace with it.

The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985, does not ban bhang, although it prohibits two other products of the cannabis plant  charas and ganja. States like Assam and Maharashtra have declared bhang illegal, but counter-currents have been equally strong. Uttarakhand legalised bhang in 2017, and so did Prime Minister Narendra Modis home state Gujarat, because, as a state minister famously said, it is consumed only as the prasad of Lord Shiva. In Rajasthan, the bhang ki lassi at the government shop  owned by Chander Prakash Vyas or Dr Bhang, at the foot of Jaisalmers famous Golden Fort  enjoys higher TripAdvisor ratings than the historic landmark in whose shadow it thrives, thanks to its discovery by the late Anthony Bourdain.

In Varanasis Godowlia Chowk, the 150-year-old Kashi Vishwanath Thandai Ghar is famous for its year-long supply of special thandai spiked with Lord Shivas prasad (the lassi is one of the offerings made to Shiva at the pre-dawn arti at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple). The city has 200 such shops, including the Blue Lassi Shop, whose menu has 80 variants of this summer drink, but when you ask for the unlisted special, it is understood you are a good devotee. Mathuras Sarkari Theka Bhang is another eternal favourite for its golis and lassis, as are Pushkars many hole-in-the-wall cafes.

The voices in favour of legalizing government-supervised production and sale of non-synthetic bhang  and its siblings charas and ganja  are getting more influential, starting with Union Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi (specifically in the context of people living with cancer) and two of the most eloquent MPs from the outgoing Lok Sabha  Tathagatha Sathpathy (Biju Janata Dal) and Shashi Tharoor (Congress).

What used to be a voice in the wilderness, that of Bengaluru resident Vicki Vaurora and The Great Legislation Movement he launched in 2014 with the purpose of legalising cannabis, is finding echoes in the highest echelons of our constitutional institutions. Bhanga (as it is mentioned in ancient Sanskrit texts) is hailed as one of the five sacred plants by the Atharva Veda (c. 1500-1000 BCE), held up by the Sushruta Samhita (c. 650 BCE) as a treatment for diarrhoea, and recommended by Vangasenas encyclopedic compendium of ancient Indian medical wisdom, Chikitsa-sara-samhita (c. 1000-1100 CE), as an appetiser and digestive. As our British rulers realised, and so recorded in the eight-volume report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission  based on statements of more than 1,200 witnesses in 1893-94 on a directive of the House of Commons  the use of bhang was too widespread and too much a part of religious rituals and celebratory occasions to merit a blanket ban. This, despite bhang and siblings being taxed by the East India Company since 1798.

The testimony of a contemporary official, JM Campbell, Collector of Land Revenue, Customs and Opium, Bombay, reads like an ode to bhang. Campbell made two important points: even Hindus who were against alcohol for religious reasons did not seem to have any reservations about bhang, and Muslims, too, were not far behind in their admiration for the narcotic. Campbell quotes Urdu poets of his time identifying bhang with the spirit of al-Khidr (Khizr), a messenger of the Prophet celebrated in the Quran (and held in high esteem in Sufism). Khizr wore a green turban and robes of the same colour, and is hailed as the Prophet of Water, and the poets quoted by Campbell, notably Delhis Sufi troubadour Mohammad Shah Naseer Nasiruddin, linked the two characteristics with the cult of bhang.

Viewing the subject generally, it may be added that the moderate use of these drugs is the rule, and that the excessive use is comparatively exceptional, the Commission noted. The moderate use practically produces no ill effects. In all but the most exceptional cases, the injury from habitual moderate use is not appreciable. Excessive use may certainly be accepted as very injurious, though it must be admitted that in many excessive consumers the injury is not clearly marked. British Raj did not allow Victorian morality to come in the way of its acceptance. The official attitude hasnt changed much since Independence. Now, with the chorus getting louder, the devotees of Shiva and Krishna can hope to soon get a bigger bhang for their buck.

(Sourish Bhattacharyya has been a journalist for 33 years. He is now a blogger and founder director of the Tasting India Symposium)
In an affidavit, filed in a writ petition of CPM and its general secretary Sitaram Yechury, the Centre said the electoral bonds were introduced on 2 January, 2018 to promote transparency in funding and donation received by political parties. These can be encashed by an eligible political party only through their authorised bank accounts.

New Delhi: The Centre on Thursday defended in the Supreme Court its decision to issue electoral bonds saying it aimed at ensuring "enhanced accountability" and pushing electoral reforms "to defeat the growing menace of black money".

In an affidavit, filed in a writ petition of CPM and its general secretary Sitaram Yechury, the Centre said the electoral bonds were introduced on 2 January, 2018 to promote transparency in funding and donation received by political parties. These can be encashed by an eligible political party only through their authorised bank accounts.

"Keeping in view the emergent need to ensure that there is enhanced accountability and electoral reforms to defeat the growing menace of black money, especially when the country is moving towards a cashless-digital economy, the legislature has adopted a conscious legislative policy culminating in the introduction of the electronic reforms," the Centre's affidavit said.

It added that the electoral bonds do not have the name of the donor or the receiving political party and only carry a unique hidden alphanumeric serial numbers as an in-built security feature. Only a political party, registered under Section 29A of the Representation of People's Act, 1951 and which has secured not less than 1 per cent of the votes polled in the last general election to the Lok Sabha or the Legislative Assembly, will be eligible to receive the bond, it said. "A non-KYC compliant Application or an Application that doesn't meet the requirements of the scheme shall be rejected," it said.

The Centre denied that the amendments and the notification issue by it seek to create "an anonymous and secretive mechanism for increasing the wealth of political parties". It also denied that they are "arbitrary in nature or brings in unreasonable restrictions on the freedom to information regarding the identities of persons or corporations making contributions to political parties".

The government further stated that the scheme envisages building a transparent system of acquiring bonds with validated KYC and an audit trail.

"Besides, a limited window and a very short maturity period shall make any misuse improbable. Donors, who buy these bonds, their balance sheet will reflect such donations made. The electoral bonds will prompt donors to take the banking route to donate, with their identity captured by the issuing authority. This will ensure transparency, accountability and a big step towards electoral reform," it said. The government sought dismissal of the petition filed by the left party saying there is "no invidious or arbitrary discrimination, and there has been no violation of any fundamental right of the Petitioner".

On 2 February, 2018, the apex court had sought the Centre's response on a plea by the CPM and Yechury terming the issuance of electoral bonds by the government as "arbitrary" and "discriminatory". The plea has claimed that government's decision entitles political parties to receive unlimited donations without recording its source. Challenging the Centre's decision, the CPM said that the amendments in the Finance Act, 2017, jeopardise the very foundation of Indian democracy and it would lead to greater political corruption.

The petition claimed that the introduction of electoral bonds by the Finance Act by which details of donations made to political parties are not reported or recorded by the parties and whose purchasers' identity remains hidden from the public realm is the creation of an "obscure funding system" which is unchecked by any authority.

It sought striking down of amendments made through the Finance Act, 2017 and the 2 January, 2018 notification issued by the Ministry of Finance, whose cumulative effect is that political parties are entitled to receive unlimited donations from individuals and corporations, including loss-making and foreign corporations, without having to record or report the sources of such funding. The NDA government had announced electoral bonds in the earlier budget, claiming that the scheme would clean up political funding. The move was resisted by opposition parties. The Election Commission of India had also expressed its reservations initially.
In a letter to New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, Narendra Modi stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence, the External Affairs Ministry said in an official release.

New Delhi: Expressing "deep shock" over killings of scores of people in the Christchurch terror attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies, and expressed India's solidarity with the people of New Zealand at this difficult time.

In a letter to New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, Modi also stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence, the External Affairs Ministry said in an official release.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's suburb, seen as one of the worst attacks on Muslims in that country.

Observing that according to unofficial reports nine Indians are missing since the attack, a source said that due to certain processes involved, official confirmation about Indian casualties may take a while to come in.

In his letter, Modi offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injured and underscored India's solidarity with the "friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time".

The prime minister has expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch, the release said.

"The prime minister stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies," it added.

Modi also expressed his deepest condolences to the bereaved families in the dastardly attack.

Earlier, the MEA said its high commission is in touch with local authorities for more information and was ascertaining more details about the possibility of Indians being affected by the terror attacks.

"Our mission is in touch with local authorities to ascertain more details. It is a sensitive matter and therefore we can't give confirmed numbers/names till we are absolutely certain," MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

Meanwhile, MP Asaduddin Owaisi, President of All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party, said an Indian has been shot at in the incident.

A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad & would like to go to NZ for Ahmeds family. I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family  Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) March 15, 2019

India's High Commission said that any Indian national affected by the attacks can contact it for assistance.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for those affected.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh tweeted,"India stands with New Zealand in this hour of grief and sorrow and offers it's condolences to the bereaved families.The shootout in New Zealand underscores the importance of the global fight to counter terrorism - the world needs to get together and defeat this demon."
Today's top stories: The death of of the CSMT foot over bridge collapse has risen to six; the Supreme Court will hear a PL filed by 21 Opposition parties on the EVM plea; UK Parliament votes for a Brexit delay; and more.

Six dead after foot overbridge collapses in Mumbai

At least six people were killed and 36 injured after a major portion of a foot overbridge near the iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus Railway station collapsed on Thursday evening. A big slab of the foot overbridge came crashing at around 7.20 pm due to which several pedestrians were injured.

Five of the deceased have been identified as Apoorva Prabhu (35), Ranjana Tambe (40), Zahid Shiraj Khan (32), Sarika Kulkarni (35) and Tapendra Singh (35).

The Railways and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) have blamed each other for the deterioration of the condition of the bridge.

The Maharashtra government has ordered a "high-level inquiry" even as politicians have begun trading blame for the disaster. Congress has slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party government for "shameless, insensitive, arrogant and absolutely uncaring" statements. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, in the line of fire, is also set to begin a pre-election statewide tour with Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray from Vidarbha on Friday morning.

SC to hear Opposition's EVM audit plea

The Supreme Court will hear public-interest litigation (PIL) filed by leaders of 21 Opposition parties, seeking an audit of at least 50 percent of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter-verified paper audit trails (VVPATs) to be used in the upcoming general elections.

The petitioners include Telugu Desam Party chief Chandrababu Naidu, Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal, Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, Nationalist Congress Party head Sharad Pawar, Trinamool Congress leader Derek O'Brien, Congress leader KC Venugopal, National Conference leader Farooq Abdullah, Bahujan Samaj Party leader Satish Mishra, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader MK Stalin, Loktantrik Janata Dal leader Sharad Yadav and Rashtriya Lok Dal founder Ajit Singh.

A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India will hear the plea.

Politics erupts over China blocking Masood Azhar's entry into terrorists' list

The BJP on Thursday hit back at Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, asking why he is in a celebratory mood whenever India is in pain, hours after he attacked the government over China blocking a UN resolution to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar a global terrorist.

Earlier, Rahul had slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi, claiming he was "weak and scared" of Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, "Why is Rahul Gandhi in a celebratory mood when the country stands failed by this attitude of China? Your tweet would be shown in the office of Jaish-e-Muhammad with much merry...I ask with great pain today that what is the Congress's commitment today to fight against terror," he said addressing a press conference.

He said Rahul's tweet must be "headline news" in Pakistan. "You feel very happy seeing your news in Pakistan," Prasad claimed.

Rahul, meanwhile, will visit Raipur in Chhatisgarh, where he is expected to interact with doctors and health workers. He will then address a public meeting in Bargarh district in Odisha.

UK Parliament votes to ask EU to delay Brexit by at least three months

Britain's Parliament voted on Thursday to seek a delay of the country's departure from the European Union, a move that will likely avert a chaotic withdrawal on the scheduled exit date of 29 March.

With Brexit due in 15 days and no divorce deal yet approved, the House of Commons voted 412-202 to ask the bloc to postpone Britain's exit until at least 30 June.

Power to approve or reject the extension lies with the EU, whose officials have said they will only allow a delay if Britain either approves a divorce deal or makes a fundamental shift in its approach to Brexit. In a historic irony, almost three years after Britain voted to leave the EU, its future is now in the bloc's hands.

RBI governor Shaktikanta Das to meet heads of small finance banks

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das will meet heads of small finance banks on Friday, to discuss various issues related to them. There are 10 small finance banks operating in the country. "Small finance banks have an important role in promoting financial inclusion and priority sector lending. Will hold a meeting with the managing directors and CEOs of small finance banks," he said in a tweet on Thursday.

The small finance banks are entities that provide basic banking services like accepting deposits and lending to the unbanked sections such as small farmers, micro business enterprises, micro and small industries and unorganised sector entities. The central bank had received 72 applications to set up small finance bank licences. After scrutiny, the RBI decided to grant in-principle approval to 10 applicants to set up small finance banks.

Tesla Model Y to be unveiled today

Announced almost four years ago, Tesla is finally all set to unveil its Model Y SUV today at an event in Los Angeles. Not a lot is known about the SUV when it comes to specifics but we do know that the new car will be based on the underpinnings of the successful Tesla Model 3 sedan and will be smaller than the company's existing Model X SUV.

The launch is expected to begin at 8:30 am IST.

Shah Rukh Khan 'pretty shaken up' after Zero?

Raajneeti and The Legend of Bhagat Singh writer Anjum Rajabali, at a FICCI Frames panel discussion, addressed Shah Rukh Khan's decision to opt out of the Rakesh Sharma biopic Saare Jahan Se Accha. According to PTI, there have been reports that the actor was sceptical of venturing into another space film after Aanand L Rai's Zero, which had his character Bauua Singh travel to Mars.

"If you're asking me, there was a problem with the script (of Zero). Himanshu (Sharma, the writer) is a very talented person but things go wrong sometimes. I don't think he said no to Saare Jahan Se Achcha because of space (angle). I think he's also pretty shaken up, he was banking a lot on that," said Rajabali.
| BY Kim Shaw |

Serviceplan Malaysia has hired Senior Creative Director Richard Chong to work closely with General Manager Elaine J. Chew with the remit of expanding Serviceplan business in the region.

Chew commented, Richard and I worked together years ago, and we both had a good working chemistry which allowed us to come together again. Richard is passionate, has an eye for details and most importantly is a good listener. Richard takes the time to understand the brands and issues at hand; resulting in great creative solutions. Richard is also a good mentor and inspiration to the Creative and Brand Management team here at Serviceplan Malaysia.

After gaining a B.F.A. in Visual Communications and Art Direction in the USA, Chong (pictured) returned to Malaysia to embark on an advertising career which has seen him work at high profile global agencies including; Y&R, JWT, Grey, McCann and Publicis. He left Malaysia to take up a bigger role in Beijing as Group Creative Director at McCann Healthcare, where he also served as a Global Creative Council member within the network.

Chong has led various creative teams and was responsible for some big brands, both in Malaysia and China including; Maxis, Petronas, OCBC, Astro, Nestle, BMW, Tourism Malaysia, Johnson & Johnson, Reckitt & Benckiser, JD.com.

Chongs work has been recognised with creative and effectiveness awards including; D&AD, LIA, One Show, AdFest, Spikes, Asian Marketing Effectiveness Awards (AMEs), PMAA and the EFFIEs.
Describing himself as a 'white man from a regular family', one of the suspected shooters of the New Zealand mosque shooting, revealed that he is 28 and worked as a 'kebab removalist'

New Zealand mosque shooting: Here's what we know of suspected shooter who described himself as 'kebab removalist', arrests made so far

Even though there is no official confirmation about the motives of the three suspects arrested in the New Zealand mosque shootings, preliminary media reports and one of the suspects' 'self-declaration' of sorts suggests Islamophobic and anti-immigrant undercurrents to the deadly attack. Describing himself as a 'white man from a regular family', one of the suspected shooters, who also live-streamed the dastardly attack, revealed that he is 28 and worked as a "kebab removalist".

To regain India's data credibility, govt should withdraw faulty GDP back series, release NSSO job numbers

Perhaps more than the concerns of slowing growth, what is probably hurting the Indian economy even more now is the widening trust deficit on countrys official data, particularly on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and employment/unemployment. In a letter released on Thursday, 108 economists and social scientists called for the restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity to the statistical organisations in India freeing critical data releases from the clutch of damaging political interference'.

MiG-21 Bison shooting down F-16 attests to IAF's combat prowess; procuring next-gen aircraft key to maintaining edge

Although the man-machine combination of the IAF pilot and the MiG-21 Bison, which shot down a superior F-16 fighter jet, but India needs to recognise and accept the fact that the MiG-21 is six decades old. The IAF need the right aircraft in the right numbers and at the right time in order to retain the prestigious ranking and the qualitative edge it enjoys today.

How a small Madhya Pradesh village is striving to keep kabaddi's legacy afloat despite institutional apathy

Rohna is a dot on Madhya Pradesh's map. But the small village in Madhya Pradesh has a rich history of kabaddi and given a dozen or so national-level kabaddi players. The sport has also brought about a social change as well with the village giving up the old custom of 'mrityu bhoj' after a young kabaddi player died recently. Still, it struggles to keep the sport ticking in the region due to lack of support.

Sarnath Banerjee on subverting 'truth-manufacturing industries' with fiction, and the therapeutic power of imagination

"In this age of truth-manufacturing industries, falsehood reigns in the form of fake news, propaganda and internet trolling. I am skeptical of people who offer Truth with a capital T. If you push forward a point emphatically, persistently and loudly enough, you can create your private truth," says graphic novelist and artist Sarnath Banerjee, who is out with his latest book, Doab Dil (Penguin Randomhouse India). The book takes us into history  alternating fact and fiction to create a narrative that is compelling, informative and visually stunning.
Ten days after Pakistan announced what has been billed as its most-serious crackdown on terrorist groups yet, an in-house magazine published by the Jaish-e-Mohammed has revealed that the proscribed group's leadership continues to hold indoctrination classes

New Delhi: Ten days after Pakistan announced what has been billed as its most-serious crackdown on terrorist groups yet, an in-house magazine published by the Jaish-e-Mohammed has revealed that the proscribed group's leadership continues to hold indoctrination classes at its sprawling headquarters in Bahawalpur, organise meetings across the country.

Published each week from Peshawar, the 15 to 21 March issue of al-Qalam also contains articles by leaders of the jihadist group, including its emir, or prince, Maulana Masood Azhar Alvi and his brother, Talha Saif.

Islamabad had, on 5 March, said it had decided to "speed up action against all proscribed organisations". "In compliance, 44 under-observation members of proscribed organisations, including [JeM second-in-command] Mufti Abdul Rauf and Hamza Azhar, have been taken in preventive detention for investigation".

Earlier, on 22 February, the government of Pakistan's Punjab province announced it was taking over the administration of group's two main complexes in the city of Bahawalpur.

However, articles in al-Qalam make clear that activities at the Markaz Osman o-Ali  one of those two centres  are continuing as usual. The newspaper records that 27 students have begun the daura siyasa course, held each fortnight, at the Markaz Usman-o-Ali.

In its 1 March issue (see below), the newspaper said the course  where students are taught "knowledge of jihad"  "is devised by the emir of the mujahideen, Maulana Masood Azhar, and is conducted under his directions by teachers who have received instruction from him".

Al-Qalam has also invited participants for three other indoctrination courses to be in coming weeks  a Daura tafseer, from 16 to 30 March, a Daura tarbiya, from 22 March to 5 April, and Daura asasiyah, from 23 March to 6 April.

In his regular column in al-Qalam, Azhar  who uses the pen-name Sa'adi  alludes to difficulties, saying "our wings beat because of our prayers, which seek god's intercession for the Muslim nation... I urge my brothers to give a final push to realise the dreams of the Kashmiri people for freedom," Azhar writes, invoking the memory of Pulwama suicide bomber Adil Dar.

The newspaper's continued publication suggests that there that bank accounts used by the organisation  known to be held by individuals close to the organisation at branches of the Bank Islami in Karachi and Lahore  continue to be active.

Facing blacklisting by the multinational Financial Action Task Force for its failure to act against terror financing, Pakistan had announced an action plan to clamp down on fundraising by terrorist groups.

Bahawalpur-based sources told Firstpost there were no signs of change at the Markaz Usman-o-Ali, despite its takeover by the government. Although the Punjab government had appointed an administrator to run the centre, armed Jaish-e-Muhammad personnel continued to be stationed there.

Earlier this month, the BBC's Secunder Kirmani reported seeing a poster depicting an "assortment of guns alongside a slogan evoking a famous battle from Islamic history" at a JeM seminary in Islamabad.

"In the dusty street outside, a poster advertising a rally on behalf of the Kashmiri cause was emblazoned with the distinctive white and black flag of" the JeM, he wrote.

New Delhi has voiced scepticism on Pakistan's willingness to act against terrorism, noting that both the JeM and Lashkar-e-Taiba emerged from past bans, in 2002, 2008 and 2016, unscathed, once international pressure eased.

The Latest Edition of Al-Qalam by Firstpost on Scribd
Telling the truth has long been a struggle for Indias national-security establishment. Even data already in the public domain is reflexively denied

In April 2018, the Israeli Air Force struck at the Tiyas (T-4) Air Base, near the Syrian city of Homs, targeting a single hanger housing surveillance drones and a yet-to-be-installed Iranian-supplied Tor air defence missile system. Photographs show the warheads gutted the inside of the hanger but left only tears on its metal skin. The structure, despite the multiple hits, remained almost intact.

For the Indian Air Force (IAF), under siege ever since independent satellite analysts claimed that there is no evidence that its February 26 air strike hit the Jaish-e-Mohammed training base in Balakot, those images are good news.

The IAF has, in off-record briefings, been pointing to tears on the roof of one of the northern buildings of the complex as evidence that it did indeed hit its targets. Its Spice 2000 bombs, the IAF says, carried 80-kg fragmentation warheads, similar to those used at Tiyas.

Part of the reason few have been listening, though, is that the T-4 imagesalong with other imagery available with the governmenthavent been circulated. Indeed, the government put out no technical data at all to back its case. That points to one of the important deficits in Indias national security responses: credibility.

Telling the truth has long been a struggle for Indias national security establishmenteven when there are few costs of doing so. Even data which will become available through government websites or is already in the public domain is reflexively denied.

Phone me when Im having coffee in Khan Market and ask where I am, says one bureaucrat jokingly, and Ill insist Im at the other end of city. Ive become psychologically incapable of telling the truth even when theres no reason to lie.

Israel, by contrast, routinely releases satellite imagery and video as evidence in support of strikes it acknowledges the country conducteda tool both to undermine denials by its adversaries and to block propaganda on civilian fatalities. For the most part, the US and the UK follow the same practice. The case against this practice is that its hard to hide the facts when things go wrong, but experience has taught these democracies that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Indias credibility crisis after Balakot illustrates the point. In Pakistan, Indias claims now have no credibility. This means at least one important objectivepersuading Pakistani public opinion of the costs of allowing jihadists to operatehas failed despite the IAFs stellar operation. Its also opened the way for a divisive, bitter political battle at home.

This is true to pattern. For example, New Delhi hasnt publicly revealed that the IAF is investigating credible claims that the Mi-17V5 helicopter shot down over Budgam, Jammu and Kashmir, on 27 February may have been brought down by the countrys own air defence system. Pilots on the helicopter, IAF sources say, were cleared to land just as air defence systems at Humhama and Awantipora airbases went on high alert in response to Pakistans counterstrikes, leading to a missile operator firing in error.

Tragic as such incidents are, the so-called friendly fire is a routine part of war: a staggering 24 percent of all US military fatalities in the first Gulf War were inflicted by its own forces. There, however, public disclosure led to improvements in operating practices and procedures.

In India, the bureaucratic impulse is to cover up or scapegoat, often with disastrous consequences, not the least of which is that hushed-up good-faith errors become fodder for conspiracy theories. Economy with the truth costs lives. In Kargil, a large body of military history now tells us, the army leadership pushed under-prepared formations into combat to cover up its mistakes. Political leaders, similarly, are known to have made serious strategic misjudgments on Kashmir, leading to unacceptable escalations in Indian military fatalities.

The standard response to these criticisms is that we ought not question the armed forces.

Its worth considering, though, where not asking questions takes us. In the build-up to the 1962 war, a servile media failed to confront then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the cabal of pet Generals around him on strategy and military preparedness. The consequence was national humiliation.
Following the landslide victory registered by the BJP in 2014, other political parties too saw merit in social media.

Prior to 2014, barring a few political leaders who used social media to communicate with their supporters, the medium was yet to impress the community of political pundits. But the BJP was using social media as an integral part of its campaign, and the party enjoyed first-mover advantage in this new format of communication.

However, following the landslide victory registered by the BJP in 2014, other political parties too saw merit in the medium. All parties that are vying for a piece of power in 2019 have official handles on social media. Top leaders, including those who had been reluctant till now, like Mayawati, have taken the plunge in order to regularly interact with their followers, and political opponents. Political communication, including critical appointments of office bearers, lands first on social media. Social media, like any other medium that amplifies messaging, has the power to rise to the occasion and steer opinions in a particular direction.

Clearly, for the medium that is at par with electronic formats with respect to availability of information and participation from political newsmakers, it was only a matter of time before the Election Commission brought social media under the ambit of the Model Code of Conduct. India currently has 500 million internet users, 35 million active users on Twitter, 300 million on Facebook, and 71 million on Instagram. This indicates the significance of the medium and its ability to spread information and influence opinions.

For many of us, who had been asking for the move, it was only after the Election Commissioner read the code for social media that it dawned on us: the colossal scale of implementation challenges this announcement entailed.

Digital world has no boundaries

The world wide web has no physical boundaries. As information violates geographical boundaries, it is increasingly difficult to trace the point of origin of content. While elections will be held in India, content will be generated and shared across the globe. Those accounts that fall out of the jurisdiction of India will not be covered under the Model Code of Conduct. For example, if a global leader of another nation wishes luck to one of the contestants, does that tantamount to breach?

Digital world is timeless

Digital content is always available for reuse across platforms. Aged content, shared by a contestant, if circulated by the supporters of the leader, is still able to influence opinion. However, it would be inappropriate to penalise the leader for old content resurfacing just before the date of voting. For example, this particular tweet of the prime minister is in the context of 2014 elections.

While supporters are well within their right to share and spread the message before 2019 voting date, technically, the contestant cannot originate such content a day before the voting day. So, is distribution of this tweet by the digital cadre not in violation of the content?

Multi-phase elections

The 2019 general elections are scheduled to be held in seven phases. All constituencies are not governed by the code of conduct at the same time. As a result, leaders in various parts of the nation cannot be held liable for sharing content that has the potential to violate the code of a constituency that falls out of their own.

If a celebrity who hails from Uttar Pradesh and now based in Maharashtra posts her experiences during the on-going moratorium in UP, and the post gets widely shared by users located in the state of the election, is it possible for this to be counted as breach of code?

Independent supporters and volunteers

In the past five years, social media has given a platform to those citizens who otherwise did not have any channel to voice their opinions. Several of these citizens who offer sharp insights and facts also have very strong ideological or political alignments.

They campaign in their individual capacity through their social media accounts and pages/channels. A lot of them have materially significant following as well. Advertisements running on their pages, promoting a particular party, should not be monitored, because that may be encroachment of a citizens right to freedom of expression.

Bots/traceability

Social media platforms, true to their nature, have little to do with whether the account is being operated by a human being or just a robot. Technology provides opportunities to scale a particular task with little effort. This also leads to the menace behind fake accounts and fake facts. Without having a solution to dealing with fake news, it is imminent that countless accounts, nameless and faceless, will be in action.

Where is WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is a messaging application which allows multi-media content to be shared with more than one person across the globe. In the recent past, it has been known as the carrier of fake news and propaganda that can incite violence. The medium provides the user with unlimited access and reach through groups. With little control and visibility on the content that is being distributed, the regulator needs to get WhatsApp in its ambit through access to groups, while individual messages can remain encrypted.

The Election Commission has owned the responsibility to manage the social media ecosystem that extends beyond boundaries. Expectedly, it will be inundated with complaints and grievances related to social media that the regulator will need to address and close. Notwithstanding the challenges, most importantly, general elections 2019 will mark the beginning of a long, winding journey towards ensuring that social media is a place for responsible campaigning and opinion making by/of/for the citizens.
The Election Commission for the first time has also started a new mobile app called Observer App. Using this App, General, Police and Expenditure observers can submit their Observer's report securely to ECI to upload the relevant document from the mobile app.

New Delhi: As a run-up to the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls and Legislative Assembly elections of four states, the Election Commission of India on Thursday organised the first briefing for Observers to be deployed in various states across the country.

Over 1800 senior officers drawn from IAS, IPS officers as also from Indian Revenue Service and few other Central Services attended the briefing. These officers are being deployed as General, Police and Expenditure Observers, read a statement. Reminding the Observers of their crucial role, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora pointed out that the officers need to be earnest and have no choice but to ensure that no mistakes are committed.

Arora recalled that in the recent state elections held, it took all of miniscule percentages of instances of slippages in following the laid down protocol for EVM-VVPAT procedures or missing out of few names from the electoral roll, or delay in the counting of votes, rendering all other good work done in the background, the statement added. Arora further noted that with changing times, concerns about abuse of money power and also social media are posing newer challenges. He said the endeavour of ECI is not only to conduct free and fair elections but also transparent, clean and ethical elections.

Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa reminded the group that as Observers, they need to ensure implementation of all instructions of the ECI in letter and spirit. He mentioned that the recently launched CVigil App has helped empower every citizen to help the Commission keep a vigilant eye for Model Code violations. But the availability of this App has itself put more responsibility on officers managing and overseeing the electoral system, the statement read.

He reiterated that the Observers need to be accessible and available to all stakeholders on the ground as the officers are literally the extended arms of ECI in the field, the statement added. Addressing the officers, Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra drew the attention of the officers that as Observers their role is to be eyes and ears of the Commission in keeping a watchful eye and to take all preventive measures to ensure free and fair elections. He pointed out that the role of Expenditure Observers becomes crucial when methods of inducements to voters are becoming very innovative too, the statement read.

During the day-long briefing sessions, the officers were given comprehensive and thorough inputs about the various aspects of election management by the Senior Deputy Election Commissioner, DECs and DGs of ECI. Detailed thematic presentations were made on Election planning, Observers roles and responsibilities, electoral roll issues, enforcement of Model Code of Conduct, legal provisions, EVM/VVPAT management, media engagement and the wide array of activities undertaken for voter facilitation under the Commissions flagship SVEEP (Systematic Voters Education and Electoral Participation) programme. The Observers were also acquainted with the various IT initiatives and mobile applications launched by the Commission for voter facilitation as well as effective and efficient management of election process in the field, the statement read.

Moreover, the Observers were provided a functional demonstration of EVMs and VVPATs and briefed about the multifarious technical security features, administrative protocols and procedural safeguards that surround the EVM ecosystem to make it completely secure, robust, reliable, non-tamperable and credible. The Election Commission for the first time has also started a new mobile app called . Using this App, General, Police and Expenditure observers can submit their Observer's report securely to ECI to upload the relevant document from the mobile app. The Observers will get all important notifications, alerts, and urgent messages on this App while they are on duty. It will also facilitate observers to get their deployment status, download the ID card and update their profile, the statement read.

Since the observers will be closely involved in real-time disposal of the cVIGIL Model code and expenditure violation cases, this App would help see all the cVIGIL cases under their jurisdiction. The Observers can make a written observation after the flying squads have investigated the matter. Observers are put on deputation with ECI for the entire duration of the election process, it added.
The court censured Coimbatore Superintendent of Police R Pandiarajan for having revealed the name of the Pollachi rape survivor at a press conference.

The Madras High Court on Friday directed the Tamil Nadu government to pay an interim compensation of Rs 25 lakh to the survivor in the Pollachi rape case for "violation of her privacy", according to several media reports.

A bench of Justice N Kirubakaran and SS Sundar strongly censured Coimbatore superintendent of police R Pandiarajan for having revealed the name of the survivor on 1 March at a press conference, The News Minute reported. The police also reportedly revealed the name of the survivor on 6 March in a press statement.

The Madras High Court also asked the state government to take action against Pandiarajan, India Today reported.

Four, including key accused Thirunavakkarasu, were arrested late last month in connection with the case which sent shock waves after a leaked video in which the woman was screaming and resisting her assailants went viral.

There were also reports that the four had indulged in similar sexual harassment of several other women over the past seven years after befriending them.

The case assumed political overtones after a local functionary of ruling AIADMK allegedly attacked the victim's brother for lodging a police complaint about the harassment and was expelled from the party.

Opposition parties led by DMK have accused the AIADMK of attempting to shield the accused, a charge it denies.

The state government Tuesday decided to recommend a CBI probe into the case.

With inputs from PTI
Devendra Fadnavis visited the spot where part of a foot overbridge, located near Mumbai's CSMT railway station, collapsed. He also visited some of the people who were injured in the incident,

Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Friday arrived at the spot where part of a foot overbridge, located near Mumbai's CSMT railway station, collapsed on Thursday evening. He also visited the injured in the hospital, ANI reported.

Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis visits the spot where part of a foot over bridge near CSMT railway station collapsed yesterday. 6 people had died in the incident. pic.twitter.com/aHB3VLufDw  ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

At least six people were killed and 31 others were injured after the bridge, commonly called 'Kasab bridge' because the 26/11 Mumbai attack terrorist passed through it, collapsed. A big slab of the foot overbridge, connecting CSMT platform 1 with BT Lane near the Times of India building. came crashing at around 7.20 pm, ANI said.

Following his visit to the injured persons, ANI quoted the chief minister as saying, "There are around 10 injured admitted in the ward, one is in the ICU. But all of them are out of danger now. A high-level enquiry will be launched into the matter. FIR has been lodged."

A case has been registered against officials of Central Railway and the BMC in connection with the incident, police said.

Fadnavis had on Thursday night announced an ex-gratia of Rs 5 Lakh each for the families of those who died in the incident and compensation of Rs 50,000 for the injured. He said that the state government will pay for their treatment.

The deceased were identified as Apoorva Prabhu (35), Anjana Tambe (40), Bhakti Shinde (40), Zahid Shiraj Khan (32), Tapendra Singh (28) and Mohan, said the disaster management cell of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Prabhu and Tambe were employees of the GT Hospital, the officials said.

Following the foot overbridge collapse, Congress has demanded the ouster of Railway Minister Piyush Goyal.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said he was deeply saddened to learn about the Mumbai bridge collapse where several people are still reportedly trapped under the debris. He went on to attack the BJP government over the incident.

"Modi Government and Maharashtra government are criminally culpable for inaction leading to repeat tragedies  29 September, 2017 Elphistone Stampede. 3 July 2018  Andheri Bridge Collapse.

"Railway Minister's tall claims of audit have failed time and again. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal must resign or be sacked," he said on Twitter.
IAF pilots combat superiority, even when faced with an advanced F-16 fighter jet, has been proven in the past, but to ensure the air force maintains its qualitative edge it's imperative that it gets the right next-generation aircraft in the right numbers and at the right time

In the recent past, a lot has been written, spoken and discussed on the dog fight between an American origin F-16 aircraft of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) and a Soviet origin MiG-21 aircraft of the Indian Air Force (IAF). Speculations were rife as to how a combat inferior MiG-21 aircraft shot down a combat superior F-16 aircraft in this aerial duel. The social media was also buzzing on the said issue, and humorously, improving the sale quotient of the MiG-21 aircraft, much to the embarrassment it might be causing to the erstwhile General Dynamics, now Lockheed Martin, the company which produces the F-16 aircraft. But the makings of this dog fight go back to 2004.

The IAF had started to mature as a potent combat force much before the year 2004. The induction of Jaguar aircraft, a Deep Penetration Strike Aircraft (DPSA) in 1979, followed by the induction of the Mirage-2000 multi-role aircraft, changed the complexion of the IAF. The MiG-21 aircraft, which had been inducted into the IAF in the early 1960s, was later supplemented by the other MiG series aircraft namely MiG-23 aircraft  both in ground attack (GA) role and in air defence (AD) role  MiG-25 in the strategic reconnaissance role, MiG-27 aircraft in GA role, MiG-29 in the air superiority role, and Sukhoi SU-30 as a multi-role combat aircraft. All these inductions painted the IAF canvas projecting IAF as a world power. To add to the canvas, two major events took place in 2004.

One was Exercise Cope Thunder, an international exercise held in Alaska. It was for the first time ever that the fighter aircraft of the IAF were required to fly across the globe to Alaska to participate in the exercise. The DPSA Jaguar aircraft of the IAF was chosen to take part in the exercise. The author of this article, then in command of a major IAF base in the western sector, was entrusted with the responsibility of operational training of the aircrew who would take part in the exercise, and of ensuring that six Jaguar aircraft were to be prepared for participation in the exercise.

It would be worth mentioning that till then, there were no templates to go by, and needless to say that both the machines and the men operating the machines had to remain in a state of extreme fitness all through the period of the exercise. It was a tall order, and the IAF had given ten months as the preparation period.

Proudly accepting the challenge, preparations began almost immediately. A lot went into ensuring that all six aircraft remained serviceable and operationally airworthy for the ferry to Alaska and back, and for the duration of the exercise. Towards operational training of aircrew, it was ensured that each air warrior was competent in the art of mid-air refuelling, a new discipline which till then only a handful had been exposed to, and to remain alert in the cockpit for long durations of flight and be able to undertake combat engagements and accurate weapon delivery in all kinds of environmental conditions.

After an extensive and rigorous training lasting all of ten months, the team was ready to project to the world that the IAF had arrived. With a disciplined and professional integration between the fighter aircraft and the mid-air refuelling mother tanker, the proud IAF team reached Alaska in a befitting man-machine combination.

During the exercise, the IAF team gave an excellent account of its professionalism which prompted other participating air forces to acknowledge its contributions to their envy. Laudable statements and accolades continued to pour in making the IAF ever so proud. This led to the start of an era of IAF fighter aircraft flying to various locations in the world to take part in international exercises. In addition, it almost became a habit for the IAF to excel each time, and in the process, winning the respect of all participating air forces every time.

The other event was Exercise Cope India, a bilateral exercise with the US Air Force (USAF) held in India at one of IAFs military airfields in central India. In this exercise, the IAF employed Jaguar aircraft, Mirage-2000 aircraft, SU-30 aircraft, MiG-27 aircraft, and above all, the MiG-21 Bison aircraft  upgraded with Russian Phezatron radar, Vympel R-73 Close Combat Missiles (CCM), and Beyond Visual Range (BVR) Vympel R-77 missiles. The USAF employed F-15 and F-16 aircraft. Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT) missions were flown as part of the exercise, first ever in 40 years. During the missions, it was observed that IAF pilots flying the upgraded MiG-21 Bison blew away the F-15 and F-16 aircraft of USAF in one to one as well as in mixed exercises. The USAF acknowledged that the IAFs MiG-21 Bison and SU-30 aircraft were tough opponents.

During the exercise, IAF reportedly notched up astounding kill ratios against the all-powerful USAF, sending shock waves through the American defence establishment. The adaptive capability of the IAF flying seemingly inferior Russian systems in a superior manner to overcome technological inequalities disproved many American threat assumptions.

While the Pentagon tried to underplay the IAFs achievements, the USAF gave the IAF its due. The Aviation Week and Space Technology quoted the USAF as saying, "The two most formidable IAF aircraft proved to be the MiG-21 Bison, an upgraded version of the Russian made MiG-21 baseline, and the SU-30, also made in Russia." About the capabilities of IAF pilots, USAF Team Leader Colonel Greg Newbech said, "What we have seen in the two weeks of the exercise is that the IAF can stand toe-to-toe with the best air forces in the world. I pity the pilot who has to face the IAF because he wont be going home." Similar sentiments were sounded in Alaska about the IAF during the Exercise Cope Thunder which took place just a few months after the Exercise Cope India.

On 27 February 2019, the PAFs F-16 locked horns with IAFs MiG-21 Bison in a dogfight. The MiG-21 Bison shot down the F-16 using its R-73 CCM. The assumed assessment of the USAF with regard to the MiG-21 Bison wasnt totally misplaced. With near comparable thrust weight ratios, and good, though inferior avionics, the MiG-21 Bison managed to obtain an edge over an otherwise superior adversary. It is also in order to place on record the superlative operational training of IAF air warriors, a fact which was well observed by the USAF in 2004. It is perhaps the man-machine combination that made the day.

Although the man-machine combination of the IAF air warrior and the MiG-21 Bison made the nation proud, India needs to recognise and accept the fact that the MiG-21 entered IAF service in the early 1960s. This makes the aircraft around six decades old. We all know how technology has advanced in the last six decades, and we cannot keep flogging the old horse. The requirements of a new generation combat aircraft and weapon systems cannot be over-emphasised. We also need to look at our inventory deficiencies in terms of numbers which are at a sad low. It is imperative that the IAF acquires next-generation aircraft in good numbers to offset the deficiencies and for further qualitative improvement. It must also be understood that human integration with new systems is time-consuming. In order to retain the prestigious ranking in the qualitative edge which the IAF enjoys today, it needs the right stuff in the right numbers as of yesterday.

The author is a retired fighter pilot of the Indian Air Force with approximately 4,000 flying hours. Presently, he is a distinguished fellow at the Center for Air Power Studies.
The BMC, in its primary report on the CSMT bridge collapse on Friday, pinned the blame on the firm which carried out a structural audit in 2018.

A day after a bridge adjoining Mumbai's iconic Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) collapsed, killing six and leaving 31 injured, authorities are attempting to fix responsibility for the incident and to ascertain the causes behind it.

Speaking to Firstpost, an expert on Mumbai's railway network said, "The portion of the bridge that is inside the station was constructed in 1984. The structure was later extended across the adjacent DN Road." He further said, "Weeks before an audit of the bridge took place, the BMC changed the tiles at the bridge. These tiles, which were heavier, may have played a part in the collapse of the structure.

However, Kiran Dighavkar, Assistant Commissioner of A ward in the BMC, said, "These are entirely baseless claims. After we received complaints from some citizens, we changed the old tiles and painted the new tiles. If the structural auditor found that the new tiles are heavy and are affecting the stability of the bridge, he should have brought it to our notice. He did not do so. At that time, the audit report merely said that the bridge needed minor repairs."

In 2018, a firm named DD Desai's Associated Engineering Consultants and Analysts Pvt Ltd submitted its audit report to the BMC, which concluded that the bridge was "in a fairly good condition." However, it also said that concrete slabs showed the effects of corrosion, and cracks had formed on some of the railings.

The BMC, in its primary report on the incident on Friday, pinned the blame on the firm, concluding, "Prime facie, it is observed that the structural audit is not carried out correctly and major lapses are observed in conducting the structural audit of the bridge on the background of the sudden collapse of the bridge."

The civic body has announced that the firm which carried out the audit will be removed from the list of empanelled structural auditors, and will be issued a show-cause notice for blacklisting. It will also file an FIR against the firm. Meanwhile, the BMC has also suspended two serving officers, while charges will be framed against three others who have now retired.

Bridge linked CSMT to important offices, markets

While officials of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) declined to give an estimate of the number of people who used the bridge on a daily basis, the CSMT station is among the busiest ones on the Mumbai suburban train network. It sees a daily footfall of about 6 lakh commuters, and it can be estimated that a significant percentage of these people had been using the bridge which collapsed on Thursday.

The bridge acquired the grim moniker of 'Kasab bridge' in 2008 after terrorists Ajmal Kasab and Ismail Khan were seen on the structure during the 26/11 attacks.

Lata Arghade, secretary of the Mumbai Rail Pravasi Sangh, said, I had been using the bridge ever since it was constructed. On Thursday, when I walked across the bridge a couple of hours before the collapse, I felt it was a little shaky. However, I thought it might be because of my footwear or some such reason. After all, in the middle of the rush hour, one usually does not have the time to think much about these things. Fortunately, I was not at the spot when the bridge collapsed.

Arghade pointed out, A large number of people used the bridge, as it was a link between the CSMT station and some market areas and offices. People took it to go to the killa court (chief metropolitan magistrates court), Crawford market, the police commissioners office, GT Hospital and other nearby places.

She further said, To prevent such incidents in the future, it is important that elected representatives are held to account, not just some junior officers. Also, it is not just councilors from the civic body who are responsible; MLAs and MPs are also responsible for ensuring that the problems of citizens are highlighted.

In the initial blame game that ensued in the aftermath of the collapse, Shiv Sena MP Anil Desai said the bridge comes under the Indian Railways and the railways should have ensured the maintenance of the bridge (the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance rules the BMC). However, Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said during an interaction with the media on Friday, While a high-level inquiry will be carried out, I have asked the municipal commissioner to fix the primary responsibility for the incident and take action on the same. It is very shocking that such an incident occurred even after a structural audit was conducted. This would indicate that maintaining the bridge was, indeed, the responsibility of the BMC.

This isn't the first time a bridge has collapsed in Mumbai. In July, the Gokhale road overbridge which connected Andheri West and Andheri East collapsed, leaving one dead. After the collapse, IIT-Bombay, which conducted an audit of bridges over railway tracks in the city, recommended the closure of the Delisle Road overbridge in Lower Parel. It also recommended the repair or reconstruction of five other bridges: Frere ROB at Grant Road, Belasis ROB at Mumbai Central, Tilak ROB at Dadar, Carol ROB at Prabhadevi and a road overbridge at Mahalaxmi.

In October 2017, a portion of a skywalk, which was being repaired, caved in near the Charni Road railway station in south Mumbai. One person was injured in the incident. The accident occurred just weeks after a stampede at Elphinstone Road station (now renamed to Prabhadevi), in which 23 people died and many more sustained injuries.
The brother of an Indian national injured in the New Zealand mosque shooting on Friday requested the Indian government to help him.

The brother of an Indian national injured in the New Zealand mosque shooting on Friday requested the Indian government to help him get a visa so he could travel to New Zealand to attend to his brother.

"We haven't been able to get proper information yet. I request the government to help me to get a visa so I can travel to New Zealand to take care of my brother," ANI quoted Khurshid Jahangir as saying.

"My brother was injured and is now recovering in a hospital. He is currently undergoing surgery. We have seen in the video he has been shot in the chest. We're trying to reach the Embassy," he further said.

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi also tweeted, saying that an Indian national called Ahmed Jahangir was shot in the attack and his brother was a resident of Hyderabad.

These are Mr. Khursheeds passport details. His brother is serious & his family has little support. Im only requesting the immediate support of your good offices in expediting his visa process. Hell make all arrangements to travel to NZ by himself pic.twitter.com/vXMbnZeJ2X  Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) March 15, 2019

Owaisi further said that another person of Indian origin, Farhaj Ahsan, was missing after the attack. He requested the Centre to provide his family in Hyderabad "immediate assistance".

Farhaj Ahsan, a person of Indian origin, was also reported to have gone to the same mosque and is currently missing. His family in Hyderabad, I request immediate assistance to his family as well. His familys contact details are available with me & Ill share the same with you. pic.twitter.com/KYwBcs2yTM  Asaduddin Owaisi (@asadowaisi) March 15, 2019

India on Friday said its High Commission in New Zealand was ascertaining more details about the possibility of Indians being affected by the terror attacks on two Christchurch mosques and urged the community to contact the mission for any assistance.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb.

In New Delhi, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said that India's High Commission in New Zealand is in touch with local authorities for more information.

"Our mission is in touch with local authorities to ascertain more details. It is a sensitive matter and therefore we can't give confirmed numbers/names till we are absolutely certain," he said.

India's High Commission said that any Indian national affected by the attacks on two Christchurch mosques can contact the mission for assistance.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers: 021803899 and 021850033, for providing assistance.

With inputs from PTI
| BY Kim Shaw |

TBWA\Indonesia has launched Disruption Consulting, a new specialist unit which leverages TBWAs Disruption methodology to solve commercial problems and drive growth for clients.

Marketing strategist, Henry Manampiring, has been appointed to lead the new offering in addition to his role as head of strategic planning at TBWA\Indonesia. He has over 20 years experience in market research and advertising, having worked at companies including Ogilvy, Facebook, Leo Burnett, Millward-Brown, Edelman, JWT, Lowe, and Coca Cola.

Both established brands and start-ups alike, are these days facing myriad challenges  from being stranded by newer avenues of growth, to getting stuck in a chasm, or even being held back with consumer acquisition having overexposed the brand without a strong conviction, said Manampiring. Disruption Consulting is a house of processes and skillsets, that are designed to accelerate businesses past market challenges.

Disruption has been TBWAs software for the past two decades, and has helped create some of the worlds most iconic advertising, said Soum Banerjee, CEO at TBWA\Indonesia. As weve continued to update this software for an ever-evolving consumer landscape, our emphasis on data and consumer insights now allows us to move further upstream and utilize Disruption to solve business problems  and were delighted to have Henry onboard to lead this new offering.

A specialist in consumer insights, Manampiring has developed brand communication strategies for clients across a range of industries including FMCG, Technology, Telco and Banking. He has also conducted numerous studies on advertising effectiveness, product concept and development, and consumer segmentation.

The use of consumer insights should not be limited to brand marketing. They can provide opportunities to innovate in range of business functions, from product development to customer experience and activation, added Manampiring. Im excited to utilize TBWAs unique methodology to uncover emerging behaviors and formulate ideas that drive business growth for both large corporations and burgeoning startups.
Places of worship are 'soft targets' as they reign in a psychological hijack of people. 'By targeting a house of worship, rather than a private home or business, the attacker has committed a powerful symbolic transgression: profaning a space that is both sacred and communal.'

On Friday, 40 have been shot dead and 20 injured so far in shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch during afternoon prayers, an attack which has once again shaken the world and directed its attention to the growing number of hate crimes all over the world.

In 2017, 26 were killed at an attack on a church in Sutherland Springs in Texas; nine were dead in a shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; in 2012, six died at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin; and three at a Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2014. These are just some of the recent examples of attacks on places of worship which have proved to be deadly and thus, raised concerns over the safety of community religious places.

Attacks on Jews

After a massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018, it suggested that Jewish centres needed heightened security to protect them from anti-Semitic. In fact, US president Donald Trump suggested that armed guards belong at houses of worship  a safety measure the Jewish community has deployed for at least two decades, an NBC News report said.

Its a policy that gained new urgency after the 1999 shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles that wounded five, including three young children. Thereafter, many Jewish institutions beefed up security, and the Los Angeles Police Department increased patrols of houses of worship, the report said.

In Britain, the Theresa May government announced that places of worship that have been subjected to or could be vulnerable to hate crime attacks will be supported with a further one million pound funding for protective security. Earlier, funding had been awarded only when places of worship had either been victim to or at risk of a hate attack, including graffiti, defacing of religious symbols or attacks on worshippers.

UK's 'The Places of Worship Security Funding' scheme, which was launched in 2016 and is worth 2.4 million pounds in total, has helped 89 churches, mosques, temples and gurdwaras to install protective alarms, security lighting and CCTV cameras to deter attackers. Synagogues are covered under a separate government-funded scheme administered by the Community Security Trust.

May said, We are a country of many faiths, and... An attack on one community is an attack on all of us. Freedom of worship, respect, and tolerance for those of different faiths is fundamental to our values and I am determined to stamp out extremism and hate crime wherever it occurs.

She further said, Security at places of worship is important to provide congregations with peace of mind, but let me be clear where groups or individuals incite hatred or are engaged in vile, religiously motivated criminal activity, they should expect to be prosecuted and face the full force of the law.

But problem not restricted to anti-Semitism alone

Her remarks cam exactly a year later to the Finsbury Park attack in which one person was killed and nine injured when a van driven by Darren Osborne rammed into pedestrians in London' Finsbury Park near the Muslim Welfare House and just 90 metres away from the Finsbury Park Mosque.

Meanwhile, according to The Telegraph's report, The Church of England is also not sufficiently protected from terrorists. In a blog post the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr John Hall, acknowledged that churches could become targets but said that staff did not want to "turn the Abbey into a fortress". "Even so, we know that the Abbey is not immune from attack. We need it to be open and welcoming, but also safe," the report quoted him as saying.

The reports of concerns emerged after two terror attacks in Manchester and London, both of which took place close to cathedrals, with Southwark Cathedral even forced to close for several days following the London Bridge attack.

In a piece for the Church of England newspaper, Nick Tolson, a former cathedral verger, said: "Security has been incredibly neglected by places of worship over the past decade despite plenty of warning signs that they need to start taking it seriously and putting in place practical procedures to try and reduce the risk to people who work and attend churches in the UK. Over the last decade, I have visited almost every cathedral and can count on one hand the number of churches that actually have effective security that does the job."

Religious places are 'soft targets'

Attacks on places of worship  from synagogues to Christian churches to Sikh temples to mosques have increasingly become common and targets for extremist violence. Many of these attacks can be explained as violent reinforcement of white supremacy and targeting of perceived liberals, ethnic minorities and revenge strikes against terror attacks carried out by Islamic extremists or jihadists in various parts of the world.

Places of worship are 'soft targets' as they reign in a psychological hijack of people. "By targeting a house of worship, rather than a private home or business, the attacker has committed a powerful symbolic transgression: profaning a space that is both sacred and communal. Attacks on places of worship double not just as attacks on worshippers, but as attacks on the community itself," a Vox report states.

In July 2008, a gunman opened fire at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, during a church theatre production of the musical Annie, killing two people and wounding seven others. According to the Vox's report, the assailant later told police he did so because he believed that Democrats were ruining the United States and that all liberals should be killed, citing the historically progressive policies of the Unitarian Church. Thus, bringing to fore the ideological vengeance angle.

Four years later, an avowed white supremacist and an army veteran attacked a gurdwara, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin killing six people and wounding four more before killing himself. A longtime member of the white power music scene, the assailant had been on federal investigators radars for years before he committed the act.

In June 2015, in a shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, nine members of the congregation, including the senior pastor were killed by another self-proclaimed white-supremacist who had written frequently and publicly about his desire to kill the non-whites. And yet, he was able to gather arms and carry out the attack raising serious questions on what purpose public surveillance is serving.

After the Pittsburgh shooting, local synagogues reportedly did "lots of training on things like active shooters, and looked at hardening facilities as much as possible." Squirrel Hill, Tree of Lifes neighbourhood, is considered the de facto centre of Pittsburghs Jewish community  according to a Brandeis University report  the synagogue represented a powerful symbol of Jewish life. And thus, the attack was symbolic to drive home a message of hate and divide.

Following the Wisconsin gurudwara attack, Tell MAMA, a UK-based group that monitors anti-Muslim attacks tweeted: Sikh places of worship attacked. Synagogues need security from far right and IS-inspired extremists. Mosques are increasingly becoming fenced off with cameras. This is not what we want for our country."

Muslims victims of Islamic extremism

Muslims are a minority in the predominantly Catholic country of Philippines and represent about a quarter of the population of the Mindanao region. In January, two people were killed and four others injured in a grenade attack on a mosque in the southern Philippines. The attack in Zamboanga city took place just days after deadly twin blasts at a Roman Catholic cathedral in the island of Jolo and a vote backing wider Muslim self-rule in Mindanao, the country's volatile southernmost region, AlJazeera reported.

Suicide attacks by terror organisation like the Islamic State (IS) on mosques in troubles states like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan are also not uncommon. Twenty-five people were killed in twin suicide attacks at a Shia mosque in eastern Afghanistan in August 2018. Shia Muslims have been repeatedly targeted by groups affiliated to the IS.

Another terrorist group, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, carried out a suicide attack on a mosque in Mohmand district, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which killed 36 worshippers during Friday prayers in September 2016.

In Pakistan, between 2002 and 2015, about 101 terrorist attacks hit mosques, imambaras and minorities' worship places throughout the country, leading to the deaths of 1,366 worshipers and injuries of 2,748 others, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal. However, the Islamic nation claimed that its 'Operation Zarb-e-Azb' (an army offensive in North Waziristan that began in June 2014) has played a pivotal role in minimising militancy in the country. "It wiped out safe havens, infrastructures, bomb-making units, training centres and weapons depots of the militants in North Waziristan," officials said in a report by Pakistan Forward.

Despite these actions, during Eid ul Adha in 2016 itself, terrorists targeted a Shia congregation in Shikarpur as one suicide bomber blew up himself injuring 13 people.

To convey and reiterate that Islam does not propagate hate and violence, a leading 400-year-old Islamic seminary in India, the Darul-Ifta Firangi Mahal issued a 'fatwa' against terrorists targeting places of worship and killing innocent people. According to a report published on Rediff, quoting from the 32nd 'Ayat' of 'Sur-e-Mayda' in the Holy Quran, Firangi Mahal chief Maulana Khalid Rasheed pointed out, "God has very explicitly stated that if any human being kills any other human being, he would be guilty of murdering humanity." His fatwa read: "If any Muslim causes harm to any place of worship of indulges in the killing of innocent people, Islam would regard it as the worst possible crime and the Shariat would consider it absolutely unlawful."

Incidents in India

In India, a gurudwara in Amritsar's Adliwal village was attacked with explosives when around 250 followers of the Nirankari spiritual group had gathered for morning prayers on 17 November, 2018. Three were killed and 15 injured in the attack.

There have also been several incidents of churches being attacked and targeted all across the country. Around Christmas in 2018, the worst attack took place in Kowad village of Kolhapur district in Maharashtra, where masked men carrying sharp weapons attacked a Christmas gathering on 23 December. Earlier, On 5 May, 2018 the St. Stephen's College chapel was vandalised and the cross desecrated with pro-Hindutva slogans in the capital city of Delhi.

However, despite assurance from security agencies and anti-terror forces all over the world, the truth is, attackers deliberately choose religious places to created division and disharmony in the society and ignite further hate crimes, eventually perpetuating a cycle of revenge attacks based on religious beliefs and intolerance for peaceful co-existence of other faiths.

Follow LIVE updates on the New Zealand shooting here
In the wake of the 14 February attack on a CRPF convoy that killed over 40 CRPF jawans, there has been growing pressure on Pakistan to crack down on its homegrown terror industry

In the wake of the 14 February attack on a CRPF convoy that killed over 40 CRPF jawans and was claimed by the Jaish-e-Mohammed, there has been growing pressure  from India as well the US and a host of other countries  on Pakistan to crack down on its homegrown terror industry.

On Wednesday, China  for the fourth time  put a 'technical hold' on a resolution at the UN Security Council to designate JeM chief Masood Azhar a 'global terrorist' under the 1267 Sanctions Committee list. On its part, while Pakistan has made some of the right noises about terrorism  albeit as a concept rather than something emanating from its soil, there has been minimal actual action on the ground in terms of eradicating this phenomenon.

While its much-publicised Operation Zarb-e-Azb between June 2014 and April 2016 was dismissed by most observers as no more than an eyewash, Pakistan has yet to do very much to address global concerns about terrorism and terror propaganda coming from within the country.

A case in point, JeM continues to put out its in-house publication al-Qalam  that has repeatedly called for attacks on India  undeterred and unfettered. The latest issue of the terror outfit's propaganda mouthpiece can be viewed below:

The Latest Edition of Al-Qalam by Firstpost on Scribd

Aside from being used as a platform from which for Azhar and other JeM functionaries to call for jihad against India and other States  Myanmar too bore the brunt of the JeM's ire in September 2017  al-Qalam has been used by the JeM to send out updates on its latest meetings and discussions.

As this article points out, "The 28 February issue of al-Qalam is peppered with references to meetings held across Pakistan, where young people are recruited to the group. In Karachi, the magazine records, there were 'magnificent gathering at two locations, where hundreds of volunteers assembled to learn about the realities of jihad Mufti Khalilullah'."
In Refashioning India, Maitrayee Chaudhuri focuses on post-liberalised India, where a market-driven media witnessed phenomenal growth, and within which dramatic changes in the manner in which men and women were represented occurred

The period after the year 1990 in India was a significant one; the country witnessed sudden changes in its economy. Two decades since then, the conversation about the media has expanded, and there has been increasing awareness about the linkages between the media, economy, and now, politics. But there is one question that has perhaps not got quite the same focus from scholars and media analysts: What shifts have taken place historically in the media representation of women, that accompany transformations in the political economy?

It is this particular question that Maitrayee Chaudhuri explores in her book Refashioning India: Gender, Media and a Transformed Public Discourse. This book seeks to map the changing ways in which gender has been represented in dominant Indian public discourse over modern history. The storyline is complex. It begins with a close look at the First Plan Document of India (1947) and ends with the 2014 General Elections. In between is the storyline of the 2012 Delhi Gang Rape and the ubiquitous presence of the advertising and public relations industries.

In this conversation with Firstpost, Chaudhuri, professor of sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, talks about the themes that dominate her book, media manipulation of popular opinion, and whether there is greater space for marginalised voices today.

Can you tell us about the two interlinked themes that the book addresses?

One is that gender has been central to modern Indias public discourse; and two, that recent years have seen a shift in both the content and form of gender representation... It is generally thought that the discourse on gender is contemporary in nature. However, what must be noted is that the discourse on gender has been present throughout modern Indian history. When you look at the 19th century social reform movement, besides caste, one constant was gender, whether we talk of upper caste reform or we talk of anti-caste reform movements.

Regarding my second point, that is the transformed nature of gender representation, my focus in the book is a post-liberalised India where a market-driven media witnessed phenomenal growth, and within which dramatic changes in the manner in which men and women were represented occurred. The key argument being made is that these changing gender images were signifying a shift in Indias public discourse, corresponding to the shift from a developmental vision that privileged equity and self-reliance to growth, and where the focus shifted from working class women to women as consumers of the good life.

Gender therefore is the vantage point from where one examines the discourse on the nation throughout the book.

In his book Propaganda, while speaking about what Chomsky calls manufactured consent, Edward Bernays writes: No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or socially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion." Ironically, in the same book, he suggests that women can use the media for propagating their own cause. Your book looks at and explores a similar irony; would you elaborate on this idea?

I would say that manipulation is a very complex and mediated process. For instance, the concept of individual choice has been constructed as natural. Thus when women and men desire and work towards having a body of a certain kind  say the idea of a size-zero for women, and six-pack abs for men  the concerned women and men would be seen as acting of their own free choice. They would not for a moment think that they have been pressurised or manipulated.

Choice and freedom as concepts can acquire new meanings in new contexts. Constraints which were visible earlier have now become less visible. For example, during the time of the Emergency, the visibility of restrictions on the press was direct and brutal. State censorship could be more easily seen. Market censorship operates very differently  modular kitchens, celebrity lifestyles, weddings of the rich and beautiful, appear to be news naturally. That stories of the marginalised disappear from front pages may not even be noticed. So yes, manipulation occurs, but more through consent and not coercion.

Can you tell us about the ways in which the media representation of women changed immediately after the implementation of the LPG (liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation) policy in the 90s?

It was actually quite dramatic, we had only Doordarshan and the All India Radio then. Suddenly, after the 90s, newspapers became glossier with extremely attractive advertisements, and television channels multiplied at an amazing speed. The newspaper prices came down, and for the people who were used to prices of all goods going up, this seemed exciting and strange. It was difficult as a consumer and reader at that point to follow the implications of this very simple move. In hindsight, one realises that the newspaper started to get money not from the readers but from the sponsors. The front page of most newspapers now are often full-page adverts  indeed, sometimes the first two pages. In this regard, I refer to the buzz about sunny size journalism.

I argue that three strands have affected the contemporary representation of women in media. One is of course neoliberalism, the second is the appropriation of strands within feminism by neoliberalism, and the third is the rise of a media-driven discourse and the culture of publicity.

One of the chapters in my book refers to how researchers for advertisers suggest that when you have to target middle-class women, there should be an element of feminism in it.

In your book, you write: After decades of sedate existence, the Indian media universe has witnessed a big bang of sudden and gigantic expansion." Do you think this enormous expansion has made available new avenues for the marginalised to assert themselves?

In my book, I have particularly looked at the print, and I feel that the possibilities for the marginalised to assert themselves have been very limited in the print media. However, social media is perhaps more accessible to multiple groups. Take the example of Dalit and womens movements. However, it would be wrong to conclude that the presence of multiple voices necessarily lead to more informed discussions, necessary for a democratic society.

I would like to refer here to over-communicative abundance.

There is too much information; too much noise. We have narrow casting; customised news.

For instance, if I am a Bengali middle class person, I get to see only those news items and feeds that a Bengali middle class, middle-aged woman would be interested in. The larger world bypasses me. You are in turn seceded from the larger society. Although the internet assures you that it is global, it actually is very far from being truly global; so instead of broadcasting, it is actually narrowcasting. I as a citizen have in some ways seceded from the wider imagined community. Instead of being a citizen, I am a consumer who the media and PR industry targets.

The linkages between women's representation and nationalism have interested many contemporary sociologists. You particularly look at the complex ways in which these linkages transform themselves in a neoliberal economy. Could you explain this further?

I am a little uncomfortable with how womens representation and nationalism have been discussed in contemporary times. The dominant trend has been either to critique nationalist representation of women as upper caste Hindu or middle class, which is not wrong, but the story line of women's representation is more complicated, and nationalism is not entirely a cultural project. It is historically specific and with inextricable links to political economy and specific class configurations. In my book, I therefore seek to use gender as a vantage point but from a dynamic perspective, wherein gender as an organising principle works with other processes, such as the changing nature of capitalism on the one hand and the rise of cultural nationalism on the other.
With a sharp decline in regular salaried jobs and self-employment opportunities, defending Hinduism has become a major occupation of men in western UP

Perhaps it was the bullying of the older auto-rickshaw drivers, who ganged up on him seeing his new-fangled electrickery-rickshaw, and wouldnt let him pick up passengers. Perhaps it was because there isnt much else for young people to do in Bhainswal, his village in Shamli district of western Uttar Pradesh. Perhaps, then again, it was because of the unsettling feeling that there ought to be more to life than waiting by the highway, shrouded in truck-exhaust and dust, hoping a passenger shows up.

Whatever the reason, four years ago, Sandeep Kashyap set up a Dharm Jagran Samiti, or Religious Awakening Committee, in his village. It is better I do religious work to pass the time than drink or squabble like others, he says.

Belonging to a community officially recognised as socially and educationally backward, Kashyap is now a minor celebrity, his face plastered on posters announcing the Samitis gatherings. His worth is judged by how many members his Samiti enrols and how much muscle it flexesnot by how many passengers he picks up. In a social setup where lifes trajectory is tied to caste and class, Kashyap has found his own personal salvation.

The story of young men like him, who are drawn to adopt religion in an organised as opposed to private  manner, is complex. It is sown and watered not just by hate but a generations desperate search for agency and self-worth in a world apparently designed to deny it.

Highway 709B swings through western Uttar Pradesh, past villages nestled in sugarcane and mustard fields, and heads north of Shamli town and past Bhainswal. The bucolic scenery, though, veils an ugly reality. An International Labour Organisation study from 2017 reports a sharp dip in regular salaried jobs for male workers, despite the regions dramatic economic growth and a big drop in poverty. Self-employment opportunities shrank, even casual labour growth was almost stagnant.

Put simply, the regions green revolution gains have plateaued, leaving the young facing the prospect of their generation not being able to sustain the gains of their parents.

For young men, this is a crisis of self-worth, even masculinity: at an age where their fathers supported families, they are prospectless. Being a man in west Uttar Pradesh includes marrying, having children, educating them, and caring for aging parents.

Kashyaps Samiti holds out hope of escaping this morass. Each month, its 48 members donate `100 to its kitty. With this money, Kashyap has organised a Ramcharitamanas reading, four all-male pilgrimages to a Hanuman temple in Rajasthan and two visits for women to a nearby temple, all free of cost.

The Samiti is a form of collective support. I had an accident last year and needed lakhs of rupees, says Sonu Kashyap, one of the three founding members. The Samiti contributed all it had`20,000. With traditional joint-families decaying, such support is a major draw.

Samiti-like bodies are also part of a larger project. Varun Vashisht, who prompted Kashyap to set it up, belongs to the Hindu Yuva Vahini, the militant Hindutva outfit raised by Uttar Pradeshs firebrand chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

Kashyap claims not to know this. For him, its irrelevant that the Samiti is part of an enterprise to forge a Hindu political identity. Indeed, Kashyap affects disinterest in politics: Ill remain a labourer no matter whos in power, he says, stoically.

Kashyap is, however, deferential towards Vashisht, former school teacher and son of a contractor from Bijnor, and a Brahmin. He is media in-charge and coordinator of the Vahini in Shamli.

Four years ago, Vashisht was drawn to the Vahini after an official in Shamli took him to a meeting, where he first heard of Adityanath. I Googled Maharaj-ji and discovered Hindutva, Vashisth says, referring to Adityanath, who continues to be chief priest of the Gorakhnath temple.

For Vashisht, Hindutva is primarily Hinduism minus caste. As a corollary, his vision of a Hinduised nation is India minus caste-based reservations. Hindutva tells us were all Hindus, regardless of caste, he says.

Sah-bhoj, or inter-caste dining, is the primary source of Vashishts belief that Hindutva eradicates caste. Sah-bhoj rests on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sanghs notion of inculcating samajik samrasta, or social harmony (as opposed to equality). It presupposes that subaltern castes gain self-respect and dignity upon dining with elite caste membersa tradition dating back to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and before.

This caste-free Hinduism has limits. For instance, co-dining is encouraged but not inter-caste marriage with Dalits. That cannot happen overnight, Vashisht protests, eating together is a beginning. Given that commensality as a technique to bridge the caste divide is a century old, Hindutva remains stuck in the beginning. Nevertheless, Kashyap gains status by fraternising with elite castes, a privilege denied in the traditional order.

Vahini teams are going door-to-door in Shamli and beyond, checking on government-funded schemes for housing, toilets and education. The problem is that the administration doesnt listen to people while people blindly trust gram pradhans, who rip them off, Vashisth says.

The Vahini sidesteps pradhans and takes matters straight to district authorities. Unless officials convince us why a government benefit hasnt reached a household, we abuse them, he says. The Vahini might not be able to obtain prized government jobs for the youth, but it does help them exert power over petty bureaucrats.

For years, Yashveer Singh, a wealthy farmer from Mundet village, helped locals with administrative matters or disputes. Mostly, his interventions failed. The scenario changed dramatically as soon as he joined the Vahini a decade ago. The administration hears us now, says Singh, who manages the Vahini in the district. Earlier, they did not. The entire district knows Maharaj-jis instruction that no one should be oppressed.

This usurping of state power has paid off. Vashisht reports that the Vahini, which appoints 21 members each in village, block and district, has no position vacant. The more credit the Vahini can claim for resolving problems, the more members it gathers. So strong was the interest that enrolments were stopped in 2017. We were getting 5,000 requests daily to join, Singh says. We even suspected infiltration by rival groups.

Favour-seeking and -granting enhance the growing appeal of the Vahini and assorted outfits. Sachin Nirwal, 28, from a Jat family in Shamli, obtained a Masters in education, believing it would help him land a job. When it didnt, he tried the army. But farming while preparing for exams proved an insurmountable challenge.

Six years ago, his uncle, 32-year-old Vishal Nirwal, joined the Bajrang Dal. Vishal was involved in a police case that a local Bajrang Dal man, Vivek Premi, had helped him get out of, earning his loyalty.

In turn, Vishal recruited Sachin, who had given up on finding a job. Sachin began attending Bajrang Dal events informally. I go when I can, for cow protection or dharnas against the other side, Sachin says. As he has friends on the other sidewith people ideologically opposed to Hindutvahe isnt fully committed to Bajrang Dal events. Besides, hes married and runs a farm.

Only someone 100 per cent jobless can be a full-time member, he says. If youre full-time, when they drop a WhatsApp message that youre needed for a cow-smuggling raid, you have to leave meals unfinished and go.

In mid-February, after the massacre of CRPF jawans in Pulwama, Vishal joined thousands who hit Shamli streets, clamouring for the blood of the gaddartraitors. Nationalism is a headier opiate than religion.

Put together, the prospect of a new Hinduism transcending caste, and their networks of influence, have transformed allegiances of backward communities. They are the glue that is drawing the youth from all sections to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Peoples priorities shift when theyre given a religious identity, says Sudhir Panwar, a Samajwadi Party leader. They start doing dharm jagrans instead of demanding economic and social rights.

For members of backward communities, organising religious events has an added appeal: to them, it represents their social and political assertion in addition to their obvious identification with the Hindu religion.

For this new Hindu society to be built, one group needs to create the otherand Muslims serve that purpose. This is why, after Pulwama, the slogans raised in Shamli, Agra, Bharatpur and beyond harped on punishing traitors.

But theres no traitor herejust aggressive nationalism fostering divides, says Jayant Chaudhary, former Member of Parliament and Rashtriya Lok Dal leader. Other political outfits are left with little choice but wait for high-pitched campaigns against gaddars to die. All issues, from unemployment to farm crisis, get washed away in nationalism, says Chaudhary.

In this context, anyone who says outrageous things about other leaders, the administration, or the other, is regarded a good leader. Extreme statements become a way to get ahead, deepening the identity crisis.

Those who separated from IndiaPakistan, Bangladeshgot Muslim countries but India didnt become Hindu Rashtra because some Hindus betrayed us, says Ghanshyam Parcha, a farmer in Shamli.

The flip side is that high-pitched campaigns can apply counter-pressure on governments, fueling a spiral of demands and expectations. Vivek Premi, now the Uttar Pradesh in-charge of Bajrang Dals student outreach says, On the thirteenth day after the Pulwama attack the Indian government sent fighters into Pakistan with our greetings. We felt content, at peace. He is referring to the Hindu ritual held either four days or 13 days (tehravi), after death; the attack actually happened on the 14th day. Premi had been waiting for some such action by India against Pakistan.

How far this politics will sustain is unclear. Hindutva outfits in Shamli insist on state subsidy for their pet projectcow shelterswhile confessing they havent been paid lakhs of rupees due from sugar mills. The government has failed to make agriculture remunerative. And abandoned cows are eating up crops and farmers are falling ill as they have to guard their fields on bitterly cold nights.

Competitive communalism, too, is a growing concern. Imran Masood, a Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh, said in March 2014, that he would cut Modi to pieces. Nahid Hasan of Samajwadi Party, and scores others, have made derogatory statements, hoping to attract insecure Muslims.

Probably the Gau Rakshak, as an idea of Hindu identity, will thrive so long as despair shapes young mens lives. Hindu nationalism has provided the burgeoning youth cohort with a sense of purpose and agency that they lack in everyday life. Faith and nationalism help them cope with their sense of emasculation: through militant action against cow slaughter, love jihad campaigns, they discover a lost self-worth. Then a Sandeep Kashyap becomes more than just another autorickshaw drivera defender of Hinduism, the sharp, priapic sword of his peoples faith.

This article also appeared in the 16 March edition of Firstpost Print
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In a communique to the regional joint director of chennai zone, Director of Collegiate Education R Sarumathi pointed out that in view of the Lok Sabha elections the MCC was in force on 13 March, when Rahul Gandhi held an interaction with colleges students in Chennai.

Chennai: The Tamil Nadu government has ordered an inquiry on how a college in Chennai gave its nod for Congress president Rahul Gandhi to interact with its students when the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) is in force.

The top Congress leader, in his interaction with students of the Stella Maris College on 13 March, promised 33 percent reservation in government jobs for women and answered several of their questions.

The Director of Collegiate Education, R Sarumathi directed a subordinate official to inquire "immediately" on the matter and submit a report, official sources said.

In a communique (dated 14 March) to the Regional Joint Director, Chennai Zone, the director pointed out that in view of the Lok Sabha elections the MCC was in force and under such circumstances sought to know "how permission was granted" by the college for the event.

Sources said Stella Maris is one of the 10 government-aided colleges in Chennai. Such institutions are not only bound by state norms, but are also expected to follow the MCC.

According to the MCC, displayed in the Election Commission website, "use of educational institutions, including their grounds (whether government aided, private or government) for political campaigns and rallies is not allowed."

When contacted, the college authorities declined to say if any inquiry was made by the collegiate department officials.

The chief electoral officer also did not comment. In his interaction with the students, Rahul had brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process.

To a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, he had said that the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively.

"I will be the first person to say it... investigate Robert Vadra, but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra

Modi," he said.

Vadra is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district.

Rahul also questioned whether the Prime Minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions
The threat to an imagined ancient Hindu manhood is sought to be countered through a variety of modern symbols: Hanuman is now a brawny, scowling figure and a six-pack Shiva marshals his trishul like a laser gun

The villages and towns of western Uttar Pradesh (UP) are unique contexts for erratic playing out of north Indian masculine culture. In their entanglement with the contemporary Hindutva politics, they create an unstable behavioural cocktail that speaks of defending ancient traditions while simultaneously wanting to ride the consumerist modernity wave.

The uniqueness of western UP lies in the fact that though it is close to the Capital, it has remained isolated from significant social change. Besides, though a plethora of educational institutions have mushroomed in the region, offering a variety of professional courses, their abysmal quality has largely trapped local youth in an endless cycle of unemployment and hopelessness. This is a fertile ground for the making of Hindu masculinityan identity that promises men control over a world that otherwise seems to be passing them by.

Masculinity is a relationship between men and women as well as men and men. So, while on the one hand it defines all men as superior to all women, it also serves to define active forms of masculinity as better than passive forms.

Western UP is a swathe of land where large numbers of young men are nurtured in the crucible of family, kin and community ties that are trapped in time as far as gender power is concerned. However, they are simultaneously experiencing socio-economic churning around them, which are undermining their sense of power. Their own identity as men with complete control over their worlds is gradually diminishing. The rise of Hindu masculinity is a bid to wrest control by fashioning an identity that can dominate over groups that are represented as threats to the Hindu concept of manhood.

The threat to an imagined ancient Hindu manhood is sought to be countered, however, through a variety of modern symbols. Hanuman is now a brawny, scowling figure and a six-pack Shiva marshals his trishul like a laser gun.

While it is impossible to influence broader processes such as impractical educational policies and haphazard economic planning, for example, that thwart peoples opportunities, appeals to Hindu masculinity give the illusion of taking immediate control. This is precisely the manner in which forces that seek to harness the identity for their political gains pitch their campaign. Muslims have become a convenient proxy for all that has gone wrong in western UP.

Expressions of religious nationalismrepresented through notions of honour, shame, valour, etc., are commonly based upon appeals to mythic and masculinised historical beliefs. In this mythic past, Hinduism was a force to be reckoned with and both men and women lived harmoniously as each knew their place in society. Religion provided both a moral and practical code of life. However, the thinking goes, the contemporary ills like lack of jobs, economic instability and inability to live a life of material comfort are a result of a disruption in this Utopia. Muslims are the most identifiable culprits for all that has gone wrong. As the Utopia slides into dystopia, Muslims are being held responsible for Hindu emasculation: Hindu men can no longer exercise their natural control because of their socio-economic weakness.

This forms the most obvious justification for anti-Muslim violence. Hindu masculinity expresses itself in another allied manner, in which women of the family seek to express a measure of a freedom. Changing aspirations among young women have meant a greater desire for education and, perhaps, a job. Hindu men feel particularly threatened by womens changing aspirations and even a minor demand for autonomy is being seen as a threat to the established male order. Western UP has witnessed a peculiar form of masculine anxiety that is linked to Hindu women, but expressed through attacks on Muslim men. Love jihad, where Muslim men entice Hindu women into bonds of intimacy, continues to be a significant bogey of making Hindu men believe that their manhood is under threat from lascivious and cunning Muslims who seek to undermine their masculinity by stealing their women who are, after all, their property.

(Sanjay Srivastava teaches sociology in Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi University)
Bhartiya Shiksha Board will standardise Vedic education. It will draft syllabus, conduct exams and issue certificates to gurukuls, pathshalas and schools

There are some who feel ancient Indian knowledge has been unfairly sidelined in favour of its modern, Western counterparts. But lets look at some basic facts. Article 30 of the Constitution permits all minorities, whether based on religion or language, to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice. However, there is no such provision for the majority religion. In the same vein, Article 51-A (H) asks its citizens to develop the scientific temper, humanism, and spirit of inquiry and reform. Seen in the above light, how can one justify the idea of a Board for Vedic education?

Though we are not aware of the detailed terms and conditions of the proposed Board, one can imagine what is in store for us with a little help from Patanjali representative Balkrishnas statement. According to him: A student should also learn our Indian morals, culture and values. We are already running Acharyakulam on this model. Standardisation of Indian traditional knowledge, such as Vedic education, Sanskrit education, Shastras and Darsanas, etc. will also form part of the syllabus of the proposed education system.

In this context, we should remember that every aspect of culture is not an asset. There are liabilities in every culture. If assets have to be preserved, then liabilities should be weeded out. Only an objective and value-free mind can do this job, not devotees. A prejudiced mind will fail to comprehend the liabilities. That is why one is forced to ask a few disturbing questions regarding the normative and prescriptive socio-political system existing in the Vedic period. It is because of aforesaid realities that one is sceptical about the whole idea of Vedic education.

For instance, whether Vedic education is going to deconstruct or reconstruct the type of social structure prescribed in the Rig Vedas tenth Mandal (part), Purusha Sukta, 91st Richa (hymn). In this hymn, the origin of the fourfold Varna-based Hindu social order has been givenBrahmins, Rajnaya (we should be aware that the word Kshatriya has not been mentioned in the Rig Veda), Vaishya and Shudra. How would this social structure accommodate the ex-untouchables, tribals, religious minorities, etc. or will they remain out of the social reconstruction based of Vedic education?

Further, the Hindu social order also consists of varnashrama-dharma: there are four ashramas which are akin to four epochs in the life of an individual: Brahmacharya, Grahastha, Vanaprashtha, and Sanyasa. Will the proposed Board prescribe these epochs for future generations too?

What type of duties (dharma) will the Board members assign to the followers of each Varna? Because each Varna has to take on various types of responsibilities. For example, in the hymns of the Rig Veda, the job of the Brahmin was to read and write, teach and preach, offer and officiate sacrifices.

In the same vein, sociologist GS Ghurey in his book Caste and Race in India (1936) argues that the duties of Kshatriyas (Rajanya) must have consisted in administrative and military dutiesIn the prayer for the prosperity of Kshatriya, he is said to be an archer and good chariot fighter. The Vaishya were supposed to be traders. Further, Ghurey argues that,  the fourth class, the Shudra represented domestic servants, approximating very nearly to the position of slaves. The Shudra is described as the servant of another, to be expelled at will, and to be slain at will. The Panchavimshati-Brahmana defines this position still more precisely when it declares that the Shudra, even if he is prosperous, cannot be but a servant of another, washing his superiors feet being his main business.

Ghurey goes on to argue that the Shatapatha Brahmana goes to the length of declaring that the Shudra is untruth itself. In this context, what duties would ex-untouchables and Adivasis will be assigned in the new syllabus and curriculum of Vedic education? Last, but not the least, what will be the position of women? Will ex-untouchables, Adivasis and women have their legitimate rights and privileges?

The idea for a Board for Vedic education is a step towards reproduction of cultural hegemony and ethnocentrism. Is it an indirect path to establish Brahminical hegemony as they were/are the custodian of Sanskrit language and great tradition related to Sanskritic texts? Is it going to undermine other cultural traditions which need special attention? Rather than standardisation of cultures, what India needs is celebration of diversity and equal importance of every socio-political-cultural entity.

(Vivek Kumar is professor in the department of sociology, JNU, New Delhi)
The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which represents 70 million traders, said it would burn Chinese goods on 19 March to 'teach a lesson' to China

New Delhi: An influential Hindu nationalist group and an Indian traders body called on Thursday for a boycott of Chinese goods after Beijing blocked a move to put Masood Azhar on a UN terrorist list following a suicide attack last month.

Regarded by Pakistan as its most reliable friend, China has repeatedly thwarted efforts to implement UN sanctions against the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), the group that claimed responsibility for the attack that killed 40 paramilitary police in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which represents 70 million traders, said it would burn Chinese goods on 19 March to "teach a lesson" to China.

"The time has come when China should suffer due to its proximity with Pakistan," CAIT said in a statement. "The CAIT has launched a national campaign to boycott Chinese goods among the trading community of the country, calling the traders not to sell or buy Chinese goods."

The United States, Britain and France asked the Security Councils Islamic State and Al Qaeda sanctions committee to subject the Jaish leader to an arms embargo, travel ban and asset freeze.

But China placed a "technical hold" on the proposal, saying it needed more time to consider, using the same stalling tactic it has used in the past.

Mounting impatience with Beijing's stance was evident on social media on Thursday as #BoycottChineseProducts was the second-highest trending hashtag on Twitter in India.

Similar campaigns in the past have proved ineffectual.

China is Indias second biggest trading partner. Chinese products  from mobile phones made by companies such as Xiaomi Inc to toys  are ubiquitous in India and trade between the countries grew to nearly $90 billion in the year ending March 2018.

The leader of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the economic wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group with close ties to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also called for a boycott of Chinese goods.

He also wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommending that India hit Beijing with higher tariffs.

"Government of India needs to take immediate action to raise tariff duties on all Chinese imports," Ashwani Mahajan said in the letter, seen by Reuters.

"China, which is already under economic stress, thanks to trade war initiated by US and other trade partners of China, will definitely realise the implications of the unjust action of protecting terrorists."

India's trade ministry said in an email the country cant take any unilateral punitive action against a fellow member of the World Trade Organization.

A senior government official, who refused to be named as he was not authorised to speak to media, said there has been a move to "restrict" Chinese imports but that India was not in a position to replace products such as electronics.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley warned against any hasty reaction.

"Its a diplomatic issue, and India will take a decision after a careful thought," Jaitley told CNN-News18. "We're not a small player on the global stage, but foreign policy issues are tackled in a measured way, not in a knee-jerk manner."

With just weeks to go before a general election, Indias main opposition Congress party said Modis attempts to improve ties with China were not yielding results.

"Weak Modi is scared of Xi. Not a word comes out of his mouth when China acts against India," Congress President Rahul Gandhi said on Twitter, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Chinas foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a faxed message seeking comment on the boycott calls.

Renu Kohli, an independent economist in New Delhi, doubted whether any boycott would hit critical mass. "Its going to fizzle out sooner or later when the consumer realises that their pocket is being hit by costlier domestic products," said Kohli.
The BMC and the Indian Railways should try telling this to the relatives and the loved ones of the people who died in the collapse, as well as to the people who were severely injured, on a normal Mumbai evening.

'Ae dil hai mushkil jeena yahan,

Zarra hatke zarra bachke,

Ye hai Bombay meri jaan.'

These are words from a song that perhaps best defines the city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). It was written by Majrooh Sultanpuri for the 1956 movie CID and set to tune by OP Nayyar (who copied the old American tune My Darling Clementine).

The song, which is more than six decades old, is still relevant, given that it tells Mumbaikars to be generally careful (zarra hatke zarra bachke) as they go about living their daily lives, because somewhere around the corner lies trouble which should be best avoided.

In a way, the song is telling Mumbaikars, you are responsible for your lives because no one else cares.

On Thursday, a footover bridge at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in south Mumbai collapsed, killing six people and injuring more than thirty. Soon reports of the incident started trickling in, the blame game began. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) blamed the Indian Railways for the accident, and vice versa, with each washing their hands off the incident by saying that the bridge doesnt come under their jurisdiction.

The BMC and the Indian Railways should try telling this to the relatives and the loved ones of the people who died in the collapse, as well as to the people who were severely injured, on a normal Mumbai evening. The politicians who washed their hands of the incident are essentially telling Mumbaikars that they are responsible for their own lives.

But the question is, does it matter who was responsible for the maintenance of the footover bridge  the BMC, or the Indian Railways? It doesn't really matter and here's why:

1) Let' start with the assumption that the BMC is responsible for the bridge. In this situation what stopped it from maintaining the bridge properly. Lack of money? The corporation has fixed deposits of more than Rs 70,000 crore with banks. On these deposits, the BMC earns interest every year. With Goods and Services Tax coming into force, the corporation can no longer collect an octroi tax on goods entering the city. This was a big revenue earner for the BMC. Nevertheless, the state government compensates the corporation for this. In 2017-18, the compensation had stood at Rs 7,200 crore. Hence, money clearly is not an issue for the BMC. There is a lot of it lying around. The corporation has the money to build/repair normal bridges and footover bridges. So what is the problem?

2) The fact that they are not doing it, shows the general apathy of the BMC towards the city and the lack of a work ethic, more than anything.

3) Now, let's take Indian Railways for instance. The Railways could easily have repaired this particular bridge and all other bridges across the Mumbai suburban railway network. While, the Railways isnt exactly as loaded as the BMC, but the money still shouldnt have been a problem.

4) The Indian Railway Finance Corporation was created in 1986 exclusively for arranging finances for projects of Indian Railways. As of March 2017, it had borrowings of close to Rs 1.03 lakh crore. The point being that the Railways borrows a lot of money to build and complete projects.

In this scenario, the Railways could have easily borrowed a few thousand crore more through IRFC to repair/rebuild the footover bridges of Mumbai. The fact that they chose not to do it, shows the attitude of the different railway ministers and governments, towards the city. They like to collect all the tax that the city pays, but when it comes to building physical infrastructure in the city, there is no money for that.

5) It's politically more rewarding to borrow money to inaugurate new projects (which are also necessary) than to repair old dilapidated bridges being used across India's largest suburban railway network, by hard-working people who will get back to their jobs the next day, come what may.

And this is a major problem. We are more excited about building a bullet train track than filling up potholes across roads and repairing bridges. These things are not exciting enough.

6) At the end of the day, whether it's BMC or it's the Indian Railways, it doesn't matter. Both the organisations have the money to carry out the repair/rebuilding of the bridges. Its just that its not on the top of their agenda for the city.

And there is nothing one can do about this lack of concern. As far as general apathy of the administration is concerned, one needs just go back to September 2017, and remember the stampede that broke out at the Elphinstone Road station. It took a stampede for the government to build new footover bridges at the station. To conclude, as far as citizens are concerned, it still makes sense to follow what Majroor Sultanpuri wrote about the city, more than six decades back: Zarra hatke zarra bachke, Ye hai Bombay meri jaan and believe that we are all responsible for our lives.

The author is an economist and the author of the Easy Money trilogy
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  The Department of Justice (DOJ) has ordered the release of Marawi City Vice Mayor Arafat Salic, who was arrested Wednesday over rebellion charges.

Senior Assistant State Prosecutor Peter Ong said the complaint filed by the police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group against Salic was "not inquestable."

He explained that an inquest only applies to warrantless arrest, when a crime is being committed, a person is about to commit a crime or a person to be arrested escaped from detention while being transported.

"What was filed as an inquest case was wrong," Ong said. "Please do not do again. That magkakasama tayo sa trabaho, magkakahiyaan tayo [That we work together, we'll all get embarrassed.] Do not insist on what is wrong."

Salic was included in a martial law arrest order, but prosecutors said Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana has revoked this.

The DOJ will instead conduct regular preliminary investigation on the complaint.

The Philippine Army said yesterday that Salic is included in the Office of the Martial Law Administrator's arrest order for rebellion, in relation to his alleged involvement in the Maute-ISIS takeover of Marawi City in May 2017.

His brother, former Marawi Mayor Fajad "Pre" Salic, was also arrested in 2017 for rebellion in line with the order issued by Lorenzana.

CNN Philippines Correspondent Anjo Alimario contributed to this report.
| BY Kim Shaw |

Next week, in a session at AdFest 2019 in Thailand, Marcus Tesoriero (pictured) will warn creatives against isolating themselves as specialists in only scriptwriting, art direction, copy or design. Tesoriero is Executive Creative Director at The Brand Agency in Perth.

What inspired the topic of your session at AdFest 2019, The New Era of Creative Problem Solving?

Its funny actually, I feel one of the biggest problems our industry currently has is its name  advertising. To many of our clients, thats all they think we do. In reality, ads are no longer the silver bullet for every brief a client gives us. So, we need to show that we can offer them so much more.

We live in an age of ad blockers and hectic forms of advertising hitting us wherever we go. People dont want to see our brand messages in the same old formats. Today we need to earn peoples attention by becoming part of their lives  rather than simply demanding they become part of ours.

Over the past year Ive been helping build a tight-knit, collaborative environment, not only within our agency, but with our clients as well. No creative team can take on the new era of creative problem solving by themselves. It takes the commitment of everyone. And hopefully the people of AdFest can take something away from this, too.

If our industry needs to evolve from ad makers into problem solvers, what sort of skills will creatives need to acquire?

Our industry has been evolving constantly since I joined it many years ago. Traditional, experiential, digital, data-driven  who are we now? The fact is, we are a bit of everything  and more. Breaking it down simply, today we are problem solvers, solving client issues and opportunities in whatever creative form that may be.

I feel the number one skill creatives will need to acquire moving forward is collaboration. Solving problems for brands in ways that have never been produced before takes the commitment of the whole agency, clients and a wider network of suppliers you may have never even met. Effectively utilising connections and resources is essential in building big, problem-solving ideas.

For me, future creatives shouldnt isolate themselves as specialists in only scriptwriting, art direction, copy or design. Instead, the great ones are becoming overall mechanics of creativity  inventors, scientists, film makers, product designers and more. Sure, they champion a sole craft like copywriting, but they have a thirst to learn more about the synchrony of all creativity and what makes people tick.

How do you use data to your advantage? When does data become dangerous?

To many creatives, data is a dirty word. But it doesnt mean our ideas are becoming zeros and ones. It just means we can mine information from the masses to direct our creativity more effectively.

For me, data is best used at the beginning of a project to analyse information and guide a precise strategy for a creative brief. Its also best used at the end of the project to define an accurate media strategy, ensuring people are targeted at the right place and right time. To be truly effective though, its not just about personalisation. Its using data to ensure a targeted person is going to be most receptive to the creative idea youve crafted specifically for that place and moment.

The only danger I see from using data is if our consumers decide to stop giving it up. But I believe the worlds addiction to social media and search is too strong to forfeit it. Its an interesting trade-off, really. As quoted from a reporter after the Facebook Senate hearing, If youre not paying for it then youre the product being sold.

You moved from Sydney to join The Brand Agency in Perth in 2018. What inspired you to make the move, and what can you tell us about life at The Brand Agency?

Western Australia borders almost half the land mass of our entire country and yet its virtually invisible to the world when it comes to our industry. When I was offered the Executive Creative Director position at The Brand Agency, I saw it as a real opportunity to help showcase more of Perths creativity to the world.

The Brand Agency is the largest integrated agency in Perth, with over 100 intelligent people in their different fields. Over the last year weve been working towards a more collaborative environment within the agency and with our clients, while building what I now believe is one of the best creative and design teams in the country. The agency is really working together well now and producing great work to back it up.

I also find the clients over here have quite an entrepreneurial spirit which is constructive for selling in big ideas. There are fewer destructive egos too, which makes it easier to talk on an even level with everyone. On top of that, Perth is one of the most beautiful places in the world. The white sand beaches run for miles and miles along an unpolluted coastline of crystal-clear blue water, all accompanied by what feels like 300 days of summer. Who could argue with that?

How has your approach to creative problem solving evolved since your earliest days as a junior?

My first agency was heavily TV-based which meant writing script after script  sometimes producing up to 30 TV ads per year, which was a great launch into storytelling. As digital worked its way into the world, I saw a new beginning of communication and an invitation for brands to start becoming part of peoples lives  to live stories, rather than just telling them.

Excited by this, I went on to work at a string of agencies that were digital, mobile and data centric, widening my knowledge on all facets of communication. So, coming back to big, integrated agencies such as DDB, McCann, and now The Brand Agency, I have a clear vision that in todays world, we need all that expertise and more to solve our clients problems.

Now that the Mad Men days are over, what do you look for when youre hiring junior creatives?

Now that the Mad Men days are over, there are thankfully less alcoholics and more women applying for jobs. But most of all, when looking to hire young creatives I look for ambition. It takes hard work to be great. Fortunately, I now have a team with the tenacity to get there.

The New Era of Creative Problem Solving takes place on Friday 22 March at AdFest 2019 in Pattaya, Thailand.
World Consumer Rights Day is celebrated every year on 15 March as part of an initiative by Consumer International, a membership organisation for consumer groups around the world

World Consumer Rights Day is celebrated every year on 15 March as part of an initiative by Consumer International, a membership organisation for consumer groups around the world. The group brings together over 200 member organisations in more than 100 countries to "empower and champion the rights of consumers everywhere." The aim behind marking an international date to celebrate consumer rights is to build a world where everyone has access to safe and sustainable products and services.

"World Consumer Rights Day was inspired by President John F Kennedy, who sent a special message to the US Congress on 15 March 1962, in which he formally addressed the issue of consumer rights. He was the first world leader to do so. The consumer movement first marked that date in 1983 and now uses the day every year to mobilise action on important issues and campaigns," declares the Consumer International website.

This year's theme is "Trusted Smart Products" chosen in view of the increased popularity of smart gadgets like smart phones to wearable fitness trackers, to voice-activated assistants and smart TVs which make our lives simpler, but inadvertently connect one aspect of it with another, establishing a sort of interdependency on previously unrelated avenues of life.

Consumer International wants to highlight what consumers want and need from a connected world and how important it is to put them at the heart of the development of these digital products and services.

In India too, the Government of India has undertaken several initiatives to protect the rights of consumers, which stem from the Consumer Protection Act, 1986 that gives Indian consumers some basic rights. However, lack of awareness remains a key issue in citizens benefitting fully from their rights as protected by our Constitution. On this World Consumer Rights Day, here are some of the rights you hold as a consumer in India.

By definition, consumer rights mean that each consumer has the right to have information about the quality, potency, quantity, purity, price and standard of goods or services. The consumer is also to be protected against any unfair practices of trade under the Indian law. Hence it becomes essential that the people are aware of their rights, which broadly include:

The right to be protected from all kind of hazardous goods and services

The right to be fully informed about the performance and quality of all goods and services

The right to free choice of goods and services

The right to be heard in all decision-making processes related to consumer interests

The right to seek redressal, whenever consumer rights have been infringed

The right to complete consumer education

In case of a rights' violation, there are several channels for grievance redressal as well. According to the Government of India, an aggrieved consumer can approach one of the following channels.

National Consumer Helpline: Consumers can call on a toll-free number 1800-11-4000 or 14404, which provides advice, information and guidance to empower consumers and addresses their concerns. An Integrated Grievance Redress Mechanism (INGRAM) portal was also launched for bringing all stakeholders such as consumers, Central and state government agencies, private companies, Ombudsmen and call centers etc. on to a single platform.

Smart Consumer Application: The government has launched a mobile application "Smart Consumer" to enable the consumer to scan the bar code of the product and get all details of the product such as name of the product, details of manufacturer, year and month of manufacture, net content and consumer care details for making complaint in case of any defect. This is in line with the protection of right to be fully informed about the performance and quality of all goods and services.

Grievances Against Misleading Advertisements (GAMA): In its endeavor to address the problem of misleading advertisements, the government has launched a portal called Grievances Against Misleading Advertisements (GAMA).for registering complaints online. A Consumer can register a complaint along with a copy / video / audio of such advertisement through the web portal.

Online Dispute Resolution: This is an online consumer mediation centre, established at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru under the aegis of Ministry Of Consumer Affairs, which aims to provide for a state-of-the-art infrastructure for resolving consumer disputes both through physical as well as online mediation through its platform. "The center provides innovative technology for consumers and organisations to manage and resolve conflicts and to propel online mediation as a first choice to resolving consumer disputes. This is an innovative tool that affords consumers better access to justice through quick and easy redressal mechanism and at the same time provide opportunity for businesses to maintain good customer relations," according to the government portal on consumer protection.
At the Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj this year, the Ganga ran clean, but it was the result of temporary solution  not enough to keep the river basin pollution free, and one that only concealed the problem By Soumya Sarkar Gulab Chand Negi was a happy man. On a freezing February morning, he had just taken a dip at the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna in Allahabad (recently renamed Prayagraj), where millions of devout Hindus had come to wash away their sins at the Kumbh Mela  the bathing festival of Hindus and the biggest gathering of people on the planet. The water is so clean and refreshing, said the 68-year-old Negi. I feel like a new man. There were nods and smiles from his family of eight. For the native of Pauri district in the Himalayan province of Uttarakhand that is home to the headwaters of the Ganga and Yamuna, the purity of the Ganga was never in question. But, comparing his previous visits to the bathing festival, he said, The sangam (confluence) is especially clean this time because of the action the government is taking. Several other bathers at the confluence taking the holy dip at the auspicious morning of Mouni Amavasya, the high point of the Kumbh, agreed with Negi. Most of them said the water was much cleaner due to the special efforts that the government had made. The Kumbh Mela is held by turn at Prayagraj, Haridwar, Ujjain and Nashik. Many millions gather on riverbanks to take a dip that they believe will wash away their sins. In the process, they also further pollute the rivers, which have seen seen their flows reduced drastically recent years. Polluted rivers Most rivers in India are incredibly filthy. A recent report by the Central Pollution Control Board showed that the number of polluted stretches in Indias rivers has increased to 351 from 301 two years ago. The number of critically polluted stretches has risen to 45 from 34, the federal pollution watchdog said. As per data from the State Pollution Control Boards, the Ganga is fit for neither drinking nor bathing in most of its stretches. The CPCB classifies rivers according to category of pollution, with a category of 3.1-6 mg per litre of Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) as Category 5, and the most polluted, of 30 mg per litre or greater as Category 1. In one case, the level has been measured as high as 250 mg per litre. The Ganga is considered a Category 4 river, with a BOD of 3.5-8.8 mg/litres. So how did the Ganga run clean during the Kumbh? Reinforcing the anecdotes of salvation seekers, PK Agarwal, general manager of the Ganga Pollution Control Unit at Arail  a neighbourhood in Prayagraj  said not a single drop of untreated sewage was flowing into the Ganga and Yamuna following special efforts to treat the enormous amount of human waste generated by millions of pilgrims. We have laid sewer lines throughout the Mela grounds and have augmented our treatment capacity, Agarwal claimed. We are treating 99 percent of the sewage, which is why the rivers are so clean this time. He attributed this achievement to the funds made available through the National Mission to Clean Ganga (NMCG) and the extra efforts by Jal Nigam, the government utility that manages water supply and sewage treatment in the city.

The Mansahita nullah at Prayagraj dumps untreated waste into the Ganga River. Such wastewater drains are common throughout the river basin. Photo courtesy Soumya Sarkar

Agarwal however admitted that the release of extra water upstream at the Tehri dam in Uttarakhand and the temporary shuttering of heavily polluting tanneries in Kanpur have also helped keep the Ganga clean during the Kumbh Mela this year. This show of cleanliness is important to the ruling dispensations at the central and state levels led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because India goes to the polls soon to elect a new Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament. Band-Aid solutions River experts and activists say that the transformation of the Ganga and Yamuna at Prayagraj amounts to event management, as many experts termed it, and will unlikely be sustained over the long term. It is an election period chimera at best. When an Ardh (half) Kumbh could be turned into a Kumbh for obvious reasons, anything and everything could be claimed. What they have done is to release 6-7,000 cusec (cubic foot per second) of water in Ganga from the Tehri dam in a period when normal flow in the river, with all dams and barrages upstream, does not exceed 1,000 cusec, said Manoj Mishra, Convenor of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan (Living Yamuna Campaign). Obviously, with good dilution water in the river, it would appear rejuvenated. But for how long? These are Band-Aid solutions and temporary at best, said river expert Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, a non-profit. Thakkar feels that unless there is an overhaul of the governance system, such attempts at keeping the river clean will prove futile. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a parliamentarian from Varanasi, some 125 km downstream from Prayagraj, vowed to clean the Ganga on the bathing ghats (steps that lead to the river) of the holy city after he was elected in 2014. He launched the Namami Gange (Salutations to Ganga) programme to clean the river and its tributaries, with a huge allocation of more than INR 200 billion (USD 2.8 billion) to be spent by the end of 2019. The government also renamed the Ministry of Water Resources as the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation to indicate the seriousness of its intent.

The famed ghats on the Ganga at Varanasi, the holy city of Hindus, are unfit for bathing, although there has been some cosmetic cleaning of the ghats in recent months. Photo courtesy Soumya Sarkar

This is not the first attempt to clean the river. In the 1980s, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi launched the Ganga Action Plan, also from the ghats of Varanasi. Scores of sewage treatment plants (STPs) were built in the three most populous provinces along the river  Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. However, most of them remained defunct and the population increase due to rapid urbanisation in India quickly made the STPs inadequate to deal with the flood of sewage. Although the federal government financed the plants, city corporations and municipalities operated them, and they often failed to keep the STPs running. In 1993, under then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, a new batch of STPs was added not only along the Ganga but also its main tributaries such as the Yamuna, the biggest. Several thousand kilometres of sewer lines were added. In 2009, the Manmohan Singh government established the National Ganga River Basin Authority to take a more holistic approach to clean the basin and maintain free flow of the river. But the emphasis remained on building STPs. Despite all these efforts, the Ganga is more polluted today than it was in the 1980s. Primary pollutant The discharge of untreated sewage into the Ganga and its tributaries is undoubtedly the primary cause of pollution. This is responsible for 80 percent of the pollution in the Ganga. The other 20 percent is industrial and agricultural waste, according to official data. This is the main reason why building a network of efficient STPs is important, according to Vinod Tare, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur and lead author of the Ganga River Basin Management Plan. A consortium set up in 2010 by Jairam Ramesh, Indias environment minister at that time, of the seven main IITs prepared the plan that was submitted to the government of India in 2015. The Ganga basin is one of the most densely populated areas in India. There are more than 1,500 cities and towns in the basin, out of which the major cities  Delhi, Kolkata, Meerut, Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi and Patna  have populations exceeding 1 million each. The mega urban agglomerations around Delhi and Kolkata are home to more than 15 million people each. India has been urbanising at a rapid pace. In the Ganga basin cities, population increased from 75 million in 1991 to 165 in 2011, according to the Census of India. This exponential rise has led to a corresponding increase in sewage, but not in sewage treatment. NMCG says that the 10 largest cities on the Ganga alone account for more than 80 percent of the nearly 3,000 million litres of sewage that is discharged into the river. This excludes New Delhi, which pours over 2,000 million litres daily (MLD) into the Yamuna. There is absolutely no way to keep the Ganga free from pollution if we are unable to treat the enormous amount of sewage generated in the cities along its course, Tare said.

(Above: The tent city at the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna. The Kumbh Mela at Prayagraj this year attracted more than 300 million people over a month and a half. Photo courtesy Soumya

Sarkar.) The official estimates of sewage is much below the actual amount because more than a fourth of the urban population in India live in unauthorised slums and shantytowns that are not linked to the sewage network. The waste from these places usually flow into storm water drains and ultimately flows into the river untreated. Not keeping pace The installed capacity of STPs in the Ganga basin does not exceed 1,500 MLD, according to CPCB. The Namami Gange programme has sanctioned INR 247 billion (USD 3.5 billion), the government said in Parliament at the end of 2018. A lions share of that will be spent on treatment plants. While there is little dispute over the importance of STPs, the governments approach on focussing on only big STPs has been criticised by experts. (Above: The focus of central government spending on reviving the Ganga river basin remains overwhelmingly on sewage treatment plants. Source: National Mission for Clean Ganga, December 2018.) Our experience of trying to clean the Ganga and Yamuna for the past 30 years teaches us that the focus has to shift away from mega STPs, said Thakkar. Delhi has the highest STP capacity in the country. But that hasnt stopped the Yamuna from becoming a dirty drain. STPs upkeep in Delhi is a classic case of how sewerage management should not be carried out, argued Mishra. The governments focus on STPs as the solution to river woes has failed repeatedly, first with Ganga Action Plan, then with Yamuna Action Plan, and shall unfortunately fail again under Namami Gange. The focus on large scale sewerage concentrates everything on one aspect, whereas pollution reaches the river through multiple avenues. A more decentralised structure could be more adaptive, and would focus on the source of the pollution, but this approach has not been followed. Strong criticism Thakkar has been a fierce critic of the Namami Gange programme of the current government. The quality of water has deteriorated in the past four years, even in Varanasi, he said, adding that even the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India has found serious deficiencies and shortfalls in almost every aspect of the programme. (Above: A large portion of the funds allocated to build sewage infrastructure remains unspent. Source: National Mission for Clean Ganga, December 2018.) (The) National Mission for Clean Ganga could not finalise the long-term action plans even after more than six and half years of signing of agreement with the consortium of Indian Institutes of Technology, the CAG said in a 2017 report. Ruling party politicians have not helped matters by making extravagant forecasts. In just 10 percent work of the Rs 26,000 crore (USD 3.68 billion) project currently underway, the Ganga has started getting cleaner, Water Resources Minister Nitin Gadkari was quoted as saying in a media report. By March this year, 30-40 percent of the work will be completed, and by March next year, Ganga will be 100 percent clean. Keeping a river clean is a continuous process, said Thakkar. How can it have an end date? It is not just experts who understand this. Ive been coming to the Magh Mela for the past few years and have seen that it doesnt matter how well it is organised, said Chittaranjan Haldar, a sanitation worker from West Bengal deployed by a government contractor at the Prayagraj Kumbh. You have to keep cleaning. Otherwise the filth piles up again.

An inline sewage treatment project at Jhunsi, a suburb of Prayagraj. A few such innovative projects seek to lower the cost of sewage treatment. Photo courtesy Soumya Sarkar

The Magh Mela is held in the winter every year at Prayagraj, which transforms into the much bigger Kumbh Mela every 12 years. An Ardh Kumbh  like the one celebrated this year  is held in every intervening sixth year. Decentralised solution Promoting small and decentralised STPs is a better solution to keep untreated waste from reaching the river, experts said. A river should not be treated as the end destination of any waste or used water, be it domestic or industrial. Every city and industry must be zero discharge as far as any nearby water body or a river is considered, said Mishra. Decentralised management of domestic effluent is the only answer, says Somnath Bandyopadhyay, associate professor at the School of Ecology and Environment Studies in Nalanda University, Bihar. Smaller, decentralised and localised solutions work better simply because they are simpler and could be adapted to the specific needs and managed better. The problem becomes even more intractable when it comes to industrial effluents, says Bandyopadhyay, who earlier worked for the National Ganga River Basin Authority. Central effluent treatment plants (CETPs) [which treat industrial waste] face a different set of challenges. It is an unknown cocktail that it has to deal with. One solution is some amount of pre-treatment and quality-based charges imposed on quantities discharged by individual factories, Bandyopadhyay said. But transferring the liability from industries to the CETPs might work better, he added. Bandyopadhyays comments point to the economic aspects of making any cleaning programme sustainable. Experts say that municipalities and city corporations need to be empowered to tax citizens to pay for waste treatment if such efforts are to be made sustainable rather than depend on government dole all the time. If we can pay for the food we eat, said Tare. We should also be made to pay for the waste we generate. The Third Pole is a multilingual platform dedicated to promoting information and discussion about the Himalayan watershed and the rivers that originate there. This report was originally published on thethirdpole.net and has been reproduced here with permission.
AAP leader Alka Lamba on Friday dropped subtle hints about her inclination to return to the Congress.

New Delhi: AAP leader Alka Lamba on Friday dropped subtle hints about her inclination to return to the Congress.

In a post on Twitter in Hindi which roughly translates as, "Five years ago, I left my 20 years long journey with Congress to defeat the BJP in Delhi. BJP lost the elections. Now when the turn has come to defeat the BJP at the national level, how leaving the five-year-old collaboration is wrong? Today, I feel happy to see AAP and me giving strength to Congress in order to defeat the BJP."

In December, the AAP MLA said that the party had sought her resignation after she raised objection over the resolution passed in the Delhi Assembly pressing for revoking Bharat Ratna conferred to late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi over 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

However, Lamba has not made any official announcement regarding her exit from AAP.
A successful entry into the Uttar Pradeshs political game, via Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad, may give Congress a formula that it could execute to good effect in other states

In a spirited season of high-decibel election buzz, its not surprising that political pundits are seeing a deeper meaning in Priyanka Gandhi's visit to a young Dalit leader from Uttar Pradesh, Chandrashekhar Azad aka Ravana, in hospital on Wednesday.

Though Priyanka, the partys in-charge for eastern Uttar Pradesh for the upcoming election, stated that her meeting with the Bhim Army chief was a courtesy call, speculations are rife on alliances that the Congress may be exploring for the upcoming Lok Sabha election.

And for good enough reasons.

Despite its successes late last year in seminal Assembly elections, the party enters the 2019 Lok Sabha poll standing on the tenuous ground. Currently, it has the lowest number of Lok Sabha MPs ever in the electoral history of India and has been shoved out of a majority of states by regional satraps, who steadfastly refuse to yield any ground to the grand old party in their respective turfs.

Regional bigwigs in states such as Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, that account for a big number of Lok Sabha MPs, have prevented the Congress from getting its foot in the door, which it desperately needs to get back into the reckoning at the national level.

In such a scenario, a courtesy call such as the one on Bhim Army chief assumes significance  the newer kids on the block may be Priyankas best bet to set the Congress on its long pilgrimage back to national power.

If an alliance does come out of the 'apolitical' meeting between Priyanka and Azad, Congress may well have found its template to replicate in other states of India. Its quite similar to Gujarats Patidaar leader Hardik Patel closing ranks with the Congress  he had met Rahul Gandhi at a hotel room in Gujarat in October 2017  before formally joining the party, and bringing his dedicated followers to the Congress fold.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Chennai admitted on Wednesday that alliances in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Bihar have practically concluded, and the one in Jammu and Kashmir was in the final stage.

"Wherever required, the Congress will go for alliances with like-minded parties, with no ideological clashes. Dalits in Uttar Pradesh constitute an important vote bank and their role in electoral politics cant be undermined at any cost. Its too early to comment whether Congress will have any alliance with Bhim Army or not, a senior Congress leader said on the condition of anonymity.

The significance of Azad and the Uttar Pradesh template

The importance of having a sound footing in the state of Uttar Pradesh, that elects 80 Members of Parliament to the Lok Sabha  the largest number among all the states  cannot be overemphasised. A successful entry into the states political game, via Azad, may well give Congress a formula that it could execute to good effect in other states where it is not the main opposition party and is languishing at the number three or number four spot.

Congress definitely needs good representation in Uttar Pradesh where its last government ruled in 1985-1989. Since then, the state has been ruled by the local stalwarts  Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samajwadi Party (BSP)  and the BJP.

Uttar Pradesh has been Congress karmabhoomi since pre-Independence and has given the country quite a few Congress prime ministers. If the party wants to have a role in national politics again like it used to, it needs Uttar Pradesh on its side. Congress had won 21 seats in the state out of 80 in the 2009 Lok Sabha election with 18.3 percent vote share, the number had come down to a dismal two in the 2014 Lok Sabha election and the vote share had dipped to 7.5 percent. Only the BJPs vote share had increased from 17.5 percent in 2009 to 42.3 percent in 2014, thanks to the Narendra Modi wave.

Yet, SP and BSP seem resolute in not ceding even an inch to the Congress in Uttar Pradesh. Their firm refusal to have an alliance with the Congress in the state (or even elsewhere as BSP has declared) doesnt leave much choice for the party other than exploring newer options.

We have an ideological difference with the Congress, as this party had been responsible in the past for having defeated the countrys greatest icon of the movement for Dalits, OBCs and the poor, Babasaheb Ambedkar. These voices (Azad) will have to stand the test of time like Babasaheb, Kansiramji and Mayavatiji as champions of the Dalits. Anybody aligning with Congress will be seen as anti-Dalit, BSPs national spokesperson Sudhindra Bhadoria said.

The states vote bank is tightly divided between the SP, BSP and the BJP with Congress not getting even a foot in the door.

Thats where Azad probably fits in. However, time will prove his credibility as a serious political contender.

Though BSP enjoys a committed voter base of the Dalit population in the state, Azad has built his own constituency through aggressive posturing.

As a young and dynamic leader positioning himself as an alternative to BSP supremo Mayawati, a friendship with Azad is a tempting prospect for the Congress. He promises the possibility of breaching the BSP fortress that may have a domino effect on the Mayawati-led party's current alliance with the SP. This can help the Congress if it plays its cards right. UP has the highest Dalit population in the country, with a share of 20.5 percent.

Even though Azad is ruffling feathers in the BSP camp  Mayawati held an emergency meeting with SP chief Akhilesh Yadav after the Priyanka-Azad meet  he is yet to be tested in the political waters.

The Congress, however, also seems to be enthused with a renewed energy after the appointment of Priyanka in a frontal role in the 2019 election campaign. The party seems almost emboldened to make a charged push for Uttar Pradesh.

The new-found confidence also owes a lot to the partys stellar performance in the three crucial Assembly elections in late 2018  where it won the three important Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Uttar Pradesh seems the next logical step, which can act as a springboard for catapulting the party back to the high stakes of national politics.

Similarly, the Congress has also sought a referendum from its booth-level workers through its Shakti app on whether it should have an alliance with the AAP in Haryana, as no alliance could materialise with the ruling party in Delhi.

In order to defeat the BJP, the AAP national convener and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal sought an alliance with the Congress in Haryana. In the 2014 election, while Congress bagged one seat from Haryana with 22.9 percent vote share, AAP scored nil with a low 4.2 percent vote share against the BJP that won seven out of the 10 seats. In 2009, Congress had won nine seats.

In Haryana, it all depends on how the Congress party views AAP. As an important ally, it may consider the offer provided its a win-win situation for both. At present, Congress has an upper hand.
Rajasthan chief minister and Congress leader Ashok Gehlot on Thursday alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems more like a Bollywood actor than a politician, who 'worked less and did jugglery more'

Sikar: Rajasthan chief minister and Congress leader Ashok Gehlot on Thursday alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems more like a Bollywood actor than a politician, who "worked less and did jugglery more". He claimed that the Constitution and democracy "will be in danger" if the BJP is voted to power again.

At a public meeting, Gehlot said, "He (Modi) seems more like a Bollywood actor than a politician. He worked less and did jugglery more, because of which country has to suffer a deep crisis. BJP has forgot all the promises it made before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls."

He said Sikar district strongly supported the Congress in the assembly elections, which ultimately led to the formation of the party's government in Rajasthan. So it is only right to launch state Congress' election campaign for Lok Sabha polls from here, Gehlot said.

Accusing the BJP and RSS of spreading rumours on social media, he claimed that they were hatching a conspiracy against the Congress, whereas people of the country have made up their mind to vote for the grand old party. Rajasthan Congress president and deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot said the people of Shekhawati region will remove the BJP from power at the Centre just like in the state.

Congress general secretary and state in-charge Avinash Pandey, Rajasthan health minister Raghu Sharma, education minister Govind Singh Dotasara, former assembly speaker Deependra Singh Shekhawat and former Union minister Subhash Meharia also addressed the public meeting.
Both the TMC and BJD are simultaneously attempting to combine the increased women representation with the women-centric policies launched in their tenure.

Couple of days after Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik announced that his party Biju Janata Dal will offer 33 percent reservation for women candidates in the general elections, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee put 17 women in the list of 42 Trinamool Congress candidates. Thats over 40.5 percent. Banerjee may seem bottled up by the Central forces but she seems ready to contest in neighbouring states without worrying about being distracted from her state campaign. Despite facing headwinds from the Centre, she makes bold statements, floats cardboard cutout characters from the film world (from Moon Moon Sen to Locket Chatterjee to Shatabdi Roy) and pulls votes from across Bengal on her personal appeal.

Unlike children of politically valuable bloodlines, a girl from a lower middle-class family took the student politics route, voiced her opinion in newspapers and erased her anonymity the day she busted the invincibility of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) rule at the age of 29 by defeating a stalwart like Somnath Chatterjee. Today, from the same Jadavpur seat that etched the TMC supremo on the canvas of Indian political history, Bengali actress Mimi Chakraborty has been fielded. Encouraging women from non-political backgrounds to join politics and cashing in on their familiarities, which doesnt threaten her own supremacy isnt a sign of inclusivity in the electorate. From Jayalalithaa to Mayawati to Mamata Banerjee, women leaders in India have failed to groom a second rung of strong women leadership that can eventually take over, which is why the need to fill up electoral space with women arises in the first place.

Mahua Moitra, former investment banker and now a member of the Trinamool Congress told Firstpost that the Womens Reservation Bill still hasnt been passed and that the lack of a bill will not deter Banerjee from doing the right thing. Lately, Congress president Rahul Gandhi was also seen seeking the support of parliamentarians on womens reservation quota in the Legislature. Back in 2013, when Narendra Modi was chief minister of Gujarat, the state Assembly had passed a legislation reserving 50 percent of all seats for women in panchayat, nagar panchayat, nagar palika, mahanagar palika and zila panchayat. But it was shot down by then governor Kamla Beniwal.

Nandini Satpathy, Odishas first and only chief minister and an ally of Indira Gandhi, had imprisoned noted activists Nabakrusna Choudhuri and Rama Dev during the Emergency. Today, four decades after assuming power, women in the same state require a reservation to come out and join politics. Her son Tathagath Satpary, former MP of Dhenkanal from the BJD, recently quit politics. He shared with Firstpost that he remembers a time in Odisha when his mother would go and campaign in villages and the women would come out and talk while the men would stand behind and listen. While he supports what Patnaik and Banerjee are doing, the fact that reservation is premised on the belief that the beneficiary is weaker might not auger well with the necessity of courage to rise through the ranks in politics.

Aparajita Sarangi, the bureaucrat-turned-politician who joined the BJP in Odisha, tours new villages every other idea. In places like Gania, Balipatna, Begunia, and even an advanced area like Khurda, I see women are low on confidence. College-going girls hide behind doors and fail to find the strength and come out and interact with political leaders, she said. In recent months, important women leaders like Prabhati Parida and Lekhashree Samantsinghar have joined the BJP. Last year, the state unit of BJPs women wing launched a state-wide Mahila Suraksha Yatra.

Both the TMC and BJD are simultaneously attempting to combine the increased women representation with the women-centric policies launched in their tenure. In the case of Odisha, Sasmit Patra of the BJD highlights, the move to offer reservation is not a knee jerk reaction but a logical progression that started from the grassroots.

Mission Shakti, launched by the BJD, is a self-help group driven programme that offers loans on zero percent interest and 70 lakh women in a state of 4.3 crore are attached to this scheme, he said. Biju Mahila Janata Dal president Sulochana Das, who is actively running the campaign titled Ghare Ghare Shankh (the partys symbol, the conch shell, in every house), said that it was those 70 lakh women and their families who brought the BJD back to power the last time. But Sarangi shared that Odisha often fairs terribly in the rape and domestic violence index and that its women are repeatedly asking her to have liquor banned in the state. In the BJD rule, 4,470 liquor shops have sprung open. This threatens the safety of women more than anything else, she pointed out.

Across the border from Odisha, Banerjees government launched the Kanyashree scheme, a conditional cash transfer scheme, which ensures girls stay in school and defer their marriages till the age of 18 and the total scholarships sanctioned have benefited nearly 50 lakh students.

True emancipation of women will happen when women in power sincerely chose to lift up other women and not just merely involve them to play second fiddle.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party president Amit Shah and other top BJP leaders will attend the central election committee meeting.

New Delhi: The BJP is likely to release its first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha polls on Saturday, when its central election committee is scheduled to meet.

The list will have the names of most of the candidates for the first phase of polling, which will be held on 11 April in 91 seats.

The election for 543 parliamentary seats will be held in seven phases till 19 May and the counting of votes will be taken up on 23 May.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party president Amit Shah and other top BJP leaders will attend the central election committee meeting.

All 42 seats in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana will go to the polls in the first phase with a fraction of constituencies in many other states, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha and Assam, also to witness polling on 11 April.

The Assembly polls in Telangana and Odisha will be held simultaneously with the general election.

With Modi known for dropping a number of incumbents in order to beat the anti-incumbency factor, the saffron party has been abuzz with speculation over the fate of its sitting MPs.

It has sought feedback from a number of sources, including the public, and has also asked its MPs to furnish details of the works they have carried out as it finalises its candidates for the upcoming polls.
Although both Priyanka Gandhi and Chandrashekhar Azad called the meeting a courtesy call, in politics, such courtesies are not without purpose.

BSP spokesperson Sudhindra Bhadoria on Thursday posted two sarcastic tweets targeting Congress leader Sheila Dikshit. These would otherwise have been passed off as political counterpoints. However, the tweets had several connotations, as they came a day after Priyanka Gandhi and Jyotiraditya Scindia met Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad, who is in custody and in a Meerut hospital.

Bhadoria made a reference to Dikshit's remarks about Manmohan Singh in which she had purportedly said that the former prime minister was not as strong and as determined as Modi is in dealing with terrorism. Bhadoria, in a blistering attack on the Congress, remarked, "The Congress itself is determined to campaign for the BJP."

In another tweet, he referred to Amit Shah's statement "thanking" Dikshit for her statement, and asked, "What's cooking between the Congress and BJP? Amit Shah and Sheila Dikshit are praising each other; something must be fishy."

While Bhadoria's Twitter account says that his "views expressed are personal," sources in the BSP said he could not have made statements on such a sensitive issue without approval or prompting from the party leadership. Dikshit is no ordinary Congress leader. She had been Delhis chief minister for 15 years, and the Congress chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh in the early days of the 2017 Assembly election campaign. She is now the Delhi Congress president, and enjoys the confidence of the Gandhi family. Therefore, it is anybody's guess as to who the target of the BSP leader's statement is.

BSP leaders are deeply aggrieved over Priyanka having travelled to Meerut to meet Chandrashekher Azad (aka Ravan). They believe that by doing so, she was trying to find an antidote to the BSP and Mayawati, and cut into Dalit votes. The Bhim Army chiefs aggressiveness has created a sizeable following for him among the Dalit community, particularly the youth.

Although both Priyanka and Azad called it a courtesy call, in politics, such courtesies are not without purpose. There are numerous examples to suggest that such "courtesies" have resulted in alignments and realignments, and the fall and formation of governments. In 1999, a courtesy meet between Sonia Gandhi and Jayalalithaa at a tea party brought down the Vajpayee government. In 2004, a courtesy call by Sonia Gandhi to Ram Vilas Paswan brought the latter into the UPA fold. A courtesy meet between Hardik Patel and Rahul Gandhi ended up with the former joining the Congress. The list can go on.

It is generally understood that such courtesy calls in politics dont happen abruptly; they take place after back room channels have done the homework required. In this case, the newly-appointed general secretary in-charge of Eastern Uttar Pradesh travelled to the hospital in Meerut (which is in western Uttar Pradesh) to meet the Bhim Army chief. This happened at a time when the Congress, after being snubbed by the SP-BSP-RLD alliance, is desperately looking for alliances with small caste-based parties and players.

In politics, alliances are of two kinds  overt and tacit.

It should also be noted that Priyanka met Azad, whose opinions on various issues are a bit on the radical side, only two days after the BSP chief delivered the final snub to the Congress, shutting the door for alliances with the latter in Uttar Pradesh and in any other state where there may have been such possibilities.

Azad has expressed his desire to contest from Varanasi against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and against the SP-BSP candidate. It would be interesting to see whether the Congress supports him by not putting up its own candidate.

Though the BSP leaders exude confidence that any Congress-Bhim Army understanding, overt or tacit, will not have any bearing on Mayawatis proven influence over the Dalit community in general and the Jatavas in particular, they are not hiding their anguish.

Mayawati has not taken it kindly. A BSP leader said to Firstpost, Congress ne ye kar ke bahut bada bayana mol liya hai (By doing this, the Congress has taken on a big challenge). This colloquial saying is used in a negative sense about a rival who tries to take up major tasks without realising the consequences they may have to face.
Nobody has hurt India's global reputation and credibility more than the Modi government, the Congress alleged on Friday after over 100 economists and social scientists expressed concerns over 'political interference' in statistical data in the country.

New Delhi: Nobody has hurt India's global reputation and credibility more than the Modi government, the Congress alleged on Friday after over 100 economists and social scientists expressed concerns over "political interference" in statistical data in the country.

As many as 108 economists and social scientists on Thursday called for the restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity of statistical organisations. Their appeal came against the backdrop of controversy over the revision of gross domestic product (GDP) numbers and withholding employment data by the NSSO.

"Nobody has hurt India's global reputation and credibility more than Modi government. 108 global economists and social scientists are concerned and you should be too!" Congress' chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said in a tweet. He urged people to vote out a party which, he alleged, "hides its massive failures by statistical jugglery and excel sheet management!"

The economists and social scientists have appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data" and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

The signatories include Rakesh Basant (IIM-A), James Boyce (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US), Emily Breza (Harvard University, US), Satish Deshpande (Delhi University), Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia, Canada), R Ramakumar (TISS, Mumbai), Hema Swaminathan (IIM-B) and Rohit Azad (JNU).
The Congress demanded the ouster of Railway Minister Piyush Goyal over the Mumbai bridge collapse, which has killed at least six people.

New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday held the BJP-led Central and state governments responsible for the Mumbai bridge collapse, which has killed at least six people, saying they are "criminally culpable" of inaction and also demanded the ouster of Railway Minister Piyush Goyal.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi offered condolences to the families of those killed in the incident and prayed for speedy recovery to the injured.

"I am saddened on hearing the news of the Mumbai foot overbridge collapse. I express my heartfelt condolences to the families of those who have died. I pray that injured get relief soon," he said in a Facebook post in Hindi.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said he was deeply saddened to learn about the Mumbai bridge collapse where several people are still reportedly trapped under the debris.

"Modi Government and Maharashtra government are criminally culpable for inaction leading to repeat tragedies  29 September 2017 Elphistone Stampede. 3 July 2018  Andheri Bridge Collapse.

"Railway Minister's tall claims of audit have failed time and again. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal must resign or be sacked," he said on Twitter.

He offered condolences to the families of the victims and expressed hope that the administration will take swift action and provide urgent medical help to the injured.

Five people were killed and 29 injured after a major portion of a foot overbridge near a train station in south Mumbai collapsed Thursday evening, officials said.

The bridge which connected the area near The Times of India building with the iconic CSMT station was commonly known as 'Kasab bridge' as the 26/11 Mumbai attack terrorist passed through it during the terror strike. All the injured have been rushed to nearby hospitals, a disaster management cell official said.
| BY Kim Shaw |

If youre after advice on launching a successful agency, Nick Cummins is a good person to ask. Cummins believes our industry needs more agencies, and next week at AdFest 2019, hes giving a talk explaining his passion for start-ups, and why it is easier to start an agency from scratch rather than change an old agency.

Cummins (pictured) has started two independent advertising agencies in Australia  Sputnik Agency and The Royals, where he is Creative Partner  and both have grown to become multi-award-winning, culture-led businesses. He sold his first agency to a white-collar criminal who ended up in a Columbian prison charged with fraud  one of many anecdotes hell share at AdFest next week.

Cummins career spans 30 years in both traditional and digital agencies. Since launching The Royals seven years ago, its grown into an agency of over 80 people across Sydney and Melbourne.

The Royals has a very distinctive mission: to be the most interested agency in the world. How did you arrive at that mission and what impact does it have on the work you create for clients?

Striving to be the most interested agency in the world is a huge part of our culture. It is something I think our industry has lost along the way. I love the legends of great advertising people from the 60s going out to factories interviewing the makers of a product to get a better understanding of how to market it.

So being interested in our clients businesses, products and consumers is nothing new but incredibly important. But most interested goes beyond that  it is a healthy interest in pop culture, community sentiment, platforms and channels that we can use to make connections with our audience. Finding people who are personally most interested helps our business and our clients businesses immensely.

Do you really think the world needs more advertising agencies? Why is this the topic of your AdFest session?

No, of course the world doesnt need more advertising agencies, but I believe our industry desperately does. I also believe if new vibrant creative, intelligent, businesses pop up and flourish with people who come to work to solve problems in new ways, we may find some of them might just help solve some of the problems our world faces today.

Can you tell us a little about The Royals  what was your vision seven years ago at launch, and have you stayed true to it?

Starting a business is easy, sticking to it is difficult. For us, starting The Royals began with a conversation at the pub about what kind of agency we felt Australia needed at the time. I went home that night and told my wife I was going to start another business and we would probably have to sell the house. She is very supportive, my wife.

Our vision was to create an agency that sat between large multinationals that are good at strategy and storytelling and digital shops that are great at understanding new platforms and technologies. So we started collecting the kinds of people who get modern communications and we are still collecting them today.

Yes, I believe we have stayed true to our vision. We try to look at the agency as an operating system. We are constantly making updates and improvements and I think being independent makes that easy. We dont have to ask New York for approval to change a process or try something different. It helps us avoid falling into the trap of just doing things the same way the industry has for the last 50 years.

The Royals hired 40 people in 2018. What are the challenges of growing so rapidly?

Culture. And remembering everyones names. Im shit with names. Creating a culture together is one of the most exciting things to be a part of in any business. If you get it right, it is rocket fuel for an organisation. So managing culture while having rapid growth is incredibly important. Like rocket fuel, if you dont have a tight grip on the wheel things can get wobbly.

The Royals now has its own research and development lab, as well as a CX division. How has this impacted your own creative process or improved the agencys work?

These two skill sets are a great example of how we have stuck to our vision of creating a truly integrated and modern agency filled with a very diverse group of people. Even though we call them a department, they work in true collaborative fashion with the broader agency.

Our CX division was born from being most interested. Listening to our clients, it became clear this was something they wanted to channel energy towards. Our CX team is knocking it out of the park at the moment. Advance Party, our product research and development lab, has been part of our agency for the past few years. It has its own dedicated space within the building. Having this mind set and skill set enables us to solve problems for our clients that normally wouldnt come to us in the form of a marketing brief.

What do you look for when youre hiring creatives?

For me, it is about finding interested entrepreneurial people. I have seen individuals shape independent agencies. Tapping in to that passion that someone has can create incredible momentum for the agency. We have revelry as one of our three values. If our staff are revelling in what they love to do, if they are hustling and shaping the agency, it makes things exciting and creates growth for the agency and all who live within it.

Whats your proudest achievement  professional or otherwise?

I think being part of starting two successful agencies that people talk highly of would have to be something that makes me proud. Creating an environment and atmosphere that people remember as being a great chapter in their lives after they move on is a worthy achievement to me. Its why we named the company The Royals. We think of ourselves as a gang. Im a Royal, youre a Royal.

Oh and my kids. My kids are pretty cool and I had a hand in raising them.

With offices in Sydney and Melbourne, do you have plans for expanding into other markets? What are your goals for 2019?

At the moment we are focused on Melbourne and Sydney. 2019 is going to be a year all about our creative product.

 Why the World Needs More Agencies and how to start one, presented by Nick Cummins, takes place on Friday 22nd March in Pattaya, Thailand as part of AdFest 2019.
Old fault lines between the Vikhe Patils of Ahmednagar and Sharad Pawar of Pune district have resurfaced over decades-old animosities; but at stake here is the Congress-NCP alliance in Maharashtra.

Two feuding Maratha clans, an alliance of convenience, filial bonds and political loyalties: outcome of Lok Sabha polls in one small constituency is inconsequential for battle 2019, but a generous helping of these elements makes the Lok Sabha election in Ahmednagar seat a riveting contest.

Old fault lines between the Vikhe Patils of Ahmednagar and Sharad Pawar of Pune district have resurfaced over decades-old animosities, but at stake here is the Congress-NCP alliance in Maharashtra.

The alliance was decimated by the Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2014 elections, but till recently, it seemed confident of bouncing back in the state. However, the tug-of-war between the two powerful clans in the sugar belt has now left the Congress red-faced and its internal rifts exposed.

Discords out in the open

News of rising discords over seat-sharing formula  and the Ahmednagar seat in particular  was trickling in since December. However, the hostilities came out in the open when Congress relented the Vikhe Patils' traditional bastion to NCP, following which Sujay Vikhe Patil, son of the leader of the opposition in the state assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, joined the BJP. The NCP plans to field party legislator Arun Jagtap from the constituency.

This not only left the Congress embarrassed but also exposed the factionalism rife within its Maharashtra unit as another party leader (known to be of anti-Vikhe Patil camp) Balasaheb Thorat virtually questioned Radhakrishna's loyalty towards the Congress party after his son joined BJP. Talking to PTI at Sangamner, 80 kilometres from Ahmednagar, Thorat said the Vikhe Patil family has been associated with the Congress for the last five decades and the party has treated its members well. However, the Vikhe Patils have "betrayed" the Congress at a crucial time, Thorat said.

Meanwhile, a shouting match between Thorat and Radhakrishna at the Congress core committee meeting was reported in the media. While Thorat sought a clarification from Radhakrishna over Sujay joining BJP, the latter questioned whether the former is larger than the party leadership to question him.

On the other hand, IANS reported that Sujay has practically fought a war with the Vikhe Patil family; he admitted publicly on Tuesday that his father Radhakrishna is not even on speaking terms with him currently after he joined the BJP. This created a furore in Congress circles with demands for his (father's) resignation from some quarters.

In the midst of all this, NCP chief Sharad Pawar added salt to injury when he raked up the decades-old rivalry between the two clans and commented on Radhakrishna's father Balasaheb Vikhe Patil. And unsurprisingly, both Radhakrishna and Sujay fretted and fumed, and blamed the latter's jump to BJP on Pawar's 'unwarranted' and 'hurtful words' with Radhakrishna also using the matter to wriggle out of a situation where he might have had to campaign against his own son.

"Sharad Pawar's comment against my father was unwarranted and uncalled for.... He should have stuck to alliance dharma and avoided such words. My father is not even alive now... If Pawar despises my family so much, I would rather not campaign for the NCP candidate from Ahmednagar," he said.

Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had earlier said that he will recommend Sujay's name for Ahmednagar constituency to BJP top brass.

Meanwhile, Pawar expressed dismay at the development and said that he can't "fulfil demands of children from other families".

"I can look after my house. How can I fulfil the demands of children from other families? If anyone is changing the route and think that the journey will be smooth, then I have nothing but well wishes," Pawar told reporters on Tuesday evening.

However, Pawar's statement too should not be taken at face value as there are several reports indicating there were long parlays held to convince the NCP supremo to exchange the Ahmednagar seat with Congress. But the NCP chief dug his heels even as NCP had lost two elections on a trot in the constituency. The parties even toyed with the idea of fielding Sujay on NCP ticket  with Pawar's nephew Ajit Pawar visiting Vikhe Patils' sugar mill to meet Sujay  but talks ultimately fell through.

The senior Vikhe Patil, Radhakrishna, had even made an appeal to Pawar to consider Sujay as his grandson, but Ajit had announced that "there was no question of the NCP relinquishing the Ahmednagar seat to the Congress".

The decades-old rivalry

Pawar recently alluded to how he ensured the defeat of Balasaheb Vikhe Patil (in an election in the early 1990s) and that he also remembered the lawsuit the late Congress leader filed against him. And this was the time when the seeds of political rivalry between the Vikhe Patil and Pawar clans were actually sown: two generations ago.

Sujays grandfather Balasaheb Vikhe Patil, a recipient of Padma Bhushan award, was a heavyweight Maharashtra state Congress leader, an eight-time MP, a former Union minister of state and a Sugar baron  in fact, the whole rivalry partly stems from the ambition to control the sugarcane cooperative societies, but more on that later.

In short, Balasaheb Vikhe Patil was already a political hotshot when Pawar was taking his first political steps in Congress under the guidance of YB Chavan. Balasaheb vowed unwavering loyalty to late Shankarrao Chavan, whose politics centred around curbing the clout of Vasantdada Patil and Pawar among prosperous sugar cooperatives. This ensured that Pawar and Balasaheb firmly remained on the opposite sides of the political spectrum even when both were within Congress. Neither shied away from frequently sparring in public, while they also continued to cultivate contacts with each others' rivals in the background, particularly in Ahmednagar.

While Pawar promoted anti-Vikhe Patil sugar barons, including Bhausaheb Thorat, Govindrao Adik, Shankarrao Kolhe, Yeshwantrao Gadakh and Appasaheb Rajale, Balasaheb bridged ties with Pawars political rivals, including Shankarrao Chavan, AR Antulay, Vilasrao Deshmukh and Gopinath Munde.

As Pawar's sway increased in Congress by the early 1990s, he ensured Balasaheb didnt get a Lok Sabha ticket, prompting the latter to contest the polls as an Independent. Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi then asked Pawar to ensure Balasaheb's defeat in 1991. Pawar had then fielded Gadakh against Balasaheb.

This was perhaps the last straw in open rivalries. The political rivalry translated into a full-blown legal battle and Balasaheb, who lost the 1991 polls, accused Pawar, then Maharashtra chief minister, of corrupt electoral practices to ensure Gadakh's win. The battle reached the Supreme Court, which eventually cleared Pawar of the charges in 1993. But Pawar's voting rights were annulled for the next elections while the case came to its conclusion.

It was this instance that Pawar referred to that reignited the war between the two families in 2019.

Meanwhile, the rivalry easily spilt over to the next generation as well. In 2011, with the Congress government in power in the state, Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Corporation (MERC), controlled by then power minister and Pawar's nephew Ajit took away electricity distribution rights from Mula Pravara Society, an electricity cooperative in Ahmednagar owned by the Vikhe Patil family. The reason given was that it owes the state Rs 2,200 crore, but according to reports, the move was perceived as a continuance of the old family rivalry, Hindustan Times reported.

The bitterness of sugar

It was Balasahebs father, Vitthal-Rao Vikhe Patil, who pioneered the cooperative movement amid sugarcane farmers and established the first sugar cooperative factory in Ahmednagar's Loni area in 1951. Pawar, meanwhile, started a sugar factory at Malegaon in western Maharashtra in 1957.

Several rounds on the political chessboard and today Pawar and his NCP dominate the work of around 187 sugar factories (both cooperative-style and privately owned) in the state. Since each cooperative factory has a network of sugarcane farmers as members, controlling it meant access to a captive vote bank and elections to the boards of these units were  and are still  fiercely contested.

And Ahmednagar became a key flashpoint not just because it was by now an ego issue, but also because of its 17 sugar cooperative factories and multiple credit societies, and a massive support base.
Continuing his tirade against the prime minister, Rahul said that Modi talks about farmers in every meeting but does not waive farm loans. He only waives loans of rich businessmen, the Gandhi scion alleged.

Bargarh (Odisha): Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday lashed out at Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for 'failing' to provide jobs for the youth in the state.

"What has Naveen Patnaik done for the unemployed youth of Odisha? Is there anyone here who can say Naveen Patnaik or Narendra Modi gave them employment? But Modiji indulged in corruption and gave Rs 30,000 crore to Anil Ambani," he said while addressing a gathering in Bargarh.

Continuing his tirade against the prime minister, Rahul said that Modi talks about farmers in every meeting but does not waive farm loans. He only waives loans of rich businessmen, the Gandhi scion alleged.

Rahul asserted that his party not only makes promises but also keeps them, with regards to loan waivers implemented in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh a few hours after forming the government in these states.

"We waived loans in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. We will do the same in Odisha. We promised farm loan waiver if the Congress won the Assembly elections in Chhattisgarh. I told Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel that we must announce farm loan waiver within ten days of coming to power and I am proud to say that he did it within six hours of assuming office," Rahul said at the rally.

Within hours of being sworn-in as Baghel announced to waive off farm loans amounting to Rs 6,100 crore. The new government also decided to raise the minimum support price of paddy to Rs 2,500 per quintal.

In his first decision, taken within two hours of assuming office as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Kamal Nath waived the outstanding short term crop loans of farmers up to Rs 2 lakh as on 31 March, 2018, taken from nationalised and the cooperative banks.

Rahul's campaign is a part of the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections which is scheduled to start from 11 April and will go on till 19 May. Counting of polls will take place on 23 May.
Congress considers Vadakkan, a close aide of United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi as a demonetised currency whose exchange period expired long ago.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front is seeking a mandate for stopping the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Narendra Modi juggernaut in Kerala saying that if elected the Congress candidates could end up in the saffron camp.

The LDF began the campaign after senior Congress leader G Raman Nair joined the BJP in the midst of the Sangh Parivar struggle against the 28 September Supreme Court verdict allowing women of all ages to enter the Sabarimala temple.

The LDF propaganda got a boost with Congress media veteran Tom Vadakkan joining the saffron party on 14 March. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has led the campaign saying that the Congress is a recruiting agent for the BJP.

However, Congress considers Vadakkan, a close aide of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi as a demonetised currency whose exchange period expired long ago.

Just as he brings no asset value to the ruling party, except for a few brownie points to beat Congress with, Rahuls party has lost virtually nothing by Vadakkan walking out. Although Vadakkan has been alien to electoral politics during the two decades that he was with the Congress, it was not by his own volition.

He always wanted to be in it, but party politics never let him come anywhere near contesting an election in his home state of Kerala. He was always considered as an outsider by Keralas Congress leaders, who were themselves split into factions of various hues. He was, of course, an insider in the Congress power corridors in Delhi, but with no outside influence, it mattered little in terms of clout. The result was that he belonged to neither power centres.

Vadakkan, a staunch Sonia loyalist, had managed to get the high command to superimpose his candidature for the Thrissur Lok Sabha constituency in Kerala for the 2009 elections but faced stiff resistance from the local Congress leaders who objected to his lack of grassroots level connections as a big deterrent to success. In 2014, Vadakkan worked through the powerful Christian bishops to land a ticket but was again unsuccessful in the end. The 2019 election was perhaps his only chance, but it was certain that he would prove to be third time unlucky.

He was virtually pouring his heart out at the press conference with Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad when he said there was no place for self-respecting people in the Congress party. I gave my prime of life to the Congress. But dynastic politics is now at its zenith in the party... There's no place in it for self-respecting people," he lamented. He said he was a victim of the dynastic politics of Congress and its use and throw culture.

While Vadakkan was drawing a blank in terms of electoral ambitions, the generation change in the Congress party ensured after Rahul Gandhi took over the mantle that he remained on the sidelines organisationally too. The Congress media unit was completely in the hands of Randeep Singh Surjewala and team and Vadakkans role was limited to holding ornamental positions under the Rahul Gandhi leadership.

So it was a matter of time that the Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi loyalist would get disenchanted with his situation. The Pulwama terror attack and the Congress partys response to how the government handled it provided the right opportunity for him to make his exit, and give it an air of moral indignation. It hurt me deeply when you question the integrity of the armed forces. At a time like this, it is not right to engage in such commentary. If a political party takes such a position that is against the country, then I'm left with no option but to leave the party, he claimed.

It is believed that he may have received assurances of securing a BJP ticket from somewhere. It is no big deal for the saffron party in Kerala to give someone a seat to contest as there are no real stakes for the party, unlike the Congress-led UDF or the CPM led Left Front, for both of which each seat counts a lot. But state BJP president P S Sreedharan Pillai refused to commit himself on fielding Vadakkan as a candidate, although he joined the celebration of defection by a member of Sonias Roman Catholic family with gusto.

Pillai said he was aware of Vadakkan crossing over but the state leadership had no role in the development. The BJP state president promised that more Congress leaders were in line to join the saffron party, which according to him suggests a positive turn in favour of the party in Kerala.

As expected, the state Congress leadership dismissed the Vadakkan episode as of no consequence whatsoever. We have only seen Vadakkan on TV channels. In Kerala, he has had no space or role. His leaving is not going to affect us in any manner," commented Congress spokesperson Joseph Vazhakken. His colleague PC Vishnunath, MLA, said he failed to understand the noise over Vadakkan joining the BJP.

It is obvious that Congress does not lose anything due to Vadakkans departure; nor does it help the BJP improve its prospects in Kerala, says political analyst Sunnykutty Abraham. But he points out in the same breath that it is a shot in the arm for the ruling Left Front, not because it will alter the electoral scene in any manner, but lends credence to the argument by the Marxists that any vote cast in favour of the Congress will turn out to be for the benefit of BJP.

The Kerala CPM plans to make a big noise over the BJP poaching into other parties, particularly Congress, insisting that there would be no point in voting for Congress candidates as many of them could end up joining the BJP at a later stage, depending on how the post-election scenario shapes up. The well-considered CPM line is to project a scenario where the mantle of stopping the BJP-Modi juggernaut in Kerala is solely on the Left Front as Congress neither has the stomach nor the will to fight BJP.

Tom Vadakkan, whose virulent attack against Modi that took up much air time before he switched sides, is the best bet for the Left Front to cast doubt on the credibility of Congress leaders in fighting Modi and the BJP. The promise by the state BJP chief of more defections in the days to come provides the Marxists with further ammunition in the Left Front assault against the Congress in Kerala, which is arguably its only rival, with BJP not expected to perform any miracle despite its best efforts to turn the Sabarimala issue into a pro-saffron wave.
One of the most bitter critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, Mamata Banerjee firmly pitched herself as a leader who could act as the glue to unite disparate political parties seeking to oust the NDA from power when she mustered leaders of 23 parties at a rally in Kolkata in January this year.

Kolkata: As she led thousands of hungry and angry farmers on the dusty streets of Singur and Nandigram over a decade ago, defying the mighty Communist regime of West Bengal, little did she know she was on the threshold of scripting history.

Mamata Banerjee, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo, might well be at the doorstep of making history yet again, if the BJP-led NDA fails to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha election, ending up becoming a kingmaker in national politics if not the king.

One of the most bitter critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, she firmly pitched herself as a leader who could act as the glue to unite disparate political parties seeking to oust the NDA from power when she mustered leaders of 23 parties at a rally in Kolkata in January this year. "We would play an important role in the new government formation under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee. The people of this country are looking up to her and TMC to save them from the reign of fear of Narendra Modi," TMC leader in the outgoing Lok Sabha Sudip Bandopadhyay told PTI, indicating that the fiery West Bengal leader has set her sights on New Delhi.

For the 64-year-old, the political journey from the restive streets of Nandigram and Singur in 2007-08, when she waged a relentless battle against the Left Front government, to 'Nabanna', the seat of power in Kolkata, was as captivating as it was punishing.

Though she cut her political teeth as a young Congress volunteer in her student days and rose to become a minister in UPA and NDA governments, it was in the crucible of Nandigram and Singur movements against forcible acquisition of farmland by the Communist government for industrialisation that her destiny and that of the TMC took shape.

She founded the TMC in January 1998 after parting ways with the Congress and it was through struggles, big and small, against the Communist dispensation that her party grew.

In 2001, when the state had its first assembly polls after the launch of the TMC, the party bagged an impressive 60 seats in the 294-member House, while the Left Front clinched a staggering 192. In its second outing in the 2006 assembly elections, the TMC's strength came down by half as it could pocket only 30 seats, while the Left scored a resounding victory with 219 seats.

The four years that followed were the most momentous in the contemporary political history of West Bengal as she put up a spirited fight against the Left Front government over alleged excesses in Singur and Nandigram. The assembly elections of 2011 were historic, as she decimated the Left in one of its longest-standing bastions. Mamata's party ended the Left Front's 34-year unbroken stint in power, winning a whopping 184 seats riding the crest of massive public outrage against the Communists, who were restricted to just 60 seats.

The street fighter-politician further tightened her hold on the levers of power in West Bengal in the assembly elections of 2016, when she beat the Communists hollow, winning 211 seats. The Left Front, with just 32 seats in its kitty, even lost its position as the main opposition party which went to the Congress that clinched 44 seats.

According to a senior party leader, it was time for the party to make a mark in the national political arena.

At a time when the Congress has lost much of its political heft and is not in a position to take on the BJP single-handedly, many in the TMC feel that regional players could call the shots in the corridors of power in New Delhi. "And we would be one the most important players at the national level. If we are able to win most of the Lok Sabha seats from the state, we will play a major role in the formation of the next government.

"The question of the prime ministerial candidate would be decided after the polls and we would be one of the main claimants. Our party supremo, who had been both a Union minister and chief minister, has acceptability across party lines," said a senior TMC MP who did not wish to be named. The TMC had 34 MPs in the outgoing Lok Sabha.

Another party leader said the "faulty" policies of the Modi government and the "vacuum in the opposition space" has provided the TMC with an opportunity to position itself firmly as a pre-eminent anti-BJP and anti-Modi force.

Mamata's characteristic belligerence on issues like demonetisation, implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST), the contentious National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and alleged politicisation of Pulwama terror strike and "destruction" of institutions like the CBI and Enforcement Directorate has found resonance with other opposition parties, he said.

However, power has many a pitfall. Infighting is one of them, and the TMC is no exception despite its strong-willed leader's iron fist. It was due to the infighting and the slowly but surely growing clout of the BJP, that Mamata dropped 10 of her sitting Lok Sabha MPs and brought in 18 new faces. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior TMC leader conceded as much.

"There is factionalism at various levels and some of the aspirants who didn't get tickets might cause problems in some areas. But we hope to remove such irritants soon," he said.

The BJP, which has been trying to occupy a substantial part of the opposition space in the state, feels that the TMC supremo is fast losing ground. "Before eyeing to become the prime minister Mamata Banerjee should protect her own turf because she is fast losing ground and people of this state want to get rid of her misrule," BJP national general Kailash Vijayvargiya told PTI.

The Congress, a potential post-election ally of the TMC, is also not too happy with her, as it feels she was more concerned about blocking Rahul Gandhi's chances of becoming the prime minister instead of fighting the BJP. "When Congress recently won elections in three states, only TMC didn't congratulate Rahul ji. There are many other instances which show she is more averse to Rahul Gandhi becoming the prime minister than preventing Narendra Modi from occupying the post," West Bengal Congress president Somen Mitra said.
Lok Sabha Election 2019; Model Code of Conduct Watch: The Election Commission (EC) has issued a notice to BJP's Chandigarh candidate Kirron Kher, seeking a reply after she shared a video on Twitter in which children were seen campaigning for her.

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However, Sharma deleted the post later, but said that he did not understand why was the poll body was so "allergic" to a person cheering the heroic act of its soldiers and rejoicing over an act of national honour. "The Election Commission is biased against nationalist leaders like me," he said.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Wednesday issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for putting up two posters featuring him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. The Commission asked him to take down the post and give a reply by Thursday.

Bahujan Samaj Party's (BSP) Pratapgarh Lok Sabha constituency in-charge Ashok Tripathi was among 68 booked for poll code violation on Wednesday. A case was registered against Tripathi, divisional president Ajay Pasi, Kamlesh Verma and 65 unnamed people at Lalganj Kotwali on Wednesday evening, police said. On Saturday, sector magistrate Pradip Kumar reached Verma Nagar crossing where an election meeting was going on without permission. The organisers failed to produce any document to establish they had permission for the meeting, the police said

According to UT administration, a complaint was received on the C-vigil app on Wednesday, following which the Assistant Returning Officer (ARO) took cognizance and thereafter issued notices for convening the election meetings at government properties Community Center in Sector 29, Ram Darbar in community centre at Sector 37, Chandigarh.

Show cause notices were issued to BJP's Chandigarh chief Sanjay Tandon , four BJP councillors, two nominated councillors and three officials of the Municipal Corporation Chandigarh on Wednesday for violating the model code of conduct. The notice asked the officials to reply within 24 hours as to why disciplinary action may not be taken against them.

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday asked the Election Commission to take action against Congress President Rahul Gandhi for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct by making unverified allegations against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ANI reported . Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said, We have requested the EC to take action against Rahul Gandhi for levelling unverified allegations against Narendra Modi on Wednesday in Ahmedabad, when the Model Code of Conduct is already in effect."

Congress registered it's first complaint MCC violation complaint with the Election Commission on Thursday. In Maharashtra, the party gave a written complaint to the chief electoral officer against government advertisements still displayed outside state transport buses, bus stops and petrol pumps. Congress general secretary and spokesperson Sachin Sawant said that despite the MCC coming into force, ST buses, bus stops and petrol pumps among other public places were displaying government advertisements. He said that the commission should ask the government about it and register a case of violation, and wrote a letter to the Maharashtra chief electoral officer (CEO) Ashwani Kumar for the same.

In a letter, the Goa NSUI president has said, The NSUI, Goa writes to you demanding: ban of the movie in theatres in states during the 'election silence' period that is two days prior to the day of voting and ban of the movie in the Lok Sabha Constituency where the prime minister would be contesting.

The NSUI demands a ban on the movie 48 hours prior to voting which is known as election silence where a party is not allowed to promote or campaign.

The National Students' Union of India  Goa, the Congress party's student wing, on Friday urged the Election Commission to ban the release of the Narendra Modi biopic, alleging that the movie was propaganda by the BJP to influence voters during the Lok Sabha elections.

Das's photographs allegedly appear on posters of schemes like the mid-day meal. The party also told the newspaper that tablets distributed to teachers under the Gyansetu initiative have Das's photograph on display and alleged that this too was a violation of the model code of conduct.

The Aam Aadmi Party's East Singhbhum wing) has written to the deputy commissioner of the Election Commission, alleging that posters of Jharkhand chief minister Raghubar Das were seen inside school campuses in the district, reported Times of India .

The notice also stated that comments on other political parties had been visible on boards put up along the sides of the e-rickshaw.

The notice issued to her states she had displayed her name in a poster on an e-rickshaw on which she travelled across city, on 14 March, reported ANI.

An assistant returning officer of Vidhan Sabha constituency 25, Jagdish Lal, has issued a notice for violation of the Model Code of Conduct on the mayor of Haridwar Municipal Corporation, Anita Sharma, reported Daily Pioneer.

It is the duty of the EC to conduct a fair election and protect democracy. The threatening by Delhi Police is still continuing even after MCC has come into force. The Delhi Police is acting like BJPs goons. We have asked that it should be stopped, he added. They (call centre) are not doing something proxy. AAP has hired them. AAP has an agreement with them, Sisodia clarified.

An AAP delegation lead by Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia met EC officials urging them to suspend three Delhi Police officials whom he accused of working on behalf of BJP As per BJPs directions, names of 24 lakh voters were stuck off voter list. We launched a campaign to get their name re-registered in the voter list. Delhi Police acting on behest of BJP has been raiding the call centre with whose help we did this campaign, Sisodia said. Delhi police is threatening the owner of the call centre that if you work for AAP, we will make you fall in line, Sisodia claimed.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Friday complained about the alleged harassment of the owner of a call centre by the Delhi Police on the "behest of BJP." The call centre was alleged to be hired by AAP to "help people whose names were allegedly stuck off the voters' list," ANI reported.

On 17 March, Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera had told ANI: "Whenever farmers of this country and unemployed youths ask tough questions to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he hides behind terrorists and Pakistans intelligence agency ISI."

On 16 March, Khera had said that 'Modi' stood for 'Masood, Osama, Dawood and ISI' during a television debate, a comment which the Congress leader is facing flak for.

BJP has appealed to the Election Commission to take appropriate action under penal laws and election laws, for allegedly violating the MCC.

Calling it a blatant violation of the MCC, the BJP in its letter said: "Such speech amounts to a violation of the MCC. The MCC Manual 2019 under Chapter 4 Clause 4.4 prescribes no criticism of other parties or their workers on the basis of unverified allegations or on distortions."

The BJP in its letter to the Chief Electoral officer has asserted that 'comparing Prime Minister Narendra Modi with dreaded terrorists is not only unparliamentary but defamatory and deplorable.'

The BJP in its complaint has claimed that Khera, during a news channel's event, had stated that 'Modi stands for Masood Azhar, Osama, Dawood and ISI.'

Since the Model Code of Conduct came into effect on 10 March, the Delhi Police has also seized 82 unlicensed weapons, 2,113 live cartridges, 16,495 litres of illicit liquor and 94.337 kilograms of drugs.

Also, four FIRs have been registered against political parties , including two against AAP and one against the BJP, for violating the Model Code of Conduct.

Chief Electoral Office of Delhi Ranbir Singh said 90,937 posters, hoardings and banners had been removed from across the city on Monday. He added that 235 FIRs had been registered under the Excise Act and 242 people had been arrested for violating the Act.

"In order to secure votes, Chief Minister Rao has used illegal means and made statements against the Hindus of this country. He tried his level best to flare up religious tension and instigate the people of other religions against Hindus," claimed the VHP in its memorandum.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has approached Telangana Chief Electoral Officer Rajat Kumar for action against Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct by "defaming" Hindus during a public meeting. The group has handed over a memorandum to Kumar, in which it has claimed that KCR had made many derogatory and defamatory statements against Hindus and tried to flare up "religious tension".

Opposition parties in Tamil Nadu on Monday accused Palladam AIADMK MLA A Natarajan of violating the Model Code of Conduct by inspecting a number of developmental projects in his constituency. They raised the issue at the all-party meeting organised by the district administration at the collectorate in Tirupur. CPM Tirupur district executive member N Gopalakrishnan also presented photos as evidence at the meeting. The District Revenue Office said it has yet to recieve a complaint.

The Ranchi district administration on Monday filed a poll code violation case against Union minister Jayant Sinha, who is an MP from Hazaribag. The case was filed on a complaint by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha that wrote to Jharkhand Chief Electoral Officer L Khiangte, claiming that Sinha has used the convocation ceremony at IIM-Ranchi to publicise the BJP government's achievements, in gross violation of the Model Code of Conduct.

In order to put a check on the poll irregularities and other malfunctions ahead and during the Lok Sabha elections, a 24x7 control room was opened at the office of the Chief Electoral Officer in Bhubaneswar on Friday. The control room would monitor activities like poll irregularities, model code of conduct (MCC) violation, and other violations such as the distribution of illegal inducements, black money and hate speech. The CEO office has issued a number 0674-2395015 for this purpose. Based on these complaints, the control room will direct the concerned authorities which will then spring into action to check the violation, reports said.

However, state BJP president Jitu Vaghani dismissed the complaint and said that there was no violation of the code of conduct. "The chief minister has certain rights. Election campaigns are not allowed (from government buildings), but it is his residence. Chief Minister's security... everything has to be considered. We are meeting and having discussions at the CM residence. Campaign or speeches are not being done," he said, according to a DNA report .

"The CM's official residence is a government building. Political activities are not allowed there when the model code of conduct is in force. BJP's meetings of 17 and 18 March for selection of candidates (for Lok Sabha elections) at the chief minister's residence are a violation of the code of conduct," Balubhai Patel, chairman of Gujarat Congress' election coordination committee, said in a complaint to the state's Chief Electoral Officer S Murali Krishna. Following the complaint, the CEO office directed the Gandhinagar collector to look into the matter and to submit a report.

The Gujarat Congress on Monday complained to the election authorities that BJP had violated the model code of conduct by holding meetings of its parliamentary panels at the Chief Minister Vijay Rupani's official residence.

The highest number of 85 complaints were received from Pune, followed by Thane (61), Solapur (44), Mumbai suburban (40), Mumbai city (39) and Nagpur (26). Most of the complaints pertained to banners being put up without permission, the official said.

The Maharashtra Chief Electoral Office has received as many as 400 complaints of MCC violations through its cVIGIL app, an official said Wednesday. "The local team gets an alert once the complaint is lodged, and our people reach the spot and verify the details. If the complaint is valid, we record the details and initiate an inquiry," the official added.

"The very title of the book and its display on the election poster is an open declaration by the candidate that he is Hindu. This is a subtle attempt aimed at exploiting Hindu religious sentiments. This is a gross violation of election rules and the Model Code of Conduct. Significantly, the poster was published and publicised after the election notification," the BJP's complaint read.

The Kerala BJP on Tuesday complained to the Chief Electoral Officer in Thiruvananthapuram, claiming that the posters put up by the Congress related to MP Shashi Tharoor's book Why Am I A Hindu violated the Model Code of Conduct (MCC).

The saffron party claimed APP had burned the manifestos to attack the BJP on the issue of full statehood to Delhi. "AAP leaders violated the MCC by either not seeking permission for such events from the Election Commission, or they sought permission for election meetings from the EC and misused this permission to violate the MCC by burning BJP's manifesto," read the letter written by SN Verma, co-convener of Delhi BJP's legal department.

The Delhi BJP on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Chief Electoral Office in the city, seeking action against the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for allegedly "indulging in violent acts" and violating the MCC. The BJP claimed AAP leaders, including Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, had burned copies of its 2014 manifesto on 13 March.

The BJP leader claimed he had not made the music video, and that media houses had covered it while he was recording of the song, WION reported.

West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Basu said, ''We are keeping a close watch on media and through the surveillance, we came to know of the election campaign song of Babul Supriyo... This is a violation of the Model Code of Conduct. We have issued a showcause notice to Babul Supriyo. He has to reply to the notice within 48 hours."

The Election Commission on Tuesday issued a showcause notice to BJP leader and Union minister Babul Supriyo for violating the MCC. The notice is related to a campaign song, which Supriyo allegedly promoted on electronic media and social media sites without a media certification from the EC. The Trinamool Congress had also registered a complaint against the song with the EC

He said that they did so "by publicising materials in a bid to appeal to religious sentiments of voters."

Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday wrote to the chief electoral officer (CEO) or Kerala in order to "file a complaint in relation to the malicious attempt by BJP and the Sabarimala Karma Samithi to vitiate free and fair polls in Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency."

Earlier in March, a BJP delegation comprising Ravi Shankar Prasad, JP Nadda and others had urged the EC to declare Bengal as a super sensitive zone while expressing apprehensions that the ruling TMC government might not allow free and fair elections to be held in West Bengal.

A Trinamool Congress (TMC) delegation comprising Derek O'Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Ray, and Chandan Mitra approached the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday to lodge a complaint against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regarding an alleged violation of the Model Code of Conduct. The TMC claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modis photo was being published on railway tickets as part of a government scheme, which, the party said, was in violation of the MCC. It urged the poll body to ensure that the pictures were taken off rail tickets.

The Cubbon Park police have booked Praveen, Abhilash and Raj under various sections of the Representation of People's Act and also under the Karnataka Police Act.

In a complaint to the police on 19 March, a flying squad official for the 163 Vidhana Sabha constituency, stated that actor-turned-politician Prakash Raj had used a mike and campaigned for elections at a public rally held at the Mahatma Gandhi Circle near MG Road on 12 March. The rally was organised by one Praveen K and Abhilash CS under the banner Media and Freedom of Expression and it was a non-political programme. Several writers, artists and activists attended the programme where Prakash Raj used the mike and began to canvass seeking votes, Murthy stated in his complaint. A whatsapp video footage as evidence of Raj speaking on the mike was handed over to police. However, by the time the flying squad reached the spot, the programme was over and people had dispersed. Permission was taken to conduct a non-political programme but Raj used it as a platform canvassing for the election. This amounts to violation of the model code of conduct, Murthy said in his complaint.

Twenty-nine FIRs have been registered against various political parties in Delhi so far, including three each against the AAP and the BJP, for violating the model code of conduct, Delhi's chief electoral officer said on Wednesday. Special CEO Satnam Singh said that the poll body has also removed more than 1.8 lakh hoardings, banners and posters since the enforcement of model code of conduct. Of the three FIRs registered against the AAP, one is related to using auto rickshaw for election campaign, Singh said. In most of the 29 cases, FIRs were registered against political parties for defacing public property, he said. Singh said 91 FIRs have been registered and 112 people arrested under the Arms Act since March 12 while police have seized 99 unlicensed weapons from them. As many as 296 FIRs have been registered and 302 violators arrested under the Excise Act, PTI reported.

21 March, Thursday | Three FIRs each against AAP, BJP so far for violating MCC in Delhi; 29 against all political parties

Mallikarjun Utture, the Expenditure Observer appointed by the Central Election Commission for the Udupi-Chikkamagaluru parliamentary seat , said on Wednesday that government officers should immediately suo motu register a case if there was any violation of the Model Code of Conduct. Utture said that the officers should act in such cases without waiting for the public to lodge a complaint. The officers should maintain a tight vigil to see that there was no violation of the Model Code of Conduct during campaigning by political parties. The different teams and squads appointed for election purposes should ensure that there was no effort being made to induce or influence the voters.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday said that Congress president Rahul Gandhis interaction with students of a womens college in Chennai did not violate the model code of conduct (MCC), though it has sought a report on his speech. Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Satyabrata Sahoo said local election officials have reported that there was no violation in terms of permission obtained by Stella Maris College for Women to host the interaction on 13 March. He said the District Electoral Officer (DEO) had informed him that there was permission for Rahul's event. So, there is no violation of the MCC. However, Sahoo sought further information on Rahul's speech. Have sought further information on what kind of speech was given... have asked the DEO to give a report based on the speech content, he said.

Speaking to reporters after a Congress delegation met the Election Commission on Monday, Kapil Sibal said, "We represented to the EC that there is a film being made on Narendra Modi, to be released just a few days before election. It's purpose is political. Three producers and actor belong to BJP; the director is involved in 'Vibrant Gujarat' (investors' summit). This is violative of all norms."

Earlier Banerjee had filed a complaint against Supriyo on 20 March for the circulation of false, unverified and distorted news criticising his family members. On 24 March, Supriyo made another defamatory statement in public, Banerjee cited in the letter.

In a letter to the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO), Banerjee said that Supriyo has maligned his image by levelling false and unverified allegations against him. Banerjee alleged that Supriyo on 24 March made a public statement against him which was "vindictive, libelous, and defamatory."

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has written to the Ministry of Railways and Ministry of Civil Aviation , asking them why the pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi were not removed from rail tickets and Air India boarding passes even after the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) came into effect. They've been asked to submit a reply within three days to the commission.

The Odisha Congress on Monday filed a complaint with Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of the state against BJP's Lok Sabha candidate from Puri Sambit Patra alleging violation of Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The Odisha Pradesh Congress in its complaint said that Patra violated MCC by holding the idol of Lord Jagannath in his hand during an election rally.

The Election Commission (EC) on Wednesday sent a notice to four producers of the upcoming film ' PM Narendra Modi '. Congress and the CPM had complained to the commission about the film's release, saying it's being done with political intent. EC had earlier sent notices to two newspapers on 20 March over publishing 'PM Narendra Modi' film's poster for promotions

Bollywood actor Vivek Oberoi and producer of film 'PM Narendra Modi', Sandeep Singh arrived at the Election Commission in Delhi on Thursday after complaints were filed over the release of the movie and ban of its trailer in light of the Model Code of Code (MCC) being in force ahead of the Lok Sabha election.

The EC committee headed by Deputy Election Commissioner in charge of the MCC division Sandeep Saxena came to the conclusion that Modi's speech did not violate the guidelines because "he did not mention the BJP, nor did he appeal for votes" in the duration of his address.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech on 'Mission Shakti' did not violate the Model Code of Conduct, the Election Commission announced on Friday, even as the Opposition had accused the prime minister of violations and "publicity mongering".

Cups sporting Main Bhi Chowkidar ads, the prime minister's pet campaign unveiled just before elections, were spotted at a Shatapdi train today. Tea was served in these paper cups but these were later withdrawn after some passengers brought this to the notice of railway officials and pictures of it became viral on social media.

Ministry of Railways reacted to the controversy over tea being served in Shatabdi train in 'Main bhi Chowkidar' cups. The railway officials said that the incident happened today but the cups were immediately withdrawn. The ministry said that these are not procured from any political party and penal action will be taken against the contractor, and the railways supervisor.

The office of Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) has shot off a letter to head of departments, saying the projects that actually started on the ground after obtaining all necessary permission, before the poll code came into force, can be continued.

The Delhi poll body has received several complaints about the AAP government departments and BJP-ruled MCDs starting work on projects before the model code of conduct came into force, but seeking formal approvals later.

He said as per the FIR, based on the complaint of Mansur Chak Block Development Officer-cum-flying squad magistrate Shatrughan Rajak, Kanhaiya had addressed a public meeting in a village on Thursday without obtaining prior permission for the same from the authorities.  PTI

The case was lodged at Mansur Chak police station of the district under relevant sections of the Representation of People Act, SHO Arvind Kumar said.

Former JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is contesting the Lok Sabha polls in Bihar's Begusarai as a CPI candidate, was booked for violation of Model Code of Conduct.

"Jokes apart, Sanjaykaka Patil has done a good job here in Miraj by getting funds for development of roads, highways, railways and other infrastructure," he added. - PTI

When someone from the crowd asked what would he give them if they got Patil re-elected, he said, "You will get five lakh rupees or even more."

Addressing a joint gathering of the BJP, Shiv Sena and RPI (A) workers Wednesday, Deshmukh purportedly said it was not going to be easy to retain the Sangli Lok Sabha seat, where the BJP has fielded sitting MP Sanjaykaka Patil.

"After ascertaining the facts, a complaint was registered at Miraj and Bhilwadi police stations," the CEO's office said in a release.

The Election Commission had received a complaint about the comments made by Deshmukh in Miraj on 27 March, it said.

A case has been registered against Prithviraj Deshmukh, Sangli district unit chief of the BJP, for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct, the office of Maharashtra's Chief Electoral Officer said Saturday.

According to Babu, the chief minister has moved a civil suit in the high court in connection with the issue and has obtained an injunction against certain people from making such statements.- PTI

He alleged that Stalin and the DMK with an intention to cause disrepute, to defame, and damage the name and reputation of Chief Minister K Palaniswami has been circulating video clips, making allegations linking the chief minister to the Kodanad Estate murder and robbery case.

RM Babu Murugavel submitted that the code of conduct prohibits levelling false statements by any candidate or his agent or any other person in public domain.

A spokesperson of the ruling AIADMK has approached the Madras High Court seeking a direction to the State Chief Electoral Officer for taking action on a complaint against DMK chief M K Stalin for alleged violation of the Model Code of Conduct.

This comes after the BJP leader (Choubey) was caught on camera while having a verbal altercation with Sub Divisional Magistrate (SDM) KK Upadhyay after the official had stopped his convoy for allegedly violating MCC. Giving clarifications over the incident, Choubey said, "I abide by the Model Code of Conduct (MCC), as I'm not the kind of guy who goes against the rules. But, I would like to mention that these people are stopping me from doing 'Chowkidari'. I will keep on raising my voice against them."

Following a verbal altercation between Union Minister Ashwini Choubey and a government official over alleged violation of Model Code of Conduct, an FIR has been lodged against 150 people including Choubey. The FIR also names BJP leader Rana Pratap Singh and various other leaders. The said 150 accused have been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) including 'assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty'.

Singh courted controversy last week when he told reporters in Aligarh on 23 March that everyone wants Modi to win and that its necessary for the country. Hum sabhi log BJP ke karyakarta hai aur iss naatey se hum zaroor chahengey ke BJP vijai ho. Sab chahengey ek baar phir sey kendra mein Modiji pradhanmantri banein. Modiji ka pradhanmantri banna ye desh ke liye avashyak hai, samaaj ke liye avashyak hai (We are all BJP workers, so we will want the BJP to win. Everyone will want Modi to become PM again. Modi becoming PM is necessary for the nation and society), he had said.

The Election Commission has found Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singhs remark that Narendra Modi should be re-elected as the Prime Minister violative of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) and the commission will write to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring it to his notice, The Indian Express reported.

"Congress ke log aatankwadiyon ko biryani khilate they aur Modi ji ki sena aatankwadiyon ko goli aur gola deti hai (Congress would feed biryani to terrorists, while Modi's army gives them bullets and bombs). This is the difference. The Congress people use 'ji' to refer to Masood Azhar to encourage terrorism," Adityanath had said at an election rally in Ghaziabad on Sunday.

The Election Commission on Monday took cognizance of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yodi Adityanath referring to the Indian Army as 'Modi ji ki sena'. The district magistrate of Ghaziabad has been asked to furnish a report in this regard, a functionary said. The report will be submitted to the office of chief electoral officer of Uttar Pradesh which has sought the details after taking cognizance of media reports in this regard.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) filed a Model Code of Conduct (MCC) violation complaint against BJP accusing it of advertising on commercial taxis in the run-up to the general elections. AAP has alleged that some public service vehicles are being used for political advertisement by BJP and were spotted plying in Delhi. It also mentioned that such advertisement was in violation of the Delhi Transport Policy. Delhi Transport policy also forbids political advertisement through any vehicle which is being used for transporting passengers, the letter reads. In its letter, AAP has also given the number and image of a car which it claims was spotted on 2 April, carrying an advertisement of the BJP in Delhi.

Meanwhile, the producers of PM Narendra Modi, which is slated for release on Friday, have already replied to the poll panel's notice to them on the Oppositions' complaint against the film.

Earlier, Opposition parties had alleged "political intent" in the release of the Vivek Oberoi-starrer and had complained to the poll watchdog, claiming that 'PM Narendra Modi' would serve as an advertisement for the BJP. Till Tuesday, the Election Commission had been awaiting the BJP's reply to a plea by Opposition parties seeking to prevent its screening amid the ongoing poll process. Since the complaint to the commission had mentioned BJP in it, its copy was sent to the party for its reply.

The Election Commission has given its approval for the release of the biopic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, reports said . News18 reported sources as saying that the Election Commission has asked the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to decide on whether to allow the release of 'PM Narendra Modi'.

CEO Krishna said he has directed collectors of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar to inquire into the matter. "I have received that complaint. I have directed collectors of Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar districts to conduct an inquiry into the matter," he said.

On Saturday, Shah had addressed a gathering near Sardar Patel's statue in Naranpura area of Ahmedabad before participating in a 4 km-long road show from Naranpura to Ghatlodia. He then left for Gandhinagar to file his nomination papers. In its complaint, the Congress alleged that despite knowing that three big hospitals with emergency and trauma care are situated close to the Sardar Patel statue, loudspeakers were used during Shah's rally at the venue. Such use of the loud speakers near the hospitals is a clear violation of the model code of conduct, the party said.

The Gujarat Congress on Tuesday lodged a complaint of model code violation against BJP chief and party's Gandhinagar nominee Amit Shah's rally cum roadshow on 30 March alleging that loudspeakers were used near hospitals. In its complaint sent to Gujarat Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) S Murali Krishna through fax, the Opposition party demanded necessary action against Shah for "violating" the poll code.

The Election Commission had sought a response from the ministry on the 24-hour TV channel 'NaMo TV' based on a complaint filed by the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

In its reply, the information and broadcasting ministry told the polling watchdog that NaMo TV is not a licensed channel but a direct-to-home (DTH) advertisement platform, reported India Today.

Hema, who is re-contesting elections from Mathura, held a public rally in the premises of a government school in Chaumuha on Tuesday.

Mathura DM SR Mishra told ANI that permission was granted to BJP MP Hema Malini to hold a public meeting but not at a govt school premises. He said that if a violation of model code of conduct is found, a FIR will be registered against the concerned persons and appropriate action will be taken.

4 April, Thursday | Hema Malini did not have permission to conduct public meeting at govt school, action will be taken: Mathura DM

The Congress had questioned the decision to run the address in full. EC had asked DD News for complete information on coverage of various political parties and prominent leaders to assess whether there was any truth in Congress allegations of preferential treatment to the ruling party.

In response to a notice from the Election Commission of India, DD News is learnt to have defended its decision to run Prime Minister Narendra Modis 1.24-hour public address  Main Bhi Chowkidar  in full on 31 March on the grounds of its high news value". According to The Economic Times' report , DD News, in its response, has said that that various other private TV channels also ran the address in its entirety due to the same reason.

When contacted for his reaction, Joshi said "it is for the Election Commission to decide on the matter."

He alleged that the report was deliberately released at this point of time just to benefit the ruling TRS.

In a complaint to the EC on 6 April, G Niranjan, Convener,Election Commission Coordination Committee of state Congress, said Chief Secretary S K Joshi and other officials released the report on 5 April, "just five days before the elections, which is against the Model Code of Conduct (MCC)."

The Congress in Telangana has requested the Election Commission to take action against the Chief Secretary and government officials for allegedly violating the model code of conduct for the 11 April Lok Sabha polls by releasing a report on the governments achievements.

Singh had filed his nomination earlier on Monday in the presence of former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Jabalpur. The district administration also registered a First Information Report report against eight people in this regard.

Madhya Pradesh BJP chief and Jabalpur candidate Rakesh Singh has been issued a show-cause notice for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct. The notice was issued to Singh for allegedly taking more than five people to the returning officer's room while filing nomination.

Baghel, who also holds the post of state Congress president, reached the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Subrat Sahoo along with senior party leaders and handed over the written complaint.

Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel Monday lodged a complaint of alleged poll code violation against Prime Minister Narendra Modi for making statements about the Army and surgical strikes during his public meeting held in Balod district of the state on 6 April.

9 April | Addressing first-time voters, Narendra Modi invokes Pulwama attack, Balakot air strikes at Latur rally Prime Minister Narendra Modi violated the Model Code of Conduct on Tuesday, by appealing to first-time voters in Maharashtras Latur to vote for the BJP government for carrying out the Balakot air strikes against Pakistan reportedly as a response to Pulwama terror attack that killed over 40 CRPF soldiers in February. Addressing a rally in Latur, where he shared the stage with Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, Modi urged first-time voters to exercise their franchise carefully. You will remember you first vote for all of your life. Would you dedicate your first vote to the brave soldiers who conducted the Balakot air strikes in Pakistan? Would your first vote honour the CRPF soldiers who lost their lives in the Pulwama attack? Modi said. Through a notification dated 9 March, the Election Commission (EC) had asked political parties to not use the armed forces for political advertisements or campaigns. The Armed Forces of a nation are the guardian of its frontiers, security and political system. They are apolitical and neutral stakeholders in a modern democracy. It is therefore necessary that political parties and leaders exercise great caution while making any reference to the armed forces in their political campaigns. The Commission is of the view that photographs of Chief of Army Staff or any other Defence personnel and photographs of functions of Defence Forces should not be associated with or used in any manner in advertisement/propaganda/campaigning or in any other manner in connection with elections by political parties and candidates, the EC had said in the notification. The prime minister had allegedly violated the MCC last month as well while addressing the nation after the successful completion of the A-SAT test by the DRDO.

The Meerut District Magistrate is expected to file a report on the matter by 11 am on Wednesday.

The BJP leader said Dalit-Muslim unity is impossible, and in Bareilly, he accused Mayawati of hurting Dalit sentiments with her call to Muslim voters at a rally in Saharanpur's Deoband. "Agar Congress, SP (Samajwadi Party), BSP ko Ali par vishwaas hai, toh humein bhi Bajrangbali par vishwaas hai (If the Congress, the SP and the BSP have faith in Ali, then we too have faith in Bajrang Bali)," the BJP leader said at an election meeting in Meerut.

Attacking Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader Mayawati for recently appealing to Muslims to vote for the Opposition alliance in Uttar Pradesh, Adityanath said now the Hindus have no option but to vote for the BJP.

The Election Commission has taken cognisance of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath's remarks at Meerut on Tuesday, with which he seemed to suggest that Hindu and Muslim voters were in an Ali-Bajrangbali contest.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Wednesday sent a notice to Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao for violation of Model Code of Conduct over his derogatory remark against Hindus at a public rally in Karimnagar on 17 March, PTI reported. The Commission has produced his remarks in Telugu but did not give English translation of the same. "... the Commission is, prima facie, of the opinion that by making the aforesaid statement which has the potential of disturbing the harmony and aggravating existing differences between social and religious communities, and appealing to communal feelings, you have violated the ... the Model Code of Conduct," the notice served Tuesday said.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) is learned to have directed the Chief Electoral Officer of Delhi to ensure that the contents of NaMo TV are pre-certified by the local media certification and monitoring committee. The EC has also asked the CEO to inform whether the political contents were at any time cleared by the certification committee. The commission has ruled that the channel which touted as BJPs purported advertising portal carried by DTH operators, should be subjected to content certification regime, like all other political advertisements during the poll code period.

The Election Commission of India on Wednesday stalled the release of PM Narendra Modi, a day before it was set to hit theatres. The election watchdog has ruled that no biopics can be released during elections as the political content in such movies "threaten level playing field".

District poll authorities issued her with a show cause notice. The Election Commission in Delhi is also examining the transcript of the minister's speech, which was condemned by the Congress.

In a controversial remark, Union minister Maneka Gandhi has told Muslims to vote for her as they will need her once the Lok Sabha elections are over. We are not Mahatma Gandhi's children that we keep giving and not get anything in return, she said in Sultanpur's Muslim-dominated Turabkhani area on Thursday.

A case registered against her under the 171-D and 171-F of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in the Kopar Khairane police station. 58-year-old Mhatre had won the Belapur assembly seat on BJP ticket in the 2014 assembly election in Maharashtra.

A case was registered against BJP MLA Manda Mhatre for allegedly violating MCC. Mhatre was accused of flouting Election Commission's norms by requesting voters to cast their ballots twice in favour of Rajan Baburao Vichare, a sitting Member of Parliament (MP) from Thane Lok Sabha constituency, while campaigning for him on 13 April.

BJP also complained against Congress spokesperson Sunil Kauthankar for allegedly violating MCC "while addressing a press conference, wherein he has grossly misinterpreted the statement of BJP national president Amit Shah and has tried to spread lies."

Goa BJP complained to the Election Commission (EC) against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) by propagating fear-mongering among Christian and Muslim community at a public meeting. Kejriwal was in Goa on 13 April to address a public meeting at Margao in south Goa. "Arvind Kejriwal has blatantly violated MCC by way of inciting religious sentiments in his speech," read the letter. "Arvind Kejriwal has been reported to have made utterances such as 'Mob lynching taking place in the country under the guise of cattle theft is actually organised murder," said the complaint. "He also tried to propagate fear-mongering among the Christian and Muslim community by his utterance that 'Christian and Muslim will be driven into the sea under the guise of infiltrators," it read.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath was seen visiting a temple on Tuesday morning, a day after the Election Commission  citing Article 324 of the Constitution  barred him from holding any public meetings, public processions, public rallies, road shows and interviews, public utterances in media (electronic, print and social media) in connection with the ongoing Lok Sabha election. He was handed a 72-hour ban for delivering a communal or hate speech during one of his rallies. Though the BJP leader did not defy the ban by participating in a poll campaign, he did violate the spirit of election by making a public visit to the temple.

A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Gujarat Ramesh Katara on Tuesday reportedly told villagers at a rally in Dahod constituency that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has installed cameras in polling booths and he will come to know who votes for whom in the Lok Sabha elections. Katara has been served a show-cause notice by the Dahod collector and district election officer VL Kharadi for his remarks and also notice by the Election Commission (EC) for violation of MCC.

The Jammu and Kashmir unit of the BJP has written to the Election Commission demanding an FIR against Ghulam Nabi Azad, Vikramaditya Singh and Waqar Rasool Wani for allegedly violating the model code of conduct, ANI reported.

The Election Commission has taken cognisance of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur's remarks that former Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare, who died during the 2008 Mumbai terror attack, met his untimely death due to bad karma, and ordered an enquiry into the same. Thakur on Friday had said that the former ATS met his unfortunate fate because he had "tortured" her during the investigation of the 2008 Malegaon blast case. A complaint was filed against the BJP candidate from Bhopal with the Madhya Pradesh EC hours after she made the controversial statement.

The poll panel pointed out that an FIR has already been lodged against him in Bihar's Kathiar under some sections of the penal code and section 123 of the Representation of the People Act.

The Punjab minister has been asked to respond within 24 hours, failing which the EC will take a decision without further reference to him.

The EC said prima facie he has violated provisions of the model code of conduct, election law and a Supreme Court direction asking politicians not to mix religion with political discourse while electioneering.

The Election Commission on Saturday issued a showcause notice to Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu for his remarks in which he allegedly warned the Muslim community that efforts were on to divide their votes in Bihar.

Singhvi alleged the EC hesitates in taking action against one-two persons sitting on top posts. He said: "The EC listens to us. They act on our request. It is, however, unfortunate that the EC hesitates in taking action against one-two people sitting on tops posts of the country."

He also expressed his disappointment over the ECIs inaction on another complaint earlier submitted by the Congress against Modi for allegedly violating the MCC by citing the services at a rally in Maharashtra on 9 April. "It is very distressing and sad that the very credibility of an independent police force of the elections is at stake. We showed the EC a video of Modis campaigning. We have demanded a ban on him for 48 to 72 hours from campaigning, and also on Shah," he said.

A Congress delegation led by Abhishek Manu Singhvi met the Election Commission officials and sought action against Modi for holding a procession after casting his vote on Tuesday in Ahmedabad. They also requested the EC to act against Shah for repeatedly citing the services of armed forces in his election rallies. "The Prime Minister is violating the Model Code Conduct (MCC) shamelessly and advertently. He made political statements, held a procession after casting his votes today," Singhvi told reporters. The Congress spokesman said: "On Monday we had filed a written complaint to the EC that Modi would violate the Model Code of Conduct by holding a procession after casting his vote." Singhvi termed Modi as a "habitual, egregious and completely uncaring offender".

The Congress party on Tuesday sought to impose 48 to 72 hours ban on campaigning by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC).

The party has requested the ECI and Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Jammu and Kashmir Shailendra Kumar to take appropriate action against the three leaders under the rules and regulations governing MCC and relevant provisions of Representation of the People Act, 1951. BJP has further requested the ECI to debar Azad from campaigning for Congress in the country.

The BJP, in a complaint filed on Thursday, accused Waqar Rasool Wani, who was campaigning for Congress' candidate from Udhampur-Doda parliamentary constituency Vikramaditya Singh, of violating MCC by campaigning on polling day and requesting voters of a particular religion to vote for their party. In the audio clip, a copy of which has been sent to the ECI, Wani could be heard saying that Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is currently campaigning in Kerala, called him up and directed him to appeal to the voters of the erstwhile Doda region belonging to particular community to cast their votes on communal lines, BJP claimed.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has moved the Election Commission of India (ECI) demanding FIR against Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Vikramaditya Singh and an ex-MLA of Banihal town for allegedly violating Model Code of Conduct (MCC) during the ongoing Lok Sabha polls in the state.

The Election Commission has taken cognisance of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur's remarks that former Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare, who died during the 2008 Mumbai terror attack, met his untimely death due to bad karma, and ordered an enquiry into the same. Thakur on Friday had said that the former ATS met his unfortunate fate because he had "tortured" her during the investigation of the 2008 Malegaon blast case. A complaint was filed against the BJP candidate from Bhopal with the Madhya Pradesh EC hours after she made the controversial statement.

The poll panel pointed out that an FIR has already been lodged against him in Bihar's Kathiar under some sections of the penal code and section 123 of the Representation of the People Act.

The Punjab minister has been asked to respond within 24 hours, failing which the EC will take a decision without further reference to him.

The EC said prima facie he has violated provisions of the model code of conduct, election law and a Supreme Court direction asking politicians not to mix religion with political discourse while electioneering.

The Election Commission on Saturday issued a showcause notice to Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu for his remarks in which he allegedly warned the Muslim community that efforts were on to divide their votes in Bihar.

While addressing a rally in Jalna on Sunday, BJP leader Pankaja Munde said: "We did surgical strike after cowardly attack on our soldiers (by Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pulwama). Some peole ask what was surgical strike and what's the evidence? I say we should've attached a bomb to Rahul Gandhi and should have sent him to another country. Then they would have understood."

The Election Commission found Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu guilty of violating model code of conduct for appealing for Muslim votes. It has banned him from campaigning for 72 hours.

Singhvi alleged the EC hesitates in taking action against one-two persons sitting on top posts. He said: "The EC listens to us. They act on our request. It is, however, unfortunate that the EC hesitates in taking action against one-two people sitting on tops posts of the country."

He also expressed his disappointment over the ECIs inaction on another complaint earlier submitted by the Congress against Modi for allegedly violating the MCC by citing the services at a rally in Maharashtra on 9 April. "It is very distressing and sad that the very credibility of an independent police force of the elections is at stake. We showed the EC a video of Modis campaigning. We have demanded a ban on him for 48 to 72 hours from campaigning, and also on Shah," he said.

A Congress delegation led by Abhishek Manu Singhvi met the Election Commission officials and sought action against Modi for holding a procession after casting his vote on Tuesday in Ahmedabad. They also requested the EC to act against Shah for repeatedly citing the services of armed forces in his election rallies. "The Prime Minister is violating the Model Code Conduct (MCC) shamelessly and advertently. He made political statements, held a procession after casting his votes today," Singhvi told reporters. The Congress spokesman said: "On Monday we had filed a written complaint to the EC that Modi would violate the Model Code of Conduct by holding a procession after casting his vote." Singhvi termed Modi as a "habitual, egregious and completely uncaring offender".

The Congress party on Tuesday sought to impose 48 to 72 hours ban on campaigning by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC).

Taking a jibe at the poll panel, he said the Congress is saddened to say that it seems that from the second word of Election Commission, 'C' has been dropped, and it has become "Election Omission" for the Modi-Shah duo.

"We have a right to approach the courts seeking action over model code violations... we can exercise that option... the mega policeman has turned a blind eye," Singhvi said, adding that silence can be construed as approval.

The two leaders have "cheated" on the issue of level playing field for all parties during elections and questioned the "silence of mega policeman" Election Commission (EC), Senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi alleged at a press conference.

Alleging that the Model Code of Conduct has become "Modi code of conduct", the Congress on Saturday questioned the EC's "silence" over poll code "violations" by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah, and said it may approach courts to seek action against the duo.

Satti said that the alleged speech was circulated on social and print media by the Congress party workers who intended to malign and rapture of his image.

In his reply to Mandi District Electoral Officer, he said, "I was not having any political vendetta or intention against any of the workers or leaders of any of the political party/opponents. I never made any false, derogatory or inciting remarks, as alleged in the notice under reply. Moreover, the wording of my speech was taken otherwise by press correspondents," he added.

"Our leaders are sitting on the dais. If anyone dares to raise their finger, we would chop their hands off. We are not nincompoops. We are not a group of stupid people," Satti had said addressing a rally in Mandi on Wednesday.

Himachal Pradesh BJP president Satpal Singh Satti on Saturday replied to the Election Commission's notice over his "will chop off hands of those who point fingers at BJP leaders" remark and denied making any false, inciting or derogatory remark.

Kejriwal said even Pakistan wants to divide India and accused BJP of fulfilling Pakistans agenda. "The BJP is fulfilling Pakistan's agenda of dividing India," he added.

"Can it be done, is it possible. At least 20-25 crore people come from these religions. So I want to ask Amit Shah what is your plan. Are you going to throw all these people, throw them in the Pacific Ocean or would they be mob lynched? What will be done with all these people," Kejriwal had asked.

Quoting Shah's tweet, Kejriwal said this means the BJP's plan is to remove all religions except Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs from the country.

"He has made the highly provocative speech which has the tone and tenor to aggravate existing differences or create mutual hatred between different religious communities, and thus violative of provisions of MCC. That such statements that have the undertone and propensity to polarize the elections" the BJP's letter to the EC said.

"Arvind Kejriwal with the sole intention of creating panic and mutual hatred between the communities made a deliberate and false statement. Kejriwal is trying to mislead the people of India by saying that BJP considers Muslims, Christians, Jains, Parsis and other minorities in India as infiltrators..," read the complaint.

Shah had in his tweet had said: "We will remove every single infiltrator from the country except Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs".

The BJP has written to Election Commission of India (EC) alleging that Delhi chief minister and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convener Arvind Kejriwal had violated the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) with his statement related to a tweet by BJP president Amit Shah.

Kher later said she has sent her reply to the EC.

The EC had subsequently instructed that it should be ensured by all political parties and election officials that children are not involved in any election-related activity, as per the notice.

In the notice, it was mentioned that the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights in January, 2017 had requested the EC to ensure that children are not involved in any form with election-related activities, by either election officials or political parties.

"You have shared a video on your Twitter account which shows that children are being used for election campaign in your favour through slogan 'Vote for Kirron Kher' and 'Ab Ki Baar Modi Sarkar'," the notice issued on 3 May said.

However, in her reply, Kher said it was done "unintentionally", acknowledging that it was "wrong".

The Election Commission (EC) has issued a notice to BJP's Chandigarh candidate Kirron Kher, seeking a reply after she shared a video on Twitter in which children were seen campaigning for her.

Lok Sabha Election 2019; Model Code of Conduct Watch: The Election Commission (EC) has issued a notice to BJP's Chandigarh candidate Kirron Kher, seeking a reply after she shared a video on Twitter in which children were seen campaigning for her.

However, in her reply, Kher said it was done "unintentionally", acknowledging that it was "wrong". The poll panel had asked the actor-turned-politician to reply within 24 hours.

"You have shared a video on your Twitter account which shows that children are being used for election campaign in your favour through slogan 'Vote for Kirron Kher' and 'Ab Ki Baar Modi Sarkar'," the notice issued on 3 May said.

Alleging that the Model Code of Conduct has become "Modi code of conduct", the Congress on Saturday questioned the EC's "silence" over poll code "violations" by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah, and said it may approach courts to seek action against the duo.

The two leaders have "cheated" on the issue of level playing field for all parties during elections and questioned the "silence of mega policeman" Election Commission (EC), Senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi alleged at a press conference.

The Congress party on Tuesday sought to impose 48 to 72 hours ban on campaigning by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC).

A Congress delegation led by Abhishek Manu Singhvi met the Election Commission officials and sought action against Modi for holding a procession after casting his vote on Tuesday in Ahmedabad. They also requested the EC to act against Shah for repeatedly citing the services of armed forces in his election rallies.

The Election Commission found Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu guilty of violating model code of conduct for appealing for Muslim votes. It has banned him from campaigning for 72 hours from 10 am on Tuesday.

BJP leader Pankaja Munde said on Monday that a bomb should be tied around Congress president Rahul Gandhi and sent to the neighbouring country for questioning surgical strikes.

While addressing a rally in Jalna on Sunday, Munde said: "We did surgical strike after cowardly attack on our soldiers (by Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pulwama). Some peole ask what was surgical strike and what's the evidence? I say we should've attached a bomb to Rahul Gandhi and should have sent him to another country. Then they would have understood."

The Election Commission on Saturday issued a showcause notice to Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu for his remarks in which he allegedly warned the Muslim community that efforts were on to divide their votes in Bihar.

The Election Commission has taken cognisance of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur's remarks that former Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare, who died during the 2008 Mumbai terror attack, met his untimely death due to bad karma, and ordered an enquiry into the same. Thakur on Friday had said that the former ATS met his unfortunate fate because he had "tortured" her during the investigation of the 2008 Malegaon blast case

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has moved the Election Commission of India (ECI) demanding FIR against Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Vikramaditya Singh and an ex-MLA of Banihal town for allegedly violating Model Code of Conduct (MCC) during the ongoing Lok Sabha polls in the state.

The BJP, in a complaint filed on Thursday, accused Waqar Rasool Wani, who was campaigning for Congress' candidate from Udhampur-Doda parliamentary constituency Vikramaditya Singh, of violating MCC by campaigning on polling day and requesting voters of a particular religion to vote for their party.

A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Gujarat Ramesh Katara on Tuesday reportedly told villagers at a rally in Dahod constituency that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has installed cameras in polling booths and he will come to know who votes for whom in the Lok Sabha elections. Katara has been served a show-cause notice by the Dahod collector and district election officer VL Kharadi for his remarks and also notice by the Election Commission (EC) for violation of MCC.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath was seen visiting a temple on Tuesday morning, a day after the Election Commission  citing Article 324 of the Constitution  barred him from holding any public meetings, public processions, public rallies, road shows and interviews, public utterances in media (electronic, print and social media) in connection with the ongoing Lok Sabha election. He was handed a 72-hour ban for delivering a communal or hate speech during one of his rallies. Though the BJP leader did not defy the ban by participating in a poll campaign, he did violate the spirit of election by making a public visit to the temple.

Goa BJP complained to the Election Commission (EC) against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) by propagating fear-mongering among Christian and Muslim community at a public meeting. Kejriwal was in Goa on 13 April to address a public meeting at Margao in south Goa, where, BJP alleged, the AAP leader said that "Christian and Muslim will be driven into the sea under the guise of infiltrators".

The Goa Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) ordered an inquiry into an alleged hate speech given by a Christian priest against the BJP following a complaint from the party. A video of the priest from South Goa addressing some people inside a church had gone viral in which the priest, speaking in Konkani, is seen criticising the BJP, party president Amit Shah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and late Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar.

A case was registered against BJP MLA Manda Mhatre for allegedly violating MCC. Mhatre was accused of flouting Election Commission's norms by requesting voters to cast their ballots twice in favour of Rajan Baburao Vichare, a sitting Member of Parliament (MP) from Thane Lok Sabha constituency, while campaigning for him on 13 April.

In a controversial remark, Union minister Maneka Gandhi has told Muslims to vote for her as they will need her once the Lok Sabha elections are over. We are not Mahatma Gandhi's children that we keep giving and not get anything in return, she said in Sultanpur's Muslim-dominated Turabkhani area on Thursday.

District poll authorities issued her with a show cause notice. The Election Commission in Delhi is also examining the transcript of the minister's speech, which was condemned by the Congress.

The Election Commission of India on Wednesday stalled the release of PM Narendra Modi, a day before it was set to hit theatres. The election watchdog has ruled that no biopics can be released during elections as the political content in such movies "threaten level playing field".

Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh wrote to the Election Commission over the 'shockingly disgraceful' invocation of the Balakot air strikes and Pulwama terror attack during his speech in Maharashtra's Latur on 9 April.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) is learned to have directed the Chief Electoral Officer of Delhi to ensure that the contents of NaMo TV are pre-certified by the local media certification and monitoring committee. The EC has also asked the CEO to inform whether the political contents were at any time cleared by the certification committee. The commission has ruled that the channel which touted as BJPs purported advertising portal carried by DTH operators, should be subjected to content certification regime, like all other political advertisements during the poll code period.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Wednesday sent a notice to Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao for violation of Model Code of Conduct over his derogatory remark against Hindus at a public rally in Karimnagar on 17 March, ANI reported.

The commission also issued show cause notices to producers of two TV serials following allegations that the shows were violating the Model Code of Conduct by promoting various government schemes.

The Election Commission has taken cognizance of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath's remarks at Meerut on Tuesday, with which he seemed to suggest that Hindu and Muslim voters were in an "Ali-Bajrangbali" contest. "If the Congress, the SP and the BSP have faith in Ali, then we too have faith in Bajrang Bali," the BJP leader said at an election meeting. The Meerut District Magistrate is expected to file a report on the matter by 11 am on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi violated the Model Code of Conduct on Tuesday, by appealing to first-time voters in Maharashtras Latur to vote for the BJP government for carrying out the Balakot air strikes against Pakistan reportedly as a response to Pulwama terror attack that killed over 40 CRPF soldiers.

Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel Monday lodged a complaint of alleged poll code violation against Prime Minister Narendra Modi for making statements about the Army and surgical strikes during his public meeting held in Balod district of the state on 6 April.

The Madhya Pradesh BJP chief and Jabalpur candidate Rakesh Singh has been issued a show cause notice for allegedly violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The notice was for allegedly taking more than five people to the returning officer's room while filing his nomination.

The Tripura unit of the Congress has lodged a complaint with the Election Commission (EC), seeking the immediate arrest of Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb for allegedly spreading communal hatred in the state.

A case was registered against BSP leader Omar Ali Khan and his supporters for violation of Model Code of Conduct (MCC) as they carried out a procession on the road without permission and misbehaved with the SDM.

In response to a notice from the Election Commission of India, DD News is learnt to have defended its decision to run Prime Minister Narendra Modis 1.24-hour public address  Main Bhi Chowkidar  in full on 31 March on the grounds of its high news value".

Bharipa Bahujan Mahasangh chairperson and grandson of BR Ambedkar, Prakash Ambedkar, on Thursday threatened to take action against the Election Commission of India (ECI) if his party is voted to power. While addressing a public gathering at Yavatmal, Ambedkar called the Election Commission biased and slammed the organisation for directing political parties to not talk about the terror attack in Pulwama.

The Congress had questioned the decision to run the address in full. EC had asked DD News for complete information on coverage of various political parties and prominent leaders to assess whether there was any truth in Congress allegations of preferential treatment to the ruling party.

The District Magistrate of Mathura has said that BJP MP Hema Malini did not have permission to conduct a public meeting at a government school and appropriate action would be taken in the matter if MCC violation is found. Hema, who is re-contesting elections from Mathura, held a public rally in the premises of a government school in Chaumuha on Tuesday.

In its reply to the Election Commission, the information and broadcasting ministry told the polling watchdog that NaMo TV is not a licensed channel but a direct-to-home (DTH) advertisement platform, reported India Today. The Election Commission has sought a response from the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry on the 24-hour TV channel 'NaMo TV' based on a complaint filed by the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

The Madhya Pradesh Election Commission has sent a notice to Congress for using the Rafale issue in poll advertisements as the matter is sub-judice. EC has ordered Congress to take down the six advertisements using Rafale issue as a campaign plank of the party, India Today reporte

The Gujarat Congress on Tuesday lodged a complaint of model code violation against BJP chief and party's Gandhinagar nominee Amit Shah's rally cum roadshow on 30 March alleging that loudspeakers were used near hospitals. In its complaint sent to Gujarat Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) S Murali Krishna through fax, the Opposition party demanded necessary action against Shah for "violating" the poll code.

The Election Commission (EC) has given its approval for the release of the biopic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, reports said. News18 reported sources as saying that the Election Commission has asked the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to decide on whether to allow the release of 'PM Narendra Modi'.

Niti Aayog Vice-Chairman Rajiv Kumar on Tuesday told the Election Commission that his comment son Congress' Nyay scheme were made in his personal capacity as an economist and should not be interpreted as Niti Aayogs stand on the Congress announcement. The Election Commission had pulled up Kumar for targeting Congress's minimum income guarantee scheme, NYAY during a media interview. Speaking to India Today, Kumar had said that the Congress has made the announcement only for the sake of winning the elections. "This is the worst kind of vote politics," he said.

BJP MP from Mathura Hema Malini, who is re-contesting elections from the seat, may face a case of MCC violation for holding a public rally in the premises of a government school in Chaumuha on Tuesday, The Times of India reported.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) filed a Model Code of Conduct (MCC) violation complaint against BJP accusing it of advertising on commercial taxis in the run-up to the general elections. AAP alleged that some public service vehicles are being used for political advertisement by BJP and were spotted plying in Delhi.

The Election Commission took cognizance of Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yodi Adityanath referring to the Indian Army as 'Modi ji ki sena'. The district magistrate of Ghaziabad has been asked to furnish a report in this regard, a functionary said. The report will be submitted to the office of the chief electoral officer of Uttar Pradesh which has sought the details after taking cognizance of media reports in this regard.

A case was registered against Samajwadi Party's Badaun candidate Dharmendra Yadav and three others for allegedly violating the model code of conduct. Yadav had apparently used a convoy of cars for campaigning. A video of the incident had also gone viral on social media. A case was registered and the matter is being investigated further.

The Election Commission found Rajasthan Governor Kalyan Singhs remark that Narendra Modi should be re-elected as the Prime Minister violative of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The commission will write to President Ram Nath Kovind to bring it to his notice, The Indian Express reported. Singh had courted controversy last week when he told reporters in Aligarh that everyone wants Modi to win and that its necessary for the country that he is re-elected.

Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut was also served a notice by the Election Commission on Monday for his editorial in Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamana in which he made reference to tampering of EVMs in Begusarai. Raut has been asked to give a clarification by 3 April to the notice issued by Mumbai District Election Officer Shivaji Jondhale.

Meanwhile, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) wrote to the Election Commission on Monday complaining against the recently-launched "NaMo TV", asking the poll panel if political parties having TV channels was in adherence to the Model Code of Conduct. The Arvind Kejriwal-led party asked the EC if the BJP had sought approval for the launch of the channel, which has Prime Minister Narendra Modi's photograph on its logo and runs all his speeches.

Following a verbal altercation between Union Minister Ashwini Choubey and a government official over alleged violation of Model Code of Conduct, an FIR has been lodged against 150 people including Choubey. The FIR also names BJP leader Rana Pratap Singh and various other leaders. The said 150 accused have been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) including 'assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty'.

A video had surfaced on Sunday purportedly showing Choubey, on the front seat of a vehicle, furiously reacting to the official who attempted to apprise the Union minister about Election Commission's order.

Former JNU students union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who is contesting the Lok Sabha polls in Bihar's Begusarai as a CPI candidate, was booked for violation of Model Code of Conduct.

Ministry of Railways reacted to the controversy over tea being served in Shatabdi train in 'Main bhi Chowkidar' cups. The railway officials said that the incident happened today but the cups were immediately withdrawn. The ministry said that these are not procured from any political party and penal action will be taken against the contractor, and the railways supervisor.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's speech on 'Mission Shakti' did not violate the Model Code of Conduct, the Election Commission announced on Friday, even as the Opposition had accused the prime minister of violations and "publicity mongering".

Bollywood actor Vivek Oberoi and producer of film 'PM Narendra Modi', Sandeep Singh arrived at the Election Commission in Delhi on Thursday after complaints were filed over the release of the movie and ban of its trailer in light of the Model Code of Code (MCC) being in force ahead of the Lok Sabha election.

The Election Commission (EC) on Wednesday sent a notice to four producers of the upcoming film 'PM Narendra Modi'. Congress and the CPM had complained to the commission about the film's release, saying it's being done with political intent. EC had earlier sent notices to two newspapers on 20 March over publishing 'PM Narendra Modi' film's poster for promotions.

The Odisha Congress on Monday filed a complaint with Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of the state against BJP's Lok Sabha candidate from Puri Sambit Patra alleging a violation of Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The Odisha Pradesh Congress in its complaint said that Patra violated MCC by holding the idol of Lord Jagannath in his hand during an election rally.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) has written to the Ministry of Railways and Ministry of Civil Aviation, asking them why the pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi were not removed from rail tickets and Air India boarding passes even after the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) came into effect. They've been asked to submit a reply within three days to the commission.

After a Congress delegation met the Election Commission on Monday, Kapil Sibal told reporters, "We represented to the Election Commission that there is a film being made on Narendra Modi, to be released just a few days before election. It's purpose is political. Three producers and actor belong to BJP; the director is involved in 'Vibrant Gujarat' (investors' summit). This is violative of all norms."

Karnataka Congress has asked the Election Commission to allow political parties to pre-view the biopic on Narendra Modi.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday said that Congress president Rahul Gandhis interaction with students of a womens college in Chennai did not violate the model code of conduct (MCC), though it has sought a report on his speech.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Punjab, led by Leader of Opposition Harpal Singh Cheema, filed a complaint with the Chief Electoral Officer against cabinet minister Vijay Inder Singla for allegedly influencing voters of Sangrur by misusing his official position. Cheema alleged Singla had violated the model code of conduct by trying to induce voters by sanctioning funds worth crores for the repair of government schools.

Actor-turned-politician Prakash Raj was booked by the Cubbon Park Police for violating the Model Code of Conduct as he was accused of using a mike and campaigning for elections at a public rally held at the Mahatma Gandhi Circle in Bangalore on 12 March.

A Trinamool Congress (TMC) delegation comprising Derek O'Brien, Sukhendu Sekhar Ray, and Chandan Mitra approached the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Tuesday to lodge a complaint against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claiming that Prime Minister Narendra Modis photo was being published on railway tickets as part of a government scheme, which, the party said, was in violation of the MCC.

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Wednesday wrote to the chief electoral officer (CEO) or Kerala in order to "file a complaint in relation to the malicious attempt by BJP and the Sabarimala Karma Samithi to vitiate free and fair polls in Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency."

He said that they did so "by publicising materials in a bid to appeal to religious sentiments of voters."

The Delhi BJP on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Chief Electoral Office in the city, seeking action against the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for allegedly "indulging in violent acts" and violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). The BJP claimed AAP leaders, including Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, had burned copies of its 2014 manifesto on 13 March.

Meanwhile, the Election Commission of India issued a showcause notice to BJP leader and Union minister Babul Supriyo for violating the MCC. The notice is related to a campaign song, which Supriyo allegedly promoted on electronic media and social media sites without a media certification from the EC. The Trinamool Congress had also registered a complaint against the song with the EC.

In Kerala, the BJP complained to the Chief Electoral Officer in Thiruvananthapuram, claiming that the posters put up by the Congress related to MP Shashi Tharoor's book Why Am I A Hindu violated the Model Code of Conduct (MCC). Tharoor, however, claimed they were not election posters.

Gujarat Chief Electoral Officer S Murali Krishna has ordered an inquiry after the Congress, on Monday, filed a complaint alleging that the BJP had violated the MCC by holding a meeting of the party's state parliamentary board at Chief Minister Vijay Rupani's official residence. The Congress pointed out that the chief minister's official residence in Gandhinagar is a government property, and no political activity is permitted from a government premises when the poll code is in force.

meanwhile, the Deputy Commissioner of Baramulla (Jammu and Kashmir) on Monday rescinded transfers ordered by the districts assistant commissioner in violation of the model code of conduct, after the state government questioned the reshuffle affected despite standing directions.

On the other hand, after last week's takedown notification to Facebook, the EC called all social media platforms including Google, Twitter, Whatsapp, ShareChat and Tiktok for a meet to discuss over their violative social media content, ad policy and response time over complaints on Tuesday. The meet comes in wake of confusion over ECs first takedown notice to Facebook regarding a Model Code of Conduct (MCC) violation on 13 March.

A delegation led by Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) Election Commission Coordination Committee convenor G Niranjan complained to the CEO on MCC violation by Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao for inviting Congress leader and former home minister Sabitha Indra Reddy and her sons to his camp office on 13 March for deliberations and reportedly influencing them to joins TRS.

BJD accused BJP of violating the Model Code of Conduct by allegedly shifting the Railway Electrification Board unit from Bhubaneswar to Bengaluru on 13 March after the announcement of the Lok Sabha election dates. Whereas, in order to put a check on the poll irregularities and other malfunctions ahead and during the Lok Sabha elections, a 24x7 control room was opened at the office of the Chief Electoral Officer in Bhubaneswar on Friday.

BJPs Delhi unit wrote to the Election Commission to appoint special observers in mosques to prevent religion from influencing electoral outcomes. The BJP has squarely blamed the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for polarising the voters on religious and caste lines and has stated that it is Arvind Kejriwal who has been delivering many inflammatory and baseless statements to polarise votes, especially in Muslim dominant areas.

The Ranchi district administration on Monday filed a case of Model Code of Conduct (MCC) violation against Union minister Jayant Sinha on a complaint by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. In its complaint to Jharkhand Chief Electoral Officer L Khiangte, the party claimed that Sinha had used the convocation ceremony at IIM-Ranchi to publicise the BJP government's achievements, violating the poll code.

Meanwhile, the BJP on Monday filed a complaint against Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera for allegedly violating the MCC. In its complaint, the party claimed that Khera, during a news channel's event, had stated that 'Modi stands for Masood Azhar, Osama, Dawood and ISI.'

The Congress registered its first Model Code of Conduct violation complaint with the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday. In Maharashtra, the party gave a written complaint to the chief electoral officer against government advertisements still being displayed outside state transport buses, bus stops and petrol pumps.

Show cause notices were issued to BJP's Chandigarh chief Sanjay Tandon, four BJP councillors, two nominated councillors and three officials of the Municipal Corporation Chandigarh on Wednesday for violating the model code of conduct. The notice asked the officials to reply within 24 hours as to why disciplinary action may not be taken against them.

In Arunachal Pradesh, the Nirjuli police under the supervision of Capital Complex Superintendent of Police Tumme Amo on Tuesday night seized Rs 15.6 lakh from undisclosed people for violation of the model code of conduct.

Bahujan Samaj Party's (BSP) Pratapgarh Lok Sabha constituency in-charge Ashok Tripathi was among 68 booked for poll code violation on Wednesday.

The ECI on Wednesday issued a notice to BJP's Jaipur MP Ramcharan Bohra and Rajasthan Congress' General Secretary Sunil Sharma for putting up posters in different locations across Jaipur depicting various operations done by the Indian Armed forces along with their own photos. It also asked both the politicians to file a reply within three days.

The Commission on Wednesday issued a show-cause notice to Delhi BJP MLA Om Prakash Sharma for putting up two posters featuring him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IAF Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman on Facebook. The Commission asked him to take down the post and give a reply by Thursday.

The Election Commission has asked all political parties to refrain from making reference to the armed forces during their campaign.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, hoardings and banners containing the photographs of Prime Minister Narendra Modi were removed from petrol pumps in New Delhi on Tuesday following the enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct for Lok Sabha elections.

ECI on 10 March, 2019 announced the dates of the seven-phase upcoming Lok Sabha election scheduled to begin on 11 April. The results will be announced on 23 May. The last polling date is 19 May. With the announcement of the schedule, the Model Code of Conduct kicked in the very same day.

The ECI referred to its December 2013 letter in which it had "called upon all political parties to advise their candidates and leaders to desist from displaying photographs of defence personnel or photographs functions involving defence personnel in advertisements".

More than 820 million citizens will cast their votes across India this year. The number of eligible voters has gone up by more than five times since the first General Election. Voter turnout has also increased from 46 percent in 1951-52 to 66 percent in 2014. In the last election held in 2014, there were roughly 815 million, but just 550 million exercised their right to vote. Lok Sabha Election 2019 will see over 1.5 crore first-time voters. These voters in the age group of 18-19 years constitute 1.66 percent of the total electorate. Two-thirds of Indians are under 35 years of age.
Under pressure to form pre-poll alliances or field common candidates so that the anti-BJP vote is not divided, the Congress faces the question of Modi versus who and struggles to defend its record of 70 years

A month before the Lok Sabha election, the Congress confronts a major question: should it focus on party-building or nation-building? This question assumes importance because the Congress will evidently not join the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance in Uttar Pradesh. In Delhi, too, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Congress have failed to agree on seat-sharing.

The BJP is riding a wave of confidence following events in Pulwama and Balakot, as anger against Pakistan turns inwards. Opinion on whether this will impact electoral choices is divided but some media reports suggest it has given the BJP an edge just when its prospects didnt look good. It is looking to polarise voters on national security by portraying the Opposition as anti-national. Against this backdrop, the Congress will field candidates in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, complicating the poll arithmetic by weaning away Dalit, backward and Muslim votes from the SP-BSP alliance and AAP.

In states such as Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Bihar, the Congress has a sizable base. Elsewhere, it has ceded ground to regional players  the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, BSP in Uttar Pradesh, AAP in Delhi, the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal and so on. The Congress is under pressure to form pre-poll alliances or field common candidates, so that the anti-BJP vote is not divided.

Since its dramatic growth in 2014, the BJP has mobilised religion in the service of political power. Its politics of polarisation, division and hatred has brought India to a tipping point. A united Opposition can be a bulwark against normalising politics of hatred and prevent the BJP from consolidating its hegemony, at the same time, a Congress lacking adequate seats will be ill-equipped to defend the idea of India. It needs to win 100 or 110 seats, a climb from 44 in 2014, without which it risks losing relevance. The Congress would also forfeit a significant role if a post-poll agreement at the Centre is discussed, should the BJP fail to win a majority on its own.

Over the last 10 years, the Congress has lost its grip over its history. Yet, partly because the Congress has been in power for very long, there is a sense of exhaustion with its politics, especially dynastic politics. The narrative of strong leadership has also appealed to people: the question Modi versus who is repeatedly asked particularly by the middle classes. This is the predicament at the heart of the Congress poll strategy.

Many are asking if the Congress has chosen the right moment to revive its base in Uttar Pradesh, instead of letting regional parties defeat the BJP. It has been out of power in Uttar Pradesh for 30 years. Barring 2009, when it won 22 seats, the Congress has failed to make a dent in the states identity-centric politics. Its eight per cent vote share has to double for it to win a significant number of seats. It has some support among Brahmins and Muslims but it is not enough. It still needs other social groups. And in the 2017 assembly election, it allied with SP but the tie-up didnt help either of them.

Even regional parties are reluctant to share seats with the Congress. The BJP has already taken away some of their voters and the Congress, they fear, would further weaken them.

Of late, the Congress has been flirting with religious politics. Its ambivalent relationship with religion is reflected in its ambiguity towards secularism. The BJP talks about development but deploys the politics of religion, whereas the Congress tilts towards majoritarianism at times and on other occasions, attempts to transcend this. It is trying to compete with the BJP on its turf, forgetting that if people have to vote for a Hindu party, they would prefer the one that explicitly practices that brand of politics. The Congress is sometimes intimidated by its rival and sometimes imitates them, but ends up compromising its secular, pluralist identity.

In going it alone in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, the Congress is assuming that Muslims will also vote for it. This is true in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, where there are no strong regional players but Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal or Delhi are different. The Congress wants Muslim support but doesnt want to be seen to have it. This is reaffirmed by its strategy in ticket distribution. It has refrained from fielding a large number of Muslim candidates, especially in states where it is in a direct contest with the BJP. Party leaders admit it is in response to the BJP labelling the Congress a Muslim party. Symbolic gestures such as temple visits and promise of cow protection are aimed at living down that image.

The Congress has failed to defend its record of the past 70 years that would help it counter the BJPs failures. There is much for it to defend from UPAs first term. It has not highlighted its national-security strategy, and until this week, did not raise the Kandahar hijacking and release of Masood Azhar by a BJP government. The BJPs talk of nationalism is ironic, given the absence of the Hindu right and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from the freedom struggle. But, the Congress hasnt cornered it on this. Today, the BJP is conflating nationalism and national security, Hinduism and Hindutva, state and government, while the Congress is not challenging such binaries. It is invariably unsettled or overwhelmed by BJPs hyper-nationalism.

Growing economic inequality, combined with politics of hatred, has created a new political conjuncture. There is insecurity among vulnerable communities which needs to be taken head-on. The Congress was doing this until the Balakot air strikes. It needs to refocus on issues of livelihood, unemployment and agrarian distress. The Congress promise of minimum income guarantee is a significant assurance in this regard. Basically, it must speak up for equality for all.
While defections undermine the basis of parliamentary democracy, poaching subverts it. In the past few years, the BJP has almost destroyed the foundations of parliamentary democracy through poaching. It has formed governments in Goa and the North-east by buying out, we use the phrase advisedly, smaller parties and splinter groups.

Denied a ticket for the impending Lok Sabha elections, Arjun Singh, a Trinamool Congress MLA from North 24 Parganas, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Thursday. It was a personal decision, you could argue. Nothing amiss at all and no big deal since the likelihood is that this will mean the extirpation of his political career. Over the past few months, two other Trinamool MPs have crossed over to the BJP. Personal choice again. A prominent BJP member, also the owner and editor of a newspaper, went the other way not so long ago.

Its not as if this phenomenon of crossing the floor, metaphorically speaking, is confined to Bengal; its happening all over the country. North India perhaps shades our very own down under a little bit in the great floor-crossing sweepstakes. One of the problems is that this movement is something in the nature of Brownian motion. In other words, peoples representatives are changing parties across the board  from the Samajwadi Party (SP) to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP); from both to the BJP. Its not as if, though, that the BJP is insulated from this trend.

It's time to get some clarity into our understanding of the phenomenon of defection, seen simplistically, before other factors are weighted in. At the simplest level, an individual peoples representative is free to quit his or her party and join another one  the condition is forfeiture for the time being of ones membership of whichever legislative body one belongs to.

Even at this level, random movement between parties  especially when they are ideologically contrapuntal  is conceptually problematic. Let's return to the Bengal situation. Its not really a problem if and when the movement is between the two Congresses; when it is between either and the BJP it is problematic from one end. Neither of the Congresses in Bengal are ideologically straitjacketed: the Trinamool Congress is ideologically promiscuous, while the Congress has a history of a broad-church ethic with a basic liberal mooring.

Its a problem, however, from the BJP end. The saffron party is anything but ideologically promiscuous, nor is it a broad church. Thus, when it goes out hunting for renegades, or even just accepting them, we can only reach one conclusion: the BJP is more than willing to dilute its ideological commitments to get its grubby hands on the levers of state power. All of this applies to the Left in Bengal as well, especially because much of the BJPs spectacular rise in the state is due to the exodus of Left leaders/cadres/voters. Talk of ideological/political lines getting blurred; its more like being obliterated.

Its pretty much the same all over north India (including the western parts that are south of the Vindhyas). Technically, the north Indian regional parties have inherited the obscenely splittist variant of socialism of which the high priest was Ram Manohar Lohia. To be fair to Lohia, however, his penchant for splitting the Left movement was grounded in a particularly inflexible reading of politics. His political descendants have inherited some traits but not inflexibility. Genetics is not an exact science, politically and biologically. So, the movement between various parties is determined by expectations of personal gain constrained by a complex calculus determined by factors related to caste, gender and other factors. To conclude this bit, ideology plays no role in this scramble for pelf and familial aggrandizement.

Lest, we appear to be on the better side of naivete, let us assure readers that is not the case. We are merely staking out the territory to approach a phenomenon that is completely distinct. When individuals change sides, it is usually caused by a relatively straightforward meeting of two kinds of desire: the individuals desire for aggrandisement or pelf and the partys desire to increase its political firepower.

Typically, however, the story changes when we move from the individual to the group. When groups of legislators change sides, the element of inducement becomes more prominent. That is, groups of legislators (or lower levels of party functionaries) change sides because they are aggressively pursued with offers of money and other inducements like ministerial office. We call this poaching. This phenomenon usually causes either the destabilization of lawfully elected governments or their creation.

On the scale of aggravated grand larceny, this happened in Bihar when Chief Minister Nitish Kumar led his party out of its alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and others and allied with the BJP to form a new government. It was a betrayal of the pre-poll mandate and was occasioned by the exchange of suitcases, not briefcases. The BJP had the deep pockets, the Janata Dal (United) the exceptionable cupidity to betray the mandate. Job done.

But the classic template of inducement-driven poaching can be found in Karnataka. A brief recap would help. In elections conducted last year, the BJP emerged as the single largest party, but before it could really orient itself, the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) struck a deal to form a coalition government. The alliance still exists. On Wednesday, the two parties announced a seat-sharing deal. On the day the alliance was first announced, the BJP launched Operation Lotus, a polite name for the totally unscrupulous project that aimed at bribing legislators to shift sides to enable the BJP to form a government. That it didnt happen is hardly an extenuating circumstance. In fact, on Wednesday, a BJP leader announced, proudly, that if it got 22 seats out of 28 in the Lok Sabha elections, it could form a government in 24 hours. Former BJP chief minister BS Yeddyurappa seems to be stuck in the 20s.

While defections undermine the basis of parliamentary democracy, poaching subverts it. In the past few years, the BJP has almost destroyed the foundations of parliamentary democracy through poaching. It has formed governments in Goa and the North-east by buying out, we use the phrase advisedly, smaller parties and splinter groups. Its swollen war chest makes that possible. Now with the elections impending, it is busy once again in the market. It is only to hoped that this bull run will end in a bear hug that will destroy the semi-legal corporation called the BJP.

After the fourth general elections led to the whittling of the Congresss majority in the Lok Sabha and its unseating in nine states, a fractured polity saw a violent outburst of defections that led to a disturbingly rhythmic fall of dispensations; one legislator changed parties thrice in the space of 24 hours. In 1968, an all-party committee was formed to report on the phenomenon of defections, used especially after 1970 by the ruling Congress (R) to gain advantages. It submitted a report but legislation failed to follow. It was only when Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister that an anti-defection act was passed.

With its legislative preponderance, the BJP has all but killed it in letter and spirit, aided, to be sure, by other parties. Voters should now object to having the mandate they deliver being stolen from under their feet. Unfortunately, for the present, they can only do so by delivering another vulnerable mandate. Yet, it would be a start if the BJP got no more than two seats in Karnataka.
Bengal, which was bereft of any caste-based polarisation, for the first time, saw leaders courting the organised sect to cross the finishing line

On a scorching Sunday afternoon, Kalidas Pandey sat cross-legged inside his tinned-roof shop in Thakurnagar, about 80 kilometres from Kolkata, waiting for customers to buy framed pictures of gods and goddesses. As Kalidas, a Matua  a sect propounded by 19th-century social reformer Harichand Thakur  waited, local Dipen Biswas and a few others gathered and blurted out the question that was troubling everyone in the community: after the demise of Binapani Devi  affectionately called Boroma, meaning elder mother  what will happen to them? With a bitter internecine political war engulfing the Thakur family, who will hold the umbrella for millions of Namasudras (a sub-caste within scheduled castes) and fight for their cause?

Matuas have always looked up to the Thakur family for some kind of deliverance. Boroma had been the backbone of the organisation, sewed the community in a single string and made them a force to reckon with. In the past, someone from the Thakur family would have assuaged their doubts. After the matriarchs death, however, the family and the Matua Mahasangh  the highest decision-making body  appears split into two.

The centenarian had a distinct and, at times, discreet way of dealing with political parties and their leaders. While it was essential for the downtrodden community to side with the ruling elite, the family made it a point to remain apolitical, lest it would invite the wrath of the opponents. In 2010, when Matuas, under Binapani Devis aegis, held a protest demanding citizenship, leaders across the political spectrum  TMC, BJP, Congress and Left Front  visited her, promising support. She was even lauded by the then state minister for housing and CPI (M) leader Gautam Deb for bringing disparate political forces together. The timing was significant as the Left had lost considerable ground and the Trinamool Congress under Mamata Banerjee was going for the kill. Bengal, which was bereft of any caste-based polarisation, for the first time, saw leaders courting the organised sect to cross the finishing line. It was a milieu which established the role and influence of Boroma but, more significantly, it sent out a clear message  after years of being subsumed by class politics controlled by the upper-caste gentry, identity politics had made its grand entry into the state. And it persuasively established the legitimacy of the first family as not only being the caretaker of their religious tradition but also the guiding star for asserting their claim in the scheme of larger political empowerment.

Inside Thakurbari, as the house is referred to by its members, Binapani Devis daughter-in-law Mamata Bala Thakur, widow of her late son Kapil Krishna Thakur, and her grandson Santanu Thakur, born of her younger son Manjul Krishna Thakur, were pondering over the nitty-gritties of the shradh ceremony but separately. The two warring factions live in the same compound but in different houses. Named The Exile and Expulsion, the modest dwellings stand as a constant reminder of the refugee status of a sizable section of the Matuas who still live under the fear of deportation. While Mamata Bala claims it was Binapani Devi who herself had anointed her to carry on with the work of the Sangh, the rival faction led by Santanu wants to have its own say on the matter. The fight became so ugly that Santanu publicly accused his aunt and other leaders from West Bengals ruling TMC of having a hand in his grandmothers death, as she had written to chief minister Mamata Banerjee asking her to support the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016, which the Centre had brought in. The letter, which contained her purported signature, is now under investigation. Mamata Thakur says the community has reposed its faith in her, while the younger Thakur scion predicts she will bite the dust in the upcoming polls for betraying the cause of the Matuas and eliciting TMCs support for narrow political gains. When asked about his familiarity with the saffron outfit, Santanu was unequivocal: any support is contingent on meeting the long-standing demand of providing citizenship to Matuas irrespective of their migration to India, and that he wants keep the family out of the purview of party politics.

Boromas family has been the go-to for the devotees since the mid-19th century when Harichand Thakur formed the sect in what is now Bangladesh, to fight against the oppression of zamindars and escape from the scourge of untouchability. Matuas have their own temples, priests from within the community with the underlying basic tenet of equality being the cornerstone for attracting others. The sects motto is empowerment through education and, with the states help, end discrimination. During the Swadeshi and Non-Cooperation movements, Guruchand, Harichands son, decided against supporting the Gandhi-led campaigns despite the icons earnest exhortation, as they saw it as a grave injustice for the family to ask votaries to buy expensive clothes. Besides, siding against the British would have had its own repercussions for a caste which had always been at the receiving end of the Brahminical cannon. Guruchands grandson, PR Thakur, was the first barrister from the community who marked a turnaround in the political firmament, with the Mahatma, Netaji and Jinnah all seeking their support.

Born in Barishal district of Bangladesh in British India, Binapani Devi was married off early to PR Thakur. Her initiation into the organisational aspect of the social movement began under the guidance of Guruchand himself, but it was only after Partition that she was forced to take the plunge. In the tumultuous years leading up to it, Boroma along with her kids, fled East Bengal, arriving in Kolkata in 1946. The social movement was in complete disarray as issues of housing, land, jobs took centre stage with members dispersed all across the state and beyond. The establishment of Thakurnagar in 1948 by PR Thakur as the first refugee colony ensured that her primary responsibility was to touch base with those who had been ripped apart by Partition. In 1952, when barrister Thakur decided to join the electoral fray, Boroma strategised the campaign and formed a group of carefully chosen advisers to assist the Matua leader. Though Thakur lost, Boroma started laying the groundwork which resulted in subsequent victories in the 1957 and 1962 assembly polls as a Congress candidate. The jubilation was short-lived as differences with the Congress arose due to its treatment of refugees from the then East Pakistan. The barrister was put behind bars along with other leaders. Binapani Devi sat on a fast, demanding release of the leaders and intervention from the government to accept the refugees. Since the beginning of the 1970s, the next two decades were spent spreading the faith and extending the organisation into other parts of India where Matuas had been resettled since Partition.

Currently spread across Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh, the community has more than a crore votes in Bengal alone, while being the determinant factor in 60-70 assembly seats in the state. In Assam, their numbers are a few million. Some even lost their lives in the violence during implementation of the NRC. Though generally its the lower castes which form the core and majority of the sect, the community also boasts of Brahmins and Kshatriyas. The recently-lapsed Citizenship Amendment Bill of 2016 was not a panacea for the Matuas as it also put a cut-off date, though it was better than any of the previous bills.

After PR Thakur passed away in 1990, eldest son Kapil Krishna was made the president of the Mahasangh, while Boroma became the chief adviser. Since then, Binapani Devis doors remained open to all political leaders, but she was careful not to endorse anyone. It was partially because of the CPI (M)-led Left Fronts hold over every organisation and institution in the state, perpetuated through the now-infamous party-society culture, and partly due to lack of political alternatives which could have challenged the suzerainty of the Jyoti Basu government.

But things started to change in the run-up to 2009 general elections when Mamata Banerjee managed to get the matriarchs blessings. The spiritual and political head did not publicly ask her followers to support the challenger but the photo-ops were a hint enough. Though the Left Front tried to nullify the Trinamool chiefs influence, the damage was already done. Left leaders have admitted despite their ideological aversion to identity politics, the loss of Matua votes cost them dear. To cement the relationship, Mamata Banerjee gave ticket to the matriarchs youngest son Manjul Krishna for the assembly polls, and he became a minister in the government. It was only in 2014, when the late Kapil Krishna decided to stand for parliamentary polls on a TMC ticket that the rift became apparent. A year later, Kapil passed away and his widow was asked to contest the bypolls. A disgruntled Manjul hobnobbed with the BJP who fielded his eldest son Subrata against Mamata Bala, but he lost. Santanu has termed his fathers entry into politics a mistake. But, he doesnt hide the fact that Prime Minister Modis visit was a watershed moment in the annals of the Matua movement. The sitting TMC MP, however, denied that Boroma was miffed with her or her husbands decision to join the firebrand leader. People who have kept a close watch on the ferment in the family term Kapil Krishnas death as the beginning of the fight for legacy.

While a section of the community is still loyal to the ruling party, others have started shifting their allegiance to the BJP. As the fight for Boromas legacy intensifies, the internal rumblings in Thakurbari might precipitate the unravelling of one of the largest scheduled caste communities in India with political fence sitters waiting to grab any opportunity.
tech2 News Staff

Google announced the very first beta of Android Q for the entire lineup of Pixel phones on 14 March. While we covered nearly all the major features that Google will be introducing in the new Android OS, there are still a few features that are being revealed in parts. Here's a list of them.

Dark Mode. Or thereabout...

While a system-level Dark mode has been teased by Google for a long time, Android Q has offered the first glimpse of what it might look like. However, the problem is that this mode is a bit tricky to access. As per The Verge, the only way to access dark mode right now is to enable the battery saving mode, which will prolong phone charging and clear background processes.

Quick estimate of remaining battery

Initially, users had to go into the battery option in the Settings menu to check out the estimated standby time. Android Police now points out that with Android Q you can get this estimate with just a swipe down on the notification bar itself.

Fast Sharing

Earlier you were bombarded with a giant list of apps compatible for sharing information whenever you clicked the share button. There was also a slight delay as the entire list was generated, something which is not seen on iOS. 9to5Google has said that with Android Q, developers will have the option to choose their preferred sharing methods, which should make it easier for users to select and share.

Power button has an emergency option

Long pressing the power button will now give you an option to contact emergency services with Android Q, as per The Verge. However, we would like to point out that this is a feature that already exists on the OnePlus 6T.

Share Wi-Fi passwords via a QR code

You can now share your Wi-Fi password via a QR code. TNW says that anyone wanting to join your Wi-Fi network can simply scan the QR code available in the Wi-Fi menu and join in.

Recent notifications

Nowadays with so many apps pushing out notifications one after the other it isn't easy to track which one is the latest. As per 9to5Google, Android Q has introduced a tiny bell icon on the notification that rang last.

There will undoubtedly be more revelations about Android Q as this is just the first beta out of the planned six. Google has said that it will release the final build by the third quarter this year.
Ameya Dalvi

If you are looking for a new feature-rich phone in a modest budget, we have already covered the best under Rs 10,000 and the best under Rs 15,000 earlier this month. You may want to have a look at those. Right now, it's time to move on to the next price slab of Rs 20,000 and shortlist the five best phones that are worth your money in that budget this March. Lets jump straight into the action.

Best phones under Rs 20,000 in India

Poco F1

Let us start with the best performer of the lot, the Poco F1 (Review). Xiaomi released its new sub-brand Poco last year and equipped its first handset with a flagship Snapdragon 845 SoC. The price of the base variant has dropped further, making it the only smartphone with a Snapdragon 845 under Rs 20,000. Needless to say, it offers great value for money. But it is not perfect in every aspect. For instance, the design is fairly generic and the plastic body wont please style-conscious users. But if you are willing to look past that, theres ample on offer. The 12 MP + 5 MP dual camera setup at the back does a good job in decent lighting. It runs Android Oreo 8.1 with a Poco launcher, which is a definite improvement over MIUI.

Other than Qualcomms flagship SoC, the base variant of the phone comes bundled with 6 GB RAM and 64 GB storage. The storage can be further expanded up to 256 GB using a microSD card. You get a bright, 6.2-inch Full HD+ notched display and a 4000 mAh battery that provides sufficient juice for a days usage. If you are a performance buff or a gamer who isnt too picky about design or camera output, the Poco F1 is the right choice for you. It lets you play PUBG and other popular games smoothly with high settings in this budget.

Poco F1 price in India: Rs 19,999 6GB RAM/64GB storage

Redmi Note 7 Pro

Where the Poco F1 lacks in style, the Redmi Note 7 Pro (Review) more than makes up for it on that front, and more. The glass-clad Redmi Note 7 Pro is pleasing to the eye and protected against scratches by Gorilla Glass 5 at the front as well as at the back. A 6.3-inch Full HD+ display with a drop notch makes an appearance too. Though this handset isnt powered by a Snapdragon 845 SoC, it has a fairly powerful new Snapdragon 675 SoC that is no slouch in gaming either. You get the 6 GB RAM and 128 GB internal storage variant in this budget. The 4,000 mAh battery lasts a day of standard usage comfortably.

Another major talking point of the Redmi Note 7 Pro is its 48 MP rear camera with a Sony IMX586 sensor. Like some of the flagship devices from other brands, it uses pixel binning technology that combines details from 4 pixels into one that provides more light data and helps retain finer detail in captured images. It is arguably the best phone for low light photography in this budget. Theres a 5 MP depth-sensing camera too for bokeh shots and a 13 MP AI assisted front camera for selfies. On the OS front, the new Xiaomi device runs the latest Android Pie out of the box with a MIUI 10 layer on top.

Redmi Note 7 Pro price in India: Rs 16,999 for 6 GB RAM/128 GB storage

Realme 2 Pro

The Realme 2 Pro (Review) retains its place in our list. This phone is a great combination of specifications and features at a very aggressive price. While we included its mid variant in our list of phones under 15K, you can get its top-end variant in this budget. This phone is powered by a Snapdragon 660 SoC but loaded with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB internal storage that can be expanded further. That makes multitasking a breeze.

Just like the Redmi Note 7 Pro, this too has a 6.3-inch full HD+ display with a tiny drop-sized notch. The 16MP + 2MP dual rear camera setup is quite competent in most conditions but just about acceptable in low light. A 3,500mAh battery keeps it powered for a day of moderate usage. It runs Android Oreo 8.1 with a ColorOS 5.2 layer on top. This is perhaps the only phone that offers 8GB RAM in this price bracket currently. And with a Rs 2,000 price drop, the deal is even more attractive than before.

Realme 2 Pro price in India: Rs 15,990 8 GB RAM/128 GB storage

Oppo K1

The Oppo K1 is another good looking phone that you may want to consider. This doesnt have the processing power of the Xiaomi devices or a high amount of RAM like the Realme but the K1 is slimmer and lighter than all the phones listed here, and its 3D gradient body is bound to grab attention. It has a slightly larger 6.4-inch Full HD+ AMOLED screen with a drop-sized notch. The screen is protected by a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 5. This phone too is powered by a Snapdragon 660 SoC and comes with a modest but acceptable 4 GB RAM and 64 GB storage that can be expanded further.

Another set of people who would like this phone are selfie enthusiasts courtesy of its 25MP front camera. The 16MP + 2MP rear cameras do a decent job too. Like some of the flagship phones these days (eg. OnePlus 6T), the Oppo K1 has an in-display fingerprint scanner, a feature that looks cool but not something I am a fan of yet. But if you are an early adopter of newer technology, this is perhaps the cheapest phone with an in-display fingerprint scanner available in India. The 3,600 mAh battery should keep the phone running for a day before you go looking for a charger.

Oppo K1 price in India: Rs 16,990 for 4 GB RAM/64 GB storage

Honor Play

Huaweis sub-brand, Honor had ideas similar to Xiaomi when they released the Honor Play (Review) with their then flagship Kirin 970 SoC under Rs 20,000. The performance is comparable to a Snapdragon 845 in most areas, though it doesnt go past it. Unlike the Poco F1, the Honor Play has a metal (Aluminium) body and elegant design. It has a slightly larger 6.3-inch Full HD+ notched display, 3750 mAh battery and runs Android Oreo 8.1 with EMUI 8.2 on top.

Photography is handled by 16MP + 2MP dual rear cameras, while theres a 16MP sensor at the front for selfies. It comes with 4 GB RAM and 64 GB internal storage that can be expanded further with a microSD card. The Kirin 970 chip along with Huaweis GPU Turbo technology provides enough processing muscle in gaming and other resource-intensive tasks. The price of the phone has just dropped to Rs 14,999 on Amazon and wouldnt be a bad idea for mobile gamers to grab one before the stocks run out or the price goes up again.

Honor Play price in India: Rs 14,999 4 GB RAM/64 GB storage
| BY Kim Shaw |

A strong follow up from its 2018 #TouchOfCare video, Vicks once again releases another true-to-life story on the transformative power of care, to celebrate the extraordinary stories of the people who have lived it by their actions. This time, it centers on a child infected with HIV and a woman whose love and care paved way for the transformation of both their lives. This is a powerful story that aims to challenge current beliefs, social norms, definitions, and stereotypes; a bold move aimed to address issues on discrimination.

Vicks, a brand synonymous with Generations of Care globally, continues its mission on transforming peoples lives with the power of care with the belief that it is Care that makes a family, and not the other way around. The brands #TouchOfCare campaign brings to the surface societal taboos and sheds light on them to inspire change in perspectives and preconceived biases. It reveals how anybody with a loving touch of care has the capability to transform another persons life.

The purpose of the Vicks brand is rooted in care. With our #TouchOfCare campaign, we aim to share stories where people have transformed lives of others through their extraordinary acts of care. The story of Agnes was one such story which just needed to be told. We hope the campaign inspires more people to transform lives and transcend social norms, definitions and stereotypes through their own acts of care, said Akhilesh Negi, P&G Brand Director Healthcare APAC.

The 4-minute video heroes a child who was born with HIV infection. When his mom died from the disease, the 4-month old was handed by his immediate family to Agnes* his moms friend. Captured in the story is how Agnes later on found out about the childs condition, and instead of turning away from the unexpectedly difficult situation, she committed to raise him and showered him with love and care. It was the start of a beautiful life transformation for the two; revealing how Agnes fought for childs life against all ridicule and discrimination from the people around them. Today, with Agnes unfaltering love and care, the child is 4 years old and his HIV infection lays dormant in his body.

With the Touch of Care campaign, we are passionate about telling powerful stories of love. The story of Agnes just grabbed us from the start and we felt this moving tale of mother and son, amidst their challenges, was something we want to share with the world. This is the power of care that Vicks celebrates, for when you choose it, you have a hand in transforming another persons life and make it better, said Lester Estrada, P&G Philippines Marketing Director

Vicks believes that sharing Agnes story will create a ripple effect that inspires people to look past the current beliefs, social norms, definitions, and stereotypes placed on people, and ultimately creates a transformative power of care. The brand also wants to create societal awareness for children born with HIV in order to change societys beliefs and perspectives towards them. Vicks is committed to amplifying inspiring stories that show the transformation of human lives when people give a touch of care.

While brands have the power to lead conversations and influence culture, it is ordinary people in their everyday lives who actually inspire these brands to reflect relevant realities in our advertising. This extraordinary ability of a person to transcend every imaginable boundary to feel and care for another life, another human being, continues to be the inspiration for Vicks Touch of Care campaign across multiple geographies. To celebrate the lives, amplify the stories and support our everyday heroines and heroes is a privilege for our brand, said Ajay Vikram, Publicis Singapore Chief Creative Officer, Global Clients

Vicks has partnered with Project Red Ribbon (a partner of Department of Health  National AIDS/STI Prevention and Control Program, and is associated with the World Health Organization and UNAIDS). This partnership aims to give the same love and care seen in the film to the children under the Duyan Project. Duyan, a Filipino noun which means cradle, aims to provide care and support to children with HIV in the Philippines. Through the said program, they will be given care, love and attention, to improve their quality of life until they are once again healthy and can go back to school.

Credits 

Chief Creative Officer, Global Clients: Ajay Thrivikraman

Creative Director: Sheila Gonzales

Account management: Natalie VanderVorst, Prachi Partagalkar and Jessica Geli

Account Planning: Jordan Price and Josh Roth

Director (film): Alan Harca

Production agencies: Elastic Studios and Provill

Post production: Elastic Studios

Music and Sound design: Loudbox

Agency Producer: Alain Tan

PR Agency: Fuse Philippines

Head of Fuse: Ley Lacsamana

P&G, VICKS Philippines

Vice President, Asia-IMEA Healthcare & APAC Oral: Sujay Wasan

Regional Associate Brand Director, P&G HealthCare Asia Pacific: Akhilesh Negi

Country Category Leader, P&G Health Care, Philippines: Vijay Pampana

Assistant Brand Manager, P&G HealthCare Asia Pacific: Gagandeep Singh Sumbria

Assistant Brand Manager, P&G Healthcare, Philippines: Michael Gabriel Jayme
Agence France-Presse

China's rubber-stamp parliament approved a foreign investment law on 15 March that may serve as an olive branch in trade talks with the United States, but it received a lukewarm welcome from business groups.

The legislation aims to address long-running grievances from foreign firms including stronger protections for intellectual property, but the US and European chambers of commerce voiced concerns that they were not given enough time to give their input.

The National People's Congress voted 2,929 in favour of the law  with eight against and eight abstentions  barely three months after a first draft was debated, an unusually quick turnaround for the legislature, which meets once a year.

The move comes as US and Chinese negotiators hold complex talks aimed at resolving a months-long trade war that has pounded businesses with tariffs on $360 billion in two-way commerce.

US President Donald Trump said on 14 March the negotiations should wrap up within four weeks, adding: "We are getting what we have to get."

China's top trade negotiator, Liu He, held phone talks with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, with the official Xinhua news agency saying they made "substantial progress".

The bill will eliminate the requirement for foreign enterprises to transfer proprietary technology to Chinese joint-venture partners and protect against "illegal government interference"  major sticking points in the trade negotiations.

The legislation will come into force on 1 January 2020.

China will also amend its intellectual property law and "introduce a punitive damages mechanism to ensure that all infringements will be seriously dealt with", Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told reporters at the end of the parliament's two-week session.

The changes will "ensure violators have no place to hide", he said.

Under the bill, foreign investors will enjoy the same privileges as Chinese companies in most sectors, unless they have been placed on "negative lists", officials say.

Small slice' of concerns

Li said China will soon announce shorter negative lists and continue to trim them in future, "increasing the scope of what is not prohibited".

Tim Stratford, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China said, "the last minute efforts are appreciated".

But, he added, the changes "only address a small slice of the overall set of concerns our members have about the uneven playing field foreign companies encounter in China".

The chamber was concerned about vague language in provisions that allowed local governments to expropriate investments that "harm public interest" and the inability to appeal against the outcome of national security reviews.

Jacob Parker, Beijing-based vice president at the US-China Business Council, welcomed the "positive language" in the bill but added that "real investment on the ground will depend on how narrowly tailored those negative lists are going forward".

Businesses are still concerned that industry-specific laws and local administrative approvals may impede full market access despite provisions in the negative list.

The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China had earlier complained that Beijing was rushing the investment law to appease the United States.

"More than anything else, foreign companies want equal treatment and opportunities," said Mats Harborn, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.

"While not all of our concerns were addressed in this law, it is time to move forward," he added.

Both the EU and American trade chambers had urged China to consider having a single Company Law to govern both foreign and domestic enterprises, as is common in many countries.

The law includes a new article on protecting foreign companies' commercial secrets and fleshes out criminal penalties for officials who leak confidential information they obtain from overseas businesses.

"I think we can safely assume that this language is a result of the trade negotiations as it was slipped in at the last minute," Parker said.

The European Chamber singled out one of the law's stipulations that permits China tit-for-tat retaliation against any country that discriminates against Chinese investment.

"This clause allows for political issues to influence investor-state relations, and gives China power to take unilateral action," the European chamber said.
Reuters

Facebook Incs chief product officer and one of its earliest employees, Chris Cox, said on Thursday he is leaving the company just days after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed a plan to transform the worlds biggest social network into an encryption-focused messaging company.

Cox, the 36-year-old Zuckerberg lieutenant who would have managed the CEOs vision to bring Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp closer together, said in a blog post that his departure came with great sadness. He had left a graduate programme at Stanford University to join Facebook in 2005 as a software engineer and helped developed its original news feed feature.

As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network ... This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through, Cox said in a Facebook post.

Coxs departure removes a layer of management, bringing Zuckerberg closer to a family of apps that he wants to make compatible, in what technology analysts expect will be a complicated engineering task.

Shares of Facebook were down 1.7 percent in extended trading following the announcement.

Cox informed the company of his intention to resign on Monday, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.

Also departing is WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels, adding to a string of recent high-profile exits from Facebooks product and communications teams. The shakeup is the second major management restructuring in as many years as the company also faces numerous government investigations across the world related to user privacy and fake news on its services.

Daniels had informed the company several months ago of his intention to leave and will stay on through a leadership transition, a person familiar with the matter said.

Zuckerberg told Wired magazine on 6 March that there will be a bunch of work inside the company to make sure that we have the right folks in the right roles to bring Facebooks apps together and introduce more privacy features.

EMarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg said that whenever there is a shift in strategy, its not unusual to see some personnel changes.

New Structure

Will Cathcart, vice president of product management, will now lead WhatsApp, and Head of Video, Games and Monetization Fidji Simo will be the new head of the Facebook app, Zuckerberg said.

Cathcart and Simo worked closely to bring video uploading tools and professional video content to Facebook. And growing viewership and advertising on videos are of growing importance to both the Facebook and WhatsApp apps.

The company does not immediately plan to fill Coxs role, Zuckerberg said, adding that Cathcart, Simo and the heads of Instagram and Messenger will now report directly to him.

Facebooks family of apps strategy has so far been led jointly by Cox and Javier Olivan, vice president of growth.

Zuckerberg said on Thursday that Olivan will now lead the effort to integrate Facebook apps, a key move as the company encrypts conversations on more of its messaging services and makes them compatible.

Cox gained greater oversight of WhatsApp and Instagram following the exits of their founders over the last two years. He also remained a key figure at Facebook, where for years until Monday he spoke at the orientations for new employees.

Daniels, who had worked on Facebook initiatives in developing countries, had moved a year ago to WhatsApp, which is more popular than Facebook in many big emerging markets.

A WhatsApp spokesman declined to comment on Daniels departure or make him available for comment.

Zuckerberg still has a number of long-time product and engineering lieutenants. They include hardware Vice President Andrew Bosworth, who joined shortly after Cox, as well as decade-long veterans Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer and engineering Vice President Jay Parikh.
tech2 News Staff

In recent weeks Xiaomi has announced the Redmi Note 7 and Note 7 Pro (Review) smartphones in India and now it is gearing up for another launch which will be aimed at the entry-level segment.

Manu Kumar Jain, VP of Xiaomi, has announced on his Twitter channel that Xiaomi will be launching the Redmi Go smartphone on 19 March. This will be the very first smartphone from the Chinese smartphone maker to come with Google's Android Go program. The phone has already made an appearance in Kenya so we are aware of what the specs of the device might be.

In terms of colour options, the Redmi Go looks to be coming in blue, red, black and other variants.

The phone comes with a 5-inch IPS LCD display with an HD resolution. On the processor front, we can imagine that the phone will come with the Snapdragon 425 SoC as Xiaomi mentions a 1.4 GHz quad-core chipset. The Redmi 5A, launched last year also came with the same chipset. Being an Android Go phone the Redmi Go will have 1 GB of RAM and about 8 to 16 GB of internal storage which will be expandable to 128 GB.

The expected price of the device has been rumoured to be about Rs 4,000. The phone will have a single camera with perhaps an 8 MP sensor with a 5 MP front-facing selfie shooter. More details about the phone should be revealed on 19 March.
The Oppo F11 Pro is for buyers who are interested in owning a premium looking smartphone without the expensive price tag.

In the space of a year, Oppo went from embracing the notch to replacing it completely with a pop-up slider. And in a market literally flooded with phones, Oppo's bold design decisions have helped it stand out; the F11 Pro is no exception. It is indeed a refined design and can hold its own against the best in the segment.

Having used the Oppo F11 Pro as my primary device for a little under a week, it has become increasingly difficult to find any reasonable flaw that might deflect buyers from this device. The truth is that for a price of Rs 24,999, the F11 Pro is a device that looks and feels way more expensive. The internals may be lacking a little in comparison to the phones exterior, but this is not a device that has marketed itself as a performance beast. It is, as most of Oppos phones are, a camera-first device, and a very good example of one.

Should you buy this device? If you love cameras and have a budget of Rs 25,000, and have an eye for how a phone looks, then the Oppo F11 Pro is for you. If youre a PUBG fanatic, then you shouldn't be looking beyond the Poco F1. Allow me to explain.

Designed to impress

Oppo is not slacking off when it comes to design. Having reviewed the F9 Pro earlier, I was happy to note that Oppo took the design forward with the F11 Pro: the mesmering back panel of the F9 now has a triple-gradient, which looks quite lovely on the Thunder Black variant we received. This is a phone which is extremely premium to hold, although I would have preferred a glass finish over the polycarbonate unibody design given to us by Oppo.

The weight of the device is slightly on the higher side, but I dont think the few extra grams matter. The dual-camera setup is aligned centrally with the flash on the phones backside, and so is the pop-up camera on the top of the phone. The polished edges do not cut into my palm and also give a grippy feel. The fingerprint reader, the Oppo branding and the designed by Oppo text are all centrally aligned with the camera unit as well, giving the phone a very symmetrical look. Good job on the design, Oppo!

On the front of the device, we spot a notch-less display and next to no chin. Oppo touts a 90.8 percent screen to body ratio. The lack of a notch and a gigantic 6.3-inch FHD+ IPS LCD display always make for the best viewing experience in my opinion.

The phones display is neat and it leaves me with little to complain about. The colours are as accurate as Ive seen on an LCD display under Rs 30,000, though there appears to be a slight oversaturation of reds and yellows. Regardless, the colours seem more real than on the Nokia 8.1 (Review), which is its nearest competitor, and also the OnePlus 6T (Review), which has a very oversaturated AMOLED display.

The display is not as bright as I wouldve liked, but even in brightly lit sunny conditions, the display was quite legible. It also dims enough in the dark to not hurt my eyes. Oppo also provided a blue light filter for night-time phone browsing. Overall, the display is great.

The 48 MP camera does a splendid job

To put it bluntly, Oppos 48 MP Sony IMX586 sensor has done a splendid job, but we must remind ourselves that the cheaper Redmi Note 7 Pro (Review) has the same sensor and it too did a remarkable job of capturing images.

The F11 Pro has a 48 MP main camera and a 5 MP depth sensor, in which the latter is used only for background blurring to give DSLR-like pictures. By default, the phone uses a technique called pixel binning to produce relatively sharp, detailed 12 MP images from that 48 MP sensor. You can change camera settings to shoot at 48 MP if you prefer. I tried both modes and to be honest, I don't see much difference between the pixel-binned 12 MP shot or the 48 MP unbinned shot.

All this is not to say that the F11 Pro does not take great pictures. It does, and in fact, it captures better colour and dynamic range than the competing Nokia 8.1. However, the colours are slightly oversaturated, but this has been trademark Vivo and Oppo for years. Exposure in the shots are also up to the mark and nearly equal to the Nokia 8.1.

Video recording on the device is also up to the mark, with EIS on the device stabilising most of my shaky hand-held footage. The phone can only record 1080p and 720p a@30 fps.

Nightscape is something that Oppo had talked in its press briefing. In my opinion, the night mode on the F11 Pro was a hit and miss. While the phone can take photos which capture a lot of detail in low-light, there is a lot of noise in photos a well. The Nokia 8.1, while not having a dedicated night mode, captured more colour accurate photos even though exposure was understandably lacking. I expect that Oppo should improve Nightscape in upcoming future software updates.

The front camera on the device is a pop-up one and is very fast at that. It opens in a less than a second and takes the same time to go back down. Quality of the 16 MP front sensor is great, but you can see the Oppo brand of screen smoothing taking effect in almost every click. For those interested in a more natural facial look should look towards the Nokia 8.1.

Check out the Oppo F11 Flickr album for high-res images

Performance is mildly impressive

The Oppo F11 Pro has decent internal specs but, as with most smartphones in this range, cannot compete with the Poco F1's hardware. Poco sacrificed design and build quality for power to get the hardware in this price range, and Oppo appears to have taken the opposite approach.

Inside the Oppo F11 Pro is a Helio P70 MediaTek SoC which is also part of the much cheaper Realme 3 (Review). Apart from that, the phone gives you 6 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage with an option to expand using a micro-SD card.

Benchmarks show that the Oppo F11 Pro lags slightly behind the Nokia 8.1 and its Snapdragon 710 SoC, but in real-world use, both phones seemed equally fine to me. Chrome, Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other heavy apps ran perfectly well without a hiccup, as expected.

The PUBG Mobile experience on the phone was nice, although I couldnt play at max graphics settings due to processor constraints. As with most phones, including the liquid-cooled ASUS ROG phone, you start to notice a bit of lag after an hour or two of gameplay. It's not game-breaking, but it is noticeable. Asphalt 9, on the other hand, can run smoothly for longer periods of time.

The phone has a headphone jack (Thank you, Oppo). The single speaker at the bottom is not the greatest but is passable enough for in-room listening. Call quality was as good as expected and the earpiece functioned perfectly. Coming to authentication, the phone has a fingerprint reader which functions lightning fast. The face unlock system is no slouch either, with the phone unlocking itself long before the front camera finished popping up. Of course, the caveat here is that this is a single-cam face unlock, which means it's not secure and could be fooled by photos and video.

Software is a slight issue

While Oppo's software has improved greatly with ColorOS 6.0 (based on Android 9.0 Pie), there is still a lot that's in need of refinement. For instance, Im constantly bombarded with the "sign-in to your Oppo ID" notification, and there seems to be no option to turn that off.

There is little bloat as compared to the previous version of ColorOS, but the unnecessary Oppo App Store, an extra browser and a second messenger app are still there and can't be removed.

I do like the new UI however, with those big icons in the drop-down menu. There is also an app drawer, which is always a welcome feature for me. The point is that it may not be as clean as stock Android on the Nokia 8.1, but with time, you will get used to ColorOS.

Superb battery life

I saw nearly five-plus hours of screen on time and binged through half the third season of Hannibal (it's a great show). The 4,000 mAh battery is doing its job and it is doing it very well. Battery life while playing PUBG was a solid two hrs.

The phone comes with Oppos proprietary VOOC fast charging system, which can charge the device from 0-50 percent in 30 minutes, which is great for a 4,000 mAh battery. Fully charging the phone takes about an hour, which happens to be 50 percent faster than on the Nokia 8.1, which, do note, has a smaller, 3,500 mAh battery.

Verdict

Its easy to recommend the Oppo F11 Pro to buyers who are interested in owning a premium-looking smartphone but don't want to dig too deep. I mean, you could place it side-by-side with the Pixel 3 and I can guarantee those who are not aware of the Pixel 3 (Review) will choose the F11 Pro.

The camera, display, and battery of the device all receive heavy checkmarks, but the performance and software could do with some tweaks.

Get the Oppo F11 Pro if you're a sucker for looks and appreciate a great display and a great camera. For performance look no further than the Poco F1, and if it's clean software you seek, you have the Nokia 8.1.

The Oppo F11 Pro is retailing on Flipkart at a price of Rs 24,990.

Images: Omkar Godambe

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In a media statement issued on Friday afternoon, Anning said that the attacks highlighted the growing fear over an increasing Muslim presence in Australia and New Zealand and pinned the blame for the bloodshed on latter immigration policy.

Queensland Senator Fraser Anning has been slammed for his remarks in the wake of the New Zealand mosque shootings as he blamed the Muslim community for being "perpetrators" of violence all over the world and called Islam the "religious equivalent of fascism".

In a media statement issued on Friday afternoon, Anning said that the attacks highlighted the growing fear over an increasing Muslim presence in Australia and New Zealand and pinned the blame for the bloodshed on latter immigration policy.

I am utterly opposed to any form of violence within our community, and I totally condemn the actions of the gunman. However, while this kind of violent vigilantism can never be justified, what it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence. As always, left-wing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of todays shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views but this is all cliched nonsense. The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place," he said.

He concluded his statement with a passage from the Bible and said that those who followed a violent religion that called on them to murder cannot be too surprised when someone takes them at their word and responds in kind.

And while the statement has now been removed from his social media accounts, he later tweeted:

Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?  Senator Fraser Anning (@fraser_anning) March 15, 2019

Responding to criticism on his comments, Anning wrote on Twitter that he wonders if the outrage would be the same outrage "from the left wing" when the next "Muslim terrorist attack" occurs.

I wonder if there will be as much outrage from the left wing when the next Muslim terrorist attack occurs? Most likely silence and talk about lone wolf attacks, mental illness and no connection to Islam.  Senator Fraser Anning (@fraser_anning) March 15, 2019

He also shared an image of a protesting Muslim man carrying an inflammatory placard and asked if any left-wing leader would condemn such protests.

Will any left wingers condemn this? pic.twitter.com/PQo439pUyX  Senator Fraser Anning (@fraser_anning) March 15, 2019

Forty-nine people have been killed, and at least 20 are seriously injured, as gunmen targeted two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern described the attack as an "unprecedented act of violence."

Follow LIVE updates on the New Zealand mosque shootings here
China on Friday flatly rejected criticism of mass detainment of Muslim minorities in its restive Xinjiang region.

Geneva: China on Friday flatly rejected criticism of mass detainment of Muslim minorities in its restive Xinjiang region, insisting it has set up "campuses", not camps, in a bid to counter radicalisation.

China's vice foreign minister Le Yucheng, the head of a delegation speaking before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, slammed "ill-intentioned accusations against vocational training centres in Xinjiang."

He was responding to a long line of comments and recommendations regarding the situation in Xinjiang made during a so-called Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of China's rights record before the council last November.

A number of countries at the time cited estimates that some one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic minorities are being held in detention centres in Xinjiang, and asked China to halt the practice.

But Le insisted on Friday that such claims showed "a total disregard for the facts", and were aimed at "interference under the disguise of human rights."

"The training centres...are actually boarding schools or campuses, and not camps as claimed by the ill-intentioned few," stressing the official line that they are meant to help educate and rehabilitate people susceptible of falling "prey to terrorist extremism".

He said the "trainees" at the centres were free to go home regularly and to have contact with their families, and that those who graduated easily found jobs, allowing them to break "free of both extremist ideology and poverty.

"We are delighted to see on the faces of the trainees smiles of contentment and appreciation of the government." Le said there had been "thousands" of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang since the 1990s, but that thanks to the use of the "vocational training centres", not a single attack had taken place in the past 27 months.

"As the counter-terrorism situation improves, the training programme will be gradually downsized, leading to its completion," he said.

Nearly 100 countries requested the right to respond to China's remarks, but due to strict time constraints, only around a dozen were permitted to take the floor.

In advance, the rights council drew the name of the first country, Mali, from a hat, and from there countries were called upon in alphabetical order, through to the Philippines.

This meant that most critical voices from Europe and North America were not called upon, with only Norway speaking up against China's Xinjiang policies. Most other speakers took the opportunity to praise China for accepting and respect for human rights.

Non-governmental organisations were also given a chance to speak, but there too, groups praising China grabbed six of the 10 available speaking slots.

Activists said this showed that China had gone to great lengths to stifle criticism at the event.

John Fisher of Human Rights Watch commented on the lack of criticism during the event, suggesting that Beijing had coerced states into singing its praises.

"Let me start by acknowledging China's active participation in the UPR process  not just through its national report, but also through its tireless efforts to encourage such a large number of states to uncritically endorse its approach," he said.

Sarah Brooks of the International Service for Human Rights agreed, telling AFP that the numerous pro-China NGO's speaking at the event was "yet again an example of the investment they will make to buy silence and cover of abuse."
The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disaster  the second involving the model in five months  and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond.

Paris: A French investigation into the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash that killed 157 passengers and crew opened on Friday as US aerospace giant Boeing stopped delivering the top-selling aircraft. The MAX has been grounded worldwide following the disaster  the second involving the model in five months  and the fallout has left the company, regulators and airlines scrambling to respond.

"We are pausing the delivery of the 737 MAX until we come up with a solution," a Boeing spokesman said Thursday, adding: "We are going to continue the production but we are assessing our capacities." An Ethiopian delegation delivered the black boxes to France's BEA air safety agency "and the investigation process has started in Paris", Ethiopian Airlines said Friday on Twitter.

The BEA confirmed it had received the black box recorders from the plane, which was just four months old and crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday. BEA investigators will now try to retrieve information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster. Thousands of miles (kilometres) away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.

Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the black boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyze the data. The information that they contain helps explain 90 percent of all crashes, according to aviation experts. On Wednesday, US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between the Ethiopia crash and that of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October that killed 189 people.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said findings from the crash site and "newly refined satellite data" warranted "further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents." An FAA emergency order grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice, effectively taking the aircraft out of the skies globally.

The move came after a growing number of airlines and countries decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it is determined there are no safety issues. US President Donald Trump told reporters the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern".

FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency had been "working tirelessly" to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because of the damage to the flight data recorders. The new information shows "the track of that aeroplane was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight" to warrant the grounding of the aeroplanes so more information can be gathered to determine if there is a link, Elwell said Wednesday on CNBC. Boeing's shares have fallen 12 percent in the days after the crash in Ethiopia, wiping out nearly $30 billion in value.

The 737 MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model and it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service. There are 74 registered in the United States and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA. The accounts of the recent crashes were echoed in concerns registered by US pilots on how the 737 MAX 8 behaves.

At least four American pilots complained following the Lion Air crash that the aircraft would suddenly pitch downward shortly after takeoff, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by NASA. In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air disaster, pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane's trajectory in response. It was unclear if US transport authorities review the database or investigated the incidents.

However, the FAA said this week it had ordered Boeing to update its flight software and training. Questions about the Lion Air crash have honed in on a stall prevention system, the MCAS, designed to automatically point the plane's nose downwards if it is in danger of stalling.

According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the MCAS repeatedly pushed the nose down after takeoff. The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged to the ground.

According to The New York Times, air traffic controllers observed the Ethiopian Airlines plane "oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet" prior to the crash. Speaking in a "panicky voice," the doomed aircraft's captain requested permission to return to the airport almost immediately after takeoff as the plane "accelerated to abnormal speed," the newspaper reported Thursday, citing a person who had reviewed the air traffic communications.

"Break break, request back to home," the Times quoted the pilot as saying just prior to the crash. "Request vector (direction) for landing." Boeing was criticized after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the stall prevention system. Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said the doomed flight's captain was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours.
Mehbooba Mufti said that had a shooting like the one in New Zealand's Christchurch taken place in India, the leadership would have politicised it while indulging in war-mongering and covertly supporting attacks on Muslims.

New Delhi: Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chief Mehbooba Mufti on Friday stirred controversy by stating that had a shooting like the one in New Zealand's Christchurch taken place in India, the leadership would have politicised it while indulging in war-mongering and covertly supporting attacks on Muslims.

Mehbooba tweeted:

Admire how New Zealand PM conducted herself & addressed the media post #christchurchnz attacks. Clearly stating that there is no place for such terror attacks & that NZ is a home to all the migrant communities regardless of their religion. Respect for such leadership qualities.  Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) March 15, 2019

We all have a lesson or two to learn from it. Had the same incident happened here, the leadership would have politicised it, indulged in war mongering and covertly supported attacks on muslims.  Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) March 15, 2019

At least 49 people lost their lives while many others sustained injuries when gunmen opened fire at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday.

New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern said police have taken four people into custody over the gruesome shootings, with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirming that at least one attacker is an Australian citizen.
WASHINGTON/QUITO (Reuters) - An international human rights organisation has turned down a request by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that Ecuador, which has sheltered him for more than six years at its embassy in London, ease the conditions it has imposed on his residence there. A spokeswoman for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is linked to the Organization of American States, said the group rejected Assange's complaint

WASHINGTON/QUITO (Reuters) - An international human rights organisation has turned down a request by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that Ecuador, which has sheltered him for more than six years at its embassy in London, ease the conditions it has imposed on his residence there.

A spokeswoman for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is linked to the Organization of American States, said the group rejected Assange's complaint.

Assange's lawyer Jennifer Robinson had no immediate comment.

Assange took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That probe was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks.

He says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and has put pressure on him to leave by requiring him to pay for his medical bills and phone calls, as well as clean up after his pet cat.

He had sought the support of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in his case against Ecuador. While the commission did not back Assange, it said it reminded Ecuador of international law that no state should deport, return or extradite someone to another country where that person might face human rights abuses.

A friend who regularly visits Assange says he privately complains that Ecuador's government recently replaced Embassy diplomats sympathetic to Assange with officials who are much less friendly.

Last year, U.S. federal prosecutors in the state of Virginia mistakenly made public a document saying that Assange had been secretly indicted. Officials have since declined to confirm or deny he has been charged.

U.S. federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, have maintained a long-running grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. One source said it includes a probe into leaks of Central Intelligence Agency documents to the WikiLeaks website.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Alexandria ordered former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be jailed for contempt after she refused to testify about WikiLeaks before the grand jury.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington and Alexandra Valencia in Quito; Editing by Leslie Adler)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours including India after the upcoming general elections, Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Thursday, claiming that Islamabad has taken the first step on a new path to peace and progress.

Islamabad: Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours including India after the upcoming general elections, Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Thursday, claiming that Islamabad has taken the first step on a new path to peace and progress.

Recently, tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district in 14 February.

Khan, who announced visa reforms at a ceremony, said that Pakistan is confident today that it has taken the first step on a new path to peace and progress. "Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours  including India after the end of their elections.

"We will have good relations with all our neighbours and a peaceful Pakistan will be a prosperous Pakistan," he said as he announced major visa reforms, including online visa issuance facility, to attract tourists and investors. The elections in India will begin on 11 April and polling will be held over seven phases through 19 May, followed by counting of votes on 23 May.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party tweeted that the new e-visa scheme will available to visitors from 175 countries. "This is the first step to open up the country, the Naya (new) Pakistan," Khan said, adding that it would revive the confidence of 60s when Pakistan was making fast progress. The prime minister said that Pakistan would attract religious tourism from all over the world.

"Taxila was the centre of Buddhism. We have discovered a 40ft Buddha  the world's largest sleeping Buddha  which we have yet to share with the world. "Sikhs' holiest places like Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur were also in Pakistan. We also have very old sites for Hinduism in Pakistan, including Katas Raj," Khan said.

He also announced that the next season of the Pakistan Super League will be organised in Pakistan instead of Dubai. Officials said that initially, the e-visa facility will be available to nationals of Turkey, China, Malaysia, the UK and the UAE and later extended to other 170 countries. Business visas will be given to 90 countries, while 55 countries will be granted visa-on-arrival.
Christchurch New Zealand Mosque Shooting LIVE updates: Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan strongly condemned the attack by White supremacists at Christchurch that killed 49 people in two mosques. He said he blamed these terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 were the entire Muslim population has been blamed for the actions of a few.

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"A serious and evolving situation is occurring in Christchurch with an active shooter," police said in a statement.

Armed police in New Zealand swarmed central Christchurch Friday amid a shooting at a mosque in the South Island city.

Police commissioner Mike Bush said all schools in the city had been placed on lockdown in response to "a serious ongoing firearms incident"

Local media told AFP there were multiple casualties at one mosque and said another had been evacuated, and there were reports that members of the Bangladesh cricket team were also present at one site.

"Police are currently responding to reports of shots fired in central Christchurch at around 1:40 pm," it wrote.

There are no official information on casualties yet.

Player Tamim Iqbal tweeted that it was a "frightening experience" and that there were "active shooters".

They are safe. But they are mentally shocked. We have asked the team to stay confined in the hotel," he told AFP.

Bangladesh Cricket Board spokesman Jalal Yunus said most of the team were bussed to the mosque and were about to go inside when the incident happened.

Bangladesh's cricket team escaped unscathed after a shooting at a mosque in central Christchurch, an official told AFP on Friday.

Reports claim that Christchurch mosque shooting suspect wrote in a manifesto, "I chose firearms for the affect it would have on social discourse," also said he hoped to draw media attention and hoped to influence political matters in the United States

The mosque shooting suspect, reports say, wrote that he supported US president Donald Trump, but not in every regard.

Reports identify shooter as Brenton Tarrant, 28, of Australia. He allegedly streamed footage of himself live on Facebook.

New Zealand media reports of a shooting at a second mosque in the city of Christchurch.

"We urge New Zealanders to stay vigilant and report any suspicious behaviour immediately to 111," wrote New Zealand police on Twitter.

A person has been taken into custody, says a CNN report. Details on his or her identity are, however, unavailable still.

"Police has apprehended a person, but I don't have further details of him yet," she added.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern condemned the incident and said, "This is one of New Zealand's darkest days. It was an unprecedented act of violence."

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern says may be 'other offenders' in Christchurch shootings, reports AFP.

Police warn worshippers not to visit mosques 'anywhere in New Zealand'.

New Zealand police say 'multiple fatalities' have taken place in the mosque shooting.

Several people sitting through the lockdown commented in a tweet asking people not to reveal details on the shooters' identities. Many asked for others to pray for them.

The Guardian reported that police commissioner Mike Bush has warned: No one in the country must go to a mosque under any circumstances.

'No one must go to a mosque under any circumstances,' says police commissioner

An ESPN Cricinfo reporter who was with the Bangladeshi team when they managed to escape the site of the shooting, has uploaded a video of the team fleeing.

He said that he had a friend in another mosque in the area had told him a gunman had opened fire there as well and five people were dead.

"I was in the mosque. It's a big mosque and there were more than 200 people inside. The gunmen came from the backside. Gunshots went on for a long time. We had to jump the wall to escape. I saw lots of broken glass and bricks on the backside of the mosque," he said.

Speaking to CNN, witness Mohan Ibn Ibrahim said he was inside the mosque when the gunman opened fire.

"We are offering flexibility to anyone booked to travel to or from Christchurch today."

"We are deeply saddened by the shooting tragedy in #Christchurch city and our thoughts go out to all those involved.

One person is in custody and there have been people killed in two mosques, one on Deans Ave and one in Linwood.

TVNZ quoted the police as having confirmed that there have been multiple fatalities, and that there still is an active shooter scenario playing out.

"Police are aware there is extremely distressing footage relating to the incident in Christchurch circulating online. We would strongly urge that the link not be shared. We are working to have any footage removed," the New Zealand police tweeted.

Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities  New Zealand is their home  they are us.

"What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand," tweeted PM Jacinda Ardern.

Police has informed parents that there is no timeframe "at this stage" for when the lock down will be lifted. The children are being taken care of by schools, it assured.

"Due to the ongoing serious firearms incident in Central Christchurch Police would like to remind all parents and caregivers that schools across the city remain in lock down," writes NZ Police on Twitter.

'No timeframe when lockdown will be lifted,' says police

The third Test between New Zealand and Bangladesh has been called off following the shooting at a mosque in Christchurch

There have been reports of a third shooting outside a hospital and an unconfirmed shooting at a high school.

Third shooting likely to have taken place outside a hospital, say unconfirmed reports

He said one person was in custody but there may be other offenders and armed officers were attending a number of scenes.

"This is an evolving incident and we are working to confirm the facts, however we can confirm there have been a number of fatalities," commissioner Mike Bush said.

Local media reported at least nine people were dead and the South Island city was placed in lockdown as police hunted for an "active shooter."

It is not yet known if there was more than one person involved in the attack.

Australian news outlet 1 NEWS has reported that the person behind the shooting is an Australian citizen.

"They should not close the mosques in New Zealand," wrote politician Nicholas Sarwark. Writer Wajahat Ali chipped in with the politics of the attack. Others criticised the attack on peaceful worshippers.

"I heard three quick shots then after about 10 seconds it started again it must have been an automatic no one could pull a trigger that quick," he told AFP.

A Palestinian man in the mosque, who did not want to give his name, said he saw a man shot in the head.

The Masjid al Noor in central Christchurch was filled with worshippers, when the attack happened, as was a second mosque in suburban Linwood.

The mosques were packed with worshippers gathering for Friday afternoon prayers, and members of the Bangladesh cricket team were arriving when the shooter opened fire, AFP has reported.

Canterbury Police NZ tweeted: "We have a critical incident in Deans Ave Christchurch. Please avoid the area. We will give more in the near future."

According to TVNZ, Nazir saw multiple deaths and injuries, including three women on the ground outside the mosque.

"The second shot, I run, lots of people were sitting on the floor," he said. "The gun was (at the) front door, I run behind the mosque and I was sitting behind... and I called the police."

Witness Mohammed Nazir told TVNZ that he "heard the big sound, the gun" at about 1.45 p.m.

New Zealand police have warned all mosques countrywide to shut their doors after active shooters opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch city centre, reported CNN.

People from all walks of life note sadness and disbelief as reports of multiple shootings in the New Zealand city of Christchurch trickle in.

"In this picture, you can see "Gaston IV of Bearn" written over Christchurch shooter's weaponry. Gaston was viscount of Bearn was also known as "the Crusader" and fought in Reconquista of Spain and seige of Antioch against Turk muslims during the First Crusade," he wrote.

Strategic affairs analyst Divya Kumar Soti tweeted a photo of the weapon used in at least one of the mosque shootings.

Both the Bangladeshi and Kiwi teams and support staff groups are safe, it assured. The third Test between the two countries has been cancelled.

"Our heartfelt condolences go out to the families and friends of those affected by the shocking situation in Christchurch," the team wrote through its official Twitter handle.

Australian channel Nine News Melbourne has reported that there may be as many as 27 deaths in the twin mosque firings in Christchurch. AFP had reported local media as having quoted nine deaths.

The gunman entered this mosque first and began shooting with an automatic weapon, leading to what police has called "multiple fatalities".

Twitter user Mustafa Hamdani has uploaded an image of the outside of the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch where the attack took place.

New Zealand police, reported CNN, has said that four people (three men and one woman) are in custody over the Christchurch mosque shootings, but they "cannot presume that the danger is gone."

He added that there are lessons from the day which "we can call learn."

Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, Winston Peters, tweeted that this was an "awfully, awfully, sad day for New Zealand."

"We will ensure that everyone who needs to go home can go home," he said.

In his press conference where he announced that four have been taken into custody, New Zealand police commissioner Mike Bush said police are now seeking to "saturate" the city area to ensure that schools and other institutions can come out of lockdown.

"We would like to reassure members of the public that there is a large Police presence in the city and the safety of the community is our priority," it added.

"Police can now confirm the lock down of schools throughout Christchurch has been lifted," NZ police has tweeted.

He said he was born to a working class, low-income family  who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.

In a news.com.au report, the 73-page manifesto which Tarrant posted online is quoted. Tarrant, a 28-year-old has described himself as just a regular White man.

As is now known by now, the suspect, who identified himself on Twitter as Brenton Tarrant from Australia, had livestreamed his deadly attack on Facebook.

A Reddit spokesperson told Mac that they have been actively taking down all links associated with the video "as they become aware of them" because they violate its policy around glorifying violence.

He posted excerpts from both YouTube and Facebook's statements on the fact that these mediums were used by the shooter.

BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Mac has noted how various social media sites flagged or removed the shooter's live stream in varying degrees of haste.

The gunman was an ardent supporter of US president Donald Trump and wrote about him in his manifesto. He also mentions his unquestioning loyalty to black Republican Candace Owens.

Quoting from this 73-page manifesto, the news portal said Tarrant has described his reasons for the attack as to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people. The emphasis on "never" is Tarrant's own.

The gunman, Brenton Tarrant, wrote in his manifesto that he carried out the attack to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands, noted news.com.au.

Gunman wished to show invaders 'our land will never be their land'

However, some flights have been affected. "Aviation Security has increased its presence in the terminal as a precaution. Were caring for a number of people who are staying in the terminal while the advice from police is to stay indoors," it noted.

The Christchurch Airport, which until now had been noting that operations have been going on as normal, wrote on Twitter that is "still open".

Partridge wrote that Tarrant has family in Grafton of New South Wales. He is believed to have been living in New Zealand for the past three years.

Emma Partridge, a senior reporter of 9 News Sydney has revealed that the gunman allegedly involved in the New Zealand shooting is indeed 'Brenton Tarrant'.

After another few minutes, he leaves again, gets in his vehicle and drives away, talking to himself throughout."

He then is seen re-entering the mosque and again begins shooting, continuing to methodically move through the mosque. Several victims can be seen in the footage, many lying on top of one another motionless in a corner of the room.

The 17-minute video, which appeared to be recorded on a helmet camera, shows his drive to the mosque, followed by a harrowing nearly two minutes of his firing on the worshipers in one of the mosques before fleeing the building and running back to his car and swapping weapons.

"Shortly before the shooting, someone appearing to be the gunman publicly posted links to a manifesto on Twitter and 8chan, an online forum. The 8chan post included a link to what appeared to be the gunmans Facebook page, where he said he would soon broadcast live video of the attack.

A New York Times report describes what the live stream of the shooter showed. The videos have been taken off most social media platforms now:

Police have asked all mosques nationally to shut their doors, and advised people to refrain from visiting the places of worship.

"At this stage we will not be discussing the offenders possible motivations or the causes of this incident,"tweeted New Zealand Police.

"I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person," he wrote.

Swedish YouTube star Felix Kjellberg, popularly known as PewDiePie, has reacted to the fact that the alleged shooter Brenton Tarrant asked the viewers of his Facebook livestream to follow him, before going out on the rampage.

"I condemn the violent, extremist, right-wing terrorist attack that has stolen the lives of so many innocent New Zealanders as they went about their peaceful practice of worship at their mosques in Christchurch today," he wrote on Twitter.

Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrisson registered his shock and sadness at the shootings.

Local media has pegged the number of people dead between nine and 27.

While police have said that a "significant'' number of people have been killed in the two shootings at Christchurch mosques, there is no information on what the exact number is.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has confirmed that 40 people have died in the two shootings.

Those arrested were not on Intelligence agency watchlists, New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern has confirmed.

"Members of the public can see the footage of brothers, fathers, sons being brought into hospitals," added Ardern.

Ardern assures that the main gunman has been arrested. She adds that there have been three individuals apprehended. Police Commissioner Mike Bush had earlier said there were four people who were taken into custody.

Two of the suspects' cars were fitted with explosives, she said. The cars have been stripped off them, Ardern added.

"One of the offenders had publicised their ideology. We have no reason to assume that the others who have been arrested were of any other ideology," said PM Jacinda Ardern, while addressing a press conference in the aftermath of the attack.

Likely that all offenders had same ideology: New Zealand PM

Tonight is about ensuring the security of the attackers, Ardern added.

"This act is not an expression of who we are as a nation. Of course it will take time to heal. Our thoughts and our prayers are with those who were affected. We will try to retain our identity as a nation," the PM said.

Act not an expression of who we are as a nation: PM

New Zealand Herald has reported that armed police are stationed at Auckland's Britomart Train Station. A section of Galway Street in the city has been cordoned off around two backpacks left unattended.

An explosion was heard at Auckland's Britomart, barely moments after New Zealand prime minsiter Jacinda Ardern had finished briefing the media on the security situation in the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings.

The train station has been blocked off to motorists, the news outlet reported.

A police spokesman confirmed to NZ Herald that armed police were at the Britomart Train Station site, where backpacks was found unattended.

The explosions heard at Auckland's Britomart Station have been confirmed as controlled detonations, reported NZ Herald.

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern had said in her press conference that she has received word from Morrison.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced that he will request all institutions to fly the Australian flag at half mast out of "respect and condolence" for those who were killed in New Zealand.

This is being assumed to be because of the presence of unclaimed backpacks in the station. The bags contained explosives which were detonated by police in a controlled manner.

The official handle of Auckland Transport has confirmed that the Britomart Station and its surrounding areas are all closed, leading to a temporary pause in train and bus services.

Around 200 family members are on site awaiting news of their loved ones. Together with police we are providing support to these people," the Hospital noted .

"Twelve operating theatres are currently in use and due to the nature of some of the injuries, many people will need multiple surgeries.

"Forty-eight patients, ranging from young children to adults with gunshot wounds are being treated at Christchurch Hospital. Injuries range from critical to minor. Additional patients with gunshot wounds were presented to other health facilities in the community," a statement by the hospital reads.

He claimed that the real reason behind the violence perpetrated on people in Christchurch was due to New Zealand's immigration policy.

He also tweeted on the issue, while police were dealing with an active situation, asking, "Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?"

In the aftermath of two shootings which killed 40 people in two Christchurch mosques, an Australian senator, Fraser Anning, has come in the face of criticism after saying that the attacks pointed to the "fear" in the city over Muslim presence. Anning released a full statement exploring his opinions on the social trends which led to this attack, ostensibly blaming Muslim people for the attack.

United Kingdom prime minister Theresa May offered her "deepest condolences" to the people of New Zealand in the aftermath of the shootings in Christchurch that killed 40 people.

A man, in his late 20s, has been charged with murder, say reports. Two others are in custody for possession of firearms.

The two other people arrested in possession of firearms are still being investigated, he added.

One of those arrested may have had nothing to do with the attack, New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said.

Police have recovered a number of firearms from both of the scenes, Linwood Avenue and Deans Avenue, he added.

"Three other people were apprehended. We believe one of those persons who was armed and was at the scene may have had nothing to do with this incident, and the two other people that have been apprehended, again in possession of firearms in the general environment, we are working through to understand what their involvement is," he was quoted by The Guardian as having said.

In his statement, the NZ Police Commissioner Bush said the man in his late 20s (who is believed widely to be the Brenton Tarrant, who uploaded the live stream and his manifesto) will appear in the Christchurch Court on Saturday morning.

The New South Wales counter-terrorism police are investigating the background of Brenton Tarrant, a former student at Grafton High, who is believed to be the man in his late 20s who carried out at least once of the two mass shootings at Christchurch, reports say.

"At the Deans Avenue mosque, we now know that 41 people have lost their lives. And at the Linwood mosque, 7 have lost their lives. Of the 40 people who have been treated at Christchurch Hospital, one has now passed. So the total number of people who have died in this horrendous event are 49," said the Police Commissioner, in his briefing.

"None of us had ever imagined that such a thing would happened. We are very lucky to have escaped. There were quite a few of us in the bus, around 16 or 17, who had gone for namaz. Only two players were in the hotel, the rest of us had gone there. We had almost reached, we could see the mosque. We were fewer than 50 metres away. Had we reached 3 to 4 minutes earlier, then we would have been inside the mosque. We are very lucky to have escaped, we could see it all happen outside the mosque, just as you watch a movie. We were in the bus for eight to ten minutes. We had crouched down to escape any possible firing," he is heard saying.

Bangladesh cricket team manager Khaled Mashud Pilot spoke to the media following the shootings Christchurch. The Bangladeshi team managed to narrowly escape a shooting.

Morrison, who had earlier said Australia was a country of all faiths, also criticised the rightwing Senator Fraser Anning who had blamed the New Zealand attack on immigraton.

As the Australian identity of the man considered to be the main suspect, Brenton Tarrant, emerges, the Australian PM has been among those who have issued a call to maintain peace. He has called Tarrant "a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist".

The New Zealand Police, fresh off its challenge in dealing with two mass shootings has published a slew of tweets ensuring that families grappling with the aftermath of the attacks have minimal struggle while searching for their loved ones.

As Twitterati noted, Trump did not even write a single line of condolence.

The US president only tweeted a link to the rightwing news website Breitbart, the founder of which, Steve Bannon, was his media adviser for a while.

United States president Donald Trump, who the alleged shooter has named in his manifesto as someone he deeply admires, has responded in an odd fashion to the tragedy which left 49 people dead.

Even Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealands national security threat level has been raised to high from low.

The events that took place on Friday have shocked a nation where gun violence is relatively rare, reported Bloomberg.

New Zealand's national security threat level has undergone an enormous shift in the light of the surprise terrorist shooting attack and has been lifted from low to high.

"This reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families," he tweeted.

Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan also "strongly condemned" the attack by White supremacists at Christchurch that killed 49 people in two mosques. He said he blamed these terror attacks on the "current Islamophobia post-9/11" were the entire Muslim population has been blamed for the actions of a few.

Surrounding houses, along with the property in question, have been evacuated.

Police have swarmed into a property on Somerville Street in the city of Dunedin in response to a situation having arisen in relation to the attacks in Christchurch.

The New South Wales counter-terrorism police are investigating the background of Brenton Tarrant, a former student at Grafton High, who is believed to be the man in his late 20s who carried out at least once of the two mass shootings at Christchurch, reports say.

"At the Deans Avenue mosque, we now know that 41 people have lost their lives. And at the Linwood mosque, 7 have lost their lives. Of the 40 people who have been treated at Christchurch Hospital, one has now passed. So the total number of people who have died in this horrendous event are 49," said the Police Commissioner, in his briefing.

Bangladesh Team Manager Khaled Mashud Pilot speaks to the media following the incident of shooting in Christchurch. Blackcaps (NZC) and the Bangladesh Cricket Bord : Tigers (BCB) has been made to cancel the Hagley Oval Test pic.twitter.com/CH80ohDFMO

"None of us had ever imagined that such a thing would happened. We are very lucky to have escaped. There were quite a few of us in the bus, around 16 or 17, who had gone for namaz. Only two players were in the hotel, the rest of us had gone there. We had almost reached, we could see the mosque. We were fewer than 50 metres away. Had we reached 3 to 4 minutes earlier, then we would have been inside the mosque. We are very lucky to have escaped, we could see it all happen outside the mosque, just as you watch a movie. We were in the bus for eight to ten minutes. We had crouched down to escape any possible firing," he is heard saying.

Bangladesh cricket team manager Khaled Mashud Pilot spoke to the media following the shootings Christchurch. The Bangladeshi team managed to narrowly escape a shooting.

The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting. Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament.

Morrison, who had earlier said Australia was a country of all faiths, also criticised the rightwing Senator Fraser Anning who had blamed the New Zealand attack on immigraton.

As the Australian identity of the man considered to be the main suspect, Brenton Tarrant, emerges, the Australian PM has been among those who have issued a call to maintain peace. He has called Tarrant "a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist".

3/6 ...appropriate enquiries to find missing persons. People will have the option to make this information visible to the public or kept private when they fill out the required form. People living in New Zealand can also register missing persons on 0800 115 019.

2/6 The RFL website is a tool where the public can self-register they are alive so family and friends know they are safe. Members of the public can also register missing persons. Police will be working with New Zealand Red Cross who is managing the website, making all...

1/6 Police wish to notify the public of the Restoring Family Links (RFL) website where people can register missing persons or register themselves as alive. Police have asked Red Cross to activate the website due to the serious firearms incident in Christchurch.

The New Zealand Police, fresh off its challenge in dealing with two mass shootings has published a slew of tweets ensuring that families grappling with the aftermath of the attacks have minimal struggle while searching for their loved ones.

As Twitterati noted, Trump did not even write a single line of condolence.

The US president only tweeted a link to the rightwing news website Breitbart, the founder of which, Steve Bannon, was his media adviser for a while.

United States president Donald Trump, who the alleged shooter has named in his manifesto as someone he deeply admires, has responded in an odd fashion to the tragedy which left 49 people dead.

Even Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealands national security threat level has been raised to high from low.

The events that took place on Friday have shocked a nation where gun violence is relatively rare, reported Bloomberg.

New Zealand's national security threat level has undergone an enormous shift in the light of the surprise terrorist shooting attack and has been lifted from low to high.

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim. This has been done deliberately to also demonize legitimate Muslim political struggles. https://t.co/5bBREoayLz

"This reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families," he tweeted.

Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan also "strongly condemned" the attack by White supremacists at Christchurch that killed 49 people in two mosques. He said he blamed these terror attacks on the "current Islamophobia post-9/11" were the entire Muslim population has been blamed for the actions of a few.

2/2 Alternative accommodation has been provided for residents requiring it and cordons are in place in the Somerville Street and Everton Road area. There is no further information available at this time.

Surrounding houses, along with the property in question, have been evacuated.

Police have swarmed into a property on Somerville Street in the city of Dunedin in response to a situation having arisen in relation to the attacks in Christchurch.

Christchurch New Zealand Mosque Shooting LATEST updates: Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan "strongly condemned" the attack by White supremacists at Christchurch that killed 49 people in two mosques. He said he blamed these terror attacks on the "current Islamophobia post-9/11" were the entire Muslim population has been blamed for the actions of a few.

New Zealand's national security threat level has undergone an enormous shift in the light of the surprise terrorist shooting attack and has been lifted from low to high. Police Commissioner Mike Bush said as many as 1,000 police personnel are deployed in and around Christchurch.

United States president Donald Trump, who the alleged shooter has named in his manifesto as someone he deeply admires, has responded in an odd fashion to the tragedy which left 49 people dead. The US president only tweeted a link to the rightwing news website Breitbart, the founder of which, Steve Bannon, was his media adviser for a while. As Twitterati noted, Trump did not even write a single line of condolence.

As the Australian identity of the man considered to be the main suspect, Brenton Tarrant, emerges, the Australian PM has been among those who have issued a call to maintain peace. He has called Tarrant "a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist".

Morrison, who had earlier said Australia was a country of all faiths, also criticised the rightwing Senator Fraser Anning who had blamed the New Zealand attack on immigraton.

A man, believed to be in his late twenties, has been charged with murder, say reports. Two others are in custody for possession of firearms. New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said a revised total of 49 people have been killed in the Christchurch mosque attacks.

Forty-eight patients, ranging from young children to adults with gunshot wounds are being treated at Christchurch Hospital, the hospital said in a statement. Twelve operating theatres are currently in use and due to the nature of some of the injuries, many people will need multiple surgeries, the hospital said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced that he will request all institutions to fly the Australian flag at half mast out of "respect and condolence" for those who were killed in New Zealand. New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern had said in her press conference that she has received word from Morrison.

The explosions heard at Auckland's Britomart Station have been confirmed as controlled detonations. Fresh explosions were heard there, barely moments after New Zealand prime minisiter Jacinda Ardern had finished briefing the media on the security situation in the aftermath of the Christchurch shootings.

New Zealand Herald has reported that armed police are stationed at Auckland's Britomart Train Station. A section of Galway Street in the city has been cordoned off around two backpacks left unattended.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has assured that the main gunman has been arrested. She added that three individuals had been apprehended. Police Commissioner Mike Bush had earlier said there were four people who were taken into custody.

She has confirmed that 40 people have died in the two shootings.

Police have said that a "significant'' number of people have been killed in the two shootings at Christchurch mosques. However, they have not confirmed the precise number. Local media has pegged the number of people dead between nine and 27.

Thanking people for their continued support, New Zealand Police tweeted that at this stage it will not be discussing the offenders' possible motivations or the causes of behind the incident. The cops reiterated their demand for all mosques nationally to shut their doors, and advised people to refrain from visiting the places of worship.

The gunman, Brenton Tarrant, wrote in his manifesto that he carried out the attack to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands, noted news.com.au.

Quoting from this manifesto, the news portal said Tarrant has described his reasons for the attack as to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands, our homelands are our own and that, as long as a white man still lives, they will NEVER conquer our lands and they will never replace our people. The emphasis on "never" is Tarrant's own.

The gunman was an ardent supporter of US president Donald Trump and wrote about him in his manifesto. He also mentions his unquestioning loyalty to black Republican Candace Owens.

The suspect, who identified himself on Twitter as Brenton Tarrant from Australia, had livestreamed his deadly attack on Facebook. In a news.com.au report, the 73-page manifesto which Tarrant posted online is quoted. Tarrant, a 28-year-old has described himself as just a regular White man.

He said he was born to a working class, low-income family  who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.

New Zealand police, reported CNN, has said that four people, including three men and one woman, are in custody over the Christchurch mosque shootings, but they "cannot presume that the danger is gone."

Australian channel Nine News Melbourne has reported that there may be as many as 27 deaths in the twin mosque firings in Christchurch. AFP had reported local media as having quoted nine deaths. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has called it New Zealand's "darkest day".

New Zealand police have warned all mosques countrywide to shut their doors after active shooters opened fire in two mosques in Christchurch city centre.

Local media told AFP that at least nine people were dead and the South Island city was placed in lockdown as police hunted for an "active shooter."

"Police are aware there is extremely distressing footage relating to the incident in Christchurch circulating online. We would strongly urge that the link not be shared. We are working to have any footage removed," the New Zealand police tweeted.

TVNZ quoted the police as having confirmed that there have been multiple fatalities, and that there still is an active shooter scenario playing out.

One person is in custody and there have been people killed in two mosques, one on Deans Ave and one in Linwood.

Scared hostage reports shooter held outside Papanui. Twitter has suspended an account purportedly used by New Zealand mass shooting suspect, a journalist has reported. Facebook too has suspended the account that was used to live stream the massacre.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern condemned the incident and said, "This is one of New Zealand's darkest days. It was an unprecedented act of violence. Police has apprehended a person, but I don't have further details of him yet," she added.

Six people have been reported dead, New Zealand local media reported and they also reported of a second shooting at another mosque in Christchurch itself. Bangladesh's cricket team escaped unscathed after a shooting at a mosque in central Christchurch, an official told AFP on Friday.

Bangladesh Cricket Board spokesman Jalal Yunus said most of the team were bussed to the mosque and were about to go inside when the incident happened.

Armed police in New Zealand swarmed central Christchurch Friday amid a shooting at a mosque in the South Island city.

"A serious and evolving situation is occurring in Christchurch with an active shooter," police said in a statement.

"Police are responding with its full capability to manage the situation, but the risk environment remains extremely high."

Local media said there were multiple casualties at one mosque and said another had been evacuated, and there were reports that members of the Bangladesh cricket team were also present at one site.

Police commissioner Mike Bush said all schools in the city had been placed in lockdown in response to "a serious ongoing firearms incident".

"Police urge anyone in central Christchurch to stay off the streets and report any suspicious behaviour," he said in a statement.

An eyewitness told Radio New Zealand he heard shots fired and four people were lying on the ground, with "blood everywhere".

ESPN Cricinfo reporter Mohammed Isam said members of the Bangladesh cricket team, who are due to play a Test match in Christchurch tomorrow escaped from the mosque.

"They ran back through Hagley Park back to the Oval," he tweeted.
A solemn New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Friday the deadly mosque shootings in Christchurch had plunged the country into one of its 'darkest days'.

Christchurch: A solemn New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Friday the deadly mosque shootings in Christchurch had plunged the country into one of its "darkest days". "Clearly, what has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence," Ardern said in an address to a shocked nation.

A gunman opened fire inside the Masjid al Noor mosque during afternoon prayers, causing multiple fatalities. "Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here," Ardern said.

"They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They should have been in a safe environment," she said.

One person is in custody, but police said it was not yet clear if there were other people involved. "There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme and unprecedented violence," Ardern added.

"For now, my thoughts, and I'm sure the thoughts of all New Zealanders, are with those who have been affected, and also with their families." Her comments were echoed by the Leader of the Opposition Simon Bridges.

"We stand with and support the New Zealand Islamic community," he said. "No one in this country should live in fear, no matter their race or religion, their politics or their beliefs."

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison was among the foreign leaders who expressed their concern. "I'm horrified by the reports I'm following of the serious shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand," he said. "The situation is still unfolding but our thoughts and prayers are with our Kiwi cousins."
Donald Trump put out a statement on the social media platform conveying his 'warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand'.

After Donald Trump was raked across the coals on social media for simply tweeting out a link to the homepage of Breitbart, a conservative, "far-right" American news platform after the twin shootings in New Zealand, the US president deleted the tweet and instead put out a statement on the social media platform conveying his "warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand".

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

Information about only one of the apprehended suspects has filtered through, who also reportedly live-streamed the dastardly attack and uploaded a 'manifesto' of sorts revealing details about himself. One of the gunmen believed to be responsible for the attack had expressed admiration for Trump in the 73-page manifesto.

In a document detailing his intentions behind the attack, the gunman said that he was a supporter of Trump's policies. He also said that he was inspired by Candace Owens, who is an American conservative commentator. Journalists, activists and the general public from all over the world have condemned Trump's tweet, which is "bereft of condolence"
As the international community reels under the shock of the blatantly hate-driven shootings in two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch, US president Donald Trump has invited criticism for his tweet after the incident which only contains the link to the homepage of Breitbart, a conservative, 'far right' American news platform.

As the international community reels under the shock of the hate-driven shootings in two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch, US president Donald Trump has invited criticism for his tweet after the incident which only contains the link to the homepage of Breitbart, a conservative, "far right" American news platform.

Even though there is no official confirmation about the motives of the suspects in the shootings  which have resulted in the deaths of 49 people  preliminary media reports and one of the suspects' 'self-declaration' of sorts suggests Islamophobic and anti-immigrant undercurrents to the deadly attack.

However, information about only one of the apprehended suspects have filtered through, who also reportedly live-streamed the dastardly attack and uploaded a 'manifesto' of sorts revealing details about himself. One of the gunman believed to be responsible for the attack had expressed admiration for Trump in the 73-page manifesto.

In this document detailing his intention behind the attack, the gunman said that he was a supporter of Trump's policies. He also said that he was inspired by Candace Owens, who is an American conservative commentator. Journalists, activists and the general public from all over the world have condemned Trump's tweet, which is "bereft of condolence". An activist also posted links of Democrats in the race for the US Presidential Election in 2020.

May our country survive your hate and weakness.  Shannon Coulter (@shannoncoulter) March 15, 2019

The New Zealand Mosque shooter says in his manifesto that he admires Donald Trump because Trump is a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.  Christopher O'Riley (@cjoriley) March 15, 2019

No words of condolences?

No words of mourning?

No words of support?

No words of condemning the attack? Just a useless link to a conspiracy website that has been proven to push lies and right wing extremism. You make me sick.  Ida Skibenes  (@ida_skibenes) March 15, 2019

I think you misspelled Christchurch.  Rogue NASA (@RogueNASA) March 15, 2019

You're just out here plugging Breitbart for no reason whatsoever? Cool. That's a totally normal, presidential thing to do. Especially in the midst of what's happening in Christchurch. Which is a city in NZ by the way, not a place of worship where you inexplicably sign bibles.  Daddy Files (@DaddyFiles) March 15, 2019

How about tweeting about the horrific mass-shooting at the #NewZealand mosques, and acting like a world leader instead of a world buffoon on Twitter. Shame on you... #Trump  Andy Ostroy (@AndyOstroy) March 15, 2019

With inputs from agencies
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday urged the international community to 'stand united against anti-Muslim hatred'.

United Nations: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday urged the international community to "stand united against anti-Muslim hatred" and all forms of bigotry and terror following the shootings at two mosques in New Zealand that left at least 49 dead and many others wounded.

"I'm saddened & strongly condemn the shooting of innocent people as they prayed peacefully in mosques in New Zealand. I express my deepest condolences to the victims' families. Today and every day, we must stand united against anti-Muslim hatred, & all forms of bigotry & terror," the UN Chief tweeted.

In a statement issued by his spokesman, the Secretary-General said he is "shocked and appalled" at the terrorist attack at the two mosques in Christchurch. He extended his deepest condolences to the families of the victims and to the Government and people of New Zealand.

"The Secretary General recalls the sanctity of mosques and all places of worship. He calls upon all people on this holy day for Muslims to show signs of solidarity with the bereaved Islamic community," his spokesman said.

Guterres reiterated the urgency of working better together globally to counter Islamophobia and eliminate intolerance and violent extremism in all its form.

The gunman, who police have described as being in his late 20s, has been arrested and charged with murder. According to news reports, he live-streamed himself via a head-mounted camera online, firing at worshippers inside the Al Noor mosque in the largest city on the South Island of New Zealand, Christchurch. A second attack also took place at the city's Linwood Mosque.

Police have asked the public not to share the "extremely distressing" footage posted by the gunman online.

Meanwhile, Facebook has reportedly taken down the gunman's Facebook and Instagram accounts, which allegedly contained racist and anti-immigrant views.

Two other men and one woman were also detained in connection with the terror attacks, although one was subsequently released.

President of the General Assembly Maria Fernanda Espinosa strongly condemned the terror attacks against two mosques, saying, "This heinous act of extreme violence against a house of worship is an abhorrent crime."

She stressed that more must be done to combat intolerance, hate speech and extremism for the sake of humanity, her spokesperson Monica Grayley told reporters.

Other senior UN officials took to Twitter on Friday to express their condolences and horror at the attacks in New Zealand.

Director General of the International Organization for Migration Antonio Vitorino extended his "sincere condolences" to victims' families and expressed deep sadness over "the terrible loss of life", pointing out that "it is believed that among the dead and injured were many refugees and migrants".

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi tweeted a picture of the New Zealand flag with a message saying the UNHCR stands "firmly with the people and government of New Zealand in mourning, prayer and solidarity.

"We grieve with children facing the profound shock that a parent is never coming home," tweeted Executive Director of the UN Children's Fund Henrietta Fore, calling the aggression "a senseless attack on a peaceful community and the universal right to freedom of worship".
Choe Son Hui questioned the claim by Donald Trump at a news conference after the talks in Hanoi broke down that the North was seeking the lifting of all sanctions against it, and said it was seeking only the ones that are directed at its civilian economy

Pyongyang: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon make a decision on whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain the country's moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, a senior North Korean official said, noting the US threw away a golden opportunity at the recent summit between their leaders.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, addressing an urgent meeting on Friday of diplomats and foreign media in Pyongyang, including The Associated Press, said the North was deeply disappointed by the failure of the two sides to reach any agreements at the Hanoi summit between Kim and President Donald Trump.

She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States takes measures that are commensurate to the changes it has taken such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests and changes its "political calculation."

Choe, who attended the 27-28 February 27-28 in Hanoi, said Kim was puzzled by what she called the "eccentric" negotiation position of the US. She suggested that while Trump was more willing to talk, the US position was hardened by the uncompromising demands of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton.

"Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful," she added.

She said it was entirely up to Kim whether to continue the launch and test moratorium, and said she expects he will "clarify his position" within a short period of time.

"On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission said, 'For what reason do we have to make this train trip again?'" she said.

"I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the US will eventually put the situation in danger. We have neither the intention to compromise with the US in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation."

Choe questioned the claim by Trump at a news conference after the talks in Hanoi broke down that the North was seeking the lifting of all sanctions against it, and said it was seeking only the ones that are directed at its civilian economy.

After the summit had ended, State Department officials clarified that was indeed the North's position, but said the lifting of economic sanctions was such a big demand that it would essentially subsidize the North's continued nuclear activity.

Choe said it was the US that was being too demanding and inflexible. "What is clear is that the US has thrown away a golden opportunity this time," she said.

"I'm not sure why the US came out with this different description. We never asked for the removal of sanctions in their entirety. This time we understood very clearly that the United States has a very different calculation to ours," she added.

She refused to comment directly when asked by one of the ambassadors about news reports the North may be preparing for another missile launch or satellite launch.

"Whether to maintain this moratorium or not is the decision of our chairman of the state affairs commission," she said, using one of Kim's titles.

"He will make his decision in a short period of time." Journalists were not allowed to ask questions during the briefing, which lasted nearly an hour.
China worries that with the end of the war in Syria, out-of-work jihadists will end up in its backyard

From the images which illustrate the pages of the Majma al-tawarikh, the magnificent historical manuscript that emerged from the city of Herat around 1425CE, we may attempt to imagine how it may have appeared: the grim-faced communist, president Xi Jinping, metamorphosed into a cherubic archangel Gabriel with red and purple wings, appearing, deus ex machina, to save the prophet of a new, Islamic world order, Maulana Masood Azhar Alvi, from the torments of a tyrants prison.

In 2016, a Jaish-e-Mohammed fidayeen unit had stormed the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot, and hoping to avert a crisis, Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif jailed the jihadist leader.

India and its paid agents were going after him. The Sharif government registered a case against him and was arresting his associates, pro-India media was running a campaign against himChina intervened and declined the Indian request to put him on the list of terrorists, wrote the Jaish ideologue Naveed Masood Hashmi.

This is how god works, the cleric exulted, this is the way of the almighty.

This week, dismayed Indians have struggled to make sense of Chinas latest shoot-down of efforts to have Azhar listed as a terrorist by the United Nations. Like its predecessors, Prime Minister Narendra Modis government built the case for proscribing Azhar on high-principles appeals, arguing there ought not be double standards on terrorism.

These appeals to universal moral values, the kind prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru would have been proud of, have great persuasive force: its hard, after all, to make the case for popping babies in microwave ovens. But, the world does not run on high moral principles. Behind Chinas actions is the relentless pursuit of its national interests.

In 2017, president Xi vowed to build a great wall of iron to protect Muslim-majority Xinjiang province from jihadist violence. The end of the war in Syria is a security nightmare for Beijing. Estimates of how many Xinjiang-origin jihadists there were in Syria vary some say 1,000 or 2,000, 2,000 or 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000, and some say even more, Beijings special envoy Xie Xiaoyan said last summer.

Ledgers recovered by US forces, recording details of women members of the Islamic State, bear out these numbers. Of the 1,139 women listed, 76 reported Xinjiang as their place of origin, making Chinas far-western region the third most common place of origin after Dagestan with 200, and Turkey with 124.

To put these numbers in context, consider this: 23 Indians are known to have joined in the fighting in Syria; Pakistan and Indonesia a few hundred each. Elsewhere in Asia, the potential risks have been demonstrated: it took the Philippines armed forces five months of brutal fighting to recapture the city of Marawi from Islamic State fighters.

Beijing fears that the jihadists evicted from Syria could end up on its peripheries and then use Afghanistan and Pakistan to launch an insurgency in Xinjiang.

From the biography of Abu Omar al-Turkistani, a senior commander in al-Qaedas ethnic-Uighur affiliate, the Turkistan Islamic Party, we know Xinjiang jihadists do indeed have deep roots in the region. Xinjiang-born al-Turkistani fought with Osama bin Laden against the United States at Tora Bora, and went on to spend a decade in a Pakistani jail. Then he returned to Afghanistan, joined a group linked to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan before moving to Syria to fight alongside al-Qaeda in Aleppo and Latakia. He was killed in a January 2017 drone strike in northwestern Syria.

Beijing has reacted with remarkable focus to the slightest hint of Islamist challenge, cracking down on visible signs of religious expression in Xinjiang, like long beards and veils. It is also flooding the region with cash and migrants from elsewhere in China.

That hasnt, however, put an end to the problem: the 2016 car-bombing of the Chinese mission in Bishkek, the 2015 slaughter at the Aksu coal mines, the 2014 killings in Kunming, and the 2013 bombing at Beijings iconic Tiananmen Square are all evidence of a deep threat.

Iron walls to block threat from across the Karokaram mountains is critical to China, and Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence agency key to building them. The ISI can not only contain jihadists inside Pakistan, but exercise influence over their one-time patrons, like the Afghan Taliban.

For Beijing, irking India is a small price to pay for keeping the ISI happy, especially when the debate concerns a terrorist who has the great virtue of never having spoken out against Beijings persecution of Xinjiangs Muslims.

Even though China does not want the instability and economic costs that would come with India-Pakistan conflict, anything short of an outright war is an acceptable price to pay.

New Delhi needs to make a dispassionate appraisal of what sanctioning Azhar is actually worth. The sanctioning of the Lashkar-e-Taibas parent organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and its chief, Hafiz Saeed, after 26/11 hasnt forced Pakistan to shut down either its military infrastructure or charitable operations.

Even though the United States treasury department has had stringent sanctions in place against Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar for years, it has done nothing to stop him from living in all but plain sight in Karachi.

The Jaish, it is often forgotten, has been sanctioned, as an organisation, since 2001 but that hasnt stopped it from building a seminary in Bahawalpur, running training camps, or staging attacks.

Indeed, the UN 1267 committees annual monitoring reports show that the Taliban have expanded their narcotics operations and revenues, despite international proscription. The bankruptcy of the global sanctions regime put in place after 9/11 is no more graphically illustrated by the fact that its principal target, al-Qaeda, today controls exponentially greater territory than it did then.

Fancy diplomatic moves play well on television but arent going to make India more secure. New Delhi needs to focus on growing the countrys counter-terrorism capacity and building smart alliances with countries facing the same enemies such as Afghanistan and Iran.

Leverage and capacity win wars, not words. The post-9/11 world is a lot like the world before itunprincipled and unscrupulous. India has to learn to work in the world that exists, not the world it wishes for.
An airline spokesman has said pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines plane was given permission to return. But the plane crashed minutes later, outside Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board

Addis Ababa: The pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed requested permission "in a panicky voice" to return to the airport shortly after takeoff, The New York Times reported on Friday.

The report cited "a person who reviewed air traffic communications" from Sunday's flight saying controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by hundreds of feet, with its speed appearing unusually fast.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return. But the plane crashed minutes later, outside Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board.

French authorities now have the plane's flight data and voice recorders for analysis. The agency in charge of the review said it was unclear whether the data could be retrieved.

In Ethiopia, officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. Countries including the United States have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 as the US-based company faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

The decision to send the flight recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the United States, which held out longer than most other countries in grounding the jets. The US National Transportation Safety Board sent three investigators to help French authorities.

Boeing executives announced that they had paused delivery of the Max, although the company planned to continue building the jets while it weighs the effect of the grounding on production.

The US Federal Aviation Administration grounded the planes on Wednesday, saying regulators had new satellite evidence that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610. That flight crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October 2018, killing 189 people.

The Max jets are likely to be idle for weeks while Boeing tries to assure regulators around the world that the planes are safe. At a minimum, aviation experts say, the plane maker will need to finish updating software that might have played a role in the Lion Air crash.

Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step, while reiterating its "full confidence" in the safety of the 737 Max. Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jet's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Satellite-based data showed that both the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport.

How long the planes stay grounded depends largely on what investigators find on the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director for the NTSB.

The Max is the latest upgrade to the Boeing 737s. Because its engines were larger and heavier, they were placed higher and farther forward on the wings. That created concern that the plane might be slightly more prone to an aerodynamic stall if not flown properly, so Boeing developed software to prevent that.

Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether the software automatically pushed the plane's nose down repeatedly, and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem by throwing toggle switches and canceling the automated nose-down commands.

Ethiopian Airlines says its pilots received special training on how to deal with the Max's anti-stall software.

At the crash scene in Hejere, about 50 kilometres from Addis Ababa, searchers continued to pick through the debris. Blue plastic sheeting covered the wreckage of the plane.

Anxious family members who had begun giving DNA samples waited for news on when identifications of remains would begin, and whether they would have anything to bury.

"We are not told what they have found so far," Faysal Hussein, whose cousin was killed, told The Associated Press.

"We are sitting here like forever. We were taken to the crash site on Wednesday but not allowed to get a closer look. And then yesterday Ethiopian Airlines officials called us to a meeting but they don't have anything to say. This is frustrating."
On March 17, 1959, the Tibetan leader Dalai Lama escaped from Lhasa to India. Sixty years later, the nuns-in-exile are fighting a battle of a different kind. Amid brazen gender disparity, they seek to find respect, and their place in the sun

Two persons don the same red robes of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic; their faces look the same, their vows are the same. Yet, one is ample-bellied and dashing around in a Toyota. And the other, the frail, sad looking little one is selling postcards by the roadside. The reason for the contrast: the big one is a monk and the other only a nun.

These lines from a poem by Tibetan writer-activist Lhasang Tsering describes a regular day in the hill town of McLeod Ganj, the seat of the Central Tibetan Administration, or government-in-exile.

The disparity between the two monastics predates the exile and the religious repression under Chinese control that necessitated it. Nunneries in Tibet were fewer, poorer, and less prestigious than monasteries. Most nuns were taught exclusively by male teachers and many received no formal education at all.

Monastic androgyny

The act of renouncing family life and traditional gender markers such as hair and clothing is supposed to neutralise gendered stereotypes, and make available to nuns and monks alike what anthropologist Charlene Makley describes as monastic androgyny, or the third gender of the renunciate. However, examples abound of nuns getting resexed in the misogynistic conceptions of their communities.

As recently as the 1990s, Makley registered their marginality in the gossip at the Labrang monastery in the Amdo region of Tibet: They dont like nuns, you know; the laity here, if a monk is going by, say, Ama, a monk went by, take off your hats! As for nuns, they compare us to (Chinese) Muslims and stray dogs!

Historian Hanna Havnevik describes this as a triple subordination  discrimination by the Chinese, negotiating a monastic structure made by and for monks, and the inferior position of being women in a patriarchal society.

It might come as a surprise then that the nuns have organised guerrilla movements, distributed pamphlets, and led protests in prisons. The first three Tibetan women to self-immolate were all nuns.

Six decades of resistance

March 17 marks the 60th anniversary of the Dalai Lamas escape from Lhasa. His move was preceded by the failed armed uprising on March 10,1959. Between the two days is another less-remembered anniversary. On March 12, thousands of Tibetan women organised a non-violent demonstration outside the Potala Palace, the seat of the Dalai Lama; among the leaders were several nuns.

Nuns continued to hold protests during the Cultural Revolution, which unleashed a large-scale destruction of monastic institutions. In a 1984 survey, the Council for Religious and Cultural Affairs of His Holiness the Dalai Lama estimated that there were 818 nunneries in Tibet before 1959, most of which were destroyed.

Geden Choeling, the oldest nunnery in Dharamsala, was started by nuns who fled Tibets Nechungri Nunnery after it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. When Nechungri reopened in 1988, there were only five nuns. Geden Choeling now has 170 nuns.

One of them is Gyaltsen, who at 20 joined the Gari Nunnery in Lhasa. When the nunnery was destroyed, the nuns moved into caves. Gyaltsen, whose story was made available through the Tibetan Nuns Project, was jailed for seven months and tortured before she escaped to India.

Nuns remained at the forefront of political activity in the ensuing decades. Several took to the streets during protests that rocked Tibet from 1987 to 1989. Since then, 50 per cent of the demonstrations in Tibet have been organised by young nuns, says Tibetologist Robert Barnett. A large number of them were arrested. Many of them faced physical and sexual torture, including the use of electrical batons on sensitive body parts. Some were sentenced to reform through labour or were executed.

In September 1989, Ngawang from Chubsang Nunnery went with 22 nuns to a protest at the Dalai Lamas summer palace of Norbulingka. She recounts her experience to the Tibetan Nuns Project: The Chinese police soon arrived with electric cattle prods and arrested nine of us I was stripped naked and searched After two years of continual beatings, underfeeding, and forcible blood extraction, I was weakened to the point of death I suppose the Chinese officials wanted to avoid the embarrassment of having me die in prison, so they released me

Even those who escaped are traumatised and fear for the safety of their families back home. Many prefer not to recount their stories or identify themselves. Their accounts have to be published through aliases, mismatched particulars, and fiction.

Rebuilding in exile

In addition to lingering trauma, air pollution and the crowded conditions of makeshift dwellings led many nuns to contract ailments such as impetigo and tuberculosis. To house the growing stream of new arrivals from Tibet, the Tibetan Nuns Project (TNP) was founded in 1987.

Spearheaded by TNP, exiled nuns advocated for, and secured, religious and educational parity with their male counterparts. This includes training in ritualised philosophical debate, instituting the geshema degree (equivalent of a PhD), and establishing a tantric studies programme, once a preserve of monks.

Tibetan nuns have joined others from South and Southeast Asia in seeking gender equity. From a position of ecclesiastical marginality, they have asserted themselves as rigorous scholars and teachers. Exactly a year ago, the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje began the process of revitalising full female ordination in Tibetan Buddhism, reviving a lineage that had been broken for about a thousand years.

Political nuns

I spent the summer of 2004 as an undergraduate fellow at Dolma Ling Nunnery, the headquarters of the TNP, and have gone back most years since then. I have noticed that the lives of nuns are embedded not only in their religious vows, but within a firm political resistance.

The nuns I met put badges, stickers and prints of the Tibetan flag on their bags and walls. They insisted they were in exile only to be able to keep their religious vows. They participated in vigils in Dharamsala and Delhi. Thus, as Havnevik has argued, in choosing to embrace monastic life under the threat of Chinese attempts to erase the Buddhist organisation of Tibetan society, they become political nuns.

This 60th anniversary provides a vantage point to assess the struggle for freedom and cultural preservation through the twin perspectives of those who escaped and the families they left behind, and also cross-generationally. As Ngawang said, My parents, who were farmers, are now dead  my mother died of a broken heart when I left Tibet I was not schooled, so I cannot be a teacher, but I can help through political activity.

(Names of nuns have been changed to protect their identity)

(Swati Chawla is a historian and a fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's top prosecutors is leaving the Department of Justice, according to a National Public Radio report on Thursday, possibly signaling the end of the federal investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election. Andrew Weissmann is departing the Special Counsel's Office to teach at New York University (NYU), the NPR report said, citing two sources close to the matter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's top prosecutors is leaving the Department of Justice, according to a National Public Radio report on Thursday, possibly signaling the end of the federal investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election.

Andrew Weissmann is departing the Special Counsel's Office to teach at New York University (NYU), the NPR report said, citing two sources close to the matter. Politico also reported his departure, citing one source familiar with the move.

A spokesman for Mueller, whose team has been investigating Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign, had no comment on the reports.

Representatives for NYU did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Weissmann led the case against U.S. President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was sentenced this week in a second federal criminal case and faces more than seven years in prison for crimes ranging from tax and bank fraud to conspiracy.

Mueller has led the U.S. probe into Russia since 2017, four months after Trump took office in the White House. The investigation so far has charged numerous people, including several top Trump advisers and a series of Russians, with a range of crimes.

Moscow has denied any election interference, and Trump has repeatedly called the investigation a "witch hunt" and said there was no collusion.

(Additional reporting by Karen Freifeld; Writing by Susan Heavey; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Original members of the EU, France, Germany and Italy are engaged in diplomatic sniping that will worsen ahead of the European Parliament elections

Before the Brexit referendum there was Viktor Orban. In 2014, two years before Britain voted narrowly to leave the European Union (EU), the Hungarian leader was pledging to turn his country into an illiberal democracy. In effect, Orbans Hungary was exiting the EU in spirit, by fiat and without a referendum.

As Brexit day, originally set for March 29, approaches, there is discord within the EU core and its not caused by Britain or because of it. France and Germany, both founding members of the EU, disagree on several issues including arms sales to the Saudis, the Russian gas pipeline and trade talks with the United States.

France also has tensions with another EU founding member, Italy, so much so that it briefly recalled its ambassador to Rome last month. It was the first time such a step had been taken since June 1940, when Italy declared war on France and it marked a startling deterioration of relations between two countries whose leaders worked to build European amity. French foreign minister Robert Schuman and Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi are often cited alongside Germanys Konrad Adenauer as pioneers of European unification after the horrors of World War II. The provocation for the French ambassadors recall in February was different from a shooting war. Since taking office in May, Italy's two deputy prime ministers  Luigi Di Maio of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini  have launched several verbal attacks against Frances president Emmanuel Macron. They challenge his claim to lead a European "Renaissance" with EU values that fight nationalist retrenchment.

Such barracking can only get worse even as it becomes more common across the EU in the countdown to the May 23-26 European parliament elections. Orbans Fidesz party, for instance, is running a campaign that features billboards viciously attacking European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. Orban alleges Juncker is part of an entrenched Brussels plot to destroy Europes Christian civilisation by encouraging immigration.

And a poll released on March 9 by Germanys Bild newspaper showed that Right-wing eurosceptic parties are in the lead in half of the six countries surveyed. That parties hostile to the European project and its liberal and democratic values are poised to make gains in elections to the European parliament is just one of the bitter ironies of the situation. There is also the EUs inability or unwillingness to quickly and decisively penalise member-states whose governments take its money but flout the unions rules and basic norms. EU funding constitutes 61 per cent of infrastructure investment in Poland, which is accused of weakening judicial independence, and 55 per cent in Hungary, where Orban has dismantled institutional checks and balances, taken over the press, clamped down on civil society and manipulated elections. Three years ago, Orban used two million euros of EU funds for a vanity project  the notorious railway to nowhere between his native village of Felcsut and an arboretum owned by his father three miles away. But Orban continues to flourish, even thrive, seemingly beyond EU constraints, strictures and injunctions.

European ineffectualness when faced with an existential threat from within makes for a sour taste ahead of its birthday. On March 25, it will be 62 years since the unions founding treaty was signed in Rome but the mood is hardly celebratory. Having positioned himself in recent years as Europes most staunchly anti-migration leader, Orban is leading a hostile charge against the very values the EU often preaches to countries in Asia and Africa  inclusiveness, tolerance and unity. Making common cause with Italys Salvini, and Jarosaw Kaczynski, leader of Polands Right-wing governing Law and Justice party, Orban wants a radical re-branding of the European project.

In August, he exhorted the West to confidently declare that Christian democracy is not liberal. Liberal democracy is liberal, while Christian democracy is, by definition, not liberal: it is, if you like, illiberal. In July, he declared, right after meeting German chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, that Hungary took as a duty the need to protect Europe. Merkel, however, simply spoke about Europes obligation to help those in need. Some might say the German sentiment would be a greater protection for Europe than Orbans muscular notion of a Christian fortress-continent.

Whats clear is competing ideas of Europe are now coming into direct conflict. The new Europe includes the central European nations, notably the Visegrad Four grouping of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Italy is also ideologically aligned. Salvini recently spoke of a European spring, one that would break the hold of France and Germany on the EU, and offer the union new blood, new strength, new energy.

According to Hans Kundnani, senior Europe research fellow at Londons Chatham House think tank, there are now three competing ideas of Europe. First, Merkels notion of market discipline for member states. Second, Macrons vision of a Europe qui protege, or a Europe that protects. This would mean more redistribution and risk-sharing in the Eurozone. And finally, there is Orbans proposed Christian Europe of sovereign states.

The implications are obvious. Former Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni recently noted that one of the consequences of national populism was the ceaseless search for enemies inside and outside your country to keep the consensus united. But it was dangerous, he said, to identify an enemy in a neighbour and friendly country.

That the Hungarians, Italians and Poles are doing so, and casting Paris, Berlin and Brussels as the enemy, takes Europe into dangerous territory. It may yet get to the point where post-war western Europes normally congenial politics is barely possible. If the hostility carries on, how long before one or more members of the EU refuse to pay their dues into the common kitty? How long before barriers are erected within Europe to the entry of certain EU nationalities?

If European disunion persists and intensifies, it may not even be necessary for Britain to exit. There might be nothing to leave or certainly nothing worth staying for.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is an international affairs columnist based in London
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Google, last year announced Look Out, an app to assist people who are blind or have low vision in gaining information about the world around them. As per the recent development, Google has announced that Lookout will finally be available to download only for Pixel devices in the US.

With this app, the company aims to use AI to provide more independence to nearly 253 million people in the world who are blind or visually impaired. It draws upon similar underlying technology as Google Lens, which lets users search and take action on the objects around you, simply by pointing your phone. In fact, the app is designed to work in situations where people might typically have to ask for help like learning about a new space for the first time, reading text and documents, and completing daily routines such as cooking, cleaning and shopping.

Lookout tells you about people, text, objects and much more as you move through space. Once youve opened the Lookout app, all you have to do is keep your phone pointed forward.

Google also claims, As with any new technology, Lookout will not always be 100 percent perfect. Lookout detects items in the scene and takes a best guess at what they are, reporting this to you. Were very interested in hearing your feedback and learning about times when Lookout works well (and not so well) as we continue to improve the app.

Further, the company is working to bring Lookout to more devices, countries and platforms soon.

Source
Evolution Petroleum Corp ( EPM -0.57% )

Q2 2019 Earnings Conference Call

, 10:00 a.m. ET

Contents:

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

See all our earnings call transcripts.

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your Evolution Petroleum Second Quarter Fiscal 2019 Earnings Release Conference Call. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for questions and comments following the presentation. (Operator Instructions)

At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, David Joe, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, the floor is yours.

David Joe -- Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President

Thank you, Karen. Good morning and welcome to Evolution Petroleum's earnings call for our fiscal 2019 second quarter ended December 31, 2018. We will discuss operating and financial results for the quarter. I am David Joe, CFO, and joining me on the call today is Bob Herlin, Chairman of the Board and Interim CEO; and Steve Hicks, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Business Development.

If you wish to listen to a replay of today's call, it will be available shortly by going to the company's website or via a recorded replay until March 6, 2019. Please note that any statements and information provided today are time sensitive and may not be accurate at a later date. Our discussion today will contain forward-looking statements of management's beliefs and assumptions based on currently available information.

These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that are listed and described in our filings with the SEC. Actual results may differ materially from those expected. Since detailed numbers are readily available to everyone in yesterday's news release, this call will highlight the key results and overall trends and an update on Delhi for the remainder of our fiscal 2019.

I am now going to turn the call over to Bob Herlin.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

Thanks, David, and welcome to everybody for this second quarter of our fiscal 2019 earnings call. Once again Evolution has posted a really strong quarter of performance. We had earnings of almost $4 million on $11 million in revenues, nice ratio. We had quarterly cash flow from operations of $14 million, and we are able to fund our CapEx at Delhi payout over $3 million dividends and increase our working capital by $3 million compared to the start of the fiscal year.

So we did pretty well fiscally for the shareholders. We now have almost $31 million of working capital, with no debt drawn on our elected $40 million borrowing base. Our Delhi Field asset is performing really well, with our 2018 infill well program already beginning to contribute meaningfully to production. We're working with the operator on some new projects that could further increase cash flows and value of our assets there.

We expect to begin next phase of project expansion at Delhi sometime during our fiscal 2020 period. Since we don't have any debt outstanding, the board has elected to not utilize hedges on recent periods. Consequently, our current and future performance will be tied to losing the light sweet oil price that currently sells at a nice premium to NYMEX, which is a real benefit to our shareholders.

Now we review that strategy on a quarterly basis and we consider what prices are at the time, what our expectations are and what our financial needs are. Looking forward, we continue to evaluate numerous opportunities to acquire compatible developed oil and gas related properties that meet our specific criteria and support our dividend policy. The process of selecting a new CEO is also continuing and I'm expecting that this should be completed this spring.

Now, with that I'm going to turn this discussion back over to David for some more operating details. David?

David Joe -- Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President

Thanks, Bob. As Bob mentioned we reported yet another excellent financial quarter despite much lower oil and NGL prices in our fiscal second quarter. The continued strength in the premium for Louisiana Light Sweet oil pricing in our fiscal second quarter, combined with production growth of 2% at Delhi were key factors to these financial results.

Looking forward it appears that the LLS premium remains positive through at least February of 2019 and the operator expects stable production from Delhi as more infill wells come online and improved efficiencies at the NGL plant are expected to improve rates.

For the quarter ended, December 31, 2018 total production volumes increased 2% compared to the prior quarter. As anticipated, oil production from the infill drilling program had contributions from six wells in our fiscal second quarter.

One well commenced production in January and the remaining two wells are expected to commence production in our current fiscal third quarter. Realized quarterly oil prices on average were $64 in our fiscal second quarter, a 10% decrease from the prior quarter. Realized NGL prices were $24 -- $22.46 per BOE, a 40% decrease from the prior quarter.

Thus far, January's average WTI price is 5% higher than December's WTI price and the first six days in February is a bit higher than that. So, we all hope this trend continues throughout the month, the quarter and the year.

Total CO2 cost, which makes up a significant portion of our operating cost or 45% or more was essentially flat quarter-over-quarter at $1.5 million. Purchased CO2 volumes were up 10% quarter-over-quarter to 77 million cubic feet per day. We expect these CO2 purchased volumes to increase to about 90 million cubic feet per day as additional injector wells commence injection in the current quarter ending March 31st.

As previously mentioned, oil prices were down 10% in the quarter, which offset increased CO2 volumes and thereby helped maintain overall CO2 expenses flat quarter-over-quarter.

Our other lease operating expenses in the field were flat quarter-over-quarter at $2 million. Our total lifting cost for the quarter was $18.45 per BOE, a 2% decrease from the prior quarter of $18.88 -- $18.87 per BOE.

With revenues per BOE at $59, Delhi continues to generate field operating margins in excess of $40 per BOE, which is an impressive 68% of revenues per BOE. With the large part of our operating costs relatively fixed and the majority of any commodity price increase will directly increase our operating margins in the field.

In the current quarter our CapEx at Delhi remained modest at $1.3 million, the majority of which was for completing a water source well and a water injection well in preparation for next phase of the development and for some work over in conformance projects.

The anticipated capital expenditure for the remainder of our fiscal year or for the next six months is estimated to be up to about $1 million net to Evolution. The operator has not yet proposed our capital development plans for Delhi for calendar year 2019, however, it's not expected to -- it's expected to resemble historical spend rates in the field.

It's worth reiterating that the Delhi field is a high-quality, long-lived asset, which has been a game changer for Evolution shareholders for a while now and she continue to generate free cash flow for the company in the foreseeable future.

We continue to manage our G&A expenses prudently, reporting a decrease of about 4% to $1.25 million for the quarter ended December.

The company remains committed to returning cash to shareholders and has now paid out $53 million or about $1.61 per share in dividends to shareholders since the program's inception over five years ago. Current dividend rate is $0.40 per annum, a robust 5.5% yield, based on yesterday's closing price.

Our liquidity position remains very strong with working capital of $31 million and building at quarter-end, substantially all of which was cash. We have an undrawn reserve-based credit facility set in elected amount of $40 million and Evolution remains well-positioned to fund future development of Delhi to fund the dividend program and to pursue new growth opportunities.

This concludes our review of financial results for our fiscal quarter. In summary, we reported strong revenues of $11 million, net income of $3.9 million or $0.12 earnings per share, continue to pay out a quarterly dividend and declared our next dividend and continue reinvestment into the development of Delhi Field.

I would now like to turn the call back over to Bob for some closing remarks.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

Thanks, David. I just wanted to clarify one thing. We want to make sure everyone understands. While January prices are a little higher than December, oil prices declined substantially during the quarter, so our December oil price is far less than the average for the quarter. Just want to make that real clear.

Now, as we've discussed in past calls over the last year, Evolution is actively seeking to acquire additional long-life, mostly developed and producing reserves, that are going to provide diversity, while supporting and growing our dividend. This effort is very disciplined and we won't take undue risk or excessive leverage. And we are only going to pursue those opportunities that fit our very specific criteria of location, fit appropriate risk-return ratio, and with our cash resource and untapped credit line, I think we're really uniquely positioned to pursue opportunities, and we do that on a regular basis.

With that, we are ready to take questions. Operator, please open the line.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And our first question comes from Jeff Grampp from Northland Capital. Please state your question.

Jeff Grampp -- Northland Capital -- Analyst

Good morning, guys.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

Hey, Jeff.

Jeff Grampp -- Northland Capital -- Analyst

I was hoping to get a little bit more clarity, in the release you guys talked about some efforts you're all making on the NGL side, both on -- it sounds like both the pricing and the production side of the equation. Can you guys talk a little bit more about that? Is it -- are there some kind of, I guess, NGL recovery issues you're working through or plant reliability, or I guess, just some more detail there and maybe expectations for the next couple of quarters as far as pricing and production levels of NGLs.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

Sure, Jeff. There's really two things that we have been working and continue to work on. One is, to improve the production of the existing plant and improve reliability and reduce downtime. I think we've had some real good success so far and we're already seeing the benefits of that. I think production appears to be steadily higher. Now, whether or not we'd improve the uptime on that is something that spans out our time.

On the second front which is a little more substantial, we're really not in a good position to talk about that. We're working with the operator Denbury on some opportunities on how to high grade what we make on our NGLs. But I really don't think it's appropriate at this time to go in any detail since that's still kind of fluid situation. So, I prefer not to go into more detail on that sorry.

Jeff Grampp -- Northland Capital -- Analyst

No, I understand. I appreciate the details nonetheless. And for my follow-up, I just want to make sure I heard the comments properly, you guys talked about I think the CO2 injections going up to 90 million a day, kind of, in the near-term. I just wanted to clarify is that, kind of, related to expansion of the infill drilling program that you guys have completed? And I think in past quarters, you talked about expecting to see some increased injection rates once Phase V starts ramping up. So, just wanted to clarify that 90 million a day is, I guess, exclusive of any ramp-up that might also occur when Phase V gets up and running?

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

I think you are correct that the increase in injections is tied to the infill program which added additional injection wells to the field and obviously, then that would mean that we would need to have more injection of gas. So, we inject all the gas that's produced in the field of CO2 that is. And then we also have increased our purchase amounts.

And we expect that purchase level to be higher for some period of time, not for life of the field, but certainly in the next few years, we'll see a little higher, in general, purchase rate of CO2.

Jeff Grampp -- Northland Capital -- Analyst

Okay, great.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

And obviously we're doing it because that's going to increase oil production which we have been seeing. We've seen a very nice improvement in production-related to the infill wells, of course, it's still early, but we're very pleased at this point with the results.

Jeff Grampp -- Northland Capital -- Analyst

All right. Great. Now, that's helpful detail Bob. Appreciate the time guys.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

You bet.

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from Joel Musante from Alliance Global. Please state your question.

Joel Musante -- Alliance Global -- Analyst

Hi. Yes, I just had a -- I just was going to ask a question on the NGLs. And I'm not sure if you can talk about why there were -- why the price was lower this quarter as opposed to given your previous comments to Jeff?

David Joe -- Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President

Yes, the simple answer, Joel, is the NGLs follow the price of oil. And so the WTI price in December for oil when we know what all the averages were for the quarter. December oil was $49 -- $48, November was $56. So, we saw the NGL prices, kind of, falloff the cliff in relation to the drop in oil price in November and December unfortunately. That's the simple answer.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

There's a second part to that Joel. Part of what -- part of our NGL revenues are actually recorded as a reduction to LOE. And so our reported NGL price is really not indicative of our actual receipts. But under accounting requirements, we have to show a portion being reflected as a reduction of LOE. And that's somewhat deceptive in terms of the price we show is really not the real price that we're getting. Accounts will shoot me if I try to describe it better than that but...

Joel Musante -- Alliance Global -- Analyst

Okay. Fair enough. All right. And I just wanted to see if we can get a sense. I know you don't give guidance, but I just wanted to see if we can get a sense for third quarter production directionally, is we look into something that's flattish or maybe same kind of growth as the second quarter?

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

I would say that our daily rates are better and we had a little bit of downtime in January for turnaround of the plant. So that will impact January production a little bit. But I think on a daily rate, for the quarter, our uptime, that we'll do better than Q2. The flip side to that is obviously oil price. We're not going to get as much oil price as we averaged in Q2.

Joel Musante -- Alliance Global -- Analyst

Right, right. So you should get help on the LOE side there to kind of offset?

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

Yeah, a little bit. I mean, that's kind of the odd thing about Delhi and our operation there is that the impact of oil price is partially offset by the reduced cost of CO2 on per Mcf basis, because it is tied to oil price. But it isn't a one-to-one offset by any means, it just cushions it.

Joel Musante -- Alliance Global -- Analyst

Right, right. Okay. And anything you can add on the acquisition front. I know the Delhi asset is kind of a hard asset to replicate from an acquisition point of view but I'm just wondering.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

We are working very hard on it. That's what is basically the full time -- almost full-time job of Steve Hicks, our Senior VP, and another fellow who helps him out. That's basically all they do is look at deals. We have some very hard criteria that we follow and we don't want to stray from.

We have -- in terms of size, in terms of location, in terms of the nature of the reserves, are they long life, what kind of the P&A obligation do they have, is it properly reflected, how does that asset impact our head? Because we roll that into our cost forecast. We worry about, OK, what kind of a commodity price they get, or they exposed to a volatile area, like if a gas asset that sells into the Waha Hub, that's a scary place to be, it has been for some time now.

Do we really want to be exposed to that? Do we want to have -- do we want to buy a gas asset where the gas can only flow to, let's say, California. You have to factor all those things in, in terms of how does it fit with what we are trying to accomplish. And what we're trying to accomplish is, how do we maintain our dividend, how do we extend it and how do we grow it.

That's the question we ask every time we look at the deals, is how does it fit into that? How does it impact our risk-return profile? Our shareholders have made it clear to us that they don't want us to take undue financial risk. And quite honestly, with my background and history I really have no desire to take undue risk.

I'd rather be a little boring and mundane and be consistent for our shareholders. I think that's why we get the valuation we get in the marketplace. So we've been very careful in what we do and how we do it. But that is a mandate by the board. So we want to do something, we want to acquire something that meets all of our criteria. Kind of long-winded answer, but it's a topic at the forefront of every board meeting and in a lot of our conversations in and around the office.

Joel Musante -- Alliance Global -- Analyst

All right. Well, I appreciate it. That's all I had and thanks, Bob.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

Thanks, Joel.

Operator

And there appear to be no further questions at this time.

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

All right. Thanks everybody. Appreciate you all listening in, and again, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to call in. I'm sure David will be happy to answer them or you can always get hold of me, I'll be happy to help you as well. Thanks again.

Duration: 22 minutes

Call participants:

David Joe -- Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President

Robert Herlin -- Interim Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and Co-founder

Jeff Grampp -- Northland Capital -- Analyst

Joel Musante -- Alliance Global -- Analyst

More EPM analysis

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  A local court on Friday convicted a Maute Group member of rebellion and crimes against humanity committed during the Marawi siege last year.

The Taguig Regional Trial Court Branch 70 sentenced Junaid Awal to up to 40 years in prison and ordered him to pay at least P500,000 in fines.

The court found Awal guilty of violating Article 134 of the Revised Penal Code and Republic Act No. 9851 or "The Philippine Act on Crimes against International Humanitarian Law, Genocide, and Other Crimes Against Humanity."

Acting Presiding Judge Felix Reyes, found that Awal "willfully, unlawfully and feloniously helped" and supported the uprising of the terror group which has pledged allegiance to the dreaded ISIS.

"Rebellion under Article 134 of the Revised Penal Code is committed by rising publicly and taking arms against the Government for the purpose of removing from the allegiance to said Government or its laws, the territory ofthe Republic of the Philippines or any part thereof, or any body of land, naval, or other armed forces or depriving the Chief Executive or the Legislature, wholly or partially, of any of their powers or prerogatives," the decision read.

The bandit was also found guilty of making a female minor his sex slave during the May 2017 siege.

More than 900 terrorists, 47 civilians and 165 government troops were killed during the siege. Some 300,000 residents were displaced as houses and buildings were turned to rubble.
Galveston, TX (77553)

Today

Windy with isolated thunderstorms developing. Near record high temperatures. High 78F. Winds S at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Isolated thunderstorms this evening becoming more widespread overnight. Low 68F. Winds SSW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 90%.
Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021.
Nokia 3.1 gets the taste of pie with Android 9 Pie update News oi-Vivek Nokia 3.1 was launched with Android 8.1 Oreo OS

HMD Global is one of the few smartphone OEMs that offers timely software updates to the entire portfolio. Now, the company has officially released Android 9 Pie update for the Nokia 3.1, which was July 2018 with Android 8.1 Oreo OS.

Along with the Android 9 Pie, the Nokia 3.1 now supports digital wellbeing (monitoring your smartphone usage with proper statistics) and supports Android 9 Pie gesture navigation keys. Features like Adaptive brightness and Adaptive battery are also included in the update, which will help the device to offer better battery backup.

The OTA style update has started to roll out across the globe. To update your smartphone, go to settings > about device > software update > and install the latest update. Make sure that you have a stable Wi-Fi connection for an un-interrupted updating experience.

Nokia 3.1 specifications

The Nokia 3.1 was launched in India for Rs 10.499, and the smartphone is now available for Rs 7,660 on Amazon, making it one of the most affordable smartphones with Android 9 Pie OS.

The device comes with a 5.2-inch HD+ (720P) IPS LCD screen with an 18:9 aspect ratio, protected by 2.5D curved tempered glass. Under the hood, the MediaTek MT6750N processor powers the smartphone with 2/3 GB of RAM and 16/32 GB of internal storage with a microSD card slot for additional storage expansion.

The smartphone has a dual SIM card slot with support for 4G LTE and VoLTE on both the slots with support for Bluetooth 4.2 and Wi-Fi. On to the optics, the Nokia 3.1 has a single 13 MP camera on the back with an f/2.0 aperture and an 8 MP selfie camera on the front. Both cameras are capable of recording 1080p videos @30fps.

The smartphone is fueled by a 2990 mAh Li-ion battery with support for 10W fast charging via micro USB port with a dedicated headphone jack (3.5mm).

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Redmi Go India launch slated for March 19, to be priced under Rs. 5,000 News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu Redmi Go is expected to be priced under Rs. 5,000 in India.

Redmi Go, the first Android Go smartphone from Xiaomi was announced in January this year. The device went on sale in select markets including the Philippines. Now, it looks like this budget smartphone will be launched soon in India as the company has started sending invites for its launch event.

Well, the Android Go smartphone from Xiaomi will be launched in India on March 19. The company is sending out invites for the 'Go' launch event slated to happen on March 19 in New Delhi at 12 PM. The official Redmi India Twitter handle has also teased the same and there is a dedicated microsite on Mi.com for the interested fans to catch up with the launch event.

This microsite reveals several features of the Redmi Go smartphone. It teases the Android Oreo (Go Edition), HD display, Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC, Google Assistant in Hindi, dedicated expandable storage support and support for over 20 regional languages.

Expected Redmi Go price in India

Redmi Go was launched in January for PHP 3990 in the Philippines, which translates to approximately Rs. 5,400. Having said that, we can expect this smartphone to be launched in India under Rs. 5,000. Notably, the most affordable Redmi smartphone - the Redmi 6A is priced at Rs. 5,999, which makes us believe that the Android Go smartphone will be priced relatively lower.

Redmi Go specifications

The Android Go smartphone from Xiaomi comes fitted with a 5-inch HD display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels and an aspect ratio of 16:9. This smartphone makes use of a quad-core 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 SoC teamed up with Adreno 308 GPU and 1GB RAM. It comes in two storage configurations - 1GB RAM + 8GB RAM and 1GB RAM + 16GB ROM. It has a dedicated microSD card slot supporting up to 128GB of additional storage space.

On the optics front, the device comes with an 8MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture along with 4-element lens and LED flash. It has features such as real-time filters, burst mode, HDR and smart scene modes and supports video recording at FHD 1080p. At the front, there is a 5MP selfie camera with f/2.2 aperture and support for beauty filters and HDR shots. The other goodies of the Redmi Go include a 3000mAh battery and the necessary connectivity features.

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Astronomers discover 83 supermassive black holes using Subaru Telescope News oi-Vishal Kawadkar This could be an important discovery to understand their origin.

A team of astronomers who have long been looking for ancient, supermassive black holes, might have just hit a jackpot. The team has discovered 83 previously unknown quasars. The team tuned the ultra-powerful "Hyper Suprime-Cam", which is placed atop Subaru Telescope in Hawaii that has been surveying the sky for over five years.

By studying the images, the team was able to pick potential quasar candidates out of the dark. Notably, the method of probing populations of supermassive black holes that have a similar size to the ones that are being observed today has given us a peek into their origin.

After identifying 83 potential candidates, the team used a few international telescopes to confirm their findings. The supermassive black holes there were discovered are around 13 billion lightyears away.

"It is remarkable that such massive dense objects were able to form so soon after the Big Bang," said Michael Strauss, who co-authored the paper, in a press release.

Astronomers have been studying the universe for a long time now and have managed to locate many distant objects. NASA has recently discovered a dwarf planet - FarOut, orbiting 120 AU and was believed to be the farthest object in the solar system.

But, just months after its discovery, FarOut has lost the title of being the most distant object observed in our solar system. The scientists have found a new object that is orbiting at 140 AU.

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Toyota working closely with JAXA to develop manned lunar rover News oi-Vishal Kawadkar Toyota to take its technology beyond Earth's orbit.

Japanese carmaker Toyota has put forward its plans to produce manned lunar rover on the Moon in 2029. The company will be working closely with Japan's space agency Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) for the mission. The vehicle will be capable of carrying two astronauts allowing them to stay inside it without having to wear their spacesuits.

However, the rover is still in a concept phase but is said to measure around 6 meters in length, 5.2 meters in width, and 3.8 meters tall. The biggest concern for the Japanese carmaker would be developing a fuel technology that would allow the rover to travel miles on Earth's natural satellite. If the reports are to be believed, the rover will have a range of 10,000 kilometers.

The development of the rover will be hastened and will be aimed to aid human exploration of the Moon. The first manned missions to the Moon are said expected to commence in the 2030s, while JAXA is aiming to launch the rover a year before the missions kick off.

Recently, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has also observed a few signs of water on the Moon, which could be really helpful and encouraging for the space agency's plans to send astronauts to the lunar surface again.

"The study is an important step in advancing the water story on the Moon and is a result of years of accumulated data from the LRO mission," said John Keller, LRO deputy project scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.

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March 14, 2019

News

By David Vergun

Defense.gov

2020 Budget Focuses on High-End Threats, DOD Leaders Say

WASHINGTON -- The $718 billion defense budget request for fiscal year 2020 addresses growing threats from Russia and China, the Defense Department's top leaders told Congress today.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan and Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified on the budget before the Senate Armed Services Committee. They were joined by David L. Norquist, DOD's comptroller and chief financial officer.

"China's defense spending approaches that of the U.S., when we take into account purchasing power and the portion of our budget going to military pay and benefits," Shanahan told the senators. "That, coupled with China's organized approach to steal foreign technology, has allowed China to modernize its missile, space, and cyber capabilities, as well as project power far beyond its borders."

He also noted that Russia "continues to compete asymmetrically with the U.S., modernizing and developing its own missile, space, and cyber capabilities."

Dunford noted that the capabilities developed by China and Russia "limit our ability to operate freely in space, cyberspace, land, sea and air."

"The capabilities we identified in this year's budget are really designed to allow us to project power when and where necessary to advance our interest in the context of that emerging threat from China and Russia," the chairman said.

Shanahan added that besides addressing threats from China and Russia, the budget also was built to deter and defeat terrorists and other regional threats.

High-End Weapons Delivered

Shanahan provided an overview of some of the budget request's provisions that address the great power competition with Russia and China. Development of hypersonics, missile defense system capability improvements and modernization of the nuclear triad represent significant portions of the budget, he said, adding that the budget includes double-digit increases to investments in both space and cyber, to include establishing the Space Force.

The request would fund the department's largest research, development, testing and evaluation budget in 70 years, Shanahan said, noting that it includes research for disruptive technologies, which he called important game-changers.

This is also the largest shipbuilding request in 20 years, he said. Included are construction of three Virginia-class attack submarines and two Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers.

Trade-offs Were Made

This is a "requirement-informed budget" needed to support the 2018 National Defense Strategy, Shanahan said. As such, he told the Senate panel, trade-offs were required. For example, he said, retiring the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman is one of the strategic choices made in formulating this year's budget request. "It was a very difficult decision for us," he added.

The Truman decision was made in concert with the Navy's request to buy two new aircraft carriers, the acting defense secretary said. That decision will grow employment in the shipyards and the supply chain and will increase lethality, he told the senators. The purchase of the new carriers saved $4 billion, Shanahan said, and the decision not to refuel the Truman, but to retire it early instead, saved $3.4 billion.

The other services also made painful tradeoffs, Shanahan said, noting that the Army cut or reduced spending for about 100 programs to fund its six modernization priorities: long-range precision fires, next-generation combat vehicles, future vertical-lift aircraft, network improvements, air and missile defense, and soldier lethality.

Reform Efforts

Norquist told the panel that in addition to having a budget that supports the National Defense Strategy, reform efforts also are important to the Defense Department. The recently completed first departmentwide audit "was not a paperwork exercise," he said.

Tangible benefits resulted, Norquist said. Some organizations learned of erroneous data on items they thought they had or didn't have in their inventory and ins the labeling of some items on a scale from usable to unusable, he said.

The audit resulted in cost savings and greater readiness, and the department looks forward to future audits, along with improvements in its own internal processes, Norquist added.

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March 14, 2019

News

By Terri Moon Cronk

Defense.gov

DOD's Artificial Intelligence Initiatives Outlined Before Senate

WASHINGTON -- Three Defense Department research entities outlined the department's artificial intelligence initiatives in the face of great power competition March 12 during a hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee here.

Witnesses included Steven H. Walker, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency director; Michael Brown, Defense Innovation Unit director; and Air Force Lt. Gen. John N. T. "Jack" Shanahan, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center director.

AI is changing computers from tools to partners, Walker told the senators.

"It's a great time to be at DARPA because we're on the brink of a lot of really exciting things and that's the genesis of the current initiative  the $2 billion investment that we've said we're now making in AI technologies," he said.

DARPA's AI focuses on dealing with adversarial AI, high-performance computing cycles and minimizing energy, while delivering radically new capabilities, Walker said.

"This is the  genesis of the AI Next campaign  creating systems capable of reasoning with generative, contextual and explanatory models," the DARPA director said. "We already have over 20 [new] programs running in AI," with more than 80 programs in the agency, he added.

"About one-third of the programs in the entire agency now are either creating AI technologies or [are] aggressive users of those technologies," Walker said.

Defense Innovation Unit

"China and Russia have already recognized the enormous commercial and military potential of AI and are investing heavily with aims to become dominant," Brown told the committee. "By 2025, China aims to achieve major breakthroughs in AI, and increased its domestic market to reach $60 billion."

On the other hand, the DIU director added, Russia is behind the United States and China in its overall AI investment research and startups.

In the face of great power competition, DIU is working alongside the rest of DOD to "maintain our technology edge, not only in AI, but in other dual-used technologies," he said.

As a foundational technology, DIU's AI portfolio prioritizes projects to address three major impact areas where AI is proven to excel commercially, Brown said.

Those areas are computer vision  adding automation to object recognition and infrastructure assessment, large data-set analytics and predictions making sense of massive data sets and patterns more efficiently and cost-effectively than by human analysts, and strategic reasoning  mapping problematic chains of events and developing alternative strategies to inform top-down planning in environments characterized by uncertainty, missing information and speculation.

"DIU is prototyping an application that leverages AI to provide insights to high-level strategic questions," Brown said, adding, "with these projects, DIU engages across [DOD] on AI and makes its commercial knowledge in relationships with potential vendors available to any of the services, service labs and components."

Enabling DOD to be a better customer for early-stage companies will not only help it acquire the best commercial technology faster and cheaper, the DIU director said. "[It] will also provide access to the ideas of sought-after AI talent that DOD may not be able to attract," the director said.

"The more we collaborate with the private sector on mutually beneficial projects, the more opportunities we'll have to engage in open dialogue about the applications and principles for the use of AI," he added.

Joint Artificial Intelligence Center

Shanahan told the committee that the JAIC is the focal point of the DOD AI strategy. The center stood up in June 2018 to provide a common vision, mission and focus to drive departmentwide AI capability delivery.

Projects at the JAIC, he said, are in one of two categories: national mission initiatives, or NMIs; and component mission initiatives, also known as CMIs.

"NMIs are driven and executed by the JAIC as broad, joint crosscutting AI challenges, whereas CMIs are component led, but are able to make use of JAIC's common tools, libraries, best practices and more," Shanahan explained.

He told the committee JAIC's first two NMIs are predictive maintenance with Special Operations Command in an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter use case, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, where JAIC will field AI capabilities to help with natural events such as wildfires and hurricanes.

"At the same time, we are in the early problem-framing stage for another proposed NMI in fiscal year 2020 that will be more oriented on the National Defense Strategy in operations against peer competitors," Shanahan told the senators.

He noted that the JAIC also is working with the military services and combatant commands on applying AI to help with diverse areas that include suicide prevention, preventive medicine and information operations.

All three directors said their entities need people.

"The success of human-centered AI and human/machine teaming within DOD requires growing and sustaining an AI-ready force," Shanahan said, "one that is conversant in the language of AI, willing and able to operate with a new kind of speed and agility."

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March 14, 2019

News

By Jim Garamone

Defense.gov

NATO Military Committee Visits Pentagon, Discusses Alliance Strategy, Capabilities

WASHINGTON -- Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford welcomed the members of the NATO Military Committee to the Pentagon yesterday and offered to share with the alliance group the experiences of the U.S. in its development of the National Defense Strategy.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thanked British Royal Air Force Air Chief Marshal Stuart Peach and the 29 military representatives on the committee for their interest. Dunford offered to share U.S. experiences in developing joint force capabilities, and the integration of those capabilities.

NATO's chiefs of defense make up the Military Committee. The military representatives who are visiting this week represent their nations on the Military Committee in permanent session. The U.S. military representative in Brussels is Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John K. Love.

The committee discussed the U.S. strategy process, dynamic force employment and the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations. They come to Washington after visiting Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia, and the new Joint Force Command centered around the 2nd Fleet. They also visited the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman.

Alliance Progress

"Without candy coating it, we have really made significant progress in the alliance," Dunford said at the Pentagon.

He noted the world situation when he became chairman in 2015. At that time, Dunford made news by saying that Russia was an existential threat to the United States.

He further contrasted strategy from 1998 to today. The chairman attended the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, beginning in 1998. He went back to the school to speak last year and dusted off the U.S. strategy from his time there.

"There was no mention of China in our National Security Strategy in 1998," he said. "No mention of violent extremism except for the potential nexus between violent extremism and weapons of mass destruction. And Russia  we were in a dialogue between NATO and Russia so there was no threat."

Changing Times

The 1990s were a period where the U.S. ability to project military power where and when it was necessary was uncontested, Dunford said. The United States taking the fight to al-Qaida in Afghanistan in 2001 was a demonstration of that ability.

"The 1990s was a time when we, as an alliance, had no peer competitor and no hot breath on the back of our neck from a competition perspective," he said. "When I look back on the 1990s, it's impossible to overstate how insidious it was not to have a competitor and not to have a competitive mindset.

"When it came to things like assessments, when it came to things like capability development, when it came to things like strategic thinking we  were not at the top of our game," he continued. "In many cases, we were focussed on failed and failing states, peacekeeping operations."

It is different today, after years of war in Afghanistan, Iraq and countering terrorists in Africa and Asia. "In 1998, the competitive advantage was decisive," he said. "I still believe we have a competitive advantage, but the margin of our competitive advantage is significantly changed. In my judgment, what that means is we got to be cleareyed about our strategy, which is the foundational element in which all of our activity should take place."

National Defense Strategy

The United State promulgated a National Defense Strategy last year which recognizes the shift in the strategic landscape. Great power competition has returned and American strategy concentrates on countering the capabilities of Russia and China. Still, the United States must address Iran, North Korea and violent extremism.

Strategy is "not just a document to put on the shelf," Dunford said. "It is not just a document to answer the mail. It should be the best military thinking we can offer about the strategic environment in which we find ourselves. And it should be the document that is the basis for all that we do as an alliance."

When the chairman talks to Congress he speaks about the significant progress the alliance has made since 2015  "from the organizational construct that addresses logistics to the maritime element to the readiness initiative to the focus on what it is we should be prepared for as an alliance. I think we get good grades in that evolution."

Change is Needed

The grades are less stellar in updating operational concepts to reflect the current environment and in setting the conditions to integrate combat power to deter or win, Dunford said.

"If we don't up our game in terms of our operational concepts, and we don't more coherently think about the path of capability development, we are not going to be where we need to be," he said. "What I can say with confidence is the 29 nations of NATO -- politically, economically and militarily  how would anyone look at that and think they could come up on the upside?"

At the end of a full day, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Paul Selva spoke to the committee members. "What's encouraging to me is to watch the adaptation that's going on around the acknowledgment that most of the threats that each of us face are not regional, but global, and that if we don't answer them as global problem sets then we're only looking at a small part of the challenge," he said.

"I'm so encouraged at the work that the alliance is doing of looking at a long term strategy to articulate the things that are important to the alliance, the things that are important collectively to each and all of us, because it is together that we present strength in the face of those challenges," Selva said.

NATO is unique in that the alliance is a political and military framework that sets the conditions to maintain a rules-based order from which all nations benefited since World War II. "That coherent collective action should not be something we take for granted," Dunford said. "It is the envy of the rest of the world."

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Keel Laid on Future USS Bougainville

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS190314-17

Release Date: 3/14/2019 3:09:00 PM

From Team Ships Public Affairs

PASCAGOULA, Miss (NNS) -- The keel laying and authentication ceremony for the future USS Bougainville (LHA 8) was held at the Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) Pascagoula shipyard, March 14.

The ship's sponsor, Ellyn Dunford, authenticated the keel by welding her initials into the keel plate.

Traditionally, keel laying marks the first step in ship construction. However, with today's advanced modular shipbuilding, the keel laying ceremony now recognizes the joining together of a ship's components and is a major milestone in the ship's construction. Fabrication of Bougainville began in October 2018.

"We are honored to have Ellyn Dunford with us today to commemorate this milestone," said Tom Rivers, Amphibious Warfare program manager, PEO Ships. "The production team has made steady progress and we look forward to bringing the next generation of amphibious capabilities to the Navy and Marine Corps warfighters."

The future USS Bougainville is the third ship of the America (LHA 6) class of amphibious assault ships built to facilitate forward presence and power projection. LHA 8 is the first Flight I ship of the America class with a reincorporated well deck to increase operational flexibility while maximizing the aviation capability inherent on the Flight 0 ships, USS America and the future USS Tripoli.

Designed to support the Marine Corps tenets of Operational Maneuver from the Sea and Ship to Objective Maneuver, America class ships are capable of rapid combat power buildup ashore The America class accommodates the Marine Corps' Air Combat Element including F-35B Joint Strike Fighter and MV-22 Osprey, essential to maintaining power projection, air superiority, and theater logistics.

HII's Pascagoula shipyard is also currently in production on Tripoli (LHA 7), the guided missile destroyers Delbert D. Black (DDG 119), Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123), Jack H. Lucas (DDG 125), and amphibious transport dock ships, Fort Lauderdale (LPD 28) and Richard M. McCool Jr. (LPD 29). The shipyard is also under contract for six Flight III Arleigh Burke class destroyers awarded as part of the FY18-22 multiyear procurement.

As one of the Defense Department's largest acquisition organizations, PEO Ships is responsible for executing the development and procurement of all destroyers, amphibious ships, special mission and support ships, boats and craft.

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USS Florida Arrives in Souda Bay, Greece

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS190314-11

Release Date: 3/14/2019 2:53:00 PM

From U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet Public Affairs

NAVAL SUPPORT ACTIVITY SOUDA BAY, Greece (NNS) -- The Ohio-class cruise missile submarine USS Florida (SSGN 728) arrived in Naval Support Activity Souda Bay, Greece, for a scheduled port visit, March 14, 2019.

Florida, homeported in Kings Bay, Georgia, is on a routine deployment in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations.

"My Sailors, the young men and women who bring life to the Florida, sacrifice daily and serve quietly to help ensure a strong and free region," said Capt. Seth Burton, commanding officer of the Florida Gold crew. "After months of dedicated and hard work at sea, they are so excited to experience the hospitality and culture of our Greek allies."

Florida was commissioned in 1983 as a ballistic-missile submarine and in 2006, became one of the four Ohio-class submarines to be converted into a guided-missile submarine. It is the sixth U.S. Navy ship to be named after the state of Florida.

U.S. 6th Fleet, headquartered in Naples, Italy, conducts the full spectrum of joint and naval operations, often in concern with allied, and interagency partners, in order to advance U.S. national interests and security and stability in Europe and Africa.

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Pacific Fleet Commander Emphasizes Readiness for High-End Warfighting During Visit with San Diego Commands

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS190314-03

Release Date: 3/14/2019 8:41:00 AM

From Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet Public Affairs

SAN DIEGO (NNS) -- Navy leaders up and down the chain of command need to prepare their crews to fight and win in blue-water, fleet-on-fleet combat. That was the message Adm. John C. Aquilino, commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, delivered during a series of discussions with waterfront leaders in San Diego, March 11-13.

Aquilino, along with U.S. Pacific Fleet Force Master Chief James Honea, visited various commands at the largest fleet concentration area on the West Coast. At the Naval Air Station North Island's Lowry Base Theater, they led a conversation with leaders from air, surface, subsurface, expeditionary and special warfare communities about the importance of building and sustaining readiness fleetwide.

Aquilino expressed urgency, telling the gathering of commanding officers, executive officers and command master chiefs that he and Honea were there to help drive a shared effort to build winning, high-end war fighting crews with high-end war fighting capability.

"We are in this together," Aquilino said. "Readiness is a team sport. Here is what I owe you: I owe you the people, the parts, the time, the syllabus and the trainers to generate readiness. You also have a responsibility. I need you to take those things I give you and turn them into lethal combat power."

Aquilino acknowledged there was more work to be done, and asked the diverse group of leaders for feedback on barriers to building and sustaining readiness.

"I won't assign you missions you're not ready to go do," Aquilino said. "This is the leadership across all communities in San Diego. I need to hear from you what's working and what isn't."

Honea challenged the command master chiefs in attendance to align their efforts to their commanding officer's priorities.

"When we talk about building winning teams, it's the chiefs' mess that develops the technical experts that build the readiness," Honea said. "Those winning teams have confidence in themselves and the faith of their commanding officer that they will have the weapons they need when they go into those fights."

At the Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet's (CNSP) Surface Warfare Commanders Conference, Aquilino repeated the need for high-end war fighting capability. Leaders carried that message into CNSP's Spring 2019 Commander's Training Symposium (CTS), which is a forum for commanders and commanding officers to receive updates on fleet-wide initiatives, as well as to ask questions and provide feedback directly to CNSP.

"I'm confident that we will win any fight," Aquilino told the San Diego-based Navy leaders. "Let there be no doubt: Each one of our Sailors should know they are part of the best damn Navy in the world."

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Venezuela says US behind 'terrorist' attack on oil facility

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 14, 2019 07:12PM

Venezuela says the US and the country's Washington-backed opposition are behind a "terrorist attack" on an oil facility in the crisis-hit Latin American state.

The blaze broke out at the Petro San Felix heavy oil processing plant in eastern Venezuela late Wednesday. There were no reports of casualties.

Speaking to state television, Oil Minister Manuel Quevedo accused the head of the opposition-ruled Congress, Juan Guaido, who has named himself as Venezuela's interim president, for triggering the incident.

The minister said on Twitter that Guaido and the opposition were "intensifying terrorist incursions" against the state-owned oil company PDVSA to impact Venezuela's vital crude exports.

'US after bloodshed'

Quevedo also accused Guaido of collusion with the United States. "Traitors!" he wrote, adding "the US has decided to rob Venezuela of its oil resources... (and) wants blood to flow."

The US has recognized Guaido as Venezuela's head of state and has already targeted Venezuela's oil exports, which account for 90 percent of the country's revenues, with sanctions.

Washington has also been pressuring other countries to reduce their oil purchases from Venezuela.

The Latin American country has been facing dire economic conditions and months-long protests, with President Nicolas Maduro putting the country's woes down to US intervention and accusing Washington of attempting a coup against his government.

Guaido named himself interim president in January. Washington took the lead in recognizing his claim followed by the US' major European allies, including France, Germany, and Britain.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that all options are on the table in promoting Washington's choice for Guaido over Maduro.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza, meanwhile, told a United Nations meeting in Austria that the US "has threatened our people with a military aggression" and was taking "unilateral economic steps" in the form of sanctions that cost Venezuela billions of dollars.

Russia, China and Iran have opposed US interference in Venezuela. The European Union has also warned against any military action targeting the Latin American nation.

Venezuelans back to work after power restoration

On Thursday, Venezuelans in the capital Caracas and other cities heeded a government call to resume their jobs following successive days of a paralyzing blackout, which the country has likewise blamed on US acts of sabotage.

Employees across the public and private sectors were back in their jobs after the power was restored and the government called on all public sector employees to restart their operations.

Over the previous week, however, the outage had rendered most people unemployed, and reportedly cost the country hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Bus and subway stations were brimming with people, while long queues formed in front of banks.

The national industry federation Conindustria said, though, that it would take several days for some activities to return to normal.

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Airstrikes kill over 30 people in Afghan province of Ghazni

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 14, 2019 06:38PM

A series of airstrikes have claimed the lives of more than 30 people in southeast Afghanistan amid a spike in civilian deaths from aerial attacks.

Afghan Defense Ministry said in a statement on Thursday that the casualties were caused after the air raids targeted a "base" belonging to the militants in Ghazni province a day earlier.

The ministry did not specify who carried out the airstrikes. However, Ghazni governor's spokesman Mohammed Aref Noori said the strikes had been carried out by US forces.

Civilian casualties from aerial attacks conducted by US forces have surged across Afghanistan over the past few months.

A US airstrike in November last year killed at least 30 civilians, including children and women, in Afghanistan's southern province of Helmand.

The United States has recently stepped up its air raids in an attempt to exert pressure on the Taliban to accept a negotiated end to its 18-year insurgency.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan recorded 649 civilians casualties as a result of aerial attacks in the first nine months of last year, the highest number in any year since systematic recording began in 2009.

The US, along with a number of fellow-NATO members, invaded Afghanistan in 2001, toppling the Taliban but it has failed to restore security in a country plagued by militancy and terrorism.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is now negotiating with the Taliban group, excluding the Kabul government.

Over 8,000 people lost their lives or were wounded in Afghanistan between January and September last year, making the country deadlier than Syria in 2018.

Taliban's five-year rule over at least three quarters of Afghanistan came to an end in the wake of a US-led invasion in 2001, but the militant group still continues to attack government and civilian targets as well as foreign forces.

The US forces, meanwhile, have remained bogged down there through the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump.

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Rival Police Clash In North Afghan City In Spat Between President, Ex-Governor

By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan March 14, 2019

MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan -- Gunfire has broken out in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif between police loyal to a powerful former provincial governor and Interior Ministry forces sent to support a new police chief who was appointed by President Ashraf Ghani.

The March 14 gunbattle was sparked by the dispute between Ghani and Balkh Province's former governor, Atta Mohammad Noor, an ethnic Tajik former warlord whose militia fighters now form most of the provincial police force.

Hospital officials in Mazar-e Sharif told RFE/RL that at least 13 people were hospitalized with gunshot wounds sustained during the March 14 fighting -- including eight police officers and five civilians.

They did not specify whether the wounded police were from the Interior Ministry or provincial police who remain loyal to Noor.

RFE/RL's correspondent in Mazar-e Sharif reports that fighting erupted on March 14 as Interior Ministry police were escorting the newly appointed police chief, Abdul Raqib Mobarez, to provincial police headquarters.

Mobarez, appointed under a presidential decree, arrived at Mazar-e Sharif's airport earlier on March 14 but was briefly blocked by Noor loyalists when he tried to reach police headquarters to officially take up the post.

However, with backing from Interior Ministry police, Mobarez eventually managed to enter the headquarters building in the provincial capital.

Mobaraz announced after arriving at the building that he had officially taken on the post of police commander.

Mobaraz also said Interior Ministry police had control over security in Mazar-e Sharif and will "take action against anyone who takes up arms" against them.

RFE/RL's correspondent reports that sporadic gunfire was continuing across the city after Mobaraz's announcement.

Interior Ministry spokesman Nusrat Rahimi told RFE/RL that at least "25 irresponsible armed men" had been arrested by Interior Ministry police in Mazar-e Sharif before sundown.

Noor wants to name his choice to head Balkh's provincial police force and insists that the Afghan president promised he would be allowed to do so.

Mohammad Hanif Atmar, one of the leading candidates in the country's July 20 presidential election, criticized the deployment of Interior Ministry police in Mazar-e Sharif as "an illegal step," saying forces from outside of Balkh Province should not have been sent there by the central government.

Atmar also charged that the March 14 Interior Ministry operation was part of an attempt by Ghani to remove Atmar's supporters from positions of power ahead of the vote.

Noor has backed Atmar's presidential election campaign.

The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, John Bass, issued a Twitter statement calling on both Noor and Ghani to instruct the security forces and police under their command "to stand down, and for political leaders on both sides of the dispute to put the Afghan people first."

Bass said: "Afghan security forces are tasked with protecting the Afghan people, not fighting each other over political disputes."

He also said "the parties involved" should "quickly and peacefully resolve this dispute in a way that gives Afghan citizens confidence in their leadership and strengthens security."

"Asserting authority by forces of arms takes Afghanistan's democracy backwards," Bass tweeted.

Earlier on March 14, many residents of Mazar-e Sharif heeded Noor's call to go on a day-long strike to protest Mobarez's appointment.

Noor called on city residents to keep shops and markets closed, demanding that Ghani withdraw his decree that appointed Mobarez.

But Deputy Interior Minister Khoshal Sadat tweeted that Ghani appointed Mobarez as the new police chief due to "the worsening security situation of Balkh province."

Mobarez "will be accompanied by Special Forces units. The situation is controlled & nothing to be worried about. Additional forces will also soon reach Balkh," he wrote in a separate tweet, adding that Ghani's decree "will be implemented without any delay or hesitation."

Noor, who for months had rejected Ghani's efforts to remove him from office, in March 2018 agreed to resign as governor of Balkh after 14 years in the post.

Noor is a leading figure in Jamiat-e Islami, a party that is dominated by officials and former militia commanders from the Tajik minority.

With reporting by AP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/north-afghan-city-shut- down-amid-spat-between-powerful-ex- governor-president/29820887.html

Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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India, Pakistan Officials Hold Talks On 'Friendship' Border Crossing

By RFE/RL March 14, 2019

Pakistani and Indian officials say they have held "cordial" discussions on the opening of a visa-free border crossing for Sikh pilgrims from India travelling to visit one of their holiest shrines located in Pakistan.

The March 14 meeting came amid easing of tensions after a deadly suicide bombing in Indian-administered Kashmir last month triggered a dangerous escalation between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

The two sides held "detailed and constructive discussions," a joint statement said after the officials met at Attari on the Indian side of the border to discuss details of the planned crossing.

Pakistan and India "agreed to work toward expeditiously operationalizing" the crossing, known as the Kartarpur corridor, the statement added.

Earlier in the day, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal, who headed the Pakistani delegation, told journalists that the opening the border crossing was "aimed at turning animosity into friendship."

India and Pakistan have a history of bitter relations since gaining independence from Britain in 1947.

The two nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars, two of them over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, where the two sides still regularly exchange fire.

In a rare instance of cooperation, the two neighbors agreed last year to open a new crossing point between their two regions called Punjab.

The planning crossing in intended to make it quicker and easier for Sikh pilgrims from India to visit a shrine to Guru Nanak, the 15th-century founder of Sikhism.

Instead of visas, Pakistan and India plan to give special permits to devotees to access the site, which is located some 4 kilometers from the Indian border.

The corridor is planned to be opened later this year to mark the 550th anniversary of Baba Guru Nanak's birth.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held on the Pakistani side of the border in November.

Pakistan used to be home to a large Sikh community, but most of its members went to India during the 1947 partition, with only a few thousand remaining in Pakistan.

Thousands of Sikhs visit Guru Nanak's shrine in Pakistan every year.

With reporting by AP, dpa, and Dawn

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/india-pakistan -officials-meet-to-discuss-new-border -crossing/29820858.html

Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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Missiles Fired Toward Tel Aviv First Time Since 2014

Sputnik News

22:14 14.03.2019(updated 04:02 15.03.2019)

TEL AVIV (Sputnik) - The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said on Wednesday, after air raid sirens sounded in Tel Aviv for the first time since summer of 2014, that it had registered launches of two rockets from the Gaza Strip.

An Israeli military spokesman cited by Reuters said the incident was under investigation. Local media reported that several residents had heard sounds similar to those of an explosion.

The press service of the Israel Defence Forces confirmed that the sirens had sounded for the first time since summer 2014. At least two missiles were fired from the Gaza Strip toward the Tel Aviv area, Reuters reported, citing local media. One rocket was intercepted by the anti-missile Iron Dome system, according to media reports.

"Two launches from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory were registered", the IDF press service said in a press release.

Israel's Channel 10 news said Thursday, citing anonymous military officials, that one of the rockets landed in an uninhabited area, and that there were no reports of injuries.

Accordging to AFP, an Israeli military spokesman told local reporters that no interceptions were made by Iron Dome aerial defence systems. Similarly, Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai told local broadcaster, cited by AFP, one of the Gaza rockets "apparently fell into the sea, the other hit somewhere but not in Tel Aviv".

In Gaza, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad, an allied group, issued statements denying any responsibility for the attack, which came just over three weeks ahead of Israel's 9 April election, according to AFP.

However, IDF said Friday they could confirm that the rockets fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv earlier "were launched by the Hamas".

The IDF had previously made public intelligence about an alleged new Hezbollah-affiliated terror cell operating in Syria's Golan Heights.

Tensions between the Israelis and the Palestinians near the fence separating Gaza from Israel have been mounting since last March, which marked the beginning of the Great March of Return. The situation on the Gaza border has reportedly escalated due to continued shelling and launches of arson balloons from Gaza into the Israeli territory, and the shooting and killing of protesters, medics, journalists and children near the border by IDF soldiers.

 Sputnik

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US Army Inks $714Mln Contract for Poland Air Defence Controls - Northrop Grumman

Sputnik News

16:48 14.03.2019(updated 22:07 14.03.2019)

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  A $714 million US Army contract aims to produce a ground-based battle command system in Poland for an advanced air- and missile-defence network (IBCS), Northrop Grumman announced in a press release on Thursday.

"Poland is taking a leadership role in today's complex threat environment by selecting IBCS over legacy stove-piped systems that were designed decades ago for a much different threat profile," Northrop Grumman Vice President for Missile Defence Dan Verwiel said. "IBCS is the future of multidomain operations and with it, Poland will have a state-of-the-art system to modernize its integrated air and missile defence capabilities."

It was unclear whether the $714 million deal overlapped with a $349.4 million contract announced by the Department of Defence on Wednesday night for "two complete battery sets" in Poland's IBCS network.

The IBCS control system outlined in the $714 million contract features open architecture which will allow integration of disparate radars and weapons, as well as interoperability with current and future missile defence systems, the release said.

Later in the day, Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz announced that a US missile defence base in the northern Polish village of Redzikowo may be fully functional by the end of 2020.

The US base in Radzikowo, located close to Poland's northern Baltic coast, has been under construction since 2016. The facility will include radar tracking and missile systems.

"There is a chance that before the end of the next year this base will be completed and ready for action," Czaputowicz said at a press conference in the Polish capital of Warsaw.

In February, Poland National Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said the nation plans to spend nearly $50 billion over the next seven years to modernize its military.

In February, Russian President Vladimir Putin slammed the United States for breaching the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by launching target missiles and setting up launch pads in Romania and Poland. Putin stressed that the possible US deployment of missiles to Europe would threaten the security of Russia and the whole world.

Meanwhile, the United States has continued to claim that its military facilities in Eastern Europe are intended to improve coverage against threats allegedly coming from outside NATO.

 Sputnik

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US Awards Northrop Grumman Contract to Install Missile Defence System in Poland

Sputnik News

05:18 14.03.2019

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The US Army has awarded Northrop Grumman with a $349.4 million contract to provide Poland with its Integrated Air and Missile Defence Battle Command System, the Department of Defence said in a press release.

"Northrop Grumman, Huntsville, Alabama, was awarded a $349,377,402 firm-fixed-price, Foreign Military Sales (Poland) contract for the procurement of two complete battery sets of Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System production hardware and software", the release said on Wednesday.

In February, Polish National Defence Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said Poland will spend nearly $50 billion over the next seven years to modernize its military. The modernisation plan envisages the purchase of new multi-purpose fifth-generation fighter jets, attack helicopters, artillery and anti-missile systems as well as submarines, the minister added.

At a meeting with his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda last September, US President Donald Trump said that the United States was considering establishing a military base in Poland. Trump also said that Warsaw had agreed to pay more than $2 billion toward the cost of the base. The Polish president, in turn, suggested that the base be called Fort Trump.

Senior DoD officials told US Congress on Wednesday that Washington and Warsaw were drafting details for a planned US base and could reach a final agreement on the military facility within a year.

Meanwhile, Poland is also trying to renew its aging air force fleet with the US fifth-generation combat jets, as its combat aircraft only include Soviet-made Mig-29 and Sukhoi Su-22 fighters, as well as US F-16 jets.

Andrzej Duda said Tuesday that Warsaw was negotiating with the United States the acquisition of Lockheed Martin's F-35 stealth multirole fighters. According to 2017 Pentagon report, the aircraft has hundreds of deficiencies, which range from structural problems to software trouble.

 Sputnik

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US Air Force's B-52 Bombers Patrol South China Sea for Second Time in March

Sputnik News

03:52 14.03.2019

WASHINGTON (Sputnik)  Two American B-52 bombers flew over the South China Sea for the second time in ten days, the US Air Force's Pacific Command said in a statement.

"Two B-52H Stratofortress bombers took off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, and conducted routine training in the vicinity of the South China Sea March 13, 2019 (HST), before returning to base", the statement said Wednesday, quoted by the Diplomat. Wednesday's mission followed the dispatch of two B-52 bombers over the East and South China Seas on 4 March.

The South China Sea is one of the thorns in the side of US-China relations, with the United States criticizing Beijing for moving weapons to the Spratly archipelago, something that China qualifies as interference in its internal affairs.

The United States views the sea as an international waterway and routinely defies China with patrols by American and allied warships in so-called freedom of navigation exercises that lately have been augmented with bomber flights.

The South China Sea and the East China Sea are also sources of tension for China and its neighbors, including Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, as the countries continue to argue over the waters' maritime borders. China considers the Spratly archipelago, a group of artificial islands located in the South China Sea, as its territory, despite an international tribunal ruling that these claims had no legal basis.

Speaking at an energy conference in Texas on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that China was blocking access to recoverable energy reserves worth $2.5 trillion to countries of the Asia-Pacific. According to the top US diplomat, China's alleged illegal construction of islands in international waters was not just a security issue but one that concerned the blocking of access to resources.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Wednesday that the behavior of some faraway countries that undermine the situation in the South China Sea was irresponsible.

 Sputnik

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F-16s provide essential support to US, coalition forces in Afghanistan

By Senior Airman Rito Smith, 455th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs / Published March 14, 2019

BAGRAM AIRFIELD, Afghanistan (AFNS) -- During a recent raid on a terrorist stronghold in a remote Afghan village, U.S. ground forces came under enemy fire. They called for close air support, and shortly thereafter, an F-16 Fighting Falcon dropped munitions to eliminate the threat.

Lt. Col. Benjamin Freeborn, 510th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron commander, distinctly remembers that mission.

"What really struck me about that particular mission was this village was small, and our troops took more risk than they could have in order to protect the civilian population," Freeborn said. "For us it's more important to protect the population and support the government of Afghanistan than it is to apply massive fire to the ground."

The 510th EFS at Bagram Airfield delivers precision fire to protect U.S. and coalition forces in support of Operation Freedom's Sentinel and the NATO Resolute Support mission. While many fighter squadrons have multi-role missions and train across the spectrum of air threats, surface threats and close air support strategic strikes, this team focuses mainly on the close air support aspect. Freeborn said the airpower they deliver helps ensure the safety of the ground forces they support.

"Oftentimes we spend a couple of hours just flying over watch," Freeborn said. "Then when a firefight kicks off, we have almost no warning and have to get there quickly to provide that coverage for the ground troops."

Freeborn said building and maintaining a positive relationship with the F-16 maintainers is paramount in ensuring operations run smoothly.

"The trust we need to have in them is amplified because we fly single-engine, single-seat aircraft where there's not a large margin for error," Freeborn said. "Our aircraft maintenance unit is among one of the best I've had the chance to work with."

With operations going around the clock, keeping these aircraft mission ready in a combat zone is a daunting task for the 510th Aircraft Maintenance Unit; but they are up to the challenge.

"Everyone here is focused on the mission," said Chief Master Sgt. Seth Lininger, 510th AMU superintendent. "We just make sure we can get aircraft in the air 24/7."

Lininger said when an F-16 returns with empty railsmeaning they dropped munitionsmaintenance Airmen do an end-of-fire inspection, load new munitions and ensure all the aircraft systems are functional before preparing for another flight.

"We have a nonstop flow of aircraft into the air," Lininger said. "We want to make sure our ground troops are always covered."

The close relationship between the flying squadron and maintenance unit started well before this deployment; the Airmen are also stationed together at Aviano Air Base, Italy, and have been preparing for their mission here together for over a year.

Lininger and Freeborn said the 510th EFS takes great pride in their work and come together as a seamless team to ensure mission accomplishment. As an F-16 pilot, Freeborn said his job is satisfying because he sees the immediate impacts of his role, which is all about taking care of the Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors and Marines on the ground.

"There's nothing as satisfying as hearing, 'good effects' from the ground party," Freeborn said. "You get that immediate feedback when you drop a bomb in close proximity to friendlies, and it hits the target and protects civilians and friendly troops. That's the most rewarding feeling."

The 510th EFS and 510th AMU are part of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, the Air Force's premier counterterrorism wing in Afghanistan. Headquartered at Bagram, the wing has geographically separated units at Kandahar and Jalalabad airfields in Afghanistan and provides decisive airpower throughout the region.

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Talks With Taliban Expose Rift Between Washington, Kabul

By Jeff Seldin March 14, 2019

Several U.S. officials have touted U.S.-Taliban talks as the best chance in decades to bring peace to Afghanistan, but key Afghan officials' comments suggest the talks are instead widening a rift between Washington and Kabul.

The most pointed criticism has come from Afghan National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib, who while in Washington for meetings Wednesday and Thursday slammed the U.S. strategy as a glorified surrender.

"If this is a recipe for peace, we don't know what is a recipe for war," Mohib, the former Afghan ambassador to Washington, told reporters Thursday, adding that the process was "ostracizing and alienating" the Afghan people.

"We don't have the kind of transparency that we should have," he said. "The last people to find out are us."

Khalilzad assailed

Mohib saved his most pointed criticism for the chief U.S. negotiator, special representative Zalmay Khalilzad, accusing him of putting his personal ambitions ahead of the need for peace.

"The reason he is delegitimizing the Afghan government and weakening it, and at the same time elevating the Taliban, can only have one approach," he said. "Perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government of which he will become the viceroy. We are only saying this because that is the perception."

Khalilzad wrapped up 16 days of talks with the Taliban in Qatar on Tuesday.

"Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides," he said at the time.

At first, reaction from Kabul seemed to be positive.

"We hope to witness a long-term comprehensive cease-fire with the Taliban, and hope that direct negotiations of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban begin soon," tweeted Haroon Chakhansuri, spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

Some analysts believe the change in tone may have more to do with Ghani's political frustrations at home. With his term ending in May, they say he may be worried he and his allies could soon become irrelevant.

Others believe Ghani and Mohib have a legitimate gripe as they watch Washington pursue what they see as a face-saving agreement.

"The State Department moved ahead with the talks out of desperation, even though its own ally wasn't a party to them," Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told VOA.

Excluding government in Kabul "is what the Taliban wanted all along," he added. "The rift between the U.S. and the Afghan government caused by these talks was entirely predictable."

The State Department on Thursday reacted strongly to the accusations against Khalilzad and said Mohib had been brought in for a meeting "to communicate the United States government's displeasure."

"Mr. Mohib's comments are inaccurate and unhelpful," a State Department official said on the condition of anonymity.

'No lack of coordination'

Later, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters Khalilzad has been in regular contact with Ghani and has traveled to Kabul for in-person consultations.

"We don't believe that the comments that were made warrant a public response," he said, adding, "There is no lack of coordination" between Washington and Kabul.

There have been persistent rumors that Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan but earned his doctorate in the U.S. and rose to the rank of ambassador at the State Department, was interested in seeking the Afghan presidency. He has been widely praised by the White House and Pentagon officials.

"We support the ongoing negotiations  the best window for peace there in 40 years," acting U.S. Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told lawmakers Thursday.

Khalilzad's efforts have also earned the praise of Afghan opposition officials.

Former Afghan National Security Adviser Haneef Atmar used Twitter to call his successor's criticisms "misguided & against our national interests."

Mohib, however, expressed concern that the U.S.'s willingness to exclude the current government while engaging directly with the Taliban would risk hard-earned gains.

"You cannot get a cat to guard your milk," Mohib told an audience in Washington. "The Taliban and terrorism is one DNA."

"There are millions of people that the U.S. has invested in, in Afghanistan, that would be completely sidelined and thrown under the bus if this current approach is pursued," he said.

VOA's Nike Ching and Ayaz Gul contributed to this report.

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Israel Strikes Back After 2 Rockets Launched at Tel Aviv

By VOA News March 14, 2019

Israeli rockets struck what the army calls "terror targets" in Gaza overnight Thursday, hours after two rockets were fired toward Tel Aviv.

The military gave no other details, but Palestinian media say the rockets were fired at the southern Gaza port of Khan Yunis.

There are no reports of damage or casualties.

Just hours earlier, two rockets were fired toward Tel Aviv from Gaza, setting off air raid sirens across much of central Israel.

The army said Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system intercepted one of the rockets while the other one likely fell on open ground.

It is unclear which militant group fired the rockets. Hamas, which rules Gaza, and Islamic Jihad both say they were not responsible.

But some Israeli officials said during an emergency security meeting late Thursday that Hamas must be held responsible.

Tension between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza have increased in recent weeks.

A Palestinian rocket was fired into Israel last Saturday. Israel retaliated with airstrikes on Hamas targets.

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US Diplomats Pack Up and Leave Venezuela

By VOA News March 14, 2019

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced that all U.S. diplomats assigned to Venezuela have departed, in an exit the State Department calls "temporary."

Pompeo released a statement Thursday, soon after the last diplomats were reported to have left. The U.S. flag outside the embassy had been taken down.

"I know it is a difficult moment for them," he said, referencing the U.S. diplomats. "They are fully dedicated to our mission of supporting the Venezuelan people's aspirations to live in a democracy and build a better future for their families."

Pompeo said the diplomats assigned to Venezuela will continue their work "from other locations" where they will continue to work on getting humanitarian assistance to the Venezuelan people "and support the democratic actors bravely resisting tyranny."

Pompeo added that the United States government "remains firm in its resolve and support for the people of Venezuela and interim President Juan Guaido." He said staffers look forward to resuming their presence in Venezuela "once the transition to democracy begins."

Also Thursday, the State Department confirmed it has revoked 340 U.S. visas from Venezuelans, including more than 100 former diplomats and their families. State Department spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters that the U.S. has revoked more than 600 visas from Venezuelans since late last year. Palladino urged any U.S. citizens left in Venezuela to leave.

Palladino also warned followers of the embattled Nicolas Maduro not to harass U.S.-backed leader Juan Guaido.

The New York Times on Thursday quoted Palladino saying, "We hold former President Maduro and those surrounding him fully responsible for the safety and welfare of interim president Juan Guaido and his family.  It would be a terrible mistake for the illegitimate Maduro regime to arrest Juan Guaido."

The United States is one of about 50 countries that have thrown their support behind opposition leader Guaido, who has announced himself "interim president" after last year's disputed election. Maduro, the incumbent president who is hanging on to power despite shortages of food, water and electricity, says he is the victim of a coup plot by the United States.

Power was restored Thursday after a weeklong blackout that Maduro blamed on the United States. He has also promised an investigation into Guaido for "alleged involvement in the sabotage of the Venezuelan electricity system."

Guaido denied the allegations at an anti-Maduro protest Tuesday. "The whole world knows who the saboteur is," he said. "Maduro is responsible."

Maduro tried Tuesday to send a group of his relatives to Colombia, but Colombian authorities stopped them at the border, saying they do not recognize Maduro as president and will now allow his family to flee the discomfort suffered by other Venezuelans.

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Sudan's Government Crackdown on Protest Stirs Concern

By Fatiha Belfakir March 14, 2019

Rights groups are voicing concerns about Sudan's violent action against anti-government protests, which have been sweeping the African nation since last December. The rights groups say the action has left at least 60 people dead and hundreds in jail.

The rising costs of bread and fuel sparked the initial protests, which quickly escalated to demand removal of longtime President Omar al-Bashir.

Jehanne Henry, associate director of the Africa division at Human Rights Watch, said the widespread crackdown by Sudanese police was aimed at opposition leaders, protesters, activists and journalists.

"These protests are ongoing daily and they have been met with quite a lot of violence and abuses by government security forces that inflict very brutal beating on people as they arrest them. Many have been killed so far," she told VOA.

Sudanese officials, however, say rights groups are exaggerating the death toll.

A senior Sudanese official who spoke to VOA on condition of anonymity said, "Protesters are taking advantage of the situation and violate the law by stealing, looting and damaging government property." He said there were fewer than 31 cases. Yet this is still a "large number and a grave concern," the official admitted.

Local accounts

Local residents charge that Sudanese authorities are targeting everyone who sympathizes with the protests.

Momena Bashir said that her father, Muawiya Bashir, 57, recently died at a hospital in the capital, Khartoum, after Sudanese police shot him inside his house.

She said police had targeted her father because he harbored some protesters who were hiding from Sudanese security forces.

"My father had sympathy for the protesters," Bashir told VOA. "My father believed that the Sudanese regime is corrupt and is destroying our country.

"We don't know what will happen to us. We are still in a state of shock  after my father's death."

US stance

U.S. officials have sharply criticized Khartoum for official violence toward peaceful protesters demanding political change in their country.

"It is absolutely unacceptable for security forces to use excessive violence to crack down on demonstrators, to use detention without charge, certainly unacceptable to use brutality, torture ... and needless to say there's no reason anyone should be killed," said Cyril Sartor, senior director for Africa at the U.S. National Security Council.

U.S. officials have also voiced concerns about the state of emergency in Sudan.

"We are deeply concerned about the declaration of the national state of emergency and calling the government of Sudan to respect the right of all individuals in Sudan, bringing an immediate end to the violent repression of peaceful protests and seek accountability for those responsible for violation and abuse," Jonathan Cohen, acting U.S. permanent representative to the U.N., said at a Security Council briefing on the situation in Sudan last week.

In an attempt to end the protest movement, President al-Bashir, who has been in power since 1989, declared a yearlong nationwide state of emergency in late February, while issuing several reform measures.

Hundreds jailed

Since the uprising in mid-December, the Sudanese government has detained hundreds of people, including rights activists, journalists, organizers and ordinary protesters, the rights groups said.

"There are dozens of people who are still in detention even though the government continues to pretend it is releasing everyone. It will announce releases, but it will not actually release everyone," said Henry of HRW.

"They [Sudanese authorities] are responsible for killing people on the street, they are responsible for going to neighborhoods [and] pulling people out of their homes  behavior that ... makes Khartoum look more like a war zone than just a policing operation," Henry added.

Some analysts also charge that al-Bashir's recent reforms are at best ceremonial and aimed at easing the tensions with ordinary Sudanese.

"These are not measures that can be called reforms," said Omer Ismail, a senior policy adviser at the Enough Project, a Washington-based research group. "This is a desperate dictator [who] is applying martial law to crush the demonstrations by force."

"A president who means reform will call his opponents to the table for a constructive dialogue instead of deploying tanks on the streets," he added.

US terrorism list

The deadly crackdown on protesters could also threaten Sudan's efforts to be removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. The U.S. designated Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993.

"We have been quite clear, quite explicit ... with all the government leaders that I have met with that the current conditions in Sudan and the overreaction of the security forces in particular put the talks at risk," Sartor of the NSC said.

In late 2017, the U.S. government lifted economic sanctions on Sudan and also removed the country from the list of countries with travel restrictions.

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IDF Pounds Gaza in Response to Recent Attack Toward Tel Aviv

Sputnik News

02:26 15.03.2019(updated 05:11 15.03.2019)

The Israeli military said early on Friday that it had launched strikes against "terror sites" in the Gaza Strip.

On Thursday night, rocket alarms went off in the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv for the first time since 2014. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that it had registered "two launches from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory."

According to Palestinian eyewitnesses, cited by Reuters, several blasts were heard early on Friday from what they claimed to be IDF jets' attack on Hamas positions.

IDF said Friday that they could confirm that the rockets fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv earlier "were launched by the Hamas".

Notably, Hamas said earlier in a statement, quoted by Reuters, they were "not responsible for the firing of the rockets tonight towards the enemy. They were fired as a meeting was underway between the leadership of the Hamas movement and the Egyptian security delegation over the understandings regarding the Gaza Strip".

Meanwhile, moments after the IDF launched its air raid against alleged Hamas targets in Gaza, alarm sirens went off in the southern part of Israel, signaling possible Palestinian shelling.

After a while, the IDF issued another rocket alert.

Moments after the issued rocket alert the IDF said it had intercepted one of the projectiles fired from Gaza toward Israel.

The Israelis usually respond to alleged Palestinian shelling by attacking military targets belonging to Hamas, holding the movement responsible for any aggressive actions originating from the territory of the Hamas-controlled enclave.

The new wave of escalation near Israel's border with Gaza began last March, when Palestinian protests, dubbed the Great March of Return, kicked off. The tensions further mounted in fall due to continued shelling and arson balloons launches from Gaza into Israeli territory and Israeli strikes on Palestinian targets in response to those actions.

 Sputnik

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US senators vote to terminate national emergency

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 14, 2019 09:42PM

In a fresh rebuke, the Republican-controlled US Senate has passed a proposal to terminate President Donald Trump's declaration of an emergency at the southern border.

Fifty-nine Senators, including a dozen Republicans, on Thursday voted in favor of the resolution of disapproval blocking Trump's declaration and 41 others voted against it. The resolution passed the House last month, 245-182.

Trump was quick to respond by tweeting a single word of VETO.

With the emergency declaration, the president is seeking an alternative way to get billions of dollars for the wall after Congress declined to give him funding.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had called on Republicans to defeat the measure, which was approved in February by the Democratic-led House of Representatives.

Earlier in the day, Trump made an eleventh hour plea to Republican senators, and signaled he could be open to future changes to his emergency powers. But he also said that a vote for the resolution by Republicans would be vote for Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as well as "Crime and the Open Border Democrats!"

"Prominent legal scholars agree that our actions to address the National Emergency at the Southern Border and to protect the American people are both CONSTITUTIONAL and EXPRESSLY authorized by Congress...." Trump said in one of his tweets.

McConnell supported Trump and said he was "operating within existing law."

"Let me first say that I support the President's decision, so I will vote today to uphold it and reject this resolution of disapproval," he said.

On Wednesday, the Senate passed another resolution, urging the government to cease its support for Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, rejecting Trump's policy toward the kingdom.

The Senate passed the resolution by a 54 to 46 tally, seeking to halt any US military involvement in the conflict, including providing targeting support for Saudi airstrikes, without authorization from Congress.

Introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders, Mike Lee and Chris Murphy, the resolution will scale back the US role in and American military assistance for Saudi war on Yemen ahead of the fourth anniversary of the day when the Saudi-led coalition started its campaign against the impoverished nation.

The resolution now heads to the Democrat-led House of Representatives, which is expected to overwhelmingly pass it, possibly this month.

Sanders, a co-sponsor of the text, has called the Saudi war on Yemen a humanitarian and strategic disaster.

The resolution sets the foundation for what could become Trump's first presidential veto, as White House advisers said earlier in the day that Trump would veto the resolution.

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China Prevents UN Blacklisting Of Pakistani JeM Leader

March 14, 2019

China has blocked a bid to designate as a terrorist the leader of the group behind an attack last month that dramatically escalated tensions between India and Pakistan.

China prevented the United Nations Security Council on March 13 from blacklisting Masood Azhar, the leader of Pakistan-based group Jaish-e Mohammad (JeM), which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed 40 troops in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Tensions between India and Pakistan have soared following the February 14 attack in disputed Kashmir, stoking fears of a war between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

Britain, France, and the United States had requested Azhar to be subject to an assets freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo.

But China placed a "technical hold" on the request, saying it needed more time to examine it.

China, a Pakistan ally, had previously blocked attempts to have Azhar blacklisted.

India said that it will continue to pursue "all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice."

Azhar founded JeM in 2000. The group, which is officially banned in Pakistan, was blacklisted by the Security Council in 2001.

Based on reporting by the BBC, Reuters, and AFP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/china-prevents-un-blacklisting -of-pakistani-jem-leader/29820707.html

Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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US Senate Passes Bill to End Trump's Border Emergency

Sputnik News

21:46 14.03.2019(updated 22:57 14.03.2019)

Shortly before the vote, the US president tweeted that he would veto the legislation to end his national emergency declaration at the border if the bill passes the Senate.

The US Senate has passed a resolution aimed at ending the national emergency at the US border with Mexico, declared by president Donal Trump on 15 February after Congress refused to allocate the $5.7 billion he requested for border security. The chamber voted 59-41 for the bill.

Moments after the measure passed, US President Donald Trump tweeted, "VETO!" However, Trump's pending rejection could still be overturned by two-thirds of the House and Senate. He followed it up with an explanation.

The bill was sent to the chamber after in February the US House of Representatives voted 245 to 182 to revoke the emergency declaration.

Explaining his decision to declare a national emergency, Trump said he could appropriate funds for the wall's construction, a long-sought objective of the president. The Trump administration aims to divert military funding to install 234 miles' worth of steel barriers along the country's 1,950-mile border with Mexico.

 Sputnik

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New Delhi Disappointed as China Blocks Bid to Blacklist Militant Leader

By Anjana Pasricha March 14, 2019

India has expressed disappointment that a measure by the U.N. Security Council to name the head of the Islamic militant group, Jaish-e- Mohammad (JeM) as a global terrorist, has been blocked by China. The measure was proposed after India and Pakistan came to the brink of war last month following a suicide attack in Indian Kashmir for which the group claimed responsibility.

India has long been frustrated by the repeated block exercised by Pakistan's close ally, Beijing, on its decade-long effort to blacklist Masood Azhar. New Delhi blames his JeM group for several high profile attacks in India.

In a statement India's Foreign Ministry vowed to pursue "all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens are brought to justice."

France, along with the United States and Britain, proposed the move to name Azhar a global terrorist after India mounted a diplomatic offensive to put pressure on Pakistan to act against militant groups following the February 14 suicide attack that killed 40 paramilitaries in Kashmir  the deadliest such incident in 30 years.

It was India's fourth attempt to put Azhar on a U.N. global list of terrorists, which would subject him to an assets freeze, travel ban and an arms embargo.

After putting a "technical hold" on the move to blacklist Azhar, China said it needs more time to conduct a "thorough and in-depth investigation" on the matter. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing is "ready to communicate and coordinate with all sides including India to properly handle this issue."

China's block of the man New Delhi considers the "mastermind" of high profile terror attacks in India, has become a festering irritant in its ties with its giant neighbor.

It triggered an angry reaction among social media users in India with the hashtag #BoycottChinaProducts trending on Twitter in India. It was headline news in newspapers and television broadcasts.

The attack for which the JeM claimed responsibility triggered huge anger in India and prompted a dangerous aerial confrontation with Pakistan after New Delhi carried out airstrikes on what it said was a militant base of the group inside Pakistan.

Islamabad says it banned the JeM after the group was blacklisted by the United Nations in 2001 following an attack on India's parliament, but security analysts say it continues to operate under different names.

Pakistan also said last week that it had detained the son and brother of Masood Azhar as part of a recent crackdown on militant groups. But India, which blames Pakistan for not doing enough to rein in militant groups, has expressed skepticism about Islamabad's actions.

Masood Azhar founded the militant group after he was released by India in 1999 in exchange for the passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines plane. Besides an attack on its parliament in 2001, India blames the JeM for attacks on an air base in Punjab and a military camp in Kashmir in 2016.

On Wednesday the Indian foreign minister, while giving a speech on her government's foreign policy, said that if the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan "is so generous and a statesman, he should give us Masood Azhar." She also said that India could have a good relationship with Pakistan only if the neighboring country "takes action against terror groups on its soil."

However, in a sign that tensions between the arch rivals are de-escalating, officials from both countries met on Thursday for discussions on facilitating visits by Sikh pilgrims in India to one of their holiest shrines located in Pakistan.

Held on the Indian side of the Wagah border crossing between the two countries, a joint statement said the discussions were "constructive" and both sides agreed to "rapidly operationalize the project."

Analysts say it is a positive signal that their recent hostilities did not derail the initiative, which many had hoped would improve ties between the nuclear armed countries. Dubbed a "corridor of peace," the Kartarpur corridor is set to open later this year.

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WHO Aims to End DRC Ebola Outbreak in 6 Months

By Lisa Schlein March 14, 2019

The World Health Organization (WHO) chief says the Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) can be brought to an end in six months, if everything goes as planned. Latest figures from the DRC Ministry of Health put the number of Ebola cases at 927, including 584 deaths.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that any of the challenges that lie ahead could undo the gains achieved so far in controlling the spread of the Ebola virus.

But he said enough progress has been made to believe the Ebola outbreak in Congo's North Kivu and Ituri provinces can be shut down in six months' time.

He said transmission of the Ebola virus has been stopped in Beni, Mangina, Komanda, and Oicha in North Kivu province.

"It has not spread to other parts of the country, and it has not spread to neighboring countries. I think anybody can agree that this is a fact and something that we can say is good news. And the second is not only that it is not spreading, it is actually contracting," Tedros said.

WHO reports the virus has been contained in 11 of the 28 communities affected by Ebola. Since January, it said the number of new cases reported every week has dropped by half from an average of 50 cases to 25.

Nevertheless, Tedros said challenges remain. He said security is the No. 1 concern, with armed groups posing a serious threat in Katwa and Butembo, the current epicenters of the disease.

Three weeks ago, treatment centers in Katwa and Butembo were attacked, and the facility in Butembo was attacked again last week while the WHO chief was visiting the region.

Tedros said another big challenge is that of gaining the trust of communities. They often are suspicious of the demands made by health workers that go against their traditional practices.

The WHO chief said six months is a feasible goal for ending the Ebola outbreak. However, he added WHO is prepared for any eventuality, and if the goal is missed, the agency will continue its work in the region for as long as it takes to end the Ebola epidemic.

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IBCS to provide leap-ahead capabilities for Poland's national air and missile defense program while increasing NATO security efforts

March 14, 2019

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.  March 14, 2019 -- The U.S. Army has awarded Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) a $713 million contract for the production of Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS) for the first phase of Poland's WISA air and missile defense program.

"Poland is taking a leadership role in today's complex threat environment by selecting IBCS over legacy stove-piped systems that were designed decades ago for a much different threat profile. IBCS is the future of multidomain operations and with it, Poland will have a state-of-the-art system to modernize its integrated air and missile defense capabilities," said Dan Verwiel, vice president and general manager, missile defense and protective systems, Northrop Grumman. "Through the acquisition of IBCS, Poland will be in line with the U.S. Army's future direction. Poland will have the flexibility to consider any radar and any interceptor, optimize sensor and effector integration and keep pace with an evolving threat."

Under this foreign military sales contract for WISA, Northrop Grumman will manufacture IBCS engagement operations centers and integrated fire control network relays and deliver IBCS net-enabled command and control for four firing units. The IBCS engagement operations centers will be integrated with IBCS battle management software that maximizes the combat potential of sensors and weapon systems. IBCS engagement operations centers and network relays will be transported by Polish Jelcz vehicles.

"Northrop Grumman continues to work closely with the Polish Ministry of National Defense and Polish industry toward a comprehensive offset program that meets the program goals and requirements. We look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with PGZ and its consortium of companies on this and future phases of the WISA program," said Tarik Reyes, vice president, business development, missile defense and protective systems, Northrop Grumman. "We are pleased with the opportunity to deliver cutting-edge, net-centric IBCS technology to Poland and support the Ministry of National Defense's modernization priorities."

IBCS is the air and missile defense command-and-control solution of choice for Poland. In March 2018, Poland signed a Letter of Offer and Acceptance with the U.S. government to purchase IBCS and became the first international partner country to acquire this advanced capability. By implementing IBCS, Poland will transform its IAMD capabilities in a manner consistent with the U.S. Army.

IBCS creates a paradigm shift for IAMD by replacing legacy stove-piped systems with a next-generation, net-centric approach to better address the evolving complex threat. The system integrates disparate radars and weapons to construct a far more effective IAMD enterprise. IBCS delivers a single integrated air picture with unprecedented accuracy and broadens surveillance and protection areas. With its truly open systems architecture, IBCS allows incorporation of current and future sensors and weapon systems and interoperability with joint C2 and the ballistic missile defense system.

IBCS is managed by the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Missiles and Space, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.

Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products and solutions in autonomous systems, cyber, C4ISR, space, strike, and logistics and modernization to customers worldwide. Please visit news.northropgrumman.com and follow us on Twitter, @NGCNews, for more information.

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IRGC owns largest assault bomber drone

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, March 14, IRNA -- A large scale military maneuver of assault- combat drones of Islamic Revolution Guardian Corps (IRGC) Airspace Forces dubbed as;' Till Beit-ul-Moqqadas 1' held in Persian Gulf.

IRGC information office reported on Thursday that for the first time, 50 assault drones 'RQ-170' accompany with a number of other combat-assault drones participated in the maneuver.

IRGC Airspace Forces Commander Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said all technologies to develop these drones are designed, produced and became operational in Research center of the Force.

He added that Islamic Republic of Iran has the largest combat-assault drone fleet in the region.

The general said one of important character of the war game was the ability of design and plan simultaneous flight of the drones in a small geographical area, which indicates emergence of a new aerial power in Iran.

He added that some of participating drones were similar to the US model 'MQ1'.

1391**1424

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Iran's IRGC holds massive drone drills in Persian Gulf region

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 14, 2019 10:14AM

Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) holds offensive-combat drone exercises in the Persian Gulf region, involving dozens of RQ-170 stealth unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that Tehran has manufactured based on a model of a US Sentinel drone it captured unharmed in 2011.

The massive drills, dubbed 'Towards al-Quds 1,' were staged by the IRGC's Aerospace Division in the general range of the Persian Gulf, with senior military officials in attendance, Sepahnews reported on Thursday.

Different types of "offensive and combat" drones, including 10 Iran-built RQ-170s, took part in the maneuvers.

It is the first time that the Armed Forces test the performance of such a high number of offensive drones during a combat-offensive operation, which saw the aircraft fly simultaneously at a distance of over 1,000 kilometers from the hostile targets before approaching and striking them at a specific time.

"Sanctions bore fruit," Brigadier General Hossein Salami, the IRGC's second-in-command said ironically while commenting on the military exercises.

"Despite the empty and satanic dreams of the US and other ill-wishers of the Iranian nation, we witnessed tens of modern and advanced domestic RQ-170s and other types of combat drones in flight during a major drill and unique offensive operation," he added.

The IRGC's Aerospace Division, he added, is proud of being the pioneer in the area of producing modern and advanced drones at home.

Salami also noted that all the drones successfully destroyed the enemy targets during the maneuver.

Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC's Aerospace Division, said that the force had reached self-sufficiency in designing, producing and operating drones.

Under the supervision of Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, the IRGC is today in possession of the biggest fleet of offensive bomber drones in the region.

The UAVs flew from different positions towards the designated targets on Faror Island of Iran's southern Hormozgan Province and destroyed them, he added.

In December 2011, Iran famously grounded a US RQ-170 Sentinel using electronic warfare techniques, as the stealth aircraft was flying over the Iranian city of Kashmar near the Afghan border.

In just a few years, Iran unveiled its own RQ-170 drone manufactured by the reverse-engineering of captured Lockheed Martin's Sentinel aircraft.

Last November, Hajizadeh said Iran currently possesses the biggest collection of captured or downed American and Israeli drones, including the US' MQ1, MQ9, Shadow, ScanEagle, and RQ-170 as well as the Israeli regime's Hermes.

The reverse-engineered version of the RQ-170 drone was used to target Daesh terrorists' positions in Syria and Iraq. Iran's UAV program has also played a significant role in monitoring US warships in the Persian Gulf.

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IRGC Holds Massive Drone Drills in Persian Gulf - Reports

Sputnik News

14:35 14.03.2019(updated 14:36 14.03.2019)

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) conducted on Thursday massive exercises, involving combat drones flying over the Persian Gulf waters, Mehr News Agency reported.

A total of 50 domestically-built versions of the US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drones and a number of other combat and assault unmanned aerial vehicles took part in the drills, according to Mehr News Agency.

The drones have reportedly taken off from the bases as far as 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) away from the operation zone to hit the target.

On 22 February, the Iranian Armed Forces conducted massive naval drills in the Strait of Hormuz that lasted for three days. The manoeuvres covered a total area of 2 million square kilometres (772,000 square miles) across the Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean.

 Sputnik

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US 'rights' report avoids linking MbS to Khashoggi murder despite CIA report

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 14, 2019 07:06AM

In its annual "human rights" report, the US administration attempts to whitewash the Saudi crown prince's role in the gruesome assassination of dissident Journalist Jamal Khashoggi despite a CIA report blaming Mohammed bin Salman for the crime.

In the section on Khashoggi's murder, the US State Department report released on Wednesday attributed the crime to "government agents," without mentioning the controversial prince.

This is while The Washington Post, for which Khashoggi was a columnist, reported last November that the CIA had concluded that the heir to the Saudi throne  also known as MbS -- ordered the assassination of the journalist, who was an outspoken critic of bin Salman.

In its account of Khashoggi's death, the State Department report acknowledged that he "was killed by government agents during a visit to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey," in early October 2018.

"The government initially claimed he had left the consulate in good health but changed its story as facts came to light," the report added.

At a press conference unveiling the document, Ambassador Michael Kozak of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor claimed that the report relies on facts rather than speculation on Khashoggi's murder case.

"There are two governments that have criminal jurisdiction over the case, the Turkish government and the Saudi government, and they're pushing towards a genuine, transparent, thorough, factual investigation," he said.

Both Istanbul and Riyadh have been conducting an investigation into the murder, but the joint inquiry has made little progress, with the Turkish authorities considering their Saudi counterparts uncooperative.

Ankara wants the suspects in the case to stand trial in Turkey, but Riyadh refuses to extradite them.

"We have not -- and not only in the report but I think in any other format -- tried to draw our own conclusions as to who was and who was not responsible," Kozak claimed. "Until we see that, trying to speculate about who might and might not have been involved is just not productive."

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained in a preface to the report that a country's rights record would not be a determining factor in shaping Washington's diplomatic engagement with that state.

"The policy of this administration is to engage with other governments, regardless of their record, if doing so will further US interests," he said.

Khashoggi was killed and his body was dismembered by a Saudi hit squad after being lured into the consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018.

Turkey, which said it was in possession of audio evidence of Khashoggi's murder soon after he failed to exit the consulate, has indirectly suggested that bin Salman was behind the journalist's killing.

After weeks of outright denial, Riyadh eventually acknowledged the "premeditated" murder but has attempted to shift the blame to bin Salman's underlings and away from the prince himself.

Khashoggi's murder has sparked an outcry from American lawmakers, many of whom believe President Donald Trump is covering up the crime.

Trump said last November that the US supports the Saudi regime amid the Khashoggi scandal because any damage to bilateral ties could affect American interests in the Middle East.

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European Parliament votes to suspend accession talks with Turkey

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 14, 2019 08:18AM

The European Parliament has voted to suspend negotiations between European governments and Turkey on Ankara's accession to the European Union (EU), citing a series of concerns, including alleged human rights violations.

The European Parliament, the legislative branch of the EU, on Wednesday voted 370 to 109 in favor of a resolution that recommends suspending accession talks with Turkey. Another 143 members abstained.

Although the vote is non-binding, it is a strong measure of opposition to Ankara's accession to the EU inside Europe.

"The European Parliament remains seriously concerned about Turkey's poor track record in upholding human rights, the rule of law, media freedom and the fight against corruption, as well as its all-powerful presidential system," the European Parliament said in a statement on the same day, enumerating its concerns.

Kati Piri, a Dutch lawmaker and the EU rapporteur on Turkey, accused Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of being involved in a "witchhunt against his critics." She said European calls for Turkey to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms had "fallen on deaf ears."

The Turkish government responded with effective disdain.

"It is not possible for us to attribute any value to the one-sided and non-objective approach adopted by the European Parliament," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said, according to the Daily Sabah.

A spokesman for Turkey's ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party called the decision "disreputable."

"This disreputable decision shows that the European Parliament is under the influence of far-right ideology," said Omer Celik.

He called Piri, the EU rapporteur, "racist."

Some 15 years since Turkey launched efforts to join the EU, it is still struggling to secure accession. The 28-member bloc has long maintained that Ankara is not doing enough to uphold European standards required for accession.

That drawn-out process seems to have frustrated Turkey. In October 2018, President Erdogan said the EU was wasting Ankara's time.

"If the European Union continues wasting Turkey's time in its accession to the union, then the country could hold a referendum over its membership bid. It is better to see this process faster so that Turkey can determine its way," the Turkish president said back then.

Relations between Turkey and the EU have been especially strained following the July 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan, which the Ankara government claims to have been masterminded by US-based opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen.

The EU has often criticized the crackdown in the wake of the botched putsch, in which over 150,000 people have been detained or dismissed over their alleged backing for the putsch. Ankara, in return, has accused Brussels of being unsupportive of the alleged threats that it faces.

As part of a deal between Turkey and the EU that was struck in March 2016, Turkey has agreed to take back rejected asylum seekers attempting to enter Europe via its territory in return for, among other things, accelerated accession talks. While Turkey has remained committed to that deal  something the European Parliament acknowledged in its Wednesday resolution  the accession talks seem effectively stalled.

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Turkey's purchase of Russian missile poses threat to NATO

Iran Press TV

Fri Mar 15, 2019 12:57AM

US officials have warned Turkey not to purchase Russian-made S-400 missiles, saying it would pose a security threat to members states of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO).

Unidentified senior US officials, who spoke to a select group of journalist on condition of anonymity on Thursday, said Ankara's purchase of the S-400 was tantamount to a threat to NATO member states.

Reuters news agency said the unnamed US state officials had warned Turkey against the purchase of the F-35 aircraft, saying the deal would be cancelled if Ankara went through with the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system.

US officials told reporters that F-35 fighter jets cannot be deployed alongside the Russian-made systems.

Turkey has pointed out that will not retreat from its decision to purchase the Russian-made missile system.

Earlier, Moscow said it will install the Russian-made S-400 missile system in October.

Turkish officials have said that they would not give in to pressure by US-led NATO forces, insisting that the installment of the S-400 system would go ahead as planned.

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said earlier this month that Ankara's decision to buy S-400 air defense missile systems will not be stopped despite strong opposition from Washington and warnings that it should not buy the anti-aircraft platform.

"Turkey does what is necessary for its own interests regarding the S-400 missile defense system, it takes own decision and choice," Oktay insisted, adding that Ankara will not renege on its agreement with Russia.

Oktay's remarks came a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara would not retreat from buying the S-400 missile defense systems from Russia, adding that Ankara may subsequently also look into buying S-500 systems.

Meanwhile, Turkey has asked Russia to strengthen its air defense systems after Washington's 2015 decision to withdraw its Patriot surface-to-air missile system from Turkish borders.

Ties between Turkey and US-led NATO further deteriorated after Washington began showing support to Kurdish groups opposed to Ankara.

Turkey has asked US officials to extradite Fethullah Gulen, a powerful Turkish opposition figure who lives in the US. Ankara accuses Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan, of masterminding the July 2016 coup attempt against the Turkish president.

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Defence Secretary sets out ambitious Defence Prosperity Programme

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has reaffirmed his commitment to growing Defence's contribution to UK economic growth.

14 March 2019

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has reaffirmed his commitment to growing Defence's contribution to UK economic growth, setting out a new package of measures to drive productivity and innovation in the sector.

In July 2018, Philip Dunne MP published a review of the economic value of Defence, highlighting the crucial role the sector plays in supporting over 260,000 jobs and contributing on average 7bn in exports each year.

The Ministry of Defence invested 18.9bn with UK industry in 2017/18, equating to 290 per resident, which supported 115,000 jobs across the country.

Ahead of today's Prosperity Conference, bringing together leading defence industry partners in the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry, the Defence Secretary has announced:

- 500k investment from the Defence Innovation Fund for a pilot programme with industry to further strengthen the international competitiveness and productivity of the UK defence sector.

- A joint programme supported by Invest Northern Ireland and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to pilot a Defence Technology Exploitation Programme (DTEP) in Northern Ireland, worth an expected 1.2m in Research and Development investment.

- A commitment to working with the Welsh Government on the potential for an Advanced Manufacturing Research Institute alongside the Defence Electronics and Components Agency (DECA) in North Wales to cement the region as a centre of excellence for innovation.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said:

"These announcements demonstrate the progress we are making in our commitment to boost Defence's contribution to national prosperity."

"Our world-class defence sector operates at the very forefront of innovation, supporting 260,000 jobs and increasing economic growth throughout the UK."

"The MOD is playing a central role in the Government's Modern Industrial Strategy and prosperity agenda, ensuring the UK remains a world-leader in defence technology in the years to come."

Secretary of State for Wales Alun Cairns said:

"The Ministry of Defence plays a crucial role in Wales and supports thousands of jobs across the country. It is Welsh expertise which ensures the Armed Forces are equipped with the latest technology, and DECA Sealand and companies like AerFin are proving Wales' credentials as a global leader in aviation technology."

"The UK Government is committed to ensuring this trend continues, and through the Industrial Strategy aims to invest in key industries and infrastructure in Wales to boost productivity and support businesses in creating well-paid jobs."

In recognition of the need to improve the quality of data on the UK defence sector available to decision-makers by stimulating greater academic involvement in the area, the Defence Secretary also announced:

- The proposal to create a Joint Economic Data Hub with industry, sitting within the UK Defence Solution Centre and overseen by a new independent advisory panel, to collect and aggregate economic data from across the defence sector.

- A commitment to sponsor an international Defence Economics Conference at Kings College London later this year, as the first of a series of events to develop understanding of the significant economic value of Defence.

Earl Howe outlined these proposals in more detail at the Defence Prosperity Conference today, before taking part in a panel event with senior industry and government officials.

The initiatives build on the Philip Dunne report commissioned by the Defence Secretary, entitled 'Growing the Contribution of Defence to UK Prosperity', which has been widely welcomed by Government and Industry.

Rt Hon Philip Dunne MP said:

"I welcome today's response by the Secretary of State to my report and the steps taken so far to drive the UK prosperity agenda forward, both within the MOD and as it engages with the defence industry on future initiatives."

"I look forward to helping the MOD continue to develop the way in which it demonstrates its positive impact within the UK economy."

Paul Everitt, CEO ADS said:

"Providing thousands of high-value jobs and delivering vital equipment for the UK Armed Forces, the UK defence industry is making a big contribution to our national prosperity and security."

"UK industry is designing, developing and manufacturing the best in advanced defence equipment and services, and it is vital that industry and Government continue to work closely together to make sure we develop the skills and capabilities our country needs."

Andrew Cowdery, Industry Co-Chair Defence Growth Partnership said:

"The DGP welcomes the Defence Secretary's continued focus on the UK defence sector and its importance to the prosperity of the country."

"By working jointly with the Government through the DGP our industry can continue to make long term investments in innovation, skills and the right capabilities."

"This will allow the sector to continue to meet the requirements of our Armed forces and maximise international trade."

Stephen Phipson, Chief Executive, Make UK (formerly EEF) said:

"Make UK are pleased to support the Defence Secretary's drive to grow our national prosperity from defence activity."

"The UK's defence supply chain operates at the technical frontier, delivering the cutting-edge innovation that is essential to ensuring that our Armed Forces are, and remain, ahead of their competitors and adversaries."

"In doing so our industry does more than just help to safeguard our national security; it makes a vital contribution to our prosperity."

Recent announcements highlighting the importance of Defence to the UK economy include:

- A 400m contract with MBDA UK to add ultra-accurate Brimstone missile capability to RAF Typhoon jets, supporting 400 jobs in Bolton, Stevenage and across their UK supply chain.

- Contracts worth 1bn announced in October 2018 to support the UK's Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships and the Royal Navy's Survey and Hydrographic fleet, supporting over 700 jobs at shipyards across the country.

- A 500m contract from the US Department of Defense centred on the Defence Electronics and Components Agency in Sealand, North Wales, to repair state-of-the-art F-35 Lighting fighter jets, cementing the UK's role as the Global Repair Hub for F-35 aircraft.



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British Lawmakers to Seek 3-Month Brexit Delay

By VOA News March 14, 2019

British lawmakers voted Thursday to seek a three-month delay in Britain's scheduled March 29 split from the 28-nation European Union after overwhelmingly voting against holding a new Brexit referendum.

The House of Commons voted 412-202 to seek the delay after being unable in several votes this week to muster a majority for an exit plan.

The vote to delay calls on Prime Minister Theresa May to seek an extension from the EU until June 30. The lawmakers have already twice rejected her plans for Brexit, but by law, Britain will leave the EU on March 29 with or without a deal, unless it cancels Brexit or secures the delay.

Earlier, pro-European campaigners wanted a new vote to overturn the 2016 referendum calling for Britain to withdraw from the EU. But lawmakers voted against a new plebiscite, 334-85, with most lawmakers from the main opposition Labor Party abstaining.

String of votes

Lawmakers have held a series of votes on how to proceed with the Brexit deadline two weeks away. On Tuesday, parliamentarians massively voted against May's renegotiated plan with EU leadership that sought to allay concerns about border passage between EU member Ireland and Northern Ireland. On Wednesday, they voted against a plan to quit the EU without any terms of the departure set in place.

The lawmakers on Thursday voted 318-302 against a plan offered by opposition Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn calling for May to use a Brexit delay to give parliament time "to find a majority for a different approach."

EU members would need to approve a delay beyond March 29. They have repeatedly said they would need proper justification to agree to push back the deadline. After Wednesday's vote, they said that while it was one thing for the British government to reject a so-called no-deal exit, at some point it would have to figure out the alternative, a deal that could actually pass.

The EU also prefers that any extension be limited, finishing before its own elections in late May.

European Council President Donald Tusk left open the possibility of a longer delay, saying Thursday that ahead of a meeting of EU leaders next week, he would be appealing to member states to consider that option if Britain "finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy."

Third time?

May brought what she said was an improved deal to Parliament for Tuesday's vote, one that sought to remove concerns about the Irish border with Northern Ireland. Opponents want to make sure Britain is not locked into a long-term customs agreement that subjects the country to EU trade rules.

May hinted Wednesday that she could try for a third time to get lawmakers to approve the deal that negotiators from Britain and the EU worked on for two years.

The Wednesday vote rejecting a no-deal exit does not carry legal weight, only political force, meaning it is still possible that without an extension and without an agreement during the next two weeks, Brexit could proceed with no divorce terms in place.

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US to test banned missiles after leaving INF treaty with Russia in August

Iran Press TV

Thu Mar 14, 2019 07:55AM

The United States is preparing to test two ground-launched missiles that it has been developing for more than 30 years in August, when it is expected to abandon a treaty with Russia that bans the use of such weapons.

The projects include a low-flying cruise missile with a range of about 1,000 kilometers and a ballistic missile with a range of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers, military officials who could not reveal their name under the Pentagon's security rules told the media.

The cruise missile will be flight-tested in August, when Washington's three-month suspension of the Cold War-era Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty comes to an end.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has threatened to fully withdraw from the agreement unless Russia dismantles the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile, which Washington believes is in violation of the INF.

Russia has rebuffed US claims by showcasing the missile to journalists and revealing many of its sensitive specifications to ensure the international community that the Trump administration is being dishonest.

Singed in 1987, the treaty banned the US and the former Soviet Union from developing ground-launched nuclear-capable missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers.

The Pentagon's new ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) might be ready for deployment within 18 months, an official said.

The longer-range ballistic missile, however, won't be ready for flight tests before November and its deployment will take five years or more, the official added.

Michelle Baldanza, a Pentagon spokeswoman, had announced on Monday that the military was fabricating parts of a new GLCM.

She said then that Washington would stop the projects if Moscow agreed to a deal to rescue the INF treaty before August.

American officials insist that none of the new missiles will be capable of delivering nuclear payloads but that is not the real threat of such weapons.

What makes intermediate-range weapons a destabilizing force is the short time they take to reach their designated target.

The current situation bears similarities to a missile standoff between the US and the Soviet Union in 1980s, when Washington deployed a nuclear-armed weapon in Britain and several other European NATO countries along with Pershing 2 ground-based ballistic missiles in response to Moscow's deployment of SS-20 missiles that could reach Western Europe.

Those missiles were withdrawn and destroyed upon the signing of the INF.

The Pentagon officials said they had yet to discuss possible deployment of the new weapons with US allies in Europe and Asia, particularly because the NATO is still studying the possible effects of the INF's collapse.

However, one defense official said Washington could deploy the new intermediate-range ballistic missile could be deployed on the Pacific territory of Guam, which is close enough to China and Russia to cause a threat.

US arms control advocates as well as congressional Democrats have questioned the decision to leave INF.

"The Russians have been violating the INF treaty for years but, instead of focusing world opinion against the Russians, the Trump administration decided to withdraw from the treaty," Representative Adam Smith, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said recently. "Instead of punishing the Russians, the administration has announced it would sink to the level of the Russians."

Washington has a long track record of tying major weapons upgrade plans to an external threat in order to convince the taxpayers.

The Pentagon announced in August 2017 that it had hired Boeing and Northrop Grumman to develop a replacement for the US Air Force's arsenal of ageing Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and cruise missiles.

Back then, Washington used an escalated war of words between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, which saw both sides trade threats of nuclear apocalypse, to justify the move.

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Pentagon Planning To Test Long-Banned Missiles After INF Pullout

By RFE/RL March 14, 2019

The Pentagon plans this summer to test a ground-launched cruise missile of the type that has been banned for three decades by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, U.S. news agencies report.

"We're going to test a ground-launched cruise missile in August," a senior defense official, who declined to be named, was quoted by Reuters as saying on March 13.

Pentagon officials spoke to a small group of reporters on the condition that they would not be identified.

The United States on February 2 launched the six-month process of leaving the INF Treaty after Washington and NATO repeatedly accused Moscow of violating the accord by developing the 9M729 cruise missile, also known as the SSC-8.

Russia, which denies the accusation, said it was also withdrawing from the INF Treaty, which banned both countries from developing, producing, and deploying ground-launched cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

When he announced that the United States would pull out of the INF Treaty, Trump said the military would "move forward" with developing a military response to Russia's alleged violations.

The U.S. cruise missile to be tested in August will have a range of 1,000 kilometers, Reuters quoted a Pentagon official as saying.

If the test proves successful, the missile could be deployed in about 18 months, the official said.

The same official said the Pentagon was also tentatively planning in November to test an intermediate-range ballistic missile.

The Associated Press quoted an official as saying the second ballistic missile would have a range of 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers. It would not be ready for deployment for at least five years.

The defense officials told reporters that allies in Europe and Asia had not yet been consulted about the planned missile tests or if they would be deployed on their territory.

One official said the intermediate-range ballistic missile could be deployed on Guam, a U.S. territory close enough to China or Russia to be considered a threat.

Some proponents of arms control have questioned the strategy around the tests.

"The Russians have been violating the INF Treaty for years but, instead of focusing world opinion against the Russians, the Trump administration decided to withdraw from the treaty," Adam Smith, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said recently.

"Instead of punishing the Russians, the administration has announced it would sink to the level of the Russians."

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and The Guardian

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/pentagon-to- test-cruise-missiles-inf-treaty -russia/29820423.html

Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.

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US Gen. Sheds Light on Plans to Deploy Cruise Missiles in Europe Amid INF Exit

Sputnik News

15:48 14.03.2019

The remarks come after the Hill reported on Wednesday that the US plans to test two missile systems banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the US announced its decision to withdraw from later this year.

General Ben Hodges, former commander of United States Army Europe (USAREUR), has suggested that after leaving the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the US will increase the potential of its missile defence system in Europe without focusing on deploying its cruise missiles to the continent.

"The technologies have changed so much that it may not be necessary", Hodges told Sputnik.

He declined to comment on the capabilities of the existing US missile defence systems in terms of intercepting the latest Russian hypersonic missiles, citing a lack of information on the matter.

He accused Russia of violating the INF Treaty, which Hodges believes may still be saved. At the same time, he refused to comment on Russian concerns about the agreement-related violations by the US.

According to him, the existence of the INF Treaty is better than its absence, since it serves as a basis for greater security and stability.

Hodges did not elaborate on how the treaty could be replaced but noted that in any case, "transparency and a clear protocol on compliance with observers" should be a bottom line of the issue of arms control.

Separately, he predicted that the US "will continue the development of its missile defence program [] to protect European citizens", something that he said he tried to improve when he was the USAREUR Commander.

Hodges' comments came amid media reports that the US plans to test two missile systems banned under the INF Treaty, and that a new cruise missile is scheduled to be tested in August, while a longer-range ballistic missile will be test-launched in November.

The reports came after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree in early March on the suspension of the implementation of the INF Treaty between Moscow and Washington "until the United States rectifies violations of its commitments under the said Treaty or until its termination".

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Europe would be most vulnerable to any negative consequences of the potential collapse of the INF Treaty.

German Economy and Energy Minister Peter Altmaier said, in turn, that he does not rule out a new arms race in the event of the termination of the agreement.

In an earlier statement in February, US President Donald Trump announced that Washington would be suspending its obligations under the provisions of the INF Treaty starting on 2 February. He spoke about Russia's 9M729 cruise missile, which American officials claim violates the treaty limitations.

Russia has repeatedly denied the allegations that the missile violates the treaty, pointing out that American missile defence systems deployed in Europe can be re-purposed for offensive use and therefore are themselves violating the accord.

The INF Treaty was signed by the Soviet Union and the US in 1987, and provides for the elimination of all nuclear-armed ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles that operate at ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.

 Sputnik

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US Plans to Test Missiles Banned by INF Treaty in 2019 - Report

Sputnik News

05:45 14.03.2019(updated 11:26 14.03.2019)

The test is scheduled for when Washington completes its Treaty withdrawal procedure. Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced its decision to resume manufacturing parts for missiles that violate the treaty.

The United States plans to test two missile systems banned under Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the US announced its decision to withdraw from, later this year, The Hill reported Wednesday.

A new cruise missile is scheduled to be tested in August, while a longer-range ballistic missile will be tested later in November, unnamed defense officials told reporters.

Under the INF treaty, all missiles with range between 500 and 5,500 kilometers are banned. The new cruise missile is supposed to have a range of 1,000 kilometers, while the ballistic missile will have a range of 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers, the officials said.

Neither of the two missiles will be armed with nuclear warheads, they said. This corresponds to Pentagon's earlier statement, in which the Department said its missile efforts are "conventional only  not nuclear."

During the Pentagon's budget rollout Tuesday, officials dodged questions about funding for INF-noncompliant systems, with acting Pentagon comptroller Elaine McCusker saying only that "our budget is, right now, INF-compliant," The Hill report says.

President Donald Trump announced last month the US would unilaterally withdraw from the treaty, pointing towards Russian 9M729 cruise missile, which American officials claim violates the treaty limitations.

Russia repeatedly denied the allegations that the missile violates the 1987 treaty, pointing out that American missile defense systems deployed in Europe can be repurposed for offensive and therefore are themselves in violation of the treaty. Moscow responded to President Trump's decision to withdraw by suspending its own participation.

 Sputnik

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The National Consortium of Breast Centers (NCoBC),



Interdisciplinary Breast Center Conference, Las Vegas, March 15-20, 2019

Visit Supersonic Imagine at Booth # 105 at the NCoBC

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SuperSonic Imagine (Euronext: SSI, FR0010526814), a company specialising in medical imaging using ultrasound technology, will introduce the new generation of its Aixplorer MACH 30 breast imaging solution at the prestigious National Consortium of Breast Centers (NCoBC). The NCoBC conference takes place every year and is attended by breast specialists, surgeons, radiotherapists, oncologists, radiologists and nurses to discuss and share methodologies and treatment options to improve and develop treatments and quality of care for breast patients.

We are very happy to present our new Aixplorer Mach 30 breast imaging solution; the enhanced performance of our innovative imaging modes, the signal purity and the comfort of use is sure to appeal to physicians. explains Michele Lesieur, CEO of SuperSonic Imagine.

SuperSonic Imagine has a long history of expertise in breast imaging and the benefits of ShearWave Elastography have been demonstrated by several multi-centre studies carried out in the United-States and Europe. The real-time tissue stiffness as evaluated by Shearwave PLUS has become a critical variable in the diagnosis and clinical follow-up of breast lesions and in the grading of breast cancers, states Jacques Souquet, Director of Innovation and Founder of SuperSonic Imagine.

Aixplorer MACH 30 is the next generation of premium breast ultrasound

The new Aixplorer Mach 30 is equipped with next generation of ShearWave PLUS (SWE PLUS) elastography and offers an advanced breast imaging solution with enhanced speed of acquisition. Both 2D and 3D patented SWE PLUS offers greater performance of real-time, reliable, quantitative and reproducible evaluation of tissue stiffness and visualisation. SWE PLUS provides new information and helps improve the identification of malignant or benign lesions. It offers greater diagnostic precision, which considerably reduces the number of false positives and unnecessary biopsies.

SuperSonic Imagine also offers numerous innovative imaging modes to improve the efficacy of breast examinations and patient comfort. Needle PL.U.S offers increased reliability during procedures guided by ultrasound and biopsies. The application enables physicians to view anatomical structures and biopsy needles simultaneously and predict their trajectory in real time. Angio PL.U.S offers unrivalled resolution for imaging microvascularisation of lesions, and TriVu combines real-time simultaneous imaging of B-mode, ShearWave PLUS and Angio PL.U.S. enabling you to visualize the anatomy, function (tissue stiffness) and blood flow on the same image, simultaneously.

Aixplorer Mach 30 features a new concept in ultrasound with its revolutionary SonicPad touchpad, designed to enhance the user experience. With its intuitive touch screen interface, SonicPad offers intuitive control of all the functions needed to conduct the exam and allows imagers to focus their attention on analysing the clinical information displayed on the screen rather than on the controls used to optimise the acquisition of an image.

Learn more about Aixplorer MACH 30 at aixplorer-mach.com

About SuperSonic Imagine

SuperSonic Imagine specializes in ultrasound medical imaging. The company manufactures the flagship Aixplorer series of products, which feature the exclusive UltraFast technology. UltraFast has given rise to new imaging modes that set the standards of care for non-invasive characterization of breast, liver and prostate diseases. The first groundbreaking UltraFast mode developed is ShearWave Elastography (SWE), which enables doctors to view and instantly analyze tissue stiffness, a vitally important factor in the diagnosis of many conditions. To date, more than 600 published articles have validated the diagnostic value its technologies.

The most recent addition to the Aixplorer range is the Aixplorer MACH 30 ultrasound platform that introduces the next generation of UltraFast imaging, which optimizes the systems innovative imaging modes: ShearWave PLUS, Doppler UltraFast, Angio PL.U.S, and TriVu.

The company has more than 2,300 ultrasound systems installed in over 80 countries. Its main growth markets are China, the United States and the European Union (France). The company generated a turnover of 24.6 million in 2018. SuperSonic Imagine is listed on Euronext (symbol: SSI).

Find out more at www.supersonicimagine.com .

Contacts
TORONTO, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Magnolia Colombia Limited (Magnolia or the Company) (TSXV: MCO) is pleased to welcome Neil Said to its board of directors effective immediately.



Mr. Said is a corporate securities lawyer who works as a legal consultant to various Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange listed companies in the mining, oil & gas and technology industries. He also sits on the board of directors of various public and private companies. Mr. Said previously worked as a securities lawyer at a large Toronto corporate law firm, where he worked on a variety of corporate and commercial transactions. Mr. Said obtained a Juris Doctor from the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and he received a Bachelor of Business Administration (Honours) with a minor in Economics from Wilfrid Laurier University.

The appointment of Mr. Said follows the resignation of Fred Leigh as a director of the Company.

The management and board of Magnolia would like to thank Mr. Leigh for his service and the contributions he has made to the Company and wish him well in the future.

The Company also announces that it has granted 200,000 stock options to Chris Eben who was appointed to the board of directors on November 13, 2018. The options vest immediately, have an exercise price of $0.10 and expire five years from the date of grant. The grant of options remains subject to approval by the TSX Venture Exchange.

About Magnolia Colombia Limited:

Magnolia Colombia Limited is a Canadian independent oil exploration company.

For further information, please contact:

James Lanthier, President & CEO

Email: james.lanthier1@gmail.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains "forward looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the appointment and resignation of directors of the Company. 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: financing not being available at desired prices; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; the actual results of current exploration activities; timing and availability of external financing on acceptable terms; conclusions of economic evaluations; competition; future prices of mineral prices; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; and, delays in obtaining governmental approvals or required financing or in the completion of activities. 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.

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.
BENSALEM, Pa., March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Law Offices of Howard G. Smith announces an investigation on behalf of Conagra Brands, Inc. investors (Conagra or the Company) (NYSE: CAG ) concerning the Company and its officers possible violations of federal securities laws.



On December 20, 2018, the Company disclosed disappointing financial results for 2Q 2019, including net sales for its recently-acquired Pinnacle segment that were below expectations due to weak performance across a range of significant brands, which resulted in much negative scrutiny by analysts, questioning whether Conagra had performed proper due diligence in the transaction. On this news, shares of Conagra fell $2.13 or nearly 9%, to close at 22.15 on December 21, 2018, thereby injuring investors.

If you purchased Conagra securities, have information or would like to learn more about these claims, or have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to these matters, please contact Howard G. Smith, Esquire, of Law Offices of Howard G. Smith, 3070 Bristol Pike, Suite 112, Bensalem, Pennsylvania 19020 by telephone at (215) 638-4847, toll-free at (888) 638-4847, or by email to howardsmith@howardsmithlaw.com , or visit our website at www.howardsmithlaw.com .

This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules.
Press Release

Nicox signs agreement for ZERVIATETM in China for up to 17 million in milestone payments plus royalties

................................................

March 15, 2019- release at 7:30 am CET

Sophia Antipolis, France

Nicox SA (Euronext Paris: FR0013018124, COX), an international ophthalmology company, and Ocumension Therapeutics today announced they have entered into an exclusive license agreement for the development and commercialization of Nicox's product ZERVIATETM (cetirizine ophthalmic solution), 0.24% for the treatment of allergic conjunctivitis for a territory comprising mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Nicox and Ocumension recently also entered into a collaboration for the development and commercialization of NCX 470 for patients with glaucoma or ocular hypertension, in the same territory. Ocumension Therapeutics is an ophthalmology company funded by 6 Dimensions Capital, one of the leading global healthcare investment funds, formed by the merger of Wuxi Healthcare Ventures and Frontline BioVentures.

Ocumension will receive exclusive rights for the agreed territory to develop and commercialize ZERVIATE. Under the terms of the agreement, Nicox may potentially receive development and sales milestones of up 17 million together with royalties of between 5% and 9% on sales of ZERVIATE.

"Following our collaboration on NCX 470, Ocumension was the obvious choice for us to partner with for ZERVIATE in this region." said Gavin Spencer, Chief Business Officer of Nicox. "Nicox has built a track record of successful partnerships, and we are actively engaged in discussions to further maximize the value of our commercial and development assets outside of the U.S. and the EU markets. We look forward to announcing more international collaborations for ZERVIATE in the coming months."

"ZERVIATE brings Ocumension an additional late stage opportunity and expands our therapeutic area coverage into ocular allergy," said Ye Liu, Chief Executive Officer of Ocumension. "We very much appreciate the collaboration with the Nicox team, and this deal further strengthens our relationship with one of the leading R&D companies in the ophthalmology space."

Ocumension is expected to have to conduct additional clinical studies for the regulatory approval of ZERVIATE in the Chinese market. All development activities will be overseen by a Joint Development Committee comprising representatives of both companies, with Ocumension responsible for undertaking all the activities at its own cost.

About ZERVIATE

ZERVIATE (cetirizine ophthalmic solution), 0.24%, previously AC-170, is the first and only topical ocular formulation of the antihistamine cetirizine for the treatment of ocular itching associated with allergic conjunctivitis. ZERVIATE is a novel formulation of cetirizine, the active ingredient in ZYRTEC, developed and approved for the first time for topical application in the eye. Cetirizine is a second-generation antihistamine (H1 receptor antagonist) that binds competitively to histamine receptor sites. Cetirizine, in approved oral formulations, has a well-characterized systemic efficacy and safety profile with worldwide exposure resulting from 20 years of oral use.

ZERVIATE is approved for commercialization in the U.S. where its commercial launch is planned in summer 2019 by Eyevance Pharmaceuticals LLC, our exclusive U.S. licensee.

About Allergic Conjunctivitis

Allergic conjunctivitis occurs when an allergic reaction causes conjunctivitis. Conjunctivitis is an inflammation of the thin layer of tissue that lines the outside of the white surface of the eye and the inner surface of the eyelids. It may affect one or both eyes. The signs and symptoms may include eye redness, excessive watering, itchy burning eyes, discharge, blurred vision and increased sensitivity to light. It is estimated that more than 75 million people suffer from allergic conjunctivitis in the U.S. and the estimated prevalence of allergic conjunctivitis may be between 15% and 40%.

About Nicox

Nicox S.A. is an international ophthalmology company developing innovative solutions to help maintain vision and improve ocular health. By leveraging our proprietary expertise in nitric oxide (NO) donation and other technologies, we are developing an extensive portfolio of novel product candidates that target multiple ophthalmic conditions, including glaucoma. Our portfolio includes three programs in development including NCX 470 for intraocular pressure lowering, based on our proprietary NO-donating research platform and NCX 4251, a proprietary formulation of the well-established molecule fluticasone, for acute exacerbations of blepharitis. Our research activities are focused on novel future generation NO-donors including NO-donating phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5) inhibitors and NO-donating soluble guanylate cyclase (sGC) stimulators (in partnership with Ironwood). In addition, we have two ophthalmology assets that have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA); VYZULTA (latanoprostene bunod ophthalmic solution), 0.024%, exclusively licensed worldwide to Bausch + Lomb, a Bausch Health Companies Inc. company, and commercialized in the U.S. by Bausch + Lomb since December 2017, as well as ZERVIATE(TM) (cetirizine ophthalmic solution), 0.24%, exclusively licensed in the U.S. to Eyevance Pharmaceuticals. Nicox is headquartered in Sophia Antipolis, France, is listed on Euronext Paris (Compartment B: Mid Caps; Ticker symbol: COX) and is part of the CAC Healthcare, CAC Pharma & Bio and Next 150 indexes.

For more information on Nicox, its products or pipeline, please visit: www.nicox.com

About Ocumension Therapeutics



Ocumension is a China-based company with a mission of being a pioneer in Ophthalmology. It develops and provides prescription medicines that meet the evolving needs of patients, healthcare professionals, and caregivers. With its experienced group, Ocumension's capabilities span from research and development to clinical trial execution to marketing and sales of in-licensed and wholly owned products. Aiming to help more patients, Ocumension is building its portfolio of new medications and technologies through internal research & development and strategic alliances with global partnerships.

Analyst coverage

Bryan, Garnier & Co Hugo Solvet Paris, France

H.C. Wainwright & Co Yi Chen New York, U.S.

The views expressed by analysts in their coverage of Nicox are those of the author and do not reflect the views of Nicox. Additionally, the information contained in their reports may not be correct or current. Nicox disavows any obligation to correct or to update the information contained in analyst reports.

Upcoming financial and business conferences



March 19-20 Oppenheimer's 29th Annual healthcare Conference New York, U.S.

April 7-9 H.C. Wainwright Global Life Sciences Conference London, UK

April 16-17 SmallCap Event Paris, France

May 16 European MidCap Event Copenhagen, Denmark

June 2-6 BIO2019 Philadelphia, U.S.

June 18-19 European MidCap Event Paris, France

June 19-20 JMP Securities Life Sciences Conference New York, U.S.

Contacts

Nicox

Gavin Spencer,

Executive Vice President, Chief Business Officer

& Head of Corporate Department

T +33 (0)4 97 24 53 00

communications@nicox.com

Investors & Media

United States & Europe

LifeSci Advisors, LLC

Hans Herklots

T +41 79 598 71 49

hherklots@lifesciadvisors.com Media

France

LifeSci Advisors, LLC

Sophie Baumont

M +33 (0)6 27 74 74 49

sophie@lifesciadvisors.com Disclaimer The information contained in this document may be modified without prior notice. This information includes forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. These statements are based on current expectations or beliefs of the management of Nicox S.A. and are subject to a number of factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Nicox S.A. and its affiliates, directors, officers, employees, advisers or agents, do not undertake, nor do they have any obligation, to provide updates or to revise any forward-looking statements.



Risks factors which are likely to have a material effect on Nicox's business are presented in the 4th chapter of the 'Document de reference, rapport financier annuel et rapport de gestion 2018' filed with the French Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF) on March 6, 2019, which are available on Nicox's website (www.nicox.com). Nicox S.A.

Drakkar 2

Bat D, 2405 route des Dolines

CS 10313, Sophia Antipolis

06560 Valbonne, France

T +33 (0)4 97 24 53 00

F +33 (0)4 97 24 53 99

Attachment
English Finnish

PLC UUTECHNIC GROUP OYJ STOCK EXCHANGE RELEASE 15 March 2019 at 9:10 AM

INVITATION TO THE ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF PLC UUTECHNIC GROUP OYJ

Plc Uutechnic Group Oyj shareholders are hereby invited to the Annual General Meeting that will be held on Wednesday, 10 April 2019, starting at 13.00 at Hotel Scandic Simonkentta, Simonkatu 9, Helsinki.

A. AGENDA OF THE ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

1.Opening of the meeting

2.Calling the meeting to order

3.Election of persons to scrutinize the minutes and to supervise the counting of votes

4.Recording the legality of the meeting

5.Recording of the attendance at the meeting and adoption of the list of votes

6.Presentation of the financial statements, consolidated financial statements, review by the Board, and auditor's report for the fiscal year of 1 January 2018 - 31 December 2018

Review of the CEO.

7.Verification of the financial statements and the consolidated financial statements

8.Resolution on the distribution of the profit shown on the balance sheet and the payment of dividends

The Board of Directors proposes to the Annual General Meeting that no dividend would be paid and the profit for the period would be transferred to the retained earnings account.

9.Resolution on the discharge of the Board members and the CEO from liability

10.Resolution on the remuneration of the Board members

Shareholders who collectively own over 10 % of the Company's shares and votes have brought forward to the Board that they are proposing the elected Board members to be paid during their term as follows: Position as the Chairman of the Board is proposed to be half-time and remuneration paid for the position is proposed to be raised to 60 000 euros (2018: 36 000 euros). Remuneration for other members of the Board is proposed to remain at 22 000 euros. In addition to the yearly remuneration, no other remuneration is provided to the members of the Board (i.e. attendance allowance). Travel and other costs following the work on the Board are compensated based on the Company's normal practice.

The same group of shareholders proposes also that if a member of the Board or the Chairman of the Board is a full-time employee for the Company this person cannot receive remuneration set for these positions in the Board.

The term for the members of the Board is proposed to last until the end of the next Annual General Meeting.

11.Resolution on the number of Board members

Shareholders who collectively own over 10 % of the Company's shares and votes have brought forward to the Board that they are proposing 3 members to be elected as part of the Board.

12.Election of Board members

Shareholders who collectively own over 10 % of the Company's shares and votes have brought forward to the Board that they intend to nominate Jouko Peraaho, Sami Alatalo and Hannu Kottonen (independent from the notable shareholders of the Company and the Company itself) to be re-elected to the Board.

All of the persons proposed to the Board have given their assent.

The proposed Board members have informed the Company that if they are elected, they will elect Sami Alatalo as the Chairman of the Board.

13.Resolution on the remuneration of the auditor

Shareholders who collectively own over 10 % of the Company's shares and votes have brought forward to the Board that they are proposing that the remuneration of the auditor would be paid according to the invoice.

14.Election of the auditor

Shareholders who collectively own over 10 % of the Company's shares and votes have brought forward to the Board that they intend to nominate as the auditor, to serve until the end of the following Annual General Meeting, the company's current auditor, public auditing firm Ernst & Young Oy, which has declared that it intends to appoint Osmo Valovirta, CPA, as chief auditor.

15.Authorization of the Board to decide on an issue of shares as well as other special rights entitling to shares

The Board proposes that the Annual General Meeting would authorize the Board to decide on an issue of new shares as well as other special rights entitling to shares referred to in Chapter 10 Section 1 of the Finnish Companies Act in one or several lots. The number of new shares issued would be no more than 10 000 000, including shares to be issued based on the special rights.

The authorization entitles the Board to decide about all terms of the share and special rights offerings, including the right to deviate from the right of pre-emption of shareholders.

The authorization is proposed to last until the next Annual General Meeting, unless the General Meeting decides to change or cancel the authorization prior to this date. This authorization revokes all the other unused share issue authorizations that have been given prior to this.

16.Closing of the meeting

B. DOCUMENTS OF THE GENERAL MEETING

The aforementioned draft resolutions, which are on the agenda of the Annual General Meeting, and this invitation to the Annual General Meeting will be available on Plc Uutechnic Group Oyj's website at www.uutechnicgroup.fi. Plc Uutechnic Group Oyj's annual report, including the company's financial statements, consolidated financial statements, review by the Board, and auditor's report, will be made available for inspection at the company's head office and on the aforementioned web site no later than on 15 March 2019. The draft resolutions and the financial statement documents will be available also at the Annual General Meeting, and copies of the draft resolutions and this summons will be sent to the shareholders upon request. The minutes of the Annual General Meeting will be available for inspection on the aforementioned web site as of 12 April 2019.

C. INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE GENERAL MEETING

1.Shareholders registered in the shareholders' register

Each shareholder, who is registered on 29 March 2019 in the shareholders' register of the company held by Euroclear Finland Ltd., has the right to participate in the general meeting. A shareholder, whose shares are registered on his/her personal Finnish book-entry account, is registered in the shareholders' register of the company.

A shareholder, who is registered in the shareholders' register of the company and who wants to participate in the general meeting, shall register for the meeting no later than 5 April 2019 at 16:00 by giving a prior notice of participation, which shall be received by the company no later than on the above mentioned date. Such notice can be given:

a) by placing a telephone call to +358 400 613 896;

b) by e-mail to address leena.junninen@uutechnic.fi; or

c) by sending a letter to the address Plc Uutechnic Group Oyj, Muottitie 2, 23500 Uusikaupunki, Finland.

The registration must include the name, identity code, address, and telephone number of the shareholder, as well as the name of the possible assistant. Information disclosed by the shareholders to Plc Uutechnic Group Oyj will be used solely in connection with processing the general meeting and related necessary registrations.

2.Holders of nominee-registered shares

A holder of nominee registered shares has the right to participate in the general meeting by virtue of such shares, based on which he/she on the record date of the general meeting, i.e. on 29 March 2019, would be entitled to be registered in the shareholders' register of the company held by Euroclear Finland Ltd. The right to participate in the general meeting requires, in addition, that the shareholder on the basis of such shares has been registered into the temporary shareholders' register held by Euroclear Finland Ltd. at the latest by 5 April 2019 by 10:00 AM. As regards nominee registered shares this constitutes due registration for the general meeting.

A holder of nominee registered shares is advised to request without delay necessary instructions regarding the registration in the temporary shareholder's register of the company, the issuing of proxy documents and registration for the general meeting from his/her custodian bank. The account management organization of the custodian bank has to register a holder of nominee registered shares, who wants to participate in the general meeting, into the temporary shareholders' register of the company at the latest by the time stated above.

3.Proxy representative and powers of attorney

A shareholder may participate in the general meeting and exercise his/her rights at the meeting by way of proxy representation. A proxy representative shall produce a dated proxy document or otherwise in a reliable manner demonstrate his/her right to represent the shareholder at the general meeting. When a shareholder participates in the general meeting by means of several proxy representatives representing the shareholder with shares at different securities accounts, the shares by which each proxy representative represents the shareholder shall be identified in connection with the registration for the general meeting.

Possible proxy documents should be delivered in originals to Plc Uutechnic Group Oyj, Muottitie 2, 23500 Uusikaupunki, Finland before the last date for registration.

4.Other instructions and information

Pursuant to chapter 5, section 25 of the Companies Act, a shareholder who is present at the general meeting has the right to request information with respect to the matters to be considered at the meeting.

On the date of this invitation to the general meeting, the total number of shares in the company is 56 501 730 shares, which represents 56 501 730 votes.

In Uusikaupunki on 15 March 2019

PLC UUTECHNIC GROUP OYJ

The Board of Directors

Further Information:

Jouko Peraaho, CEO, Plc Uutechnic Group Oyj, +358 500 740 808

Uutechnic Group is focused on improving the competitiveness of its customers by providing them advanced equipment technology and unique service concept worldwide. The product range includes agitators, different types of long welded and machined axially symmetrical parts as rolls, cylinders, tubes and cones.

The main industries are hydrometallurgy, mining-, pulp and paper-, food-, fertilizer-, other chemical industries and environmental technology.

Plc Uutechnic Group's subsidiaries are AP-Tela Oy, Uutechnic Oy and Stelzer Ruhrtechnik International GmbH.
Seattle, WA, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- CFN Media Group (CFN Media), the leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the North American cannabis industry, announces publication of an article discussing Helix TCS Inc. (OTCQB: HLIX), the companys international expansion efforts, and why investors may want to take note.



Many cannabis investors have focused their attention on North American markets, but emerging international markets could be the next frontier. Canadian licensed producers have started expanding into new export markets, consulting companies are offering their expertise, and ancillary service providers are expanding their products and services. Investors may want to take a closer look at companies that have embraced these kinds of expansion.

Helix TCS Inc. (OTCQB: HLIX) is a leading provider of ancillary services to the legal cannabis industry with over 2,000 customer locations in 33 US states and six countries around the world. With a proprietary technology suite and security service offerings, the company has processed over $18 billion in cannabis sales and helped countless businesses remain compliant with evolving government regulations.

Please click here to download the investor fact sheet and receive updates.

Europes Nascent Cannabis Market

Europe has about 750 million citizens spread across 50 different countries, making it one of the largest potential cannabis markets in the world. By comparison, North America has roughly 580 million citizens spread across just 20 countries. Europes cannabis industry may not be as permissive as North America, but the European Parliament recently voted on a resolution that incentivizes European countries to increase access to medical cannabis.

Helix TCS recently announced an expansion into Europe via new agreements with licensed cultivators and manufacturers in the United Kingdom. These companies have started using the companys flagship seed-to-sale tracking solution, BioTrackTHC, to track cannabis plants throughout the supply chain. The presence in the United Kingdom could be a springboard to the rest of Europe, including Germanys rapidly growing market.

As international markets develop and more countries create a legal cannabis industry, our technology and services solution will continue to reach new markets quickly to meet the needs of businesses and regulators in any regulatory environment, says Helix TCS CEO Zachary L. Venegas. We are very excited to see the progress of legal cannabis on the global stage and look forward to continuing to play a vital role.

Please click here to download the investor fact sheet and receive updates.

A Growing Presence in Australia

Australias cannabis industry could be worth upwards of $5.5 billion by 2023, according to Prohibition Partners, when factoring in both medical and recreational markets. In addition to already being a leading exporter of agricultural products, the country is well positioned to serve the lucrative Oceania region, which includes some of the most populous countries in the worldChina, Japan, Singapore and Indonesia.

Helix TCS has already established a leadership position in the Australian and New Zealand cannabis markets. Demand for medical cannabis in both of these countries continues to rise as they lay the groundwork for safe and transparent patient access, which makes reliable and secure seed-to-sale tracking software essential to the industrys success. BioTrackTHCs proven track record makes it a natural choice for these seed-to-sale tracking capabilities.

BioTrackTHC can service businesses in countries halfway around the world because of our geographically distributed team, says BioTrackTHC Chief Operating Officer Dr. Moe Afaneh. With support spanning more than four time zones, we are confident in our ability to support the medical cannabis operators in Australia and New Zealand as they prepare to launch and scale their businesses.

Please click here to download the investor fact sheet and receive updates.

Looking Ahead

Helix TCS Inc. (OTCQB: HLIX) is an established provider of ancillary cannabis products and services with an existing presence in 33 US states and six countries around the world. As new international markets open up, the company is well positioned to leverage its success in the most dominant global cannabis industries, ultimately creating significant barriers to competition.

For more information, visit the companys website at www.helixtcs.com.

Click here to read the full article: https://www.cannabisfn.com/helix-tcs-expando-global-markets/

About CFN Media

CFN Media (CannabisFN) is the leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the global cannabis industry, helps companies operating in the space attract investors, capital, and publicity. Since 2013, private and public cannabis companies in the US and Canada have relied on CFN Media to grow and succeed.

Learn how to become a CFN Media client company, brand or entrepreneur:

http://www.cannabisfn.com/featuredcompany

Download the CFN Media iOS mobile app to access the world of cannabis from the palm of your hand: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cannabisfn/id988009247?ls=1&mt=8

Or visit our homepage and enter your mobile number under the Apple App Store logo to receive a download link text on your iPhone: http://www.cannabisfn.com

Disclaimer

CannabisFN.com is not an independent financial investment advisor or broker-dealer. You should always consult with your own independent legal, tax, and/or investment professionals before making any investment decisions. The information provided on http://www.cannabisfn.com (the Site) is either original financial news or paid advertisements drafted by our in-house team or provided by an affiliate. CannabisFN.com, a financial news media and marketing firm enters into media buys or service agreements with the companies that are the subject of the articles posted on the Site or other editorials for advertising such companies. We are not an independent news media provider. We make no warranty or representation about the information including its completeness, accuracy, truthfulness or reliability and we disclaim, expressly and implicitly, all warranties of any kind, including whether the Information is complete, accurate, truthful, or reliable. As such, your use of the information is at your own risk. Nor do we undertake any obligation to update the items posted. CannabisFN.com received compensation for producing and presenting high quality and sophisticated content on CannabisFN.com along with financial and corporate news.
London, UK, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The lead analyst of the report said: The Military Deployable Infrastructure will represent significant revenue growth rate over the forecast period. The Research and Development in Military Deployable Infrastructure Systems has increased in recent years owing to relatively increase in the demand from military agencies globally. The research study provides market insights on the global Military Deployable Infrastructures. The Military Deployable Infrastructure includes infrastructure equipment deployed for basic life support of military personnel. This includes camps, shelter equipment, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and Reconnaissance) infrastructure equipment. The camps and shelters further includes modular buildings, tents with lightweight deployable structures, trans pack containers, with optimum living conditions and reduced transportation and assembly, Field kitchen units, The Combined Instrument Repair Facility (CIRF), specialist containerised storage facilities and Medical treatment facilities and associated specialist medical facilities. This also includes rugged tank containers manufactured to operate under harsh environments, and remote locations. The Military Deployable Infrastructures facilitate in supplying and storing various supplies to military encampments and barracks as well homeland security teams and armed forces deployed at various isolated locations. Pertaining to the fact that, the major defense forces are increasingly deploying their troops to different remote locations to maintain a secured environment and deter terrorists and cross border threats, the demand for water, fuel, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and food supplies is increasing constantly. Attributing to the increasing demand, the defense forces are enhancing their infrastructure capabilities by procuring new and upgrading old infrastructure equipment.

For free sample pages on this report please click on:

https://www.visiongain.com/report/military-deployable-infrastructure-market-report-2019-2029/

The 187-page report contains 73 tables and 90 figures that add visual analysis in order to explain developing trends within the Military Deployable Infrastructure market. Visiongain provides Military Deployable Infrastructure Spending forecasts for the period 2019-2029 for the leading Military Deployable Infrastructure submarkets, namely ISR Infrastructure and

Shelter (Container Type Steel Shelters, Lightweight Deployable Structures, Ballistic Composite Shelters, Vehicle Mounted Shelters). The report also includes forecasts for the sub-segments by prominent countries including Australia, China, Japan, Russia, U.S., U.K, Germany, France, India, Israel, and Italy.

The 187-page report offers market forecasts and analysis for 10 leading national markets and the rest of the world market. In addition, the report contains a dedicated leading companies chapter covering more than 10 companies leading the field in Military Deployable Infrastructure Market.

If you are interested in a more detailed overview of this report, please send an e-mail to sara.peerun@visiongain.com or call her on +44 207 549 9987

The Military Deployable Infrastructure Market Report 2019-2029: Forecasts & Analysis By Infrastructure Type (ISR Infrastructure and Shelter), By Shelter Type (Container Type Steel Shelters, Lightweight deployable structures, Ballistic Composite Shelters, and Vehicle Mounted Shelters) By Geography (America, Asia Oceania, Europe, Rest of World) Plus Profiles Of Leading Companies with recent deployable infrastructure contracts report will be of value to anyone who wants to better understand the Military Deployable Infrastructure market and its various segments. It will be useful for businesses who wish to better comprehend the part of the market they are already involved in, or those wishing to enter or expand into a different regional or technical part of the Military Deployable Infrastructure industry.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  Manila Water is urging consumers not to throw away the brownish water that comes out of their faucets amid the water shortage in Metro Manila.

Manila Water, the company in charge of supplying water to the eastern side of the National Capital Region, explained Friday that whenever pipes are not used for a long time, minerals which have settled at the bottom of the pipes make the water look dark. But the firm stressed the water is safe to use.

"Sana 'wag itapon kasi kulang tayo sa tubig, pwede gamitin pang flush ng toilet, pang dilig ng halaman at kung 'di maselan pwede ito ipaligo," said Dittie Galang, Manila Water's Communications Planning and Tactical Development Manager.

The concessionaire also promised that hours-long water interruptions will not last throughout summer, stressing that it has started implementing a rotational water supply scheme.

It however explained water supply is sometimes delayed because it has to maintain low pressure.

"Pressure is expected to improve in the coming days as the reservoirs are continually refilled to enable water to reach highly elevated areas," Manila Water said in a separate statement.

On March 7, customers of Manila Water were surprised by an unannounced water interruption. Since then, its customers comprising 1.2 million households have been experiencing no water supply or low water pressure. The water concessionaire attributes the shortage to the lowering level of water at the La Mesa reservoir in Quezon City due to the dry spell.

To help alleviate problems of government employees affected by the water crisis, the Civil Service Commission (CSC) said agency heads may suspend the requirement to wear uniforms by issuing internal rules.

"We understand that there may be employees affected by water shortage who are unable to regularly wash their office uniforms. We do not want this to become a reason for their absence from work and to eventually cause problems in productivity," the CSC said.
TORONTO, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wayland Group (CSE:WAYL) (FRANKFURT: 75M) (OTCQB:MRRCF) (Wayland or the Company) today announced that it has completed the drawdown of the second facility under its previously-announced subscription agreement with Alpha Blue and issued the corresponding Convertible Debenture and Facility Warrants. Please refer to the Companys news release of February 20, 2019 for further details.



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 and, Allesandria, Piedmont, Italy. Wayland will continue to pursue new opportunities globally, including the consummation of its previously announced transactions in the United Kingdom, Australia, Colombia, and Argentina, in its effort to enhance lives through cannabis.

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

IR@waylandgroup.com

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)

MaricannGmbH

c/o Wayland

Max Joseph Str. 7

80333 Munich
Boston, MA, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Allergy Standards Ltd (ASL), an international certification company which develops scientific testing protocols to reduce asthma and allergy triggers, has been recognized as a leading innovator among Irish companies investing and operating in the US. As a result, several members of ASLs leadership team will be attending high-level meetings in Boston, New York City, and Washington D.C. to strengthen the companys economic ties between the US and Ireland.

Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) held a St. Patricks Day Medals Ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA hosted by Professor Mark Ferguson, Director General of SFI and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland. Dr. John McKeon, CEO of ASL, and Dave Morrissey, CIO of ASL, were invited as special guests, an honor bestowed upon leaders of Irish companies with significant contributions to the life-sciences sector.

As Allergy Standards is, at its core, a life sciences company, it is great to be in the Boston Med-tech hub to share ideas with like-minded companies, said Dave Morrissey, Chief Innovation Officer. These past 12 months for us have been about innovation, including working proactively with Enterprise Ireland and the Irish Management Institute, so it is terrific to be back at MIT since the launch event of the Innovation 4 Growth program. We also learned last week that we have been shortlisted for the Royal Irish Academys Innovation Award, so this week is even more special. We are fortunate to be meeting with the Irish Minister for the Environment, Richard Bruton, as we seek to improve the lives of those impacted by poor quality indoor air.

Allergy Standards CEO, Dr. John McKeon, announced the Amber Tringale Memorial Award alongside Kenneth Mendez, CEO of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA), at the Global Ireland Lunch in Boston. Witnessed at the event by the Consul General of Ireland, Finnoula Quinlan, SFI, and Irelands Minister for the Environment, Richard Bruton, this travel award will be an annual fund awarded by ASL and AAFA to help facilitate cross-border dialogue and research into the prevention of asthma and allergies.

For the 9th annual Ireland Day at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Courtney Sunna, ASLs VP of Strategic Business Development, gathered with key C-suite business and political leaders from Ireland and the US into the NYSE Freedom Hall, where they were welcomed by John Tuttle, Chief Operating Officer of NYSE Group and Charge dAffaires to the US Embassy in Ireland, Reece Smyth. At this event, it was announced that ASL was recognized on the release of the 2019 Ireland INC US 250, an index of the 250 Irish companies investing and operating in the US. A panel was held with Congressman Richard Neal, Former Irish Ambassador to the U.S. Anne Anderson, and Former US Ambassador to Ireland Kevin OMalley to discuss and investigate the challenges and opportunities presented by Brexit to both Ireland and the US.

ASL is leading the charge in healthcare innovation into the prevention of asthma and allergies through science, so as an Irish-based company whose research and expertise contribute significantly to the US market, it is important for us to involved in discussions involving investment and economic policy between the US and Ireland, said Courtney Sunna, ASLs VP of Strategic Business Development. It is an honor to represent ASL and discuss the exciting breakthroughs weve experienced at events with senior leaders at the NYSE, United Nations, and other high-level business and political forums.

Courtney Sunna and Dave Morrissey have also been invited to a celebration of St. Patricks Day with the senior leadership team of Bank of Ireland, hosted by the CEO of Bank of Ireland, Francesca McDonagh, as well as a St. Patricks Day Reception at the United Nations with Ambassador Geraldine Byrne-Nason, Irelands Ambassador to the UN, and Charles Flanagan, Irish Minister for Justice and Equality.

The ASL team is honored to be part of these prestigious events and being recognized as an industry leader in helping to improve lives of people impacted by asthma and allergies.

About Allergy Standards

Allergy Standards Limited (ASL) mantra is design thinking and an innovation for healthier indoor air for the allergy aware consumer. As an independent, international certification company, it creates meaningful scientific standards for testing a wide range of products and services to determine their impact on improving indoor air quality. ASLs intellectual property portfolio includes unique testing protocols and suitability specifications for products to be CERTIFIED asthma & allergy friendly. ASLs mission is to improves lives by empowering people create the healthiest possible indoor environment through science, education and innovation.



http://www.allergystandards.com/

Attachment
ST. LOUIS, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Stereotaxis, Inc. (OTCQX: STXS), the global leader in innovative robotic technologies for the treatment of cardiac arrhythmias, announced today that it will be attending the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) Annual Congress from March 17-19 in Lisbon, Portugal. The congress brings together more than 3,000 industry practitioners from over 80 countries to address the implementation of diagnostic and therapeutic innovations in daily practice.



We are excited to be attending the 2019 EHRA congress in Portugal, said David Fischel, Stereotaxis Chairman and CEO. This will be the largest gathering of European electrophysiologists during the year, so it is a great opportunity for us to engage with the physician community and highlight the benefits of robotic ablation.

In exhibit space #B700, Stereotaxis will feature simulators, which provide physicians with the opportunity to experience robotic ablation in a hands-on environment. In addition, Company representatives will be available to discuss the latest clinical evidence and techniques for robotic ablation, highlighted by the following presentations by distinguished expert physicians:

Fast PVI Ablation & Durable Lesions with Robotic Navigation by Dr. Tamas Szili-Torok from Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, NL  Sunday, 17 March, 10:30  11:00



Remote Controlled Catheter Ablation for Arrhythmia Management in Patients with Complex Congenital Heart Disease by Dr. Sabine Ernst from Royal Brompton Hospital, London, UK  Monday, 18 March, 10:30  11:00



Robotic Navigation & Dipole Density Mapping: First Clinical Experience with Stereotaxis Combined with Acutus Medical by Dr. Tamas Szili-Torok from Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, NL  Monday, 18 March, 16:00  16:30

About Stereotaxis

Stereotaxis is the global leader in innovative robotic technologies designed to enhance the treatment of arrhythmias and perform endovascular procedures. Its mission is the discovery, development and delivery of robotic systems, instruments, and information solutions for the interventional laboratory. These innovations help physicians provide unsurpassed patient care with robotic precision and safety, improved lab efficiency and productivity, and enhanced integration of procedural information. Over 100 issued patents support the Stereotaxis platform. The core components of Stereotaxis systems have received regulatory clearance in the United States, European Union, Japan, Canada, China, and elsewhere. For more information, please visit www.stereotaxis.com .

This press release includes statements that may constitute "forward-looking" statements, usually containing the words "believe, "estimate, "project, "expect" or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. Factors that would cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, the Company's ability to raise additional capital on a timely basis and on terms that are acceptable, its ability to continue to manage expenses and cash burn rate at sustainable levels, its ability to continue to work with lenders to extend, repay or refinance indebtedness, or to obtain additional financing, in either case on acceptable terms, continued acceptance of the Company's products in the marketplace, the effect of global economic conditions on the ability and willingness of customers to purchase its systems and the timing of such purchases, competitive factors, changes resulting from healthcare reform in the United States, including changes in government reimbursement procedures, dependence upon third-party vendors, timing of regulatory approvals, and other risks discussed in the Company's periodic and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By making these forward-looking statements, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release. There can be no assurance that the Company will recognize revenue related to its purchase orders and other commitments in any particular period or at all because some of these purchase orders and other commitments are subject to contingencies that are outside of the Company's control. In addition, these orders and commitments may be revised, modified, delayed or canceled, either by their express terms, as a result of negotiations, or by overall project changes or delays.

Company Contact:

David Fischel

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Martin C. Stammer

Chief Financial Officer

314-678-6100

investors@stereotaxis.com




SAN FRANCISCO, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Allergy Standards Limited (ASL) has been expanding its activities on the West Coast and a visit to San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles by its CEO Dr. John McKeon and CIO Dave Morrissey this week is providing the opportunity to further deepen its presence and develop its initiatives in healthcare analytics.



The ASL team have attended a number of Irish Government business events hosted by Enterprise Ireland over the St Patricks Festival period, including an Enterprise Ireland business breakfast at which the visiting Irish Minister for Health Simon Harris TD was present.

A full-day certification workshop with strategic partners SCS Global Services in Berkeley provided the opportunity to accelerate the partnership under which SCS Global Services is now approved by ASL to offer the asthma & allergy friendly Certification. While in Berkeley, a visit to one of ASLs testing partners, Berkeley Analytical , reinforced the strong relationships that ASL maintains with all of its testing partners to ensure that its certification remains robust and trusted by consumers and industry alike.

Stanley Mathuram Vice President, SCS Global Services (SCS) said, SCS, is a trusted leader in third-party certification. Our mission is to build value for our clients through auditing and standards development that positively impact on lives and the environment. We are delighted to scale our relationship with Allergy Standards in the US and internationally. Meeting the Irish Minister for Heath with the Consul General demonstrates the high regard that ASL are held in.

Speaking in San Francisco Dr. McKeon said, This has been a year of digital transformation for ASL with the launch of our client services portal so a visit to Silicon Valley including the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) and now this event with the Minister for Heath is an excellent fit. Our work brings together some of the most innovative companies in the US under the banner of improving indoor air quality, and this makes us a flagbearer for Irish innovation and scientifically supported Irish-US business collaboration, with a broader health and community benefit. Getting data closer to decision makers will empower ASL client companies to harness new technologies in their research and development.

About Allergy Standards

Allergy Standards Limited (ASL)s mantra is design thinking and innovation for healthier indoor air for the allergy aware consumer. As an independent, international certification company, it creates meaningful scientific standards for testing a wide range of products and services to determine their impact on improving indoor air quality. ASLs intellectual property portfolio includes unique testing protocols and suitability specifications for products to be CERTIFIED asthma & allergy friendly. ASLs mission is to improve lives by empowering people to create the healthiest possible indoor environment through science, education and innovation.

http://www.allergystandards.com/

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/04543029-30c5-4be1-a4d1-6a714293a64a
Governments around the nation are working to design the best vaccine policies that keep both their employees and their residents safe. Although the latest data shows a variety of polarizing perspectives, there are clear emerging best practices that leading governments are following to put trust first: creating policies that are flexible and provide a range of options, and being in tune with the needs and sentiments of their employees so that they are able to be dynamic and accommodate the rapidly changing situation.
stated that California Gov. Gavin Newsom was fast-tracking legislation to require charter schools to follow the same transparency guidelines as public schools. He had already signed it in early March.

When Barack Obama was first assembling his White House Cabinet in late 2008, one of his top candidates for education secretary was Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford University professor leading his education transition team. Her selection would have been a rebuke to the leading school reformers of the time -- charter school supporters who fought the teachers unions to advance policies like merit pay based on students' test scores.Darling-Hammond opposed merit pay , had a union-friendly focus on education funding, and was seen by charter school advocates as a threat to their movement. The pro-charter political action committee Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) worked to prevent Obama from picking her, deploying whatdescribed as  a highly coordinated media campaign .In the end, the president-elect chose DFERs preferred candidate -- Arne Duncan, the leader of Chicago's public school system. But a decade later, the Democratic Party is increasingly turning against DFER-style reforms like charter schools and merit pay, and Darling-Hammond is getting another opportunity to directly shape education policy -- in the nations most populous state.California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, nominated Darling-Hammond last month to lead the State Board of Education. Education experts say her tenure will be closely scrutinized in policy circles and could end up influencing school systems across the country.Her fellow board members are expected to vote her in as president this week. The state Senate will then have a year to confirm her appointment, which so far hasnt produced any organized opposition.She's an ingenious choice by Gov. Newsom, largely because Professor Darling-Hammond has strong ties with the labor and the social justice communities, says Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This contrasts the Obama era, and even [former Gov.] Jerry Brown's reign, when one wing of Democrats was pitted against the other. Professor Darling-Hammond has the robust capacity to unite educators and activists intent on building equitable schools.Fuller says Newsoms selection suggests hes not warming to charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, unless they have the same regulations as traditional public schools. Indeed, he already signed a new law that will require charter schools to follow the same transparency guidelines as public schools. Like much of the the Democratic Party, Newsom's education approach has shifted to become less favorable toward charters, which he supported when he was mayor of San Francisco.Charters are intended to be innovative and free from bureaucratic red tape, but they divert taxpayer dollars from traditional schools, and many fail to outperform them.Charter school opponents have mixed feelings about Darling-Hammonds appointment.Until recently, I felt sure that Linda understood the damage charters and privatization do to public schools, says Diane Ravitch, a prominent education historian who served as U.S. assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush and is a leading critic of the school choice movement. But she and her team recently published a report on choice accepting charters as part of the tapestry of American schooling. ... Im hoping she will insist on accountability for charters and speak for the 90 percent [of students] in public schools.Carol Burris, executive director of the anti-charter Network for Public Education, believes Darling-Hammond will at least crack down on for-profit charters, even if she leaves the nonprofits alone.We are hoping that the best of Linda Darling-Hammond prevails, she says.During his State of the State address , Newsom described "charter school growth" as one of California's education stressors, along with understaffed schools, overcrowded classrooms, pension pressures [and] the achievement gap. He noted that California ranks toward the bottom in per-pupil funding and said he wants to invest more state dollars in education.Darling-Hammond declineds request for comment but told EdSource that she would largely seek continuity with the policies of former Gov. Jerry Brown and former State Board of Education President Michael Kirst.Brown -- a founder of two charter schools -- vetoed the charter transparency legislation that Newsom is now pushing and was generally hesitant to regulate charters. He did, however, sign a bill last year meant to ban for-profit charters. But school choice critics like Burris question its effectiveness."No matter how well intended, [the new law] will not shut down Californias for-profit schools anytime soon. In some ways, it may make matters worse by obscuring the reality of what many charter schools are ... And whether they are for-profit or nonprofit, there will still be ample opportunity in the charter sector for profiteers to take advantage of the public treasure and trust," Burris wrote in The Washington Post. Under Brown and Kirst's control, the state also changed funding formulas to target low-income and high-needs students, created a new state accountability system, and expanded efforts to address teacher shortages, especially for math, science and special education.Brown and Kirst laid a strong foundation for a new approach to 21st-century learning, Darling-Hammond toldShe hopes to be continuing that very strong trajectory while taking it to the next level.Her nomination comes as education politics in the Democratic party are moving to the left. One of the ideas gaining traction is a moratorium on charters. But Rick Hess, one of the nations most prominent education scholars, who directs education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, doubts Darling-Hammond would adopt that policy. He says she's not the kind of "school-choice-hating, social-issue-crusading firebrand" he might have expected from Newsom.Linda looks positively Blue Dog compared to some of that stuff, Hess says. My sense is she's sympathetic to all of that, but .... I think for political and practical reasons, she would counsel against going nearly [that] far."Still, Hess believes Darling-Hammond's influence will extend outside California as Democrats chart a new course on education policy in 2020 and beyond.
SPEED READ:

Collectively, the 50 states, the District of Columbia and two U.S. territories have more than $6 billion in federal funding at stake due to President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall.

California, Hawaii and Maryland stand to lose the most funding.

Some of the border wall money will come from National Guard funding that is currently used to fight drug trafficking.

How Much Could the Border Wall Cost Your State?

President Trumps emergency declaration to build a border wall puts up to $6 billion in federal funding at risk for the states, the District of Columbia and two U.S. territories.After failing to get the money from Congress and shutting down the government over the dispute, the administration declared a national immigration emergency so that it could cobble together the funds for the $8 billion wall from defense accounts that provide billions in military construction and National Guard funding to the states.California, Hawaii and Maryland stand to lose the most financially. All three states are among the 16 suing the president over his emergency declaration, claiming he manufactured an immigration crisis.California has an estimated $896 million in vulnerable federal military construction and National Guard funding, Maryland has more than $550 million and Hawaii has $362 million, according to an analysis byIf the president is essentially stealing money that's been allocated to go to the various states for various purposes but no longer will, we're being harmed, our people are being harmed, said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra when he announced the lawsuit.Taking money away from authorized military construction would not only harm national security, the lawsuit argues, but also cause damage to state economies because of the loss of jobs and spending.Specifically, Trump is asserting his power to tap three pots of money for his border wall: $600 million from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund for law enforcement priorities, $2.5 billion from a military anti-drug account and $3.6 billion in military construction funds.The National Guards Counterdrug Program, which provided about $200 million last year across 50 states, the territories and D.C., is funded through the Department of Defenses anti-drug account. California, New York and Texas accounted for one-third of last years funding, according to the U.S. Government Accounting Office The program helps coordinate interagency efforts to combat drug trafficking . Last year, for instance, it helped law enforcement agencies confiscate nearly $11.2 billion of illicit drugs. National Guard analysts also contributed to the disruption or dismantlement of more than 4,500 drug trafficking groups and helped prevent more than 3.3 million pounds of illicit drugs from reaching American communities.States across the country benefit from the National Guard Counterdrug Program, which assists local law enforcement agencies and supports drug interdiction efforts, says Mary Catherine Ott, legislative director of the National Governors Association Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee. Its an example of a federal-state partnership that yields results that benefit Americans.In California, construction projects at Camp Pendleton and Naval Base Coronado account for more than $250 million in allocated funds that are now at risk. In Maryland, some of the vulnerable funding includes roughly $130 million allocated this year for a new hangar complex to house the presidents soon-to-be revamped Air Force One The other states joining the lawsuit are: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Virginia. Together, they have more than $2.8 billion in vulnerable funding.
Clinic Closures

The Future of Title X

In a move being lauded by anti-abortion advocates and criticized by abortion rights supporters, the Trump administration plans to withhold federal funding from health clinics and departments that provide abortion services or referrals.The new rules, finalized last month, will apply to Title X, a historically bipartisan program that represents the federal governments only funding stream exclusively for family planning. They will shift the program's funding away from reproductive health clinics and toward faith-based clinics that emphasize fertility awareness and abstinence education.Title X money largely benefits low-income patients and is spent on women's health services, such as birth control, pregnancy testing, STI treatment and cancer screenings -- but not abortions. The 1976 Hyde Amendment prevents federal dollars from directly funding abortions. The Trump administration's rules take Hyde to the next level, banning Title X from funding providers for, at a minimum, letting patients know abortion is an option even if they do not perform the procedure themselves.Title X is estimated to serve 4 million Americans and 4,000 clinics. On average, it makes up about 19 percent of grantees' revenue, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation The changes at the federal level mirror policies that some conservative states have been pursuing for years. For a glimpse into this new era of Title X, experts suggest looking to Texas. In 2011, Texas passed a law that cut state family planning dollars by 66 percent and redirected state family planningfunding away from reproductive health clinics and toward general primary-care providers.In response, the Obama administration cut all of the state's Title X funding because the state law did not follow the program's guidelines at the time.Texas was very instructive, says Jessica Marcella, vice president of advocacy and communications for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, an organization that opposes the new cuts. If the [Trump] administration is successful, health outcomes could be severely impacted. The fact is, when you move away from science, youre ignoring public health.As a result of the 2011 law in Texas, the state's Health and Human Services Department, which served around 244,000 women, lost Title X funding. Within a year, 82 clinics across the state closed -- a third of which were run by Planned Parenthood.According to a2016study by thebirths among Texas women covered by Medicaid increased 27 percent, and there was a 36 percent drop in claims for long-acting reversible contraceptives, such as IUDs. There was also anecdotal evidence of STD upticks in areas where clinics closed.Anotherstudy in 2015 found that teenagers had to travel further to receive confidential care."The exclusion of Planned Parenthood affiliates from a state-funded replacement for a Medicaid fee-for-service program in Texas was associated with adverse changes in the provision of contraception," the 2016 study noted.Theres been some recovery of Title X funding in recent years. In 2013, the nonprofit Womens Health and Family Planning Association of Texas received a Title X grant, which it disperses to reproductive health clinics and organizations across the state, including those run by Planned Parenthood as well as city- and county-run clinics.In an attempt to make up for the loss of clinics, the state launched the Healthy Texas Women program in 2016. At participating providers, it covers pregnancy testing and counseling, family planning, breast and cervical cancer screenings and immunizations at no cost to low-income women. But it excludes abortion services.While these are positive developments, the reality is the number of women receiving services through the state in 2018 still falls below the number of women served in 2011, says Kami Geoffrey, CEO of the Womens Health and Family Planning Association of Texas.On Tuesday, the American Medical Association announced it was filing suit against the changes to the federal program. The day before, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced his own lawsuit to block Trump's Title X changes. Separately, 20 other state attorneys general plan to sue.Pending legal challenges, the Trump administration's new rules are set to go into effect in May.Its too soon to know how many Title X-funded clinics will lose funding or face potential closure as a result.Supporters of the new Title X rule argue that women can still receive the care they need at federally qualified health centers and other community health clinics that traditionally don't offer abortion services.But if Texas serves as an example, the future for low-income women seeking health care is more complicated than that.Eliminating providers and assuming others can pick up the slack is erroneous thinking," says Geoffrey. "Just because you give money to a clinic doesnt mean overnight theyll have the space and the staff to offer those services to more clients.
States would be banned from denying driver's licenses and job licenses to people for falling behind on their student loan payments under bipartisan legislation introduced last week in the U.S Senate.Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio are working together on the Protecting Job Opportunities for Borrowers (Protecting JOBs) Act , which they first introduced last June."We shouldn't punish people struggling to pay back their student loans by taking away their driver's or professional licenses, preventing them from going to work and making a living," Warren said in a statement.In his own statement, Rubio said its wrong to threaten a borrower's livelihood with this type of catch-22. He said the bill ensures that borrowers are able to continue working to pay off their loans, instead of being caught in a modern-day debtors prison.Nearly 30 percent of professions require a license, according to the Brookings Institution. The list includes higher-paid jobs like doctors and lawyers as well as lower-paid jobs like teachers and hair stylists.The legislation, which didnt receive a vote last year , would maintain the federal governments current debt-collection practices. But Warrens website says it would prevent states from suspending, revoking or denying state professional licenses solely because borrowers are behind on payments.This practice is currently permitted in 14 states, according to the libertarian Institute for Justice . In Florida, the state Board of Health recently told more than 900 health-care workers that their licenses could be suspended over student loan defaults.Americans owe a collective $1.5 trillion in student loan debt , more than they owe for auto loans ($1.1 trillion) and credit cards ($977 billion). Rubio has spoken publicly about how it took him 15 years to pay back $150,000 he borrowed for his own degrees. Last summer, he tweeted his regret about voting for a bill in the state legislature allowing Florida to suspend the licenses of workers who defaulted on student loans.A politically diverse collection of groups is supporting the Warren-Rubio legislation, including the liberal Generation Progress and the conservative Heritage Action and R Street. The nations two largest teacher unions -- the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers -- endorsed the bill, as did a variety of consumer, civil rights and youth organizations.There does not appear to be any organized opposition to the legislation.
Past Racism Catches Up to Politicians

'I Regret What I Said'

Worse Consequences for Public Workers?

Last week, Shane Bouchard stepped down as mayor of Lewiston, Maine, after texts were revealed in which he shared racist and sexist jokes. What made this unusual was not that Bouchard was caught using offensive language but rather that he chose to resign.Hardly a day seems to go by without revelations that a public official somewhere has said something racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic. In many cases, they either apologize or bluster their way through the situation. Only some choose to bring their own careers to an end -- even when the calls for them to resign may be loud.Last June, Arizona state Rep. David Stringer, a Republican, turned back calls for him to step down after he referred to immigration as an "existential threat," saying there weren't "enough white kids to go around" in the state's public schools.He won reelection in November. That month, he faced renewed calls for his resignation after he told a group of Arizona State University students that, unlike European immigrants, African-Americans "don't blend in." But Stringer has kept his seat, despite the revelation that he was found guilty on multiple sex charges in 1983.Democratic Del. Mary Ann Lisanti was unanimously censured last month by the Maryland House for using the N-word when referring to a black-majority legislative district. But Lisanti apologized and has resisted calls to resign.In neighboring West Virginia, Republican Del. Eric Porterfield has also refused to resign over controversial comments he made last month. Unlike Lisanti, he did not apologize. After using the homophobic slur "f----t," he later defended himself, saying the LGBTQ community is "a modern-day version of the Ku Klux Klan, without wearing hoods, with their antics of hate and that he was being "persecuted" by the community, which he referred to as a "terrorist group."Attacking their critics like Porterfield did has become a fairly common technique for public figures who are found to have engaged in hate speech. After the liberal site Media Matters for America published audioclips of Fox News host Tucker Carlson making racist and homophobic statements, Carlson responded on his show: We will never bow to the mob.Of course the most prominent cases right now of politicians surviving revelations of racism are in Virginia and deal with behavior long before they were elected officials.Last month, Gov. Ralph Northam and state Attorney General Mark Herring, both Democrats, admitted donning blackface while they were students in the 1980s. The controversy started with a photo on Northam's medical school yearbook page of one person dressed in blackface and another as a member of the KKK.Both faced widespread calls to resign from leaders of their own party, yet both appear firmly ensconced in office at this point. Both apologized, and Northam has pledged to devote the remainder of his term to racial reconciliation.The situation in Virginia prompted reporters around the country to look at other old yearbooks. Soon after the Northam and Herring stories broke, the Virginian-Pilot reported that Tommy Norment, the top Republican in the Virginia Senate, edited a Virginia Military Institute yearbook that included racist language and photos of students in blackface.Norment issued an apology and also remains in office."The use of blackface is abhorrent in our society and I emphatically condemn it, Norment said in a statement. As one of seven working on a 359-page yearbook, I cannot endorse or associate myself with every photo, entry or word on each page.Shortly before the Northam story broke in Virginia, Florida Republican Secretary of State Michael Ertel did resign after photos surfaced showing him in blackface 15 years ago. But Florida GOP state Rep. Anthony Sabatini has refused to step down from office after a photo of him wearing blackface emerged, dismissing it as a silly high school prank.At a moment of seemingly heightened sensitivity, old pranks and posts continue to haunt politicians. During his ultimately successful campaign for a Virginia House seat in a special election last month, Ibraheem Samirah apologized for five-year-old Facebook posts in which he said that sending money to Israel is worse than sending money to the KKK.Not all examples of public figures' hateful speech are relegated to years past.Recent comments made by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, were perceived by many of her colleagues as anti-Semitic and led to lengthy debate in the House about whether and how to condemn her. In the end, the House approved a broad anti-hate speech resolution.Omar has repeatedly made comments suggesting that the loyalties of American supporters of Israel are suspect. Omar has apologized for giving offense, releasing a statement last month that said, "I thank my Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes."Some of Omars own critics, it turns out, have made anti-Semitic comments themselves. While decrying Omar's comments about Israel during a radio interview on Monday, former Maine GOP Gov. Paul LePage said that the Jewish people in America supply the Democratic Party with most of its funding.LePage is known for making controversial comments. Last month, he criticized the National Popular Vote Compact, which is seeking to abolish the Electoral College, because he said it would mean that  white people would have nothing to say. On Monday, Bennett Bressman, who was a junior staffer for Nebraska GOP Gov. Pete Ricketts reelection campaign, apologized for thousands of online posts, many of them anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant. Bressman once suggested it would be a good idea to run down Black Lives Matter protesters.I understand how they look really bad and are really bad on their face, Bressman told the Lincoln Journal-Star . I regret what I said."While many politicians are able to survive media storms triggered by hate speech, either by apologizing or denigrating their opponents, public servants appear to be more likely to pay a price. Firing a government employee can be easier than ousting an elected official who won't step down.Last month, the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon removed Lt. Jeff Niiya from a team that polices protests afterreported on hundreds of friendly texts he exchanged with Joey Gibson , a right-wing provocateur."The texts appear to unnecessarily encourage Joey Gibson, the leader of a group that perpetrates hate speech and violence," Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said in a statement. "Demonstrations that he has led have caused significant disruption and increased fear in our community."This past Sunday, Alex McBabb, an emergency medical technician in Patrick County, Va., was fired in the wake of reports that he compared black patients to gorillas on a podcast and said he took immense satisfaction when he terrorized an African-American boy with a needle.
Voting is not mandatory in the United States, as it is in Australia. But does that mean that American citizens who have the right to vote in elections also have the right not to vote?Its a question that was raised in Ohio when the state stripped Larry Harmon, a Navy veteran, from its voting rolls. I earned the right to vote, Harmon, who was kicked off the rolls in 2015 after he failed to vote in three prior elections, told NPR. Whether I use it or not is up to my personal discretion. They dont take away my right to buy a gun if I dont buy a gun.That argument was persuasive with a series of courts that heard Harmons case. After all, the National Voter Registration Act says that states cant remove individuals from the rolls simply for not voting. Ohio has a policy of sending out postcards to individuals after they fail to vote in two consecutive federal elections. Theyre supposed to respond to the postcard to affirm that they still live at the same address. But many people, including Harmon, say that they never saw the postcard, which they might have mistaken for a piece of junk mail.Last year, Harmon lost his case. The U.S. Supreme Court, noting that the state had made a good faith effort to contact voters, upheld Ohios policy -- known as use it or lose it -- of striking nonrespondents from the voter rolls. Do you have a right not to vote? asks Michael McDonald, an expert on voting at the University of Florida. The Supreme Court said no, you have to be periodically voting.The ruling triggered warnings bordering on panic from voting rights groups across the country. They worried that aggressive purging of registered voters could lead to disenfranchisement on a broad scale. Even before the Ohio case was decided, the Justice Department put out a press release announcing it would side with Ohio, reversing the agencys policy under the Obama administration. The next day Georgia removed some 200,000 voters from the rolls. Jon Husted, then serving as Ohios secretary of state, said the method can serve as a model for other states to use.In response, the League of Women Voters warned that the Supreme Court decision would fuel the fire of voter suppression across the country. NBC reported that at least a dozen other politically conservative states were planning to follow Ohios lead. Voting is a constitutional right, says Jim Condos, the Democratic secretary of state in Vermont. We should not be very aggressive about removing people from the rolls.Broad voter purges appeared to be the next step in a decade-long campaign to make voting more difficult. Expressing concerns about security, a majority of states have taken steps in recent years that restrict voting in one way or another, including photo identification requirements, cutbacks to early voting and policies designed to make it more difficult for students to vote where they attend college.But something else is happening in response. This year, hundreds of pieces of legislation are up for consideration in more than 30 states that seek to expand voting rights. Already, New York has passed a package of bills that would move the state, long considered one of the least voter-friendly in the nation, into the modern era. All over the country, both ballot measures and legislation are being promoted to make voting and registration easier and closer to universal. Its not happening everywhere; theres still a partisan divide on many voting issues. But politicians from both parties, in various states, have come around to the idea that its time to make voting easier.Differences in approaches to voting rights arent just partisan. Theyre also historical and tend to swing like a pendulum. Beginning in the 1960s, the nation as a whole began to expand voting rights in multiple ways. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made real the promise of the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing access to the ballot to African-Americans who had been disenfranchised by a century of Jim Crow laws. It also gave the federal government authority to review state and local requirements for registration and voting. A year earlier, in 1964, the ratification of the 24th Amendment banned the use of poll taxes imposed to keep black people from voting. In 1993, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act, which was originally known as the motor voter law because a provision guaranteed people the ability to register when signing up for drivers licenses.These expansive measures were followed in recent years by a series of restrictions, including voter ID laws and, in Kansas and Arizona, laws requiring that voters provide proof of citizenship. (The Kansas law was put on hold by a federal court last year.) The Supreme Court made much of this easier in 2013, when it issued a ruling that gutted parts of the Voting Rights Act and freed states from having to receive preclearance on election law changes from the federal government. Today, 35 states have voter ID requirements in place; some states have restricted early voting and placed new hurdles in front of voters.But the expected rush to purge voters following the Supreme Court ruling in the Ohio case hasnt taken place. Instead, momentum has shifted back in the direction of expansive voting rights. There is a push and pull with voting rights, as with other civil rights, says Jonathan Brater, an elections lawyer who recently left the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Some of what weve seen in the last decade can be seen as a response to the huge participation in 2008, particularly of minority voters.Fewer than 10 states have Ohio-style use it or lose it policies on the books. In some cases, these policies date back to the 1990s. The states include Georgia, where the race for governor last year seemed to turn at least as much on questions regarding voter registration processes as on policies. But they havent been joined by a flock of others. Its a pretty retro method of keeping the rolls clean, says Justin Levitt, associate dean for research at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. I dont think that states that dont have it will have an interest in putting something like it in place.Everyone involved in election administration agrees about the importance of keeping voter rolls clean and up to date. Having people who are dead or who have moved away still on the list is an invitation to fraud. Duplicative or inaccurate registrations also represent an unnecessary cost, due to election-related mailings and logistical questions, such as planning the number and locations of polling places. But there are more modern ways of keeping rolls current, notably automatic voter registration (AVR). As the name suggests, under such a system, individuals are automatically registered to vote when they interact with the department of motor vehicles or other agencies, unless they choose to opt out. The major sell on automatic voter registration isnt that its going to register lots of new people, says McDonald, the Florida political scientist. The major sell is efficiency. What McDonald means is that when people update their information through the DMV, that information is shared electronically with the voter database. That cuts down on errors and, when people move within their state, their information moves with them.Since Oregon passed the first AVR law in 2016, no fewer than 15 other states have adopted similar systems, including red states such as Alaska and Georgia. More than three-dozen states have put into effect a form of online registration -- some allowing same-day registration. In January, New York became the 18th state to allow individuals to register to vote as late as Election Day itself. The legislative package there also included the creation of an early voting period and a measure to allow citizens as young as 16 to pre-register to vote.At the congressional level, Democrats have made clear that voting rights are a top priority for their new House majority. Nearly every Democratic representative has signed on as a co-sponsor of the sweeping bill, which would require online voter registration, automatic voter registration and same-day registration, as well as offer protections against voter purges, among many other provisions. The bill appears to have zero chance of moving through the Senate, let alone gaining President Trumps signature. But these types of ideas are now being tried out in legislatures all over the country and are likely to pass in at least some states.Theres an old rule of thumb that the closer you live to Canada, the more likely you are to vote. Northern states including Maine and Minnesota have long led the pack when it comes to turnout, while Southern states generally lag far behind. This isnt because voting is a welcome cold-weather activity. It has to do with the political cultures and histories of these states.But the issue of whether states encourage or discourage people from voting nowadays has more to do with internal partisan inclinations than geography. Generally speaking, blue states are rushing to make voting and registration easier, while red states have tended to put more restrictions in place. Democrats are pushing for increased access to the ballot, and Republicans favor certain restrictions such as voter ID requirements as protection against the possibility of fraud.What these latter measures have in common is adding an additional layer of effort for people who wish to vote. Its no longer enough, in many cases, to register and then show up at the polls. Voters have to show identification proving they are who they claim to be. They may also have to monitor their own registrations to make sure theyre still on the rolls. There are protections under the National Voter Registration Act for voters whose names are struck because the state believed they may have moved -- protections that remain in place despite the Supreme Courts Ohio ruling last year. But there are fewer protections for people the state thinks have died or been imprisoned. Many states dont provide notice when they remove voters for such reasons. When you are eligible and nothing has changed in your situation, its understandable that people are upset when they go to the polls and they cant vote, says Levitt, the Loyola professor. Youve done everything right, and your circumstances havent changed.Voters have generally been supportive of some of the recent restrictions. Polls over the past decade have consistently shown that at least two-thirds of the public supports voter ID laws, finding them to be both reasonable and achievable. One Gallup poll conducted in 2016 found that 80 percent of those surveyed supported voter ID laws. Last November, voters in Arkansas and North Carolina easily adopted voter ID ballot measures.But in many other places lawmakers are implementing policies that expand the franchise. And theyre already having a practical effect. In Vermont, Secretary of State Condos reports, online and automatic voter registration represented close to 70 percent of voter registrations last year.The same Gallup poll from three years ago found that the same percentage of respondents who supported voter ID laws also supported same-day registration. Its clear that the public will support policies that are advertised as making voting easier. Such measures have proven highly successful. In Michigan, voters last year easily approved a proposition to allow same-day registration, which the legislature recently amended in a lame-duck session. Nevada voters approved automatic voter registration. Perhaps the years most publicized measure, Floridas Amendment 4, received nearly 65 percent of the vote. Amendment 4 made restoration of voting rights automatic for most former felons, excepting those convicted of murder and sex crimes.Amendment 4 has had its effects -- not just in Florida, where registrations have spiked since the new law took effect in January, but in other states as well. Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has proposed amending the state constitution to allow former felons to vote after they complete their sentences, which in Iowa would mean not just jail time but also finishing probation or parole. A lawsuit has been filed in Kentucky, which is the only other remaining state where voting rights are not automatically restored to ex-felons. Massachusetts and New Mexico may go even further. Those states are considering restoring voting rights to individuals who are currently incarcerated.Even as public opinion and policy momentum appear to have shifted toward expanding voting rights, there continue to be concerns about maintaining a balance that ensures electoral integrity. Academic studies have shown that in-person voting fraud -- the type that identification requirements guard against -- is exceedingly rare. Other types of fraud, however, particularly those involving mailed ballots, are more common. A case in point is last years disputed congressional race in North Carolina, in which as many as a thousand absentee ballots may have been destroyed. Such incidents have heightened concerns about electoral integrity, especially among Republicans. Expanding access to the polls without addressing safety protocols to protect the integrity of our electoral process is a disservice to the voters of our state, New York state Sen. Robert Ortt, a Republican, complained after the state expanded voting rights.In January, the Office of the Texas Secretary of State announced that it would ask county officials to investigate the citizenship status of up to 95,000 registered voters, as many as 58,000 of whom might have cast ballots in elections dating back to 1996. The news triggered a series of concerned tweets about voter fraud, including one from President Trump and another from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who tweeted, Any illegal vote deprives Americans of their voice.Texas officials backtracked almost immediately, with the secretary of state saying thousands of people on the initial list are in fact citizens. In previous instances in recent years, in which Florida and Pennsylvania announced there were thousands of noncitizens on the rolls, the problems turned out to be based on computer or human error, not fraud. In both states, the final number of non-citizens who turned out to be registered was fewer than 100.The goal for some policymakers in Texas, suggests McDonald, the Florida political scientist, is ultimately to require all new registrants to provide proof of citizenship. Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott has been a leading voice regarding voter fraud. His state has one of the strictest voter ID requirements, and has grown more aggressive about purging voters in the years since it was released from federal preclearance by the Supreme Court decision in 2013.Although advocates and the media pay attention to specific restrictions when they are passed, they dont always do as good a job looking at their cumulative effects, McDonald says. A series of hurdles may make citizens less likely to vote or make the attempt to vote harder than any single law on its own. The effects of discouragement compound over time, with the number of voters affected increasing from election to election. In Texas, the combination of laws has created a political culture that dampens voter turnout. Despite being home to one of the most expensive and publicized U.S. Senate contests last year, Texas didnt see turnout rise nearly as much as in many other states. In fact, Texas ranked 48th in voter turnout in 2018.This back and forth over voting rights -- from making voting easier to making it more difficult -- is nothing new in American politics. Voting registration itself, which began in the 1800s, was the product of lawmakers seeking to target political opponents by writing rules that applied only to residents of large cities. As recently as 2002, Wisconsin had such a law on its books, singling out voter registration rules only in larger jurisdictions within the state.Whether making them looser or tighter, politicians have always sought to game the system by changing the rules around voting and registration. Politicians dont make changes to laws, especially election laws, McDonald says, without thinking about the consequences of those laws on their reelection chances and the fortunes of their political parties.
SPEED READ:

Departments in Arizona , Kansas, Nevada, North Dakota, Washington state and Vermont let state employees bring their infants to work.

The option is growing mostly in states that don't offer paid family leave.

Six states currently have paid family leave laws, but not all of them cover public workers.

The Push for Paid Family Leave

Not an Option for Everyone

Kassandra Diederich has it all planned out. After the 36-year-old assistant attorney general in Vermont returns from parental leave this month, shell bring her newborn daughter to work two days a week.I have a door to my office I can close, she says. I envision having a Rock 'n Play [baby sleeper] for her to sleep in.Diederich will be among the first to participate in Vermonts  Infants in the Workplace  program, an initiative for state government employees launched by Gov. Phil Scott last month. With approval from their supervisors, new parents can bring their babies to work when they are six weeks to six months old.It's one way Vermont is trying to attract more millennials to the public sector in a state that's much older than the national average and aging every year.We wanted to provide an opportunity for young parents to be more drawn to work in state government, says Dan Pouliot, deputy commissioner of the states human resources department.The new policy also helps parents bond with their children and save on child care, which costs an average of $8,700 a year nationwide.Vermont isnt the only state letting every day be "Bring Your Baby to Work Day. This is a growing trend, largely in states that lack a paid family leave law. Select departments in Arizona , Kansas, Nevada, North Dakota and Washington state offer the perk."It really points to the fact that people are not satisfied with the status quo ... [and] ... know we need a better balance between people's ability to work and support their families, says Vasu Reddy, the senior policy counsel for workplace programs at the National Partnership for Women & Families.In addition to the Infants in the Workplace program, Republican Gov. Scott is also pushing for a bi-state voluntary paid family leave program with New Hampshire GOP Gov. Chris Sununu. It would replace 60 percent of workers' wages, be run by a private insurer and funded by the states. Scott said well be able to do it without putting another mandate on businesses or adding to the tax burden of our citizens.By working together and with a private insurer we will be able to start this program more quickly, effectively and reliably than if each state government had to start from scratch, the governors said in a statement.But Democratic lawmakers, who control the Vermont Legislature, think Scotts plan doesn't go far enough. Theyre instead advancing a bill to require all employers to offer 12 weeks of paid family leave a year. That plan would replace 100 percent of wages and be funded by a payroll tax of just under 1 percent, split evenly between employers and employees. Scott, however, vetoed a similar bill last year."I think it's great that governors of Vermont and New Hampshire are taking interest in paid leave," says Reddy. "But the solution they've come up with ... isn't really adequate."Six states -- California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Washington, plus the District of Columbia -- currently have paid family leave laws, ranging from four to 12 weeks. But some of these laws don't cover all state workers. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom recently proposed a plan to offer six months of leave in California.Without paid parental leave, bringing your baby to work could be the next best option for some new moms and dads. Some parents might even prefer it to taking months off work.Washington state's program started with health department employees in 2015 and has since been adopted by roughly 20 agencies. Kim Kenderesi, who coordinates the initiative for the health department, says its been fantastic and that workplace disruption really hasn't been an issue. Theyve had a total of 76 babies participate and often put on graduation ceremonies for the children.In Vermont, the benefit wont be available to all state workers. It's up to state agencies to decide whether they want to opt in. Early participants include the departments of administration, agriculture, digital services, education, labor, natural resources and transportation. The governors office is encouraging all agencies to take part.There are also some workplaces where infants won't be allowed at all -- correctional facilities or state vehicles, for instance. This has drawn criticism from the union representing state workers, the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA).Its not fair that one parent gets this and another parent doesnt, VSEA Executive Director Steve Howard told VT Digger last month. They shouldnt be treating one employee differently than another.The state HR department counters that some workplaces are simply not appropriate for infants.As these debates continue, employees like Diederich look forward to taking advantage of the new policy."I think it helps promote a healthy work-life balance, she says. I think it's phenomenal. ... It makes me feel more trusted and valued."
A Widespread Problem

A $20,000 Difference

Al Laubsch is in charge of one of nine centers in New Jersey that deals with unemployment insurance claims. In 2016, he was offered a promotion to become manager of all nine.He turned it down. What may be more surprising is the reason why.I would love to have had the chance to show the other eight offices how to run a highly efficient work unit, says Laubsch. But I have two kids, and theyre looking at dad to pay the bills. I couldnt afford to take the promotion.This is a prime example of a phenomenon called salary compression -- when the pay given to managers is similar to the pay of their subordinates -- or salary inversion, when managers makethan the people who work for them."I tell anyone who wants to be a manager, 'If you take a promotion, it better be because you love the work because the compensation will never be worth the effort you'll put in being a manager," says Laubsch, who is a member of and the business manager for his labor union.If he had taken the job, his rise in the ranks would have cost him his union membership because most states with collective bargaining don't allow high-level managers to unionize. The result is that promotions can mean giving up benefits and taking a pay cut from higher salaries that were negotiated during collective bargaining. Laubsch says his dilemma is shared by hundreds of other employees.At the mid-year meeting of the National Association of State Personnel Executives (NASPE) in January, this was a hot topic. The problem has garnered very little attention outside of government HR folks. But to them, its a widespread issue with troublesome ramifications.A lot of union states are having difficulty in getting people to take managerial and supervisory positions, said Leslie Scott, executive director of NASPE. Sometimes managers are making less -- and sometimes significantly less -- than the employees theyre managing. Its a big challenge.It's not hard to see how salaries can converge. In New Jersey, high-level government managers received zero raises from 2007 to 2018. In contrast, during that time period, the pay for 34,000 lower-level state employees went up nearly 20 percent, thanks to the Communication Workers of America union.In Michigan, John DeTizio, the longtime labor relations manager for the state Association of Governmental Employees, says hes seen dozens of occasions in which employees have refused promotions. Lately, this has been a problem in prisons and child protective services.Subordinates get overtime, and they get paid for being on-call, but the supervisors dont, says DeTizio. Its not worth being a supervisor.Salary compression and inversion doesnt just happen in union states. It can occur in any type of workplace thats struggling to attract workers. Desperate to fill jobs, employers might pay new employees more than their current ones.Its hard on the psyche, says Tambra Rodriquez, the HR manager for compensation in Johnson County, Kan. Youve been working 15 years, and youre sitting next to someone who has been working three years, and theyre making the same amount. It bothers you.This hits some industries harder than others.According to a 2017 survey of private-sector companies by Pearl Meyer, a global firm that focuses on executive compensation, pay compression was most pronounced in IT, finance and engineering. About 70 percent of respondents said it had either a moderate or high impact on job satisfaction, and slightly more than 70 percent said it negatively affected morale.The complicated nature of this form of pay inequity may be best illustrated in Hawaii County, Hawaii.Between 2006 and late 2016, union-represented employees received annual negotiated pay raises, and managers received comparable wage increases. But the salaries for the countysdepartment directors and their deputies are set by a salary commission, which languished during those 10 years. With no new members appointed, the commission couldnt achieve a quorum and, as a result, pay levels were stuck in quicksand.We had some departments where the department head was making $99,000, the deputy was making $94,000, and their highest-paid subordinate was making $120,000, says Bill Brilhante, director of the countys HR department. They had difficulty filling the department head positions.A new administration was elected in November 2016 and made the appointments necessary to get the salary commission back in action. It set about raising department head and deputy salaries -- but that meant raises that were as large as $30,000, which immediately caused a public outcry.Now, the salary commission is gun-shy, as Brilhante says, about increasing pay for the people at the top. And with union workers pay regularly increasing, salary compression and inversion is making a comeback, effectively shrinking the pool of talent.You want to have your best and brightest people at the top making the high-level managerial decisions, says Brilhante. But inversion creates an artificial barrier because the best and brightest dont want to take on additional responsibility and a cut in pay.
SPEED READ:

President Trump's 2020 budget proposes major cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency, Medicaid, food stamps, cash welfare, public housing, transportation, clean energy and economic development.

State and local organizations are noticeably quiet in response.

It would run a $1 trillion federal deficit for the next four years.

Trumps Budget Is Dead on Arrival

'A Plan Only Water Polluters Can Love'

Major Health-Care and Welfare Cuts

Infrastructure and Economic Development a Mixed Bag

Weve Seen This Before, But...

Impact on the Federal Deficit

This week, President Trump introduced his vision for the federal governments 2020 budget . It proposes slashing domestic spending by 9 percent, including a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Defense spending, on the other hand, would increase by 5 percent, or $34 billion.Here are six things state and local officials should consider when reviewing the administrations proposal.Nobody expects Trumps proposal to go anywhere. Congress sets the budget, and the presidents document -- no matter whose it is -- is largely viewed as a window into his spending priorities.But it does indicate where hes likely to pressure members of his party, particularly in the Republican-controlled Senate.The Center for American Progress, a fierce Trump critic, warns that Trumps priorities and policies reveal his sheer contempt for the forgotten men and women for whom he pledged to fight. Case in point: Trump's budget cuts Medicare and Social Security, two entitlement programs for the elderly that he promised voters he wouldn't touch.Those are the words of Natural Resources Defense Councils Jon Devine, who says slashing the EPAs budget puts more onus on states to ensure clean waterways while giving them less money to do it.Among other things, the budget would eliminate the $16.8 million in funding that pollution control agencies receive for basic research needs like evaluating water for safe swimming or fish consumption. It also eliminates funding for beach monitoring and contamination notification efforts.It would severely cut federal funding for bodies of water with a history of major environmental and health problems. The Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes would lose 90 percent of their funding, while funding would be eliminated for the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Champlain, Long Island Sound and Puget Sound.It would mean more polluted drinking water supplies, make restoring the fisheries of the Chesapeake Bay and other waters harder, delay needed fixes to failing sewer systems, [and hamper programs that] monitor beach water quality and warn beachgoers about conditions that can make them sick, said Devine.Trumps budget reflects his continued desire to shift Medicaid from an entitlement program to a grant-based one by arguing that the latter gives states more flexibility. His proposal cuts $777 billion, over 10 years from Medicaid, the nation's health insurance program for the poor.He would also cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (commonly referred to as food stamps) by 30 percent, or $220 billion, over 10 years. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, what most refer to as cash welfare, would be cut by $21 billion.The budget also calls for deep cuts in public housing and would raise rents for millions of low-income households receiving rental assistance.The proposal would substantially cut transportation funding (by 19 percent) while squeezing the budget for economic development. Of note, Trump has renewed his proposal to eliminate the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which funds a wide range of community projects, and the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, which promotes homeownership, for cities and counties.The budget would also kill funding for federal programs that drive investment in clean energy innovation. Bob Keefe, executive director of Environmental Entrepreneurs, which advocates for business-friendly environmental policies, says hundreds of small companies depend on that funding and that local governments in turn rely on those clean tech entrepreneurs and incubators to create the local companies and jobs of tomorrow.On the positive side for infrastructure advocates, the plan includes about $200 billion over 10 years for infrastructure spending , which the White House says could leverage $1 trillion from private, state and local sources. It also doubles funding to $2 billion for the Infrastructure for Rebuilding America grant program for roads and bridges.Many of Trumps proposed cuts are reprisals of his first two budgets . Whats notably different this time around is the lack of outcry from state and local organizations Trumps proposed elimination of CDBG and HOME programs, for instance, elicited fiery statements and press conferences early on in his administration, but the silence this week has been palpable.For what its worth, Trumps budget release came during the middle of the National League of Cities Congressional City Conference in Washington, D.C. The conference includes an advocacy day on Capitol Hill, so more than 200 city leaders and advocates were already scheduled this week to speak with members of Congress about the importance of federal funding, particularly for infrastructure.Trumps budget would spend more than the federal government brings in, not balancing out for another 15 years. It would run a $1 trillion deficit each year for the rest of his term.Those projections are based on the White House's assumption that the economy will continue to grow at a healthy clip, or 3 percent. But objective organizations like the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office are projecting growth at or below 2 percent.Trumps chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, pointed out this week that there were plenty of naysayers last year about the administrations projected economic growth who were proven wrong. ( GDP growth last year was 2.9 percent.)So far, we won round one, Kudlow said on PBS NewsHour . I'm going roll the dice again, and I'm going to take the over and suggest that we will be right again this year, and many of our critics will not be.
It may still be an emerging technology, but in U.S. local government, the Internet of Things is everywhere According to survey data from the 2018 Digital Cities survey, a Center for Digital Government* project, 92 percent of cities participating in the program said they were considering the potential of IoT in their strategic planning.Thats not necessarily a representation of all cities in the U.S.; the data simply reflects survey participants. But the trend in that question is undeniable  the annual project has been asking participants this question for years now, and since 2015, the percentage of cities answering affirmatively has risen from 61 percent to 92. That rose steadily each year the question was asked.IoT involves connected sensors of any kind, such as air quality sensors or pedestrian-counting cameras. One particularly popular local government IoT project as of late has been smart street light upgrades , where a municipality will swap out old, inefficient lighting for LEDs. As they do so, many cities opt for lights that are dimmable, can change their color and are outfitted with connectivity hardware that allows them to remotely control the lights and add on extras like cameras, computers and sensors.The question is worded somewhat vaguely, so it's possible some of the participants involved are simply stating that they are thinking about how they might use IoT, as opposed to actively testing it and using it for operations.But there are definitely some using the technology in real-world settings. Take Coral Gables, Fla., a city in the Miami area that won first place in its population category in Digital Cities 2018. Coral Gables IT strategic plan lays out several projects the city has undertaken since 2017, including air quality sensors, pedestrian counters, smart street lights and online dashboards to aggregate all the data together.This data is part of a larger infographic based on Digital Cities 2018 data to be released in the coming weeks.
San Francisco-based Populus , a startup whose software platform gives cities data to plan for shared mobility services like scooters and bikes, has raised $3.1 million to grow its team to keep pace with demand.Regina Clewlow, CEO and co-founder of Populus, said the seed funding round began in January and closed on Monday, bringing its total funding to $3.85 million. Lead investors were Precursor Ventures and Relay Ventures, with additional backing from Castor Ventures and others.Without specifying exactly how many clients Populus has, Clewlow toldthe company serves cities from coast to coast, adding roughly a city a week.We are going to be expanding the team, because we are seeing significant growth in demand for our platform and are going to be scaling it to more cities around the world, she said. Most of the demand is in the United States, but wherever scooters launch, there tend to be new regulatory regimes that are put in place by cities. Wherever you see cities, you typically see a need for mobility management.Launched in April 2018, Populus platform collects vehicle and trip data from shared mobility operators, such as scooters, bikes and cars, and shares it with city planners who can identify new bike and scooter parking areas and dedicated lanes. Populus also bills itself as the only data platform that gets real-time data from shared cars to help cities with curbside management and pricing.In a few short months, we have already seen that when cities have access to shared mobility data through our platform, they are able to make decisions that are sometimes politically challenging, such as carving off street space for bikes and scooters to safely operate, Clewlow said in a statement. We are also seeing that many public agencies are beginning to consider new pricing models for streets, sidewalks and curbs  that can help reduce traffic and shift our cities towards more energy efficient transportation systems.Populus counts governments in the metropolitan areas of Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles as clients, as well as mobility companies who use the platform to share their data with cities.Over the past decade we have seen an explosion of shared mobility services, said Charles Hudson, a managing partner of Precursor Ventures and new Populus board member, in a statement. In order to fulfill their promises of delivering safer, equitable and efficient streets, shared mobility operators will require platform partners like Populus to facilitate their continued growth.
(TNS)  A far-reaching bill to change how Georgias 7 million registered voters cast their ballots is on the verge of clearing the Georgia General Assembly after the state Senate voted Wednesday for a new touchscreen-and-paper voting system, despite objections that it wouldnt be any more secure from election tampering than whats currently in use.The Senates 35-21 party-line vote sets up the $150 million election overhaul bill for final passage within days. The legislation is now ready for a final vote in the state House, which already passed a previous version of the bill. It would then head to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature.During a three-hour debate, Republican senators endorsed the incoming voting technology, which uses computer printers to make paper ballots for voters to review before inserting them into scanning machines. The states current electronic voting machines dont produce a paper ballot.Democrats tried to stop the legislation, House Bill 316 , calling it an expensive switch to a new voting method that will be just as vulnerable to hacking and computer errors as the states current 17-year-old direct-recording electronic voting machines. They want paper ballots bubbled in by pen, saying they would create a voting record thats less susceptible to meddling.The partisan divide over how to best safeguard democracy in Georgia comes after Novembers heated race for governor. Democrat Stacey Abrams, who opposes electronic voting, alleged that widespread problems with voting machines caused inaccurate counts, while Kemp said the states voting system conclusively showed he won.Members of both political parties agreed on one thing: Georgia should switch to a voting system that includes a paper ballot to check electronic vote counts. Georgia is one of just four states that relies entirely on electronic voting machines without a verifiable paper trail, along with Delaware, Louisiana and South Carolina.Republican state Sen. William Ligon said the new voting machines, called ballot-marking devices, will be familiar to voters while providing a way to verify the accuracy of elections by checking electronic results against paper ballots. The new voting system would be put into place statewide in time for the the 2020 presidential primary election.Touchscreen ballot markers leave absolutely no room for doubt of voters intent since voters make a clear choice with a touch of a button, said Ligon, who represents the Brunswick area. This is a secure system.Georgia would become the first state in the country to rely entirely on ballot-marking devices for every voter on Election Day. Some jurisdictions in 24 states use similar voting systems, often to assist voters with disabilities.Democrats said the switch to ballot-marking devices is a costly waste of taxpayer money that will benefit well-connected voting companies at the expense of voters. They repeatedly pointed out that Kemp hired a lobbyist for voting company ES&S, former state Rep. Chuck Harper, as his deputy chief of staff.And they said it was suspicious that voting companies estimates for the cost of ballot-marking devices, roughly $150 million to $200 million plus annual fees and additional equipment costs, didnt come to light from the Secretary of States Office until Tuesday. When Kemp was secretary of state last year, his office refused to release the companies pricing information.Georgia Public Broadcasting first reported the voting companies estimates of their products costs.We still need the people of Georgia to believe in the process, and right now they are unconvinced, said state Sen. Elena Parent , a Democrat from Atlanta. Its risky to forge ahead to a place where there are dozens of unanswered questions.A key disagreement was over whether paper ballots printed by a machine or paper ballots filled out by hand are more trustworthy.Republican Senate Rules Chairman Jeff Mullis said he fears paper ballots completed with a pen could be used to manipulate election results. He suspected fraud occurred during his campaign for office in 1998, when initial results showed he had won by 23 votes but an additional 151 paper ballots appeared during a recount, handing the election to his opponent.Paper ballots are a way to fraud an election. I for one will not stand for that, said Mullis , who represents the Chickamauga area. The ballot process should be the most secure place in our voting structure in America.But Democratic Sen. Ed Harbison said technology-based voting systems are inherently flawed because they could be hacked.The most secure system is to return to the future, and that is hand-marked paper ballots read by an optical scanner, said Harbison , who represents the Columbus area. This puts nothing between the voter and the ballots.Several voters demonstrated against the legislation outside the Georgia Capitol, carrying moneybags and signs saying the new voting system blows up GA budget. They said voting by hand would be less expensive.Theyre also concerned that along with the printed text of voters choices, paper ballots would include computer-readable bar codes that humans cant authenticate.We dont know who is going to take over if we have insecure voting, said Liz Throop of DeKalb County. We dont want to cede power to the best hackers.The legislation goes far beyond voting machines, calling for many other broad changes in Georgia elections.Election results would be audited starting with the November 2020 presidential election. Inactive voters registrations couldnt be canceled for at least eight years. Polling places couldnt be changed in the 60 days before a general or primary election.If the legislation becomes law, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger will solicit competitive bids from voting system companies and then test ballot-marking devices during municipal elections in November.
Police Department Body-Worn Camera Vendor Date of first purchase New York City Axon April 2017 Chicago Axon November 2015 Los Angeles Axon August 2015 Philadelphia Axon October 2017 Houston WatchGuard April 2016 Washington, D.C. Axon November 2015 Las Vegas Axon 2014 (month unavailable) Dallas Axon January 2014 Phoenix Axon April 2013 Baltimore Axon March 2016 Detroit WatchGuard May 2016 San Francisco Axon November 2014 San Antonio Axon February 2016 Boston Axon August 2018** Honolulu Axon August 2018 Memphis Axon August 2015 Milwaukee Axon October 2015 San Diego Axon June 2014 Austin Axon March 2017 Jacksonville Axon October 2018** Charlotte-Mecklenburg Axon April 2015 Atlanta Axon November 2016 Indianapolis None yet, pilot program only Fort Worth Axon March 2015 Denver Axon November 2015

After police fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in the latter half of 2014, his family publicly declared that every police officer in the U.S. should wear body cameras.That moment is widely cited as the moment that propelled law enforcement agencies across the country to start buying the devices . And data indeed shows a marked rise in body camera purchases after Brown's death and the subsequent nationwide protests  but the flurry of body camera purchases didn't reach its peak until about a year and a half later, after the Obama administration introduced grants through the Department of Justice to help law enforcement agencies pay for them.One way to trace the timeline of body cameras in use is through historical sales data. Axon, formerly known as Taser, is the largest provider of body cameras in the U.S., and has been selling the devices to police departments in the country since 2010. It is also publicly traded, meaning it reports its revenue to federal regulators four times a year.Those filings, illustrated in the chart above, show only a small uptick in Axon's video segment in the next several quarters after the events in Ferguson. The real momentum began in the second quarter of 2016, after the DOJ began giving out grants to help police departments start using the technology.A review of bid data in Government Navigator, a database from the, shows a similar trend  a big rise in body camera purchasing activity in 2015, followed by a peak in the middle of 2016.Of course, one confounding factor in pinpointing the importance of the grants in kick-starting body camera use is the sheer length of time it takes for government to purchase technology. In general, it's common for state and local agencies to take a year or more to actually finalize and release a request for proposals for some kind of technology. So it's likely that much of the activity shown in Navigator began earlier than the graph suggests.The window of 2015-16 is when the majority of the 25 largest police departments in the country by officer count started purchasing body cameras. Five of those departments had body cameras before 2015, a full 13 purchased them in 2015 or 2016, and six have purchased them since 2016. One  the police departments in Indianapolis  has tried out body cameras with intent to deploy them soon.Among this top segment of the market, Axon dominates. All but two of the largest police departments that use body cameras have chosen Axon.Since 2016, as the Navigator data shows, body camera purchases have leveled off a bit. In 2017, bid activity dropped below 2015 levels, and then in 2018 they rose back up again. The bid data doesn't capture the entire market, but the data set consists of more than 300 RFPs and provides a good window into trends over time.And one trend emerges from the data very clearly  body cameras are no longer a rarity. For law enforcement agencies in the U.S., they are a fact of life.Government Technology's
The Center for Digital Government* has been tracking the status of state projects revamping and rebuilding their IT structures since early 2016. In just three years, the landscape has changed dramatically. Comparing then and now gives us a chance to assess successful efforts as well as document the ways that IT infrastructures (both in tech and personnel) have shifted over time.There is no IT project more daunting than overhauling a states entire IT structure. More than an initiative or a realignment of resources, these reorganizations change a structural component of government operation across every agency.To track changes, we put states into three categories: centralized, hybrid and decentralized. Once a system strays far enough to escape easy classification as mostly centralized or mostly decentralized, it is a hybrid system.Centralized state IT is characterized by a single consolidated IT organization which provides most IT services to the other agencies. This main agency provides IT governance, strategy and oversight as well as most IT services, support and personnel for other state agencies. For years, this has been considered the most advanced and desirable form of IT structure. Centralizing IT generally results in simplified and more comprehensive governance and security, along with significant cost savings.Decentralized state IT is a structure where individual agencies have internal IT departments which provide most of their support, systems and strategy. A state or central IT agency may also be present, but it does not provide services or staff, instead focusing on policy and possibly even oversight of large projects and procurements. This structure is usually characterized by siloed systems and data across the agencies. It is also significantly more expensive and is difficult to maintain consistent security and quality.Hybrid state IT structures are a mix of the two, either by design or because the state is transitioning towards a fully centralized structure. Hybrid IT provides options and agility while still allowing the state to benefit from some of the cost-savings of a fully centralized system.Here's what the landscape of state IT systems looked like in 2016:And here's what it looked like at the end of 2018:Since our 2016 analysis, 15 states have transitioned to a different IT structure. Almost half of these states (seven) were originally decentralized.A total of 13 states shifted toward centralization. Eight states  Alaska, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee and Washington  moved into the centralized category. Another five  Hawaii, Idaho, Massachusetts, Nevada and South Carolina  transitioned from a decentralized to a hybrid system.Interestingly, two states broke the mold by backing away from centralization. New Jersey moved from centralized to a hybrid system. Meanwhile, Oregon abandoned its centralization attempt and continues its legacy decentralized structure.Only Illinois and North Carolina fully moved from decentralized to centralized within the time frame of this ongoing project.While the centralized system has been commonly viewed as the ideal, states seem to be trending toward hybridization instead of complete centralization. In addition to the five states that transitioned into hybrid structures, 10 more states retained their hybrid designation over these three years: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Montana.Flexibility is a major reason hybrid modeling may be appealing over full centralization. If agencies have widely varying day-to-day infrastructural needs, a nimbler system may allow for better responsiveness and specialized skills. Purchasing and equipment refresh may also be expedited where larger contractual/purchasing oversight is in place, but individual agencies retain some purchasing power. Whatever the underlying reasoning, state IT structures are changing; over the last three years, 30 percent of states have shifted their IT governance structure.Government Technology's
(TNS)  A local charter school with STEM in its title has come under fire by the state Department of Education for not offering a rigorous and well-designed selection of science courses.The acronym stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.During the education department's exhaustive five-year review of Times2 STEM Academy, a kindergarten through grade 12 school, the agency found numerous problems with the state's second-oldest charter school, among them: Serious problems with the school's leadership by its executive director, Rudolph Moseley, and its board of directors, including a vote of no confidence last summer by the school's teachers. A lack of coherence in science courses, with limited science instruction in the elementary school. High school students with a free period who had nowhere to go and wound up in the hallway. Other classrooms didn't have an adult assigned. Low achievement and growth, with only 13 percent of students proficient in math and 20 percent proficient in English. Failure by the board and Mosley to routinely monitor the school's academic progress. Repeated complaints by parents and teachers that concerns are ignored by school leaders. The report said communication with parents is "inconsistent."Because of these problems, the Rhode Island Department of Education issued Times2 a three-year license renewal in late January rather than a five-year one. The Providence charter has until June 30 to address the issues. If it doesn't, then RIDE will take the matter before the Council for Elementary and Secondary Education."A vote of no confidence grabs your attention in any school, especially a long-standing charter school," said Steve Osborne, RIDE's chief of innovation. "We have very serious concerns about school leadership."Asked if RIDE had confidence in Moseley, Osborne said his agency has received more negative feedback about Times2 than it has from all of the other charter schools combined. The criticism ranges from a lack of communication between school leaders and staff to the way decisions are made on course changes and teaching responsibilities.Charter schools are publicly funded but run by independent boards. They have greater flexibility than traditional public schools over such things as the length of the school day. Times2 is unusual because its teachers belong to the Providence Teachers Union.No charter school has ever been closed in Rhode Island, although former education Commissioner Deborah Gist tried to shut down Highlander Charter School in Providence. Gist backed down after a huge outpouring of support from parents. Across the United States, dozens of charter schools have been closed, primarily for misuse of funds.Gist also raised the bar on charter schools, asking them to reach a higher academic standard than their traditional public school peers.Asked what it would take to close a charter in Rhode Island, Osborne said, "With a school such as Times2, renewal or closure may not [represent] the full range of options."Moseley agrees that the school "has to make major changes to meet our mission," and said the board has been working on that for three years.He said Times2 has begun to address some of RIDE's complaints, increasing the number of college courses available to high school students, reducing class size, adding a special education teacher and a social worker, and introducing after-school enrichment programs.Times2, he said, has also developed a written explanation showing how parents can express their concerns."We're on notice," Moseley said. "We have a sense of urgency. At the same time, there are issues that we have already addressed."But Ana Bazzaro, an outspoken critic with four nieces in the school, said Times2 won't change until Moseley is gone."If I was RIDE, I'd call into question his leadership," she said. "Every time I've gone to a school committee meeting, he has thrown other administrators under the bus. He has had his opportunity to show what he's capable of doing. He is not capable of turning the school around."
SAN RAMON, Calif.  Drivers may love their backup cameras, but remain unsure about a cars ability to drive itself.As car manufacturers pile on more driver-assistance features, such as cameras showing the area behind cars and sensors alerting to nearby objects, or adaptive cruise control, drivers are increasingly inclined to rely on them. However, driver comfort with these features may not translate to an easy embrace of autonomous vehicles, according to research from AAA.While many consumers say they like these features in their vehicles, only 20 percent of U.S. drivers will trust a self-driving vehicle, said Megan McKernan, manager of the Automotive Research Center for the Automobile Club of Southern California, speaking on March 8 during a panel at the fifth annual Redefining Mobility Summit in San Ramon, Calif. So, its kind of a weird scenario where theres an over-reliance on the systems, and yet, when you talk about fully autonomous vehicles, people are still a little bit scared.The summit, organized by the Contra Costa Transportation Authority, brought together industry and government officials to explore some of the innovation developments central to the transportation sector, with a strong focus on the future of autonomy in personal vehicles and freight movement.Surveys conducted by AAA suggest drivers welcome more AV features in their cars, but they want to remain in control. Some 55 percent of consumers say there is a desire for some autonomous features in their next vehicle, while 73 percent say they are afraid of self-driving vehicles, according to McKernan.Drivers have become so comfortable with advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) features such as the rear-facing cameras, that 25 percent say they no longer look behind them when backing up, said McKernan, adding 29 percent of drivers admit to engaging in other activities while driving.One of the things that AAA is concerned about is this over-confidence in the technology, said McKernan. Were not at fully autonomous vehicles yet.The findings show an increasing number of drivers are placing a lot of dependence on ADAS, suggesting behavior that may be becoming too reliant on technology and allowing attention to drift away from the task of driving, say panelists.I think the possibility that people change their behavior and start to become over-reliant is definitely something that we think about and [need to] mitigate, said Brian Kebschull, president of Dynamic Research Inc., based in Southern California, a company involved with testing AV technologies.The problem is, consumers are not completely aware of their limitations yet, McKernan added. And some of them have an over-confidence in how some of the systems will work.Where consumers seem to be comfortable with completely autonomous vehicles is when they function as small, low-speed shuttles. AAA of Northern California, Nevada & Utah, recently partnered with the city of Las Vegas, Keolis North America and the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada (RTC) to deploy and test a small AV shuttle in downtown Vegas in an effort to familiarize the public with the vehicle and technology. Similar projects has been launched in other cities in Ohio Georgia and California at the Bishop Ranch office park, the site of the Redefining Mobility Summit.As for the fully autonomous personal vehicles, those are still probably a number of years away, say sumitt attendees. The future of automated driving is quite positive, said Kebschull. But I think the rollout may be slower than originally promised.The technology is not ready for prime time yet, said McKernan.
(TNS)  Washington state lawmakers failed to vote Wednesday on a bill that would allow Seattle to use traffic cameras to enforce bus-only lanes and crosswalks, missing a key deadline and killing the bill.The proposal, HB 1793 , would have authorized cities with populations of more than 500,000 people to use automated cameras like those used in some school zones to ticket drivers who violate rules against driving in a bus-only lane or blocking a crosswalk.The bill was a priority of transportation and disability-rights advocates, and both King County Metro and the city of Seattle testified in support. Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, D-Burien, sponsored the bill.Im disappointed that not enough House members recognize the need to keep transit moving downtown, said Fitzgibbon, whose district also includes West Seattle, in a text message Wednesday. Seattle is an economic engine for the whole state, and gridlock downtown hurts my constituents the most but harms the whole state too.Under the bill, the cameras could also have been used to issue tickets for blocking locations restricted for entry and exit of emergency-response vehicles and the boarding of public-transportation vehicles, including ferries. Drivers would have received a warning on the first violation within a five-year period.Supporters said using cameras would improve the flow of transit and discourage the dangerous practice of blocking crosswalks that can be crucial for pedestrians and people with disabilities to cross the road safely. Without cameras, ticketing people violating bus-only lane restrictions can further clog those lanes by requiring officers to pull people over on already congested streets.But the bill met opposition in the Legislature, including from the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.The ACLU of Washington is broadly skeptical of increased surveillance and was worried about how the bill would pair with another bill dealing with traffic cameras. The second bill would have allowed law-enforcement agencies to, with a warrant, use photos from traffic cameras and toll systems for criminal investigations. (Use of photos from traffic cameras is currently limited to the applicable traffic rules and tolls.)If we want cameras on every corner to try to catch people committing crimes, lets have that conversation, said Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington. Lawmakers should not be working to remove restrictions on the cameras while trying to have a lot more of them at the same time, Narayan said.That bill passed a House committee but also did not receive a full House vote by the Wednesday deadline.Fitzgibbon said he also faced opposition from some fellow Democrats, whom he declined to name, either because they generally opposed traffic cameras or they worried about racial or income disproportionalities in enforcement. Fitzgibbon argued cameras were less likely to result in disproportionate enforcement than human officers.Members of the disability-rights group Rooted in Rights, which lobbied for the bill, were disappointed, said program director Anna Zivarts.Our streets need to be accessible for all users and we cant allow inconsiderate and illegal behavior by some drivers to put our communities at risk, Zivarts said in an email. A video by Rooted in Rights shows two people using wheelchairs attempt to navigate a mess of cars blocking intersections in Seattle, sometimes having to travel through traffic to get around vehicles and onto sidewalks. The video has been seen more than 1 million times on social media, Zivarts said.
(TNS)  The next Chicago mayor should have a chief mobility officer to handle issues like ride-share regulation and self-driving cars, as technology continues to change how we get around, according to a new report.The report from Mayor Rahm Emanuels mobility task force also recommends a pilot program this year for electric scooters, and an increase in the state gas tax.Look, somebodys got to pay for this, said former U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who chaired the task force. Transportation is not free.The Emanuel administration formed the task force back in September. Its 20 members include academics, government officials and members of the private sector.The group developed guidelines to manage a multi-modal transportation system, with old technology like CTA buses interacting with new ways to travel like Uber and Lyft. Among the goals of the task force was a system that is better for the environment, reduces dependence on single-occupant vehicle trips and makes the city easier to live in.The task force came up with 50 separate recommendations, covering concerns such as accessibility, congestion and the drop in public transit use.For example, the task force proposed that the city try an electric scooter pilot this year, within a defined area instead of all over the city. Scooter speed would be capped at 15 mph, to help prevent some of the injuries seen in other cities. Chicago would collect information on how scooter rental companies manage sidewalk clutter, and how scooters could affect other transportation choices, like transit, the report said.Scooters have been a source of contention in other cities because of concerns that they can litter sidewalks and pose a safety hazard to riders and pedestrians.Emanuel said in an interview that the next mayor needs to learn from other cities what works and what doesnt. He suggested that scooters could be integrated into the bike share system, and there should be someplace for scooters to be docked.People are just dumping it as if the sidewalk is their bedroom, and thats not appropriate, Emanuel said of the scooter programs in other cities.The city also must modify its laws to allow for scooters and electric bikes in bike lanes and clarify where they should not be used, like on sidewalks, the report said.The task force also proposed a uniform requirement for data from all ride-share companies  such as information about where passengers are picked up and dropped off  which would help the city figure out how ride-share is affecting traffic. The ride-share industry has exploded in the city, from 2 million monthly trips in 2015 to 9 million in 2018, and has been blamed both for increased congestion downtown and lower use of transit, the report said.The report suggested that the city could adjust its fee structure to encourage high-capacity, less-polluting trips. This could mean lower fees for pooled-ride share trips over individual trips, or dropping lease payments for bike-share.Another proposal is that individual ride-share drivers could get tax credits for going into lower-income neighborhoods, instead of having that credit go to the company.The report also suggested creating a pilot to find the best way to handle curb management for short-time users like cabs and delivery trucks; expanding Ventra to include more modes of transportation; and creating more bus rapid transit. The CTA could aim for an all-electric bus fleet by 2040, the report said.The next mayor and the new City Council will really be the ones to act upon these recommendations, said Ron Burke, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, who was on the task force. I think the report points us in the right direction and I hope the next mayor considers it.Emanuel said the next mayor would be smart to adopt the recommendations, and that he is leaving the citys transportation system in better shape than it was when he found it. He pointed to more than $8 billion in projects on the CTA, 115 miles of protected bike lanes and other achievements.The candidates for mayor, former federal prosecutor Lori Lightfoot and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, have not yet received copies of the report, according to the mayors office. Both have agreed in the past with some of the ideas in the report, such as expanding bus rapid transit.
Utah: IAM Veteran

Michigan: Impressive Progress

Pennsylvania: Helping Agencies Modernize IAM

Indiana: Creating a Holistic View of Citizens

When it comes to identity and access management (IAM), state IT executives want to emulate the solutions developed by retail giants such as Amazon. Think about how citizens access their favorite retail website, said Erik Avakian, chief information security officer of Pennsylvania. They can go to different areas of the site and buy what they need with one unified credential.Modeling itself on todays digital retail world, the Keystone State is integrating identity proofing, social media log-ins and password strength meters. These are things people expect when they go to other major websites, so we are trying to bring that type of experience to government, he added. Regardless of the agency they are doing business with, citizens will have a unified credential they can use across multiple applications.To some people, IAM might seem like a technical security issue about back-end authentication between systems. But it also serves as a cornerstone of digital business. Without an enterprise-level IAM strategy, state agencies will continue to operate in a siloed fashion, and each application will require its own password system and identity-proofing solution.As more states move to implement digital government strategies, identity comes into play, because it is part of securing those types of transactions and enabling the digital experience, said Avakian. But what is the best approach? Four states have tackled IAM at the enterprise level, creating laboratories for possible success elsewhere. Here are their stories.Some state governments have been working on single-sign-on (SSO) capabilities for years, while others are planning their first pilot projects. But executives have come to accept that IAM is less of a one-time project and more of a discipline. Like security, IAM is a lifestyle, said Gartner analyst Kevin Kampman. It is not going to go away. The objectives change, the terrain is changing, the needs are changing, and you need to be able to adapt to that.Dave Fletcher (left), Utahs chief technology officer, noted that IAM is tied to security, and the threat environment is always changing. Adapting to that reality requires adding new features such as multi-factor authentication. We also need to be able to integrate a growing number of cloud services with our sign-on solution, he said. It is a constantly moving target.Utah has been working on SSO capabilities since 2002, primarily focused on provisioning and deprovisioning employees and enabling access to the applications they need for their jobs, Fletcher said. Utah ID provides access to about 900 different applications and services. Now the state is applying that approach to business- and citizen-facing applications as well. Utah provides more than 1,300 online services, and more than half provide services to businesses.In 2016, legislation was passed that requires the Department of Technology Services (DTS) to create a single-sign-on business portal. With a budget of $1.3 million annually, the first phase of the portal is expected to be completed in July 2019. The new portal works primarily with four agencies: Tax Commission, Department of Workforce Services, Labor Commission and Department of Commerce. Business owners will be able to sign up for notifications, such as a tax payment deadline; and service providers, including accountants and attorneys, will have the opportunity to manage multiple businesses.Utah is not stopping with business owners. DTS is working with the state Medicaid agency to integrate its applications into the SSO effort. The thing that initiated the business single sign-on was that some legislators wanted to extend that type of service to the citizens at large, Fletcher explained, so this business portal is just the first step.Fletcher explained that the portal will become a common eligibility system that cuts across all of the health and human services departments as well as unemployment, making them fully integrated and easier to use. Eventually DTS wants to take it beyond state agencies to local governments as well.The state of Michigan is another example that shows you are never really done with IAM. It has been working on its MILogin enterprise IAM solution for more than five years, with different use cases for employees, businesses and individual citizens. Citizens can use MILogin to renew their drivers license, hunting license or fishing license. Employees across all agencies now use MILogin to access the statewide enterprise and resource planning system called SIGMA, said David DeVries (below right), who recently left the position of CIO and director of the Department of Technology, Management and Budget.By almost any measure, the state has made impressive progress. Almost 230 Web and mobile applications are integrated behind MILogin, and more than 4 million Michigan citizens have logins. We have an established program here, DeVries said. Our challenge has been, and still is, to keep up with the technology because it is constantly changing.DeVries established a policy that all new software programs and all major rewrites or upgrades will have MILogin as their front-end identity piece. Several systems are going live with the SSO log-in in 2019. DeVries pointed to the states new vehicle registration system that will be using the MILogin, which he anticipated going live in February. Our main requirement was that the vendor was not going to bring his own log-in system to use. They were going to incorporate ours. We are forcing that through the other programs. That is another challenge: how to encourage that, enforce it, and then keep the cost down.In 2013, the National Institute of Standards and Technology awarded grants to Michigan and Pennsylvania to pilot identity management solutions. That started the conversation in Pennsylvania on how to streamline the citizen experience and enhance security and has led to the Keystone Login SSO initiative. We want to get to a unified credential that is secure and provides different levels of assurance depending on the type of transaction the citizen is trying to do, said CISO Erik Avakian (below left).If a citizen is applying for benefits, that may require identity proofing, he explained. Here is how that works: A user can provide information from their drivers license or state ID card, which is then verified by the Department of Transportation based on an exact match of the information provided. Or the person can undertake a knowledge-based authentication, which is currently provided as a service by Experian. The constituent is asked for identifying information (name, address and other optional pieces of information). Experian matches the user against its data system and returns a series of multiple-choice questions that the constituent should be able to correctly answer. A score is then returned based on the responses and other criteria such as the vendors fraud alert system.Pennsylvania is seeking to move beyond siloed applications that require citizens to have user logins and passwords for multiple sites. All these different user names and passwords are frustrating to the citizen and less secure because they have to remember all of them, Avakian said. The experience is disjointed. Keystone Login gets us beyond that.One application that has gone live with Keystone Login is a financial disclosure application used by more than 10,000 current and former employees to file annual Statements of Financial Interest under the State Ethics Act and/or Governors Code of Conduct (an executive order). Approximately 30 applications are scheduled to go live in 2019, including the voter services portal, business registration and professional licensing and an enterprise grants portal.Pennsylvanias Office of Information Technology is trying to get agencies to see Keystone Login as part of their legacy modernization process. As agencies modernize or move to a new version, we say as part of this version, lets migrate you to Keystone Login instead of using your own directory, Avakian said. We have APIs to help agencies come on board; there is an onboarding guide, and a communications plan put into effect. We have been working hand in hand with the agencies and have an applications team available to help them. It is definitely something the agencies need help with. But we didnt do it in a silo; we are all moving together.Indiana expects several agencies to go live with its Access Indiana SSO solution in 2019. The states Office of Technology and Management Performance Hub have been working since 2017 with four of the states largest citizen-facing applications from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), Health and Human Services, Workforce Development and the Department of Revenue.Graig Lubsen, communications and marketing director at Indianas Office of Technology, sits on three of the four working committees involving Access Indiana. He said Indiana sees SSO as a first step toward the state taking a more holistic view of citizens and the services they access by creating a single client account across agencies. If you dont have everybody using the same credential, you cant have a singular view of a person or citizen from the state governments perspective, Lubsen said. We had to tackle single sign-on first.Better understanding citizen interactions with state government could lead to the state being able to recommend services that they would either qualify for or could be interested in, according to Dewand Neely (right), the states chief information officer. The state could maybe utilize the citizen information to save money, such as on mailing costs by being able to centrally verify a persons address. We can also develop a central portal for a citizen to manage their experience with state government, customizing the design to show things the user interacts with or messages that are of interest.The state chose to work with NIC subsidiary Indiana Interactive to build the solution. Initially we were using another off-the-shelf product from a major technology company, which we had in place for INBiz, our business one-stop portal, Lubsen explained. But as we developed the requirements, we found that there were too many restrictions on what we could do with that solution, so we chose to build our own. (For instance, adding multi-factor authentication would have been too expensive using the previous solution, he said.) We have saved a bunch of money and were able to add flexibility in terms of password requirements and the user flow and experience.Like other state IT execs, Neely and Lubsen have found that legacy system integration is a more involved process: Our Department of Homeland Security has a public safety portal that is being built from scratch, Lubsen said. We were able to add the sign-on component with only 10 hours of development work. With the BMV, their system is older and it took them weeks to do.Neely explained that from discussions with agencies early in the development process, his team is aware that each new agency will have unique needs. This has shown itself from various password complexity requirements or even the password history. Its important that we have phases where we bring in agencies over time and not bite off everything at once. This means Access Indiana must be resilient, scalable and flexible to meet these demands.Integration work for the BMV and Department of Revenue is already done, but the state may wait until other agencies are ready to make a bigger bang as they all go live with Access Indiana together, Lubsen said.Indiana has found that good governance is a key part of the IAM process. The work is led by an executive committee made up of the heads of all participating agencies and the governors office. There also is an advisory committee of the IT directors and a marketing committee made up of communications directors from each of the agencies. A call center committee was established to determine how the state was going to handle calls about creating an account. They chose to outsource that work to a third party. We didnt want to throw that onto the agencies, and we need to have 24/7 support, Lubsen said. We tried to look at it from all the angles and make sure these committees are composed of subject matter experts to drive the process forward.Through Indianas governance structure, the IAM team accepts feature requests from all project partners and then each partner rates how high a request is ranked. There are currently 16 items in our backlog, such as strengthening confidence in user identities, which are being sorted by order of importance, based on agency votes.Gartners Kevin Kampman encourages IT leaders to see IAM as an evolution as they work with agency partners. It doesnt take long before you realize that, like security, identity touches every activity you do, so you need a comprehensive approach to identity in order to succeed, he said. Otherwise, it is just like driving on a rocky road: You are going to have bumps all the way. You want to be able to smooth that out by having a consistent and shared view of how you deal with identity in different contexts.
Citizen access is expanding, with taxpayers logging into a variety of state and local systems. Loose control over IAM leads to fragmentation and excessive complexity, not to mention a poor citizen experience.

The rise of cloud technologies creates a range of new access points for government employees, whose identity must be verified and validated across both legacy and emerging platforms.

Rising mobile access among both citizens and government workers creates an additional vector for IAM.

Regulatory and compliance constraints put added pressure on government to ensure proper management of beneficiary identity and other aspects of IAM.

Cloud-Based Management

AI and Machine Learning

Blockchain

Beyond Access

As a technology innovation leader in the Illinois Department of Commerce, Jennifer M. ORourke struggled with the sheer volume and complexity of identity and access management, or IAM.As we looked to provide a particular organization with a tax credit, there were audit points that included other organizations, but we kept those resources in isolated, segmented, disparate systems, said ORourke, now co-founder and president of identity technology firm Attest. There was no efficient, portfolio-level way in which a given individual or organization could engage with the department.Across government, technology leaders and business-line managers rank IAM as a foremost concern: In 2018 the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) included identity on its top 10 list of state tech priorities for the first time. A number of factors have come together to make IAM a pressing issue:Biometrics and multifactor authentication have helped validate user identities, but these tend to be tech-heavy solutions and they arent always user-friendly. IT leaders are looking toward the next iteration.The vendor community is eager to assist: Grand View Research sees the IAM market reaching $22.68 billion by 2025. Before the spending starts, its worth looking at some of the main tools currently emerging on the IAM landscape, including cloud-based controls, artificial intelligence and blockchain.The rise of cloud computing creates new challenges around IAM, but also offers new solutions.Move to the cloud and IAM leaves the familiar (if clunky) confines of your legacy environment. You may work with multiple cloud providers, each with its own unique security controls. This creates the potential for confusion and complication. But cloud also brings its own remedies.Cloud providers and third parties may offer identity as a service, or identity as a platform. These tools create a central identity database that integrates with your internal directory. Through that they manage a single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, and they can identity life cycle management, said Henry Bagdasarian, executive director of the Identity Management Institute.Google, for instance, boasts that its Cloud Identity tool makes it easy to provision and manage users and groups, set up single sign-on, and configure multi-factor authentication directly from a central console. All the major cloud providers claim similar capabilities. Some will also offer identity governance services, helping to create policies for identity management, while others may deliver authentication services in support of multi-factor authentication.Centralization is the key asset here. By leveraging the cloud to create a central directory, IT leaders can gain a global view of IAM, integrating their legacy and cloud iterations in a common touchpoint. You want to centralize and automate as much as possible. You dont want your system admin to have to go one by one removing and adding people, Bagdasarian said.In the big picture, IAM seeks to manage identity, ensuring that those who interact with government systems are who they claim to be. In a more granular sense, though, IAM puts the emphasis on access  its about limiting who gets in, and where.Some experts point to rising capabilities around machine learning and artificial intelligence as a potential boon to access management. AI can see into the inner workings of a system with a speed and volume unmatched by human senses.Imagine Im looking at a dashboard showing how many logins I had today, how many people requested access to a system, how much traffic we are seeing, said Sarah Squire, co-author of the 2017 NIST Digital Identity Guidelines.AI can look for those same types of things and it can crunch way more data, said Squire, now senior technical architect at IAM solutions firm Ping Identity. It can also see much more subtle patterns. It can find anomalies: No one has ever logged into your government system at 3 a.m. from China before. Thats weird. Lets tell someone or block that access.An instructor with the SANS Technology Institute, Kenneth G. Hartman says this kind of access control could be the low-hanging fruit for AI. The simplest examples are when I am known to be in San Francisco and someone is using my identity in China. That automatically triggers an alarm, he said. Whats interesting about AI is that it can detect even more subtle patterns, things we as humans might not notice. I normally log in at 9 a.m. and then I start coming in at 7 a.m. and maybe there are algorithms that pick up on that.AI and machine learning could help on the identity management side as well, for instance by cross-checking the veracity of citizen data across multiple fragmented databases. Suppose you have data that isnt consolidated and there is a discrepancy, said Gartner Senior Analyst Kevin Kampman. You might be able to use machine learning to spot that. Say someone puts their initials instead of their full name, but everything else seems to match. Machine learning could help you to consolidate those records on a large scale.On the cutting edge of IAM, theres blockchain, the shared immutable ledger technology best known as the infrastructure that supports bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Those key descriptors  shared, immutable, ledger  make some believe that blockchain could serve as a formidable new implement in the IAM toolkit.At Attest, ORourke and her team have a product in beta (due for a Q1 2019 release) that includes a wallet wherein citizens can digitally establish their identity on blockchain, and a pair of APIs that government could use to connect with citizens seeking to authenticate themselves in this way.One advantage here lies in the validity of the credential. A physical drivers license can be altered, whereas with a cryptographically endorsed digital credential, it is immutably clear that the drivers license has in fact been issued by the DMV, ORourke said.Moreover, the identity rests in the hands of the citizen, potentially freeing government from the laborious upkeep of those many, fragmented IAM repositories. For the first time, a user can have a natively digital attribute, something about themselves, and they can be the holder of that, as opposed to the current state where all the different government departments are the authors or writers of this information and the holders of this information, she said.Blockchain credentials would have the advantage of being sharable across all government offices. In the absence of a central identity database  which many citizens would find more than a little creepy  government could leverage blockchain as a way to consolidate its IAM needs.In the ecosystem today, there is no one single entity that has certificate authority. There is no central place where all the participants can consistently go to in order to validate a document or a relationship between an individual and, say, the department of motor vehicles, ORourke said. Blockchain could deliver that central touchpoint, without the Orwellian overtones of a central ID database.In fact, some say the greatest value of blockchain lies in the possibility that it could get the government out of the identity business entirely.Former Utah state CIO Phillip Windley chairs the Sovrin Foundation, a nonprofit that is using blockchain to back up identity. In Canada the organization has worked with banks and employers to launch initial forays into what it calls self-sovereign identity, the idea of a decentralized identity that is more about who you are and less about who issued the credential.We dont want government to be the central identity player and we certainly dont want Google or Facebook to do that either, Windley said. So we create a decentralized network where the parties issue credentials about whatever they know about. The bank issues a credential saying that I am a customer. My employer issues me a credential saying that I work in a certain place.The idea is nascent, but it has its supporters: IBM has partnered with Sovrin and has even produced a GitHub tutorial on self-sovereign identity.If government were to pursue these emerging IAM methodologies, some say, it could reap added benefits, beyond just access control.Take AI for instance. The immediate benefit is clear: Lets stop those 3 a.m. logins from China. But AI could have broader applications across identity management as well. Say the county is trying to act as a buyer for electrical power and they want to give constituents a discount. AI could be used to identify constituents who could benefit from that and who havent signed up for some reason, Kampman said.This example highlights the potential for IAM to make government more user-friendly, but it also highlights the inherent risk in any new IAM evolution: When you tinker with identity, you skirt the edge of privacy.You have to be careful when there is sensitivity around personal data, Kampman said. Whether its AI or any identity-related effort, you need governance over this to be clear about what can be used and what cant be used for a given purpose. You are a custodian of data and when you aggregate that data your responsibilities increase exponentially.Broadly, the looking-before-leaping paradigm is in full force here. As government IT leaders and their business-line peers seek to better manage access and identity in an emerging cloud-driven enterprise, theyll need to be thoughtful not just about the how, but about the why behind their efforts.There needs to be a strategy, Kampman said. What is the outcome going to be? The technology world can solve these problems but it needs to be done with a viewpoint toward how it will appear to the end user. You want to have control over the technologies but you also want all the stakeholders to have an opportunity to contribute toward governance.Some, meanwhile are looking over the horizon to an IAM end game in which all these pesky log-ins and multiple identities and siloed access management apparatus just  go away. They envision a world where people simply are who they say they are.Some describe it as contextual identity. You typically log in from this device, in this place, at this time. You type this fast, using these keys, with a browser configured in this or that way. Taken together and smashed through appropriate algorithms, this data could serve to identify a user with little to no further fuss.We want a situation where our security is so good, we can tell whether you are an attacker or a valid user just through your traffic, Squire said. Our holy grail is zero log-in.
A tech company has sought to change the law in statehouses across the country, using lobbyists to promote a controversial sea swell of legislation that would create a larger market for their services.TransparentBusiness has hired lobbyists to push nearly identical bills in more than two dozen states that would mandate the digital monitoring of government contractors engaged in high-end IT work.The company proffers that such work verification services would help state governments save millions of dollars by cutting down on fraud and waste, while critics contend that it would create unnecessary risks for state data.One of the companys primary products is software that captures regular screenshots and keystrokes on the systems it is installed on, making it a natural fit to supply the services required under the newly proposed laws.Related legislation has been introduced in at least 30 different states, according to Alex Konanykhin, the company's CEO. All of the legislation was modeled on language suggested by the company itself, and has been advocated for by the companys lobbyists, he added.As example, a new bill in Arkansas would require a contractor to procure and use software to verify the legitimacy of the hours billed for work performed on a computer under a contract with a state agency or a political subdivision for work in excess of $100,000, according to the text. Bills introduced in Hawaii, California, Texas and other states include similar language.Konanykhin, a former Russian banker with ambitions to create the next tech company that will, in his own words, change the world, has stated that his ambition is to use the transparent management paradigm to develop a "solution which can save tens of billions of dollars [for] government agencies and corporations."In an email, Konanykhin said that he felt the services his company were offering would help state governments save money while avoiding waste and fraud."In absence of transparent verification of billable hours, some contractors rob their government clients blind," Konanykhin said in an email, referencing alleged incidents in New York Pennsylvania and Maryland Konanykhin also provided with a manual he said had been used to "evangelize" to legislators about the benefits of transparency.The manual lists alleged examples in which state governments were cheated by contractors, while also describing the companys endeavor as part of [an] overall trend to transparency in business, like body cameras for police or fleet control for transportation companies.Konanykhin's vision has been hotly disputed by some who allege his model would cause unnecessary risk with nebulous payoff. The wave of bills recently caused the National Association of State Chief Information Officers to take the largely unprecedented step of issuing a statement condemning the legislation While NASCIO certainly supports contractor productivity, cost efficiency and successful project outcomes, legislation of this nature could introduce unnecessary risks to citizen data by essentially transferring ownership of private citizen data to a third party, the statement reads.NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson said that it is largely unheard of for the organization to come out against legislation the way that it has.In my tenure of 15 years as executive director, we have not issued any oppositional statements to state legislation  its not something we generally weigh in to, he said.Reiterating points made in NASCIOs recent statement, Robinson said the biggest concerns were the potential impact on privacy and security." As state contractors are utilized more and more by states to do crucial work, the notion of transferring large amounts of their data to a third party seems an inherent security risk, he said.While being exceedingly broad in what we would consider to be some pretty key areas, its also extremely prescriptive in terms of what has to be done, he said of the language in the legislation.Indeed, of the over two dozen pieces of legislation that have been introduced, all of them refer to screenshot capture on a three-minute basis, and all but six refer to mouse and keystroke movement tracking. The majority also set the threshold for contracts at projects over $100,000.Robinson added that the information NASCIO had received from its state leaders implied that the legislation going around had been crafted to benefit only one company, TransparentBusiness. Meanwhile, he and other NASCIO officials felt they knew almost nothing about the technology that the company would use should it deliver these services. We have no direct knowledge of this software, its functionality or the efficacy of any of it, and thats a key challenge, he said.Proponents of the legislation have reiterated the companys stance that its services would save states money while also increasing efficiency.Michael McKeon, a partner with New York-based lobbying firm Mercury LLC, which represents TransparentBusiness, said he felt the criticism from NASCIO is likely to remain a major embarrassment for the organization for decades to come."Its based on a false premise, contradicts accepted practices and was issued without any semblance of due diligence, McKeon said in an email.McKeon further argued that the legislation could help save New York millions of dollars.He also disputed that the New York legislation would transfer data to a third party, as the bill states that data collected "shall be considered accounting records belonging to the contractor. The contractor must store, or contract with another to store, the data collected by the software for a period of seven years and provide the access to the contracting agency or state auditors on their request.If NASCIO had a genuine concern, theyd communicate it to the bill sponsors and proponents, requesting an explanation and/or modifications," McKeon added, claiming that NASCIO officials had made no such attempt.If there is a true need for the kind of services TransparentBusiness is offering, legislatures have largely failed to capitalize on it. Of the over two dozen bills that have been introduced, a fair number have died in committee and are no longer under consideration. None have been passed into law.In Hawaii, for example, legislation was pushed that would have required contractors to procure work verification software for projects upward of $100,000. A hearing for the bill was held, but a bevy of interest groups  many representing contractors  came forward to object to the legislation.One such interest group was the American Council of Engineering Companies of Hawaii, which represents many of the contractors that do work for the state. A representative for ACECH offered that the legislation is being pushed by a single firm solely motivated by the profit it could receive by getting states to require this software of all their professional and technical service providers and is not in the best interest of government agencies in Hawaii."Konanykhin has called such allegations "utter nonsense.""There are competing solutions on the market and there are thousands of software companies in America capable of producing new compliance solutions," Konanykhin said, while also adding he hoped TransparentBusiness would lead the way in developing such solutions.Konanykhin also compared his company's legislative efforts to those of other tech giants Uber and Airbnb."It's a typical situation," he argued. "Uber and Airbnb, for example, pushed through major changes in most jurisdictions and their valuations are now measured in tens of billions of dollars; however the legislators permitted those new practices because they benefited the public, not as a favor to Uber or Airbnb," he said.
(TNS)  Legislation to replace Georgias electronic voting machines with a touchscreen-and-paper ballot election system is heading to Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature after winning final approval from state lawmakers Thursday.The Georgia Houses 101-69 vote, mostly along party lines, concluded a polarized debate over how to protect democracy and ensure accurate election results. Republicans and Democrats fiercely disagreed over whether voters should use computer-printed ballots or paper ballots bubbled in with a pen.The Republican majoritys decision to go with voting machines and printed ballots comes in time for the system to be in place for next years presidential election, when the states 7 million registered voters will be eligible to cast their ballots.The $150 million statewide system that won approval includes the same kind of touchscreens that Georgia voters have been using for the past 17 years. Printers are designed to spit out paper ballots for voters to review and then insert into a scanning machine for tabulation. The states current voting machines lack a paper ballot.Georgia would become the first state in the country to rely entirely on these kinds of voting machines, called ballot-marking devices, for every voter on Election Day. Some jurisdictions in many other states use similar voting systems, often to assist voters with disabilities.Republicans supported the new voting machines, saying theyre easy to use and provide a paper record to check that vote counts are correct. The devices also include accessibility options, such as adjustable type sizes, for disabled voters.A piece of paper is printed showing exactly who they voted for, said state Rep. Barry Fleming , a Republican from Harlem who sponsored the bill. You get to see and verify that you voted for the right people.Democrats fought the legislation, House Bill 316 , saying it would leave Georgias elections susceptible to hacking and tampering.Democrats wanted Georgia to switch to paper ballots bubbled in by pen, saying those ballots would better reflect voters intentions. They said printed-out paper ballots include bar codes alongside the text of voters choices, and voters wont be able to authenticate that the computer count of the bar codes matches the text. State Rep. Jasmine Clark , a Democrat from Tucker, said paper ballots printed from touchscreens arent trustworthy.The ballot-marking device adds an extra layer between voter intent and vote tabulation, Clark said. Theres no reliable source document to show if the machine is wrong. If theres an issue, its going to affect the whole state.Its not immediately clear when Kemp will sign the bill but he has shown support for it.When he was secretary of state last year, Kemp created a panel that reviewed voting systems and recommended that the state move to ballot-marking devices. That proposal led to the legislation that passed the General Assembly on Thursday.House Bill 316 modernizes Georgia system and ensures our elections remain secure, accessible and fair, Kemp said in a statement.After Kemp signs the legislation, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger plans to solicit competitive bids from voting system companies and then test ballot-marking devices during municipal elections in November. The new voting machines would be deployed statewide in time for next years presidential primary election.I commend the Legislature for taking steps to ensure Georgians have an accurate and accessible election, Raffensperger said in a statement. We are looking forward to opening the bid process to begin selecting the next vendor, and we feel certain that the most cost-effective, secure system will be chosen.The outcome of the final vote wasnt in doubt after the bill had previously passed the House last month. The House had to vote on the bill again Thursday because it had been amended in the Senate, which passed the measure Wednesday. House Majority Leader Jon Burns , a Republican from Newington, said the voting system will provide the best platform for every Georgians vote to be counted and respected.He said audits of paper ballots, which will start during the November 2020 presidential election, will ensure election results are accurate.Democrats said they had doubts about testing a relatively new technology on such a wide scale. About 70 percent of voters in the United States already use paper ballots.This system, ballot-marking devices, are vulnerable, said state Rep. Sam Park , a Democrat from Lawrenceville. This bill will further undermine the trust and integrity that voters in Georgia have in terms of our elections.The fact that Georgia is switching to a system that includes paper ballots is more important than whether voters use printers or pens, said David Becker, the executive director for the Washington-based Center for Election Innovation & Research , a nonprofit that works to make elections more accessible and secure.He said ballot-marking devices are a significant improvement over Georgias current electronic voting system. Georgia is one of just four states that relies entirely on electronic voting machines without a verifiable paper trail.Youll get a human-readable ballot produced by this voting system, and any human being can look at it and confirm their choices, Becker said. Georgia voters should be much more confident in the security of the systems and the accuracy of the counts.
The need for social services has reached an all-time high. This article takes a look at how the social good sector can learn from the private sectors adoption of technology and data to help serve the most critical needs of our communities.
Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. and Mitsubishi Motors Corporation will introduce four new minivehicles in Japan through their joint venture, as the companies continue to expand their collaboration.

Production of the all-new Nissan Dayz, Nissan Dayz Highway Star, Mitsubishi eK wagon and Mitsubishi eK X has begun at Mitsubishis Mizushima Plant in Kurashiki, Japan. For the first time, the models will be offered with semiautonomous driving technology, designed for single-lane use on highways.

NMKV, a joint venture of the two companies, integrated Nissans advanced technologies and Mitsubishis extensive experience in minivehicle production into the tall wagon-type cars.

The companies launched the first generation of the models in 2013 and have increased their collaboration since becoming Alliance partners in 2016. Last month, the all-new Nissan Livina, which shares a platform with the Mitsubishi Xpander, went on sale in Indonesia.

The new models deliver a markedly improved performance, with upgraded platforms, engines and transmissions. They also feature all-new design. While the Nissan and Mitsubishi minivehicles share key components, they retain separate brand features.

The models will go on sale later this month.
Toyota announced it will exceed its 2017 pledge to invest $10 billion in the US over five years with a new commitment to reach nearly $13 billion over the same period.

Of that, Toyota announced nearly $750 million in five different states, with more to come. The new investments include adding Toyota RAV4 Hybrid and Lexus ES 300 Hybrid vehicle production at its Georgetown, Ky. manufacturing plant; expanding engine capacity at its Huntsville, Ala. facility; doubling hybrid transaxle capacity at its plant in Buffalo, W.Va.; and a building expansion for additional castings at Bodine Aluminum's Jackson, Tenn. facility as well as additional castings at its Troy, Mo. facility.

In Alabama, Toyotas $288,000,000 investment will increase annual engine capacity from 670,000 to 900,000 by the end of 2021 to increase product flexibility and better accommodate market demand. New 4-cylinder and V6 engine lines will add 450 new jobs to its Huntsville, Ala., facility, the largest hiring need in the plants history. The investment also includes a building expansion. Overall, the plant represents an investment of $1.2 billion.

Toyotas Kentucky vehicle plant, the companys largest globally, will begin production of the Lexus ES 300 Hybrid in May 2019 with annual capacity of 12,000 units while RAV4 Hybrid production will start January 2020 with an annual capacity of 100,000 units. The new investment totals $238 million. TMMKs 8,000 team members also build Camry, Camry Hybrid, Avalon, Avalon Hybrid and Lexus ES models with an annual capacity of 550,000 vehicles. Overall, the plant represents an investment of more than $7 billion.

The $62-million investment in Toyotas Bodine Aluminum plant in Missouri will provide equipment to produce an additional 864,000 cylinder heads for Toyotas New Global Architecture (TNGA.) Bodines 900 Missouri team members currently produce more than 3 million cylinder heads a year, which are made for every Toyota and Lexus manufactured in North America. Overall, the plant represents an investment of $455 million.

The $50-million Tennessee investment includes a building expansion and equipment to double the capacity of hybrid transaxle cases and housings to 240,000 annually. The investment will also provide equipment to produce an additional 288,000 engine blocks a year for TNGA. The plants 300 team members currently produce 1.7 million engine blocks a year, which supply every Toyota and Lexus manufactured in North America, and 580,000 transmission cases and housings. Bodine will add 13 new jobs to its facility in Tennessee. Overall, the plant represents an investment of $365 million.

The $111-million West Virginia investment includes a building expansion and equipment to double capacity of hybrid transaxles from 120,000 units (Start of Production-2020) to 240,000 units annually in 2021. To meet the production demands, TMMWV will add 123 new jobs to its facility in Buffalo, WV. Overall, the plant represents a $1.4 billion investment.

This past year, Toyota announced a joint venture with Mazda to build an additional plant in the US. The $1.6-billion joint investment will create up to 4,000 new jobs in Huntsville, Ala. with production slated for 2021. Meanwhile, Toyota's Princeton, Ind., plant is undergoing a $600-million transformation (previously announced) to incorporate TNGA and increase Highlander capacity by 40,000 units annually.

With this, Toyota is adding 400+ people to its team in Indiana. In Blue Springs, Miss., Toyota is launching the all-new 2020 Corolla on the TNGA line that included a $170-million investment and an increase of 400 jobs (previously announced.) Currently, Toyota employs more than 37,000 Americans.
Photo: Contributed

Three public schools in the West Vancouver school system have broken the stranglehold enjoyed by private schools in the Fraser Institute's annual B.C. schools report card.

The controversial report uses average scaled Foundational Skills Assessments test scores from Grade 4 students at 955 elementary schools across the province.

Cedardale and West Bay elementary schools in West Vancouver both pulled an overall rating of 10 out of 10, joining 17 private and independent schools with a perfect score.

Irwin Park, another West Vancouver public school, came in with a score of 9.8.

Teachers and administrators have panned the report over the years, calling the system flawed.

Central Okanagan School District Supt. Kevin Kaardal said after last year's report many teachers don't take them seriously because the data is misused in this ranking format.

The percentage of students not taking the test is also factored in as a negative.

Okanagan schools finished well down in the Fraser Institute rankings.

Aberdeen Hall in Kelowna was the highest rated school in the Valley, with a score of 9, while Holy Cross in Penticton and Our Lady of Lourdes in West Kelowna both had scores of 8.9. The top school in the Vernon region was St. James, with a score of 8.

Okanagan Falls was the highest ranked public school in the Okanagan with a score of 7.4.

Anne McClymont was the top rated public school in the Central Okanagan with a score of 6.8, while the top school in the North Okanagan was Beairsto in Vernon at 6.5.

Responding to criticism that some schools are not capable of improving their scores, officials with the Fraser Institute point to Armstrong Elementary, which showed a "significant improvement in reading, writing and math."

Its score rose from 1.9 in 2014 to 6.1 in this latest report card.

"We often hear excuses in B.C. that schools can't improve student performance because of the communities and students they serve, but the evidence suggests otherwise," said senior policy analyst Angela MacLeod.
BMW i Ventures has invested in Bright Machines, a company delivering intelligent, software-defined manufacturing for the next generation of products.

Headquartered in San Francisco, CA with offices worldwide, Bright Machines was founded in 2018 to bring intelligence to the factory, enabling manufacturers autonomously to build physical products.

Bright Machines delivers software-defined manufacturing by combining the best in robotics and software with machine learning, computer vision, and data science. Software-Defined Manufacturing brings automation, greater clarity, flexibility and speed to the manufacturing process.
Photo: CTV News

A reputed mob boss has been the victim of what appears to be a targeted hit in New York Wednesday.

Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, was gunned down in front of his home after what police describe as a staged car accident designed to lure Cali outside.

CTV News is reporting that police are reviewing surveillance-camera video of the attack on the 53-year-old Cali, which shows the assailant speeding off in a pickup truck.

No arrests have been made and so far there is no motive for the attack.

-with files from CTV News
Hong Kong: Edward Yau to visit Georgia, Hungary

Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Edward Yau will lead a delegation to visit Georgia and Hungary from March 18 to 22 to promote Hong Kong as the prime platform for the Belt & Road Initiative and strengthen the city's economic ties with the two places.

The delegation comprises more than 30 business people and professionals as well as respresentatives from startups and sectors including accounting, finance, insurance, infrastructure and real estate development, legal and dispute resolution services, transport and logistics, and telecommunications.

A 15-person parallel Guangdong trade delegation led by Deputy Director General of the Guangdong Department of Commerce Li Yongyi will also join part of the visit.

Mr Yau said the mission will facilitate formation of strategic partnerships between Hong Kong and Guangdong enterprises in exploring the Belt & Road markets, and will help bring about mutual collaboration.

The delegation will first visit Tbilisi in Georgia from March 18 to 20, to be followed by a visit to Budapest, Hungary, on March 21 and 22.

Apart from meeting relevant government officials, local business leaders and chambers of commerce, the delegates will visit local development projects for business exchanges and to receive updates on the current economic and investment environments of the two countries.

The delegation will also attend the "Hong Kong IN: Exploring New Business Opportunities" Seminar & Networking Dinner jointly organised by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council in Tbilisi, where Mr Yau will deliver a keynote speech.

In Budapest, Mr Yau will speak at a luncheon with the Budapest Chamber of Commerce & Industry.

He will also call on the Chinese Ambassadors to Georgia and Hungary to update them on Hong Kong's latest developments.

Mr Yau will return to Hong Kong on March 23. Under Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Bernard Chan will be Acting Secretary during his absence.

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  The party of President Rodrigo Duterte admits at least 10 bets it is fielding in the midterm polls in May are in the government's so-called narco list.

Partido Demokratiko Pilipino - Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban) spokesperson Ronwald Munsayac told CNN Philippines that these politicians hold certificates of nomination and acceptance from the party.

Munsayac said they are validating the names with their own list. He added that the party will take action immediately.

But based on the Commission on Election's official list of candidates, eight of the 46 names in the narco list are running under PDP-Laban.

PDP-Laban President Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III said in a text message that the party will require its members whose names appeared in the list to explain why they have been linked to illegal drugs.

"If we find their explanation to be unsatisfactory then we will expel them from the PDP-Laban. The party has no place for narco politicians as well as for corrupt officials. We do not want them in our party," Pimentel said.

Pimentel could not immediately confirm to CNN Philippines if they have members in the list. He said he is waiting for a report from their headquarters in Davao.

Meanwhile, the Nationalist People's Coalition and the Nacionalista Party have eight candidates each in the narco list, Lakas-CMD has four, the National Unity Party (NUP) has two and five are running as independent bets.

Duterte, party chairman of PDP-Laban, named Thursday dozens of politicians in the government's narco list, which he described as "somewhat validated."

Media watchdogs and rights groups have warned against the release of the list, saying it may be used for the persecution of political opponents.

CNN Philippines Correspondent Gerg Cahiles contributed to this report.
Photo: VPD Pashminder Boparai

A gang member wanted for conspiracy to commit murder was found near Kelowna late Wednesday night.

Pashminder Boparai, a 30-year-old Abbotsford resident, had a nationwide warrant out for his arrest.

After tips from the public, Boparai was apprehended and is now in custody. Police wouldnt provide any more details about where he was located.

The Vancouver Police Department announced in February additional arrests and charges in relation to Taskforce Tourniquet and Project Territory had been made. Boparai and three other men were among the new charges laid.

Project Territory has resulted in the seizure of more than 170 firearms, more than 10 kilograms of fentanyl, 40 kilograms of heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine, and more than $2 million worth of cash, jewelry, and high-end vehicles.

We would like to thank the public for tips and acknowledge the Kelowna RCMP for their assistance. They were instrumental in helping capture Mr. Bopari, says Sgt. Jason Robillard.

Well continue to work collaboratively with our partnering agencies to combat gang violence that affects our communities.

Moeen Khan, 22, of Surrey remains at large and police are encouraging him to turn himself into authorities.
BROOKFIELD  Jason Lewis grew up fishing on Candlewood Lake and enjoying the water. Its why his family says it is so fitting the local VFW has named its lakeside headquarters after the late Navy SEAL.

Lewis, 30, a Brookfield native, was killed in July 2007 by an improvised explosive device during a combat mission in Baghdad.

The Brookfield Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1021 is planning a ceremony for the spring to dedicate its new space in Lewis name.

He would be honored that they would name that post after him, said Donna Lewis, his wife of 5 1/2 years. In addition to that, he would just love being (there). That would be a space thathad he been able to live out a typical military career, where he retires and joins the VFWI think he would like to be a member of that.

Lewis decided to become a Navy SEAL his senior year of high school, said Jean Mariano, his mom. She did not know what a Navy SEAL was at the time, just that her son was determined to be one, she said.

Jason never wavered, said Mariano, of New Milford. Jason was always laser focused.

He started basic training two weeks after graduating high school, eventually becoming a Navy SEAL at 20. The petty officers deployments included Japan, Guam and Iraq.

He married Donna Lewis in 2001. Donna and Jasons older sister were friends, and the couple got engaged after four months of dating. They had three kids Jack, Max and Grace, who are now 15, 14 and 12.

Jason jammed so much into 30 years that some people dont do in 50, Mariano said.

Before Max was born, Lewis left the Navy for a year, but then returned to the job, his wife said.

He left, really, for more family time, Donna Lewis said. He got back in (because) nothing really fulfilled him the way that job did, just the work he was doing, the people he was surrounded by.

Lewis family described him as humble. Mariano said her son never would have wanted a statue, but she cried when she visited the VFW building for the first time and saw the beautiful view of the water.

Its just what Jason would want, she said, adding she envisions bringing Lewis children fishing there.

Town Hall has a bench in honor of Lewis and other soldiers, while a police K9 in a Virginia, where his widow and children live, was named after him.

Hes been remembered on several occasions in many ways, but nothing permanent, said Jack Tyranski, Lewis father-in-law and a member of the VFW. The thing about this is its a permanent remembrance.

The organization is raising money through a GoFundMe for a plaque with the halls new name and a shadow box that will display Lewis patches, awards and medals, including the Purple Heart he was given posthumously.

Until recently, the Brookfield VFW has met at the Brookfield Museum, the Senior Center or Town Hall. But now it has its own space in the Sokol Lodges building on Candlewood Lake Road.

Its never been a post, a real post, Tyranski said. Now, this will be our home. Everyone is very excited about it.

Brookfields VFW has grown considerably over the last two years, when it was at risk of shuttering because of a lack of members. Now, there are 57 members, including some legacy members who no longer live in town, with meetings attracting up to 25 people, said Joe Beal, post commander.

The organizations renewed emphasis on service has attracted younger veterans, he said.

They want to serve again, Beal said. That's what were providing them.

The organization also aims to form a VFW Auxiliary, which relatives of war veterans can join.

Naming the hall after Lewis fits with these efforts to appeal to younger veterans, Beal said.

We felt he was the right person and the right time for us to be honored with using his name, Beal said. Everything we do from this point as a post will be a reflection of Jasons commitment to service.
While, organizations, by law, may not ask about an applicants age in an interview, a September 2018 AARP survey found that more than 90 percent of U.S. workers described age discrimination as somewhat or very common in the workplace, and 44 percent of older job applicants said they personally had been asked (illegally) for age-related information from potential employers.

In short, age and experience are often perceived as a negative, rather than a positive, by companies. In fact, according to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commssion, age discrimination has consistently been the focus of more than 20 percent of its discrimination cases. So, what does this mean for the older female worker?

Related: Ageism Is Hurting Your Tech Company's Hiring More Than You Realize

The National Bureau of Economic Research looked at the issue directly. Testing for the prevalence of age discrimination in hiring, it found that that the resumes of older women get far fewer callbacks than both those of older men and younger applicants of either sex.

No big surprise there: Plenty of organizations have been perceived to be clearing out older employees. Ohio State University was accused of calling older staff "deadwood." And, in the youth-oriented tech sector, HP has been accused of ageism practices, along with Google and Tinder. Some Facebook ads have not even been shown to older users, implying that ageism is literally baked into its algorithm; a lawsuit accuses Facebook of purposefully using algorithmic tools to feed job ads to younger workers.

Sex discrimination isnt new, and neither, of course, is ageism. But, combined, they create the perfect storm for older women unfortunate enough to be looking for work.

The new age demographic of the workforce

Take a look at the overall data stemming from the population's glut of baby boomers and our healthier lifestyles: The number of Americans aged 65 and older is projected to more than double, from 46 million to over 98 million, by 2060. And every day in the United States, 10,000 people turn 65.

For people born today, the likelihood that they will live to triple digits is strong: A child born in 2011 has a one in three chance of living to his or her 100th birthday. And, globally, the number of people aged 60 and older will increase to 2 billion by 2050. In other words, we are living longer; therefore, whether by choice or necessity, we are remaining in the workforce longer, and how we deal with this trend will determine how we ultimately deal with an older workforce.

Some companies appear to not be dealing with it well: In a lawsuit last November, Saks Fifth Avenue was accused of age discrimination, when two employees, ages 68 and 70, said their younger counterparts had received help from supervisors. As a result, even though they kept up their sales, the suit says, these employees claimed they were "set up for failure" and unjustly terminated.

Related: An Employment Lawyers' Perspective on Age Discrimination in Silicon Valley

Women and ageism

An old saying holds that, "Men age like a glass of wine, women like a glass of milk." Why is it that as a society we perceive older men as experienced and successful while older women are viewed as a burden or a sector that no longer has a purpose?

Heres the double whammy: When women are younger, meaning of child-bearing age, it is assumed that they will take time off to raise a family. Then, when those same women are older, it is assumed that not only did they take time off, but that they therefore have less experience or are less qualified than a man of a similar age.

In July 2016, female servers sued the Saks Fifth Avenue restaurants located within the flagship store in New York, claiming women over the age of 40 were unfairly terminated in favor of younger, more attractive male servers. In the lawsuit, the five women plaintiffs claimed they were let go because they were "not attractive enough" and "getting old.

Its all about the money.

Women live longer than men, so it's fair to argue that they need more income to provide for their retirement. However, women get paid less than men for similar work. A lot of people quote the "80 cents to $1" number which has been the accepted measurement of the gender pay gap for years

Then there's the recent study by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, which analyzed a longitudinal dataset showing total earnings over the most recent 15 years for all workers who worked in at least one year.

That data, the Institute said, showed that women workers faced an actual wage gap of 51 percent in the 2001-2015 time period. Its research also found the cost of taking time out of the labor force to be exorbitant for women. For those who took just one year off from work, the study said, annual earnings were 39 percent lower than those of women who worked all 15 years between 2001 and 2015.

So, what can we do?

I believe these issues of ageism and sexism all start with the one question: Who is expected to stay home and raise the children? Heres how we can solve this question in a way that is more favorable to women.

We need paid family leave and affordable child care. The same research found that 43 percent of todays women workers had at least one year with no earnings, which was nearly twice the rate of men with that experience. So, the conclusion is that we need to protect womens earning potential when they are out of work because, well, they made a human.

We also need to encourage men to take family leave. I was at my companys marketing kick-off recently, and we were talking about maternity leave. I live in Ireland, where we have six months' paid leave (more, if we accept reduced pay). The United States is the only developed country that does not offer any federal paid parental leave! (Only five states and the District of Columbia have it.)

American parents rely heavily on the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows parents (of either sex) to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave without penalty in pay or position.

Often, men dont take advantage of the family leave available to them because they are concerned about how it might impact their career. We need to change that.

So, we need to strengthen ageism laws. But one critical issue with really measuring ageism is that qualified candidates dont even get to the interview stage. We need to change what is happening inside organizations. Leaders need to be on board; HR needs to ensure it reviews a balance of resumes when hiring for a new position; and promotions need to reflect the diversity of people in the organization.

Finally, we need to train workers better to counteract unconscious age bias. As an executive myself, I find this need particularly crucial. People have unconscious biases about older workers, especially older women. We need to change this and ...

Enable people to recognize their prejudices.

Develop recruitment programs for older people (afterall, research shows that more diverse groups make better decisions)

Adapt cross-generational mentoring, which has been shown to increase retention rates.

Recognize the research that shows the value to companies of a more diverse employee profile.

As Jo Ann Jenkins, AARP CEO, has said,Studies have shown that the productivity of both older and younger workers is higher in companies that have mixed-age work teams than in companies that do not and that age diversity within a team heightens performance in groups that must undertake complex decision-making tasks.

Related: Combating Reverse Ageism as a Young Entrepreneur

In short, diversity is key -- for all kinds of groups but especially considering that this is Women's History Month, for women and older women, in particular.

Related:

Ageism and the Gender Pay Gap: Why Getting Older Can Be Problematic for Women

Combating Reverse Ageism as a Young Entrepreneur

Ageism Is Hurting Your Tech Company's Hiring More Than You Realize



Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Photo: pixabay

A South Okanagan-based cannabis startup has announced the lease of a commercial greenhouse in the White Lake area for the production of industrial hemp.

Green Mountain Health Alliance is already building a cannabis production facility outside Kaleden off Highway 3A on company-owned ALR land. Green Mountain also holds an intent-to-lease on 98 acres of Penticton Indian Band land in Marron Valley.

The company says it plans on growing outdoor hemp on the Marron Valley property while using the greenhouse in White Lake for hemp cultivation and research and development on a high CBD hemp strain. Applications for an industrial hemp license at both locations are being reviewed by Health Canada.

Health Canada has a relatively fast approval period for industrial hemp licenses, so we are looking forward to the potential of entering the market faster by growing hemp for cannabidiol (CBD) than with cannabis alone, said Green Mountain president, Wade Attwood.

CBD is in huge demand across the globe for its health benefits. The oil often retails for over $90/fl. oz. and its estimated that CBD consumer sales in the US will total around $1.15 billion by 2020, making this likely a highly profitable venture for Green Mountain.

The company says it will selectively grow hemp with high CBD and almost no THC  the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. CBD is regarded to be behind many of medicinal benefits of cannabis.

Currently, industrial hemp licenses only allow for cultivation of hemp strains located on the Industrial Hemp Approved Cultivars List, which are relatively low in CBD. Our company is working on researching and developing a high CBD hemp strain, far higher than what is on the market now, Attwood said.

If we complete the process to have this strain approved, this means far higher yield of CBD and incrementally higher ROI per acre than the strains that are currently available, which is great for Green Mountains bottom line.

The company is also awaiting Health Canada approval for its under-construction facility off Highway 3A.
The following excerpt is from Nightingale-Conants book The Power of Passive Income: Make Money Work For You. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | IndieBound

Sometimes people assume that leaving the salaried world means starting a whole new life. In a way, thats true, but it shouldnt mean abandoning everything youve learned and gotten good at. If youre working in the marketing department of a large corporation, for instance, you dont have to go into an entirely new field just because you want to become self-supporting. Instead, ask yourself how you can create passive income by using the skills youve already developed.

When you do this, youll find that often it takes you into the area of intellectual property -- that is, work youve generated in the form of words, sounds, or images. All these can be copyrighted, and you can gain income by allowing access to them. In short, intellectual property is the ultimate side hustle.

Heres an example. Marli, a freelance translator, noticed a discussion on the internet about copyright issues. She wondered, Do I have any rights to the translations I produce? The answer turned out to be yes, especially if there was no contract stating otherwise. This led to some very productive ideas for creating passive income. Here is her story:

When a piece of writing has been out of print for many years, the copyright ownership of that book may lapse. Or in the case of a foreign language document, it may be the copyright of the translation that loses force. As a translator, the difference between these two issues is very important to me. For example, no one owns the copyright to Shakespeares plays. I can print an edition of the plays on my computer and try to sell it, and neither Shakespeares heirs not his many publishers can object. But if I translate Hamlet into Finnish and someone in Finland wants to publish my translation, they have to get my permission -- even though the play itself is in the public domain. Once I understood this, I immediately started translating some well-known public domain stories, especially stories that are often anthologized. This has been an excellent passive income stream for me -- and the more stories I translate, the bigger it gets.

Be aware of the many areas of your life in which you may be producing something that qualifies as intellectual property. If youre in a service industry such as consulting, photography, or even manufacturing, theres a good chance this is the case -- and if it is, here are some steps you should take right away.

Related: 4 Ways to Successfully Turn Your Day Job into a Side Hustle That Earns You Passive Income

Copyright it

Assert your rights by inserting a copyright notice, getting trade or service marks, or obtaining patents to protect the product of your work. You must protect the fruits of your labors by making it difficult for others to sell it or use it for their own profit. Its actually much easier than you might think to copyright something. Usually just stating that material is copyrighted -- at the bottom of a website, for example -- is legally all it takes. With printed texts, just draw the letter c with a circle around it, then write your name. Copywriting designs or software innovations can be a bit more complicated, so its a good idea to consult an attorney. But dont neglect taking this step. You cant draw passive income on intellectual property unless you can prove that the property is yours.

Charge a protected license fee

Charge a separate fee for your protected materials whenever theyre used. This can provide a major passive income stream. And if you cant be sure that youll be able to control the use of your creations, you can deal with that problem in your original contract.

Heres a case in point. Youre a landscape architect and you create a beautiful design for the parklike area around a new office complex. You invested time, talent and imagination in the creation of this design. If another real estate developer wants to develop a similar office park, its very possible the developer will copy your design without any compensation for you. To deal with that possibility, you can negotiate a licensing fee from your original client in addition to whatever your one-time payment might be. This will insure you against the probability that your efforts will be reused for profit by others.

Related: 3 Clever Ways to Identify the Customers Who'll Generate Your Passive Income

Negotiate a royalty

You can also negotiate a royalty if a client uses your copyrighted material to generate sales. This is a legitimate fee for the continuing use of your intellectual property by a profit-making enterprise.

Subcontract work

You can also create passive income by subcontracting with other professionals to help create the intellectual property you sell. Be sure to have both parties sign off on an agreement that allows you to either license or purchase their work outright for inclusion in your content. For example, if you want to create an online course module but are terrible at design, outsource that function and create an agreement that gives you ownership of the design. Outsourcing some of these functions can vastly increase the total volume of work you can handle, and the income you make will be compensation for your administration and quality control efforts.

Related: Goldmine or Dud? These 3 Ecommerce Options Are Best for Passive Income Entrepreneurs

Market your intellectual property

There are plenty of opportunities out there to grow your side hustle by way of intellectual property once you start thinking creatively. An excellent way to start is by joining an affiliate program related to your main area of expertise. These programs allow you to collect a commission for any sales that come through the affiliate links. By associating your own intellectual property with related affiliate programs, you not only bank extra cash but also get the halo effect of being linked to other companies.

Related:

How Intellectual Property Can Create an Income Stream Even When You're at Work

Building Cannabis IP Includes Both Your Brand and Your Technology

Remember Slice Soda? It's Back -- But Very Different.



Copyright 2019 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
A lawmaker wants to require some Missouri residents to own AR-15 guns.

Andrew McDaniel, (R-Deering), introduced House Bill 1108 on Feb. 28. According to the bills description, it would establish the McDaniel Militia Act, which requires every person between 18 and 35 years of age who can legally possess a firearm to own an AR-15 and authorizes a tax credit for a purchase of an AR-15.

Documents presented during the bills proposal said any person who qualifies as a Missouri resident on Aug. 28, 2019, and who does not own an AR-15, would have a year to purchase one. In addition, anyone who becomes a Missouri resident after Aug. 28, 2019, would have to purchase an AR-15 within a year.

In addition, McDaniel filed a bill that would require every person 21 years of age and older to own a handgun if they are legally able to. That bill, House Bill 1052, was introduced two days prior to House Bill 1108.

According to the Missouri House of Representatives website, neither bill is currently scheduled for a hearing or is on a House calendar.
A screw-like device found in the wreckage of the Boeing 737 Max 8 that crashed Sunday in Ethiopia has provided investigators with an early clue into what happened, as work begins in France to decode the black boxes recovered from the scene.

The so-called jackscrew, used to set the trim that raises and lowers the plane's nose, indicates the jet was configured to dive, based on a preliminary review, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The evidence helped persuade U.S. regulators to ground the model, said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the inquiry.

France's aviation safety agency BEA received the cockpit voice and data recorders on Thursday for decoding, while investigators on the scene near Addis Ababa continue to sift through the plane's wreckage. The second crash in five months has thrown Boeing into a crisis, sending the shares plunging and raising questions about the future of its best-selling jet.

Separately, the New York Times reported that doomed Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 to Nairobi was in trouble almost immediately after takeoff as it lurched up and down by hundreds of feet at a time. The captain asked in a panicky voice to turn back only three minutes into the flight as the plane accelerated to abnormal speeds, the newspaper reported, citing a person who reviewed the jet's air traffic communications.

"Break break, request back to home," he told air traffic controllers as they scrambled to divert two other flights approaching the airport. The aircraft had accelerated far beyond what is considered standard practice. All contact between air controllers and the aircraft was lost five minutes after it took off, the report said.

Federal Aviation Administration chief Daniel Elwell on Wednesday cited unspecified evidence found at the crash scene as part of the justification for the agency to reverse course and temporarily halt flights of Boeing's largest selling aircraft. Up until then, American regulators had held off even as nation after nation had grounded the model.

Boeing fell 1.6 percent to $367.26 at 10:56 a.m. in New York, logging the biggest decline on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company's stock is on track for its biggest weekly decline in almost a decade.

The jackscrew, combined with a newly obtained satellite flight track of the plane, convinced the FAA that there were similarities to the Oct. 29 crash of the same Max model off the coast of Indonesia. In the earlier accident, a safety feature on the Boeing aircraft was repeatedly trying to put the plane into a dive as a result of a malfunction.

All 157 people aboard died after the plane crashed near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital. The jet's flight recorders are in France, where they are being analyzed at the BEA's laboratories. The agency posted a photo of the mangled hardware and has yet to comment on any progress on getting the data. "The investigation process has started in Paris," Ethiopian Airlines said in a Twitter post on Friday.

The discovery of the jackscrew was earlier reported by NBC News.
Daniel Acker | Getty Images

Democratic congressional members, emboldened by a freshman class that put their party in control of the U.S. House of Representatives, have pressed fast-forward on introducing progressive legislation. The Green New Deal is one example. Legalization of recreational marijuana from sea to shining sea is another.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker has reintroduced the Marijuana Justice Act, which he first proposed in 2017. It legalizes marijuana at the federal level, among many other sweeping changes. The chances of it passing Congress and becoming law are approximately zero -- Republicans still hold a majority in the U.S. Senate and President Trump has a veto -- but it should at least get a full hearing in the Democratic-controlled House. California Representatives Barbara Lee and Ro Khanna have introduced the act in the House.
Im a fourth-generation orchardist from Oliver, and I'd like to share a bit of insight to my views on this proposed National Park Reserve in our area.

My late father Greg greatly opposed this idea for many good reasons, including the impact on agriculture.

It is narrow minded to think that a national park is the only way to ensure these lands are protected for future generations. There are many other options that are much less invasive to our communities and cost much less to taxpayers.

Ranchers are some of the most committed stewards of the land in this province. Their livelihood depends on their cattle's range being productive and healthy, so it is in their best interest to take care of the land.

A recent blog post compared the local proposal to Grasslands National Park in Saskatchewan, so I decided to do a bit of research. I contacted a couple of different residents/ranchers from the area. Here's what I learned:

The town of Val Marie has a population of not much more than 100 people. Comparing the economic advantages to our area is a bit ridiculous. Its like having three places in town to work rather than two. Most of the parks related jobs are summer jobs with only a few full-time jobs. Almost all the families that have sold their properties to parks have moved away from the area. Most of the eco tourists are minimalists and dont buy much locally during their stay.

They did not allow grazing in the park for about 20 years after it was established in the early '80s until Parks finally figured out it was having negative effects on the ecosystem. Now, there ar- expensive grazing leases, short term agreements, changes from year to year... meaning ranchers cant always count on it.

Ranchers are also limited in what types of meds they can use on their cattle in the park.

When the park was created, there were 11 species from the area on the endangered/protected lists. Now there are 27. How is a park helping? The only species they have had any real success with is the prairie dog, whose numbers have increased 4,500 per cent. In the prairies, these animals are considered rodents and pests. Other species such as sage hens are suffering greatly from the overpopulation of these rodents eating food sources and damaging habitat but because it is a national park, nothing can be done to control the numbers.

In fact, they told me the budget for aiding prairie dogs in the park for the year is $500,000. Can you imagine your tax dollars being spent on protecting voles or other rodents just over the fence from your orchard or vineyard?

I was told that the park proposal in Saskatchewan divided the community there as well, and although a great majority opposed the park, it was still pushed through.

I told them a bit about how Parks Canada has seemed to avoid actual public consultation and they told me that it sounds just like what happened there.

How long do you think it will be before they decide that your farms and crops are better off as preserved lands than productive agriculture lands?

Top Flight Helicopter Training has operated out of Penticton Airport since 1951, providing essential training to many of our military and RCMP pilots, among many others. If this national park is pushed through, they stand to lose their primary training areas.

I have also had the pleasure of chatting with a few park supporters, and I can certainly respect their environmental concerns, but I dont believe for one second a national park is the answer. I feel the locals around here look after our backcountry pretty well. There will always be jerks who abuse privileges and there is always room for improvement.

One thing that they have mentioned is that We need the federal dollars to help. Our provincial government doesnt budget enough for these things. I dont disagree that more money budgeted for conservation and preservation in our province would be fantastic. However, I feel it is selfish of these people to support a national park here. The hundreds of millions of dollars that are intended to be spent on this park purchasing lands, etc. could have huge benefits to all of B.C. in regard to conservation and preservation.

I am an avid outdoorsman and would love to see that happen. Approximately $4 million has been spent on this proposal by Parks Canada since 2001. That money could have been spent much more wisely on preservation projects and conservation staff in the area.

There are much better alternatives to a national park. An LRMP (Land and Resource Management Plan) for example is one. This process allows all stakeholders on either side of the discussion to work together to come up with solutions to protect the environment and address all concerns.

Whatever side youre on, please take the time to let your opinion be known by doing the survey at letstalksouthokanagansimilkameen.ca.

Jesse Norton
In response to Andrew Markowskis op-ed on Friday, March 8 (Family leave would be tough on small business), I offer a more up-to-date version of the story of Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) which both incorporates the multitude of proponents with a lot of evidence and momentum on their side and has addressed the concerns of a few small businesses.

There is overwhelming support for paid leave in Connecticut and across the country. In 2016 an AARP poll found 83 percent of Connecticut voters supported it and a Small Business Majority poll found 59 percent of their community in favor. As Andrew pointed out, opponents dont dispute the benefits for workers and families but warn of the risks to their businesses.

Connecticut is in a great position to leverage the findings from our neighbors: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, among others, which have already implemented statewide publicly administered paid leave programs such as Gov. Ned Lamonts bill SB 881. There were similar predictions of economic hardship for small businesses leading up to the passage of these bills which have not materialized. In 2015, a year into the Rhode Island program, a survey found that a majority of the small and medium sized companies were supportive of the law. Key findings from California after five years were that most employers had either a positive effect or no noticeable effect on productivity (89 percent), profitability/performance (91 percent), turnover (96 percent), and employee morale (99 percent). A further 60 percent of employers surveyed reported cost savings, according to a report by Appelbaum & Milkman 2011.

With the positive experiences from early adopters, the conversation has shifted away from potential unintended harms to small businesses to the impactful costs of doing nothing, and importantly, the intended consequences of such programs. A small, but significant sample includes: financial security, reduced infant and maternal mortality, increasing involvement of dads in child rearing, improving gender pay equity, less reliance on public assistance, lower child poverty rates, and overall well-being for new parents and care-givers.

I am an advocate of PFML because I am one of the lucky few to have had 12 weeks of paid leave with both my young children as part of a generous corporate benefit. I can confidently speak to how much it mattered for me, my family and how it much not having it negatively affects most everyone I know. I have followed the national debate closely and I read much of the public testimony relating to Gov. Lamonts bill along with the many versions over the past decade presented to the Connecticut legislature. There are extensive facts and studies that confirm the economic and health benefits of paid leave and vast support from organizations across the state which represent a variety of interests, including: women, children, education, the elderly, and small businesses. In addition, there are countless personal stories about experiences of living without paid leave.

Connecticut wants to be competitive for business to attract and retain workers. The current bills which are entirely funded through small employee deductions with no direct costs to employers have teed up an incredible opportunity for our state to lead with one of the most progressive and inclusive paid leave policies to do that this year.

Find out how you can help us get Paid Family and Medical Leave for Connecticut.

Lorelei OHagan is a Cos Cob resident.
The German intelligence agency BND has stated that Huawei isnt a trustworthy partner and shouldnt be a part of the countrys 5G network deployment. The agency bases this on security-relevant incidents from the past. Previously, Norwegian intelligence raised similar concerns and Denmark agreed.

Of course, the biggest pressure comes from the US  the US embassy in Berlin has warned that a potentially compromised 5G network could endanger the future of intelligence sharing between the two countries.

The worry is that Huawei has built backdoors into its hardware that will be used by the Chinese government, a charge that Huawei is denying. The company is even suing the US government for banning it and damaging its reputation.

BnetzA, the German regulatory body responsible for telecommunications (among many other things) will start the auction for 5G bands in a few days (on March 19).

Four carriers have been admitted to the auction (press release here): Drillisch Netz, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile) and Vodafone. 420MHz total will be auctioned off from the 2GHz and 3.6GHz bands. However, uncertainty about who will provide the hardware may cause a delay in the the auction.

Source
Dominika Koszowska is a photographer who exclusively uses a smartphone as her tool and that smartphone is an Xperia. She captures landscape and portrait photos and even won the 2018 Mobile Photography Awards' grand prize for the imagery she captured with an Xperia XZ1 and XZ2.

Sony caught up with Dominika to ask her about her tips on photography - what she likes to capture, how she captures it.

Dominika likes to shoot using the Manual mode on her Xperia smartphone so as to have full control over the final image. She doesn't mention it in her interview but it's also clear she's an advanced editor as well as a shooter.

When it comes to lower light she uses a tripod to capture long exposure photos with as low an ISO as possible. That means she might not be taking advantage of Sony's high-ISO mode, but that's to be expected when maximum image quality is pursued.

Dominika's tips for capturing better photos is using the best light during the day, like Golden Hour at sunrise or sunset and Blue Hour just after sunrise or sunset. She also shares her preferred shutter speeds depending on her needs.

Of course you could always just use the Auto mode on your smartphone to capture a great photo. Phones nowadays have gotten great at just doing it all once you hit that virtual shutter button.

Source 1 | 2
PASCAGOULA, Mississippi -- Ingalls Shipbuilding celebrated a milestone in the construction of the third amphibious warship in the America class, the Bougainville (LHA 8) during ceremonies at the Pascagoula shipyard Thursday morning.

Ship sponsor Ellyn Dunford, wife of Gen. Joe Dunford, the 19th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, traced her initials onto the ships keel plate and declared the keel truly and fairly laid, in keeping a with a longstanding maritime tradition.

LHA 8 will be the second U.S. Navy warship to bear the name Bougainville, commemorating the eponymous campaign which took place during World War II. The campaign, which ran from 1943 to 1944, resulted in Allied forces securing a strategic airfield from the Japanese in the northern Solomon Islands, which helped break the Japanese stronghold in the South Pacific.

Bougainville will retain the aviation capability of the America-class design while adding the surface assault capability of a well deck. The well deck will give the U.S. Marine Corps the ability to house and launch two landing craft air cushion (LCAC) hovercraft or one landing craft utility (LCU) as needed during their maritime missions. Other additions to Bougainville include a larger flight deck configured for Joint Strike Fighter and Osprey V-22 aircraft, which can be used for surface and aviation assaults. The additional area on the flight deck comes in part from a smaller deck house and an additional sponson.

Ingalls is currently the sole builder of large-deck amphibious ships for the U.S. Navy. The shipyard delivered its first amphibious assault ship, the Iwo Jima-class USS Tripoli (LPH 10), in 1966. Ingalls has since built five Tarawa-class (LHA 1) ships, eight Wasp-class (LHD 1) ships and the first in a new class of ships, America (LHA 6). The second ship in the class, Tripoli (LHA 7) is currently under construction and Bougainville (LHA 8) is the third ship in the class.
Photo: File photo

A junior constable with the Langley RCMP was arrested Tuesday and charged after new information from a 2013 stabbing in Edmonton came to light.

Benjamen Kozlovich was arrested in Chilliwack and charged with aggravated assault and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, but he's since been released on bail.

The charges relate to a stabbing that occurred in the drive-thru of a North Edmonton McDonald's in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2013, prior to Kozlovich joining the RCMP.

According to the Edmonton police, a man approached a car in the drive-thru with a knife and a physical altercation ensued.

Two people were seriously injured in the stabbing and the suspect fled the scene.

This January, the Edmonton Police Service received new information, leading to the arrest.

The investigation can now be concluded with thanks to witnesses that came forward with important information, said Detective Paul Kelly of the Edmonton Police Service's Northwest Division.

Kozlovich completed his RCMP training in January 2018 and is a probationary member.

The BC RCMP has now launched an internal investigation, and Kozlovich's employment status is being reviewed.




Haiti - Security : Christophe Aristide Jr., ASEC of Grand Ravine, shot dead





Wednesday afternoon, Christophe Aristide Junior, Administrator of Communal Section (ASEC) of Grand Ravine, who had gone to the Procuratorate of Port-au-Prince to support people in his area illegally arrested, was hit bt a bullet the head when leaving the Procuratorate.



The incident occurred while in the area of the Bicentennial (Boulevard Harry Truman) a high-tension situation where individuals armed of the Gang "Ti Je" tried to break into the courthouse, to try to exfiltrate Emmanuel Ulysses aka "Bawon" the number 2 of the Head of Gang "Ti Je", who was auditioned at the Public Prosecutor's Office.



An attempt that failed thanks to the agents of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) who courageously and firmly opposed this attempt.



Reacting to this sudden death, of Christophe Aristide Junior, collateral victim of growing insecurity in the capital, the Administration Communale of Port-au-Prince in a note "address his most sincere condolences to the relatives of Mr. Christophe Aristide Junior. It takes this opportunity to firmly condemn this criminal act which, once again, tarnishes the image and fundamental values of our society where respect for human life should be the norm.



The Communal Administration of Port-au-Prince renews its confidence in the National Police of Haiti, guaranteeing the safety of lives and property, to restore a safer environment and reduce crime on the national territory."



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Army : Towards a possible military cooperation with Colombia





As part of an official invitation, Enold Joseph, the Minister of Defense, left the country this week for Colombia to participate in the Colombian military's traditional fair on military equipment, which ends this Friday. March 2019.



On the sidelines of this event, Minister Joseph met with his Colombian counterpart, Guillermo Botero, as well as with the Colombian Air Force General, on the progress of the process of remobilization of the Armed Forces of Haiti (FAd'H) and in particular a possible resumption of military cooperation between the two countries.



Building on international cooperation to implement its three-year plan, Minister Joseph will take advantage of the presence of international representatives on site, to promote the Haitian military institution and try to convince new partners of the international community to accompany the Haitian state militarily.



SL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Crisis : The measures of reduction of the expenses and deficit are put in place





Jorchemy Jean-Baptiste, Advisor to Prime Minister Jean Henry Ceant affirms that the emergency measures announced by the Prime Minister in an address to the Nation, mid February https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-26955-haiti-flash-prime-minister-ceant-reveals-9-emergency-measures.html are being implemented.



For the moment, the 9 governmental measures including among others budget cuts, the removal of the privileges of the major clerks of the State, the fight against the corruption, the perspective of the holding of the trial PetroCaribe https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-27177-haiti-justice-the-petrocaribe-case-in-the-hands-of-the-instruction-judge.html one of the main demands of anti-government demonstrations as well as the upcoming appointment of a new Director of the Central Financial Intelligence Unit (UCREF) and a new Director of the Anti-Corruption Unit (ULCC), "contribute to restoring public confidence in the State and will have a positive effect on the management of the Government", according to the Councilor of Ceant.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-26955-haiti-flash-prime-minister-ceant-reveals-9-emergency-measures.html



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Haiti - News : Zapping...





Reopening of the seaside resort Moulin sur mer

After its temporary closure last February following riots and blocking of the country preventing the displacement of its employees and made supply difficulties due to the scarcity of products https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-26982-icihaiti-tourism-moulin-sur-mer-temporarily-stops-its-activities.html , the seaside resort Moulin Sur Mer, located in Montrouis, announces its reopening this Friday, March 15, 2019.



The PNH in formation in Texas

Deputy Chief of Mission, Robin Diallo, welcomes officers of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) who travel to Austin, Texas for training at the Public Security Department of Texas. This training, funded by the International Bureau of Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), will strengthen the capacity of the PNH to respond to major events.



$79 million from Canada

Thursday, was hels the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding between Jean Claudy Pierre the Minister of Planning and External Cooperation and the Accredited Ambassador of Canada to Haiti, Andre Frenette, on 6 development projects for a total amount of 79 million Canadian dollars. To be continued...



Senator Cantave meets OCID

President Carl Murat Cantave met this week with members of the Citizen Observatory for the Institutionalization of Democracy (OCID). In particular, the country's socio-political and economic crisis, the functioning of Parliament and the upcoming elections were discussed.



Inter-Haitian dialogue evoked in Geneva

On Wednesday morning, Chancellor Bocchit Edmond spoke at the Human Rights Council in Geneva to present the position of the Haitian Government following the publication of the report of this UN body. On Thursday, Edmond met with Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Chile, to discuss the latest Human Rights Report around the world, including Haiti. The question of the national inter-Haitian dialogue was also discussed.



President Moise controls virtually nothing

"President Jovenel Moise controls virtually nothing at present," said former justice minister Paul Denis, who says the country has never been in such a difficult situation in the last 30 years.



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By Vasia Orion | Published on 2019/03/14

We've had all manner of casting news about OCN's upcoming "Kill It", the 'killer action' drama about a veterinarian hitman with a hidden past and a detective chasing a serial killer, and it looks like Dramaland is about to deliver another helping of non-Korean characters. Can the usual cringe be turned into a win?

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Recent news pieces contemplate the drama's main draw for audiences, offering the take that the first and second points are the hitman (Jang Ki-yong) and detective (Nana) duo's exciting story, and the stylish action respectively. The third point talks about the foreign characters we can meet here, and it's interesting that they are said main point.

The two mentioned in the pieces are Pavel, played by David Lee McInnis, and Karimov portrayed by Robin Deiana. Karimov is a second generation member of the Russian Mafia out to kill Kim Soo-hyeon (Jang Ki-yong), while Pavel is the man who raised Soo-hyeon as a hitman. While I fully expect Karimov to be a token foreign killing puppet, Pavel sounds like an interesting role.

Pavel is the man who saved Soo-hyeon's life, and raised him while teaching him all of his skills. The once mighty hitman is now ill with Alzheimer's disease. In news released back in February, he is reported as a Cold War era spy who, upon its end, fled to a rural village near Vladivostok and opened a veterinary clinic in order to avoid the purge.

As tempted as I am to giggle at the show's choice to grey-spray-age the 46-year-old David Lee McInnis into his "Kill It" form, his character descriptions have a bit of meat to them. It would be nice if this turned into a solid, albeit unconventional, father and son relationship with some emotional weight. "Kill It" is premiering on the 23rd, and I look forward to meeting ol' Pavel here.

Written by: Orion from 'Orion's Ramblings'

Sources (1) (2)
Photo: The Canadian Press Police talk to witnesses near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019.

UPDATE 7:03 a.m.

The gunman behind at least one of the mosque shootings in New Zealand that left 49 people dead on Friday tried to make a few things clear in the manifesto he left behind: He is a 28-year-old Australian white nationalist who hates immigrants. He was set off by attacks in Europe that were perpetrated by Muslims. He wanted revenge, and he wanted to create fear.

He also, quite clearly, wanted attention.

Though he claimed not to covet fame, the gunman  whose name was not immediately released by police  left behind a 74-page document posted on social media under the name Brenton Tarrant in which he said he hoped to survive the attack to better spread his ideas in the media.

He also livestreamed to the world in graphic detail his assault on the worshippers at Christchurch's Al Noor Mosque.

That rampage killed at least 41 people, while an attack on a second mosque in the city not long after killed several more. Police did not say whether the same person was responsible for both shootings.

While his manifesto and video were an obvious and contemptuous ploy for infamy, they do contain important clues for a public trying to understand why anyone would target dozens of innocent people who were simply spending an afternoon engaged in prayer.

There could be no more perplexing a setting for a mass slaughter than New Zealand, a nation so placid and so isolated from the mass shootings that plague the U.S. that even police officers rarely carry guns.

Yet the gunman himself highlighted New Zealand's remoteness as a reason he chose it. He wrote that an attack in New Zealand would show that no place on earth was safe and that even a country as far away as New Zealand is subject to mass immigration.

He said he grew up in a working-class Australian family, had a typical childhood and was a poor student. A woman who said she was a colleague of his when he worked as a personal trainer in the Australian city of Grafton said she was shocked by the allegations against him.

UPDATE 5:44 a.m.

Justin Trudeau has issued a brief statement on Twitter condemning the fatal shootings at two mosques in New Zealand.

The prime minister says attacking people during prayers is "absolutely appalling."

He went on to say Canadians join New Zealanders and Muslim communities around the world in grieving.

ORIGINAL 5:30 a.m.

At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Two other armed suspects were being held in custody. Police said they were trying to determine how they might be involved.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the events in Christchurch represented "an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence," and that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees.

"It is clearthat this can now only be describedas a terrorist attack," Ardern said.

In addition to the dead, health officials said 48 people were being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds. Injuries ranged from minor to critical.

Police took three men and a woman into custody after the shootings, which shocked people across the nation of 5 million people. Police later said one of the arrests didn't relate to the shootings.

While there was no reason to believe there were any more suspects, Ardern said the national security threat level was being raised from low to high, the second-highest level.

National carrier Air New Zealand cancelled at least 17 flights in and out of Christchurch, saying it couldn't properly screen customers and their baggage following the shootings.

Police said the investigation had extended 360 kilometres (240 miles) to the south, where homes in Dunedin were evacuated around a "location of interest." A police statement gave no further detail of how it might be linked to the attacks.

Authorities have not specified who they detained, but said none had been on any watch list. A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack. He said he was a 28-year-old white Australian and a racist.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed that one of the people detained was an Australian-born citizen.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush said Friday night that a man had been charged with murder. He did not say whether police believed the same shooter was responsible for both attacks.

Ardern alluded at a news conference to anti-immigrant sentiment as the possible motive, saying that while many people affected by the shootings may be migrants or refugees, "they have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us."

As for the suspects, Ardern said, "these are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand."
Emergency responders from Havre Fire and Havre Police work at the scene of a carbon monoxide detection at Heirloom Jewelers Friday morning in downtown Havre. The scene was cleared of CO and Third Avenue was reopened Friday afternoon.

Carbon monoxide detected at Heirloom Jewelers forced emergency services to block off Third Avenue between Second and Third streets in downtown Havre Friday morning.

Havre Fire Chief Mel Paulson said the fire department responded to a report of a gas leak at about 10:15 a.m. and called NorthWestern Energy to the scene when firefighters determined carbon monoxide was in the air.

NorthWestern Energy spokesperson Brandy Powers said a company gas serviceman found dangerous levels of carbon monoxide upon arriving at the scene. The serviceman immediately evacuated the building and shut down the power to the surrounding buildings until he could determine the source of the leak. Powers said the leak affected several businesses on Second and Third streets.

Havre Police, who assisted on the call, evacuated multiple storefronts on the block, including Heirloom Jewelers, Lunch Box, Serenity Salon & Boutique, Flynn Realty and Havre Hardware and Home.

Powers said the source of the leak was a furnace inside a business which was improperly vented and back-drafting into the building. The furnace was shut off to stop the flow of dangerous gas.

Once the threat subsided, power was restored to buildings in the immediate area at 2:17 p.m. Third Avenue was reopened to traffic.

NorthWestern Energy is reminding residents the importance of carbon monoxide detectors and ensuring appliances are in working order.

Proper ventilation is incredibly important, Powers said, especially during winter weather when vents can get blocked by ice and snow.
Editors note: This version corrects who opened the Havre Gary & Leos store.

Gary & Leos Fresh Foods has been awarded top recognition from the Independent Grocers Alliance.

IGA awarded Gary & Leos with its 2019 International Retailer of the Year award.

This is an international award, with the Montana chain joining three other U.S. businesses as well as stores from China, South Africa and Australia in the 2019 recognition.

It was one of those once in a lifetime experiences that was really over the top, Gary & Leos co-owner Laura Malisani said. I was so grateful to get to be and work with and spent my life with so many wonderful people and it kind of just brought that home to me.

Malisani, who owns the business with her husband, John, and Tracy Job, said the award was a surprise to her. She was not notified of the award until shortly before being presented with it while at the IGA Global Rally in San Diego in February.

The award recognized Gary & Leos for the execution of excellence in the grocery industry, serving its communities with devotion and passion, a press release about the award said.

The International Retailer of the Year was presented for all of the stores in the Gary & Leos chain, which includes stores in Florence and Conrad.

Gary Leland and Leo Job opened their Havre store in 1986.

Laura Malisani said the store has been with the Independent Grocers Alliance from the beginning.

Their supplier Super Value Wholesaler nominated them for the award, she added.

She said Gary & Leos also received an award this year for innovation within its bakery, adding that she was excited about that award because it honors bakery manager Shelly Fisher, who is retiring after 31 years.

Malisani said because of Fishers planned retirement, Gary & Leos also worked hard to put seconds  co-managers or assistant managers who have gone through management training  in every department, to prepare people to take over the departments.

Our people are so committed to excellent customer service they know their products, they are truly professionals, Laura Malisani said. I think that mindset and education behind them really sets them apart.

This was not the first time Gary & Leos were recognized for their business practices, she said. Previous awards include the Montana Family Business award in 2014 and Malisani receiving the IGA Progressive Grocer Woman award in 2012.

She said she remembers being surprised they won the International Retailer of the Year Award this year and how she felt looking out from the stage and seeing her family, friends and everyone who she had worked with closely there supporting her.

The event was held in the Air and Space Museum in San Diego in the rotunda room, she said, with big glass ceilings and old airplanes hanging overhead.

While there, she met a number of other retailers from all around the world, comparing cultures and comparing ideas, she said.

One of the ideas she wanted to take back to her stores was signage for their made-in-house items. letting the public know that they have their own donut recipes, maple frosting recipes and more, Malisani said.

For the past three to four years, she said, she has been asked to participate on projects on a national level and served on the IGA executive board as a retailer.

As independent grocers they do not have the same technology available as larger chain stores do, she said, but by having employees working together as a group, customers are able to receive top of the line service. A large amount of information is available for shoppers in the modern world, she said, and shoppers need retailers who are well-educated to be able to assist them with any and all of their questions or concerns.

All of Gary & Leos employees are well trained to assist with customers and are shown how to provide best service, she said.

Our employees rock, she said. I mean we are so lucky to work with such amazing people because they really do bring their care, their concern for the customer, and I think that is what really sets us apart.

Malisani mentioned employee Brenda Friede, who decorates the store during holidays. She and other employees spend extra time to specially present the store and make it personal, Malisani said.

Michael Rogers, in the deli, I think has a beautiful way to say it: I have the opportunity every morning to make somebodys day a little brighter and make it go a little better, Malisani said. I think that is how the majority of our employees come to work.
Press release

Ian Marquand is coming to the Havre-Hill County Library Tuesday, March 26, at 7 p.m. to present Kumamoto: Your Sister State: An evening with Ian Marquand.

For 25 years, Marquand, a former television journalist, has been the president of the Japan Friendship Club of Montana. Hes been a leading promoter of Montanas sister state relationship with Kumamoto, Japan, and is now honorary consul of Japan for Montana.

Tuesday, March 26, Marquand will share images and stories of the Montana-Kumamoto relationship at the library. He will tell about the origins of the relationship  including the role of former U.S. Sen. and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield  and take the audience on a tour of this fascinating part of Japan where Montanans are especially welcome.

From historic Kumamoto castle to an active volcano to dinosaurs to Japanese culture, Marquand will share the best of Montanas sister state.

The event is free and open to the public.
First meeting set for April 3 in Helena

Press release

HELENA  After receiving significant interest from producers and stakeholders throughout the state, Montana Department of Agriculture Director Ben Thomas announced thursday that nine people have been appointed to the Montana Hemp Advisory Committee.

We are grateful that so many folks were interested in serving on the Hemp Advisory Committee, and the selection process wasnt easy, said Director Thomas. The appointees represent Montana hemp growers both large and small, and also reflect the diverse growing regions of Montanas ag industry. I look forward to working with the committee to shape the future of Montanas hemp industry.

The nine people appointed to one-year terms on the committee are:

 Jeremy Anderson  Fort Benton

 Jackee Beck  Deer Lodge

 Ken Elliott  Wolf Point

 Jamie Fitterer  Bozeman

 Arlin Fratzke  Stevensville

 Bart Icopini  Hysham

 Ross Johnson  Conrad

 Dean Nelson  Homestead

 Kim Phillips  Helena

The committee will hold its first meeting on Wednesday, April 3, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in Room 225 at the Montana Department of Agriculture at 302 N. Roberts, Helena. The first meeting will include an overview of Montanas State Hemp Plan, commodity dealer licensing and a discussion on how hemp laws are implemented in Montana. The meeting is open to the public.
Photo: The Canadian Press Chinese Premier Li Keqiang is displayed on screens during a press conference after the closing session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great hall of the People on Friday, March 15, 2019.

China's No. 2 leader has sought to defuse tensions with Washington and Europe over technology and other issues by promising to treat foreign and domestic competitors equally.

Speaking at the end of China's 10-day annual legislative session, Premier Li Keqiang also denied Friday that Beijing tells companies to spy on their overseas competitors.

Li's rejection of spying accusations at a news conference was the communist government's highest-level effort so far to put to rest concerns that threaten Chinese access to lucrative markets for telecom and other technology.

"This is not how China behaves. We did not do that and will not do that in the future," the premier said when asked whether Beijing told Chinese companies to spy on foreign countries.

The United States, Australia and some other governments have imposed curbs on use of technology from Chinese vendors including Huawei Technologies Ltd. Washington is lobbying European and other allies to shun Huawei as their phone carriers prepare to invest billions of dollars in next-generation technology.

Huawei, the biggest global maker of network gear, has denied accusations it facilitates Chinese spying. Its founder has told reporters he would reject official requests to disclose customer secrets.

President Xi Jinping's government faces mounting pressure to repair trade relations with the United States and other major markets after economic growth fell to a three-decade low of 6.6 per cent last year. Activity has weakened further on multiple fronts including cooling export growth and a contraction in auto sales.

Li promised to create a "level playing field" for all competitors in China's state-dominated economy to "boost the vitality of the market." He pledged to open more industries to foreign investment but gave no details.

"We will adhere to the principle of neutrality and treat domestic and foreign companies as equals," the premier said.

Also Friday, the largely ceremonial legislature endorsed a law discouraging Chinese officials from pressuring companies to hand over technology.

The measure is part of an investment law that aims to address complaints China's system is rigged against foreign companies.

"This is designed to protect the rights and interests of foreign investors and attract more foreign investment," Li said.

Washington also wants China to roll back plans for government-led creation of global competitors in robotics and other technologies, and it was unclear if the measure would mollify Trump. He raised duties on Chinese imports in July in response to complaints Beijing steals or pressures companies to give up technology. Beijing followed suit.
Press release

HELENA  The Montana Sage Grouse Oversight Team has opened its second grant application cycle for conservation projects to benefit sage grouse and their habitat.

Habitat conservation is a key component of Montanas conservation strategy, especially on private lands, where most of Montanas sage grouse live, said Carolyn Sime, Sage Grouse Habitat Conservation Program Manager. The purpose of these grants is to maintain, enhance, and restore sage grouse habitats, while at the same time creating mitigation sites that can be used to offset impacts of development elsewhere.

The 2015 Montana Legislature created the grant opportunity when it passed the Greater Sage Grouse Stewardship Act. Approximately $3.2 million is available. Priority will be given to projects involving partnerships between public and private entities, as well as projects that leverage matching funds.

Qualifying projects must be located at least in part on land in designated sage grouse habitats. Higher priority will be afforded to projects located in Montanas Core Habitat Areas, but projects in General Habitat and the North Valley Connectivity Area that have high resource values will also be considered.

Sime noted potential projects could include reduction of conifer encroachment; restoration or improvement of sagebrush health; restoration of cropland to grazing lands; incentives to reduce conversion of native sagebrush rangelands to other land uses; conservation leases and conservation easements having a minimum duration of 15 years.

MSGOT especially welcomes applications for projects that restore or enhance sage grouse habitats or that engage private landowners who ordinarily would not participate in mitigation or other habitat conservation opportunities.

Conservation agencies and organizations are eligible to receive funds. Organizations and agencies must hold and maintain conservation easements or leases or be directly involved in sage grouse conservation activities approved by MSGOT. Private citizens are not eligible to receive funds directly and should work with a sponsoring agency or organization.

The application process entails a Pre-Proposal review of the project by the Program. This requires would-be applicants to determine key details about the project in advance to make sure it conforms to requirements of the Stewardship Act and the grant opportunity. This step also allows the Program to review potential projects and provide feedback to would-be applicants to help them decide whether to submit a more detailed Complete Application for MSGOTs formal consideration.

Completed Pre-Proposal Forms must be received by March 30, 2019, via email at [email protected]

Details on the application process are available on the Montana Sage Grouse Habitat Conservation Program web site at https://sagegrouse.mt.gov/grants.html/. Also, two conference calls to answer questions on the application process will be hosted by Program staff on Thursday, March 7, 2019, from 12 to 1 p.m. and on Friday, March 8, 2019, from 9 to 10 a.m. The call-in number for both sessions is 406-449-7478, with Conference ID number 2307.

Interested parties may also schedule a one-on-one call with Program staff. To schedule a call, send a request to [email protected]

Complete Applications will be due in early May 2019. Complete Applications will be reviewed by the Sage Grouse Habitat Program and independent subject matter experts. The Program will also apply the MSGOT-approved habitat quantification tool to determine the quality and quantity of sage grouse habitat within the project area that would be available to offset impacts of development elsewhere.

As required by the Stewardship Act, applications will also be made available for public review on the Programs web site. MSGOT is expected to select grant recipients during a regularly scheduled public meeting in the fall of 2019.

In the first grant cycle through four projects, Stewardship Account funds conserved 43,148 acres of sage grouse habitat. About $2.8 million from the Account was leveraged with an additional $6.6 million in matching funds from federal and private sources.

The Montana Sage Grouse Habitat Conservation Program works to sustain viable sage grouse populations and conserve habitat, enabling Montanans to maintain control of their lands, wildlife and economy by avoiding a listing of the Greater Sage-grouse under the federal Endangered Species Act. The future of sage grouse in Montana will depend on our collective efforts.
Clouds blow over the Sweet Grass Hills Wednesday. Tribal officials say the purchase of 280 acres of land in the hills helps regain and preserve a key part of history and culture for the Chippewa Cree Tribe of Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation.

Wednesday, March 6, was a monumental day for Chippewa Cree Cultural Resources Preservation Department Director Alvin Windy Boy Sr., he said.

That was the day the Chippewa Cree Tribe of Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation regained a piece of its history, purchasing 280 acres of land in the Sweet Grass Hills.

"We, as indigenous people to this land, became strangers in our own land," he said. "Accessibility to sites was always a hindrance over the course of time. But fortunately ... my grandfather, that I have seen and witnessed, had a good relationship with many farmers and ranchers in the area, and their old-timers at the time understood who we were and understood what we did."

Chippewa Cree Business Committee Vice Chair Ted Whitford said the Business Committee purchased the land to preserve its historical significance.

The Chippewa Cree Tribe comprises the descendants of the band of Chippewa led by Stone Child, or Rocky Boy, and Little Bear's band of Cree that were put on Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation when it was created by an act of Congress in 1916.

The two bands had been in Montana for decades, often traveling or camping together.

Stone Child had lobbied officials for many years to obtain a reservation, a home for his band.

The creation of the reservation in 1916 also followed years of prominent Montanans trying unsuccessfully to find permanent homes for the bands.

Windy Boy said he has lived his whole life on Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation and had the opportunity to live with his grandparent Standing on Cloud Windy Boy. When they were growing up, his grandfather took him and his brothers to areas that were historically and culturally significant to the tribe.

Many of them were in the Sweet Grass Hills.

He said he remembers that in 1959, when he was about 8 years old, they camped in the Sweet Grass Hills, spending the majority of their summer there. When they were there, he said, he remembers being shown sacred ceremonial areas of the hills which the elders held in high regard.

"And the hill that we purchased was certainly one of those," he said.

The Sweet Grass Hills are culturally significant and sacred to many Montana tribes which still utilize the area, such as the Chippewa Cree, Blackfeet, Aaniiih and Nakoda tribes.

In the 1970s when he was a young man, Windy Boy said, Manhattan Mineral based out of Calgary, Alberta, proposed mining that area.

"The elders at the time didn't speak English," he said. "I tried to relay for my grandpa what they were doing and the response that they relayed is, 'Don't do it.'"

As time progressed, the mining plans were abandoned, he said.

He said he credits prayers made by his and other tribes for circumventing any development of the area.

"The significance to it is, certainly, one that we would do everything that we can to preserve, to protect and to defend that area," he said.

He and his family members still use sites on the Sweet Grass Hills for cultural reasons, he said, although he realizes not everyone may be as culturally astute.

"But we need to pay attention to who we are," he said. "Who we are, certainly, is mindful that the ceremonial areas, that have cultural significance to my tribe, makes us who we are. If we don't know who we are, we have to ask ourselves who are we."

Last year, Kathrine Lehmann, who is not a Native American, inherited the 280 acres, he said, and while he was talking to her she asked if the tribe would be interested in purchasing the land. Without hesitation, Windy Boy told her yes, he said, before even considering where the money was going to be coming from at the time.

Windy Boy added the he is grateful to Whitford, who worked hard and took special interest in the Business Committee getting funding to purchase the land.

Whitford said he was overjoyed with the deal.

"We don't want it to be destroyed, because it has cultural significance to our tribe and other tribes in this region," he said.

He said the landowner gave first priority to the tribe to purchase the land, before speaking to any other interested parties. The deal has been in the process for close to 12 months, he said. After the year of negotiations, the tribe was able to purchase the land for $200,000.

"It's hard to describe how it feels to have the land back," he said.

Chippewa Cree Business Committee Chair Harlan Baker said the main reason for the purchase was that the tribe wanted to preserve the land. He said the deal to purchase the property has been in the works since Windy Boy notified the committee that the tribe was offered first purchasing rights to the land.

"It feels good," he said. "It's a good thing for our tribe to be able to protect those sites that have been used and very important to our people for centuries."

Baker said the property that was purchased is landlocked by other property owners who are ranchers and farmers. He said the tribe already has a good relationship with some of these property owners and he will work to get a right-of-way agreement so the tribe can access the land.

The land does not have road access, and the tribe sees no reason to change that, he said, with access by foot being perfectly sufficient.

"I hope that we can work with the landowners out there so tribal people can access land, use those lands," he added.

In the past, the tribe has worked with landowners in the Sweet Grass Hills to get students, on school field trips, foot access, he said. Students are educated about several sacred sites on the hills which hold great historical significance to a number of tribes, he said. In the future, he hopes they will be able show people some of those sites and increase the historic teachings for students, Baker said.

Because many sites on the property are culturally significant to more than the Chippewa Cree Tribe, Baker said, he wants to contact other tribes, including in Canada, to help preserve the whole area.

Windy Boy said the Chippewa Cree Cultural Resources Preservation Department, has several archaeologists and tribal elders who want to help further identify these site.

Hopefully the tribe will be able to "gain a better understanding of who we are as Cree people and an understanding that we still preserve and practice our way of life," Windy Boy said.

The tribe also wants to maintain a positive relationship with the farmers and ranchers in the area, he said, while also practicing their traditional way of life.

"As Native people, Cree people don't technically have a religion," he said. "We have a way of life that is consistent with nature, the water, the air, the being, the plain, that is our way of life, because we live in existence with them."

He said that by allowing tribal people to practice their way of life, it helps preserve the tribal people, with language and tradition, which is priceless. Once something sacred has something attached to it, such as a price tag or is used for personal financial gain, it is stripped of what made it extraordinary and, therefore, made ordinary, he said. Windy Boy added that the tribal people cannot lose their hearts, can't lose what is sacred to them.

"We have to make sure that our elders, who have since gone on, (know) that we are still here, we are going to be here and that we are adhering to their direction to us," he said, "to always make sure we understand who we are, what we are and why we are here, and being a Cree Indian helps us understand."
Editor,

Montana WIFE, Women Involved in Farm Economics, has been celebrating National Agriculture Week by inviting Montanas school children to express their ideas on farm life by participating in the Art of Farming contest and sending their entries.

There were certificates and cash prizes awarded to the top three winning entries and two honorable mention certificates in all elementary grades. Then 25 winning entries representing all grades and many areas around Montana were placed on a calendar.

We had a lack of entries in 2018 maybe due to childrens lack of knowledge about farming and ranching, and we know there are a lot of other art projects for students. People didnt need our calendars because they use their cell phones.

After 32 years, Montana WIFE members voted at our state convention in September, 2018, to end the art contest and the calendar project. We would like to thank all of those teachers and students who helped make this a successful project for so many years. We would also like to thank all of the judges of the contests who made difficult decisions regarding the many good entries over the years.

Thank you newspaper editors for the many press releases of our project.

Women Involved in Farm Economics
In what could be his last battle, McGrady tackles redistricting, liquor laws

Colleagues in the state House applaud for state Rep. Chuck McGrady on his birthday last week.

RALEIGH  Glancing over a House calendar, Chuck McGrady pronounced the taking of the annual members photo  its always like herding cats the most challenging part of the afternoon floor session.

Theres nothing wildly controversial but that doesnt mean people wont talk forever, he says. You saw that in that committee meeting. Everybodys got to talk.

Earlier that morning, the House Judiciary Committee had indeed taken up noncontroversial bills and managed to fill the available window of time, whether talking was needed or not. Its not in McGradys nature to fill the air with platitudes or otherwise talk for the sake of talking. And that may be one reason why he admits to getting close a decision to retire from the job hes held since 2011. Although hes served in elective or appointive office for almost 20 years  not counting his stint as president of the national Sierra Club  he never considered himself a lifer.

He won easy election to the state House in 2010 after Rep. Carolyn Justus retired and hes not been seriously challenged since.

I said Id probably be here three or four terms. Im now on my fifth term, he says after we get seated at Bad Daddys Burger Bar a few blocks from the Legislative Building. Conceding that its next to impossible to eat healthy in his line of work, McGrady endorses the fare at the trendy fast-casual spot. He orders Nicks Patty Melt on rye toast with tater tots and sweet tea and continues to recount how he ended up in Raleigh for one more term.

In the middle of the last session I came back to Henderson County pretty sure I was not going to run again, he says. But I had a series of meetings with a wide range of people  not just supporters but the business community particularly, and tried to recruit people. Couldnt find somebody to recruit and basically was told, Chuck, you need to suck it up and stay there.

Unfortunately, youve got to make these decisions way in advance. This was 2017 when I was worried about 2018. So now, in a year from now, there will be a primary, and so Ive got to make a decision relatively quickly.

Even more quickly than usual.

When the Legislature moved the spring primary to March 2020 it moved the filing period to December of this year.

'Pragmatic, fiscally conservative centrist'

Whatever his political future, McGrady has plenty on his plate, not all of it as tasty as a burger and fries.

The redistricting issue is hugely important to work on and Ive got the lead on that, he says. Ill move ABC deregulation forward in some capacity. Again, Ive got a point (position) on that. Funding issues  Im the senior guy from the mountains. Ive got things to do, thats why I ran again. But Im tired, tired of that drive.

State Rep. Linda Johnson and Rep. Chuck McGrady share a laugh when she surprised him with lemon-filled donuts on his birthday.He told me I had picked a good day to visit, given that the House would be in session and, after members had their picture made, would take up a broad school safety package and a bill that would require floor sessions to be televised. Plus, it was his 66th birthday, which meant he was feted with everything lemon his favorite. His aide, Kimberly Neptune, baked him a lemon cheesecake. A good friend and colleague, Rep. Linda Johnson, brought him lemon-filled Krispy Kreme donuts. He tossed aside a gag gift  zesty nacho kale chips.

The legislation hes pushing, to reform redistricting and liquor laws, isnt that appetizing to his own party, including some of the leadership.

McGrady leads the uphill charge of good-government types, (out-of-power) Democrats and some Republicans to eliminate the habitual gerrymandering that has sustained power for the party in power in North Carolina for decades. Democrats drew creative and bizarre lines cycle after cycle. When Republicans gained control, in 2010, they showed that they, too, could master the art of picking their voters instead of the other way around.

With respect to redistricting, Im a pragmatic, fiscally conservative centrist, he says. In a political perspective, because of the way we do redistricting, both parties continue to set up this dynamic where you dont really worry about the general election, you have to worry about the primaries. Republicans need to worry about somebody running from their right and Democrats need to worry about somebody running from their left, and youve seen this over a decade now.

If were going to get back to a place where theres some middle, and you can compromise and move incrementally on issues, thats the way to get there.

Its easy to see why the redistricting fight suits McGrady well. Hes always been independent, willing to compromise and reach across the aisle, even buck leaders  political traits in short supply in Raleigh and Washington.

To me redistricting is right down the middle, he says. I dont need to do it to win my district but who better to do it?

But why does he insist on violating the Larry Justus rule, coined by the late Republican House member from Dana: If it doesnt involve you, dont get involved.

McGrady says redistricting does involve him and besides, he doesnt mind pushing a heavy rock up a steep hill. Art Pope, the Republican fundraiser/kingmaker, is one of McGradys allies in the effort to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot establishing rules for nonpartisan redistricting standards.

In a late night phone call recently, Pope said: Chuck, I just dont understand. Do you work on anything easy?

Rep. Chuck McGrady confers with a colleague before a House Judiciary Committee opens.Although redistricting may not be easy, McGrady says its never been more ripe for reform. Neither party knows for sure which one will take control in 2020, though the odds favor the GOP. A greater threat for the Republican Party is the courts. Democrats have turned to the state courts, instead of the federal judiciary, to challenge the state legislative lines as unconstitutional on the grounds theyre hyperpartisan. The strategy worked for Pennsylvania Democrats. And North Carolina Democrats are doubly emboldened now that the state Supreme Court has tilted 6-1 in their favor. Add partisan gerrymander challenges from North Carolina and other states that are headed for the U.S. Supreme Court and McGrady says independent redistricting is actually the safer bet for either party.

Why would we take it up now when we havent taken it up before? One, were one session away from a census, he says. Were at a point in time where no one knows whos going to be in charge, and so would the Republican leadership now want to roll the dice and put the Democrats in charge of the process?  Given the change in the composition of the North Carolina Supreme Court Im suspecting, in fact I know, my leadership is trying to figure out  how do we deal with this?

McGrady says 68 or 69 legislators support House Bill 140, which calls for the constitutional amendment, and somewhere between 70 and 80 support either that or a separate bill to create an independent redistricting commission, without a constitutional amendment.

That sends a pretty clear signal to the leadership that the votes are there to take up redistricting, he says.

When asked about the Senate, which tends to march in lockstep with the Republican leadership, McGrady says leaders of both chambers will be hearing from the same set of lawyers on whether the GOPs defense is going south. Im not working the Senate yet, he adds. Im just focusing on the House.



Who would run for House?

If McGrady retires, two names have surfaced as possible candidates. Tim Moffitt, the former Buncombe County legislator, has moved to Henderson County. A 1982 graduate of West Henderson High School, Moffitt declines to comment on the question. County Manager Steve Wyatt was mentioned as a possible candidate for Senate when Tom Apodaca retired in 2016 and hes been talked about as a potential candidate for McGradys seat. Wyatt dismisses the idea with a crack.

No. Im afraid Id get elected, he says. I dont like those people down there generally. It would not be good fit. If they would be willing to leave. 

I fully support Rep. McGrady, Wyatt adds. I think hes done a fantastic job. Id like to see him stay there indefinitely. Hes been really good for Henderson County and of course he received his training as a county commissioner right here.

Moffitt also praises McGrady.

Hes the most honest person I ever met and served with in the Legislature, he says.

Sen. Chuck Edwards says hes had nothing but positive interactions with McGrady.

He and I make a great team, Edwards says. We think a lot alike, we talk often. There are times that we spend the entire 4-hour ride to and from Raleigh on the phone. Henderson County is adequately represented with both of us there and its actually been very enjoyable working with Chuck.

The great outdoors

Friends tell McGrady hed be bored out of his skull if he left public policy work entirely. He has been involved in environmental protection and conservation in his days in the Sierra Club; in his life as a summer camp owner, which brought him to Henderson County; in his service on the Henderson County Planning Board and Board of Commissioners, where he pushed for strong countywide zoning, in his five terms in the state House, where he has taken the lead on politically loaded topics like coal ash cleanup and regulatory reform; and in his philanthropy, which has helped to conserve thousands of acres of land in the North Carolina mountains.

What would Chuck McGrady do in retirement?

Go camping and hiking, he says. The thing about running a summer camp is I never had summer vacations. So here I am, former president of the Sierra Club. Have I ever taken any of my kids or family to a national park? No. Ive got this long list of things that Ive worked on and Jean and I have worked on, a lot of places Id like to see.




Photo: The Canadian Press Martin Winterkorn, former CEO of the German car manufacturer 'Volkswagen', arrives for a questioning at an investigation committee of the German federal parliament in Berlin, Germany.

U.S. regulators charged Volkswagen and former CEO Martin Winterkorn with defrauding investors during its massive diesel emissions scandal.

The charges from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission come two years after the German automaker settled with the U.S. over criminal and civil charges, as the company tries to distance itself from one if its darkest eras.

The SEC said that between April 2014 and May 2015, Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the country grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance, and the company's financial standing, which gave Volkswagen a financial benefit when it issued securities at more attractive rates for the company, according to the SEC.

"Volkswagen hid its decade-long emissions scheme while it was selling billions of dollars of its bonds to investors at inflated prices," said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC's enforcement division.

In September 2015 Volkswagen installed software on more than 475,000 cars that enabled them to cheat on emissions tests, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The software reduced nitrogen oxide emissions when the cars were placed on a test machine but allowed higher emissions and improved engine performance during normal driving.

In 2016 the Justice Department sued Volkswagen over the emissions-cheating software and the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, saying it made false claims in commercials promoting its "Clean Diesel" vehicles as environmentally friendly.

Winterkorn resigned saying he took responsibility for the fraud, but insisted he personally did nothing wrong.

Volkswagen said Friday that the SEC is simply repeating unproven claims about Winterkorn.

"Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company," the company said in a prepared release.

The company has paid some $20 billion in fines and civil settlements. It has also pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the United States and several managers, including Winterkorn, were charged there.

The surprise charges from the SEC arrive as the German company attempts to distance itself from the scandal. On Tuesday the automaker said that it planned to ramp up production of electric vehicles over the next ten years, to 22 million, and reduce its carbon footprint over vehicle life cycles by 30 per cent.

Volkswagen's pivot to electric vehicles comes as it seeks to comply with new limits on carbon dioxide emissions in Europe, and a push by China for more low-emission vehicles.
Photo: The Canadian Press Imperial Oil logo at the company's annual meeting in Calgary.

Imperial Oil Ltd. says it has slowed the development of its Aspen in situ oilsands project because of uncertainty due to the Alberta government's oil production curtailment program and other challenges.

The Calgary-based company says the slowdown will likely result in a delay of at least one year. First production from the project had been expected in 2022.

Imperial sanctioned the $2.6-billion project in November, before Alberta announced its production curtailment program which began Jan. 1.

The province mandated the production cuts in an effort to reduce the price discount on oil produced in Western Canada.

Imperial says it remains concerned about the unintended consequences of the provincial government's decision and believes the intervention sends a negative message to investors.

Aspen is expected to create 200 permanent jobs and produce 75,000 barrels of oil per day once it is completed.
Kilkenny gardai recently raided at a location near Thurles, Co Tipperary, where they seized two high-powered Audi vehicles. (Stock picture/PA)

A highly skilled 'wheelman' who drives high-powered cars for one of the country's most prolific burglary gangs has been arrested as part of a major investigation.

The Finglas-based suspect, aged in his 20s, was released without charge after being questioned about six commercial burglaries on the same night.

Senior sources revealed that the criminal - who is out on bail for other offences - has acted as the getaway driver for a Clondalkin-based organised crime gang.

He was arrested last week by Portlaoise detectives and quizzed about a "night of chaos" around six weeks ago, in which his gang is suspected of smash and grab raids on six shops in counties Laois and Kilkenny.

The mob was intercepted by gardai in Urlingford, Co Kilkenny, during one raid in the early hours of the morning.

Chase

A chase ensued but the gang was able to evade officers as it was using a high-speed car.

However, crucial CCTV was obtained showing the burglary crew driving back towards the capital on the motorway which led to last week's arrest.

It is understood that DNA evidence has also been obtained by investigators but there have been no charges yet.

"This was a highly significant arrest and a file is now being prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions," a senior source said.

"This individual, who comes from an Eastern European background but is actually Irish-born, is the driver for one of the country's most prolific burglary gangs, who have generally been using high-powered Audi vehicles.

"He has been collated driving at speeds well in excess of 250kph on the motorways and the chase that happened in Urlingford is not the first time that he has managed to evade arrest.

"The gang he is involved with use crude methods to break into shops in the early hours of the morning - they generally go after cash floats as well as cigarettes. They have been highly prolific in the last six months.

"Some of his closest associates have already been charged with serious burglary offences and the expectation is that he will be next.

"Obviously he is completely refusing to co-operate with the garda investigation."

Meanwhile, officers in Kilkenny have had major success against a separate criminal organisation linked to dozens of residential burglaries nationwide in January alone.

This mob is led by two Traveller criminal families based in the Tallaght area and has been using so-called "hubs" in different areas of the country to stash vehicles and ill-gotten loot.

Haven

"These hubs are located in rural areas - their associates reside in these locations and it means they can offer a safe haven for the gang but they also provide surveillance for the Dublin-based criminals on properties for the gangs to target," a senior source said.

It was one of these hubs that Kilkenny gardai recently raided at a location near Thurles, Co Tipperary, where they seized two high-powered Audi vehicles that are suspected of being used by the Tallaght Traveller crew in a number of burglaries.

The seized cars are still being forensically examined by specialist officers.

"It was a major result to get those vehicles out of circulation - they are connected to a Traveller gang based in the Tallaght area and they were seized by officers acting on specific information," the source added.

It is understood that there has been a general decrease in burglaries involving both gangs in recent weeks, with the national anti-burglary unit continuing to carry out a number of major late-night surveillance operations in an attempt to catch some of the main players.
A Dublin man accused of having nearly 2,500 worth of cocaine in a car in the south of the city is facing trial on drugs charges.

Aonghus O'Reilly (44) had the case against him adjourned for the preparation of a book of evidence after a judge ruled it was too serious to be dealt with at district court level.

Mr O'Reilly, of no known address, is charged with possession of cocaine with intent to sell or supply.

He is also charged with unlawful possession of cannabis, with the drugs alleged to have been found at Donnybrook Road in an incident last year.

A garda sergeant told judge Michael Walsh that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) had consented to the case being dealt with summarily in the district court, subject to jurisdiction being considered.

Grinder

Asked by the judge what the value of drugs involved was, the sergeant said the accused was alleged to have been found in possession of 2,288 worth of cocaine and cannabis worth 203, a total of 2,491.

The judge said the amount of cocaine was significant, and asked if it was in one amount or broken up in several amounts.

The sergeant said the cocaine and cannabis were allegedly found in the central console of a vehicle.

Gardai also found three mobile phones, a large amount of cash, weighing scales and a grinder, the court was told.

Judge Walsh refused jurisdiction to deal with the case in the district court.

He adjourned it to a date next month for the preparation of a book of evidence.

The defendant, who has not yet indicated how he intends to plead, was not required to address the court during the brief hearing.

He was remanded on continuing bail.
Theresa May will try to put her deal before parliament again

THE Armageddon scenario of a crash-out Brexit in two weeks' time appears to have been narrowly avoided, but a battle now looms in Europe over how long a reprieve to give the UK.

MPs voted to seek an extension to the Brexit deadline from the EU, the length of which will depend on whether British prime minister Theresa May can get her deal through parliament in a third time lucky attempt next week.

Frantic talks between the Tory leader's allies the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and hard-line European Research Group (ERG) began last night, and are expected to last all weekend in a bid to see them support the deal when it is voted on again next week.

The DUP has signalled it could back the deal, which was seen as dead only a few days ago.

Killed

Revised legal advice is one avenue being pursued in a bid to get the deal over the line.

UK attorney general Geoffrey Cox is said to be redrafting the advice that ultimately killed Mrs May's vote on Tuesday to incorporate the Vienna Convention, which allows for the termination of a treaty if there is a "fundamental change of circumstances".

It is understood he is looking at whether the Irish backstop becoming permanent could be one of the grounds that would constitute a "fundamental change" and, if so, this will be reflected in the updated advice.

It is not clear, however, if the change to the advice would be enough, with some in the ERG suggesting it would not be enough to sway the deal's detractors among Brexiteers.

DUP leader Arlene Foster said her party is "working very hard" with the UK government so "we leave the EU with a deal".

She claimed the issue of the backstop had been overplayed and that Northern Ireland has a "very small market".

"We have always said if people have a mind to find those ways to deal with these situations, but unfortunately there has not been a willingness to find the way," she added.

"It is not a huge issue. People have made it into a huge issue. Let's be sensible, let's get a deal and let's make it work."

Meanwhile, the EU has off-ered to restart efforts this weekend to help Mrs May get the deal through, but also insists negotiations are done.

One suggestion being floated is offering further clarity on the role Stormont could have in negotiations in trade talks.

Mrs May's performance over the coming days will determine if she attends the EU Council next week with a deal in hand, or if she will be begging for an extension to allow the UK to get its house in order.

If her deal is agreed next Wednesday, she will seek an extension to give her until June 30 to allow Westminster to legislate for the deal to take effect.

However, if the withdrawal agreement is not passed, she will have to petition for a longer extension and the UK will need to participate in the European elections.

Options

European leaders have expressed differing views on the idea of a long extension, but European Council president Donald Tusk has suggested a year or more.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said a longer extension would give the UK time to consider options "like participation in the customs union and single market".

"I think we need to be open to any request they make, listen attentively and be generous in our response," he said.

Ireland is expected to lobby other European leaders to help Mrs May secure an extension if she pleads for more time.

A two-year extension would mean the UK has to continue paying into the EU budget and would also throw up questions about the type of mandate MEPs would have in Europe.

Sources described the potential battle over an extension as a "robust debate" and a "bunfight" over what to give Mrs May if she seeks one.
Families of those who were cut down march through the Bogside in Derry.

One former British soldier will be prosecuted for two murders in the Bloody Sunday killings of 13 unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry.

The evidence was insufficient to charge 16 other former soldiers, Northern Ireland's Public Prosecution Service (PPS) said yesterday.

Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment opened fire on January 30, 1972, during an unauthorised march in the Bogside. They killed 13 people and wounded 14 others, one of whom died later.

A judicial inquiry said in 2010 the victims posed no threat to the military. It was the worst single shooting incident of the Troubles.

Challenge

Stephen Herron, director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland, announced that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute Soldier F for the murder of James Wray and William McKinney and for the attempted murders of Joseph Friel, Michael Quinn, Joe Mahon and Patrick O'Donnell.

Expand Close John Kelly, whose 17-year-old brother Michael was killed by British soldiers in the city on Bloody Sunday / Facebook

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However, "in respect of the other 18 suspects, including 16 former soldiers and two alleged Official IRA members, it has been concluded that the available evidence is insufficient to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction", he added.

Victims' families said they were disappointed, and their lawyers said they would challenge in the High Court any prosecutorial decision that did not withstand scrutiny.

"We would like to remind everyone that no prosecution, or if it comes to it, no conviction, does not mean not guilty, it does not mean that no crime was committed, it does not mean that those soldiers acted in a dignified and appropriate way," said Mickey McKinney, a brother of one of the victims.

Before a prosecution service briefing in the City Hotel, the families marched from the Bogside and sang civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome.

Mr Herron said he was conscious that relatives faced an "extremely difficult day".

"However, much of the material which was available for consideration by the inquiry is not admissible in criminal proceedings, due to strict rules of evidence that apply," he said.

The British government said it would provide full legal support to Soldier F.

"The welfare of our former service personnel is of the utmost importance," the UK's Defence Secretary Gavin Will- iamson said. "Our serving and former personnel cannot live in constant fear of prosecution."

Tanaiste Simon Coveney said it was important that no one said anything to prejudice the process following yesterday's decision, adding that his thoughts were with all of the families.

The Saville Report, which was published in 2010 after a 12-year inquiry, reversed the findings of a hastily-convened inquiry from 1972 by Lord Widgery, who concluded that the soldiers fired only after being fired on.

Supporters of the paratroopers say they were acting under extremely confused and stressful conditions, and it is unfair to pursue them so long after the event when many suspected IRA bombers and gunmen have been told they will no longer face arrest under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Apologise

Victims' families and other voices say they must nonetheless be held to account for their actions.

The decision to prosecute came a week after Northern Secretary Karen Bradley was forced to apologise for saying that killings by British soldiers and police were "not crimes".

Sinn Fein said it shared the families' disappointment and "sense of incredulity" at the PPS's decision.

"The decision to prosecute just one ex-soldier does not change the fact that Bloody Sunday was a massacre of innocents," said Sinn Fein's Northern Ireland leader, Michelle O'Neill.
Flowers near the scene where Rosalyn Joy Few (inset) died

An American tourist died on holiday in Ireland when she suffered catastrophic head injuries in a freak pony and trap accident in the Gap of Dunloe.

Rosalyn Joy Few (64) died at the Co Kerry beauty spot only seconds before her daughter arrived at the scene in another pony and trap.

The revelation came as Ms Few's inquest was opened before Kerry coroner Aisling Quilter to allow a death certificate to be issued for her US family.

Worst

Ms Quilter said Ms Few, a resident of Phoenix, Arizona, died last April 9 after the freak accident, ich also claimed the life of Ms Few's partner, Normand Larose.

A post-mortem examination conducted at University Hospital Kerry (UHK) determined that Ms Few suffered blunt force trauma to the head, inflicting a fatal traumatic brain injury, following a fall from a pony and trap.

The inquest was immediately adjourned after the medical evidence was given.

It was the worst accident in modern times at one of Ireland's most popular visitor sport.

Mr Larose and Ms Few had come to Ireland for a family holiday.

They were catapulted nearly eight metres into a ravine and on to rocks after a pony pulling their trap-style carriage suddenly became startled and the cart flipped over.

Ms Few's daughter Tonya was following her mother in another pony and trap with her husband and two children.

The family were horrified to come upon the accident scene, and realised that Ms Few and Mr Larose had been critically injured. The accident happened not far from Kate Kearney's Cottage.

Mr Larose's inquest last August was opened and closed before Ms Quilter once med- ical evidence had been dealt with.

The inquest heard the 62-year-old, who was originally from Quebec, Canada, died from blunt force trauma injuries to his skull and brain caused by a fall on to rocks from a pony and trap.

Steepest

The accident happened at the steepest part of the descent, where the Gap of Dunloe road passes a bridge parapet by a deep ravine.

Last year, Ms Few's daughter acknowledged the "incredible" support the family had received from the people of Kerry.

Tonya said the couple "radiated happiness everywhere they went".

"Joy and Norm touched so many people's lives. They loved their family and their friends deeply and unconditionally," she said.

"They both loved life and lived their lives to the fullest."
Photo: Contributed

Analysis of the flight recorders of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane has begun, the airline said Friday, and The New York Times reported that the pilot requested permission "in a panicky voice" to return to the airport shortly after takeoff as the plane dipped up and down sharply and appeared to gain startling speed.

The report cited "a person who reviewed air traffic communications" from Sunday's flight saying controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by hundreds of feet.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return. But the plane crashed minutes later outside Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board.

French authorities now have the plane's flight data and voice recorders for analysis. They have said it was unclear whether data could be retrieved. The data recorder appeared to show damage. Ethiopian Airlines said an Ethiopian delegation led by its chief accident investigator had arrived in Paris.

In Ethiopia, officials started taking DNA samples from victims' family members to assist in identifying remains. The dead came from 35 countries.

Countries including the United States have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 as the U.S.-based company faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

The decision to send the flight recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the United States, which held out longer than most other countries in grounding the jets. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board sent three investigators to help French authorities.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said regulators had new data from the satellite-based tracking that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610. That flight crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

The data show both planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport.

Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step, while reiterating its "full confidence" in the safety of the 737 Max. Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jet's nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Boeing also announced it had paused delivery of the Max, although the company planned to continue building the jets.
Photo: Contributed

Some big changes are afoot at Kelowna's Orchard Park Mall.

Demolition plans have been submitted to the city's planning department for the former Sears location at the northeast corner of the mall.

"About half of the (Sears) building will be demolished and turned into parking. They are going to expand parking," says planner Adam Cseke.

"The whole parking lot is getting reconfigured, and they are adding parking."

Cseke says the Dilworth entrance will also be closed off.

According to plans, Canadian-owned Mark's Work Warehouse would move into the other half of the former Sears store.

Sears vacated both its main store and the Sears Home store in January of last year when Sears Canada shut down.

Currently, Mark's has two locations in the Central Okanagan. One in the Central Park mall at Highway 97 and Banks Road in Kelowna, and another in West Kelowna.

Cseke indicated there may be more changes coming at Orchard Park, but those plans have not yet been made public.

The demolition plan is expected to make its way to city council soon.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  The Sandiganbayan on Friday found former Optical Media Board (OMB) chief Ronnie Ricketts guilty of graft.

The anti-graft court's Fourth Division sentenced him to imprisonment of at least six years and one day to a maximum of eight years.

Ricketts was given until Monday to post a 30,000 bond for his provisional liberty while he appeals the decision.

The former OMB head refused to comment on the verdict.

The action star was charged with graft for mishandling confiscated DVDs and VCDs from Sky High Marketing Corporation in 2010.

He and three other OMB officials were accused of authorizing the release of confiscated items hours after these were seized, and for failing to file appropriate charges against the company.

In 2015, Ricketts posted bail and pleaded "not guilty' to the graft case.

The court in February granted Ricketts' motion to travel after the former OMB chair posted a 90,000 travel bond.

This is a developing story.

CNN Philippines Correspondent AC Nicholls contributed to this report.
Photo: The Canadian Press People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday.

World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent Islamophobia.

In a tweet, U.S. President Donald Trump sent "warmest sympathy and best wishes" to the people of New Zealand.

He wrote that "49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the attacks the "latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia."

New Zealand police said at least 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city of Christchurch. More than 20 were seriously wounded in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a "terrorist attack."

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car. Two other people were being held in custody and police were trying to determine how they might be involved.

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister, Erdogan said the Islamophobia that motivated the attacks "has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer."

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed those sentiments.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9-11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim," he tweeted.

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement that the attack "served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia."

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealand's head of state, said in a message to the country she was "deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch" and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

"At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders," she said in her message.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack "with horror and profound sadness."

"The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life," he wrote.

In France, home to western Europe's largest Muslim community, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner ordered regional authorities to bolster security at mosques as a precaution.

London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the city's Metropolitan Police force would be visible outside mosques.

"London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack," he said. "London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy."

Mayor Bill de Blasio said New York City is providing extra security for Muslim community centres and mosques. He said he wants the city's Muslims to know that New Yorkers "truly embrace" them and "have their backs."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians are appalled by the attack and said they remember all too well the sorrow after a Canadian man shot dead six Muslim men in a Quebec mosque in 2017.

"Far too often, Muslims suffer unimaginable loss and pain in the places where they should feel safest," Trudeau said in a statement. "To move forward as a world, we need to recognize diversity as a source of strength, and not a threat."

Indonesia's President Joko Widodo condemned the attacks, in which an Indonesian father and son were among those wounded. Indonesian Muslim leaders expressed anger at the shooting rampage while urging Muslims to show restraint.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said bigotry in Western countries contributed to the attacks on Muslims in New Zealand. In a Friday tweet, he also criticized the West for "defending demonization of Muslims as 'freedom of expression.'"

Afghanistan's Taliban movement  Islamic militants who carry out near-daily attacks on Afghan security forces  also condemned the shooting rampage, calling it an "unforgivable crime."

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yusuf called on the New Zealand government to investigate "the root cause of such terrorism and hand a hefty punishment to the attackers."
'So much we want the public to know': Meritus COVID cases surge again
Rob Gibson

Canada's Public Safety Minister, Ralph Goodale addressed the media in Kelowna Friday morning regarding Canada's response to the shootings in New Zealand.

At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers in an attack broadcast in a horrifying, live video by an immigrant-hating white supremacist wielding at least two assault rifles and a shotgun in New Zealand.

One man has been arrested and charged with murder, and two other armed suspects have been taken into custody while police try to determine what role they played in the hate crime.

Goodale spoke from the banks of Mill Creek at the Parkinson Recreation Centre and indicated he will be speaking with his New Zealand counterpart, Justice Minister, Andrew Little later today.

Goodale has offered Canada's support and assistance to the government and people of New Zealand. Goodale indicates he is in constant contact with Canadian security officials, including the Commissioner of the RCMP and the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. "Canada's threat level remains unchanged at medium where it has stood since 2014."

Goodale reiterated "Canada's unwavering commitment to protect the safety and security of Canadians and indicated that the RCMP will be working with police in local jurisdictions across the country to ensure proper public safety at all facilities."
Photo: Heather Prisk Robert Wright in Penticton

Lawyers representing a former Penticton couple are in Vancouver Supreme Court today, arguing for access to a trust set up after a settlement the husband received following a brain injury he received at the hands of the RCMP in Northern B.C.

Robert Wright suffered a severe brain injury in 2012 after having his head smashed into the bench of a Terrace, B.C. jail cell, while he was handcuffed, by Const. Brian Heideman. Wright had been detained on suspicion of drunk driving. RCMP and Wright reached a multi-million dollar settlement, with his new wife, Heather Prisk assigned as trustee and caregiver.

Const. Heideman, now stationed in Vernon, has faced other allegations of excessive force while interacting with First Nations men.

Prisk and Wright moved to Penticton after receiving the settlement and lived in the Delta Mobile Home Park prior to being evicted due to redevelopment plans.

The relationship between Prisk and the administrators of the trust, Deloitte and now Royal Trust, fractured over a disagreement on whether the trust would pay for a caregiver beyond the 40 hours a week Prisk was already providing herself. The trust also refused to pay for expenses like vet bills for the couple's dogs.

Since Prisk resigned as trustee in 2017, she has not been getting any remuneration for the care she provides her husband. Despite the seven-figure settlement, the pair are now living in a trailer on First Nations land in New Brunswick on just $2,000 a month.

Either pay me for the care that I provide, or pay somebody else for the care that he needs, Prisk told Castanet, adding she wants to be able to go get a job if shes not getting paid for her time caring for her husband.

Prisk holds a degree in social work, which has helped her care for Wright.

If I didnt have my education and the background that I have, I probably couldnt do this, but because I can do it doesn't mean I should be taken advantage of.

Im held hostage, she added. The number one priority should be Rob having a roof over his head with enough income to support himself and live in the community and the care that he needs to remain in his home.

Lawyers representing Wright, Prisk and Royal Trust have a hearing in Vancouver Friday  coincidentally on International Day Against Police Brutality  seeking the administrators of the trust accept Wrights wishes that his wife cares for him and is paid for her time.

I want to continue to live with Heather and our dogs, he stated in a sworn affidavit. I do not want to live in a care facility under any circumstances. The idea of a care facility makes me think of prison.

Heather helps me every day. She organizes my days, drives me to my appointments...helps me with everyday tasks like dressing and grooming...provides me with companionship, and calms me down when I get worried or stressed. I trust Heather to make decisions for me and care for me.

I want to be able to use monies from the trust to pay for the full-time care and support Heather gives me, the affidavit concludes.

In a statement, Wrights lawyers said they are asking the courts to give him some degree of control over how his settlement is spent, taking into account his own wishes and views, because the best interests of Mr. Wright depend on Mr. Wright himself and his specific circumstances and experiences.

We had a future, we had plans and had only been married eight and a half months, when the jail beating occurred, Prisk said. I should be able to get up and go to work in the morning."

The hearing in Vancouver Friday is expected to last at least one full day.
Photo: Twitter

A First Nation in B.C.'s Central Interior says it will seek an injunction from the province's top court in order to halt the start of drilling at what it considers a sacred lake on its territory.

The Tsilhqot'in Nation is against a plan by Taseko Mines to begin drilling on Tuesday and has scheduled a hearing in the BC Court of Appeal for next Friday in a bid to protect Fish Lake, known as Teztan Biny in its language.

Taseko's proposed New Prosperity Mine was approved for development by the provincial government in 2010 and it issued a drilling permit in 2017 for the company to collect geotechnical information.

The Tsilhqot'in challenged the permit in the appeal court, but it upheld a lower-court decision on March 1, and now the First Nation says it will attempt to have the Supreme Court of Canada hear its case.

The federal government had twice rejected the mine, citing damage to fish and fish habitat.

Taseko spokesman Brian Battison says the work slated to start Tuesday is the company's attempt to prove fish in the lake will not be harmed.
(JNS)Twelve pro-Israel groups delivered a letter on Monday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), urging for the removal of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the committee amid the Minnesota congresswomans latest anti-Semitic remarks.

Speaker Pelosi, you demonstrated wisdom and leadership in rebuking Rep. Omar on February 11 following her use of anti-Semitic stereotypes, and Chairman Engel, your reaction to the classic anti-Semitic trope of the charge of dual loyalty about American Jews, that Rep. Omar uttered this weekend at a Washington establishment, was highly appropriate, and we applaud you both for that, they said.

We hope you will continue to demonstrate your commitment to the high moral standards of your office by removing Rep. Omar, a woman who has repeatedly exhibited strong biases against the State of Israel and the Jewish people, from this critically important and sensitive committee, the continued.

The groups also sounded the alarm ahead of Omars scheduled appearance at Islamic Relief USA, whose parent organization and chapters have documented ties to terrorist organizations.

The organizations said her upcoming keynote speaker gig demonstrates that she has learned next to nothing over the last few weeks when she was reprimanded by [Pelosi and Engels] office and by other Democrats for posting ugly, anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and their organizations.

The groups included the Endowment for Middle East Truth, ACT for America, Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi), Americans for a Safe Israel, Americans for Peace and Tolerance, Center for Security Policy, Coalition for Jewish Values, Committee for Israel, The Jewish Policy Center, National Council of Young Israel, Zachor Legal Institute and Jexodus, the Millennial Pro-Israel Movement.

In a separate appeal, the Republican Jewish Coalition called on Pelosi to remove Omar from the committee: Anti-Semitic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar must be stripped of her membership on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the only person that can do this, and it is her responsibility to do this as the head of Omars party.

In a separate letter to Pelosi, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt requested a congressional resolution condemning anti-Semitic sentiment.

Rep. Omar has argued that these statements reflect good faith disagreements about U.S. policy toward Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the relationship between the two, he said. This could not be further from the truth.

Accusing Jews of having allegiance to a foreign government has long been a vile anti-Semitic slur that has been used to harass, marginalize and persecute the Jewish people for centuries, he continued. Sometimes referred to as the dual-loyalty charge, it alleges that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens because their true allegiance is to their co-religionists around the world or to a secret and immoral Jewish agenda.

This anti-Semitic allegation posits that non-Jews should not trust the motives or actions of their Jewish neighbors, who may be engaged in deceitful behavior to accomplish their own goals at the expense of others, he added.
John Hickenlooper participates in a discussion as part of the Brookings Institution's Middle Class Initiative in Washington, D.C., Oct. 10, 2018.

(JTA)-John Hickenlooper is the latest Democrat who thinks he can win back the White House in 2020. The former Colorado governor and self-described "extreme moderate" announced his candidacy on Monday and is holding his first campaign rally this week.

"Ultimately I'm running for president because I believe that not only can I beat Donald Trump, but that I am the person that can bring people together on the other side and actually get stuff done," he said on "Good Morning America."

During his political tenure as governor of Colorado and mayor of Denver, Hickenlooper, a Quaker, built strong ties with the Jewish community and Israel. He also managed to learn some Yiddish along the way. JTA rounded up some of the highlights from his Jewish record.

Visiting Israel for the first time had a deep impact

In 2013, Hickenlooper made the trip with Larry Mizel, a prominent Jewish Colorado businessman. In Israel, he had a nearly hour-long meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a three-hour dinner with former prime minister Ehud Olmert. He also did the typical tourist things: He "bobbed around like a cork in the Dead Sea," visited Masada, rode a camel and touched the Western Wall.

Israel wowed Hickenlooper, who has consistently expressed support for the country and has spoken at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's annual conference. He called his visit "the most remarkable seven-day trip of my life, without question."

In an interview about the trip with the Colorado statesman, Hickenlooper couldn't stop raving about Israel.

"We met tons of entrepreneurs of all different stripes. It's got to be the most entrepreneurial driven... It's like a gigantic version of Boulder, right? Just entrepreneurs everywhere," he said.

Hickenlooper was particularly amazed by the trees planted by the Jewish National Fund (he even got to plant one of his own), a topic he returned to several times in the interview, and Israel's agricultural system.

"Anyway, to see the incredible innovations in agriculture and the efficient use of water, I mean... I always for some reason thought it was so desert like that they were importing most of their food," he said. "My gosh, what an amazing agricultural system it is."

He also was deeply moved by a visit to Yad Vashem, calling the national Holocaust memorial "the most transformative museum experience I've ever had in my life."

In 2016, Hickenlooper signed a bipartisan bill requiring the state's retirement program to divest from companies that boycott Israel.

He thinks Colorado and Israel are natural partners-in the cannabis industry

In 2015, two years after that initial Israel visit, Hickenlooper led a trip there to encourage business ties between the country and his state, notably in the recreational and medical marijuana industry.

"You guys have some of the top resources in the world on some of these effects, and we have resource money now, so we are looking for partners," he told The Jerusalem Post at the time.

Hickenlooper, who initially opposed decriminalizing recreational marijuana, told the Post he had come around.

The trip wasn't just about cannabis. His delegation also worked to improve ties between Colorado and Israel in other fields such as agriculture and cyber security.

He is close with a Jewish Republican businessman

Mizel, a businessman and Republican donor, has been described as a "close friend" of the Democratic presidential hopeful. Mizel organized Hickenlooper's 2013 trip to Israel and the lawmaker has traveled on a plane owned by Mizel's company, MDC holdings, on at least one occasion. In 2007, the real estate developer honored Hickenlooper with a community enrichment award given through the Mizel Institute.

Mizel has been described as "a go-to person for Republicans looking to understand Israel and demonstrate their support for it." He serves on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition and plans trips for Republican political hopefuls, including arranging meetings with Israeli leaders, according to Politico. In 2016, Mizel helped organize a fundraiser for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, for which attendees paid up to $25,000.

Mizel declined a request for comment by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the pair's relationship and how they navigate their obvious political differences.

He seems to have a favorite Yiddish word

Hickenlooper used Yiddish to make a point about unity in Colorado when he was inaugurated as governor in 2011.

"There's a Yiddish word, 'landsman,' which roughly translated means 'a fellow villager'  a stranger, perhaps, but still someone you welcome because you know they share a common connection in the village of your ancestors," he said in the speech.

"I think we can learn from this Yiddish expression and the warmth it evokes. This value doesn't spring from government. But it can teach all of us to govern together. I feel that every Coloradan is a member of our administration."

It turns out that he learned the word at a Jewish event he attended the previous year, when Mizel introduced the then-mayor of Denver as "an honorary landsman," the Intermountain Jewish News reported.

The word seems to have stuck with Hickenlooper. On a visit to a local Chabad house in 2017, he used landsman again to talk about unity in Colorado, according to Col Live.

He attended local Jewish events

Hickenlooper built ties with Colorado Jews by attending Jewish events, including one for men by the local federation's men's event, a Hanukkah menorah lighting and a Holocaust remembrance hosted by the Anti-Defamation League. In October, he participated in a vigil at Temple Emanuel, a Reform synagogue in Denver, to honor the 11 victims of the shooting at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue.

"We are a nation built on freedoms, and our most sacred freedom is the freedom of worship," Hickenlooper said at the vigil. "It's come to the point where that which is valued the most is most at risk."
Puppets of Jews on display at the Aalst Carnaval in Belgium on March 3, 2019.

(JTA)-Participants in a street celebration in the Belgian city of Aalst paraded giant puppets of Orthodox Jews and a rat atop money bags.

Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs condemned the float Sunday at the annual Aalst Carnaval street celebration as "shocking." It contains "typical, anti-Semitic caricatures from 1939," he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The umbrella groups representing Flemish and French-speaking Jews in Belgium, FJO and CCOJB respectively, complained to the federal UNIA watchdog on racism about the display. "In a democracy like Belgium, there is no room for such things, carnival or not," they wrote.

The group Vismooil'n created the two puppets as their 2019 theme for the Aalst carnival, the local edition of celebrations that take place throughout parts of Europe and Latin America annually in anticipation of Lent, the 40-day period before Easter. Participants prepare floats and dance routines, parading them through town on Carnaval.

The Vismooil'n group, a veteran participant that specializes in hyper-realistic puppets, created the display to address rising prices, they told a Belgian blogger last month. They titled the work "Shabbat Year."

The display features two giant puppets with streimels, hats favored by some Orthodox Jews, in pink suits. They both have sidelocks. One of the puppets is grinning while smoking a cigar and extending a hand, presumably to collect money. That puppet has a white rat on his right shoulder. Both puppets are standing on gold coins and have money bags at their feet.

In the background is a round window reminiscent of the architecture of many European synagogues and a small box resembling a mezuzah on its right-hand side.

"Everything has become so expensive [we though that] if we do 2019, there would be no more money left for next year," a member of the group was quoted as saying. "So we all went quiet until we smartly decided to go for the Shabbat Year and that was that. So simple."

In 2013, a different group designed for the Aalst carnival a float resembling a Nazi railway wagon used to transport Jews to death camps.

The people who designed the float, known as the FTP Group, marched near the float dressed as Nazi SS officers and haredi Orthodox Jews. A poster on the wagon showed Flemish Belgian politicians dressed as Nazis and holding canisters labeled as containing Zyklon B, the poison used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews in gas chambers in the Holocaust.
(Chabad.org/News via JNS)One of the chief engineers involved in the creation and post-launch supervision of the moon-bound Israeli spacecraft Beresheet is a Chabad-Lubavitch Chassid who overcame Soviet oppression and anti-Semitism to play a leading role in Israels public and private space programs.

Mathematician and engineer Alexander Friedman, 68, currently enjoys the freedoms and high accolades of a noted Israeli rocket scientist, but was once part of a Soviet-era family forced to pray in silence for fear the neighbors would turn them in.

His father, Zalman, a combat engineering officer in the Soviet army, was jailed for Jewish activism just before his son was born, accused with dozens of other Jews and fellow Chabad contemporaries of collecting money to smuggle Jews to Israel. He was sentenced to labor camp in Kazakhstan for seven years. As a result, father and son didnt meet until Alexander was 7. With the help of doctors notes, the boy would feign sickness to avoid having to attend school on Shabbat, one of the many other tactics the family used to persevere in their practice of Judaism.

Alexander, his mother, Dina, a medical secretary, and his grandparents lived in a two-room virtually mud and straw hut without internal plumbing in Moscow, awaiting the fathers return. One of the young Friedmans fond memories was hearing his grandfathers sing-song voice reciting Psalms early in the morning.

This was the way of life for many Jews in Soviet Russia, whose lives were subject to even greater scrutiny and hardship once they revealed they wanted to leave Russia, as was the case with the Friedman family. When Friedman reached college age, Soviet oppression and anti-Semitism would prevent him from his first wish: becoming a physicist. Because of his familys Jewish activism, he was prevented from enrolling in a university physics program and redirected himself to mathematics.

From immigrant to directing a control room of 25 scientists

The Friedman family was permitted to leave Russia in 1970 and immigrated to Israel with thousands of other refuseniks. At the age of 20, Friedman enlisted in a selective division of the Israeli Defense Forces and later entered the space program.

A graduate with a masters degree in applied mathematics from Hebrew University and with more than 35 years of experience in satellite design, he is the systems-engineering manager and control room director among some 25 scientists monitoring the moon launch from the ground.

Just before the space launch, Friedman, a father of seven and grandfather of 21 who lives in Nof Ayalon in the center of Israel, commented about what he felt was exceptionally momentous about his involvement in the project.

This is an inspiring event, Friedman said via social-media post. For me, it is also the closing of a personal and national circle.

The boy from Russia who was not accepted to study physics because he was a Jew is now part of a team that is sending off a spacecraft containing a disk with the entire Hebrew Bible scanned onto it.

A spiritual payload

A time capsule was loaded onto the unmanned craft containing various Jewish artifacts, including a digitally encoded Tanach, an acronym that refers to the Five Books of Moses, the Holy Writings and the words of the Prophets. Another key inclusion was a digital Chitas, a compilation of the Chumash (Five Books of Moses), the Tanya (the foundational work of Chabad Chassidus) and Tehillim (Book of Psalms).

Friedman expounded on what it has been like to be a serious Torah-observant Jew and an equally serious rocket scientist throughout his career, claiming in the end to have exceptional role models.

Maimonides was a doctor and an astronomer and the Lubavitcher Rebbe [Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson] studied electrical engineering, mathematics and physics, he noted. Regarding being surrounded in the program largely by non-practicing Jews, As long as everything is done with mutual respect and acceptance of the other, there should be no problem, he told Kfar Chabad magazine. I feel like a shaliach [emissary]. Like the Rebbe always said, a Jew should be an emissary in every place that he is.

If the spacecraft in fact overcomes all obstacles after more than a month of orbiting the Earth and then the moon before its scheduled touch down on April 11, it will make Israel the fourth country to land on the moon, after the United States, Russia and China.

The first privately funded moon-landing project, which was created by startup company SpaceIL and later supported by Israel Aerospace Industries, has as its main goal discovering more about the moons magnetic fields through a study of its rocks.

The four-legged spacecraft, 180 kilograms and approximately the size of a washing machine, lifted off on Feb. 21 from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The craft was hitched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from the private U.S.-based SpaceX company of entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Friedman had a prayer composed for the success of the mission, which expressed the hope that Gd should lead our spacecraft to peace and bring it to peace, and save it from all sorts of malfunctions, and allow us to see it reach the moon in peace. And may You bring it back in happiness and in peace.

This article originally appeared on Chabad.org/News.
(JNS)Amid this week being Palestinian Rights Awareness Week at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., pro-Israel campus students and Hillel professionals disagree on the appropriate approach toward countering the latest installation of anti-Israel bias. While some campus activists want to fight the initiative head on, Hillel professionals have been counseling the students to lay low.

The week-long initiative, promoted by Kristina Guptaan assistant professor at the schools Department of Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studiesis dedicated to raising awareness about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the importance of recognizing Palestinian rights.

Students reached out to Hillel International for assistance on fighting back against the event, but were met with advice to let it pass without creating any additional attention.

Wake Forest junior Joshua Sokoloff told JNS that the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Students Supporting Israel (SSI) and StandWithUs (SWU) have more of an on-campus presence than Hillel.

Hillel International states they are deeply involved with Israel, and donors give money to Hillel for specifically this reason, he told JNS. Organizations such as SSI, ZOA and StandWithUs have reached out to us to provide support. They have been pivotal in helping us counteract this poorly organized week that has taken actions to attack Israel.

It is times like this where we cannot be silent and need to stand in unison to protect Jewish students on campus, he added.

In an email obtained by JNS to WFU Hillel Israel chair Phillip Yurchenko, director of Jewish life on campus Gail Bretan instructed him to stay low-key, ask respectful/thoughtful/insightful questions and to present alternative information to that which is presented throughout the events.

Yurchenko, however, told Bretan that only Jews are expected to lay low in the face of bigotry. Imagine rumors of a homophobic event coming to campus and the director of the LGBTQ+ Center telling students to not bring more attention to the event, he continued. Imagine rumors of a racist speaker coming to campus and a university official telling concerned students to not bring more attention to the event. Unimaginable.

Bretan also noted that Palestinian Rights Awareness Week is a direct response to a pro-Israel resolution passed by the student government in December.

The resolutions main clauses state that the Student Government recognizes that some, but not all, criticisms of and attacks on the State of Israel can be anti-Semitic dog-whistles and condemns such criticisms and attacks, including denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination and denying Israel the right to exist.

Yurchenko, a junior who is also president of Wake Forests chapter of Students Supporting Israel, rebuked Bretans claim that the passed pro-Israel resolution is to blame for this weeks anti-Israel festivities.

The present situation is not a direct response to a resolution that simply stated that Jews have same rights as ALL other people, he said [emphasis his].

For years, anti-Semitism at WFU was bubbling just under the surface, he continued. Professor [Charles] Kennedys infamous class on the Middle East has been discussed endlessly. Jewish students are warned to not take the class because it is so incredibly biased. Multiple WFU professors have signed on to BDS, which is a movement with the aim of destroying the Jewish state. The list could go on, but blaming the resolution for the situation is dishonest.

Bretan did not respond to a request for comment, instead forwarding it to Timothy Auman, a chaplain at the university.

Regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there are many different perspectives, including those represented in the student-organized campaign and those of student groups representing other worldviews, said Auman. Given the strong response to the information on display for Palestinian Awareness Week in the Benson University Center atrium, the Office of the Dean of Students has made additional space available for community members to display alternative information, perspectives and beliefs.

Not draw attention to it

Wake Forest junior Gabriel Benzecry chastised Hillel International for not assisting the pro-Israel community on campus: They werent a helpful resource during this week.

Although I am not connected to Hillel anymore, I was the president of our Wake Forest chapter last year, he continued. Our chapter has being super helpful and is definitely a pillar of the pro-Israel movement in our campus.

However, I cannot say the same thing about Hillel International, he added. They did not offer a relevant support for students, and they did not have a presence in our campus like other organizations did.

Along the same lines as Bretan, Jason Horowitz, regional Israel education director at Hillel International, emailed Yurchenko, writing, My initial thoughts are to not give it more publicity than it already has. If we make a big deal out of it happening, its going to attract more attention. We should keep tabs on it, but not draw attention to it.

Hillel International campus support director Rebecca Simons concurred with her colleague, emailing Yurchenko: Jason raises some very important points. The balance [here] is to manage the situation on campus without drawing further attention to the issue. The last thing you want is that your actions increase the publicity around their efforts.

Yurchenko told JNS that in a conversation with Simons, She asked what she could do to be supportive of Jewish students. I said it would be great to see a statement from Hillel International condemning the anti-Semitism on [the] Wake Forest campus. She told me that is complicated because she does not speak for all of Hillel International and because of free speech.

Hillel believes strongly that all students have the right to feel safe and welcome on college campuses, and has no tolerance for anti-Semitism, Hillel International vice president of communications Matthew Berger told JNS. We work closely with university leaders across the country to prevent and mitigate anti-Semitic incidents on campus, as well as to train administrators to understand how attacks on Israel can often lead to anti-Semitic rhetoric.

We are supporting the Office of Jewish Life at Wake Forest University as they work with students, staff and the campus administration toward a common goal of a Wake Forest University community in which Jewish students, faculty and staff feel safe and valued as they engage in Jewish life, learning and Israel, he continued.

We have been and continue to work throughout the year to provide opportunities for Jewish and pro-Israel programs, speakers and initiatives to counter anti-Israel activities on the campus, added Berger. In the last year, Wake Forest has hosted a UNESCO photo exhibit on Israel and anti-Semitism, explored Israeli cooking and archaeology, and sent students to experience Israel themselves through Birthright and Onward.

A duty to listen to Jewish students

Masha Merkulova, executive director of Club Z, which has helped Yurchenko and his peers through the dilemma, told JNS that we have a duty to listen to Jewish university students across the country; they are the ones on the ground. In the case of Wake Forest University, students followed what we preach: speak up against anti-Semitism and the delegitimization of Israel on campus.

It is extremely disappointing that Hillel International discouraged these students by advising them to lay low and not attract attention to what is happening, she continued. Thats unacceptable. We must do better as a Jewish community and act in support of students. I am so proud that these students are standing up for themselves and for the entire Jewish people. These are the kind of leaders we need today.

In his email to Bretan, Yurchenko said, I will not stay low-key when I see anti-Semitism. I will always be respectful, but I will not be quiet. If anyone sees it another way, I challenge you to question your ethics and truly ask yourself where you stand.

I am most disgusted with the suggestion to stay low-key,  he said. Many Jewish students are worried about anti-Semitism coming to campus, and our support system is advising us not bring more attention to this event.
NEW YORK (JTA)-At the end of March, the National Council of Young Israel, an Orthodox synagogue association, will hold a gala dinner hosted by Pete Hegseth, the co-host of "Fox & Friends."

The invitation advertises that Rep. Kevin McCarthy and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, both Republicans, will speak. Tommy Hicks, the co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, will receive the Guardian of Israel award. The chairman of the dinner, Rabbi Yechezkel Moskowitz, has tweeted that "#DemocratsAreDestroyingAmerica."

Moskowitz has also trained his Twitter fire on Young Israel rabbis who object to their group's rightward tilt.

"Everyone of the Rabbis on this list from reconstructionist lover @RabbiStarrYITH to tree hugger Barry Kornblau should be ashamed of themselves joining with liberal progressive groups like @IfNotNowOrg in attacking @NCYIYoungIsrael for defending Israels democracy," he tweeted Monday.

Moskowitz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he speaks only for himself, not Young Israel.

In non-Twitter-speak, Moskowitz was referring to a small-scale rebellion in the 107-year-old association, which counts more than 100 Orthodox synagogues nationwide among its members. Young Israel synagogues practice Orthodox Judaism and are Zionist. The name Young Israel is one of the most identifiable markers of an Orthodox synagogue in the United States.

For years, the National Council of Young Israel has issued public statements largely supporting right-wing policies and politicians, including President Donald Trump. But now a group of Young Israel rabbis and leaders are protesting the group's political positions. They say the statements do not necessarily represent their views and are made without consulting member synagogues. Some synagogues have floated leaving Young Israel, in part over this issue.

"I would have liked an apology for speaking on our behalf, with divisive issues that are not representative," said Rabbi Adam Starr, who leads Young Israel of Toco Hills in Atlanta. Starr was one of the rabbis Moskowitz called out in his tweet.

"There certainly have been statements made in the past on political issues," Starr said. "My approach is not about whether it's right wing or left wing. A synagogue organization should not be making deeply divisive political statements on our behalf."

All major American Jewish religious movements weigh in on public policy, usually with a distinct ideological if not partisan tilt. And the National Council of Young Israel's president, Farley Weiss, told JTA that he sees such advocacy as part of the group's mission.

Weiss said the Jewish people face "existential threats," pointing in particular to statements by U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, that many see as echoing anti-Semitic stereotypes. He added that Young Israel has long been politically active, working on behalf of displaced Holocaust survivors, Soviet Jewry and various pro-Israel causes, like moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

"I know that the overwhelming majority of our shuls want us speak out on these issues," he said. "The National Council of Young Israel has been, historically, an organization of activism that has been unparalleled in Jewish organizations."

A split over Israeli politics

The current backlash came over politics in Israel, not America. Last week, Weiss defended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brokering a deal with Jewish Power, or Otzma Yehudit, a far-right political party, for a merger with the more moderate right-wing Jewish Home party ahead of elections in April. A range of American Jewish groups condemned the move as a normalization of bigotry. Weiss in a statement called it a matter of political calculus.

Weiss said the statement was meant to defend a legitimate political maneuver-"what we consider to be a decision made that was not going to lead to anything more than the Jewish Home party being part of the government coalition."

After Starr and other Young Israel congregational rabbis objected, Weiss clarified in a statement that he was speaking for himself and a majority of the board, not necessarily for member synagogues. But the controversy has not abated. Last week, 23 Young Israel synagogues signed a statement objecting to Weiss' comment in particular as well as Young Israel's political statements in general.

"In recognition of the current, highly divisive political environment in the United States, Israel, and beyond, we... call upon NCYI leadership to immediately cease making all political pronouncements," the synagogues' statement said.

Weiss is unhappy that synagogues chose to make a public statement objecting to his stance, especially after his second statement clarifying that he was not speaking for them. He said it was the first time that a statement of his elicited this level of backlash.

"To me that should have been the end of it, and if they wanted to say things to their congregations or under their own names, it's perfectly fine to do that," he said. "I don't think they should have made a statement and made a public debate."

But some Young Israel rabbis say there is a larger issue at play that they have raised previously with the national organization.

Rabbi Barry Kornblau of the Young Israel of Hollis Hills-Windsor Park in Queens, New York, called the Jewish Power statement "the final hammer blow, the straw that broke the camel's back."

"There's been long-simmering discontent among numerous Young Israel congregations, Young Israel leaders, Young Israel rabbis, regarding a whole variety of public policy statements that have been issued by the leadership of NCYI," said Kornblau, one of the public statement's co-authors and another target of Moskowitz's Twitter fire. "Local rabbis and lay leaders do not want to be addressing such controversies in their communities."

Endorsing Republican politics

The issue is larger than the Israeli election statement, some rabbis say. Recent years have seen national Young Israel leadership unabashedly supporting Republican politics in a variety of forums.

Young Israel's first vice president, Joseph Frager, effusively praised Trump at a February event in Israel. A Young Israel staff member gave a benediction at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference. Following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October, Young Israel thanked Trump for visiting Pittsburgh and posted to Facebook, "The Jewish people in the US & Israel have never had such a great champion in the White House."

In addition, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman belonged to a Young Israel near his home in Woodmere, New York. Friedman was Trump's attorney.

"Truthfully, you have never seen anything-the revolution that this man has created for the Jewish community in the world, and particularly in Israel," said Frager, referring to Trump. "Incredible things that people just take for granted, but we don't take for granted ... I know everyone in the National Council of Young Israel doesn't take for granted. We know who our friends are and what they have done."

And Weiss' Jewish Power statement is not the first controversial one Young Israel has made. Last year it defended Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, after he suggested that liberal financier George Soros betrayed fellow Jews during the Holocaust. Soros survived the Holocaust as a young teen by hiding in the family home of a gentile man who occasionally took him along when he surveyed Jewish-owned properties.

"What Louie Gohmert said was based upon this interview w/ 60 Minutes in which Soros in his own words clearly implied he helped in confiscation of Jewish property during holocaust while posing as a non Jew & saying he felt no guilt doing so," Young Israel posted to Facebook, adding that Soros' statement "upset many Jews."

(Abraham Foxman, the former national director of the Anti-Defamation League and himself a child survivor of the Holocaust, dismissed the criticism of Soros. "To hold a young boy responsible for what was going on around him during the Holocaust as part of a larger effort to denigrate the man is repugnant," Foxman said in 2010.)

In 2016, studies showed that most Orthodox Jews voted for Trump, even as most Jews overall voted for Hillary Clinton. For American Jews who favor hawkish positions on Israel, supporting Trump has come naturally as he has forged a close alliance with Netanyahu.

Weiss said there is no problem with praising Trump for what he sees as two groundbreaking pro-Israel actions: moving the embassy move to Jerusalem and withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal brokered by his predecessor.

"People view our praise of him, on especially these two issues, as somehow we're being more partisan," he said. "The fact is, when I was [Young Israel] president under President Obama, when I felt there was something we could praise President Obama for, we praised him."

The protesting rabbis say they have two problems with the National Council's statements: how contentious their subject matter can be, and that synagogues are not consulted before the statements are released. Rabbi Heshie Billet of Young Israel of Woodmere, New York, says synagogues should at the very least have a chance to read and respond to statements before they go out.

"It means they're speaking in the name of my synagogue," said Billet, a former president of the Rabbinical Council of America. "How are they supposed to know when they're speaking in the name of my synagogue or not? President Trump has certainly done good things for Israel. Nevertheless, that is a political statement. If you're going to make a statement, you have to be speaking for the entire Young Israel national council."

Weiss believes the statements do reflect Young Israel's synagogues because delegates from member congregations elect the slate of national board members. He said he composes the political statements in conjunction with Frager and a public relations consultant.

Dinner, then a break?

Will the protesting synagogues leave Young Israel? As of now, none has immediate plans to do so, though a couple of rabbis discussed the idea.

Discontent among those synagogues has only risen as the Republican-heavy dinner approaches. And tweets by Moskowitz attacking the protesting rabbis have inflamed tensions even more.

"Unfortunately 'some' Rabbis, such as yourself, have decided to become tools of the liberal Progressive left in a crusade to push their ideology," Moskowitz tweeted to Starr, the Atlanta rabbi, on Tuesday. "Baruch Hashem, lines are going to be drawn in the sand and I think that this is just the beginning."

Starr responded to Moskowitz's initial Twitter attack on Facebook, where he wrote, "Yes, I am a reconstructionist lover, and a reform lover and a conservative lover and an orthodox lover, because I love all Jews. Even those who make mistakes in judgement such as tweeting something like this."

Since then, Weiss has asked Moskowitz to refrain from attacking Young Israel rabbis personally, and chalked up the statements to the polarizing effect of social media. He added that Young Israel aims to commend pro-Israel Democrats as well as Republicans. In addition to the Republicans, Democratic Rep. Grace Meng of New York also will be speaking at the dinner.

Moskowitz also told JTA that he believes Young Israel should strive to be bipartisan. But he still had harsh words for the Democratic Party.

"I am 100 percent committed for this dinner, to make sure Young Israel is a success in a bipartisan fashion, to represent its bipartisan values," he said, adding later that "I have very good relations with Democrats. When I say Democrats are destroying America, it's not directed at a person. It's as a movement. I believe their agenda will destroy America."

Before the Twitter war, Starr told JTA that his synagogue board was considering dropping the Young Israel affiliation. He's not sure what benefit it brings to the congregation, which is also affiliated with the Orthodox Union, a centrist Orthodox umbrella group.

"Many Young Israels, including my [own], are also O.U. synagogues," Starr said. "So we're a proud member of the Orthodox Union. What is the value of having multiple synagogue affiliations?"

Rabbi Barry Kornblau of Young Israel of Hollis Hills-Windsor in Queens, N.Y., has protested the national Young Israel organization's right-wing stances.

Billet said, "I have no great need to be the rabbi of a Young Israel synagogue," but that "there's been no major uprising in my community to say we don't want to be members."

For his part, Moskowitz tweeted that Starr's synagogue should leave the movement. It took part in a joint memorial service with a Reconstructionist congregation following the Pittsburgh shooting and, he said, "that alone should have it booted from the National Council."

But other Young Israel congregations that signed the protest statement still want to remain part of the movement. Rabbi Moshe Shulman of Young Israel of St. Louis said that being a Young Israel member means having name recognition-and taking part in a national movement.

"If they want to move to the community or are passing through, they hear Young Israel, they know that's an Orthodox shul," he said. "There are other Young Israels around the country we connect with. There's a lot of value to being a synagogue that has a name that represents something."
On Friday, Feb. 22, 500 students, faculty, community members and parents gathered together in the Pegasus Ballroom, the center of campus for Chabad at UCF's seventh annual Mega Shabbat. This was an elegant evening of joy and Jewish pride that brought the entire Jewish campus community together.

This event brought out many students for the first time giving them a taste of Shabbat and showing them they have a community on campus they can call their own.

For more info about Chabad at UCF visit http://www.jewishucf.com.
The Jewish Family Services Restock Challenge food drive is here once again, running from March 15April 30. The Weiner Family and The Winter Park Wealth Group will generously match $0.50 for every $1 or pound of nonperishable food donated to restock JFS Orlandos Pearlman Emergency Food Pantry, with a total match up to $10,000.

Last year, the Restock Challenge collected enough donations to feed over 800 families. Please consider participating and joining JFS Orlando in fighting hunger in Central Florida.

A special thanks to the Winn Dixie located in Fern Park and Personal Mini Storage for providing collection bags and boxes.

Food donations can be dropped off at JFS Orlando - The George Wolly Center 2100 Lee Road Winter Park, FL 32789. Monetary donations can be made out to JFS Orlando and mailed to the same address or made online at http://www.JFSorlando.org.
A Torah scroll is unlike any other holy book. One can't just sit at a computer and type the letters that make the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The Torah scroll must be hand-written. And not just anyone can write the letters. It must be done by a sofer-a specially trained individual who is devout and knowledgeable in the laws about writing and assembling a scroll.

The parchment on which a scroll is written must be the skin of a kosher animal. The sofer also mixes a special ink and writes with a quill from a turkey feather.

Mel Pearlman adding a letter.

Once all the writing is complete, the pieces of the parchment are sewn together with a special thread. The finished scroll is attached to wooden rollers. After the scroll is completed a dedication takes place with a lot of celebration.

And so it was with Orlando Torah Academy. They welcomed a new Sefer Torah on Sunday, Feb. 10, after almost of year of writing by sofer Rabbi Betzalel Schur from Chicago. The project was undertaken by Dean Rabbi Avraham Wachsman to honor the memory of his father, who passed away a year earlier.

As the sofer completed the last few lines of the Torah (the last letter was written by Wachsman), the festivities began with Orlando Torah Academy students decorating flags and making other Torah-themed projects at a mini Kidstivities popup station, and then participated in the Torah marching musical parade as the Torah scroll was carried into its new home at the Orlando Torah Academy.
(JNS)John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020 on Monday.

Despite having led a state with a relatively small Jewish community, Hickenlooper has a wide-ranging relationship with the Jewish state, including two trips to Israel as the leader of the Centennial State between 2011 and 2019.

During his first 100 days in office, Hickenlooper, 67, organized a meeting between 65 Israeli and Colorado water officials to share ideas surrounding water problems and methods as both climates experience periods of severe drought.

In 2013, he traveled to Israel for the first time ever, calling it the most remarkable seven-day trip of my life, without question. He dined with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, met with current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and visited the Golan Heights and other sites.

Hickenlooper also heard from the experts at the Jewish National Fund. We have millions of acres with dead trees on it that were going to have to replant, he told The Colorado Statesman. In terms of drought and fire-resistant trees, theyre the experts in the world.

Critical to stand should-to-shoulder with Israel

The following year, Hickenlooper issued a statement following rocket attacks launched by Hamas in Gaza against Israel.

Violence in the Middle East has escalated, as Israel has launched rocket strikes against the terrorist organization Hamas in Gaza, he said. As outlined in a bipartisan resolution that was adopted in the U.S. Senate by unanimous consent on Tuesday evening, I support the United States mediation efforts for a durable ceasefire agreement that immediately ends Hamas rocket assaults and leads to the demilitarization of Gaza.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the violence on both sides. In chaos and carnage, right and wrong bleed in the rubble, and it becomes more critical that we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel, the only enduring democracy in the region, he continued. We wish the Middle East the peace it has for so long been unable to find.

In March 2015, Hickenlooper criticized the fraying relationship between the United States and Israel as Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress that was boycotted by Democrats, such as those in the Obama administration, including the president himself.

I think its unfortunate that this became a partisan issue. The relationship between the U.S. and Israel should never be partisan, Hickenlooper told FOX 31 Denver. Both parties have always stood steadfast in their support of Israel.

The governor expressed support for what was then negotiations between America and Iran over the latters nuclear-weapons program.

I cant believe that the United States would ever do anything to put Israel at risk, said Hickenlooper. I think Netanyahus concern is that our tolerance for risk might be higher than Israels.

Cannabis partnership with Israel

The following October, Hickenlooper led a two-week business delegation to Israel, declaring that the Jewish state could be a partner in the recreational cannabis industry, leading to more revenue for Colorado. He met with Netanyahu again and visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

We are reaching out. You guys have some of the top resources in the world on some of these effects, and we have resource money now, so we are looking for partners, Hickenlooper told The Jerusalem Post in Tel Aviv.

In that same interview, Hickenlooper expressed astonishment over how violence in Israel is covered in the press.

When we put the television on after 9/11and for seven days, all we did was watch the towers fallwe were doing the work of the terrorists, he said. I guess I was just surprised by how much the media was dominated by these attacks, which admittedly are alarming.

I dont want to diminish it in any way, he continued. This kind of violence is disturbing, but I think historically, Israels response to terror has been more measured, and it seems to be everywhere, and relative to when suicide bombers were blowing up and going into crowds, this violence, you wouldnt think it would get the same sensational headlines.

In 2016, Hickenlooper signed into law legislation that mandates Colorados retirement program divest from firms that boycott Israel.

He also signed onto the American Jewish Committees Governors United Against BDS campaign.

While Hickenlooper is joining an already crowded and growing field of 14 candidates, his executive experience from a purple Western state could appeal to moderate voters in the Democratic Party.
(JNS)This July, Argentinas Jewish community will mark the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were murdered and hundreds more were seriously wounded. It is promising to be a wretched and depressing commemoration, frankly, because there is no reason to expect anything else.

On July 18, 1994, a Renault utility truck packed with explosives smashed into the AMIA building in the busy downtown area of the Argentine capital, leaving a scene of absolute carnage in its wake. The bombing, which came two years after a nearly identical attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, an atrocity that killed 29 people, was similarly planned and carried out by the Iranian regime and its Lebanese Shiite proxy, Hezbollah. An entire generation later, exactly none of the AMIA suspects, the subjects of Interpol Red Notices since 2007, have been captured and placed on trial.

Indeed, as the years wound on, the AMIA investigation was exposed as a bigger source of political intrigue and duplicity than even the bombing itself. Consider the record. The first AMIA investigation, set up under former Argentine President Carlos Menem (more on him momentarily), collapsed after it was exposed as a den of corruption, whose strategic goal was to deflect attention from the responsibility of the Iranians for the bombing.

The second reconstituted AMIA investigation, set up under former President Nestor Kirchner in 2004, was more promising, principally because it became the domain of the fearless federal prosecutor, Alberto Nisman. It was Nismans diligent work that resulted in Interpol releasing those warrants for the senior Iranian and Hezbollah operatives. But Nisman eventually paid for his efforts with his life in 2015, when he was discovered murdered in his apartment hours before he was due to unveil a complaint against then-President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (the spouse of the now-deceased Nestor) that detailed her governments collusion in exonerating the Iranian mullahs.

Nisman, some said, was the 86th victim of the AMIA bombing. Cristina Kirchner, herself ousted from office by current President Mauricio Macri in November 2015, is widely suspected of both involvement in Nismans death, and of recruiting the Argentine police and judiciary into spreading the lie, exposed after Macris election, that he committed suicide. Now that Kirchner has been elected to Argentinas Senate, she can claim immunity from prosecution.

Of the six Interpol Red Notice suspects, the five Iranian officials among them remain at large, while the one LebaneseHezbollahs second-in-command, Imad Mughniyehwas killed by a car bomb in Damascus in 2008. Meanwhile, the other senior Iranian officials implicated in the AMIA bombing have never been subjected to even a tap on the shoulder. One of them, former Iranian President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, who allegedly hosted the meeting where the AMIA attack was decided upon, died two years ago. Another, the former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, still enjoys extensive influence as a senior adviser to the regimes so-called Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Justice has so far escaped the AMIA executioners; for those who abetted them, the record is also miserably poor. Last week, in the first significant AMIA-related event of this 25th anniversary year, the victims and their families received yet another kick in the teeth when a court in Buenos Aires acquitted Menem of engaging in a cover-up during the first, thoroughly discredited AMIA investigation.

Prosecutors had been pushing for Menem to serve a prison sentence of at least four years. Accused of endorsing bribes to officials that pushed the AMIA investigations attention away from the Iranians and onto domestic suspects, Menem was also named by a former senior Iranian intelligence operative as having been a paid asset of the Iranian regime during his term in office. But none of this was seriously examined in court, where Menem, as the Buenos Aires Times reported last Thursday, gave little away in his testimony, saying state secrets meant he was prevented from presenting bombshell evidence. His lawyer explained to the court in 2016 that Menem declined to reveal any information that could affect the current government, the interests of the nation, and peaceful coexistence with other nations. 

Some of the conspirators beneath Menem, including former federal judge Juan Jose Galeano, and former prosecutors Eamon Mullen and Jose Barbaccia, did receive prison sentences this week for their roles in corrupting the first AMIA investigation. But the exoneration of Menem brought a furious response from Memoria Activa, an Argentine-based advocacy group seeking justice for the AMIA victims. The judges decided to acquit Menem when it became clear, according to the evidence, that he was one of the main [individuals] responsible for the impunity in the AMIA case, the group said in a statement. His government knew that the attack was going to happen; not only did they not prevent it, they ordered the manipulation of the investigation so that the truth would not come out.

When Jewish leaders and foreign dignitaries fly into Buenos Aires this July, it is to be hoped that they will call the AMIA debacle for what it is: a travesty of justice, an insult to victims of terrorism everywhere and an exemplary case of a terror-sponsoring state, Iran, bribing and cajoling a foreign government to bend to its will after murdering nearly 100 of its citizens. There is much to mournmost of all those who died in the bombing, along with Alberto Nisman, who was assassinated for telling the truth. There is nothingnothing at allto be proud of.

Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS.
The Jewish community here in Central Florida should make its voice heard concerning the anti-Semitic slurs being spewn about in Congress as well as the appointment of Ilhan Omar to the Foreign Affairs Committee.

One community member, Dr. Daniel Layish, has made his voice heard by one congressman. (He said he even got a human being to answer the phone with no waiting.)

Call Congressman Eliot Engel (D-NY) to encourage him to stay strong in his condemnation of Ilhan Omar, Layish said.

Rep. Engel is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the ever-important committee to which Democratic leadership unbelievably assigned Omar.

Call Rep. Engel at 833-298-3536 and tell him to stand strong against Ilhan Omars anti-Semitism... and tell him to demand that Ilhan Omar be removed from HFAC, Layish further stated.

After Omars blatantly anti-Semitic comments, Rep. Engel had initially demanded an apology from Omar. Omar is now refusing to take responsibility for her anti-Semitism and apologize for her latest comments. Unfortunately, Rep. Engel is refusing to call for removing Omar from his committee.

We know that Congressman Engel is feeling a lot of pressure from the progressive base within the Democratic party who support Omar and her anti-Semitic views. In fact, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, theyre even threatening to run primary opponents against moderate, pro-Israel Democrats like Rep. Engel.

Its time for us to make sure Rep. Engel knows that the majority of Americans are disgusted by anti-Semitism, and we want him to continue standing up to the anti-Semites in his party, Laysih concluded.

Are we fed up with the anti-Semitic talk in our government? Can our Jewish Community Relations Council or the Holocaust Center speak up as well against this? Organized voices do speak louder than one single voice. Still, if enough single voices speak up, we will be heard.
(JNS)Why is anti-Semitism now out of control in the West?

Jew-hatred, alas, is always with us. The most we can expect is that it is kept down by unequivocal social disapproval. What causes it to explode into an uncontrolled epidemic is the weakening of that powerful social stigma.

After the Holocaust, the enormity of that crime was such that anti-Semitism went underground. Any such expressions that did occur were regarded as the province of cranks on the fringes of society who were accordingly shunned. What tells you the Jews are in trouble is when such expressions are regarded by a critical mass of the population with indifference or even approval.

Thats what is happening now in Britain, America and parts of mainland Europe.

Last weekend, participants in a street celebration for Lent in the Belgian city of Aalst paraded giant puppets of grotesquely caricatured Jews standing on gold coins with moneybags at their feet.

One, with a rat in his shoulder, was smoking a cigar and extending a hand as if to collect money. The Dutch Chief Rabbi, Binyomin Jacobs, condemned this display as shocking, typical, anti-Semitic caricatures from 1939.

The really shocking thing, however, was that the people who produced this float werent refused permission or driven from the carnival as social pariahs. On the contrary: They constructed this obscenity assuming that it would gain the approval and enthusiasm of the citizens of Aalst.

In America, freshman Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar tweeted soon after her election that AIPAC bought congressional support with the Benjamins. After a reminder that in 2012 she had accused Israel of hypnotizing the world and prayed that Allah awaken the people and help them see [Israels] evil doings, she issued a feeble apology before doubling down on her claim of a Jewish conspiracy.

Yet the Democrat House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, actually appointed Omar to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which gives her a platform from which to bash Israel. Worse still, the Democrats have also failed to act against other Jew and Israel-bashers, such as Omars fellow freshman representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, while prominent Democrats have also appeared on platforms with the virulent anti-Semite Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Omar further exacerbated her offence by claiming last week that she and Tlaib were being accused of anti-Semitism only because they were Muslims, and then suggesting that supporters of Israel in Congress were pushing for allegiance to a foreign country.

The proper response to such brazen and repeated anti-Semitism would be to remove Omar from Congress.

Yet Pelosi posed with Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, along with a black female novice congresswoman, on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, which Pelosis official website was promoting last weekend with the legend: A picture is worth a thousand words, and that this one was worth millions of dreams to women and girls across America.

Worse still, amid gathering uproar over Omars comments, the Democrats couldnt even bring themselves to vote on a feeble motion condemning anti-Semitism in general, but which didnt name Omar. They are now reportedly working on a motion to condemn all prejudice. Flinching from condemning the anti-Semites in their own ranks, they have failed to take any action against them at all.

Meanwhile, those supposed standard-bearers of liberal decency, The New York Times and The Washington Post suggested respectively that Omars attack on AIPAC raised important questions about the influence wielded by Zionists and Jews, and that if Pelosi unequivocally condemned anti-Semitism, she would provoke questions over Americas policy towards Israel.

All this suggests the Democrats are going the same way as Britains Labour Party, which is in an ever-deepening crisis over the virulent anti-Semitism that has erupted among, at minimum, hundreds of its members.

One tweeted Jews murder people and children and questioned whether Jewish parliamentarians had human blood with their hearts and brains totally devoid of humanity. Another ranted about their double dealing, back stabbing, cheating chilling coldness. Yet another reportedly wrote that Joan Ryan, the non-Jewish former chair of Labour Friends of Israel, should be thrown in the ovens.

The evidence is so appalling that almost 1,000 supporters of the partys hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn have even signed an open letter apologizing to the Jewish community, saying Labour has been too slow to recognize the anti-Semitism in its ranks. Most perpetrators have not been called to account and are still in the party.

So why is there such tolerance for this intolerable bigotry? Anti-Semitism currently comes from four groups: the left, the Islamic world, neo-Nazis and, in the United States, radicalized African-Americans.

Of these, the left are the most important, as they control the levers of our culture. And the left are currently both incubators and facilitators of anti-Semitism.

This is why. First, many of them now subscribe to the Marxist view that life is a constant battle between the powerful and the powerless.

Under this dogma, those with power can never be good; those without power can never be bad. Those who make money have power over those who dont make money. Those who make money are bad; those without money are good. Jews make money. Therefore, Jews are powerful and bad.

The second reason is the lefts signature motif of grievance culture and intersectionality, in which overlapping identity groups play the victim card. This gives such groups a moral free pass on the basis that victims cant be held responsible for their own misdeeds.

So every group that does not conform to the left-wing definition of powerdeemed to be pale, male, heterosexual and Westernclaims victim status and that get-out-of-jail-free card. But Jews cant be victims, under this rubric, because they are widely perceived to run the financial world, the media, the law, the arts, American foreign policy. So they are seen as all-powerful.

Worse, there is a burning resentment against the Jews perceived status as the worlds supreme victims. Under the surface bubbles the belief that the Holocaust has enabled the Jews to get a free pass.

From what, exactly? Why, from all the stuff that anti-Semites think about the Jews: that they are rapacious and disloyal, and are out to control the world. In other words, such people think these anti-Semitic libels are actually true, but the Jews status as ultimate victims prevents people from voicing them.

And now follows the shocking link to todays victim culture: that if the Jews have got a free pass for their misdeeds, then so, too, can any group that claims to be victims. The difference, of course, is that while victim groups thus claim impunity for acts of irresponsibility, abuses of power or other bad behavior, the Jews are wholly innocent of the crimes that anti-Semites so falsely lay at their door.

So victim culture is innately anti-Jew. But victim culture lies at the very heart of progressive thinking.

In addition to this, the left supports the Palestine cause, which is based on anti-Semitism; and they pounce on any criticism of either Muslims or the black community as Islamophobia or racism.

In these ways, the profound anti-Semitism in their own ranks is being legitimized by, and is in turn legitimizing and emboldening, both the anti-Semitism spewing from both the Islamic world and from neo-Nazis and their ilk, whose utterances are often indistinguishable from Muslim or left-wing anti-Semites.

That is the shocking and truly appalling reason that anti-Semitism in the West is now out of control.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a column for JNS every two weeks. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which has also published her first novel, The Legacy, released in April 2018. Her work can be found at her website, www.melaniephillips.com.
(JNS)The Palestinians have been busy for the past week demonstrating in word and deed that U.S. President Donald Trumps deal of the century will be dead on arrival.

In an op-ed on Sunday in the official, Palestinian Authority-controlled daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, who served as national-affairs adviser to former P.A. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, launched an assault on the White House. While he was at it, he offended all people with special needs.

As Palestinian Media Watch reported, Al-Ghoul wrote, Anyone who looks at [Trump envoy Jason Greenblatt] discovers that he has external and inner characteristics similar to those suffering from Down syndrome: He is short, his eyes are similar to Mongoloid eyes, he prattles unrestrainedly, and is politically retarded.

Al-Ghoul continued: The ill Greenblatt is not the only one who has Down syndrome, for it strikes all the components of the American administration. Anyone who examines the general genes of the components of the Trump administration sees that it is a politically crippled creature. ... Mongoloid Greenblatt, together with President Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Zionist [US] Ambassador [to Israel David] Friedman can prattle on as much as they wish about the ominous deal. However, they should know for certain that without the signature of PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas no deal will pass, and their foolish steps and policy will continue to be pointless.

Four days earlier, as PMW also revealed, Abbass Fatah faction posted an anti-Semitic diatribe on its official Facebook page. Along with three World War II photos, Fatah distorted a story from the memoirs of a Russian prisoner, claiming that he said that Jews eagerly responded to a Nazi order to bury Russian civilians alive. According to the Fatah account, after the Jews began to throw dirt on the Russians in a pit, the German commander stopped them from completing the task and shouted to the victims, I just wanted you to know who the Jews are and why we are killing them!

As if on cue, three Palestinian terrorists on Monday rammed their car into an Israeli border guard and an IDF officer who had exited their stalled jeep. Both were wounded in the attack, one of them seriously.

Other soldiers on the scene opened fire on the terrorists vehicle, killing two of them and wounding the third. It later transpired that these terrorists earlier had been hurling Molotov cocktails at a nearby highway.

On Monday morning, Hamas lauded the two martyrs, saying, their death proves that the Palestinian people are continuing their fight against the occupier until our land is liberated.

The families of all three perpetrators will now be rewarded with a hefty stipend from the P.A., which announced this week that no matter how much money Israel deducts from tax revenuesaccording to a new law aimed at curbing Abbass pay-for-slay policythe terrorists would be paid their salaries. Hatred for Israel, after all, is one of the few things on which Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in Ramallah are in complete agreement.

Speaking of which, on Monday evening, two balloons carrying explosives were flown from Gaza into Israel, going off between two homes in the Eshkol Regional Council. The incident occurred hours after Israel attacked terrorist targets in Gaza in retaliation for last weeks round of explosive balloons and Palestinian riots, which included the burning of tires and setting off of numerous explosives along the security fence.

Meanwhile, the Gaza-based Palestinian Scholars Association issued the latest in a series of fatwas (Islamic religious opinions) warning against peace agreements with the Zionist entity. According to a Gatestone Institute report by Khaled Abu Toameh, the P.S.A. fatwa ruled that normalization and reconciliation means empowerment of Jews over the land of the Muslims, surrender to the infidels and loss of religion and Islamic lands.

In addition, the P.S.A. fatwa determined, any peace with Israel denies the right of the Palestinian people to its land and falsely recognizes the right of the Jews to it. Reconciliation and normalization with the Zionist enemy is considered null and void and an explicit violation of the provisions of Sharia.

Abbas clearly intends to adhere to this fatwa, as he made clear during a trip to Egypt in January.

I will not end my life as a traitor, he told reporters in Cairo. I can say no, and I have a people that can say no beside me. ... The doors are closed to the U.S. As long as it does not retract its decisions against the Palestinian people, no Palestinian should meet with the American leadership, no matter what their role is.

More recently, on a visit to Iraq on Monday, Abbas told leaders in Baghdad that the Trump administration is encouraging Israel to be a state above the law, as well as biased and not suitable to be a sponsor of peace talks.

So much for the deal of the century, whose details have yet to be revealed. So much for the fantasists in Israel and abroad who continue to harbor any hope.

Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and author of To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the Arab Spring.
Paise khilaye tune? (Did you pay a bribe?) asks a disappointed Bhavesh Joshi in the 2018 Indian vigilante film, titled Bhavesh Joshi Superhero. Bhaveshs friend and fellow anti-corruption crusader, Sikander pays a police officer after repeated failures to obtain his passport through legitimate means.

I had no option, replies Sikander as the viewer sees the inevitable death of naive and idealistic activism by one of its protagonists. The scene breeds cynicism about the possibility of a virtuous world and leaves you bitter in the same manner as observing woke male feminists being called out as sexual harassers or progressive free-speech advocates preventing the entry of speakers with dissenting opinions to college campuses.

Sikander was made to pay (as Kaushik Basu labels it) a harassment bribe where a citizen has to shell out money for services that he has a right to. Most often such bribes are a result of heavy government regulation which exists for the purpose of rent-seeking (taking money for the usage of public resources that they manage) by government officials.

Businesses and small enterprises are among the worst hit victims of harassment bribes. Lets take the example of the restaurant industry.

The extent of regulation in this industry is such that the restaurant management often has to break one law to ensure compliance with another. Harassment bribes need to be paid to the fire department, the police, the excise department and multiple other government officials, not once, but on a recurring basis. If by any chance a restaurant fails to pay up a harassment bribe in the renewal process, an official can possibly close down the establishment. It is no surprise, then, that in India, unlicensed restaurants account for 66% of the market share.

The cost of following these regulations is often too high for businesses and thus they are forced to function in the informal economy. Shruthi Rajagopalan, in her Livemint article, succinctly sums up this problem:

Most businesses have no choice but to hide from the regulatory system, which imposes too high a burden. If firms actually comply with all the regulation, their costs are too high to offer competitive prices to the customers. Customers look elsewhere (usually imports or the informal economy) and the firms go out of business. This is the short version of the tragic tale of most firms in India.

This idea is not new. In 1974, in a seminal paper on corruption, American economist, Anne O Krueger, explained that excessive state regulation led to rent-seeking activities, which had detrimental effects on gross domestic product growth of countries.

One might suspect that it is the rich who are the most capable and responsible for bribe giving in India. But research released by Transparency International (TI) proves this hypothesis wrong, showing that 73% of the poorest people paid a bribe for public services against 55% of the richest. This is due to the poor (especially the rural poor) being forced to depend on the government for the provision of basic services.

Around two millennia ago, Kautilya in his Arthashastra rightly warned us, Just as it is impossible to know when a fish moving in water is drinking it, so it is impossible to find out when government servants in charge of undertakings misappropriate money.

In his book ,Corruption  the Worlds Big C: Cases, Causes, Consequences, Cures, Ian Senior finds that there is no significant correlation between a culture of personal honesty or religious practice in countries with their quantum of bribe taking. In India, where 69% of the population admits to greasing the palms of public officials, political activists who use moral suasion or protesting (on social media or at Jantar Mantar) as a means to curb bribing should perhaps find themselves a new hobby or at least enrol in an economics 101 class on incentives.

Most of the countries that Transparency International reports as having high levels of corruption are ranked in the bottom one-third in terms of economic freedom from government intrusion in the annual Index of Freedom report. Thus, chances to ask for harassment bribes can only come down if the government redirects its capacity from being a paternalistic intervener in the everyday economic activity to being a protector of life and liberty of its citizens. Measures suggested by policymakers such as increasing legal penalties for bribe giving against businesses and citizens end up exacerbating this sickness rather than curing it.

Archit Puri is a Delhi based researcher and writer

The views expressed are personal
Commentators in the United States and India are beginning to call the current trade standoff between the two countries a full-blown trade war. Its official: India is Trumps next target in the trade wars, the Washington Post recently declared.

What prompted the Post and other newspapers and analysts to come to that conclusion was the US announcement that it will end preferential trade treatment for thousands of Indian products guaranteed under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP), a trade programme that has been in existence for more than 43 years now. The idea behind the US GSP is to promote trade with more than a hundred developing countries by giving duty-free entry for their goods. India is the largest beneficiary of the programme.

Now, unless the White House has second thoughts about the termination of the GSP  or a deal can be struck  the United States will start levying tariffs beginning May on Indian goods worth approximately $5.6 billion. India has signalled that, in retaliation, it will impose tariffs on US products worth more than $10 billion.

Retaliation is not a good approach in this instance. Negotiation is. That negotiation should be structured to reach a rapprochement in the near-term and a partnership in the long-term. There are several compelling reasons for taking this approach.

One, the latest US move in itself doesnt constitute a significant threat to bilateral trade. In dollar terms, only about 10% of the products ($5.6 billion) the United States imported from India last year received preferential treatment and generated only $190 million in duty benefits. To put that in context, Indian exports to the United States amounted to more than $54 billion in that same period.

Two, this is part of Trumps negotiation strategy. Ratchet up the pressure until India gives it some concessions that the White House can tout as a big win. Thats the modus operandi Trump has followed during his 26-month tenure, while he tried to rewrite NAFTA and renegotiate trade deals with China. That he hasnt been able to come up with qualitatively better deals on either front than the existing ones is a different matter.

Three, the impetus for this withdrawal of the GSP looks like a tit for tat measure. It is driven by complaints regarding lack of access to the Indian market from US businesses and industries such as medical devices, dairy, and information and communication devices. In bilateral talks, the US asked for greater access. But according to the India Department of Commerce and Industry, India was able to offer a meaningful way forward on almost all US requests but a few US requests were not found reasonable and doable in the light of Indias national interests. So, it seems there may be a basis for renewing and continuing negotiation.

Four, if the US tariffs kicked in and India retaliated, there is little doubt that the Trump administration would retaliate in return and up the ante.

Five, Trumps trade policies are not working internationally. In contrast, the trade relationship with India looks quite good. The US Department of Commerce has just revealed that the United States trade deficit has ballooned to $900 billion, the highest ever. Two years of trade wars and incessant bluster had no positive effect on the US trade deficit. The deficit increased by $68.8 billion, or 12.5%, from 2017.

Despite the tension on the trade front, India-US bilateral trade topped $87 billion last year, up from $73 billion in 2017, a recently released report from the US department of commerce says. Indian exports to the United States grew from $48.6 billion to $54.4 last year, while the countrys imports from America increased from $ 25.7 billion to $33.1 billion.

Six, India should keep its eye on the big picture. Since the country began liberalising its economy in 1991, its bilateral trade with the United States has increased dramatically and India is the ninth largest trading partner of the US today. The growing bilateral trade has made businesses in both the countries stakeholders in the broader strategic relations. There is no question that these businesses have played a crucial role in advancing the ties to the current level.

Even while the two nations are engaged in an unprecedented level of commercial activities, bilateral trade is still well below its potential. US trade with India constituted only a little over 2% of overall US foreign trade. CUTS (Consumer Unity and Trust Society) firmly believes that the US and India could achieve $500 billion in bilateral trade by 2030. One study indicates that it could be $1 trillion by 2030.

Seven, India should think of the long-term and envision its relationship with the US beyond the Trump administration. Indias persistence in working with the current administration will not pay off in a major way over the next two years. The best that can be hoped for, because of the recalcitrance of Trump and his administration, is rapprochement. I firmly believe that 2021 onwards, the India-US relationship will become a meaningful and memorable partnership.

India must negotiate, and the negotiation must work towards achieving rapprochement in the short-term, and a partnership in the long-term. Or, as I wrote in an earlier in the Hindustan Times, India should keep cool, keep calm, and carry on.

Frank F Islam is an entrepreneur, civic leader, and thought leader based in Washington DC

The views are expressed are personal
The subcontinents military crisis is anything but over. Pakistans military generals fear another surprise Indian strike, which explains why much of Pakistans airspace is still closed to commercial traffic: Most international overflights remain barred, while domestic flights must stick to a narrow western corridor close to Iran and Afghanistan. Pakistans armed forces are on full operational alert, with combat air patrols continuing and the army beefing up deployments along the India frontier.

Yet, emboldened by Chinas support, Pakistan is ignoring international calls to take concrete, irrevocable steps against the terrorist groups that operate openly from its territory. Indeed, Pakistan has yet to take the first credible step, which is to declare a policy  embraced by the chief of army staff (COAS) and the chairman joint chiefs of staff committee (CJCSC)  to deny sanctuary and financing to all terrorist groups.

The COAS remains Pakistans effective ruler. Imran Khan is not just one of Pakistans weakest prime ministers ever but also has shown himself to be the militarys willing puppet. Even while announcing the Indian pilots release as a peace gesture, Khan denied Pakistan is cultivating terror groups but justified terrorist attacks and suggested Pulwama was an Indian conspiracy.

Against this background, China again blocking UN action against Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) founder Masood Azhar was aimed at thwarting international pressure on Pakistan to take credible, irreversible anti-terror actions. That China still protects a terrorist, who reportedly is on his deathbed, undergirds the extent to which it shields Pakistans proxy war by terror against India.

It also helps highlight Chinas own proxy war against India by employing Pakistan as a surrogate for containment. While reaping an ever-increasing trade surplus with India, China is systematically undermining Indian interests. Yet, since the Wuhan summit, Indias China policy has become more feckless than ever.

It is not a question of whether but when an Indian target will be attacked again by a Pakistan-based terrorist group. If war is to be averted, major powers other than China must tighten the screws on Pakistan. A major source of international leverage is Pakistans current desperate need for a $12 billion International Monetary Fund bailout. This will be Pakistans 22nd IMF bailout in six decades, and the largest ever. The IMF should bail out debt-ridden Pakistan only in return for concrete anti-terror action.

An international financial squeeze can effectively force Pakistans hand. The key to this is the US, which has the IMF clout (underscored by a dominant 17.46% voting share) to put off the impending bailout or tie it to specific conditions. India must seek to persuade the US  and other key IMF members like Japan and Germany, with 6.48% and 5.60% voting shares respectively  to not let go the present opportunity to reform a scofflaw Pakistan.

US President Donald Trumps administration, far from welcoming Khans tokenistic anti-terror measures, has insisted Pakistan take sustained, irreversible action against terrorist groups. However, Trumps zeal to finalise a tentative deal that his administration reached with the Pakistan-created Afghan Taliban in late January offers Pakistans generals their trump card.

Through their brutal proxies, the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, these generals have compelled the US to negotiate the terms of its exit from Afghanistan and to seek Pakistans help to midwife the deal. However, the US will be able to honourably end the longest war in its history, and get the Taliban to keep up its end of the bargain, only if it makes Pakistans generals realise that sponsoring cross-border terrorism in Afghanistan carries major costs. If the generals are to take concrete anti-terror steps, there must first be tangible action on Americas part, including stripping Pakistan of its Major Non-NATO Ally status, adding it to its list of State sponsors of terrorism, or at least leveraging the IMF bailout.

Pakistan is trapped in a vicious circle, seeking new loans to repay old ones. Despite recently getting $7.5 billion in cash from Saudi, Emirati and Chinese transfers, it cannot do without a large IMF bailout. Pakistans cycle of dependency on IMF has paralleled the rise of its military-mullah-jihadist complex. Foreign aid and lending have helped underpin Pakistans collusion with terrorist groups.

Today, an IMF bailout will aid Chinese designs by freeing up other resources in Pakistan for debt repayments to Beijing. It will thus implicitly support Chinas debt-trap diplomacy with Pakistan, the largest recipient of Belt and Road financing. Such lending has contributed to Pakistans dire financial situation, locking it in debt servitude to China.

Pakistan has long employed not just nuclear blackmail but also fiscal blackmail  help us financially or face the perils of the country falling apart. If Pakistan is unwilling to sever its links with state-nurtured terrorists, it is better for the world to let it fail than to continue propping up its military-mullah-jihadist complex with aid and loans  the equivalent of giving more alcohol to an alcoholic, instead of treating the addiction. The treatment now must centre on making Pakistan take verifiable and unalterable anti-terror steps.
Several Bollywood A-listers wished Gully Boy actor Alia Bhatt on her birthday. Alia turned 26 on Friday and rang in her birthday celebrations with family and friends. While her Brahmastra co-star and boyfriend Ranbir Kapoor visited her to wish her at midnight, she later celebrated the occasion by cutting a cake in the presence of the media.

Alia Bhatt shares her happiness with the media.

Alia Bhatt eats her birthday cake.

Alia Bhatt clicks selfies with her fans on her birthday.

Among her industry friends who wished her on her birthday were Priyanka Chopra, who shared a picture along with her from an earlier event and captioned it, Happy birthday beautiful. Sonam Kapoor also wished her on the occasion with a cute message. She shared a picture with the caption, Happy happy birthday dear youre classy, sassy and kind. Thats more important then all the talent in the world which you have in spades. All my love.

Priyanka Chopra and Sonam Kapoor shared birthday messages for Alia Bhatt in their Instagram stories.

Katrina Kaif is in Dubai for the Da-Bangg Tour but didnt miss wishing Alia on her birthday. The Zero actor shared a stunning picture of hers in a pink dress and captioned it, Happy birthday Alu...may you rise to greater and greater heights.

Katrina Kaif, Vicky Kaushal and Varun Dhawan shared birthday wishes for Alia Bhatt on Instagram.

Vicky Kaushal also shared an unseen picture of Alia in his Instagram stories, possibly from the sets of their 2018 film Raazi. The actor can be seen dressed in a yellow kurta-salwar while looking at the mountains with her back towards the camera. He wrote with the picture, Happy Birthday Alia.

Also read: Inside pics from Alia Bhatts 26th birthday party: Ranbir Kapoor pays a visit, actor cuts 3 cakes with parents and friends

Varun Dhawan wished his Kalank co-star by sharing her new poster from the film with the caption, Roop happy bday. He also shared a throwback picture from Alias earlier birthday party showing her cutting several birthday cakes, standing beside her team members. He captioned it, These pics are from low budget Bday parties Before.

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Last year, she just had one release, Raazi. But Alia Bhatt, who has kicked off 2019 with the superhit Gully Boy, clearly has a packed year ahead with Kalank coming up followed by Brahmastra. Plus, shell also start shooting for SS Rajamoulis next RRR and Sadak 2 that will be helmed by her father, film-maker Mahesh Bhatt.

But despite her choc-a-bloc schedule, Alia isnt looking for a breather. I want to keep working forever. Now, for example, I am looking for a light film which is more of a comedy than a love story. In fact, Ive always said that I really want to do an out-and-out comedy. I feel that part of my personality is ready to erupt now (laughs), says the actor, who turns 26 today.

Well, Alia might be caught up on professional front, but her personal life never fails to make news. Of late, talks have been rife that she may get hitched [to boyfriend Ranbir Kapoor] this year. Not at all, says the actor, adding: I feel its all unnecessary chatter. You have to understand that personal life is called personal for a reason. In fact, thats why, not many speak up about their relationships. The minute you say anything, there are random pieces of news including my supposed marriage.

The Dear Zindagi (2016) actor says things [with regards to marriage talks] have reached a stage where its not just limited to media. It has even reached my fans. So, sometimes, when I interact with them on social media, they also ask me when I am getting married. And I am like, why are you asking me this? Have I said anything? Have I given a feeler? No, says Alia, adding that since it has been a season of marriages, everyone expects that I might also do the same.

Also read: Deepika Padukone on her Madame Tussauds statue: My mom never imagined I would make it here

But marriage is something that hasnt even crossed my mind. I am not averse to it. But its not a part of my plan right now. I have a lot of work to do. Its not as if I wont work post marriage, whenever it happens. But right now, my focus is just on work. My priorities will probably shift in time. As of now, it hasnt, says Alia, whose only companion right now is her world famous cat, Edward.

I am just obsessed with cats and animals in general. I feel very terrible going away from him constantly [when I travel]. But I have to work, and I dont think he cares (laughs). He does care for maybe five-and-a-half minutes and also sulks with me when I come back, she says.

To Rumi, with love!

That Alia loves cats is an open secret. But did you know that she is an avid admirer of Persian poet, Rumi? So much so that cushions at her plush Juhu home have Rumis quotes printed on them. I just love Rumi, she says, adding that she totally believes in a Rumis quote which reads: You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens. She explains This is one of my most favourite quotes. Theres something about letting someone feel sad, heartbroken or low. Most people will always tell me, oh, you must be happy. But I feel you cant always be happy and its important to feel the other side, too. I feel once your heart opens, there are so many possibilities for you. In fact, I really love Meryl Streeps line, take your broken heart and turn it into art. I feel greatness comes with a heartbreak.

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Arjun Kapoor, who is rumoured to be planning a wedding with Malaika Arora, has said the intrusion of privacy is a very small price to pay for stardom. Reacting to the rumours of his wedding, Arjun said: When there is something to talk about, you will all know.

Actors Arjun Kapoor and Malaika Arora seen at a club in Mumbais Juhu. (IANS)

Asked if he was disturbed with the intrusion of privacy, he said, Not really... It is a very small price to pay. At the end of the day, for what I have gained out of being an actor, somebody who is known across the country and the world, its a small price. And people like to know how we are. They like to be surprised how normal we are, they like to know our idiosyncrasies. It doesnt really bother me. If anyone says mujhe meri privacy chahiye (I want my privacy) then you are in the wrong profession. Because you sell that the day you become recognisable.

Also read: Deepikas wax statue unveiled, Ranveer wants to take her home

The 33-year-old actor said one can pick how much information to share in the public domain. Its your choice how much you put out there or yourself and your availability. Today you have a lot of control over as to how much you want people to know about your life. Speculation and gossip is a part of it. I am not the first actor or the last. Our entire tribe is immune to it... Because it is the nature of the business, he said.

The actor is excited to have been roped in as the brand evangelist for the second edition of Belvedere Studio B, a property that celebrates the spirit of creative collaboration. On the Bollywood front, Arjun has an interesting slate of work including Indias Most Wanted, Panipat and Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar.

Over the last few years in the Hindi film industry, Arjun has portrayed different characters in films such as Finding Fanny, Gunday, Half Girlfriend, Ishaqzaade, Ki & Ka, Mubarakan, Namastey England and 2 States.I feel humbled, he said, adding: Success and failure is a part of life at the end of the day. We all actors have our highs and lows, ups and downs and good Fridays and bad ones, but what keeps going is... if you keep your head down and listen to your audience for the love and affection you get.

Arjun believes the audience gives an indication for the kind of films they want to see him starring in.They (audience) give you signals what they like you to do and what they dont. Social media also helps... Thats what has kept me going. Connect with the audience today is rare. In a population of a billion plus, I am fortunate that I actually have a connect, he added.

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Actor Deepika Padukone has said that it would be interesting to play an Avenger in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Deepika was speaking at the unveiling of her wax statue at Madame Tussauds, London, on Thursday.

Asked if she would want to join the MCU, Deepika said it would be interesting.I mean Id say Indian origin. So whether its Marvel or whether its Avengers, or you know, any of these iconic characters that weve seen in cinema, I think it would be very interesting. She said she thinks the world is ready for it, to see one of these superheroes, one that originates from India. I believe it will happen soon. I know it will.

Deepika was accompanied by husband Ranveer Singh and their families at the unveiling ceremony for her wax statue. The unveiling was streamed live on Instagram, and the video showed both the Padukones and the Bhavnanis posing next to the statue. Ranveer could be seen circling the wax figure and was heard asking, Can I take her home?

Deepika was recently featured as one of the 14 international actors in the latest issue of American Vogue. She was joined on the cover by South Korean actor Doona Bae and Avengers: Endgame actor Scarlett Johansson.

Deepika made her Hollywood debut with 2017s action-thriller, xXx: Return of Xander Cage, opposite Vin Diesel. She is expected to reprise her role for the follow-up. The actor is currently filming her Padmaavat follow-up, Chhapaak, for director Meghna Gulzar. She will be seen under heavy prosthetics in the film, about an acid attack survivor.

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Actor Alia Bhatt rang in her 26th birthday amid friends, family and a lot of love. She cut her birthday cake with all her favourite people at her Mumbai residence at midnight. Her boyfriend and Brahmastra co-actor Ranbir Kapoor also paid the birthday girl a visit.

Fashion designer and one of Alias best buddies, Masaba Gupta shared pictures from the birthday celebration. In one picture, Alia is seen getting a big cuddle from all her friendsMasaba, Anushka and Akanksha Ranjan and Atiya. You were pure magic since we were babies .... and you continue to be pure magic.... Happy birthday Alu, Masaba captioned her post.

She also shared a video of Alia cutting three birthday cakes. As she blew out the candles, her father, filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt held back her hair from catching fire. Alias mother and actor Soni Razdan was also seen singing the birthday song for her.

Soni also shared a picture with Alia on her Instagram page. Happy Happy Birthday sweet Alia ... your light is shining brighter each day ... wish you all the light love and the bestest best of the rest in you life. Keep shining. Love you, she captioned the photo. Alia also took to her Instagram stories to promote Sonis upcoming film, No Fathers In Kashmir, the trailer for which, will be released on Friday.

Mahesh Bhatt also shared a picture with his daughter. Sunshine mixed with a bit of magic. Happy Birthday Alia, he captioned the pic. He also shared a childhood video of her in which she is seen sitting on top of him as a baby while he sings the birthday song for her. Some memories do not wither with time. Happy birthday Alia, he captioned it.

Ranbir and filmmakers Karan Johar and Ayan Mukerji were also spotted by the paparazzi, arriving at Alias home. Ayan had a bright red package in his hands, perhaps a gift for the birthday girl. Ranbir was seen in a blue jacket that was embellished in the back while Karan wore a light blue jacket to the party. Check out pics:

Karan Johar at Alias home. (Varinder Chawla)

Ayan Mukerji at Alias home. (Varinder Chawla)

Ranbir Kapoor at Alias home. (Varinder Chawla)

Alia will soon be seen in Kalank with Varun Dhawan, Madhuri Dixit, Sanjay Dutt, Sonakshi Sinha and Aditya Roy Kapur. The film is produced by Karan Johar, directed by Abhishek Varman and will release on April 17. Her film with Ranbir, Brahmastra, will release in December and she will begin shooting for Karans directorial Takht later this year with Ranveer Singh, Kareena Kapoor, Vicky Kaushal, Bhumi Pednekar and Anil Kapoor. She has also signed SS Rajamoulis RRR.

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The latest song from actor Akshay Kumars period drama Kesari launched online Friday afternoon and it is highly patriotic in tone and flavour. Titled Teri Mitti, the new song features Akshay and is crooned by B Praak while Manoj Muntashir has penned the lyrics.

The video opens with slow motion shots of the battle in the movie. It plays to an emotional mood with the video, focussing on a soldiers life, his feelings for the country, his love and more. The lyrics, on the other hand, focus on patriotism.

Also read: Alia Bhatt is the greatest Bollywood actor of her generation, and she doesnt even know it

Earlier this month, a behind-the-scenes video of Kesari was released online. In the video, Akshay was heard saying, I have had one of the best times doing the action sequences for Kesari because they were so raw. It was completely out of the world. The very premise of the film is something which swells my chest with pride.

Watch the song here:

Starring Parineeti Chopra opposite Akshay Kumar, Kesari is the story of Battle of Saragarhi, fought in September 1897 between the British Indian armys Sikh regiment and Afghan tribesmen. The British Indian contingent, comprising 21 Sikh soldiers, was attacked by around 10,000 Afghans. The battle is considered by some as one of historys greatest last-stands. Directed by Anurag Sinha, the film will hit theatres on March 21.

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The Captain Amarinder Singh-led Congress, which rode the populist bandwagon to power in Punjab with one seat short of a two-thirds majority (got one more in a by-election later) in 2017, will complete two years in government on March 16. As it prepares its strategy for the May 19 parliamentary polls, HT looks at the performance of Amarinder and his team of ministers through the prism of promises made in the poll manifesto and other announcements

Capt Amarinder Singh, chief minister: Master of optics

Age: 77, Education: Graduate

A scion of the erstwhile Patiala royal family, Capt Amarinder Singh has a taste for grand gestures. Before he led the Congress to a thumping triumph two years ago, Amarinder, in the run-up to the polls, promised the moon to everyone. On taking over, the two-time chief minister launched a war on drugs and gangsters, but felt constrained by fund crunch in implementation of populist promises. After the euphoria around the Congress return to power following a gap of 10 years faded away, it was all about headline management. A master of optics, Amarinder has managed to hit the headlines with fair regularity by panning Pakistan and instituting an inquiry into sacrilege cases and the police firing on protesters at Behbal Kalan in 2015 that has his predecessor, the Badals, under pressure. Though there are some voices of discontent, he has maintained a firm grip on power.

PROMISES: The war on drugs, farm loan waiver, power to industry at Rs 5 per unit, freeze on power tariff for other categories, Rs 2,500 unemployment allowance, free smart phones, one job per family, direct transfer of subsidies, job to a member of suicide-hit farmer families, Rs 1,500 monthly social welfare pension and direct income support to farmers are a few among a long list of promises made by the Congress.

PERFORMANCE: Cracking down on drugs, gangsters and terror modules from the word go, Amarinder began well, besides taking steps to end VIP culture by abolishing red beacons and the halqa in-charge system. When it comes to steps having direct final implications, major promises, except farm loan write-off and power to industry at Rs 5 a unit, remain unfulfilled. The loan waiver, though watered down from the poll promise, has been replicated by the Congress in other states. Neither much has been done on other promises, nor is there any commitment as to when these will be fulfilled. The government has been blaming empty coffers that it inherited for the delay.

CONTROVERSIES: The contradictory stands of Amarinder and his local bodies minister Navjot Singh Sidhu on Pakistans role in the Pulwama terror attack, the Indian Air Forces retaliatory airstrikes and the groundbreaking ceremony of the Kartarpur corridor, besides certain governance issues, have been a constant source of controversy.

1. Tript Rajinder Singh Bajwa: CMs yes man

Portfolio: Rural development and panchayats; urban development and housing

Age: 74 , Education: Graduate

Tript Singh Bajwa made news whenever his cabinet colleague Navjot Singh Sidhu did. It is not only due to an overlap in functions of local government (Sidhus ministry) and urban development, which Sidhu wanted, but also because Bajwa is chief minister Captain Amarinder Singhs counter to Sidhu. The minister wields political clout due to his heavyweight departments and is in command of all vote-catching schemes and policies, urban and rural. Bajwa was in the news during the panchayat elections in December last year and claimed credit for their peaceful conduct. But the opposition says he let the writ of the ruling party run amok and the elections were marred by rigging.

Promises: The Congress manifesto had promised to regularise illegal colonies that came up on or before March 31, 2013. It had avowed a third-party audit of rural and urban infrastructure projects of the previous regime and facelift of villages by cleaning and remodelling ponds, piped water supply, unified service centres and implementation of MNREGA through a rural infrastructure renewal fund. It also promised an urban infrastructure renewal fund. The panchayat land usurped by the high and mighty was promised to be freed and developers penalised for not retaining 10% quota for EWS. The party promised to probe government permissions for all Badal businesses, including the luxury resort at Pallanpur village in New Chandigarh.

Performance: The hallmark of Bajwas performance has been tokenism. His policy on the regularisation of illegal colonies, plots and buildings watched the interest of colonisers and the deadline of March 19, 2019, and not 2013 as promised. Sidhu aired his objections publicly saying the scheme will turn Punjabs cities into an urban mess. Bajwa ordered an audit of grants to 2,200 panchayats during the previous regime but found nothing amiss. A status-quoist, the urban department did not look into how the New Chandigarh master plan was tweaked for SAD chief Sukhbir Singh Badals resort. The government rolled out the Smart Village Campaign and Urban Environment Improvement Programme to give villages and towns a facelift two months ahead of the poll code. Women were given the promised 50% representation in panchayats, though most were fielded as proxy candidates. The works under MNREGA have doubled and income of village common lands has seen a jump.

Controversies: Bajwas trip to the United Kingdom in August last year had kicked up a storm with the BJP accusing him of meeting office-bearers of the Sikhs for Justice (SFJ), the organiser of Referendum-2020.

The regularisation policy for illegal colonies and moratorium to promoters on paying external development charges were short-sighted. They will discourage genuine builders and buyers and turn Punjabs cities into slums.

The departments marriage palace policy has so far found only 73 takers.

2. Brahm Mohindra: Half-way recovery

Portfolio: Health and family welfare, medical education and parliamentary affairs

Age: 72, Education: Post-graduate

Number two in the Punjab cabinet, Brahm Mohindra is known to be a seasoned but shrewd politician. He is a six-time MLA and barring this term, throughout his political career, he remained the political opponent of chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh. The ministers chemistry with the chief minister in this tenure has surprised many. He is deputed to bail the government out of crises.

Promises: Running an aggressive drug de-addiction campaign; setting up a clinic for every 1,000 population; regular recruitment of doctors; upgrading civil hospitals; improving drug supply in government dispensaries; universal health insurance scheme; and opening five medical colleges.

Performance: A few steps were taken but the health department faces a financial crunch. Recruitment of doctors improved and using his clout, Mohindra was able to remove the condition of paying only basic salary to them. He started free dialysis in government hospitals besides free availability of blood in their banks. Lack of hygiene in hospitals is a concern. The department failed to buy few essential drugs due to the fund crunch. He started a scheme to hire super specialists from private hospitals for OPDs in civil hospitals.

The department started out-patient opioid assisted treatment (OAAT) centres but the misuse of buprenorphine was reported. The new medical college in Mohali has not seen the light of the day.

Controversies: Lok Insaaf Party MLA Simarjit Singh Bains accused Mohindra of favouring private firms supplying buprenorphine. The minister filed a defamation case against the MLA.

3. Om Parkash Soni: Put to the test

Portfolio: School education, food processing

Age: 61, Education: Under graduate

Beginning his political career as Amritsars first mayor, Om Parkash Soni won five consecutive assembly elections  the first two as an independent candidate  and has come a long way. When inducted into the cabinet in April 2018, he was not happy with his school education and environment portfolios, but got on with the task. Abysmal results, quality of education, dipping enrolment and constant protests by teachers were just a few of his challenges. He was divested of the environment portfolio a few days after the National Green Tribunal slapped a fine of Rs 50 crore on the government in November 2018 for river pollution.

Promises:Rationalisation of teacher deployment, improvement in the quality of education, regularisation of contractual teachers and others, English as a medium of instruction, smart IT-enabled classrooms and hike in allocation. Free textbooks, transportation and free internet connectivity were promised in poll manifesto.

Performance: Soni and his school education secretary Krishan Kumar, a no-nonsense bureaucrat, took measures to improve the quality of education, increase enrolment, regularise contractual teachers and crack down on copying, besides undertaking school beautification. But delivery is an issue. Free textbooks got delayed and free uniforms were not given at all. The promises of free transportation and internet connectivity remain unfulfilled. The online transfer policy has not been implemented. Teachers are also opposing the Padho Punjab, Padhao Punjab programme, aimed at improving quality. Contractual teachers remained in protest mode for regularisation with pay protection. As the protest escalated, Soni showed patience and held several rounds of meetings with teachers before they ended the stir. Soni and Kumar got appreciation from the state cabinet last week for their handling of the teachers protests.

Controversies: Row over change in history syllabus and mistakes in Class 12 textbooks by Punjab School Education Board left the Congress government red-faced and it had to withdraw them. In January, he faced flak for comparing government schools to dhabas and private schools to five-star hotels.

4. Balbir Singh Sidhu: Laboured but little to show

Portfolio: Animal husbandry; dairy development and labour

Age: 59, Education: Graduate

Balbir Singh Sidhu reached Mohali in 1981 from his native town of Rampura Phul with politics in mind. He contested two assembly elections in 1997 and 2002 unsuccessfully but since 2007, he has been a consistent winner from Kharar and Mohali constituencies. Other than politics, he has interests in the liquor trade.

Promises: To revise the deputy commissioner wage rates for labourers by linking them to the general price index and setting up a board for the welfare of labourers; and recruitment of veterinary doctors in the animal husbandry department.

Performance: The promises for labourers await a policy decision. The animal husbandry department has started the process to recruit 117 veterinary doctors and 291 veterinary inspectors. Sidhu brought the technology of sexed semen in the state that gives dairy farmers the freedom to choose the gender of the calf. With his initiative, the area under shrimp fish production has gone up to 350 acres. Each acre provides an annual income of Rs 6 lakh.

He admits the problem of stray animals is tough to counter for the department but is sure it will come under control with the sexed semen technology.

A promise by the Congress to give five marla residential plots or tenements to the economically weaker sections (EWS) remains only on paper.

Controversies: The name of an associate of the minister figured in a case of illegal sand mining but Sidhu denied his role. His liquor business interests clash with his official status. He may face trouble once the state government passes the conflict of interest law.

5. Bharat Bhushan Ashu: Tall claims, but short on delivery

Portfolio: Food and civil supplies and consumer affairs

Age: 48, Education: Graduate

Bharat Bhushan Ashus rise from councillor in the Ludhiana municipal corporation to a minister in the state cabinet was slow and steady as it took 20 years. He took charge in April last year when the wheat procurement season was on. Succeeding Adaish Partap Singh Kairon of the SAD-BJP government who had hands-on experience of the food department, Ashu faced the challenge of managing operations across the state.

Promises: Labourers to get direct payment in accounts by minimising the role of contractors; online security refund to millers after the delivery of rice; smart ration cards for PDS beneficiaries and fake beneficiaries to be culled out.

Performance: The cabinet recently decided to give contracts to labourers for lifting and transporting foodgrains, bypassing the contractors who fleece them but this will take time to implement. Online security refund to rice-millers remains on paper. At least 4 lakh fake beneficiaries removed from PDS list.

Despite tall claims, the department failed to stop the arrival of rice bought at lower prices from other states that is allegedly mixed with freshly shelled rice to increase profit.

The government promised to bypass commission agents while paying the minimum support rice for wheat and paddy through direct transfer but only two farmers opted for it.

Despite rain at the paddy maturing stage, the quality of produce suffered but procurement was smooth. The government managed to save Rs 175 crore by streamlining transport contracts.

Controversies: The Aam Aadmi Party demanded Ashus dismissal during the budget session after he was named for grant of change of land use permission to a real estate builder in Ludhiana. Though he claimed innocence, the AAP made an issue of it and the CM ordered a probe.

An audio clip was shared on social media, purportedly of Ashus telephonic conversation with a police officer in which the minister is threatening the officer.
In the 1993 film, Groundhog Day, the lead character Phil awakens each morning to relive the same reality. That may well resonate with Indias mandarins at Turtle Bay, headquarters of the United Nations in New York City.

Its been nearly a decade since India first attempted to have Masood Azhar, founder of terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed, proscribed under the provisions of Resolution 1267 of the ISIL (Daesh) and Al Qaeda Committee of the UN Security Council

When China blocked the first attempt, Indian officials at the time were relatively confident that, given sufficient proof of Azhars malefic designs, Beijing would oblige as it had done with Laskhar-e-Taiba head, Hafeez Saeed.

Instead of being convinced, China has proved obdurate in its continued obstruction of sanctioning Azhar, a move that would curtail his travel, access to weaponry and funding. The latest episode in this predictable series of events came about as China placed the UNSC move, rife with symbolism, in a holding pattern.

With the Security Council otherwise behind the designation of Azhar, China was isolated as it kept up the Great Wall of protection for a convicted terrorist. This will hardly help Chinas global standing, one that is already tottering. In protecting its Pakistan investment, Beijing may end up with a heavy price to pay.

Chinas stubbornness on this issue is related, obviously, to its soft spot for Islamabad, even if that allows extremism to flourish. As far as Saeed and his LeT were concerned, he had fallen out of favour with Rawalpindi and was considered far too much of a free radical by his handlers within the ISI. Azhar, however, has emerged as the Pakistan establishments mainstay in its proxy war with India.

In exchange for Beijings blessings, Pakistan has virtually become a vassal state of China, somewhat like the status it acquired during the 1980s and 1990s with regard to the United States. During those decades, and through the first few years of this millennium, it proved itself useful in aiding American operations in Afghanistan. As America began to look for an exit path, Islamabads utility flagged, except for brief interludes like the present as the Donald Trump Administration seeks to leverage Pakistans influence with the Taliban to carve out a truce that, even if not sustainable, would be sufficient for the US to quit the Afghan theatre.

That impatience for departure has been building for a few years, even while Barack Obama was President. With Trumps arrival, this became coupled with lesser largesse for Pakistan and its deep state. America increasingly wants to exit the business of bribing Pakistan into moderating its double game in Afghanistan.

Beijing has stepped into the role of Pakistans principal benefactor. China has many ambitions, including supplanting the United States as the worlds pre-eminent economic and military power. Those aspirations may prove premature, but it has certainly succeeded in replacing Washington as the prime sponsor of Pakistans bad behaviour.

Anirudh Bhattacharyya is a Toronto-based commentator on American affairs

The views expressed are personal
A 41-year-old woman died on Wednesday after being thrashed by factory workers who caught hold of a group of suspected thieves allegedly trying to break into the building in Delhis Samaypur Badli, police said. Another woman, who too was part of the group, was caught and sent to jail.

Police are yet to file a complaint against the factory workers.

Around 5am on Wednesday, a group of six-seven women began dismantling the rear entrance of the building where pressure cookers were assembled and stored, police said.

The workers at the factory woke up and caught the women red-handed trying to steal pressure cooker parts. While most of the other women managed to escape, two were caught, said Gaurav Sharma, the deputy commissioner of police (outer-north district).

The deceased was identified as Sakeena (her last name remains unknown), a widow. She lived in Bhalswa Dairy with her six children aged between 10 and 20. She and her oldest son were the earning members of the family.

The workers beat up the two women. The owner of the factory called the police after which a team of personnel visited the spot. One of the women [Sakeena] suffered injuries and was taken to a hospital. The other woman [Afsana] was taken to the police station, said Sharma.

Sakeena was treated at the hospital before police formally arrested her, and produced the two women in a court on Wednesday afternoon. When it was time for the women to be taken to jail, Sakeenas condition worsened. She was rushed back to the hospital, but she died by the time, said Sharma said.

Sakeenas oldest son, Arbid Khan, said his mother was innocent, adding that the nature of injuries suggested his mother was beaten with sticks, rods and a screw driver. She was left with a fractured arm and had visible injuries all over her body. The wounds on her limbs seemed to suggest she was beaten up with a screw driver, said Khan.

My mother was a rag-picker who brought home Rs 100-200 every day. She would leave with other women from our neighbourhood around 4.30am every morning and return home by afternoon, said Sakeenas second son, Mohammad Sarbid, who is differently abled.

DCP Sharma said Sakeena was a thief who, along with some women, would steal from godowns in neighbourhoods. We are checking her past record, the DCP said when asked whether there was any police case against her.

The officer said a decision to register a first information report (FIR) against the factory workers would be taken only after the completion of a magisterial inquiry into Sakeenas death.

Sakeenas relatives alleged that she was thrashed by a female officer even after her arrest, but Sharma denied that and said Sakeena wasnt even taken to the police station.
Leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) thanked Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit , while members of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) attacked her for purportedly saying in a TV interview on Thursday that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wasnt as strong or as determined as PM Narendra Modi in responding to terror attacks.

Dikshit later tweeted that her comments had been taken out of context by the media. Here is what I said  it may seem to some people that Mr Modi is stronger on terror but I think this is a poll gimmick more than anything else, she tweeted. She further added that national security has always been a concern and that Indira ji [Indira Gandhi] has been a strong leader.

Here is the transcript of the controversial part of the Sheila Dixit interview. I asked her if people would vote for Modi because of his record on national security.

This is what followed. Judge for yourself if it is a ringing endorsement of Modi. pic.twitter.com/zxIokWqPkY  vir sanghvi (@virsanghvi) March 14, 2019

BJP chief Amit Shah thanked the three-time Delhi chief minister for admitting what the Congress was never ready to admit. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal, on the other hand, slammed her and alleged that the Congress had a secret understanding with the BJP.

In an interview to be aired on CNN News 18, excerpts of which were released on Thursday, Dikshit was asked about the criticism that the UPA government did not do much after the Mumbai terror attack in 2008. To this, she purportedly said: Manmohan Singhs yes, I agree with you wasnt as strong or as determined as he [Modi] is perhaps but then there is also the feeling that he is doing all for politics, not that he wants to, not out of the sense of.

Soon after the excerpts of the interview were released, Kejriwal said in a tweet in Hindi: This statement of Sheila Dikshit ji is extremely shocking. It appears that something is cooking between the BJP and the Congress.

Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said that the AAP has been saying since the beginning that this time, the Congress is working to make Modi ji the Prime Minister again.

The AAP later said in a statement that over the years, depending on their convenience and according to time and situation, the BJP and Congress have not hesitated to come together.

Delhi is one of the prime examples that witnessed this phenomenon many times during the last four years, when the Congress did not hesitate even for a moment to join hands with the BJP. Delhi Congress unit, during the last four years, left no stone unturned in joining hands with the BJP to stall public welfare policies of the elected Delhi government, the AAP statement read.

Dikshit has openly expressed her opposition to a tie-up in Delhi between the AAP and the Congress though several senior leaders from both parties have been asking for a pact to prevent the split of anti-BJP votes.
The ICSE class 10 students in Lucknow found the economics paper a tad lengthy, a bit tricky as it required a little analytical approach.

Priyanka Pandey, a student of St Teresas College, Aashiana said question paper was on expected lines and there was nothing out of syllabus. Shabnam Khan said that the paper was easy but lengthy. Students said questions were bit tricky.

Ramza Hayat said that the paper was pretty easy and scoring but was tricky. Lovey Malhotra said that it was the best paper till now. Areeba Siddiqui said that the question paper had a balanced composition of difficulty level from easy to moderate. Areeba add that questions were based on rational thinking approach and moderate authoritarian approach.

Economics teacher at St Teresas College, Aashiana, Vibha Singh found that the ICSE Examination 2019, Economics paper was easy and scoring, students were satisfied and confident after the examination. The questions were based on the same pattern as in internal examination

ICSE Students of City Montessori School, Aliganj 1 Campus who appeared for the economics paper today said that the paper was easy but lengthy. According to Gaurav Mittal and Shambhavi Pandey, the paper was quite straight forward and nothing tricky was asked

The students looked overjoyed as they came out of the examination hall. The questions were comparatively easier than the previous years, said Anjali Agarwal and Vansh Khanna. Another student, Mehmood Ahmed said that, practice throughout the Year will definitely result in full marks for everyone.

Principal Jyoti Kashyap expressed her pleasure to see the smiling beaming faces of student as they came out of the examination hall.

The students at Hoerner College, Lucknow found Economics Paper for ICSE Class 10 to be very easy going by the testimony of jubilant students. Shruti Mayur and Apoorva Gupta said 90 percentile is expected and Saurabh Saini said that if entire syllabus was studies it was a cakewalk.

Their teacher Meenakshi Bajaj mirrored the opinion of the Students and also mentioned that a lot of the questions were already taken up in the Pre Boards and that it was relatively easy. The principal Dr Mala Mehra said that even though she is not an Economics graduate but an avid reader of the Economy based papers and said she would have maxed Section A.
Her jackets and jeans, bangles and bags can instantly send tongues wagging and designers sales soaring.

Since being catapulted into the global spotlight as Prince Harrys girlfriend in 2016, Meghans outfits have been scrutinised and copied, often crashing websites selling her apparel.

Fashion blogs and social media accounts dedicated to the Americans style have mushroomed, just as they sprang up for her sister-in-law Kate, Prince Williams wife, allowing followers to comment on her latest sleek looks usually in a monochrome palette.

The Meghan effect is this economic phenomenon similar to the Kate effect...where if she wears it, it turns to gold, said Christine Ross, co-editorial director of Meghans Mirror fashion blog, describing Meghans style as very on trend and modern.

Almost everything she wears up to and around the $300 or 300 pound-mark, a pretty high price point, sells out, she added.

Designer dresses, luxury handbags and stylish stilettos are the fashion dream of many women, but for a young royal they are the staple of an everyday wardrobe.

For her busy royal diary, the now Duchess of Sussex usually wears expensive labels, namely French couture house Givenchy whose British artistic director Clare Waight Keller designed Meghans wedding dress.

Dior, Ralph Lauren, Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta are among other formal and eveningwear go to brands.

Meghans wardrobe is really unique because there are so many bespoke pieces in it and well really never know how much those cost, Ross said.

She estimates her wardrobe at about 500,000 pounds ($657,750) a year.

STYLE MUSE

While becoming a trendsetter, Meghan, named 2018s best dressed woman by People magazine, has stayed loyal to smaller brands she wore before her global fame.

The 37-year-old, who used to film drama Suits in Toronto, has worn Canadian labels Mackage, Aritzia and Line the Label.

For casualwear, she has worn J.Crew and brands known for their environmental and social credentials: a Reformation dress, Veja sneakers, Outland Denim jeans and jewellery made from recycled metal.

Meghan carved this niche for supporting these sustainable fashion brands, Holly Rains, digital editor at magazine Marie Claire UK, said. People are now going to Meghan as a style muse...She crashes sites.

It is particularly her more affordable accessories that are snapped up by consumers.

The jewellery, the bags, the belts is where we can dip in and get that kind of Meghan touch to our outfits, Rains said.

Ross said Meghans casual jean looks proved popular with readers. Her maternity wear as she awaits her first child is also eagerly followed.

Shes done a lot of bespoke pieces, a lot of customisation pieces that arent maternity at all and its really been a difference, Ross said.

Royal fashion expert Michael Talboys said he hoped to see Meghan wear more British labels. She has worn items from UK brands Victoria Beckham, Strathberry, Marks & Spencer and her second wedding gown was a halterneck dress by Stella McCartney.

She should, as an English duchess, really be patronizing English designers and promoting them in the eyes of the world, he said.

Kate frequently wears British high street dresses.

On the streets of London, student Savanah Edwards said Meghans classic style was having an impact.

I personally cannot afford anything that she wears but it does influence me to try new pieces, she said.

($1 = 0.7602 pounds)

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Former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar, 73, has been using his large political clout to derail trial and influence witnesses in cases related to 1984 anti-Sikh riots, the CBI told the Supreme Court on Friday while seeking that the life term given to him should be upheld.

Kumar has challenged in the top court the Delhi High Courts December 17, 2018, verdict sentencing him to life term in a case related to killing of five Sikhs in Delhi Cantonments Raj Nagar Part-I area of southwest Delhi on November 1 and 2, 1984, and burning down of a Gurudwara in Raj Nagar Part-II.

In response to Kumars application seeking suspension of sentence and grant of bail, the CBI has said that he is capable of influencing/terrorising witnesses and fair trial would not be possible in the case pending against him, if he is granted bail.

The CBI has said brutal murders during the 1984 riots fall under the category of crimes against humanity on parity with well known genocides worldwide like large scale killing of Armenians by Kurds and Turks, mass extermination of Jews by Nazis, mass killing of Bangladeshi citizens by the sympathisers of Pakistani Army and mass killing during various ethnic riots within India also.

Opposing Kumars application, the agency said that in this case the minority community was targeted by spearheaded attacks of dominant political actors like the applicant/convict (Kumar) and duly facilitated by law enforcement agencies.

In view of Kumars conduct in using his political clout to derail trial and influence witnesses, his sentence must be upheld and bail should not be granted, the CBI said.

It took 34 valuable years of legal battle and courage shown by fearless witnesses/victims, which has resulted in his conviction and no leniency, therefore, on the ground of age should be granted, it said.

The probe agency further said Kumar is a political leader with a large political clout and he has a following in and around Delhi and is capable of influencing/terrorising witnesses.

The matter came up for hearing on Friday before a bench of justices SA Bobde and SA Nazeer. It has fixed the case for further hearing on March 25.

The CBI said that at the time of the incident, Kumar was a member of Parliament of the then ruling party in India and killings in this case had taken place in pursuance to the provocative speeches made by him against the Sikh community.

Considering the influence of the applicant/convict (Kumar) in the society, the fact that he belongs to one of the older political parties having substantial following, the gravity of the offence for which the trial is going on, the prosecution seriously apprehends that a fair trial in the aforementioned pending case would not be possible if the applicant/convict is enlarged on bail, the CBI said.

It said due to Kumars powerful position and influence, several persons who had mustered courage to be witness against him have resiled from their earlier statements out of fear.

The CBI further said that in January this year, they have received a letter from three prime witnesses in the case who have apprehended that they may be harmed by Kumar.

It is, therefore, most humbly prayed that in view of the above submissions (in the reply), the application filed by the applicant/convict seeking bail/suspension of sentence may kindly be dismissed in the interest of justice, it said.

Kumar, through his counsel Ajay Marwah, approached the apex court against the high courts verdict convicting him in the case.

Anti-Sikh riots had broken out after the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, by her two Sikh bodyguards. The top court earlier admitted Kumars appeal for hearing and issued notice to the CBI on his bail plea.

Kumar surrendered before a trial court here on December 31, 2018, to serve the sentence in pursuance of the high courts judgment awarding him life imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life.

After his conviction in the case, Kumar had resigned from the Congress party.

In its judgment, the high court noted that over 2,700 Sikhs were killed in the national capital during the 1984 riots which was indeed a carnage of unbelievable proportions.

The high court had set aside the trial courts 2010 verdict which had acquitted Kumar in the case.
Leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on Friday protested outside the office of the Election Commission of India (ECI) alleging that the Delhi police were trying to collect data of voters for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by conducting raids on call centres hired by the AAP. The sit-in protest by AAP leaders prompted chief election commissioner Sunil Arora to convene a meeting of the Delhi chief electoral officer and police later in the evening.

Sisodia said the police, in the joint meeting, accepted they had visited the call centres. However, they said that technically it was not a raid. We asked the ECI stop the police action and if the commission thinks AAPs action is a crime then it should conduct a probe in its own capacity. Right now, election officers have gone to brief the ECI about this meeting and seek their directions. We are waiting for their directions, he said after the meeting.

Earlier in the day, AAP leaders including Sisodia, MP Sanjay Singh, its Lok Sabha candidates Raghav Chadha and Atishi, had met Arora to urge him to take action against the Delhi police for harassing call centre executives hired by the party without any prior notice. Sisodia, after the meeting in the afternoon, had said that the CEC had assured to look into the matter.

But, drama unfolded at the ECIs office by evening as AAP sought another appointment with the CEC, complaining that even after their meeting with Arora, the police again raided the call centres. Barely an hour after we met CEC Sunil Arora to lodge a complaint against the police, a fourth raid was conducted. The Delhi police is acting at the BJPs behest to harass call centre employees. Demanding fair elections, we are sitting outside the election commission to protest against the raid on the call centre, Sisodia said.

The Delhi police said they have registered an FIR following several complaints regarding bogus calls about Delhis electoral rolls and investigations were underway. Relevant facts of the matter are being ascertained. The investigation is being conducted strictly in accordance with the law. Nobody has been arrested in the case so far. As far as the allegations against us (Delhi Police) are concerned, we have already responded about it to the EC. Moreover, no call centre owners have filed a complaint regarding harassment by our investigating team members, said Satish Golcha, special commissioner of police (crime).

Delhi CM and AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal also questioned the CEC and said that the police while questioning the call centre employees was asking only for server details and the AAPs data . Why is CEC raiding our call centres and asking for our data? What is our crime? Please tell our crime at least.. Police is saying just one thing  give your data. This means the election commission wants to take our data and hand it over to Amit Shah (BJP chief), he posted on Twitter.

A BJP team had earlier met Arora and alleged that the AAP was making misleading phone calls about the citys electoral rolls. Ahead of the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to begin on April 11, the ECI had directed the police to take necessary action against people making such calls. An FIR was also filed .

The AAP leaders have asserted that they were responsible for hiring the call centre employees to make people aware that names had been deleted from voters lists and the police should question the party leaders instead of the workers.

The party has alleged that the BJP got more than 30 lakh voters names deleted in Delhi, even as some leaders such as AAP MP Sanjay Singh have often quoted the figure as 24 lakh. However, responding to an unstarred question, Delhi election minister Imran Hussain recently told the Delhi Assembly that names of 11.54 lakh voters were deleted from the electoral rolls between 2015 and 2018, while 18.45 lakh names were added.
Air India in the UK confirmed on Friday that it would be suspending all flights to and from Birmingham Airport from Saturday due to extraordinary circumstances involving the closure of Pakistans airspace.

The Indian national carrier said that its daily flights to India from London Heathrow remain unaffected as the New Delhi and Amritsar services in and out of Birmingham will be grounded until further updates.

The flight cancellation is due to extraordinary circumstances, namely closure of Pakistan airspace and resultant impact which is beyond the control of Air India, said Debashis Golder, Regional Manager  UK and Europe.

In fact, besides Birmingham, many other flights in our network have been cancelled, combined or being operated with restricted payload, to reduce impact on passenger travel to the minimum, he said.

Pakistan airspace remains closed since Indian airstrikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist camp in the country following a terror attack claimed by the terror outfit that killed 40 jawans in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir last month.

Air India flies six times a week from Birmingham Airport  three times direct to Delhi and three times direct to Amritsar.

The airport expressed its disappointment at the suspension of AI113 Delhi-Birmingham, AI114 Birmingham-Delhi, AI117 Delhi-Amritsar-Birmingham, and AI118 Birmingham-Amritsar-Delhi and said it was working with the airline to restore the schedule.

The airport is very understanding of the current situation which means that Pakistan airspace cannot be overflown and the operational impact that this is having on Air India, a Birmingham Airport spokesperson said.

Passengers that are already booked on Air India flights from Birmingham will be contacted by the airline to re-book or to gain a refund. We are working closely with Air India to restore these flights to Birmingham Airports schedule as soon as possible, the spokesperson said.

Among the other routes affected by Fridays announcement include Air Indias Delhi-Madrid and Madrid-Delhi flights.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah on Friday sat down with senior leaders of the party from Bihar to iron out differences with ally Janata Dal (United), or JD (U), on which seats the two parties will contest in the April-May parliamentary elections, two leaders privy to the talks said.

The BJP and the JD(U), led by of chief minister Nitish Kumar , announced in December that they will contest 17 seats each in Bihar and leave the remaining six for the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) of Ram Vilas Paswan.

We are almost close to identifying the seats that each party will contest. There are some issues that need to be sorted out. We are working on it. An announcement is expected in the next couple of days, one of the two BJP leaders quoted above said on condition of anonymity.

The leader said there are some seats that all three constituents of the NDA in Bihar want to contest and there has been no agreement so far. Both the BJP and JD(U) have staked claim to Khagaria, a seat currently held by the LJP. The LJP is not ready to leave its claim on this seat, the first leader said.

The LJP wants Nawada, a seat currently held by junior minister Giriraj Singh. The Bihar strongman wants to contest Nawada, but a decision has to be taken to move him to Begusarai, a seat held by late BJP MP Bhola Singh.

Out of four Lok Sabha seats of Mithilanchal, the JD(U) has staked claim on three. Its a BJP bastion and we want to contest at least two, the second leader said.

Darbhanga, Madhubani, Jhanjharpur and Supaul are the four seats in the region. The Congress won Supaul and the BJP the remaining three in the last parliamentary elections.

The JD(U) won just 2 seats in 2014, and yet we gave 17 seats to them. Now it wants to contest most of the winnable seats and leave those for the BJP where it finds the social equation working against it, the second leader said.

The BJPs central election committee is meeting in New Delhi on Saturday to release its first list of candidates, but a decision on Bihar is unlikely.
People in Punjabs Amritsar reported hearing two loud bangs early on Friday which woke them up, but officials said it was the sound of the fighter jets of the Indian Air Force flying near the border with Pakistan.

Social media exploded with residents claiming blasts and heightened air activity in the city and soon #Amritsar started trending with conversation around sonic booms, low flying jets and loud sounds across the sky.

Senior superintendent of police (rural) Parampal Singh said it was a sonic boom of the fighter jets of the Indian air force. Sonic boom happens by shock waves created by any object that travels through the air faster than the speed of sound.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) carried out an exercise last night during which many fighter jets flew near the India-Pakistan border in Amritsar at supersonic speeds, said the SSP.

Amritsar Police officials appealed to the people not to panic and said they have checked the entire city. Amritsars commissioner of police (CP) SS Srivastava said he too heard the sounds but said: We have got checked from all the city, nothing has happened.

We have gathered information from Verka, Sultanwind area, bus stand, railway station, Airport Road, Chheharta etc. We have not got any information about any blast in the city. Even, we didnt get any such information at our emergency numbers, additional deputy commissioner of police (ADCP-city 1) Jagjit Singh Walia said.

He also appealed to the people not to believe the rumours being spread on social media.

Everything is fine in the city, as per our information, he said.

Residents of the holy city said they heard the bangs at around 1:15am, forcing them to come out of their houses. Following this, the sound of flying aircraft was also heard in Amritsar and the areas near the border with Pakistan.

Some tweeted that their windows panes cracked after the loud sound and some asked others to stop rumour mongering.

Some rumour mongers are spreading this screenshot from India TV. This is an old news from November 2018. If you see someone spreading it , please report that tweet. Dont fall for rumours. #Amritsar (sic), user Roshan Lal wrote.

Amritsar is 28 kilometres away from the Wagah border with Pakistan. Hostilities between the neighbours escalated last month when India attacked a terror camp in Pakistans Balakot of the Jaish-e-Mohammed that had carried out a suicide attack in Pulwama of Jammu and Kashmir on February 14. Forty CRPF soldiers were killed in the worst terror attack in decades.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu retained most of the sitting MLAs and inducted 20 new faces in the first list of candidates for 126 assembly seats late on Thursday amid protests by rival groups within the party.

Andhra Pradesh with 175 assembly and 25 Lok Sabha seats will go to polls on April 11. The votes will be counted on May 23.

The Telegu Desam party with 102 seats, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) four, YSRC 67 and two Independents constituted the first assembly of the successor state of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. The TDP sent 15 members, BJP two and YSRC eight to Parliament from the state in the elections held along with the state polls that year.

The chief ministers residence at Undavalli witnessed a flurry of activity and series of protests by party workers either seeking tickets for their leaders or opposing tickets for rival groups in the run-up to the release of the list.

Almost all the ministers got the tickets, barring a few who are either being fielded in the Lok Sabha elections or have preferred being replaced by their children.

Dalit minister KS Jawahar, who hold the excise portfolio, was shunted out of his native Kovuru in West Godavari to contest from Tiruvuru in Krishna district in the wake of mounting opposition within the ruling party over his presence in his home constituency.

Women and child welfare minister Paritala Sunitha opted voluntary retirement from electoral politics to make way her son Sri Ram from her native Rapthadu. Deputy chief minister KE Krishnamurthy chose to stay out of the fray in Pattikonda this time enabling the entry of his son Syam Babu as his heir apparent.

Forests and environment minister Siddha Raghava Rao and marketing minister C Adinarayana Reddy, who hold the Darsi and Jammalamadugu segments in Prakasam and Kadapa districts respectively, were nominated as Lok Sabha candidates in Ongole and Kadapa.

Three ministers from the legislative council - Naidus son Nara Lokesh (IT and panchayat raj), P Narayana (municipal administration) and Somireddy Chandramohan Reddy (agriculture) - took a plunge into direct elections. Lokesh has been fielded in Mangalagiri under which capital falls.

Around 20 sitting MLAs, mostly in the reserved segments, were replaced by fresh faces. A few of the new entrants are relatives of state ministers and sitting lawmakers.

Backward Classes got 30 seats while Kammas and Reddys 32 and 22 respectively in the first list.

Also read | Lok Sabha Elections 2019: All you need to know about Andhra Pradesh

Some leaders within the TDP such as party Lok Sabha member JC Diwakar Reddy have said earlier that the party will find the going tough in the elections unless more than 40% of the sitting MLAs were replaced. Reddy said many legislators from the ruling party have become unpopular in their constituencies and alienated from people, stoking anti-incumbency.

Political analyst T Lakshminarayana said the Naidus first list looked like the one released by his Telangana counterpart K Chandrasekhar Rao, who successfully faced the state election in December last year with old faces.

KCR (as Rao is popularly called) led his party to power with a landslide victory by taking the sitting MLAs on board dispelling the notions suggesting anti-incumbency might upset his apple cart. It is to be seen whether Naidu will take a leaf from KCRs book and return to power or allow the perceived anti-incumbency to scuttle his come-back plans, Lakshminarayana said.

Naidu told reporters that the candidates for Lok Sabha seats will be announced on Friday.

Yuvajana Sramika Rytu Congress (YSRC) chief YS Jaganmohan Reddy is expected to release the first list of his partys candidates at Idupulapaya in Kadapa district on March 16 before he embarks on a bus yatra, a campaign-on-wheels in the state.

Jana Sena leader and actor Pawan Kalyan released a list of candidates for 32 assembly seats in the first phase at a party foundation programme in Rajahmundry on Thursday evening. It failed to clear the ambiguity over the presence of Kalyan in the election fray.

Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president N Raghuveera Reddy said his party has completed the exercise of the selection of candidates for all the 175 assembly segments and 25 Lok Sabha seats. The lists will be announced after clearance by party president Rahul Gandhi by Friday evening, he said.

For complete coverage of Lok Sabha Elections 2019, click here.
Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge has accused the Narendra Modi government of using his refusal to attend the Lokpal selection panel meeting as an excuse for not appointing the countrys first ombudsman. He has written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterating his objection to invitation extended to him for the selection panel meeting as a special invitee.

Kharge, who has been invited by the government to attend the selection panel meeting as a special invitee, maintained that he would attend it only after relevant changes are made in the law. He hit out at the Modi government for not amending the Lokpal Act to facilitate participation of the opposition in the Lokpals selection process.

He said, Since 2014, the government has not made any attempt to amend the relevant provisions of the Lokpal Act to include the Leader of the Single Largest Party in the Opposition to be a member of the Selection Committee.

This comes in the wake of a Supreme Court direction to the Centre on March 7 giving it 10 days to inform it about the possible dates when the selection panel for the appointment of the countrys first Lokpal will meet.

The Lokpal Search Committee led by former Supreme Court judge Ranjana Prakash Desai, formed by the government last year, has forwarded three panels of names for chairperson, judicial members and non-judicial members to the Lokpal selection committee. A meeting of the committee is scheduled later in the day.

In his letter to PM Modi, Kharge has referred to the meetings of the search committee and previous meetings of the Lokpal selection panel alleging that the intention of the government was only to exclude the opposition from this crucial process.

A Special Invitee would not have any rights of participation in the process of selection of the Lokpal and I cannot accept the opposition being made voiceless in a critical matter, Kharge said. This is the seventh letter that Kharge has written to PM Modi since February 28 last year on the matter.

Parliament had passed the Lokpal Act in 2013, when the Congress-led UPA government was in power. The law provides for a Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas in states to probe the cases of corruption against public servants.

The Prime Minister, the Lok Sabha Speaker, the Chief Justice of India or his nominee, Leader of the Opposition and an eminent jurist are the members of the Lokpal Selection Committee. As there is no designated Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha currently, the government has invited Mallikarjun Kharge, the leader of the Congress Legislature Party in the House to the meetings of the selection panel but as a special invitee.
Congress president Rahul Gandhi was in Chhattisgarh on Friday interacting with health professional in Raipur, where he indicated that his party a promise for universal healthcare law could be part of the manifesto for the Lok Sabha election.

At one point of time during his interaction, Gandhi took a dig at his own partys minister TS Singh Deo, who responded to a query by a non-permanent health worker. We will keep it in mind, said Deo to the health worker, who wanted relugarisation of the contract with the Chhattisgarh health department and fair compensation for the service.

This is a political answer that he has given, said Gandhi on Deos reply. Deo is the health minister in the Chhattisgarh government. The Congress presidents response drew laughter and cheers from the audience with the health worker seconding him saying, This is what we get whenever we ask for a clear answer.

Watch: Rahul Gandhi charms Chhattisgarh health workers with dig at Cong minister

This forced the minister to offer a detailed answer stating that the Congress government will implement its manifesto that talks about the issues related to health workers.

But this did not satisfy Gandhi, who asked the minister to give a clear answer to the simple question put by the health worker. The conversation ended with the minister promising that compensation will be given to such health workers.

At the event, Gandhi asserted that if the Congress is voted to power in the Lok Sabha election, the government will increase its expenditure in the health sector to three per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP). Indias health spending has been under 1.5 per cent of the GDP.

The Congress president dismissed the Ayushman Bharat scheme, the flagship health insurance programme of the Narendra Modi government saying, It is handout to the 15 to 20 richest businessmen in India.

That is not the type of scheme we are going to run. You need public expenditure in healthcare and education, he said adding, Healthcare is, in a sense, a foundation. So, we have to ensure that foundation is built firmly. The Congress government in 2019 is dramatically going to increase amount of money we put into healthcare and education.

The Congress returned to power in Chhattisgarh last year after 15 years on the promise of sweeping reforms in the state in the sectors of health, agriculture and education. The BJP formed three successive governments in the state before losing the assembly election in November last year.
An Election Commission (EC) appointed three-member special observers team arrived in Srinagar on Thursday to seek fresh feedback from political parties about scheduling the assembly polls in the state.

Almost all political parties in Jammu and Kashmir have criticised the ECs move of not conducting the assembly polls along with national elections in the state.

Governor Satya Pal Malik dissolved the state assembly on November 21, five months after chief minister Mehbooba Mufti lost power as the BJP withdrew its support to her PDP led government.

Vinod Zutshi, Noor Mohammad and AS Gill arrived in Srinagar days after most political parties requested an EC team, led by chief election commissioner, Sunil Arora, to conduct both elections simultaneously.

PDP leader, Firdous Tak, called the observers visit futile. The EC has already wasted resources, energy and time in assessing the situation for the assembly elections... The general perception is the EC is working under some kind of political pressure from the ruling party [BJP] in Delhi.

Congress spokesman, Ravinder Sharma, said:An EC team was here on March 5 and received feedback from political parties. All the parties... favoured simultaneous polls but the EC cited security scenario and announced only Lok Sabha poll schedule. Now, again observers are in the state. Tell me, what has changed?

Panthers Party leader, Harsh Dev Singh, said their delegation met the observers in Srinagar. Our stand remains the same. If Parliamentary elections can be held, then why not assembly polls?
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has set the Friday evening deadline for the authorities to find what led to collapse of the deck of a foot-over bridge in Mumbai. Six people lost their lives in the Thursday evening incident. Many others are injured.

Fadnavis, who visited the site of bridge collapse this morning, said, he has asked the authorities to fix primary responsibility for the bridge collapse by this evening.

There are around 10 injured admitted in the ward. One person is in the ICU. All of them are out of danger now. High-level enquiry will be conducted to probe into the matter. FIR has been lodged, Fadnavis said after meeting those injured and admitted in a hospital.

The incident happened near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, which is one of the busiest railway stations in the country. The bridge was constructed in 1980. In a structural audit conducted last year, the collapsed foot-over bridge was given clearance by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

Fadnavis had on Thursday said, If the bridge collapses despite clearance, it raises questions on the audit.

Congress leader Milind Deora also raised question on the safety audit. After the Elphinstone tragedy, the footover bridge outside CSMT has collapsed despite being structurally audited just six months ago, Deora tweeted.

Meanwhile, news agency PTI reported that the BMC is likely to take a call on the future of the collapsed bridge. Civic commissioner Ajoy Mehta will meet Road and Bride department officials and then take a call on dismantling the entire FOB, PTI quoted a BMC spokesperson as saying.
France on Friday sanctioned Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar and said it would take up the matter of including him in a European Union list of terrorist individuals against the backdrop of China blocking an attempt to list him at the UN Security Council.

The move, which came two days after China placed a technical hold on a proposal spearheaded by France to designate Azhar as a global terrorist with the UNs Islamic State and al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee, reflected the frustration and anger in Western capitals, people familiar with developments said. A joint statement issued by Frances ministries of Europe and foreign affairs, economy and finance and interior, said: France has decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code.

A joint decree of the ministries of interior and economy and finance was published in the official gazette on Friday.

We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree, the statement said.

France has always been and always will be by Indias side in the fight against terrorism, it added.

An Indian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: The development is the result of Indias focus on working with international interlocutors on counter-terrorism. It also reflects their disappointment with Chinas hold on Azhars listing and is their way of expressing solidarity with India. The French statement noted that JeM, which the United Nations has deemed to be a terrorist organisation since 2001, had claimed responsibility for the deadly attack in Pulwama on February 14 that killed 40 Central Reserve Police Force troops. There was no clarity on the JeMs assets in France and the French statement did not specify the assets that authorities intended to freeze.

Despite Chinas blocking of the fourth effort to sanction Azhar at the UN Security Council on February 13, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Friday that international support for attempts to designate the JeM chief at the world body has grown over the years.

In a series of tweets, Swaraj noted that the Indian government was the lone proposer of a 2009 move to sanction Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee. The second proposal, moved by India in 2016, was co-sponsored by the US, France and Britain, while the third proposal in 2017 was moved by the US, Britain and France.

The fourth and most recent proposal was moved last month by France, the US and the UK, and supported by all but one of the 15 members of the UN Security Council.

It was co-sponsored by Australia, Bangladesh, Italy and Japan who are not members of the Security Council.

Thus, we have secured an unprecedented support from the international community for listing of Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee, Swaraj said.
An Indian national has pleaded guilty to the charges of smuggling Indians as illegal immigrants into the United States.

Pleading guilty before a New Jersey court on Thursday, Bhavin Patel, 38, said he did this for private financial gain.

He faces a maximum potential sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to USD 250,000. Sentencing is scheduled for July 9.

According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court, agents for the Department of Homeland Security Investigations received information that a smuggling operation run by Patel was attempting to find methods to bring foreign nationals from India into the US.

The investigation revealed that the smuggling organisation recruited Indian nationals and others to pay fees in exchange for passage to the US.

Beginning in October 2013, an undercover law enforcement officer posing as a smuggler began meeting with Patel in Bangkok. Patel told the undercover law enforcement officer that he wanted to smuggle Indian nationals into the US.

On three different occasions, Patel or his conspirator transported the Indian nationals to an airport in Thailand, at which point the undercover law enforcement officer would presumably use his contacts to smuggle them into the US via commercial airline flights, the Department of Justice said.

Patel agreed to wire down payments for each individual to be smuggled and to pay a balance of tens of thousands of dollars for each individual once the foreign nationals arrived in the US.

Over the ensuing months, Patel arranged for six Indian nationals to be brought to Thailand for smuggling into the US via Newark Liberty International Airport. He was arrested on December 7, 2018, upon his arrival at Newark Liberty.
YS Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and uncle of Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress (YSRC) president YS Jaganmohan Reddy, reportedly died of a cardiac arrest at his house in Andhra Pradeshs Kadapa district on Friday.

The local police registered a case of suspicious death following a complaint by Vivekananda Reddys personal assistant Krishna Reddy after the politicians family raised doubts over his death, citing bleeding injuries on his head and temples.

He was 68 and is survived by wife YS Sowbagya and daughter Sunitha, who is a medical practitioner in the US.

Vivekananda Reddy died after returning home from an election campaign for the YSRC candidate S Raghurami Reddy in Mydukuru assembly constituency. He was found dead in the wash room by one of his domestic helps. He was living alone at his Pulivendula house and his wife was in the United States with her daughter and son-in-law.

The YSRC leader had undergone a surgery for heart ailments in the past.

Family members said he will be cremated according to Christian rituals after his wife and daughter reach Pulivendula.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on friday has ordered constitution of a special investigation team (SIT) to probe the death.

Vivekananda was elder brother of former Andra Pradesh chief minister and Jagan Reddys father late YS Rajasekhara Reddy. He served as the Lok Sabha member from Kadapa twice from 1999 to 2009 and another two terms as an MLA from Pulivendula (1989-94 and 1994-99) from the Congress in the undivided state.

Jaganmohan Reddy, who was scheduled to launch his partys election campaign and announce the candidates list from his native Idupulapaya on Saturday, rushed to Pulivenduala. He was accompanied by his mother Vijayamma, wife Bharati and sister Sharmila to pay last respects to his uncle.

YSRC spokesperson Talasila Raghuram said the party is yet to decide on the postponement of Saturdays schedule regarding release of candidates list.

Vivekananda stood by the Congress when Jagan Reddy broke ties with the grand old party, raising a banner of revolt against the Gandhi family in 2010. In return, he was rewarded with an MLC post and the agriculture ministry in the N Kiran Kumar Reddy government.

This led to a split in the YS family with Congress high command fielding Vivekananda against Vijayamma, his sister-in-law and Jagans mother in Pulivendula in the 2011 by-election only to suffer a humiliating defeat. The by-election was caused after Vijayamma resigned as an MLA according to the partys decision.

Vivekananda Reddy later returned to Jagans party.
Sister Lucy Kalapura, who supported the protest for the arrest of Jalandhar bishop Franco Mullakkal on sexual assault allegations, has been asked to leave the vocation immediately by the Franciscan Clarist Congregation (FCC) or be defrocked.

The nun however has challenged the congregation to expel her, saying most of the charges raised against her were baseless.

Two day back, she had appeared before the Mother General of FCC congregation in Aluva in Ernakulam district to explain her position. She had sought police protection to go to the congregation HQ, fearing threat to life.

You have consciously and willfully violated the vow of poverty repeatedly. You uploaded a photo of yours in lay dress on Facebook and tried to justify your action by criticising the FCC religious habits in your channel discussions. You also bought a car in your name. I should remind you that you must petition the indult to leave the FCC, said the letter signed by superior general of FCC Sister Ann Joseph.

Since you are a perpetually professed member of the FCC and through your profession of your religious vows, you voluntarily renounce your right to freely administer money, your freedom to wear any dress of your choice, your freedom to bring anyone to your bedroom and spend night with anyone of your choice, your freedom to travel anywhere at any time, your freedom to participate in any channel discussion and your freedom to publish any books or articles etc, said exhaustive 17-page letter.

Sister Kalapura said she was issued four show-cause notices and she replied to all and appeared before the superior general in person.

I denied all charges. I will not go on my own. Let them expel me, she said, adding she will remain as a nun till her last.

She said her fight was not against the church but against some people who support unjust and corrupt practices. She has also expressed her desire to meet Pope Francis.

The Franciscan Clarist Congregation declined to speak, saying it was an internal matter of the congregation. But it confirmed a fresh letter was dispatched to Sister Lucy Kalapura on March 12.

Last June, a 43-year-old nun had filed a complaint alleging that bishop Franco Mullakkal had sexually assaulted after summoning her on the pretext of discussing an important issue in 2014 and it continued for two years. Later, she also released a 7-page letter she wrote to the Vatican Ambassador in India narrating how her plight was overlooked by church authorities.

When police failed to arrest the bishop, five fellow nuns staged a sit-in protest in Kochi. Many like sister Kalapura had joined the dharna. Later a special investigation team was floated and it arrested Mullakal in September after several rounds of questioning. After spending three weeks in judicial custody he later secured bail. There were many attempts to intimidate and transfer the five nuns who stood by the victim. The victim and five nuns are now confined to their convent in Kuravilangad in Kottayam.

Two weeks back, police had registered a case against a convent in Muvattupuzha (Ernakulam) after another nun, a key witness in the sexual assault case, complained that she was illegally confined and tortured for deposing against Mullakal. Father Kuriakose Kattuthara, who was another witness in the case, was found dead in his room in Jalandhar under mysterious circumstances last year.
Jharkhands former chief minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader Hemant Soren today met Communist Party of India leader D Raja, saying that all opposition parties should be included in this momentum fight.

Soren wrote on Twitter that he had a fruitful discussion with Raja about the contours of the grand alliance against the BJP in Jharkhand. We strongly feel that all opposition parties should be included in this momentum fight, he tweeted after the meeting.

Despite limited room, Hemant has suggested including the CPI in the opposition alliance. If this proposal is agreed upon by other allies, the CPI may get one seat to contest, a JMM leader said. If it joins the opposition alliance, the CPI could get the Hazaribag Lok Sabha seat, currently held by union minister Jayant Sinha. In return, it will have to let go of the Koderma Lok Sabha seat that it is demanding.

Jharkhand has a total of 14 Lok Sabha seats, of which the BJP won 12 in the last election.

Soren is in Delhi to finalise the seat sharing talks with the Congress leadership, and is expected to meet Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday. A formal announcement is expected tomorrow, the JMM leader said.

The seat sharing between the Congress, the JMM, the Rashtriya Janta Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (JVM) of former chief minister Babulal Marandi is stuck due to disagreement between the allies over two seats.

The JVM has staked claim over Godda, where the Congress stood second in the last parliamentary election.

The Congress has staked claim on Chaibasa, where it stood third in the 2014 election, but the JMM wants to field its own candidate because it performed better than the Congress in the 2014 assembly elections. The JMM had an alliance with the Congress for parliamentary election, and it did not field a candidate in Chaibasa in the previous Lok Sabha election. The two parties had fought the assembly election separately and the JMM had won 5 of the 6 assembly constituencies under the Chaibasa Lok Sabha seat.
Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge once again turned down the governments request to attend a meeting of the Lokpal selection panel on Friday as a special invitee, saying he could not accept the Opposition being made voiceless on a critical matter.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kharge accused the government of using his refusal to attend the Lokpal selection panel meeting as an excuse for not appointing the countrys first anti-corruption ombudsman. He also hit out at the government for not amending the law to facilitate the participation of the Opposition in the selection process.

Since 2014, the government has not made any attempt to amend the relevant provisions of the Lokpal Act to include the Leader of the Single Largest Party in the Opposition to be a member of the Selection Committee, he wrote in the letter.

This comes in the wake of the Supreme Courts March 7 direction to the Centre to inform the court within 10 days about the possible dates when the selection panel for the appointment of the countrys first Lokpal would meet.

The Lokpal Search Committee led by former Supreme Court judge Ranjana Prakash Desai, formed by the government last year, has forwarded three panels of names for chairperson, judicial members and non-judicial members to the Lokpal selection committee.

Kharge also referred to meetings of the search committee and previous meetings of the Lokpal selection panel and alleged that the intention of the government was only to exclude the Opposition from this crucial process.

A Special Invitee would not have any rights of participation in the process of selection of the Lokpal and I cannot accept the Opposition being made voiceless in a critical matter, said Kharge, who hasnt been recognized as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha because the Congress didnt have the requisite number of members in the House.

This is the seventh letter Kharge has written to Modi on the matter since February 28 last year.

The Lokpal Act, passed in 2013, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government was in power, provides for a Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas in states to probe corruption cases against public servants.

The Prime Minister, Lok Sabha Speaker, Chief Justice of India or his nominee, the Leader of the Opposition and an eminent jurist are the members of the Lokpal Selection Committee.

As there is no designated Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha currently, the government has invited Kharge, the leader of the Congress Legislature Party in the House, to the meetings of the selection panel but as a special invitee.
The Punjab Polices intelligence wing on Friday claimed to have busted an espionage racket active in the state with the arrest of a Military Engineering Services (MES) employee who allegedly passed sensitive military information to Pakistan-based operatives.

The alleged agent, Ram Kumar, is working as an electrician with MES in the Jalandhar Cantonment since 2013 and hails from Fazilka district. Two mobile phones and four SIM cards were recovered from him. The state special operations cell (SSOC) claims to have made his arrest on the basis of specific inputs provided by other agencies.

A case under Sections 3, 4, 5, 9 of the Official Secrets Act (OSA) and Section 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of Indian Penal Code was registered against him at the special operations cell police station in Amritsar.

Kumar during preliminary questioning revealed that he was befriended by a Pakistan-based intelligence operative on social media, the special operations cell said in a press release.

He was asked to provide information of the Indian Army units deployed along the Indo-Pak border besides movement of army convoys in the area. He was also asked to provide details of specific army units, a police spokesman said.

He also provided mobile numbers of military officers to Pakistani intelligence operatives. He was paid money on more than one occasion for sharing information. After the Pulwama incident, his handlers became particularly inquisitive about the movement of army units, he added.

Kumar was produced in court that sent him to four-day police remand. Further probe is on to check his social media activities, said the officials.
In the third attack on civilians in south Kashmir in the last two days, militants abducted and shot dead a civilian in Pulwama late on Thursday night, police said on Friday.

Hours before Manzoor Ahmad Lone, 40, was whisked away from his home at Dogripora and killed at Gulzarpora village six kms away, unknown gunmen attacked a National Conference (NC) block president in Bijbehara area of Anantnag district, also in south Kashmir. A day earlier, a purported army deserter was shot dead in Pulwama. A police spokesman confirmed the abduction and death of Lone. A case has been registered and investigations have begun, he said.

On Thursday evening, gunmen shot at Bijbehara NC block president Mohammad Ismail Wani. Officials said they opened fire on the 62-year-old at Thajweera village where he had gone to attend a condolence meeting.
Senior Indian army officers have confirmed that additional Indian troops were deployed along the India-Myanmar border between February 17 and March 2 but categorically dismissed reports of a cross-border strike by Indian armed forces along the lines of last months air force strike on Balakot in Pakistan.

The recent deployment, which reportedly comprised mainly of Assam Rifles units being moved south to the Myanmar border, took place simultaneous to a crackdown by the Myanmar army against rebels who were threatening and trying to extort money from Indian personnel working on the USD 484 million Kaladan multi-modal transit transport project in Myanmar being funded by India. The project aims to connect India and Myanmar by sea and land and is expected to be operational by 2020.

While the officers confirmed that India and Myanmar were in touch diplomatically ahead of the operation with the two armies holding several meetings to plan it, it was by no means a cross-border strike as is being portrayed in some reports. We operated in coordination with the Myanmar army and our main aim was to prevent these elements from moving into India, said a second senior officer in the military establishment, who did not want to be named.

We dont need to cross the Myanmar border because there is a mutual understanding on both sides and the Myanmar army largely obliges with whatever we ask them for, said a senior army officer closely monitoring the North-east. The Myanmar rebels have been creating more problems on their side than ours. At their request, we had killed 5 of their rebels and captured 8-10 on our side in 2017. Thus, the Myanmar army, too, struck the separatist National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khalang) HQ in Taga on our behalf.

At least 12 rebel positions were destroyed by the Myanmar Army which was armed with Indian hardware, a senior army officer said. Among other things, India shared radio sets with the Myanmar Army for ease of communication and to prevent incidents of friendly fire.

While confirming that at least one soldier of the Myanmar Army was critically injured in an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) blast, they dismissed reports that two Indian army jawans had been killed in a skirmish with Myanmar-based rebels in Vathuampui on the Mizo-Myanmar border.
A seven-year-old boy in Keralas Malappuram district has tested positive for West Nile Virus (WNV) disease, which spreads from birds to humans with the bite of an infected Culex mosquito.

The symptoms include cold, fever, bodyache, fatigue and nausea, with complications leading to meningitis and death.

A two-member team of experts from the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in Delhi joined counterparts in Malappuram on Thursday to support regional and state health authorities to manage the disease.

No other case has been reported yet. A team from our regional office in Thiruvananthapuram reached the spot on Wednesday but now we have also sent experts from the Delhi centre. We are being extra cautious as it is a vector-borne disease, said Preeti Sudan, secretary, health. The boy developed symptoms of cold and fever almost two weeks ago, and is being treated in the intensive care unit of Government Medical College & Hospital (GMCH), Kozhikode.

No other case has tested positive so far and there are no reports of anyone with related symptoms. The boy is undergoing treatment and we hope he recovers well, said Sudan.

A woman from Kozhikode district was admitted to GMCH seven months ago with WNV-like symptoms. But she did not test positive. The health ministry is closely monitoring the situation and is in touch with the state health department for prevention of WNV disease.

Earlier on Thursday, Kerala additional chief secretary Rajeev Sadanandan briefed Sudan on the situation. NCDCs expert team includes Dr Ruchi Jain from the regional health office in Trivandrum; entomologist Dr E Rajendran from Calicut, and assistant director Dr Suneet Kaur and epidemic intelligence service officer Binoy Basu from Delhi.

The Indian Council of Medical Research has been alerted as the samples will be sent for testing to their main lab, National Institute of Virology in Pune, said Sudan..
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 16)  President Rodrigo Duterte skipped his scheduled events on Friday because of a headache, his former aide said.

The President was supposed to distribute certificates of land ownership to farmer beneficiaries, followed by a grand campaign rally for the PDP-LABAN party in Davao City.

"Sumasakit talaga ang ulo ni Pangulo. Indisposed siya ngayong araw na ito," former Special Assistant to the President and senatorial candidate Bong Go told reporters after the PDP-LABAN rally at Crocodile Park.

[Translation: The President has a huge headache. He's indisposed today.]

Go said that the issue was not serious.

"Nothing serious po. So I assure you walang problema (there's no problem)," he added.

Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte attended the land distribution event in her father's stead.
Expressing disappointment at Pakistans response to various issues raised by India during the first meeting on the Kartarpur Corridor, Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, on Friday, urged Islamabad to be more amenable and responsive to Indias demands, keeping in view the interests of the devotees seeking to pay obeisance at the historic Gurdwara across the border.

The CM added Islamabads response to Indias demands was totally inadequate and the neighbouring country needed to reconsider its stand, if the corridor is to serve its true purpose, in the spirit in which it was decided to be opened.

The governments of the two countries took a historic decision by agreeing to open the corridor to mark the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, in November this year, said Captain Amarinder, lauding the fact that the Pulwama attack and the subsequent IAF airstrikes were not allowed to scuttle talks between the two sides on taking the project forward.

It was good that the two countries remained on track with the project deadlines, but Pakistan needed to go a step further to make the initiative truly meaningful for pilgrims, particularly the Sikh community, which had been deprived of darshan at the Kartarpur gurdwara for over 70 years, he added.

The limitation of 500 pilgrims a day, as proposed by Pakistan, was insufficient to cater to the aspirations of the large number of devotees desirous of darshan at the gurdwara, said the CM. He added that curtailing the visit to a limited number of days in a week would defeat the purpose, he added.

Pakistans response to Indias demands on Kartarpur Corridor is totally inadequate. The corridor wont serve its true purpose with such limitations. Sikhs have been deprived of Kartarpur Gurdwara darshan for 70 years, need to allow more people every day, including from overseas, he tweeted.

Captain Amarinder reiterated his demand for visa-free Khule Darshan. Pilgrims should be allowed to go through the Kartarpur Corridor for Khule Darshan at the historic gurdwara all seven days a week. Special permits should be good for identity, the visa requirement needs to be waived off. Pakistan has to be more responsive, he tweeted.
Mumbais civic authorities suspended on Friday two engineers said to be responsible for auditing and repairing a pedestrian bridge that came crashing down during the evening rush hour a day before, killing six people and injuring 31 others.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) also announced a re-examination of safety audit of 296 bridges in the city and a revamp of a department that overlooks and maintains bridges in Indias financial capital.

BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta ordered the suspension of executive engineer AR Patil, who the body said supervised the structural audit work of the bridge in 2017-18 and assistant engineer SF Kakulte, who is said to have supervised the repair work in 2013-14.

He also ordered an inquiry against five officers  retired chief engineer (bridges) SO Kori, retired deputy chief engineer (bridges) RB Tare, executive engineers Patil and AI Engineer and assistant engineer Kakulte  for poor inspection during repair work and auditing of the foot overbridge.

An inquiry will be conducted to find out the cause of the bridge collapse within a month.

A major section of the crowded bridge, known to locals as the Himalaya bridge, came crashing down during evening rush hour on Thursday. The bridge connected the busy Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) with BT Lane near The Times of India Building and the Anjuman-e-Islam School, and was used by thousands of daily commuters rushing to catch local trains on Central Railway and the Harbour Line.

Authorities spent Friday morning clearing the arterial Dadabhai Naoroji Road in south Mumbai of debris and chunks of concrete, and demolished the remaining sections of the bridge. This was the second major bridge collapse in Mumbai in nine months, and the accident involving a pedestrian bridge in almost two years.

On July 3, 2018, a pedestrian pathway of Gokhale Bridge over Andheri railway station in suburban Mumbai gave way, killing two people and injuring five others.

On September 29, 2017, a stampede on a rail foot over-bridge at Elphinstone Railway station killed 22 people and injured at least 39.

The orders came hours after chief minister Devendra Fadnavis directed the civic chief to fix primary responsibility and take action by evening.

If a bridge collapses after structural audit, it raises questions about the whole process. There is no reason to spare anyone. If there has been an audit and the bridge collapses, then the audit will also be probed if those who audited certified the bridge fit, it is a very wrong thing. The bridges that have

been audited will be revisited, he said.

The auditing firm was removed from the BMCs panel and the municipal body said the contractor who repaired the bridge in 2013 will be issued a show-cause notice and the firm likely blacklisted.

Despite spending public money on the audit, the true condition of the bridge could not be found out leading to the tragedy. The tragedy could have been avoided if the audit would have been carried out diligently, the report said.

A copy of the audit report dated August 13, 2018, made public by the BMC, showed that the bridge was in good condition and needed only minor repairs but failed to mention the nature and location of the said repairs.

A private firm that conducted repair works on the bridge between 2012 and 2014 will be issued a show-cause notice for sub-standard repair work, the BMC said.

Since the bridge collapsed within six years of the repairs being carried out it seems that the supervision work and workmanship of the contractors was not up to the mark, the report said.

The BMC said that the audit of 296 bridges, which were completed and reports submitted, will be revisited.

In 257 cases, the audit reports will be re-examined and the 39, where the audit was carried out by the same firm that looked after Himalaya bridge, will be re-audited by a different firm.

The BMC also announced a complete revamp of its bridge department that operates around 374 bridges in the city. A new post of chief bridges inspector will be created to be in charge of the bridge inspection authority.

The authority will define and set the frequency of bridge inspection, enumerate the inspections, define the template and format in which the reports will be submitted, define responsibilities of various bridge maintenance engineers and recommend remedial measures in case a structure is found to be in dangerous condition.

Neither the auditing firm nor the company responsible for repairs could be reached for a comment.
The Congress has approached the Election Commission with a complaint against the BJP, saying the ruling party has violated the model code of conduct in force after the poll body announced the schedule of the Lok Sabha election 2019.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress said on Friday, has put up hoardings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at petrol pumps, railways stations and airports.

Congress leaders RPN Singh said his party had given a representation to the poll body on March 10 about the governments hoardings with Prime Minister Modis advertisements even though the model code of conduct is in force.

WATCH : Cong claims PM Modi posters violate Poll Code, says EC ordered removal

On this, the Election Commission has clearly said that they have taken cognizance of the complaint and have issued directions to remove the hoardings. They also said they have sought a report by today evening about how many such hoardings have still not been taken down. We had mentioned that thousands of crores that the government had earned through excise duty on petrol and diesel were being spent on putting up these advertisements, Congress spokesperson Singh said.

And it has also asked for a report about other such hoardings by this evening and said it will probe into it by tonight, he said.

Also read | Rahul Gandhi talks about united oppn, finds Kejriwal ready with Haryana offer

He also said that commission has asked for the videos of the alleged obscene comments by BJP ministers against Congress president Rahul Gandhi and other leaders after a complaint.

We have said that people who are making such comments must be issued a notice immediately and action must be taken against them, he said.

This comes after the BJP on Wednesday asked the Election Commission to take action against Congress president Rahul Gandhi for allegedly violating the model code of conduct by making unverified allegations against Prime Minister Modi.

Rahul Gandhi had accused of the Prime Minister of stealing Rs 30,000 crore from the Indian Air Force and giving it to businessman Anil Ambani as part of the Rafale jet deal. He made the comments during the Jan Sankalp Rally in Gujarat on Tuesday.

The model code of conduct is a set of instructions and guidelines to be followed by political parties and candidates contesting elections for the conduct free and fair polls.

Also read | Rahul Gandhi in celebratory mood: BJPs retort to Modi scared of Xi dig
A preliminary report of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has blamed the structural audit for the collapse of foot overbridge near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station on Thursday. The incident had left six people killed and more than 30 others injured.

There is a prima facie reason to believe that the structural audit has been conducted an irresponsible and negligent manner. This tragedy could have been avoided if the structural audit had been done diligently, news agency ANI reported on Friday.

Its apparent that structural audit report has failed to point out an impending failure. In spite of commissioning the report of bridge and spending public money on it, true condition of bridge was not brought out. The structural report should be made public, ANI reported.

Watch: CM Fadnavis talks tough on Mumbai bridge collapse

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who visited the bridge site and met those injured in the incident this morning, had sought a preliminary report from the authorities asking them to fix primary responsibility for the mishap.

The BMC has suspended two officials and ordered inquiry against two retired officials. Show cause notice has been issued to the auditor and one contractor, who repaired the bridge.

This was the second incident of bridge collapse in Mumbai in nine months. On July 3, 2018 a pedestrian pathway of Gokhale bridge had come crashing on the railway tracks at Andheri railway station. Two people were killed while five others were injured in that incident.

Following the July 2018 incident, the railways had ordered audit of 445 bridge structures crossing the railway tracks in Mumbai. A team headed by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Bombay conducted audit of the bridges. This bridge was found fit for use.
Once the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) has cleared a movie no authority can restrict its screening, the Supreme Court held on Friday as it directed West Bengals chief secretary, principal home secretary and Director General of Police to ensure the unhindered screening of the movie, Bhobishyoter Bhoot, a socio-political satire. The film was forced to be withdrawn from the theatres from February 16, a day after its release.

A large number of decisions of this court have held that once a movie is certified by CBFC. .. it is not open to any authority to issue formal or informal directions preventing the producer from having the film screened as it directly infringes the rights under article 19, a bench of justices DY Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta said, issuing notice to the state government on a petition filed by the director and producer of the movie.

The states chief secretary, principal secretary for the home department and DGP were directed to ensure proper arrangements of security to facilitate the screening of the film.

The court posted the matter for further hearing to March 25.

The films producers challenged the decision of the state government to direct withdrawal of the movie from almost all theatres on the ground that that the contents of the film may hurt public sentiments...
He may seem like a maverick  he has a Facebook page in the name of Nihilanand and will not be persuaded to be shot without his fake beard  but Raphael Samuel has been busy over the past one month, joining forces with child-free and anti-natalist evangelists in Delhi and Bengaluru. The idea is to build a grassroots movement so that the Indian family could try this new option.

Anti-natalism is a philosophy that promotes being child-free as it believes human life is full of suffering so no bringing children into the world. Also, lets be honest, there are some people who dont want to clean kid shit, says Samuel, a 27 year-old entrepreneur in Mumbai, sitting in the office of his mother Kavita Karnad Samuel, a lawyer, whom he plans to sue for 1, for giving birth to him without his consent. Samuel is, incidentally, a grand-nephew of playwright-actor Girish Karnad.

Anugraha KS with his daughter Preeti, 17, in Bengaluru. Both are active members of the group Childfree India. (Kashif Masood / HT Photo)

Pratima Naik of Bengaluru heads a 500-member group of such child-free evangelists. We are not starting a religion, we are trying to build an organisation and spread our views, says Naik. We are staring at an ecological disaster. Both human beings and animals are multiplying fast. But at the most I can tell a man to have a vasectomy, but I cant have this conversation with a tiger, can I?

The group is active on Facebook under the name Childfree India but has recently started offline activities by organising meetings with its members across cities and designating roles for them. The first national meeting of the group was held in Bangalore last month. Samuel is in charge of its social media campaigns.

The group also wants to move beyond awareness campaigns and work with associations like aanganvadi centres that are part of the public healthcare system as they deal with contraceptive counselling and supply. When women come to do a tubal ligation (female sterilisation), aanganvadi workers often advise them to have a second child if the first child is a daughter, says Samuel, who has some experience of rural life, as he provided security, four years ago, to Sampat Rai, the leader of the Gulabi Gang, a feminist vigilante group, in Bundelkand.

Vivek and Varsha at their home in Mulund. Being child-free does not mean that ours is a life without responsibilities. But our life is certainly less stress-free and more spontaneous than those who are parents, they say. (Aalok Soni / HT Photo)

A certain statistic pushed him to act. A recent study says one fewer child per family can stop an average of 58.6 tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions per year, Samuel states. UNICEF data shows India topped the list of eight populous countries and accounted for 50% of all newborns born globally on January 1, 2019. If we dont stop making babies now, when will we do it?

So far this may be a minority sentiment, but it is picking up in urban centres. The tribe of Samuel includes a Mumbai-based married couple (photographer Varsha and engineer Vivek Mam), techie Ashwin, Alok Kumar, a married computer teacher in Delhi and his wife Shweta, and activist Anugraha KS of Bengaluru.

Alok has also taken a leaf out of Samuels book. He promotes his thoughts on child-freeism and other unconventional ideas about self-image through his series of Youtube videos, Varjit Satya (Forbidden Truths) under the persona of Alok Mystic. His wife Shweta does the same with her Youtube videos of Inspirational Shweta. Some amount of gimmickry, they say, is needed to propagate extreme ideas.

Alok, a Dehi youth promotes his thoughts on child-freeism and other unconventional ideas about self-image through his series of Youtube videos, Varjit Satya. (Raj K Raj/HT PHOTO)

The logic for bringing in a child cannot be that my father did this, so must I. If you really want a child, just adopt one, says Alok. My videos are seeds, they will sprout if they have to. Im under no illusion that seeing these, everyone will turn anti-natalists, Im just expressing myself. Samuels consent-clause, he says, is important, but more so for women. Samuel, of course, has stated that his consent should have been taken before his mother gave birth to him, but thats just a ploy to focus the attention on the idea of consent.There is immense social pressure on a woman becoming a mother. Why should she be told that a child alone will give meaning to a womans life or make her family complete? he asks.

Could it be that the child-free movement demonstrates the crisis and churn in the traditional Indian family as the basic unit of social existence? The support for a child-less marriage in India will, however, be a limited one, says sociologist Ravi Kumar, South Asian University. But there is no denying that the economic precarity this generation faces, is making them critique age-old ideas and hence subvert the very foundation of the family itself.

Varsha Mam could indeed be a representative of the new Indian family woman. She says her child-free state keeps her life spontaneous but not without responsibilities. Her husband Vivek agrees: We can go off on a holiday whenever we want to; I can indulge my hobbies and so can she, and also look after my parents.... My mother is, I think, a closet anti-natalist herself but perhaps few people in her generation could openly say so. The campaign for a child-free India is mainly about making women and men, and couples aware that they do have a choice and to take the stigma off when they exercise that choice by talking about it openly.

Ashwin,a computer professional, in Mumbai. Many couples ignore their personal histories otherwise they would have realised that good parenting would have been impossible for them, financially or psychologically, he says. (Aalok Soni / HT Photo)

The concept of using babies as a band-aid for an unstable marriage is something all anti-natalists frown upon. If you dont get along with your partner, how are you going to like him/her better with a child? points out Ashwin, a computer professional.

Ashwin has witnessed his fathers violence on his mother. His father, who has anger issues and used to be an alcoholic, runs a cab service. In India, many couples ignore their personal histories otherwise they would have realised that good parenting would have been impossible for them, financially or psychologically. He adds: The question is: will I do better? Its a risk, he says, he doesnt want to hazard.

The child-free advocacy group has been most active in Bengaluru. Anugraha KS gave up his anti-natalist views for a while because his wife wanted a child. But his marriage eventually broke up and his daughter Preeti is now an active participant in her fathers original project. Is it a lonely existence among extended family and friends, to have decided at 17 that she isnt going to marry or have babies. I am not an attention seeker, says Preeti, Its not compulsory to have friends.

Samuel says he hasnt lost any. His mother is with him fully, except in the case he is planning to file against her. She feels anti-natalism is a concept whose time has come. His grandmother, too, likes his views. She just doesnt like his beard.
Police on Friday arrested three people who allegedly were planning to target the suspects in sacrilege of Guru Granth Sahib in Punjab. The police also seized two .32 calibre pistols, 3 magazines and 14 cartridges from their possession.

Acting on a specific input, a police party from State Special Operations Cell (SSOC) made the arrests from near the bus stand. The accused have been identified as Baljit Singh Shri Hargobindpur, who was residing in Ajnala of Amritsar district; Jagdev Singh alias Jagga of Fatehgarh Sabhra of Ferozepur district, residing in Baba Bakala; and Manjit Singh of Jhadunangal village near Khalchian of Amritsar district.

A case has been registered against the trio under Section 25 of the Arms Act at SSOC police station here, a release said. They were produced in a court on Friday and taken into three-day police remand.

Officials said the accused are associated with different radical organisations. The trio got in touch with each other through Facebook and was planning to target the sacrilege suspects. To execute the plan, they procured the weapons from Indore. The identity of the supplier is being ascertained, officials said.

Baljit worked as a Granthi at a gurdwara in Nagpur for about 4 years and shifted to Ajnala recently, the release said. Some literature relating to different radical organisations have been seized from his house. Baljit had also visited Thailand in September 2018.

Manjit had been in Malaysia from 2012 to April 2018 and came in contact with Baljit in India. Jagdev had also visited Malaysia in February 2019.

The officials said investigations are on to find out the contacts in India and abroad. There is possibility of more arrests as the probe progresses, officials said.
The Uttar Pradesh government on Friday filed an affidavit before the Allahabad High Court stating that a revised proposal had been sent to the Centre to set up a Goods and Service Tax (GST) Appellate Tribunal in Prayagraj and its regional benches in 19 other districts of the state.

Earlier, the state government had proposed that the tribunal be set up at Lucknow.

Taking the affidavit on record, a division bench of justice Bharati Sapru and justice Piyush Agrawal directed that the matter be list for hearing after two weeks.

The counsel for the petitioner contended that despite a clear-cut provision to set up an appellate tribunal, no GST Tribunal had been set up in the state so far.

As a result, the GST assessees in the state were facing problems, the counsel stated.

Earlier, on February 28 this year, the court, while taking a serious note of the absence of a concrete proposal before the state government and GST Council to set up the GST Appellate Tribunal in the state, had directed the Centre as well as the state government to file better affidavits, providing a cut-off date by which they proposed to set up the tribunal.

In the same order, the court had permitted the state governments counsel to send a revised proposal.

As regards the first affidavit filed by the state government, stating that a recommendation had been made by it to set up the tribunal in Lucknow, the court had said it was not in accordance with the order passed by the Supreme Court in the case of Madras Bar Association Vs. Union of India and another reported in (2014) 10 SCC 1, which provides that the tribunal be set up at the place where the principal bench of the high court is situated.

In the present case, the principal bench of the High Court is in Allahabad. This seems to be another dilatory tactic, the court had observed in its order dated February 28. The court was hearing a writ petition filed by Torque Pharmaceuticals Private Limited.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Friday urged the Supreme Court to uphold the Delhi High Courts order of a life sentence for former Congress leader Sajjan Kumar in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots case. The CBI also opposed his plea for bail, saying he has been using his large political clout to derail the trial and influence witnesses.

The CBI made this submission in an affidavit in response to Kumars appeal questioning his conviction and sentence. Kumar also asked for bail until his appeal is decided. A bench led by Justice SA Bobde took the affidavit on record and fixed March 25 to hear Kumars application for bail.

Kumar, 73, was held guilty by the high court on December 17, 2018, and sentenced to jail for life in a case related to the killing of five Sikhs in Delhi Cantonments Raj Nagar Part-1 area of southwest Delhi on the intervening night of November 1 and 2.

Kumar surrendered before a trial court here on December 31, 2018, to serve the sentence in pursuance of the high courts judgment awarding him life imprisonment for the remainder of his natural life. He resigned from the Congress after his conviction in the case.

The CBI argued against Kumars release and said he is capable of influencing and terrorising witnesses. A fair trial would not be possible in the other cases pending against him, if he is granted bail, the agency said, adding that Kumars conduct in using his political clout to derail trial and influence witnesses should be a ground to deny him bail.

The murders witnessed during the 1984 riots fell under the category of crime against humanity on parity with well-known genocides worldwide like large scale killing of Armenians by Kurds and Turks, mass extermination of Jews by Nazis, mass killing of Bangladeshi citizens by the sympathisers of Pakistani Army and mass killing during various ethnic riots within India also, the CBI argued.

The minority community was targeted by spearheaded attacks of dominant political actors like the applicant/convict (Kumar) and duly facilitated by law enforcement agencies, CBI said. It took 34 valuable years of legal battle and courage shown by fearless witnesses/victims, which has resulted in his conviction and no leniency, therefore, on the ground of age should be granted, read the CBI affidavit.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is likely to drop at least one-fourth of its Parliamentarians from Uttar Pradesh to ensure the personal anti-incumbency they face does not impact the partys electoral prospects, two leaders aware of the deliberations regarding this said.

Uttar Pradesh sends the largest number, 80, to the 543-member Lok Sabha or Parliaments Lower House. The BJP swept to power in 2014 on the back of its performance in its western and northern Indian strongholds like Uttar Pradesh, where it won 71 seats. It lost three seats  Gorakhpur, Phulpur, and Kairana  in the by-elections last year to a united opposition that has prompted the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (SP) to ally for the general elections that start from April 11. The BJP won the 2017 assembly polls in the state with 40% vote share while the BSP and SP together managed to get 44%.

One of the leaders said the BJP has conducted performance reviews at various levels and through different people to get a sense about the chances the partys lawmakers of getting re-elected. There are at least 20-25 MPs [members of Parliament] who face strong personal anti-incumbency. We may have to replace them, the leader said.

He added the Prime Ministers Office, as well as the party, have asked all BJP lawmakers to share the developmental and organisational works they have undertaken over the last five years. The leader said the BJP has also got feedback from its organisation while separate seat wise surveys were also commissioned to independent agencies over the past one year.

A [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi wave brought several of these MPs to the Lok Sabha in 2014, but their performance over the last five years has not been satisfactory. There continues to be a groundswell of support for the Prime Minister, but we cannot take chances by repeating these MPs, the leader said.

Another leader said at least half a dozen BJP Parliamentarians were in touch with the opposition parties to get tickets while Savitirbai Phule, the Lok Sabha member from Bahraich, has joined the Congress. With the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal [RLD] coming together, the caste equation of almost every seat has changed. We may have to pick our candidate keeping this in mind, the second leader said.

BJPs election managers admit the SP-BSP-RLD alliance will pose a challenge particularly in western Uttar Pradesh, which has a sizeable Muslim, Dalit and Jat population. The party is depending on a counter-polarisation among the upper and backward castes to get closer to its 2014 tally of 71 seats. At a BJP meeting in Lucknow on Monday to discuss candidates, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath said the party aims to win 74-plus seats. Our discussion about candidates is almost complete. The partys central leadership has to take a call now, the second leader said.
A young lion captured after being on the run for almost a month spent the night in a South African police cell before being moved back to its national park home.

The juvenile male apparently escaped from the Karoo National Park through a hole in a perimeter fence. He was eventually tracked and darted on Wednesday before being moved by helicopter to the Sutherland police station where he ended up alone in a holding cell.

I am sure this is the first time in the world that a lion is put in jail, said police station commander Captain Marius Malan.

He said luckily the jail had no human guests on Wednesday night.

Curious residents of the village of Sutherland, known more for one of the southern hemispheres largest optical telescopes, thronged outside the police station to catch a glimpse of the locked-up lion.

He is safe and healthy. We didnt give him breakfast because he had enough to eat along the road, Malan told Reuters.

Malan said the lion, believed to be two years old, would be darted again before being transported back to his natural habitat at the Karoo National Park, a hilly region of grassy scrubland about halfway between Cape Town and Johannesburg.

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A man in Australia saved himself from serious injury thanks to his phone. No, he didnt dial for help or post a message asking for assistance. He used his phone to shield himself against a man trying to shoot an arrow at him. A post about the incident has been shared on Facebook by NSW Police Force and it has since collected quite a few reactions.

The incident took place in the Nimbin area of New South Wales on March 13. The 43-year-old man drove into his driveway and noticed the man armed with a bow and arrow. According to the post, he knew the man. The 43-year-old took out his phone to click a picture of the man ready to engage his bow.

Its alleged the man fired the arrow at the resident which pierced through the mans mobile phone causing the phone to hit him in the chin, explains the post. It left a small laceration that didnt require medical treatment.

The man was arrested and charged following the incident but granted conditional bail to appear in court.

Since being shared on March 13, the post has collected over 8,000 reactions and more than 2,600 shares  and still counting.

Sign him up for the Olympics! jokes a Facebook user. So this was where Hawkeye was the whole time, comments another. Have you tried putting it in rice? quips a third.

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When the seat sharing pact between the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka was struck, it came as a blow to some JD(S) leaders as the party had given up the Mysore constituency to the Congress.

The JD(S) got eight of the 28 Lok Sabha seats in the state as part of the pact although it had initially sought 12, including Mysore, Mandya and Hassan in the Vokkaliga-dominated southern Karnataka.

However, former chief minister and Congress Legislature Party chief Siddaramaiah, who hails from the district, had refused to yield the seat to the regional party as the Congress had already faced significant unrest among workers for not having staked claims on the Mandya and Hassan seats, where the JD(S) is the national partys bitter rival.

Two senior JD(S) leaders and one Congress leader, all speaking on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to talk about the deal, said former prime minister HD Deve Gowda decided to give up Mysore because Siddaramaiah was adamant that the Congress should not give it up.

Fought back after defeat

Siddaramaiah had been smarting from his defeat in the Chamundeshwari seat in Mysuru district in the assembly elections last year, when he was defeated by JD(S)s GT Deve Gowda by a huge margin.

Since then, he has been actively trying to ensure that the JD(S) did not increase its clout in the district. This was especially true after he was promoted to become a member of the Congress Working Committee, the senior Congress leader said.

Last month, Siddaramaiah intervened to ensure that the JD(S) did not continue its alliance with the opposition BJP in the Mysuru Zilla Panchayat.

Last November, Siddaramaiah engineered a victory for the Congress in the Mysuru City Corporation by forcing partner JD(S) to concede the mayor post. There, too, the JD(S) had been in an alliance with the BJP. The decision had caused resentment among leaders of the regional party, including its local MLAs, as they had petitioned the JD(S) leadership to ensure that its candidate was made mayor.

With the retaining of the Mysore seat, Siddaramaiah proved once again that he would not easily give up on his home district, the senior Congress leader said.

Cost to Congress

The current deal has come at a cost though, with the Congress having to give up Tumkur seat to the JD(S), a seat it had won in 2014. A senior Congress leader said that the party high command held Siddaramaiah in high regard and although it was loathe to give away any of its incumbent seats, it was forced to do so in the face of Siddaramaiahs insistence on Mysore.

In meetings with the party leadership, Siddaramaiah had pressed the high command to draw a line on Mysore. It was clear that for him, it is a question of his legacy, especially because he was forced to contest a second seat in the assembly polls, and it appeared initially that the BJP and JD(S) were able to sideline him in the district, the leader said.

Both the parties had agreed to contest together from the state when they formed a coalition in May after the state elections threw up a hung assembly. A JD(S) leader said the discussions on seat sharing had stalled because of the Mysore seat.

Workers of both parties had conveyed their anxiety to their respective leaders as the BJP had begun its campaign in the state in February. In the end, we had to relent on Mysore because Siddaramaiah insisted that the seat was not up for grabs. If we had not, the discussions would have prolonged for a while longer, the JD(S) leader, who was part of the negotiations said.

Deal sealed over phone

The seat sharing pact was finalised on Wednesday, when JD(S) national secretary general Danish Ali met Congress president Rahul Gandhi at the Kochi airport. A meeting earlier in the day between Ali and Gandhi had not taken place as the Congress president was scheduled to address a rally in Tamil Nadu.

In the half-hour-long meeting, Gandhi and Deve Gowda finalised the deal over a telephone after the former prime minister was advised that it was best to finish the discussions to begin the partys campaign in earnest.

Another JD(S) leader said the uncertainty over seat sharing was causing problems for the regional party as with its limited resources, it was all the more imperative for it to begin its campaign earlier.

In such situations, there will always be a give-and-take, but we have got Tumkur. So we must be happy with that. Of course, we had a strong claim on Mysore, but Siddaramaiah had his way in the end, the leader, who hails from Mysuru district, said.

Though Siddaramaiah appears to have won the battle with the JD(S), he faces a stiff task in wresting control of the seat from the BJP, whose candidate Pratap Simha won the seat in 2014.

Since 1998, the BJP has won the seat thrice, and is a formidable opponent. Additionally, the Congress won just one of the eight assembly segments that are part of the Lok Sabha constituency in the 2018 state polls, while the JD(S) won three and the BJP won four.
The Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati and the Jana Sena Party led by actor-turned-politician Pawan Kalyan on Friday announced their alliance for the Lok Sabha election. The BSP and JSP reached at a seat-sharing arrangement for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, where the two parties will contest the polls together.

Announcing the poll-pact in Lucknow with the BSP chief by his side, Kalyan said his wish and ardent desire is to see Mayawati become the prime minister of the country after the Lok Sabha polls in April-May.

We would like to see Mayawati as the prime minister of the country. This is our wish and ardent desireWe will make surethat our wishes get fulfilled in the days to come, said Kalyan addressing a press conference in the Uttar Pradesh capital.

Watch: Would like to see Mayawati as PM: Pawan Kalyan after alliance with BSP

This comes amid efforts by opposition parties to present a united front against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in the parliamentary polls. Mayawati is among the opposition leaders, who are said to be harbouring prime ministerial ambition.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her counterpart in Andhra Pradesh N Chandrababu Naidu are the other two non-Congress opposition leaders in the reckoning for the top post if a non-BJP coalition emerges ahead in the Lok Sabha polls.

Mayawati, in the past, has dropped hints about her prime ministerial ambition. On her birthday, January 15, days after announcing BSPs alliance with the arch-rival Samajwadi Party, Mayawati had asked her party cadres to forget past differences and ensure victory in the Lok Sabha polls.

UP decides who will come to power at the Centre and who will be the prime minister, Mayawati had said. Mayawati is seen as the most popular Dalit leader in national politics.

On Friday when Kalyan said that his party, JSP would work for making Mayawati the prime minister of the country in the national election, the BSP chief had a smile on her face and gave a slight nod of acknowledgement. She returned the compliment saying I want Pawan Kalyan to become Andhra Pradesh chief minister.

Mayawati has been campaigning for a non-BJP non-Congress political front at the national level. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Naidu has been part of the campaign. Naidus Telugu Desam Party is seeking re-election in Andhra Pradesh, which goes to simultaneous assembly and parliamentary polls on April 11.

The BSP chief will travel to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana on April 3 and 4 to campaign for the BSP-JSP alliance. Kalyans JSP makes its debut in the upcoming elections and hopes to make a mark in the state that has been dominated by Naidus TDP and the Congress.

Kalyan is the younger brother of Chiranjeevi, the actor-turned-politician, who had floated the Praja Rajyam Party (PRP) ahead of 2009 Lok Sabha elections. The PRP secured about 17 per cent vote in the polls. Chiranjeevi later merged his party in the Congress. Kalyan, however, aims to form government in Andhra Pradesh and hopes Mayawatis appeal among Dalit voters may win his party a significant chunk of votes.
The Samajwadi Party has announced its first candidate for 2019 Lok Sabha elections outside Uttar Pradesh as part of its alliance with the Bahujan Samaj Party. The SP on Friday announced candidate on one of the three seats that have come to its quota in Madhya Pradesh.

The SP will contest three of the 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh. These seats are, Balaghat, Tikammgarh, and Khajuraho. Ratiram Bansal is our candidate on Tikamgarh (MP Lok Sabha constituency number 6), said an SP spokesperson.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)-Samajwadi Party (SP) alliance on February 15 announced a poll pact to fight Lok Sabha elections in Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand with the former establishing a dominant position in the seat-sharing arrangement. The SP will contest three of the 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh while the BSP contest the rest.

In Uttarakhand, which has five Lok Sabha seats, the SP will contest the Garhwal (Pauri) seat and the BSP will fight in three constituencies, according to a joint statement by Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and BSP supremo Mayawati

The SP-BSP alliance has officially spread to three states. The two parties had announced their alliance on January 13 in Lucknow. The Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand seat division announcement came a week after the two parties announced seat-sharing in Uttar Pradesh where the BSP will contest 38 seats and the SP will fight in 37.

After leaving the Congress out of the poll pact, Akhilesh Yadav said earlier this month that the grand-old-party was part of the alliance and two seats were given to it. While announcing their alliance Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav had said that the alliance would not field candidates in Amethi and Rae Bareli parliamentary constituencies, represented by Congress president Rahul Gandhi and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi respectively.

On Tuesday, Mayawati announced that her party will not have any pact with the Congress in any state. This was a signal that the Congress will not be made part of the SP-BSP alliance in Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Voices of dissent may get louder in the ruling BJP in Himachal Pradesh with many leaders staking claim to the four Lok Sabha seats in the state amid reports that the party core committee is keen to renominate all the sitting MPs in the upcoming parliamentary elections.

Former Union minister Sukhrams grandson Ashray Sharma has expressed his desire to contest from Mandi. His father, Himachal power minister Anil Sharma, had joined the BJP ahead of 2017 assembly elections. Our family is in politics for over four decades. My grandfather has been Lok Sabha member thrice and (my) father is a minister and Rajya Sabha member. Our family has worked extensively for the development of Mandi, said Ashray Sharma, who has been touring different areas of the constituency. I will continue my tour and visit Delhi later this week, he added.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state chief Satpal Singh Satti, who is busy preparing campaign strategies for the party, sought to underplay Ashrays claim. The final decision on ticket distribution rests with the party high command. Many people, who are not even party members, are also demanding BJP tickets, Satti said.

Also Read | Lok Sabha election 2019: Issues, key players and more on Himachal Pradesh

Another BJP ticket aspirant is Brigadier (Rtd) Kushal Thakur, who has been leading an agitation for the past four years against low compensation paid to farmers for the land acquired for the four-laning of the Nagchala-Manali stretch of Kiratpur-Manali highway.

Former IAS officer HN Kashyap, another ticket aspirant, has expressed hope that the party would consider the survey conducted by the high command. Kashyap is keen to contest election from Shimla. I have already toured all the assembly segments in Shimla Lok Sabha constituency and I would continue my reach-out campaign, he said.

Meanwhile, some Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) leaders are said to be upset over chief of BJPs youth organisation Vishal Chauhan being ignored from Kangra. Gaddi leader Trilok Kapoor, former minister Ravinder Ravi and Kangra Cooperative Bank chairman Rajeev Bhardwaj are said to be in the race for the seat.

In Hamirpur, former MP Suresh Chandel has also staked claim for the ticket.

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The Congress on Thursday completed its internal survey in which it asked booth-level workers in Delhi what they felt about a possible alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.

The results will be analysed by Saturday and sent to party chief Rahul Gandhi, who will take a decision on whether to contest the seven Lok Sabha seats in the Capital alone or in a pre-poll pact with the AAP , according to people familiar with the matter.

On Wednesday evening, the party released a survey for grassroots workers, asking them to vote for or against an alliance with the party led by Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.

It is good to know what the party workers feel about an alliance. They are the people who build a party. The internal survey results will probably by Saturday be handed over to the Congress president who will then take a final call, the All India Congress Committees (AICC) Delhi incharge PM Chacko said on Thursday.

But the move has again brought to the fore the division within the Delhi Congress over the proposed alliance.

While Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit on Thursday that said she was not aware of any such survey, former Union minister Ajay Maken said that the opinion of the workers was sought on the directions of the Congress chief.

Maken said: Shakti App [the partys internal crowd-sourcing tool has been utilised on the directions of Rahul Gandhi to reach out to all 52,000 workers. Questioning Rahul Gandhis decision is wrong.

A recorded message on the app asks party workers: To defeat the BJP, should the Congress agree for an alliance with AAP in Delhi? To vote yes press one, to vote no press two.

A section in the Delhi Congress has urged the central leadership to strike a seat-sharing deal with the AAP and prevent the division of anti-BJP votes. It is important for all the secular parties to unite and join hands to defeat the communal forces. We think the alliance will make the BJP bite the dust in Delhi, senior Congress leader Hassan Ahmed said.

AAPs Delhi unit convener Gopal Rai said it is too late for any talks on the alliance in Delhi. He insisted that the AAP has now moved ahead with its poll issue of full statehood.

The Congress is progressing quite slowly compared to the challenge that the country is facing today. After the official statement of the Congress last week, AAP thought if Congress is moving towards helping BJP, we need to stop the BJP, Rai told reporters, adding that the AAP has now moved ahead with its agenda of full statehood for Delhi.

Senior AAP leader and Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Singh said the Congress is in a confused state. He said,Instead of protecting the country from the BJP, the Congress is giving different statements every day.

Another AAP functionary, on the condition of anonymity, said their top leadership is in talks with the Congress and that an official word on a tie-up could come in a few days.

All AAP leaders have been asked to speak on the matter only after the Congress officially announces an alliance with us, the functionary cited above. He said his party has been willing to agree to Congresss formula of having three candidates each from the two parties and fielding one common candidate.

Earlier this month, the AAP named candidates for six of the seven seats in Delhi. The Congress has not named anyone.

Reacting to the speculation of an alliance between the AAP and the Congress, Union minister Vijay Goel, The AAP came to power by leveling corruption charges against the Congress, especially Sheila Dikshit. Now, the two corrupt parties are planning to form an alliance to defeat the BJP. This is nothing but an admission by the two parties that they cant counter the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.
Madhya Pradesh chief minister Kamal Naths elder son Nakul Nath (44) has started campaigning for the Congress in the familys pocket borough of Chhindwara, even though the party is yet to announce its candidates for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, party leaders said. Kamal Nath has represented the constituency nine times in the Lok Sabha, making him the senior-most lower house member in the 15th Lok Sabha.

On Thursday, Nakul addressed six meetings in the villages of the Amarwara area, situated some 40 km from the district headquarters. But since the tickets to the 29 Lok Sabha seats in the state are yet to be declared, he is careful with his words. He told the villagers about the Congress governments welfare schemes and said that since his father Kamal Nath was busy looking after the entire states development, he had been entrusted with the task of ensuring that people of Chhindwara did not face any difficulty.

Nakuls mother, Alka Nath, 68, is also campaigning for him. At a womens convention on Thursday, she expressed confidence that Nakul would do double the work that Kamal Nath had done for the region and said that she has given her son to Chhindwara. He is your son, he has been coming to Chhindwara since he was five years old, she said.

There is no opposition to Nakul Naths candidature and his was the only name sent from the district to the central observer, who came here, said the local Congress leader and vice-president of media cell, Syed Jaffer.

A product of Doon School like his father, Nakul Nath has an MBA from Boston University in USA, a local Congress leader said. He used to come to Chhindwara during his holidays and often accompanied his father to meeting in his teens. His first serious foray into politics was in 1996 when he had a major role to play during his mother Alka Naths victory from Chhindwara, the same leader said.

Chhindwara, where polling will take place on

April 29, is considered to be a safe seat for the Congress. Kamal Nath lost only once - in a by-elections in 1997 - from Chhindwara since 1980. Even in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, when the Narendra Modi wave swept through the state and the BJP won 27 of the 29 seats, Chhindwara was one of the two seats that the Congress had won. The other seat was Guna, represented by Jyotiraditya Scindia.

The Congress leaders said that Nakul Nath has been assisting his father during the elections. However, his political ambition came into focus when he was seated right behind his father Kamal Nath when the latter took over as the Madhya Pradesh Congress chief in May last year. He was also present during his fathers swearing-in ceremony in November, 2018.

Since his father became the states chief minister, Nakul has been meeting local leaders and villagers during the course of the last few months and last week, when he visited Chhindwara along with Kamal Nath, the party faithfuls had shouted slogans asking for Nakul Nath to be made the party candidate from Chhindwara.

BJP spokesperson Rajneesh Agrawal said Nakul Naths candidature is not unexpected. In the Congress party, a son often succeeds his father and there were indications that Nakul Nath was interested in politics.

Political commentator LS Hardeniya said, Once Kamal Nath became chief minister, it is but natural that he will hand over his safe seat to his son. Most political heirs have similar soft entries into politics.
Before 2014, Ram Swaroop Sharma was a low-profile leader known to very few even among Himachal Pradesh BJP cadre. With his roots in the Rashritya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Sharma, who was then the state BJP general secretary, worked in the field. But he was catapulted to the spotlight when he was chosen to take on Pratibha Singh, a Congress heavyweight, in Mandi Lok Sabha constituency.

Fortune smiled on Sharma after Jai Ram Thakur, who went on to become the chief minister of Himachal Pradesh, refused to contest the parliamentary election in 2014. The BJP did not have a choice after Maheshwar Singh, a former three-term MP and then president of the Himachal Lokhit Party (HLP), a breakaway faction of saffron party, also declined the ghar wapsi offer.

Though Sharma was a greenhorn pitted against Pratibha, the wife of former chief minister Virbhadra Singh, a scion of the royal family of Bushahr, he rode the Narendra Modi wave to emerge winner.

Sharma boasts of 85% attendance in Parliament but he was not active in terms of his participation in debates and asking questions. He did not move a single private member bill in five years.

He, however, says he raised important issues of national and state interest, including building infrastructure along the China border, rehabilitation of people displaced due to the Parbati project in Kullu and problems in the hydel sector of Himachal Pradesh.

Mandi district, comprising 10 assembly segments, emerged as the new power centre in Himachal politics in 2017 when the party picked Jai Ram Thakur for the chief ministers post.

Falters on promises

The victory of a common man had revived hopes among the masses that Sharma would bring development and change in Mandi, the second largest parliamentary constituency comprising some of the remotest areas of the state.

Sharma, who often talked of his friendship with Modi, made a slew of promises of bringing new projects to his segment, improving connectivity and generating employment. Among the major promises he made was the railway expansion in the region and restarting of the Gumma Salt Mines and fruit-based industry.

However, five years on, there has been no expansion of the rail network and the mines are also not operational. The fruit-based industry is also a distant dream.

The MP proved to be an utter failure in his tenure. Nothing improved in Mandi. The roads are in a bad shape and so are health services, says Sanjay Bhardwaj, a resident of Jogindernagar.

Also Read | Lok Sabha election 2019: Issues, key players and more on Himachal Pradesh

In his defence, Sharma says that a broad-gauge railway line from Pathankot to Leh via Mandi is under consideration of the Centre. It was during my tenure that the work on the fourlaning of the Mandi-Pathankot highway was after Union minister for road transport Nitin Gadkari laid the foundation stone recently, he says.

He also took credit for opening the Prime Ministers Skill Development Centre in Mandi.

Many development projects, including roads and irrigation and drinking water supply schemes and health institutions, were built in my constituency in the past five years, he says.

Rough road ahead

With the BJP having indicated that it may not change its candidate in Mandi, Sharma is looking forward to another term as MP.

However, the ride to power is likely to be bumpy with many of his detractors within the party opposed to his candidature and his less than impressive performance as an MP. Kargil war hero Brigadier Kushal Thakur, who led the 18th Grenadier during the 1999 conflict, is still a front-runner for the candidature. He has been leading an agitation against the government for the past four years against low compensation paid to farmers for land acquired for the four-laning of the highway.

Thakur heads a joint action committee of affected farmers and has sought an early resolution to the problem. There are nearly 10,000 farmers along the Kiratpur-Manali highway from Nagchala to Manali. The famers along the Mandi -Manali highway are up in arms against the government for not being paid compensation in accordance with the right to fair compensation and land acquisition rehabilitation and resettlement Act, 2013.

CM Jai Ram Thakur steps in

The party has not yet decided on the candidate from Mandi but Ram Swaroop, called Sudama for his proximity to Modi, seems the only choice so far. Knowing that his prestige is stake, chief minister Jai Ram Thakur has been touring Mandi district to dole out sops and keep voters in good humour. Thakur, a five-time legislator from Seraj, has initiated several developmental schemes for the constituency.

Former Union telecom minister Sukh Rams son Ashray Sharma is also vying for a ticket. Ashrays father Anil Sharma had switched from the Congress to the BJP ahead of the assembly elections in 2017. Sukh Ram still wields influence in Mandi parliamentary constituency, particularly among Brahmins.

With unfulfilled promises, Ram Swaroop will ride piggyback on Jai Ram Thakur if he is given the BJP ticket for the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

In an interview to HT, Ram Swaroop Sharma said he is banking on the welfare works done by him for another term in Parliament. Excerpts:

What were the high points of your five-year term?

I worked for setting up a cluster university in Mandi besides the four-laning of the Mandi-Pathankot highway, revival of the Gumma salt mines and the Nerchok Medical College and University. I got the budget of Rs 4,100 crore sanctioned under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, approval of the Pathankot-Mandi-Leh railway track and international airport at Balh in Mandi district.

One thing you wished to do as MP but could not, why?

I wanted to develop the adopted Old Manali village as a centre of religious tourism. The Virbhadra Singh-led Congress government in the state put hurdles and did not let me fulfil the commitment.

Would you like to contest again? Why should people re-elect you?

Yes, people will re-elect me because of my performance. I belong to a poor family and worked hard to implement public welfare schemes. Earlier, only raja-rani (kings and queens) used to contest and win from here, but people voted them out. Ive remained in the field.

How was your experience in Parliament?

I cant forget how Prime Minister Narendra Modi bowed and touched the steps of Parliament House on his first visit and said it was the most sacred place for him. I share his sentiments. It was a great experience to meet top leaders of the country at one place and I realised how simple high-profile personalities too are.

People say your performance was poor and that you depend on Narendra Modi and Jai Ram Thakurs achievements.

My performance can be verified from the Parliament website. I have raised every possible issue of welfare of my constituency and state. I share achievements of the PM and CM in my speeches because of the work they have done after taking charge.

For complete coverage of Lok Sabha Elections 2019, click here
Congress general secretary for eastern Uttar Pradesh, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, will kick off her election campaign for the April-May general elections from Varanasi  Prime Minister Narendra Modis constituency  on March 20, party leaders familiar with the matter said.

Gandhi will undertake a river journey from Allahabad on March 18 and will reach Varanasi on March 20, according to the party leaders. This comes close on the heels of PM Modis visit to Congress president Rahul Gandhis parliamentary constituency Amethi on March 3 to announce a slew of projects.

During her campaign, Priyanka Gandhi is likely to raise questions over the governments key projects such as Namami Gange, aimed at a clean-up of the river, and waterways, the party leaders said.

Narendra Modi has been telling lies to the people of Varanasi and India for the past five years. We will meet Priyankaji in Lucknow a day before she begins her river journey. We are sure she will take a view of the situation and tell the truth to the people, said senior Congress leader Rajesh Mishra.

In Lucknow, senior party leaders on Friday reviewed preparations for her visit. Priyanka Gandhi, during her last visit to Uttar Pradesh, had stressed the need for strengthening the partys organisation in the state.

I am learning a lot about how to restructure the organisation and the changes needed to be made for the road ahead, she told journalists in Lucknow last month. The Congress had sent its national general secretaries to all the Lok Sabha constituencies to ensure that an organisational structure was put in place at the grassroots level.
The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Thursday announced its first list of 11 candidates to contest the Lok Sabha elections from 10 seats in Maharashtra and the Lakshadweep constituency. The NCP, which will fight the polls in alliance with the Congress and other smaller parties, is expected to field candidates on 22 of the 48 constituencies in the state.

The list includes four sitting members of Parliament (MPs), including party chief Sharad Pawars daughter Supriya Sule who will contest from Baramati. Interestingly, the list does not feature senior NCP leader Ajit Pawars son, Parth Pawar, who has insisted on contesting from Maval constituency near Pune.

Parth Pawars candidature has been in focus, as Sharad Pawar himself went back on his decision to contest, saying just two members from the family will be in the fray, thus making way for his grand-nephew. Putting both names [Supriya and Parth] from the family in one list would have given others a chance to criticise us over dynasty politics, said a NCP leader, who did not wish to be named, on why Parths name was not on the list.

We have decided to nominate four sitting MPs  Supriya Sule, Udayanraje Bhosale (Satara), Dhanajay Mahadik (Kolhapur) and Mohammed PP Faizal (Lakshadweep), said Jayant Patil, state NCP chief, adding that discussions on other names are still on, and the party will announce them in the next couple of days.

Other candidates on Thursdays list are Sunil Tatkare (Raigad); Sanjay Dina Patil (Mumbai North East); Anand Paranjpe (Thane); Babaji Patil (Kalyan); Rajendra Shingane (Buldhana); Gulabrao Deokar (Jalgaon); and Rajesh Vitekar (Parbhani).

NCP also announced that they have decided to leave one seat  Hathkanagale  for ally Raju Shetti-led Swabhimani Paksha (SP), indicating that they are still working out a formula to keep smaller parties on board.

The party, however, has as good as ruled out a formal alliance with the Maharashtra Navrinman Sena (MNS) by declaring Babaji Patil as its candidate from Kalyan, a seat NCP it was willing to give to the Raj Thackeray-led party.

Following Congress opposition, we could not have an alliance with MNS. We are now expecting MNS to support NCP candidates in those areas where it has a strong presence. In lieu, NCP will share seats with the party in the Assembly elections to be held later in the year, said a NCP leader, on condition of anonymity.
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati will address as many as 12 joint rallies with Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav and Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) supremo Ajit Singh for the April-May Lok Sabha elections, a BSP leader familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The decision was announced at the meeting of senior party leaders and office-bearers held under the chairmanship of Mayawati in the state unit office on Thursday, a day after Akhilesh Yadav called on the BSP chief at her residence in Lucknow.

The three parties are fighting the Lok Sabha polls as allies. According to the seat-sharing agreement, the SP is contesting 37 seats, the BSP 38 and the RLD will field candidates in three seats  Mathura, Muzaffarpur and Bagpat. Two seats  Rae Bareli and Amethi  have been left for the Congress.

The first joint rally will be held in Deoband (Saharanpur) in West UP on April 7, four days before the first phase of polling takes place on April 11.

Uttar Pradesh sends the largest number of MPs, 80, to the 543-member Lok Sabha. The Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power in 2014 on the back of its performance in its western and northern Indian strongholds like Uttar Pradesh, where it won 71 seats. While the SP managed to secure 5 seats, the BSP failed to open its account.

Mayawati also announced a rejig in the organisational structure of the BSP on Thursday. As part of her campaign strategy, Uttar Pradesh has been divided into six sectors and there will be an in-charge for each one of them.

The BSP is likely to release the first list of candidates on Saturday. The sector in-charges will work as ears and eyes of the BSP chief and give regular feedback, organise joint meetings of the BSP-SP workers and ensure that alliance supporters work in tandem at the grassroots level to take on the might of the BJP and the Congress in the election, said the BSP leader.

In the meeting, Mayawati directed the party workers to ensure the victory of the SP and RLD candidates in the seats allotted to the alliance partners. The sector in-charges were entrusted with the task of motivating BSP supporters towards voting for the SP and RLD candidates, he said.

Mayawati also directed the party leaders to make the birth anniversary celebrations of Dalit icon Bhimrao Ambedkar and BSP founder Kanshi Ram on April 14 and March 15 respectively a low-key affair.

The party leaders and office-bearers should ensure that there is no violation of the model code of conduct (MCC) during these celebrations as well as election campaign, she reportedly said.

Samajwadi Party (SP) state spokesperson Rajendra Chaudhary said the joint rallies of the three parties will be planned in a more systematic manner after the Holi festival. A new wave has set in UPs politics with the alliance of SP-BSP-RLD. People are increasing and fast looking up to the alliance which is based on common ideologies. The alliance has unnerved the BJP and consequently the leader of that party area making baseless statements against the alliance, Chaudhary said quoting party chief Akhilesh Yadav.

Meanwhile,Mayawati asked her party leaders to monitor the working of the electronic voting machines (EVMs) and voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) at all the booths. A VVPAT allows voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly.

Terming the alliance with the SP as perfect, Mayawati said it was capable of defeating the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.

Along with UP, the alliance will secure victory on maximum seats in Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh, she said.

Responding to the BSPs move, UP BJP leader Harish Chandra Srivastava said, Bua [aunt] and babua [nephew] are going to be together which means exposing them will be easier. We will simply remind the people how they both targeted each other and are now sharing the same stage. That shows how desperate they have become.
One failed. The other wont take-off, finance minister Arun Jaitley said as he took a jibe on the entry of Priyanka Gandhi into politics.

Generation after generation, the Congress Partys leadership berth is reserved for a member of the preferred family, he said as he traced the post-independence history of the party from Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi to Sanjay Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi.

Continuing the series of his blogs on Agenda 2019, he said the Congress tried to remove itself from the shackles of dynasty for a brief period after the unfortunate assassination of Rajiv Gandhi but could not get out of its clutches for long. Smt. Sonia Gandhi then took over as the longest serving President of the Indian National Congress and thereafter passed on the leadership baton of the Party to her son Rahul Gandhi.

Thus, generation after generation, the Congress Partys leadership berth is reserved for a member of the preferred family. When the Party is now in doldrums, another member of the family has entered the scene, said the senior BJP leader who is in-charge of partys publicity committee. Jaitley was referring to Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who has been recently appointed as Congress general secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh.

The Finance Minister further said: The key question is  will the dynastic parties learn from their 2014 drubbing and a possible defeat in 2019? Possibly not. It is here that the people of India will have to bring about a change. India is not a monarchy. Neither is it a kingdom or dynastic democracy. Dynasts disapprove persons of talent and merit. The real strength of democracy will be realised when myth of dynasties is finally buried and these parties are taken over by men of competence and merit. That will provide Indians with a better choice, he said.

The another curious feature, he said, is that most families where a single dynast created the party, have moved into the next generation. In the next generation, there may be more than one heir. Both the heirs become aspirational and, therefore, the parent dynast distributes the largesse. But recent history has proved otherwise, Jaitley said. He added that Chinese philosopher Confucius had rightly said that just as there can be only one sun in the sky, there can be only one emperor on the Earth. Where power sharing between successor dynasts takes place, who is the ultimate emperor?, he wondered as he highlighted instances of family-based political parties in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh.

In Karnataka, he said there is an experiment of sons sharing the state and the grandsons sharing the Centre, and in Maharashtra, the initial ripples have started. The Congress has undertaken the same experiment. It believes that two owners are better than one. Will Confucius be proved right and history record that one eventually prevailed over the other or will it be otherwise. One failed. The other wont take-off, Jaitley said.

On the other hand, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi grew from an extremely humble background. He worked in the party organisation till he was inducted into the leadership and he had to work and struggle for the positions that he got. He earned them, Jaitley said, and exuded confidence that Modi and aspirational India would together demolish the concept of families. The real strength of democracy will be realised when myth of dynasties is finally buried and these parties are taken over by men of competence and merit. That will provide Indians with a choice, the minister remarked.

India will start voting to elect next Lok Sabha from April 11. The results would be announced on May 23.

(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.)
A day after Congress general secretary for east UP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra met Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar in a Meerut hospital on Wednesday, there are indications that the grand old party is working on plans for a greater outreach to the Dalits and backward classes in the coming weeks in Uttar Pradesh.

Gandhi is likely to start touring different regions of the state on March 17 and will visit more Dalit and OBC areas as the Congress seeks to field its senior leaders to counter the campaign by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) among these sections in Indias most populous state.

All eyes are on her first visit to Varanasi, the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The final touches are still being given to the first phase of Priyanka Gandhis campaign,but she will likely take the river route from Prayagraj to Varanasi and cover villages dominated by Dalits and OBCs.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadras tour is likely to begin on March 17. Both the Modi government at the Centre and the Yogi government in the state have not been able to understand issues concerning the communities living by the riverside. Priyanka will visit the villages to know their problems, said Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Raj Babbar while speaking to media persons here.

After reaching Lucknow on March 17, Priyanka is likely to begin campaign next day and proposes to reach Varanasi via Prayagraj March 20. A part of her programme will be through the river route, for which we have sought necessary permission, said a senior party leader.

Babbar also said the Congresss focus on weaker sections was evident in the partys distribution of tickets too. We have taken care of the weaker sections in our ticket distribution, said Babbar, obviously pointing towards preference given to reserved seats in first two lists of candidates. Out of 27 candidates announced so far, the party has announced names for eight reserved seats.

Babbar said both Priyanka and Bhim Army chief have maintained that no politics should be seen behind their meeting and so the issue should not be politicized. Bhim army chief has also said this was a sisters visit to her brother and this should be taken in the same spirit, said Babbar.

UPCC scheduled caste department chairman Bhagwati Chaudhari, who has been fielded from Robertsganj (SC) seat, said Congress president Rahul Gandhi had launched Leadership Development Mission in Reserved Constituencies (LDMRC) in 2014. We have been sending out leaders to Dalit communities to counter the misgivings and negativity that the BSP and BJP have spread about the Congress and its relations with Baba Saheb Bhimrao Ambedkar. We have a new generation of Dalits now and they understand our point. We will send more leaders now in all the constituencies to counter their campaign. We will also tell people about how the BJP was trying to target the Constitution, said Chaudhary.
The Congress will roll out a universal Right to Healthcare law, entitling people to free diagnostics and medicines through a network of public hospitals, if it comes to power in the summers general elections, party president Rahul Gandhi said on Friday. The promise will be included in the partys national manifesto, he added.

Speaking at the concluding session of a two-day convention on Health for All organised by the Raipur-based Mayaram Surjan Foundation, he added that the party, if voted to power, would more than double government spending on healthcare to about 3% of gross domestic product and expand the number of trained medical professionals to provide high-quality services.

According to the national health profile released in January, the government spends 1.2% of GDP on healthcare, which translated to 1,112 per year per citizen in 2015-16, compared with 691 in 2009-10. The Congress president, who previously promised a minimum income guarantee for all citizens, also said on Friday that a government led by his party would increase spending on education to 5-6% of GDP.

Former finance minister and head of Congress manifesto committee P Chidambaram later tweeted that the proposed law would provide for an increase in the number of doctors by establishing more medical colleges and providing more scholarships and loans to medical students.

Government expenditure on the health sector will be doubled between 2019 and 2024 to 3% of the Gross Domestic Product, he tweeted.

The National Health Policy announced by the BJP-led NDA government in March 2017 has been criticized by some analysts for being a watered-down version of the original draft. From health being considered a fundamental right, which was mentioned in the original draft, the revised policy assured healthcare to all, with the implementation left largely to states, they added.

There were exhaustive consultations, after which it was decided to mention assured healthcare to all. Health is ultimately a state subject so the implementation lies with them, but obviously with help from the centre, Union health minister JP Nadda said while detailing the policy.

Experts say it is time the government made healthcare a fundamental right.

Inadequate infrastructure is no excuse; the government needs to strengthen infrastructure to meet the healthcare needs of people. Public healthcare delivery system must be improved as it is the right of people to get proper treatment. There should be a national law for it, said Ashok Aggarwal a lawyer and an activist.

The previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government drafted a policy on health for all that suggested putting in place a national health mission to improve the health infrastructure in the villages and towns of India.

The Congress, before the 2014 general election, promised universal healthcare, saying it would lead to the creation of six million new jobs in the sector by 2020.

Gandhi criticized the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance governments flagship health insurance scheme Ayushman Bharat, saying the initiative dealt with a limited number of healthcare issues.

If I want to be kind to it, I see it as a limited scheme which is targeting a very limited number of healthcare issues and, if I want to be frank, I think that it is a handout to the 15-20 richest businessmen in India. This is not the type of scheme which we are going to run...I am absolutely convinced that you need public expenditure in health, he said.

The scheme, billed as worlds biggest public health scheme, provides annual health cover of 5 lakh per family to 107.4 million poor and vulnerable families (around 500 million people) ,listed in the socio-economic caste census data, for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation through a network of empanelled hospitals. In first 100 days of Ayushman Bharat, launched on September 23, 2018, around 685,000 people availed of the scheme.

Gandhi said that the private sector and health insurance do have a role to play,but that the foundation for good healthcare has to be provided by the government and the public sector. Hence I believe that a proper network for healthcare programme should be made in every state, he added.

Responding to his criticism, a Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson, Sacchinand Upasane, said Gandhi has no moral right to criticize Ayushman Bharat because in the past 60 years the Congress had done nothing towards providing healthcare for the poor.

Millions of people have benefitted from the scheme and people are appreciating the BJP government for the same, he added.
After a grand wedding in Hyderabad last week, actors Sayyeshaa and Arya held a wedding reception in Chennai late Thursday and the ceremony was attended by several stars of the industry including actor Bharath and director AL Vijay.

Sayyeshaa tied the knot with Tamil actor Arya at Hyderabads Falaknuma Palace on March 10. Suriya Sivakumar, Karthi and filmmaker Rajsekar Pandian attended the wedding. Sayyeshaa is the daughter of Bollywood actors Sumeet Sehgal and Shaheen Banu, the latter being the daughter of actor Saira Banus brother, Sultan Ahmed. Sayyeshaa was seen in Shivaay with Ajay Devgn.

Also read: On Shah Rukh Khan quitting Saare Jahan Se Achha, writer Anjum Rajabali says, Hes pretty shaken up post Zero

The newly-wed couple looked stunning as the bride wore a traditional Gujarati saree while the groom sported a suave suit. The couple also posed for the media at their reception. Check out pics from the celebrations:

The couple also partied with their closest friends and family before their wedding. The pre-wedding celebrations also saw Saira dancing with much love at the sangeet.

Sayyeshaa and Arya fell in love during the making of their Tamil film, Ghajinikanth. They are currently working together on their film, Kaappan. Since her debut, Sayyeshaa has worked in films like Akhil (Telugu), Vanamagan (Tamil), Junga (Tamil) and Ghajinikanth (Tamil).

Follow @htshowbiz for more

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Boeing in the next 10 days will roll out an upgrade to the MCAS stall prevention system for 737 MAX aircraft that have had two deadly accidents in recent months, two industry sources told AFP.

The system was implicated in the crash of a 737 MAX 8 in Indonesia in October but the sources cautioned that the cause of the fatal Ethiopia Airlines accident last weekend has not yet been determined.

The software fix, which was already underway prior to the latest incident, will only take about two hours to install, said the sources, who asked not to be identified.

The MAX aircraft have been grounded worldwide in the wake of Sundays crash near Addis Ababa that killed 157 passengers and crew, and Boeing has halted deliveries of its top-selling model.

The black boxes from the Ethiopian aircraft, which was only a few months old and crashed a few minutes after takeoff, are being analyzed by the French authorities to try to determine the cause of the accident.

The Lion Air 737 MAX 8 crashed last October also just minutes after takeoff, killing 189 people. The initial investigation indicated it was due to a malfunction on the stall prevention system, a new feature on the MAX planes.

Several American pilots also reported issues with the MCAS and the Federal Aviation Administration said it ordered Boeing to issue a fix by April.

The aerospace giant held a conference call on Thursday with at least three carriers using the 737 MAX and gave them the fix, one source said, and the other airlines will get it early next week.

Contacted by AFP, Boeing declined to comment.

Boeing would like to start installing the patch in about 10 days, both sources said.

However, there is a question of logistics involving where the planes go for the installation.

American Airlines, which operates two dozen 737 MAX 8 aircraft, has chosen to update the software itself, one source told AFP.

Neither source was able to specify the cost of the upgrade, but one analyst estimated it would cost about $2 million for each plane for a total of less than $1 billion for the 371 planes in use currently.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Friday denied allegations that the country directs tech companies to spy abroad amid deepening security concerns in western countries. This is the most firm rejection by the top leadership in Beijing since the spying accusations were levelled against top telecom company Huawei Technologies.

Tensions between China and several western countries like the US have risen recently over the charges levelled against Huawei, the worlds largest vendor of telecom equipment.

The company itself has denied the allegations but that hasnt stopped Washington from imposing curbs on the use of its technology.

Let me tell you explicitly that this is not consistent with Chinese law. This is not how China behaves. We did not do that and will not do that in the future, Li said when asked whether Beijing has told Chinese companies to spy on foreign countries.

Li was addressing the Premiers annual press conference marking the end of the yearly Parliament session, the Two Sessions, at the Great Hall of the People.

Li talked about several issues, including Chinas growth and economic outlook, the Korean Peninsula, the trade war with the US, the Taiwan issue and creating a level-playing field for foreign companies.

He spoke at length on the topics, responding to questions which were in all likelihood stage-managed.

On trade tensions with the US, he said China does not want to see a US trade war that would pit the worlds biggest and second biggest economies against one another. That would not make our trade fairer.

If there were a trade war, it would be foreign-funded companies, particularly United States firms, that would first bear the brunt, Li said, citing an article written by an authoritative international think tank.

No matter what bumps the China-US relationship may run into, we hope this relationship will continue to move forward in the positive direction, Li said.

The Premier, who is second-in-command after President Xi Jinping, listed steps to be taken in coming months to give teeth to a law that some reports have said has been rushed out largely to assuage US concerns.

Chinas new foreign investment law will lead to the creation of a new complaints filing regime and an information disclosure mechanism to ensure greater transparency, among other things, Li said.

More importantly, it is a signal to various state organs on the emphasis Beijing has placed on protecting the rights and interests of foreign investors and to deepen government work in this area, he added.

This law will regulate government behaviour, requiring the government to perform its functions in accordance with the law, he said.

Speaking on the GDP, Li said Chinas adoption of a GDP target range this year is consistent with the governments determination of not allowing major economic indicators to slide out of the proper range.

The 6-6.5 percent GDP growth target for 2019 is compatible with the GDP expansion of 6.6 percent achieved last year, Li said, adding that the new target has sent a message of stability to the market.

The Premier said that the downward adjustment of the GDP growth target was made against the backdrop of a slowing global economy, as several international organisations have recently lowered their forecasts for global growth this year.
China should allow its citizens staying along the border to trade with Indians through Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims to be part of south Tibet, a legislator has proposed, adding that an increase in cross-border trade could benefit locals, reduce hostility between the two militaries and improve bilateral ties.

Increased cross-border trade through the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) will also showcase the regions achievements to India and other countries, An Ran, a professor at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou and legislator with the National Peoples Congress (NPC) told the tabloid Global Times.

India and China conduct land trade through a handful of areas along the long and disputed border.

According to data from Indias Commerce ministry, published in January this year, land trade between India and China in 2017-18 was at $3.16 million.

Theres scope for that statistics to improve, the Chinese legislator feels though she didnt share details of the proposal or whether it was feasible in the first place.

An said her proposal was based on field work conducted by a group of researchers from Yunnan University in Southwest China.

Yunnan Province borders the Tibet region, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar.

Trade through the Tibet is often hampered because of the military-to-military tension along the border, the team members found during their fieldwork.

Professor Guo Jianbin, the groups team leader, told the tabloid that his team surveyed some counties in TAR to get some insight into the ground realities.

Guo found that because the militaries of China and India in the illegal McMahon Line are tight, residents in the border areas are not allowed to cross the line freely. However, in some areas, some residents, mainly those from the Lhoba ethnic minority group, have crossed the line to trade.

Guo said: We found that the villages in the border areas have wide roads and a clean environment. If China allows residents living on the other side to trade, all these achievements and developments will help better unite the residents in border areas.

The three existing land trading points between India and China are Nathu La (Sikkim), Lipulekh (Uttarakhand) and Namgiya Shipkila (Himachal Pradesh).

But the Indian government might not be keen to further increase trade with China through land borders.

It is possible that if the points and scope of land trade is widened, cheap Chinese commodities would flood Indias border regions.

Chinese goods are already widely available in the border areas but expanded trade could lead to the goods flooding the market.
The reputed boss of New Yorks Gambino crime family was left riddled with bullets outside his home on Staten Island, an old-school hit akin to the storied executions of 20th-century mafia dons.

The grisly scene saw Francesco Frank Cali shot dead outside his colonial-style red-brick home on Staten Island, police said Thursday.

The 53-year-old with deep ties to Sicilian organized crime factions -- thought to have been leading the Gambinos since 2015, wielding influence both stateside and in Italy -- suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the torso in the attack on Wednesday evening, police said.

Cali, also known as Franky Boy, was shot six times, then hit by a blue truck in which the suspects fled. He was pronounced dead at Staten Island University North hospital, according to police.

There are no arrests and the investigation is ongoing, police said.

The Gambino family is one of New Yorks five historic Italian Mafia families -- along with the Genoveses, Luccheses, Colombos and Bonannos.

US media reported that Calis death marked the first murder of a New York mob boss in 34 years, since the death of Paul Castellano -- another Gambino family boss -- by order of the infamous John Gotti, also known as Teflon Don.

Following Castellanos murder, which saw the boss dramatically gunned down outside a Manhattan steakhouse after stepping out of a black limo, Gotti took over as the Gambino family don.

A paparazzi darling who sported flashy suits with his signature slick pompadour, police ultimately toppled Gotti and incarcerated him for conspiracy and murder in 1992.

He died in prison in 2002, leaving a notorious legacy that cemented New Yorks place in mob lore.

- Ruling from the shadows -

Cali is thought to have taken the helm of the Gambino family in 2015, replacing Domenico Cefalu.

His power and rise within the Gambino clan was owed in large part to his family connections in Palermo, Sicily; Cali reportedly married Rosaria Inzerillo, the daughter of a prominent Sicilian mob faction that was once one of the islands most powerful.

He began ascending within the ranks under capo John DAmico, who went by Jackie and became the familys acting boss in 2005 -- after which Cali became an acting captain, according to court documents.

Cali faced just one arrest over his career, over an extortion plot linked to a failed bid to build a Nascar race track. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 16 months in prison.

But federal prosecutors held that Cali was involved in a number of other crime schemes, including operating illegal gambling machines in Brooklyn establishments and snatching profits from an annual Italian Feast festival in the borough.

Cali shunned the limelight even after becoming don, ruling from the top while lying low in his affluent Todt Hill neighborhood in Staten Island, where Castellano also held court.

Situated on top of a hill with curving streets and large, shady trees, the district offered an ideal cover -- one of its Tudor-style homes was even featured in The Godfather film.

- Old habits die hard -

The post-Gotti chapter saw the mobs influence on the US eastern seaboard wane -- but Wednesdays hit threw New York back to its golden years of organized crime.

We thought those days were over, the citys mayor Bill de Blasio told journalists. But I guess old habits die hard.

It wasnt the first such spattering of gore in recent years, however.

Last October, 71-year-old Sylvester Zottola of the Bonanno family was shot dead while waiting in his car for an order from a Bronx McDonalds. His son Salvatore had been shot three months earlier outside the family home, but survived.

In another burst of mob drama, authorities announced Thursday that a Gambino family associate of over a decade, Anthony Pandrella, was arrested for robbing and murdering his friend Vincent Zito.

After prosecutors called him a danger to the community Pandrella, 59, pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn federal court to accusations of shooting Zito in his own home and stealing money from him.

He then allegedly returned to the scene of the crime hours later to grieve with the older mans family.

But he had been caught on CCTV cameras leaving and entering the house at the time of the murder, and his DNA was discovered from the trigger of the gun used to commit the crime.

It takes a certain type of evil to murder a friend in their own home, and then console the grieving relatives, said FBI assistant director in charge William Sweeney.
Britains Prince Harry and his pregnant wife Meghan are to set up their own household, breaking away from the joint operation they shared with the Harrys elder brother William and his wife Kate, Buckingham Palace said on Thursday.

Harry and Meghan, known officially as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, have shared staff with William and Kate since their marriage in May last year. Queen Elizabeth has now agreed to allow them to set up a new base at Buckingham Palace this Spring.

The Duke of Sussex currently has his own private office, which has been supporting the Duchess since the engagement of Their Royal Highnesses in November 2017, Buckingham Palace said in a statement.

This long-planned move will ensure that permanent support arrangements for The Duke and Duchesss work are in place as they start their family and move to their official residence at Frogmore Cottage.

British newspapers have reported since the end of last year that there had been a rift between the two couples, although there has been no public indication of any feud. Earlier this week, the foursome appeared on good terms when they appeared together at a Commonwealth Day service in London.

The change comes as former U.S. actress Meghan is due to give birth to her first child with the queens grandson this Spring. The couple are also in the process of moving from a cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace, where William and Kate live, to a new home on the royal familys Windsor Estate.

Frogmore Cottage, part of a royal family residence since the 18th century, is where they held the evening reception after their dazzling wedding ceremony at Windsor Castle.
T hey are back, but not as your parents knew them. Chic bar carts or trollies are so appealing in our fluctuating weather. Drinks and snacks can be wheeled outside, then whisked indoors at the first drop of rain.

Theres a tempting choice, from eye-catching retro revivals to sleek contemporary styles. Luxurious materials such as polished brass or exotic timber marquetry up the ante while clever details, such as a bottle opener dangling from the trolley handle, add functionality to the fun.

In terms of design, a bar trolley is a product you can play with, taking influence from the cocktail days of the roaring Twenties or the bachelor-style allure of the Fifties and Sixties, says Martin Waller, founder of Chelsea design store, Andrew Martin.

Its purpose is to enable a party atmosphere, so it should echo enjoyable excess, like a stylised piece of room jewellery rather than a practical go-to.

He points to Cici, 350, an Art Deco-style bar trolley with a pair of circular, distressed-brass finished frames. Each of its two white marble shelves is inlaid with a pair of blue agate stones and the whole confection runs on neat castors.

Proving that glamour never goes out of fashion, Asprey has revived an original piece from its archive of bespoke, made-to-order designs from 1935. The silver-plated Art Deco cocktail trolley, 28,000, is created by Aspreys silversmiths in workshops above its New Bond Street store and fitted with two tempered glass shelves.

Now part of the Aspreys permanent collection (asprey.com), it can be kitted out with the companys gleaming Barware essentials, at extra cost, by those with deep pockets.

Another engaging revivalist piece is Hungarian-French designer Mathieu Mategots 1954 bar trolley from Gubi.

Mategot was a master of the innovative technique of Rigitulle, in which perforated metal is combined with metal tubing, and this trolleys perforated-metal upper surface is available in a choice of subtle shades  rose, sand, dusty green, white, grey or black  while the lower, black surface embraces a newspaper/magazine holder. Priced 640 from Clippings.

An equally subtle approach is championed by the Jacques bar cart, 1,450 from Jonathan Adler. Its clear acrylic frame and tempered glass shelves are finished with brushed brass details.

The Art Deco-style Cici bar trolley, with distressed-brass finish frames and blue agate stones set in white marble shelves, 350 at Andrew Martin

A matching tray, 495, is available and the design also comes in smoked acrylic with polished nickel details.

Designer Christophe de la Fontaine gives the classic serving trolley a contemporary twist with his Come As You Are bar cart.

Its sturdy, powder-coated steel frame is fitted with two tempered glass surfaces and runs on oversized wheels. From 1,560 at Kings Road furniture retailer, Silvera.

Oversized wheels are also a feature of the James bar cart, designed by Yabu Pushelberg for Stellar Works (stellarworks.com). This eye-catching design has a black steel frame with veneer laminate surfaces and a solid walnut handle. Priced 2,628 from Silvera.

Architect David Rockwell is known for meticulous attention to detail. No surprise then to find his Valet bar cart, designed for Stellar Works, offers a leather sling wine rack below the upper surface of its powder-coated steel frame.

A leather bag for cocktail tools hangs from a retaining rail around the lower shelf  the rail itself is designed to keep spirit-bottles upright  while a bottle opener hangs from the leather cord-wrapped handlebar. Priced 1,836 from Silvera.

Anyone looking for a cocktail hour conversation piece should check out the limited-edition bar carts hand-made by Dublin-based Zelouf & Bell.

The Spyglass champagne cart (about 8,600) was first designed for the Michelin two-star Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud in Dublins five-star Merrion Hotel.

This sexy little cart is handcrafted in timber marquetry with a graphic pattern in black bolivar/citrine or pink birds-eye maple. Each has powder-coated, solid brass hardware.

Equally dazzling is the Serpent in a Maze champagne cart (about 21,500), its traditional marquetry combined with contemporary printing.

A green/grey ripple sycamore python inspired by an 18th-century illustration is tattooed over hedge-green birds-eye maple.
F rustrated tenants seeking a place to call home in the capital can feel vindicated, as a new report reveals that rent in London is the most expensive in Europe and the fourth most expensive in the world.

The report by global mobility experts Employment Conditions Abroad International (ECA), compared the cost of living for expats and people re-locating for work in 279 cities around the world.

It looked at the average cost per month of a three-bedroom home in areas popular with expats. London's monthly rent of 5,187 topped the table of rental prices in Europe.

However, the study found that while central London rents (7,000) were more expensive than outer London (4,000), rental costs in Zone 1 had also decreased over the past year.

Rents fell in prime neighbourhoods in London travel Zone 1, with salaries for top jobs largely stagnant and demand waning," said Alec Smith, accommodation services manager at ECA International.

"Rents in outer London were more stable but are anticipated to increase with London property purchases growing ever more out of the reach of many Londoners."

London's housing affordability crisis has pushed many businesses out of the capital to attract workers to cities with a better quality of life.

Renting in the UK

With the BBC and other media companies now based there, Manchester has the most expensive rental accommodation in the UK outside of London.

The average rent of a three-bedroom house in the north-western city is now estimated at 1,844 per month  54 more expensive than 2018, pushing Manchester to 30th most expensive in Europe and 119th in the world.

Central Manchester has seen a large population growth in recent years and is now widely considered the second most important city in the UK, economically, said Smith.

Numerous companies have relocated to the city, fuelling demand for rented accommodation, particularly in central areas.

Birmingham has seen the biggest spike in rental costs across the UK, increasing by 110 per month since last year, making it the 36th most expensive city in Europe to rent in.

At the other end of the spectrum, Aberdeen is the only UK city to see a drop in rental costs, falling by 190 per month.

This is largely ascribed to the decline in the oil and gas industry, which has seen a reduction in the number of overseas renters in the Granite City.

Brexit and the cost of renting in Europe

Meanwhile, rents in European cities rose significantly during the same period, in part due to the strength of the Euro, the report said.

Dublin rent rose the most over the year, up 236 to 2,902 a month, thanks to the city's economic recovery following the financial crash, combined with a number of international companies locating their European headquarters there. It is now the fifth most expensive city to rent in Europe.

Madrid, Rome, Paris and Barcelona all saw average monthly rent rises of over 100 per month.

The report said Paris, the sixth most expensive European city with average monthly rent of 2,830, is experiencing a Brexit boost with its 107-a-month rent rise attributed to businesses relocating to the French capital.

Most expensive city to rent in the world

London may top the table in Europe, but it is only the fourth most expensive city for renting in the world.

In first place, Hong Kong takes the title of the worlds most expensive location in the world, with typical expat accommodation averaging 8,315 per month.

New York, Tokyo, London and Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea were the remaining five priciest cities for expat rents.
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Appointment

15 March 2019

The Fontaine, A Kansas City Hotel announces the appointment of Jenna Phillips as associate director of sales.

Phillips will assist in the management of sales tactics, including developing corporate and association markets. Managed by Pivot Hotels & Resorts, The Fontaine is a 132-room boutique hotel located in Kansas City's Country Club Plaza district.

With over four years of hospitality experience, Phillips joins The Fontaine from the Hilton Worldwide portfolio where she most recently held director of sales & marketing and sales & catering manager roles at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Lawrence, Kansas. Phillips brings with her knowledge of convention services, opening flagship hotels, and social media marketing, in addition to extensive knowledge of the Kansas City market as a native to the region.
Appointment

15 March 2019

Six Senses Singapore is delighted to announce the appointment of Ian Mancais as their new executive chef. Ian will also oversee the entire food and beverage operation, including culinary, food and beverage management and service at Six Senses Duxton and Six Senses Maxwell. Bringing more than 37 years of experience to the role, Ian has consulted and developed concepts for various international hospitality ventures, hotels, resorts, restaurants and retail malls. He's opened operations in locations such as Hawaii, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Mexico, the Middle East, Singapore, South Africa, Tahiti, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. He has also cooked for royalty in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. Passionate about sustainability, Ian is very focused and involved with Green Key initiatives having recently been nominated as the Green Key Champion. He is a firm believer that social and environmental responsibility must exist as a pillar in any hospitality operation, where teams can constantly focus on reducing the operations' carbon footprint. With Scottish and French heritage and a childhood growing up in Asia, Ian had an interesting background from which to develop his culinary-focused career. He has lived and worked in no less than 12 countries, and was the concept consultant for the world's first undersea restaurant "Ithaa" on Rangali Island in the Maldives. He is also no stranger to the media, having hosted his own television show in Tokyo for two years and appearing both live and recorded on television shows in Buenos Aires, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, New York and Tahiti.
Appointment

15 March 2019

Dan Mizrahi has been named Food and Beverage Director of Four Seasons Resort Lanai, overseeing all food and beverage operations for the Forbes Five Star and AAA Five Diamond-rated luxury Resort.

Mizrahi comes to Lanai with a wealth of industry experience. He arrives on Lanai via Four Seasons Palm Beach, which recently reopened following major renovations. Dan led the food and beverage division, which included overseeing the opening of Florie's, a partnership with the three-Michelin star Chef Mauro Colagreco. Additional Four Seasons experience includes roles with hotels and resorts as varied as Washington, DC and Mexico City to Buenos Aires, Atlanta and Hawaii Island.

Mizrahi is a graduate of Georgia State University with a Bachelor of Science in Music Management and brings a working knowledge of French and Spanish to the Resort.
Press Release

14 March 2019

Sign up for HSMAI breakfast meeting in Amsterdam about sustainability in the hotel & travel industry

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Wednesday March 20th from 08.30-11:00 at Hotel Jakarta, Amsterdam

Sustainability and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) are two terms frequently appearing in principal speeches. Today most customers expect action rather than words. If you don't live up to expectations your company may find itself in peril. Thanks to new technology your reputation spreads at the speed of light. HSMAI Region Europe is happy to invite you to a breakfast meeting on these subjects.

You will meet:

Nico Evers, General Manager, Hotel Jakarta

Erik van Dijk, National Operation, Green Key

Edo van der Zouwen, Duurzame/Sustainable Marketing

The presentations will be in Dutch.

This is HSMAIs first breakfast meeting in Amsterdam. We will from time to time host breakfast meetings in addition to some afternoon meetings.
Press Release

15 March 2019

McLean, VA - The Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) is pleased to announce the HSMAI Hotel Sales Professional of the Year Award recipients. Amy Champagne, Director of Sales & Catering, Antlers Hotel, will be recognized as the Hotel Sales Professional of the Year in the On-property category. Laura Dinu, Director, Groups & Meetings, Global Sales Americas, IHG, has been selected as the Above-property Hotel Sales Professional of the Year Award recipient. Champagne and Dinu will be honored with the awards at HSMAI's Mike Leven Leadership Conference, March 18-19, at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, CO.

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The HSMAI Hotel Sales Professional of the Year Awards honor individuals that exemplify strong sales performance producing measurable results and demonstrate excellence in the following areas: creativity and initiative; sales acumen; innovative leadership; and advancement of the discipline.

"HSMAI is proud to honor Amy and Laura for their outstanding achievements in hotel sales," said Robert A. Gilbert, CHME, CHBA, president & CEO of HSMAI. "They are succeeding through a combination of innovation and teambuilding that should be models for the industry."

Amy Champagne, Director of Sales & Catering at the Antlers Hotel in Colorado Springs, CO, will receive HSMAI's On-property Hotel Sales Professional of the Year Award. Champagne began her career at the Antlers Hotel in 2000 as a front desk agent. Over the years, has cross trained in all facets of hotel operations. Champagne left the Antlers in 2012 for a position that encompassed overseeing multiple select service properties. She returned to her home at the Antlers in 2015, and was promoted to her current position in February 2018, where she oversees the onsite day to day successful operation of sales, catering, and marketing productions. Since obtaining her current role, Champagne has exponentially increased the hotel's overall revenue and cultivated a team passionate to provide the best guest experience in the city.

Champagne was especially cited for her leadership in the promotion and advancement of the sales discipline at the regional and local level, serving as a leader of HSMAI Southern Colorado Chapter and supporting and mentoring colleagues at her hotel and community. She also demonstrated sales and business acumen - from her keen business development skills to her work maximizing food & beverage spend on property and creatively utilizing hotel function space and partnerships to drive revenue in the slower season.

Laura Dinu, Director, Groups & Meetings, Global Sales Americas, IHG, will be honored as the recipient of HSMAI's Above-property Hotel Sales Professional of the Year Award. Dinu leads the Corporate Group and Intermediary Sales, USA for IHG, based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, she and her team are responsible for delivering groups and meetings business to all IHG hotels globally. An experienced leader with more than 15 years working in the Domestic, International Group, and Luxury Segments, Dinu helps guide her team to find strategic ways to build IHG's customers business, and IHG's partnerships. Prior to joining IHG, Dinu worked for Omni Hotels & Resorts in a global capacity in New York City and San Francisco, overseeing their regional offices. Dinu's experience also includes various roles in New York City, primarily focusing on luxury brands such as Peninsula and St. Regis.

Dinu was especially cited for demonstrated sales and business acumen, going beyond the hotel business to the business of hotels to drive results. She leveraged her more than 15 years' experience in the industry to drive significant growth from the corporate and association sectors, increase IHG's support of and engagement with the events industry at the national level (and in key markets), and increase profitability for her hotels. She also showed innovative leadership, successfully implementing new ideas that created a new dimension of performance.
Press Release

15 March 2019

In commensuration with honouring the 10th anniversary of YHS and its accomplishments, the umbrella topic of this year"s edition "The Scope of Hospitality: Envisioning  Defining  Succeeding" seeks to narrate hospitality success stories and at the same time construct a guiding path for aspiring leaders of the industry. The hospitality industry has evolved into a dynamic and complex scene with never-ending transitions in consumer behaviour and constantly emerging online disruptors. This 10th Edition will therefore explore various topics from global brand expansion strategies to data mining and collection.

Divided over the course of three days, the 10th Edition of YHS will feature a total of five keynote speeches and five panel discussions. YHS has proudly partnered with some of the industry"s biggest names, including The Dorchester Collection, Four Seasons, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Hospitality Financial & Technology Professionals (HFTP), STR, Emil Frey, and TINT. Keynote speakers include Olivier Bracard, Co-Founder and CEO of Hosco, and Tess Mattisson, Director of European Marketing at Choice Hotels. Meanwhile, joining our panel discussions are hospitality veterans such as Eugenio Pirri, Chief People and Culture Officer of The Dorchester Collection and Dimitris Manikis, President & Director EMEA of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

For the very first time, YHS is incredibly excited to welcome Virgin Galactic, the world"s premier commercial spaceline. Martijn Brouwer, YHS keynote speaker and currently responsible for Astronaut Experience and Hospitality at Virgin Galactic, works towards ensuring his customers have a blast both on the ground and in space. Julian Manning, Head of Speakers for YHS, explains "We are incredibly privileged to welcome such an incredible line-up taking YHS to the next level. I am convinced that the immense interest we have received from leading industry experts is proof of the positive impact this platform has globally."



In addition, YHS is proud to announce the five panel topics that will be discussed over the course of the summit:

The Pitfalls and Challenges in 21st Century Management and Leadership

Disrupting Distribution: Game-Changers

Global Brand Expansion: Adaptation and Development

Seizing Top Tech Opportunities: When Data is Everything

The Hotel Quality Lab: Experimenting with Service Quality

These panel discussions seek to investigate some of the most pressing issues faced by the hospitality industry, including talent management and retention, managing an increasingly complex distribution landscape, as well as the successes and challenges of taking a brand international. They will also delve into the future of hospitality with the growing prominence of Big Data in the industry, as well as the increasing need to redefine service quality with the rapid advancements of technology and ever-changing consumer needs. In bringing forth these important topics of discussion, YHS hopes to serve as a platform and accelerator to stimulate the growth of the industry by generating ideas and discussing plausible solutions.

Tickets to attend the summit are now available for purchase here. YHS looks forward to welcoming you at this incredible opportunity to join over 30 industry professionals and students from 45 first-class hospitality institutions, to network and gain interesting insights through thought-provoking discussions and speeches.

The 10th edition of the Young Hoteliers Summit will take place at Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne, Switzerland from the 25th to 27th of March 2019.

For more information on the panels, schedule, and YHS in general, please visit us at www.yhsglobal.com.

For interest in becoming a partner or speaker of the summit, and for all YHS-related matters, please contact us at [email protected].

About YHS

Creating greater networks, building hospitality connections around the world, the Young Hoteliers Summit (YHS) has come a long way since its inauguration in 2010. As the largest student-run summit in the world, YHS brings together aspiring hoteliers from the world"s top hospitality institutions, with industry professionals across the globe. In last year"s edition, the topic "Eyes on the Future: Following the Momentum of Growth" enabled attendees to widen their horizons and gain insights of the trends and opportunities driven by the escalation of millennial travellers.

Contact

Kimberly Yoong

Head of Press Relations

Young Hoteliers Summit

[email protected]

+41 78 704 20 13
Press Release

15 March 2019

Over 1,300 rooms added to growing UK portfolio as Group leases four Grange Hotels from Queensgate

Jurys Inn & Leonardo Hotels UK and Ireland now have 53 hotels and over 11,000 rooms under management.

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The Fattal Hotel Group has today announced that it has agreed to acquire the long-term lease on four Grange Hotels in London, marking the Group's first entry into the central London market.

The news comes after the recent acquisition of what was one of the single largest portfolio sales in the UK in 2018, with the purchase of the iconic Midland Hotel in Manchester.

Totalling over 1,300 bedrooms, the new hotels include the Grange Tower Bridge Hotel, the Grange St. Paul's Hotel, the Grange City Hotel and the Grange Holborn Hotel, which, following a significant investment programme, will undergo major refurbishments as the Group continues to pursue a strategy to drive superior performance and growth.

Perfectly located close to some of the most popular local tourist attractions in London, and in the heart of the business and financial district, the new hotels will be operated by Jurys Inn & Leonardo Hotels UK and Ireland. Tower Bridge, St. Paul's and City Hotels will become Leonardo Royals, and Holborn, following extensive refurbishment, will become the Group's first NYX Hotel by Leonardo Hotels in the UK.

Acquired by Queensgate Investments, a London-headquartered manager of c. GBP 3B of assets, the hotels boast high quality facilities, including meeting and events spaces that can facilitate over 4,500 people, 14 bars and restaurants, and extensive leisure facilities - including swimming pools, gyms, beauty spas and holistic therapy rooms.

The addition of these hotels brings the total number within the Jurys Inn & Leonardo Hotels UK and Ireland Group to 53, following a year of significant expansion. In total, it now has over 11,000 bedrooms across the Group.

As one of the UK industry's most significant hotel acquirers over last year - and following continued expansion across the European portfolio - Fattal Hotel Group is positioned as one of the fastest growing hotel groups in the UK, Europe and Israel. The portfolio of Leonardo Hotels in Europe & Israel comprises of 200+ hotels with 38,000+ rooms in over 100+ destinations. The brand portfolio consists of: Leonardo Hotels, Leonardo Royal Hotels and NYX Hotels by Leonardo Hotels along with the recently acquired Jurys Inn (UK + Ireland) and Apollo Hotels (The Netherlands) hotel portfolio.

In early December, the group announced the acquisition of a prominent site on Adair Street, Manchester, marking its second deal in the city following its recent flagship acquisition of the iconic Midland Hotel. The group also recently announced the acquisition of the Grand Harbour Hotel in Southampton.

In August, it revealed plans to invest 32m in the redevelopment and expansion of the existing Jurys Inn Edinburgh hotel and its neighbouring site. The investment includes proposed plans to extend the existing Jurys Inn by 100+ rooms, convert an adjacent listed building into a new 131-room property by NYX Hotels by Leonardo Hotels, and the development of 31 new residential units on the 1.2 acre Jeffrey Street site.

Jason Carruthers, Managing Director of Jurys Inn & Leonardo Hotels UK and Ireland, said, "We are delighted to add these prominent hotels to our portfolio, which are in excellent locations within the very heart of London, as we continue to increase our offering in the UK following a year of significant growth.

"As we start 2019, we believe our portfolio, our strategy and the proven capabilities of our people puts Jurys Inn & Leonardo Hotels UK and Ireland in a unique position to leverage and capitalise on the emerging opportunities in the UK hotel sector and to help create exceptional customer experiences."

The Fattal Hotel Group is one of the fastest growing hotel chains in Europe and Israel. It operates 200+ hotels in 17 countries with more than 38,000 rooms in over 100 destinations.
Australian rapper Iggy Azalea is back, and she's just dropped a twerkable single with her track "Sally Walker." Azalea has been teasing the release of "Sally Walker" all week, dropping hints at the forthcoming visual that will accompany the single. The track itself features a slow-burning, piano-heavy beat that's matched with Azalea's familiar school rhyme chorus. Little Sally Walker walkin' down the street, She didn't know what to do so she jumped in front of me... Her sassy, attitude-heavy lyrics showcase an Iggy that is unbothered by criticism as she's her own number one fan.

Azalea's "Sally Walker" visual has a number of guest appearances including a few RuPaul's Drag Race contestants and beauty brand social media star, James Charles. "Before I go truly crazy retweeting and enjoying the release can I just say how genuinely grateful & appreciative iam of @SheaCoulee @jamescharles @VanessaVanjie & @TheOnlyMayhem for coming and making my video next level memorable," Azaela tweeted.

https://twitter.com/_/status/1106400625527537664



Quotable Lyrics

If you do it for free, then it's ass backwards

All of you bitches is mad at me

Pro'ly mad cause you ain't in my tax bracket

You bitches is broker than glass crackin'

You ain't gon' do shit, you just act ratchet

Play with me, you gon' get back handed
Back in November, UFC fighter Rachael Ostovich reported a domestic abuse situation after her husband, MMA fighter Arnold Berdon, allegedly struck her in the face, head, and ribs. According to TMZ Sports, Berdon has pleaded no contest to the 2nd-degree assault charge and will most likely not have to go to jail.

The report states that the two got into a heated argument which then allegedly resulted in Berdon getting physical with Ostovich. The fighter suffered a broken orbital bone and eventually pulled out of her fight against Paige VanZant. Her fight against VanZant was eventually rescheduled to January, with VanZant ultimately winning the fight.

Audio of the entire altercation was obtained by Hawaii News Now. In the clip above, you can hear a man who sounds like Berdon, yelling "I'm going to f*cking murder you."

While the charge carries a 5-year prison sentence, Berdon was told by the judge that he will most likely have to complete a domestic violence intervention program and go on probation. Ostovich issued a statement via her attorney saying she's "satisfied that Arnold is accepting responsibility for his actions and getting the needed help so that he can be the best father to our daughter."
UFC's #2 overall ranked Lightweight Tony Ferguson has reportedly been hit with a restraining order by his wife, Cristina Ferguson.

According to reports, police have been called to the Ferguson home five different times since January 2018, including three times in the last 30 days. Tony Ferguson has not been arrested or charged with committing a crime during any of the situations.

https://twitter.com/_/status/1106495472884240385



In one of the incidents, which occurred on February 19, Tony reportedly "broke apart the fire place" after being convinced that some placed a computer chip in his leg.

Via MMA Junkie:

"On Feb. 19, police conducted a welfare check on Tony after his wife and son left the home after he allegedly made threats. According to the police report, an unidentified female told police that Tony had not slept for three days and was tearing apart the home and broke apart the fire place and believed someone placed a (computer) chip in his leg. An unidentified male told police that the former champion told him someone was inside his walls. Cristina told police that his trainer was unable to convince the fighter to leave the home and see a doctor."

https://twitter.com/_/status/1106512271122014209



Cristina Ferguson's lawyer, Jeffrey L. Heath, released a statement to ESPN on Thursday night with his client explaining her reasoning for the temporary restraining order.

"Tony Ferguson is a good husband and good father to our son," Cristina Ferguson said in the statement. "The current legal proceedings are a part of a process to ensure that Tony will receive the help necessary to continue being the best possible, as well as to pursue his passion and career as a UFC champion fighter. "All positive well wishes are sincerely appreciated and I hope our privacy will be respected."

Ferguson, winner of 11 straight fights, has not competed in UFC since UFC 229 last October when he defeated Anthony Pettis by way of second-round TKO.

https://twitter.com/_/status/1106536194517671936


The Box Chevy is set to ride again, possibly for one last hurrah. Earlier today, Yelawolf dropped off the lead single of his upcoming Trunk Muzik 3, which marks his final album on Shady Records. Now, the Alabama emcee has come through with the album's release date, which he announced via press release. Fans will be pleased to know that they'll have the album by the end of the month, March 29th to be specific.

"Trunk Muzik 3 is my third installment to the Trunk Muzik series, explains Yela. The album gets back to these 808s and classic southern rap cadences. Of all the album styles and songs Ive released over the years, this was the funnest project to make." The news bodes well for those hoping for a more bar-heavy Yela, and if "TM3" is any indication, he'll be bringing some crazy flows to match.

Mat Hayward/Getty Images

Keep an eye out for Yela's Trunk Muzik 3, and check out the tracklist below. While there doesn't appear to be any listed guests, it wouldn't be surprising to see the full roster of appearances emerge in the coming weeks. You think Yela has an Em feature on deck?

1. "TM3 Intro"

2. "Catfish Billy 2"

3. "Rowdy"

4. "Special Kind of Bad"

5. "Like I Love You"

6. "Drugs"

7. "Trailer Park Hollywood"

8. "No Such Thing As Free"

9. "We Slum"

10. "Box Chevy VI"

11. "All The Way Up"

12. "Over Again"

13. "Addiction"

14. "Over Here"
Today, Yella Beezy's new single officially hit streaming services, marking the beginning of his 2019 run. Last year, the Dallas rapper started gaining some buzz, being slotted to perform at the BET Hip-Hop Awards in the fall. Before the ceremony aired though, Yella Beezy almost lost his life after he was targeted in a shooting while leaving the strip club. His car was riddled with bullet-holes and he spent the next few days in the hospital. Thankfully, Yella Beezy is still here with us, continuing to hit his stride with songs like this.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvA8Ux1l14C



"Bacc At It Again" features Quavo and Gucci Mane, marking the Dallas artist's first big hit this year. Quavo starts the song out, spitting the first verse before Beezy returns for the menacing hook. "Keep on playin bitch then I'm stabbin' ya friend/I'm in the hood they think I'm back trappin' again," rhymes the rapper. Beezy comes in for a rapid-fire verse with Quavo's ad-libs to assist him. Finally, Guwop does his thing to close the track out.

This could potentially be a big year for Yella Beezy. Last year was just a warm-up. Do you think he has the potential to strike gold in 2019?

Quotable Lyrics:

Told them castin' my vote for who tryna get this dope cross the border

Grew up I'm from East Atlanta, but stand my ground like it's Florida

Fuck the judge, fuck the bailiff, fuck the local reporter

Tell the whole truth to my lawyer, Guwop slicker than oil

Park the Dawn, rode the Wraith, took a trip with the Adler

Look like a Rolls dealership, every time I bring out my cars
Miami rapper Yung Garzi has been building some buzz in his city, following a string of artists from the city that have meshed different styles together to create a unique genre. Florida has worked as a whole to usher in a sort of alternative rock mix of traditional hip-hop, with artists like the late XXXTentacion leading the crew. Yung Garzi is ready to step up, blending together multiple different genres to carve his own lane.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu7MwSFgDq6



Garzi's new track "Finer Things" is the best example so far of what the artist can accomplish. His emotional lyrics mixed with Andrew Luce's production bring a one-of-a-kind flavor to his brand. While emo-rap has already been done, Garzi is bringing in elements of EDM to truly become a pioneer of sorts. Do you see this trend continuing? What do you think of "Finer Things?"

Quotable Lyrics:

Can you feel it building up?

No, this isn't really what I want

I'ma get the bag then I'ma run

I'ma break your heart then I'ma run

You're gonna see me in my dreams

All black, yeah, with the ripped up jeans
The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said Thursday that he is in talks to open a regional office in Houston as a way for the agency to tap regions expertise in all things energy.

Neil Chatterjee, speaking Thursday at CERAWeek by IHS Markit, an energy conference in Houston, said Texas is playing a leading role in the development of liquefied natural gas export complexes, facilities that are permitted by FERC. He said he is in discussions with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner about locating an office in the city.

"The type of expertise to (review LNG permits) is here in Houston," he said. "A Houston office makes a lot of sense."

The mayor's office confirmed the ongoing talks.

"Houston is the energy capital of the world and the hub of energy activity in this country," Mayor Turner said in a statement. "... The conversations started in Barcelona at the Gastech Conference this past September. That same conference will be held in Houston this September."

LNG has become a major topic for the commission after it recently cleared the construction of the Calcasieu Pass LNG export terminal in Louisiana. Billions of dollars of LNG projects could have been delayed along the Gulf Coast after commissioners were divided on how to factor the potential impact on climate into their permitting decisions.

That has raised concern among many in the oil and gas sector that the FERCs approval process for LNG complexes, pipelines and other projects could become bogged down.

Chatterjee dismissed these concerns at a press briefing Thursday, arguing that its rare that commissioners dont reach consensus. Even though a vacancy has left the commission split between two Democrats and two Republicans, Chatterjee said he is confident that commissioners can come together and get things done.

Changing power mix

One thing the Trump administration wants done is propping up coal and nuclear power plants, which have struggled to compete with natural gas-fired plants and renewable energy generators. In a interview before he made his remarks, Chatterjee said he was struggling with the possibility that the commission might need to intervene to address the rapid shift on the power grid into natural gas and renewable sources and away from coal and nuclear.

State power regulators have taken action to stop more coal and nuclear plants from closing. At the same time, FERC is analyzing the phenomenon to figure out its implications for power prices and reliability of the grid.

Its vexing. I'm a conservative. I believe in states rights. Its been made clear to me don't mess with Texas, he said in an interview ahead of an appearance at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference in Houston. But I also need these markets to operate efficiently.

The Trump administration has advocated for federal intervention to stop the plant closures, arguing their on-site fuel supplies offer a unique protection for the power grid. FERC rejected a proposal by Energy Secretary Rick Perry to raise power rates for coal and nuclear plants last year, and Chatterjee said it was too early in their analysis to say whether the closures would raise the risk of power outages.

Are there any short term or long term threats to the resilience of the grid, and if there are, then we need to determine what steps we need to take, he said. Though I would prefer those steps be within markets.

The Trump administration has argued that natural gas plants are vulnerable to disruptions should pipelines that transport their fuel be damaged by natural or manmade disasters. Administration officials have considered using Trumps national security powers to keep coal and nuclear plants open.

Emphasis on cybersecurity

At his press briefing. Chatterjee spoke at length on cybersecurity, saying he believes regulators and Congress need to focus on threats to the nations pipeline system.

He said the commission is focused on cybersecurity standards to protect the pipeline network that transports the energy that keeps the U.S. economy going. The commission plans to host a conference with the Department of Energy and the Transportation Security Administration on the topic of cybersecurity at the end of the month, he said.

Americas critical infrastructure is increasingly under attack, he said.

Chatterjee said he met with TSA in January about pipeline cybersecurity and that its an issue that Congress has rightly been focused on as of late.

erin.douglas@chron.com

james.osborne@chron.com
WASHINGTON - In late 2017, ConocoPhillips filed a claim with an obscure trade court in Austria, accusing the Vietnamese government of hitting the Houston oil company with an illegal tax bill.

The bill had come five years after ConocoPhillips sold its oil and gas fields in the Southeast Asian nation to the British-French firm Perenco for $1.3 billion. As their rightful share of the profits, Vietnamese officials were demanding $179 million in taxes.

The dispute, which is still pending, is part of wave of similar cases that have come into public view as nations with oil and gas reserves not only press tax claims more aggressively, but also share information, experiences and tactics in assessing energy companies that benefit from their resources. In London, government officials from 30 countries  from established producers such as Mexico to new ones like Liberia  are meeting regularly through an advisory group set up by the think tank Chatham House.

Theyre quite awakened, alert to the value thats being lost, said Valerie Marcel, an associate fellow at Chatham House. The big challenge for them is how do you know what the costs should be when you dont have the decades of experience these companies bring.

For energy companies, this awakening could mean billions of dollars in additional taxes, revenue sharing and other costs. Much as cooperation between nations has led to more corruption cases involving oil and gas development, the increasing collaboration on tax issues could challenge the way oil and gas firms do business around the world.

Nigerias state-owned oil company sent letters earlier this year to oil companies including Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell claiming they collectively owe $20 billion in back taxes to provincial governments from offshore drilling there. A Shell spokesman said the company was challenging the claim in court.

On HoustonChronicle.com: With corruption investigations widening, oil companies face reckoning

In October, Ugandan officials told the British company Tullow Oil that their planned sale of oil fields there to French oil giant Total would generate a more than $160 million tax bill, so far delaying the transaction. In 2017, an Australian court ruled that Chevron owed $300 million after shifting $2.5 billion from a Delaware-based subsidiary to its Australian operation.

Earliest days

With commodity prices low, said Daniel Mule, a Washington tax attorney with the nonprofit Oxfam, pressure was increasing on governments rich in oil, gas and minerals to grab bigger shares of the profits flowing to foreign companies.

There is a tendency right now for governments to seek opportunities to capture greater benefit from natural resources, he said.

Oil companies declined to discuss the phenomenon. But Jim Loftis, a Houston energy attorney with the law firm Vinson & Elkins, said he didnt expect to see foreign governments backing down anytime soon.

As pressure on governments to raise social spending increases, the hydrocarbon industry is going to remain an attractive target for additional revenue, he said.

The questions of divvying up the huge wealth that comes with the discovery of oil and gas have long strained relationships between oil companies and the nations where they drill - going back to the earliest days of the industry when American oil men fanned across the Middle East in search of fortune.

In the early 20th century, oil companies could write contracts with foreign governments that granted the companies the majority of the profits. But as time passed and competition between international oil companies for drilling rights increased, foreign officials demanded higher and higher returns.

In the 1950s, a wave of nationalization began, with countries including Iran, Mexico and Venezuela seizing oil fields from the international firms, eventually leading to the creation of the cartel Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in 1960.

Fuel Fix: Get energy news sent directly to your inbox

Its been around forever. If the terms look overly generous to local eyes theres going to pressure on political leaders to change those terms, said Jim Krane, an energy fellow at Rice Universitys Baker Institute. It could be something simple like asking the company to build a school and if they say no, saying, Oh, youre in violation of our environmental laws.

A cottage industry of accountants, consultants and attorneys has emerged to help countries figure out what might be owed them.

After a decade working as accountant in international development for the U.S. government, Laura Robinson said she came to the conclusion that foreign governments often had almost no understanding of the value of their oil and minerals when they signed what could be decades-long production deals.

Show me the money

Three years ago, she launched her own firm in Washington, Swale House Partners, to advise governments on managing their natural resources. But part of her practice is trying to keep oil and mining revenues from ending up in corrupt politicians' bank accounts, and finding government officials willing to undergo that scrutiny is not always easy.

Well work with anyone, but we do say to them, How far are you willing to go to look into this? Robinson said. And if they wont give a specific answer, thats not going to be our client.

This latest upswing in tension comes at a time of rapid change within the worlds oil market. Booming shale fields in the United States have not only contributed to the global slump in oil prices since 2014, but also have sparked competition for oil companies largesse as countries seek to increase oil revenues and energy firms find they have other options.

Increasingly companies are turning away from large overseas projects, which often require massive investment in pipelines and other infrastructure and where a change in political leadership often leads to demands of new contracts. As oil majors such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron pour billions into acquiring and developing holdings in the Permian Basin in West Texas, overseas investment is declining.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Exxon, Chevron plan to dominate the Permian

Capital spending abroad by mid and large-sized oil and gas companies fell to roughly $300 billion last year, a 47 percent drop from 2013, according to the research firm Raymond James.

Whats really happening is the volatility in oil prices. Everyone thought it was picking up, then it crashed. Now its picking up again, said Muhammed Ghulam, an analyst with the firm. Companies expect to be able to ramp up and down activity as the price rises and falls. Thats why companies are putting more money in U.S. shale, where you can ramp up and down easily.

Still, with oil demand projected to rise for at least another decade, companies cannot turn their back on the developing world entirely. Recent auctions for deepwater drilling rights off the coast of Brazil have netted billions of dollars for the country. Mexicos push to open up its offshore oil fields to international firms has attracted most of the biggest names in the industry.

A-game needed

Tom McDonald, a former U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe and now an attorney in Washington with the law firm Vorys, said he has watched as countries across Africa, Asia and South America have become increasingly sophisticated in negotiations with oil and mining companies.

Countries on these three continents, especially Africa, have long resented the colonial powers and subsequently multinationals exploiting their extractive minerals, he said. Going forward those companies better bring their A-game to the table.

james.osborne@chron.com
The geography of energy is shifting. At one time, when policy oil industry executives and policy makers spoke of the Gulf, they were invariably speaking of the Persian Gulf.

Today, theyre talking about the Gulf of Mexico.

Texas and the U.S. Gulf Coast have become the new Middle East, a center of energy production and exports that is having outsized influence on the global oil markets. As the International Energy Agency concluded in its five year forecast for of the worlds oil industry, the United States, led by Texas, will dominate the growth of production and exports in coming years.

The changing geography and intensifying battle for markets between Texas shale drillers and OPEC were key themes at CERAWeek by IHS Markit, the annual Houston conference that attracts the biggest names and thinkers in the energy industry. Not so long ago, OPEC viewed shale as a niche industry with little staying power, one that it aimed to crush in late 2014 when it decided to keep pumping crude and add to the global oil glut to drive prices down and shale drillers out of business.

On Wednesday, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, minister of state for the United Arab Emirates and chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co.,conceded that shale was here to stay.

The focus of the geographical shift is the Permian Basin, where production of 4 million barrels a day is approaching that of Saudi Arabias Ghawar oil field, 5 million barrels day. With Exxon Mobil and Chevron planning to boost their Permian production to a combined 2 million barrels a day over the next few years, Permian output is forecast to hit 6 million barrels a day.

Much of that oil - and the associated natural gas  is headed for export markets, which are spurring a vast expansion that could make the energy complex that hugs the U.S. Gulf Coast unrivaled in the world. Tens of billions of dollars are pouring into export terminals for crude, liquefied natural gas and natural gas liquids. Billions more are flowing to petrochemical plants that are making and exporting plastics.

Super tankers that once offloaded crude and LNG in Gulf Coast ports are now taking on these Texas products, delivering cargoes to fast growing Asian economies hungry for energy. Those shipments are helping to make the Panama Canal as important to energy as the Suez Canal.

The irony is that all of this is happening as the world tries to wean itself from fossil fuels. California, for example, plans to make itself fossil-fuel free by 2045. Costa Rica recently said it aims to achieve the same goal by 2050. As a result, the U.S. Gulf Coasts ascendance could face a limited horizon.

Amid the uncertainty, one thing is for sure: climate change is not going away. The urgency to do something is only going to intensify.

The future of the Gulf Coast may well depend on whether the energy industry can, in fact, do something. It would likely require diverting some of the billions of dollars flowing to export terminals, chemical plants and pipelines into technologies that lower the amount of carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere.

Some companies have already started, spending to develop systems to remove carbon from emissions and the atmosphere.

The energy industry is famous for its innovation. The question is whether the same ingenuity that shifted the geography of energy can be applied to saving the planet  and the Gulf Coast economy.

rob.gavin@chron.com
Madeline Peltz works the night shift at the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America. Given the timing of that particular shift, one of her main responsibilities is watching Tucker Carlson's 8 p.m. show on Fox News.

And she's watched a lot of Tucker Carlson.

Carlson has been in the public eye for some 20 years - first as a print journalist, then a television commentator, founder of the conservative site the Daily Caller, and now, Fox News host, with a prime time slot and a salary in the millions. But people have been confused by Carlson's tone on Fox since he took over for Bill O'Reilly in 2018, noting concern about diversity and demographics in his show.

After many Carlson-watching hours, the 24-year-old researcher developed a working theory, which she outlined on the nonprofit's website: that Carlson is using his platform on Fox News to introduce white nationalist ideas to the mainstream, making him a uniquely prominent "mouthpiece for white supremacy."

Peltz dug into his recent past and discovered a trove of appearances he made on shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge's radio show between 2006 and 2011. She found a series of misogynistic, racist and homophobic remarks Carlson made, the audio of which Media Matters published this week.

In response, Carlson was defiant, casting himself as the victim of "the great American outrage machine," a mob of power-seeking organizations and people that he says are waging a political war to censor him.

In reality, credit for the tapes' publication is due to Peltz: a 20-something in her first adult job who lives in the basement of a Washington, D.C., house she rents with five other people, a few cats and a dog named Noodles.

More for you Fox News backlash hits just as it's making its pitch to advertisers

"I'm not like some high-power wielding globalist," Peltz said, adopting the conspiracy-inflected jargon of the far-right. "I'm this kid who's been on the Internet my whole life and knows how to get around it."

- - -

It's been a busy week at Media Matters, which tracks conservative media trends and has engaged in a years-long effort to cast light on the ways Fox News and its hosts sidestep traditional journalism guidelines.

The organization released the first audio of Carlson on Sunday. In that, Carlson called rape shield laws "totally unfair" and was adamantly supportive of Warren Jeffs, the former leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who is serving a life sentence for child rape. Carlson also said he would "love" a scenario involving young girls sexually experimenting and described women as "extremely primitive."

The next day, Media Matters for America released another audio file just moments after Carlson's show began. In that, Carlson said that white men deserve credit for "creating civilization," called Iraqis a bunch of "semiliterate primitive monkeys," and spoke about his desire for a presidential candidate to blame the "lunatic Muslims who are behaving like animals."

There was more on Tuesday. This time, Carlson could be heard joking about having sex with what he thought was an underage beauty pageant contestant.

On his Tuesday night show, Carlson did not address the audio itself. Instead, he took aim at Media Matters, calling it "a George Soros-funded lobbying organization whose sole mission is to punish critics of the Democratic Party."

But the tapes have turned up pressure on the show, teeing off an advertiser boycott and a protest in front of Fox News's headquarters in New York City on Wednesday, which Media Matters helped organize.

When asked for a comment for this story, Fox News spokeswoman Carly Shanahan pointed to Carlson's statements on his show this week.

- - -

Media Matters for America is not currently funded by George Soros; he has not donated to the organization in many years, its president, Angelo Carusone, said in an interview.

While Carlson described it as working to "bully" corporations, it is the fraction of the size of Fox News, whose revenue for 2018 has been estimated to be more than $3 billion. Media Matters has about 80 employees and a budget of about $14 million that mostly comes from private donors, Carusone said.

The group does media analysis from a left-leaning perspective, studying trends and themes to see how political discussions play out in the nation's media bubbles. Its staff monitors some 50,000 of live programming on television and radio every year and the organization tapes another million hours of audio and video on top of that.

Media Matters, which has an active website that highlights and contextualizes some of these moments, drew criticism during the 2016 for what some saw as an attempt to malign coverage that was critical of Hillary Clinton. But it has found a renewed prominence in the Trump era by turning its sights to the new information economy: the rise of conspiracy theories and misinformation online, the increased visibility of fringe right-wing websites and ideas, and an energized conservative media ecosystem that helps amplifies those ideas - an news cycle that often peaks with a tweet from President Donald Trump.

"When we did a power mapping of the landscape at the end of 2016 early 2017, what we found was that so much of what used to be dismissed as the fringes was now where power was being organized: 4chan; Daily Stormer comment sections; subreddits," Carusone said. "These would never have been considered worthy enough or important enough to monitor [before]. But we looked at it and they were - they were driving a lot of the misinformation and fake news of 2016. They were creating a lot of material that was making it onto Fox News or Donald Trump's Twitter feed."

Carusone said the organization had to build some new digital technology to track the online conversations in forums and message boards that he said have such a large effect on the political discourse in the United States.

"It's basically it's just a giant DVR for the 'chans, an archive of these message boards," Carusone said.

And it has been doing studies and using other data to advocate for better practices. It pushed Google to stop allowing what it had assessed as fake news-purveying websites to use the company's AdSense program. It has met with the big three technology companies - Facebook, Google and Twitter - Carusone said, but said NDAs prevented him from disclosing more about that. It also works with journalists to publicize problems or issues when other methods of persuasion fail.

"It's a combination of building up public pressure or direct lobbying," Carusone said.

Peltz's project was her idea, Carusone said. And he said the organization decided to publish portions of what she had found after deciding it was relevant to understanding Carlson's current political views.

"We didn't just try to embarrass him," Carusone said. "We took things that directly echo his show now, and things that had some relevancy today."

- - -

Carlson has responded by attacking Media Matters for America, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose categorization of hate groups is used widely by media organizations.

He has also been engaged in a long-running feud with CNN; on Tuesday he called anchor Brian Stelter a "eunuch," multiple times, name-calling that was omitted from the text of his monologue later posted on the Fox News website.

"This is what an authoritarian society looks like," Carlson said. "It was only a matter of time before they came for Fox News."

He also took aim at Media Matters' designation as a tax-exempt nonprofit and urged viewers to call the IRS.

"In its original tax application to the IRS, Media Matters claimed that the American news media were dominated by a pro-Christian bias and that they were needed to balance it," Carlson said. "It has been violating the terms of that status ever since."

He interviewed Boyden Gray, a former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, who has filed a complaint with the IRS about Media Matters. "There is something wrong with the IRS," Gray said. "There is nothing more harmful than to keep silent when you shouldn't be defending yourself."

The Daily Caller, which Carlson founded in 2010, also repurposed an story it had written previously about some racist and transphobic slurs Carusone used on a blog in 2005. Carusone had spoken in a derogatory way about "trannies," "jewry," and "japs," in a series of posts.

He wrote about his boyfriend, now husband, saying that "despite his jewry, you KNOW he's adorable," in October 2005, for example.

Carusone said the story, which he intended as satire, recirculates every time Media Matters is in the news. And he said that the persona of the blog, which he wrote in college, was designed to parody a "right-wing blowhard."

"It didn't work very well and I killed it," he said. "It's not funny and it's not nice."

- - -

Peltz said there's no doubt in her mind that Carlson has been trying to "thread the needle of mainstreaming overt white nationalism," while also avoiding the consequences for it. She cited well-publicized instances: when Carlson said immigration was making the country "dirtier," in December and another segment in which Carlson claimed the South African government was seizing land from white owners, simply because they were white. Carlson has defended that story.

Peltz said she believes the extremism has been escalating.

"It's clear in the editorial choices that he makes that he covers demographic change as basically the end of white people," Peltz said. "As someone with one of the largest platforms in media he frequently portrays himself as a victim. And that's a long tactic of white nationalists, going back all the way to the civil rights struggle in the South."

She said Carlson's response to the audio's publication is a sign that it had an affect. Media Matters says they have more material; it is not clear if the releases will continue.

"There's a lot of stuff that I don't think Fox News is super proud of," Peltz said. "It just took 10 hours a day [listening to] Bubba the Love Sponge to figure out."

- - -

The Washington Post's Shivani Vora and Allyson Chiu contributed to this report.
The Lindale Park neighborhood is set to get a new Mexican-themed bar when veteran restaurant partners open Monkey's Tail at 5802 Fulton this spring.

The new project, which will occupy the former Ike's Place, is a collaboration among Jessie Gonzalez, Sharif Al-Amin and Greg Perez. Al-Amin is the former director of operations at Helen Greek Food and Wine and Perez has Edison & Patton and Calle Onze on his resume.

CITY OF SALSA: The restaurants serving Houston's best salsa

The partners will be working with Steven Ripley (Jonathan's the Rub, Helen Greek Food and Wine and D&T's Drive Inn) who is developing the food menu and will initially oversee the kitchen. The menu will feature items such as wing baskets made with Mexican dry rubs and sauces, street corn, and New York-style pizzas. Mark Nichols of Quality Draught has created a draft system for the bar that will feature 20 taps dispensing 15 beers, one nitrogenated ale, four signature cocktails and one carbonated and nitrogenated cocktail.

Perez, who will serve as beverage director, has created a variety of craft cocktails including 3 Milks (rum, tres leches, pineapple, strawberry, cherry and nutmeg), Mama Coco (charanda sugarcane spirit, coconut, passionfruit, cilantro and poppy seeds) and Sabe Con Madre (vodka, chamomile, sage, elderflower liqueur, lemon and lychee).

Design-wise, expect to see a 3,000-square-foot bar with rolling garage doors, a dog-friendly patio, light fixtures and furniture from Mexico and a mid-century modern look embracing a Mexican heritage. Leslie Slade of Letterset has been sourcing design elements for the bar.

Monkey's Tail gets its name from the slang term for a train handle. It also references the nearby Metro rail line station.

HUNGRY? Find recipes, food news and restaurant reviews in our weekly Flavor newsletter delivered to your email here.

The bar is set to open late April. It will be open Monday through Friday from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. and noon to 2 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Greg Morago writes about food for the Houston Chronicle. Follow him on Facebook or Twitter. Send him news tips at greg.morago@chron.com. Hear him on our BBQ State of Mind podcast to learn about Houston and Texas barbecue culture.
When you think of great American food cities, New Orleans is often at the top of the list.

Ive made the 5- to 6-hour drive from Houston many times, drawn by the promise of delicious Creole rewards at old standbys like Domilises, Mr. Bs Bistro and Antoines.

But in the past few years, my trek down Interstate 10 has stopped well short of New Orleans, in the city of Lafayette, the center of Cajun country.

Walk into any convenience store on even the most obscure back road and you will often find links of boudin  the traditional rice-and-pork sausage of this area  made with the decades-old recipe of the family that owns the store. Like barbecue tours of Central Texas, boudin tours of south-central Louisiana are becoming more popular among adventurous food explorers.

In the spring, long-dormant boiling pot restaurants flicker to life as crawfish begin to surface. At Cajun Claws in nearby Abbeville, locals and tourists line up early to get a seat for arguably the best crawfish in the area. Just as Texans love to line up for barbecue, so do Louisianans line up for crawfish.

Until recently, one cuisine you would not find in Cajun country is Texas-style barbecue. But on a trip there this month, in between overflowing platters of crawfish, fried shrimp and seemingly endless strings of boudin links, I stopped by Blanchards Barbeque, the first Central Texas-style craft barbecue joint in Cajun country.

Blanchards Barbeque 2023 W. Pinhook Road, Lafayette, La. 337-322-1674 Open 10:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. or until sold out Tuesday-Saturday. See More Collapse

Owners Matt and Christy Kissy Blanchard took a long and circuitous path to opening a Texas-style barbecue joint in a nondescript shopping center in Lafayette.

Matt was born in Sulphur, La., and lived in various cities throughout the southeastern U.S. growing up. As one of five children, his parents decreed that each child had to do chores one day a week, either cooking or cleaning.

I didnt like to clean, says Blanchard. So I learned to cook. He took cues from his father, a dedicated backyard griller.

Blanchard and family eventually landed in Baton Rouge, where he graduated from St. Amant High School and spent a few semesters at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. He met his wife during his time in Baton Rouge.

After taking various jobs there, including as a chemical plant technician, Matt and Kissy moved to Memphis, where he took a job as a cook in a large church. Tasked with feeding crowds as large as 800 people, he improvised by building a 6-by-16-foot cinder-block pit and cooking dozens of pork shoulders for a pulled-pork dish.

I thought now this is fun, says Blanchard.

In 2014, Matt and Kissy moved to Lafayette, where his family had settled. A friend offered him another job in a chemical plant, but he wanted to pursue his passion for barbecue and knew it was probably his last chance before settling down and starting a family.

At the time, food trucks were all the rage in American cities, so the Blanchards started by cooking Texas-style barbecue from a trailer, with Matt as pitmaster and Kissy working the order window.

Over the next few years they built up a loyal following, as well as a savings account that allowed them to open the brick-and-mortar location in mid-2018.

Blanchards barbecue menu is faithfully Central Texas-style. On my recent visit, Blanchards prime-grade brisket was skillfully cooked with excellent smoke flavor and a classic peppery bark. Side dishes are all made from scratch  the green chile corn casserole and smoked beans were standouts.

He makes all his sauces in-house, and the Creole mustard sauce is certainly a worthy homage to local cooking traditions.

Though a few Texas-style barbecue joints have opened in New Orleans in recent years, Blanchards is the first foray of craft barbecue into deep south-central Louisiana. By all accounts, the locals in Lafayette have responded favorably, with Blanchard cooking up to 10 briskets a day  a significant number for a newly opened barbecue joint.

And there are always plenty of expatriate Texans in the local oil-and-gas industry who will appreciate a taste of home.

jcreid@jcreidtx.com

twitter.com/jcreidtx
Chris Stapleton is a relative RodeoHouston newbie. But he feels like a part of the show's fabric.

His two previous performances were among the best of each year. He's amassed a wide swath of fans thanks to his masterful voice, a sweaty and searing sound that's deeply embedded in old-school soul.

Thursday's performance drew a crowd of 72,011. It lasted under an hour and didn't feel as urgent or revelatory as past go-rounds. But it was still engaging and effective.

SORRY Y'ALL: George Strait isn't breaking the RodeoHouston attendance record

Stapleton took the stage unassumingly with "Broken Halos." He was joined by wife Morgane, who is pregnant with the couple's fifth child.

"The beauty that tames this beast," he called her.

Now Playing: The soulful singer returned for a third rodeo performance. Video: Joey Guerra

"More of You" was gorgeously understated. "Traveller" soared on its melody. "Fire Away" and "Parachute" were impressive vocal showcases.

"Might as Well Get Stoned" came with  what else?  a flood of green lights.

A sea of cell phones lit up the stadium for "Tennessee Whiskey," Stapleton's signature tune. He drew the song out, using it to introduce the band and check in with the crowd.

"Is everybody having a good time tonight?"

As if he had to ask.

Joey Guerra writes about music and pop culture for the Houston Chronicle. He will be writing about every single RodeoHouston concert. Follow him on Twitter. Send him news tips at joey.guerra@chron.com.

EDITOR'S PICKS: Best photos from Day 18 of RodeoHouston

Chris Stapleton RodeoHouston setlist "Broken Halos" "Hard Livin'" Nobody to Blame" "More of You" "Traveller" "Fire Away" "Parachute" "Millionaire" "Outlaw State of Mind" "Might as Well Get Stoned" "Tennessee Whiskey" See More Collapse

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Bryan Washington grew up in west Houston and now calls the Heights home. When the essayist and fiction writer wrote and assembled his debut short-story collection, Lot, he pictured it as a sort of cultural map of the city, with each featured area a character in itself.

Washington, who will discuss the book Tuesday at Brazos Bookstore, named his stories after streets and neighborhoods he knows and loves. Alief. Bayou. Shepherd. The stories are stocked with strivers and hustlers, survivors and dreamers. They are white, black, Mexican and Jamaican, just for starters. All of them reflect one of the most diverse cities in the country.

Washington took that diversity as a sort of marching order and guiding force behind Lot.

I want to show a sense of the empathy that the citys residents can have toward one another, as far as being accepting of their neighbors and willing to learn and live amongst their neighbors, Washington says. If that comes across in the text, that would make me pretty happy.

Fortunately, Washington, who turns 26 in April, also found room for a chupacabra. Thats a legendary creature purported to drink the blood of goats. In the story Bayou, two friends come across a chupacabra and figure it might be their big break in todays social-media-mad world. They alert the press.

Bryan Washington When: 7 p.m. Tuesday Where: Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet Details: brazosbookstore.com See More Collapse

Its got to put on a show, one of the friends says. Weve got to give it some pills or something. But the chupacabra, not surprisingly, has other ideas.

With the story, Washington was looking to do no less than turn the standard rulebook of childhood mythology on its head.

I was really interested in the idea of looking at a neighborhood and a group of people that you might not otherwise associate with a mythical or magical thing happening, Washington says. Usually, its like three white kids who fall into a pothole and end up in Narnia or something. I wanted to transplant the elements from that sort of magical story and put them a different locale.

Washington has seen the city change a great deal over the years. Case in point: his current neighborhood, the Heights, much of which has gradually, and then rapidly, become a sort of hipster haven.

You have very, very new businesses that have come in the last six months or a year, and everything is very shiny and glossy, and youve got a lot of new faces in the neighborhood, he says. These arent explicitly bad things, but they become a bad thing when the folks who were otherwise trying to make a life in the neighborhood are being pushed out or priced out or finding themselves unwelcome by merit of the newcomers.

Go to Austin and youll find bumper stickers imploring residents to keep the city weird. Washington would like to keep Houston gritty. Lot does just that. Its gorgeous prose has a little dirt under its fingernails, along with life observations that belie the authors youth. Theres a lot in Lot, much as there is in the city it depicts.
The cool colors throughout Eric Samuel Greens Kirby-area townhome add a tranquil vibe to his living space.

The palette, from island blue to dreamy white, speaks to one of Greens key points from his new book,  Style Made Simple: 10 Tips to Decorating with Style.

His tip: Choose your impact color.

Because I travel so much, my home life is calm, soothing and relaxed, said Green, who is the founder of Style Service, a creative, marketing and branding agency. Its a safe haven to cocoon and replenish so I have cool colors in my living space. You have to find the color that resonates with you.

Greens book offers jewels of information that he hopes will help readers figure out their own interior style. The book is also the first of five books that focus on decoding the science of style.

Green will sign Style Made Simple 12-4 p.m. Saturday at Pottery Barn in Highland Village, 4011 Westheimer.

A native of Washington D.C., Green has traveled the nation heading up visual merchandising and branding for companies including The Gap, Burberry, Cole Haan, Neiman Marcus, J. Crew and The North Face. He most recently was vice president and executive creative director for Houston-based retailer Charming Charlie. He moved to Houston in 2014 for the job, which he left in January to start his own consulting firm.

More Information Style hero: Milan Vukmirovic, founder of Fashion for Men and menswear creative director of Ports 1961 How many pairs of shoes do you own: 120 pairs Favorite accessory: Hermes belt Should toss from your closet but can't: Burberry white leather trench Most hated household chore: Bathroom cleaning Beauty/Grooming essential: Bio Oil First car: Burgundy Ford Focus First job: Bagging groceries Favorite color: White Favorite way to de-stress: Bikram yoga Cocktail of choice: Anything with tequila Perfect day would end with: A foot rub and cocktail Best advice you've ever received: " Find yourself a great tailor." What superpower would you want: Reading minds On your bucket list: Dance on Broadway Theme song: " Make It Rain" by Travis Porter See More Collapse

Im a storyteller, he said. When I work with a brand, I get involved in everything from the product packaging to the design of the shopping bags to the advertising, and I connect all of the pieces together so that theres one clear message.

Greens career in fashion was far from what he imagined while a student at Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. Back then, the only job he knew of was a buyer. But he earned a bachelors degree in marketing from that school, did coursework for an MBA from the University of Maryland and studied professional ethics at Georgetown University.

His first gig was actually as a visual merchandiser (the person who creates fabulous window, mannequin and product displays in stores) for an East Coast fashion brand. That led to Green expanding his skills in store design, creative direction and branding.

Im good at taking a vision and scaling it to other markets, he said.

His mother, Betty Green, who lives in Washington D.C., says of his career evolution: Ive seen him change himself and try things to make himself better. He embraces change. His philosophy is If you dont change, you wont grow. 

Greens own style is as relaxed and hip as his home. Hes wearing a blue Paul Smith shirt with red hearts, white jeans from The Gap and Stubbs and Wootton loafers.

Ive always has an affinity for luxury, said Green, who is rarely without an Hermes belt. My style has always been pretty consistent. Ive always fluctuated between preppy classic with a slash of Euro-sexy, and I always wear clothes that fit me.

joy.sewing@chron.com

twitter.com/joysewing
Texas nonprofits would be allowed to disclose sexual misconduct allegations against former employees without being sued under a new bill that was filed one month after the Houston Chronicle detailed hundreds of sexual abuses in Southern Baptist churches.

Introduced last week by McKinney Republican Rep. Scott Sanford, House Bill 4345 is the latest in what one expert said is a national wave of similar policies sparked by the #MeToo movement and ongoing religious sexual abuse scandals.

The Texas bill has support from two groups associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, which has been grappling publicly with its own sexual abuse crises since a February investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News found hundreds of Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have been charged with sex crimes in the last two decades. The newspapers also found dozens of instances in which church leaders apparently failed to disclose concerns about former employees who applied for jobs at other congregations.

Much of that, the newspapers found, was made possible by local church autonomy, the idea that each Southern Baptist church is independent and self-governing. In some cases, fear of lawsuits brought by former employers may have contributed to the silence that allowed them to find new jobs  and sometimes victims  at other congregations.

A spokesperson for Sanford, who also is a Southern Baptist minister, said the bill was brought to us by faith leaders and that Sanford saw this as an important step to reporting and preventing sexual abuse.

Gary Ledbetter, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention, said he did not know what directly prompted the bill, but that it all came together in the past month.

Churches, he said, typically are advised by lawyers to say nothing except that the person did work here when discussing former employees with potential new bosses.

Basically, we dont say anything, he said. This bill would encourage churches to tell the truth as best as they know.

Jim Richards, executive director of the Texas SBC, said churches must do everything we can to protect the innocents from predators. ... As a convention of churches we will continue to work on ways to provide a safe environment for the vulnerable. We hope HB 4345 will facilitate this goal.

The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which advocates for public policies on behalf of the nations roughly 47,000 Southern Baptist churches, also supports the bill.

Advocates for reforms to sexual abuse policies said the bill is a good step toward stopping predators, but that there still needs to be more action to protect victims from legal recourse.

Christa Brown, a longtime advocate who wrote a book about being molested by the pastor of her Southern Baptist church near Dallas, said she was threatened with lawsuits almost immediately after she came forward decades ago.

(Victims) too should receive immunity for good faith disclosures, Brown said. I kept talking, but for many victims, the mere threat of legal recourse is enough to perpetuate their silence.

Others have faced similar threats. Last year, for example, Jim Cochrun was sued for defamation by a pastor who Cochrun had accused of a decades-old molestation in Oklahoma. The pastors lawsuit, which was filed in Texas because that is where Cochrun lives, demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. It was dismissed last month, but Cochrun said it was tremendously damaging to his ability to heal.

I carried the shame of (his) sexual abuse for more than 30 years, Cochrun said, adding that the lawsuit re-victimized him.

Jims willingness to come forward with the truth is the only way to keep perpetrators like this out of positions of influence, his attorney Brent Webster said in a statement.

Marci Hamilton, a legal scholar and advocate for statute of limitations reform, applauded Sanfords bill, which she said is the latest to tackle sexual abuse.

I think its a positive sign that (officials) are thinking seriously about reporting, she said. But on the other hand, I'd like to see them stick up for the victims.

She added that churches and other groups that do not disclose sexual abuses need to face harsher punishments, including potential revocations of their tax-exempt status.

Hamiltons group, ChildUSA, supports broadening statutes of limitations for criminal and civil sexual abuse allegations. There has been considerable movement on the criminal side since the first Catholic Church abuse scandal, but Hamilton said lobbying by insurance and religious groups often has stymied civil reforms.

That may be changing. Already this year, dozens of statehouses have taken up statute of limitations reform, a drastic change that Hamilton credited to, among other things, ongoing sex abuse scandals involving the Catholic Church and high-profile cases, such as that against millionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein was the subject of a 2018 investigation by the Miami Herald that found the well-connected financier avoided life in prison for sexually abusing minor girls because of an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epsteins crimes and the number of people involved. He instead was sentenced to 13 months in county jail, the Herald reported.

Those and other pro-victim investigations have empowered lawmakers to think, OK, we can do the right thing, Hamilton said. The dam has broken.
The phone call was a long time coming.

For years, community activist Reginald Moore had been outspoken about the Sugar Land areas ties to the convict-leasing system, which used the labor of state prisoners under cruel conditions to earn profits for the state after the Civil War. Moore had warned Fort Bend ISD officials that they might find remains of inmate laborers at a school construction site.

When crews found human remains on the site of a technical center under construction last April, district Superintendent Charles Dupre personally informed Moore.

Now Playing: Fort Bend ISD Superintendent Charles Dupre talks about the 95 remains found in the location where the school district was building a new school on Tuesday, March 5, 2019 in Sugarland. Video: Elizabeth Conley/Houston Chronicle

I said I need to call him directly, Dupre said in a recent interview. I didnt want anyone else to tell him that. I wanted him to hear directly from me because I knew how much he had invested in this and how close it was to him, to his heart.

That call would vindicate Moore. For Dupre, it would begin a monthslong process to decide how the school district would handle the discovery of 95 African-American remains, believed to have been prisoners in the convict-leasing system.

Dupre recounted a challenging process of respecting the historical significance of the discovery while making sure the district followed through on opening the James Reese Career and Technical Center as scheduled this fall.

The superintendent, who took the helm of the school district in 2013, said the experience became personal for him.

As an African-American, black leader, this is my people, Dupre said. It was a wake-up call for me personally.

Fort Bend Independent School District, which educates roughly 76,000 students, found itself at the center of national attention as news spread about the historic discovery. After months of controversy, the district decided last month to negotiate with the county and cancel plans to build where the remains were discovered.

The negotiations could lead to the county acquiring the land and constructing a memorial and cemetery to honor the people buried there. Fort Bend County commissioners are asking state legislators to give them the authority to own and maintain the cemetery. The Texas Health and Safety Code limits ownership to counties with a population of 8,200 or fewer. State Rep. Rick Miller, who represents part of Fort Bend County, filed a bill to change an applicable provision of the Texas Health and Safety Code.

State Rep. Ron Reynolds, who represents another part of the county, recently introduced legislation seeking $95 million in reparations to the descendants of the people buried at the site. He also wants a plaque inside the state Capitol to honor the victims and a study to determine the legacy of the convict leasing-system.

These people were robbed of their freedom from the state of Texas. They were forced into this convict-leasing system, which was slavery by another name, Reynolds said. They received no pay. The victims worked in the sugar plantations. They built railways. They built the state Capitol.

They heavily contributed to the economic development of our state. These private companies profited and the families and the communities of these victims suffered. Thats why I believe that there should be some compensation.

As the injustices of the convict-leasing system sank in and county officials offered assistance to Fort Bend ISD, the school districts position on the remains evolved.

At first, the district appeared adamant that the remains should be moved to the nearby Old Imperial Farm Cemetery, filing a court petition in November. District officials said it would cost $18 million to change course on the project.

We initially thought maybe we could go ahead and properly honor the people and still complete the building and do something in the building to show that, Dupre said. But clearly the more we worked, the more we reflected and moved forward, it became clear that we just cant.

Dupre said the district will find other ways to provide the programs that would have been offered in the part of the building planned for the site where the remains were found. Officials have considered moving a modular building on site with temporary classrooms or offering the programs at another campus.

The school district has halted legal action in the case, but Dupre cautioned that it was a temporary suspension of action as negotiations with the county proceed.

We have not gone to the court and withdrawn the suit because right now if for whatever reason, anything falls apart with the county, we cannot get to an agreement, we still have to have the bodies re-interred somewhere else, Dupre said.

With every twist and turn surrounding the discovery, the school district faced criticism from the community for deciding to build on the site in the first place. Dupre notes that he was not superintendent when the district decided to purchase the land in 2011.

I dont think there was thought that we shouldnt build on the land, Dupre said. I think there was always the thought, if we find a cemetery that (Moore) believes is there, then well handle it at that time and well handle it properly.

District officials also have faced criticism about not following through on DNA testing of the remains, which could provide more context and background on the individuals.

The school district has said the Texas Historical Commission has the legal authority to authorize DNA testing; the commission says it lacks this authority. The Texas Attorney Generals Office is looking into the question.

 I think some of the blame that is coming from the community is misplaced. Its not the district. Its not our board, Dupre said. We have been well-intended working hard to resolve this every step of the way . But, when you have the Historical Commission saying its not their authority, that causes delays, confusion and frustration.

Despite the challenges, Dupre said the discovery has led to his own personal reflection. He recalled the impression made on him from his first visit three years ago to his native Morocco since leaving as a child. He was adopted by a white American family after leaving Morocco at age 3.

I left thinking these are my roots, Dupre said. These are my people. This is where Im from. It really caused me to see that for many, many of our African-American students, their history was broken by slavery.

Dupre envisions a memorial center to honor the remains, but he said decisions about what it will look like must await further discussions between the county and the school district. He said the district is also working on curriculum to educate students on the convict-leasing system and the historic discovery.

Even though its been tenuous at times, its been tough and challenging, you know hard conversations are never easy, Dupre said.

brooke.lewis@chron.com
They were fast, and now, they're likely furious.

Deputies have arrested four people accused of racing down the Katy Freeway over the last few days in a crackdown on illegal street racing as thousands are expected to gather in Baytown for TX2K19, an annual legal street racing event.

Late Tuesday night, deputies with the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable's Office arrested William Johnson, 23, and Kent Droughton, 19, after spotting the pair speeding down Interstate 10 near Barker Cypress at an "excessive rate of speed," authorities said.

The next night, Daniel Wojdyla, 25, was also arrested on the same stretch of highway. Their most recent arrest landed Richard Treacy-Newell in jail after he was spotted allegedly racing around 3:20 a.m. Thursday on the Katy Freeway near Elridge Parkway.

"Street racing is illegal in Texas," the constable's office stated in a press release, adding that speed demons ought to enter events like TX2K19 to legally race on Texas roadways. "Precinct 5 deputies will arrest and charge those who are racing on public roadways and endangering their own lives and the lives of other innocent drivers and passengers."

All four were charged with racing on a highway.
Graduate student associations from five Texas universities have published a joint letter to elected officials opposing federal policies and proposals that they fear will deter international graduates seeking to continue their education in the United States.

The students, from Baylor, Rice, Texas A&M, the University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin, oppose the U.S. Department of Homeland Securitys recent proposal to set a fixed maximum number of years international students may study in the country, a rule that could go into effect as early as September if approved. The proposed time limit has not been specified.

We take issue with this proposal specifically due to the fact that the length of required study and research varies dramatically between institutions, departments, and fields of study. Thus, a static and uniform duration of stay is not only poorly suited for graduate research and education, but also a visible deterrent for high-potential scientists, clinicians, and thought leaders around the world from bringing their talents to the U.S, the students wrote on Feb. 28.

The students also expressed concerns over a policy, enforced last September, that gave immigration officers the sole discretion to deny visa applications, petitions or requests that appeared incomplete or ineligible without first issuing a request for evidence or note of intent to deny. The policy intends to discourage frivolous filings  used to game the system, save resources, and improve the agencys efficiency, according to a government release in July.

More Information International student enrollment at major Texas universities in Fall 2018 Baylor University: 488 undergrad, 227 graduate, 715 total; 4 percent of student population Rice University: 455 undergraduates; 1,217 graduate students; 1,672 total; 23.9 percent of degree-seeking population Texas A&M University: 1,419 undergraduates; 4,781 graduate students; 6,200 total; 9.7 percent of student population University of Houston: 1,573 undergraduate; 2,072 graduate students; 3,645 total; 7.8 percent of student population University of Texas-Austin: 1,855 undergraduate; 3,130 graduate and professional students; 469 reciprocal exchange; 5,450 total; 10.5 percent of student population Source: Baylor University, Rice University, Texas A&M University, University of Houston, University of Texas-Austin, Texas Higher Education Accountability System See More Collapse

Another policy, effective in August 2018, authorized officials to define any student overstaying a visa as having an unlawful presence, according to a recent release by U.S. Department of Homeland Securitys citizenship and immigration services. International students could be in violation of the law starting the day after their visa expires, after they complete or terminate a course of study or if their visa is denied. The accrual of unlawful presence can be suspended during a pending application for reinstatement if it is timely filed, according to officials.

When that purpose has ended, we expect them to depart, or to obtain another, lawful immigration status, said USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna in a statement. Those who have overstayed more than 180 days may be subject to a three-year, 10-year, or permanent ban to the U.S. depending on their length of stay, according to the release.

The message is clear: These nonimmigrants cannot overstay their periods of admission or violate the terms of admission and stay illegally in the U.S. anymore, the statement says.

The recent policies align with President Donald J. Trumps executive order to enforce immigration laws, according to immigration services, and are in response to 2016 and 2017 government reports which determined international students and exchange visitors stayed beyond their authorized time more than any other group of non-immigrant visitors.

Students, however, say enforcing fixed maximums on the years of education international graduate students can pursue will prevent them from performing important research or pursuing a graduate education that could take longer.

The contributions of international graduate students to our countrys scientific, technological, and academic innovation are numerous. As graduate student leaders at the top research universities in our beloved state of Texas, we strongly urge you to support international graduate students in their pursuit of education and research in the United States, the students wrote . Opposing these detrimental new policies is one of the strongest ways to support international graduate education. Supporting international graduate education builds a stronger research community that strengthens this great state and advances the nation.

Universities and a lawmaker have taken notice of the students action.

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, said in a statement that she is against the Trump administrations efforts to curtail the number of international student visas and is troubled by figures showing that international student enrollment at U.S. universities declined overall by 4 percent from 2016 to 2017. International graduate students decreased by nearly 6 percent during that time. According to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, more than half of the decline can be attributed to a dwindling number of graduate students from India enrolling in computer science and engineering programs in 2017.

International graduate students bring a rich and full perspective to their studies from which American students learn immeasurably, Jackson Lee said. Every year, I advocate for increased funding for these vital educational opportunities.

No other members of the Texas congressional delegation responded, student organizers said.

UH spokesman Mike Rosen said in a statement that international students play a valuable role in our university, especially in research.

The statement continued: It only makes sense to allow them to remain in our country after they graduate so they can contribute their knowledge and expertise as part of our workforce rather than leave the country to compete against us.

Jason Guo, a bioengineering doctoral candidate and president of the Graduate Student Association at Rice University, began organizing last year for a campaign that felt personal to him.

Guos mother, a research scientist, and his father, a research engineer for biomedical device companies, were part of his inspiration. Both from poor backgrounds, his parents immigrated from China to pursue their graduate studies in the United States. They became citizens who climbed the economic ladder while contributing to important research, he said.

What I see is the American dream weaved through their life story, Guo said. That is very much to me the embodiment of American dream, and thats not a story that is unique to them.  Thats a story I really want to see continue and be achievable for people who come here for their graduate studies, to create a better life for themselves and their families.

Guo first contacted Sydnee Spruiell Eldridge, president of UHs Graduate and Professional Student Association. Together, they contacted other graduate student associations at major universities within the state, convening monthly over conference calls to create the letter to lawmakers.

International students  represent a huge economic benefit and give our university such a diverse perspective which is critical to the work environment, said Eldridge, a cellular molecular biology doctoral candidate at UH.

Theyre our friends. Theyre our valued peers, and at universities like University of Houston, they represent such a critical component of our campus culture, and on a personal level, theyre very special to us, she said.

A 2013 study in the Journal of International Students surveyed three groups of Duke University alumni about their interactions with international students and found that domestic students who had high interactions with international students had higher levels of development. They gained new cultural perspectives, empathy, and friendships with international students, and were more likely to were more likely to learn a foreign language, according to the report.

So far, the response from the student body has been positive. The graduate student associations have had call and letter writing sessions with students and are aiming to promote the market more publicly in days to come so that other campuses can weigh in on policies and future proposals, Eldridge said.

Guo, whose term as president ends later this month, said there are plans to establish a broader Texas graduate coalition, which will be a springboard for further discussions and collaborations regarding issues, legislation and policies that concern state graduate students. He wont be able to oversee it, but his hope is that launching the coalition will provide a strong foundation and vision that the group can carry forward.

It helps us so much when we can band together and have this more unified voice, Guo said.

brittany.britto@chron.com
Sarah Ghorad, 25, has struggled to attend Friday prayer at her local mosque in River Oaks due to her nursing student schedule.

But on Friday, she felt compelled to, to pray for the 49 people killed in terrorist attacks at two mosques in New Zealand on what is considered a holy day for the faithful.

The international and local community came together in response to the attacks, with direct police patrols added to Houstons 33 mosques as a precaution.

We mourn the heartbreaking killings of men, women and children gathered for prayer in their houses of worship and urge leaders in our nation and worldwide to speak out forcefully against the growing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate that appears to have motivated these white supremacist terrorists, said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the civil rights group, Council on American-Islamic Relations, in a statement.

Mayor Sylvester Turner, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, representatives of the Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston and American Jewish Committee, all joined the Islamic Society of Greater Houston on Friday afternoon to further denounce the attacks.

It doesnt matter where a heinous act is committed, Turner said. Whether its in this city or whether its in New Zealand  if its a heinous act against one, it is a heinous act against us all.

Acevedo noted there was no specific threat to Houston-area mosques but added this is a time when we have to be vigilant, when we have to make sure we have good security protocols in place.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush warned against going to a mosque there until further notice.

In Houston, CAIR advised Muslims to attend regular services, especially with security ramped up.

We dont want them to be shrouded in fear, said Sobia Siddiqui, communications coordinator for CAIR Houston.

Friday service offers Muslims a time to reflect on their lives, their relationship to God and their relationship to others, Siddiqui said.

That the shooters attacked mosques on such a holy day meant they knew what they were doing, she added.

For Ghorad, who attended Friday service at the River Oaks Islamic Center, Fridays back home in Egypt were meant for spending time with the extended family, eating at her grandmothers house after prayer. Its all about unity, she said.

Hearing about the attacks, it empowered me to come out and be like no I shouldnt be scared, Ghorad said. I also believe in fate  If something does happen, well, I mean Im in Gods house.

ileana.najarro@chron.com

twitter.com/IleanaNajarro
Richard Evans seemed destined to die behind bars. Convicted of running a multimillion-dollar pill mill, the Houston doctor was in his 70s when a jury found him guilty on 19 counts of money laundering, mail fraud and distributing painkillers.

The charges could have netted a life sentence, but in the end he eked out a below-guidelines sentence of just five years. It soon became apparent that could amount to the same thing; at 74, Evans found a 2-centimeter tumor on his neck last fall. The mass grew and grew, and by the start of the new year he was in need of more treatment than the Federal Bureau of Prisons could provide Again, it seemed, he might not make it out alive.

But on Thursday, Evans got out roughly two years earlier than expected. He became one of the first prisoners to benefit from a compassionate release provision of the federal First Step Act, shepherded through Congress late last year by Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn. To Evans legal team, his release represents an early victory for the new law, but to advocates and policy wonks its a small step for a new measure thats already running into unexpected roadblocks.

The new law worked, Houston-based attorney David Gerger said on behalf of Evans legal team. We are very grateful - this is why you go to law school.

Requests often denied

Before the passage of the First Step Act, terminally ill inmates in federal lock-ups could appeal to the Bureau of Prisons for early release. But their requests were often denied, and advocates viewed the compassionate release options as underutilized.

The new system offers another alternative; if the prison doesnt respond to a dying inmates request after 30 days, the prisoner may file a motion in court asking for compassionate release.

Weve been pushing for this reform for years, said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. You had people dying waiting for an answer from this bureaucracy.

To be eligible for release, federal inmates must be diagnosed with a disease or condition with an end-of-life trajectory, according to the law. If they dont have the money for an attorney, public defenders can take up the matter because it counts as a sentence reduction instead of a post-conviction appeal.

A former bank robber, Steven Cheatham, was the one of first federal prisoners approved for early release under the new law. But Bureau of Prisons records show he died behind bars hours after a Tennessee judge signed his release order. Since then, there have been others, according to Ring, but Justice Department officials this week were not able to clarify how many.

One week ago, Evans attorneys filed paperwork to make him one of that number. In their motion, attorneys Ashlee McFarlane, Samy Khalil and Gerger laid out their case.

Their client had been locked up for a scheme to sell roughly 11,000 painkillers to patients mostly from Texas and Louisiana. Sometimes, according to court records, he signed stacks of blank prescriptions and told patients who couldnt make it to the office that they could renew their medications remotely if they paid by money order.

The pharmacist embroiled in the scheme pleaded guilty on the first day of a two-week federal trial ending in a guilty verdict, a prison term and a hefty fine. Evans surrendered his license and was shipped off to federal prison.

In a Louisiana penitentiary, Evans learned he was dying. The mass in his neck turned out to be malignant melanoma, and this year doctors told him he needed surgery. The disease has one of the highest death rates of all skin cancers, and his lawyers argued that the type of care required is only available at a handful of cancer centers including MD Anderson in Houston.

Dr. Evanss diagnosis of malignant melanoma, with its need for prompt treatment, combined with the opportunity to receive treatment at MD Anderson, present extraordinary and compelling reasons for reduction of his sentence, his attorneys wrote in their March 8 plea.

On Wednesday, Judge Kenneth Hoyt agreed.

Good time credit boost

The compassionate release provision is just a small piece of a much broader measure, one thats gotten attention of late for its snags and shortcomings as well as for its promise of second chances.

Among the new laws key pieces is a move to lower some mandatory minimum sentences, bolster prison programs, and expand good time credits for early release.

At first, advocates fretted the bill didnt go far enough, but it enjoyed overwhelming support in both chambers when it finally passed last year after a few last-minute changes.

Now, though, other problems are emerging. One provision enjoyed enthusiastic support from inmate families and advocates was increasing from 47 to 54 the maximum number of good time days prisoners could earn per year if they behaved.

That piece of the measure seemed destined to take effect immediately, but the bills supporters were taken by surprise when a quirk of the phrasing lumped it into another section of the measure that the government has 210 days from signing to complete.

For families, that was the thing that was going to affect everybody and that was a long overdue reform, Ring said. But the way the bill reads, the good time fix cannot take effect until the attorney general releases the risk and needs assessment.

Federal officials missed an early deadline to create an independent review committee intended to help shape that risk and needs tool, which will determine inmates eligibility for release. The late start came as a disappointment to reformers, some of whom already hoped for a meatier bill that addressed higher-level offenses.

Theyve already missed that deadline, said Emily Mooney, a policy expert with the right-leaning think tank R Street. Now because (the Bureau of Prisons) still doesnt have a permanent director and theres a lot of staff turnover, were just concerned that even current reentry programming isnt being implemented to its full intent.

And earlier this month, The Marshall Project detailed concerns about the lack of funding for the acts programs outlined President Donald Trumps budget priorities.

For Evans, though, those concerns may seem distant. After his late-in-life brush with the criminal justice system, hes now in the hospital fighting for his life on borrowed time.

keri.blakinger@chron.com
No injuries were reported after a driver crashed into a southwest Houston apartment early Friday morning, according to Metro Video.

Police were on the scene overnight investigating whether the driver was intoxicated at the time, Metro Video reported.
For the first time in modern presidential primary history, two Texas Democrats with even a slim chance are vying for the White House in the same year.

When El Paso native Beto ORourke jumped into the race on Thursday morning, he joined former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro in the upper echelon of a crowded field of 2020 Democratic candidates.

Since Lyndon Baines Johnson left the White House in January 1969, only one Texas Democrat (Lloyd Bentsen in 1976) has made a serious run at being president and its rare for two native sons to face each other in the Iowa Caucuses.

I cant think of a time when we had two legitimate contenders for the nomination, said SMU political science professor Cal Jillson.

Jillson said there was a point in 1980 when Republicans George H.W. Bush and former Gov. John Connally were rivals in the same uphill battle against former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, but Connallys campaign never really took off and he finished way back in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

For subscribers: Beto ORourke is running for president, reshaping the 2020 Democratic primary

A double shot of Texans on the national stage is yet another sign of the states shifting political climate. Once considered a GOP stronghold, Texas is more in play that it has been in a generation, Democratic Party leaders say.

We could not be more excited about the 2020 election, Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said.

But while the two Democrats are making history by just being in the race, they are also up against history. Neither Castro, 44, nor ORourke, 46, has ever been elected governor or to the U.S. Senate, credentials that have historically been a prerequisite to winning the Democratic nomination. It has been 95 years since Democrats last nominated a candidate for president who had not served as one or the other. In 1924, Democrats nominated John W. Davis of West Virginia. He served just two terms in the U.S. House and was easily defeated by Republican Calvin Coolidge.

The lack of statewide political experience is even more pronounced given the other Democrats in the field. In a poll released last weekend by the Des Moines Register of likely Iowa Caucus voters, both Castro and ORourke were in the top 8. But they were also the only two among the top 8 who had never served in the U.S. Senate.

For subscribers: Former GOP leader joins Cornyn campaign and warns: Texas is now a swing state

On the other hand, in the era of Donald Trump, those traditional measures of a candidate may not apply, said Nate Lerner, who spearheaded a Draft Beto campaign to pull him into the presidential race. Trump, who grew famous on TV, had never run for office before getting into the presidential race and winning.

A simple message that voters can relate to, notoriety and fundraising are seen as must-haves in modern politics.

What we need is someone who can win, Lerner said.

Castro, ORourke downplay talk of rivalry between them

While they will be fighting over some of the same voters in Iowa and other early voting states, ORourke and Castro have both downplayed any potential rivalry. From the start of his campaign, Castro has insisted that there is more than enough room for himself and ORourke in the crowded Democratic field.

And ORourke made clear in his first stops in Iowa that he isnt interested in going after Castro or any other Democrat.

Critically important that we do not denigrate or demean any other candidate, ORourke said.

But Castro also is not shrinking from the challenge of dealing with ORourke in the race. Within hours after ORourkes announcement, Castro put out a press release showing he has rounded up support from 30 elected Democrats, primarily from the Texas Legislature.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, Julians brother and chairman of his campaign, said of ORourkes entry: The primary field is going to be full, as we expected, and we wish everyone well in their campaigns.

Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

Julian Castro has been cast among the more liberal candidates, embracing health-care and energy proposals favored by left-leaning Democrats, and going beyond them in speaking of the imperative of paying reparations to African-American descendants of slaves. ORourke, on the other hand, likely will be viewed as a moderate in the race, lacking a footprint from his three terms in Congress in a Democratic minority.

ORourke and Castro also start the race in very different places, said Larry Sabato, Director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Sabato said ORourke starts with a big fundraising network, more name recognition and is clearly one a top-tier candidate  as evidenced by the $80 million that ORourke raised in the U.S. Senate race he lost to Republican Ted Cruz.

Castro has a lot of work to do to get to where ORourke is, Sabato said. Castro, the former Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has national campaign experience, having served as a surrogate at campaign events for Hillary Clinton during her presidential run. He was also on her shortlist for vice president. But he has to prove he can raise the money and fire up the crowds in one of the biggest fields the Democrats have ever had.

During a stop in Austin earlier this week, Castro said hes feeling momentum in Iowa.

Were making up ground, Castro said. No question I have plenty of work to do in these early states. But Im going to do the work. One of the ways you can measure candidates is through the amount of traction that they get when they get in front of people. And I can tell Im going to gain good traction as I get in front of people.

Jillson said Castro and ORourke have vastly different pressures on them from the start. He said Castro needs to prove he can compete in Iowa. ORourke has to prove he can build the network to compete in multiple early states at the same time.

It is imperative for both of them to be in the top 10 by the time Iowa votes in February 2020.

ORourke has a better chance to stay in, Jillson said. There wont be more than 8 of them left after Iowa.

Washington Bureau reporter Bill Lambrecht contributed to this report.
AUSTIN  Senate Democrats still pledge to block the confirmation of embattled Secretary of State David Whitley, even as a top Texas law enforcement official is taking blame for major errors in a list of suspected non-citizen voters.

I take full responsibility as the leader of the Department of Public Safety, Steven McCraw told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee this week. Had the department assigned a senior level person to the project, he said, it wouldnt have turned over bad data that included thousands of people who had already proven their citizenship.

I can tell you throughout the entire project, the secretary was not involved in any of it because he wasnt there at the time, McCraw said.

The mea culpa, however, is being met with skepticism from county election officials, who first identified mistakes in the state list, and from Senate Democrats, who still fault Whitley. He had been on the job about six weeks before launching the attempted purge.

Ultimately hes responsible, because he is the secretary of state, state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville, said Thursday. I still think hes a fine gentleman, he just made the wrong decision.

Texas Take: Get the latest news on Texas politics sent directly to your inbox every weekday

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott first began casting blame on the public safety department two weeks ago, as it became clear Whitleys job was at risk. All 12 Senate Democrats have vowed to oppose Whitleys confirmation, enough to block it.

The secretary of states office in late January released the list of 95,000 registered voters suspected to be non-citizens. But county election officials, charged with vetting the names, quickly found found tens of thousands of those people were in fact U.S. citizens who had been wrongly flagged.

A federal judge recently ordered a halt to the attempted voter purge, which civil rights groups allege is calculated to discourage immigrants from voting. Some counties had already sent out notice to those on the list, threatening to remove them from the voter rolls if they didnt prove their citizenship.

The Secretary of States office began gathering data for the project in March 2018. But little is known about how the list was developed and vetted since state agencies, including Abbotts office, have denied several public records requests filed by Hearst Newspapers, citing pending litigation.

Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, said McCraws statement this week didnt change his mind.

I don't know that changed anybody's mind, Whitmire said. The harm has been done.

No timeline for confirmation vote

The Democrats resistance is a rare show of force from the minority party this early in the legislative session, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. Abbotts nominees dont usually meet much pushback from the upper chamber.

I cant remember ever having someone this controversial in my 29 years in the Senate, Lucio said.

Abbott reaffirmed this week he stands 100 percent behind Whitley, his former aide who he nominated as states top elections official in December.

The Department of Public Safety has an obligation to ensure that the information it provides to the secretary of states office is not only accurate, but also is understandable for the secretary of state to be able to use to ensure the integrity of the voter rolls in the state of Texas, Abbott said.

Even so, county election officials said the list still would have swept up registered voters who may have become naturalized after applying for or renewing their driver licenses with DPS. State Elections Director Keith Ingram acknowledged in federal court that the secretary of states office knew ahead of time that issue might pose some problems with the list. Some 50,000 people are naturalized each year in Texas.

I dont see why DPS is taking responsibility, other than its convenient for the Department of Public Safety to take the fall, rather than the secretary of state, said Special Assistant Harris County Attorney Douglas Ray, who has said DPS data is notoriously unreliable.

Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis questioned why the secretary of states office didnt spot the errors that were quickly evident to county officials.

The secretary of state had a duty to vet this information, said Davis, who is president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators. So much of this could have been avoided had they done so.

Abbott has said Whitleys office made clear to counties the list contained weak matches that needed further vetting. In a statement, Whitley said county voter registrars play an an essential role in maintaining the accuracy of our states voter rolls.

Our goal has always been to ensure that qualified Texas voters have every opportunity to register and cast a ballot, and that ineligible voters are not registered to vote, Whitley said. The office didnt answer questions about whether all the blame should fall on the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Its not the first time the state has launched a voter purge effort with bad data. In 2012, the state wrongly matched living voters to the names of deceased people in its attempt to purge dead voters from the rolls.

Its not clear when, or if, Whitleys confirmation may come up for a vote on the Senate floor.

amorris@express-news.net
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner knows that climate change is real. He has said so many times since Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. The first time I heard him talk about the connection between climate change and the hurricane, I thought: This is one politician who actually gets it. After all, the bar is low in Texas, where many lawmakers dont accept basic climate science. Turner is even the co-chair of a group called Climate Mayors.

Thats why it was so shocking to hear Houstons climate mayor actively throwing his support behind some of the most ill-conceived fossil fuel infrastructure in the state  a liquified natural gas export terminal in Brownsville.

Turner let down the climate justice community when he submitted a letter asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to approve a permit to build the controversial Rio Grande LNG export terminal. In the letter, Turner mentioned that he and his staff have met several times with NextDecade, the Houston-based company behind the export facility.

For me, this incident invites a yes or no question: Can a mayor support a dirty fossil fuel project and still work to mitigate climate change?

The answer, obviously, is a resounding No.

The mayor must have missed the years of community opposition to this project, the environmental damage the project is likely to cause, the questionable economics involved and the international campaign against it. But theres no way he, an international leader in the climate movement, misses the impact of exporting fracked gas to Europe. Im pretty sure he is aware that exporting fracked gas will harm our global climate.

The fracking boom in West Texas has had an enormous impact on the land and water: Injection wells pump millions of gallons of chemicals underground that jeopardize our aquifers, wastewater is dumped into the ocean, earthquakes are on the rise, flaring dims the light of the stars, massive gas leaks spread toxic chemicals through our pristine lands and of course methane leaks at every stage in the process. Methane is a super-pollutant that is 87 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide during the time it remains in the atmosphere. Texas is seeing more impacts of climate change with every passing day, and more LNG means more fracking, more storms and more devastation to Turners hometown.

The export facilities proposed near South Padre Island are a huge part of sustaining the unnecessary increase in fracking. And we dont even consume this fracked gas in Texas, or even in the U.S. The project would export fracked gas to Ireland, which banned fracking because of the negative environmental impacts. If this project goes through, Texas will experience those negative impacts instead.

A strong coalition of local residents, tribal members and environmental advocates have been working to stop this project from devastating their environment and economy. Just last December, they had a door slammed in their face when the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality told them that they would not be more affected by Rio Grande LNGs pollution than the general public, despite the facility being planned right in their community, and approved NextDecades air permits.

As mayor of the oil and gas hub of the nation, Turner should be doing his best to change the status quo of greenlighting projects that sacrifice the well-being of Texans for the sake of fossil fuel exports. He should be distancing himself from the industries that could make it more likely for Houston to face another Hurricane Harvey. Instead, he is gaslighting the communities mobilizing for a truly clean energy future for Texas.

Turner has the potential to be a leader and to live up to the title of co-chair of the Climate Mayors, who work across the U.S. to strengthen local efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We encourage Turner to meet with the communities that would be affected by Rio Grande LNG and hear their concerns. Solutions to climate change, just as in recovering from storms and protecting local communities, lie in the knowledge of the people impacted, not in those causing the harm. Its time to protect our city, our coast and our world.

Mayor Turner, its time to put people before LNG.

Hinojosa is a Sierra Club organizer in Brownsville.
HPE Discover More  Dubai will be opened by Dr. Fabio Fontana, vice president and managing director, HPE Middle East, who will then hand over to Antonio Neri- President & CEO, HPE. Antonio is visiting the UAE for the first time as CEO of HPE and will take the audiences through the advances that HPE brings to peoples personal and professional lives. H.E. Sarah Al Amiri, UAE Minister of state for Advanced Sciences will then put things into context for the UAE and the region, by highlighting the UAEs vision for the role of technology and its impact on the way people live and work.



Data is the biggest factor in the transformation of technology today. It facilitates the insights for progress, and its being created at rates like never before. HPE Discover More is the perfect environment for customers to engage, meet and accelerate new partnerships, said Dr. Fabio Fontana, vice president and managing director, HPE Middle East. Were bringing an ongoing, conversation to our highly engaged global audience with frequent events, delivered locally and with a diverse range of topics, tailored to local market audiences. Were very excited to be bringing this event to the UAE.
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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  Abu Dar, the elusive leader of the ISIS-linked Maute terror group, is believed to be among the fighters killed in a clash in Lanao del Sur that also left four soldiers dead.

Coronel Romeo Brawner of the 103rd Infantry Brigade told CNN Philippines on Friday that the military now has the suspected body of Abu Dar, based on "revelations of very credible informants."

He said the Philippine National Police's Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO) had collected a DNA sample to confirm the body's identity, a process that could take up to a month.

Three other suspected members of the Maute group were killed in Tubaran town Thursday afternoon. Officials said they have recovered one of the bodies while military sources have confirmed that two others were killed.

The government suffered four fatalities from Thursday's hourlong clash. The military has yet to release their names.

Brawner said the heavy fighting between government forces and remnants of the Maute group began Monday, with two militants believed killed. Authorities retrieved one of the bodies.

Abu Dar was among the Maute leaders recorded on video in a planning session that authorities believe was for the attack on Marawi City.

Terrorists stormed Marawi, the capital of Lanao del Sur, on May 23, 2017, triggering a five-month war that killed more than a thousand people, most of them local and foreign militants. The violence displaced nearly 360,000 residents and left the mosque-studded city in ruins.

Malacanang has said the presence of the remaining Maute group members is not a cause for alarm since Mindanao is still under Martial Law and the extremist group has become smaller.
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Spotifys New Hulu Bundle Could Hurt Musicians  Heres Why

In a new move towards bundling, Spotify made waves this week in announcing that Spotify Premium will also include a subscription to the ad-supported tier of Hulu. Spotify, however, already in the doghouse for opposing higher royalty rights for artists, could be further harming artists with its new package deal.

__________________________

Guest post by James Shotwell of Haulix

Following an appeal to stop mechanical royalty rates from rising, Spotifys latest bundle threatens to take even more money away from artists.

Spotify made headlines this week by announcing Spotify Premium now includes a free subscription to Hulus ad-supported plan. The new perk is available now to new and existing subscribers alike, but not everyone is thrilled with the news.

The streaming giant has been battling a string of negative press since coming out against new royalty rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board (Spotify). Spotify was not alone in appealing the ruling, which plans to raise mechanical royalty rates by 44% over the next four years, but the company made matters worse for itself after posting a blog in defense of their decision.

Does Spotify think songwriters deserve to be paid more? the post asks. Yes  this is important to songwriters and its important to Spotify. The industry needs to continue evolving to ensure that the people who create the music we all love  artists and songwriters  can earn a living. The question is how best to achieve that goal.

As we covered last week, the new CRB ruling aims to raise the value of a song from $0.003 per stream to $0.004, but Amazon, Spotify, Pandora, and Google disagree.

In its blog post, Spotify said it is generally supportive of a 15 percent rate, provided the rates cover what it calls the right scope of publishing rights, including those for videos and lyrics. Spotify argues that the CRBs decision limits the type of non-music offerings it can present to potential subscribers.

A key area of focus in our appeal will be the fact that the CRBs decision makes it very difficult for music services to offer bundles of music and non-music offerings, the company said. This will hurt consumers who will lose access to them. These bundles are key to attracting first-time music subscribers so we can keep growing the revenue pie for everyone.

The music industry, however, is not buying Spotifys claims.

David Israelite, the CEO and president of the National Music Publishers Association, cut straight to the chase on Twitter by saying that it was a big mistake for Spotify to try to deceive songwriters and artists with the blog post.

In its blog post, Spotify said it is generally supportive of a 15 percent rate, provided the rates cover what it calls the right scope of publishing rights, including those for videos and lyrics. Spotify argues that the CRBs decision limits the type of non-music offerings it can present to potential subscribers.

A key area of focus in our appeal will be the fact that the CRBs decision makes it very difficult for music services to offer bundles of music and non-music offerings, the company said. This will hurt consumers who will lose access to them. These bundles are key to attracting first-time music subscribers so we can keep growing the revenue pie for everyone.

Many in the music industry were quick to argue against the companys claims. David Israelite, the CEO and president of the National Music Publishers Association, said on Twitter that it was a big mistake for Spotify to try to deceive songwriters and artists with the blog post.

I didnt think Spotify could sink much lower  but they have, he said. This statement is one giant lie. Im sure a PR team spent a great deal of time and energy crafting a statement to try to deceive artists and songwriters. They must think artists and songwriters are stupid. They are not. The CRB ordered a rate increase for songwriters. Spotify is against it. It really is that simple.

Songwriters of North America (SONA) seconded Israelites comments by saying that Spotify, along with Amazon, Pandora and Google, who are also appealing the CRB rates, are clearly in the wrong.

View image on Twitter

While its easy to appreciate the allure of Spotifys Hulu bundle, its also hard to ignore the fact that offering more for less ultimately comes with a price. If Spotify is charging consumers the same amount for its service while offering access to another service altogether the money being spent will inevitably be split between those entities. Whatever share Spotify takes will then be split between the company and the artists who rely on its platform to get their music to consumers.

Spotify may have a point in its argument against the ruling, but the company may also have ulterior motives for wanting to keep mechanical royalty rates low. Musicians dont care if consumers get access to Hulu with their Spotify account. Some may even argue artists are against it, as it provides more programming that distracts consumers from listening to music.

Its clear the battle for mechanical royalties is far from over. Right now, consumers seem to care about the needs of their favorite musicians, but will the promise of cheaper streaming solutions be too good for them to resist? Only time will tell.

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Berkshire DA: Propane Tanks Used to Set Fire in Sheffield Murder-Suicide

Flanked by members of her office and detectives from the State Police, District Attorney Andrea Harrington briefed the press on the incident Thursday evening.

SHEFFIELD, Mass.  The district attorney's office says there is "overwhelming evidence" suggesting that Luke Karpinski killed his wife and children before setting their Home Road residence on fire.

District Attorney Andrea Harrington said on Monday that Justine Wilbur, 41, was found dead on the first floor with signs of "a traumatic injury" that appears to have occurred prior to the start of the fire. Authorities also say they found an accelerant throughout the home, including two 20-pound propane tanks on the upper floors, used to start the blaze.

"This investigation is complex and ongoing, but we have uncovered overwhelming evidence suggesting that Luke Karpinski killed his wife and children prior to committing suicide," Harrington said.

The family of five were all found dead Wednesday morning after first-responders extinguished a fire at the home. Authorities found Wilbur on the first floor of the home and the other four upstairs.

Investigators say they did not find any firearms in the home but the autopsy results with the cause of deaths were not available Monday from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The fire was reported at about 7:50 Wednesday morning.

Original Post: Berkshire DA: Sheffield Fire Being Investigated as Murder-Suicide

March 14, 2019, at 6:46 p.m



Numerous volunteer fire departments responded to the scene Wednesday morning. PITTSFIELD, Mass.  The District Attorney's office is investigating the fire that left a family of five dead as a murder-suicide.

First responders were called to 1343 Home Road shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday morning to a structure fire.

After it was extinguished, investigators found Justine Wilbur dead and later found the bodies of her husband, Luke Karpinski, and the family's three children, 7-year-old twins Alex and Zoe and Marek, age 3.

On Thursday, District Attorney Andrea Harrington said it appears as though Karpinski had killed his family.

"Five individuals including three young children died Wednesday morning that burned at 1343 Home Road in Sheffield. Among the deceased were Luke Karpinski, his wife Justine Wilbur, both 41, who lived in the home with their 3-year-old and 7-year-old twins," Harrington said.

"We are investigating this matter as a murder-suicide. At this time, the evidence indicates that Luke Karpinski was the assailant."

Harrington said little more but assured the public that "there is no reason to believe the public is in danger at this time." She would not reveal the cause of the deaths but said the bodies have been transferred to the chief medical examiner's office in Boston.

Harrington also would not reveal anything regarding weapons or whether the individuals had died before or during the fire.

The investigation into the circumstances around the incident are being investigated by the Massachusetts State Police and the Office of the State Fire Marshal. Volunteer fire companies from around the region responded to aid the Sheffield Fire Department: Great Barrington, New Marlborough, Richmond, Egremont and Monterey, and Connecticut companies of North Fork and Canaan.

The family had purchased the property in 2016 and had recently built the house on the thinly settled country road. Karpinski was a patent examiner for the federal government for more than a decade and Wilbur an attorney in patent law at Hoffman Warnick in Albany, N.Y., and held degrees in chemistry before earning her law degree.

Hoffman Warnick described Wilbur in a statement as "a talented attorney" who "was smart, knowledgeable, dedicated and hardworking."

"It is with grief and immeasurable sorrow that we learned of the death of our friend and colleague Justine M. Wilbur, who died with her family yesterday in Sheffield, Massachusetts," the firm stated.

Beth Regulbuto, superintendent of schools for the Southern Berkshire Regional School District, apprised the school community by email on Wednesday night that the crisis team would be meeting on Thursday morning "to discuss the best ways possible to provide support during school tomorrow." She said the district would have more counselors on hand and that faculty and staff would be providing "developmentally appropriate messages."




The house at 45 Edgewood Ave. has been in poor condition for years. It had been slated for demolition but a developer is trying to gain title to the property and the city has held off forcing its razing.

North Adams Homeowner Frustrated by Blighted Structure



Centerville Sticks owns the property to the west of 45 Edgewood. That structure has been two attached buildings but one has been since demolished and the property secured. NORTH ADAMS, Mass.  A resident of Edgewood Avenue brought her frustrations about a blighted neighboring property to the City Council on Tuesday night.

Karen Ferrara says she's put up with the abandoned house at 45 Edgewood for years. The dilapidated building was on the demolition list for this fiscal year but then delayed to give a local developer time to clear the title.

"Since then, the back foundation of the house has caved in, the roof has more damage and the shingles are continuously flying off onto my property and has done damage to my vehicle, more pieces are falling off the side of the house, it is loaded with rodents even worse in the summertime, I have been in contact with the mayor, council, Health Department, building inspector numerous times."

Ferrara afterward said it wasn't fair she couldn't park her car in her own driveway because of the potential for damage, which had already cost her $400. She was not sanguine about the title being cleared by June.

The city began the process of taking of the property after a lien was placed in 2010 for back taxes. The Historical Commission approved the demolition of the house in 2014 and the City Council declared it a public nuisance in May 2017 and approved $25,000 to demolish it a month later. Laforest said he found in his research that an important step was missed in the process  a vote to demolish the building.

In June 2018, the lien was reassigned to Benjamin Svenson's Centerville Sticks LLC, which submitted the winning bid of $22,730.08 that covered back taxes of nearly $13,000, accrued interest and premiums. That made Centerville the plaintiff in Land Court in taking the property. Earlier this year, Mayor Thomas Bernard indicated he would give Svenson more time to take possession.

Svenson, one of the principals in the Tourists resort development, has been buying up properties in the city, particularly along Massachusetts Avenue and Edgewood Avenue including 5-7 Edgewood, 33 Edgewood and 37-39 Edgewood, a former multi-family that abuts 45 Edgewood.

Councilor Jason Laforest and Marie T. Harpin had brought the matter forward at Ferrara's request. In their communique, the councilors say the building has "a long history as a safety issue" and request it be "addressed promptly" by the administration or referred to committee.

On introduction of the paper, Laforest asked for postponement to the meeting of June 11, which was voted unanimously by the council.

"There is a very lengthy court proceeding or a series of court proceedings relative to this property on Edgewood Avenue," he explained. "That is due to wrap up the first of April and I'm confident that will happen."

Laforest said he and Harpin had spoken to Svenson, "he assures us as soon as that paperwork is complete ... they will begin a significant investment in refurbishing this building, making it livable and hopefully alleviating all the concerns addressed by Ms. Ferrara and her neighbors."

But the drama, he said, has gone on too long and he would be demanding it be torn down if it wasn't for Svenson's track record in development.

"It is in absolutely horrible repair and it's been in horrible repair for a long time," Laforest said. "Now there are serious structural concerns."

Laforest and Harpin noted in their letter that the center section in the back of the house had collapse in February and that the building inspector was seeking an opinion from a local engineering firm.

But at this point, Laforest said, with the long legal process coming to an end, it was only a few more weeks to wrap it up.

Councilor Rebbecca Cohen said she, too, had been hearing about the property for several years and would like to hear from the building and health departments on how it has gotten to this point.

"It's time we give some relief to the owners around the property," she said. "Rats running around the property is not only disgusting it's a health concern."

Council President Keith Bona complimented Ferrara's persistence in pursuing the issue. There are other blighted buildings in the city but often neighbors don't push to the city to deal with them.

"While she has not got what she wants, there is something about being the squeaky wheel and it has kept it in front of us," he said. "I applaud your persistence because that's how some things get down."

In other business, the council approved applications from Keith Minori and David Bushey Jr., both of North Adams, to drive for RJ's Taxi but postponed consideration for Carmen M. Hyatt of North Adams to the next meeting because her application was missing information.

Councilors also again questioned the process of bringing the taxi licenses to the council if they already have to be approved by the police chief. Laforest noted two had had a license suspension. Bona said it was a question for the city solicitor.

 Bona interrupted Cohen during councilor's concerns when she again stated her objection to the change in council rules that limited citizen participation to before and after the meeting. They had previously been allowed to speak on items as they were brought up.

"I do not feel this is productive," Cohen said. "Everybody who takes time to come to these meetings needs to be heard."

The council president said her concerns didn't need to be repeated again and began talking over, causing Laforest to call a point of order. "I believe the councilor has a right to speak," he said.

 The council referred to committee a rewrite of ordinances related to fire and police departments and based on changes made to re-institute the positions of fire chief and police chief. It also passed a second reading of compensation changes for police and non-union employees, with Bona and Councilor Wayne Wilkinson abstaining because they have relatives working in public safety.
Sustaining the heartbeat of the Mekong Basin

by Brian Eyler

March 15,2019 | Source: China Dialogue

The Mekong River is often depicted as originating in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Maps show it flowing downstream through Chinas southwest, and then forming the borders of or flowing through Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, before bisecting Cambodia and Vietnams Mekong Delta on its 4,500 kilometre journey from the Himalayas to the sea. However, the Mekong has another point of origin: the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia. Each year life springs from the lake, mostly in the form of a massive fish population that migrates to the far reaches of the Mekong system both upstream and downstream.



This annual migration provides tens of millions of households throughout the Mekong Basin with regular protein. While the total catch from wild fisheries in all of North Americas lakes and rivers is 160,000 tons, each year the Mekong system produces 2.6 million tons. The Tonle Sap alone provides around 500,000 tons, comprising 75% of Cambodians protein intake, and making it the worlds largest freshwater fishery. But this rich resource is threatened by upstream dam construction, overfishing, unregulated agricultural practices and climate change.



The problem of dams



We recently published a report that explores the impact of human activities from a broader perspective. It offers alternative development pathways to optimise trade-offs between water, energy and food production. These approaches include basin-wide water and energy planning and a deeper incorporation of non-hydropower renewable energy sources into Cambodias future power mix. These approaches can avoid upstream fragmentation between the Tonle Sap and the rest of the Mekong system. This way, the monsoon pulse which each year reverses the direction of the river, draining the lake and sending 70 times more water, organic material and fish back into it, can be preserved.



The annual flooding and draining of the lake acts as a heartbeat pumping life throughout the Mekong Basin. This process is threatened by the construction of and future plans for hydropower and irrigation dams upstream of the Tonle Sap in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and China. Dams and other built structures block or reduce flows in the Mekong, which reduces the amount of water, fish and nutrients going into the Tonle Sap each year and also constricts the ability of fish to find upstream habitats. In Cambodia alone, the connectivity of the countrys 11,000 kilometres of the Mekong/Tonle Sap river system has already been reduced by 31% by the construction of two hydropower dams and six irrigation reservoirs.



The connectivity of the Tonle Sap and Mekong tributaries in Cambodia



One of those hydropower dams, the 400-megawatt Lower Sesan 2, located just below the confluence of the Sesan and Srepok rivers, cut off more than 3,300 kilometres of tributaries to the rest of the Mekong system and the Tonle Sap when it was completed in 2017. The fish ladders incorporated by the dam developer, Chinese state-owned enterprise Huaneng Hydrolancang, are unlikely to accommodate a meaningful quantity of fish in a system that is known to have as many as thirty tons swimming through in one hour during peak migration season.



Further, even if some fish do make it past the ladders to spawn upstream, the eggs and fish larvae washed back downstream towards the Tonle Sap by the annual Mekong flood pulse will likely sink and perish behind the dam as the river slows on its approach. A 2013 peer-reviewed article by Guy Ziv and colleagues, which examined the impacts of tributary dams on the Mekong system, claims the Lower Sesan 2 dam will reduce the Mekongs fish population by more than 9%.



Our study finds that the Cambodian tributaries of the Mekong are being dammed one project at a time with no comprehensive plan. Damming tributaries (rather than the mainstream) could reduce connectivity between the Tonle Sap and the rest of the Mekong system by 60%. Further, building the controversial mainstream dams at Sambor and Stung Treng would effectively annihilate Tonle Sap connectivity, terminating the lakes rhythm. Many of the dams in Cambodias inventory are poised for development through memoranda of understanding or concession agreements with Chinese dam developers. How these Chinese investments play out in the coming years could make or break Cambodias Mekong, the viability of the Tonle Sap and the tens of millions of people it supports.



Only building dams in Cambodias portion of the Mekong Basin above the Lower Sesan 2 dam could be a pragmatic option that protects the Tonle Sap. Our study shows how this could result in the generation of more than 1,000 megawatts additional capacity whilst potentially having zero net effects on Tonle Sap connectivity and fisheries productivity compared to the status quo. However, such development should not be considered unless the resettlement needs of Cambodias upland and ethnic communities upstream of the Lower Sesan 2 dam can be met. Cambodias track record on resettlement is inadequate.



The regions solar belt?



Alternatively, the expansion of hydropower above the dam could be reduced or augmented by tapping into robust solar and wind endowments in Cambodias Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri provinces, or exploiting wind, solar and biomass capacity across the kingdom. Cambodia has some of the highest power prices in the whole of Southeast Asia, as high as US$0.25 per kilowatt hour in urban areas, whereas rural residents have often paid more than 80 cents. Much of the country still runs on diesel generators or imports power from Vietnam or Thailand. Pressures to lower electricity prices, which would spur economic development, have set Cambodia on new pathways to expand its power generation mix.



The greatest opportunity for diversification of Cambodias energy mix and shifting away from over-development of hydropower lies in non-hydropower renewables. On 65% of Cambodias land, solar irradiation levels are above 1,800 kilowatt hours per square metre. This offers a total solar potential of 8,000 megawatts, which is significant given the countrys 10,000 megawatts of hydropower potential. Cambodias wind potential could be as high as 6,500 megawatts according to an Asian Development Bank study.



In 2017, the Asian Development Bank announced its support for the first 10 megawatt commercial-scale solar farm in Cambodia and then continued in June 2018 with the announcement of a 100 megawatt solar farm tender. Since then solar investment has become a hot topic. In January 2019, Prime Minister Hun Sen visited Beijing and met with the dam developer Huaneng Hydrolancang. Instead of signing agreements for new hydropower projects, he inked deals for solar power. While Cambodia has yet to set hard targets for solar development, new regulations and guidelines provide clarity for investors. For example, heavy consumers such as large apartment buildings, factories and other large compounds can install solar (above five megawatts) while maintaining connections to Cambodias national grid.



The Chip Mong Insee cement factory in Kampot recently became installed 9.8 megawatts of solar across its rooftops and in floating solar installations on its property. Cambodias sole utility company, Electricity du Cambodge, is also moving toward the purchase of solar power from private producers. This could lead to high levels of distributed generation across the country and encourage individual investments in solar. Development of a National Environmental Code is also expected to support household solar systems and provide tax breaks for companies that utilise solar power.



Aside from regulation, the major challenge to developing more solar power is land. Issuing economic land concessions to foreign developers, most of them Chinese, has long been tied to land grabbing efforts. Some of these land concessions have been revoked due to lack of development and the governments redistribution processes, others still lie fallow because of low agricultural commodity prices in recent years. A portion of these deserted concessions, if properly utilised, could be used for solar farms, especially those close to areas of high demand. The map below shows that most land concessions are within the areas that receive the high solar radiation favourable to solar photovoltaic deployment.



Cambodias economic land concessions and solar potential



With the help of foreign investors and development partners, most countries in the Mekong region are considering a greater role for solar and other non-hydro renewables. While the importance of renewables in reducing carbon emissions is increasingly understood, the role that non-hydro renewables can play in improving ecosystem services, and the availability of natural resources such as water and freshwater fish catches, is still undervalued. Our report demonstrates how Cambodia can develop its power sector with a basin-wide vision that not only conserves the fisheries of the Tonle Sap Lake but also provides a pathway for the country to rise as a leader in sustainability and conservation efforts.

Theme(s): Fisheries Resources, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Landing Centres, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Others, Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Communities and Organisations, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture.
Maldives and EU hold fourth Policy Dialogue

March 15,2019 | Source: Raajje

The Maldives government and the delegation of the European Union (EU) has held its fourth Policy Dialogue at Kurumba Maldives resort. In a joint press release on Monday, Maldives and the EU stated that their discussions covered a number of thematic areas including democracy and governance, strengthening of the justice sector, promotion and protection of human rights, climate change and the environment.



Noting that this was the first Policy Dialogue since the inauguration of the new government, the EU stated that it welcomed their reform agenda. During the talks, the government shared its policies and priorities, including its 100-day agenda, and confirmed its firm commitment to consolidate democracy, ensure good governance, and promote respect for human rights.



Prioritising judicial reform and the fight against corruption, the EU and the Maldives agreed to explore opportunities to strengthen the judicial system and the rule of law in the Maldives, including respect for civil and political rights. The Maldives reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring the safety and security of its people and European tourists. The EU reiterated its support for areas such as counter-terrorism and security reform. The EU also reassured of its continued cooperation on global challenges such as climate change and environmental issues, which constitute important priorities for both. The EU also shared details of its sustainable, comprehensive and rules-based EU-Asia Connectivity Strategy.



The government requested the EU to grant Maldives duty free access for its fisheries products. The EU took note of the request and highlighted the requirement for Maldives to fully comply with IUU fishing regulations. The EU member states also took note of the governments request to facilitate the Schengen Visa process in the Maldives. Ambassador Margue was accompanied by 11 heads of mission from the EU and the Maldives delegation was led by Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid and includes members of the Maldives cabinet. The EU Heads of Mission also met President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih following the Policy Dialogue.

Theme(s): Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Landing Centres, Others, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Communities and Organisations, Fisheries Resources, Freshwater ecosystems and threats.
Indonesias tuna fisheries seek out sustainability certification

March 15,2019 | Source: Mongabay

Indonesia is racing to certify its world-leading tuna fisheries as sustainable, drawn by the lucrative global market for eco-labeled seafood. The government has since 2014 rolled out a series of tough measures  from seizing and sinking illegal foreign fishing vessels to prohibiting destructive practices such as the use of trawl nets  to drive reform in the capture fisheries sector of one of the worlds biggest seafood-producing nations. These efforts have fueled a massive recovery in fish stocks over the past few years, the government says, and the focus is now on attaining international certification to benefit from a growing appetite for sustainably caught fish.



We want this industry to change from illegal, unreported and unregulated to legal, reported and regulated, Zulficar Mochtar, the head of capture fisheries at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, told Mongabay. The biggest draw for fishing communities and commercial fishing operators certified as sustainable is that they can sell their products at premium price of at least 16 percent over non-certified seafood products, Zulficar said.



Although its a voluntary decision by fisheries operators to get certified, were urging them to do it because this is part of our efforts to fix the fisheries industry at large, he said. Various schemes exist to certify that fish stocks are sustainable, environmental impacts are minimized, labor rights are respected, supply chain transparency and traceability are in place, and management is governed by best practices. What gets certified under schemes such as that of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) are the fishing grounds, vessels, equipment, and species of fish, with the operators as the certificate holders.



Last November, a one-by-one tuna fishery in West Papua province became the first in Indonesia certified by the MSC for sustainable fishing. Another is now being assessed by the council, while at least a dozen more are preparing to undergo the certification process. I think the interest in certification we are seeing in Indonesia is part of a global trend, stimulated by the growing market for certified sustainable seafood around the world, Patrick Caleo, the Asia-Pacific director at MSC, told Mongabay.



He said key export markets for Indonesian seafood, including China, Japan and the United States, were demonstrating strong interest in the MSC program. I believe this growing trend for certified sustainable products presents a great opportunity for Indonesias seafood industry, he said. The tuna operation in Sorong, West Papua, run by PT Citraraja Ampat Canning (CRAC), is only the second in Southeast Asia to be MSC-certified. It runs 35 pole-and-line fishing vessels and employs 750 local fishermen. In 2016, it caught and processed 2,647 tonnes of skipjack and 543 tonnes of yellowfin tuna, according to PT CRAC. It currently exports to Singapore, Malaysia and Europe.



Ali Wibisono, the companys CEO, said in a statement that attaining sustainable fishing certification was very important for our fishermen and fishing communities in Sorong and will help ensure that the fish and a healthy ocean will be there for future generations. The fishing operation has since 1975 used tethered rafts, known as anchored fish aggregating devices, to attract fish, Ali said. Theyre caught one at a time using a pole and line, a highly selective method with a small footprint on the local ecosystem. We hope this certification will inspire other Indonesian one-by-one tuna fisheries to follow up with sustainable fishing and certification, Ali said.



Its a far cry from how tuna is typically caught in Indonesia, or indeed elsewhere. Global tuna fisheries are valued at more than $40 billion annually, and Indonesia is at the top of the list, with total landings of more than 620,000 metric tonnes of the fish in 2014. Much of the tuna caught worldwide is landed using large purse seine nets to encircle schools of fish. These invariably sweep up other species of marine life, including turtles and sharks, making this method more ecologically harmful than the equipment used in so-called one-by-one fisheries, such as pole and line, handline, or troll line.



Our philosophy of one hook, one line, one fish at a time  is recognized as being the most sustainable model, Martin Purves, managing director of the U.K.-based charity the International Pole & Line Foundation (IPNLF), said as quoted by the Guardian. In February, U.S.-based Anova Food announced that its supplier operating near Buru in Indonesias Maluku Islands had entered into a full assessment to be certified by the MSC, making it the first handline tuna fishery to do so in Indonesia. The tuna processing company PT Harta Samudra wants 140 of its yellowfin tuna vessels operating off northern Buru to be certified. Assessors are scheduled to visit the site in late March.



[W]eve had our sights set on MSC certification as its extremely important for us and our supply chains to reach the highest available standards, Blane Olson, the managing director of Anova Technical Services, said in a statement. The handline skipjack fishery in North Buru district has been getting help from local NGOs, including the Indonesian Society and Fisheries Foundation (MDPI), to document their practices ahead of enrolling in the MSC assessment.



Deirdre Duggan, the director of programs and science at MDPI, said the foundation had been engaged with the fishing operation for the past five years, supporting a range of activities, including landing site data collection, vessel registration, increasing understanding of national regulations and market certification, strengthening fisher groups, and improving best handling practices for threatened and protected species. She said MDPI was also working with district, provincial and national-level governments and other stakeholders to establish co-management committees to addressing issues of concern in the fisheries sector.



Evidence of the fishery characteristics, in terms of fishing grounds, catch, gear use, etc. is key yet often challenging for such a small-scale fishery, Duggan told Mongabay in an email. Documenting this information requires collaboration from the industry, fishing communities and government over a period of time, she said. It is also important to involve government stakeholders from the beginning, to ensure they are aware of and can support the process as well as supporting in addressing any potential conditional pass scorings on performance indicators related to them.



More than a dozen one-by-one tuna fisheries in Indonesia are working to improve their activities with the aim of undergoing MSC assessment in the near term, according to the IPNLF. Most of them operate in the rich waters of eastern Indonesia, around the islands of Sulawesi, New Guinea, the Malukus and Flores.



Zulficar, the government official responsible for capture fisheries, said his office was ready to assist fisheries operations across the country to pursue sustainable certification. He also acknowledged the importance of support from NGOs working in the field, including MDPI, the Indonesian Pole & Line and Handline Fisheries Association (AP2HI), the Sustainable Fisheries Program, and WWF Indonesia. Zulficar said Indonesian capture fisheries in general had struggled to resolve key issues such as traceability of seafood products, unsustainable fishing practices, and poor working conditions.



We are working to resolve all of the problems in this industry, from upstream to downstream, he said. When these issues are resolved, it will be much easier for Indonesian fisheries to get certified by MSC and others. Nearly nine-tenths of Indonesias fisheries output comes from traditional and small-scale fishermen, who lack the resources of larger commercial operations to pay for the assessment required for certification. It is extremely difficult to meet the MSC standard for a small-scale fishery, composed of thousands of independent one-manned vessels that operate on remote islands, Saut Tampubolon, the executive director of MDPI, said in the statement issued by Anova Foods.



The MSC is committed to providing equal access for all fisheries seeking MSC certification, Caleo said. We provide additional tools and guidance for small-scale and data-deficient fisheries to help them demonstrate that they meet the MSC Fisheries Standard and get certified. Simply being certified isnt the end of the story, though, as the standards met to achieve this need to be maintained. Sustainable fisheries certificates like those issued by MSC have an expiry date (PT CRACs certification is valid until November 2023), and the issuer can revoke them at any time if the operation is found to violate its standards.



I think there is lots of opportunity for Indonesias small-scale fisheries sector to benefit from MSC program and would encourage any fishery with an interest in improving their sustainability to contact the MSC team, Caleo said. Abdi Suhufan, the national coordinator of the NGO Destructive Fishing Watch-Indonesia, welcomed the growing number of fishery outfits in the country seeking sustainability certification. He said it boded well for the sustainability of Indonesias marine resources and the livelihoods of fishing communities, which are among the poorest in the country.



The impacts from getting certified are that fishing becomes more selective, fish stocks are sustained, and there are economic benefits for Indonesian fishermen, Abdi told Mongabay. He called on the government to raise awareness among fishing communities about the benefits of sustainability certification, and to promote better working conditions for those employed in the industry.



I think there needs to be a full commitment between the government and the fishermen, because getting certification is a process from upstream to downstream, he said.



- One tuna fishing operation in Indonesia has been certified for its sustainable practices, and at least a dozen more are seeking similar certification to meet growing global demand for eco-labeled seafood.

- Indonesia is the worlds biggest producer of tuna, but its fisheries have long been plagued by poaching and destructive fishing practices.

- NGOs working with local fishing communities have called on the government to do more to support the drive toward sustainable fishing certification, given the costs of undergoing the necessary assessment and implementing operational changes.

Theme(s): Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Landing Centres, Others, Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Fisheries Resources, Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Communities and Organisations, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture.
Vietnam aims to earn 4.2 billion USD from shrimp exports

March 15,2019 | Source: Vietnam Plus

Vietnam sets a target of earning 4.1-4.2 billion USD from shrimp exports this year, higher than 3.6 billion USD recorded in 2018, according to the Directorate of Fisheries under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD).



The figure was released at a conference to launch production and business plans for the domestic shrimp industry in 2019 that was held on March 13 by MARD in the Mekong Delta province of Soc Trang, one of large shrimp producers in the country. The directorate said the industry was expected to achieve a total shrimp output of 780,000 tonnes this year, including 300,000 tonnes of tiger shrimp and 480,000 tonnes of white-leg shrimp.



In 2019, the local shrimp industry would have many opportunities but also face great challenges in export. The hot weather and salinity can impact farming areas, according to the directorate. To achieve the goal, Truong Dinh Hoe, General Secretary of the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP), said enterprises should focus on improving the competitiveness of Vietnams shrimp industry.



However, Vietnamese shrimp products still faced various kinds of barriers such as anti-dumping tax and low price of shrimp imported from India. Meanwhile, key markets have strengthened quality control and food safety, including the US, the EU and Republic of Korean markets. Each year, Vietnam still imports 200,000-250,000 units of white-leg shrimp parents, satisfying 90 percent of the domestic demand. Meanwhile, the price of Vietnamese shrimp is still higher than other countries because the industry has to depend on imports of food and medicine for shrimp production.



Many farms have not received investment for infrastructure and technology, especially in extensive farming areas. There are still many small-scale farms lacking capital and investment opportunities. According to the Directorate of Fisheries, the total area of farming brackish shrimp in 2018 reached more than 736,000 hectares, 3 percent higher than the previous year, including 632,000 hectares raising tiger prawn and 104,000 hectares rearing white-leg shrimp. Provinces having increased farming areas include Bac Lieu, Kien Giang, Tra Vinh and Soc Trang.



Total output of brackish water shrimp in 2018 reached more than 762,000 tonnes, a year-on-year surge of 6.3 percent, including 298,000 tonnes of tiger prawn and 464,000 tonnes of white-leg shrimp. However, Vietnams shrimp industry only achieved an export value of 3.6 billion USD last year, a year-on-year reduction of 7.8 percent. The shrimp exports to some major markets dropped in 2018 against the previous year, including mainland China and Hong Kong (down 28 percent), the EU (down 2.8 percent), the US (down 3.3 percent), Japan (down 9.2 percent) and Taiwan (2.6 percent).

Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Landing Centres, Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Communities and Organisations, Fisheries Resources, Others.
This content is from: Capital Markets

The US regulators decision to step into the already crowded FCPA space comes as a shock to the industry, as it looks to broaden the scope of its enforcement
President Trump at the Friends of Ireland Luncheon

Washington, DC - President Trump at the Friends of Ireland Luncheon:

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Father, very much. Its a great honor to be here. This is my third one. Its happening so fast. Who would have thought? The first I remember, the second I remember very well, and this is third. So, time flies.

But, Madam Speaker, I want to thank you very much for that  those lovely remarks. And congratulations on the Irish grandchildren. (Laughter.) Thats pretty good.

Also, I want to thank our Vice President, Mike Pence, whos with us today. (Applause.) To all of the distinguished members of Congress, of which we actually have many, and our many wonderful Irish friends, as we begin our celebration of St. Patricks Day.

This afternoon, were delighted to join all in welcoming Taoiseach, who Ive gotten to know very well. My friend. We discussed a lot of things that were of great interest to all of us just a little while ago in the Oval Office. In particular, we talked about Brexit, a  something thats turning out to be a little more complex than they thought it would be. But it will all work out. Everything does. One way or the other, its going to work out. But you had a very interesting view on it, and I appreciate your letting me know whats going on over there. Very, very tough situation.

I also want to thank Irelands Ambassador, Daniel Mulhall. Thank you very much, Daniel. I appreciate it. And the entire Irish delegation for being with us today.

The United States and Ireland are bound together by ties of both kinship and friendship. Its really a great friendship. Its a friendship like rarely does any country have with another. Our citizens share an abiding love of faith, family, and freedom. Today, our relationship is as strong and resilient as the great Irish people are strong and resilient.

Since Americas founding, men and women of Irish descent have strengthened our nation beyond measure. In every war since the American Revolution, Irish Americans have fought with distinction to win our independence, to preserve our union, and defend our way of life. And nobody has done it like the Irish. They do it with flair. They do it with brilliance. Theyve moved our hearts with timeless works of art, literature, and music.

Irish Americans have also answered the call to serve our nation at the highest levels of government. And you look at the United States Supreme Court, you look in the halls of Congress, and throughout my administration: A lot of Irish. Theyre all over the place. Right, Mike? (Laughter.) As an example, Mike, you have your sister, Annie, here today. Where is Annie? Annie, very nice to have you. Thats very good. (Applause.) And youre serious Irish. Thats what Im hearing. (Laughter.) Anyway, nice to have you, Annie. Thank you.

Many members of Congress in the room also trace their roots to Ireland, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Kevin, thank you very much. What a good job youre doing. Hows he doing, Nancy? Okay? (Laughter.) Huh? You have a little advantage. She has a little advantage, but thats okay. But hes doing okay. (Laughter.) Good. Thank you, Kevin, very much.

Senator Pat Leahy. Patrick, thank you very much. Appreciate it. And co-chairs of the Friends of Ireland Caucus, Richie Neal and Peter King. Richie, thank you very much. Wheres Peter? Where is Peter? Peter, thank you very much. We see each other here and lots of other places. And youre doing a great job. Thank you very much, Peter.

REPRESENTATIVE KING: (Inaudible) from Queens.

THE PRESIDENT: And from Queens, too. (Laughter.) On top of everything, from Queens.

This afternoon, were also proudly joined by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and 

HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER HOYER: Right here.

THE PRESIDENT: Steny, thank you very much. Steny, stand up. Come on, Steny. Youve worked hard. (Laughter and applause). Come on, stand up, Steny. (Applause.) Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Steny.

And Congressman Eliot Engel. Thank you very much. Thanks, Eliot. I appreciate it very much. They really have worked very hard on a lot of issues and some pertaining specifically to Ireland. And we appreciate it very much. Thank you, Eliot.

Since the 7th [17th] century, St. Patricks Day has honored the legacy of Irelands patron saint, a man of profound humility and faith, whose selfless service is an inspiration to us all.

On St. Patricks Day 1937, President Roosevelt noted that, In times of plenty and in times of famine, Ireland, and the descendants of Ireland, have been faithful to the heritage of St. Patrick. Thats right.

Today, we reaffirm our enduring gratitude for the profound contributions, extraordinary service, and unyielding spirit of the Irish people. As the United States and Ireland grow ever closer in friendship and partnership  and we are, indeed, growing closer. Were doing trade deals, were doing things that we, frankly, have not done to this extent before. May we find inspiration in the example of those who came before. May we draw new strength from the noble example of Saint Patrick. And may we all be blessed by the luck of the Irish. Thats a good thing, the luck of the Irish.

Mr. Prime Minister, thank you again for joining us. You had a very long and good trip. And we really appreciate that youre here. And please give our warmest and best regards to all of the great and wonderful people of Ireland. Thank you very much. Please. (Applause.) Thank you, Leo. Thank you very much.
Lena Dunham has spoken about the importance of feeling cosy amid suffering from chronic pain.

On Thursday, The New York Times published an article written by the actor and writer in which she opens up about how comfort has become integral to her existence.

In 2018, Dunham revealed that she had undergone a total hysterectomy  a procedure that surgically removes the cervix and uterus - following years of suffering from chronic pain as a result of endometriosis. Months later, she underwent additional surgery to remove her left ovary.

Cosy is my religion, she writes. There are few things in life I take as seriously as the cultivation and preservation of comfort.

While her friends and family previously attributed her love of cosyness to her penchant for organisation and even her star sign, Dunham explains: I am cosy because I have to be. I am cosy to survive.

The 25 best books by women Show all 25 1 /25 The 25 best books by women The 25 best books by women Pride and Prejudice  Jane Austen Austen remains one of historys greatest masters in two tricky literary fields: the world of romance and the world of social satire. Pride and Prejudice, then, sees her at the peak of her powers. Through the eyes of Elizabeth Bennet, her sharp-witted protagonist, we witness upper-class Regency England as both a dream and a farce. Not all is as it seems, and society betrays its holloweness when it deems that money should trump love. The 25 best books by women Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston Despite the fact that Hurston was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, Their Eyes Were Watching God was largely rejected by her peers. It was during the 1970s and 1980s that her novel was essentially rediscovered, with many contemporary black feminists heralding the genius of her work. The novel focuses on Janie Crawford, a black woman who refuses to give in to bitterness or sorrow, as she navigates three marriages and a life marked by poverty. Its a story bursting with passion and soulfulness. The 25 best books by women The Lottery and Other Stories  Shirley Jackson Jackson probed the darkest corners of the American psyche during the 1940s and 1950s, all thanks to her collections of ghost stories, including 1959s The Haunting of Hill House, which was recently adapted into a Netflix series. With several novels and over 200 short stories for readers to get lost in, there are very few horror writers like her. Thats especially true when it comes to (arguably) her greatest work, 1948s The Lottery, which traces a small towns annual tradition to its sinister conclusion. The 25 best books by women To Kill a Mockingbird  Harper Lee A Pulitzer Prize winner, To Kill a Mockingbird has carved its place in history. Its depiction of racial injustice in the American Deep South was startling frank for the 1960s, in a way that undeniably had a social impact at the time  it became an instant sensation and is now widely taught in American schools. Lee writes about the worlds cruelties with an honesty and compassion that still resonates, with the character of Atticus Finch becoming a enduring model of integrity for the legal profession. The 25 best books by women Kindred - Octavia E Butler Butler was a key figure in sci-fi history, expanding the boundaries of what the genre could achieve and what it could come to represent. First published in 1979, the book still feels as fresh as ever in its first-person account of a young black writer, Dana, who through strange circumstances, finds herself travelling between her own reality and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. Its through this unusual theme that Butler can explore the lasting trauma of Americas history on African-Americans today. The 25 best books by women Jane Eyre  Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre feels, in many ways, thoroughly modern today. Although originally published under the pen name Currer Bell, it feels likes a dive into the mind of Bronte herself. The story is told through a first-person narrative that feels so psychologically intimate, its as if shes sharing the secrets of her own world with us. We follow Jane through her school years, all the way to her later employment by Mr Rochester, a tortured soul who she falls madly in love with, with many aspects of her journey reflecting elements of Brontes own life. The 25 best books by women Half of a Yellow Sun  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Adichie, who was born in Nigeria, is considered one of the most original literary voices of her generation. You can see why this is when reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which depicts the brutality of the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, as seen through four different perspectives: twin daughters of a wealthy businessman, a British citizen, a professor, and a houseboy. Its history via an achingly human lens. The 25 best books by women White Teeth  Zadie Smith Smith remains a modern titan of the British literary scene, thanks partially to White Teeth, which is considered one of the most sensational fiction debuts of all time, becoming an immediate bestseller and sweeping up multiple awards. Its a tale of two men  Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and Englishman Archie Jones  who become friends after being stationed together during WWII. Their return to London sees the book examine British post-war attitudes to those from formerly colonised countries, although Smith ensures the subject is approached with both heart and a sense of humour. The 25 best books by women The Hour of the Star - Clarice Lispector Lispector was a literary innovator. The Hour of the Star, published posthumously in 1977, invents a narrator named Rodrigo SM, who in turns tells the story of Macabea, a poor young woman who hails from Alagoas, where Lispectors family first settled when they immigrated to Brazil. However, the way Rodrigo perceives Macabea, and reckons with her story, itself creates a dialogue between the two characters, calling into question notions of identity and authorship. The 25 best books by women Mrs Dalloway  Virginia Woolf One of literatures sharpest minds and inspiration to the feminist movement in the 1970s, Woolf not only helped pioneer the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, but utilised it to speak openly about sexuality, mental illness, and gender roles. The novel largely follows the inner thoughts of two characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, one a high-society woman in post-WWI England and the other a veteran suffering from shell shock. The 25 best books by women A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories  Flannery OConnor OConnor wrote hard stories for a hard world. Her unsentimental, sardonic use of the Southern Gothic style helped weave her own take on the parable, in which the morally weak often face violent, painful punishment for their misdeeds. That said, the door is always open for transformation and spiritual awakening by the storys conclusion, with her work frequently confronting ideas of morality and ethics through the lens of her own Catholic faith. The 25 best books by women Persepolis  Marjane Satrapi At times, it seems less like Persepolis is a story. Satrapis graphic novel, published in two volumes in 2000 and 2004, feels more like an invitation, as she takes our hand and leads us through her childhood and early adult years, so that we can see through the eyes of a curious, funny, smart young girl who must face the personal repercussions of war and religious extremism in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution. Its the political seen through the personal, but its always Satrapis own spirit that shines the brightest. The 25 best books by women Frankenstein  Mary Shelley Many have now come to consider Shelleys Frankenstein as the first pure work of science-fiction, with a central narrative driven a characters exploration of a world beyond what we already know. Not only is it significant for its later influence on culture, but Shelleys work, initially published anonymously, is astonishing in both its emotional vitality and its philosophical implications. Its a work where we both feel the anguish of the misunderstood, while also reckoning with the concept of mans unbridled power. The 25 best books by women Beloved  Toni Morrison Beloved takes its inspiration from the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and fled to Ohio, a free state. However, the story itself focuses on a protagonist named Sethe, a former slave, whose home is haunted by a malevolent presence that she believes is her eldest daughter. Its through this vivid sense of magical realism that Morrison can confront the unfathomable trauma that slavery has inflicted on the African-American collective memory. The 25 best books by women The Handmaids Tale  Margaret Atwood Although the book has received increased attention thanks to Hulus critically acclaimed TV adaptation, its all thanks to the fierceness of Atwoods critical analysis of gender politics. Her 1985 book, which imagines a near-future New England controlled by a totalitarian state, in which women are completely subjugated to men, has only become increasingly relevant  and prescient. Her work provides a continued reminder that it doesnt take much for our world to slip into complete dystopia. The 25 best books by women Middlemarch - George Eliot Mary Anne Evans, amongst other concerns, feared that her work, Middlemarch, would be dismissed entirely due to the notion that womens writing was strictly light and romantic. And so, instead, it was published in eight instalments across 1871 and 1872 under the name George Eliot. The book is far from light; set in the fictitious Midlands town of Middlemarch, it follows a vast, sweeping narrative that encompasses subjects of religion, idealism, and political reform. The 25 best books by women Little Fires Everywhere  Celeste Ng Ng writes about American suburbia with an astounding clarity, perhaps partially because she considers the act of writing about ones hometown as a little like writing about a relative, with an attachment that perceives both their greatest attributes and their flaws. Little Fires Everywhere is her second novel to take place in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where she grew up, and focuses on a new arrival to the town, who sense of mystery disrupts its residentss obsession with structure and rules. The 25 best books by women The Bell Jar  Sylvia Plath Famous for its popularity with teenage girls, Plaths work speaks to clearly to an adolescent precisely because it makes no attempt to sugar-coat the prospect of the entrance into adulthood. The books protagonist, Esther, a young woman attempting to establish herself in New York, feels more like a front for Plath to discuss her own experiences of struggling with mental health, especially in the context of the 1950s, when womens concerns were so rarely paid attention to. There is an honesty to Esthers frustration that has been a comfort to many. The 25 best books by women My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante My Brilliant Friend is only one part of Ferrantes four-book series, known as the Neapolitan Novels. As the first chapter, it is, de facto, the most well known of the series, but its also an invitation to such raw intimacy that readers will be unable to resist delving into the rest. Ferrante serves as a pseudonym, allowing the books to illuminate with candor the friendship between two women, born in Naples in 1944, who try to find peace in a world of violence and misogyny. The 25 best books by women The Age of Innocence  Edith Wharton Edith Wharton captures with vigour both the opulence and the suffocating claustrophobia of New Yorks Gilded Age, as two future newlyweds  in every other way societys perfect vision of man and woman  find their union disrupted by the arrival of a cousin shrouded in scandal. The Age of Innocence is a wistful, romantic novel that still succeeds in treating societys hypocrisy with an acute sense of disdain. The 25 best books by women The Color Purple  Alice Walker Marking a rare mastery of the epistolary novel, The Color Purple focuses on the experiences of black women living in the US South during the 1930s. Although it deals with themes of abuse and violence, the honesty in Walkers voice is disarming in a way that opens us up to her protagonists journey towards self-realisation and personal freedom. Its no wonder that the books continued relevance saw it both adapted into 1985 film, directed by Steven Spielberg, and a Broadway musical. The 25 best books by women Rebecca  Daphne du Maurier Rebecca remains one the finest examples of Gothic literature, despite the fact that du Maurier wasnt writing within the confines of some drafty Victorian castle; rather, she was examining the world of spirits during the interwar period. In its story of a woman whose whirlwind courtship with a widower turns sour when she becomes haunted by the lingering presence of her husbands first wife, Rebecca is a book filled with suppressed desires, loss, and a looming sense of threat. The 25 best books by women The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy As Roys debut novel, its an extraordinary first outing. Roy contrasts the innocence of childhood, as seen in the books protagonists, fraternal twins Rahel and Estha, with the rising political turmoil in Kerala during 1969. It also features a non-sequential approach to narrative, with the novel intricately weaving between the twinss reunion in 1993 and the lengthy flashback and sidetracks, all painted with a massive sense of scope and imagination. The 25 best books by women Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie We may know every twist and turn of Christies best works by now, but theres still a frisson to how intricately and confidently she pulls the rug from underneath readers. Murder on the Orient Express still feels like her most enthralling work, as famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finds himself in the midst of a murder scene, after his train is blocked by the heavy snowfall and a passenger is found dead, making the rest of those on board all instant suspects. The 25 best books by women The Tale of Genji  Murasaki Shikibu The oldest book on this list, this classic of Japanese literature was written by Shikibu, a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, in the early 11th century. Although the original manuscript no longer exists, whats been passed down to us now was translated initially into modern Japanese, with English translations being published at a later time. An account of the life Hikaru Genji, the son of the emperor, its a masterful work of psychological portraiture, which offers a rare glimpse into the cultural customs of post-classical Japan.

Having undergone several surgeries and suffering from fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes pain all over the body, Dunham sheds light on what it is like to live in constant pain.

Now, in adulthood, my body hurt too much for the theatre or the hip restaurant with wooden benches or even, sometimes, the embrace of someone I loved," she notes. "I could no longer define myself by what I liked to do for fun because the answer, it seemed, was nothing.

The writer goes onto explain how the experience has inspired her to reach for a definition of cosy that would help her find peace with her physical and mental state.

For those of us who live in chronic pain, basic definitions of cosy arent available, she notes.

We cant get hygge when our hips sting and our ankles give. We arent healed by exfoliating gloves or fireplaces. Our ability to enjoy the cosy patter of a routine is not a given, since waking up is also an assessment: Who am I today? What am I good for? (The same could be said of the depressed, the anxious, the financially unstable, the addicted or the lonely.)

Lena Dunham attends Lincoln Center's American Songbook Gala at Alice Tully Hall on 29 May 2018 (Getty Images)

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the term "cosy" is to give a "feeling of comfort, warmth, and relaxation". However, in the article, Dunham says that her definition of the word is similar to that of author Isabel Gillies in her book "Cozy" which she surmises to mean: "'How do I have to frame this in order to keep going?'"

In the piece, the 32-year-old admits she became obsessed with cosyness as a child but it wasnt until she met her ex-boyfriends mother, Shira, that she fully embraced the meaning of the word cosy.

She understands, in some powerful way, that cosyness has very little to do with your cashmere and your candle and everything to do with the sense of community that we derive from the shared pursuit of staying safe, she adds.

The actors article has been praised by fans on Twitter.

You nailed it for many of us, wrote one user. Glad you have some loving folks in your cosy corner of the world.

Another added: Beautiful article. Lena. I can totally relate to this - different health issues but chronic discomfort all the same- and it becomes challenging just to BE in the world.

According to the charity Arthritis Research UK, one person in every 25 may be affected by fibromyalgia.

The symptoms for the condition, which include fatigue, chronic pain, and spasms, can be very similar to inflammatory or degenerative arthritis. However, the conditions are not linked.

There is no known cure for fibromyalgia, however, it can be managed through treatment, depending on a patients symptoms.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg fought tirelessly for gender equality throughout a legal and political career spanning six decades.

At an early age, the Supreme Court Justice's mother instilled a strong work ethic in her daughter, encouraging her to strive for independence in a patriarchal society.

"My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady, and the other was to be independent," Ginsburg once said.

In 1993, Ginsburg became the second woman to be appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, swearing the oath of office during Bill Clinton's presidency.

She passed away on 18 September aged 87. Here are 13 of her most inspirational quotes:

13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes Show all 13 1 /13 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On feminism 'Feminism  I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, 'Free to be You and Me.' Free to be, if you were a girldoctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if youre a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, thats OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers - manmade barriers, certainly not heaven sent.' (Interview with Makers, 2012) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On how she wants to be remembered 'Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has. To do something, as my colleague David Souter would say, outside myself. Cause Ive gotten much more satisfaction for the things that Ive done for which I was not paid.' (Interview with MSNBC, 2015) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On the advice she'd give women today 'Fight for the things that you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you.' (Speech at Harvard University's 364th Commencement, 2015) AFP/Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On women being included in the conversation 'Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. I don't say [the split] should be 50-50. It could be 60 per cent men, 40 per cent women, or the other way around. It shouldn't be that women are the exception.' (Interview with USA Today, 2009) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On how she copes with criticism 'Well, Im dejected, but only momentarily, when I cant get the fifth vote for something I think is very important. But then you go on to the next challenge and you give it your all. You know that these important issues are not going to go away. They are going to come back again and again. Therell be another time, another day.' (Interview with ABC News Correspondent Lynn Sherr, 2000) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On women's rights 'Women's rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy.' (ACLU) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On rejection 'You think about what would have happened ... Suppose I had gotten a job as a permanent associate. Probably I would have climbed up the ladder and today I would be a retired partner. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.' (Interview with Makers, 2012) AFP/Getty 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On the biggest issue women face 'In some ways its the most familiar issue and the largest one. Its, Who will take the responsibility for bringing up the next generation? That, I think, is the hardest problem. There can be incentives and encouragement, but women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.' (Interview with ABC News Correspondent Lynn Sherr, 2000) AFP/Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On sexist, unconscious bias 'I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at. My favorite example is the symphony orchestra. When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras.' (Interview with Elle magazine, 2014) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On having a supportive partner 'If you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it. I had a life partner who thought my work was as important as his, and I think that made all the difference for me.' (Interview with Yahoo, 2014) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On how many women should be on the Supreme Court 'People ask me sometimes, when  when do you think it will it be enough? When will there be enough women on the court? And my answer is when there are nine.' (Talk at Georgetown University, Washington, 2015) (There are nine judges on the US Supreme Court) AFP/Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On the impact of discrimination 'We should not be held back from pursuing our full talents, from contributing what we could contribute to the society, because we fit into a certain mold  because we belong to a group that historically has been the object of discrimination.' (Interview with ABC News Correspondent Lynn Sherr, 2000) Getty Images 13 of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's most inspirational quotes On her most treasured talent 'If I had any talent in the world, any talent that God could give me, I would be a great diva.' (Talk at Georgetown University, Washington, 2015) AFP/Getty Images

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A biopic documenting the early stages of Ginsburg's career, titled On the Basis of Sex, was released in 2018.

Starring Felicity Jones as Ginsburg and Armie Hammer as her husband, the late Martin David Ginsburg, the film depicts the then-attorney taking on a tax case that altered the way courts in the US consider gender discrimination.

A documentary about Ginsburg's life and career, called RBG, was premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

The film went on to win Best Political Documentary at the Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, in addition to receiving several other award wins and nominations.
Killing Eve star Sandra Oh has described the impact the rapid growth of the Time's Up movement had on her, saying it "shook me out of my own isolation".

In January 2018, an open letter was published online by the Time's Up campaign in an effort to "help survivors of sexual assault and harassment across all industries".

The letter was signed by 400 women, including Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Octavia Spencer and Jennifer Lawrence.

At the same time numerous celebrities in Hollywood were being galvanised into supporting the anti-sexual harassment initiative, Oh was spending much of her time in London filming the first season of BBC thriller Killing Eve.

Despite being separated from the heart of the movement by thousands of miles, Oh felt moved by the tales she heard from women across the globe.

Killing Eve season 2 first-look photos Show all 5 1 /5 Killing Eve season 2 first-look photos Killing Eve season 2 first-look photos Sandra Oh in Killing Eve season 2 BBC/BBC America/PA Wire Killing Eve season 2 first-look photos Jodie Comer in Killing Eve season 2 BBC/BBC America/PA Wire Killing Eve season 2 first-look photos Sandra Oh and Fiona Shaw in Killing Eve season 2 BBC/BBC America/PA Wire Killing Eve season 2 first-look photos Sandra Oh in Killing Eve season 2 BBC/BBC America/PA Wire Killing Eve season 2 first-look photos Jodie Comer in Killing Eve season 2 BBC/BBC America/PA Wire

"It was just groundbreaking. I should say even ground-opening. Im not a survivor, but hearing the flood of stories from women all around the world, it shook me out of my own isolation," the Golden Globe winner tells InStyle.

"Not only that, its also, like, we are not separate. You know what I mean?"

Oh explains how she felt as though she was "living" the ethos of the Time's Up movement through her work on Killing Eve, as the production team consisted of women supporting one another.

"It was one woman giving another woman a shot," she says.

"We had [female] characters in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s onscreen and off working together, and I felt f****** great about that."

While Oh isn't directly affiliated with the Time's Up movement, she describes herself as an "absolute ally" of the cause.

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During the interview, the Greys Anatomy star also spoke about the insecurities she used to have in her twenties, that have since assuaged with age.

"I was more insecure when I was 20 than I am at 47," Oh states. "I don't know what I'm doing. It's, like, you give less f****.

"Ageing is the greatest," she adds.
The volley fired at Volkswagen by Americans chief financial regulator this morning is rich with irony.

Donald Trumps administration frequently denies climate change and has appointed a string of people who appear to care nothing for the environment to agencies charged with protecting it. Yet here is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), another of its arms, using an environmental scandal to chase down a truckload of cash from a carmaker.

Youve probably heard about VWs emissions scandal, but heres a refresher just in case. VW had installed in its diesel cars software that allowed them to cheat emissions tests. The devilishly clever defeat device was able to detect when the vehicles were being put under the microscope and to alter their performance accordingly with the aim of securing a passing grade.

When its existence emerged, the subsequent scandal knocked confidence in diesel cars globally and led VW to pay out billions of dollars in fines and compensation around the world, including in settlements agreed with watchdogs in the US up to and including the Department of Justice.

The SEC hopes to join the party by alleging that VW and its CEO Martin Winterkorn defrauded investors in billions of dollars worth of securities sold by the company  bonds and the like  because they were unaware that it was cheating at the time the investment paper was sold. Had they known, it argues, they might have been inclined to charge the company rather more than they did.

VW professes outrage, claiming that the SECs move is legally and factually flawed and that its engaged in piling on.

And it is.

Weve seen this sort of thing before when companies do bad things, banks in particular. The US regulatory system has many parts, many arms, and they all like to take their cut when theres money to be had. Sometimes it seems as if the numbers quoted in settlements have been plucked out of the air.

There is also just a whiff of politics in the air here. Trade talks between the US and the EU have not been going well. Its tech kings have faced big fines from EU watchdogs. Germanys leader Angela Merkel and Trump detest each other.

None of this changes the fact that the existence of the defeat device was, and is, an appalling scandal, a shameful and environmentally destructive piece of cheating.

Even if this is a shakedown, and even if it there is a political element to it (which will be denied) VW did wrong, just as the banks did when they got soaked. The only question is whether the SEC can prove that it extended to investors as well as to customers and the air we all breathe.

As regards that, it hasnt hard to pick holes in VWs response.

The carmaker has pointed out that the SEC does not charge that any person involved in the bond issuance knew that Volkswagen diesel vehicles did not comply with US emissions rules.

No, but leaving aside Winterkorns case, people who knew about the defeat device will have known that the company issued bonds from time to time, and were talking about the corporate entity here.

The carmaker has also said that bond investors were paid all the interest due them and got back their investments at the end of the bonds term. Great. But the bonds were still sold in the absence of a rather important piece of information which would almost certainly have affected the terms had investors known about it.

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Think about it in this way. You tell a bank that youre employed full time as a software engineer on your application for a big mortgage when you are in fact a freelancer and have secured from your parents a promise to keep things ticking over for you if your work dries up.

The bank grants you a loan at favourable terms, and gets paid back, with the help of the bank of mum and dad along the way. Congratulations. But notwithstanding that the bank is a sophisticated lender, and hasnt lost anything through your actions, you have still committed mortgage fraud (and so have your mum and dad) because it would have charged you a lot more had it known the full facts. That may be oversimplifying a bit, but still.

VW says it will fight vigorously, arguing that the SECs claim is wrong in fact and law. But its hard to feel much sympathy for it, and its equally hard to imagine the case getting before a judge given the way these things go. Id put my house on there being (yet another) big settlement paid out down the road.
The boss of the JD Wetherspoon pub chain has used a half-year earnings report to attack the anti-Brexit establishment after company profits plummeted 19 per cent.

Tim Martin said the chain, which operates more than 900 pubs, has seen pre-tax profits drop to 50.3m in the six months to January.

Although revenue increased 7.1 per cent to 889.6m, it was not enough to offset a sharp rise in labour costs following a pay rise for staff in November.

Higher utility bills and maintenance costs also contributed to the fall in profits.

Mr Martin, an outspoken Brexiteer, called for MPs to reject Theresa Mays deal and refuse any option to remain in the EU as he addressed the chains profits in the half-year earnings report.

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The result has been a barrage of negative economic forecasts from those quarters, predicting that the UK will go to hell in a handcart without a deal with the EU  which will effectively tie the country into EU membership and taxation, yet without representation, he said.

The doomsters ignore the most powerful nexus in economics, between democracy and prosperity  and the fact that the EU is becoming progressively less democratic, as it pursues an ever-closer union, for which there is no public consensus.

Martin (left) has been among the most prominent business leaders to advocate a no-deal Brexit (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

He added: Previous referendum results on major constitutional issues have always been respected in the UK, but if parliament votes either for Theresa Mays deal (which keeps us in the EU by the back door) or to remain in the EU, the referendum result will not have been respected.

This may well have significant adverse economic consequences, as the country turns in on itself to endure months, or years, of stifling constitutional argument.

Mr Martin is currently touring Wetherspoon pubs across the country, speaking to punters about why he believes a no-deal Brexit would be Britains best option.

The pub chain has also announced plans to replace champagne and prosecco with sparkling wines from outside the EU. Wheat beer and alcohol-free beer from Germany, which is currently stocked by the chain, will be substituted with UK-brewed products.
Volkswagen and its former chief executive Martin Winterkorn have been charged by the US with defrauding investors during the diesel emissions scandal uncovered four years ago.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged the German carmarker issued $13bn in bonds and securities in US markets  despite knowing that more than half a million of their vehicles were well over legal limits for emissions.

The company is also accused of making false and misleading statements about vehicle quality, environmental compliance and its financial status. Volkswagen said it would contest the SEC lawsuit.

The SEC said: By concealing the emissions scheme, Volkswagen reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in benefit by issuing the securities at more attractive rates for the company, according to the complaint.

The complaint, filed in California, charges Volkswagen AG, its American subsidiaries and Martin Winterkorn with violating antifraud laws.

In 2015, Volkswagen installed software on almost 500,000 cars that cheated emissions tests, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Nitrogen oxide emissions were reduced when the cars were put on a test machine, but levels were higher during normal driving.

Business news: In pictures Show all 13 1 /13 Business news: In pictures Business news: In pictures Flybe collapses Airline Flybe has collapsed. All future flights on the Exeter-based airline have been cancelled  leaving more than 2,300 staff facing an uncertain future, and wrecking the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. The chief executive, Mark Anderson, said: Europes largest independent regional airline has been unable to overcome significant funding challenges to its business. AFP via Getty Business news: In pictures Future product placement will be 'tailored to individual viewers' Marketing executives say that product placement in films and televison shows on streaming services such as Netflix may be tailored to individuals in future. For instance, if data shows that a viewer is a fan of pepsi, a billboard in the background of a shot would host an advert for pepsi, while for a viewer known to have different tastes it could be for Coca-Cola Paramount Business news: In pictures Corbyn wishes Amazon a happy birthday In a card sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the company's 25th birthday, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn writes: "You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on. Please pay your fair share" Business news: In pictures No deal, no tariffs The government has announced that it would slash almost all tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Notable exceptions include cars and meat, which will see tariffs in place to protect British farmers Getty Business news: In pictures Fingerprint payment NatWest is trialling a new bank card that will allow people to touch their hand to the card when paying rather than typing in a PIN number. The card will work by recognising the user's fingerprint NatWest/PA Wire Business news: In pictures Mahabis bust High-end slipper retailer Mahabis has gone into administration. 2 Jan 2019 Mahabis Business news: In pictures Costa Cola Coca-Cola has paid 3.9bn for Costa Coffee. A cafe chain is a new venture for the global soft drinks giant PA Business news: In pictures RIP Payday Loans A funeral procession for payday loans was held in London on September 2. The future of pay day lenders is in doubt after Wonga, Britain's biggest, went into administration on August 30 PA Business news: In pictures Musk irks investors and directors Elon Musk has concluded that Tesla will remain public. Investors and company directors were angry at Musk for tweeting unexpectedly that he was considering taking Tesla private and share prices had taken a tumble in the following weeks Getty Business news: In pictures Jaguar warning Iconic British car maker Jaguar Land Rover warned on July 5, 2018 that a "bad" Brexit deal could jeopardise planned investment of more than $100 billion, upping corporate pressure as the government heads into crucial talks AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures Spotif-IPO Spotify traded publically for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday. However, the company isn't issuing shares, but rather, shares held by Spotify's private investors will be sold AFP/Getty Business news: In pictures French blue passports The deadline to award a contract to make blue British passports after Brexit has been extended by two weeks following a request by bidder De La Rue. The move comes after anger at the announcement British passports would be produced by Franco-Dutch firm Gemalto when De La Rues contract ends in July. The British firm said Gemalto was chosen only because it undercut the competition, but the UK company also admitted that it was not the cheapest choice in the tendering process. Business news: In pictures Beast from the east economic impact The Beast from the East wiped 4m off of Flybes revenues due to flight cancellations, airport closures and delays, according to the budget airlines estimates. Flybe said it cancelled 994 flights in the three months to 31 March, compared to 372 in the same period last year.

The US Department of Justice sued the company over the software in 2016; the Federal Trade Commission also sued over the claims made in adverts promoting some vehicles as clean diesel.

Winterkorn resigned over the fraud and pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the US but has maintained he personally did nothing wrong. The SEC now wants to bar him from holding any corporate office or directorship.

Recommended Volkswagen boss apologises for Nazi pun

The company has paid $20bn in fines and civil settlements to date.

Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company, Volkswagen said in a statement.

The decision to sue comes just a day after the companys chief executive, Herbert Deiss, apologised for evoking the Nazi concentration camp slogan arbeit macht frei meaning work sets you free.

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In a meeting on Tuesday, Mr Deiss said Ebit macht frei  meaning the companys profitability would give it freedom. Ebit is a financial acronym meaning earnings before interest and tax.

Additional reporting by agencies
Headteachers should consider issuing lunchtime detentions to students who skip school for climate change protests, a union chief has said.

Pupils should be in school learning about climate change rather than demonstrating, said Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL).

The headteachers union leader added that sanctioning protests opened the doors to more pupil absences over issues such as homelessness and knife crime.

On punishments for the protest, Mr Barton said: Some schools will decide they want to send out a bigger signal. It might be that they do expect that those youngsters should do some work around the school.

Personally speaking, I wouldnt think it unthinkable that you say to youngsters, You werent here that afternoon, you missed work, other students couldnt be taught in the same way because the class size was smaller, you will be expected during lunch time to catch up on that.

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Children worldwide protest climate change A poster with Greta Thunberg, who began the current children's movement at the protest in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cape Town, South Africa on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh Getty

His comments came on the same day that students around the world walked out of school to demand politicians take urgent action on climate change.

It was the second day this year that children have missed school to protest over the issue.

Speaking at ASCLs annual conference in Birmingham, Mr Barton said: It seems to me that we patronise children ultimately by saying, Yes, well done. It is a sentimental response.

They should be learning in school about why climate change matters and learning how political processes work. That is our responsibility to do that.

Skipping school to protest against the Iraq war was not acceptable, and walking out of class for climate change demonstrations should not be condoned either, he said.

Mr Barton added: The more we say climate change is such an important issue that young people can go and protest about it, well the more you open up other issues.

What about fracking, what about homelessness for example, what about knife crime?

Mr Barton added that when he was a headteacher, he issued after-school detentions to the students who went on strike over the Iraq war in 2002.

Recommended UK students join school walkout demanding action on climate change

He said: I wanted to send out the message that ultimately you cant as a society expect leaders to be able to take responsibility for the welfare of young people if you then dont give them the mechanism to be able to do that.

Liberal Democrat education spokeperson Layla Moran, who attended the protest last month, said she understood the safeguarding issues around children missing school, but added that they felt they had to.

She criticised MPs for saying it was unacceptable to skip school for the strike, when some schools have recently been forced to shut early due to lack of funding.

Ms Moran said: The hypocrisy of government in this situation is astounding.

And I have got schools in my area who are actively consulting on that [early closures] or have cut bits of the curriculum, and what the young people want is to be able to do both.

They want to be able to have a planet that is going to be sustainable for them and their grandchildren and generations ahead, and attend school. I just think it is utter hypocrisy.

 'It's not some kind of future threat' says Caroline Lucas as only handful of government MPs attend climate change debate

Speaking at the ASCL conference in Birmingham on Friday, education secretary Damian Hinds urged on children to stay in school.

He said he was delighted that pupils were taking a keen interest but added: I want children in school, and I want children learning to be the engineers, the climate scientists, the geographers of the future.

And youve got a much better chance of that being in school than not being in school.
NHS charges introduced as part of Theresa Mays "hostile environment" agenda are preventing migrant children from accessing healthcare in violation of United Nations commitments, doctors have warned.

Paediatricians and policy experts said that changes introduced since 2014, which require NHS organisations to check patients are UK residents and charge upfront for some procedures posed risks to childrens health.

These measures, justified as a move to combat health tourism, have created barriers to accessing non-emergency care for the estimated 600,000 undocumented migrants in the UK  which include 120,000 children.

Undocumented migrants include many from the so-called Windrush generation, as well as victims of trafficking and modern slavery and those yet to seek, or refused, asylum in the UK.

Migrant children now have to pay a 400 NHS surcharge on immigration applications, and no longer automatically qualify for citizenship if they are born in the UK.

NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday Show all 18 1 /18 NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday Nurses test the hearing of a newborn child Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday The waiting room is busy in Milton Keynes University Hospital Reuters NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday On Ward 24, two nurses work at the nurses station Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday In A&E, a porter rushes a patient through the corridor Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday A surgical team prepares a patient for their operation Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday In the physiotherapy department, patients are treated in the hydrotherapy pool Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday On Ward 8, an inpatient awaits visitors Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday In the physiotherapy department, amputees take a class Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday A junior doctor is at work in the staff room Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday A surgical team prepares a patient for their operation Reuters NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday An inpatient has her hair washed by the staff hairdressers Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday In the audiology department, a mother watches on as her son is given a hearing test Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday On Ward 8, staff serve lunch to the patients Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday On Ward 24, a patient waits on their bed Reuters NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday On Ward 8, a cleaner is at work Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday A nurse takes blood from a patient Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday On Ward 8, an inpatient receives a visitor Reuters/Hannah McKay NHS at 70: Pride and worry as free health service celebrates birthday Inpatient Donald Ritson lies in bed in Ward 24 in Milton Keynes University Hospital Reuters

Children are thus at risk of losing entitlement to NHS care depending on the immigration and financial status of their parents, write Dr Neal James Russell, from St Georges University, and co-authors in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.

As well as the financial barriers to accessing treatment the NHS refers those with unpaid debts to the Home Office and, until last year, would share personal details with immigration officials to trace offenders.

Families may face legitimate concerns that seeking care for their sick child may result in immigration enforcement such as detention, deportation and even family separation, the authors said.

There have been several cases of patients with uncertain immigration status putting off healthcare.

Dexter Bristol, 57, who came to the UK from Grenada aged eight, was sacked and denied benefits because officials did not believe he was here legally.

A coroners report after his death from heart failure found he had not accessed healthcare for two years, which his lawyers said was due to migration concerns.

These fears create safeguarding risks for children who may be more vulnerable to neglect and abuse that would otherwise be picked up at health checks, the authors wrote.

Charging be particularly detrimental for newborns, the editorial adds, as maternity service cost as much as 6,000 for an uncomplicated delivery  and more if it is complex  which is still payable if the child dies.

NHS charging regulations undermine the governments stated commitments to child health and our obligations to children under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and contradict recommendations outlined in the UN Global Compact for Migration, signed by the UK in December 2018, they added.

The Department of Health and Social Care was approached for comment.
A man has been shot dead by armed police during a dawn raid in Birmingham.

West Midlands Police said a warrant was executed as part of an intelligence-led operation in the Lee Bank area of the city just before 5am on Friday.

A statement issued by the force said: A man, in his 50s, was shot and died a short time later at the scene.

It said video from the body cameras worn by officers involved in the operation had been downloaded and the case had been referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

The force added that the area surrounding the scene had been cordoned off.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 4 December 2021 People walk through a Christmas market in Trafalgar Square Reuters UK news in pictures December 2 2021 Duchess of Cambridge inspects a Faberge egg at the Victoria and Albert Museum Getty UK news in pictures 1 December 2021 Meerkats at London Zoo with an advent calendar PA UK news in pictures 30 November 2021 Workers put the finishing touches to the Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree ahead of the lighting ceremony later in the week PA UK news in pictures 29 November 2021 Home Secretary Priti Patel is greeted by a police dog at a special memorial service for Met Police Sergeant Matiu Ratana Getty UK news in pictures 28 November 2021 Riyad Mahrez of Manchester City battles for possession with Aaron Cresswell of West Ham United during a match at the Etihad during snow Manchester City/Getty UK news in pictures 27 November 2021 Residents clear branches from a fallen tree in Birkenhead, north west England as Storm Arwen triggered a rare red weather warning AFP via Getty Images 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

A local resident told Birmingham Live the entire block of flats was on lockdown following the shooting.

No-one was allowed in or out for the first half hour I was standing here watching, he said.

West Midlands Ambulance Service said it was called to reports of a gunshot at 5.04am.

One ambulance, two paramedic officers and a trauma doctor were sent to the scene.

A spokesperson said: On arrival, crews discovered a man in cardiac arrest.

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CPR was already being performed, which ambulance staff took over and also administered advanced life support.

However, despite everyones best efforts it sadly became apparent nothing could be done to save him and he was confirmed dead at the scene.

West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson said he was monitoring the situation extremely closely.

Early this morning there was an intelligence-led operation in Lee Bank just before 5am, he said. A man in his 50s was shot and died at the scene.

I scrutinise the police use of force very closely. Officers involved in this incident were wearing body worn cameras and that footage is being reviewed.

I can also confirm the matter has been referred to the police watchdog  the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

It comes two months after police shot and killed an unarmed man during a pre-planned raid in Coventry.

The actions of the police officer who shot Sean Fitzgerald are also being investigated by the IOPC.
Students across the UK are joining their peers around the world in walking out of their schools to demand politicians take urgent action on climate change.

Young people have already taken to the streets in Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, with around 2,000 events expected to be held in more than 120 countries.

The global day of action against climate change was inspired by Greta Thunberg, a teenager who has protested outside Swedens parliament every Friday to urge leaders to take action and has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

In the UK, students gathered in Parliament Square in London with placards reading: By the time were in charge it will be too late, we want you to panic and the greatest threat to the planet is the belief someone else will save it.

They chanted this is what democracy looks like while primary school children, who were at the protest with their parents and holding handmade placards, shouted climate change, boo!

"Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change Show all 38 1 /38 "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 Reuters "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Magdeburg, Germany on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cape Town, South Africa on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in New York on March 15 AFP/Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Madrid on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Quezon City, Philippines on March 15 Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Vienna on March 15 AFP/Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Dublin on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on march 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Erfurt, Germany on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Zagreb, Croatia on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lisbon on March 15 Reuters "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Edinburgh on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Florence, Italy on March 15 Sign reads: there is no future without a planet, let's not sell it for money EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Vienna on March 15 Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Brighton on March 15 Reuters "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cambridge on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change Students protest in Bangalore, India on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cape Town, South Africa on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change Students protest in Bangalore, India on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change A student protests in Lucerne, Switzerland on 15 March EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 AFP/Getty Images "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Milan, Italy on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 AFP/Getty "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Lund, Sweden on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change A poster with Greta Thunberg, who began the current children's movement at the protest in Lausanne, Switzerland on March 15 AP "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Cape Town, South Africa on March 15 EPA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in London on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest in Canterbury, Kent on March 15 PA "Act now or swim later" - Children worldwide protest climate change School children protest outside Holyrood in Edinburgh Getty

Organisers said they expected a larger turnout on Friday than the UKs first strike on 15 February, which saw thousands of students ditch school for demonstrations.

In Berlin, at least 10,000 protesters, mostly students, gathered in a central square waving signs with slogans such as There is no planet B and Climate Protection Report Card: F, before a march through the capitals government quarter.

In Poland, thousands marched in Warsaw and other cities to demand a ban on the burning of coal.

In Indias capital New Delhi, schoolchildren protested over inaction on climate change and rising air pollution levels that often far exceed World Health organisation limits.

Several thousand students gathered around the Pantheon building in Paris. Some criticised French president Emmanuel Macron, who sees himself as the guarantor of the Paris climate accord but has been lambasted by climate activists for being too business friendly and not ambitious enough in his efforts to reduce French emissions.

Police in Vienna said around 10,000 students rallied in the Austrian capital, while in neighbouring Switzerland a similar number protested in the western city of Lausanne.

In Helsinki, police said about 3,000 students gathered in front of Finlands parliament sporting placards such as Dinosaurs thought they had time too!

Students in the UK have staged events in 100 British towns and cities including London, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge.

They demanding the government declare a climate emergency and take active steps to tackle the problem, and have called on politicians to communicate the severity of the ecological crisis to the public and reform the curriculum to make it an educational priority.

They also want recognition that young people have the biggest stake in the future, to be involved in policymaking, and for the voting age to be lowered to 16.

It follows in the wake of a UN report published last year which warned limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which the impact of climate change would become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action.

It would require cutting global carbon dioxide emissions by almost half within 12 years, and slashing them to zero by mid-century.

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In a video released ahead of the strikes on Friday, environment secretary Michael Gove tells students walking out of lessons and lectures to call for urgent action on cutting emissions: Dear school climate strikers, we agree. Collective action of the kind youre championing can make a difference, and a profound one.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also backed the strikers, tweeting: Thank you for standing up against climate change. You shouldnt have to pay the price for the mistakes of previous generations.

Additional reporting by agencies
White Britons are twice as likely to hold extremist views as people of Pakistani descent, research has suggested.

The government vowed to fight all forms of radicalisation after academics at Queen Mary University of London warned of an undue focus on Islamic fundamentalism.

When asked whether they supported actions including suicide bombings and terror attacks as a form of political protest or to fight injustices, 15 per cent of white Britons were classed as sympathisers, compared with 8 per cent of Pakistani-origin respondents.

When divided by religion, 18 per cent of Christians and 8 per cent of Muslims were sympathisers, while 59 per cent of Christians and 68 per cent of Muslims condemned the statements.

Professor Kam Bhui CBE said: British counter-terrorism policy has had an undue focus on Islamic fundamentalism, with white British extremism normally considered as a lesser problem.

Brexit racism and the fightback Show all 9 1 /9 Brexit racism and the fightback Brexit racism and the fightback Demonstrators protest against an increase in post-ref racism at London's March for Europe in July 2016 PA Brexit racism and the fightback These cards were found near a school in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, the day after the EU referendum Twitter/@howgilb Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback Romford, Essex, June 25 @diamondgeezer Brexit racism and the fightback A worker at this Romanian food shop was asleep upstairs at the time of this arson attack in Norwich on July 8, but escaped unharmed. Hundreds later participated in a love bombing rally outside the shop to express their opposition to racism and their support of the shop owners. JustGiving/Helen Linehan Brexit racism and the fightback This neo-Nazi sticker was spotted in Glasgow on June 26 Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback But after news emerged of neo-Nazi stickers appearing in Glasgow, some in the city struck back with slogans of their own. Courtesy of Eoin Palmer Brexit racism and the fightback Getty Brexit racism and the fightback More signs began to appear in some parts of the UK, created by people who wanted to show their opposition to post-referendum racism Courtesy of Bernadette Russell

The fact that those who are white British are approximately twice as likely to have extremist sympathies as those of Pakistani heritage will therefore come as a surprise.

This raises concerns about right-wing extremism and suggests that a focus on tackling Islamic fundamentalism is flawed, and we need to consider extremism more generally.

Official statistics published last week showed that 43 per cent of suspected terrorists arrested are white, compared to 32 per cent who are Asian.

Three quarters of suspects gave their nationality as British, compared to 4 per cent Pakistani last year.

Security services have foiled 14 Islamist and four extreme right-wing terror plots since March 2017, and are running a record of more than 700 live investigations.

Assistant commissioner Neil Basu, the head of UK counterterror policing, previously told MPs that around 80 per cent of investigations by police and MI5 were into jihadis and 20 per cent other, including a significant proportion from the right wing.

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the two ideologies, both perverse, are feeding each other, Mr Basu added.

 Terror police appeal for public help to thwart plots

The number of people referred to the Prevent counter-extremism programme over suspected far-right extremism has rocketed by 36 per cent in a year, as the proportion of alleged Islamists fell.

Dr Clive Gabay, senior lecturer in international politics at Queen Mary University, said the latest study must serve as a wake-up call following research suggesting that large numbers of Brexit voters had racist and prejudicial attitudes towards migrants.

Racism is a serious factor in the current political debates around immigration and integration, and we need to be mindful of the re-emergence and growing popularity of extremist anti-BAME and anti-immigrant views, he added.

The study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, used a survey of 618 men and women living in Blackburn, Darwen, Bradford and Luton.

In total, 341 (61 per cent) condemned violent protest and terrorist actions, 144 (26 per cent) were neutral, and 73 (13 per cent) were sympathisers of violent protest and terrorism.

A positive answer to one of seven statements was used to class someone as a sympathiser, and committing minor crime in political protests was the one most commonly endorsed.

Those born in the UK were more likely to express extremist sympathies compared to respondents born abroad, as were alcohol drinkers, smokers, illicit drug users and those with a criminal conviction.

Younger people and single people supported terrorism more frequently than older, married or divorced people, while sympathies were unaffected by gender, religion, education, discrimination or life events, researchers said.

While autism and personality disorders were not found to be linked, the description of losing ones temper easily was.

The research also found that depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress were associated with having extremist sympathies.

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Professor Bhui added: Our study shows us how important it is to support people with mental health issues, who may be less able to manage radicalising messages, and could end up adopting extremist sympathies.

Researchers called for the study to be used by authorities working to stop radicalisation before it progresses to terrorism, amid a review of the governments Prevent strategy.

A Home Office spokesperson said: Through the governments counter-extremism strategy, we are taking a comprehensive approach to tackling all forms of extremism. We have been clear that we will not tolerate any group or individual that spreads hate by demonising those of other faiths or ethnicities, or stokes fears within our communities.
Four Labour MPs have resigned from the partys frontbench after defying Jeremy Corbyns orders and voting against a fresh Brexit referendum.

The Labour leader had whipped his MPs to abstain on the vote but dozens broke ranks, with 24 voting for a fresh public vote and 17 voting against.

Shadow ministers Yvonne Fovargue, Emma Lewell-Buck and Justin Madders, plus party whip Stephanie Peacock, all voted against the motion and later resigned.

Mr Corbyn is reported to have asked them to step down or face being sacked.

Earlier in the day, Stoke-on-Trent North MP Ruth Smeeth, a parliamentary aide to deputy leader Tom Watson, also resigned so she could oppose another referendum.

Recommended MPs vote against second Brexit referendum

Labour says it supports the option of a fresh referendum as one way to avoid a damaging Tory Brexit or a no-deal outcome, but ordered its MPs not to take part in the vote on a motion, tabled by the Independent Groups Sarah Wollaston, that called for a Final Say vote.

The amendment was comprehensively defeated as Labour MPs abstained and many supporters of a Peoples Vote also refused to take part, saying they were waiting to support another pro-referendum motion next week.

Shadow communities minister Ms Fovargue, shadow health minister Mr Madders and shadow children and families minister Ms Lewell-Buck all quit their roles shortly after the vote.

Ms Peacock also resigned as a whip, telling Mr Corbyn in a letter: I was elected on the Labour manifesto that pledged to respect the result of the 2016 EU referendum. The people of Barnsley elected me to honour that promise and that is what I did tonight.

I felt in all good conscience I had to vote tonight to clearly rule out any form of second referendum. I believe the people spoke in 2016 and we need to enact their decision.

Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty

Ms Smeeth said: This was a difficult decision but I have a duty to support the will of my constituents. We need to leave, and leave with a deal that works for the Potteries.

Responding to the resignations, Mr Corbyn said: I would like to thank Yvonne, Emma, Ruth, Justin and Stephanie for their service while on the Labour frontbench.

I understand the difficulties MPs have felt representing the views of their constituents during this process.

Many Labour MPs supportive of a Final Say vote abstained on Ms Wollastons motion because they believe the best way to push for another referendum is through an alternative Commons amendment being drawn up by Labour backbenchers Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson. The plan would see parliament vow to withhold support for Theresa Mays Brexit deal until she has put it to a public vote.

Labour has said it is likely to back the proposal, and senior shadow cabinet ministers, including Mr Corbyn, held talks with the two MPs on Thursday.

A Labour spokesperson said: This afternoon Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Nick Brown and Keir Starmer had a useful and constructive discussion with Peter Kyle and Phil Wilson as part of Labours engagement with MPs across parliament to find a practical solution to break the Brexit deadlock.
LANXESS closed its fiscal year with a strong result. In 2018, EBITDA pre exceptionals increased by 9.8 percent to EUR 1.016 billion. As forecast, earnings are at the upper end of the range of 5 to 10 percent above the previous years figure of EUR 925 million (without ARLANXEO).

Despite rising economic headwind, we delivered on our promises. We made very good progress strategically and operationally: LANXESS now has a very clear focus on specialty chemicals. Today, we are more profitable, more stable and more competitive than ever  and that is paying off, said Matthias Zachert, Chairman of the Board of Management of LANXESS AG.

The good operating result was driven in particular by the operating strength of the Advanced Intermediates, Specialty Additives and Engineering Materials segments as well as the integration of Chemtura and the phosphorus additives business acquired from Solvay. The EBITDA margin pre exceptionals came in at 14.1 percent.

LANXESS group sales rose by 10.2 percent from EUR 6.53 billion in the previous year to EUR 7.197 billion. At EUR 431 million, net income was considerably higher than the previous years figure of EUR 87 million. This was due to the year-on-year improvement in the operating result as well as effects from the sale of the 50 percent stake in ARLANXEO. Moreover, the previous years net income was reduced by one-off expenses.

Dividend to increase again

The successful fiscal year 2018 is also expected to pay off for LANXESS shareholders. The Board of Management and Supervisory Board will propose a dividend of EUR 0.90 per share to the Annual Stockholders Meeting on May 23, 2019. This would be 12.5 percent more than in the previous year.

Strategic milestone in 2018: sale of the rubber business completed

When fiscal year 2018 came to a close, LANXESS achieved another milestone in its realignment. On December 31, the specialty chemicals company completed the sale of its remaining 50 percent interest in the rubber company ARLANXEO to its former joint venture partner Saudi Aramco. The two companies had founded the joint venture on April 1, 2016. LANXESS received proceeds of around EUR 1.4 billion for its share, of which it has already used EUR 200 million to further finance its pension liabilities. Another up to EUR 200 million is designated for a share buy-back, which is to be completed by the end of the current fiscal year.

We have used the proceeds from the sale of our interest in ARLANXEO to further strengthen our balance sheet. In addition, we have gained additional scope for driving our growth forward both organically and through acquisitions, said Michael Pontzen, Chief Financial Officer of LANXESS AG.

Strong performance in almost every segment

Operating business in the Advanced Intermediates segment performed strongly in fiscal year 2018 despite a persistently challenging agriculture market. Sales amounted to EUR 2.207 billion, up 11.7 percent on the previous years figure of EUR 1.975 billion. The segments EBITDA pre exceptionals grew by 7.2 percent from EUR 335 million to EUR 359 million. The EBITDA margin pre exceptionals was 16.3 percent, slightly below the 17.0 percent recorded in the previous year.

In the Specialty Additives segment, sales and the operating result both increased significantly as a result of the successful integration of the Chemtura and Solvay businesses. Sales amounted to EUR 1.98 billion, up 22.9 percent on the previous years figure of EUR 1.611 billion. EBITDA pre exceptionals grew by a considerable 28.5 percent from EUR 267 million to EUR 343 million. The EBITDA margin pre exceptionals improved from 16.6 percent to 17.3 percent.

In the Performance Chemicals segment, sales and the operating result fell short of the strong previous year due in particular to weak development in the leather and construction industries. Sales fell by 6.3 percent from EUR 1.439 billion to EUR 1.349 billion. EBITDA pre exceptionals amounted to EUR 187 million, down 25.8 percent on the previous years figure of EUR 252 million. The EBITDA margin pre exceptionals came in at 13.9 percent, against 17.5 percent a year ago.

The Engineering Materials segment considerably increased both sales and the operating result on the basis of the profitable business with plastics for lightweight construction. The urethanes business that was taken over as part of the Chemtura acquisition also made a positive contribution to the result. Sales rose by 15.4 percent from EUR 1.366 billion to EUR 1.576 billion. EBITDA pre exceptionals improved by a considerable 21.9 percent from EUR 219 million to EUR 267 million. The EBITDA margin pre exceptionals for the segment improved from 16.0 percent to 16.9 percent.

Compared with the previous year, the results of all segments were affected by negative exchange rate effects, particularly from a weaker U.S. dollar.

Outlook for 2019: on track despite weakening economy

LANXESS has made a solid start to the new year despite the weakening economy. LANXESS expects EBITDA pre exceptionals for the full year 2019 to be around prior-year level.
The unity of Theresa Mays cabinet has publicly crumbled after eight of her most senior ministers refused to back her plan to delay Brexit by three months.

Those who failed to support it included the prime ministers Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay, who was joined by 187 other Conservative MPs and frontbenchers in voting against her approach.

None of the ministers opposing Ms Mays ultimately successful move to delay Brexit will be sacked, because she allowed a free vote on the issue in the face of a mass rebellion.

It followed a rowdy cabinet meeting in the morning where tempers frayed over a separate rebellion the night before in which remainer cabinet ministers refused to vote with the government on a motion ruling out a no-deal Brexit.

As a result of Thursday nights votes, however, the path is cleared for Ms May to put her twice-rejected Brexit deal to a third vote of MPs, and if it is passed she will request a Brexit delay until 30 June to push through necessary legislation.

Discussions between Conservative ministers and the partys Northern Irish DUP allies in government continued as Ms May hunts for a majority for her agreement.

After losing on previous occasions in the Commons, the prime minister was forced to let MPs vote on extending Article 50 on Thursday.

The motion put in front of the house said she would go to the European Council at the end of next week and ask for a short delay to the end of June if MPs backed her deal, and a longer one if they did not.

Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty

But with Conservative ranks full of MPs who baulk at the idea of delaying the UKs departure at all, and the prospect of having to sack dozens of minsters, she allowed a free vote.

As well as Mr Barclay, top ministers who voted against her approach included defence secretary Gavin Williamson, trade secretary Liam Fox, commons leader Andrea Leadsom, Treasury secretary Liz Truss, transport secretary Chris Grayling and development secretary Penny Mordaunt. Welsh secretary Alun Cairns abstained.

Parliament chose to reject that deal. So we now have to confront the difficult position that decisions taken by parliament have left us in Downing Street spokesman

A further 27 junior ministers and 11 whips also voted against the approach Ms May is taking, including the outspoken Conservative deputy chairman James Cleverly and other Brexit ministers Kwasi Kwarteng and Chris Heaton-Harris. Three other whips, including chief Julian Smith, declined to vote.

A Downing Street spokesman sought to play down the splits in the cabinet and wider party, pointing out that the prime minister had granted them a free vote so it was normal that they could chose to act they wished.

He went on to point the finger of blame squarely at the Commons, when discussing why the delay was necessary: The prime minister absolutely wanted and strived for the United Kingdom to be leaving the EU on 29 March.

Everything she has done since she came to office was intended to deliver that. She did not want there to be an extension. She brought forward a meaningful vote twice having agreed a deal with the EU in November.

 Watch the moment MPs reject a second Brexit referendum

Parliament chose to reject that deal. So we now have to confront the difficult position that decisions taken by parliament have left us in.

Earlier in the day, tensions peaked when Ms May sat at the cabinet table to discuss events the night before, when remainer cabinet ministers Amber Rudd, David Gauke, Greg Clark and David Mundell rebelled against her orders that they should oppose a plan to strongly rule out a no-deal Brexit.

Reports suggested that Mr Smith attacked the remainers, and then stormed out when business secretary Mr Clark tried to explain himself.

Following the bust up, Ms May agreed to allow a free vote on Thursdays motion on delaying Brexit in an apparent attempt to keep Brexiteer ministers happy and avoid a damaging split.

In other votes on Thursday, the prime ministers Conservative MPs did follow orders allowing her to successfully block opposition proposals that would have allowed parliament to seize control of Brexit and decide what to do next.

The result confirms that Ms May will now try to win a third vote on her Brexit deal, after it was defeated by 149 votes on Tuesday and 230 votes earlier in the year.

 Donald Trump says second Brexit referendum would be very 'unfair to the people who won'

The Independent understands that Ms May will likely schedule the vote for Tuesday next week, allowing her a few days to try to convince the DUP and Eurosceptic Tories to back it.

Discussion with the DUP were set to continue through the weekend, with the partys leader Arlene Foster said to have not yet bought her ticket back to Belfast.

She said: We are talking to the government and to the attorney general at the moment to try and make a deal happen because we want to see Brexit working, we want to see it working for the whole of the UK in a way that doesnt leave Northern Ireland behind.

The prospect of a lengthy delay to Brexit had also prompted some Tories to admit that they might now back Ms Mays deal.

Conor Burns, a close ally of Boris Johnson, said: I am now looking for a reason to support it. The pretence that this parliament has honoured this referendum result is now slipping away.

If there is a two-year extension then your [Brexit] mandate is five years old and the urgency of your instruction clearly diminishes over time.

Another, Lucy Allan, wrote on Twitter: Last night, Labour MPs together with a handful of hardcore Conservatives voted to take no deal off the table. So now we will not be leaving the EU on 29 Marchand they cheered.

Now the option we are faced with is Theresa Mays deal or no Brexit.
Philip Hammond is leading government talks with the Northern Irish DUP in a bid to win their support for Theresa Mays Brexit deal.

With the Conservative partys confidence and supply deal with the DUP coming up for review, the chancellors involvement indicates there could be a financial incentive to back the plan.

It comes as Ms Mays ministers also continue their efforts to convince Conservative eurosceptics to row in behind her twice-defeated deal, ahead of a new vote on Tuesday.

When the DUP agreed to prop up Ms Mays administration in the commons after the 2017 election, the party negotiated an extra 2bn in spending for Northern Ireland over 2018 and 2019.

Money in the agreement, and potentially the support of the partys 10 MPs for Ms May, is set to end in June, creating the opportunity for its leader Arlene Foster to negotiate new terms, with the governments main ask likely to be safe passage of her Brexit deal.

A source said the Unionist party was now engaging in ongoing and significant discussions with government on Friday.

Until now the talks had ostensibly focused on efforts by attorney general Geoffrey Cox to give them assurances that the UK would not be trapped in the Irish backstop.

But Mr Hammonds arrival at the negotiating table indicates there is now a financial element to the discussions.

Papers react to the Brexit vote Show all 10 1 /10 Papers react to the Brexit vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Guardian The Guardian highlights just how soon the Prime Minister's defeat has come Britain's scheduled date of departure Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mail The Daily Mail takes aim at MPs who political editor Jason Groves claims have "plunged Britain into chaos" by rejecting the Prime Minister's deal Papers react to the Brexit vote The Independent Daily Edition The Independent calls for a second referendum as a way forward Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Express The Daily Express leads with exasperation, with political editor Macer Hall writing that "Brexit was hanging in the balance last night" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Sun The Sun take the Prime Minister's "croaky" voice into account as it reports on last night's "Brexit shambles" Papers react to the Brexit vote Financial Times The Financial Times claims that the Prime Minister's authority is "in shreds" and reports on the fall in the pound in the wake of the vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph calls the Prime Minister's defeat "humiliating" and claims that a delay to Brexit is likely Papers react to the Brexit vote The i The i claims that parliament is "out of control" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Times The Times claims that Britain is in crisis and that the Prime Minister "may face resignation calls" Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror says that the Prime Minister "surrenders" in reference to the likelihood of Brexit being delayed after the vote

After the 2017 elections the two parties deal set out what the DUP agreed to support the Conservatives on, in exchange for financial support for Northern Ireland.

The deal contained an assurance from the Conservatives that they would never be neutral in expressing their support for the union and there was also a commitment that the deal would be reviewed by both parties at the end of each parliamentary session.

Support from the DUP could lead to Ms Mays deal being approved by the commons next week, after it was defeated for the second time on Tuesday by 149 votes.

MPs backed a delayed Brexit beyond 29 March in dramatic parliamentary scenes which saw a majority of the Conservative party in the opposite lobby from the prime minister.

The prospect of a lengthy delay to Brexit has also prompted some Tories to admit that they might now back Ms Mays deal.

Conor Burns, a close ally of Boris Johnson, said: I am now looking for a reason to support it. The pretence that this parliament has honoured this referendum result is now slipping away.

 Watch the moment MPs reject a second Brexit referendum

If there is a two-year extension then your [Brexit] mandate is five years old and the urgency of your instruction clearly diminishes over time.

Another, Lucy Allan, wrote on Twitter: Last night, Labour MPs together with a handful of hardcore Conservatives voted to take no deal off the table. So now we will not be leaving the EU on 29 Marchand they cheered.

Now the option we are faced with is Theresa Mays deal or no Brexit.

But any delay will require the agreement of the other 27 European Union members, with talks about any conditions for an extension set to begin before leaders gather at a summit next week.

European Council president Donald Tusk met Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in The Hague on Friday before talks with the blocs key power brokers Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron on Monday.

Following the talks, Mr Rutte said the current withdrawal agreement is the only deal on the table.
Theresa Mays deputy has played down talk of a cabinet split, despite seven of the prime ministers top team voting against her in a key Brexit vote.

David Lidington insisted the entire cabinet had accepted that Britain would seek to delay Brexit, despite seven cabinet ministers voting against the proposal last night.

The Cabinet Office minister said Eurosceptic colleagues who opposed the plan had wanted to express how unhappy they were with the UK being forced to ask the EU for an extension to the Article 50 period.

Ms May had given Conservative MPs a free vote on the issue in a bid to avoid a mass rebellion, prompting seven cabinet ministers, 27 junior ministers and 11 party whips to vote against the governments motion.

Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay, Commons leader Andrea Leadsom, defence secretary Gavin Williamson and international trade secretary Liam Fox all rejected the proposal for an extension, as did transport secretary Chris Grayling, international development secretary Penny Mordaunt and Treasury chief secretary Liz Truss.

But despite the vote having exposed a major cabinet split, Mr Lidington insisted that the cabinet was united on the way forward.

He told BBC Radio 4s Today: It was a free vote yesterday, which means that there was no whipping and MPs were free to vote in accordance with their conscience.

While its for individual colleagues to say why they voted the way they did, I think for a number of my colleagues who campaigned strongly in favour of leaving the European Union, they used this as an opportunity to register how unhappy they were with being in a position where we dont really have an option but to seek an extension of our time in the European Union.

Mr Barclay, the Brexit secretary, voted against Ms Mays motion despite having wrapped up the debate for the government and urged MPs to support the proposal.

He finished his speech to the Commons by saying: It is time for this House to act in the national interest, its time to put forward an extension that is realistic. I commend the motion put forward by the government to the House.

He then voted against the government motion, which proposed a delay to Brexit until at least June.

Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty

Mr Lidington defended the Brexit secretary, saying: It was a free vote in that division yesterday. Now what happens this morning is that the entire cabinet has accepted the position that parliament voted for last night.

Ive been working very constructively with Steve Barclay since his appointment a couple of months ago, despite the fact that he and I were vigorously on opposite sides of the debate during the referendum, and were continuing to work very constructively together today and in the days to come.

Under the terms of the motion passed by MPs, the government will seek to delay Brexit until 30 June if the Commons approves a withdrawal agreement by 20 March.

If no exit plan is agreed by that date, however, it is likely to seek a much longer extension  possibly up to two years.

Ms May is expected to hold a third meaningful vote on her Brexit deal early next week before travelling to Brussels on Thursday for an EU summit, where she is likely to formally request the extension from EU leaders.
It would be better for Britain to leave the EU without a deal than to seek a long delay to its departure, the Brexit secretary has said.

Stephen Barclay said the UK "shouldn't be afraid" of a no-deal outcome, even after parliament to take the option off the table.

The Brexit secretary was one of seven cabinet ministers who on Thursday voted against a government motion proposing a delay to Brexit, despite the fact he had wrapped up the debate for the government and urged MPs to support the proposal.

His latest comments raise questions over his position in the cabinet if the government abides by parliament's decision to rule out no-deal.

Theresa May had given her MPs a free vote on the issue of a Brexit delay in order to avoid a mass rebellion, leading to dozens of ministers opposing her plan.

Explaining his decision to vote against the government, Mr Barclay told the BBC: "There were two parts of the motion: a short technical extension, which we need with a deal and we're pushing that, [but] that's separate from whether you just have a long extension rather than no deal.

"My views are long-standing: I support Brexit, this constituency voted in very large numbers for Brexit. We need a deal, we need to get that over the line, but if we don't have a deal then we should leave with no deal - that's always been my position and I voted as the constituency would expect me to do last night."

He added: "If we get the deal through, as I hope we still will, we will now need a short technical extension, but if not we shouldn't be afraid to leave with no deal."

Mr Barclay voted against Ms Mays motion despite having concluded the debate for the government and urged MPs to support the proposal.

He finished his speech to the Commons by saying: It is time for this House to act in the national interest, its time to put forward an extension that is realistic. I commend the motion put forward by the government to the House.

Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Show all 15 1 /15 Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Pork There will be tariffs on pork in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cheese There will be tariffs in place on some cheeses including 22.10/100kg of cheddar, 19.10/100kg of processed cheese and 18.60/100kg on some blue cheeses Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Milk There will be no tariffs in place on milk Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Car Parts There will be no tariffs on car parts imported from Europe PA Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Cars However finished cars will face tariffs of 10.6% Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Alcoholic drinks There will be no tariffs on alcoholic drinks - except on some rums due to ingredients used in their distilling process Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Beef There will be tariffs on beef in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fish There will be no tariffs on many types of fish including cod, haddock, salmon and sea bass Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Fruit and vegetables There will be no tariffs on almost all fruit and vegetables Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Chocolate There will be no tariffs on chocolate or other cocoa products Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Poultry There will be tariffs on poultry in order to protect British farmers Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Ceramics There will be some tariffs in place on ceramis Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Steel There will be no tariffs on steel Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Coal There will be no tariffs on coal Getty Tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit Lamb/Mutton There will be tariffs on the meat of sheep in order to protect British farmers Getty

The motion passed by MPs on Thursday says that, if a Brexit deal is approved by the Commons by 20 March, the government will ask the UK to delay Britain's departure until the end of June.

If no withdrawal agreement is approved, however, then the extension is likely to be much longer.

Any delay will need to be signed off by all of the other 27 EU member states, with talks likely to take place at a European Council summit in Brussels at the end of next week. 

Ms May is expected to hold a third meaningful vote on her Brexit deal early next week before travelling to Brussels on Thursday for the summit.
The UK governments no-deal Brexit tariff plan would be illegal under World Trade Organisation rules, the EU commissioner in charge of agriculture has said.

Phil Hogan characterised the British plan, which would see no duties levied on goods entering Northern Ireland across the border, as a political stunt, pure and simple.

Our initial assessment is that the proposal is illegal. It is not compatible with WTO rules and its the start of a process where theyll have to get approvals, he told reporters in Dublin.

If they want to operate on the basis of being in defiance of well-established WTO rules well then thats their decision. But ultimately that will not succeed because they will be taken to a panel of dispute settlement.

The commissioner, who is Irelands member on the EUs executive, added: I think the timing of it was unfortunate and it was a deliberate attempt to put Ireland more on the agenda, as if it wasnt on the agenda already.

He claimed that the stunt was an attempt by the UK to weaken the unity of the EU26 in relation to the Irish backstop.

The UK plan would mean that 82 per cent of imports from the EU would be tariff-free, down from 100 per cent now.

Imports from the rest of the world would be 92 per cent tariff-free, up from the current 56 per cent.

The WTOs most favoured nation rule, which the UK would have to follow after Brexit, means that countries must treat other WTO members equally in terms of tariffs and quotas, unless they have a recognised free trade agreement in place.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. 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In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. 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A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. 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The UK proposal would kick in if no deal is ratified between the EU and UK, and negotiations are not revoked or extended. If the withdrawal agreement is approved there will be a transition period under which the terms of trade do not change.
The DUPs opposition to Theresa Mays Brexit deal is a major problem for the prime minister.

While it only has 10 MPs  a tiny fraction of the 391 that voted against her deal this week  the Northern Irish partys position is seen as highly significant by many Tory Eurosceptics.

If the prime minister can get the DUP onside, dozens of Conservative MPs may well step into line and back Ms May too.
Balzac tried and failed. Zola knocked on the door dozens of times and was always refused. Verlaine got no votes. Hugo got in, barely, only after multiple tries.

The august Academie francaise  the elite club of 40 immortals, as the members are known, that serves as the official guardian of the French language  does not admit just anybody. So exclusive is it that most of Frances greatest writers never made it.

But the sacred job of protecting France from brainless Globish and the deadly snobbery of Anglo-American, as a member spat out in a speech last month, has rarely been more difficult to attain.

Four vacancies  lifelong tenures  have opened since December 2016. Three times they have voted, most recently in late January, and three times they have failed to achieve a majority.

The deadlock, some academy members say, reflects Frances own  between the proud, timeless France determined to preserve itself at all costs, and the France struggling to adapt to a 21st century defined by globalisation, migration and social upheaval, witnessed in the yellow vest revolt.

Yellow vest protests continue in France Show all 20 1 /20 Yellow vest protests continue in France Yellow vest protests continue in France Protesters wearing a yellow vest (gilet jaune) stand next to a burning barricade as they demonstrate against rising costs of living they blame on high taxes at the A9 highway toll of Le Boulou, southern France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France The "Yellow Vests" (Gilets Jaunes) movement in France originally started as a protest about planned fuel hikes but has morphed into a mass protest against President's policies and top-down style of governing AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AP Yellow vest protests continue in France AP Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France Reuters Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France AFP/Getty Yellow vest protests continue in France EPA

Were the reflection of the society, and its a society thats questioning itself, says Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-born novelist and a member of the academy.

Then there are those who grumble that, for a conservative institution rived by mutually hating factions, it is merely business as usual. The academy has been around since 1634, when it was founded by Cardinal Richelieu to promote and protect the French language, and it is not in any hurry.

We could fill all the seats tomorrow, says Dany Laferriere (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

The academy is an old lady, and very sensitive, says one of the newer members, Haitian-born Canadian writer Dany Laferriere.

Actually, it is mostly old white men. There are just five women among the members, and Laferriere is the only person of colour. The average age was well over 70 in a recent tally by the French media.

Whether the academy is struggling to update or diversify itself, or even wants to, is difficult to divine. The deliberations of its members, under the graceful 17th-century dome of the Institut de France, are swathed in mystery.

But the rejections are humiliatingly public: former education minister Luc Ferry saw his name in the headlines recently, and not in a good way. The vote on his membership was decisive. Ferry declined to comment.

Aside from renewing itself, the academys real business is updating the definitive dictionary of French, which it has been doing since the 17th century. So sacred is the task that the updates are published as an official government document.

Earlier this month, the members approved the feminisation of professional titles. It was a veritable breakthrough for an academy that has for years resisted the adaptation, which is already practiced widely in France, with or without the sanction of the immortals.

Language may change, and society, too, but slowly in the view of the academy.

The question is, should the academy guard its principles? Laferriere says. We could fill all the seats tomorrow.

That is not likely to happen. The academy chooses you, you do not choose the academy. Nonetheless, no one can become a member without writing a strongly worded letter soliciting a place.

Some French writers never bother, as is rumoured to be the case with some of the countrys best-known contemporary authors.

Neither of Frances two living Nobel literature laureates, Patrick Modiano and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, are members. Neither is Michel Houellebecq, reckoned to be among the most penetrating of all contemporary European novelists. Others are encouraged to apply, then lose the vote.

We are alarmed at not finding academiciens that are to the taste of the academy, Laferriere says.

But some members reject the argument that no upstanding defender of Frances language and cultural values can be found, and hint at a deeper crisis.

Its absurd, growls Jean-Marie Rouart, a critic and novelist who has been a member since 1997.

The real question, for some, is what the deadlock says about the beleaguered France of today.

Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and former president Valery Giscard dEstaing at a ceremony in 2016 (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

What was special about France is that everybody recognised themselves in literature, Rouart says. Now, youve got to write for the university, or this group, or that group. Its deplorable. People read more, yes, but what they read are idiocies. The academy is a boat adrift in a dry sea.

Of the inability to move forward, Dominique Bona, a novelist and one of the few women to sit among the immortals, says, Im a little bit astonished.

Weve had some remarkable candidates, real choices, Bona says. Im personally disappointed that the academy is giving them the cold shoulder. Is this a French malaise? The bad mood around us, is it communicating itself to the academy?

To be sure, the ceremonious world of the academy seems a universe away from Frances current yellow vest uprising, whose instincts tend more towards revolution than preservation.

In February, the academy members trooped down a wooden staircase of the Institut de France, the sharp drumbeats of the Republican Guard echoing through the marbled halls.

They were there to induct the newest member they could agree upon, novelist Patrick Grainville, an author of baroque fantasies.

Grainville took the seat of Alain Decaux, a journalist, historian and writer who died in March 2016. Generally, the academy waits a year after a death to announce a vacancy, and if a replacement receives a majority vote, a formal induction comes about a year later. Grainville was elected in March 2018.

Former president Valery Giscard dEstaing, 93, a member of the academy since 2003, gamely negotiated the stairs supported by two aides. The smartly dressed invited public were scattered amid uniformed academy members, resplendent in their green embroidered uniforms.

Their custom-made robes cost in the region of 40,000, members said, and the swords that are de rigueur for members are not cheap, either.

The induction ceremony for Grainville spoke to an eternal France faithfully devoted to celebrating words and their ecstatic usage.

Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest, Bona said, describing Grainvilles work in the traditional induction speech. You are, sir, a writer of jubilation.

There was no hint of the social upheaval that has torn France apart in recent months. As with other ceremonious and antiquated French institutions, the pomp provides its own justification, even for those who harbour reservations about it. The academy for them represents Frances consecration of its writers, a nearly unique national status.

It was the idea of getting on the magic merry-go-round, says sharp-witted novelist Charles Dantzig, who was encouraged to apply after winning the academys prize, and then lost in recent balloting.

It was the idea of protection, he says of the appeal of being a member. Illusory, no doubt.

Indeed, the unusual nature of the academys mission, in a world where much of what it celebrates is under siege, leaves some members pessimistic it can protect even itself.

French society: will it continue? Rouart asks.

Then he answers his own question. The bourgeoisie is dying, he grumbles. Before, you would see the academy members at dinner parties. Now there arent even dinner parties. Its finished.

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 New York Times
The pilot of an Ethiopian Airlines plane which crashed on Sunday, killing 157 people, reported a flight control problem within a minute of takeoff, according to air traffic communication records.

Controllers also observed that the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft was moving up and down by hundreds of feet and feared that something was wrong, a US media report said.

Three minutes into the flight, pilot Yared Getachew sent another message requesting permission to return to the airport, according to an anonymous source who spoke to The New York Times.

"Break break, request back to home," the captain reportedly told air traffic controllers in an anxious voice. "Request vector for landing."

At this point controllers realised that the aircraft was travelling at an unusually high speed.

Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Show all 15 1 /15 Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia People stand near collected debris at the crash site AFP/Getty Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia A man carries a piece of debris on his head at the crash site AFP/Getty Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Wreckage lies at the crash site of the Ethiopia Airlines Boeing 737 near Addis Ababa EPA Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Debris at the site of the crash near Addis Ababa Reuters Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia CEO of Ethiopia Airlines, Tewolde Gebremariam inspects the crash site AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Debris from the crashed aeroplane AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia UN staff observe a minutes silence for the victims of the plane crash. 19 UN workers were killed in the crash AFP/Getty Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 (ET-AVM), the same type of aircraft that crashed EPA Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Members of the search and rescue team work at the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Reuters Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia A boarding pass at the scene of the crash Reuters Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Rescuers remove body bags from the scene of the crash near Addis Ababa AP Plane crash kills 157 in Ethiopia Wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopia Airlines flight AP

Five minutes after the plane's departure, the controllers lost all contact with it, the Times report said.

The plane crashed near Addis Ababa just six minutes after leaving the airport, killing everyone on board.

The controllers feared there was an emergency before the first message arrived, according to the person who viewed the communications.

Investigators trying to determine the cause of the crash have recovered its black boxes, which contain more information about the flight's final moments. On Thursday the flight recorders arrived in France for analysis.

Countries around the world have grounded Boeing's 737 MAX jets while the investigation is carried out.

Boeing executives announced that they had paused delivery of the aircraft, although the company planned to continue building them while it weighed the effect of the grounding on production.

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When the US Federal Aviation Administration ordered the planes grounded on Wednesday it said regulators had new satellite evidence that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610.

That flight crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October last year, killing 189 people.

Additional reporting by agencies
More than 100 people have died in Mozambique and Malawi after weeks of floods in the region, worsened by a deadly tropical cyclone which made landfall in central Mozambique on Thursday night.

Heavy rain and wind travelling at speeds of up to 170 km an hour injured at least five people as cyclone Idai hit Beira, a major coastal city.

Images on social media and local television showed billboards and rooftops blown off, trees snapped and electricity cables left fallen in the city's streets.

The United Nations' humanitarian office said on Friday that electricity and communications in the city had been cut off by the cyclone.

The storm surge has also brought more floodwater to areas of Mozambique and Malwai which have seen scores of people killed and tens of thousands displaced in recent weeks

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The United Nations said more than 100 people had already died in weeks of heavy rain and flooding in Mozambique and Malawi.

A spokesperson said villages were left underwater and that floods had washed away houses and knocked out power in some areas.

Some villages in Mozambique's northern Zambezi province were left cut off by the storm surge and at least 500,000 people in Sofala province were left without electricity.

Almost 100,000 people have fled their homes across the two nations and humanitarian work is underway to assist them.

The South African weather service said the cyclone is now moving inland and is expected to weaken.

"Cyclone Idai made landfall at about midnight and is now lying north west off Beira," said senior forecaster Jan Vermeulen.

"We don't have any communications from the area.

"This is an intense tropical cyclone, and I think there's a lot of damage to infrastructure which is probably responsible for the loss in communications."

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Zimbabwe, which neighbours Mozambique, is bracing for the storm surge as it moves inland.

Additional reporting by agencies
In the two years since Donald Trump was sworn into office, US immigration enforcement has put courthouses in its crosshairs with a sweeping new effort to detain immigrants that advocates say puts victims of domestic violence  and faith in Americas judicial system  in danger.

In courthouses across the country, advocates say US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been keeping an eye out for undocumented immigrants showing up for a range of hearings, including cases where immigrants are seeking restraining orders or child support.

The efforts have led to a 17-fold surge in the number of immigration arrests in New York City courts alone, and raised concerns that vulnerable victims will fear an institution meant to level the playing field for families, women and workers seeking their fair due.

By targeting people in courts, theyre very deliberatively chilling access to justice, and very deliberately trying to intimidate immigrants, said Lee Wang, a senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Defence Centre, which compiled a recent report noting the spike in New York arrests.

Ms Wang and attorneys representing immigrants seeking justice in American courts described to The Independent a systemic targeting of courthouses since Mr Trump became president. And, in some cases, courthouse officers with no affiliation to Americas immigration enforcement were asked by ICE agents to notify them or help in the detention of immigrants, according to documents obtained by the news site Documented.

Its really easy for them to pick up people in courts. Its the lazy way for them to meet their quotas, Ms Wang said.

People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Show all 16 1 /16 People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Washington, DC, U.S., February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants AUSTIN, TX - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school student Kathia Suarez holds up a sign as she protests with others outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. LM Otero/AP People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school senior Vicky Sosa holds a sign outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. In an action called "A Day Without Immigrants," immigrants across the country are expected to stay home from school, work and close businesses to show how critical they are to the U.S. economy and way of life. LM Otero/AP

The Trump presidency has been marked by a renewed focus on immigration enforcement, with ICE agents wielding less discretion on which immigrants they target, regardless of criminal histories. The policies of the administration led last year, for instance, to a four-fold increase in the number of workplace raids across the country.

In making his case for a border wall along the US-Mexico border and broader detention instructions, the president has argued that immigrants are bringing drugs and criminals into the country.

But attorneys say that the targeting of courthouses is a violation of the American judicial institution, and puts vulnerable individuals at risk.

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Linda Lopez, the deputy director for the legal centre at Sanctuary for Families, said that she has encountered clients who are afraid to show up in court to fight for custody of their children from abusers, and for restraining orders.

One woman Ms Lopez worked with called her before her recent court date, she said, and requested that she meet her blocks away before a restraining order hearing so she would not be arrested by ICE agents who have reportedly been seen in courtrooms themselves in plainclothes, in the vestibules of courthouses, and outside of the buildings.

While the woman had good reasons to be in court that day  the man she wanted a restraining order against had been abusive to her while in a relationship only to begin stalking her when they separated, and visiting her childrens schools  she was worried her immigration status would get her deported if she fought for their safety in court.

Theres fear about accessing any system, Ms Lopez said of undocumented immigrants in America. But the fear strengthens, or is more profound, when there are mechanisms in the system to actually do what youre afraid of.

She added: Weve fought for the past 25 years to get the systems to be responsive and to now close the door on those systems, for ICE to be in those courtrooms, is really setting us back.

A request for comment was not returned by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 Donald Trump Jr says his family has lived an 'incredible immigrant story'

Evangeline Chan, the director at the Immigrant Law Project at Safe Horizon, said that the presence of ICE in courthouses has acted to give new power to abusers, with immigrant victims being less likely to seek help from the judicial system.

What it has really done, is really pushed our clients back into the shadows and made them afraid to come forward and exercise their rights, she said.

It has empowered abusers, because they can act with impunity.
On March 13, 2019, SABIC and hte extended plans for collaboration for five more years to increase efficiency through digitalization and high throughput technologies in catalysis research and development (R&D) in petrochemicals.

Dr. Fahad Al-Sherehy, Vice President, Technology & Innovation, SABIC and Dr. Wolfram Stichert, CEO at hte, celebrated the signing of the Umbrella Research Agreement at the 6th GPCA Research and Innovation Summit in Bahrain, held under the patronage of H.E. Shaikh Mohammed bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, Minister of Oil, Bahrain, where SABIC participated as the platinum sponsor.

The agreement stipulates that SABIC and hte will maintain the operation of SABICs satellite laboratory for high throughput experimentation in Heidelberg, Germany and will install and operate a new high throughput experimentation laboratory at SABICs Corporate R&D (CRD) site at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). With this partnership, hte will also support SABIC in digitalization in R&D.

Building on the previous successful collaboration, SABIC and hte are extending their strategic partnership to include fast-track catalysis R&D. Under the agreement, SABIC will continue operation of the SABIC satellite High Throughput Experimentation Lab, established in 2015 at htes facilities in Heidelberg. In addition, SABIC will have the opportunity to transfer htes institutional knowledge to its own corporate R&D center at KAUST in Saudi Arabia.

SABIC and hte will also set up a new high throughput experimentation laboratory based on the established satellite laboratory in Heidelberg. This center will provide access to the latest technology and expertise to accelerate innovation in petrochemicals. Its close proximity to commercial plants will enable SABIC to support and optimize plant operation and productivity more efficiently. The overall aim is to decrease time and costs for the development of new catalysts and petrochemical processes considerably, and ultimately, to reduce their time-to-market.

Commenting on the umbrella agreement, Dr. Al-Sherehy, confirmed that the partnership is in line with SABICs 2025 vision, addressing future R&D needs and local access to high-end solutions and technology. He stated, We are happy to continue our collaboration with hte, a leading provider of modern R&D solutions and technology. By introducing htes comprehensive, web-enabled data management solution myhte we also will address our goal to introduce digitalization in catalysis R&D. An innovative partner like hte will add value to our business in the long term, and this will significantly enhance our pace of innovation.

Dr. Wolfram Stichert, CEO at hte said, The commitment for further cooperation with SABIC will take our relationship to the next level. We are proud to be SABICs preferred R&D collaboration partner and to extend the footprint of our partnership into Saudi Arabia for the first time.

SABIC considers research and innovation to be a key pillar in the achievement of sustainable growth and competitiveness while considering the highest standards of safety, health, and environment, which set the groundwork for enabling Saudi Vision 2030.
Robert Mueller has revealed "several" investigations are still ongoing connected to the probe into Russia's interference in the 2016 election of Donald Trump, contradicting widespread reports the process had effectively been concluded.

In a filing with the US District Court in Washington, US Special Counsel Robert Mueller cited Mr Trump's former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates continued cooperation with multiple probes and asked permission to update the judge on the case again by May 14.

Gates continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations, and accordingly the parties do not believe it is appropriate to commence the sentencing process at this time, Mr Muellers team said in the court filing.

Gates is one of several advisers to the president who have been charged or pleaded guilty to crimes stemming from the federal investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and possible collusion with Mr Trumps campaign.

Gates was the longtime business partner of the president's campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who faces more than seven years in prison for financial and conspiracy crimes after sentencing this week in a separate case in federal court in Washington.

Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty

Unlike Manafort, who stood trial and was found guilty in one case in Virginia before pleading guilty in another case in Washington, Gates agreed early on to cooperate with Mr Muellers team and took the stand to testify against his former business partner.

Gates pleaded guilty in February 2018 to conspiracy against the United States and lying to investigators.

Recommended Trump tweets link to Islamophobic website amid New Zealand attack

Russia has denied meddling in the 2016 US election. Mr Trump has said there was no collusion between his campaign and Moscow, and has characterised the special counsel's probe as a witch hunt.

He once again lambasted the special counsels investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election on Twitter, suggesting it was created under shady circumstances.

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So, if there was knowingly & acknowledged to be zero crime when the Special Counsel was appointed, and if the appointment was made based on the Fake Dossier (paid for by Crooked Hillary) and now disgraced Andrew McCabe (he & all stated no crime), then the Special Counsel should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report," the president wrote. "This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win."

Additional reporting by Reuters
Donald Trump has said there should be no Mueller report in a series of tweets denouncing the special counsels investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

It was just the latest misleading tirade Mr Trump has launched in recent months as the special counsels investigation appears to come to a close.

Mr Trump tweeted on Friday morning: So, if there was knowingly & acknowledged to be zero crime when the special counsel was appointed, and if the appointment was made based on the Fake Dossier (paid for by Crooked Hillary) and now disgraced Andrew McCabe (he & all stated no crime), then the special counsel should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report.

This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win.

He added: THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!

Criminals who worked for Trump Show all 5 1 /5 Criminals who worked for Trump Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Cohen Former lawyer for Donald Trump was sentenced to three years in prison on counts involving evading income tax, false disclosure of the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and another hush money charge Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Paul Manafort Former campaign manager for Trump Manafort was found guilty in February 2018 of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The crimes occurred prior to his appointment in Trump's campaign Getty Criminals who worked for Trump George Papadopoulos Former Trump campaign adviser Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in October 2017. He had lied about making contact with a professor who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was sentenced to 14 days in jail Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Michael Flynn Former White House National Security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017. He had lied about conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador to the US during Trump's Presidential campaign. He was not given prison time due to his "significant assistance" to the Mueller investigation Getty Criminals who worked for Trump Rick Gates Deputy chairman of Trump's presidential campaign Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in February 2018 AFP/Getty

Since the special counsels appointment in May 2017, the president has repeatedly tried to undermine Mr Muellers work, casting the probe as a witch hunt and proclaiming there was NO COLLUSION with Russia.

Under Justice Department guidelines, Mr Mueller will produce a confidential report to attorney general William Barr that explains his decisions to pursue or decline prosecutions.

Recommended Trump tweets link to Islamophobic website amid New Zealand attack

Mr Barr will then prepare his own report that would be released to the US Congress. He has said he intends to share some information with the public, though its unclear whether the special counsels actual report will ever be made public.

Six of Mr Trumps aides or advisers have been charged in Mr Muellers investigation.

On Friday, six House Democratic committee heads called on Mr Barr to make the full report public, including any evidence of misconduct by the president.

The US House of Representatives also voted overwhelmingly across party lines for a resolution calling on the Justice Department to make the report public and available to Congress.

Mr Muellers team has been dwindling in recent weeks and lawyers from the US attorneys office in Washington were assigned to the criminal case of Mr Trump confidant Roger Stone since his arrest last month, which could be an indication the special counsel is planning to hand off the investigation.

The White House said the president will let the attorney general decide whether to release the findings of the Russia investigation to the public.

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White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said Mr Trump was following the proper process by leaving the decision to Mr Barr. But she stressed that the White House was not concerned about the findings.

Ms Sanders said Mr Trump was president because he was the better candidate, adding that he didnt need to, nor did he collude with the Russians.

Additional reporting by AP
Donald Trump has used his first veto as president to block a bill that would have prevented him building a border wall - claiming the country was facing an invasion of migrants.

In language designed to resonate with his supporters, the president claimed the bill passed by the House and Senate that would have overturned his declaration of a national emergency at the border, was reckless.

As president the protection of the nation is my highest duty. Yesterday, Congress passed a dangerous resolution that if signed into law would put countless Americans in danger, very grave danger, he said, seated behind his desk in the Oval Office. Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, and I have the duty to veto it.

He added: Were on track for a million people rushing our borders ... People hate the word invasion, but thats what it is.

Earlier this week, 12 Republicans had joined with Democrats to pass a measure 59-41 to rescind the national emergency declared by Mr Trump last month in a move widely seen as a means to circumnavigate a Congress that has rejected his demand for more than $8bn (6bn) in funding for a border wall.

Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Show all 20 1 /20 Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The prototypes for President Trumps border wall are being demolished. AP Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The US Customs and Border protection had built the eight 30-foot tall steel and concrete models near San Diego on the US-Mexico border. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office found that the construction challenges presented by the four concrete models would be extensive and those presented by two of the other models would be substantial. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California It was intended that Mr Trump would choose his favourite of the designs after testing had been completed. AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The President is yet to comment. AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Each prototype cost $300,000 to $500,000 to build and they are being knocked down in order to make way for the San Diego Secondary Wall project which will see up to 14 miles of barrier being built to support the existing steel border fence. AP Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The new barrier will not employ the design of any of the prototypes, instead being built of the favoured steel bollards which make up the current section of the wall at San Diego. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The new secondary barrier being built near San Diego. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California The rubble of one of the demolished prototypes. Reuters Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A steel wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A wall prototype made from a mix of steel and concrete AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A wall prototype made from a mix of steel and concrete AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A steel wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A concrete wall prototype AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California A digger approaches the prototype wall AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California Aerial view of the wall prototypes at the US-Mexico border after they were torn down AFP/Getty Trump prototypes for Mexico border wall demolished in California An aerial view showing Tijuana, Mexico on the left and the demolished wall prototypes on the right AFP/Getty

The House of Representatives has already passed the bill, and the president had indicted straight away he would make use of his veto powers for the time to block the measure. VETO,, he said on Twitter.

Flanked by vice president Mike Pence, attorney general William Barr and Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, the president claimed the bill he had been to sign into law was dangerous.

The president found himself facing considerable bipartisan criticism for last months declaration. Democrats said Mr Trump was lying for political gain when he claimed the situation at the border amounted to a national emergency.

 House of Representatives votes to block Trump's emergency declaration

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, resented what they considered presidential overreach and his attempt to take control of powers traditionally held by Congress to fund the government. Democrats responded to Mr Trumps move by announcing they would now try to overturn his veto.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House of Representatives would take up a resolution on March 25 seeking to override his actions.

On March 26, the House will once again act to protect our constitution and our democracy from the presidents emergency declaration by holding a vote to override his veto, she said.

While Mr Trump suffered several defeats on Capitol Hill this week, it is unclear whether Democrats can gather up the two-thirds majority required in both chambers of Congress to overturn the veto.

Reuters said the president expressed pride in the Republicans who did not vote to support the resolution and said later he had sympathy for those who defied him, adding they did what they had to do. The White House had lobbied heavily for Republicans to back Mr Trump,

Before the signing ceremony, Mr Trump had thanked those who supported him, but also raised a veiled threat against those who did not.

Id like to thank all of the Great Republican Senators who bravely voted for Strong Border Security and the WALL, Trump tweeted. This will help stop Crime, Human Trafficking, and Drugs entering our Country. Watch, when you get back to your State, they will LOVE you more than ever before!
The Japanese government will pay millions of yen to victims of a now-defunct state sterilisation programme modelled on the laws of Nazi Germany.

Payments of 3.2 million yen (21,600) will be made to survivors who underwent the procedures, regardless of whether they gave consent under a new deal.

A bill to approve compensation for victims in advance of several civil cases already progressing through the courts, is expected to be approved before the end of April.

Introduced in 1948 and modelled on similar laws in Nazi Germany, the policy saw people with learning difficulties, mental illness or physical disabilities sterilised.

The plan was carried out under the belief it would prevent the birth of inferior children during post-war food shortages.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. 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Around 25,000 people are thought to have undergone forced sterilisation before Japan abolished the rules in 1996.

However, lawyers for the victims said the pay-outs would not end the legal action and criticised the wording of the bill for not offering a formal apology to the individuals from the Japanese state.

Koji Niisato, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper he was disappointed at the amount of compensation being offered.

The individuals had their rights to decide to bear and raise children violated, so a one-time payment of 3.2 million yen will do nothing to recover the damage done, Mr Niisato told a press conference.

More than 20 individuals have filed lawsuits against the government over the forced sterilisation law, some seeking as much as 38.5m yen (260,000) in compensation.

I have suffered for 60 years, a 75-year-old man who had been forcibly castrated told the news conference. I want the government to apologise and admit that it was wrong.

Japan is not the only country that has been made to face up to grim revelations it had in the past conducted forced sterilisations.

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In 1997, records were uncovered showing Sweden sterilised 60,000 women between 1935 and 1976, some due to physical or mental disabilities, others because they were seen to be inferior racial types.

Many of the women were strong-armed into agreeing to the procedures under threat of losing children or benefits under the welfare system.

The Swedish government later passed legislation offering 175,000 krona (14,250) compensation to all victims of the programme.
The man arrested over the murder of 49 people at mosques in New Zealand is believed to have met extreme right-wing groups during a visit to Europe two years ago, according to security sources.

Investigators are looking at the international dimension of the massacre and whether the gunman, who has identified himself as Brenton Tarrant, has links with violent racist individuals and organisations in Europe and Asia.

Although the killings were described in the media as the work of a lone wolf, three people  two men and one woman  were held in custody. One suspect was released after being questioned by police yesterday.

Mr Tarrant, 28, who was born in Australia, live-streamed his killings of children, women and men at two mosques in a video which was posted on 8chan, an extreme right-wing forum from where it was widely disseminated.

In the footage, which he filmed using a head-mounted camera, the man divulged his racist and anti-immigrant views before opening fire on people at random.

Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' Show all 16 1 /16 Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 562600.bin REUTERS Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 562599.bin REUTERS Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 562598.bin AP Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 562597.bin GETTY IMAGES Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561983.bin Getty Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 562261.bin AP Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561923.bin REUTERS Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561921.bin GETTY IMAGES Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561882.bin GETTY IMAGES Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561982.bin Getty Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561985.bin Getty Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561986.bin Getty Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561987.bin Getty Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561988.bin Getty Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561984.bin Getty Christchurch left devastated on New Zealand's 'darkest day' 561981.bin Getty

He appeared in Christchurch District Court on Saturday.

On Friday evening the first victim of the attack was named by his family  Daoud Nabi was killed at Al Noor mosque. He was shot as he tried to shield another worshipper from the gunman, according to NBC News.

Witnesses described seeing bodies and blood everywhere following the attack at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch at about 01:45 local time (12:45 GMT).

A search of a property in Dunedin, around 200 miles to the south, was carried out by police.

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern described the atrocity as a terrorist attack and one of New Zealands darkest days.

She told a press conference yesterday that the suspected killer had five firearms, adding that two semi-automatic weapons, two shotguns and a lever-action firearm were found. The attacker had obtained a gun licence in November 2017.

Ms Arden said: Our gun laws will change.

Security remains tight across Christchurch. All mosques in New Zealand have been closed.

Those affected in the attack include citizens from Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Ms Ardern added that none of those arrested had a criminal record and were not on any watch lists.

Greg Robertson, chief of surgery at the Canterbury District Health Board, said 11 people remain critically ill.

A two-year-old boy is among the 39 people being treated at Christchurch Hospital, Mr Robertson said. A 13-year-old boy was also wounded in the attack, he said. They are among 39 victims being treated at the facility.

The gunman listened, while driving to carry out the attack, to a song from a Serbian nationalist video made in 1995 during the war with Bosnian Muslim forces. The lyrics praised the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was subsequently convicted of genocide and war crimes.

Names of men convicted of murdering Muslims and Jews in Europe were found written on the weaponry carried by Mr Tarrant.

People outside the mosque speak on their phones after the attack (AP)

There was also the words for Rotherham  referring to the child abuse scandal in the English city, as well references to historic battles between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Requests for information about the gunman by the intelligence agencies of New Zealand and Australia to foreign counterparts has led to the tracing of a man using that name visiting Europe, as well as the Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, bordering Kashmir, the Wakhan Corridor into Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang region of China.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush The person who was detained was not willing to be arrested, he said, adding that he listened to live audio of it taking place.

An extra 125 police officers have moved into Christchurch to assist with keeping the city safe, he said.

In a 16,500 word document in which he explains why he carried out the murders, Mr Tarrant says he began planning his operation after a visit to Europe in 2017 and refers to a lorry attack in Sweden by an Isis supporter, the election in France of Emmanuel Macron, who defeated the National Front, and racial mixture in France.

However, while espousing white supremacist ideology, he praised non-diverse nations saying China was the ideal state in following this policy. He is also said to have praised Chinese monoculturalism to acquaintances.

World leaders paid their respects: Theresa May offered her deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand. The former US president Barack Obama said: Michelle and I send our condolences to the people of New Zealand. We grieve with you and the Muslim community. All of us must stand against hatred in all its forms.

US President Donald Trump offered his warmest sympathy and best wishes to New Zealand. The US stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all! he wrote.
An Australian politician has sparked outrage after blaming immigration for a terror attack at two mosques in New Zealand.

While he said he was utterly opposed to any form of violence, independent Queensland senator Fraser Anning claimed what it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence.

He added in a statement: As always, left-wing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of todays shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views but this is all cliched nonsense.

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration programme which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.

Senator Anning also claimed that while Muslims may have been the victims today, usually they are the perpetrators.

At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Show all 17 1 /17 At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Paramedics assist a man wounded in the shootings EPA At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Bloodied bandages lie on the road following the shootings EPA At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Police officers console a man at the scene of the shootings AP At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks at a press conference following the shootings Getty At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Masjid Al Noor mosque on Deans Avenue in Christchurch, the scene of the first shooting EPA At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack A tribute left near the Linwood Masjid mosque. The letter reads: thinking of everyone on this most tragic of days. We are neighbours & community here in Linwood & our hearts are with you Getty At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Armed police stand at the scene of the attack AFP/Getty At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack A forensic official works at the scene AFP/Getty At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack A car damaged in the shooting AFP/Getty At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Armed police stand at the scene of the attack Getty At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack A survivor stands outside Christchurch hospital Getty At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Emergency responders help a wounded man at the scene of the shooting at a mosque in Christchurch AP At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack People wait near the scene of the shootings AP At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Paramedics help a wounded man at the scene of the shooting at a mosque in Christchurch AP At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Members of the Armed Offenders Squad push back members of the public at the scene EPA At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack Ambulances at the scene of the shootings AP At least 49 killed in New Zealand terror attack New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks at a press conference following the shootings Getty

A gunman broadcast live footage on Facebook of the attack on one mosque in the city of Christchurch, after publishing a manifesto in which he denounced immigrants.

Police declared a critical incident after the initial, deadliest attack began at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Deans Avenue  where up to 500 people are thought to have been worshipping  and warned residents an active shooter was in the area.

A second shooting then took place at a mosque on Linwood Avenue. Police urged mosques across the country to close their doors and worshippers to stay away.

Recommended At least 49 dead in shooting at mosques in New Zealand

Prime minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealand had been placed on its highest security threat level, and that three men and one woman, who held extremist views but had not been on any police watchlists, were in police custody.

She added that it was clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack.

Police commissioner Mike Bush confirmed one man in his late twenties has been charged with murder.
Police in Slovakia have charged a man with ordering the murder of an investigative reporter and his fiancee, in a case that triggered the resignation of the countrys prime minister.

Special prosecutors investigating the death of Jan Kuciak named the suspect only as Marian K during a televised news conference in Bratislava.

Newspapers Hospodarske Noviny and Dennik N, without citing sources, identified the man as politically connected businessman Marian Kocner, who had previously been a subject of Kuciaks reporting.

At the time of his death, the 27-year-old had been investigating Mr Kocners business activities, as well as alleged links between Slovak politicians and the Italian Mafia.

Mr Kocner has previously denied having any connection to the Kuciaks killing.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Months before his death, Kuciak told police the businessman had threatened to start collecting information on him and his family, but officers took no action at the time.

Prosecutors, who could not be identified and whose faces were hidden from television cameras, neither confirmed nor denied the two newspapers information during the news conference.

A lawyer for Mr Kocner, who is already in custody on unrelated charges of forgery, did not reply to requests for comment.

Police arrested four other people in September, including a woman identified only by her initials AZ, who was also charged with ordering Kuciaks killing.

Media have identified her as Alena Zsuzsova. She has denied any wrongdoing.

One of the suspects has cooperated with investigators but his testimony was not the only thing that led to Thursdays charges, prosecutors said.

The motive for the murder was Kuciaks work as a journalist. The investigator [has based the charge] on objective evidence that cant be specified at the moment, one said.

Ms Zsuzsova was never a target of Kuciaks reportage but Slovak media have reported that she had business ties to Mr Kocner.

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Kuciak reported on fraud cases involving politically connected businessmen before he was found shot dead at home alongside his fiancee, Martina Kusnirova, in February 2018.

The murders stoked public anger over perceived corruption in Slovakia, leading to the biggest protests since communism ended three decades earlier.

Amid that unrest, Robert Fico resigned as prime minister, a post he had held for 10 of the previous 12 years. His government has stayed in power but the ruling party has weakened in polls.

Additional reporting by Reuters
Algerians flooded the streets on Friday for the first major protest against the the ailing president since he announced he would not seek a sixth tern.

On Monday, wheelchair-bound Abdelaziz Bouteflika cancelled elections originally slated for 18 April, and vowed to hand power to a successor once a new constitution was written  a process that extends his mandate to rule into 2020.

But the gambit failed as hundreds of thousands of protesters came out in their droves in Algiers, in what some news outlets called the largest protests against his rule so far.

Many say they have been betrayed before by Mr Bouteflikas unmet promises to hand power over.

They were also encouraged to demand more change following apparent defections within his ruling National Liberation Front, or FLN  the organisation that fought France for the countrys 1962 independence.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The authentic FLN supports the protest movement, and considers the popular movement to be a true opportunity, Hocine Kheldoun, a former member of the FLN leadership, said on the privately owned Ennahar network on Thursday.

The protest movement is also moral support that liberated many members of the FLN leadership who have been marginalised and excluded and stayed at home suffering in silence, as they followed what has been going on for years.

Recommended Abdelaziz Bouteflika has turned Algeria into a necrocracy

Algerias elite is comprised of rival cliques of security officials and business leaders divvying up the countrys hydrocarbon wealth with little accountability.

Many consider Mr Bouteflika, who hasnt delivered a public speech since a 2013 stroke, a mere front man for that collection of shadowy special interests.

Mr Kheldoun described the FLN as a facade for the regime.

Mr Bouteflikas newly appointed prime minister, Noureddine Bedoui, welcomed the opposition to join with the government to shape political change. But the protest movement is mostly leaderless, though Algeria has well-organised opposition political parties.

The Friday protests suggest Mr Bouteflikas dramatic announcements have failed to slow the momentum of the protest movement, led by young people but drawing Algerians of all walks of life, including families with their children.

Even police officers appeared to join the protests in Algiers, holding up a sign against Mr Bouteflika, largely seen as a symbol of the countrys stagnancy.

Those who think we are tired are wrong, said Madjid Benzida, 37, a physician, was quoted as saying by Reuters. Our protests will not stop.
France has repatriated several young children from camps in northern Syria, a move which could set a precedent for other European countries whose citizens are also stuck there.

The five children were either orphans or separated from their parents in displacement camps, which are home to tens of thousands of Isis families who fled the terror groups shrinking territory over the past few months.

The French foreign ministry said most of the children were under the age of five, while not detailing their links to France. It reiterated that it would not bring back any French adults detained in Syria on suspicion of being Isis members.

The move comes as Western nations are struggling to decide what to do with their citizens who went to Syria to join Isis.

Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Show all 14 1 /14 Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Trucks full of women and children arrive from the last Isis-held areas in Deir ez-Zor, Syria Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Zikia Ibrahim, 28, with her two-year-old son and 8-month-old daughter, after fleeing the Isis caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Men who fled the last Isis-held area of Syria line up to be questioned by American and Kurdish intelligence officials Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate A young girl pulls her belongings after arriving Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate An SDF fighter hands out bread to women and children after they arrive Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Sita Ghazzar, 70, after fleeing from the last Isis-held territory in Syria Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate A family from Russia who recently fled the last Isis-held area of Syria Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent Syria at war: Fleeing the caliphate Richard Hall/The Independent

There are believed to be more than 800 European citizens currently detained in Syria on suspicion of fighting for the terror group, and an unknown number of women and children family members.

The fate of Shamima Begum, a 19-year-old British woman who left the UK to join Isis four years ago, has been hotly debated over the past few weeks.

The death of Ms Begums three-week old baby last week sparked criticism of the British governments refusal to repatriate any of its citizens, including children, from camps where nearly 100 infants have perished in the last few months.

In the aftermath of the death, foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was too dangerous for UK officials to travel to the camps where they were being held.

"We have to think about the safety of the British officials that I would send into that war zone as a representative of the government", he said.

Those camps, which are visited regularly by journalists and aid groups, have been overwhelmed as more and more flee the last remaining areas of Isis. More than 62,000 are now living in al-Hol camp, surpassing its capacity and leaving thousands sleeping out in the cold.

The Independent understands there are around seven other British women in the camp, and as many as 20 children.

Thousands of men and women left Europe to join the Isis caliphate when it was declared in 2014.

At that time, it stretched across two countries over thousands of miles, but over the past few months its territory has been reduced to a tiny pocket in eastern Syria. All but a few hundred of its former members have been killed or ended up in the custody of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, as have their families.

The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has previously said that he would move to block any British citizen suspected of joining Isis from returning.

Mr Javid said of Ms Begums case: My message is clear: if you have supported terrorist organisations abroad I will not hesitate to prevent your return.
Israels ex-army chief  and frontrunner in the countrys upcoming elections  dismissed claims Iran stole a sex tape in a cyber-attack on his phone, calling the reports political spin.

Benny Gantz denied he was compromised by the Iranian phone hacking incident that Israels internal intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, revealed to him a month ago.

The former general instead hinted supporters of incumbent prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have been behind rumours that a sex tape was among the embarrassing material extracted from Mr Gantz's personal device.

Details of the security breach were leaked to Israeli network Channel 12 on Thursday night.

I'm not under threat of extortion, there is much more serious problem here than [my] phone. Somebody is making a spin here, making a big problem out of what doesnt exist, he said Friday afternoon.

Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Show all 10 1 /10 Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters burn tires during a demonstration on the Israel border on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters run through smoke from tear gas and burning tires during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters climb the fence along the border with Israel during a demonstration AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters holding national flags walk past burning tires during a demonstration on the Israel border AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester wears a head band as he takes part in a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel, east of Gaza City on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters and a medic run to pick up a child during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters run through smoke from tear gas and burning tires during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A man carries the Palestinian flag during a demonstration near the border fence with Israel AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester wears a mask painted in the colours of the national flag during a demonstration on the Israel border AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester returns a tear gas canister thrown by Israeli troops during a demonstration on the border AFP/Getty

He was speaking on the Gaza border at a special press conference to discuss the security situation after two rockets targeted Tel Aviv the night before.

The telephone is nothing. There is nothing about me. It is petty gossip, he added.

Lt. Gen Gantz, who is head of the centrist Blue and White party, had earlier said on Twitter there was no security information or embarrassing videos on the targeted phone.

Channel 12 reported that intelligence officials informed the former chief-of-staff of the security breach in February, as he launched a new joint elections alliance and a bid for the premiership.

The intelligence officials allegedly told him it meant Tehran had access to all information stored on his personal phone, including photos and videos.

They apparently said it made him a potential security risk as the information could be used to tamper with the election process.

Recommended Israel pounds Gaza with airstrikes after rocket fire targets Tel Aviv

Commentators in Israeli media on Friday questioned how secure the 9 April elections would be if Iran knew personal details of one of the main contenders.

Lt. Gen. Gantz said the leaks were intended to distract the nation from the worsening security situation.

Many feared Israel and Gaza were on the brink of another war on Thursday night, when two long-range rockets fired from Gaza reached as far as south Tel Aviv.

Hamas, the militant group that runs the strip, denied any responsibility for the rocket attack, which Israeli intelligence officials said may have been fired by low-ranking Hamas without official authorisation.

Israel responded by pounding a hundred targets within Gaza. Egyptian officials, who were in the enclave at the time of Thursdays assault on Tel Aviv, stepped in to broker another ceasefire, which tentatively holds.

Lt. Gen Gantz urged on Friday strict, stern and continuous policy" against Hamas.

His Blue and White Party, which is pitted to sweep the largest number of seats in the elections, also questioned the timing of the security breach leak.

It should be emphasised that this event took place 4 years after Benny Gantz completed his service as Chief of Staff and therefore raises important questions as to the specific timing of publication of this news item, they said in a statement.

In January, Shin Bet head Nadav Argaman warned that a foreign country intended to intervene in Israel's upcoming election via hackers and cyber-technology.

Mr Argaman said at the time it remained unclear what the foreign nation's political interests were but that "it will meddle  and I know what I'm talking about."

This would not be the first Iranian cyber-attack on Israel.

I am not under threat of extortion Benny Gantz, head of the Blue and White party

During Israels military incursion in Gaza in 2014 Israeli cyber-defence officials reported a widespread cyber attack, including attempts to target governmental agencies, financial services and military agencies.

Iranian hackers were believed to be behind many of them.

Mr Netanyahu hopes to win the elections, securing him a fourth consecutive term in office.

However, the embattled premier is campaigning under the shadow of possible indictment on corruption charges.
Israel pounded Gaza with airstrikes on 100 locations on Friday after militants fired two rockets towards Tel Aviv.

No damage or injuries were reported in Tel Aviv but the rare long-range attack on Thursday night sparked fears of another war just weeks ahead of a general election in Israel. It was the first time Tel Aviv has been hit since the 2014 Gaza conflict.

The rockets triggered sirens in Israels bustling commercial capital, which lies some 80km north of Gaza and is rarely affected by cross-border fire.

In retaliation on Friday morning, Israeli fighter jets struck areas controlled by Hamas across Gaza, injuring two people. It prompted a slew of rockets back into Israel, most of which were intercepted by its powerful Iron Dome missile defence system.

Past elections have also been preceded by Israeli military incursions in the Gaza Strip.

[Israeli] fighter jets, attack helicopters and other aircraft struck approximately 100 military targets belonging to the Hamas, the Israeli army said in a statement.

It added that it holds Hamas responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip and emanating from it.

Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Show all 10 1 /10 Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters burn tires during a demonstration on the Israel border on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters run through smoke from tear gas and burning tires during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters climb the fence along the border with Israel during a demonstration AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters holding national flags walk past burning tires during a demonstration on the Israel border AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester wears a head band as he takes part in a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel, east of Gaza City on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters and a medic run to pick up a child during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters run through smoke from tear gas and burning tires during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A man carries the Palestinian flag during a demonstration near the border fence with Israel AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester wears a mask painted in the colours of the national flag during a demonstration on the Israel border AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester returns a tear gas canister thrown by Israeli troops during a demonstration on the border AFP/Getty

In Gaza, the health ministry reported that a man and a woman were injured by an airstrike that hit Rafah, a town near the border with Egypt.

Hamas denied they were behind the Tel Aviv attack, saying the rockets were fired at a time when their officials were meeting an Egyptian security delegation to discuss arrangements for the Strip.

Islamic Jihad, another powerful armed faction in Gaza, also denied responsibility and later said they would hold fire if Israel did.

Palestinian families reported heavy fire throughout the early morning and posted photos showing explosions from airstrikes lighting up the sky.

We were shaken awake by the bombing, our house was rocking, Haneen Owda, 26, who lives in north Gaza, told The Independent.

It has been intense all morning, she added.

Organisers of the weekly Great March of Return protests along the Gaza border fence with Israel, meanwhile, cancelled planned Friday rallies due to the airstrikes.

The protests, calling for the right of Palestinians to return to land they were forced from or fled during the creation of Israel, often see Palestinians launch incendiary kites and balloons tied with explosives at Israel.

Israeli military forces have faced accusations by the United Nations of committing possible war crimes for firing back  killing nearly 200 people and injuring thousands.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels prime minister, met security officials in the countrys military headquarters in Tel Aviv following the rocket fire on Thursday.

Ronen Manelis, the Israeli armys chief spokesperson, said officials had no prior warning of the attack and were trying to pinpoint who was responsible.

The Israeli army later released a statement saying Hamas was responsible and posted footage of the attacks aftermath on its official Twitter account.

Army intelligence officials later told The Times of Israel news website that the rockets were fired towards Tel Aviv by mistake.

Low-level Hamas forces are believed to have been responsible for the launches, the official said.

Egyptian mediators had been in Gaza, trying to hammer out details of an agreement between militants and Israel. They stepped out again on Friday to broker a ceasefire and together with the United Nations were in contact with both sides to prevent the situation from spinning out of control, a source with knowledge of the discussions said.

Ron Huldai, Tel Avivs mayor, ordered city officials to open public air raid shelters, but otherwise encouraged residents to proceed normally.

Continue life as usual, Mr Huldai told Channel 10 TV. Be calm, but be alert.

Mr Netanyahu has in recent months urged restraint but is facing mounting pressure from across the political divide to launch a full military operation in Gaza.

Naftali Bennett, Israels hardline education minister and a powerful coalition partner, called for uncompromising pursuit and systematic neutralisation of Hamas leaders.

Regardless who is behind the firing tonight, Hamas bears responsibility, he said in a statement.

Anyone who shows restraint to missiles on Sderot [southern Israel] will get missiles on Tel Aviv. The time has come to defeat Hamas once and for all. I call upon the Prime Minister to instruct the [army] to present the Security Cabinet with a plan to defeat Hamas.

Smoke and flames are seen during an Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Friday (Mohammed Salem/Reuters) (Mohammed Salem / Reuters)

Benny Gantz, Israels ex-army chief and Mr Netanyahus chief challenger in the upcoming polls, also urged action.

He called for a significant and severe response adding that otherwise it would be impossible to renew our deterrence.

Israels embattled prime minister is hoping to be elected for a fourth consecutive term in office, which would make him the longest-serving premier in Israels history. But he is running under the shadow of possible indictment on corruption charges.

He issued a warning to Hamas earlier this week, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to pursue a wide-ranging operation in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

I suggest to Hamas, dont count on it, he said. We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general.
Israel has launched air strikes in Gaza after militants in the territory fired two rockets towards Tel Aviv late on Thursday evening, the Israeli military confirmed.

No damage or injuries were reported in Tel Aviv but the escalation in hostilities raises the likelihood of a harsh Israeli reprisal.

It remains unclear which group was responsible for the rocket fire.

Hamas, the militant group which controls Gaza, denied involvement in the attack, as did Islamic Jihad, an Iranian-backed armed organisation which also possesses a formidable rocket arsenal.

It is the first time that Tel Aviv has been targeted with rocket fire since the 2014 war fought between Israels military and Gazas militants.

Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Show all 10 1 /10 Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters burn tires during a demonstration on the Israel border on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters run through smoke from tear gas and burning tires during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters climb the fence along the border with Israel during a demonstration AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters holding national flags walk past burning tires during a demonstration on the Israel border AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester wears a head band as he takes part in a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel, east of Gaza City on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters and a medic run to pick up a child during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border Palestinian protesters run through smoke from tear gas and burning tires during a demonstration near the fence along the border with Israel on February 22 2019 AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A man carries the Palestinian flag during a demonstration near the border fence with Israel AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester wears a mask painted in the colours of the national flag during a demonstration on the Israel border AFP/Getty Palestinian protesters light fires along the Israel border A Palestinian protester returns a tear gas canister thrown by Israeli troops during a demonstration on the border AFP/Getty

Palestinian witnesses said Israeli planes bombed two Hamas security positions in the south and north of the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military confirmed that it was attacking what it called terror sites in Gaza.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels prime minister, visited the countrys military headquarters in Tel Aviv following the rocket fire.

Ronen Manelis, the Israeli armys chief spokesman, said officials had no prior warning of the rocket attack and were trying to pinpoint who was responsible.

The Israeli Defence Forces posted video footage of the attacks aftermath on its official Twitter account.

The country holds Hamas responsible for all missile fired out of the territory.

Ron Huldai, Tel Avivs mayor, ordered city officials to open public air raid shelters but otherwise encouraged residents to proceed normally.

Continue life as usual, Mr Huldai told Channel 10 TV. Be calm, but be alert.

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border.

Egyptian mediators had been in Gaza, trying to broker a cease-fire between militants and Israel but local media said they had now left the territory.

Regardless who is behind the firing tonight, Hamas bears responsibility, Naftali Bennett, Israels education minister, said.

In the past year I have said clearly that those who are lenient towards fire-starting kite launchers will get missiles. And anyone who shows restraint to missiles on Sderot, will get missiles on Tel Aviv.

The time has come to defeat Hamas once and for all.

Mr Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas earlier this week, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

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I suggest to Hamas, dont count on it, he said. We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general.

Additional reporting by agencies
There is something uniquely terrifying about finding fresh lion tracks while walking in the bush. Everything gets very quiet. Each rustle of foliage sends crackles of adrenalin darting throughout your body; each sound carried by the soft breeze makes sweat needle in your armpits, the crook of your elbows, the small of your back.

Im on foot in the Maasai Mara, where Im spending four days traversing four different conservancies using just my legs as part of Asilias new Adventures offering. There are no vehicles. No luxury bush breakfasts. Instead, Ive been walking for up to seven hours a day in the oven-like African heat, camping alongside riverbeds, in dense tangled forest and, at one point, in marshy swampland filled with boisterously loud toads.

My guide is Roelof Schutte  an Afrikaner with icy, wolf-like eyes and the ability to make aardvark dung just as exciting as a coalition of hungry cheetah on the prowl  and were joined by Rakita Shololo, an elderly Maasai (he estimates hes somewhere in his mid-to-late-seventies) with a face gullied by deep wrinkles and a gentle, calming demeanour. Rakitas from the hunter-gather Dorobo tribe, who are best known for strolling up to huge prides of lions and stealing their kills from fresh under their noses (YouTube it. Seriously.) Im in good hands, thats for sure, but fresh pug marks in the mud mean everyone is on high alert.

On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Show all 15 1 /15 On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Sunrise over the conservancy On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Walking safari On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Cheetahs at Naboisho Camp On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara Sundowners at Naboisho Camp On a walking safari in Kenya's Maasai Mara A starry night at Naboisho Camp

Suddenly, a burst of cinnamon fur explodes from the thicket beside us. Lioness! On the hunt! hisses Roelof, and gestures for me to duck down behind a dead acacia tree. Rakita is just ahead of us, about 10m from the lion, who is now stalking an impala heading straight in our direction. She sees us and freezes. Slowly, Rakita gets to his knees and lowers his whole body so he is lying flat on the ground. The two eye one another as I peer through the desiccated branches. The lion cocks her head; I notice teats swinging heavy and bloated below her body. It dawns on us: shes got cubs. And as we all know, nothings fiercer than a mother protecting her children.

Spot lions in Kenyas Maasai Mara (Asilia)

Lions have been something of a theme for our trek, which has taken us straight into the path of some of Africas most dangerous animals. Weve had huge prides surrounding our camp in the dead of night, roaring to one another as we set out each morning under the swell of bruise-coloured clouds. Weve even seen them devouring wildebeest carcasses, blood spilling on the horizon as we look on goggle-eyed through our binoculars. Thankfully, this particular female doesnt seem to fancy taking on three human beings today, and she turns and skulks deftly back into the bush.

Surveying the plains (Asilia)

Ill be honest. Id always thought of walking safaris as short pockets of terror that punctuate the more relaxing game drives offered by most camps. But spending so much time out in this incredible landscape is beginning to rewire my thinking. Each day, as we strike out across vast, open plains pockmarked with wild fig trees, we startle hyenas out of their sleeping spots. Wildebeest grunt, belch and even give birth around us, and tiny bat-eared foxes poke their heads out of their dens as we pass. As we push through thorny acacia groves and sweep through leafy valleys, we scour the trees for old leopard kills and keep our eyes peeled for the huge horns of a lone male buffalo (definitely the biggest danger to us) rising up out of the long, thick grass.

On two feet, find giraffes... (Asilia)

Spending time with elephants on foot is, it turns out, a peacefully poetic thing. As is watching two young male giraffes fight gently with their necks (a behaviour they would most surely have abandoned if we pulled up next to them in a noisy vehicle). Whats not quite so relaxing is walking straight into a wallowing hippo  the only option when that happens is to beat a hasty retreat and hope it hasnt seen you.

Rakita carries only a rungu (a wooden throwing baton) and a large seme knife tucked into a battered leather scabbard at his waist. Roelof, on the other hand, is armed with a precautionary heavy duty rifle. But Im reassured to hear he has only ever had to fire it once  a warning shot over the head of a huge matriarch elephant that was charging resolutely in his direction.

...and more giraffes (Asilia)

But this safari is not all about the big creatures. As we walk, Roelof points out mouse highways and piles of elephant dung that have been pillaged by hungry baboons and frenzied mongooses. While resting our blistered feet, we gaze down upon termite mounds being raided by armies of solider ants  tiny cities under siege. Rakita plucks sour plums from the bushes, presenting them to us like jewels, and we spend quiet moments pondering tiny terrapins floating in just-filled puddles. If this isnt mindfulness, I dont know what is.

Each day as I pause to catch my breath (which is often), I let the sounds of the bush wash over me: spider-hunting wasps that sound like heavy duty cargo helicopters as they pass; noisy thick-knee birds whose chirps sound like the wheeze of a rundown car battery. At night, the rains that fall from raven-black clouds pummel my tent like a thousand tiny fists. Thunder rolls around the valley like steel drums, and sheets of lightening illuminate the vast, eerie landscape.

Watching hippos wallow (Asilia)

But the most invigorating aspects of my walk are not the knee-deep river crossings or the close calls with big cats. Instead, its the visits we make to some of the conservation projects working in and around the Mara. When we drop into the Mara Elephant Project, muddied and sweat-soaked, we learn about new tracking technologies being implemented to prevent human/wildlife conflict. Were shown rusty piles of snares and spears used to persecute these animals, and try  with a wheeze of lungs  to lift huge elephant-tracking collars above our heads. A trip to the Mara Predator Conservation Programme HQ shows us how each individual lion in the Mara is IDd by its whisker spots, and how gaining the trust of the surrounding communities is crucial in conserving this fragile land and the animals that thrive here.

A walking safari also means protecting the land (Asilia)

Because we are, of course, on someone elses land. Many of the conservancies that orbit the world-famous Maasai Mara National Reserve  such as the Naboisho, Mara North, Lemek and Ol Chorro conservancies Ive trekked through  work in tandem with the local people. In many of these conservancies, tourism companies rent the land off these rightful owners, meaning they can still keep cattle, they dont lose access to their own property and they are given a monthly income. Its a conservation model thats flourishing, and one we bear in mind constantly while out on foot. When we walk, we dont leave tyre tracks, we dont burn diesel, we dont make noise, says Roelof. Hes right. I dont think Ive ever felt more immersed in a single environment on any of my travels. And knowing were protecting it by covering it on foot is even more rewarding.

Sunrise over the Mara conservancy (Asilia)

Im left feeling sunburnt, soggy and, as hackneyed as it sounds, humbled by the trip Ive just taken. When it comes to safaris, it really doesnt matter whether youve got a fancy lodge with a private plunge pool. Who cares about wifi on tap and state-of-the-art Land Rovers? Get out on foot and youll feel like youve really got under the surface of this remarkable landscape.

Travel essentials

Africa Odyssey offers Asilias Mara conservancies walking safari from 4,480 per person, based on four people travelling inclusive of an overnight in Nairobi, as well as transfers, internal flights and international flights.

Kenya Airways operates daily flights to Nairobi from London Heathrow from 462.
As millennials we have known nothing but his regime.

Djamila speaks for a generation, and she also speaks for a gathering sense of outrage. Protests in Algeria have been rare throughout the 20-year rule of Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and even rarer are they tolerated. After the president announced his candidacy for a fifth term on 10 February, demonstrations snowballed across the country and beyond.

Djamila was at a protest in Londons Trafalgar Square last Saturday, joining more than 1000 fellow Algerians. One month ago, if you criticised Bouteflika, people would hush you. It was taboo, she said then. Now, if you speak in support for him, people will hush you. Finally, the wall of fear has been broken.

On Monday evening, Algerian protestors had some news to digest. President Bouteflikas office announced that the 18 April elections would be postponed, and that he would not run for a fifth term.

People in Algeria celebrated in the streets, but amid the hope there was a large dose of pessimism. Twitter commentators like Said Touama warned his Algerian friends Bouteflikas renouncement is a trap. No fifth term means a fourth term could be extended to an indefinite date. We dont know the exact postponed date of these presidential elections.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. 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In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. 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Djamila, a PhD student, told me on Tuesday that her concern was that Bouteflika had used a mechanism to delay the vote, which cited imminent danger to [Algerias] institutions, to its independence or to its territorial integrity.

Bouteflikas endgame remains unclear, but the protests have momentum. Last Saturdays in central London was the third in a row, with numbers building as UK-based Algerians coordinated on Facebook to show solidarity with those back home. The new generation has grown impatient with its ailing ruler, who has been in power since 1999, after a horrifying civil war known as the black decade which saw the Islamist FIS ousted by a military junta.

Djamilas friend Fatima had travelled even further to join the protest, taking the train from York where she is reading Womens Studies. She is adamant that women need to be fully involved in the process of reforming institutions, and complains that the female ministers currently elected have failed to support womens interests.

Fatima is researching female vloggers from Algeria, who, as she explains, against all odds, are being outspoken in a society where women are not encouraged to speak out in the same way as men.

Recommended Abdelaziz Bouteflika has turned Algeria into a necrocracy

It is certainly a country now in flux. Uncertainty is widespread, with warnings of ensuing chaos, violence and war from Bouteflikas office, echoed by neighbouring leaders such as Egypts President Sisi.

Among the London crowds though, optimism dominated, and hope that peace would prevail. Young Algerian men danced and sang to the beat of traditional hand-held instruments and posed for selfies while kissing London policeman on the cheeks, mimicking photographs that have gone viral from demonstrations in Algeria. Police, lawyers, and professors across Algeria have also demonstrated, joining the people in calling for extensive reform.

Thousands of Algerians every year risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean, heading with hope towards Europe, dreaming of a future where they can thrive and not just survive; where they can work hard; support their families; reinvest in Algeria, and craft better opportunities for the next generations.

Some 70 per cent of Algerias population are under 30, and youth unemployment rates are climbing above 30 per cent. Nepotism is rife, stifling social mobility and leaving young people deeply frustrated.

Poverty and unemployment have boomed in Algeria, the largest country in Africa, even though it holds more than 12bn barrels of oil reserves. Frustration is aimed at the governments failure to diversify the economy, and invest the profits from petroleum into education, infrastructure, health care.

Opposition has been stifled, and it is still unknown who could lead the way should Bouteflika resign. One opposition figure popular with young people, Rachid Nekkaz, was reportedly arrested for trespassing at the hospital in Geneva where Bouteflika was seeking medical help. He has previously been refused the chance to stand.

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This is a Family Affair, read one placard at the London protest, emphasising the message that no foreign intervention would be welcomed. Djamila made it clear that no rescue package from a foreign nation in these moments of instability would be beneficial for the Algerian people.

They will only seek their own interests. We as Algeria have had our resources colonised since the French invasion 189 years ago. We want independence now, real independence. This is the first step; we will continue to make our voices heard until he resigns. The second step will be to work out how to establish a real democracy, where we can choose who leads us.

This coming Saturday, UK-based Algerians will be joined by Syrians demonstrating against the Assad regime  and perhaps hoping the wall of fear now broken in Algeria offers hope to others waiting for their own taste of a late-flowering Arab spring.
There is a veritable dumpster fire of scandals currently embroiling the White House. President Trump has been accused of conspiring with a foreign government, obstructing justice, and violating campaign finance law, among other things that I cannot list in full because this piece can only run to 800 words.

Indeed, Americans are facing the most pressing threat to our democracy in modern times  but there is another, even darker scandal which seems to be vexing many of our establishment politicians and much of our media: namely, that women have some power now.

Truly, this is a crisis in its own right. It would be one thing if it were older women who had gained access to the political conversation. The world has some experience processing female figureheads like Theresa May, Angela Merkel, or Hillary Clinton. As long as they adhere to pre-approved haircuts, choice exceptions can be been made for women of a certain age to fill establishment positions.

But, you see, the trouble here is that the most recent wave of womens empowerment is compounded by youth. One of the most influential voices in the political conversation right now is not only a woman, shes also 29 years old  and really good at Instagram.

Of course, I am talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New Yorks 14th district, who was such a long shot in her primary that the New York Times failed to cover her campaign. I had the chance to meet her not long before she won, defeating the Democratic incumbent with a grassroots effort that boasted an average donation of $22.

There was a time when no one, except maybe Ocasio-Cortez herself, thought she had a shot. Sitting among little more than a dozen people ahead of the election, I watched her talk to a small room about how its the small rooms where change begins. A little over two weeks later, she had won the primary, and been catapulted to such an extreme level of rock-star status that announcing her lipstick color on social media caused it to sell out almost immediately (Stila Stay-All-Day in Besos).

 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hits back at Green New Deal critics: 'Until you try I'm the boss!'

Beauty tips arent the only thing Ocasio-Cortez  now almost uniformly referred to as AOC  shares with her followers, but when she does share them, she does it well. She recently broke down the entirety of her skincare routine for social media fans, encouraging readers to double cleanse at the end of the day in order to be quite certain they are removing all their makeup. I mean, think of her impact in terms of pore-clearing alone! She is serving progressive values and a skincare revolution, honey!

Im sorry. Ill collect myself. You really have to understand how exciting this all is, though. Young women dont have many political role models. History must make certain of this claim, but I think AOC may be the first elected official to routinely elicit the word, Yaaas.

That fun-loving transparency isnt just one aspect of AOCs messaging: its essential to her model of communicating with constituents. Youll often find her appearing on Instagram Live to discuss in-depth policy ideas and proceedings while preparing dinner in her Instant Pot. She effortlessly dispels smear campaigns from her political opponents with the deployment of a GIF, and has allegedly left the more moderate members of her party in fear she will torch their careers with a sick burn. Talking about the new political order seems grandiose, until you spend 30 seconds on this womans Twitter feed.

Before, there was this particular model of the way things are. Despite the fact that Americans are extremely proud of having government by and for the people, it seemed as if our political system was defined by the same mysterious authority that empowered the Wizard of Oz.

Even if you have a sense of political agency and knowledge of the inner workings of federal government, you still feel alienated by the fact that everything is compulsorily boring. For years, our gatekeepers have cordoned off access to the political conversation, conducting themselves as if civic participation must be as painful as a trip to the dentist. AOC has managed to introduce joy into a space that once seemed clinically disinviting, and the people who used to be in charge are absolutely losing their goddamn minds.

Now, in the effort of disclosing bias, I must tell you that I am a progressive feminist who finds AOC downright delightful, and so perhaps it is only fair that you, dear reader, are given the opportunity to peruse and process her myriad scandals and controversies for yourself.

Did you know, for example, that there is a video of AOC dancing to Fatboy Slims Weapon of Choice while she was in college? In the footage, she appears cute and fun, and, certain members of the far-right are still attempting to reconcile how this is even possible in conjunction with her widespread political influence.

That shocking clip, released in January, was only the beginning. One of AOCs major policy initiatives since she was seated has been climate change solution, especially in the form of a resolution known as the Green New Deal, which aims to reduce carbon emissions along with environment-friendly job creation. That sounds utopian, until you read the recent New York Post article alerting the American public to the fact that AOC apparently had the audacity to ride in her aunts 17-mpg minivan after the St Patricks Day parade in Queens. Can you imagine? Investing in the future of the Earth with government policy proposals while continuing to use cars for transportation?

Unfortunately for the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, the moral quandaries dont end there. Notably, despite growing up poor and working to standardize a higher minimum wage, AOC has been accused of wearing clothes that she seemed to have purchased in a store instead of simply cutting a hole in a trash bag and shoving her head through it.

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

Only time will tell how the efficacy of AOCs platform will transform American politics, and in the meantime, she will have to continue to weather these striking blows to her reputation as our political gatekeepers adjust to her reign. For the sake of democracy, it is of course crucial we hold all power accountable  and it would seem that nothing is more powerful than a young woman speaking her mind.

Lauren Duca is an award-winning journalist whose writing can be found in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and New York magazine, in addition to Teen Vogue. Duca is currently a visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, but shes mostly just trying to get you to follow her on Twitter: @LaurenDuca
Im hearing that Queen song Another One Bites the Dust in my mind as I write this because weve lost yet another minister for disabled people.

Sarah Newton, who at least showed some guts by resigning to vote against the disaster of a no-deal Brexit, was the seventh to occupy the post in the nine years of Conservative or Conservative-led (mis)rule that this country has been subjected to.

When it comes to revolving doors, this one resembles something Warner Bros might have dreamt up to misfire on Wile E Coyote in one of his failed pursuits of the Road Runner (meep meep).

Newton, whose biography was still on the Department for Work and Pensions website this morning, can at least point to an achievement during her time in office. I mean, beyond her plan to appoint disability champions and not pay them. She spent 16 months in post which makes her the longest serving Tory minister of state rank in the position, beating out (bad) Penny Mordaunt by a matter of days. Yay her!

The contrast with the previous Labour administrations could scarcely be more stark. Its true that the position only came with the rank of parliamentary undersecretary of state in the Blair/Brown years, as opposed to being handed to a minister of state (usually) under their successors.

Papers react to the Brexit vote Show all 10 1 /10 Papers react to the Brexit vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Guardian The Guardian highlights just how soon the Prime Minister's defeat has come Britain's scheduled date of departure Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mail The Daily Mail takes aim at MPs who political editor Jason Groves claims have "plunged Britain into chaos" by rejecting the Prime Minister's deal Papers react to the Brexit vote The Independent Daily Edition The Independent calls for a second referendum as a way forward Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Express The Daily Express leads with exasperation, with political editor Macer Hall writing that "Brexit was hanging in the balance last night" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Sun The Sun take the Prime Minister's "croaky" voice into account as it reports on last night's "Brexit shambles" Papers react to the Brexit vote Financial Times The Financial Times claims that the Prime Minister's authority is "in shreds" and reports on the fall in the pound in the wake of the vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph calls the Prime Minister's defeat "humiliating" and claims that a delay to Brexit is likely Papers react to the Brexit vote The i The i claims that parliament is "out of control" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Times The Times claims that Britain is in crisis and that the Prime Minister "may face resignation calls" Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror says that the Prime Minister "surrenders" in reference to the likelihood of Brexit being delayed after the vote

But at least the occupants hung around for long enough to get to grips with the role. Over the 12 years Labour had in government there were just five ministers for disabled people. Maria Eagle managed more than four years in post, Anne McGuire in excess of three while Margaret Hodge clocked up just under three.

This matters because it takes time to properly understand a sector like disability. Im still encountering new wrinkles with it and Ive been writing about it for nearly a decade.

Its true that there are some problems common to all of us. We are far more likely to be unemployed than are able-bodied Britons, for example. Most of us will have faced some level of discrimination at some point in our lives. Then there is the broken testing system for disability benefits set up by the execrable Iain Duncan Smith, a problem only now (sort of) acknowledged by Amber Rudd, the current secretary of state for work and pensions, a job that has also had something of a revolving door attached to it.

These might be global sector-wide issues, but addressing them is a lot more complicated than it might look because the way they impact upon someone with autism will be different to the way they affect someone who has suffered a spinal injury, will be different to the way they challenge someone who has impaired sight or hearing.

It should also be remembered that disability is only one part of a persons identity. Most of us dont want it to define us. Wed just really like to be able to go to the shops or use public transport without facing abuse if you could manage that, thanks very much Britain.

All this means that a one-size-fits-all approach simply wont suffice when it comes to addressing these issues, and improving the lives of the very different groups of people that make up this countrys disabled community. Assuming, of course, the government wants to do that. It says it does, but I have my doubts.

The job of minister for disabled people is far from the only short-term gig in Westminster, partly because our desperate excuse for a prime minister seems to lose ministers like most of us lose our keys. But one policy person working in the sector told me that the turnover gives them the impression that this is a job people either dont want, or dont care about. Ditto the government as a while.

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And just look at the way some of the people in the role have carried on. Its hard not to come away with the impression that they are just terrible people, more interested in talking at disabled people than to them (hello Esther McVey) while repeating the lie that this country is a world leader in disability rights, which it most certainly is not. You want evidence? Then I refer you to the United Nations devastating report that accused the British government of the systematic denial of disabled peoples rights.

I suppose there is one consolation. At a time when disabled people need all the help they can get, at least the rotten apples like McVey dont hang around for long.
Following last night's vote in the House of Commons to rule out no deal, Brexiteers are crying foul. Betrayal of the 17 million who voted Leave. Democracy is being usurped.

Nigel Farage described the current situation as "one of the most shameful chapters in our country's history". While Zac Goldsmith took to twitter to lament the fact that his proposals for a proper recall system for MPs were never voted through, writing: "MPs need to feel the pressure of democracy at all times, not just before elections."

When you look at their attitude to other aspects of our democracy, this is staggering hypocrisy. Goldsmith did, to his credit, stand down and force a by-election in 2016 after the government's decision to press ahead with Heathrow expansion. Yet, when he re-stood in the 2017 general election (after losing his seat) he failed to accept invites to two separate hustings which I attended  blaming diary clashes. To make matters worse, people had paid 25 to attend one of these events. I suspected at the time that the heat was clearly too much, so he decided to get out of the kitchen. I believe a number of other Tory MPs did the same.

Papers react to the Brexit vote Show all 10 1 /10 Papers react to the Brexit vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Guardian The Guardian highlights just how soon the Prime Minister's defeat has come Britain's scheduled date of departure Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mail The Daily Mail takes aim at MPs who political editor Jason Groves claims have "plunged Britain into chaos" by rejecting the Prime Minister's deal Papers react to the Brexit vote The Independent Daily Edition The Independent calls for a second referendum as a way forward Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Express The Daily Express leads with exasperation, with political editor Macer Hall writing that "Brexit was hanging in the balance last night" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Sun The Sun take the Prime Minister's "croaky" voice into account as it reports on last night's "Brexit shambles" Papers react to the Brexit vote Financial Times The Financial Times claims that the Prime Minister's authority is "in shreds" and reports on the fall in the pound in the wake of the vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph calls the Prime Minister's defeat "humiliating" and claims that a delay to Brexit is likely Papers react to the Brexit vote The i The i claims that parliament is "out of control" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Times The Times claims that Britain is in crisis and that the Prime Minister "may face resignation calls" Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror says that the Prime Minister "surrenders" in reference to the likelihood of Brexit being delayed after the vote

When Theresa May came to my constituency (Twickenham) she only met activists in a local school hall and did not knock on a single door  a bizarre approach when the local MP was defending a wafer thin majority. Keeping her away from the public (and sending in Amber Rudd as super-sub in the TV debates) became the strategy from someone who promised us strong and stable leadership.

MPs in safe seats rarely have to canvass to win back their votes. When I went back to visit my mother in Woking (which has been a safe Tory seat for a century), I spotted less than a handful of posters as I drove around her village. My Mum could not remember the last time she was canvassed. If Brexiteers are really interested in democracy then where is their cry for proportional representation? I cannot name of a single pro-Brexit MP who campaigned for electoral reform in the 2011 referendum on the alternative vote.

Even when they are elected, Brexiteers do not always feel a need to turn up. What is truly shameful is that Ukip MEPs, who consistently berate the EU gravy train, turned up to less than 2/3 of the possible votes before Brexit.

When it came to their post Brexit benefits, voting in the European Parliament suddenly became a priority. In Farages case, it seems raising his media profile and earning extra money via shows on LBC is more important than the day job.

Brexiteers are also known for their double standards on opposition to reforming the House of Lords. Jacob Rees Mogg, chair of the European Research Group has voted twice against reforming the Lords since 2011  yet last year he suggested that peers risked "burning down the House of Lords by thwarting Brexit.

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They are also opposed to widening the voter base by lowering the voting age to 16 outside of Scotland. In 2017, Bernard Jenkin, another high profile Eurosceptic, claimed that "it would be a great mistake to lower the voting age to 16. Most 16 and 17-year-olds do not have the level of political knowledge or maturity required". What he really means, is that they are less likely to vote Tory and are largely pro-European.

One of their biggest issues with Mays withdrawal agreement is that the UK will be paying 39bn to the EU but will be unable to influence its laws in the transition period, making us a so called vassal state. But what about 16 year olds who are working and pay taxes but are currently not eligible to vote  are they vassal citizens in our democracy?

Reforming political finance is another area where Brexiteers fall silent. Despite serious question marks over the Leave campaign, the Brexiteers have refused to countenance an equivalent of the Mueller investigation, into Russian meddling in our democracy. They will never push for limits to maximum party political donations or to require disclosure of investment income for MPs, because it does not suit them either.

The Brexiteers have had countless opportunities to reform our democracy for the better. If they really cared about Westminster being out of touch, perhaps its time they lent a helping hand to those of us who do want to see change.
On the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated to the White House, a group of my students flooded into my classroom at lunchtime in the inner-city London academy school I was working in at the time to ask my advice.

They had heard there was a demonstration in central London that evening, and united in their horror that a man who they perceived to be a virulent racist was about to become the most powerful man on earth, they wanted to attend the protest and make their voices heard.

Without hesitation, I whipped out my hidden collection of coloured marker pens, ripped up the cardboard boxes that were storing exercise books in the back of my classroom, and helped them design placards with eye-catching slogans to carry on the demonstration. When the group of 20 students who had gathered left to travel to Westminster after school that day, I was proud to join and march alongside them.

Not long after, I was called into the headteachers office to be reprimanded. Did I not realise that it might have been dangerous for students to attend a political demonstration? Did I not understand that teachers were required to present themselves as politically neutral to their students, regardless of how grotesquely unjust the political issue at hand may be?

As school students prepare to engage in the latest round of climate strikes this Friday, these same spurious accusations are being volleyed at teachers and school leaders who support their students political action once again.

Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Show all 25 1 /25 Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Demonstrators block Westminster Bridge in central London to show anger at government inaction on climate and ecological issues AFP/Getty Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges A pro environment protester is arrested by police on Lambeth bridge in London EPA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Organised by Extinction Rebellion, the protest is part of many taking place this weekend to bring attention to political inaction on issues of pollution and climate change Reuters Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges AFP/Getty Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Organised by Extinction Rebellion, the protest is part of many taking place this weekend to bring attention to political inaction on issues of pollution and climate change PA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Demonstrators on Blackfriars Bridge PA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Police with demonstrators on Blackfriars Bridge PA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges AFP/Getty Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges EPA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges A demonstrator is led away by police on Blackfriars Bridge PA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Reuters Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges PA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Reuters Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges AFP/Getty Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges AFP/Getty Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges PA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges EPA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges EPA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges EPA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges PA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Reuters Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges EPA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges AFP/Getty Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges EPA Extinction rebellion: Climate change protesters block London bridges Reuters

But it is clear that the existential threat posed by climate change is too profound for teachers and their students to watch dispassionately from the sidelines as the planet burns. And suggesting that students might be in danger by attending demonstrations wilfully disregards the history of peaceful political protests in this country undertaken by school students whose actions have been fundamental in shaping national political debates.

From the mass school walkouts over the Iraq War in 2003, to the sixth form students who joined the tuition fees protests in 2011, young people have shown time and time again that the greatest danger they face is at the hands of our political elite. After all, it is their warmongering, their relentless austerity cuts, and their failure to radically tackle climate change that most profoundly impacts students everyday lives, and their futures.

It is also little wonder that Theresa May was quick to condemn the student strikes, arguing that students will miss valuable learning time by attending. This only reaffirms how narrow the Tories vision of education has become.

The legacy of Michael Goves national curriculum means that schools and students are now prescribed to disconnected, abstract facts that can be regurgitated in examinations, with little connection to anything meaningful in the real world.

Education should be so much richer and more purposeful than this. I became a teacher because I wanted to ignite a passion in young people to commit themselves to fighting the many injustices that exist in our troubled world today. Students should be equipped with an armoury of powerful knowledge, and an understanding of how to use their voices effectively, in order to effect fundamental social and political change. With this vision for education, taking part in the student climate strikes would only serve to enhance what students learnt in the classroom, rather than detract from it.

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If politics remains confined to the corridors of Westminster, Theresa Mays zombie government can lumber on. That these young people have forced climate change on to the agenda, at a moment when all political airtime is being taken up by the governments Brexit chaos, demonstrates that mass political action is impossible to ignore.

Teachers and students everywhere should unite in solidarity with the climate strikes, because when this happens, the anger and frustration of millions of people in this country at our current shambolic government will be far harder to contain.

Holly Rigby is a teacher working in an inner London secondary school. She is a Labour Party member and National Education Union activist, and writes mostly about education and politics
I had planned to write my column today about Comic Relief but, well, here we are: cast once again into a pit of disbelief in the wake of the horror in Christchurch, as the very darkest side of idiotic humanity has spilt fresh hell into the laps of unsuspecting people just going about their lives.

Not only must we deal with our shock and and sorrow for people we did not know, just as we did after the Manchester bombing, but because this was an attack on Muslims, we also have to face down the staggering callousness of those whove plotted an implacable course to dehumanise that particular people.

Shortly after the murders, the Australian senator Fraser Anning issued a statement which claimed: The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration programme which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.

Obviously, a lack of compassion bordering on the gleeful is not particular to any one stripe of extremist, but its still quite shocking to see it from an actual senator, voted in by normal people who mow their borders neatly and poke their small change into charity boxes.

Its more than a little disorienting to find that he fails to see any pressing need to hide his preposterous belief that all followers of the Islamic faith are fanatics, and even more so that his mindset seems to have presented no great barrier to election.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

But, lets be honest, this is not just an Australian problem. In a masochistic moment, I had a quick rubberneck at one right-wing publications comments section, only to find a woman cheerfully sharing that now they no how it feels not nice when the tables are turned [sic].

A comment like this, coming from an ordinary British woman who has no worries about her photo and name being published alongside it, is a feather in the cap of the online hatemongers who salivate at the prospect that there might be an immigrant to blame whenever an atrocity is reported, and are conspicuous by their silence if it transpires that there isnt. No doubt theyd counter that its all about religion, not race, but their habitual failure to identify which of the many distinct forms of Islam it is that theyre blaming this time gives the lie to that.

Recommended The horrific Christchurch attacks may have changed New Zealand forever

Of course, weve all been shaken by attacks committed by Islamist fanatics. At the risk of stating the obvious, instilling terror is the primary purpose of a terrorist; the worlds fear is their proverbial made omelette, and the innocent people they murder in the process are just so many broken eggs.

Ive felt that fear myself. I first felt it as a child, when religious fanatics were instructed by Ayatollah Khomeini  the supreme leader of Iran himself  to assassinate a satirist and poet who had criticised the regime and who, by the by, happened to be my dad. He was put on their death list, and we got asylum in the UK.

In 1984, Scotland Yard informed my father of a second plot to assassinate him on British soil, and we had to go immediately into hiding. I was 11 years old and truly, deeply terrified. Even after we were allowed to return home, I never felt safe. Every time we got into our car, I fully expected it to blow up. When the doorbell rang unexpectedly, Id feel a spike of terror that it might be men with machine guns coming to kill us, even after my father calmly informed me that he didnt think hitmen would ring the doorbell before coming in.

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For a while  and, to nervously paraphrase Liam Neeson, this is not something that I readily admit  when I saw people wearing hijabs, I would instantly think: They hate me. They hate my dad. They want us all dead. I was afraid of them. Isnt that awful? But I was a child, and the terrorists had done their job.

Thankfully, I had parents who were able to steer me away from that thought process, and helped me to understand the difference between politicised Islam and those who simply follow the faith in a quest for inner peace.

I went to a west London comprehensive school, where Muslim kids sat and learned French alongside classmates whose fathers were members of the BNP. I was at this school when a fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie by the Iranian government, and the Muslim kids, who were mostly from British Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, teased me for being a terrorist because I came from Iran. They didnt see their own beliefs as having anything to do with the book-burning and calls for murder that we were seeing on the news. And nor should they have. Bloody annoying for me, though.

That woman in the comments section will regard herself as a good person. In many ways, she probably is. I bet she and most of the other commenters are lovely to dogs and wouldnt hesitate to help an injured person in the street, and yet here they are, basking in death and violence and pure distilled misery. But then, she lives in a world where you can casually dehumanise Muslims on a Friday morning without losing all of your friends. We all do.
And there, at the end of the road at the end of the world, our heroine stands. We see her from behind, a silhouette against a wide horizon. Her eyes fix on the can at her feet, a speck of nothing, there on the asphalt, at the foot of a brick wall as high and wide as the observable universe.

This is it. She clears her throat. She tries to speak but no sound comes out. She takes a short run up. A clean hit, the can accelerates and the world is changed forever.

Swoosh!

Whats this? The brick wall billows before her like a pond beneath a stone. It falls to the ground like a theatre curtain. Her eyes widen. The strings crescendo. And there, right there before her, whats this?

Its more road. More road! It was there all along! More road! Were saved! Were saved! Theres enough road here to keep us going for a month or more. Maybe three. And whos to say there wont be more road after that?

We can kick this can forever. Forever!

And that, if youre prepared to add in a cast of around 649 non-entities and around four hours of terrible dialogue, is exactly what happened in the House of Commons on Thursday afternoon, the latest episode of your favourite drama: Brexit, which is kind of like Eldorado but with a 40bn budget.

Brexit, and our Brexit prime minister, took a long look at the end of the road, and decided the only way out was to find more road behind it.

The Commons voted by more than a hundred votes in favour of extending Article 50. No one knows for quite how long, nor even if the EU will allow it. It could be a matter of weeks, it could be a matter of months. Already leading figures in the EU, and theyre the ones who traditionally tell the truth in this drama, have suggested the UK might be staying in for 21 months or more.

Naturally, it couldnt happen without the traditional spectacle of cross party self-knot-tying, with the Commons now very much resembling that nest of obsolete cables youve moved house with three times, and precisely the same amount of use.

Theresa May has, for the record, told the Commons more than a hundred times that the UK will be leaving the EU on 29 March. In fact, it might very well be that Thursday was the only time since becoming prime minister that she has come into the Commons and not said those words.

Papers react to the Brexit vote Show all 10 1 /10 Papers react to the Brexit vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Guardian The Guardian highlights just how soon the Prime Minister's defeat has come Britain's scheduled date of departure Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mail The Daily Mail takes aim at MPs who political editor Jason Groves claims have "plunged Britain into chaos" by rejecting the Prime Minister's deal Papers react to the Brexit vote The Independent Daily Edition The Independent calls for a second referendum as a way forward Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Express The Daily Express leads with exasperation, with political editor Macer Hall writing that "Brexit was hanging in the balance last night" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Sun The Sun take the Prime Minister's "croaky" voice into account as it reports on last night's "Brexit shambles" Papers react to the Brexit vote Financial Times The Financial Times claims that the Prime Minister's authority is "in shreds" and reports on the fall in the pound in the wake of the vote Papers react to the Brexit vote The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph calls the Prime Minister's defeat "humiliating" and claims that a delay to Brexit is likely Papers react to the Brexit vote The i The i claims that parliament is "out of control" Papers react to the Brexit vote The Times The Times claims that Britain is in crisis and that the Prime Minister "may face resignation calls" Papers react to the Brexit vote Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror says that the Prime Minister "surrenders" in reference to the likelihood of Brexit being delayed after the vote

And yet, here she was, wandering through the division lobbies, voting for an extension. She managed to persuade 112 of her MPs to do the same. She has been saved by Jeremy Corbyns Labour Party, which if youre the worlds most embarrassingly stereotypical home counties Tory and not, say, a revolutionary Marxist, could be considered a touch embarrassing.

Just like the day before, large numbers of her cabinet voted in the opposite direction, including, just for laughs, her own Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay. It was he who closed the debate on the motion on Mays behalf. Then he went and voted against it.

It will be, in theory, his job to go to Brussels and negotiate for the extension he has just voted against.

Another to vote against the motion was Theresa Mays own chief whip, Julian Smith. Hed had a busy day on his hands, by the way, which means we must with some reluctance return to one of the earlier votes. On that occasion, via an amendment tabled by Labours Hilary Benn, the house was being asked to vote on whether to let backbenchers, and not the government, take control of the Commons order paper.

If youre not one for technicalities, what that means is essentially the Commons voted on whether to not have a government anymore. The government won that one, 314 to 312. When that was read out, Smith and his deputy, Chris Pincher, leaned over the front bench for fist bump of such intensity it can only be measured on the Benn-Eubank scale.

A quick word on the size of that victory. To keep your government going by two votes means that you only require two MPs to change their minds and thats your lot.

Among those, who chose to abstain? Labours Fiona Onasanya, who became the historic first MP to vote while wearing an electronic tag, and the sage of Sheffield Hallam, Jared OMara.

Still, two votes short of her own demise, May vanished at the end, sneaking out behind the speakers chair. She had come within a whisker of that being all but that, and yet she had not a single word to utter about what happens next.

That new road looks inviting, for the time being, but its a lot more dangerous than the one she travelled to get here.
(CNN)  Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has described Friday's mass shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch as "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

Speaking at a press conference in the capital, Wellington, earlier, Ardern said the terrorist attacks had been carried out by suspects with "extremist views" that have no place in New Zealand, or anywhere else in the world.

Since her statement, officials have now confirmed that least 49 people were killed and 20 seriously injured in the carefully planned and unprecedented attack that has shocked the nation.

Read the Prime Minister's full statement below:

It is with extreme sadness that I tell you that, as at 7 p.m. tonight, we believe that 40 people have lost their lives in this act of extreme violence.

10 have died at Linwood Avenue Mosque, 3 of which were outside the mosque itself.

A further 30 have been killed at Deans Avenue Mosque.

There are also more than 20 seriously injured who are currently in Christchurch A&E.

It is clear that this can only be described as a terrorist attack.

From what we know, it does appear to have been well planned. Two explosive devices attached to suspects' vehicles have now been found and they have been disarmed.

There are currently four individuals who have been apprehended but three are connected to this attack who are currently in custody, one of which has publicly stated that they were Australian born.

These are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand and, in fact, have no place in the world.

While we do not have any reason to believe at this stage that there are any other suspects, we are not assuming that, at this stage. The joint intelligence group has been deployed and police are putting all of their resources into this situation.

The defense force are currently transporting additional police staff to the region.

Our national security threat level has been lifted from low, to high. This, I want to assure people, is to ensure that all our agencies are responding in the most appropriate way. That includes at our borders.

Many of you would have seen that Air New Zealand has canceled all turbo prop flights out of Christchurch tonight and will review the situation in the morning. Jet services both domestically and internationally are continuing to operate.

I say again, there is heightened security; that is, of course, so we can assure people of their safety, and the police are working hard to ensure that people are able to move around their city safely.

I have spoken this evening to the mayor of Christchurch and I intend to speak this evening to the imam, but I also want to send a message to those directly affected.

In fact, I am sure right now New Zealand would like me to share a message on their behalf, too.

Our thoughts and our prayers are with those who have been impacted today. Christchurch was the home of these victims. For many, this may not have been the place they were born. In fact, for many, New Zealand was their choice.

The place they actively came to, and committed themselves to. The place they were raising their families, where they were part of communities who they loved and who loved them. It was a place that many came to for its safety. A place where they were free to practice their culture and their religion.

For those of you who are watching at home tonight, and questioning how this could have happened here, we -- New Zealand -- we were not a target because we are a safe harbor for those who hate. We were not chosen for this act of violence because we condone racism, because we are an enclave for extremism. We were chosen for the very fact that we are none of these things. Because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion, a home for those who share our values, refuge for those who need it. And those values, I can assure you, will not, and cannot, be shaken by this attack.

We are a proud nation of more than 200 ethnicities, 160 languages. And amongst that diversity we share common values. And the one that we place the currency on right now -- and tonight -- is our compassion and support for the community of those directly affected by this tragedy.

And secondly, the strongest possible condemnation of the ideology of the people who did this.

You may have chosen us -- but we utterly reject and condemn you.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "New Zealand PM full speech: 'This can only be described as a terrorist attack'."
The Armageddon scenario of a crash-out Brexit in two weeks appears to have been narrowly avoided - but a battle looms in Europe on how long of a reprieve to give the UK.

MPs voted to seek an extension to the Brexit deadline from the EU, the length of which will depend on whether Tory leader Theresa May can get her deal through parliament in a third-time lucky attempt next week.

Last night, frantic talks between the Tory leader's allies and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the hardline European Research Group (ERG) got under way, and are expected to last all weekend in a bid to see them support the deal next week.

The DUP has signalled that it could back the deal, which was seen as dead just a few days ago.

Revised legal advice is one avenue being pursued as a bid to get the divorce deal over the line. UK Attorney General Geoffrey Cox is said to be redrafting the advice that ultimately killed Mrs May's vote last Tuesday to incorporate the Vienna Convention, which allows for the termination of a treaty if there is a "fundamental change of circumstances".

It is understood that he is looking at whether the issue of the Irish backstop and what it would mean for the withdrawal agreement if it did, as opponents of the deal fear, become permanent.

The attorney general may be prepared to say in updated advice that if the backstop becomes permanent the UK could abandon it and the withdrawal agreement under the Vienna Convention as a permanent backstop would be a "fundamental change".

Both the EU and the UK government have repeatedly said the intention of the backstop is to be temporary, if it is ever invoked, but fears persist among Brexiteers that it could see the UK tied indefinitely to Europe.

It is not clear, however, if the changes to the advice being looked at will be enough, with some in the ERG suggesting it will not go far enough to sway Brexiteers.

Arlene Foster, the leader of the DUP, said that her party is "working very hard" with the UK government so that "we leave the EU with a deal".

She claimed the issue of the backstop had been overplayed and that Northern Ireland has a "very small market".

"We have always said if people have a mind to find those ways to deal with these situations, but unfortunately there has not been a willingness to find the way," she said.

"It is not a huge issue. People have made it into a huge issue, let's be sensible, let's get a deal and let's make it work for everybody."

Meanwhile, the EU has offered to restart efforts this weekend to help Mrs May get the deal through, but also insist that the negotiations are done. One suggestion being floated is offering further clarity on the role Stormont could have in negotiations in the trade deal talks.

Mrs May's performance over the coming days will determine if she attends the EU Council next week with a deal in hand, or if she will be begging for an extension to allow the UK to get its house in order.

If her deal, which has already been defeated twice in the House of Commons, is agreed next Wednesday then she will seek an extension the following day to give her until June 30 to allow Westminster to legislate for the deal to take effect.

However, if the withdrawal agreement is not passed then she will have to petition for a longer extension and the UK will need to participate in the European elections.

European leaders have expressed differing views on the idea of a long extension, but European Council President Donald Tusk suggested a year or more. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said a longer extension would give the UK time to consider options "like participation in the customs union and single market".

"I think we need to be open to any request they make, listen attentively and be generous in our response," he said.

Ireland is expected to lobby European leaders to help Mrs May secure an extension if she comes to plead for more time.

A two-year extension would mean the UK has to continue paying into the EU budget and would also throw up questions about the type of mandate MEPs would have in Europe.

Sources in Dublin described the potential battle as a "bunfight" over what to give Mrs May if she seeks an extension.
Farmers must stay calm and not react to the UKs tariff statement which was a political stunt, EU Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan has warned.

The commissioner said the chief threats hanging over the Brexit talks are gone after the British Parliament voted against a crash-out.

We need to stay calm and not react to the UK's tariff statement published during the week. This was a political stunt, pure and simple, designed to change the news cycle in the UK and weaken the unity of the EU 26 in relation to the Irish backstop, he said.

I want to assure Irish farmers that the EU's resolve will not buckle. Solidarity behind Ireland remains rock solid, steadfast, and unwavering.

So the EU and I as Commissioner for Agriculture stand ready to help our farmers at the appropriate time. We dont know the outcome of these negotiations from Londons point of view and therefore we cant come to any conclusions on what the appropriate response will be. We shouldnt talk ourselves down in to a crisis either.

Commissioner Hogan said that the EU has supports ready for farmers in the event of a hard Brexit but that farmers must not talk themselves in to a crisis.

The reality is that you can ignore 99pc of the howling in Westminster, which to be perfectly honest is becoming an embarrassment at this point and a stain on the UK's standing in the world, he said.

The vote on Wednesday night in the House of Commons means that a small bit of common sense has finally prevailed, and the worst-case scenario of a crash-out Brexit is now receding into the shadows where it belongs.

Speaking at the Navigating Global Trade event hosted by Grant Thornton and the Irish Farmers Journal in the RDS, Mr Hogan pointed out that additional supports must be put in place for Irish farmers and guaranteed that there would be no change to Direct Payments paid to farmers in 2019.

This is not the first time Irish agriculture has faced a risk of large proportions. In my political lifetime we have had to deal with BSE, foot and mouth, and the recent markets crisis arising from the Russian embargo, he said.

In all these cases, the Commission dipped into its toolbox to offer strong support, and Brexit will be no different  the same instruments are in place and ready to be deployed.

There is recognition across the EU of Ireland's vulnerability in relation to Brexit, particularly our beef sector. There must be additional support available for Irish famers. Irish agri-food companies have already been granted state aid relief. My services are making good progress on putting structures in place for transport and logistics, SPS issues, customs checks and all related challenges.

He pointed out that in relation to the UK market, the competition will be unable to fill market demand overnight and consumers in the UK are not going to stop eating high quality Irish beef overnight either.
Farmers have been urged to hold off purchasing large consignments of fertiliser until Irish prices have eased back in line with the international trade.

John Coughlan of the IFA said deals were available for farmers and buyer groups looking to purchase large quantities, with significant reductions on offer.

"Bulk CAN prices delivered to Irish ports are quoted down 15/t on the previous week to 205/t, 23/t off this season's highs. This will be reflected in local prices, particularly if farmers resist buying at current price levels," Mr Coughlan said.

The larger dairy co-ops opened new season quotes for granular urea at 365/t for big bags delivered, with CAN at 265/t and CAN + sulphur (26N + 3S) 10/t over CAN prices.

The IFA claimed these prices were still available to volume purchasers or group buyers. Mr Coughlan urged farmers to shop around.

Keenest quotes for 18-6-12 + S are from 375/t to 380/t, with 25/t over for 10-10-20, the IFA maintained. Many of the larger buyer groups are achieving significant discounts on the official quotes with extended credit terms.

A hangover of stock from last season has resulted in deals being offered by merchants. Farmers are also resisting efforts to enforce price increases on new-season supplies, the IFA claimed.

Industry sources point out that trade and farmer purchases of new season fertiliser pre-Christmas were significantly down on normal as nitrogen prices ratcheted up steeply from August.

The unusually mild February saw spot demand for fertiliser pick up, but activity has stalled following the recent heavy rain.

Many trade buyers have also been reluctant to purchase big volumes forward given the continuing weakness of urea and straight CAN prices.

Mr Coughlan encouraged farmers who are not members of buyer groups to purchase stocks with neighbours so as to maximise savings on delivery.

"Co-ordinate fertiliser deliveries with other neighbours because transport is a significant cost for uncoordinated drops," he advised.

Meanwhile, the cold and wet weather over the last week has resulted in a sharp fall-off in grass growth.

Growth rates are have eased back to 12-16kg/ha/day generally and most stock has been rehoused.
A meeting of European Agriculture Ministers next week will discuss a proposal allow Member States to decide whether or not to introduce a controversial salary deduction when capping large farm payments under the proposed reforms of the Common Agriculural Policy (CAP).

In its CAP reform proposals announced last year, the European Commission is proposing a reduction of payments above 60,000, with compulsory capping for payments above 100,000.

This, it says, is designed to ensure a fairer distribution of payments, with the saved monies being used to fund small and medium-sized farmers.

However, the move has been slammed by some commentators and farmers, who say this claim is misleading and disingenuous, as it ignores what is likely to be the fine-print in the Commission proposal.

The crux of the issue is that under the proposals the Commission says all Member States must allow for labour costs to be taken fully into account.

The effect of this proposal is that farmers receiving large payments can deduct the value of salaries or on-farm labour from the direct payments received before the cap is applied.

The Department of Agriculture in Ireland has voiced concerns over the proposal to deduct salaries.

Assistant Secretary, Colm Hayes told a recent meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture that it will create an unnecessary and significant administrative burden on member states that goes against the spirit of modernising and simplifying the CAP.

"If we must start factoring in individual P60s, P45s and all sorts of other factors, it will bring about a complexity nobody wants to see."

However, next week's Agriculture Council meeting will debate a report on the state of play regarding key CAP proposals which summarises the work carried out on the planned reforms since January Member State and Commission officials.

Under the new proposals, the wording to the regulation will change from 'shall' to 'may' which will allow Member States to decide whether to allow for labour costs to be taken fully into account when capping payments.
Beans have the potential to be the most profitable crop tillage farmers could sow this spring, yet merchants have confirmed seed sales remain sluggish.

Farmers appear reluctant to plant beans this year after a "disaster" last year with the weather.

Teagasc tillage specialist Ciaran Collins said indications were that interest in beans remains poor.

"Teagasc figures indicate beans could be the most profitable crop farmers could grow this spring," said Mr Collins, adding there were potential margins of 700/ha.

He urged growers to make their decision based on the five-year yield average of 6t/ha from the CSO figures from 2012 to 2017. Farmers can also avail of a 3m fund to provide a protein payment to incentivise planting.

"They were a disaster last year, there is no question about that," said Mr Collins, but he pointed out that the five-year average showed the crop's potential profit levels.

With a window for sowing from now until around St Patrick's Day, he said companies were offering contract prices for beans, while the price for barley is still not known.

"They have the potential to deliver as good a margin as anything. They are a break crop, which is valuable and a brilliant opportunity for grass weed control as you are using different herbicides," he said.

Quinns of Baltinglass created a firm market for beans by reaching out to farmers early in the year with a guaranteed price of 220/t at 20pc moisture, and it created strong interest.

Jim Gibbons of Germinal Ireland said it was all to play for with beans even though there was some "apathy" among farmers after last year's crop.

Donal Fitzgerald of Goldcrop urged farmers to sit down and examine the numbers on beans.

"They'll probably return the highest margin given a normal year," he said. "We should farm for the future, not the past."

He said forward indicators for feed barley are weak, with 3t of feed barley equal to 2t of feed beans based on current contract prices.

However, he acknowledged that with the slightly earlier sowing dates many farmers were wary of crow damage. The trade has indicated that seed for spring oats is virtually non-existent, with prices of around 750-800 for a tonne of seed. Mr Gibbons added that there was plenty of barley seed available.

IFA grain chair Mark Browne called on farmers buying compound feed rations to insist on Irish grains. He said Irish grain growers are forced to compete with non-EU feedstuffs which have advantages in relation to GM technology.

He warned the absence of a "level playing field" had seen sowings fall 20pc in 10 years.

Seed sales sluggish depite potential margins of 700 per ha this year
Hurdle: the move to short Paddy Power Betfair shares comes as all eyes in Irish and UK racing are on this years Cheltenham Festival

A US activist hedge fund that's been pushing for a potential sale of the firm behind Caesar's Palace has taken a short position in Paddy Power, hoping that the bookie's share price will fall.

HG Vora Capital Management is 'short' almost 1pc of the Irish bookie, according to Central Bank filings. Shorting allows an investor to make money when a share price falls.

It involves borrowing shares in a company, and then selling them and pocketing the proceeds in the hope that the shares can be bought back later at a lower price. It is a risky investment strategy as the potential losses are theoretically unlimited. Paddy Power Betfair declined to comment, while HG Vora did not respond to a request for comment.

Equity analyst Greg Johnson of Shore Capital said HG Vora may perceive the company to be overvalued versus peers, as its share price is higher relative to earnings. He also said regulatory pressure may be a reason why investors think the shares could fall.
Success: Philip Lane is a former governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. Photo: Bloomberg

The European Parliament has approved Philip Lanes appointment to the ECBs board and voted down a motion to delay that and the hiring of another two men to top EU jobs due to gender-balance considerations.

The appointment of Mr Lane, a former governor of the Irish Central Bank, was seen as crucial by ECB president Mario Draghi to ensure continued support for his brand of easy-money, market-oriented monetary policy.

The outcome of the vote was stalled briefly when the Greens complained about the all-men trio put forward for that position, the chair of the European Banking Authority and a seat on the Single Resolution Board.

However, the posts were approved by a big majority.
Grounded: Donald Trump said the US had to take a cautionary route on the 737 Max

Ryanair's flight schedules will not be affected by the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max jet, the airline's chief legal and regulatory officer said yesterday.

The US joined countries around the world in grounding the 737 Max on Wednesday, following a fatal crash in Ethiopia on Sunday.

Ryanair has ordered 135 737 Max 200s, a modified version of the Max 8, and has options on 75 more. It is due to take delivery of the first in April, two in May, two in June and then 50 more before the 2020 summer season.

"There is no risk for Ryanair's summer programme," Juliusz Komorek said in Warsaw. "Our fleet of 450 planes includes a lot of emergency planes, which are located strategically." He said it was too early to say if Ryanair would try to cancel its order.

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said the US had to take a "cautionary route" after the plane was involved in two fatal crashes. "I hope it is going to be for a short period. They have to find out what it is," said Mr Trump who called Boeing "a great company".

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the jet on Wednesday, reversing course after standing nearly alone by allowing the planes to stay in the air while authorities and airlines across the globe halted flights.

FAA Acting Administrator Dan Elwell said the decision was based on new evidence that showed the 737 Max that crashed in Ethiopia closely tracked another 737 Max crash five months ago in Indonesia.

Reuters and Bloomberg
St Patrick's Day is almost upon us, so it's time to partake in the unofficial national pastime of grumbling about St Patrick's Day. Come Sunday, Dublin will be soaked to the bones in Hiberno-kitsch and later literally soaked as everyone commences drinking in the streets.

Elsewhere, the more traditional St Paddy's Day programme of freezing half to death watching a parade of tractors, majorettes (what do majorettes do the rest of the year?) and 'floats' (what you call a cattle trailer on March 17) will meanwhile unfold. Stop complaining! It's part of what makes us Irish.

Or is it? The truth is, the Irish psyche is far too complex, contradictory and curmudgeonly to be understood through the prism of St Patrick's Day. And yet our "national day" - isn't it actually just a religious holiday? - reliably provokes oodles of soul-searching, as we consider what it really means to be Irish.

We're going to spare you the bother. Here is our whistle-stop guide to Irishness, as explained via a cultural map of the country.

1. Father Ted

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As we set out on our grand tour of Irish culture, let us begin somewhere comfortingly obvious. Although Derry Girls has lately stolen its glory a bit, it is undeniable that Father Ted (1995-1998) communicates the essence of growing up in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Priests were everywhere, but not really taken seriously (people would scrape and bow and then roll their eyes). Absurdity was bound up in the everyday. Nothing worked as it should; there were weirdos everywhere. And yet somehow life trundled along. If you want to know what life was like in Ireland in the days when the church had a nominal death-grip on the country, here is where to start.

2. Once

A rare urban Irish movie. Once (2007), directed by John Carney, had an underdog charm that we like to believe is quintessentially Irish. This 2007 tale of star-crossed busking lovers (Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova) wore its emotions on both sleeves - again something that distinguishes us from other parts of Northern Europe. It was also a Valentine to Dublin - not the "dirty old town" of Brendan Behan or Shane MacGowan but the exciting, sometimes chaotic, often maudlin city many of us will recognise from our own lives.

3. Guild of Dungeoneering

Culture doesn't simply reside in libraries or cinemas in 2019. Ireland's tech revolution may have raised living standards (and rents) but there have been precious few home grown successes to chime with the public. In video games especially, we continue to punch below our weight (contrast the Irish video game industry with that of Scotland, which has given the world Grand Theft Auto). Still, there have been quiet triumphs - such as this quirky 2015 fantasy adventure for desktop computer and tablets by Dublin-based game designer Colm Larkin. Guild of Dungeoneering hasn't changed the world. But it accomplishes what it sets out to fantastically and thus represents the sort of modest triumph at which the Irish excel.

4. The Hole in the Ground

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The Irish countryside is empty and haunting. Yet Irish horror movies have rarely tapped into that creepy - or channelled the darker aspects of Irish mythology. But both of these are accomplished with Lee Cronin's lauded directorial debut - in cinemas now - about a mother (Seana Kerslake) who moves to parts rural with her child and is unnerved out by the emptiness, the silence, the isolation - and her paranoid suspicion that her kid might be a demon changeling. Very scary, and very Irish.

5. Normal People

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Co Mayo writer Sally Rooney has been garlanded internationally as the voice of the millennial generation. And if her writing does convey the hopes, fears and digital angst of those raised on instant messaging and social media, there is also something quintessentially Irish about this 2018 story of two small town acquaintances whose relationship is set on a different trajectory as both up sticks for the big city. That's very Irish - as anyone who has, for instance, moved out of home to go college in Cork, Dublin or Galway will attest.

6. Disco Pigs

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Irish drama can seem a bit alienating and fusty to many Irish people, who don't really understand what Synge is getting at or thought The Importance of Being Earnest was funny the first time they sat through it but have no need to attend endless revivals. Amid such conformity, Enda Walsh's 1996 Cork-set Disco Pigs was like a punk anthem playing in a concert hall. It was visceral, vicious and communicated the reality of daily life as a 20-something Irish person mooching on the dole or in a rubbish job in a way nothing from the great Irish dramatic pantheon ever could.

7. The Bog Road

There's a burgeoning Irish independent comic book scene, often rooted in traditional mythology. Barry Keegan's Laois-set graphic novel (2018) delves into Ireland's pagan past and how it continues to inform our present. It's gorgeous and disquieting - and also addresses the often uneasy intertwining of paganism and Christianity that for centuries forged Irish identity.

8. Where's me jumper?

Love them or loathe them, there is no doubt that U2 cast an inescapable shadow over Irish music. In Dublin, especially, the sheer gravity of their success has historically made it difficult for other bands to stand out. Perhaps that is why, during the Nineties, all the most interesting Irish music was happening in cities other than the capital. Belfast had Therapy?, Limerick The Cranberries. And Cork had the twin assault of indie dreamers The Frank and Walters and punk absurdists the Sultans of Ping. It is the latter's Where's Me Jumper? (1992) that surely deserves its place in the Irish rock hall of fame. Where so much Irish music is slathered in sincerity, the Sultans were cheeky, subversive and pretentious - three words rarely associated with home grown musicians, alas.

9. Rory's Story Cubes

As pointed out above, in 2019 "culture" doesn't just mean the stuff you consume gazing at the printed page or at a screen. Rory O'Connor, from Dublin, has created one of the biggest phenomena in board gaming with his "story cubes". These are dice embossed with images of animals, objects and weather. You roll them and use them as the inspiration to weave a story. O'Connor says they aren't so much a game as a "story-telling device" - an idea that arguably springs from our very Irish love of spinning a tall tale.

10. Fairytale of New York

One of the trials of Irishness is having to navigate other people's idea of what it is to be from the old country. St Patrick's Day is the stereotypical example - an American emigrant holiday built on green bear and corned beef. In the arts, the same phenomenon is at play with groups such as The Pogues.

Though their links to Ireland run deep, Shane MacGowan is from Tunbridge Wells and his experiences are those of a second generation Irish person, not someone born to the sod. His great 1988 anthem is misty-eyed and has a undeniable emotional punch.

But it is also drowning in self pity, its veins pulsing with 99pc proof maudlin. Some of us will thus argue that the Pogues are the equivalent of a 'Kiss Me, I'm Irish' jumper and that the second generation band who most truly convey what it is to be Irish are The Smiths. Their songs coursed with dark wit, melancholy and sexual hang-ups - and you don't get more Irish than that.
James Gandolfini, left, Steven Van Zandt and Tony Sirico, right, members of the cast of the HBO cable television mob drama "The Sopranos."

The movie prequel of The Sopranos TV series will be released in September next year.

New Line have confirmed a September 25, 2020 release date and revealed that the title has changed from 'The Many Saints of Newark' to the more manageable 'Newark'.

The movie will tell the origin story of anti-hero Tony Soprano, who was played by the late James Gandolfini in the HBO series which ran from 1999 to 2007. The young Tony will be played by the actor's son Michael.

As well as Michael, Alessandro Nivola, Vera Farmiga, Ray Liotta, Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, and John Magaro will star in the film directed by Alan Taylor and written and produced by David Chase and Lawrence Konner.

Set in the 1960s during the Newark riots, which erupted between the African American and Italian American communities in the city, and which led to the deaths of 26 people, the film focuses on Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola).

He was often mentioned in the TV series but was killed before it began. Dickie is the father of Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) and cousin of Carmela Soprano.

Michael previously described his casting - which was secured after an extensive audition process - as a "profound honour".

He said: "It's a profound honour to continue my dad's legacy while stepping into the shoes of a young Tony Soprano. I'm thrilled that I'm going to have the opportunity to work with David Chase and the incredible company of talent he has assembled for 'The Many Saints of Newark'."

It was previously revealed there are expected to be call-backs and shout-outs to numerous other characters from the television series.

Chase previously admitted he was "against" creating a spin-off for a "long time", but became interested in the idea when he explored the 1967 Newark riots which were sparked after two Newark Police officers arrested and beat African American taxi driver John Smith.

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"I was interested in Newark and life in Newark at that time. I used to go to down there every Saturday night for dinner with my grandparents. But the thing that interested me most was Tony's boyhood. I was interested in exploring that," he said.

"I was against [the movie] for a long time and I'm still very worried about it, but I became interested in Newark, where my parents came from, and where the riots took place. I was living in suburban New Jersey at the time that happened, and my girlfriend was working in downtown Newark. I was just interested in the whole Newark riot thing. I started thinking about those events and organised crime, and I just got interested in mixing those two elements."
One Direction star Louis Tomlinsons sister Felicite has died after suffering a suspected cardiac arrest aged 18.

The aspiring fashion designer died at her flat in Earls Court, west London, on Wednesday.

Her death is being treated as unexplained by police.

It comes after Tomlinsons mother Johannah Deakin died from leukaemia in 2016 at the age of 43.

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In a statement, Scotland Yard said: Police were called by London Ambulance Service at 12.52 on Wednesday, March 13 to a residential address following reports of a female in cardiac arrest.

A female believed to be aged 18 was pronounced dead at the scene.

A post-mortem examination will take place in due course.

A person who was with the teenager called 999, according to The Sun newspaper.

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Felicite was well-known on social media and regularly shared posts with her 1.3 million followers on Instagram.

On January 30, she posted a picture of a row of tattoos on her forearm, which she said were the initials of all her siblings.

Her last post came just four days ago.

It is understood that Tomlinson, who is reportedly in London for a now-cancelled appearance on Friday nights Comic Relief, was told of her death on Wednesday.

The siblings mother died at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield on December 7 2016 after being diagnosed with leukaemia earlier that year.

Following her death, Tomlinson released the song Just Hold On  his debut solo single  in her honour and he performed it on The X Factor just days later.

At the time he described the performance as harder than I ever imagined.
Broadcaster Miriam O'Callaghan claims she has been defamed in a series of "false" and "malicious" adverts on social media.

The High Court was tolld Ms O'Callaghan intends to seek damages over the ads for skin care products that first appeared on Facebook and Instagram in May 2018.

The adverts contain headlines wrongly suggesting she has left her job with RTE's 'Prime Time'.

The court was told Ms O'Callaghan is most distressed at being associated against her will with what has been described as "a scam product".

It is also claimed users who avail of an offer of free trials of the products have reported money debited from their bank accounts that they did not authorise.

Ms O'Callaghan wants a permanent injunction restraining the publication of the adverts, as well as damages for malicious falsehood, unlawful appropriation of personality, various breaches of her constitutional rights and defamation.

The court was told she intends to bring proceedings against both Facebook, which owns Instagram, and those persons behind the adverts.

Ms O'Callaghan's lawyers say that at present they do not know who is behind the adverts.

As a result, Ms O'Callaghan's lawyers have brought an application against Facebook Ireland seeking an order directing it to provide her with information that identifies or may help in identifying those who have placed the ads on Facebook.

Her lawyers secured permission from Ms Justice Leonie Reynolds to serve short notice of its proceedings, seeking information about those who paid for the adverts, on Facebook Ireland Ltd.

Permission was granted on an ex-parte (one side only represented) basis. The case comes back next week.
Mobile was analysed: Mary Lowry was sent a text from an anonymous person in September 2011 saying she was hiding something. Photo: Collins Courts

Bobby Ryan suffered "a minimum of four" blunt-force blows to his head and face, with multiple fractures resulting, a radiologist has told the Tipperary murder trial.

Anthony Ryan said a CT scan showed injuries consistent with being struck by a vehicle and thrown, though he could not rule out an assault.

Patrick Quirke (50), of Breanshamore, Co Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Bobby Ryan (52), a part-time DJ known as 'Mr Moonlight', on a date between June 3, 2011, and April 2013.

Meanwhile, the trial also heard evidence that gardai have never discovered the identity of the person who sent a text message to Mary Lowry three months after the disappearance of her partner Bobby Ryan.

Phonetically written, it read: "U tink u r so col out partyn lik Bobby nevr existd. We no u hidn somethn nd wer gonta watch u till u crak."

Translated to proper English, it reads: "You think you are so cool, out partying like Bobby never existed. We know you're hiding something and we are going to watch you until you crack."

The text was sent in September 2011. Mr Ryan was last seen on June 3, 2011. His body was found in April 2013.

Radiologist Anthony Ryan, of University Hospital Waterford, told the court he performed a CT scan on the remains of Mr Ryan on May 1, 2013.

It showed "very extensive" skull fractures, with signs the force was "more likely to come from behind and above, or directly behind".

The injuries also included several rib fractures and a fractured thigh bone just above the knee which, he agreed under cross-examination, was an injury "usually caused by high-energy injuries such as falls from significant heights or motor vehicle injuries".

However, he told prosecuting counsel Michael Bowman he could not rule out a blow from an implement such as a bat. He said if the injuries were caused by a vehicle it would have to be travelling at a minimum of 30kmh, but closer to 50kmh.

Under cross-examination by Lorcan Staines SC, for the defence, he agreed some of the rib fractures may have been caused by small pieces of concrete falling into the tank during the recovery of the body.

But it was "highly unlikely" that the injuries to the skull, face or leg were caused by this, he said.

Garda Tony O'Brien, who conducted a forensic examination of handsets in the investigation, said he took possession of the mobile phones belonging to Mary Lowry, Mr Quirke, his wife Imelda, and Michelle and Robert Ryan, the children of Mr Ryan.

Mr Quirke's records showed that on the morning Mr Ryan's body was retrieved from a run-off tank at Fawnagowan, Co Tipperary, he made a call to his wife Imelda lasting eight seconds at 12.33pm.

Seconds later, he rang the local veterinary clinic, Glen Vet, in a call lasting 13 seconds.

Within a minute of that, the phone called voicemail and a minute later called Mr Quirke's wife twice more and on the last occasion, the call lasted for 36 seconds.

The data retrieved from Ms Lowry's phone showed she made at least six attempts to call Mr Ryan on June 5, 2011, two days after his disappearance.

She made two attempts to call him in September 2011.

Robert Ryan's phone showed that on the morning of his father's disappearance, he sent him a text message saying "Da are you not working today?" This text was sent at 9.44am on June 3, 2011.

Under cross-examination, Garda O'Brien said no messages were recovered from Ms Lowry's Nokia phone that was examined in June 2011. He had gone through the handset and he said that if anything was relevant he would have transcribed that.

"Obviously I saw nothing I deemed relevant on June 6, 2011," he said.

In September of that year, gardai again sought Ms Lowry's phone and this time it was a different Nokia device, with Garda O'Brien saying that "perhaps" she had upgraded it.

That phone's memory was downloaded on September 19, 2011, and a text was retrieved from it. It was written phonetically and said: "You think you are so cool out partying like Bobby never existed. We know you're hiding something and we are going to watch you until you crack."

Counsel for the defence put it to Garda O'Brien that he had investigated the number from which it was sent and that this investigation was "unsuccessful". He agreed.

Later, under questioning by Mr Bowman for the prosecution, Garda O'Brien agreed gardai had established the phone number that sent the text had not been used for anything else.

Edward Doocey BL, for the prosecution, asked whether the investigation team knew of the text and Garda O'Brien replied: "I believe so."

Asked whether anyone had queried the lack of success in examining Ms Lowry's first phone, the garda said he did not recall. Asked whether there was any Garda consultation on how to advance it, Garda O'Brien said: "I suppose at that stage it was a missing persons investigation and not a murder investigation."

Mr Doocey also asked the witness to bring the jury through CCTV footage taken from Ms Lowry's home on the day Mr Ryan's body was found in a disused run-off tank on her farm, which was leased to Mr Quirke. The footage showed Mr Quirke arriving in his 4x4 at 12.11pm, followed about 40 minutes later by his wife Imelda.

Ms Lowry arrived at the yard a few minutes later, with the first Garda van arriving at 1.20pm.

The trial continues.
A schoolboy involved in the "extreme bullying" of another pupil will escape a conviction for assaulting the boy, in lieu of a 1,000 contribution to the court's poor box.

The victim (13) was stamped on and repeatedly beaten by older pupils at the school, on unknown dates in March 2015, Limerick District Court heard last year.

At the accused's sentencing hearing yesterday, his solicitor alleged there had been a lack of supervision of students at the school at the time.

Water was thrown in the boy's face, his head was banged against a wall, and, on occasion, he was directed to "kiss the shoes" of the culprits, the court previously heard.

The accused, who pleaded guilty to one count of Section 3 assault causing harm, was one of a number of students involved in bullying the boy, the court heard.

Others were not prosecuted as they had accepted juvenile cautions from gardai.

Solicitor Ted McCarthy, defending, claimed there had been "little or no supervision" of the students in the school at the time of the bullying, which he said was "akin to a time of 'Lord of the Flies'".

"The school environment these boys were placed into was a disgrace. If there was proper supervision, none of this would have occurred," Mr McCarthy said.

The victim, who was not present in court, was recovering well from the ordeal, gardai said.

Inspector Helen Costello, prosecuting, told the court: "It was a typical case of extreme bullying. The [accused] was in fifth year and [the victim] was in first year, there was a considerable age difference."

The defendant, who is now at university, was given 12 months to make a 1,000 contribution to the court poor box, in lieu of a conviction for assault, and a 1,200 fine.
The family of murdered student Jastine Valdez will hear details of events leading up to her death at an inquest later this year.

Her parents Tess and Danny Valdez were present as a date for the hearing was scheduled at Dublin Coroner's Court.

The 24-year-old student was abducted and murdered by Mark Hennessey as she walked to her home in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, on Saturday, May 19, last year.

Hennessey (40) was shot in the arm and chest by a garda at Cherrywood Business Park the following day as a massive search to find Justine was under way.

Her remains were found on Monday, May 21, in dense woodland at Rathmichael, south Dublin.

Yesterday, Inspector Frank Keenaghan, of Bray garda station, applied to Deputy Coroner Dr Crona Gallagher for a date for hearing for the inquest.

A previous inquest hearing heard Ms Valdez died of asphyxia. She was abducted in broad daylight on a busy road close to Enniskerry. A witness who saw her being forced into the boot of a Nissan Qashqai rang 999.

Previously, the hearing heard that her mother and father travelled to the city morgue on May 22 to identify their daughter's remains.

A post-mortem conducted by Deputy State Pathologist Dr Linda Mulligan gave the cause of death as asphyxia.

Deputy Coroner Dr Crona Gallagher adjourned the inquest for a full hearing to take place on Monday, November 4, 2019.
Gardai failed to find millions of euro in drugs and an assault rifle stashed in a bed when they carried out a search of a house during a "very fast-moving operation", the Special Criminal Court has heard.

In her opening address, prosecution counsel Fiona Murphy SC said that the owner of the property later came to clear out the premises and found what appeared to be a large amount of controlled drugs and a firearm" at the base of a bed.

Michael Brady (54), with an address at Brookfield Grove, Blackrock, Co Dublin is charged with possessing 1.5 million worth of cocaine, 1.26 million worth of heroin, an assault rife and more than 180 rounds of ammunition at a property at Sallins Bridge, in Sallins, Co Kildare on January 24, 2017.

Mr Brady has pleaded not guilty to all nine counts on the indictment.

It is the State's case that forensic evidence links Mr Brady to some of the items found at Sallins Bridge and to the address itself.

Inspector Keith Halley, of the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau (GNDOCB), today told prosecution counsel Fiona Murphy SC that he became aware of an incident that had occurred at Greenogue Business Park, Rathcoole, Co Dublin on January 24 and as part of that investigation he was tasked with obtaining six search warrants.

Insp Halley said that he was present at the house at Sallins Bridge at 4.45pm when Sergeant Stephen Mullen entered the premises with a search warrant.

Under cross-examination by Dominic McGinn SC, defending, Insp Halley agreed that there had been a serious finding of 15 firearms at Greenogue Business Park that morning and as a result there could have been evidence connected with this at Sallins Bridge.

Sergeant Stephen Mullen gave evidence that he was in possession of a search warrant for Sallins Bridge and used a key to enter the house at 4.45pm that day.

No occupants were in the house at the time and two rounds of ammunition were found on a leather chair in the dining room during the search, he explained. The witness said the search was terminated at 7pm that day and he left the property.

Garda Mark ONeill said he found two rounds of ammunition at the back of the chair in the dining room and placed them in evidence bags.

Under cross-examination by Mr McGinn, defending, Gda ONeill agreed that the rounds of ammunition were tucked into the back of the chair and that it is standard practice to be as thorough as possible when conducting a search. You would have to put your hands in and separate where the chair and the back of the chair meet, he explained.

Sergeant Darren Coller said he searched a bedroom at Sallins Bridge on January 24 which appeared to be occupied and had observed an Alcoholics Anonymous book. A passport in the name of another man was inside this book, he said. Sgt Coller agreed with the prosecution that a photograph of the accused man was in this passport.

Garda Marguerite Reilly gave evidence that she took part in the search of Sallins Bridge and had searched underneath the stairs, the sitting room as well as a small bedroom.

Gda Reilly said she searched two large black bags in the bedroom and they contained mechanical equipment. She agreed with Ms Murphy that she found nothing of evidential value during the course of the search.

Under cross-examination by Mr McGinn, defending, Gda Reilly said she did not search underneath the bed in the bedroom.

The witness said she only searched inside two refuge bags before she left the house at Sallins Bridge and went to another search site.

It was a very fast-moving operation and we had to react to information received to go to another search site, she said, adding that in error, she did not brief anyone before she left the premises as to what search she had carried out in the bedroom.

Mr McGinn put it to the witness that it was the DPPs contention that an assault rifle, various ammunition and drugs were found in this bedroom.

You missed the fact that all these unlawful items may or may not have been in the bedroom at the time? asked Mr McGinn. The witness replied that she had not searched the bed.

In her opening address to the court, prosecution counsel Fiona Murphy SC said the owner of the property at Sallins Bridge came to clear out the premises four days later, on January 28. Ms Murphy said the owner found what appeared to be a large amount of controlled drugs and a firearm at the base of one of the beds.

A further search warrant was obtained and gardai found 1.5 million worth of cocaine, 1.26 million worth of heroin and 1,000 worth of cannabis. Gardai also seized a 7.62 x 39mm calibre VZ 58 assault rifle and a variety of ammunition, said Ms Murphy.

Earlier, judges at the Special Criminal Court ruled that the arrest and detention of Mr Brady was lawful.

Opening the case on Tuesday, Ms Murphy said that the property at Sallins Bridge was under surveillance as part of a wider garda operation concerning activities at Greenogue Business Park, Rathcoole, Co Dublin.

The court has heard that three men, Declan Brady (52), with an address at The Park, Wolstan Abbey, Celbridge, Co Kildare, Jonathan Harding (45) of McNeill Court, Sallins, Co Kildare and James Walsh (33), with an address at Neilstown Drive, Clondalkin, Dublin 22 were arrested at Greenogue Business Park earlier that morning at around 11.30am.

Last month, Declan Brady who is the brother of Michael Brady, pleaded guilty to possessing 15 firearms and more than 4,000 rounds of ammunition at Greenogue Business Park on the day in question. He is awaiting sentence.

In January, Harding and Walsh were sentenced to ten years and nine years imprisonment for what the Special Criminal Court called a "lethal arsenal" of weapons including four loaded guns.

The trial continues on Tuesday before Mr Justice Paul Coffey, presiding, sitting with Judge Gerard Griffin and Judge David McHugh.
Rosaleen Prendergast (red coat) pictured with her daughter Samantha (white jacket on right) Photo: Colin O'Riordan

A judge has ordered a landlord to pay compensation of 1,000 to a potential tenant who was rejected after saying he was qualified for the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP).

In what is believed to have been the first case of its type to be decided by the Circuit Court, the landlord failed in an appeal against a finding made by the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC), which also deals with non-work related equality complaints.

The president of the court, Judge Raymond Groarke, upheld the WRC finding against landlord Rosaleen Prendergast.

However, he reduced by half the 2,000 in compensation the WRC ordered she should pay.

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Judge Groarke said that while discrimination occurred, he did not believe it was intentional.

The WRC complaint was taken last year by prospective tenant Damien Keogh, who is currently living in a hostel.

After seeing a flat in Kilnamanagh, Tallaght advertised on Daft.ie, he sent an email enquiring about its availability. The email said he had been passed for HAP, a social housing support for people who have a long-term housing need.

Under equality legislation, a landlord cannot refuse to rent someone accommodation because they are getting a social welfare payment.

But Mr Keogh, who was represented in the case by legal advice charity Flac, told Dublin Circuit Civil Court he received an emailed response stating: Sorry, we do not accept HAP at the minute.

The court heard Ms Prendergast, a widow, had an extension on the side of her house and sought to rent out a small apartment in it for the first time last year.

She did not dispute the contents of the email sent to Mr Keogh. But she told the court the email response, sent by her daughter Samantha, had been a mistake.

We didnt do this on purpose. We didnt know about the HAP. We didnt mean to insult the fellow, she said.

Samantha Prendergast gave evidence that at the time she did not realise her mother did not need to be registered before she could offer the unit to someone on HAP.

She said she was inundated with emails in response to the advert and that subsequently they decided to get an estate agent to handle queries.

Judge Groarke said he was not satisfied the intention of the Prendergasts was to discriminate against Mr Keogh or anybody else receiving HAP.

He observed it was the first time they had rented the property and there was a quagmire of legislation, which they were not familiar with.

But unfortunately the law says that people are presumed to know the law and must act within the law whether they know what it is or not, the judge said.

I think that this was probably a human error, a human mistake on the part of the Prendergasts and they had no particular intention to treat anybody in a discriminatory fashion, he said.

I dont think there was any mala fides on their part. I dont think they are that kind of people. However, there was discrimination, the judge added.

However, he halved the WRC award to 1,000, saying the original award was too high.

The judge also awarded Mr Keogh legal costs of 1,000.

Mr Keogh welcomed the decision and urged more people to report landlords who refuse to take tenants on HAP.

This was my chance to get out of homelessness. The apartment was like heaven compared to my current living conditions, he said.

Flac chief executive Eilis Barry also welcomed the outcome of the appeal.

It is important that this new legislative provision which protects people in receipt of the HAP payment is found to be effective, she said.

Landlords need to be aware of this important protection and ensure that they do not discriminate against potential and existing tenants in receipt of HAP.
Marijuana is coming out of the shadows, as more states look to legalize the drug for recreational use and the stigma eases. Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in food, as weed matures from its college-dorm-pot-brownie reputation into a respected ingredient in fine dining. Exclusive, cannabis-infused supper clubs like Chicago-based Table for Twenty are popping up around the country.
The Bloody Sunday families have said the prosecution of just one soldier was a "terrible disappointment" almost five decades after the killings.

After a long campaign for justice, relatives said the families had been vindicated by the news murder charges are to be brought against a former paratrooper known only as Soldier F. However, they had hoped for multiple charges to be brought against all 17 paratroopers who were involved on January 30, 1972.

Soldier F will be charged with two murders and four attempted murders, the North's Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced yesterday.

Speaking at a press conference in the Guildhall in Derry, Alana Burke, who was badly injured when she was run over by an army vehicle on Bloody Sunday, said: "This announcement is vindication of our decades-long campaign to clear the names of our loved ones and to bring those responsible for their deaths and injuries to justice."

Mickey McKinney, whose brother Willie was one of Soldier F's alleged victims, said it was "disappointing" for families who had not received the news they wanted, but added: "For us here today, it is important to point out that justice for one family is justice for all of us."

Despite the fact there were not more charges, Mr McKinney added that a lack of prosecutions did not mean soldiers on that day 47 years ago had "acted in a dignified and appropriate way".

John Wray, aged nine when his brother James (22) was killed - also allegedly by Soldier F - said: "I'm relieved that somebody is being held to account for his death but I'm highly disappointed that the rest of the families haven't seen justice here today."

John Kelly, whose brother Michael was gunned down, said the families had worked for years on behalf of those who "cannot cry out for justice".

Soldier F was investigated over 17-year-old Michael's death but the PPS said the test for prosecution in that case had not been met.

The families vowed to keep fighting for their loved ones, with Mr Kelly adding: "The Bloody Sunday families are not finished yet."

The Irish Government has now urged that the prosecution be allowed to run its course. Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said his thoughts were with the Bloody Sunday victims and their families on a "difficult day".

"They, and all victims of the Troubles, deserve access to effective investigations," he said.

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin said the criminal justice system must be able to operate independently.

"At the same time, we need to prepare ourselves for the difficulties that this trial will cause, in terms of fuelling division across society in Northern Ireland," he said.

"This decision recognises that there is a case against one soldier. But the decision not to prosecute 16 other soldiers or the two Official IRA members will leave a terrible void for victims and families," he said.

Former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams described the decision as "wrong", while the deputy leader of the party Michelle O'Neill said the decision did not change the fact that Blood Sunday was a "massacre of innocents".

Solicitor Ciaran Shiels, who represents a number of the bereaved, said his clients had made a "remarkable achievement" but added that they will look at the decisions not to prosecute the others and, if they do not stand up to scrutiny, seek to challenge them.
The bill would see the US offer around 5,000 work visas for Irish people very year, in return for an easing on restrictions on Americans retiring here.

THERE is renewed hope that a special US visa scheme will be extended to Irish citizens who want to work in the US.

Irish-American congressman Richard Neal is set to reintroduce a bill that could see around 5,000 work visas made available to Irish people under the E3 programme.

It stalled late last year when it was blocked in the Senate by Republican Tom Cotton.

It's understood President Donald Trump has now spoken to Mr Cotton as part of efforts to get the deal over the line in Congress.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar thanked Congress and Mr Trump for their support for a new E3 visa programme.

The scheme is only open to Australians but they only use around half of the 10,500 visas available each year. The proposed legislation would see Irish citizens allowed to apply for the unused visas.
RTE presenter and producer Marian Richardson has retired after a career spanning four decades at the State broadcaster.

Ms Richardson, who presented children's favourite 'Bosco' and produced and presented 'Playback' on RTE Radio One, had become one of the most well known faces and voices at Montrose over the years.

RTE colleagues such as Aonghus McAnally and Eileen Dunne turned out to bid her a fond farewell at a retirement party yesterday.

The broadcaster spoke of suffering osteoarthritis in 2014 and ultimately she was forced to have a knee operation, but she was soon busy once again at the station.

The one-time aspiring actress toured with a theatre company when she completed her education and went on to utilise her passion for current affairs, working freelance at the BBC. Ms Richardson filed radio interviews to Dublin from England, telling stories of the Irish in London working in construction and of those that frequented the Irish bars in Kilburn and Camden during the 1970s.

She had a passion for working on air, as a producer and for being part of a team of news and current affairs broadcasters. She also presented on 2fm before transferring to 'Women Today'. She moved to the RTE newsroom in the mid-1980s to work on 'Morning Ireland' and the 'News at One', and then to the TV desk and the Oireachtas unit.

But she then returned to the Radio Centre as a producer, at the helm of 'Today with Pat Kenny' before moving to 'Drivetime'. She presented and produced 'Playback' for the past nine years.
A St Patrick's Day committee has clarified a "ban" on Irish dancers performing in this year's parade.

Anthony Lynch, chairman of the Drogheda parade committee in Co Louth, said the use of the word "ban" in media reports was a "misunderstanding".

A press release issued about the parade quoted a committee member as saying: "Due to health and safety concerns, performance has been cut out along the parade route this year. Gardai have advised us that due to health and safety regulations, we cannot allow our dancers or gymnasts to perform as they march along the route."

However, Mr Lynch said the parade will continue to allow dancers to perform as it has done for "the last 33 years" - as long as they don't dance in the one spot.

"They are still allowed dance and perform as long as they keep moving," he said.

"Marching groups must keep moving because we have four-year-olds marching and if a group stops, these little things are freezing, so the idea is for them to keep it moving and keep everybody happy."

He told the 'Drogheda Leader' earlier this week: "The dancing led to long delays, with many people actually thinking the parade had finished before it had."

A Garda spokeswoman said gardai had no role in who participates in St Patrick's Day parades. "This is a matter solely for the organising committee. There is a comprehensive policing and security plan in place for every event we attend."

The Drogheda St Patrick's Day parade is one of the biggest in the country.
A judge said he wants to hear a victim impact statement before he sentences a man who slapped his three-year-old daughter in a supermarket carpark.

The 46-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, last week had a charge of attempted witness interference against him dropped.

Judge Olann Kelleher said he now wants to finalise sentencing in the matter after being told that while a victim impact statement (VIS) was submitted to Gardai on Thursday evening, the statement was not yet available to the court.

"The sooner this is dealt with the better," Judge Kelleher said. "It (the VIS) will have to be read that day because this is now going on a while."

The man was remanded on bail to appear before Cork District Court on March 21 when sentence will be dealt with.

The defendant appeared before Cork District Court on a charge of assaulting his daughter on July 23 2017.

Judge Kelleher said that, while he found the facts proven against the man in respect of the assault matter, he wanted to consider alternatives to recording a conviction.

He said he also wanted to consider a Probation and Welfare Service (PWS) report on the man, who had no previous convictions, after previously hearing the facts of the case brought under Section 2 of the Non Fatal Offences Against the Person Act.

Judge Kelleher was previously told by Sergeant Anne Marie Twomey that the DPP directed an alleged witness interference charge, first brought on January 25 last, be withdrawn against the man.

Defence solicitor Eddie Burke confirmed that his client was co-operating fully with the PWS.

The defendant, who is not Irish, did not address the court during the adjournment.

However, on a previous court sitting he became very emotional.

"Our kid is suffering and no-one cares," he said.

"Where is the heart? I want my family safe. My family is not safe. My family is suffering. My kid is suffering...what do I have to do," he asked?

The man's wife also became extremely distraught during the previous court hearing.

Judge Kelleher said that while he found the facts proven in respect of the assault matter, he wanted to consider alternatives to recording a conviction.

A female witness told the court she was near the Dunnes Stores outlet at the Bishopscourt Shopping Centre in Bishopstown, Cork on July 23 2017.

The woman said her attention was drawn to the high-pitched sound of a child crying. She saw a man struggling with a young child by a shopping trolley.

He was trying to get the child's legs into the shopping trolley seat.

She was trying to get her legs out. But he was trying to get them back in, the woman said.

The woman noticed that the child was still crying and screaming as the man proceeded to do some shopping in the centre.

Later, she came across the pair back in the car park.

She said she saw the man standing by the rear of his car and swinging his hands into the back of the car.

The woman said she heard the child crying and noted that her voice was getting higher and louder in apparent distress.

A second woman at the complex said she also saw the man swinging his hands into the rear of the car - and heard a child crying.

The woman said, as she passed, she heard the man shouting in a loud voice: "Have you enough, now."

The female shopper said she was convinced the man had been slapping the child in the rear of the car.

Both women were very upset about the incident. Neither said they actually witnessed the child being struck but were convinced about what happened. One said she was worried for the welfare of the child.

The quick-thinking woman discreetly took a photo on her smartphone of the car complete with its registration and contacted Togher Garda Station.

Garda Brian O'Connell told Judge Kelleher he identified the vehicle and its owner from the photograph.

Garda O'Connell went to the car owner's address and brought the witness testimony to his attention.

The car owner said he couldn't recall if he had been in that shopping centre three days earlier.

However, he vehemently rejected any suggestion of having struck or hurt his daughter.

CCTV footage obtained from the shopping centre did not show the man striking his child.

The man offered sworn evidence in which he denied ever hitting or slapping his daughter.

The man said his family prefer to discipline their children by using the removal of toys or treats in cases of misbehaviour.

He told the court he believed the two women exaggerated or misunderstood what they had seen.

I have never resorted to violence, I have never hit my child and I never will, he insisted.

A doctor's report provided by the man and his family indicated the child was uninjured when examined days after the alleged Bishopstown incident.

Judge Kelleher said he had no doubt from the man's evidence that he was a good parent.

He described it as a very sad case but said the evidence of the two independent witnesses was both compelling and credible.

The case has since been referred to Tusla, the child protection agency.
GARDAI are investigating the circumstances in which an infant sustained head injuries at a Tipperary property.

The baby boy, who is three months old, was treated for serious head injuries when the alarm was raised on Thursday evening.

Later, the infant was transferred from Tipperary to a Dublin hospital as a precautionary measure.

The child is understood to be in a serious but stable condition.

Gardai are now investigating precisely how the infant suffered the injuries at the property which is located outside Thurles.

A garda spokesperson confirmed only that an investigation is underway into a matter at a location in north Tipperary.

"Gardai in Tipperary are investigating an incident which occurred at a location (outside Thurles) on Thursday involving an infant male," a garda spokesperson said.

"Tusla have been notified. Garda investigations are continuing. There is no further information available at this stage."

However, a senior garda source indicated that they are keeping an open mind about their inquiry and the precise circumstances in how the child sustained his injuries.

"The nature of the investigation will be determined by the findings of medical experts including the doctors now treating the child," he said.

"We are keeping an open mind in relation to the matter."

Gardai will be liaising closely with Tusla over the matter.

The property where the child was apparently injured was being examined by specialist officers.
Thousands of Dublin students march from St Stephens green to Leinster House today, joining a global protest for action to tackle climate change, which sees public gatherings staged at more than 37 locations across Ireland. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Thousands have turned out for the #schoolstrike4climate protest outside Leinster House this afternoon, with school children making up the majority of the crowd.

Gathering at noon at St Stephens Green, the protest of roughly 8,000 made its way to Molesworth Street where a stage had been set up for speeches from a number of teenage activists.

Expand Close Thousands of Dublin students march from St Stephens green to Leinster House today, joining a global protest for action to tackle climate change, which sees public gatherings staged at more than 37 locations across Ireland. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire / Facebook

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Whatsapp Thousands of Dublin students march from St Stephens green to Leinster House today, joining a global protest for action to tackle climate change, which sees public gatherings staged at more than 37 locations across Ireland. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire

They were calling for the government to increase its action on climate change, with the disuse of fossil fuels a priority for many in the crowd.

The movement today was part of a global initiative calling for action to end climate change, inspired by the school strikes by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.

Expand Close Thousands of Dublin students march from St Stephens green to Leinster House today, joining a global protest for action to tackle climate change, which sees public gatherings staged at more than 37 locations across Ireland. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire / Facebook

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Whatsapp Thousands of Dublin students march from St Stephens green to Leinster House today, joining a global protest for action to tackle climate change, which sees public gatherings staged at more than 37 locations across Ireland. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire

The event was being MCd by Mollie Mercier-Redmond, a second-year student from North Wicklow Educate Together Secondary School, while among speakers was Salim Kajani, a third year student from St Michaels in Dublin.

I was sickened looking at statistics  only 7pc of our energy for transport comes from renewable resources. Knowing what is going on with climate change, it is ridiculous that this government seem to be doing basically nothing compared to what we could be doing, said Salim.

Expand Close Thousands of Dublin students march from St Stephens green to Leinster House today, joining a global protest for action to tackle climate change, which sees public gatherings staged at more than 37 locations across Ireland. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire / Facebook

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Whatsapp Thousands of Dublin students march from St Stephens green to Leinster House today, joining a global protest for action to tackle climate change, which sees public gatherings staged at more than 37 locations across Ireland. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Speaking to Independent.ie, the Junior Cert pupil also expressed his anger that Geography is no longer a compulsory subject for second-level students in the junior cycle.

One of the big things is the fact that Geography was removed from the Junior cycle syllabus as a compulsory subject. It covers so many things, not only climate change but population and acid rain, he said.

As for the importance of today's protest he said:

You do have homelessness, lack of hospital beds, and Brexit, but this is one of the biggest issues and we need to focus on that."

In the UK, students have walked out of lessons and lectures across the UK to protest against the "inaction" of politicians over climate change.

The school strikes are part of a global day of action which has seen young people take to the streets from New Zealand to Europe as part of an expected 2,000 events in more than 120 countries.

Youngsters have staged events in 100 British towns and cities including London, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Oxford and Cambridge calling for urgent action to tackle climate change, cut emissions and switch to renewable energy.

In central London, one student climbed very close to the top of the 25-metre high Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, which appears to have prompted the Metropolitan Police to urge people not to climb statues.

United Nations climate chief Patricia Espinosa said young people around the world were sending a clear message "that nations must significantly increase their efforts to address climate change".

With reporting from Press Association
Ireland should be braced for a visit from US president Donald Trump later this year.

Mr Trump is believed to be keen to take up a long-standing invitation from the Government to come here before he starts his re-election bid.

A planned trip last November was cancelled, but the issue of an official visit is likely to come into focus when Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attends the annual St Patrick's Day festivities in Washington next week.

Government sources said that Mr Trump wants to visit Dublin and his hotel in Doonbeg, Co Clare.

"It makes sense for him in the context of the elections coming in 2020. There is still a big Irish-American vote," a source said.

One source noted Mr Trump was due to travel to London in December for a Nato summit. "A stopover on that trip would be the obvious opportunity, but there has been no contact about it yet," the source said.

Government sources said a visit would be unlikely to involve a major public event due to inevitable protests.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar (left), who is on an official visit to the United States, is accompanied by his partner Matt Barrett (right) as he stands in a group photograph with the US Vice President Mike Pence (second right) and the VP's sister Anne Pence Poynter at the VP's official residence in Washington DC.

Talks: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar presents US President Donald Trump with a bowl of shamrock at the White House in Washington yesterday. PHOTO: REUTERS

Leo Varadkar and Donald Trump yesterday clashed on Brexit, with the US president railing against the EU in a slap-down of the Taoiseach's remarks on a proposed free trade deal with America.

Mr Trump also used Mr Varadkar's visit to the White House yesterday to warn Ireland and the EU the US is "going to tariff a lot of their products coming in because the European Union treats us very, very unfairly".

Meanwhile, at the traditional St Patrick's Day shamrock ceremony at the White House, Mr Varadkar praised Mr Trump for the results of his efforts to 'Make America Great Again'.

In his speech, Mr Varadkar said: "Your ambition is to 'Make America Great Again', and I think we can already see some of the results of that.

"The American economy is booming. More jobs. Rising incomes."

He added: "We know and trust, that making America great again will not mean fighting or losing sight of what makes it great already."

Earlier, at a somewhat chaotic Oval Office press conference with the Taoiseach, Mr Trump took the opportunity to criticise British Prime Minister Theresa May's handling of the UK's departure from the EU.

Mr Trump said he intends to visit Ireland this year and renewed his pledge to build a border wall with Mexico.

Bilateral relations and the Irish undocumented immigrants in the US were on the agenda for Mr Varadkar's Oval Office meeting with Mr Trump, but Brexit dominated their talks.

Before Mr Varadkar's arrival, Mr Trump tweeted that he looked forward to making a trade deal with the UK, several hours before British MPs in the House of Commons were due to vote on whether they should seek an extension for Brexit from the EU.

Sitting beside Mr Varadkar, Mr Trump claimed the process of trying to reach a trade deal between the US and the EU contained difficulties.

Mr Trump was asked by reporters if he was still a Brexit supporter. He said: "It wasn't that I was a supporter. I predicted it was going to happen."

He was surprised how badly the Brexit talks had gone, adding: "I gave the prime minister [Mrs May] my ideas on how to negotiate... she didn't listen to that and that's fine. I think it could have been negotiated in a different manner."

He added: "I hate to see everything being ripped apart right now," and said he didn't think a second referendum would be possible. Mr Trump said the "issue on the Border of Ireland is one of the most complex points".

The Taoiseach said: "Well, we have a different opinion. I regret Brexit's happening."

He said it was the UK's decision and the most important thing for Ireland was to avoid a hard Border and protect the peace process.

Mr Varadkar also said Ireland wanted frictionless trade with the UK and he believed in free trade, and while it may be years before the UK "sorted itself out", the EU was "available to talk trade with the US".

This prompted Mr Trump to complain about how the US was treated in trade talks with the EU and he warned of tariffs being slapped on EU products. He said: "If they don't talk to us, we're going to do something pretty severe economically. We're going to tariff a lot of their products coming in because the European Union treats us very, very unfairly."

After their private meeting, Mr Varadkar said it had been an opportunity for him to set out Ireland's position on Brexit, "particularly when it comes to the peace process".

He said: "I know he is a supporter of Brexit and I am not.

"What I've asked for is an understanding of our situation, particularly when it comes to Northern Ireland and avoiding a hard Border and protecting the peace process. He is supportive on that point."

He said he told Mr Trump there was an opportunity for an EU-US trade deal. He added: "It will be many years before the United Kingdom is able to make any trade deals, so surely it makes sense to make one with the EU first. There's 500 million of us, only 60 million of them."

Earlier, on his plans to visit Ireland, Mr Trump said: "I'll be coming at some point during the year. I missed it last time but I would have loved to have been there. It's a special place."
Tootsie Roll packaged Charms Mini Pops in yellow bags until 2017. In court filings, the company said it invested $1 million in the redesign. The company claimed it would not only have to invest more money in a redesign, but also damage its image as a whole by changing so soon after introducing the disputed packaging.
Standing on the porch of his Washington home, US Vice-President Mike Pence broke the ice with the Taoiseach's partner Matt Barrett, saying: "Chicago is home to you... my whole family is from Chicago."

He was referring to the cardiologist's time working in a hospital in the city as he welcomed Mr Barrett and Mr Varadkar to the US Naval Observatory residence.

The conservative Christian politician has been criticised for his views on LGBT issues and his opposition to same-sex marriage. But he was a gracious host at the annual St Patrick's week breakfast and he thanked Mr Varadkar, one of the world's few openly gay leaders, for visiting and "honouring us with your presence".

However, it was not an occasion Mr Varadkar could allow pass without using the opportunity to highlight his own story and how he had, as a gay man, become the leader of a changed, tolerant Ireland.

In carefully crafted words that will surely resonate with the LGBT community in the US, Mr Varadkar told how that country had inspired him to run for office and drive change in Ireland. He said he once lived in a country where if he had been himself he would have been breaking laws and now that has all changed.

Mr Varadkar said: "I stand here this morning as leader of my country, flawed and human, but judged by my political actions and not by my sexual orientation or my skin tone or my gender or religious beliefs.

"And I don't believe my country is the only one in the world where this story is possible. It is found in every country where freedom and liberty are cherished. We are, after all, all God's children."

Mr Pence said Mr Varadkar had offered "inspiring words" and asked his sister Annie Poynter to say blessings before they tucked into a breakfast of "Eggs St Patrick", applewood smoked bacon and boxty.

It was potentially the thorniest meeting in Mr Varadkar's packed Washington schedule but it passed off well, with Mr Pence promising to visit Ireland with his mother Nancy to see their ancestral home.

In contrast, President Trump was in combative form in the Oval Office where the meeting with Mr Varadkar came shortly after the Senate voted to end his declaration of a national emergency on the US-Mexico border. When Mr Trump was asked about it by US reporters, he turned to Mr Varadkar and said: "We have a border situation also. It's slightly different than yours."

He ranted against Democrats who had brought "horrible" immigration laws and the Republicans that didn't fight hard enough to oppose them.

But he insisted: "We are going to have a very strong border very soon," and he praised law enforcement officers catching "thousands of illegal aliens a month".

Mr Varadkar looked bemused as the president mocked Democrat Beto O'Rourke, who had declared his intention to run for president in 2020. Mr Trump said he had seen Mr O'Rourke's announcement and said: "I've never seen so much hand movement. Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?"

Asked if Mr O'Rourke or former vice-president Joe Biden would be a bigger threat to him, Mr Trump replied: "Whoever it is, I'll take them on".

At the Capitol Hill lunch hosted by Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Mr Varadkar avoided remarks similar to his infamous windfarm gaffe last year. Mr Trump returned to Brexit, saying it's something that's turning out "a little more complex" than some people had thought "but it will all work out". Many in the room, including Mr Varadkar, DUP leader Arlene Foster and Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald, were surely thinking, "if only it was all so simple".
Nothing to see here: The PSRA's announcement on deeming false bidding as 'improper' is puzzling, given the lack of false bidding

Forty years ago my parents were offloading their cute Edwardian millworker's cottage in order to trade up. The cottage was to be sold by auction through a local estate agent.

Long before Blackadder, my dad and his mates got together over pints to work out a "cunning plan". On the day, the auction room floor was well seeded with his cronies; at least one bearing instructions to be 'puff adder' to the bidding. The unknowing auctioneer took up the gavel and my dad retired from the room, too nervous to watch.

After a busy bidding session closed, the auctioneer came back to my dad, jubilant to tell him that a good price had been reached. When asked to point out the buyer, the agent jabbed a finger at my dad's sheepish looking 'puffer' who, like so many often do; had completely lost the run of himself in an auction room.

But the puffer wasn't as embarrassed as my dad, who had to explain to the auctioneer why this house was still a long way from being sold and the agent's fee a long way from being paid. That's the last time I became aware of a 'puff' bid being placed at an Irish house auction and I have written about the property market for almost 30 years.

But last week it was announced that the Property Services Regulatory Authority (PSRA) is preparing new rules for estate agents to determine that "false or misleading" bidding for properties is to be "deemed improper".

Of course that should be the case. More properly than just being "deemed improper," fake bidding should be illegal and fully punishable by real penalties under law. The announcement from the PSRA has caused consternation among the established estate agency sector. But not for reasons we might expect.

You see, most Irish estate agents believed all along that puff bidding, whether at auction or private treaty, was fully illegal already; never mind soon to be deemed "improper". To estate agents, last week's announcement was a bit like declaring that it will soon be deemed improper for chimney sweeps to shove six-year-olds up sooty flues. Generally speaking, it just doesn't happen.

One estate agent with decades of experience in the Dublin market adds: "We just thought it was illegal all along, and that if anyone was caught doing it they'd be struck off. And I can speak for many I know who work in other agencies in thinking the same. It doesn't happen. You'd be fired." And they'd spill the beans if they thought the competition was at it.

A half-a-day's phone calls through various professional estate agency sources elicited much the same response. The last time they thought puffing took place was pre-2007 when agencies suspected that dodgy vendors (like my dad) were salting auction rooms to get their homes up to the reserve. But it had nothing to do with the estate agents back then and they couldn't do anything about it in any case.

Now thanks to the recent PSRA announcement, there are concerns in the sector that vendors might actually ask for puffing, given that it is now known not to be illegal (they will be turned down). Or that the few dodgy operators who plague every sector will now actively consider taking a puff or two until it is de facto declared illegal.

As someone who has received every complaint imaginable from the public concerning estate agents, I can categorically declare I haven't heard a piffle about puffing.

It also seems strange for the PSRA to raise this at a time when, thanks to technology, buyers involved in bidding can increasingly and easily access the process at any time online, to see exactly what else is on the table, from whom and when it was put there.

But what is fully ironic is that members of the public have always believed (particularly regarding the private treaty process), that they are bidding against ghosts and the estate agents are 'puffing' them up. Unfortunately they usually discover they are wrong at the point when the house is sold to the other bidder. And perhaps this core belief is the origin of proposed measures against fake bids that are, well, fake.

They're no saints. As a property market analyst I've had reasons to tear strips off estate agents over the years. Recently I hit out at the practice of over estimation of achievable prices to vendors at tender stage - a practice a handful of firms have been guilty of in order to obtain instructions ahead of their competitors. But this relies on greedy vendors, its victims are other estate agents, and the vendor ends up getting full market value for his or her home in either case.

I criticised when I believed fees were too high (they haven't been lately) and when misleading and deliberately underestimated guideline prices were being widely deployed to get bums on seats for auctions pre-2007.

Some agencies can be blamed for misleading the public about what was going on when the market was starting to crumble back in 2006/07. But at the same time, the largest networks were providing open, accurate and publicly available quarterly data. And they still do. In fact, their data has been consistently more reliable than the State's.

In fairness to the Irish estate agency sector, over 30 years it has moved (thanks in no small part to its professional organisations) towards steadily higher standards of education, ethics and practice.

Irish estate agents tend to stay in the business for life and often through successive generations. Generally they take a great pride in their work and most care about people (despite needing to appear impartial) and they deal graciously with a disparaging public. They are far better professionally and ethically than their counterparts in the UK, in Europe and in the USA. They are certainly no worse, and perhaps much better than others in supposedly more 'reputable' professions.

So is it just systematic of an ultra diplomatic profession, which seldom stands up for itself against disparaging perceptions held, that Government is looking to call out wrongs which likely don't exist? And just because popular wisdom holds it to be so? Because these days puff from the State on false bidding is very much a smokeless duel.
Neon looks like magic. From the lines of coloured light that set the night sky of Los Angeles aglow to the familiar 'Why Go Bald' sign on Dublin's Dame Lane, there's nothing to match it. Flashy, trashy and deeply nostalgic, neon has it going on. It's also one of the hottest interior trends of 2019.

Neon is not magic, of course - it's science. Neon is a gas. It was discovered in the 1890s by the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay. It's one of the four 'noble' gases - the others are argon, krypton, and xenon - so called because they are reluctant to bond with other atoms. In other words, they are snobs.

These gases are invisible but, when sealed in a glass tube and zapped with an electric current, each one lights up with its own distinctive colour. Neon is the most brilliant of them all. "The blaze of crimson light from the tube told its own story, and it was a sight to dwell upon and never to forget for nothing in the world gave a glow such as we had seen," wrote Morris Travers, one of the scientists who worked with Ramsay.

So far, so scientific. In an article for Science History (2012), Jane Boyd and Joseph Rucker describe how the Parisian inventor, Georges Claude, set about finding a way to use neon commercially. His neon lighting was patented in 1910 and two years later, he installed the world's first neon advertising sign in a barbershop in Paris.

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Neon lighting was technically difficult to achieve and shockingly expensive, but it caught on. "In New York and London, in Denver and Shanghai, along the main streets of the world, dusk brings forth a million vivid electric signs that make the night alive. There is a new sign language... written in glass!" proclaimed a 1937 advertisement for Corning Glass Works, which supplied tubes for neon signs.

There are still people working in neon today - the 'Why Go Bald' sign was restored in 1999 by Taylor Signs, the same company that had built the sign 37 years earlier - but it's a complicated and potentially dangerous process. First, the neon-bender heats the glass tube and bends it into the required shape. They attach electrodes to the tube and evacuate the air inside. Next, they bombard the interior with high voltage to clean the glass. Then, small amounts of gas are pumped in - usually a neon-argon mixture, sometimes with a little mercury - and the tube is sealed.

The neon decor that we see in today's homeware stores isn't made using gas-filled glass tubes. Most of it is faux neon, made from electroluminescent wire, known as El wire, coated in bendy plastic. It allows designers and artists to make pieces that mimic the colours of neon, and draw deeply on the heritage of neon signage without the risk, cost and complexity of working with actual gas.

"We like El wire for lots of reasons," says Emma Krause of Light Up North, a company that's pioneering the trend for neon interiors. Real neon, she explains, is incredibly bright. That's just what you want for street signage, but much too much to use in people's homes. "El wire is not as bright and it's cheaper to run. You can power it with a battery pack. Also, real neon creates a lot of heat. You couldn't add it to artwork in the way that we do."

At last year's 100pc Design in London, Light Up North collaborated with the wallpaper company Divine Savages to create a wallpaper with strands of neon running through it like embroidery threads. "We literally lit up their wallpaper!" Krause says.

It's three years since Krause launched Light Up North in Saltburn by-the-Sea, North Yorkshire. "My husband and I spent all our money doing up the house and we had no money left for cool stuff," she says. "Then we discovered El wire and started to play around with it."

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Whatsapp Blondie by Light up North, sold by Limelace

The turning point, she says, was making friends with Turtledust, a local graphic designer who suggested combining El wire with his prints to make interesting neon artwork. Blondie (135cm x 102cm) for example, is a framed print by Turtledust with the word 'Atomic' running across it in neon wire. The range also includes prints of David Bowie, George Michael and Kanye West. Each of these costs 750 (863) with the neon and 75 (86) without (but where's the fun in that?).

For Krause, the joy of working with El wire is that you use it to say anything that you want. "Tell us your idea and we'll work out a way to make it happen," says Krause cheerfully. Bespoke designs start at 350 (403), but can quickly get expensive. If you prefer a fixed price, a tailored sign (150cm x 30cm) costs 350 (403). You choose the background, the font, and the colour of wire. Then you have to think of something witty to say. No pressure.

If you have a bigger budget for neon artwork, the new range from Andrew Martin costs 2,195 (2,525) for a 182cm x 122cm print with detailing in El wire. It's pretty cool, if a little self-conscious and designs include Space Girl, an alluring young wan in a 1970s type space helmet, lit up by neon, and a Nasa space suit branded with Louis Vuitton logos. According to the company's design director, David Harris, this is the kind of thing that appeals to men. "Funky neon artworks, modern art wallpapers, architectural lighting ranges, and great furniture covered in rich velvets and leathers is helping to attract a more masculine following," he says. "Men now feel more confident than ever about their interior ideas and they want to show off their tastes."

You can, of course, get the look for less. Online stores like Red Candy have neon table lamps for 45 (52) and Amara has a nice neon flamingo wall light for 36. Many, many neon lamps are in the shape of flamingos, possibly because they're pink. Small faux neon lamps often pop up in Penneys and TK Maxx for less than 10. Or - and this is massively exciting - you can buy a 'Make Your Own Neon Effect Sign' kit. The set includes three metres of flex wire in the colour of your choice, along with everything else you need apart from the batteries and costs 14.49 from iwantoneofthose.com.

See also lightupnorth.com, andrewmartin.co.uk, redcandy.co.uk, and amara.com
The City Walls in York, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Danny Lawson/PA Wire

Portal Maya in Playa del Carmen (Mexico), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Chijmes in Singapore illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Castello Aragonese in Reggio Calabria (Italy), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Fortunato Serrano

Museu Condes de Castro Guimaraes in Cascais, Portugal, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

The Sammy Ofer Stadium in Haifa (Israel), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Kenneth F. Burns Memorial Bridge in Worcester, Massachusetts, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

The City Hall in Zamosc, Poland, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Gate of the Citadel, Montevideo (Uruguay), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative, to celebrate the island of Ireland and St Patrick.

The InterContinental Abu Dhabi, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative,

Optus Stadium in Perth (Australia) illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

The Source of the Nile Bridge in Uganda, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative.

The Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava (Slovak Republic), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

The National Palace of Culture (NDK) in Sofia (Bulgaria), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Orlin Ognyanov

Bloedel Conservatory, a conservatory and aviary located at the top of Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver (Canada), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Nation Towers in Abu Dhabi, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

Izvestia Hall in Moscow (Russia), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

The John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge in Nashville, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

The Cotton Tree in Freetown, Sierra Leone  where freed slaves gathered on their return to Africa after the abolition of slavery  illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative.

San Mames stadium, Bilbao, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Asier Camacho Fernandez

The Clock Tower of Tirana (Albania), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Ilir Agastra

The Brama Przemyska Bridge in Przemysl, Poland, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative. Photo: Grzegorz Karnas

The Town Hall in Sydney (Australia) illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Fiora Sacco

Pen Monument, Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi (Vietnam) illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

The Peninsula (hotel) in Hong Kong, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative. Photo: Kevin On Man Lee

Ljubljana Castle in Ljubljana (Slovenia), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Ian Middleton

La Concha Visitors Center in Las Vegas, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Cascata Isola del Liri (Italy), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

The Irish College in Leuven, in Belgium, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

Council House in Perth (Australia) illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative.

Stadthalle, Grafing (Germany), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative, to celebrate the island of Ireland and St Patrick. Photo: Stefan Rossman

The TV Tower in Tbilisi (Georgia) joins Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative, to celebrate the island of Ireland and St Patrick.

The Beaugrenelle shopping centre in Paris, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative. Photo: Nicolas Gouhier

Bamburgh Castle, on the north-east coast of England, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Scott Heppell/PA Wire

The historic Cutty Sark sailing ship in Greenwich, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: David Parry/PA Wire (no repro fee)

St Patricks Bike Parade at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam  a festive green procession of bicycles, with the bike wheels illuminated with green LED lights, as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative.

The MTP Spire in Poznan, Poland, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Puerta de Alcala in Madrid, Spain, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: David Mudarra

Mac the Moose in Saskatchewan illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

The Obelisk of Buenos Aires (Argentina), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

The Grand Ole Opry  the show that made country music famous!  in Nashville, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative. Photo: Chris Hollo / Hollo Photographics Inc

The futuristic Reunion Tower in Dallas, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Sauna Kuuma in Tampere, Finland, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Laura Vanzo

De Grote Kerk in The Hague (The Netherlands), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative. Photo: Nils van Houts

Galeries Lafayette in Paris, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative. Photo: Christophe Guibbaud

Shizuoka Stadium ECOPA, Fukuroi, Shizuoka Prefecture, in Japan  where Ireland will play Japan in the Rugby World Cup in September  illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

Cayan Tower in Dubai illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative

GreenKayak clean-up in Copenhagen, Denmark  volunteers in kayaks give Copenhagen Harbour a green makeover by collecting waste, as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

The Vasa warship in Stockholm (Sweden) illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative.

Bete Giyorgis (Church of Saint George) in Lalibela (Ethiopia), illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative...

The Marbella arches in Spain, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Robert Leja

The Eden Project in Cornwall, illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative... Photo: Alistair Heap/PA Wire

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai  the worlds tallest building  illuminated in green as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening

Global Greening 2019: See the landmarks going green for St Patrick's Day Close

What have the world's tallest building, Niagara Falls, Adare Manor and Finland's sub-zero take on Dragon's Den got in common?

All are among some 450 global landmarks, buildings and events going green this weekend in a burst of colour worth over 10 million to Irish tourism.

That's according to Tourism Ireland, whose 'Global Greening' initiative is rolling out to some 55 counties in this - its tenth, and biggest ever, year.

New 'greenings' for 2019 include Dubai's Burj Khalifa - the world's tallest building at 828m - Victoria Falls, and Cornwall's Eden Project.

They join old favourites like the Sydney Opera House, Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland Paris and the Las Vegas welcome sign, in an initiative seeking to capitalise on international goodwill surrounding St Patrick's Day.

It's aim? To encourage people to visit the island of Ireland.

Pari Roller and Polar Bear Pitching

Expand Close St Patricks Bike Parade at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam  a festive green procession of bicycles, with the bike wheels illuminated with green LED lights, as part of Tourism Irelands Global Greening initiative. / Facebook

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The Global Greening is an expression "of our reach, our shared values and our ambition," in the words of An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, who recently launched a book telling its story - Ireland's Greening of the World.

"It's impossible to put an accurate figure on [the marketing value], but it's worth a minimum of 10 million," adds Tourism Ireland CEO, Niall Gibbons.

And the cost? 48,000, the marketing organisation says.

Quirkier inclusions this year are a parade of bicycles in Amsterdam and Pari Roller - the world's biggest rollerskating event, which takes place every Friday night in Paris.

In Finland, a wacky version of Dragon's Den called Polar Bear Pitching will even see entrepreneurs pitch business start-up ideas while standing waist-deep in a hole cut through the frozen Baltic Sea.

Bizarrely, they will be lit up in green as they pitch.

Expand Close Adare Manor goes green for 2019 / Facebook

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Nor is it just overseas landmarks - Adare Manor is wearing green, and Dublin Airport is rolling out 2.5km of temporary cabling to light up its campus.

Eleven separate areas are going green, including Terminal 1 and 2 and the airports iconic original 1940s passenger terminal, said spokesperson Paul OKane.

10 years a-growing

The Global Greening began life in 2010, when local diplomatic staff helped convince Sydney Opera House and Auckland's Sky Tower to "go green".

Though Irish tourism is booming today, with more than ten million overseas visitors recorded last year, it was a different story when the project sparked up.

"2010 was a very emotional time for Ireland, with the Troika and bank bailouts and all of that, and the initiative had a very emotional appeal," Gibbons recalls.

Expand Close The Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand, joins Tourism Irelands Global Greening, to celebrate the island of Ireland and St Patrick. / Facebook

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Whatsapp The Sky Tower in Auckland, New Zealand, joins Tourism Irelands Global Greening, to celebrate the island of Ireland and St Patrick.

"St. Patrick's Day is undoubtedly the most celebrated national day across the world," adds Rodney Walshe, a former Irish Honorary Consul to New Zealand.

Walshe helped convince the Sky Tower to go green... sweetening the deal with a gift of two bottles of Bushmill's Whiskey.

"As the sun sets on St Patrick's Day, it's the end of the day in New Zealand and [the Greening] goes around the world from there," he says.

With some 70 million people claiming some kind of Irish ancestry, he also believes the initiative deepens links with the diaspora.

"It's a symbol of Ireland," he says.

"People or their parents may have emigrated, and suddenly there it is on St Patrick's Day - the green of Ireland and it's for everybody to join in.

"When you've lived half a world away and you see that green, you feel it... it's indescribable.... your chin goes up and your chest goes out."

"There's no other country in the world that can do that."

"There's a soft power to it," agrees Niall Gibbons, batting away the suggestion that St Patrick's Day PR comes on the back of unsubtle green stereotypes.

The Global Greening - which Tourism Ireland aims to grow to 600 sites by 2025 - targets landmarks that reflect both traditional and modern heritage, he says.

"It brings Ireland to life in a digital era."

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Green initiative: The Yas Hotel in Abu Dhabi, illuminated in green as part of a Tourism Ireland initiative to celebrate St Patricks Day. Photo: Tourism Ireland

Ryanair has announced a new route from Dublin to Billund in Denmark, a twice-weekly service taking off from October.

The announcement comes as airports and airlines prepare for a busy St Patrick's weekend, with Dublin alone expecting 350,000 passengers between Friday and Monday - a 6pc rise on last year.

Passengers are flying to and from Cheltenham, Ireland's St Patrick's Festival celebrations, and Ireland's Six Nations rugby match in Cardiff... and the airport advises arriving at least 90 minutes before departure times.

Ryanair says it will fly over 70,000 customers to Ireland this weekend... with 6,000 or more of them named 'Patrick' - or some variation of the name, including Patricia, Pat or Padraig.

Expand Close Green initiative: The Yas Hotel in Abu Dhabi, illuminated in green as part of a Tourism Ireland initiative to celebrate St Patricks Day. Photo: Tourism Ireland / Facebook

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It has launched a 'Shamrocking Sale' to celebrate, with seats on its European network available from 17.99 for a limited time.

St Patrick's Day traditionally marks the start of Ireland's tourism season, with government ministers travelling around the world and Tourism Ireland overseeing the 'Global Greening' of hundreds of landmarks.

Cork is also busy, with new figures revealing it as Ireland's fastest-growing airport, thanks to a 10pc jump in customers (to 151,000) in February, when compared to the same month last year.

New routes like Aer Lingus's year-round service to Lisbon and a daily Air France route to Paris are driving the growth, with 40,000 passengers expected this weekend, and 2.6 million passengers throughout 2019, it says.

Cork has seen nine new routes in the past year, and Ryanair has announced new winter services to Katowice as well as Alicante, Budapest, Malta and Poznan - all extensions of existing summer services.

This year, the airline has also promised new winter flights from Dublin to Milan Malpensa and Ireland West (Knock) to Tenerife.

This week also saw the commencement of Irish Ferries sailings from Dublin to Cherbourg on its new, 150m W.B. Yeats 'cruise-ferry'.

Sailings to France take around 18 hours, Irish Ferries says - departing at 16.00 and arriving in Cherbourg at 11.00 the following day.

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Hey, cynics - need to add spice to your verbal demolition of teen climate change activism today?

How's this: the author of one of the most definitive studies on personal responses to global climate change (the 2017 report by Professor Kim Nicholas of Sweden's Lund University) concluded the most effective way for any individual to reduce his or her carbon emissions was this - have fewer children.

Throw that in as an anecdote as you mock the fact that today, in cities across the world, pre-teens and teenagers are downing pens to stage the biggest protest to date in their so-called 'Fridays for Future' series of climate action demonstrations.

The Irish primary and secondary school children who are expected to congregate outside the Dail at lunchtime today are determined to make the grown-ups see just how seriously they take the clear and present danger modern life presents to the environment.

In reality, two prevailing adult responses appear to dominate.

The first is dismissal. Most of them are in it for the break from school, this line runs. And how many of them will get a lift to the Dail in their parents' gas-guzzling cars? Where will they go on their Easter break? Might there be planes?

The second more or less tracks the response from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who declared himself "inspired and enthused" about today's march - while continuing to preside over a Government policy that has sidestepped the need to act on the topic of carbon tax.

This reaction is understandable, in many ways. We are used to finding our kids somewhat mystifying and peculiar. We like an opportunity to praise them. But then modern teens are usually synonymous with a whole pile of angst - about their obsession with games like 'Fortnite', or apps like Snapchat, or their binge drinking on Junior Cert results night, or their mounting anxiety levels.

And so something like a climate change protest shines out to the elders in a manner reminiscent of the annual Young Scientists exhibition - a display of laudable if ultimately not all that important - joyous idealism. Look at them with their placards and their earnest expressions. Bless.

Let them all have their day of protest and by Saturday it will all be forgotten and we can get back to the usual routine. Right?

We may need to buck up our ideas.

We all know, intellectually, that climate change is probably the greatest existential threat out there. We've all seen the statistics. We know we need to modify our own habits to make a difference (and buying a hybrid car is not the only answer) and we know we should force our industry and politicians into more responsible behaviour.

The stakes are sky-high. Recent months have brought the grim news that the Arctic region is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, with ice melting at a catastrophic rate. And yet we prevaricate.

Maybe when it all hits our pockets hard, we'll react. The Governor of the Central Bank, Philip Lane, recently named climate change as a strategic priority for the whole Irish financial system, such are its potential risks to our economic stability.

Just this week, the deputy governor of Australia's central bank chimed in to say global warming has created risks for Australia's financial stability in all sorts of ways - affecting future insurance premiums, legal exposure for polluter companies and all kinds of future asset valuations, for businesses and households.

Perhaps the problem is that with so many competing urgent threats to worry about - between Brexit, Isil, cyber-espionage, Trump, Korea, China, Russia and all the rest - we simply struggle to focus on what seems like it might not happen for decades to come.

Instead we mock, or 'ah bless' the kids to oblivion.

Have we that right, though? When were we last on a demonstration? About anything?

One thing is sure; while we adults have been busy thinking about everything but the planet, a laser-sharp focused brand of teen activism has been on the rise for more than a year.

It probably began when February 2018's tragic school shooting in Parkland sparked a protest borne out of American teens' very real fear for their lives due to gun violence. After most mass shootings in America, the media focused squarely on the killer's or killers' background motivation, supported by effusive expressions of "thoughts and prayers" for victims.

Parkland survivors weren't interested in any of that and they very savvily and effectively changed the story.

A year on, the Parkland kids (many of whom have turned 18) have some real victories to proclaim.

True, the sheer might of the US gun lobby has blocked any dramatic policy alterations in Washington, but the National Rifle Association has lost several lucrative corporate tie-ins as a result of the protests, and several states have tightened their gun laws.

The campaign continues and its approach is often cited as a blueprint for climate change activism. In fact, one of Parkland's instigators, David Hogg, made headlines in recent weeks when he dismissed US Republicans' approach to climate change as more "thoughts and prayers".

BACK in Europe, an unsmiling young Swede called Greta Thunberg is setting an interesting tone for her growing legions of followers. Thunberg is the teenager who kicked this whole protest era off when she staged a solo sit-down outside the Swedish parliament last August.

She's since been feted and interviewed over and over by a fawning world media, but her quotes make very clear that she's not one bit impressed by the glamour of it all.

"No, I am not more hopeful than when I started," she declared last week, unwilling to be coaxed by any reporter into a sunnier take on world events. "The emissions are increasing and that is the only thing that matters."

It looks as though these marching youngsters don't need our approval and they definitely deserve more than our scorn. They are justifiably angry and that's neither silly nor cute - it's serious.
'A hero who sneezed, abruptly seized retreat, and reversed it to victory."

Thus rang the infectious theme song to 'F Troop', one of the first television comic parodies of those heroic American cowboy movies. The series dates way back to the mid-1960s, but is such an ever-green that it has often been re-run and will never age.

This tale of epically incompetent US Cavalry soldiers, who manned 'Fort Courage' begins with a soldier collecting laundry whose sneezing fit is taken to be a coded order for a very successful attack.

This farcical tale has strange parallels with the story of one Theresa May, the crusader who we are told has a messianic mission to deliver Brexit.

Some people believe this embattled UK prime minister - twice already beaten by a ton in efforts to have her Brexit deal ratified at Westminster - just might "lose her way to an eventual win".

Just like our incompetent US Cavalry men, she might take one of her many retreats "and reverse it to victory".

Well, we have long ago thrown away the political rule book when it comes to observing the doings at what was once haughtily misnamed 'The Mother of All Parliaments'.

Adopting the rampantly political abnormal to become the new normal, we brush aside the reality that two huge defeats on a fundamental issue would consign any other political leader to the dustbin of history.

Forget all that one-time reality and do a pragmatic political stock-take of where we are now, just 14 days from B-Day. Last night, the MPs voted convincingly to delay Brexit beyond the March 29 deadline.

And it also emerged that Mrs May will bid for "third time lucky" by running her mouldy-old deal past MPs again, along with some more cosmetic tweaks and ribbons attached.

If she defies hitherto received political logic, and gets a majority, she will seek a short delay until June 30 next.

If, as is likely, she loses one more time, then it's a long-term extension. This is the big-stick threat to her own party's ardent Brexiteers and the Democratic Unionist party.

It's a plain and unvarnished message: take the exit door offered - or risk a long delay which could take Brexit into a fog of confusion from which it may next again emerge.

The message has not changed since Mrs May came back with her draft deal on November 25 last year, after a special EU leaders' summit. It's just that any clutter has been stripped out and the volume has been pumped up.

From an Irish point of view, we are at the nearest we can get to Brexit good news. The likelihood of a no-deal Brexit in a fortnight has heavily receded. The chances of a much softer Brexit, far from being as good as the UK staying in the EU, is becoming more likely.

But we must remind ourselves of some important facts. The remaining 27 EU members must give unanimous approval to any extension. It is very likely that they will do the decent thing here - but it cannot be taken for granted.

As we have noted before, many of the other governments will need to know what will beneficially change during an extension.

If it's going to be more of the same, they are far less interested.

The idea of a longer extension, taking in negotiations on a future post-Brexit EU-UK trading relationship, would be of great interest for Ireland. It does raise the prospect of Brexit being considerably softened or even reversed.

But some more dramas must first be enacted. Mrs May's third Brexit deal vote is expected on Wednesday and EU leaders gather the following day for a summit.
On September 5, 1972, I was walking to school from the lower Ormeau Road to St Mary's Christian Brothers' grammar school at Barrack Street. I was 15 years old exactly, it was my birthday.

At 8.45am, a UDR patrol pulled up in front of me at the top of Ireton Street between Botanic Avenue and Wolseley Street in south Belfast.

After a few minutes, when they established my identity and the Christian names of both my parents, Margaret and Isadore, I felt dark clouds coming down quickly.

A young member of this regiment then casually put a pistol at my mouth, told me to open wide, the way a dentist tells you to do it, and called me a "Fenian bastard".

It's hard to believe that, until that day, I didn't really know what the word Fenian meant, and as for the word bastard, well, never let your mother hear you say such profanity.

My mother Peggy Whyte was murdered by the UVF in April 1984. She was from the Markets area of Belfast.

My late father was called Isadore, the patriot saint of Barcelona, I have since learnt. Both were decent people, not unlike your ma and da or that favourite auntie who gives you a few shillings on the sly.

It appeared that the name Isadore had provoked some members of the UDR to believe my father was from Italy and a Catholic, he was the latter but not the former. Rasharkin is nowhere near Italy, I am reliably informed.

I believe that on that day childhood innocence evaporated in the hatred that I felt from these public servants, tattooed, smelling of alcohol and, of course, in the main from the unionist community.

The years that followed, 1973 to 1994, are well documented in any history book involving the Anglo-Irish conflict. On a macro level, this part of Ireland imploded. On a micro level, thousands of families just like ours, the Whytes of 139 University Street, fell victim to bile, toxicity, hatred, prejudice, and straightforward no-nonsense discrimination.

So, what was the nature of this hatred? It involved endless raids on our home, direct job discrimination, specifically in the public sector, repetitive harassment at road blocks and of course the usual sectarian filth from those who should have been protecting us.

I often wonder whether the parents of these protectors felt proud of their children.

As you read this, I suspect, many thousands of people can identify with the general story.

Don't get me wrong, I cared little for the UDR or the RUC. To me, they were the armed wing of unionism: crass, rude, a permanent embarrassment and an occasional disgrace to any civilised liberal democracy, paid to intimidate, suppress and humiliate Catholics.

Over the years, I met a few decent cops, and I must say in many ways the state has been good to me - three university degrees, a solid job, children educated. As my late mother would say: "Ten family allowances. You couldn't find a better place to have a family."

It is in the context of this brief experience that I, Jude Whyte, a member of the victims' forum for eight years, have come to the conclusion that as we sit here in Northern Ireland, nearly 50 years since this conflict broke out, that we are no further on in building a united society, in resolving our ethnic differences, or in simply tolerating the diversity that this small place manifests in everyday life.

The vast majority of us live apart, are educated apart, play different sports, go to different places on holiday, and somewhere deep in our heart, no matter who we meet or where, an awful thought goes through one's head: "I wonder are they one of us, or one of them."

This takes me to the point of legacy and dealing with the past.

Can we as a society go forward if we don't deal with the outstanding issues of collusion and the inescapable fact that the UK and some of its paid employees are guilty of murder of unarmed civilians, both Catholics and Protestants, men and women, even our children.

There will, in my opinion, be no meaningful legacy or investigations by the state of the actions of many of its military and civilian employees.

The reasons are very simple. I apologise in advance to victims. The truth is hard to write.

1: There is no political will or agreement on the nature or cause of this conflict.

2: The UK is the strongest multicultural liberal democracy on Earth. In order to defend those values, it - without apology or explanation - went outside the rules and values of law and order to defend itself. It asked its security forces to defeat an enemy within at any cost.

The next insurgency will be met with an equally vicious counter-insurgency from the security forces, its gangs and counter gangs.

It is beyond any rational argument that people will be prosecuted for defending their realm. Let's face it, who will defend the realm in 10, 20 or 30 years' time from Isil if we prosecute members of the security forces now?

3: Even if point one was agreed, the collective power of 18 MPs in Westminster is irrelevant in matters of national security. Seven of the 18 do not take their seats.

4: The process for discovery of documents will always be hindered by national security, which is an all-embracing spurious term to block any serious investigation into state murder. It also is used to deny people who served time in this conflict access to a variety of jobs, travel and other services.

5: The collective will in Westminster and Dublin is a line in the sand that must be drawn, these events put into the dustbin of history. Both governments have the power to do this under various pieces of legislation, for example offences against the state and anti-terrorist legislation.

6: The current generation - that is anyone over the age of 45 like me - if the truth be told, are all recovering to various stages from our own trauma. Hence our objectivity, rationale and ability to openly analyse events is lost.

I consider myself a recovering bigot who will take years of extensive exposure to decency to finally sleep at peace in my bed, if ever.

I am bitterly sorry for places like Ballymurphy, the New Lodge Road massacre, Kingsmills, as well as hundreds of lesser-known individual murders that will remain unsolved, unaccounted for, and except for the families involved, unknown to the outside world.

My late mother is one victim among thousands, 53 years of age, a grandmother at the time. She then had two grandchildren, and she now has 27.

I can't bring her back, I can't bring her relatives back, and eight long, dreary years on the Victims and Survivors Forum has taught me that we live in the most hate-filled, hateful, poisonous society, totally a place apart from the real world.

I believe the best we can hope for is to live in parallel universes of barely tolerating each other.

It's time to move on, it's time to forgive. If the dead could speak to us now, they would say "forgive".
The bill would prevent the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation from going after banks for doing business with the marijuana industry. To date, the state has not taken such action but the law would assure that it would not do so even if there was a change in circumstances or a new administration, the sponsors said.
I would like to make some comments regarding John Downings article, Neither Ireland nor the EU blinked as the UK lost out  but are we blinkered? (Irish Independent, March 13).

Belief in going it alone outside the EU and still hopeful of international investment into the UK when there are perhaps 12 or 13 EU economies with much lower labour and freight costs vying for it is wishful thinking. Multinational competitiveness says No.

Derivative mortgage-backed securities are a principle cause of the EUs housing, renting and homeless problems, so financial economies (including London) are going to have to pay for depositors unlawful loss of interest on their savings.

When Theresa May says the EU is ready to sign the Withdrawal Agreement shes not being quite honest as no EU citizens have voted on this treaty change, yet most of its workers will be less able to move to any EU economy. Its a corrupt, unlawful deal.

Its odd that both the UK and the EU did not go to the EUs Court of Justice for opinion and ruling on what they were jointly doing to the treaties with restricted immigration law within freedom of movement rights that seems both unlawful and inhumane.

Globally, a Brexit UK will be seen as racist and selfish as will all anti-immigrant economies, which is not where any trading nation seeking consumers wants to be. EU consumers will vote with their pockets too.

The UK will be isolated with a weak sterling, lose competitive advantage to nine other currencies including the euro that will avoid the need for sterling exchange costs, and will have to lower prices to compete with eight non-euro EU economies.

Its clear the referendum was won by false information, particularly the 350m a week contribution. Its equally clear most MPs see the staggering cost and dont want to go there. A new referendum is the only honourable and honest solution.

Michael McPhillips

Ballymun, Dublin 9

The love story that would break Theresa Mays heart

The abduction of Derbforgaill, wife of Tigernan Ua Ruairc in 1152, led to the Norman and later the English invasions of Ireland. Amazing to think that the love of a Derbforgaill by Diarmaid Mac Murchadha, the King of Leinster, would be breaking Theresa Mays heart in 2019.

Declan Foley

Berwick, Australia

Time to ask Dail to deliver Britains Brexit destiny?

Is there any chance Dail Eireann can vote to rule Britain as our own MPs have treacherously failed to deliver on the 2016 Brexit vote and are clearly incapable of running the UK?

Dominic Shelmerdine

London SW3, UK

No crime was committed when Jesus was crucified

George Dalzell (Question over hypocrisy is answered by Trumps antics, Letters, Irish Independent, March 13) is confusing religion and belief with history in his assertion that we, whoever that might be, murdered Jesus by crucifixion.

The simple historical facts are that Jesus, a descendant of the last great Jewish monarch King David, was executed by the Roman state for claiming to be the king of the Jews. This was a direct challenge to the authority of the Roman governor  a capital offence. Jesus was given a trial and many chances to recant but chose not to do so. This made his execution inevitable.

Many Christians believe Jesus had chosen to sacrifice himself and the Roman state was the means by which he achieved this objective. We, whoever that might be, committed no murder, nor did the Romans.

Anthony OLeary

Portmarnock, Co Dublin

Westminster drama is a lesson in true democracy

The scenes in recent days in the UK Parliament made for great television.

Then again, is the (no doubt temporary) breakdown of whipped party politics, and its replacement with individual conscience and principals, such a bad thing?

Isnt it called democracy, and perhaps we might learn from it?

Roger Blackburn

Naul, Co Dublin

Teens have answers to life, the universe and everything

There has been discussion on secondary school students going on strike to protest about Government inaction on climate change.

I am reminded of a line I heard many years ago to the effect we should listen to everything our teenage children have to say while they still know everything!

Paul Harrington

Navan, Co Meath
Police shared images of the bears on their Facebook page (Massachusetts State Police/PA)

A section of road in the US was shut down on Thursday while wildlife officials moved a family of bears which had made a den on the central reservation.

Massachusetts police shut down a stretch of Route 2 in Templeton while environmental police tranquillised the mother bear and relocated her and her cubs to a safer location in a nearby forest.

Nothing but the bear necessities, said police, explaining the situation in a statement on Facebook.

Nothing but the bear necessities This morning, all traffic on Route 2 in Templeton was stopped, to allow Massachusetts... Posted by Massachusetts State Police on Thursday, March 14, 2019

Thank you all for bearing with us, while we had traffic stopped to allow this to happen, they added.

Authorities say the bears had to be moved as a precaution to ensure their own safety as well as the safety of motorists.

Route 2 is a four-lane road and was shut down for about 45 minutes.

State police tweeted that everything went beary well with the move.
Members of the media wait outside the district court building (Mark Baker/AP)

A man suspected in at least one of the shootings that killed at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand has appeared briefly in court.

Two armed guards brought Brenton Tarrant into court.

He showed no expression as District Court Judge Paul Kellar read one charge of murder to him.

The court appearance lasted only about a minute and he was led back out in handcuffs.

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He was ordered to return to court again April 5.

After Tarrant left, the judge said that while there is one charge of murder brought at the moment, it is reasonable to assume that there will be others.

The gunman posted a 74-page manifesto on social media in which he identified himself as Tarrant and said he was a 28-year-old Australian and white supremacist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.
Parkfield Community School in Birmingham which has suspended lessons about diversity and LGBT issues. Photo: Richard Vernalls/PA

LGBT lessons have been suspended at a primary school in Birmingham following weekly protests from parents.

Parkfield Community School in the West Midlands said its 'No Outsiders' programme, which uses story books to teach about same-sex couples, will no longer be taught until a resolution is found.

It comes after parents took part in a series of demonstrations outside the school, where most pupils are Muslim, as they argued the children are too young to learn about same-sex relationships. Some families withdrew their children from the school this month in protest against the lessons.

The British schools watchdog Ofsted concluded the LGBT lessons were age-appropriate, but talks between parents, education chiefs and the academy trust which runs the school led to the announcement the lessons would be suspended.

Last week, Birmingham City Council warned protesting parents risked attracting "extreme fringe movements" that could fuel hate and division as it called for families and the school to "come together".
Spain's conservative Popular Party (PP) has pledged that pregnant illegal immigrants will be able to avoid deportation by giving their baby up for adoption, if the party wins April's general election.

The PP, Spain's main opposition group, has drawn up the maternity plan to boost childbirth figures in ageing Spain, which includes the proposal to give undocumented migrant women a stay on repatriation if they agree to adoption.

The suggestion has caused fury among rival parties.

"It's a racist and fascist barbarity," said Jose Ignacio Garcia, a spokesman for the Podemos party in Andalusia, the region where the PP has governed since January in coalition with the liberal Ciudadanos party, supported by the far-Right, anti-immigration Vox.

Rafael Simancas, a parliamentary spokesman for the governing Socialist party, said the idea was "the cruellest thing we have ever heard".

"Saying to an immigrant: 'Either you give me your child or I'll expel you from the country' is completely unacceptable," Mr Simancas added.

Most recent polls suggest a PP, Vox and Ciudadanos coalition will win a majority on April 28.

Cuca Gamarra, a member of the PP's social policies team, claimed the move would save babies from being abandoned and dying. "Sadly, many still show up in rubbish bins, and that is what is inhuman and cruel," Ms Gamarra tweeted in response to the criticism.

It is part of a maternity package presented by PP leader Pablo Casado to stave off what he has described as a "demographic winter" in Spain, where the fertility rate stands at 1.33 children per woman.
One of the black box flight recorder from the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet, in le Bourget, north of Paris. Photo: AP

Investigators in France have taken possession of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines jet's black boxes, seeking clues into a disaster that has grounded Boeing's global 737 Max fleet and left scores of families mourning and angry.

Sunday's crash after take-off from Addis Ababa killed 157 people from 35 nations in the second such calamity involving Boeing's new flagship model in six months.

Possible links between the accidents have rocked the aviation industry, scared passengers worldwide, and left the world's biggest plane manufacturer scrambling to prove the safety of a money-spinning model intended to be the standard for decades.

Relatives of the dead stormed out of a meeting with Ethiopian Airlines yesterday, decrying a lack of transparency, while others made the painful trip to the crash scene.

"I can't find you! Where are you?" said one Ethiopian woman, draped in traditional white mourning shawl, as she held a framed portrait of her brother in the charred and debris-strewn field.

Nations around the world, including an initially reluctant United States, have suspended the 371 Max models in operation, though airlines are largely coping by switching planes.

Almost 5,000 more are on order, meaning the financial implications are huge for the industry.

After an apparent tussle over where the investigation should be held, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders arrived in Paris and were handed over to France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) agency.

A BEA spokesman said he did not know what condition the black boxes were in. "First we will try to read the data," he said, adding the first analyses could take between half a day and several days.

The investigation has added urgency since the American Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the 737 Max citing satellite data and evidence from the scene indicating some similarities and "the possibility of a shared cause" with October's crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people.

Though it maintains the planes are safe, Boeing has supported the FAA move. Its stock has fallen about 11pc since the crash, wiping $26bn (23bn) off its market value.

It is unclear how long the aircraft will be grounded and a software fix for the 737 Max that Boeing has been working on since the Lion Air crash in Indonesia will take months to complete, the FAA said.

Deliveries of Boeing's best-selling jets have been effectively frozen, although production continues.

And in what may presage a raft of claims, Norwegian Air has said it will seek compensation from Boeing for costs and lost revenue after grounding its 737 Max fleet.

Japan became the latest nation to suspend the planes yesterday. And airline Garuda Indonesia said there was a possibility it would cancel its 20-strong order of 737 Maxs.

Under international rules, the Ethiopians are leading the investigation but France's BEA will conduct black box analysis as an adviser.
The wreckage of a Hamas military site hit by Israeli air strikes in Gaza City (Adel Hana/AP)

Israeli warplanes struck some 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Friday in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli city of Tel Aviv.

Rocket fire persisted into the morning, setting the stage for additional possible reprisals.

The army said its targets included an office complex in Gaza City used to plan and command Hamas militant activities, an underground complex that served as Hamass main rocket-manufacturing site, and a centre used for Hamas drone development.

In Gaza, health officials reported four people wounded, including a husband and wife in the southern town of Rafah. There were no further details.

The office building struck by Israel had been used by Hamass office of prisoner affairs.

The sudden outbreak of violence comes at a sensitive time for both sides, and it appeared that Israel and Gazas Hamas rulers had incentives to end the fighting.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the middle of a tight re-election battle.

A tough response would draw international criticism and domestic accusations that he is acting out of political motivations ahead of the April 9 vote. But a restrained response would attract criticism from his fellow hardline rivals.

Hamas, meanwhile, is coping with its own domestic problems.

Israel and Egypt have maintained a crippling blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over the territory in 2007. The blockade, along with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and Hamass own mismanagement, have fueled an economic crisis that has driven unemployment to more than 50%.

Shortly before the rocket attack, Hamas police on Thursday violently broke up a rare protest by demonstrators angry about the dire living conditions in Gaza.

The crackdown triggered heavy criticism on social media, raising the possibility that the rocket fire was a diversionary tactic.

Palestinian media in Gaza said a weekly protest along the Israeli border would take place as usual.

The fighting came as Egyptian mediators were trying to extend a ceasefire between the bitter enemies, which last fought a war in 2014. The Egyptians left Gaza late on Thursday.

Hamas, which typically claims responsibility for its military actions, denied involvement in the rocket attack on Tel Aviv and even said it had undermined its interests. But Israels military said it had concluded the group was behind the attack.

The IDF holds the Hamas terror organisation responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip and emanating from it, the military said in a statement.

The late-night attack on Thursday on Tel Aviv, Israels densely populated commercial and cultural capital, marked a dramatic escalation in hostilities. It was the first time the city had been targeted since a 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants.

Following the first Israeli air strikes, several additional rounds of rocket fire were launched into Israel. The military said several rockets were intercepted by its air defence systems, and there were no reports of injuries.

The initial blasts from the Israeli air strikes in southern Gaza were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 15 miles (25km) to the north. The Israeli warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

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Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Despite its denial, Hamas is one of the only groups in Gaza with the means to strike Tel Aviv. A smaller militant group, the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, also possesses a large arsenal of rockets, though it too denied involvement.

Smaller Salafi groups inspired by Islamic State also operate in Gaza, though it is unclear whether they have powerful rockets capable of striking so deep inside Israel.

Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said the army had been caught off guard by Thursday nights rocket barrage and had no advance intelligence.

Israeli Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett, a hardline rival of Mr Netanyahu, called on the prime minister to convene a gathering of his Security Cabinet and demand the army present a plan to defeat Hamas.

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border. Late on Thursday, local media said Egyptian mediators had left the territory.

At the time, Mr Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

I suggest to Hamas, dont count on it, he told his Cabinet. We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general.
Doctors have been given permission by a judge in a specialist court to amputate a mentally ill man's left foot against his wishes.

Ms Justice Lieven heard the man's leg was infected and concluded that the operation would be in his best interests.

Specialists said the man, who suffers from schizophrenia and is in his early 60s, could die if the lower part of his leg was not removed.

The judge gave doctors the go-ahead after a hearing in the Court of Protection, where judges consider issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions, in London.
At least 49 people have been killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers in an attack broadcast in horrifying live video by an immigrant-hating white nationalist wielding at least two rifles.

One man was arrested and charged with murder, and two other armed suspects were taken into custody while police tried to determine what role they played.

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, prime minister Jacinda Ardern said, noting that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees.

She pronounced it one of New Zealands darkest days.

What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities  New Zealand is their home  they are us.  Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) March 15, 2019

The attack shocked people across a nation of five million people which has relatively loose gun laws but is so peaceful even police officers rarely carry firearms.

The gunman behind at least one of the mosque shootings left a 74-page manifesto that he posted on social media under the name Brenton Tarrant, identifying himself as a 28-year-old Australian and white nationalist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe by Muslims.

Using what may have been a helmet camera, he live-streamed to the world in graphic detail his assault on worshippers at Christchurchs Al Noor Mosque, where at least 41 people were killed.

An attack on a second mosque in the city not long after killed several more.

Police did not identify those taken into custody and gave no details except to say that none of them had been on any watch list.

At least 48 people, some in critical condition, were being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds, authorities said.

While there was no reason to believe there were any more suspects, the prime minister said the national threat level was raised from low to high.

Police warned Muslims against going to a mosque anywhere in the country, and Air New Zealand cancelled several flights in and out of Christchurch, saying it could not properly screen customers and baggage.

Following the tragedy in #Christchurch, the remainder of regional departures from Christchurch Friday evening have been cancelled. This is because it is not possible to screen customers and their baggage. Check here: https://t.co/rXQtFJxCe3  Air New Zealand (@FlyAirNZ) March 15, 2019

Police said the investigation extended 240 miles to the south, where homes in Dunedin were evacuated around a location of interest.

Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter the Al Noor mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running out in terror.

Mr Peneha, who lives next door, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in his driveway and fled. He said he then went into the mosque to try to help the victims.

I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said. I dont understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. Its ridiculous.

He said the gunman was wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top, giving him a military-type appearance.

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In the video that was apparently live-streamed, the gunman spends more than two minutes inside the mosque spraying terrified worshippers with bullets again and again, sometimes firing at people he has already cut down.

He then walks outside, where he shoots at people on the pavement. Childrens screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get another rifle. The gunman then walks back into the mosque, where there are at least two dozen people lying on the ground.

After going back outside and shooting a woman there, he gets back in his car.

The second attack took place at the Linwood mosque about three miles away.

The man who claimed the Al Noor shooting said he was not a member of any organisation, acted alone and chose New Zealand to show that even the most remote parts of the world are not free of mass immigration.
A US federal judge set a criminal trial for US President Donald Trump's former adviser Roger Stone for November 5, and cautioned the Republican political operative that he needed to comply with a gag order.

Mr Stone, a self-proclaimed political "dirty trickster", pleaded not guilty on January 29 to lying to Congress, obstructing an official proceeding, and witness tampering. Those charges were brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team in its probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Mr Stone is a longtime Trump ally and advised his campaign.

US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson had previously tightened a gag order limiting Mr Stone's public comments on the case after he posted a photo of her on his Instagram account next to an image resembling the crosshairs of a gun.

That order still stands, she told Mr Stone at yesterday's hearing on the case, but he must follow it. "I expect compliance," Judge Jackson said.

Earlier this week, attorneys for Mr Stone apologised for misrepresenting plans about his book criticising Mr Mueller, but they said their mistake was unintentional and does not mean the court will be unable to seat an impartial jury in Mr Stone's criminal trial.

In a seven-page filing and 120 pages of emails and documents submitted at the request of Judge Jackson of Washington, attorneys for Mr Stone acknowledge that the gaffe could land him in jail if the judge finds he violated a gag order in his case barring him from feeding prejudicial pretrial publicity. But they denied using an erroneous March 1 filing notifying the court of the "imminent release" of the book - after the judge imposed the gag order on February 21 - to build publicity for the work, 'The Myth of Russian Collusion', a retitled version of his earlier book about Trump's 2016 campaign, with a new introduction.

"There was/is no intention to hide anything," wrote Mr Stone's attorneys, led by Bruce Rogow of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "Having been scolded, we seek only to defend Mr Stone and move ahead without further ado."

Mr Stone (66) is accused of lying to Congress and obstructing justice to cover up his efforts to gather information concerning hacked Democratic Party emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. He has pleaded not guilty and remains free pending trial, but he is under the gag order and has travel limitations.
Analysis of the flight recorders of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane has begun, the airline said, amid reports that the pilot requested permission in a panicky voice to return to the airport shortly after take-off.

The New York Times cited a person who reviewed air traffic communications from Sundays flight saying controllers noticed the plane was moving sharply up and down by hundreds of feet and appeared to gain speed.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return, but the plane crashed minutes later outside Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board.

French authorities have the planes flight data and voice recorders for analysis, but have said it is unclear whether data could be retrieved. The data recorder appeared to be damaged.

Ethiopian Airlines said a delegation led by its chief accident investigator had arrived in Paris.

In Ethiopia, officials started taking DNA samples from victims family members to assist in identifying remains. The dead came from 35 countries.

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Nations including the US have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 as the American company faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

The decision to send the flight recorders to France was seen as a rebuke to the US, which held out longer than most other countries in grounding the jets. The US National Transportation Safety Board sent three investigators to help French authorities.

The US Federal Aviation Administration said regulators had new data from satellite-based tracking that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610. That flight crashed into the Java Sea off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

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The data shows both planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport.

Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step, while reiterating its full confidence in the safety of the 737 Max.

Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jets nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Boeing also announced it had paused delivery of the Max, although the company planned to continue building the jets.

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Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether software automatically pushed the planes nose down repeatedly, and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem.

Ethiopian Airlines says its pilots received special training on the software.

At the crash site in Hejere, about 30 miles from Addis Ababa, searchers continued to pick through the debris. Blue plastic sheeting covered the wreckage of the plane.

Anxious family members began giving DNA samples and waited for news on the identification of remains. Members of Israels Zaka emergency response team were granted access to the site for forensic work.
The Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft is launched with Expedition 59 crewmembers Nick Hague and Christina Koch of Nasa, along with Alexey Ovchinin of Roscosmos (Bill Ingalls/Nasa via AP)

A Russian-American crew has arrived at the International Space Station, five months after a botched launch led to an emergency landing for two of the three astronauts.

This time, the Russian Soyuz rocket carrying Nasa astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch along with Roscosmos Alexey Ovchinin lifted off precisely as planned from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12.14am on Friday (1914 GMT Thursday).

Six hours later, their capsule docked at the orbiting outpost.

On Octover 11, a Soyuz carrying Hague and Ovchinin failed two minutes into flight, activating a rescue system that allowed their capsule to land safely.

That accident was the first aborted crew launch for the Russian space program since 1983, when two Soviet cosmonauts safely jettisoned after a launch pad explosion.

Welcome to the @Space_Station! The Soyuz spacecraft carrying @AstroHague, @Astro_Christina & cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin docked to our orbiting laboratory at 9:01pm ET while flying about 250 miles over the Pacific Ocean just west of Peru. Watch: https://t.co/mzKW5uDsTi pic.twitter.com/fGcu2gVF6E  NASA (@NASA) March 15, 2019

On Friday, Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine congratulated the crew on a successful launch.

So proud of Nick Hague for persevering through last Octobers launch that didnt go as planned, he tweeted.

Speaking at a pre-launch news conference at Baikonur, the astronauts said they trusted the rocket and fully believed in the success of their mission.

Im 100% confident in the rocket and the spacecraft, Mr Hague said.

The events from October only helped to solidify that and boost confidence in the vehicle to do its job.

Congratulations to @AstroHague, @Astro_Christina and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin on todays successful launch! So proud of Nick Hague for persevering through last Octobers launch that didnt go as planned. Ad Astra! pic.twitter.com/5s0ISFriwe  Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) March 14, 2019

The trio will join Nasas Anne McClain, Roscosmos Oleg Kononenko and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency who are already on the space station. They will conduct work on hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science.

When one of the four strap-on boosters for their Soyuz failed to separate properly two minutes after their launch in October, Mr Hague and Mr Ovchinin were jettisoned from the rocket.

Their rescue capsule plunged steeply back to Earth with its lights flashing and alarms screaming, subjecting the crew to seven times the force of gravity.

Mr Hague emphasised on Wednesday that they were well-trained for the emergency.

The nature of our profession is we spend 90-95% of our time practising what to do when things go wrong, he said.

And so we spend all that time training, running through all those scenarios. And because we do train that way, like in October when things like that happened, we were ready to do what we need to do to come out successfully.

The Soyuz carrying @AstroHague, @Astro_Christina, and Alexey Ovchinin docked to the station at 9:01pm ET flying about 250 miles over the Pacific Ocean just west of Peru https://t.co/adwXnVLrtn pic.twitter.com/Ti6cForXMF  International Space Station (@Space_Station) March 15, 2019

The October failure was the first aborted launch for the Russian space program in 35 years and only the third in history. Each time, the rockets automatic rescue system kept the crew safe.

A Russian investigation attributed Octobers launch failure to a sensor that was damaged during the rockets final assembly. The next crew launch to the space station in December went on without a hitch.

Mr Ovchinin recalled that they felt more annoyed than stressed when their rescue capsule touched down in the barren steppes of Kazakhstan.

It was disappointing and a bit frustrating that we didnt make it to the International Space Station, he said.

Nasa and Roscosmos praised the crews composure in the aborted launch and promised to quickly give them a second chance into space.

On our way to the launch complex at Baikonur Cosmodrome. Lift off on #PiDay...an engineers dream come true. Next stop, @Space_Station! pic.twitter.com/B1O7SYgbeU  Nick Hague (@AstroHague) March 14, 2019

We dont accept the risk blindly, we have mitigated it as much as we can, and we always plan to be successful, Mr Hague said.

Mr Ovchinin stressed that the aborted launch in October was an interesting and very useful experience that proved the reliability of the emergency rescue system.

Since the 2011 retirement of the US shuttle fleet, Russias Soyuz spacecraft have been the only vehicles that ferry crews to the space station.

Nasa, however, is counting on SpaceX and Boeing to start launching astronauts later this year.

The SpaceX ship Dragon returned on Friday from a six-day test flight to the space station and could take astronauts there on its next flight as early as this summer.
Spains Socialist government has set June 10 as the date for relocating the remains of former dictator General Francisco Franco from a self-aggrandising mausoleum to a more discreet grave in a public cemetery in Madrid.

The countrys prime minister Pedro Sanchez, who is trying to remain in power in the countrys April 28 election, had promised to exhume Francos embalmed body from the Valley of the Fallen by the end of 2018.

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However, his call has been hampered by opposition from Francos relatives and the abbot of the basilica where the dictator was buried in 1975.

The countrys Supreme Court is to deliver a preliminary decision in the coming days.

Deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo said on Friday that the government would comply with whatever the judges decide.
A still image taken from video circulated on social media, apparently taken by gunman Brenton Tarrant and posted online live as the attack unfolded, shows him driving in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. Photo: Reuters

An Australian senator is being widely criticised for a statement he released following an attack on two mosques which left at least 49 people dead.

Australian Senator Fraser Anning said the "real cause of bloodshed" is immigration which "allowed Muslims fanatics to migrant to New Zealand in the first place".

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved.(AP Photo/Mark Baker) AOS (Armed Offenders Squad) push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand,, March 15, 2019. REUTERS/SNPA/Martin Hunter A view of the Al Noor Mosque on Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand, taken in 2014. REUTERS/SNPA/Martin Hunter Police stand outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved. (AP Photo/Mark Baker) Police escort witnesses away from a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved. (AP Photo/Mark Baker) A police officer photographs witnesses near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved. (AP Photo/Mark Baker) A still image taken from video circulated on social media, apparently taken by gunman Brenton Tarrant and posted online live as the attack unfolded, shows him driving in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. Photo: Reuters An injured person is loaded into an ambulance following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. Grieving members of the public following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019 New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks on live television following fatal shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand March 15, 2019, in this still image taken from video. AOS (Armed Offenders Squad) member following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. REUTERS/SNPA/Martin Hunter Members of a family react outside the mosque following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. REUTERS/SNPA/Martin Hunter / Facebook

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Whatsapp A man reacts as he speaks on a mobile phone near a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved.(AP Photo/Mark Baker)

I am utterly opposed to any form of violence within our community, and I totally condemn the actions of the gunman, Senator Anning said.

However, while this kind of violent vigilantism can never be justified, what it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence.

As always, left-wing politicians and the media will rush to claim that the causes of todays shootings lie with gun laws or those who hold nationalist views but this is all cliched nonsense.

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place."

Senator Anning went on to say that while Muslims may have been victims of attacks, he claimed they were also perpetrators. and blamed deaths on the entire religion of Islam.

"Let us be clear, while Muslims may have been the victims today, usually they are the perpetrators. World-wide, Muslims are killing people in the name of the faith on an industrial scale."

It is the religious equivalent of fascism, he said.

He ended with a passage from the bible and said those who followed a violent religion that called on them to murder cannot be too surprised when someone takes them at their word and responds in kind.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the comments "disgusting" and said they have no place in Australia.
Chicago goes green this weekend for St. Patricks Day, a holiday in which the entire city seems to participate, regardless of any personal Irish affiliation. The celebrations most famous festivities take place downtown: the dyeing of the Chicago River from a weird shade of green to a cool shade of green, best viewed from the east side of State Street, the west side of Columbus Drive or along Wacker Drive between those two streets. Theres also the St. Patricks Parade, which steps off at Balbo and Columbus Drives and heads north along the latter. 9 a.m. Saturday for river dyeing, noon Saturday for parade; chicagostpatricksdayparade.org
The moment someone mentions Rajasthan, we think about its heritage. Everything in Rajasthan reminds you of royalty. From the fascinating architecture to the hospitality, a simple vacation in Rajasthan can make you feel like a royal yourself! All the beautiful colours you find in the region are a visual treat. And the food here is rich with flavour and will keep you coming back for more. A perfect place for vacation when youre looking at discovering a place which is full of heritage and culture, Rajasthan is truly a land of the royals.

Here are photos from Rajasthan that prove it is the place you need to visit when youre looking at a royal vacation:

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Looks like the perfect place for a royal vacay!
No matter who you are or what position you have achieved in life if you are a Muslim and has said something critical about Modi or the BJP, you have been told "go to Pakistan" at least a few times in the past few years. This is true in the case of celebrities like Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan, and even former Vice President of India Hamid Ansari.

BCCL/ FILE

It is not just some fringe groups making this blabs. Even some high profile BJP leaders including Lok Sabha MP Sakshi Maharaj, MLA Kailash Vijayvargiya, VHP leader Sadhvi Prachi all have been distributing tickets to Muslims to "go to Pakistan".

BCCL/ FILE

But some guy decided that he will send all Indian Muslims to Pakistan legally. So he filed a PIL in the Supreme Court (yes this happened for real, we didn't make this thing up!) to send all Muslims to Pakistan.

The case came up for hearing in the Supreme Court on Friday in front of the Bench of Justice Rohinton Nariman and Vineet Saran.

BCCL/ FILE

According to a report by Bar and Bench, Justice Nariman was visibly upset at the prayer and asked the petitioners counsel to read it out loud.

After the lawyer read it out, Justice Nariman asked, Do you seriously want to argue this? We will hear you but we will pass strictures against you.

Upon which the petitioner's lawyer said "No my lord".

Justice Nariman then ruled that the petition has been dismissed!

At this point, we are only wondering why was there no fines imposed on the petitioner for wasting the time of the court. In the past, the SC has slapped fines on such litigants and warned others against wasting the time of the court in the name of PILs.
Once a tragedy strikes a city, notable personalities come forward to give their condolences or to contribute to the bereaved and affected families. Politicians from respective parties appear on television news debates to discuss the situation at-hand.

When a Mumbai foot-over bridge collapsed at the CSMT railway station on Thursday, politicians, celebrities and common public expressed their outrage over the current infrastructure that remains in shambles.

Many questions were raised on structural audits, safety norms, maintenance funds and incumbent government. However, chief spokesperson for BJP Mumbai Sanju Verma shocked the citizens when she appeared on a TV news debate and called the collapse a natural calamity.

Soon, her comments gained attention on social media where she was bashed for being insensitive towards the victims. She vindicated herself and her party of any wrongdoing and said that the falling apart of the bridge was not a governance deficit.

A large part of the blame was on the pedestrians: @Sanju_Verma_, Leader, BJP while speaking to @navikakumar | #MumbaiBridgeCollapse pic.twitter.com/FUrSsYa7R1  TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) March 14, 2019

"My heart goes out to the people who are reportedly dead because they did not deserve this. Having said this, I would not agree to the fact that there was a governance deficit. Could this have been avoided? Perhaps, yes. I have been closely monitoring this. In the last two years, there have been two major bridge collapses in Mumbai - Elphinstone and Gokhale. The fact remains that in both the cases, a large part of the blame was on pedestrians." she was quoted as saying on Times Now.

She went onto say that pedestrians need to be cautious of their duties as citizens. They shouldnt travel. She even said, Who are you to decide whether it is an accident, or a sabotage or a government deficit? while replying to another panelist who questioned her party's responsibility.

How can you be so insensitive, these are fellow Indians who have died due to poor infrastructure maintenance. People who take this lightly and make stupid statements should be given free medical treatment.  CandyMan (@CandyManSaga) March 15, 2019

However, her comments werent well-received by the twitter users and other dignitaries who called out to her for her sheer crassness and ignorance.

Six people were killed and 33 others injured after a portion of the concrete slab of a key foot over bridge which connected Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus to a school on the busy Dadabhai Naoroji Road in south Mumbai collapsed on Thursday at around 7.35 pm.

This @Sanju_Verma_ should be sacked immediately! Senseless woman https://t.co/jpkYX6hjSa  Atul Khatri (@one_by_two) March 14, 2019

Under fire, Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis government has ordered a probe into the accident which he termed as "unfortunate". Police have registered cases against BMC and Indian Railway officials charging them with culpable homicide following the accident.

Someone please ask BJP spokesperson @Sanju_Verma_ to shut up on @TimesNow She is blaming pedestrians and common citizens for collapse of the bridge in Mumbai. Truly shameless comments. Anchor @navikakumar shut off her mike but she continues her obscene rant.  Pritish Nandy (@PritishNandy) March 14, 2019

THIS is what happens when you don't question your leadership.

(Any party, anywhere in the world)

It leads to this level of asinine arrogance. Even as people die @Sanju_Verma_ of the BJP says it's the people who are at fault 

#MumbaiBridgeCollapse pic.twitter.com/4qSxLwNQ7r  Akash Banerjee (@akashbanerjee) March 14, 2019
The Federal Aviation Administration of the United States has discovered stark similarities between the Ethiopian aircraft crash and the Lion air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people. This discovery has led the agency to ground all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 9 planes for weeks.

In an emergency order, the US lawmakers said that both the disasters posed a probability of a shared cause that needs to be better understood and addressed. The planes will remain grounded until a software upgrade can be tested and installed.

US President Donald Trump said that America was also grounding the Boeing 737 Max planes immediately and all the pilots, airlines have been notified.

Photo: AFP/Boeing MAX 737 7 plane (File Photo)

An Ethiopian Airline flight bound to Nairobi crashed on Sunday and all 149 passengers including eight crew members on board were killed. Investigators from France will begin analysing the black boxes from a jet that crashed in Ethiopia.

The pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 had reported internal control problems and received permission to return, before the plane came down and burst into a fireball on an arid farmland.

Ethiopian Airlines spokesman Asrat Begashaw had told CNN the "black box" data recorders recovered would "definitely be going to Europe," as Ethiopia does not have the necessary equipment to analyze that data.

Photo: Reuters/Man walks past debris of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, near Addis Ababa

Reuters reported Boeing has said it would roll out the software improvement across the 737 MAX fleet in the coming weeks. Relatives of the dead stormed out of a meeting with Ethiopian Airlines on Thursday, decrying a lack of transparency, while others made the painful trip to the crash scene.

We continue to build 737 MAX airplanes while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system, Boeing spokesman Chaz Bickers said.

Around 5,000 MAX planes are currently operational which means the financial implications are huge for the aviation industry.

Photo: AFP/ Family members mourn the death of their loved ones in the Ethiopia crash

Lion Air Flight 610 was a domestic flight operated by the Indonesian airline Lion Air between Jakarta and Pangkal Pinang on October 29, 2018 around 12 minutes after taking off. The crash was the first worldwide of Boeing Cos new 737 MAX jet.

The Indonesian Lion Air crash is still underway. A preliminary report by KNKT in November, before the retrieval of the cockpit voice recorder, focused on maintenance and training and the response of a Boeing anti-stall system to a recently replaced sensor, but gave no reason for the crash.

Boeings stock is down about 11 percent since the Sunday crash, wiping more than $26 billion off its market value. It fell 1 percent on Thursday.
There was a slow progression  it started with Dead Again, which I was like, OK ; Let the Right One In  quite romantic. And then it just kept getting more and more dark and horrific. By the time I watched Martyrs, I tried to watch it early at night, so I asked my friend to come over at 7 and we were done by 9:30, and I was so shaken. Then he said, OK, see you. And I just started crying, Please dont go. And he had to stay for like another two hours.
The Ides of March will be now be remembered as the day when school kids from more than 90 countries skipped school to demand urgent action against climate change.

And among are the school kids from Delhi who have decided to bunk classes on Friday to join the climate change action bandwagon.

'School Strike 4 Climate' started with 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. She skipped class to sit outside government buildings in last year, accusing her country of not following the Paris Climate Agreement.

133 million youth of the Nation will be first time voters in India.

These youngsters are the creators of the destiny of our nation in the 21st Century.

Your time is now!!#ExtinctionRebellion#StudentStrike4ClimateChange#MyRightToBreathe pic.twitter.com/ohVGfrNKX6  Jai Dhar Gupta (@jai_dhar) March 13, 2019

You grownups dont give a shit about my future. She gained international attention speaking at the U.N. Climate Talks in Poland last December.

And now it's a global movement!

Now Indian students across the country will joining the march, hoping to force the government to take quick action.

Student groups from Indian cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Delhi as well as Bhavnagar in Gujarat, Ambikapur in Chhattisgarh, and Udaipur are taking part.

#StudentStrike4ClimateChange #ClimateStrike

Children from many schools get together for the strike.

At Gurugram , India pic.twitter.com/hBHwXZQ4KR  N SOOD (@NSOOD6) March 15, 2019

According to TOI, 500 primary and high school students from across schools in Gurgaon are likely to stage a protest against the governments inaction on climate change at the Wazirabad bundh in Sector 53.

This young girl makes it clear. They worry about their future..

At the #ClimateStrike against#climatechange

At Gurugram, India#StudentStrike4ClimateChange pic.twitter.com/BVtu2GQG6Q  N SOOD (@NSOOD6) March 15, 2019

Our future is talking. Act now, protest now, save a LOT of grief for future generations!#StudentStrike4ClimateChange#ExtinctionRebellion#FridaysForFuture pic.twitter.com/6zo7JWhHdC  Sherebanu Frosh (@sherryfrosh) March 14, 2019

The number of children in Delhi that are planning to bunk school and gather at the Central Park in Connaught Place on March 15 is over 400, reports HT.
One of the gunmen, Brenton Tarrant, live streamed one of the worst shooting in the history of New Zealand. At least 40 people were confirmed dead and at least 20 others were injured in the twin Christchurch shootings.

The twin attacks took place in central Christchurch, close to where school children were taking part in the Global Climate Strike protest.

#BREAKING The Christchurch gunman filmed his mass shooting live on social media, video shows dozens wounded/deceased.

NTS Sources name the shooter as Brenton Tarrant, he said "subscribe to pewdiepie" before the attack.

MORE: https://t.co/BTwmoNZcyt pic.twitter.com/FWTsGocjZD  News This Second (@NewsThisSecond) 15 March 2019

In an extremely graphic video that's been doing the rounds online, the gunmen can be heard giving a shoutout for Swedish YouTuber Pewdie Pie and asking people to subscribe to his channel.

Ok, this is insane...

Also, why a lot of people start blaming Pewd? It's not his fault. pic.twitter.com/aPM2hEwLl3  Alan Risdian (@alanr_x1x) 15 March 2019

The Christchurch gunman is heavily armed, stills from his live stream show 6 guns,multiple magazines and body armour. https://t.co/BTwmoNZcyt pic.twitter.com/qOT9rUwHxa  News This Second (@NewsThisSecond) 15 March 2019

The entire stream ran for approximately 18 minutes. The man, who was apparently wearing a GoPro device, filmed himself storming into the building and shooting down every person he saw.

Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch.

I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.

My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy.   (@pewdiepie) 15 March 2019

After the gutwrenching incident of the gunmen killing innocent people and calling out his name, Youtuber Pewdie pie reacted angrily saying he is, 'I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person. My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy.'

Police have since arrested four people in connection to the deadly shootings.
The arrest of an Indian priest and his subsequent release has hit headlines in Dubai, leaving the Indian community utterly shocked.

The priest who goes by the name Mahant Sudhir Das Pujari of Nashik's Kala Ram temple is said to have duped a member of Dubai's royal family. According to TOI, Sudhir Prabhakar aka Mahant Sudhir Das Pujari was arrested following complaints from a member of the royal family that he was misusing the familys name to raise capital.

Twitter

The funny part being, right after his arrest the Indian Consul General himself had reached the police station to ensure his bail, states the report.

A Gulf News report states that Member of Parliament (MP) and Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) of his hometown have written to the Minister of External Affairs of India Sushma Swaraj to intervene in the matter.

While he is out on bail, his passport is still with Dubai officials.

To give a little background, Mahant Sudhir Das Pujari is a frequent visitor to Dubai and has as many as three companies in the UAE, AL Boom Marine Logistic, Saraha Vision Investment and Naaz General Trading, states the National Herald.

Recently We launch 3 new companies in Dubai - U.A.E

Today is first day in office As a #Chairman and #CEO...

1-AL BOOM MARINE LOGISTIC L.L.C...

2-SARAHA VISION INVESTMENT L.L.C..

3-NAAZ GENERAL TRADING L.L.C...

H.O.: 506, 5th Floor, Ithraa Tower, Al Garhood#Dubai - #UAE pic.twitter.com/q2pAtLYjHA  Shri Mahant sudhirdas Maharaj (@mahantpt03) 19 May 2018

His active social media accounts show him to be an ardent BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modis supporter and an opposition-hater.

                              

               :  #ModiAtConclave19 pic.twitter.com/PPkoetSFSN  Shri Mahant sudhirdas Maharaj (@mahantpt03) 2 March 2019

The National Herald report states that the became famous after opening a temple for Dalits on Nashik back in 2006. He is also said to have contested election in 2009 from Nashik as a BSP candidate and lost.
A still from Photograph featuring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sanya Malhotra. Nawazuddin is alright as Rafiq, but is fast showing his limitations with that classic tendency of theater and arthouse cinema actors of acting exactly the same way regardless of role, while Sanya Malhotra is supposed to be blank, and does it well. (photo provided)
Indian activists carry placards of the chief of Jaish-e-Mohammad, Maulana Masood Azhar during a protest against the attack on the air force base in Pathankot, in Mumbai on Jan. 4, 2016. China March 14 once again blocked the designation of Azhar as a terrorist. (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images)
Chinese imports of fluorspar trebled year-on-year in 2018 as the nation became a net importer of the material, according to the latest data from the countrys customs authorities.

The data showed that 419,828 tonnes of fluorspar was imported into China during 2018, three times the 140,229 tonnes imported in 2017.

Fluorspar exports from China grew to 202,000 tonnes in 2018, from 184,000 tonnes the year before.

Because of the Chinese boom in steel production over 2018, the majority of this growth in fluorspar imports was likely to be metallurgical grade material, although the Customs data does not distinguish between acid and met grades.

Fluorspar is used as a flux material in steel production.

Exports were steady throughout 2018, peaking at 23,940 tonnes in January. The 12,315 tonnes shipped in March was the lowest single monthly value.

Imports peaked at the end of the year, when 225,000 tonnes of fluorspar, 54% of the years total, was brought into China between September and December.

Chinas crude steel output grew by 4.6% over the year, according to its National Bureau of Statistics.

This means that Chinese steel producers would have produced an additional 41 million tonnes of steel in 2018 compared with the previous year. The total for 2018 was 894,000 tonnes.

China accounts for roughly half the worlds output of crude steel but its growth in output will fall significantly in 2019, according to forecasts by Fastmarkets research. Chinas output of crude steel will grow by 0.8% this year, according to the research, adding around 7 million tonnes to the nations total.

This could raise questions over whether China has permanently become a net importer of fluorspar.

The increased output of steel was reflected in metspar prices.

The weekly price assessment for metspar, 90% CaF2, fob China, was $430-460 per tonne on March 7. It was $390-410 per tonne one year earlier.

The price for metspar, 85% CaF2, fob China, was $360-400 per tonne, also assessed on March 7.

The price for 85% CaF2 material was narrowly lower one year ago at $350-370 per tonne, but it was $290-310 per tonne in November 2017.

The last time both prices were as high as their current levels was in 2012.

2019 imports to dip

Fastmarkets is aware of one fluorspar trading house which reported that it had imported around 100,000 tonnes of acid-grade fluorspar in 2018. But that traders outlook for 2019 was bleaker because international prices of acidspar had caught up with the high Chinese prices.

The monthly price for acidspar, 97% CaF2, wet filtercake, fob Durban, South Africa, was $450-490 per tonne on February 28.

This was up by 25% from $350-400 per tonne this time last year.

By comparison, Chinese fluorspar averaged a price of $460-527 per tonne over 2018.

The price for acidspar, 97% CaF2, wet filtercake, fob China, was $450-550 per tonne on March 7. The price started the year at $550-580 per tonne.

There was no official data detailing how much aluminium fluoride (AlF3) or hydrofluoric acid (HF) is produced in China. But data presented at Fastmarkets latest fluorspar conference - in Johannesburg, South Africa, over September 25-27, 2018 - showed that there was plenty of unused AlF3 capacity in China.

Only 72.5% of Chinas capacity for 943,000 tonnes per year was being used.

Weaker demand for AlF3 has caused the price to drop, to around 11,000-11,500 yuan ($1,638-1,712) per tonne, according to sources. This price dropped by 5% in January.

The HF price also recently dropped, to 10,775 yuan per tonne on March 13 from around 14,500 yuan per tonne on December 12, according to commodity data group Sunsirs.

Again, this price was down because of lower demand for refrigerants in China, although demand is down at the moment because it is winter in China.
I also saw that guy  and many hundreds of his much more pleasant and relaxed cousinswhen this show played in New York. Why is this? Well, A Bronx Tale, directed by the improbably combination of Jerry Zaks and Robert De Niro, is the ultimate old-school musical, a story of an Italian-American kid growing up in the outer boroughs in the early 1960s and finding himself influenced by two very different father figures. One  the fella who actually gave him life  drove a bus and preached the gospel of hard work, discretion and familial affection. The other was a made man, an exciting figure to a kid who came with power, sidekicks, wads of cash and a criminal record.
We now offer lithium prices and coverage free for reference. Click here to read all about it. Join our growing community of participants who want to learn more about electrification and how this market is developing.
Chanda Dutts seasonal authentic Burmese food pop-ups are perhaps the best recurring culinary event in the city, and we bet she knows it too. Which is why, shes back with a spring pop-up at the good ol Beniapukur address, and is even set to serve some brand new delicacies. Dutt, who used to own the successful Golpark Burmese eatery Chanda's Khaukswey, had to close up temporarily, as it was too small; she is now on the lookout for a new space for the same. Meanwhile, you can taste some of her bona fide Burmese delicacies at the upcoming pop-up to be held on March 22, at 7 pm.

Coconut rice at Chanda's popup

The new items to be introduced are coconut-rice with red n gold chicken curry, then theres the fish rice or nga htamin, pork cooked with raw mango, raw tamarind and sour gooseberry/ amloki, string bean salad. The old favourites chicken khaukswey, Balachaung and Nga-pi chet ( fish paste with tomato) will be there too, Chanda tells us. The cuisinier and former thespian, has spent a lot of her childhood in Myanmar and reveals that the culinary traditions were kept alive in her family, even after they left the country.

After leaving Burma my mother and aunts would cook many of our favourite Burmese dishes regularly. In fact, after I got married I started missing the kind of food we grew up with. I would often take it for granted, thinking that "oh ma is there. She will provide them! I eventually realised that now ma is in her nineties and I cannot bully her into cooking for us. I started to take interest in the nitty gritty of perfecting the dishes which I serve. adds Chanda, who would often pack her homemade Burmese dishes for her colleagues at the school where she used to work as an English teacher. She tells us that after some resounding encouragement from her peers, she thought about opening up a restaurant, and did her first pop-up as an experiment.

Pork curry, rice with some greens at Chanda's popup

Dutts winter popups which are held around Christmas are hugely popular. The upcoming spring pop-up dinner is a pre-booked event, and would cost you Rs 1,000 per head. And if youve never been to one of her pop-ups, you should know that all of the customers from Chandas first ever pop-up never stopped coming back. My first ever pop-up despite my apprehension, went off pretty well! It was a test of nerves I must say. But somehow I knew that the food would be a hit. People who came on that were mostly unknown guests, but they went home happy. We had around 80 guests and almost all of them came back as repeat customers and continue to do so, Chanda recalls.

Pork Hinlay at Chanda's popup

Kolkatas gastro-scape never really did replace the chilli chicken and noodles, but Chanda hopes the diverse Burmese cuisine gets recognized as easy comfort food. Burmese cuisine is not just khaukswey, people should be given a chance to explore more of the nation's dishes. Kolkatans are very adventurous and are willing to spend on new eateries and food and I know for sure very soon chow and chilly chicken will be replaced by khaukswey! adds the expert.

Chandas Spring Pop-Up, 22 March, 7 pm at 40, Beniapukur Lane, Kolkata
Chelsea Manning has been sent back to jail after refusing to answer questions before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. Manning, a U.S. Army whistleblower, had been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors in Virginias Eastern District to appear for questioning about her 2010 leak to WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of State Department and Pentagon documents about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We speak with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Music by Mangueira, Brazils most famous samba school. Last week, Mangueira won Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, getting a perfect score from judges for its float honoring Rio Councilwoman Marielle Franco, who was assassinated almost a year ago. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Im Amy Goodman.

U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been sent back to jail after refusing to answer questions before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Manning had been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors in Virginias Eastern District to appear for questioning about her 2010 leak to WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of State Department and Pentagon documents about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

To talk more about the jailing of Manning, as well as other issues, including whats happening in Venezuela, we turn right now to Glenn Greenwald, speaking to us from Brazil. Hes a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about Chelsea Manning once again being jailed.

GLENN GREENWALD: I dont think its a surprise to anybody that Chelsea Manning is extraordinarily heroic. She has demonstrated that repeatedly over the last decade in all kinds of ways. But what shes doing here is really remarkable, because the context is that the Trump administration is trying to do what the Obama administration tried to do but ultimately concluded it couldnt do without jeopardizing press freedoms, which is to prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for what it regards as the crime of publishing top-secret or classified documents.

And the media in the United States has spent two years screaming about the threat that Trump poses to press freedoms because he says mean things about the media on Twitter or insults Wolf Blitzer and Chuck Todd, and yet here we have what is really a grave threat to press freedom: the attempt to make it a felony to publish classified materialwhich is what WikiLeaks did. Even the anti-press freedom Obama administration said this was a bridge too far for us.

And while most reporters are mute on this scandal, on this controversy, and while a lot of Democrats are supportive of it, because they still hate WikiLeaks so much from the 2016 election that theyre happy to see Julian Assange go to jail, even if it means standing behind the Trump administration, Chelsea Manning is not just opposing it, shes opposing it to the point where she refuses to participate in it, even if it means, as it now does, that shes going to be jailed for being in contempt of court for refusing to comply with a subpoena. We all owe our immense gratitude to Chelsea Manning for everything shes done over the last decade, but even more so now.

AMY GOODMAN: Id like to go back to 2017, when Mike Pompeo talked about Chelsea Manning in his first address as CIA director in April of last year [sic].

MIKE POMPEO: WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information. It overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations. Its time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a nonstate, hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Pompeo when he was head of the CIA. Now, of course, he is secretary of state. Can you respond to what he has said, Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: This is the part I find so amazing. Do Democrats not realize the irony here of cheering for the most reactionary, right-wing forces in the Trump administration, who are the ones trying to imprison Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in order to criminalize journalismnamely, Mike Pompeoand the person who actually first vowed to put WikiLeaks and Assange behind bars, which was then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has since left the Trump administration?

The Obama administration tried to create theories to say that WikiLeaks did more than just passively receive documents from Chelsea Manning and then publish them, because they knew they had to do that in order to prosecute WikiLeaks; otherwise, how do you justify prosecuting WikiLeaks for publishing classified documents, without also prosecuting The New York Times and The Guardian? The Justice Department, under Obama, searched high and low for evidence that WikiLeaks participated in Chelsea Mannings taking of those documents. They found no evidence. She testified under oath that she acted alone, that they played no role whatsoever in her decision to do that.

And now, suddenly, seven years later, Mike Pompeo claims that they have evidence or that they believe that WikiLeaks told her to do it, and therefore they intend to prosecute WikiLeaks. And unfortunately, between the Republicans, who have long hated WikiLeaks for exposing the war crimes of the Bush administration, and Democrats, who now hate WikiLeaks because they published documents that were harmful to or reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, very few people are willing to stand up to this very serious attack on press freedom. And thankfully, Chelsea Manning is one of those people.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to John Bolton speaking about Chelsea Manning in the 2012 BBC film Wikileaks: The Secret Life of a Superpower. He was interviewed by Richard Bilton.

RICHARD BILTON: What do you think of Bradley Manning?



JOHN BOLTON: I think he committed treason. I think he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.



RICHARD BILTON: What does that mean?



JOHN BOLTON: Well, treason is the only crime defined by our Constitution, and it says treason shall consist only of levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. And he gave our enemies a lot of aid and comfort.



RICHARD BILTON: So what should happen to him?



JOHN BOLTON: Well, he should be prosecuted. And if hes found guilty, he should be punished to the fullest extent possible.



RICHARD BILTON: And what is that?



JOHN BOLTON: Death.



RICHARD BILTON: You think he should be killed.



JOHN BOLTON: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You think you should be killed. Yes, responded John Bolton, now the national security adviser. Of course, Bradley Manning became Chelsea Manning. She announced her transition the day she was sentenced. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: These are the sentiments that are driving the current attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks and Assange. And those are the monsters who are responsible for it.

So, I would hope that however angry someone might be at Julian Assange or WikiLeaks for whatever they think they did as part of the 2016 election to undermine Hillary Clinton by publishing truthful documents that showed the corruption of the DNC, however angry one might be at WikiLeaks for having done that, one can separate those emotions and understand that what the Trump administration has nothing to do with the 2016 election. The criminal proceedings that have led to Chelsea Mannings jailing for the second time in the last decade are all about documents that were published, not in 2016, but in 2011 and 2012.

And its being done by people, like John Bolton, who believe that if you publish top-secret documents that report on the misdeeds and criminal acts of the U.S. government, youre not only a criminal, but a traitor who deserves to be killed. You just heard that with your own ears. And so, anyone supporting the Trump administrations efforts to put Julian Assange in prison because youre angry about what he did in the 2016 election, youre aligning yourself with and youre empowering those warped, sociopathic sentiments that you just heard come out of John Boltons mouth.

democracynow.org/2019/3/11/glenn_greenwald_chelsea_mannings_refusal_to
Insurance fraud seems like it might be an easy thing to do. Insurance companies are often so huge, one wonders how they might not even notic...
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Thousands in Oregon face eviction as lawmakers scramble AP - Thu Dec 9, 11:11PM CST PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Inside Musonda Mwangos Portland apartment are details of his life that have transformed the property into a home. His guitars hang in the corner where he composes music, Christmas... $SPX : 4,667.45 (-0.72%) $DOWI : 35,754.69 (unch) $IUXX : 16,149.57 (-1.49%)

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Insurer RACQ has welcomed a new government move which would help drive down car theft across Queensland.

The Queensland government agreed to reinstate funding for the National Motor Vehicle Theft Reduction Council (NMVTRC), after new figures revealed a staggering 47% rise in car theft in the state, while most states and territories trended downwards.
While the program was introduced with the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, it had really been in the making since The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which FEMAs chief executive of the NFIP David Maurstad described as the largest flood disaster in the history of the country. In the decades following The Great Mississippi Flood - which left 27,000 square miles inundated up to a depth of 30 feet - various administrative and legislative proposals were tabled to determine how to manage the flood risk of the country.

It wasnt until Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965, remembered as one of the deadliest and costliest storms in US history, that Congress really focused its attentions on finding a solution to the US flood problem. They came up with a program that included private sector support and involved participation by American communities. The NFIP was born.

Who can purchase flood insurance from the NFIP?

Anyone who lives in or has a business in a high-risk area, or a special flood hazard area (SFHA), can get flood insurance from the NFIP. This becomes a requirement for residents and business owners who live or work in an SFHA if they have acquired a loan from a federally regulated and insured lender. The law states they must carry flood insurance for the life of that loan.

You can also purchase NFIP insurance if you live or own a business outside of a mapped SFHA. In moderate to low-risk areas, policyholders may be eligible for a lower-cost policy, called a preferred risk policy.

How much coverage can you buy?

According to a FEMA advisory, homeowners can insure a home for up to $250,000 and its contents for up to $100,000. Meanwhile, renters can cover their belongings for up to $100,000. Commercial property owners can insure a building and its contents for up to $500,000 each. FEMA says the average premium for an annual flood insurance policy is approximately $700.

Flood insurance rate maps and zones

Flood maps show areas of high, moderate and low-flood risk. Theyre used by communities to set minimum building requirements, and theyre used by lenders to determine flood insurance requirements.

High-risk areas, or SFHAs, are shown on FEMAs flood maps as zones beginning with the letters A or V. Theyre also known as 100-year floodplains, which means theres a 1% probability of flooding in any given year. In these zones, theres at least a one in four chance of flooding during a 30-year mortgage. All home and business owners in these zones, who have mortgages from federally regulated or insured lenders, must buy flood insurance.

Moderate and low-risk areas, or non-SFHAs, are shown on the flood maps as zones beginning with the letters B, C, or X (or a shaded X). Flood insurance isnt required in these areas, but it is strongly recommended by FEMA. Furthermore, some flood maps include zones beginning with the letter D. These are areas that are unstudied or have undetermined flood hazards.

Criticism of FEMAs flood maps

A report published by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General in 2017 found that many of FEMAs maps may not reflect actual flood risk, or are out of date.

Without accurate floodplain identification and mapping processes, management, and oversight, FEMA cannot provide members of the public with a reliable rendering of their true flood vulnerability or ensure that [NFIP] rates reflect the real risk of flooding, the report said.

FEMA has spent over $200 million in recent years updating its flood maps. However, a study released in February 2018 by Environmental Research Letters found that more than 40 million Americans are exposed to serious flood risk at the 100-year-flood or 1% level  roughly three times more than the risk FEMAs flood maps suggest. The agency is under pressure to update its maps to more accurately reflect the countrys flood risk.

What is the Write Your Own Program?

From the offset, the NFIP has relied upon a very strong public-private partnership, explained Maurstad. Essentially, FEMAs NFIP has a collaborative relationship with a number of Write Your Own (WYO) private insurance providers, which enables participating property and casualty insurance companies to write and service the standard flood Insurance policy in their own names. The WYO companies get an expense allowance for the policies written and claims processed, but FEMA retains responsibility for the losses.

Today, the NFIP relies on 63 of the leading property insurance companies in the nation to administer the program on our behalf, said Maurstad in an NFIP 50th anniversary video in 2018. In addition to those 63 companies, we also have a handful of vendors that support those companies and also support our NFIP direct program, which policyholders can access if they dont have a relationship with one of the 63 companies.

In the 22,000 communities that participate in the NFIP program, every property owner in those communities can access the program through NFIP direct or the WYO companies  and the WYO companies are supported by their agency partners. Thousands of insurance agents around the country sell and advise our product with their customers and our customers. Then you also have the independent adjusters who are helping the policyholder at the time of a disaster or claim through that claims journey. The public-private partnership is unique in the sense that you have large company support and then you have a lot of small business support throughout the nation. Thats actually one of the strengths of the program.

NFIP funding  and debts

The NFIP is funded primarily from an authorized federal account called the National Flood Insurance Fund (NFIF). Its generally funded by receipts from the premiums of flood insurance policies and borrowing from the Treasury when the NFIFs pot is insufficient to pay the NFIPs obligations  aka, the insurance claims. The problem is, over the years, the program has had to borrow more and more from the Treasury, racking up considerable debts. Aggressive back-to-back Atlantic hurricane seasons in 2017 and 2018 have really turned the spotlight on the programs struggling finances.

According to CRS analysis of data provided by FEMA Congressional Affairs, the NFIP borrowed approximately $7.425 billion in 2017, paid back nothing, and recorded a cumulative debt of $30.425 billion. In 2018, the struggling program borrowed $6.1 billion, paid back nothing, and recorded a cumulative debt of $20.525 billion. A debt of $16 billion was cancelled on October 26, 2017, to make it possible for the program to pay claims for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

Reauthorization woes

Congress must periodically renew the NFIPs statutory authority to operate. This is called reauthorization. In recent years, NFIP reauthorization has turned into a political war zone, with neither party willing to take control of the program and commit to necessary reforms. This has resulted in a series of ongoing short-term extensions, or stop-gap measures passed through Congress. The program is currently in its 10th short-term extension since its last long-term authorization expired on September 30, 2017.

R.J. Lehmann, The R Street Institutes director of finance, insurance and trade policy, said in July 2018 (after the current laws seventh reauthorization): The NFIP is unsustainable as currently constructed and Congress cannot continue to ignore its problems. Even after Congress moved in 2017 to erase $16 billion of the agencys debt, it still owes taxpayers roughly $20.5 billion. The Congressional Budget Office projects it will lose an average of $1.4 billion every year.

Over the past 20 years, the NFIP has come up for reauthorization 41 times [now 44 times] and 38 times Congress has moved to extend it without adopting any needed reforms. That cycle must end. There are simple, common sense, bipartisan proposals to fix the issues that ail it: from encouraging the market for private coverage to investing in mapping and mitigation, to addressing repetitive loss properties. We cannot afford any more delays. The time for action is now.

An explainer about the emerging private flood market will be published soon. Stay tuned.
Some of the opportunities in the marketplace today include potential partnerships with so-called disruptors. Rather than looking at these entrants as companies who will turn everything upside-down and negatively impact the business of brokers and agents, explained French, insurance professionals should be aware of whats happening in the market and look for ways to partner with these disruptors to bring better technologies into their businesses that will ensure they remain a vital part of the distribution channel.

French highlighted the Leadership Exchange Summit Chicago as a place where these partnerships can get off of the ground.

The more conferences that we have like this, that actually get all of the people in the industry in front of these new disruptors and insurtechs  and they can share ideas and see what everyone is bringing to the table  thats going to give us more insight into how we can move forward together, instead of leaving certain sections of the distribution channel behind, said French, adding that she encourages everyone to look into attending Leadership Exchange Summit Chicago.

It provides a great opportunity for agents and brokers to not only connect with, but to receive information, from a great cross-section of key industry contacts.

Deann French will be sharing insights on this topic and more at the upcoming Leadership Exchange Summit Chicago on June 6. See further information or book your ticket here.
Tropical Cyclone Idai, which has already caused at least 60 deaths in southern Africa, lashed Mozambiques coast Friday, knocking out electricity and phone networks in its fourth-biggest city.

Idai made landfall just after midnight after strengthening to the equivalent of a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, packing wind gusts of up to 144 miles per hour, near the port city of Beira.

Before forming a tropical cyclone on March 9, the system had already dumped heavy rains over Mozambique and Malawi last week, displacing more than 100,000 people. The storm then moved back out to the southern Indian Ocean, where warm waters caused it to rapidly strengthen as it once again took aim at Mozambiques coast.

The first incarnation of the storm last week resulted in a temporary halt to coal exports from Vale SAs Moatize operation, Mozambiques biggest producer, after railway lines were submerged. Operations have since resumed, the company said by email.

The tropical cyclone threatens to cause more fatalities and destruction in an area where 1.6 million people live, according to the United Nations. Flights have been canceled and people evacuated from the areas likely to be affected.

Several experts predict that Cyclone Idai could be the strongest to make landfall in Mozambique since Tropical Cyclone Eline, which struck in February 2000, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

Idai is likely to head toward eastern Zimbabwe, where it may cause flooding in areas that have suffered a drought this year.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.
Canada is moving to overhaul its securities regulations to cover crypto trading platforms such as Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp., a digital exchange that lost access to C$260 million ($195 million) of investor assets after the death of its founder.

The Canadian Securities Administrators, an umbrella organization of provincial and territorial regulators, is seeking comment on a tailored framework to address the novel features and risks of platforms that trade crypto assets. These include a potential lack of investor safeguards, conflicts of interest, a dearth of price transparency and inadequate security controls, it said.

Currently, some platforms are subject to securities regulation depending on what crypto assets they trade and how theyre operated, but others are unregulated, said Pat Chaukos, deputy director of the Ontario Securities Commissions LaunchPad, which works with fintech startups.

This consultation is really directly responsive to what weve heard from these platforms, Chaukos said in a phone interview. Theyve told us that a regulatory framework is welcome because theyre trying to build consumer confidence and expand their businesses across Canada and in some cases globally.

Chaukos wouldnt comment on whether the Quadriga situation had any bearing on the review. The firm has been unable to access the assets of 115,000 customers since founder Gerald Cotten died in India in December, and has been under court-approved creditor protection since Feb. 5.

Crypto assets with a value of almost $1 billion were stolen in 2018 from platforms around the world, the CSA said in its consultation paper published Thursday. Global incidents point to crypto assets having heightened risks related to loss and theft as compared to other assets, it said.

The CSA made several proposals about how a new regulatory framework for crypto trading platforms should look, including requiring registration as an investment dealer; independent audits of internal controls; prohibiting dark trading and short selling; disclosing potential conflicts of interest; and requiring insurance to protect investors assets.

Regulators are also seeking input on whether there are any global approaches that Canada should look at, Chaukos said. Stakeholders have until May 15 to provide feedback on the proposals.

In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission has said anyone trading securities within its jurisdiction must comply with existing guidelines.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Legislation Canada
Or what of the families torn up when the grandfather or grandmother die, weeks, sometimes months, after being attacked in street robberies that are forgotten? Or the mothers and fathers who have lost their sons and daughters to killers who are never brought to justice?
French authorities are working to contain a fuel spill off the Atlantic Coast after an Italian container ship sank following a fire.

French and British rescue teams saved all 27 people aboard the Grande America after it sank Tuesday, according to a French government statement.

Images released Thursday by the French navy showed flames and plumes of black smoke spewing from the ship as it listed sharply.

The regional maritime authority says the ship has since leaked fuel over an area of about 10 kilometers (6 miles) long and one kilometer wide. The ship was carrying about 2,200 tons of fuel before the accident, the French government minister in charge of the environment, Francois de Rugy, told BFM television Thursday.

A French cleanup ship was expected in the area Thursday. France has also reached out to the European Maritime Security Agency for help using satellites to locate leaks.

The ship sank about 330 kilometers (200 miles) west of the French city of La Rochelle, while en route from Hamburg to Casablanca.

The regional prosecutor has opened an investigation, and France has issued a formal warning to the ships operator to assess the damage and help prevent more leaking, de Rugy said.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Energy Oil Gas France
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a $10 billion plan to push out the lower Manhattan coastline as much as 500 feet, or two city blocks, to protect from flooding thats expected to become more frequent as global temperatures rise.

The project would protect the South Street Seaport and the Financial District, along the eastern edge of lower Manhattan, an area just 8 feet (2.4 meters) above the water line, de Blasio said. Portions of the extended land would be at 20 feet above sea level. The city cant build flood protection on the existing land because its too crowded with utilities, sewers and subway lines, he said.

The new land will be higher than the current coast, protecting the neighborhoods from future storms, according to the plan de Blasio announced Thursday. Extending the shoreline into the East River is the only feasible way to protect these vulnerable and vital parts of the city.

Sandy Aftermath

The neighborhood was flooded in 2012 by a storm surge brought by Hurricane Sandy, which caused $19 billion in damage to real estate and infrastructure. The area includes Wall Street, center of one of the worlds financial capitals, $60 billion of property, 75 percent of the citys subway lines, 90,000 residents and 500,000 jobs. The extension will secure lower Manhattan from rising seas through 2100, de Blasio said.

Its one of the core centers of the American economy, the financial capital of the world, and it should be a national priority. But the fact is, it is not, said de Blasio, who has said hes considering a 2020 run for president. This should be a case where the federal government is asking us how it can help. Thats just not happening.

President Donald Trumps skepticism that climate change is the result of carbon-dioxide emissions from the use of fossil fuels means that the city cant rely on federal funds unless someone else occupies the White House, de Blasio said. Climate scientists overwhelmingly consider such emissions as the driver of rising global temperatures.

The extension would jut out into the East River north of the Brooklyn Bridge, up the east side to the Bowery. It would be part of an overall resiliency plan for Lower Manhattan that includes a $500 million project to fortify the area with a U-shaped expanse of grassy berms and removable storm-barriers that can be anchored in place as storms approach, de Blasio said.

On Staten Island, which also experienced devastation from the storm, the city has received $615 million in federal funding to create a protective seawall on its eastern shore. Other fortifications have been installed along the southern Queens shoreline in the Rockaways, including a boardwalk that will also act as a barrier to tidal surges.

Marine Life

Tim Dillingham, executive director of the New Jersey-based American Littoral Society, which advocates for protecting coastal environments, said he worries about the effect of the proposal on marine habitat.

We very rarely accept the rationale that you can sacrifice the environment for economic development, Dillingham said by phone on Thursday. We would want to see alternative ways to do that.

Ideas to build some sort of seawall around lower Manhattan have circulated for years, including one proposed in 2013 by then Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The former mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

That plan, dubbed Seaport City, included major private sector development, which would take more time to implement, de Blasio said. This project is focused on resiliency, de Blasio said.

While de Blasio should be commended for thinking big, his proposal doesnt contain a rigorous cost-benefit analysis comparing it to other proposed mega-engineering resilience projects, said Roland Lewis, president of the Waterfront Alliance, a New York-based advocacy group. It also doesnt have enough regional sweep to take into account other equally vulnerable areas, he said.

All options should be on the table, but we need to have a full understanding of the trade-offs, Lewis said. Most important, there is no time. Solutions based on the best analysis with robust and real public input are needed to address the urgency of now.

Jesse Keenan, a faculty member and researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Design who advises governments on climate resilience and adaptation, said the instinct to hold back climate change with walls and other infrastructure projects can sometimes create a false sense of security at great cost and for a limited amount of time. But New York City is an exception.

I cant think of anywhere else in America where there would be a stronger impetus to make this kind of investment, said Keenan, who co-authored a 2014 study on protecting Southern Manhattans coast that grew out of the Seaport City idea. Given the elevation and total amount of economic output and productivity from this part of the country, we really have no other alternative.

That doesnt mean de Blasios proposal will be easy. The main drawback, Keenan said, is the amount of red tape the city must clear.

Once you talk about moving into the water, youre talking about a level of coordination with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and likely Congress and other environmental stakeholders, that could significantly lengthen and complicate it, Keenan said. But maybe thats inevitable. Maybe we shouldnt run away from that.

The process would also include years of local land-use hearings and environmental impact studies that could delay construction until 2025 or later, de Blasio said. The mayor said residents that experienced Sandys devastation may want changes while supporting the concept.

After Sandy you dont find many climate-change deniers in New York City, de Blasio said. This is the existential threat, the core issue that we all must face as soon as possible.

With assistance from Stacie Sherman.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Flood New York Climate Change
In June 2005, a 63-year-old woman was thrown from a tram at the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro. The vehicle tipped over onto her, seriously injuring her shoulder and requiring years of treatment. The state paid out $85,000 more than a decade later.

North Carolina officials agreed in 2015 to pay $100,000 to a Cumberland County family whose fathers body had been left to rot, unrefrigerated, for two days in a hospital morgue after an exam.

In Wilmington that same year, the city spent $9,000 settling a claim after police yanked a woman from her bed half-naked and handcuffed her while serving a warrant at the wrong address.

In these cases and hundreds of others, North Carolina officials have shelled out millions through insurance and taxpayer money to quell the risk of legal action  whether from an employee alleging discrimination or a driver hit by a school bus.

Despite the sometimes large price tags, these settlements can be massive cost-saving measures for agencies, staving off prolonged court battles or expensive judgments. But the payouts add up quickly.

With little uniformity in how agreements are tracked and shared with the public, a collaborative investigation released March 11 by nine newsrooms across the state found the total costs sometimes difficult to calculate. The project was timed to coincide with Sunshine Week, a national celebration of open government and the publics right to know.

Settlements between private individuals  a corporation and a former employee, for example  can be secretive by nature, and the public isnt necessarily entitled to know details. But when a government agency is involved, those agreements must by law be disclosed to the public, with rare exceptions.

Reporters in January requested five years of settlement agreements from 61 agencies  from county school boards to the governors office  across North Carolina. Thousands of pages of documents revealed massive variations in the types and volume of cases agency lawyers have handled since 2014, some of which have plodded through the legal process for a decade or more.

Whether the resolution is $60 or $600,000, lawyers on both sides say the intent is to make a deal before the legal maneuvering becomes too costly for either party.

The process can be more art than science, according to Attorney General Josh Stein, whose lawyers litigate on behalf of state agencies.

Its playing poker, Stein said. Youve been dealt a hand of cards. Somebody with the same hand of cards can end up winning the pot; someone else with the same hand of cards may fold and walk away.

The price of running government services involves human beings making mistakes, breaking rules and suffering accidents. That can cost taxpayers millions.

For example, the state Transportation Department paid $15.3 million in workers compensation claims over the five years 2014 through 2018, records show. That doesnt include medical expenses and administrative costs to manage the claims.

Sometimes settlements came after workers  like an information specialist at the North Carolina Zoo  fought reassignment to an easy-to-fire job instead of one with civil service protections.

Employees arent the only recipients of state payouts.

In March 2011, 76-year-old retired Army Sgt. Maj. Larry Kono died at his home in Fayetteville. His body was sent to the morgue at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center for a physical exam by a nurse practitioner contracted by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

After the exam, Konos body was left unrefrigerated in a body bag for days. The funeral home advised against the family viewing the body.

In a memo justifying the $100,000 settlement to the family on behalf of the state Department of Health and Human Services, Special Deputy Attorney General Gerald K. Robbins was unequivocal.

The exposure to liability going to trial would be potentially hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of dollars if this case made it to a jury, Robbins wrote in 2015.

Stein said thats the calculation his agencys lawyers have to make in every case.

Sometimes the state was wrong. No person  certainly no corporation, no entity  is going to be right in every instance, Stein said. So when the states wrong, we have to make a payment. If we dont settle these cases, and we just litigate them to the max, sometimes you run the risk of the adjudicator or a jury getting really upset with you.

The media coalitions review of the settlement agreements also revealed some contain confidentiality provisions that may run contrary to state law.

Antoine Graham and Jerry Melvin sued officers from several southeastern North Carolina law enforcement agencies after Graham was shot while the men allegedly tried to drive away from a DWI checkpoint in Brunswick County in 2013. The formal settlement said the plaintiffs would forfeit the $155,000 they received if they talked to reporters about the incident or shared video from the incident.

If the plaintiffs are asked by anyone about the terms or conditions of this Settlement and Release, he will limit his response to the following: `The matter has been resolved, Grahams settlement agreement reads in part.

Several agencies had yet to provide a single page of records by the deadline for this story.

Nearly a month after the original request was filed, Department of Public Instruction spokesman Drew Eliott said reporters should have directed the inquiry to the attorney generals office, which negotiates the claims. Every other state agency uses lawyers with the attorney generals office in a similar manner, but no other agency sent reporters there to get records.

In contrast, several agencies responded swiftly and completely. By the end of February, the Agriculture Department provided more than 600 documents, some of which show:

Dollar General stores were fined every year from 2014 through 2018 for overcharging customers with price-scan errors. The departments Standards Division inspects retail pricing equipment for accuracy.

In 2017, the department tried to charge the Waterkeeper Alliance environmental organization just over $2,000 to fill a large request for public records. The Alliance sued to challenge the fee. To settle the dispute, the agency paid almost $700 to the group and made a $2,000 donation to the Sunshine Center of the Open Government Coalition at Elon University.

___

This story was reported by Emery P. Dalesio, of the Associated Press; Frank Taylor, of Carolina Public Press; Ames Alexander and Ann Doss Helms, of The Charlotte Observer; Steve DeVane, John Henderson, Rachael Riley and Paul Woolverton, of The Fayetteville Observer; Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan, Lynn Bonner, Will Doran, Keung Hui, Anna Johnson and Andy Specht, of The News & Observer and The Herald-Sun; Ann McAdams and Brandon Wissbaum, of WECT; Tyler Dukes, of WRAL News; and Jason deBruyn, of WUNC.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Agencies North Carolina
Just over a week into the 2019 legislative session, insurance industry-supported bills aimed at reforming Florida assignment of benefits (AOB) abuse are making progress in the state legislature.

Lawmakers in the Florida House of Representatives and Senate have each advanced legislation that Floridas insurance regulator, industry and consumers advocates say would help stem the tide of abuse that is spreading statewide and leading to higher rates for consumers.

And both bills tackle the number one issue that AOB reform advocates say is fueling the abuse: Floridas one-way attorney fee statute.

Pressure from the states insurance regulator and new governor may be helping to move things along in what is now the seventh year the issue has been before state lawmakers.

AOB abuse has an adverse impact on our consumers and directly undermines the ability of Floridians to have reliable insurance products available at affordable prices. I will remain a vocal proponent of measures that stem AOB abuse and protects consumers from the abusive tactics exhibited by bad actors who exploit Floridas unique attorney fee structure, Florida Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier said after the passage of a bill by a Florida House committee last week.

Floridas new governor Ron DeSantis has weighed in on the issue at his first state of the state on March 5, saying, There are areas where Florida can do better. I hope the Legislature passes legislation to reform the issue of AOB, which has become a racket.

Telling reporters after his speech, as reported by the Sun Sentinel, DeSantis further commented on the need for AOB reform.

I would like to see the abuses pared back, the Sun Sentinel reported him as saying. I think its going to drive insurance rates up. I think the fact that weve had bad storms lately, that is going to cause insurance rates to go up. This, I think, just fuels that, and I want to help the insurance market.

The AOB problem in Florida stems from unlicensed water remediation and roofing contractors who have homeowners sign over their insurance policy rights in exchange for repairs to their homes. The contractors, typically working with an attorney, file inflated or fake claims, and then pursue lawsuits against insurers when those claims are disputed or denied.

Floridas one-way attorney fee statute, which is blamed for driving AOB abuse, leaves insurers footing the bill for the inflated claims and the attorney fees if the insurer is found to have underpaid the claim by any amount.

The consensus among all stakeholders is that any reform must address the one-way attorney fee statute.

The current one-way attorney fee statute incentivizes abuse and excessive litigation. OIR recommends narrowing the current one-way attorney fees statute relating to litigation involving an AOB agreement to disincentivize AOB abuse, while maintaining consumer protections, Commissioner Altmaier told Insurance Journal.

The current remedy in the Senate supported by the industry and Altmaier was introduced by Florida Sen. Doug Broxson, an insurance agent who chairs the Senate Banking & Insurance Committee, before the 2019 session began on March 4.

Senate Bill 122 would continue to allow policyholders and beneficiaries to recover attorney fees under Floridas one-way attorney fee statute but would have prohibited assignees from obtaining attorney fees.

SB122 was tabled at the Feb. 11 committee meeting after several committee members expressed concern over the bill. Sen. Jeff Brandes, a committee member who supports the legislation, successfully moved to postpone the bill with the hope that lawmakers could come to a consensus on how to move forward.

There is no perfect bill to resolve [AOB]  this is a great attempt. We should support this bill. We should continue to hone and refine and work on this bill, he said.

Which was exactly what lawmakers did. An amendment was added at the start of the legislative session that includes more consumer protections and a prevailing party fee structure as it relates to attorney fees. A few of the consumer protection additions in the amendment include:

Limits AOBs between service providers and consumers under urgent or emergency circumstances by stating that if a consumer acts under urgent or emergency circumstances to protect property from damage and enters into an agreement with a service provider to stabilize, protect, repair, or improve such property, the service provider may only contract for, receive, or acquire in any manner from the consumer at such time the right to payment for the work necessary to stabilize, protect, and prevent additional damage to the property.

Limits a post-loss AOB for homeowners in an emergency circumstance to $3,000 or 1 percent of the Coverage A limit

Limits an AOB to $500 for auto policies for windshield damage

Requires consumers to provide a copy of the AOB to the insurer within 3 business days after the AOB is executed.

Allows the consumer to rescind the AOB within 14 days of execution, or at least 30 days after the execution if the service provider has not begun substantial work on the property.

The amendment would amend the Florida attorney fee statute to create a prevailing party fee shifting statue that gives the prevailing party  either the insurer or the service provider  in AOB cases the right to collect attorney fees and costs. The amendment defines prevailing party as the party which prevails on the significant issues of the case. However, the court may determine that there is no prevailing party in a case.

The amendment says that in determining if there is a prevailing party, the court must consider: 1. The issues litigated; 2. The amount of the claims by the service provider versus the amount recovered; 3. The existence of setoffs and counterclaims, if any; and 4. The amounts offered by either party to resolve the issues prior to or during litigation.

The prevailing party change to the attorney fee statute is designed to take away the incentive from contractors and law firms to sue the insurer, experts say.

Attorney Michael Packer, a shareholder with Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin in Florida and who has defended insurers in AOB cases, says SB 122 would be a pretty sizable change in the way these cases are litigated.

It would definitely have an effect on cases getting filed and the willingness to negotiate, he said. Everything is stacked against the insurance company right now  this would level the playing field somewhat or at least create a situation where these service providers have something to lose if they are not reasonable.

But Packer said the ultimate benefit of SB 122 is the consumer protections it provides.

Ultimately what it means is we should start to get these invoices back to reasonable amounts that companies would charge if there was no insurance involved, he said.

Altmaier released a statement after SB 122 passed the committee praising Sen. Broxson for his commitment to bringing relief to Floridians who continue suffering from AOB abuse and the exploitation of Floridas unique attorney fee structure. He said the advancement of SB 122 is a win for consumers across the state.

Addressing the AOB crisis will remain a top priority in the coming weeks and months. We must protect Floridians from the bad actors who seek to maximize profits at the expense of every policyholder in our state, he said.

SB122 is on the March 18 agenda of the Florida Senate Judicial Committee.

Florida House Bill

The option that will be considered by the Florida House was filed by the House Civil Justice Subcommittee on March 6 and is now House Bill 7065.

The House bill also includes consumer protection provisions such as:

Providing requirements for homeowners and auto policy AOBs that includes allowing consumers to rescind an AOB within seven business days of execution for homeowners and two calendar days for auto glass.

Requires the service provider to give the insurer a copy of the AOB within three business days after the AOB has been executed or work has begun, whichever is earlier for homeowners and within one calendar day for auto-glass

Requires the AOB include a written, itemized, per-unit cost estimate of services and, if the estimate includes water restoration services, provide proof that the assignee is certified by an entity that requires services to be performed according to a nationally-recognized standard.

The bill addresses attorney fees by requiring the service provider to give an insurer and the consumer prior written notice of at least 10 business days before filing suit on a claim.

It also states:

The notice to sue may not be served before the insurer has made a determination of coverage according to the timeframes and requirements of current law. The notice must specify the damages in dispute, the amount claimed, and the pre-suit settlement demand, and must include an itemized, detailed written invoice or estimate of the work performed or to be performed.

If the work includes water remediation services, the invoice must include proof the service provider is certified by an entity that requires repairs to be performed according to a standard approved by the American National Standards Institute.

The insurer must respond to the notice in writing within the 10- day timeframe by making a settlement offer or requiring appraisal or other alternative dispute resolution.

If the parties fail to settle and subsequent litigation results in a judgment, the PCB provides the exclusive means by which either party may recover attorney fees.

The bill allows an award of attorney fees based on the difference between the amount recovered and the amount offered during settlement negotiations. To accomplish this, the bill defines the difference between the insurers pre- suit offer and the assignees pre-suit demand as the disputed amount.

Fees are then awarded based on a percentage of the difference between the judgment obtained and the settlement offer.

The House bill would allow insurance companies to offer a residential or commercial property insurance policy or comprehensive or combined additional coverage motor vehicle insurance policy restricting, in whole or in part, the assignment of post-loss benefits under certain circumstances.

An additional bill in the Senate that passed the Banking & Insurance Committee this week was SB 754, which just applies to windshield glass AOB abuse. If passed, the bill would prohibit motor vehicle repair shops and their employees from offering anything of value to a customer in exchange for making an insurance claim for auto glass replacement or repair. The bill does not address attorney fees, however.

Insurer trade group APCIA said it supports this bill, as the number of AOB auto glass lawsuits has skyrocketed from 400 in 2006 to 20,000 in 2016.

Auto glass repair schemes are becoming another example of AOB abuse in Florida and this bill helps address this growing problem, said Regional Manager of State Government Affairs Logan McFaddin.

Topics Lawsuits Carriers Legislation Auto Florida Property Homeowners
The Florida Legislature met Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis deadline to hand him a bill to repeal the states ban on smokable medical marijuana when the House passed the legislation Wednesday.

While lawmakers arent necessarily in favor of allowing medical marijuana to be smoked, they faced the prospects of having it become legal without any restrictions.

This is a difficult issue, and youre going to have people on both sides; some that are happy that now this is available to them and others that feel that we didnt go far enough, House Speaker Jose Oliva said after the vote. We did the best that we could do and still remain responsible.

Voters approved medical marijuana in 2016, but lawmakers banned smokable forms of the plant in a bill signed by then-Gov. Rick Scott in 2017. The state was sued over the issue and a judge declared the ban unconstitutional. Scott, now a Republican U.S. senator, appealed the ruling. DeSantis said in late January that the current law doesnt represent the will of the voters and that he would drop the appeal if lawmakers didnt repeal the ban by mid-March.

Lawmakers quickly followed up on his ultimatum. The bill is the first to go to the governor in the 60-day legislative session that began last week and the only bill the House has considered at this point. The Senate passed the repeal six days earlier and the House passed it on a 101-11 vote without debate.

I thank the Florida Legislature for taking action on medical marijuana and upholding the will of the voters, DeSantis said on Twitter.

The bill places several conditions on smokable medical marijuana. It would not be available to anyone under the age of 18 unless the patient is terminally ill and if two doctors, one of them a pediatrician, say it is the most effective form of treatment. It could not be smoked in public or at private businesses subject to the states cigarette smoking ban.

Private property owners would have the right to prohibit it. Patients wouldnt be able to possess more than four ounces of marijuana in a smokable form.

Republican Rep. Ray Rodrigues sponsored the bill and pointed out that the law that passed two years ago was widely supported even with the smoking ban.

We passed that bill 109 to nine, Rodrigues said. Many of us feel like we got it right.

But if DeSantis were to drop the lawsuit appeal, Rodrigues said, there would be no rules guiding smokable medical marijuana.

Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, who advocated for a repeal of the smoking ban, praised the vote in a news release.

Todays action to finally allow smokable medical marijuana brings four words to the lips of people across our state: Its about damn time, said Fried, a Democrat. Its long past due that the State of Florida honored the will of the people and allowed doctors to determine their patients course of treatment.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Legislation Florida Cannabis
March 15, 2019 (Investorideas.com Newswire) A Stifel report discussed the positive attributes of this Texas-based exploration and development corporation.

In a March 8 research note, analyst Michael Scialla reported that Stifel initiated coverage on W&T Offshore Inc. (WTI:NYSE), a Gulf of Mexico pure play, oil & gas explorer and developer, with a Buy rating and a $10 per share price target. This compares to the company's current share price of $5.24.

The company's assets include 330,000 net acres, 250,000 on the continental shelf and 80,000 in deepwater, the analyst relayed. W&T Offshore's proven reserves as of year-end 2018 were 84 million barrels of oil equivalent, made up of 47% oil, 12% natural gas liquids and 41% natural gas.

"W&T offshore exposes investors to one of the strongest free cash flow and debt-adjusted production growth per share profiles in our small and mid-cap exploration and production universe," Scialla commented. "The company is well positioned to augment this growth with accretive acquisitions in a region where high-quality assets will solicit a short list of competitive bidders."

Having developed offshore assets for 35 years, W&T Offshore has history and experience on its side, Scialla highlighted. The oil and gas company is proving naysayers wrong by continuing to show that Gulf of Mexico assets can compete with shale. For instance, it drilled more than 40 wells since 2020 with a greater-than-90% success rate. "The proved reserves assigned to the 21 wells WTI completed between 2013 and 2017 were more than double the company's predrill estimates while nonprice reserve revisions have been positive for its offshore assets in seven of the past eight years," noted Scialla.

Also going for W&T is its long-term discipline in spending less than the cash flow it generates and the likelihood it will improve even further in this regard. Since 2016 the energy company's free cash flow yield has remained at 21%, much higher than the average 24% level of Stifel's small and midcap universe. "Over the next three years, we expect the company to remain the leader in our peer group with a free cash flow yield of 24%," Scialla highlighted.

In addition, its more robust balance sheet will allow W&T Offshore to grow, though it may only be "modest" and single digit to start, Scialla pointed out. "However, the company should generate a 2018 to 2020 debt-adjusted production growth per share of 32%, the strongest in our small and midcap group, where the average is projected to be 0%."

That growth could come through accretive acquisitions, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico where the current market favors buyers after numerous operators have left the region, Scialla indicated. W&T Offshore is well positioned financially to pursue such opportunities. He added, "We believe W&T's proven track record of exploiting similar out-of-favor assets, its strong balance sheet and a short list of potential buyers could yield attractive acquisitions for the company."

Disclosure:

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Disclosures from Stifel Nicolaus & Company, W&T Offshore Inc., March 7, 2019

I, Michael S. Scialla, certify that the views expressed in this research report accurately reflect my personal views about the subject securities or issuers; and I, Michael S. Scialla, certify that no part of my compensation was, is, or will be directly or indirectly related to the specific recommendations or views contained in this research report. Our European Policy for Managing Research Conflicts of Interest is available at www.stifel.com.

For a price chart with our ratings and any applicable target price changes for WTI click here.

W&T Offshore, Inc. is a client of Stifel or an affiliate or was a client of Stifel or an affiliate within the past 12 months.

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There are always people beyond a companys success  the employee remains the bedrock of progress. Not surprisingly, employers strive to deliver decent and safe working conditions to their subordinates. Today, when the number of work-related fatalities increases every month, the employees safety stays the number one priority in any organization where occupational risk factors exist.

A viable approach to ensuring employees safety in the Industry 4.0 era is the internet of things (IoT). Numerous IoT use cases in business show that this technology brings both employers and employees convenience and productivity. But what about safety? Lets explore several real-life examples of how both technology giants and small startups leverage IoT to help employees stay out of harms way.

Nation Waste and IBM Provide a Full-Scale Solution for Workers Safety

By having joined hands with IBM, Nation Waste, Inc., a waste disposal company based in Houston, developed an IoT-powered solution for worker safety. Called The Nation Safety Net, it helps employees avoid work-related injuries and employers deliver timely assistance in case of any hazard.

The collaboration brought a full-scale solution for worker safety improvement. It embodies employee and employers mobile apps as well as a sensor-equipped helmet, vest, and wristband.

For example, the helmet contains an accelerometer that tracks employee movement and helps managers detect if a worker falls down or collides with something. Environmental sensors embedded into the vest monitor temperature, light, noise, oxygen, and carbon monoxide levels. The wristband, in its turn, finds out whether an employees heart rate and body temperature are within the norm.

To start using the solution, the worker should put on all the wearables and pair them to the employee mobile application, which starts monitoring their condition. The supervisor has their own version of the mobile app, which shows whether all workers wear all the necessary equipment. Both applications deliver timely audio and vibration notifications in case of hazards such as gas exposure, heat stress, fatigue, or equipment removal. Upon receiving the immediate alert, supervisors and their subordinates can take the necessary actions in the earliest time possible.

The Nation Safety Net now is used as an occupational risk preventing practice by a range of companies. The results of the solutions implementation force to believe in IoT effectiveness: according to the statistics cited on the official website of Nation Waste, an oil and gas company that used the product managed to reduce their injury rate by 86 . Nation Waste forecasts that the solution will bring 150 increase in profit margins for the next five years.

Fujitsu Presents a Set of Wearables Aimed at Worker Safety Advancement

Fujitsu, a Japanese multinational IT company, doesnt remain indifferent to the problem of worker safety too. In recent years, the company developed a set of wearables aimed at worker protection. The solution is comprised of the Vital Sensing Band, Location Badge, and Driver Drowsiness Detector.

The Vital Sensing Band is a lightweight wearable with the ability to capture and measure an employees vital signs along with some environmental factors such as temperature and humidity. The band can detect if the employee falls or is exposed to heat stress.

As for the Location Badge, the device uses GPS and RTLS (real-time location solution) for outdoor and indoor monitoring. The product allows work providers and their subordinates to get location data and detect postures and falls.

The Driver Drowsiness Detector consists of a device to be worn around a drivers neck and a sensor clip attached to their earlobe. The sensor gathers the drivers pulse waves and sends their patterns to Fujitsu proprietary algorithm, which can identify the signs of drowsiness based on this data.

For their IoT solutions, the company uses over 68 algorithms that transform sensor data into illustrative event information. Bluetooth Low Energy transmits this data to an employees or/and an employers mobile applications. If any abnormalities detected, the wearable vibrates, or the mobile app gives an alarming voice message.

Today, Fujitsu devices for worker safety are used in companies around the world and help employees to bypass or successfully live through work-related hazards. Enterprises employing the solution say the system is raising morale among workers. According to Fujitsu, their accurate analysis of falls, heat stress, and worker wellbeing brought the company almost 50 patents.

Small Companies Also on Guard of Employee Safety

While market giants like IBM and Fujitsu are moving towards employee safety at a rapid-fire pace, small enterprises also take the problem of work-related hazards and their elimination rather seriously.

Consider the example of SolePower, a startup that creates OSHA-approved smart boots that provide workforce managers with automatic alerts of possible and ongoing accidents. The proprietary IoT system tracks employee indoor and outdoor location, measures their vitals, and delivers visualized results of the gathered data to managers.

Intending to prevent driver fatigue, Australia-located SmartCap developed a belt to attach to their helmet or hat. Unlike the Fujitsu Driver Drowsiness Detector that tracks pulse waves, SmartCap belt reads brain activity data through EEG to measure an operators alertness and provides notifications in case of soon-to-come microsleeps.

Safety and Productivity: Two Sides of the Same Coin

As you can see, today both market giants and small startups are employing IoT solutions for employee safety. These products help enterprises reduce injury rates as well as give workers the confidence that they will return home safely. And this confidence can be considered the most valuable employee benefit. When workers know that their lives count, it boosts their loyalty and productivity, which is also good for the organization they are working for.

About the author: Alex Paretski is a Technology Observer at Itransition, a custom software development company headquartered in Denver, Colorado. He specializes in exploring IT innovations and enjoys following the latest business trends. Alex also considers that knowledge and research are the most important constituent parts in the process of making the right decision.

Edited by Ken Briodagh
A total of 70 companies have invested in Ireland as a direct result of Brexit, the IDA has said.

The agency said more than 5,000 jobs have been created here through these investments since the UK voted, in June 2016, to leave the EU.

"These updated figures are another reminder of how our EU membership and stable pro-enterprise policies are appealing to investors who are looking for certainty. For US companies with ambitions to be global players, Ireland is a natural fit for their international operations," said IDA chief executive Martin Shanahan.

The IDA said investors' main Brexit-related concerns relate to increased transaction costs, regulatory divergence and tariffs. The IDA also announced that technology firm TradeIX is to add 70 jobs in Dublin as part of an expansion of its global headquarters.

Meanwhile, Revenue has slammed accusations made against it by accountancy body Acca. Acca accused Revenue of effectively helping to increase the risk of smuggling after Brexit by "unlawfully" issuing tax agent identification numbers (Tain) to unqualified accountants and tax advisors by not checking if they are supervised and regulated.

"Revenue absolutely refutes the Acca allegation that it is somehow engaged in any "breach of law" when assigning Tain and also refutes that it has an obligation to "check that persons are supervised and regulated" before assigning a Tain. The engagement of an agent or advisor to assist in the management of tax issues is a matter for each taxpayer to consider and to satisfy oneself as to the credentials of that individual," Revenue said.
Donald Trump said he hopes the grounding of Boeings 737 Max family of passenger jets is only temporary but the US had to take a cautionary route after the plane was involved in two fatal crashes.

I hope it is going to be for a short period of time. They have to find out what it is, the US president told reporters at the White House.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Boeings 737 Max on Wednesday, reversing course after standing nearly alone by allowing the jets to remain in the air while aviation authorities and airlines across the globe halted flights in recent days.

The first concrete evidence of a possible link between two deadly Boeing 737 Max crashes came from space.

A new satellite network capable of tracking planes in high fidelity across the globe captured the flight path of the 737 Max that crashed Sunday.

The data was critical in persuading the US to join the rest of the world in grounding the jet, according to industry and regulatory officials.

The erratic, six-minute flight of the Ethiopian Airlines plane convinced the Federal Aviation Administration it was close enough to what preceded the October 29 crash of another 737 Max off the coast of Indonesia to warrant concern.

FAA acting administrator Dan Elwell said the decision was based on the new evidence. It became clear  to all parties, actually  that the track of the Ethiopian Airlines flight was very close and behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight.

Kevin Durkin, an aviation lawyer, said the connection could be important in any court cases.

If Boeing knew of a defect in the 737 Max fleet, the plane manufacturer could face extra damages in lawsuits. The companys knowledge might be demonstrated by its statements that it was making software changes after the Lion Air crash, he said.

We had to take a cautionary route. The grounding of the planes yesterday was a big thing, Mr Trump said.

He called Boeing a great company, adding hopefully theyll figure it out very quickly.

Ethiopia has sent black boxes from the crashed Boeing jet to France for decoding after refusing to hand them to US authorities that had kept the Max model flying after most other regulators grounded it.

FAA officials privately briefed members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Panel members including Democrat Steve Cohen of Tennessee and Republican Bruce Westerman of Arkansas said afterward they were given no indication of how long the grounding and investigation would last.

More signs emerged of a weakening order book for the 737 Max.

Garuda Indonesia plans to slash its remaining order for 737 Max planes and said it may switch suppliers.

Garuda initially planned to slash its 737 Max orders to 20 planes from 49 outstanding before the October disaster involving Lion Air flight 610.

Now it plans to cut even more, president director I Gusti Ngurah Askhara Danadiputra said in Jakarta.

Garuda is open to switching to other suppliers. A decision will depend on negotiations with Boeing and assurances from the FAA.

The airline, which had ordered 50 737 Max 8 jets in 2014, has taken delivery of just one aircraft, which has been grounded after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. The planes were to be delivered through 2030, Mr Danadiputra said.

After reviewing the latest development, especially the increasing customer concerns toward Max 8, we have lost the confidence in the product, Mr Danadiputra said.

Xi Jinping will discuss a major order of Airbus planes with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, when the Chinese president visits Paris this month, a French official said. There are positive signals regarding the contract, the official said.

Mr Macron, who is traveling in Africa, touted talks for Chinese and Ethiopian deals to buy more Airbus jets. France had earlier confirmed its received the black boxes from the Ethiopian Airlines crash and will download the data.

Snatching a deal would be a boost for Airbus in a country thats become a battleground with Boeing for orders.

It was reported in September that chances for a 15.9bn Airbus deal had been revived amid Chinas trade war with the US, while Chinese purchases of US goods are part of talks to resolve the two countries differences  which could give Boeing a lift.

Average airfares in India soared after the nation joined others in grounding 737 Max jets, shrinking capacity in the worlds fastest-growing aviation market, where carriers have traditionally lured first-time flyers with ultra-cheap fares.

Average fares on 14 main routes jumped more than 65%, compared with a year ago, data from online travel agent Yatra.com showed. In contrast, fares on average were up just about 30% on February 12, when India was yet to decide on grounding the Boeing jets, the data showed.

More than a quarter of Indian budget carrier SpiceJets narrow-body fleet was idled after the ban.

SpiceJet is one the biggest customers for Boeing with as many as 205 of the Max jets on order.

The DGCAs decision to ground 737 Max aircraft has resulted in a fairly significant impact on the airfares for immediate travel on certain key routes, said Sharat Dhall, chief operating officer of the business-to-consumer segment at Yatra Online Pvt.

With current increase in load factors and this reduction in capacity, we expect airfares to rise further in the short to medium term.

Boeing, whose shares have lost 11% of their value this week, faces escalating financial risk.

With extensive grounding of the 737 Max, near term news could get worse for Boeing before it improves, Cai von Rumohr, an analyst with Cowen, said.

However, he added, because the company is readying an update to its flight-control software, we dont see meaningful long term risk.

Indeed, the only real rival to Boeing is Airbus, whose production line for the A320neo is full well into the next decade.

- Bloomberg
By Andrew Harris, David Voreacos and Eamon Quinn

Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, who until recently owned the huge Aughinish Alumina smelter in the Shannon Estuary, has sued the US Treasury Department and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, seeking a US court order lifting sanctions against him.

Mr Deripaska is the latest victim of political infighting and ongoing reaction to Russias purported interference with the 2016 US presidential election, according to the complaint filed in a US court. Hes been unfairly and illegally targeted by the US Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control, and his net worth has dropped by $7.5bn (6.6bn) due to the sanctions, according to the lawsuit.

Mr Deripaska is the billionaire founder of En+ Group and Rusal. He was among the most prominent tycoons penalised with sanctions by President Donald Trumps administration. The sanctios had until recently included Rusal and threatened hundreds of jobs at Aughinish.

The move followed the passage of a law to retaliate against Moscow for meddling in the 2016 election.

The US Treasury slapped sanctions on Mr Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and six other Russian oligarchs in April 2018 in response to the Kremlins malign activity around the globe.

In January, the US lifted sanctions on three firms tied to Mr Deripaska, including Rusal, though he remained personally under US sanctions, with his property blocked.

The sanctions have resulted in the utter devastation of Deripaskas wealth, reputation and economic livelihood, according to the complaint, filed in a Washington federal court.

The US Treasury Departments actions were arbitrary and capricious, Mr Deripaska claims. He asked the court to intervene, seeking an order to bar the agency from referring to him as an oligarch.

He also asked the court to order his removal from executive orders imposing the sanctions and the so-called Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List administered by Ofac.

His investments have become toxic, and defendants have caused his former companies to separate from him through the irrevocable divestiture of his interests and severance of his control, according to the complaint.

Bloomberg. Additional reporting Irish Examiner.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources enforces a keep your feet wet policy, but legal experts debate whether the public has a right of way up to the natural high water mark*.
Lufthansa shares sank nearly 7%  and the most in four and a half months  after the German airline cut its growth plans after a slide in fares and higher fuel costs weighed on 2018 earnings.

The carrier said it will slow capacity increases to 1.9% this summer from the 3.8 previously planned in an effort to bolster prices and cope with limited room for extra flights at airports.
Ryanair is to rebrand its Polish flight services as Buzz later this year.

It will, effectively, add a fourth brand to the airline's group network alongside its main Ryanair fleet; Austrian carrier Laudamotion which it recently acquired in full; and Ryanair UK which came into being after the airline took a new UK operating licence allowing it to continue flying in and out of Britain after Brexit.
Update: Full refunds for Nicki Minaj's cancelled concert at the 3Arena in Dublin tonight will be available from this Tuesday from point of purchase.

Nicki Manaj has cancelled her 3Arena concert tonight due to weather conditions on the Irish Sea
Cork City Council investigators have visited the site of the former Bessborough mother and baby home to ascertain if the destruction of the historic folly near a burial plot warrants an enforcement action.

A council spokesperson said that investigators had visited the site yesterday and strongly advised that works should cease.

We are continuing to assess the facts which may result in enforcement action, said the spokesperson.

Sinn Feins Pat Buckley raised the matter with Tanaiste Simon Coveney in the Dail, saying the destruction of the folly had caused considerable anguish to survivors of the former mother and baby home, given its location near a burial ground.

It may seem a minimal issue, but the survivors of the mother and baby home in Bessborough are angered and anguished that developers have moved onto the site and begun knocking buildings without it being public knowledge, or a geophysical radar scan having been carried out, said Mr Buckley.

These events are atrocious. I would love to get an answer on this issue

Mr Coveney asked Mr Buckley for a file on the matter and said he would make sure it gets to the right person.

The semi-ruined former two-storey, three-bay structure, dating from 1870-1890, is owned by the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. It is located on the site of the nuns burial plot.

The Irish Examiner reported last week that work had begun on the structure after a sign appeared on a gate leading into the site suggesting the folly presents a major health and safety hazard due to crumbling mortar and loose stones.

The order said it was carrying out repair work to the structure and had notified the Mother and Baby Homes Commission. It did not answer questions about who was involved in the work and said it would deal directly with the Commission on all related matters.

However, it subsequently emerged over last weekend that almost half of the structure had been demolished.

The order said that before it decided to carry out the work, it sought professional advice and established that the building is not on the Record of Monuments and Places (RMP) as maintained under the statute by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland and the Commissioners of Public Works.

City officials have now confirmed that all work on the site has been ordered to stop.

Workers Party activist and survivor of a mother and baby home Catherine Coffey, said the follys destruction was an outrageous act which had hurt survivors and their families.
Cork County Council has secured a court order for the demolition of two properties in the heart of Bandon town where a section of a busy street has been closed for almost three months.

The privately-owned buildings on the towns Oliver Plunkett partially collapsed on December 10 last.

Amid ongoing concerns about the risk that the damaged buildings posed to public safety, the council enforced a full closure of the street.

It then served statutory notices on the building owners in January directing them to demolish the structures and clear the site.

But the council said as a result of inaction on these notices, it moved quickly to seek a District Court order to give it the right to enter and carry out the works itself as the building continued to present a risk to the public.

Given the urgency of the situation, the council secured an early hearing in Bandon District Court today and was granted the order.

It said it will now proceed to make immediate arrangements to undertake the work required and ensure that that section of Oliver Plunkett Street can be reopened as soon as possible.

Cork County Councils Chief Executive, Tim Lucey, welcomed the court decision.

It is regrettable that the owners of the properties in question have not acted fully on foot of the statutory notices served on them in late January and that that has prolonged the time which we have had to close off part of Oliver Plunkett Street.

Primary responsibility has always rested with the property owners to remedy this situation.

We will continue to treat this as a priority due to the strategic positioning of the property within the town of Bandon and will now proceed swiftly to demolish the buildings and make the area safe so that we can reopen the street at the earliest possible date.
A 65-year-old man suggested he had killed a former partner to ensure the young girl he was sexually abusing would not tell anyone, a court has heard.

The man, who cannot be named to protect the now teenage girl's anonymity, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to six counts of sexual assault on dates from 2009 to 2013.

The court heard the last of these sexual assaults happened in 2013 when the then 10-year-old girl had been on a trip outside the jurisdiction with the man and his current partner. This partner is the girl's family member.

Detective Garda Ken McGreevy told Pauline Walley SC, prosecuting, that the girl had been staying in a camper van with both adults. The man had come in drunk while the girl was sleeping and put his fingers inside her. He apologised three times as the girl cried.

Det. Gda McGreevy said the girl disclosed this abuse and previous incidents of sexual assault after her mother noticed she had not seemed her usual self on her return home.

The girl subsequently told specialist garda child interviewers that the man had digitally penetrated her between 20 and 50 times over the past number of years. She said this would happen in a shed outside the man's home when he had her sitting on his knee while he was on a computer.

She said on one occasion he put his fingers inside her while they were on a walk together in Wicklow.

On another occasion, she had been spending time with the man and he lifted her on top of him as he lay in bed, pulled her pyjama bottoms down and rubbed himself off her private parts.

Det. Gda McGreevy told Ms Walley that the man made the girl promise not to tell and made reference to killing a former partner.

In a victim impact report read out by Ms Walley, the girl said she would wake up in the middle of the night with bad dreams and wouldn't be able to sleep.

She revealed she lived in fear that the man would come after or hurt her if she shared the secret. She said she has trouble trusting people and that her skin crawls when family members give her a hug.

She described how the man, through his assaults, would leave her with scrapes and scratches and that it would be painful at times to urinate because of these little cuts. She said her relationship with her father has suffered because she assumed every man wanted to hurt her.

A simple hug makes me feel really uncomfortable, she said.

The man claimed to gardai in interview that he might have accidentally touched her over her clothes if he had been sitting watching TV with his arm around her. Similarly, he claimed the touching might have been accidental while he was helping her ride a bicycle without stabilisers.

He told gardai he had memory problems but also said the girl was an honest, intelligent child who was not a liar.

When asked if he was a paedophile in light of these allegations, the man replied: Probably.

Det. Gda McGreevy agreed with Feargal Kavanagh SC, defending, that his client couldn't bring himself to give full admissions during interview, but was accepting some degree of paedophilia.

Mr Kavanagh submitted to Judge Cormac Quinn that the defence was awaiting a psychological report and asked for the case to be adjourned.

Judge Quinn granted the adjournment and remanded the man on continuing bail until sentencing in May.
Above the rumble of a rising westerly gale, the four Irish Coast Guard air crew who lost their lives in the Rescue 116 helicopter crash two years ago were remembered with prayers in north Mayo last night.

A continuing long Good Friday was how Fr John Loftus described the ordeal for the bereaved during Mass in St Brendans Church, Tirrane, to mark the second anniversary.

Capt Dara Fitzpatrick, Capt Mark Duffy, and winch crew Paul Ormsby and Ciaran Smith had been tasked from Dublin to provide top cover for a medical evacuation of a fisherman 250km off the west coast. Their Sikorsky S-92 helicopter was approaching Blacksod lighthouse to refuel when the crash occurred.

Relatives were among over 150 people at the evening service, along with representatives of the rescue agencies and those involved in the 42-day official search. Winch crew Paul Ormsby and Ciaran Smith are still missing.

Tirrane church is several kilometres from Blacksod lighthouse, which was nucleus for the air, sea, and sub-sea search effort, and a kilometre from Eachleim community hall, where support was offered to the rescue agencies and volunteers.

Last year, the families joined hundreds of people for a candle-lit vigil in stormy weather on the headland overlooking Blackrock island. This year, the island 12km to the west was also obscured in thick fog as driving Atlantic rain lashed the Mullet peninsula.

Yesterday, some of the relatives visited Blacksod lighthouse to view images recorded during the 42 search days by photographer Fergus Sweeney.

We will never forget them... They are engraved in the memory of this community

- said Mr Sweeney, nephew of Blacksod lightkeeper Vincent Sweeney.

A selection of hundreds of cards sent with donations from all over Ireland were also displayed as part of the exhibition.

The final report into the crash by the Air Accident Investigation Unit (AAIU) is at an advanced stage, but it is expected to be some months before it is published. It is one of three investigations into the crash  the other two by An Garda Siochana and the Health and Safety Authority.

One preliminary report and one interim statement have been issued by the AAIU, but it said earlier this month (march) that it would not be issuing a second interim statement as its focus is on completing the final draft.

Its preliminary report published in April 2017 focused on anomalies in the flight navigational information, while a separate ground proximity warning system, which is not a primary navigational tool, did not have Blackrock island in its database. The preliminary report also identified a flaw in the installation of satellite locator beacons on crew lifejackets.

An interim statement issued last year called on Shane Ross, the transport minister, for Transport to conduct a thorough review of search and rescue aviation operations, and recommended that CHC Ireland  the air crews employer should review its safety management systems.

Three of the reviews 12 recommendations accepted by Mr Ross were given a three-month deadline. However, only one of these three has met the deadline, according to a statement from the Department of Transport.

It confirmed that the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) is progressing work on assuming an oversight role for civilian aviation search and rescue. The IAA is also still engaged in discussions with the Irish Coast Guard in ensuring it is directly engaged in regulatory aspects of the helicopter contract for search and rescue held by CHC Ireland.

CHC Ireland said this week that all of the recommendations in the preliminary and interim AAIU reports on the crash have either been implemented or are in the process of being implemented  with completion expected in the near future.

 CHC continues to engage with all the relevant authorities on each of the recommendations, it said.
Fresh efforts to secure special work visas for Irish citizens in America will go ahead after talks between Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and US president Donald Trump, writes Juno McEnroe in Washington DC.

The new bill for the E3 scheme could result in up to 5,000 extra visas going to Irish workers and their families annually.

As well as having the support of both US Republicans and Democrats, it is understood that Mr Trump personally had a hand in making progress with the proposed scheme.

Currently, thousands of E3 visas are not used annually by workers from Australia, which was given the special scheme in 2005 in exchange for its support of the US during the Iraq war.

The proposed E3 Bill would allocate to Irish citizens whatever visa Australians do not use, which are estimated to number at least 5,000 annually.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was told when in Washington DC this week that Democrat congressman Richard Neal will reintroduce the Bill, along with Republican Jim Sensenbrenner.

While the proposed Bill did pass its first US Congress hurdle last November, it was ultimately blocked in the senate by just one vote from Arizona immigration hardliner Tom Cotton.

The Irish Examiner understands that Mr Trump as well as US vice president Mike Pence, who is Irish-American, both spoke to Senator Cotton earlier this week, paving the way forward for the bill.

Mr Trump in turn told Mr Varadkar as well as special US envoy John Deasy this week that the bill should now be filed again. Support was also expressed for it at the special St Patricks Day Speakers Lunch on Capitol Hill.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner, Mr Deasy said: This week in Washington it was made clear to us by all the leaders of both parties that they want to get the E3 Bill passed. Richard Neal confirmed he would soon be reintroducing the bill.

Mr Varadkar also signalled, during his speech in the White House at the bowl of shamrock presentation on Thursday night, that progress had been made on the special visa scheme.

He told Mr Trump: I want to thank you and Congress for your support for a new E3 visa programme, which would allow a limited number of Irish people to come here annually.

Australia currently gets an agreed 10,500 E3 visas a year, which can be renewed every two years.

For Australians to qualify, they must have a legitimate offer of employment and be taking up a position that would be considered a special occupation. The two-year visa also extends to an applicants spouse.

With Australia only utilising about half of their E3 quota annually, nearly 5,000 American working visas have been going unused every year.

In return for opening up access to the E3 visas, the government have said that they will look at easing up on restrictions for American citizens who want to retire to Ireland.

Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar arrived in Chicago last night for the second leg of his US visit. He attended the Irish Fellowship Club of Chicago dinner and also met emigrant support groups.
This is just the beginning - that was the message from the 5,000-strong cohort of secondary school students who marched to demand action on climate change in Cork.

Thousands of students from dozens of Cork schools walked out of classes in solidarity with marches all over the world to send a simple message that enough is enough.

Following on from the lead of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, students have protested outside City Hall in Cork for the last ten weeks to call for action on climate change.

Today's rally drew a huge turnout. Garda estimates put the numbers at between 4,000 and 5,000 people, with the centre of Cork city coming to a standstill as the marchers walked from Emmett Place to City Hall.

Homemade signs made the message clear: enough is enough, it's time to make a change.

Cork student protest...live https://t.co/mHC5IQGSb2  Random Cork Stuff (@RandomCorkStuff) March 15, 2019

Slogans like "the greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it" showed that these students have had enough. Others, like "the seas are rising - and so are we" made it clear that today's march was not just an excuse to skip school.

The atmosphere was more like a concert or a festival than a protest. There was drumming, chanting and singing from the second the students reached Emmet Place - many were there an hour before the rally even started - until they were met by the Lord Mayor outside Cork City Hall.

Students take part in a demonstration against climate change during a Friday Global Climate Strike in Parliament Square in London

Organisers attempted to make speeches when the crowd stopped at City Hall but the cheering and chanting was so loud that they could barely be heard.

Outside City Hall, the crowd was so thick that all traffic came to a standstill and gardai had to ask the organisers to disperse the crowd. Many started to filter away but hundreds remained to hear speakers and show their support.

The school children of Cork demanding action on climate change outside the City Hall. pic.twitter.com/ON2sDMcVRy  Tony Langlois (@tchianneteux) March 15, 2019

Cork Educate Together student Samhain Mohally-Castellano was among those to address the crowd.

"This is just the beginning," she said. "We don't know how long it will last but it is incredible that so many people came and stood up for what they believe in. We heard about this movement and we were inspired to do something.

"It was incredible to get so many people: we didn't know if it would be 200 or 2,000. I believe that we can make a difference. They have to start listening to us."

Cork city Kids Climate Strike Im crying with pride #ClimateStrike pic.twitter.com/CutbU5jJA2  Rachael OSullivan (@Ravenroots) March 15, 2019

The crowd drew a huge cross-section of support.

The vast majority of marchers were secondary school students but they were joined by third level students, local and national politicians - including Fine Gael Senator Jerry Buttimer and Labour TD Sean Sherlock - and hundreds of supporters, including many young children that had been brought along by their parents.

Chants of "change now" and "leave your carbon in the soil" could be heard as the crowd moved through Cork's main streets, bringing the working day to a standstill.

Another student, Maisie Morgan-Sutton, said that the support was encouraging.

"It is amazing," she said.

When we come together, it is amazing what we can do. If they don't start listening to us, we won't stop. We won't stop until there is a drastic change, until something is done.

Cian Farrell shared the sentiment.

"It is tragic: this is the biggest problem facing the world and it is kids who are the ones telling the government that something needs to be done," he said.

They need to wake up - they can't deny it anymore.

After meeting students outside City Hall, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Cllr Mick Finn said that he would pass their demands, which include a call for government to declare a climate emergency, onto national politicians.

"It is one of the biggest rallies I have ever seen," he said. "It's our planet and we all have to share it and live with the decisions we are making - or not making."
When its high, it becomes more of an issue because private owners are worried about losing their land, and it can be harder for the public to find passage through these protected lands, Brammeier said. When the water is low, its much easier to recreate, but you may still end up with conflicts. Either way, the obligation of the state to protect this land for the public is always there.
Fancy picking up a slice of the Dublin property market for less than 300,000?

You might be in luck.

Despite prices in the capital continuing to increase, a savvy buyer can nab a bargain, once they dont mind scrimping on space. Measuring just 2m wide, 19a Long Lane is listed for sale for 285,000.

Located just off Dublins Camden Street, the property is known as The Skinny House. And, it lives up to its name: it measures 34sq m in total.

The house was apparently created by accident. The builder of the red- brick property started construction at either end and the houses failed to meet in the middle. Originally used as a laneway, 19A was eventually roofed and turned into a house.

It has high ceilings, currently used for storage, and served its current owners as an Airbnb and their own home-away-from-home.

Previously, Tom Sykes lived in Carlow and used 19A as a place to stay when in Dublin, but he and his family have now moved to the capital and no longer need the property.

He said it is a wrench to let it go, but that it makes sense.

When we bought it, it was pretty much a wreck, he said.

Literally everyone told me I was mad to buy it but I just thought it was really cool. I had always wondered what was behind that little door.

My wife trained as an architect and we were fascinated by it.

It is comparable to many one-bed apartments, Mr Sykes said.

Its not that small because there is no wasted space. In a normal apartment, the hallway is just wasted space.

It was a hit with most of its Airbnb residents  they were usually surprised by how spacious it was, Mr Sykes said, bar one who complained that it was a bit small.

You cant please everyone, but we had a four-and-a-half-star rating because we made sure to tell them how small it was, he said.

Last year, property in Dublin 8 sold for an average price of 357,900, according to the CSO. Nearby one-bed apartments are listed for very similar prices.

Estate agents Sherry Fitzgerald are handling the sale, with an open viewing tomorrow at 11am.

There has been a really good response, a sales agent said.

Lots of first-time buyers have enquired, many of whom are shopping in the apartment market.

Mr Sykes refuted the idea that the price was excessive in the current climate.

The property market in Dublin is nuts, he said.

But look at other capital cities.

He pointed to Londons so-called slim house, a 7.5ft wide house that is listed for 1m.

I just hope that whoever buys it loves it and appreciates it as this cool, unique property, he said.
A woman in a male-dominated profession, Julia Gebel, stone cutter, is literally at the cutting edge.

Her cast-iron credentials in stone conservation work have taken her from Cormacs Chapel on the Rock of Cashel to, most recently, a prime piece of architectural heritage in the form of St Patricks Bridge in Cork city centre.

Im looking at the bridge differently now. Im proud to have been involved. We spent so much time on it, there was so much detail to tend to. I had to work according to the tides and being from the continent, I was a total newbie to tidal science, says Julia.

While Cumnor Construction cleaned and re-pointed the bridge, Gebel and Helling Conservation repaired faulty stonework using two different approaches.

Where there was a fault in a stone, the fault was cut out and new stone inserted.

The indents had to fit by the millimetre so it was very accurate work. There were nearly 200 of those, says Julia.

Another 400 stones required mortar repairs.

Where material was missing, we replaced it with repair mortar to reinstate the aesthetics of the bridge.

While Julia did most of her work on the bridge  Cumnor Construction facilitated her with a pontoon and scaffolding for riverside work the pre-cut work to fill indents was done at the company workshop in Kilumney, Ovens, Co Cork.

There were days when they had to work roadside because the tide was too high and days when even high tide was too low to reach a part of the bridge, riverside. Julia is by now well-acquainted with the Port of Cork website link to weather and tides.

Julia and her co-workers also recut and repainted the lettering on the panels on the piers of the bridge. They completed their work just this week.

As part of the overall works, the bridges footpaths and carriageway surfacing were replaced and new road markings put in place.

Existing traffic lights, elevation and architectural lighting, and directional signage were also upgraded, while four of the bridges lamp columns were sent to Italy for specialist repair and restoration.

Julia, a German living in Tipperary, was drawn to the trade through an interest in historic buildings, and has an impressive CV, with, inter alia, qualifications in stonecutting and sculpture, some acquired in Ireland.

Conservation work is her main focus.

Its where the traditional trade gets its best expression, she says.

She would like to see more women in the job.

Its very physically demanding, but so is nursing. It can also be quite tricky at times, but the possibilities are enormous.



There is such a gender imbalance in the construction industry, we could definitely do with more women. They bring a different dynamic and can be more communicative and inclusive.

Its a very competitive environment. It could be softened a bit.

Other industries have gone through this development and construction seems to be the last outpost where it hasnt happened yet. But it is happening, she says.

It will be beneficial. Its never beneficial when something is too one-sided.

St Patricks Bridge officially reopens tomorrow under the weight of 158 chosen Paddies  the result of a Cork City Council shout-out to anyone with a name derived from that of our patron saint.

The 158 chosen  one for each year in the life of the bridge  will line up for a commemorative picture at 12.45pm.

At 2pm, the trowel used to lay the original foundation will also lay the last piece of stonework.

Lord Mayor Mick Finn and senior management from Transport Infrastructure Ireland, who funded the project in conjunction with Cork City Council, will be in attendance.

Julia herself will not.

I was thinking about it, but I think its time for a Mammys Day out.

At this stage my children, aged seven and three, know the project intimately and I dont think they are interested in attending the ceremony.
Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has ruled out ever replacing Leo Varadkar as Taoiseach or Fine Gael leader.

Mr Donohoe made the eye-catching claim despite being repeatedly name-checked as a potential successor to Mr Varadkar should he leave office.

Speaking during an interview with wire agency Bloomberg during a visit to the company's London headquarters, Mr Donohoe said he has no interest in the post "nor in the future".

It is a short and simple question that actually does have a short and simple answer. Which is: we have a Taoiseach and I have a job.

"The only focus I have is in continuing to do this job. When we got to this point before I said I dont have an interest in being Fine Gael leader," Mr Donohoe said.

The Finance Minister's admission would appear to rule him out of any future leadership bid, which may be driven if Fine Gael falls from power after the next general election.

It is believed while Mr Donohoe privately considered running for the 2017 leadership when Enda Kenny stood down after repeated demands for a new leader from his own backbenches, he chose not to do so as he has a young family.

While Mr Varadkar is currently in a strong position as Fine Gael leader, other potential future contenders include Health Minister Simon Harris and Tanaiste Simon Coveney.

While Mr Harris is almost a decade younger than his counterparts and has been damaged by the children's hospital costs crisis, he gained significant credibility during the eighth amendment referendum and was rumoured to have also considered a leadership tilt in 2017 before ruling it out.

Similarly, while Mr Coveney's leadership ambitions have been dented by his failure to beat Mr Varadkar in 2017 and his inability to resolve the homelessness crisis while housing minister, his steady diplomatic hand as foreign affairs minister throughout the Brexit crisis has not gone unnoticed.
Students across the country are set to take part in school strikes today demanding that immediate action is taken on climate change.

Marches will be held in Dublin and Cork, while there will also be local strikes held at school gates nationwide.
I have told [first name of Clerk A] and [first name of Clerk As Chief of Staff] that we would be sending a donation of 10,000 dollars, Donagher wrote in a September 2011 email, according to the indictment. Later, in reference to a request for contributions for a birthday celebration for Brown in 2013, Donagher allegedly sent an email to two of his employees and two of the companys Illinois lobbyists: Handle this appropriately. I told her we would do 2500. Two days after that email, Donagher mailed five $500 checks to Browns campaign, prosecutors say.
The former head of quality assurance at US laboratory Quest Diagnostics defended in the High Court the sending of the smear slides of Irish women for testing to a laboratory allegedly not stipulated in its CervicalCheck contract.

Dr Ronald Kennedy was giving evidence in the case of Ruth Morrissey who has sued over the alleged misreading of her smear slides by Quest Diagnostics in 2009 and a different laboratory in 2012.

I dont think we were hiding we were using a laboratory in Grand Rapids, Wyoming," he told Mr Justice Kevin Cross.

Put to him by Ruth Morrisseys counsel, Patrick Treacy SC, the programme manager of CervicalCheck John Gleeson had previously told the court he did not know anything about the Grand Rapids laboratory being used, Dr Kennedy said CervicalCheck did know.

Dr Kennedy who was director of quality assurance at Quest Diagnostics until his retirement earlier this month was giving evidence in the long-running action by terminally ill Ruth Morrissey who has sued the HSE and two US laboratories including Quest Diagnostics over the alleged misreading of her smear tests taken under the CervicalCheck screening programme in 2009 and 2012.

She has also lodged a claim for punitive damages against the HSE and Quest relating to the issue of governance.

Dr Kennedy said the Quest Diagnostics contract began in 2008 and cytotechnologists were assigned to work on Irish smear slides only with a 10-day turnaround expected. He said Quest Diagnostics answered to the National Cancer Screening Service in Ireland (NCSS).

Mr Treacy put it to Dr Kennedy that Quest Diagnostics took it upon themselves to send slides to Grand Rapids and there was not a shred of evidence there was notice given to the NCSS.

Dr Kennedy replied: There is no evidence we took it upon ourselves.

The laboratories used, he said, were adhering to Irish standards but Ruth Morrissey's 2009 smear slide he said was "part of the Goody surge" referring to when there was an uptake in the number of Irish and UK women going for cervical smear tests after the death of reality TV star, 27-year-old Jade Goody from cervical cancer.

He told the court that in the Spring/Summer of 2009, due to Jade Goody's death, a large number of Irish women went for smear tests and the large influx, he said, meant Quest Laboratories exceeded its capacity for the 10-day turnaround time and there were capacity issues.

This is why he said slides were sent to Grand Rapids and Quest had a backlog of Irish slides.

In Grand Rapids, Wyoming, where the Ruth Morrissey slide was screened, he said 23,000 Irish slides were tested there.

Ruth Morrissey at the High Court earlier this week.

Referring to the reporting of Ruth Morrissey's smear slide sent to Quest Diagnostics in August 2009, Dr Kennedy said the initials of two cryotechnologies was on the report which indicated there was full manual screening of the slide. One of the screeners he said was 20 years with Quest and the other, 30 years with the multinational.

Michael Cush SC for Quest Diagnostics told the court that Quest does not intend to call the two cytotechnologists to give evidence in the case.

Cross-examined by Mr Treacy, Dr Kennedy said cancer rates among Irish women decreased year after year once Quest Diagnostics became involved.

"I don't accept we were doing a disservice to the women of Ireland," he said.

Ms Morrissey and her husband Paul Morrissey of Kylemore, Schoolhouse Road, Monaleen, Co Limerick have sued the HSE and the US laboratory Quest Diagnostics Ireland Ltd with offices at Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Dublin along with Medlab Pathology Ltd with offices at Sandyford Business Park, Dublin 18.

It is claimed there was a failure to correctly report and diagnose and there was a misinterpretation of her smear samples taken in 2009 and 2012

The HSE admitted it owed a duty of care to Ms Morrissey. The laboratories deny all claims.

The case resumes on Tuesday.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has told US president Donald Trump that making America great again does not mean forgetting or losing sight of what makes it great already, writes Juno McEnroe in Washington DC.

In his speech to mark the presentation of the shamrock bowl to Mr Trump and his wife Melania, Mr Varadkar reflected on America's history, its economic bonds with Ireland, and inspiring figures who have changed the world.

Discussing past US presidents with crowds at the traditional St Patrick's Day celebration ceremony in the White House, Mr Varadkar also praised his host:

Your ambition is to make America great again, and we can see the results today. The American economy is booming. More jobs. Rising incomes. Exactly what you said youd do.

Nonetheless, he stressed the importance of American values, to the congressmen, business leaders, and Irish and American officials in the packed room.

However, I believe the greatness of America is about more than economic prowess and military might. It is rooted in the things that make us love America: your people, your values, a new nation conceived in liberty. The land and the home of the brave and the free.

Video by political correspondent Juno McEnroe in Washington DC.

Finishing a packed day which included the Speakers lunch in Capitol Hill and breakfast earlier at the vice president's residence, the Taoiseach praised American values that had inspired generations.

The promise of America inspired those seeking liberty and freedom around the world, including in my own country.

The Taoiseach also added: "And we know and trust, that making America great again will not mean forgetting or losing sight of what makes it great already.

Video by political correspondent Juno McEnroe in Washington DC.

"People around the world have been inspired by America and have travelled here to make them their own. And people came, including millions from Ireland who were among the hands that built America.

The Irish Examiner has also confirmed that President Trump has personally intervened in the Irish visa scheme ahead of fresh attempts to get it agreed.

Government sources confirmed that Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been told that congressman Richard Neale will reintroduce the E3 scheme and has said so to senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.

It is understood that President Trump has also personally spoken to senator Tom Cotton who previously blocked the scheme.

The visa scheme is currently only open to Australians.

Leo Varadkar will travel to Chicago tomorrow to continue his US visit to mark St Patrick's Day celebrations.
AS a boy Ross Byrne was rarely seen without a rugby ball in his hand. Being motivated to play was never an issue for the Dubliner since he first took up the sport at the age of five or six, a passion that was cultivated in the rugby-playing schools he attended.

In St Michaels I played the whole way up and then in Old Belvedere I played club rugby on a Sunday. I was pretty much always keen to play.

This week, the Leinster and Ireland player took part in and promoted the Simon Home Run, an 8km run in aid of the Simon Community. Now in its 36th year, the run was a huge success and fundraising is ongoing as Irelands housing and homelessness crisis continues to take hold.

I thought it was a good charity to get involved in. Ive seen things the Simon Community have done before and just hearing about, particularly in Dublin, the problems with homelessness. And seeing more [homeless people] day to day when you are in the city.

I just thought I could use [my] profile or anything I have to give them a hand. I think they are doing fantastic work and even the people Ive been dealing with do work incredibly hard and are incredibly grateful for any help they do get.

The 23-year-old has had a good year, playing for Leinster and featuring in the Ireland squad for last Novembers internationals.

Hopefully, Ive got another good bit left in me. Its been going pretty well and Ive been very happy with last year. I got to play an incredible amount of games and got loads of good exposure. Thats exactly what you want to do  the more you play and the more experience you get, the more comfortable you feel at the higher-up levels, thats what its all about.

He feels that Irish rugby is in a good place, with interest in the sport growing all the time.

The sports becoming more and more popular and I think more kids will probably want to play it as well which is always brilliant.

For more information about the Simon Community and how you can support it see www.simon.ie

What shape are you in?

Im in okay shape. In Leinster, were pretty much told exactly what to do and when to do it, so we dont have to worry about any of the planning. Its all taken care of by the strength and conditioning staff and they look out for us very well.

What are your healthiest eating habits?

I try to eat fish once a week. Id be good generally but Id need to feed the cravings every now and then. I think when youre training hard and youre eating well you definitely feel good. If you feel its making you improve or makes you feel a bit physically better then that means its working.

What are your guiltiest pleasures?

Chocolate. Its not in the house. If its in the house itll be eaten.

What would keep you awake at night?

If I drank too much coffee in the day thats the big one for me. I never have it in the evening. If I had it in the evening Id probably be awake all night.

How do you relax?

Id be a big fan of a TV series. I watched the new True Detective and enjoyed it massively. Or a jacuzzi and a sauna.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

Ricky Gervais. Im a big fan of his, along with Denzel Washington. And Mike McCarthy, who used to play for Leinster and Ireland. Hes a very funny character.

Whats your favourite smell?

Freshly cut grass. And petrol.

What would you like to change about your appearance?

I dont know what Id change  a bit more tanned, maybe.

When is the last time you cried?

I couldnt tell you. I was crying with laughter at Green Book, the movie. It was very enjoyable.

What traits do you least like in others?

If someone has poor punctuality.

What traits do you least like about yourself?

Nothings really jumping out, which is probably a bad thing.

Do you pray?

No.

What would cheer up your day?

Good weather. We have to train outside, our office is outside, so its always nice when the weathers good.
Irish artist Mary Swanzys reputation is being restored to its rightful place with a new exhibition at the Crawford, writes Marjorie Brennan.

WHILE the name of Mary Swanzy may be greeted with a nod of recognition in some circles, the work of this extraordinary Irish artist has gone very much under the radar in the public mind. However, that is now changing, with an ambitious retrospective of her work, first shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art last year, opening at the Crawford Gallery in Cork today.

The impressive survey, the first in 50 years, has been curated by Sean Kissane of IMMA and is fittingly titled Voyages. From Swanzys technically accomplished portraits, to her better-known works in the Cubist and Futurist style, to her joyful depictions of life in the South Seas, the exhibition is also a voyage of discovery for the viewer, a revelatory journey through the life and work of a true pioneer.

Swanzy not only witnessed the birth of modern art but was an active participant, experiencing one of the most exciting eras of creative upheaval alongside the likes of Picasso, Cezanne and Matisse.

Born in Dublin in 1882 into a well-off Protestant family, she trained at the Metropolitan school and a portrait of her father, ophthalmic surgeon Henry Rosborough-Swanzy was exhibited to great acclaim in the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1905. Dublin basically said We have no more to teach you, you had better go off to Paris, says Kissane.

The impact of the change in milieu can be seen almost immediately in Swanzys work, says Kissane.

Mary Swanzy paintings on display at the Crawford include Cubist Landscape

During that period, post-impressionism was really the fashion you can really see the colour and the brush strokes immediately start to come into her work, he says.

In Paris, Swanzy became acquainted with the influential writer and art collector Gertrude Stein. Already, by 1905, Mary Swanzy has been introduced to Stein, and seen the paintings of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and all of the other artists patronised by Stein, first-hand, unframed, lying against the walls in her house, says Kissane, adding that Swanzy was very much part of this zeitgeist.

Female artists are always inspired by whereas male artists are geniuses or inventors. So it is very important to point out that she is exactly the same age as Picasso and everything around her is part of a tendency and a zeitgeist. She is not influenced by anyone.

Swanzy first exhibited in Paris in 1914 but then WWI intervened. Although she lived through a time of great turmoil, Swanzy did not like to be drawn on politics, preferring to focus on her art.

She was in Dublin during the Rising. In interviews, she is constantly pressed on what her political leanings are and she pushes it away, saying that in all revolutions, the baby is thrown out with the bath water, says Kissane.

MACCURTAIN KILLING

However, there was no escaping politics when one chapter of Cork history would turn out to have a fateful impact on Swanzys life.

Mary Swanzy paintings on display at the Crawford include Young Woman with a White Bonnet

In 1920, her cousin Oswald Swanzy [an RIC inspector in Cork] was implicated in the killing of Tomas MacCurtain [the Lord Mayor of Cork was shot dead by a group of masked RIC men in his home in Blackpool]. The army tried to hide him, and sent him to Lisburn but Michael Collins put together a group of hitmen and they shot and killed him on the steps of Lisburn Cathedral after Sunday service, which led to three weeks of rioting. Swanzy left Ireland six weeks later and never really came back, says Kissane.

Swanzy travelled to Czechoslovakia to join her sister St Clair who was volunteering with a Protestant mission. Swanzy produced a significant body of work there. I could have done a whole exhibition of her Czech paintings. It is a beautiful period, says Kissane.

In 1923, Swanzy went to Canada, then travelled overland through the US to California and from there sailed to Honolulu, to visit her uncle Francis. After spending several months there, she sailed 2,500 miles to Samoa.

Mary Swanzy paintings on display at the Crawford include Samoan Scene

So, she is a woman, who didnt speak the language, doesnt know the customs, had no connections there, and went off on her own, which is a remarkable achievement, at a time when women couldnt even vote, says Kissane. There are only three modern artists that we know of who went to the South Seas, first and most famously, Paul Gaugin, Emile Nolde and the third is Mary Swanzy.

In her paintings, Swanzy takes a more respectful and less patronising perspective than Gaugin.

We see the labour of women constantly recorded they are not the Paul Gaugin sexualised blank canvas onto which you project male fantasies, says Kissane.

Now, in the context of the #MeToo positioning of artwork in museums, we are obliged to give more context to the making of the work and ask if people were harmed. And in Gaugins case, they were, with his child brides and tertiary syphilis, etc. Whereas Mary Swanzy is making work, probably 15, 20 years later, but the gaze is so different. She is respectful to everyone she meets and they to her.

Swanzy is perhaps best known for her Cubist and Futurist works. Among these is La Poupee Japonaise, which, according to Kissane, places Swanzy at the centre of the avant-garde movement in the 1910s, and worthy of being called the first Irish Cubist. She is a fascinating character in terms of being so productive. The variety of styles can be bewildering, says Kissane.

PERSONAL TWIST

In her later years, Swanzys work became more personal and took a somewhat darker turn.

You have these strange late images, the beginning of a personal narrative which she has never explained. In her work Roundabout, you have these human/animal hybrids dancing and a prison containing snakes, birds, monkeys. People said she had lost her marbles.

Mary Swanzy paintings on display at the Crawford include The Melee

We will be playing an interview she did at 95 years old shortly after her retrospective [in 1968]. She bats back every question and she is as sharp as a tack. This is an artist who knew exactly what she was doing.

According to Mary McCarthy, director of the Crawford Gallery, people should seize this opportunity to see such a significant collection of Swanzys amazing work in the same place.

Swanzy has a particular place in our hearts, because the Crawford owns a number of her works. Swanzy and a lot of women artists of that period are only now being reclaimed in the public mind for their brilliance and how they were achieving equally to and in many cases, beyond, their male counterparts, she says.

Swanzy once remarked that If I had been born Henry instead of Mary, my life would have been very different.

Kissane backs up this assertion, but perhaps in not quite the expected way.

Given her social class, had she been a man, she would probably have been killed in the war. If not, she would have had to come home and be a doctor like her father.

So, conversely, Swanzys gender may in fact have allowed her a certain freedom.

Yes. She was also one of the millions of spare women after the First World War which is also an explanation of why so many of them didnt marry. And, for her, marriage wasnt compatible with an artistic life. She said if you were married and had the responsibility of a husband and children, then you had no life left for your easel. She told one interviewer that the wives of the artists were all unhappy.

Mary Swanzy: Voyages is at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, from today to June 3
RP ODonnell left America to make West Cork home. As he marks another Patricks Day here, hes convinced we should leave the parades to the diaspora.

I first came to Ireland 10 years ago. I had never met an Irish person before. Like the rest of the Americans with me, I was expecting blushing milkmaids in woollen jumpers, and men who all looked like the Healy-Raes. But then we went to Penneys.

Americans grow up thinking that the Irish are all either farmers, farmers wives, Michael Flatley, women in aprons holding a bucket on a windy hill, or leprechauns. They think the Irish all wear tweed and green and flat caps, treat the shamrock as a beloved talk show host, stuff their pockets full of potatoes (they all still remember the Famine like it interrupted their Weetabix this morning) and are either in church or on their way.

And why is that? Anybody who actually comes into contact with modern Ireland sees that this is nonsense. My own visions of pale milkmaids vanished on my first trip to Penneys.

Self-tan covered an entire wall; it was ransacked. It looked like the women didnt wait to get home, they just ripped the boxes open and smeared their faces with fistfuls of the stuff. Between their leopard print jackets and the mens tracksuits, it looked like the 1980s and the Jersey Shore were going through an unpleasant divorce and flinging stuff out the windows.

Few Irish-Americans have ever been to Ireland. Almost none have ever met anyone Irish  their Irish blood comes from great-great-grandparents. So, how do they learn about their Irish culture? St Patricks Day of course.

St Patricks Day is a holiday for the diaspora; it has been from the beginning  and I mean specifically the Irish-American diaspora here. The first St Patricks Day parade occurred in New York, nearly 200 years before the first one in Ireland. It is far bigger in the States than it is anywhere else, even Ireland.

New York has celebrated the day ever since 1762 with thousands annually lining the streets to watch its world-famous parade.

St Patricks Day is why Irish-Americans have such an old-fashioned view of the Irish. This one holiday is how most Americans learn everything they know about the Irish culture. And on St Patricks Day, they celebrate old-fashioned traditions. They arent celebrating Ireland, theyre celebrating their Irish heritage; and their Irish heritage ends abruptly with their emigration.

When they remember Ireland, they remember it the way they last saw it. Or rather, how their great-great-grandparents last saw it. When they celebrate St Patricks Day, theyre celebrating their ancestry, which involves pious people in tweed, eating corned beef and cabbage. So thats what their holiday is. And, in a feedback loop, thats how the next generation learns about the Irish culture.

This is a bit of a problem. St Patricks Day is based solely on Irish-American nostalgia. And if you leave anything in the hands of Americans, especially anything nostalgic, its going to get very commercial, very quick. Just look at all the live-action Disney remakes. The holiday isnt based on anything real. If other holidays, like Christmas or Easter, get too commercial, they at least have a bit of substance that believers can point to and pull back the reins on. But St Patricks Day doesnt have that. Its a celebration of a mostly made-up, imaginary identity. The nostalgia that Irish-Americans haveits for times they never had, in a place theyve never been, with people theyve never met.

The city of Chicago takes the day very seriously and has turned the river green ever since 1962.

And when Irish-Americans do visit Ireland, and this is what theyre expecting, of course the tourism industry doesnt correct them. It doesnt need to. They just send them to Killarney. Its exactly what Irish-American tourists are expecting. Its St Patricks Day every day there.

Recently, there have been complaints (mainly from the Irish) that St Patricks Day has not only become commercial; its also full of harmful stereotyping. Theyre not wrong. The holiday gives the impression that the Irish spend their days wandering around in a cirrhotic haze, punching every sober citizen they find. A whiskey in every hand, and a sheep in every bed and all that. But the Irish decrying this  theyre trying to reinvent the day to be a celebration of Ireland. And I chose that word carefully; reinventing. Again, its an Irish-American holiday, for the diaspora. So, I say, leave it.

Let them have it, if they want it. Because between you and me, its not a great holiday. The whole day is just getting unreasonably drunk for an untenable amount of time, followed by waking up with a head that feels like its been worked on by an over-enthusiastic taxidermist. Thats all well and good (its like a spring cleaning for the mind, blast out the cobwebs and such) but thats the same as any other bank holiday.

Also, St Patrick wasnt a great saint. Sure, he drove the snakes out  but he left the spiders. And the bankers. He brought in Catholicism, yes, but look how that turned out. So, why not abandon St Patricks Day altogether? Theres no point trying to take it back; you know how addled Americans get when they think somethings being taken away from them. Lets make our own holiday, one that properly celebrates Ireland.
Its hard to recall a more open Cheltenham Gold Cup than the one that will unfold before our eyes at 3.30pm this afternoon. Of the 16 set to go to post in the Magners-sponsored Cheltenham Festival highlight, only four can be dismissed with real confidence  it really is that open.

The obvious starting point is Presenting Percy. A fine winner of the Pertemps Network Final Handicap Hurdle at the 2017 Festival, Pat Kellys charge was even better in last years RSA Chase, cruising to a seven-length victory in the style of a future Gold Cup winner.

His course record clearly warrants huge respect and he could be a superstar, but his preparation for D-Day has been, to put it mildly, anything but conventional. Presenting Percy has only run once since last March, winning the Galmoy Hurdle at Gowran Park in January.

Consequentially, he will line up for this ferocious test without a run over fences this season. To put the challenge he faces into some sort of context, no horse has won the Gold Cup without a run over fences in the same season since Easter Hero won the blue riband in 1929.

That doesnt mean he cant win but a price of around 7-2 doesnt reflect the scale of the task he faces. For that reason, he has to be opposed.

Reigning champion Native River is back for more and conditions should suit this dour stayer. However, every horse who has won this race more than once has been a superstar and, admirable though he is, the suspicion is Native River is not quite at that exalted level.

Might Bite was a gallant second to Native River last year but has been way below that form in two runs this season. Hes had a wind surgery since disappointing in the King George at Christmas and, though it requires quite a leap of faith, he would be a big danger if he came back to his best.

Willie Mullins has opted for a four-pronged attack as he seeks to finally break his Gold Cup hoodoo. Bellshill, the choice of Ruby Walsh, looks the best of that quartet but he has yet to bring his A game to Cheltenham and holes can be picked in his form.

Ultimately, the horse with the best profile for this years race is the progressive Clan Des Obeaux. Paul Nicholls has won this race four times already and Clan Des Obeauxs superb victory in the King George is the single best piece of form on offer this season.

He followed that up by winning the Denman Chase in fine style and a big run seems certain.

The fact he has yet to win in four trips to Cheltenham is an obvious concern but the seven-year-old is a far better horse now and he gets the vote to land what promises to be a compelling renewal.

The JCB Triumph Hurdle kicks off Gold Cup day and the Joseph OBrien-trained Sir Erec looks banker material.

A useful performer on the Flat for Josephs father, Aidan, Sir Erec has successfully transformed that ability to hurdles and he can ensure day four gets off to a flying start for punters.

The gruelling nature of the Albert Bartlett Novices Hurdle means it tends to be a graveyard for favourites with history suggesting a big-priced battle-hardened slogger is the way to go.

Dinons fits the bill. Gordon Elliotts charge doesnt have a sexy profile but he did put together a quick-fire five-timer between last August and October with the last of those wins coming at Cheltenham. He hasnt been since disappointing at Navan in November and he lacks the potential star-quality of some of the market principals. Against that, he has course form and proven toughness, assets that should serve him well today. At around 12-1, he makes each-way appeal.

Elliott may also provide the answer in the St Jamess Place Foxhunter Challenge Cup Open Hunters Chase where useful handicapper Ucello Conti should go well for Jamie Codd.

The first of the days three handicaps is the Randox Health County Hurdle. This looks fiendishly tough but Monsieur Lecoq, second to Malaya in last weekends Imperial Cup, may be able to go one better providing the Sandown run hasnt left a mark.

Elsewhere, Gary Moores Not Another Muddle should go close in the Johnny Henderson Grand Annual Challenge Cup Handicap Chase while Elliott can conclude what could be a terrific final day for the Meath man by winning the Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys Handicap Hurdle, the final race of the 2019 Festival. Elliott has won the race named after his mentor the last two years and Dallas Des Pictons has leading claims of making it a hat-trick.

Norris tips

1:30 Sir Erec (Nap)

2:10 Monsieur Lecoq

2:50 Dinons

3:30 Clan Des Obeaux

4:10 Ucello Conti (nb)

4:50 Not Another Muddle

5:30 Dallas Des Pictons
Societies that are politically and socially are will prepared to face the environmental shocks that climate change will inevitably bring, writes Eloi Laurent.

Today on the Ides of March, the day by which ancient Romans were expected to settle their debts, young people in 60 countries around the world will stage a school walkout to press world leaders for more urgent action on climate change.

It is a tragedy that younger generations are forced to speak out against the injustice they will suffer as a result of choices made by others; yet, at the same time, it is deeply reassuring to witness their power and passion as they try to change the course of history.

Concerns about the intergenerational injustice of the climate crisis are of a piece with concerns about inequality in the here and now. Following in the footsteps of his papal namesake, Francis of Assisi (named patron saint of ecology in 1979), Pope Francis observed in his May 2015 encyclical that we are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.

This means that making the necessary shift to an ecologically sustainable economy cannot ignore the challenges that many people are already facing today. But just as the problems of climate change and inequality go hand in hand, so do the solutions.

Adopting renewable energy, for example, can also yield massive health benefits, create jobs, and improve other indicators of social wellbeing.

In fact, according to the Lancet Commission, tackling climate change could be the greatest global health opportunity of the 21st century. As younger generations already recognise, our economic systems can no longer be based on the logic of trade-offs, and must now follow the logic of social-environmental synergy.

Fortunately, more policymakers are also coming to this realisation.

Consider the proposals in the US for a Green New Deal, which is designed to address the systemic injustice driving todays ecological crises, the brunt of which is borne by frontline and vulnerable communities.

The hardship and calamities that these populations  which include children, the elderly, the poor, and many ethnic minorities  are already suffering will befall all of us if we continue to destroy our habitat blindly and with abandon.

Or consider a recent open letter co-signed by many of the worlds top economists calling for carbon dividends of the type economist James K Boyce has proposed. To be sure, such a policy would help to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

However, it would succeed only if it included measures to ensure the most vulnerable are not hurt by the introduction of a carbon price. Presumably, the recent protests in France will have provided ample warning to policymakers considering this route. Environmental policies must also be social policies.

One country making notable progress toward social-environmental synergy is China. Now that the governments war on pollution has started to show results, people in many parts of the country are enjoying the benefits of better air quality. According to the Energy Policy Institutes recently released Air Quality Life Index, sustained exposure to particulate matter in the air can result in lower life expectancy for affected communities.

Yet by reducing local pollution, particularly in urban areas, China is not just improving the wellbeing of its citizens; it is also reducing carbon-dioxide pollution globally.

Policymakers in Europe are also advocating concrete proposals to advance the goals of sustainable equality. A report from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats in the European Parliament, for example, acknowledges that inequality is an environmental issue just as environmental degradation is also a social issue.

Accordingly, it offers a series of recommendations for reducing emissions in key sectors such as heavy manufacturing and agriculture while also supporting the communities that will be most affected.

By definition, all of the policies being designed around social-environmental synergy will yield co-benefits with respect to inequality and climate change. But, equally important, they will also benefit humanity both in the present and the future.

The fact is that our societies will be more just if they are more sustainable, and more sustainable if more just.

Societies that have been rendered socially and politically fragile by inequality will be ill-prepared to face the environmental shocks from climate change. And as ecological conditions continue to deteriorate, one should expect to witness an explosion of injustices, new and old.

Why should I care about future generations? Groucho Marx is said to have quipped. What have they ever done for me?

Today, young people around the world will remind us that the question is moot. While our debt to posterity grows ever larger, young people are asking merely that we help them by helping ourselves.

Eloi Laurent is a senior research fellow at OFCE (Sciences Po Center for Economic Research, Paris), Professor at the School of Management and Innovation at Sciences Po, and visiting professor at Stanford University.

He is the author of the forthcoming The New Environmental Economics  Sustainability and Justice.
We need to stand together for that, to keep vigilant, to speak out against incidents like this, to be vocal, Sohel said. Saying we condemn or we mourn  its not enough.  Weve got to reach out to our legislators and make sure that we have the right laws in place that this is no longer tolerated, that the root causes of these are attacked.
Asia Indian Groups Urge Boycott of Chinese Goods Over Stance on Pakistani Militant

Demonstrators burn Chinese goods and poster of Chinese President Xi Jinping during a protest organized by activists demanding the boycott of Chinese products, in New Delhi, India on October 26, 2016. / REUTERS

NEW DELHIAn influential Hindu nationalist group and an Indian traders body called on Thursday for a boycott of Chinese goods, to slap Beijing for blocking a move to put a Pakistani militant leader on a U.N. terrorist list following a suicide attack last month.

Regarded by Pakistan as its most reliable friend, China has repeatedly thwarted efforts to implement U.N. sanctions against Masood Azhar, the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), the group that claimed responsibility for the attack that killed 40 paramilitary police in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), which represents 70 million traders, said it would burn Chinese goods on March 19 to teach a lesson to China.

The time has come when China should suffer due to its proximity with Pakistan, CAIT said in a statement. The CAIT has launched a national campaign to boycott Chinese goods among the trading community of the country, calling the traders not to sell or buy Chinese goods.

The United States, Britain and France asked the Security Councils Islamic State and al Qaeda sanctions committee to subject the Jaish leader to an arms embargo, travel ban and asset freeze.

But China a placed a technical hold on the proposal, saying it needed more time to consider, using the same stalling tactic it has used in the past.

Mounting impatience with Beijings stance was evident on social media on Thursday as #BoycottChineseProducts was the second-highest trending hashtag on Twitter in India.

Similar campaigns in the past have proved ineffectual.

China is Indias second biggest trading partner. Chinese productsfrom mobile phones made by companies such as Xiaomi Inc. to toysare ubiquitous in India and trade between the countries grew to nearly $90 billion in the year ending March 2018.

The leader of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the economic wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group with close ties to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also called for a boycott of Chinese goods.

He also wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommending that India hit Beijing with higher tariffs.

[The] government of India needs to take immediate action to raise tariff duties on all Chinese imports, Ashwani Mahajan said in the letter, seen by Reuters.

China, which is already under economic stress, thanks to trade war initiated by U.S. and other trade partners of China, will definitely realize the implications of the unjust action of protecting terrorists.

Indias trade ministry said in an email the country cant take any unilateral punitive action against a fellow member of the World Trade Organization.

A senior government official, who refused to be named as he was not authorized to speak to media, said there has been a move to restrict Chinese imports but that India was not in a position to replace products such as electronics.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley warned against any hasty reaction.

Its a diplomatic issue, and India will make a decision after a careful thought, Jaitley told CNN-News18. Were not a small player on the global stage, but foreign policy issues are tackled in a measured way, not in a knee-jerk manner.

With just weeks to go before a general election, Indias main opposition Congress party said Modis attempts to improve ties with China were not yielding results.

Weak Modi is scared of Xi. Not a word comes out of his mouth when China acts against India, Congress President Rahul Gandhi said on Twitter, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Chinas foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a faxed message seeking comment on the boycott calls.

Renu Kohli, an independent economist in New Delhi, doubted whether any boycott would hit critical mass.

Its going to fizzle out sooner or later when the consumer realizes that their pocket is being hit by costlier domestic products, said Kohli.
Burma AA Accuses EU of Pro-Govt Bias in Statements on Rakhine Conflict

Photos reportedly obtained from prisoners of war detained by the Arakan Army. The AA says the images are proof of police and fire brigade officers involvement in Myanmar military operations. / AA website

YANGONThe Arakan Army (AA) says it will stop targeting police task force members in Rakhine State when the European Union guarantees that police have ended what it says is their assistance to repressive operations by the Myanmar military against the Arakanese public in Rakhine.

The demand comes after the EUs Wednesday joint statement which said the AAs killing of nine police from Yoe Ta Yoke police station in restive northern Rakhine States Ponnagyun Township the previous week could not be justified.

The EU urged the AA and the Myanmar military to end their armed violence citing the grave deterioration in the humanitarian situation in northern Rakhine and neighboring Chin States Paletwa region. It called on the civilian government led by the National League for Democracy (NLD) and the AA to resolve their historical grievances through dialogue and an inclusive political process.

It encouraged both sides to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law to protect civilians and allow the delivery of humanitarian aid. It mentioned that restrictions on humanitarian work by aid agencies in five townshipsRathedaung, Buthidaung, Maungdaw, Ponnagyun and Kyauktawwere having a serious impact on the already precarious humanitarian situation of at least 95,000 people.

The EU demanded that authorities reopen access to humanitarian aid workers and local seasonal agricultural workers before the coming monsoon season.

After the EU statement on Wednesday, the AA published a series of photos in which fire brigade officers and high-ranking police officers were seen pictured alongside dozens of army majors in a joint military operation elsewhere in Myanmar.

Regarding the EUs joint statement, AA spokesman U Khine Thukha questioned the impartiality of the EUs stance on Arakanese affairs, saying it had ignored recent alleged rights violations by Myanmar Army soldiers and policemen in northern Rakhine.

U Khine Thukha said, Well, if they say our operation against police could not be justified, then how does the EU justify the violence of Army and police against the Arakanese public? If they could guarantee it will never happen [again] and urge the police to [reject] the Armys repressive mechanism in Rakhine, we will stop targeting police.

He recalled the brutal killing by police of seven protestors in Mrauk-U in January 2018 and criticized the EU for failing to express its sympathies upon the death of the Arakanese or condemn the police and government. He said police have been actively carrying out arbitrary arrests of villagers.

U Khine Thukha explained that they are fighting against the oppressors. The Arakanese opted to take a rebel path to fight the military as the political problems of Rakhine had been sidelined for generations. He urged the EU not to just look at the attack on the police station, but to look at the overall issue of Rakhine including how Arakanese are being repressed by the police and Army.

The EU should take into consideration all these facts rather than just focusing on the attack on the police station. I would like to say their conclusion [regarding] us is absolutely narrow-minded and biased.

U Khine Thukha said that villager Maung Hla Win, 23, from Mrauk-U died while under Army interrogation on Thursday. He explained that a local charity group was transporting Maung Hla Win from a village to Mrauk-U Hospital as the patient was seriously ill with malaria when he was unexpectedly held by the Army for hours. Later the police handed over his body to the hospital without any explanation. Plus, six charity workers had still not been set free by police as of Friday evening and their family members had no idea about where they were being detained.

That patient died in the military compound, not in the hospital. This is an inhumane act. I havent seen an EU statement on such cruelty. They are always silent about the wrongdoings of the government but [comment] without hesitation on the AA, so it is obvious that the EU itself is biased.

An AA spokesman said the group will keep looking at the response of the EU on wrongdoings of the military in Rakhine. He had heard that the EU urged the government to seek peace but argued the military acts inconsistently. Although the military expresses a desire for peace talks, it launches serious offensives with excessive force in northern Rakhine.

He pointed out that the EU should have urged the Army and government to halt offensives in northern Rakhine instead of urging the AA to seek a truce. Even on Wednesday and Thursday, the Army used airstrikes and bombed the mountain the whole night where the AA rebels are believed to be based.

U Khine Thukha said That operation I would say was the heaviest attack in this region since the Second World War. They should urge the Army to ease attacks in Rakhine instead of saying it to us. Otherwise, their stance could be defined as complicity with the Army.
Burma Govt Forms New Committee on Rakhine; Members Caught by Surprise

President U Win Myint. / President's Office

YANGON  The government has announced a new committee tasked with bringing stability to Rakhine State, whose northern townships have seen heavy fighting between the Myanmar military and the rebel Arakan Army (AA) since late last year.

Some of the appointed lawmakers, however, say they knew nothing until reading about it on Facebook.

In an announcement issued Thursday night, the Presidents Office said the 14-member committee would report back to the Presidents Office and draw its budget from the Union Government Office. Its duties include meeting with Rakhine residents to consult and explain government policy and to suggest ways to stabilize the region and foster inter-ethnic harmony. It is also tasked with facilitating dialogue between the government, lawmakers and locals.

The announcement, signed by President U Win Myint, says the committee will be led by U Aye Tha Aung, the deputy speaker of the Union Parliament Upper House, and two deputies  all ethnic Rakhine.

However, Union lawmakers for the Arakan National Party (ANP) named to the committee said they were not informed that they had been appointed.

Upper House lawmaker Daw Htoot May said she only found out Thursday night via Facebook.

I only found out when the announcement from the Presidents Office spread on social media, but there is no official notification about it, she told The Irrawaddy on Friday.

Lower House ANP lawmaker U Oo Hla Saw was also named but had not been informed, either, according to Daw Khin Saw Wai, a fellow ANP lawmaker not named to the committee.

He told the media that he would not participate because this was a childish act, she told The Irrawaddy.

She said the announcement also reserves a seat on the committee for an unnamed Rakhine State lawmaker.

I heard the state speaker also has no idea who it is, she added. The party has not been given any information.

The National League for Democracy has been trying in vain to bring some stability to Rakhine State since taking power in early 2016. It has been heavily criticized for excluding key political and civic Rakhine figures and ignoring local public opinion.

Considering that the government has formed a number of committees already to develop and stabilize the troubled state, we need to review whether there is a need to form another, said Daw Htoot May.

The question, she added, is whether the existing committees are effective; we need to assess whether they are really working.

For the new group to have any chance of success, the government should have sought the consent of those who will be on the committee, said U Ye Tun, a political analyst and former Lower House lawmaker.

The Rakhine parliamentarians know what the public is thinking, so their consent is important, and they should have been informed and consulted prior to the announcement, he said.

The fact that some of the appointees are refusing to serve only undermines the committees credibility further, he added.

To end the fighting in Rakhine and the countrys other ethnic states, Daw Htoot May said, the government should immediately start creating a federal system.

The current problems need a political solutions. Therefore, we need to establish a federal state right away, she said.

If we can build a federal system, it will help solve the majority of the problems in our country, because as long as there is no equality in politics and self-determination, the ethnic armed conflicts will continue, not only in Rakhine but also in other parts of Myanmar.
Burma Govt Invites 8 Armed Groups to Peace Talks Next Week

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the State Counselor and chairperson of the National Reconciliation and Peace Center, arrives to attend a summit with NCA signatories in Naypyitaw on Oct. 16, 2018. / NRPC.

YANGONThe government has invited eight ethnic armed groups who are non-signatories to the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) to peace talks in Naypyitaw on March 21.

In letters dated March 13, the National Reconciliation and Peace Center (NRPC) invited each of the following organizations, which are all political wings of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs), to send two representatives each: the United Wa State Party (UWSP), Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Monglas Eastern Shan State Peace and Solidarity Committee (PSC), Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP), Kokangs Myanmar National Truth and Justice Party (MNTJP), Palaung State Liberation Front (PSLF), United League of Arakan (ULA) and Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP).

The NRPC, which is led by State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, plans to hold talks with them on March 21. On the following day, according to a copy of the invitation letter seen by The Irrawaddy, the Tatmadaws negotiation team will meet the individual group[s] who agree to meet them.

During the Tatmadaws ongoing four-month truce, which started Dec. 21, the Tatmadaw has held separate talks with the SSPP and RCSS in Naypyitaw in late February and this week, respectively. Despite having engaged in a few clashes with the latter group, the talks in Napyitaw were so far positive, according to the stakeholders.

The planned Naypyitaw talks are the result of a series of informal talks that the governments Peace Commission held with the KIO, PSLF, MNTJP and ULA in Chinas Yunnan province on Feb. 25 and with the KNPP in Chiang Mai, Thailand on March 10.

The NRPC will collectively meet the eight groups and we hope that [next weeks] meetings will help further the peace negotiations, said U Hla Maung Shwe, an adviser to the Peace Commission.

U Shwe Myo Thant, the general secretary of the KNPP, said his group welcomed the invitation because it is [aimed at] trying to overcome a deadlocked peace process. But we still have to work harder to get the process back on track. The KNPP has been holding bilateral talks with the Kayah State government while also negotiating with the Union governments Peace Commission on finding ways to take part in the NCA process.

According to sources close to the peace process, the KNPP will hold bilateral talks with the government on March 18.

The Arakan Army, the armed wing of the ULA, which is currently engaged in heavy fighting with the Myanmar military (or Tatmadaw) in Rakhine State, said it is still considering whether to join next weeks talks and, if it decides to attend, what proposals it would bring to the table.

AA spokesman U Khaing Thuka told The Irrawaddy on Friday, We are still in discussions and we will let you know tomorrow evening. The Irrawaddy has learned that other invited groups are holding similar internal discussions on the issue.

Except for the KNPP, the northeast-based invitees are all members of the UWSP-led Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee, which has pushed for an alternative to the NCA approach.

Political and ethnic affairs analyst U Maung Maung Soe believed the NRPCs move would help open up the stalled peace process, but cautioned that the government needed to keep holding talks in order to end the current fighting with the AA.

The decision has been taken to reopen talks, which had been stalled since after the third session of the Union Peace Conference [in July last year], he said.

He added that while the eight groups had consented to join next weeks talks, senior leaders of the EAOs were unlikely to attend, as the UWSP/United Wa State Army is preparing to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its founding in mid-April.

In 1989, the year it was established, the UWSA signed a ceasefire with the government, so it is billing its anniversary celebration as 30 Years of Peace.
Burma NLD Proposes Lifting Ban Barring Daw Aung San Suu Kyi From Presidency

President U Win Myint (third from left) and State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi arrive at the Parliament building in Naypyitaw in March 2018. / Htet Naing Zaw / The Irrawaddy

NAYPYITAW  The ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) on Thursday proposed scrapping an article in the Constitution that bars Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from the presidency during a meeting of a joint committee drafting amendments to the charter.

Article 59 (f) says the president shall himself, one of the parents, the spouse, one of the legitimate children or their spouses not owe allegiance to a foreign power, not be the subject of a foreign power or citizen of a foreign country. They shall not be persons entitled to enjoy the rights and privileges of a subject of a foreign government or citizen of a foreign country.

The NLD proposed scrapping Article 59 (f), a member of the committee who asked for anonymity told The Irrawaddy.

Other committee members confirmed the proposal.

Daw Yin Min Myint Swe, spokesperson for the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), said changes to the article had national implications and as such could not be made easily.

Speaking for our partys policy, we have no plans to touch Article 59 (f), she told The Irrawaddy.

The joint committee was formed in mid-February with 45 lawmakers from all parties in Parliament as well as military appointees in rough proportion to their number of seats. It is reviewing the military-drafted Constitution chapter by chapter and is to draft a bill with proposed amendments.

To date the committee has reviewed three out of 15 chapters in the charter.

According to some members of the committee, representatives of the ethnic parties are proposing more changes than even the NLD  whose idea it was to form the committee  while the USDP and military have suggested none.

Proposals by the NLD and ethnic parties include gradually reducing the 25-percent quota of legislative seats reserved for military appointees, and having only one vice president instead of two by doing away with the one chosen by the military.

During the previous quasi-military administration, the NLD attempted to amend Article 59 (f) and Article 436 in Parliament. Although it collected some 5 million signatures in support of the changes with the help of the 88 Generation Peace and Open Society, the attempt failed.

Everyone knows whether or not Article 59 (f) is reasonable, Upper House NLD lawmaker U Aung Kyi Nyunt, a member of the joint committee, told reporters.

Mandalay-based lawyer U Thein Than Oo said Article 59 (f) should not exist at all as it was written specifically to keep Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, whose children are foreign nationals, from the presidency.

The original draft article on presidential eligibility barred only those with foreign spouses. But after Daw Aung San Suu Kyis husband, Michael Aris, died in 1999, it was updated to include children.

Ultra-nationalists have meanwhile staged protests in Yangon and elsewhere against amending Article 59 (f).

The joint committee is to submit a report on its review of the entire Constitution by July 17.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.
On This Day Ethnic Shan Awarded Red Cross Medal for Icy River Rescue

Henry Dunant Medal winner Sai Aung Hlaing Myint

On this day in 1959, Sai Aung Hlaing Myint, the first person to win the Henry Dunant Medal in Southeast Asia, was born in a small village in Kachin State.

He was only 21 years old when he received the medal at the 23rd International Committee of the Red Cross conference in Bucharest, Romania, in 1977. Eighteen people had won the award before him, but he was the youngest.

He was only the third Henry Dunant Medal recipient in all of Asia.

The Red Cross member and ethnic Shan rescued a solider from a sunken truck after diving for about 20 minutes in the icy Irrawaddy River in Kachin State in January 1976.

Sai Aung Hlaing Myint served as an assistant information officer with the Myanmar Red Cross Society after receiving the award.

He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Mar. 25, 1985. His body was donated to the Institute of Medicine (1).
A gunman jumped out of a truck and shot a man walking down a block on the South Side, then got back in and continued firing as the man tried running away, according to Chicago police.
London's Metropolitan Police has shared information about a number of journalists, working for whistleblower website WikiLeaks, with prosecutors in the US for at least four years.

The information was provided as the US Department of Justice conducted a secret probe into the editor and publisher of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

A statement from WikiLeaks said the Met had confirmed the sharing of information with Washington since at least 2013. The staff whose information was shared included former investigations editor Sarah Harrison, editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson and section editor Joseph Farrell.

The three journalists became aware in 2014 that an East Virginia court had ordered Google to provide their emails, contacts, log-in IP addresses and calendar entries to the US as part of an investigation into alleged violations of US Federal laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the US Espionage Act.

Assange's has been under investigation by the US ever since former US soldier Chelsea Manning leaked a cache of government material that was later published by WikiLeaks.

Manning, whose 35-year jail term, was commuted by former president Barack Obama, was arrested again last week when she refused to testify before a grand jury probe into WikiLeaks.

The role of the Met was exposed following a ruling by the information appeal tribunal in November which ordered the Met to confirm whether it was in possession of correspondence on the three WikiLeaks members.

The order was made in the wake of a legal challenge by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi who works for La Repubblica.

Assange has been taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. His problems began when he visited Sweden in August 2010 to attend a conference where he was scheduled to give a talk. During that visit, he had sex with two women whom he met. The pair filed rape and molestation complaints against him later, claims that he denied.

He was questioned by Swedish authorities and cleared. He could have left the country then and there, but stayed for a while, in case the authorities decided to question him again.

Interpol issued a Red Notice for his arrest on 20 November 2010. On 27 November, Assange surrendered to authorities and appeared before a Westminster judge. He was granted bail in December after his backers provided 240,000 in cash and sureties.

A legal back and forth eventuated and went on until June 2012, when Swedish prosecutors sought his extradition.

Assange's lawyers, among them the world-renowned Australian Geoffrey Robertson, replied that if he agreed to the extradition request, then he could be flown to the US from there.

On 19 June 2012, he jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, seeking asylum in the South American country. British police surrounded the building and blocked any chance of his leaving.

Ecuador granted him asylum in August 2012. He has had to stay inside the four walls of the embassy since then. He was granted Ecuadorian citizenship by a former president of the country, Rafael Correa.
Collegiate Choir Concludes Tour with Home Concert

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.  The Illinois Wesleyan University Collegiate Choir will present a freewill concert at Second Presbyterian Church, 404 N. Prairie St., Bloomington, on Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at 8 p.m.

This concert is the final of 10 appearances the Choir will make during its 2019 spring concert tour. The itinerary includes performances in Michigan, Toronto and Montreal, Canada, New York, Ohio, and Illinois.

The Illinois Wesleyan Collegiate Choir has established a long history of excellence through its on-campus performances, annual tours, and recordings. The Choir also sponsors the IWU Choral Commission Series, which in its 68-year history has added many significant works to the choral repertoire and resulted in a number of important world premieres at Illinois Wesleyan University.

The Collegiate Choir is composed of student musicians representing the School of Music and other areas of the University, and is dedicated to the performance of the finest sacred and secular choral music spanning six centuries and a variety of languages. Members are selected by audition and maintain a rigorous rehearsal schedule in preparation for their concert tour and other engagements throughout the year.

The Choir, under the direction of Dr. J. Scott Ferguson, Director of Choral Activities at Illinois Wesleyan University, has received acclaim for the breath-taking beauty and skill of the voices, the superb repertoire, and the awesome musicality. Programs have been called wonderfully well-selected, versatile, interesting, and musical. An Estonian conductor praised the choirs clear intonation, beautiful and sound harmony, multifarious strokes, and broad dynamic scale. A renowned Czech conductor noted, I was overwhelmed by the great intonation, precise rhythm, beautiful work with dynamics, and incredible stylistic interpretation of compositions from all style periods and genres.

This years tour program includes literature from the Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and Contemporary eras. The first half of the program opens with selections from the 2018 IWU Christmas Choral Concert by John Tavener, G. P. da Palestrina, and Andrej Makor. Then follow two compositions that share textual similarities  the dramatic Domine Deus meus by Levente Gyngysi and an arrangement by Margo Klar of an Estonian runic song, Mu Sde rka les. The first half closes with two contrasting motets whose texts are expressions of praise  Meine Seele erhebt den Herrn, Op. 81, No. 1 by Heinrich von Herzogenberg and Lobet den Herrn, BWV 230, by J. S. Bach.

The second half of the program is devoted to American choral music composed, with one exception, in the 21st century. The first group of selections includes Reena Ismail's Tuttarana, Andrew Rindfleisch's To His Music, a memorial to the renowned choral conductor Robert Fountain, Judith Shatin's I Love (the 2018-19 Collegiate Choir commissioned work), and Allemande, the first movement of Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 Voices. The program concludes with Hehlehlooyuh by James Furman, Angel Band arranged by Shawn Kirchner, and John Orfe's virtuosic Fire!
But prior to the completion of that review, Henderson sued UIC and three of its officials in July 2014, claiming they improperly revealed publicly that a third party had filed a complaint with the university about her dissertation. Henderson also said the Tribune story was the first shed heard of any concerns about the integrity of her research.
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Court records show Howe has been arrested at least three times in the past for theft. In 2016, he was sentenced to three years in prison but was given credit for time served.
What if your children were in danger? she said. If their futures were at risk? Wouldnt you do anything and everything you could in your power to save them? Or would you not even try? Would you give up before youve even begun, saying that saving your children is too unrealistic? Thats what these people in power are doing right now.
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If you are wise enough to determine who should be in the legislature, who to vote for as governor, who to vote for as president, you are also then wise enough to determine  especially with all of the information thats out there today about the dangers of smoking  about whether or not to choose to smoke, said Sen. Dan McConchie, a Hawthorn Woods Republican.
The Cheollima group, which also goes by the name Free Joseon, first came to prominence in late 2017 after it successfully evacuated the nephew of Kim Jong Un from Macau after potential threats to his life surfaced. The nephew was the son of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leader's exiled half-brother who was assassinated in a 2017 nerve gas attack in a Malaysian airport. Kim Jong Nam is widely believed to have been killed by the regime, making his son a likely target.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 14, 2019) - Bearing Lithium Corp. (TSXV: BRZ) (OTCQB: BLILF) (FSE: B6K2) ("Bearing" or the "Company") announces today the resignation of Jonathan Lee as a director of the Company effective March 18, 2019 in order to pursue other endeavours. The Company wishes to express its gratitude to Mr. Lee for his service and wish him well in his future endeavours.

About Bearing Lithium Corp.

Bearing Lithium Corp. is a lithium-focused mineral exploration and development company. Its primary asset is an 18% interest in the Maricunga lithium brine project in Chile. The Maricunga project represents one of the highest-grade lithium brine salars globally and the only pre-production project in Chile. The 2019 Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) demonstrates the project as one of the most efficient producers globally with a long-life, high-margin production profile. Over US$40 million has been invested in the Maricunga project to date.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Signed "Jeremy Poirier"

Jeremy Poirier, President and CEO



FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Jeremy Poirier-- President and CEO Bearing Lithium - Telephone: 1-604-262-8835



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 Statements Regarding Forward Looking Information

This press release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, without limitation, statements relating the future operating or financial performance of the Company, are forward-looking statements.

The words "expect", "target", "estimate", "may", "will" and other similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things, the future prospects of the Maricunga Project. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which are beyond Bearing's ability to predict or control and may cause Bearing's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any of its future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and other factors include, but are not limited to, strategic, legal, planning and other risks, the impact of changes in, or to the enforcement of, laws, regulations and government practices, potential defects in title to the Maricunga Project that are not known as of the date hereof, the occurrence of unexpected financial obligations, fluctuations in the price of lithium and other commodities, fluctuations in the currency markets, changes in national and local government, legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments, risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development and mining (including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected formations, pressures, cave-ins and flooding), risks related to operational matters and geotechnical issues, the success of future exploration and development activities, the occurrence of any labour unrest, the ability to accurately predict decommissioning and reclamation costs, the risk of budget and timing overruns, potential opposition to the Maricunga Project by local communities and the ability to secure construction financing. Such forward-looking statements are also based on a number of assumptions which may prove to be incorrect including changes in Maricunga Project parameters as plans continue to be evaluated as well as those factors disclosed in the Company's documents filed from time to time with the securities regulators in the Provinces of British Columbia and Alberta. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Bearing undertakes no obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements contained herein whether as a result of new information or future events or otherwise, except as may be required by law.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Rio2 Limited (Rio2 or the Company) (TSXV: RIO; BVL: RIO) is pleased to announce that Rio2 begins trading today on the OTCQX Best Market under the ticker RIOFF. U.S. Investors can find current financial disclosure and Real-Time Level 2 quotes for the company on www.otcmarkets.com.

Alex Black, President and CEO of Rio2 stated: This is an important milestone for Rio2 as it enables a broader range of U.S. investors to participate in our growth. The OTCQX Market will provide greater exposure, accessibility and liquidity to our existing and potential U.S. investors.

Rio2 Limited was sponsored for the OTCQX Best Market by Dorsey & Whitney LLP, a qualified third-party firm responsible for providing guidance on the OTCQX Best Market requirements and recommending membership.

The company's shares will continue to trade on the TSX Venture Exchange and on the Bolsa de Valores de Lima (BVL) under the symbol RIO.

ABOUT RIO2 LIMITED

Rio2 Limited is building a multiasset, multijurisdiction, precious metals company focused in the Americas. With the Fenix Gold Project in development in Chile and exploration platforms in Peru and Central America, Rio2 Limited will continue pursuing additional strategic acquisitions to compile an attractive portfolio of precious metals assets where it can deploy its operational excellence and responsible mining practices to create value for its shareholders. Rio2 Limited has assembled a highly experienced executive team to generate significant shareholder value, with proven technical skills in the development and operations of mines and capital markets experience. Through its strategy of acquiring precious metals assets at exploration, development, and operating stages, the executive team will grow Rio2 Limited and create longterm shareholder value through the development of highmargin, strong freecashflowing mining operations.

ABOUT OTC MARKETS GROUP INC.

OTC Markets Group Inc. (OTCQX: OTCM) operates the OTCQX Best Market, the OTCQB Venture Market and the Pink Open Market for 10,000 U.S. and global securities. Through OTC Link ATS and OTC Link ECN, we connect a diverse network of broker-dealers that provide liquidity and execution services. We enable investors to easily trade through the broker of their choice and empower companies to improve the quality of information available for investors.

For more information about Rio2 Limited, please contact:

Alex Black

President and Chief Executive Officer

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Telephone: +1 (604) 260 2696

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian and United States securities laws. The use of any of the words expect, anticipate, continue, estimate, objective, ongoing, may, will, project, should, believe, plans, intends and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking information or statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such forward-looking statements and information are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements and information because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct.

Since forward-looking statements and information, including those related to potential new investors and company growth, address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks. Other factors which could materially affect such forward-looking information are described in the risk factors in the Company's most recent annual managements discussion and analysis that is available on the Companys profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. The forward-looking statements included in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release are made as of the date hereof and the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Velocity Minerals Ltd. (TSXV: VLC) (Velocity or the Company) is pleased to announce that it has closed a C$9.0 million strategic investment (the Strategic Investment) with Atlantic Gold Corporation (TSXV: AGB) (Atlantic Gold) and its wholly-owned subsidiary, 1193490 B.C. Ltd. (the Investor). The Strategic Investment was comprised of a private placement of 18,600,000 units (each, a Unit) for total gross proceeds of approximately C$3.9 million (the Equity Placement) and a convertible debenture in the aggregate principal amount of approximately C$5.1 million (the Convertible Placement). As a result of the completion of the Strategic Investment, Atlantic Gold now owns 19.80% of the outstanding common shares of Velocity on a non-diluted basis and 39.05% on a partially-diluted basis.

We are very pleased to welcome Atlantic Gold as a shareholder of Velocity, stated Keith Henderson, President & CEO of Velocity. Since announcing the strategic investment, existing shareholders and new investors alike have expressed support for the transaction. With Atlantic Golds recent operational achievements in Nova Scotia, Velocity will benefit from their mine building expertise and shared corporate strategy of implementing a hub and spoke model of development.

Use of Proceeds

Net proceeds from the Strategic Investment will be used to fund the advancement of the Rozino gold project located in southeast Bulgaria (Rozino) towards feasibility and permitting, including resource expansion and definition drilling, engineering studies, environmental monitoring and assessment, and for general working capital. In addition, Velocity will proceed to option and explore additional satellite deposits in the region.

Planned Exploration

The 2019 drill program at Rozino is now fully permitted and a total of 12,000m to 14,000m of drilling is planned. The drill program at Rozino is intended to include exploration drilling and infill drilling aimed at increasing the existing mineral resource base (see news release dated October 29, 2018) and improving resource definition.

The drill program is also expected to support additional metallurgical and comminution studies, as well as hydrogeological and geotechnical work. Environmental data collection is ongoing and will continue.

An additional 1,000m of drilling is planned outside of Rozino. These regional targets are located in favorable structural settings with surface geochemical support. It is anticipated that new discoveries within several kilometres of the Rozino deposit could potentially add value by utilizing common infrastructure.

The Company also expects to initiate exploration activities within the larger Exploration and Mining Alliance area held with Bulgarian operating partner Gorubso-Kardzhali AD (Gorubso). Descriptions of these projects together with planned exploration activities will be disclosed in future news releases.

A key objective of the Company over the next year will be to evaluate multiple near-surface gold deposits that may have the potential to feed mineralized material to the operating carbon-in-leach (CIL) plant in Kardzhali, Bulgaria.

Transaction Details

In connection with the Equity Placement, Atlantic Gold has acquired 18,600,000 Units of Velocity at a price per Unit of C$0.21 for total gross proceeds of C$3,906,000. Each Unit consists of one common share of the Company and one-half of one common share purchase warrant, with each whole warrant (each, a Warrant) entitling Atlantic Gold to acquire one common share at a price of C$0.25 per common share for a period of 36 months.

The Convertible Placement consisted of C$5,094,000 principal amount of secured convertible debentures (the Convertible Debentures) issued by the Company to Atlantic Gold. The Convertible Debentures carry an 8.5% coupon over a five-year term and are secured by general security agreement of the Company. Velocity can elect to pay any interest due in cash or shares at its sole election. Atlantic Gold can, at its option, convert the Convertible Debentures into common shares of Velocity at a conversion price of C$0.25 per share.

Pursuant to the terms of the Agreement, Atlantic Gold has been granted:

the right to appoint one director to Velocitys Board of Directors, and increasing to two directors upon Atlantic Gold holding over 30% of the issued and outstanding common shares of Velocity; and

the right to participate in any future equity issuances by Velocity in order to allow Atlantic Gold to maintain its pro rata fully-diluted ownership in Velocity.

Atlantic Gold is subject to a one-year standstill limiting it from acquiring additional common shares of Velocity. Furthermore, Atlantic Gold has agreed to vote with Velocity management and not to sell any of its Velocity securities for a one-year period.

In connection with the Strategic Investment, the Company paid an advisory fee to Haywood Securities Inc. consisting of C$382,500 cash and 459,418 common shares in the capital of Velocity (the Advisory Fee Shares).

The securities issued under the Strategic Investment, including the Advisory Fee Shares, are subject to a four-month and one day hold period in accordance with applicable securities legislation. Atlantic Gold holds its securities in the capital of Velocity through its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Investor.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this release has been approved for disclosure by Stuart A. Mills, BSc, MSc, CGeol, a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and the Companys Vice President Exploration. Mr. Mills is not independent of the Company.

About Atlantic Gold Corporation

Atlantic Gold is a well-financed, growth-oriented gold development group with a long-term strategy to build a mid-tier gold production company focused on manageable, executable projects in mining-friendly jurisdictions.

Atlantic Gold is focused on growing gold production in Nova Scotia beginning with its Moose River Consolidated phase one open-pit gold mine which declared commercial production in March 2018, and its phase two Life of Mine Expansion at industry lowest decile cash and all-in-sustaining-costs (as stated in Atlantic Golds news releases dated January 16, 2019 and January 29, 2018). Atlantic Gold is committed to the highest standards of environmental and social responsibility and continually invests in people and technology to manage risks, maximize outcomes and returns to all stakeholders.

About Velocity Minerals Ltd.

Velocity is a gold exploration and development company focused on eastern Europe. The Company envisions staged open pit mining of satellite deposits and processing in a central, currently operating CIL plant owned by its Bulgarian operating partner Gorubso. The Companys management and board includes mining industry professionals with combined experience spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas as employees of major mining companies as well as founders and senior executives of junior to mid-tier public companies. The team's experience includes all aspects of mineral exploration, resource definition, feasibility, finance, mine construction and mine operation as well as a track record in managing publicly listed companies.

Velocitys Rozino gold project is located within the Tintyava property and is located within an Exploration and Mining Alliance area with Bulgarian operating partner Gorubso (see news release dated February 22, 2018). Velocity began exploring and drilling at the Rozino gold project in August 2017 and completed a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) in September 2018. The PEA provides a base case assessment of developing the Rozino gold project by open pit mining and on-site crushing, milling and simple flotation to produce a 30 g/t gold concentrate. The concentrate would then be trucked 85km on existing roads to the currently operating CIL plant where saleable gold dore would be produced. Mineralization remains open for expansion. Having delivered the PEA, the Company exercised its option for a 70% interest in the project and formed a joint venture with Gorubso in March 2019. Velocity now holds a 70% interest in the Tintyava property, with Gorubso holding the remaining 30%.

About Bulgaria

Bulgaria is a member of NATO (2004) and a member of the European Union (2007). The local currency (BGN) has been tied to the Euro since 1999 (1.956 BGN/EUR). The country is served by modern European infrastructure including an extensive network of paved roads. Bulgaria boasts an exceptionally low corporate tax rate of only 10%. The countrys education system is excellent with good availability of experienced mining professionals in a favorable cost environment. Foreign mining companies are successfully operating in Bulgaria. The countrys mining law was established in 1999 and updated in 2011. Mining royalties are low and compare favorably with more established mining countries.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Keith Henderson

President & CEO

For further information, please contact:

Keith Henderson

Phone: +1-604-484-1233

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Web: www.velocityminerals.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION:

This news release includes certain forward-looking statements under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the conversion by Atlantic Gold of all or some of the Convertible Debentures or Warrants, the use of funds from the Strategic Investment, the appointment by Atlantic Gold of a nominee to the Board of Directors of the Company, and the future business and operations of Velocity. Often, but not always, forward looking statements can be identified by words such as pro forma, plans, expects, may, will, should, budget, scheduled, estimates, forecasts, intends, anticipates, believes, potential or variations of such words including negative variations thereof, and phrases that refer to certain actions, events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, that market fundamentals will result in sustained gold demand and prices, the receipt of any necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in connection with the future development of the Companys Bulgarian projects, the availability of financing on suitable terms for the development, construction and continued operation of the Companys projects, and the Companys ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws. Forward looking information involves 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, operating and technical difficulties in connection with mineral exploration and development and mine development activities for the Rozino project and the Companys projects generally, including the geological mapping, prospecting and sampling programs for the projects, the fact that the Companys interests in certain properties are only options and there is no guarantee that such interests, if earned, will be certain, actual results of exploration activities, including the Bulgarian drill programs, estimation or realization of mineral reserves and mineral resources, the timing and amount of estimated future production, costs of production, capital expenditures, the costs and timing of the development of new deposits, the availability of a sufficient supply of water and other materials, requirements for additional capital to fund the Company's business plan, future prices of precious metals, 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, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry, delays in obtaining governmental and regulatory approvals, 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 and the timing and possible outcome of pending litigation, environmental issues and liabilities, risks related to joint venture operations, and risks related to the integration of acquisitions, as well as those factors discussed under the heading. "Risk Factors" in the Company's annual 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 information. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking information in this news release or incorporated by reference herein, except as otherwise required by law.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A.I.S. Resources Limited (TSX-V  AIS, OTCQB: AISSF) (the Company or AIS) is pleased to announce that its Guayatayoc option agreement has been extended to June 15, 2019 at no additional cost to AIS. The extension was granted as a result of the UGAMP meeting being deferred until such time as the President of the Rincondillas Community signs the Assembly document which was a Department of Mining pre-requisite for the meeting.

Our team in Jujuy will continue dialogue with the Rincondillas Community to respond to their queries and resolve concerns preparatory to signing the Assembly document and scheduling the UGAMP meeting.

We have provided the Jujuy Department of Mining with the results of our base line environmental study that monitored air, water and soil in the locations they indicated. The results of the surface water testing were very encouraging with commercial grades of lithium concentrated. The table below sets out the values of the samples taken from Guayatayoc Mina.

Sample No lithium ppm Boron Potassium ppm MS 1 213 128 4907 MS 2 441 14138 8143 MS 3 418 666 9468

Note 1. These lithium values are above the benchmark values of being commercially viable.

Note 2. The potassium lithium ratio rule of thumb is 1:15 i.e. 10,000ppm of K indicates rates of approximately 660ppm Li.

Phil Thomas CEO said that, We were very appreciative of the concession that Ekeko SA has made to extend our option from March 31, 2019 to June 15, 2019. The team in Jujuy are very hopeful that all the outstanding issues can be resolved and we can move on to the next three drill holes to progress this exciting lithium brine project. We remain the only option holder with a Mining Permit in the salar.

Qualified Person

Phillip Thomas, BSc. Geol, MBusM, MAIG, MAIMVA, (CMV), a Qualified Person as defined under NI 43-101 regulations, has reviewed the technical information that forms the basis for this news release, and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Thomas is not independent of the Company as he is Chief Executive Officer and a shareholder.

About A.I.S. Resources

A.I.S. Resources Ltd. is a TSX-V listed investment issuer, was established in 1967 and is managed by experienced, highly qualified professionals who have a long track record of success in lithium exploration, production and capital markets. Through their extensive business and scientific networks, they identify and develop projects worldwide that have strong potential for growth with the objective of providing significant returns for shareholders. The Companys current activities are focused on the exploration and development of lithium brine projects in northern Argentina.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors, A.I.S. Resources Limited

Phillip Thomas

President and CEO

Contact

Phillip Thomas - President and CEO

E: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Website: www.aisresources.com

Martyn Element

Chairman

T: 604 687-6820

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ADVISORY: This press release contains forward-looking statements. More particularly, this press release contains statements concerning the anticipated use of the proceeds of the Private Placement. Although the Corporation believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Corporation can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. The intended use of the proceeds of the Private Placement by the Corporation might change if the board of directors of the Corporation determines that it would be in the best interests of the Corporation to deploy the proceeds for some other purpose. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date hereof and the Corporation undertakes no obligations to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

TORONTO, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- African Gold Group. (TSX-V: AGG) (AGG or the Company) announces its intention to seek the necessary approvals to consolidate its common shares.

The Company has called a special meeting of common shareholders (the Meeting) for April 4, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. (Toronto time). The Meeting will be held at the Companys head office at 65 Queen Street West, 8th floor boardroom, Toronto, Ontario M5H 2M5. AGG shareholders will be asked to consider and approve a share consolidation (the Consolidation) on the basis of one new common share of the Company (each, a New Share) for up to every 7.5 existing common shares of the Company (each, an Existing Share), or such lower number of Existing Shares as may be determined by the Board of Directors of AGG and as may be required to obtain approval of the Consolidation from the TSX Venture Exchange.

The principal effects of the Consolidation will be that the number of Shares of the Company issued and outstanding will be reduced from 359,582,671 Existing Shares as of the date hereof to approximately 47,944,356 New Shares, assuming a consolidation ratio of 7.5 to 1.

The expected benefits of the Consolidation include improved trading liquidity from lower transaction costs, great investor interest as well as reduced future dilution from the ability to raise additional capital at a higher price per Share. Additional benefits of the Consolidation, as well as the procedure for implementing the Consolidation and the full text resolution approving the Consolidation may be found in the Companys management information circular dated March 5, 2019 (the Circular) that is being mailed to shareholders and may be found under the Companys profile on SEDAR. The Consolidation remains subject to shareholder approval and acceptance by the TSX Venture Exchange.

About African Gold Group

African Gold Group is a Canadian listed exploration and development company on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX V:AGG) with its focus on developing a gold platform in West Africa. Its two principal assets are the Kobada Project in Mali and the gold project located in Madougou, Burkina Faso.

For more information:

Andrew Cheatle

Chief Executive Officer

(416) 861 2267

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Cautionary statements

This press release contains forwardlooking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forwardlooking information includes, but is not limited to, statements regarding the Consolidation. Generally, forwardlooking 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 statements that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. Forwardlooking 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 AGG to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forwardlooking information, including but not limited to: receipt of necessary approvals; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; future prices of mineral prices; accidents, labour disputes and shortages and other risks of the mining industry. Although AGG 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 forwardlooking information. AGG does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

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.
OTTAWA, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Orezone Gold Corporation (TSXV:ORE) (Orezone or the Company) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Louis Archambeault as VP Corporate Development and Strategy and Mr. Ryan Goodman as VP Legal & Administration.

Mr. Archambeault has over 15 years of capital markets and finance experience, and has been involved with the Company as a consultant since July 2018. Prior to joining Orezone, Mr. Archambeault was the Director of Corporate Development for Goldcorp Inc. Before that, he spent several years in the CIBC Mining Investment Banking Group and prior to that, he worked as a mining engineering consultant at AMEC. Mr. Archambeault holds a Masters degree in Mining Engineering from McGill University.

Mr. Goodman has over 16 years of experience working with mining companies in various stages of growth and development, and specializes in such areas as financings, M&A and corporate governance. Most recently, Mr. Goodman was the VP Legal Affairs of Aura Minerals Inc. for the past 7 years. Previous to Aura Minerals, Mr. Goodman practiced law with a large Canadian multinational law firm with a focus on securities and mining. Mr. Goodman holds a J.D. from the University of Manitoba.

The Company also announces the departure of Mr. Tim Miller as Chief Operating Officer and the planned departure, after a short transition period, of Joe McCoy as VP Administration.

Patrick Downey, the Companys President and CEO commented, I am excited to have Louis and Ryan join the Orezone team. Their diverse skill sets and experiences in the mining sector and capital markets will assist the Company in the continued development and financing of the Bombore mine. The Company also wishes to thank both Tim and Joe for their long service and contributions made to the Company over the last several years, and wishes them well in their future endeavours. With the move of the Companys corporate office to Vancouver, and Tim and Joe located in Miami and Ottawa respectively, this is a natural transition. Tim has also expressed the need to dedicate more time to his other business interests.

The Company has started the process of recruiting an experienced site-based Project Manager for the development and construction of the Bombore gold project and will not be replacing the COO role vacated by Mr. Miller.

About Orezone Gold Corporation

Orezone is a Canadian company with a successful gold discovery track record and recent mine development experience in Burkina Faso, West Africa. The Company owns a 90% interest in Bombore, a fully permitted, low cost, development stage gold project in Burkina Faso, situated 85 km east of the capital city of Ouagadougou, adjacent to an international highway.

For further information please contact Orezone at +1 (778) 945-8977 or visit the Companys website at www.orezone.com.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
JUSTICEINFO.NET IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS Alain Godonou

Director of the Museums Programme at the National Agency for Heritage Promotion and Tourism Development in Benin

Founder and first director of the School of African Heritage, Beninese curator Alain Godonou is a pioneer in ideas and action for returning to Africa cultural property seized or looted during colonization. French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to restore to Benin a first 26 valuable pieces. In its wake Berlin followed by launching, on Wednesday, a major inventory of collections from the colonial era. Alain Godonou explains the importance for reparation, remembrance and reconciliation.

JUSTICEINFO.NET: For nearly half a century, several countries or communities have been calling for the return of objects that disappeared, were stolen or bought illicitly during the colonial period. At the end of the 1970s, UNESCO even produced a standard form for requests for return or restitution. Then nothing was done for 40 years. What has changed recently and why?

ALAIN GODONOU: The main reason is Africans awareness that something of theirs was missing. The first claims were made rather by countries such as Egypt and Greece. Sub-Saharan African countries were not yet in a position to file claims.

At the School of African Heritage [founded in 1998 in Benin], students and teachers were given the task of reviewing the inventories in their museums. They concluded that there was not much there, that most of the things had been to a large extent taken away. We travelled and knew the importance of the collections in some of the major colonizing countries. You know, when I was a conservation student in Paris, I didnt have access to African collections.

Why?

Because I was African and that could be dangerous.

Which years are you talking about?

The mid-1980s. When I asked to do my internship at the Musee de lHomme on African collections, I was sent to work on mouldings. It may not have been an institutional policy, but it was complicated as an African to have access to the inventories of African collections.

Because people thought you would steal them?

Yes, or simply because when you enter the Musee de lHomme or Quai Branly Museum [art and culture of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas], you may be shocked to see that there are so many things when there is nothing in your country. How come theres all this here and nothing there? Just that could bring a feeling of revolt. So it wasnt easy. And even now, because it is considered part of French heritage, I am not allowed to use the photos. The rights belong to the Quai Branly. I cant have a high resolution photo, its not possible. Ive been denied it.

When you enter the Musee de lHomme or Quai Branly Museum [art and culture of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas], you may be shocked to see that there are so many things when there is nothing in your country.

Thats when the realization came that we had, in fact, lost a lot. I published work on this and gave the statistics. When Egypt claims a few objects and Greece claims Parthenon marbles back, it is not in the same order of magnitude as when Africans say they have lost their memory.

What is the order of magnitude?

For African countries, it is a minimum of 75% that has gone. I helped draw up these statistics from the inventories of public museums.

In November 2017, in Ouagadougou, the French President announced his intention to organize, within five years, the temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage that is in French public museums. Is this speech a turning point or just hype?

It is a major turning point that a French statesman, in his position, makes such an affirmative speech on restitution. There have been ups and downs in this area. South Korea, for example, has been asking since the days of President Mitterrand for France to return manuscripts of Buddhist temples, and today they are still discussing how much, when, what, etc. Some of them have been returned on long-term loan, but have never been declassified from French heritage.

It is a major turning point that a French statesman, in his position, makes such an affirmative speech on restitution.

The major obstacle that President Macrons speech removes is the one that says these objects are governed by French law and that in order to place them elsewhere we must review the laws, change the French heritage regulations and that it is almost impossible to do.

Arent you worried that it is just a little symbolic gesture that doesnt really change the situation?

First of all, I think President Macron is sincere and wants to move forward. He has given us proof of this in Benin. A new team is coming [this] week to discuss with us how to move forward on this issue. But what can slow down this dynamic is whether African countries are ready. Benin has made some claims, but after Benin there is no one much else.

Your country is to receive 26 works that Emmanuel Macron has announced are being returned. How has Benin managed to convince France  or at least its president  to take this first step?

Because Benin has a consistent program to develop its museums. There has been a lot of thinking in the country, which is poor, has no oil, diamond or gold mines but has a very rich history and heritage. The thinking is as follows: we live from what we have and we have a rich heritage, so let us devote ourselves to it and show what we have, let us base part of our economy and development on it.

The criticism levelled at the countries of the South was that they did not have institutions capable of hosting [these collections]. We now have this big project, so we would like to have these collections.

This calls for institutions and museums around which we can create a certain social and economic dynamic. The criticism levelled at the countries of the South was that they did not have institutions capable of hosting [these collections]. We now have this big project, so we would like to have these collections.

Indeed, what do you think of this argument against restitution that says there is a lack of adequate skills in African museums?

This argument no longer holds since our policy sets up arrangements. It is not that there is no museum curator in Africa and that there cannot be one. It is just that up to now this heritage and museums sector has not been a priority and has not received the necessary means and capacities to develop.

But isnt the incapacity argument in itself a particular way of looking at things? Arent museums just one way to preserve objects? And for these objects to have been found, did they not have to have been preserved in the first place? Isnt it a bad argument?

I wouldnt say completely bad. Another side of the reality is that there is a lot of trafficking in ancient African art. So if there is no guarantee of safekeeping, they will disappear. We know of cases of art that has been returned and ended up on the market. In the past, the museum institution as we know it today did not exist. There were other forms of conservation. Today there are museums, but there are also all kinds of trafficking networks and mafia that target this type of object. We cannot therefore stick to an intellectual position saying that we used to keep things this way in the past and so we should be able to do the same today. Traffickers dont think that way.

Can you remind us of the context in which these pieces ended up in France? What is this phenomenon of colonial capture  war booty, military looting, scientific raids  described as a crime against peoples by the authors of the report to President Macron, Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy?

There were several scenarios. First of all, there was war booty. In this case, it is mostly objects symbolic of the people defeated, such as regalia and emblems of power. We must draw a parallel with what the English did in the Ashanti country  todays Ghana  where there was a great battle to take possession of the golden throne, symbol of Ashanti royalty. This took place in the middle of the 19th century, when the colonial powers entered, taking possession of the land and what was truly symbolic of the peoples they defeated. These were not riches, they were what was symbolically important.

The colonial powers entered, taking possession of the land and what was truly symbolic of the peoples they defeated. These were not riches, they were what was symbolically important.

There are also soldiers who left taking things with them. It is a story we saw again and again over 30 years in many parts of the world, not only in ancient Benin, Dahomey or Ghana, but also in Asia with, for example, the sacking of the palace in China.

Is restitution easier for these artifacts, since looting by soldiers has been considered for more than a century a clear violation of international law?

Absolutely. In addition, we are currently living, more or less, in a period of peace between peoples. There is no reason to continue keeping the war trophies. It seems barbaric. It is not justified, morally or philosophically.

There is no reason to continue keeping the war trophies. It seems barbaric.

Then there are other series of objects [carried off] by missionaries, anthropologists, colonial officials. I have an issue with the somewhat excessive assertions in the Sarr and Savoy report considering this as raids. It was a time, we must not forget, when anthropology and ethnography made great progress. Of course, there were excesses. Yes, they took things, but it was not in a spirit of raiding or of conquest.

The first research institute in Africa, the Institut francais dAfrique noire (IFAN), was created at the beginning of the twentieth century by Theodore Monod with its headquarters in Dakar. IFAN had departments in all countries. Obviously, this was a way of extending the reach of the colonizing country in the conquered territories. But the first national researchers were born there. IFANs work led to the writing of the first general history of Africa. Many things were born in this cauldron, in this effervescence. I do not attribute too many bad intentions to that. Of course it was a colonial period, but there was a kind of positive advance of republican ideas during that period. This type of work, this type of research stemmed more from that, in my view, than raids or looting of riches. Traders and traffickers were in other sectors of the economy.

What are you expecting of the 26 artefacts from the ancient kingdom of Abomey?

There is the political agenda and the conservation agenda. Since it is the politicians who decide, we are waiting for their decision. From the conservation point of view, the restitution must be done at a time of year that ensures that the returned objects arrive in good condition. They shouldnt travel when the climates are very different. Winter is not the right time. The restitution should always be made during the summer period [in Europe]. If not this summer, it will be next summer.

We take precautions as if we were transporting nuclear material!

There is also a whole insurance and preparation procedure requiring daily work that the layman does not understand. Its a long procedure. Id say we take precautions as if we were transporting nuclear material!

These pieces do not only have a museum dimension, they speak to the imagination, they sometimes have a function. What do they mean to the people of Benin?

The museum is only a receptacle to allow their reintegration. These objects are regalia, symbols of royal power. To understand them, it is important to know that those who had custody of them let them go at the cost of their lives. That is, they would rather die than see these objects leave  because they were the sign of their attachment to the land, to their ancestors, the symbol that they were men and women, that they were a people. The symbolism is therefore very strong.

When the English wanted to take the golden throne of the Ashanti, which symbolized the Ashanti nation, it caused terrible wars. These objects bear testimony to that, to the attachment and loyalty to ones roots, to what one believes.

You will no longer find objects of this beauty and workmanship. This creative force has been lost.

Aesthetically, they also bear witness to know-how that has now disappeared. You will no longer find objects of this beauty and workmanship. This creative force has been lost. But it is also a classical notion that creativity is encouraged by looking at things that represent the height of what we want to do. These objects will therefore also be used extensively in teaching not only historians but also artists and philosophers, to make them think about what they represent.

Finally there is also their aesthetic quality for our eyes. People will say with pride: well, at one point we were able to do that, so maybe we can make things of such quality again.

90,000 pieces are said to be listed in the public museums of France; Great Britain has 69,000 objects from Africa in the British Museum; Belgium has 180,000 in the Royal Museum; Germany has 75,000 for its future Humboldt Forum in Berlin; and then there is Italy, Spain, Portugal. How do you see the position of the other former colonial powers on the issue of restitutions?

It cannot remain a one-to-one between France and Benin, or between France and its former colonies. It must become an international debate and perhaps be the subject of an international convention, so that all countries have a framework to manage this type of issue. I am referring to a convention that talks about the circulation of artworks. The word circulation is important.

It must become the subject of an international convention, so that all countries have a framework to manage this type of issue.

With regard to Beninese, Senegalese and Burkinabe objects, there is as much need for them in the diasporas. Today, we are all from everywhere. Therefore, these objects must have a status that allows them to circulate. And for that to happen, rules must be set

The authors of the Sarr and Savoy report fear that talking about circulation is mainly a way of not talking about the restitution issue

Yes, and its true. There is ownership, which must be clear. The issue of conservation capacities should be separated from the legitimate right of ownership. From this point of view, the objects should be considered as on deposit, on loan for a more or less long period, in the museums of the former colonial powers. The rationale of proposing long-term deposits in countries of origin as a solution must be reversed! This means that countries of origin, regaining ownership, will have rights to the images, which are important for different uses, and a say in the circulation of works of which they have regained ownership.

The rationale of proposing long-term deposits in countries of origin as a solution must be reversed!

Then there is where they go. This question is important because it also arises internally in Benin. The objects were talking about started in Abomey. Should we send them back to Abomey when our objective is to build the nation and have them regarded as the whole countrys heritage? There is also work to be done here, and this is a debate in Benin.

There are significant differences of interest on the African continent around the issue of restitution. Sarr and Savoy note that in some countries amnesia has worked and the process of erasing memory has been so successful that some communities are unaware of the existence of this heritage and the depth of the loss suffered

That is for sure.

On the other hand, in countries where the loss of heritage is linked to violent, painful or tragic events, as in Benin, the memory is still alive and it is a hot issue, they write. Do you also see these factors at play?

Yes, absolutely. There are differences because of the role of forgetting. It depends on how history is taught, how colonization has worked. The colonial occupation was not violent everywhere. It was not a war of conquest everywhere. It was sometimes done peacefully, in good cooperation, with one side tricking the other and then gradually establishing itself. In some countries, such as Benin, there was very serious violence and wars. So these wounds remain.

But the story is complex. It should be understood that the French were not at war with all the peoples that make up todays Benin. They had allies who were at war, for example, against Abomey. It is a more complex story than we are saying, and it should not be simplified for heritage reasons. They remain complex. These objects, which were taken from Abomey, can be a problem in Benin. The peoples against whom Abomey was waging war, such as the Yoruba  many of whom found themselves slaves in the Americas  in their past and present memory are justified in thinking: why all this fuss around the people who massacred us?

You remind us of the storys complexity, but you remain very clear that restitution must happen

Yes, absolutely. These objects say much more. They say things about our societies, about our ways of thinking, and it is important to have them to reflect on them, not to make them the property of a small group of the population.

To speak openly about restitution is to speak of justice and reparation. Is that what scares Europeans?

I believe that what makes Europeans afraid is the amnesia over the violence that colonization represented. They do not want that page reopened, because colonization is widely presented as positive. However, tens of thousands of people were killed by massacres. Cesaire said that colonization prepared Nazism. From the moment we kept quiet about the massacres of the natives, Nazism could do its job. This type of discourse has not been listened to.

And do you think it is heard today?

Oh, I think it is still very uncomfortable!

The rapporteurs Sarr and Savoy seem optimistic that European societies are ready to confront this past. Are you also optimistic?

I dont know. Im watching. When we look at the political movements that are resurgent, we may be taken aback by a retreat of ideas. These are societies that are today very diverse, more so than in the past, but we still see widespread cliches, prejudices, forms of racism and intolerance of all kinds. This means that we must continue working to make intelligence prevail.

Is there not a fear that the restitution of cultural property is just a first unconscious step in the work that Europeans have never done on their own past, and that it could lead to an escalation of claims and demands for reparations for colonization?

Some people say openly that things will escalate. There are movements making claims. But I dont think thats the main thing. I dont think we can live on claims and reparations. We must talk about the violence suffered, the injustices suffered, need for reparation. This is morally and philosophically important. If humanity sets itself a common destiny and thinks of itself as a community, that must happen.

I dont think we can live on claims and reparations. From our point of view, we are entering a field where there is a need for appeasement.

But from our point of view, we are entering a field where there is a need for appeasement. We are not in opposition to France. We have a common history, which has been brutal, sometimes very hard, but we are still here and we must move forward. All our problems are related. Working this out together is important.

Restitution is also a work of memory. What is at stake, in your opinion?

For the victims, it makes them proud to know that they did not come from nothing, that they had things in their home country. Part of the colonial discourse was to bring civilization. But there was already civilization! So erasing this type of discourse that treated us as savages which we were not, is important. Restitution contributes to this. This is about becoming more aware of our common humanity.

On this point, you agree with Felwine Sarr, who says that one of the challenges of these restitutions is a reinvention of the relationship between peoples, and that these objects must be mediators of a new relationship.

Absolutely.

Is the restitution of cultural property therefore also a reconciliation issue?

Thats for sure. From our point of view, restitution is not a conflict issue. President Macrons approach is also more about reconciliation. Let us say that most countries experience it as a moment of pride, of affirmation in the face of great injustice that has persisted, something that says justice will be done, that our voices are heard.

Most countries experience it as a moment of pride, of affirmation in the face of great injustice that has persisted, something that says justice will be done, that our voices are heard.

Interviewed by Thierry Cruvellier.
Gaza has for nearly a year been the scene of massive protests and clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers along its demarcation line with the Jewish state.

In that time, more than 250 Palestinians have been killed, along with two Israeli soldiers.

Here is a recap:

 First deadly day 

Protesters stage a mass rally on March 30, 2018, demanding the right to return to homes, now inside Israel, that Palestinians fled or were expelled from in the late 1940s as the Jewish state was created.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians converge along the barrier that separates Gaza from Israel.

Officially organised by civil society groups, The Great March of Return is backed by Islamist militant movement Hamas, which runs Israeli-blockaded Gaza.

Several groups of protesters face off with Israeli soldiers, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.

Israeli snipers respond with live fire, killing 19 Palestinians.

 Kites on fire 

On April 6, thousands of Palestinians gather again near the security barrier. Nine Palestinians are killed and nearly 500 injured.

Four days later, the Palestinians employ a new tactic, sending kites across the border, some carrying explosive devices, to set fire to farmland.

Similar kites and balloons have since torched thousands of hectares of land and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of damage.

 Bloodbath 

On May 14, tens of thousands of Palestinians return to the barrier as the US opens its controversial embassy in Jerusalem after recognising the disputed city as Israels capital.

At least 62 Palestinians are killed by Israeli fire in the ensuing violence, with more than 2,400 wounded.

On June 13, the United Nations General Assembly adopts a resolution, opposed by Washington, condemning Israel for the violence.

 Summer of violence 

On July 14, Israel unleashes dozens of air strikes, killing two Palestinians, while 200 rockets target Israel.

Overnight August 8-9, Hamas fires some 180 rockets and mortars from Gaza, according to the Israeli army, which says it responded by targeting 150 of the movements military sites.

After a brief respite, 10 Palestinians are killed in clashes with the Israeli army during demonstrations on September 28 and October 5.

 Aid from Qatar 

On November 9-10, as mediation efforts progress, Palestinian civil servants in Gaza receive millions of dollars in salary arrears, funded by Qatar.

Since then, four instalments of Qatari aid have been distributed to Palestinians in Gaza.

Under UN auspices, Qatar has also financed deliveries of fuel to the territorys only power plant.

 Escalation 

On November 11, an Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip leaves seven Palestinians and one Israeli soldier dead.

In revenge, Hamas the next day attacks an Israeli bus, severely wounding a soldier.

It is the beginning of one of the worst escalations in years, with hundreds of rockets and mortars fired at Israel and dozens of Israeli strikes against Gaza positions.

Seven Palestinians are killed.

On November 13, an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire is agreed. A day later, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman resigns, saying Israel is capitulating to terror.

On November 21, four Palestinians are killed by Israeli soldiers.

 UN probe 

On February 28, 2019, a UN probe says Israel may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity in responding to unrest in Gaza, as snipers intentionally shot civilians, including children.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects the report outright.

 Rockets and strikes 

On March 14, rockets are fired from Gaza towards the region of Tel Aviv.

Overnight, Israeli aircraft and helicopters strike dozens of Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip.

The organisers of Friday protests along the Gaza-Israel demarcation line say they are calling off this weeks rallies.
The United States announced on Friday it would deny visas to members of the International Criminal Court involved in investigating the actions of US troops in Afghanistan or other countries.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Washington was prepared to take further steps, including economic sanctions, if the war crimes court goes ahead with any probes of US or allied personnel.

The ICC is attacking Americas rule of law, Pompeo told reporters. Its not too late for the court to change course and we urge that it do so immediately.

The United States has never joined the ICC, where a prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, asked judges in November 2017 for authorization to open an investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Pompeos announcement of visa restrictions was the first concrete action taken by the US against the ICC since the White House threatened reprisals against the Hague-based body in September of last year.

Im announcing a policy of US visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of US personnel, the secretary of state said.

This would include anyone who takes, or has taken, action to request or further an investigation, he told reporters.

If youre responsible for the proposed ICC investigation of US personnel in connection with the situation in Afghanistan you should not assume that you still have, or will get, a visa or that you will permitted to enter the United States, Pompeo added.

The secretary of state said visas could also be withheld from ICC personnel involved in conducting probes of US allies, specifically Israel.

These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis, without allies consent, he said.

Pompeo said implementation of the policy has already begun but he did not provide any details, citing confidentiality surrounding visa applications.

These visa restrictions will not be the end of our efforts, Pompeo said. Were prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions, if the ICC does not change its course.

 Politically motivated prosecutions 

The secretary of state said the US had declined to join the ICC because of its broad unaccountable prosecutorial powers and the threat it proposes to American national sovereignty.

We are determined to protect American and allied civilian personnel from living in fear of unjust prosecution for actions taken to defend our great nation, he said.

We feared that the court could eventually pursue politically motivated prosecutions of Americans, he said, and our fears were warranted.

Pompeo said the US government was obliged to protect its citizens and procedures were already in place to deal with members of the US armed forces who engage in misconduct.

When US service members fail to adhere to our strict code of military conduct they are reprimanded, courtmartialed and sentenced, if thats whats deserved, he said.

The US government, where possible, takes legal action against those responsible for international crimes, he added, noting that it has supported prosecution of war crimes in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

The ICC and human rights groups reacted swiftly to Pompeos remarks.

The ICC, as a court of law, will continue to do its independent work, undeterred, in accordance with its mandate and the overarching principle of the rule of law, the ICC said.

Richard Dicker, international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said the US move is a naked attempt to bully judges and impede justice for victims in Afghanistan and blatant contempt for the rule of law.

James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, said Pompeos remarks reflected the administrations view that international law matters only when it is aligned with US national interests.

Attacking international judicial actors for doing their jobs undermines global efforts to hold to account those most responsible for atrocity crimes such as torture and mass murder, Goldston said.

The ICC was established in 2002 under the Rome Statute and joined by 123 countries.

But ICC membership was never ratified by the US Senate and the America First administration of President Donald Trump has been a particularly virulent opponent.

John Bolton harshly condemned the ICC in one of his first speeches after becoming Trumps national security advisor in September.

We will not cooperate with the ICC, Bolton said. And we certainly will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own.
"When we did a power mapping of the landscape at the end of 2016 early 2017, what we found was that so much of what used to be dismissed as the fringes was now where power was being organized: 4chan; Daily Stormer comment sections; subreddits," Carusone said. "These would never have been considered worthy enough or important enough to monitor [before]. But we looked at it and they were  they were driving a lot of the misinformation and fake news of 2016. They were creating a lot of material that was making it onto Fox News or Donald Trump's Twitter feed."
The United States has never been a member of the ICC. The Clinton administration in 2000 signed the Rome Statute that created the ICC but had reservations about the scope of the court's jurisdiction and never submitted it for ratification to the Senate, where there was broad bipartisan opposition to what lawmakers saw as a threat to U.S. sovereignty.
Prosecutors say Higgins, of Miami, came to Milwaukee to give Noelani to Robinson but it's unknown if Higgins actually brought her with him. Police say Robinson had been living in Las Vegas since February.
The Senate has been less eager to push Barr on the release of the report, despite some in the GOP caucus who have said they want to ensure transparency. Graham, a close ally of Trump's, said he would only allow the Mueller resolution from the House to move forward if it were amended to call for a new special counsel to investigate misconduct at the Justice Department surrounding the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the abuse of the secret surveillance warrant process.
MEDFORD, Ore. A federal jury found a Klamath County man guilty of stealing more than $30,000 in Social Security on Wednesday. According to investigators, the money Theodore Kirk, 64, stole belongs to his mother, Nadine Kirk. She has been missing since March 2010 and is presumed to be deceased.

This case began with a single tip from an observant community member and led to the discovery of a multi-year scheme to exploit the Social Security programa critical tax payer-funded program supporting the nations elderly. Tips play an important role in law enforcement and help to reveal crimes that might otherwise go undiscovered, said Billy J. Williams, U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon in a press release.

According to court documents and information shared during trial, in July 2015, a concerned community member contacted the Klamath County Sheriffs Office regarding the whereabouts of Nadine. This person claimed she had not been seen for multiple years.

Police visited the home she shared with her son. Kirk claimed his mother had left with friends to travel to California two months ago. He wouldn't let the deputy in the home to confirm his mother was not there.

A month later, Kirk was interviewed by police again. He told officers he believed his mother was still in California. He added that it had been quite some time since his mother had seen a doctor despite having suffered from multiple strokes.

It was at this time he acknowledged that he shared a joint checking account with his mother, into which her monthly Social Security payments were deposited.

Later in August 2015, the Social Security Administration suspended payments to the Kirks joint checking account based on Nadine's unknown whereabouts. A Social Security investigator reviewed Nadine's bank records and found that the last transaction with her signature was dated January 2010.

From January 2010 until August 2015, more than $1,000 in benefits were deposited monthly into the joint checking account and nearly every month, Theodore Kirk would withdraw the entire amount in cash. All of the withdrawals from the account occurred in Oregon, not in California were Kirk told police Nadine was suppose to be.

In August 2017, investigators searched Kirk's property. They found a detailed calendar kept by Kirk. Prior to 2010, the calendar included activities for both Kirk and his mother. The calendar showed Nadine had a series of strokes between 2004 and 2010. The last dates recorded showed she had two strokes in three days. There were no more entries for Nadine after those strokes in 2010.

Kirk faces a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. He will be sentenced on Thursday, June 27, 2019 before U.S. District Court Judge Michael J. McShane.

This case was investigated by the Social Security Administration, Office of Inspector General with the assistance of the Klamath County Sheriffs Office and prosecuted by Adam E. Delph and Gavin W. Bruce, Assistant U.S. Attorneys for the District of Oregon.
SALEM, Ore.--A nine-month old infant died after becoming unconscious in a day care center in Lane County in August. Now, House Republicans are demanding to know why they're only learning about it now.

House Republican Leader Carl Wilson says he learned about the death in an article published by The Oregonian on March 5th. The day care where the child died was state-regulated.

In a letter to a Oregon's U.S. attorney today- Wilson said it was either "gross negligence" by DHS or it was covered up for political reasons. The death occurred in the middle of governor campaign.

The House GOP is asking the Department of Justice to examine the death and the steps taken by the government after it. Republicans say they're concerned by the disturbing pattern of failures and questionable practices within the department of human services. The day care center where the infant died had been cited before for unsafe sleep practices in June 2018.

Newswatch 12 talked with a local daycare provider about about how the state regulates their business.

Kimberly Wilson, Owner of Precious Angels LLC in Medford, says that the state makes unannounced home visits to her daycare about once a year. She says they are checking her home for both safety and health violations. She says the state will also come out to inspect if a parent makes a complaint to the DHS.

"If an offense is founded then you have to actually post it where parents can find it and notify the parents that you have actually been found not following regulations," says Wilson.

But she says that's a new regulation.

Wilson told NewsWatch 12 about the sleep practices for infants that she is required to follow.

"You are to lay them on their backs and it has to be in a playpen or a crib. There can be no loose blankets, if there is a sheet is has to be loose fitting the only thing that can be in with the infant is a pacifier. No toys, no bibs, no blankets, stuffed animals," says Wilson.

She also has to follow rules about how many kids she can have in her care at a time and making sure all unsafe objects, medications, and chemicals are kept out of a child's reach.
EUGENE, Ore. -- The family of a Eugene man who was stabbed to death in April 2017 has filed a $6.5 million lawsuit against the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board and Springfield Police, claiming the alleged killer was on "holiday leave" from a state-run mental hospital at the time.

Josh Jaschke is set to go trial, starting April 16, for allegedly killing 49-year-old Spiros "Steve" Ghenatos in Eugene. Ghenatos' friend Sherri Shaw said the two men knew each other and Jaschke was staying at Ghenatos' apartment.

"He took a beautiful person out of this world," Shaw said. "Steve would have done anything for anyone."

The lawsuit alleges the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board failed to supervise Jaschke when he was on a holiday pass that was set up to allow him to visit his mom in southern Oregon.

Court documents state Jaschke was serving a 20-year sentence for first-degree assault.

The lawsuit also alleges that before the murder, the Springfield Police Department let Jaschke go after a domestic dispute even though they knew he was supposed to be in custody for violating the conditions of his holiday leave.

Shaw said she believes that Jaschke is faking the mental illness.

"I hope he gets locked up for the rest of his life," Shaw said. "I hope he goes to a prison where he belongs, in a cage."

KEZI 9 News reached out to the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board and the city of Springfield, but both said they could not comment on pending litigation.
SALEM, Ore. (AP) -- Oregon Gov. Kate Brown endorsed a growing movement to make daylight saving time permanent.

When asked if she was in favor of a proposal to abolish the yearly time shift, the Democrat told reporters on Thursday: "Hell yes!"

"I think everyone's done with the time change," she added.

Washington and California are also considering shifting to a permanent daylight saving time. Florida became the first state to approve such a change.

Any state law extending daylight saving time would have to be approved by Congress.

Brown noted that this was one of the few issues where she agrees with President Donald Trump. The president tweeted earlier this week that daylight saving time year-round would be "O.K. with me!"
CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Hundreds of firefighters from around the world were in Seattle over the weekend for the 28th Annual Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Firefighter Stairclimb.

Each year, about 2,000 firefighters climb 69 flights of stairs at the Columbia Center in full gear to help find a cure for blood cancer.

The Corvallis Fire Department Stairclimb team was one of the top fundraising teams this year. The 21-member team raised nearly $33,000.

"As you're climbing, on all the different floors, they have pictures and some are in honor of and some are in memory of...so there's over 140 pictures of people you're doing this for," Lt. Rob Yencopal said.

He said they're collecting donations through April 11. If you'd like to donate, click here.
OREGON -- After years of negotiations and disappointment with the Oregon State Legislature's proposed budgets, Oregon educators are saying enough is enough. And if a deal can't be reached soon, teachers say they plan to hold a walkout.

Tad Shannon, who has been president of the Eugene Education Association for seven years, said they've kept steady pressure on lawmakers to get the resources teachers need to best serve students.

In a letter sent out to teachers, Shannon wrote: "No one can do this for us. The time is now. We can't wait any longer."

The letter claims Oregon has one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation as well as the third highest class size.

Now, teachers are speaking out about the importance of smaller class sizes.

I believe education is about relationships, and in general when we have these mega class sizes -- when youre seeing 34 students come in in a 45-minute class period and then another 34 to 35 -- you just dont have time to build those relationships, said Paul Neiffer, a teacher in the Ione School District in Morrow County.

"We can't continually cut education and expect the results to continually improve," Shannon said.

Administrators and teachers alike said students thrive in smaller classrooms and in larger ones they suffer.

Diana Wallace, a learning consultant, said larger classrooms have the ability to create learning gaps.

"From the kid's perspective, it's difficult because they don't get the one-on-one time that they need, and so if they have a learning gap, they're not getting the interventions maybe that they should receive because the teacher can't differentiate for that many kids," Wallace said.

If legislators and educators cannot reach a compromise, the walkout will happen May 8.

Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that local educators are upset with Gov. Kate Brown's budget proposal. In fact, the concern is with a proposal by leaders in the state Legislature.
By J. Keeler Johnson ("Keelerman") Twitter: @J_Keelerman

A week later than originally expected, the Kentucky Derby favorites Game Winner and Improbable will make their much-anticipated three-year-old debuts in the two separate divisions of Saturday's $750,000 Rebel Stakes (gr. II) at Oaklawn Park.

Both colts are Grade 1 winners trained by Bob Baffert, who has won the Rebel six times since 2010. They'll be heavily favored to give Baffert his seventh and eighth wins in this rich Road to the Kentucky Derby prep race, but could one or the other be vulnerable to an upset? Let's take a look at the main contenders in each race....

Division #1

In my opinion, this is the deeper of the two divisions, but it's also the one where I'm more confident in the morning line favorite. #9 Improbable is 3-5 for a reason; the son of City Zip went 3-for-3 last year with blowout wins in the Street Sense Stakes and the Los Alamitos Futurity (gr. I). In both races, he easily defeated high-class competition by open lengths, demonstrating the ability to track the pace and power home with authority. He also ran fast on the Beyer and BRIS speed figure scales.

Improbable hasn't run in more than four months, but he's been training up a storm at Santa Anita, throwing down eleven workouts since January 9th. That includes a bullet five furlongs in :58 2/5 as early as February 1, plus six furlongs in 1:12 on February 25 and a couple of :59-and-change moves in March.

If Improbable has one shortcoming, it's that he's shown a tendency to get aggressive and a bit rank early on in his races, but drawing post position nine in the Rebel Stakes should afford him the option to stay in the clear and settle into stride while tracking the speedy pair of #7 Classy John (a two-time stakes winner sprinting six furlongs) and #8 Galilean. Granted, Improbable will be a very short price and not really worth playing in the win pool, but if you're looking to play the all-stakes Pick 4, he looks like a very logical single and is my clear choice to win.

Speaking of Galilean, he's the most likely candidate to produce an upset, considering that he's won the King Glorious Stakes and the California Cup Derby against California-breds by a combined 13  lengths in his last two starts. Trained by Jerry Hollendorfer, Galilean obviously has a lot of talent, but the caliber of competition that he's been beating is questionable, and I was a little disappointed by his victory in the California Cup Derbyhe had to work harder than I expected to win by 4  lengths as the 1-20 favorite. For what it's worth, he'll also be conceding three pounds to Improbable despite being the less accomplished runner.

If you're looking for a longshot to play in the exotics, I would suggest #4 Easy Shot. He was no match for the talented Mucho Gusto in the Robert B. Lewis Stakes (gr. III) last time out, but he didn't miss second place by much against the capable graded stakes winner Gunmetal Gray. Previously, Easy Shot had finished fifth in the Sham Stakes (gr. III), but I think that performance was much better than it appears at first glancehe was easily on his way to a third-place finish (maybe better) until he got shut off late in the homestretch, causing him to take up and lose his momentum. He's arguably no more than the fourth-best California shipper in this race, but that could still be sufficient to land him on the board with the right trip.

Division #2

I have had #5 Game Winner listed at the top of my Kentucky Derby rankings since he won the Del Mar Futurity (gr. I) back in September, and so far, this beautifully-bred son of Candy Ride has lived up to expectations by recording two additional Grade 1 wins in the American Pharoah Stakes (gr. I) and the Breeders' Cup Juvenile (gr. I).

I was particularly impressed by Game Winner's triumph in the Juvenile, as he raced wide every step of the way, but gamely overcame his tough trip to win going away by 2  lengths over the Grade 1 winner Knicks Go. Game Winner's efforts for the year were more than enough to secure him an Eclipse Award as the champion two-year-old male of 2018.

But as much as I respect Game Winner's talent and accomplishments, and as much as I believe he can achieve this year given his ability and stamina-oriented pedigree, I wonder if he'll be vulnerable to an upset on Saturday. Ever since Game Winner and Improbable made their mutual returns to the work tab on January 9, Game Winner has seemed to be a little behind schedule compared to his stablemate. He's posted just nine workouts this year compared to Improbable's eleven, going roughly ten days between workouts early on before accelerating his work schedule in February.

Also, Game Winner works have generally been longer and slower than those posted by Improbable. That's not really surprising nor concerning since Game Winner has never been as flashy as his stablemate, but it also leaves me wondering whether Game Winner will be short of his absolute best for the Rebel Stakes. His workmanlike, late-running style is less reminiscent of Baffert's recent stars American Pharoah and Justify and instead similar to that of Lookin at Lucky, Baffert's two-time champion who had to summon every ounce of his ability to win the 2010 Rebel Stakes in his first start of the season.

If Game Winner does come up short, #6 Omaha Beach seems like clearly the most logical candidate to take advantage. This son of War Front managed to lose his first four starts, but the first three came on turf, and he lost the last three by the combined margin of less than a length while knocking heads with the well-regarded Nolo Contesto and the future stakes winners Flying Scotsman and Bob and Jackie.

After showing improvement in his dirt debut, Omaha Beach stepped up significantly in a seven-furlong maiden special weight at Santa Anita. After tracking a very quick pace over a sloppy, sealed track that was playing fast, Omaha Beach powered clear with complete authority and drew off to win by nine lengths.

Granted, that was a sprint, but Omaha Beach's four previous runs had all come going a mile or farther, so I don't think there's any reason to question his stamina. He appears to be rounding into form at the right time, and his superior early speed should give him a tactical advantage over Game Winner. All things being equal, I still think Game Winner is the better horse (and a legitimate contender for the Kentucky Derby), but I'm not sure all things will be equal this Saturday. Omaha Beach's recent races could give him the advantage he needs if Game Winner is indeed a race or two away from reaching his peak. I'm willing to take a shot with him on top since he strikes me as the only horse with a serious chance to upset the favorite, making him fair value at his 7-2 morning line odds.

Now it's your turn! Who do you like in the two divisions of the Rebel Stakes?

*****

Want to test your handicapping skills against fellow Unlocking Winners readers? Check out the Unlocking Winners contests pagethere's a new challenge every week!

*****

The Road to the Kentucky Derby handicapping challenge is back for the fifth straight year! Check out the Road to the Kentucky Derby contest page for more details.



J. Keeler Johnson (also known as "Keelerman") is a writer, blogger, videographer, handicapper, and all-around horse racing enthusiast. A great fan of racing history, he considers Dr. Fager to be the greatest racehorse ever produced in America, but counts Zenyatta as his all-time favorite. He is the founder of the horse racing website www.theturfboard.com.
But lately, some in the flock have been baring their teeth. Being humiliated, ignored and taken for granted by an overbearing narcissist who has little regard for conservative principles has lost its charm for a group of Republican lawmakers. They have begun to act on the novel idea that they have every right to oppose a president of their own party when hes wrong.
European Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan has slammed as beggars belief the no-deal Brexit tariffs on agricultural goods proposed by the British government.

The Kilkenny man said any decision to introduce a temporary tariff regime in the case of a no-deal Brexit was an 'ill-thought out' proposal aimed at breaking European Union unity and frightening Ireland.

The European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development from the village of Tullaroan condemned the British government for proposing to impose a draconian regime of tariffs on March 29th and said the contradictions of the proposal beggars belief.

We dont even know if its legal, if its compatible with the World Trade Organisation rules, Mr Hogan told RTEs Six One News. I think this is an ill-thought out proposal to change the news cycle in London. In the event of a new deal I dont believe these issues will actually be relevant.

The purpose of this is to try and break the European Union unity in respect of Ireland in particular. The EU has been very strongly supportive of the Irish issues and the UK do not like this. So every effort is being made between now and the European Council meeting next week to try and break that unity, and it will fail," he predicted.
The European Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan has said the EU stands ready to support Irish farmers in a no-deal Brexit. "The European Commission will protect farmers from the impact of UK tariffs, the European Commission for Agriculture," Phil Hogan has said.

When asked by Irish Farmers Journal editor Justin McCarthy at the Navigating Global Trade conference if he could give farmers assurances that the Commission would put in place the tools that would nullify the impact of tariffs the Commissioner said; thats exactly what our intention is.

We are confident that we will have the necessary tools to help our farmers in our market situation as well as in our income situation, he said. He said one never knows when the UK might have an 11th hour conversion to a deal. I hope they come on board, weve had enough instability and uncertainty. Its beggars belief that the UK and its public representatives still dont understand that the EU works together, he said.

Tools

The Commissioner outlined in his speech seven or eight tools available that would be mobilised in helping farmers in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Were not going to find ourselves in a situation talking at a time where we dont know the political outcome of the negotiations, we dont know what the tariff schedules are going to be in spite of the efforts by the UK to try and frighten people this week and I think that farmers need the assurances that these are just proposals. This is only the start of a process and their market situation will be underpinned by market measures in the same way that weve done in the past, he said.
AUSTIN, Minn. - The Austin Police Department is assisting with the recent Amber Alert issued by Milwaukee police.

Austin police said 2-year-old Noelani Robinson was in the Austin area within the last 30 days.

We are asking for any information that may lead to the safe return of Noelani. If you have any information, please contact the Law Enforcement Center at 507.437.9400 ext 1.

From Wisconsin Amber Alert: On 3/11/2019 Dariaz L Higgins did not return 2 year old Noelani J. Robinson to her mother. Dariaz L. Higgins (also known as Dariaz Taylor and Dariaz Lewis) was arrested on 03/13/2019 and is in police custody. Noelani Robinson is still missing. Noelani may be in the company of a relative, friend, or acquaintance of Dariaz Higgins, and may be outside of the state of Wisconsin.
MANTORVILLE, Minn.  Authorities are concerned a large ice dam on the Zumbro River could cause flash flooding when it breaks free.

The Dodge County Sheriffs Office says the ice dam just west of the Highway 57 bridge, south of Berne on the middle fork of the Zumbro River, has backed up a large amount of water. When the ice dam breaks free, which the Sheriffs Office says could happen sometime Friday, that water will rush down the river toward Pine Island. Homes and properties along County Road 24 all the way into Pine Island could be affected.

The Sheriffs Office is asking anyone who lives in the area to be aware of possible fast rising water on the Zumbro River. Olmsted County and the Minnesota Department of Transportation are also monitoring the situation.

Updates will be posted on the Dodge County Sheriffs Office Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Facebook and Instagram are up and running again after being down Wednesday.

The social media giant turned to their rival twitter to let users know they were having technical problems. The Facebook outage affected users around the globe for as long as 14 hours leaving some users unable to post content or login. Mohammed Gibreel says it was frustrating dealing with the sites.

I shut off my phone and open it a couple of times but it didnt work out and I thought that maybe my phone is having an issue with the internet, said Gibreel.

19-year-old Amber Beighley had some technical difficulties.

"I didn't think anything of it," said Beighley.

The nursing student wasn't devastated by the downtime.

"For a lot of people it's a way to communicate and see the world," said Beighley.

For Mohammed Gibreel the Facebook platform is essential.

"The first thing I do when I wake up I open the Facebook, Instagram, Youtube to see what's going on," said Gibreel.

Social media is the way this Sudanese man remains linked to his homeland. Sudan is enduring political turmoil. He says the outage has turned his world upside down.

"So the news the government prevents them from them from covering the protest for the people so they use Facebook that is our only source now."

Beighly is keenly aware that Facebook is the way many of us connect to the world.

"it's a comfort for most people."

Facebook says a change to server configuration was to blame rather than any cyber hackers. The company's stock fell nearly three percent this morning in the wake of the outage.
FOREST CITY, Iowa - With a boil advisory in place, Forest City will be distributing free water to residents over the next several days. Residents can pick up one case of water per household per day. The city is also looking for volunteers to help give out water.

The issue began early Friday morning when the city said the following: "Due to a loss of pressure in the water system the City of Forest City is under a boil order until further notice."

Water will be available for pick up at the following times:

Friday (3/15) 12:30 pm- 9pm

Saturday (3/16) 8am - 5pm

Sunday (3/17) 8am - 5pm
On the citys finances, Lightfoot is straightforward. She doesnt promise pie-in-the-sky tax relief or miraculous eradication of Chicagos monstrous debt. What she does promise is an exercise in cost-cutting and case-building before turning to tax hikes. She says one of her first acts as mayor would be to hire a professional risk manager to reduce what the city spends on legal settlements, attorney fees and liability judgments. On police misconduct lawsuits alone, the city spent more than $113 million in 2018 and more than a half-billion total since 2011, according to a recent analysis from The Chicago Reporter. Reducing those costs is an urgent concern, Lightfoot says, along with speeding the transfer of the citys workers compensation and disability program from the City Councils Finance Committee to professionals at City Hall. She expects millions of dollars in cost savings there, too.
MILWAUKEE (AP)  Milwaukee's police chief says authorities are asking for help "from the entire nation" to find a missing 2-year-old girl after a man was arrested on suspicion of killing her mother.

Chief Alfonso Morales says Dariaz Higgins has been providing police with information on the whereabouts of his daughter, Noelani Robinson, but it has "proven to be untrue."

Higgins is accused of fatally shooting Sierra Robinson and wounding one of her friends Monday. Police arrested him Wednesday and prosecutors have charged him with first-degree murder.

Prosecutors say Higgins, of Miami, came to Milwaukee to give Noelani to Robinson but it's unknown if Higgins actually brought her with him. Police say Robinson had been living in Las Vegas since February.

Police have said Noelani may be in Austin, Minnesota, but Morales emphasized she could be anywhere.
KASSON, Minn. - On Monday and Tuesday, Principal of Kasson-Mantorville Elementary School, Ariana Wright, testified in front of the Minnesota House and Senate in support of HF 1177. If passed, the piece of legislature would increase funding for the Minnesota Math Corps, a part of the Americorps.

Currently, Math Corps tutors work with 4th through 8th graders. Increased funding would allow Kindergarten through 8th graders to receive the one-on-one math intervention tutoring.

"We lay that groundwork here at the elementary level and so I'm very passionate about making sure that our students, our future engineers, our future teachers, our future leaders are well-equipped," explains Wright.

On Wednesday, Kasson-Mantorville received an annual Math and Reading Corps grant. Next school year, 3.5 reading tutors and 1 math tutor will be working in the elementary building. If the HF 1177 passes, eventually more math tutors could be working with KoMets.

"Hopefully with this legislation, we'd be able to expand that more quickly and I'd be happy to pilot any new curriculum that Math Corps is looking to add," adds Principal Wright.

According to the Office of the Revisor of Statutes, the most recent update to HF 1177 was on February 14. It was referred to the Education Finance Division.

This week is both Math Week, proclaimed by Governor Tim Walz, and Americorps Week.
GARNER, Iowa  A school teacher arrested for drunk driving is pleading not guilty.

Raylea Lynn Hepker, 27 of Britt, was charged with OWI-3rd offense after being arrested on January 28. Britt police say she was pulled over after a complaint of a vehicle driving on the wrong side of the road. Officers say there was a strong smell of alcohol coming from Hepkers vehicle.

Court documents say a breath test found a blood alcohol content of .267, more than three times the legal limit.

Hepker, who is still listed as a teacher on the West Hancock Community Schools website, is scheduled to stand trial starting on May 1.
In the 1930s, when Social Security was signed into law, it was a pretty straightforward process for eligible retirees. There wasnt a difficult decision about when to file for benefits. You had to be 65 to claim your benefits  there was no early retirement age. And delaying past 65 didnt get you extra  so it really wasnt worth waiting. Today, its far tougher to pin down exactly when you should file  even if you only consider age (which you shouldnt). You can take your benefits as early as 62  though the earlier you claim, the less youll get  or as late as age 70 (with the incentive that youll get 8% more for each year you wait past your full retirement age). Of course, some people dont have much choice; they claim at 62 because they need the money. Theyve lost their job or had to quit because of health or other issues. According to the Social Security Administration, among Social Security beneficiaries, 48% of married couples and 69% of unmarried individuals receive 50% or more of their income from Social Security. Theres also the fear factor: Will Social Security be solvent when its time for you to start collecting? The number of Americans 65 and older is projected to increase to approximately 79 million in 2035 from 49 million today. Right now, there are 2.8 workers putting money into the Social Security bucket for every one retiree taking money out. In 2035, there will be 2.2 workers contributing for every one retiree being paid benefits. Its not surprising that people file early, based on their belief that the money may not be there later.

And then there are always those who really dont give the whole thing much thought  theyre tired of working, or they just do what their parents did. In many cases, thats filing before their full retirement age. Still, most of the people I see do fret over the filing decision. Theyd like to think theres some magical equation that will give them their exact break-even point, so they dont claim too soon or wait too late. And there is  kind of. You can run the numbers using calculators provided at www.ssa.gov/planners/calculators/, www.aarp.org/tools/ and other sites. Before you go to the trouble, though, you should know that Social Security benefits are designed to be actuarially equivalent for a person with an average lifespan. Which means it shouldnt make much of a difference when you start collecting benefits. There are, however, many external factors that can greatly affect what you, as an individual, actually receive. Taking those things into account could help you make a smarter decision about when to file. They include: 1. Your health and family history. If youre not well or have a family history of heart disease, cancer or some other illness, you may want to retire and take your benefits as early as possible. That way you can enjoy doing what you want and spend precious time with your loved ones. On the other hand, if youre healthy and/or most of your family members have had a long life, you may wish to delay filing and get the maximum benefit to see you through what could be a decades-long retirement. Remember, Americans in general are living longer. The first person to receive a monthly Social Security check  Ida May Fuller  lived to 100, but that was rare back then. In 1940, when Fuller turned 65, the average woman her age could expect to live another 14 years. Now, the average 65-year-old woman can expect to live another 21 years. 2. Your spouse. If youre married, one of your primary concerns is probably what will happen to your spouse if you die first. When one spouse dies, the lower of the two Social Security payments goes away. If you have a pension, depending on which survivorship option you choose at retirement, he or she also could lose that income stream. So its important to maximize the higher earners benefit when possible  especially if Social Security will be a major source of income.

If the higher earner in the family is one with a poor family history of longevity, you should plan early in case delaying is not an option and you have to claim a smaller benefit. 3. Your taxes. Back in Ida May Fullers day, Social Security benefits were exempt from taxes. Thats no longer the case for everyone. Now, the IRS measures your provisional income to decide if youre required to pay taxes on your benefits. Its calculated by adding your adjusted gross income, any tax-free interest you received and 50% of your Social Security benefits. If the number is over the designated threshold ($25,000 and up annually for singles and $32,000 and up for those married filing jointly), based on your filing status, your Social Security benefits could be taxed up to 50% or even 85%. Because many people now retire with a significant amount of savings in a tax-deferred retirement account, this is an important consideration. If youre getting Social Security income and withdrawing from your IRA at the same time, you may pay more in taxes. You might want to delay claiming for a while and withdraw from your tax-deferred accounts at a lower rate. 4. Your other assets. Before you decide to delay claiming to save on taxes or to get a higher Social Security payment down the road, you should be sure you have enough income to cover your current expenses without drawing too much from your retirement savings. Youll likely want to leave some money there to keep growing in case you need it later in retirement. 5. Your legacy. If leaving behind something for your children is a priority, you could use your Social Security income to make that happen. One way would be to claim your benefits (which they cant inherit) and leave more in your IRA (which they can). Or, if you are wealthy and dont need Social Security to support your lifestyle, you could consider claiming your Social Security benefits and using that money to purchase life insurance. The critical thing to remember is that your Social Security filing decision cant be made in a vacuum. It should be an important piece of an overall financial plan. There are hundreds of claiming strategies and thousands of governing rules. To truly maximize your benefits, youll have to choose what works best for you, your spouse and your family. Take your time, think it through and dont hesitate to ask for help from a qualified financial adviser. Kim Franke-Folstad contributed to this article.
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In ancient Rome, interregnum was the term given to the period between stable governments when anything untoward might occur, and sometimes did  civil unrest, warfare between warlords, power vacuums and, finally, succession wars.

But, eventually, the dust would settle and the victors, whoever they might be, would at some point, restabilise the empire, often with a new map, showing the latest lines of geographic possession.

In 1929, the Italian Antonio Gramsci was in a fascist prison, writing about what he considered to be a new interregnum  a Europe that was tearing itself apart. He anticipated civil unrest, war between nations and repeated changes in the lines of geographic possession.

At that time, he was attributed as saying, The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.

And, of course, looking back from our vantage point in the twenty-first century, we have no difficulty in confirming that he was correct in his prognosis. The world war that followed, brought forward the worst traits in mankind. The sociopaths of the world came centre-stage. By the time the dust had settled, tens of millions were dead.

What we do have difficulty with is recognizing that the same pattern is again with us. National leaders and their advisors spoiling for war, building up weaponry, creating senseless proxy wars in other nations backyards and playing a dangerous game of chicken with other major powers.

This will not end well, of course. It never does. Once the shoving-match has begun, it only escalates. And, at some point, whether its the false-flag assassination of an Archduke, as in World War I, or the false flag invasion of Germany by Poland, as in World War II, we can always count on some excuse being created to justify diving headlong into war.

Its also true that, when empires get into economic trouble thats too far gone for any solution to be viable, a trick thats always employed to by political leaders to keep the citizens from removing them from their seats of power, is to start a war. A people will, if they believe their homeland is in peril, accept the temporary removal of their freedoms.

Even in the United States, the famed Land of the Free, political leaders have routinely imprisoned dissidents in times of warfare. People tend to get behind their leaders in times of war, no matter how undeserved that loyalty might be.

And so, now is the time of monsters, as Mr. Gramsci rightly stated. A time of uncertainty, when countries are in turmoil and would-be leaders are jostling for power with existing leaders. An interregnum.

Troubled times tend to bring out all the crazies  all the sociopathic-types that would find it hard to succeed in stable, prosperous times.

In such times, the average person becomes worried that things are not going to turn out well. Thats perfectly understandable, but, unfortunately, most people lack both the imagination and the courage to cope with how the times are impacting their lives. They instead rely on others to provide a torch that might provide escape from the darkness.

Not surprising then, that every snake-oil salesman in town sees an opportunity to offer big promises  promises that he has neither the ability nor the inclination to fulfill.

At such times, the people of a country tend to become polarized, placing their faith in one political party or another, hoping that their party will make the bad stuff go away.

In the US, we see, on the liberal side, promises for free health care for all, a guaranteed basic income, housing for those who cannot afford it, and an endless stream of promises that, if the government were to implement them all, they will not be able to pay for them, even with 100% taxation from those who presently pay tax.

On the conservative side, we see promises such as Make America Great Again, with tax rebates that do not rejuvenate the economy, breaks for firms that have expatriated, but do not fool them into returning, claims to cut budgets, only to increase them, and promises to eliminate debt, only to expand it.

We see presidential elections in which one of the two leading candidates is a textbook narcissist, whilst the other displays all the traits of sociopathy.

And we see a waitress elected to Congress by a substantial margin, raised to the status of heroine, merely for promising all things to all people, whilst offering no plan as to how that might come about. Record numbers of candidates pour into the political arena, seeking a last grab at power, prior to systemic failure.

But, to be fair, the US is by no means alone in delivering incapable people with nonsensical solutions to the higher offices.

In the UK, each leading party states emphatically that a hard Brexit would be a disaster, yet neither party can come up with a working alternative. What they can do, as in America, is point fingers and shout invectives at each other.

In France, riots have become a weekend staple, whilst the disconnected president essentially says, Let them eat cake, serving only to create further fury on the street.

To be sure, the problem begins at the top. But it doesnt end there. It sifts down to the proletariat, who, unable to come up with constructive solutions, create their own monsters, trashing the shops and burning the cars of people who had no hand in creating the problem.

But, surely, this is just a one-off phase in which the best and brightest are temporarily pushed offstage, but will soon return, yes?

Well, unfortunately, no. Historically, a period such as this one is followed by one of increased madness. Historically, the next step is societal breakdown. Riots, secessions and revolutions become commonplace, accompanied by economic collapse.

Out of these events come the worst of all the monsters. Its in the wake of such developments that the people of any country then turn away from those that made the empty promises and toward those who promise revenge against an ill-defined group who are characterized as having caused the problems.

Thats when the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Hitlers  the greatest monsters  are swept into power. They invariably deliver the same message  that theyll seek out the aristocracy, the gentry, the patricians, and strip them of their positions and possessions.

Invariably the way that this shakes out is not that the average man rises up, taking his fair share of the spoils. Instead, the leaders take the spoils and the proletariat are reduced to an equality of poverty.

Our friend Mr. Gramsci found himself imprisoned by Benito Mussolini and died from illnesses incurred in prison. Unfortunately, his approach was to complain, but remain, as his country deteriorated around him. This proved, for him, to be the worst of choices.

And, so it is today.
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(Kitco News) - The precious metals space will soon be reawakened by palladiums rally, with gold, silver, and platinum prices heading higher, according to Bloomberg Intelligence (BI).

The precious metals market is about to resume a rally, in our view, on the back of a surge in the palladium price, BIs senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone wrote in his March report. For the first time in five years, the Bloomberg Precious Metals Spot Subindex is poking above its 72-month average. It may be a better bullish broad-market indication if the recent visit above $1,500 an ounce in palladium marks a peak.

Palladium broke the $1,500 an ounce level for the first time in the end of February, with June palladium futures last trading at $1,513.20, down 0.09% on the day.

A pattern in which the precious metals follow palladiums lead has already been established, McGlone pointed out.

Platinum, silver and gold embarked on decade-long rallies shortly after a similar parabolic palladium rally and peak in 2001, he said. History is likely to repeat, as we see it. The precious metals index is just recovering from the halfway point of that rally, with platinum the most unloved, similar to 1999. The platinum discount to palladium appears to be unsustainable.

Platinum and silver have the most upside potential, with the former looking ready to test the resistance level of $1,500 an ounce, BI pointed out.

That level is the recent record high in palladium, but only the halfway mark of the 2008-09 bear market for platinum. At the bottom of that range now, with the palladium-to-platinum ratio extending the 2001 peak, we think platinum is ready to take the bull market baton, noted McGlone.

Silver has room to rise above $16 an ounce and test the resistance level around the $18 level, the strategist added.

Silver hasn't sustained above this mean in almost two years. What's different now is a potential peak dollar and mean reversion from the extreme at last year's lows, McGlone explained.

Gold is also looking interesting with peaking U.S. dollar and strong gold ETF inflows defining the space at the moment.

Gold ETF investors appear unstoppable, collecting ounces last equal to about $1,460, the strategist wrote. Up almost 60% since the Federal Reserve's first rate hike this cycle, the percentage increase in total known gold ETF holdings is more than double that of the spot price. Such a disparity last occurred about a decade ago, shortly after the inception of gold ETFs (2004) and coincident with the financial crisis.

Other significant gold drivers include increasing U.S. budget and trade deficits, more stock-market volatility, and uncertainty surrounding the U.S. 2020 elections, the report added.
SYDNEY/LONDON (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of school students around the world walked out of classes on Friday in a global strike to protest against government inaction on climate change.

Climate change is worse than Voldemort, read a handmade sign carried by one student in Wellington, referring to the evil wizard in the hugely popular Harry Potter books and films.

The oceans are rising, so are we, read another in Sydney.

Student protests in Wellington, Sydney and Melbourne drew tens of thousands of people. In Europe, students packed streets and squares in Paris, Madrid, Rome, Brussels and other cities for the Fridays for Future protests.

Demonstrations were also planned in the United States.

The worldwide student strike movement started in August 2018, when 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began protesting outside her parliament on school days. She has since been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

On Friday, she spoke at a Stockholm demonstration. Other rallies were held in 100 towns around Sweden.

We have only been born into this world, we are going to have to live with this crisis our whole lives. So will our children and grandchildren and coming generations, Thunberg said. We are not going to accept this. We are striking because we want a future and we are going to carry on.

Thousands marched through central London with banners reading The future is in our hands and Were missing lessons to teach you one.

Education is important but climate change is more important, 14-year old Molly Powell said.

CLIMATE CATASTROPHE

Scientists say fossil fuel use releases greenhouse gases that trap heat and lift global temperatures, bringing more floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

The 2015 Paris climate conference pledge to keep the increase in global average temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (35 F) above pre-industrial levels requires a radical cutback in use of coal and fossil fuels.

More than 220 rallies were held in Germany. In Duesseldorf, some 2,000 schoolchildren paraded with a carnival float depicting a giant effigy of Thunberg with Do something about the climate catastrophe at last written on her raised arms.

They stopped around the city, home to the headquarters of many of Germanys largest manufacturers, reading out calls for change. The clock is ticking and time is against us! they shouted. We are the last generation that can fix this.

About 60 students protested at government house in Bangkok, holding cardboard signs to campaign against plastic. Thailand is one of the worlds worst marine plastic polluters.

As youths who will inherit the land, we gather here to demand that the government work with us to solve these problems, said 17-year-old Thiti Usanakul, of student-led group Grin Green International.

The group was later invited to meet officials at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in two weeks.

There were also demonstrations in South Korea, India and South Africa. In Singapore, where strict laws regulate public assembly, young people planned a virtual campaign on social media.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern supported the strikes, saying teenagers should not wait for voting age to use their voices. [L3N21013U]

That contrasted with politicians in Australia and Britain who rebuked them for missing lessons.

For action on issues that they think is important, they should do that after school or on weekends, said Dan Tehan, Australias education minister.

Wellington parent Alex, who marched beside his 11-year-old son, disagreed: Its a much better day of education. This is the greatest issue of our time.
HOUSTON (Reuters) - A glance at the attendee list at one of the worlds largest energy industry events in Houston this week left little question about the growing influence of the United States over global oil politics.

Present: top U.S. diplomat Mike Pompeo. Absent: leading Saudi and Russian officials, and most OPEC nations.

As the United States weans itself off foreign oil imports - thanks to booming domestic production - the complex web of politics and business interests that have shaped decades of Washingtons energy diplomacy in the Middle East and beyond is changing.

That shift was unmistakable in Houston this week.

In his keynote address, Pompeo spoke of exploiting the power the United States is accruing through rising energy supply in punishing bad actors; he laid out a vision of working with energy firms to isolate Iran and Venezuela; and he emphasized the need to protect oil supplies by countering Chinas moves to control the South China Sea.

The Secretary of State delivered the half-hour speech to a packed room of energy executives, while dozens more watched via jumbo screens at the adjacent convention center.

It marked the type of reception usually reserved for the Saudis and other members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. When OPEC Secretary General Mohammed Barkindo addressed the conference a day earlier, the auditorium was half empty.

The speech itself was a far cry from past addresses by OPEC heavyweights: Barkindo called for cooperation with the shale industry, which has helped drive U.S. oil output to more than 12 million barrels per day (bpd), making the United States the world's largest producer. (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2VIJTbg)

Just two years ago, Saudi Oil Minister Khalid al-Falih delivered a combative keynote speech warning U.S. shale executives that OPEC would not carry free riders in its efforts to balance world oil supply and demand.

It turned out to be an empty threat, and a reflection of how OPEC had struggled to deal with the surge in U.S. energy production.

POMPEO MEETS BIG OIL

Beyond his keynote at the Houston conference - the first ever for a sitting Secretary of State at the gathering known as CERAWeek - Pompeo circulated among executives in closed-door meetings, even, according to a source, hosting a group informally at Pappasitos Cantina, a Mexican restaurant in the Hilton Americas Hotel where the conference took place.

Im not used to it, but I think its great, said Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, saying she was impressed by Pompeo and his teams outreach. Occidental has been one of the biggest winners from the surge of U.S. shale exports.

In one private meeting on Tuesday, Pompeo and his State Department energy adviser Frank Fannon sat down with big oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, BP plc, Occidental and Chevron Corp.

At that meeting, first reported by Reuters, Pompeo talked about how the government and the worlds top energy companies could work together to encourage U.S. allies to buy more of its oil, according to two sources familiar with the discussion. He also asked for their cooperation on Iran.

The Trump administration has imposed hefty sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, both OPEC members, with growing confidence that there is enough oil from the U.S. and elsewhere to deal with any supply disruptions.

So far, that bet has panned out - global oil prices are currently less than $70 a barrel.

Coming into office, President Donald Trump promised to deregulate the energy industry and assert U.S. oil independence - a sharp turn from an Obama administration that, while placing sanctions on Irans oil exports, largely built its energy policy around renewables and reducing emissions.

Aided by rising shale production and new technology that has made pumping U.S. crude less costly, Trump has also been able to publicly lean on OPEC, frequently taking to Twitter to urge members to increase output to keep prices low.

Under the Trump administration the U.S. feels far more emboldened by our oil-and-gas production and the support and alliance they feel with Saudi Arabia, said Sarah Ladislaw, who leads energy policy analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Washingtons growing influence, she added, has already started to shift oil politics among allies and adversaries across the world.

Saudi Arabia and Russia in September, for instance, informed the U.S. before speaking to OPEC allies when they reached an agreement to boost production ahead of the official restart of sanctions on Iran. [L8N1WJ5M6]

In addition to the Middle East, the Trump administration is hoping to use U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe to counter the planned Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would bring gas from Russia.

Germany in February said it would consider building two LNG terminals to import from the United States, bowing to U.S. pressure to diversify supply after Trump termed Nord Stream 2 a horrific project that would make Berlin more reliant on Russia.

We dont want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream II project, any more than we ourselves want to be dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies, Pompeo told the conference.

LESS OPEC

OPEC had its smallest representation for at least five years at the event. Saudi Arabia sent no senior speakers, though that was in part because state-run Saudi Aramco held board meetings in Riyadh this week.

OPEC is a less important player because the United States is the number-one producer of oil, natural gas and refined products, said Mike Sommers, president of U.S. industry group the American Petroleum Agency, at the conference.

The U.S. Department of Energy sent its largest contingent ever, it told Reuters, without giving a specific number.

OPEC has responded to the growing influence of U.S. production by forging an alliance with Russia and other non-OPEC producers to curtail supplies from a wider swathe of the global energy industry. (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2U9HzK9)

The most relevant aspect of OPEC now is where it has reached beyond its organization, which is Russia, and whether that can be sustained or formalized, said Suzanne Maloney, deputy director of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution.

There have been mixed signals on that front. Russias Igor Sechin, head of oil giant Rosneft, has expressed support for ending production cuts, believing OPECs deal plays into shales hands because it underpins prices.

They (OPEC) know they cannot do it alone. To swing the pendulum from left to right in terms of production to make sure you get the price that you want, you still need other producers, said Saidu Muhammad, chief gas and power operating officer at Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.

"Today it is Russia - tomorrow I believe it will be the U.S." (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2EUmNsT)
DETROIT (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett earned salary, bonus and stock awards of $17.1 million in 2018, up from $16.3 million the previous year, while adjusted pretax profit for the automaker dropped $2.6 billion from 2017, the company said on Friday.

Including pensions and perks, Hackett made $17.7 million. The company said Hackett, who took the helm of the No. 2 U.S. automaker in May 2017, made 276 times the median total compensation of all Ford employees of $64,316.

Ford Chairman Bill Ford earned salary, bonus and stock awards for the year of $12.5 million. Including pensions and perks, he earned $13.8 million.

The company reported 2018 adjusted pre-tax income of $7 billion, down from $9.6 billion in 2017.

Ford is restructuring its global operations, including recent plans to make cuts in Europe. It also has announced an alliance in commercial vehicles with Germanys Volkswagen AG, with plans to jointly develop electric and self-driving vehicles, in moves meant to save billions of dollars.

In January Ford, the No. 2 U.S. automaker, posted a lower operating fourth-quarter profit as losses in every global region except North America weighed on results.

In a Jan. 24 email to employees after posting those results, Hackett told employees the company would not accept last years mediocre results and said Ford was aiming to nearly double its annual operating profit. He provided no time frame for hitting that target.

Hackett, told employees in that email time to bury (2018) ... in a deep grave.
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(Kitco News) - Investors, especially in Europe, should be stockpiling gold now to protect themselves against currency devaluation, said Frank Holmes, CEO of U.S. Global Investors.

Whats also interesting is why golds above $1,300 [an ounce] is seeing the amount of debt thats offering negative real interest rates, its $9 trillion, Holmes told Kitco News.

Holmes said that the issuance of low-yield or negative-yielding debt, especially in Europe, is currency destruction.

On the mergers happening in the mining space, Holmes said that much of the consolidation is happening out of necessity, due to a dwindling of reserves.

I think you get these smart guys who understand this thesis that theres peak gold, and [reserves] are very hard to replace, so youre going to get these mergers that try to maintain their status quo, he said.

His comments come as Newmont and Barrick have agreed to a joint venture project in Nevada instead of a full merger.

Its called peak gold. Theyre scrambling to try to maintain; they cant replace. Just think of Nevada. Those two companies, when they put their joint venture together, will produce 4 million ounces a year. If they collaborate and drive down their costs they can maintain those 4 million ounces a year, he said.

Holmes added that the highest growth in the mining sector would come from mid-cap and small-cap companies.
Two messages come at us from faraway New Zealand. The first is the need to call out the hatred of the mass them, no matter who they may be. The second is to teach tolerance and embrace the differences that make people of all backgrounds unique and equal.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Cash-strapped Indian carrier Jet Airways pilots union has for the first time sought the governments help to recover pending salaries and dues from the airline after their pleas to the management have fallen on deaf ears.

In a letter to Indias labor minister, National Aviators Guild, which represents the majority of Jets pilots, has asked that the airline immediately pay their outstanding salaries and allowances till date with interest.

This situation is leading to extreme tension and frustration amongst our members, hardly an ideal situation for pilots in cockpit, captain Karan Arora, president of the union, said in the letter dated March 6, seen by Reuters.

Jet has delayed payments to its pilots, suppliers and lessors for months and defaulted on loans after racking up over $1 billion in debt. The airline is in talks with the countrys main state-backed banks for a rescue deal and emergency funds.

The pilots in August were given a staggered schedule of payments for salaries but Jet has not kept up, the union said, adding the airline still owes the pilots most of the salary for December, and all of January and February.

Jet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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(Kitco News) - The sentiment at PDAC was "bit sobering" this year, says Kai Hoffmannn, CEO of Soar Financial Partners.

The PDAC's annual convention is held during the first week of March in Toronto.

Hoffmann, who spoke with Kitco News on the convention's final day Wednesday, said macro concerns like the ongoing China-U.S. trade talks are weighing on base metals. The Trump Administration is currently in a trade spat with China, one of the top importer of metals. China's economy is also slowing.

The major issue within the sector, micro concerns, is the Barrick-Newmont merger. Hoffmann says the merger is creating a bit of a vacuum, especially around the mid-tier producers. He predicts the industry will see a pause or slow-down in M&A activity while the Barrick-Newmont merger plays out.

"There are $14B in assets for sale [if the deal goes through] and mid-tier producers, especially the ones that have access to capital, are probably waiting to see what's falling off the plate," says Hoffmann.

During previous large mergers, such as Barrick acquiring Placer Dome in 2005, Hoffmann says mid-tiers picked up assets that re-shaped the whole industry.

The attention the merger is bring to the industry as a whole is a positive, says Hoffmann.

"And if [the merger] doesn't become a nasty fight, it should be good for the industry, especially with the FANG stocks taking a dip in 2018."
By Ayai Tomisawa

TOKYO, March 15 (Reuters) - Japan's Nikkei closed higher on Friday as companies with large exposure to China soared on Beijing's commitment to boosting economic growth, while investors also saw signs of progress in U.S.-China trade talks.

There was little impact on the market from the Bank Of Japan's decision to keep monetary policy steady. The Nikkei share average ended 0.8 percent higher at 21,450.85, with the index gaining 2.0 percent for the week.

China's economy is facing additional downward pressure but Beijing will not let economic growth slip out of a reasonable range, Premier Li Keqiang told reporters on Friday at end of the annual parliament meeting. Separately, Xinhua news agency said on Friday that Chinese Vice Premier Liu He spoke by telephone with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, with the two sides making further substantive progress on trade talks. "The market mood is improving as worries about a global economic slowdown are receding," said Hiroyuki Fukunaga, chief executive of Investrust.

The news from China boosted Japanese firms with large exposure to the world's second largest economy.

Fanuc Corp rose 1.4 percent, while Komatsu Ltd gained 1.8 percent and Yaskawa Electric Corp jumped 4.2 percent.

Elsewhere, Descente soared 2.7 percent after the Nikkei reported that trading house Itochu Corp had raised its stake in the sportswear maker to 40 percent from about 30 percent.

The broader Topix gained 0.9 percent to 1,602.63, with all but two of its 33 subsectors in positive territory. Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones 1,434 to 634.

(Reporting by Ayai Tomisawa Editing by Darren Schuettler)
SEOUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea is considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink a freeze on missile and nuclear tests unless Washington makes concessions, a senior diplomat said on Friday, according to news reports from the Norths capital.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States wished to continue talks with North Korea and had every expectation that its leader, Kim Jong Un, would stick to pledges not to resume nuclear and missile testing.

Pompeo gave no sign of U.S. willingness to soften its stance in demanding that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. [L1N2120IB]

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui blamed top U.S. officials for the breakdown of last months summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in Hanoi, Russias TASS news agency and the Associated Press reported.

We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind, TASS quoted Choe as telling reporters in the North Korean capital.

The second Trump-Kim summit broke down over differences about U.S. demands for Pyongyang to denuclearize and North Koreas demand for dramatic relief from international sanctions imposed for its nuclear and missile tests, which it pursued for years in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Choe said Pompeo and U.S. national security adviser John Bolton created the atmosphere of hostility and mistrust and, therefore, obstructed the constructive effort for negotiations between the supreme leaders of North Korea and the United States, TASS reported.

Kim would make an announcement soon on his position on the denuclearization talks and North Koreas next steps, TASS quoted Choe as saying. She said Washington had thrown away a golden opportunity at the summit and warned that Kim might rethink a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, AP reported.

I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger, AP quoted Choe as saying.

However, she added: Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful.

Bolton told reporters outside the White House Choes statement was inaccurate. He said he had spoken to his South Korean counterpart but wanted to consult with other U.S. officials before responding further.

Bolton later accompanied Trump to a pre-arranged meeting with top defense officials at the Pentagon.

U.S. SEEKS MORE CONVERSATIONS WITH NORTH

Pompeo told reporters it was not the first time he had been called gangster-like by North Korea. And following that we continued to have very professional conversations ... I have every expectation we will be able to continue to do that, he said.

Pompeo said that in her remarks, Choe had left open the possibility that negotiations would continue.

Its the administrations desire that we continue to have conversations around this, Pompeo said. As the president said when he was in Hanoi, the offer that they made simply didnt rise to the level that was acceptable, given what they were asking for in exchange.

Kim had committed multiple times to Trump in Hanoi that he would not to resume nuclear or missile testing, Pompeo said. Thats Chairman Kims word. We have every expectation he will live up to that commitment.

Pompeo told Fox News he did not want to forecast what we will do or what we might do if Kim were to resume testing, but added: That would be most unfortunate. I think Chairman Kim understands that.

Trump has pointed to North Koreas freeze in nuclear and missile testing since 2017 as a positive outcome from nearly a year of diplomatic engagement with North Korea. He and Kim had previous exchanged fiery rhetoric that had raised fears of war.

Washington has said it is closely watching activity at a North Korean rocket site that U.S. think tanks have said could be preparations for a new launch.

Trump has made much of his personal chemistry with Kim and has said he would be very disappointed in Kim if North Korea were to resume testing.

South Korea, which has an ambitious agenda of engagement with North Korea that is dependent on Pyongyang and Washington resolving at least some of their differences, said it was too early to tell what Choes comments might mean.

We cannot judge the current situation based solely on Vice Minister Choe Son Huis statements. We are watching the situation closely. In any situation, our government will endeavor for the restart of North Korea-U.S. negotiations, South Koreas presidential Blue House said in a statement.

Choes comments echoed the Norths usual rhetoric at tense points in its dealings with Washington. North Korea expert Joshua Pollack said North Korea may be delivering an ultimatum.

Theyre putting down a marker, saying which way things are headed if nothing changes, Pollack, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said.

Joel Wit of the 38 North think tank said North Korea was likely toughening its negotiating position after the collapse of the Hanoi summit. It is likely to gauge the U.S. reaction in the days ahead before making a decision to launch a rocket, he said.

Choe had said after the Hanoi talks that Kim might lose his commitment to pursue a deal with the United States after seeing it reject a request to lift some sanctions in return for the North destroying its main known nuclear complex.

In Beijing, Premier Li Keqiang urged patience and further dialogue between North Korea and the United States.

Earlier on Friday, a spokeswoman for South Koreas Ministry of Unification told a press briefing that the weekly inter-Korean meeting scheduled at a liaison office in Kaesong, North Korea, had been canceled after the North Koreans said they would not be sending senior officials.

The spokeswoman said the ministry had not confirmed why the North Korean officials decided not to attend.
JOHANNESBURG, March 15 (Reuters) - South Africa's firmed early on Friday, reversing some of its losses from the previous session with demand for emerging market currencies boosted by new signs of a trade deal between China and the United States.

* At 0730 GMT the rand was 0.41 percent firmer at 14.4800 per dollar compared to a close of 14.5400 overnight in New York.

* Chinese Vice Premier Liu He spoke by telephone with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the two sides made further substantive progress on trade talks, Xinhua news agency said on Friday.

* Bonds also gained with the yield on the benchmark paper due in 2026 down 3.5 basis points to 8.725 percent.

* Stocks opened firmer, with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange's Top-40 index up 0.35 percent to 49,712 points.

(Reporting by Mfuneko Toyana) Messaging: mfuneko.toyana.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and may not reflect those of Kitco Metals Inc. The author has made every effort to ensure accuracy of information provided; however, neither Kitco Metals Inc. nor the author can guarantee such accuracy. This article is strictly for informational purposes only. It is not a solicitation to make any exchange in commodities, securities or other financial instruments. Kitco Metals Inc. and the author of this article do not accept culpability for losses and/ or damages arising from the use of this publication.
(Adds background, comment from association, analyst)

By Tom Daly

BEIJING, March 15 (Reuters) - China on Friday issued output quotas for rare earth minerals for the first half of 2019 at lower levels than last year's unusually high amount, leading to concerns the lower supply may not be enough to meet domestic demand.

China is the world's biggest producer of rare earths, a prized group of 17 elements used in everything from ceramics to consumer electronics, and its output quotas -- typically announced twice per year -- are closely watched.

The mining output quota for the first half of 2019 was set at 60,000 tonnes, down 18.4 percent from a year earlier, while the smelting and separation quota was set at 57,500 tonnes, down 17.9 percent, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a joint statement with the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Last year's first batch of quotas were set at an unusually high level, which was smoothed out when the second-half quotas were given in October.

The full-year quotas for 2018 ended up at 120,000 tonnes and 115,000 tonnes. Still, the lower quotas has increased concerns that China may not be able to produce enough rare earths for its demand.

"It is already an industry consensus that the total (quotas) cannot meet the demand of China's domestic market," said Chen Zhanheng, deputy secretary general of the Association of China Rare Earth Industry.

Amid a crackdown on illegal mining, China became the world's biggest importer of rare earths in 2018, ahead of Japan and the United States, Adamas Intelligence managing director Ryan Castilloux said on Wednesday. Imports came from countries including neighbouring Myanmar but fears that illegally mined Chinese material is being smuggled to the Southeast Asian country and brought back could well curtail shipments this year, he added.

"There needs to be a major increase (in production quotas) dedicated to heavy rare earths if China is to make up for impending lack of supplies from Myanmar," Castilloux said in an email on Friday.

Heavy rare earths, which include yttrium, a silvery metal used in superconductors and in medicine, are one of two rare earth categories, the other being light rare earths.

China will announce the second batch of quotas, which will "take into account market demand," by the end of June, according to the statement.

(Reporting by Tom Daly; additional reporting by David Stanway in SHANGHAI; Editing by Kim Coghill and Christian Schmollinger)
* FTSE 100 up 0.6 pct* FTSE 250 up 1.1 pct* Sterling rally aids mid-cap index* Frankie & Benny's owner surges on sales rise* Just Group slips for 2nd straight day* Interserve slumps with administration imminent (Recasts, adds company news items, updates with closing prices) By Muvija M and Shashwat Awasthi March 15 (Reuters) - Britain's mid-cap index hit a 5-month high on Friday, tracking a rally in sterling as talks between the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party and British ministers over Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit deal were described as "good".

The domestically-focused FTSE 250 hit its highest since Oct. 10 and ended the day up 1.1 percent, while the blue-chip FTSE 100 rose 0.6 percent for its fifth straight session in the black.

Industrials, consumer and financial stocks together added more than 140 points to the mid-cap index. The Northern Irish party that props up May's government said it had held good talks with ministers on additional assurances that would be needed for them to back her twice-defeated Brexit deal. Mid-caps were also lifted by gains in Frankie & Benny's owner Restaurant Group , which jumped 10 percent after annual pretax profit exceeded its forecast and recently acquired noodle bar chain Wagamama posted strong sales. Ireland's main index , often considered a gauge of Brexit mood, added 1.2 percent. Britain's parliament on Thursday approved asking the European Union for a short delay if lawmakers can agree on a Brexit deal by March 20, or a longer delay if nothing can be agreed in time. However, Spreadex analyst Connor Campbell said the need for the EU to unanimously approve any delay meant some uncertainty remained, drawing some investors to defensive stocks. British American Tobacco added 2.7 percent and Prudential rose 2.6 percent. Credit rating agency Moody's also warned uncertainty around the Brexit outcome was very high and would continue to weigh on investment, hiring and spending decisions, which was credit negative for UK issuers. Housebuilders , considered to be among most vulnerable to economic hits stemming from Brexit, rose on the back of Thursday's vote and after a trading update from mid-cap Berkeley. Berkeley rose 1.9 percent after it stuck to its profit target despite softness in Britain's housing market caused by Brexit uncertainties. Retirement services specialist Just Group slipped for a second session to close 4.2 percent lower, adding to a 12 percent fall on Thursday which followed a cash call. Interserve shares lost more than a third of their

value and were suspended from trading as the heavily indebted outsourcer was set to go into administration after shareholders rejected a rescue plan. Asia-exposed financial heavyweights gained on Sino-U.S. trade optimism.

(Reporting by Muvija M and Shashwat Awasthi in Bengaluru; Editing by Alison Williams and Kirsten Donovan)

outside U.S. +91 80 6749 3638; Reuters Messaging: muvija.m.thomsonreuters.com@reuters.net))UK hot stocks: [HOT and GB] Wall Street: Gilts report: Euro bond report Pan European stock report: Tokyo stocks: HK stocks: Sterling report: Dollar report:* For company prices, click on -* Company directory: By sector:* For pan-European market data, click on -* European Equities speed guide................ FTSE Eurotop 300 index........................... DJ STOXX index................................... Top 10 STOXX sectors........................ Top 10 EUROSTOXX sectors................... Top 10 Eurotop 300 sectors.................. Top 25 European pct gainers.................... Top 25 European pct losers..................... ))
(Adds union appealing decision, quote from judge)

By Tanisha Heiberg and Mfuneko Toyana

RUSTENBURG, South Africa, March 15 (Reuters) - South Africa's labour court has rejected a request by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) to hold an industry-wide strike covering the platinum and gold sectors, Anglogold Ashanti, Anglo American Platinum and Lonmin said on Friday.

AMCU has been on strike at Sibanye-Stillwater's gold operations since mid-November in a pay dispute. It wanted to extend the strike to at least 11 other mining firms including Anglo American's gold and platinum operations, Harmony Gold and Lonmin . The union said it was shocked and would appeal the decision, adding that "secondary strikes are an integral part of the constitutional right to strike".

In a written judgement, labour court judge Connie Prinsloo said an extended strike would put the entire economy at risk.

"This factor certainly outweighs the negligible effect the secondary strike may have on Sibanye and therefore renders it unreasonable," the judge said.

Sibanye's U.S.-listed shares rose around 3 percent on the judgement, while on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange they gained 1.5 percent.

Mine firms, struggling with volatile commodity prices globally and rising costs at home along with political uncertainty, said the judgement would help stabilise their operations.

South Africa is home to the world's biggest deposits of platinum group metals, accounting for around 70 percent of global production.

Data on Thursday showed gold production contracted for the 15th month in a row, shrinking by 22.5 percent in January, while platinum output was up 8.8 percent in the same period. "We welcome the decision of the court to grant an interdict against the secondary strike action called by AMCU. We maintain that a secondary strike by AMCU would not be in the best interests of our employees or the industry," Anglo American Platinum's chief executive, Chris Griffith, said.

Job cuts are politically sensitive in Africa's most industrialised economy, where the unemployment rate is more than 27 percent, and more so with national elections due in May.

Rivalry at numerous mines between the militant AMCU and the National Union of Mineworkers has seen work stoppages drag on and often turn violent.

Last week, Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe asked police to intervene as violence near Sibanye's mines in

Carletonville, west of Johannesburg, had resulted in nine deaths and around 62 houses being burnt down.

($1 = 14.4787 rand)

(Reporting by Tanisha Heiberg; Writing by Mfuneko Toyana; Editing by Dale Hudson and Mark Potter)
And in June of 2016 he said: We have to be very strong in terms of looking at the mosques, you know which a lot of people say, Oh, we dont want to do that. We dont want to do that. Were beyond that.
More so now than ever, particularly in the current administration, weve witnessed a flurry of misinformation, underhanded reprisals and backstabbing that have disintegrated the doctrine that once defined our political system and the Constitution on which it was founded. Our once-respectable principles have been jettisoned and replaced by a Congress that cannot get along with its own party constituents, let alone those on the other side of the aisle. Isnt it time that members of our government get back to basics and address what is right and just for their party and the people they represent instead of giving in to their egos?
We feel Lori is clearly the better choice to lead Chicago at this time, they said in a statement. She will help us create the new jobs, businesses, affordable housing and opportunities that will improve the quality of life for everyone, especially those in the South and West Sides. Were confident Lori is the right choice to make sure Chicago is led in a just, fair and inclusive manner.
He is truly independent  and in Chicago thats major, said Livingston, who is not making an endorsement in the runoff election. He financed his own campaign and didnt ask for money from anybody. Its a powerful peace to be able to say what you want to say and do what you want to do and not have any repercussions.
Angola, IN (46703)

Today

Foggy early. Then periods of showers this afternoon. High 46F. Winds ESE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 100%..

Tonight

Cloudy with periods of rain. Thunder possible. Low around 45F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Foggy with occasional rain during the afternoon. Thunder possible. High 47F. Winds ESE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 100%..

Tonight

Rain likely. Thunder possible. Low 46F. Winds S at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%.
(ROCK PORT, Mo.) The Atchison County Commission and the Atchison County Levee District #1 are recommending people to evacuate who live near the Missouri River Bottom, this includes all areas in Atchison County west of I-29.

According to a press release, county officials say that there is danger of water going over the levy within the next week to 10 days. Officials are anticipating a mandatory evacuation to follow in the coming days.

If anyone is in need of shelter, contact the Atchison County Emergency Management at 660-744-6606.
(ST. JOSEPH, Mo.) The City of St. Joseph has declared a state of emergency due to the threat of flooding along the Missouri River.

In order to receive assistance from the state and federal level, a state of emergency must be declared.

The city declared the emergency Thursday.

"To be able to utilize resources at the state and federal level, we have to locally declare a State of Emergencymake that appeal to the state and federal, which we did do that today," Communications manager Mary Robertson said. "That frees up state and federal resources to the City of St. Joseph."

The city requested 365,000 sandbags through SEMA (Missouri State Emergency Agency) to assist with the levees and ordered a bagging machine. Sandbagging is expected to begin Friday morning.

The state of emergency was put into place as a precaution and to help out with preparations ahead of possible Missouri River flooding.

"When we do that, the Governor can look at this situation and assess the situation and I'm sure everyone around us is doing the same thing, but that does give us the availability of resources and materials to come from the state," Robertson said.

By making the declaration, it will also help the city with reimbursement.

New projections show the Missouri River at St. Joseph cresting at 28.7 feet on Tuesday.
Thousands of colleges across the country are welcoming both new and returning students back to campus for the fall semester. To coincide with the beginning of another school year, Stacker compiled a list of the best colleges in America using Niches 2021 rankings.
(ATCHISON COUNTY, Mo.) Flooding has forced more evacuations in northwest Missouri.

The Atchison County Commission issued an immediate mandatory evacuation Friday for areas west of I-29 due to the threat flooding.

The Missouri River at Brownville, NE is approaching record levels.

As of Friday afternoon, the river is at 44.49 feet just shy of the record crest of 44.8 set in 2011.

The river is expected to crest at 48 feet on Sunday.

Near-record level flooding has also forced the shutdown of I-29 at the Missouri/Iowa border.

Interstate 29 at Rock Port exit 110 is closed due to flooding in Iowa.

The Missouri Department of Transportation said drivers wanting to use I-29 northbound should use I-35 and then I-80 into Iowa.

More Information:

Full closures of I-29 are in place at

US 136 at Rock Port, Mo. (Exit 110); and

Iowa 92 South of Council Bluffs, Iowa (Exit 48)

Those who would normally use I-29 as a through route should instead use

I-35 N from Kansas City to

I-80 West in Des Moines to

I-29 near the Council Bluffs/Omaha metro area

and vice-versa until further notice.

Travelers already on I-29 North

Drivers who are currently heading north on I-29 should use US 71 North north of St. Joseph to I-35 if possible.

Those north of the US 71 junction can continue to Rock Port and take US 136 East to US 71 North to I-35. DO NOT take US 275 North. Flooding in Hamburg, Iowa will block your progress.
(ST. JOSEPH, Mo.) The Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) is closing roads due to flooding in northwest Missouri.

MoDOT crews and partners are monitoring road conditions closely but flood waters can rise quickly.

Here are the roads that are closed in northwest Missouri as of 11 a.m. Thursday:

Andrew County

Route 48 on the east side of Rosendale between Elm Street and County Road 168

Route 48 on the west side of Rosendale between County Road 149 and Line Street

Route B on the west side of Bolckow between Richardson and County Road 141

Route C on the east side of Rosendale between Route 48 and Lake Street

Route C on the east side of Rosendale between Prospect and County Road 177

Atchison County

U.S. Route 59 between U.S. Route 136 and Fairfax

Route A between Watson and B Avenue

Route BB northwest of Watson is not closed, but water does cover one lane. Use caution.

Buchanan County

Route C between St. Joseph and Easton from U.S. Route 36 south to Easton Saxton Road

Route H in Agency between Route FF and SE 90th

Route MM south of Agency between Loutermilch Road and Old Frame Road

Nodaway County

Route 46 south of Quitman between Route PP and Route 113

Route C west of Clearmont between Dragonfly Road and Dynasty Road

Route DD west of Skidmore at Catalina Road

Route U on the east side of Arkoe between Keystone Road and Arkoe

With flash flooding, roads can be closed or reopened on short notice. To see the most up-to-date list of known roadways closed due to flooding, travelers have a few options:

MoDOT is reminding motorists that it only takes six inches of water (or less) to lose control of your vehicle and to never drive through flooded roadways.

To report a roadway with water on it, call the 24-hour customer service hotline at 1-888-275-6636.

You can find up-to-date road conditions with the traveler information map, which can be found by clicking here.
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1845 N. Orchard St., Chicago: $5,989,888 | Listed: Nov. 9, 2021



This six-bedroom home has six full bathrooms, two half baths, and a carved limestone and brick exterior. The Christopher Peacock kitchen has Waterworks fixtures, a farmers sink and two Subzero refrigerator/freezers. It also opens to the living room, which leads to an outdoor area with a full kitchen, seating areas, and a wood-burning fireplace. On the second floor, the primary bedroom suite features a dressing room and morning kitchen and an en suite bath with a separate shower and soaking tub. Three additional en suite bedrooms are also on the second floor. Other features include a wine cellar, a library, a media room with a Savant projection and audio system and an attached four-car garage with extra storage.



Agent: Carrie McCormick, @properties, 312-961-4612



*Some listing photos are virtually staged, meaning they have been digitally altered to represent different furnishing or decorating options.



To feature your luxury listing of $800,000 or more in Chicago Tribunes Dream Homes, send listing information and high-res photos to ctc-realestate@chicagotribune.com.



Join our Chicago Dream Homes Facebook group for more luxury listings and real estate news.
Rath said the village takes workplace injuries seriously and if policies needed to be updated to prevent injuries then changes are made. But, the human resources chief said she could not say if any policies were changed or updated after Hundrieser was injured.
We have decades-old equipment that needs to get up to modern standards in our increasingly violent community to make sure everyone is protected, Hain said. We are nowhere near close where we need to be. In the last two years, 10 officers have been hit by gunfire in Kane County. We have never experienced that.
Texas Parks and Wildlife are asking for your input on some changes to White-tailed Deer hunting in Fannin and Hunt counties.

Texas Parks and Wildlife is proposing expanding "doe days" in Fannin County and 19 other Texas counties to control the population.

Right now there are four days, usually during Thanksgiving weekend, where local hunters can take antler-less deer without a special deer permit.

But the proposal would quadruple that to 16 consecutive days.

"They make their predictions based off counts in individual counties."

Pat Garrard is the co-owner of Whitewright Armory, a local gun shop and hunting supplies store.

"There's an oversupply of doe, so they're looking to increase and cut down on doe population," Garrard said.

Local hunter Allen West says the bag limit of doe will still be the same: two all season.

But hunters will have more time to find them.

"Now, it's four days in a row. if you can't make it, you don't get to hunt at all," West said.

That is unless you pay $49 a year for an antler-less permit to hunt on managed land.

West is all for the change, and so is Fannin County hunter Bart Tadlock.

"You can space your time out," he said, "And one thing is the families can get out together too."

Parks and Wildlife are taking public comment until Tuesday.

You can find more information and share your opinion here: https://tpwd.texas.gov/business/feedback/public_comment/
The students are very excited to dance to music from Michael Jackson because many connect with his music and have been inspired by his music and performances over the years. It was hard to choose the songs for each dance because he has so many excellent ones.
Through their investigation and evidence gathered at the scene, detectives were able to determine that the couples 26-year-old son, who lived with the couple, was a suspect and that he likely fled the state. Navin Abrahams abandoned car was located on the side of a highway in Oklahoma on Monday morning and detectives were able to track him down in Ranger, Texas, where he was taken into custody that same day, Lemont Police Cmdr. Thad Mezyk said.
Fineline also was cited for using a forklift in ways not specifically designed by the manufacturer, including to lift workers on a makeshift plywood platform without ensuring the platform was attached to the fork and that the forklift was not moved horizontally while occupied, according to the report.
We find no statute or constitutional provision which bars the same person from holding both positions, McMahon said. However, a state legislator cant accept compensation as a public officer or employee from any other government entity for the time during which he is in attendance as a member of the General Assembly, he said.
Przekota said Cobian was at the womans home in the 1800 block of Simpson Street the evening of March 8 and at one point she went outside and found him sitting in his car. When the woman asked Cobian why he was alone in his vehicle, he told her he was annoyed because she was not paying enough attention to him, Przekota said.
The birthday celebration group will touch on many styles, Zahn said. We will play everything from traditional cowboy songs from the 1800s right on up to some jazz tunes. The set list includes Make Me a Pallet On the Floor, a folk blues standard from the early 1900s, Lullaby of the Leaves, a jazz tune popular in the 1930s sung by Ella Fitzgerald, and an arrangement of Buddy Hollys It Doesnt Matter Anymore.
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User Content License. For all User Content you post, upload, or otherwise make available (in this section - Provide) to the Site, you grant Los Angeles Times a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and fully sub-licensable license to use, copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, adapt, translate, archive, store, and create derivative works from such User Content, in whole or in part, in any form, format, or medium, of any kind now known or later developed. Without limiting the generality of the previous sentence, you authorize Los Angeles Times to: (i) share the User Content across all websites, mobile applications, newspapers and other online and offline services affiliated with Los Angeles Times; (ii) include the User Content in a searchable format accessible by users of the Site and other Los Angeles Times websites, mobile applications, newspapers and other online services; (iii) place advertisements in close proximity to such User Content; and (iv) use your name, likeness and any other information in connection with our use of the material you Provide. You waive all moral rights with respect to any User Content you Provide to the Site. You also grant Los Angeles Times the right to use any material, information, ideas, concepts, know-how or techniques contained in any communication you Provide or otherwise submit to us for any purpose whatsoever, including but not limited to, commercial purposes, and developing, manufacturing and marketing commercial products using such information. All rights in this section are granted without the need for additional compensation of any sort by Los Angeles Times to you. You agree that you will indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Los Angeles Times and its officers, directors and employees for all claims resulting from User Content you post. We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of such disputes, and in any event you will cooperate with us in asserting any available defenses.

You also hereby grant each user of the Site a non-exclusive license to access your User Content through the Site, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Content as permitted through the functionality of the Site and under these Terms.

Unsolicited Material and Ideas. We are happy to hear from our users and welcome feedback regarding our Site. The Site is not responsible for the similarity of any of its content or programming in any media to materials or ideas provided to the Site. If you do transmit unsolicited submissions to us through the Site or otherwise, you grant Los Angeles Times a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and fully sub-licensable license to use, copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, adapt, translate, archive, store, and create derivative works from such submissions, and you understand and agree that such submissions may be adapted, broadcast, changed, copied, disclosed, licensed, performed, posted, published, sold, transmitted, or otherwise used as Los Angeles Times sees fit. By using the Site and transmitting an unsolicited submission to us, you agree that you are not entitled to any compensation, credit or notice whatsoever with respect to such submission, and that by sending an unsolicited submission you waive the right to make any claim against the Site, Los Angeles Times and its parents, officers or directors relating to our use of such submission, including, without limitation, infringement of proprietary rights, unfair competition, breach of implied contract or breach of confidentiality, even if material or an idea is used that is or may be substantially similar to the idea you sent.

User Content Screening and Removal. You acknowledge that the Site and/or its designees may or may not pre-screen User Content, and shall have the right (but not the obligation), in their sole discretion, to move, remove, block, edit, or refuse any User Content for any reason, including without limitation that such User Content violates these Terms or is otherwise objectionable.

User Content Assumption of Risk. Although the Site may from time to time monitor or review postings, transmissions, and the like on the Site, it cannot and does not monitor or manage all User Content, and does not guarantee the accuracy, integrity, or quality of User Content. All User Content provided to the Site is the sole responsibility of the person who provided it. This means that you are entirely responsible for all User Content that you provide. To protect your safety, please use your best judgment when using Site forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs or similar features. We discourage divulging personal phone numbers and addresses or other information that can be used to identify or locate you. You acknowledge and agree that if you make such disclosures either through posting on any bulletin board, forum, blogspace, message or chat area, or uploading text, images, audio files or other audio-visual content, in classified advertising you place or in other interactive areas, or to third parties in any communication, you do so fully understanding that such information could be used to identify you.

User Content Posting Rules. Any decisions as to whether User Content violates any posting rule set forth in these Terms will be made by us in our sole discretion and after we have actual notice of such posting. When you provide User Content, you agree to the following rules:

If the photo or video depicts any children under the age of 13, you affirm that you have written permission from the childs parent or guardian to provide the photo or video.

Do not provide User Content that:

Contains copyrighted or other proprietary material of any kind without the express permission of the owner of that material; Contains vulgar, profane, abusive, racist or hateful language, expressions, epithets, slurs, text, photographs or illustrations, or is in poor taste, or is an inflammatory attack of a personal, racial or religious nature; Is defamatory, threatening, disparaging, grossly inflammatory, false, misleading, fraudulent, inaccurate, unfair, contains gross exaggeration or unsubstantiated claims, violates the privacy rights of any third party, is unreasonably harmful or offensive to any individual or community; May cause any harm or damage to the Site, you, us, or anyone else; Violates any right of the Site, Los Angeles Times or any third party; Infringes other individuals privacy rights or rights of publicity; Discriminates on the grounds of race, religion, national origin, gender, age, marital status, sexual orientation or disability, or refers to such matters in any manner prohibited by law. Violates or encourages the violation of any municipal, state, federal or international law, rule, regulation, ordinance, or similar requirement; Interferes with any third partys use of the Site; Advertises, promotes or offers to trade any goods or services, except in areas specifically designated for such purpose; Collects any user content or information, or otherwise accesses the Site using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission; Violates any robot exclusion headers of the Site, if any, or bypasses or circumvents other measures employed to prevent or limit access to the Site; Shares, recompiles, decompiles, disassembles, reverse engineers, or makes or distributes any other form of, or any derivative work from, the Site; Attempts to scrape or collect any personal or private information from other users or from the Site; Pretends to come from someone other than you, or where you are impersonating someone else; Intercepts or monitors, damages, or modifies any communication not intended for you; Uses or attempt to use anothers registration account, password, service or system except as expressly permitted by the Terms; Uploads or transmits viruses or any other harmful, disruptive or destructive files, materials or code; Disrupts, interferes with, or otherwise harms or violates the security of the Site, or any services, system resources, accounts, passwords, servers or networks connected to or accessible through the Site or affiliated or linked sites; Flames any individual or entity (e.g., sends repeated messages related to another user and/or makes derogatory or offensive comments about another individual), or repeats prior posting of the same message under multiple threads or subjects; or Otherwise breaches these Terms.



WARNING: A VIOLATION OF THESE POSTING RULES MAY BE REFERRED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES.

You shall notify us immediately upon becoming aware of the commission by any person of any restricted uses of the Site by sending an email to termsofservice@latimes.com, and you shall provide us with reasonable assistance in any investigations we conduct in light of the information you provide in this respect.

You acknowledge that we have no obligation to monitor any users access to or use of the Site, or to review or edit any Content, but we have the right to do so in our sole discretion: (i) for the purpose of operating and improving the Site (including without limitation for fraud prevention, risk assessment, investigation and customer support purposes); (ii) to ensure your compliance with these Terms; (iii) to comply with applicable law or the order or requirement of a court, administrative agency or other governmental body; or (iv) to address content that we determine is otherwise objectionable or violates these Terms. We reserve the right, at any time and without prior notice, to remove or disable access to any Content that we, in our sole discretion, consider to be objectionable for any reason, in violation of these Terms, otherwise harmful to the Site, or for any other reason that we deem appropriate. In order to protect the integrity of the Site, we also reserve the right at any time in our sole discretion to block users from certain IP addresses from accessing and using the Site.

You acknowledge, consent, and agree that we may access, preserve and disclose any of your information if we are required to do so by law, or if we believe in good faith that it is reasonably necessary: (i) to respond to claims asserted against us or to comply with legal process (for example, subpoenas, warrants, or other process ); (ii) to enforce or administer our agreements with users, including without limitation these Terms; (iii) to render services you request; (iv) to protect the rights or property of the Site, Los Angeles Times, and their respective third-party suppliers and licensors; (v) for fraud prevention, risk assessment, investigation, customer support, product development and de-bugging purposes; (vi) to protect the rights, property or safety of the Site, its users, or members of the public; or (vii) in circumstances that we deem, in our sole discretion, to pose a threat to the safety of us, you or others.

Transactions and E-Commerce. During your visit to the Site, you may elect to engage in a transaction involving the purchase of a product such as a newspaper subscription, a print or online advertisement or other tangible goods and services. Credit card transactions and order fulfillment are often handled by a third-party processing agent, bank or distribution institution. While in most cases transactions are completed without difficulty, there is no such thing as perfect security on the Internet or offline. If you are concerned about online credit card safety, in most cases a telephone number will be made available so you can call us and place your order by phone. The Site cannot and does not take responsibility for the success or security of transactions undertaken or processed by third parties.

Linked Sites If we provide links to other websites, you should not infer or assume that we operate, control, or are otherwise connected with these other websites. Please be careful to read the applicable terms and conditions and privacy policy of any other website before you provide any personal information or engage in any transactions. We are not responsible for the content or practices of any website not part of the Site, even if the website is operated by a company affiliated or otherwise connected with us. By using the Site, you acknowledge and agree that we are not responsible or liable to you for any content or other materials hosted, served, or residing on the domain from any websites other than the Site and then only to the extent provided for herein.

During your visit to the Site, you may link to, or view as part of a frame, certain content that is actually created, hosted and/or licensed by a third party. Because the Site has no control over third-party sites and resources, you acknowledge and agree that the Site is not responsible for the availability of external websites or resources, nor for the content, actions, or policies of those sites. Information you provide on such websites, including personal information and transactional information, is subject to the applicable terms and conditions and privacy policy of those websites.

Errors in Advertisements. On occasion, a product or service may not be available at the time or the price as it appears in an advertisement or other material in the Site. In such event, or in the event a product is listed at an incorrect price or with incorrect information due to typographical error, technology error, error in the date or length of publication, error in pricing or product information received from our advertisers or suppliers, or for any other reason, you agree the Site is not responsible for such errors or discrepancies.

Communications with Third Parties Through the Site. Your dealings or communications through the Site with any party other than Los Angeles Times are solely between you and that third party. For example, certain areas of the Site may allow you to conduct transactions or purchase goods or services. In most cases, these transactions will be conducted by our third-party partners and vendors. Under no circumstances will the Site be liable for any goods, services, resources or content available through such third-party dealings or communications, or for any harm related thereto. Please review carefully that third partys policies and practices and make sure you are comfortable with them before you engage in any transaction. Complaints, concerns or questions relating to materials provided by third parties should be directed to the third party.

Notice of Intellectual Property Infringement. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other applicable law, it is the policy of the Site, in appropriate circumstances, to terminate the registration account of a member who is deemed to infringe third-party intellectual property rights or to remove User Content that is deemed to be infringing. If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement and is displayed on the Site, please provide substantially the following information to our Copyright Agent (please consult your legal counsel or see 17 U.S.C. Section 512(c)(3) to confirm these requirements):

an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright or other intellectual property interest; a description of your copyrighted work or other intellectual property that you claim has been infringed; a description of where the material you claim is infringing is located on the Site (providing us with website URL is the quickest way to help us locate content quickly); your address, telephone number, and e-mail address; a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright or intellectual property owner or authorized to act on the copyright or intellectual property owners behalf.

The Sites copyright agent can be reached as follows:Copyright Agent, Legal Department, Los Angeles Times, 2300 E. Imperial Highway, El Segundo, CA 90245, 213-237-5000 (voice) copyrightnotice@latimes.com

Please note that the above contact information is for intellectual property infringement notices only. DO NOT CONTACT OUR COPYRIGHT AGENT FOR OTHER INQUIRIES OR QUESTIONS. For other inquiries or questions, please email us at termsofservice@latimes.com . Please also note that, pursuant to Section 512(f) of the Copyright Act, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing may be subject to liability.

General Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability. While the Site and Los Angeles Times use reasonable efforts to include accurate and up-to-date information, neither the Site nor Los Angeles Times make any warranties or representations as to the accuracy of the Content and assume no liability or responsibility for any error or omission in the Content. The Site and Los Angeles Times do not represent or warrant that use of any Content will not infringe rights of third parties. The Site and Los Angeles Times have no responsibility for actions of third parties or for content provided by others, including without limitation User Content.

USE OF THE SITE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. ALL CONTENT AND ACCESS TO THE SITE ARE PROVIDED AS IS AND AS AVAILABLE. NEITHER LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SITE, NOR ANY OF LOS ANGELES TIMES AND/OR SITE OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, SHAREHOLDERS, MEMBERS, EMPLOYEES, REPRESENTATIVES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS, CONTENT PROVIDERS OR LICENSORS, MAKE ANY REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY OF ANY KIND REGARDING THE SITE, THE CONTENT, ANY ADVERTISING MATERIAL, INFORMATION, PRODUCTS OR SERVICES AVAILABLE ON OR THROUGH THE SITE, AND/OR THE RESULTS THAT MAY (OR MAY NOT) BE OBTAINED FROM USE OF THE SITE OR THE CONTENT. ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, WARRANTIES AGAINST INFRINGEMENT, AND WARRANTIES THE SITE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE OR ERROR FREE, ARE SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMED. THE SITE, LOS ANGELES TIMES AND THEIR RESPECTIVE OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, SHAREHOLDERS, MEMBERS, EMPLOYEES, REPRESENTATIVES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS, CONTENT PROVIDERS OR LICENSORS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE OR LIABLE FOR CONTENT POSTED BY THIRD PARTIES, ACTIONS OF ANY THIRD PARTY, OR FOR ANY DAMAGE TO, OR VIRUS OR MALWARE THAT MAY INFECT, YOUR COMPUTER EQUIPMENT, MOBILE DEVICE, OR OTHER PROPERTY. THE SITE CONTAINS FACTS, VIEWS, OPINIONS, STATEMENTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF THIRD-PARTY INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS. THE SITE DOES NOT REPRESENT OR ENDORSE THE ACCURACY, CURRENTNESS OR RELIABILITY OF ANY ADVICE, OPINION, STATEMENT OR OTHER INFORMATION DISPLAYED, UPLOADED OR DISTRIBUTED THROUGH THE SITE. ANY RELIANCE UPON ANY SUCH OPINION, ADVICE, STATEMENT OR INFORMATION IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SITE, LOS ANGELES TIMES AND/OR THEIR RESPECTIVE OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, SHAREHOLDERS, MEMBERS, EMPLOYEES, REPRESENTATIVES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS, CONTENT PROVIDERS OR LICENSORS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, DAMAGES RELATED TO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO OR ALTERATION OF YOUR TRANSMISSIONS OR DATA, THE CONTENT OR ANY ERRORS OR OMISSIONS IN THE CONTENT, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SITE, LOS ANGELES TIMES AND/OR ANY OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, SHAREHOLDERS, EMPLOYEES, REPRESENTATIVES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS, CONTENT PROVIDERS OR LICENSORS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY AMOUNT FOR DIRECT DAMAGES IN EXCESS OF THE LESSER OF $100 OR THE AMOUNT YOU PAID TO USE THE SITE.

Indemnity. You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless the Site and Los Angeles Times, as well as each of their respective parent companies, and each of their respective partners, suppliers, licensors, officers, directors, shareholders, members, employees, representatives, contractors and agents, and sub-licensees from any and all claims (including but not limited to claims for defamation, trade disparagement, privacy and intellectual property infringement) and damages (including attorneys fees and court costs) in any and all jurisdictions arising from or relating to any allegation regarding: (1) your use of the Site; (2) the Sites and/or Los Angeles Times use of any User Content or information you provide, as long as such use is not inconsistent with these Terms; (3) information or material provided through your registration account, even if not posted by you; and (4) any violation of these Terms by you.

International Users. The Site is controlled, operated and administered by Los Angeles Times from its offices within the United States. The Site and Los Angeles Times make no representation that materials or Content available through the Site are appropriate or available for use outside the United States and access to them from territories where their contents are illegal is prohibited. You may not use the Site or export the Content and/or User Content in violation of U.S. export laws and regulations. If you access the Site from a location outside the United States, you are responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. If you are located in any member state that is part of the European Economic Area or any member state that has adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, you are not permitted to provide personal data to us.

Modifying these Terms. The Site and Los Angeles Times reserve the right to change these Terms at any time in their respective discretion and to notify users of any such changes solely by changing the Effective Date of these Terms. The most current version of these Terms will supersede all previous versions. Your continued use of the Site after the posting of any amended Terms shall constitute your agreement to be bound by any such changes. Your use of the Site prior to the time these Terms were posted will be governed according to the Terms that applied at the time of your use.

Discontinuation of Service. The Site may modify, suspend, discontinue or restrict the use of any portion of the Site, including the availability of any portion of the Content at any time, without notice or liability. The Site may deny access to any registered member or other user at any time for any reason, or no reason at all in our sole discretion. In addition, the Site or Los Angeles Times may at any time transfer rights and obligations under these Terms to any Los Angeles Times affiliate, subsidiary or business unit, or any of their affiliated companies or divisions, or any entity that acquires Los Angeles Times, the Site or any of their respective assets.

Statute of Limitations. To the extent allowed by law, you agree to file any claim regarding any aspect of this Site or these Terms within six months of the time in which the events giving rise to such claim began, or you agree to waive such claim.

Disputes. Our Customer Support Department is available at termsofservice@latimes.com to address any concerns you may have regarding the Site. Our Customer Support Department is able to resolve most concerns quickly to our customers satisfaction. The parties shall use their best efforts to settle any dispute, claim, question, or disagreement directly through consultation with the Customer Support Department and good faith negotiations, which shall be a condition to either party initiating a lawsuit or arbitration.

For any dispute that is not subject to binding arbitration or otherwise as set forth in these Terms, you and the Site agree to submit to the personal and exclusive jurisdiction of and venue in the federal and state courts located in the State of California, County of Los Angeles. You further agree to accept service of process by mail, and hereby waive any and all jurisdictional and venue defenses otherwise available.

These Terms and the relationship between you and the Site shall be governed by the laws of the State of California without regard to conflict of law provisions.

MANDATORY ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER

PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY. IT AFFECTS YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, INCLUDING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE A LAWSUIT IN COURT.

You and Los Angeles Times agree that these Terms affect interstate commerce and that the Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of these arbitration provisions.

This Section is intended to be interpreted broadly and governs any and all disputes between us, including but not limited to claims arising out of or relating to any aspect of the relationship between us, whether based in contract, tort, statute, fraud, misrepresentation or any other legal theory; claims that arose before these Terms or any prior agreement (including, but not limited to, claims related to advertising); and claims that may arise after the termination of these Terms. The only disputes excluded from this broad prohibition are the litigation of certain intellectual property and small court claims, as provided below.

By agreeing to these Terms, you agree to resolve any and all disputes with Los Angeles Times as follows:

Initial Dispute Resolution. Most disputes can be resolved without resort to litigation. You can reach our Customer Support Department at termsofservice@latimes.com . Except for intellectual property and small claims court claims, the parties agree to use their best efforts to settle any dispute, claim, question, or disagreement directly through consultation with our Customer Support Department, and good faith negotiations shall be a condition to either party initiating a lawsuit or arbitration.

Binding Arbitration. If the parties do not reach an agreed-upon solution within a period of sixty (60) days from the time informal dispute resolution is initiated under the Initial Dispute Resolution provision above, then either party may initiate binding arbitration as the sole means to resolve claims, subject to the terms set forth below. Specifically, all claims arising out of or relating to these Terms (including the Terms or Privacy Policys formation, performance, and breach), the parties relationship with each other, and/or your use of the Site shall be finally settled by binding arbitration administered by JAMS in accordance with the JAMS Streamlined Arbitration Procedure Rules for claims that do not exceed $250,000 and the JAMS Comprehensive Arbitration Rules and Procedures for claims exceeding $250,000 in effect at the time the arbitration is initiated, excluding any rules or procedures governing or permitting class actions. The arbitrator, and not any federal, state, or local court or agency, shall have exclusive authority to resolve all disputes arising out of or relating to the interpretation, applicability, enforceability, or formation of these Terms or the Privacy Policy, including but not limited to any claim that all or any part of these Terms or Privacy Policy is void or voidable, whether a claim is subject to arbitration, or the question of waiver by litigation conduct. The arbitrator shall be empowered to grant whatever relief would be available in a court under law or in equity. The arbitrators award shall be written and shall be binding on the parties and may be entered as a judgment in any court of competent jurisdiction. To start an arbitration, you must do the following: (a) write a Demand for Arbitration that includes a description of the claim and the amount of damages you seek to recover (you may find a copy of a Demand for Arbitration at www.jamsadr.com ); (b) send three copies of the Demand for Arbitration, plus the appropriate filing fee, to JAMS, Two Embarcadero Center, Suite 1500, San Francisco, California 94111; and (c) send one copy of the Demand for Arbitration to Los Angeles Times at 2300 E. Imperial Highway, ATTENTION: LEGAL, El Segundo, CA 90245.

To the extent the filing fee for the arbitration exceeds the cost of filing a lawsuit, Los Angeles Times will pay the additional cost. If the arbitrator finds the arbitration to be non-frivolous, Los Angeles Times will pay the fees invoiced by JAMS, including filing fees and arbitrator and hearing expenses. You are responsible for your own attorneys fees unless the arbitration rules and/or applicable law provide otherwise.

The parties understand that, absent this mandatory arbitration provision, they would have the right to sue in court and have a jury trial. They further understand that, in some instances, the costs of arbitration could exceed the costs of litigation and the right to discovery may be more limited in arbitration than in court.

If you are a resident of the United States, arbitration may take place in the county where you reside at the time of filing. For individuals residing outside the United States, arbitration shall be initiated in Los Angeles County in the State of California, United States of America, and you and Los Angeles Times agree to submit to the personal jurisdiction of any federal or state court in Los Angeles County, California to compel arbitration, to stay proceedings pending arbitration, or to confirm, modify, vacate, or enter judgment on the award entered by the arbitrator.

Class Action Waiver. The parties further agree that the arbitration shall be conducted in their individual capacities only and not as a class action or other representative action, and the parties expressly waive their right to file a class action or seek relief on a class basis. YOU AND LOS ANGELES TIMES AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN YOUR OR ITS INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. If any court or arbitrator determines that the class action waiver set forth in this paragraph is void or unenforceable for any reason or that an arbitration can proceed on a class basis, then the arbitration provisions set forth above shall be deemed null and void in their entirety and the parties shall be deemed to have not agreed to arbitrate disputes on a class basis.

Exception. Litigation of Intellectual Property and Small Claims Court Claims:Notwithstanding the parties decision to resolve all disputes through arbitration, either party may bring enforcement actions, validity determinations or claims arising from or relating to theft, piracy or unauthorized use of intellectual property in state or federal court or in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect its intellectual property rights (intellectual property rights means patents, copyrights, moral rights, trademarks, and trade secrets, but not privacy or publicity rights). Either party may also seek relief in a small claims court for disputes or claims within the scope of that courts jurisdiction.

30-Day Right to Opt Out. You have the right to opt out and not be bound by the arbitration and class action waiver provisions set forth above by sending written notice of your decision to opt out to termsofservice@latimes.com with the subject line, MANDATORY ARBITRATION AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER OPT-OUT. The notice must be sent within thirty (30) days of (a) the Effective Date of these Terms; or (b) the first date that you used the Site that contained any versions of the Terms that included this version of the mandatory arbitration and class action waiver, whichever is later. Otherwise, you shall be bound to arbitrate disputes in accordance with the terms of those paragraphs. If you opt out of these arbitration provisions, Los Angeles Times also will not be bound by them.

Changes to This Section. Any changes to this section will be made in the same manner as described in the Modifying these Terms section above; however, such changes will only become effective sixty (60) days after the revised Effective Date of these Terms and only will apply prospectively to claims arising after the sixtieth (60th) day. If a court or arbitrator decides that this subsection on Changes to This Section is not enforceable or valid, then this subsection shall be severed from the section entitled Mandatory Arbitration and Class Action Waiver, and the court or arbitrator shall apply the first Mandatory Arbitration and Class Action Waiver section in existence after you began using the Site.

Survival. This Mandatory Arbitration and Class Action Waiver section shall survive any termination of your account or the Site.

General Provisions

Force Majeure. The failure of the Site to comply with any provision of these Terms 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 the Site (excepting compliance with applicable codes and regulations) or other force majeure event will not be considered a breach of these Terms.

Severability. If for any reason any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, that provision shall be enforced to the maximum extent permissible so as to effect the intent of the parties as reflected in that provision, and the remainder of these Terms shall continue in full force and effect.

No Waiver. Any failure of the Site to enforce or exercise any provision of these Terms or related right shall not constitute a waiver of that right or provision.

No Third-Party Beneficiaries. You agree, except as expressly provided in these Terms, there shall be no third-party beneficiaries to these Terms.

Section Titles. The section titles used in these Terms are purely for convenience and carry with them no legal or contractual effect.

Termination. In the event of termination of these Terms for any reason, you agree the following provisions will survive: the provisions regarding limitations on your use of Content, the license(s) you have granted to the Site, the Disputes provisions, and all other provisions for which survival is equitable or appropriate.

Conflicts. In the case of a conflict between these Terms and the terms of any electronic or machine readable statement or policy, these Terms shall control. Similarly, in case of a conflict between these Terms and our Privacy Policy, these Terms control.

No Joint Venture, Partnership, or Agency Relationship. No joint venture, partnership or agency relationship exists between you and the Site. These Terms, our Privacy Policy, any uses of the Site by you, and any information, products, or services provided by the Site to you do not create and shall not be construed to create a joint venture, partnership or agency relationship between you and the Site or Los Angeles Times.

Limitation of Liability and Disclaimer of Warranties are Material Terms of these Terms. You agree that the provisions of these Terms that limit liability and disclaim warranties are essential terms of these Terms of Service.

Entire Agreement. These Terms constitute the entire agreement between you and the Site and supersede all prior or contemporaneous understandings regarding such subject matter. No amendment to or modification of these Terms will be binding unless made in writing and signed by Los Angeles Times. No failure to exercise, and no delay in exercising, on the part of either party, any right or any power hereunder shall operate as a waiver thereof, nor shall any single or partial exercise of any right or power hereunder preclude further exercise of any other right hereunder. In the event of a conflict between these Terms and any applicable purchase or other terms, these Terms shall govern.

Effective Date: June 19, 2018
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, on Wednesday requested former Fox News reporter Diana Falzone turn over all documents relating to her reporting on President Trumps debts and payments to silence women alleging extramarital affairs with him prior to the 2016 presidential election.

The request comes a week after the New Yorker published an investigation on Fox News that disclosed Falzone had reported an article about Trump making payments to porn star Stormy Daniels prior to the 2016 presidential election in order to keep her quiet about their alleged affair. According to the New Yorker, Fox killed the story because Rupert Murdoch, chairman of 21st Century Fox, wanted Trump to win the election.

Ken LaCorte, Falzones editor at Fox, published a response in Mediate disputing her version of events, saying the piece didnt meet journalistic standards and was not killed because of any political agenda.

Falzone, who has since left Fox, sued the company for gender and disability discrimination in May 2017. However, as part of her settlement, she signed a nondisclosure agreement and has not been able to rebut LaCortes claims or any matter arising out of her time at Fox.

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Cummings (D-Md.) has also requested that Falzone appear before the committee by March 21. Falzones lawyer Nancy Erika Smith, a partner at Smith Mullin in Montclair, N.J., says her client will comply. When the New Yorker story came out, Ken LaCorte started lying about my clients reporting and what happened, she said. Its a relief to her as a journalist that the truth will come out.

A Fox News representative could not be immediately reached for comment.

Congress request for a reporters notebooks adds a new wrinkle to the many ongoing investigations into Trump. It may also shed further light on the relationship between the president and Fox News.

This is about obstructing justice and a news organization thats become an arm of a campaign, Smith said. If Fox makes this an attack on journalism, thats ridiculous. Real journalists dont kill stories because of political preferences and certainly not two weeks before a presidential election.

stacy.perman@latimes.com

Twitter: @stacyperman
A screw-like device found in the wreckage of the Boeing Co. 737 Max 8 that crashed Sunday in Ethiopia has provided investigators with an early clue into what happened as work begins in France to decode the black boxes recovered from the scene.

The so-called jackscrew, used to set the trim that raises and lowers the planes nose, indicates that the jet was configured to dive, based on a preliminary review, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The evidence helped persuade U.S. regulators to ground the model, said the person, who requested anonymity to discuss the inquiry.

Frances aviation safety agency BEA received the cockpit voice and data recorders Thursday for analysis, while investigators on the scene near Addis Ababa continued to sift through the planes wreckage. The second crash of a 737 Max in five months has thrown Boeing into a crisis, sending the companys stock plunging and raising questions about the future of its bestselling jet.

Separately, the New York Times reported that the doomed Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 to Nairobi was in trouble almost immediately after takeoff as it lurched up and down hundreds of feet at a time. The captain asked in a panicky voice to turn back only three minutes into the flight as the plane accelerated to abnormal speeds, the newspaper reported, citing an unnamed person who reviewed the jets air traffic communications.

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Break break, request back to home, he told air traffic controllers as they scrambled to divert two other flights approaching the airport. The aircraft had accelerated far beyond what is considered standard practice. All contact between air controllers and the aircraft was lost five minutes after it took off, the report said.

U.S. Federal Aviation Administration chief Daniel Elwell on Wednesday cited unspecified evidence found at the crash scene as part of the justification for the agency to reverse course and temporarily halt flights of 737 Max planes. Up until then, U.S. regulators had held off, even as nation after nation grounded the model.

How a 50-year design came back to haunt Boeing with its troubled 737 Max jet 

Boeing shares, which had plunged more than 12%, or $28 billion, in market value since the crash in Ethiopia on Sunday, closed up 1.5% Friday, at $378.89.

The jackscrew, combined with a newly obtained satellite flight track of the plane, convinced the FAA that there were similarities to the Oct. 29 crash of the same Max model off the coast of Indonesia. In the October accident, it was determined that a safety feature on the Boeing aircraft malfunctioned and repeatedly put the plane into a dive.

All 157 people aboard the Ethiopian Airlines jet died after the plane crashed near Addis Ababa, Ethiopias capital.

In France, where the flight recorders are being analyzed at the BEAs laboratories, the agency posted a photo of the mangled hardware but has yet to comment on any progress on getting the data. The investigation process has started in Paris, Ethiopian Airlines said Friday on Twitter.

The discovery of the jackscrew was reported earlier by NBC News.
CBS Corp. directors agreed to pay $1.25 million to settle investors claims that network owner Sumner Redstone received millions of dollars in improper compensation after he became incapacitated in 2014.

The money  coming from insurance covering CBS officers and directors  will go back into the networks coffers and not to individual shareholders, according to a Thursday filing in a Delaware court. Such derivative suits are common against corporate boards.

The settlement resolves what may be the last lawsuit over the corporate fallout from Redstones physical decline and jockeying over control of CBS  the most-watched network in the United States  and media company Viacom Inc., both owned by the Redstone family.

CBS spokeswoman Kelli Raftery declined to comment Friday on why the companys directors decided to settle. CBS had defended the payments to Redstone.

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Redstone, 95, controls CBS and Viacom through his family investment vehicle National Amusements Inc., but his involvement has waned as his health has deteriorated. His daughter Shari Redstone has assumed a larger role on the companies boards.

Redstones health played a central role in a corporate clash over a proposed merger of CBS and Viacom, pitting Shari Redstone against CBS then-Chief Executive Les Moonves.

Moonves and his CBS board allies sought to oust the Redstones as CBS controlling shareholders, but were thwarted when Moonves was shown the door over sexual harassment allegations. CBS added five new directors to its board after Moonves left.

The CBS investors noted Redstones mental competence was called into question when reports surfaced in 2014 that he wasnt attending the networks board meetings and was having trouble speaking.

A Delaware Chancery Court judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed, ruling in April that the shareholders raised legitimate questions whether CBS board agreed to pay Redstone in exchange for services it allegedly knew that he could not render.
The muddled response by U.S. regulators and the Trump administration to the safety risks of the Boeing 737 Max raised fresh doubt about the international airworthiness not only of a jetliner  but also of American leadership.

Across the globe, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for decades represented the gold standard for air safety  a regulator whose decisions, particularly on American-made aircraft, boosted the confidence of plane travelers in New York, Miami and Los Angeles as well as London, Rio de Janeiro and Beijing.

Yet since Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash shortly after takeoff  the second 737 Max to go down in less than five months  foreign observers watched Washingtons handling of the crisis with mounting alarm. Critics at home and abroad blamed, at best, erratic decision-making and, at worst, domestic commercial interests, for what many of them decry as a flawed U.S. reaction.

Protection of passengers is what the FAA is there for. Beyond any consideration, its safety, safety, safety. And traditionally, the FAA has been the best in the world, said Elmar Giemulla, a professor of aviation law at the Berlin University of Technology in Germany. But now, this has been spoiled.

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After the March 10 crash, the FAA defended the 737 Max until reversing course on Wednesday, two days after China led a host of nations in grounding the jetliners. President Trump, meanwhile, fired off rambling tweets about newfangled planes before preempting his own regulators and announcing the U.S. decision to finally ground the aircraft based on new evidence that showed similarities between Sundays crash in Africa and that of another 737 Max crash in Indonesia in October.

The outcome, critics say, has undermined American credibility as the pacesetter for global aircraft standards, while potentially ushering in a new era in which international regulators  particularly those in China and Europe  assert growing clout. The global response now stands in contrast to 2013, when foreign aviation authorities largely followed the U.S. lead in dealing with a rash of battery problems that led to the temporary grounding of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

This time, the FAA just looked idiotic, said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general of the U.S. Transportation Department. Noting that Ethiopia has decided to send black boxes recovered from Sundays crash to France rather than the United States for analysis, she added, There is no way this doesnt erode confidence in American aviation regulation and American leadership.

Giemulla said the delays in Washington have reinforced fears that the Trump administration is compromising the work of government agencies and experts in deference to the wishes of big companies such as Boeing.

It fits the impression that the world outside the U.S. has of Donald Trump. And the suspicion, of course, is that he has ordered the FAA to deviate from its main task, he said.

For some, the events of this week harked back to the international distrust of American financial regulators that surfaced after a toxic meltdown on Wall Street sparked the global financial crisis a decade ago. Yet it also fueled further concern over what critics call the recklessness of a Trump era driven by edicts via Twitter, impromptu trade wars and the on-again, off-again detente with North Korea.

In the aftermath of the crash, global experts marveled at what they called a sudden rebellion in an area Washington once dominated: global aviation.

The Americans may feel, and not without justification, that they have the greatest insight into the Boeing aircraft, said Sandy Morris, an aerospace analyst at Jefferies International in London. But this is a case when others in the world decided that they wanted to bring the risk of another accident down to zero. What youve seen here is a rebellion.

Shanghai Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 planes in China. (Associated Press)

Perhaps nowhere was U.S. leadership on aviation safety being questioned more than in China, the first country to ground the 737 Max  an unprecedented move for a government that long followed cues from American authorities.

A top Chinese regulator said his agency made its decision because the FAA and Boeing had not provided China with satisfactory answers about the airplanes software and safety issues after the first 737 Max crash  of Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia that killed all 189 passengers and crew.

Li Jian, deputy director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC, suggested that the FAA was reluctant to take strong measures against the 737 Max.

They have had difficulty making a decision, so we took the lead, Li told reporters.

Chinas move triggered a cascade of other countries, including Britain, Canada and members of the European Union, to follow suit within 48 hours, effectively isolating the FAA before Trump ordered the planes temporarily grounded as well.

Chinese officials probably welcomed the opportunity to establish their leadership credentials at an inflection point in the countrys aviation history, analysts said. Chinas civil aviation market is expected to eclipse that of the United States in three years, while its first homegrown passenger jet, the C919 narrow-body model that is designed to compete with the 737 Max, is also expected to take to the skies by the mid-2020s, at least in China.

As China grows, as its aviation grows both as a market and manufacturer, as its products and technology develop, its obviously the intention of the Chinese government to take on more and more global leadership, said Guo Yufeng, chief executive of the Q&A Consulting firm in Guangzhou.

In Europe, several aviation officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the process by which jets are grounded, said they traditionally looked to the FAA for guidance on U.S.-built planes.

And for days, they stuck to that, opting not to take action in the face of mounting pressure to do so. As recently as Tuesday morning, regulators in some nations in Europe issued statements standing by the U.S. decision to keep the 737 Max flying.

But within hours, European officials made a different determination, prompted in part by new satellite information suggesting similarities between the crash on Sunday and the Lion Air flight that went down October  evidence the United States would not act on until later in the day on Wednesday.

China says no to Max, FAA says dont worry, EU closes airspace. So much for U.S. leadership. Stephen Saideman, Canadian scholar

Aviation safety is our number one priority & the EU is taking every step to ensure the safety of passengers, wrote the top European Union official in charge of transportation, Violeta Bulc, on Twitter.

The outcry of international criticism was not universal  few, for example, in Japan and South Korea appeared to challenge U.S. management of the crisis. But from Canada to China to the Middle East, a social media storm erupted over the erosion of American credibility.

Smart friends of mine have pointed out the reactions to 737 Max might be inflection point for U.S. hegemony, tweeted Canadian scholar Stephen Saideman. China says no to Max, FAA says dont worry, EU closes airspace. So much for U.S. leadership.

In Brazil, the controversy surrounding the 737 Max even before Sundays crash was not so much a rejection of U.S. leadership as an attempt to function in its absence. When the Max models were first introduced, for instance, Brazil ignored an FAA report that did not require additional pilot training for the aircrafts software, instead determining that such training was in fact needed.

On March 11, Indias civil aviation regulator first announced that any pilot flying the 737 Max must have a minimum of 1,000 hours of experience and reserved the right to impose other restrictions based on information received from the FAA and Boeing.

But as other countries grounded the planes entirely, Indias aviation regulator  which eventually grounded the aircraft Tuesday night  faced a growing chorus of criticism for its own delayed reaction. Critics there said the fact that the FAA was even slower to react undermined its role as a decider in such crises.

We all live by their rules, said Neelam Mathews, a veteran aviation journalist based in New Delhi. Its very disappointing the way the FAA reacted.

By Wednesday, the last major holdout  besides the United States  was Canada.

As other countries grounded the planes, Ottawa stood with Washington. Canadian Transportation Minister Marc Garneau on Tuesday said the country would keep flying the 737 Max.

That changed Wednesday morning. With domestic pressure growing, Garneau and Canada switched course, just hours ahead of Trump, citing new evidence from satellites and other sources.

Canadian reporters pressed him on whether the U.S. had pressured Canada to keep the planes in the air. He said it had not.

Hours later, Trump announced the United States was also grounding the planes.

Were doing it almost as a simultaneous thing. Because we were coordinating with Canada. We were giving them information, they were giving us information, and we very much work in conjunction with Canada, he said.
The ugly as well as complex nature of human intelligence operations naturally encourages the alternative of using electronic information gathering and surveillance. American fondness for and skill at technology has led us to embrace this approach, during but especially following World War II. The British are relatively more committed to the use of human agents and means.
U.S. regulators charged Volkswagen and former CEO Martin Winterkorn with defrauding investors during its massive diesel emissions scandal.

The surprise charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission, filed late Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, come two years after the German automaker settled with the U.S. over criminal and civil charges, as the company tries to distance itself from one of its darkest eras.

The SEC said that between April 2014 and May 2015, Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the country grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance and the companys financial standing, which gave Volkswagen a financial benefit when it issued securities at more attractive rates for the company, according to the SEC.

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Volkswagen hid its decade-long emissions scheme while it was selling billions of dollars of its bonds to investors at inflated prices, said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SECs enforcement division.

In September 2015, Volkswagen installed software on more than 475,000 cars that enabled them to cheat on emissions tests, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The software reduced nitrogen oxide emissions when the cars were placed on a test machine but allowed higher emissions and improved engine performance during normal driving.

In 2016, the Justice Department sued Volkswagen over the emissions-cheating software and the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, saying it made false claims in commercials promoting its Clean Diesel vehicles as environmentally friendly.

Saying he took responsibility for the fraud, Winterkorn resigned, but he insisted he personally did nothing wrong.

Volkswagen said Friday that the SEC is simply repeating unproven claims about Winterkorn.

Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company, the company said in a prepared release.

The company has paid about $20 billion in fines and civil settlements. It has also pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the United States and several managers, including Winterkorn, were charged there.

The charges from the SEC arrive as the German company attempts to distance itself from the scandal. On Tuesday, the automaker said that it planned to ramp up production of electric vehicles over the next 10 years, to 22 million, and reduce its carbon footprint over vehicle life cycles by 30%.

Volkswagens pivot to electric vehicles comes as it seeks to comply with new limits on carbon dioxide emissions in Europe, and a push by China for more low-emission vehicles.

The SECs complaint charges Volkswagen AG, its subsidiaries Volkswagen Group of America Finance, LLC and VW Credit, Inc., and Winterkorn with violating the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws.

The SEC seeks permanent injunctions, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest and civil penalties. It also wants to bar Winterkorn from holding any corporate officer or director positions.
This has been a great week for having our noses rubbed in things we knew were happening but didnt want to believe it was this bad.

The biggie, of course, is the college admissions scandal, in which wealthy families were busted bribing their way into top schools.

Most of us parents probably assumed all along the system was rigged in favor of the rich. But it was hugely disheartening to learn how much money was changing hands, and how effective the racket was, to make sure children of privilege could elbow aside those of lesser means to cheat their way into a leading university.

No less dismaying, though, were a pair of reports showing how significantly consumer protection has waned under the Trump administration.

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We all probably suspected since President Trump took office that hed go easier than his predecessor on businesses that abused, misled or defrauded consumers. But to see the hard facts makes it painfully clear that Trump has little if any interest in watching our backs.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau still has hundreds of dedicated staff members who want to enforce the law, said Chris Peterson, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America and author of one of this weeks reports.

The one thing thats changed is the political leadership, he told me, and that leadership has signaled that its going to be less aggressive in holding businesses accountable for their practices.

I heard the same from Alan Zibel, who came up with similar findings in his report for the advocacy group Public Citizen.

Theyre sending a message that corporate wrongdoers can do whatever they like, and theyre throwing consumers under a bus, he said.

Public Citizen found that the CFPB pursued 35 enforcement actions against businesses with fines of at least $5,000 during the first two years of Trumps time in office. Thats down from 64 during the last two years of the Obama administration.

The Consumer Federation determined that the bureaus enforcement activity has plunged by 80% from 2015, when the CFPB was at the height of its powers. Average compensation to consumers, it found, is down by  wait for it  96% per case.

I asked the bureau what it had to say about this. I received a statement declaring that the bureau is and will continue to vigorously enforce the law.

In the first two months of 2019, the bureau announced five public enforcement actions, it said. The bureau also has a significant number of open non-public investigations being handled by enforcement staff.

Trumps appointee as CFPB director, Kathy Kraninger, a person with no background in consumer protection or financial services, testified this week before the Senate Banking Committee.

She said shes emphasizing stability, consistency and transparency as hallmarks as we mature the agency and institutionalize the many partnerships that are key to our success.

Those are laudable goals, although its hard not to notice her to-do list doesnt contain the words consumer and protection.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who spearheaded creation of the CFPB after the 2008 financial crisis, pointed out to Kraninger that enforcement actions have plunged under Trumps watch. She asked how many lawsuits have been filed against student lenders.

Kraninger said she didnt have the specific answer to that question.

The public record seems to show zero, Warren shot back. Not one single action. She noted that 50 cases were filed against student loan companies under the previous administration, with $712 million in restitution recovered for consumers.

You are supposed to be the cop on the beat, but you are only watching out for the crooks who are cheating American consumers, Warren said. If you had any decency youd either do your job or resign.

Ouch.

The Consumer Federation report concludes that under the leadership of acting Director Mick Mulvaney, and more recently, Director Kathy Kraninger, enforcement activity at the CFPB has declined to levels that are either nonexistent or significantly below that of the prior administration, even in the areas where consumer complaint activity is the highest.

It says the bureau returned about $43 million in restitution to consumers every single week when Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee, was in charge. Under Mulvaney that figure dropped to $6.4 million a week, and under Kraninger is now down to about $925,000.

Debt collectors seem to have received particularly lax treatment. Since Trump took office, the federation found, the CFPB has announced only one case of enforcing the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. It settled this case without ordering a single dollar of restitution to victims.

Similarly, while Obama was in power, the bureau announced 15 student lending-related cases with an average $47.5 million in restitution per case. Under Trump, as Warren observed, the bureau hasnt announced or resolved a single student-lending enforcement action, and has provided no relief to borrowers.

Nobodys broken any student-lending laws over the last two years? said Peterson, the federation reports author and a former CFPB official. Thats ridiculous.

Public Citizen found that a get-out-of-jail-free mentality isnt unique to the CFPB.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission completed only three enforcement actions against businesses in 2018 and four in 2017. Thats about half the number of product safety enforcement actions during Obamas final two years.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission completed 40 enforcement actions against corporations during Trumps first two years, down 31% from 58 cases in Obamas final two years.

Trumps appointees seem to believe that consumer protection is a last resort, said Public Citizens Zibel. Thats a 180-degree difference from what he promised during the campaign.

Indeed, while Trump was always clear about his intention to roll back rules for businesses, he consistently said this would not be at the expense of safeguarding consumers.

The bureaus position is that its vigorously enforcing the law. The numbers indicate otherwise.

These numbers are a matter of public record, said Peterson. The public record speaks for itself.

Either the CFPB is now turning a blind eye to corporate malfeasance or U.S. businesses have had a collective come-to-Jesus moment and are now committed as never before to doing the right thing.

Yeah, tough call.

David Lazarus column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.
Since Jan. 1, brothers Tal and Oren Alexander, who oversee a 10-person team of brokers at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, have worked on three deals worth nearly a half-billion dollars.

First came the Jan. 21 sale of a London mansion to billionaire Ken Griffin for $122 million, the highest recorded purchase in that city since 2011. The brothers served as referrers.

Two days later, the Douglas Elliman team closed the sale of a New York City penthouse at 220 Central Park South for a whopping $238 million, the most expensive home ever sold in the U.S., also to Griffin.

Then on Feb. 1, the Alexanders represented the seller in the $50-million sale of a Miami mansion. That price, paid by an undisclosed buyer, was a record for a single-family home in Miami-Dade County.

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Sitting poolside at their sprawling Miami Beach mansion, Tal, 32, and Oren, 31, acknowledge their record-setting real estate hat trick has been a little surreal.

Just dont call them lucky.

Real Estate brokers Tal (left) and Oren Alexander at their home on Miami Beach on Feb. 1, 2019. (Patrick Farrell / Miami Herald)

People often say weve had beginners luck, Oren said. But weve been doing this for over a decade. There were deals that weve been working on for the past three years, using relationships that weve cultivated over the last decade. Weve been able to grow a network that is unprecedented. Theres not a person or a client we cant get to.

In just 10 years, the Alexanders have established themselves as major players in an industry that often takes decades to crack: The competitive world of ultra-high-end real estate.

After growing up in Miami Beach, the brothers separated to attend college. Oren went to the University of Colorado Boulder, and Tal attended Hofstra University in Long Island. Upon graduation, the pair moved to New York City to launch their careers in 2008, just as the real estate market imploded.

Still, they pushed forward. Oren landed a job with Douglas Elliman Realty and focused on sales. He was only 21 when he brokered his first major deal, an $8.2-million penthouse at the Park Imperial in Manhattan, in the summer of 2009. The buyer was the well-known Miami attorney Jim Ferraro.

Four years later, Ferraro paid $7.75 million for the adjacent penthouse in the same building, again hiring Oren as his broker.

It definitely crossed my mind at the time that Oren was so young, Ferraro said recently. But I started my law firm three years out of law school, so I started young too. He got me a great deal. The numbers were really good and they got a write-up in the New York Post, because the market was dead at that time. And my place today is worth more than double what I paid for it.

While Oren concentrated on sales, Tal started his own company in 2009 focusing on luxury rentals.

I was showing apartments to an elderly couple who were looking to sell their place and move downtown, Tal said. They owned a seven-room apartment at the Eldorado on 90th and Central Park West, and I told them they had to meet my brother.

That $7.5-million unit became Orens first listing in 2011 and made the brothers realize they should be working together. Since then, the pair have negotiated sales for clients including the state of Qatar and the unnamed Russian buyer who paid $47 million in cash for that Miami estate that just sold for $50 million ($47 million was the previous record price in the county).

Other famous clients have included footwear magnate Steve Madden, designer Tommy Hilfiger and Hamilton producer Sander Jacobs. The Alexanders currently represent more than $1 billion of properties in New York and Florida.

Word of mouth is the most important kind of marketing, Oren said. It makes up 90% of our business.

The other 10%: Showing their high-worth clients they play at the same level. The Alexanders various Instagram accounts, which have a combined 65,000 followers, are filled with photos of the brothers frolicking in the Bahamas, Aspen, Cambodia and West Maui. They travel constantly, whether its bouncing back and forth between Manhattan and Miami or visiting Art Basel fairs in Switzerland, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires and wherever else their clientele might be.

Oren and Tal have a knack for being at the right event during Art Basel, at the right camp at Burning Man and at the right party at the Oscars, said Jay Parker, chief executive of Douglas Ellimans Florida brokerage. They have the gift of gab, they work very hard, theyre very disciplined and theyve been able to leverage their previous successes. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, and these guys never stop squeaking.

Parker said he first met the Alexanders at a Shabbat dinner at their parents home  a familial connection that remains intact today. Their father, Shlomi Alexander, a developer who specializes in building high-end mansions and spec homes, said the real estate bug bit his sons early.

They would run around with me when they were still kids at the construction sites, already negotiating with people, said Shlomi, who built the Miami mansion that has paid off so handsomely for the brothers.

Oren is the ambassador, the one who speaks about architecture and design and stonework. Tal is the salesman, the one with the encyclopedic knowledge of statistics and market trends.

Jonathan Miller, chief executive of the New York-based Miller Samuel Inc. real estate consulting firm, said he was walking down Madison Avenue last fall when he ran into Tal.

He started grilling me about the market, and in return shared a lot of intel with me, Miller said. I dont know what their secret sauce is, but they have something that gets them in the middle of many high-profile deals other brokers cant touch.

Part of that secret sauce may be the confidence the brothers exude  the kind of self-assurance that only comes with success.

Our deals do the talking for us, and were a lot younger than the competition by far, Tal said. We look forward to settling down and starting families one day, but right now this is a 24/7 job for us. And our parents taught us to be equal partners and work together from an early age. We bring a different perspective into the industry because of that. For the price of one, youre getting the best of both.

Rodriguez writes for the Miami Herald

hotproperty@latimes.com
After landing their first major round of investment in 2015, the co-founders of one of L.A.s fastest-growing start-ups had to make a major decision.

They were flush with cash. It was time to start hiring more employees. But where should they go?

Some people were asking if we could move to Santa Monica, or move downtown, said Vahe Kuzoyan, ServiceTitans president and co-founder.

So Kuzoyan called an all-hands meeting and laid out all the potential locations that made sense for the company.

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I said, OK, we can go to West Glendale. Or North Glendale. Or South Glendale.

Four years later, ServiceTitan has grown to a company valued at $1.65 billion by building a software suite for the plumbers, electricians, HVAC-repair people and garage-door installers of the world.

The tech hubs of Silicon Beach and Silicon Valley have germinated thousands of start-ups serving every imaginable need of the kinds of people who work at start-ups. But they had largely ignored the $400-billion home services economy.

It took two guys who grew up in Glendale helping their fathers work as plumbers and contractors to see that huge untapped market as an opportunity. And they werent about to give up that home-field advantage.

In March 2018, the company raised a $62-million round of venture capital. In November, it raised an additional $165 million. And with few competitors, ServiceTitan appears to have room to just keep growing, a relative rarity in todays crowded tech landscape.

ServiceTitans headquarters now sit high in a tower on Brand Boulevard, bounded by the concrete ditch of the Verdugo Wash on one side and the concrete ribbon of the Ventura Freeway on the other. Since that meeting in 2015, the staff has ballooned from 40 to more than 600 employees, with a satellite office in Atlanta.

Kuzoyan, 35, and co-founder and Chief Executive Ara Mahdessian, 33, both have offices with sweeping views of the Verdugos. Both have stately homes on the same street just a few minutes drive away.

Weve created what we like to call Silicon Hills over here, Mahdessian said.

ServiceTitans Vahe Kuzoyan and Ara Mahdessian revisit Phoenicia, a Glendale restaurant where they spent the night talking with an investor after their companys first $18-million funding round. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

The founders both moved to L.A. as young children in the 80s  Mahdessian from Iran, as a refugee fleeing the brutal Iran-Iraq war, and Kuzoyan from Armenia, then a part of the Soviet Union. Mahdessians family landed in Glendale, where his father started a contracting business. Kuzoyans family started out in East Hollywoods Little Armenia, then North Hollywood, and finally made it to the promised land of Glendale, he said, once his fathers plumbing business found some success.

The boys focused on school, helping their fathers over weekends and summers. Mahdessian got into Stanford; Kuzoyan got into USC. Both majored in computer science and seemed destined for cushy jobs at big-name tech firms: Facebook, maybe, or Google.

But when they met on a joint USC-Stanford Armenian Student Assn. ski trip (Theres like a thousand Armenians at USC, Mahdessian said. Theres only 25 of us at Stanford  so they invited us loners.), they found a new path that took them back home.

We talked about our lives growing up, and seeing our parents struggling with their businesses, Mahdessian said.

Kuzoyan had been tinkering with some software to help his dad, and Mahdessian had already told a firm in Glendale that hed try to cook up something similar.

They both knew how small home services businesses were run on a hodgepodge of paper forms and one-off programs, thick appointment books and gnarly Excel sheets. And they realized they could build the software to streamline the whole operation.

Id answered calls and Id gone into the field and helped my dad out a few times, but I have like negative mechanical aptitude, Kuzoyan said. I couldnt even hold a flashlight correctly  my strengths are more computer-based.

After graduation, they started coding together. It started out as a simple program to track customer calls and marketing budgets, so their dads could figure out whether an ad in the yellow pages or on Google was worth their time. By the end of the summer, other contractors were asking to see the software.

At the time, John Akhoian was running a Mr. Rooter franchise in Mission Hills. He had been working as a plumber in the Valley since he was 17, and like many in the industry, he didnt get into the business for the paperwork.

The dispatch system ran on a discontinued type of database software. Invoices, sales reports and orders came in a mishmash of analog and digital forms. Plumbers had to haul big books out into the field to show customers pricing and product info. A cup of coffee would spill on a check, and a plumber would have to waste an hour driving back to get a new one.

I knew it was possible to make all of this computer-generated, Akhoian said, just nobody was willing to work on it.

But Mahdessian and Kuzoyan were happy to keep adding new functions to match the needs of their growing client base (Akhoian was their first, besides Kuzoyans dad). For five years, they kept building an all-in-one software suite for local customers. Then they realized they had to change.

This is embarrassing, but we first built it as a desktop application  we literally missed the internet, and this is in 2007, Kuzoyan said. We didnt have this grand vision like what we have today.

The mass adoption of high-speed internet fundamentally changed the software business. Customers used to pay big upfront fees for floppy disks or CD-ROMs, and repeat the process whenever an update came out.

Then Salesforce came along. In 1999, it became the first big company to take advantage of the new connectivity by selling software not as a discrete product, like a loaf of bread or a power drill, but as a subscription service.

This software-as-a-service business model (known as SaaS in the tech world) let customers instantly expand or contract the number of devices running the software, get new updates on the fly and access the same info no matter which computer they were using.

And it let the SaaS companies bring in reliable rivers of money. Under the old model, developers sank years of work into a new version of software, betting that customers would upgrade en masse. Now, they had locked-in customers paying up each month  all they had to do was keep them happy.

The model has grown Salesforce to a $123-billion company and San Franciscos largest tech employer, and been embraced by tech start-ups and venture capital firms alike.

As they talked to more contractors, the ServiceTitan team realized that if anything, SaaS was even more useful outside the bounds of a typical white-collar job.

With just an iPad linked to the cloud service, a plumber could check and update a dispatch calendar, show customers an always-updated inventory catalog, take notes for the next visit, and even process payments on the fly  and the back office could see all this happen. With location tracking, they could even check whether the plumber was knocking off early to hit the bar, or doubling back to a house on the weekends to do an all-cash side job for a customer.

Nobody was thinking about this industry, right? Mahdessian said. But it is a core part of life. Who else provides the basic necessities of life  water, relief from the scorching heat in L.A., or the crazy cold in the East, and then light and electricity? Its the basis of civilization.

Investors soon bought in. Byron Deeter, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, met up with the founders in 2015, in Kuzoyans dads shop, to shake hands over their first $18-million round of funding, then spent the night talking at Phoenicia, a sprawling restaurant across the street from the Armenian Consulate.

That customer empathy and love and understanding, just coming from that world, has served them extremely well, Deeter said. It gave us complete conviction that they could build this product.

Deeter foresaw challenges in attracting trades aside from plumbing, where ServiceTitan began, and growing quickly in an industry split into a galaxy of small operations. But word spread fast, and ServiceTitan started signing contracts with some of the countrys largest home service franchises and regional chains, and has enlisted hundreds of five- and 10-person shops, too.

We went from a world where it was push push push, and then it started to pull, Kuzoyan said. Weve been holding on for dear life ever since.

ServiceTitan has racked up more than 2,500 clients who run a workforce of 50,000 across the U.S. and Canada. Annual revenue has doubled yearly since the company raised its first round, and is projected to top $100 million this year.

The threat of competition from one of the software sectors true giants, or getting undercut by a newer (and cheaper) start-up, is always present. But to date, heavy hitters such as Salesforce, Microsoft and Oracle have stayed out of the home services business, focusing their cloud-based field software efforts on healthcare, IT and manufacturing.

They want to sell million-dollar packages to billion-dollar companies, said William Hsu, a managing partner at Mucker Capital, the Santa Monica firm where ServiceTitan first found seed funding. The small- and medium-sized business market is really, really unsexy, he added, leaving the field open for ServiceTitan.

And according to its co-founders, ServiceTitan has a competitive advantage in Glendale itself.

In the Bay Area, everyone is getting poached left and right, Mahdessian said. But we have a bunch of superstars, and nobody ever leaves.

Kuzoyan said that ServiceTitan alone has moved more than 100 families into Glendale from Northern California or out of state, and the Jewel City vibe has proved to be a draw.

The founders have also built connections in the Armenian tech community, both at home and abroad.

Theyre both helping kick-start the Armenian tech scene, said Taron Lizagub, who moved to Glendale from Armenia more than two decades ago, but met Kuzoyan at a tech event in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, back when ServiceTitan was small.

Lizagub had an idea for a company to make virtual reality headsets, but needed some cash to get it going. Vahe just offered to help out  he went back to the U.S. before me, and wired me $30,000, no questions asked, Lizagub said. The company, Knox Labs, went on to sell millions of Google Cardboard VR sets.

ServiceTitan has set up a 10-person research and development office in Yerevan, and has given free office space at its headquarters to entrepreneurs who recently immigrated to Glendale.

Glendale is already home to a handful of other sleeper tech successes, including the legal automation company LegalZoom and the education-tech giant Age of Learning.

On the recommendation of ServiceTitan and other local companies, the city itself is investing in better internet infrastructure, hosting more social events for the growing scene, and trying to attract more co-working spaces for start-ups in search of cheap desks.

Then theres the real estate. As the cost of Westside housing and office space has risen, being Valley-adjacent has become something of a perk.

And frankly, said Jennifer Hiramoto, Glendales economic development officer, people outgrow the beach.

sam.dean@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter: @samaugustdean
Well, that was a surprise!

(M)iyamoto Is Black Enough  the first in what will be an ongoing collaboration between the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills and Brooklyns newest and presumably hippest major new music site, National Sawdust  was described in advance materials as well as the program booklet as a riveting piece about Ariana Miyamoto, the mixed-race winner of Miss Universe Japan 2015. They got one thing right: It was, indeed, riveting.

But the performance had next to nothing (make that nothing) to do with the Japanese and African American beauty queen or her having to weather backlash for her lack of pure parentage, which is to say for not having been Japanese enough. In fact, (M)iyamoto Is Black Enough turns out to be the name of a band or new music group or something. Not being genre-specific, the foursome cant yet quite figure out what to otherwise call themselves. They havent even managed to come up with names for the pieces they play.

The trailblazing members are poet Roger Bonair-Agard, steelpan player and composer Andy Akiho, jazz and pop drummer Sean Dixon and former Kronos Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler. They started working together in 2015 when Miss Universe was in the news, and because Akiho and Zeigler are half Japanese, (M)iyamoto resonated. As for the parentheses, youll have to ask them, not that theyre very good at coming up with answers.

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Essentially what (M)iyamoto does is feature Bonair-Agard reciting his poems while the musicians back him up. The music is by Akiho, much of it written but based on improvisation and a few parts open for group improv. Each member at some point during the 75-minute set gets a solo. There is strong sound design by Garth MacAleavey.

None of that is peculiar. In the free-flowing Brooklyn new music scene, pop and experimental music are no longer distinct. Nor is the addition of poetry anything new. Beat poets and jazz musicians were often on the same stage and in the same groove in the 1950s. A couple of decades later, Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass made a striking duo working together.

Yet (M)iyamoto comes across as absolutely fresh. A good deal of that has to do with the compelling Trinidad-born, Brooklyn-raised Bonair-Agard, who does share certain qualities with Ginsberg. His background, race, experience, influences and languages may all be different. His oracular style of reading has traces of calypso, hip-hop and sermonizing. But the urge toward ecstasy, the spiritual revelation that comes out of uncertainty, the summoning of spirits from ancient traditions capable of elevating his spirit without forsaking the flesh feels newly important.

Where poets have notes, he reminded the audience during a talk back after the performance, poets have vowels. And his vowels resonate with inescapable power as he returns to the mystical core of his Trinidad roots, as he reclaims the black Brooklyn of his youth, as he recounts the meaning of parenthood. (He very sweetly recorded the audience shouting, Get better, Nina, on his phone to play for his ill daughter.) Standing there in his red tracksuit and yellow sneakers, he becomes an incarnation of revolt and revitalization. Be alive, be black, burn, build is one motto. He tells us that he knows Mozart and he knows Marley. He does.

Not that theres any Mozart around. Dixon is a driving drummer, and he fuels the poet; his solo, which included using a sampler as a percussion instrument, was a tour de force. Akiho, who has a feel for repetition that doesnt feel like repetition and who uses his steel drums not only for experimental effects but also to perfume the sonic atmosphere, and Zeiglers electric cello often stand apart. They bring a lyricism on which Bonair-Agard floats.

All of this, the band notes, is very much a work in progress. They promise to come up with titles when they complete their first recording, now in the works. Each member, moreover, is an artist in his own right with his own significant career. Akiho, for instance, is collaborating with the Industry, Yuval Sharons unclassifiable L.A. opera company, for a production of Bertolt Brechts Galileo to be performed on the beach.

But (M)iyamoto, incandescent in its synergy between music and poetry, is already more than good enough.
Otis College of Art and Design President Bruce W. Ferguson has stepped down, ending a four-year run, the school said Thursday, and former provost Randall Lavender has stepped in as interim president.

Due to a number of contributing factors, the trustees of Otis College felt that a change in leadership was necessary in order to move the college forward, Jeffrey Perkins, Otis vice president of communications and marketing, said by email.

The sudden departure is unrelated to the recent college admissions scandal involving wealthy business executives and Hollywood actresses, the college said, nor is it related to sexual misconduct or ethics violation of any kind, although Otis would not offer any other information about the leadership change.

Bruces presidency contributed to Otis College in a number of important ways and sought to bring more people to Otis opportunities, said a letter from the board of trustees to alumni Thursday. Ferguson was credited with initiating an L.A. summer residency program that brings international professional artists and designers to work on the Otis campus for a month.

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Lavender is a nationally and internationally exhibited artist whose works in oil on panel and sculptural tableaux are included in dozens of public and private collections, the letter said. He has been affiliated with Otis since 1983 and was appointed provost by Ferguson, serving from 2015 until September 2018.

OTIS: Whats on view at the colleges Ben Maltz Gallery 

In 2016, Otis completed a $50-million expansion that included the colleges first residence hall, accommodating more than 200 students. The expansion also included an academic building for the fashion design department, which used to be in downtown L.A.

The college is celebrating its centennial this school year. Partly noting that milestone, the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts satellite gallery at Charles White Elementary School (formerly the Otis Art Institute) has an exhibition about artist White, formerly head of the colleges drawing department. Life Model: Charles White and His Students will be on view until September. The California African American Museum in Exposition Park this month debuted Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary, and LACMA is showing Charles White: a Retrospective.

Otis trustees will begin the search for a new president in the next few months. They will consult with faculty, other staff and student representatives, the college said.
James Gunn has been quietly reinstated by Disney as writer and director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, The Times confirmed Friday.

The decision, which was made a few months ago, is an about-face from Disneys decision last July to fire Gunn over years-old social media messages that made light of topics including rape, pedophilia, 9/11 and the Holocaust.

Gunn tweeted his gratitude shortly after the news was first reported by Deadline.

I deeply appreciate Disneys decision and I am excited to continue making films that investigate the ties of love that bind us all, Gunn wrote on Twitter early Friday afternoon. I have been, and continue to be incredibly humbled by your love and support.

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Gunn took responsibility for the now-deleted offensive tweets and explained them in a statement at the time.

Many people who have followed my career know when I started, I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo, he wrote, in part, back then. As I have discussed publicly many times, as Ive developed as a person, so has my work and my humor. I used to make a lot of offensive jokes. I dont anymore.

Gunns offensive tweets were unearthed by people on the right after the Guardians director came to the defense of filmmaker Mark Duplass, who himself had been attacked by people on the left for making positive comments about conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.

Despite an outpouring of public support for Gunn, including Guardians actor Dave Bautista, Disney couldnt stomach the situation.

The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studios values, and we have severed our business relationship with him, Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn said in a statement at the time.

After he was fired, Gunn wrote, I understand and accept the business decisions . All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be.

Horn reportedly met with Gunn several times in the aftermath of the firing and was persuaded by how the director handled the situation, according to Deadline.

As the news spread, fans began rejoicing on Twitter and praising Disneys decision to rehire Gunn, who helmed the first two Guardians films.

Yay! @JamesGunn is back in the driver's seat of #GuardiansOfTheGalaxyVol3

The best news I've heard today! pic.twitter.com/NokbaxGTNJ  Matthew Beimford (@mattbeim90) March 15, 2019

cdz@latimes.com

@theCDZ on Twitter and Instagram
In 2018, Jordan Peele became the first black writer to win an original screenplay Oscar. The honor came for his debut feature Get Out, a horror film exploring the latent menace lurking behind a seemingly well-meaning white liberal family.

I stopped writing this movie about 20 times because I thought it was impossible, he said in his acceptance speech. I thought it wasnt going to work. I thought no one would ever make this movie. But I kept coming back to it because I knew if someone let me make this movie, that people would hear it and people would see it.

A day after Peeles win, Shudder, AMC Networks horror and thriller streaming service, green-lit the documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, which explores the origins, evolution and impact of black films and filmmakers in the genre with Get Out serving as its centerpiece.

The documentary, directed by up-and-coming filmmaker Xavier Burgin, explores the history of black horror actors and creators by tracing their presence in horror movies from the silent film era through Get Out. Among the voices in the film are Candyman star Tony Todd, author and academic Tananarive Due and The Craft actress Rachel True.

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Horror as a genre is definitely a way that our American culture has projected its societal fears, said Due. We have so many daily anxieties, whether its at the workplace, with our kids, with the police, and that anxiety has a cost that I believe horror helps us interpret.

With social media, you see everything in real time, said Burgin, alluding to the prevalence of police brutality videos shared online. Its a constant thing that we see on a regular basis. And a lot of the time it feels like horror in a way.

To me, it made sense that black horror took off [after Get Out] because we were being told We have Obama, nothings wrong anymore, added True. So for it to naturally extend itself in this direction makes sense now. I think with horror there is a way to survive the big bad thing that is intangible in real life. We can defeat it on camera.

Horror  is definitely a way that our American culture has projected its societal fears. Tananarive Due

This is Us: Jordan Peele wants Americans to face their demons in new home-invasion horror film 

A few weeks after the documentarys streaming release, Burgin, Due, Todd and True huddled in a conference room at Shudders Santa Monica offices to discuss the current landscape of horror  and black filmmaking of any genre  since Peeles Oscar win.

Unfortunately in the time to come, there will be more cynical attempts to create a story that seems black because it has black faces in it, but in fact is not a black story and not even meant for black people, Due predicted.

True fake-coughed Green Book as an example.

Its a shame about Green Book because that subject matter is an extremely important part of our culture, said Todd.

And that is why when we saw all those white faces accepting the Oscar, it left a sour taste in our mouths, said True. Not to say that white people cannot produce a black story, they can. But that is a case in point of maybe not the narrative we would have told.

Although the mainstream success of Get Out means studios will become more willing to bet on black filmmakers and stories, much of horrors history  like film history in general  is steeped in one-dimensional or stereotypical portrayals of black characters.

Theres the sacrificial Negro who exists only to save a white character, Due said. Theres the magical Negro trope which sort of gives us supernatural abilities that are often used in service to warning the white characters or asking if theyre OK. And then first to die was around for a long time. It kind of became a joke. We can chuckle about it now, but frankly, if we dont address it and if we dont call out the tropes, five years from now, 10 years from now, they roll back around.

Daniel Kaluuya as Chris Washington in Get Out. (Universal Pictures)

A timeline of the most influential black horror films and filmmakers 

The documentary, based on Robin R. Means Colemans 2011 book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, posits that horror means something entirely different to black people than it does to whites, which is what makes the current pivot toward black storytelling by black creators so revolutionary.

Were developing a consumer base thats a little more sophisticated about what it means to enjoy a black project, said Due. So its not just about the black faces, but is it a black story? And Get Out is a great example of a horror film that is a black story from a black perspective by a black artist that just so happens to be something anyone can enjoy. You get to the universal through the specific.

When race is just an afterthought or meant to fulfill some kind of trope in horror then its going to be bland, she added. And at worst its going to be offensive. When black creators put black people in their stories, theyre just trying to express their humanity, theyre not doing it to fulfill a trope or because someone told them it would be more profitable that way. Theyre doing it to tell the truth.

Things are changing, roles are changing, said Todd. Things are getting deeper. The more things that we write and create, the more the project, I think, feels real. The lens cap is off now and it sees everything.

I cant wait for Jordan Peeles Us to come out, said Due. Hes a great leader in that. And I know [Peeles production company] Monkeypaw is producing other horror series and The Twilight Zone is coming down the pipe. Its great that hes so supportive of other artists.

That ability to support other artists rather than subscribe to a crabs-in-a-barrel mentality is what sets the current landscape of black horror apart from recent years.

What I noticed in black Hollywood in the 90s is it was a bit of a Highlander mentality: there can only be one, theres only room for one of us, said True. So if theres three other black people over there, all of a sudden theyre adversaries. I think were seeing a shift in being able to support each other more and help bring up other black people and not see them so much as competition.

And what I hope comes from black creators is not just the optics of having black characters in the stories but you get a slightly different twist, slightly different mythologies and beliefs that make it scary because you havent seen it done a hundred times over. Horror is one of those genres thats ripe for difference because horror fans want to be scared.

Were finally able to actually take control of the narrative, said Burgin. [Until recently] blackness was seen through the lens of whiteness. Now black filmmakers are trying to get out our perspectives front and center.

sonaiya.kelley@latimes.com

follow me on twitter @sonaiyak
When Tony Todd breathed life into the undead horror character Candyman back in 1992, he wasnt aware that he would become the first black supernatural killer depicted onscreen.

"[Director] Bernard Rose didnt tell me at the time, but he actually got complaints from the NAACP when he wrote the script, said Todd. They had to have meetings to explain what they were going to do, why would they make this African American the villain.

Last fall, Jordan Peeles Monkeypaw Productions announced it would produce a remake of the urban horror film helmed by director Nia DaCosta, which will be set in a gentrified Chicago. Aquaman actor Yahya Abdul-Mateen II has been tapped to star as the titular killer.

Im so honored that the character is going to continue, said Todd. Ive lived with this character for 25 years, and Ive kept his image alive  sharing is caring. Privately, am I a little stunned? Of course. Because its hard to let go when you live with something that long. When you do a good theatrical production, sometimes you dream about that 8 oclock curtain call for six months. Its going to be a little bit of that.

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Although Candyman is inarguably one of the most seminal black horror films, it is just one of several movies that paved the way for Get Out to achieve the blockbuster success it did in 2017, and in turn led to Peeles highly anticipated follow-up, Us.

Horror author and academic Tananarive Due, a producer on Shudders Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror documentary walks us through several key titles  some pure horror and some with looser connections to the genre  that represent that history.

Shudders Horror Noire traces the history of black films and filmmakers in the genre 

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Its not considered a horror film unless youre a black person, said Due. If youre a black person, its a horror film all right. Or if you love the future of your country, its a horror film.

Son of Ingagi (1940)

It was really meant to confront so many negative stereotypes about black people in cinema but using horror, which was a very popular genre, to present us just being ourselves.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Duane Jones stars as a strong, competent, intelligent ... gorgeous black man who is breaking all kinds of barriers and breaking zombies heads.

Blacula (1972)

 Blacula is from the blaxploitation era with a black director, William Crane. So even within the constraints of budget and the expectations of filmmaking at that time, you can still make some strong statements about our existence in history.

Ganja & Hess (1973)

Bill Gunn basically shed all studio expectations and just made a vampire movie his way, which is about addiction and class and where we get to be self-reflective among ourselves. Its not even so much about race, really. We got to turn the lens inward and express ourselves and our humanity, our frailties and our struggles.

Def by Temptation (1990)

 Def by Temptation was coming out of that period in the 80s when we disappeared in horror for a while or were very ill-used in the genre. It really opened the gate to expressions by a lot of different filmmakers, including Rusty Cundieffs Tales from the Hood. 

Candyman (1992)

Tony Todd scared the crap out of the whole world. People are still scared to say Candyman five times today. Like Jordan Peele said in the documentary  that we can be the Freddy [Krueger] in a movie is huge.

Eves Bayou (1997)

A woman filmmaker [Kasi Lemmons]  we dont have that many. [It was] a very self-contained Southern Gothic story about a black community. [Its] about our humanity and confronting issues of family and parenthood and sisterhood and is not about the white gaze.

Get Out (2017)

Get Out just crashed so many doors open, including this documentary [Horror Noire], which got the greenlight from Shudder the day after [Peele] won the Oscar. I think the Oscar helped everyone understand, Oh, this is important.

This is Us: Jordan Peele wants Americans to face their demons in new home-invasion horror film 

sonaiya.kelley@latimes.com

follow me on twitter @sonaiyak
The Los Angeles Times is in Austin for South by Southwest, the the annual festival of film, music, technology, art, culture, tacos, barbecue, partying  and something of a laboratory think tank for the future.

Times film writer Mark Olsen (@IndieFocus) talks with @marcmaron, whos expanding his wings as a movie actor, along with director @lynnsheltonfilm, who saw him as a star. Olsen also interviews @alexgibneyfilm, whose documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley, is set to debut on HBO.

And in a preview of next weeks episode, Austin native Ethan Hawke shares his affection for SXSW, and says its DNA is a little more punk rock than any other festival in America.

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Elizabeth Holmes in a scene from The Inventor. Credit: HBO (HBO)

(L-R)- Jon Bass as ONathaniel, Marc Maron as OMelO, Michaela Watkins as OMaryO and Jillian Bell as OCynthiaO in Lynn SheltonOs SWORD OF TRUST. Credit: IFC Films (IFC Films )

READ MORE: Jordan Peele reveals the secrets of Us at South by Southwest 

READ MORE: Shia LaBeouf got out of jail, walked onto a film set while making SXSW hit Peanut Butter Falcon 


It looks as if Lake County might escape this weekend without any major flooding, as the Des Plaines River is set to crest Saturday, and while the Fox River is getting lots of water from Wisconsin, control gates on the river are wide open.
During each crucial stage of his music career, Gerard Way chose a uniform. Just like a superhero in a comic book. Or maybe the villain.

In 2004, as his band My Chemical Romance broke into the mainstream, he dressed up as a demon whose jet-black hair matched his jet-black suit, set off by a bright red tie. At the top of MCRs game in 2006, he bleached his locks white and put on a grim marching-band outfit, like Sgt. Pepper ready to lead a funeral procession. After Way released his solo album in 2014, his electric cherry hairdo bounced off his sleek, royal-blue suit. There was always a look.

But on a recent morning visit to his home in Eagle Rock, Way, 41, appeared far less put together. Wispy whiskers sprouted on his still-boyish face. His unkempt hair was its natural dark brown for once. An oversized Army fatigue-style jacket and pants set from designer Greg Lauren hung off his body.

It looked like the kind of comfy ensemble youd settle on during a chilly day when there isnt much of a reason to leave the house. Still, that same ensemble has continued to show up in Ways publicity images for The Umbrella Academy, the new Netflix show that was inspired by the comic book series he created and where hes credited as a co-executive producer.

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Detail of the cover art from The Umbrella Academy comic book by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba. (Dark Horse Comics)

On the set of Umbrella Academy, Netflixs next play in TVs superhero wars 

He had found a new uniform befitting a writer of fantastical universes, not the star of them. Its the job hes been focusing on for the past 2 years.

Way has emerged as a singular and respected voice in comics, whose contributions arent considered just a vanity side project. Hes a talented writer who embraces the bizarre and the postmodern possibilities of the medium. Issues of The Umbrella Academy have become increasingly and joyfully complex, while his take on the weirdos in The Doom Patrol is reliably brain-bending.

Ive found over the years that all your creativity is circular. Its the same ride going into all this stuff, Way explained as he sat in front of a table covered in a colorful assortment of gemstones and crystals. In my notes Ill write a song title. Sometimes thatll become a song, but sometimes thatll become a short story. Sometimes thatll become a comic. I never fully know what theyre going to be until I finally decide to do it.

In some respects, Ways time in one of the most popular and influential rock bands of the 21st century was a detour from the career he was supposed to have. As a high schooler in Belleville, N.J., Way wrote two issues of On Ravens Wings for a small comic-book imprint. He went to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he majored in cartooning and illustration.

My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way leads the band at the Hollywood Palladium in 2011. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

After watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11 from across the Hudson River, Way was inspired to create a grand, empathetic artistic statement. He started My Chemical Romance, founding the high-concept-driven punk group with his younger brother Mikey and three other Jerseyites. Then the year after MCRs 2006 opus, The Black Parade  an album about a cancer patient that features Queen-sized dramatics, a Liza Minnelli cameo, and a heavy death obsession  brought the first issue of The Umbrella Academy.

Made in collaboration with Brazilian artist Gabriel Ba, Umbrella Academy begins with the spontaneous and simultaneous birth of 43 children around the planet to women who previously werent pregnant. A rich inventor named Sir Reginald Hargreeves adopts seven of them and turns the kids into a crime-fighting team imbued with superpowers.

Though there are flashbacks, the action focuses on when the children have all become bitter grown-ups, reunited after the death of their unloving father.

Ways Umbrella Academy burns through big, messy ideas and delights in its small, eccentric details. Theres time travel and chimpanzees who can talk and ultra-violence and an ancient mummy king weaponized for the Vietnam War. Way called it a comic about comics.

Detail of artwork from The Umbrella Academy from Gerard Way in collaboration with Brazilian artist Gabriel Ba. (Dark Horse Comics)

The first six issues, a collection titled the Apocalypse Suite, won the comic book industrys Eisner Award in 2008 for best limited series. Two weeks later, Universal Pictures optioned it to make Umbrella Academy movies.

This was before the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe opened up all the possibilities available for superhero properties, and most comic-book movies were hung up on retelling elaborate origin stories, which The Umbrella Academy dispenses with over only a few pages. Way worked with screenwriters on draft after draft, but nothing got greenlighted. When the film option ended, Umbrella Academy was repackaged into a new series for Netflix.

Comic book writers have historically had a mixed reaction to their work being reinterpreted in other mediums. Alan Moore, for example, famously decried how his comics like the Watchmen series have been adapted over the years.

Way is far more at peace with relinquishing control of his creations. I could have been a lot more involved in the show, he said. I could have probably co-showrun it or directed some episodes. That couldve been my life. But the comic was so important to me, I didnt want anything more in my life.

Steve Blackman, a veteran of FXs Fargo and Legion, eventually took on showrunner duties for The Umbrella Academy. Blackman confesses to not being much of a comic book fan and said he was drawn to the dysfunctional-family aspect of the story. The Netflix series spends much more time doting on the relationships between the different members of the group than on superhero action.

No. 5 (Aidan Gallagher) learns of the impending apocalypse when he travels to the future in The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. (Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix)

In their capacity as co-executive producers, Way and Ba were both consulted during various points in the production, offering their notes on everything from the look of the uniforms to the overall tone. He wanted a feeling of subversiveness. He wanted to keep it whimsical and odd in many ways, Blackman said of Way. He just didnt want it to feel like everything else out there.

Beyond The Umbrella Academy, Way has stayed busy with other comic book projects. He curates a pop-up imprint for DC Comics called Young Animal, where he chooses which titles they publish, devises the general concepts and works with other writers on their specific direction.

Review: Umbrella Academy vs DC Universes Doom Patrol: A battle of misfit shows 

At the center of this endeavor is Ways take on Doom Patrol, a team who have been tagged the worlds strangest superheroes.

This embrace of strangeness guided the rest of Young Animals titles, which mostly featured riffs on forgotten or unloved characters from DCs past. [Way] definitely has a quirkiness to him, said Cecil Castellucci, the writer of the standout Shade, The Changing Girl series. He has a real ability to see the weird and how that relates to the human heart.

Though no Young Animal titles are being printed at moment, Way is actively scripting more Doom Patrol issues.

Artwork from Doom Patrol. (DC Comics / Young Animal)

Way recently set up a recording studio at the home he shares with wife Lindsey (a visual artist who also plays bass in the band Mindless Self Indulgence) and their 9-year-old daughter Bandit. Hes begun dedicating one day of the week to making music and now uploads a new song to music streaming services every month like it was a fresh issue of a comic book hitting the stands.

In 2013, three years after My Chemical Romance released what would turn out to be their final album, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, Way developed a post-apocalyptic comic book series that finished the story that the record started. His new songs have winked at his recent writing in more subtle ways. One of his latest tracks is called Baby Youre a Haunted House, and in a panel of a recent issue of The Umbrella Academy, a character described herself with those words.

Its all part of the cosmic swirl in Ways expanded universe.

Even though Ive got a lot of things going on, I dont see it as being ambitious and trying to be the best at everything, he said I see it as just constantly challenging myself and also trying to get as many of these things out of me as possible. Because if you dont put stuff out, you dont get ideas out. They just sit there.

calendar@latimes.com
After more than two years of an itinerant existence between pop-ups at Dinosaur Coffee in Silver Lake and a swarmed stall at the Hollywood farmers market, Jason Maury Kaplan will finally have a bricks-and-mortar bagel shop to call home on Sunday, when Maurys opens its doors.

At his cozy shop, beside the new Psychic Wines in a residential area on the border of Silver Lake and Echo Park, Kaplan hopes to create a little burst of appetizing culture, where youll find coffee and bagels and their accouterments, such as cream cheese, sustainably sourced smoked fish and in-house cured gravlax, which can be had while watching bakers shove freshly boiled dough on boards into Kaplans new Fish P-60 oven.

Bagel offerings in the city have expanded over the past few years, but many are tucked away in pastry cases, as they are at Zoe Nathan and Josh Loebs Milo & Olive and Roxana Jullapats Friends & Family; or compete on cornucopian menus at restaurants such as Freedmans and Travis Letts Gjusta.

Jason Kaplan, baker and owner of Maurys Bagels, making bagels at his new bakery. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

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Raised in Washington, D.C., Kaplan moved to Los Angeles in 2004, and worked a variety of jobs before becoming engrossed in bread-making under Lett and Nicole Rucker at Gjelina Take Away. Since his earliest days there, and even before that, he has thought a lot about what makes those hand-shaped bands of yeasted dough so good.

Its not like Im trying to reinvent the bagel experience; I actually think its perfect the way it is, says Kaplan, but I dont think theres a way for you to really truly experience it out here the way I was able to back East. So Im just trying to do justice to what I know it can be.

While some bagel makers boil in honey water or add sugar to the dough, Kaplan avoids sweetening, and only his egg bagels have eggs in them, so most of his bagels are naturally vegan.

The transition to a bricks-and-mortar space has required some surprising reconfiguring, Kaplan says. Bagel dough is considered low-hydration, which means that even a small change in the water can affect the baked product. The reverse-osmosis filtration system in his shop lowered the mineral content of his water, which in turn required Kaplan to adjust the amount of yeast in his recipe.

Kaplans grandparents were Orthodox and his moms father was a really good cook, with a repertoire that included cabbage and shells, cholent, and jelly omelets. But the bagel he has spent years perfecting is based on his memory of the one his mother would pack for his lunch at a Jewish day school. It was likely from Lenders, the first brand to offer prepackaged bagels in supermarkets, but he remembers it as something delicious. When he started working toward the bagel he makes now  on the smaller side, so you can eat two, he says, perfectly chewy, with a thin, crisp exterior and dusted with zaatar or rolled in his everything-spice mixture  he was nostalgic, he said, for a bagel that Ive never actually had.

Over the years, Kaplan has watched a 1979 documentary short on YouTube called Hot Bagels, about a Brooklyn bagel operation, more than 20,000 times, he says, scrutinizing every frame.

Toward the end of the film, the narrator takes a plain bagel and he just rips into it, like a doughnut, Kaplan recalls. And I said, thats what I want. I want someone to be able to eat my bagel, by itself, with nothing on it. Kaplan spent about a year and a half baking a dozen plain bagels a day before starting Maurys in 2015.

Kaplans East Coast influences come through, particularly in his bialy, a type of bagel sought out by some, unknown to others  flat, holeless, and topped with a silky puddle of sliced onions  that is rarer to find on the West Coast.

The problem with bialys, he says, is that everyone who made bialys is dead. Theres no one you can talk to about bialys. All the bialy shops closed or got sold. Even Kossars in New York is owned by someone new now. And maybe they bought the recipe, but whoever taught them had inherited something; who knows how many things they changed?

When you bite into a Maurys bagel, whether undressed or besmeared with cream cheese and draped with lox, you understand that Kaplans bagel is an homage to the archetypes of the past (chewy, dense and consistent) with playful twists of the present (zaatar-spiced or topped with avocado and tomatillo).

My bagel isnt what Id call a California bagel, he says, but I want to make a delicious bread and have it be a delicious bagel.

2829 Bellevue Ave., Silver Lake; (323) 380-9380; maurysbagels.com.

Jason Kaplan, baker and owner of Maurys Bagels, pulls bagels out of his oven. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

7 local places that make their own bagels:

Bagel Broker: This family-run joint is a neighborhood favorite, and the line often leaks into the strip mall parking lot. Try the wholly comforting cinnamon-raisin, whose caramelized surface evokes cinnamon toast. Prefer your bagel hollow? Available on request. 7825 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 931-1258, bagelbroker.com.

Bagel Nosh: At this deli, which has been on the block for more than 40 years ago, youll find the rare pumpernickel, cheddar cheese and jalapeno cheese, salt, and even chocolate-chip bagel. Theres also a flamboyant menu of spreads, including strawberry, peanut butter and walnut-raisin cream cheeses. 1629 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 451-8771, bagelnoshdeli.com.

Belles Bagels: Belles bagels come untoasted, unless you request otherwise. Theres an everything bagel with onion, garlic, sesame, poppy, fennel, and caraway; the fish is smoked in South L.A. and North Hollywood. And theres a sandwich with dill and beet cream cheese and crispy salmon skin for the unorthodox. 5043 York Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 208-9408, bellesbagels.com.

Freedmans L.A.: The plain and sesame bagels made in-house at this contemporary deli are based on the ones sibling-owners Jonah and Amanda Freedman grew up eating at the century-old Gryfes Bagel Bakery in Ontario, Canada. They are delicious  on the breadier side  especially toasted on the griddle with a hint of chicken fat and oil. 2619 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 568-3754, freedmansla.com.

Friends & Family: Baker Roxana Jullipats bagels, like all of her baked goods, contain a minimum of 20 percent whole grains, as well as a bit of honey and milk. Try the jalapeno cheddar, cinnamon currant and salty-sweet (a combination of Maldon salt, raw turbinado sugar, cinnamon, and a pinch of cayenne). 5150 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 668-2000, friendsandfamilyla.com.

Gjusta: Gjusta makes the difficult-to-find bialys, overlaid with poppy seeds and onion slivers. You can get them plain, or with porchetta, arugula, Gruyere and harissa ketchup. 320 Sunset Ave., Venice, (310) 314-0320, gjusta.com.

Milo & Olive: The bagels at Zoe Nathan and Josh Loebs bakery and pizza joint often sell out, so its best to call and place an order when it opens if youre buying by the dozen. Otherwise you can enjoy a chewy sesame or poppy seed, everything, onion, or cinnamon and sugar bagel polished with butter or cream cheese, or dressed up with creme fraiche, cucumbers, red onion and tomatoes. 2723 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, (310) 453-6776, miloandolive.com.

food@latimes.com
Ashley Lee is a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times, where she writes about theater, movies, television and the bustling intersection of the stage and the screen. An alum of the Eugene ONeill Theater Centers National Critics Institute and Poynters Power of Diverse Voices, she leads workshops on arts journalism at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. She was previously a New York-based editor at the Hollywood Reporter and has written for the Washington Post, Backstage and American Theatre, among others. She is currently working remotely alongside her dog, Oliver.
Hugo Martin covers the travel industries, including airlines and theme parks, for the Los Angeles Times Business section. A native Californian, Martin was part of the Metro staff that won three Pulitzer Prizes in 1993, 1995 and 1998. He was also on the Travel section staff that won the Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers in 2008. He is an avid outdoorsman, gardener and Lakers fan.


Matt Pearce is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times covering internet culture and podcasting. He previously covered the 2020 presidential election and spent six years on The Times national desk, where he wrote stories about violence, disasters, social movements and civil liberties. Pearce was one of the first national reporters to arrive in Ferguson, Mo., during the uprising in 2014, and he chased Hurricane Harvey across Texas as the storm ravaged the Lone Star State in 2017. A University of Missouri graduate, he hails from a small town outside Kansas City, Mo.


Richard Read was the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Seattle, covering Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Alaska and Hawaii. A former Tokyo-based foreign correspondent, he won a Pulitzer Prize for a series that explained the Asian financial crisis by following a container of French fries from a Northwest farm to a Singapore McDonalds. He served on a team that won the Pulitzer for Public Service for exposing U.S. immigration agency abuses. Born in Scotland and raised in Boston, he has reported from all seven continents. He retired in 2021.
Scott Martelle is a former Times staff writer and member of the editorial board. He also is the author of several nonfiction books on such disparate subjects as the Ludlow Massacre and 1913-14 Colorado coalfield war, the history of Detroit, and William Walker, the pre-Civil War American adventurer who for a brief time made himself president of Nicaragua.


A group of migrants who breached the U.S.-Mexico border fence by the Pacific Ocean at Playas de Tijuana was detained Thursday by Border Patrol agents in Border Field State Park on the U.S. side.

But the whereabouts are not confirmed of at least five other migrants who crossed over on Wednesday, according to a witness who recorded both the Wednesday and Thursday breaches on video and spoke with some of the migrants.

The group of about 35 people who crossed on Thursday included men, women and children who said they were mostly from Honduras and came to Tijuana in a caravan.

Video shot from the Mexican side shows the group climbing through a broken piece of fencing and running down the beach.

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 A group of about 35 people crossed on Thursday via breach at the U.S.-Mexico border fence included men, women and children.

Agents with the Border Patrol had the group sit on the edge of a muddy trail while they collected their belongings into paper bags.

The detained migrants were instructed by Border Patrol agents not to speak with the media.

One member of the group, a man in his early 20s, was detained separately and kept his eyes closed as he was loaded into a separate van.

The group was apprehended about 200 yards from the border fence on the U.S. side.

Access to the area is typically closed to vehicles during periods of wet weather. The area where the migrants were stopped is about a mile from the parking lot at the entrance to Border Field State Park.

The migrants were loaded into Border Patrol vans, which drove away at about 6:15 p.m. Thursday.

Some areas of the trail were muddy and badly flooded after recent rains.

At center, a 22-year-old Honduran man says final words to his wife before he squeezed through the pillars in Tijuana on Wednesday carrying his young child. (Thomas E. Franklin / For the Times)

A 22-year-old Honduran man squeezed through the pillars in Tijuana on Wednesday carrying his child while Customs and Border Patrol was not on watch. They disappeared into the distance and did not appear to be captured, but this was not confirmed. (Thomas E. Franklin / For the Times)

On Wednesday, photojournalist Thomas E. Franklin, an assistant professor of multiplatform journalism at Montclair State University in New Jersey, captured video of migrants slipping through the porous border fence in Playas, where a section of the lattice fencing had been pulled back. Franklin went back to the fence Thursday to see whether it had been repaired.

As we arrived we saw a large group of people  about 75 people  jammed up against the fence looking through, a group of about 20 to 30 had snuck through the fence and a number of them were running down the beach in the distance, Franklin said.

Franklin had been working in the area on a border-related project when he recorded the footage, which he shared with The Times.

After the last of the migrants slipped through on Thursday  two women with one holding a child  a Border Patrol SUV drove up to the fence and blocked the gap.

Two women, one carrying a young child, followed about 20 to 30 migrants who squeezed through an opening in the border fence at Playas de Tijuana on Thursday, running past Border Patrol heading toward San Diego. (Thomas E. Franklin / For the Times)

In the video shot Wednesday, the migrants can be seen running down the coastline in Imperial Beach while an agent chases after them. The video also shows people on the Mexican side jeering the Border Patrol agent.

One of the men seen in the video is fleeing while he is carrying a small child in his arms.

It remains unknown whether the people who slipped through the fence Wednesday were apprehended.

A spokesman for the Border Patrol said he was not immediately aware of either incident.

Fry writes for the San Diego Union-Tribune.
A young girl found dead inside a duffel bag last week near a trail in Hacienda Heights has been identified as Trinity Love Jones, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department.

Authorities are still trying to determine who killed the 9-year-old and the circumstances of her death. Investigators have detained two people who may be connected to the case, the sheriffs department said in a statement Sunday night.

Los Angeles County Sheriffs Capt. Kent Wegener, who oversees the homicide bureau, said more detectives were being assigned to assist in the investigation, given the volume of information related to the childs body.

We have had thousands of tips come in from across the country, Wegener said.

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Detectives havent made public how the girl died, and they expect to get more information from an autopsy and tests on the childs body in the next couple of days, he said.

A sheriffs spokesperson late Friday said the girls death had been ruled a homicide.

Several sources said investigators were seeking forensic evidence including any DNA from the duffel bag and the childs clothes that could identify who dumped the body. Camera footage is also being sought from nearby shopping areas.

The girls 55-pound body was found at the bottom of an embankment just east of the 3400 block of Hacienda Boulevard, about 120 yards from the beginning of the trail. Shed been there less than 48 hours when she was discovered, investigators said.

A man who identified himself as the girls father told KTLA on Sunday that he was in shock.

Words cant explain what Im feeling right now, Antonio Jones said. I just want answers. I just want justice.

She was just the best, he said. Full of character, full of life, full of joy.

Jones did not provide further details about the case.

A 2016 L.A. Times examination of child homicides found there had been more than 400 since Jan. 1, 2000, across Los Angeles County. Many of the children were victims of abuse or violence in their homes, and most died at the homes of parents or guardians.

Dan Scott, a retired L.A. County Sheriffs sergeant who was involved in dozens of child abuse and death investigations, told The Times the circumstances of this case were particularly unusual and that it was extremely rare to see a childs body dumped.
With nearly all votes tallied for a pivotal Los Angeles school board seat, Heather Repenning holds second place by 31 votes, a margin that is probably enough to get her into a runoff against Jackie Goldberg, election officials said.

The counting period officially ends Wednesday, and there might not be any additional votes. Currently there are no more to count, although 47 voters whom officials have tried to contact could come forward and correct problems that kept their ballots from being tallied. A few missorted ballots also might turn up.

But the math is strongly working against Graciela Ortiz, who is just behind Repenning  especially because nearly half of all voters chose Goldberg. Repennings campaign declared victory Friday  suggesting that she had secured the second spot in the runoff.

If Repennings lead holds, Ortiz could challenge the results by paying for a recount. Both the Ortiz and Repenning campaigns have requested and received the small list of voters whose ballots need to be cured before they can be counted, said Alex Olvera, the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerks division manager for election information and preparation.

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A special election was held last week to fill the vacant District 5 seat on the seven-member Board of Education. In recent years, the board has been split over key issues, including how best to oversee privately operated charter schools and how to deal with looming financial problems. The board also was divided over the hiring last year of Supt. Austin Beutner.

Goldberg finished far ahead of nine other candidates in the March 5 election, claiming more than 48% of the vote. But because she did not win a majority, she has to face the second-place finisher in a May 14 runoff.

A longtime teacher, Goldberg previously served eight years on the school board before moving on to the L.A. City Council and the state Legislature.

Repenning, a former longtime senior aide to L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, resigned as a city public works commissioner to run for office. Ortiz is a school counselor and member of the Huntington Park City Council. Huntington Park is within the L.A. school district.

howard.blume@latimes.com

@howardblume
I went out through the garage, and she was coming across the street, and she said there was a fire and (her husband) was still inside, Smock said. I went in through the garage and it was full of smoke.
Hundreds of students from across Los Angeles County joined a worldwide walkout from school Friday as part of a day of action to demand that more be done to combat climate change.

The local protest, which began around noon outside City Hall, was part of an international youth movement calling for swift action to prevent or mitigate the devastating effects of human-caused global warming.

Sofia Cervantes, 16, and her brother Leo Crespo-Cervantes, 18, took the Metrolink train to downtown L.A. from Claremont to join the demonstration.

Sofia said the effects of a warming climate have become a growing concern for her generation  especially in Southern California, where a prolonged fire season could mean extensive damage.

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It is terrifying, the sophomore at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts said. We are never going to get our planet back to the way it was. Everyone  every generation  needs to work together on this now.

She said she has been inspired by the wave of student activism, especially the work of Swedish student Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

At LA City Hall where a few hundred students have left school, theyre joining millions around the globe striking for climate change awareness. #ClimateChangeStrike #FridaysForFuture @KFIAM640 pic.twitter.com/hF2bms6961  Kris Ankarlo (@KrisAnkarlo) March 15, 2019

Hugh Thomas, an 18-year-old at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, said he also was inspired by Greta, who started the international movement.

She is the reason we are all out here. She gave us the confidence, said Thomas, a senior.

He said that while local politicians say they want to address climate change, he thinks their rhetoric is done simply to persuade voters.

He wants swifter action.

I want my kids to live, he said. I want them to have a happy life and to enjoy the Earth and the water.

Thousands of students left class today and joined in a worldwide day of protest against climate change #FridaysforFuture #Dublin | https://t.co/AZORxGcGti pic.twitter.com/lhjh88XtKY  RTE News (@rtenews) March 15, 2019

There is a lot on Rosalinda Contreras mind right now. The 18-year-old is a senior at La Mirada High School. She wants to major in biology and study oceans and wetlands.

I dont even know if I want to have kids because I dont know what the future is going to hold, she said.

Contreras, who is registered to vote, said politicians in the U.S. and around the world need to take a bolder stance on addressing a warming planet.

They need to see that this is an issue we arent going to let go, she said. We can vote them out if they dont listen.

Watch Live: New York City students are rallying as part of a global protest movement for action on climate change. #climatestrike https://t.co/UG64kyL2yx  WIRED (@WIRED) March 15, 2019

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report last year saying that without dramatic steps to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released into the air, global temperatures could reach a tipping point in only a dozen years.

The report stated that, within a generation, the planet could see even more catastrophic wildfires, worsening food shortages and a mass die-off of coral reefs, among other effects.

Young people all over the globe have been at the forefront of the latest protests over politicians slow response to climate change.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was recorded debating with a group of schoolchildren over climate change policy last month. The viral video revealed generational tensions brewing over how aggressively to combat climate change.

At around 11 oclock this morning, hundred of students gathered in St. Helens Square In #York to protest against climate change. This is one of many #YouthStrike4Climate across the UK. pic.twitter.com/cOcoKZV2Vn  York Atkinson (@YorkAtkinson1) March 15, 2019

javier.panzar@latimes.com

Twitter: @jpanzar
The mother of 9-year-old Trinity Love Jones, whose body was found in a duffel bag along a trail in Hacienda Heights last week, was extradited Thursday from Texas to California to answer questions about her daughters slaying.

Taquesta Graham, 28, a former Long Beach resident, is being held without bail on a warrant unrelated to her daughters death at the Los Angeles County sheriffs Norwalk station.

Graham has not been charged in the girls death.

Grahams boyfriend, Emiel Hunt, 38, is charged with murdering Trinity. Authorities say Hunt killed the girl on March 1 and dumped her body on the trail. If convicted, Hunt faces up to life in prison.

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The girls body was found five days later inside a large duffel bag that had been abandoned in light brush a short distance from the 60 Freeway. Her head and part of her torso were protruding from the bag. Authorities have not said how she was killed.

After the gruesome discovery, Los Angeles County sheriffs investigators sought the publics help to identify the girl and released a sketch of her. An informant, whom police have not identified, told authorities that the sketch of the girl resembled Trinity. The person expressed concern, but did not know the whereabouts of Trinity or her mother, the Sheriffs Department wrote in a news release.

Investigators looked into Graham and Hunts criminal histories and began searching for them as possible suspects in the case. Court records show Hunt was convicted of felony child abuse in San Diego County in 2005 and sentenced to 12 years in state prison. Graham has a prior conviction for involvement with a minor in prostitution.

Detectives at the time still werent positive about the girls identity.

On March 8, Hunt and Graham were stopped in Hunts black Nissan Armada at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Hudspeth County, Texas. Graham was taken into custody on an unrelated warrant, and Hunt was released. After his girlfriend was arrested, Hunt drove back to California.

Detectives arrested Hunt a day later after they found him sleeping in his SUV, which was parked in a lot near San Diego International Airport. Family members met with coroners investigators on Sunday and formally identified the dead girl as Trinity.

Graham, Hunt and Trinity moved from a family members home in Long Beach in May 2018. Extended family saw or heard from the couple and the girl on only a few occasions over the last 10 months, and investigators discovered they had been homeless just before the girls death. They had been sleeping at a motel in Santa Fe Springs or in their car, authorities said.

Barbara Jones, Trinitys grandmother, said the family is filled with rage and called Hunt a monster. She questioned how a man with such a criminal history was allowed near her grandchild.

I want to do to him what he did to her, she said.

Times staff writer Nicole Santa Cruz contributed to this report.

hannah.fry@latimes.com

Twitter: @Hannahnfry
An Oxnard grandmother admitted to helping her daughter and her granddaughters father conceal evidence of their 3-year-old girls death, the Ventura County district attorneys office announced Thursday.

Maria De Jesus Lopez, 45, pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to destroy and conceal evidence after the death of her granddaughter Kimberly Lopez.

Prosecutors said the woman lent the couple her car and gave them money to travel to Tijuana and destroy Kimberlys remains. For 15 months afterward, she helped them hide the death from authorities, prosecutors said.

The FBI began investigating the girls disappearance in 2016 after she was last seen by a social worker the year before.

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Lopezs daughter, Mayra Alejandra Chavez, 27, was convicted in December of second-degree murder, torture and assault leading to Kimberlys death.

Omar Lopez, 34, was charged with second-degree murder but pleaded guilty to child endangerment and perjury and testified against Chavez in a plea deal.

On the night she was killed, Chavez became angry when the girl soiled her diaper, according to her fathers testimony. He said Chavez aggressively pulled down Kimberlys pants and yanked her legs out from under her, sending the girl toppling to the floor, where she struck her head. The girl later began having seizures and died in the middle of the night, Omar Lopez said.

John Barrick, a senior deputy district attorney, said Omar Lopez and Chavez drove to Maria De Jesus Lopezs home in the early morning after Kimberly died.

Her reaction was to lend her car to them and give them $300, he said. Thats exactly what they did.

The woman also helped the couple find and pay for a rental home in Tijuana and purchased appliances and furniture for the home, the prosecutor said. While they were there, Chavez and Omar Lopez buried Kimberly in a blue plastic bag in a shallow grave, he said.

They lived in the rental home for a few weeks before returning to Oxnard, but after worrying the girls body would be found, that they returned to Tijuana on July 25, 2015  again with Maria De Jesus Lopezs car  and exhumed her remains, Barrick said.

They broke apart her bones with pliers and tried to dissolve her remains in a bucket with bleach and water, which they later poured down a sink in the house they were renting, he said.

They literally poured their daughter down the drain, Barrick said, adding that the couple scattered the girls bones on various roads before returning to the United States.

For more than a year, Maria De Jesus Lopez helped her daughter hide the truth and spread false reports to authorities about the girls disappearance, Barrick said.

There is no evidence of remorse, or even that she missed Kimberly, he said.

Maria De Jesus Lopez will be sentenced April 23, according to the Ventura County district attorneys office. She faces a maximum possible sentence of 180 days in prison and three years of probation. She is currently out of custody on $200,000 bail.

Chavez will be sentenced April 30 and faces 47 years to life in prison, Barrick said.

The Oxnard Police Department, prosecutors, detectives and the San Diego foster family who cared for Kimberly when her mother lost custody of the girl are hosting a memorial service Saturday at the Oxnard High School Performing Arts Center, the Police Department announced in a Facebook post.

They loved Kimi, as they affectionately called her, and had hopes to adopt her, the post said.

alejandra.reyesvelarde@latimes.com

Twitter: @r_valejandra
A Florida man charged with sending pipe bombs to prominent critics of President Trump is expected to plead guilty next week.

A notice entered in the case file of Cesar Sayoc in federal court in Manhattan shows a plea hearing has been scheduled for Thursday.

Without a plea deal, Sayoc, 56, faced charges carrying a potential penalty of mandatory life in prison. It was not known which charge or charges the plea would involve.

He was off: Before bomb allegations, Cesar Sayoc was a strip club manager, wannabe wrestler and criminal with an anti-Democratic streak 

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Sayoc was set to go to trial in July on charges that he sent 16 improvised explosive devices through the U.S. mail to victims across the country. None exploded.

Authorities say he targeted numerous Democrats, CNN and critics of Trump, heightening tensions before the midterm elections.

The charges said he aimed to kill, injure and intimidate an individual and unlawfully ... damage and destroy a building, vehicle, and other real and personal property.

Comment was requested Friday in an email to defense lawyers and a call to prosecutors.

The New York-born Sayoc has been held without bail since his late October arrest outside a South Florida auto parts store. He had been living in a van covered with pro-Trump stickers and showing images of some Trump opponents with crosshairs over their faces.

In the indictment, prosecutors noted that an improvised explosive mailed to former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in Chappaqua, N.Y., contained a picture of her and members of her family marked with a red X.

The indictment said others targeted by the mailings received similarly marked pictures of themselves along with the explosives.

Pipe bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc searched for his targets online as part of his domestic terror attack plan, Justice Department says 

Others targeted by the mailings include former President Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey. Packages were also mailed to CNN in New York and Atlanta.

Prosecutors say evidence against Sayoc includes DNA linking him to 10 of the explosive devices and fingerprints on two of them.
A blizzard that paralyzed parts of Colorado and Wyoming barreled into the Midwest on Thursday, bringing whiteout conditions to western Nebraska and dumping heavy rain that prompted evacuations in communities farther east.

Emergency crews responded after a vehicle was swept off a road in Norfolk, Neb., and rising water along the Elkhorn River prompted evacuations in the city of 24,000 people. The missing individual had not been found by midday Thursday.

Evacuations also occurred in several other eastern Nebraska communities and at least one Iowa town. Cara Jamison and her neighbors had to leave their homes in Fremont, Neb., after water and ice chunks from a flooding Platte River blocked their street. She and her husband moved photo albums to the second floor of their home.

Photos are the important things, she said. Furniture can be replaced.

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South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem closed all state offices Thursday as the blizzard conditions moved in, and later in the day ordered the opening of the states Emergency Operations Center to handle the response to the blizzard and flooding. The state was preparing an emergency declaration, Noem said. The Red Cross opened shelters in Sioux Falls and Yankton.

Wind, blowing snow and snow-packed roadways also made travel treacherous in western Nebraska.

Heavy rain caused flooding in eastern parts of South Dakota and Nebraska, as well as in Iowa, where all or part of nine state parks were closed because of rising floodwaters. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed an emergency disaster proclamation Thursday and activated the state emergency operations center.

Several cities in the region have been hit by rain this week, with records set Wednesday in Sioux Falls, S.D., and Sioux City, Iowa.

Weve got a lot of water, and its got to find a way to get out of here, said Tracy West, mayor of Lennox, S.D.

The system was moving out of the central Plains on Thursday, but National Weather Service meteorologist Peter Rogers said flooding was likely to persist into the weekend in parts of South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa, with deeply frozen ground preventing rain and snowmelt from soaking into the soil.

The massive late-winter storm hit Colorado on Wednesday, causing widespread power outages, forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights and wreaking havoc on roadways. A wind gust clocked in at 97 mph in Colorado Springs.

Xcel Energy said it had restored power to some 360,000 customers in Colorado but that thousands remained without electricity Thursday. Some may have no power into the weekend.

In the Texas Panhandle, a utility worker was killed while working to restore power amid strong winds pushed in by the storm. And in New Mexico, 36 miners at a nuclear waste repository were trapped underground in an elevator for about three hours because of a power outage caused by the extreme weather. Outages also were reported from North Dakota to Nebraska.

The storm also contributed to the death of Daniel Groves, a Colorado State Patrol officer who was hit and killed by a car as he helped another driver who had slid off Interstate 76 near Denver.

About 50 National Guard soldiers and airmen used specialized vehicles with tank-like treads to rescue 75 people stranded in their cars during the storm. The total number of people rescued statewide is likely higher, as local law enforcement ran separate rescue efforts.

The Red Cross reported Thursday that 620 people had stayed in shelters overnight in Colorado and in Wyoming, where the state Transportation Department reported snow drifts on Interstate 80 that were as high as 10 feet.

Jackie Ratcliff stayed in a hotel and on Thursday was waiting in Wellington, Colo., for Interstate 25 to reopen so she could return to her home in Cheyenne, Wyo. She had tried to make the trip Wednesday but the interstate was shut down because of a pileup  one she thinks she narrowly avoided.

Im feeling pretty lucky, she said, despite her dog at home needing to be fed.

The window-rattling storm brought blizzards, floods and a tornado across more than 25 states Wednesday, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains to Texas and beyond.

Five people were hurt and 150 dairy cows had to be euthanized when a tornado hit the small town of Dexter, N.M. A tornado also touched down Thursday in western Kentucky, damaging utility lines and trees. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo sought to downplay a North Korean warning Friday that Kim Jong Un was considering breaking off nuclear talks with the Trump administration and resuming the countrys nuclear and missile tests.

Pompeo said that during last months nuclear summit in Hanoi, Kim on multiple occasions had assured President Trump he would not lift a self-imposed moratorium on the tests.

So thats Chairman Kims word, Pompeo said at the State Department. We have every expectation that he will live up to that commitment.

The Hanoi summit collapsed without an agreement and both leaders left empty-handed, leaving the two sides at an impasse despite the high-level engagement.

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Pompeo spoke several hours after North Koreas deputy foreign minister, Choe Son Hui, told foreign journalists and diplomats in Pyongyang that Kim would decide in a short period of time whether to resume tests.

North Korea has not launched a ballistic missile or detonated a nuclear device since 2017, and Trump has cited the pause as one of the main achievements of his rapprochement with Kim.

Choe, who accompanied Kim to the Hanoi summit, said that the Trump administration had thrown away a golden opportunity and that without concessions from Washington, North Korea may pull out of talks.

We have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation, Choe said, according to the Associated Press.

Choe criticized Pompeo and Trumps national security advisor, John Bolton, by name, saying they had created an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust that undermined cooperation.

She avoided blaming Trump, saying relations between the two leaders were still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful.

Pompeo and Bolton are known to be deeply skeptical of Kims intentions, and were among the senior Trump aides who worried the president might offer deep concessions in Hanoi to strike a deal.

Asked whether the personal attack would hurt his efforts to negotiate, Pompeo noted that North Korean state media had called him gangster-like after a visit to the capital, Pyongyang, in July. Choe repeated the barb Friday, describing the U.S. stance in Hanoi as gangster-like.

Pompeo denied that he and Bolton have created an atmosphere of mistrust. Communications with Kim Yong Chol, North Koreas lead negotiator, remained professional with detailed conversations, Pompeo said.

Choes news conference appeared the latest effort by Kims government to counter the U.S. account of why the Feb. 27-28 summit collapsed  that North Koreas demands for sanctions relief, in exchange for giving up only a small part of its nuclear program, were unreasonable.

The night after the Hanoi talks fell apart, Choes boss, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, called a news conference to say North Korea asked only that sanctions hampering civilian life be removed.

Since then, U.S. officials have appeared to harden their public stance, asserting North Korea must give up its entire nuclear arsenal and ballistic missile program. Bolton told ABC News that the country must also surrender its chemical and biological weapons as part of denuclearization.

Stephen Biegun, U.S. special representative for North Korea, said in Washington this week that the administration was not going to do denuclearization incrementally.

Independent experts have said a multiyear, step-by-step process, involving intense inspections and monitoring, would be required to safely remove North Koreas vast nuclear infrastructure and weapons in exchange for a steady lifting of sanctions.

Before the summit, Biegun had appeared to support that view, saying that U.S. and North Korean concessions could take place simultaneously and in parallel.

Wilkinson reported from Washington and Kim from Hong Kong.

For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter
The Trump administration said Friday it will revoke or deny U.S. visas for judges, lawyers or other members of a major international tribunal if they investigate or prosecute U.S. soldiers for potential war crimes.

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo said the action was aimed at the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague since 1998, because of a case involving U.S. service members in Afghanistan.

The United States never joined the international court because previous administrations also objected to non-U.S. courts prosecuting American soldiers. But the Trump administration has viewed the tribunal with special disdain.

Revoking U.S. visas was an unusual move since the court operates under an international mandate.

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In response, the court said in a statement it would continue its independent work, undeterred.

Pompeo would not say how many people might be affected. The court has about 450 staffers, including 16 U.S. citizens.

The case involving U.S. troops in Afghanistan has not been formally filed but is under investigation. Officials have not provided details.

Court members responsible for the investigation should not assume that you still have or will get a visa or will be permitted to enter the United States, Pompeo said at the State Department.

He said U.S. visas also would be revoked for ICC members who investigate Israel, an apparent allusion to a request by the Palestinian Authority for the tribunal to examine alleged abuses by Israeli troops in the West Bank.

Human rights activists accused the Trump administration of attempting to evade accountability.

Taking action against [the court] sends a clear message to torturers and murderers alike: their crimes may continue unchecked, Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

The tribunal, which is backed by more than 120 nations, is seen as a court of last resort for the investigation and punishment of people accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other egregious atrocities.

It began its work in 2003, taking up the mantle from two ad-hoc international courts that investigated atrocities in the Balkans war in the 1990s and the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter
The U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant spent hours on end planning a wide-scale domestic terrorist attack, even logging in at his work computer on the job at headquarters to study the manifestos and heinous paths of mass shooters, prosecutors say. He researched how to carry out sniper attacks, they contend, and whether rifle scopes were illegal. And all the while, investigators assert, he was amassing a cache of weapons as he ruminated about attacks on politicians and journalists.

But Christopher Hasson was not an isolated figure, according to a contractor who worked with him. The 49-year-old lieutenant with more than two decades in the Coast Guard was part of a project to replace some aging cutters in the fleet, tasks that regularly required interacting with civilians and military officials at meetings and on travel.

I dont remember him saying anything that was crazy, said Adam Stolzberg, a contractor who worked at headquarters and was in meetings with Hasson a couple of times a month. Politics never came up, Stolzberg said.

It was only after Hassons arrest last Friday at his workplace that the chilling plans prosecutors assert he was crafting became apparent, detected by an internal Coast Guard program that watches for any insider threat.

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The program identified suspicious computer activity tied to Hasson, prompting the agencys investigative service to launch a probe last fall, said Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, a service spokesman.

Hasson was arrested on gun and drug charges after officials with the Coast Guard Investigative Service and agents with the FBI in Baltimore began looking into activities that prosecutors said in court were linked to what they described as Hassons white-nationalist views. Federal law enforcement officials seized a stockpile of guns and ammunition from his basement apartment in the Maryland suburbs near Washington in the far east side of Silver Spring in Montgomery County.

The sheer number and force of the weapons recovered from Mr. Hassons residence in this case, coupled with the disturbing nature of his writings, appear to reflect a very significant threat to the safety of our community, particularly given the position of trust that Mr. Hasson held with the United States government, U.S. Atty. for the District of Maryland Robert Hur said Thursday after a hearing in which Hasson was ordered detained.

Prosecutors and Hassons federal public defender sparred over whether it was appropriate to jail him after an arrest on gun and drug charges, but no terrorism-related counts.

The judge, Charles Day, said that it is unusual to detain a defendant based on the charges Hasson was facing and that the issue at hand is all about the defendants state of mind and intentions.

Hassons federal public defender, Julie Stelzig, said the governments court filings are a histrionic characterization of Mr. Hasson and there was no actual indication of any plan. She said that Hasson had no prior record and that the number of weapons he had were modest at best for average gun collectors.

Its not a crime to think negative thoughts, Stelzig said of the writings the government points to as evidence of his extremist views. Its not a crime to think about doomsday scenarios.

But with Hasson in court, prosecutors called him a domestic terrorist who intended to murder innocent civilians.

What drives the governments concern is what also gives the court pause, Day said before he gave the government 14 days to bring additional charges and before Hassons lawyer could file an appeal for his possible release.

Hasson called for focused violence to establish a white homeland, prosecutors said in court filings. Its unclear whether Hasson had a specific date for an attack, but the government said he had been stockpiling weapons for at least two years, spending $14,000 a year on equipment to ready for an attack.

As he built an arsenal, prosecutors contend, Hasson read manifestos by the Unabomber, the Virginia Tech shooter and the Olympic Park bomber among other domestic mass shooters, and also looked for guidance to the plot of right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who in 2011 unleashed two attacks in Norway that killed 77 people.

I am dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth, Hasson said in one of his letters that contemplated creating a biological plague, according to records filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

During the raid this month, law enforcement officers seized 15 firearms and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from what they called his cramped basement apartment that was at the line near Prince Georges County.

Hasson, who had a bald head and was wearing a pink prison uniform, did not speak in court.

No one answered the door at the residential address that appeared to be associated with Hasson. Law enforcement officials in Montgomery County also said that while there were calls about loud parties in the area in recent years, there were no calls for service that would indicate anything was amiss at that residence.

Hasson joined the Coast Guard in March 1996 as an enlisted electronics technician and was promoted to chief warrant officer in 2012 and lieutenant in 2015, McBride said. He will remain on active duty until the legal case against him is adjudicated, but has stopped working since his arrest.

Hasson was arrested once the FBI and Coast Guard investigators were confident in the strength of the evidence supporting the criminal complaint and warrant, McBride said.

As recently as Jan. 17, Hasson created a list of traitors and targets in a spreadsheet while reviewing various broadcast news sites from his work computer, court filings show. The list included people prosecutors believe to be Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), CNN reporter Don Lemon and nearly two dozen others.

Unlawful possession of drugs and firearms, as well as advocacy for supremacist doctrine, ideology, or causes, violates Coast Guard policy, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and our organization core values, McBride said in an email.

Hassons access to Coast Guard headquarters has been revoked. He held a secret-level security clearance beginning in April 2005, and background checks did not find information that merited denying it, McBride said. Secret clearance typically allows access to information that can cause serious damage to U.S. national security if disclosed. It is considered more significant than confidential access and less significant than top-secret access.

Yvonne Carlock, a Marine Corps spokeswoman, said Wednesday that Hasson joined the service in December 1988, serving as an F/A-18 aircraft mechanic. His last rank in that service was corporal.

Federal authorities said he left sometime in 1993.

In June 1994, Hasson moved over to the Virginia Army National Guard, becoming an infantryman with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 183rd Infantry Regiment, said Kurt Rauschenberg, a National Guard Bureau spokesman. His unit was based south of Richmond, Va., near the town of Petersburg.

In September 1995, Hasson switched to the Arizona Army National Guard and left about six months later, in March 1996, exiting with the same rank as when he joined.

Property records indicate Hasson moved frequently in his varied military career, including stints in Arizona, California and Virginia. In 2007, he bought a house in Currituck, N.C., just across the bay from the Outer Banks. Neighbors said Hasson lived in the house for several years with a woman they identified as his wife and at least one young child.

It was very neat, said Delena Ostrander, who owns the adjacent lot. I never heard any complaints.

Her stepfather, Stanley Maculewich, still lives on the short, unpaved lane and remembers Hasson as a big, gun-owning Coast Guardsman who commuted to work early each morning by motorcycle.

He was a good-sized guy, but I had no problem with him, Maculewich said. He was shooting his gun out there one day. But when I asked him to stop because I had a daughter in the house who was sick, he said Fine. And that was it, he stopped.

Stolzberg, the contractor who also worked at Coast Guard headquarters with Hasson, said Hasson never raised any alarms at the office. Tall and muscular with a shaved or bald head, Hasson sometimes drove a Harley-Davidson motorcycle to work, Stolzberg said. But his black leather jacket didnt bear any insignia, and his arm tattoos didnt appear out of the ordinary. Nor did Hasson express any radical views, Stolzberg said.

I didnt have a hard time getting along with him, he said. I was trying to think back: What did I miss? Was there anything there?

Lynh Bui, Dan Lamothe and Michael E. Miller write for the Washington Post. The Posts Dan Morse, Steve Hendrix, Jennifer Barrios, Julie Tate and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. Its Friday, March 15, and heres whats happening across California:

TOP STORIES

What does the college admissions cheating scandal look like from the point of view of poor students trying to get into some of the same elite schools where the alleged fraud occurred? The kids at East Los Angeles College are working numerous jobs, and many would be the first in their family to go to college. To some, its so unfair. To others, its far from surprising. Los Angeles Times

 The scandal is roiling some of Southern Californias most elite prep schools, leading to resignations and questions as federal prosecutors seek student records from the institutions. Los Angeles Times

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 Their parents face jail time. But what will happen to the children caught up in the scandal? Los Angeles Times

 Is this the L.A. parent whose tip set off the probe? Wall Street Journal

 Columnist Robin Abcarians biggest question: How could you gaslight your kids like this? Los Angeles Times

 Reviewing 11 lies that allowed children of the rich to get into elite schools. Los Angeles Times

 What exactly is the crime? New York Times

February showers bring ...

Its better than going to Disneyland, says one park ranger, describing the unprecedented super bloom of flowers being seen across Southern California. But all those people mean a lot of flowers meeting with horrible deaths under the shoes of humans. Los Angeles Times

Flowers compete for space in Walker Canyon. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

 Its official: California is 100% drought-free. For the first time since 2011, the state shows no areas suffering from prolonged drought and illustrates almost entirely normal conditions. Los Angeles Times

 All that rain brings a season of potholes. San Diego Union-Tribune

 Social media and blogs were ablaze this week with photos of a so-called lake that formed in Death Valley National Park last week after another heavy rainstorm. Its not quite that dramatic. Los Angeles Times

Drastic measures at the track

Why are many horses dying, and what can be done? Santa Anita suffered a 22nd horse fatality Thursday morning, just one day after the main track was reopened for training. A few hours after the death, the tracks owners banned the use of all race-day medication and restricted whip use in the latest attempt to stop the deaths. The medication decision, which will bring the track into alignment with standards established by the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, is believed to be without precedent in North American racing. Los Angeles Times

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L.A. STORIES

Taking precautions: Los Angeles police were beefing up patrols around mosques late Thursday after deadly mass shootings in at least two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. While this attack appears to be an isolated incident with no nexus to LA, out of an abundance of caution were providing extra patrols around mosques, the Police Department said on Twitter. Los Angeles Times

Very interesting: Several years ago, the Lakers seriously discussed leaving Staples Center and returning to a completely remade Forum in Inglewood. Los Angeles Times

Jail is better: A year-long investigation found three of Orange Countys emergency homeless shelters riddled with problems including reports of physical and sexual abuse, neglect of residents with disabilities and mental illnesses, and filthy conditions, according to a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union. Los Angeles Times

A community responds to a teen suicide. Orange County Register

A badge-shaped cake: The Los Angeles Police Department turns 150. L.A. Daily News

At last: Construction has begun on the people-mover system to LAX. Curbed Los Angeles

CRIME AND COURTS

Spa bombing update: A Long Beach man is facing additional felony charges after a federal grand jury returned an indictment against him in connection with the bombing of an Orange County day spa that killed his ex-girlfriend last year. Los Angeles Times

Avoiding life in prison: Anger over a plea deal for a man accused of killing a transgender woman in the Central Valley. Fresno Bee

POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

A range of reaction: As word of Gov. Gavin Newsoms moratorium on the death penalty spread, victims families reacted with varied emotions. Most have lived through grief, legal trials and long waits after the murder of loved ones, and their responses were a reminder of how personal and polarizing the issue has remained through the years. Los Angeles Times

More power to them: Are microgrids the key to reducing wildfires? Los Angeles Times

CALIFORNIA CULTURE

#SaveODAAT: Say goodbye to L.A.s favorite sitcom family. Netflix is canceling its One Day at a Time reboot after three seasons because not enough people watched to justify another season, the streaming service said. Los Angeles Times

Welcome to San Francisco: Despite so much bad press about homelessness, crime and dirty streets, tourism in San Francisco is booming. San Francisco Chronicle

Valley talk: Facebook is losing a top executive, and that has become the talk of Silicon Valley amid another week of troubles for the tech giant. Mercury News

Berry Accius quest: This man tried to eat only at black-owned restaurants during February. It was much more difficult than he thought. Sacramento Bee

Mondo MOCA: An important  but not necessarily beloved  piece of L.A. architecture is back in the spotlight. Does it deserve better? Los Angeles Times

CALIFORNIA ALMANAC

Los Angeles area: partly cloudy, 74, Friday; sunny, 79, Saturday. San Diego: partly cloudy, 72, Friday; sunny, 74, Saturday. San Francisco area: sunny, 64, Friday; partly cloudy, 64, Saturday. San Jose: sunny, 69, Friday; mostly sunny, 64, Saturday. Sacramento: sunny, 67, Friday; mostly sunny, 70, Saturday. More weather is here.

AND FINALLY

Todays California memory comes from Karen Abbey:

In 1979, I discovered Morro Bay, after being raised in Fresno. When I would arrive on the outskirts of Morro Bay and the fog was rolling in, after leaving 110 degrees, I felt like I had died and gone to heaven! I still feel the same way about Morro Bay! Love it!!

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.
California law gives teenagers the legal right to consent to abortions, obtain birth control, get tested for HIV or vaccinated for sexually transmitted diseases, even if their parents object. Should they also have the right to seek out immunization for other serious and potentially deadly diseases such as measles, tetanus and polio?

Its a reasonable question here  and everywhere  as measles cases continue to surge globally and in the U.S., and faith in vaccinations has eroded to the point that the World Health Organization listed vaccine skepticism as one of the biggest threats to human health in 2019. Its one thing to allow parents to make healthcare decisions, even bad ones, for their babies and toddlers who cant make rational choices for themselves. Its another thing entirely to deny scientifically proven treatment to worried high school students who have followed the news and fully understand what their parents do not: that the recommended childhood immunizations are perfectly safe and not having received one puts them at risk of contracting highly contagious and serious diseases that can lead to lifelong health complications or even death.

A large measles outbreak among Orthodox Jewish communities in New York has prompted state legislators there to propose an urgent measure allowing teens 14 and older to obtain vaccinations, even over their parents objections. The Legislature should pass it, allowing teenagers who know better to protect themselves from the very real threat of this disease and others. Other states, such as Oregon and Washington, allow teenagers of various ages to obtain vaccinations on their own. (This is useful, in light of the major measles outbreak at the moment in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan region.)

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

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It makes sense to enable more people to obtain safe immunizations because the diseases they protect them from are not minor. Before wide-scale adoption of vaccinations, for example, measles killed more than 2.5 million people a year. Even now, the disease routinely kills thousands of people across the globe. A quarter of measles cases are so serious they result in hospitalization. Measles infections in children can lead to pneumonia, brain damage and encephalitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Whats more, vaccinations dont just protect the people who are vaccinated; they also raise the general herd immunity level that guards against disease outbreaks and protects even those too sick to get immunized.

And despite the fears and assertions of many parents, the vaccination for measles does not cause autism. Study after study have looked for and found no connection, including a major Danish study released just this month.

If kids are old enough to comprehend the danger of preventable disease, they ought to be old enough to take steps to avoid it  no matter what their uninformed parents think.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
District spokesman Nick Alajakis said Valadez had been at Washington campus to use a workout space in the basement that staff can use when its not being used by students and the quick visits in February were related to a project he was assisting with, dropping off and picking up paperwork.
There are more questions than answers at the moment after the horrific massacre of 49 people during Friday prayers at two New Zealand mosques, allegedly by a self-described ethno-nationalist who methodically planned the attacks, posted a 74-page manifesto online, purportedly explaining his motives, and then livestreamed himself as he mowed down the innocent.

We will, of course, be told that this was the work of a madman and, perhaps, some equally deranged accomplices  police are questioning three other people. That may well be. But, at heart, it appears to be the work of a violent white supremacist who had acquired combat-style weapons and who was driven, according to his manifesto, to kill nonwhites in New Zealand to show that there was no where left to go that was safe and free from mass immigration. And he chose to use firearms for the affect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide and the effect it could have on the politics of United States and thereby the political situation of the world.

The sick irony is the alleged Australian-born anti-immigrant killer was an immigrant himself to New Zealand, though he didnt see it that way. He saw himself acting in defense of a shared European-derived culture that is not defined by a passport. And he saw Muslim immigrants as an attack on that culture.

The sick irony is the alleged Australian-born anti-immigrant killer was an immigrant himself to New Zealand.

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A lot will be made of the fact that the suspected 28-year-old gunman, who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant, cited President Trump in his manifesto as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose, even though he goes on to say he opposes Trump as a policy maker and leader. More relevant is the manifestos nod to the Norwegian anti-immigrant extremist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a 2011 bombing and firearms attack.

What were seeing in the New Zealand attacks is yet another atrocity committed in the name of white supremacy. Of course, such racism is not new in the world, as our own history attests. Hitler immolated most of Europe and North Africa in hopes of building an Aryan empire, and in the modern era, the U.S. suffers more terror attacks by home-grown white supremacists than from foreign actors. It is a scourge, and we pay it too little heed. Dylann Roof killed nine African Americans in a church to foment a race war. Robert Bowers killed 11 worshippers in a synagogue because all these Jews need to die. Gregory Bush killed two African Americans as they shopped but told a white shopper he spared that whites dont kill whites. And on it goes while Trump falsely singles out Muslims and Central American immigrants as existential threats.

We would hope that outrage over such acts would be universal, but, once again, we hope for too much. The support for the killings on fever swamps like Gab.com show that even a racist murderer has an audience in a social media age in which anyone with a camera and a login can become a broadcaster. According to the purported manifesto, the point of the killings was to send a global message to Muslims to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands by intimidating and physically removing the invaders themselves. The alleged gunman also sought to provoke partisans on both sides, to create an atmosphere of fear and change in which drastic, powerful and revolutionary action can occur. Doing so requires a way to convey that message, and thats why the first 17 minutes of the attacks were streamed, live, on Facebook.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

The shooter might have carried out his mayhem even if there were no giant social media networks available to broadcast it around the globe. But there are, and while Facebook quickly removed the video and terminated the alleged killers account, the video spread rapidly on YouTube and Twitter despite those companies efforts to keep it off their networks. Thats a problem inherent in a platform that makes content posted by users available for sharing, instantaneously and without filters, around this modern media world. The manifesto, meanwhile, remains available on multiple sites.

But the impulse behind the acts isnt new, and the persistence of violent expressions of racism and religious intolerance in the 21st century undercuts any pretense that the world has advanced beyond such medieval notions. Few impulses are more primitive than wanting to kill other people just because they are different. And yes, Muslim extremists perpetrate horrific crimes. Christian extremists perpetrate horrific crimes. So do extremist Hindus and Buddhists. The commonality among them all is that one word: extremism. And in New Zealand today, 49 more people lay dead, the freshest victims of an old curse.

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The Trump administration, which has used the arrival of Central American migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border as a catalyst for all manner of stupid and cruel decisions, announced earlier this week that it will close immigration processing offices in more than 20 countries and shift the employees back home to help address a massive backlog in asylum requests.

Its not clear, however, that the training and skill sets of people handling specialized immigration requests in overseas consulates are applicable to processing asylum requests within the U.S.

In reality, shuttering those offices will further slow the already glacial pace of visa processing, in essence hamstringing the bureaucracy that handles applications from the would-be immigrants whom President Trump and the nativists in his inner circle seek so desperately to keep out. That seems to be the intent here, and the excuse that those overseas workers are needed back home to process asylum requests is just a pretext.

It makes you wonder what shape the nation will be in once Trump is gone.

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And theyll probably get away with it, because once you fire an FBI director to slow an investigation, lie with impunity about matters big and small, and circumvent the Constitution by declaring a nonexistent national emergency and get a pass by our falsely vaunted system of checks and balances, whats a little bureaucratic subterfuge?

The offices involved fall under the International Operations division of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and they handle a range of visa and immigration requests, including those for family reunification, international adoptions and humanitarian emergencies, among others.

In announcing the closure of 24 offices and the repatriation of 240 employees, USCIS said it would hand those responsibilities over to the State Department, which, so far, has been mum on the issue, suggesting the already-understaffed State might not have even been aware that its being asked to shoulder yet more duties.

The closures will likely only exacerbate general slowdowns in processing by USCIS, which was the subject of a scathing report in January about crisis-level delays by the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. According to the association:

The overall average case processing time surged by 46% over the past two fiscal years and 91% since FY 2014.

USCIS processed 94% of its form types  from green cards for family members to visas for human trafficking victims to petitions for immigrant workers  more slowly in FY 2018 than in FY 2014.

Case processing times increased substantially in FY 2018 even as case receipt volume appeared to markedly decrease.

The backlog is 2.3 million cases, double the amount in the previous year. A group of more than 80 Democratic members of Congress demanded an explanation last month from USCIS head Lee Cissna, though its unclear whether theyve received a response.

And a slow response would be fitting given the backlogs elsewhere in the department.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute 

The irksome part of this is the nefarious manner in which the administration is yet again seeking to throttle back the flow of immigrants and refugees to the U.S., which not only spurns our international obligations but also defies our history. There are reasonable policy differences to be hammered out over the scope and nature of immigration, but it should be Congress that makes those calls and not the nativists in the administration who can achieve their ends by simply not doing their jobs.

Its not the only place where Trumps minions are severely undercutting the scope and processes of government as their P.T. Barnum of a boss distracts the nation. Looking at you, environmental protection, workplace safety, and white-collar criminal prosecutions.

It makes you wonder what shape the nation will be in once Trump is gone. Short answer: not good. Long answer: Steve Bannon, long banished from the White House, seems to still be getting his way in forcing the destruction of the administrative state, known otherwise to the rest of us as the federal government.
The last year has not been kind to the men in Beijing.

After years of seeing power drain to the East, the West is striking back. At the fore is U.S. pressure on China to modify its practice of protectionist trade policy and industrial espionage. The Trump administration has given notice that China must change its ways or pay a heavy price. Trade negotiations are progressing toward new rules.

Security services in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Britain and other countries have issued warnings against wireless technology giant Huawei on grounds of national security. In Chinas state-led capitalism, companies like Huawei have a duty to collaborate with government authorities, including sharing data. Huaweis chief finance officer is under house arrest in Canada, awaiting extradition to the U.S. In January a Huawei employee was arrested in Warsaw and charged with espionage.

Also over the last year, respected research organizations including the Mercator Institute in Berlin, the Asia Society in New York and the Royal United Services Institute in London have issued reports detailing Chinas influence policy aimed at political and educational institutions, media and civil society in democratic countries.

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The West has been desperate to see China as a collaborative force, but Beijing has made it impossible to hold on to that illusion.

American lawmakers have spearheaded a fight against Chinas use of financial clout to chip away at the foundations of academic freedom. Western universities have become reluctant to welcome the Trojan horse of Confucian Institutes, and established institutes are being shut down. The tone of voice in media commentary has changed. Apologists are silent and the dominant melody is one of warning.

A year ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping made his first serious mistake since becoming supreme leader in 2012. He had the constitutional two-term limit on the presidency lifted. That pulled back the curtain for the world to see the regime as it is. Xi speaks the language of rule of law but will change the constitution at the flick of a finger if it suits him.

Internally, Communist Party control has been tightened in draconian ways under Xi. A heroic community of human rights lawyers has been decimated. Social control is being perfected in a big-data social credit system in which daily life rewards and punishments are distributed according to a peoples citizenship behavior score on a scale from good to bad. The western province of Xinjiang, where the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are concentrated, has been turned into a totalitarian police state, complete with mass detentions and a network of concentration camps.

Externally, Beijing is pursuing a policy of global domination. The main instrument is the Belt and Road Initiative in which China lends participating countries capital for infrastructure investments. The loans and projects are irresistible but have the effect of tying receiving nations into dependency on Beijing.

The West has been desperate to see China as a collaborative force, but Beijing has made it impossible to hold on to that illusion. When loans taken on by Sri Lanka became unserviceable, China took over the port in question and 15,000 acres of land around it on a 99-year lease, establishing a Hong Kong-style concession in a weaker country. Others caught in Chinas debt trap include Zambia, which in late 2018 lost control of its main international airport, and Kenya, which is in danger of having to hand over its main port in Mombasa for inability to pay back its Chinese loan to fund a China-built, but unprofitable, Mombasa-to-Nairobi railway.

To make matters worse for themselves, when meeting resistance Xi & Co. revert to bullying. After New Zealand joined other Western countries in a stand against Huawei, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was unable to schedule a long-planned visit to China, and the launch of a much-promoted tourism initiative was abruptly canceled. Also in New Zealand, in a much-noticed case, professor Anne-Marie Brady of the University of Canterbury, after publishing a critical paper about Chinas influence in the country, has found herself and her family on the receiving end of a campaign of intimidation she believes is orchestrated by Chinese authorities.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion 

When the British secretary of defense made some critical remarks about the South China Sea, the chancellor of the exchequer found a planned visit called off. Norway has been forced to sign a treaty of friendship in which its government, otherwise a consistent voice in defense of human rights, commits itself to silence on Chinas abuses.

But as the West pushes back, the realignment of power  not too strong a term  is finally starting to narrow Chinas space of action. An immediate beneficiary is Taiwan, which sits on the contemporary fault line of totalitarianism and democracy. The danger that China will trample liberty underfoot there is less today than it was a year ago.

Winston Churchill in the early years after World War II said of Josef Stalin that he did not believe Stalin wanted war, just the spoils of war. The same can be said of Xi Jinping today. But now, the West is finding its voice against Chinese abuses of power. It turns out that speaking clear language to the giant works.

Stein Ringen is a professor of political economy at Kings College London and the author of The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century.

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To the editor: With a touch of nostalgia, we bid farewell to a fig tree that stood in the birthplace of Los Angeles for 144 years before collapsing suddenly on March 2.

She was a Mediterranean species, and she had, so to speak, a good run. But looking to the warmer, more arid future that climate scientists predict, it is important to choose a California native, drought-tolerant species for the replacement tree. A Quercus agrifolia, known more commonly as the coast live oak, would be appropriate.

I suggest planting as young a tree as possible and surrounding it with a few acorns of the same species and variety. The new oak could be surrounded by other California native species that ordinarily coexist with Quercus agrifolia and that would eventually form an appropriate understory for the oak.

As the surviving fig trees in El Pueblo de Los Angeles expire, which they are likely to do, native oaks could replace them as well.

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Susan Klenner, Woodland Hills

..

To the editor: What an amazing story about the demise of the 144-year-old Moreton Bay fig tree in downtown Los Angeles.

There was such a sense of awe reading your article until you got to the very end, where someone thought it worthy to quote a neighbor as saying, A tree is a tree is a tree. Im not sure which is sadder, the trees demise or the neighbors perspective.

Jean Ratkowski, Long Beach

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook.
Several readers from groups targeted in violent attacks over the last few years wasted no time in expressing their outrage over the far-right white supremacism that allegedly motivated the gunman who killed 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday.

Most letter writers offered the heartfelt expressions of solidarity and grief typical after massacres like this one. Others  including some Muslims  responded also with pointed words condemning white supremacy, islamophobia and violence.

Saif Hussain of Woodland Hills mentioned President Trump:

The toxic spread of global Islamophobia manifested itself in an unlikely place Thursday  New Zealand. While the media and general public are focused on the unmitigated horror of this atrocious act of terrorism, it might behoove us to also consider root causes.

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The normalization, and in many cases the legitimization, of anti-Muslim bigotry has been fueled by countless mainstream individuals and groups. There is no better example of this than the president of the United States, who called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States during his campaign  a ban that he later promulgated and the Supreme Court shockingly validated.

This brazen Islamophobic bigotry has spread to New Zealand. To view this one incident in isolation would be tantamount to missing the forest for the trees, not to mention overlooking the pernicious role of uncaring hatemongers like Trump and his ilk.

Munjed Farid Al Qutob of London decries discrimination faced by Muslims:

The New Zealand attack is an assault on our common humanity. It demonstrates the salient fact that terrorism knows no boundaries  national, religious or otherwise.

I just returned from Ghent, Belgium. A professor there told me how the Muslim community is now besieged by job discrimination and social ostracism.

As we convey our heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims of this horrid attack, we reiterate our belief that Islam remains an oasis of tolerance, mercy and global solidarity, and that we should spare no effort in fighting terrorism.

Rabbi Allen S. Maller of Encino offers a prayer:

When I say the Friday evening prayers tonight, I will join with hundreds of American Reform rabbis who will recite Kaddish, a special Jewish Aramaic prayer said for the dead, for the 49 Muslims killed in New Zealand.

This attack is only the latest on a long list of recent acts by white supremacist terrorists. Others include the killing of 12 Jewish worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, the killing of six Muslims in a Quebec City mosque in 2017, the shooting deaths of nine black Christian parishioners in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, and the slaughter of 77 Norwegians in 2011.

Everyone who loves democracy must mourn all the various victims of terrorism. We must never give in to negativism and hate. One can only overcome death by living a better, kinder and more holy life. My prayers will be with all Muslims who mourn these 49 victims.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook
The Environmental Protection Agency announced a partial ban Friday on a toxic chemical used to remove paint and varnish, angering groups that have advocated for a complete prohibition of a substance thats been linked to dozens of deaths.

Once the rule takes effect later this year, consumers will no longer be able to buy paint removers containing the chemical methylene chloride. Anyone scanning the shelves of major retailers such as Lowes and Ace Hardware will discover that its probably already gone  many brands committed to phasing it out months ago.

But in a news briefing Friday, EPA Assistant Administrator for Chemical Safety Alexandra Dunn said the chemical will still be available for commercial uses. The agency is considering creating a federally enforceable training program for workers who use products containing methylene chloride.

This chemical has been used in the workplace for some time, Dunn said. Yes, there have been fatalities, and we are very concerned about those. But that is why today we are looking at receiving input in 60 days about whether its possible to have a training program, federally proscribed, that would manage the use of this product in a commercial setting.

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Dunn left open the possibility that the chemical may be disallowed in the future, if the risks cant be managed.

The agencys announcement is another step in the Trump administrations effort to roll back or significantly weaken Obama-era environmental and public health initiatives.

In the final days of the Obama administration, agency officials determined that methylene chloride and a similar solvent known as NMP represented unreasonable risks to the publics health. They proposed an across-the-board ban on both of them for use as paint strippers. But under Trump, the EPA chose not to go forward with that prohibition.

The EPAs announcement Friday drew sharp criticism from environmental and public health groups, as well as family members of victims who died of exposure to the chemical. These groups had advocated for protections for both consumers and commercial users.

We will not allow this administration to once again attack our community, because that is what this rule does. It leaves workers blatantly exposed to deadly chemicals, Hector Sanchez Barba, executive director of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, said in a statement.

Latino and immigrant workers are overly represented in jobs that require exposure to deadly working conditions, including paint strippers, he said. Methylene chloride must be fully banned.

According to the EPAs own findings, exposure to methylene chloride fumes can quickly lead to dizziness and loss of consciousness.

Contractors and other commercial users account for many of the deaths linked to the chemicals toxic fumes. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, from 2000 to 2015, 17 workers died while using paint stripper products containing the chemical.

In 2015, a paint company based in Fullerton, Calif., agreed to pay nearly $1 million a to settle a lawsuit stemming from the death of an employee, Roberto Ramirez Magdariaga, who had been exposed to the chemical. Prosecutors said Magdariaga and another employee had been handling the paint stripper without the proper training or safety protocols. The other employee survived but sustained serious injuries.

Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) issued a statement accusing the Trump administration of failing to follow the updated Toxic Substances Control Act that Congress passed in 2016.

In that law, we explicitly authorized EPAs work to ban methylene chloride-based paint strippers because of their dangerous effects on both workers and the public, Udall said. EPAs action today is a watered-down protection that apparently values industry profits at the expense of public health and safety  particularly for the hardworking people who will still be risking their lives with exposure to these deadly products.

The latest from Washington 

More stories from Anna M. Phillips 
When workers at North Koreas Sohae rocket facility began rebuilding the dormant sites launchpad and engine test stand this month, U.S. spy satellites orbiting overhead quickly detected the construction.

So did Joe Bermudez, a freelance North Korea military expert who keeps close tabs on unclassified overhead photos of the countrys scattered missile and nuclear weapons facilities.

Unlike U.S. intelligence agencies, Bermudez immediately went public.

North Korea is pursuing a rapid rebuilding of the long-range-rocket site at Sohae, Bermudez and Victor Cha, a former U.S. National Security Council official, warned in a March 5 analysis published by a Washington think tank that included satellite images of the hilly launch site near North Koreas border with China.

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The analysts suggested that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un might be moving toward resuming ballistic missile tests only days after the collapse of his summit with President Trump in Hanoi  a possible blow to Trumps efforts to persuade Kim to abandon his missile and nuclear weapons programs.

It also showed how the burgeoning availability of high-resolution commercial satellite photos of North Korea and other isolated global hot spots has challenged the monopoly that U.S. intelligence agencies long held on satellite imagery analysis.

Activity is evident at the vertical engine test stand and the launchpads rail-mounted rocket transfer structure, Bermudez and Cha wrote. The rebuilding activities at Sohae demonstrate how quickly North Korea can easily render reversible any steps taken towards scrapping its WMD program, referring to weapons of mass destruction.

Senior U.S. officials involved in the negotiations with North Korea can barely contain their disdain for the unofficial analysis, viewing it as overly pessimistic and potentially disruptive to their efforts.

The tendency to reach these snap conclusions is, in my view, a little bit hasty, Stephen Biegun, the special U.S. envoy for North Korea, said at a Washington conference Monday.

We take very seriously the reports that weve seen about whats happening at Sohae, he added. We dont need to depend upon commercial satellite photography.

John Bolton, Trumps national security advisor, similarly dismissed recent overhead images showing rail cars and other activity at Sanumdong, a facility near Pyongyang where North Korea has assembled some of its intercontinental ballistic missiles and satellite-launching rockets.

I dont really want to get into speculation about what theyre doing, he told ABCs This Week on March 10.

No one suggests the analysts are endangering national security. But evidence that Kims government is continuing its missile and nuclear weapons development deepens questions about whether Trump is engaged in a fruitless diplomatic initiative.

Pyongyang has not launched a ballistic missile or tested a nuclear device since the run-up to the Trump-Kim summit  their first  in Singapore in June, a fact Trump touts as one of the accomplishments of his high-level engagement with Kim.

U.S. intelligence agencies that study the reclusive North Korean government use communication intercepts, defector reports, reconnaissance flights and other sources. Sophisticated spy satellites transmit classified images said to be substantially more detailed than those publicly available.

That enables them to keep surveillance on dozens of sites where Kims government is believed to be working on nuclear weapons or long-range missile components.

U.S. intelligence officials say Kim is unlikely to surrender his nuclear stockpile or long-range missiles, seeing them as a guarantee of his grip on power.

But a cottage industry of U.S. academic groups, nonproliferation groups and Korea experts are buying the latest commercial satellite shots to look for their own evidence that Pyongyang is secretly advancing its weapons work while talking peace with Trump.

In the competitive world of Washington think tanks, satellite photos that appear to offer insight into North Koreas next move  and that challenge the administrations version of events  generate buzz, news stories and even donations from people and foreign governments who see North Korea as a threat.

The most active player in this parallel intelligence-gathering universe is the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy research organization that employs Bermudez as its senior fellow for imagery analysis and that issues frequent  sometimes breathless  reports using overhead imagery.

Bermudez has spent decades examining Pyongyangs secret missile and weapons programs, including as senior analyst for DigitalGlobe, a Colorado-based satellite imagery company whose primary customer is the U.S. intelligence community.

Before signing on with CSIS, the Colorado-based analyst worked with 38 North, another nonprofit research group and website focused on North Korea that regularly issues its own reports on overhead imagery of Pyongyangs missile and nuclear sites.

I got sucked into North Korea and never have been able to get out, said Bermudez, who refuses to say whether he formerly worked for a U.S. spy agency.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department entity that collects and analyzes satellite imagery, has given Bermudez and a handful of other analysts access to its vast trove of unclassified North Korea imagery in return for their analysis on obscure topics.

His report on rail shipments of iron ore from the North Korean city of Wonsan was posted on the agencys public website in November, part of a year-old NGA program to enlist outside experts to do unclassified research that its own analysts dont have time to do.

But Bermudezs work on North Koreas missile and nuclear programs gets the most attention.

After their first report on the new construction at Sohae, Bermudez and Cha issued new pictures of the launch site two days later, labeling the structures and noting what had changed since the satellite last had passed overhead.

Commercial satellite imagery acquired March 6, 2019  shows that North Korea has essentially completed the rebuilding of both the rail-mounted transfer/processing structure on the launchpad and the vertical engine at the Sohae Launch Facility, they wrote.

That could indicate deliberate preparations to test rocket engines again, they added.

Other outside analysts say Bermudez and Cha sometimes push their conclusions too far, extrapolating from limited information on the images what Kims next move may be.

Their work sometimes is a target for rivals, including 38 North, which brought on two new former U.S. government imagery analysts after Bermudez left for CSIS.

Its really easy to abuse using satellite images, said Jenny Town, a research analyst at 38 North. In the CSIS stuff, the analysis is good, but some of the conclusions are pretty far-reaching.

When 38 North made public its report on Sohae on March 13, it avoided speculating about what the construction at the site might indicate about Kims intentions.

Recent commercial satellite imagery of the Sohae Satellite Launching Station shows no changes to the launch pad or engine test stand between March 8 and March 13, Town and the two former U.S. government imagery analysts concluded.

The latest from Washington 

More stories from David S. Cloud 
A girl in a pink bow stood proudly center stage Friday at the Justice Department, dwarfed by two statues and adults in black judicial robes behind her.

We need more judges, quipped James McHenry, director of the executive office of immigration review, which administers the countrys clogged immigration courts. Were now recruiting children too.

Thus went the ceremony for officials, family and friends to welcome 31 new immigration judges, the second-largest class ever.

The Trump administration has hired more immigration judges in two years than was done in the previous seven years, according to Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, who plans to retire soon.

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But the hiring surge is unlikely to resolve the backlog of nearly 830,000 immigration cases that continues to grow.

Rosenstein said the new judges  on top of 414 currently serving  will help cut the vast logjam.

Whether the immigration backlog continues to grow depends in large part on how immigration judges discharge their duties, Rosenstein said.

It will also depend on money. McHenry notified immigration court staffers last week that budget shortfalls had blocked the hiring of additional judges and would delay recruitment of court support staff, according to BuzzFeed.

The caseload worsened significantly during the 35-day government shutdown over President Trumps demands for a border wall. About 400 immigration judges were furloughed, and tens of thousands of hearings were canceled or delayed, exacerbating delays that now exceed two years on average.

Amid continued fighting with Congress over immigration and border security funding, the White House has requested money for 100 additional teams of immigration judges for 2020.

Migrants routinely wait years for a final determination of whether they can stay in the country, according to a Homeland Security inspector generals report released Thursday.

In contrast to regular U.S. courts, immigration courts are not in the judicial branch of government. The judges are classified as government attorneys at the Justice Department and they ultimately report to Atty. Gen. William Barr.

The Trump administration has prioritized deporting thousands of migrants in detention and preventing their release into the United States while they await court hearings.

But because of limited detention space and record numbers of asylum seekers and Central American families adding to the backlog, Trump officials have released some detained migrants.

Some administration policies also have proved counterproductive to reducing the backlog, according to some current immigration judges, former officials  and McHenry.

Boosting enforcement efforts without increasing resources for immigration courts could seriously compromise their ability to address [the] caseload and greatly exacerbate the current state of the backlog, McHenry wrote to Rosenstein in October 2017.

In a plan that officials said would reduce the backlog, the Justice Department at the time instituted a quota for immigration judges and forced them to reopen closed cases. The caseload grew by more than 230,000 new cases last year, however.

McHenry sought to steel the new judges on Friday, saying they were entering into the most significant and emotionally charged debate over immigration for some time. He even read out a pause for tense laughter.

molly.otoole@latimes.com

Twitter: @mollymotoole
In his first month in office, Atty. Gen. William Barr has sent a reassuring message to the beleaguered Justice Department  he wants a return to basics after years of disruptive firings, tweet storms and scandals.

In briefings, Barr has asked detailed questions about cases, suspects and legal arguments. He has wandered his fifth-floor hallway to converse about the law.

And he declined the traditional clap in where a newly confirmed attorney general walks through the building and subordinates applaud. Instead, Barr held a three-hour reception in his conference room.

Advisors and associates said the approach reflects Barrs low-key persona, and his top goals of steering the Justice Department out of the line of political fire, boosting public confidence in it, and improving the morale of its 110,000 employees.

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Everything the attorney general is doing right now is about restoring the [departments] reputation as a nonpartisan institution whose only allegiance is the law and to the rule of law, not politics, said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and close friend.

Barr could soon face the toughest test of his tenure. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is expected to release his final report in coming weeks, and Barr must decide how much to release to the public.

The pressure on Barr intensified Thursday when the House voted 420-0 to demand he release to Congress and the public the full findings of Muellers investigation into Russias attempts to sway the 2016 election and whether President Trumps campaign or associates aided the Russians.

With wide bipartisan support the House has agreed: The American people deserve to know the truth about what, if anything, special counsel Mueller has uncovered, and now we should finally see this investigation come to a close, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking Republican, said in a statement.

A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, later called the nonbinding resolution ridiculous, and it is unlikely to pass the Senate. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, blocked a Democratic effort to bring the measure up.

Barr will have to weigh those bipartisan demands against the privacy rights of those not charged with crimes and federal rules governing the release of classified and other sensitive information.

Regulations leave much to Barrs discretion, and he has been circumspect about his plans, beyond promising to be as transparent as the law allows. Aides said Barr understands the political stakes.

If he tries to hide the report and evidence, it will not only tar his reputation but also the reputation of the Department of Justice, said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. His decision will have lasting consequences.

Barr, 68, is hardly a novice. Three decades ago, he served as U.S. attorney general under President George H.W. Bush after previously holding other Justice Department posts. He later served as the top lawyer for two major corporations, GTE and Verizon.

A stalwart of the Republican legal establishment, Barr was in semi-retirement when Trump tapped him in December to again serve as attorney general. He is only the second person in history to hold the post twice.

He has told associates he took the job because the Justice Department faced a critical juncture.

He reveres the Justice Department as an institution, said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School and a friend. To understand Bill Barr is to understand he has come to the Justice Department with a mission and it is to entirely benefit the institution, not any individuals.

Barr is particularly concerned that politics may have influenced several high-profile investigations.

Barr was flabbergasted, associates said, at news reports that Peter Strzok, a top FBI agent, and Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, had exchanged private text messages critical of Trump in 2016 even as they investigated Hillary Clintons use of a private email server while she was secretary of State.

Strzok later led the FBIs inquiry into Russias interference in the election and potential links between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. He was fired last year.

Barr is a proponent of robust presidential authority, and he shares most of the priorities and policy positions of his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, a former U.S. senator from Alabama who had strongly backed Trumps candidacy in 2016.

But Sessions drew Trumps ire  and months of demeaning tweets  when he recused himself from overseeing the Russia investigation shortly after he was confirmed. Sessions resigned at Trumps request in November.

Like Sessions, Barr believes an immigration crisis exists at the southern border, and the Justice Department needs to do more to combat the opioid epidemic and violent crime. Aides say he will lay out his priorities in speeches crafted like legal arguments.

One of his first addresses, they said, will advocate for restricting the ability of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions halting administration policies.

Judges have blocked the Trump administration from enacting a range of policies, including the initial ban on visitors from several majority Muslim countries and curbing grants to so-called sanctuary cities.

Aides said they expect Barrs public statements to focus on policy with a markedly different tone than used by Sessions, who was known to wax poetic about the Trump era and the presidents leadership despite their strained relationship.

Barr will advocate for administration policies but is not likely to engage in what some viewed as Sessions politicking for the president, according to advisors.

He supports the president and his policies. He is a conservative, said a senior Justice Department official who requested anonymity to discuss Barrs work. But he isnt a rah-rah political kind of guy. He thinks and speaks like a litigator.

Barr starts his office day at 8:30 a.m. when he reviews the presidents daily brief, the intelligence communitys classified, high-level analysis of national security matters. Three days a week, he receives a threat briefing from FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, and he meets every morning with Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein and top aides to suss out issues of the day.

He has gone out of his way in meetings to praise Rosenstein, who has been criticized by Trump. The deputy attorney general is expected to leave office in coming weeks, perhaps after Mueller submits his report.

To improve collaboration, Barr has instituted a weekly brown bag lunch in his conference room for top officials. He has spoken to lawmakers of both parties, aides said, and has met daily with a different U.S. attorney to better understand needs and challenges in the departments 94 districts.

On a recent afternoon, a senior advisor said, Barr popped into Solicitor Gen. Noel Franciscos office to chat. They soon were engaged in a spirited assessment of an arcane case before the Supreme Court that could result in overturning how courts approach federal agencies interpretations of their own regulations.

He loves the minutiae of the law, said Turley, the law professor. He believes the law is found in the details. If you ask him to read something, he will read every word of it. And he will have questions.

Times staff writer Jennifer Haberkorn contributed to this report.
Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1970s and 80s can easily remember when the environmentally conscious were dismissed as tree-huggers. We should have recognized it for what it was  a divide-and-conquer distraction technique designed to put profits ahead of the water that we drink without a second thought and the fish that we hook and the beaches where we spend a carefree summer weekend.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom stepped onto a state Capitol podium on Wednesday to order a moratorium on executions  an action more sweeping than that of any California governor in history  he brought with him only a folded piece of paper with a few notes scribbled as reminders.

There was no finely crafted speech to win over the hearts and minds of skeptical Californians. The governor sent a message to the world outside by looking inward  taking the political and making it personal.

I wont be able to sleep at night, he said of allowing executions to resume once a revised lethal injection procedure is approved by the courts. This is about who I am as a human being. This is about what I can, and cannot, do.

Few decisions as governor will afford Newsom a similar chance to speak beyond the heated battles of the moment. Even humanitarian dilemmas like homelessness or the detention and separation of migrant families come with political implications that are more immediate. The debate over the death penalty, in contrast, has lasted for generations.

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And yet Newsoms announcement did share something in common with the other big decision of his nascent administration: his embrace of a new path forward on high-speed rail. While he made his position more clear on capital punishment than he did on the bullet train project, in neither instance did he do more than offer a temporary solution.

To do more on the death penalty will take the support of the voters and an amendment to the California Constitution. The governor offered a brief sketch of what that campaigns message might look like  ending racial and class inequity in death sentences, reducing the cost to taxpayers for years of court appeals, stopping the immorality of state-sanctioned killing  but stopped short of pledging to lead the effort.

I have enormous respect and admiration for people that disagree, he told reporters. These are tough things to square. These are hard things, you know, to process.

What families of murder victims have to say about Gavin Newsoms death penalty ban 

Should Newsom step forward it will take more than just a personal plea. Ballot initiatives to repeal the death penalty failed in 2012 and 2016. A Bay Area lawmaker is now proposing the Legislature place the issue on the ballot for a third time in 2020.

The odds could be tough in the state Capitol, too. Twenty-seven Assembly Democrats represent districts that voted against the 2012 repeal measure. Thirty-three Assembly members  more than half of the houses Democratic caucus  represent districts that voted against the proposal in 2016. Similar challenges exist in the state Senate.

Data from decades of the nonpartisan Field Poll show consistently strong statewide support for the death penalty as far back as the mid-1950s. Even in 2011, 68% of registered voters surveyed were in favor. Self-described middle of the road voters seemed to be a key factor.

But the governor and other death penalty opponents may believe, as do some political strategists, that Californias electorate is shifting toward the political left. Once a sure bet to favor stiff penalties and punishment, recent elections have shown a willingness to consider new approaches to criminal justice. While the line has held steady at the death penalty, repeal supporters have wondered what it would take to change that.

Thats where Newsom comes in. Perhaps sensing the peril in making a hard sell too soon, the governor suggested Wednesday that there would be plenty of time to ask Californians to reconsider their position.

I hope this will prevail as a conversation anew on the death penalty in this country, Newsom said in announcing his executive order. Now the pendulum is swinging in a new direction.

john.myers@latimes.com

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The little girl was not gaining weight.

The diagnosis: failure to thrive, a term used to describe a child who isnt growing as expected. The remedy: nutritional shakes packed with protein.

That typically would be the end of the appointment, said the girls doctor, Nadine Burke Harris, a 43-year-old Jamaican American raised in Palo Alto who was named Californias first surgeon general last month. But, in her new role, Burke Harris said she will push to change a profession that too often settles for quick fixes over unearthing root causes of ailments.

The San Francisco pediatrician has been a leading advocate in pushing the state to expand screenings for abuse and extreme stress in children. Gov. Gavin Newsom included $45 million in his January budget proposal to start screening low-income Medi-Cal patients for what the medical community calls adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, beginning in 2020.

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Burke Harris said that when children are exposed to high levels of stress or abuse often enough, hormones are triggered that can have lasting effects on brain development and the immune system. Burke Harris said that in such situations the bodys stress thermostat, which is high during traumatic events, breaks and stress hormones continue to pump into a childs body.

Burke Harris said she wants universal stress screenings for all children as part of their regular physical exams, but that it was too early to say when she would make that push. Too often mental trauma is considered unrelated to medical care, she said, despite studies showing a clear link to physical ailments.

The impact of early adversity gets under our skin in a way that can be invisible, but can have profound impacts on health and development over a lifetime, Burke Harris said.

Burke Harris is based in San Francisco, where she lives with her four children, all boys, and husband Arno Harris, a clean power and transportation entrepreneur.

Burke Harris, who will make $200,000 in her new role, said that, while she is a political appointee, she doesnt see herself wading into many of the contentious healthcare debates in the state Capitol. She said she will be narrowly focused on toxic stress, welcome words for her fellow advocates for universal trauma screening.

She has a great deal of humility, said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of National Crittenton, an Oregon-based social justice group that supports girls and young women affected by trauma. She does what she does for the right reasons  not for political reasons, not for expediency and not for notoriety.

California is in the process of adopting screening tools to evaluate low-income children for toxic stress. Burke Harris raised funds and helped develop one of the tools being considered, which would be offered to the state free of cost.

Only three other states have a surgeon general. Newsom previously named Burke Harris to San Franciscos Citizens Committee on Community Development when he was the citys mayor. She has also worked with First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, appearing in one of her documentaries and serving as an informal advisor to her while Newsom was mayor.

Dr. Burke Harris is the right person for this state to take leadership across the country on this important issue, the governor said in a statement.

Burke Harris said she wants to use her elevated platform to push fellow doctors to diagnose differently. Like with her pediatric patient who wasnt gaining weight, she wants doctors to ask a series of questions about traumatic events to help properly diagnose physical symptoms now or prevent ailments later.

Burke Harris said that for her young patient, there were so many traumas that she didnt know where to start. But she rattled off the statistics for what could happen if she didnt address them  increased risks for stroke, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers and other ailments, and a higher rate of engaging in risky behavior like drug use.

Her diagnosis, knowing the girls troublesome home life?

Toxic stress, Burke Harris said.

Her revised remedy? Child-parent psychotherapy, follow-up doctors appointments, and yes, still the nutritional drinks.

Screening a child for toxic stress involves asking a parent to count how many of the following 10 issues a child has encountered: physical, sexual or emotional abuse, physical or emotional neglect, a parents mental illness, substance dependence, a parents incarceration, parental separation or divorce and domestic violence.

Each one results in a point, which doctors use to give a score. The higher that score, the higher the risk that the child has unhealthy stress levels. Burke Harris said that information can help doctors diagnose patients more accurately, offering mental health treatment, stress-reducing exercises or medication.

You have to know what you are treating, she said. Its like catching Stage 1 cancer versus Stage 4. If we can diagnose at Stage 1, you can treat far more people with the same resources.

Early intervention has long been a priority for Burke Harris, even before she became a doctor.

When she was 17, her brother Louis, who was suffering from schizophrenia, opened the door of their parents car at a stop light and walked away. He has been missing ever since.

In the years that followed, Burke Harris said she has searched the faces of patients and strangers, hoping to find one that looks like her own.

We literally do not know if he is still living, she said. This has been a big motivation for me in trying to serve vulnerable communities.

When she opened a pediatric clinic in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood in southeastern San Francisco, a high-poverty, predominantly African American community, she said she saw kids repeatedly showing signs of poor health and wondered whether there was a biological link to trauma in their lives.

A 1998 study by Kaiser Permanente and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed for her that there was.

People told me, How do you think you are ever going to solve this? Its too big, Burke Harris said. I dont think Ive ever met anyone who hasnt experienced or knows someone who has experienced significant adverse childhood experiences. That means we are solving this for everyone.

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melody.gutierrez@latimes.com

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Bellarmine-Jefferson High School in Burbank will close temporarily at the end of the school year so officials can analyze how to solve a decadelong decline in enrollment.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles announced Wednesday that the Catholic school at 465 E. Olive Ave. will stop operating at the end of the 2017-18 school year not only due to low student registration but because of rising operating costs, according to a statement from the archdiocese.

Bell-Jeff, a four-year, college-preparatory high school, was founded in 1944 by Monsignor Martin Cody Keating. It became an archdiocesan-administered school in 1980.

Although Bell-Jeff will close in the spring, archdiocese officials said they plan to reopen the campus for the 2019-20 school year.

While the school and archdiocese have tried to increase enrollment over the past 10 years, Bell-Jeffs student population has dropped from 295 students to 98 currently, according to the statement.

The school will be undergoing a complete analysis and structuring process to build on the strong academic foundation of Bell-Jeff and provide the infrastructure needed to become a successful and viable school, said Kevin Baxter, senior director and superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, in the statement. Our hope is to complete the restructure initiative for the 2019-20 school year and offer an innovative Catholic education program that best meets the needs of the community we serve.

This is a decision to land the plane and do that work thats needed on the site so that we can take off and soar moving forward. Dr. Kevin Baxter, senior director and superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles

Baxter said on Thursday that archdiocese officials will be looking at various types of information, such as census data, trends in birth rates and economic data, to determine if Burbank is still a suitable site for a Catholic high school.

After analyzing that information, the goal is to develop a school model that will be most successful for the archdiocese and the community.

We wouldnt want to just simply replicate the same model that Bell-Jeff is operating because we recognize that that became something that was unsustainable, Baxter said.

He added that officials will also be looking into whether Bell-Jeff should be a school with an emphasis on entrepreneurship, technology or the arts.

Bell-Jeff was flying like an airplane, and we tried to do work on the engine while it was flying  shift programs and try to make the school a little more attractive to prospective parents, Baxter said. This is a decision to land the plane and do that work thats needed on the site so that we can take off and soar moving forward.

School officials are currently working with parents whose children are enrolled at Bell-Jeff to help transfer them to other nearby archdiocese Catholic high schools for the 2018-19 school year. Administrators are also helping find new positions for faculty and staff.

We have excellent teachers and students at Bell-Jeff, and our utmost priority is to assist them in finding other Catholic high schools in the area in which to teach and learn, Baxter said in Wednesdays statement. Students will be given priority status in enrolling at local Catholic high schools, as well as transitional tuition assistance and reimbursement for new uniforms.

Officials at Providence High School, an independent Catholic high school in Burbank, said they were saddened to hear the news about the upcoming closure of Bell-Jeff, and they are ready to work with parents should they choose to transfer their children to Providence.

We are optimally enrolled right now, but that doesnt mean that we couldnt make some room for a few kids, if it was the right fit, said Joe Sciuto, the head of school at Providence. We are the other Catholic high school in Burbank and, for a lot of their families, we would be an obvious choice. Even if the archdiocese does not subsidize those families, we certainly will look at all the applications and consider them strongly.

Bell-Jeff alumni have already started a Change.org petition asking the archdiocese to keep the schools doors open.

Andrew McCratic, a 2008 alumnus, said it would be devastating to the community if Bell-Jeff were to close its doors  even temporarily. Though the archdiocese said that it would be aiming to reopen the school for the 2019-20 school year, McCratic said he has concerns about whether his alma mater will remain the same after the reopening.

Theres rumors that it might become a new high school, and other rumors that it could become part of the [St. Robert Bellarmine] Elementary School, McCratic said. Bell-Jeff gave me a lot of the tools to be where I am today. Bell-Jeff has a close-knit family, and they instill a lot values to lead a successful life once you leave high school.

Bellarmine-Jefferson High School graduate Kyle Balmonte leads the way during commencement exercises for the class of 2017 at the schools church in Burbank on Saturday, May 27, 2017. Twenty graduates made up the class of 2017. (File Photo )

anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpio
Burbank should ban rental scooters or at least put restrictions on them.

The shared electric scooters are dangerous and do not have many safety rules put fully into place. There is nothing to stop youths from hopping on one of these scooters and going 15 mph or more without a helmet.

Also, the scooters do not have bright colors or reflectors so that cars can see them easily at night.

Another reason we should get rid of the scooters is because they are being left all over cities and are blocking driveways, sidewalks and public entrances. They are becoming a problem, especially for people in wheelchairs who cant get past these scooters because the pathway is blocked.

Emilio Martin Del Campo

Burbank

--

Either the city of Burbank is for the landlords or they are for the tenants.

In Los Angeles County I have found a few landlords who care and respect their tenants. More often, thats not the case.

We need rent control and protection for thousands of tenants within Burbanks city limits.

Landlords can charge outrageously high rents, fail to properly maintain their properties, blame tenants for wear and tear, evict at their discretion, enter units illegally and with little or no recourse for the tenants.

Typically, new tenants are given a one-year lease. Unfortunately, landlords are not required to point out problems in the building and on the block.

I have attended the Burbank Landlord-Tenant Commission meetings off and on for decades. Renters have come in with horror stories, and I have never seen anyone helped. I have experienced no help with the Housing Authority.

Then there is the Burbank smoking ordinance. In my experience, it hasnt been enforced.

Dont like it? Move.

Really? Where is it better?

We need rent control and protection for thousands of tenants. Obviously, the city of Burbank is for the landlords.

Kudos to Glendales grassroots tenant association and their efforts to help residents.

Jane Harrison

Burbank

***

On a recent Wednesday we received 10 robocalls at our home, most of them with no one on the other end of the line.

I would like our representative in Congress, Rep. Adam Schiff, to stop wasting my tax dollars on his war on the Trump administration and do something about robo calls that benefits us all. Ten robocalls, starting at 8:06 in the morning!

Tim Elliott

Burbank
Have you ever buried your trash in the sand while at the beach rather than carrying it to a bin  even a simple plastic baggie from your sandwich?

How about discarding unwanted items overboard when nobody was watching on your last boat trip to Catalina Island? If you are honest and answer guilty as suspected, then you are joining millions of folks, not just here in Southern California but worldwide, who for far too long  centuries, in fact  have assumed our vast oceans are a bottomless waste disposal.

Science has been sounding the alarm that we humans are potentially poisoning the planet due to such irresponsible abuse. Research reports that enormous sections of ocean floor worldwide are covered with waste, much of it non-biodegradable. So dont be surprised when restaurants ban plastic straws and utensils and similar items. It is not a plot by staunch environmentalists to ruin businesses. Such regulations may in fact save business, and more importantly, save the planet for many generations to come.

The waste problem is just one aspect of the challenges facing those dedicated to ocean conservation and preservation. There are serious threats to all variety of maritime life, many species at risk due to overfishing Other environmental habitats are ruined from human behavior including oil spills and coral bleaching. There has been a loss of vast reefs that support many species.

And then there is climate change, a spooky term for non-believers. But tell that to oceanographic scientists gauging higher water temperatures worldwide. The debate should not be if climate change is real, but rather what is the cause and what can be done about it, whether it is man- or nature-related or both.

For the past 11 years in Orange County, the worlds most respected and largest ocean conservation organization, Oceana, has held a major summer fundraiser on the Pacific Coast. The SeaChange Summer Party is held annually at an Italian-Mediterranean-inspired villa in Laguna Beach hosted by the Bruce Cahill family.

Oscar Nunez and host Bruce Cahill meet up at Oceanas SeaChange Summer Party in Laguna Beach. (Courtesy of Ryan Miller, Anna Garcia, John Watkins and Tom Vickers)

Actor Ted Danson, Jennifer Condas and Kathryn Cenci gather at the annual SeaChange Summer Party in Laguna Beach. (Courtesy of Ryan Miller, Anna Garcia, John Watkins and Tom Vickers)

The event attracts a gathering of SoCal whos who, including a contingent of Hollywood glitterati who also are dedicated to the cause. Among them is actor Ted Danson, who has fronted the event each year. Also front and center for the 2018 party were Dennis Haysbert (Youre in good hands with Allstate), Austin Nichols, Hassie Harrison, Christina Ochoa and Oscar Nunez, many of whom have supported Oceana for years.

The celebs mingled with some 400 local VIPs clinking glasses on a balmy July evening high in the hills of Laguna, overlooking an endless Pacific as the sun moved west into the horizon. Dinner was served al fresco on the Cahill lawn as experts spoke about serious issues.

Oceanas CEO, Andy Sharpless, flew in from its East Coast headquarters and addressed the crowd on the theme of the 11th SeaChange, protecting corals. Sharpless had encouraging words: Oceanas teams are winning battles that will give the corals a chance.

Guests take in the views at the annual SeaChange Summer Party in Laguna Beach. (Courtesy of Ryan Miller, Anna Garcia, John Watkins and Tom Vickers)

The massive undertaking was organized this season by Oceana board vice chairwoman Valarie Van Cleave along with Elizabeth Wahler and event vice chairman Jeff Blasingame. Major support came from Tricia and Michael Burns, Jean and Tim Weiss, Janet and Carl Nolet, Teresa and Doug Pasquale, Bonnie Lee and Justin Pham, Danni Sun, Carol and Dennis Berryman, Laura and Lou Rohl, Suzie Kim, Michael Silvers and Valaree Wahler.

An impressive list of corporate sponsors included South Coast Plaza, Chanel, Latham & Watkins LLP, Gucci, BNY Wealth Management, Crevier Foundation, Marisla Foundation and Pfleger Foundation.

The summer party concluded with a special performance by the talented and beautiful Katharine McPhee, who brought the audience to its feet with her rendition of Over the Rainbow.

With proceeds from tickets, auction and underwriting gifts, Oceana raised $1.2 million to help save our oceans from us and for us.

To learn more, go to oceana.org.

B.W. COOK is editor of the Bay Window, the official publication of the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach.
To Marlys Vasterling, Balboa Islands mixture of old and new, quaint and modern, makes it a special place, even though an old gas station, bank, pharmacy, hardware store and, most recently, a market that had been in the same location for around 80 years are gone.

So, too, are many of the islands original beach cottages  replaced by bigger houses.

Yes, the island is changing, no question about it, said Vasterling, a real estate broker who grew up on Balboa Island and is continuing Vance Realty Group, the business her late mother, Lora Vance, established 45 years ago.

But the island remains one of the most desirable places to live, she said.

The Vance family originally moved to Collins Island (a piece of Balboa Island) from Corona del Mar before they bought 1311 N. Bay Front in 1960 for $63,000. Vasterling sold the latter three years ago for nearly $3 million.

No. 4 Collins Island is still owned by the family my parents sold it to for $120,000 that same year and is the same configuration with an estimated value of approximately $5 million to $6 million, depending on interior improvements, Vasterling said.

She noted another example of price appreciation by providing the sales history of a cottage sold the year the Vance Realty office opened on Marine Avenue, Balboa Islands main drag. The home, at 215 Amethyst, sold for $74,000 in 1974 and for $900,000 in 2001. It was then torn down and built anew. In 2018, the property sold for $3.065 million.

Real estate broker Mary Hardesty, whose office is on the west end of the island, cant believe she has lived on Balboa Island for 50 years.

She recalls the first time seeing it and thinking, Oh my God, who gets to live here? Its like Disneyland.

It was 1966, and she, along with her brothers, had just crossed the bridge on their way to go surfing. Three years later, Hardesty got to live on Balboa Island after she married a real estate broker who owned an office there.

Hardesty obtained her real estate license in 1971 when she began working with her then-husband at Hardesty Realtors on Park Avenue. That continued until 1985, and after working as an independent broker, she opened her own office in 1997 on Agate Avenue with associate and family member Erika Primeau.

Hardesty said she has seen an increase in single-family homes replacing duplexes, mainly because of parking requirements for new duplexes that call for four spaces instead of two.

During the past 40 to 50 years, Hardesty has seen a gradual shift on Balboa Island from homes being mostly vacation rentals to mostly permanent for their owners. Many of them have been handed down through generations.

Most of the vacation rentals were owned by families from the greater Los Angeles area and the plan was to ultimately retire and move down here into the beach house, Hardesty said. Today, 75% of the homes on the island are owner-occupied or second homes, while 25% are rental properties.

Real estate agent Bing Girling said that as more properties have become permanent residences, many people have made full use of the lots by replacing original beach cottages with big houses.

Businesses also are turning over with increased frequency.

The dynamics of the island may change, but not the community feel, Girling said. Its still a unique community that I dont think will ever change.

Girling  who is partnering with his son, David, in the Girling Real Estate Group, affiliated with Villa Real Estate  moved to Balboa Island in 1979, when the price for a 30-by-85-foot inside lot ranged from $300,000 to $400,000. Before that, he recalled, he saw a home for sale on South Bay Front for $105,000 in 1967.

Girling said a 30-by-85-foot lot currently ranges from $2 million to $8 million.

Hardesty sees similarities between Balboa Island and a blue zone environment where people tend to live longer.

Some of the qualities that contribute to longevity  exist on Balboa Island, like the social networking and the camaraderie that goes with living in a tight community, looking out for one another, talking to the people in their 90s who are sitting on benches, and getting out and walking, Hardesty said.

Vasterling agreed, saying the community is distinguished from all others by its 2 miles of sidewalk stretching around the island, providing a continuous water view for pedestrians, plus its shopping, dining and, for some, the privilege of a boat dock in front of their house.

Theres no other place on the California coast quite like it, she said.

As they tear these  cottages down and build lovely new homes, they cannot tear down this truly historic place, she said.

Susan Hoffman is a contributor to Times Community News.
Over 10 weeks, nine groups of fifth-graders are sleeping, eating and learning at a four-day, three-night Newport Bay science camp as part of a program called Fostering interest in Nature.

The FiiN program, in its freshman year, focuses on bringing students from Title I schools to Newport Beachs Back Bay, where they can learn about the estuary and have an outdoor experience they will never forget.

Title I schools have large concentrations of students from low-income households and receive supplemental federal funds to help meet educational goals.

FiiN focuses primarily on educating students about watersheds, marine ecology and the history of the bay, but students also can go on hikes and a boat tour in addition to kayaking and exploring tide pools. They camp outdoors at Camp James and are fed by Newport Dunes Waterfront Resort, both of which partner with FiiN.

The program is currently on its fourth group of students. It expects to have hosted about 350 students by the end of its first year.

City staff said the program is open to any Title I school in Orange County, but students attending this year are from the Santa Ana and Newport-Mesa unified school districts.

When I grew up, it was part of the curriculum that you can go out and you do a nature camp. But it was all done by the individual, said Heather Cieslak, director of operations for the Newport Bay Conservancy.

My family had to fundraise or pay for it, and here, its an opportunity for these students if maybe their parents cant afford it or are disconnected, that they can then come for this four-day, three-night program and get to experience it.

FiiN is funded by the city of Newport Beach and the Lido House hotel as part of negotiations for the latters lease of city land after the California Coastal Commission said the city needed to find lower-cost visitor accommodations before it would approve the project.

Mario Cuevas, a fifth-grade teacher at Lowell Elementary School in Santa Ana, said his students were excited to be at the camp. The opportunity plants a seed for future biologists, doctors, engineers and puts a whole different perspective on science, he said.

[The students] eyes lit up when they saw the estuary, Cuevas said. They couldnt believe that they were going to be sleeping in a tent. And the relationships that theyre going to build here could last for a lifetime.

Arlette Velasquez, 10, said she was nervous and excited to go to the camp. She said she wasnt sure whether shed like the people or meet new people. But its been pretty fun, she said.

Arlette said she had never gone camping before or been on a boat.

Valeria Pedraza, 11, whose father, Ernesto, is a teacher at Lowell and also attended the camp, said she was really excited to go.

Ive gone camping and I really like it, she said.

FiiN is set to run for 10-week seasons every year for the next decade. City staff said its too early to tell what would happen after that.

The hope is to expand the program to serve more students or extend the camps duration, according to Jim Campbell, Newport Beach deputy director of community development.

Its a fantastic opportunity for [the conservancy], Cieslak said. Weve been around for 50 years, advocating for protection, conservation and education of open spaces. To be able to have this opportunity with the city to educate fifth-graders that just live 20 minutes down the road is really important to us.
As some cities struggle to set regulations on sober-living homes, state Assemblyman Tom Daly (D-Anaheim) has introduced a bill he contends would establish operating standards for residences that are protected by federal and state housing and antidiscrimination laws.

Assembly Bill 1779, introduced Feb. 22, would require the California Department of Public Health to adopt practices developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to help limit neighborhood nuisances. Sober-living homes seeking to receive local funding would be prohibited from referring people to residences that havent agreed to abide by the standards.

For the record: This article originally stated incorrectly that Assemblyman Tom Daly is a Republican. He is a Democrat.

Recovery residences are one stop along a lengthy process for people seeking to emerge from drug or alcohol addiction, Daly said in a statement. But unlike residential treatment facilities, which are subject to licensure by the state, recovery residences are private apartments or houses that are not licensed or regulated if they have six or fewer residents.

Huntington Beach partnered last year with the Orange County district attorneys office to crack down on illegal in-home businesses. The city filed lawsuits in October against five locations it alleged were residential alcohol or drug rehabilitation facilities operating without proper permitting, violating Californias civil code and the citys municipal code.

Two of the five cases were dismissed in January after David and Andrea Lacy and Anthony Roxstrom agreed to end illegal activity on their properties, according to City Atty. Michael Gates.

Coastline Recovery at 8301 Yorktown Ave. is seeking a license from the Department of Health Care Services and, if obtained, the city will drop its lawsuit, Gates said in an email. He said suits also may be dropped against StepHouse Recovery Inc. at 10412 Christmas Drive and South Coast Counseling Inc. at 10321 Christmas Drive, depending on how they proceed.

Officials in neighboring Costa Mesa have for years grappled with issues surrounding sober-living homes.

In a bid to prevent such facilities from clustering, the City Council adopted ordinances requiring that group homes, licensed alcohol and drug treatment facilities and sober-living homes be at least 650 feet from one another in residential areas.

The regulations drew a legal challenge from sober-living home operators who alleged unfair discrimination against people recovering from alcohol or drug addiction. An eight-person jury unanimously rejected that claim in December.

A fresh start for Newport pension debt

The Newport Beach City Council unanimously agreed this week to restructure the citys unfunded pension liability in a bid to pay off about $320 million in unfunded pension obligations within 15 years and save about $45 million in interest.

The commitment, similar to one the city made in 2013, does not directly affect the discretionary payments of about $9 million a year the city makes on top of its compulsory payments to the California Public Employees Retirement System. Nor does it affect pension debt racked up going forward  only the $320 million the city currently owes.

The city will pay $35 million per year for 14 years, then $22.8 million in the 15th year  a total of nearly $513 million, including the $320 million principal and an additional $193 million in interest.

Without a locked interest rate, Newport could end up paying $558 million overall on the $320-million liability.

Its a really big deal, said Mayor Pro Tem Will ONeill, a pension hawk who also chairs the city Finance Committee. Its really hard to explain how big a deal this really is, but when you start seeing numbers like that I think it [gives] a better understanding.

Newport Womens Democratic Club to present speakers

The Newport Beach Womens Democratic Club will have its monthly meeting at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Room 2 at the Oasis Senior Center, 801 Narcissus Ave., Corona del Mar.

Guest speakers will be Susan Parks, chief executive of Orange County United Way, and Mary Navarro, who will speak about early childhood education.

Doors will open at 5:30 p.m. for refreshments and networking. Admission is $15 general, $10 with an RSVP and free for club members.

To RSVP, visit nbwdc.org or call (949) 423-6468.
One of seven women who authorities allege were drugged and sexually assaulted by a Newport Beach doctor filed a motion with a judge Thursday requesting that Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer be found in contempt of court for distributing sealed documents about the case to the media last month.

According to her lawyer, Dan Gilleon, the woman, known as Jane Doe No. 5, submitted the papers in Orange County Superior Court against Spitzer, who is running for Orange County district attorney in next weeks election.

Spitzer handed out copies of a sealed search warrant and affidavit at an Oct. 17 news conference outside a Newport Beach courthouse following the arraignments of Grant Robicheaux, 38, and his girlfriend, Cerrisa Riley, 31, who are accused of multiple counts of rape by drugs, kidnapping, oral copulation by anesthesia, assault with intent to commit sexual offenses and other crimes. They have denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex.

Though Jane Doe No. 5 was not involved in the sealed search warrant, which pertained to three other women, she reported allegations of a sexual assault at the hands of Robicheaux and Riley to the Orange County district attorneys office after Sept. 11, when law enforcement announced it was seeking additional potential victims, the district attorneys office said.

Jane Doe No. 5 was upset and was uncomfortable with the fact Spitzer might be in charge of the district attorneys office if he won the election, according to her court papers. She believed he acted inappropriately and violated the rights of the victims in this case when he should be protecting the victim.

Gilleon said in an email that his client has been terrified from the moment she contacted the DA and she remains so.

Like any sexual-assault victim, it was not easy for my client to come forward in the first place, Gilleon said.

He said she feels Spitzers conduct with the documents inappropriately interfered with the case.

Spitzer said Thursday evening that hes a major advocate for victims rights and that his career track record proves it.

The only person Jane Doe has to blame is the district attorney for his incompetence, Spitzer said, adding that her alleged assault took place after the two initial incidents investigated by authorities in 2016. He sat on this case so he could exploit this for his election purpose.

Spitzer said he was just trying to help the victim.

No one is more sensitive to victims than me, Spitzer, who previously worked in the D.A.s office, said.

The motion argues that Spitzer admitted he knew the documents were under seal at the time he distributed them and had the ability to comply with a court order barring their release.

The search warrant and corresponding affidavit, which details the police investigation into the couple beginning in 2016, was filed in court Jan. 3 and sealed Sept. 11, according to the district attorneys office.

Spitzer told the Los Angeles Times last month that he obtained the search warrant as a public record before it was sealed.

There was no dispute the record was public, Spitzer said. The case law is clear on this issue when it comes to public records.

On Oct. 23, Superior Court Judge Greg Jones reversed his earlier order and unsealed the warrant.

Jane Doe No. 5 told authorities that she met Robicheaux and Riley through a mutual acquaintance at a Halloween party in Newport Beach on Oct. 29, 2016.

The defendants are accused of placing GHB, a date-rape drug, in the womans drink while at their house and then sexually assaulting her in their bedroom while she was intoxicated and unable to resist. The woman woke up during the assault, the district attorneys office said.

julia.sclafani@latimes.com
No single non-lethal method is known to be universally or consistently effective in deterring sea lions from sunbathing on a dock or boat deck.

Not even a menacing plastic coyote.

Sea lion experts briefed the Newport Beach Harbor Commission on Wednesday on how to keep the massive animals at bay without harming them. The commission is considering updates to the local harbor code, including its provisions on sea lion interactions.

Sea lions are smelly, oily, occasionally noisy and cantankerous and always clever. Theyre also federally protected, compounding the frustration of Newport Beach boat owners who want to keep them off their property.

Taking  killing, wounding or harassing sea lions  is forbidden under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, said Laura McCue, a biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration out of Long Beach.

That means no mats or barriers studded with nails or screws, no snare traps or razor wire, no striking the animals with boats or clubs and definitely no ammunition.

McCue acknowledged that sea lions can be nuisance pinnipeds.

Justin Viezbicke, NOAAs marine mammal stranding coordinator for California, said sea lions are highly intelligent and need to be kept on their toes  or flipper tips  to keep them off private property, which the law allows people to protect, within limits.

Their intelligence means theyll probably figure out that a plastic coyote isnt a real threat, he said.

These sea lions, theyre actually very smart and theyre very lazy, he said. If they can figure out a way to do things and get it for free, theyre going to do that.

Viezbicke said he doesnt think Newport Beach is doing anything extraordinary to attract the animals. But with its sprawling mooring fields  the harbor accommodates up to about 1,200 anchored vessels of all sizes  and ample supply of waterfront homes with private docks, sea lions have thousands of places to sun themselves.

NOAA suggests fences, noisemakers or relatively gentle methods such as paint balls or water jets as deterrents.

Devices like the locally manufactured SealStop also get the NOAA stamp of approval, and the experts brought some as visual aids. SealStops are plastic, nubby spinners that can be screwed onto swim steps, gunwales and decks and are pointy enough to jab a sea lion but not sharp enough to break its skin. The irritation is akin to stepping on a Lego barefoot, Viezbicke said.

The city requires boat owners to keep sea lions off their vessels and suggests several methods: blocking swim steps or decks with cloth covers, patio furniture, potted plants, large plastic buckets, snow fencing or kayaks. Those with an engineering inclination can build a solar-powered, motion-activated sprinkler to interrupt the animals basking.

Sea lions natural carrying capacity  the maximum population that can be sustained indefinitely in the environment  has probably been reached and their number is on a downward slope, Viezbicke said, pointing to increased pup strandings and mortality in the past few years.

Rescues of sick marine mammals have spiked this year in Orange County, the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach said this month.

But the decline may not be obvious, Viezbicke said.

The reality is there isnt going to be a solution on the table [other than] taking the sea lions to bring the numbers down, and thats not a viable solution, he said.
On March 12, the Irvine City Council voted 4-1 to effectively criminalize the living arrangements of thousands students and other Irvine residents by making many shared-space living arrangements subject to being designated by city ordinance to be a boarding house.

If those living under the same roof are not the functional equivalent of a family, the living arrangement requires the non-trivial process of getting a conditional use permit, even if they are on the same lease. And what happens to roommates and others in similar situations who do not get this permit? They are breaking the law, can be fined and subject to eviction.

Irvine tightens restrictions on boarding houses, despite opposition from UCI students 

This new ordinance would not only apply to the thousands of roommate situations that UC Irvine students and others have to arrange in order to afford living in Irvine, but also to many others, including retired homeowners who have to rent a room in order to help defray expenses, as well as university faculty who may rent a room to a visiting scholar.

The council heard from about 40 students and others who this would directly affect. However, four council members continued to see no issue and did not move to amend the ordinance to protect these thousands of residents.

City staff and the council has heard from many homeowners who see parking limitations and infractions and other disturbances from homes with many residents. However, this needs to be addressed by enforcing other ordinances that protect the neighborhood, as correctly addressed by the single dissenting council member on the ordinance as it is written, Melissa Fox.

This ordinance is still not passed, as this was the first of two votes it requires, therefore I urge you to contact your council members to amend the ordinance to not criminalize our students and retired seniors. They must work more closely with our campus administrators, faculty and Associated Students to not pass such a drastic ordinance.

Another California city with a large UC campus regulates boarding houses differently: Berkeley defines a boarding house to be that where both lodging and meals are provided to five or more persons for compensation. That seems much more reasonable and that reasonableness we should demand from our elected city council members and mayor.

Kev Abazajian

Professor of Physics & Astronomy, UC Irvine

Irvine

Response to death was atypical

Re Source of great county stories has one of her own, (Feb. 4): Many people respond to the loss of loved ones by sealing off their memories, as Jill Lloyds father evidently did. Id simply like to add this isnt a Christian Scientists normal response to grief.

Ones first response, as a Christian Scientist once wrote, may be to feel the very heavens should open and weep ... But that doesnt close the story, as the article itself shows. Gods love and grace heal the heart in surprising ways. Those weve loved are cherished all the more for what they have given, not forgotten or their lives denied.

For Christian Scientists, the humanity expressed by Jesus is the model for living. Rather than glossing over death or the new life seen in his resurrection, it is the practical following of his teachings  loving others, humility, and gentleness opens the door for true healing here and now.

Anne Cooling

Christian Science Committee on Publication for Southern California

Aliso Viejo

Foundation shows next generations promise

Our future is bright. Kudos to the Newport Beach Foundation and the young men and women it believes will be the next generation of leaders (The Crowd: Newport Beach Foundation prepares the next generation to lead, March 11). I am so glad the tradition of encouraging new talent is alive and well.

Back in 1983, when I was a development consultant to the then-Newport Harbor Art Museum, I urged the trustees to create the Contemporary Club, a new support group of thirtysomething Baby Boomers. At first the trustees balked, but eventually embraced the idea of welcoming new blood, new ideas and new money. Not too long afterwards, one of the club members was invited to join the museums leadership team.

Two years later, as the Performing Arts Center was coming out of the ground in Costa Mesa, I was asked to help create another group of young professionals. A few of the museums newest donors joined Center 500, but most of its members were unknowns at the time. By my count, at least six members of Center 500 went on to become board members of the Arts Center and its affiliated venues.

South County is full of interesting, dynamic and successful young professionals. Individually, their backgrounds and experiences are noteworthy; collectively, they are unstoppable. Thanks to the Newport Beach Foundation, this seventysomething father of three knows our future is bright.

Denny Freidenrich

Laguna Beach

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Dick Dale, Greg Topper will be missed

Greg Topper, an Orange County entertainer, sadly passed away recently. Topper appeared at numerous venues throughout the O.C. over the years, providing his brand of rock n roll, sometimes surprising his audiences with famous guest entertainers. One night at the old Airporter Inn across from John Wayne Airport, Topper was doing his thing and all of a sudden announced he had a surprise guest, who turned out to be Dick Dale, which caught the crowd off-guard and resulted in cheers, applause and musical mayhem beyond comprehension. The two obviously loved to entertain and did so for many years. Sadly both passed away within a week of each other. Their presence and talent will be missed by their fans, friends and family.

Bill Spitalnick

Newport Beach

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Water district should adhere to ruling and pay its bills

As current and past water board members, mayors and city council members, we have served the South Orange County community for decades. Today, we are writing to implore the Moulton Niguel Water District to pay its bills and put South Orange County residents first (Water district is obligated to pay its share of costs for Laguna wastewater treatment plant until 2030, judge says, Feb. 28).

This is now imperative following a Superior Court judges Feb. 26 ruling that the water district is legally obligated to pay its bills for a wastewater plant located in Laguna Niguel. The ruling came after the three other contractual partners at the facility were forced to sue Moulton Niguel to recover more than $2 million of past-due invoices dating back to 2016.

We believe that there is no more sacred duty in government than fulfilling contractual obligations. In fact, we cannot recall ever seeing a local municipality refuse to pay its bills.

For its part, Moulton Niguel has said it wants to save money. But it has likely spent millions of ratepayer dollars in legal fees fighting its past-due bills. If it appeals or prolongs the legal proceedings, it will spend significantly more. Its also likely to be on the hook to pay the legal bills of the plaintiffs.

In short, Moulton Niguel is throwing good ratepayer money after bad. Moulton Niguel has taken this issue far enough. In the end, continuing this effort will only cost South County residents more money. It has divided the local community and compromised operations at a key public health and environmental protection infrastructure facility.

The courts have ruled decisively that Moulton Niguel must uphold its legal obligations. There is no ambiguity about this matter. A contract is a contract. It is time for Moulton Niguel to pay its bills.

Megan Yoo-Schneider

Board member, Municipal Water District of Orange County, District 7

Frank Ury

Former mayor, Mission Viejo

Phil Tsunoda

Former mayor, Aliso Viejo

Joel Bishop

Former mayor, Dana Point

How to get published: Email us at dailypilot@latimes.com. All correspondence must include full name, hometown and phone number (for verification purposes). The Pilot reserves the right to edit all submissions for clarity and length.
Last week, a judge ruled against the city of Glendale for violating Proposition 218 in creating its current water rate-pricing structure first adopted in 2014, in a lawsuit brought by the Glendale Coalition for Better Government.

In late January, the same Los Angeles Superior Court Judge, James Chalfant, ruled in favor of the same petitioner, the coalition, when he decided that the city must repay nearly $57 million for violating Proposition 26 for an unauthorized transfer of funds from its utilities to the General Fund.

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FOR THE RECORD

3/3, 9:45 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Judge James Chalfant ruled in late March that the city had violated Proposition 26. The ruling was made in late January.

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In three separate issues, the coalition argued that the city of Glendale violated Proposition 218, which requires approval from voters before the city can impose new taxes or increase taxes on property owners.

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The first issue is in regard to how the city charged different categories of clients for water use.

During a 2014 study to establish water rates, the city had to determine what is known as peaking factor  the ratio of the maximum flow to the average daily flow in a water system  among 15 classes of customers.

These included multifamily, single-family, businesses and the city itself. City officials decided that 15 classes were too many and condensed them into just four categories.

The coalition argued, and the judge later agreed, that the city provided no meaningful evidence to justify combining its own water-rate usage with those under the commercial category  whose peaking factor is considerably lower than the citys  and averaging the peaking factor between them both.

Basically, what that ended up doing is small business subsidizing the citys use of its water, said Roland Kedikian, a coalition board member.

The judge also ruled that the 2014 studys assigned pricing tiers for single- and multiple-family residential groups was incorrect because it was not based on analysis of cost as required by Proposition 218. Rather, the city chose to assign tiers based on a historical usage of water.

The third portion of the ruling against the city agreed with the coalition that the inclusion of fire protection costs  such as fire hydrants  levied against customers in the fixed monthly water charge also violated state law.

According to Proposition 218, fire services are considered a general government service and available to public at large and the burden to fund them should not fall disproportionately on water customers.

The Glendale City Council must first vote on whether or not to appeal the ruling before current water customers and those affected by the rate hike can expect new water rates or a reimbursement of any kind.

The city hasnt decided to appeal yet, but if it does, the [judges] decision will be stayed pending that appeal, said city spokesman Tom Lorenz in an email.

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Jeff Landa, jeff.landa@latimes.com

Twitter: @JeffLanda
Long before the city of La Canada Flintridge incorporated in 1976  before the United States declared its nationhood in 1776 and before Spanish settlers roamed coastal landscapes a century before that  a coast live oak stood tall and proud.

As centuries passed the oaks multi-trunk base thickened to a 6-foot diameter as boughs reached heights of 65 feet and its canopy encompassed an 84-foot span.

Roads were cleared and homes were built around the spot where the tree and several others like it grew to splendor, near the current intersection of Georgian Road and Oakwood Avenue. At 650 Georgian Road, a single-story ranch home was built in 1952, its floor plan shaped in a semicircular arrangement with the tree at its center.

Now, after some 400 years, the mighty oak is slated to come down. City officials received a request for a tree removal permit from new property owner Alan Frank on Oct. 2, accompanied by an arborists report indicating the tree is in poor health.

The tree is hazardous and is at risk of falling on persons and property, read the report, prepared by William McKinley, a consulting arborist for Glendale-based McKinley & Associates. The oak is no longer an asset to the subject property but now poses a clear liability.

Conducted at the behest of Frank and La Canada architect Dave De Angelis, the report included findings for another large oak tree in the homes frontyard and a sycamore tree. Those were found to be in relatively good shape, and McKinley suggested protective measures to preserve them. But the backyard oaks prognosis was grim.

The only reasonable course of action is the complete removal of this tree, stated McKinley, whose findings were corroborated in a letter by La Canada arborist James R. Smith.

Several oak species, as well as California sycamores, are protected by the citys tree ordinance but no special status is given to trees whose age and size might be considerations for landmark or heritage designation.

On private properties, protected trees cannot be removed without a permit or the owners paying fines from $1,062 to $10,800 for illegal removal. A $291 tree removal permit that can prove disease, liability, damage or hardship to an owners enjoyment of the property preempts restitution.

Planning Department employees visited 650 Georgian Road on Oct. 24 and noticed a 16-inch diameter cavity in the trees trunk along with cracked bark tissue and a canker on one side.

A large old oak can be seen in the backyard, from the street through an entryway, at 650 Georgian Road, in La Canada Flintridge on Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018. (Raul Roa / La Canada Valley Sun)

There is significant wood decay in the trunks and stems, causing the tree to begin to lose structural integrity, the citys report indicated. If the tree were to fall, the house and residents would be heavily impacted and potentially injured.

The removal permit was approved Nov. 2, on the condition the new owner plant one 48-inch box-sized replacement oak on the property within 90 days.

But some whove lived in the neighborhood for decades and who knew the homes previous owners and the arborist who once cared for the oaks, are disappointed by the reports findings and incredulous about the future plans of the property owner, who purchased the home in September.

Longtime Beulah Drive resident Dottie Juett worries La Canada is losing its heritage as a tree community through the sanctioned loss of its oaks.

Im not going to go to the city and stand up and protest  if people are going to do it, theyre going to do it, she said. It just makes me sad.

Community Development Director Susan Koleda said the city has not yet received building plans for 650 Georgian Road.

Adjacent homeowners have been notified of the trees pending removal. Anyone wishing to appeal the decision to the Planning Commission has until 5 p.m. Friday to submit a request.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardine
They faulted Southern Californias unusually cold and wet winter.

They wondered if something was wrong with Santa Anitas mile-long dirt track.

They brought in two experts to study the mixture of sand, silt and clay. They tweaked safety rules in an effort to identify at-risk horses. They suspended racing and training last week.

But horses continued dying.

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The surge in catastrophic breakdowns by horses at Santa Anita that have defied explanation and roiled the sport continued on a cloudless Thursday morning.

The day after the track reopened for training, Princess Lili B broke both front legs at the end of a half-mile workout and was euthanized.

The loss of the 3-year-old filly was the 22nd racing- or training-related horse death at the track since Dec. 26.

A few hours after the death, the tracks owners banned the use of all race-day medication and restricted whip use in the latest attempt to stop the deaths. The medication decision, which will bring the track into alignment with standards established by the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, is believed to be without precedent in North American racing.

We have arrived at a watershed moment, Belinda Stronach, chairwoman and president of track owner the Stronach Group, wrote in an open letter.

There are some who will take a stand and tell you that it cannot be done, Stronach continued. To them we say the health and welfare of the horses will always come first.  The time to discuss why these advancements must take place is over. The only thing left to discuss is how.

The new rules will also be used at Stronach-owned Golden Gate Fields in Berkeley.

Rick Baedeker, executive director of the California Horse Racing Board, expects other tracks in the state to follow the lead of Santa Anita, where racing is scheduled to resume March 22, and Golden Gate Fields. Any new requirements passed by the CHRB wouldnt take effect until the summer at the earliest.

Virtually every country outside North America bans the use of medication on race day. That includes furosemide, better known as Lasix, which is supposed to lessen the risk of exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage. The drug is so common at U.S. tracks that results sheets note which horses were injected.

According to data compiled by the Jockey Club, only 3.6% of the 279,774 starts in the U.S. last year were made by horses without Lasix.

American racing is a bit of a lone ranger internationally, said Kenny McPeek, a thoroughbred trainer in Kentucky whose 19 wins with non-Lasix horses last year were the most in the U.S.

The drug is a potent diuretic that causes a horse to urinate 15 to 20 liters in the hours before a race.

At least nineteen of the 22 horses who have died at Santa Anita in the recent spike used Lasix, according to Equibase. Records for the three remaining horses werent available because they hadnt participated in a race.

Lasix has been the subject of ferocious debate in the sport for several years. Some view it as enhancing performance and potentially damaging horses while others see it as harmless and essential to protecting equine health.

Its almost as if they think horses need drugs to race, and theyre unwilling to open their minds, said Sid Gustafson, a Montana veterinarian who has worked at Santa Anita and other California tracks. He is a longtime opponent of race-day medication.

In addition to banning Lasix, the Stronach Group said it would strengthen rules on a variety of issues including legal painkillers, anabolic steroids and shock wave therapy. The company also pledged complete transparency in veterinary records and increased drug testing outside competition.

Some of the changes are going to be significant adjustments, said Henry Williamson, who owns horses at Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields.

As the drama played out at Santa Anita on Thursday, members of Congress moved to bring increased oversight to the sport. Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) and Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) reintroduced the Horseracing Integrity Act, a measure that would ban the use of medication in the 24 hours before a race and introduce national standards for horse racing to replace the hodgepodge of regulations from the 38 state racing commissions.

The bill was first introduced in 2017. During hearings last year by the House Subcommittee on Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection, some industry stalwarts railed against the ban on race-day medication.

Lasix use is not doping, and no one, to my knowledge, can reasonably conclude otherwise, Eric Hamelback, chief executive of the National Horsemens Benevolent and Protective Assn., testified at the time.

The Stronach Group supported the bill, and Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), whose district includes Santa Anita, cosponsored it.

Twenty horses died as a result of races at Santa Anita in 2017, according to the latest figures collected by the Equine Injury Database, for a rate of 2.4 deaths per 1,000 starts. That exceeded the national rate of 1.61 deaths per 1,000 starts the same year.

The figures dont include deaths during training and from other causes. While the database showed 150 deaths at Santa Anita from 2009 to 2017, CHRB data put the total at 502 deaths during the same period. That included a high of 71 deaths in 2011-12.

None of those deaths prompted the kind of change announced Thursday.

We recognize that for real change to result from this difficult situation we must engage those stakeholders quickly and dedicate time and other resources, the Breeders Cup said in a statement in response to the medication ban. We must, as an industry, press forward on implementing existing best practices and rapidly proceed with the consideration of further reforms. It is vital that we all do so.

Times staff writer Eric Sondheimer contributed to this report.
As Santa Anita watched its reopen date slip away because of its proposed new medication regulations, the Los Angeles district attorneys office assigned investigators to look into the deaths of 22 horses since Dec. 26.

But the day wasnt all bad, as the track found some support from its trainers over a new set of regulations except in the area of race-day Lasix, which is the topic holding up the reopening. And there were no reported incidents of any injuries as 96 horses worked out over both the main dirt and training tracks Friday.

Santa Anita was originally scheduled to reopen March 22, but because of its plan to impose a restriction of no race-day Lasix, it has to first be approved by the Thoroughbred Owners of California and then by the California Horse Racing Board. Any agreement with the CHRB can come only after a 10-day public notice, according to Rick Baedeker, executive director of the CHRB. There is also no agreement with the TOC.

So, for now, Santa Anitas regulatory changes are on hold until it meets all the state regulatory rules for notification. Plus, it has to come to an agreement with the TOC. In short, no racing next weekend unless Santa Anita reverses its position on race-day Lasix.

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Meanwhile, the district attorneys office confirmed Friday that it would work with the CHRB to find out what may have caused all the equine deaths.

On Thursday, Princess Lili B, a 3-year-old filly, was the latest casualty as she broke both front ankles at the end of a half-mile workout on the main dirt track. She was later euthanized. It was the 10th death in dirt training, adding to seven during dirt racing and five during turf racing.

On March 1, PETA requested that an investigation be conducted into the horse deaths as violations of the California cruelty-to-animal laws. In the three-page letter to Jackie Lacey, L.A. district attorney, the animal-rights advocacy group cited historical data but nothing specific about the current deaths of horses.

Were happy to have them involved, Baedeker said. We can explain our current process and get them the information theyre looking for. They were happy to learn we have sworn officers, some of who used to work for the district attorney. Well get them what they need, as Im sure anyone else in the industry will do.

In a news release, PETA said an investigation should look at trainers and veterinarians.

We welcome an investigation, said Alan Balch, executive director of the California Thoroughbred Trainers. Its long past the time that these unfounded accusations be proven wrong and that everyone realize that our trainers first concern is always for their horses.

Judy Chu, who serves in the House of Representatives for the area of the San Gabriel Valley that includes Arcadia, also called for an investigation.

She said the House Energy and Commerce Committee should investigate and hold a hearing on the treatment of horses at Santa Anita and throughout our country.  Until we know the horses are safe, the Santa Anita [race track] should be closed.

On Thursday, the Stronach Group announced a series of measures it says will make racing safer at its two California tracks. But instead of bringing an immediate sense of calm to an industry feeling its on the precipice, it was met with skepticism as everyone tried to figure out the ramifications of the changes.

The new measures include a controversial race-day ban on Lasix, a diuretic used to ease breathing and lessen the chances of bleeding from the lungs. Almost every country outside the U.S. bans its use on race day. According to the Jockey Club, only 3.6% of the almost 300,000 starts last year in the U.S. were made without Lasix.

Dr. Rick Arthur, who is the chief veterinarian of the CHRB, said there is virtually no relationship whatsoever between Lasix and catastrophic musculoskeletal injuries (CMI), the almost universal cause of breakdowns on the track. However, the Stronach Group plan comes with other medication rules that Arthur is encouraged about, including increasing the regulations on legal non- steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), joint injections, anabolic steroids and shock-wave therapy.

I have no objection to what the Stronach Group is doing, Arthur said. I think horse racing has to position itself in the future.

This view on regulations is shared by the trainers.

Many of these rules are highly regulated, and we would be open to an even higher standard. Balch said. We also support significantly increasing out-of-competition testing and the digitizing of detailed veterinarian records in perpetuity.

The Thoroughbred Owners of California plans a member call Saturday to discuss these latest changes. In a note to membership, it cited potential unforeseen consequences of the implementation of the announced reforms. A message to Greg Avioli, president and chief executive of the TOC, was not returned.

Those consequences likely include potentially losing horsemen to other states with fewer restrictions on medication.

Trainer Peter Miller said the vast majority of trainers are against banning Lasix and insisted there was no connection between a horses soundness and use of the drug designed to protect against bleeding.

My owners are of the mind-set to leave the state if theres no Lasix, and so am I, he said. I find it inhumane. You wouldnt have someone with high cholesterol and high blood pressure problems and not give them medication.

Trainer John Sadler also expressed concern over the new rules.

This stuff is so new, I dont know how it will be implemented or when, Sadler said. [Management] has to have some serious discussions on their side. Theyve carded 13 races for the Santa Anita Derby [on April 6]. You have to cut back the number of races and race dates, all those things.  This kind of make it up as you go along doesnt make sense.

One rule that seems to already have been implemented is forbidding the use of a riding crop to urge horses unless its required for safety.

The entrance to the stretch now has a sign, in both English and Spanish, that says USE OF CROPS FOR SAFETY PURPOSES ONLY. NO STRIKING ALLOWED.

New sign, new era at Santa Anita. pic.twitter.com/daVJStOd4y  eric sondheimer (@latsondheimer) March 15, 2019

When the Stronach Group announced its changes, it implied that Del Mar was completely on board, but that wasnt the case.

We certainly support what they are trying to do, and we think its the right step for them and the industry, said Joe Harper, the CEO at Del Mar. But I think weve got a lot of work to do with the horsemen. Lasix has always been the stumbling block.

Harper later told Thoroughbred Daily News that Lasix will be allowed at the two Del Mar meetings this year. Los Alamitos also announced that it plans to allow the use of Lasix for both thoroughbreds and quarter horses.

While all of this plays out, there remains one factor that overshadows all others. Santa Anita has to have clean training from now until racing resumes and then continue with incident-free racing. Its survival might depend on it.

Sign up for our horse racing newsletter 
Hello, my name is John Cherwa and welcome back to our horse racing newsletter as we sadly have to say another horse has lost its life.

The death of a 22nd horse at Santa Anita during training on Thursday was followed by a long statement announcing reforms at Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields. The announcement was coming and would have happened regardless if the death had not occurred.

Eric Sondheimer was on the case for us and heres his report. Just click here. Theres also a report from Nathan Fenno you can read by clicking here.

Barring something unforeseen, racing will resume on March 22.

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There is plenty of time for analysis as to the impact of these changes. Off the top, you can expect smaller fields and maybe even some trainers moving out of state. Will it cut down the number of breakdowns? Time will answer that question, if only anecdotally.

The release leaves some questions unanswered such as if these moves will eventually be adopted at Gulfstream in Florida and Laurel in Maryland. They are not mentioned. And it carefully dances around the participation of Del Mar. It says it is on board but not if it plans to implement those exact changes. Maybe thats for Del Mar to say.

Forgive me if I turn over this newsletter to the voice making the news, plus some regular contributors, while I sit back and allow everyone to digest what happened and if this is the move that can change California racing for the better.

Heres what Belinda Stronach, head of The Stronach Group, said in announcing the changes:

What has happened at Santa Anita over the last few weeks is beyond heartbreaking. It is unacceptable to the public and, as people who deeply love horses, to everyone at The Stronach Group and Santa Anita.

The sport of horse racing is the last great sporting legacy platform to be modernized. If we expect our sport to grow for future generations, we must raise our standards.

[Thursday], Im announcing The Stronach Group will take the unprecedented step of declaring a zero tolerance for race day medication at Santa Anita Park and Golden Gate Fields. These Thoroughbred racetracks will be the first in North America to follow the strict International Federation of Horseracing Authorities (IFHA) standards.

We have arrived at a watershed moment. The Stronach Group has long been a strong advocate for the abolishment of race-day medication, but we will wait no longer for the industry to come together as one to institute these changes. Nor will we wait for the legislation required to undertake this paradigm shift. We are taking a stand and fully recognize just how disruptive this might be.

This mandate encompasses a complete revision of the current medication policy to improve the safety of our equine and human athletes and to raise the integrity of our sport.

These revisions comprise best practices currently employed at racetracks around the world:

Banning the use of Lasix.

Increasing the ban on legal therapeutic NSAIDS, joint injections, shockwave therapy, and anabolic steroids.

Complete transparency of all veterinary records.

Significantly increasing out-of-competition testing.

Increasing the time required for horses to be on-site prior to a race.

A substantial investment by The Stronach Group in diagnostic equipment to aid in the early detection of pre-existing conditions.

Horses in training are only allowed therapeutic medication with a qualified veterinary diagnosis.

Additionally, it is time to address the growing concern about use of the riding crop. A cushion crop should only be used as a corrective safety measure. While we firmly believe our jockeys have not purposely been mistreating their mounts, it is time to make this change.

These modernizations are in addition to the previously announced commitment to the continued engagement of outside experts to regularly review our dirt, turf and synthetic courses for consistency, composition and compaction to create the safest racing surfaces in the world.

We will be continuing our daily conversations with industry stakeholders to further define these transformative guidelines. But make no mistake: these changes will be implemented. The time to discuss why these advancements must take place is over. The only thing left to discuss is how.

There are some who will take a stand and tell us that it cannot be done. To them we say the health and welfare of the horses will always come first. We also say not only can it be done, it is what we are doing. Racing at Santa Anita and Golden Gate is a privilege, it is not a right.

Ultimately, we recognize the owners and trainers of these horses have the final responsibility to assess their fitness for racing and training. Our goal is to make every resource available to aid them in that determination. We are all in this together to make the horse the first priority.

Our COO, Tim Ritvo, has been a horseman for almost four decades. As he said, The time has come for this industry to evolve. It must do so for the sake of the horses and the people who depend on this sport for their livelihoods. Moving to international standards will help to set the right foundation for racing and fairness. We love the sport of horse racing and want it to succeed today, tomorrow and long into the future.

Weve spoken with the California Horse Racing Board and they will be holding a meeting on March 21 at which the situation at Santa Anita Park will be addressed. In the interim, Chairman Chuck Winner told us he personally appreciates the initiatives that The Stronach Group announced today. The Chairman said, The safety of horses and riders has been, is, and will be the primary concern of the CHRB. The CHRB has been working with The Stronach Group and the various stakeholders to achieve a common objective, which is the best possible conditions for the health and safety of our equine competitors.

Organizations who advocate for animal welfare have also affirmed their support for these measures. Kathy Guillermo, Senior Vice President for PETA said, PETA thanks Santa Anita for standing up to all those who have used any means to force injured or unfit horses to run. This is a historic moment for racing and PETA urges every track to recognize that the future is now and to follow suit. This groundbreaking plan will not bring back the 22 horses who have died recently, but it will prevent the deaths of many more and will set a new standard for racing that means less suffering for Thoroughbreds.

These initiatives are a seismic shift in how the sport has been conducted for centuries. We are pleased that Stuart S. Janney III, Chairman of The Jockey Club, which has long supported the Horseracing Integrity Act, said, We applaud The Stronach Group for its announcement today to effect sweeping changes at Santa Anita, which would bring them on par with the strict standards seen in major international racing jurisdictions.

Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, has also voiced their agreement with these new changes. Joe Harper, CEO said, Del Mar has and will continue to support discussions and implementation of measures that enhance the safety and welfare of our athletes. We are committed to working with Santa Anita, The Stronach Group and other industry stakeholders to continue to improve.

We recognize this will impact our field size as horses and horsemen adjust to this new standard. There will be horses that will not be able to race because they have required medication to do so. For those horses, we are prepared to dedicate the capital required to rehabilitate, retrain, rehome and provide aftercare for them. They deserve nothing less.

We are taking a step forward and saying, quite emphatically, that the current system is broken. While the cause of the injuries on the racetrack might be varied, they have one thing in common: the industry has yet to do everything that can be done to prevent them. That changes [Thursday].

First and foremost, we must do right by the horse. When we do right by the horse, everything  everything  will follow.

Jon Whites Kentucky Derby rankings

Lets do a swerve from the big story at Santa Anita and turn our attention to the Kentucky Derby. So, were lucky to have the top expert Jon White take a look at whats happening there. Its welcome relief. Jon makes the morning line at Santa Anita, hes a licensed steward, and hes the pre-eminent historian on racing. Were lucky to have him. So, heres his Kentucky Derby rankings, brought courtesy of Xpressbet.com.

Game Winner, who sits atop my Kentucky Derby Top 10, and Improbable, ranked No. 2, will be running in Saturdays 1 1/16-mile Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn Park.

The Rebel originally was to have a $1 million purse and offer 85 qualifying points (50-20-10-5) for the May 4 Kentucky Derby. Oaklawn president Louis Cella said last week that if the race drew 20 or more entries, the track would be willing to split it into two divisions, each worth $750,000. Cella said that while doing so would make no sense whatsoever from a financial standpoint, Oaklawn would do it strictly on the basis of sportsmanship and what is best for the sport and best for the top 3-year-olds trying to get to the Kentucky Derby.

When 19 were entered in the Rebel, Cella could have stuck to his guns and saved a considerable amount of money by not splitting the race because it did not get 20. But in a classy move, Cella gave his blessing to go ahead and split it with 19.

Oaklawns proposal to split the Rebel and have each division worth $750,000 stemmed from the suspension of racing at Santa Anita due to a spike of equine fatalities there.

Game Winner and Improbable, who both hail from the powerful Bob Baffert barn, were supposed to have started in Santa Anitas March 9 San Felipe Stakes. But that 1 1/16-mile race now will not be run in 2019. With no San Felipe, Baffert had to call an audible, rerouting Game Winner and Improbable to the Rebel.

Each division of the Rebel will offer 63.75 qualifying points for the Kentucky Derby (37.5 for first, 15 for second, 7.5 for third and 3.75 for fourth). The 63.75 qualifying points for each $750,000 division of the Rebel represents 75% of the original $1 million purse.

Game Winner and Improbable would have had to face each other in the San Felipe, but that will not be the case in the Rebel. Improbable, who has not started since winning the Grade I Los Alamitos Futurity on Dec. 8, heads the field of nine entered in the first division of the Rebel. Eclipse Award winner Game Winner, who has not raced since his victory in the Grade I Breeders Cup Juvenile at Churchill Downs on Nov. 2, gets top billing in the second division, which has 10 entered.

In all likelihood, Game Winner and Improbable will be odds-on favorites.

Omaha Beach, who is No. 8 on my Top 10, is entered in the second division of the Rebel. He is coming off a nine-length win in a seven-furlong maiden race on a sloppy track Feb. 2 at Santa Anita. Omaha Beach worked six furlongs in a scorching 1:10.60 at Los Alamitos on March 9 for trainer Richard Mandella.

Galilean, ranked No. 9, is in the first division of the Rebel. Hes coming off a facile 4 1/2-length victory in the California Cup Derby against California-breds at Santa Anita on Feb. 18. Jerry Hollendorfer trains Galilean.

There were three races last Saturday with qualifying points for the Kentucky Derby up for grabs. They were Aqueducts Gotham Stakes (50-20-10-5 points) at one mile, the Tampa Bay Derby (50-20-10-5 points) at 1 1/16 miles and Turfway Parks Jeff Ruby Steaks (20-8-4-2 points) at 1 1/8 miles.

Haikal, trained by Kiaran McLaughlin, rallied to win the Gotham by one length at odds of 4-1. Mind Control, 5-1, finished second. Instagrand, who was shipped all the way to the Big A from California by Hollendorfer, ran third as the even-money favorite.

The Gotham was Haikals third straight victory. His lone defeat in four lifetime starts came when he finished a close second in his Nov. 10 unveiling at Aqueduct.

Instagrand was No. 4 on my Top 10 last week. His Gotham performance was not bad in that it was his first start since last Aug. 11 and the first time he had raced farther than six furlongs. Nevertheless, off his Gotham defeat, I have dropped Instagrand several notches to No. 10 this week.

Tacitus closed strongly from well off the pace at odds of 8-1 to win the Tampa Bay Derby by 1 1/2 lengths in his 2019 debut. Outshine, 6-1, finished second. Win Win Win, the 7-5 favorite, came in third.

Boasting one of the finest pedigrees of anyone on the Kentucky Derby trail, Tacitus is a son of premier sire Tapit and $2.7 million-earner Close Hatches. Trained by Bill Mott, Tacitus has won two of three career starts.

Somelikeithotbrown registered a 3 1/4-length triumph in the Jeff Ruby Steaks on Turfways synthetic surface despite zigzagging down the lane while clear. That was his third win from a total of seven starts. The only time that Somelikeithotbrown has raced on dirt, the Michael Maker-trained colt finished seventh in a maiden race at Saratoga last July 23. But its possible that a line can be drawn through Somelikeithotbrowns uninspiring July 23 effort due to it being the first race of his career and a sloppy track. Keep in mind that Somelikeithotbrowns sire, Big Brown, did capture the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, both on dirt, in 2008.

Here are this weeks rankings, courtesy of Xpressbet:

1. Game Winner (1)

2. Improbable (2)

3. War of Will (3)

4. Code of Honor (5)

5. Mucho Gusto (6)

6. Bourbon War (7)

7. Roadster (8)

8. Omaha Beach (9)

9. Galilean (10)

10. Improbable (4)

NOTE: Last weeks rankings in parentheses

Golden Gate weekend preview

Santa Anita may not be running but Golden Gate is, so were back with our weekly look at the best racing at Golden Gate Fields. As with the last couple meetings, were delighted to have race caller and all-around good guy Matt Dinerman as our host for previews and other musings. So, take it away, Matt.

Live racing resumes through Sunday, and the weather is supposed to be good. Like Southern California, we had a good amount of rain in January and February, with additional patches of showers in the first half of March. However, weather forecasts indicate the last spell of major rainfall has passed the Bay Area and locals will be treated to sun and a clear sky for the foreseeable future.

TVG was on-site for live coverage of our races last week, and it is back this week too. Joaquin Jaime will, once again, be back reporting throughout the racing week, and be joined over the weekend by Todd Schrupp, Simon Bray and Rich Perloff.

Congratulations to journeyman jockey Catalino Martinez, who picked up career win 1,000 in the first race on Saturday. Martinez was sprayed with water and champagne after the race by fellow riders and was soaking wet when interviewed by TVGs Jaime. Catalino has been riding in the Bay Area for more than a decade and is a consistent, top 10 rider for many years. Congrats Catalino.

Friday entries look terrific. The fifth and sixth races will be Legs C and E in the Stronach 5 wager. The fifth race is for 3-year-old maiden filles and drew a field of 11 and looks wide open. I made a legit case/angle for 8 of the 11 entrants. Th sixth race is a starter allowance sprinter for 3-year-olds and is equally as competitive. Other races that catch the eye on the Friday program: te fourth, a second-level allowance route event featuring the 2019 debut of talented Southern California mare Meal Ticket, and the eighth race, a second-level allowance sprint for fillies and mares which includes stakes performer Steph Being Steph for trainer Brian Koriner, the Peter Miller trained Suspicious Spouse and a number of sharp Northern California contenders.

Southern California jockey Heriberto Figueroa won a pair of races last week while apprentice Jorge Valez also picked up a victory. Both jockeys, represented by agent Nelson Arroyo, will be back to ride at Golden Gate this week. Aaron Gryder and Ruben Fuentes rode in races over the weekend and will also be making the trip back up North.

Big races preview

I know were a day early, but heres a look at graded stakes or races worth more $100,000 or more on Saturday. All times PST.

11:05 Oaklawn (1): $100,000 maiden special weight, 3-year-olds, 6 furlongs. Favorite: Breaking News (7-2)

11:40 Aqueduct (3): $100,000 Correction Stakes, fillies and mares 4 and up, 6 furlongs. Favorite: Sower (8-5)

12:11 Oaklawn (3): $100,000 maiden special weight, 3-year-olds, 1 1/16 miles. Favorite: Cowboy Diplomacy (3-1)

12:12 Laurel (5): $100,000 Harrison E. Johnson Memorial Stakes, 4 and up, 1 1/8 miles. Favorite: Twisted Tom (5-2)

12:43 Oaklawn (4): $101,000 allowance, 3-year-olds, 1 1/16 miles. Favorite: Dessman (8-5)

1:12 Laurel (7): $100,000 Beyond the Wires Stakes, 3-year-olds, 1 mile. Favorite: Las Setas (3-1)

1:14 Oaklawn (5): $100,000 maiden special weight, 3-year-olds, 1 1/16 miles. Favrorite: Warriors Charge (2-1)

1:43 Laurel (8): $100,000 Private Terms Stakes,3-year-olds, 1 1/16 miles. Favorite: Always Smiling (4-5)

2:21 Oaklawn (7); Grade 2 $350,000 Azeri Stakes, fillies and mares 4 and up, 1 1/16 miles. Favorite: Midnight Bisou (6-5)

2:37 Gulfstream (11): Grade 2 $200,000 Inside Information Stakes, fillies and mares 4 and up, 7 furlongs. Favorite: Tequilita (5-2)

2:57 Oaklawn (8): Grade 2 $750,000 Rebel Stakes (first division): 3-year-olds, 1 1/16 miles. Favorite: Improbable (3-5)

3:29 Oaklawn (9): $300,000 Essex Handicap, 4 and up, 1 1/16 miles. Favorite: Giant Expectations (5-2)

4:06 Oaklawn (10): Grade 2 $750,000 Rebel Stakes (second division): 3-year-olds, 1 1/16 miles. Favorite: Game Winner (4-5)

4:38 Oaklawn (11): $100,000 maiden special weight, 3-year-olds, 6 furlongs. Favorite: Nifty (3-1)

Los Alamitos weekend preview

This weekly segment is in the hands of Orlando Gutierrez, marketing and media maven at Los Al. So, the floor is yours, Orlando.

Three allowance races, including a pair of highly competitive 870-yard events, will highlight the eight-race program at Los Alamitos Race Course on Friday. First post is 6 p.m. The first of three allowances is the 870-yard third when Heaven Squared is back after a six-length victory on Feb. 24. Now facing winners, the Art Sherman-trained filly by Square Eddie will take on five  four who posted their maiden wins this year.

The second allowance is also 870 yards and features the return of the Edward Freeman-trained Staythirstymyamigo. The Kentucky-bred filly finished second in a 5 1/2 furlong race during a daytime race held in September. She followed that effort with back-to-back starts at six furlongs, first at Santa Anita on Nov. 3 and then at Del Mar on Nov. 12. The 300-yard eight race has an $11,525 allowance purse. Top runners include recent winner Ballast Point and Los Alamitos Maiden Stakes finalist Miss Montielita.

On Saturday night, razor sharp Run Raging Rhino Run and always tough Bound To Bet -- a pair of top quarter horses around the turn -- will face some of the toughest thoroughbreds on the grounds in the $15,000 Rossmoor Handicap at 870 yards.

Run Raging Rhino Run finished second to Rule He Will in the Snowbound Superstar Handicap at 870 yards on Dec. 9 and then won the Barbra B Handicap at 550 yards. In his most recent start, the son of FDD Dynasty set the pace in an 870-yard test before finishing second to the tough Thoroughbred Oil on Feb. 23. Lorenzo Ruiz will saddle the solid thoroughbreds Great Ma Neri and St. Reno in this race. Great Ma Neri has won her last two starts by daylight, while St. Reno won at Los Alamitos during the daytime on Dec. 15 and then at night on Jan. 5. He recently finished third at Santa Anita.

Earlier this week, owner Johnny Trotter confirmed that AQHA World Champion Bodacious Eagle has been retired from racing and is now being trained for halter.

He doesnt owe us anything more, Trotter said. He has achieved so much on the racetrack and it was time for him to move on from his racing career. I would like for him to become a Supreme Champion with his achievements on the racetrack, and now hopefully in the performance arena.

The son of leading sire One Famous Eagle won the Grade 1 Champion of Champions last year. In five years the sorrel gelding won 14 of 33 career starts and earned $1,293,444.

In last weekends Grade 1 Los Alamitos Winter Derby winner Powerful Favorite stumbled at the start, but quickly recovered to win his trial to the El Primero Del Ano Derby in the fastest qualifying time. The $211,000 final will be held here on March 31. Terrific First Down, who finished third to Powerful Favorite in the Winter Derby, posted the fastest time to the $210,000 La Primera Del Ano Derby for fillies. The final is set for March 30.

Chris Wades LA pick of the day

RACE TWO: No. 2 Reign On (4-1)

He went well late after a less than stellar start to finish a solid third versus two long gone speedsters over a speed favoring racing surface 19 nights ago. The figure earned in that outing compares favorably with the others in Fridays second race and the gelding should improve in his second start over the oval for top notch connections. With an expected step forward in a field that has two horses that should go for the lead in Shadow Op and Swiss Cheese, I like Reign On to sit closer down the back-stretch and give the pacesetters a run for the money inside the 1/16th pole.

(Chris Wade has been the racing analyst and host of the Los Alamitos night simulcast broadcast for nearly two decades. While Ed Burgart is on vacation, Chris also fills in as the nighttime morning-line maker.)

Final thought

If you would like to subscribe to the newsletter you can click here and sign up. Remember, its free, and all we need is your email, nothing more. Tell your friends, or even people you dont like that much.

Any thoughts, you can reach me at johnacherwa@gmail.com. You can also feed my ego by following me on Twitter @jcherwa.

Thanks to ours stars of the show, Jon, Matt and Orlando. Way to go guys. If all goes well, well be back next Friday and the resume our normal schedule.
Stockholm is more than just another pretty face, although its setting  at the intersection of Lake Malaren and Salt Bay, suggests that as an obvious attribute. For the next few days, its an affordable one too, at least in terms of airfare, thanks to this SAS sale.

Fare: From LAX, $420 round trip, including all taxes and fees, to Stockholm

Restrictions: Subject to availability. For travel Sept. 2-Feb. 6. You must buy your ticket by Thursday.

Info: SAS, (800) 221-2350

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Source: Airfarewatchdog

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravel
Get away from it all in Guatemala, where you can explore Mayan ruins, find tranquility beside a quiet lagoon or barrel down a mountainside on a zip-line. The three-night itinerary, based at Las Lagunas Boutique Hotel, includes a guided hiking tour of Tikal National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Centre recognized as a major site of Maya civilization. The park, inhabited from the 6th century BC to the 10th century AD, contains temples, palaces and public squares. The itinerary also includes zip-lining, ATV tours and boat rides to Monkey Island, a 30-acre reserve for rescued monkeys.

Dates: Available through December.

Price: $1,597, including taxes, for a three-night stay for two adults. Includes accommodations, breakfasts, a tour of Tikal with entrance fees and lunch, adventure activities and Wi-Fi.

Info: Book online at bit.ly/laslagunasadventure

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travel@latimes.com
Inspired by the natural beauty of Hawaii, the Waikiki Beachcomber is unveiling a collection of original art.

From the floors beside the elevators to the walls behind the beds, the commissioned works feature underwater photography, prints and music.

Heres a partial list of the 12 artists whose creations are part of The Beachcomber Originals:

Erin Ibarra, known as Hawaiis chalkboard queen, is a self-taught muralist. Her Floors of Flora can be found beside the elevators on each floor of the hotel.

Vince Lim, well-known for his drone photography of Honolulu, created an aerial image of Waikiki Beach that appears in each guest room.

Photographer Vince Lim, who is known for creating images using drones, took this aerial shot of Waikiki Beach. The photo hangs in each guest room at the hotel. (Vince Lim)

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Makana, a popular slack key guitarist in Hawaii, wrote and performs The New Sound of Waikiki, music that is heard in the public spaces.

Zak Noyle, one of the worlds best-known surf and underwater photographers, shot the dramatic wave scene that appears on the wall behind each guest bed. His underwater imagery, stretching 75 feet, covers a ground-floor tunnel leading to the elevators. Noyle will also host photography seminars.

Margo Ray created the colorful painting that covers an entire wall inside the hotels Maui Brewing Co. location. The 64-foot painting features the late Auntie Beverly Noa, one of the states best-loved hula dancers.

Printmaker Abigail Romanchak strives to create a sense of Hawaiian identity and culture in her works that appear in each guest room.

The Beachcomber Originals is part of a $35-million makeover of the hotel.

travel@latimes.com
Salamatu Jibril takes one look at month-old Sufiyan, drowsy under a heavy blanket on a sweaty day in northern Nigeria, and knows theres a problem.

The child is 2.7 kilograms [5.9 pounds] and is wasted, Jibril says, using a term that specialists commonly ascribe to children who dont weigh enough for their height. You can see it.

Sufiyan doesnt stir, his long fingers resting limply on the blanket. The woman who runs the orphanage where he lives has rushed him to the pediatric unit of Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital in the city of Kaduna.

When a member of the hospital staff lifts him onto a wooden board to be measured, Sufiyan offers a halfhearted stretch, the skin loose around his thighs, and his toes and feet looking too big for his tiny body.

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Sufiyan, a 1-month-old from an orphanage in Kaduna, Nigeria, was examined in the pediatric unit at the Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital. (Krista Mahr / For The Times)

The hospital is the last stop in Kaduna states public healthcare system for children who are gravely malnourished. By the time most of the young patients get to nutritionist Jibril and her colleagues, who specialize in stabilizing critically malnourished children, they are dangerously ill.

If we have 10 patients, we lose four or five, she says. We manage [to save] some, and some are gone within hours of coming.

Nigeria is one of Africas economic powerhouses, a crowded, ambitious and oil-rich nation that will go to the polls Feb. 23 in a race that pits former military leader and incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari against opposition leader and businessman Atiku Abubakar. The vote had been set for Saturday, but hours before polls were to open the election commission postponed it a week, citing challenges in getting election materials to all parts of the country.

The country vies with South Africa for having the continents largest gross domestic product, but, like other resource-rich nations, Africas largest oil producer has not managed to spread its wealth around.

Nigeria recently surpassed India as having the most people living in extreme poverty, a worrying development given the fact that its young population of about 200 million is set to double by 2050, making it the third-most populous country in the world.

Those numbers are a source of particular anxiety for people like Jibril who spend their days watching a preventable problem like malnutrition stalk the generation that will shape the future of the country.

About 2.5 million children in Nigeria are acutely malnourished, according to the United Nations, and only 2 out of 10 of those children receive treatment.

Overall, only 64% of children in Nigeria are growing healthily without being stunted or wasted, according to the countrys 2018 National Nutrition and Health Survey.

The problem is most severe in the countrys north, far from the flashy cars of Lagos and the oil fields of the southern Niger Delta.

In the troubled northeast, where the Boko Haram insurgency rages on, humanitarian agencies have been steadily ramping up food aid for years to help people displaced and cut off by the conflict.

But poverty cuts across more stable parts of the north as well, affecting families ability to make sure their children are getting the food they need.

In Kaduna state, which is north of the capital, Abuja, and is Nigerias third-most populous state, more than a third of children are acutely malnourished, the state government says. Even more, 42%, are stunted, showing low height for their age and impaired overall development, according to the health survey.

The gravity of the problem caught the government by surprise when new malnutrition statistics came out three years ago, the states permanent secretary for health, Shehu Usman Muhammad, admits.

It is very alarming, and its unacceptable, he says.

Back then, he says, there were only sporadic efforts by the government to track child malnutrition and intervene where problems were observed.

There was no deliberate plan, so not only did the malnutrition rate grow, but stunting got worse, he says. That will have a big impact on the economy and future of the state.

In 2017, the Kaduna state government, partnering with international donors like UNICEF and Save the Children, rolled out an emergency plan to tackle the complicated problem of why hundreds of thousands of children in the state arent eating well enough.

Part of the governments strategy has been to try to reduce poverty and improve its medical response to malnutrition, such as starting supplementary feeding programs for malnourished children in more clinics.

But a lot of the effort has been about educating families and changing their mindsets, by encouraging exclusive breastfeeding, or dispelling cultural beliefs that sick children have been bewitched and are beyond doctors care, or getting families to buy less processed food.

You see people selling their milk, eggs and chickens to buy instant noodles, Muhammad says. We need to change food habits.

Aisha Usman, in charge of the high-calorie food supplement stock at the Badarawa Primary Health Care Center in Kaduna, Nigeria, with 8-month-old Hassan Shuaibu Yusuf, son of Amina Adamu. (Krista Mahr / For The Times)

In some places, the plan seems to be working. At the Badarawa primary healthcare center in the city of Kaduna, Amina Adamu, a 27-year-old mother of six, expertly wrestles her youngest son out of his clothes and sets the startled 8-month-old onto a hard plastic scale.

Adamu has been bringing her son here for four weeks, since noticing he wasnt gaining weight. I thought it was because he was sucking his thumb, she says.

This is one of the clinics where the government has trained specialized staffers to work on malnutrition cases. They explained to Adamu how to use better hygiene at home with her children, and they have been giving her son packets of high-calorie supplementary food to eat every day.

Now hes doing better, Adamu says. They put me on the right path.

A packet of high-calorie supplementary food for malnourished children at the Badarawa Primary Health Care Center in Kaduna, Nigeria. Mothers are required to bring in the empty packets to show the medical staff theyve been giving their children the food. (Krista Mahr / For The Times)

As the country heads into its national election, both leading presidential candidates have pledged to do more to ease Nigerians daily struggles with poverty.

Abubakar has not missed the chance to point out that President Buhari has presided over Nigerias rise to being the nation with the most extremely impoverished people, and the opposition leader has said his economic reforms would lift 50 million Nigerians out of poverty in two years.

Buhari, for his part, has used his stump speeches to mention some of the food security programs hes developed since coming to power in 2015, including a school feeding program that the government says reaches more than 9 million children.

But tackling complex public health problems like malnutrition has not been at the heart of the battle for votes. And critics say the existing local and national efforts to address malnutrition are too patchy to have broad impact.

(Los Angeles Times)

Having policies is different from implementing them, says Andy Bako Byeing, executive director of the Bako Youth Development Foundation, which helps families struggling with child malnutrition in Kaduna.

We have the resources to make life better for everybody in this country, he says. Now we are the poverty headquarters of the world. Who knows where well be if things dont change?

At the Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital, the staff worries it does not have what it needs to deal with the scale of the problem.

In the pediatric intensive care unit, several babies lie on a padded communal table, IV drips hanging above their heads on a metal rack. Most of the children in this room are sick in part because theyre malnourished, the staff says.

One child lies on a blanket, wrapped in a light-blue cardigan with his arms splayed out on either side. He appears to be barely conscious, and now and then shudders with the effort to breathe, despite the help of an oxygen tube.

This hospital is the final hope for these patients and their families. But, says Abdulkadir Musa Tabari, the hospitals chief medical director, given the number of children we see, its certainly inadequate.

Jibril, the nutritionist, says her ward needs more staff and training and a real kitchen to cook meals. Right now, she says, she cant even afford to call parents after theyve left to make sure they continue to give the right care to their recovering children.

After long, expensive stays in the hospital, many families dont want to go back to see more doctors at home, fearing more draining medical bills.

The moment they will be discharged, she says, they run away.

For now, Sufiyan appears to have a chance of getting better.

He doesnt have to be admitted, at least. Cecilia Tambaya, who is in charge of him and 30 more babies at a nearby orphanage, nods as Jibril suggests different types of formula she can try to give him.

And she promises to bring him back in two weeks.

Mahr is a special correspondent.
Students who test positive for the first time must meet with Huther and their parents and then undergo therapeutic interventions with referred organizations, Carmel officials said. A second drug test would be required at the familys expense.
Days after Algerias ill 82-year-old president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, announced under pressure that he would not seek a fifth term, protesters flooded the nations capital Friday to call for his governments ouster.

With some wrapped in the countrys white-and-green flag and others holding banners with the terse message, Leave means leave, tens of thousands of people young and old marched peacefully a few hundred yards from the presidential palace in Algiers after Friday prayer services.

It was the fourth week of Friday protests against the longtime president, who had initially announced his intention to run again in the April 18 election, despite having suffered a stroke in 2013 that rendered him all but mute and unable to walk.

The move had enraged Algerians fed up with the barely-there Bouteflika, who recently returned from treatment in a Geneva hospital.

At first, Bouteflika tried to mollify the protesters, offering to serve only one more year if reelected. Then he seemed to relent, releasing a statement saying, There will be no fifth term.

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The catch, however, was that the upcoming election would be postponed and the government reshuffled. A caretaker government, headed by former Interior Minister Noureddine Bedoui, would preside over the creation of the Inclusive and Independent National Conference, a body representative of all Algerians.

According to the plan, the leaders would craft a constitution by the end of 2019 and submit it to a referendum. If ratified, a date would be fixed for a presidential election in which Bouteflika promised he would not run.

The message from the people Friday, however, appeared to be a dismissal not only of Bouteflika, but also of Le Pouvoir (The Power), Algerians blanket term for the nexus of figures in the military, intelligence, government and business sectors who preside over the resource-rich North African country.

As the masses gathered, large numbers of riot police moved to block them from reaching the government palace. The mood, according to most reports, seemed peaceful, even festive.

Tout Sur LAlgerie, a news agency in Algeria known as TSA, showed images of an Algiers resident offering dates from a plastic box.

After Bouteflikas announcement that he would not run again, the once-deft politician was unable to rally support for his alternative governing plans.

Even members of his own party, the National Liberation Front (FLN), began to distance themselves from him.

Speaking to Algerian television outlet Ennahar on Thursday, Hocine Kheldoun, a former FLN spokesman, said the president was history now. He added that the party had to support the protesters.

Bouteflikas proposal, many said, was illegal.

Hes staying as head of the country without any provision or possibility to know exactly when the election will take place . He didnt have the right to take that decision, said Madjid Messaoudene, a French Algerian politician from the city of Tizi Ouzou, in a phone interview Thursday.

He then quickly added that the decision, which had been attributed to Bouteflika, was probably the work of his brother and his inner circle.

What were sure of is that Algerian people are not demonstrating against a man, but against a regime, he said, the same regime that has been managing Algeria since 1962.

Bouteflika and others around him have tried to tamp down protests by stoking fears of instability, harking back to years of internal strife in the 1990s, before his ascension.

But half the countrys population of 42 million is under the age of 27, according to estimates, and has no memory of the period often referred to as the Black Decade.

Most now are concerned about a lack of jobs, inadequate government services and political corruption  even though the country is rich enough in natural resources to supply a third of Europes gas needs.

In the run-up to the eighth anniversary of the Arab Spring, the series of revolutions that blasted through the regions ossified autocracies, most governments believed they had reached a detente, however tense, with their restive citizenry.

In Egypt, where largely peaceful protesters forced the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak, the country is again under the rule of an autocrat, Abdel Fattah Sisi. Syrian President Bashar Assad, with Russia and Iran backing him, has largely subdued his adversaries. Libya may remain a chaotic thicket of competing governments, but Persian Gulf nations appear secure in their rule.

Yet the masses on the streets of Algeria have leaders across the region paying attention.

Egypts Sisi, speaking Sunday, delivered an oblique criticism of the protests in Algeria.

All this talk [of protests] comes at a price that people are required to pay, he said in a televised address. How are tourism or factories or trade supposed to get off the ground? Should we eat or should we say that we were busy protesting?

The protests, now and eight years ago, were also in the thoughts of veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, 85, appointed by the government to head the transitional council.

In an interview with Algerian state news on Wednesday, Brahimi asserted that the regime could not be dissolved overnight, saying that such a move would plunge the country into the chaos of Iraq post-Saddam Hussein, deposed in the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Brahimi also cautioned against haste in adopting the new constitution and holding elections, saying that the result would end up like Egypt.

Yet his message resonated little with protesters, many of whom had already dismissed him for his remarks in a December magazine interview in which he said Algeria was doing quite well and that he did not believe Bouteflikas rule was widely contested.

No one will trust anyone from the same political circle as Bouteflika, said Messaoudene, the French Algerian politician. All the government was doing, he said, was putting one minister in the place of another.

Its musical chairs. At the end, its the same game. We dont want to play anymore, he said. They make the rules. Thats the problem. And we have to make our own rules now.
On the eve of a crucial vote in Parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May won concessions from the European Union during a last-ditch trip to France late Monday to try to save her Brexit deal.

As negotiations deadlocked and she faced the prospect of another humiliating defeat in Parliament, the prime minister flew to Strasbourg to meet with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The agreement includes legally binding changes to strengthen the plan for exiting the EU that had been contested by lawmakers, May said after the meeting.

The amendments capped a day in which many lawmakers and analysts had been predicting chaos.

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Until Monday night, the EU and Britain had not resolved how to maintain an open border between the Republic of Ireland, an EU member, and Northern Ireland, which will leave the 28-member bloc along with the rest of the United Kingdom.

British lawmakers had balked at a so-called backstop agreement, a contingency plan in case Britain and the EU could not agree to a future trade agreement. It would have the whole of the U.K. remain in an EU customs union until a permanent solution were found; Northern Ireland would remain linked to some rules of the EU single market.

Some critics said such differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. could damage the union, a danger in a region once marred by years of bloody sectarian conflict. Others complained the backstop could tie Britain indefinitely to EU trade and customs regulations with no means of unilaterally withdrawing.

David Lidington, minister of the Cabinet Office, appeared before Parliament in London late Monday and told lawmakers that they would be presented with two new documents ensuring the European Union cannot try to trap the U.K. in the backstop indefinitely.

At a news conference with Juncker, May said the amendments deliver exactly what lawmakers had asked for.

Today we have secured legal changes. Now is the time to come together to back this improved Brexit deal and to deliver on the instruction of the British people, she said.

May said the deal enabled Britain to regain control of its laws, border and money while also guaranteeing a close future partnership with the EU.

Juncker warned that the concessions made late Monday were as far as the EU was willing to go.

There will be no third chance, he said. It is this deal or Brexit might not happen at all.

The opposition Labor Partys Brexit spokesman Sir Keir Starmer said the prime minister had gotten herself into an absurd situation and argued that it appeared though nothing had fundamentally changed.

With 18 days to go until the March 29 deadline, when the decades-long partnership is due to officially end, questions remain about how Britain will proceed with its divorce from the European Union.

Opponents have argued that the prime minister is attempting to force the hand of lawmakers who think approving an imperfect deal is better than failing to agree on one altogether  a move that risks the country crashing out of the EU without any contingency plans.

May last put her Brexit deal to lawmakers in January, and it was defeated by 230 votes in the 650-seat Parliament  the largest defeat for a sitting government in British history.

It highlighted the depths of discord within Parliament over how to implement the results of the 2016 referendum that asked British voters whether they wanted to leave, or stay in, the European Union.

Leave voters won by 52% to 48%, and the issue has consumed the political agenda ever since. The bitter nature of the campaign left the country divided, and both the ruling Conservative Party and opposition Labor Party have become deeply fractured.

Whatever happens now, youve got to think of the social impact that will be left behind, said Matthew Flinders, a University of Sheffield politics professor. Youre going to be left with an incredibly fractured society.

Even though an EU withdrawal deal was agreed to by British and EU negotiators and signed off on by all 27 EU leaders in November following months of difficult negotiations, it was vehemently opposed by some British lawmakers who took exception to the backstop arrangement regarding the land border on the island of Ireland.

After Januarys failed vote, May promised her colleagues she would go back to Brussels and return with a revised deal that they could vote on.

If Mays deal is rejected again Tuesday evening, lawmakers will be offered the chance to vote on leaving the EU on March 29 without any deal, a resoundingly unpopular option because of the damage it could cause to the already shaky economy.

If that vote also fails, they will then be asked to vote on extending the March 29 deadline to see whether a new compromise can be sought. But it is unclear how long any extension could last, and this could put Britain in the awkward situation of having to put forward candidates for the upcoming European Parliament elections at the end of May.

Many pro-EU lawmakers and campaigners believe a vote to extend the deadline would be their chance to overturn Brexit altogether.

The so-called Peoples Vote campaign has been gaining pace and supporters in recent months and has planned another huge march through London on March 23. The last rally drew 700,000 people, according to organizers.

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn recently said he would also support a second referendum if Mays deal fails to pass Parliament and the prime minister will not rule out no deal.

The mood among EU leaders and diplomats had been bleak Monday before the May-Juncker meeting. Some officials had begun discussing a post-May government.

The fact that May has survived this long as prime minister is remarkable. No other recent leader has endured so many parliamentary defeats and still remained in power.

It is a testament to her tenacity as an individual, but also symptomatic of the fact that no other politician wants to take up what is widely seen as a poisoned chalice.

Nevertheless, in recent days, some members of her own Conservative Party have started to openly question not if, but when, it will be time for May to move on.

Lawmaker George Freeman, who has openly raised questions about a new prime minister, said Monday that he is not calling for a panicked change of leader right now, but as soon as Brexit is done.

I do think we need to choose a new leader for a new generation with a new vision of a Conservatism that can make sense of Brexit and reinspire and reunite the nation, he said.

May herself has told her party members that she will not lead them into another election, scheduled for 2022.

Boyle is a special correspondent.
On Feb. 14, a car bomb hit a convoy of paramilitary police officers in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The suicide attack claimed by a Pakistan-based terrorist group killed 40 officers, and Indian social media accounts were immediately filled with gory images.

But many of the pictures and videos that went viral werent from the attack. While the paramilitary force was evacuating its injured and sending the remains of the dead back to their families, a deluge of fake news  doctored and mislabeled  was spreading across India.

One image showed a bucket filled with mutilated body parts, mislabeled as the remains of a dead Indian soldier. A video of an exploding vehicle, purportedly showing the Kashmir bombing, actually originated in Iraq. Another viral video turned out to be of a car bomb in Syria.

With India in the midst of a heated national election campaign, the false and misleading images  sometimes republished by mainstream media  fueled calls for military retaliation against rival Pakistan.

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Two weeks after the attack on police in Pulwama district, India bombarded what it said was a Jaish-e-Muhammad terrorist camp deep inside Pakistan, and Pakistan responded by downing an Indian fighter plane and capturing its pilot. Tensions subsided when Pakistan released the pilot, but experts said that fake news had helped bring the two nuclear-armed neighbors close to fighting another war.

The wave of misinformation after the Pulwama attack was driven by inflamed emotions, overanxious media on all sides, the desire to use this as a political weapon, said Govindraj Ethiraj, a journalist who runs the Indian fact-checking site Boom.

Fake news is the manifestation of accelerated information dissemination, he said. In Pulwama, this has gone to a new high.

India has seen a burgeoning industry of fake news and misinformation, driven by the proliferation of smartphones and the popularity of WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messaging platform with more than 200 million users in India.

Politicians have blamed WhatsApp, and Indian regulators have warned social media companies that they must take down false and unlawful information or face legal action. WhatsApp has responded by limiting the size of chat groups and the number of times one message can be forwarded; it also launched a public education campaign in India to curb the spread of fake news.

How WhatsApp is battling misinformation in India, where fake news is part of our culture 

An Indian newspaper vendor in New Delhi in July reads a paper carrying a WhatsApp ad intended to counter false information. (Prakash Singh / AFP/Getty Images)

But the barrage of misinformation after the Feb. 14 attack in Kashmir suggests that these efforts are not enough.

Maybe these steps have reduced [misinformation], but the scale of this event is so large it could well be counter-balancing the impact of these fixes, Ethiraj said.

A viral video showing fighter jets destroying a target, purportedly the Indian air forces Feb. 26 airstrike, turned out to have been taken from a video game. A video posted as showing military personnel celebrating after the airstrike was actually year-old video of Indian army soldiers dancing. A photo labeled as an Indian soldier reporting for duty despite being injured really showed a wounded Russian soldier.

Credible mainstream television channels even picked up false social media posts and presented them as facts. On Feb. 26, several Indian media outlets showed old footage of a Pakistani jet and incorrectly identified it as having been taken that day.

Many of the posts were overtly political. A doctored image purported to show Rahul Gandhi, president of the opposition Congress Party, standing next to Adil Ahmed Dar, who had claimed to be the suicide bomber. A doctored video of Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra claimed to show her laughing at a news conference after the bombing. A photo taken out of context showed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posing for cameras instead of paying tribute to the slain paramilitary officers.

Many of the fake posts were easily debunked. But experts said they fed into many Indians jingoism and political partisanship.

During such a time, when peoples sensitivities are involved, people are more vulnerable and gullible, said Pratik Sinha, co-founder of Alt News, an Indian website that aims to debunk fake news. Sinha said his sites traffic increased by more than five times on the day of the Indian airstrike.

Why the next round of India-Pakistan hostilities could be even scarier 

A man shouts patriotic slogans in Kolkata to celebrate the Indian air forces strike in Pakistan on Feb. 26. (Piyal Adhikary / EPA-EFE/REX)

The effect of fake news was exacerbated by a lack of details from the Indian government and conflicting accounts provided by India and Pakistan.

The Indian air force did not confirm details or casualties of its Feb. 26 airstrike. But the Indian foreign secretary said the strike killed a very large number of terrorists, and Amit Shah, president of Modis ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, claimed that more than 250 terrorists were killed.

Pakistan said there had been no casualties or damage to infrastructure.

As the election campaign heats up, with voting in multiple stages set to begin in April and results expected May 23, the Election Commission of India has raised concerns about the effect of fake news. Facebook has said it is expanding its fact-checking network in preparation for the elections.

Even the Indian military has begun to fight fake news.

As false images went viral in February, Indias Central Reserve Police Force, whose soldiers were killed in the initial attack, asked Facebook and Twitter to block such content and issued an advisory on Twitter asking people to refrain from circulating unverified images.

This was false and very disrespectful of the sacrifices made by the soldiers, M. Dhinakaran, a CRPF spokesman, said in an interview. During such a sensitive time it had the potential to create communal tension and lead to violence.

The day after the attack, the CRPF set up a team of 12 soldiers to fact-check the deluge of fake posts. They asked their force of 300,000 soldiers spread across India to identify misleading posts, which were fact-checked at headquarters, and to speak up in their private WhatsApp groups to correct misinformation.

With traditional media, we could control the spread of fake news by giving them the correct picture, Dhinakaran said. But with social media controlling the message, it is harder.

The elaborate ceremony that says everything you need to know about India-Pakistan tensions 

In the days after the attack, the team said, it debunked about 20 stories. Some verged on the absurd  including a photograph of a puppy accompanying a false claim that 13 trained sniffer dogs had been killed in the blast.

Some of the doctored images shared were so gory that members of the CRPF team erased them from their computers and phones.

It was really heartbreaking, said one team member who requested anonymity because he wasnt authorized to speak to the media. Forty of our martyrs had laid down their lives for the integrity of the country. If hatred was being spread in their names, we thought that this defeats the purpose. So we decided to counter it.

Weeks later, politicians in both India and Pakistan are sticking to their stories about the various attacks. Pakistans media have also carried unsubstantiated claims. On Feb. 27, Pakistani mainstream media outlets showed a 2016 image of a crashed Indian jet and claimed it was taken that day.

The fact that both governments have effectively been able to create these information bubbles, where it seems like most of their citizens believe the official version, paradoxically creates room for de-escalation, said Sadanand Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who writes about South Asia.

Everybodys willing to believe their own version, which means that both sides can declare victory to their people and go home.

Thirani Bagri is a special correspondent.
Cross-border fighting between Israel and Gazas ruling Hamas group appeared to be winding down Friday, amid reports of an Egyptian-brokered truce and Israeli media saying a misfire was believed to be responsible for the rare Gaza rocket attack on Tel Aviv that triggered the exchange.

The two rockets had struck late Thursday, taking Israels military by surprise. Residents reported hearing explosions, but there were no reports of injuries or damage. The military said neither rocket was intercepted by Israels Iron Dome military defense system, though warning systems had operated as required.

Overnight, Israeli warplanes hit approximately 100 Hamas targets in Gaza in response. The army said targets included an office complex in Gaza City used to plan and command Hamas militant activities, an underground complex that served as Hamas main rocket-manufacturing site and a center used for Hamas drone development.

In Gaza, health officials reported that four people were wounded, including a husband and wife in the southern town of Rafah. There were no further details. The office building struck by Israel had been used by Hamas office of prisoner affairs.

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On Friday, Israeli media quoted defense officials as saying a preliminary investigation indicated that the rockets were fired by mistake. It was not immediately clear if it was a technical malfunction or human error. The Haaretz daily quoted the officials as saying the rockets were fired during maintenance work. The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

Also Friday, a Hamas official said an agreement to restore calm has been reached. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because Hamas has yet to announce the deal, said Egypt led meditation efforts that have apparently paid off.

The sudden outbreak of violence came at a sensitive time for both sides.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the midst of a tight reelection battle. A tough response would draw international criticism and domestic accusations that he is acting out of political motivations ahead of the April 9 vote. But a restrained response would draw criticism from his fellow hard-line rivals.

Hamas, meanwhile, is coping with its own domestic troubles. Israel and Egypt have maintained a crippling blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over the territory in 2007. The blockade, along with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and Hamas own mismanagement have fueled an economic crisis that has driven unemployment over 50%.

Shortly before the rocket attack, Hamas police on Thursday violently broke up a rare protest by demonstrators angry about the dire living conditions in Gaza.

The crackdown triggered heavy criticism on social media. The organizers of a weekly protest along the Israeli border canceled the demonstration in the wake of the escalation.

The fighting came as Egyptian mediators were trying to extend a cease-fire between the bitter enemies, which last fought a war in 2014. The Egyptians left Gaza late Thursday.

Hamas, which typically claims responsibility for its military actions, denied involvement in the rocket attack on Tel Aviv and even said it had undermined its interests. Israels military said earlier Friday that it holds Hamas responsible for all attacks coming from Gaza.

The late-night attack Thursday on Tel Aviv, Israels densely populated commercial and cultural capital, marked the first time the city had been hit since a 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants.

Following the first Israeli airstrikes, several additional rounds of rocket fire were launched into Israel. The military said several of those rockets were intercepted by its air defense systems, and there were no reports of injuries.

The initial blasts from the Israeli airstrikes in southern Gaza were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 15 miles to the north. The Israeli warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since Israel and Hamas fought their last war, in 2014.

Despite its denial, Hamas is one of the only groups in Gaza with the means to strike Tel Aviv. A smaller militant group, the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, also possesses a large arsenal of rockets, though it too denied involvement.

The Washington Post contributed to this report.
- Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) said Boko Haram leadership is in disarray

- MNJTF's spokesperson, Colonel Timothy Antigha, said the former terrorists who have surrendered confessed that the the morale of the insurgents is at its lowest

- Antigha said the MNJTF would sustain its current operations until Boko Haram capitulates and its leadership brought to justice

The Headquarters of Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF) has said the leadership of Boko Haram Terrorists (BHT) is overwhelmed and in disarray after sustained air and land operation of ongoing operation Yancin Tafki.

A statement from the spokesman of the MNJTF, Colonel Timothy Antigha in NDjamena, Chad on Tuesday, March 12 said, information from captured and defected Boko Haram fighters indicates that the leadership of Boko Haram terrorist network has been overwhelmed and are currently in disarray.

Antigha continues: The former fighters who are receiving humane attention further divulged that morale and fighting spirit of Boko Haram fighters is very low as a result of growing insecurity and the inability to replenish stranded fighters in the islands with food, medicine and ammunition.

READ ALSO: Emir of Kano speaks on inconclusive elections

He recalled that an integral part of Operation Yancin Tafki has been a series of well-coordinated day and night Human Intelligence as well as Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions.

He said these are conducted by the Air Forces of the Lake Chad Basin countries; Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria, leading to successful and devastating air interdictions.

The spokesperson said the air attacks have destroyed Boko Haram's logistic facilities and fighters in Tumbum Gini, Abadam, Arege, Tumbun Rego and Dagaya environs between 7th and 11th March 2019.

He noted that in the last four weeks of the operation, about 70 Boko Haram vehicles, mostly Gun Trucks and facilities such as fuel dumps, weapons and ammunition have been destroyed.

He said since the commencement of the operation several terrorists have surrendered while others are battle-weary and have indicated interest to surrender.

He said the morale of the terror fighters is at its lowest, while desperation has also set in, leading to intrigues and in-fighting.

Reliable sources say internal crisis led to change of Boko Haram leadership on 3 March 2019; it could be recalled that the Islamic State West Africa Province announced the sack of the former Boko Haram Chief, Abu Musab Al-Barnawi and the appointment of Abu Abdullahi Ibn Umar Al-Barnawi, Atigha said.

He said the frequent execution of Boko Haram commanders and fighters which have been observed in the past few months as well as the recent replacement of its leadership are clear indications of the effectiveness of ongoing Operation Yacin Tafki.

He said the MNJTF would sustain its current operations until Boko Haram capitulates and its leadership brought to justice.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) said its Air Task Force (ATF) of Operation LAFIYA DOLE , had destroyed Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) terrorists vehicle at Tumbun Sale and Tumbun Allura in Borno.

NAFs spokesman, Air Commodore Ibikunle Daramola, disclosed this in a statement on Monday, March 11, in Abuja.

He said that the ATF equally destroyed some logistics infrastructure of the ISWAP at Tumbun Sale and Tumbun Allura on the fringes of Lake Chad in the state. Daramola explained that the operation was conducted following intelligence reports indicating the presence of ISWAP fighters with some vehicles and logistic support items were well camouflaged under the dense vegetation within the settlements.

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Nigerian Air Force Operations Against Boko Haram - on Legit TV

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- The Nigerian Navy has deployed no fewer than 500 naval officers and 15 warships to a multinational sea exercise tagged Obangame Express

- The exercise is designed to improve cooperation and tactical expertise among participating nations

- The exercise will also be beneficial to the Nigerian Navy, especially in fighting ship piracy on the seas

The Nigerian Navy says no fewer than 500 naval officers have been deployed to a multinational sea exercise, Obangame Express, sponsored by the US Africa Command.

The flag officer commanding, Western Naval Command, Rear Admiral Obed Ngalabak, said this on Wednesday, March 13 in a telephonic news conference organised by the US Embassy, Abuja, NAN reports.

READ ALSO: Lagos guber: We always knew Sanwo-Olu would win - Igbo Movement

Legit.ng gathers that he said that Obangame involved naval authorities in the Gulf of Guinea, European and US Navy, adding that the aim of the exercise was to deepen cooperation amongst Gulf of Guinea navies.

Obangame Express is an annual multinational exercise supported by African, European and US partners.

Ngalabak said that the exercise was designed to improve cooperation and tactical expertise among participating nations in order to increase maritime safety and security for Gulf of Guinea nations.

We have over 15 Nigerian warships participating in the exercise; we have eight ships actively participating that will go into the sea, while the rest would be placed on standby.

The number of personnel participating in the exercise could be over 500, because each ship has its own personnel; some have up to 200, some 50 and so on. So, we have about 500 personnel participating.

Outside the training, the collaboration has helped to establish good platform for sharing information with our sister African nations, he said.

According to him, the cooperation through Obangame Express has helped to reduce criminal activities on West African water highways.

Today if there is any criminal activity going on in neighbouring countries, it will be easier for us to track it down and arrest it.

Recently we even pursued vessels to the Beninian waters and the vessels were arrested. Now that the criminal knows that there is no hiding place, it is a bonus for all of us.

Apart from information-sharing, look at human capacity building and also mutual trust. Before now, there was this apathy within Francophone, Anglophone, Portuguese and other nations.

We dont really interact among ourselves but with the Obangame Expressway, we now understand ourselves better so that mutual trust has been established.

When we are doing something in Nigeria, other countries fall in line. We get it done as a team; it is a very good thing to all of us, he said.

According to him, the other area Nigeria has benefited is synergy in operation. So, if we cannot get it in that area, we can easily ask other countries to do it. It is a good thing.

Ngalabak said that the exercise had been beneficial to the Nigerian Navy, especially in fighting ship piracy on the seas.

He said: The Nigerian Navy will be hosting this years exercise and has committed some of its capital ships and helicopters towards the exercise.

Speaking on the exercise, the commander, Military Sealift Command Europe and Africa, Capt. Eric Conzen said: The exercise has proven successful in past years in building capacity.

Im looking forward to working with our African partners to address maritime crime.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Central Naval Command, Nigerian Navy, Yenagoa, clarified that the rating officer that died in the command on Saturday, March 9, was not due to violence during the state House of Assembly election in Bayelsa.

Flag officer commanding the Central Naval Command, Rear Admiral Saidu Garba, made the clarification in a statement made on Monday, March 11, in Yenagoa.

Garba, in the statement signed by Commodore Joseph Akpan, the officer commanding the Central Naval Command, said the deceased did not die in Brass local government area of the state as was speculated.

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2019 Armed Forces Remembrance Day - on Legit TV:

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- President Buhari has been asked by an energy analyst to focus more on reforming the NNPC

- Kareem urged Buhari-led administration to restructure the operations of the corporation to boost the nations economic growth

- The oil and gas expert, however, said the sector has been relatively stable after recovering from issues related to Niger Delta militants

An energy analyst, Jubril Kareem, on Thursday, February 14, urged President Muhammadu Buhari to focus more on reforming the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) for more effective performance in the next four years.

Kareem told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos that it became imperative for the Buhari-led administration to restructure the operations of the corporation to boost the nations economic growth.

According to him, some of the key expectations from the Buhari administration in the next four years are to ensure effective reform of the NNPC and passage of the Petroleum Industry and Governance Bill (PIGB) into law.

READ ALSO: No plan to transfer CP Wakili from Kano - police

He said: Other key expectations include resolving the pricing of petroleum products and making a key decision about the three refineries.

The need to continue spending significantly on the refineries as we expect the Dangote refinery is counter-intuitive.

The indecision about the PIGB and necessary reform of NNPC continue to hinder investment in the upstream space, said Kareem, who was a former Head of the Energy Desk at Ecobank."

Kareem said that several projects stuck in planning stages were unable to progress to Final Investment Decision ( FID) as investors continue to weigh the impact of expected change to industry regulations when eventually the PIGB becomes law.

On deregulation and downstream challenges, he said the main issue still remained petroleum product pricing, the lack of flexibility in Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) while pricing would continue to result in higher subsidy expenses for the NNPC as crude oil price continues to recover.

The expert added: We need to allow for a new pricing mechanism where price of PMS can better reflect the international price and cost of import, and reduce the burden on NNPC and by extension increase government revenue.

PMS remains an inappropriate product to subsidise if the aim is to benefit the low income masses."

READ ALSO: Why Gov Okorochas name was omitted from list of senators-elect - INEC

The oil and gas expert said that the sector had been relatively stable after recovering from issues related to Niger Delta militants in 2015/2016, adding that however, it had also remained stagnant with little progress on key reforms that were anticipated.

He said that the Buhari-led administration had done well in putting in place a system to deal with outstanding cash calls from NNPCs Joint Ventures (JVs).

Kareem said that the NNPC still remained an opaque company with poor transparency despite the administrations supposed low tolerance for corruption

He said: The issues surrounding petroleum product subsidy still remain unresolved and NNPC continues to incur significant subsidy expenses which are now even more shrouded in opaqueness more severe than the previous administration.

We simply cannot quantify how much NNPC is spending on petroleum subsidy under the current administration.

"Also despite significant expenses, the nations three refineries are still operating at abysmal capacity utilisation below 20%.

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The poor operation level of the refineries does not justify the capital expenses on renovation attempts.

Looking forward, the private petroleum product marketers and depot owners need to start preparing for commencement of Dangote refinery and how to realign their operation to receive products from the refinery as against import."

Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation had announced a recruitment exercise for prospective staff of the revenue-generating organisation just days after the end of the general elections in the country.

The NNPC placed the announcement on its social media walls asking applicants to visit its website to register.

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Woman who returned millions found at the airport speaks | Legit TV

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- NNPC has denied receiving memo from the presidency mandating it to take over OML from Shell

- The corporation's spokesman, Ndu Ughamadu, made this known against report that it has been given directive to take over the oil bloc

- OML 11, which is located is in the Niger Delta region, is owned by four Joint Venture (JV) partners Shell, Agip, total, NNPC

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said it has neither received letter nor directives from presidency mandating it to take over the operatorship of the entire Oil Mining Leases 11 from SPDC, a local arm of Anglo Dutch oil major operated by Shell.

Reacting to the purported directive, NNPC spokesman, Ndu Ughamadu, on Thursday, March 14, said the corporation did not receive any letter signed by the chief of staff to the presidency, Abba Kyari.

Ndu Ughamadu also added that the NNPC will decline comment until it received directive from the president.

READ ALSO: No plan to transfer CP Wakili from Kano - police

Recall that a memo with a reference number SH/COS/24/A/8540 dated March 1 had emerged on Wednesday, March 13, mandating the cooperation to take over the OML 11 from Shell.

The memo, purportedly signed by Chief of Staff Kyari read: NNPC/NPDC to take over the operatorship, from Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), of the entire OML 11 not later than 30 April 2019 and ensure smooth re-entry given the delicate situation in Ogoniland."

NNPC has, however, denied receiving the memo, adding that the cooperation has not even sighted any such letter.

Legit.ng gathers that OML 11, which is located in the Niger Delta region, is owned by four Joint Venture (JV) partners: Shell, Agip, total, NNPC.

The bloc, which is operated by Shell, has 33 oil and gas fields of which eight were producing as per 2017, being one of the most oil producing oil blocs in Nigeria. NNPC owns 55 % stake, while Shell has 30, Total 10 while Agip has 5%.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng earlier reported that the licence for the operatorship of Oil Mining Lease 11 in Ogoni land granted to Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) had been revoked by the federal government.

The federal government ordered that the licence be transferred to the NNPC and its upstream subsidiary, the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC).

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Price of petrol crashes in Nigeria | Legit TV

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- President Muhammadu Buhari met with Borgu people from Niger, Kebbbi and Kwara states

- The delegation demanded for the creation of a Borgu state

- The president promised to look into their request

Borgu people from Niger, Kebbbi and Kwara states have paid a visit to President Muhammadu Buhari and demanded the creation of a Borgu state.

Daily Trust reports that they were led by the Emir of Borgu, Alhaji Muhammed Haliru Dantoro on Thursday, March 15.

The delegation included top Borgu traditional rulers and politicians including the spokesperson of the Senate, Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi.

The emir said the Borgu people in Niger, Kwara, and Kebbi where focused on having their own state.

READ ALSO: Buhari allegedly shuns Aso Villa meeting with Bauchi, Adamawa governors

He said: It is our belief that if states will be created by this administration or subsequent administration, Borgu state should be considered because of the abundance of economic potentials needed to move Nigeria forward."

He also asked the government to help in tackling the challenges facing communities, hosting hydroelectric installations across the country, of which Borgu community is an integral part.

He said: Establishment of export-oriented processing factories in major Borgu border towns particularly Yashikira and Babanna, to take advantage of the security and relative peace available across Borgu Kingdom.

The establishment of an international border market at Babanna as planned will open up the agrarian communities of Yashikira, Gwanara, llesha, Okuta and Kishi through good linkage roads for the movement of farm produce to the international market.

In his response, President Buhari promised to tackle the problems affecting the nation.

He said: I understand your shopping list. I hope the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) has taken note. Since Im not looking forward to another election, I will try to do what I can but I assure you the request of infrastructure in your domain would be looked into.

Meanwhile, President Buhari says the federal government is doing its best to correct and reverse the terrible mismanagement the country had experienced, and with some luck, our best will be good enough.

The president stated this when he received a delegation of non-career Ambassadors, who came to State House, Abuja, to congratulate him on his re-election.

He said Nigeria was trying to live within her means, so we can improve our lot, adding that government was determined to upgrade the countrys profile, both locally and internationally.

READ ALSO: NAIJ.com upgrades to Legit.ng: a letter from our Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda

President Buhari said it would be inexcusable for government not to take care of its Ambassadors in their various stations, hence the special attention being paid to the countrys foreign missions.

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INEC announces Buhari as 2019 election winner, Nigerians react | Legit TV

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- The minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, has travelled to Benin Republic at the behest of President Muhammadu Buhari

- Onyeama travelled to Benin to intervene in its political crisis as the country heads for election on April 28

- The minister met with President Patrice Tallon of Benin on Thursday, March 14, in Cotonou

President Muhammadu Buhari, the ECOWAS chairman, has dispatched the Foreign Affairs minister, Geoffrey Onyeama to intervene in the political crisis in Benin Republic as the country heads for elections on April 28.

Sarah Sanda, media aide to the minister, said this in a statement in Abuja on Thursday, March 14, News Agency reports.

Legit.ng gathers that Sanda said that the minister in company of the ECOWAS commission president, Jean Claude Brou, met with President Patrice Tallon of Benin on Thursday in Cotonou.

READ ALSO: INEC set to weigh 4 options on Rivers election on Friday, March 15

According to her, the visit of the envoy is to resolve the political disagreement which prompted the opposition to threaten a boycott of the parliamentary elections scheduled for April 28.

She said: Benin Republic has been undergoing political reforms aimed at strengthening democracy.

"The reforms includes the registration of political parties with a view to having parties with national spread based on a new legislation that stipulates conditions for registration.

"However, out of the many parties that applied for registration, only a few have been successful both at the Ministry of Interior and the National Electoral Commission (CEMA).

With barely a month to the parliamentary election scheduled for April 28, the opposition have complained about being deliberately shut out of the process by the government.

She said the opposition staged demonstrations and cried out to the ECOWAS to intervene or they would boycott the elections entirely.

The envoy said that after initial engagements and reports from delegations from the ECOWAS Commission who visited the country, President Buhari who is the ECOWAS Chairman sent a Special envoy to meet with President Tallon.

The envoy said was received by Beninoise minister of Foreign Affairs, Aurelien Agbenonchi and the Nigerian ambassador to Benin Republic, Emmanuel Oguntuase.

The envoy according to her, also met with the Tallon behind closed door to deliver the message of the ECOWAS chairman, President Buhari.

Sanda quoted Onyeama as saying: President Buhari remains concerned about the growth of democracy in the sub region.

Hence his message to President Patrice Tallon to ensure that all politicians and political parties in Benin Republic are given a level playing ground to participate in the democratic process."

He said that Buhari stressed the need for the rule of law and dialogue to prevail in the country, especially as the parliamentary elections were approaching.

He also called on the opposition to embrace dialogue and discuss their grievances rather than resorting to boycott of the entire process.

Also speaking, the minister of Foreign Affairs of Benin Republic, Aurelien Agbenonchi, also said: There is no political crisis in Benin Republic as the main bone of contention is the governments desire for reform in line with the rule of law.

He said President Tallon was open-minded and willing to carry all political actors along including the opposition.

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He said the parliament would look at the laws again and see areas that could be addressed in line with the concerns of the stakeholders.

The minister further disclosed that President Tallon also used the opportunity of the visit to again congratulate President Buhari on his re-election.

Nigeria according to him, continues to set the example for the sub region and Africa in terms of consolidating democracy.

Legit.ng previously reported that Nigeria emerged chairman of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) group at the United Nations.

Nigeria replaced Togo as chairman of the 15-nation sub-regional group.

The permanent representative of Nigeria to the UN, Tijjani Bande, took over from his Togolese counterpart, FrancK Kpayedo at the sub-regional groups meeting in New York.

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What is working well and what needs improvement in Nigeria? | Legit TV

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- Young actress Efia Odo has shared her thoughts on self infliction of pleasure and fornication

- The actress claimed that self infliction of pleasure is more spiritual damaging than fornication

- Odo compared someone pleasuring his or herself to someone who takes their own life

A young Ghanaian actress has raised eyebrows on Twitter after she shared her thoughts on infliction of pleasure and fornication. The young actress identified as Efia Odo had claimed that self infliction of pleasure is worse than fornication.

The young actress had shared her thoughts on popular microblogging platform, Twitter, The actress had noted that self infliction of pleasure has more spiritual damage than fornication.

According to Odo, even though the two are both sin one carries more weight of spiritual damage than the other.

READ ALSO: I am depressed and going to lose everything I worked for since 1994 - Filmmaker Egor Efiok cries out

Odo had even gone as far to compare the two to murder and taking one's life. She claimed that self infliction of pleasure is like when someone takes their own life while fornication is like murder.

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In another tweet, Odo further explained that self infliction of pleasure is what someone does to his or herself. She noted that it does not matter how it is done.

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng had earlier reported that Nigerians reacted to the love story of a former adult-film star. It had been reported that the adult-film actress Mia Khalifa is getting married to the man of her dreams.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better

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The buyer of the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem scored its first official win Thursday afternoon when the Bethlehem Planning Commission approved its request to place its name on all of the propertys signs.

Wind Creek Hospitality is seeking Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board approval of its $1.3 billion bid to buy the South Side Bethlehem casino. The affiliate of the Alabama-based Poarch Band of Creek Indians and the Sands submitted a change of ownership petition to the board Feb. 21. A vote has not been scheduled.

But Wind Creek officials seem confident in the deal, since they applied to the city to take down the massive neon red Sands sign from the iron ore crane and replace it with their name and logo in a similar sign. Wind Creek attorney Nick Talvacchia noted everything planned hinges on the approval of the casino license transfer.

City Signs Inc. of Horsham, Pa., which made all of the existing signs on the Sands property, presented renderings of the sign changes to the planning commission Thursday. The signs have a long production time, hence the early application.

Wind Creek sought sign waiver requests because the new signs are much larger than what city zoning allows --- 50 square feet for wall and freestanding signs -- on the property. Sands needed a similar waiver in 2009 for its ore bridge sign, but since the new owners name is much longer, the ore crane sign will have to increase by 693 square feet.

Wind Creek, in addition to its longer name, is also adding a separate logo to the signs, Talvacchia said. While they may be larger than the existing signs, theyre in scale for such a large building, he said.

Wind Creek is also asking to alter the following signs:

Three main monuments, which sit at the three main entrances to the property.

The hotel.

The events center. Its sign will decrease in size.

Seven plaques.

The outlet mall.

In its review of the waiver request, the city planning department requested that Wind Creek make its signs on the hotel and events center individual letter signs like the ones currently in place. Wind Creek plans to mount the individual letter signs on a brushed aluminum panel to make them more visible, Talvacchia said, which city officials were fine with.

Today, Las Vegas Sands is the majority owner of Sands BethWorks Gaming LLC, which owns the events center, casino and surrounding land totaling about 56 acres. Local attorney and developer Michael Perrucci, New York real estate developer Barry Gosin and their business partners have about a 10 percent share in BethWorks Gaming.

The rest of the land, almost 61 acres, is owned by Sands BethWorks Retail LLC, and ownership is split 50/50 between the Sands and Perrucci and his partners. BethWorks Retails holdings include the outlet mall, the blast furnaces, the Steel General Office building, No. 2 Machine Shop and several parking lots.

If it all shakes out as planned, the Sands will sell Wind Creek the casino, outlet mall, events center, hotel and some parking lots. Perrucci and his investment partners will sell off their stake but retain ownership of the property and execute a ground lease with Wind Creek, according to the filing.

Earlier this week, Perrucci declined to comment on the details of the ground lease, citing a nondisclosure agreement preventing him from commenting on the deal.

We will retain the SGO and the annex and certain parts of parking lots, he said. We are working closely with Wind Creek and the Sands.

Its been a year since Sands and Wind Creek announced that one of Pennsylvanias most lucrative gaming halls would be changing hands.

Once the sale is finalized, Wind Creek plans to immediately invest $190 million into a 300-room hotel expansion and development of the No. 2 Machine Shop, possibly into an indoor water park.

Sands employs about 2,500 people, who will all keep their jobs, and the hotel expansion is expected to add another 400 workers, plus an unknown number of construction workers. All of the existing restaurants, including Chef Emeril Lagasses eateries, will remain.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A repeat theft and drug suspect carrying power tools stolen from Home Depot fled from Wilson Borough police, but was quickly apprehended by a borough police K-9 team, according to a news release.

K-9 Rex suffered minor injuries during the apprehension Thursday afternoon of 29-year-old Easton area resident Thomas Mertz, according to police.

Mertz was also hurt, treated at Easton Hospital and released to the custody of the Northampton County Sheriff's Department. Mertz was taken to Northampton County Prison on multiple warrants and will face new charges in Thursday's incident, Wilson police Chief Chris Meehan said in the release.

The incident unfolded about 1:15 p.m. when borough police noticed a suspicious man carrying a large duffle bag containing what appeared to be new power tools in the 400 block of South 24th Street, according to the release.

"Officers stopped to speak with the male and he stated he just bought the tools from the nearby Home Depot," Meehan states. "He became extremely nervous and provided misleading information to the officers. While officers were attempting to verify if the tools were stolen, the male fled on foot."

Further investigation revealed the power tools had just been stolen from Home Depot on South 25th Street in neighboring Palmer Township, according to police.

Mertz had warrants from Northampton County Domestic Relations for failure to pay child support, Northampton County Adult Probation for violating conditions of his parole for a previous drug arrest and Colonial Regional police for retail theft, receiving stolen property, conspiracy to commit retail theft and possession of drug paraphernalia, the release states.

The Colonial Regional incident occurred Feb. 12 in Lower Nazareth Township, and Mertz also faces a retail theft charge from Jan. 1 in Bethlehem Township, according to court records.

Mertz will face charges filed by Wilson police of receiving stolen property, false ID to law enforcement and resisting arrest, in addition to retail theft filed by Palmer Township police.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Dr. Joseph Doc Mattioli, founder of Pocono Raceway, is one of five nominees for the Landmark Award for Outstanding Contributions to NASCAR.

The Landmark Awards focus on working members of a racing organization, race team, track facility, sponsor, media partner or a general ambassador for the sport, both professionally or non-professionally. Each year, five nominees are selected by the NASCAR Hall of Fame Nominating Committee. Award winners receive a special plaque in the Hall of Honor as a way of recognizing their dedication.

Doc along with his wife, Dr. Rose Mattioli, founded Pocono Raceway, known as the The Tricky Triangle for its three-sided track. The Long Pond facility in Monroe County continues to host two NASCAR race weekends each summer. The couple owned and operated the track for more than 50 years, making them prominent figures within the NASCAR community.

Docs passing in 2012 was a big loss to not only his family but to NASCAR as a whole, Pocono Raceway said Thursday in announcing his nomination. His legacy is being recognized through his Landmark Award nomination, a great recognition for his hard work within the industry, according to the announcement.

Along with Doc, the other nominees for the 2020 Landmark Award are Edsel Ford II, member of the board of directors for Ford Motor Co.; Alvin Hawkins, NASCARS first flagman who established NASCAR Racing at Bowman Gray Stadium; Mike Helton, the third president of NASCAR who held previous roles at Atlanta Motor Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway; and Ralph Seagraves, who formed the groundbreaking Winston-NASCAR partnership as an executive with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

Previous recipients of the Landmark Award for Outstanding Contributions to NASCAR include Jim Hunter (2019), Jim France (2018), H. Clay Earles (2017), Harold Brasington (2016) and Anne Bledsoe France (2015).

Here is the 2019 schedule of events at Pocono Raceway:

May 31: General Tire #AnywhereIsPossible 200 ARCA Menards Series

June 1: Pocono Green 250 Recycled by J.P. Mascaro & Sons NASCAR Xfinity Series

June 2: Pocono 400 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series

July 26: Pennsylvania 150 ARCA Menards Series

July 27: Gander RV 150 NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series

July 28: Gander RV 400 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series

August 18: ABC Supply 500 NTT IndyCar Series

Aug 24-25: The Great Pocono Raceway Air Show

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Sources and sinks

For the entire history of our species, humans have lived on a planet capped by a chunk of ice at each pole. But Earth has been ice-free for about 75 percent of the time since complex life first appeared. This variation in background climate, between partly glaciated and ice-free, has puzzled geologists for decades.

Now a team of scientists led by UC Santa Barbara's Francis Macdonald has published a study suggesting that tectonic activity may be the culprit. They found that long-term trends in Earth's climate are set by the presence or absence of collisions between volcanic arcs and continents in the tropics. The results appear in the journal Science.

"There've been a few hypotheses but no agreements as to why we have warmer or colder climates on these very long timescales," said Macdonald, a professor in the Department of Earth Science.

And when Macdonald says "long timescales," he's talking about 10 million-year periods, at a minimum. These are broad climatic trends, the backdrop against which natural and human-made fluctuations play out. Scientists have a relatively good understanding of what factors influence the climate on a thousand-year timescale, according to Macdonald.

On any scale, though, the primary agent of climate change is carbon dioxide (CO2). The question is what factors influence the amount of CO2 in atmosphere. Some processes produce CO2, while others absorb it. Scientists call these sources and sinks.

The debate among geologists is whether sources or sinks affect the climate more. "Some have argued that CO2 sources, like volcanism, have driven climate change on long timescales, while others have argued that, no, it's the sinks that have caused climate change on these timescales," said Macdonald.

He believes it's mostly the sinks, specifically vast deposits of rock that absorb CO2 through chemical reactions. But these carbon sinks are not distributed evenly across the surface. For instance, greater Indonesia is only 1-2 percent of the Earth's exposed land area, but accounts for roughly 10 percent of the current geologic carbon sink.

The activity of these sinks depends on a number of factors. Water is important for the chemical reactions and also washes the end results away into the oceans, where they consume CO2. Mountain-building increases the reactions by uplifting and exposing new rock. In flat terrain, the soil shields the underlying rock.

Rock type also plays a key role. Stone rich in iron and magnesium has simpler chemical bonds that are more easily broken down. This makes these mafic rocks, like basalt, better carbon sinks than rocks such as granite, which have more complex bonds.

Plate tectonics is what drives this geologic carbon cycle. When one tectonic plate slides under another -- usually a dense ocean plate under a continent -- the melting rock fuels a row of volcanoes on the top plate called a volcanic arc. The Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest is one example of this.

Macdonald and his colleagues reckoned that when these volcanic arcs collide with another continent, the collision uplifts mafic rocks. These rocks are readily eroded, particularly in warm, wet, tropical latitudes, and the sediment is sent out to oceans where it consumes CO2. So, he reasoned, when these collisions happen in the tropics, they drive the climate toward cooling.

"The tropics are where the rocks weather best because it's the warmest and wettest," explained coauthor Lorraine Lisiecki, an associate professor also in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Earth Science.

To test their hypothesis, the team used reconstructions of the continents and mountain-building events that scientists had built up over the past decades. This gave them an idea where and when arc-continent collisions happened. They limited themselves to the last 500 million years, since the geologic record is much less complete, and reconstructions less certain, before that time.

Temperature is harder to get a read on than geography, so the team used a simple metric: Was there ice on the poles at a given time or not? They reconstructed this information from the literature by looking at data on rocks that form only in the presence of ice. What they found was that Earth had significant ice cover during only four periods in their time window.

Combining the geographic and temperature data, the team found that over the last 500 million years, glacial climates occurred during periods of extensive collision between continents and volcanic arcs in the tropics. There was less than a 1 percent probability that the match was due to chance.

"Given how many things are changing on Earth at the same time, it's amazing that it all came out really clean and matched so well," said Lisiecki.

The collisions have the added effect of shutting down volcanic arc activity, which cuts off that source of CO2. "But if it was a volcanic effect, it wouldn't matter where the volcano was," Lisiecki said. It's only the weathering effect where latitude makes a difference. And the team found a much stronger relationship between the climate and collisions that happened in the tropics, rather than those that were outside the tropics.

"These hypotheses are not necessarily entirely independent," said Macdonald, "but our analysis suggests that the strongest relationship is with the weathering piece."

Macdonald embarked on this large compilation project after several of his colleagues had pushed back on results from studies with smaller scopes. "I thought, 'You're absolutely right. We need to look at this more broadly,'" he recalled. Now the team hopes this paper challenges their colleagues to make a more rigorous case for their own hypotheses.

Macdonald and Lisiecki also know that this paper is not the last word. "The database is open," Macdonald said, "so I'm hoping that this is an iterative project. And as more constraints come online, they can be entered and the model can be refined." To that end, he is currently investigating how strong an effect rock type has on this hypothesis.

Humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years with little concept of the dramatic changes the planet has witnessed over the eons. Although the subjects it studies are ancient, modern geology developed relatively recently. The theory of plate tectonics, for example, was not widely accepted until the 1960s. "We often think of Earth as always being like we're seeing now," said Macdonald. "But it's been a totally different planet throughout its history."

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This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The French naval vessel Le Vendemiaire recently carried out a mission on the islands of Matthew and Hunter. Image: Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes
Filmmaker Zeke Zelkers hard work is about to pay off: His 2019 film Billboard is hitting cinemas nationwide in over 25 markets.

The film tells the story about Casey Lindeweiler, an entrepreneur who struggles to keep his late-fathers radio station afloat. Lindeweiler hosts a billboard-sitting contest, where four people must live on a catwalk in front of a billboard. The participants compete for the chance to win a mobile home and nine-sixty thousand dollars.

Zelkers Billboard mimics a true event that occurred along the Route 22/MacArthur Road interchange, over 261 days in 1982-83. Harold G. Fulmer III, a Lehigh Valley businessman, launched a contest where individuals were required to spend as long as they could on a Whitehall Township commercial-district billboard. Contestants Ron Kistler, Dalton Young and Michael MacKay competed for the chance to win an $18,000 mobile home, which helped promote Fulmers radio station, WSAN.

Billboard has been featured in sneak-preview screenings in certain parts of Pennsylvania. Now, the movie is hitting screens across the country.

Viewers can see the movie beginning on April 5 at ArtsQuest in Bethlehem, Acme in Lambertville, and Movie Tavern Theaters in Trexlertown, Exton, Flourtown and Collegeville. Other theaters will be announced at a later date.

The movie is scheduled to be featured in Los Angeles the following week and then throughout the rest of the markets across the country.

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One resident was treated for smoke inhalation early Friday morning at a hospital, following a two-alarm row home fire that the Bethlehem Fire Department was quickly able to contain to a second-floor bedroom, city Fire Chief Warren Achey said.

Flames were roaring from second-floor windows at 110 Graham Place on the citys South Side when firefighters arrived just after midnight, Achey said. The two residents were out by then, one of them having suffered a smoke injury, the chief added.

The fire was out within 30 minutes and fire damage was limited to the bedroom area, Achey said.

There was smoke and water damage to the rest of the center home in the three-house row between West Third and West Fourth streets, Achey said. Outside of the smell of smoke, the adjoining homes at 108 and 112 Graham werent damaged, Achey said.

The cause of the fire and the ignition point remain under investigation, Achey said.

The residents on either side were initially out of their homes, but can return, Achey said. The residents of 110 Graham cant return yet, he added.

The home that sustained the damage was built in 1916 and is owned by Jie Floyd, Northampton County property records show.

The middle of a three-home row, 110 W. Graham St. in Bethlehem, was damaged by fire just after midnight March 15, 2019. (Sara K. Satullo | For lehighvalleylive.com)Sara K. Satullo | For lehighvalleylive.com

The American Red Cross of Eastern Pennsylvania is assisting two adults from one of the three families impacted by the incident and is expected to assist another -- an adult and child -- who initially went to the hospital, a spokesman for the Lehigh Valley-Bucks Chapter said. The Red Cross provides short-term basics such as food, clothing and housing.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A 36-year-old Easton man, trying to get his child support payment amount lowered, lied under oath and forged a document, authorities charged this week.

Joseph Elzie Popham, of the 800 Wood Avenue and father of one child, knowingly provided false testimony before Northampton County Judge Jennifer Sletvold relating to the forged document during a recent hearing on his request, a county detective says in court papers.

Physicians Verification Forms documenting his inability to work normal shifts therefore impacting his ability to pay the stipulated amount of child support were submitted to Pophams county Office of Domestic Relations caseworker, court papers say.

One form, signed by Dr. Lance Dunlop of Omni Heath Services Inc., was faxed May 29, court papers say.

Popham delivered the second form, in the name of Dr. Kutaiba Chaleby of Step by Step in Allentown, to the caseworker on June 6, court papers say. The form was dated May 18 and appeared to have the same language as the form the office received May 29 from the other doctor, court papers say.

The caseworker noticed the address for Step by Step -- which, according to its website, provides community support services to children and adults in Pennsylvania with intellectual disabilities, behavioral health and autism spectrum disorders -- was written over where correction fluid had been applied to the document, court papers say.

The caseworker informed the judge about that, court papers say.

The judge asked Popham about the document when he was under oath and he told her he saw Kim Garcia, a doctor of nursing practice, sign it, court papers say.

The detective interviewed Chaleby and Garcia, court papers say.

The doctor told the detective that he didnt examine Popham in this circumstance and the signature was not his, court papers say. Garcia told the detective only a physician can sign the form and although she is highly trained, she is not a physician, court papers say. She also told the detective that she did not sign Chalebys name on the form.

Popham was arraigned Thursday afternoon before District Judge Daniel Corpora on charges of perjury, forgery and two counts of tampering with evidence, records show. He was released on $10,000 unsecured bail and has a preliminary hearing tentatively scheduled 9 a.m. March 28 in Corporas court on Eastons South Side.

Court papers didnt show an attorney for Popham. A phone number for Popham wasnt immediately available so he couldnt be reached for comment.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Lehigh Valley groups joined the world in expressing shock, condolences and condemnation following a deadly terrorist attack Friday in New Zealand that left at least 49 people dead.

Mass shootings were reported at two mosques in Christchurch full of worshippers attending Friday prayers. The attack was broadcast in horrifying live video by an immigrant-hating white nationalist wielding at least two assault rifles and a shotgun, the Associated Press reports.

One man was arrested and charged with murder, and two other armed suspects were taken into custody while police tried to determine what role they played.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, noting that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees.

A demonstrator hangs banners from multi-faith group 'Turn to Love' during a vigil at New Zealand House in London, Friday, March 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)AP

Messages from the Lehigh Valley condemned the attacker and called for unity and support, both locally and abroad.

From the Lehigh Dialogue Center, a nonprofit volunteer organization of academics and business professionals: This heinous attack is the most recent incident in a chain of attacks that targeted various places of worship. Once again we realize the importance of mutual understanding, tolerance, and unity for peace. May the tragic event be an occasion to strengthen our commitment to promoting love, respect and compassion among every individual.

Message of Condemnation and Condolences for Mosque Attack in New Zealand Posted by Lehigh Dialogue Center on Friday, March 15, 2019

From the Lehigh Conference of Churches, a nonprofit social services organization: This mass shooting was a terrible crime against women, men and children at the time of their prayers and serves as an attack on all believers and an assault on the bonds of shared humanity and peaceful coexistence which unite us all. The Lehigh Conference of Churches stands in solidarity with all Muslims at this time, especially the Muslims of Aotearoa New Zealand, and expresses the strongest possible condemnation of these actions and of the hateful and dangerous ideologies that they represents.

The Lehigh Conference of Churches condemns terror attacks on mosques in New Zealand, calls for end to violence. ... Posted by The Lehigh Conference of Churches on Friday, March 15, 2019

From the Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley: We strongly condemn this attack, which is a barbaric assault on every person who believes in the dignity of human life. ... Our community stands with our Muslim brothers and sisters  in New Zealand, in the Lehigh Valley and around the world  in the face of extremist hatred and violence. Tonight, as we gather to pray for Shabbat, we will pray for the souls of the victims and for the recovery of those injured. We express our deepest condolences to the bereaved family members and send our love and compassion to the resilient people of Christchurch.

The Jewish community of the Lehigh Valley is saddened, shocked and outraged by the terror attacks in Christchurch, New... Posted by Jewish Federation of the Lehigh Valley on Friday, March 15, 2019

From the Bethlehem Interfaith Group: We know that New Zealand may seem far away to some for a public response, but it appears that the terrorist who carried out the attacks identified closely with U.S. white nationalism and saw himself in league with it as part of the global white supremacist movement. It is part of the disease of hate that we must stand together to fight against, wherever it may appear. We recognize that U.S. Muslims are feeling especially threatened and vulnerable, especially as they head to Jummah today. Know that we stand together with you, and that we commit ourselves anew to work and pray for the day when hate, racism, and xenophobia have no power or place in our society, and we may all live together in community, justice, security, and peace.

From Or Chadash: Rabbi Joseph M. Forman, of Or Chadash in Flemington, said he spoke with Imam Yaser ElMenshawy from the Islamic Center of Hunterdon County on Friday about their shared sorrow following the murders. The shootings at the Mosques there remind us that we are each vulnerable to the sometimes violent and always ignorant hate that exists in our world. Islamophobia, racism and bigotry, any violence towards any people or religious community should find no quarter in our nation nor in any place. We stand with the entire Moslem community and decry this atrocity, Forman said in a statement.

The Muslim Association of the Lehigh Valley also planned to make a statement at a news conference scheduled for 5 p.m. Friday at its mosque, 1988 Schadt Ave. in Whitehall Township.

We are heartbroken, the associations Mohammed Khaku said in advance of the news conference. We are in mourning with our Muslim family in New Zealand. We are doing our best, as individuals in grief, to hold each other close.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveNovakLVL and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP)  Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers killed 49 people on what the prime minister called one of New Zealands darkest days, as authorities charged one person, detained three others and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the events in Christchurch represented "an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence" and acknowledged many of those affected may be migrants and refugees. In addition to the dead, she said more than 20 people were seriously wounded.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Ardern said.

Police took three men and a woman into custody after the shootings, which shocked people across the nation of 5 million people. One of the suspects was later charged with murder.

While there was no reason to believe there were more suspects, Ardern said the national security threat level was being raised to the second-highest level.

Authorities have not specified who they detained, but said none had been on any watch list. A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack. He said he was a 28-year-old white Australian and a racist.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed that one of the four people detained was an Australian-born citizen.

Police Commissioner Mike Bush said Friday night that a man had been charged with murder. He did not mention the other three suspects and did not say whether the same shooter was responsible for both attacks.

Ardern at a news conference alluded to anti-immigrant sentiment as the possible motive, saying that while many people affected by the shootings may be migrants or refugees "they have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us."

As for the suspects, Ardern said "these are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand."

Bush said police had found two improvised explosive devices in one car, a clarification from an earlier statement that there were devices in multiple vehicles. He said they had disabled one and were in the process of disabling the second

The deadliest attack occurred at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch at about 1:45 p.m. At least 30 people were killed there.

Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter the mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door to the mosque, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in his driveway, and fled. He said he then went into the mosque to try and help.

"I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque," he said. "It's unbelievable nutty. I don't understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. It's ridiculous."

He said he helped about five people recover in his home. He said one was slightly injured.

"I've lived next door to this mosque for about five years and the people are great, they're very friendly," he said. "I just don't understand it."

He said the gunman was white and was wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top, giving him a military-type appearance.

A video that was apparently livestreamed by the shooter shows the attack in horrifying detail. The gunman spends more than two minutes inside the mosque spraying terrified worshippers with bullets again and again, sometimes re-firing at people he has already cut down.

He then walks outside to the street, where he shoots at people on the sidewalk. Children's screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get another rifle.

The gunman then walks back into the mosque, where there are at least two dozen people lying on the ground. After walking back outside and shooting a woman there, he gets back in his car, where the song "Fire" by English rock band "The Crazy World of Arthur Brown" can be heard blasting from the speakers. The singer bellows, "I am the god of hellfire!" and the gunman drives away. The video then cuts out.

There was a second shooting at the Linwood Masjid Mosque that killed at least 10 people.

Mark Nichols told the New Zealand Herald he heard about five gunshots and that a Friday prayer-goer returned fire with a rifle or shotgun.

Nichols said he saw two injured people being carried out on stretchers past his automotive shop and that both people appeared to be alive.

The police commissioner warned anybody who was thinking of going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand on Friday to stay put.

The man who claimed responsibility for the shooting said he came to New Zealand only to plan and train for the attack. He said he was not a member of any organization, but had donated to and interacted with many nationalist groups, though he acted alone and no group ordered the attack.

He said the mosques in Christchurch and Linwood would be the targets, as would a third mosque in the town of Ashburton if he could make it there.

He said he chose New Zealand because of its location, to show that even the most remote parts of the world were not free of "mass immigration."

New Zealand is generally considered to be a welcoming country for immigrants and refugees. Last year, the prime minister announced the country would boost its annual refugee quota from 1,000 to 1,500 starting in 2020. Ardern, whose party campaigned on the promise of raising the intake of refugees, dubbed the planned increase "the right thing to do."

A cricket match between New Zealand and Bangladesh scheduled to start Saturday was canceled after the Bangladesh cricket team had a narrow escape.

Players and members of the team's coaching staff were reportedly on their bus, approaching the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Hagley Park when the shooting broke out.

Batsman Tamim Iqbal tweeted "entire team got saved from active shooters. Frightening experience and please keep us in your prayers."

Mass shootings in New Zealand are exceedingly rare. The deadliest in modern history occurred in the small town of Aramoana in 1990, when gunman David Gray shot and killed 13 people following a dispute with a neighbor.
This is to help enlighten the Democrat Party as to what their double standard technique has perpetrated. Democrats have instigated many investigations against President Trump and his family, so Im questioning who investigated their past shady situations.

Bill Clinton giving sensitive advanced missile technology to China, an enemy. His illicit affair with Monica Lewinsky and others. Hillary Clintons part in selling off a good portion of our essential uranium supply to Russia.

The Clinton Foundations millions of dollars donated from foreign countries, to do what? Barak Obamas giving over $1 billion to Iran, an enemy, to do what?

James Comeys decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her extreme negligence involving use of her private server containing classified information.

Mostly all of the above situations could have been detrimental to our countrys safety and welfare. Compare that information to what the Dems are trying to pin on Trump.

The fake dossier suggesting Trump had colluded with Russia to alter the election was supposedly paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Yet that was just swept under the rug.

Therefore my advice to the double standard, left-wing, liberal media and Democrat politicians is, keep trying to dig up more dirt on Trump instead of doing your job as over-paid propagandists. See how that works out for you in 2020.

Audrey Cowell

Upper Nazareth Township
Im responding to Robert Kalmans March 14 letter, Democrats doing a good job of brainwashing voters. My response is meant as anodyne in nature, not as an ad hominem tit-for-tat attack. The writer opines that because I do not agree with Donald Trumps policies I am therefore gullible. Actually, not just gullible, but have been brainwashed into believing Trump is the biggest threat to Americas democracy.

The writer seems to discount the notion that there are three co-equal branches of government run by basically two political parties. The Republicans and Democrats, like the writer and myself, probably tend to agree on the substance of many of todays issues. Where we diverge is probably more due to our differing viewpoints as to the severity of the issue, and the policies that would best resolve those issues. We are all free-minded as opposed to gullible.

With that being said, the opposition to Trump is more of a sticks-and-stones one. I resent the stick Trump uses to beat down the well-established institutions of government. I also resent the stones being thrown at people who show any sign of disagreement with his views and policies. Character attacks by Twitter is trite, as are sardonic articles about being Americas worst enemy.

Thomas J. Schoner

Forks Township
A Phillipsburg man faces nine drug charges after authorities served a narcotics search warrant Thursday at a home in town, Warren County Prosecutor Richard Burke announced.

Peter Minchella Jr., 29, of the 300 block of Lincoln Street, was arrested after police seized methamphetamine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, Burke said in a news release.

Peter Minchella Jr. (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

The arrest resulted from a three-week investigation into the distribution of meth in Phillipsburg, Burke said. It was conducted by Phillipsburg, Washington Township and New Jersey State police, in conjunction with the Warren County Sheriffs Department and the prosecutors office Narcotics Unit, according to the release.

"While arresting those who violate the law will not, in and of itself, eradicate the drug problem, we must hold accountable anyone who places the citizens of Warren County in danger by selling illicit drugs," Burke says in the release, before thanking the investigators: "This operation and others like it would not be possible without the cooperation of many law enforcement agencies."

Three of the charges against Minchella are second-degree crimes, including two counts of intent to distribute methamphetamine within 500 feet of a public park. Each of these charges is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $150,000, upon conviction, according to the prosecutors office.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
In his announcement that he will seek a second term, Phillipsburg Mayor Stephen Ellis frames himself as a fighter.

Hes been in a lot of fights over the last four years.

There have been two efforts to recall him. A no-confidence vote. A meeting he was asked to leave and more that he refused to attend. Two residents who have accused him of assault or harassment (one case is still pending). Two possible investigations into his administration (one announced just this week). Battles over appointments, staff and salaries, including his own.

Unfortunately," Ellis, a Democrat, said in a news release late Thursday, "there are forces in Phillipsburgs government who would rather spend their time threatening my children and abusing their power to wage political vendettas than creating economic opportunity and doing the work to revitalize our community.

"Despite the hardship to my family," the statement continues, "they support me in standing up to these bullies and fighting for the future of Phillipsburg. I cannot abandon Phillipsburg to people who know no boundaries of decency and who seek to profit from Phillipsburgs decline. I will always fight for Phillipsburg."

(MORE ELECTION NEWS AND CANDIDATE ANNOUNCEMENTS)

Ellis took office in 2016, having defeated four-term Republican incumbent Harry Wyant the year before. Ellis, a Phillipsburg-born-and-raised Democrat, had worked with the state park service for 35 years but never held an elected office before.

The re-election news release was emailed out at 9:40 p.m. Thursday, but it was increasingly clear before then that Ellis was going to launch a campaign.

In September, when asked if he planned to resign amid ongoing controversies, he told WFMZ: If anything, Ill run again just to make sure I outlast them, meaning the Republican majority council. On Tuesday, after council leadership proposed a new law-enforcement investigation into alleged bribery, Ellis said theres about a 90-percent chance he would run.

From left, incumbent Mayor Stephen Ellis, and council candidates J.P. Stettner and Lee Clark. (Courtesy photos)Courtesy photos

The mayor will appear on the Democratic ticket with two other familiar faces running for council seats: J.P. Stettner and Lee Clark. Incumbent Democratic Councilman Josh Davis is not seeking re-election.

Stettner is a former Phillipsburg police chief who previously served 12 years on town council, the Phillipsburg Housing Authority and school board. He did not run for re-election on council in 2015, the same year that voters picked Ellis. He now says he is running once again to end the negativity and to bring a sense of stability to our government.

Lee Clark is a watershed outreach manager for the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters and Conservation Voters of Pennsylvania. He was also appointed to the town housing authority by Gov. Phil Murphy this year as the states representative. Clark ran for council in 2017, but lost when the Republicans swept the ticket.

It is with great pride in our community and great hope for the future of Phillipsburg that we proudly announce our... Posted by Fighting for Phillipsburg: Ellis, Stettner, Clark on Thursday, March 14, 2019

The trio of Ellis, Stettner and Clark are running on a platform of economic development, especially along the Delaware River.

Candidates for New Jerseys primary must file by April 1. The primary election is June 4 and the general election is Nov. 5.

CORRECTION: An incorrect filing deadline was initially reported for candidates in New Jerseys primary election. April 1 is the correct date.

Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveNovakLVL and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A 20-year-old man deceived an injured party by taking money for a guitar he had advertised on Done Deal, but never delivered the item.

At last week's sitting of Portlaoise District Court, Patrick Quaide, 20, with an address at the Bram Stoker Hotel, Clontarf Road, Clontarf East, Dublin 3, was charged with a deception offence, at the Bank of Ireland, Main Street, Portlaoise, on March 20, 2017.

Sgt JJ Kirby gave evidence that in March 2017, the accused posted an advert on Done Deal for a guitar and accessories.

The injured party contacted him and agreed to lodge 125 in his bank account, but the items were never posted out.

Sgt Kirby said the delay in bringing the prosecution to court was because the gardai had been unable to locate the accused for a while.

Defence, Mr Declan Breen said the accused had been homeless at the time and had issues with drink and drugs.

It was a mean thing to do, said Mr Breen of the offence.

Defence said that the accused had been in care from an early age and went through 17 different foster homes.

He had no one to guide him, said Mr Breen, and fell into bad company and bad ways.

Mr Breen went on to say that the accused had decided a year and a half ago to rectify things and is now clean of drugs.

Judge Catherine Staines adjourned the case to June 13 next for a restorative justice report.
A man who was before Athy District Court for the unlawful sale or supply of drugs was sentenced to nine months in prison on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 and three months consecutive for driving with out any insurance.

Martin Flynn with an address listed as 93 Coneymeadows, Coneyboro, Athy came to the attention of gardai on January 14, 2017 after they searched the meter box outside his house and found 492 worth of cannabis, deal bags and a grinder. The court heard that he was seen by gardai using the outside meter box. Sgt Brian Jacob told the court that the defendant was supplying drugs to the public.

His solicitor David Gibbons said his client is a 27-year-old man who has got himself back on his feet. He handed in a urine analysis into the court showing that there was no trace of narcotics in the defendant's system for the few weeks.

He was also before the court for driving with no insurance after he was stopped by gardai on September, 17, 2017 at Blackpark in Athy. The court heard he has 11 previous convictions including a disqualification for driving without any insurance.

Judge Desmond Zaidan said the driving with no insurance was carried out while disqualified from driving.

Once bitten twice shy, said Judge Zaidan.

Drugs will destroy you and it is a life sentence - a slow death - you remember that. Drugs are pure evil and they destroy the small fry like you. If there aren't any foot soldiers the godfathers won't survive.

He was disqualified from driving for four years.
Solicitors, barristers, gardai, probation officers, court staff and the local judge all paid glowing tribute to the retiring Imelda Grogan, manager of the court services in Naas.

Read also: Cheap fuel on sale today at official opening of new service station near Naas

Ms Grogan was welcomed to the courthouse in June 1978 by no less a figure than Sean Connery who was filming the Great Train Robbery.

She spent the vast majority of her working career in the courts service since then rising through the ranks to become manager of the offices in Naas.

Judge Desmond Zaidan said that she was very respected and trusted by her colleagues and others who worked in the court house.

He said that she had ignored his advice to follow Chelsea and took up aqua aerobics instead.

He said he hoped she would find contentment and health in her retirement.

Eithne Coughlan paid tribute to Imelda, pointing out that she had used her computer skills to change the a considerable number of processes in the court offices which had previously been paper based, and in the process making the working lives of her colleagues far easier.

On behalf the gardai, Superintendent Martin Walker paid tribute to her and wished her all the best for her retirement.

David Gibbons, on behalf of the local Bar Association did likewise and referenced her unfailing helpfulness and professionalism over the years.

Sarah Connolly, BL, on behalf of the barristers also thanked her for her helpfulness, noting that no job was too big or too small, no query too annoying or repetitive.

Veteran solicitor Tony Hanahoe said he actually remembered Sean Connery in the courthouse and said he hoped Ms Grogan would have a fabulous retirement.

Probation Officer Marita Costigan noted that everybody spoke so highly of you.
There was a school strike today in Naas.

But it had less to do with pay for teachers than with the price we all might pay if climate change isnt addressed.

Second year students demonstrated outside St. Marys College - with the support of the teaching staff.

The initiative to tackle climate change and criticise the inaction of national governments was launched by the sixteen year old Swedish girl last year.

Dep James Lawless talks to the students

Schools around the country are taking part in todays of action and a a gathering will be students march in Dublin from St, Stephen's Green to Leinster house.

Climate change is happening and its happening quickly. The students know this and it the issue brings the CSPE (Civil Social and Political Education) subject to life. They are young but they are learning about what is happening to the environment and they are aware of what happens if countries like Ireland dont reduce carbon emissions, said teacher Margaret Humphreys.

Ms Humphreys thanked Fianna Fail TD James Lawless who addressed the students before the protest ended.

At the same time students from Gaelcholaiste Chill Dara demonstrated outside Naas Town Hall.

READ ALSO Cheap fuel on sale today at a new service station near Naas
Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin has been voted Best Gin at the prestigious 2019 Flaviar Spirit Awards in New York.

Flaviar is one of the worlds most competitive drinks contests, which awards Best Spirit gongs to only 5 of the 22,000 eligible premium spirits brands each year.

The significance of the award for the Irish Gin brand is not merely honorary  the Flaviar awards are considered early predictors of which spirits brands are set to trend globally.

Flaviar is the worlds leading online spirits enthusiasts club & the winning brands are selected from over 90,000 ratings submitted from thousands of dedicated premium spirits consumers from the USA, Europe & across the world.

This is the first time in the history of the Flaviar awards that an Irish Gin brand has won a Best Spirit Award & claimed the Best Gin title.

Flaviar co-founder Jugoslav Petkovic says, Once you taste Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin you can absolutely see why our members are raving about it - Its a real explosion of flavour in a bottle.

The reaction amongst Spirit aficionadosacross the world & in particular in the US, has been off the scale, a telling sign according to Flaviar that this Irish gin is one to watch.

One Oregon fan admitted to buying the entire stock of the brand in his local liquor store:

We fell in love with Gunpowder Gin and the Irish way of making gin and tonics {..} We found where we could buy the gin in Oregon and bought all bottles the store had! We love our Gunpowder G&Ts.

And even non-gin drinkers are converting:

This was the best one and I dont even drink gin.

I've never had neat gin but this one was an amazing experience

Easily the most flavourful and aromatic gin I've ever tasted. The bottle it comes in is also beautiful, and I plan on keeping it. Will definitely buy again.

Demand for the brand has led to listings in all control states in the US.

Its welcome news for Leitrim and the Drumshanbo team at The Shed Distillery of PJ Rigney, where Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin is slow-distilled by hand with oriental botanicals and gunpowder tea.

Following the incredible support for the brand at home and the exceptional international response  there are now 30 people in full-time employment at the Leitrim distillery, most of whom were previously long-term unemployed.

This Sunday The Shed Distillery heads to Prowein International Drinks Fair in Dusseldorf where as well as marking the third anniversary of the launch of Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish Gin to the International market, distributors across the world are hoping to get an early taste of the first ever premier grand cru whiskey from The Shed Distillery, which is due to be launched later this year.
We're sorry that the ministry you were looking for is no longer available on LightSource.com. However, below are some great ministries that offer related content. Enjoy the inspiration, encouragement, and Biblical challenge from these LightSource.com ministry partners!
A SMALL bit of history will be made at this years city St Patricks Day parade, with trade union Siptu entering for the first time.

They are in 48th position and will mark the 100th anniversary of the Limerick Soviet which will be marked next month.

Often a forgotten part of Limericks rich history, back in April 1919, martial law was declared in the city after a general strike was organised by the Limerick Trades Council in protest against the British Armys declaration of a Special Military Area.

Croagh man Pat Condon, who chairs Siptus Limerick District Council, is leading the way on the unions entry into the parade.

A new flag has been designed, depicting the people on Sarsfield Bridge being stopped at the barrier, as well as the 10 shilling promissory note allowed by the Limerick Trades Council.

This, along with the traditional Siptu district one and two banners will be hauled down OConnell Street as part of the parade.

Speaking to the Limerick Leader, Mr Condon, who co-ordinates the Limerick district council said: Its a great thing to recognise the fact the unions worked so hard in 1919. Youd need to ask if we are still in the same boat 100 years down the road when you look at precarious work and people with difficulty with continual contracts which are never linked to a substantive post.

We are extremely proud of the fact that workers in 1919 decided to unite and bring the city to a standstill, he added.

Around 60 members of Siptu will be joined in the parade by players from the forthcoming Bread not Profits play, which will be a huge public performance in the Cleeves factory during the month of April, marking the 100th anniversary of the Soviet.
A COLLEGE degree which allowed students to study at both Mary Immaculate College and the University of Limerick has been scrapped after just two years.

The two colleges have this week confirmed the axing of the joint BA liberal arts degree, blaming cost, a lack of funding and complex logistics in terms of mobility and scheduling.

The move has led to fears in some quarters that Mary Immaculate College could merge with the University of Limerick (UL)  or go back to being solely a teacher training college. Job cuts are also feared among teaching staff.

Future students are ultimately the big losers here, said one staff member, who did not wish to be identified.

The joint BA course was established in 2016 as a way to stop the duplication of programmes at UL and Mary Immaculate College, and allow students to study different elements of their degree on campus both in Castletroy and the South Circular Road.

However, the staff member said one of the reasons the project did not work out was because of poor transport links between the two colleges  something the institutions referenced in their joint statement to the Limerick Leader.

UL and Mary Immaculate College are linked by the delay-ridden Bus Eireann 304 service, something highlighted on these pages in recent weeks.

Teachers at Mary Immaculate College have said they felt the joint BA was launched as a way to avoid amalgamating the two colleges, something the Higher Education Authority (HEA) was understood to be keen to do.

One Mary Immaculate Colllege lecturer, speaking on condition of anonymity,said: Some staff are concerned about their job, especially if there are moves to a merger of the two colleges. Could staff be asked to transfer across to UL, or will their positions disappear entirely? People dont know what will happen.

Mary Immaculate College staff were told the news at a meeting on Friday, and its understood there was real concern among staff following the news.

A lot of work has been put into this, and it feels like it has been cut dead, one staff member, who was instrumental in setting up the course, told the Limerick Leader.

This Septembers cohort of students on the joint BA course will be the final ones taking the course, the colleges have confirmed.

One of the reasons for this is the fact the course has already been advertised through CAO.

But, the lecturer added, the 2020 arts intake will not offer the cross-campus subjects.

It means popular subjects like geography may not be available at UL going forward.

It was supposed to increase the offering to students on both campuses. Previously, if you did a BA in UL, you couldnt do drama or philosophy. Likewise on our side, we couldnt do geology, politics or economics. Its a big loss, the lecturer added.

In a joint statement, Mary Immaculate College and UL confirmed the news.

Regrettably, the cost of resourcing the joint programme, a lack of adequate funding and complex logistics in terms of mobility and scheduling have culminated in a decision to discontinue the joint element of the programme, with both institutions continuing to offer their respective arts programmes without the joint subjects, they said.

UL and Mary Immaculate College will, they add, continue to build on the stimulating and fruitful engagement developed in this partnership, and look forward to working on new collaborative initiatives.
TWO Limerick men received prison sentences after they admitted being in a car a number of hours after it was stolen from outside a house in the city.

Gary Bermingham, aged 20, of Castlebrook, Castletroy, and John Sheehy, aged 24, of St Munchins Avenue, St Marys Park, Limerick, were arrested a short time after the stolen car was located by gardai near the Markets Field, Garryowen, on December 6, last.

After both men pleaded guilty, at Limerick District Court to an offence under the Road Traffic Act, Inspector Liz Kennedy said Mr Sheehy was observed getting out of the blue Peugeot car at around 10am while Mr Bermingham was observed in the vicinity of the vehicle.

CCTV footage which was later obtained by gardai captured Mr Sheehy driving the stolen car in the Garryowen area prior to the arrival of gardai.

Insp Kennedy said another man, who is accused of stealing the car from outside an address at Courthouse Lane following a burglary, was also arrested on the day.

He is facing trial on indictment before the circuit court.

Solicitor Tom Kiely said Mr Sheehy, who has a number of previous convictions, was not involved in the theft of the car and only got in after it pulled up on the morning.

He said he has suffered from addiction problems in the past but had been doing well until shortly before the incident.

Judge Mary Larkin was told Mr Bermingham  a father of two young children  is a vulnerable young man and that he is easily led and prone to making stupid decisions.

It was accepted he was not involved in the theft of the car but had gone for a ride-along.

Mr Kiely said Mr Bermingham acknowledges he needs to start copping himself on and needs to grow up.

Both men made admissions when questioned by gardai and both have been doing well since they were remanded in custody last December.

Judge Larkin imposed three month prison sentences  backdating them to the date of their arrest. Both men were released from custody a short time after the sentences were handed down.
MAYOR James Collins has opened an online book of condolences for victims of this Fridays shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand.

In an incident which has shocked the world, 49 people lost their lives after a gunman  who identified himself in footage as 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant  opened fire at two mosques in the city, on New Zealand's South Island. He will appear in court tomorrow.

Mayor Collins said the thoughts and prayers of the people of Limerick are with those who were injured and with the families of those who were killed in the Christchurch attack, which has also injured at least 20 people.

It is impossible to comprehend the shock and devastation being experienced by the people in Christchurch as a result of the attack. I hope this attack will not damage their spirit, friendliness and welcoming nature, he said.

In solidarity with the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, and in memory of the victims of the terror attack, Limerick City and County Council has opened an online book of condolence. Sign it here: https://t.co/pye2mSrfEc pic.twitter.com/V5fIo4blkG  Limerick Council (@LimerickCouncil) March 15, 2019

The book of condolence can be accessed on Limerick.ie, at : www.limerick.ie/council/services/your-council/books-condolence/book-condolence-christchurch-new-zealand
An artwork by Paul Signac  a painter who helped invent the pointillist style  was stolen from a French home during a Nazi raid in 1940. Signac's painting recently resurfaced in a private collection, and German cultural authorities said it will be returned to the descendants of its original owner.

The painting had been in the infamous Gurlitt trove, a collection of art that German authorities have been investigating for the past several years, because many pieces were suspected to have been stolen from Jewish families and other victims of Nazi persecution.

Proving that an artwork was stolen, however, has been tricky for the researchers at the German Lost Art Foundation who have been working on the Gurlitt case. The collection of about 1,500 artworks was discovered in 2012. So far, only seven Nazi-confiscated pieces, including the Signac painting, have been identified. Other artworks identified as Nazi loot include paintings by French artists Camille Pissarro, Henri Matisse and Thomas Couture. [Images: Missing Nazi Diary Resurfaces]

The original owner of the Signac painting was French Jewish real estate broker Gaston Prosper Levy. In Paris, Levy had been compiling a collection of French impressionist paintings and was a champion of Signac's. In 1927, he acquired Signac's 1887 painting "Quai de Clichy. Temps gris" (or "Clichy Dock. Grey Weather").

Before Levy and his wife fled the Nazis and went to Tunisia, he sent most of his art collection to his residence Les Bouffards, south of Paris, in June 1940. Witness accounts indicate that a few months later, the collection was seized by German soldiers. What happened to the collection after this raid is still unknown. But researchers have figured out that somehow "Quai de Clichy" entered the French art market, and German art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt acquired it sometime between 1943 and 1947.

Gurlitt had collaborated with the Nazis to sell "degenerate" art abroad and to acquire pieces for Nazi museums, such as Hitler's planned Fuhrermuseum. Gurlitt was exonerated in his denazification trials, and he remained in the art world after World War II ended. His son Cornelius Gurlitt, who died in 2014, inherited the artworks, which came to the attention of authorities in 2012. By then, new standards had been developed for dealing with and restituting cultural property that been stolen by the Nazis.

"We are already in contact with a representative of the descendants, and I am confident that we will be able to restitute the painting very soon," Germany's commissioner for culture and media Monika Grutters said in a statement announcing the identification. "This case reminds us once again that we must never give up in our efforts to thoroughly investigate Nazi art theft, for which Germany bears responsibility. Each restituted work of art is another important step in the quest for historical justice."

Originally published on Live Science.
A woman in Spain had a lump protruding out of her belly button that turned out to be cancer. Above, an image of the lump (left) and a CT scan showing masses in the pelvis and near the belly button area (right, arrows).

A strange lump growing out of a woman's belly button turned out to be metastatic cancer, according to a new report of her case.

The 73-year-old woman went to an emergency room in Spain, where she told doctors that the painful lump in her belly button had been enlarging over the past four months. Two days earlier, she had noticed blood coming out of the lump.

The mass was firm and measured 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) in diameter, the report said. Doctors could also feel a mass in her pelvis. [27 Oddest Medical Case Reports]

Imaging tests showed that the woman had a relatively large mass in her pelvic area, measuring 11 cm by 11 cm by 9.5 cm (4.3 by 4.3 by 3.7 inches).

Biopsies of both masses revealed that the woman had an advanced stage of ovarian cancer. Indeed, the mass protruding from her belly button was the result of the cancer spreading, or metastasizing.

This type of metastasis to the belly button, or umbilicus, is known as a "Sister Mary Joseph's nodule," according to the report, published online yesterday (March 13) in The New England Journal of Medicine.

A Sister Mary Joseph's nodule is sometimes seen in patients who have gynecologic or gastrointestinal cancers. But it's "relatively rare," said case report co-author Dr. Javier Barambio, a general surgery and digestive system physician at the University Hospital Foundation Jimenez Diaz in Madrid, Spain, who treated the woman. Only about 1 to 3 percent of abdominal and pelvic cancers spread to the umbilicus, according to a 2013 report.

It's unclear exactly how cancer spreads to the belly button area, said Dr. Wasif Saif, deputy physician in chief of medical oncology at Northwell Health Cancer Institute in Lake Success, New York, who wasn't involved in the case. But it may spread through the blood or lymphatic system, or may travel along ligaments or remnants of embryological structures that were needed during development but no longer have a purpose after birth, he said.

The appearance of a lump in the umbilicus alerts doctors to the possible presence of a tumor in the abdomen or pelvis, Saif said. But it doesn't definitely mean that a person has cancer  for example, the lump could be caused by something else, such as a hernia  so additional testing is needed, Saif told Live Science.

The woman had surgery to reduce the size of her tumor, along with chemotherapy to treat the remaining cancer, the report said.

Patients with a Sister Mary Joseph's nodule generally have a poor prognosis, since it is a sign of advanced cancer, according to 2009 report.

But in this case, the patient may have beaten the odds. She is in "good general condition" and free of disease after her treatment, Barambio told Live Science.

Originally published on Live Science.
Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the "arrow of time," is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered over time. But recently, researchers from the U.S. and Russia have bent that arrow just a bit  at least for subatomic particles.

In the new study, published Tuesday (Mar. 12) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very tiny quantum computer made of two quantum particles, known as qubits, that performed calculations. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]

At the subatomic scale, where the odd rules of quantum mechanics hold sway, physicists describe the state of systems through a mathematical construct called a wave function. This function is an expression of all the possible states the system could be in  even, in the case of a particle, all the possible locations it could be in  and the probability of the system being in any of those states at any given time. Generally, as time passes, wave functions spread out; a particle's possible location can be farther away if you wait an hour than if you wait 5 minutes.

Undoing the spreading of the wave function is like trying to put spilled milk back in the bottle. But that's exactly what the researchers accomplished in this new experiment.

"There is basically no chance of this happening on its own," lead researcher Valerii Vinokur, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, told Live Science. "It is like that saying, where if you give a monkey a typewriter and a lot of time, he may write Shakespeare." In other words, it's technically possible but so unlikely it may as well be impossible.

How did the scientists make the essentially impossible happen? By carefully controlling the experiment.

"You really need a lot of control to make all the broken pieces of a teacup come back together," Stephen Bartlett, professor of physics at the University of Sydney, told Live Science. Bartlett was not involved in the study. "You have to have a lot of control over the system in order to make it do that  and a quantum computer is something that lets us have a huge amount of control over a simulated quantum system."

The researchers used a quantum computer to simulate a single particle, its wave function spreading out over time like a ripple in a pond. Then, they wrote an algorithm in the quantum computer that reversed the time evolution of every single component of the wave function, essentially pulling that ripple back into the particle that created it. They accomplished this feat without increasing entropy, or disorder elsewhere in the universe, seemingly defying the arrow of time.

Does this mean the researchers made a time machine? Did they violate the laws of physics? The answer is no to both of those questions. The second law of thermodynamics says that the order of the universe must decrease over time but not that it can never stay the same in very special cases. And this experiment was small enough, short enough and controlled enough that the universe neither gained nor lost energy.

"It is very complex and complicated to send waves on a pond back" once they've been created, Vinokur said, "but we saw that this was possible in the quantum world, in a very simple case." In other words, it was possible when they used the control given to them by the quantum computer to undo time's effect.

After running the program, the system went back to its original state 85 percent of the time. However, when a third qubit was introduced, the experiment succeeded only 50 percent of the time. The researchers said the complexity of the system likely increased too much with the third qubit, making it harder for the quantum computer to maintain control over all aspects of the system. Without that control, entropy can't be held in check, and the time reversal is therefore imperfect. Still, they're aiming for bigger systems and bigger quantum computers for their next steps, Vinokur told Live Science.

"The work is a nice contribution to the foundations of physics," James Whitfield, a professor of physics at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "It reminds us that not all applications of quantum computing must be application-oriented to be interesting."

"This is exactly why we're building quantum computers," said Bartlett. "This is a demonstration that quantum computers can allow us to simulate things that should not occur in the real world."

Originally published on Live Science.
The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal

By William J. Burns

Random House. 501 pp. $32

---

"Events, dear boy, events." In his masterful diplomatic memoir, William J. Burns uses this aphorism, attributed to former British prime minister Harold Macmillan, to explain what so often sabotaged the strategic plans of the five presidents he served.

These presidents all wanted to play a visionary "long game." But as Burns cautions, "It's the short game - coping with stuff that happens unexpectedly - that preoccupies policymakers and often shapes their legacies." That has been especially true with the Middle East, bungled by one president after another, with the best of intentions. The region, he writes, "remained best in class in dysfunction and fragility."

Burns has written a wise, sometimes rueful account of why things often don't work out the way statesmen plan. Reading the book, you'll appreciate why Burns is widely viewed as the best Foreign Service officer of his generation. His clarity, good judgment and basic decency come through on every page. Yet it's painful that Burns, the best and brightest, couldn't prevent the chain of error that helped undo the American century.

This book is fascinating in part for its account of how Burns became such a good diplomat. From the first, he was a golden boy, a young man whom older men and women instinctively trusted and cultivated. In his early years, he moved from mentor to mentor - from Colin Powell at the National Security Council to Dick Murphy at the Near East Bureau to Secretary of State Jim Baker. Burns doesn't say so directly, but the reader senses that of all these teachers, the stealthy, subtly manipulative Baker may have been his favorite.

Burns was a listener, with fluent Arabic and Russian, and he could hear the nuances that others often missed. He worried about squeezing a wounded post-Soviet Russia too hard by over-aggressive expansion of NATO; he knew that toppling Saddam Hussein could destabilize Iraq and the Middle East; he sensed that overthrowing Hosni Mubarak might similarly create chaos in Egypt. But knowing and doing are different, unfortunately.

Reading Burns' narrative of the cables and memoranda he sent to his superiors, I had two conclusions: First, he was usually correct in his intuitions about potential mistakes that presidents should avoid. But second, he usually went along with decisions, even when he sensed they could cause difficulty. The reader is left feeling grateful that Burns never resigned in protest but wondering if perhaps he should have.

President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a prime example. Burns wrote a warning memo titled "The Perfect Storm" as an "antidote to the recklessly rosy assumptions" of the Bush administration. "We highlighted the deep sectarian fault lines in Iraq. ... We emphasized the dangers of civil unrest and looting if the Iraqi military and security institutions collapsed. ... We noted the likelihood that ... Iran could wind up as a major beneficiary."

Yet as Burns honestly admits, that wasn't enough: "What we did not do ... was take a hard stand against war altogether. ... In the end, we pulled some punches. ... Why didn't I go to the mat in my opposition or quit? ... I still find my own answer garbled and unsatisfying." (For what it's worth, I would make a similar self-criticism of my journalism during that period.)

Russia is another car wreck that Burns saw coming but couldn't stop. He was a political officer in Moscow from 1994 to 1996, during the catastrophic disarray of Boris Yeltsin's reign, when Russia was literally falling apart, and he returned as ambassador from 2005 to 2008, when Vladimir Putin was consolidating power and taking revenge. "Basically, we're facing a Russia that's too big a player on too many issues to ignore," he wrote in a gloomy cable about Putin's revanchism.

Burns had cautioned in a 1994 cable from Moscow that Russian hostility to NATO expansion "is almost universally felt across the political spectrum here," but the United States went ahead anyway, admitting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1997 and then moving further east. He quotes (without disagreement) George F. Kennan's comment that this hyper-fast expansion of NATO was "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era."

By the time he returned to Moscow and presented his credentials at the Kremlin as ambassador in 2005, Putin pulled him aside and told him: "You Americans need to listen more. You can't have everything your way anymore. We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms."

Burns understood that the pugnacious Putin was looking for a fight, especially after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton challenged the legitimacy of his party's success in the Duma elections in 2011 - which Putin would later cite as justification for his meddling against Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Yet for all his caution and good sense, Burns helped pull the tiger's tail harder when he visited newly installed Ambassador Michael McFaul in January 2012 and accompanied him to meet Russian opposition leaders before the March presidential election. Putin saw it as more U.S. meddling, and the incident poisoned McFaul's tenure in Moscow. "The nastiness never stopped," Burns writes. "I just wish I hadn't provided such an immediate and visible trigger."

On Syria, Burns is brutally frank: "It is hard not to see Syria's agony as an American policy failure." As Obama's deputy secretary of state, Burns advocated what I think were the right positions, arguing for an early push in 2012 to arm and train the Syrian opposition when it might have succeeded, and urging Obama to retaliate after President Bashar al-Assad violated global norms and used chemical weapons. He lost those fights but stayed on as deputy secretary.

Burns writes wisely of the Syria fiasco: "Yet again, where we ran into trouble was in our short game. We misaligned ends and means, promising too much, on the one hand - declaring that 'Assad must go' and setting 'red lines' - and applying tactical tools too grudgingly and incrementally, on the other."

That's the poignancy of Burns' book, that it illustrates so vividly the gap between knowing the right thing and getting it done.

A genuinely masterful example of how the policy process should work is the Iran nuclear negotiation, which Burns conducted through a "back channel" that amazingly remained a secret through eight rounds. I had to smile reading Burns' frustration with the Iranians' assertion of a "right to enrich" uranium, a claim they said had been bolstered by secret talks with "various Americans, including members of Congress."

Burns doesn't mention that the chief culprit in feeding Iran's belief that the United States had conceded this "right" was John Kerry, who had the first exploratory talks in Oman when he was a senator, and later, of course, became Burns' boss as secretary of state. (Kerry outed himself on the right-to-enrich issue in his own memoir, but Burns doesn't rub it in.)

Burns closes with what I found a too-cheery reassurance about American "resilience" and the "plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the potential of American diplomacy." I'd like to think he's right, but the evidence is questionable.

The American-led global order is like a bridge that had become weakened over decades and that finally cracked under the strain of President Trump's disastrous leadership. The State Department and the National Security Council staff are gutted; American alliances are in disarray. Today, it's fair to say the interagency policy process that Burns served for 31 years has all but collapsed.

A future president may repair some of the damage. But I'm not sure America will ever get back to where it was in November 2016, or March 2003, or Sept. 11, 2001 - pick your date when the yarn began to break. Burns was the very best diplomatic representative that America had in the years leading up to the great unraveling. A reader wishes he was still in government but wonders if even he could make much of a difference.
Louisa on the Front Lines: Louisa May Alcott in the Civil War

By Samantha Seiple

Seal Press. 243 pp. $27

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Louisa May Alcott was a runner. Of the many fascinating details that come to life in Samantha Seiple's new book, "Louisa on the Front Lines," this one is particularly telling. Just think about it. More than 100 years before running became a popular sport, Alcott ran for the sheer joy of it, faster than all the boys in her village - and presumably in leather shoes and long, heavy skirts. It is a revealing insight that lets us know there is nothing old-fashioned about the author of "Little Women." Alcott was way ahead of her time.

Somewhat fittingly, "Louisa on the Front Lines" isn't a traditional biography, checking the boxes of the events and dates of her life, although it does cover much of her life. Instead it focuses primarily on the pivotal six weeks when Alcott worked as a nurse in Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, an experience that sparked her literary coming of age. Seiple paints a compelling picture of the upbringing and personal traits that drew Alcott to volunteer and the tremendous impact her experience as a nurse had on her later life and work. In a larger sense, it is the story of a woman finding her voice in a society that offered women very constrained and narrow roles.

The first chapters fill in the backstory to Alcott's fateful decision - as she would later describe it - to go to war. Despite constantly living on the edge of poverty, Lu (as Alcott was commonly known) crossed paths with some of the most famous literary and philosophical figures of her day. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was an important Transcendentalist thinker and educator whose strict moral principles were easier to admire from afar than to actually live with. He would not accept wages, only donations, and founded a vegan utopian commune called Fruitlands that failed miserably after six months. When the family's financial straits became so dire that Lu considered selling her beautiful long hair, Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped in to give the family a loan. Nathaniel Hawthorne was their neighbor, and Harriet Tubman used their house as a station on the Underground Railroad. Surrounded by people who were changing the world, when war finally came, Alcott was desperate to do more than make bandages.

Using her connections to Dorothea Dix, a family friend and prominent 19th-century reformer, she managed to secure a position as a nurse. As odd as it sounds today, at the beginning of the Civil War the very idea of a female nurse was considered shocking and utterly inappropriate. Even when the Union Army began the controversial practice of hiring women as nurses, they were paid less than men and were required to be, among other things, at least 30 years of age and plain looking. Actual nursing experience was not required, although given the limited medical knowledge of the day, empathy was often the best treatment available. Sadly, that too was often in short supply.

Seeing the conflict through Lu's eyes gives it an immediacy that sweeps you up so much,you sometimes forget who won the war. At one point, Seiple briefly switches from Alcott's story to that of John Suhre, a courageous young soldier from Pennsylvania, transporting the reader onto the chaotic battlefield of Gen. Ambrose Burnside's ill-fated Fredericksburg campaign. So when a fresh batch of casualties arrives at the Union Hotel Hospital in December 1862, you know how much they have been through. Alcott's concern for her patients is palpable, as is her dismay at the corruption and the wretched conditions the wounded and dying endured. While she strove to present a brave face in her letters home to her family, her journal entries are heartbreaking. Have a box of tissues handy.

The second half of the book follows Alcott's growing success as an author, allowing her for the first time to fully support her family with her earnings. A terrible illness cut short her time at the hospital and sent her home before the end of war. While recovering she wrote "Hospital Sketches," which was hit with a public desperate for news from the front. This marked the start of her success as an author. She eventually won over the editor of the Atlantic, who had previously dismissed her writing and suggested she stick to teaching. He published her poem "Thoreau's Flute" and was so impressed with "Hospital Sketches" that he commissioned an original story. More books followed, including a story "for girls" that she wrote at her publisher's request. Later she traveled to Switzerland as the companion of an invalid, where she perhaps had a love affair.

Toward the very end Seiple seems to run out of steam, repeating several points almost verbatim and dropping hints that the future is bleak for Alcott. Suddenly the book jumps ahead 10 years with a brief chapter on Alcott's commitment to women's suffrage, and then that's all, the story is done. It's almost as if a chapter has been accidentally left out or Seiple ran up against a hard deadline or page limit. But given that the text takes up less than 200 pages, it's hard to make sense of the abrupt stop. It's like eating a delicious meal at a restaurant but having to leave before your dessert has arrived. No doubt many readers will turn to Google to find out what finally happened to Alcott, filling in the rest of her story.

Even though it ends too soon, "Louisa on the Front Lines" is a rich, enlightening tale. Seiple wisely lets her subject narrate as often as possible, and Alcott's voice shines through in her fresh, clean prose. Drawing from multiple letters, diaries and other sources, many of them previously unmined, the portrait that comes through is of a fearless, hardworking, fun young woman devoted to her family and friends and unafraid to challenge conventions. In our similar age of great social and political division, "Louisa on the Front Lines" is an inspirational story about perseverance and commitment to ideals. If she was alive today we would run her for Congress.

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Robb is a director for the National Archives Foundation and was a founding board member of the Fairfax Library Foundation.
The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal.

By Evan Ratliff

Random House. 446 pp. $28

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Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire

William Morrow. 351 pp. $27.99

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Paul Le Roux was raised in South Africa and mastered computer programing well enough to have made a good living and even gotten rich, had he pursued a straight career in software development or cybersecurity. Instead, he built an international mafia-style empire, hired a team of hit men to kill and torture people, and went to federal prison.

Why? In his book "The Mastermind," Evan Ratliff speculates that Le Roux's obsessive immersion in coding might have warped his mind and amplified his sadistic leanings. "His approach was algorithmic, not moral," he observes. But Ratliff takes the idea no further; he's more concerned with how Le Roux's coding affected the rest of us - by making him vastly more powerful and dangerous.

This allows him to place Le Roux's story within a larger one about a world made more incoherent and frightening by the internet. Web promoters and billionaires praise the internet's potential to redistribute power and disrupt institutions, but Ratliff reminds us that those so empowered include people like Le Roux - in thrall to greed and uninhibited by ethics - and the institutions so weakened are those that once afforded us protection.

Ratliff's thoughtful, deftly written account begins in 2007, when federal investigators in Minneapolis come across Le Roux's vast network of online pharmaceutical suppliers. Le Roux, then in his mid-30s, had been a dropout, a computer geek and an inventor of groundbreaking encryption software, then built his gray-market drug empire from scratch. The business was filling thousands of prescriptions by mail, mostly painkillers not yet regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was soon grossing $250 million a year, and Le Roux branched out into overseas logging, gold-buying and money-laundering ventures.

Ratliff describes how Le Roux's enterprises metastasized into international shipments of cocaine, methamphetamine and illegal arms. His gang of mercenary thugs, mostly former soldiers from "the international private security circuit," roughed up people at his bidding, Ratliff writes. They threatened a journalist and killed, among others, a lawyer and a real estate agent in the Philippines.

Finally, federal law enforcement caught up with Le Roux, made a deal with him and used him in a sting to catch some of his underlings, including American mercenaries involved in the Philippine murders.

Bit by bit, Le Roux's juvenile drug-lord fantasyland comes into focus: He treated women like toys and bought himself an island. But Ratliff recognizes that Le Roux, despite his over-the-top heinousness, is at base an uninteresting figure. He focuses instead on the workings of his empire.

This proves a fascinating chronicle, especially when Ratliff turns to the many ways poor nations serve as spillways for the dark excesses of rich ones. He highlights a telling remark Le Roux made about Liberia while being covertly recorded by investigators: "I understand this type of place," he says approvingly. He means Liberia is a haven for organized crime.

In fact, it is the Liberian police who aid the DEA's arrest of Le Roux, but up until then, his sense of where to find cover was unerring. For years, he inhabited an alternate universe - a dark zone of semi-failed states across Africa, Asia and Latin America through which he moved freely, shielding his criminal enterprises from the law. He bribed embassy workers in the Philippines and, in an astonishing episode, set up an armed corporate compound in Somalia.

Ratliff doesn't spare the intermediaries who linked this world to Western drug consumers. These included a Midwestern pharmacy and an Israeli call center. Le Roux found American doctors willing to write prescriptions for patients they had never seen and telemarketers willing to peddle painkillers to random strangers. He even employed a team of software engineers to develop a missile-guidance program to sell to Iran. The web made Le Roux's rise possible. But so did the willingness of so many professionals to tread the edges of ethics and legality.

Ratliff's book was released a few weeks before "Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire" by Elaine Shannon. Though she covers much of the same ground, Shannon's lens is narrow where Ratliff's is wide, and the cultural spaces the two books inhabit are different.

Ratliff has produced a sharp and critical examination of the entirety of the case. Shannon has spun an action-packed yarn around a piece of the whole - the DEA sting operations that led to the arrests. Filmmaker Michael Mann owns the film and television rights, and with "Hunting LeRoux," he inaugurates his book line under William Morrow. True to the Mann formula, Shannon's purpose is to dramatize the "boundary-breaking" efforts of one set of DEA agents who joined the case several years after the agency began to track Le Roux's business.

Probably no one involved with either book is happy about this concurrence. But the two narratives complement each other in interesting ways. Ratliff suggests that rivalries inside the DEA were bitter; Shannon's fleeting mention of any investigative efforts besides her subjects' can be taken as confirmation. Similarly, the DEA mostly refused to talk to Ratliff. So he is left to infer that agents were swayed by unfounded hopes of obtaining valuable intelligence about North Korea and Iran. Shannon, to whom DEA agents seem to have happily recounted their exploits, shows this was indeed much in the air.

One example sums up the contrast between Shannon's slightly overheated style and Ratliff's detached one: Shannon introduces a key character as a capable military veteran with a "pleasantly craggy face" and a "deep bass voice." In Ratliff's hands, the same man is revealed to be an idle, sun-seeking expat who washes up in a Philippine beach town to milk his public benefits.

Despite its cinematic gloss, Shannon's book does contribute some worthy observations to Ratliff's more penetrating - and more interesting - account. She is especially convincing when she laments the inability of traditional institutions to cope with the globe-straddling crimes of Le Roux. Ratliff's reporting shows this problem's depth and, unlike Shannon, zeroes in on the lackluster results of the U.S. government's investigation. He's especially troubled by the favorable terms Le Roux won in his cooperation deal. Le Roux, after all, was helping agents catch people who were carrying out his orders.

By that time, Le Roux had already lost the loyalty of several associates. (Shannon shrewdly notes that the internet allowed Le Roux to become an international crime boss without "a massive structure of camaraderie, like the Mafia.") Le Roux was reckless. He had been on authorities' radar for years. And although both authors nod to the conceit that he was a cyber-genius, even this seems arguable. Ratliff captures an early employer saying that Le Roux "wasn't a brilliant pure coder" and mostly built on others' work.

What Le Roux clearly had in excess was cruel obsessions. Isolated and with visions of movie-villain grandeur, he was able to extend his stunted worldview across borders partly because the forces that might have contained him proved feeble. To those who celebrate the internet's capacity to flatten barriers and transcend institutions, read Ratliff and think of Le Roux.

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Leovy is the author of "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America" and a senior fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy.
From fried boudin balls to gumbo, etouffee, and a lineup of seafood poboy sandwiches, a new Cajun-themed food truck has joined the San Antonio street eats scene.

The husband-and-wife team of Carlos and Tiffany Graves have launched Saint Queenies, a truck they have branded as Cajun food with a Texas twist. Carlos said the truck is named after Tiffany, who goes by the nickname Queenie.
A man has been arrested for stealing vitamins from the H-E-B on 1301 Guadalupe St.

The case unfolded on Sunday.

Loss prevention personnel detained a man who concealed a package of vitamins and exited the store without paying for the merchandise.

Police said the suspect initially identified himself as Daniel Emanuel Rodriguez. Authorities said they could not find a record under that name, including a Texas identification.

READ ALSO: LPD: Multiple females accused of stealing 70 items from local Walmart store

He further stated that he may be in the system with the last name Flores. Still, police could not find anything on him. Further investigation revealed he was providing a wrong date of birth, according to police.

LPD then identified him as Daniel Emanuel Flores, 33. He was charged with failure to identify and cited for stealing the vitamins. He was also served with a capias out of the Laredo Municipal Court for unpaid fines.
An effort to reach out to women who work in sex trades throughout Houston is bringing together two groups to spread messages with a spiritual slant.

Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church Women, in support of Jesus Said Love, will gather at 8:30 p.m. Friday, March 22.

MDPC Food Ministry is creating a special gift to share with the women who work in the sex trades throughout the city, according to a news release. The JSL team and MDPC Women will come together in worship and prayer to send out volunteers into the clubs that evening. This exercise of encouragement, commission, and faith-building brings together these organizations with a common purpose: To intercede alongside one another for the sake of these exploited women.

Jesus Said Love, founded in 2004, is based in Waco and conducts outreach services in Waco, Houston, Tyler, Dallas and Killeen. For more information about JSL, go to https://jesussaidlove.com.

We go into strip clubs across Texas, build relationships with club employees without strings attached and connect them to community and spiritual resources, the organization reports.

The MDPC Women will conduct an ongoing prayer chain from 9:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. while the JSL team is out ministering.

Community participation in the gathering at 8:30 p.m. or in the prayer chain is welcome. Contact Amanda Grace Caldwell, LPC and MDPC counselor-in-residence, at acaldwell@mdpc.org or 713-490-0931.

Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church is located at 11612 Memorial Drive in Houston.

rkent@hcnonline.com
Regardless of how any business leader personally feels about data-privacy regulations, they seem destined to grow stronger.

In December, a coalition of more than 200 banks, retailers and tech companies called on Congress to draft stricter privacy legislation. Coalition members said they believed that all companies should be subject to the same rules, regardless of their size or industry, and that there should be a national standard for data-breach notifications.

The fact that private industry was itself calling for legislation is significant. Companies are now acutely aware of the financial and public relations fallout from data breaches, so much so that they are actually asking lawmakers to hold them to higher standards. The public is equally anxious about data privacy.

Related: The Very Strong Business Case for Complying With the Worlds Toughest Data Protection Regulation

And it's that combination that makes it extremely likely that tougher data regulations are headed down the pipeline.

All this comes on the heels of the General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR) implementation in the European Union last spring, plus the passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act last summer. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are currently butting heads on the issue, with the GOP interested only in a federal law that would supersede any state regulations.

What does small business think of all this? Considering that California's law goes into effect in January 2020 and that nearly every other state has proposed various data privacy legislation, small businesses are obviously eager to avoid a potential patchwork of state laws. The regulatory waters are already choppy enough.

Some industries, like finance, are accustomed to data regulations. Considering the scope of potential new regulations, that finance sector experience wont count for much, however. For the simple fact is that every company in America needs to prepare for new compliance challenges throughout 2019.

Have you thought about what compliance means to you?

The costs

Most companies expect pending regulations to be modeled on the GDPR that now applies to every business serving customers in the European Union. GDPR levies fines for every single record that is exposed in a breach, meaning fines can run into the millions (or even billions) of euros (do the math for $U.S.).

If the size of those numbers is troubling, consider the likelihood of a fine. Forthcoming regulations will obligate companies to take a whole new approach to data and customer engagement. Adjusting to complex, wide-ranging new regulations wont be easy. Companies may be eager to comply but find themselves in trouble because theyre unable.

The ever-increasing threat of cybercrime is another worry. Todays hackers are both tenacious and sophisticated, making cybersecurity incredibly difficult to ensure. Following whatever regulations are released wont make companies immune to attack or exempt from fines -- though it will make them better protected than they are today.

Making compliance simple and certain

We dont yet know what form any new regulations might take or how they would affect individual companies. Luckily, the details are not necessary for businesses to begin building a better approach to compliance. The goal is to make managing compliance simultaneously easier and more consistent. Start with these steps:

1. Collect data from across channels.

Dont think of data as "regulated" versus "unregulated." All data is potentially sensitive, so instead of protecting some data, companies should begin protecting all data equally. That starts with busineses being able to collect data from as many sources as possible for storage on one platform thats been standardized for compliance.

Related: The Feds and the States Are Embracing Privacy Law; What That Means to Your Business

Xerox recognized the value of standardization when, in 2017, it established an Office of Compliance, which strives to create a positive corporate compliance culture by helping employees do diligent work, and ensuring that senior leaders and all members of management send consistent messages. This office also constantly reviews and updates corporate policies to align with evolving regulatory and legal requirements.

Such top-down coordination will be essential once fast-moving data in multiple formats becomes subject to privacy laws. Think of it as a dedicated compliance team that's entrusted to stay abreast of each new development and respond accordingly.

Companies of all sizes should copy Xerox and make an effort to codify their compliance protocols -- the sooner, the better. Just make sure to stay open to the possibility of procedural changes, as forthcoming regulations will surely require flexibility as they are introduced and enacted.

2. Facilitate internal and external audits.

Audits are crucial for compliance. Complying with auditors often means turning over massive amounts of information. Alternately, conducting internal audits allows companies to find and correct issues before the regulators even arrive. In either case, companies need to have on-demand access to all their data; otherwise, any kind of audit is a burden.

Having all data on a platform accessible with unified search makes retrieval basically effortless. Nikon understands that a fast response is important -- so much so that it has developed independent systems. These systems enable the company's internal audit department to review compliance with laws and regulations, as well as with internal rules, without interference from operational divisions.

An overview of each departments annual activities -- to determine primarily whether divisions' operations are being conducted in accordance with laws and regulations, as well as to create proposals for improvement -- is provided to the companys executive committee and board of directors.

Picture how much easier external investigations will be to manage after your company performs numerous dry runs. Practice makes perfect. As regulations evolve over the course of 2019 and beyond, reacting and adapting fast will be key. Get a head start by instituting a system of internal audits as soon as you can.

3. Practice good governance.

Regulations dictate how a company must act both before and after a breach. Because of that increased scrutiny, companies must become hyperaware of data security. If, for instance, a breach went undetected, and therefore unreported, the resulting fine could be multiplied. Considering how unpredictable cybersecurity can be, companies need to have plans and policies detailing exactly how to act after a breach.

Related: Three Reasons Why Your Startup Needs A Corporate Governance Playbook

General Electric helps its global workforce keep compliance top of mind by employing about 800 compliance leaders and more than 600 part-time ombudsmen to serve as sounding boards.

Instead of trying to sweep compliance issues under the rug, GE confronts them head-on, ensuring that concerns are heard and addressed, and utilizing a hotline where employees can report any compliance concerns. Workers can also go to their managers with those concerns. The idea is that honest, open dialogue among all parties will stop many problems before they have a chance to start.

Every company should follow GE's lead. Sure, you likely don't have hundreds of employees to commit to the task, but having a layered network of oversight will help eliminate blind spots and stay on top of new legislation.

Avoiding hefty fines and negative publicity is important, but penalties are not the core reason to care about compliance in 2019. What is: Customers care about their private data and are tired of seeing companies misuse it.

In that way, regulators are paving a path for companies to thrive in a future economy driven entirely by data.

Related:



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WASHINGTON - Relations between the Trump administration and the government of Afghanistan fell to a new low this week, as they exchanged public accusations of bad faith and exposed deep differences over U.S. negotiations with the Taliban.

On a visit to Washington, the Afghan national security adviser, Hamidullah Mohib, charged that any U.S. deal with the Taliban would "dishonor" American troops who have fought and died in the war. Afghan-born U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad was acting out of "personal ambition," Mohib said, and seeking to "create a caretaker government, of which he will become viceroy."

In Kabul, U.S. Ambassador John Bass said Thursday on Twitter that it was "Afghan corruption and misuse of equipment, funds and other support provided by the American people" that dishonored the troops. "So do any Afghans who put their personal or political interests ahead of the national interest," Bass tweeted.

In a sharply worded statement, the State Department said Mohib had been "summoned" to a meeting with Undersecretary for Political Affairs David Hale, who reminded him that "attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are attacks on the Department and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process."

President Donald Trump has said he wants to withdraw all 14,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a vow that his top military and civilian aides recently persuaded him to tie to progress in the Taliban negotiations.

The Afghan government has been excluded from talks between Khalilzad and Taliban representatives, who concluded a lengthy fifth round of negotiations Tuesday in Qatar. Afghan-to-Afghan talks about the country's future eventually will happen, Khalilzad has said, but the dialogue has focused so far on U.S. counterterrorism concerns and the Taliban demand for foreign troops to withdraw.

The U.S.-Afghan relationship has been marked by mutual suspicion and exasperation throughout the nearly 18 years since the Afghan war began and U.S. troops arrived and ousted the Taliban government. But, with the exception of a brief foray under President Barack Obama, successive U.S. administrations have rebuffed repeated Taliban demands to hold direct talks with Washington, saying they should be talking to their own government. The Taliban calls the Kabul government a U.S. "puppet."

During his presidential campaign, Trump described the Afghan war as a "total disaster" and vowed to bring home U.S. forces. Instead, a lengthy White House review of Afghanistan policy resulted in the deployment of 5,000 additional troops and a commitment to a "conditions-based" withdrawal with no timetable.

By most measures, Taliban control of Afghan territory has increased since. Last summer, the administration announced the appointment of Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq during the George W. Bush administration, as Trump's special adviser on Afghanistan.

His "singular mission," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the time, will be "developing the opportunities to get the Afghans and the Taliban to come to a reconciliation."

Direct U.S. talks with the Taliban began soon afterward. After the fourth round in January, Khalilzad announced agreement in principle on a draft "framework" for the eventual full withdrawal of U.S. forces, and a Taliban guarantee that Afghan territory would never be used by terrorists - including al-Qaida and the Islamic State.

Trump indicated a week later, in his State of the Union address, that there was no date for withdrawal. But "as we make progress in these negotiations," he said, "we will be able to reduce our troops' presence and focus on counterterrorism."

President Ashraf Ghani's government, already livid from what it said was a failure by a "disrespectful" Khalilzad to even provide a comprehensive briefing on the talks, hit the roof, placing most of the blame on Khalilzad.

"The last people to find out is us," Mohib said in a briefing for reporters Thursday. "We get bits and pieces of information," he said, charging that Khalilzad's report to Ghani after the January talks "was about six minutes."

"In the space of information and reconciliation, there is no transparency . . . and a hell of a lot of tension," he said. "We are told that Zal," as Khalilzad is widely known, "is a great diplomat. I'm not sure I buy that. He is ostracizing and alienating a very trusted ally. . . . We think either Zal doesn't know how to negotiate, or there are other reasons behind" his actions.

Asked what those reasons were, Mohib noted that Khalilzad had twice before expressed interest in running for president of Afghanistan and has numerous friends and contacts among Ghani's political opponents.

As it directs its ire toward Khalilzad, Ghani's government seemed to be trying to avoid blaming Trump.

When Vice President Mike Pence visited Afghanistan four days before Christmas, Mohib said, he told Ghani that Trump was "not looking to withdraw" but was "looking for peace." Trump flew in five days later to visit U.S. troops, but he met with no Afghan officials.

"Try to reassure us," Mohib said, appealing to the White House. "Tell us what the president's policy is. . . . We are asking for our sovereign rights," he said, and "don't need colonialist approaches."

Ghani has asserted repeatedly that any credible peace negotiations must include Afghan authorities and a cross-section of society, and he has announced that a national jirga, or assembly, on the issue will convene next month.

But with presidential elections scheduled for July, Ghani has faced instability within his own administration, as well as political competition and in some cases violent defiance from longtime partisan and ethnic rivals.

Writing Tuesday on Twitter, at the end of the most recent round of talks, Khalilzad declared that "The conditions for #peace have improved. It's clear all sides want to end the war. Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides."

As soon as a newly completed draft agreement on foreign troop withdrawal and counterterrorism measures was finalized, he said, "the Taliban and other #Afghans, including the government, will begin intra-Afghan negotiations on a political settlement and comprehensive ceasefire."

In Senate testimony Tuesday, Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan expressed support for the talks, which Shanahan called "the best window for peace there in 40 years."

- - -

The Washington Post's Pamela Constable in Kabul and Paul Sonne in Washington contributed to this report.
Adeeb Sami's trip to New Zealand was supposed to be joyful - a chance for the Dubai-based father to surprise his twin children in time for their birthday.

Instead, the 52-year-old ended up in surgery to have a bullet removed from his spine after he dove in front of his two sons to protect them from a gunman who stormed a mosque in Christchurch on Friday, Gulf News reported.

By the time the rampage was over, the gunman had killed 41 people. An attack at another mosque killed seven more, and one victim died at a hospital, leaving the country reeling in the aftermath of its deadliest mass shooting in recent history.

"My dad is a real hero," Sami's daughter, Heba, told Gulf News on Friday. "He got shot in the back near his spine in an attempt to shield my brothers but he didn't let anything happen to them."

New Zealand police have not released the names of those killed in the attack, but charging documents listed one of the victims as Salwa Mirwan Mohamad.

Children are believed to be among the dead and wounded. Heba told the Dubai-based news outlet that she lost five family friends, including a 12-year-old boy, in the attack.

Abdulrahman Hashi, 60, a preacher at Dar Al Hijrah Mosque in Minneapolis, told The Washington Post that his 4-year-old nephew was among those killed. He received a phone call Friday morning from his brother-in-law Adan Ibrahin Dirie, who was in the hospital with gunshot wounds. Dirie had been worshiping in Christchurch that morning with his five children when the gunman opened fire. Four of his children escaped unharmed, but the youngest, Abdullahi, was killed.

The family had fled Somalia in the mid-1990s as refugees and resettled in New Zealand.

"You cannot imagine how I feel," he said. "He was the youngest in the family." He said that he would preach against Islamophobia during Friday prayers. "This is a problem of extremism. Some people think the Muslims in their country are part of that, but these are innocent people."

The gunman live-streamed the attack on social media. In gruesome video footage, which The Post is not publishing, the attacker approaches the entrance to the mosque and raises his weapon. One man tries to greet him calmly, calling out "Hello, brother." Then the gunman opens fire. In addition to the 49 killed at the two mosques, dozens of others were wounded or are missing.

Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan, honorary consul for Bangladesh in Auckland, told the AP that at least three Bangladeshis were among those killed in the attack, and others were wounded. "One leg of an injured [person] needed to be amputated while another suffered bullet injuries in his chest," he said.

Jordan's state-run Petra news reported that two Jordanians were killed in the attack, and Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal tweeted that four Pakistanis were wounded and five others missing Friday.

On Facebook, a user named Alta Marie said her husband Zulfirman Syah and her son were both shot at the Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch.

"I was recently united with my son, who has a gunshot wound to the leg and backside," she wrote. "He is traumatized, but we are all alive."

Asim Mukhtar, secretary general of the Pakistan Association of New Zealand, told The Post in a phone call that at least two members of the Pakistani community were wounded Friday, and five are missing. He said the Al Noor mosque is the largest in Christchurch, and that the shooting started 15 minutes before Friday prayers, when many people were still in the parking lot or walking toward the mosque. If the shooting had started mid-prayer, he said, he thinks the death toll would have been higher.

"This is a time of distress, we are in disarray, we don't know why this has happened," he said. "This is probably the last thing on our mind living in New Zealand that this will ever happen."

"We are really not feeling safe at the moment," he added.

A group called Syrian Solidarity New Zealand said Syrian refugees were inside the mosque when it came under attack.

Ali Akil, an Auckland-based spokesman for the group, told The Post that members of a refugee family from Syria were inside the mosque at the time of the attack. The father in the family was killed, one son was wounded and another was missing, he said, citing information he had received from a friend of the family.

The family had fled the civil war in Syria in search of "a safe haven, only to be killed here," he said.

Yasmin Ali told New Zealand's 1 News that she lost a close family friend who she loved like a grandfather and now fears she could be targeted just for wearing her headscarf in public.

"Family friends that we've known for 19 years - dead. People who were there for my engagement - dead," Ali told the news outlet. "You don't think something like this can happen in New Zealand, in Christchurch of all places with such a small community, kind and loving."

---

The Washington Post's Alexandra Baumhardt contributed to this report from Minneapolis and Kareem Fahim from Istanbul.
BRUSSELS - The years-long renovation of Belgium's grand museum devoted to Central Africa was intended to overhaul an institution that was packed with racist images of Africans as savage, sexualized creatures, in exhibits barely touched since the heyday of the country's domination of Congo. Now its reopening has ignited an angry debate here about whether the country has done enough - or too much - to own up to its past.

Celebrities have said they knew little growing up about Belgium's violent history in Congo, learning only of the "civilizing mission" the museum once focused on. Defenders of colonial rule have said the new museum is overly apologetic and plays down the benefits of Belgian state-building in Congo. African expatriate communities in Belgium say the renovation didn't go far enough. Even a United Nations human rights commission has weighed in.

The controversy shows the raw emotions still swirling around the rule of Congo by Belgium, a nation of 11 million where most white families have ancestors who were involved in the colonial project. Belgian King Leopold II took the entire territory as his personal fiefdom starting in 1885 - an enterprise that historians say was violent even by the standards of the era. To the extent Leopold is remembered abroad, it's for the bloodiness of his reign in Africa. In Belgium, however, his bearded visage still stares down from pedestals in parks and plazas.

At the newly renamed Africa Museum - an ornate palace down a broad, beech-lined avenue on the outskirts of Brussels - curators struggled with how to modernize exhibits in a place where racism is literally built into the building, in the form of carvings and murals of eroticized Africans on the walls. Belgian heritage laws forbade any change to the building's structure, even if the exhibits within it could be revised.

Museum leaders say they did their best. The displays in place since the former Royal Museum for Central Africa reopened in December after its five-year revamp present the story of Africa as beginning long before European colonists invaded. The narrative no longer emphasizes the benefits for Africans of colonial rule. And some of the artifacts on display - most of them from the old collection - no longer say they were given by Congolese subjects "in gratitude" to their Belgian rulers.

Some halls were redone altogether. One is devoted to life before the Europeans, another to the slave trade and the deprivations of colonial life. Yet another is focused on rituals of everyday life in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, the three modern countries where Belgium once ruled. An entire room in the basement is filled with racist statues on display in a kind of hall of shame, including a black man wearing a leopard skin about to attack another black man lying on the ground.

"When I arrived here 18 years ago, the permanent exhibit had not changed for 60 years, even since the independence of Congo" in 1960, said Guido Gryseels, the museum's director. "Belgium came to terms very late with its colonial past."

Gryseels tried to find ways to address parts of the building that couldn't be removed, including by etching the names of some of the Congolese who died during colonial rule on a window in front of a wall memorializing Belgians, so that when the sun shines, the Congolese victims' names are projected onto the original memorial.

In a country as small as Belgium, the museum has a major role in shaping the nation's attitudes about the past. Generations of Belgian schoolchildren have filtered past the cavernous glass cases of crocodiles, gemstones, ritual masks and other artifacts from the vast collection, most of which was acquired during Belgian conquest and colonial rule.

The new exhibits seek to present the same objects with a different emphasis.

"When I arrived here, it was very paternalistic in spirit," Gryseels said. "People had really colonialistic attitudes. They were showing an Africa we don't want to show anymore."

Leopold's dominion over Congo was so harsh it inspired Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella, "Heart of Darkness," and international condemnation. Many historians estimate that millions of Congolese died in the first decades of Belgian colonial rule from violence, starvation and disease.

The colonial system promoted a type of apartheid; nearly no native Congolese had opportunities for higher education, for example. And its assumptions lingered: As recently as 1958, the Belgian government organized a Congolese human zoo in the shadow of the Atomium, a Space Age monument that is now a Brussels symbol.

The renovation, predictably, has taken flak from critics on both sides.

One major objection is the lack of people of African descent on the staff of a museum devoted to the study of Africa. Gryseels said that 8 percent of the museum's scientists are African.

"That's not bad, but we have to do more," he said.

Others say the museum is still working within its old colonial constructs.

"There are the same mental categories as before," said Gratia Pungu, who served on an advisory committee for the renovation and said she believes the museum remains a "cabinet of curiosities," mixing displays testifying to Congo's mineral wealth with masks and modern African art.

Some activists in Belgium's African diaspora community say the museum reflects perceptions in Belgian society as a whole. Foreign Minister Didier Reynders dressed in blackface in 2015, for instance, something critics said was a sign of widespread racial insensitivity here. About 2 percent of Belgian residents are estimated to be ethnically sub-Saharan African.

"In Belgium, you often hear people talking about the positives and negatives of colonization. People don't take the whole machine on. You don't hear people talking about the positives and negatives of the Nazi system," said Aliou Balde, a member of an organization called Colonial Memories that offers walking tours of Brussels to teach about the colonial past.

"It's very emotional," he said. "It's people's grandmothers and grandfathers."

Others agree that the issue is emotional - and say that the museum needs to do less apologizing for Belgium's past.

"If you present Belgian colonialism, you must do it factually," said Robert Devriese, a former Belgian diplomat who is the managing director of the Royal Belgian Overseas Union, a group devoted to defending the interests of people with connections to colonialism. "Negative, why not? But also the positive."

He said that the new museum focuses too much on violence and death in colonial-era Congo.

"In three generations' time, we managed to make it the wealthiest country. It was an area that wasn't even in the Middle Ages," he said. "If the Congo is still a state today, if it hasn't fallen to pieces after all that happened, it's because of Leopold II."

The unresolved questions have drawn the attention of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, where experts working on a report about conditions of people of African descent living in Belgium said last month that the museum's renovation "has not gone far enough."

"The Working Group notes the importance of removing all colonial propaganda and accurately presenting the atrocities of Belgium's colonial past," the experts said in a statement.

The pageantry surrounding the reopening of the museum has also raised questions about the provenance of its collection of Central African artifacts, which museum leaders boast is the biggest in the world. Congolese officials say they plan to request the repatriation of some of the artifacts, a step Gryseels said he is willing to consider.

Overall, he said, he hopes the museum will live up to its new goals.

"It's not just about the colonial past," he said. "It's about how we deal with Africans, and about treating people as equals."
Federal prosecutors on Thursday brought terrorism and other serious charges against five people arrested last year on a New Mexico compound, alleging in a new indictment that the group was gathering weapons and training in their squalid quarters to kill FBI and military personnel.

The superseding indictment significantly upgrades the charges against the five, who were arrested last year after they were discovered living with 11 children on the compound. Prosecutors say members of the group conspired to provide material support to terrorists, conspired to murder an officer of the United States and kidnapped a child who later died.

"The indictment alleges that the defendants conspired to provide material support in preparation for violent attacks against federal law enforcement officers and members of the military," Assistant Attorney General John Demers said in a statement announcing the charges. "Advancing beliefs through terror and violence has no place in America."

The case against Jany Leveille, 36; Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 40; Hujrah Wahhaj, 38; Subhanah Wahhaj, 36; and Lucas Morton, 41; drew significant attention when the group was first arrested last year - in part because of the compound on which they lived and in part because officials suggested they were Muslim "extremists." Officials found 11 guns on the compound in Amalia, near the state's border with Colorado, as well as 11 children they said were neglected and the body of Ibn Wahhaj's 3-year-old son, Abdul-Ghani.

Authorities said Abdul-Ghani, who was taken by his father from Georgia, faced severe health problems. A previous complaint against the group, citing an unidentified witness, alleged Leveille - an undocumented immigrant from Haiti and considered the group's leader - wanted to perform an exorcism on him.

Some of the initial state child abuse charges in the case, though, fell apart, and federal authorities initially only charged them with weapons offenses.

Amy Sirignano, a lawyer who represents Morton, declined to address the specific charges but said, "All of our clients will be pleading not guilty at the arraignment next week." She said she was referring to all those charged.

The Justice Department alleged in the new indictment that Ibn Wahhaj and Morton maintained a firing range at the compound where they trained and dug an underground tunnel, and that Leveille and Morton attempted to recruit others to their cause.

The compound was low tech; prosecutors said it was composed of a wooden frame, a trailer, plastic tarps and tire walls.

The indictment does not identify any particular terrorist group affiliation but says the group talked of engaging in jihad and dying as martyrs. The indictment says they wanted in particular to target FBI, government or military personnel.

Most terrorism suspects arrested by the FBI are charged with non-terrorism offenses, according to internal bureau data reviewed by The Washington Post, and more domestic terror suspects were arrested last year than those said to be inspired by international terror groups. A senior law enforcement official told The Post recently that it is often "the violence that motivates someone more than any particular ideology."
William C. Powers Jr., a long-serving president of the University of Texas who earlier produced a scathing report in 2002 on the wrongdoing that led to the collapse of the Enron Corp., died Sunday in Austin, Texas. He was 72.

His family said the cause was complications of a fall and of oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy, a rare, adult-onset muscle disorder.

Powers was president of the University of Texas at Austin, the flagship campus of the state's sprawling university system, from 2006 to 2015.

But it was while he was a top legal scholar and dean of the University of Texas law school that he came to national prominence. In 2001, he joined Enron's board and agreed to lead a committee to investigate the company's financial dealings. Its findings led to one of the nation's largest corporate scandals and the collapse of Enron, a Houston-based energy company that had started to implode in 2000.

His blistering 217-page report found a culture of deception, self-dealing and self-enrichment at Enron. Controls, it said, had failed at almost every level, and the losers were the company's shareholders, to the tune of more than $60 billion.

Some critics had feared Powers would be soft on Enron because the company had donated $3.5 million to the University of Texas, including $276,000 to the law school. But those concerns evaporated once the report came out and Powers testified before Congress, saying that what he found was "absolutely appalling."

The Powers Report said Enron executives had intentionally manipulated the company's profits, inflating them by almost $1 billion.

The report, which served as a road map for more than a dozen congressional and executive branch investigations, placed the blame squarely on Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's longtime chairman and chief executive, and his protege, Jeffrey K. Skilling, who was president and the next chief executive.

Skilling, who was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in 2006, was released from federal custody last month after serving 12 years of a 24-year sentence; Lay faced the possibility of the rest of his life in prison but died of coronary artery disease at 64 before he was sentenced.

After issuing his report, Powers returned to the law school, where he was an expert on product-liability law. He served as dean until 2005, when he was named president of the university.

During his tenure as president, Powers spent much of his time clashing with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, over the direction of the university and its funding. Still, he completed an eight-year fundraising campaign that netted $3.1 billion and helped establish the university's Dell Medical School.

In addition, he championed affirmative-action programs, carrying the fight to the Supreme Court. In Fisher v. University of Texas, a landmark 2016 ruling, the court said the university could consider race as one of several factors in undergraduate admissions.

William Charles Powers Jr. was born on May 30, 1946, in Los Angeles. His father was an educator and his mother, Mildred Rose (Fluke) Powers, a homemaker.

He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967, and spent three years in the Navy, stationed in Bahrain.

He then attended Harvard Law School, where he was managing editor of Harvard Law Review. He received his degree in 1973.

Powers taught at the law schools of Southern Methodist University, the University of Michigan and the University of Washington before moving to the University of Texas at Austin to teach in 1977.

He married Karen Devendorf in 1967; they divorced in 1981. In 1983, he married Kim Heilbrun, who survives him, as do his sons, Matt and Reid; his daughters, Kate, Allison and Annie Powers; six grandchildren; and his sister, Susan Powers. Another sister, Patricia Bemis, died in 2015.

As president of the university, Powers faced repeated challenges from Perry, who wanted the university to be run more like a business. The governor tried to remove professors whom he considered elitists, defund expensive research labs and measure the productivity of faculty members on spreadsheets so they could be paid according to the revenue they brought in. Powers rejected this approach, defending research investments and the broader goals of a liberal arts education.

"Bill put every ounce of himself into defending the soul of our university," Gregory L. Fenves, Powers' successor as president, said in a statement. "He bravely stood up for what was right."
Hejere, Ethiopia

It was too much to bear. She feared she would have nothing of her loved one, no body, no remains to bury.

She took handfuls of dirt and flung it in her own face, overcome.

More families arrived on Thursday at the site of the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people. They came with the hope that they could bring some trace of their loved ones home.

Some fell to their knees in grief when they learned there was nothing left. Others hurled themselves forward, wailing, or staggered in relatives' arms.

The mourning was mixed with frustration. For some, their beliefs dictated they must have something to bury.

"Big families, a lot of people and the full Israeli nation is waiting for these remains and we will not go out of Ethiopia until we find the remains to bury them," said Moshi Biton of Israel, who lost his brother, Shimon Daniel Re'em Biton.

"Because if not, they will stay missing for the rest of the life and we cannot do that in our religion."

Some Muslim families fretted. A body must be buried as soon as possible.

In the Ethiopian Orthodox religion, bodies are buried a day after death.

On Wednesday the family of a young crew member on the doomed flight, Sara Gebremichael, held a religious ceremony for her photograph. They had nothing more.

Many of the grieving gathered at the rural, dusty crash site outside Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa. The dead came from 35 countries.

Some families, including that of the flight's senior pilot, Capt. Yared Getachew, came bearing large framed photographs of the dead. In one, a victim wore a graduate's cap and gown, a source of immense pride.

Others arriving wore black T-shirts printed with a photo in remembrance. They held sticks of incense, the flames flaring in the wind.

One man held a tiny, torn scrap of document showing a photo of one of the dead.

In the background, searchers carrying large clear plastic bags continued to move slowly through the rubble, looking for more.

Some relatives at the scene expressed frustration, saying authorities were not sharing the information they badly needed.

An airline spokesman on Wednesday said some remains had been found and were in a freezer awaiting the forensic DNA work needed for identifications.

On Thursday it was no longer clear how long that work, once estimated at five days or more, would take. Israel's consul to Ethiopia, Opher Dach, suggested the remains would be sent to a laboratory Britain.

The airline, overwhelmed with requests, announced it would take no more questions from reporters and would post any developments on social media and its website.

Even at an airline briefing for families in Addis Ababa some tearful relatives stormed out.
When a gunman opened fire on a mosque in New Zealand on Friday, and a second mosque came under attack, the resulting death toll of at least 49 people meant that more were killed on one day than are usually murdered in an entire year in the country, according to national police statistics.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressed the public Friday evening local time, calling it "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

Only hours later, on Saturday morning, Ardern announced that New Zealand's gun laws would be changed, as she confirmed that the attacker held a firearms license. The quick response marked a stark contrast to reactions by other leaders in countries where mass shootings have occurred, who often respond far more cautiously to demands to reform gun ownership laws.

Three suspects are in custody, and the man who held a firearms license, according to Ardern, released a manifesto online hinting at the years-long relative peacefulness in New Zealand as one motive for the attack, which he suggested would show "that nowhere in the world was safe." His claim echoed remarks by an apparent role model, Norwegian far-right extremist Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people - many of them teenagers - in 2011. Norway has roughly the same population as New Zealand and an even lower murder rate.

In the coming days, debate over New Zealand's gun laws is likely to intensify in response to the massacre and Ardern's announcement.

"I can't imagine a country less likely to let this slide than New Zealand," said Philip Alpers, a New Zealander professor at the University of Sydney who founded a website that tracks gun policy worldwide. "Jacinda Ardern is not likely to say 'our thoughts and prayers are with you' and then move on," Alpers said before Ardern's announcement that laws would have to change.

In New Zealand, gun owners must be licensed to carry guns and gun ownership is seen as a conditional privilege, but firearms do not have to be registered. Gun licenses are valid for 10 years, and Alpers said the process for licensing involves interviews with individuals who have intimate relationships with prospective gun owners, including spouses, ex-spouses and roommates.

Gun laws came under scrutiny in New Zealand in 1997, when retired High Court judge Thomas Thorp released a report that endorsed mandatory registration and said self-defense should no longer be considered reason enough for purchasing a gun. The report also recommended that the government buy back military-style assault rifles, among a number of other suggestions that were not adopted in legislation. Now, Alpers said, essentially all those measures will be back up for discussion, particularly regulation of assault weapons. "They are the choice of mass killers and they will be the focus of everybody's attention," he said.

Although New Zealand's gun laws have triggered tense but restrained debates in the past, the conversation isn't as heated and ideological as it is in the United States. By comparison, American civilians are estimated to own nearly 400 million firearms, or about 120 per 100 people. In New Zealand, civilians hold around 1.5 million firearms, averaging out to approximately one gun per three people in a country of around 5 million.

"New Zealanders see themselves certainly not as a gun-free nation but as a nation with fewer firearm problems than most," Alpers said. "They look on the U.S. as most of the world does . . . with some degree of horror."

In his alleged manifesto, the suspect charged with murder in the mosque attack implicitly hoped for a gun debate.

"I chose firearms for the affect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide and the effect it could have on the politics of United States and thereby the political situation of the world," the manifesto says. The implied hope was that the debate might eventually escalate tensions between supporters of gun rights and opponents and result in civil-war-like violence that would cause more damage than one attacker or group could commit alone.

Although some New Zealand residents have joined Islamist militant groups, the threat of terrorist attacks has consistently been regarded as low. The European debate over the cycle of crimes blamed on migrants and right-wing violence has largely been unknown in New Zealand, where the far right remains marginalized. Instead, authorities have predominantly focused on bringing down the number of incarcerated indigenous Maori people, who are disproportionately represented in the country's prisons.

Until recently, police in New Zealand had not felt the need to carry firearms on duty. Last month, however, the Canterbury district on New Zealand's southern island broke with that protocol after a series of incidents that left a shooting suspect on the loose.

At the time, New Zealand Police Association President Chris Cahill told Reuters that "more and more policemen are finding criminals with guns, so unless we find a way of stopping these firearms from reaching them, we will have no other choice but to arm our officers."
JERUSALEM - The Israeli military said that it struck more than 100 targets in Gaza overnight Friday after two rockets were fired toward Tel Aviv, escalating tension less than a month before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces reelection.

Residents reported hearing explosions, but there were no reports of injuries or damage. The military said neither rocket was intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome military defense system, though warning systems had operated as required.

The Israeli military said they believed Hamas was responsible. Israeli media reported that their initial assessment was that the group launched the rockets by mistake.

One rocket probably fell into the sea, Tel Aviv's mayor, Ron Huldai, told Israeli television. He said he had instructed the city to open all bomb shelters, but life appeared to be returning to normal shortly after the incident.

While rocket launches from Gaza are not unusual, it was the first time in more than four years that they have targeted the major city of Tel Aviv. Israel and Hamas fought a 50-day conflict in the summer of 2014.

Netanyahu called an emergency meeting with top security officials, after which Israel mounted its response.

In the early hours of Friday morning the Israeli military said it was targeting "terror sites" in the Gaza Strip, striking around 100 military sites belonging to Hamas, including the main site used to manufacture standard grade rockets.

Seven more rocket launches followed, six of which were intercepted by the Iron Dome.

The escalation on Thursday followed a day of unrest in Gaza, where Hamas, the militant group that controls the Palestinian enclave, had forcibly put down demonstrations against deteriorating living conditions. Some analysts speculated that Hamas might have been trying to cause a distraction.

Others pointed the finger at Islamic Jihad, the second largest militant organization in Gaza, saying the group may have been trying to disrupt efforts by Egypt to broker a truce between Hamas and Israel. An Egyptian delegation had arrived in Gaza on Thursday evening.

No group immediately claimed responsibility. Islamic Jihad denied that it was behind the attack. Hamas also denied responsibility, pointing out the attack took place at the same time the group's leaders were meeting with Egyptian officials to discuss the cease-fire. It said it would find the perpetrators and called off its weekly Friday demonstration at the fence with Israel.

Netanyahu last year was criticized by members of his own government coalition for being soft on Hamas by agreeing to a cease-fire with that group after a spate of rocket attacks from Gaza toward communities in southern Israel. His political opponents have also criticized Netanyahu's decision to allow Qatar to deliver $15 million a month into Gaza to pay salaries of Hamas civil servants.

Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general and former national security adviser, said he believed Netanyahu was "experienced and sober enough" that electoral pressure would not be a factor in determining his response. "There is no real argument in the Jewish community about the need to react," he said on a conference call with journalists.

Israel normally holds Hamas responsible for any violence emanating from Gaza, regardless of which group perpetrated the attack.

President Donald Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, reacted on Twitter, saying, "Hamas violently suppresses its own people demonstrating against Hamas' rule & failures today and NOW fires rockets at cities in Israel. OUTRAGEOUS!"

Hazem Balousha in Gaza City contributed to this report.

Read more

Botched Israeli army operation in Gaza triggers sharp escalation in violence

Palestinian factions say Gaza cease-fire reached after worst fighting since 2014 war

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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Theresa May's government says the European Union could force the U.K. to remain chained to the bloc for more than a year if lawmakers continue to reject her divorce deal. The reality is a bit more complicated.

There's still no consensus in the bloc as to how long an extension should last, or even how it should be structured. And according to European officials, there's some concern about the implications of the U.K. taking part in EU elections in May and continuing to have a role in decision-making even as it's heading for the exit.

The prime minister is still trying to get her deal through Parliament and will have a third attempt early next week. If she fails, the government has pledged to ask the EU for an extension, and says the bloc will probably force Britain into a long one. It's at least in part a tactic to scare pro-Brexit purists into backing the deal, rather than risk the alternative of a long delay that could end up diluting or even reversing the divorce.

On the EU side, there's increasing optimism in some quarters that a second referendum could be called. That's another justification for a longer extension, two EU officials said. Still, there's no question of making a plebiscite a condition for a delay. Instead, leaders want May to set out a road map for the coming months, such as a schedule for votes in Parliament to work out a U.K. Brexit policy that can win majority support.

EU Council President Donald Tusk, who coordinates the strategy of European leaders, said in a Twitter post on Thursday that he wants government chiefs to be open to a "long extension" if Britain decides to "rethink its Brexit strategy and build consensus around it."

While several EU officials say in private an extension of about a year is the most likely option, two European officials raised the prospect that a much shorter delay would be agreed to. The EU doesn't want to be seen to force the U.K. into taking part in European Parliament elections on May 23, which a longer extension would make necessary, he said.

The risk of a short extension is that it creates another cliff-edge just a few months later, and the bloc wants to avoid "serial extensions" every three months.

A possible compromise has also been floated, according to two officials. A delay could be structured around two dates: Britain would be told it has a one-year extension on the condition it holds EU elections by June 30. If May manages to get her deal through Parliament in the extra time, Britain leaves on June 30 and doesn't hold elections.

If she doesn't, Britain would have to hold elections and stay for a longer period. This idea would have the effect of creating a new injury-time deadline for lawmakers to get the deal through.

Any request that May makes has to be approved by all 27 EU leaders. They'll discuss the issue after hearing from the prime minister at an EU summit in Brussels on Thursday.
TOKYO - North Korea is considering suspending denuclearization talks with the United States unless Washington changes its stance after the breakdown of a summit meeting in Hanoi between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a senior North Korean official said Friday.

Kim is set to make an official announcement soon on whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain the country's moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui told foreign diplomats and journalists in Pyongyang, the Associated Press reported.

But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration hopes to continue talks with North Korea. "She left open the possibility that negotiations will continue, for sure," he told reporters Friday, referring to Choe. "It's the administration's desire that we continue to have conversations around this."

The threat to suspend talks comes after evidence surfaced that North Korea has rebuilt a satellite rocket launchpad and amid speculation it might be preparing a rocket launch, a move that would seen as very provocative in Washington.

Choe said that North Korea was deeply disappointed by the breakdown of the talks in Hanoi and said the United States had missed a golden opportunity there, though she still described the relations between Trump and Kim as "mysteriously wonderful."

She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States changes its "political calculation," and takes measures that are commensurate with the steps North Korea has already taken, such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests, AP reported.

"On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission said. 'For what reason do we have to make this train trip again?'" she said, referring to Kim.

"I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger," she added. "We have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation."

At the summit, Kim offered a partial shutdown of the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center, where a large part of North Korea's fissile material is produced, in return for lifting almost all the meaningful economic sanctions on his country, U.S. officials say.

Trump rejected that deal on the grounds that it would allow Pyongyang to continue producing weapons of mass destruction, effectively financed by the lifting of sanctions. Globally, there was widespread agreement that North Korea was offering too little and demanding too much.

But Trump's counter-offer was also widely seen as unrealistic. He tried to convince Kim to "go big," and surrender his entire arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in return for "a bright future" economically.

Choe, who attended the Hanoi summit, said Kim was puzzled by what she called the "eccentric" negotiation position of the United States, but she said the North Korean leader still had a good relationship with Trump.

"Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful," she said,while accusing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton of creating an atmosphere of "hostility and mistrust."

She said even though the North Korean people, military and munitions industry officials had sent Kim thousands of petitions to never give up the nuclear program, he went to Hanoi to build trust and carry out mutually agreed commitments "step by step," AP reported.

"What is clear is that the U.S. has thrown away a golden opportunity this time," Choe said. "This time we understood very clearly that the United States has a very different calculation to ours."

She said it was entirely up to Kim whether to continue the launch and test moratorium, and said she expects he will "clarify his position" within a short period of time, AP reported.

Satellite images released last week showed North Korea has completed reconstruction of a rocket launchpad and rocket engine testing station at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, with work beginning even before the Feb. 27-28 Hanoi summit.

Activity was also seen at a site in Sanumdong, just outside Pyongyang, that is North Korea's primary developer of ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles. The work led some experts to conclude that the launch of a space rocket was being planned - although that does not mean it will go ahead.

Trump said last week he was "a little disappointed" at reports of the rebuilding work at Sohae, but added that time will tell if diplomacy will be successful.

Many experts see signs of a hardening of the U.S. stance post-Hanoi, with Bolton taking a leading role in the media ruling out any sanctions relief until North Korea fully denuclearizes and even threatening to ramp up sanctions.

U.S. envoy Stephen Biegun has also ruled out doing denuclearization "incrementally," although he insisted on Monday that diplomacy was "still very much alive."

John Delury, an expert on East Asia at Seoul's Yonsei University, said Choe's comments could be seen as a response to Bolton's threat to ramp up sanctions, and didn't mean the door to dialogue was closed.

"This is each side reminding each other what's at stake," he said.

Delury took heart from the fact that there was no name-calling or insults, while noting that Choe also took pains to praise Kim's relationship with Trump. "A lot of this is rhetoric or posturing, but both sides have been careful not to fling mud," he said.

Nevertheless, the deterioration in relations has been a major blow to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has staked his reputation on closer ties with North Korea. His office said it would not be daunted in this effort Friday.

"In any circumstance, our government will make efforts to resume negotiations between North Korea and the United States," Yoon Do-han, a presidential spokesman, said in a statement.

Han Jung-woo, a deputy spokesman, said the government was watching events closely. "The current situation cannot be judged solely on Vice Minister Choe's remarks," he said.

- - -

The Washington Post's Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C.  A North Carolina woman is facing charges after police say an Illinois paratrooper stationed at Fort Bragg died in a crash Sunday.

Reports say 22-year-old Spc. Patrick McDill, a paratrooper assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airbone Division, was riding a motorcycle when it collided with a car being driven by 24-year-old Jasmyne D. Russell-Dicker.

McDill, an Alton High School graduate, died at 4:38 a.m. Sunday at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center in Fayetteville. Arrangements are pending at Gent Funeral Home in Alton.

Russell-Dicker was arrested on charges of driving while impaired and has since been released on $5,000 bail.

Spc. McDill dedicated the last three years of his life as an Airborne infantrymen, said Col. Andrew O. Saslav, combat team commander. His tragic loss will be felt by his family, friends and the entire Devil Brigade. He will be missed.

Capt. Eric Kim, McDills company commander, said McDill truly embodied the 82nd Airborne Divisions motto of All the Way as he put his best effort in every challenge given to him. Alpha Company misses his genuine smile, the care he gave to his fellow Blackhearts and his indefatigable energy. Alpha Company deeply mourns his loss and is focused on supporting his family and friends through this tragedy.

McDills mother, Shannon R. Admire-McDill of Alton, posted a message on Facebook to those rocked by the news.

I want to thank all of Pat McDills friends for their wonderful words. I want you to know that I have read each and every one of those posts. I cant begin to tell what it means to me to know you all loved him as much as I did. The kid had a huge heart and it shows in your posts.

Growing up, he was always the protector, the one that wanted to shield those close to him from all bad things. I am proud to know that he carried that over into his paratrooper life. My heart goes out to all of you. Please know that I am very thankful that he made a positive impact on so many people. You were part of Patricks family and that means you are a part of mine. When I read your posts the tears do flow, but my heart beams with pride. And I thank you all for that.
An activist who has projected protest slogans on famous Washington facades was arrested Wednesday night after he shined the words "Discrimination is wrong" on the Rayburn House Office Building.

The misdemeanor count against Robby Diesu, 30, marks the first time anyone involved in the group responsible for the displays has been criminally charged. The artist who heads the effort said participants have had encounters with police agencies over the past few years.

The projections have become a new fixture of protest in the District of Columbia, shared on social media and on TV news, targeting government and private buildings that include the Trump International Hotel, and FBI headquarters. Participants projected "PAY TRUMP BRIBES HERE" on the side of the hotel along with other slogans, and an image of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the outside of the Newseum to protest President Donald Trump's acceptance of Saudi Arabia's version of how he was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.

Robin Bell, the artist who has coordinated the unique protests, noted at least one projected phrase that contained an obscenity Trump used to describe Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations.

Bell said he found it ironic that "after everything we've done, you would think the one thing nobody would have an issue with would be "Discrimination is wrong," a message intended for legislators debating the Equality Act, a bill to ban discrimination against the LGTBQ community.

Bell added, "We are insanely public about what we are doing."

A spokeswoman for U.S. Capitol police, Eva Malecki, said the charge was for demonstrating in a "prohibited demonstration area." Malecki said that by projecting an image onto the House building, the protester was "unlawfully demonstrating on Capitol Grounds." She said such activity is prohibited under D.C. code and traffic regulations for the Capitol grounds.

Malecki declined to provide the identity of the person arrested, referring the question to the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, which prosecutes misdemeanor cases. A spokesman for that office declined to comment, saying the office did not yet have the documents from the arrest.

Bell provided a copy of the citation. He said Diesu has helped him in at least eight projections and works for D.C. Action Lab, a local advocacy group.

Clay Calvert, a professor and director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida, said the citation seems to be a collision between the First Amendment and trespassing law, and the critical distinction will be in the intent of police in the arrest.

"If the reason for the arrest is that the government didn't like the message, then that would raise major First Amendment, free-speech concerns," Calvert said. "If the government has a content-neutral reason from preventing images then that is more likely to be upheld. I think this is probably their message, that a government building is not a billboard for people's speech."

Calvert added, "It's really a novel question."

In an interview, Diesu said he was projecting from a public area on the side of the Rayburn building when an officer walked by, didn't say anything and then returned. He said a sergeant then drove up to him and, "instead of issuing a warning or asking us to stop," put Diesu in handcuffs and confiscated the projection equipment.

Diesu said he was taken to the Capitol police station and given a citation that orders him to court. He said he was released after about two hours.

Police still have the projection equipment; Bell declined to say how much it is worth but said, "If I didn't firmly believe in what we are doing, and I cared about money, I'd be upset. I feel we are challenging what the First Amendment is and creating conversations. It's worth every penny."

Bell said he wants the story "to be about what we're saying, not about us."
Authorities believe that a man killed his wife and three children before setting their western Massachusetts house on fire and killing himself.

Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington said officials are investigating the fatal house fire in Sheffield as a murder-suicide.

Harrington said 41-year-old Luke Karpinski apparently killed his wife, 41-year-old Justine Wilbur, and their 7-year-old twins and 3-year-old before himself.

The fire was reported just before 8 a.m. Wednesday. Crews said the home was fully engulfed when fire crews arrived. The fire was extinguished just over an hour later, and the bodies were found when firefighters entered the residence.

Harrington said Wilbur's body was found by itself on the first floor, while the other four bodies were found upstairs.

The bodies have been transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Boston for autopsies. Harrington said the causes of death are not available at this time.

Family members told the Berkshire Eagle Luke Karpinski was a federal chemical patent examiner who worked from home. Wilbur has been identified by her employer as a patent attorney with an Albany, New York, firm.

"Justine was smart, knowledgeable, dedicated and hardworking. She was a devoted mother to her wonderful children, and a true friend to everyone in our firm," a statement from Hoffman Warnick Intellectual Property Law said. "We are each devastated by loss and extraordinary sadness, but are comforted and grateful for having shared Justine's infectious spirit and energy. We pray for her family and those who loved her."

A neighbor, who wished to remain unidentified, told the Berkshire Eagle the couple's three children caught the bus to the elementary school each morning, which her grandchildren also attended.

"They were very kind people," she said. "And very quiet, private people."

The State Fire Marshal's Office, Massachusetts State Police and the Berkshire District Attorney's Office are still investigating the scene and searching for evidence.

Harrington said there is no reason to believe the public is in danger at this time.
Washington

In a stunning rebuke, a dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats Thursday to block the national emergency that President Donald Trump declared so he could build his border wall with Mexico. The rejection capped a week of confrontation with the White House as both parties in Congress strained to exert their power in new ways.

The 59-41 tally, following the Senate's vote a day earlier to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, promised to force Trump into the first vetoes of his presidency. Trump had warned against both actions. Moments after Thursday's vote, the president tweeted a single word of warning: "VETO!"

Two years into the Trump era, a defecting dozen Republicans, pushed along by Democrats, showed a willingness to take that political risk. Twelve GOP senators, including the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney of Utah, joined the dissent over the emergency declaration order that would enable the president to seize for the wall billions of dollars Congress intended elsewhere.

"The Senate's waking up a little bit to our responsibilities," said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who said the chamber had become "a little lazy" as an equal branch of government. "I think the value of these last few weeks is to remind the Senate of our constitutional place."

Many senators said the vote was not necessarily a rejection of the president or the wall, but protections against future presidents  namely a Democrat who might want to declare an emergency on climate change, gun control or any number of other issues.

"This is constitutional question, it's a question about the balance of power that is core to our constitution," Romney said. "This is not about the president," he added. "The president can certainly express his views as he has and individual senators can express theirs."

Thursday's vote was the first direct challenge to the 1976 National Emergencies Act, just as Wednesday's on Yemen was the first time Congress invoked the decades-old War Powers Act to try to rein in a president.

Seven Republicans joined Democrats in halting U.S. backing for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in the aftermath of the kingdom's role in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Even though there's not likely to be enough numbers to override a veto, the votes nevertheless sent a message from Capitol Hill.

"Today's votes cap a week of something the American people haven't seen enough of in the last two years," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, "both parties in the United States Congress standing up to Donald Trump."

The result is a role-reversal for Republicans who have been reluctant to take on Trump, bracing against his high-profile tweets and public attacks of reprimand. But now they are facing challenges from voters who are expecting more from Congress.

Centrist Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins, who's among those most vulnerable in 2020, said she's sure the president "will not be happy with my vote. But I'm a United States senator and I feel my job is to stand up for the Constitution, so let the chips fall where they may."

Trump's grip on the party, though, remains strong and the White House made it clear that Republicans resisting Trump could face political consequences. Ahead of the voting, Trump framed the issue as with-him-or-against-him on border security, a powerful argument with many.

"A vote for today's resolution by Republican Senators is a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats!" Trump tweeted. "Don't vote with Pelosi!" he said in another, referring to the speaker of the House.

A White House official said Trump won't forget when senators who oppose him want him to attend fundraisers or provide other help.

Trump brought on the challenge months ago when he all but dared Congress not to give him the $5.7 billion he was demanding to build the U.S.-Mexico wall or risk a federal government shutdown.

Congress declined and the result was the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Against the advice of GOP leaders, Trump invoked the national emergency declaration last month, allowing him to try to tap some $3.6 billion for the wall by shuffling money from military projects, and that drew outrage from many lawmakers.

The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, and lawmakers seethed as they worried about losing money for military projects that had already been approved for bases at home and abroad.

The Democratic-led House swiftly voted to terminate Trump's order.
The planned demolition of a portion of the Beltway 8 near Texas 225 sent debris flying onto a nearby feeder road, damaging several vehicles.

It all happened Wednesday on the Beltway 8 feeder road near Texas 225 when Nicholas Laye was stopped in traffic. A rear-facing dashcam Laye had installed in his Lexus caught the moment when construction crews demolished a large portion of the bridge.
The beginning of the school year when you got to show off your new duds, new cars, new looks!

Sports! Playing, cheering, watching high school athletics.

The arts: Dramatic arts, musical groups and shows, graphic arts groups, debate, etc.

The prom! No dancing the night away or punch bowl antics.

The daily interactions. Just being with the group, hanging with friends and classmates.

Access to college recruiters and advisors  its harder to line up higher education.

Walking onstage to get a diploma while all the family is watching with everyone elses family.

Vote

View Results
A Fianna Fail European Parliament candidate has pulled out from contesting the Midlands North West selection race, citing travel difficulties for his supporters in attending this evening's selection convention in Longford.



Kildare County Councillor Naoise O Cearuil said a large percentage of those expected to back his candidacy would be unable to attend due to work commitments.



"The decision to hold the convention this Friday has meant that many of my supporters will not be able to attend the convention in Longford," he said, in a statement to the Leader.



"I appreciate that the party needed to have the meeting before St Patricks Day, however this date doesnt work for many of those supporting me that work in Dublin and throughout the entire region."



A native of Maynooth, Cllr O Cearuil has been widely tipped as being among a new and talented breed of local politicians looking to make the step up onto the national political stage.



Cllr O Cearuil's withdrawal, however, will come as a blow to Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin's plans to enhance the party's influence at European level and comes hot on the heels of a similar decision taken by Seamus McGrath in Cork.



Cllr O Cearuil said it was imperative Fianna Fail returned at least one, or possibly two MEP's to the "vast" area which covers the Midlands North West constituency.



"The NCC (National Constituencies Committee) have decided that one candidate is to be selected on Friday evening and I urge the NCC to consider adding a candidate in the East if the candidate chosen is from the West or North of the constituency," he added.



"The majority of the population of the area is in Kildare, Meath and Louth."



The Irish teacher said his main focus now was on ensuring his own re-election on Kildare County Council when both the local and European elections are held at the end of May.

Former Donegal Fianna Fail TD Niall Blaney was also critical of staging the convention in Longford, on Friday March 15 with voting from 2pm to 8pm. Cavan TD Brendan Smyth along with Anne Rabbitte TD from Galway East are also seeking the nomination to contest the Euro election.
Local News, Business & Finance, Health & Wellness, Press Releases

By Chris Boyle Published: March 15 2019

Because mold can spring up in just a few days,homeowners need to understand what mold is and what it can damage.

Our homes are our sanctuaries, places where we usually feel our very safest. But, what if there were something inside that home  within its very walls, hidden out of sight  that could be literally poisoning you?The culprit might be mold, and the mold might be toxic. Because mold beneath the surface is invisible, you might not know its there until it causes all kinds of health issues or structural damage.

Because mold can spring up in just a few days,homeowners need to understand what mold is and what it can damage. Otherwise, homeowners could riskspending alot of money and compromising their health. We spoke with Robert Weitz, a certified microbial investigator and president of RTK Environmental Group , one of the most experienced environmental testing companies in metropolitan New York, which works with homeowners, businesses, school districts, and even local governments. He shared some of the top questions RTK is asked.



Robert Weitz, CMI, President of RTK Environmental . Photo Credit: RTK



Is all black mold toxic?

No, but mold is still a health hazard. Mold of any color can be classified as either anallergen or a toxin.While toxic mold can create extremely serious health problems, all types of mold and mildew can cause health issues, especially among those who suffer from asthma and allergies.

What are the symptoms of toxic mold exposure?

Symptoms depend largely on how sensitive your body is to mold exposure, and can vary a great deal. The most common symptoms include cold and flu-like symptoms like shortness of breath, chronic cough, weakness, chronic fatigue, and sinus congestion. But studies show that toxic mold exposure can also cause a tingling or numbing sensation on skin, difficulty concentrating, light sensitivity and headaches, joint stiffness and pain, poor memory or difficulty finding words, fibromyalgia, and multiple chemical sensitivity, which causes varying symptoms due to low-level exposures to commonly used chemicals.

Once mold is remediated, will it come back?

It could, especially if a water-damaged site was remediated too quickly and was not allowed to dry thoroughly. In many cases, especially after hasty repairs post-Superstorm Sandy, moisture was trapped inside when the peopleconducting the remediation sealed up the walls. Mold thrives in damp, warm, dark areas. To fully dry an area, it usually takes on average between one and three days or more. Thats why a best practice is to conduct post-remediation mold clearance testing to ensure the area was remediated properly.

Can you take care of a mold problem by yourself rather than hiring a professional?

It depends. Theres only one way to fully understand the extent of your mold problem - have a professional, independent mold inspector to conduct a test. Why? Mold spores are lightweight and tiny and spread easily, so its very easy for someone not accustomed to working with mold to cross-contaminate clean areas of their home.

Is it cheaper to hire a company that does both remediation and testing?

Its a bad idea that can cost you thousands more! Homeowners should hire two separate companies for remediation and testing. Unfortunately, companies that do both may offer free or cheap mold testing and then make up the difference through remediation services. Companies that both perform testing and remediation are known to exaggerateor even fabricatea mold problem to profit on a costly remediation job. This problem became so widespread that in New York State, a consumer protection law now makes it illegal for the same company to test and remediate the same mold job. You must also be certified by the state.



Robert Weitz, CMI, President of RTK Environmental . Photo Credit: RTK



So whats Weitzs advice? If you suspect you have mold, get a test by a certified microbial inspector. They are trained what to look for but also use a wide variety of high-tech tools to determine what type of mold is present, the source of the water that is feeding the mold, whether the mold is toxic or an allergen, and more.

Most of our work in the last few years has been involving mold, says Weitz. It's a really big issue now on Long Island, a direct result of Superstorm Sandy, which caused terrible water damage that people are still feeling the effects of.

RTK, founded in 1994, has offices in Floral Park, Manhattan, White Plains, Connecticut, and New Jersey. Owner and co-founder Weitz has an extensive background in the environmental field, having begun his career in the lead testing industry.

During the past 25 years, we've performed almost 40,000 inspections, Weitz said. There are so many health issues that people are concerned about these days. When you consider that 80 percent of all homes and offices have an environmental issue that can contribute to significant health issues, you can understand the demand for testing.

He said that RTK tests for various hazards besides mold, such as lead, asbestos, and radon, and they also check your indoor air quality as there can be materials in your home that give off toxic fumes. If we find a problem we'll put together recommendations about what needs to be done in order to solve it, Weitz said. What we wont do is handle any abatement or removal procedures, because that would be a conflict of interest. We just let our customers know what we found, and what we feel needs to be done in order to remedy the problem, whatever it is.

Tom Taylor, RTK Lead Investigator. Photo Credit: RTK

The fact that RTK is only a testing company without any ties to businesses that handle the removal of the potential substances they may discover at a location is actually one of the company's main advantages, Weitz noted.

If a company takestheir own samples, does their own testing, and then handles the removal of any substances they may find, they will absolutely have a conflict of interest, Weitz cautioned. At RTK, we keep that totally separate. Completely unbiased testing is our mantra. If a company does testing and also does their own remediation, we will not work with them on a testing level at all.

From there, the client is free to contact any remediation company they wish in order to handle the removal of the mold or other harmful substances that RTK may have discovered on their property. Again, due to the completely bias-free nature of their business model, RTK is not directly affiliated with any remediation companies. After they complete testing and provide a blueprint for remediation, it's up to the customer to choose who they want to work with.

But regardless of how healthy someone is or isn't feeling in their own dwelling, Weitz was adamant in noting that if you're encountering health issues whenever you enter your home or workplace, it's probably a good idea to have someone come in and take a look especially with the prevalence of mold.

Again, it's a fact that 80 percent of homes and businesses have an environmental issue, he said. It really warrants peopleasking themselves, Hey, is this an issue that I have that can be corrected? If so, howdo I identify it? That's what a good testing company will do.
The challenge of how to improve understanding of intellectual property was discussed by Manny Schecter, chief patent counsel at IBM, at the Second Annual Intellectual Property Awareness Summit in New York on November 29.

Increasing awareness is one thing; increasing understanding something else entirely, Schecter said. He believes the general level of awareness is higher than before.

"In my mind we have a kind of conundrum," he said. "I think awareness about IP is in many ways increasing but I don't think real literacy and real understanding is on the same trajectory. It might be increasing but it isn't keeping up, that's for sure. That confusion, that lack of understanding, isn't the sole cause but it enables the lack of respect for intellectual property."

Importantly, however, Schecter noted: "I don't think awareness and understanding are the same thing. We can be aware that there is such a thing as patents, trade marks and copyrights and have a sense of what they do but not really understand them, and not be literate in them. A lot of the public are aware but not really literate."

This lack of understanding is a result of a variety of reasons.

"Intellectual property is hard," said Schecter. "It is not an intuitive subject to many people. Every one of us has seen articles where the types of intellectual property are used confusingly  where patents, trade marks and copyrights are used interchangeably, incorrectly so, because it is obvious the author didn't really understand fully what he or she was writing about."

On the patent side, people often get confused about various aspects of patents, such as the difference between filing and grant date. "All understandable," noted Schecter.

Those who are intimately familiar with IP do not necessarily help the situation: a second area of confusion, according to Schecter, comes from the public debate around IP. "We argue vigorously for positions in the intellectual property world, and we have a tendency to use a lot of rhetoric and take a lot of extreme positions in trying to make our point," said Schecter. "Sometimes we actually want that extreme position and sometimes we are just trying to get our point across."

Schecter urged the audience to close the gap between awareness and understanding by increasing the level of understanding. "We have to figure out how to optimise the benefit of intellectual property," he said.

Schecter believes that people who say that intellectual property is somehow hurting innovation are really saying is it is not achieving its optimum promotion of innovation.

"If we are actually going to get people understanding intellectual property we have to overcome confusion, we have to overcome misinformation, we have to overcome our own rhetoric and we have to overcome pressure from our clients. Just speak honestly and respectfully. Our innovation economy, our national security, frankly our everyday creature comforts may depend on it," he said.

"Those of us that really understand IP should feel an obligation to teach the others that need to know about IP but don't, to help them learn. If we want our competition to respect our IP, we need to respect theirs. And for other countries to respect US IP, they should see us in the United States behaving the same way towards each other. That sounds like something a parent would tell a child but I mean it sincerely."

Michael Loney

Managing editor

The material on this site is for law firms, companies and other IP specialists. It is for information only. Please read our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Notice before using the site. All material subject to strictly enforced copyright laws.  2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs.

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The UK recently decided the question of who should pay for the implementation costs of blocking orders. Attorneys at Herbert Smith Freehills analyse how the framework, case law, liability and costs for such orders differ in the UK, Germany, Italy and France
Several organisations, including the Yugoslav IMT Marxist Organisation Reds, have mobilised together in a united front as the Left Bloc for several weeks as part of mass protests in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Zrenjanin. The Bloc put forward social demands in the demonstrations, instead of the merely civil and democratic demands presented by the organisers from the opposition.

Our goal was to present an alternative to the policies of the ruling coalition around the Serbian Progressive Party, but also to put forward a different approach from the opposition coalition spearheaded by the Alliance for Serbia, who were organising the protests. Additionally, we wanted to mark a sharp difference from the policies promoted by the AFS: an unprincipled coalition of people recycled from previous ruling parties, members of the far-right and liberals who try to portray themselves as leftists. This alliance includes a spectrum of parties from the so-called left, to those on the far right.

It was known from the start that the opposition was behind these protests, but they were presented as open to all citizens, because the opposition feared that if people saw their hand behind these protests, it would hurt the turnout. Because of that, it was not just sympathisers of the Alliance for Serbia and the urban middle-class were attending the protests, but also a broader layer of people from different social backgrounds, disgruntled with the state of society and poor living standards.

Stop bloody workers' uniforms / Image: Reds

This was the reason for our decision to go out on the streets, and offer a different vision of progress through a class-based struggle for social rights, instead civic questions concerning the rule of law, and moralising disgust towards the corrupt government.

Stop bloody shirts (AKA one in five million)

Aftermath of attack on Borko Stefanovic / Image: Levica Srbije on Twitter

The cause for these protests was a street attack suffered by Borko Stefanovic, the leader of the Serbian Left, on 23 November 2018. The attack was definitely politically motivated and the most likely motive for it was the term left in his party's name. We condemn this attack, even though there is nothing left-wing about the Serbian Left, because it was most likely orchestrated by right-wingers who have been behind attacks on the radical left in the past. Those active in the class struggle know that attacks on the left by all types of thugs are nothing new or surprising. We are also aware that, with time, leaning on these hooligans this will be a more common tactic of the ruling class in crisis, no matter which party comes to power.

Two weeks after the attack the protests against violence named Stop bloody shirts began in Belgrade, organised by the opposition, but labelled as civic protests. After the statement by president Aleksandar Vucic that he would not give in to any demands, even if five million protesters demonstrated, the protests were renamed one in five million, after the defiant placards carried by the protesters. Tens of thousands of people came out to the streets of Belgrade, a turnout that probably surpassed even the expectations of the bourgeois opposition. The opposition followed a different tactic than that adopted in the April 2017 protests against Vucics victory, which were also started by them, but of which they quickly lost control, partially due to the intervention of the radical left. This time, the opposition called for apolitical protests, so they could prevent any different political position than theirs being expressed, until they had prepared the ground for taking over the protests. But due to the fact that the protests formally didnt belong to any party, the radical left could nevertheless find room to intervene.

Left Bloc on the protests

United Action Roof Over One's Head, an organisation fighting against evictions, informed the organisers of the protests that they would distribute their leaflets on the third protest, scheduled for 22 December. Since the protests were against violence, the assumption was that it would be allowed to highlight the struggles against evictions, thus raising awareness about a common form of violence against working people. The organisers replied that Roof Over Ones Head were not welcome with their leaflets on the protests, because (according to a statement by Roof Over Ones Head): of a supposed agreement that no party, initiative or movement should distribute anything at the gatherings (an agreement which was never publicly announced). The statement further added: [as if] the faces of the leaders of the Alliance for Serbia in the front rows of the protests are not a perfectly clear party symbol, while the organisers are AFS youth.

The activists of Roof Over Ones Head decided to distribute their leaflets anyway, despite the clear message that they were not welcome. The left-wing organisations supporting them organised themselves into the Left Bloc on the fourth protest, separated from the opposition with banners saying Down with Vucic  down with capitalism!, as well as No one without a home! and Stop bloody workers uniforms!, which were replies to the hypocrisy of the opposition, which organises protests against violence when their own shirts are bloodied in attacks, but when people are evicted from their homes or when workers die or get injured in their workplaces, they are nowhere to be found. Last year, 53 people died in workplace accidents in Serbia, and there were 779 serious injuries as reported by Kurir. Among those were the deaths of construction workers at the infamous project Belgrade Waterfront, which is a gentrification project funded by United Arab Emirates investors. Some of the slogans chanted by the Left Bloc were No one without a home, a roof over our heads now!, A worker is not a slave, scaffolding is not a grave!, France!  Serbia!  revolution!, since the yellow vests were at their peak at the time, as well as the famous song from the April protests of 2017, whose lyrics were coined by the Reds:

You band of thieves You sold everything Schools and factories Health care and pensions But well get all of it back!

Demands put forward by the Left Bloc were:

Safety in the workplace

Moratorium on evictions

Suspension of privatisation and selling of public companies and their property

Permanent and stable jobs for all

Constant attacks on the Left Bloc by the opposition

With the emergence of the Left Bloc in the protests, there came tensions with the opposition and the Alliance for Serbia. The first who objected to our attendance was the very star of the protests, Borko Stefanovic. On an unrelated comment on Twitter  pointing out the hypocrisy of the opposition being bothered by slogans against them, all the while calling for an apolitical protest  Borko cynically replied Youve had a great slogan: stop bloody workers' uniforms, because, you see, my busted head is a yellow, dirty thiefs head and therefore it is not important. Its also interesting that Stefanovic added: pointing out party slogans is unnecessary and bad. Imagine everything that we could point out, but we think it would be excessive. At that point, at the protest rallies, there were speakers directly from the Alliance of Serbia. The Agreement with the People was read out: a document written by the Alliance for Serbia with a number of commitments that the opposition will hold to if the document is signed by the people  none of this is apparently excessive.

Mislim da je isticanje para stranackih parola nepotrebno i stetno. Zamislite sta bismo mi sve istakli, ali mislimo da je visak. Imali ste sjajan transparent "Stop krvavim radnickim odelima", posto, jelte, moja razbijena glava je prljava lopovska i zuta glava i nije bitna.  Borko Stefanovic (@BorkoStef) December 31, 2018

Several weeks later, at the end of the protest rally, among the activists from the Left Bloc appeared Dragan ilas, ex-mayor of Belgrade and former leader of the Democratic Party, as well as the current leader of the Alliance for Serbia, followed by three bodyguards. This was intended as nothing but a provocation. With the aim of warding him off, the activists started shouting Vucic, ilas, same shit!, at which point his security tried to grab one of our activists signs which said: Public executors  private robbery. The aim of those slogans was to point out that Vucic and ilas are two sides of the same system, which is oppressing the working majority. The law that allows evictions was introduced under the rule of ilas former party. An altercation occurred again after the protest, when ilas was confronted with criticism of his own and Vucics policies, and he replied in a haughty tone, like he owned the place, insulting the Left Bloc activists with phrases such as: fuck you, faggots.

The regime media spun the situation. With the aim of discrediting ilas and belittling the left-wing activists, the incident was reported as an attack by ilas on poor little children, completely ignoring the fact that those children gave it back to poor little ilas harder than what he gave! This hypocritical defence by the regime media only sought to discredit the anti-regime protests as some sort of carnival, where nobody knows who is fighting whom. This was followed by a campaign in defence of the opposition on social media by AFS bots: people who, on social media, try to artificially manipulate public opinion. They attacked the left-wing organisations, presenting them as in cahoots with the Vucic regime, even though these same organisations have been speaking out against Vucic for years.

Realising that we would not easily budge, on 2 February, the opposition prepared a row of stewards, cordoning off access at the usual meeting place of the Left Bloc, with the aim of stopping us from joining the protest. This time they were far more aggressive, and when we moved to join the protests it came to shoving and even attempts at taking our banners. Of course, that did not stop us, and as soon as we went for a stronger push, we broke through the line of the opposition stewards. After all, left-wing ideas of a better society are a far stronger motive that personal interest and repeating the cycle of worn-out, capitalist policies. After that, a few stewards stood in front of our banner Stop bloody workers uniforms, one of which was in constant communication with his superiors through headphones and a microphone. The aim of this move was to provoke an attack from the Left Bloc, which would be distorted and used to discredit us, but all they did was to confirm that the Alliance for Serbia doesnt care about bloody workers uniforms, any more than the coalition around Vucic.

Stewards mocking the Left Block with a banner of Vulin and showing the Serbian nationalist three-finger salute / Image: Reds

The protests spread to other cities, and with them the Left Bloc spread to Zrenjanin and Novi Sad. But, as rumours started to spread about the Agreement with the People  the document redacted by the Alliance for Serbia with the aim of formally taking over the protests  so the number of ordinary people at their protests in Belgrade decreased. The culmination of the conflict with the opposition happened on 16 February, when the Alliance for Serbia printed out actual copies of the Agreement with the People to be signed by the people on the protests. Members of the Democratic Party, together with members of the far-right Dveri, dressed in shiny vests, came to provoke the Left Bloc, a move that was in part caused by the support the Left Bloc received from the Croatian reformist party, the Workers Front, which was regarded as a big torn in their side by the Serbian right-wing. Ladies dressed in expensive clothing jumped to take away our megaphone, the opposition stewards made a banner with the face of Vulin to mock the Left Bloc, calling us Vulins Left, since he is a regime bootlicker whose party has socialist in its name. Later on they tried again to take away our banners and flags. The authenticity of the slogan, which came out spontaneously without much thought, was proven correct that day: Vucic and ilas truly are cut from the same filthy cloth.

How to continue the fight?

The Left Bloc has decided not to join these protests any longer, even though they have continued. The opposition has successfully scared away a decent layer of the wider public when it formally took over the protests, which made us turn to more important fields of activism. The subsequent protest ended with the protesters chasing away the street cleaners, who were forced by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party to remove the stickers attacking Vucic that the protesters had left in a tunnel. Meanwhile the organisations supporting the Left Bloc met in a conference where the conclusions and political perspectives of each organisation were discussed. Through United Action Roof Over the Head, we defended a few families from evictions. We joined a protest of postal workers, the International Women's Day march, and the protest organised by an organisation called Moms are the Law, which is fighting against cuts to child benefits.

Member of the Reds on the International Working Women's Day march / Image: fair use

In the case of street protests like the ones organised by the opposition, it is always a matter of time before they will start to dissipate, especially when there are no concrete results. The mood for struggle among the masses cannot last forever without a road forward, but while that mood lasts, that is when the left should intervene. After the April 2017 protests against Vucics victory, the radical left once again proved it is necessary to clearly stand out against both the regime and the so-called opposition.

Even though we consciously entered the struggle against far stronger enemies, like the ruling Serbian Progressive Party and the opposition Alliance for Serbia, we will continue to join working people in the struggle for a better future, and will continue down this road until we accomplish this. Only by building the forces of Marxism around the IMT can offer an alternative to this cruel system and create a world fit for humanity!
At a service at the Islamic Societys Boston Cultural Center on Friday, Shaykh Yasir Fahmy described one image, one sound he could not stop replaying in his head.

When this ideologically-charged white supremacist, terrorist entered into that mosque, there was a Muslim at the door who said to him, Hello brother, Fahmy said, describing the mass shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand that left 49 dead and 20 wounded.

'Hello brother, welcome.' I cant, I cant stop thinking about that. I cant. Because thats what this world needs. It needs brotherhood and sisterhood, Fahmy said to a crowd of worshippers at the Islamic Society center in Roxbury on Friday afternoon.

The Friday service in Roxbury, attended by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Boston Police Commissioner William Gross and other faith leaders, was centered around mourning the New Zealand victims.

The shooter, an alleged white supremacist in his 20s who authorities have not identified, opened fire on two mosques just miles apart. He used Facebook to live-stream the terror as it unfolded in real time. Reports say the man is in custody, and left behind a 74-page manifesto describing racist beliefs and a desire to cause division and destruction.

The shootings occurred at the two mosques on Friday afternoon in New Zealand, the traditional time each week when Muslims gather to pray and worship.

Our brothers and sisters...went to pray in New Zealand, on a day just like this one. Just, this day, this exact day. In these exact spaces and the same faces, Fahmy said to those congregated at the cultural center Friday. To go and to experience what they did...leaves us all in a profound state of loss, in a profound state of pain.

The Shaykh encouraged those gathered at the cultural center to remain steadfast in their religion. Fahmy also said that society must not forget recurring violent acts inspired by religious intolerance and hate.

If the Tree of Life Synagogue, or the Parkland shootings, or the Sikh Temple, or the mosque in Christchurch, or the mosque in Vancouver, or the countless synagogues and churches and mosques that have been at the forefront of receiving the pain and the trauma and the hurt of white supremacist terrorists...if we dont see them, then were not seeing what things are," Fahmy said. That there is this ideologically-driven reality present in our society, and it is amongst, if not the greatest, source of great trauma for millions across the world."

We have to understand there are reasons why these realities play out. Its not just because of a few words of certain politicians, Fahmy continued. But there has been a concerted effort in the mainstream to pull a wool over this reality, and its just not right. Because too many people have suffered.

Walsh spoke after the service to denounce the terrorist acts in New Zealand.

We want you to know in Boston, youre safe. Weve reached out to the mosques in our city, weve reached out to the other places of worship in our city to let people know that were, that were paying attention. Were watching, Walsh said.

Theres nothing that I can say as a mayor of a city, as a Catholic, as a human being, that I can say that can turn around the feelings that everyone here is feeling today. I just want you to know that were here with you, the mayor added.

Police in Massachusetts three largest cities -- Boston, Worcester and Springfield -- are increasing patrols outside mosques following the New Zealand attacks.

The Boston Police Commissioner did not focus on safety in his address to worshippers on Friday, but instead turned to faith.

We are the good, we are not the evil. You can not defeat us, because the soul is everlasting, Gross said. Those cowards, those cowardly acts in New Zealand, only strengthens us. You look around you, look whos here in solidarity.

The solidarity was evident: Jewish and Christian leaders attended the service on Friday to share their support for the Muslim community as they mourned the loss of the New Zealand victims.

Jeremy Burton, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, said the community had become accustomed to supporting one another in times of hate.

I will speak, but really all of us are here just to be alongside you. Because youve been alongside us, because weve stood together as a community time and again. Because, candidly weve become too good at this. Weve become too good at being with each other in this city, in Boston, Burton said after the service.

The words of unity by city officials and faith leaders were met with applause and support from worshippers.

Im so glad and happy to hear the mayor of the city to talk about the faith of whatever kind of religion, Muslim, Jewish or Christianity, Boston resident Fatima Omer said. The mother of two said that though it was a sad occasion, she was happy to see everyone come together -- something that is typical in this city, she said, where she has always felt safe as a Muslim woman.

Boston is the greatest city. I consider myself as Bostonian, Im so glad to be here, she added.

Others, like Soufiane Chami, a student from North Dakota visiting Boston on spring break, said he felt inspired by the Shaykhs message during the service on Friday.

I think, like, the first reaction for someone who learns about the news, he can feel really scared. Like, should I go [to mosque]? But sometimes you have to go, you have to continue believing, Chami said.

The college student said he didnt believe the tragic shootings in New Zealand represented its people, nor does he believe any past acts of hate in the U.S. reflect on the country.

Americans make a lot of efforts to understand people and welcome people, this is how I know Americans, Chami said.
Improvements to the Tobin Bridge will cause significant traffic impacts to those traveling north of Boston.

The Tobin Bridge, which serves as a main access point to Boston from Chelsea for those driving on Route 1, will see heavy traffic as crews begin a project to update old infrastructure that has been untouched since the 1970s.

Repairs are already underway on other parts of the bridge, but construction will be extended to include the Chelsea curves section where grounded Route 1 meets the bridge.

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation said the maintenance work will require one lane to be closed on both the northbound and southbound side of the bridge, leaving two of the three lanes open during daytime hours, and just one lane open during nighttime hours.

Construction begins on April 1, MassDOT said in a statement.

The MBTA is offering free fares for inbound customers on the Silver Line 3, as well as additional Blue Line train capacity at certain stations. Customers will also be able to use their CharlieCard to travel between North Station and Chelsea on the Commuter Rail, MBTA General Manager Steve Poftak said in a statement.

Public officials are urging commuters to take buses or trains if possible to avoid the heavy delays expected on Route 1 during construction.

We thank travelers for their patience as MassDOT begins this necessary project," Highway Administrator Jonathan Gulliver said in a statement. We encourage everyone traveling throughout the Route 1 area to make smart commuting decisions such as considering public transit, using the appropriate technology apps to find the best route and time to travel, and building extra time into their commutes to account for potential roadway congestion.

It is unclear when construction on the Chelsea side of the Tobin Bridge will end, but MassDOT said crews are using accelerated techniques to speed up the maintenance process. All projects on the Tobin Bridge are expected to be completed by 2021, MassDOT said.
The White House says it strongly condemns the attack on two mosques in New Zealand calling the shootings a vicious act of hate.

The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate, Sarah Sanders, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement Friday morning.

Shootings in two Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand left 49 people dead and at least 20 more seriously injured. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the terrorist attack an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence, according to the New York Times.

The attacks were especially shocking, community members told the Times, because they happened in the midst of the Friday prayer.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all! President Donald Trump wrote in a tweet.

The police said four people, three men and one woman, had been taken into custody following the attack. Officials said one man in his late 20s has been charged with murder. Police also found two explosive devices in a car they stopped, according to the Times.

The police said that four people, including three men and one woman, had been taken into custody. Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia said that one of them was Australian.

Morrison called him an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.

The gunman - whose name was not immediately released by law enforcement - shared 74-page document under the name Brenton Tarrant on social media accounts.

The Australian reports that Tarrant was a white supremacist whose manifesto spoke about how he wanted to go after invaders to directly reduce immigration rates to European lands."

Tarrant called President Trump a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose, according to the Times, also made fun of his abilities as a policy maker and leader.
SPRINGFIELD  MGM Springfield casino generated $21.5 million in gross gaming revenues in February, reflecting a 9.1 percent increase over Januarys total, which had set a low mark since the casino opened in August.

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission reported that MGM Springfields gaming revenue in February totaled $21,500,878.31, an increase of $1,802,824.43 compared to January. The revenue in February consisted of $14,526,578.53 for slots and $6,974,299.77 for table games,

The resulting taxes paid to the state by MGM for the month was $5,375,219.58.

In January, the gaming revenue was $19.7 million., the lowest revenue of any full month of operation since the $960 million casino opened on Aug. 24.

Michael Mathis, president of MGM Springfield, said February was a solid month of gaming operations.

The contributing factors included dynamic marketing campaigns coupled with distinct entertainment offerings, Mathis said The offerings included a Lunar New Year celebration, several sold-out comedy shows, and a Valentines Day burlesque performance, he said.

The casino has more than 15,000 daily visitors, Mathis said.

MGM Springfield had told the Gaming Commission it expected $418 million in annual gross gaming revenue in its first year  or $34.8 million per month. The casino had $27 million in gross gaming revenue in September, its first full month of operation.

The Gaming Commission also reported that the Plainridge Park Casino had gaming revenues from slots in February that totaled $12,594,203.49, compared to revenues of $12,379,114.94 in January. Plainridge taxes to the state totaled approximately $6 million.

The state taxes gaming revenues at 25 percent from MGM Springfield while Plainridge is taxed at 49 percent of its total gaming revenues.

MGM Springfield separately pays taxes to the city of Springfield annually, along with other funding requirements under its Host Community Agreement.

Of the taxes paid by Plainridge to the state, 82 percent is paid to local aid and 18 percent is allocated to the Race Horse Development fund.

The Gaming Commission provides monthly reports on gaming revenue for both MGM Springfield and Plainridge. It does not report monthly on other revenues received by the gaming establishments including food and beverage sales.
Built to Spill will include a stop in Holyoke in its upcoming Keep It Like A Secret 20th Anniversary tour.

The show plays Gateway City Arts on Sept. 24 at 8 p.m.

Tickets for the show are on sale beginning March 15 at 1 p.m. through the promoters website at dspshows.com.

Built to Spill, the indie rock band out of Boise, Idaho, is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its fourth studio release Keep It Like a Secret. The album was a critical and commercial success for the band and was ranked as the 41st best album of the 90s by industry trade Pitchfork.
SPRINGFIELD - Two city residents are facing federal charges for conspiring to steal Social Security benefits by receiving more than $30,000 in payments for people who were not under their care, according to the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts.

Hilda Griffin, 37, and Daquan Harris, 24, were arraigned this week in U.S. District Court in Springfield on three counts of theft of public money and a single count of conspiracy. Each denied the charges and was released pending trial.

The two were indicted by a federal grand jury. According to the indictment, Griffin had been listed as the representative payee for three people who were receiving Social Security benefits. In October, 2014, the three people were no longer living with her, but Griffin continued receiving payment.

Prosecutors charge that she conspired with Harris to continue receiving payments, and this continued though last May.

Griffin is accused of stealing $8,900 in benefits, and Harris more than $21,800.

If convicted, they could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison, three years probation, and a $250,000 fine.
WARE  The state attorney generals office this week ordered town officials to publicly respond to an Open Meeting Law complaint filed against the Board of Selectmen by Fire Chief Thomas Coulombe.

The board and the town manager had previously signaled that they would not issue a response until the AGs office had ruled on whether they violated the law by failing to notify Coulombe of a Feb. 19 discussion about him in executive session. The complaint also alleges the board failed to give Coulombe the choice to participate in the discussion in open session.

The town placed Coulombe on paid administrative leave on Feb. 20, and hired a Connecticut law firm to conduct an investigation. No specific allegations against the chief have been made public.

Coulombe filed the complaint against the board on Feb. 24.

According to his complaint, the board held executive sessions on Feb. 19 and on several other dates.

Coulombe says he wasnt invited to the Feb. 19meeting, and was not given an opportunity to rebut any accusations against him.

Prior to the order issued Tuesday by Attorney General Maura Healeys office, the board  according to Ware Town Manager Stuart Beckley  had intended to wait to take any action until the AG ruled on the complaint.

In a memo to the board Thursday, Beckley said: In accordance with the Open Meeting Law and instructions from the Attorney Generals office, the Board must publicly review the complaint. After review, the Board or Counsel will send a response to the complainant and to the AG.

Coulombe is seeking to have the Feb. 19 meeting nullified, for the board to be fined, and get reinstated to his job. In an interview, Coulombe said he would like an apology.

The boards agenda for Tuesdays meeting includes an item that says: Open Meeting Law Complaint Review and Response.

The March 19 selectmens meeting at Ware Town Hall, 126 Main St., begins at 7 p.m.
Most Americans today might associate the term Bloody Sunday with the March 7, 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, but in Northern Ireland it is associated with a Jan. 30, 1972 civil rights march that made global headlines and earned that name for the deaths of 13 people and the wounding of another 13, one of whom later died of his injuries.

How those fatalities and injuries resulted has never passed into history and on Thursday, March 14, Northern Irelands service that prosecutes criminal cases and dates to 1972 announced a former British paratrooper, referred to as Soldier F, will be prosecuted for the deaths of marchers James Wray and William McKinney.

Others who died that day included Patrick Doherty, Gerald Donaghey, John Duddy, whose body being carried by protestors is immortalized in a noted photograph, Hugh Gilmour, Michael Kelly, Michael McDaid, Kevin McElhinney, Bernard McGuigan, Gerald McKinney, William Nash and John Young.

The Public Prosecution Service of Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, said the evidence was insufficient to prosecute 16 other former soldiers of the British Armys Parachute Regiment who were deployed that day to the march through Derrys predominately Catholic area known as Bogside.

The march, which drew a crowd of approximately 15,000, was to protest the re-introduction of internment, that is, the right to imprison people without trial, by the Northern Ireland government that had also banned such protests as a response to growing acts of sectarian violence between Protestants who constituted the majority population and the Catholic minority.

Often referred to as the Troubles, the decades old conflict dating to the division of the island in 1921 was fueled by the desire of politically and economically suppressed Catholics, long excluded from the Northern Ireland police force as well as other positions of unemployment, to see the six counties of Northern Ireland reunited with the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland.

An immediate British government inquiry after the 1972 March exonerated the soldiers, finding they had been fired on first.

A 12-year, 5,000-page report that took evidence from nearly 2,500 individuals reached a different conclusion in 2010. It said the soldiers fired without provocation on unarmed civilians and without warning.

David Cameron, British prime minister at the time, apologized, saying, I am deeply sorry, and called what happened on Bloody Sunday both unjustified and unjustifiable.

As a result of that inquiry, referred to as the Saville report for the judge who headed it, the Police Service of Northern Ireland began a murder investigation with detectives submitting their results to the Public Service of Northern Ireland toward the end of 2016.

However, much of the material collected by the Saville investigation in which former paratroopers were given anonymity and broad protections from criminal charges, was inadmissible, prosecutors said, in criminal proceedings due to strict rules of evidence.

In making their announcement, prosecutors said Soldier F will also face charges for the attempted murders of Patrick ODonnell, Joseph Friel, Joe Mahon and Michael Quinn.

Dozens of relatives carrying black-and-white images of the slain demonstrators walked quietly to Londonderrys Guildhall to hear the announcement and their reactions were mixed in the media.

Liam Wray, brother of victim James Wray, said he was relieved that an ex-soldier would be prosecuted for his brothers murder after 47 years.

According to the Saville report, James Wray was shot twice  once as he ran away, and once as he was on the ground.

But Im very saddened for the other Bloody Sunday families who have not got justice here today and whose hearts must be broken and sore now, his brother told the BBC.

Linda Nash, sister of victim William Nash whose death is not being prosecuted, told the media she felt let down.

I just feel let down by a law and a justice system that's supposed to protect people and bring anybody to book for crimes they've committed in the past - and it's just not happened, Nash said.

"The most difficult thing I had to do today was to call my children and tell them that there are no prosecutions for their granda and uncle."

The investigation into prosecuting the former soldiers for actions decades ago at a time of increased tensions in Northern Irelands has been controversial.

Gavin Williamson, the United Kingdoms minister of defense, said the government will offer full legal support to Soldier F, including paying his legal costs and providing welfare support.

The welfare of our former service personnel is of the utmost importance, Williamson said in a statement.

Our serving and former personnel cannot live in constant fear of prosecution.

Karen Bradley, secretary of state for Northern Ireland, where changes have been made to government and security since the 1998 peace accord, called for reforms as well as saying the government was indebted to those who served with courage and distinction to bring peace to Northern Ireland, and I have the deepest sympathy for the suffering of the families of those who were killed on Bloody Sunday and all those who lost loved ones during the Troubles."

"Everyone agrees that the current process for investigating the past in Northern Ireland needs to be reformed, Bradley said.

That is why we need to get the institutions to investigate the past set up quickly and completed as soon as possible.

In calling for the Saville report in 1998, then Prime Minister Tony Blair told the British House of Commons, There have been many victims of violence in Northern Ireland before and since Bloody Sunday. More than 3,000 people, civilians as well as soldiers, policemen and prison officers, have lost their lives in the last 26 years. It may be asked why we should pay such attention to one event.

But Bloody Sunday was different because, where the States own authorities are concerned, we must be as sure as we can of the truth, precisely because we do pride ourselves on our democracy and our respect for the law, and on the professionalism and dedication of our security forces, Blair said.
Men and women filtered into the Brighton mosque for Friday afternoon prayers, removed their shoes, greeted friends, then sat on the floor to pray.

This is the place we come and worship. This is the place we come and meet people. We do everything here, said Malhar Saheed, a former Boston resident visiting from Illinois, who is the director of financial planning for a college. This is a community place, not just a place to pray. You wonder is this place going to be safe for us to come and do all that stuff.

Saheeds wife, Fatima Sattar, an assistant sociology professor, entertained one of the couples two young children, who sat next to her during the service. We consider the mosque a place of worship, and a place of safety and protection and community and peace, Sattar said.

A day after a gunman massacred 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand, Boston-area Muslims gathered for the traditional Friday prayers. Many expressed sadness and outrage at the massacre, which police have described as a terrorist attack by a white nationalist.

For the most part, residents said they feel safe in Massachusetts. But they also said they never know when Islamophobia will crop up.

In everyday interactions, you never know if youll be confronted by Islamophobia or people yelling at you, Sattar said.

Police in Boston, Springfield and Worcester all stepped up patrols at area mosques after the shooting.

At Brightons Yusuf Mosque, the entry hall displays cards from the last few years showing support from the mosques neighbors. At the same time, Imam Ismail Fenni said female members have had their hijabs pulled, and members have had racial slurs hurled at them.

The community, he said, was shaken to hear of the New Zealand shooting. Going to a place of worship and having your safety be compromised is not something that anyone would expect, Fenni said.

Fenni said politicians around the world need to speak out against hateful actions, whether the New Zealand shooting, a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue or violence at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville.

Its imperative that our politicians really stand up for what is right, and so far many have taken advantage of the divisions to sow fear and to sow more divisions within our social fabric, Fenni said.

At the Islamic Society of Bostons mosque in Cambridge, Jewish members of a neighboring synagogue gathered outside the mosque to show support. A police car guarded the mosque.

Its important to have a presence here because its the same, whether its a shooting in a synagogue like Pittsburgh or in a mosque in New Zealand, said Rabbi Emily Mathis, director of community development at Temple Beth Shalom. The synagogue and the mosque are geographic neighbors, but were also community neighbors, and the violence that is happening now, not only here but even in places like New Zealand, is something that we need to gather together to respond to and, God willing, to drive out.

Badr Elmaanaoui, a worshipper at the Cambridge mosque, said the Cambridge community is open and supportive and he does not feel personally vulnerable. But he called it another sad day.

Its the Muslim community, but in reality, its another crime against humanity, Elmaanaoui said. Weve seen these mass shootings, whether in Vegas or in schools all around the U.S. or in Brazil recently.

Elmaanaoui, an engineer with school age children who lives in Belmont, said the mosque shooting hits closer to home, similar to past school shootings. Its easier to associate with a certain event when youre tied to it directly, he said.

Sobhi Hadri, a worshipper at the Cambridge mosque, said it was not a normal day in the mosque, but one that was full of sadness.

John Robbins, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he is hearing incredible grief and outrage from Muslims as the community gathers for prayers. The hatred that prompted this, its truly a heartbreaking moment, Robbins said.

Ali Shebani, a 75-year-old Muslim retiree, said he is increasingly upset at the religious violence worldwide. Religious hatred, he said, is igniting disasters all over the world. ... It is very sad.

Anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-anything, this is ridiculous, Shebani said. These (religious) books, they came from heaven. All the prophets came from heaven, from the same God.

Driss Sahli, a pastry chef who has lived in Boston for 40 years and worships at the Brighton mosque, said the attack hurts. Theyre really just innocent people. They dont deserve this massacre, he said.

Sahli said he feels safe in Boston, but with bad people everywhere, he also feels that there is no guarantee of anyones safety, Muslim or not. This is what life is today, Sahli said. Nobodys safe.
SPRINGFIELD - A 35-year-old Bronx man could be sentenced to up to 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty in U.S. District Court in Springfield to taking part in a drug trafficking operation that moved dozens of kilos of heroin and fentanyl each month from New York City to Springfield.

Marvin Ortega pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to distribute and possession with intent to distribute heroin. Judge Mark G. Mastroianni has scheduled sentencing for June 26.

Ortega was arrested in January 2019 in New York. Prosecutors charge he would transport large amounts of drugs to Springfield for sale, and then transport large amounts of cash back to New York.

He was linked to an drug trafficking organization that was run out of Springfield, allegedly by Alberto Marte, who was arrested in 2016 and is awaiting trial for operating what has been described as a heroin mill in Springfield.
LUDLOW  Hampden County Sheriff Nick Cocchi was honored this week by two federal agencies for his leadership in combating human trafficking in Western Massachusetts.

Representatives with the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Attorneys Human Trafficking Working Group presented Cocchi with a plaque in recognition of their appreciation for the sheriffs departments partnership in initiatives to combat human trafficking.

Jeff Stillings, resident agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations for the agencys Springfield office, surprised Cocchi with the presentation during a supervisors meeting at the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow.

I am here today to recognize a man whose commitments towards human trafficking, and specifically the exploitation of women and children, have made a profound impact in Western Massachusetts, Stillings said.

Sheriff Cocchi has gone above and beyond with his support to the cause, and the Department of Homeland Security rightfully recognizes his efforts, he said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Grant said it was just a few years ago that his office decided to ramp up investigation and enforcement of human trafficking in Western Massachusetts. What the Sheriffs Department has done since is indispensable.

Cocchi, since becoming sheriff in 2017, has directed Lt. Tara Kelliher to work specifically with federal agents in the investigation of cases of suspected and reported human trafficking in Greater Springfield. Cocchi also directs additional resources when needed in investigations.

This is a great partnership and it is my privilege to have the department work with such professionals, Cocchi said. Im honored and humbled to be recognized but this is really a reflection of the good work of Sheriffs Department employees who work hard every day to fight against human trafficking and to help the victims.

He also has Victim Services Coordinator Monica Dominique working with victims of human trafficking and forced sexual servitude to help them get their lives back in order.

Human trafficking is an all-encompassing term for a type of modern slavery where the victims suffer violence, starvation and threats against themselves and their families. They are forced to work as prostitutes, or in factories or as domestic servants at little or no pay. Victims can include children and adults, foreign nationals and people born in this country.

According to the FBI, human trafficking is the third most common criminal activity in the world.

The contributions of our state and local partners like Hampden County are vital to the successful outcome of any complex human trafficking investigation, said Peter Fitzhugh, special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations in Boston. (Homeland Security Investigations) applauds the efforts of the sheriffs office and we look forward to their continued partnership.

Cocchi has also helped the YWCA of Western Massachusetts obtain funding for its Springfield facility to provide a safe haven for women who have escaped from human trafficking.

When I first met the sheriff, the YWCA had no beds for victims of human trafficking, said YWCA of Western Massachusetts Executive Director Elizabeth G. Dineen. But with his help, that all has changed and we are working to transform them from victims into survivors.
MONSON -- Police have issued an arrest warrant for a Connecticut man accused in a rash of vehicle break-ins and stolen cars that occurred earlier this month.

In total 21 vehicles were broken into and three were stolen between the night of March 1 and early morning of March 2. Most of the crimes were reported to police on March 2, police said.

The crimes occurred in the neighborhoods around Margaret Street, Pease Avenue and Country Club Heights, police said.

Following a lengthy investigation, police identified Lamar Kennedy, 20, of Hartford, as a suspect and received an arrest warrant for him on Thursday. He faces charges of three counts of larceny of a motor vehicle, 21 counts of breaking and entering into a motor vehicle, six counts of larceny under $1,200, larceny of credit cards and larceny over $1,200, police said.

Police said they have not located Kennedy yet and do not have him in custody.

Although there were additional suspects working with Kennedy, he is presently the only individual who has been identified and charged in this case, police said in a Facebook post.

Anyone with any information about the crimes or has video from a private camera of the area taken around the time of the break-ins is asked to contact Det. Adam Symanski at 413-893-9500 ext. 116.
HOLYOKE  The City Councils Charter and Rules Committee held off recommending a special election tied to funding two proposed middle schools. The Wednesday night meeting attracted an overflow crowd.

The special election would call for an up or down vote on a debt exclusion, or Proposition 2 override, with the additional revenues floating a $55 million, 30-year construction bond.

In December, Councilor Joseph M. McGiverin introduced the debt exclusion motion. At the time, the council took no position on the special election or the recently drafted ballot question. The motion mentioned an April 30 election date, which likely will not happen now.

Voters must decide if they want to their property taxes to rise over the coming years. A simple majority would be needed to pass the measure. A no vote kills the middle school plan.

The $55 million bond would partly fund the two schools, which currently have a combined $132 million price tag.

Plans include razing and replacing the William Peck School off Northampton Street, which School Superintendent/State Receiver Stephen Zrike deemed substandard.

The Massachusetts School Building Authority, the state agency that oversees public schools construction projects, reimburses communities up to 80 percent of construction costs. However, the proposed Holyoke schools exceed square-footage guidelines, lowering the reimbursement to less than 60 percent. That rate leaves the city $55 million short of paying for the two schools. Floating a bond would let the city proceed with project funding.

Ward 2 Councilor Terence Murphy, who chairs the Charter Committee, did not favor the motion, stating only a small percentage of Holyoke voters go to the polls. He wanted more details before recommending a special election. Murphy also said a later date allows the City Clerks Office to prepare for a special election.

Councilor James Leahy said the special election could be called either by the council or through a citizen petition drive. Leahy asked why the committee was rushing the ballot question. He called for more public dialogue before deciding on a special election.

Councilor Linda Vacon wondered if the city was mortgaging its economic future. She called for rehabbing current structures rather than building the new schools. Vacon added that discussions continue on how to fund public safety and other city departments adequately.

Mayor Alex B. Morse said a school building committee has met over the past year, examining many of the questions posed at Wednesdays meeting. He said the conversation on renovating existing or building new schools began when he took office in 2012.

Morse said the school proposals were once in a lifetime, and it is rare the School Building Authority agrees with building two 500-student schools. He said he wants neighborhoods across the city to have equal access to a good education.

He described the debt exclusion as a progressive tax, one based on a residents home value. He was open to a June vote, providing more time to get information out to the public. He wants voters to decide the matter.

Holyoke residents pack the City Council Chamber Wednesday night. The Charter and Rules Committee held public comment on a proposed special election tied to school funding.

The committee allowed public comment, with each speaker limited to brief statements.

Stefany Garcia, the mother of twins who attend Metcalf School, said past studies showed that current schools could not be rehabbed, including the former John J. Lynch Middle School.

John Aubin, who owns the massive Open Square complex, said he is not opposed to the new schools, but that not enough quality information is available. While Aubin is not opposed to his taxes going up, he worried about the effect an override would have on future development.

Patrick OConnor, a teacher, said housing 1,110 middle school students in one building would cause problems. He said he wants a quality education for all Holyoke school children, which includes access to state-of-the-art facilities.

OConnor added that renovating Peck and H.B. Lawrence Schools would be futile. He said the proposed schools would change the citys future for the positive. He wants surrounding communities to know that Holyoke invests in education.

Eileen Bresnahan, of Bresnahan Insurance, said the April 30 date was too soon and that the community needs more information. Take the time to think about it, she said.

Michael Siciliano was concerned about the proposal to drastically raise taxes in Holyoke, especially the effect it would have on homeowners with limited incomes. Siciliano, who ran for mayor in 2017, said, I believe the taxpayers in Holyoke are over-leveraged.

Former City Council President Kevin Jourdain opposed a ballot question. He said any question should be placed on a general ballot. He said the jury was out on whether new schools contribute to improving educational outcomes.

Jourdain said the ballot question would generate community division. In the past, school bonds came through and were decided by the City Council. He called the proposal absurd.

Rory Casey, a member of the school building committee, said the process has been transparent from the start. He noted all the building committees minutes and documents are online, including the reasoning behind seeking the debt exclusion.

Casey, formerly Morses chief of staff, said Peck School is the worst designed school in the district. He said there was a huge difference in educational outcomes between renovating a Peck School and building anew. Any delay would increase construction costs by millions of dollars, according to Casey.

Helene Florio, of the Holyoke Taxpayers Association, said the committee was faced with a tough task, approving the ballot question. She said Zrike identified inadequacies in the school district, including the buildings. But she wants the city to explore alternatives to an override. She was offended by one study that compared Holyokes tax burden to that of Burlington, a bedroom community near Boston.

She asked the committee not to rush to judgment, and said members should carefully consider a debt exclusion vote.
SPRINGFIELD  Elected officials and residents gathered at City Hall on Friday to raise the Irish flag and kick off a weekend of activities tied to St. Patricks Day.

The flag raising ceremony is conducted annually on the steps of City Hall in conjunction with the Springfield St. Patricks Parade Committee. It celebrates the Irish heritage and a schedule of St. Patricks Day events including Holyokes parade on Sunday.

Mayor Domenic J. Sarno offered a proclamation in recognition of St. Patricks Day, and (to) honor our Irish Community for their many contributions to the Citys and the Nations cultural identity.

In the words of an old Irish Blessing: 'May the luck of the Irish enfold you and may the blessings of St. Patrick behold you," Sarno said.

Monsignor David Joyce, the 2019 Springfield Parade Marshal, was among the dignitaries in attendance.

Its a great honor for me to be selected to lead the Springfield delegation, Joyce said. Im proud. I think my ancestors would be proud and I think of them especially today.
World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks on mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent anti-Islam sentiment.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the attacks the "latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia."

New Zealand police said 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city. More than 20 were seriously wounded in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a "terrorist attack."

Police took three men and a woman into custody after the shootings. One of the suspects was later charged with murder.

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister, Erdogan said the anti-Islam hatred that motivated the attacks "has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer."

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed Erdogan.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim," he wrote in a tweet.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack "with horror and profound sadness."

"The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life," he wrote.

In France, home to western Europe's largest Muslim community, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner ordered regional authorities to bolster security at mosques as a precaution.

London's Mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the city's Metropolitan Police force would be visible outside mosques.

"London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack," he said. "London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy."

London mosques have been targeted in the past. One man died and several others were injured in 2017 when Darren Osborne drove a van into people leaving evening prayers. Prosecutors say Osborne was motivated by a hatred of Muslims and far-right propaganda he found online.

Anwar Gargash, the United Arab Emirates' minister of state for foreign affairs, tweeted, "heartfelt condolences" to New Zealand.

"Our collective work against violence & hate must continue with renewed vigor. Our thoughts & prayers are with the families of the victims," Gargash wrote.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas extended his country's sympathies to the friends and families of the victims of the attack.

The horrific terrorist attack in Christchurch targeted peacefully praying Muslims  if people are murdered solely because of their religion, that is an attack on all of us, he said.
Police are investigating the scene of an overnight shooting in Methuen that left one man seriously injured, according to reports.

Methuen police are investigating after a suspect opened fire at 3 a.m. in the area of 170 Broadway. Streets in the area were closed early Friday as police interviewed witnesses and searched for evidence.

The victim reportedly suffered serious injuries from gunshot wounds, according to WCVB. Methuen police said the victim was transported by a medical helicopter to a Boston hospital.

Authorities did not announce any arrest in connection to the shooting.

on scene SHOTS FIRED | 170 BROADWAY/SUBJECT HAS BEEN SHOT/please avoid Bway @ Oakland Ave road shut down. @cityofmethuen via @ChiefSolomon  Methuen Police  (@MethuenPolice) March 15, 2019
NORTHAMPTON  Irish immigrants Dominic Daley and James Halligan were convicted and executed here in 1806 for a murder no one today believes they committed.

They died, said former judge and district attorney W. Michael Ryan because Halligan and Daley were different. They spoke differently than the Yankees. who dominated Massachusetts in those days. They dressed differently and they worshiped differently as Catholics.

They are a good example of how immigrants were treated when Irish were immigrants, Ryan said. And of how immigrants today are treated, if they are Arabs, if they are Latinos from Mexico or central Americas, and how we need to start treating those people. Make their voices louder.

Ryan pointed out that some of the stereotypes that got Halligan and Daley convicted and hung are still attached to immigrant communities  and the stereotypes are still wrong.

The Mexican immigrant community has a lower crime rate than the population at large, he noted.

Nearly 20 people, many of Irish heritage, gathered Friday at a monument here to Daley and Halligan. the message of tolerance toward newcomers who may be of different culture and a different faith was especially important following sobering news of shooting attacks in two New Zealand mosques, said organizer Bill ORiordan.

And then you have the comments out of the White House yesterday about the troops and the bikers, ORiordan said. It used to be the Irish who were different. Help make the bottom rung of the ladder stronger. Dont knock it away.

The event is always timed for the St. Patricks Parade in neighboring Holyoke.

Ryan explained to the crowd that there was no physical evidence tying Halligan and Daley to the 1805 murder of Marcus Lyon in Wilbraham. There was only the testimony of a 12-year-old boy. who changed his story each time he testified.

It was enough, Ryan said.

Gov. Michael Dukakis officially exonerated Daley and Halligan in 1984.
BOSTON  The states highest court on Friday reversed a lower-court ruling and decided that employees at a Franklin County farm are entitled to be paid overtime because the work they performed at the farm was not the same as farming.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Friday ruled in favor of the 15 plaintiffs in the case of Ana Arias-Villano and others vs. Chang & Sons Enterprises of South Deerfield. It ordered the case be returned to the superior court level for reconsideration.

The decision reverses a superior court ruling that denied the workers overtime pay. That ruling cited the Massachusetts overtime laws that exempt any workers engaged in agriculture and farming on a farm.

The SJC ruling declared the agricultural exemption is not applicable in this case because the workers were involved in processing crops for market, and not the actual growing or harvesting.

Justice Kimberly S. Budd, who wrote the decision, noted the scope of the agricultural exemption turns on the meaning of the phrase agriculture and farming.

At the Chang & Sons operation, employees between 2012 and 2015 worked up to 70 hours per week year-round inside a processing facility where they cleaned, inspected, sorted, weighed and packaged bean sprouts. They also cleaned the facility and discarded waste, the ruling notes.

Under the plain language of the statute and legislative history, Budd wrote, the agricultural exemption does not apply to the plaintiffs, and therefore they are entitled to overtime wages.

The Central West Justice Center, which represented the 15 plaintiffs, hailed the ruling as an important victory for workers rights.

Leticia Medina-Richman, managing attorney for the center, said the decision brings clarity about what constitutes fair compensation for the many hours worked by those performing the kinds of tasks that the plaintiffs performed.

With the decision, the case will have to be reintroduced at the superior court level. She said there is no figure yet for how much will be sought in back wages for overtime.

Attorney Susan Garcia Nofi, who argued the case before the SJC, said in a statement that the employees were not involved directly with the growing or harvesting of the crop. They performed post-harvesting work in a factory-like setting, she said.

Employees said work weeks regularly exceeded 40 hours and sometimes reached 70 hours.

The attorney for Chang & Sons, Sandra Lundy of Boston, could not be reached for comment.

The local and state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a friend of the court brief that was supportive of the plaintiffs. Harris Freeman, a cooperating attorney with the ACLU-Massachusetts and a professor at Western New England University School of Law, said the ruling is an important decision for labor.

The decision of the SJC keeps Massachusetts in the lead of protecting the rights of all low-wage workers, including and most importantly, low-wage workers engaged in agricultural processing, he said.

Picking cucumbers is not the same as making pickles, he said.

Northampton attorney William C. Newman, head of the Western Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU, said the court clearly and emphatically ruled that Massachusetts labor law will be interpreted to protect as many workers as possible, especially those most vulnerable to exploitation.

Chang & Sons Enterprises grows, packages and distributes bean sprouts and other crops throughout New England.

It has previously run afoul of federal law laws in 2013 and 2015 for failing to pay people at least minimum wage. In 2013, the company was ordered to pay $305,500 in back wages and penalties. Employees were being paid $5 an hour, below the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and were working up to 90 hours a week.
He described himself as a regular White man. Yet early reports paint the picture of a right-wing extremist who sought to remove non-whites from Europe.

Authorities have not named the 28-year-old man who opened fire on worshippers  while live streaming the attack  in at least one of the mosque shootings Friday, which left at least 49 people dead.

Authorities told Australian media that the gunman, one of four people taken into custody, is an Australian-born citizen. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called him an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist."

The gunman - whose name was not immediately released by law enforcement - shared a 74-page document under the name Brenton Tarrant on social media accounts. In the manifesto, he said he hoped to survive the attack to further spread his ideas.

The manifesto states that he grew up in a working-class and did poorly in school. After his father died of cancer in April 2010, he used funds he saved from a BitConnect investment and went on a seven-year trip around the world. That brought him to Western Europe in 2017, where he said his views on white nationalism solidified.

He was in Europe when an Uzbek man drove a truck into a crowd of people in Stockholm, according to the Associated Press review of the manifesto. The driver killed five people, including an 11-year-old Swedish girl, which the gunman says pushed him toward violence against nonwhites. He grew angry at the sight of immigrants settling in towns across France.

Heres what the manifesto revealed, according to excerpts of the document online and the Associated Press:

The gunman believed in Europe for Europeans and said he wanted to get rid of nonwhites or invaders from Europe, whether its done peacefully, forcefully or violently. He called for the death of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

He started plotting the attack on Christchurch three months ago. He chose the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch because it was remote and he wanted to prove that mass migration is a problem even in parts of New Zealand.

The gunman does not appear to be affiliated with any organization, but he said he donated to several nationalist group. He mentioned he resents the wealthy 1 percent. He also considers himself an environmentalist and a fascist closely aligned with the values of China.

He claims to have been influenced most by American conservative pundit Candace Owens.

He chose to use guns in lieu of other weapons in hopes of sowing divisions in the United States over the countrys already tense gun control laws.

The rampage came as a shock to residents in Grafton, where the gunman reportedly worked as a personal trainer. Residents told Sky News theyre shocked by the allegations against a man who seemed like a well-mannered young man.

Early reports describe a man who was a product of extremist right-wing communities on the internet. He live-streamed the shooting video and shared it to sites like 4chan, a website consisting of user-created boards, where members complimented his aim and called him a hero.

The video also made its rounds across social media, including Facebook and Twitter. Users expressed concerns that they unwittingly came across the disturbing video and asked the social networks to remove the footage.

Please don't circulate the video of the terrorist gunning down our brothers and sisters. That's what he wanted. #NewZealand  Omar Suleiman (@omarsuleiman504) March 15, 2019

My before school conversation with my 16-year-old this morning was about why he shouldnt watch online video of the New Zealand Mosque terrorist attacks & how to talk with friends about it. My heart breaks for the Muslim community & for all of us  Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) March 15, 2019

People can see images live from Christchurch, it will be obvious to them that this is a significant event. This is and will be one of New Zealands darkest days. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters.
Mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand took the lives of dozens attending prayers and left the country reeling.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called Friday one of New Zealands darkest days" and said the events Christchurch represented an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence."

Scott Brown, the United States ambassador to New Zealand spoke Friday of the attacks to Boston 25. Were not only sad but were angry as well, he said, adding, We condemn it. Plain and simple.

Brown is a former Massachusetts U.S. senator.

"We condemn it. Plain and simple."



U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand @SenScottBrown just spoke with @sara_underwood on @boston25 about the mass shooting that left 49 dead. @MichaelHenrich has updates all morning on what investigators said was a "well-planned terrorist attack." pic.twitter.com/KqyBpFBcer  Jason Law (@JasonLawNews) March 15, 2019

The attacks left 49 people dead and more than 20 seriously wounded.

Police took four people into custody after the shootings and said multiple explosive devices were defused.
Sen. Bernie Sanders cut his head on a shower door Friday morning and received seven stitches, his campaign told Politico.

The 77-year-old Vermont senator went to a walk-in clinic out of precaution, Arianna Jones, a Sanders spokeswoman said in a statement shared on Twitter by a Politico reporter.

Sanders was given a clean bill of health and is already back on the campaign trail, Jones said.

The senator has proceeded with all of his scheduled events  joining a group of approximately 20 local clergy for a breakfast this morning  and looks forward to joining a roundtable with South Carolinians this afternoon to discuss how we can provide high quality affordable health care for all.

Sanders will head to Nevada Friday night, ahead of a rally in Henderson Saturday.
U.S. Sen. Ed Markey took issue Friday with reports suggesting that North Korea may suspend diplomatic talks with the United States and resume missile testing unless the Trump administration lifts various sanctions -- a threat the Massachusetts Democrat called nothing short of extortion.

Markey, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committees East Asia sub-panel, raised concerns about a North Korean officials reported assertion that Pyongyang has no plans of continuing talks unless the United States makes new concessions and changes its political calculation.

The senator further questioned North Koreas commitment to denuclearization and urged the Trump administration to prepare to ramp up pressure on Kims regime if his country moves away from diplomacy.

Comments from North Korean officials threatening to discard diplomacy and return to nuclear testing if the United States doesnt lift a wide range of sanctions is nothing short of extortion, he said in a statement. With theatrics like this, (North Korean Leader) Kim Jong Un is confirming the view of skeptics that he is not interested in conducting serious, good faith efforts to denuclearize."

Markey added that should North Korea decide to abandon diplomacy or conduct new provocations, the United States must be ready to apply additional pressure on the Kim regime."

"We should not concede to North Koreas threats, he stressed.

North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui told diplomats and foreign media Friday that Pyongyang was disappointed by the lack of any agreements reached at a recent summit between President Donald Trump and Kim in Vietnam, the Associated Press reported.

Choe, who said Kim was baffled by the United States eccentric negotiation position at the late-February summit, added that North Korea has no plans to compromise or continue talks unless the U.S. takes steps similar to those Pyongyang has taken, like a moratorium on launches and tests, according to the AP.

She, however, offered that the personal relations between Trump and Kim remain positive, despite what she cast as the sense of hostility and mistrust created by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Boltons demands at the summit.

Choe further said she expects Kim to soon clarify his position on the launch and test moratorium, the Associated Press reported.

Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he had no update on North Korea, but said he seemed to have a very good relationship with the countrys officials.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, meanwhile, said earlier this week that Trump left the Vietnam summit without striking a deal with Kim because he didnt feel that what was on the table was enough.

The president is 100 percent committed to denuclearization of the peninsula, and hes going to make sure that whatever we do furthers that process, she told reporters. Well see what happens with North Korea, the same way were going to see what happens in the negotiations with China. Theyre ongoing.
SPRINGFIELD  A Hampden Superior Court jury on Friday acquitted Melvin Jones III of possession of PCP with intent to distribute.

The jury found Jones guilty of the lesser offense of possession of PCP in the trial before Judge John S. Ferrara. His bail was revoked and sentencing was scheduled for Tuesday.

Jones, who seven years ago won a $499,000 settlement in a police brutality lawsuit, was charged with the drug dealing count after a traffic stop on June 23, 2017, in Springfield.

Defense lawyer Aliki Recklitis told the jury the reason her client had 18 small bags of PCP in a Sprite can in his car was because he was going to use them himself. Recklitis said there was nothing to indicate Jones had, or would have, sold any of the drugs.

Assistant District Attorney Kerry A. Beattie told jurors the way the drug was packaged, and the fact there was a scale and $104 in the car Jones was driving, were some of the factors that showed Jones was intending to sell PCP.

In 2012, Jones won a $499,000 settlement in a civil case involving Springfield Police Officer Jeffrey Asher, who in a separate criminal case was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in jail for assaulting Jones. The assault was filmed by a woman trying out her new camera, and the video was later obtained by The Republican and posted on MassLive.

Weeks after his legal victory, however, Jones was sentenced to three years in state prison in a drug trafficking case. In a second case, he was placed on probation on a domestic assault charge. In 2017 he was sentenced to six months in jail for violating probation.
SPRINGFIELD  The lawyer for Melvin Jones III told Hampden Superior Court jurors Thursday the reason her client had 18 small bags of PCP in a Sprite can in his car was because he was going to use them himself.

Jones, who seven years ago won a $499,000 settlement in a police brutality lawsuit, is on trial for possession of PCP with intent to distribute (subsequent offense). The charge stems from a traffic stop on June 23, 2017, in Springfield.

Defense lawyer Aliki Recklitis said there was nothing to indicate Jones had, or would have, sold any of the drugs.

Assistant District Attorney Kerry A. Beattie told jurors the way the drug was packaged, and the fact there was a scale and $104 in the car Jones was driving, were some of the factors that showed Jones was intending to sell PCP.

Beattie said police determined during the traffic stop that Jones would not be allowed to drive his car away. Officers conducted a vehicle inventory prior to having it towed and found the PCP in the center console.

Recklitis said the tiny bags of PCP were not bundled into packs of 10. The officers did not send the scale to the state laboratory to see if it had traces of the drug on it, she said.

She said since the drugs were visible in a can as soon as the center console was opened, Jones was not trying to hide them.

Police Officer Evan Donermeyer testified that he and his partner were on patrol in the South End when they saw a car committing infractions. It was not said what those were.

The officers attempted to stop the car, and although it didnt stop right away it pulled into a gas station. Donermeyer said Jones got out of his car and started to advance in our direction. He later said Jones didnt get far from his own car but turned toward them.

They felt Jones was a safety risk to them, so after he followed their commands to put his hands on the hood of his car they handcuffed him and put him in a cruiser. They called for backup and two other officers arrived to search Jones car, Donermeyer said.

Jones could not validly operate the car, he said. Jurors were not told why.

Donermeyer said Jones was taken to the police station and booked on the drug charge. He said he spent close to an hour with Jones.

His demeanor was fine, he was pretty calm and collected, Donermeyer said.

The trial continues Friday before Judge John S. Ferrara.

In 2012, Jones won a $499,000 settlement in a civil case involving Springfield Police Officer Jeffrey Asher, who in a separate criminal case was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in jail for assaulting Jones. The assault was filmed by a woman trying out her new camera, and the video was later obtained by The Republican and posted on MassLive.

Weeks after his legal victory, however, Jones was sentenced to three years in state prison in a drug trafficking case. In a second case, he was placed on probation on a domestic assault charge. In 2017 he was sentenced to six months in jail for violating probation.
A Greek restaurant that closed its doors on Worcesters Shrewsbury Street two months ago is set to reopen in a larger space just feet from its former location, bringing with it an expanded menu and more events.

Meze Estiatorio  formerly Meze Greek Tapas  will likely open in about two weeks, pending city inspections, in the space formerly occupied by The Chameleon restaurant.

Panos Georgiadis, who owns the restaurant with his girlfriend, Atea Stiko, said the larger space will allow Meze to expand its menu with a focus on entrees and host events like Greek nights with live music.

After five years of being in the restaurant business on Shrewsbury Street, we learned a lot, he said. We learned how to change things for the better.

Georgiadis bought the property at 166 Shrewsbury St. in September. The new space features an 80-seat dining room and full bar with local and Greek beverages on tap. He said the restaurant will import about 40 wines from across Greece and will have eight cocktails on draft, including Greek sangria and tea.

A lot of the cocktails are regular cocktails people are familiar with, but theyll have a Greek twist  Greek liquor or spirits or a Greek mixer, Georgiadis said.

Most ingredients will be sourced from Greece and the restaurant will use recipes passed down through the Georgiadis family, which hails from northern Macedonian Greece.

Panos Georgiadis is first-generation American and grew up on Belmont Street in Worcester. His father, Sotirios Sam Georgiadis, owned the previous Meze location before passing the torch to his son.

Its authentic Greek food that weve kept for generations and now (Im) a Worcester native, born and raised Worcester, giving authentic Greek food, Georgiadis said.

Signature menu items include spanakopita, made with spinach, feta and filo dough pie; Lavraki -- fresh sea bass from Greece, stuffed with lemon and grilled; and Moussaka -- layered potato, eggplant, ground beef and bechamel sauce with shaved kefalograviera cheese.

Georgiadis said he had his eye on the former Chameleon building ever since the restaurant was shut down and the property sized by the federal government after its owners were charged in a drug- and money laundering-related crimes.

As soon as the property was listed for sale, Georgiadis, who also has his real estate license, began asking if he could make an offer. After purchasing the building in the fall, he  with help from his father and his girlfriend  began renovating the space.

We came in here and they had the neon green wallpaper and the yellow pine floor and it was kind of dark, he said. We came in and we did this limestone stucco that they do for all the buildings in Santorini and Mykonos on the outside, we were able to put it on all the interior walls, so it feels like you're in Santorini.

Meze also commissioned work from several artists, including a painting of Greek man doing a traditional zeibekiko dance that adorns a wall in the dining room. It was done by POW! WOW! Worcester artist Ryan Gardell.

He came up with that whole design and that concept, that guy specifically he came up with by himself, we added the curled mustache because my great-great grandfather always had that curled mustache, Georgiadis said.

A graffiti artist who goes by the name Ferd painted a Greek-inspired scene on a large outdoor wall.

Georgiadis added that owning the building will also allow Meze to host more events with live music. In its previous leased space, Georgiadis said the restaurant had to quiet things down around 10 p.m. due to upstairs neighbors.

The space is about 200 square feet larger than Mezes previous location.

When it comes to the menu, Georgiadis said he decided to focus more on entrees rather than the smaller plates Meze used to be known for.

And with that change came a new name.

For here, we wanted to keep the Meze because I think we have a good reputation and it shows that it's still us, he said. Estiatorio is like the Italian word trattoria, it's an upscale restaurant above a tavern or a taverna, as they would call them in Greece."

Georgiadis said Meze will use local ingredients and will source as many as possible from Greece  including salt and a variety of fish thats flown in to Boston on ice.

Within a day or two, it goes from swimming in the Mediterranean in Greece to being on your plate in Worcester, Massachusetts, he said.

During the summer, the restaurant will have about 20 outdoor seats on the sidewalk. The space also has a private room that can host up to 25 people for special events.

Meze will likely open in two weeks, pending local approvals. Georgiadis said the restaurant plans to bring in a Greek band from Boston for a grand opening celebration.
Months after a five-alarm blaze claimed the life of Worcester Firefighter Christopher Roy, Worcester District Attorney Joseph Early Jr. was finally able to announce that a suspect is being charged with the firefighters death on Friday.

A Worcester County Grand Jury indicted 21-year-old Momoh Kamara, of 157 Hartwell St. in West Boylston, on charges of second degree murder, arson of a dwelling, armed burglary and malicious destruction of a motor vehicle, Early said during a press conference. He praised a team investigative effort by his office, the Worcester police and fire departments, as well as ATF and other officials.

Worcester firefighters filled the courtroom as Early made the announcement, hands folded and a solemn look in their eyes.

While we are heartened that Mr. Kamara will face justice, our department is still devastated by the loss of our brother firefighter Christopher Roy, Worcester Fire Chief Michael Lavoie said during the press conference.

Kamara is a former resident of 5-7 Lowell St., Early said, the three-story building that caught fire on Dec. 9. Roy and fellow firefighters tried to quell the five-alarm blaze as flames grew.

But Roy became trapped on the second floor of the six-unit building. After fellow firefighters pulled Roy out of the burning building, he succumbed to his injuries.

The loss of 36-year-old Roy in December was mourned by many in the city and greater region - upwards of 10,000 firefighters attended Roys funeral.

The loss was especially heart-wrenching for the Worcester Fire Department, which has a sad history of firefighter deaths in the month of December, including the loss of the Worcester Six in the Cold Storage Warehouse Fire on Dec. 3, 1999, and the death of Firefighter Jon D. Davies Sr. in a Dec. 8, 2011 blaze.

On Friday morning, Kamara was arrested in West Boylston on a warrant charging him with murder, arson, armed burglary and malicious damage to a motor vehicle in connection with the fatal fire and Roys death.

At his arraignment in Worcester Superior Court Friday afternoon, Kamara pleaded not guilty. He was ordered held without bail.

An exact motive for the crime was not released, but prosecutor Jeffrey Travers did say that when Kamara lived at 5-7 Lowell St., he had disagreements with roommates.

It appeared that on the morning of the fatal fire, Kamara took an Uber early that dropped him off near Clark University in Worcesters Main South neighborhood. Police tracked Kamaras movements from there by utilizing surveillance video, which showed him entering Lowell Street around 2:30 a.m., Travers said during the arraignment.

Kamara set several fires in the basement while residents were inside the 100-year-old building, according to the prosecutor.

The fire was reported at 3:58 a.m., Travers said.

The Worcester Police Department arrived at the scene at 4:04 a.m., Travers said. Firefighters arrived one minute later.

Surveillance video picked up images of Kamara leaving Lowell Street near the intersection with Main Street within four or five minutes of police and fire arriving at the fire, Travers said.

Kamara then walked away and took a Lyft ride out of Worcester.

Kamara has never been convicted of a crime but was accused of strangling his girlfriend in 2017. The case was dismissed a few months later.

Roy, who had been a firefighter for two and a half years, lived in Shrewsbury with his 9-year-old daughter, Ava.

Week after week fundraisers to support Ava have been announced across Central Massachusetts.

Lavoie, Early, Worcester Police Chief Steven Sargent and Worcester City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. all said the Roy family has remained in their thoughts in the months since the blaze.

The past three months have been extremely difficult for all of us as we continue to mourn his loss, Lavoie said. The Roy family remains in our thoughts and hearts as the investigation moves forward to the prosecution phase.

Sargent said the city came together in one of its darkest moments.

We will never forget his sacrifice, Sargent said, adding that Roy defines what it means to be a hero.

When thousands mourned the loss of Roy at his funeral, he was remembered as a martyr.

"What Chris did the other morning, of course it went way beyond the norm because this is what you do" as a firefighter, Rev. Walter Riley, the Worcester Fire Department Chaplain said during Roy's funeral Mass.

Christopher Roy is at peace after a Sunday morning of treachery, disorientation, Riley said. Christopher Roy is a Worcester martyr.

Friends and family recalled his endless love for his daughter.

You were your fathers world, Roys friend and fellow firefighter, David Scavone, told Ava during a eulogy for Roy. He moved heaven and Earth to give you the best life possible that you deserved.

Members of the fire department have remained committed to their jobs even while grieving the death of Roy.

I want to ensure this community that our firefighters before this fire and since have exhibited the courage to answer every call for help and the bravery to get their jobs done and thats not going to change, Michael Papagni, the president of the Worcester Firefighters IAFF Local 1009.

The fire chief echoed that sentiment.

Our members have not and will not waiver from their commitment to serve whenever and wherever we are called, Lavoie said.

As of Friday morning, a death certificate on file at the Worcester city clerks office listed Roys cause of death as smoke inhalation, the manner of death as homicide and the time of death listed as 6:25 p.m. on Dec. 9.

Previously, the certificate listed Roys cause of death as pending.

In mid-February The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, started its investigation into Roys death.

The Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program by NIOSH is intended to help provide information to prevent future fatalities by identifying factors that contributed to firefighter deaths. The program is not intended to enforce compliance with regulations or assess culpability.

The agency said it is difficult to determine how long it will take to complete an investigation and release a report.

Other agencies investigating Roys death include the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and state fire marshals office.
Northwestern University trustee and alumna Virginia M. (Ginni) Rometty (79), chairman, president, and CEO of IBM, will receive the 2019 Edison Achievement Award.

Often called the Oscars of innovation, the Edison Awards include 16 annual awards that honor excellence in new product design and technological innovation. The Edison Achievement Award recognizes one leader each year for making a significant and lasting contribution to the world of innovation. Past recipients include Steve Jobs and Elon Musk.

Rometty will accept the achievement award at the Edison Awards Gala on Thursday, April 4 in New York City. At 3 p.m., she will deliver the events keynote address at the Meet the Innovators Forum.

Rometty graduated from Northwesterns McCormick School of Engineering in 1979 with a bachelors degree in computer science. After joining IBM as a systems engineer in 1981, she rose through the ranks to become the first woman to head the company. Since becoming CEO in 2012, she has reinvented IBM as a leader in artificial intelligence, blockchain, cybersecurity, and quantum technologies.

Northwestern conferred an honorary doctorate to Rometty in 2015, when she delivered the main address at the Universitys 157th commencement ceremony. During her address, she stressed to her new fellow alumni that they were graduating at a truly unique moment in history  the dawn of a new era of computing made possible by big data.

What steam was to the 18th century, electricity to the 19th, and hydrocarbons to the 20th, data will be to the 21st century, Rometty said. Thats why I call data a new natural resource.

Four game-changing products developed at IBM are also finalists for the 2019 Edison Awards for best new products. Under Romettys lead, the company has three products in the applied technology category and one in the living, working, and learning environments category.

The finalists illustrate that innovation never sleeps, said Frank Bonafilia, executive director of the Edison Awards. With ingenuity and technological advancements, the dreams of yesterday will become the reality of today to make an impact on how we live, work, and play."

This isnt the first time Northwestern has been represented at the Edison Awards. Walter Herbst, director of the Master of Product Design and Development Management program, has received five Edison Awards for industrial design.
, a medical device company with offices in Caesarea, Israel and Woburn, Massachusetts, recently announced a $22 million Series A venture investment round led by LA-based OCV Partners. This brings the companys total venture funding to $35 million. This technology received FDA 510(k) clearance in January 2019.

Ossio has developed the OSSIOfiber Intelligent Bone Regeneration Technology, which provides a biocompatible framework for bone regeneration after traumatic fractures or orthopedic surgery. The platform is a bioabsorbable polymer resin (PLDLA) combined with natural mineral fibers, constructed in a sturdy matrix to maximize biomechanical properties. Unlike traditional metal screws, the OSSIOfiber technology promotes natural bone growth but is reabsorbed over time, leaving no permanent implant, and preventing the need for subsequent, hardware removal surgery. Full bio-integration of the OSSIOfiber platform takes place in 18-24 months.

The current standard for bony fixation of fractures or implants involves implantation of a bone graft as well as rigid fixation with a metal or hard plastic device. This foreign body insertion provides structural support during the bone healing phase, however, it poses a risk of infection for the patient. The advantage of a biocompatible, osteo-regenerative implant is its structural stability combined with a theoretical lower risk of infection. While the implants mechanical properties have been tested in animal studies, use of the implant in humans has yet to be reported.

While the current commercial technology is primarily targeted in foot and ankle surgeries, where hardware removal is common, the company plans to expand to other orthopedic markets, targeting the overall $10 billion orthopedic fixation market.

Heres an Ossio video about its technology:

Link: Ossio homepage

Via: OSSIO
Market Scenario

The Global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Market is presumed to register 51.9% CAGR during the forecast period (2018-2023) owing to the growing adoption of AI solutions among the healthcare providers, asserts Market Research Future (MRFR). Artificial intelligence (AI) is regarded as the next frontier for healthcare innovation. In the healthcare sector, artificial intelligence is being applied for sorting structured and unstructured data. Potential of AI spans across healthcare verticals. AI is considered to play a vital role in overcoming some of the toughest hurdles being faced by healthcare providers.

Competitive Dashboard

The prominent players operating the global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market are Google, General Electric, IBM Watson Health, Microsoft Corporation, Intel Corporation, DEEP GENOMICS, Koninklijke Philips N.V., General Vision, NVIDIA Corporation, CloudMedx Inc., Next IT Corp., and Stryker.

Get Premium Sample Copy @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5681

Drivers and Constraints Impacting the Market

The augmented focus on the use of artificial intelligence in the healthcare sector in the recent past. The adoption of AI solutions in the healthcare sector is growing rapidly owing to the growing number of healthcare applications of AI coupled with its rising demand for medical research. AI is also being employed in clinical laboratories, hospitals, and research facilities, which is further contributing to the growth of the market during the assessment period. Broader applications of AI and technological advancements in deep learning have further led to its increased adoption in the healthcare sector across the globe.

Technological companies are highly investing in the development of AI for research and healthcare, which is further boosting the market growth. Moreover, AI in the healthcare sector is being used for prognosis, diagnosis, and therapy, thereby stimulating its growth during the appraisal period. AI has also developed several applications across the healthcare sector, such as delivery of health services, detection of diseases, drug discovery, and management of chronic conditions. AI in the healthcare sector ensures effectiveness and efficiency, which is further considered to trigger its adoption in the coming years. AI also enables the healthcare sector to overcome the crisis of human resource by providing productivity through automation of complicated tasks. Such factors are presumed to contribute to the market growth.

On the flip side, the high cost associated with the implementation of AI in the healthcare sector coupled with the stringent guidelines regulating AI are some of the major concerns considered to dampen the market growth during the appraisal period.

Global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare Market: Segmental Analysis

The global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market has been segmented on the basis of component, application, technology, end-user, and region.

By mode of component, the global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market has been segmented into software, hardware, and services.

By mode of application, the global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market has been segmented into virtual nursing assistant, robot-assisted surgery, clinical trial, dosage error reduction, automated image diagnosis, and preliminary diagnosis. Among these, the robot-assisted surgery segment is considered to hold the most significant share in the global market owing to the flexibility and high precision assured by robot-assisted surgeries while performing complex procedures.

By mode of technology, the global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market has been segmented into querying method, machine learning, and natural language processing. Among these, the machine learning segment is considered to demonstrate the highest CAGR owing to the ability to handle multi-dimensional data while facilitating a reduction in the process time cycle.

By mode of end-user, the global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market has been segmented into pharmaceutical & biotechnology companies, hospital & diagnostic centers, and academic & research laboratories. Among these, the hospital & diagnostic centers segment holds the largest market share owing to the extensive application of healthcare AI in robotic surgeries and diagnostic imaging.

Regional Insights

Geographically, the Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market span across regions namely, Europe, America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.

Among all the regions, America is predicted to dominate the global Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare market due to the growth witnessed in the biotechnology industry, presence of a developed healthcare sector, and rising cases of robotic surgeries.

The European region has secured the second position across the globe and is considered to garner USD 3453.4 million during the appraisal period. The growth is attributed to the extensive research and development activities for healthcare AI. Also, increased funding is responsible for catalyzing the proliferation of the regional market.

The Asia Pacific region is predicted to strike a relatively higher CAGR owing to the increasing therapeutic demand for chronic diseases coupled with the fast-developing healthcare sector.

Industry Updates

December 25, 2018: By harnessing digital health data, artificial intelligence, and deep learning, Shefayim-based health care start-up Zebra Medical Vision is aiming towards identifying the exotic diagnoses; the zebras by offering radiologists with high-performance algorithms in order to identify accurately and prevent breast, lung, cardiovascular, liver, and bone diseases.

Browse Full Reports with Table and Figures Respectively @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/upcoming-reports/Healthcare-artificial-intelligence-market-5681
Withings, the famous French maker of stylish activity trackers, blood pressure cuffs, and other personal healthcare and fitness devices, is releasing a breathing disturbance monitor. Built into its Sleep tracking mat, the technology can detect many of the instances when a persons breathing is interrupted. These events can be signs of sleep apnea, which in turn can lead to a variety of cardiovascular conditions. As a matter of fact, Withings is planning to add true sleep apnea detection to the Sleep mat once it received FDA and European regulatory clearances, something it expects to obtain soon.

Sleep apnea is a condition thats often left undetected, though its not hard to spot if someones listening out for its loud signals. The Withings Sleep mat can detect breathing, heart beats, and snoring, so this data was used by sleep physician Dr. Pierre Escourrou within the Paris-Beclere hospital sleep lab to develop the breathing disturbance monitoring feature of the mat.

All the sleeping data, including disturbed breathing, is now available through the Health Mate app that shows the frequency and intensity of individual events, as well as a month by month breakdown of sleep.

Despite its prevalence and serious consequences, sleep apnea goes largely undetected as current tests are confined to the clinical and sleep lab environment, in a published statement said Eric Carreel, President of Withings. By allowing people to track the intensity of breathing disturbances, we are helping them identify warning signs early. This announcement is very important as it furthers our mission to bring medical grade analytics into the home and is the first step towards the medical certification of sleep apnea detection which we aim for by the end of this year.

Product page: Sleep Tracking Mat

Via: Withings
by Alex Weprin , March 15, 2019

The video advertising platform Innovid has added two top executives to its ranks.

The company has named Ken Markus chief client officer. He is charged with expanding and supporting the companys roster of clients.

In addition, the company named Seamus Whittingham managing director for the EMEA region, based in London. Along with Whittinghams appointment, the company announced plans to open an office in Tokyo.

Markus had been senior vice president, global operations and client services at Innovid. In addition to his promotion, the company promoted Tom Hartman to vice president, global brand partnerships, and hired Bruce Budkofsky as regional vice president, agency sales for the Eastern region.

Whittingham is joining Innovid from the digital marketing company IgnitionOne, where he was managing director.

The company is expanding after raising $30 million in a new funding round led by Goldman Sachs earlier this year.

With video advertising poised to grow even further in 2019, Innovid is eyeing new markets, while expanding its sales and client operations to build out its existing markets.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, March 15, 2019

Companies would be required to obtain people's explicit consent before sharing their faceprints, under a bill proposed this week by Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Roy Blunt (R-Missouri).

The Commercial Facial Recognition Privacy Act would also require companies to notify people about the use of facial recognition technology, and impose testing requirements aimed at addressing inaccuracies in the technology.

Our faces are our identities. Theyre personal. So the responsibility is on companies to ask people for their permission before they track and analyze their faces, Schatz stated Thursday.

The proposed bill would task the Federal Trade Commission with enforcement, and would also allow states to impose their own, tougher laws.

Microsoft, which has been calling for new limits on the use of facial recognition technology, has already expressed support for the proposed federal legislation.

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A few other states -- including Illinois and Texas -- already regulate biometric privacy. The Illinois law, which provides for damages of up to $5,000 per violation, requires companies to obtain users' consent before collecting scans of facial geometry.

Companies including Facebook, Google and Shutterfly are currently facing lawsuits alleging violations of the Illinois law.

Washington state lawmakers are also considering new restrictions on the use of facial recognition technology. A proposed law that already passed in the state Senate would require private companies to notify consumers about the use of facial recognition and exercise choice. That law would also prohibit government agencies from using the technology in public spaces without a court order, unless there's an emergency.
by Sara Guaglione , March 15, 2019

The Guardian US devoted its homepage to climate change for 11 minutes this morning, in support of school climate strikes taking place today around the world to raise awareness about the state of the global climate crisis.

The homepage went live from 11 a.m. to 11:11 a.m. EST, with more than 40 stories from Guardian correspondents and columnists, the same 11 minutes students were walking out of schools in the U.S. A rally was held at the U.S. Capitol, and more than 70 events swept across the country.

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To raise awareness of the global emergency, the Guardian US dedicated our site to climate change stories for 11 minutes," the site read this afternoon.

A recent UN report warned that the world has 11 years to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Throughout the day, The Guardian will highlight the voices of young people from the US and around the world who have never known a world where the climate isnt rapidly heating," Jane Spencer, deputy editor of The Guardian US, wrote in a post on The Guardian US.

A photo gallery on The Guardian US featured tens of thousands of students striking across the globe, from India to Sweden.

Were inspired by the new generation of young activists fighting to put climate change at the top of the agenda, stated Spencer. In the coming year  and throughout the 2020 election  The Guardian US will amplify the voices of young people to make sure those most threatened by climate change are part of the conversation."

Starting at 10 a.m. in Australia, (Thursday 7 p.m. EST in the U.S.), The Guardian will also offer live coverage for 24 hours of the worldwide strikes as they move across the globe. Reports will come from countries like Australia, Thailand, the UK, Belgium, Sweden, France and Spain.

Fridays climate protests are expected to be one of the largest environmental protests in history, with planned events in at least 100 countries. Organizers estimated over 1 million people would take part.
by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, March 15, 2019

Christchurch, New Zealand -- my home -- was attacked yesterday.

Multiple gunmen opened fire on two mosques, with shots reported at the hospital and elsewhere. As of this writing, 40 people have been confirmed dead. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has called it one of New Zealands darkest days.

Like most of the city, I spent a surreal afternoon on lockdown at my office, some of it on the floor under desks with colleagues. We followed the news for a bit and watched Netflix for a bit. And spent a bit of time on social media.

Here is the right way to use social media in a time of crisis:

If you are a journalist or a news outlet that takes time to confirm sources and obtain accurate information from reliable channels, you can use social media to share important updates with the public.

If you are in the vicinity of the crisis, and you are OK, you can use one of Facebooks most redeeming features: the Mark yourself safe function.

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You can use it to seek help from your neighbors. When Christchurch was hit by earthquakes eight years ago, Twitter brought out the best in our community spirit: For anyone who needs water, theres a working water tap on Tennyson St between St Martins Road and Colombo. Can someone in the Bexley area check on my mother-in-law? Her phone is down and I havent been able to get in touch with her.

Finally, you can use it to uplift. You can use it to share words of love, off peace, of connection  to communicate the best of what is in your heart, and to remind us of who we want to be.

And here is how not to use social media in a time of crisis:

Whether you are a journalist or not, please, please, please do not share unsubstantiated information. In times of crisis we all become combustible, and rumor is kindling soaked in gasoline.

Whether you are a journalist or not, please, please, please do not speculate or engage in conjecture: about who did things, why they did them, what they were thinking.

Finally, if you are a social media platform, and -- as happened yesterday -- a mass shooter livestreams his horrific act, get the footage off your site.

Get it off. Get it off. Get it off. Use your algorithms and your human moderators and your community flags and whatever you have to use to get it off.

Social media is an amplifier. It can amplify accurate information or inaccurate drivel. It can amplify messages that encourage the better angels of our nature or messages that feed the demons that live in all of us. It can amplify stories of love or stories of hate.

Our darkest days are when the need to amplify stories of love is greatest. When the worst side of us presents itself, we need reminders of the best side of us: reminders to reach out to each other in our grief and our pain, reminders to forgive each other and remember whats important, reminders to hold our loved ones close and to let go of our petty grievances.

In a time of crisis, this is what social media is good for. For tweets like this one: I put my youngest to bed & he asked for extra hugs. We held each other real tight & then as I let go he said that extra hug is for all those people whose family died today.

Today, Im sending you an extra hug. Please feel free to amplify it.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, March 15, 2019

Faced with litigation by the broadband industry, the state of Vermont has agreed to hold off on enforcing its new open internet rules.

Vermont and broadband industry representatives informed U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss in Burlington on Thursday that they also agreed to stay legal proceedings in the case. The delay will last until after a federal appeals court decides the validity of the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of the Obama-era rules.

The move brings a temporary halt to a lawsuit brought last year by a host of broadband industry organizations over Vermont's net neutrality law. That measure, passed last May, prohibits broadband access providers that contract with state agencies from violating the Obama-era net neutrality rules -- including rules prohibiting carriers from blocking or throttling traffic and from charging higher fees for prioritized delivery.

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In December of 2017, the Republican-led FCC voted to revoke the Obama-era rules and to prohibit states from passing their own measures. Tech companies, advocacy groups and others are challenging that decision in court. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments earlier this month, and is still considering whether to uphold all or part of the December 2017 order.

Net neutrality supporters argue net neutrality rules are necessary to prevent Comcast, AT&T and other broadband providers from censoring sites or discriminating against competitors like Netflix. But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says the former rules were heavy-handed.

Pai has often claimed the former rules depressed broadband investment, but other observers disagree. The pro-neutrality advocacy group Free Press has said investment by 13 major broadband providers increased in the two years after the FCC passed the net neutrality regulations.

After the FCC voted to repeal the former rules, the governors of Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Montana and Hawaii signed orders similar to the one in Vermont, while the state legislature in Oregon passed a bill banning state agencies from contracting with broadband providers that violate net neutrality principles.

Washington State passed a more comprehensive law that prohibits broadband providers operating in the state from blocking or throttling traffic and from charging companies higher fees for prioritized delivery.

California enacted a broad net neutrality law that prohibits broadband providers from blocking or throttling traffic, charging higher fees for fast-lane service, and from exempting their own video streams from consumers' data caps.

That measure faced an immediate court challenge by the Department of Justice, American Cable Association, CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom. In October, California agreed to hold off on enforcing that law.
by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, March 15, 2019

UM, part of IPG Mediabrands, has been named the U.S. media agency for quick-service restaurant chain TGI Fridays.

The brand spent about $45 million in measured media in 2017, according to Kantar Media.

The account will be led from the agencys Detroit office. Strategy, research and analytics are all part of the remit. The client, which has more than 880 restaurants in 60 countries, is based in Dallas. It was acquired by Sentinel Capital Partners and TriArtisan Capital Partners in 2014.

Were thrilled that TGI Fridays, one of Americas iconic brands, has chosen UM to lead its media efforts in the United States, stated Lynn Lewis, U.S. CEO, UM. We look forward to this exciting partnership and the opportunity to leverage our Better Science, Better Art, Better Outcomes proposition to enhance their communication efforts across the U.S.

TGI Fridays is the latest in a string of recent wins for UM. Earlier this year, it won Energizer Holdings and Henkel. Late last year it won American Express.
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Prostate Cancer & its Classification

Salient Features of the Study

Data were obtained from the UK National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS)

The study was carried out between 2000 to 2010

Study population included 10,089 men diagnosed with non-metastatic prostate cancer from Eastern England

External validation cohort included 2,546 men diagnosed with non-metastatic prostate cancer from Singapore

Median follow-up was 9.8 years with 3,829 deaths, of which 1,202 were due to prostate cancer

The various treatment modalities and their frequency are presented below:

Radiotherapy: 34.6 percent



Androgen deprivation monotherapy: 31.5 percent



Conservative management: 19.8 percent



Prostatectomy: 14.1 percent

PREDICT Prostate predicts the personalized 10-15 year survival rate based on the following parameters:

Age at diagnosis



Prostate-specific antigen (PSA)



Clinical stage



Hospital admissions (past 2 years)



BRCA status



Histological grade



Gleason score



Biopsy data

Advantages of PREDICT Prostate

Stratifies non-metastatic prostate cancer patients on the basis of survival rather than treatment outcomes, which is the current norm

Not only predicts the 10-15 year survival rate, but also the impact of opting for monitoring vs treatment on survival

treatment on survival Can predict the likelihood of success of treatment intervention, as well as the possible risk of side-effects

Has improved the accuracy of classification to more than 80 percent as opposed to 60-70 percent, based on the NICE Guidelines

Could potentially reduce costs incurred by the National Health Service (NHS), arising from unnecessary treatment due to the poor predictive power of clinical evaluation alone. This could mean savings of over 7,000 per patient who undergo radical treatments such as surgery or radiotherapy. The current rate of these procedures, based on data from the National Prostate Cancer Audit, UK is 2-25 percent. Besides the cost factor, these procedures also have significant side-effects

Validation of PREDICT Prostate

Strengths of the Study

Limitations of the Study

Relatively small size of the external validation cohort from Singapore

Inability to anticipate the delayed changes to treatment beyond one year

Absence of tumor-stage subclassifications

PREDICT Prostate can only be used in consultation with a doctor

The web tool is unsuitable for patients with very aggressive cancer

The web tool cannot be used if metastasis has already occurred at the time of diagnosis

Concluding Remarks

Funding Source

Individual Prognosis at Diagnosis in Nonmetastatic Prostate Cancer: Development and External Validation of the PREDICT Prostate Multivariable Model - (https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002758)

The study, published in, was led by Dr. Vincent Gnanapragasam, MBBS, BMedSci, MA, PhD, FRCS, FRSCEd (Urol), who is a University Lecturer in Uro-oncology and an Honorary Consultant Urologist at the University of Cambridge, UK.The lead author of the study was Dr. David Thurtle, BMedSci (Hons), BMBS (Hons), MRCS, who is an Academic Clinical Fellow in Urology at the CRUK Cambridge Center, University of Cambridge, UK.The study was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Paul Pharoah, who is a Professor of Cancer Epidemiology at the Center for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, UK. Prostate cancer affects the prostate gland in men, which is a small walnut-shaped gland, located below the urinary bladder and surrounding the urethra. It produces seminal fluid, which is an important component of semen.Cancer Research UK statistics reveal that. Prostate cancer usually occurs in old age; disease progression is slow and is not always life-threatening. However, in a significant number of men, cancer can metastasize and spread to other parts of the body, which can be fatal.Currently,Depending on the severity, the doctor recommends either patient monitoring or treatment. The latter involves radiotherapy or surgery, which are associated with significant side-effects such as urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction However, the current classification system, which is based on the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Guidelines, is only 60-70 percent accurate. This means that patients, who are advised treatment, may not actually need it. This has been substantiated by a recent UK study, which found that for patients with early prostate cancer (low and intermediate risk); the 10-year survival for those who received treatment was the same as those who didn't receive any treatment.In this regard, Gnanapragasam says:He adds:The accuracy of the predictive power of PREDICT Prostate has been validated in a randomized study consisting of almost 200 prostate cancer specialists. Half of them had access to the web tool as well as patient vignettes, while the other half had access to only the vignettes. Clinicians without access to PREDICT Prostate were more prone to overestimate the risk of death, thereby recommending treatment. On the other hand, those clinicians who had access to PREDICT Prostate were less likely to recommend treatment, based on the more accurate prognostic estimate provided by the web tool.Since the study was based on highly accurate, detailed and comprehensive data, provided by the UK's National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS), the predictive power of PREDICT Prostate was increased manifold.The major limitations of the study include the following:is a personalized prostate cancer prognostic tool built from baseline diagnostic data. Despite inputs from routine pathological information, its prognostic power is considerable and is capable of predicting potential treatment benefits on overall survival. In this regard, Thurtle says:Thurtle concludes:The study was funded by The Evelyn Trust, Cambridge and The Urology Foundation, London, UK.Source: Medindia
What's up everyone? It's our girl Superwoman out there making India proud!

Lilly Singh aka Superwoman has just become the first Indian-origin woman to host a Late Night talk show and basically the entire world is showing nothing but support for her.

It's official. Ya girl is getting her own @nbc late night show... A Little Late with Lilly Singh. Thank you so much for being here. I am truly so grateful. 



Thank you @jimmyfallon @sethmeyers pic.twitter.com/h44HoPRtel  Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) March 15, 2019

She started off her career online by posting YouTube videos on her channel ||Superwoman|| and quickly became a fan favourite on the website because of her hilarious and relatable content. Imagine going from making YouTube videos in your room to getting your own talk show down the line. Sounds like a dream, right? Does it make you want to go back in time and start a YouTube channel doing stupid things and posting it online?

Coming back to her show 'A Little Late with Lilly Singh', she's taking over Carson Daly's 1:30 am slot on NBC and the show is expected to debut this year in December. This is not just important because she's Indian-Canadian, but also because she would be joining the few women hosts in a majorly male-dominated area. Moreover, she's also an openly bisexual woman, so it's like a trifecta of representation.

Ever since the news broke online, all her fans and even celebrities have been showing excitement over this and are tweeting showing support.

National jiju has spoken.

YES! So awesome congrats!  Nick Jonas (@nickjonas) March 15, 2019

The shade was so good.

Thanks bro in law! Appreciate you tweeting this while probably still celebrating your wedding haha! Love uuuuu  https://t.co/NLk3BNSHLf  Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) March 15, 2019

Congratulations are pouring in.

We can't wait.

Oh... and India I can't wait to celebrate with you. Mamas timing ain't no mistake x   Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) March 15, 2019

Even The Rock has spoken.



She's come a long way! Proud of you sis! @IISuperwomanII https://t.co/64LC81PvfW  Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) March 15, 2019

This is so cute.

Thank you for the advice DJ. I'm forever grateful! Now let's get to work  love you x https://t.co/gts9ufCPBM  Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) March 15, 2019

No hard feelings.

Thank you so much! I have enormous shoes to fill. An honour  https://t.co/awVzeQ94iw  Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) March 15, 2019

It is monumental for real.

MONUMENTAL. An LGBT woman of color hosting late night! Congrats @IISuperwomanII you are blazing an important, unprecedented path!  https://t.co/MBaAAdwtLu  Eugene Lee Yang (@EugeneLeeYang) March 15, 2019

The best way.

Tonight I learned who @IISuperwomanII is and I'm obsessed and also so very proud of a complete stranger, but that's the best way to be proud!  Kalen Allen (@TheKalenAllen) March 15, 2019

Queen!

Trying to keep up with your excellency doe  https://t.co/IbX8JQo2Wc  Lilly Singh (@IISuperwomanII) March 15, 2019

Such a great thing!

HELLO!!!!! NETWORK'S FIRST FEMALE LATE NIGHT HOST IS GONNA BE AN INDIAN WOMAN??????? MISS LILLY SINGH IS DOING THAT pic.twitter.com/cytLSMCw2W  neelam saw captain marvel! (@chasegerts) March 15, 2019

The best.

Reason to Smile: @IISuperwomanII, a bisexual woman of color, is now hosting her OWN late night show on NBC?? This is the best news of the day.  Thomas Sanders (@ThomasSanders) March 15, 2019

It really is!

WOW! This is SO amazing! The only woman currently hosting a late night show on one of the big 4 broadcast networks! & also YALL! this is such a victory for the @YouTube community! Congrats @IISuperwomanII  https://t.co/o1FysEySUF  Scott Hoying (@scotthoying) March 15, 2019

Seriously tho.

An Indian woman is getting her own late night talk show. What a time to be alive! Congratulations @IISuperwomanII! https://t.co/dRSXvC1Xrn  Yashar Ali  (@yashar) March 15, 2019

Yes!

Yeaaaahh @IISuperwomanII !! Go sis go!   Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) March 15, 2019

Alexa, play!

#BAWSE #BAWSE #BAWSE  Bout to have me turn into an OWL catching NEW episodes of A LITTLE LATE WITH LILLY SINGH! And when I'm not HOO-HOOing  my DVR is BOOKEDT and BUSY!  Alexa play CONGRATULATIONS! Alexa play INDEPENDENT WOMEN, Pt. 1!!!  https://t.co/Mvr4bhK4yt  Kingsley (@kingsleyyy) March 15, 2019

Good word play.

LILLY  YOURE SUPER, WOMAN.  gabbie (@TheGabbieShow) March 15, 2019

So exciting.

This is very good and very exciting. Congrats @IISuperwomanII!! https://t.co/86TWHewDt6  Zach Kornfeld (@korndiddy) March 15, 2019

Times are changing.

This is HUGE.



1. Someone from my hometown hosting a late night show



2. Someone South Asian



3. A woman of colour



These are all things I thought I'd never see in that role, but I'm thrilled it's happening. Congrats @IISuperwomanII #RepresentOnAllFronts https://t.co/L38EabGwCp  Momin Qureshi (@Momin680NEWS) March 15, 2019

Yes sister, congrats.

CONGRATULATIONS SISTER OMFG  James Charles (@jamescharles) March 15, 2019

All of our hearts.

Lilly is just the coolest and now my heart is full  CONGRATS @IISuperwomanII https://t.co/u833AHo816  Adam Rippon (@Adaripp) March 15, 2019

History in the making.

My heart is sooo full.. ladies and gentlemen you're witnessing history!



Congrats @IISuperwomanII!! pic.twitter.com/CKfhdGDlvK  Humble The Poet (@humblethepoet) March 15, 2019

All hail.
Earlier this week, Facebook and Instagram were out of commission for several hours. Facebook said the outage was a result of a server configuration change, which has now been taken care of. But for those several hours, most of the internet freaked out staring at their blank screens.

A lot of people, who genuinely wanted to communicate with others, switched to alternate services like Telegram. But the rest of the people, who didn't really have any alternate medium to waste their time, headed to, wait for it, Pornhub.

 Pornhub

Yes, that's right. Pornhub seems to have received a lot of traffic during the Facebook and Instagram outage. The porn site reported that its traffic immediately spiked by 11 per cent and kept increasing until it hit 19-percent above the average.

Additionally, Pornhub also noted that the users specifically searched for 'Instagram' and 'Facebook'. Apparently, the website registered a 323-percent spike in searches for 'Instagram' and a 221-per cent spike in searches for 'Facebook'. Looks like social media addiction is a real thing.

 Twitter

On a totally unrelated note (or maybe not), people were also searching for terms like 'tentacle porn' among other terms like WWE, Marvel, and Fortnite. Why would there be a spike in search for these terms when Facebook and Instagram went down? Well, that's not on us to figure out.
Today, 15 March 2019, the proceedings of the 1st Greece-Kuwait Joint Interministerial Committee, which were co-chaired by Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs Sia Anagnostopoulou and Kuwait's Minister of Finance, Dr. Nayef Al-Hajraf, came to conclusion.

In a friendly and productive atmosphere, the two Delegations exchanged views and ideas for further developing bilateral relations. The following four bilateral agreements were signed:

a) Cooperation agreement on issues of Media and Radio and Television productions

b) Memorandum of Understanding on issues of promoting exports,

c) Memorandum of Understanding on issues of industrial cooperation and

d) Memorandum of Understanding on issues of certification.

The successful conclusion of the proceedings of the 1st Joint Interministerial Committee between the two countries, bears witness to the excellent level of bilateral relations and the common will to develop collaboration in new fields of economic, investment and commercial activity.

It was agreed that the Greece-Kuwait Joint Interministerial Committees be convened on an annual basis, with the next meeting scheduled in Kuwait during 2020.
Turkeys effort to equate the flights of Turkish military aircraft that violate Greece's national sovereignty with the identification and interception missions the Hellenic Air Force carries out in defense of national sovereignty, is completely unacceptable.

Turkish military aircraft violate Greek national air space on an almost daily basis, including through low-altitude overflights of inhabited Greek islands. This is a practice that Greece systematically condemns and reports, both bilaterally as well as to the competent international bodies.

Turkey's leadership has to realise that international law must be respected by everybody, in its entirety. Selective application of its provisions merely serves to expose Turkey, while at the same time undermines regional security and stability. Specifically with regard to the Aegean, we reiterate that its legal status is clear and fully enshrined in International Law, leaving no room for doubt.

Turkey, a NATO ally and a candidate country for accession to the EU, would do well to adopt Greece's sober, lawful, and responsible stance, promoting good neighbourly relations, for its own benefit as well as for the benefit of the wider region.
UBLY  For only the seventh time in the storied, 91-year history of the Michigan Future Farmers of America, the association will be led by a student from Huron County.

Ubly science teacher and FFA advisor Melissa Kramer and senior Haili Gusa attended this weeks Ubly Board of Education meeting, where Kramer announced the results of the 91st annual FFA convention, which included the news that Gusa was named the associations president for the 2019-20 school year.

Its pretty big stuff, Kramer said. Shes the first president that Ubly has ever had, she is the first female president from Huron County, only the third female president from our region, and is only the seventh president in 91 years of FFA from our county. So, were really excited and proud of her.

Gusa decided to run for state office and after she went through the regional level interview, was selected in the top three, which sent her to the state level interviews.

The interview process lasted most of the weekend, as she started at 5 p.m. Friday night, and was not finished until 1 p.m. Sunday.

They are watched, unless they are going to the bathroom, sleeping, or showering, Kramer said. They live with their interviewers, they eat with their interviewers, theyre given formal interviews, theyre given formal tests and then theyre also watched to see how they interact with other people while theyre bowling, making T-shirts, and just how they interact with the other students.

While Gusa admitted the interview process was intimidating at first, she noted she received help from multiple avenues at Ubly.

There was a lot of preparation that went into the interviewing part of it because Ive never done a weekend-long interview, Gusa said. That was kind of intimidating at first, but I got a lot of help from a variety of different people. The most came from (Board Treasurer) Ryan Kramer. Hes been a state officer before and we did a lot of practicing interviewing. (Superintendent Joe) Candela came out and interviewed me and that was very helpful. Different community members came in and worked with me for extemporaneous speaking and for my interviewing.

There was a lot of preparation that went into that, so it wasnt just me, there was a lot of help from a lot of different people, she added.

During the week of the convention, Gusa was the state winner for Extemporaneous Public Speaking and on Friday, it was announced she was named the associations president for the upcoming year.

I was so nervous before they announced it, Gusa said. We were standing in a huddle on the side of the stage and my legs were shaking. Then I got to run out when they announced that I was president. I was just so excited. This is my dream, this is what I want to do the next year, and Im actually going into communications, and this is better than any internship I could have ever gotten.

Over the next year, Gusa will be traveling throughout the state of Michigan, doing agri-business and industry tours, where she will be talking to FFA sponsors, or future sponsors.

She will also be doing chapter visits, where she will talk to chapters across the state about FFA, and she will be the voting delegate for Michigan at the national level.

When new policies or officers get elected at the national level, Gusa will be voting for the Michigan chapter of the FFA, along with plenty of other roles and responsibilities.

Gusa will be doing all of this while attending classes at Michigan State University, where she plans to study communications.

For the president specifically, there is a state presidents conference and thats going to be an awesome leadership experience, Gusa said. Theres a lot that goes into it, well be running the state convention next year. Theres just a lot of really neat things that go on throughout the year and Im super excited.
Conservative commentator and Stamford native Candace Owens had her name cited by an alleged gunman in deadly shooting attacks Friday at two mosques in New Zealand that left at least 49 dead.

Though he claimed not to covet fame, the man charged with the murders  whose name was not immediately released by police  left behind a 74-page document posted on social media under the name Brenton Tarrant in which he said he hoped to survive the attack to better spread his views in the media.

The rambling manifesto is filled with confusing and seemingly contradictory assertions about his beliefs.

Beyond his white nationalistic ideals, he claimed to be an environmentalist and said he is a fascist who believes China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values. He said he has contempt for the wealthiest 1 percent.

He singled out Owens as the person who had greatly influenced him.

According to International Business Times, the Australian gunman answered the question: Is there a particular person that radicalized you the most?

Yes, the person that has influenced me above all was Candace Owens. Each time she spoke, I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for me are too much, even for my tastes.

Owens, 29, responded on Twitter.

LOL! FACT: Ive never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam. The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in ... New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government handouts is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL! she wrote in a series of tweets. HAHA OMG you racist Leftists are taking your racism and crazy to a whole new level hahah. Black people dont have to be Democrats now means ... mosque shootings in New Zealand? This clearly wont stick but damn if I wont grow #BLEXIT highlighting your sheer desperation.

In another tweet Friday, Owens, who regularly appears on Fox News and travels to speak at college campuses, said that if the media portrayed her as the inspiration for the attack, it had better hire lawyers.

Leaving aside whether the alleged terrorist was serious in singling out Owens or simply name-dropping a polarizing cultural figure in order to troll the media, Owens response to the situation drew criticism from many corners, including the Connecticut chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations.

Anybody whos even intending on laughing at something like this are themselves laughable, said Executive Director Tark Aouadi.

Owens did issue a more-formal statement to the media: What happened last night in Christchurch, New Zealand is a tragedy and I echo the sentiment of all Americans, in wishing love and healing for all those impacted. That said, any insinuation that black conservatism in the United States has somehow inspired radical Islamaphobic white supremacy terror overseas is pointedly absurd. People on both sides of the political aisle  especially the victims  deserve a more honest conversation.

The content of Owens tweets tend to be about how black people are not beholden to the Democratic Party, not her views on Islam, as she pointed out in her first tweet after news broke of her names inclusion in the terrorists manifesto. However, she has occasionally mentioned Muslims, such as in an exchange on Twitter last year.

On Nov. 13, 2018, she wrote: If France wants to build an army to defend itself against anything, it ought to be the declining birth rate of its people. All signs indicate that it will be a Muslim majority country in just 40 years!

This prompted an online reply from one reader of: Candy / racism much? to which Owens responded: Muslim is not a race. Stupid much?

Earlier this month, Owens drew sharp criticism for proclaiming, America is not a racist country, during a conservative convention after once winning a Connecticut lawsuit as a victim of racism.

Owens family received a $37,500 settlement from the Stamford Board of Education after she accused a group of teens of leaving her threatening and racist messages while she was a high school student in 2007.

Includes reporting from staff writer Barry Lytton and the Associated Press.
Buoyed by a change of heart from the states medical society, proponents of legislation that would let terminally ill patients access medication to end their lives say they feel more optimistic about the bills chances this year.

The Connecticut State Medical Society, which had long opposed the so-called aid-in-dying measure, recently adopted a position of engaged neutrality, meaning the group will allow its doctors to decide whether they want to prescribe a lethal dose of medication if such a practice is legalized.

That, coupled with a new crop of lawmakers who appear more open to the proposal, may give the bill better odds this year, supporters said.

The majority of physicians probably will not feel comfortable choosing to participate in this aid-in-dying process, but there are more and more physicians who understand  that helping people maintain the quality of life they want and make their own decisions is consistent with their role, said Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, a co-chair of the legislatures Public Health Committee.

A public hearing on the bill is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Monday in the Legislative Office Building.

The measure would allow doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to patients who have six months or less to live and who are in deep and dire pain. Two physicians, including a primary care doctor who is familiar with the patient, would have to sign off on the decision.

State Rep. Josh Elliott, D-Hamden, said most people who have expressed interest in an end-of-life program dont actually go through with it.

What they want is just control, he said. So its really important for us to not be legislating based on morality, but allowing people to have ownership of their own lives.

Aid in dying is legal in Washington D.C. and seven states: California, Montana, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Steinberg said Connecticut lawmakers have reviewed legislation approved in some of those states and tracked annual reports on the issue.

The proposal has been raised many times in Connecticut, including as recently as last year, but has never made it out of committee.

I think we have a decent prospect this year, Steinberg said. We have a lot of new members in the legislature who may have a different point of view.

The bill also has aroused frustration among detractors, who say old concerns arent addressed in the latest version.

Theres a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong, said Cathy Ludlum, a spokeswoman for Second Thoughts, an advocacy group for people with disabilities. Theres an awful lot of opportunity for coercion, misdiagnosis, despair and lack of understanding of what it means to live with a severe disability.

Stephen Mendelsohn, another representative of Second Thoughts, said Thursday that terminal diagnoses are not always precise.

Doctors are not very accurate at predicting six months to live, he said. How many lives are going to be cut short?

The Family Institute of Connecticut denounced the plan in an email blast and urged opponents to attend Mondays hearing.

The societal implications of legalizing assisted suicide are staggering, Peter Wolfgang, the groups executive director, wrote. Government and doctors would be endorsing suicide.

We cannot let this happen in Connecticut.
Two bills that would give legislators greater oversight of the Connecticut State Colleges and University system were endorsed with unanimous support Thursday, including one that would enable lawmakers to stop plans to merge the states 12 community colleges into a single statewide institution.

I think this is imperative that we do this this year, said Rep. Terrie Wood, R-Darien, shortly before the vote was taken in the Higher Education Committee on Senate Bill 749. This community college consolidation  the process has not been transparent. I dont believe the numbers add up. We just need more accountability and more understanding of it.

Sen. Mae Flexer, D-Killingly, and a vice-chairwoman of the committee, said she hopes to see the bill, which has been sent to the floor of the Senate, get through the General Assembly so that legislators are empowered to stop the college merger plan backed by CSCU President Mark Ojakian, who also heads the Board of Regents for Higher Education.

We are at risk of losing many of the community-based strengths of our community system with the creation of one single institution, Flexer said. When the Board of Regents was created, we were assured we were going to have 12 independent community colleges and four state universities. That is no longer the case and the legislature needs to be the voice of the people to ensure they have a role in this discussion.

A second bill, House Bill 7254, unanimously approved by the committee Thursday, says the president of the Board of Regents must make quarterly reports to the higher education committee on the status of Students First, as the college consolidation plan is called.

As the law stands now, the Board of Regents, the governing board for CSCU system, makes the decision on whether to close or merge institutions. With the backing of Ojakian, the board has decided to merge the states 12 community college in an attempt to bolster the systems ailing finances.

Ojakian has estimated that the plan will save $23 million annually when the consolidation is complete and he hopes to invest any savings into services for students that will strengthen retention and graduation rates.

Last year, the accrediting agency for the CSCU institutions, the New England Commission of Higher Education, turned down Ojakians bid to consolidate the 12 colleges, but Ojakian said he has been working closely with NECHE to ensure a better chance of success when he submits the plan again. His hope is to receive approval from NECHE in time to completely consolidate the colleges in 2023.

The Senate bill would require that any proposed merger or closing of a CSCU institution must be approved by a majority vote in both chambers of the General Assembly, but to reject it would require only a majority vote of either chamber. The vote must be taken not later then one year after receiving notice by the Board, the bill says, adding that if the General Assembly fails to act, the recommended merger or closing shall be deemed acceptable.

Ojakian, who opposed the bills approved by the committee Thursday, said the system must be restructured if it is to remain solvent.

I believe that if you have a board of regents or a board of trustees that is mostly appointed by the governor that you should give that board the authority to make those kinds of decisions, Ojakian said Thursday, shortly after the committee vote. While I respect the legislative process, I think if you have legislators approving or rejecting closures or mergers then you are going to inject politics into those decisions even more than is being done now.

If politics enter into the decisions about which colleges remain open or closed, he said, the students would be the ones to suffer in the end.

You know Ive never said I want to close campuses. Im committed to not closing campuses, Ojakian said. His plan preserves all 12 campuses, but centralizes administration.

But if a successor attempted to close a campus, Ojakian said he thinks its the colleges in the more rural areas that may be at greater risk because they have a smaller delegation in the legislature.

You clearly see legislators, in a desire to protect their own institutions, basically arguing that we should close another institution, said Ojakian.

I think President Ojakian underestimates the strength of the voice of northeastern Connecticut, said Flexer, who is from the northeast corner of the state and graduated from Quinebaug Valley Community College. Twelve campuses run by a bureaucrat in Hartford is not the same. Its not keeping the community in our community college system.

Rep. Gregg Haddad, D-Mansfield, and co-chairman of the higher education committee is another strong proponent of the bill.

Were the funding agency for the system and I think thats an expectation here that we want an understanding about what it is that we are providing money for, said Haddad. I think its not surprising that legislators would want a say in something as sweeping as what hes proposing.
WASHINGTON  On the same day the Connecticut Supreme Court issued a historic ruling allowing a lawsuit by victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to move forward, Connecticut lawmakers introduced resolutions that aim to block the use of federal education grants to arm teachers.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal called the state Supreme Courts 4-3 decision to overturn a lower court dismissal of a case against Remington Arms and other gun manufacturers a bombshell victory.

Sen. Chris Murphy said allowing the gun liability case to move forward, even if the Sandy Hook victims eventually lose the case, will provide a wealth of information through the legal process of discovery about how the industry markets its products.

Discovery alone could be damaging to the gun industry, Murphy said.It will teach us a lot about how the gun industry took a weapon that was designed for military use and put it in the hands of Adam Lanza.

Lanza, the shooter who killed 20 first-graders and six educators, fired a version of the AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle.

But the senators chief purpose in holding a news conference Thursday was to introduce a resolution to clarify that federal education dollars cant be used by schools to arm teachers.

The U.S. Department of Education has declined to say whether recipients of Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, which are controlled at the district level, cant be used to arm teachers. The grants can be used for a wide variety of purposes including promoting school safety so that students are free from violent and disruptive acts.

Proponents of arming teachers say that means the money can be used for purchasing guns and training teachers how to use them.

But Democrats like Blumenthal and Murphy say the same section of the law that established the grants also prioritizes the creation of a school environment that is free of weapons.

Murphy said the resolution would make it perfectly clear that the education grants cant be used to arm teachers.

Teachers have way too much to do, Murphy said. They dont have to be marksmen.

Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, introduced companion legislation in the U.S. House on Thursday, the first time the freshman lawmaker is the original sponsor of a resolution.

The idea coming out of this administration to possibly arm teachers is just wrong, Hayes, a former teacher, said.

Hayes, who is married to a police officer, said she is concerned first responders at a school shooting will spend crucial minutes trying to determine is this an active shooter or is this a teacher?

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said her union is backing the Murphy-Hayes resolutions.

I find it incredibly harmful to even be having this debate because its insanity to me, she said. My members and children got killed in Newtown. My members and children got killed in Parkland.

A school safety report by a commission chaired by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that was released in December lauds various state programs that arm teachers.

Nine states, including Texas, Arkansas and South Dakota, arm schoolteachers. But none of them, as of yet, are using federal funds to do so.

Murphy and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, members of Appropriations Committee in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, said they would try to include language in spending bills that fund the U.S. Department of Education making it clear that federal dollars cant be used to arm teachers.

The National Rifle Association supports arming teachers.

Murphy said he hopes to win GOP support for his resolution in the Senate which, unlike the House, is still in Republican hands.

Republicans understand that the world has changes and the NRA is no longer in charge of this place, Murphy said.
HARTFORD  It isnt an unusual complaint from Connecticut town officials that even though the majority of a municipalitys budget is made up by education spending they have no control over school expenditures.

The question has often been raised: should Connecticut give some local school boards the ability to set their own tax rates for their education budgets?

The Planning and Development Committee heard Friday from local elected leaders about the issue during a public hearing on a bill that would make local and regional school districts with average daily memberships of less than 15,000 students, fiscally independent.

The issue is controversial and has divided local elected officials.

In favor is South Windsor Town Manager Matt Galligan.

Galligan, prior to working in Connecticut, served as state auditor for the New York State Comptrollers Office, among other positions he held in the state.

Galligan told the committee he finds Connecticut system of doing budgets a waste of time and energy.

In New York, Galligan said: the superintendent and the Board of Education would put their budget together and go directly to the voters or taxpayers and answer questions and advocate on behalf of their budgets.

Having worked in both New York and Connecticut, I found that their system of delivering education is more efficient and effective, Galligan said, telling the committee it forces better and continued communication between town and school officials through the entire budget-making process.

Galligan added: In many instances in Connecticut, the education budget is simply a line item when it is presented to the public though it represents approximately 70 percent of the overall budget. Whereas the general government budget is itemized in detail.

The result of creating a financially independent education taxing district is that the board of education would by default have to present an itemized budget for taxpayers to review and vote on, increasing transparency and accountability, Galligan said.

But Galligans statement that the New York system of doing budgets is superior to Connecticuts ran into opposition from several committee members.

A separate taxing district could potentially create chaos in a town, Rep. Tom Arnone, D-Enfield said.

It would pit young against the old, Arnone told Galligan. Its going to be parents with kids on one side against those with no kids on the other, he said.

Former House Speaker Brendan Sharkey, who was in front of the committee to testify on another bill, did throw his support behind the taxing authority initiative.

It increases transparency on how money is spent at the local level, Sharkey told the committee.

Creating independent education taxing districts was a recommendation back in 2015 from a legislative commission created by former Sharkey. It was again put forward by Gov. Ned Lamonts shared services transition committee, which was co-chaired by Sharkey.

On the other side, Wilton Superintendent Kevin Smith said it might surprise people that hes opposed to giving school boards independent taxing authority.

In an era of chronic fiscal deficits at the state level and an accompanying scramble to reduce costs and increase efficiencies there is simply no logic (and quite certainly no savings) in creating a duplicative tax collection apparatus in municipalities, Smith said in written testimony.

Currently, 30 states have entirely fiscally independent school districts, while 16 states have some fiscally dependent and some fiscally independent school districts, and eight states have state dependent school districts, according to Katie Roy, executive director of the Connecticut School Finance Project.

Roy said in states with fiscally independent school districts, taxpayers receive a bill from their town tax assessors office  similar to Connecticut  but the tax bill includes separate tax rates: one for the school district and one for the town.

She said there is no duplicative assessment and tax collection office for the schools.

But opposition remains.

While not taking sides in the debate, Roy said Fiscally independent school districts can bring a degree of greater transparency and accountability because taxpayers know the proportion of property taxes directed toward the support of local public schools and the proportion directed toward municipal services, such as police, fire, and waste removal.

If the bill were to include school districts or municipalities that served by academies then you can count Norwich City Manager John Salomone as in favor.

Salomone said Norwich Free Academy (NFA) charges Norwich for each student enrolled.

The Board of Education has no control over the bill NFA sends, Salomone said. Last year, the Norwich Board of Education overspent its budget and City Council had to tap into its budget reserves by over $1 million to cover the deficit.

If the taxing authority bill were passed, Salomone said, It may have the ancillary effect of incentivizing NFA to come to the table and work with the Board of Education more closely, which they are reticent to do so now.

Cristin McCarthy Vahey, D-Fairfield, said she felt one of the benefits of the Connecticut budget system is that it allows education and town officials to play to their strengths.

McCarthy Vahey, a former member of the Fairfield Board of Education, said having the education budget distinct from the municipal budget allows us to primarily focus on educating the kids.
HARTFORD  Taxpayers from every walk of life descended on the Legislative Office Building Friday to offer their opinion on the first public airing of Gov. Ned Lamonts tax proposals.

Some were in support, others in opposition, and some offered their own alternatives.

The Progressive Caucus within the Democratic Party, which held a press conference before the public hearing on the tax bills, said they would like to see would like see a half percent increase in the income tax on top income earners. The top rate for individuals making $500,000 a year and couples making $1 million a year is currently 6.9 percent. The caucus would like to see it increased to 7.49 percent.

Rep. Anne Hughes, D-Easton, one of more than 40 members of the caucus, said that would raise enough revenue to cover the revenue needed to spare home goods and services from the elimination of the sales tax and there would no longer be any need for the sugary beverage tax.

Preliminary estimates from the Office of Fiscal Analysis show that an increase of a half a percent on top income earners would raise about $227 million.

Hughes said they are also exploring increasing the capital gains tax rate.

Office of Policy and Management Secretary Melissa McCaw said Lamont is open to discussing Connecticuts tax structure with any lawmaker but has been clear about how he feels about changes to the income tax.

Lamont has said repeatedly that he doesnt favor an increase in the income tax.

Senate President Martin Looney, D-New Haven, agrees.

He said one-third of the income tax is highly volatile from year-to-year so I think we need to find some other way to expand the responsibility for needed revenue outside the income tax.

But Looney warned they should do it in a way thats not regressive.

There were dozens of others who attended the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee public hearing encouraging members not to take away their sales tax exemptions.

From lawyers to accountants, more than 120 members of the public signed up to testify on the governors tax package.

Lincoln Woodard, president of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers, said requiring the legal community to implement a 6.35 percent sales tax on their services would cause undue harm to its clients.

The tax is scheduled to bring $35.3 million in the first year and $71.7 million in the second year of the governors budget.

Taxing legal services is simply not a viable way to raise revenue, Woodard said. It would create a barrier to the unalienable right to justice.

The expansion of the sales tax base is expected to bring in $371 million in 2020 and $652.6 million in 2021.

The biggest portion of that would come from repealing the sales tax exemption on vehicle trade-ins.

Repeal of the trade-in tax credit will on average increase the cost to a consumer financing a vehicle by $1200-$1500, Jeff Aiosa, owner of Mercedes Benz of New London, said. This kind of price increase will directly impact consumer behavior resulting in delayed or postponed sales, sales of less expensive vehicles, or worse, no sales at all. This burden will affect all consumers trading in a car.

With repeal of the trade-in exemption, Connecticut will stand alone in the Northeast as the only state to tax the trade-in vehicle.

All states, with the exception of California, that have a sales tax on motor vehicle sales similar to Connecticuts have some type of allowance exempting the trade-in from the sales tax, Jill Silverman, owner and assistant general manager of Richard Chevrolet, said. More importantly, all northeastern states, with the exception of New Hampshire, which has no sales tax, give consumers a trade-in exemption.

The Progressive caucus, which is seeking changes to the overall package, also expressed their opposition to a tax on sugary beverages.

Lamonts budget proposed a 1.5 cent per ounce tax on sweetened beverages. That amounts to about 18 cents on a 12 ounce can or $2.16 cents on a 12-pack of soda or a $1.92 tax on a gallon jug of iced tea.

Dr. David Katz, director of Prevention Research Center at Yale University and Griffin Hospital, said sugar-sweetened beverages are really the tobacco of our time.

Opponents of the tax, including the Progressive Caucus, argue the tax is regressive.

Rep. Juan Candelaria, D-New Haven, said the sugary beverage tax will disproportionately impact working and middle class families.

Obesity and diabetes are horribly regressive, Katz said.

He said its just a fact the obesity and diabetes are also impacting those communities at a greater rate and thats regressive. He said the cost of those diseases dwarf the cost of the tax.

Katz said taxing sweetened beverages actually levels the playing field. He said no one in any of these communities is going to go thirsty if they cant buy soda.

The sugary beverage tax is expected to generate $163.1 million in the second year of the budget.

Meanwhile, Lamonts revenue proposals also had its supporters.

The two-year budget released on Feb. 20 doesnt make many changes to the spending side of the budget.

The decision to increase spending slightly did not go unnoticed by advocates for the poor, disabled, and elderly.

A number of advocates for the individuals who receive services in some way from the state came to testify Friday in favor of Lamonts revenue proposals.

Ben Szczerbicki, a recovery coordinator for Reliance Health, Inc., said he wanted to encourage the Finance, Revenue, and Bonding Committee to make the difficult decisions require to increase state revenue. He said the revenue is necessary to fund the services that saved his life.

He was one of many to testify in favor of the tax increases.

If this committee doesnt pass a budget with sufficient revenue to support the funding needed to maintain those programs, there will be no choice but for the Appropriations Committee to make additional cuts - cuts the folks who participate in these programs simply cannot afford, Kathy Flaherty, executive director of the CT Legal Rights Project, said.
A man recently came into the Bethel police station looking to get a copy of an accident report.

But this normally straightforward task was not so simple.

No one at the station had a clue about what he was saying.

He didnt speak one bit of English, said Capt. Stephen Pugner.

Once they realized there was a language barrier, officers picked up the phone and called an electronic translation service.

We were able to get a translator on the phone who was able to tell us what he needed, said Pugner, adding that the man was in and out in no time.

From hiring bilingual officers to employing electronic translation services, area police departments are striving to find ways to overcome language barriers and assist those in their communities who dont speak English.

A language other than English is spoken in nearly 30 percent of Fairfield County households, according to the U.S. Census Bureaus 2017 Population Estimates  and Danbury is one of the most diverse cities in Connecticut.

While nearly all police departments in the greater Danbury area have at least one officer who speaks a non-English language, many find the electronic translation services extremely helpful. With the regions ever-growing diversity, most departments understand the importance of being able to communicate with those who speak other languages.

The Danbury Police Department, for example, has about 10 officers who speak non-English languages, said Detective Lt. Mark Williams.

These department translators speak a variety of languages, including  but not limited to  Spanish, Portuguese and German. They also get compensated for volunteering to translate, Williams said.

Its not a big dollar mark, he said, but we do use them on occasion  usually for criminal investigations and more in-depth interviews.

Spanish is the most commonly translated language for the Danbury Police Department, Williams said.

Proper understanding is important, so one of the considerations when we use translators is the worthiness of the translation, because there are different dialects  especially in Spanish, he said. Someone from Spain and someone from the Dominican Republic might speak the same base language, but the dialects may be very different.

The Bethel Police Department has three or four officers who understand a lot of Spanish, said Pugner, as well as an officer who speaks Polish, another who speaks one of the languages of India and an officer who speaks both Portuguese and Spanish.

Pugner said translation is most often needed for Spanish and Portuguese in Bethel.

The Ridgefield Police Department has three officers who speak Spanish and one that speaks Portuguese.

We utilize interpreters approximately 10 to 20 times per year, most of which is Spanish or Portuguese, said Capt. Shawn Platt.

Redding Police Chief Mark ODonnell said his department has an interpretation service, but didnt clarify which one.

We also, in an emergency, call the town building supervisor, who speaks Spanish, he said.

The New Milford Police Department has one officer who is fluent in Spanish, said Lt. Lawrence Ash.

When that officer is unavailable or translation is needed for another language, Ash said, officers turns to Voiance Language Services.

The State of Connecticut contracted with Voiance Language Services to provide translation for our 911 calls three years ago, said Ash.

For routine translation, we have a PIN number that we use, he said. There is a separate PIN number for our 911 calls.

The Danbury, Bethel and Ridgefield police departments use the 24-hour telephone translation service LanguageLine.

Its a great service, said Pugner. We can call up and get a translator for just about every language imaginable live over the phone.

Pugner said Bethel police have been using it for at least 10 years.

It comes in handy, he said. There have been some really odd languages that weve come across over the years and weve called the translation service and got a translator.

kendra.baker@hearst.com
MIDDLETOWN  Getting the most accurate count possible for the 2020 census is critical for any number of reasons, federal, state and local officials said Friday.

Those reasons include determining international trade agreements, predicting school enrollments, enabling businesses to decide where to open a new plant, and enable cities and town to accurately project their budgetary costs for the coming years.

A low number on the census can also mean political consequences, as Connecticut could potentially lose a U.S. representative in Congress.

But perhaps the most significant reason is that an undercount means money lost to Connecticut and, by extension, to the cities and towns of Middlesex County.

We have $10.7 billion riding on that count for the state, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz said during a news conference in the Common Council chamber in City Hall.

The state has launched an effort  Connecticut Complete Count Committee  to ensure that every Connecticut resident is counted in 2020.

Gov. Ned Lamont has charged Bysiewicz with overseeing the program and creating Local Complete Count Committees that will target hard-to-count populations, which includes portions of Middletown.

Roughly 22 percent of Connecticut is considered hard-to-count communities, Bysiewicz said.

In general, those communities are made up of young adult males, individuals with impermanent housing and immigrant communities, she said.

She was joined at the news conference by U.S. Reps. John Larson and Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., state Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, Middlesex Chamber of Commerce President Larry McHugh, Deputy Mayor Robert D. Santangelo and Councilor Mary Bartolotta.

This is a critically important effort, DeLauro said.

If the state is not accurately counted and federal aid is reduced, These shortfalls have to be made up by our cities  and they dont have the money, she said.

For DeLauro, the process has a decidedly personal resonance. Her mother was a census taker, and DeLauro said she can remember the effort that went into collecting information by hand.

That was then. In 2020, For the first time you can fill out your form online or do it over the phone, she said.

She then turned to offer the microphone to Larson, calling him senator as she did. Realizing her mistake, DeLauro said, I just gave you a promotion.

Or a demotion, Larson deadpanned.

In his remarks, Larson stressed another key point: We send more to Washington than we get back.

Telling Bysiewicz Its our honor to work with you, McHugh said the data derived from the census is critical to the business community and in particular to the manufacturing sector that includes both Pratt & Whitney and Electric Boat.

More than just elected officials, Bysciewiczs outreach efforts includes partners as varied as faith-based organizations and libraries.

The Rev. W. Vance Cotton, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, said he would add his voice to the effort, telling his congregation of the importance of being counted.

Jennifer O. Keohane, the executive director of the Connecticut Library Consortium, teased the stereotype of librarians by offering a loud message: that we are ready, willing and able to help make the 2020 census a success.

During the session, officials indirectly acknowledged a delicate issue in the effort to find and count everyone. It involves people who are living in Connecticut but who are not U.S. citizens, and as such may be reluctant to step out of the shadows for even the most modest exposure, because it might lead to their arrest or deportation.

Lisa Moore, the Census Bureaus assistant regional manager for the Northeast and Puerto Rico, sought to assure them that All your data is safe. By law, the Census Bureau cannot share any of your data with any other agency, Moore said.

She, too, pointed to valuable programs such as Head Start, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Community Development Block Grants that could be scaled back without the most accurate count possible.

So, obviously we need to get this right, she said.

Moore also offered some encouraging news: as the census approaches, the bureau will need to staff up. They are temporary positions, but they do pay $21 an hour, Moore said.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Councilor Deborah Kleckowski spoke at the census event. It was Councilor Mary Bartolotta who spoke at the news conference.

jmill@middletownpress.com
MIDDLETOWN - A former Middletown man is facing seven counts of failure to register as a sex offender after he was picked up by federal agents in New York, police said.

Rochene Wiggins, 44, with addresses listed in Middletown and New York City, was convicted in 1992 of first-degree sexual assault and third-degree sexual assault. He was detained by the U.S. Department of Justice, in New York City on March 1 based on a warrant held by Middletown police, local police said.
MIDDLETOWN  When the Passacantando family put the Italian market theyve run for three decades up for sale recently, they were willing to wait however long it took until the right person came along.

That wish was fulfilled when  of all people  a young man who worked at Public Market on Main Street in his late teens walked in one day in January and decided to buy the place. Hed had an epiphany after he stopped by and gazed at a photograph of the late patriarch on the wall, he said.

Middletown resident Josh Morris, 23, who bought the modest grocery store Friday, will reopen the shop Monday morning, he said, greeting customers with his smiling, recognizable face.

Hes the perfect person for it. And hes got the personality, former owner Maria Passacantando said of Morris.

Public Market has a long history. Its been at 480 Main St. in the citys North End since 1915. In 1989, John Passacantando bought and revitalized the shop. He died unexpectedly in August 2015 at 58.

Since then, Maria Passacantando, who wasnt involved in the business when her husband operated it, took over the operation with the help of her son, Middletown Police Officer John Passacantando, and daughter Amelia Passacantando.

Morris started out at 18, slicing meat and cheese in the deli part time. He attended college, studied to be an accountant, and left the market at 22 to take a full-time job in his field for two years.

As I gained Johns trust, and I moved up a little bit, he gave me more responsibilities, like doing the catering orders by myself, doing a lot of the deliveries, Morris said of working in the shop the first time.

He soon became the informal manager, running things when John Passacantando wasnt there.

John installed a lot of work ethic in me, Morris said. He taught me if you want something, you can do it, but you have to work hard for it. If you put your mind to it and work really hard, you can achieve whatever you want. It did it every day. He took me under his wing and really taught me a lot of life lessons.

Public Markets atmosphere and offerings hearken back to a less hurried, much simpler time, when people often stopped by the corner market for fresh deli meats, produce, salads and pastries, and stayed a while to shoot the breeze.

The shop was closed Friday. The family put a neon orange sign on the front window, indicating it would reopen Monday. Still, a handful of people stopped by every hour, pulling the door handle, surprised to find it was locked evidence of how many customers are used to simply walking in seven days a week, for decades.

Marie Passacantando decided recently it was time to turn over the business to someone new. Her son, who had worked at Public Market since he was 13, had a full-time job with the police force, and her daughter has a 2-year-old, Giovanni  named after his grandfather  with another child on the way.

It was getting too much for me: long hours, seven days a week, my daughter had a baby, helping her out, 17 apartments I had to take care of, Maria Passacantando said. It was a big role, and the shoes were too big to fit.

The elder John Passacantando was always generous to his employees  and could quickly recognize the good in people, even if they had gotten into trouble in the past, his son said.

He was the type of person, regardless of your background, lets say youve been in trouble before, he gave people that second chance, a chance to work, the younger John Passacantando said. After he passed away, we learned stuff we never realized. The things he would give away to people in the community who didnt have money, employees that started working here that had a rough past are now very successful.

Maria Passacantando said she had no idea how generous her late husband was, and recalls being frustrated he worked such long hours every day of the week.

This is all new to me, which is why it was hard, Maria Passacantando said. He was never home: He never had dinner with us, but now Im in that position, now I feel bad that I yelled at him.

The elder John Passacantando allowed one employee, a high school dropout who started at Public Market at 17, to stay in one of the apartments above the grocery store with the permission of his mother, as long as he remained employed there. Today, hes an executive chef at multimillion dollar restaurant on the Boston waterfront.

The man wrote a long letter to the editor of the Press upon John Passacantandos death. Morris recalls how poignant his missive was. As he was going through a rough time and was talkign to long-time employee Dolly Evora, he saw John Passacantandos smiling face from the wall.

Im a very religious person. I felt like I got a feeling from God. I was staring at the the picture, and said, Dolly, I want to buy this place, Morris said.

And Evora just said why not? he said.

I was excited, touched, Maria Passacantando said. Then he told me how it happened. I didnt want to just give it up, so it felt good he said he wanted to keep the legacy going. It was a perfect fit.

Morris plans to also focus on growing the catering business. In fact, his first day on the job, John Passacantando took him out on his rounds.

Thats where John guided me, Morris said. I used to love going on deliveries, going to peoples houses and setting up the food, creating a connection with people. Thats my favorite part.

Ive got big shoes to fill, but Ive got big feet, he said, as mother and son Passacantando broke out in laughter.

For more information, visit publicmarketmiddletown.com or call 860-398-9500.
HARTFORD  State Sen. Matt Lesser, D-Middletown, applauded the work of the Alzheimers Associations Connecticut Chapter during its recent Advocacy Day at the Connecticut state Capitol.

Sen. Lesser singled out Middletown resident Christy Kovel, the Alzheimers Association interim executive director and director of public policy, for helping to positively impact the lives of so many people, according to a press release.

The Alzheimers Association is doing incredible work. Its always great to see Christy Kovel, who has led on bringing awareness to the needs of those battling this disease and the individuals who provide care for them, Lesser said in a prepared statement.

The Alzheimers Association works to create awareness and provide support for those battling Alzheimers, unite caregivers and push for more research into this disease. They have been doing so since 1980, according to its mission.

Their work in helping those battling Alzheimers is much needed, Lesser said in the release.

Alzheimers is the most common form of dementia, and, by 2014, as many as five million people had the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC also reports that changes can occur in the brain years before the first symptoms appear. Alzheimers can seriously affect a persons memory, ability to hold a conversation and carry out daily activities, according to the CDC.

This is a disease that touches people regardless of race, religion, creed, no matter where you are, or whether youre rich or poor. It is a huge public health challenge for the state and Im committed to doing everything I can to support our aging population and the caregivers who support them. Im happy to work with the Alzheimers Association and be an advocate on this important issue, Lesser added.
KILLINGWORTH 

Registration is now open for the Arts Center Killingworths annual July Fashion Camps. Space for all camps is limited so please register early. For availability call (860)663-5593 or email artscenterkillingworth@gmail.com.

Fashion Week One, Monday-Friday, July 8-12, for ages 11-15. Mornings are spent working with a professional illustrator learning to draw the fashion silhouette as live models pose for your sketches. End the week of illustration with a portfolio ready piece. Afternoons are spent with professional seamstresses learning to read, pin and cut a pattern of your choice. Construct and finish your garment by sewing and adding accessories. Professional hair and makeup stylists help prepare you for the end of the week photo shoot and fashion show. Model your creations for friends and family! Cost for one registrant is $360 per week, with a deposit of $180. Each participant must supply their own sewing machine. Drawing and sewing material lists are available.

Fashion Week Two, Monday-Friday, July 15-19, for ages 11-15, camp goers dig deeper and focus their designs on the influences of top fashion designers. Afternoons, they sew their creations and add details. The week ends with a portfolio-ready fashion illustration and their turn to make their way down the runway for family and friends.

This years design muse is the feminine and rebellious Miu Miu design house. Learn sketching from a live model and design your own Miu Miu inspired creations. Fashionistas can register for either week or both weeks. No previous experience is necessary.

Cost for one registrant is $360 per week, with a deposit of $180. Each participant must supply their own sewing machine. Drawing and sewing material lists are available.

Nature Art Camp, July 22-26 for ages 7-11, with participants spending fun summer days drawing en plein air and painting and sculpting on the grounds of the Arts Center. Nature is the inspiration for a variety of unique projects for this camp including Busy Little Beehive Sculpture, Nature Rocks, Magic Tree Collaborative, Birds & Branches/Natures Paint Brushes. Cost for one camper is $325 with a $162 deposit.

Applicants sought for Sal Salafia award

Initiated in 1997, the Sal Salafia Community Award, a $1,000 schooarship, is awarded to a graduating Middletown secondary school student who has demonstrated excellence in community service. Applicants must include a detailed description of their service, how they have been changed by the experience, and why they should be recognized  in the form of an essay no longer than 750 typed words. The community service must have been performed in Middletown.

A brief letter must accompany the essay from a senior representative of the organizations from the community service organization, along with a letter of recommendation from the school guidance counselor, and signed by the parent or guardian. Students must have maintained a 3.0 (B) average and provide a grade transcript.

Students from Middletown High School, Mercy High School, Vinal Regional Vocational Tech or Xavier High School may apply.

Applications must be received by April 15 and sent to Shirley Salafia, 54 Linbert St., Middletown, CT 06457.

Advocacy group to hold expo

CLINTON  The Changing Minds Advocacy Group of Killingworth and the Henry Carter Hull Memorial Library are co-sponsoring a second annual Mental Health and Wellness Expo, March 23, 2-4 p.m. at the library, located at 10 Killingworth Turnpike (Route 81) in Clinton.

Admission is free, refreshments will be provided and there is ample parking.

Guests can talk to a wide variety of providers from the area who offer both traditional and non-traditional mental health and wellness services to youth and adults.

For information, contact Melissa Ferrara at 860-663-3482 or email at changingmindsgroup@yahoo.com.

Social justice grants available

The Office for Catholic Social Justice Ministry of the Archdiocese of Hartford is offering social justice grants to nonprofit organizations located within the Archdiocese. The deadline is April 1.

To qualify for a Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) grant, an organization must assist people living in poverty, and allow them to have a dominant voice in the organization. The organization must demonstrate both the intention and capacity to work effectively toward the elimination of the root causes of poverty and to enact institutional change.

For additional information on the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and grant guidelines and applications visit: http://www.catholicsocialjustice.org

Commission welcomes grant applications

EAST HAMPTON  The East Hampton Arts & Culture Commission is accepting applications from East Hampton High School Seniors for a $200 grant to support an annual East Hampton High School Capstone Project.

The grant will help support one student's proposed Capstone Project, a multifaceted assignment that serves as a culminating academic and intellectual experience for students. Capstone projects may take a wide variety of forms including a long-term investigative project that culminates in a final product, presentation, or performance.

Applicants for the EHACC Capstone Grant will be invited to present his/her Capstone Project idea to commission members during an agreed upon commission meeting. Deadline to apply is April 1. Applications are available at www.artsforeasthamptonct.org or email arts@easthamtponct.org for information.

Groups can also apply for grants

EAST HAMPTON  The East Hampton Arts & Culture Commission welcomes grant applications from East Hampton organizations and individuals with programs and/or projects that enrich the lives of East Hampton residents through the arts. Deadline to apply is April 1.

Eligibility: One of two $300 grants are available to be awarded to individuals or organizations residing in East Hampton, Connecticut. The commission reserves the right to award a grant to an individual or organization it determines will have the most potential impact of arts and/or culture on the town. Incomplete forms will be denied; applicants can resubmit.

Criteria for awarding grants: The artistic and organizational quality of the organization and/or project and its likelihood of continuing viability or success. The organizations or projects accessibility and service to the East Hampton community. Grant recipients must credit the East Hampton Arts and Culture Commission on all press releases, posters, print advertising and programs.

Evaluation: An interview may be requested of the candidate prior to awarding the grant. An update of your progress will be required six months post-award date and a final report will be required one year post award date.

Applications are available at www.artsforeasthamptonct.org
DURHAM  A Meriden man was arrested Thursday after he allegedly made generalized statements about shooting his fellow employees at Durham Manufacturing, according to state police.

Jeffrey Wilson, 46, of Catlin Street, was charged with second-degree breach of peace, police said in a report.

State police at Troop F received a report Thursday morning that an employee at Durham Manufacturing had been escorted off the premises after they made statements about harming other employees, according to the report.

The initial report indicated that the accused, Jeffrey L Wilson, had gotten upset at work and made generalized statements about shooting fellow employees at the company, said Trooper trainee Jose Rivera in the report. Two witnesses were identified and statements were obtained supporting the initial complaint.

Wilson left the area before police arrived on scene, according to the report. As a precaution, local schools were directed to have students shelter in place.

He was later located at his Meriden home and arrested without incident, according to the report.

Wilson cooperated with the investigation and admitted to making those statements, but indicated that he had no intent cause harm to anyone, said Rivera.

Wilson is scheduled to appear in court March 28, according to the report.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
An Air Force colonel who flies F-22 Raptors will serve 35 days' confinement after being found guilty of assault and battery, but was found not guilty on other charges including rape, service officials said this week.

Col. Jason W. Costello was accused of multiple sexual-assault offenses that allegedly took place between 2012 and 2014.

"Col. Costello was found guilty of one specification of Article 128, assault consummated by battery," Stephen Brady, a spokesman for the 21st Space Wing, said in a statement. "He was sentenced to a reprimand, forfeiture of $2,000 pay per month for six months, and 35 days' confinement, with four days of credit for pretrial confinement. He was found not guilty of the other four charges."

Air Force Times first reported the verdict March 12.

The Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado-based unit was the designated oversight authority for the court-martial.

Costello's charges included rape and sexual assault, as well as assault consummated by battery. According to charge sheets obtained by Military.com, he was accused of penetrating a woman while she was asleep in late 2014, non-consensual assault of a woman with intent to gratify himself in late 2012, and non-consensual sexual contact with a woman on various occasions between December 2012 and August 2014.

The counts of assault include allegations that he hit someone in the face in 2013, and that he grabbed an individual on the arm, wrist and hands in 2017.

It's not clear from the documents whether the allegations pertain to one individual or multiple alleged victims.

Richard Stevens, Costello's civilian attorney, told Military.com in a statement that all allegations were made by a single individual who is a civilian.

"With regard to that lone assault conviction, this stemmed from a tense confrontation in 2017 in which Col. Costello grabbed his truck keys from the complaining witness, and then, according to what that person admitted to the responding police officer, the complaining witness initiated a physical struggle with Col. Costello to get the keys back," Stevens said. "In that struggle, the individual punched Col. Costello in the face, and claimed that Col. Costello grabbed the person's arms.

"We hope the public record about this incident can now start to be corrected, and we hope all parties can start to move forward and past this case."

Costello, an Air Force Academy graduate, previously commanded the 325th Training Support Squadron out of Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida.

He has been assigned to the North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command Training and Exercises Directorate since 2016, officials previously said.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.
The U.S. Air Force in recent weeks took 60 C-130H Hercules aircraft out of service to examine and replace engine propeller blades that inspectors deemed risky because the blades were manufactured before 1971.

Lt. Gen. Timothy Fay, deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements for the service, on Thursday revealed that officials had blades on 60 aircraft inspected and many "removed" for the safety issue.

"We removed those propellers from the fleet ... and [propellers on] 55 of those 60 [planes] have been replaced, and the last five should be complete this week," Fay said during a House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces hearing.

It took roughly a month to inspect the blades on the 55 C-130H aircraft, said service spokeswoman Ann Stefanek. The maintenance checks began Feb. 4.

The five remaining aircraft still in depot are down for routinely scheduled maintenance and will have their propellers examined and replaced as part of the preplanned work, Stefanek said. In all, 60 aircraft were affected, but the number of blades permanently discarded was not disclosed.

The review was prompted by a KC-130T crash that killed 15 Marines and one Navy corpsman in 2017. A corroded propeller blade -- improperly maintained by Air Force maintenance crews in 2011 and later overlooked by the Navy, according to officials -- set off a series of events that would result in the KC-130T aircraft coming apart in three pieces before it fell to the ground on July 10, 2017, in a LeFlore County, Mississippi, field, killing all on board.

Following the crash, the Air Force commissioned an "independent review team" to assess the blade overhaul process, ultimately creating a new 21-step process for inspection.

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In January, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen, David Goldfein commissioned another senior-level review board to sift through the investigations findings and all actions taken since the KC-130T crash.

Analysts were able to determine, based on the documentation, that 22 out of 23 blades that had historically been affected by corrosion were manufactured by or before 1971. Those 23 blades are no longer in service, officials said.

Manufacturing processes changed that year, Fay said.

We "have 15 million hours flying on this fleet," which has been operating for 60 years, he said. "So we have mounds of data, and we dug into that data and dug after this problem."

Stefanek said the majority of the 60 aircraft were in the Air National Guard, though a handful were in the active-duty and reserve components.

"Some were fixed within days. Others, based on maintenance workload ... may have taken longer," she said Thursday.

The Air Force was able to "continue the mission" across its C-130H inventory despite the stand-down for inspections, she said.

Each unit has had to manage their schedules appropriately, but worldwide operations were not affected, Stefanek said.

The Air Force has 188 C-130H models in its inventory for airlift transport only, according to the Air Force Association's 2018 Almanac.

It was not immediately clear whether similar inspections have begun for the Air Force's other actively flying C-130H variants, such as the WC-130H, a Hercules converted for weather reconnaissance; EC-130H Compass Call, an electronic warfare variant; the special operations MC-130H Combat Talon II; or Arctic mission LC-130H Hercules.

In all, the service has 49 aircraft across those models, according to the AFA Almanac.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.
The F-22 Raptor stealth fighter has been part of the air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since operations against the group began in 2014.

But not anymore. At least, not for the time being.

The Air Force's Raptors, from the 1st Fighter Wing and 94th Fighter Squadron at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, came home last fall. Instead of the fifth-generation fighter, the F-15C Eagle is now on flight lines in the Middle East for Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) missions, according to Air Combat Command.

"The United States Air Force deployed F-15Cs to the [Air Forces Central Command area of responsibility] in early 2019," ACC spokeswoman 2nd Lt. Lilia Calvillo told Military.com on Thursday. Air Force Magazine first reported the swap March 5.

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"The F-15C model type was specifically requested by AFCENT and, as they stated, it is not a switch between aircraft but rather [the F-15C] provided a unique set of capabilities," Calvillo said.

ACC said it has not been determined whether the F-22s will return. The Raptors are normally stationed at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, when operating in the theater.

The F-22 has played a critical role in intelligence-gathering during the conflict. With advanced stealth technology and powerful sensors, the aircraft has often been the first coalition plane in hostile airspace after a major incident.

Such was the case after the U.S. downings of Syrian aircraft in 2017, as well as the U.S. Navy's Tomahawk missile strike on al Shayrat Air Base that April.

"The F-22 was necessary over Syria during the period of most intense U.S. operations," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dave Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

"It acted as a 'sensor-shooter' and was most valued for its ability to go anywhere over Syria, collect critical information, share it with the rest of coalition forces, and thereby dramatically increase the situational awareness of the rest of the force," said Deptula, who was the Air Force's first deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and an F-15 Eagle pilot. His son, Lt. Col. David "Ghost" Deptula, is an F-22 pilot.

But the retired general said it's also necessary for the F-22 to get some downtime as the Air Force is racing to ramp up mission-capable rates for its elite fighters, such as the F-22, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and F-16 Fighting Falcon.

In October, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ordered the Air Force and the Navy to increase the mission-capable rates of the Pentagon's premier fighter jets to more than 80 percent by the next fiscal year, requiring a major boost in maintenance and sustainment for dozens of fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft.

"Mattis established a goal of achieving an 80 percent mission-capable rate, and the F-22 needs some recovery time to be able to meet that objective," Deptula said. Mission-capable rates refer to the aircraft's ability to perform its mission or deploy at a moment's notice.

Because the F-22 fleet is small, it has challenges, he told Military.com this week.

The fleet has started to reorganize for more effective use.

Following Hurricane Michael, which damaged most structures at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, as well as dozens of stealth jets, the Air Force moved its remaining F-22 fleet, dividing the aircraft between Langley-Eustis; Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska; and Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.

Last July, the Government Accountability Office said the F-22 is rarely employed to its fullest potential, due to maintenance challenges and fewer opportunities for pilot training, as well as the fleet's inefficient organizational structure.

"Unfortunately, [then-Defense Secretary Robert] Gates terminated the F-22 at less than 50 percent of the military requirement and so it is stretched thin," Deptula said.

The Air Force originally wanted at least 381 Raptors, but production ceased in 2011 at 187 aircraft.

More than 160 F-22s belong to active-duty units; the remainder are with Air National Guard elements.

While some aircraft have come out of active status for testing purposes, the Air Force has 183 aircraft in its inventory today. Four were lost or severely damaged between 2004 and 2012.

Deptula said, "The F-15 can handle the much less involved effort involving force application against the remnants of the Islamic State, and the significantly reduced threat environment."

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.
Members of I Marine Expeditionary Force taking part in Pacific Blitz 2019 may find themselves helping the Navy attack enemy ships with long-range precision fires from shore positions.

About 5,000 Marines from I MEF joined approximately 5,000 sailors operating on four ships from the Navy's 3rd Fleet on March 12 for the large-scale, joint exercise off the coast of Southern California. It runs until March 26.

For the Marines, some of the focus of the exercise will be on "how are we doing naval integration in such a way that we can contribute to the sea control fight that the Navy would be prosecuting" against a near-peer adversary such as China or Russia, Lt. Gen. Joseph Osterman, commander of I MEF, told defense reporters Friday.

"Some of [what] we are looking at is ... by putting a landing force ashore, for example, how would that landing force project fires, both kinetic and non-kinetic, to help achieve sea control?" he said.

This could be made possible using developmental missile technology designed to be retrofitted onto the high mobility artillery rocket system, or HIMARS, Osterman said.

"We would be able to ... project things like that ashore to be able to conduct anti-surface fires from the shore," he said.

Marines might also act as forward observers from shore, using high-tech sensors on unmanned aerial systems to target enemy ships for naval fires.

"Maybe the force that's ashore is actually doing the target acquisition and target identification through electronic means or visual means. Or let's say a UAS operating from the shore then cues a naval shooter that is over the horizon," Osterman said. "This would allow, from a sea control perspective, for the ground forces to actually be woven in  That we could help contribute to."

It has been about two years since I MEF participated in such a large-scale exercise, but the Marine Corps is trying to get back to having a MEF-level exercise every year, he said.

"For me, it's not so much about end-states achieved as much as it is the exercise kind of giving us somewhat of a journey," Osterman said. " ... Really, kind of almost a shifting from what we have been used to doing in terms of a counterterrorism ... environment in Iraq and Afghanistan and ... getting more toward the near-peer fight."

Marine aviation assets such as the MV-22 Osprey and CH-53 helicopters will focus on conducting refueling operations at forward arming and refueling points, or FARPs, during Pacific Blitz.

"We are working with them in terms of being able to conduct FARP operations with the MV-22s, the CH-53s and then even to the point of bringing in high-capacity [fuel] bladders and things like that to refuel from remote locations, a little more extensive than we have done in the past with a typical raid operation," Osterman said.

The exercise will also give I MEF a chance to test new concepts and procedures aimed at refining its UAS strategy.

I MEF's leadership will spend a lot of time during Pacific Blitz working with leaders from the 3rd Fleet on how to enhance and streamline joint decision-making, he said.

"When we go into a near-peer fight, you would end up with a situation whereby the enemy has probably got very similar capability, very similar capacity and very similar lethality. So you have to ask yourself, where is your tactical edge? Where can you basically get ahead of the enemy?" Osterman said. "In my mind, that is in the decision space."

If a joint Marine-Navy force "can make decisions faster than the enemy, that effectively becomes your edge in these kinds of fights," he said.

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
The dock landing ship Fort McHenry has apparently been avoiding port calls for months after 25 sailors and Marines aboard were diagnosed with a viral disease in December.

In a statement, U.S. 5th Fleet confirmed that the service members, including sailors deployed on the ship and members of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, were diagnosed with parotitis, a disease similar to mumps. CNN was first to report the outbreak Wednesday.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the disease involves swelling of one or both salivary glands. CDC literature indicates infections may be on the rise, with several hundred reported cases of acute parotitis during the 2014-2015 flu season in the U.S., the largest number of reported cases in history.

The first case was detected Dec. 22, officials said, and affected service members were quarantined and treated while they displayed symptoms. To date, 24 of the 25 have returned to duty, according to a statement, and there have been no active cases since March 9.

Fifth Fleet officials said none of the cases was life-threatening and full recoveries are expected in all cases. To minimize the spread of the disease, all living and working spaces affected were cleaned and disinfected, and the entire population aboard Fort McHenry received measles, mumps and rubella booster vaccinations.

"Fort McHenry's operational schedule has been modified while the ship's medical team monitors crew health to ensure the readiness of her Sailors and Marines," officials said. " ... Routine unit-level training and operations have continued."

Officials with 5th Fleet did not immediately respond to questions about specific modifications to the ship's operational schedule, but releases tracking the deployment indicate the Fort McHenry has not made a port stop since early January.

The ship left its homeport in Mayport, Florida, in December for a seven-month deployment with the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group and the 22nd MEU to support operations in Europe and the Middle East.

The ship made a scheduled port visit in Constanta, Romania, on Jan. 7, according to military news releases. Following the port stop, the ship spent time in the Mediterranean before moving into the 5th Fleet area of operations in the waters surrounding the Middle East.

The Fort McHenry transited the Suez Canal on Jan. 15.

In addition to multiple replenishments-at-sea and a variety of onboard training evolutions, the troops aboard conducted a passing exercise, or PASSEX, on Feb. 14 with a guided-missile frigate from the Egyptian Navy in the Northern Arabian sea, and a burial-at-sea Feb. 19 for 36 military veterans. The ship transited the Strait of Hormuz, between the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, on March 11.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.
Military families went years with no one in leadership paying attention to their complaints of unhealthy and dangerous living conditions in on-base housing.

The top brass is listening now.

In the past several weeks, the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force have visited military bases, viewing substandard homes and speaking with families. Lawmakers have traveled to installations in their districts for a first-hand look at living conditions. Staff members of influential congressional committees have flown far and wide to understand the scope of the issue.

And in these visits, they may be building cases against the eight major companies that hold the contracts to manage base housing.

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According to Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, lawmakers and Pentagon leaders have seen evidence shared by families -- photos, videos and more -- of conditions that are not only "disgraceful," but may also show criminal fraud.

"One spouse sneaked into her house -- because families don't have access to their own homes [during repairs] -- and has documentary evidence that the workforce in her home wasn't fixing, but cosmetically patching," Warner said during a visit Thursday at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. "In terms of mold issues, that's not fixing, that's trying to cover it up. That's fraud. That's a criminal offense."

Added Army Secretary Mark Esper, "In a couple of cases, where it looks like, sounds like, smells like fraud, I want to investigate these and, if there is real evidence here, we want to pursue it."

During the past two years, multiple reports -- including years-long investigations by Reuters -- have surfaced regarding squalid conditions at military houses run by private management companies, including faulty wiring and exposed plumbing, poor water quality, vermin infestations, mold and lead contamination.

One military spouse, Warner said, nearly died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty HVAC unit, and the housing management company tried to force the family back into the home.

"The companies have this mindset that if they can keep punting on the problem, ultimately the families will redeploy or move on," Warner said.

Concerns and complaints went either ignored or haphazardly addressed by the housing companies, which hold 50-year contracts on the properties. In addition, military commanders responsible for managing the federal housing staff that is supposed to represent the troops, "over time stepped away," Esper said.

"When I was in the Army in the early 1980s, our responsibility was to take care of soldiers wherever they lived -- in the barracks, off-base housing, on-base housing. We have to get back to that," Esper said.

To address the problems, the Army, Navy and Air Force launched inspections of on-base housing and have held town hall meetings at every installation, according to officials. They have drafted a tenant bill of rights that will allow troops to withhold rent payments if their homes are not in working order or repairs haven't been properly made.

The Army last week suspended its utility billing program, ensuring that families don't have to pay for using extra utilities.

Esper said the Army is educating base commanders on improving their oversight of the housing companies that manage programs on their installations. And the services secretaries are examining whether they can break the 50-year contracts and replace them with agreements that could be renegotiated every few years.

Noting that the Navy had problems with mold in contractor-owned housing in 2012 and the problem was "fixed for a year or two," Warner suggested the services go further to hold base commanders responsible.

"There has to be a relentless focus by management. This has to be part of their [military] evaluation -- the satisfaction of the families on their bases," he said.

Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, who also visited Virginia military installations this week, have introduced legislation that would allow the military to withhold payments to contractors until problems are resolved and allow installation commanders to retain a service member's basic allowance for housing payment to companies until a reported problem is fixed.

Their bill also would allow the Defense Department to retain incentive fees it now pays to some companies if performance is unsatisfactory.

"The real problem is families don't feel like they can get an answer. We have to turn it around for them. The housing companies have to improve, but the military has to fix [the problems]," Kaine said.

Allegations of criminal fraud were first raised March 7 during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the problems in military housing.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, suggested that the services ask the Justice Department to investigate, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and Sen. Mike Rounds, R-South Dakota, asked the service secretaries to consider potential malfeasance and fraud.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @patriciakime.
Airmen Have Five Days to Get Immunized After Vaccine Exemption Is Denied or They Face Punishment, Air Force Says

The service required all active-duty troops to become fully vaccinated by Nov. 2 after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in...
The U.S. Army recently awarded QinetiQ North America a contract worth up to $152 million for special robots that are light enough to be carried in a backpack into combat.

The Common Robotic System Individual, or CRS (I), is the Army's first "small-sized" robotic program of record, according to a recent press release from the service's Maneuver Capability Development Integration Directorate at Fort Benning, Georgia.

"CRS (I) is a remotely operated, highly mobile, unmanned ground vehicle that is light enough for a dismounted soldier to carry in a backpack," the release states.

These new robots, which the Army plans to begin fielding in fiscal 2020, "will provide the dismounted soldier with enhanced situational awareness, force protection and increased standoff capability from enemy threats," the release adds.

The potential value of the total program could be $429 million over seven years for the delivery of more than 3,000 ground robots, according to a May 22, 2018, QinetiQ North America press release announcing that the company had been chosen as one of two finalists in the program.

The Army selected the Waltham, Massachusetts, firm after its performance during an engineering and manufacturing development competitive run-off test held at Aberdeen Test Center in October 2018, according to the release.

What's still unclear is the robot's exact weight. Benning officials said it weighs less than 25 pounds.

The system features a universal controller capable of controlling current and future unmanned air and ground platforms, as well as an "open architecture common mobility platform allowing for future capability growth," the release states.

Benning, the center for Army maneuver robotic requirements, is hosting a robotic, artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies demonstration next year to showcase new ground, air, water and virtual systems for infantry platoons.

Army leaders have placed a high priority on using robotics and AI technologies to make combat units more lethal for the future battlefield.

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.
Your servicemember just brought home orders to move overseas. You know where he or she will work. But where will you get a job?

One of the best jobs for military spouses overseas is to become a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL). In countries such as South Korea, Japan, Turkey, Greece, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, there are schools of English that constantly look for native English speakers to work as teachers.

Related: Does your resume pass the 6-second test? Get a FREE assessment.

Here are our answers to some of the questions most frequently asked by military spouses living overseas.

What is required to become an EFL teacher?

There are usually three minimum requirements to become an EFL teacher at an English language school. First, you have to speak English at a native speakers level.

Second, you need a bachelors degree. Even if sometimes schools accept candidates with an associates degree, they do prefer to hire people who have a bachelors degree. Your major doesnt really matter, but a Bachelor of Arts degree is preferred.

The last requirement to become an EFL teacher is that of course you have to be a qualified and certified EFL teacher.

How do I become a certified EFL teacher?

The first step to becoming a certified EFL teacher is to take a CELTA course. CELTA stands for Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults. It is usually a four-week intensive course or it can also be done on a part-time basis.

During this course, you will learn all that there is to know about teaching English as a foreign language. Military spouses overseas can become certified via an online class or, if you live near a school of English, you can ask them if they offer the CELTA course.

How do I find a job as an EFL teacher?

Once you are an EFL teacher, it is a straightforward process to find a job as a military spouse living overseas. Most newly qualified EFL teachers get hired during summer time, as there are many more students who come from all over the world to better their language skills.

Related: Search for Teaching & Education jobs.

Many times, these summer contracts turn into long-term careers. The EFL world is very large and there are many different branches of the English language you could teach: general English, grammar, vocabulary, reading, listening, speaking, business English, and then there are the exam classes such as IELTS, TOEFL, FCE, CEA and many more.

Do I have to speak the language of the host country?

You do not have to speak the language of the host country to become an EFL teacher. If you do, it is a plus, but it is not required.

Moreover, as long as your English is at a native speakers level, you dont necessarily have to come from an English-speaking country to become an EFL teacher. Many schools promote diversity and they welcome different accents.

Will this job work if I have kids?

As a military spouse living overseas, one of your main concerns might be how to juggle a full-time job with your family life. If you have children, for example, it can become challenging to find daycare or a trustworthy babysitter.

The EFL world is very understanding of women who are primarily stay-at-home moms. In fact, most schools of English also look for stay-at-home teachers who can provide private one-to-one classes for selected students.

You can choose the days and hours you want to work, all the while being in the comfort of your own home.

How much can I earn as an EFL teacher?

The pay scale for an EFL teacher with very minimum experience can be lucrative. Rates range from $26 per hour in England up to $50 per hour in Saudi Arabia.

As an EFL teacher, you would teach a minimum of 20 hours to 40 hours per week, depending on whether you work part-time or full-time. The more experience you gain, the more your hourly rate will increase.

Related: The Military Spouse Employment Manual

If you have enough experience, you might also be able to teach at the university level. In Japan, for example, they often look for EFL teachers who can teach at universities. The basic pay is $2,600 per month.

Depending on the country you live in, you may also receive many perks that some of these EFL jobs offer, such as paid expenses, tax exemptions, private cars, chauffeurs, first-class tickets, and a little VIP treatment.

What other jobs can come from experience as an EFL teacher?

Becoming an EFL teacher can lead to a life-long commitment and career. In fact, after two years of teaching experience, you can take the next step and become a DELTA-certified teacher. DELTA stands for Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults.

After gaining substantial experience as a DELTA teacher, you can also apply for the position of Assistant to the Director of Studies (ADOS).

Becoming an EFL teacher is only the first step toward a career that could lead you to one day become a Director of Studies (DOS), principal or even to own your own school of English.

So many military spouses must be ready to leave their job when their servicemember is transferred. The ability and the experience of teaching English in many different countries is actually considered to be one of the winning points when a director of studies decides which person to hire.

Moreover, if you and your family have to move back to the U.S., your job can follow you because there are many schools of English in the United States as well, especially in New York, Florida, California and Maryland.

For more information about jobs for EFL teachers, paygrades, and much more, please visit www.tefl.com

-- Brunella Irma Costagliola is a proud military wife, an EFL teacher and a professional ghostwriter. She earned her CELTA from the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. She specializes in writing non-fiction books, and throughout her career she has helped many aspiring authors see their dreams come true: Their names in print and their books published.

Related: For the latest veteran jobs postings around the country, visit the Military.com Job Search section.

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Want to live in Japan? Poland? How about Ecuador? If you want to see another country up close, as well as get the opportunity to work abroad, you have probably given some thought to teaching English to non-native speakers -- a wide-open field for those seeking an international adventure.

And while the credentials for teaching English abroad remain somewhat flexible, many schools now require teachers to have training or certification in teaching English to those who speak foreign languages. Such requirements have led to a flourishing industry devoted to training people to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL).

Related: Does your resume pass the 6-second test? Get a FREE assessment.

"It's become an important prerequisite," says Dave Sperling, founder of Dave's ESL Cafe, a popular online destination for those interested in what's also known as English as a second language (ESL).

The number of TEFL programs has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, presenting students with plenty of choices as well as the task of sorting through and making sense of them. "They really have to do their research carefully and make sure they're getting into a legitimate program," says Sperling.

Keep in mind that a certificate in teaching English as a foreign language does not substitute for a degree. Schools hiring English teachers typically require a bachelor's degree. Immigration requirements also may prevent people without a four-year degree from teaching or otherwise working in the country.

Related: Search for Teaching & Education jobs.

Consider these issues as you research such an opportunity:

Look for programs with a teaching component, allowing you to gain practical teaching experience under an experienced instructor's observation. Many positions require this.

Ask to speak to graduates. "Don't trust a school that won't give contacts, like current or former students," says Sperling. "It's important to get firsthand feedback."

Be wary when operations guarantee job placement. "You have to be careful of schools that promise the world," says Sperling.

Related: The Military Spouse Employment Manual

Training Programs

American Language Institute am TEFL Graduate-Level Certificate : An offering of the American Language Institute at San Diego State University, the am TEFL program is a 120-hour, graduate-level certification course for people hoping to teach abroad. The program's emphasis is on practical classroom teaching and includes mentoring by veteran teachers and observed practice teaching. The Institute provides graduates lifetime job-placement assistance.

School for International Training TESOL Certificate : A 130-hour course, the Brattleboro, Vermont-based School of International Training's (SIT) TESOL certificate focuses on teaching demonstrations, practice teaching and learning theory, covering everything from second-language acquisition to lesson planning. Typically a four-week course, the program is offered internationally through SIT partnerships.

TEFL International TESOL Certificate : TEFL International, based in Thailand and Woodburn, Oregon, offers intensive four-week training in locations such as Phuket, Thailand and Alexandria, Egypt. The learning experience includes training in a foreign language to help teachers in training reflect on the experience of learning a new language. The course covers various language learning approaches, lesson planning and other areas, and includes teaching practice and observation.

Cambridge ESOL Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) : Cambridge ESOL is part of the UK-based University of Cambridge. Offered in more than 50 countries, the CELTA is designed for people with little or no teaching experience. CELTA courses are typically four or five weeks if taken full-time, and include practical skills for teachers, as well as hands-on teaching practice.

This article originally appeared on Monster Career Advice.

Related: For the latest veteran jobs postings around the country, visit the Military.com Job Search section.

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In the years following the American Civil War, Canada was still very much a possession of the British Empire. As such, it had a number of official fortifications and other important areas along its border with the United States.

One of those was Fort Erie, directly across the Niagara from the American city of Buffalo, New York. In June 1866, some 850 men crossed the Niagara from Buffalo, intent on capturing the fort.

They were Irishmen, and they were going to conquer Canada to free their home country.

Irish immigrants flowed into the United States in droves following the Acts of Union that saw British domination of Ireland since the early 1800s. The Great Irish Famine of the late 1840s also saw a huge emigration of Irish people to the United States.

By 1860, there were more than 1.6 million people of Irish descent who called themselves American  and upwards of 175,000 of them were about to serve in the Union Army.

The Irish made-up 40 percent of foreign-born enlistments in the Civil War, and were 17 percent of the overall Union force. When these battle-hardened veterans returned home after the war, many of them were headed to New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England. It was there that Irish National leaders were waiting to use the veterans' new talent for combat.

To be fair, when this plan was hatched, there were upwards of 10,000 Fenians

Called the Fenian Brotherhood, its original aim was to send money, arms, and supplies to Irish rebels in Ireland via Irish emigres living in the U.S. Many in the movement were soon convinced that liberating Ireland through a direct uprising was impossible, so they decided to step up their game a bit.

If the Irish couldn't mount an invasion of Ireland, then they would mount an invasion of Canada, the nearest British-held country and trade it for Irish independence.

T.W. Sweeny a former Union general who also served in the Mexican War hatched a three-pronged plan to invade Canada, set up an Irish government-in-exile, and pressure Britain to release Ireland to the Irish. It called for multiple incursions into Ontario in an effort to draw the main British force out of Quebec. With that done, the main Fenian force would invade Quebec, cutting off lines of communication and supply.

Noncommissioned officers of the 10th Royal Regiment of Toronto Volunteers, circa 1870.

On June 1, 1866, a force of Irish-American members of the Fenian Brotherhood landed in Ontario and planted the Irish flag. They tore up railroads and cut the telegraph wires, effectively cutting Fort Erie off from the rest of Canada.

Then, 600 Fenians marched westward. At the same time, the commander of British forces in Canada activated upwards of 22,000 troops to put the insurrection down. While the larger force formed up, 850 men under Lt. Col. Alfred Booker were dispatched to pin the Irish down and keep them from wreaking any more havoc.

The two forces met at Ridgeway in Ontario, Canada. It was the first time an all-Canadian force was led by a Canadian commander. Unfortunately for the Canadians, the Fenians were well-armed and skilled fighters, having just braved the battlefields of the American Civil War. The Canadians were soon reinforced, and the superior numbers caused the Fenians to retreat.

No. 5 Company of the Queen's Own Rifles.

The Fenians were repulsed elsewhere along their proposed lines of attack. Having assumed that Irish Canadians would join the uprising, they were surprised at how the Canadians responded to their invasion.

By the time British forces mounted a full response, many of the Fenians had retreated back across the river, the United States Navy was stopping Fenian barges from bringing reinforcements, and the U.S. declared total neutrality in Canadian affairs.

There would be more Fenian uprisings in later years, but for the time being, the push to trade Canada for Ireland would not come to pass.

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Islamic history of women rights is glorious: Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri

PAT and Minhaj-ul-Quran Women League took out a peaceful march outside the Lahore Press Club in response to the objectionable placards and banners displayed on the occasion of the so-called Aurat March on the International Womens Day. The March was led by MWL leaders namely Farah Naz, Sidra Kramat, Ayesha Mubashar, Zainab Arshad, Anita Ilyas, Sana Waheed, Amna Batool, and Noreen Alvi.

Addressing on the occasion, MWL President Farah Naz said that a select group tried to degrade the women in the name of the women rights and empowerment agenda on the occasion of Aurat March on March 8. She said that we reject their slogans and agenda and demand only those rights that are sanctioned by Islamic teachings and the constitution of Pakistan. She said that women dissociate themselves from the slogans that run contrary to the Islamic teachings, adding that we cannot allow unknown women to obliterate our values and family traditions.

Women were carrying placards and banners on which slogans such as education is my basic right, give me my share in inheritance, dignified job is right of women, daughters are blessings of Allah, my veil, my respect and sharing the household work is the Prophets (peace and blessings be upon him) practice were written.

Farah Naz read out the special message of Shaykh-ul-Islam Dr Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri in front of the participants of the March in which he said: Islam is the only divine religion that not only encouraged the concept of women empowerment in every walk of life but also spelled out educational, moral and spiritual guidelines for this purpose. The Holy Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) enhanced the prestige and status of a mother by describing that the paradise lay under her feet. The history of women rights in Islam is full of glorious traditions. The laws for women empowerment certainly exist but there is a dire need to translate them into reality.

The women speakers said that we are happy that there is a personality in Pakistan that is advancing the Islamic concept of women empowerment in the country and has set up the institutions of learning and training for real empowerment of the women.

Farah Naz said that the Last Sermon of the Holy Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) represents a complete charter of women rights. She said that women waged an exemplary struggle for the establishment of Pakistan by staying within the Islamic boundaries. She said that if women who constitute half of the overall population are kept out of the national mainstream, it will not be possible to achieve any development target.
Nawaz Sharif thought he was untouchable: Khurram Nawaz Gandapur

PAT Secretary General Khurram Nawaz Gandapur has said that we have come to know through media reports that the new JIT has got permission from the court to record the statement of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. He said if the news is correct, we consider it to be a good development so far as the probe into Model Town tragedy is concerned. He said that it was PM Nawaz Sharif who ordered the transfer and posting of former IG Police Mushtaq Sukhera from Balochistan to Punjab overnight; hurled threats of dire consequences at us; and ordered the direction of Dr Tahir-ul-Qadris aircraft. The former PM also maintained a criminal silence on the grave crime of the killing of innocent people at the hands of the top political and government functionaries.

The PAT Secretary General said that Justice Baqir Najfi raised the question in its report that the Establishment Division failed to furnish any solid administrative reason to justify the overnight transfer of IG Musthaq Sukhera. He said that the background facts of the transfer were to stop the arrival of Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri to Pakistan and to perpetrate the Model Town operation, for no professional police officer was ready to shed the blood of innocent people and it is for this reason that Mushtaq Sukhera was transferred out of Quetta to Lahore in emergency because he was ready to do everything and he did as well.

Khurram Nawaz Gandapur further said that Nawaz Sharif was among those who summoned us to his residence in Model Town and threatened us on June 15, 2014. He said that the third major proof of Nawaz Sharifs involvement in Model Town tragedy is to order the change of route of the aircraft Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri was traveling in. He said that this step was not possible without the will of the PM. He said that the report of Justice Najfi has also mentioned these facts. He said that as long as there was the government of the PML-N, Nawaz Sharif considered himself untouchable and no one had the courage to ask him any question. He said now that the JIT has decided to record his statement, it augurs well. He said that it is the justice we want, for the matter pertains to the killing of 14 innocent people. He said that the case should not be allowed to linger on anymore.
The Rangers are receiving a ton of calls expressing interest in infielder Jurickson Profar, according to MLB.coms T.R. Sullivan. Texas appears to be weighing whether it truly wants to part with the 23-year-old, but Sullivan hints that its at least a possibility in the right scenario.

Among the suitors, the Rays appear to stand out with interest. Tampa Bay has several potential starting pitching trade pieces that could be a fit, though Sullivan suggests that the Rangers may not value pitchers like Jake Odorizzi, Matt Moore, and Drew Smyly highly enough to give up Profar.

Rotation help continues to stand out as the biggest need for Texas, though as Sullivan notes its also possible to imagine Profar being packaged in a deal for a catcher. That might be Jonathan Lucroy, he says, or perhaps an alternative backstop who matches Profar in terms of control and upside  though it isnt easy to come up with any clear examples of such a player who might be available.

The real question underlying the decision for the Rangers, perhaps, is how to value Profar  both in general and with regard to roster fit. He only has three more years of control left, all via arbitration, because his prior injuries occurred when he was on the major league roster. And the team does have big-dollar shortstop Elvis Andrus around for the foreseeable future.

Still, its possible that Texas could view Profar as worthy of handling regular shortstop duties as soon as 2016, per the report. In that case, Andrus would likely move into the sort of utility role that Profar currently fills.

The Rangers have several other plausible trade pieces that it could utilize instead of Profar. Chief among them, perhaps, is slugger Joey Gallo. Like Profar, he seems ready to contribute at the major league level, but has veterans ahead of him on the depth chart. And similarly, he could be viewed as somewhat expendable  with Adrian Beltre now locked up at third base for another two years  or as an important future piece, given that he could step in at first base with Mitch Moreland departing.

What seems most clear from the report is that Texas wont be moving Profar for anything short of a high-quality asset. Thats plenty understandable given his top-flight pedigree and .318/.366/.455 batting line in 142 plate appearances this year. The long-term health of his shoulder remains a concern, and the relatively short timeline of control limits his upside, but the Rangers surely have little reason to deal him if they arent able to get an impact player in return.
SATURDAY: Extension talks are off for the time being, according to MLB Networks Jon Heyman, who tweets that the Twins and Gibson didnt come close to a deal during their discussions.

FRIDAY: The Twins and right-hander Kyle Gibson are discussing an extension that would keep him in Minnesota beyond the current season, Gibson himself revealed to Phil Miller of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Gibson is set to become a free agent after the 2019 campaign, but Miller notes that agent Randy Rowley has been in Ft. Myers for the past few days and met with the Twins to discuss a deal. Gibson is already earning $8.125MM this season after avoiding arbitration earlier in the winter.

Its really just trying to figure out what makes sense for the Twins and if it is something they want to do as well, Gibson told Miller, adding that Minneapolis is definitely somewhere he wants to be beyond the 2019 season.

A first-round pick by the Twins back in 2009, Gibsons path to the Majors was slowed by Tommy John surgery. Hes been a mainstay in Minnesotas rotation since 2014, however, and while he struggled in both 2016-17, Gibson enjoyed easily the best season of his career in 2018. Last year, the Mizzou product totaled a career-high 196 2/3 innings while registering a 3.62 ERA with 8.2 K/9, 3.6 BB/9, 1.05 HR/9 and a 49.8 percent ground-ball rate. Gibson upped the use of his slider a bit while throwing his changeup less often and saw his swinging-strike rate increase from its career mark of 9.8 percent to 11.5 percent.

If the two sides can ultimately strike a deal, Gibson would become the third starting pitcher to forgo free agency in favor of a pre-season extension, joining Reds right-hander Sonny Gray (three years, $30.5MM) and Cardinals right-hander Miles Mikolas (four years, $68MM). Gibsons situation isnt a direct parallel with either of those righties, however. Hes two years older than Gray but also coming off a demonstrably better season, whereas Mikolas is a year younger and coming off a surprisingly dominant season in his return to the big leagues after a three-year run in Japan.

The Twins likely have some added incentive to try to broker an agreement, as in addition to Gibson, theyll see right-handers Michael Pineda and Jake Odorizzi become free agents following the 2019 season. Jose Berrios, who rejected an extension overture earlier this spring, is the only established starter that Minnesota controls beyond the 2019 season. Fifth starter Martin Perez has a club option on the one-year contract he signed this winter, though hell need to reestablish himself as a viable big league arm in order for that to become a consideration.
On a warm, sunny afternoon in Pensacola, Fla., Ashley VerHey and Nic Massey are sitting on a restaurant patio overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.

Ashley, who grew up in Schoolcraft south of Kalamazoo, is marveling at her good fortune to be living in Florida in winter, and to be sharing that with Nic, her new husband. They are madly in love, these two, and exuding the happy astonishment of newlyweds thrilled to have found each other.

Its a far different vibe from the last time Ashley and I had lunch.

That was three years ago in Kalamazoo. I was writing a series of stories about Ashleys mother, Cathy VerHey, who was dying of ALS, or Lou Gehrigs disease, a terrible, terminal illness with no chance for a cure.

Cathy had been diagnosed with ALS the previous year, at age 49. It hit the close-knit VerHey family like a bomb. Tony, Cathys husband and Ashleys father, fell into a deep and debilitating depression. Ashleys older sister was away at graduate school. Ashleys younger brother was only 15.

That left Ashley, a 20-year-old living at home and juggling two part-time jobs, to take charge.

It was a role she embraced with fierce love and devotion. She always had been close to her mother, the one person before Nic who really understood her. Mother and daughter shared a passion for horses, hitting the barrel-racing circuit. As Ashley grew into adulthood, Cathy was both her mother and her best friend.

Now Ashley would become Cathys caregiver. At first, it wasnt so bad. Ashley took over the cooking and cleaning, and Cathy could still take care of herself. But month by month, Cathy became sicker. By fall 2015, she was dependent on a wheelchair and began to lose her ability to talk. She lost muscle function in her hands. Swallowing became a problem.

In February 2016, Cathy had a permanent feeding tube inserted. Instead of improving her quality of life, the surgery accelerated the downward spiral. Soon, Cathy was completely bedridden. Her ability to speak gone, she used an iPad to communicate.

Ashley was attending to Cathy full time, around the clock. Cathy was in a fight for her life, and she and Ashley were in it together.

By the time Ashley and I had lunch that April, Ashley looked and sounded bereft. She was utterly heartbroken to think her mother might die soon. But she was also scared the process would be drawn out for years. How much more could Cathy or the family endure?

Over lunch, Ashley mentioned she was planning to take a trip West for a brief respite. For part of the trip, she told me, she would be visiting a friend in Utah. A guy she knew, but nothing romantic.

The guy was Nic.

He grew up in Gobles, west of Kalamazoo, and met Ashley at a party just before he went into the military in 2009. They stayed friends through social media and texting, and occasional visits when Nic was in Michigan. He was a 25-year-old student at Southern Utah University when Ashley came to visit. Unbeknownst to Ashley, he already had predicted to friends this was the woman he would marry.

Ashley was in love by the time she returned.

Nic was so smitten he moved back to Michigan in May, arranging to finish his final year of school through online classes and taking transfer courses at Western Michigan University.

He was able to meet Cathy, and Cathy was able to give her approval to the match. And Nic was by Ashleys side when Cathy died in July 2016.

He literally saved my life, Ashley says.

Still, Ashley was overwhelmed by grief. Caring for her mother had been brutal. Cathys death was even worse.

But Ashleys burgeoning relationship with Nic gave her a path forward.

Before Cathys illness, Ashley figured shed live in or around Schoolcraft for the rest of her life. Her dream then was to own a farm that would board horses.

Now Schoolcraft was laden with painful memories. Ashley stopped barrel racing; too many painful memories there, too.

Nic offered new options. With Ashleys encouragement, he re-entered active service in the Air Force after graduating college. Ashley moved with him to Pensacola, where hes now a second lieutenant in combat systems training. Theyll move again this summer, but they dont know where.

In many ways, life is golden. Theyre young and in love. They love Florida. Theyre excited to see where theyll live next, embracing it as an adventure.

Its not the life she anticipated, Ashley says, and shes thrilled to have opportunities and experiences she had never considered.

And shes well aware it may not have happened if her mother hadnt gotten sick.

It was because of Cathys illness that Ashley seized on the invitation to visit Utah. And it was Ashleys response to that illness that really drew in Nic. He always saw Ashley as an attractive woman with an engaging personality. But when she became her mothers caretaker, Nic saw a whole other side of Ashley: Her tenderness. Her selflessness. Her willingness to do what needed to be done, even in the worst circumstances.

It showed, Nic says, that Ashley was someone who would there for better or worse.

Meanwhile, Ashley fell in love with Nics compassion, his willingness to share her burdens, his calming presence.

So its the bittersweet truth of Ashleys life that the worst thing that ever happened to her led her to the best thing.

Ashley says shes still grieving her mother. I think of her every single day," she says. Shes always there.

But life goes on. Her mothers death changes the trajectory of Ashleys life, and despite the enormity of the loss, Ashley is finding that happiness is possible once again.

What shes learned, Ashley says, is that things happen for a reason. Life takes unexpected turns. Even in the midst of utter despair, good things can happen.

As she details her journey of the past four years, Ashleys eyes well with tears.

I should have brought tissues, she says.

I feel like Im still dusting myself off from the rubble of a war, she says. But at the same time, Im having the best blessings of my life.
LEWISTON, MI  Two Michigan residents are facing child abuse charges after a nanny cam revealed they neglected an infant in 2017.

Devon Hubbard, 24 and Tiffine Jingles, 26, both of Lewiston, have were charged with Child Abuse 2nd Degree and Child Abuse 4th Degree, respectively, in the 88th District Court in Alpena.

The charges come after troopers from the Michigan State Police Alpena Post reviewed a nanny-cam video and found it to contain evidence that Hubbard abused his then six-month-old son in May of 2017.

Troopers also found evidence suggesting that the childs mother, Jingles, had failed to protect the child because she was aware of the abuse, but continued to have Hubbard watch the victim without supervision on a weekly basis.

At the time of the incident, Hubbard and Jingles were boyfriend/girlfriend and lived together, according to police. The abuse was not reported to police until the investigation began in January.

Both subjects were arrested on March 4. The child victim is safe and has been placed in foster care, police said.
The National Weather Service has confirmed the weaker of the two Thursday, March 14 tornadoes to rip through Mid-Michigan, while information on the stronger one is expected later on Friday.

This one was classified by the weather service as an EF-0, with an estimated peak wind of 80 mph and path length of 6.4 miles with a maximum width of 100 yards. There are no reported injuries or deaths connected to this twister.

Related: Large, extremely dangerous tornado reported on the ground in mid-Michigan

An EF-0 classified tornado is considered weak as it features maximum wind speeds of 65 to 85 mph. Even if those 80 mph winds had tipped to at least 86 mph, an EF-1 tornado is also classified as weak.

Specifically, the NWS reports that this EF-0 tornado touched down at 6:47 p.m. at the intersection of Bennington Greens and Innsbrook Drive, and continued northeast on M-52.

Related: Tornado causes damage at mobile home park in Genesee Township

Hardwood trees were observed snapped with large limbs down, the NWS writes in a Friday update. "The tornado then hit a farm along South Morrice Road, just south of W. Garrison Road.

Trees were uprooted and a well built farm outbuilding lost its roof. The tornado snapped additional trees near Vandecarr and Bennington Roads before lifting near the Maple River.

The NWS reports that this EF-0 tornado touched down at 6:47 p.m. at the intersection of Bennington Greens and Innsbrook Drive, and continued northeast on M-52.

Related: Video shows tornado churning through central Michigan

Related: Tornado rips through Michigan, leaves destruction in its wake

The weather service reports the twister ended after seven minutes at 6:54 p.m near Corunna in Shiawasse County.

Additional information on the stronger tornado will be provided later today. The last tornado to hit Shiawasse County was on June 15, 2015, an EF-0 near Durand.
DETROIT, MI -- President Donald Trump needs some help from the public to achieve his signature campaign issue, Steve Bannon said at a Detroit rally Thursday.

Bannon, former Trump chief strategist and former Brietbart News executive, visited Detroits Cobo Center for an event to crowdfund $1 billion for a border wall. The event was held on the same day the U.S. Senate, with the support of 12 Republicans, voted to block Trumps emergency declaration to divert military funds for the wall.

Twelve Republicans humiliated the president of the United States on the core issue that brought people out to support him, Bannon said. What it is, is a call to action for everyone.

Brian Kolfages GoFundMe campaign, organized in December 2018, has raised $20.6 million from nearly 351,700 donors as of March 14. Kolfage, a triple amputee and Air Force Veteran, said he started the fundraiser out of anger because elected officials failed to address border security.

Midwest states face a rise in illegal drugs and crime caused by Mexican gangs and weak border security, Kolfage said Thursday. He argued donors should take up the charge while Congress blocks efforts to build a wall on the Southern U.S. border.

Speakers, including former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, urged Michigan residents to begin organizing for 2020 elections.

Several hundred people were attracted to the downtown Detroit rally, held blocks from the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and Ambassador Bridge to Canada. We Build The Wall organizers chose Detroit as the third stop on a nationwide tour that has so far visited Cincinnati, Ohio and Tuscon, Arizona.

Dominic Czajka, 20, said hes seen proof that Michigan residents are personally impacted by illegal drugs coming across the border. His aunt was killed by a fentanyl overdose in 2015.

Thats why I feel so strongly about the border wall," Czajka said. For them to say theres not an issue at the border is just ridiculous ... It really upsets me when I hear people say theres not a southern border crisis."

During a White House press briefing Wednesday, Trump said trafficking of ultra-lethal fentanyl and other illegal activity on the southern border threatens threaten the safety and security of all Americans.

Trump gave the crowdfunding effort his blessing in a telephone conversation, Kobach told the New York Times.

People who immigrate illegally undermine those who complete the lengthy citizenship process, said Jazmine Early. The 48-year-old Mexican immigrant said it took her five years to become a U.S. citizen.

The people should come legally, Early said. I support that 100 percent for our safety and for economics. The finances of our country are going to drain if we let this keep happening.

Bannon said the border wall has nothing to do with race."

I tell the minorities stop being used (by Democrats), Early said. I support the Republican platform.

Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, said the divisive rally was hosted by Republican extremists.

Democrats believe in uniting to solve the problems facing all Michiganders, while far-right Republicans continue their efforts to divide us in order to distract from the real issues we face, like skyrocketing healthcare costs, the opioid epidemic, and Donald Trumps failed, corrupt presidency, Barnes said in a statement.

The campaigns website acknowledges that the federal government wont be able to accept our donations anytime soon." However, speakers at the Detroit event said donors are better equipped to complete segments of the wall faster and cheaper than the federal government, while meeting regulatory, engineering, and environmental requirements.

Holland-based Fortress Stabilization Systems is the third-largest donor, contributing $12,000 last December. The two top donations of $50,000 and $13,337 came from anonymous sources.

Kolfage estimates that if each of the 63 million people who voted for Trump in the 2016 election were to donate $80, the campaign would raise $5 billion. Trump demanded $5.7 billion for a border wall during the 35-day-long partial government shutdown.

Trump declared a national emergency on Feb. 15 to divert military funds to construct a southern border wall.

All seven Michigan House Democrats and Republican U.S. Reps. Justin Amash, R-Cascade Township, and Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, voted in favor of a resolution to block the emergency declaration. The U.S. Senate, with the support of 12 Republicans, voted to overturn the emergency declaration Thursday.

The president promised to veto any effort to stop the declaration.

VETO!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2019

I look forward to VETOING the just passed Democrat inspired Resolution which would OPEN BORDERS while increasing Crime, Drugs, and Trafficking in our Country. I thank all of the Strong Republicans who voted to support Border Security and our desperately needed WALL!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2019

Other members of an advisory board for the fundraiser include Erik Prince, the brother of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and founder of security company Blackwater USA. Retired Brig. Gen. Robert S. Spalding III, Moran Industries Inc. CEO John Moran Jr. and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado, also serve on the board.
MARQUETTE, MI  Police have arrested and charged a suspected serial butt-grabber in Michigans Upper Peninsula.

Caleb Scott Anderson has been charged with multiple counts of criminal sexual conduct in the fourth degree. Anderson is accused of running up to unsuspecting women, grabbing them on their buttocks against their will and running away.

The incidents occurred within the city of Marquette and on the campus of Northern Michigan University, according to police.

Anderson was arrested following a joint investigation by the Marquette Police Department and the Northern Michigan University Police Department.

Anyone who has been victimized in a similar fashion should contact Det. Aldrich at the Marquette Police Department at 906-228-0400 or Det. LaPlante at the Northern Michigan University Police Department at 906-227-2151.
A tornado left mid-Michigan shaken Thursday.

The tornado was reported to be over Lennon at 7:04 p.m., moving quickly at 60 mph. It tore through the Durand and Vernon areas of Shiawassee County, leveling properties.

We believe it touched down on Tyrrell Road," Shiawasse County Sheriff Brian BoGole said.

No injuries were immediately reported.

Much of the region was left in the dark as first responders hunted for downed power lines and removed fallen trees from the roads.

The storm came in violently.

It sounded like a loud roaring howl, said Durand resident Patricia Rothney.

Rothney was at home in the 6000 block of Newberry Road when the storm blew through. The power went out, but no one was injured.

At 7:30 p.m. the NWS confirmed there had been a tornado in the town of Vernon in eastern Shiawassee County, a touch-down near South Maple Street and Bennington Road. In that same town, fire officials reported lots of debris, with at least two homes damaged.

The tornado developed in Shiawassee County between Corunna and Bancroft, then moved northeast through Vernon, then into the western edge of Genesee County.

The storm was part of a bomb cyclone system that wreaked havoc in the Great Plains before aiming for the Midwest.

It began its path north across lower Lake Michigan, initially landing in Southwest Michigan before raging across the bottom half of the Lower Peninsula. Winds as fast as 67 mph were reported in South Haven, 60 mph in Fowlerville, 56 mph in Calhoun County and 46 mph in Jackson.

The strength of the tornado will be ranked after the National Weather Service examines the extents of the storms damage on Friday.

People affected by the storm took to social media to post about the damage it caused.

Readers commenting on MLives Facebook page reported a damaged apartment building and downed trees. One person said their back deck had been sucked off.

Joey Stinson, of Durand, was able to capture a video of the tornado that destroyed his house.

Stinson and his family sought shelter in their basement and he held the basement door shut until it broke. A short while later, he went back upstairs and, apart from the broken glass and some scattered objects, things didnt appear to be too badly damaged.

I then went upstairs to my bedroom and saw I didnt have a roof, or, as I call it now, my skylight, he told MLive.

In Genesee Township, the winds from the tornado tossed around several units at a mobile home park.

(The wind) just got really bad, really strong, Eric Wichert said after the storm, standing on the front porch of his home, siding and tree branches strewn across the yard. My son, he watched the window get pushed in, the back window (to the home).

Wichert lives in the Camelot Villas mobile home park, located off Genesee Road, between Frances and Mt. Morris roads, in Genesee Township. More than 20 units at the park were damaged during the storm, according to officials.

The storm also knocked out power for more than 8,000 Consumers Energy customers in and around Vernon, Durand, Gaines, Lennon and Clayton Township in Shiawassee and Genesee counties, according to the utility companys outage map.

There were numerous road closures in the Vernon area Thursday night, as well. It wasnt clear when roads would open back up due to the numerous power lines down, BeGole said.

Were working with Consumers (Energy) to remove power lines out of the road and then remove the trees that are preventing us from making our way through, BeGole said.

A shelter was set up at the Corunna Community Center in McCurdy Park Thursday night for people whose homes were destroyed by the tornado.

Im feeling good that nobody has reported being hurt or killed, BeGole said.

The storm was causing problems in other areas, too. In Midland County, both lanes of eastbound U.S. 10 from Coleman Road to M-18 were closed due to water over the roadway. The closure was expected to last overnight.

There were also tornado warnings in Washtenaw and Jackson counties Thursday.
Back in 2017, Toyota said that it would invest at least $10 billion over the course of the next five years in its U.S. manufacturing presence. Now, the Japanese automaker is saying it will exceed that goal in announcing a new commitment of $13 billion in the same timeframe.

The automaker reported Thursday, March 14 that this would add 600 jobs stateside, and that it would also help move production of the hybrid versions of the RAV4 and Lexus ES Hybrid to its Kentucky plant. With this expanded investment, Toyota says that it will see increases and building expansion at its plants in Huntsville, Alabama; Buffalo, West Virginia; Troy, Missouri and Jackson, Tennessee.

President Donald Trump celebrated the news Thursday afternoon with a tweet saying that the USMCA is already fixing the broken NAFTA deal."

Related: Trump says new trade deal with Canada and Mexico will benefit U.S. farmers, workers

Congratulations @Toyota! BIG NEWS for U.S. Auto Workers! The USMCA is already fixing the broken NAFTA deal. https://t.co/f9iHprPk5B  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2019

These latest investments represent even more examples of our long-term commitment to build where we sell, Jim Lentz, CEO for Toyota in North America, said in a Thursday news release.

By boosting our U.S. manufacturing footprint, we can better serve our customers and dealers and position our manufacturing plants for future success with more domestic capacity.

Related: Toyota, Mazda join forces on $1.6B US manufacturing plant, create 4,000 jobs

The automaker broke down how this expanded investment -- and the initial one -- would change operations in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, West Virginia and more.

Alabama will receive $288 million, which will increase its annual engine capacity from 670,000 to 900,000 by the end of 2021. The addition of the four-cylinder and V6 engine lines will see the addition of 450 new jobs, according to the automaker.

Related: Toyota commits $1.33B investment to Kentucky assembly plant

The companys Kentucky plant -- Toyotas largest vehicle plant globally -- will see $248 million bring the production of the aforementioned hybrid RAV4 and Lexus ES. The annual vehicle capacity at the Kentucky plant will increase to 550,000.

In Missouri, the automaker will invest $62 million that will help it product 864,000 more cylinder heads each year. Currently, the team of 900 in Missouri produces more than 3 million annually.

As for West Virginia, Toyota says a $111 million investment will reportedly help double its hybrid transaxles annual capacity from 120,000 to 240,000. To meet these needs, the automaker says it will 123 new jobs to the facility in Buffalo, West Virginia.

Related: Toyota to invest $600 million, add 400 jobs at Indiana SUV plant

All of this comes on the previous investment of $10 million, which saw a joint-venture with Mazda lead to a new U.S. plant, 4,000 more jobs in Alabama, and a $600 million transformation project on its Indiana plant.
ANN ARBOR, MI - A day before climate strikes are planned in nearly 1,700 towns and cities across the planet, Christiana Figueres rallied a capacity crowd at Hill Auditorium, urging the audience to join a Friday, March 15 demonstration on campus at the University of Michigan.

Friday at noon, we will all be at the Diag, she told the crowd, referring to the Global Climate Strike.

The former executive secretary of the UN Convention on Climate Change and architect of the Paris Agreement spoke at UM as part of the Wege Lecture on Sustainability.

She urged audience members to have the same stubborn optimism she exercised in helping lead 195 governments to unanimously sign on to keep global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius in just a five-year period.

With the progress that has been made, Figueres said there must be inter-generational responsibility during a momentous crossroads in human history.

The fact that Fridays climate strike was a youth-led global movement started by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden, should be inspiring to the generations young and old, she said.

This really is an impressive, daunting moment where our two generations are bookending that decision that will determine the quality of life for this planet," she said.

Figueres said people must work together to affect change at the state and local levels of government at a time when the the U.S. has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.

The decisions were making now will decide the quality of life on this planet for the next 100 years," she said. Were talking about investment and policy decisions today that will affect the quality of life for the next 100 years. That puts quite a bit of pressure on us.

Its time to say thank you coal," she added. "Thank you for what you did in the last century. Now its time to retire to the museum.

Figueres criticized President Donald Trumps administration for rubber-necking on the issue of climate change, advocating for the phasing out of fossil fuels.

She instead pointed to bold steps taken in countries like India for guidance, where the government has set a target of electric vehicles making up 30 percent of auto sales by 2030. China also has made progress, she said, with projections that it will meet its 2020 pledge and its nationally determined contribution targets.

China set themselves a very ambitious goal, they harvested ingenuity and innovation," she said.

During the question and answer portion of the event, some students asked Figueres how UM can do better to reach its own goals of carbon neutrality. Students were critical of the universitys endowment investments in the fossil fuel industry and its reliance on natural gas to fuel its Central Power Plant.

Figueres encouraged gradual divestment from fossil fuels, while adding that natural gas can be a step up from coal in the interim.

There definitely is a legacy of fossil fuels in the power grids and transportation but we are moving exponentially toward a renewable world," she said. "Were on our way to an exciting future.

The climate strike in Washtenaw County begins at 11:11 a.m. on Friday, when some Ann Arbor-area K-12 students will walk out of class. A noon rally marking the event also is scheduled on the UM Diag.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Khadija Khokhar, a high school senior, fears for her future.

Thats because by the time shes 30, as the worlds leading climate scientists have warned, global warming could exceed a potentially critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

If youre panicked right now, good," the Washtenaw International High School student said Friday, March 15 during the Washtenaw County Climate Strike on the University of Michigan Diag.

If youre in fear, good. Take all of those emotions - the fear, the frustration, the anger - and fuel it into change. You have more power than you think. You have more power than adults want you to think.

Khokhar was one of hundreds of area K-12 students to participate in Fridays climate strike, which is part of a youth-led global movement called Fridays For Future started by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist from Sweden.

Climate strikes were planned in nearly 1,700 towns and cities across the planet Friday.

Some students kicked off the demonstration by walking out of class at 11:11 a.m. Friday, a reference to the 11 years it could take for global warming to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

After the rally, demonstrators marched through the streets of Ann Arbor to UMs Fleming Administration Building, where they chanted demands in the hallways outside the office UM President Mark S. Schlissel.

Posted by Washtenaw County Climate Strike on Friday, March 15, 2019

High school and college student organizers of the rally joined area politicians and activists to call for more research and resources to combat climate change.

State Rep. Yousef Rabhi, D-Ann Arbor, encouraged students to call their legislators to stress the importance of supporting the Green New Deal, a set of proposed economic stimulus programs aimed at addressing climate change and economic inequality.

Right now in Michigan, Im working with colleagues of mine to draft a Green New Deal for Michigan, Rabhi said. We dont have to wait on the federal government, we can do it right here in the Great Lakes State.

That appears unlikely under the current legislature.

The state House Energy Committee voted 9-7 this week to oppose the Green New Deal, pointing to high taxpayer costs.

Michigan families work too hard to have their money taken to fund the progressive fantasyland that is the Green New Deal,'" said Republican Party Chairman Laura Cox in a statement.

Demonstrators in Ann Arbor Friday called the Green New Deal the responsible way to spark change and protect children.

It is not enough to talk on the margins about solving climate change," said former gubernatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed. "It is not enough to talk about how youre going to use the market to solve climate change. Weve got to mobilize our entire society to rebuild ourselves to that we are the kind of place that leads on renewable energy, leads on environmental justice, leads on the dignity of human being on our Earth and those are the same fight.

Washtenaw County Environmental Council Chairwoman Michelle Deatrick said she was encouraged by the determination and organizational efforts of young people who demonstrated Friday.

Climate change is an alarm clock thats been going off, ignored by those in power for years, she said. This strike is a beautiful thing. We have been called the grassroots for a reason - step on us, we spring back up.

Strike organizers have made a list of national and local demands for Ann Arbor City Council and UM. They are:

Re-entry of the United States to the Paris Agreement

End all extraction and burning of fossil fuels

Commit resources to enact rapid and just energy transitions

Create ambitious climate goals, including committing publicly to a goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2030

Pass proposed policy changes including a commitment to the Green New Deal, while allocating funding for the Ann Arbor Office of Sustainability and Innovations and establishing green revolving funds at the university, city, county and state levels

Protect the right of all people by ensuring a healthy living environment, including eliminating the source and the presence of PFAS and 1,4-dioxane in water systems

A complete breakdown of the groups demands can be found here.
OAKLAND COUNTY, MI  A Linden teen has been charged in connection with guns that came up missing from his familys home.

The incident that led to schools in Genesee and Oakland counties going into secure mode.

David Christopher Rollins, 17, was arraigned Thursday, March 14 in Oakland Countys 52-2 District Court on single counts of carrying a concealed weapon and receiving or concealing stolen property, both felony charges.

Officers with the Linden Police Department received a call around 6 a.m. March 12 for a potential larceny of guns.

Linden police Chief Scott Sutter previously said officers spoke with a mother and father who noticed two handguns and two rifles were missing from their home. The weapons are owned by the couple.

The teen, who was not at home when police arrived, is a Lake Fenton High School student, officials said.

At the time, Linden police reached out to the schools resource officer -- a Genesee County Sheriffs deputy -- to try and find out if the teen was at school.

The Genesee County Sheriffs Office relayed some information to Linden police after speaking with acquaintances of the teen that included messages on social media about him selling guns, Sutter said.

It was also discovered the teen may have been hanging out with a friend in Holly. Officers in Holly began surveillance on an apartment in the village, an address provided by Linden police.

A Holly police officer arrested the teen upon leaving the apartment. A 9-millimeter handgun was found in the teens waistband, Sutter said.

Police later recovered the other handgun inside the apartment and the rifles from an Argentine Township residence where the teen spent a few nights.

The investigation led to Lake Fenton, Fenton and Holly schools going into secure modes. The secure modes were lifted following the teens arrest.

There were no threats at any of the schools or no threats made against any person," Sutter said.

He pointed toward the cooperation between Fenton, Holly, Linden, Argentine township police departments and the Genesee County Sheriffs Office in quickly handling the situation.

Just how they communicated throughout this they were able to follow up on leads and get the guy into custody without any harm to anyone, Sutter said. It wouldnt have been done with that. This happened at 6:30 in the morning. By 11 oclock or so, he was in custody and we got the guns.

Rollins was issued a $10,000 cash/surety bond, according to district court records. Sutter expects a larceny charge to also be filed in Genesee County.
VERNON, MI -- Residents outside the small farming community of Vernon began their Friday morning by salvaging belongings after a raging tornado swept through the area, destroying more than 50 properties.

The tornados -- the National Weather Service now believes there were two -- blew down barns, toppled sheds, damaged homes, trapped cows and downed trees and power lines on Thursday, March 15.

The next morning, people were left picking up the pieces.

The tornado developed in Shiawassee County between Corunna and Bancroft, then moved northeast through Vernon, then into the western edge of Genesee County. It touched down around 7 p.m. on Tyrrell Road near the Shoreline Condominiums, which sustained the worst damage, Shiawassee Sheriff Brian BeGole previously said.

Jeff Kimmel, who manages the condos, was standing in his living room when he heard very loud howling and growling winds outside.

I was looking outside of the window in my living room watching it go across the lake, said Kimmel, who noted there was still a visible trail of debris littering the frozen lake in front of the condos Friday morning. There was so much debris and it was really gray-looking out. Soon as the wind died down a little bit, it started thundering and lightening really bad.

Kimmel decided to get in his truck and begin assessing the damage, but he couldnt get around because fallen pine trees were blocking the path.

No one was hurt, the (condo) park is closed during the winter, Kimmel said. Most of the people that own these live in Arizona or Texas, theyre snow birds. Most of them are retired.

Kimmel said the park still plans on opening April 15.

The National Weather Service now believes there were two tornados. The weaker of the two was classified by the weather service as an EF-0, with an estimated peak wind of 80 mph and path length of 6.4 miles with a maximum width of 100 yards. There are no reported injuries or deaths connected to this twister.

Information on the stronger one was expected later on Friday.

The tornado began its path north across lower Lake Michigan, initially landing in Southwest Michigan before raging across the bottom half of the Lower Peninsula. Winds as fast as 67 mph were reported in South Haven, 60 mph in Fowlerville, 56 mph in Calhoun County and 46 mph in Jackson.

Del Chapman was in Flint when he got a call from his neighbor saying a tornado had just destroyed his barns on Garrison Road. Chapman has lived in the area for 19 years and operates a dairy farm with cattle, hay and straw.

Both structures were stripped of their framing and toppled over by the storm. The only part left of the structures were the slanted rooftops.

There was quite a lot of people out here because there was some cattle in the barn that got out. They had to dig the cattle out with machines, Chapman said. Its just a huge mess. The windows on the west side of our house are blown out but we have them covered up for now.

Macy Cole, whose family owns Chapmans dairy farm, said the cattle were dug out around 2 a.m. after using heavy equipment to remove the collapsed structures.

Three cows were trapped under there and we were able to rescue them last night, Cole said.

Cole also had to check on her familys other dairy farm and storage for their meat business on Vernon Road. Downed power lines littered the path to Coles barn and the neighboring white house was destroyed by fallen trees. Cole said shes dealt with tornadoes coming through the area before, but nothing of this magnitude.

Were going to try and salvage what we can and the meats still cold so were going to give that out and let everyone cook it, Cole said. Well be cleaning up and getting the cows out of here because they dont have any good or water. We still have to figure out a way to haul them out.

As of Friday afternoon, there were still several road closures in Shiawassee County due to downed power lines, poles and trees: M-71 between Bennington Road and the overpass; Vernon Road between the south Vernon Village limits to Lansing Road; Garrison Road between Vernon Road and Harvest Mills and Reed Road between M-71 and Bennington Road.

Police are asking residents to avoid these areas and not to bypass barricades.

The Shiawassee County Sheriffs Office is asking residents whose property has been damaged to contact police or the local fire department and leave a message. The message will be relayed to emergency management wholl report the damage.

A shelter was set up at the Corunna Community Center in McCurdy Park for people whose homes were destroyed by the tornado.

Kelly King, executive director of the mid-Michigans Red Cross, said the shelter is opened 24 hours to anyone who was affected by the tornado. There are currently no residents in the shelter.

Emergency management is out on the scene identifying what peoples needs are, King said. This is the only shelter open in the county and will provide residents with a safe place to stay, snacks and food until they can get back on their feet.

Residents inquiring information about the shelter can reach the Red Cross at 989-743-6227.
FLINT, MI  A decision is still in the offing on whether to sentence four teens as juveniles for their role in the October 2017 rock-throwing incident on Interstate 75 in Genesee County that left a 32-year-old man dead.

Alexzander Miller, 16, appeared before Genesee Circuit Judge Joseph J. Farah on Thursday, March 14 for a continuation of a hearing meant to aid the court in making the determination.

Kenneth A. White died after a large rock crashed through the windshield of his vehicle on southbound Interstate 75 in Vienna Township. He was a passenger in the vehicle.

The rock, estimated to weigh around 20 pounds, was thrown from the Dodge Road overpass.

Miller and Mikadyn Payne, 17, Mark Sekelsky, 17, and Trevor Gray, 16, previously reached a plea deal that dropped 10 of 11 charges and amended a second-degree murder charge to manslaughter.

The plea still needs to be officially accepted by the court.

Russell Fowler, a probation agent with the Michigan Department of Corrections, testified about the potential sentencing for Miller. Fowler prepared a report about the teen that takes the seriousness of the crime, culpability, prior delinquency and available programming into consideration.

Assistant Genesee County Prosecutor Karen Hanson noted a segment of the report included time for Miller at the Charles Egeler Reception and Guidance Center in Jackson. Had a deal not been in place, Fowler said he would be leaning towards sentencing as an adult.

Ultimately, Fowlers report suggests sentencing Miller as a juvenile and placing him in a residential facility.

Holly Walker, a probation officer with Michigan Department of Corrections, testified last week that her recommendation was also to sentence the teens as juveniles.

From my standpoint, as an adult probation officer, when it gets referred to us, it gets referred to us due to the seriousness of the crime, Fowler said. I feel like if it wasnt serious enough to reach my desk then it would have been handled in the juvenile system originally and not ever got to where Im at.

Farah told those assembled in the court that the hearings are taking place to make sure the process is examined in full prior to a decision being made.

A continuation of the juvenile sentencing hearing has been scheduled for mid-April.

A sentencing hearing for Kyle Anger, 19, was adjourned on Tuesday without a decision. He will be sentenced as an adult in the case. Anger previously agreed to a plea deal that dropped all charges but one count of second-degree murder.

All the other teens will testify against Anger as part of their plea deals.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- The head of Grand Rapids Environmental Services Department has been on administrative leave for a month and counting, and city officials wont say why.

Grand Rapids Utilities Director Mike Lunn was placed on paid administrative leave Feb. 14 while the citys Labor Relations Office investigates him on a personnel matter, according to city spokesperson Amy Snow-Buckner.

Snow-Buckner refused to say why the city managers office placed Lunn on leave.

A copy of Lunns personnel file, obtained by MLive/The Grand Rapids Press through the Freedom of Information Act, gives no indication of poor performance. It also contains no complaints or disciplinary actions.

Snow-Buckner said a complaint would only be placed in a city employees personnel file if it resulted in disciplinary action, which is a potential outcome of a labor relations investigation.

Multiple calls to Lunn for comment were not returned.

Lunn is a city employee of 22 years. According to his LinkedIn account, he took over as environmental services manager in 2014. In 2018, his role expanded to include oversight of the Energy, Lighting and Communications Department and he was named utilities director.

In his position as utilities director, he is responsible for the wastewater treatment plant, stormwater management and the citys energy, lighting and communications infrastructure.

When asked how many employees Lunn supervises, Snow-Buckner said there are 11 employees who report directly to him. His annual salary is $129,171.

Assistant Environmental Services Manager Chuck Schroeder is filling in for Lunn while he remains on leave.

Snow-Buckner said there is no timeline for a decision.

There is no time limit, Snow-Buckner wrote in an email. The leave period is for the time it takes to complete an investigation.

The Labor Relations Office is currently conducting a separate investigation into Grand Rapids Police Capt. Curt VanderKooi for his role in the detainment of an American citizen by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
NEWAYGO COUNTY, MI -- Several counties north of Grand Rapids are under a flood warning because of heavy rain and melting snow.

The National Weather Service issued the warning for Muskegon, Newaygo, Montcalm and Gratiot counties, then seven other counties to the north. It will expire at about 6 p.m. Friday, March 14.

In Newaygo County, flooding caused numerous road closures. The list includes the following:

8th between Stone and Warner

Luce between 24th and 32nd

Dickinson between Luce and Baseline

12 Mile at Maple Island

Cottonwood at 128th

Cypress between 128th and 136th

Stone from 44th to State

Also, Oceana County Road Commission shut down M-120 (Maple Island) from 24th Street to 48th Street, according to Newaygo County Emergency Management officials.

National Weather Service meteorologists said a half-inch to nearly two inches fell in parts of northern Michigan on Thursday, March 14.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  The Grand Rapids Board of Educations interviews with four candidates to be the districts next superintendent will be live streamed Saturday, March 16, for those who are unable to attend.

The first interview begins at 10 a.m. and the last one is scheduled for 2:10 p.m. at the Lyman Parks Administration Building, 1331 Franklin St. SE. Each interview is expected to last around an hour. Doors open at 9:30 a.m.

Live Stream will available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZVVaEvNFz4. Feedback forms will be available online and onsite.

A fifth candidate, Aaron Johnson, associate superintendent of Farmington Public Schools, was scheduled to be interviewed 9 a.m. Saturday, but notified district representatives Friday that he would not be interviewing for the position due to family obligations.

The school board on Monday, March 11, agreed to interview six candidates. An unnamed sixth candidate did not accept the interview when contacted.

The school board could potentially take action Saturday on whether it wants to bring back a couple candidates back for a final round of interviews on Monday, March 25. There were 30 applicants to replace Superintendent Teresa Weatherall Neal, who is retiring effective July 1.

The four candidates are currently working in New York, Maryland, Wisconsin, and Kentucky. All of the finalists have doctorate degrees and have had experience in the classroom as well as in administration.

Below are the candidates, their interview times, and additional information about their employment background:

10:00 a.m.  Adrian Talley has been Director of Community Schools for Prince Georges County Public Schools in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, since 2018. The diverse district has more than 130,000 students from urban, rural and suburban communities in the Washington, DC suburbs. He was appointed by the Board of Education in September to the newly created position to establish community schools within the district that will be focused on supporting student development, improving student outcomes, and supporting families. Previously, he served three years as the executive director of student services.

11:20 a.m.  DeVon Horton joined the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Kentucky, as Chief of Schools in June 2018. The district has approximately 101,000 students. Horton served as Deputy Superintendent of East St. Louis School District 189 from July 2014 through June 2018. Hortons Office of School Turnaround earned the Award of Excellence from the Illinois State Board of Education for improving academic performance in his district. The chief of schools position was recommended after an organizational review noted the lack of a chief to provide focused operational oversight and guidance to and consistent evaluation of school principals.

1 p.m.  Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard has been an assistant professor of educational leadership at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, since 2018. She was superintendent of the City School District of Albany, a district of nearly 9,000 students. She joined the district in September 2012 and resigned in January 2016. She was a deputy superintendent in Patterson, New Jersey, from 2010 to 2012. Vanden Wyngaard is the founding director of EquiVisible, a firm that seeks to shed light and make visible systemic equity issues through consultation with for-profit, non-profit and faith-based organizations and school districts.

2:10 p.m.  Darrell L. Williams has been the Assistant Superintendent for Operations, Administration and Equity for the School District of Beloit in Wisconsin since September 2015. The district has around 7,000 students. He served as interim superintendent of Beloit between December 2016 and April 2017 and from November 2017 to July 2018. Highlighted among his qualifications is nearly 23 years of administrative experience in education, nearly 10 years of instructional experience as a teacher and college instructor, and strong mediation and negotiation abilities and skills. Prior to Beloit, he served in Milwaukee Public Schools from 1993 through 2015, including as a Turnaround Principal at Casimir Pulaski High School.

Additional information about the candidates is available on the district website.

The school board is encouraging the community to share input on each candidate.

School leaders say those who have questions about the superintendent search or would like to submit a feedback form should email SuperintendentSearch@grps.org.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  A proposal to build a two-story, 30-unit apartment building at 1542 Michigan St. NE was rejected Thursday by the Grand Rapids Planning Commission, whose members said the structure was not a good fit for a residential neighborhood.

The request by Michigan Street Apartment Homes for a special land use permit to build the apartment building was defeated 6-2. Walter Brame and Stacie Behler were the two commissioners to support the project, which has drawn strong opposition from the Fulton Heights Neighborhood Association.

The property is about a half mile east of the corner of Michigan Street NE and Fuller Avenue.

Kyle Van Strien, who chairs the planning commission, said he voted against the project because of secondary impacts the additional residential units would bring to the area, such as traffic and noise.

All of the things that come with additional density, thats whats were trying to alleviate, he said.

Michigan Street Apartment Homes wants to build the 30-unit apartment building behind an existing 12-unit apartment building it owns on the property.

Because the property is zoned as a traditional neighborhood, low-density area, Michigan Street Apartment Homes was required to receive a special land use permit from the planning commission.

Michigan Street Apartment Homes has 30 days to appeal the commissions decision with the citys zoning board of appeals, Van Strien said. The company can also reintroduce the request if substantial changes are made or resubmit it in its current form one year from now.

Gary Hensch, whos listed as the resident agent of Michigan Street Apartment Homes, declined to comment.

His companys application to the city said the project would not result in excessive traffic or noise, and that all lighting will be shielded to eliminate glare. Neighborhood walkability would not be hurt by the project, the application said.

The project was opposed by area residents.

A petition protesting the apartment building, signed by more than 100 neighborhood residents, was sent to the planning commission. Roughly 30 neighbors also sent letters of opposition to the commission, expressing concerns about a loss of green space and increased traffic.

They also worried about the projects impact on property values.

To add a 30-unit apartment building to our neighborhood doesnt fit with the design of the neighborhood and am concerned that it would lower the property value of our homes  especially those that would now have the apartment complex in their backyard, Fulton Heights resident Christine Tuttle said in a letter to the commission.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  A woman told police that her fiance and a friend strangled a man she brought to her house under the guise of a drug deal, police say.

Miqueenise Weed, 31, her fiance, Marcus Terrell, 28, and a friend, Corey Jones, 28, have been charged in what police called a long and complicated investigation into the death of Benjamin Lamar Coates, 29, of Kentwood.

The victims body was found Oct. 19 seat-belted in the passenger side of his car parked on Plaster Creek Boulevard SW in Wyoming.

Wyoming police investigated because the body was found in Wyoming. Investigators later learned that the killing happened at Weeds house in the 800 block of Sheldon Avenue SE in Grand Rapids, Wyoming police Capt. James Maguffee said. He said Grand Rapids police assisted in the investigation.

The victim was last seen near Sheldon Avenue SE and Delaware Street around 1:15 p.m. on the day his body was found. His cousins told police that he was selling drugs when he left to sell or pick up more drugs.

He was not heard from nor was he seen alive after that time, a Wyoming police investigator wrote in a probable-cause affidavit filed in Grand Rapids District Court.

The investigator said that Coates family could not reach him on his cell phone, which was unusual.

Police later found his body in his car on Plaster Creek Boulevard between South Division and Buchanan avenues.

An autopsy showed he had been asphyxiated.

Police said that state crime laboratory workers played important roles in the investigation.

Police found a palm print on the side of the victims car that belonged to Jones. Terrells DNA was found under the victims fingernails, suggesting a physical struggle.

In December, Kent County prosecutors, using an investigative subpoena to compel testimony, interviewed Terrell about the killing.

He allegedly insisted he had no knowledge of the killing and did not remember where he was or what he did that day.

Jones, in his testimony under an investigative subpoena, said he had never met Coates, hadnt been in or near his car and knew nothing about the homicide, police said in court records.

Police discovered that Weed  who had numerous phone conversations with Coates in the hours before his death  was the link between her co-defendants, Terrell and Jones. Coates cell phone records also showed he had been at the Sheldon Avenue home on the day he died.

Weed confessed when she was interviewed, police said.

Miqueenise confessed to involvement in the events that led up to Bens death and confessed that Corey and her live-in fiance, Marcus Terrell, attacked Ben in her home on Sheldon after she had set Ben up under the guise of a drug deal, the investigator wrote in the affidavit.

Miqueenise gave details about the homicide and the disposal of the body that matched up forensically and also matched up with an independent witnesss statement.

Her DNA was also found on the drivers seat belt of Coates car, police said.

She is charged with open murder and unarmed robbery. Jones and Terrell are charged with open murder, felony murder and unarmed robbery.

They are held without bond.
JACKSON, MI  Jackson County Sheriff Steven Rand should not be removed from office, the attorney generals office has recommended  partially blaming Jackson County officials for procedural deficiencies in its request.

Such claims are completely incorrect, said county Board of Commissioners Chairman James Steve Shotwell Jr.

Rand is accused in a federal lawsuit of being a multifaceted bigot by Sheriffs Lt. Tommy Schuette, due to discriminatory comments made at work against minorities, women and the disabled.

Contrary to a letter from the attorney general's office, Shotwell said county officials did submit an affidavit when asking the governor's office to remove Rand last year. The county also served Rand a copy of the request, Shotwell said.

He isn't surprised, however, with the recommendation.

"It's a cop out," Shotwell said. "It's exactly what I thought the governor's office would do  bail on it."

Shotwell disputes the notion that county officials were supposed to tell the attorney general's office which of the six grounds for removal their request falls under.

It was the countys responsibility to point out Rands misconduct, which it did in the affavadit, Shotwell said. From there, the Attorney General should have conducted an investigation to determine which rules were broken.

I guess everybody but the governor and the attorney general has listened to (the audio recordings,) he said.

Schuettes lawyer released hours of audio recordings he secretly took of Rand at work. Recordings include Rand calling a female circuit court judge a scatterbrained c--- and the sheriff saying he wanted to make a snuff film with a female court employee and shoot her right in the back of the head when I (inaudible) my load.

Rand previously confirmed it is his voice on the recordings.

Only the governor can remove a sitting sheriff in Michigan, outside of a recall. After Jackson city and county boards asked Gov. Rick Snyder to do so in February 2018, the request was forwarded to Attorney General Bill Schuette. Nothing surfaced in the next 10 months.

Community leaders had hoped new Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel would be different. While campaigning, Whitmer said the people of Jackson deserve answers and added shed hold the sheriff accountable for any misconduct in office.

Whitmer will likely follow Nessel's advice about the sheriff, a representative from Whitmer's office said.

To say the least, Im just disappointed, Jackson Vice Mayor Arlene Robinson said. It speaks volume to a group of people  women, people of color. That doesnt sit well.

After Whitmer's visit to Jackson last week, Mayor Derek Dobies said Whitmer will get to the conflict with the sheriff and fight for Jacksonians. Dobies and Rand didn't return calls and messages for comment, Friday.

A recall of Rand is on hold, after nearly half of the required 15,213 signatures were collected. The approved recall language expires in late May. Dean Schuette Sr., father of Tommy and organizer of the effort, said he looks to refile language and start over circulating petitions during the summer at outdoor events.

"What he's supposed to do, he's not able to do because he can't go to functions or anything because of his mouth," Schuette Sr. said.

Because a primary and general election would need to take place, the soonest the recall could happen is May 2020. Rands four-year term expires at the end of 2020.

People are still angry and willing to put in the work for the recall, Schuette Sr. said  especially after the attorney general's recommendation.

"Everybody's fired up and wants to go after it. My phone's been blowing off the hook since last night," Schuette Sr. said. "People are just disappointed. They were just hoping for more."

When asked if county officials plan to refile a request to the governor, Shotwell said they've already done everything they can do. Robinson plans to send a letter telling Whitmer and Nessel she's dissatisfied with the decision.

Im just in a state of shock that nothing will be done, Robinson said. To recommend nothing, thats just not good. Its just sad.
ST. JOSEPH, MI -- About 60,000 patients of Spectrum Health Lakeland in St. Joseph may have had their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal information jeopardized by a data breach.

The breach does not impact patients of other Spectrum Health care facilities, according to health system officials.

In a press release Thursday, March 14, Spectrum Health Lakeland officials said the company they contract to mail billing information to patients was hit by hackers.

Spectrum Health knew of the breach in December 2018 but wanted to verify which patients might have had their personal information breached before alerting them and the public, said Spectrum Health spokesperson Bruce Rossman.

Rossman said the verification process accounted for the delay.

He said other Spectrum Health patients arent affected because their other hospitals and care facilities dont use Detroit-based Wolverine Solutions Group, the mailing company hit by the breach.

Security experts for Wolverine Services Group found no evidence that patient information was removed from their systems or misused but also could not confirm it hadn't been, according to the Spectrum Health Lakeland statement.

Spectrum Health Lakeland is the latest to announce it was impacted by the cyber attack on Wolverine Solutions Group. Other West Michigan health systems impacted by the breach include North Ottawa Community Health System and Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital.

More than 600,000 Michigan residents across the state might be impacted.

Spectrum Health Lakeland patients possibly affected by the data breach will receive a letter in the next seven to 10 days.

Wolverine Services Group is offering free credit monitoring and financial investigative services for those impacted through AllClear ID. More information can be obtained by calling 877-412-7144 or by visiting www.spectrumhealthlakeland.org/datasecurity.
KALAMAZOO, MI  The Kalamazoo Public Schools Board of Education met Thursday, March 14, without first meeting to discuss school issues over dinner, district spokesperson Alex Lee said.

The board discontinued the dinner meetings this month. Board President Patti Sholler-Barber announced the decision in the first week of March, as MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette was reporting on a story about the meetings.

Kalamazoo Public Schools trustees for years have gathered over dinner to discuss issues with the superintendent and among themselves in the meetings held an hour before regular board meetings. While district officials said the meetings were public, some teachers referred to them as secret meetings. They were held in a small conference room adjacent to the board room with little room for the general public.

Trustees discussed the issue Thursday and talked about a path moving forward.

The board, and Im sure everyone in this room is aware, has decided to discontinue the dinner meetings that we were having before the meetings, Trustee Tandy Moore said. They werent something the public was appreciating. It wasnt a venue that really was very accommodating and allowed for a lot of public participation.

I think it was the right decision to do that, said Moore, whose calls for greater transparency in the district were a major theme of her 2018 campaign. She was elected to the board in November.

Moore said the board should look for alternate opportunities for deeper discussions and exploration of issues, and should continue to look for ways to include the community in those discussions.

Sholler-Barber said other boards in the area use a variety of methods, saying some are much like our dinner meetings and some are not.

Exploring those other options will be helpful, she said.

We need to have this discussion among us and we need to make sure theres a portion of it that the community can engage in," Sholler-Barber said.

The school boards meetings are required to be open to the public by law. But the way the dinner meetings were announced and their location inside a small conference room in the superintendents office with no seats available for the public showed a conflict, at least in spirit, with Michigans Open Meetings Act, according to Jennifer Dukarski, legal counsel with the Michigan Press Association.

Former Kalamazoo Public Schools Trustee Eric Breisach, who served from 1999 to 2011, spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting.

I like reading about whats going on at KPS in the Gazette, Breisach said. "I had two headlines in the last two weeks that talked about board issues, board governance and board relationships. That takes the eye off student achievement.

He encouraged the board members to ask Superintendent Michael Rice questions to stay informed, and work together to build a strong team.

Breisach previously brought feedback to the board at its Jan. 10 meeting. Reading from a letter signed by six former board members, he criticized the process by which the board appointed Jason Morris, who received the third most votes in the November election, to fill a seat vacated when Trustee Lauren Freedman resigned shortly after the election.

On Thursday, the board also heard a report from Rice about KPS graduation rates reaching an 11-year high in the 2017-18 school year.
KALAMAZOO, MI  Police reports show the three young adults killed when the car they were riding in was hit by a train had driven around active crossing gates.

Jarmaine Brown, 20, Marcionna Edwards, 19, and Jordan Brooks, 18, all of Kalamazoo, died when their northbound vehicle was struck by a westbound Amtrak train around 10 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 24, at the railroad crossing at 11th Street near KL Avenue in Oshtemo Township.

Michigan State Police redacted the victims names, including who was driving, from the police report released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from MLive/Kalamazoo Gazette, citing privacy concerns.

State police interviewed the operators of the train, who said they sounded the horn and saw the warning signals at the crossing were operational. The person being interviewed by police, whose name was redacted from the report, said a pickup truck moved around the warning signals and railroad crossing guards that were activated and in the down position.

The operator said right after the pickup crossed, the victim vehicle, which was on the south side of the tracks, backed up and also tried to maneuver around the activated crossing gates to drive north.

The operator said he activated the emergency brakes 100 yards before the intersection and sounded the horn continuously, as is their protocol.

As the locomotive approached the intersection the victim vehicle remained in a stationary position on the train tracks, an MSP trooper said in a report. It was during this time the locomotive struck the victim vehicle which was on the railroad tracks.

The train was traveling at 78 mph when it hit the car, according to police.

The impact split the car into two and ejected Brown, who was found near the rear portion of the vehicle, police said. All three occupants of the vehicle died at the scene.

A passenger who was riding in the fifth car of the Amtrak train told police said he felt a lurch and heard the engineer over the radio saying, We hit a car, it drove around the gate and stopped on the tracks, according to the police reports.

As of the time of the reports, police were still waiting to view dash cam footage from the front of the Amtrak train.

This is the second fatal crash at same railroad crossing in recent years. On Nov. 18, 2014, 21-year-old Joshua Cartwright, 20-year-old Ashley Melson and 19-year-old Justin Mastin, all of Kalamazoo, were killed at the crossing when an Amtrak train hit their minivan.

In that case, witnesses told police that a minivan, driven by Cartwright, was northbound on 11th Street when it drove around vehicles that were stopped for train crossing signals.

The van drove around the crossing signals and was struck broadside by an eastbound Amtrak train that was carrying about 120 passengers. The van was pushed about a mile before the train came to a complete stop.
LAPEER, MI  Lapeer Industries Inc. has reported to the state of Michigan a layoff affecting 160 workers.

In a letter to the states Talent Investment Agency dated March 12, Lapeer Industries Chief Financial Officer Michael A. Billings said the manufacturer has not been able to secure new business to replace a large customer program which was completed in December, nor has it been able to secure working capital funds needed to keep its operations running.

The layoffs, which were planned to take place in stages between Jan. 4 and March 18 of this year, are expected to be for an indefinite period of greater than six months and could possibly mean the closing of one or more of Lapeer Industries facilities, according to the letter.

We have been actively seeking capital, but we need to take these measures now to avoid and/or postpone a complete shutdown for a reasonable period or even possibly permanently, the letter reads.

Employees affected by the layoffs include 59 welders, 22 paint shop operators, nine blast booth operators, eight machine operators and eight general laborers, among others, none of whom are represented by a union.

Its unclear how many people the company employs in total. Billings could not immediately be reached for comment.

Lapeer Industries, which has its headquarters and three plants in Lapeer, serves customers in defense, automotive and renewable energy. For nearly 40 years, Lapeer Industries has supplied various automotive and defense components to major corporations and the U.S. military, according to the companys website.

Lapeer Industries made headlines in recent years when two workers died on the job and others were injured in two separate incidents. In 2014, one person was killed and three others were injured in an explosion at Lapeer Industries, and, in 2017, a worker became trapped under a steel fixture and later died at an area hospital.

Lapeer City Manager Dale Kerbyson said Lapeer Industries is one of the citys larger employers, along with McLaren Lapeer Region, Lapeer Community Schools, Mold Masters, Lapeer County and ZF Chassis Components.

Of course the city of Lapeer never likes to hear that one of its companies has the need to adjust their workforce down, Kerbyson said in an email to MLive/The Flint Journal. Lapeer has a great record of keeping in contact with its corporate partners and will stand by them to assist them in any way we can.

Kerbyson said this layoff represents about half of the companys workforce, according to the most recent information the city has.

It is our hope that every one of these employees can find work within ... Lapeer as we know that our community and region has been suffering from a lack of available workers, his email continued. I know that there is a system in place (GST Michigan Works) to assist those workers on the search for their next employer. It is our hope that their transition is seamless and timely.
BUENA VISTA, MI  A motel owner said he will be homeless if Buena Vista Township takes ownership of his business and demolishes it.

Jitendra Jeet Patel, owner of Welcome Inn & Suites, 3245 E. Holland, was ordered to vacate the premises of the motel on March 14 after an arbitrator ruled that the building was dangerous and unsafe and violated Michigan housing laws. That opens the door to the township razing the motel.

Patel, who lives in the motel, has 21 days to appeal the decision.

According to Patel, he purchased the building for $625,000 in 2009 shortly after relocating to the U.S. from India, where he was into real estate and developing.

Patel provided MLive with fire inspection reports that date back to 2010. A 2014 inspection showed three violations, a decrease from multiple violations shown in previous reports.

However, according to Township Supervisor Christina Dillard, Patel also had to pass electrical, building, plumbing and mechanical inspections, which he did not.

No work was done and, after another probe or inspection of the building, the conditions were even worse, Dillard said, causing the township to suspend Patels license to conduct business in 2016.

Dangerous building

Near the end of 2018, another inspection was conducted under the dangerous building ordinance, according to Code Enforcer and Building Inspector Jeff Cain.

Patel, who had an independent inspection of his building conducted in October of 2018 by Spicer Group, said he began fixing the problems that were found. However, the list of defects presented to him in a notice of dangerous and unsafe building on Feb. 11 and a show cause hearing notification presented on Feb. 28, detailed pages of violations he said he was not aware of.

Why would they wait two-and-a-half years to tell me about these? Patel asked. I was doing all the work that Spicer Group provided.

Superintendent Torrie McAfee said the violations in both orders were presented in the Spicer Group assessment.

Patel argues that township officials refused to allow him to fix the problems by twice denying contractors to complete the work. Paperwork provided by Patel show two estimates from New Jersey-based contractors to complete the work for about $200,000 a piece.

Patel claims that township officials made it difficult for his contractors and eventually denied them altogether on the grounds that they did not have a license to do work in Michigan.

One estimate was from Yash Construction in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and dated Jan. 24, 2017.

In a follow-up letter to Cain from the company dated July 11, a project manager from Yash stated, After numerous emails, phone calls and physical meetings with your office, Spicer Engineering and the Motel Owners, we continue to hit this roadblock over the matter of conception design and engineering designs that are acceptable to B.V.C.T.

McAfee said that the township tried numerous times to work with Patel, but Patel focused on making only cosmetic changes to the property.

It needs more than cosmetics, McAfee said. At the end of the day, this is a dangerous building.

More problems

Patel also said that township officials did not honor a request to reschedule the show cause hearing that was held on March 13. Patel or a representative for him was not in attendance.

On March 11, Patel filed a letter with the township asking that the hearing be moved to March 19 or 20, due to conflicts and already scheduled appointments on his calendar.

McAfee said that Patel did not have to be in attendance for the meeting, however, he was notified of the hearing on Feb. 28.

I would think this wouldve been priority, McAfee said.

Patel said that his wife had an appointment with doctors in Ann Arbor on that date, a detail he did not disclose in the letter.

Patel also claims there is some conflict with township officials because they are using a piece of his property as a parking lot. Patel said he owns the property between his building and the townships hall where township employees, officials and visitors park when conducting business at the hall.

McAfee agreed that a piece of the property belonged to Patel, but pointed out that the township had an agreement dated back to 1967 that was entered into with a previous land owner to jointly use the driveway and there had not been an issue with Patel over the property.

We could just move our cars if he would like, McAfee said.

Patel provided MLive with a copy of that agreement.

Weighing options

At the moment, Patel has a few options available. He can appeal the decision and hope to get a favorable ruling or extension. He can let township officials raze the structure under the dangerous building ordinance and apply the cost to his property taxes, or he can have the building demolished himself. He also retains ownership of the land in the last two options.

Patel, who held back tears while weighing those options, said that he wants to fight to keep his building but feels the deck is stacked against him.

Every night I have a nightmare, Patel said.

Patel said he owes $400,000 on his mortgage and the three estimates he received for demolition hovered around $100,000 each.

Dillard estimated that it would cost the township around $200,000 to demolish the building and the cost will be added to Patels taxes.

If he can do it for less then that is his best option, Dillard said, adding that the value of the property will rise significantly after the building is razed.

Patel said all his bills and taxes are paid. Dillard also confirmed.

Ill try to appeal, but I dont have an attorney and no attorney wants to go against the township, he said. I dont have a choice. What can I do?
BAY CITY, MI  A 64-year-old Mount Pleasant man has been ordered to spend more than seven decades in a federal prison.

U.S. District Judge Thomas L. Ludington on Thursday, March 14, sentenced Byron D. Bird to 888 months, or 74 years, behind bars. The judge also imposed five years of supervised release, should Bird serve his complete sentence and make it out of prison. He would be age 138.

A jury in December found Bird guilty on each charge he faced, listed as follows:

 Four counts of commission of a federal sex offense by someone required to register as a sex offender.

 Four counts of crime of violence by someone who failed to register as a sex offender.

 Two counts of sexual abuse of a minor.

 Two counts of sexually abusive contact.

 One count of failure to register as a sex offender.

 One count of witness tampering.

During the trial, prosecutors alleged that between Oct. 27, 2016, and Jan. 13, 2018, Bird sexually abused a girl. He kept her from reporting the misconduct by threatening her, authorities alleged.

The girl made her first disclosure in January 2018 when her mother brought her to an area hospital for a condition that ended up being a molar pregnancy, which the Mayo Clinic describes as "rare complication of pregnancy characterized by the abnormal growth of trophoblasts, the cells that normally develop into the placenta."

Though Bird denied having sexually assaulted the girl, DNA evidence strongly indicated he had contributed sperm to the false pregnancy, prosecutors said.

In 2007, Bird was convicted of sexual interference with a person younger than 16 in Sarnia, Ontario.

As a Native American, Bird has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada, his attorney had said. Despite his prior conviction, Bird never registered as a sex offender in Michigan, prosecutors alleged.
An Australian senator is being heavily criticized for lashing out at Muslim immigrants in the wake of the horrific shootings at two New Zealand mosques.

Queensland Senator Fraser Anning released a media statement on Friday afternoon, hours after the terrorist attacks at two Christchurch mosques. In it, Anning claimed while he was utterly opposed to any form of violence and condemned the actions of the gunman, he said the atrocity highlighted the growing fear over an increasing Muslim presence in Australia and New Zealand.

While this kind of violent vigilantism can never be justified, what it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence.

READ MORE: Death toll in New Zealand mosque shootings rises to 49 - police

Anning claimed the real perpetrator that killed 49 people and injured more than 40, including children, is New Zealands immigration policy. Three suspects have been arrested in connection with the attack, one of which has been charged with murder.

Anning went on to criticize left-wing politicians and the media who he said will rush to blame gun laws or those who hold nationalist views, but this is all cliched nonsense.

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.

READ MORE: Absolutely sickened: PewDiePie responds to shout-out on NZ mosque killers livestream

Anning went on to ask if anyone still dispute[s] the link between Muslim immigration and violence? on Twitter  inciting a slew of negative feedback from Australias Prime Minister Scott Morrison and former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, fellow MPs and constituents.
The US based aviation corporation has paused deliveries of the ill-fated Boeing 737 MAX to customers after the aircraft type was grounded around the world following the deadly crash in Ethiopia.

The move was announced by the company on Thursday. No time frame on when the deliveries might be resumed was immediately provided, yet the production itself continues.

We continue to build 737 MAX airplanes while assessing how the situation, including potential capacity constraints, will impact our production system, a Boeing spokesman said.

The decision comes after Boeing 737 MAX planes were grounded and banned from the airspace of the majority of the worlds countries, including the United States. The plane type was targeted with the restrictions after a crash in Ethiopia on Saturday, which killed 157 people  everyone on board. The Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed shortly after take-off, taking a steep nosedive.

While the exact causes of the tragedy have not yet been established, the crash appears to resemble another catastrophe involving a 737 MAX aircraft. Last October, a Lion Air jet crashed in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.

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LIVERPOOL VS PORTO

Last year's beaten finalists will be pleased with the draw, given that Porto are among the lesser-fancied teams left.

The pair met at the last 16 stage last season, with Liverpool winning 5-0 on aggregate after a demolition job in Portugal.

This campaigm, Jurgen Klopp's team were impressive in beating Bayern 3-1 on Wednesday, and while they are fighting on two fronts with their push for the Premier League, their fabled attacking trident of Salah, Mane and Firmino - plus the poise and calm of van Dijk in defense - will make them among the outright favorites for this year's Champions League.

The five-time winners meet a Porto team with two European Cups to their name, the last coming in 2004 under a certain Jose Mourinho.

They will be the underdogs, but then again they were in the last round before they put in a gutsy display to beat Roma 4-3 on aggregate.

Liverpool favorites, but won't be taking the Portuguese lightly.

Champions League quarterfinals draw: Last 8 learn their fates

Champions League quarterfinals draw: Last 8 learn their fates

Source : RT Sport News
In an effort to threaten everyone into not investigating US or Israeli war crimes in the International Criminal Court, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says anyone involved in such probes will lose their visa and may be sanctioned.

The Washington war hawk said that action had to be taken because any investigation into alleged war crimes and torture committed by the United States would be a threat to US rule of law. Visas will be pulled or denied for anyone who has been involved in or even requested an ICC investigation of any US personnel.

The ICC is currently mulling over a request to investigate possible war crimes committed by the US in Afghanistan in the course of the nearly 20-year conflict which has left over 100,000 Afghans dead. The international court prosecutors office says it has reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity were, and continue to be, committed by foreign government forces in Afghanistan.

Pompeo openly stated that the action was intended to get the court to drop the potential investigation, and that Washington was ready to further increase the pressure if they dont do as he says.

We are prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions, if the ICC does not change course, he said.

Also on rt.com North Korea mulls renewing tests after gangster-like stance by Pompeo and Bolton  Deputy FM

The court responded later in the day saying they would continue their work undeterred by Pompeos aggressive statement, and act in accordance with international law rather than Washingtons threats.

An independent and impartial judicial institution [is] crucial for ensuring accountability for the gravest crimes under international law.

Following up on National Security Advisor John Boltons threats against the court last year, Pompeo said that action had already been taken against members of the Hague-based court for daring to look into potential crimes committed by the US abroad. He declined to name any names or reveal how many people had been targeted.

We are determined to protect the American and allied military and civilian personnel from living in fear of unjust prosecution for actions taken to defend our great nation, he declared.

Washington also stepped up to protect its close ally Israel from the threat of prosecution for crimes against Palestinians.

These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis, without allied consent, he continued.

Also on rt.com Pompeo seeks to recruit top world oil execs to promote US foreign policy

While the US signed the initial document which created the international court in 2000, it has since refused to actually become a member, and many American politicians see the courts ability to hold the country accountable for its actions abroad as a threat to national sovereignty. Bolton later unsigned the document altogether.

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Israeli jets and helicopters hit around 100 Hamas-linked targets in Gaza on Thursday overnight, the Israeli Army has said. The air raids were conducted in response to rockets launched from Gaza at Tel Aviv.

A Hamas HQ in Gazas downtown Rimal district, a rocket-manufacturing site and militant training ground, were among the targets hit, according to the military.

The airstrikes were made in retaliation to rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli territory, towards Tel Aviv. Both rockets were intercepted and destroyed by the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense system.

Hamas terror group bears the responsibility for everything going on in and out of Gaza, the IDF said.

Also on rt.com Israel strikes Gaza in reprisal for 2 rocket launches (VIDEO)

After the IDF raid into Gaza, Hamas fired two more rockets into Israel on Friday, both of which were also destroyed mid-air, the military reported. Aerial attack warning sirens were heard in the city of Sderot and the Shaar HaNegev municipality near the Gaza border.

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Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett has blamed Hamas for firing two rockets into Israel, which triggered alarms near Tel Aviv. He told RT that it was time for Israel to retaliate against the radical Islamic terror state.

While both the Hamas military wing and the hardline militants from Islamic Jihad denied responsibility for the latest rocket fire that hit Israeli territory on Thursday, Bennett has called to force the militants out of the Gaza Strip.

Also on rt.com Israel strikes Gaza in reprisal for 2 rocket launches (VIDEO)

Hamas has been shooting rockets at the southern part of Israel for roughly a year now and now they shot two rockets at the Tel Aviv area. It's time to defeat Hamas, it's time to demilitarize the Gaza Strip, he told RT.

Bennett blamed Arabs for turning Gaza into a failed state, to which Israel now must retaliate.

When we handed it over to the Arabs, they turned it into a radical Islamic terror state and now it's time to fight back against that state and we will.

The minister dismissed as utter nonsense the argument that both sides have been equally responsible for the violence that is raging in the region.

We left Gaza. We want peace. The moment they stop shooting missiles at my children's school and kindergarten is the moment there will be peace.

Bennett, who is a member of the Israeli Security Cabinet and a proponent of his own version of a one-state solution, also brushed off international calls for Israel to stop its rampant settlement construction.

As long as it's up to me, I would build for Jews anywhere in Israel, because this is our home. I would build much more Jewish communities within our land.

US special Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt has echoed Bennett, blaming Hamas for the attack and failing their people day after day.

WATCH the full interview below.

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Norways government is proposing to expand the area that will be offered for oil and gas exploration in the 2019 licensing round of acreage in mature areas, Petroleum and Energy Minister Kjell-Brge Freiberg said on Thursday.

Norway plans to include a total of 90 new blocks in the so-called APA annual licensing round this year, including 48 blocks in the Barents Sea, 37 blocks in the Norwegian Sea, and five blocks in the North Sea, Freiberg said.

Its important to maintain the positive development in exploration activity in the Barents Sea. I hope this will lead to robust field development solutions and increased value creation in the north, Reuters quoted Freiberg as saying in a statement.

There has been opposition to the extension of the acreage under the APA licensing round from politicians of the opposition and from environmentalists, who have argued that those licensing rounds with additional blocks are being used to expand exploration to beyond the scope of those roundsthat is mature and well-explored areas.

In the 2018 APA licensing round, Norway awarded 83 production licensesa record number of awards for such rounds.

53 years after the first licensing round, this new record confirms the industrys belief in continued value creation and activity in Norway, Freiberg said in January this year, when he announced the new licenses and the 33 different companies that were awarded ownership interests.

Norways oil production is expected to drop this year to its lowest level since 1988, but to recover afterwards thanks to two large developments.

Production is expected to jump in 2020 through 2023, thanks to the start up in late 2019 of Johan Sverdrupthe North Sea giant, as operator Equinor calls it.

But after Johan Sverdrup and after Johan Castberg in the Barents Sea scheduled for first oil in 2022, Norway doesnt have major oil discoveries and projects to sustain its oil production after the middle of the 2020s.

Read more on Oilprice.com: Two largest oil price benchmarks are set to diverge

The Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) started warning last year that from the mid-2020s onward, production offshore Norway will start to decline so making new and large discoveries quickly is necessary for maintaining production at the same level from the mid-2020s.

This article was originally published on Oilprice.com
In a landmark ruling on Thursday, Connecticut's top court has given the go-ahead to a lawsuit by the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which blames the manufacturer of the AR-15 style rifle used in the massacre.

The Connecticut state Supreme Court narrowly overturned the 2016 decision of a lower court that threw out the lawsuit, arguing that the defendants, arms manufacturer Remington and the distributors of the rifle, are exempted from responsibility under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). The PLCAA passed by Congress in 2005 relieves weapon manufacturers from liability in gun violence crimes.

Also on rt.com Americas oldest gun maker goes bust

While the court on Thursday reaffirmed that the gun maker enjoys protection under the act, it ruled that the plaintiffs, families of the nine victims of the massacre and a teacher who survived the bloodshed, are entitled to sue the companies for alleged violation of marketing rules.

The lawsuit argues that Remington violated the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA) when it aggressively promoted its semi-automatic Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle to civilians. The plaintiffs took particular issue with Remington's marketing of high-capacity magazines.

READ MORE: Sandy Hook gun manufacturer lawsuit to proceed

The issue was thrust back into the center of the national gun control debate after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting. Last month, a bill to outlaw high-capacity magazines, typically defined as magazines that are able to hold more than 10 rounds, was reintroduced in Congress. However, in Connecticut and several other states, they have been banned since April, 2013. It is a felony in Connecticut to possess these types of magazines if obtained after that date.

The lawsuit points out that even before the Sandy Hook tragedy in 2012, the AR-15 style rifle was notorious as a symbol of mass shootings.



READ MORE: From Ritalin to Marilyn: Forget gun laws, what else is being blamed for mass shootings?

"Assault rifles like the Bushmaster XM15-E2S had been used to kill in department stores and fast food chains, at offices and homecoming parties, on courthouse steps, and in schools," it states, accusing Remington and its co-defendants of turning a blind eye to the "unreasonable risks associated with selling assault rifles under these circumstances."

The lawsuit has reignited the debate on whether gunman Adam Lanza's obsession with violent video games was a major contributing factor in his decision to go on a shooting rampage in real life. Back then, it was revealed that Lanza had scored over 83,000 "kills" on his favorite video game, 22,000 of them headshots.

The plaintiffs argue that marketing the rifle through video games was another example of unscrupulous advertising practices in which the company engaged.

Justice Richard Powers, who heard the case in Connecticut, sided with the plaintiffs as he ruled that their allegations are a valid basis for the lawsuit to be returned to a lower court.

"The regulation of advertising that threatens the public's health, safety and morals has long been considered a core exercise of the states' police powers," Powers said.

The decision was hailed by the lawyers for the plaintiffs as "a crucial step" towards exposing "Remington's calculated and profit-driven strategy to expand the AR-15 marketat the expense of Americans' safety."

Also on rt.com Outcry as Trump links violence to video games, shows reel with gaming massacre at Moscow airport

The company has argued that it cannot be held responsible for Lanza's actions since it is in no position to assess the mental state of its end consumer. The lawsuit will now allow the plaintiffs to gain access to internal Remington documents that could shed light on its advertising practices.

Adam Lanza killed his mother and then went on to gun down 26 people at the elementary school in Newton, Connecticut, in 2012, before taking his own life.

The shooting foreshadowed financial troubles for Remington, an American arms manufacturer with a history going back two centuries. In March last year, shortly after another high-profile school shooting in Parkland, Florida, it filed for bankruptcy protection. However, it has since recovered and returned to the market in May after successful restructuring.

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Washington has slapped a fresh batch of sanctions on Russia over unjustified actions during a maritime incident last November in the Kerch Strait near Crimea when three Ukrainian boats went into Russias territorial waters.

The US Treasury Department included six people and eight entities in its Friday update of Ukraine and Russia-related Designations. The deputy director of the Russian Border Guard Service, which is under the command of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), as well as the head of the FSB service in Crimea and Sevastopol are among the sanctioned individuals.

The list of entities consists of eight enterprises related to the shipbuilding industry and operating as Russias defense contractors, including a St. Petersburg engine manufacturer, several shipyards located both in Crimea and mainland Russia, and companies producing hydroacoustic devices and ship automatics.

The sanctions were imposed over the unjustified November 25 attack on three Ukrainian naval vessels near the Kerch Strait, the US State Department said in a statement, accusing the designated individuals of no less than personally orchestrating the assault.

Also on rt.com Proposed sanctions from hell against Russia may curb Trump, but wont help US rule the world

Two people were separately subjected to sanctions over what the state department called sham elections in Eastern Ukraine in November. It also said that the action was coordinated with Canada and the EU.

In November last year three ships of the Ukrainian Navy entered Russias territorial waters while traveling from the Black Sea through the Kerch Strait, which separates Crimea from mainland Russia.

Also on rt.com Seized Ukrainian warships were armed beyond regular loadout & planned moving 'stealthily'  Moscow

Moscow said that the Ukrainian vessels didnt follow established procedure to request the passage, made dangerous maneuvers and did not comply with demands from Russian authorities to stop. Following an hours-long standoff, the ships were rammed by the Russian coast guard and three Ukrainian personnel were injured. In total, 24 Ukrainian sailors were detained and prosecuted for illegally crossing Russias border.

Russia also later said that the detained ships were armed beyond the regular payload and apparently planned to move stealthy through the Russian waters. The incident predictably drove Kiev into a frenzy and rushed to call on its backers to punish Russia for its actions. Ukraine even urged Turkey to close the Bosphorus Strait to Russian ships in response to the incident and repeatedly called on the US and its allies to send their Navy ships to cross the Kerch Strait and see how Russia reacts.

Washingtons European allies, however, appeared to be reluctant to heed Kievs call. Following the incident, Berlin and Paris rebuffed calls for fresh sanctions against Russia. In March it was revealed that the German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood up to pressure from Washington as she declined a proposal by Vice President Mike Pence to send German Navy ships towards Russias Crimea. Paris also dismissed such proposals by calling such actions an unnecessary provocation.

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A hazmat squad responded after a bucket full of radioactive waste was found near a trash can in Minsk, Belarus. The materials were marked with radiation symbols, which did not stop a local woman from taking them out like trash.

A bucket with cans made of glass and plastic and sporting distinctive radioactivity warning signs were discovered by a stunned communal service worker in Minsk on Thursday. The bucket was placed near a trash can at a dumpster in a residential district.

The vigilant worker immediately alerted emergency services, who dispatched a hazardous materials unit to check for radiation exposure. Once the team arrived at the scene, which was sealed off in precaution, they discovered that the level of radiation within one meter (3.2 ft) from the bucket was four times higher than normal.

Also on rt.com Plans to bury nuclear waste under national parks backed by UK govt

However, when they moved two meters (6.5 ft) away from the dangerous find, the radiation was back to normal background level again.

The bucket with the chemicals was removed from the dumpster and taken to a nuclear research facility for testing.

A total of five containers were discovered in the bucket, each weighing 1kg (2.2 lb). All of them were used to store different types of uranium waste, including uranyl chloride, uranyl nitrate, uranyl sulfate and uranium trioxide, an extremely toxic substance.

Police launched an investigation into how the radioactive waste landed at the dumpster. It promptly turned out that the chemicals had been discarded by a local woman during a routine cleaning of a nearby apartment belonging to her late grandmother, a local chemistry professor. Apparently not sharing the late woman's knowledge of chemistry, her granddaughter simply took the waste to the dumpster without a second thought.

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Chinese violinist Angelo Xiang Yu is among the 2019 recipients of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Development Grants, the Avery Fisher Artist Program announced on Thursday.



"I'm very, very humbled and honored to receiving the prestigious award, one of the highest achievement for artists, " Yu told Xinhua before attending the awarding ceremony, slated for Thursday evening at New York City's Greene Space.

"I grew up listening to the CDs of artists such as Andre Watts, Gil Shaham, and Joshua Bell, who have won this award in the past. I never really even dreamed of my name on the Avery Fisher Career Award. I still feel like I'm in the dream," said Yu, who is from northern China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and now lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

"So it's a huge honor for me. And it also really motivates me to strive for excellence and to improve myself everyday," said the 28-year-old virtuoso, who performs on a 1729 Stradivarius violin generously on loan from an anonymous donor.

The Avery Fisher Career Grant, established by electronics pioneer and amateur musician Avery Fisher, is an award given to up to five outstanding instrumentalists each year. This year's other three grant recipients are JACK Quartet; Piano Duo, Christina and Michelle Naughton; Pianist, Henry Kramer.

In addition to winning First Prize as well as the Bach and Audience Prizes at the 2010 Menuhin Competition, Yu was awarded the 2nd prize at the Lipinski Wieniawski International Violin Competition, and the 3rd prize at the Michael Hill International Violin Competition.

In March 2017, he was chosen to join the roster of the prestigious Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two). In January 2019, he received the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists, an annual prize that honors outstanding artistry and serves to acknowledge the promising future of selected performers of Lincoln Center.

The Avery Fisher Career Grant are a part of the Avery Fisher Artist Program, along with the Avery Fisher Prize and Special Awards. They are administered by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The Grants, which are currently 25,000 U.S. dollars, are designed to give professional assistance to young musicians who are deemed to have the potential for a solo career. Chinese pianists Wang Yujia and Zhang Haochen were also honored with the award respectively in 2010 and 2017.
You are here: Arts

The share of foreign students attending English language courses in Malta stood at 3.4 percent of the total inbound tourists in 2018, Malta's National Statistics Office (NSO) revealed on Thursday.

According to the NSO report, foreign students attending English language courses numbered 87,112, almost unchanged from that of 2017.

The majority of students attending English language courses in Malta came from Italy, followed by Germany and France, which account for 48.7 percent of those students.

The largest share of language students was aged 15 years or less, accounting for 34.2 percent of total students.

Female students outnumbered males, and accounted for 61.3 percent of total students.

The average length of stay during the year under review stood at 2.5 weeks, down by 0.3 weeks when compared to 2017.

English language teaching is an important sector within the tourism industry as well as a predominant contributor to an ever-evolving education sector in Malta.
The Mogao Caves, a UNESCO world cultural heritage site located near Dunhuang, northwest China's Gansu province, will be officially opened to the public for night tours this year, in a bid to attract more tourists, China News Services reported Tuesday.



The grottoes are an essential component of the economic tourism circle across Dunhuang, and so a series of night tours will be launched from mid-April to early May, providing customized cultural services for tourists, said Wang Xudong, head of Dunhuang Academy.

Aside from the night tour of the Mogao Caves - a complex cave structure made up of hundreds of Buddhist and Taoist grottoes which are over 1,000 years old, tourists will also be offered options for trips to Yangguan Pass and Yumenguan Pass, two major passes of ancient China along the historic Silk Road.

Similar night tours were provided for research, study, and tour groups by Dunhuang Academy last year, and were widely welcomed by sightseers.
The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) unveiled a wax candle sculpture on Friday morning. The sculpture, a man reading on his iPhone, was lit up and will ultimately melt into a puddle.

"This sculpture shows us that art in the 21st century shape shifts, it is not static, it is alive and always changing, reflecting the world in which we live," National Gallery Director Nick Mitzevich said.

The four-meter sculpture, Francesco 2017, is NGA's latest major acquisition by artist Urs Fischer. It depicted a man standing on a refrigerator, his head lowered to look at the iPhone, as a reminder of the common obsession of people nowadays with electronic devices.

Inside the head are candle wicks which are lit and, over time, result in the sculpture's disfigurement and collapse.

Mitzevich said that it is the opposite of classic sculptures like Michelangelo's David, which people usually protect with all measures, as Francesco is wax, not marble, and will disintegrate as it burns to the ground.

"This sculpture is a metaphor to the fact that if you don't look carefully, things will change and pass you by," he said. "Life isn't static. This work has a process of life itself. In some way it is just like the life we lead," he added.

He took an elevator to light up the wax candle. Soon, wax oil began dripping on the ground. The work will be lit each week over six months, and when fully melted it will be recast to its original form.

Mitzevich told journalists that as part of the acquisition process, they also received the cast and the mould and a manual to recast it, so that the gallery can recast the work as many times as it desires.

He said that people are going to watch the death of an art work. "And, just like a phoenix, it rises again," he said.

Francesco is just one sculpture from a series of wax portraits that Swiss-born artist Fischer created since the early 2000s when he began creating wax sculptures. His works have been collected by leading public and private collections around the world.

"His candle portraits have been seen by millions of people, and now Australians can experience this captivating work of art which lures you to watch it morph with every visit to Canberra," Mitzevich said.
You are here: Business

The beginning of 2019 offered fresh evidence of a stabilizing Chinese economy with economic data for the first two months showing resilience and progress.



The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Thursday unveiled a string of economic indicators in Jan.-Feb., showing a pick-up in investment, stable consumer spending, and optimized industrial structure.

Fixed-asset investment, a major growth driver, grew 6.1 percent year on year in the first two months of 2019, 0.2 percentage points higher than that recorded in 2018. The growth has maintained an upward trend since last September.

Retail sales of consumer goods, an indicator of consumption, rose 8.2 percent year on year in the first two months of the year, flat with that in December.

Industrial output expanded 5.3 percent year on year in the first two months, narrowing from 5.7 percent growth in December 2018, with fast growth in emerging industries and new products.

"The national economy in the first two months of this year continued to remain stable while making progress," NBS spokesperson Mao Shengyong told a press conference, noting the economy performed within a reasonable range.

Mao said readings of Thursday's data showed some bright spots in the Chinese economy, including rising domestic demand, optimized industrial structure, stable employment and consumer prices and positive market expectation.

The investment in the tertiary industry expanded 6.5 percent in the past two months, picking up pace from the 5.5-percent increase in 2018.

After deducting price factors, retail sales of consumer goods grew 7.1 percent in real terms, accelerating from December's 6.6-percent rise, a sign of rising domestic demand.

Meanwhile, the industrial structure continued to improve. Production in strategic emerging industries maintained fast expansion, with its output increasing by 10.1 percent, 4.8 percentage points higher than the general industrial output growth.

The output of new energy vehicles saw a surge of 53.3 percent year on year during the period, while solar cell production rose by 13.5 percent.

Investment in high-tech industries and industrial technology improvement jumped 8.6 percent and 19.5 percent year-on-year, both faster than the overall growth of fixed asset investment.

China's consumer confidence index edged up 2.3 points to 126 in February from January, pointing to a positive outlook of market expectation.

Despite mounting external uncertainties, Thursday's data was the latest in a slew of economic barometers that showed resilience and progress in the Chinese economy.

The purchasing managers' index (PMI) for the manufacturing sector came in at 49.5 in January, slightly up from 49.4 in December last year, offering fresh signs of stabilization.

The growth in China's foreign trade of goods rebounded strongly after the week-long Spring Festival. In the first eight days of March, the country's foreign trade soared 24.7 percent year on year, with exports rising nearly 40 percent.

Admitting the downward pressure for the Chinese economy, Mao is confident that China can maintain stable and healthy economic growth this year with the solid implementation of counter-cyclical adjustment policies.
Sonia Dhawan, former senior Paytm executive and the long time secretary of founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma has been released on bail by the Allahabad High Court after spending almost five months in judicial custody.

Dhawan, along with her husband Rupak Jain and an administration resource Devender Kumar, were arrested for allegedly being part of an extortion bid against Sharma in October.

Ajay Shekhar Sharma, brother of Vijay Shekhar Sharma, had earlier told Moneycontrol that a person named Rohit Chomwal from Kolkata had tried to extort Rs 20 crore by threatening to leak "some photos and personal financial details" of his brother at the behest of Dhawan.

Chomal had apparently taken the names of Dhawan, Jain and Kumar as the people behind the plot.

While Jain was granted bail by Allahabad High Court, Dhawan's bail plea was rejected by the Surajpur district court last month.

Her lawyer had then moved the Allahabad High Court which accepted her bail application on March 5.

"Applicant while claiming innocence has laid stress on fact that there is nothing concrete emerging against the applicant and it cannot be said that the applicant ever indulged in any illegal activity secretly obtaining any data from the laptop of any device of the informant or his company and she never blackmailed as such. There is no active role assigned to the applicant. Suppositional charges have been levelled, which allegations cannot stand concrete," read the order copy, which has been sourced by Moneycontrol from the website of Allahabad High Court.

"Learned AGA has opposed prayer for bail. However, he has not disputed the aforesaid facts. Without entering into the merit of the case but considering the facts and circumstances of the case, the nature of the accusation and the severity of punishment in case of conviction and the nature of supporting evidence, reasonable apprehension of tampering with witness or apprehension of threat to the complainant and prima facie satisfaction of the court in support of the charge, the applicant is entitled to be released on bail," it added.

While Dhawan or her family didn't not immediately respond to calls or messages, a person privy to the development said that her release happened on March 11.
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The financial troubles of Jet Airways seem to be growing as the cash-strapped carrier could be staring at another default of $109 million, which has to be paid to the HSBC Bank Middle East by March 28. This is the second instalment of a $140-million loan Jet had taken in 2014, for which Etihad Airways was the guarantor.

On March 11, Jet Airways defaulted on its commercial borrowings of $31 million to HSBC, which were guaranteed by Etihad, Business Standard reported.

The cash-strapped airline wrote to HSBC on March 11 about the liquidity crunch it is experiencing and assured the bank that the lenders are working on a resolution plan. The carrier informed the bank that the plan is in its final stage and awaiting corporate and regulatory approvals.

Also see: Etihad may not agree to Jet Airways' bailout plan

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Jet Airways' Naresh Goyal and Etihad protected the interests of the latter as the guarantor. Sources told the paper that the MoU has a clause, which states that before getting credit, Jet Airways had to pledge 15 percent of its shares in JetPrivilege in favour of HSBC as security.

Jet Airways has a 49.9 percent stake in its loyalty programme -- JetPrivilege, which has an estimated enterprise value of around Rs 4,000 crore. The airline needs fresh credit as soon as possible, as over 40 percent of its fleet is grounded. The resolution plan led by the banks planned to bring in nearly Rs 4,000 crore.

Etihad was expected to infuse Rs 750 crore into the airline, after which the banks were to contribute the same amount. But that plan has been delayed by the Abu Dhabi-based carrier.

Jet Airways signed the loan agreement with HSBC in January 2014 and it was reworked with an amendment in two months after that. The loan was taken by the company in two instalments, on March 5 and March 27, 2014, for five years, with bullet repayment obligations at the end of the fifth year.

Goyal communicated with Etihad group CEO Tony Douglas recently, making it clear that Etihad's fund infusion was imperative for Jet Airways, but no confirmation regarding the deal has come from Etihad as of now.

This comes weeks after Goyal and Etihad agreed upon a new deal with changes to equity contributions from both sides after long deliberation.

Moneycontrol couldnt independently verify the report.

Lenders to Jet Airways, led by State Bank of India , had designed a resolution plan, according to which Etihad is expected to infuse Rs 1,600-1,900 crore in the airline. The banks were to provide Rs 1,000 crore and the proposed new investor -- National Investment and Infrastructure Fund -- was to bring in Rs 1,600-1,900 crore. Goyal's stake would then come down from 51 percent to 17.1 percent.
Chinese researchers have put forward a new deployment plan for the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)-based network to tackle China's shortage of IP addresses.

Designed by the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), the deployment plan will help bridge the transition from the IPv4 to IPv6 network through protocol exchange, improving China's IPv6 application level.

Computers, mobile phones, electronic devices and sensors that are connected to the internet need IP addresses to identify themselves and communicate with each other. IP addresses originating from the existing IPv4 network are nearly exhausted while the IPv6 network offers much higher numbers of IP addresses, which allows almost everything online.

China is in urgent need of a more developed IPv6 network to support the fast development of its internet industry, including industrial Internet, the Internet of things, cloud computing and artificial intelligence.

However, the adoption rate of the IPv6 network in China is less than one percent, far lower than the global average.

According to experts from the CASIC, the deployment of the IPv6 network has encountered several obstacles in China, such as difficulty in transformation, long upgrade periods and the lack of a profit model.

Ma Jie, with the CASIC Second Academy, which developed the deployment plan, said their technology could help realize the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 and gradually phase out the IPv4 network. IPv4 network-based cellphones can be updated to the IPv6 network through software installation.

"We have also used China-developed software and hardware to strengthen the IPv6 network security system," Ma said.

The deployment plan has been implemented by Guangzhou Broadcasting Network. It is also adopted in many places including Beijing, and provinces of Fujian, Zhejiang and Hebei.

China in 2017 issued a plan to encourage large-scale adoption of IPv6 network. According to the plan, by the end of 2025, network and terminal devices will fully support the adoption of IPv6 in China, and it will have the largest number of IPv6 users in the world by the end of 2025.
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Nitin Paranjpe, 56, who heads Unilevers foods and refreshments business, has been elevated as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Unilever, world's second-largest consumer goods company. He is the second Indian after Harish Manwani to make it to the global post.

From 2008 to 2013, Paranjpe was Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer at Hindustan Unilever (HUL), before he became President of Unilevers foods and refreshments division.

Man of Transformation

Paranjpe is known in the domestic corporate world for navigating Indias largest FMCG company HUL through the tough times of the global economic crisis.

He was appointed as Chief Executive Officer of Hindustan Unilever, India and Executive Vice President for the South Asia cluster in 2008.

Having taken the helm of HUL in April 2008 at about the same time the global financial crisis starting shaping up, Paranjpe led Indias largest consumer packaged goods company on an aggressive growth charge over the last five years despite a tough macroeconomic environment.

From 2008-2013, the net profit grew from Rs 2,504.51 crore (for the 15-month period ending March 31, 2009) to Rs 3,828.98 crore in FY13. The period considered is 15 months because until 2007 HUL followed the calendar year for reporting yearly figures. Starting in 2010, the company began disclosing numbers on a financial year basis.

For HUL, sales in those five years grew at 5.71 percent on a compounded annual growth rate basis from Rs 20,457.95 crore to Rs 27,003.99 crore. In comparison, its peers such as Dabur, Emami and Marico fared far better (21.2/22.4/19.2 percent sales CAGR from FY08 to FY13, respectively), albeit on a significantly lower revenue base.

Between 2013 to 2017, he was the president of Unilever's Home Care business and joined the Unilever Leadership Executive. Figures for home care business are not available for FY13 since the company did not disclose it. For this segment, HUL began reporting numbers only from FY17.

He was appointed as President of Unilever's foods and refreshment business and member of the Unilever Leadership Executive January 1, 2018. Revenues from the foods and refreshment segment stood at Rs 6,925 crore from January  December 2018, up 10.3 percent during the same period in 2017.

Under his leadership, HUL acquired GSK Consumer in December 2018. By virtue of the deal, the Horlicks brand came under HULs umbrella, thereby enabling it to strengthen its positioning in the healthy food drinks segment. Foods & Refreshment (F&R) division constituted 18.4 percent of HULs net sales for 9M FY19. With this merger, F&R revenues are likely to scale up to more than Rs 11,000 crore, which will be approximately 28 percent of HULs post-merger sales.

Unilevers new bet signifies the trust that the company has in Paranjpe.

"Todays increasingly fragmented consumer, channel and media environment requires us to operate with more speed and agility than ever before. With his deep knowledge and experience of our markets, Nitin is ideally placed to work with me and the Unilever Leadership Executive to drive our performance and help deliver our growth ambitions, said Unilever CEO Alan Jope in a statement to the exchanges

Journey with Unilever, HUL

Paranjpe joined Unilever in 1987, as a management trainee in its Indian subsidiary. In his early years, he performed different roles across marketing and customer development.

Subsequently, he moved to London to work as Assistant to the Unilever Chairman and then returned to lead the Laundry and Household Care categories in India before joining the management committee of the Indian business in 2006 as head of the Home and Personal Care business.

Paranjpe has a degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA in marketing from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai.

He is a member of the nomination and remuneration committee, stakeholder relationship committee and corporate social responsibility committee of HUL.
Puneet Chhatwal, Managing Director and CEO of Indian Hotels, spoke to CNBC-TV18 about the company's business plans and growth prospects.

Chhatwal said occupancies and revenue have improved over the last nine months.

"Year-to-date we are looking at double-digit growth in revenue and almost 27 percent increase in EBITDA. We are also witnessing a very healthy growth in the upper upscale and luxury segment and 70 percent of our portfolio trades in that positioning," Chhatwal said.

On the capex front, Chhatwal said, "We have added 22 contracts to our pipeline in the current financial year and we hope to continue with this trend and our ambition is to open a hotel every month commencing next financial year and most of that will be on a management fee-based model which will help us balance our portfolio."

"We are confident that this growth will help us achieve, what we call our aspiration 2022, in increasing our margins by almost 50 percent coming from 17 percent EBITDA margin to 25 percent and growth in our portfolio is a very important pillar of this journey," he added.

Talking about the low-cost hotel format, he said, "We do see a big opportunity in that segment with our Ginger brand which we have completely revamped in the last six months."

"Opened the first Ginger in the lean-luxury segment, as we call it, in Panjim, Goa and 10 more will follow this year and see kind of a refurbishing over the next 12-18 months. I think that will revolutionize the positioning of this brand in this segment and lead a branding charge in the Indian subcontinent," added Chhatwal.

Source: CNBC-TV18
Schott Kaisha, the Indo-German joint venture that makes tubular ampoules, vials, glass syringes and cartridges used in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics is investing over Rs 500 crore to set up new facilities and expand existing ones.

The expansion is driven by demand from Indian drug makers that are increasingly launching injectable drugs domestically and overseas.

The company has two plants in Daman and Jambusar near Vadodara and plans to add new facilities in Daman and Baddi.

The company said it plans to start work on a new facility in Daman by end of this year and the Baddi facility in the next few months.

The company said the Baddi facility is meant to be closer to the North Indian market, where Chinese manufacturers are holding sway.

The company, which has invested Rs 250 crore on Jambusar site, said nine lines are under production and nine more will come under production by end of this year.

The company is investing a couple of million euros on each line at the Jambusar unit.

It is also in the process of modernising and consolidating its existing facility in Daman.

We are seeing an exponential growth after a slowdown two-three years back, said Rishad Dadachanji, Managing Director of Kaisha Lifesciences in an interview to Moneycontrol.

Schott Kaisha's revenue grew 38 percent in FY18 and company is in line to beat the growth this year.

The products Schott Kaisha makes are used to package injectables and sterile solutions.

All companies are coming back from regulatory problems, they have been vigorously filing ANDAs. The approvals are granted much quicker by USFDA, Dadachanji said on reasons leading to growth.

Indian companies are chasing low competition-high margin generic injectable drugs, compared to generic oral solids which tend to become commoditized over a short period of time.

In addition to USFDA approvals, Dadachanji says the growth is also coming from innovative drugs and formulations such as biosimilars, cancer drugs and vaccines. For instance, the move from the oral polio vaccine to inactivated polio vaccines (IPV) that comes in injectable form has created huge demand.

The real growth will start from 2021, hopefully, we are going to hit Rs 1000 crore, Dadachanji added.
More than 50 countries have grounded all Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 9 aircraft following two major aviation accidents over the past five months, including the Ethiopian Airlines crash which claimed 157 lives. The US was the latest to ground the aircraft amid burgeoning concerns over passenger safety. (Image: Reuters)

Boeing has issued an advisory recommending a temporary global suspension of the entire 737 Max fleet. An analysis held in Paris of the black box of Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed would provide insights into issues with the Boeing 737 Max 8's. (Image: Moneycontrol)

Which countries have grounded the Boeing 737 Max so far | Over 50 countries, including India, have banned or grounded the aircraft. Indian aviation watchdog DGCA on March 13 announced the immediate grounding of the planes over passenger safety. (Image: Reuters)

What sparked the worldwide ban | On March 10, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in Ethiopia to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, nosedived six minutes after takeoff. The tragedy claimed the lives of all 157 people on board, including 8 crew members. (Image: Reuters)

While the cause of the crash is yet to be ascertained, the plane manufacturer faced backlash and the aircraft was grounded by various governments worldwide. Around six months back, the Indonesia-based Lion Air Flight 610 crashed under similar circumstances. The plane crashed 12 minutes after take off killing 189 passengers and crew on board. (Image: Flickr/Bathara Sakti)

The trial of the black box | Black boxes recovered from the Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 was scheduled to be examined in Paris on March 14. The French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) will investigate the records, however, reports suggest that the bureau will not announce the results to the public. "Only the Ethiopian authorities will report on the progress of the investigation. There will be no press conference," a BEA spokesman told CNN. (Image: Reuters)

Boeing's response | The company called for a temporary global suspension of the entire 737 Max fleet. They are currently working with investigators to understand the cause of the accident. "On behalf of the entire Boeing team, we extend our deepest sympathies to the families and loved ones of those who have lost their lives in these two tragic accidents," said Dennis Muilenburg, President, CEO and Chairman of The Boeing Company. (Image: Reuters)
Import of vegetable oils in February rose 7.4 per cent to 12.42 lakh tonnes on sharp rise in shipments of refined palm oil, according to industry body SEA. Vegetable oils comprise of edible oil and non-edible oil. Oil marketing year runs from November to October.

"Import of vegetable oils during February 2019 is reported at 1,242,533 tonnes compared to 1,157,044 tons in February 2018," Solvent Extractors' Association of India (SEA) said in a statement.

While import of edible oil increased to 11,82,062 tonnes in February 2019 from 11,24,999 tonnes in the year-ago period, the inward shipments of non-edible oil nearly doubled to 60,471 tonnes from 32,045 tonnes.

During November-February period of 2018-19 oil year, the overall import of vegetable oils went up by 1.61 per cent to 48,62,849 tonnes compared to 47,85,778 tonnes in the corresponding period of the previous year.

"Ministry of Finance with effect from January 1, 2019, reduced import duty on palm oil and also reduced the duty difference between crude and palm oil from 10 per cent to 5 per cent on palmolein to be imported from Malaysia".

This has resulted into sharp increase in import of RBD Palmolein which nearly doubled to 2,41,101 tonnes in February 2019 from 1,30,459 tons in December 2018, up by 85 per cent at the cost of reduced import of CPO (crude palm oil), SEA said.

The association said the imports could rise further in coming months considering the shipments that are lined up from Malaysia for export of RBD Palmolein to India.

"This development has the potential of sounding the death knell of palm refining industry in our country, if this aberration is not corrected," SEA cautioned.

During November'18-February'19, the import of refined oil (RBD Palmolein) increased to 6,47,900 tons from 6,07,359 tons in same period of last year. However, import of crude oil decreased to 39,63,912 tonnes from 40,48,091 tonnes during the same period of last year.
India's demand for liquefied natural gas (LNG) is set to rise by about 10 percent this year even as the country adds import capacity at a faster clip, because infrastructure constraints keep gas from getting to consumers and hinder growth rates.

New Delhi made a commitment in the Paris Agreement of 2015 to reduce the carbon emissions intensity of India's economy by one-third, and aims to more than double the share gas has in its energy mix to 15 percent by 2030, from 6.2 percent now.

India had four terminals receiving LNG last year, taking in 21 million to 23 million tonnes of the super-chilled fuel, up nearly 10 to 13 percent from 2017, according to data from the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell and shipping data.

Over the next seven years the government plans to build another 11 terminals. One of those was commissioned this month, and two more are expected to start up later this year.

"The strongest growth rate is expected in city gas demand, primarily due to an increase in consumption by commercial users on the back of growth in city-gas infrastructure," said Poorna Rajendran, senior analyst for consultancy FGE.

But with existing terminal capacity now at 35 million tonnes a year, and additions and expansions expected to bring that to 41.5 million tonnes by end-2019, India's LNG import terminals are likely to remain underutilised for years to come.

Driven by demand from city gas distribution and transportation, India's LNG demand is expected to grow by 9 to 11 percent to about 25 million to 26 million tonnes this year, said analysts from Wood Mackenzie and FGE. That would still put terminal utilization at just over 60 percent at year-end.

While India's ruling party plans to invest billions of dollars to extend the gas pipeline network across the country, progress is slow and half of the existing terminals operate at well below their capacity, several industry sources said.

The government aims to run all LNG terminals at full capacity by 2022 as it works to complete the entire pipeline grid, India's Oil Secretary M M Kutty told Reuters.

Analysts, though, say India will struggle to do this.

"The pace at which (planned projects) come on-stream will be dictated by the financial and technical capabilities of the promoters as well as wider infrastructure and land-related challenges in India," said Wood Mackenzie's senior analyst, Kaushik Chatterjee.

CONSTRAINTS

The Dabhol LNG terminal in Maharashtra state is underutilised, especially during monsoon season, although operator Konkan LNG, a subsidiary of utility GAIL (India), plans to invest in a breakwater to protect the harbour from big waves.

Petronet LNG's Kochi terminal in South India is not even connected to a main gas network because of resistance from land owners to pipelines, the sources also said.

Kutty said a 400-km pipeline connecting Kochi to industries in Mangalore in the north "will be sorted out by March-April ... worst case scenario it may be another month."

After that, capacity utilization at the terminal will rise to 40 percent, according to earlier estimates.

Indian Oil Corp's Ennore terminal - the nation's newest - is also expected to remain underutilised as significant pipeline progress is needed before the gas can be delivered to regions outside of Ennore or Manali, said FGE's Rajendran.

An IOC official said the Ennore terminal is connected to only three customers, including IOC subsidiary Chennai Petroleum Corp, Madras Fertilizers Ltd and Tamil Nadu Petroproducts.

It would take at least two years to build a pipeline to serve other Ennore customers, the official said.

India has 16,000 km of gas trunk pipelines in operation, and 13,000 km more approved and in various stages of construction, said Satpal Garg, a member of India's downstream regulator, the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB).

In comparison, China's most complete regional gas grid in the southwestern province of Sichuan and Chongqing municipality has a total length of 42,000 km.

The PNGRB has awarded licenses to build city gas distribution networks across the country, targeting districts that cover about 70 percent of India's population, Woodmac's Chatterjee said.

The government is also aiming to connect more than 10 million households with piped gas by 2020 from the current 4.8 million, with the city gas portion of India's natural gas use expected to more than double to 15 percent of the overall gas market, Chatterjee said.

"In the past, there were some problems in getting the state government approvals for example in Tamil Nadu and Kerala but ultimately it is in the interest of both the centre and the state government to have a pipeline as there will be (industrial) development in the state," Garg said.

"We are trying to convince the states to expedite clearance and granting the right of way for the pipeline," he said.

India's National Clean Air Programme launched earlier this year in theory should boost natural gas usage in households, transportation and power.

In reality, the plan is not legally binding and provides few guidelines to reduce pollutants in the country, FGE and Woodmac analysts said.

"India's (LNG) demand will grow and has the potential to match China, but the path to get there will be slow," an LNG trader familiar with the market said.
India's palm oil imports in February dropped 1.1 percent from a year earlier to 751,703 tonnes as soyoil imports jumped, a leading trade body said on Friday.

Soyoil imports surged 65 percent to 220,376 tonnes in February, while sunflower oil imports eased 3.7 percent to 200,358 tonnes, the Solvent Extractors' Association of India (SEA) said in a statement.

India is the world's biggest importer of edible oils. Its total vegetable oil imports rose 7.4 percent to 1.24 million tonnes in February, it added.

The country's refined palm oil imports in February jumped 19.1 percent to 241,101 tonnes as a reduction in import tax made it more attractive than crude palm oil, the SEA said.

India buys palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia, with its soyoil mainly imported from Argentina and Brazil, and purchases sunflower oil from Ukraine.

In the first four months of the 2018/19 marketing year ending October, India has imported 4.61 million tonnes of palm oil, down 1 percent from a year ago, it said.

(Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu)
Etihad Airways may not agree to a provisional debt resolution plan proposed by lenders for the cash-strapped Jet Airways, according to a Mint report.

At the board meeting of Etihad on March 12, several members expressed reservations about the terms proposed by Jet Airways' lenders, which included adding two nominee directors from the latter's promoter group, sources told the newspaper. The meeting remained inconclusive.

"Another contentious issue was Goyal's demand for exclusion of the perpetuity clause, which capped Goyal's shareholding to 22 percent," the report quoted a source as saying.

As per the provisional pact, a 'new investor' was to inject between Rs 1,600 crore to Rs 1,900 crore for about 20 percent in Jet Airways and the Goyal-led promoter group's stake was to fall to 17.1 percent, with a caveat seeking to cap it at 22 percent.

Watch: Editor's Take | Not Naresh Goyal, but Etihad now holding up Jets lifeline deal

At present, Etihad holds 24 percent stake in Jet Airways, while promoter Goyal and his family own a controlling 51 percent stake.

According to the report, Etihad's board is expected to meet again to discuss the revised terms. "Etihad may still consider a rescue plan and the board is expected to meet again to discuss the revised terms," another source told the newspaper.

Moneycontrol couldnt independently verify the report.

An early resolution to the financial woes is crucial for crisis-hit Jet Airways as 61 of its 116 aircraft are currently grounded by lessors due to non-payment of lease rentals. It has also delayed salaries to pilots and interest payments on its debt.

Read: Naresh Goyal may step down, but is far from deboarding Jet Airways

On March 11, Jet Airways Chairman Naresh Goyal sought an urgent funding of Rs 750 crore from its equity partner Etihad, citing 'the very precarious' position of the airline, following the lingering cash flow issues that got amplified after the forced grounding of over 50 of its planes.

In a letter to the Gulf-based carrier's Group Chief Executive Tony Douglas, Goyal said the airline has also secured the go-ahead from the Aviation Ministry to pledge its shares in JetPrivilege for securing the interim funding.

Read: Profile | 'The great survivor' Naresh Goyal throws in the towel

Meanwhile, the distressed airline on March 11 defaulted on repayments on external commercial borrowings (ECBs) due to a paucity of funds.

On March 14, Jet Airways said it would be unable to repay HSBC Bank UAE ECBs worth $140 million, as per the report. The cash-strapped airline was expected to make the repayment through two tranches on March 11 ($31 million) and March 28 ($109 million), respectively.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regulations state lenders must find a resolution to cases pertaining to defaulting companies within 180 days of their first default. If the case remains unresolved, the company has to be referred to a bankruptcy court.

Jet Airways, which has a gross debt of Rs 8,411 crore as of September-end, had first defaulted on a scheduled interest payment to domestic lenders on December 31, 2018.

Etihad Airways on March 14 reported its third consecutive annual loss despite cost savings of nearly half a billion dollars as it trimmed its workforce and fleet. The Abu Dhabi state-owned airline blamed challenging market conditions including higher fuel prices for a $1.28 billion loss in 2018, less than the $1.58 billion it lost in 2017.
India's health ministry has called for Juul Labs Inc's electronic cigarettes to be blocked from entering the country, a letter seen by Reuters showed, potentially dealing a blow to the US company's plans to tap the South Asian market.

Juul has plans to launch its products in India by late 2019 as it looks to expand away from its home turf. The company has hired new executives and plans to open an India subsidiary, Reuters reported in January.

Citing the Reuters article, India's top health official wrote a letter to the federal commerce secretary in February, saying necessary measures should be taken to "prevent entry of such products in our markets".

"Novel products such as 'JUUL' are harmful and addictive and could potentially undermine our tobacco control efforts," Health Secretary Preeti Sudan wrote in her letter dated Feb. 18.

"It is felt that the young generation would be particularly vulnerable to such products and gimmicks."

Asked for a comment on the letter, Juul spokeswoman Victoria Davis said the company was "open to dialogue with lawmakers and regulators in order to help switch" adult smokers in India to a viable alternative to combustible cigarettes.

Juul has previously said India was among the Asian markets under evaluation, but there were no "definitive plans".

The details of Sudan's letter have not previously been reported. She also sent a copy to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's office.

The commerce ministry, which is likely to be involved in discussions if Juul was to receive an India approval, did not respond to Reuters queries. Modi's office also did not respond.

Juul's sleek vaping devices, which resemble a USB flash drive and offer flavours such as mango and creme, are a sensation in the United States, but have drawn tighter regulatory scrutiny due to surging use among teenagers.

India has 106 million adult smokers, second only to China in the world, making it a lucrative market for firms such as Juul and Philip Morris International Inc.

However, India's regulatory environment for tobacco and electronic cigarettes is highly restrictive. The health ministry last year advised states to stop the sale or import of e-cigarettes, saying they pose a "great health risk". About a third of India's 29 states currently ban e-cigarettes.

In February, India's federal drugs regulator told all states to ensure that e-cigarettes were not sold or manufactured in their regions, according to a circular seen by Reuters.

Advocates for the devices say e-cigarettes are far less harmful, because users do not inhale the dangerous matter taken into the lungs through cigarette smoking. But many tobacco-control activists are opposed to e-cigarettes, saying they could lead to nicotine addiction and push people to consume tobacco.

Juul has said its mission was to "improve the lives of the world's one billion smokers by offering a satisfying alternative to combustible cigarettes".

Indian health secretary Sudan, however, said in her letter that products such as Juul would hurt India's anti-tobacco efforts through their "easy availability, disguised appearance and the false notion of being safe".

More than 900,000 people die each year in India due to tobacco-related illnesses.
business Buy or Sell | Use pull back to go long; buy Karnataka Bank, Bharat Forge The market continues to remain upbeat and the immediate hurdle for Nifty will be at the 11,340-11,360 mark.
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Chinese Vice Premier Liu He on Thursday spoke with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on the trade dispute between the two countries in their third phone conversation.

Further substantial progress in text material was made, according to Xinhua.
Experts believe that the bull run in the market can continue in the lomg term with Sensex hitting 50,000 or going beyond in the next decade. This should bring some cheer to the investors.

Last week, Morgan Stanley said in a report that the bull run in the Nifty and Sensex, which began in March 2009, just completed its 10th year.

This has been Indias longest and slowest bull run with a CAGR of 16 percent over 10 years. The global investment bank in its base case scenario expects the index to touch 42,000 by December 2019. At that level, the BSE Sensex would trade at a forward P/E of 20x, slightly higher than the 25-year trailing average of 19x.

We believe that the probability of Sensex peaking at 50,000 or more in the current bull market is high. One note of caution is that the Indian market is correlated to global markets, and the global business cycle is maturing, Vivek Ranjan Misra, Head of Fundamental Research at Karvy Stock Broking told Moneycontrol.

The probability of a global recession in 2020 cannot be dismissed and thus some caution would be warranted by mid-2020, he said.

Dipan Mehta, Director, Elixir Equities is of the view that foundation is being set for the next leg of this multi-year bull market. We should see 50K on the Sensex in the next decade and maybe even 1,00,000 before 2030, he said.

Near-term challenges:

Apart from global concerns with respect to growth, on the domestic front, at least in the near-term, there are lingering concerns about upcoming elections that have put investors in a fix.

Mutual fund data of past month suggests that retail investors are on sidelines as inflows into equity mutual funds fell to a 25-month low in February.

But, it is not the time to slow down your investments into funds or into market because the liquidity rush from foreign investors is supporting the bull market rally, suggest experts.

And, the optimism is not based on elections or one particular government resuming power, but it is more fundamental in nature.

Ahead of the elections, foreign investors have developed an appetite for Indian equities. FIIs bought equities worth over Rs 20,000 crore so far in 2019.

"Indian equity market continued its positive momentum with both mid and small-cap stocks being the biggest gainers. Reduced geopolitical tension, a possibility of stable government, strengthening rupee and recent FII buying has supported the turnaround in the market," Siddhartha Khemka, Head of Retail Research, MOFSL told Moneycontrol.

"The Indian economy and earnings are improving as we step into FY20. We also expect the RBI to cut rates further in its April policy meeting. Our analysis of fundamentals and valuations for midcaps and comparison of mid-caps versus large-caps on several frontiers suggest that the relative attractiveness of midcaps has gone up," he said.

Data suggests that the Indian market is not dependent on which political party is ruling at the Centre. The BSE-30 index increased 305x over the period of January 1, 1980 to December 31, 2018, according to Quantum Mutual Fund a note.

The returns of the BSE-30 Index are completely independent of which kind of government is in power. The highest returns from the BSE-30 index have been under coalition governments - and the lowest returns also under coalition governments, the note added.

But, it is also true that under three of the four single party governments, the rate of return on the BSE-30 index has grown more than the 39-year average of 19.3 percent, it said.

The equity team at Quantum firmly believes that India is a long-term growth story and continues to pick stocks using the deliberate investment philosophy - irrespective of who is in power.

: 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.
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Hindustan Unilever shares declined more than 2 percent in morning trade on Friday after the management rejig, but global brokerage house CLSA remained bullish on the stock.

The stock was quoting at Rs 1,697.40, down Rs 39.95, or 2.30 percent on the BSE, at 11:36 hours IST.

The FMCG major, on March 14, has elevated HUL Chairman and Managing Director Sanjiv Mehta as the President of Unilever South Asia with effect from May 1, 2019.

Mehta would also continue as the Chairman and Managing Director of Hindustan Unilever. As part of the new role, he would also become a member of the Unilever Leadership Executive (ULE).

Unilever also announced appointment of Nitin Paranjpe, President, Foods & Refreshment, as the Chief Operating Officer.

He will be responsible for all of Unilever's go-to-market organisations, driving and co-ordinating in-year performance across our countries in line with company's divisional strategies.

Hanneke Faber, currently President, Europe, has been appointed as the President, Foods & Refreshment.

Kees Kruythoff, President, Home Care, has decided to leave Unilever after 27 years of service to pursue external opportunities, the company said.

Peter ter Kulve, Chief Digital Officer and EVP South East Asia & Australasia (SEAA), has been appointed President, Home Care.

While maintaining outperform call on the stock with a price target at Rs 2,010 (implying a 16 percent potential upside), CLSA said Q4FY19 is an important quarter for Indian staples to gauge consumption trends.

The research house said as input price trend remains benign and medium-term guidance on modest margin expansion stays, premium Valuations will likely sustain.

Deutsche Bank also remained positive on the stock with a buy call and price target at Rs 2,100 apiece as it expects company to report volume growth of 7.5 percent in Q4 YoY.

It expects sales/EBITDA / PAT growth of 11/15/16 percent for Q4.

"Rural growth is still higher than urban growth, but moderated to 1.2x urban growth," it said.

Initially this week, Reliance Securities initiated coverage on Hindustan Unilever with a buy recommendation and a target price of Rs 2,000.

Looking ahead, it expects HUL to witness the fastest earnings growth among the major FMCG companies, notwithstanding the size and scale of operations.

"HUL is expected to register earnings CAGR of 23 percent over FY19-21 driven by both organic and inorganic initiatives. Acquisition of GSK Consumers India business provides HUL a strong foothold in the foods segment in terms of diversifying its portfolio and reducing dependence on homecare and personal care segments," it said.

At CMP, the stock trades at a premium valuation multiple of 50x FY20E earnings, which it believes to sustain owing to strong growth visibility.

: The above report is compiled from information available on public platforms. Moneycontrol advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
The grounding of Boeing's 737 MAX aircraft following the crash in Ethiopia on March 10 is set to cost the company orders worth $600 billion. Many of Boeing's customers have started to reconsider their orders for the model after the crash, which is a second such incident after the Lion Air crash in October 2018.

Before the cause of the crash is ascertained, companies are wary of extending their contracts with Boeing. VietJet Aviation had placed an order for the aircraft valued at $25 billion, double its last order, but is now awaiting more information on the crash. Russia's Utair Aviation is seeking more clarity as well. Kenya Airways may also switch to Airbus SE, which is MAX's main competitor, but may not desert Boeing altogether, Bloomberg reported.

Indonesia's Lion Air, after the deadly crash of October 2018, has dropped a business order for 737 MAX worth $22 billion. After the accident, which killed 189 people, the airline was considering ending its relationship with Boeing. So, the latest incident will only fuel this process.

Saudi Arabian Airlines are also rethinking a $5.9 billion contract. Flyadeal, which is a unit of the Saudi Arabian Airlines, had announced in December that it would shift from Airbus to Boeing and buy 50 737 MAX jets. But the transaction has been put on hold as of now.

The 737 was the best-selling model in the aviation industry and was the top earner for Boeing. The re-engineered version, MAX, has over 5,000 orders worth over $600 billion. This includes planes that have been delivered.

The underlying reason for the Lion Air crash five months ago was found to be maintenance issues and human error. However, in the Ethiopian crash, there is a concern that one of the features in the upgraded 737 MAX model have made it harder to operate.

Most of the countries have grounded the planes, including the US, China, India, Brazil and many countries of the European Union. This has dragged down Boeing's shares by nearly 11 percent this week.
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A special court here Friday issued a non-bailable warrant (NBW) against the wife of fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi, a key accused in the Rs 14,000 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case.

The warrant against Ami Modi was issued by Special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) Judge M S Azmi after he took cognisance of the supplementary chargesheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against Nirav Modi (48) and other accused a few days ago.

The financial crime probe agency has alleged that Ami Modi used an international bank account to move $30 million, suspected to be proceeds of the scam.

The funds were used to buy property located in New York's Central Park, the ED has said.

In its supplementary chargesheet, the agency has recorded additional evidences gathered in the case and attachments made.

It is understood that the ED has underlined the role of Ami Modi and funds routed by her in the supplementary chargesheet.

The ED had filed the first chargesheet in this case in May last year.

According to investigating agencies, Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, in connivance with certain bank officials, allegedly cheated PNB to the tune of Rs 14,000 crore through issuance of fraudulent Letters of Undertaking (LoUs).

These LoUs were allegedly issued in a fraudulent manner by a Mumbai branch of the PNB to the group of companies belonging to Nirav Modi since March 2011 till the fraud came to light in January 2018, the agencies have said.

Nirav Modi, Choksi and other accused are facing charges under the PMLA Act and the Indian Penal Code in the fraud case which is being probed by multiple agencies, including the ED.

According to a UK media report last week, Nirav Modi is currently living in a three-bedroom flat occupying half of a floor of the landmark Centre Point tower block in London, where rent is estimated to cost 17,000 pounds a month.
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Shares of Glenmark Pharma rose nearly 2 percent intraday Friday after it received final approval from USFDA for Clindamycin and Benzoyl Peroxide Gel.

According to company release on BSE, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Inc., USA has been granted final approval by the United States Food & Drug Administration (USFDA) for Clindamycin and Benzoyl Peroxide Gel, 1%|5%, a generic version of BenzaClin Gel, 1%|5%, of Valeant Bermuda.

The BenzaClin Gel, 1% | 5% market achieved annual sales of approximately USD 99.4 million, as per IQVIATM sales data for the 12 month period ending January 2019.

Company's current portfolio consists of 151 products authorized for distribution in the US marketplace and 53 ANDAs pending approval with the USFDA.

In addition to these internal filings, Glenmark continues to identify and explore external development partnerships to supplement and accelerate the growth of its existing pipeline and portfolio, it added.

At 09:40 hrs Glenmark Pharma was quoting at Rs 641.10, up Rs 10.70, or 1.70 percent on the BSE.
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A US district court in California has reportedly dismissed lawsuit filed against Apple and Infosys alleging visa fraud by both the companies.

The lawsuit was filed in 2016 by a whistleblower alleging that the iPhone maker Apple and Indian IT company Infosys conspired to bring two Indian nationals for training on B-1 visa instead of more expensive H1-B visa.

According to a report published on website Apple Insider, Apple and Infosys had both asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit brought by contractor Carl Krawitt for the US government, under the False Claims Act and the court on Tuesday approved appeal of Apple by dismissing the case, while Infosys motion was denied as moot -- meaning no impact on the case.

The court accepted Apple's appeal that the trainers' work under the B-1 visa was acceptable, and that neither Apple nor Infosys were attempting to commit fraud, the report said.
Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad Friday addressed a rally with BSP founder Kanshi Ram's sister and announced that he will contest the Lok Sabha elections against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Varanasi seat, a move that is likely to upset the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh. The Bhim Army, which has been trying to mobilise Dalits in Uttar Pradesh, also told PTI that it will field a candidate against Union minister Smriti Irani and "wherever there's a need of a strong nominee against the BJP".

At the rally organised to mark the 85th birth anniversary of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram, Chandrashekhar said he would ensure that PM Modi is not re-elected to the Lok Sabha from Varanasi.

"I will challenge Narendra Modi in Varanasi... to protect the Constitution and the rights of Dalits. I do not want to become an MP or MLA. Had that been the case, I would have chosen a reserved seat," he said.

"After the prime minister came to know that we are going to challenge him in Varanasi, he started washing the feet of sanitation workers in Allahabad," the Bhim Army chief said.

The BJP is yet to announce the constituency from where Modi will contest the upcoming election.

Chandrashekhar alleged that the Narendra Modi government's decision to give 10 per cent quota to the general category poor is an attack on the Constitution and is aimed at serving the BJP's interests.

Recalling that Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav's comment in Parliament that Modi should become prime minister again, he asked Akhilesh Yadav to answer if his party will protect the rights of Dalits if they voted for it.

The Dalit leader also said the SP-BSP alliance should "send (Kanshi Ram's sister) Swarn Kaur to Parliament".

Bhim Army Vice President Manjeet Nautiyal told PTI that they will field a candidate against Irani and "also on the seats where the SP-BSP alliance is not strong enough to defeat the BJP".

Asked if the Dalit group will support the Congress, he said the Rahul Gandhi-led party did not fight for Dalits for the last 70 years. "The Congress and the BJP are two sides of the same coin".

In what is being seen as a Dalit outreach move, Congress general secretary for eastern UP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Chandrashekhar at a Meerut hospital.

Until now, the Bhim Army had been saying that it won't contest elections. It had welcomed the SP-BSP alliance in the state and said it would support anyone who's ready to take on the BJP and fight for Dalit rights.

The Chandrashekhar-led group shot to limelight during the May 2017 clashes between Dalits and upper caste Thakurs in Saharanpur.

Chandrashekhar was arrested after the clashes. Though he was granted bail by the Allahabad High Court, the UP Police arrested him under the stringent National Security Act. He was released in September 2018 after 16 months in jail.
Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours including India after the upcoming general elections, Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Thursday, claiming that Islamabad has taken the first step on a new path to peace and progress.

Recently, tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after a suicide bomber of Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed killed 40 CRPF personnel in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district in February 14.

Khan, who announced visa reforms at a ceremony here, said that Pakistan is confident today that it has taken the first step on a new path to peace and progress.

"Pakistan will have better relations with its neighbours  including India after the end of their elections.

"We will have good relations with all our neighbours and a peaceful Pakistan will be a prosperous Pakistan," he said as he announced major visa reforms, including online visa issuance facility, to attract tourists and investors.

The elections in India will begin on April 11 and polling would be held over seven phases through May 19, followed by counting of votes on May 23.

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party tweeted that the new e-visa scheme will available to visitors from 175 countries.

"This is the first step to open up the country, the Naya (new) Pakistan," Khan said, adding that it would revive the confidence of 60s when Pakistan was making fast progress

The Prime Minister said that Pakistan would attract religious tourism from all over the world.

"Taxila was the centre of Buddhism. We have discovered a 40ft Buddha  the world's largest sleeping Buddha  which we have yet to share with the world.

"Sikhs' holiest places like Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur were also in Pakistan. We also have very old sites for Hinduism in Pakistan, including Katas Raj," Khan said.

He also announced that the next season of the Pakistan Super League will be organised in Pakistan instead of Dubai.

Officials said that initially, the e-visa facility will be available to nationals of Turkey, China, Malaysia, the UK and the UAE and later extended to other 170 countries.

Business visas will be given to 90 countries, while 55 countries will be granted visa-on-arrival.
India asked Pakistan to ensure that the Kartarpur Sahib pilgrims are not subjected to the Khalistani separatist propaganda with the neighbouring country promising that it will not allow any such activity, an MEA official said.

The Pakistan gave the assurance during a meeting of officials from the two countries on the proposed Kartarpur Sahib corridor.

India also said this meeting should not be seen as resumption of dialogue between the two countries.

"The matter (pro-Khalistan propaganda) has been part of discussions in which our concerns were shared with Pakistani side and we have asked them to ensure that no such activity should take place which goes against the faith of pilgrims," MEA Joint Secretary Deepak Mittal told reporters.

"The Pakistani side told us that they would not allow their land for any such activity. We have, however, expressed our concern," he said

The Ministry of External Affairs official was replying to a question on the promotion of pro-Khalistan propaganda in Pakistan and Referendum 2020, a campaign for a separate nation of "Khalistan", run by a US-based outfit "Sikhs for Justice".

Replying to another question, Joint Secretary S C L Das of the Ministry of Home Affairs said New Delhi's expectations were made clear to the Pakistani delegation.

"The meeting in no way amounts to resumption of bilateral talks. The position on dialogue is very clear -- terror and talks cannot go together," he said.

Das said there were no handshakes at the meeting, held amid heightened tension between the two countries after the Pulwama attack.

"This in no way signifies the normalisation of relations. We have made it amply clear directly and indirectly," he added.

The meeting was only in the context of Kartarpur Sahib corridor aimed at providing pilgrims smooth and easy access to the historic shrine, said Mittal.

On a question on possible infiltration into the corridor, risking the security and safety of devotees, Das said security concerns will remain paramount.

"We are very conscious of this aspect. It was a formal part of the agenda and the draft agreement prepared by us. We are trying to provide for an 'escalation mechanism' should such a thing still happen," said Das.

The MHA official said an assurance has been given by the other side that the clearance to visit shrine will be done within seven days after an application is made for the purpose.

Another MHA official said Pakistan would make arrangements to ferry the pilgrims on its side as the shrine is 4.5 km from the border in Pakistan.

"We demanded that the pilgrims do not have to bear any extra cost," MHA Joint Secretary Nidhi Khare said, adding the pilgrims cannot stay for night at the Gurudwara premises and have to return the same day.

It was the first meeting between the two sides to finalise the modalities for the proposed corridor linking Gurdaspur in Punjab with the Sikh shrine in Pakistan's Kartarpur.

It took place in a cordial environment, a joint statement said.

The Union Cabinet on November 22 last year had decided to build the passage from Dera Baba Nanak in Gurdaspur district to the International Border.
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The foot overbridge (FOB) connecting Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus railway station to the opposite pavement that flanks the Times of India building collapsed on Thursday evening.

Six people died in the incident while 34 got injured.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis announced an ex-gratia of Rs 5 lakh for the kin of the deceased. He also announced that Rs 50,000 would be given to each of the injured as compensation and the state would also provide for their treatment.

Two of the deceased were employees of GT Hospital, where 10 casualties are receiving treatment, while others have been shifted to St George Hospital.

A National Disaster Relief Force team initially suspected that 10-12 persons may be trapped under the debris, Mumbai Police said all were rescued.

The bridge collapsed around 7.30 pm, the peak evening hour that sees the highest footfall. The incident affected traffic in the area and commuters were asked to take alternate routes.

The FOB was built in 1984 and connected CST platform 1 to BT Lane. Minor repairs were carried out on the bridge six months ago during a safety audit, and it was declared 'fit for use'. Under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, in 2016, the northern end of the bridge was beautified, but not repaired. At the time of the accident, too, the FOB was undergoing repair work but was still in use.

Also read: Mumbai bridge collapse: Live updates

Soon after the accident, blame game ensued between concerned authorities. While the Railway Ministry said the FOB was under Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), Shiv Sena leader Anil Desai junked the claim.

State BJP minister Vinod Tawde said both the authorities will have to probe the incident. He said the concerned authorities will probe the bridge wasn't closed until work was done.
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About 80 million cubic meters of water from the Yellow River, China's second longest river, was diverted to a major lake in Xiongan New Area in north China's Hebei province during the past winter.

The annual water diversion project, which ran from Nov. 29 last year to March 10, is aimed at improving the environment of Baiyangdian Lake in Xiongan and ease water shortage in the cities along the 482-km-long diversion route, according to the Henan Yellow River Bureau.

The route starts from Puyang County in Henan Province and runs through five cities in Hebei Province before reaching Baiyangdian.

The project is the first permanent water conservancy project after the establishment of the Xiongan New Area, a new economic zone about 100 km southwest of Beijing.

The project also supplied about 260 million cubic meters of water to the cities along the diversion route to improve the local environment and support agriculture and other industries, the bureau said.
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a plea of former AIADMK leader TTV Dhinakaran and V K Sasikala challenging a Delhi High Court order granting the 'two leaves' symbol to a faction led by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister E K Palaniswami.

A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi issued notice to the Election Commission of India (EC) on the limited plea of Dhinakaran that they be allowed to use common symbol of "Pressure Cooker".

The bench, also comprising justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna, sought reply by March 25.

At the outset, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Dhinakaran faction said that EC is not giving them a common symbol.

He said the apex court has directed to allot "pressure cooker' as a common symbol to the party.

Senior advocate Mukul Rohatagi, appearing for Tamil Nadu Chief Minister E Palaniswami led faction said that, "I am the real AIADMK and he (Dhinakaran) has already floated a new party".

The bench said that it will hear the matter on March 25.

On February 28, the high court had dismissed the pleas of Dhinakaran and VK Sasikala challenging the Election Commission's order granting the 'AIADMK' name and the 'two leaves' symbol to the faction led by the Tamil Nadu chief minister, saying the figures showed the Palaniswami-led group "enjoyed a clear majority".

It had upheld the EC's decision of November 23, 2017, saying none of the grounds of challenge raised by the Dhinakaran-Sasikala faction were made out and there was "no infirmity" in the poll panel's order allotting the party name and symbol to the group led by Palaniswami and his deputy O Panneerselvam.

After the high court order was pronounced, Dhinakaran and Sasikala had urged the court to direct the EC not to allot the 'pressure cooker' symbol to anyone during the next 15 days so that they have time to move the apex court and seek an appropriate relief from there.

The EC, thereafter, had agreed not to allot the 'pressure cooker' symbol to anyone for next 15 days in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry.

Dhinakaran had floated Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) after he and Sasikala were expelled from the Palaniswami-led AIADMK.

The symbol issue has been lingering since April 2017 and the verdict came as a shot in the arm for the Palanisami-led AIADMK ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.

The Dhinakaran-Sasikala faction had contended before the court that EC, while trying to ascertain who enjoyed the majority support, ought to have considered the views of the primary members in the party as well and not just its organisational and legislative wings.

Rejecting the argument, the high court had said the petitioners (Dhinakaran and Sasikala) had before the EC claimed that the organisational and legislative wings best represented the wishes of the primary members and "subsequently, changed their stand when the members of such wings changed their allegiance".

The court while referring to the numbers of General Council members, Members of Parliament and MLAs in support of both factions had said, "The aforegoing figures show a clear majority enjoyed by the faction led by the respondents (Palaniswami-Panneerselvam)."

The EC in March 2017 had given the 'hat' symbol to the Sasikala-Dhinakaran group after it froze the use of the 'two leaves' symbol to which the group led by Palaniswami and Panneerselvam had also staked claim.

The Palaniswami-Panneerselvam faction had at the same time been granted the 'electric pole' symbol.

However, on November 23, 2017, the poll panel had ruled in favour of the Palaniswami-Panneerselvam faction by allotting the 'two leaves' symbol to them.

The symbol issue has been lingering since April 2017 in the aftermath of the announcement of the bypoll to Radha Krishnan Nagar constituency in Tamil Nadu following the death of AIADMK supremo J Jayalalithaa in December 2016.

Earlier, rival factions led by Sasikala and Panneerselvam had staked claim over the symbol. Palaniswami was then in the Sasikala camp. Later, a large number of legislators led by Palaniswami revolted against Sasikala.
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The NCP on March 15 demanded that the multi-billion dollar Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project be scrapped, a day after a foot overbridge connected to iconic CSMT station collapsed here, killing six persons and injuring 31.

Nationalist Congress Party MLA Jitendra Awhad said the money being spent on the high speed rail project, a joint venture between India and Japan, should be invested to upgrade suburban railway facilities in the metropolis and surrounding areas.

He said scrapping the bullet train project would be part of the NCP's manifesto and claimed it would be called off within one month of the party attaining power.

"The prime concern of the government should be improvement of railway facilities. A blame game by authorities is not the solution. We demand that the bullet train project be cancelled since it is merely a show-off project and a waste of tax-payers' money," he claimed.

"We will also include this point in our manifesto. Within one month of coming to power, we will scrap the bullet train project and use the money for suburban rail and its connecting services," Awhad added.

"Specialised audit and immediate maintenance is required of dilapidated bridges, several 50-70 years old, over railway tracks in Mumbai and suburban areas," he said against the backdrop of Thursday's bridge collapse.

He claimed over 200 railway-related accidents occur daily which either cause loss of lives or injuries to commuters.

Maharashtra Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant said an audit of the bridge, done a year ago, had recommended minor repairs but money for it was never sanctioned.

"This is a BMC-made disaster. Seeing the debris, the corrosion was clearly visible. The BMC is responsible for the loss of lives in this bridge collapse. Due to the corrupt practices of BJP and Shiv Sena, Mumbai has become a city of accidents," Sawant alleged.

He claimed the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena came to power on the back of votes of "Marathi people", but it was these very people who were getting killed in such accidents.
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City-based Allahabad Bank, which had recently come out from the prompt and corrective action (PCA) after RBI removed it from the weak bank watch list in February, is looking ways to raise capital in the next financial year, an official said.

The bank would be weighing the options of dilution of stake in the general insurance joint venture Universal Sompo and sell off non-core assets like properties in places like Mumbai, MD and CEO of Allahabad Bank S S Mallikarjuna Rao told reporters here on Friday.

"Allahabad Bank has come out of the PCA. It is only the starting point", Rao said, adding that this had happened due to infusion of capital by the government as some conditions relating to net NPA and CRAR were breached", he said.

Rao said that net NPA of the bank had fallen below six per cent, adding that recovery would be the mainstay for further lowering of NPA.

"Expecting that the bank would book profits in 2019, the capital infusion by the government was for meeting regulatory requirements. However, some growth capital is also needed but we are not worried about that", Rao said.

As per SEBI requirement, there was still headroom for the government to dilute stake in the bank, Rao said. He said that the bank was having 12 properties which were identified, adding that the bank was targeting to raise Rs 250 crore to Rs 300 crore by selling the non-core assets, like properties.

Allahabad Bank and others like Indian Overseas Bank, Karnataka Bank and Dabur which had formed the non-life insurance company Universal Sompo had already appointed a consultant for the valuation of the JV. "Efforts will continue to get capital out of Universal Sompo and also from selling off non-core assets like properties", Rao said.

On the whole, he said that the bank would be looking at raising Rs 500 crore probably in the next fiscal by way of Universal Sompo stake dilution and sale of non-core assets. Chairman of Universal Sompo O N Singh said that the insurance JV stated with an initial capital of Rs 150 crore and was making profits.

The JV launched a co-branded health insurance product exclusively for Allahabad Bank customers. Singh said that the exclusive co-branded product would help Allahabad Bank to raise its savings accounts deposit base.
China will stay on the path of "peaceful development" and continue to be a "positive force" and contribute for regional and global peace, Premier Li Keqiang said here on March 15, amidst global concern over Beijing flexing its muscles in the region.

Li, who addressed over two-and-a-half-hour press conference at the end of the Chinese legislature the National People's Congress, mostly answered selected questions on China's economy and internal social issues as well as ties with the US, Russia and the EU.

However in his closing remarks, he said that China will continue to follow the principles of amity, sincerity, mutual benefit and inclusiveness in developing relations with its neighbours.

"China will stay on the path of peaceful development and continue to be a positive force and contributor for regional and global peace," he said.

China asserts nearly all of the resource-rich South China Sea as its territory, while Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam have counter claims over the area.

The US has been conducting regular patrols in the South China Sea to assert the freedom of navigation in the area where Beijing has built up and militarised many of the islands and reefs it controls in the region.

When asked about China's priority regarding the conclusion of the China-Japan-South Korea Free Trade Agreement and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, Li said it will depend on the efforts made by parties concerned.

"Whichever will be concluded first, China will take a welcome attitude to the development," Li added.

Though he did not comment on the current situation in South Asia, Foreign Minister Wang Yi in his annual press conference last week said that India and Pakistan should quickly turn the page after the Pulwama terror attack, meet each other halfway and transform the present crisis into an opportunity for a long term and fundamental improvement in their bilateral relations.
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Limited to a couple of constituencies in the old Mysuru region in the successive Lok Sabha polls since its formation in 1999, the JD(S) in Karnataka is aiming to break new ground in the coming parliamentary elections capitalising on the party being in power.

After the Janata Dal split in 1999, former prime minister H D Deve Gowda's JD(S) has been winning two to three Lok Sabha seats in the old Mysuru region, largely from party bastions of Hassan and Mandya, dominated by the Vokkaliga community, its solid vote base, as also from Bangalore Rural and Chamarajanagara once.

The JD(S), the lone surviving active offshoot of the erstwhile Janata Dal in the state, which has seen a revival with it coming to power in Karnataka in alliance with the Congress after the May 2018 assembly polls, wants to use the opportunity to expand its horizons.

The party's presence in the coalition government with the Congress and H D Kumaraswamy's stature as chief minister will help the party in increasing its tally in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, senior JD(S) leader Y S V Datta told PTI.

"It is true, if we were not in government and if there was no coalition, then our strength would have been limited to two or three seats in the old Mysuru region, but now that we are in the government and since our leader Kumaraswamy is chief minister, we can capitalise on his stature across the state," he said.

Datta, who is party's campaign committee chief, said as per the understanding, the Congress will not field its candidates where the JD(S) is contesting, so minorities, backward class and SC/ST votes that were traditionally with the grand old party in those constituencies, will get transferred to the party.

However, he also conceded that the JD(S) should have a base in those constituencies, as one cannot bat on a dead pitch.

The Congress will contest 20 seats and the JD(S) eight in the Lok Sabha polls in Karnataka under a deal finalised by the two partners of the ruling coalition on Wednesday after weeks of haggling and uncertainty.

The Lok Sabha constituencies that the JD(S) will contest in are Uttara Kannada, Chikmagalur, Shimoga, Tumkur, Hassan, Mandya, Bangalore North and Bijapur.

However, political analysts don't see JD(S) gaining much in this election.

"It is a bit unlikely... The JD(S) can improve its performance only if the Congress supports it wholeheartedly, which seems unlikely, because the sentiment that both parties should come together to forge an alliance against the BJP is not shared among the party's rank and file," Narayana A, a professor at Azim Premji University, told PTI.

The kind of signals that have been going out ever since the formation of the coalition government has created some kind of confusion among the workers as to whether they are really in alliance, he said.

"So it is unlikely that one can expect the kind of support from the the Congress that the JD(S) needs to win," he said.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, the vote share of the JD(S) in the seven constituencies was -- Chikmagalur 1.44 per cent, Shimoga 21.29 per cent, Tumkur 23.47 per cent, Hassan 44.43 per cent, Mandya 43.95 per cent, Bangalore North 6.83 per cent and Bijapur 5.95 per cent. The party had not fielded any candidate from Uttara Kannada.

The JD(S) had won the Hassan and Mandya seats in the last general elections. The Congress had bagged nine and the BJP 17 seats. However in the by-polls, the BJP yielded the Bellary seat to the Congress.

Among the eight seats that the JD(S) is contesting this time, it has its sitting MPs in two. Tumkuru is with the Congress and the rest five constituencies are represented by the BJP.

According to sources, during seat negotiations, the JD(S) got the Tumkur seat, dominated by the Vokkaliga community, after a hard bargain as the Congress had decided not to cede those constituencies to the regional partner where it has a sitting MP.

Mysore-Kodagu was another constituency that the JD(S) had demanded from the old Mysuru region, but could not bag it due to opposition from Siddaramaiah, as the seat is in his home turf, sources said.

Narayana also feels that despite the JD(S) fielding Deve Gowda's grandson Nikhil Kumaraswamy in their bastion of Mandya, it will not be a cakewalk for the party this time.

"I'm not too sure that the party workers will have the same kind of feelings towards him, as they had towards, Deve Gowda or Kumaraswamy," he said.

He however said, Hassan should not be much of a problem for the JD(S), where Gowda's other grandson Prajwal Revanna is the candidate, as he has been associated with the party affairs there for some time now.

There is opposition to Nikhil Kumaraswamy's candidature in Mandya, as many who claim to be JD(S) supporters have hit out at the party leadership for sidelining loyal party workers to favour some one from their family, despite not being actively involved in party activities in the district.

Nikhil is likely to be pitted against Sumalatha Ambareesh, wife of late actor-turned-politician Ambareesh in Mandya.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will seek re-election from Varanasi parliamentary constituency in Uttar Pradesh, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh confirmed in an exclusive interview with Rahul Joshi, MD & Group Editor-in-Chief Network18.

Singh stated that he will be contesting from Lucknow.

"I will contest from Lucknow. I have got a lot of love from the people of Lucknow. Modi Ji will contest from Benaras," Singh told Joshi.

Earlier, it was being speculated that the prime minister may contest from the temple town of Puri.

In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, Modi had won the Varanasi parliamentary constituency with a margin of close to 400,000 votes. The union home minister had won from Lucknow in 2014 with a margin of over 2.5 lakh votes.

He has often said that he wants to carry on the legacy of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lucknow, a seat he had represented in the Lok Sabha for five consecutive terms.

The BJP is likely to release its first list of candidates on March 16.

Earlier this week, Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad had announced that he will contest from Varanasi.
Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is expected to kick-off her campaign for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from the political hotbed of eastern Uttar Pradesh, Prayagraj and Varanasi, taking the river route to establish a direct contact with people.

The Congress general secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh, who was earlier scheduled to arrive at the state capital on Friday, was now expected to launch her campaign on March 18, a senior party leader said here.

Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Raj Babbar had said Wednesday that Priyanka would be arriving here on Friday but hours later, he had informed that the programme was postponed.

According to a letter submitted to the Election Commission (EC), permission has been sought for the Congress leader's visit from Prayagraj to Varanasi from March 18 to March 20.

The letter also informs that Priyanka will use a motorboat, taking the river route to cover the distance of around 100 kms, and programmes to welcome her have been scheduled all along, for which permission was required in accordance with the Model Code of Conduct.

According to Congress leaders, the party will attempt to reach out to the people living in the riparian areas that are not easily accessible by road.

Priyanka is likely to arrive at the state capital on March 17 and proceed to Prayagraj to launch her campaign the next day.

A senior leader said she would launch her campaign from Prayagraj, the birth place of the first prime minister of independent India and her great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, from where she would take the river route till Varanasi.

When contacted, Congress spokesman Anshu Awasthi said permission from the EC for Priyanka's visit was awaited.

Meetings in preparation for the visit had started since Thursday and the details would be worked out soon, he added.

At Allahabad, Priyanka is expected to visit the historic Anand Bhawan, the erstwhile official residence of the Nehru family, now a museum housing the personal belongings of Nehru and his father Motilal Nehru.

Congress sources said Priyanka might offer prayers at the Vindhyavasini temple at Mirzapur and the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi -- the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge has again rejected the government's offer to attend a meeting of the Lokpal selection panel, saying there is no provision for a special invitee attending the meet. The meeting slated on March 15 evening would be boycotted by Kharge the seventh time since February 2018.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Congress leader alleged that the government has not made any attempt to amend the relevant provisions of the Lokpal Act to include the leader of the single largest party in the opposition as a member of the selection committee.

"Since there is no provision under section 4 of the Lokpal Act, 2013, for a special invitee to be a part of the Selection Committee or attend these meetings, I am once again forced to respectfully decline this invitation," he said in his letter.

Kharge, as a leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, was earlier invited to attend the selection panel meetings six times and he has rejected the offers on the same grounds each time.

He also alleged that the government and its ministers have repeatedly used his refusal to attend the meetings as a special invitee as an "excuse for not appointing a Lokpal over the last five years".

"However, the fact remains that whatever tardy progress the government has made has only been under pressure from the Supreme Court," Kharge said.

Alleging that "excluding the opposition", this process is being "vitiated", the Congress leader said, "I would like to caution the government that anyone selected through this one-sided process may decline to accept this position."
Congress president Rahul Gandhi on March 15 accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of "trying stop the truth" about his "criminal failure" on employment from becoming public after over 100 economists and social scientists expressed concerns over "political interference" in statistical data in the country.



NoMo trying to stop the truth about his criminal failure on employment from becoming public. https://t.co/w7xSfQKmyV

 Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 15, 2019

Gandhi's attack came a day after 108 economists and social scientists on March 14 called for restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity of statistical organisations.

The appeal came against the backdrop of controversy over revision of gross domestic product (GDP) numbers and withholding employment data by the NSSO.

Earlier in the day, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala also hit out at the Modi government over the issue.

"Nobody has hurt India's global reputation & credibility more than Modi government. 108 global economists and social scientists are concerned and you should be too!" he said in a tweet.

Surjewala urged people to vote out a party which, he alleged, "hides its massive failures by statistical jugglery and excel sheet management!"

The economists and social scientists appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data" and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

The signatories include Rakesh Basant (IIM-A), James Boyce (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US), Emily Breza (Harvard University, US), Satish Deshpande (Delhi University), Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia, Canada), R Ramakumar (TISS, Mumbai), Hema Swaminathan (IIM-B) and Rohit Azad (JNU).
Before a packed room in the United Nations' Geneva Office, Chinese officials, experts and foreign diplomats shared their views on Wednesday about human rights progress in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China.

Zuliyati Simayi, a professor at the School of Political Science and Public Administration of Xinjiang University, spoke on Xinjiang's history, culture and religion.

Her talk included key evidence to show how Xinjiang has evolved in its long history as a multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural region that borders on eight countries.

"Xinjiang has been a land of multireligious harmony and cultural integration," she told about 300 people who attended, most of whom were in Geneva to attend the ongoing 40th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Zhang Nan, a researcher at the Anti-Terrorism Law School of Northwest University of Political Science and Law in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, and a member of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, talked about the serious harm done to Xinjiang by violence, terror and religious extremism.

Zhang, who was born and raised in Xinjiang, cited detailed cases of how violence, terror and religious extremism have trampled the basic human rights of various ethnic groups in Xinjiang, including the rights to freedom of religious belief. He also dismissed some misunderstandings of China's religious policy.

Li Changlin, a law professor at Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, detailed the legal basis for fighting terrorism and extremism through vocational training in Xinjiang and said China has built an effective legal framework for combating terrorism.

Yu Jianhua, head of the Chinese mission to the UN Office at Geneva, said, "China will never allow Xinjiang to go back to the days of raging violence, terror and extremism and will never allow those forces to take away the peaceful and happy life from the people in Xinjiang." He added that conducting vocational education and training programs based on law is the right thing to do.

Vadim Pisarevich, deputy permanent representative of Belarus to the UN Office at Geneva, told the audience what he saw after a visit to the vocational education and training program in Xinjiang. "Those young people eat very healthy, and they study hard," he said.

Nikita Zhukov, deputy permanent representative of Russia to the UN Office at Geneva, who also visited the vocational education and training program in Xinjiang, said he was impressed by the social and economic development in Xinjiang.

Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta, Cuba's permanent representative to the UN Office at Geneva, said he was impressed by the social and economic progress in Xinjiang.
Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic | Source: Wikimedia Commons

Bugatti Atlantic was a grand tourer produced by French car manufacturer Bugatti from 1934 to 1940. It belongs to a line of GTs called Type 57 and one of the personal designs of Jean Bugatti, who was the son of the founder Ettore Bugatti.

Developed in 1936, the Atlantic was Jean Bugattis attempt to modernize his fathers company. Deviating from the usual trend of building multiple models, he decided on developing one car and offering it in different body styles. Thus, the Bugatti Type 57 was born.

The car was powered by a 3.3-litre, inline eight-cylinder engine, which made 135BHP and could speed past at 153 kmph. It was also a rather wide car, with a wheelbase of 3302 mm and weighed 950 kg.

The Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic was better known as one of the rarest and most expensive cars in the world. For that model, only four were produced out of which one has been lost to time.

Only 4 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic have ever been built. The first Atlantic with the Chassis No 57473 was originally sold to the Parisian business man Jacques Holzschuh. #Bugatti #BugattiAtlantic #Type57SC #BugattiHistory #BugattiStory #Bugatti110Years #Bugatti110Ans pic.twitter.com/S15EnrexQr Bugatti (@Bugatti) February 19, 2019

As an ode to this engineering marvel of Bugatti, the company is working on reviving the Type 57. However, it will not be a restored Atlantic, but an entirely new design based on the original. As per hints from Bugattis Twitter account, it seems that the modern iteration will maintain the curves, lines and rivets like the original, but will have its modern touch to it. It could be safe to expect that the car will be a front-engine, rear wheel drive car like the others. Whether Bugatti shares the Chirons mighty 8-litre W16 engine with the Atlantic will have to be seen.
Anand Subramaniam

The journey towards obtaining customer intelligence is always extremely tricky. Customer Intelligence is a qualitative subject, and a grey area for several enterprises.

Since obtaining customer intelligence is not a one-stage process, banks in India struggle at different stages of the process and feel confused and elated at the same time. Elated, because they feel that customer intelligence has been implemented. Confused, since the application through the customer intelligence process isnt responding as well as the predictive analysts foretold it to be.

Each customer intelligence framework focusses on a particular concentration point or a combination of points such as data ingestion or extraction, machine learning algorithms or data cleansing. However, end-to-end customer intelligence frameworks, drawn up specifically for banks which take advantage of the available data and the advancement in technology is a rarity. But, that shouldnt be the case.

So, whats been going wrong and what is the appropriate corrective measure?

Experts have agreed that its important to obtain quality data. But it doesnt stop there. There needs to be a particular data management process that cleanses your data of incorrect data and values  data that might alter the course of action from the best advised action. Also there needs to be a machine learning process that feeds data into its algorithm to detect patterns among magnanimous amounts of data. These can be achieved through a customer intelligence framework that includes an iterated three or four stage process.

Banks and financial institutions in India have a lot to benefit from the implementation of a customer intelligence framework.

Customer retention, acquisition and increased profitability are some of the major benefits from customer intelligence for banks which contribute to your ROI in the long run. As these benefits pile on, its also important to note that the rate of implementation for this platform among Indian banks has been low.

Hence before stepping out into obtaining quality customer intelligence, Indian bankers and decision scientists should evaluate the major issues which prevent the use of quality data for higher purposes. A comprehensive evaluation or analysis would provide a deeper understanding on the different stages that are hampered by bottlenecks.

One of the biggest challenges in the Indian banking industry is the presence of multiple internal issues which restrict the flow of data or prevent the opportunity to get actionable insights at each stage of the process. Once these bottlenecks are watered down, it would help the bank to deliver services to customer in a manner which benefits both the parties.
Sounak Mitra

What is the biggest threat to the worlds largest democracy? The simple answer: Fake News. Now, what is the best medium to spread it? Again the simple answer: social media, especially instant messaging apps.

The above two facts are fact checked, users of social media platforms (especially those responsible for spreading fake news) know it, the owners of these platforms know it, and even the lawmakers know it.

There has been a series of developments in the past few weeks that can be summed up as genuine efforts by Indias lawmakers and companies running social media platforms to fight fake news.

The latest being instant messaging platform WhatsApp testing a search image feature that would spot if an image shared on the platform was genuine or doctored.

This, probably, is the best practical initiative by the Facebook-owned instant messaging platform since it stepped into the Indian market. To understand the importance better, lets take a look at how Indians use WhatsApp.

Indians just dont love WhatsApp, for a lot of them it is also the source of information and knowledge. Thats probably is the reason why the term WhatsApp University has been coined.

Some statistics could be useful here. Of the 1.3 billion Indians, only around 200 million use WhatsApp. This may make the real issue look smaller. Now, consider this. According to data provided by WhatsApp to the Wall Street Journal, Indians exchanged more than 20 billion New Years messages (thanks to cheap mobile data), the highest by any country. The WSJ, in a report in January 2018, termed Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the most famous morning -message enthusiast (who is known to fire off good morning messages as the sun is rising every day) in India where billions of good morning messages are being sent every morning that could probably be clogging the Internet.

During the initial days, Indians were using WhatsApp for text messaging which was relatively costlier that time. With mobile data prices coming down, pictures and videos have become fresh favourites.

Thus, the initiative by WhatsApp to check the authenticity of images shared is important, especially to curb fake news, considering that India is going to vote in less than a months time.

However, how effective will be WhatsApps search image feature?

Reportedly, WhatsApp is going to use Google image search for its search image feature aiming to combat fake news. Interestingly, Googles image search isnt a full proof function. As reported by Medium on February 22, 2018, the search engine has made it harder to spot fake news when the whole world is struggling to deal with misinformation. One of the reasons for this was copyright issue.

Google uses advanced algorithm to make its image search function work. It is probably the best way to do it, but technology has its limitations. Besides, Google can only search and compare images available to its database. While questioning Googles database may sound stupid, there are still chances that the Google database isnt the ultimate thing. Also, what happens to images are doctored by highly-skilled professionals who might have already figured a way out to fool Googles image search algorithm?

WhatsApps parent Facebook also has a reverse image search function, where it also uses Googles services.

That said, there is one more thing to note. WhatsApps search image would allow users to check the authenticity of an image if and when the user would like to do so. Most users forward almost everything they receive, sometimes even before reading the message itself. It is such an epidemic that WhatsApp had to introduce an India-first feature, in July 2018, which allows each message to be forwarded only to five contacts each time.

WhatsApp needs to develop a feature that would check the authenticity of an image automatically when someone tries to share it, and block that if the image is fake. Otherwise, the search image function will not be effective to combat fake news.

WhatsApps search image function is only available with a beta update (selective to users who would opt for it), and that too only for Android users. Considering that Android is widely used across India, this would cover a majority of the users once WhatsApp makes the feature available to all its users (on Android devices).

That would take some time, and could be late for Indias immediate need, which is to check fake news via WhatsApp before the nation goes to the polls. This is all the more important because the chances of fake news influencing voter decisions cannot be ruled out.

Yet, its never too late.
Image for representation

Though many news articles on non-resident Indians finally gaining rights to cast vote online have been doing the rounds on social media, they are far from the truth.

In fact, the Election Commission had to file a police complaint about this, to check further spread of such news and take action against the offenders.



It has come to our notice that the following FAKE NEWS is circulating on some WhatsApp groups.

It is clarified that you can only apply for voter registration online through https://t.co/oC8AwgyIdK portal pic.twitter.com/OTxjb1zFbA

 Sheyphali Sharan (@SpokespersonECI) February 21, 2019

Sheyphali Sharan, the official spokesperson of the Election Commission issued a statement on Twitter, saying: The social media posts informing those who hold an Indian passport, can now vote online, is fake news.

To begin with, there is no provision to vote online in Indian election norms. To exercise the Right to Adult Franchise, one has to personally visit a polling booth. While there are provisions of postal ballots and proxy voting, they are available only for government or armed forces personnel.

While an NRI holding an Indian passport can cast his/her vote from their respective hometown by registering as an Overseas Voter, they still have to be present in person on the day their constituency goes to polls. Also, those registering as overseas voters must fill Form 6A.

Now, considering there are around 3.1 crore NRIs settled in various countries across the globe, a special committee of the Election Commission gave approval for proxy voting. To facilitate this during the upcoming polls, The Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill, 2017, was also passed in the Lok Sabha some time ago. However, it didnt get passed in the Rajya Sabha and lapsed eventually.

The NRIs have nonetheless been pretty upset about it. They have questioned time and again, why despite being an I-T power, India cannot extend this basic right to them.

It may be so, that the dismayed lot bought the fake news on them getting online voting rights this year so easily because that is something they have been eagerly looking forward to.
In the recent past, the country has seen a growing sentiment of hatred against minority communities among a few. From lynching over the choice of meat to calling out Muslim actors and politicians, spewing hatred has suddenly been gaining ground.

And when it comes to hauling up a Muslim who is explicit about his/her views, which may at times not be in favour of the party at power in the Centre, the usual jeer is to ask the person to go back to Pakistan.

However, as the day unfolded, it was revealed that a certain citizen of one of the greatest secular democracies of the world, wasnt satisfied with just passing such insensitive remarks. He decided to actually send Muslims back to Pakistan. How? He filed a petition in the Supreme Court in this regard.

The case came up for hearing in the apex court on Friday in front of a Bench of Justice Rohinton Nariman and Vineet Saran.

A report published by Bar and Bench stated Justice Nariman was dismayed and appalled by the prayer.

He asked the petitioners lawyer to read it out loud. When the counsel did so, the angry judge lambasted the petitioner and asked: Do you seriously want to argue this? We will hear you, but we will pass strictures against you.

The question was met with a no and the petition was dismissed. Thats that. But one cannot dismiss the horrors of the seeds of communal animosities being sowed in the hearts of a multitude of fundamentalists in the country.



Petition in Supreme Court to send Indian Muslims to Pakistan: Justice Rohinton Nariman blasts the petitioner.

"Do you seriously want to argue this matter", Nariman J. to lawyer. "No", says lawyer. Dismissed. @barandbench  Murali Krishnan (@legaljournalist) March 15, 2019

 Sam wise (& romantic) (@SubtweeterIndia) March 15, 2019



Effect of 2014 to 2019 political regime.

 v venkataramu (@vvenkataramu) March 15, 2019



How could it even come for hearing, when Nirbhaya, Adivasi rights and other crucial matters await dates from their Lordships.

 Elephant Lord (@MonkofMaude) March 15, 2019



"Do you seriously want to argue this matter", Nariman J. to lawyer. That's a classic example of a Rhetorical Question. #awesome Should be taught in schools.

 S for Sidharth (@motion_allowed) March 15, 2019



The judge has every right to pull up a lawyer for wasting the courts time with preposterous petitions and if you ask me, the lawyer got off real easy this time in this particular court).Plus, the lawyer said no to arguing the matter so why did he even come before court with it.  Unnati Misra (@UnnatiMisra) March 15, 2019



However, Justice Narimans way of dealing with the petitioner was met with much praise on Twitter and some even questioned how and why such a trifle petition was even taken up by the court in the first place. We say, who knows, maybe the agenda was to bring the man back to his senses!Should have imposed fine for wasting court's time.

How did it get admitted in the first place? SC has refused to hear or penalized petitioners in other cases.This definitely warranted punitive action against petitioner & lawyer.  Shantanu Katre (@Shantanu_katre) March 15, 2019



Isn't there any filtration process to weed out silly PILs before it reaches the court?

 Madhavankutty Pillai (@cpmadhavan) March 15, 2019

Although missed it but can very well imagine Justice's expressions while asking the lawyer  Vanya Gupta (@vanyaguptaadv) March 15, 2019
It looks like Samsung is not going to stop till it releases smartphones under its updated Galaxy A series. After launching the Galaxy A10, A30, and A50 in India, the company may launch the Galaxy A70.

According to 91Mobiles, Samsung has received Wi-Fi certification for a new smartphone under its affordable Galaxy A series. The company plans to launch another smartphone under its lineup after launching three smartphones last month. The new Galaxy A70 has received Wi-Fi certification with the model number SM-A705FN/DS. This means the smartphone with dual-sim would be launched soon. The certification listing revealed that the A70 would come with dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi support and run on Android 9 based OneUi.

It is rumoured that the A70 would come with triple camera setup at the rear, just like the A50 and rumoured A60, another device that is expected to launch on April 19. The smartphone is said to feature a 6.7-inch full HD+Super AMOLED display with an optical fingerprint scanner under the screen. The A70 is said to have an edge-to-edge display with a water drop notch on top. Samsung would not offer its premium ultrasonic fingerprint scanner that is available on its flagship Galaxy S10. There is no information on the processor that would power the A70. However, the device is rumoured to be paired with 6GB RAM and 64GB internal storage. It would house a 4,400 mAh battery with support for fast-charging.

The report suggests that Samsung would launch the device on April 19 along with Galaxy A60. Another Samsung A series device that is expected to be released soon is the Galaxy A40 . It would feature a smaller 5.7-inch display and would have support for Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 5.0 LE. Not much is known about the smartphone, but reports suggest that it would be powered by an Exynos 7904 octa-core processor paired with 4GB RAM and 64GB internal storage. There is no update on the launch date of this device, but it may get launched alongside the A60 and A70.
Google is partnering with China, where the state-owned companies have a "direct pipeline" with the military, but the Internet search engine giant has shown a lack of willingness to work with the US Department of Defence, top Pentagon officials have told American lawmakers.

Acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan and General Joseph Dunford, chairman joint chiefs of staff, said this during a Congressional hearing as lawmakers expressed concern over increasing Chinese coerciveness with American companies.

"Correct," Shanahan said when Senator Josh Hawley said Google is doing business in China in a way that benefits US's Chinese competitors.

"The interesting thing  and this is why China is  this is such an important issue for our country. The fusion of commercial business with military is significant. USD 5 trillion of their economy is state-owned enterprises," he said.

"So, the technology that is developed in the civil world transfers to the military world. It's a direct pipeline. Not only is there a transfer, there's also systemic theft of US technology that facilitates even faster development of emerging technology," the acting defence secretary said.

Shanahan clarified that Google hasn't refused to work with the Department of Defence. "But there is a lack of willingness to support DOD programme," he said. Gen Dunford agreed.

"The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military, and I've been very public on this issue, as well," he said.

"In fact, the way I described it to our industry partners is, look, we're the good guys  and the values that we represent, and the system that we represent is the one that will allow and has allowed you to thrive. And that's the way I've characterized it," Gen Dunford said.

"We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit. Frankly, maybe not a full characterisation of the way it really is. It's more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military, he said.

In his opening statement, Shanahan said China's defence spending approaches that of the United States, when one takes into account purchasing power and the portion of US budget going to military pay and benefits.

That, coupled with China's organised approach to steal foreign technology, has allowed China to modernize its missile, space, and cyber capabilities, as well as project power far beyond its borders," he said.

I think we've been ignoring the (China) problem too long, Shanahan said in response to a question.

The California-based Internet giant has long sought to expand in China, home of a "Great Firewall". It previously said it will keep looking for opportunities to invest in China.

But it's not clear if that would mean a return of Google Search to China after its exit over eight years ago following a showdown with the Chinese government over censorship.

The comments from top Pentagon officials on Thursday came amid a trade war simmering between the US and China.

On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said he is not in a rush to enter into a trade deal with China, the negotiations for which has been undergoing since December last year.

"I think things are going along very well. We'll just see what the date is. I'm in no rush. I want the deal to be right, much more importantly. Somebody said I'm in a rush. I'm not in a rush at all," Trump told reporters at the White House.

Media reports said Chinese President Xi Jinping has postponed his trip to the US president's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida later this month.
One of four people detained in New Zealand after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch is Australian, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on March 15.

"I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody I have been advised is an Australian-born citizen," he told reporters in Sydney.

"As family members with our New Zealand cousins today, we grieve, we are shocked, we are appalled, we are outraged, and we stand here and condemn absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist."

New Zealand media have reported that between nine and 27 people were killed in the shootings.
In a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump, a dozen Republican senators broke party ranks and sided with Democrats to terminate the US President's declaration of a national emergency on America's border with Mexico.

In a 59-41 vote, 12 Republicans joined every Senate Democrat on Thursday in a rare move to block the president's effort to divert billions in funding to build his long-promised border wall without congressional approval.

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives last month backed the measure.

The Republicans joined Democrats in voting down the emergency, arguing that the president had exceeded his powers in trying to build a border wall over Congress' objections, the New York Times reported.

Following the vote, President Trump tweeted, "VETO!"

Trump slammed the vote, calling it a "Democrat-inspired Resolution".

"I look forward to VETOING the just passed Democrat inspired Resolution which would OPEN BORDERS while increasing Crime, Drugs, and Trafficking in our Country," he said in a tweet.

"I thank all of the Strong Republicans who voted to support Border Security and our desperately needed WALL!" Trump said.

Congress needs a two-thirds majority of both chambers to override a presidential veto, which is viewed as unlikely in this case.

"Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway," said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee.

Trump had sought to frame the vote publicly as not only a declaration of support for his border security policies but as a sign of personal loyalty, the report said.

"It's pure and simple: It's a vote for border security; it's a vote for no crime," Trump told reporters before the vote, which he declared on Thursday morning on Twitter to be "a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats!".

But he could not overcome concerns among Republican senators about the legality of redirecting USD 3.6 billion from military construction projects toward the border wall, even after Congress explicitly rejected the funding request.

"I believe the use of emergency powers in this circumstance violates the Constitution," said Senator Jerry Moran, Republican from Kansas, in a statement.

"This continues our country down the path of all powerful executive  something those who wrote the Constitution were fearful of," Moran was quoted as saying.

The Republican senators who stood by Trump insisted that there was an immigration crisis at the southern border and that the order was well within the jurisdiction of the National Emergencies Act, which gives presidents wide-ranging latitude to declare a national emergency.

The vote came a day after the Senate rebuked president Trump on foreign policy by approving a bill to end US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

Trump declared a national emergency last month after signing a funding agreement that did not include the money he requested to build a wall.

His signature ended a 35-day partial shutdown of the federal government, which was triggered by a showdown after Congress refused to appropriate the USD 5.7 billion he requested to start construction at the border.

In his annual budget proposal, which Trump sent to Congress this week, the president asked for USD 8.6 billion in funding for his wall, far more than he had previously requested.

A wall along the US-Mexico border was one of Trump's signature campaign promises.
Farmer suicides go unabated and shockingly, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which has been collating this data annually, has strangely stopped doing so since 2015.

In Maharashtra, as per information recently received under right to information (RTI) act, from the revenue department, number of farmers suicides has doubled in the past four years. While 6,268 farmer suicides were recorded between 2011 and 2014, the number has almost doubled to 11,995 during 2015 to 2018.

Mumbai based RTI activist, Jeetendra Ghadge, who has been using RTI for the last nine years regarding this issue, recently filed RTI applications to procure information for the period of 2015-2018 on the number of farmer suicides in Maharashtra; the number of deceased farmers families who received compensation of Rs1 lakh and; the recipients of the upgraded compensation of Rs5 lakh as announced by the Maharashtra government in 2015, along with an insurance policy named after the late political leader, Gopinath Munde. He addressed his requisitions to the revenue department of Maharashtra.

Mr Ghadge states that, the information available with the revenue department is generally perhaps one tenth of the actual suicides committed by farmers. Pointing to a reply he procured under RTI in 2015, he states, While the number of suicides provided to me in 2015 under RTI, was about 70 in Sangli district, the figure given by the district police department during the same period was 2,000. That is the kind of disparity in the records. The figures of suicides that are recorded are mostly those of family members of the farmers who have committed suicide. One can safely assume that out of every 10 suicides, only two to three are recorded. And now, since 2015, there are no national statistics available of farmers suicides since 2015.

He also sought information on the number of people who received compensation of Rs1 lakh to be paid to the families of the deceased farmers. As per the RTI reply, 1358 farmers received compensation and 674 applications were rejected in 2014. In 2018, rejected applications increased to 1050 and more cases have been rejected.

Following are the statistics of compensation and rejection in Amravati district which sees the maximum number of farmer suicides:

The much tom-tommed `Gopinath Munde Accident Insurance Scheme launched by the then revenue minister Eknath Khadse in December 2018 has not taken off, as per the RTI reply. The much tom-tommed `Gopinath Munde Accident Insurance Scheme launched by the then revenue minister Eknath Khadse in December 2018 has not taken off, as per the RTI reply.

Mr Ghadge received a reply from the revenue department stating the decision is still on hold. Also, due to the word accident insurance scheme, a suicide does not come into that category and hence there is confusion.

This insurance scheme seeks to provide Rs2 lakh insurance safety to the 1.30 crore farmers of Maharashtra, as per information provided under RTI by the department of agriculture and animal husbandry.

In a reply to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which in 2015, sought information on erratic compensations provided to deceased farmers families, the revenue department had stated in its reply that, `the prominent reasons noted for farmers suicides in the state of Maharashtra are debt, crop failure, inability to repay debt resulting in pressure from debtors, inability to procure enough money for daughters marriage or other religious activities, chronic severe illness, vices like alcohol addictions, and gambling.

As per the government resolution (GR) of 19 December 2015, debt, crop failure, inability to repay debt resulting in pressure from debtors are the norms considered eligible for financial assistance of Rs1 lakh to the family of the deceased farmer from the state government thus rendering suicides committed for other reasons, ineligible. And therein lies the problem. Scrutiny is done by officials of the collectors offices leading to controversies over rejections.

While fundamental changes to agrarian policy are long overdue, the compensation mechanism to the victims in the meanwhile too leaves much to be desired.
Six firefighters have died and one injured after battling a blaze in Qinyuan County in north China's Shanxi Province, local authorities said Friday.





At about 5 p.m. Thursday, seven firefighters were trapped while battling a forest fire in Qinyuan, due to a sudden change in wind direction. They were rescued and rushed to hospital, but six of them died of injuries early Friday morning.





The fire was put out at about 6:40 p.m. Thursday. The cause of the fire is under investigation.




Mumbai sees an unusually high number of fires and other disasters every year. While experts have not been able to pinpoint a single cause, haphazard development, lack of fire and electrical audits are some common reasons. Keeping this in mind, Moneylife Foundation had organized a special session on Dos and Donts of Fire Safety by Adv Bapoo Malcolm and Shivajirao Bagat, deputy controller of Civil Defence Organistion.

Adv Malcolm began the session by providing an overview of electricity and how it can work against us if not handled with proper care. Today, electricity is one of the leading causes of death and combined with fires due to short circuits or faulty wiring it can be quite deadly.

In his talk, Adv Malcolm spoke about the common causes of electrical accidents such as use of defective tools, cables or equipment, improper installation of electrical equipment, old wiring, flammable materials left near exposed electrical wiring, and loose connectors.

He also shared simple rules that one must follow while handling electricity such as using wires with appliances of proper capacity and insulation, not overloading the electrical circuit, using appropriate circuit breakers and only using appliances with the ISI mark.

Do not use the common yet wrong practices of inserting too many plugs into a single socket, using temporary wiring or sticking bare wires directly into a socket. Careless mistakes such as these can be a quick stop solution at the moment, but will most certainly prove lethal, Adv Malcolm added.

Covering every aspect of a fire, Mr Bagat from CDO, started the talk explaining how a fire starts and spreads by filling up any space with thick black smoke within minutes. A person trapped inside a place on fire has a very short amount of time to make critical decisions on escape.

Mr Bagat advised, With thick black smoke it will become very difficult for a person to clearly see their surroundings and identify safe pathways of exit. You should try your best to escape from heat before it starts getting dark due to the heavy smoke.

Once a fire has started, life threatening toxic gases are bound to be released. Breathing even a small amount of smoke and such toxic gases can make a person drowsy, disoriented and short of breath. The odourless, colourless fumes can lull you to sleep even before the flames reach you door, he added.

During his talk, Mr Bagat repeatedly stressed that time is precious and every second counts during a fire outbreak. He says, This precious time should not be wasted gathering your valuables because your life is more precious thant the valuables.

Some of the basic tips that he offered were to stay calm, not to immediately panic and start running. Your first step should be to escape out of the premises and then proceed to calling for help. Once you have ensured that there is no one left behind and a safe path of exit is open, you should also attempt to close all doors and windows on your way out. While escaping, only use routes that have been specifically designated for that purpose and always use staircases instead of elevators, he added.

According to Mr Bagat, if you are in a situation where you are trapped in a smoke filled area, it is advised to lie down and keep your nose close to the ground, then crawl towards an exit point. If you are trapped in your room and do not see a clear path out, shut the door and block any gaps that might let smoke or fumes through. Gaps under a door should be covered by a rug, blanket or any other piece of clothing available nearby. It is important to note, that when you are trapped in a room, under no circumstances should you jump out of the window. Instead, signal or shout for help to draw the attention of rescue personnel on the ground.

These days, especially in Mumbai there have been quite a few fires in high-rise buildings. Speaking about such fires, Mr Bagat said, If a fire does break out in a building in your flat, in most circumstances you should be safe in your own flat. But if your flat is affected by the heat or smoke, leave at once while closing doors and windows behind you. He also spoke at length about the various prevention systems such as smoke, heat and gas detection systems, overhead fire sprinkler system, fire pump and underground water tanks.

When speaking about fire safety in high rise buildings, Mr Bagat talked about following the rules and regulations as laid down in the National Building Code (2005/2016) and the Maharashtra Fire Prevention & Life Safety measure Act (2006/2009). There are a few basic rules that every high rise resident should strictly follow - ashtrays for indoor smoking, waste receptacles to be emptied regularly, correct rated wires to be used for all electrical appliances, faulty appliances to be repaired or replaced immediately, etc. Most important of all, emergency exit doors should be kept free from obstructions and safety equipment should be maintained in high standards with checks at regular intervals. Every floor in a high rise building should have an Emergency Evacuation Plan placed at strategic locations, indicating the exits that are available on that particular floor.

Although fire evacuation drills have not become mandatory, Mr Bagat feels that buildings should conduct them at regular intervals, so that residents become familiar with the emergency exit routes available to them.

Being thorough in his talk, Mr Bagat also shared the most effective way of contacting the local Fire Brigade in case of emergency. When calling fire services at 101 or Police at 100, he advises, Always remain calm, even while informing about the incident to the fire services. Tell them the name, exact address, a nearby landmark and give contact numbers. As far as possible, inform them about the type of emergency and the shortest accessible route to the incident site.
The Supreme Court on Thursday told Fortis's Shivinder Singh that since he has come back from 'sanyas', he should focus on paying along with his brother Malvinder Singh Rs 3,500 crore awarded to Japanese drug maker Daiichi Sankyo by a Singapore-based arbitration tribunal.

"Now you have come (back) to world, then pay", said Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi who along with Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna told both the brothers to inform the court how they are going to secure the arbitration tribunal award.

Initially senior counsel Fali Nariman appearing for Daiichi told the court that Malvinder Singh has said that he was anxious to pay his dues and Shivender Singh has said, "I have become a 'sadhu' and taken 'sanyas' and I don't want to do anything now."

However, when senior counsel P.S. Patwalia told the court that he has come back to world, CJI Gogoi said, "Now you have come to the world, then pay."

Patwalia appeared for Shivinder Singh

Both Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh were asked to give plan for securing the Singapore-based arbitration tribunal's award asking them to pay it Rs 3,500 crore in a dispute relating to Japanese drug maker Daiichi Sankyo's acquisition of their family pharma company Ranbaxy.

Telling the two brothers, who are otherwise at loggerheads, to unite on the issue and give a plan for securing the award, the bench reminded them of their legacy of being the flag-bearer of the health sector and asked them to honour the award.

Both Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh were present in the court in pursuance to March 14 order of the court directing their presence. The court asked them to remain present in the court on March 28, the next date of hearing.

Reminding Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh of their obligation to secure the award, the court told them: "Once the award is passed, you have to honour it (award). It (not doing so) does no good to the country. You were once the flag-bearer of the country in health sector. Pay your debts and come out of it."

Daiichi Sankyo has moved the top court contending that the two brothers have sold their stakes in Fortis Health Care to Malaysia's IHH Health and were also liquidating their other assets to escape the liability to pay Rs 3,500 crore arbitration award to Daiichi.

"How do you intend to pay in the event of an order upholding the arbitration award?" the court asked Malvinder Singh, telling him that his brother has "renounced" the world and had "nothing to do with it".

Finding Malvinder Singh not forthcoming with the response, CJI Gogoi told him: "If you are not prepared to answer, don't answer, because all that you say will be recorded."

The court told Singh brothers that they can take time to "reflect, look into their accounts and seek legal advice. Then court then adjourned the hearing till March 28.

Directing the next hearing on March 28, CJI Gogoi said, "This is first time you are coming to court. Let the next appearance be the last one."

As Court asked which date they would like to come prepared with the plan to secure the award, senior counsel Harish Salve, appearing for Malvinder Singh, said since Nariman is senior-most, let him suggest the next date.

"Thankfully, I am only the senior-most and not the debtor," Nariman said amid laughter.
Trading of shares in Environmental Clean Technologies Ltd [ASX:ECT] has been halted since Wednesday, pending the outcome of a meeting with an Indian mineral producer.

ECT is in the business of commercialising new coal and iron-making technologies which are capable of delivering both financial and environmental benefits.

Before the trading halt, ECTs share price was trading up to 1.3 cents per share, with a one-year return of 30%. Its current market cap currently sits at $62.41 million.

ECTs Shares Not trading any time soon

In an announcement made this morning, ECT exited its voluntary trading halt and entered a suspension from quotation.

The cause for the original halt in trading has not been formally specified by the company. However, it may be due to the fact the company is awaiting the outcome of a board meeting with NMDC Limited, an Indian iron producer.

ECT this morning informed investors it would enter and remain in voluntary suspension until 1 April 2019.

According to its filings to the ASX, the company has partnered with two Indian Government Public Sector Undertakings to advance the next stage of the commercialisation of its Coldry and Matmor technologies.

The partnership includes NLC India Limited, the countrys largest lignite miner and NMDC India, the countrys largest iron ore miner.

Revealed: Three In-House Small-Cap Stocks the Experts Are Watching in 2019. Download today.

NMDC had originally tabled a research collaboration agreement (RCA) with ECT for its most recent board meeting. However, according to ECT, this matter was not discussed and will need more time to complete the approval process.

It seems the RCA has been caught up in a web of bureaucratic red tape for some time. This is not the first instance of ECT entering into a trading halt pending a decision from NMDC.

In fact, this is the just the second time within two months.

Frustration from investors has continued to mount over the continuous trading halts, with ECT providing little information about why the RCA keeps being overlooked.

NMDC confirmed its board did not consider the RCA today, but restated their support for the project. They have appealed for further time to complete an internal approval process.

Whats next for ECTs India project?

It is difficult to speculate what will happen with ECTs now stalled India project. This cycle has continued for some years now in spite of the commitments given by NMDC.

Only last month did ECTs chairman and COO travel to India to finalise the RCA. But todays announcement sends a clear message that very little was finalised  at least on NMDCs end.

The 1 April reinstatement date does give ECT just over two weeks to head back to the drawing board to draft an agreement NMDC will hopefully consider.

The companys other option would be to sever dealings with NMDC and cooperate solely with NLC, who have already considered and approved the RCA.

Regardless of which they choose, investors will no doubt be watching the developments closely as the company has banked heavily on its India project.

More to come.

Regards,

Ryan Clarkson-Ledward,

For Money Morning

PS: If you need help picking small-cap winners, our three in-house small-cap experts have revealed their top picks for 2019. Download the free guide today.
This morning, European Lithium Limited [ASX:EUR] highlighted its participation in a 1,000,000,000 battery production funding programme launched by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy.

At time of writing, European Lithiums share price is trading at nine cents, up 2.27%.

EUR is part of a syndicate applying for funding from a programme led by BMWi, to boost battery production in Germany. And because of the lithium resources mined and produced in Austria, the group will be able to represent the entire value chain within Europe.

Related: Whats Driving This Green Energy Stock Frenzy? Download this free report to find out.

European Lithiums share price helped by Wolfsberg project update

This morning EUR gave an update on its Wolfsberg Lithium project, located in Austria.

European lithiums chairman, Tony Sage, said:

We are progressing full steam ahead and it is our strong belief that our Wolfsberg project will be the first local producer of lithium hydroxide in Europe.

EURs Non-Executive Director, Stefan Muller, said:

The current developments are a testament to the quality of our project. The great interest and support expressed by industry, capital markets as well as local and European political members highlight the unique selling propositions of the Wolfsberg Project. With lithium from the Wolfsberg project located in Carinthia positioned at the very start of the value chain, our future industry partners will be the only ones in the near-term that are able to boost an entirely European solution for battery production, and complying with the most demanding global standards in terms of a fully sustainable production cycle, from mine to battery.

The Wolfsberg Lithium project has an established mine, which already has approximately 1,500 tonnes of pegmatite ore (completed back in 2013). This gives EUR some benefits, and the material is already there and able to be used in the lithium carbonate refining process, as well as lithium hydroxide products.

Based on results, EUR is set to be in a strong position to produce premium quality lithium products right off the back, and gives an important advantage to the company as well as potential offtake partners.

Whats to come for European Lithium?

European Lithium is currently in advanced stages of long-term offtake agreements with multiple European companies, some of which are members of the previously mentioned syndicates.

Based on the encouraging results, European Lithiums share price is edging higher and could continue to do so, if the development of its lithium projects goes as planned.

More to come.

Regards,

Ryan Clarkson-Ledward,

For Money Morning

PS: If youre unsure about which mining stocks are for you, check out this FREE report: 10 ASX Resource Stocks You Should Be Watching. Download now.
March 15, 2019 CIA Blames Its Proxy For Its Raid On North Korea's Embassy In Spain The CIA is the main suspect in the military style raid on the North Korean embassy in Madrid. It now launched a somewhat hapless effort to deflect from it. The Spanish report in which Spanish government sources accuse the CIA said: At least two of the 10 assailants who broke into the embassy and interrogated diplomatic staff have been identified and have connections to the US intelligence agency. The CIA has denied any involvement but government sources say their response was unconvincing. That the CIA is the main suspect in the assault was reported on Wednesday in the Spanish mainstream paper El Pais. The paper made the extra effort to publish an abbreviated English language version. It was widely picked up by other international outlets. Some of the assailants were Asian and spoke Korean language. They were probably from the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS), a subsidiary of the CIA know for its extremely hawkish politics. It often rigs elections in South Korea in support of hawkish conservatives candidates. Attacking a foreign embassy in a third country is far out of bounce of international law and diplomatic decency. After the El Pais report something had to be done to direct the attention away from the CIA and to find some other culprit. A story was thought up and pushed to the favorite CIA outlet, the Washington Post. It wasn't the CIA which did it, writes the Post's national security reporter, it was a CIA controlled 'regime change' organization. A shadowy group trying to overthrow Kim Jong Un raided a North Korean embassy in broad daylight In broad daylight, masked assailants infiltrated North Koreas embassy in Madrid, restrained the staff with rope, stole computers and mobile phones, and fled the scene in two luxury vehicles. The group behind the late February operation is known as Cheollima Civil Defense, a secretive dissident organization committed to overthrowing the Kim dynasty, people familiar with the planning and execution of the mission told The Washington Post.

...

People familiar with the incident say the group did not act in coordination with any governments. U.S. intelligence agencies would have been especially reluctant to do so given the sensitive timing and brazen nature of the mission. But the raid represents the most ambitious operation to date for an obscure organization that seeks to undermine the North Korean regime and encourage mass defections, they say. The CIA agents, led by torture queen Gina Haspel, are snowflakes who would never break the law or cause some international outrage. It must have been some independent group: This group is the first known resistance movement against North Korea, which makes its activities very newsworthy, said Sung-Yoon Lee, a North Korea expert at Tufts University. The identity of the assailants is a particularly sensitive topic given the delicate nature of Trump and Kims relationship.

...

Any hint of U.S. involvement in an assault on a diplomatic compound could have derailed the talks, a prospect the CIA would likely be mindful of. Derailing the talks was (and is) exactly what Trump's National Security Advisor John Bolton wanted to do. We know that because the Post reported it on February 20, two days before the raid on the embassy and seven days before the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi: Last month, in a lengthy speech at Stanford University, [Trump's special envoy Stephen E.] Biegun set out his vision for North Korea to dismantle its plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities in exchange for corresponding measures by the United States. Hawks such as Bolton have fiercely opposed this step-by-step process in favor of maintaining maximum pressure through economic sanctions that would, in theory, force a better deal by eroding North Koreas resolve. Tasking the CIA to raid a North Korean embassy to spoil the talks is exactly a thing John Bolton would do. The Post's shameful attempt to make believe otherwise is laughable: Infiltrating a North Korean embassy days before the nuclear summit would throw that all into jeopardy, said Sue Mi Terry, a former Korea analyst at the CIA. This is not something the CIA would undertake. The agency declined to comment. We can of course fully believe the 'former' CIA analyst's assertion that the CIA would never do such a thing. Aside from Bolton's urge to sabotage the negotiations it would have had no motive. Except, of course, it would have had many: Experts say the computers and phones seized in the raid amount to a treasure trove of information that foreign intelligence agencies are likely to seek out from the group. In 2017 Spain asked the North Korean ambassador Kim Hyok Chol to leave. He is now the leader of the negotiations with the United States. To know everything about him is important. He may even be susceptible to blackmail: The assailants also possess a video recording they took during the raid, which they could release anytime, said one person who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive and illegal operation. The Spanish language version of the El Pais report had a side box that might explain the possible content of a video (machine translated): One of the darkest aspects of the assault on the North Korean Embassy in Madrid is the interrogation to which the head of the command, who called himself The Entrepreneur, subjected the charge of business, leading the diplomatic delegation since the ambassador was expelled. The head of the commando separated the diplomat from the rest of the hostages and locked himself alone with him. It is not known what he intended, but the current head of the Pyongyang delegation in Madrid probably knows a lot about Kim Hyok Chol, head of the North Korean delegation in the nuclear negotiations before the US, with whom he coincided when the latter was ambassador in Madrid, between 2014 and 2017. Mentioning a video recording taken during the raid is supposed to sow 'fear and doubt' in and about the North Korean negotiator. The new Washington Post/CIA story goes on to describe the 'regime change' organization that is supposed to divert from the direct CIA involvement in the raid: The Cheollima group, which also goes by the name Free Joseon, came to prominence in 2017 after it successfully evacuated the nephew of Kim Jong Un from Macau when potential threats to his life surfaced. The nephew was the son of Kim Jong Nam, the North Korean leaders exiled half brother who was assassinated in a nerve-gas attack in a Malaysian airport in 2017.

...

For safety reasons, the leader of the group does not disclose his name, and his identity is known only to a small group of people. Cheollima is the name of a mythical horse in Chinese and Korean folklore. The Joseon dynasty ruled Korea from 1392 to 1897. It went down when Japan tried to gain control of the country which it achieved a few years later. Kim Jong Nam was killed on February 13, 2017. In a redacted video his son Kim Han-sol thanks the people who picked him up. (They might want to use him as a future replacement for Kim Jong-un.) The video was recorded on February 15 2017 ("my father was killed two days ago"). It was published on March 7 2017 on a Cheollima channel on Youtube created on March 4 2017. The Cheollima website domain the group uses was anonymously registered in March 2017. It was updated on November 29 2018 shortly after the South Korean NIS received new orders from its headquarter in Washington DC. Cheollima/Free Joseon also seeks defectors from North Korea. On February 28 2019 (not "in March" as the Post claims), the very same day the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi failed, Cheollima published a manifesto that clearly aims at 'regime change' in North Korea: WE DECLARE ON THIS DAY the establishment of Free Joseon, a provisional government preparing the foundations for a future nation built upon respect for principles of human rights and humanitarianism, holding sacred a manifest dignity for every woman, man, and child. We declare this entity the sole legitimate representative of the Korean people of the north. The U.S. driven 'regime change' attempt in Venezuela also has a figure that claims to be the "sole legitimate representative" while having zero power in that country. The English version of the manifest reads like it was written by someone who is a native English speaker or at least studied English literature: Joseon must and shall be free. Arise! Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves! We reject the chains of our historic unrequited grief, declare henceforth a new era in our history, and prepare the way for a New Joseon. We therefore proclaim the birth of our revolution and our intentions towards building a more just and equal society, as truest expressions of the shared affections of our people. A report on the manifest launch in the British Sun remarks: The Cheollima Civil Defense (CCD) organisation has declared itself as a shadow government which is working to overthrow the regime.

...

Not a lot is known about the CCD but some people believe it is linked to South Koreas spy agency. The White Helmets, the MI-6 organization for 'regime change' in Syria, has the website domain "www.syriacivildefense.org". Cheollima's website domain is "www.cheollimacivildefense.org". The logos of the two organization are also somewhat similar.

Is there a corporate design/marketing company specialized in promoting spy service cutouts for 'regime change'? The 'former' CIA analyst in the Post piece 'predicts' that there will be more 'embassy raid' operations: In its messaging, the group said they have formed a provisional government to replace the regime in Pyongyang, said Terry, who is a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. They have now shown the seriousness of their intent and some capabilities to carry out operations. We will see in the coming months the extent of their capabilities. While the CIA makes a hapless attempt to cover its traces in Madrid, North Korea continues to follow its game plan for the next round of negotiations. It prepares the public for a U.S. failure: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon decide whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain his moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, a senior North Korean official said Friday, adding that the U.S. threw away a golden opportunity at the recent summit between their leaders.

...

She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States takes measures that are commensurate to the changes it has taken  such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests  and changes its political calculation. The North Korean statement blames Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo for the failure of the negotiations while it empathizes a special relation between Kim and Trump. The signaled satellite launch by North Korea will proceed. It will push the Trump administration back to the starting point of its efforts to 'denuclearize' North Korea. The difference now is that North Korea has earned good will in China and Russia. It showed its willingness to negotiate and stuck to its commitments made in the Joint Declaration in Singapore while the U.S. obviously refused to fulfill its parts. China and Russia already gave North Korea some unofficial 'sanction relief'. They are unlike to again support the failed 'maximum pressure' approach the Trump administrations once set out with. The hapless CIA nonsense will not change those facts. Posted by b on March 15, 2019 at 22:50 UTC | Permalink Comments next page  next page 
The Department of Defense has submitted its fiscal 2020 budget proposal to Congress. The $718 billion request represents a 5% increase over fiscal 2019. However, the $247 billion in investment funding (procurement and research, development, test, and evaluation, or RDT&E) is more pertinent for defense companies and is slated to rise only 2% year over year. Despite this lackluster growth, the budget is in line with our expectations, and were not moving our fair value estimates for the contractors we cover.

We see four takeaways for investors:
A Teranet report released earlier this month found that tougher qualification rules have shaved a chunk off the Big Five banks market share in Ontarios mortgage lending sector. These major institutions accounted for 72.6% of the Ontario markets new mortgages in last year, compared to 75.3% in 2017 and 73.7% in 2016.

Read more: GTAs borrowers are dumping traditional mortgages

Said growth in the popularity of non-major bank options was quite apparent in Toronto, where private lenders represented an 8.9% share in 2018.

The sectors steady growth can be attributed to what a February analysis by online comparison portal LowestRates.ca uncovered: The lowest mortgage rates offered by the countrys leading banks are consistently higher-priced than similar products from alternative lenders.

As an example, the study noted that RBC cut its 5-year fixed-rate mortgage to 3.74% back in January, but as of last month, the best available 5-year fixed-rate term from non-bank lenders was at a 3.23% rate.
A major factor in this intensification is the fact that tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon will be hiring tens of thousands of new workers and spend billions in office expansions over the next few years.

Microsoft currently has 2,300 employees in the country and 14,000 partners, which could grow to 60,000 overall jobs between employees and partners. Amazon will also grow substantially with plans for 6,000 new jobs across corporate offices in Vancouver and Toronto and multiple new fulllment centres, the report noted.

Read more: Tech might save commercial real estate during a recession

In particular, Montreal  which plays host to two of Canadas leading universities and a bustling AI research scene  will enjoy much of the fruits of these developments.

[R&D is] encouraging the development of new purpose-built rentals to meet the growing demand. Rental rent growth will remain robust this year despite a new delivery high for the current cycle, drawing more investment capital to the apartment sector.
Montreal continues to surpass the once-blazing markets of Toronto and Vancouver in terms of home price growth, according to the TeranetNational Bank of Canada House Price Index covering February 2019.

The citys real estate prices have reached a historic high in February, growing by 0.36% from the previous month and 5.15% year-over-year. This annual increase has made Montreal the only market among Canadas 11 largest cities to establish a new record.

For perspective, the Teranet HPI found that overall prices nationwide fell by 0.4% month-over-month in February, and are only 1.87% higher than the same time last year. In fact, the year-over-year increase was noted to be the third smallest non-recession increase, behind July and August of last year.
On the issue of B-20, only 57% of respondents are even aware of it, while half of all respondents feel it hurts affordability. Fifteen percent of respondents who are aware of the stress test believe it should be reduced below 200 basis points, and that surprises Daniel Johanis.

The 15% who believe the stress test should be reduced is a surprisingly low number, said the Rock Capital Investments mortgage broker. I field quite a few calls from clients who have circled back after a couple of years contemplating a purchase and theyre surprised that theyre in a worse predicament, as far as affordability goes. B-20 dampened the market.

Ten percent of respondents believe that amortizations should be extendedan idea that has gathered steam recently after NDP leader Jagmeet Singh called for the return of 30-year amortizations.

Some Canadians want an increase in the amortizationI know that definitely would be welcome for a lot of buyers, said Johanis. It would be a great thing to implement.

Another interesting finding from the Zoocasa poll is that 28% of respondents believe that increasing the first-time homebuyers tax credit would help affordability woes. It might still be early in the spring market, but Johanis says that there is no shortage of first-time buyers taking full advantage of the tax credit.
 Flash

China on Thursday said that it firmly opposed a United States human rights report making unfounded accusations against China, urging the U.S. to stop interfering in China's internal affairs.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lu Kang made the remarks when commenting on the 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices released by the U.S. Department of State which again criticized China's human rights situation.

Just as that in the previous years, the China-related content of this year's report is full of ideological bias, disregards the facts, confuses right and wrong, and makes groundless accusations against China, Lu said.

"China firmly opposes it and has lodged solemn representations with the U.S. side," said Lu at a routine press briefing.

"The Chinese government attaches great importance to protecting and promoting human rights," Lu said. "Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, in particular over the past four decades of reform and opening-up, tremendous progress has been made in China's human rights cause."

"The Chinese people have the most say and our achievements are obvious to all," Lu said, adding China will continue to forge ahead on the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics and achieve new development along the way.

He urged the U.S. to take off its tainted glasses, abandon the Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice, view China's human rights situation in an objective and fair manner, and stop using this issue to interfere in China's internal affairs.

Lu said the U.S. should reflect on its own human rights situation and deal with its own issues first.
The chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Neil Chatterjee said he is in talks to open a regional office in Houston.



Chatterjee, speaking Thursday at CERAWeek by IHS Markit, an energy conference in Houston, said Texas plays an important role with regards to LNG permitting, and that he's in discussions with Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to open a regional office in Houston.

Houston companies are leading the development of LNG export terminals along the the Gulf Coast and elsewhere.

"The type of expertise to (review LNG permits) is here in Houston," he said. "A Houston office makes a lot of sense."

LNG has become a major topic for the commission after it recently cleared the construction of the Calcasieu Pass LNG export terminal in Louisiana after commissioners were divided on the climate impacts of LNG infrastructure. The division had threatened to delay billions of dollars worth of LNG projects.

Chatterjee, during a luncheon speech, reiterated his conservative approach to regulations, saying that FERC's role is sometimes to "simply get out of the way."

He also spoke at length on cybersecurity, saying he believes regulators and Congress need to focus on threats to the nation's pipeline system as well as legal challenges to infrastructure.

Chatterjee said natural gas pipelines are critical to U.S. security and that the commission is very focused on security standards for the nation's pipeline network. The commission plans to host a conference with the Department of Energy and the Transporation Security Administration on the topic of security at the end of the month, he said.

"America's critical infrastructure is increasingly under attack," he said.

Chatterjee said he met with TSA in January about pipeline cybersecurity and that it's an issue that Congress has rightly been focused on as of late.

But another threat to natural gas infrastructure is in the courts, Chatterjee said. Lawsuits by environmental groups and communities that don't want pipelines in their backyard are an increasing legal challenge for regulators in making sure permits can withstand "sophisticated" legal challenges by "well-meaning people," he said.

RELATED: FERC chair says power market shifts "vexing"

Chatterjee spoke of diversifying the energy mix but emphasized putting competition first, and finding ways to keep prices low for consumers as new renewable technologies come online.

"The increasing reliance on electric infrastructure and expanding threats to the grid, (makes us) take a closer look at if we're doing enough to protect ourselves," Chatterjee said. "Solar and wind has the potential to fundamentally alter the way we consume energy."
Oilfield Helping Hands gives first Permian Basin grants

Oilfield Helping Hands, a nonprofit organization that helps oilfield families in financial crisis, has awarded its first grants from the Permian Basin Chapter. The chapter held its first meeting under new leadership in November.

To qualify for a grant, an applicant must work for one of OHHs corporate members or live and work in an area covered by the Permian Basin Chapter. He or she must also have a minimum of four years experience in exploration and production, and 75 percent of income must derive from that employment.

We are proud to provide support to our first grant recipients in the Permian Basin region, Justin Robertson, Permian Basin Chapter president, said in a press release. Our mission -- to provide financial aid to oilfield families in crisis through no fault of their own -- is made possible by the support of our corporate members and volunteers.

Our chapter meets every month and has upcoming fundraising events scheduled, including The Black and Gold Bash, slated for June 2019. We are seeking sponsors for these upcoming events, he said.

H-E-Bs Hunger Stops Here donates to WTFB

H-E-Bs Hunger Stops Here campaign is to donation $4,500 to West Texas Food Bank, one of 10 beneficiaries. The presentation is planned for today.

The campaign raised $26,000 for food banks and community nonprofits across Texas.

Throughout February, H-E-B restaurants donated a portion of sales from every transaction to the Hunger Stops Here campaign, which is a part of H-E-Bs Food Bank Assistance Program, a year-round initiative that raises awareness and battles hunger. Participating H-E-B restaurants included True Texas BBQ in Midland and Odessa. The effort also benefitted from H-E-B restaurant orders placed via Favor, an on-demand delivery service.

Last year, H-E-B donated more than 32 million pounds of food through this effort. Since the program started, H-E-B has donated more than 1 billion pounds of food to 5,500 nonprofit organizations in Texas and Mexico.

Bush home to host childrens author for Down syndrome awareness

Texas author and artist Jordan Burk will appear at the George W. Bush Childhood Home to sign copies of Kelly and the Great Pinewood Derby. The childrens book is the first in a planned series Burk based on his late uncle, Kelly Burk, who had the genetic disorder.

The signing will be held in the visitors center from 1-3 p.m. Thursday, which is World Down Syndrome Day.

Following this event will be the regularly scheduled Third Thursday Reading event by Laura Bush Literacy Program at 4:30 p.m. where Burk will read his book and share stories about his uncle.

The George W. Bush Childhood Home is located at 1412 W. Ohio Ave.

Midland Vet Center to host a 50th-anniversary commemorative

The Midland Vet Center, 4400 N. Midland Drive, will host a 50th anniversary Vietnam War commemoration ceremony on March 29. The event will include a presentation of lapel pins to veterans in attendance.

The vet center provides free counseling, outreach and referral services to veterans, active duty service members and their families. For more information, call 697-8222.
During the last semester for high school seniors, Trinity School has made an effort to achieve one of its main goals for these students: to prepare them to enter adulthood.

Over the past two weeks, the school has worked to accomplish this with a panel discussion and workshop. Seven Trinity graduates younger than 35 spoke to all high school students on Feb. 28 and "Life 101"  a workshop on tasks and topics that would be covered in a basic home economics course  was presented to the graduating class of seniors last week.

During the panel discussion, the graduates gave advice and shared their Trinity experience and how it benefited them after graduation. Speaking on a range of different fields and expertise were:

--Michael Wood, class of 2004.

Wood studied economics and history at New York University and later received his MBA at Southern Methodist University. He is a U.S. Marine Corps reservist and is the owner of Lone Star Policy Institute.

--Mike Christensen, class of 2006.

Christensen studied political science and Spanish at Texas Christian University and later attended Texas Tech School of Law. He is an attorney with Stubbeman, McRae, Sealy, Laughlin & Browder Inc.

--Carrie Hawkins, class of 2007.

Hawkins studied design at University of Texas in Austin. She is a graphic designer at Pearly Gates Designs.

--Laura Quinn Sonnenberg, class of 2008.

Sonnenberg studied at Texas Tech University and is now a physician assistant.

--Beth Webster, class of 2011.

Webster studied psychology at Baylor University, and later attended Brandeis University for graduate school in the same field. She is a prevention specialist at the Life Center.

--Nelson Grimes, class of 2011.

Grimes received his certificate in energy management at UT and later studied ranch management at TCU. He is a land man with Endeavor Energy Services.

--Will Tindol, class of 2011.

Tindol studied petroleum engineering at Texas A&M University. He is a drilling engineer with Concho Resources.

Each of the panelists said they thought Trinity adequately prepared them for the "real world" and were grateful for the experience.

Webster said Trinity provides a great opportunity to network and make connections. For instance, the sixth-grader who taught her to read when she was in first grade is the daughter of her now-boss.

She said she also had great teachers who were easy to talk to and create close relationships with. When she attended Brandies, she said some of her classmates struggled to complete the same assignments she was expected to complete during her high school education  such as long research papers.

"Don't take it for granted," Webster said.

After the panel, students attended a separate discussion, with one of the graduates of choice, to discuss their experience more in-depth.

The Life 101 workshop trained seniors in self-defense, first aid and CPR  with college-specific scenarios  and mental health in college, providing students with resources and ways to help.

Teresa Porath  a licensed professional counselor of Centers for Children and Families  presented the mental health portion. She began with an activity, dividing students into groups and having them read to the class different scenarios of mental health struggles. After listening to the scenario, the class was to identify the disorder and offer solutions.

The program addressed bipolar disorder, eating disorder, anxiety, depression, identity development and suicidal thoughts.

"Mental health issues can be overlapping," Porath said.

Throughout the activity, the students' solutions had a common theme of offering support to their friends. The students also said they would suggest resources, including therapy, the counseling center, the residential advisors and clubs and organizations that would help them become involved.

A PowerPoint presentation followed the activity, and Porath offered 11 helpful tips to students for their first year of college, including "if you're not a morning person, don't schedule an 8 a.m. class" and "set realistic goals for yourself." She also encouraged students to develop healthy coping skills, manage their time and stress and "work hard, but don't be too hard on yourself."

Aside from health in college, there was also a session on professional communications and a session on money management led by a representative of First Basin Credit Union. The workshop also taught students traditional life skills, including sewing basics and clothing care, as well as basic auto care.

John Klassen, Trinity government and economics professor, said one of the interesting things about the program is that the students requested it.

"They had a lot of issues and things that they worried about," Klassen said. "So, the faculty and the administration put this together, with their own wants and desires in mind, along with some things we thought would be helpful to them. It's really kind of a smorgasboard, but it's designed specifically for things they might notice their freshman year."

Student body president Greg Shipkey said he will either attend University of Arizona or the University of California, Los Angeles  which are both very different from Midland and Trinity.

He said the panel was great, because learning from individuals who attended Trinity  just like him  and hearing their stories was inspirational, and let students know they could achieve the same things.

Life 101 was also helpful, he said, because he did not know how to sew  and he also did not know the basic auto care information he was going to be taught later that afternoon.

"(UA and UCLA) are big universities far away from home," Shipkey said. "But I think Trinity has prepared us, and these last two weeks have been really helpful to getting us there."

Follow Brandi on Twitter for more education news: @BrandiDAddison
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The U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that all U.S. diplomats remaining in Venezuela departed the South American country on Thursday.

Calling the withdrawal "temporary departure," Pompeo said in a statement released by the State Department that U.S. diplomats will continue their work from other locations.

The U.S. diplomats' exit came after Pompeo announced on Monday night the decision of withdrawing all remaining U.S. personnel from its embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, within this week.

On Tuesday, Venezuelan government ordered American diplomats to leave within 72 hours.

The United States recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's "interim president" on Jan. 23, days after Maduro was inaugurated for a second term as Venezuelan president.

In response to Washington's support for Guaido, Maduro announced that he was severing "diplomatic and political" ties with the United States.

The Trump administration recently has kept piling up pressure on Maduro.
If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved

By Michael Tomasky

Liveright. 273 pp. $27.95

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The United States faces a national emergency - and it has nothing to do with immigration. It is a crisis of democracy. Self-government requires a willingness to accept disagreement and respect the opposition. But for decades Americans and their political leaders have been sliding in the opposite direction, threatening to send our democracy into permanent stalemate or, worse, civil war.

In his riveting new book, "If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved," Michael Tomasky traces the history of conflict in American democracy and shows why self-rule is at risk today. Deep divisions, of course, are as old as the nation itself. For the most part, except for the shattering clash over slavery, Americans have sought to bargain their way toward political settlements. Tomasky shows that throughout American history - until now - our political parties were composed of unstable coalitions that helped facilitate dealmaking to resolve national conflicts. In the past, party members at times voted with the opposition to produce results. But since the 1990s, the Republican Party has marched in lockstep in support of its platform and in opposition to any deviations from it. As a result, partisanship has intensified and the democratic process of compromise has suffered.

Over time, the Republicans and Democrats evolved into conservative and liberal parties, but they are now, in Tomasky's words, "totally different creatures." The Republican Party has become "the conservative movement," while the Democratic Party is "a different kind of vehicle," a patchwork of diverse groups "too disparate to add up to a movement." Even if small openings have appeared - a dozen Republican senators breaking ranks to vote against President Trump's emergency declaration over funding for a border wall, for instance - real compromise between the parties still seems less likely than ever.

It wasn't always so. At the Constitutional Convention, small states insisted on equal power with large states. That explains why every state has two U.S. senators, while House seats are allocated according to population. Southern states, notably South Carolina and Georgia, threatened to bolt from the convention if abolishing slavery even came up for debate. So, in an awful bargain, slavery survived. Disagreements could be a matter of life and death, as the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr illustrated. But reconciliation was preferable and, Tomasky shows, possible. In his inaugural address after the hotly contested election of 1800, which lay behind Burr's hatred of Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson declared, "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," and he meant it. Beneath their squabbles, Americans shared common ground.

As the 19th century wore on, the parties struck bargains again. But Tomasky makes clear that compromises were possible because divisions within the parties disguised a widening divide on slavery until the Civil War wrenched the nation apart. Abraham Lincoln tried valiantly in his second inaugural address to "bind up the nation's wounds" by observing that the North shared guilt for the nation's original sin of slavery. But his assassination reopened those wounds.

Tomasky aims his engaging popular history at "average concerned citizens" rather than pundits or scholars. It is a delight to read. A responsible, accurate history (with the single exception of locating Woodrow Wilson's birthplace in Georgia instead of Virginia), it is informed by recent historical scholarship but not weighed down by it. Tomasky also draws heavily on the best recent analyses of our current condition, including E.J. Dionne's "How the Right Went Wrong" and Greg Sargent's "An Uncivil War."

Tomasky shows that into the 20th century the parties were still able to overcome their differences, in part because of their internal divisions. Anger over the plight of farmers and industrial workers simmered until both parties adopted progressive reform measures, under Republican President Theodore Roosevelt and Democratic President Wilson. President Franklin Roosevelt was later forced to accede to Southern Democrats' demands that the signature achievements of the New Deal exclude agricultural and domestic workers, i.e., most African-Americans. The New Deal survived thanks to support from both sides of the aisle because both parties were ideologically incoherent coalitions. Moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats, although uneasy, agreed to let the programs stand. In 1954 Republican President Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar that "should any party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again." Only a "tiny splinter group" consisting mostly of "Texas oil millionaires" disagreed. But "their number is negligible," Ike concluded, "and they are stupid." Maybe so, but their influence has grown steadily ever since.

While compromise was more frequent before our current era, it's important not to romanticize its prevalence in the first 150 conflict-filled years of U.S. history. However, the challenges of the Depression and World War II did, indeed, bring Americans together. Tomasky contends that relative to what came before and after, the years from FDR's election in 1932 to Ronald Reagan's in 1980 can be termed "the age of consensus." In this unique period, business and labor, rich and poor, and different ethnic and racial groups came to share a common "civic faith," a belief that "the American way of life" makes room for everybody, even though in reality many were excluded from full participation.

As early as 1964, when Republicans put forward Barry Goldwater as their presidential nominee, right-wing activists were at work hardening the conservative line. Goldwater's defeat failed to discourage Americans still furious over the New Deal and alarmed by the civil rights and women's movements. In the following years, some groups and individuals invested unprecedented amounts of money in efforts to drag the Republican Party toward extreme positions on a variety of issues, from the government's role in the economy to abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, gay rights and immigration. The result has been increasingly rigid partisanship, an unwillingness to compromise that makes it impossible for our democracy to function. This is the national emergency we face.

What is to be done? In the spirit of Wilson at the end of the war to end wars, Tomasky offers his own Fourteen Points. His political fixes: to end gerrymandering, Senate filibusters and the electoral college; increase the size of the House; shift from our unusual system of winner-take-all elections to the proportional representation of candidates from different parties within state delegations to Congress; and implement ranked-choice voting, which encourages moderation because in such systems all candidates have an incentive to be voters' second choice, even if they will not be the first choice. All of these are sensible ideas, but as Tomasky concedes, they are highly unlikely because all these steps would threaten the far-right fringe that controls the Republican Party. His cultural fixes: foreign-exchange programs to give high schoolers, college students and young employees of big corporations a chance to encounter the conditions and views of communities unlike their own; engendering social responsibility in corporate leaders now interested only in short-term profits; and expanding the study of history and civics to awaken students to their civic duties.

Finally, Tomasky implores the left not to further fracture our fractured politics. At a moment when many Democrats are encouraging the party to go low in its electoral strategy and to advance truly ambitious, budget-busting programs such as Medicare for all, tuition-free college and a Green New Deal, Tomasky makes an impassioned - and persuasive - plea for progressives to aim instead for incremental progress that will attract middle-of-the-road voters. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he was impressed as much by Americans' willingness to help one another and by their civic engagement as he was by their industriousness. He thought these qualities reinforced each other. What we need now, Tomasky shows, is to redirect our passion toward rebuilding our democracy, renouncing hyper-partisanship, and cultivating commitments to reasoned debate, respectful disagreement and an unending search for responsible compromise.

---

Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren professor of American history at Harvard. His recent books include "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition" and "Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought."
PITTSFIELD  Two people were arrested Thursday on drug- and weapons-related charges after deputies, city police and officers from a regional drug task force searched an East Griggsville Street residence.

Authorities said they found cannabis and substances designed to look like LSD blotter papers inside the house when it was searched about 10:30 a.m. Thursday.
For years now, President Trump has prioritized border security above all else. And for good reason: We have a state of emergency at our southern border.

That is why the American people continually state illegal immigration as one of the top problems facing our country.

Unfortunately, congressional Democrats are ignoring their constituents and illegal immigration writ large. Not only are Democrats preventing Trump from constructing the border wall, but they have also taken to smearing law enforcement agencies and the public servants who keep Americans safe. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York recently described Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a dangerous agency, vowing to defund ICE and eventually abolish it. Unhinged by the Trump presidency, Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez have even argued that Latino people should be exempt from immigration laws because they are native to the United States.

The Democrats are not alone. Now, some Republicans are openly opposing Trump as well  at the expense of national security. After Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina publicly stated they would side with the Democrats resolution disapproving of the presidents national emergency declaration. They were recently joined by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who put it this way: I cannot support the use of emergency powers to get more funding (for the wall).

In other words, these Republican senators are accepting the status quo  an unsecure border that costs American citizens, in the realist of terms. America is now home to more than 22 million undocumented immigrants  the equivalent of Australias entire population.

And they do not come cheap to the American taxpayer. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the total cost of illegal immigration  at the federal, state and local levels  comes out to nearly $135 billion annually. Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants contribute only about $20 billion in federal, state and local taxes.

Of course, illegal immigrations economic burden is just the tip of the iceberg. Theres also the crime: The Texas Department of Public Safety reported that, from 2011 to 2018, 186,000 undocumented immigrants were booked into local jails and faced 292,000 charges. Were looking at thousands of assault cases, weapons charges and homicides  in Texas alone.

In one recent year, Border Patrol agents in San Diego confiscated almost 83,000 kilograms of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin from the three ports of entry in that area. Laredo, Texas, was a close second, as law enforcement agents seized just in excess of 70,000 kilograms of drugs.

These drugs make their way from South America to states all across America, ravaging local communities and putting American families at risk. Illegal immigration is not just a problem for California or Texas  harsh consequences are felt in New Hampshire, West Virginia and countless other states.

Fortunately, Trump is doing his best to solve the problem. After the Trump administration implemented a zero tolerance crackdown on illegal immigration, border drug prosecutions took a nosedive. The number of people charged under drug-trafficking laws dropped by 30 percent along the southern border. In fact, federal prosecutors charged fewer people with drug-trafficking violations than at any point since the early 2000s.

We can only solve the problem from a position of strength. And we need that now more than ever: Federal authorities expect another surge in illegal immigration this year, as the winter turns to spring and summer. Last month, law enforcement agents detained more than 70,000 migrants  up from 58,000 in January.

What we dont need is weakness, especially coming from Republican senators. Those who fail to support border security arent just letting down Trump; they are letting down the American people.

The status quo is no longer acceptable. Our national security is at risk.

Its time for leadership. Its time to build the wall.

Ted Harvey is chairman of the Committee to Defend the President.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order earlier this week, placing a moratorium on the death penalty in California.

Newsom was Fridays KVML Newsmaker of the Day.

The executive order also called for withdrawing Californias lethal injection protocols and immediately closing the execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison. The order does not provide for the release of any individual from prison or otherwise alter any current conviction or sentence.

The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as Governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual, said Newsom. Our death penalty system has been, by all measures, a failure. It has discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown, or cant afford expensive legal representation. It has provided no public safety benefit or value as a deterrent. It has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Most of all, the death penalty is absolute. Its irreversible and irreparable in the event of human error.

There are 737 people currently on death row in California. California has the largest death row population in the Western Hemisphere  one in four people on death row in the United States are in California.

According to Newsom, the death penalty is unevenly and unfairly applied to people of color, people with mental disabilities, and people who cannot afford costly legal representation. More than six in ten people on Californias death row are people of color. A 2005 study found that those convicted of killing whites were more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as those convicted of killing blacks and more than four times as likely as those convicted of killing Latinos. At least 18 of the 25 people executed in the U.S. in 2018 had one or more of the following impairments: significant evidence of mental illness; evidence of brain injury, developmental brain damage, or an IQ in the intellectually disabled range; chronic serious childhood trauma, neglect, and/or abuse.

The Governor also stated that innocent people have been sentenced to death in California. Since 1973, 164 condemned prisoners nationwide, including five in California, have been freed from death row after they were found to have been wrongfully convicted. No person has been executed since 2006 because Californias execution protocols have not been lawful. Yet today, 25 California death row inmates have exhausted all of their state and federal appeals and could be eligible for an execution date.

Since 1978, California has spent $5 billion on a death penalty system that has executed 13 people. Three states  Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania  have Governor-imposed moratoria on the death penalty and in 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional and racially biased.

The Newsmaker of the Day is heard every weekday morning at 6:45, 7:45 and 8:45 on AM 1450 and FM 102.7 KVML.
Sonora, CA  Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator from California Kamala Harris supports Governor Gavin Newsoms death penalty moratorium and wants to take it one step further.

Harris speaking on National Public Radio yesterday says there should be a federal moratorium on executions. Her voicing of this stance came a day after Newsom signed an executive order placing a moratorium on executions, which in turn granted reprieves to 737 death row inmates, as reported here.

When asked whether there should be a federal equivalent to Newsoms order. Harris replied, Yes, I think that there should be. Further questioned regarding whether no one would be executed if Harris was president of the United States, she responded, Correct, correct.

While Californias attorney general, Harris defended the states use of the death penalty. In a statement Wednesday, she lamented that it is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective, and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars. She says it is an issue she has addressed before and has always voiced her opposition to government sponsored executions.
HOUSTON _ A former U.S. Border Patrol agent was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in federal prison for helping cocaine and immigrant smugglers and selling immigration documents.

David Duque Jr., 36, pleaded guilty in September to bribery and three counts of unlawfully transferring identification documents.

Prosecutors showed Duque accepted $5,000 to allow a vehicle hauling nearly five kilograms of cocaine through the Falfurrias checkpoint on June 14. An FBI agent testified that Duque also assisted in immigrant smuggling and sold identification documents he acquired while working.

U.S. District Judge Gray H. Miller sentenced Duque to 14 years for the bribery conviction, to be followed by three years of supervised release and a $2,500 fine. Miller imposed five years on each of the three counts of unlawfully transferring identification documents with the sentences to run concurrently.

Duque's bond was revoked during the hearing and he was taken into custody of the U.S. Marshals Service.

An FBI agent said Thursday that Duque had been allowing cocaine and illegal immigrants through the Falfurrias checkpoint for several years and sold almost 70 identification documents including passports, birth certificates, green cards and Social Security cards.
The Contemporary Art Museum Plainview (CAMP) is the recipient of a $15,000 grant through the Community Foundation of West Texas, CAMP announced via news release on Thursday.

The grant will be used to fund CAMP's 2019 programs, which include three exhibitions and three community projects, according to the news release.

"Community projects include a mural with the Juvenile Justice Alternative Education Program of Hale County, CAMP Kids summer classes and 2nd Saturdays at the Museum," the news release reads.

The exhibitions include "Rural Elements" by BC Gilbert of Wichita Falls, "A Retrospective," by Bale Creek Allen and the exhibition currently on display at the museum, "A Wheeler Brother's Retrospective: The Lubbock Years," according to the news release.

"This grant will help CAMP reach one of its major objectives, to make Plainview Texas a destination city for the arts." said Executive Director Kelly Alison, in a provided statement on the news release. "Rural Communities are the new frontier in the arts and our programing is designed to bring creatives and their supporters together, participating in initiatives that will benefit the people of Plainview and the wellbeing of the entire city."

CAMP is a nonprofit organization that serves Plainview and the surrounding area with a mission to unite people through art and to help increase tourism as a result.

According to the news release, the funding from the foundation reflects for the CAMP program reflects about one third of the museum's annual budget.

The Community Foundation of West Texas was created in 1981 to be a resource to impact the communities it serves by providing a financial resource to help improve quality of life by providing thousands of dollars each year to go toward community grants and scholarships.

For additional information about CAP, visit www.contemporaryartmuseumplainview.org or call (713)826-9605 to talk to Alison. For information about the Community Foundation of West Texas, visit www.communityfoundationofwesttexas.org.
The Plainview City Council voted Tuesday night to approve the first reading of an ordinance meant to protect the waterfowl at Travis Trussell Pond.

The Parks and Recreation ordinance restricts activities including operating remote-controlled boats and aircrafts at the park. Those who violate the ordinance could receive a fine.

Councilwoman Teressa King, District 4, questioned whether the ordinance would be too restricting for the parks and during the work session, she asked if there had been any problems reported.

During the meeting, Tim Crosswhite, director of parks and recreation, said there had been a couple.

But there were already restrictions in place that applied to every park in Plainview prohibiting any aircraft except in designated areas, he said. The restriction of floatation devices, which would apply exclusively to Travis Trussell Park, is a new addition to the ordinance.

"It (the park) was really meant to be a sanctuary for the birds," he explained.

It was also meant to be a place to birdwatch, he added.

City Manager Jeffrey Snyder said protecting the waterfowl falls in line with the city's comprehensive plan.

The Council unanimously approved the first reading of the ordinance. Council members Nelda VanHoose, District 1, and Susan Blackerby, District 5, were absent.

The Council also unanimously approved the first reading of an ordinance reaffirming the juvenile curfew.

Plainview Police Chief Ken Coughlin said the state requires cities to vote on their curfew laws every three years and its time to vote on Plainview's.

During his presentation, Coughlin said the current curfew makes it unlawful for kids 16 years old and under to be out between the hours of 12:01 and 6 a.m. daily.

There are exceptions and PD officers are generally understanding if they do catch a juvenile out during those hours if they're not engaged in criminal activities, he said.

Coughlin believes the curfew is helpful in reducing crime.

Information he presented to the Council shows there were 242 calls regarding damaged property last year and 32 of them were during the curfew hours. He also noted 62 DUI reports outside of curfew and 48 during curfew hours.

Coughlin also said there were 22 juvenile arrests in 2018  11 for assaultive offenses, seven for drug-related offenses and four for thefts or mischief.

During the work session, he mentioned a House Bill currently going through the state legislature that would prohibit the imposition of curfews on juveniles. He doesn't believe it'll pass but he's keeping an eye on it, he said.

Following his presentation, Fire Chief Tim Gibson presented a resolution to the Council to authorize American Medical Response (AMR), a private transfer service, to take over emergency medical service transfers for the city.

Ground transport services are currently being provided through Aerocare, which was meant to be more of an aerial transport service, he said. It started doing more ground transports several years back when the hospital's transport services stopped.

AMR is Aerocare's parent holding company and is the ground transport side of the organization, he explained. AMR also provides ground transport services to several areas in the Panhandle and across the country.

The Council approved the resolution for the city to sign the permit to allow the change to move forward following a brief public hearing.

The Council also voted to approve amendments to the Minimum Housing/Dangerous Building Code ordinance following its second reading.

Minutes for the Feb. 21 and Feb. 26 City Council meetings were approved and absences were also excused.

The Council wrapped up its meeting by accepting a bid from Caldwell Country in Caldwell to purchase two 2019 Chevy Tahoes for the PD at $33,442 each.
Aside from the rodent droppings, dead roaches and flies spotted at restaurants this week, some staff at area eateries also partly contributed to low scores during random health inspections across the Alamo City this week.

For example, one health inspector jotted down they observed a staff member at a North Side Mexican restaurant who "failed to wash hands after sneezing into hand and after touching bare skin," according to an inspections report.

Meanwhile, at another North Side Mexican eatery, the wait staff told a health official that the "food was made the day before by afternoon shift."

LAST WEEK'S INSPECTIONS: March 8, 2019

Other gross violations included multiple dead or live roaches or fruit flies at a Northwest Side Vietnamese restaurant. The spot was also marked for using grocery style bags to store raw meat.

Click through the gallery above to see the gross highlights that city health inspectors observed at more than 40 San Antonio restaurants this week.

To land on this weekly list of restaurants compiled by the Express-News, an establishment must score 89 or below  or anything less than an "A"  during a random city health inspection.

The San Antonio Express-News examines hundreds of restaurant inspections each week conducted by the San Antonio Food and Environment Services division to bring you the eateries with scores of 89 or below.

Restaurants are graded on a 100-point system where "100" is a perfect score, and demerits are based upon the number of violations found during a regular food establishment inspection. There are three categories of demerits and each is assigned a demerit score of 3, 2, or 1 points, according to the health division.

If you have questions about inspections or complaints about a food establishment, contact the Metropolitan Health District office by calling 3-1-1 or 210-207-6000. Be prepared to provide the name, location, date of incident and details of the incident.
Out of the past comes these rare photos of the USS Houston during one of its visits to the Bayou City in the 1930s.

These first two photos, graciously provided to Bayou City History by Sandra Stockwell Cox, were found in a box of pictures from her deceased aunt.

The heavy cruiser visited Houston three times, in October 1930, September 1934 and April 1939. Here, we see the Houston docked at the Turning Basin in the Port of Houston. Which visit we're see here is undetermined. (If you definitely know, drop me a line and I'll add it here.)

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Explore Houston's past in our weekly archive dive

Thousands would turn out for the ship's weeklong visit to its namesake city after its shakedown cruise in 1930.

Four years later, the thing visitors had to see was President Franklin Roosevelt's quarters when he traveled on the ship during its travels to Hawaii and Portland, Oregon. In all, Roosevelt would hitch a ride on the ship he regarded as his favorite four times.

By February 1942, the Houston found itself off the coast of Java and Australia, aiming to keep Japanese forces from advancing further south from the Philippines toward the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. In the late-night hours of Feb. 28, the Houston and the Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth were traversing the waters of the Sunda Strait when the ships found themselves surrounded by Japanese forces preparing to invade Java. Despite the valiant fight both ships put up, the Houston and the Perth were sunk in early morning hours of March 1.

SCHIEFFER: The story of the USS Houston reminds us we're better together than alone

Of the roughly 1,100 aboard the Houston that night, 368 would survive, only to be captured by the Japanese. Dozens would die in captivity over the course of the war. The story of what happened to the Houston and its crew would not be fully known until the war's end.

The city of Houston would mobilize months after its sinking in a volunteer enlistment effort to replace those killed in action. A fundraising effort would generate $85 million to cover the costs to replace the Houston with a new ship and to construct a light aircraft carrier, the San Jacinto.

J.R. Gonzales, a third-generation Houstonian, covers local history with an eye toward the people and events that have mostly been forgotten to time. Follow him through Bayou City History on Facebook and Twitter. He can be reached at 713-362-6163 or john.gonzales@chron.com.
The cost of living is steadily increasing in Texas and Houston, encouraging potential homebuyers and renters to find cheaper housing in the suburbs.

According to a previous Chronicle article, it is about $9,000 cheaper for Americans to live in the suburbs rather than the city. In Houston, it's about $5,368 cheaper.
NEW YORK  Organized crime leaders have long been shrouded in a layer of mystique that has made their deaths a matter of public intrigue and Mafia folklore. But it had been decades since a mafia boss was killed in New York City, until Wednesday.

Francesco Cali, the reputed boss of the Gambino crime family, was fatally shot outside his home on Staten Island on Wednesday night. Cali, 53, was shot six times, a police official has said, and there was a report of a blue pickup leaving the scene around the time of shooting.

Calis sudden, violent death potentially places him in a long line of mafia leaders who, have been targeted for assassination. Past mob figures have often been shot in moments of vulnerability  while eating out or relaxing at the barber. Their killers were rarely brought to justice. In fact, the slayings often led to more violence and, in some cases, the killers ended up being killed themselves.

Heres a look at some other high-profile mob hits in New York.

Paul Castellano, 1985

Paul Castellano led the Gambino crime family for years, conducting business from a mansion in Todt Hill  the same Staten Island neighborhood where Cali was killed Wednesday.

In December 1985, Castellano, 70, and an associate stepped out of a limousine outside Sparks Steak House in midtown Manhattan when three men approached. The assassins drew semi-automatic weapons from under their trench coats and opened up a barrage of gunfire at close range, striking Castellano and his associate about six times. Bystanders were sent screaming and diving into doorways. The gunmen fled on foot and jumped into a waiting dark car that sped away.

Castellano and the associate fell dead beside the open doors of their black Lincoln limousine. Castellano was face up, his head slouched against the seat of the limousine, his feet sprawled on the pavement.

Carmine Galante, 1979

Carmine Galante, who had been described by police as the head of a 200member crime family, was considered to be one of the most powerful organized crime figures in the nation. He had been a target for a year or more because of his supposed aspirations to succeed Carlo Gambino as head of the Gambino crime family  the job given to Castellano instead.

In July 1979, Galante, 69, was slain in a hail of bullets fired by three skimasked gunmen, apparently on the orders of a rival crime family. He had been dining on the patio of a small Italian restaurant in Brooklyn.

Two other men  a bodyguard for Galante and the owner of the restaurant  also were killed. The owners 17yearold son was seriously wounded in the attack.

All three of the slain men were unarmed and caught by surprise when they were shot at pointblank range by the killers, who escaped the scene. A cigar Galante had been puffing was still clenched in his teeth when the police arrived.

Joseph Gallo, 1972

In April 1972, Joseph Gallo, a Mafia figure known as Crazy Joe, was assassinated as he celebrated his 43rd birthday at a restaurant in Manhattans Little Italy neighborhood.

Almost immediately, some sources said his slaying was a result of the wars between the Colombo and Gallo families. No one was convicted in his death.

As the story goes, Gallo and his associates were sitting in the back of the restaurant, drinking soda and eating Italian delicacies, when his assassin strode silently through the door.

As gunfire broke out, there were screams and customers hit the floor. Gallo, mortally wounded, staggered out of the front door and collapsed in the street. His killer hopped into a waiting car and escaped into the darkness. No one was convicted in the slaying.

Joseph A. Colombo Sr., 1971

In 1971, Joseph A. Colombo Sr., who was believed to be the head of a Brooklyn Mafia family, was shot three times in the head while he stood in Columbus Circle in Manhattan waiting for a rally of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which he founded.

Seconds later, the man who the authorities said shot him, Jerome A. Johnson, was mysteriously shot to death with a stolen weapon.

The perplexing case led the police to believe that rivals of Colombo in the Italian underworld community had hired Johnson as an assassin, a police official said at the time, and then ordered the execution of Johnson to silence him.

No one was ever charged in Johnsons death, and no one was indicted in Colombos shooting. But some believed that Gallo was involved and that his assassination the next year was retribution for the attack on Colombo.

Colombo, 48 at the time, did not die immediately but fell into a coma and was left almost totally paralyzed. The once robust leader, who dressed expensively and was known for seeking the spotlight, spent his remaining years incapacitated at his estate. He died seven years later, in 1978, from a condition stemming from his gunshot wounds.

Albert Anastasia, 1957

Albert Anastasia, a feared mob boss who was known as the head of Murder Inc., an execution squad accused of dozens of murders in the early 20th century, had managed to escape death by the electric chair.

But death found him in a barbers chair, as he relaxed under a pile of hot towels.

Anastasia had been convicted of murder in 1921 and sentenced to death but was freed in a retrial. He was killed Oct. 25, 1957, when two men walked into the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel and drew their guns. The men, wearing scarves to hide their faces, shot Anastasia five times.

No arrests were made. But the authorities believed that Carmine J. Persico, a mob boss who died this month in prison, had a strong hand in his and other killings. In a sentencing memorandum about Persico in 1986, federal prosecutors said he had admitted to a relative, I killed Anastasia.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
A Houston police officer trying to pursue a possible stolen vehicle crashed into a pedestrian and two parked pickup trucks Friday afternoon, according to HPD.

The crash happened around 4 p.m. in the 700 block of W. Little York Road, authorities said.

Investigators say the officer was investigating a LoJack hit, which is a device used to track stolen vehicles. As the officer was speeding west on W. Little York with his lights and sirens on, he somehow veered left and crashed into the parking lot of a convenience store near Green Meadow Lane, according to Houston Police Department Lt. Thurston Roberson

BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: Get your Houston breaking news alerts delivered to you

It was not immediately clear why the officer to veer off the roadway, Roberson said.

In all, three people - including the pedestrian and officer - were rushed to area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, according to Roberson.

Other officers were unable to catch up with the vehicle they were pursuing, Roberson said.

RELATED: Suspects with AK-47 open fire during armored truck robbery in southwest Houston

HPD's Vehicular Crimes Division is investigating, working to determine if the officer followed procedure on pursuing vehicles.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story stated that two officers were in the police vehicle during the crash. That was according to initial information gathered on scene. Lt. Roberson later clarified only one officer was involved in the accident.

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
An incumbent known for his verbal flair, a woman trying to make history and a former presidential hopeful are vying to represent one of San Antonios most diverse City Council districts.

Freshman Councilman Manny Pelaez, who won a runoff for the seat two years ago, is facing two challengers in his re-election bid on the Northwest Side: Frankie-Gonzales Wolfe, a political consultant trying to become the first transgender person elected in Texas, and Tony Valdivia, a USAA analyst who made a quixotic run for president in 2016.

On ExpressNews.com: In District 1, incumbent Trevino faces most challengers of any San Antonio City Council member

District 8 starts at Callaghan Road just outside Loop 410 and runs northwest past Loop 1604. It includes the University of Texas at San Antonios main campus and the Medical District, and it has an unusually diverse population with thousands of refugees.

Here are the candidates in the order they will appear on the ballot.

District 8 candidates Manny Pelaez, incumbent Age: 45 Occupation: Attorney Family: Married, two children Education: Bachelor's, Trinity University; law degree, St. Mary's University In his own words: "Neither of (my opponents) will be able to claim that they have the experience I bring to the table." Tony Valdivia Age: 41 Occupation: Senior reporting analyst, USAA Family: Married, two children Education: Bachelor's, University of Houston In his own words: Running for president "really opened my eyes for what I could do in public office." Frankie Gonzales- Wolfe Age: 42 Occupation: Precinct chair, Bexar County Democratic Party Family: Married Education: Brackenridge High School; studying psychology at the University of the Incarnate Word In her own words: "This time around, I felt like I didn't need to help someone else be my voice." See More Collapse

Manny Pelaez, the 45-year-old incumbent, is a labor attorney who previously chaired the Brooks City Base Development Authority and was also a trustee for VIA Metropolitan Transit.

The councilman said he tackled a variety of issues in his first term, ranging from taxes to stray dogs.

Pelaez has advocated for a study on how the Bexar County Appraisal Districts methods differ from others across the state. The council is set to vote on that effort April 4, and he hopes it will lead to new answers on how to alleviate tax burdens here.

Another program Pelaez spearheaded helps stray dogs become service animals for veterans. That ordinance passed in January.

If re-elected, Pelaez said, he would continue addressing some of those issues. Hes also working on an ordinance that is aimed at boosting development of middle-class housing, among others.

Pelaez, who used to do stand-up comedy, is known for his verbal flourish on the dais. When the city was conducting its search for a new city manager, Pelaez equated the process to trying to select his favorite hero from Marvels The Avengers.

And when asked where he currently lives  the councilman faced scrutiny last election about whether he lived in District 8  Pelaez quipped: In a state of bliss. He added later that he moved to a new house that is still, he said, within district boundaries.

On ExpressNews.com: Mayoral duel will predictably take center stage in municipal elections

Tony Valdivia, 41, is a financial analyst for USAA making his second consecutive run for the District 8 seat. He received 10.69 percent of the vote in 2017 and finished fourth.

But it was his presidential campaign a year before that raised more eyebrows. After hearing complaints from his parents and their friends about the tenor of the race, Valdivia officially registered as a write-in candidate in 19 states and Washington, D.C., gleaning roughly 500 votes.

That experience really opened my eyes for what I could do in public service, he said.

Valdivia hopes to leverage his business experience in the citys budget process if hes elected. He wants the city to offer a $10,000 homestead exemption for property taxpayers.

He also wants to ease traffic congestion and the districts transit issues. He mentioned a railless train system in China, and he said its somewhat similar to the citys preliminary proposal to use rubber-wheeled, trackless trams as a rail alternative.

Its a whole lot more convenient than for me to try to take a bus to get to a lot of areas, Valdivia said.

The financial analyst also took issue with Pelaezs verbal style. He specifically mentioned the councilmans comments during a hearing on a proposal to demolish the old Beacon Hill Elementary building. Pelaez called school officials tacky and said they were using students as props. He said the superintendent was peddling exaggerations and hyperbole.

Thats not the type of representation I want, Valdivia said.

Pelaez said he thinks people are hungry for plainspoken politicians.

I think what Im known for on the dais is speaking hard truths, he said. Im keenly aware that Im known for saying uncomfortable things.

Frankie Gonzales-Wolfe, 42, is a political consultant and precinct chair for the Bexar County Democratic Party. She ran Monica Alcantaras campaign for chair of the party and has worked on numerous campaigns since 1996.

But this time, she said, shes not staying behind the scenes.

For the past 23 years, (I have) really been devoted to helping candidates who I thought were going to be the right voice for me at the table, Gonzales-Wolfe said. This time around, I felt like I didnt need to to help someone else be my voice.

The consultant brings a historic nature to the campaign: Shes trying to become the first transgender person elected to office in Texas.

As a very proud trans woman, I just felt that representation was important, Gonzales-Wolfe said, adding later: There is a lot of pressure that comes with that.  Somebody has to be first.

Gonzales previously worked in financial services. She rose to become an assistant vice president in human resources at Wells Fargo before retiring in 2017.

If elected, one of her top priorities would be to offer more incentives to locally owned small businesses. Gonzales-Wolfe said the city offers incentives to large corporations to lure them here, but that help often isnt afforded to smaller companies eyeing expansion within the city.

Dylan McGuiness covers City Hall and local politics in San Antonio. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | dylan.mcguinness@express-news.net | Twitter: @DylMcGuinness
San Antonio police need the public's help to crack a unsolved 2017 homicide.

On July 27, 2017, police found 36-year-old Jessica Ramona Gonzales in the 3500 block of South Flores Street wrapped in a black and white bed sheet, officials said.

FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox

Police determined she had been fatally shot in the head.

Before her death, Gonzales was one of three people to accuse Erick Montez, a former Bexar County detention deputy, of sexual assault. An indictment claims Montez sexually assaulted Gonzales on Dec. 31, 2012, while she was in jail on a drug possession charge.

Due to her death, the case in which Gonzales was the accuser has been dropped by state prosecutors.

Police previously said they have been unable to establish a link between Montez and the fatal shooting and that he is not a suspect in the homicide.

READ MORE: Woman found slain in South Side alley had accused former BCSO deputy of sexual assault

Montez was found guilty of an improper sexual relationship with an inmate that occurred on Dec. 27, 2015, after an accusation from another Bexar County inmate.

Anyone with information on Gonzales' death is asked to call the homicide unit at 210-207-7635.

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
San Antonio police identified the woman accused of drunkenly striking and killing a pedestrian Wednesday.

Melissa Nicole Woodard, who had two children in her car, was charged Thursday with intoxication manslaughter and two counts of endangering a child.

FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox

The pedestrian was identified Thursday as Andrew McGarity, 37, according to the Bexar County Medical Examiners Office.

Woodard, 32, was driving in a white Honda with a 7-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl when she is alleged to have struck McGarity from behind at around 12:40 p.m., according a police report. Police did not detail the womans relationship with the children.

McGarity had been walking on the sidewalk near the 800 block of Enrique M. Barrera Parkway. The impact launched McGarity about 200 feet, police said.

According to police, Woodard left the roadway and side-swiped a utility pole before she is alleged to have dragged McGarity to his death.

Woodard sustained serious injuries and was hospitalized Wednesday, but jail records showed she was booked into Bexar County Jail later that day. It was unclear if the children were injured but they were not hospitalized.

Woodards criminal past includes multiple prostitution convictions. She was also arrested on a drug possession charge, but records showed the case was dismissed pending further investigation.

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
History has a strange sense of justice for those documenting and preserving it for posterity. Even historians are not immune to the quirks and turns of the Greek sense of moira, the fates who weave a grand sense of cosmic irony over mortals.

In the plaza of San Angel, Mexico, a plaque reads, In Memory of the Heroic Battalion of St. Patrick Martyrs Who Gave Their Lives in the Mexican Cause during the Unjust North American Invasion of 1847.

The St. Patricks Battalion (1846-1848), part of the Mexican army made up of men of European descent, was led by John Reilly, a union soldier who deserted because he felt compelled to follow a higher order than a decree that violated human rights and basic human decency.

Back then, America was swept by a raging fever  Manifest Destiny, a manufactured belief that the early republic needed to occupy all lands stretching west across the Mississippi. California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and parts of Colorado were easy targets of western expansionism. Once Texas was admitted into the Union as a slave state, the land-grab expanded, and President James Polk got his war with Mexico.

Manifest Destiny was a convenient crisis to justify something unjustifiable. Not all were taken by the rhetoric. A young, junior officer named Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs, I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign. Even John Quincy Adams opposed the war and referred to the U.S. conflict with Mexico as a most unrighteous war.

But those who did have the moral courage paid a heavy price. Capt. John Riley of Galway, Ireland, became disillusioned with his newly adopted country after a series of misfortunes at the hands of military officers who regularly flogged Irish and German Catholic soldiers over the tiniest infractions and reneged on military payments. Anti-Catholicism was rampant, and immigrants from Ireland and Germany were lured into signing up for military service right off the boats. They needed work to send money back home. As the war festered, untrained units from Texas  mainly Texas volunteers  saw opportunities to settle old scores with Mexico.

According to the website The Ancient Order of Hibernians, under the subject The San Patricios: Serving in the disputed Mexican territory, the Irish couldnt believe the actions of the US military. In trying to initiate hostility, churches were desecrated, religious processions disrupted and drunken soldiers, who raped, pillaged and burned Mexican villages and churches, were only sent home.

Riley led the unit composed of hundreds of immigrants and expatriates of European descent who fought with brave hearts in five major battles from Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, to Churubusco in Mexico City. But a mightier force prevailed, and U.S. Gen. Winfield Scott won the war.

After the war, some 30 from Rileys battalion were hanged near the steps of El Castillo de Chapultepec, while another 48 were sentenced to hanging. Riley, however, was spared, and tied to a post and flogged until he passed out. After a branding of D for deserter on his cheeks, Riley and his comrades were freed. They returned to Mexico to serve out time in the Mexican army, and Riley retired as a major.

History about deserters is usually absent from textbooks because it disrupts the patriotic narrative. Riley is not forgotten in his native Ireland nor the country that adopted him.

Historians note a sad irony: Years after the Civil War, President Andrew Johnson gave a full pardon and amnesty to Confederate soldiers for the offense of treason against the United States.

Rafael Castillo, who teaches English and humanities at Palo Alto College, is the author of Distant Journeys and Aurora.
We interrupt the talk of the president manufacturing a crisis at the border with this hair-raising report about the crisis at the border.

Alarming new numbers about border apprehensions from U.S. Customs and Border Protection should puncture the lazy conventional wisdom about the border being under control, except in the lurid imagination of President Donald Trump.

More than 76,000 migrants were apprehended crossing the southern border last month, the highest February in more than 10 years and the highest month of the Trump administration. The number of apprehensions tops any month during the 2014 border surge under President Barack Obama, which no one had a problem calling a crisis at the time.

Every indication is that the situation is going to get worse. We could be about to experience a migrant surge worthy of Angela Merkel at her most openhanded, even though, in immigration terms, Viktor Orban  the Hungarian prime minister who favors tough border enforcement  is president.

Yes, there were more overall apprehensions in the 2000s. But it was a different population, made up overwhelmingly of adult males from Mexico who might be apprehended trying to cross multiple times and were reliably returned home when they were caught. Now, we are apprehending people but not returning them.

Migrants are coming in greater numbers from Central American countries instead of Mexico, and they are primarily families and children. In an astonishing shift, in 2012, 10 percent of apprehended migrants were families and children; in recent months, its been 61 percent.

The rules for dealing with migrants from noncontiguous countries and with family units make it all but impossible to swiftly return or detain them, not to mention that our physical facilities were built with single adults in mind.

There is no mechanism to return these migrants home, to hold them after they cross the border or to remove them once they are in the interior. And word has gotten out. Theres a reason that the subset of migrants that we cant stop from getting into the country is growing so rapidly.

Needless to say, a spiraling border crisis is maddening for a president committed to controlling the border, which is why weve seen such frenetic activity from Trump.

Hes tried to prosecute all adults crossing the border illegally and had to abandon it in the (understandable) firestorm over the resulting family separations. Hes tried to jawbone Mexico into helping, with some success, although migrants are still traveling through Mexico in large numbers. Hes tried to tighten asylum policy but been blocked in the courts. Hes tried to get Congress to fix the rules for dealing with migrants, to no avail. And, of course, hes tried to build a wall.

Trumps rhetoric may be over the top, but the impulse to get a handle on this is absolutely correct.

First, theres the question of basic sovereignty. If we are going to welcome a large number of migrants from three or four foreign countries, we should make that decision as a conscious policy, rather than slip-sliding into it unawares.

Then theres the matter of assimilation and legality. Poorly educated immigrants, like the ones coming from Central America, have the hardest time assimilating, and they will lack legal status on top of it.

Finally, theres the humanitarian question. Migrant families show up needing medical attention that we arent well-prepared to provide. Wed be much better positioned to tend to the migrants under our care if the numbers werent overwhelming.

But we are at a stalemate. The New York Times editorialized the other day that Trump declared that theres a crisis at the border, contrary to all evidence. Then, the paper ran a news story headlined, Border at Breaking Point as More than 76,000 Migrants Cross in a Month.

Both of those pieces cant be right. Theres manufacturing a crisis, then theres ignoring one for fear of conceding anything to Trump.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
The Southern Baptist Convention needs to revisit the recent actions of its bylaws group, which gave short shrift to attempts to launch an investigation into the activities of certain member churches.

Without conducting any investigation, the SBC Bylaws Workgroup quickly began walking back attempts by the SBC president to address public concerns about handling of sexual abuses in its ranks.

A monthslong investigation by the Express-News and Houston Chronicle published last month detailed hundreds of incidents of rape, molestation and other sexual misconduct within the largest coalition of Baptist churches in the U.S., documenting more than 700 victims, many of them minors. This correctly opened a national dialogue on sexual abuse within Baptist churches.

At the center of the discussion was the SBCs failure to address the festering problem because of the autonomy the organization gives its member churches.

It was a great relief to hear SBC President J.D. Greear publicly acknowledge the abuse and demand scrutiny of the 10 churches identified in the newspaper articles for their handling of sexual abuse to determine if they should be removed from the group.

Greear said all the things one would expect from someone trying to manage a crisis.

This is not a fabricated story made up by people with a secular agenda. Weve not taken reports of abuse in our churches as seriously as our Gospel demands, and sometimes even worse, outright ignored or silenced victims. Its time we back up our words with actions, he said in speech to SBC leaders in Nashville, Tenn., on Feb. 18.

Less than a week later, Ken Alford of Valdosta, Ga., chairman of the SBCs bylaws workgroup, announced his group was removing seven of the 10 churches and asked Baptist leaders to refrain from publicly criticizing churches without giving them an opportunity to respond.

The backlash from SBC pastors and sexual assault survivors was swift and loud. They decried the lack of investigation and the workgroups failure to contact many of the survivors.

Alford resigned shortly thereafter, citing controversy and angst over his former committees vote to end inquiries into multiple churches. His resignation raises serious questions about which path the SBC will take in its investigation.

In his resignation letter, Alford said it was unfair of Greear to ask the committee to conduct an investigation that the group was not equipped to handle.

What should be obvious is that the task of conducting extensive investigations of churches is an assignment far beyond the capability of our small Bylaws Workgroup, he said wrote. Beyond that fact, however, is the reality that neither the Bylaws Workgroup nor the Executive Committee has any investigation authority given to it by the SBC.

OK, if true, the SBC should commission an independent investigation.

Alford acknowledged the workgroup conducted no investigation into any of the allegations outlined in the newspapers investigation. He also clarified that the group did not clear any of the churches of wrongdoing before announcing an end to inquiries into their activities.

The SBC cannot continue to use the autonomy policies that govern its 47,000 member churches and the lack of any central figure as an excuse for continuing to do nothing.

The SBC has a sexual abuse crisis on its hands, and the victims in theses case deserve better. Just saying the right things is not enough. Action is needed.
Sen. Kelly Hancock and Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer should be applauded for their legislation to treat all emergency room visits as in-network and eliminate surprise billing to patients.

Both legislators should also consider input from the American Medical Association to further their efforts for patient protection and to reduce the administrative workload on doctors, thus allowing more time for patient care.

It appears both the legislators and AMA cannot contend with the fact that they agree.

William Blount, New Braunfels

Go back, warn them

Re: Citizens no match, Your Turn, March 8:

I wish your reader who pointed out the massive superiority in arms our government enjoys had been around in 1775. Perhaps he could have saved those squirrel hunters and half-trained militias from trying to defeat the strongest army in the world at that time.

Thanks for the sage advice and encouragement to be docile little snowflakes. Now, please, pardon me while I retreat into my safe space and eat my ice cream and cookies.

Steve Weakley

About reparations

Once again the Democrats are looking for a way to pander for votes from African-Americans. They know quite well that a lot of them are working because of the economic boom and will vote Republican in 2020 to ensure they have a future without handouts.

I am all for payments to any children of slaves who are still alive, but really, the nonsense must end.

Did I mention that Im a quarter Cherokee and would like my land back?

Michael Pullen, Bulverde
SEVERE sexual hunger is reportedly stalking women in Matobo District in Matabeleland South amid reports that some married women whose husbands work in South Africa and Botswana are now turning to herdboys for sexual satisfaction.

This was revealed on Friday last week by the Districts Development Officer Christine Nyathi at a media and advocacy meeting organised by Hope for a Child in Christ (HOCIC) to mark the International Womens Day.

Nyathi said during community gatherings, most women from the district and whose husbands are based in South and Botswana were always complaining of sexual starvation saying their husbands were not coming back on time to sexually service them.

During our community gatherings, some married women are always complaining of sexual hunger saying their husbands who have migrated to South Africa and Botswana were taking long to come back and perform their duties.

These women end up having sex with herdboys because they are sexually starved. Honestly speaking how do these husbands who go for about a year expect their pretty wives to survive? she queried adding that those women had feelings so they would be left with no option but to have sex with the young boys who work for them.

Nyathi said the situation usually led to the increase in GBV cases especially in December when those men (injivas) returned home and found their wives pregnant or hear through rumours that they have been sleeping with other men.

Most times when the husbands come back after a year or so they hear that their wives have been indulging in extra-marital affairs. They then beat up their wives. In most instances the infuriated husbands end up brutally torturing their wives in their privates, said Nyathi.

She said survivors of GBV also suffer significant health consequences, including unwanted pregnancies, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, physical trauma, and even death.

A representative from a local gender rights advocacy group  Musasa Project said the late reporting of rape  especially in cases where women and girls had also been impregnated  often meant that there was little that authorities could do to terminate such pregnancies and to mitigate diseases such as HIV and Aids.

She revealed that Musasa Project had dealt with 2 817 cases of women abuse in Bulawayo last year.

What is heart-rending is that if the victims report, they are left stranded with nowhere to go. They tend to seek shelter from our organisations of which we do have these shelters for them but only for a minimum period.

After counselling them we expect them to go back to their families but they are afraid to face their husbands, said the official who refused to be named citing bureaucracy.

She said that was the reason why in most cases women suffer in silence.

They are afraid of being beaten again for reporting to us. However, there are other reasons why these women prefer not to report such as being ill-treated by the police who tell them that they have to be patient in marriage so they tend to lose heart in seeking a protection order from the police, she said.

HOCIC programmes officer Sibonisiwe Mpofu said Government should chip in by ensuring that all survivors of GBV are able to access care and support so as to reduce the impact of GBV.

To address the needs of survivors we appeal to the Government to bring lasting solutions to victims so that they do not fear reporting sexual abuse, suggested Mpofu.

Meanwhile, in Kenya, women once held a serious demo in Limuru, Kiambu County protesting against the dwindling performance of men in the bedroom and their failure to impregnate them.

The women reportedly held a peaceful demonstration claiming that most of their men, including young men had failed to deli their conjugal rights.

They claimed the trend was worsened by high levels of alcohol consumption which has seen many men abandon their families before calling on government to make strict laws restricting drinking from 5pm to 11pm for week days and 2pm-11pm for weekends.

 BMetro

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CALL it double dipping!

Panic has gripped the Bulawayo community after shocking and controversial statistics revealed that 80 percent of Bulawayo men that patronise bars and the red light districts are sleeping with other men.

The shocking revelations were made by Bulawayo male sex workers to a local media outlet.

Outraged Bulawayo men took to micro-blogging site Twitter to express their disgruntlement and distaste at the allegations. Some people made a joke of it while most women were panicking that they could be sharing their partners with men.

We are having trouble dealing with omakhwapheni (small houses), and then we have to worry about other men at mens conference? The drinking buddies! It just cant be! said one Lisa Khanye on Twitter.

Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) said they were aware of the statistics that have almost got Bulawayo Twitter crashing. They, however, said they could neither dismiss nor confirm the said figures.

In a statement to B-Metro, GALZ regional director Teddy Munyimani said his organisation was aware of the statistics mentioned in the allegations, made online.

He said such claims would be credible if backed by evidence from a study.

Statistics have to be backed by evidence, maybe of a study concluded of which we are not aware of any that has been done or its results shared or published, said Munyimani.

He, however, highlighted that he would not dismiss the claims as sex was a private matter and hence it was difficult to really know for sure what happens behind closed doors.

It is difficult to establish statistics of men in sexual relations, sex is a private matter and we are not in the business nor would we want to advocate for the policing of peoples bedrooms, he said.

Some Twimbos were in denial, saying there was no such thing as male prostitution in the city of kings.

However, B-Metro spoke to its network of the male sex workers community, who claimed to have many clients that were heterosexual during the day.

The male sex workers are however, not the ones behind the 20 percent revelation, which is alleged to be part of a study being carried out by a local organisation.

One of the male sex workers who spoke to B-Metro, Ayanda, said most men were in denial of having a fetish for other men.

I have been in this business for a long time and people do not mind me anymore. However, the interesting part about my job is that I get to see the different side of people that other people never get to see.

I am popular in clubs in Harare and Bulawayo and I often have clients that are married. The men are straight and heterosexual during the day but it is a totally different story after hours. I am happy because they enjoy my services but it sometimes beats me why they live a life of pretence during the day, said Ayanda.

When these men are with me, they get to live their fantasy and that is something that they will never get to experience in their marriages, as they are just for cover up, said Ayanda.

Ayanda alleged that some very prominent pastors of popular Pentecostal churches were some of his regular clients.

He said the charismatic religious leaders were some of his best paying clients as they also took him away for holidays while pretending to be on business trips.

Their wives are very comfortable with them having male personal assistants but they do not know that I am the side guy. I get annoyed though when the big men start wanting to own me. I do not date, I am in business. I also have my boyfriend and he supports my hustle.

Sources said the statistics stem from a study that is being carried out by a local organisation. However, details were still sketchy as the study was not yet complete.

If there is some truth to the allegations, it looks like the city is surely in crisis.

 BMetro

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President Emmerson Mnangagwa has warned youths to be aware of elements who may want to abuse the present economic challenges to mislead them

The government of the Second Republic remains committed in its resolve to develop young people as provided for in the constitution of the land.

This was said by President Emmerson Mnangagwa while interacting with young people at the inaugural National Youth Indaba this morning at the Harare International Conference Centre.

He highly commended todays interface in which youths were asking questions and getting a response from the President.

Enshrined in the constitution is participatory decision-making.

Such interaction will help achieve the Zimbabwe we all want with youths getting an opportunity to lay out their ideas, said President Mnangagwa.

The President said the National Youth Policy is being reviewed in line with current trends, something which even Youth, Sport, Arts and Recreation Minister Kirsty Coventry also reiterated in her remarks.

Cde Mnangagwa challenged youths to be more cognisant with regards to honoring their societal obligations, adding that they should embrace the National Clean-up Campaign which government is spearheading.

It has been disheartening that young people and youth organisations have not taken up the national clean up campaign with the vigor it deserves.

Less talk and more action will move our country forwardyou have heard how your Minister (Kirsty Coventry) persevered in the field of swimming until she succeeded in winning medals, he said.

President Mnangagwa said the establishment of the Empowerment Bank, womens bank and SEDCO must precipitate jobs revolution in the country.

He said jobs of a modern and highly technical Zimbabwe will be realised, hence the establishment of the National Optic Fibre Link built in Beitbridge which he commissioned a few day ago.

The President spoke about the incubation hubs which are set to help to nurture skills of young people, encouraging youths to visit them for enlightenment.

He added that young people in universities should fully utilise the incubation hubs to grow ideas of projects to a point of nationalisation.

Only through such functional education will you be able to create wealth, said President Mnangagwa.

He said the new administration is revamping Vocational Training Centres to ensure they practically drive industrialisation in the country.

President Mnangagwa told youths that the future of the country is in their hands, hence the need to embrace government initiatives to realise the Zimbabwe we want.

The future is nowthere is need to consciously work hard to realise the Zimbabwe we want. Be a catalyst for positive exchangeschoose to progress, choose to unite, choose to be peaceful. Our success is investable and rests upon us all, he said.

Turning to behavioural issues, the President said youths must desist from drugs and substance abuse.

President Mnangagwa also spoke about the recent Zimbabwe-South Africa Bi-National Commission, saying the onus is upon youths to embrace the strengthening of ties between the two countries and take up opportunities available.

During a question and answer session, President Mnangagwa responded to questions and concerns of young people on how they too can participate in the agriculture, mining, tourism, public procurement, creative industry sectors.

He said government is committed to ensure youths get opportunities that they can explore, but implored them to organise themselves into groups before establishing a project.

The President said young people have equal right to access land if they go through the Ministry of Lands while those with innovative ideas to use land are prioritised.

He encouraged young people to come together and embark on projects which require land.

On tourism, the President said there are many ways for youths to enter into the sector, encouraging them to approach the Zimbabwe Tourism Authority to get information on the needs in that sector.

He reveals that the sector has grown by 26 percent since the advent of the new dispensation.

The indaba is being held under the theme: My Future is Today.

 ZBC

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More than 100 people have been killed and 843,000 affected by torrential rains in Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa, the UN and officials said, as tropical cyclone Idai is expected to hit the continents south-eastern countries.

At least 66 people in Mozambique, and four in South Africa were killed, after heavy rains caused flash flooding.

In neighbouring Malawi, the death toll rose to 56, an official said on Wednesday, with the country on high alert for cyclone Idai, which is expected to make landfall on Friday.

Almost 83,000 people have been displaced in the country since storms began more than a week ago, causing rivers to break their banks, leaving villages underwater, and knocking out power and water supplies in some areas.

Chipiliro Khamula, spokesman for Malawis Department of Disaster Management, said 56 deaths had been recorded as of Tuesday, as well as 577 injuries.

Most of the displaced families are living in camps, Khamula said.

So far, a total of 187 camps have been established in the affected districts.

Malawi is on high alert for more rain and flooding on Thursday when tropical Cyclone Idai is expected to make landfall through Beira, Mozambique, the Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services said.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1105120640233807872

The cyclone will dump heavy rains and winds over Mozambique, before moving to southern Malawi and later Zimbabwe, the departments director, Jolam Nkhokwe, said.

Malawis President Arthur Peter Mutharika, who declared a state of disaster in southern Malawi late on Friday, cancelled trips to the northern region of Malawi to attend to the flooding.

The Mozambique government have also issued a red alert with heavy rains expected to continue.

Mozambique cabinet spokeswoman, Ana Comoana said in Maputo on Tuesday: the government has decreed a red alert due to the continuing rains and the approach to the tropical cyclone Idai.

The floods have reportedly already destroyed more than 5,000 homes, and affected more than 140,000 people in the country, which is one of the poorest on the continent.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1105449556739801088

More than 168,000 hectares of crops were destroyed, the government spokeswoman said, and authorities ordered the compulsory evacuation of flood-prone areas.

Ms Comoana added: Sixteen accommodation centres have been opened in the provinces of Zambezia and Tete to accommodate the displaced.

The government needs 1.1 billion meticais ($16m) to assist 80,000 families affected by the rains.

Tropical Cyclone Idai, which formed over the Northern Mozambique Channel on March 9, is expected to make landfall near Beira on March 14 or 15, said the UNs Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

 Standard/ Additional reporting by Reuters.

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THE ruling Zanu PF partys youth league could be thrown into fresh turmoil after it emerged there was a push for someone under 35 to lead the structure, this publication has learnt.

The demand could be part of a plot to unseat current politburo secretary for youth Pupurai Togarepi. The Gutu South MP survived an ouster plot two weeks ago after two thirds of the youth leagues national executive voted to push him out only for President Emmerson Mnangagwa to block the move.

According to the ruling partys deputy youth secretary Lewis Matutu, Zanu PF has embarked on a restructuring program which will see them pushing for 15-35-year-olds to take over the leadership of the assembly.

Togarepi who turns 55 this year, will no longer be eligible to lead the assembly if the policy is adopted.

The Zanu PF parliamentary Chief Whip, was recently saved by President Emmerson Mnangagwa after some provinces passed a vote of no confidence in his leadership.

As the youth league we are going to take advantage of the restructuring of the two provinces to strengthen our structures, giving an opportunity to those within the ages of 15-35 to lead the youth.

This is an opportunity to reflect on ourselves as we work to transform our league into a modern political organisation, said Matutu who will be heading the Bulawayo restructuring program.

There is need to accommodate the youth. I am prepared for the challenge and after all our constitution is very clear on that matter.

The Zanu PF constitution stipulates that its youth arm should be made up and led by individuals between the ages of 15 and 30 years. However as party leader Mnangagwa has leeway to appoint secretaries to head different structures of the party including the youth league. Those appointed from the partys central committee get a seat into the politburo, Zanu PFs administrative arm.

Mnangagwa has reportedly directed his deputies Kembo Mohadi and Constantino Chiwenga to oversee restructuring of the party in Bulawayo and Harare respectively following the dissolution of all structures.

The Zanu PF leader was forced to dissolve party structures in both metropolitan provinces last week after the re-emergence of fault lines within the party which threaten a second implosion in two years.

Reports claim Chiwenga and Mnangagwa are heading different factions of the party with the Vice President allegedly angling to stop the partys leaders wish for a second term in five years time.

 NewZimbabwe

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Saviour Kasukuwere vowed to take the fight to President Emmerson Mnangagwas ruling Zanu PF party on Friday after prosecutors were given the greenlight to sell a property he put down as surety for his bail.

Kasukuwere, who is facing corruption charges, has failed to attend court for the beginning of his trial and is now believed to be back in exile.

Harare regional magistrate Hosea Mujaya granted an application by prosecutors to forfeit a RTGS$250,000 holiday home in Nyanga owned by the former Local Government minister.

Kasukuwere, who last attended court when he applied for the release of his passport to enable him to receive medical attention in Johannesburg, said his prosecution and attempts to seize his property were political.

We will certainly go to the High Court, he said on Twitter, signalling that he would be appealing the forfeiture order.

The former Zanu PF political commissar fled Zimbabwe in November 2017 when soldiers peppered his home with automatic rifle bullets during a military coup that ousted former President Robert Mugabe.

Believing that the situation had calmed, he returned home in May 2018 saying he had retired from politics and would focus on his businesses and tender to his farm.

He was charged with immigration offences for using an undesignated exit when he fled the military in 2017, but a magistrate dismissed the charges, ruling that Kasukuweres life was in danger.

Prosecutors later charged him with criminal abuse of office over housing stands he allegedly allocated to Shuvai Gumbochuma, the elder sister of former first lady Grace Mugabe, while he was Local Government minister.

He was allowed to leave Zimbabwe in January after the court was shown medical documents proving that the former minister needed to undergo a medical procedure in Johannesburg.

Kasukuwere, who had refrained on commenting on political developments in Zimbabwe, seemingly fearing he would offend the new regime in Harare, appears to have thought better of returning home, leading the court to find him in wilful default.

This is a very good invitation back into politics. Handei tione! (Bring it on!), Kasukuwere said on Twitter, after learning of the court outcome.

He continued: I said it will be rough, but its gonna be rougher but thereafter we will have a ZW we all want. This monopoly and idiocy shall be challenged. With or without, 2023 is coming. Tatamba zvakwana! (The time for games is over!)

https://twitter.com/Hon_Kasukuwere/status/1106543089466916864

Whilst silence is golden, there comes a time when your enemies think you are enjoying it. Abuse of authority and power has limits. God Bless ZW. #itsmycountrytoo!

Whilst silence is golden, there comes a time when your enemies think you are enjoying it.Abuse of authority and power has limits.God Bless ZW#itsmycountrytoo!  Saviour Kasukuwere (@Hon_Kasukuwere) March 15, 2019

Kasukuweres cousin, the former Mashonaland Central Zanu PF chairman Dickson Mafios, was jailed for four years in February after being convicted of inciting violence over January 14 fuel protests that rocked Zimbabwe. He maintained his innocence, claiming political persecution. He is appealing the conviction and sentence at the High Court.

Kasukuwere rejoins over a dozen former Mugabe regime loyalists who are scattered around the world among them former police chief Augustine Chihuri and former ministers Patrick Zhuwao, Jonathan Moyo, Godfrey Gandawa and Walter Mzembi.

Gandawa and Mzembi have pending corruption cases before the courts but both skipped bail before their trials were concluded.

 ZimLive

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By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and co-founder of Bank Whistleblowers United. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives

Third article in a series on MMT[1]

I urge readers to review Scott Fullwilers brief paper on the theoretical and predictive successes of MMT scholars on a topic of enormous theoretical and practical importance. You do not need economics training to understand it. Fullwiler reports the results of two natural experiments. In this context, this means an unplanned experiment. The twin experiments were:

What would happen if orthodox scholars tested the predictive strength of MMT? How would Paul Krugman react to an orthodox scholars demonstration of the predictive accuracy of key MMT insights  if Krugman did not knowthat the orthodox scholars work was verifying key MMT predictions?

Fullwilers paper answers both questions. The orthodox scholar, unknowingly, confirmed the predictive strength of many of MMTs most important insights. Krugman praised De Grauwes findings as seminal. Krugman had no idea he was praising the predictive successes of MMT scholars because Krugman had never read MMT scholars work. Fullwilers paper shows that a series of MMT scholars made De Grauwes point more than a decade before De Grauwe published his seminal contribution in an orthodox journal. Stephanie Kelton was one of the MMT scholars who demonstrated precedence, making Krugmans use of the word seminal as a descriptor even more unintentionally humorous.

The natural experiment helps explain the timing, cause, and tactics of the sudden, coordinated effort to demean MMT scholars and the newly elected progressives that terrify orthodox economists. First, the truth that everyone in economics knows is heterodox economics scholars overwhelmingly read the orthodox economics literature (and often other fields) andthe heterodox economics literature. Orthodox economic scholars virtually never read heterodox economic scholars work and generally claim that they are proud that they refuse to read it. The orthodox scholar that wrote the supposedly seminal piece almost certainly did not read the heterodox scholars who actually had developed the insight. The outside reviewers the orthodox economics journal used did not read the heterodox scholars work so they did not call the De Grauwes attention to the work by MMT scholars. I believe that Krugman will confirm that when he wrote to praise De Grauwe, he had never read any of the MMT scholars publications listed in Fullwilers paper. I believe that Krugman will confirm that even today he has not read any of those papers.

We are not claiming De Grauwe stole our ideas or stole our ideas and refused to give us credit for our insight. We would be startled to discover De Grauwe read the work of MMT scholars prior to writing his paper. I would be surprised if he read Fullwilers paper.

This pattern of deliberate, asymmetrical ignorance and orthodox arrogance is not some secret conspiracy. The typical professor in an orthodox economics doctoral program assigns zero heterodox scholarship. If an orthodox professors refers to MMT it will typically be a snide dismissal based on a claim that MMT says X when MMT actually says the opposite. Those orthodox sneers at MMT by orthodox professors in class were vanishingly rare. The overwhelming orthodox norm is never to inform students that MMT exists. At UMKC, we assign our economics doctoral students hundreds of orthodox readings. Our doctoral candidates cannot pass their comps unless they demonstrate mastery of a canon of over 100 orthodox scholarly papers. We requiredoctoral students to engage in multi-disciplinary research in other disciplines as well. We also, of course, assign them to read hundreds of papers by heterodox scholars.

We are not claiming that only MMT scholars promptly recognized the dangers of the euro. Warning about the euros dangers was a repeated focus of MMT scholars at a very early date that does great credit to them. Conversely, only a very small percentage of orthodox scholars published similar warnings. We agree that those orthodox scholars early warnings do great credit to them.

This asymmetry is indefensible, and we welcome Krugmans interest in MMT as a means of beginning to end orthodoxys celebration of ignorance. Krugman and MMT scholars share a broad overlap in economic theory and policy. Fullwilers article exemplifies the point  when Krugman did not know he was evaluating an MMT original insight he was lavish in his praise of our ideas. Fullwilers article also begins to demonstrate that Krugman is actually aware of far more MMT scholarly literature than he knows  he simply does not know of the very large overlap between his views and the views of many MMT scholars. On a broad range of issues, including microfoundations, Krugman will find that MMT views make us natural allies.

The Third Natural Experiment: Krugmans Non-Debate with a Non-MMT Non-Scholar

We know the extent to which Krugman kept himself willfully ignorant of the MMT scholarship because Krugman reported the results of a natural experiment he unknowingly conducted in August 2011. The remarkable thing about this third natural experiment is that Krugman did not know he had conducted a natural experiment even after he unknowingly reported the results of the experiment he unknowingly conducted. I hope that sounds bizarre, for Krugman acted bizarrely on multiple dimensions. He also demonstrated an eagerness to demean MMT scholarship and scholars he had never read and a degree of errant arrogance that reached ten on the Krugman scale.

In August 2011, Krugman announced that he was debating the Modern Monetary Theory guys. That phrase was already a warning that Krugman was lost. Female MMT scholars are particularly well known. Krugman then assured his readers that I have read various MMT manifestos  this one is fairly clear as they go. That phrase represented the second, third, and fourth warning signals that Krugman had gone off the rails. Why would a scholar read manifestos to learn of the work of other scholars?

Why would Krugman read manifestos by non-scholars? Even more fundamentally, why would he read a non-scholarly manifesto by Cullen Roche, a non-MMT, non-scholar  and claim that it demonstrates his familiarity with MMT scholarship and competence to criticize MMT?

It gets better. Krugman found reading Roches manifesto to be a painful exercise due to the writing style.

I do dislike the style  the claims that fundamental principles of logic lead to a worldview that only fools would fail to understand has a sort of eerie resemblance to John Galts speech in Atlas Shrugged.

For Krugman, comparing the pain of reading Roches rant to pain of reading the worlds most infamous Ayn Rand rant  John Galts turgid 60-page ode to narcissism  is the ultimate insult. It also raises a question that would be obvious to any scholar trying to learn about a scholastic field he or she had never studied. No one had a gun to Krugmans head demanding that he subject himself to the masochistic horror of reading a manifesto he considered an eerie resemblance to Galts execrable manifesto. For Krugman, having to read an eerie resemblance to Galts endless rant must closely approximate his working definition of hell.

Why did Krugman choose to read Roche, and why did he continue to read Roches rant when he found the process excruciating? Reading Wray would be the obvious way an American economist would begin to learn about MMT. There are many advantages of reading Wray instead of an eerie resemblance to Galt if one wishes to learn about MMT. First, reading a top academic in a field is a great way to learn both the general theory and the nuances. Second, it is quicker. Third, academic works have copious citations that allow academic readers to understand how the author researches and provides the academic reader with resources to research particular topics in greater depth.

Krugman can draw on the New York Times researchers and university librarians. Consider the other obvious alternative  combining those resources with the telephone. Find the contact information for a prominent MMT scholar, call the scholar, explain you would like to learn about key MMT precepts, ask for suggestions on several concise scholarly articles that he or she could email you. That would be the collegial approach  scholar to scholar. That would be the approach based on developing and signaling mutual respect. Krugman appears never to have followed this approach. We call it revealed preferences. His preference is to treat MMT scholars as non-colleagues and non-equals.

Krugman, without reading any MMT scholarship assumed there would be no meaningful difference between the work of experienced MMT scholars and a rant by a non-scholar that Krugman found to be torture to read. That is every bit as absurd, arrogant, biased, un-collegial, and insulting as it sounds.

The third natural experiment, of course, demonstrates that Krugman did not understand MMT scholarship because he never could be troubled to take the obvious steps essential to learn about MMT scholarship. He was so ignorant of MMT that even after assuring his readers that he had read several non-scholarly MMT manifestoes he could not tell that Roches rant was not MMT scholarship. Roche runs an investment firm. In fairness to Krugman, at the time that Roche first wrote his manifesto he did describe himself as favorably influenced by MMT scholars on a subset of MMT. Roche now considers himself an MMT critic. Roche later made this explicit to Krugman. Clicking on Krugmans hyperlink to Roches rant brings up this message from Roche (emphasis in the original).

https://www.pragcap.com/my-view-on-mmt/ My View on MMT Cullen Roche  05/16/2011 Updated  2018: In 2011 I was briefly associated with a group of economists who advocate for a theory called Modern Monetary Theory. Paul Krugman even cited an early draft version of a popular paper of mine as a MMT paper. This paper is not a MMT paper although an early draft cited aspects that were consistent with MMT. The paper is not a representation of MMTs views and I have never fully endorsed MMT. That said, I am sympathetic to some MMT ideas (like endogenous money theory), but Ive never fully agreed with MMT as a whole and in fact believe there are elements of MMT that are wrong. In fairness, there are also elements I think are useful. Ive outlined those views in a post here. Ive also written an extensive critique of MMT here. On the whole I find MMT to be an eye opening and useful theory to understand, but I do worry that some of their ideas are a bit extremist and twist the operational realities of our monetary system in an effort to promote progressive policy ideas. I hope you find the attached material helpful.

The good news for Krugman is that while he falsely represented to his readers that Roches rant represented the views of lead MMT scholars, Krugman did so unknowingly and unintentionally. The bad news is that in this case even after he read Roches rant he knew so little about the MMT scholarly literature that he represented to his readers that it exemplified MMT. The even worse news is that even after he read, and hated, Roches rant, Krugman knew so little about the MMT literature that he decided to provide his readers with a link to the rant  and only the rant  as supposedly representative of the MMT scholarly canon. To sum it up, Krugmans attempt to assure his readers that he had listened to the gentiles (his phrase, not mine) before attacking them proved he had failed to do so. Krugman was so eager to reject and demean MMT scholars that his subconscious transformed Roches rant into the mother of all strawman arguments to aid his assault on MMT scholars.

The fourth article in this series explains the four tells that demonstrate that Krugman knows he cannot win an honest debate against MMT.

[1]I have numbered the articles in this series in what I consider their logical progression, but I have completed the closely related third and fourth articles prior to the second, so we will publish them prior to the second article.
The UK is rudderless as Brexit looms. Theresa May was never in control; her fundamentally wrongheaded approach to the negotiations of thinking the UK had the advantage, compounded by the massive own goal of calling snap elections, led to the EU steering the negotiations at key junctures. But May was still able to exert influence even as her authority kept eroding. She still has perhaps one play left, but even if she prevails, the UK will need to petition the EU for an extension. Ian Dunt, in a despairing post, Britain pleads to extend Article 50: This is one of our darkest hours, summed up where things stand:

We are no longer in control of our own destiny.We are now at the mercy of others. This is what Brexit has done to what was, just a few years ago, one of the most powerful countries in the world. The debate in the Commons was typically contradictory, scheming and chaotic. Remainers collapsed into an internecine battle over when to table an amendment on a Peoples Vote. That was embarrassing and self-harming, with no-one coming out of it looking good. Hilary Benn and others tried to table an amendment wrestling back control of Brexit from the government, but it fell by just two votes. Chris Bryant toyed with an amendment blocking the prime minister from bringing her deal back, but didnt put it forward to a vote. When all was said and done, it was a straight vote on the governments motion saying it would ask for an extension of Article 50. It passed easily, by 412 votes to 202. Immediately afterwards, many commentators insisted that that was it: Britain was now officially not leaving the EU on March 29th. But they were wrong.

As most readers already know, one of the amendments Dunt mentioned above, on a second referendum, failed by 334 to 85, with a remarkable 223 abstentions. Recall that whenever the EU has discussed the possibility of the UK getting an extension, officials have consistently stressed that the UK needs to give a reason, and a second referendum was often an example. Even though Jeremy Corbyn said he was all for another referendum after whipping against it, EU leaders are likely to regard the vote as dispositive until they have an awfully good reason to thin otherwise.

As Politicos morning European newsletter put it:

GOOD FRIDAY MORNING. This was the week the U.K. parliament took all the workable options for Brexit off the table  deal as well as no deal. It was also the week MPs deprived the country and the rest of the EU of the one certainty they thought they had: That the divorce would happen at a specific point in time. So much for our updates on how many days until Brexit. What we do know: Prime Minister Theresa May isnt in control any more, if she ever was. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hasnt ever been able to change the course of Brexit. The impact of Speaker of the House John Bercows handling of procedures on the real world is yet to be seen. And the queen is not supposed to say or do anything. On the European end of things, the decision on whats next is neither in the hands of Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker nor Council President Donald Tusk (who on Thursday expressed his preference for a long Brexit delay, to the surprise of two EU diplomats who expected Tusk to just purdah, as everybody else does). The EUs chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, said any decision was beyond his control. Collective bargaining: It seems as if the EU27 leaders really do hold all the cards, write David Herszenhorn, Jacopo Barigazzi and Diego Torres.

May said that her game plan was to hold yet another vote on her deal next week, assuming Speaker John Bercow does not block her from submitting the same matter yet again. That means she will spring whatever version of extension she is asking for on the EU 27 right before or even at the meeting. This is not going to improve their mood.

Government working on bribing the DUP to secure a Withdrawal Agreement win. It helps that the DUP is signaling that it wants to be bought. However, with a 140 vote gulf last time, the Ultras as rabid as ever, and the widespread UK assumption that the EU will agree to an extension, the odds that so many votes will change looks very remote even if the DUP switches sides. May seemed to be pinning her hopes on getting ERG defections after Attorney General Geoffrey Cox gave an additional opinion on the Irish backstop which found nee grounds why it might not wind up being a roach motel. The lawyers for the Ultras have rejected it.

Ultras are still trying to blow things up. Clive flagged a new story at the Telegraph:

Theresa May has faced renewed pressure to resign as Tory MPs warned they could support a vote of no confidence in the Government. George Freeman, a Tory former minister, suggested a pledge from the Prime Minister to quit could persuade Brexiteers to support her deal. But Sir Christopher Chope, the veteran Eurosceptic Tory MP, said Mrs Mays handling of Brexit meant he would now seriously consider voting to bring down the Government.

He added:

Sir Christopher Chope is my mother in laws MP. The local association there are mad as loons. They had to out-UKIP UKIP such was the euroskeptic theocracy that is the electorate there. Which they did without breaking into a sweat.

However, even if the Ultras do table a vote of no confidence, aside from the fact that enough MPs are likely to have worked out that triggering a general election now would almost guarantee a crash out, its also not a good time for Labour. From a John Authers piece at Bloomberg:

It isnt a given that the EU will give a long extension if May fails to win approval of her Withdrawal Agreement. Its not that UKIP and other right wingers trying to get no votes from Italy, Poland, or Hungary is likely to do the trick. The EU has been loath to have the UK seat members in the next European parliament.

But the immediate issue is that the EU has said every time that the idea of an extension has come up, the UK needs to give a reason why (aside from a short technical extension), the EU can have reasonable odds of believing that the UK can sort itself out and agree on a different type of Brexit that still sits on Barniers ladder, his now-notorious chart of Brexit options given various red lines.

But now we have the UK having shown itself to be in a degree of disarray unthinkable in any country, or even large organization. And May seems to be going about seeking an extension in a way designed to lower the odds of her getting one. It doesnt seem likely shell offer a reason, since the UK is fundamentally divided and theres no ready way to change that. She cant say a new referendum and she wont say a general election. And she might not even say how long long is.

Key EU leaders were already not well disposed towards the lengthy extension idea. From CNN:

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday any extension to Brexit could only be a technical delay to allow more time to put their departure in place. Macron, who is currently in Kenya, added that the UK would need a purpose for the EU to grant any extension, so as to ensure something will come out of it.

Attitudes have hardened in Germany too. From Reuters:

Only delaying Britains departure from the European Union does not bring a solution, Germanys Justice Minister Katarina Barley on Friday said. I think the EU would be ready to delay Brexit, but one has to have a plan on what is supposed to happen during this period, Barley told rbb broadcaster.

In the Spectator, Robert Peston confirmed this view is well shared:

So the stakes for the UK could not be higher when the PM launches Meaningful Vote 3 after the weekend. Now if I am right, and the PM loses that vote again, how would the EU react? Well my sources in EU capitals are clear and agreed on only one point. It depends utterly on whether the PM asks for something specific. For the avoidance of doubt, if she turns up and simple says gimme a delay, but Im not sure what Ill do with it, theyll ask her for clarity  according to one well-placed source  and would not take any decision at all. She would be sent home, and invited to re-submit her request for extra time at an emergency council of EU leaders the following week. Yes, I am not making this up.

Consistent with our earlier observations, May springing whatever her plan winds up being on the EU at the 11th hour is going to hurt her. Even though professional diplomats wind up in those roles for their ability to maintain their composure, the UK has run roughshod over them too many times. From the Telegraph:

Brussels has reacted furiously after Theresa May announced plans to hold a third meaningful vote on her Brexit deal just one day before an EU summit to approve an extension to the Article 50 negotiations. While EU-27 leaders are divided over the length and conditions for the extension beyond the March 29 deadline, they are united in their irritation that the prime minister will give the bloc very little time to consider their response and prepare a joint position. Last night Mrs May said that MPs would hold a third vote on her deal on March 20. Officials and diplomats have told Britain to set out its extension plans as early as possible, preferably on Thursday, ahead of the summit in Brussels on March 21. There is frustration and anger among the ambassadors of the EU-27 in Brussels at Mrs Mays plan. This is not how things are done before EU summits. We need to plan. A lack of planning leads to another Salzburg, the diplomat added, in a reference to one of Mrs Mays humiliations at the hands of EU leaders at a summit last year.

As Ian Dunt put it:

Other voices in Europe are strongly opposed to an extension  some in all circumstances, others only in certain circumstances. With no deal in place, they might view an extension as an ability to allow Britain to prepare for the aftermath, which they feel they are better protected against. That would open up the possibility of further extensions and erode the EUs strength in talks. There are even some figures in Europe, including in France, who quite welcome no-deal from a self-interested medium-term strategic perspective. Others are simply fed-up with Brexit and believe its time to cut the UK off. This is not the most likely outcome. Chances are, theyll offer a extension on the condition that it is quite long and contains a set idea of what will take place to change the situation. But lets be clear what this means. We are no longer the ones who decide what happens to our country.

Normally I would expect the EU to ask the UK to make a hefty financial payment to get an extension, particularly a long one when the odds favor that the UK will just faff about, but The Times suggests the EU will force a plan on May if she doesnt present one (recall that the Times has a particularly poor record with rumors, but even a blind pig sometimes finds a truffle):

The European Union is poised to tell Theresa May that she must hold a second referendum or soften Brexit in return for them granting a lengthy delay to Britains departure date. The Times understands that the prime minister has been told by senior EU officials and other European leaders that conditions for an extension to the Article 50 exit process would include the option of a second vote on EU membership. Mrs May is expected to ask a summit of EU leaders next week for a delay to Brexit. Unless the House of Commons has ratified the withdrawal agreement by then momentum is growing across the EU for a lengthy postponement to give Britain a long reflection period.

This view seems at least in part based on Donald Tusks remarks, but as Politico indicated above, the locus of decision-making has shifted away from Brussels to the individual EU leaders, so Tusk has less sway than he did before.

Finally, I wonder how Barnier feels about all of this. Hes 67. Admittedly, he has a very able deputy in Sabine Weyand, but hes done a remarkable job in the face of Mays thickheadedness and repeated self-sabotage, and the revolving door of idiotic Brexit ministers. How much more of this does he want to put up with? And what happens when he decides to retire? In some ways, Brexit has only begun. As some experts have pointed out, the talks on a trade deal will be even more taxing.
Normally, CalPERS stakeholders, even important ones, hew to a ritual level of deference in interacting with the CalPERS board, even when protesting against the giant funds plans. That posture has always bothered me, since it seems to go beyond famed California nice, as well as the upper class norm of hewing to standards of discourse, and that includes not making too much of a fuss about anything. For a society that prizes the appearance of egalitarianism, its awfully reminiscent of subjects petitioning a monarch.

So it is refreshing as well as revealing that two prominent retirees sent blunt letters that object strenuously to CalPERS private equity plan. The fact that they felt compelled to send forceful and well-documented missives says they are alarmed. They see CalPERS intending to act in a way that is almost impossible to square with the obligation of the pension fund to put the interest of beneficiaries first. Moreover, most finance and business-savvy would see their concerns as well warranted.

We are including one letter from former prosecutor David Soares, sent as an e-mail, in the body of this post; the other, by Al Darby, the president of the Retired Public Employees Association, is embedded at the end.

We are also embedding three all-too-obviously-generated-by-CalPERS letters sent on the letterheads of unions in CalPERS orbit. A former employee who is concerned about private equity sent them to me.

Note the contrast between the detailed arguments made by Soares and Darby versus the repeated text that appears in all three of the union pieces.1

Its one thing to try the canned letter trick with mass market save the whale petitions and quite another to resort to it on letters intended for the CalPERS board on its biggest initiative in recent years. It says that CalPERS staff was too lazy to generate a unique letter for each cats paw. It also says the union officials who signed these letters sent them back with only a mild revision as a matter of form. Well show how this confirms that they lack an independent or informed view

Not only are the arguments in these letters handwaves, but CalPERS cant even make an honest case through its proxies. All letters argue based on absolute returns, when any finance student who tried that on an exam would fail. What matters is risk-adjusted returns, and CalPERS and a considerable majority of investors in private equity have not gotten returns in private equity high enough to offset the risks over the last decade. Top executives in private equity have been warning since 2016 to expect even lower returns going forward.

The letters also create a straw man by acting as if the choice is between committing to CalPERS scheme or giving up on higher returns. First, as JJ Jelincic has said, what CalPERS needs is not private equity per se but higher-return strategies. CalPERS has presented nothing to demonstrate that its reasonable to expect this scheme to do that; in fact, its admitted that its Warren Buffett strategy will deliver lower returns than conventional private equity. CalPERS has yet to offer a coherent reason why it is refusing even to consider the most obvious way to get better returns in private equity, the one recommended by Dr. Ashby Monk (and before that, endorsed by McKinsey) of bringing private equity in house.

The three union letters also claim that CalPERS has done serious research, when that is false. We did a PRA of what CalPERS research amounted to. They interviewed Big Names who for the most part were too removed to give any insight, and the few who might know something had glaring conflicts of interest. We found out that one of the supposed interviewees, Professor Ludovic Phalippou, was asked out for a drink with a CalPERS guy and was shocked to learn that 45 minute chat was depicted as an interview for CalPERS planning purposes. I also got the documents CalPERS said it used in its research. As a former consultant who regularly did strategy research, I can confirm that there was no there there. I suggest that these three authors get the results of my PRA #3286 and see for themselves.

The letters also contend that the plan is well thought out. The fact that CalPERS, after nearly two years, has admitted it has only a concept and keeps changing major features at virtually every board meeting, demonstrates otherwise.

And the places where the letter authors apparently did try to add their own ideas just shows they dont know enough to have an informed point of view on this plan, even if they actually had tried to make an independent assessment. Get a load of this howler from the California School Employees Association letter, signed by Executive Directors Dave Low and Keith Pace:

Given CalPERS fondness for telling Big Lies, it should come as no surprise that their allies are taking a page from that book. As anyone with an operating brain cell knows, private equity has been a major force in cutting jobs, breaking unions, and cutting retirement benefits. In our review of Eileen Appelbaums and Rosemary Batts landmark book Private Equity at Work, we pointed out:

One of the most striking is the authors discussion of an extremely extensive series of analyses on the employment impact of private equity ownership, conducted by Stephen Davis and his colleagues. The papers (a series produced from 2008 to 2013) rely on data from 5000 target companies and roughly 300,000 target establishments (an establishment is a single work location, such as a store or factory). For some of the papers, smaller subsets were used. But in each case, Davis et al. developed controls by matching PE owned establishments with ones that were as similar as possible in terms of size, industry, age, and other key factors. One of the most widely publicized findings out of this extensive body of work was that employment shrank at private equity owned establishments at a greater rate than in the controls over comparable two-year periods.

Its been striking to see public pensions help fund anti-worker, anti-union players and blinker themselves to how this weakens public pensions, both by lowering employment and incomes, which hurts state and local tax revenues, and by shortening private sector job tenures and weakening their rights, which leads voters to see public sector workers as pampered, which then generates calls to cut their pay and benefits, particularly pensions.

A former union official was so upset about this section that he sent it to the AFL-CIO national officials, and they arent very happy about it either.

But this is par for the course for what weve seen for the effort to design and sell CalPERS unorthodox private equity scheme: ignorance leading to abject misrepresentations.

Now to the letters. Have fun and circulate them widely!

* * *

My name is David Soares. I am a licensed attorney and a CalPERS beneficiary, having retired at the end of 2016 after serving for 32 years as a prosecutor for the County of Santa Clara. During my career as a prosecutor, I also represented over 300 prosecutors and public defenders in collective bargaining for 12 elected terms on the board of the Santa Clara County Government Attorneys Association. I currently serve as a board member of the California Retired Public Employees Association, although I write to you today in my individual capacity as a CalPERS beneficiary and a taxpayer.

I am extremely concerned about the propriety of approving Agenda Item 8a of the March 18, 2019 Investment Committee Agenda, entitled the Action Item  Total Fund. I have followed with great interest the moving target that has been variously called CalPERS Direct or more recently, Private Equity Pillars III and IV. Im very concerned that CalPERS has left the position of managing investment director for Private Equity unfilled for the past two years, that the current Chief Investment Officer has only been on the job for two months, yet staff are asking for a board vote on a vaguely-defined concept on an unknown timeline with unidentified partners. The only document offered in support of this requested delegation of authority is Attachment 1, a 12-slide PowerPoint presentation which contains a few aspirational platitudes but no specifics at all.

To vote in favor of a vague concept as is set forth in Item 8a would be the very definition of a violation of fiduciary duty by a member of the CalPERS board.

California State Constitution Article XVI section 17 mandates that the individual members of a public pension board act as the sole fiduciariesresponsible for providing benefits, minimizing contributions, and defraying reasonable expenses of the fund. The Constitution goes on to require that the members of the board, shall discharge their duties with respect to the system with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence under the circumstances then prevailing that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with these matters would use in the conduct of an enterprise of a like character and with like aims.

As a lawyer who has served on various boards, I feel that it is important to remind each member of the CalPERS board what it means to act as a fiduciary  especially the meaning of a fiduciarys Duty of Care. The Duty of Care most importantly encompasses the Duty of Inquiry  to go out and seek information about the wisdom of proposed actions. In exercising the Duty of Inquiry, a fiduciary must follow the Business Judgment Rule, which requires making Reasonable Inquiry, entertaining a Good Faith Belief in the prudence of a course of action, and having No Personal Interest in the outcome. In addition, a prudent fiduciary investing assets must avoid speculation and avoid waste.

I am especially concerned that the board exercise its Duty of Inquiry as to the claims being made in Attachment 1 about Private Equity performance as an asset class. The CalPERS 2017-18 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) lists Private Equity investments at Net Asset Value (NAV), often simply leaving as a blank space the field Profit Sharing Paid (Carry). One must question the claims being made about the astounding recent performance of this asset class, especially considering that this occurred during a period of divestment from the class as a whole. While a fiduciary may rely upon the opinions of experts, these claims raise serious questions about the expertise of the staff urging adoption of this concept.

The only proposed benefits emanating from board approval of the so-called concept are increasing the scale of the Private Equity asset class, and fostering an improved alignment of interest with the partners. I note that the CalPERS board and investment staff spent the period 2009 through 2015 reducing the scale of Private Equity investment from approximately 15 percent of assets to the current 8 percent, largely because the board had found that this investment class was the source of corrupting influences that led to the current imprisonment of the former CEO of the fund, the suicide of a former board member, and the resignations of several board members who were under the cloud of a criminal investigation. There is nothing in the current transmittal or supporting attachment which addresses how to correct this troubling history of mis-alignment of interests between the partners and the members and beneficiaries.

The only concept that appears to have been put forward in Item 8a is that there is no concept. To vote in favor of such a non-existent concept would be a willful abandonment of fiduciary duty by the board. There is no urgency. The February 24, 2019 edition of the Wall Street Journal reports that CalPERS partner BlackRock has been unable to raise funds for their Warren Buffett Strategy, and we know that Warren Buffett himself has announced that he has no plans to deploy funds in the coming year. For CalPERS to embark on such a course without a formal managing director of Private Equity in place is the height of imprudence.

David Soares

Santa Cruz, California

Cc: Hon. Gavin Newsom; Hon. Betty Yee; Hon. Fiona Ma; Hon. Jerry Hill; Hon. Freddie Rodriguez; Hon. Mark Stone; Hon. Bill Monning; Hon. Ro Khanna

Cc: CalPERS BoA: Rob Feckner; Eraina Ortega; Adria Jenkins-Jones; Henry Jones; Ramon Rubalcava; Theresa Taylor; Bill Slaton; Dana Hollinger; David Miller; Margaret Brown; Jason Perez

Cc: Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, Susan Webber, Naked Capitalism

Cc: Santa Clara Co GAA, RPEA

____

1 The inclusion of typos, like 75% as opposed to 7%, does not count.
By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at DownWithTyranny!



A cigarette, martini, a staircase and Bette Davis  the 2020 election in a nutshell

There are two groups of candidates in the Democratic candidate field. The first group contains people like Bernie Sanders. The second group contains all other candidates whom corporate Democratic power brokers will find acceptable.

That makes handicapping this field pretty easy, at least so far. Note that its very early days still, so this is a way-too-early set of predictions.

Characterizing the Pool of Voters

Before we begin, however, the pool of voters must also be grouped, since they have a role in the coming drama. The three main groups of voters are:

Rebels against the pre-Trump status quo (2020 change voters). Those comfortable with the pre-Trump status quo (Obama was just fine). Trump-and-Trump-only voters

Theres a certain overlap between groups one and three, but group three rules out all who might vote for any non-Trump candidate. That is, group three isnt all Trump supporters, just his most rabid ones. There could be plenty of Trump voters in the first two groups.

According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trumps overall approval is at 39%. The percentage of Republicans, from the same poll, who think the country is on the wrong track is 29%, with 10% not sure. That is, only 60% of Republicans think the country is on the right track, though almost all of them would consider voting for Trump in 2020.



So lets take a guess at the percentage of Trump and Trump only voters in the electorate. The latest Gallup poll divides the electorate this way:

That is:

Independents: 42%

Democrats: 30%

Republicans: 26%

This means that perhaps 15% of the electorate (60% of 26%) is in group three, with the rest, or 85% of the electorate, in the other two groups. Thats a lot of people who might vote for someone other than Trump.



Whom Will the Democratic Nominate in the General Election?

Lets go back to our grouping of Democratic candidates. A recent Morning Consult poll lists the leaders this way:



I would put Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (unless she spins herself out of this group by a terrible misstep) in the like-Sanders group  real threats to the status quo, at least on economic policy. Lets call these actual change candidates, people who dont just preach change, but whom voters can count on to deliver it.

I would put each of the others:

Joe Biden

Kamala Harris

Beto ORourke

Cory Booker

Amy Klobuchar (who has no chance at all)

Somebody Else

in the second category. Lets call them status quo ante or next Obama candidates  people who want to return to the pre-Trump years when they thought everything was just fine  or at least fine enough  in America. This group may preach change, but it will clearly be change at the margins of a reasonably OK system. And they will signal that either advertently or inadvertently.

To take the case of Amy Klobuchar, for example, she signaled that inadvertently just recently with her student loan proposals.

For the following, lets assume that (a) Trump is the Republican nominee and (b) all Democratic candidates get all Democratic voters (according to the Gallup division) to vote for them.

Case 1: If one of the Democratic actual change candidates  someone who espouses broad Sanders-like Democratic Socialist policies and is believed to be credible by the majority of Sanders most eager supporters  is nominated by the Democrats, that person could easily capture not just all of the Democratic voter pool, but a very large percentage of the independent voter pool and a good chunk of those 29% of Republicans who think the country is on the wrong path.

If that person got the 30% who identify as Democratic, most of the wrong track independents, and just some of the 29% of dissatisfied Republicans (remember that much of Trump support came from change voters in a change year), that person could command perhaps 56% of the electorate, if not more:

30% among self-identified Democrats

22% or more among independents

4% among change Republicans who think Trump is on the wrong track

That puts a Democratic Socialist in the White House. Remember, the total percentage of wrong track independents is 62%, or a full 26% of the electorate  assuming they all vote.

Case 2: If one of the status quo candidates is nominated, however, things look different. A true status quo candidate will have to sell him- or herself to independent voters using a small set of appeals. These are:

1. The Obama status quo is plenty good enough. Dont be scared by all this change-making.

2. Im really a change candidate, though my past belies that. Im just not as change-y as those I like to call  radicals.

3. I have so much charm, you dont care what I think.

About the latter appeal, Joe Biden himself espoused something like that in the 1970s (quoted here): I dont think the issues mean a great deal in terms of whether you win or lose, Biden told Washingtonian back in 1974. I think the issues are merely a vehicle to portray your intellectual capacity to the voters . . . a vehicle by which the voters will determine your honesty and candor.

By honesty and candor he meant charm and charisma, since honesty he had none of, even back then.

If he runs, Joe Biden will sell himself as keeper of the Obama status quo, plus folksy charm. Harris, Booker and Klobuchar (before she drops out) will each use the second appeal: Despite my past, Im change-y enough. ORourkes primary sell is eager charisma; none of his past looks remotely like change, despite the inexplicable addition to his campaign organization of some of the 2016 Sanders alums.

Where Does That Put Them in the General Election?

Again, each will get the 30% of the electorate that identifies as Democratic. Very few staunch Party supporters will withhold their votes from any Democratic nominee in 2020.

Because none of them is a credible change candidate in Republican eyes, very few Republican voters will switch sides if any of these candidates is the Democratic nominee. That puts 26% of the voters against them.

How will independent voters split? According to Reuters/Ipsos, 21% of independents think the country is on the right track, with another 17% unsure. If Trump picks up all of the right track independents and a little more than half of the not-sures, his vote totals so far look like this:

26% among self-identified Republicans

9% among right track independents

5% among not sure independents

With 40% of the electorate already in his pocket, Trump has to win just 17% of the wrong track independents to cross 50% of the electorate as a whole.

Again, 62% of the independent voters in America think the country is on the wrong track. Will they vote for Trump, a status quo Democrat, or stay home? They didnt vote for Clinton in enough numbers to guarantee her a sure win. Will they stay home in sufficient numbers twice?

2020 Presidential Outcomes

It comes down to this. If the Democrats nominate a genuine change candidate, she or he will likely win comfortably. I could easily see a 55-45% popular vote split, with an even greater margin in the Electoral College.

If the Democrats nominate a status quo or change-y enough candidate, on the other hand, the race could be tight, as it was in 2016.

The key is the wrong track independents. Will they vote for Trump, vote just to vote against Trump, or stay home? Remember, shrinking the voting pool means shrinking the number of wrong track independents who actually vote; many of those lost votes will be lost by the Democrat.

To show you what I mean, if all independents stayed home, the split between Democratic and Republican voters is just 4%. But 9-14% of independents are likely Trump voters. If only they vote, Trump has a 10% cushion among independents that the Democrats must make up. Can a status quo, change-y enough, or charisma-only candidate do inspire them to vote?

45% of all U.S. voters stayed home in 2016, a 20-year low. While all of them werent independents, thats ironically the percentage of independent voters in 2018.

What Will Democrats Do?

What follows is even more speculative than the rest of this piece, but theres some history to back it up.

1. Unless Sanders or a Sanders-like candidate has such a large lead that the race cant be stolen, the status quo (pro-corporate) leaders of the Democratic Party, with media help, will try to steal it.

2. If the theft is so obvious that even NPR news watchers notice, it will drive down Democratic support among independents, who are largely a pro-change group if they see someone they like, and non-voters if they dont.

3. That wont matter to Party leaders. Assuming there hasnt been a palace coup that replaces them, they will run an even more strident version of the 2016 campaign: Trump?! You want to leave Trump in office?!

(This is where Someone Else comes in, by the way. If each of the other not-Sanders candidates stumbles, Someone Else will be put forward. There are some interesting names in this list.)

4. If a non-Sanders-like candidate is nominated, the 2020 election will be a squeaker, as was 2016, with the incumbent (because this time there is one) likely winning.

5. If the incumbent is Pence, the same applies.

Of the standard-issue Democrats, the most likely nominees at this point, and also the most vulnerable to attack in the eyes of independents and millennials, are Joe Biden (see here for a very long list of his sins) and Kamala Harris, the aggressive, anti-pot pot-smoking prosecutor.



Of course, something surprising could happen between here and there  this is a way-too-early handicapping of the race. And frankly, I hope something surprising does happen; for example, I would love to see the palace coup I mentioned above, though Im not holding my breath.

The wild card seems to be the amount of support the Sanders-like candidate gets. If that persons support is wildly off the charts, if she or he is ahead by miles, the refs cant steal the primary. Otherwise, its going to be bumpy ride all the way into November.
Nature has manufactured the perfect machines. Only the fastest, toughest, and most cunning creatures have endured. We examine how animals have evolved and how we can benefit from their evolution.

Sundays from 8:30pm AEDT.
Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller welcomed European Commissioner for the Security Union Sir Julian King to NATO on Thursday (14 March 2019), for talks on how NATO and the EU can work more closely together to counter hybrid warfare. Hybrid tactics, which include cyber-attacks, disinformation and economic interference, are increasingly used against NATO and EU member countries.

Ms. Gottemoeller noted that Russia has used hybrid actions, malicious cyber activities and widespread disinformation campaigns to undermine Euro-Atlantic security. Allies have also expressed concerns about attempts by Russia to interfere in the upcoming European elections. In response to such challenges, NATO and the European Union are stepping up their cooperation.

NATO and the EU already cooperate closely in the cyber domain, including with exercises, and by sharing real-time warnings on cyber threats. NATO and EU countries have also taken steps to better defend against hybrid warfare, including by establishing the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, focused on how to counter tactics like cyber-attacks and propaganda. The Deputy Secretary General called the Centre a real boost for cooperation between the EU and NATO, as hybrid activities have become a permanent feature of Europes security environment. She added that NATO has also established Counter Hybrid Support Teams, which can provide assistance to Allies in preparing for and responding to hybrid threats.

Todays talks focused on a broad range of issues, including improved warning and intelligence sharing. Also on the agenda were issues linked to the supply chain security of IT products and cyber as a tool to spread disinformation. NATOs top officials regularly engage with EU leaders and Commissioners, as part of the strong cooperation between NATO and the EU. NATO and the EU will continue to consult regularly on cyber, hybrid and counter terrorism challenges.
The NATO Military Committee led by its Chairman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach visited Washington from 13-15 March 2019. The programme started with a visit to the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, followed by a table discussion with the Atlantic Council and concluded with a Wreath Laying at Arlington Cemetery.

The NATO Military Committee arrived at the Pentagon for a day of briefings and meetings. After being greeted by General Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the NATO Military Committee were briefed on the on US Military Strategy, updated on the US ongoing operations and informed about the Dynamic Force Employment concept which calls on the US military to be more agile and less predictable.

The 29 Military Representatives were then invited to participate in a panel discussion on Russia, Ukraine and the current security environment in Europe. The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Sir Stuart Peach commented on the ripple effect that has been felt across the Alliance, since 2014 and the illegal annexation of Crimea by Russia and the constant Russian military overture we have seen since then, Nations as well as NATO have felt the need to improve their defences to ensure their security.

The NATO Military Committee then headed to the heart of Washington to visit Capitol Hill. This was also an opportunity for them to meet with the Senate NATO Observer Group which was re-established last year as a show of continued support to NATO.

The group led by Air Chief Marshal Peach were then hosted by the Atlantic Council for a roundtable discussion on NATOs priorities after the 2018 Brussels Summit, its ongoing adaptation and the dual approach to Russia.

Before departing Washington, the NATO Military Committee stopped at Arlington Cemetery to pay their respects. In a wreath laying ceremony, the NATO Military Representatives saluted the sacrifice made by US troops around the world in the name of freedom, peace and security.
(Natural News) There is no shortage of scrutiny for Alexandria Ocasio Cortezs controversial Green New Deal. Experts say the financial burden of AOCs plan would send the United States spinning into economic ruin  but the cost of the Green New Deal may be even greater than the almighty dollar. Some pundits are now suggesting that the price of the plan put together by AOC may ultimately be paid in human life.

Writing for All News Pipeline, John C. Velisek alleges that the Green New Deal will take the United States back to the Stone Age, and will require millions of lives to be sacrificed  a sacrifice he posits the Left is more than willing to make. Climate change theory has been consistently called into question by independent science, but adherents to the global warming narrative continue to champion their cause, and all the tyranny theyre trying to shoe-horn in with it, as necessary for the good the planet. Many skeptics argue the global warming agenda is driven by fear  not facts  by design, and is a movement more entrenched in advancing government interests than protecting the environment.

A killer deal

Its not a secret that a substantial number of experts have spoken out about the potential risks of AOCs Green New Deal. As Bloomberg reports, while the Green New Deal may be billed as an environmental policy and jobs program, a closer look reveals a sordid truth: This deal also promises a bevvy of new entitlements, which AOC apparently intends to pay for with unlimited deficit spending.

If that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, its because it is.

While AOC may be spewing lies about climate change being a matter of life and death, Velisek argues that the Green New Deal really is that serious.

As we see now with our Bartending climate expert, anyone can parrot the climate change lie. She and many like her are willing to sacrifice millions of people for the radical environmental agenda based on falsehoods and lies, Velisek writes.

Climate change charade

Velisek is one of many pundits sharing their concerns about the real cost of the Green New Deal. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore also recently spoke out about the pitfalls of AOCs not-so-brilliant plan to upend the U.S. economy, stating it would be the end of civilization as we know it.

Speaking with Tucker Carlson at Fox News, Moore stated further:

The Green New Deal will be the end of civilization if 85% of the worlds and 85% of the US coal, oil and natural gas were fazed out over the next few years, like the next ten years. We do not have anything to replace them with Half of the population will die in a very short period of time. And as I also pointed out, there wouldnt be a tree left on this planet because that would be all there was to heat and cook.

Mike Adams, founder of Natural News and creator of Brighteon.com, also recently published an article detailing the ways in which AOCs Green New Deal will set the stage for disaster. After conducting a thorough anaylsis, Adams posits that this killer deal would lead to total collapse of the food supply, and worse.

As a theory, climate change has more holes than Swiss cheese. Earlier this year, Natural News compiled a list of all the biggest climate change scandals, revealing dozens of climate alarmist myths that have been proven false.

Not only will the Green New Deal plunge the economy and the food supply into total chaos, it will allow the central government to begin growing its power and radically change the culture of the U.S.  shifting citizens even further away from personal freedom and liberty towards a culture of dependence.

You can see more coverage of the latest climate atrocities at ClimateScienceNews.com.

Sources for this article include:

AllNewsPipeline.com

Bloomberg.com
(Natural News) It is now being widely reported that a multi-year crusade against Jack Phillips, the Colorado cake baker whos been under endless assault by the L.G.B.T. mafia for refusing to bake cakes for homosexual weddings and transgender conversion parties, is finally out of the Leftists crosshairs following a recent decision by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (C.C.R.C.) to basically stop persecuting Phillips simply because of his faith. But the eye-opening reality is that, despite this small but noteworthy victory, the demonic war being waged against Christians in this country has only just begun.

While we might not be hearing much about Phillips anymore, Christians at large throughout America should expect to feel the heat of escalating hostility against their free speech rights, particularly online. In case you havent noticed, censorship on all of the major tech platforms, including Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Apple, Twitter, and Instagram, has been on the rise in a major way in recent years  and one of its primary targets is Christianity and all things associated with it.

You see, the spirit of antichrist, backed by a growing army of mindless L.G.B.T. foot soldiers, is on the move in these final days to destroy all Christians wherever they might be found. And it wont stop until every last thing thats good, moral, and right in the eyes of God is completely obliterated from society, using whatever means necessary.

Eliminating internet free speech seems to be the current tactic, as Big Tech has all but completely morphed into an extension of the deep state thought police in trying to regulate what people say and share online. One of the latest trends pushing for this abolition of the First Amendment online involves Leftists falsely accusing Christians, conservatives, and other Big Government defectors of engaging in hate speech every time they express their views  hate speech having already been programmed into the minds of the brainwashed masses as being an unforgivable no-no.

By classifying Christianity as hate, Leftists hope to abolish it in the name of tolerance and love

The Southern Poverty Law Center (S.P.L.C.), for instance, a hate group pretending to support civil rights, has actually made it a fundamental policy to designate any and all Christian organizations it comes across as hate groups, perpetuating the myth that any person or group of people that espouses beliefs contrary to what Big Brother deems acceptable is somehow embodying and perpetuating hate, and thus needs to be silenced.

The SPLC regularly designates Christian organizations as hate groups because of their support for Biblical marriage, reports Bonnie Pritchett for WORLD magazine, noting that a far-Leftist group known as Change the Terms has already been tasked with identifying and targeting for elimination all forms of Christian hate speech online.

Cloaked as a bid to purge neo-Nazis and white supremacists from internet platforms, the group admonishes tech companies to combat hate activities while protecting minority voices. Its members include the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Center for American Progress.

Bible-believing Christians already know that, as revealed in the Bible from long ago, antichrists will roam the earth seeking out whomever they can lay their hands on in order to completely devour. In this current day and age, much of the persecution and tribulation being inflicted upon Christians as a result of their faith in Jesus Christ is happening online  though the elimination of all free speech, including speaking directly with others in everyday life, is sure to be next on the chopping block.

Thats the whole idea. Trying to wear out the saints, wrote one commenter at CBN News about how the Cult of L.G.B.T. and others often seek to silence Christians by embroiling them in endless legal proceedings. But we are more than conquerors through Him who loves us.

Sources for this article include:

CBN.com

NaturalNews.com

WNG.org
(Natural News) Because Twitter has now repeatedly violated Sec. 230 of the CDA (Communications Decency Act), the dishonest, unethical tech giant can now be sued by victims of the mass shooting involving two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the murder of innocent Muslim churchgoers just took place in the last few hours.

The two mosques where shootings took place, according to Radio NZ, are the Masjid Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Masjid Mosque.

At least one of the shooters obtained what almost certainly appear to be illegal weapons in New Zealand, then posted his intentions to kill Muslims on Twitter. He even posted deranged photos with revenge messages scrawled across firearm magazines. Twitter did not remove his account, even as Twitter banned Natural News (@HealthRanger) from posting stories about nutrition and natural health.

Yes, you read that correctly: Twitter banned one of the most prominent online channels on natural health and nutrition but didnt ban an insane, deranged mass shooters channel that clearly contained disturbing visual proof of an intent to carry out mass murder. As youll see below, Twitter may be complicit in this carefully planned, staged event that took the lives of innocent people for the purpose of causing cultural chaos and violence.

Heres one of the photos that Twitter carried on behalf of the mass shooter, who went on to murder an unknown number of churchgoers:

Twitter and Facebook can both be sued for publishing this killers photos and videos, since they have forfeit any liability protection under Sec. 230 of the CDA

The facts of this horrific event seem to point toward huge legal liability for Twitter, which is now functioning as an editorial publisher by selectively banning channels for political speech or health freedom speech.

Twitter can now be sued by all the families of the victims of these violent shootings, for Twitter has forfeited Sec. 230 legal immunity by selectively banning pro-America, pro-Trump channels as part of its agenda to assert strong editorial control over its platform. This puts Twitter in the position of being legally liable for all the content posted on Twitter, including the content posted by this mass shooter.

The shooter also live-streamed the entire mass killing on Facebook, posting a video that looks eerily like a first-person shooter video game except these were real casualties and real deaths, not imaginary video game scores. By the same legal reasoning, this also makes Facebook legally liable for potentially billions of dollars in damages stemming from lawsuits of the families whose loved ones were murdered while Facebook used a video stream of the mass murder to increase its corporate profits.

Both Twitter and Facebook, accurately stated, are complicit in these New Zealand murders.

Heres a screen grab of the video the shooter live-streamed on Facebook. Note the bizarre scrawling in white marker on this shotgun which was used at the beginning of the shooting. The fact that this event was carefully scripted, video recorded and published on social media proves that this real violence was staged as a global media event to achieve a specific political purpose (see below).

The violence is real, but the entire shooting appears to be an elaborate staging of events to provoke more war and hatred and Twitter just helped the killers achieve their ultimate goal

Notably, as much as the violence in this event appears to be genuine, it also appears that the shooter was setting up an elaborate narrative to blame conservatives such as Candace Owens, who is for some reason named in a post that was reportedly authored by the shooter. (Candace Owens is a brilliant, African-American conservative commentator who abhors the use of violence, by the way.) Other parts of the post containing hate-filled rants against Islam and a desire to carry out violence against Muslims.

The narrative that this shooter was radicalized by intelligent conservative voices like Candace Owens is obviously contrived, and it points to larger questions about who might really be behind this event (and who benefits from the narrative that emerges from the carefully scripted, video-documented violence).

According to the shooters own manifesto which was apparently posted to social media, the shooter specifically chose to use firearms to escalate mass media coverage and cause a civil war in the United States. The rantings read like a CIA divide and conquer blueprint, or a problem-reaction-solution approach to sowing dissent and sparking even more violence. See TheGatewayPundit.com for rapid coverage of tweets and videos, as we are refusing to publish the videos here, since they are too graphic.

Another suspicious fact thats emerging from this event concerns reports that there may have been three shooters at two locations, meaning this may have been a coordinated, carefully planned (i.e. staged) event.

Notably, New Zealand is already an extremely restrictive nation when it comes to civilian ownership of firearms. The rifle that has been shown in photos that appear to be linked to this shooting are firearms which are extremely difficult to obtain in New Zealand and require multiple levels of government permitting, background checks and home inspections. Although it is too early to know yet, it seems almost certain that at least one of these weapons was acquired illegally.

We mourn the loss of innocent life and reiterate that no person  not Muslims, not Christians, not Hindus, Sikhs or Jews  deserves to be subjected to violence merely because of their religion.

Since President Trump was elected in 2016, however, Leftists in America have been escalating their hate-filled attacks on Christians in America, all while labeling Bible scripture hate speech and censoring Christians from social media. The same tech giants that censor Christians who preach the word of God, it turns out, are more than happy to live-stream mass murder by a deranged lunatic whose rantings just happen to perfectly fit the globalist narrative that would foment worldwide violence and hatred.

How convenient.
(Natural News) For urban dwellers, time is crucial. A lot of people today are choosing emergency rooms over scheduled consultations. In fact, a new study suggests that Americans seek help through emergency departments due to the inadequacy of health insurances. The team of researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) found that there is a surprisingly high number of usage of emergency department visits in lieu of inpatient and outpatient care.

David Marcozzi, an associate professor in the UMSOM Department of Emergency Medicine, and co-director of the UMSOM Program in Health Disparities and Population Health, stated that this study is a means to better understand this countrys healthcare system, and how individuals demand health care services.

Some medical personnel suggest limiting emergency department use in order to prioritize patients with critical health needs, but others say that it isnt possible as of the moment. Most individuals seek healthcare from emergency departments because it covers deficiencies of outpatient and inpatient care. These deficiencies include lack of medical equipment, hospital beds/rooms, and hospitals, and the promptness of being attended to. Having a healthcare insurance does not exactly equate to being cared for, hence the need for people to seek attention from departments that are supposedly for individuals with critical cases. The volume of patients currently checked in at emergency departments can be attributed to the deficiencies mentioned above. Furthermore, the increase in emergency department visits can be blamed on the lack of disease/illness prevention and health-maintaining strategies.

Unlike most inpatient and outpatient services which are mostly scheduled, emergency rooms are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The countrys current living population demand speedy and efficient services, especially in relation to health. Unfortunately, emergency departments are also lagging behind in service time due to the high number of visits daily. The average time spent by a patient waiting before seeing a nurse, assistant, or physician is around 24 minutes. Individuals with broken bones wait for an average of an hour before being administered pain medication. Most patients spend more than two hours before being sent home or taken to their room when admitted.

Emergency department statistics

Every year in the U.S., there are 136.3 million emergency department visits, as compared to outpatient and inpatient visits at 101 million and 39 million, respectively. Inpatient visits include planned consultations and hospital confinements. In the U.S. overall, there are 42 visits per 100 persons.

Out of 100 people, 38 people in California visit the emergency department; 44 in Florida; 41 in Illinois; 37 in New York; and 49 in Texas. Statistics also show that 21 percent of 18-year-olds and under make use of the emergency department as compared to 63 percent of individuals aged 18 to 64, and 16 percent who are 65 years and older.

Only 29 percent of emergency department visits use private insurance; 35 percent use Medicaid or the Childrens Health Insurance Program; 18 percent use Medicare; 14 percent have no insurance; and 13 percent have an unknown insurance status.

The five hospitals that have the most emergency department visits are: Florida Hospital Orlando, Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Florida, Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, Genesys Regional Medical Center in Michigan, and Memorial Hermann Southwest Hospital in Texas. According to the study, those living in the South are more likely to have an emergency department visit than other areas of the country.

Using the emergency room for non-emergency and non-critical cases is a bit risky because it heightens confusion among healthcare professionals when assessing the patients health needs. In other words, patients with non-emergency cases are mistakenly given priority over patients who really need the medical attention. It goes both ways: Patients with emergency cases can likewise be seen by healthcare experts as non-emergency cases that are not to be prioritized.

To sum it up, having health insurance does not mean you will get attended to immediately. Having it might reduce medical expenses, but no assurances can be made for the time it takes to be fully taken care of, especially when you have health needs that you deem critical. It is best to take care of yourself first and keep a healthy lifestyle in order to reduce our reliance on health insurances.

Sources include:

ScienceDaily.com

BeckersHospitalReview.com
(Natural News) Though the organization today is among the most outspoken when it comes to drumming up mass hysteria over global warming and climate change  its homepage currently has a pop-up urging visitors to sign a petition to Tell Congress to Push for a Green New Deal  Greenpeace wasnt always a shameless advocate for junk science.

In fact, the co-founder of Greenpeace Canada, Patrick Moore, recently spilled the beans during an interview on SiriusXMs Breitbart News Tonight, explaining that not only is global warming completely fake, but that its also being used by social engineers around the world  including Greenpeace  to fear-monger the public in to giving up their rights and freedoms.

Speaking with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak, Moore held nothing back in revealing fear and guilt are being used as conversion tactics to draw more followers into the Cult of Climate Change  the endgame being to siphon as much cash from people as possible in order to implement a globalist system of governance in which nobody will be allowed to drive big cars, eat meat, use plastic, or in any other way harm the planet.

Fear has been used all through history to gain control of peoples minds and wallets and all else, and the climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign  well, fear and guilt  youre afraid youre killing your children because youre driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that, Moore explained during his interview.

Theres no stronger motivation than those two.

For more news about the hoax that is global warming and climate change, be sure to visit GlobalWarming.Fetch.news and ClimateScienceNews.com.

Green companies are also a propaganda-driven fraud, Moore says

But what about all of the climate scientists whove reached a consensus that the earth is heating up because of cow farts, you might be asking? According to Moore, the whole thing is a faux-science racket driven by corrupt politicians and bureaucracies that are trying to centralize more political power and control, and that couldnt care less about the environment.

Its the same situation with so-called green companies, which are also fraudulent in that theyre simply mechanisms of deception designed to steal more taxpayer funds and funnel them into pet projects that never actually go anywhere.

Americans witnessed this under the Obama regime, when about $80 billion in green energy stimulus money was basically flushed down the toilet after it was learned that nearly 50 of the green energy companies that Obama subsidized on the taxpayer dime ultimately went belly-up.

The unholy trifecta of the green movement, the fake media, and corrupt politicians continue to drive the conspiracy theory of global warming and climate change, despite not having a shred of legitimate evidence or proof that these mythical concepts even exist  and the brainwashed masses just continue to gobble it all up.

 youve got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. Youve got the media echo chamber  fake news  repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that theyre killing their children. And then youve got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials, Moore says.

And then youve got the green businesses, the rent-seekers, and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this. And then, of course, youve got the scientists who are willingly, theyre basically hooked on government grants.

You can listen to Moores full interview with Breitbart News Tonight at this link.

Sources for this article include:

Breitbart.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) In New York, a federal judge has ruled against the parents of non-vaccinated kids, denying their children their right to attend school.

U.S. District Court Judge Vincent Briccetti denied a temporary injunction request that would have permitted 44 unvaccinated kids to return to school. This will keep the students out of the Green Meadow Waldorf School for at least three more weeks.

In December, Rockland Countys health commissioner, Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, ordered that children who are unvaccinated at 60 different private schools across two zip codes stay home from school during what has become the states longest measles outbreak in years, with 145 cases reported so far. The order applies to schools where the vaccination rates fall below 95 percent, and it marked the first time that county officials have moved to ban unvaccinated kids from schools.

The parents of the unvaccinated students at the heart of the injunction filed a lawsuit against the Rockland Health Department as well as the commissioner challenging that order in hopes of enabling their children to attend school without having to inject them with toxins to regain access. Their lawsuit says that the order not only violates their religious objections to the concept of vaccinations but is also unnecessary because the measles cases have so far been mostly confined to Hasidic Jewish communities. All of the children who are involved in the lawsuit had been granted religious exemptions to vaccination, but none are Orthodox Jews.

No cases of measles at the school in question

According to the countys law department, the vaccination rate at Green Meadow stood at around 33 percent when the order was put in place in December and has since grown to roughly 56 percent. No cases of measles have been reported at the private school so far.

The parents of the students in question told the media that their children were affected psychologically by the order and cant understand why theyre not allowed to go to school. One mother said her child has missed 90 days of school so far.

The lawsuit says that the childrens constitutional rights have been violated by forcing them to stay home from school and that the order has substantially disrupted their education.

A future court date hasnt been set, although Briccetti told the parents lawyer, Michael Sussman, that he might fare better in state court. He added: Its a tough situation and I feel bad about it  but I dont feel I have the authority to do this.

Sussman said: I do not believe state law gives the authority to the public health commissioner of the county or the state to exclude children from school where there is no reported case of measles in the specific school.

Green Meadow Spokeswoman Vicki Larson said that the school does not have an official stance on the matter but is following the exclusion order issued by the county and working with the local health department. Students who want to return to school have to either prove their immunity to the disease or show that they got the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination.

The exclusion will end when no new cases are reported in the area for 21 days, although this time can be increased to 42 days as measles numbers rise.

Its sad that these young children are suffering because of the mass hysteria created over an illness and vaccine that are widely misunderstood. If those who are vaccinated against the disease have the protection that vaccine proponents claim, they should not be afraid of allowing unvaccinated students to share their classrooms.

Of course, the truth is that not only can vaccinated kids indeed contract measles, but they can also infect others with it, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. In fact, the 2011 New York measles outbreak was caused by a vaccinated person. If they really dont want kids to spread measles, perhaps everyone should be forced to stay home.

Sources for this article include:

NewYork.CBSLocal.com

NYPost.com

USAToday.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) The next time you come across a sea turtle in the wild, remember that there are pieces of plastic trash inside the animals belly. And if that is not stomach-churning enough for you, imagine the damage caused by jagged pieces of toxic pollutant tumbling inside your belly.

Researchers in the United Kingdom raised this issue after checking more than 100 turtles in three different oceans and seas. Given the results of their study, they warned that turtles and other forms of marine life are paying the price for the unfulfilled promises made by plastic manufacturers and governments when it came to cutting back on plastic pollution.

Supported by the University of Exeter and the marine conservation group Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), the study examined the digestive systems of turtles found in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea. It found plastics, smaller microplastics, and various synthetic items in the bellies of each and every single animal.

This study provides more evidence that we all need to help reduce the amount of plastic waste released to our seas and maintain clean, healthy and productive oceans for future generations, said Penelope Lindeque, the co-author of the scientific paper. (Related: Plastic trash polluting our oceans is expected to double by 2025what is being done to stop this global crisis?)

Mediterranean sea turtles could have hundreds of plastic bits in their bellies

Lindeque and her research team had been studying microplastic pollution for many years. Time and again, they uncovered evidence that tiny plastic pollutants have contaminated almost every marine animal species that they have evaluated.

Microscopic zooplankton, fishes in adult and larval stages of life, and dolphins have all shown signs of accidentally eating plastic. Sea turtles are merely the latest in a long line of victims that the researchers looked over.

In the new study, the researchers safely extracted over 800 pieces of plastic from the guts of 102 turtles. The biggest particle measured less than half a centimeter in length, which is shorter than half the diameter of a penny.

Based on their estimates, the typical turtle would have around 150 plastic particles inside its digestive system. The amount varied according to the sea or ocean the animal lived in.

Of the three bodies of water involved in the study, the Mediterranean Sea displayed the highest level of plastic contamination. Some of the turtles living in that sea turned out to have up to 500 pieces of plastics inside their bodies.

The unknown health hazards posed by microbeads and other microplastics

The plastic trash recovered from the digestive systems of the sea turtles originated from a variety of sources. Cigarettes, polyester clothing, marine gear, and automobile tires proved to be the most common sources of these pollutants.

The researchers also found microbeads inside a good number of the animals. These tiny plastic spheres used to be the rage for certain personal care and beauty products, such as body washes and facial scrubs. However, the U.S. banned them in 2015 with the U.K. following suit in 2018.

Lindeque and her co-author Dr. Emily Duncan warned against underestimating the dangers of microbeads and other small bits of plastic contaminants. While microplastics were much less likely to become a deadly choking hazard to the animals that accidentally consumed them, the tiny pollutants could pose a different kind of threat to health.

Future work should focus on whether microplastics may be affecting aquatic organisms more subtly, Duncan remarked on the little-known effects of microplastics on sea turtles and other marine organisms. For example, they may possibly carry contaminants, bacteria or viruses, or they may affect the turtle at a cellular or sub-cellular level.

Sources include:

EcoWatch.com

Exeter.ac.uk
(Natural News) The Left was always been an unhinged bunch but in the age of POTUS Donald Trump, those Americans in that group who were teetering on the edge of sanity have fallen over the cliff big time, as we have seen time and again.

The latest example involves a Connecticut woman who was caught in a photo texting that shed blow away a state senator if she had a gun, as well as several members of the National Rifle Association.

And no doubt she never caught the irony of hating Second Amendment supporters so much that she wanted to kill them  with a gun.

As The Daily Wire reported, the woman  an anti-gun activist attending the annual Connecticut Judiciary Committee public hearing on gun bills  was photographed writing that she would blow away [Republican state senator Rob] Sampson and a large group of NRA if only she had a constitutionally protected firearm.

The Connecticut Post reported the story; WTNH chief political correspondent Mark Davis tweeted the photo:

Woman expelled from gun hearing after being seen sending this text about a state lawmaker. pic.twitter.com/ySVc9Zm9x5  Mark Davis (@markdavisWTNH) March 11, 2019

The photo and incident were reported to Capitol Police, and the woman was asked to leave the chamber. But she wasnt charged; apparently, tweeting an unhinged threat in Connecticut isnt the same as verbalizing one. (Related: It is the right and duty of all Americans to REFUSE to comply with unconstitutional gun laws.)

The paper reported that Sampson is a very big supporter of the Second Amendment  which in and of itself is ironic; anyone elected to office in American who swears an oath to the Constitution should be a big supporter of all the amendments and the rights contained therein, not just a few of them.

Why are Americans constantly forced to ask for, defend, or otherwise seek permission to enjoy our RIGHT to keep and bear arms?

As for the hearing the unhinged Leftist woman was kicked out of, National Review summarized it:

The legislation was introduced in response to the death of 15-year-old Ethan Song, who was killed after accidentally shooting himself in the head with a gun that belonged to his friends father. The gun had been secured with a lock, but left in a container with the key and accompanying ammunition. As a result, state prosecutors said they could not charge its owner, because state law requires only that loaded guns are properly secured. Under the new legislation, which has been dubbed Ethans Law by his parents, owners would be required to lock loaded and unloaded guns alike.

So in other words, passing another law that would only further infringe  yes, thats the right word to use, given the language of the Second Amendment  on a lawful gun owner would do nothing but cause them greater inconvenience and put themselves and their families at greater risk because, of course, a locked gun does no one any good when confronted in their home by an armed burglar.

Another bill being considered, according to the Hartford Courant, says any gun owner visibly carrying a handgun would be required to produce a state-issued permit if police requested it. This bill came as the result of a man in Bridgeport, Conn., repeatedly refusing to show cops his permit, though eventually the situation was peacefully resolved. Said Sampson, I dont know what [the situation] was allowed to escalate. This person was minding their own business, like riding down the road or mowing your lawn Why would law enforcement need to show up for that purpose?

Sampson is spot-on. The rights contained in the Bill of Rights  including the Second Amendment  are just that: Rights. They are not permissions to be requested and then granted by government, and they are not suggestions. They are rights recognized as natural for all humans by our Constitution.

We shouldnt have to hold hearings to get permission to use them or suffer violent Leftist fools who dont appreciate them.

Read more about the violent libtard Leftists at Violence.news and Libtards.news.

Sources include:

Courant.com

NationalReview.com

SecondAmendment.news
Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham, R-San Luis Obispo, wants state regulators to crackdown on identity thieves who use stolen information to register as Uber and Lyft drivers. Those stolen IDs allow criminals and unlicensed drivers to circumvent background checks and vehicle inspections.

In September, the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit first exposed the underground black market for counterfeit rideshare accounts. Now law enforcement is looking into several cases of potential fraud according to an Uber spokesperson.

THATS NOT MY ID!

One case under investigation involves the stolen identity of Oakland resident Jimonte Johnson.

For the past four years, Johnson has worked as an Uber driver to help pay for his education. But those trips ended in February when the company blocked his account.

A manager at Ubers Greenlight Hub told Johnson that someone started a secondary account using his personal information and spent the prior two months picking up passengers under his name.

Someone had my ID. [An Uber representative] showed me. It was my ID, but they had the picture cropped out and it had someone elses picture on there, Johnson told NBC Bay Area.

Johnson said he doesnt understand why Ubers technology would allow someone to start an account thats obviously fake.

I know theyre probably not responsible for someone having my information, but they should be able to block it from being used on their platform. Thats whats concerning to me.

STATE REGULATORS

Assemblyman Cunningham wants to see law enforcement work with regulators at the California Public Utilities Commission to solve cases of identity theft, especially when it leads to phony drivers getting behind the wheel.

If people are stealing IDs and fraudulently starting accounts as drivers, thats a big problem and we may need to look at legislation to make that in and of itself a crime, Cunningham told NBC Bay Area.

In 2018, Cunningham passed legislation aimed at helping passengers confirm their rideshare driver is legitimate. The new law requires all transportation network companies to provide users with the name and photo of their driver. Cunningham introduced the bill in response to a string of alleged sexual assaults by an Uber driver in his district.

Whats troubling about these stories coming out [NBC Bay Area] is investigating, it sounds like, while weve made strides trying to give the customer more power in verifying their driver, they are able to evade that altogether, Cunningham said.

IDENTITY THEFT NOTIFICATION

Johnson believes Uber should have contacted him as soon as someone tried to start an account with his drivers license, instead of kicking him off the platform and forcing him to go to a Greenlight Hub to learn his identity was compromised.

A spokesperson for Uber told NBC Bay Area the company does have a process to alert customers when the company catches suspicious behavior, but wouldnt offer specific details.

Lyft told NBC Bay Area the company also has a team that investigates fraudulent behavior.

After Uber verified Johnsons identity, his account was reactivated. While hes relieved he can drive again, Johnson said hes disappointed in his longtime employer.

Im clearly not the only person this is happening to, so I feel like there should be this pressure of, Hey you guys should be keeping peoples data secure and peoples identities secure. There should be more responsibility on Uber for this, Johnson said.

In addition to federal law enforcement, the CPUC tells NBC Bay Area the agency is now investigating cases of fake driver accounts set up with stolen information, however its unclear whether the agency can assess any penalty for fraudulent drivers.

If you have a tip for the Investigative Unit, email theunit@nbcbayarea.com or call 888-996-TIPS.
The Oakland Police Department said on Thursday that four officers who fatally shot a homeless man with mental health issues a year ago have been placed on administrative leave.

However, the department didn't explain why it took that action against Sgt. Francisco Negrete and Officers William Berger, Brandon Hraiz and Craig Tanaka, saying, "At this time the department will not be discussing any additional details."

Michael Rains, an attorney for the union that represents Oakland police officers, couldn't immediately be reached for comment on the matter.

The department's action comes a week after it released documents showing that its federal monitor, Robert Warshaw, criticized police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick's decision to only impose light discipline against the officers for firing 12 shots at 32-year-old Joshua Pawlik in the 900 block of 40th Street at about 7 p.m. on March 11, 2018.

Warshaw also said he believes the officers overreacted to slight movements by Pawlik.

Oakland police said a large number of officers were dispatched after they received reports of an armed, unconscious man lying between two houses.

Police said Negrete, Berger, Hraiz and Tanaka shot Pawlik because he ignored repeated commands to take his hand off the gun and when he began to move he posed an immediate threat with the risk of death or serious bodily harm.

But Warshaw said in his Feb. 19 report made public last week that Pawlik's movements, as seen on a video of the incident, "do not coincide with the movements to which the officers claim they reacted."

Warshaw wrote, "Mr. Pawlik roused to consciousness, and the video shows his actions to be consistent with someone who was waking up and attempting to orient himself. He was moving minimally."

Warshaw said, "He was a live human being -- and any reasonable officer should not have expected him to remain perfectly still."

Warshaw wrote, "Mr. Pawlik's slight movements did not constitute intent and a reasonable officer should not have concluded such."

The monitor also said the investigations by the Oakland Police Department's internal affairs unit and its use-of-force review board were "deficient" and Kirkpatrick's summary of the shooting was "deficient and myopic."

Warshaw's concerns about the way Kirkpatrick and her department investigated the shooting prompted him to ask U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick, who is overseeing court-mandated reforms to the Oakland Police Department, to appoint an outside investigator to look into the shooting.

Orrick granted Warshaw's request and two weeks ago he appointed San Francisco criminal defense lawyer Edward Swanson, who has investigated two other Oakland police controversies, to investigate the shooting.

Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris filed a wrongful death on behalf of Pawlik's mother Kelly Pawlik last month, alleging that officers had no justification for shooting Joshua Pawlik multiple times because he didn't point a gun at them or threaten them in any way.

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley issued a report last week saying that an investigation by her office concluded that "the evidence does not support criminal charges being filed" against the four officers who shot Pawlik.
Young people in the Bay Area are joining other youth all over the world in walking out of class Friday to demand action against climate change.

Hundreds of high schools and middle school students from across the region held colorful signs that read "Youth vs. Apocalypse" and "Green New Deal Now," packing the streets of San Francisco as part of the worldwide Youth Climate Strike.

"Whats the use of going to school and learning how to be in the world, if theres no world in the future to be in? So were trying to make a change of that now, while we still can," Sam, a sophomore at Berkeley High School, told NBC Bay Area.

The walkout is all in an effort to demand legislative action to halt the human-made effects on climate change and advocate for other environmental issues. They hope to have their voices heard by lawmakers like Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who have offices in city.

Thousands of young people walked out of their classrooms and took to the streets to demand local officials to take action against climate change. Hear why the youth is advocating in Palo Alto.

Feinstein was at the center of the Green New Deal debate in February when a group of Bay Area students confronted her on the ambitious Democratic-led plan to shift the U.S. economy from fossil fuels to renewable sources.

"That resolution will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them," Feinstein told them after the students insisted the legislation was badly needed.

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo urged Palo Alto students to continue advocating on climate change during the nationwide climate strike.

Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo is one Bay Area lawmaker who joined kids rallying in Palo Alto. "What you are doing is part of an extraordinary American tradition, when people rise up and say this is not good and we need to do this, she told a crowd of students.

Young people in the Palo Alto joined youth all over the world in walking out of class Friday to demand action against climate change, so we asked 12-year-old climate change advocate Julia Zeitlin how others can help reverse the issues.

The coordinated "school strikes," were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year.

Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.

Climate Strike: Hundreds of Students Walk Out of Class in SF

Friday's rallies were one of the biggest international actions yet. Protests were underway or planned in cities in more than 100 countries, including the United States, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Wellington, New Zealand, and Oulu, Finland.

NBC Bay Area's Sam Brock and Jennifer Gonzalez contributed to this report.
San Francisco police are on alert and Muslim leaders in the Bay Area are denouncing the terror attacks that left 49 people dead and more wounded in New Zealand.

"We mourn the heartbreaking killings of men, women and children gathered for prayer in their houses of worship," said Ammad Wajahat Rafiqi, a civil rights and legal coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Bay Area office in Santa Clara.

Rafiqi also asked for support from other leaders.

"...(We) urge leaders in our nation and worldwide to speak out forcefully against the growing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate that appears to have motivated growing white supremacist attacks against vulnerable communities such as Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and African-Americans," he said.

A gunman opened fire at two different mosques in New Zealand during prayers on Friday, killing 49 people. Many more were wounded.

Authorities also found explosives attached to a vehicle, according to national media reports. A suspect has been arrested.

In the United States, authorities were posted outside mosques. San Francisco police officers are doing extra passing calls around mosques in the city, according to spokesman Joseph Tomlinson.

"It's a precautionary measure," Tomlinson said. "We want to at least be aware."

Rafiqi also suggested Muslim organizations step up their own security following the attacks.

"In the wake of this tragedy, we urge mosques, Islamic schools and other community institutions in the United States and around the world to take stepped-up security precautions, particularly during times of communal prayer," he said.

Rafiqi said community leaders are expected to hold vigils for the victims this weekend in the East Bay, Peninsula and San Francisco. Details on those events weren't yet available Friday morning.
Berkeley commuters could one day trade their long drive into San Francisco for a stress-free ferry ride.

The Berkeley City Council has approved a study to look into restoring the closed Berkeley Pier to make way for ferry service between the Berkeley Marina and San Francisco.

East Bay commuters say its about time.

"Its a cool option to have, to be able to relax on the ferry and get a drink," Berkeley resident Lindsey Moore said. "Its much less stressful than BART is."

On Wednesday, the City Council voted unanimously to enter an agreement with the Water Emergency Transportation Authority to begin planning for a ferry service and a public recreation pier at the Berkeley Marina.

"The timing is perfect as were looking big picture at the future of our marina and our waterfront," Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin said.

Money from the bridge toll measure passed last year is helping pay for the $250,000 feasibility study.

The WETA board of directors also will need to vote on the agreement for the project. If all goes according to plan, ferry service from Berkeley to San Francisco could launch by 2035.
32 years ago, at a staff retreat, Exploratorium physicist Larry Shaw came up with the idea to celebrate pi  the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter  as a fun activity for his co-workers.

Today, much like the irrational number it celebrates, Pi Day has gone on and on  and may continue forever. The holiday, celebrated on March 14th  that's 3/14  has spawned a worldwide following, and attracts hundreds to the Exploratorium each year (though all the free pie  the kind you eat  probably doesn't hurt).

"We love math!" exclaimed a teacher from Los Altos, who brought her students to San Francisco to walk in the Pi Day procession, held at 1:59 p.m. each year. Participants each hold a digit of pi, at the end of a yardstick, inscribed on a paper plate  the kind you eat pie from, of course.

"I'm number 73!" exclaimed one young boy, proudly holding his digit in the air.

The 73rd digit of pi is a zero, by the way.

3.14 isn't the only number being celebrated at the Exploratorium this year.

"It's our 50th year, we were founded in 1969," explained CEO Chris Flink. "This is the golden anniversary of the Exploratorium."

In half a century, the museum's mission hasn't changed. In fact, Flink said, it's become arguably more relevant than ever.

"We stimulate people to open their eyes, to make sense of the world around them for themselves, to connect the dots, if you will," he said. "If that was true in 1969, before the internet and before we each had a device in our pocket, how much more true is that today?"

From the beginning, the Exploratorium brought scientists and artists together under one roof to craft hands-on exhibits that would be tested with museum visitors, re-worked, and re-released from the Exploratorium's own workshop. Now, in its still-new home on Pier 15, Flink said the museum is ready for another half century of discoveries.

"I think this is one of the most inspiring places on earth," Flink said. "People come here and their eyes are opened in new ways."
San Jose students were called out by police on Thursday to a dance battle.

The event was part of Morrill Middle School's annual career day. After students heard from a host of professionals on career paths available to them, the campus and visitors gathered to hear from San Jose Police Department Sgt. Brian Spears, who served as a keynote speaker.

Spears, along with officers Andy Yciano, Edward Carboni, Aaron Alvarez and Jennica Nguyen spoke to students about working hard to achieve success.

Spears in his speech emphasized the importance of supporting and improving our own communities. And then he challenged students to a dance battle.

Officers Carboni and Yciano were selected by students to represent police.

"This experience allows our students to see our local police officers in a different light and helps build positive relationship and partnerships within the community," Principal Thomas Carroll said.

As to who won the dance off, we'll leave that up to you to decide after watching the video above.
Skateboarder Jake Phelps, who edited Thrasher Magazine, published in San Francisco, has died, according to the city's medical examiner and Thrasher Magazine.

Phelps was 56, and lived in San Francisco.

Tony Vitello, who posted about Phelps' death on the magazine's website, said, "I never met anybody who loves anything more than Jake worshipped skateboarding."

Thrasher Magazine has been published monthly in San Francisco since 1981, according to its website, and claims to be the longest-running, best-selling skateboarding magazine.

From his hospital bed at Zuckerberg San Francisco General on Thursday, Phelps told NBC Bay Area his side of the controversy surrounding the event and the police response.
A Brentwood business says it has seen a bump in so-called grab-and-run thefts at its store, and it is worried about the trend getting worse.

The store sells fashionable, brand-name clothes; a hoodie can run almost $150. Twice in recent days, managers said people came in and grabbed clothes and took off without paying.

"We just had two recent grab-and-runs," said Brandon Nido, a manager at Mainland Skate and Surf. "They walk up to the counter and pretend their going to pay and distract one of us, and once they have that window, they run out."

The store shared two videos, one showing a single thief walking out with a shirt in hand, the other showing a group of thieves taking off with some of the store's priciest clothing.

"Billionaire Boys Club, thats like the hottest brand right now that all these kids are wearing," Nido said. "It's expensive, $150, thats what we usually see thats being stolen."

The total loss at Mainland was more than $900. The store filed a report to security at the Streets of Brentwood mall. In a statement, the mall said in part its working with police and tenants to detour and prevent retail property crimes and to assist in the prosecution when possible.

Workers say they didnt call police directly because the store was busy, and they doubted anyone would get caught. But when we spoke to Brentwood police, they immediately sent an officer out and said every crime matters, and the sooner its reported the better.

Police say they have a good relationship with management at the shopping center, meeting once a month. And they patrol the mall regularly. The grab-and-runs typically involve a car, and police advised witnesses to try to get a license plate if it can be done safely.
Authorities say an off-duty Indiana State Police trooper has been shot and wounded by his son at the trooper's home in northern Indiana.

The St. Joseph County prosecutor's office says the trooper was shot late Thursday in Granger and was taken to a hospital in semi-stable condition with a single gunshot wound.

The prosecutor's office says the trooper's son, who is 11-years-old, was detained on a preliminary charge of attempted murder pending a review by prosecutors and juvenile authorities.

The Associated Press isn't reporting the name of the trooper to avoid identifying his son. The shooting is under investigation and the prosecutor's office says it planned to release additional information later.
Border agents have been told to explicitly target Spanish speakers and migrants from Latin America in carrying out a Trump administration program requiring asylum seekers wait in Mexico, according to memos obtained by The Associated Press that reveal some inner workings of a top government priority to address the burgeoning number of Central Americans arriving in the country.

The Trump administration launched the program in late January in what marks a potentially seismic shift on how the U.S. handles the cases of immigrants seeking asylum and fleeing persecution in their homeland. The program initially applied only to those who turned themselves in at official border crossings, but a memo from a division chief of the Border Patrol's San Diego sector says it expanded Friday to include people who cross the border illegally.

The guidance includes instruction about various groups of immigrants who are not to be sent back to Mexico and instead go through the traditional asylum process in the U.S. immigration court system. They include pregnant women, LGBT migrants and people suffering medical issues. Authorities said previously that Mexican asylum seekers are excluded, as are children traveling alone.

U.S. officials must check if the asylum seeker has any felony convictions and notify Mexico at least 12 hours before they are returned. Those who cross illegally must have come as single adults, though the administration is in talks with the Mexican government to include families.

The program is being implemented as border arrests soared in February to a 12-year-high and more than half of those stopped arrived as families, many of them asylum seekers who generally turn themselves in instead of trying to elude capture. Guatemala and Honduras have replaced Mexico as the top countries, a remarkable shift from only a few years ago.

The instructions say Mexican officials insist that no more than 20 asylum seekers are returned each day from San Diego to Tijuana, Mexico, on Monday through Saturday, underscoring challenges that the U.S. faces in trying to quickly ramp up one of its top border enforcement priorities and most significant changes to the U.S. immigration system of Donald Trump's presidency. Authorities said Tuesday that more than 76,000 were stopped or apprehended at the Mexican border in February, more than double the same period last year.

A memo on Tuesday to top Border Patrol officials in San Diego said the agency is under "pressures to utilize this program as much as we can."

Asylum-seeking families are typically released from U.S. custody immediately and allowed to settle with family or friends while their cases wind through immigration courts, which often takes years. Critics say that amounts to "catch-and-release," which administration officials want to limit with the new Mexico program.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security described the program as "another tool available in the law" to respond to the record numbers of Central American migrants arriving at the border in recent months. The agency said the program is being carried out in a "thoughtful and deliberate manner" that protects vulnerable migrants and is done in collaboration with the Mexican government.

Two U.S. officials who were not authorized to discuss the internal guidance and spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed contents of the memos obtained by the AP.

Explicitly targeting Spanish speakers and Latin Americans had not been previously disclosed, though some critics said it was no surprise considering that recent arrest numbers are largely Central Americans.

Judy Rabinovitz, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the criteria "does smack of the same concerns we had in the Muslim ban," referring to Trump's ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries, which was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court.

"We know they are trying to get at Central American asylum seekers but to see it written there so blatantly is so disturbing," said Rabinovitz, whose organization was among those that sued the administration last month to block the policy.

Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has made the administration's "Migrant Protection Protocols" a top priority, working for months with Mexican counterparts to seal the broad outlines of an agreement in November.

Testifying Wednesday in Congress, Nielsen said the U.S., working with Mexico, was exercising its authority to make people wait outside the country.

"All asylum seekers have the opportunity to present their case," she said. "We're not turning anybody around."

The effort has gotten off to a modest start amid mixed signals from Mexican officials and been limited to San Diego. Tonatiuh Guillen, who heads Mexico's immigration agency, told the AP that Mexico accepted 112 Central Americans during the first five weeks, including 25 children. Homeland Security has declined to release numbers.

A Homeland Security official, speaking to reporters Friday on a conference call on condition of anonymity, said the administration planned to grow the effort exponentially across the border, including to people who cross illegally between border crossings. The official declined to say when or where but said it was likely to be expanded in the next few weeks.

One memo obtained by the AP shows that it had been expanded on the same day.

Associated Press Writer Colleen Long contributed to this report.
A traffic stop on Interstate 70 landed two Indianapolis men in jail and took an estimated $3.5 million worth of drugs off the streets, according to Indiana State Police.

Police say that at 11:33 a.m. on Wednesday morning, they stopped a vehicle driven by 27-year-old Danny Luttrell and 27-year-old Brandon Pierson for a traffic violation.

A search of the vehicle revealed approximately 250 pounds of marijuana and 50,000 vape cartridges, which were filled with THC.

The street value of the marijuana is approximately $2.5 million, and the estimated value of the vape cartridges was $1 million.

The suspects in the case were returning to Indiana from Burbank, California, according to state police. Both men were charged with Dealing Marijuana, a Level 5 felony, and both were taken to the Hendricks County Jail.

A court date has not yet been set for the two suspects.
Clean-up efforts are underway in Lowell, Indiana after severe weather, including a possible tornado, hammered the area.

I was sitting on the couch, and it was hailing, then all of the sudden, kaboom!, storm victim Angela Bursac said.

Bursac looked outside after she heard the loud noise, only to see her fence flying away. The strong winds also ripped a swing set and trampoline out of the ground, and caused damage to her home.

We have a gas leak and water in our furnace, because the cap came off, she said.

Bursac is one of several residents in Lowell cleaning up after the storm. The National Weather Service has not yet confirmed whether the cause of the damage was a tornado, but a funnel cloud was spotted, spawning a Tornado Warning on Thursday afternoon in the region.

The Chicago-area got a taste of spring Thursday as warm weather and thunderstorms hit the area. NBC 5s Christian Farr kicks off our team coverage of the weather.

For the Bursacs, the damage inside their home is so significant that they will be staying with family for the foreseeable future.

Were just grateful everyone is okay, she said.

Elsewhere in Indiana, the storm damaged the roof of an apartment building, and a church was also damaged.

Another victim, Jared Brock, said his garage was lifted from its base, causing the door to crumble.

It was terrifying. Ive never had something like this happen, he said.

The Three Creeks Elementary School also sustained damage, as the storm extensively damaged newly installed solar panels.

The National Weather Service will make a final determination Friday on whether the damage was caused by a tornado.
Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer will become the first woman to serve as Chicagos chief federal judge after Judge Ruben Castillo steps down from the role this summer.

Court officials announced in a statement Thursday that Castillo will be stepping down on June 30, and Pallmeyer will succeed him on July 1.

As I reflect on the 200th anniversary of our Court and on this International Womens Day, Im delighted to make way for the Northern District of Illinois to be led by its first female Chief Judge, Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, Castillo said in the statement. I am extremely pleased to be followed by someone who so deeply loves our Court.

[NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More

Pallmeyer, born in Tokyo, Japan, was nominated to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997 and confirmed by the Senate in 1998, according to a statement from the U.S. District Court. She earned her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1979 and has previously worked as an attorney, a law clerk at the Minnesota Supreme Court, an administrative law judge for the Illinois Human Rights Commission and a U.S. magistrate judge.

Castillo received his law degree in 1979 from the Northwestern University School of Law, officials said. He has worked as a private attorney, a federal prosecutor and regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund before he was nominated to the federal bench by Clinton in 1994.

He was the first Latino federal judge in Illinois and became the states first Latino chief judge in 2013, according to the statement.
In July 2018, Isaac Christian was among 28 students and 4 chaperones who traveled from Parkland, Florida, to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch  a visit intended to help the students cope with the shooting they had survived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

When Christian saw the news that a gunman had entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, he frantically began sending text messages.

Its kind of like the same feelings as when our school shooting happened. It felt so surreal, Christian, 17, a junior at Stoneman Douglas, said of the latest massacre.
Members of a mosque in Meriden that was the victim of an act of hate in 2015 are reflecting on the deadly mass shooting in New Zealand, and say the world needs to work harder to focus on love over hate.

At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshipers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

What happened at the Ahmadiyya Baitul Aman Mosque in Meriden in no way compares to the horror of the shooting during Friday prayers in Christchurch, New Zealand. But mosque leaders say the way they responded to bullets hitting their house of worship is the only way for love to defeat hate.

It was nowhere near to the sheer terror and the innocent lives that just got lost over there, said Wajid Ahmed of his mosques experience. In November 2015, a neighbor of the mosque shot 30 shots in the direction of the building. Four of them struck the peaceful place of worship.

"Thank god no one was here during the time we had the bullets come through our walls," Ahmed said.

At the time, convicted mosque shooter Ted Hakey Jr. was a self-proclaimed Muslim hater.

People when they dont know something they start hating or it or they start doing something and they try to take things into their own control, terrorism has no religion, said Dr. Mohammed Qureshi, president of the Connecticut Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

Before his sentencing, Hakey sat down with mosque leaders to apologize. He told NBC Connecticuts Keisha Grant that the conversation changed his attitude about Islam. The former marine, who was arrested for a hate crime, now spends time spreading the religions true meaning in the community.

We reached out to our neighbor Ted Hakey, and we were able to educate him and once we educated him hes one of our best friends now, Qureshi said.

Following this latest attack on his faith, Qureshi says more must be done to bring peace to the world.

The more you show love and more outreach you do realistically not and you mean from your heart more people listen and the more people join you and thats how you conquer this hate, he said.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim community is taking part in a peace symposium later this month with Christian and Jewish groups. It was planned before the terror attacks in New Zealand.

Its happening March 27 at the State Capitol.
Police in some Connecticut towns are adding police at mosques, as well as other house of worship, after mass shootings at mosques in New Zealand Friday that killed at least 49 people.

The news of the shootings is upsetting to people across the globe, including Muslims in Connecticut.

Jason Tartt, the vice president for the Islamic Association of Central Connecticut, still plans on attending Friday prayer at the mosque in New Britain.

My love and respect for Islam is much greater than my fear and thats what helps me get through my day to day, Tartt said.

New Britain Police have had a police officer stationed outside the mosque for Friday prayer for the last four or five years, according to Tartt. But following the events in New Zealand, police plan on having two officers for services on Friday.

As Tartt prepares to attend, he said he wants people to know that Islam is about peace, not terrorism. He is hoping in the wake of this tragedy that people will take time to learn about Islam and break this cycle of violence.

We live in peace amongst other people and actually try to spread love and peace as our day to day, said Tartt.

Stamford police said in a Facebook post that they have added security at Stamfords mosques and increased patrols at all of Stamfords houses of worship.
The funeral will be held today for State Representative Ezequiel Santiago. The 45-year-old Bridgeport resident died on March 15 after a heart attack, according to House Democrats.

The governor had directed that all state of Connecticut flags fly at half-staff until sunset on March 22.

The funeral services will be held at 10 a.m.

Santiago served on the Bridgeport City Council before being elected to the state House of Representatives.

We were terribly saddened to learn this morning of the sudden passing of Representative Ezequiel Santiago, a man who truly loved public service and his hometown of Bridgeport, Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement last week. The State of Connecticut has lost an outstanding advocate, and our hearts are broken today as we mourn his loss. He was a devoted father, fighter for his community, and a dedicated public servant. Our prayers are with his family, friends, and constituents at this difficult time.

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy said on Twitter that Santiago was a great ally and called him a quiet, steady, dignified force for good.

Horrible news. Zeke loved Bridgeport with all his heart. He was a great ally in all sorts of causes. A quiet, steady, dignified force for good. So sad that hes gone. https://t.co/bItCLEFl5e  Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) March 15, 2019

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal also released a statement calling Santiagos death is a painful loss.

His tireless dedication and hard work made him an immensely accomplished public servant of even greater promise. He will be deeply missed for his great heart and boundless caring and compassion. I was proud to have him as a friend. My heart goes out to his family, Blumenthal said in a statement.

In lieu of flowers, memorial donations can be made to the Bridgeport Caribe Youth Leaders, in his memory. https://luzdepaz.com/tribute/details/2098/Ezequiel-Santiago/obituary.html
A mother of three from Waterbury, Connecticut and her boyfriend tied to an Amber Alert issued in February have been arrested in Texas.

The Denton County Sheriffs Office confirms 29-year-old Crystal McGrath and 38-year-old Lester Joy are being held at the Denton County jail. They each face charges of risk of injury and custodial interference.

Amber Alerts were issued in Texas for McGraths three children, who were reported missing from Connecticut on February 16.

All three children, 2-year-old Maryah Matthew, 5-year-old Dylan McGrath and 7-year-old Maddison McGrath, were last seen with Crystal on February 16, 2019, at approximately 12:30 p.m.

Officers said Crystal was allowed supervised visits with her three children, but she violated the conditions of the supervised release.

Police said Crystal left a McDonald's restaurant in Waterbury with the children. Her boyfriend, Joy, was believed to be in the vehicle at the time.

Texas Ambert Alert Network

Police said they were searching for Crystal and Joy in connection with the kids' abduction and traced them to Texas.

The whereabouts of the children were not immediately clear.
The federal government has acknowledged that it shares its terrorist watchlist with more than 1,400 private entities, including hospitals and universities, prompting concerns from civil libertarians that those mistakenly placed on the list could face a wide variety of hassles in their daily lives.

The government's admission that it shares the list so broadly comes after years of insistence that the list is generally not shared with the private sector.

Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has filed a constitutional challenge to the government's use of the watchlist, called the government's admission shocking.

"We've always suspected there was private-sector dissemination of the terror watchlist, but we had no idea the breadth of the dissemination would be so large," Abbas said.

The watchlist is supposed to include only those who are known or suspected terrorists but contains hundreds of thousands of names. The government's no-fly list is culled from a small subset of the watchlist.

Critics say that the watchlist is wildly overbroad and mismanaged, and that large numbers of people wrongly included on the list suffer routine difficulties and indignities because of their inclusion.

The government's admission comes in a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Alexandria by Muslims who say they regularly experience difficulties in travel, financial transactions and interactions with law enforcement because they have been wrongly added to the list. The Associated Press is the first to report on the disclosure after reviewing the case documents.

Abbas said now that the government has disclosed how many private entities receive access to the Terrorist Screening Database, the official name of the watchlist, it now needs to explain exactly which private entities are receiving it and what they're doing with it. He's asked a judge to require the government to be more specific. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.

"Are universities taking TSDB status into account in making admission or disciplinary decisions? Are Inova Alexandria Hospital's building security personnel screening visitors against the TSDB and denying entry to listees? Is Motorola screening its software engineers who work on cellular infrastructure equipment against the TSDB and firing listees? Plaintiffs have no idea," Abbas and co-counsels Lena Masri and Carolyn Homer wrote in a brief submitted Friday.

In depositions and in court hearings, government officials had denied until very recently that the watchlist compiled by the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center is shared with private entities. At a pretrial hearing in September, government lawyer Dena Roth told U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga that the Terrorist Screening Center "does not work with private partners, and that watchlist status itself ... is considered law enforcement sensitive information and is not shared with the public."

Despite that assurance, the judge ordered the government to be more specific about how it disseminates the watchlist. Trenga said the plaintiffs are entitled to the information to try to prove their case that inclusion on the list causes them to suffer "real world consequences."

In response to Trenga's order, TSC Deputy Director of Operations Timothy Groh filed a written statement earlier this month acknowledging that 1,441 private entities have received permission to access the watchlist. Groh says those private entities must be in some way connected to the criminal justice system. He cited police forces at private universities, hospital security staff and private correctional facilities as examples.

It is not clear what restrictions are placed on how private institutions use the list.

The FBI did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment.

Hugh Handeyside, attorney with the ACLU's National Security project, said the government's disclosure is "noteworthy in that it corroborates what we've long suspected, but it still leaves unanswered several important questions." He said more information is needed to know how private entities use the information.

"The likelihood of stigma or adverse consequences is increased" every time the government shares the list with a private organization, a foreign government or any other agency, he said.

The exact number on the list is kept secret by the government, but it acknowledged in an earlier lawsuit that it adds hundreds of thousands of names to the list every year. It also emphasized that names are routinely removed from the list.

In some quarters, the government has been criticized for failing to widely disseminate the list to private agencies who might need to know about suspected terrorists. A 2007 report from a government watchdog criticized the government for just that.

Abbas, though, said the problem with disseminating the list is that the list itself is so faulty and littered with so many innocent names that, for all practical matters, the list is merely a compilation of "innocent Muslims who have never committed a crime."

"It is a fool's errand," Abbas said of the watchlist's purported goal. "They are trying to predict, among the innocent, which people will be terrorists. That is an impossibility."
The House voted unanimously Thursday for a resolution calling for any final report in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation to be made public, a symbolic action designed to pressure Attorney General William Barr into releasing as much information as possible when the probe is concluded.

The Democratic-backed resolution, which passed 420-0, comes as Mueller is nearing an end to his investigation. Lawmakers in both parties have maintained there will have to be some sort of public resolution when the report is done  and privately hope that a report shows conclusions that are favorable to their own side.

Four Republicans voted present: Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie.

The nonbinding resolution calls for the public release of any report Mueller provides to Barr, with an exception for classified material. The resolution also calls for the full report to be released to Congress.

"This resolution is critical because of the many questions and criticisms of the investigation raised by the president and his administration," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler. "It is important that Congress stand up for the principle of full transparency."

It's unclear exactly what documentation will be produced at the end of the probe into possible coordination between associates of President Donald Trump and Russia, and how much of that the Justice Department will allow people to see. Mueller is required to submit a report to Barr, and then Barr can decide how much of that is released publicly.

Barr said at his confirmation hearing in January that he takes seriously the department regulations that say Mueller's report should be confidential. Those regulations require only that the report explain the decisions to pursue or to decline prosecutions, which could be as simple as a bullet point list or as fulsome as a report running hundreds of pages.

"I don't know what, at the end of the day, what will be releasable. I don't know what Bob Mueller is writing," Barr said at the hearing.

The top Republican on the Judiciary panel, Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, said the vote on the resolution was unnecessary but that he would support it anyway. He said he has no reason to believe that Barr won't follow the regulations.

But Democrats have said they are unsatisfied with Barr's answers and want a stronger commitment to releasing the full report, along with interview transcripts and other underlying evidence.

In introducing the resolution, Nadler and five other Democratic committee chairs said "the public is clearly served by transparency with respect to any investigation that could implicate or exonerate the president and his campaign."

Texas Rep. Will Hurd, a GOP member of the House intelligence committee, said before the vote that he believes the resolution should have been even broader to include the release of underlying evidence.

"I want the American people to know as much as they can and see as much as they can," said Hurd, a former CIA officer. He added that "full transparency is the only way to prevent future innuendo."

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley, however, called the resolution "ridiculous."

"They came in and so many of them said they wanted to work with the president and get things done for infrastructure and health care and instead they're moving on all these radical ideas," Gidley said of Democrats in an interview on Fox News.

Gidley said he hadn't spoken with Trump about whether the report should be made public.

If a full report isn't released, House Democrats have made it clear they will do whatever they can to get hold of it. Nadler has said he would subpoena the final report and invite  or even subpoena  Mueller to talk about it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has been less eager to push Barr on the release of the report, despite some in his caucus who have said they want to ensure transparency.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced legislation with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut that would require Mueller to submit a detailed report to lawmakers and the public at the end of the investigation. But both McConnell and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, have declined to say whether they would support the legislation.

Graham said he agrees "with the concept of transparency," but stopped short of supporting Grassley's bill, saying he disagrees with taking discretion away from the attorney general.
A fashion model and beauty pageant finalist who was apparently drunk when she slapped a flight attendant and subjected passengers to obscenities and racial slurs on a January flight from Australia to Los Angeles is facing a June 24 sentencing date.

Adau Akui Mornyang, 25, was found guilty Thursday in Los Angeles federal court of interference with a flight attendant and assault. She was acquitted of a third federal charge of assaulting an air marshal.

The trouble started Jan. 21 about nine hours into the 15-hour flight from Melbourne when passengers approached United Airlines crew member Romeo Gutierrez to complain that Mornyang was "yelling obscenities and racial slurs and flailing her arms," according to court documents.

When Gutierrez approached, the Australia-based South Sudan-born model began to shout and slapped him across the face. When the abuse continued, Gutierrez tried to hold her down until federal air marshals could assist, court papers show.

Air marshals stayed with Mornyang at the rear galley of the plane through the remainder of the flight.

An affidavit in the case stated that Mornyang responded that she was a "strong black woman" and that the crew was "singling her out" for abuse. At one point, she removed her socks and threw them at nearby passengers, prosecutors said.

Crew members who served her two glasses of wine before the trouble started noticed an empty wine bottle at her seat, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Mornyang migrated to Australia when she was 10 as a refugee from war-torn South Sudan. A 2017 Miss World Australia finalist, she received international attention two years ago when she streamed an hour-long Facebook Live video about being raped. She is also known as an advocate against rape victim-blaming culture, particularly in South Sudanese communities.
Students at Long Beach Polytechnic High School won prizes for documentaries in C-SPAN's national 2019 StudentCam competition, it was announced Thursday.

Hamid Torabzadeh, Katherine Padilla and Pia Hao will receive $1,500 as second-prize winners for their documentary, "Retained by the People: The Promise of America," about the Ninth Amendment. Their winning video will air April 14 on C-SPAN at 3:50 a.m. Pacific time and throughout the day.

Grant Atwood, Justin Rosu and Jacob Jacoub will receive $250 as honorable mention winners for their documentary, "We Didn't All Come on the Mayflower," about immigration.

Samantha Williams and Inanna Khansa will receive $250 as honorable mention winners for their documentary, "The Press and the People."

Audrey Song will receive $250 as an honorable mention winner for the documentary, "One Person, One Vote," about voter representation.

Each year since 2006, Washington, D.C.-based C-SPAN partners with its local cable television providers nationwide to invite middle and high school students to produce short documentaries about a subject of national importance.

This year students addressed the theme, "What does it mean to be American? Choose a constitutional right, national characteristic, or historic event and explain how it defines the American experience."

In response, a record 6,318 students (a 10 percent increase over 2018) from 48 states and Washington, D.C., participated.

The most popular topics among the 2,923 submissions included First Amendment rights (17 percent), equality/discrimination (13 percent) and immigration (9 percent).

The Long Beach winners are among 340 students across the country winning a total of $100,000.

There are one grand prize winner, four first prize winners, 16 second prize winners, 32 third prize winners and 97 honorable mentions.

This year C-SPAN marks its 15th year of the competition and awards its 1 millionth dollar in StudentCam prize money.

The 150 winning videos can be viewed at www.studentcam.org.
The mother of a 9-year-old girl whose body was found partially inside a large duffel bag near an equestrian trail in the Hacienda Heights area was extradited to Los Angeles from Texas Wednesday morning and was being held without bail.

Investigators booked Taquesta Graham, 28, at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Norwalk Station for an unrelated parole violation and she was subsequently interviewed about her daughter's death, officials said.

A 38-year-old man believed to be Graham's boyfriend, Emiel Lamar Hunt, was arrested early Saturday and charged with the murder of the girl, identified by the county coroner's office as Trinity Love Jones.

The girl's body was found about 10 a.m. on March 5 at the bottom of an embankment close to Colima Road and the 3400 block of Hacienda Boulevard, near the His Lai Buddhist Temple. The body, which was found by county workers clearing some brush, was partially inside a black roll-away-type duffel, with her head and upper body protruding from the partially zipped bag, authorities said.

Hunt, who was arrested after being found sleeping in his black Nissan Armada SUV in a lot near San Diego International Airport, appeared briefly in a Pomona courtroom Tuesday, but his arraignment was delayed until April 16. He remains jailed in lieu of $2 million bail.

The criminal case naming Taquesta Graham is being prepared for presentation to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, according to the sheriff's department.

The complaint against Hunt alleges he has a 2005 conviction for child abuse from San Diego County.

Hunt could face up to 50 years to life in state prison if convicted as charged, according to the District Attorney's Office.

As sheriff's homicide detectives investigated the case, Hunt and Graham were stopped in Hunt's SUV about 6 a.m. Friday at a border patrol checkpoint in Hudspeth County, Texas, officials said.

"Graham was arrested for an unrelated warrant and Hunt was released," according to a sheriff's department statement that said investigators in Los Angeles County were unaware of the arrest.

After Graham was arrested, Hunt began driving back to California, officials said.

Investigators have not revealed how they learned he was in San Diego.

Graham, Hunt and Trinity moved from a family member's home in Long Beach in May and during the past 10 months their extended family had limited contact with them, according to the sheriff's department.

They were homeless just prior to the girl's death and were living in a Santa Fe Springs motel or in their vehicle, officials said.

Investigators announced earlier that they believed Trinity's body had been left along the equestrian trail within 48 hours of being found, but since then they have come to believe she had been left at the scene during the afternoon of March 1, according to the sheriff's department.

"There were no open or active Department of Children and Family Services cases involving Trinity," officials said.

The coroner's office has ruled Trinity's death a homicide, but officials have not said how the girl died and the case is on a security hold.

Sheriff's detectives had initially asked for the public's help in identifying the girl, releasing a composite sketch of the child and photos of the clothing she was wearing.

Family members who created a memorial of candles, flowers, balloons, stuffed animals and photos near where the girl's body was found eventually confirmed her identity.
Friends of a homeless Vietnam veteran who died last year after living for decades in the Skid Row neighborhood organized a brief military memorial for him Thursday on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall.

Neil Schaffer, whose friends said he fell through the cracks of society but lived a quiet, peaceful life, died of cancer last Aug. 19 in a room at the Madison Hotel.

Some Skid Row residents raised the funds for Schaffer's cremation, and the ceremony included the release of a dove.

Retired U.S. Air Force Chaplain Doc Cohen, who oversaw the ceremony, said Schaffer served in the military as a carpenter from 1971 to 1973 before being honorably discharged.

"And then it all went downhill. And he struggled. He tried, he got a job, he lost a job, whatever he could do, it wasn't enough, and he died on the streets right here in L.A.," Cohen said.

Another ceremony will be held at Los Angeles National Cemetery on March 31, Cohen said.

The Los Angeles National Cemetery has been closed to new interments of servicemen for decades, but Schaffer's ashes will among the first interred in a columbarium that is opening up there this summer, Cohen said.

Eriq Moreno was one of the friends of Schaffer who helped organize the City Hall service. Although he has a home and career now, Moreno said he met Schaffer about 17 years ago in Skid Row when he was homeless.

"He offered me shelter, and he became a really close friend and a father figure mostly, because I never had one," Moreno said. "When his situation with his health got worse, I knew I had to be there all the way, and I was, and he kind of left me in charge of his arrangements. He made a good change in the world and I just wanted someone to acknowledge that."

Moreno said that Shaeffer helped him get out of homelessness, but struggled to explain why Shaeffer could not do the same for himself.

"I just think he had a lot of -- I don't know -- roadblocks with what he wanted to do and I don't know if he knew how to do it," Moreno said.

"But at the same time he was a good guy. He should have been able to. I just kind of helped him live a better and happier life."

Cohen said that neither he nor the coroner's office were unable to locate any of Shaffer's relatives.

"We went through the records, we couldn't find anything. All we know is he came from ... Camden, New Jersey. We couldn't find a relative, we couldn't find people back there that knew him, but at least we did this and we will again on the 31st," Cohen said.
World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent Islamophobia.

New Zealand police said at least 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city of Christchurch. Several dozen more were seriously wounded in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a "terrorist attack."

Ardern said migrants and refugees affected by the attacks "have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us."

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car. Two other people were being held in custody and police were trying to determine how they might be involved.

Shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, left dozens of people dead on Friday. Police say three men and a woman are in custody. Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern said, "There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme and unprecedented violence."

Among the four people initially taken into custody  one was later released  was an Australian man. A man who earlier claimed responsibility for the shooting said he was a 28-year-old Australian and described anti-immigrant motives in a long manifesto.

The manifesto mentioned popular YouTuber Pewdiepie, who responded in a tweet by saying he was "absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person." Pewdiepie, whose name is Felix Kjellberg, offered condolences to the people affected by the shooting.

Condolences poured in from nations around the world.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said: "We are outraged, and we stand here and condemn absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist right wing terrorist. This attack reminds us of the evil that is ever present."

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealand's head of state, said in a message to the country she was "deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch" and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

[NATL] Photos: Mourning, Increased Security After Deadly Mosque Shootings in New Zealand

"At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders," she said in her message.

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement that the attack "served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the attacks the "latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia."

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister, Erdogan said the Islamophobia that motivated the attacks "has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer."

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed those sentiments.

"I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim," he tweeted.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, noted that the purported gunman's manifesto quoted U.S. President Donald Trump and called on Trump to clearly condemn the attack and assure people that they will be protected.

"Mr. Trump, your words matter. Your policies matter. They impact the lives of innocent people at home and globally," Awad said. "You should condemn this, not only as a hate crime, but as a white supremacist terrorist attack."

Trump, in a tweet, had earlier sent "warmest sympathy and best wishes" to the people of New Zealand in a tweet. He wrote that "49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!"

Awad called the message in Trump's tweet "a first step" that nevertheless rang hollow.

On Thursday night in the U.S., as early reports of the shootings were coming in, he tweeted a link to right-wing Breitbart News, which had interviewed him. The tweet was deleted by Friday morning.

His press secretary, Sarah Sanders, released a statement Friday morning saying the country "strongly condemns the attack" and that the U.S. stands "against this vicious act of hate."

Several police departments across the United States said they increased security around mosques in response to the shooting.

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said: "The people of New Zealand are in the hearts and minds of New York City tonight as heartbreaking reports continue out of Christchurch. Our love and prayers are with all impacted by the horrific attack at these mosques."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, weighed in, drawing comparisons to the mass shootings that have occurred at various houses of worship in the U.S.: "At 1st I thought of saying, 'Imagine being told your house of faith isnt safe anymore.' But I couldnt say 'imagine.' Because of Charleston. Pittsburgh. Sutherland Springs."

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack "with horror and profound sadness."

"The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life," he wrote.

In France, home to western Europe's largest Muslim community, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner ordered regional authorities to bolster security at mosques as a precaution.

London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the city's Metropolitan Police force would be visible outside mosques.

"London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack," he said. "London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy."

Indonesia's president Joko Widodo condemned the attacks, in which an Indonesian father and son were among those wounded. Indonesian Muslim leaders expressed anger at the shooting rampage while urging Muslims to show restraint.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said bigotry in Western countries contributed to the attacks on Muslims in New Zealand. In a Friday tweet, he also criticized the West for "defending demonization of Muslims as 'freedom of expression.'"

Afghanistan's Taliban movement  Islamic militants who carry out near-daily attacks on Afghan security forces  also condemned the shooting rampage, calling it an "unforgivable crime."

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yusuf called on the New Zealand government to investigate "the root cause of such terrorism and hand a hefty punishment to the attackers."

Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Western countries, condemned the "policy of hatred that the United States is feeding around the world instead of prevailing religious values that call for forgiveness."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks a "brazen act of terror." His office said on Twitter that Israel mourns the murder of innocent worshippers, condemns the assault and sends its condolences to bereaved families.

Jordan's King Abdullah II tweeted that "the heinous massacre against Muslims praying in peace in New Zealand is an appalling terrorist crime. It unites us against extremism, hatred and terrorism, which knows no religion." Jordan's Foreign Ministry confirmed that one Jordanian was killed and five wounded in the attack.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas extended his country's sympathies to those who lost loved ones, saying "if people are murdered solely because of their religion, that is an attack on all of us."

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the "dastardly terrorist attack" and offered his condolences, as did several other world leaders.

A telegram of condolences sent by the Vatican on behalf of Pope Francis said he was "deeply saddened to learn of the injury and loss of life" caused by the "senseless acts of violence" in Christchurch. He assured all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his "heartfelt solidarity."
The collapse of the Florida International University pedestrian bridge one year ago has left a trail of deep personal loss and professional finger-pointing  but few answers.

The disaster that killed six people on Southwest Eighth Street at 1:47 p.m. on that warm, clear Thursday is a construction failure born of design errors and what appears to be a misguided attempt to address them by adding tension to a critical, failing truss without closing the road below.

But it is rooted in the university's ambitious plans to leave its mark on the region.

The disaster that killed six people on Southwest Eighth Street at 1:47 p.m. on that warm, clear Thursday is a construction failure borne of design errors and what appears to be a misguided attempt to address them by adding tension to a critical, failing truss without closing the road below.

Seeking bidders for the project in June 2014, FIU envisioned "an innovative signature bridge that will become a respected and valued design landmark in Miami," part of a project linking the campus to Sweetwater. "If we get the bridge right, everything else can fall into place. If we get the bridge wrong, nothing else will matter."

It turns out, a lot matters, including how the families of six dead and one critically brain-injured patient will get justice for what they claim in lawsuits was negligence by the general contractor, MCM, the designer, FIGG Bridge Engineers, and 23 other companies involved in the $12 million contract. Eleven other people are suing as well.

NBC 6s Tony Pipitone reveals another problem with the FIU bridges move that happened days before the collapse.

In just the last month, FIU and the Florida Department of Transportation have been added as defendants; FIU announced it has submitted a claim against MCM over the disaster; and MCM has filed for bankruptcy, seeking to reorganize and avoid paying those whose deaths and injuries they allegedly caused any more than the $42 million it has in insurance coverage.

To help the public understand what was  and for some families, still is  a devastating event in our community, the NBC 6 Investigators have compiled a detailed timeline including documentation of some key events along the way.

Jenna Mendez, who tried to help pull people from the rubble when a bridge collapsed at FIU, is still coping with the tragedy one year later. NBC 6s Tony Pipitone reports.

Among the revelations not previously reported:

There were problems with equipment used during the lift and placement of the bridge on March 10, 2018. An engineer with Bridge Diagnostics Inc., a Colorado company that installed and monitored sensors to track forces exerted during the operation, says a software program designed to track relative changes in the bridge's position -- called offsets -- appears to have malfunctioned: "When the computer was turned back on after a break, the software program that carries the offsets for each sensor did not automatically pull the offset file as it should have once the file was reopened," according to an investigation revealed in court records by the claims administrator for BDI's insurer. Al Brizuela, a professional engineer consulted by NBC 6, said if the offset readings were wrong during the move, engineers may have received inaccurate data. A call to BDI seeking further explanation has so far gone unanswered.

Almost immediately after the bridge was placed on its pier and pylon, a subcontractor took at least one photograph of cracking on the north end and texted it to his employer, according to lawsuits.

Previously, the first known pictures of post-placement cracks were taken three days after the move.

In March 2016, one month after FIGG produced a set of early design-build plans, FDOT engineer Tom Andres, who was concerned about cracks forming in the "tricky" design, asked a FIGG engineer if the firm had considered a different design  "a real cable stay" bridge, where cables attached to the 109-foot-high upper pylon would help support the deck and canopy. Andres calls the FIGG design a "fake cable stay" because the tubes that were to extend down to the canopy were largely ornamental. FIGG stayed with the fake cable-stay design, its plans state.

FDOT allowed FIGG to proceed to final plans without having them double-checked by an independent peer reviewer, which the contract specified should be done when the 90 percent plans were submitted. FIGG wanted to do its own review out of another firm office, but FDOT insisted they get someone independent, according to email exchanges reviewed by NBC6 Investigators.

By the time FIGG executed a $61,000 agreement with that independent firm, Louis Berger, one of the sets of plans had already been certified by a Louis Berger engineer and all required plans did get certified eventually.

Andres wanted to know for months where FIGG intended to place two transporters to lift the bridge from its roadside construction site and place it over Eighth Street. In March 2017, FIGG said the transporters would be directly beneath where diagonal trusses met closest to each edge of the span. But on Sept. 18, 2017, FIGG accepted a change in plans that put the north transporter more than 7 feet farther away from the edge  something that would change the forces applied to the north side of the bridge during the lift-move-and-place operation. Records released so far do not show FDOT's engineer being informed of the change; nor do they show revised plans adjusting post-tension bar forces to accommodate what Brizuela said would have been a significant change in forces exerted on the north end of the bridge during the move.

The move on March 10 had to be stopped 10 to 15 times because the span twisted greater than one half of one degree -- requiring workers to readjust rigging supports each time, according to the claims administrator for BDI's insurer. When it was lowered into place, the readings were slightly over one half of one degree. The bridge was straightened prior to being put it in place and engineers on site agreed it was a successful move. A call to BDI seeking further explanation has so far gone unanswered.

Exactly how significant any of those issues is remains cloaked in secrecy imposed by the National Transportation Safety Board, which is forbidding any of the parties to their investigation from commenting. It also has issued a blackout on all documents created after Feb. 19. 2018, until its investigation is completed. The NTSB says the cutoff date was "not arbitrary." The NTSB "determined that while the earlier information is important, it is not as critical to the investigations as information after that date." An NTSB lawyer this week said he expects the investigative report will not be done until possibly late September, a lawyer for plaintiffs told a judge this week.

NBC 6s Tony Pipitone speaks to the family of Alexa Duran, who died after a pedestrian bridge above her at FIU collapsed.

What we know for certain is this: At 1:47 p.m. last March 15, as the re-stressing of the bars in Member 11 continued, a failure occurred and the 950-ton structure crumbled onto SW Eighth Street, killing five people in vehicles: Alexa Duran, 18; Brandon Brownfield, 39; Alberto Arias, 53; Osvaldo Gonzalez, 57; and Rolando Fraga Hernandez, 60; and one worker, Navaro Brown, 37, who was on the bridge canopy at the time. A co-worker, the one who texted a photograph of cracking on March 10, Kevin Lee Hanson, suffered a critical brain injury and remains in a neurological rehabilitation facility.
The Broward state attorney's office has released edited body camera footage of Nikolas Cruz's arrest.

Cruz was captured by officers less than an hour after he brought an AR-15 style semi-automatic rifle into the school he once attended and started shooting.

In the footage, Cruz is heard talking about "the demons" and "voices" while he was handcuffed and on the ground.

"Where's the voices?" Cruz asks. "What the f---? Where the f--- am I? Holy s---. What happened?"

Officials said Cruz was expelled from the school in 2016 for unknown disciplinary reasons. An arrest affidavit said Cruz purchased the gun in February 2017, and ATF officials said it was purchased lawfully.

Cruz was wearing what appeared to be a Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps shirt from the school with an eagle logo on the arm. Students told NBC 6 that Cruz was a part of the JROTC when he attended the school.

Cruz tried to blend in with a group of students who were fleeing the scene. He went to a nearby Walmart where he bought a drink at Subway, then walked to a McDonald's, Israel said. He was taken into custody by a Coral Springs officer about 40 minutes after leaving the McDonald's.

The 20-year-old Cruz faces the death penalty if convicted in the mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2017. Prosecutors rejected a guilty plea in exchange for life in prison.
Florida International University held a moment of silence to mark the one-year anniversary of the collapse of a pedestrian bridge that killed six people.

The ceremony honoring the victims was held at 1:47 p.m. Friday. The moment of silence was led by Deacon Ralph Gazitua, and bells rang six times for each of the victims.

Meanwhile, the family of 18-year-old Alexa Duran, an FIU freshman killed in the collapse, will hold a memorial vigil at the site of the collapse Friday afternoon.

The 174-foot-long bridge, scheduled to open to the public in early 2019, crossed Southwest 8th Street near 109th Avenue and was built to allow students living across the busy roadway to cross safely. The collapse crushed cars below the bridge on Southwest 8th Street.

The construction company that built the bridge has filed for bankruptcy. Magnum Construction Management LLC  also known as MCM  is being sued for wrongful death.
South Florida law enforcement agencies are taking extra precaution following the mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand that killed at least 49 people.

Miami-Dade Police said they are monitoring the situation in New Zealand but said there are no known threats to Miami-Dade County.

"Nonetheless, we ask that our community remain vigilant and if you #SeeSomethingSaySomething and contact police," the department tweeted Friday.

Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina said the department was placing marked police vehicles at local mosques "as a sign of solidarity, and hopefully to provide a sense of safety during this difficult time."

"Hate is hate. We are deeply disturbed and horrified with the senseless violence perpetrated against worshippers in New Zealand last night. The City of Miami Police Department stands with our communities in mourning for the lives lost," Colina said in a statement.

Officials say one man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack, and the deadliest in modern New Zealand history. In addition to the dead, health officials said 48 people were being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds. Injuries ranged from minor to critical.
Casino magnate and GOP donor Sheldon Adelson has cancer and has not been at his company's offices in Las Vegas since around Christmas Day.

Adelson's poor health was revealed earlier this week by one of his company's attorneys during a court hearing in a years-old case brought by a Hong Kong businessman. The founder and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp. did not participate in the casino operator's conference call with analysts and investors following its earnings report in January.

Attorney James Jimmerson told the court Monday that he learned last month "of the dire nature of Mr. Adelson's condition, health." The comment from the attorney came when discussing whether Adelson could sit for a deposition in the case and was first reported by The Nevada Independent.

Las Vegas Sands Corp. on Thursday told The Associated Press that Adelson has cancer.

"Mr. Adelson is still dealing with certain side effects from medication he is taking for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma," company spokesman Ron Reese said in an emailed statement Thursday night. "These side effects have restricted his availability to travel or keep regular office hours."

The effects haven't prevented Adelson, 85, from fulfilling his duties as chairman and CEO, Reese said. The company expects he'll return after he completes treatment.

Adelson also suffers from peripheral neuropathy, a condition that affects the nervous system.

The billionaire and his wife, Miriam, gave President Donald Trump's campaign $30 million in 2016. They followed that by contributing $100 million to the Republican Party for the 2018 midterm elections.

Adelson is Las Vegas Sands' largest shareholder and regularly participates in the company's earnings calls, but was absent when it reported results on Jan. 23. Sands President Robert Goldstein said at the time that Adelson was "a little bit under the weather."

"We met with him yesterday," Goldstein said of Adelson during the January call. "He's taking some medications making him a bit drowsy, so he decided this morning to take a rain check on this one."

Adelson was expected to testify in the case brought by Hong Kong businessman Richard Suen and his company, Round Square Co. He testified in 2013 and 2008 in the case's two previous trials.

Suen has been seeking compensation because he said he helped Sands secure business in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau. Sands has argued Suen didn't help get crucial approval to build casinos in Macau and deserves nothing.
Two years after New Mexico's largest county barred local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration authorities, its leaders learned that the policy was being subverted from within.

Staff members at the Bernalillo County jail in Albuquerque were still granting immigration authorities access to its database and, in some cases, tipping them off when a person of interest was being released.

"I was surprised and horrified," said Maggie Hart Stebbins, chairwoman of the Bernalillo County Commission. "Individual employees do not have the freedom to pick and choose what they want to observe."

The disclosure last month cast a spotlight on an often-overlooked way in which immigration officials around the U.S. may be getting around local "sanctuary" policies  through informal relationships with police and others willing to cooperate when they're not supposed to. Immigration activists say they have seen it places like Philadelphia, Chicago and several communities in California, which has a statewide sanctuary law.

On Wednesday, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that emails show that a detective in Orange County, California, regularly looked up license plate information for an immigration officer.

"Often people underestimate the informal relationship between ICE and local law enforcement," said Sara Cullinane, director of the immigrant-rights organization Make the Road New Jersey. She said a major way to make sure immigrant-friendly ordinances are being obeyed is training officers about what they can and cannot do.

Over 100 local governments around the country have adopted a variety of sanctuary rules barring police and jails from cooperating with immigration authorities, often by refusing to hold people arrested on local charges past their release date at the request of immigration officers who intend to pick them up.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says these types of policies have made the streets less safe. The restrictions have also led the agency in the past couple of years to find other ways to make arrests, such as by staking out courthouses for immigrants, a practice ICE had generally avoided.

In 2017, the governing commission in Bernalillo County, population 680,000, barred the use of county money, resources or personnel to enforce civil immigration laws. County employees are not allowed to investigate, question or apprehend people based on their immigration status.

Last month, Bernalillo County passed another resolution further restricting county workers from sharing any sort of information regarding immigration status. A day later, on Feb. 27, the jail administration notified county leaders that it learned, while discussing the latest resolution with jail staff, that some had still been working with ICE in an informal way.

Staff members let immigration officers walk beyond the public areas of the jail and use the county computers, where they had logins to access inmate information such as names, places of birth and addresses. On occasion, staff would call immigration officers to let them know when an inmate was being released.

The county now bars ICE from going anywhere past the public areas. Nobody has been disciplined so far, said jail spokeswoman Candace Hopkins.

Hopkins said jail workers tipped off ICE regarding about one person out of around 3,000 released each month. "Our records department was complying with those requests with rare occasion. Extremely rare is something that we want to emphasize," she said.

ICE said that accessing the jail database made the public safer by ensuring that criminals facing deportation weren't released back onto the streets in the U.S.

"When sanctuary-city policies inhibit ICE officers' ability to identify and take custody of criminal aliens in a controlled environment such as local jails, ICE is forced to dedicate its limited resources to track down fugitives and dangerous criminals upon release," said Corey Price, an official with the ICE field office in El Paso, Texas, which covers New Mexico. He said sanctuary policies are "misguided efforts" by "those who ultimately want to shield dangerous criminals from being deported."

In Chicago, police are barred from cooperating with immigration authorities in a number of ways, but ICE still had access to its gang database, advocates say. In 2017, the city settled with a man who sued after he was mistakenly placed on a gang database that ICE accessed and used to arrest him. Immigration officers seriously injured the man while arresting him at his home.

In Philadelphia, which since 2014 has prohibited its jails from holding detainees for ICE or notifying the agency of release dates, authorities even in high-level administrative posts were still informally working with the federal agency, according to advocates and an investigative report by The Philadelphia Inquirer . The newspaper documented about 10 occasions in which police notified ICE about immigrants they arrested.

Blanca Pacheco, co-director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, said that until last year, the city's probation officers, who shared an office building with ICE, were walking clients over directly to the federal agency to turn them in, in violation of the city's directive. Pacheco said the practice stopped when it came to light.

She said it went on largely because some people weren't trained on the policies. Training "is really key because one thing is to win the policy, and another is to train people. There are people that, because of racism, do it, but also there are officers who just don't know," Pacheco said.

In another case of behind-the-scenes cooperation, the ACLU reported that ICE uses a license-plate recognition database containing information submitted by some 80 police departments, some of them in sanctuary cities that are not supposed to be cooperating with ICE.

Jorge L. Baron, executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, an advocacy and legal services group in the Seattle area, said immigration agents have always found ways to get information on deportable criminals when it's not easily accessible.

"We have to continue working on ways that we can prevent information-sharing," Baron said.
A Virginia woman who admitted putting her blood in her sons nose and mouth while he was in the hospital said she did it because she wanted her son to get attention from the hospital staff.

Elizabeth Malone, a mother of three from Fairfax County, pleaded guilty to child abuse Wednesday.

She denies any intention to harm her child, her attorney told the judge. She loves her child like any mother.

Malone had recently moved from Texas to Fairfax County when her disabled 5-year-old son, who is unable to speak, was hospitalized at Inova Fairfax last spring.

Malone often disagreed with his treatment, but she liked the response she saw once when the boy was bleeding. Thats why she injected her son with her own blood to recreate those symptoms, her defense said.

But the prosecution said the injections left the child with infections and high fevers.

In April, after a nurse saw a syringe hidden in Malones shirt sleeve and a bloody napkin in the bathroom, a camera was installed in the boys room.

Video played in court shows Malone using a syringe to inject blood into the childs trach tube and central line.

Police watched the video and arrested Malone.

In a police interview, Malone first denied doing anything to her son, but she broke down in tears and admitted it when detectives told her they had it on video.

I don't want to intentionally cause him harm, she said. I know I did, I know I did. Punish me but please let me see my children again.

Since Malone has been in jail, her little boys condition has improved dramatically, and he is now attending school, the prosecution said.

Malone will be sentenced in mid-July.
By Scott Reeves, China Daily | Mar. 12, 2019

The plane in the Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 was a 737 Max 8

More than 20 airlines worldwide continued to fly the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft Monday after some carriers, including those in China, grounded the airplane following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight shortly after takeoff in Africa.

Cause of the crash that killed all 157 passengers and crew was not known. The jet's flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder have both been recovered, Ethiopian Airlines said. The Associated Press reported that an airline official, however, said one of the recorders was partially damaged and "we will see what we can retrieve from it".

Investigators from the US and Boeing traveled to Addis Ababa to determine what went wrong. The AP also reported that a witness to the crash said that smoke was coming from the rear of the plane before it hit the ground.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam told reporters at a press conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital, that the pilot of flight ET 302 that crashed Sunday morning had reported technical difficulties and asked for clearance to return to Addis Ababa. He was given clearance to turn back, according to GebreMariam.

In the United States, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, the biggest buyer of the aircraft in the US, said it would continue flying the jet. Air Canada said the aircraft meets all safety standards and will continue to make regularly scheduled flights.

The airline said the flight had passengers from at least 30 countries. The dead included at least 32 Kenyans; 18 Canadians; nine each from Ethiopia and France; eight each from the United States, China, and Italy; and seven from Britain, according to the airline, officials and news accounts. At least 22 United Nations staff were on board.

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent condolences to the leaders of Ethiopia and Kenya and said he was shocked and saddened by the crash. On behalf of the Chinese government and the Chinese people, Xi said he mourned for the dead and expressed heartfelt sympathies to the families of the victims.

Boeing expressed confidence in the aircraft and grief for the crash victims.

"The investigation is in its early stages, but at this point, based on the information available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators," said Charlie Miller, Boeing's vice-president of communications. "We are taking every measure to fully understand all aspects of this accident, working closely with the investigating team and all regulatory authorities involved. Boeing is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of the passengers and crew."

Boeing's stock opened Monday at US$371.27 a share on the New York Stock Exchange and closed at US$400.01, down US$22.53, or 5.33 percent from Friday's close of US$422.53. The drop in Boeing's stock wiped almost US$13 billion off the company's market value.

The pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines flight had about 8,000 hours of flying time while the co-pilot had about 200 hours, according to the airline, which said the senior Ethiopian pilot had an "excellent flying record'. It was not known who was at the controls when the plane took off.

The 737 Max 8, the newest version of Boeing's single-aisle airliner, was first introduced in 1967 and has become the world's most common passenger jet and Boeing's best-selling aircraft.

Last October, a Lion Air flight using Boeing's Max 8 plane crashed in Indonesia shortly after takeoff. All 157 people on board were killed. The Lion Air pilot and co-pilot each had more than 5,000 hours of flying time. There is no apparent link between the two crashes, but investigators said the similarities demand a careful investigation.

China's Civil Aviation Administration, citing its "zero tolerance" for potential safety hazards, ordered all domestic Boeing 737 Max 8 jets grounded. Chinese airlines have ordered about 104 of the aircraft and have taken delivery of about 70.
A father of three appears to have killed his wife and his children, then taken his own life and set fire to the family home in rural western Massachusetts, the area's top prosecutor said.

Luke Karpinski and Justine Wilbur, both 41, along with their 7-year-old twins and a 3-year-old child, were found dead in their Sheffield home after the Wednesday morning fire was extinguished.

"We are investigating this matter as a murder-suicide. At this time, the evidence indicates that Luke Karpinski was the assailant," Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington said Thursday.

Wilbur's body was found on the first floor of the year-old home. Karpinski and the children were found on the second floor.

The investigation is ongoing, and Harrington did not disclose how the victims died or a possible motive. The state medical examiner's office is conducting autopsies.

Karpinski and Wilbur were high school sweethearts who started dating their senior year at Wahconah Regional High School in nearby Dalton, family members told The Berkshire Eagle.

They were both attorneys who lived in Virginia before moving back to Massachusetts.

Wilbur was a patent attorney who worked in the Albany, New York, office of Hoffman Warnick and had worked on patents for cancer treatment, nanotechnology and advanced materials, the firm said in a statement.

"Justine was smart, knowledgeable, dedicated and hardworking. She was a devoted mother to her wonderful children, and a true friend to everyone in our firm," the statement said.

Karpinski was a federal chemical patent examiner who worked from home, Justine Wilbur's sister said.

The deaths were the second tragedy to hit the town of about 3,200 residents about 120 miles west of Boston in less than a week. Samya Stumo, 24, who died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday, grew up in Sheffield.
What to Know In 1985, Gambino family mob boss Paul Castellano was shot dead outside a New York City steakhouse

In 2007, FBI agents arrested 11 members and associates of the Gambino and Luchese families on multiple charges including racketeering

In 2016, the NYPD arrested John Gotti Jr. and six other mobsters in a drug bust called Operation Beach Party

Francesco Cali, supposed leader of the Gambino crime family, was shot to death on Wednesday night. But this isnt the first time New Yorkers have seen the notorious Gambino family on the news. The NYC mob has long been making headlines for various crimes including murder, extortion, and racketeering.

Gambino family mob boss Paul Castellano was shot to death outside of a New York City steakhouse in 1985. He was the last family crime leader to be shot in NY before Cali.

In 2007, FBI agents arrested 11 members and associates of the Gambino and Luchese families on charges of racketeering, bribery, extortion, money laundering, loansharking, and bank fraud. One of the members arrested included George Decicco, alleged boss of the Gambino family at the time.

The FBI recorded Decicco making threats such as Ill burn your eyes.

The NYPD arrested John Gotti Jr. and six other mobsters in a drug bust in 2016 called Operation Beach Party. Police say they found hundreds of pills and $40,000 in cash was seized during the bust.

Gotti is the grandson of the late John Gotti, one-time boss of the Gambino crime family. In 1992, John Gotti was convicted in the murder of Paul Castellano, previous mob boss, as well as a multitude of other crimes. Gotti died of cancer in prison in 2002.

Gotti is currently serving an eight year prison sentence after pleading guilty to selling drugs in his Queens neighborhood.
What to Know Meatless Mondays will expand to all New York City public schools, city officials announced Monday

The program was first piloted in 15 schools in Brooklyn in Spring 2018

"Meatless Mondays," which calls for public schools to serve vegetarian menus on Mondays, will begin citywide in the 2019-2020 school year

Meatless Mondays will expand to all New York City public schools, city officials announced Monday.

The program, which was first piloted in 15 schools in Brooklyn in spring 2018, will become a citywide initiative beginning in the 2019-2020 school year, at which point all schools will serve vegetarian menus on Mondays.

"Meatless Mondays" is a national initiative that focuses on healthy, environmentally friendly meal options. According to the city, this past fall, the pilot was brought to schools citywide in order to evaluate student feedback on a broader scale. The decision to implement "Meatless Mondays" across city schools came following an evaluation of participation metrics and student feedback.

City officials say the expansion will be cost-neutral, and the Department of Educations Office of Food and Nutrition Services will meet with students to get qualitative feedback before the menu for fall is finalized.

Cutting back on meat a little will improve New Yorkers' health and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. We're expanding Meatless Mondays to all public schools to keep our lunch and planet green for generations to come.

Schools Chancellor Richard A. Carranza shared similar sentiments.

Meatless Mondays are good for our students, communities, and the environment, Carranza said in a statement. Our 1.1 million students are taking the next step towards healthier, more sustainable lives.

According to the city, "Meatless Mondays" builds on the citys efforts to provide free, healthy meals to all students and will form part of the citys Free School Lunch for All, which launched in the 2017-18 school year and provides free, nutritious, healthy breakfast and lunch to all participating public schools.

In the 2017-18 school year, more than 150 million breakfasts and lunches were served free of charge. Additionally, each summer, the DOE provides free breakfast and lunch to any New Yorker under 18 through the Summer Meals program, according to city officials.
What to Know The death of a missing Staten Island woman found inside a vacant home days after she vanished has been ruled a homicide

69-year-old Johynita Jordan was strangled in January, officials said; a person of interest was quickly identified in her case

He is a registered sex offender who faces charges in a different random attack on another woman the same month

The case of a missing 69-year-old Staten Island woman found dead earlier this year, nine days after she disappeared, has been ruled a homicide, and the medical examiner's office said Thursday she was strangled.



Sunday, and police sources say they've identified a person of interest -- a convict accused in another random attack of a woman earlier this month.

Johynita Jordan of Park Hill Avenue was reported missing Friday, Jan. 18, and turned up dead inside a vacant home on Van Duzer Street around noon on Jan. 27.



A day after Jordan's body was found, law enforcement sources familiar with the case told News 4 they had identified a person of interest -- a convict accused in another random attack of a woman several weeks before Jordan died.

At the time, sources said surveillance video showed 31-year-old Linden Beaton -- a registered sex offender -- leading Jordan into the vacant house. He was the only one who later walked out. Investigators had said they were looking into whether Jordan was sexually assaulted, though it wasn't clear as of Thursday if they determined that she had been. He also remained a person of interest and had not been charged in Jordan's case.



He was arrested a few days after her body was found in another attack three weeks earlier, on a woman named Beatrice Kaliku. He was charged with assault, criminal obstruction of breathing and harassment in that case, officials said.

Kaliku said she was walking to church just after midnight on Jan. 5 when she was suddenly grabbed in a chokehold and viciously beaten. She needed eight stitches in the head and had two broken bones.

Kaliku said at the time she was heartbroken to hear her alleged attacker may be linked to the killing of another woman.

"I tell God 'thank you that I'm here,' but somebody else didn't get that chance to live," she said.

Details on an attorney for Beaton, who was sentenced in 2010 to seven years in prison for attempted rape, weren't immediately available.
What to Know Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshipers killed 49 people on what the prime minister called 'one of New Zealand's darkest days'

Johnson & Johnson must pay $29 million to a woman who claimed its baby powder gave her terminal cancer, a jury ruled

The Hallmark Channel cut ties with favored star Lori Loughlin, a day after her arrest in a college admissions scam

Get the top headlines of the day in your morning briefing from NBC 4 New York, Monday through Friday. Sign up for our newsletter here.

49 Killed in New Zealand Mosque Shootings; Man Charged

Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshipers attending prayers killed 49 people on what the prime minister called "one of New Zealand's darkest days." Authorities charged one person, detained three others and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the events in Christchurch represented "an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence" and acknowledged many of those affected may be migrants and refugees. In addition to the dead, she said more than 20 people were seriously wounded. Police took three men and a woman into custody after the shootings, which shocked people across the nation of 5 million people. One of the suspects was later charged with murder. While there was no reason to believe there were more suspects, Ardern said the national security threat level was being raised to the second-highest level.

Kim Rethinking US Talks, Launch Moratorium, N. Korean Official Says

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon decide whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain his moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, a senior North Korean official said, adding the U.S. threw away a golden opportunity at the recent summit between their leaders. Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, addressing a meeting of diplomats and foreign media, including The Associated Press, in Pyongyang said the North was deeply disappointed by the failure of the two sides to reach any agreements at the Hanoi summit between Kim and President Trump. She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States takes measures that are commensurate to the changes it has taken  such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests  and changes its "political calculation." Choe, who attended the Feb. 27-28 talks in Hanoi, said Kim was puzzled by what she called the "eccentric" negotiation position of the U.S.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/North-Korean-Official-Kim-Rethinking-US-Talks-Launch-Moratorium-507188531.html

Senate Rejects Trump Border Emergency as Republicans Defect

In a stunning rebuke, a dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats to block the national emergency that President Trump declared so he could build his border wall with Mexico. The rejection capped a week of confrontation with the White House as both parties in Congress strained to exert their power in new ways. The 59-41 tally, following the Senate's vote a day earlier to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, promised to force Trump into the first vetoes of his presidency. Trump had warned against both actions. Moments after Thursday's vote, the president tweeted a single word of warning: "VETO!" Two years into the Trump era, a defecting dozen Republicans, pushed along by Democrats, showed a willingness to take that political risk. Twelve GOP senators, including the party's 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney of Utah, joined the dissent over the emergency declaration order that would enable the president to seize for the wall billions of dollars Congress intended elsewhere. Many senators said the vote was not necessarily a rejection of the president or the wall, but protections against future presidents -- namely a Democrat who might want to declare an emergency on climate change, gun control or any number of other issues.

Johnson & Johnson Ordered to Pay $29M in Baby Powder Case

Johnson & Johnson must pay $29 million to a woman who claimed its baby powder gave her terminal cancer, a California jury ruled. A Superior Court jury in Oakland found the world's largest health care company mainly liable for Teresa Leavitt's mesothelioma. The verdict said the baby powder was a "substantial contributing factor" in her illness. Her suit is one of many that link cancers to asbestos in Johnson & Johnson's talc-based products and contend that the company concealed the health risk for decades. Requests for comment from the New Jersey-based comment were not immediately answered. Johnson & Johnson is facing some 13,000 similar lawsuits around the country.

Hallmark Drops Lori Loughlin, Daughter Loses Sephora Amid Scandal

The Hallmark Channel cut ties with favored star Lori Loughlin, a day after her arrest in a college admissions scam put the family-friendly network and extended Hallmark brand in uncomfortable proximity to a headline-grabbing scandal. "We are saddened by the recent allegations surrounding the college admissions process," Hallmark Cards Inc., parent company of the Crown Media Family Networks umbrella group that includes the Hallmark Channel, said in a statement. "We are no longer working with Lori Loughlin" and have stopped development of all productions with the actress for Crown Media channels, the statement said. The company initially took a wait-and-see approach after a federal investigation of the scam involving more than 30 parents, many of them prominent, was revealed Tuesday. Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, are accused of paying bribes to gain their daughters' college admissions. Loughlin's career and the Hallmark Channel were deeply intertwined.

Louis Tomlinson's Sister Felicite Dies at 18, Reports Say

One Direction's Louis Tomlinson's younger sister, Felicite Tomlinson, has been found dead at the age of 18. Felicite, a model and social media influencer with over 1.3 million Instagram followers, reportedly collapsed after a suspected heart attack at her apartment in London. The Metropolitan Police Service tells E! News police were called by London Ambulance Service to a residential address following reports of a female in cardiac arrest. Officers attended, and a female believed to be aged 18 was pronounced dead at the scene. She last shared a photo to Instagram March 10. In the picture, Felicite can be seen sitting on the floor as she takes a selfie. This devastating news comes just over two years after Felicite and Louis' mom, Johannah Deakin, died after a long battle with leukemia. It was exactly one week ago that the 27-year-old One Direction star released an emotional new song about his mother's death called "Two of Us."
What to Know In 2014, Congress mandated that the VA create a burn pit registry.

More than 170,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have reported symptoms on the voluntary registry.

More than 11,500 vets have submitted claims for illnesses they blame on burn pits, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The American soldier can still remember the black smoke's effect during his time Balad Air Force Base in Iraq.

"You could just taste it," the former intelligence officer said in an interview. "It was like this sickening thing that burnt the back of your throat."

It's a recollection shared by tens of thousands of soldiers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who served on the desert bases of Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is the description of the taste of a burn pit, which was for years the term used for a giant military garbage disposal.

"And thats smoke from our lovely trash pile here on Anaconda, another soldier can be heard saying in a video shot from another base.

More than 11,500 healthcare claims by military personnel have been submitted to the Veterans Administration, yet only two in 10 have been approved.

Congress and researchers are taking notice.

Veteran Chad Baer, who is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, wants the V.A. to revamp its burn pit registry. There are currently 170,000 participants on the list.

"It's a pretty flawed tool," Baer said.

The V.A. should be collecting data for soldiers that includes proximity to burn pits, what was being burned in the pits and other soldiers who worked with the veteran in question.

"The V.A. can go from being. A laggard who's constantly getting beat up by the media to kind of a leader," Baer said.

Last year, several former soldiers and medical doctors spoke to NBC10 Investigators about their experiences with burn pits: large holes dug by crews who then filled the pits with trash and lit them on fire with jet fuel. For many soldiers deployed to the desert and living on bases adjacent to the debris disposal, the billowing black smoke was just part of their daily life.

Some now say exposure to these pits has adversely affected their long term health. Their submitted claims blame burn pits for chronic illnesses.

U.S. Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., has authored several bills to get better medical care for those affected by burn pits.

"If we don't know what was burned, then we won't be able to identify the health risks in order to outreach to our veterans," said Ruiz, who is a medical doctor.

Toby Bryant served in Vietnam. Her daughter, Melissa Bryant, served in the Middle East. The two sat down with NBC10 to share their incredible stories that only two generations of a military family can have. The younger Bryant is currently a leading advocate for veterans who may be suffering from exposure to burn pits, which once were prevalent on bases...

A spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs said in a statement last November, "VA doctors treat all manner of Veterans health issues and the department continually looks at medical research and follows trends related to medical conditions affecting Veterans."

Army National Guard officer Cindy Aman is one of the former soldiers who remembers the smoke, the smell, the coughing.

She served in Iraq in the early 2000s. Once she returned home to Delaware, she began to notice new symptoms: shortness of breath, fatigue. More than two years later, she was diagnosed with an incurable lung disease called constrictive bronchiolitis.

She blames it on her near-constant exposure to burn pits, and told NBC10 that her fight for care has been "the longest journey ever."

Aman is among the vets who have submitted claims for illnesses they blame on burn pits, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Less than a quarter of them have, like Aman, have had their claims granted as of Aug. 30, 2018, the VA said.

Thousands of American military veterans have come back from service in the Middle East the last two decades with respiratory problems, possibly related to the use of burn pits, according to veterans and researchers. A spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs said, VA doctors treat all manner of Veterans health issues and the department continually looks at medical research...

In 2014, Congress mandated that the VA create a burn pit registry.

"Agent Orange took 35 years to have recognition," Aman said. "Here we dont  Im not waiting 35 years. God, we have veterans that are too sick to wait for 35 years. Thats not fair."

Melissa Bryant, who works with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association, said her group is pushing a bill called the Burn Pit Accountability Act  legislation that would hold the Department of Defense accountable for the health of its service members before they leave the military.

Never before has the DoD looked to be accountable for the toxic exposures that we face, said Bryant. Were already 17 years into this. So somethings gotta give.

The VA said in a statement from a spokesman that every claim is "will be adjudicated using the latest scientific and medical evidence available."

"VA has granted service connection for various ailments associated with burn pits, and does so on an individual, case-by-case basis after review of a Veterans case," department spokesman Rick Fox said.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

The Veterans Affairs Department's Airborne Hazards and Open Burn Pit Registry is available online at https://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/burnpits/registry.asp

Two veterans' advocacy groups are also working to raise awareness and on behalf of vets: Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran of America and BurnPits360.

Former Army soldier Ryan Conklin sums up how his base in the Middle East disposed of all its garbage: Pretty much everything we have that we have to get rid of, we burn. That tactic is now being exposed as a possible cause to thousands of veterans illnesses. A spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs said, VA doctors treat...
One of the porn industrys top agents has been accused by women whom he represents of fraud, sexual abuse and links to an illegal escort business  accusations including coercing performers to pay off "unconscionable" fees and penalties either in cash or by performing sexual acts on him.

Derek Hay, the owner of LA Direct Models in Los Angeles, is named in a complaint filed with the California Labor Commissioner's Office in June.

"Most egregiously, he coerces some of his performers into 'escorting' and then, should they seek to terminate their (illegal) contracts, threatens to 'out' them for performing illegal sex work," says the complaint.

If they do not comply, Hay destroys their careers by refusing to book them for work, even if they have been requested specifically, it says.

Several actresses represented by LA Direct described to NBC how they were financially manipulated and funneled into prostitution by Hay in a 75-minute documentary produced by NBC.

Hay, during a hearing before the Labor Commissioner's Office, denied any wrongdoing and any connection to illegal escorting. Hay has declined to comment to NBC, but he posted a 50-minute video online after NBC published this story in which he denied forcing clients to perform sexual acts or funneling them into prostitution.

"Obviously, the question itself is offensive in nature," Hay said in the video to allegations that he coerced clients to perform sexual acts on him in exchange for better bookings or reducing or foregiving debt.

The women who brought the complaint are identified only as Jane Does 1 through 4. They say in the complaint that they fear retaliatory physical or mental harm and the ruin of their careers by a powerful industry insider.

NBC spoke to 26 current and former adult film performers and other agents who made allegations similar to those contained in the complaints to the Labor Commissioner's Office. Many said they were afraid to come forward because they feared retaliation.

Adria Rae signed up as a client of LA Direct Models and although she has not filed a complaint against Hay, she described similar experiences.

"It terrifies me that another young girl could fall victim to something like this," said Rae, using her screen name.

Heather Berg, a lecturer in gender and sexuality studies at Dornsife College at the University of Southern California, said that employment law was poorly designed and put the burden of enforcement on individual workers. The state will not act unless individual workers bring a formal complaint, an expensive process that opens them up to retaliation, said Berg, the author of a forthcoming book on the industry, "Porn Work."

According to the complaint, the stigma against sex workers makes it difficult for actresses to seek legal help when they are subjected to harassment, coercion and other illegal conduct, despite the #MeToo movement.

"Yet, in these changing times, a small - brave - group of women have decided to come forward, risk their careers and their personal safety, in an effort to vindicate their rights as actors, and human beings, and to protect others," the complaint says.

Berg said that the #MeToo Movement had not made a huge difference in terms of performers' willingness to come forward and noted that performers had been criticizing Hays alleged practices for years.

"But it has made it easier for outsiders to hear those criticisms and place them into a familiar framework," Berg said.

She argues that one hurdle in bringing the #MeToo movement to sex industries is that anti-pornography feminists have convinced people that all porn performances are violent.

"So when workers come forward about actually exploitative practices, outsiders assume it's normal, almost something workers sign up for when they enter the industry," she said.

The complaint accuses Hay of signing multi-year, multi-page contracts with his clients but then submitting only one page for approval by the Labor Commissioner's Office. He requires producers to pay more than his clients' agreed upon fees but fails to pay his clients their share, the women say.

They charge that Hay is affiliated with an illegal escort business called The Luxury Companion, allegedly owned by Dwight Cunningham and Karine Michmichian, and that they exchange secret referral fees. Hay has used The Luxury Companion to book sexual encounters with his own clients, they say.

"Hay, Cunningham and Michmichian are willfully involved in prostitution and sex trafficking," the complaints alleges.

They also accuse Cunningham of threatening and engaging in physical violence against those who challenge Hay, with Hay's knowledge and under his direction.

Earlier cases filed with the Labor Commissioner's Office contain some of the same charges. One woman accused Hay in 2017 of withholding at least $1,955 from her for three modeling engagements, which he denied. In October, Labor Commissioner Julie A. Su ordered Hay to pay her $3,500 in unpaid earnings and interest plus attorney fees. Another woman, in 2013, said Hay required her to provide escorting services. She said she later dropped her complaint because she was losing money.

Berg said that support for workers who try to organize could improve conditions in the pornography industry. Performers have attempted to unionize at different points over the last 30 years and have been met with employers fighting hard to quash their efforts, she said. Employment law must better fit the needs of independent contractors and not place the burden of enforcement on individual workers, she said. Finally, prostitution should be decriminalized and laws meant to fight sex trafficking  the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act  should be overturned because they make it harder for performers to work independently and give power to abusive managers, she said.

Hadley Viscara is another Hay client who is speaking out but who also has not brought a formal complaint against him.

"Nobody should have to have sex with someone in power to get better work and to be treated better," said Viscara, who is also using her screen name. "And in this case you do."

"Im speaking out now because there have been so many other girls who were in my exact same situation that couldnt speak out," she said. "And his time is up."

Editors Note: Following publication, Dwight Cunningham told NBC that he does not own or run the Luxury Companion and he disputes that NBC attempted to contact him for comment in connection with this story.

An earlier version of this story misidentified the California Labor Commissioner's Office.

Noreen O'Donnell contributed to this story.
What to Know A Delaware man was convicted of detonating a pipe bomb outside his estranged wifes home last year.

Mark Consiglio, 49, of Elsmere, Delaware, pleaded guilty Thursday to possessing a destructive device.

Consiglio faces a maximum sentence of 10 years.

A Delaware man was convicted of detonating a pipe bomb outside his estranged wifes home.

Mark Consiglio, 49, of Elsmere, Delaware, pleaded guilty Thursday to possessing a destructive device.

On March 12, 2018, Consiglio detonated a pipe bomb at his estranged wifes home in Elsmere before fleeing the scene. Two people were home at the time of the blast. The explosion shattered the front living room window of the house as one of the occupants slept. Shrapnel from the blast was found inside the living room.

Consiglio was detained by police nearby. Investigators searched his home and found three more pipe bombs, a .38 caliber revolver, materials used to make a pipe bomb, gun powder, a World War II-era flare launcher that had been modified to accept 9mm ammunition, and a book titled CIA improvised sabotage devices that was dog-eared on the incendiary devices page.

At the time of his arrest, Consiglio was already charged with threatening to kill his wife.

Consiglio is scheduled to be sentenced on July 2, 2019. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years with three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine and a $100 special assessment.
What to Know Jacob Sullivan has admitted to killing Grace Packer in 2016 as part of a rape-murder fantasy.

Sullivan, 46, still faces the death penalty when he is sentenced.

Grace Packer's adoptive mother, Sara Packer, agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence and could testify at the penalty phase.

Warning: The details of this story are extremely graphic and could be disturbing to some readers.

A Pennsylvania man should be put to death for killing and dismembering his girlfriend's 14-year-old daughter as part of a rape-murder fantasy he and the teen's mother shared, a prosecutor said Friday.

Jacob Sullivan, 46, pleaded guilty to all charges last month in a case that raised questions about the child welfare system's failure to protect Grace Packer, who spent years in an abusive home before she was raped, drugged, bound and gagged for a dozen hours and then, finally, strangled in the attic of a suburban Philadelphia home in 2016.

Prosecutors said Grace's adoptive mother, Sara Packer, plotted the crime with Sullivan and watched him violate and kill her daughter. Sara Packer, a former foster parent and county adoptions supervisor, has agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence and is scheduled to testify at the penalty phase of Sullivan's trial, which opened Friday outside Philadelphia.

In his opening statement, Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub said he would be asking the jury to impose the death penalty for Sullivan's "awful, unspeakable, heinous crimes." Sullivan and Packer "decided together that Grace was not worth the air she breathed," Weintraub said, and "he made Grace Packer's last 24 hours of life a hell on earth."

Sullivan's lawyer, Jack Fagan, asked jurors to spare Sullivan's life, saying he should get the same sentence as Sara Packer. Fagan said Packer was controlling and manipulative, hated Grace long before she met Sullivan online in 2013, and masterminded the plot to rape and kill her.

"Sara Packer was the driving factor in the intent, the planning and the execution of what happened to her daughter," he said.

The defense plans to call Packer as a witness.

The jury that will decide his sentence must be unanimous in order to impose the death penalty; otherwise Sullivan will get life without parole. Even if he's sentenced to death, it's unclear whether the punishment would ever be carried out. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf declared a moratorium on capital punishment shortly after taking office in 2015. Pennsylvania last carried out an execution in 1999.

Packer and her husband at the time, David Packer, adopted Grace and her brother in 2007. The couple cared for dozens of foster children before David Packer was arrested in 2010 and sent to prison for sexually assaulting Grace and a 15-year-old foster daughter at their home in Allentown, about an hour north of Philadelphia.

Sara Packer lost her job as a Northampton County adoptions supervisor in 2010 and was barred from taking in any more foster children.

The Pennsylvania Department of Human Services launched an investigation after Grace Packer's murder but its findings have not been made public.

On Friday, Weintraub said Grace's short life was a series of terrible misfortunes, culminating in her agonizing death.

"What is the worst thing you can think of you can do to a child?" he asked the jury. "Because in this courtroom, we are going to check all of those boxes."

Sullivan has admitted he punched and raped Grace, bound her hands and feet with zip ties and stuffed a ball gag in her mouth. Prosecutors said Sullivan and Packer also gave her what they intended to be a lethal dose of over-the-counter medication and left her to die in a sweltering attic.

Returning the next day and finding Grace was still alive, Sullivan strangled her. The couple stored her body in cat litter for months, then hacked it up and dumped it in a remote area where hunters found it in October 2016, according to prosecutors.
Philadelphia City Council did a very Philly thing and officially declared March 15 through 17 Meek Mill Weekend.

City Council President Darrell Clarke made the proclamation Thursday morning. He was joined by State Sen. Sharif Street in praising Mill, whose legal troubles catapulted him into national stardom as a criminal justice advocate and critic of mass incarceration.

Mill became a symbol for criminal justice reform activists after a judge in Pennsylvania sentenced him to two to four years in prison for minor violations of his probation conditions in a decade-old gun and drug possession case. He spent months in prison before a court ordered him released.

He said at Thursday's announcement that he's trying to "give young kids a fair shot in the system."

The embattled rapper and Philly native will perform this weekend at Philadelphia's newly revamped Metropolitan Opera House.

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A Philadelphia man pleaded guilty to shooting and killing a victim in a quiet Delaware County community less than an hour after firing 17 shots at two men.

Derrick Rollins, 25, was convicted Thursday of murder, attempted homicide and aggravated assault.

On July 29, 2017, Rollins shot John Le, 29, in the chest and hand outside a building on the 2300 block of Haverford Road in Haverford Township. Le was taken to Lankenau Hospital where he was later pronounced dead.

About a half hour before Les murder, Rollins tried to kill two men in Philadelphias Overbrook Park section. He fired 17 shots before fleeing the scene.

Rollins spent weeks on the run after Les death before being captured in Georgia in August, 2017.

Rollins sentencing will take place on April 12.
Leaders and residents in the Philadelphia region responded with grief, resilience and heightened security after a pair of mosque shootings left dozens dead in New Zealand.

The shooting left 49 people dead after a gunman opened fire at two separate mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. As leaders extended their condolences, the Philadelphia Police Department promised frequent checks on the city's mosques and other houses of worship.

"Philadelphia stands with New Zealand and those affected by the horrific terrorist attack at two mosques. Our hearts are with you. Arohanui," Mayor Jim Kenney wrote on Twitter, using a Maori word that translates roughly to "with deep affection."

Thank you, @PhillyPolice. Philadelphia stands with New Zealand and those affected by the horrific terrorist attack at two mosques. Our hearts are with you. Arohanui. https://t.co/avCP0CKDkQ  Jim Kenney (@PhillyMayor) March 15, 2019

Former Vice President Joe Biden, a Pennsylvania native and former Delaware representative, also expressed his sympathies.

"Whether it is antisemitism in Pittsburgh, racism in Charlottesville, or the xenophobia and Islamophobia today in Christchurch, violent hate is on the march at home and abroad. We cannot stand by as mosques are turned into murder scenes," Biden Tweeted.

Whether it is antisemitism in Pittsburgh, racism in Charlottesville, or the xenophobia and Islamophobia today in Christchurch, violent hate is on the march at home and abroad. We cannot stand by as mosques are turned into murder scenes.  Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 15, 2019

Though the massacre happened thousands of miles away, it resonated deeply with Philadelphia's Muslim community.

At the Muslim American Society in North Philadelphia, a school and mosque, teachers held an assembly to try to explain to young students what happened in New Zealand. "How do you talk to others about this? We just have to be strong and ... represent who we are, not hide and move forward from this," said teacher Yasmin Sherif.

In front of a sea of children, many of them girls sporting pink hijabs, jackets and backpacks, an 8-year-old fifth-grader took the microphone, encouraging his peers to not bow to hatred or fear.

"You can't hide yourself," he said. "You need to wear your hijab with pride, wear your thobe with pride. You can't hide."
A cruise ship that was headed for Havana, Cuba on Friday was denied entry to the country. Now, customers are upset and travel organizers are working to figure out why they couldnt get into Cuba.

We didnt pay to sit in international waters, we paid to go to Cuba, to Havana! said one passenger yelling inside a theater on the ship.

Bahamas Paradises cruise ship, the Grand Classica, departed the Port of Palm Beach Thursday for her maiden voyage to Cuba. The ship would have arrived in Havana on 7 a.m. Friday. Some people would have gotten off the ship to explore the island, and some Cuban nationals would have been allowed to temporarily board to reunite with family and friends.

Its very sad, said Lily Wynter, who flew from Los Angeles to take the cruise with her mother. Its something we planned for a couple months. I have an uncle I havent seen in 17 years.

Wynters mother left Cuba in 1972. This would have been her first time back.

A spokesperson for Bahamas Parade Cruises said that Viva Travels, a travel agency, chartered the Grand Classica. The spokesperson said that despite prior approval from the Cuban government, they were denied entry for unknown reasons.

The ship left Cuba and made its way to the Bahamas. The ship is set to return to West Palm Beach on Monday.

Theres no activities, theres no performances, theres really nothing to do, said Wynter.

A State Department spokesperson released a statement to NBC affiliate WPTV saying, Every state has the sovereign right to regulate the entry, screening, and stay of foreign nationals in its territory, subject to its international obligations. For cases regarding into Cuba, we would refer you to Cuban immigration authorities.

WPTV said that a call to the Cuban embassy in Washington DC was not returned.
Mothers who have been fighting for decades to see the death sentence run its course for the man who killed their sons say they fear the Governors moratorium on the death penalty has rendered their efforts useless.

Just last week, Maria Keever and Milena Sellers Phillips were in San Francisco to watch as the man convicted of killing their boys in 1993 made yet another appeal to have his death sentence reversed.

Charlie Keever, 13, and Jonathan Sellers, 9, pedaled away from their homes on bikes 26 years ago and never returned. Their bodies were later found in the Otay River. Investigators said they had been beaten raped and murdered.

Scott Erskine, who was already serving a decades-long sentence for rape, was convicted and sentenced to death for the double murder. Keever and Phillips say they were upset and hurt by the decision, and that it makes them feel like they dont matter.

12:45pm: The death chamber at San Quentin. Closed. pic.twitter.com/0zK4UUItBG  Office of the Governor of California (@CAgovernor) March 13, 2019

Keever said the decision disgusted her, and that Erskine got his wish.

That's what he always wanted, she said. He wanted the death penalty off and he got it.

Newsoms executive action is only temporary. Repeal of capital punishment would be up to California voters, who have consistently rejected statewide ballot measures to repeal the death penalty.

Keever said when Erskine took her sons life, he took her life as well. She says she doesnt live -- she only survives -- and is angered by the thought of Erskine and other death row inmates not having to fear their pending punishment.

He won't be afraid of the death penalty, she said. They'll just go to jail and get food and sleep. They won't be afraid anymore.

Phillips says shell be OK if Erskines death is never ultimately administered by the state of California, but she would at least prefer that her sons killer die as a death row inmate.

I understand, and maybe its easier for me to accept it because I know they stay on death row for so long, she said. He's locked up in that little cage and can't get out but one hour a day. Thats what I want. He will die an old man by himself as opposed to making new friends in his prison community.

No matter their opinions on appropriate justice, Keever and Phillips say they will continue to fight to keep Erskine on death row.

California, which has 737 condemned inmates and the nation's largest death row, has not executed anyone since 2006.

The last inmate to be executed in California was Clarence Ray Allen, killed Jan. 17, 2006 at age 76. Allen, sentenced to death on three counts of first-degree murder, was on death row for more than two decades before a lethal injection was administered.

An administration source in the governor's office said Newsoms order does the following:

 Puts in place an executive moratorium on the death penalty in the form of a reprieve for all individuals sentenced to death in California.

 Withdrawals California's lethal injection protocol.

 Immediately closes the execution chamber at San Quentin.

 States clearly the directive does not provide for the release of any individual from prison or otherwise alter any current conviction or sentence.

"I think he's making a bad decision," San Diegan Kent Richardson told NBC 7. "He's not thinking about the consequences."

Other like Michael Jacobelly say since it's not being enforced, it might as well be gone.

"How many executions have there been? Practically none," he said.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978, there have been 13 executions at a cost of nearly $5 billion.

Attorney John Cotsirilos argues the death penalty isn't what it used to be, and says the money spent administering it could be spent more effectively.

"Half the murders and rapes in the state go unsolved. That money could be spent in a way that actually brings more safety to the public on a daily basis. The death penalty is purely symbolic in this state," he said.
In January, the City of San Diego adopted a ban on Styrofoam containers. The ban will be fully enforced beginning May 24, with fines starting at $200 for a first offense.

But not so fast.

Three San Diego restaurant owners, the California Restaurant Association, and Dart Cardboard Corporation of California have now filed a lawsuit against the city of San Diego seeking to block the citys ban on Styrofoam containers.

The suit claims the City Council adopted the ban with zero environmental analysis.

The lawsuit, filed March 12, alleges the City violated the California Environmental Quality Act when it failed to appropriately analyze the environmental impacts of its foam ban before implementing it. The City ignored evidence presented to the City Council that foam alternatives might be worse for the environment, according to the suit.

One of the restaurant owners behind the suit is Javier Rodriguez. He owns Antojitos Colombianos on Imperial Avenue in Logan Heights.

I want the city to be fair, said Rodriguez, who also must consider the expense of changing from Styrofoam to a different type of container.

The lack of an environmental study in San Diego prior to the city considering a ban on polystyrene food packaging is alarming, stated the California Restaurant Association in a press release. The City ignored a critical step in evaluating the environmental impact that replacement products will have at local landfills, along beaches and to air and water quality. We have all the confidence in the legal process and that the court will validate our complaint.

Rodriguez claims the chemicals used on replacement packaging are pretty much the same chemicals they use on Styrofoam.

Both are recyclable, so I dont know what the issue is here, said Rodriguez.

The California Restaurant Association says Expanded polystyrene is a safe, affordable recyclable product. Banning foam will result in increased costs to residents, restaurant owners and small businesses.

Currently, 120 cities in California have adopted bans on Styrofoam. San Diego is the largest.

The polystyrene ban ordinance is important for protecting our environment. Our office will vigorously defend this ordinance through the courts, City Attorney Mara W. Elliott said.
The new honorary mayor of Fair Haven, Vermont  a 3-year-old goat named Lincoln  was officially sworn into office this week.

Lincoln was dressed in a sash reading "Mayor" for the Tuesday ceremony at the Fair Haven town offices. Town Clerk Suzanne Dechame and the select board were present to deliver the oath of office.

Fair Haven, a town of about 2,500 along the border with New York just west of Rutland, does not have an actual mayor.

Town Manager Joseph Gunter says the honorary pet mayor idea was conceived as a fundraiser for a playground, but it turned into a civics lesson for kids.

On the way out of the offices, the honorary mayor defecated on the floor  leaving clean-up to the police chief and other attendees.
Police have arrested and charged four men and a teenager in the gruesome murder of a 16-year-old boy from Fairfax County, Virginia.

The five suspects are part of an MS-13 "clique" that operates in Fairfax County, Virginia, police said. The victim, Jacson Pineda Chicas, also belonged to the gang.

A sheriff's deputy found the Chicas' body over the weekend in a wooded area off of River Road in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Authorities believe he was murdered in Prince George's County, Maryland.

Prince George's County police said Friday that 29-year-old Jose Ordonez-Zometa, 25-year-old Jose Hernandez-Garcia, 20-year-old Jonathan Castillo-Rivera, 18-year-old Kevin Rodriguez-Flores and 16-year-old Christian Martinez-Ramirez were charged in Chicas' murder.

Chicas' mother, who did not want to be identified, told News4 Thursday that her son was forced to join the gang in El Salvador and that's why their family fled the country. But Chicas was unable to escape the gang's grip in America.

"They threatened him and they would follow him to work. He worked at IHOP ... everyday he would leave [the house] with fear," she said.

She said Chicas was trying to leave the gang and he started living at a house in Prince George's County to spare his parents and siblings from danger.

Chicas' mother told News4 that when gang members previously accused him of talking to police they threatened to kill his family and he had told them to kill himself instead.

"He had to take knives to defend himself, and screwdrivers. He had razors and he told me, 'Mom, I'm going to defend myself with them, but it's not going to be enough.'"

Police have not confirmed a motive for the killing, but said Chicas and several members went to a meeting at the clique leader's home in the 7000 block of Varnum Street in Landover Hills on March 8.

"During the meeting, a violent attack took place where our victim was stabbed as many as 100 times," said Major Brian Reilly with the Prince George's County Police Department.

Reilly said the suspects then drove Chicas' body to Stafford County, where they dumped it and set it on fire.

Ordonez-Zometa is in the custody of Prince George's County police, while the four others are in custody in Virginia.

Chicas was a student at Falls Church High School.

"Jacson was an engaging young man, well-liked by all who knew him, and will be greatly missed by the Jaguar school community. I have been in contact with Jacsons family to offer them our condolences and support. They have allowed me to share the news of his death with you so that you may be prepared to support your child," Principal Ben Nowak said in a letter to parents.

Police are asking anyone with information on the investigation to call detectives at 301-772-4925. Callers wishing to remain anonymous may call Crime Solvers at 1-866-411-TIPS (8477), or go online at www.pgcrimesolvers.com, or use the P3 Tips mobile app.

The Stafford County Sheriff's Office is collaborating with Prince George's County police in the investigation.
A body discovered over the weekend in a wooded area of Fredericksburg, Virginia, is that of a 16-year-old boy  and authorities believe he was murdered in Prince George's County, Maryland.

Police say Jacson Chicas, of Falls Church, was killed inside a home in the 7000 block of Varnum Street in Landover Hills. His killers then dumped his remains in an area between River Road and the Rappahannock River, police said.

A sheriff's deputy discovered his body off River Road near Route 3 on Saturday.

Chicas' mother, who did not want to be identified, told News4 in Spanish that her son was forced to join the MS-13 gang in El Salvador and that's why their family fled the country.

But Chicas was unable to escape the gang's grip in America.

She said Chicas was trying to leave MS-13 and he had started living at a house in Prince George's County to spare his parents and siblings from danger.

Chicas' mother said when gang members accused him of talking to police they threatened to kill his family and he told them to kill himself instead.

His mother said she knew her son was dead when she saw the photo police posted of a bloody forearm tattoo.

The Stafford County Sheriff's office said Thursday it is collaborating with Prince George's County police in the investigation.

In a video posted to Twitter, the Stafford County Sheriff's office also asked anyone to report suspicious activity they may have witnessed, including a car parked overnight along the road.

On Friday, Prince George's County police said four men and a teenager were arrested and charged in connection to Chicas' murder. Police said all five suspects are part of an MS-13 "clique" that operates in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Police asked anyone who may have information related to the case to call 540-658-4450.
What to Know In 1942, there were only 16 whooping cranes left in the country. Now there are more than 500, most living in the wild.

The rescue of a crane in 1964 led to scientists developing a way to artificially inseminate birds.

75 whooping cranes will be relocated to Louisiana and Texas.

The last of a flock of 75 whooping cranes has left a U.S. Geological Survey site in Maryland, marking the end of a 52-year-old breeding program.

The Baltimore Sun reports the federal agency says the last bird has been transferred from the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel.

There were fewer than 50 whooping cranes alive when the breeding program began with a one-winged bird named Canus.

Canus was rescued by scientists in Canada in 1964 and taken to the center where he lived for more than 30 years and produced generations of whooping cranes.

Because he had a broken wing, he couldnt use it to balance for mating, so the scientists at Patuxent developed a method of artificial insemination for birds.

While still vulnerable, the whooping crane population is now about 700, thanks to efforts including artificial insemination and biologists dressing in crane costumes.

USGS officials say its breeding research is no longer needed. The whooping cranes have gone to research institutions and zoos in Virginia, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Louisiana and Canada.
A Maryland man wanted in Florida for an apparent attack on a pelican was arrested in Ocean City Friday morning.

The Monroe County, Florida, Sheriffs Office got an arrest warrant for 31-year-old William Hunter Hardesty after a video of a man jumping off a dock and landing on a pelican March 7 in the Florida Keys was posted on social media. Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay said the bird nipped at Hardesty and got away unharmed.

Maryland State Police received a tip Friday morning about a man at an Ocean City hotel bragging about being wanted for feeding and tackling the pelican, police said.

Troopers arrested Hardesty without incident on the warrant charging him with animal cruelty to migratory birds and intentional feeding of pelicans, police said. He is awaiting extradition to Florida.

After the post, outraged viewers quickly noticed Hardesty lists JW Frew Electric as his employer on Facebook. The business received a slew of negative reviews and messages, but the business says Hardesty hasn't worked there for almost four years.

At Hardesty's home in Davidsonville, Maryland, his father said he's received threatening phone calls since the viral video of his son. He said his son is a fisherman and would never do anything to hurt a pelican.
A Virginia business owner accused of taking thousands of dollars from customers but never delivering the medical equipment they ordered already faces six felony charges in the commonwealth, but now a Maryland woman says the same thing happened to her.

Karen Mitchell-Nurses daughter Naiya was born with multiple disabilities, and years of seizures left her non-verbal and unable to walk on her own.

Now 19 years old, Naiya is too big for Mitchell-Nurse to carry.

I tried to lift her myself, she said. I was the only one in the house  and I hurt myself.

A ceiling lift is her saving grace, but its not the one she originally ordered and paid $4,500 for  $2,500 of her money and the rest from a grant.

She said Jim Clore, the owner of Access Mobility, never actually ordered it for her.

She said she spent months begging Clore to either refund her money or install the lift, and she was getting desperate.

The second time he was supposed to deliver it, Naiya was falling out of her bath chair, Mitchell-Nurse said.

Her frustration left her anxious, and she started seeing a psychiatrist, which is when things changed.

I went for my routine visit, and she said, I was watching something and it sounded like what happened to you, Mitchell-Nurse said.

Her doctor showed her one of News4s recent stories about Access Mobility, and she felt instant relief knowing she wasn't alone.

Several people told News4 they also paid Clore thousands of dollars for medical equipment that was never delivered.

There has to be something to be done, not only for me to receive the money back, but to stop him, because I don't want anybody to feel the way that I felt, Mitchell-Nurse said.

She filed a complaint with the Montgomery County Office of Consumer Protection, which started an immediate investigation.

Last week, Clore sent Mitchell-Nurse a partial refund of $500.

Regardless, Montgomery County said it is pursuing criminal charges against him.

Clore sent a statement saying, "The business has been closed and is in bankruptcy. All customers will be refunded 100 percent. My heart's desire is to resolve all of this, as it was never intentional for the business to fail."

News4 couldnt find a record of the bankruptcy filing, so Clore directed questions to his attorneys office. They said he gave them a deposit in October but never followed up to file the case.

Clore has a preliminary hearing in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, on two felony charges next week. He's facing four other felonies in Stafford County, Virginia, which go before a grand jury next month.

Reported by Susan Hogan, produced by Meredith Royster and edited by Perkins Broussard.
Unbowed by a congressional rebuke, President Donald Trump issued the first veto of his presidency on Friday in a demonstration that he is not through fighting for his signature campaign promise, which stands largely unfulfilled 18 months before voters decide whether to grant him another term.

Trump rejected an effort by Congress to block the emergency declaration he'd used to circumvent lawmakers as he tried to shake loose funds for his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The monthslong confrontation now moves to the courts, but not before marking a new era of divided government in Washington and Republicans' increasing independence from the White House.

"Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution," Trump said, "and I have the duty to veto it."

A dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats in approving the joint resolution on Thursday as both parties strained to exert their power in new ways. It is unlikely that Congress will have the two-thirds majority required to override Trump's veto, though House Democrats will try nonetheless on March 26.

Despite the reproach, Trump seized the opportunity to publicly rebuff Congress and show his commitment to the border wall. In embracing the opportunity to deploy the constitutional power of the veto for the first time, he treated the occasion with all the traditional pomp of a bill-signing.

Trump was surrounded in the Oval Office by supporters, including law enforcement officials and the parents of children killed by people in the country illegally, who offered profuse thanks and frequent applause. Trump dramatically signed his veto message and then held the document up for the cameras to capture.

Trump wants to use the emergency order to divert billions of federal dollars earmarked for defense spending toward the southern border wall. It still faces several legal challenges from Democratic state attorneys general and environmental groups who argue the emergency declaration was unconstitutional.

Those cases could prevent Trump from diverting extra money to barrier construction for months or longer. American Civil Liberties Union, which filed one of the challenges, said the veto is meaningless, like the declaration in the first place.

"Congress has rejected the president's declaration, and now the courts will be the ultimate arbiter of its legality. We look forward to seeing him in court and to the shellacking that he will receive at the hands of an independent judiciary," said Executive Director Anthony Romero.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trump's veto a "lawless power grab" and railed that, even after both chambers tried to stop him, Trump "has chosen to continue to defy the Constitution, the Congress and the will of the American people."

Trump, however, insisted the situation on the southern border is "a tremendous national emergency," adding, "our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point."

Many lawmakers said Thursday's vote was not necessarily a rejection of the president or the wall, but protections against future presidents  namely a Democrat who might want to declare an emergency on climate change, gun control or any number of other issues.

It was the first direct challenge to the 1976 National Emergencies Act, just as a Wednesday vote on Yemen was the first time Congress invoked the decades-old War Powers Act to try to rein in a president. That resolution seeking to end U.S. backing for the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting in Yemen was approved in the aftermath of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and is expected to be the subject of Trump's second veto.

Despite the embarrassing defections of the 12 GOP senators, Trump's grip on the party remains strong and the White House made it clear that Republicans resisting Trump could face political consequences. Ahead of the voting, Trump framed the issue as with-him-or-against-him on border security, a powerful argument with many.

But Friday, Trump said he had sympathy for the Republicans who voted against him and emphasized that he never truly twisted the arms of lawmakers, because he knew there were not enough votes to override the veto.

"Look, they were doing what they have to do," Trump said, insisting he "put no pressure" on lawmakers to vote against the resolution because he realized that the measure was likely to pass.

Still, a White House official said Trump won't forget when senators who opposed him want him to attend fundraisers or provide other help. The official was not authorized to speak publicly on internal deliberations so spoke on condition of anonymity.

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump painted his usual portrait of a lawless and violent border. He cited "thousands and thousands" of gang arrests and claimed many of the asylum seekers released into the U.S. were "stone-cold killers," ignoring data that shows immigrants are less likely to commit crime. He noted, correctly, a spike in the number of people coming to the border to claim asylum.

Trump initiated the showdown months ago when he all but dared Congress not to give him the $5.7 billion he was demanding to build the U.S.-Mexico wall, by threatening a federal government shutdown.

Congress declined and the result was the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Against the advice of GOP leaders, Trump invoked the national emergency declaration last month, allowing him to try to tap about $3.6 billion for the wall by shuffling money from military projects, and that drew outrage from many lawmakers. Trump had campaigned for president promising Mexico would pay for the wall.

AP writers Alan Fram, Lisa Mascaro, Catherine Lucey and Colleen Long contributed.
A Massachusetts woman has been indicted after allegedly having sex with an inmate at the correctional facility where she worked in Bridgewater.

A Plymouth County Grand Jury returned an indictment Friday against Vicki Oliver, 53, of New Bedford, according to the Plymouth County District Attorney's office. Oliver was charged with one count of sexual relations with an inmate.

On Feb. 17, another corrections officer at the Massachusetts Treatment Center reported to corrections officials that they had witnessed Oliver having sexual intercourse with a male inmate at the treatment center.

Authorities said the indictment came after an investigation by state police assigned to the Plymouth County District Attorney's Office and the Massachusetts Department of Corrections.

Oliver will be arraigned on the charge at a later date in Brockton Superior Court.
What to Know Authorities announced Friday that the death of Worcester firefighter Christopher Roy last year has been ruled a homicide.

Momoh Kamara, 21, has been charged with second-degree murder and arson in connection with Roy's death.

The investigation determined the fire was set in the basement, and led them to Kamara, a former resident of the building.

The December death of a Massachusetts firefighter has been ruled a homicide after authorities determined the blaze he was fighting in an apartment building had been deliberately set by a former tenant.

Secret indictments were handed up Friday by a Worcester County grand jury, Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early said. The suspect, Momoh Kamara, 21, of West Boylston, is charged with second-degree murder, arson of a dwelling and armed burglary.

Kamara was arrested without incident and arraigned Friday afternoon in Worcester Superior Court. He was ordered held without bail and is scheduled to return to court on April 24.

Blake Rubin, Kamara's attorney, said afterward that his client is "beside himself." He added that the prosecution's case is based solely on circumstantial evidence.

"This is a man with no real experience in a prison, and he's 21-years-old, so he's terrified," said Rubin. "You're talking about a young man whos not very familiar with court."

Roy, 36, of Shrewsbury, died after responding to a 5-alarm fire in an apartment building on Lowell Street around 4 a.m. on Dec. 9, 2018. He became trapped on the second floor of the structure along with four other firefighters. He managed to escape using a ladder and was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he died. His cause of death was smoke inhalation, according to the medical examiner.

He left behind a 9-year-old daughter, his parents and a brother.

The fire investigation determined the fire was set in the basement, Early said, and the criminal investigation eventually led them to Kamara, a former building resident.

Prosecutors said video recordings from around the fire scene showed Kamara entering the area around 2:30 a.m. and exiting within 5 minutes of when firefighters arrived. They said Kamara had previously been involved in a disagreement with former roommates about property.

Worcester Fire Chief Michael Lavoie said his department is "extremely grateful" to investigators "for their determination and professionalism" in pursuing the case.

"While we are heartened that Mr. Kamara will face justice, our department is still devastated by the loss of our brother, firefighter Christopher Roy," he said. "The past three months have been extremely difficult for all of us as we continue to mourn his loss."

"We will never forget his sacrifice," Worcester Police Chief Steven Sargent added. "His actions define what it means to be a hero."

Early said the investigation into the fire is still ongoing.

Roy's death was the eighth fatality the Worcester Fire Department has experienced in the past two decades. In 1999, six firefighters were killed battling the Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse fire.
What to Know An 11-year-old is in police custody in connection to a double shooting on Friday morning in Alton, New Hampshire.

The Union Leader reports that one of the shooting victims has died.

Two local schools were temporarily placed in lockdown in the wake of the incident.

An 11-year-old is in custody after allegedly killing two adults in a shooting Friday in the Lakes Region town of Alton, New Hampshire.

The New Hampshire Attorney General's Office said Friday night that 50-year-old Lizette Eckert, who had suffered a gunshot wound, was found dead after police responded to a 911 call on Dobbins Way around 7:30 a.m. Her husband, James Eckert, 48, was also found shot.

James Eckert was taken to Portsmouth Regional Hospital in critical condition but was pronounced dead later Friday night, the New Hampshire Attorney General's Office said.

An autopsy was completed Saturday on Lizette Eckert. The manner of her death was ruled a homicide and the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head.

An autopsy has been scheduled Monday for James Eckert.

According to Geoffrey Ward, a senior assistant attorney general, the juvenile suspect was apprehended around 9:30 a.m. He was charged with one count of reckless second-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. The charges filed are under the juvenile system. It's not immediately clear if he'll face additional charges now that James Eckert has died from his injuries.

Because of the suspect's age, Ward said limited information would be made available to the public.

Officials said there is no danger to the general public.

The nearby Alton Central and Prospect Mountain High schools were placed in lockdown during the time when Ward said authorities were searching for the suspect.

"There is no current threat to ACS," Alton Central School Principal John MacArthur said in an email. "As a precautionary measure we have activated a secure campus. Nobody is permitted in or out of the building until we are given an all clear."

State police tweeted around 9:45 a.m. that the "critical incident" had come to a conclusion and the schools lifted the lockdowns shortly after.

The investigation is ongoing.

Anyone with information is asked to call New Hampshire State Police at 603-223-4381.
The investigation after a racist image was sent to Boston high school students attending a weekend regional jazz festival on the campus of the University of New Hampshire is complete, and it has been determined the incident is not a criminal case, according to a UNH statement on Friday.

The incident was investigated by the UNH Police and other law enforcement agencies.

"It was determined that the responsible individual was not a member of the UNH community. An out-of-state juvenile from a New England high school was identified as the one responsible," the statement said. "The two affected schools are in contact about how best to address the incident through education and awareness."

The statement added that racism has no place on the UNH campus or in society.

In a letter sent to students' families, Boston Arts Academy Headmaster Anne Clark said the students at the jazz festival "were subjected to a disturbing incident of racism."

A number of students were sent the image shortly before they were scheduled to perform by one or more people nearby who used the AirDrop feature on an iPhone.

The picture in question is a selfie edited with black marker on the persons face. The caption at the bottom reads, Celebrate black history month.

The incident happened over the weekend at the Clark Terry UNH Jazz Festival hosted by the university. The festival is an annual event that features guest artists, UNH jazz faculty, the UNH Jazz Band and students from high schools and middle schools throughout New England.

Clark told the students' families, "This incident was completely unacceptable, and I am very sorry that our students had their otherwise positive experience disrupted by a hateful act."

Both Boston Public schools and the University of New Hampshire issued statements Sunday night.

"We are deeply disturbed that Boston Arts Academy students were subjected to racist conduct during a regional high school jazz festival out of state, and are ensuring that the affected students receive support," Boston Public Schools said in a statement. "There is no place for such hateful and vitriolic conduct in our society."

"We were saddened to learn that students from one of the participating schools received racist images on their smartphones via AirDrop while guests on our campus," a UNH official said in a statement. "This behavior has no place on our campus and goes against all of our values as a community. Our first concern is for the affected students."

The Boston Arts Academy students say they had spent hours rehearsing for the jazz festival.

"It was like a big new experience for us because we actually never left the school as a collective," senior Brandon Volel said.

But before a single note was played Saturday, students began receiving pictures on their phones.

"The first couple Airdrops were just different, like, memes and different pictures," said Samantha Marcelino, a freshman in the band. "And then my friend Leanne she had took my phone to see what they were and that's when I got the black face picture."

Marcelino said after receiving that image, she felt "just weird, kind of felt out of place after that."

They were the only kids of color in the space that they were in. It starts off with pictures, it starts off with what they think is harmless words, but you know we have a long really turbulent history based in this type of stuff when it comes to race, Marcelinos mom said. I'm sending her out into the world on her own and in this journey of music and that this is one of the first experiences that she has going out there, it's a little bit disheartening and a little worrisome."

Volel says he had to calm down some students before they went on.

"It's very alarming to be a person of color, to have to still deal with that in 2019," he said.

Volels mom, Maria Andrade, says the students had been practicing too hard to have to deal with this racially-charged intimidation.

I honestly don't feel they're mature enough at the level to understand the ignorance behind it," she said. "It may just be a joke to you, but it's not. No one should be ridiculed, no one should be laughed at. No one should be made less because of the color of your skin."

Headmaster Clark says she has offered her support to the affected students and she is working with the BPS Office of Equity and officials at UNH to ensure this incident is investigated and addressed.

"Each and every day, we strive to foster a safe, welcoming, supportive, and inclusive environment at Boston Arts Academy and throughout the Boston Public Schools. I commend our students for carrying on with integrity, maturity, and respect after this deplorable incident occurred," Clark said in her letter. "Boston Arts Academy is full of trusted adults, and we are always here for any students who wish to talk or are in need of counseling or other resources. Racism has absolutely no place in our society. We must do all that we can to support one another and stand up against this type of offensive behavior."
A 30-year-old man was rushed to a hospital via helicopter early Friday following a shooting in Methuen, Massachusetts.

Police responded to the shooting sometime before 3 a.m. near the area of 170 Broadway, according to officials. There, they encountered the shooting victim.

The victim suffered life-threatening injuries and is in critical condition, according to Methuen police. They did not release the victim's name.

A preliminary investigation revealed the shooting was not a random act and was targeted for that location.

Broadway from Park to Brown Streets is closed and Oakland Avenue from Union to Broadway is closed, according to Methuen police. They encourage commuters to avoid the area as officials conduct their investigation.

K-9 units and officers canvassed the scene during the investigation. Officials are considering the possibility of two people being responsible for the shooting.

Details on what led up to the shooting were not immediately clear.
What to Know Hundreds of residents in Nahant, Massachusetts, are trying to stop plans for a new Northeastern University science center on East Point

Decades ago, East Point was a military installation. Eventually, ownership was transferred in part to Northeastern University

Northeastern unveiled plans for a 60,000 square foot science center which residents say will increase pollution and wipe out animal habitats

On virtually every street in Nahant, Massachusetts, you'll find messages of pride and passion.

"I think the tiniest towns in Massachusetts are the most passionate towns in Massachusetts," said Susanne Macarelli, who called 'Talk to Ten' late last month.

Macarelli was born in the tiny North Shore town, and is one of the hundreds of residents trying to stop plans for a new Northeastern University science center on East Point, located at the very tip of the community.

For many, East Point is treasured.

Dr. Marie Pasinski, who lives nearby, described it as "the most scenic vista in all of Nahant."

Thomas Costin Jr., of Nahant, went a step further, telling NBC10 Boston that the area is 'sacred.'

Decades ago, East Point was a military installation. Eventually, ownership was transferred in part to Northeastern University.

Inside the war-time bunkers it opened a Marine Science Center, focused on marine research and teaching. Sitting next to the Marine Science Center is Lodge Park, which is owned by the Town of Nahant.

Northeastern's facility in town drew little opposition for years. But that changed in February 2018, when the University suddenly unveiled plans for a new 60,000-square-foot science center.

Geoffrey Trussell, the director of the Marine Science Center, admits "we really got off on the wrong foot, so that's on us."

He hopes the new center, which will roughly double the capabilities of the current facility, can focus on things like climate change, sea level rise, and fisheries exploitation.

"We see this institute as addressing some really fundamental problems that are a threat to the nation's security," Trussell adds.

In the wake of last year's outcry, Northeastern changed its original plans, and in December presented three new possible layout options.

In each case, the new building would sit on top of the existing bunker, a key concern amongst opponents.

Many of those opponents say by building the facility on top of the bunker, it will increase light pollution, and will wipe out plants and nearby animal habitats.

"You can't not see the irony in this," says Jeff Musman, a resident nearby who says a center designed to study the environment shouldn't harm it.

In response, developers say that's the only spot where they can build while adhering to local wetlands rules, while also offering the required parking as dictated by the town.

"The last thing we would want to do is embark on a project that's going to be bad for the environment," Trussell notes.

Trussell goes a step further, saying that many of the plants on the property now are invasive, or non-native to the area. He says they grew up after the military cleared the land many years ago.

"Why didn't they manage them before?" Linda Pivacek asked in response, while talking to NBC10 Boston. It's hard for me to think that they'll do it now."

Pivacek is an avid birder, and goes on to explain her concern about the impact of this new building on various species that frequent East Point.

"The birds are migrating down the coast, and they land here. It's a great spot for them," she says.

In response, Trussell says, "We see this as a great opportunity to actually restore the native species composition out here and as a result enhance the ecological functioning."

He adds that after hearing concerns from birders, and other residents, both about the threat to animals and light pollution, the design of the building is now likely to involve less glass.

Another major area of concern involves traffic. Residents say the construction of this new facility, and the fact that more staff and students will work out of the building, may tie up local roads, or threaten the town's fragile infrastructure.

The first traffic study conducted by the University determined that right now, 2 percent of the total traffic that enters Nahant goes to the Marine Science Center. Northeastern says it will conduct more studies going forward at various times of the year.

Numerous residents also said Northeastern has ignored some of their suggestions, or refused to answer questions.

Vi Patek said she reached out to the University on several occasions.

"It was absolute silence. No reply to my letter, which I sent by email and by paper," Patek said.

She adds that her comments raised at three different public meetings were also not addressed.

Trussell says the University is listening, and points to changes in the plans as evidence that action is being taken based on feedback.

He does add, however, that "there are some questions that folks ask in terms of our financial model or business model that were just not going to get into."

Water discharges from the Marine Science Center have been the focus of much questioning, particularly by Nahant's fishing community.

Some have suggested that water being sent from the Center, back into the ocean, has warmed the temperature of the nearby sea.

Northeastern disputes that, saying in part:

"In collaboration with the Department of Environmental Protection, since mid-March we have been monitoring seawater intake and discharge temperatures in Bathing Beach Cove. The data reveal that neither our current system nor our proposed future system will lead to elevated water temperatures in the cove. Furthermore, our proposed subsurface design will discharge farther out, beyond Bathing Beach."

When reached by NBC10 Boston, the Department of Environmental Protection said that statement is 'not accurate.'

A spokesperson said, "The Marine Science Center conducted this monitoring and has submitted information to the EPA and MassDEP for further evaluation. At this time, EPA and MassDEP have not made a determination on the potential impacts of the discharge."

Thinking big picture, residents freely admit that this is a battle that may take some time.

"You're talking a David and Goliath kind of story," Musman says, referencing Northeasterns deep financial pockets, compared to the small budget of Nahant.

In spite of that, he expects "that people will continue to try to fight this." Musman adds that few residents are against the scientific mission of the Marine Science Center, but rather the way in which this particular project is playing out.

For his part, Trussell is hoping for further compromise.

"I'm hoping that we can find some harmony here, so that we can do the good science and education that's going to be a benefit to not only Nahant but to other coastal communities, and the town can look at this institute as something they're proud of," Trussell said.
The U.S. Attorney's Office has filed a lawsuit against the city of Quincy, Massachusetts for allegedly violating the Clean Water Act by dumping sewage into the Boston Harbor and surrounding water.

The lawsuit was announced Friday morning and states the city dumps untreated wastewater into Boston Harbor, Dorchester Bay and Quincy Bay. Water samples collected from 2009 through 2018 was gathered as evidence and shows Quincy dumped pollutants that carried E. coli and Enteroccous into the waters, according to the complaint.

In addition to allegedly dumping waste to beaches, Quincy is also accused of having its sewer system overflowed numerous times, causing discharge of untreated wastewater and sewage.

The Clean Water Act was established in 1972 and states it is illegal to discharge pollutants into navigable waters unless a permit is obtained.
Samsung makes the Samsung Galaxy S10 available in the market. After the successful pre-order of the S10 series phones dated March 1, 2019, to March 14, 2019, customers can get easy access to the phones in the market. Samsung S10 offers all the features and specs, people expect in a great smartphone. Find the price, specs and EMI information for S10 phones in Nepal below.

Samsung Electronics celebrating a decade since the first Galaxy S launch brings a new line of premium smartphones: Galaxy S10. The four devices in the Galaxy S10 line meet the whole sole needs of a consumer from a smartphone. The S10 phones deliver a great experience in display, camera, and performance, for which smartphone owners care the most.

Since its launch ten years ago, the Galaxy S series has stood for premium innovation  offering consumers an incredible experience, and the ability to find the device thats right for them, said Pranaya Ratna Sthapit, Head of IMBiz, Samsung Electronics Nepal. Galaxy S10 builds on that incredible legacy and delivers breakthrough display, camera, and performance innovations.

With four premium devices, each built for a unique consumer in mind, Samsung is leveraging a decade of industry leadership to usher in a new era of smartphone technology. He further shared his gratefulness to the Nepali consumers for their response towards Samsung Galaxy S10 series during the pre-ordering phase.

Samsung claims itself as the number one mobile phone brand in the domestic market in the smartphone series over the past few years. They have recently launched M10 and M20 phones for the affordable range in the market.

S10e specs

Samsungs octa-core 9820 Exynos processor.

5.8 inch Dynamic AMOLED FHD+ screen, HDR10+

6 GB of RAM and 128 GB storage

Dual Rear camera of 16 MP, f/2.2 ultrawide and 12 MP with aperture switching between f/1.5 and f/2.4

Front camera of 10 MP, f/1.9

Battery: 3100 mAh

Fingerprint sensor in the side.

Black Color

One UI over Android 9.0 Pie

S10 and S10 plus

Samsungs Octa-core 9820 Exynos processor.

S10: 6.1 inch vs S10 plus: 6.4 inches, Dynamic AMOLED FHD+ screen with HDR10+

S10 plus: 6.4 inches, Dynamic AMOLED FHD+ screen with HDR10+ 8 GB of RAM

S10: 128 GB storage, S10 plus: 128 GB, 512 GB

Triple rear camera: 16 MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens, a 12 MP f/2.4 telephoto lens and a 12 MP lens which switches between f/1.5 and f/2.4 aperture

Front camera of S10: 10 MP, f/1.9, S10 plus: Dual front camera of 10 MP and 8 MP

S10 colors: Black, blue, White. S10 plus colors: Black and blue for 128 GB, Ceramic black for 512 GB

Reverse wireless charging.

In-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor

3400 mAh in S10 vs 4100 mAh in S10 plus

4100 mAh in S10 plus One UI over Android 9 pie

Galaxy S10 Colors availability and price



Galaxy S10+ is available in 512GB storage variants and offers to consumers at a price of NPR 154,500. The color of Galaxy S10+ 512 GB storage is available in Ceramic Black. The price of S10+ 128GB is NPR 123,500 105,900 in the colors of Prism Blue and Prism Black. Similarly, the price of Galaxy S10 is NPR 110,900 84,900 with colors available in Prism white, Prism black, and Prism blue. And Galaxy S10e is available at a price of NPR 93,900 79,965 and in Prism Black color.

Galaxy S10+, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB storage: Rs 1,23,500 105,900

105,900 Galaxy S10+, 512 GB: Rs 1,54,500

S10, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB storage: Rs 110,900 84,900



84,900 Galaxy S10e, 6 GB, 128 GB: Rs 93,900 79,965



EMI availability & Breakage Insurance

Samsung also provides Easy EMI from 9 different banks, namely Global IME Bank, Nabil Bank, Laxmi Bank, Nepal Investment Bank, Mega Bank, Kumari Bank, Hulas Investment Bank, NMB Bank, and Machhapuchchhre Bank. You need to contact those banks for more information on the installment details. With the buying of S10 phones, customers will also get 1-year breakage insurance.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Viber to get latest news, information about Ntc, Ncell, Smart Cell and phones in Nepal.



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Missionary speaker for North Norfolk Filling Station

Phil Whitehead, a pastor and missionary now based in Berkshire, will be the guest speaker at the North Norfolk Filling Station meeting on Monday March 25.

Phil became a Christian at the age of 17 years and was soon leading Christian Unions at both of the colleges he attended. Following a short career as a school teacher he served as missionary in Nigeria, before becoming the 'Evangelism and Missions Director' at Kensington Temple, a large multi racial church in Notting Hill Gate, part of the Elim denomination. From there he travelled to numerous nations, pioneering unreached people group projects into the Republic of Benin and Albania. Phil & Caroline pastor were recently invited to become the pastors of Kennet Christian Centre, Newbury, a growing church in Berkshire. Their ministry still takes them to many different nations. He authored the increasingly popular book, 'Thriving in the Grace of God.





The Filling Station, which was born out of the Church of England in the West Country, has grown exponentially in terms of venues opening all over the United Kingdom and continues to serve and refresh both Church leaders, congregations and more importantly to open the eyes of those who are seeking answers to the meaning of life through the Christian faith. The Filling Station is helping to bring unity amongst believers from across the whole Church spectrum.



All are welcome at this meeting of The Filling Station for an evening of fellowship and wonderful worship followed by the main talk.



Coffee and cakes will be available from 7pm, with the main talk at 7.30pm. There will also be a prayer ministry time at the end of the evening.



Swanton Novers Village Hall, St Giles Road, Swanton Novers, Melton Constable, NR24 2RB.



For further information please email Tasha North at : nnfillingstation@gmail.com

or telephone 07825702360.



Do you have a news story or forthcoming event relating to Christians or a church in North Norfolk?
It has been just 10 months since Tom Gillis became VMware's senior vice president and general manager of its networking and security business, and in that time he has overseen some major changes in the companys core products.

Most recent is a milestone release of the companys NSX-T Data Center software, making it VMwares primary networking platform for organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native applications, bare-metal workloads as well as the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds.

Gilliss group also rolled out a new firewall  the Service-defined FirewallVMware says protects enterprise applications inside data centers or clouds. There have been other key additions, too, including an expanded relationship with AT&T around its SD-WAN offering.

Leaning on his previous executive experiences  general manager of Cisco's security technology business, CEO of Bracket Computing, vice president of marketing at IronPort Systems and others  Gillis is tasked with keeping VMware squarely in front of cloud, security and enterprise computing.

He recently talked with Network World senior editor Michael Cooney about some of the companys key networking and security directions and a big competitor, Cisco:

Cooney: Coming up on your year anniversary with VMware  what have been some of the biggest networking and security challenges youve addressed or hope still to address?

Gillis: NSX-T is a very big deal for us. We have hundreds of engineers developing that software, and fully decoupling NSX from ESX was a big job. In the end we want to blur the lines between public and private cloud with the idea changing the notion of what the data center can be in the future. Our APIs let customers and developers have the public-cloud experiences everywhere, where we set a baseline of policies that define who gets to talk to who, that lets them easily implement a modern, secure cloud native application that can be replicated from a desktop to a mainframe. Its a different model for how to more effectively run a data center.

Another challenge is positioning VMware in the security space
It is not clear if the school will open as scheduled in September

THE opening of a new primary school in Newbury has been thrown into doubt after the company building it has entered into administration, it has been confirmed.

Dawnus started work on the Highwood Copse Primary School in the grounds of Newbury College last August.

But administration firm Grant Thornton said the company had gone bust on Friday after work was halted on several UK projects.

No builders were seen on the site off Monks Lane this morning by a reporter from the Newbury Weekly News.

The 210-pupil school, sponsored by Newbury college, was expected to welcome its first intake of pupils this September.

The roof of the school was nearing completion last month and construction remained on schedule, the schools website said.

But Highwood Copse Primary School Academy Trust (HCPSAT) and West Berkshire Council have said it is unclear whether any delay to the project will postpone its scheduled opening.

Dawnus stopped working on the primary school site yesterday (Thursday 14) and the site has since been secured.

A spokesperson from HCPSAT said: West Berkshire Council are now urgently investigating the options to enable the building works to continue.

Whilst these options are being explored further, the extent of any delay on the project and consequently the planned opening in September, is not yet known.

The Academy Trust and West Berkshire Council are continuing to work together ahead of school places being offered in April.

The trust added that all parents with children due to start at Highwood Copse Primary School in September have been contacted directly by the Academy Trust to inform them of the situation.

The statement added: Where parents are offered a place at Highwood Copse Primary School, they will also be allocated a place at another local school too.

This will ensure every child has a place regardless of whether or not Highwood Copse opens this year as planned.

West Berkshire Council had planned to open the school in September 2018, but later postponed the opening until September 2019 following high increases in build costs from its then appointed contractor Kier.

Those wishing to make more enquiries regarding the Highwood Copse Primary School should contact the admissions team on 01635 845000.
Pupils from secondary schools demonstrate outside district council offices

SCHOOL pupils from Newbury staged a second climate change protest in as many months today (Friday).

Over 100 pupils from St Bartholomews School, Trinity School and Park House walked out of lessons at 11am and marched to Newbury Town Hall.

A group of young children who are home educated also took part, holding placards and homemade posters in the Market Place.

Pupils are now heading down Northbrook Street and Parkway before finishing up at @WestBerkshire Council. One elderly guy just asked a student how he gets to school. I cycle, he replied. #YouthStrike4Climatepic.twitter.com/qpyK8yWhLO  Fiona Tomas (@fionatomas_nwn) March 15, 2019

The secondary school pupils then marched down Northbrook Street and up through Parkway shopping district, chanting slogans such as, Whose future? Our future! and Pollutions not the solution! before gathering outside West Berkshire Councils offices on Market Street.

There the group lined Newburys Echo Circle where St Barts sixth former Isaac Fernandes and Year 10 pupil Ruth Beatty-Duarte addressed the crowd, which also heard from the chair of West Berkshire Green Party, Carolyne Culver.

The demonstration was part of a wider international student movement against world leaders inaction over global warming, called Youth Strike 4 Climate.

It is the second student-led protest of its type, after pupils from St Bart's and St Gabriel's protested outside Newbury Town Hall last month.

A wave of similar demonstrations were staged by thousands of school children across the world today, inspired by the 16-year-old Swedish pupil Greta Thunberg who gave up going to school on Fridays last September to campaign outside the Swedish parliament against climate change.

See next weeks Newbury Weekly News for more.
In three projects completed over the last three years, Ramin Ganeshram, as author and local historian, has s tationed herself at the dangerous crossroad where this nations conceptions of slavery and racism intersect.

The two most recent overlap.

Last November, Ganeshram saw the publication of The Generals Cook, her historical novel based on the life of the slave named Hercules who commanded George Washingtons kitchens at Mount Vernon and in Philadelphia.

It is a novel for adults. Hercules has a mixed-race lover in Philadelphia that, from 1790 to 1800, served as the U.S. capital. The greater freedoms he has there makes him chafe even more at the constant reminders that he, and his children, remain the presidents property. More than for his own well-being, Hercules lives in fear his son will be sold off as a trouble-maker.

The Generals Cook came out midway through a long running exhibit, Remembered: the History of African Americans in Westport, that Ganeshram curated and oversaw as the newly installed executive director of the Westport Historical Society. The loaded word in the title is remembered, as in what is and what is not.

The exhibit forcefully reminds that the first blacks in town were likely enslaved people. Crucial documentation came from Greens Farm Church records that showed between the years 1742 and 1822 its enslaved population outnumbered free blacks 240 to 80. Among the artifacts in the exhibit are shackles and a reconstructed crawl space where two girls, household slaves, might have slept.

The shackles and crawl space speak to the physical conditions of slavery. But the artifact that speaks most directly to the racist ideas that justified slavery is a broken tombstone borrowed from the Newtown Historical Society. Barely legible, its 1828 markings identify the deceased only as N----r Bob, age 4.

We have many visitors who come in and say, Well, thats the word they used back then. (Or) when I grew up, my parents didnt know any better. Thats what they called black people,  Ganeshram says.

She is emphatic that people did know better, even in 1828. The N word was deployed, casually and perhaps even unconsciously, as an act of diminishment. She also sees direct parallels with the recent blackface scandal in Virginia and, surprisingly, one of her own earlier books.

In January 2016, a 32-page childrens book she had written, A Birthday Cake for George Washington, also based on Hercules life, was pulled from publication because of a social media outcry that the illustrator had depicted the kitchen slaves as cheerful.

The withdrawal by such a respected publisher as Scholastic got international attention. The Guardian newspaper even printed a long essay by Ganeshram explaining she had objected to the tone of the illustrations over which she had no control. The fact that the editor and illustrator were African-American is less irony than proof of how contentious the depiction of slavery can be.

In the essay, Ganeshram herself was intent on defending Hercules as a proud and commanding figure who, like others, triumphed over terrible circumstances. But she wrote, It goes without saying that these and other enslaved people were not happy to be enslaved. It goes without saying that that their lives were harder and crueler than we could possibly imagine with our modern, free outlook.

The Virginia governors yearbook page, the cancelation of Megyn Kellys show over her comments on dressing in blackface on Halloween, the withdrawal of fashions with blackface designs all are evidence of a wishfulness to think or believe otherwise.

Ganeshram says she lost it when she first saw the proofs of her birthday cake book. I felt it was a minstrel show because it depicted Hercules and the household full of happy, smiling, dancing people  The happy enslaved person is a trope that is trotted out throughout American history. Its the Mammy character from Gone with the Wind. Its Aunt Jemima. Its what Uncle Tom became.

The happy blackface itself can be a mask for those who wear it. You are doing it knowing it is derisive, insulting. Its just the nature of it. Its a costume. Its a send up. Its an exaggeration. Its a mockery, she says.

Ganeshram came to Hercules and the Westport Historical Society in a roundabout route. She is a graduate of both the Columbia School of Journalism and the Institute of Culinary Education. Shes written food articles for the New York Times and many magazines, and has been a marketing executive.

She first learned about Hercules while working on an African-American heritage cookbook. Her novel was basically finished when her editor at Scholastic suggested a childrens book. She originally proposed the Remembered exhibit as a member of TEAM Westport, the towns diversity committee.

With a Trinidian father and Iranian mother, she describes her own ethnicity as ambiguous. Over the years shes made a study of race and identity and slavery. The consensus of scholars now is that slavery and racism evolved in tandem. In earliest colonial times, laborers from Africa were treated as indentured servants. But gradually the laws and logic of slave ownership came to depend on a belief in black inferiority.

Africans we're put in the category of chattel, of beasts of burden, and animals are considered insensible, they dont feel pain, they are unaware of their surroundings, she says, condensing a vast literature.

Many of the details in The Generals Cook are taken from historical records. Washington once ordered a slave sold to the West Indies as punishment for owning a dog, then hanged the dog. Hercules became Washingtons property after being mortgaged by a neighbor named Posey.

Ganeshram is continuing her Hercules research. Just last month she and Sara Krasne, the historical society archivist, found records of a Hercules Posey living in New York City around the same time she speculates he fled there. Washington, wanting his cook back, sent detectives to track him down.

The Westport Historical Society exhibit runs through June. It has been nominated for a national award. Last October, Ganeshram herself won an excellence award from the New England Museum Association.

Joel Lang is a frequent contributor to Sunday Arts & Style.
The fourth program in the Connecticut Humanities-funded series Land And Culture will continue March 21 with a presentation given by Kyle Turoczi, owner of Earthtones Native Plant Nursery in Woodbury, at Minor Memorial Library in Roxbury

The talk, the first part of a two-part presentation, will show people how to look for and decipher past activities that may have occurred on land that now is forested.
Minor Memorial Library in Roxbury will open its next show, My Head is a Map, with a reception March 23 from 2 to 4 p.m.

The show, which will run through April 20 at the South Street library, will feature a collection of historic, antique maps by collector Mark Cohagen. To highlight this exhibit, Cohagen will give a gallery talk, History of Map Making, March 30 from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Ever since his childhood fascination with Robert Louis Stevensons map of Treasure Island, Cohagen has admired the art and historical importance of maps.
The Womens Auxiliary of the Warren Volunteer Fire Company, Inc. in Warren will hold a pancake breakfast March 17 from 7:30 to 11 a.m. at the Warren Community Center on Sackett Hill Road.

The breakfast will feature plain and blueberry pancakes, sausage, orange juice, and coffee or tea.
Fluoroscopy is a diagnostic scan used to study the movement of body structures. This article describes the medical procedure that takes place during a fluoroscopy.

X-ray Barium enema showing normal colon mucosa. Image Credit: Richman Photo / Shutterstock

What is fluoroscopy?

Fluoroscopy shows a continuous X-ray image on a monitor, much like an X-ray movie. During the procedure, an X-ray beam is continuously passed through the specific body part being examined. The images are transmitted to a monitor to evaluate the organs movement.

The doctors can visualize many body parts, such as the digestive, skeletal, respiratory, urinary, and reproductive systems. In some instances, interventional fluoroscopy is performed. It uses ionizing radiation to guide small instruments such as catheters through blood vessels.

It is a promising procedure because its less invasive that only requires a small incision. It substantially reduces the risk of infection and can promote a briefer recovery time, compared to conventional surgical procedures.

What is a fluoroscopy? Play

What are the indications for fluoroscopy?

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Fluoroscopy is used in various types of procedures and examinations, including cardiac catheterization, lumbar puncture, arthrography or visualization of joints, barium X-rays, placement of intravenous catheters, biopsies, hysterosalpingogram, and intravenous pyelogram, among others. The other uses of fluoroscopy include locating foreign bodies, injecting image-guided anesthesia into the spine or joints, and in percutaneous vertebroplasty.

What are the risks of fluoroscopy?

Fluoroscopy is generally safe for patients. However, the patient may ask the doctor about the amount of radiation used during the procedure and the risks. The risks linked to radiation can be related to the cumulative number of X-ray examinations or treatments over a long period of time.

For patients undergoing fluoroscopy with a contrast medium, its important for the patient to notify the doctor about allergies to the substance or any history of allergic reactions. Patients who are allergic to some medicines, iodine, latex or contrast media are at a greater risk of developing an allergic reaction. Pregnant women are also discouraged from undergoing this procedure since it can harm the fetus.

What to expect during a fluoroscopy procedure?

Fluoroscopy procedures help effectively diagnose a disease or to guide doctors during treatment procedures. Some procedures are performed as outpatient procedures, during which the patient awake and not under general anesthesia. For example, awake fluoroscopy can be used for gastrointestinal series to examine the esophagus, stomach, and small intestine.

Some patients may need to be sedated, particularly those undergoing cardiac catheterization to evaluate heart function and the supply of blood to the heart muscle.

Prior to the procedure, the patient will be asked to remove any jewelry or clothing that may get in the way of the body part being examined. Some patients may need to receive a contrast medium, given intravenously, orally, or rectally (via enema).

During the exam, the patient will be asked to lie on a table. Often, fluoroscopy procedures are painless but can be uncomfortable for some patients.

The patient will be asked to refrain from normal eating or drinking for a time prior to the procedure. Also, in some patients, they may need a bowel preparation to better visualize the bowel or large intestine. Patients will be asked to wear a gown.

The patient will be positioned on the table, depending on which part is to be examined. A special X-ray scanner will be used to create fluoroscopic photos of the body part being examined or treated.

The type of care needed after the procedure depends on the type of procedure performed. For instance, in cardiac catheterization patients, they need more time to recover. They may need to be admitted to the hospital since they need several hours with immobilization of the leg or arm where the catheter was inserted. But, some procedures may need only a short time of recovery.

Fluoroscopy, just like other diagnostic tests, is important in the early detection of diseases or any abnormality. It enables doctors to plan for a treatment regimen that can help address the problem.

Further Reading
The debilitating side effects of radiotherapy could soon be a thing of the past thanks to a breakthrough by University of South Australia (UniSA) and Harvard University researchers.

UniSA biomedical engineer Professor Benjamin Thierry is leading an international study using organ-on-a-chip technology to develop 3D models to test the effects of different levels and types of radiation.

A microfluidic cell culture chip closely mimics the structure and function of small blood vessels within a disposable device the size of a glass slide, allowing researchers and clinicians to investigate the impact of radiotherapy on the body's tissues.

To date, scientists have relied on testing radiotherapy on cells in a two-dimensional environment on a slide.

Professor Thierry, from UniSA's Future Industries Institute (FII) and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Convergent Bio-Nano Science and Technology (CBNS), says the organ-on-a-chip technology could reduce the need for animal studies and irrelevant invitro work, both of which have major limitations.

"An important finding of the study is that endothelial cells grown in the standard 2D culture are significantly more radiosensitive than cells in the 3D vascular network. This is significant because we need to balance the effect of radiation on tumour tissues while preserving healthy ones," Prof Thierry says.

The findings, published in Advanced Materials Technologies, will allow researchers to fully investigate how radiation impacts on blood vessels and - soon - all other sensitive organs.

"The human microvasculature (blood vessel systems within organs) is particularly sensitive to radiotherapy and the model used in this study could potentially lead to more effective therapies with fewer side effects for cancer patients," Prof Thierry says.

More than half of all cancer patients receive radiotherapy at least once in the course of their treatment. While it cures many cancers, the side effects can be brutal and sometimes lead to acute organ failure and long-term cardiovascular disease.

Prof Thierry's team, including UniSA FII colleague Dr Chih-Tsung Yang and PhD student Zhaobin Guo, are working in close collaboration with the Royal Adelaide Hospital and Harvard University's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with the support of the Australian National Fabrication Facility.

"Better understanding the effect of radiotherapy on blood vessels within organs - and more generally on healthy tissues - is important, especially where extremely high doses and types of radiation are used," Dr Yang says.

The researchers' next step is to develop body-on-chip models that mimic the key organs relevant to a specific cancer type.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota, in collaboration with researchers at Medtronic, have shown that noninvasive daily ultrasound stimulation of the spleen in mice with inflammatory arthritis resulted in significantly less joint swelling compared to arthritic mice that were not treated. The research is a first step to developing new treatment options for more than a million people in the United States who currently suffer from rheumatoid arthritis.

The research is currently published in Nature Communications and has resulted in a University of Minnesota-led preliminary human clinical trial.

"What we found in our mouse study is that we could actually 'turn down' the inflammatory response with daily ultrasound stimulation of the spleen from outside the body," said Daniel Zachs, the first author of the study and a biomedical engineering researcher in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering. "We're hopeful that this type of noninvasive treatment could someday supplement current treatments for people with rheumatoid arthritis."

Inflammatory arthritis is an autoimmune disease, which means that the body's immune system attacks healthy tissue in addition to germs, viruses and other foreign substances. This reaction can cause pain, stiffness, and joint damage. Current treatments usually include medicines that have a wide variety of side effects.

Researchers involved in this new study induced inflammatory arthritis in laboratory mice and then targeted the spleen with ultrasound stimulation for seven days following the injection. Some mice were treated only after the arthritis was evident on the third day. The mice that received the ultrasound treatment had significantly less joint swelling than arthritic mice that did not receive ultrasound stimulation.

"Using noninvasive ultrasound stimulation of the spleen to treat a progressive disease like inflammatory arthritis seemed like a far-fetched idea," said Hubert Lim, Ph.D., a senior author of the study and a University of Minnesota biomedical engineering associate professor in the College of Science and Engineering and the Medical School. "We were pleasantly surprised with our results and how a separate study, independently performed by GE Research and The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research published in the same issue of Nature Communications, showed findings that were consistent with our research."

In addition to focusing on reducing inflammation, the researchers also studied the specific type of white blood cells that were required for reducing inflammation. By analyzing gene expression and deleting specific types of white blood cells, the researchers found that white blood cells called T cells and B cells were both involved in reducing the severity of arthritis.

"Rheumatoid arthritis can be a devasting disease if not treated aggressively," said Bryce Binstadt, M.D., Ph.D., a senior author of the study and an associate professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology in the University of Minnesota Medical School. "The idea that we can improve arthritis treatment by using ultrasound rather than additional medications is exciting. This research shows the progress we can make when doctors and engineers come together to solve problems."
Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists are working on a promising approach for treatment of chronic kidney disease - regeneration of damaged tissues using therapeutic cells.

By harnessing the unique properties of human amniotic fluid-derived stem cells, WFIRM scientists have demonstrated that the cells could potentially help recover organ function in a pre-clinical model of kidney disease.

"Our results indicate that this type of stem cell could be used as an off the shelf universal cell source and may provide an alternative therapeutic strategy for patients suffering from this chronic and debilitating disease," said senior author James J. Yoo, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of regenerative medicine at WFIRM.

Study results were recently published online ahead of print in the journal Tissue Engineering Part A. This paper is one in a series the research team has published regarding therapies for the treatment of kidney disease. Known worldwide for their pioneering research on 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs, WFIRM researchers have also been tackling kidney disease and the shortage of organs in a variety of ways.

They were first in the world to identify and characterize stem cells derived from amniotic fluid in 2007 and have developed techniques for isolation and expansion of the cells. Amniotic fluid-derived stem cells can be used as a universal cell source because they have the ability to become different cell types as well as the ability to be anti-inflammatory, making them a potential source for regeneration. Unlike pluripotent and adult stem cells, amniotic fluid-derived stem cells are not as likely to provoke an immune system response. Additionally, their use does not lead to risks of tumors or ethical concerns, as with embryonic stem cells.

For this study, researchers found that amniotic fluid stem cells injected into a diseased kidney in a pre-clinical model led to improvement of kidney function based on measured waste levels after 10 weeks. Biopsy findings showed reduced damage to the cluster of capillaries where waste products are filtered from the blood.

"Our studies demonstrate that treatment with amniotic fluid stem cells had positive effects on functional improvement and structural recovery of the kidney," said WFIRM Director Anthony Atala, M.D., and a co-author of the paper.

Kidney disease is a worldwide public health problem and can manifest in acute and chronic symptoms. More than 30 million American adults are affected by the disease and millions more are at risk of developing it, according to the National Kidney Foundation. Transplantation is the only definitive treatment method that restores kidney function, but has its own challenges with rejection and life-long immunosuppression. There also are not enough donor organs to meet demand.

Sunil George, Ph.D., a WFIRM research fellow and co-author who has been a part of the studies, said further research is being pursued. "It remains to be seen whether injecting more cells or more efficient engraftment of the infused cells enhances improvement of organ function," he said.
Exposure to potentially harmful chemicals is a reality of life. Our ancestors, faced with naturally occurring toxins, evolved mechanisms to detoxify and expel damaging substances. In the modern world, our bodies regularly process chemicals, from medicines and food additives to agricultural and industrial chemicals, to protect our tissues from harm.

As the organs responsible for metabolizing and excreting toxic chemicals, the liver and kidneys bear the brunt of this exposure and are at the highest risk for toxin-induced damage. Understanding how these organs respond to, or are damaged by, toxins is of particular importance in pharmaceutical development and public health research.

Now, Harvard Medical School investigators have developed a machine learning approach using high-quality, large-scale animal model data that sheds new light on the biology of the liver and kidneys after toxin exposure.

The findings, recently published in Molecular Systems Biology, reveal new mechanisms of toxin vulnerability and tolerance that may be broadly relevant to studies of human disease, the authors said.

Their analysis--based on a publicly available data set of the effects of 160 different chemicals on physiology, histopathology and gene expression in rats--revealed nine distinct patterns of response to chemical exposure that the authors termed "disease states."

These states shed light on the dynamics of toxin-induced liver and kidney injury, including defense mechanisms and novel biomarkers, and provide insights into molecular signals that cause toxin-induced appetite suppression and weight loss.

"We used machine learning to ask a simple question: What can we learn from this rich data set about what happens to the liver and kidneys after exposure to different chemicals?" said lead study author Kenichi Shimada, HMS research fellow in therapeutic science in the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology.

Shimada and co-author Tim Mitchison, the Hasib Sabbagh Professor of Systems Biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, focused on the Open TG-GATEs database, the result of a 10-year effort by a Japanese public-private consortium to assess 170 different compounds with the aim of improving and enhancing drug safety. These compounds represent a wide range of chemicals and medications, including common ones such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen, known for their toxic effects on the liver and kidneys at high doses.

Each compound was administered at multiple dosages and time points to rats, as well as to rat and human liver cells grown in culture. For each of these treatment conditions, a variety of measures were collected, including blood chemistry, physiological measures such as body and tissue weight, histology and gene expression data.

To identify commonalities and patterns in how the liver and kidneys respond to different drugs, Shimada and Mitchison developed an unsupervised machine-learning approach in which a computational algorithm--without relying on predefined questions, labels or categorizations in order to avoid researcher-introduced bias--analyzed data on 160 compounds administered in rats, representing more than 3,500 treatment conditions.

Injury patterns

Their initial analyses relied on blood chemistry and body and tissue weight data, which reflect the standard clinical tests used to diagnose human patients.

These analyses revealed nine different patterns of response to chemical exposure that the researchers termed disease states. Additional computational analyses of gene expression and histopathology data--microscope-based examinations of tissue performed by pathologists that are also used in routine clinical assessment of toxicity--shed light on the distinct characteristics of each disease state.

The states fell into two broad categories. One set reflected tissue injury. For example, exposure to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen induced a late-onset response in the liver associated with bleeding, a well-documented side effect of these drugs. The team saw a pattern of response marked by increased gene expression linked with inflammation and blood coagulation, decreased levels of red blood cells and hemoglobin, and elevated markers for red blood cell production.

Other injurious disease states corresponded with response patterns that indicated acute liver injury, bile duct impairment, liver cell damage and kidney damage.

The other group of disease states reflected neutral, unknown or even potentially beneficial responses. For example, synthetic hormones triggered a defensive response pattern marked by enhanced tolerance to toxins. The activity of genes involved in toxin metabolism increased, and so did biomarkers that indicated increased resistance to ferroptosis--a recently recognized form of regulated cell death triggered by the accumulation of metabolic byproducts.

Tolerance transition

Unexpectedly, the team found that some injurious states transitioned to this defensive response over time. Increased toxin tolerance was strongly associated with increased resistance to ferroptosis in the liver, but not to other forms of cell death. A better understanding of this process may help uncover ways to target ferroptosis and improve the liver's ability to tolerate drugs.

"Often, patients have to stop taking medication because of adverse side effects and wait for their bodies to recover before they can begin again," Shimada said. "This gives us a starting point to study tolerance in a controlled format, and perhaps find ways to improve dosing schedules or even pretreat patients so that they are better able to cope with toxicity and suffer less tissue injury."

Shimada and Mitchison also shed light on why weight loss is such a common feature of toxin exposure by analyzing genetic and molecular biomarkers alongside changes in body weight.

They found that the expression activity of insulin-like growth factor-1 (Igf1) and three other associated genes were strongly up- or down-regulated. In the data set, rate of food consumption was most strongly linked with body weight over time, as expected, which could be partially explained by the role these genes play in blood sugar levels. These signals appear to collectively mediate organ-to-body communication as part of the toxin response, the authors said.

The team also identified a gene, Gdf15, that was linked to appetite suppression. The protein encoded by this gene is known to regulate feeding by acting on receptors in the brain stem. Increased Gdf15 gene expression activity, particularly in the kidneys, was a consistent response to tissue injury. The pathway may represent a novel mechanism for appetite suppression and toxin-induced weight loss, but further studies are needed to clarify its role, the authors said.

Because the data set is based on animal models, the findings are not immediately applicable in humans, Shimada said. In addition, the computational analyses revealed statistical clusters of toxin-induced changes in the kidneys and liver but are not inclusive of other organ systems and likely miss responses unique to one drug or do not share similarities with other responses.

The methodology and findings, however, provide important new insights into biomarkers and mechanisms underlying toxin response and offer a framework for future research, such as more refined toxicology studies in humans, the authors said.

"Data-driven diagnosis of disease is an eventual goal for researchers, and it is absolutely achievable with access to high quality data as in our paper," Shimada said. "I think the biological features we discovered, and in particular the tolerance mechanisms, can, with further study, inform treatment strategies and perhaps even the design of better medicines."
The vast majority of cancer deaths occur due to the spread of cancer from one organ to another, which can happen either through the blood or the lymphatic system. However, it can be tricky to detect this early enough. Researchers at Tohoku University have developed a new method that would allow doctors to detect cancers in the lymph nodes while they are still small, before they travel to other parts of the body. This can greatly increase the chances of a successful treatment.

There aren't many imaging techniques that can detect tumors in lymph nodes before they grow too large, especially in smaller nodes. Biopsies of lymph nodes is a possible option, but it can often give false negative results. So the team wanted to come up with a new method that would accurately detect the earliest stages of a cancer moving to another part of the body, using a technique called x-ray microcomputed tomography (micro-CT).

The team tested their new method on mice with breast cancer cells inserted into their lymph nodes. They injected a contrast agent at a slow, steady pace into the lymph nodes upstream of those carrying the cancer cells. As the contrast agent made its way through the lymphatic system, the researchers were able to map out its movement using micro-CT.

Initially, the researchers did not observe any change in the flow of the contrast agent. However, after 28 days of injecting the cancer cells into the lymph nodes, they had divided and grown to a point where they blocked the flow of the contrast agent, creating empty pockets in the scan that did not have any contrast agent.

By comparing the shape of the lymph node and the areas that contained the contrast agent, the researchers were able to get a clear picture of the presence of cancer cells there.

Next, the researchers would like to hone in on better contrast agents that would offer a clearer, more precise picture of how cancer cells are moving around the lymphatic system. In the future, this technique could be an effective way to detect tumors early before they spread around the body, saving many lives and adding one more tool that doctors can turn to in their fight against cancer.
New research shows that U.S. safety net hospitals could benefit substantially from a new model that accounts for social risk factors like poverty and living in a disadvantaged neighborhood in determining how the federal government penalizes hospitals financially for their readmission rates.

Researchers say their risk adjustment model could reduce the financial penalty for at least half of all safety net hospitals, which care for patients regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay. And in some cases, it could render them free from any penalty.

Conversely, more affluent hospitals - those that care for higher-income, better-educated patients - could see their penalty for readmission rates increase.

The study, published online in Health Services Research and due out in print in April, is certain to intensify the debate of the equity of Medicare's Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, or HRRP. The program, administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, creates financial incentives for hospitals for lowering their readmission rates by penalizing those with higher rates.

Safety net hospitals have long held they are unfairly penalized for their readmission rates under HRRP's current performance model because it doesn't account for social risk factors that put these patients at risk for readmission.

"Our study shows how accounting for social risk can have a significant positive financial impact on safety net hospitals," says David Nerenz, Ph.D., the study's senior author and director emeritus of the Center for Policy and Health Services Research at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. "And we can do so without compromising quality of care."

A commentary accompanying the study concluded that researchers provided "new evidence that incorporating social risk into risk-adjustment models may help by sparing hospitals serving the most vulnerable patients dire financial straits and perhaps even allowing them to flourish in meeting their underlying mission."

The findings demonstrate for the first time the feasibility and impact of adjusting for social factors and financial penalties for HRPP readmissions. The HRPP has been the focus of debate for its exclusion of risk adjustment for social factors since the policy's implementation in 2012. A 2016 study examining the potential impact of adding adjustment for patient income found little "meaningful change" in readmission rates, though it did not assess the financial impact of the adjustment. Under the 21st Century Cures Act, Congress now requires CMS to assign hospitals to five peer groups based on patients' Medicaid status in assessing penalties under HRPP.

Karen Joynt Maddox, M.D., MPH, the study's lead author and assistant professor of Medicine in the Cardiovascular Division at Washington University's School of Medicine in Missouri, says the study suggests that adjusting for social risk factors "has potential for leveling the playing field for hospitals that serve the most vulnerable patients."

"HRPP penalties cost safety net hospitals millions of dollars each year, but aren't a fair reflection of their performance," Dr. Maddox says. "Adding social risk factors to risk adjustment would be a significant step towards a more equitable program."

For their retrospective study, researchers analyzed claims data from nearly 3 million fee-for-service Medicare patients hospitalized for heart attack, congestive heart failure or pneumonia from December 2012 to November 2015. Their analytic approach was three-pronged:

Incorporated a broader group of social risk factors than analyzed in other prior research.

Compared hospital performance on readmissions with and without adjustment for social risk factors.

Calculated the financial impact of penalties levied against hospitals after adjusting for social risk factors.

Researchers found that social risk factors like poverty, disability and living in a disadvantaged neighborhood were linked with higher readmissions in all three medical conditions. However, when adjusted for social risk factors, the readmission rates for safety net hospitals dropped significantly for all three medical conditions compared to their affluent counterpart hospitals. More striking, the changes translated to a "major shift" in assessed penalties:

Safety net hospitals saw a 21.8 percent reduction in penalties, or roughly $17 million.

Affluent hospitals saw a 22 percent increase in penalties, or roughly $15 million.

Mat Reidhead, vice president of Research and Analytics at the Missouri Hospital Association and a study co-author, says the risk-adjusted model used in the study provides meaningful evidence of the magnitude of penalties levied against safety net hospitals.

"Failing to account for differences in the social complexity of patients hospitals care for has stripped significant resources away from our safety net," Reidhead says. "These are resources that could have been directed toward clinical quality improvement or upstream community health interventions. And while the recent intercession of Congress is certainly a step in the right direction, our findings suggest more can be done to ensure equity in the readmissions reduction program."
The World Health Organization (WHO) published a report on the Ten Threats to Global Health in 2019, which highlighted the main threats to human health across the globe. The comprehensive list comprised an array of well-known threats including non-communicable diseases such as cancer, type-2-diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and stroke, as well as emerging threats such as antimicrobial resistance.

It was, therefore, no surprise that Pittcon 2019 featured biomedical researchers from around the world who were working diligently to address these important health issues through the development of new techniques and technologies.

 Guschenkova/Shutterstock.com

The Pittcon 2019 Technical Program was held in Philadelphia from March 17th-21st, 2019 and showcased a range of biomedical methodologies which can provide improved diagnostics, better treatments, faster discovery and ultimately improved medical outcomes.

Spectroscopic Approaches to Global Health Threats

Spectroscopy is fast becoming one of the greatest advances in biomedicine. Raman spectroscopy is one of the many spectroscopic techniques that featured at Pittcon 2019. Raman is a low-energy, non-destructive and non-invasive technique that can be used to image even delicate tissues in situ. The only limitation of Raman is the signal to noise ratio, as low energy signals can be swamped and lost in the noise. This has been addressed through the development of combinatorial techniques such as Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS), which has recently been used to image brain tissue in Alzheimers disease.

Read the full article: From Bench to Bedside, The Biomedical Techniques Tackling Global Health Threats

To demonstrate how Raman spectroscopy can be coupled with photoacoustic imaging, Professor Dan Fu of the University of Washington presented his research at Pittcon 2019 in a talk entitled Label-Free Chemical Imaging of Brain Structure and Function at Subcellular Resolution. In this presentation he explained that Stokes Raman Scattering (SRS) is able to detect synaptic acetylcholine, plaque structure, and even complex cell organization without any labelling in Alzheimers research.

Raman spectroscopy has slipped into biomedical science proving its utility in medical diagnostics for diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease and bacterial infections. Raman is proving its value in both the diagnostic laboratory and the clinical environment.

Professor Jurgen Popp is a great advocate for Raman spectroscopy and is an expert in his field. He received the 2016 Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award at Pittcon 2016 and gave a presentation entitled Clinical Cell and Tissue Diagnostics by Multimodal Molecular Spectroscopy. The work examined advances in spectroscopic methods, especially Raman spectroscopy and combinatorial spectroscopic or optical procedures to analyze cells and tissue in pathological samples. Popp also demonstrated the potential of Raman spectroscopy as a point-of-care method for a fast identification of pathogens.

Transmission Raman spectroscopy (TRS) is a further example of a developing biomedical Raman technique. The method works by illuminating the sample on one-side and collecting the transmitted light on the other side. This technique has become a non-invasive technique for the analysis of breast calcification detected from mammograms.

Nick Stone, Professor of Biomedical Imaging and Biosensing at the University of Exeter, presented his research paper at Pittcon 2019 entitled Biomedical Spectroscopic Tools for Rapid Analysis of Disease Specific Changes Using Novel Raman and IR Techniques. This showed how Raman and IR spectroscopy is being used for the rapid and accurate analysis of tissues in pathology, high-speed spectral histopathology.

Microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology, combined with spectroscopy has the potential to become a new biomedical analytical phenomenon. Microfluidic systems are more cost effective than traditional methods, require minimal training, provide faster results and improved accuracy.

Dr Ester Segal of Technion is an expert in microfluidics and presented a talk entitled On-Chip Rapid Diagnostic Susceptibility Testing of Bacteria and Fungi from Clinical Samples at Pittcon 2019. This showcased the testing of microorganisms for antibiotic resistance using a functionalized photonic 2D silicon microarray as a platform.

MALDI Imaging

Immunohistochemistry and radiolabelling have revolutionized the visualization and detection of compounds in pathological tissue samples. But now, high-throughput, high-speed MALDI (matrix assisted laser desorbed ionization) mass spectrometry imaging has arrived. MALDI Imaging mass spectrometry (MALDI-IMS) can be used to analyse complex mixtures ranging from small molecules to complex peptides in a proteome. This method also has the advantage that it does not harm the sample.

A recognized authority in mass spectrometry imaging, Professor Pierre Chaurand of the University of Montreal, presented his research in a presentation entitled Image MS of Tissue Biopsies to Assess Diagnosis, Prognosis and Response to Therapies at Pittcon 2019.

Biomarker Discovery

Researchers are continually searching for new biomarkers for health threats, including cancer, neurological diseases, and cardiovascular diseases. If molecular signatures of disease can be identified early then rapid and targeted treatment can improve patient survival providing an economic advantage.

A potential method for discovering new biomarkers in lung disease is exhaled breath condensate (EBC). EBC is a body fluid matrix in which biomarkers may be identified and is considered by many to be equivalent to blood, sweat, tears, urine and saliva.

A presentation entitled Human Exhaled Breath Aerosol Collection in the Clinical Setting - Techniques, Concerns, and Considerations was provided by Professor Michael D Davis of the Children's Hospital of Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). The talk provided an overview of collection techniques and analysis for EBC.

An area where biomarkers are needed urgently is Alzheimers disease (AD). AD is a major public health issue; the condition is the 6th leading cause of death in the US and around 5.7 million American citizens live with the disease at any one time. Currently, a definitive diagnosis of AD requires post-mortem slides of neural material. It is hoped that a series of new biomarkers will provide a definitive diagnosis for living patients and help scientists to understand the progression of the disease at a molecular level. Two approaches that are currently being utilized for the discovery of new biomarkers are proteomics and lipidomics studies on blood and post-mortem tissues.

The potential of these techniques was outlined by Dr Rena Robinson of Vanderbilt University, who presented her paper at Pittcon 2019, entitled Comprehensive Proteomics and Lipidomics Strategies to Advance Alzheimer's Disease Research. This will define a high-throughput quantitative proteomics method to provide hundreds of proteins distinct to specific disease genotypes.

Biomarkers and Metabolomics

Metabolites are the intermediates and products of metabolism. Cells constantly carry out discrete physiological processes and these can be affected by human disease. To determine the structure and regulation of metabolic pathways is essential especially in brain tissue for researching AD.

Monitoring brain chemistry metabolites is, however, a challenging area. In this case, biosensors have been used to understand brain energy metabolism and neurotransmission. The sensors provide timed temporal resolution and enzymatic assaying of any redox or non-redox molecule. This can be of great help in the real-time monitoring of brain chemistry during the course of traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, despite the miniature size of the of the biosensors, implantation is often considered dangerous and comes with major health risks.

At Pittcon 2019, Dr Stephane Marinesco of INSERM gave a presentation entitled Ultra-small Microelectrode Biosensors based on Platinized Carbon Fibers for Brain Injury Monitoring. This research demonstrated how ultra-small microelectrodes are implanted in the brain to provide accurate estimates of oxygen, glucose and lactate and other essential compounds. The idea is that this technology could monitor changes occurring in traumatic brain injury and provide improved diagnosis.

Pittcon 2022: March 6-10 Click here to learn more Ernest N. Morial Convention Center

New Orleans, LA USA

References

Ten threats to global health in 2019, https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/ten-threats-to-global-health-in-2019 Accessed 4th March 2019 M Ji, S Lewis, S Camelo-Piragua, SH Ramkissoon, M Snuderl, S Venneti, Detection of human brain tumor infiltration with quantitative stimulated Raman scattering microscopy, Science translational medicine 7 (309), 2010, 309ra163-309ra163 Nadine Vogler, Sandro Heuke, Thomas W. Bocklitz, Michael Schmitt, Jurgen Popp, Multimodal Imaging Spectroscopy of Tissue, Annual Review of Analytical Chemistry 2015 8:1, 359-387 Ghita, A, Matousek, P. and Stone, N. (2018), High sensitivity noninvasive detection of calcifications deep inside biological tissue using Transmission Raman Spectroscopy. J. Biophotonics, 11: e201600260. Leonard, Heidi & Colodner, Raul & Halachmi, Sarel & Segal, Ester. (2018). Recent Advances in the Race to Design a Rapid Diagnostic Test for Antimicrobial Resistance. ACS Sensors. 3. 10.1021/acssensors.8b00900 P Chaurand, Imaging mass spectrometry of thin tissue sections: a decade of collective efforts, 2012, Journal of proteomics 75 (16), 4883-4892 Albert B. Arul and Rena A. S. Robinson, Sample Multiplexing Strategies in Quantitative Proteomics, Analytical Chemistry, 2019, 91 (1), 178-189, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.8b05626 Tholance Y, Barcelos GK, Dailler F, Renaud B, Marinesco S, Perret-Liaudet A. Biochemical neuromonitoring of poor-grade aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage: comparative analysis of metabolic events detected by cerebral microdialysis and by retrograde jugular vein catheterization. Neurological Research, 2015, 37: 578-87. PMID 25668478 DOI: 10.1179/1743132815Y.0000000012

About Pittcon

Pittcon is a registered trademark of The Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, a Pennsylvania non-profit organization. Co-sponsored by the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh and the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh, Pittcon is the premier annual conference and exposition on laboratory science.

Proceeds from Pittcon fund science education and outreach at all levels, kindergarten through adult. Pittcon donates more than a million dollars a year to provide financial and administrative support for various science outreach activities including science equipment grants, research grants, scholarships and internships for students, awards to teachers and professors, and grants to public science centers, libraries and museums.

Visit pittcon.org for more information.

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Mumbai: A day after a foot overbridge connected to CSMT railway station collapsed, killing six persons and injuring 31, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has decided to dismantle the structure.

In a meeting chaired by BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta Friday morning, it was also decided that the civic body's Chief Engineer (Vigilance) would conduct an inquiry into the causes that led to the deck of the FOB collapsing on Thursday evening.

Ward Officer Kiran Dighawkar said work on dismantling the FOB had begun and cranes and gas-cutters had been assembled for the work. "We aim to open DN Road for vehicular traffic by 7pm Friday," he said.

Another official said the Chief Engineer (Vigilance) has been asked to submit his preliminary report within 24 hours identifying staff responsible and the role of those who carried out its structural audit.

The scope of the probe would include the history of the bridge, the time when the structural audit was carried out, and whether the methodology used was appropriate and staff deployed had adequate technical expertise, the official informed.

Earlier in the day, a BMC official had said the FOB was was found to be structurally safe when it was audited in August 2016, soon after a British-era bridge over Savitri River got washed away in monsoon downpour in Mahad in Raigad district.

"During that audit, 354 bridges were checked for their structural soundness. The FOB that collapsed on Thursday was marked C2B. This means it needed minor repairs only. Tenders were floated for the repair but it got held up," the official had said Friday morning.

After a visit to the site Friday morning, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had asked Mehta to fix "primary responsibility" for Thursday's foot overbridge collapse by evening.

(With inputs from PTI)
Mar 15, 2019 13:05 (IST)

-Forty people been killed and 20 injured in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, which occurred during afternoon prayers. Three people , one of them confirmed an Australian-born man , are in custody.

-It was described as a terrorist attack by NZ prime minister Jacinda Ardern, and an extremist, right-wing violent terrorist attack by Australian prime minister Scott Morrison.

-Christchurch remains on high alert with the police issuing strict advisories to stay indoors and "keep all doors closed".

-Ardern said: Many directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here...They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not.

-The attacker is believed to have livestreamed at least one of the attacks on Facebook. Even while the police urged people not to share the distressing footage, the 17-minute clip has gone viral on the internet.
Heartbeat Bill Victory in Kentucky

NEWS PROVIDED BYMarch 15, 2019FRANKFORT, Ky., March 15, 2019 / Christian Newswire / -- Kentucky's House passed Senate Bill 9 , a fetal heartbeat bill, by a vote of 71 to 19 last night. SB 9 bans most abortions in the state once a fetal heartbeat is detected. The measure requires anyone seeking an abortion to first determine if a fetal heartbeat is detectable, typically about six weeks into pregnancy. The bill now moves on to Governor Matt Bevin's desk.Republican Rep. Chris Fugate sponsored SB 9 on the House floor. Fugate said for him, this bill is not political but is about the millions of babies that have been killed. In February, the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 31 to 6. While the bill was in committee, April Lanham, a woman 18 weeks pregnant, allowed the room of people to hear her preborn baby's heartbeat by way of an electronic monitor. Afterward she stated that she did so because the heartbeat would be a "powerful noise" for lawmakers to hear.

Governor Matt Bevin is expected to sign the bill. Because of an emergency clause, upon the governor's signing, it will take effect immediately. The ACLU of Kentucky has expressed an intent to bring a lawsuit once the fetal heartbeat bill becomes law.

"Liberty Counsel commends the legislators of Kentucky for this move to protect the lives of the most innocent among us," said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. "If the vilest criminal cannot be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, then how much more should laws protect an innocent unborn child from the most despicable form of torture and death? Every state must fight to make the womb a safe place again," said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics. Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.



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CONTACT: Mat Staver, 407-875-1776, Liberty@LC.org



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Pastor Matthew Diegel looks over the damage to his offices ceiling at Our Saviours Lutheran Church on Thursday from the rains that hit Thunder Bay over the last two days.
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Dear Newsie Readers,

Newsie has now permanently ceased it's services as of Friday 20th December 2019.

Newsie has been an owner-funded operation since day one.

Coming up to three years old, while we still firmly believe Newsie has a place in the New Zealand media landscape, the cost in both time and money has become too burdensome for the owners to continue alongside other ventures.

With the current government looking to restructure public broadcasting, and seemingly supporting NZME buying a ring-fenced Stuff, the time seems right to call it a day.

Should it happen, the combination of NZME and Stuff will ensure New Zealands national media will die a death by a thousand opinion-based articles.

Newsie has always tried to stick to balanced news, to inform readers of the facts of a situation, amid being largely ignored by government. Hopefully, one day someone else will take up the challenge to fight the good fight.

The good news, however, is that there were no job losses as a result of Newsie closing. Thanks to careful structuring, everyone involved in Newsie will retain their current positions.

We hope you all have a happy Christmas and new year. Stay safe, and stay out of the news.

The team at Newsie
London:

Tata Motors-owned Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has initiated a voluntary recall of around 44,000 cars in the UK over higher than certified levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The UK-based luxury car-maker said on Thursday that it will contact the owners of the affected vehicles to arrange for free-of-charge repairs after regulators found 10 models were emitting more of the greenhouse gas than they had been certified to emit. "Jaguar Land Rover is conducting a voluntary recall following the identification of CO2 performance variability with certain Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles fitted with 2.0L diesel or petrol engines," a JLR statement said.

"Affected vehicles will be repaired free of charge and every effort will be made to minimise inconvenience to the customer during the short time required for the work to be carried out," the statement noted.

The repairs could include software updates as well as physical alterations, with some Range Rover Evoque models possibly requiring new tyres.

The UK's Vehicle Certification Agency found 10 models for the Land Rover and Jaguar brands were emitting more greenhouse gases than had been certified initially. JLR then informed the country's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), which handles recalls, of the findings.

The recall will affect versions of the Land Rover Discovery, Discovery Sport, Range Rover Sport, Velar and Evoque made between 2016 and 2019. Jaguar models affected include the E-Pace, F-Pace, F-Type, XE and XF. While most affected models run on petrol, some diesel models are also part of the recall.

The European Commission's rapid alert system warned that JLR's cars "may emit excessive levels of CO2 and may not conform with the certified condition".

All European vehicle manufacturers are under pressure to reduce the average emissions of their new cars from 118.5g of CO2 per kilometre to less than 95g by 2021.

While the recall is not expected to have a major financial impact on the company, it comes at a time when Britain's largest carmaker has already been battling Brexit-related headwinds for the automotive industry. Earlier this year, it had confirmed job cuts of around 4,500 amid sluggish global sales.

JLR has the largest number of retailers for its cars in Europe, with around 800 outlets across 42 countries. Its CEO, Ralf Speth, has repeatedly warned the UK government against a bad Brexit deal, which could cost the company billions per year.
Bengaluru:

Former Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Siddaramaiah on Friday accused the BJP of using the surgical strikes carried out in Pakistan by the Indian security forces to gain "political mileage" ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.

While levelling the charges, Siddaramaiah went on to claim that 10-12 such surgical strikes were carried out during the UPA regime, adding that the Congress never took political advantage from those incidents.

"They should not take political advantage from the Incidents against Pakistan. If that is the case, during Congress time there was more than 10-12 Surgical strike, we never tried to get mileage out of it. Bangladesh was liberated during Indira Gandhi time, is this bigger indecent than that. We don't take political advantage out of all those Incidents. Nobody should do politics related to Country, National Security, Army and war," he said while speakign to media in Mysore.

Siddaramaiah's referece was to the pre-emptive strikes carried out by the Indian Air Force on Jaish-e-Mohammed's biggest terror camp in Pakistan's Balakot, killing a "very large number" of terrorists, trainers and senior commanders.

India's action came close to the Pulwama incident in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed in one of the deadliest terror strikes in decades in Jammu and Kashmir.

Opposing the government's claim of 300 terrorists killed in the strikes, the Congress has questioned the damage inflicted in the IAF strike.

On September 29, 2016, the Indian Army had carried out surgical strikes on seven terrorist launch pads across the Line of Control (LoC) as a response to an attack on its base in Uri earlier that month. Then too, the Congress had questioned the veracity of the surgical strikes.

Siddaramaiah wants Rahul to contest LS polls from Karnataka.

Siddaramaiah on Friday said the Karnataka Congress wants party president Rahul Gandhi to contest the coming Lok Sabha polls from the southern state.

Calling Gandhi the "next Prime Minister of India", the Congress Legislature Party leader recalled his grandmother Indira Gandhi and mother Sonia Gandhi contesting the Lok Sabha polls from Karnataka in the past.

"Karnataka has always supported & encouraged @INCIndia leaders. It has been proved in case of Smt. Indira ji & Smt. Sonia ji.

We also want our next Prime Minister of India Shri. @RahulGandhi to contest from Karnataka & herald new developmental paradigm.

#RaGaFromKarnataka," Siddaramaiah said in a tweet.

While Indira Gandhi had scripted her political comeback from Chikkamagaluru in Karnataka by winning the Lok Sabha bypolls in 1978, United Progressive Alliance (UPA) chairperson Sonia Gandhi had contested and won from Ballari in 1999, trouncing the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Sushma Swaraj.

Interestingly, the Congress has ceded the Chikkamagaluru seat to its alliance partner Janata Dal (Secular) this time, while Ballari remains with the grand old party.

Siddaramaiah's tweet has come amid reports about pressure within the Congress for Rahul Gandhi to contest from one of the seats in south India.

The Congress had, earlier this month, announced that the party chief would contest from Amethi and Sonia Gandhi from Rae Bareli, both traditional strongholds of the party in Uttar Pradesh.
New Delhi:

In another jolt to the Congress ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, a senior leader from Haryana, Arvind Kumar Sharma, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Friday. This comes a day after, Sonia Gandhi aide Tom Vadakkan took the saffron plunge. Sharma was a two-time MP from the Karnal constituency. Sharma had quit the Congress to join the BSP during the Assembly elections in 2014. He had been declared the chief ministerial candidate by BSP supremo Mayawati. The party had won only one seat with Sharma losing from both seats.

On Thursday, the voice of Congress for the past 15 years, Vadakkan has been known as a close confidant of Sonia Gandhi. In fact, he was the man who witnessed the change of guard at 24, Akbar road in 1998. A staunch Congress supporter, Vadakkan was chosen by Sonia Gandhi to send out the message of her willingness to enter active politics Vadakkan was summoned by Sonias office to carry an important message to then party chief Sitaram Kesri. I got the letter and went to Kesri-jis office but his peon didnt allow me inside. I handed over the letter to Harish Khare, his advisor then. In the letter, Soniaji had expressed her willingness to campaign for the party, which was an indication that she would be finally stepping into active politics, Vadakkan was quoted as saying by the Economic Times in a 2016 report.

Apart from being Congress spokesperson, Vadakkan was also a member of National Central Film Censor Board and a delegated Member of Kerala Film Censor Board. In 2009, Kerala Congress had faced revolt over Vadakkans Thrissur candidature. In fact, state spokesman of Youth Congress Gopa Prathap was expelled from party for six years for speaking against Vadakkan.

This election season, Congress has faced major blows with prominent faces joining the BJP. On March 12, Sujay Vikhe Patil, son of the leader of opposition in Maharashtra Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, joined the BJP in the presence of Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai. Reportedly, the development comes after NCP chief Sharad Pawar, whose party is in alliance with the Congress in the state, rejected Sujays request to contest the polls from Ahmednagar Lok Sabha seat.

"I am impressed with PM Modi's leadership. We can count on BJP," Sujay said while addressing reporters after joining BJP. He had said, "I've taken this decision against my fathers wishes. I dont know how much my parents will support this decision, but I'll try my best to make my family proud by working under the guidance of BJP. CM and other BJP MLAs were supportive and helped me take the decision."
New Delhi:

In what can be called a southern outreach for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, BSP chief Mayawati on Friday formed an alliance with superstar-turned-politician Pawan Kalyans Jana Sena. Making the announcement about the alliance in Lucknow, Pawan said that, We would like to see Behen ji Mayawati ji as the Prime Minister of our country, this is our wish and our ardent desire. The BSP chief also reciprocated and said that BSP wishes Pawan to be next Andhra Chief Minister. A day before on Thursday, Pawan Kalyans Jana Sena released the first list of contestants for four of the 25 Lok Sabha and 32 of the 175 assembly constituencies in Andhra Pradesh.

Pawan will contest from the Gajuwaka Assembly seat of Visakhapatnam of Andhra Pradesh in the upcoming Assembly elections and not from Anantapuram as was announced earlier. Gajuwaka was once a stronghold of the Praja Rajyam Party and so party workers insisted that the popular face must fight the polls there. He is also said to be popular with the youth there.

Meanwhile, Mayawati is leant to have given final touches to the list of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections and discussed other important electoral issues at a party meeting. The BSP president held a meeting with important district and division-level leaders in Uttar Pradesh, a party release issued here said.

According to it, names of party candidates and other important electoral and political issues were discussed at the meeting. The decisions taken at the meeting will be carried forward after discussions with the top leadership of alliance partner Samajwadi Party (SP), the release said.

According to the feedback received during the meeting, the appeals of BSP and SP leaders have had a good impact on the people, it said. Workers of all the three parties in the alliance, including the Rashtriya Lok Dal, have gotten into election mode, setting aside their differences.

After taking the feedback, Mayawati directed her party men to ensure strict compliance with the model code of conduct. She also directed BSP workers to ensure that birth anniversaries of party ideologues Kanshi Ram and Bhimrao Ambedkar on March 15 and April 14 respectively are observed in accordance with the poll code.
New Delhi:

With the Lok Sabha elections nearing and alliance talks gaining pace in all states, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has come up with some advice for the Congress.

Without naming the Congress, Yadav said that it is necessary to respect other parties in order to come in power and the BJP has managed to keep its allies intact despite the pressure exterted by them.

"They (the BJP) know that to come to power, you have to respect other parties. BJP is accepting alliances even at the cost of fewer seats... Despite all the pressures being exerted upon them, BJP still chooses them (allies)," Yadav said in an interview to NDTV.

This comes days after the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party forged an alliance in Uttar Pradesh for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections while keeping the Congress out of the pact.

Yadav, however, later said that the Congress was part of the alliance as the SP-BSP bonhomie had not fielded candidates on Amethi and Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seats.

Meanwhile, the Congress announced to contest on all 80 seats in the politically crucial state on its own. Also, it joined hands with a the little-known Mahan Dal.

So far, the Congress has failed to forge alliance with prominent parties, not only in Uttar Pradesh but also with Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi and Mamata Banerjee's TMC in West Bengal.

On the other hand, the BJP has managed to placate its sulking allies SBSP and Apna Dal (Sonelal) in Uttar Pradesh, LJP and JD(U) in Bihar and Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, which wanted a bigger share of seats.
New Delhi:

With the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections just one month to go, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on Friday released its second list of 5 candidates, with party chief Sharad Pawar's grandson Parth Ajit Pawar being fielded from the parliamentary constituency of Maval in Pune. Parth is the son of former Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar - the nephew of three-time chief minister Sharad Pawar. After the second list, the total number of declared candidates for the NCP has reached to 17.

The development came days after party chief Sharad Pawar on Monday announced his decison to not contest the Lok Sabha Elections 2019, adding that he is dropping out for his nephew Ajit Pawar's 28-year-old son Parth, who would contest from Maval.

Apart from Pawar, the other candidates who has found place in the second list of the NCP, includeA Dhanaj Haribhau Mahale (Dindori), Sameer Bhujbal (Nashik), Amol Kolhe (Shirur) and Bajrang Sonavane (Beed).

"Nationalist Congress Party releases list of 5 candidates for upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Parth Ajit Pawar to contest from parliamentary constituency of Maval in Pune district," the news agency ANI reported.

Nationalist Congress Party releases list of 5 candidates for upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Parth Ajit Pawar to contest from parliamentary constituency of Maval in Pune district. a ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019

Earlier on Thursday, the NCP declared its first list of 12 candidates for the ensuing Lok Sabha polls and fielded senior party leader and Sharad Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule from its stronghold of Baramati. The party has also given ticket to Mohammad PP Faizal from Lakshadweep.

Besides, it has decided to field sitting MPs Udayanraje Bhosale and Dhananjay Mahadik from Satara and Kolhapur, respectively. The other candidates include Anand Paranjpe (Thane) and Sanjay Dina Patil (Mumbai Northeast).

The name of Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghtana leader Raju Shetti, whose party left the NDA and joined the UPA, also figures in the NCP's list.
New Delhi:

With 2019 Lok Sabha elections looming over the nation, News Nation has conducted an Opinion Poll to gauge the voting intention in the politically crucial Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Our reporters travelled across all the Lok Sabha constituencies (Chhattisgarh -11, Madhya Pradesh - 29) and asked people several questions to find out who will have the better chance of winning the ensuing General Elections 2019. So, will the Congress be able to steal the show following its recent victory in Assembly Elections 2018 or the BJP will manage to regain its lost ground in the Hindi heartland states? Stay tuned with us to get the answer of your billion dollar question.

As per the News Nation poll survey, the BJP is expected to win 21 of the 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh, witnessing a downfall in its performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha Elections. As far as the vote share is concerned, the BJP is likely to get 41 per cent of the total votes while the Congress may get 35 per cent vote share. In the last Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had won 26 seats in the state while the Congress had managed to garner only three seats.

Talking about Chhattisgarh, the BJP, which bagged 10 of the 11 Lok Sabha seats in 2014, is likely to win five seats while the Congress will claim victory on the remaining six seats. A neck-and-neck fight is expected between the BJP and the Congress, with the former likely to get 41 per cent of the votes and the latter expected to garner 42 per cent of the total votes in Chhattisgarh.

General Elections in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are crucial as the BJP will be aiming to avenge its recent debacle in 2018 Assembly Elections.

In December 2018, the Congress staged a massive comeback in Chhattisgarh by leading in 67 of the total 90 seats and wresting the state from the BJP, showcasing its best sign of resurgence. The BJP, on the other hand, was reduced to only 18 seats while the Janata Congress Chhattisgarh-Bahujan Samaj Party (JCCJ-BSP) combine managed to win only seven.

In Madhya Pradesh, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led BJP government suffered a major setback at the hand of the Congress after 15-long years. The Congress, which was locked in a tantalising see-saw battle with the BJP, emerged as the single-largest party with 114 seats. Falling two short of the majority mark of 116, the Congress later got the support of Mayawatis BSP which had won two seats in the state.

While Lok Sabha Elections in Madhya Pradesh will take place in four phases during April 29-May 19 period, polls for Lok Sabha constituencies in Chhattisgarh are scheduled to be held in three phases on April 11, 18 and 23.

Here are the Highlights: Join us with #NNOpinionPoll as we bring you the most accurate Opinion Poll of the nation every Friday at sharp 06:00 pm.

18:40 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In NN Opinion Poll: 48 per cent people of Chhattisgarh believes that the Modi-led NDA government came up with new employment opportunities.

18:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Chhattisgarh Opinion Poll: While 46 per cent people in the state want Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister of the country for the second consecutive time, 34 per cent people voted for Congress president Rahul Gandhi.

18:33 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In When asked about the most favourable Prime Ministerial candidate in 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, 51 per cent people in Madhya Pradesh voted for Narendra Modi. However, 37 people of the state want Congress president Rahul Gandhi to run the country.

18:19 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In In a thumping performance, the BJP bagged 10 of the 11 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 Lok Sabha Elections.

18:31 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In As far as the seat share is concerned, the Congress is likely to emerge victorious with wins in 6 seats while the BJP may end up getting only 5 seats in Chhattisgarh.



18:15 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In In Chhattisgarh, a neck-and-neck fight is expected between the BJP and the Congress, with the former likely to get 41 per cent of the votes and the latter expected to garner 42 per cent of the total votes.

18:13 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In In 2014 Assembly Elections, the BJP had won 26 seats in the state while the Congress had managed to garner only three seats.

18:12 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In As far as the vote share is concerned, the BJP is likely to get 41 per cent of the total votes while the Congress may get 35 per cent vote share in Madhya Pradesh.
New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Friday sought the Election Commission's response to a plea by Opposition leaders seeking the matching of at least 50 per cent of the Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) slips with EVMs in each constituency before the Lok Sabha results are declared.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna listed the plea filed by over 20 opposition parties for March 25 and asked the Election Commission to depute an officer to assist the court.

Several opposition leaders, including Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and others, had moved the apex court on Thursday demanding the Electronic Voting Machines to be tamper-free.

The parties also demanded that at least 50 per cent of the voter verifiable paper audit trails (VVPATs) be counted and matched with the tally of EVMs.

The application has been moved by 21 Opposition parties, including the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, Aam Aadmi Party, CPI(Marxist), CPI, Trinamool Congress, Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashtriya Lok Dal, Loktantrik Janata Dal and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

The move comes after the Opposition parties met at NCP chief Sharad Pawar's residence.The parties had raised apprehensions in a meeting with the EC in February about the credibility of EVMs, although the poll panel has denied allegations of machines being tampered with.

The EC, while announcing the Lok Sabha election schedule, had said that mandatory checking of EVMs and VVPAT will be done on the basis of one polling station for each Lok Sabha constituency.
Kolkata:

As she led thousands of hungry, half-clad and angry farmers on the dusty streets of Singur and Nandigram over a decade ago, defying the mighty Communist regime of West Bengal, little did she know she was on the threshold of scripting history. Mamata Banerjee, the tempestuous Trinamool Congress supremo, might well be at the doorstep of making history yet again, if the BJP-led NDA fails to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha polls, ending up becoming a kingmaker in national politics if not the king.

One of the bitterest critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, she firmly pitched herself as a leader who could act as the glue to unite disparate political parties seeking to oust the NDA from power when she mustered leaders of 23 parties at rally here in January this year.

We would play an important role in the new government formation under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee. The people of this country are looking up to her and TMC to save them from the reign of fear of Narendra Modi, TMC leader in the outgoing Lok Sabha Sudip Bandopadhyay told PTI, indicating that the fiery West Bengal leader has set her sights on New Delhi.

For the 64-year-old spinster, the political journey from the restive streets of Nandigram and Singur in 2007-08, when she waged a relentless battle against the Left Front government, to Nabanna, the seat of power in Kolkata, was as captivating as it was punishing.

Though she cut her political teeth as a young Congress volunteer in her student days and rose to become a minister in UPA and NDA governments, it was in the crucible of Nandigram and Singur movements against forcible acquisition of farm land by the Communist government for industrialisation that her destiny and that of the TMC took shape.

She founded the TMC in January 1998 after parting ways with the Congress and it was through struggles, big and small, against the Communist dispensation that her party grew.

In 2001, when the state had its first assembly polls after the launch of the TMC, the party bagged an impressive 60 seats in the 294-member House, while the Left Front clinched a staggering 192.

In its second outing in the 2006 assembly elections, the TMCs strength came down by half as it could pocket only 30 seats, while the Left scored a resounding victory with 219 seats.

The four years that followed were the most momentous in the contemporary political history of West Bengal as she put up a spirited fight against the Left Front government over alleged excesses in Singur and Nandigram.

The assembly elections of 2011 were historic, as she decimated the Left in one of its longest-standing bastions. Banerjees party ended the Left Fronts 34-year unbroken stint in power, winning a whopping 184 seats riding the crest of massive public outrage against the Communists, who were restricted to just 60 seats.

The street fighter-politician further tightened her hold on the levers of power in West Bengal in the assembly elections of 2016, when she beat the Communists hollow winning 211 seats. The Left Front, with just 32 seats in its kitty, even lost its position as the main opposition party which went to the Congress that clinched 44 seats.

According to a senior party leader, it was time for the party to make a mark in the national political arena.

At a time when the Congress has lost much of its political heft and is not in a position to take on the BJP single-handedly, many in the TMC feel that regional players could call the shots in the corridors of power in New Delhi.

And we would be one the most important players at the national level. If we are able to win most of the Lok Sabha seats from the state, we will play a major role in the formation of the next government.

The question of the PM candidate would be decided after the polls and we would be one of the main claimants. Our party supremo, who had been both a Union minister and chief minister, has acceptability across party lines, said a senior TMC MP who did not wish to be named.

The TMC had 34 MPs in the outgoing Lok Sabha.

Another party leader said the faulty policies of the

Modi government and the vacuum in the opposition space has provided the TMC an opportunity to position itself firmly as a pre-eminent anti-BJP and anti-Modi force.

Banerjees characteristic belligerence on issues like demonetization, implementation of Goods and Services Tax (GST), the contentious National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and alleged politicisation of Pulwama terror strike and destruction of institutions like the CBI and Enforcement Directorate has found resonance with other opposition parties, he said.

However, power has many a pitfall. Infighting is one of them, and the TMC is no exception despite its strong-willed leaders iron fist.

It was due to the infighting and the slowly but surely growing clout of the BJP, that Banerjee dropped 10 of her sitting Lok Sabha MPs and brought in 18 new faces.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior TMC leader conceded as much.

There is factionalism at various levels and some of the aspirants who didnt get tickets might cause problems in some areas. But we hope to remove such irritants soon, he said.

The BJP, which has been trying to occupy a substantial part of the opposition space in the state, feels that the TMC supremo is fast losing ground.

Before eyeing to become the prime minister Mamata Banerjee should protect her own turf because she is fast losing ground and people of this state want to get rid of her misrule, BJP national general Kailash Vijayvargiya told PTI.

The Congress, a potential post-election ally of the TMC, is also not too happy with Banerjee as it feels she was more concerned about blocking Rahul Gandhis chances of becoming the prime minister instead of fighting the BJP.

When Congress recently won elections in three states, only TMC didnt congratulate Rahul ji. There are many other instances which show she is more averse to Rahul Gandhi becoming the prime minister than preventing Narendra Modi from occupying the post, West Bengal Congress president Somen Mitra said.
Mumbai:

Superstar Aamir Khan says filmmaking does excites him, but currently he wants to focus on acting.

The 54-year-old actor, who made directorial debut with "Taare Zameen Par", said he will quit acting once he decides to turn full-fledged filmmaker.

"I am inclined towards filmmaking and I coincidentally directed 'Taare Zameen Par'. I have been in love with filmmaking and acting and I can't alienate the two but what I can say right now is that I began my career as an actor and it excites me.

"The moment I become a full-fledged filmmaker I will stop acting. Right now, I don't want to stop acting, that's why I am holding back the director inside me," Aamir told reporters here on Thursday.

As a producer, Aamir has backed films like "Lagaan", "Taare Zameen Par", "Jaane Tu Yaha Jaane Na", "Peepli Live", "Dhobi Ghat", "Delhi Belly", "Talaash", "Dangal" and "Secret Superstar". The actor said his aim is to support good scripts and making money is not his agenda.

"I had not thought at what pace I will make films. Usually, people make films with their production houses for business. That is not our first agenda. Creativity is our agenda. Till the time we don't get a good script, we don't make it into a film."

When asked if as an actor does he have any Hollywood aspirations, Aamir said he would work in any part of the world if he gets a good opportunity.

"For me, as an actor, what is important is what the film is all about and what it is trying to say. It should excite me as an actor. It is not important that it should have a social message.

"It does not matter which part of the world it originates from. If someone from Japan or Africa offers me something and if I get excited, I will do it. But I don't have a fascination for Hollywood," Aamir added.

The actor has announced his next project, "Lal Singh Chaddha", an official adaptation of Tom Hanks' 1994 film "Forrest Gump".

He was also in talks for Netflix series on spiritual leader Rajneesh, popularly known among his followers as Osho, but he said the script has not been finalised yet.

"Nothing is happening on Osho at the moment. I am not aware. The script is not ready," he said.

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
Mumbai:

Akshay Kumar, whose Kesari is based on the Battle ofA A Saragarhi, says it is sad that the story has not been made into a film until now. The Battle of Saragarhi was fought between the British Indian army's Sikh Regiment and Afghan tribesmen on September 12, 1897. Saragarhi was a tiny village in the then North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan).

The British Indian contingent comprised 21 Jat Sikh soldiers of the 36th Sikhs who were stationed at an Army post and were attacked by 10,000 to 12,000 Afghans.

Led by Havildar Ishar Singh, the Sikhs chose to fight to the death, in what is touted by some military historians as one of history's greatest battles ever fought. "The Battle of Saragarhi ranks second when one would search about the top battles ever fought by India. Sadly we haven't made a film on it and not many people know about it. I also did not know much about it in detail, but I learnt a lot of things while working on the film," Akshay said in an interview.

"It is fascinating that these people had the chance to run away but they didn't. They were aware that they will not win this battle but still chose to fight," he added.

Akshay said he considers himself lucky to have had the chance to play Havildar Ishar Singh. Talking about the action scenes in "Kesari", Akshay said, "There is a technique called Gatka, which is popular in Sikhs. We had to do that in this film. I know martial arts so I had to make some efforts to do it. I had to learn some techniques. It was a new genre of action for me. It was a different kind of fight."

Some crucial portions of the film were shot in Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh and Akshay said it was difficult to shoot there because of the temperature. "The kind of terrain we shot the film was difficult... There is less oxygen in Spiti Valley. Besides, the pagdi (turban) that I wear in the film weighs one and half kg and the sword was of 6-7 kg but in reality their sword was 25-30 kg. The film is not shot on real locations but this place where we shot matched the era of 1897."

The film will arrive in theatres on March 21. It is produced by Akshay's Cape of Good Hope Films and Karan Johar's Dharma Productions and Anurag Singh has directed the film.

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New Delhi:

Deepika Padukone made her Hollywood debut with Serena Unger in aXXX: The Return of Xander Cagea with Vin Diesel is now all ready to take up a new project in the west and the actress recently hinted that she wanat to be a part of Avengers Endgame.

At the unveiling of her iconic wax figure at Madame Tussaud's, London on March 15, Deepika expressed that she would love to tackle the role and that it would be very "interesting" to essay the role of a superhero that originates from India.

A

A Yeah, of course. Why not?," She said at the event. "I mean Iad say Indian origin. So whether itas Marvel or whether itas Avengers, or you know, any of these iconic characters that weave seen in cinema, I think it would be very interesting."

A "And I think the world is ready for it to see one of these superheroes, one that originates from India. "I believe it will happen soon. I know it will," Deepika said.

A Last year it was learnt that Deepika is working on a superhero project. The Padmavaat actress will have various action scenes which fans havenat seen her doing before. The untitled film will be produced by Fox Star.

Deepika also featured on the cover of a Hollywood magazine, Vogue along with Avengers star Scarlett Johansson and Korean actor Doona Bae. Fourteen international stars featured in the April issue of the magazine.

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New Delhi:

Film PM Narendra Modi has been one of the most talked about films of the year and is now all set to release on 12th April 2019. The makers unveiled the first look and poster of the film in January in 23 languages and it instantly made a splash on the internet.

The larger than life film started filming on 28th January 2019 in the state of Gujarat, after shooting in Ahmedabad, Kutch-Bhuj and in the beautiful mountains of Uttarakhand the film is currently completing its last leg in Mumbai.

Producer Sandip Ssingh said, "This is a very special film and a story that needs to be told.I hope this story of faith inspires the audiences. We are excited and happy to release the story of 1.3 billion people."

Directed by Omung Kumar, PM Narendra Modi biopic will traverse the journey of Narendra Damodardas Modi from his humble beginnings to his years as Chief Minister onto his landmark win at the 2014 election and finally being nominated as the Prime Minister of India.

This much-anticipated film has versatile actor Vivekanand Oberoi in and as PM Narendra Modi. Apart from Vivek Oberoi, critically acclaimed actors like Boman Irani, Suresh Oberoi, Manoj Joshi, Zarina Wahab, along with Darshan Kumar and Barkha Bisht have been roped in for the film.

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Scarlett Johansson, one of the sexiest women and Black Widow to the Avengers franchise recently graced the cover of Vogue's cover for March alongside Deepika Padukone, and South Korean actress Bae Doona. Not only was the shoot breathtakingly ethereal, it also featured a video that circled around the celebration of global talent from national nationalities such as Nigeria, Mexico, Iceland, US and France, and a whole lot of insights into Johanssonas world.

Scarlett Johansson, who have always been bold with her characters doesnat shy away from shooting intimate scenes with both men and women, because how can anyone forget the steamy scene in 2008 Woody Allenas Vicky Cristina Barcelona movie between Johansson and Penelope Cruz? In one segment of the show when Scarlet was asked this, "Who would you like to kiss on screen?a, Scarlett didnat flinch a second to give the answer, she replied "I would go round two with Penelope Cruz," along with a wink while saying "Hey P". Penelope, are you listening?

TheA Avengers: Infinity WarA actress, also joked about her love life without mentioning her boyfriend of nearly two years, Colin Jost while shooting for the cover of Vogueas latest issue. Playing coy about her relationship status in an interview published by the magazine on Thursday, March 14. aIam dating my doorman,a she quipped.

Scarlett will be seen next in the last franchise of the Avengers, Avengers: Endgame also the most awaited movie of the year. The 34-year-old actor will once again be seen in her fictional superhero avatar, Black Widow aka Natasha Romanova for the Marvel Cinematic Universe film.A

For all the Latest Entertainment News, Hollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

The official website of the Gujarat Congress was reportedly hacked on Friday.

Following the hack, a grab from the alleged sex scandal video which showed a man resembling Hardik Patel with an unidentified woman was posted on the website's landing page. It came along with the caption "Welcome Our New Leader".

The site was shut down soon after, but several people managed to take a screenshot of the page.

Also Read: Ten days on, BJPs official website still under maintenance, Twitterati poke fun at party

The Gujarat Congress website was hacked in February also and had inappropriate content posted on it.

A message uploaded by the hacker was: "Become a part of the oldest and largest political party in India who looted India for 70 years. Originally founded by the British rulers in the country, the party evolved into the natural party of thugs after independence and a custodian and champion of anti-nationalism."

The latest hack comes days after the BJP's official website was hacked on March 5. 11 days gone, the website still remains under maintenance mode.

When the website was hacked, it came up with a meme featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi whose caption read Brothers and sisters, I've fooled all of you. Brothers and sisters, weve fooled all of you. More to come! Many, many congratulations!

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New Delhi:

Amid the ongoing tension between India and Pakistan, the Indian Air Force carried out a major combat drill on the intervening night of March 14 and 15. The IAF fighter jet went supersonic over border areas in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir along the Line of Control. According to news agency ANI, the reason for carrying out the combat drill was to be prepared for thwarting any misadventure by the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) to intrude into the Indian air space. The drill comes days after two Pakistani fighter jets intruded in the Indian airspace in Poonch sector. The IAF has been on high alert since the February 14 Pulwama terror attack.

Interestingly, there were some reports that people in Amritsar had woken up in dead of night after hearing loud explosion. With the report about IAFs drill coming out in public, it is safe to say that those blast sounds were the combat jets. At that time, Jagjit Singh Walia, ADCP Amritsar had said that, I appeal to the people to not believe in rumours on social media. Everything is okay, as per our information nothing has happened.

India and Pakistan have seen the worst standoff in recent years ever since the Pulwama attack and Indian Air Forces subsequent air strike in Khyber Pakhtunkhwas Balakot. For the first time in more than four decades, India went deep inside Pakistan to destroy the terror camp. Though there has been no official statement on number of casualties, several reports have said that the number of terrorists killed in Balakot terror camps can range from anywhere between 250 to 300.

Latest media reports by two news channels have revealed how Islamabad tried to get rid of the terrorists bodies after the Indian Air Force air strike on the terror camp run by Jaish-e-Mohammed. According to Republic TV, an eyewitness have come forward and talked extensively about the way authorities across the border tried to doctor the site. Bodies of some terrorists were thrown in river while others were set on fire.

Meanwhile, Times Now, another news channel ha also aired some incriminating details about the Balakot air strike. According to the news channel, 263 terrorists had gathered at the terror camp. These terrorists were categorised according to a strict hierarchy, the channel reported. 18 senior Jaish commanders were present at Balakot facility to train the terror recruits. While 83 terrorists had assembled for Daura-e-Aam  the beginners training course, 91 terrorists had assembled for Daura-e-Khas  advanced training, the channel reported.

As many as 25 terrorists were selected for special fidayeen training. A total of four missiles, which have now been identified as SPICE bombs were dropped at the Balakot JeM camp by Indian Air Force Mirage-2000 fighter jets. Among those killed were IED expert, video expert of the Jaish-e-Mohammed. Those injured were send to a local hospital in adjoining Waziristan.

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Amaravati:

Y S Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, was Friday found dead at his house in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh.

Police initially registered a case under Section 174 Cr P C (unnatural death) when the body of Reddy was found by his staff early in the morning. After a post-mortem in the local government hospital, police confirmed the case was altered to Section 302 IPC that relates to murder.

His party, the YSR Congress, demanded a CBI investigation into the case even as the Andhra Pradesh government constituted a Special Investigation Team, headed by CID Additional Director General of Police Amit Garg, to probe the death.

This was the third unnatural death in the YS family that has a powerful political hold in Kadapa district.While the father Y S Raja Reddy was murdered in 1998, the eldest son M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was killed in a helicopter crash in 2009.Vivekananda Reddy was a two-time MLA, two-time MP and a one-term MLC.

He served as agriculture minister in the N Kiran Kumar Reddy government in united Andhra Pradesh. The 68-year old YSR Congress leader is survived by his wife and a daughter.Police said injuries were found on the forehead, head and its back, besides on the hand and thigh.

"We have gathered some clues in the case. We are questioning the former ministers household staff. Some fingerprints were also collected from the scene," Kadapa District Superintendent of Police Rahul Dev Sharma said.

"We have taken the case seriously and are investigating it from all angles," Sharma added.

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu spoke with Director General of Police R P Thakur and other senior officials and asked them to conduct a thorough investigation into the former minister's deaths and not spare the guilty, said a CMO communique.

Naidu recalled Vivekananda's services as a public representative and extended sympathies to the bereaved family.

His death sparked a political row between the TDP and the YSRC.

"He actively took part in election campaign in Jammalamadugu yesterday. That he died suddenly gives rise to several suspicions. So we want a CBI investigation to bring out the facts," YSRC spokesperson Vasireddy Padma demanded.

State Animal Husbandry Minister C Adinarayana Reddy, who belongs to Jammalamadugu, took objection to YSRCs insinuation and said it has become a habit for the opposition to politicise everything.

"I also want to know the facts behind such a nice persons death. We too want an impartial inquiry, but YSRC leaders should stop mudslinging," he told reporters here.

YSR Congress president Y S Jaganmohan Reddy and his mother Vijayamma rushed to Pulivendula from Hyderabad on hearing the news.

Known to be a down-to-earth and genial person, Vivekananda was elected as MLA in 1989 and 1994 from his hometown Pulivendula in Kadapa district.He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Kadapa constituency in 1999 and 2004 and to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council in 2009.

He had a differences of opinion with his nephew Y S Jaganmohan Reddy after the latter quit the Congress and established the YSR Congress, and chose to stay back with the parent party.Vivekananda lost the by-election to his sister-in-law, Vijayamma in 2011.

Subsequently, the family differences were sorted out and Vivekananda Reddy joined the YSRC.Two days ago, he was seen at the Lotus Pond residence of Jaganmohan Reddy in Hyderabad and on Thursday he campaigned for the YSRC in Kadapa district.He was reportedly alone at his residence in Pulivendula on Thursday night.

"There was no response when I went to his house this morning. I called his wife in Hyderabad over phone and she asked me not to disturb him. Later, the cook and other household staff reached the house but they too did not get any response.I then went in through a side door and found Vivekananda's body in the bathroom, with blood clots in the bedroom and the bathroom. There were several injuries on his body," Vivekananda's personal assistant M V Krishna Reddy said.

He lodged a complaint with the police, based on which the FIR was registered.YSRC MP V Vijayasai Reddy expressed shock over the former minister's death.

"He was such a humble person who always engaged himself in public service. It is a huge loss to the YSRC and also the state," the MP said in a message.

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Amaravati:

Y S Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, was Friday found dead at his house in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh.

Police initially registered a case under Section 174 Cr P C (unnatural death) when Reddy's body was found by his staff early in the morning. After post-mortem in the local government hospital, police confirmed the case was altered to Section 302 IPC that relates to murder.

According to reports, seven injury marks were found on the body. Police said injuries were found on the forehead, head and back, besides on the hand and thigh.

"We have gathered some clues in the case. We are questioning the former minister's household staff. Some fingerprints were also collected from the scene," Kadapa District Superintendent of Police Rahul Dev Sharma said.

"We have taken the case seriously and are investigating it from all angles," Sharma added.

Vivekananda Reddy's personal assistant MV Krishna Reddy had found the body at his residence in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh on Friday morning. He had expressed doubts over the nature of the death as blood clots were found in the bedroom and the bathroom.

Two days ago, he was seen at the Lotus Pond residence of Jagan Mohan Reddy in Hyderabad and on Thursday campaigned for the YSRC in Kadapa district. He was reportedly alone at his residence in Pulivendula on Thursday night.

"There was no response when I went to his house this morning. I called his wife in Hyderabad over phone and she asked me not to disturb him. Later,the cook and other household staff reached the house but they too did not get any response. I then went in through a side door and found Vivekananda's body in the bathroom, with blood clots in the bedroom and the bathroom. There were several injuries on his body," Vivekananda's personal assistant M V Krishna Reddy said.

He lodged a complaint with police, based on which the FIR was registered.

The incident sparked a political slugfest between the opposition YSR Congress and the ruling Telugu Desam Party with both trading allegations against each other.

Vivekananda Reddy's party,YSR Congress, demanded a CBI probe into the case even as the state government constituted a Special Investigation Team, headed by CID Additional Director General of Police Amit Garg, to probe the death.

YSR Congress president Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy alleged that chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu was responsible for the death of his uncle.

Lashing out at the YSRC chief, Naidu told a press meet later that the slain leaders family appeared "prima facie guilty" as they not only tried to hide the murder but also destroy vital forensic evidence.

Jagan Mohan Reddy and the YSRC blamed him, his son Lokesh and the TDP only for political gains, Naidu alleged.

"Truth is truth. Nothing can be hidden. They wanted to use a family members murder for political gains. Its a misfortune to have such a leader in politics," Naidu said, hitting out at the YSR Congress chief.

Rejecting Jagan Mohan Reddys demand for a CBI investigation, Naidu said the demand was raised only to get away from the case. He asserted that only the state police would investigate the case.

Terming the killing as a "politically mean act," the YSR Congress chief told reporters at Pulivendula after visiting the spot that only a CBI probe would bring out the truth.

Justice would be done only if a third party probed the case, Jagan Mohan Reddy said, adding they had no faith in the state police.He also alleged that the state government was fabricating evidence to portray Vivekananda's death as natural.

"They (government) came out with a letter purportedly written by my uncle, naming a driver (as the culprit). How could a person write a letter while being killed?" he asked.

This was the third unnatural death in the YS family that has a powerful political hold in Kadapa district.While the father Y S Raja Reddy was murdered in 1998, the eldest son M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was killed in a helicopter crash in 2009.

Vivekananda Reddy was a two-time MLA, two-time MP and a one-term MLC. He served as agriculture minister in the N Kiran Kumar Reddy government in united Andhra Pradesh.The 68-year-old YSR Congress leader is survived by his wife and a daughter.

The Chief Minister spoke with the DGP R P Thakur and other senior officials, asked them to conduct a thorough probe and not spare the guilty, said a CMO communique.Naidu recalled Vivekananda's services as a public representative and extended sympathies to the bereaved family.

"He actively took part in election campaign in Jammalamadugu yesterday. That he died suddenly gives rise to several suspicions. So we want a CBI investigation to bring out the facts," YSRC spokesperson Vasireddy Padma demanded.

State Animal Husbandry Minister C Adinarayana Reddy, who belongs to Jammalamadugu, took objection to YSRCs insinuation and said it has become a habit for the opposition to politicise everything.

"I also want to know the facts behind such a nice person's death. We too want an impartial inquiry, but YSRC leaders should stop mudslinging," he told reporters here.

Known to be a down-to-earth and genial person,Vivekananda was elected as MLA in 1989 and 1994 from his hometown Pulivendula in Kadapa district.He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Kadapa constituency in 1999 and 2004 and to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council in 2009.

He had differences of opinion with his nephew Jagan Mohan Reddy after the latter quit Congress and established the YSR Congress and chose to stay back with the parent party.

Vivekananda lost the by-election to his sister-in-law, Vijayamma in 2011. Subsequently, the family differences were sorted out and Vivekananda Reddy joined the YSRC.

(With inputs from agencies)

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New Delhi:

Congress Central Election Committee to meet today. Congress president Rahul Gandhi will visit Odisha in the run-up to the general elections. The BJP Central Election Committee is also likely to meet today. The US is considering targeted measures against human rights violations in China. Stay tuned for all the latest news from around the world.

07:33 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Federer and Nadal to clash in Indian Wells semi-final.

16:11 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Fire breaks out at plastic waste godown in Coimbatore



Tamil Nadu: Fire breaks out at a plastic waste godown at Sundarapuram in Coimbatore pic.twitter.com/9mknGCoftr

 ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019



15:23 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Patiala House Court allows Enforcement Directorate to interrogate lobbyist Deepak Talwar in Agusta Westland case. Talwar is in judicial custody as per jail rules. The ED can question him from Monday to Friday between 9 am to 6 pm.

14:11 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Sunanda Pushkar death case: Delhi's Patiala House Court has asked the Delhi Police to file a reply on interim order which was passed by Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate restraining prosecution &investigating agency from sharing documents of the case with third party or outsider.

13:45 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Karnataka: Sumalatha, wife of late Congress leader MH Ambareesh after meeting BJP leader SM Krishna, says, "I will be firmly announcing what I am going to do, on 18 March. Congress has let their own workers & leaders down by this decision (to give Mandya Lok Sabha seat to JDS )."

13:27 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In ED today approached Delhi's Patiala House Court seeking permission to interrogate Altaf Shah alias Altaf Fantoosh with two others in Tihar Jail in connection with terror funding case involving Hafiz Saeed. Altaf Shah is the son in law of Separatist SAS Geelani.

13:20 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Pakistan: Former ISI official commits suicide after NAB files reference.

13:19 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In The Supreme Court issues notice to Election Commission on petitions filed by VK Sasikala and TTV Dhinakaran challenging order of Delhi HC dismissing their petitions in connection with a dispute over AIADMK two leaves election symbol case. The Supreme Court seeks the Election Commissions response before March 25.

12:53 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In

DMK Chief MK Stalin: Constituencies from where DMK will contest include Thoothukudi, Chennai South, Chennai Central, Kanchipuram, Nilgiris, Pollachi. MDMK -Erode. Congress from Krishnagiri, Trichy, Theni, Puducherry. CPM- Coimbatore and Madurai, CPI- Tirupur and Nagapattinam.













12:53 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Supreme Court declines to entertain a plea filed by a woman seeking police protection & permission to approach Delhi High Court for legal remedies with her allegations of gang rape against four persons, including Pema Khandu, the present Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh.

12:53 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge to boycott Lokpal Selection Committee meeting today. In letter to PM says ' A special invitee would not have rights of participation in process of Lokpal and I cannot accept the opposition being made voiceless in this critical matter'.

12:30 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In CBI seeks dismissal of plea by ex-Cong leader Sajjan Kumar challenging life-term awarded to him in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case.

12:27 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Reuters: France says it has decided to freeze the French assets of Jaish-e-Mohammed Chief Masood Azhar.

12:26 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Mumbai: Remaining portions, including the metallic frame of the bridge, will be removed today. The slabs were removed last night after a part of a foot over bridge near CSMT railway station collapsed yesterday.

12:22 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Supreme Court stays Meghalaya High Courts contempt order against The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim and publisher, Shobha Chaudhuri for publishing articles on the perks and facilities for retired judges and their families.

12:22 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Rahul Gandhi during his interaction with healthcare professionals in Raipur: Healthcare is, in a sense, a foundation. So, we've to ensure that the foundation is built firmly. Congress govt in 2019 is dramatically going to increase the amount of money we put into healthcare and education

12:21 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Congress President Rahul Gandhi during his interaction with healthcare professionals in Raipur: India is transitioning from a rural system to urban system. There is a massive shift that is taking place. It's a traumatic shift.

12:01 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Andhra Pradesh: CM Chandrababu Naidus son & state IT Minister Nara Lokesh offers prayers at Lakshmi Narasimha Temple, Jamia Masjid & a church in Mangalagiri.



Andhra Pradesh: CM Chandrababu Naidus son & state IT Minister Nara Lokesh offers prayers at Lakshmi Narasimha Temple, Jamia Masjid & a church in Mangalagiri. pic.twitter.com/BKZcIZDFgf

 ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019



12:00 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In SC issues notice to Election Commission on a plea of DMK seeking direction to EC to notify by-elections and publish the schedule of elections in Aravakurichi, Ottapidaram and Thiruparankundram assembly constituencies in Tamil Nadu, along with other by-elections to be held on April 18.

12:00 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In

DCP Special Cell(Delhi Police): Southern and Northern range of Special Cell has recovered 83 kg heroin worth Rs 332 crore in the international market. 10 people have been arrested.













11:13 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Delhi: BJP Central Election Committee (CEC) meeting to be held tomorrow.

11:13 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In A bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi also asked Election Commission to depute a senior officer to assist the court and posted the matter for next hearing on March 25.

11:12 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Supreme Court issues notice to the Election Commission on plea of 21 Opposition parties seeking direction that 50 per cent EVM results are matched and crosschecked with VVPATs before the declaration of results in the upcoming General Elections.

11:00 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Four people in custody after shooters target two Christchurch mosques.

10:57 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Reuters: Investigators of Ethiopian air crash found a piece of the stabilizer with trim in an unusual position similar to Lion Air crashed jet in October 2018.

10:51 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Spot-fixing case: Supreme Court asked the BCCI to reconsider its order of life ban on S Sreesanth.

10:32 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Rameshwaram (Tamil Nadu): More than 2000 Indian pilgrims begin their journey to Katchatheevu Island to attend two-day long annual St. Anthony's Church Festival in Sri Lanka.



Rameshwaram (Tamil Nadu): More than 2000 Indian pilgrims begin their journey to Katchatheevu Island to attend two-day long annual St. Anthony's Church Festival in Sri Lanka. pic.twitter.com/8cfyAzrxsJ

 ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019



10:32 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Associated Press: New Zealand police say they have defused a number of improvised explosive devices found on vehicles after the Mosque shootings.

10:28 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In YS Vivekananda Reddy (in pic), YSR Congress party leader and former minister of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, passed away due to heart attack, in Kadapa. He was the brother of former Chief Minister late YS Rajasekhara Reddy.



YS Vivekananda Reddy (in pic), YSR Congress party leader and former minister of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, passed away due to heart attack, in Kadapa. He was the brother of former Chief Minister late YS Rajasekhara Reddy. pic.twitter.com/p0jXKtGLpi

 ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019



09:09 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In TS Singh Deo, Chhattisgarh Health Minister: There is no need for more infrastructure. We can do a lot with the current 170 Community Health Centres. We can increase it with the requirement. Every village is being covered by the health workers. CM has given assurance to help.



TS Singh Deo, Chhattisgarh Health Minister: There is no need for more infrastructure. We can do a lot with the current 170 Community Health Centres. We can increase it with the requirement. Every village is being covered by the health workers. CM has given assurance to help. https://t.co/szOFXiM9pi

 ANI (@ANI) March 15, 2019



09:08 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In TS Singh Deo, Chhattisgarh Health Minister: Ayushman Bharat is insurance-based model in which taxpayers money is given to insurance companies. Instead of insurance companies where some irregularities are reported, we should provide quality healthcare to ppl based on our infrastructure.

08:55 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In J&K terror funding case: National Investigation Agency has issued fresh summons for Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Naseem Geelani for 18th and 19th March.

08:55 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In AFP News Agency: Media in New Zealand report shooting at a second mosque in the city of Christchurch.

08:55 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Jacinda Ardern,NZ Prime Minister on shooting at a Mosque in Christchurch: This is one of New Zealand's darkest days. It was an unprecedented act of violence. Police has apprehended a person, but I don't have further details of him yet.

08:52 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In A Russian cosmonaut and two US astronauts have arrived at the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, five months after the failed launch of a rocket carrying two of the passengers.

08:20 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In A global day of student protests aimed at spurring world leaders into action on climate change to protect the planet for future generations kicks off in Australia and New Zealand.

08:12 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In Armed police in New Zealand swarm central Christchurch amid reports of a shooting at a mosque in the South Island city, as local media report multiple casualties.

06:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In RSS economic wing SJM urges PM Narendra Modi to withdraw 'most favoured nation' status of China.

06:39 (IST) Facebook Twitter Whats app Linked In J&K Police: One individual was shot dead by terrorists in Gulzarpora, Awantipora last night. He has been identified as Manzoor Ahmad Lone, a resident of Dogripora. Initial investigation revealed that he was forcibly taken away by terrorists & shot dead. Case registered.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Nine people of Indian origin are reportedly missing following the mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch which left 49 people dead, according to Indian envoy to New Zealand Sanjiv Kohli, who cited updates received from multiple sources.

"As per updates received from multiple sources there are 9 missing persons of indian nationality/ origin. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families," he tweeted.

Earlier, Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party or AIMIM has said two Indians have died in the attacks, a third is battling for his life.

Owaisi sought help from foreign minister Sushma Swaraj for the brother of one of the victims. The family is from Hyderabad.

In a tweet, Owaisi said: "His brother is serious & his family has little support. I'm only requesting the immediate support of your good offices in expediting his visa process. He'll make all arrangements to travel to NZ by himself."

"My son went to the mosque to offer Friday prayers. My son has not returned yet. About 17 people are still missing. Request government to find about the whereabouts and well being of my son," said Mohammed Sayeeduddin, father of Farhaj Ahsan who is missing since shootings in Christchurch.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed "deep shock and sadness" over the heinous terrorist attack in New Zealand while stressing India's strong condemnation of terrorism and of all those who support such acts of violence.

In a letter to Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, Modi also underscored India's solidarity with the people of her country at this difficult time.

"Prime Minister has expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch," the External Affairs Ministry said in an official release.

"The Prime Minister stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies," it added.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi also termed it "a despicable act of terrorism".

He said the world stands in need of compassion and understanding and not bigotry and hate-filled extremism.

"The New Zealand Shooting is a despicable act of terrorism, that must be condemned unequivocally. The world stands in need of compassion and understanding. Not bigotry and hate filled extremism. My condolences to the families of the victims. My prayers go out to those who were injured," he said on Twitter.

Witnesses said that victims being shot at close range, with women and children believed to be among those killed.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist".

He livestreamed the dastardly act on Facebook. The video showed him repeatedly shooting at worshippers from close range.

The Facebook Live video, taken with a camera that appeared to be mounted on the gunman's body, shows a clean-shaven, Caucasian man with short hair driving to the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch. He enters the building and fires repeatedly at worshippers as he moves from room to room.

In the video, the shooter parks his car next to the mosque and gets out of the vehicle with a rifle. He slowly goes to the boot of his car and retrieves another firearm.

He then walks into the compound of the mosque and fires at a person standing near the doorway before dropping the rifle and shooting repeatedly with the second weapon as he moves inside.

The gunman fires dozens of bullets at people trying to run away or lying down in huddled groups in corners of the rooms.



Approximately 200,000 Indian and Indian-origin people live in New Zealand. There are over 30,000 Indian students in the country, according to the Indian High Commission's data on its website.

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New Delhi:

Continuing with its duplicitous game on the Kartarpur corridor issue, the same way it did with false promises on terrorism, Pakistan has proposed a number of restrictions on the movement of pilgrims to Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara, thus defeating the very purpose of having a dedicated corridor.

Pakistan has said that the number of Indian pilgrims visiting the shrine in that country should be capped at 500 even while India has approved facilities wherein up to 5,000 pilgrims can be handled daily and over 15,000 pilgrims on special occasions.

While India is executing a state-of-the-art passenger terminal building for visit of over 5,000 pilgrims daily and over 15,000 pilgrims on special occasions like Vaisakhi (falls in mid-April), Pakistan has limited it to mere 700 pilgrims per day.

Pakistan did not agree to the Indian demand of allowing daily visits of pilgrims and has restricted it to "visiting days" which will be specified by it. It did not agree to permit travel of devotees on foot or as individuals, and has insisted on movement of groups of 15 and by vehicle, another official said.

Despite having assured visa-free passage to Kartarpur Sahib, Pakistan has now brought in, through the back door, the requirement of issuance of special permits by them to pilgrims, that also at a fee, which is "outrageous and defeats" the very purpose of the corridor, the official said.

Pakistan has restricted the corridor facility to only Indian Passport holders to the exclusion of large number of Overseas Citizens of India card holder devotees. Pakistan is pretending to be blind to the fact that Guru Nanak Dev holds universal appeal, including the large Indian diaspora, the official said.

Pakistan has "surreptitiously usurped" lands belonging to the Kartarpur Sahib gurdwara in the name of developing a corridor for the convenience of pilgrims and objected to most of the Indian proposals for the project, reflecting its "double-speak", officials said on Friday.

The Indian delegation, which attended the first India-Pakistan meeting on Thursday to finalise the modalities for the proposed corridor linking Gurdaspur in Punjab with the Sikh shrine in Pakistan's Kartarpur, strongly protested against the "rampant encroachment" on the lands belonging to the holy Sikh shrine in utter disregard to the sentiments of devotees of Guru Nanak Dev in India.

"Pakistan has lived up to its old reputation of making false promises, making tall claims and delivering nothing. Its double-speak on the Kartarpur Sahib corridor has been exposed in the first meeting itself at Attari on Thursday," a government official, who attended the meeting, said.

The encroached lands were donated to the Kartarpur Sahib by devouts like late Maharaja Ranjeet Singh and others.

"Lands owned by the gurdwara have been surreptitiously usurped by the government of Pakistan in the name of developing the corridor. A strident demand was made by India for restoration of these lands to the holy gurdwara urgently, keeping in view the strong sentiments on the issue within India," the official said.

Pakistan wanted to restrict the duration of Kartarpur agreement to just two years, despite India making it clear that it is executing long-lasting and comprehensive facilities at the border by spending Rs 190 crore.

While India has made serious efforts to fulfil the long standing aspiration of the Indian pilgrims and devotees of Guru Nanak Dev for smooth, easy and hassle-free access of pilgrims to Kartarpur Sahib, Pakistan has scuttled the proposals made by New Delhi.

"Against the hype created by the Pakistan government and the Pakistan media, its actual offer during the talks turned out to be farcical and mere tokenism. There is a sea of difference between what Pakistan, including Prime Minister Imran Khan, had announced, and in what they offered at Attari meeting. Clearly, Pakistan is not interested in providing Indian pilgrims easy access to Kartarpur Sahib," the official said.

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New Delhi:

Since 2008, World Sleep Day is being observed as an initiative by the World Sleep Day Committee of the World Sleep Society, formerly World Association of Sleep Medicine, to celebrate the importance of a sound and healthy sleep. Apart from good food, sex, sleep is one of the most essential yet satisfying state we dont credit much to. In 2013 NASA offered up $18,000 to those who were able to laze around the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas for a total of 70 days to test the effects of microgravity in terms of the human body. While the prospect of never leaving the bed sounds too good to be true, do you know that you can be actually paid for sleeping? Check out the below jobs you can try if you love sleeping:

Scientific Subject matter: While sleeping for a job ricocheted with NASAs offer, did you know that you can literally have a job as a professional sleeper? To study the process of sleep, hospitals and universities are constantly looking for participants who can sleep for long. These studies are focused to measure the brain waves, respiration, heart rhythm, and muscle movement. Participants can be healthy individuals or those who suffer from sleep disorders depending on what the study demands.

Bed and Mattress tester: How did you miss this one? There are jobs for people who choose to never get out of their bed, because there is. This involves testing anything from mattresses to duvets. For the job, individuals test products and then give their critic about their experience or help companies make decisions based on the products they test. Like any company, bedding and mattress companies are always looking for unique ways to increase sales and strengthen their market presence.

Exhibitionist Sleeper: Comfortable sleeping in the view of many eyes? Then this job has to be it. In 2009, the New Museum in New York was looking for women between the ages of 18-40 who were willing to be part of a Chu Yun exhibit. This job required them to take sleeping pills and sleep in the middle of the museum between the hours of 12 pm and 6 pm.

Working for big conglomerates that offer nap-time: In Japan sleeping during work is considered as a sign of hard-work and it viewed as something good. In fact, a lot of big companies Google, Facebook, all encourage their employees to take a mid-day snooze. Theyve even invested in energy pods which offer a unique design, allowing employees to recline and block out sights and sounds from the environment around them.
New Delhi:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has termed the Christchurch shooting as one of the darkest days in countrys history. When asked if she would call it a hater crime, Ardern said that, I would describe it as an unprecedented act of violence. New Zealand is facing its worst mass shooting since 1990 after two gunmen attacked two mosques in Christchurch on Friday. She said that those who were in attendance at a mosque should have the right to be exercising their religious freedom, but they were not safe. Ardern says actions like this have no place in New Zealand.

What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities  New Zealand is their home  they are us.  Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) March 15, 2019

Over 20 people were killed and 50 people have been injured in the shooting. New Zealand Police issued a statement saying that, Police is responding to a very serious and tragic incident involving an active shooter in central Christchurch. One person is in custody, however Police believe there may be other offenders.... This is an evolving incident and we are working to confirm the facts however we can confirm there have been a number of fatalities.

Police is currently at a number of scenes. We understand that there will be many anxious people but I can assure New Zealanders that Police is doing all it can to resolve this incident, the statement added. The police has told citizens to stay indoors. We ask all mosques nationally to shut their doors, and advise that people refrain from visiting these premises until further notice, the police said. After the press conference Ardern is flying to Wellington, where officials are convening.

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His Royal Highness Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa called for strengthening coordination between the Executive and Legislative branches to benefit Bahrain and its people. We are all working for the sake of the nation and its people, and we must strengthen coordination between us that would contribute to achieving the aspirations of citizens, HRH the Premier told Parliamentarians during a meeting held at Riffa palace.

HRH Premier underlined governments continuous efforts to implement modernisation and development projects saying, meeting the citizens needs and providing the requirements of decent living for them is a government priority. Let those in the House of the People be assured that their interests are ours and that our aspirations for the sake of the citizens go beyond theirs.

We spare no effort and harness all available potentials and resources to make the citizens feel that their security is preserved and their stability is ensured, the Premier added. Members of the Representatives Council lauded HRH Premiers open-door policy and extended deepest thanks and appreciation to HRH the Prime Minister for his unwavering support for strengthening Executive-Legislature cooperation.
Shaikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, Oil Minister, yesterday honoured the winners of the first edition of the Innovation Contest praising their creativity in providing research and chemical innovations We are proud of the students who are strong and eager to develop various sectors in the Arab countries, the Minister said highlighting the importance of innovation and research in the development. The contest came under the activities of the GPCA Innovation and Research Summit held from March 13-14.

Athari Muhammed Al Hosni from Caledonian College of Engineering of the National University of Science and Technology in Oman won first place in the competition and a cash prize of AED 10,000 for Production of polymers from sulfur solid waste. Hebatallah Humaid Al Jabri from the National University of Science and Technology in Oman was awarded second place and a cash prize of AED 6,000 for his work in Application of nanotechnology in corrosion inhibition of oil pipelines.

The jury awarded third place and a cash prize of AED 4,000 to Hussain Al-Ibrahim from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia for his Design integration of gasification and reforming technologies for the syngas production.
This upcoming week in the United Kingdom, the fuel cell industry holds an annual confab whose scheduled lineup of speakers includes a senior FuelCell Energy expert providing an overview of large-scale applications of the technology.

As for his own company, which has designed and built the largest fuel cells ever en route to its golden anniversary marked in mid-March at its Danbury headquarters?

Elusive still is the alchemy to achieving profitability, in the same steady state that its machines generate electricity with no noxious emissions.

Even as it marked 50 years in business on Thursday, FuelCell Energy reported last month it had crossed the $1 billion mark for the accumulated deficit it has amassed in its history as a public company  if strung out over its full history, amounting to $20 million a year on average in good years and bad.

In the 1990s selling both stationary fuel cell power plants and nickel-zinc batteries, FuelCell and ERC had a string of years in which it eked out profits ranging up to $500,000. In 1998, however, FuelCell embarked on its current run of annual losses that reached a trough of $97 million in 2008, while never getting above a $30 million loss in any one year.

The two-decade run of earnings futility that raises an obvious question: will FuelCell ever be able to find a path to profitability to justify it continuing as an independent company? And if not, what are the long-term implications for the clean-energy innovator that employs more than 400 people in its home state today?

A builder and an operator

A FuelCell spokesperson did not did not answer Hearst Connecticut Media questions on that front, but in recent conference calls with investors the company has suggested the companys path to sustained profitability lies in operating the fuel cell power plants it builds, in addition to manufacturing fuel cells and modules for sale to other entities.

Fuel cells produce streams of electricity by passing hydrogen through stacks of coated membranes that siphon off electrons chemically. The hydrogen is then combined with oxygen to produce water as the main emission, along with heat that can be channeled for facility needs.

The Wales scientist Robert William Grove is credited as being the first to demonstrate the process in 1838, and after more than a century of additional research, General Electric hit on breakthroughs with membrane coatings to produce sufficient electricity for fuel cells to be used on NASAs Project Gemini space expeditions in the 1960s.

Bernard Baker and Martin Klein created FuelCells predecessor company in March 1969 as Energy Research Corp., with Baker having been introduced to fuel cell technology while on a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Amsterdam. There, Dr. G.H.J. Broers was experimenting with molten carbonate fuel cell technology designed to generate efficiencies by operating at more than 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, with Baker using that as the springboard to starting the company that would become FuelCell.

FuelCell, Bloom Energy and Doosan Fuelcell in South Windsor remain the three biggest U.S. makers of stationary fuel cell power plants today. With its heritage long rooted in its original molten carbonate heritage, in the past few years FuelCell has been working to develop solid oxide platforms, the specialty of San Jose, Calif.-based Bloom Energy.

Bloom Energy went public last July, with its shares down 16 percent, with FuelCell shares down more than 70 percent over the same interval.

A when question

In a 300-page Battelle Memorial Institute analysis of the cost of fuel cells conducted on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy, researchers identified what they determined to be the biggest driver of costs for the technology: insufficient demand to justify mass production, losing out on economies of scale that have benefited the solar panel and battery industries among others.

Bottone suggested as much in a 2013 interview with the United Kingdom publication Quartz, quoted as saying its a when question, not an if question in his words to achieve profitability as FuelCell ramped up production.

To do so, Bottone added at the time, FuelCell would have to have an annual production rate of systems producing 80 megawatts of electricity in any given year, with FuelCell manufacturing just 25 megawatts of systems in each of its two previous fiscal years ending in October.

In January, an analyst with Cowen & Co. estimated that FuelCell spends between $5 million and $6 million today to manufacture and install its systems, as calculated on a per-megawatt basis, and that it sells them for between $6 million and $7 million a megawatt.

But other costs apply, including future interest on loans FuelCell requires to finance the construction of a plant, and fuel cell modules become spent over time requiring new modules to be swapped in, at additional expense.

FuelCell completed construction in 2014 of its largest single project to date, a facility in South Korea generating nearly 60 megawatts. Posco Energy assembled the fuel cells in South Korea under license from FuelCell, with the companies now in a legal spat over future sales rights in the region.

The companys largest upcoming project is to produce fuel cells that will generate nearly 40 megawatts of electricity for the Long Island Power Authority, with installations to take place over multiple years.

Hard to predict

FuelCell has been in negotiations with Dominion Energy to buy back a 15-megawatt plant in had built in Bridgeport  a megawatt provides power for the rough equivalent of 1,000 homes  with the company also to operate a plant half that size in Groton on behalf of the U.S. Navy.

With financial support from the U.S. government, FuelCell has spent the past few years exploring how its systems could operate in tandem with energy and industrial facilities that emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, which if captured and shunted into its systems could be rechanneled to generate electricity. The company has been working up a demonstration of the system with ExxonMobil, with one researcher at the energy giant describing the potential as a holy grail to helping it eliminate carbon dioxide emitted as exhaust at plants powered by natural gas.

FuelCell has stepped up its patent activity the past several years, with about 40 applications currently before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office after producing less than half that number over a decade through 2016. Last year, the company filed multiple patent applications that envision fuel cells used as components in a system to store excess energy generated by renewable power systems.

On Triangle Street in Danbury not far from its headquarters, FuelCell is experimenting with a new design that configures a systems modules to glean full utilization of the fuel needed to generate electricity. But the company has yet to reveal any exponential leaps in technology that would represent an emphatic pivot to sustained profitability.

The ... new order cycle continues to be hard to predict, Bottone said in early March on a conference call with investment analysts. We are actively working on a number of projects and are encouraged by the growing appreciation for the energy solution our fuel cells provide.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
A year ago, Zuzana Caputova was a lawyer whose biggest claim to fame was stopping a well-connected businessman from building a landfill in Slovakia's wine country. Now she's the favorite to become president.

Caputova, 45, has ridden a wave of anti-government anger triggered by a journalist's killing, propelling her from obscurity to poll leader. Support for her pro-European Union, rule-of-law message marks a departure from the political mood in neighbors Poland and Hungary, whose nationalist governments have clashed with the bloc over the erosion of democracy.

The NGO lawyer's slogan - "Let's fight evil together" - has resounded with voters who've taken to the streets in the biggest protests since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Vowing to overhaul a justice system she says is skewed to benefit politicians and their cronies, she differs from other leaders in a region grappling with populism by vowing to fight nationalism.

"Slovakia's at a crossroads," she said in the town of Zilina, a bastion of Slovak nationalists where she was cheered by a packed crowd. "We're facing a crisis of confidence in politics, and democratic values are being doubted. If we don't stop this trend, extremists will gain more ground."

Despite robust economic growth, record-low unemployment and rising living standards, some Slovaks are turning away from traditional political forces toward figures mounting xenophobic campaigns.

As a vice chairwoman of the Progressive Slovakia party, Caputova supports gay partnerships and adoption, a rare stance in predominantly Catholic Slovakia. She also backs deeper integration with the EU in the economy and defense.

She led public resistance against an illegal landfill in the western Slovak town of Pezinok, the heart of the country's wine-producing region. Once deemed a long shot for president, which is largely ceremonial but plays a key role in granting government-forming mandates and appointing judges, she mesmerized audiences in television debates, leaping past former front-runner Maros Sefcovic, vice president of the European Commission.

"She has an appeal across different groups of voters," said Martin Slosiarik, director of the FOCUS pollster. "Some are emotionally attracted by the fact that she's a woman. For rational voters, it's her message that works: restoring justice. She's able to unite people in opposition against politics as usual."

While Slovaks generally embrace the EU, many voters have shunned Sefcovic because he's the candidate of the ruling Smer party, whose leader and three-term prime minister was ousted last year by anti-graft demonstrators. The protests were triggered by the killing of a reporter investigating corrupt ties between officials and business.

Her other main challenger is Stefan Harabin, an anti-NATO former Supreme Court judge and justice minister who's dominated Slovakia's legal sphere since the 1990s. Incumbent Andrej Kiska has decided to step down after one term.

Caputova leads the field before Saturday's ballot with 45 percent support, according to a Feb. 26-28 FOCUS survey. Sefcovic had half that amount, and Harabin had 12 percent. Caputova would get 64 percent in a runoff, which will take place if no candidate wins more than 50 percent, with Sefcovic second, the poll showed.

"It will be a contest between an anti-establishment, anti-European stance and mainstream candidates who want to preserve the Western, liberal orientation," said Grigorij Meseznikov, director of the Institute for Public Affairs, a think-tank in Bratislava. "Caputova is destined to win."
Police on Thursday discovered the Virginia-based database that hosts much of the nations license plate recognition systems is available to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, as reported earlier in the week by the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Police officials in Westport and Fairfield said they do not use the system to spy on residents, or even record peoples race or ethnicity, as alleged by the ACLU report. They continue to keep using the system.

But Wethersfield Police Chief James Cetran said after learning there was an option to share the information with ICE, he withdrew his town with a click of a computer mouse.

I have no problem sharing our data with other police departments, Cetran said in a phone interview. We can uncheck those that we dont want to share with. Cetran noticed ICE was listed as receiving his towns data, confirming the ACLU report. Although I know its perfectly legal, for political expediency, we are no longer sharing with them. It was my discretion.

Cetran, president of the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association, said the group is allowing local police departments to decide for themselves whether to remove ICEs access to their data.

Eight law enforcement entities were listed by the ACLU as having relationships with ICE, including Fairfield, Westport, Stratford, Norwalk, Trumbull and Southern Connecticut State University.

Westport officials said Thursday the firm Vigilant Solutions Inc. makes the towns license plate reader (LPR) data available to 500 other law enforcement agencies.

The LPR system in no way provides the officer information as to the immigration status, race, gender, sex, name of the person operating the vehicle, or the owner information of the vehicle, nor does it record any of this information, said Westport Police Chief Foti Koskinas in a statement. Vigilant Solutions, the vendor from whom we purchased the system and with whom we have a contract, manages and stores the minimal data collected.

He said the data has a proven record in helping fight crime, and the town is confident that federal compliance standards are being met.

We always attempt to balance the safety of officers and citizens with privacy. Information sharing and communication amongst law enforcement agencies is critical to that safety, Koskinas said.

Fairfield Capt. Robert Kalamaras agreed.

The Fairfield Police Department currently owns and operates License Plate Reader (LPR) technology which data is managed and stored by Vigilant Solutions, he said in a statement. These devices have served hundreds of police agencies across the United States, including Fairfield, to ensure the safety and security of our citizens. While there has been some scrutiny as to the privacy rights of individuals, the LPRs do not provide the officer with race, gender, ethnicity, or immigration status from the information provided by the registration plate.

He stressed the crime-fight ability of the system

The Fairfield Police Department takes privacy rights very serious and seeks to find a balance between ensuring peoples constitutional rights, and the use of the LPR data to solve crimes and maintain the security of our community, Kalamaras said.

In Trumbull, Police Chief Michael Lombardi said Thursday the LPR technology has been responsible for investigating a robbery and assault in a local park; and a bank robbery.

The LPR has been a valuable tool, not only for identifying the everyday violations that are a danger to the motorists on the streets of Trumbull, but for those very serious crimes where we need every means possible to assist in keeping our neighborhoods safe, Lombardi said, adding the Hearst Connecticut Media report of the ACLU findings provides inaccurate and misleading statements.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
HARTFORD  A flash mob of the cast of the musical Rent turned into a public memorial for state Rep. Ezequiel Santiago on Friday before about 2,000 people gathered in the vast atrium of the Legislative Office Building.

Spectators jammed shoulder-to-shoulder on the first floor and along the four upper balconies when the noontime event, scheduled to raise AIDS/HIV awareness, became a family mourning session for lawmakers, who cried and hugged, remembering Santiago, 45, who died suddenly earlier in the day from a suspected heart attack.

Members of the touring cast of the rock musical sang the show-stopping Seasons of Love, in an appearance first scheduled as a semi-secret performance to support legislation that would make it easier for people to obtain a drug found to help prevent the HIV virus.

But when news of Santiagos death reached lawmakers, it quickly turned into a emotional celebration and musical tribute for the popular, 10-year member of the House of Representatives from Bridgeport.

Shortly after noon, Rep. Brandon McGee of Hartford called for quiet in the bustling atrium and asked for visitors, employees and lawmakers to join the legislative Black and Hispanic Caucus in a moment of silence. On the floor around him were dozens of lawmakers and legislative leaders.

Then, the actors, wearing gray T-shirts and lined up along the second-floor balcony, were led by a single acoustic guitar:

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes

More News Bridgeport state Rep. Ezequiel Santiago dies at 45

Five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes

How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife?

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes

How do you measure a year in the life?

We had been working behind the scenes for the last week with The Bushnell about having some sort of afternoon of HIV/AIDS awareness, said Rep. Jeff Currey, D-East Hartford, as the noontime crowd slowly dispersed. Then obviously we all woke up this morning to the news of his passing and anybody who knows the show Rent and who knows the song they were going to sing, it was just a perfect way to tie it all together and allow for a moment of hope, sadness, basically every emotion you can possibly imagine, all rolled up into one. And I think that was evident in the smiles, the tears, the cheers that you heard throughout the atrium.

He touched everyone in this building, said state Rep. Steve Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport. He was such a quiet, soft-spoken leader. We have a very close-knit and tight delegation. We rely on each other for so much. I feel like I lost a brother today.

We lost our heart, added Rep. Jack Hennessy, the senior member of the citys delegation of two state senators and six House members.

Shawn Lang, deputy director of the non-profit AIDS Connecticut, said the touring cast of the 23-year-old Broadway hit, currently performing at The Bushnell across the street from the Capitol, had originally agreed to raise AIDS/HIV awareness, particular a legislative proposal that would make it easier for people to obtain prophylactic medication, a one-a-day pill found to stop the spread of the virus.

We are really trying to shine a light on the populations that are hardest hit by HIV and AIDS, which are young black and Latino men who have sex with men, she said. We have the tools now to end the AIDS crisis.

kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT
DERBY  City officials are concerned that a vacant, downtown building which has been dropping portions of its chimney and siding on Main Street is in imminent danger of collapse.

But Michael Hillis, a local lawyer and principal in Derby Shore, LLC, which owns the building, says it is structurally sound.

The city made us do a tremendous amount of structural work 10 years ago, said Hillis, who specializes in criminal defense work. We probably spent at least $250,000.

Hillis said the issue is a probably with the roof, over which Derby Shore has a pending lawsuit with an insurance company.

Nevertheless, Hillis said he has contacted a structural engineer who will inspect the site next week and file a report with the city.

I got a call (Thursday) at 9 a.m. from the city and was down there with a contractor by 11, Hillis said. Since then, he said, he has been in contact with Vin Marino, the citys corporation counsel.

City officials maintain the building is bowed and leaning onto Main Street/Route 34 near the corner of Main and Minerva streets.

Were looking out for passerbys and drivers, said Andrew Baklik, chief of staff for Mayor Richard Dziekan. This building is right near a bus stop. We have to do whats best for everyone.

He (Hillis) is of the opinion that its only an exterior problem, Baklik said. If thats the case, then he will have have to remediate the exterior of the building.

But city officials suspect there are bigger issues.

We obviously cant go inside, nor would I recommend anyone go inside, Baklik said. But our building inspector (Carlo Sarmiento) and a structural engineer observed it from the outside and deemed it uninhabitable and unsafe. They believe its in imminent danger of collapsing.

Baklik said the city has contacted the state Department of Transportation and closed the sidewalk around the building.

Weve established a fire safety watch and will bill the owners, he said.

The safety watch involves stationing volunteer firefighters at the scene around the clock.

We dont want anyone going inside or anyone getting hurt by falling debris, Baklik said.

Baklik said United Illuminating and Eversource have been at the site to shut off electricity and gas.

The building is on the opposite side of Main Street where crews are demolishing the remaining four structures. The state expects to widen Main Street, also known as Route 34, into four lanes from Home Depot to the Derby-Shelton bridge. That project is expected to start in 2020.

Hillis said said the building is about 200 years old and an historical part of downtown Derby.

The four story structure once housed a dentist and a paint store with apartments on the upper three levels.
GREENWICH  Bribery, cheating and mail fraud; scheming college counselors, unethical test proctors and unscrupulous Hollywood stars.

The juicy details of the college-cheating scandal that made headlines across the country this week  and touched down in Greenwich  have a few drops left to be squeezed, but experts in the field say parents of college-bound teens should bracket that temptation and use the event as reason to evaluate whether they are unduly driving their childs application process, when they should be taking a backseat.

Parents take on way too much of this with a good heart, but the message it sends is, Were going to do it and save you from it, West Hartford-based college consultant Laura Boyer said. If we dont shift that dynamic, its unhealthy for children and their development.

The families who engaged in the fraud effectively told their children being at the top is worth sacrificing morals, and that whatever their children could do on their own would not be good enough, said Greenwich therapist Orla Cashman.

I think it highlights that were misguided, she said. Weve lost our way.

Cashman sees an omnipresent pressure to achieve in Greenwich, which is also the home of one of the indicted parents, Gordon Caplan.

The success-driven culture is particularly evident in Greenwich families approach to college, said author Heather Won Tesoriero.

The writer spent a year embedded in town while writing The Class about superstar science students at Greenwich High School, and describes in her book the ever-present pressure on teens to do well and get into a good college.

Its a community with a lot of very successful, high-performing people who want their kids to be successful, high-performing in equal measure, she said.

But experts wonder whether the drive for name-brand schools is worth the pressure, the money doled out for test prep and consultants, the calling in of connections and even alumni donations?

Broadly speaking, we have sold the American population that a college education is absolutely necessary for success, said Christine Lai, who, in addition to founding the Special Education Legal Fund, which provides support for families of children with special needs, also volunteers to do admissions interviews for her alma mater.

Upper-echelon families are particularly obsessed with name-brand schools, Lai and Boyer agreed.

Once, a mother told Boyer: My child has to apply to an Ivy or Ivy-like institution so that she can meet her future spouse and live the life she has been accustomed to. Another said her son had to attend a tier-one college or university so he can reach his goals faster because employers are more apt to hire graduates from top-tier schools.

Tesoriero observed in some cases one college being built up as the single place where a teen could achieve his or her goals, making the application process an ever-present source of tension and secrecy. Parents and their teens kept where they applied a secret to discourage competitive, cut-throat behavior, but the opacity among parents and students ramped up the possibility of bad feelings, she said.

As a society, from birth to 18, we are disproportionately tilted in this direction that college is the most important thing that were working toward and I dont think that that is healthy, she said. College is not the ultimate determinate of success or happiness in life.

Whole families bought into the college craze and were consumed by it, she said.

The parents, by and large, were just as much wrapped up in it as the kids were, Tesoriero said.

Kids pushed to attend a parents alma mater can face a particular battle. Unlike their parents, who enrolled in the given school when acceptance rates were five to 10 times higher, college-bound teens today have to be more competitive because the schools now have single-digit acceptance rates, Lai said.

What would really change the system is if people became disillusioned for the product, Lai said.

Another factor feeding the college frenzy is image: Parents care so deeply because it also reflects on them, Cashman said.

I also think that their childs trajectory or success or failure is seen as a reflection of them and their parenting as opposed to that child and their experience, she said.

But unless parents dial back their involvement, Boyer said, their children will not learn how to tackle problems on their own and are more likely to fail once they get to their parents dream school.

Instead, the job of the parent is to teach, guide and facilitate their childrens accomplishments, and accompany them, Cashman said.

Learn who your child is, she said.

jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com
HARTFORD  Three significant bills were passed out of committee Thursday: a minimum wage increase, limits on what employers can say to employees in the workplace, and the creation of a public health insurance option for small businesses.

The Labor and Public Employees Committee voted in favor of all three, mostly along party lines.

Two bills would raise the minimum wage from its current $10.10 to $15 an hour by January 2022. Another, supported by Gov. Ned Lamont, would increase the minimum wage to $15  but his bill would take a year longer to get to that goal, hitting the $15 mark in January 2023.

All five Republican members of the committee objected to increasing the minimum wage, while all nine Democratic lawmakers supported it.

State Rep. Richard Smith, R-New Fairfield, said the business owners in his community arent worried about increasing the minimum wage for the 30-year-old single mom whose working a minimum wage job. He said they dont want to increase the wage to support teenagers.

If you have to pay the student $15 an hour and you have to pay the mom $15 an hour theres only so much money at the end of the day, Smith said.

Rep. Joe Polletta, R-Watertown, said hes concerned about applying future increases on the Consumer Price Index once the state reaches $15 an hour.

I fear that with the CPI this minimum wage could get up to $20 an hour, Polletta said.

He said he also has concerns about hurting the employees theyre actually trying to help.

An estimated 330,000 Connecticut workers earn the minimum wage.

Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, said they are trying to give people more disposable income so the state can see more tax revenue. And in an era when the price of everything from rent to groceries continues to go up while the minimum wage stays at $10.10 an hour, how are we supposed to keep up?

She said the minimum wage is not a livable wage, but minimum wage service jobs are what have proliferated since the 2008 recession.

The committee also approved a captive audience bill that would limit what employers can say to employees in the workplace.

Former Attorney General George Jepsen tossed cold water on a similar captive audience bill in 2011 following an 11-hour debate in the House. Years later, Jepsen issued a formal opinion on April 26, 2018, that said similar legislation was pre-empted by federal law and warned lawmakers about passing it.

Legislators have declined to ask Attorney General William Tong for his opinion on the matter.

Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, asked why they wouldnt ask for an opinion.

Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, said she believes the language in the bill is legal.

We believe this language will stand up to pre-emption laws, Kushner said.

Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, disagreed.

To ignore the Attorney Generals definitive judgment is an abdication of our responsibility as legislators to uphold the law, Fasano said. Attorney General Jepsens opinion provides a clear analysis of the law that leaves no room for question. Any opinion to the contrary would certainly raise eyebrows.

All five Republicans voted against the measure while all nine Democrats voted in favor of it.

There was a little more bipartisan support for expanding Connecticuts state employee health insurance plan to include small businesses.

A bill that would allow businesses to join the Connecticut Partnership Plan offered by state Comptroller Kevin Lembo was approved 11-3.

Two similar bills that would expand the state health insurance pool to certain populations were held by the Insurance and Real Estate Committee and likely will appear on the agenda for their next meeting.
NORTH HAVEN  Funeral services and a memorial fund has been set up for Maureen Munzner, who was killed by a hit and run driver on Monday.

Munzner was walking on Ridge Road with her two children around 5:30 p.m. Monday when she was struck by a 2008 red Ford Fusion that did not stop. Munzner was pronounced dead a short time later.

The GoFundMe campaign - in memory of Munzner - will also help her husband, Steve and sons, Zachary and Alex.

The funds donated to this site will go directly to the Munzner family, primarily in support of Zachary and Alex for such things as education, summer camp programs, and support services, according to the site. As of early Friday afternoon, more than $8,000 had been raised.

We are all still quite in shock about the recent death of our beloved friend and longtime Spring Glen Church member Maureen Munzner. The outpouring of love shown to the Munzner family is a testament to the far-reaching impact Maureen had on our community, whether at work or at home, at church or at school. Anyone who saw the costumes she made for North Haven's recent production of Beauty & the Beast saw firsthand the skill, the creativity, the commitment, and the care of her generosity.

It will be good to gather together to mourn, to tell stories, to laugh, to cry, to sing, to pray.

Calling hours will be from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at North Haven Funeral Home, 36 Washington Ave.

The funeral will be at 10 a.m. Monday at Spring Glen Church, 1825 Whitney Ave., Hamden. Overflow parking is available on the south side of the church on Spring Glen Parkway and at Temple Beth Shalom.

Cash donations, and checks payable to "cash" with "Munzner Family" in the memo line, will be accepted at this service.

A reception with refreshments will follow in the Ball Room of the High Lane Club, 40 High Lane, North Haven.

According to her death notice, Maureen Munzner was born in New York on February 20, 1962 and was the daughter of Patricia A. Rogers Schwartz. Step-Daughter of Robert Schwartz, Sr. She was married to Steven Paul Munzner for 22 years.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the American Cancer Society, 825 Brook Street, I-91 Tech Ctr. #3, Rocky Hill, CT 06067.

On Thursday North Haven police said a short time after Munzner was struck, a man called 911 reporting he struck a deer on Mount Carmel Road with his 2008 red Ford Fusion. The vehicle had serious front-end damage and a smashed windshield.

The driver gave inconsistent stories regarding his travel pattern, police said in a statement Thursday afternoon.

Members of the South Central Connecticut Traffic Unit are coordinating efforts in the investigation.

The deceased victim and her family are owed an appropriate investigation, and our efforts will result in determining all of the facts associated with this tragedy.

The GoFundMe site is the official site of the family and Spring Glen Church, UCC, Sr. Pastor Jack Perkins Davidson. The originator is Ron Offutt, Sr. Trustee of Spring Glen Church.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 15)  President Rodrigo Duterte's order for the release of 150 days worth of water from Angat Dam to alleviate the water crisis is not possible, according to the government agency in charge of ensuring efficient supply of potable water.

The Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) on Friday said the President may have been misinformed.

"Actually pikon na rin sya, but ah, I think the recommendation that were given to him, are not the right recommendation," MWSS Administrator Reynaldo Velasco told reporters in a chance interview.

He said about 4,000 million liters of water are being released from Angat Dam per day, adding that "we have actually released all the water already that can be accommodated sa La Mesa Dam."

The National Water Resources Board, which manages Angat Dam, likewise said the current supply can last for the whole summer, but Manila Water's infrastructure can only take in a limited volume of water.

Duterte's order

These agencies issued the clarification after Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo on Friday said Duterte directed concessionaires Manila Water and Maynilad to immediately release of 150 days worth of water to Metro Manila and nearby provinces  by noontime.

"The President is directing the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) to demand from the Manila Water Company, Inc., Maynilad Water Services, Inc. and other responsible offices to release water from Angat Dam by noon time today, March 15, good for 150 days, in order to supply the affected areas in Metro Manila and deliver, as well as distribute sufficient water to the residents thereof," Panelo said in a statement.

Panelo also said that those who will fail to comply will feel the wrath of Duterte.

"Failure to act or comply with this directive, the President will personally go to them and make the responsible officers account for such failure," he said.

Velasco said he has since reached out to Malacanang to explain the problem, which he said stems from the failure of Manila Water to operate its water treatment plant in Cardona, Rizal by December last year. This could have augmented water supply for its consumers, he added.

On March 7, customers of Manila Water were surprised by an unannounced water interruption. Since then, its 1.2 million customers have been experiencing no water supply or low water pressure. The water concessionaire attributes the shortage to the decreasing water levels at the La Mesa reservoir in Quezon City due to the dry spell.

Solutions to the water crisis

Measures being undertaken to solve the problem include the sharing in supply of the two utility firms, Manila Water and Maynila. On Friday, Maynilad opened one of its valves in Quezon City to begin distributing its supply to Manila Water. It is currently allocating 50 million liters per day to Manila Water in a bid to help ease the supply gap.

"Kasama po yun sa concession agreement, na magshesharing ng water, in cases of emergency," said Ronaldo Padua, head of Maynilad's Water Supply Operations

The Manila Water is also cutting supply in areas where there is normal water supply to redirect to areas where there is no water at all.

"Nilolower po namin yung pressure, para po ma extend po natin yung supply sa mas maraming nacocover na area. At kailangan magsakripisyo po ng konti yung iba, para makinabang yung iba," Manila Water President and CEO Ferdinand dela Cruz said.

CNN Philippines' David Santos, Lara Tan, and Eimor Santos contributed to this report.
Gov. Ned Lamont and Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Katie Dykes said Friday Dominion Energy and Connecticuts two major electric utility companies, Eversource and United Illuminating, struck a deal Friday that will keep the companys Millstone nuclear facility in Waterford operating.

Word of the deal came hours before a deadline that Virginia-based Dominion had to notify New Englands regional electric grid operator, ISO-New England, whether or not the nuclear plant would be shut down. Under the terms of the agreement, Dominion will supply Eversource and UI with electric power generated at Millstone for a 10-year period.

The deal must still be approved by Connecticuts Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, which has 180 days to act on it. Ken Holt, a Dominion spokesman, said the date when Millstone begins supplying the power to the utilities and other details of the contract wont be released until PURA has ruled on the deal.

The contract is for 10 years and calls for Millstone to produce 9 million megawatt hours per year for UI and Eversource customers. Millstone currently provides about half of the electricity that Connecticut uses and 19 percent of the power used in New England, Holt said.

Dominion Energy had threatened to close Millstone if a deal could not be reached because the cost of natural gas has allowed power plants that operate on that fuel to run more cheaply than the aging nuclear plant, which is located on Long Island Sound.

Paul Koonce, president and chief executive officer of companys Power Generation Group, called the agreement a huge win for Connecticut, the region, and our colleagues at Millstone.

Not only does this preserve the vast majority of Connecticuts carbon-free electricity, it preserves good jobs for the 1,500 women and men who work at Millstone and keeps 4,000 other residents employed, Koonce said in a statement.

Company officials said in a statement the contract represents a modest financial uplift.

This result marks another significant milestone in Dominion Energys multi-year progression towards a more regulated and long-term contracted earnings profile and the resulting reduction in business risk, the companys statement said in part.

Lamont said the loss of Millstone would have been catastrophic for our state and our region.

The shutdown of the plant would have exposed the New England region to a nearly 25 percent increase in carbon emissions, increased risk of rolling blackouts, billions of dollars in power replacement costs, and the loss of more than 1,500 well-paying jobs, Lamont said in a statement. The deal the utilities have negotiated secures Millstones zero-carbon power for ten years, and reduces by nearly 50 percent the incremental ratepayer cost of the contract, as compared to the original bid selected.

Millstone was one of the winning bidders selected by DEEP officials late last year to meet Connecticuts future energy needs. But a deal between UI, Eversource Energy and Dominion still had to be reached and in-person negotiations didnt start until earlier this month and DEEP officials had given the two Connecticut utilities a mandate to reduce the costs associated with the original bid.

Lamont said he also has a commitment from all New England governors to evaluate regional mechanisms to help maintain critical nuclear and clean energy facilities.

luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com
NEW HAVEN  The city celebrated the return to housing in a portion of Wooster Square that 50 years ago became a commercial corridor that cut off the neighborhood from downtown.

Darren Seid of Epimoni and Peter Antoniou of Adam America were joined by city officials in a ceremonial groundbreaking at 87 Union St. Thursday where 299 apartments, that will include studios, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom units, will be constructed as well as dedicated parking.

The site, bound by Union Street, Fair Street and Olive Street, is the first development there in many decades, but it will be joined by others.

It was held up for awhile by a suit brought by the owners of the nearby Strouse-Adler Smoothie apartments at 78 Olive St.

Epimoni and Adam America bought the site for $10 million in 2017 from Petra Development and Davis Adam Realty, who submitted the original site plan for the development. Part of the design will be townhouses that will emulate the look of those already in historic Wooster Square.

The final project design was tweaked somewhat with the 6,000 square feet of ground floor retail space now facing Olive Street. The retail component is within walking distance of the CitySeed Farmers Market and Wooster Square Park.

The complex will feature such amenities as a pool, rooftop space and state of the art technologies.

Michael Piscitelli, interim economic development administrator, said the new housing will be a two-minute walk to the State Street train station and only a few blocks from Union Station.

He said the new residents will be located in one of the most culturally iconic neighborhoods anywhere in the Northeast  Wooster Square.

This development is only blocks away from one approved years ago for Chapel and Olive streets by Spinnaker that was hit with multiple suits by PMC Property Group, which owns the Smoothie apartments.

The suit against 87 Union St. disappeared fairly quickly when the courts ruled PMC had no standing to sue over this project.

Piscitelli said both developments were part of longtime planning in conjunction with the neighborhood which Alder Aaron Greenberg said goes back to 2014.

He said the sites are ground zero for businesses that are part of the innovation-based economy in New Haven.

Mayor Toni Harp said the market for apartments has been growing for downtown from Wooster Square to the Yale Medical School.

There is no question in my mind that this new project underscores how New Haven is becoming a self-contained urban oasis for thousands of new residents who want easy access to all these opportunities within walking distance of their homes and mass transit, Harp said.

I fell in love with New Haven the first time I visited it, Antoniou said.

Seid said it has been a delight to deal with the citys economic development staff and all the initiatives taken by the city years before they arrived.

You guys have been doing things here that have been drawing development and drawing spending, drawing investment and we are just happy to become part of it. The charm of this neighborhood is so unique. New Haven is unique in itself compared to any place in the country ... Wooster Square as well has its beautiful pocket of New Haven that is a delight to be working in, Seid said.

The project will soon have demolition permits to knock down the warehouses formerly used by Torroco, a plumbing supply company, and Turtle & Hughes, an electrical distributor.

Seid said the prices of the rentals will be close to those at 360 State Street and the Corsair on upper State Street. He said the entry price, however, to the complex will be lower than those two high-end apartments.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com; 203-641-2577
WALLINGFORD  Mayor Williams Dickson Jr. and several Republican state lawmakerswill rally outside Town Hall Saturday in opposition to efforts to legalize recreational use of marijuana in Connecticut.

The rally will begin at 11 a.m. and will be moved inside in the event of inclement weather. Dickinson, who is a Republican, will be joined by state Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, and state Reps. Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, and Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford.

A Wallingford anti-drug group, Coalition for a Better Wallingford has been waging a highly publicized campaign against efforts to make recreational marijuana legal. Earlier this month, they protested outside a North Haven outdoor advertising company that has a billboard on Interstate 91indicating marijuana can legally be purchased in neighboring Massachusetts.

Dickinson said the possibility of marijuana be made legal for recreational use is a public health issue.

The health impact of this has not been adequately investigated and now were leaving it to others at the federal level others to look into this, he said. What does the CDC (federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) say? What does the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) say?

Dickinson said the approval of recreational marijuana use as a legal activity could result in a public health scourge in the future. He said legal marijuana could create the same drug abuse problems that opioids have in society.

The prospect of legalizing use of recreational marijuana has drawn support from Democratic lawmakers in Greater New Haven.

Further, Democratic committee leaders announced Thursday that bills in three different committees would be the core of the General Assemblys wide-reaching legislation on the full legalization of marijuana for recreational use and retail sales. If enacted the legislation could yield an estimated $170 million a year in taxes, once it gets off the ground.

The bills would originate in the Judiciary, General Law, and Finance committees and include the erasure of criminal records for possession of small amounts of marijuana; a standard for driving while under the influence; and a tax rate for sales, with a chance for cannabis licenses to go to inner-city communities that have been impacted by the racially disproportionate law enforcement.

The legislation would also allow towns to prohibit or restrict marijuana sales.

Equity must be at the forefront of the conversation around the legalization of cannabis, said state Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, said in a statement Thursday.

Part of our job is to ensure that those who have been most impacted by the war on drugs are not left behind in this conversation, and instead are at the center of it. Measures like the expungement of criminal records for those with cannabis convictions are ways we can establish a policy that is equitable and just for all, Winfield said. Prioritizing equity applicants and sending a significant portion of the revenue raised from cannabis legalization back into the urban communities that bore the brunt of the unjust war on drugs are all important.

In looking to do this we realize that from time to time unforeseen issues will arise after legalization. In order to ensure all perspectives are taken into account as we move forward, we have also included members with a background in civil rights and justice matters on the Cannabis Control Commission.

Jeese Reynolds, a Democratic candidate for the Wallingford Town Council, said Friday he is in favor the legalization of recreational marijuana  with some caveats.

Any legalization of marijuana in Connecticut should be accompanied by limits on who can produce, a minimum age for purchase of the substance and set asides of some of the revenue the state gets from sale of the drug for treatment of opioid addiction and improvement of activities for youths, he said.

I think the concern here is misplaced and a little anachronistic, Reynolds said. The state needs money, the majority of people in the country think it should be legal, the governor campaigns on legalizing it and were going to draw a line in the sand? I know people who have died from alcohol addiction and opioid addiction and we tolerate both those both those things in society.

Hearst Connecticut Media reporter Ken Dixon contributed to this story. luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y.  Best-selling author Louise Penny regaled nearly 1,000 admirers with a first-person account of her internal and external struggles related to making it in the world of writing fiction during an event last week.

Penny is the author of the very popular Chief Inspector Gamache crime novels centered in a small Canadian village, not unlike the one she lives in outside of Montreal.

Her March 5 appearance in the Shenendehowa High School West auditorium filled nearly every seat with fans coming from as far away as Vermont, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

Penny is so popular the event received scarce publicity due to the limited seating and the high demand. Her appearance was made possible by the generosity of the Friends of the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Library.

In the hour-long presentation on becoming the author she had always sought to be, Penny had the room roaring with laughter practically from the moment she moved to the microphone.

Since getting her first book in the series, Still Life, published in 2005 she has produced 12 others in the series and one crime novella. The books have sold thousands of copies all over the world and resulted in one made-for-TV movie. But it wasnt always that way.

After making the move from journalism to writing fiction, she had five years of writers block, a description that brought an extended laugh from the audience.

Three would have been enough, but five? she said.

Like many authors, Penny grew up loving books. It was through them that she lost her fear of spiders, a circumstance she described as magic.

I learned that words can heal, so one had to choose words carefully, she said. From that moment I knew I wanted to be a writer, but my fear of spiders had been transferred to a fear of writing.

That fear of writing lingered deep inside her through 20 years as a journalist with the Canadian Broadcasting Company. It lingered inside her after leaving journalism to write fiction. What she didnt realize, she said last week, was that writing was, in the end, not magical but a process. Once she understood that the writers block was overcome and she dove in.

I thought if I just sat down it would come and if it didnt then I was doing something wrong, she said. I realized how much getting approval had affected my life, including writing. I decided I would try and if I failed I would have no regrets because I had tried.

Penny said she sat down to write a book she would want to read thinking that there were others out there who might feel the same way about what she had written. The result was Still Life.

My first book came out when I was 45, she said, so I had a lot of time to think about what a book tour would look like.

The line got a roar from the audience.

Layer by layer she revealed segments of her life in vivid detail, much to the delight of the audience.

She described the satisfaction of finishing her first book, the non-effect that achievement had on the local bookstore clerk, the dilemma of getting an agent and a publisher, and a book tour stop where no one showed up.

After completing Still Life and submitting it for a competition, Penny received an invitation to a writers conference in London. While there she and her late husband Michael spoke with publishers about taking her on. She also sought information on literary agents. After making a list they narrowed it to three names.

One refused to see me, the second was out, and the third was drunk, she said.

At a conference dinner that included a silent auction, she and another woman took an intense interest in an attractive scarf that was being auctioned. Both went to pick it up at the same time and neither would let go. After an exchange of identities and questions as to whether the other belonged there, Penny realized the woman at the other end of the scarf was the literary agent who had been unavailable. That woman eventually took her on as a client.

There are a lot of circumstances that had to have happened, ones Im not even aware of, that got me here standing in front of you all, Penny said from the Shen stage.

Her readers are devoted to her and the characters in her books.

She makes her characters so comfortable [that] you want to be part of that community; you want to be living there, said Christine Saplin. And when you come and meet her, you say, oh my goodness, no wonder, shes so personable, of the earth.

Its her characters, said another reader waiting in line for a signed book from the author. The way in which the members of the community treat each other and support each other, they are very Canadian.

Other readers shared why they enjoy reading her books.

I live near the Canadian border in Vermont and her writing is kind of relatable, said Ethel Emery of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. So, for me, its kind of personal in that way. Were kind of independent in Vermont, and the people in the village are kind of independent.

I read them because she connects on all levels, theres humanity, kindness, and there are difficult things that happen and they continue on, said Linda Fieldhouse. She hits the core of humanity, a struggling, loving, complex human person.

She writes so well that she puts you right into their minds, said Clifton Park resident Larry Syzdek. The people are all related to the community and they are very fascinating and all of it hinges on some flaw or a character trait that youd never get. Its common people doing common things in a most beautifully, loving way.
If Connecticut is to meet its self-imposed goals to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it will not happen via increased use of natural gas.

The threat of global climate change goes far beyond Connecticut, but it would be wrong to say we dont have a part to play in allaying its worst impacts. We have a responsibility to do all we can, because, as we have seen, the effects will be felt not only in future but are happening today, in the form of extreme weather, more severe storms and threats to coastal communities.

It will only get worse. Connecticut has made laws pledging a reduction in the kinds of emissions that cause global warming, and needs to increase its efforts. The state must move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. Technology is already available, and costs are dropping rapidly, but its up to the state to make the process go faster.

Natural gas was long considered by some to be safer for the environment as compared to coal or oil, but the difference, evidence has shown, is not enough to make a difference in climate change, and by some accounts may make matters worse.

As an important step, the state must eliminate a law that would put all citizens on the hook to pay for a new pipeline importing natural gas. There is not currently a plan for a pipeline, but according to legislation passed several years ago, the state can make such a move and charge the people for it.

A new pipeline isnt needed, and the state should remove the temptation to build one by passing the Pipeline Tax Repeal Bill.

In Massachusetts, a similar law that would have required all ratepayers  not just those who use natural gas  pay for a new pipeline was struck down. That would put the burden of paying for a new pipeline, should it ever arise, even more on the backs of Connecticut residents. The Legislature should ensure it never comes to that.

The mix of energy sources Connecticut relies on to keep the lights burning has changed quickly in recent years. The demand for more natural gas is down and is likely to keep declining, even as new natural-gas-burning plants continue to open and be proposed. The state needs to put a halt to that trend, understand that natural gas is not the way of the future, and close off any path toward importing even more fossil fuels.

As the sources of Connecticuts energy have changed, so too has efficiency increased. Electric cars still are rare today, but will become more common in years to come. Were using less energy and finding better ways to procure it. There is vast potential to increase our production from wind-powered facilities in Long Island Sound.

The state doesnt need a new pipeline, and the ability to charge state residents for it should be rescinded.
As I write this, I am just back from the Connecticut State Legislature, where I gave testimony in support of a soda tax proposed by our Governor. Before answering the questions (and provocations) of legislators (again) both favorably and ill-disposed to the measure, I had roughly 3 minutes to make my case. I lay it out for you below, along with the embellishments that did not fit in so tight a space.

Of punishment, and crime

Well, to be fair, a modest tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, be it an excise tax (as I favor), or a sales tax (as the current legislative language under consideration here in CT posits) involves neither punishment, nor crime. But the references are germane just the same, because of an expression we all know: let the punishment fit the crime.

Excise taxes are applied when products are sold at the potential expense of the well-being of those buying them. The best-known examples are alcohol and tobacco. I dont see many people now, at any position on the political spectrum, arguing that taxes on tobacco should be revoked. Those taxes  along with actual punishment of tobacco companies for actual crimes  have raised revenue put to good use advancing public health. And, perhaps more importantly, they played an important role in reducing smoking rates.

If you think the Big Soda playbook is much different from the Big Tobacco playbook, think again. The parallels are overwhelming, as laid out in copious detail in Soda Politics, a book by NYU professor Marion Nestle.

Connecticut, like the rest of the United States, is awash in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic disease in adults and children alike, and almost none of it needs to happen. These modern plagues are much fueled by empty calories and added sugar that is both a scourge in its own right, and a goad to appetite, causing more over-consumption, and more obesity. While far from the only source of empty calories and added sugar, soda is decisively in the vanguard. A tax applied here is a modest response to a well-established threat, and well aligned with precedent and the relevant lessons of history.

Two arguments for

The two primary arguments for a soda tax are that (1) it will raise revenue that can, and in my view should, be used for public health programming aimed at adding years to lives, and life to years; and (2) it works to dissuade people from drinking quite so much soda.

Connecticut is not inventing this wheel. Several cities in California; Boulder, Colorado; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and other countries have instituted soda taxes. Revenue goes up, and soda consumption goes down every time. There are lots of ways to spin the data, or climb a tree to pick a nit off a leaf while overlooking the forest, but that really is the gist: where soda taxes are passed, revenue is garnered, and soda consumption declines.

Two argument against the two main arguments against

Those opposed to a soda tax always raise two main arguments, as they did in response to my testimony today. The first, and I think lesser, because it is falsifiable with data, is that soda taxes hurt business. The second is that soda taxes are regressive, i.e., impose the greatest burden on those least able to pay. I gave what I consider to be the very robust rebuttals to both today.

As noted, Connecticut is not inventing this concept; its been done. And overall, the evidence makes clear that business do not suffer. Its not as if people stop getting thirsty, drinking, or shopping because of an excise tax on soda. If the tax doesnt deter them, they keep buying soda anyway, paying just a bit more if the manufacturers pass along the costs. If the cost does deter them they drink something else. There is no evidence of anyone, anywhere, ever suffering thirst as a result of a soda tax. Really.

When people drink something else, they often buy the something else  teas, waters, seltzers, and so on  from the same companies selling the soda. One of the salient trends in the beverage industry is merger and acquisition because smart people run big companies, and they can read the writing on the wall. As soda rightly acquires its reputation as heir to the ills of tobacco, more and more informed people are saying: no, thanks. Big beverage companies would much prefer selling them something they do want to drink, than losing their business. So they have long been acquiring companies that make and sell better alternatives. As just one example: while it operates rather independently, Honest Tea is owned by Coca Cola. Theres a lot of that going around.

Lets leave it there: soda taxes dont hurt business.

Nor, in my view, are they regressive  because they are much less regressive than obesity and diabetes and all the other epidemiologic mayhem that disproportionately assaults disadvantaged communities. This has been the focus of my lab, the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, these past 20 years: health disparities here in CT. I know this space very intimately, and its a fact that fast food, junk food, and soda are marketed and sold preferentially in communities of lesser economic means. Its a fact of epidemiology that the modern plagues of obesity and diabetes preferentially target these same communities. The costs of these conditions, in both dollar and human terms, is monumentally greater than the pennies involved in the proposed tax. To whatever degree a soda tax helps to right these wrongs, it is the very opposite of regressive; it is anti-regressive. It helps to level a very tilted playing field.

Of Taxes, Carrots, and Stick

Finally, some comments I had no time to make at the Capitol today. For starters, I dont like taxes. I pay them like everybody else (well, almost everybody else, apparently)  and they are no fun at all. When used to nudge behavior, they are stick, not carrot.

The things we say about carrots and sticks all come to us from the world of horses. Horses love carrots, and the idea is that you can cajole them into many of the things you might want them to do (famously, drinking not included) with the offer of that orange, crunchy treat. Horses, understandably, dont like being whacked with a stick (riding crop), but that rebuke can, as well, dissuade them from untoward behavior, or compel a preferred alternative. So, in general, we speak of carrots and sticks as alternative means of nudging horses toward some desired behavior. We use the same expression, metaphorically, when referring to ourselves.

As a health promotion expert who has spent years studying behavior change methods, this is of general and professional interest to me. But it is of rather more intimate interest to me, too, because I have a horse. Troubadour and I have at this point spent countless hours, many in the company of others, but most of them alone together riding the fields and forests of Bridgewater (a gem in Connecticuts rural crown). Troubadour is my horse  my mighty friend  and I love him.

Accordingly, I much prefer carrots to sticks, as does he, and our relationship is very much oriented that way. We talk about carrots quite a bit (well, I talk, and he mostly listens  although if we allow that the various angulations of a horses ear constitute communication, he does reply), and he always gets a batch after a ride. We both like that.

I do, however, carry a stick  much as I rarely use it. The simple fact is, Troubadour is roughly 1,300 lbs of muscle prone to spook (as all horses are, especially the smart ones) at every unexpected sound, sight, or shadow. He could quite readily kill me by accident. Good riding is the best defense, but occasionally, a smart application of the stick is the most reliable remedy.

In public health, my attitude is much the same. I prefer carrots all around.

But food companies, including those that sell us sugary beverages none of us needs, methodically design products to be all but addictive. An excise tax is the smart application of a stick to mitigate harm. That harm is rampant obesity and diabetes in adults and children alike with which the wares of Big Soda are incontrovertibly linked.

A 1,300-pound mountain of equine muscle with a relatively small brain in charge of it all can kill you, even by accident. A large company with a relatively small conscience and a voracious appetite for profit can kill you, too, albeit slower, and arguably, on purpose. The judicious application of a stick may be warranted for safety in both cases.

Dr. David L. Katz, author, The Truth about Food. All book proceeds go to support the True Health Initiative, a federally authorized 501c3 nonprofit.
After three decades and untold sums spent on development, HondaJet has hit the skies, winning market share as the worlds bestselling small business jet.

Creating a Global Bestseller

For the second year running, the Greensboro, North Carolinabased Honda Aircraft Companys HondaJet has won the title of the top-selling small business jet on earth. The company sold 37 aircraft in 2018, putting it in first place in its class, a repeat of its first-place finish in 2017 with sales of 43 aircraft. Cessna and a handful of other aircraft manufacturers had traditionally led the market for this class of jet until HondaJet, an offshoot of motorcycle and auto manufacturer Honda Motor Company, came along and vaulted to the top position.

HondaJets most remarkable feature is its over-the-wing engine mount configuration. By contrast, most other business jets engines are attached to the fuselage. HondaJets revolutionary design, which improves aerodynamic performance and fuel efficiency, made it possible to increase the aircrafts range and speed. Mounting the engines over the wings also maximizes internal space and reduces in-cabin noise and vibration.





Another point in HondaJets favor is greatly reduced pilot workload, effected through the use of touchscreens similar to those for smartphones. The touchscreen makes flying intuitive by allowing the pilot to select icons and other indicators at the touch of a finger.





But the road to the top spot for Hondas aviation business was long and hard. At times, there was even talk of scaling back the enterprise or shutting it down entirely.

Scaling Back After the Bubble

No story of HondaJets success can begin without mentioning Honda Aircraft Company President and CEO Fujino Michimasa. In 1986, three years after he began working for Honda, Fujino was assigned to the companys Fundamental Technology Research Center in Wako, just outside Tokyo. Although Fujino had earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Tokyo, he had decided to join an automaker, so this personnel assignment was a surprise. Little did he know that he would spend his career working on Hondas aircraft business.

Fujino began research activities in earnest at Mississippi State Universitys Raspet Flight Research Laboratory. During his time there, he created two experimental aircraft. But the bursting of Japans asset speculation bubble in the early 1990s changed the financial picture for Honda, which decided it could no longer devote generous financial resources to developing an aircraft. The research project was scaled back; in 1996 Fujino and the other overseas members of the research team were recalled to Japan, and the staff in Japan were assigned to other divisions. That should, by all rights, have spelled the end of the road for Hondas foray into the aircraft business.

Inspiration in the Middle of the Night

As Fujino recalls, he was jolted out of a sound sleep, sometime toward the end of 1996 or early 1997, by a flash of inspiration. With no notepaper handy, he sketched out his ideathe over-the-wing engine mount configurationon the back of a calendar. Fujino may not have known it then, but the HondaJet was born in that instant.



Fujino sketched his idea for the over-the-wing engine mount configuration on the back of a calendar. (Courtesy of Honda Aircraft Company)

In the fall of 1997, Fujino, still in his thirties, by chance got to talk informally with Kawamoto Nobuhiko, then Honda Motors president. He took the opportunity to expound on the importance of Hondas continuing in the aircraft business. Fujinos passion must have struck a chord with Kawamoto, because he instructed the young engineer to bring the matter up at a management meeting. At the meeting, Fujino got approval to resume development of a prototype aircraft and was named project leader. Hondas dream of reaching for the sky had been granted a reprieve.

A Successful First Flight

Fujino returned to the United States, where he threw himself once more into aircraft development and design. The first successful test flight of the experimental craft, which flew for one hour, took place in December 2003 at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro.

But Hondas management had decided that the aircraft would not be commercialized. At the time, managers viewed the aircraft business as pure research intended to develop technologies that could be applied to automobiles. According to Honda, many within the company were opposed to commercializing the aircraft, foreseeing huge problems with certification, production, sales, and aftersales service and anticipating formidable barriers to market entry.

A Chance Encounter

A downhearted Fujino took time off and went to the Bahamas for a vacation. One day, as he was breakfasting with his family, an American man sitting at the next table remarked on how adorable his children were. As the two men chatted, the American commented that he had traveled to the Bahamas on his business jet. At that point, Fujino revealed that he was working on developing aircraft for Honda.

The American replied that he had read a news article about HondaJet and remarked, The HondaJet is really cool. If you ever start selling it, I will definitely buy one, so let me be the first to know. Those words gave Fujino much-needed encouragement.

Although the company had no plans to commercialize the aircraft, flight testing continued. The HondaJet was first unveiled at an air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July 2005. In front of several thousand spectators, the aircraft, with its innovative over-the-wing engine mount design, made a definite splash. But despite this, the company still viewed the aircraft as a means of demonstrating its technological prowess to the world, rather than something to actually market.

Selling Like Hotcakes

A change in fortune occurred in March 2006. After a personal appeal from Fujino, Fukui Takeo, Hondas president at the time, agreed to take steps to commercialize the aircraft. In October the same year, Honda exhibited the HondaJet at the National Business Aviation Associations business aviation show in Orlando, Florida, and began taking orders. The company promptly received orders for over 100 aircraftthe jet, in Fujinos words, sold like hotcakes. It was a sweet reward for all the years he spent persevering in research and advocating for his creation.

Fujino was also in for another surprise. Hearing someone call his name, he turned to see the man he had met in the Bahamas. Do you remember me? I came today because I told you I would definitely buy your plane, he said, and signed a purchase order on the spot.

No matter how well an aircraft performs, though, no sales can go through without type certification. Honda obtained this from the Federal Aviation Administration in December 2015, paving the way for final delivery of the aircraft to customers, nine long years after orders had initially been received.

Fujino, Engineer cum Manager

Of course, success was not due entirely to Fujinos efforts. At an August 2018 press conference at the Japan National Press Club, Fujino remarked that he kept meetings to a minimum in order to get the most out of his team. Initially, said Fujino, all team members gathered regularly, but the meetings soon started to feel like a chore and no new ideas were being generated. Thats when he changed his management style, reducing meetings to the bare minimum and tasking team members with gathering information on their own instead. In doing so, he succeeded in creating an environment conducive to thinking creatively.

Today, when the original 40-strong team has grown to 1,800 people, Fujino admits that its hard to run the company without meetings. But according to him, whats important is to keep things flexible and practical. He has learned that shepherding a project from research and development through to sales requires capabilities not just as an engineer but also as a manager, supervising employees and keeping track of everything that goes on within the organization.





Passing On the Dream

For Honda Soichiro, airplanes had always been a dream. As a boy, he had reportedly been fascinated by the aerial exploits of the stunt pilot Art Smith, who had come to Japan for exhibition flights. Fujino only met the Honda Motor Company founder oncean encounter made all the more memorable by the bright red Hawaiian shirt the legendary inventor was wearingin the mens room at the companys research center in Wako.

Fujinos boss had warned him never to mention the aircraft project to Honda. At the time, Honda had already retired from all executive positions. But everyone knew that he loved aircraft, and they worried that he might insist on resuming an active role if he got wind of the aircraft development project. Fujino, as instructed by his boss, never said a word.

Two years later, in 1991, Honda Soichiro died at the age of 84. Thirty years have gone by since then, and today HondaJet aircraft are flying around the world. Although Fujino never exchanged a word with Honda, the latters dream may have been passed on during that chance meeting.

(Originally written in Japanese. Banner photo: The Elite, the newest HondaJet model, went on sale in 2018. Photo courtesy of Honda.)
A convicted drug dealer who had heroin stamped body count appeared in federal court Thursday to face charges she peddled the drugs that killed a man in Atlantic City, according to officials and court papers.

Rajeri Curry, 30, was charged with possession with the intent to distribute heroin and distribution of heroin and fentanyl that resulted in a death, New Jersey U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said in a statement. A judge in Newark federal court ordered Curry detained without bail after a hearing.

The charges stem from the June 2018 death of a 30-year-old man, who was discovered unconscious in the drivers seat of a car at an Atlantic City restaurant, according to court documents. An autopsy found he died at the scene from the combined adverse effects of heroin and fentanyl.

Security camera footage showed Curry selling heroin to the man in a parking lot meeting near the restaurant shortly before he died, a criminal complaint stated.

Authorities also recovered wax folds containing heroin and fentanyl in the mans car, an investigator working for a Drug Enforcement Administration task force wrote in the complaint. The folds were marked body count, and police also discovered an open bag of syringes on the man.

Wax folds of heroin with the same stamp were seized from Currys jacket pocket during a January 2018 search of her Atlantic City home, according to the complaint. In all, officers seized 300 wax folds of the drug.

Investigators also recovered text messages from Curry about the mans death after she was arrested in June 2018, court documents said. In one message, Curry asks another person to come to the dead mans viewing with her.

Evidence recovered in the course of this investigation confirmed that Curry attended the victims viewing, an officer wrote in the complaint.

The Atlantic County Prosecutors Office charged Curry last year in the death and on drug distribution charges. She pleaded not guilty in that case.

According to court documents, Curry was convicted in Atlantic County on state drug distribution-related charges in 2008 and July 2011.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Federal authorities charged seven New Jersey residents including a cop and multiple firefighters Friday and accused them of key roles in a vast $50 million prescription fraud scheme that enlisted government and school employees to seek unnecessary speciality medications for ailments including pain, scarring, fungal and libido problems.

More than a dozen people have previously been charged in the expanding probe of prescriptions for compounded medications, which are individually made for patients a much higher costs. The latest roundup on Friday by FBI targeted the alleged ringleaders and those who helped recruit government and school workers into the scam, authorities said.

The 50-count indictment unsealed shortly after the arrests names:

William Hickman, 42, of Northfield

Sara Hickman, 42, of Northfield

Thomas Schallus, 42, of Northfield

Thomas Sher, 46, all of Northfield

Brian Pugh, 41, of Absecon

John Sher, 37, of Margate City

Christopher Broccoli, 47, of West Deptford

They all face charges of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud and with individual acts of health care fraud and wire fraud, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.

William Hickman and Sara Hickman ran Atlantic County-based Boardwalk Medical, which they used to funnel the prescriptions to a compounding pharmacy in Louisiana, authorities said.

The Hickmans then had Pugh and other conspirators recruit individuals who had coverage for compounded medications, and those conspirators found additional recruiters, including Thomas Schallus, John Sher, Thomas Sher, and Christopher Broccoli, the U.S. Attorneys Office said in a statement.

Schallus is a Ventnor police officer, John and Thomas Sher are Margate firefighters and Broccoli is a Camden firefighter, according to public records. The seven are expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Camden Friday afternoon

The scam, which ran from July 2014 and April 2016, led to millions in kickbacks, authorities said.

After the prescriptions were filled, the Compounding Pharmacy paid Boardwalk Medical a percentage of each prescription filled and paid by the Pharmacy Benefits Administrator, the U.S. Attorneys Office said. The Pharmacy Benefits Administrator paid Compounding Pharmacy over $50 million for compounded medications, and the Compounding Pharmacy paid William Hickman and Sara Hickman over $26 million for prescriptions obtained by the conspiracy. The Hickmans paid a portion of that amount to Pugh, Schallus, John Sher, Thomas Sher, Christopher Broccoli, and other conspirators.

More than a dozen people previously have been charged in the scam and some have already pleaded guilty.

The Hickmans and Pugh face additional charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and individual acts of money laundering, authorities said.

6 people led out of the FBIs office in Northfield after surrendering this morning. Indictments in wide reaching prescription fraud investigation involving public employees expected to be unsealed today. @NBCPhiladelphia pic.twitter.com/rEpK62cer9  Ted Greenberg (@tedgreenbergNBC) March 15, 2019

Compounded medications are made by pharmacists to meet the specific needs of individual patients. While lacking approval from the Food and Drug Administration, the medications still require prescription from a physician, and are often used when a patient cannot take FDA-approved medications. This can happen when someone is allergic to a specific ingredient.

The drugs made in Louisiana were eligible for thousands of dollars in reimbursements for a one-month supply, authorities said. Those involved in the alleged scheme learned that some in New Jersey, including local government employees, educators, firefighters, police officers and New Jersey State Police troopers had insurance that covered these speciality medications, as did some other insurance plans.

Dr. John Gaffney, who did not see the patients, signed the prescriptions, authorities said. They were faxed to the pharmacy, which filled the prescriptions and billed the Pharmacy Benefits Administrator, authorities said.

Gaffney was paid for signing the fraudulent prescriptions, and previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud.

Attorneys for the Hickmans said they would fight the charges.

Mr. Hickman is innocent and we are eager to contest these charges in a court of law, Samuel Moulthrop and Ryan Magee said in an emailed statement. We are confident that Mr. Hickman will be exonerated after trial.

Mrs. Hickman denies the charges against her, attorneys Lee Vartan and Jenny Chung said in a separate emailed statement. She had no substantive role in anything alleged by the government, and will be fully vindicated in court.

The charges of health care fraud and wire conspiracy carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison as well as a $250,000 fine.

This story has been updated to include comment from the Hickmans attorneys.

Amanda Hoover can be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey would run the the airport near Atlantic City if one top lawmaker gets his wish.

Senate President Steve Sweeney declined to comment, but legislative workers with knowledge of the situation said the Sweeney is in favor of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey taking control of the Atlantic City International Airport, currently being run by the South Jersey Transportation Authority (SJTA). They point to the success of Stewart Airport, a small Port Authority-run airport in New Windsor, New York as an example of the type of turn-around that could be just the boost the small city airport  with only one carrier  needs.

In addition to Stewart Airport, the other airports the Port Authority operates that regularly handles commercial flights currently includes JFK International and LaGuardia Airports in New York and Newark Liberty in New Jersey. The Port Authority had a previous agreement with the SJTA to provide operational support for the air facility for $500,000 a year. The deal has since ended.

However, SJTA officials said there are no active discussions with the Port Authority, which was first reported by The Press of Atlantic City.

Contrary to recent media accounts, the South Jersey Transportation Authority (SJTA), owner/operator of the Atlantic City International Airport (ACY) has not been in nor is in any active discussions with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for their purchase of the airport, SJTA communications director Mark Amorosi said in a statement.

Port Authority Chairman Kevin OToole was not immediately available for comment.

Another person who is on board with the takeover is U.S. Congressman Jeff Van Drew D-NJ. Van Drew stated he talked with Sweeney about the takeover and both feel as if it is a good idea. Van Drew also sent a letter to OToole, advocating for the proposal.

For a host of reasons, it would be good for South Jersey, and it would create jobs, Van Drew said. The devil is in the details. Like anything else, it has to be worked out, but I have been supportive of it.

Van Drew said the idea of a Port Authority takeover had been around for a few years, but it never gained any traction.

Theres no sense in not trying because its a tremendous facility with the ability to host very large planes and could host a number of planes, the congressman said. This is a big airport, and it could be very productive for the area. I think its incumbent upon us to look at every possible way of increasing the economic viability of South Jersey.

According to a spokeswoman for the Airports Council International Worldwide Airport Traffic Report, in 2018, the Atlantic City Airport ranked 101st out of 169 airports in the country (676th worldwide) in passenger traffic, having 1,164,937 passengers utilize the facility. The number was a 5.7 percent increase from 2017.

So far, according to the SJTAs January 2019 monthly statement, the number of passengers that went through the airport was up 8.3 percent, with 93,293 people flying on commercial routes.

Currently, Spirit Airlines is the only commercial airline that regularly flies out of the airport. Previously, routes serviced by airlines such as United Airlines and Air Canada have operated out of the resort town, but service was eventually stopped.

In every market we serve, we continually review demand for the service, and our Atlantic City routes were no longer sustainable. We are always evaluating our network and how we can best serve our customers in the future, a spokesman for United Airlines said in a statement to NJ Advance Media.

In statements and responses made to NJ Advance Media, Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, and Allegiant Air said they were currently not looking at bringing service to Atlantic City. JetBlue said the airline had no decisions regarding Atlantic City to announce at this time. Delta Airlines declined to comment, stating any hypothetical discussion of potential future plans for new routes or flights is viewed very unfavorably by federal government agencies who regulate and oversee the airline industry.

In 2011, the Atlantic City Airport underwent a $27 million terminal expansion, adding 75,000 square feet that created an international gateway, additional passenger gates, baggage carousel improvements and retail space.

This has not stopped the SJTA from continuing to try to lure another airline into the region.

We continue to communicate with various airlines regarding different cities, Amorosi said in a previous statement. Our efforts to secure additional air service, whether it is with our current partner, Spirit Airlines, or other carriers, includes an attractive incentive program and it is an ongoing process.

Chris Franklin can be reached at cfranklin@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @cfranklinnews or on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us.nj.com/tips
A controversial new set of rules designed to improve trust between New Jersey police and immigrant communities goes into effect Friday, though not everyone is happy about the changes.

The sweeping new procedures, unveiled in November by State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, outline when the states 36,000 police officers can ask people about their immigration status and cut back on cases where police can cooperate with federal Immigration agents. The rules also limit when county jails can detain prisoners who are in the country illegally.

Grewal said the directive does not mean immigrants get a free pass if they break the law. But the new rules will make it clear local police officers are not immigration agents and undocumented immigrants should not fear reporting crimes or cooperating with police.

"No law-abiding resident of this great state should live in fear that a routine traffic stop by local police will result in his or her deportation from this country, Grewal said when he introduced the directive.

ICE officials said the directive makes it harder for immigration agents to do their jobs in New Jersey if local police are forbidden from helping the federal agency in some cases.

When asked about Fridays deadline for local police to put the new rules into effect, an ICE spokesman referred to a statement from November.

Ultimately, this directive shields certain criminal aliens, creating a state-sanctioned haven for those seeking to evade federal authorities, all at the expense of the safety and security of the very people the New Jersey Attorney General is charged with protecting, Matthew Albence, an ICE deputy director, said in the statement.

Here are some of the new rules going into effect today:

1. No asking about immigration status, unless its relevant to an investigation of a serious crime.

The new rules say local and state police cant stop, question, arrest, search or detain an immigrant because they suspect they are living in the U.S. illegally. Police cant ask about immigration status unless they are investigating a serious crime where it is relevant to the offense.

2. No helping with ICE raids.

New Jersey police officers cant participate in ICE operations or raids involving civil immigration cases. Local police are also forbidden from giving ICE access to their databases, equipment, office space or other law enforcement resources in those cases. However, local police and ICE can still work together in emergency situations and on joint task forces.

3. Corrections officers can only hold prisoners for ICE in limited circumstances.

New Jersey correction officers are forbidden from allowing ICE agents to interview people detained on criminal charges unless the detainee had consulted a lawyer and signed a consent form.

New Jersey jails also can't honor an ICE "immigration detainer" -- a request that the jail hold an immigrant until ICE can pick him or her up -- unless the detainee has been charged with or convicted of a serious crime or has a pending deportation order from a judge.

ICE officials have protested this practice and repeatedly pointed out cases where undocumented immigrants who committed minor crimes were let out of New Jersey county jails despite requests by ICE that they be held until immigration agents could pick them up.

That means ICE agents will be forced to conduct more raids and arrests of immigrants in their neighborhoods and workplaces, ICE officials warned last year.

As a result of limited cooperation with local and state authorities, ICE will have no choice but to conduct at-large arrests in local neighborhoods and at worksites, which will inevitably result in additional collateral arrests, instead of focusing on arrests at jails and prisons where transfers are safer for ICE officers and the community, ICE officials said in a statement.

4. Prosecutors cant discredit witnesses in court based on their immigration status.

New Jersey prosecutors are forbidden from saying witnesses in court lack credibility because they are immigrants living in the country illegally.

Prosecutors also can't ask a judge to hold someone charged with a crime in jail before a trial solely because they are unauthorized immigrants.

5. Law enforcement agencies have to help unauthorized immigrants apply for visas.

All police departments, prosector's offices and law enforcement agencies must develop procedures to help victims and witnesses living in the country illegally to apply for special visas. The T-Visas and U-Visas give unauthorized immigrants a special immigration status for helping with law enforcement investigations.

6. No more making side deals with ICE to deputize local police as immigration officers.

The directive prohibits New Jersey police departments and law enforcement agencies from entering or renewing deals -- called Section 287(g) agreements -- with ICE without the attorney general's permission.

The deals allow local and county police departments to deputize their officers to essentially act as ICE agents and enforce federal immigration laws. Cape May, Salem and Monmouth counties previously had the deals.

However, the new rule does not affect counties, including Essex and Bergen, that have lucrative deals to house ICE detainees in their county jails. Those deals can stand, if the counties choose to continue them, the attorney general said.

7. Report every instance where cops helped ICE.

All state, county and local police departments and agencies need to keep track of every case where they assist federal immigration authorities and report them to the attorney generals office.

That should include every case where New Jersey's county jails held prisoners accused of serious crimes on ICE detainers so they could be picked up by immigration agents.

The attorney general plans to issue an annual report online showing how often local and state law enforcement agencies help ICE.

Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyHeyboer. Find her at KellyHeyboerReporter on Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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The Cumberland County man who stabbed his estranged wife nearly 90 times, killing her in front of their young son just a week before Christmas in 2016, was sentenced Friday to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Jeremiah E. Monell showed no emotion as Superior Court Judge Cristen P. DArrigo levied the sentence in the brutal killing of Tara OShea-Watson at her Commercial Township home.

OShea-Watsons son, who was 12 at the time of the killing, cried and hugged a family member as a statement he wrote was read to the court.

She was honest, loyal and protective," he said. "She was an awesome person.

He spoke of fond memories, including how his mother would wake up at the crack of dawn to make breakfast for her family and say good morning. I miss hearing those words, he said.

During the trial that led to Monells murder conviction in January, the teen testified about witnessing the crime and crying himself to sleep that night.

I think youre right where you belong, the son told his father Friday, noting that he can no longer hurt OShea-Watson or her children.

Loretta Anderson, OShea-Watsons sister, held back tears as she addressed the court.

How can I have closure when this pain will be with me forever," Anderson said. "You have taken from me a sister and from my mother a child. The worst thing is, you have taken from your own children the most important of all their bonds. You took their mother. You brutally took her life with no remorse.

I believe that after today, the only real closure is that Tara will no longer live in fear of you. She is at peace.

Monell remained on the loose for two weeks before he was arrested in Atlantic County for the crime.

Tara O'Shea-Watson was killed in Commercial Township on Monday, Dec. 19, 2016. (Submitted photo)

Prior to his trial, he rejected a plea deal under which he would have faced 30 years to life.

Monell decided not to testify in his own defense.

OShea-Watson, 35, had told friends Monell was abusive to her and that she was planning to take her kids and flee to Tennessee, where her mother lives. They were still married but living separately.

Monell allegedly assaulted OShea-Watson at her home in April 2016 and she obtained a restraining order against him. He was indicted on a domestic violence charged In August of that year, but the charges were dismissed at OShea-Watsons request.

A restraining order was in place at the time of the killing and Monell had a history of domestic violence, DArrigo noted Friday.

Emily OShea, the victims mother, told the court it was time for Monell to pay for his crimes.

Thank God you are going where you can never harm another person, she said. Youre finally going to answer for all of the evil, lying, cheating, stealing, cruel and abusive things you have done.

Why couldnt you just let her and the children go?

Public defender Nathan Perry said his client regretted his actions.

I know that he is very contrite, Perry told the judge. Theres no way to unring the bell. Theres no way to go back in time. If we could do that, I think that he would have pursued a decidedly different course.

He also spoke about his clients need for mental health treatment.

Emotionally and mentally, theres some underlying disturbance that needs to receive some treatment and hopefully through time in the state system hell be able to receive the benefits of some of that treatment.

21 Jeremiah Monell sentenced to life in prison for murder of estranged wife, March 15, 2019

Ed Monell, the defendants father, addressed the court prior to sentencing and asked for his sons forgiveness.

You didnt aways see a godly example in me as a dad and as a husband, he said. Me and mom love you. I failed in a lot of ways and Im sorry for that.

Monell nodded to his father.

Prosecutors presented evidence including two blooded knives and blood-stained clothing during the trial. Police investigators offered extensive testimony about evidence found at the scene, including Monells bloody palm print on the handle of one of the knives.

Monell was suspicious of his estranged wife, prosecutors said, and witnesses testified that he screamed at her outside of the victims trailer in the Laurel Lake community on the night she was killed.

The son testified that he saw his father choking his mother on the living room floor and heard her say, Let me die in peace.

Monell then retrieved a knife from the kitchen and repeatedly stabbed the woman. When the child awoke the next morning, he grabbed his younger sister and ran to a neighbors house for help.

When asked by the judge if he had anything to say Friday, Monell declined.

I came here today to be sentenced and Im ready for that, he replied. With that, DArrigo sentenced Monell to life without parole.

Speaking after the sentencing, Emily OShea talked about how she would like to see laws on domestic violence changed.

I think a second count of domestic assault should be a permanent restraining order and he shouldnt even have visitation rights, she said. That was the loophole that got him what he wanted. If shed have been in Tennessee, it wouldnt have happened. He had visitation rights. That was their loophole. It needs to be stopped.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us: nj.com/tips.

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The Wayne public school district is taking another try at starting a full-day kindergarten program, despite twice being blocked by voters.

Superintendent Mark Toback outlined on Thursday night a three-year, $4.199 million plan for implementing full-day kindergarten starting in the 2021-22 school year.

The first phase, totaling $1.3 million, is included in the K-12 districts proposed $172.6 million budget for the 2019-20 school year.

This budget is a pathway to full-day kindergarten. Thats a pretty exciting thing to think about. Its something that is within our grasp, Toback said at the school board meeting.

While most school districts in New Jersey offer full-day kindergarten, it is not required under state law. Bills have been introduced in the New Jersey Senate and Assembly, dating to 2016, that would mandate full-day kindergarten in all districts.

For some holdouts, full-day kindergarten is a tough sell. In Hillsborough in Somerset County, a referendum that would have established a full-day kindergarten program was defeated - 4,432 to 3,003 - on Tuesday.

In Wayne, which has a population of 54,000, voters rejected full-day kindergarten in successive referendums in 2015 and 2016. The K-12 district currently offers a wrap-around program in which parents may enroll their children in a program roughly the equivalent of full-day kindergarten, at a cost of $250 per month.

Toback, in discussing the three-year plan, said it would begin by transforming the Preakness Library annex into an early childhood center. The $1.3 million slated in the next budget would be covered via $900,000 in employee medical benefits savings, and $400,000 in reallocated capital project funds.

Pre-kindergarten students would begin using the new center in the 2020-21 school year, and the $1.156 million slated for that years budget would also include classroom work aimed at accommodating full-day kindergarten.

Full-day kindergarten would launch in the 2021-22 school year at all schools, at a cost of $1.742 million.

Toback cautioned that potential obstacles would loom even if the board approves the first part of the plan. Going to full-day kindergarten hinges on continued increases in state aid - Wayne recently received an additional $567,000 - in addition to avoiding financial setbacks, maximizing revenues and maintaining school board support.

Referencing the reallocate capital funds, Toback said the district would have to reduce the pace of other facility work."

He indicated, though, that in his view full-day kindergarten is worth the investment.

Its not set in stone, but we are on a path, a great path that will take us where we need to be, he said.

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First, Lakewood School District received an extra $15 million in school funding through some special treatment in the governors proposed education budget.

Now, the state says the district should get millions more thanks to a new category of state aid called provisional stabilization aid. As it turns out, though, Lakewood is the only school district in the state eligible to receive provisional stabilization aid aid this year.

The result? Another $15 million in proposed aid for a district already getting more than it is technically owed according to the states funding formula and that spends much of its money on special education and busing for private school students.

The money was a surprise outside of Lakewood because it wasnt mentioned in Gov. Phil Murphys initial budget proposal. Lakewood officials announced the extra aid on Tuesday, and the state Department of Education confirmed in a statement Thursday evening that only Lakewood will benefit from the new form of funding, which still needs legislative approval.

But the state stopped short of explaining how Lakewood qualifies for the new funding or why the new category was introduced. Those details will be revealed when Murphys full budget plan is published in the coming days, said Mike Yaple, spokesman for the Department of Education.

Combined, the two streams of special aid would give Lakewood $30 million more in state funding, helping the cash-strapped district avoid taking another state loan. However, much of the money will go toward services for more than 30,000 Lakewood children attending Jewish yeshivas, increasing scrutiny of the districts finances and the states school funding system.

With New Jersey slashing funding for nearly 200 school districts, extra spending anywhere else calls for an explanation, said David Healy, superintendent in Toms River, which is facing a $2.7 million reduction in state aid this year.

Its a little bit disheartening, and its certainly compromising further the credibility of the process," said Healy, who said his comments are about the states method of school funding and are not about Lakewood.

With five times more students in private schools than public schools, Lakewood is an anomaly among New Jersey school districts. The townships booming Orthodox Jewish population sends children to local private schools, but the district is still required to pay for certain busing and special education costs for those students, straining district resources.

Thats left local officials facing an annual budget nightmare and pleading for a series of state loans to avoid devastating cuts to the public schools, where most students come from low-income families.

Murphys administration appears intent on breaking that cycle.

Prior to the announcement of the stabilization aid, Lakewood was already set to gain $14.9 million from its 2018-19 state funding, a 63 percent increase and the largest hike of any district in the state.

The governors budget gave Lakewood a $6.1 million increase in transportation aid and an $8.9 million hike in special education aid, money that appeared in the proposed budget as though it was tied to the school funding formula.

But an NJ Advance Media analysis found that most other districts were flat funded in those categories, and the state later confirmed the money is supplemental aid to help Lakewood accommodate transportation and special education costs for private school students.

The maneuver was questioned by school funding observers, who wondered how the state calculated the increases and why the money wasnt labeled as supplemental.

Officials in Lakewood say the money is all desperately needed, regardless of the source.

State law requires districts to provide busing to private schools, within certain parameters, and more than 20,000 Lakewood children qualify, according to the district. Special education costs have also skyrocketed as the district has controversially labeled hundreds of students as special education and placed them in private schools.

Those special costs tally more than $50 million a year, forcing Lakewood to borrow more than $40 million from the state over recent years.

Extra state funding will help the district spare the public schools from deep cuts, even if some of it goes toward services for private school students, said Michael Inzelbuch, the school boards attorney.

The state has an obligation to make sure all children receive the education and services they deserve, Yaple said.

And this budget proposal reflects that responsibility, he said.

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Wow look who stopped by, it's Michael Gandolfini, James Gandolfini's son. Posted by Holsten's on Thursday, March 14, 2019

Nearly 12 years after his father suddenly disappeared from our screens during the series finale of The Sopranos, Michael Gandolfini visited the table at Holstens where we got our final look at Tony Soprano.

Gandolfini is the son of James Gandolfini, who famously played the New Jersey mafia boss to great acclaim. He recently visited the Bloomfield ice cream parlor and sat across from a sign that says this booth reserved for the Soprano family.

Holstens on Thursday shared a photo on Facebook of a smiling Gandolfini sitting at the table. The young actor, who was born in 1999, the same year Sopranos premiered on HBO, will play a young Tony Soprano in The Many Saints of Newark, the Sopranos film prequel due out on Sept. 25, 2020 from Chase and New Line.

Gandolfini is currently working on the third and final season of HBOs The Deuce, in which he plays Joey Dwyer.

James Gandolfini died in 2013, when he was 51, almost exactly six years after the end of the show.

In the series finale of The Sopranos," which aired in June 2007, Tony Soprano meets his family at Holstens, where they pop onion rings in their mouths. As Tonys song pick, Journeys Dont Stop Believin', plays on the jukebox at the restaurant, his daughter Meadow rushes in from the street. In the final scene, a bell rings to signal someone coming through the door. Tony looks up and the screen cuts to black, right on the words dont stop" in the song, leaving viewers to wonder if Tony died or lived.

Series creator David Chase recently provided a detailed take on the final scene in The Sopranos Sessions, a book from former Star-Ledger critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall tagged to the series 20th anniversary this past January.

The Daily Meal reports that Gandolfini, who recently mingled with cast members from the original show for the 20th anniversary, was not at Holstens to film any scenes for the movie, with a Holstens manager saying Gandolfini has visited before.

The site for the final scenes of The Sopranos has become a curiosity for tourists and a constant fixture on Sopranos tours. When James Gandolfini died, fans paid their respects to the actor by visiting the ice cream parlor.

Chase and Lawrence Konner co-wrote the script for the Sopranos" prequel film, which will see a young Tony in the 1960s, during the time of the Newark riots.

Alan Taylor, who directed episodes of the original series, is directing the movie, which also stars Alessandro Nivola (Disobedience), New Jersey natives Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Ray Liotta (GoodFellas), Jon Bernthal (The Punisher), Billy Magnussen (Aladdin and "Velvet Buzzsaw), John Magaro (Chases Never Fade Away) and Corey Stoll (First Man).

Beyond Gandolfinis role in the film, not much is known about what parts the actors will play, except for Nivola, who is slated to play Dickey/Dickie Moltisanti, father of Christopher Moltisanti and mentor to young Tony.

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The Sopranos film The Many Saints of Newark will be released on Sept. 25, 2020, Deadline reports.

The film, co-written by Sopranos creator David Chase and Lawrence Konner, serves as a prequel to the TV series and is reportedly set in the 1960s during Tony Sopranos childhood, circa the time of the Newark riots. Sopranos (and Game of Thrones) alum Alan Taylor is directing the movie for New Line.

An earlier report from Deadline asserted that the movies named had been changed to Newark, but that information was incorrect.

The cast of The Many Saints of Newark will feature 19-year-old Michael Gandolfini, James Gandolfinis son, as a young Tony. Alessandro Nivola will play Dickey/Dickie Moltisanti, father to Christopher Moltisanti, who serves as a mentor to young Tony. Moltisanti translates to many saints.

Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air," The Departed"), who grew up in Essex County  in a Ukrainian enclave in Irvington, attending school in Newark  and went to Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, is set to play a role in the film, though that role is unknown. So will Ray Liotta, who grew up in Union Township. This will be his first role in the Mafia space since Killing Them Softly in 2012 and GoodFellas in 1990.

Jon Bernthal (The Punisher), Corey Stoll (First Man, The Romanoffs) and Billy Magnussen (Aladdin, Velvet Buzzsaw) are also attached to the film in unknown roles. So is John Magaro (The Big Short," The Umbrella Academy"), who starred in Chases 2012 film Not Fade Away.

The Sopranos, which bowed out in 2007, featured a series of flashbacks to Tonys childhood that included younger versions of his mother, Livia, along with his father, Johnny Boy Soprano, and his uncle, Junior Soprano.

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When consumers have a complaint about a company, they often turn to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) for help.

In New Jersey alone, there were 37,688 complaints to BBB in 2018, the BBB said.

Topping the list were complaints about Cell Phone Supplies, accounting for nearly 21 percent of last years complaints, BBB said.

BBB categorizes complaints in broad categories, and it attributes the large number of complaints about Cell Phone Supplies to Verizon Wireless. Thats because the company is located in New Jersey and the states BBB takes complaints from around the country, said Melissa Companick, president and CEO of New Jerseys BBB.

Most [complaints] are classified as 'problem with a product or service, which includes contract issues, customer service issues, product issues, refund/exchange issues, repair issues and service issues, Companick said. We arent currently noting any repetitive issues.

Verizon Wireless has an A+ rating despite the number of complaints, in part because it answers BBBs inquiries on behalf of consumers. (To learn more about how BBB handles complaints, read this story.)

Overall, the top 10 complaint categories in 2018 accounted for about 54 percent of all complaints received.

Heres a look at the categories with the number of complaints received for each.

Cell Phone Supplies: 7,898 Home Warranty Plans: 3,217 Wholesale Electronic Supplies: 3,039 Online Retailer: 1,914 Electric Equipment Repair: 1,137 New Car Dealers: 1,093 Used Car Dealers: 685 Retail Florist: 500 Mortgage Banker: 483 Moving Companies: 474

BBB said 2018s top complaints were similar to 2017.

Looking ahead, what can consumers expect in 2019?

We are starting to see an uptick in complaints regarding online purchases, often via paid ads on social media, Companick said. Many times these websites are overseas and offer no contact information.

She encourages consumers to check with BBB before they click or buy.

For additional help with your consumer complaints, read this story about what every consumer should know, and this one with more resources for consumers.

And if you encounter an issue you cant fix through traditional customer service channels, you can always reach out to Bamboozled at the email address below.
A convicted sex offender is facing new charges he lured a teen girl from South Jersey to an East Orange boarding house and sexually assaulted her on multiple occasions over a five month span, authorities said.

Michael Bordo, 42, faces charges of sexual assault, child endangerment and luring, the Essex County Prosecutors Office said Thursday.

The girls mother alerted authorities after finding inappropriate text messages on the teens iPad, authorities said. Investigators determined Bordo lured the girl to the boarding house where he lived between Oct. 1 and March 5, authorities said.

Bordo was previously convicted of aggravated criminal sexual contact in Cape May County in 1996. When he was 19, he entered a bedroom shared by two teenage girls he knew and sexually assaulting them both.

Near the end of his five-year sentence, New Jersey passed a law allowing authorities to civilly commit sex offenders, and he became one of the first people in the state to be ordered held for treatment. In 2007, the court that evaluates sex offenders determined Bordo should be released because he was no longer highly likely to commit a new sex crime.

He was released in 2009, but made headlines again shortly after in 2010 for having a relationship with a top state psychologist who treated him during his civil commitment.

Bordo is being held at the Essex County jail on the new charges.

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Essex County authorities on Thursday said they seized an estimated half a million dollars worth of drugs, along with loaded guns, in raids of homes in Livingston, Newark and East Orange.

Karlin Grant, 45, of East Orange, Dennis Anderson, 47, of Livingston, and Jasmine Ingram, 39, of Irvington, were charged with a range of drug distribution and weapons-related offenses, according to authorities. The trio remained at large following the searches.

Officers seized methamphetamines, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, three fully-loaded firearms, about $19,100, drug paraphernalia and marijuana edibles in the operation, according to Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore N. Stephens and Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose.

These charges are a part of our ongoing effort to rid our community of drug trafficking that potentially harms the quality of life for everyone by fueling violence and other illicit activities, Stephens said in a statement.

The seized methamphetamine carried an approximate street value of $29,130, while the cocaine was valued at $350,000, about $200,000 worth of heroin, and $3,000 in marijuana, officials said.

The three were also using a surveillance camera to watch for approaching police in Newark, the prosecutors office said. Authorities served search warrants at an apartment in the 200 block of South Harrison Street in East Orange, a residence on Stecher Street in Newark and a Laurel Avenue home in Livingston.

Ambrose said Newark detectives partnered with the prosecutors office and Rutgers University police, which are part of a county drug task force, to work the case.

We will continue working vigorously to shut down the operations of individuals who bring guns and narcotics into our communities, he added.

Police asked anyone with information on the whereabouts the fugitives to call 1-877-TIPS-4EC.

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SECAUCUS  The U.S. Coast Guard has given permission to halt almost all marine traffic that requires the opening of the Portal Bridge during peak travel times, news that will be a relief to beleaguered rail riders whose commutes have been disrupted when the rusty, century-old bridge wont close.

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat, announced the news Friday at the Secaucus Junction transit hub, saying the Coast Guard has answered our call to OK keeping the Kearny bridge closed with limited exceptions between 5 and 10 a.m. and 3 and 8 p.m. for at least the next six months. Federal regulations require the bridge to swing open for boats riding underneath it on the Hackensack River.

The 108-year-old rail span occasionally fails to close properly after opening for marine traffic, leading to long delays on NJ Transit and Amtrak and stress on commuters as they wait for workers to get the bridge closed again. Workers sometimes have to use sledge hammers to bang rails between the bridge and land back into position.

Bridge problems led to at least six delays so far in 2019 and five delays in 2018. It was stuck twice in one October day last year, leading to 90-minute delays during the evening rush.

There will be exceptions to the new rule on Portal Bridge openings due to tidal restrictions, with advance notice of two hours minimum, Menendez said.

Over 200,000 Amtrak and NJ Transit commuters cross over the bridge on weekdays. One of them is Ryan Dicovitsky, who takes NJ Transit trains every weekday between his home in Rahway and New York City. Dicovitsky, 30, told The Jersey Journal delays due to the Portal Bridge feel like they occur monthly. Hes happy about the new change.

Im sure there are logistical reasons why they do things the way they do  maybe some boats can only take that route  but youre losing much more economic activity and commerce with that many people being delayed to work versus the boats that get delayed during rush hour," he said.

David Gehrke commutes into New York City from South Orange. Gehrke, 37, told The Jersey Journal he shakes his head every time he crosses the Portal Bridge as he thinks of how old it is and how there appears to be no money or political will to replace it.

Gehrke said hes happy about the Coast Guards decision to restrict bridge openings but called it the very definition of a Band-Aid.

Its scary that so much of the commute of thousands of people comes down to a guy hammering the track, he said.

Menendez called the six-month reprieve, which may be extended, a temporary fix to a much larger problem. A planned, $1.5 billion Portal Bridge replacement plan is part of the larger, $30 billion Gateway project that would replace two aging Hudson River railroad tunnels and make other improvements to the rail route, the nations busiest. The Trump administration has denied federal funding for that project.

All we need is President Trump to step up and put pettiness aside," Menendez said. "He is literally the only thing standing in the way of a gateway towards a new future.

Trump administration officials say replacing the Portal Bridge and Hudson tunnels are the responsibility of New York and New Jersey officials. A White House spokesman declined to respond to Menendezs Friday comments.

Federal officials dealt a blow to the projects Friday afternoon when it gave them low ratings, an action that means they will not get federal funding.

Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.
EDITORS NOTE: On April 3, NJ Cannabis Insider will host an all-day live event, featuring industry leaders and the key voices who will shape the industry. Tickets are limited. More information.

The new marijuana legalization bill in New Jersey was unveiled for the first time on Wednesday night, the pinnacle of more than a year of work by lawmakers to bring legal weed to New Jersey.

Over the next week and a half, those lawmakers will be hitting the phones and trying to swing enough votes to legalize marijuana in New Jersey. The vote is tentatively scheduled for March 25.

And while its clear from the bill that its sponsors have worked hard to address a number of concerns from legislators  like expungements and taxes  a few issues remain that could hamstring the debate.

Municipalities would have to ban again

Point Pleasant Beach was the first town in the state to ban marijuana businesses, in December 2017. Since then, more than 60 other New Jersey towns have taken some steps to keep pot shops out. But if the bill passes, those towns would have to redo their ordinances for the bans to stand.

The bill has a section aimed at towns that says any ban of marijuana businesses must be done after enactment of the bill. Any ordinance enacted prior to the effective date of the bill is null and void, the bill says.

If the bill passes, towns would have six months to pass an ordinance banning marijuana businesses, or risk being grandfathered in to allowing marijuana businesses for five years.

Scott Rudder, president of the New Jersey CannaBusiness Association, said it makes sense to make municipalities redo their marijuana bans.

You cant ban something that hasnt happened yet, he said.

Where are the taxes going?

The bill lays out three ways tax revenue will be used:

To pay for the Cannabis Regulatory Commission, the body tasked with overseeing the industry.

To help pay for the states overhaul on clearing marijuana convictions from peoples records.

To help pay for police training in response to legalization.

Several lawmakers have said they would like to see tax revenue used for a variety of other projects, from emergency response to drug treatment. State Sen. Declan OScanlon is among them, and he hasnt said yet whether he plans to support the bill.

Is legalization the right thing to do?

The two points above are about local control and fiscal concerns, but what if it comes down to simple morality? There are several lawmakers in both parties and in both chambers who have been a no vote since Day 1 of the debate. For them, its not about taxes or social justice, its that they dont think legalizing marijuana is what should be done.

Rudder said, You can explain this to them all day long, but they may not feel that its the right thing to do.

Lawmakers seem confident that there arent too many of these ironclad no votes, but its far from certain that the above issues, and others, wont derail legalization.

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Nine people were arrested this week and charged for their roles in a commercial burglary ring that targeted cellphone and cosmetic stores in New Jersey, police said.

The arrests capped a six-month investigation by the Bergen County Prosecutors Office Special Investigations Squad into commercial burglaries in Bergen County and around the state, according to a prosecutors office release.

The men who were charged with burglarizing the store used large tools to break into the stores and once inside, they loaded the merchandise into large containers which were then moved into recently stolen vehicles, officials said.

The stolen goods were then brought to an independent source, or fence, who would then illegally sell it, according to the release.

Among the stores burglarized were Verizon on Route 17 North in East Rutherford and E. Ridgewood Avenue in Ridgewood, as well as a AT&T store on Route 46 West in Lodi. There was an attempted burglary at another AT&T location on Route 17 North in Paramus. A Bluemercury cosmetics store in Englewood was also burglarized.

Samuel Lymore, 39, of County Club Hills, Illinois; Dashonti Wiley, 27, of East Orange; Muhtaqim Faird, 43, of Newark; and, Duane Holmes, 47, of North Bergen, were identified as suspects in 20 burglaries in Bergen County while Lymore, Wiley and Holmes were also involved in commercial burglaries in Union City and South Orange, prosecutors said.

Manuel Dessus, 49, of Bogota and his wife Aileen Dessus, 38, of Bogota were identified as fences," authorities said.

Holmes and Wiley were charged with burglary and attempted burglary, fencing, money laundering and other offense.

A third man, Michael Reyes, whose age and hometown were not released, was also charged with burglary and attempted burglary but he was not listed him among the nine people arrested. The Bergen County Prosecutors Office did not immediately answer an email seeking clarification.

Farid, Lymore, Manuel Dessus and Aileen Dessus were charged withe money laundering, fencing and other offenses.

Lymore, Wiley, Farid, Holmes and Manuel Dessus were in custody at Bergen County Jail pending their first appearances and detention hearings that were scheduled for Friday at 9 a.m.

Aileen Dessus was released after first court appearance on Tuesday.

Jennifer Reyes, 30, of West New York and Ivette Reyes, 32, of West New York were charged in Hudson County with drug-related offenses and child endangerment

Gregory Hyman, 45, of Nyack, New York was serves a summons for a drug-related offense and released.

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A 38-year-old man from India admitted Thursday he conspired to smuggle people from his country into the United States on commercial flights that landed at Newark Liberty International Airport on multiple occasions in exchange for money.

The investigation into Bhavin Patels smuggling operation spanned more than six years after Department of Homeland Security Investigations officials received a tip and an undercover officer, posing as a smuggler, began meeting in 2013 with Patel in Thailand, authorities said.

On three occasions, Patel arranged to smuggle Indian nationals to the U.S. after a stop at an airport in Thailand. He charged tens of thousands for each of the six people smuggled in the scheme, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. Patel was arrested in December when he arrived at Newark airport.

He pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiracy to smuggle foreign nationals, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. His sentencing is scheduled for July 9.

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Hundreds of students around New Jersey skipped school Friday for a cause that runs much deeper than a typical day of hooky.

"We are here to pressure our local, state and federal officials to take action on climate change, said Eden Summerlin, a 16-year-old junior from Madison High School, who spoke from the steps of Morristowns town hall to a crowd of more than 100 students, parents and activists.

This was one of countless youth climate strikes organized by high and middle school students around the world Friday, in solidarity with a global movement that has steadily gained traction in recent months. At each strike, the core demands were the same: Slash greenhouse gas emissions, switch from fossil fuels to clean energy and create stronger laws and regulations to protect against pollution.

Student activists in Morristown tie ribbons as part of a climate strike on Friday, March 15, 2019. (Patti Sapone | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

Summerlins speech was just one of many at the Morristown rally, which was attended by all ages, from toddlers in strollers, to gray-haired lifetime environmentalists. An entire busload of students came just from Ridge and Valley Charter School in Blairstown.

Between student speakers, there was singing, chanting and ukulele playing. Protest signs dotted the crowd. A string of ribbons bearing statements of love to the planet fluttered in the wind.

Rachel Gurevich, a 14-year-old student at East Brunswicks Churchill Junior High and one of the organizers of the Morristown strike, said she was hopeful that the global protests would push policymakers to take action.

I think if they werent listening before, this will force them to, Gurevich said.

The demonstrations stretched across the state.

In Montclair, students at Montclair High School staged a walkout. Students in Princeton and Mahwah held their own climate strikes; as well as students in New York City, Philadelphia and around the world.

According to Sana Shaikh, a 17-year-old student at the Morris County School of Technology and the lead organizer for New Jerseys climate strikes, more than 2,000 strikes in 123 countries around the world took place Friday. Every continent was represented -- even Antartica, thanks to a solidarity strike held by German scientists.

Ultimately, we are demanding the preservation of our future, Shaikh said.

Fridays climate strikes were the first globally coordinated set of actions since a Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg began refusing to go to school last August. Spurred on by Swedens hottest summer on record, according to The Guardian, Thunberg instead spent her time protesting in front of the Swedish parliament to call for new climate change policies.

In December, she gave a speech to global policymakers at a United Nations climate conference in Poland that went viral. Earlier this week, Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. And through it all, Thunberg began inspiring other students around the world to take action.

Many students, like 14-year-old Sarah Mufson from the Morris County School of Technology, said that they became invested in climate issues after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report last October. The report laid out the potentially devastating effects that could come from the Earth warming just 1.5 degrees celsius. According to the report, humanity needs to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in order to avoid warming even more than that.

I think about the hard number of 11 years, said Mufson, who will be 25 years old in 2030. That really scares me.

As the students in Morristown chanted, sang and gave speeches, they were occasionally greeted with honks of approval from cars passing by on South Street.

But at one point, during Summerlins speech, a utility van passed the crowd with its window rolled down.

Theres no such thing! No such thing, called out a voice from the van, expressing disbelief that climate change poses any problem at all. It was a faceless reminder of the opposition that the students and their supporters still face.

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It was probably appropriate that the lawsuit by Jeffrey Edwards against the New Jersey State Police and Wells Fargo Bank for false arrest, malicious prosecution and humiliation literally concluded with a prayer for relief. Known to his congregants as Pastor Jeff, the spiritual leader of the United Methodist Church of Parsippany knows a little bit about prayer.

But the arrest last year of Rev. Edwards for fraud might have tested his faith.

It was pretty unnerving, he said.

In the lawsuit filed Thursday in Morris County Superior Court, attorneys for the 63-year-old pastor sought unspecified damages against Wells Fargo, which has come under fire over a series of scandals in recent years. Also named were the State Police detectives who originally brought the charges against him last year after bank security officials allegedly mistakenly identified a photo of Edwards taken at an ATM machine as a suspect in a series of fraudulent check deposits.

Whether it is creating fake customer accounts or engaging in securities fraud, Wells Fargo has already established that it couldnt care less about its customers, said attorney Gerald Krovatin of Newark, who represents Edwards. This case is the latest egregious example of this bank using its immense power to malign a good and decent man, a pastor with an impeccable reputation, whose only mistake was banking with Wells Fargo.

A spokesman for Wells Fargo said the bank had yet to be served with the complaint.

Since this is a pending legal matter, we are unable to comment any further," said Kevin Friedlander.

A spokesman for the State Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The pastor said he first discovered he was the focus of a criminal investigation last year after a parishioner texted him a State Police Facebook posting requesting the publics help identifying a man suspected of depositing fraudulent checks at an ATM.

She said, Youve got a twin, he recalled. I saw a picture that looked pretty much like me.

After he realized it actually was him, he said he pretty much freaked out. The post had already been shared more than 460 times in 24 hours.

The math exploded in my head how this was going to go viral, he said. Im a pastor and the core of my professional identity is someone who is trustworthy.

The Wells Fargo ATM photos of Rev. Jeffrey Edwards that were distributed by the State Police in their efforts to identify a suspect in a fraudulent check cashing scheme.

According to the lawsuit, the apparent case of mistaken identity began when four checks issued by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and made payable to various state entities and utility companies were used by someone to counterfeit four separate fraudulent checks using the same check numbers and account numbers. The fake checks totaling more than $6,000 were made payable to an individual named Tyler Mathis, and then cashed at the Wells Fargo branch on Route 46 in Parsippany.

Thats where Pastor Jeff does his regular banking.

In the lawsuit, Edwards attorney wrote that Wells Fargo notified the State Police when it discovered the bogus transactions, and the bank was asked to provide any still photos or video images taken from the ATM at Parsippany where some of the checks were deposited and later cashed out.

The bank sent photos of Edwards, who had made his own deposit of checks at the same ATM the very same day, according to the complaint, which said a Wells Fargo security team leader told State Police investigators that she could not automatically link the check numbers to the pictures. But the lawsuit said she offered to hand-write check numbers on the photos of the man they determined had deposited the counterfeit checks  implicating Edwards.

Two State Police detectives interviewed Mathis, who admitted man known to her only as Cousin Swing told her he would deposit checks into her account and once they cleared, he would split the money with her, said the lawsuit. Mathis was not charged. Instead, the State Police told her she was a victim of a check fraud scam, said the complaint.

The investigators then posted to the State Police Facebook page the two photos of Edwards taken at the Wells Fargo ATM that were provided by the bank, asking the public for help in identifying the man they tied to a scam stretching from Parsippany to Neptune Township. Two radio stations and a newspaper picked it up.

In an interview, Edwards said after seeing the post, he called the detectives and shared a copy of his banking transactions to show he had not deposited the fraudulent checks. I thought it would clear things up, he said. They said all their information was from Wells Fargo.

After several months of investigation, Edwards said he grew increasingly concerned that the State Police had not cleared him.

I didnt know what to make of it. It didnt seem conceivable that they could think that I did this, he said. I have been the pastor at the church for 29 years, with a core of people in whom I have their trust.

Finally last September, Edwards said he was asked to come down to the State Police station in Holmdel. After he got there, he said he was shocked to find out he was being arrested and charged with third degree forgery. When he protested and said somebody made an error, he said one of the investigators asked him if the case did go to trial, who would the jury believe  a bank security expert or him?

They fingerprinted me. Took my mug shot and gave me a court date, he said.

The case soon fell apart. On January 16, the criminal forgery charge against Edwards was dismissed, said Krovatin. Edwards, who still does his banking at Wells Fargo, said neither Wells Fargo nor the State Police apologized.

The carelessness of both Wells Fargo and the State Police is kind of appalling, and I wonder what happens to somebody who might not have the resources to defend themselves, the pastor said. I told them yes that was my picture and yes I was in the bank that day. Thats all they needed to arrest me.

Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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A superior court judge who came under fire for asking a woman who said she was raped whether she could have closed her legs is now being sued by a former law clerk over allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination.

The lawsuit filed last week describes Judge John F. Russo Jr. as a tyrant who belittled, humiliated and yelled at his law clerks to the point that he went through four in a year.

Valisha Desir, 31, of Highlands, said she worked for Russo in 2017 and feared reporting the harassment  including a comment about her looks and about giving his wife a pass to cheat  because Russo bragged about how he could make or break careers. He told her he forced former Gov. Jim McGreevey to resign, the suit said.

Defendant Russo repeatedly told Plaintiff about his political connections, his ability to ruin careers and his expertise in retaliation, the lawsuit said.

Russo was removed from the bench in the Ocean County Family Division in May 2017 after Desir reported the harassment. He was quietly reassigned to the Burlington County Civil Division in November, though the court is still considering judicial misconduct charges against him.

A call to Russos attorney, David F. Corrigan, was not returned Friday morning.

The lawsuit is the allegations against Russo, 56, of Toms River, the son of the late state senator John F. Russo Sr. It was filed in Superior Court in Ocean County March 7 by Smith Mullin P.C., the Montclair firm known for representing women in sexual harassment cases, including Gretchen Carlson formerly of Fox News.

Desir, who describes herself as an African-American woman of Haitian descent, said that Russo was demeaning, offensive and hostile to her within two weeks of her clerkship starting in January 2017. She alleged that he had stark and unpredictable mood swings and had been admonished in the past by the assignment judge for how he treated his clerks.

In a civil filing, Ocean County Assignment Judge Marlene Lynch Ford said one of the reasons she removed Russo from the bench was his verbal abuse of his law clerks.

Desir recounted an incident on Feb. 13, 2017 when Russo allegedly told her his wife worried that Desir was too attractive to work with him, and also commented that he would give his wife a pass to cheat on him because she was such a good mother to his son.

She also said he would stand so close to her, despite being asked not to, that she positioned chairs around her desk in order to create a physical barrier between she and Defendant Russo.

On another occasion, the suit said, he summoned her to his office, sat with his legs spread wide open and tried to get her to come closer. When she refused to get closer than five feet, he yelled at her to just leave, the suit said.

Desir also claimed he made comments she believed were motivated by racial prejudice, including asking her if all of her siblings had the same father and if her parents were married, the suit said. When he learned she had Haitian heritage, he asked her how she felt about being colonized, the suit said.

The lawsuit said that on April 10, 2017, Desir reported Russos behavior to Ford and Family Division Presiding Judge Madelin F. Einbinder. The next day, after alleging he angrily threw a file at her from the bench, Desir asked and was granted a reassignment to Fords chambers, according to the suit.

Her lawsuit says she suffered distress, humiliation, loss of earnings and damage to her career path. She is seeking damages, costs and attorneys fees.

Russo made national headlines in 2018 when it was revealed he was being reprimanded for a 2016 comment to a woman before him who said she was sexually assaulted. The woman was seeking a restraining order against a boyfriend she said had raped her and Russo asked her if she closed her legs to try to prevent it, according to court records. When brought before the Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct a year ago, Russo testified that he was trying to prod the woman into providing more details.

He is still facing judicial misconduct counts, including for allegedly not recusing himself from a matter where he knew the parties and using his influence to reschedule his own personal matter in another family court.

After being removed from the bench, Russo sued the courts, Ford and Einbinder, claiming they were punishing him because he requested intermittent family leave to care for his son, who has Down syndrome. That suit has been stayed while the judicial conduct review is ongoing.

Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @rebeccajeverett. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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By Abed Awad

To those who, when calamity strikes, Say: We belong to God, and to Him we shall return. Upon them descend blessings from God and mercy. They are guided right. Quran, 2:157. Our thought and prayers are with families of the New Zealand mosque massacres.

A suspected white nationalist terrorist killed 49 Muslim worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on Friday. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the gunman an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.

The suspects manifesto and social media posts confirm his right-wing white supremacist political beliefs. [I]ncite violence, retaliation, and further divide, the suspect explained the objective of his killing spree. Not surprisingly, the suspect may have been inspired by American hate and anti-immigrant ideologues, as the suspect called President Trump a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose and praised Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.

These horrific massacres will not be the last against Muslims. The rise of nationalism and populism around the world is code for white supremacy and anti-immigrant xenophobia. Trump & Co. have built their political ideology on appealing to hate and fear. This anti-immigrant hate and fear has caught on fire all over Europe. Just follow the rise of populist nationalists in Germany, Poland, Hungry, Holland, France and England.

In 2010, Trump suggested that the United States is at war with Muslims. Since then, he has talked about the Muslim Problem, supported the surveillance of Muslims, defended warrantless searches of Muslims, complained about Syrian Muslims entering the United States and said he would, look at closing mosques. He also supported creating a database to track Muslims, spoke of Muslims as a Trojan Horse, said that New Jersey Muslims cheered on 9/11, planned a Total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, and uttered or tweeted the following: We are at war with radical Islam, Muslims are sick people, Islam hates us, Muslims dont respect us, and ...let the Muslims flow in. No way!

Like Trump, the members of his administration are avid and open Islamaphobes. Steve Bannon, Trumps chief strategist claimed that the Judeo-Christian west is engaged in a global war against jihadist Islamic fascism. General Mike Flynn, his (first) National Security Advisor, claimed that Islam is a cancer. Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka was terminated by the FBI for having over-the-top Islamophobic rhetoric. Anti-Muslim ideologue Brigitte Gabriel, head of ACT for America  the U.S.s largest anti-Muslim hate group  is welcomed at the White House to meet with Trump. John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, both well-known for their ties with Anti-Muslim Hate Groups, are part of Trumps inner circle.

You have people coming out of mosques with hatred and death in their eyes, Trump exclaimed during a 2015 CBS News interview. The repeated messaging and narrative from right wing media and Trump is simple: Muslims are the enemy. Muslims hate us. Muslims are terrorists. Muslims want to take over our country. Muslims want to change our culture. Islam hates us. Muslims cant be Americans. This is an organized messaging machine intent on dehumanizing Muslim Americans. The Muslim becomes the other and foreign that has no humanity and it is the enemy.

New America, a think tank, and the American Muslim Institution conducted a survey on Nov. 6, 2018, on perceptions about Islam among Americans. The survey found that 71 percent of self-described Republicans agreed they dont believe Islam is compatible with American values. This is not a surprise in the current anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim environment in the White House. Sixty percent agreed that Muslim Americans werent as patriotic as non-Muslim Americans. While the negative views of Islam by Republicans is alarming, the fact that close to 40 percent of Americans hold a negative view of Islam and Muslims is more alarming.

It is easy to dehumanize Muslims when a large portion of Americans hold such negative views combined with the anti-Muslim rhetoric from Trump & Co. that is carried live by right-wing media outlets. Let us not be surprised that another white terrorist inspired by this Islamaphobia and hate rhetoric will massacre Muslims at a mosque near you.

Abed Awad, a New Jersey/New York attorney, a fellow of the International Academy of Family Lawyers and an adjunct law professor at Rutgers Law School, Newark. He has also taught at Pace Law School and Seton Hall Law School.

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By Paul Waldman

Support for President Donald Trump among congressional Republicans has been all but absolute over the past two years. But there's a drama playing out right now over his declaration of a national emergency to divert funds to border wall construction that portends a more complicated 2020 for the president and his allies.

If rifts are developing in that relationship, it could lead to a spiral in which members of Congress see it in their interests to separate themselves from the president, and in response he lashes out at them, which only encourages them to distance themselves from him even more. What has been a tight alliance could break down quickly.

Let's begin with some Washington Post reporting on the emergency declaration:

"Trump issued a fresh veto threat Thursday morning after three Republican lawmakers showed up at the White House the previous night, seeking a way to stave off an expected rebuke in the Senate over his national emergency declaration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

"Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ben Sasse of Nebraska unexpectedly arrived as Trump was having dinner in the residence with family, according to two people familiar with the episode, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.

"The senators argued for a last-minute proposal aimed at satisfying concerns of senators who are inclined to vote Thursday afternoon for a measure nullifying Trump's declaration, the people said. Details on their proposal could not immediately be learned.

"The people familiar with what transpired said a White House lawyer was brought in to explain why the proposal wouldn't work, and the discussion was ultimately unsuccessful, irritating Trump, who renewed his veto threat with an early morning tweet on Thursday."

This came after Trump rejected a separate proposal by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, that would have required that emergency declarations expire without action by Congress to approve them. Trump is simply not going to accept any limits on his authority.

While there's probably a part of the president that likes the idea of standing alone against all the weak-kneed forces of Washington unwilling to protect America from an invasion of murdering rapist drug dealers, there's surely another part of him that's enraged by the idea that any Republicans would defy him. According to The Post's Josh Dawsey, White House officials think 10-12 Republicans will join with Democrats in the vote to roll back the emergency declaration, a high enough number to suggest that party unity behind Trump is cracking.

Not only that, seven Senate Republicans just joined with Democrats in a vote to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, another rebuke to Trump administration policy.

And in an action that may make Trump even more angry, the House just voted 420-0 to urge Attorney General William Barr to publicly release Robert Mueller's report on the Russia scandal in its entirety once it is complete.

We should be clear that for most of the potential defectors on the emergency declaration, this is a vote on principle. They believe the president's powers are limited and he shouldn't be able to circumvent Congress with a phony emergency declaration whenever he doesn't get what he wants. But of course, politics is never far from anyone's mind.

Now lets think about what might happen in the second half of this year and 2020 as the presidential campaign really gets going. Although the race will probably be close, theres a good chance Trump will be running behind in the polls for much of it; his approval never moves much from around 40 percent, and if the economy turns down as many believe it will, hell be in real trouble.

So every Republican running for the House and Senate will have to ask themselves: How closely do I want to tie myself to Trump if he might be going down? If they're running in a strongly Republican district or state, the question is easy to answer. But there are senators up for re-election in 2020 who could face tough races. I count at least six: Martha McSally of Arizona, Cory Gardner of Colorado, David Perdue of Georgia, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Susan Collins of Maine and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

The worse the president is doing in polls, the more incentive they'll have to display their independence to home-state voters by disagreeing with him (and that's not to mention others who may do so for substantive reasons from time to time). And the more they do, the angrier Trump will get and the more likely he'll be to start campaigning not just against Democrats but against Congress in general, including members of his own party.

It's not hard to imagine Trump, who is absurdly sensitive to personal slights, doing a rally in a place like North Carolina and pouring derision on Tillis for some recent vote, then telling the crowd that it doesn't matter who else they vote for as long as they return him to the Oval Office. Which in turn could encourage the senator he's insulting to distance himself further from the president.

From Trump's perspective, all that matters is that he be re-elected. Republicans don't have any remaining significant legislative goals, and he himself certainly doesn't. He needs the Senate to stay Republican in order to confirm his appointments, but would that be enough to overcome his natural instinct to make an enemy out of anyone who defies him? I doubt it. All of which suggests that the GOP could be in for a bumpy 2020.

Paul Waldman is an opinion writer for the Plum Line blog.

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Can Americans still have a sensible and friendly political discussion across the partisan divide? The answer is yes, and we intend to prove it. Julie Roginsky, a Democrat, and Mike DuHaime, a Republican, are consultants who have worked on opposite teams for their entire careers yet have remained friends throughout. Here, they discuss the weeks events, with prompts from Tom Moran, editorial page editor of The Star-Ledger.

Q. Gov. Phil Murphy and legislative leaders agreed on a bill legalizing recreational use of marijuana, but dont have the votes to pass it yet. When Murphy was asked about rounding up votes, he seemed to rule out horse-trading, saying Im not a big believer in transaction politics. What does that mean? And your best guess: Is the bill going to pass?

Roginsky: As Donald Rumsfeld once famously said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. And in Trenton, you engage in transactional politics, even if you wish the Socratic method were the most effective way to persuade reluctant legislators to support your priorities. The governor has the ability to move the needle on individual legislation because of the immense power of his office, not because of lofty rhetoric. And I believe that if marijuana legalization is a priority for him, he will cut the kinds of deals he needs to cut to make it happen.

DuHaime: Julies right. Transactional politics makes it sound worse than it really is. Our system of government requires compromise between the executive and legislative branches. Hamilton and Jefferson and Madison made the deal to establish a national bank in exchange for relocation of the U.S. Capitol to the banks of the Potomac. They were in the room where it happens. Not much has changed since the late 1700s. Lofty rhetoric has its place in mobilizing constituents to push legislators, but that seems to be taking quite a while in this case.

Q. President Trumps new budget gives the military more than the Pentagon asked for, but offers no funding for the Hudson River tunnel. Does he have something against New Jersey, or blue states in general?

Roginsky: Of course President Trump has something against blue states. He is the ultimate narcissist and he punishes those who do not support him. And, of course, he knows that the Gateway Project is a priority for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, which makes him even more loathe to support it. Never mind that a collapse of the Hudson River tunnel would lead to an economic crisis that would impact not just this region but the nations economy as a whole.

DuHaime: I would like to believe we can strengthen the military and embark on the most critical infrastructure project in the country at the same time. I hope our Senators and Congressional delegation can work across the aisle in the budget process for this, as Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen was able to do for phase one.

Q. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, was caught making bigoted remarks about women, gays, and Arabs in radio interviews from last decade unearthed by Media Matters. So far, Fox is defending him. Do these moments have any political impact these days?

Roginsky: The free market will determine Tucker Carlsons fate, as it determined his predecessor Bill OReillys. If enough advertisers permanently flee his show, Fox will remove him. If those who have already fled eventually come back or are replaced, he stays. Rupert Murdoch loves Tucker Carlson and personally selected him for his time slot. My sense is that he would prefer to keep him, despite the outcry, but market conditions will be the final determinant.

DuHaime: I love when Julie shows her free market conservative side. Carlson should probably apologize and move on, but at this time, you can become a hero for pushing back on political correctness. The belief is political opponents will never forgive you for something you said or did 10 years ago, so why even bother apologizing. I hope thats wrong, but maybe hes right.

Unearthed audio shows Tucker Carlson using white nationalist rhetoric and making racist remarks https://t.co/RzpYgxwhRT pic.twitter.com/XumSIJFAxm  Media Matters (@mmfa) March 12, 2019

Roginsky: Not my free-market conservative side. I was just around for the fall of OReilly and know full well that while ideology is important to Fox News, the bottom line is king. If Mypillow.com is the only advertiser left on Tuckers show, he will go the way of Glenn Beck, OReilly and other network stars who were indispensable until advertisers disposed of them.

DuHaime: Stop pretending youre not a free market conservative.

Q. Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Washington Post this week that she opposes efforts to impeach Trump, for now, and that any such move must have bipartisan support. Most Democrats say shes unlikely to allow a vote on the Green New Deal either. What do you make of that?

Roginsky: Nancy Pelosi recognizes that the Democratic majority was built on previously Republican districts that are now occupied by moderate Democrats.

DuHaime: This is a smart move by Speaker Pelosi. Democrat overreach, impeachment without grounds, would heavily play in the presidents favor and hurt Democrats in swing districts.

Q. Back to Jersey: The Lakewood school district got special attention in Murphys budget, an increase of 63 percent, by far the largest bump. Much of it is devoted to students in private Yeshivas, who far outnumber those in public schools. Does Lakewood have outsized political punch? Why is that?

Roginsky: Lakewood's Orthodox community votes virtually monolithically and has the ability to determine margins in Ocean County.

DuHaime: Julie is right. It is the fastest growing municipality in the state and will soon surpass some of the largest cities in population. It is a key municipality for anyone running statewide.

Q. And finally, Murphys relationship with Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin seems to be on the mend. They are talking frequently and saying nice things about one another. What happened? And will the love last?

Roginsky: The governor presented a budget earlier this month that more than met legislative leaders halfway. He needs to be applauded for that, as should his new chief of staff, George Helmy, who has worked very hard to change the tenor.

DuHaime: All things appeared cozy the day of the budget address, and I agree George deserves credit for his efforts and some early success. That said, there is real animus between the principal players here that goes back years now. There are deep political rifts and attacks that have been made that wont be easily undone. Just because they agree on some policy proposals that unite nearly the entire Democrat party doesnt mean it is time for a ticker tape parade just yet.
A New Jersey woman will receive $20,000 after she and her children were kicked out of their home over the presence of an emotional support dog, which had helped her 13-year-old daughter cope with depression following her fathers death.

As part of a Feb. 27 settlement, the Brooks-Sloate Terrace Cooperative Association of Paterson, along with its management contractor Colonial Mutual Housing Corporation, must develop an anti-discrimination policy, release all claims for rent, fines, property damage and legal fees they have against the former tenant, and place her back on the cooperatives wait list, the Attorney Generals Office and Division of Civil Rights announced Friday.

Brooks-Sloate is a 200-unit housing cooperative development in Paterson, in which 40 units are rentals.

The emotional support dog belonged to tenant Jerrica Spences daughter, who received it as a gift after her father died. A physician described it as therapeutic for treating her conduct disorder, according to finding of probable cause from the Division of Civil Rights.

The co-ops management first learned of the dog when entering the unit during a November 2015 routine pest control visit, according to the finding. A violation notice was issued the next day, giving the family five days to get rid of the dog.

Spence met with two board members and their attorney, explaining that the dog was helping her daughter, who was suffering from depression following her fathers death, according the finding. She sent a letter asking to meet with the full board, noting: My daughter made the honor roll I am so proud of her. Its been many years since she had all As and Bs. She is definitely improving!

But she received just an attorneys letter ordering her to vacate the premises by Dec. 21, 2015 while also levying $75 per day fine as long as the dog is on the premises," according to the finding.

She sent a doctors letter, laying out why the dog was a therapeutic necessity to her daughter. Pet therapy is a medical treatment that is recommended for (Spences daughter) and her ability to heal, it read.

Yet the Brooks-Sloate Board of Directors stood its ground, claiming the therapeutic benefits provided by the dog were just a pretense," and that the animal had received no special training, according to the documents.

That, the division noted in its finding, was where the board was mistaken. Emotional support animals need no special training under the law to qualify. Additionally, Brooks-Sloate and Colonial Mutual failed to provide evidence that the dogs presence in Spences apartment would create an undue burden, according to the finding.

The Division also noted that the property managers had failed to conduct a reasonable accommodation analysis or fact sensitive examination regarding Spences request, which violates the Law Against Discrimination (LAD).

The New Jersey (LAD) and the federal Fair Housing Act were created, among other reasons, to protect the rights of people with disabilities  including those who legitimately need service dogs and emotional support animals," Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement. "We are committed to upholding the law, and to holding accountable those who fail to follow it.

Amanda Hoover can be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Its microscopic. It wallows in dirt. And its on the fast-track to the top in Trenton.

The state Senate voted Thursday to designate Streptomyces griseus as the official state microbe.

Sure, its not as majestic as a horse (the state animal), as tasty as blueberries (the state fruit), as lofty as the red oak (the state tree) or as cute as a goldfinch (the state bird). But when did square dancing (the state dance) ever save millions of lives?

Streptomyces griseus helped create the worlds first antibiotic for tuberculosis, and state lawmakers want to shine a light on its New Jersey origins and tremendous accomplishments.

Sen. Samuel Thompson, R-Middlesex, the bills sponsor, called the discovery one of the most significant breakthroughs of the past century.

As a result, so many lives have been saved, he said.

The Senate passed it 34-0 on Thursday, after it cleared the Assembly last month without opposition. If the bill (S1729) is signed into law by Gov. Phil Murphy, New Jersey would become the second state in the U.S. with its own microbe. The other is Oregon.

Streptomyces griseus, a soil-based microorganism, was discovered in New Jersey in 1916 by Dr. Selman Waksman and Dr. Roland Curtis. Waksman, along with Dr. Albert Schatz and Elizabeth Bugie, would lead a team of Rutgers scientists to create streptomycin, the worlds first antibiotic for tuberculosis, in 1955, according to the bill.

Tuberculosis was at the time the second-leading cause of death in the U.S., the bill said, adding that that within 10 years of the antibiotics public release, the tuberculosis mortality rate fell from 194 deaths per people in 1900 to 9.1 deaths per 100,000 people in 1955.

Few people are aware of the enduring social value of Schatz, Bugie, and Waksmans research, as penicillin has overshadowed streptomycin as the twentieth centurys greatest antibiotic discovery, the bill said.

It is altogether fitting and proper to renew the publics awareness of this historic achievement, and New Jerseys role in combating tuberculosis.

Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @samanthamarcus. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
WASHINGTON  U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey lashed into President Donald Trump Friday after the president vetoed a congressional resolution overturning his declaration of national emergency to fund a southern border wall that Congress specifically rejected.

To be sure, if a Democratic president acted in this way, Republicans would be calling him or her a dictator," said Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

To be sure, if a Democratic president acted in this way, Republicans would be calling him or her a dictator. https://t.co/bEMHOLmEHq  Senator Bob Menendez (@SenatorMenendez) March 15, 2019

Trump had promised that Mexico would pay for the wall, then refused to sign a spending bill to fund the government without taxpayer funding for the barrier, leading to a record-long, 35-day shutdown.

On Friday, he said there was an emergency that justified him overruling the will of Congress.

Our porous southern border continues to be a magnet for lawless migration and criminals and has created a border security and humanitarian crisis that endangers every American, Trump said in his veto message.

Trumps policy was unpopular among U.S. voters, according to two polls released earlier this month. In a Quinnipiac University survey 66 percent of voters disapproved of Trumps action, more than double the 31 percent who supported it. A Monmouth University poll of U.S. adults offered a similar breakdown, with 65 percent opposing the emergency and 33 percent in favor.

Menendez and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., were among the 59 senators who voted on Thursday to reject Trumps declaration. The House passed the resolution last month with all 11 New Jersey House Democrats in favor.

Just now: I, along with the majority, of the Senate voted to REJECT @realdonaldtrump's emergency declaration for his wall. The President's scare tactics & tantrums won't work. The fact that Pres. Trump didn't get his way, is NOT a national emergency. https://t.co/9g4rGgbs9z  Sen. Cory Booker (@SenBooker) March 14, 2019

Trump has said he would take the funds from military construction already approved by Congress.

House Appropriations Committee Democrats said that could threaten $41 million for a munitions disassembly complex at Picatinny Arsenal and $10.2 million for a new refueling system for planes with hazardous cargo at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.

Booker, Menendez and the 11 House Democrats told acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan in a letter Thursday that they opposed taking any defense funds from New Jersey.

It would be irresponsible to prevent these military installations in our state from receiving this critical funding," the lawmakers wrote.

"Furthermore, it would weaken our national security and mission readiness if these installations were not properly equipped. If your objective is to make the nation safer, transferring money away from the militarys vital operations in New Jersey would do the exact opposite.

The only Republican in the states congressional delegation, Rep. Chris Smith, R-4th Dist., also was the only lawmaker not to sign the letter. Smith has said that Joint Base officials told him that the funding earmarked for the facility was not threatened.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.

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New Jersey lawmakers are moving to make it easier for sexual assault victims in the state to sue their abusers, approving a measure advocates say would crack open a culture of silence and shine a light on systemic abuse.

The state Senate on Thursday voted 32-1 in favor of legislation that would allow adult sexual assault victims in New Jersey seven years to file a civil lawsuit, instead of the current two-year time limit.

The measure still needs to be approved by the state Assembly before landing on Gov. Phil Murphys desk.

The legislation (S477) also would allow adults who were sexually assaulted as children to bring a civil suit against an individual or institution up until the age of 55 or seven years after they make the discovery" connecting their emotional and psychological injury to their abuse.

Victims who previously could not file lawsuits because of the statute of limitations would have a two-year window  from Dec. 1, 2019, to Nov. 30, 2021  to file their cases, even if they are over the age of 55.

Expanding New Jerseys narrow two-year statute of limitations has been a point of contention since the late 1990s, facing fierce opposition from the Catholic Church.

But the winds changed last year following the release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report identifying 300 clergy members credibly accused of sexual assault.

In September, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal announced he was launching a similar effort to investigate allegations of sexual abuse by members of the clergy within the Catholic dioceses of New Jersey, and any efforts to cover up such abuse.

Vitale told his colleagues on the Senate floor Thursday that perpetrators and institutions have benefitted from short statutes of limitations  until recently.

He said a recent public hearing on the measure, which featured gut-wrenching stories of rape and abuse from victims and their parents, was the saddest day of his career as a legislator.

State Sen. Gerald Cardinale, R-Bergen, was the sole no vote, arguing that "by going after the assets of nonprofit organizations, it takes the pressure off true offenders.

The bill, Cardinale said, will make some folks feel good that weve done something, but will not stop pedophiles.

After the hearing, Vitale called Cardinales comments disrespectful to victims and clueless about the benefits of this bill.

NJ Advance Media staff writers Brent Johnson and Susan K. Livio contributed to this report.

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So....Is our Cory Booker actually dating Rosario Dawson?

Yes, very much so, Dawson answered when asked about it by TMZ, as she walked through Reagan National Airport in Washington DC.

Sporting a Booker We Rise button from his 2020 presidential campaign on her purse, Dawson answered so far, so wonderful when asked how their relationship was progressing. The admission confirms months of rumors that Booker was dating the Sin City and Daredevil actress.

In 2016, Dawson had been a fervent supporter of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. But on Thursday, when asked if Booker would make a great president, she answered, I think so -- hes an amazing human being.

For his part, Booker has been mum on his personal life with Dawson, referencing it only obliquely during a visit to Power 105.1 FM morning show The Breakfast Club, Booker acknowledged he had a boo, but wouldnt say who.

Earlier this month, Booker appeared on Buzzfeeds A.M. to DM, but refused to answer when asked what he enjoyed doing with Dawson when they went out.

Wow, that is a set up if Ive ever heard one, he complained, declining to take the bait.

Booker is the only bachelor in the 2020 Democratic field, a point of some interest among politicos. The last president to win the Oval Office a bachelor was James Buchanan in 1856.

On Thursday, Dawson said she has no idea if an engagement ring might be forthcoming. I am just grateful to be with someone that I respect and love and admire so much who is so brilliant and kind and caring and loving, she said.

Calls to a Booker spokesman were not immediately returned.

Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Police are investigating after a swastika and other hateful graffiti was found in a bathroom at High Point Regional High School in Sussex County earlier this week.

The graffiti was reported at 3:11 p.m. Monday and the State Police, which provides local law enforcement in Wantage where the school is located, is handling the investigation, Trooper Charles Marchan said.

New Jersey Herald reported the swastika was accompanied by anti-semitic statements including Hitler was here.

An officer that was already assigned to the school continues to monitor school grounds, Marchan said.

A representative from High Point Regional School District confirmed in an emailed statement that the district was working with New Jersey State Police, and that no immediate threat was associated with the graffiti.

The district school would continue look for educational opportunities for students to send a clear message that incidents of this nature will not be tolerated, according to the representative.

The hate incident would also be addressed at the schools annual upcoming Stand Up Against Hate Symposium.

Swastika, anti-Semitic graffiti found at High Point Regional High Schoolhttps://t.co/pGETtis3LO pic.twitter.com/UIABmiTjMm  New Jersey Herald (@NJHerald) March 15, 2019

Taylor Tiamoyo Harris may be reached at tharris@njadvancemedia.com. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Federal officials gave low ratings to two critical commuter projects to replace the aging Portal Bridge and Hudson River rail tunnels because the projects lack local funding.

NJ Transit officials confirmed the low to medium ranking, expected to be officially announced by the Federal Transit Administration Monday. It came despite New Jerseys commitment of $600 million last year toward the $1.5 billion project to replace the century-old-bridge in Kearny.

Overall the FTA gave the Portal project a medium-high justification rating, but the financing ranking dragged overall rating to medium-low. The tunnels received an overall medium low, according to the FTA report.

Applications have been made for federal grants to help offset the cost of both the Portal Bridge replacement and a companion project to build two new Hudson River rail tunnels as part of the Gateway Project.

At this point in time, after several years, both the Hudson Tunnels and Portal North Bridge projects are ineligible to receive Capital Investment Grants funds, because each project has received a medium-low rating from the FTA, said an FTA spokesman.

NJ Transit officials received the news Friday, said Kevin Corbett, executive director of NJ Transit.

Corbett called the rankings very disappointing. The FTA rated the financing as 37-percent of 100-percent because local matching funds werent solid, he said.

I know our local (funding) match is 100 percent solid  we need to go back and demonstrate its 100 percent, Corbett said. Technically, the FTA knows its a good proposal for Portal.

The ranking was a surprise after Gov. Phil Murphy committed $600 million in state Economic Development borrowing last June to Portal Bridge to convince the FTA get the project moving. The replacement for Portal Bridge is designed, has necessary environmental permits and is waiting for federal funding.

"Additional steps must be taken by NJ Transit to fully commit non-Capital Investment Grants funding in the states capital improvement program and to demonstrate it has the financial capacity to fund unexpected cost increases or funding shortfalls, an FTA spokesman said.

The FTA rankings came several days after U.S. Deputy Transportation Secretary Jeffrey Rosen said that there was no Gateway funding in the proposed federal budget because those transit projects are local responsibilities, even though the tunnels and Portal Bridge are owned by Amtrak, the federal passenger railroad company.

Rosen said New Jersey and New York have not come up with funding for the project, even though the states have publicly committed more than $5 billion.

We are extremely disappointed that the U.S. Department of Transportation continuously fails to recognize the urgency around the Portal North Bridge and Hudson Tunnel Projects, and the commitment and ongoing work by the local partners to get them done," said Jerry Zaro, Chairman of the Gateway Program Development Corporation, which oversees delivery of the Gateway Program fired back that both states have committed more than $5.5 billion to the projects.

Citing past opposition by President Donald Trump, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, D-NJ, called the ranking a political decision.

Todays ludicrous decision by the FTA is as tied to reality as President Trump is tied to the truth, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, D-NJ, said in a statement. Its just the latest Trumped-up excuse for this administration to deny our region the vital funding we need to ensure the safety and reliability of a transportation lifeline for one-fifth of the entire U.S. economy.

The Portal bridge, built in 1910, is the bane of NJ Transit and Amtrak riders on the busy Northeast Corridor line when it gets stuck in the open position after opening to allow barges to pass on the Hackensack River.

Todays news is incredibly disappointing and continues to needlessly delay construction of the Portal North Bridge and slow down progress on the critical Gateway tunnels," said U.S. Senator Cory Booker, D-NJ..

The two Hudson River Tunnels were damaged by corrosive chemicals in flood waters driven by Hurricane Sandy and need to be gutted. If one tunnel is closed for repairs, that would cut rail capacity to and from Manhattan by 75 percent.

Let me be very clear: This president is playing politics with a transportation ticking time bomb, Menendez said.

Larry Higgs may be reached at lhiggs@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @commutinglarry. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Fleurty Girl will close its French Quarter store next month after losing its lease, owner Lauren LeBlanc Haydel said. The retailers other five stores will remain open.

Haydel first announced the closure Thursday night (March 14) in a Facebook post to customers. The French Quarter store has been at 632 St. Peter St., between Royal and Chartres streets (map), for seven years.

Speaking over the phone Friday morning, Haydel told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune the building was recently purchased, and, earlier this week, she received a call from the new owner telling her that we cannot honor your lease." The new owner explained Fleurty Girl would need to leave the location, she said.

I was kind of blown away, Haydel said.

Haydel said she and the new owner negotiated a deal where the store will stay open through French Quarter Fest in April. She plans to reopen at a new French Quarter location later this year, and is currently lining up prospective real estate.

Well take a six month hiatus, well do our best to keep the jobs for our employees of that store, but during that time, were going to miss our French Quarter regulars and visitors and those carriage drivers yelling, Stella! as they passed our door with a load full of boozed-out touristic passengers, she wrote on Facebook. We were honored to be there. Every. Single. Day.

The French Quarter store employs up to six people during high season, Haydel said.

It wasnt immediately clear who the buildings new owner is. Haydel declined to identify the new owner, acknowledging that business is business. She mainly wants to get the word out to customers and let them know the Fleurty Girl brand will remain in the French Quarter.

We dont want to lose our presence there, Haydel said.

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Fleurty Girl is the latest local retailer to announce changes linked to shifts in the citys real estate market. The family behind Genes Po-Boys and Daiquiri Shop, which has operated out of the bright pink building at Elysian Fields and St. Claude avenues for decades, intends to sell the eatery and its iconic building. It went on the market in late February for nearly $5 million. On the same intersection, Beauty Plus, which has sold beauty supplies there for 18 years, said it would close after it found its rent would nearly triple this year.

Haydel said shes worried rapidly rising real estate prices will catch more unique, local businesses off guard.

New Orleans is changing. Pay attention, she wrote in her Facebook post.

Fleurty Girls other locations include a store on Magazine Street in New Orleans, and stores in Old Metairie, Gretna, Lakeside Plaza in Metairie, and Mandeville. The brand will also open a store in the new airport terminal set to open in May.

Read Haydels full post below:

Stay with NOLA.com for more on this story.

NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune reporter Jennifer Larino contributed to this article.

Carlie Kollath Wells is a morning reporter at NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Have an early-bird tip? Send it to her: cwells@nola.com or Twitter @carlie_kollath.
The Maritime Building in the Central Business District, recognized as New Orleans oldest skyscraper, has been sold and will reopen as timeshares in 2020.

The 11-story building, located at the corner of Carondelet and Common streets, was purchased prior to Mardi Gras (March 5) by a pair of developers working with Orange Lake Resorts, a timeshare operator based out of Orlando, Florida, according to a news release. Developers plan to renovate the 126-year-old property starting in May.

The building will re-open in early 2020 with 105 one- and two-bedroom villas, the release said. A significant proportion of those units will be luxury timeshares, according to the release.

The Maritime, built in 1893 and considered the citys first skyscraper, was redeveloped into apartments in 2010 by developer Marcel Wisznia. At the time, Wisznia pieced together tax credits and federally-backed financing to make the nearly $40 million project happen.

The Maritime now joins a growing list of CBD apartment buildings set to be converted into timeshares. Last May, the 17-story apartment building at 144 Elk Place was sold to Bluegreen Vacations, another Florida-based timeshare operator. The 98-unit building has since been converted to timeshares, forcing residents out. More recently, the Saratoga Building at 212 Loyola Ave., also owned by Wisznia, was sold to the RMR Group. They plan to reopen the property under Sonesta Extended Stay, a timeshare brand in the Royal Sonesta hotel family.

The Maritimes corner on Carondelet is one of the best locations in town for timeshares, said Lenny Wormser, a senior vice president with HREC Investment Advisers, which brokered the deal as well as the Saratoga and Elk Place transactions.

Wormser noted a number of forces at work. CBD blocks closest to City Hall and Tulane Medical Center have gotten safer and busier, he said. CBD buildings are facing competition from trendy apartments and condos going up in the Warehouse District, he added.

In early 2018, the New Orleans City Council approved new zoning rules that make it easier for timeshares to operate in the CBD. Interest has surged, Wormser said.

Its definitely created an opportunity, he said.

Affordable housing advocates say the trend is concerning. No matter how you slice it, housing options are being taken away from people who live here, said Breonne DeDecker, an affordable housing advocate who directs programming at Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, an organization focused on housing rights.

The Maritime is one of several properties the group has been watching as it maps the proliferation of short-term rentals across the city. The group also filed a complaint last October with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development about the number of short-term rentals at the Maritime and Saratoga buildings. DeDecker noted city records indicate 24 operating short-term rental permits linked to the Maritime Building as well as 34 expired permits and 20 revoked permits. It was not immediately clear why the permits were revoked.

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Short-term rental changes in New Orleans would require owners on-site

The Maritime was pitched as a development that would house local professionals and help spur more affordable housing nearby, DeDecker said. Wisznia worked closely with HUD and the Federal Housing Administration to craft the unusual financing behind the project. Ultimately, the project combined federal and state tax credits, and a FHA-backed loan under a special two-tier lease that required HUD to alter some of its program rules.

A decade later, the property has evolved into yet another tourism development with the help of federally-backed funds, DeDecker said.

Its sort of a bait and switch, she said.

The Maritime timeshares will be Orange Lake Resorts first location in New Orleans as well as its first location in an urban setting. The company runs 26 timeshare resorts total, all under the Holiday Inn Club Vacations brand.

Despite recent activity, Wormser said timeshares in New Orleans remain a very small share of the hospitality market, which supports roughly 25,000 hotel rooms in downtown alone. Unlike many short-term rentals, timeshares look and run like hotels, and have been closely regulated for long time, he said.

The timeshare use is no more intense than a hotel, he said.

Housing advocates want the City Council to take another look at timeshares. DeDecker worries the model could be a way for developers to skirt affordable housing requirements city officials are considering baking into the citywide short-term rental rules currently being debated. At a Tuesday meeting, members of the City Planning Commission noted lucrative short-term rentals could be used an incentive for developers to add affordable units.

You have to close the loopholes, DeDecker said.

Jennifer Larino covers residential real estate, retail, tourism and other consumer and business news for NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. Reach her at jlarino@nola.com or 504-239-1424. Follow her on Twitter @jenlarino.
A 13-year-old girl from New Orleans is accused of teaming up with three adults to commit a series of armed robberies in St. John the Baptist Parish Tuesday night, according to authorities.

76-year-old Belle Chasse man accused of shooting neighbors dog in neck

The foursomes mini-crime wave ended after a car chase into St. Charles Parish  with an 8-year-old boy in tow, according to the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriffs Office.

They inflicted physical and emotional pain on victims who were going about their daily lifestyles, Sheriff Mike Tregre said in a statement released Thursday.

Arrested were Reiontae Ward, 18, of New Orleans, Develyn Smith, 24, of Reserve, and Byron Green, 39, of New Orleans. The 13-year-old girl was not named because she is a juvenile.

The robberies began about 7:40 p.m. in the 100 block of Riverside Drive in Reserve. A boy, 14, was standing outside his home using his iPhone when he noticed a sport utility vehicle drive up, the Sheriffs Office said.

The 13-year-old girl got out of the SUV wearing a black-hooded shirt and ordered the boy to turn over his phone and belongings. The girl brandished a pistol, pointed it at the boy and hit him in the mouth, the Sheriffs Office said.

The boy then handed over his phone and cash. The girl got into the vehicle, which sped off, according to authorities. The boy refused medical treatment.

About 20 minutes later, the group struck again in the parking lot of a large strip mall in the 300 block of West Airline Highway in LaPlace, the Sheriffs Office said.

A woman, 41, was sitting inside her vehicle with the engine running when the 13-year-old walked up to drivers-side window, pointed a gun and ordered her out of the vehicle. The woman, instead, drove off.

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The group selected a third target, a couple in the 200 block of Somerset Road in LaPlace, the Sheriffs Office said. The couple had just gotten out of their vehicle about 8:45 p.m. when the 13-year-old girl and a woman later identified as Smith walked up.

Once again taking the lead, the girl pointed a gun at the couple and demanded their property, authorities said. The girl pistol-whipped the female victim, 70, when she refused to hand over her purse, the Sheriffs Office said.

Smith, meanwhile, took on the 60-year-old husband, attacking him, according to authorities. Smith and the girl managed to take the couples belongings and fled the scene.

The couple was taken to a local hospital for treatment of their injuries and later released, the Sheriffs Office said.

By then, local authorities were on the lookout for the SUV, which had been reported stolen out of New Orleans, the Sheriffs Office said. Deputies spotted the vehicle on Main Street at Woodland Drive in LaPlace and tried to make a traffic stop.

But Ward, who was behind the wheel, refused to pull over, the Sheriffs Office said. She led deputies and State Police on a chase eastbound on Interstate 10 before heading onto Interstate 310 in St. Charles Parish.

The chase continued over the Hale Boggs Bridge and onto the West Bank. It ended on the Highway 3127 off-ramp where Ward stopped the SUV and ran into the nearby marsh, the Sheriffs Office said.

Authorities, including St. Charles Parish Sheriffs Office deputies, detained the 13-year-old, Smith and Green. Smiths 8-year-old son had been in the SUV the entire time, according to the Sheriffs Office. Deputies released him into the custody of his grandmother.

Ward eventually came out of the marsh, and she, too, was arrested.
A judge denied a lawyers request to reduce bond for a 26-year-old man accused of fatally stabbing his uncle in the French Quarter, based on his concern that a mental health facility could not provide the required security.

Morgan Rothe-Skinner was arrested Feb. 7 and booked with second-degree murder charges in connection to the slayingr of 52-year-old Daniel Magrini. Rothe-Skinners lawyer, Billy Sothern requested that his clients bond be reduced from $500,000 to $100,000 under the condition that he be moved to an inpatient mental health program.

Magistrate Commissioner Jonathan Friedman denied that request Thursday (March 14) following a preliminary hearing and kept his bond at $500,000, which was the amount he originally set in February. His judgment was based on the concern that a mental health facility could not provide security to ensure Rothe-Skinners attendance and ensure public safety.

In his request to reduce his clients bond, Sothern claimed that Rothe-Skinner, who appeared in court Thursday, has psychotic symptoms, hallucinations and delusions and that his incarceration at Orleans Parish Justice Center jail will only aggravate the symptoms.

Assistant District Attorney Abigail MacDonald opposed the bond reduction, arguing that he appeared in court and that he was competent on Feb. 6 when he stabbed the victim.

When police arrived to the scene in the 600 block of Burgundy Street around 6:21 p.m. Feb. 6, they found a man, later identified as Magrini, rolled up in a rug and stabbed to death. Rothe-Skinners grandmother, Katherine Magrini, told police her grandson admitted to killing her stepson, Daniel Magrini.

In court Thursday, MacDonald questioned Stephanie Gray, a detective with New Orleans Police Department about the details in the polices investigation. Gray said police found the victim inside a carpet, stabbed 20 times.

Gray said that based on information she has received from a source, still being investigated, Rothe-Skinner was a threat to society.

During a cross-examination, Gray said that Rothe-Skinner was very calm and compliant during an interview held one hour after police detained him. She added that he looked slightly disheveled but she did not believe him to be psychotic.

Gray said that Rothe-Skinner told police that he believed that Daniel Magrini had drugged and raped him. Based on Rothe-Skinners appearance, she did not believe that he was drugged, but did not comment on the rape accusations in court Thursday. Sothern argued that his accusations were examples of his clients psychotic delusions.

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While she did not believe him to psychotic, Gray said that Rothe-Skinner may suffer from some elements of post-traumatic stress disorder.

This has undone me,' says grandmother of fatal French Quarter stabbing suspect

On the night of the fatal stabbing, Katherine Magrini told police that her grandson held her inside for hours and that he was barricaded inside. Police found Rothe-Skinner near the back of the house armed with a knife, according to a warrant for his arrest. After detaining him, police went to an adjacent apartment, saw a rolled-up rug, then observed human feet hanging from the end. When they opened the rug, officers found a man who had multiple lacerations to his body and face. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

In his written request to reduce bond, Sothern argued that doctors working for the Orleans Parish Sheriff s Office determined that Rothe-Skinner is seriously mentally ill. He also said that Rothe-Skinners mental health was declining in the years prior to his arrest.

Before she called the police that night, Katherine Magrini said she saw her grandson walking around agitated. After she asked him what was wrong, Rothe-Skinner admitted that he had killed her stepson, Daniel Magrini.

He was just very manic, Katherine Magrini said of Rothe-Skinner, adding that she hadnt witnessed any violet tendencies from her grandson prior to that night.

Katherine Magrinis niece, who identified herself only as Emily, agreed that she had not seen evidence of a propensity for violence in her nephew: Never.

Katherine Magrini said the family knew that Rothe-Skinner dealth with mental illness, but it had not exposed itself in a way that worried her.

I knew it was off, but I thought it was harmless, she said. Obviously something was wrong, to do what he did, she added.
Avoyelles Parishs C-graded public school system is the latest in the United States to switch to a four-day week, eliminating Monday classes. The School Board voted 7-2 on Tuesday (March 12) to make the change for the 2019-20 academic year, The Avoyelles Journal reports.

Advocates say four-day school weeks can save money and help recruit and retain certified teachers. I had a teacher from Pineville High School [in Rapides Parish] call me today and say, If your four-day work week passes, give me a call, Avoyelles High Principal Michael Rachal was quoted as saying by KALB television.

More than 500 U.S. school systems have switched to four-day weeks, with some in Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, New Mexico and South Dakota making up the vanguard, according to a June report by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Many drop Fridays and lengthen Monday-Thursday instruction time. Research into the effect on academic performance has been mixed.

Jefferson Parish closing three schools, expanding nine to K-8 model

The Avoyelles superintendent, Blaine Dauzat, previously worked in the B-graded Caldwell Parish school system, which already operates on a four-day week. In addition to Avoyelles, the C-graded Natchitoches Parish school system this year considered a four-day week but dropped the idea Thursday, the Natchitoches Parish Journal reports.

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Read complete stories by The Avoyelles Journal and KALB.

Colorado school system switching to four-day week

. . . . . . .

Drew Broach covers Jefferson Parish politics and education plus other odds and ends. Email: dbroach@nola.com. Facebook: Drew Broach TP. Twitter: drewbroach1
The Ouachita Parish Sheriffs Office reported this month that a substitute teacher battered a student at East Ouachita Middle School, NBC 10/FOX 14 reports.

The TV station obtained footage of a viral video on Facebook that shows the student being pressed against a wall by the teacher on March 5.

The incident spurred another childs parents, Christina Hamilton and her husband Melvin, to tell NBC 10/FOX 14 about the time their son was yanked by his book bag by a paraprofessional at the same school in 2018.

Hamilton told the station her 14-year-old son lives with special needs. Restraining a disabled child doesnt include momentarily blocking their actions," according to the Louisiana Department of Education. Additionally, the Ouachita Parish Sheriffs Office told the station theres no school resource officer assigned to East Ouachita Middle School.

Both of the teachers involved are no longer employees of the school, the station reported.

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Ouachita Middle School in Monroe enrolls 601 students in grades 6 through 8, according to the state Education Department.

Read the full story at NBC 10/FOX 14.

9-year-old with autism handcuffed to chair at Franklin Parish school: report

Wilborn P. Nobles III is an education reporter based in New Orleans. He can be reached at wnobles@nola.com or on Twitter at @WilNobles.
Libertys Kitchen participants and alumni will be able to take a free college and career readiness class starting this spring thanks to a partnership with Delgado Community College.

The class, which provides academic advising for participants, is a non-credit course, though participants may be eligible for prior learning credit upon future enrollment at Delgado, according to a news release. Classes will take place at Libertys Kitchen at 300 N. Broad St.

The program is being funded by a grant from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Delgado will provide the textbook and course materials free of charge, the release said.

In a statement, Arlanda Williams, Delgados vice chancellor of workforce development and institutional advancement, urged all Libertys Kitchen participants and alumni to explore their potential through the program.

Libertys Kitchen works to create career pathways for young adults in New Orleans through workforce training, leadership development and other support services. The group has worked with over 750 young adults since its inception in 2009.

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Our alumni have often used Libertys Kitchen as a first step to re-engaging further education," Libertys Kitchen CEO Dennis Bagneris said in a statement. "Im excited to take an important step with Delgado Community College and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation to formalize that pathway.

Classes will be held from March 25 to June 12 on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, from 2 p.m. to 3:15 p.m., according to the release.

For more information and enrollment questions, contact Senior Program Manager Brianna Skinner at skinner@libertyskitchen.org or 504-304-3362.

University of Holy Cross aims to make transfers easier for Delgado culinary students

Wilborn P. Nobles III is an education reporter based in New Orleans. He can be reached at wnobles@nola.com or on Twitter at @WilNobles.
Parishioners and staff at St. Joseph Church and Shrine on the West Bank, located at 610 6th St., Gretna, are very excited about the good things going on there. After over a year of patiently waiting, the restoration work on the exterior of the historic church has finally begun, the restoration campaign is working well and The Mother Church Cookbook is a winner.

But, the folks are even more pleased and deeply honored that Archbishop Gregory Aymond of the Archdiocese of New Orleans is coming to Gretna on March 19 to celebrate a Solemn Mass at 10 a.m. in honor of their Patron Saint.

After the Mass, the Archbishop will lead a Procession of people including children, depicting the Holy Family from the church to the St. Joseph Altar location, in the gym of the St. Joseph Complex on the corner of 7th and Newton Streets.

As they arrive, they will perform the Tupa, Tupa, a Sicilian tradition depicting the Holy family knocking door-to-door for food and shelter, an integral part of the St. Josephs Altar celebration.

Children represent Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the angels. The ritual begins with St. Joseph knocking on the door looking for food and shelter for his family.

At each of the first two knocks, the people inside asks, Who is there? and get the response, Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

What do you want? The response, We seek food and shelter.

The response comes: There is no room for you here.

When they knock for the third time, the dialog is repeated, but this time the joyful response is Come in.

Archbishop Aymond will then officially bless the St. Joseph Altar and the children depicting the Holy Family and Saints are treated to a meal. The public is cordially invited to eat at the Altar from noon until 6 p.m.

The public is also invited to attend a Prayer Service on March 18 at 6 p.m., at the Altar that will remain open until 7:30 p.m. for viewing only, food will not be served.

March 19 is the anniversary of the debut of The Mother Church Cookbook, the pride and joy of the St. Joseph Restoration Campaign. The first printing was for 1,000 cookbooks and one week later, a second printing of another 1,000 was ordered. So successful has been sales that the third printing of another 1,000 is on the way.

The cookbook was one of the first endeavors to raise the needed money to restore the exterior of the church. The sealant over the stucco went bad which created the necessary job of removal and replacement with a paint job to follow. There were also needed repairs for old termite damage in the auditorium.

The cookbook includes family-favorite recipes generously donated from parishioners and locals who love St. Joseph Church, as well as recipes from Gretna Restaurants, Then and Now and St. Joseph Altar Recipes. Besides the 500 recipes, the cookbook is chock full of church and St. Joseph Altar histories.

Mother Church Cookbooks will be available for sale at the Altar for $25 each, with some fancied up with Easter colored bows. So even if you already have a cookbook, you can help the restoration fund while generously giving a gift to a loved one.

Cookbooks can be purchased online for $30, including shipping and handling at stjosephgretna.com.

If you have never attended a St. Joseph Day Altar, youve missed a very special treat. Altars are not as prevalent in other parts of the country as here in Southern Louisiana.

This delicious and beautiful custom, La Tavola di San Giuseppe, came to New Orleans in the 1800s as immigrants formed what is still the largest Sicilian population in the country. St. Joseph is known to Catholics worldwide as the patron saint of fathers, families and workers. People seek his intercession when unemployed.

Since Altars were held to thank St. Joseph for relieving hunger, offerings of food are essential. Cookies, cakes and decorative breads are common decorations.

Fava beans, called lucky beans are associated with St. Joseph Day because favas that were usually fed to animals sustained the Sicilians during the famine. Fava beans received at Altars are carried in purses and pockets year-round for good luck.

Altar menus include pasta with meatless Milanese gravy since meat is never served on Altars. There is fried catfish, at least 5 different vegetable casseroles, cakes for dessert, bread, tea, both red and white wines.

As guests leave St. Josephs, they are given a brown bag holding assorted Italian cookies, a lucky bean, a piece of blessed bread and a St. Joseph prayer card.

St. Cletus St. Joseph Altar

The public is also invited to the St. Joseph Altar at St. Cletus Church, 3600 Claire Ave. in Gretna. On March 18, there will be a Rosary and Altar blessing in Jerome Hall at 6:30 p.m., followed with a viewing only until 8 p.m.

On March 19, the Altar will be open from 11:30 a.m. until 7 p.m. as long as there is food to serve. For more information, call the Altar Chairman Bill Landry at 504.909.1685.

Vieni a mangiare e gustare, come and eat and enjoy at either or both of the two Gretna Altars. When celebrating St. Josephs Day, everyone becomes a little bit Italian!

Reservations are being taken for the performance of Some Like It Hot, dinner theater at the Gretna Cultural Center for the Arts which will run on weekends from March 22 through April 7.

The comedy includes seasoned performers like Dane Rhodes, Sandy Bravender, Ashton Ackridge, Denice Ponce, Bob Scully, Crystal Thomassie, Shelly Lauman, Cheryl Amacker, Scott Amacker and Margeaux Fanning, just to name a few. Newcomers Maryam Bahman and B.J. LeBlanc are also in the cast.

Tickets for the buffet and show are $53 each, or $40 for show only and can be purchased by calling 504.362.4451.

The St. Joseph St. Vincent de Paul Society is stepping out into the community with a fundraiser on April 5, from 5 to 7:30 p.m. in the St. Joseph Complex gym on the corner of 7th and Newton Streets in Gretna.

Dine in or Take out offerings include a fried fish dinner or a shrimp and grits dinner, either served with baked macaroni or fries, coleslaw and bread for $9 each. Drinks and desserts will be available for sale, camaraderie is free.

The Gretna Historical Society is hosting the Spring Tour of Homes on April 7, from 1 to 4 p.m. Tickets can be purchased for $15 the day of the tour at the GHS Museum Complex, 209 Lafayette St. The GHS Museum Complex and German-American Cultural Center will be included in the tour.

The tour will feature beautiful homes in the historic district, the fabulous new residence on Newton and 8th Streets and one of the Riverview Condos on 1st Street.

Helen Williams is a Gretna resident who writes about people and events of community interest. She can be reached at 504.450.8481 or email her at gretnaglance@cox.net. Her posts and videos can be seen at: http://connect.nola.com/user/mhwilliams/index.html.
Thirteen people were injured Friday afternoon (March 15) when a bus crashed along Interstate 10 eastbound in Mississippi, just beyond the Louisiana state line, WVUE Fox 8 reports.

Traffic was backed up to the Interstate 10/12/59 interchange in the Slidell area around 4 p.m.

Hancock County Sheriff Ricky Adam said the tour bus ran off the interstate at Mile Marker 1 near, hitting a sign and then a tree, according to the report.

The bus was carrying 25 passengers, with 13 being treated for injuries, the report says.

The bus was a Golden Gulf Limousine vehicle, a woman who answered the phone at the Biloxi, Mississippi, business confirmed Friday afternoon.

WLOX reported the bus was traveling from New Orleans headed to Harrahs Gulf Coast, which issued the following statement:

Right now our thoughts are with those that were injured in the accident, and we are working with law enforcement to aid in their investigation in any way possible.

See WVUE Fox 8s full report.
A 29-year-old man was arrested in the fatal shooting of a man found dead Thursday morning (March 14) in a Treme apartment building.

Gerardo Bugallo-Beret was booked into Orleans Justice Center jail Thursday night on one count of second-degree murder, according to New Orleans police and Orleans Parish Sheriffs Office records. An NOPD release says only that detectives developed Bugallo-Beret as a suspect in the shooting, which took place shortly before 8:15 a.m. in the parking lot of the St. Ann Square Apartments, at the corner of St. Ann and North Prieur streets.

Residents in the area said the shooting started with a brief exchange of words between two men at the apartments. An eyewitness, who asked to remain anonymous, said one of the men  a resident of the apartments  grabbed a gun and opened fire, killing the second man. The man who fired the gun attempted to leave but was detained by police, according to multiple people at the scene.

The NOPD release does not say whether Bugallo-Beret is the man bystanders say was detained at the scene. The coroners office has not released the identity of the deceased.

Bugallo-Beret is a former NYPD officer employed by the department from July 2014 to May 2016, according to records provided by the NYPD. His departure from that department coincides with allegations he attacked a bouncer at a Greenwich Village bar, according to a report from the New York Daily News, which says he was charged with misdemeanor assault.

Anyone with information about this fatal shooting should contact NOPD Homicide Detective Nicholas Williams at 504-658-5300, or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111.
Even though Republicans dominate Louisiana politics, only one GOP woman, Suzanne Terrell, has ever held statewide elected office. Her term as elections commissioner ended in 2004.

Terrell and three Republican women serving in the Legislature say their party could be doing more to recruit women to run for office.

You dont know if someone is good because they arent in office yet, Terrell said. Im not saying to vote for a candidate just because theyre a woman, but the Republicans dont know all the capable people out there because the party hasnt tried.

While female Democrats saw record-breaking success nationally in 2018, Republican women have had much more limited success in running for office. In Louisiana, some say they have struggled to find a place in the states traditional boys club political structure.

Sen. Sharon Hewitt, R-Slidell, an engineer and manager at Shell Oil for nearly 35 years, had chaired a parish recreation board when she started her first campaign for the state Senate in 2015. She said she was openly discouraged from seeking office.

Hewitt said the campaign manager of her Republican opponent, Pete Schneider, called her and said that the powers that be met in Slidell and decided that it was my opponent's seat.

He deserved it, and I was just a PTA mom, Hewitt said. That fired me up. PTA moms make the world go around. By disparaging PTA moms, you basically insulted every female in my district. It was a great rallying call.

Roger Villere, who chaired the Louisiana Republican Party from 2004 until early 2018, said he tried to encourage female candidates, but he claimed they were more difficult to recruit than their male counterparts.

In the end, a lot of them say, Well, Ill run, but youve got to finance it. But it just doesnt work that way, Villere said, explaining that the state party does not have money to donate to individual campaigns.

Female candidates sometimes get tied up in rhetoric and take political attacks more personally than their male counterparts, Villere added.

The guys, for the most part, let a lot of the vitriol bounce off of them, he said. Youll see them attack one another in the morning, and then theyre out at a party kidding around with one another. Whereas the ladies tend to hold a grudge a little longer.

My whole thought process was: Lets elect Republicans, he said. And I would like to have a woman. But if I cant, then well go with the men. Im not going to go with a weak Republican woman who doesnt really want to run and doesnt have the resources.

Louis Gurvich, who succeeded Villere last year as the state Republican chairman, said in a statement that our party is doing everything it can to recruit, train, organize and assist our candidates, both male and female, as never before.

Twelve of the 22 women in the Legislature are Republicans, and the partys gains there along with the many Republican women elected to parish and local offices solidly attest to its progress, Gurvich said.

Still, research shows voting for female candidates is not a priority for Republican voters nationwide. More Democrats than Republicans find electing women into public office is important, according to 2018 election exit polls Edison Research conducted. Of the 45 percent of respondents who said it is very important to elect more women to public office, only 17 percent identified as Republicans.

In the past 20 years, only four Republican women other than Terrell have run for statewide elected office. None garnered more than 11 percent of the vote.

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Democratic women, including former Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, have won six elections to statewide office, with three of those victories in the past 20 years.

Only 705 of the 7,383 women in state legislatures are Republicans, according to the National Council of State Legislatures. Even traditionally red states, such as Mississippi and Alabama, have more female Democrats than Republicans.

The Democratic Party is flush with organizations designed to recruit women candidates. Hewitt began working in 2018 to bring a chapter of the GOP-centric Right Women Right Now group to Louisiana. The organization was formed in 2012 to recruit, train and support state-level female candidates.

In 2016, 163 out of 690 Right Women Right Now candidates won their races or were appointed to office. Three took congressional seats from Democrats in Alaska and Rhode Island in last falls midterm elections.

Terrell said that even when political tides shifted toward Republicans in 2010, women in the party were not being recruited to run in Louisiana.

The state party was always more concerned with electing someone with an arm, she said, referring to their own financial support network. Theyve never looked at the trenches to see whos there to be cultivated.

Terrell emphasized that it is rare for women who run for office to have the same trajectory as men, who are more likely to have long-term political ambitions.

Ive been around a lot of men in politics and they tend to (say), Im going to go to college  and eventually Im gonna end up president, Terrell said. With me, and I think with a lot of women, its much more of an organic process. It was the idea that I could go and fix something.

Terrell was the last person to hold the elections commissioners post in Louisiana; she successful pushed to consolidate the office with the secretary of state. She worked in citizen advocacy at the State Capitol before her seeking office.

She said she considered a run for the Legislature but was discouraged by friends who suggested she would be more effective serving on a local level. Her first elected post was on the New Orleans City Council from 1994 to 2000.

Rep. Julie Stokes, R-Kenner, was a CPA with a large accounting firm before she ran for the Legislature in 2013. She rankled more conservative Republican House members last year when she urged them to compromise on sales tax measure to finalize the state budget. She failed to make the runoff for Louisiana secretary of state last fall, even though she raised more campaign funds than any of the nine candidates.

On Wednesday (March 13), during a panel on women in politics at LSU, Stokes said before she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017, she was told she was too pretty for men to take seriously when it comes to issues like the state budget. But she said when she campaigned for secretary of state, her Facebook page received comments such as I wouldnt vote for a woman who looks like a man, a reference to her short hair from the cancer treatment.

Rep. Paula Davis, R-Baton Rouge, was a lobbyist herself before running for the Legislature in 2015. I never thought I would actually run. Really, it was just being at the right place at the right time, she said.

Hewitt added that it is important to have strong women in leadership positions and in statewide offices so others can see its possible for women not just to run, but to win.

- Abbie Shull, LSU Manship News Service
Construction on an Interstate 10 interchange to expedite traffic to and from Louis Armstrong International Airports new passenger terminal wont begin until September at the earliest - 3 months after the terminal opens. And its going to take four years to finish.

The new timetable was provided this week by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, which expects to spend $95 million to $125 million expanding the I-10 interchange at Loyola Avenue in Kenner. Construction proposals are due by April 23, and the agency expects to award the contract July 1 and tell the winner to start at the end of August.

The job calls for adding flyover ramps connecting I-10 directly with new access roads close to the $1 billion terminal, for widening the interchanges existing ground-level ramps and for related work. The flyover ramps are designed to whisk I-10 traffic to and from the airport without mixing into local traffic on ground-level Loyola Avenue.

New Orleans airport terminal will open long before I-10 flyover ramp

But from May 15 when the terminal is scheduled to open until 2023 when the highway work might end, thats exactly whats going to happen. Officials predict heavy congestion on Loyola, with southbound traffic from I-10 doubling in the afternoon peak period.

Thats going to be huge, traffic engineer Carmelo Gutierrez told the Kenner City Council in January. Youre probably going to have to suffer for a few years."

It could be worse. In hopes of alleviating congestion over the next four years, the state and Kenner are spending $6.8 million to add another exit lane from westbound I-10 to Loyola, redesign the ground-level intersection, widen southbound Loyola to six lanes and redesign the Loyola intersection at Veterans Memorial Boulevard.

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South of Veterans, the state and the airport are spending $6.1 million on a new road to the terminal.

It was 2013 when the New Orleans Aviation Board, steered by then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu, decided to build the new, 30-gate terminal. The cost has risen as often as the completion date has been delayed in a manifold undertaking that requires coordination of three local governments, the state of Louisiana and at least two federal agencies.

Work to start on $6.8 million 'temporary' New Orleans airport road

Since then all the local governments and the state have changed chief executives. And along the way, momentum to improve the I-10 interchange lagged behind progress on the terminal.

The state transportation department is now taking a design-build approach to the work, with a single contractor both designing and constructing the interchange improvements. Its short list for the job totals three companies: Boh Bros. Construction Co. of New Orleans, Gilchrist Construction Co. of Alexandria and James Construction Group of Baton Rouge.

. . . . . . .

Drew Broach covers Jefferson Parish politics and education plus other odds and ends. Email: dbroach@nola.com. Facebook: Drew Broach TP. Twitter: drewbroach1.
DECIN, Czech RepublicCzech zoo welcomed the arrival of an albino wallaby baby and raised hopes that it will become the zoos new star attraction.

Staff and visitors to Decin Zoo were devastated when their best-known resident Sigfried the grizzly bear died last year and now hope the baby wallabys striking white fur and red eyes will draw visitors.

Decin Zoo spokeswoman Alena Houskova said the arrival of the wallaby has already delighted staff members since it is the first albino wallaby the zoo has had in its history.

We have five red-necked wallabieswe had one male and two females which have both just delivered their joeys (baby wallabies). One of them had a white albino joey. We are really glad as this is a first for the zoo, said Houskova.

She also added that the joeys mother is believed to be carrying two other babies.

Wallabies can have three joeys at a time, each at different stages of development, as they have the ability to suspend pregnancies and wait until their first baby has left their pouch.

We can already see the white one, another hasnt emerged from the pouch and is still suckling and the third is still developing in the womb, Houskova said.

Although albino wallabies are not rare, they would struggle to survive in the wild due to their sensitive skin and eyes but would be expected to thrive in a contained environment such as the zoo.
The United States on March 13 released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices documenting violations in nearly 200 countries and territories, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo singling out by name Iran, South Sudan, Nicaragua, and China in his preface.

The 2018 global human rights report compiled by the State Department paints a dark picture of appalling violations of human life, liberty, and dignity that happen every day in many parts of the world. The department has exposed such occurrences every year since 1977.

In his opening remarks, Pompeo said he wished the countries evaluated in this years report had spotless or even improved records, but he noted that it was simply not the case.

Even some of our friends, allies, and partners around the world have human rights violations.. We document those reports with equal force, Pompeo told reporters. Our aim is always to identify human rights challenges and use American influence and power to move every nation toward better, more consistent human rights practices.

Pompeo called out Irans Islamic regime for killing more than 20 people last year and arresting thousands of protesters, adding that it continues the pattern of cruelty that the regime has inflicted upon the Iranian people for the last four decades.

He then mentioned South Sudan, whose military forces have used sexual violence against civilians based on their political allegiances and ethnicity, and Nicaragua, where civilians were met with sniper fire for peacefully protesting over social security benefits, and critics of the government faced a policy of exile, jail, or death.

But Pompeo said China was in a league of its own when it came to human rights violations.

Today, more than 1 million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other Muslims are interned in reeducation camps designed to erase their religious and ethnic identities, he said. The government also is increasing its persecution against Christians, Tibetans, and anyone who espouses different views from those or advocates those of governmentor advocates change in government.

Michael Kozak, head of the State Departments Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, told the same briefing that abuses like those currently being committed against Chinas Muslim minority had not been seen since the 1930s.

The report also detailed how practitioners of Falun Dafa have been victims of systematic torture in custody by the Chinese Communist Party. Additionally, some activists and organizations continue to accuse the government of involuntarily harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience, especially members of Falun Gong, the report stated.

Falun Dafa is a meditation practice which includes gentle exercises and moral guidance based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. The communist regime banned the practice in 1999 and orchestrated a nationwide crackdown on practitioners which continues to this day.

Venezuelas illegitimate dictator, Nicolas Maduro, was reelected through a deeply flawed political process, the report noted, detailing human rights issues in the country, including extrajudicial killings and torture by security forces and deplorable prison conditions.

From The Epoch Times
It was sold as a next generation aircraft. But it has now been involved in two fatal crashes in just five months. The Boeing 737 Max 8 entered the market in 2017, a part of the 737 Max class, and became an instant hit. Within the first six months, more than 4,000 Boeing 737 Max 8 planes had been ordered. It quickly became the companys best-selling plane ever. The new model was advertised as a rare win-win for both airlines and passengers. Its going to give them max efficiency, which leads to profitability; max reliability, and to the flying public: max passenger appeal. The demand for something new. Boeing debuted the new planes in response to market pressures. In late 2010, Boeings archrival, Airbus, had just announced a new fuel-efficient version of its best selling A320. Boeing countered with the introduction of the 737 Max  The Max uses 14 percent less fuel than current 737s  its own version of fuel- and cost- efficient aircrafts. Their message to customers was: These are new planes that arent that new. Boeing 737  Newest arrival in the Boeing family of airliners, the 737 attracts a crowd. Boeings first 737 model took off in 1967. A new queen of the sky. For the Max class, Boeing upgraded the engine and design. They added more cabin space, bigger windows and multicolored ceiling lights to help modernize the planes. But the company kept the 737 name because it evoked a legacy of reliability and built trust. Ill tell you what, its just a beautiful, beautiful airplane. Not only were they able to modernize the airplane with new engines, and new winglets, but they were able to keep that classic iconic 737 look. But that isnt the whole story. The new model was also designed to help carriers save money. Which means CEOs like the Max. Really like the Max. Major changes to the plane would have required pilots to be retrained. But Boeings position was that the new models handled enough like the old ones. Though the 737 Max 8 planes did actually have a number of changes, including the size and location of the engines. The higher and more forward position of the larger engines can cause the planes nose to pitch up, a potential danger. To compensate for this, Boeing added a computerized system called MCAS to prevent the planes nose from getting too high and causing a stall. But the F.A.A. initially said pilots did not need to be informed of this system update. Experts say that the lack of training for the new system may have helped cause a deadly crash with a Max 8 off the coast of Indonesia in October, killing 189 people. All of the Boeing 737 Max 8s in the world are believed to have been grounded, while a second crash in Ethiopia is investigated. Boeing said it supported the decision to ground the planes and is cooperating with investigators.
Decades have passed since the era when the notorious John J. Gotti strutted around Manhattan and the Gambino family virtually dominated New York Citys organized crime world.

In the years since, the organizations power has declined, and apart from a few relatives starring in reality television shows, Gambino bosses have kept a relatively low profile.

But on Wednesday, the family was vaulted into the spotlight after its reputed boss, Francesco Cali, was fatally shot outside in his home on Staten Island.

The killing was striking for how it seemed to connect Mr. Cali, a publicity-shy don, with the ill-fated ends of past Mafia bosses.
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A New York appeals court on Thursday rejected President Trumps argument that the Constitution makes him immune from state lawsuits, clearing the way for a defamation suit from a former contestant on The Apprentice who has said Mr. Trump groped her.

The five-judge panel in Manhattan ruled that Summer Zervos, who competed on Mr. Trumps reality game show, could go forward with her lawsuit, which she filed after Mr. Trump said her claims that he had groped and kissed her against her will were lies.

The 3-to-2 ruling upholds a lower-court decision from a year ago that similarly concluded the president could be sued in state court while in office for actions unrelated to his official duties.

The current sitting president attempts to shield himself from consequences for his alleged unofficial misconduct by relying upon the constitutional protection of the presidency, Justice Dianne T. Renwick wrote for the majority. We reject defendant President Trumps argument.
SAN FRANCISCO  Facebook said on Thursday that it had repaired a technical error that led to long lapses in service at its various properties, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

The interruption lasted nearly 24 hours on some of the services and was the longest in Facebooks recent history. It was an eye-opening reminder that even the most powerful internet companies, employing the best computer scientists and cutting-edge technology, can still be crippled by human error.

All of the big web companies have multiple lines of defense, but sometimes a coding mistake made by one engineer can make its way onto many thousands of computers and cause major errors, said Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook and a lecturer at Stanford University. In other words, rebooting something as complex as Facebook is very, very hard.

A server configuration change made on Wednesday had a cascading effect through the companys network, a Facebook spokesman said. That created a repeating loop of problems that kept growing and could not be immediately fixed, according to one current and one former Facebook employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to talk to reporters.
The Sanders Institute, a public policy group started by the wife and son of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said on Thursday that it would suspend operations amid Mr. Sanderss presidential campaign.

When Bernie decided to run again, and announced it on Feb. 19, we thought it was better in todays politics to definitely stop taking donations, said Jane OMeara Sanders, the senators wife and political adviser, in an interview. We stopped taking donations right away, so that nobody could think they had access or could gain favor to Bernie by giving to the Sanders Institute.

She said the board had acted in late February at the urging of their son, David Driscoll, the institutes executive director. The news was first reported by The Associated Press.

The institute, begun in 2017, was envisioned as a wellspring of progressive policy that would build on Mr. Sanderss agenda. The couple drew criticism over the involvement of Mr. Driscoll, who had previously served as an executive at Burton Snowboards and Nike. Last year, Mr. Driscoll was paid about $100,000, and the institute raised $730,000, Ms. Sanders said.
Forty-nine people were killed in shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, in a terrorist attack that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.

 Officials said that one man in his late 20s had been charged with murder, and that two explosive devices were found attached to a vehicle that they had stopped.

 A Muslim leader in New Zealand said the attack was especially shocking as it took place around Friday Prayer. The police urged people to stay away from the mosques until further notice.

 A video and manifesto that appeared to be by a gunman involved in the shooting were posted online on the day of the attack.
Though the forms are drawn from indigenous sources, the production of 3-D printed tiles and other components is anything but. Mr. Rael and Ms. San Fratello deploy a variety of printing methods, often using a process invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called binder jetting that consists of a liquid material being sprayed onto a thin layer of powder hundreds or thousands of times until a hardened object emerges. The two also invented a software application for a 3-D printer that extrudes wet clay, pushing it through a nozzle like a gigantic toothpaste tube.

A series of clay vessels called Bad Ombres  was produced by this extrusion method: the name alludes both to President Trumps comment about Mexicans and a term for the gradual blending of one color into another. Like much of the pairs work, the vessels marry artisanship and geekiness. The clay is built up layer by layer, producing striated patterns and surfaces resembling knitting, complete with knots and loops. Occasionally, the code will tell the printer to drop a stitch, which creates visual drama.

As they document in Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing, published last year, mud is dear to their hearts. Mr. Rael grew up in an adobe house built by his great-grandfather in a small Hispanic village in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. His youthful playgrounds were adobe dwellings in varying states of decay. I was fascinated with the cactuses growing on roofs, the rays of light and dust, he said.

They met in 1995 on their first day of architecture school at Columbia University, and traveled to Yemen to explore the ancient walled city of Shibam, a dense cluster of ancient mud-brick buildings often called the city of skyscrapers in the desert.

Their design for a 3-D printed free-standing adobe structure is currently on view in the exhibition New Cities, Future Ruins at the Border at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso (through April 6).
All people should have the opportunity to meet their rich material cultural heritage in their countries and communities of origin, to interact with it and pass it on to future generations, the agreement said.

Former colonial powers in Europe are slowly coming to a view that they have no legal or moral right to own many objects displayed in the Continents archaeological or ethnological museums.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, which was one of the major colonial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, recently commissioned a report that noted that 90 percent to 95 percent of Africas cultural heritage is currently held by museums outside the continent. The report recommended steps for returning artifacts that were taken to France without the consent of their countries of origin.

Last week, the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands presented new rules for reclaiming artifacts looted under Dutch colonial rule, and promised that it would investigate its own collection, rather than waiting for claims.

But many critics say that German museums still have much work to do.

Hannes Hartung, a lawyer specializing in art and artifacts who is also a lecturer at the University of Munich, said that the newly signed agreement was soft law. The pact is not legally binding and does not create any reliable legal framework, he added.
The man, a New York art dealer of Russian descent, Alexander Khochinsky, has refused, arguing hell only return it if the Polish government compensates him for its appropriation of his familys property in Poland after his mother, a Jew, fled the Nazis.

Mr. Khochinskys land claim is not based on the most detailed of document trails. He has only an address in Przemysl, a city in southeastern Poland, from his mothers birth certificate. But it is, nonetheless, the stance he is taking, even as Poland ramps up its efforts to have him extradited to face criminal charges related to the acquisition of stolen goods.

Last month, during a visit to Paris he was detained by the police, and is now currently barred by court order from leaving the European Union. For his part, Mr. Khochinsky has sued Poland in United States federal court, arguing that its efforts to retrieve the painting, which he says he inherited from his father, a former Soviet soldier, have damaged his business.

Resolving international disputes over looted art is never easy. But this one has become particularly complicated by the fact that Polish suffering and losses from the war remain a potent issue here. Anything that touches on the nations unfathomable suffering during the war, which saw six million Poles killed, of which three million were Jewish, sets off a wellspring of emotion. The current right-wing government has tapped into those feelings and intensified in recent years its efforts to track plundered treasures and rebuild the nations historical heritage. The official list of looted art still includes some 63,000 objects.

Mr. Khochinsky, on the other hand, has raised the specter of anti-Semitism in the Polish governments pursuit of him, and in its refusal to negotiate compensation for what he describes as the confiscation of his mothers home. On the site now stands a Catholic Church.
After two years of cataloging and preparing, the Lou Reed Archive at the New York Public Librarys performing arts branch at Lincoln Center opens to the public on Friday. And to celebrate, the library is issuing 6,000 limited-edition library cards featuring an image of Reed taken by Mick Rock in 1972.

The library acquired the archive  a large collection of notes, photographs, and more than 600 hours of recordings  after the rockers wife, Laurie Anderson, decided to share it with an institution that could preserve and showcase it.

Before Reed died in 2013, he had never discussed what to do with his belongings, Anderson said in a phone interview.
The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will return to television after the broadcasters of his shows announced Friday that they had completed their investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against him.

The investigation is complete, and we are moving forward with both StarTalk and Cosmos, Fox Broadcasting and National Geographic said of his two shows. StarTalk will return to the air with the remaining 13 episodes in April on National Geographic, and both Fox and National Geographic are committed to finding an air date for Cosmos. There will be no further comment.

The statement did not say what investigators concluded about the complaints. Dr. Tyson was accused in December of behaving inappropriately with two women, in an article published by the website Patheos.

One accusation came from Ashley Watson, his assistant on Cosmos, who said that during a visit to his apartment, which she took to be a work visit, he made her feel uncomfortable by holding her hands and looking into her eyes in what he called a Native American handshake. As she was leaving, she said, he told her, I want you to know that I want to hug you so bad right now, but I know that if I do Ill just want more. She quit the show.
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Netflix was already home to a dizzying amount of content before it committed to churning out 1,000 original series, films and specials in 2018. And theres much more on the horizon: The streaming site has production deals with not only Barack and Michelle Obama, but also with some of TVs most powerful creators, including Ryan Murphy, Marti Noxon and Kenya Barris. Then theres the steady flow of (often foreign) Netflix originals that are bought by the streaming service postproduction  Bodyguard, for example, was created by the BBC.

Its a lot to keep up with. If youve fallen behind, here are some recent Netflix originals that are worth checking out. Whether youre looking for a new reality dating show, an irreverent comedy or a broody British thriller, theres a little something for everyone on this list.
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.

Nuh Uh v. Yeah Huh

The Senate voted on Thursday to reject President Trumps executive order declaring a national emergency at the border and redirecting funds for his wall, seconding the Houses vote last month and setting up a showdown with the president. Trump immediately tweeted VETO! afterward  and indeed, the 59-vote Senate majority that overturned his order would not be enough to override a presidential veto.

That said, the vote represented a historic  and humbling  rejection of the president. And Stephen Colbert was more than ready to rub it in, rattling off a short list of Trumps other unfortunate presidential firsts.
The third-person voice narrating all this, however  so distinct from those of any of the three women  is jarring. Shorrs modern intrusions are welcome (of Bath she says, You might call it the proto-gated-community effect), and the reminders of the subjects youth are crucial: Shelley is 24, and Joan of Arc a teenager here. But these are women who nonetheless attained an astonishing poise and maturity that fails to come across in Shorrs prose, except when theyre quoted directly. Perhaps its an impossible task, but I doubt if any of these headstrong, blazing women would recognize their inner voices in her tepid sentences.

299 pp. Norton. $25.95.

WOMEN WHO DARED TO BREAK ALL THE RULES

By Jeremy Scott

Image

What do Mary Wollstonecraft, Coco Chanel, Victoria Woodhull (the spiritualist who ran for president of the United States in the 1870s) and Aimee Semple McPherson (the early-20th-century preacher whose Pentecostalist sect still commands hundreds of millions of followers today) have in common? The answer, Scott tells us in Women Who Dared, is charisma: a quality elusive to pin down. One suspects, however, that had he been more frank he might have informed us that these are women who simply happen to interest him. Telling their stories one after another, moving back and forth among centuries and continents, this group biography really illuminates the limitations of retelling the same lives in new combinations. The desire to consecrate womens experiences is liable to decrease in dividends if it turns into an industry.

A reader might expect a male author who appoints himself the task of writing biographies of such complicated subjects to display unusual sensitivity to female experience. Instead, Scott seems openly baffled, delighted and infuriated by women. McPherson is exceptionally pretty with animated face, bee-stung lips and a mouth made for kissing, he writes excitedly, before later reflecting that she and Woodhull must have been a nightmare to deal with when their blood was running. He is attentive, meanwhile, to the trials of men: He feels for the Duke of Argyll, whose thrice-adultering wife, Margaret (one of the books designated subjects), was photographed in a sexually explicit position with an unidentified man, lamenting that the dukes image as a kilted treasure-hunter  morphed into that of a cuckold and weakling.

There are some great stories along the way, and Scott tells them with verve, but this is not a book that needed to be written. It feels too easy to accuse him of mansplaining. But here he is on nymphomania: You will not have failed to note that every one of these diagnoses, categories and labels was devised by males. You dont say!

275 pp. Oneworld. Paper, $20.
I recently read about an elementary school class that was studying the American Revolution. Each student chose a historical figure to write about. When the teacher asked if anyone had picked a woman, a little girl called out: No! There were no women then! Even in 2019 this is what many kids think, which is why we still need a month dedicated to the words and deeds of females. Knowing the challenges and achievements of all manner of women history makers, from the big names (Im looking at you, Amelia Earhart) to the unsung heroes, destroys the false notion that females are mere observers to history. Their stories serve as both inspiration and empowerment: If she could, then I can.

PLANTING STORIES: The Life of Librarian and Storyteller Pura Belpre (HarperCollins, 40 pp., $17.99; ages 4 to 8) beautifully captures the life and essence of Pura Belpre, the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. Arriving in Manhattan with the stories her abuela taught her, Belpre eventually takes a job at the library as a bilingual assistant. But where are her abuelas stories? Not one folk tale from Puerto Rico is on the shelves. How lucky for the library that Pura has story seeds ready to plant and grow. Belpre goes on to transform library programs through the telling (and eventual publishing) of several culturally diverse stories.

Anika Aldamuy Denises intimate telling captures the magical, folk-tale feeling of Belpres own stories. Her lyrical text, sprinkled like fairy dust with Spanish words, begs to be read aloud, while Paola Escobars stylishly detailed and warmly expressive illustrations capture the joy of sharing stories. But this biography, like all good biographies, does not simply chronicle a life. Beneath all the fun is a valuable message. As Denise writes in her authors note, Belpres life is a testament to the power of our own stories to build bridges  not just to literacy, but to social change.
Looking ahead: The announcement of the charges came two days before a presidential election. The governing party  tainted by the scandal  is behind in the polls .

Heres what else is happening

U.S. Congress: The Senate, in a bipartisan rebuke, voted to overturn President Trumps declaration of a national emergency at the southern border to fund his wall. The Senate vote was the first time Congress has blocked a presidential emergency declaration and almost certainly sets up Mr. Trumps first veto. And the House voted 420-to-0 to demand the public release of the report that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is assigned to submit to the attorney general.

Climate change: Students in more than 100 countries will be protesting climate change today in what could be one of the largest demonstrations yet against global environmental policies. It all started with a shy 16-year-old in Sweden.

E.U. Parliament: The president of the body, Antonio Tajani, incited outrage and apologized after putting a positive slant on Benito Mussolini, Italys fascist former leader.

Germany: Volkswagens chief executive, Herbert Diess, apologized after using a phrase that echoed a Nazi-era slogan, Arbeit macht frei, or Work sets you free, emblazoned on the gates of Auschwitz. Ebit macht frei, he repeatedly told hundreds of managers at an internal company event. Ebit is an acronym for earnings before interest and taxes.

Northern Ireland: Officials said that one former British soldier would be prosecuted on murder charges in connection with the massacre of unarmed civilians by British forces nearly 50 years ago in Londonderry, an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday.
1. This is one of New Zealands darkest days.

That was Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, above, after 49 people were killed in shootings at two mosques during Friday Prayer in central Christchurch. The terrorist attack also left dozens wounded.

A suspect has been charged with murder and appeared in court Saturday morning local time. The 28-year-old Australian man was apparently motivated by white nationalism and a desire to drive cultural, political and racial wedges between people across the globe. Heres what we know about him.

Ms. Ardern said a total of five firearms, including two semiautomatic weapons, were used in the attacks. Well continue to provide live updates here.
Spotify is asking to keep all those benefits while also retaining 100 percent of the revenue, Apple said. Spotify wouldnt be the business they are today without the App Store ecosystem, but now theyre leveraging their scale to avoid contributing to maintaining that ecosystem for the next generation of app entrepreneurs.

The dispute highlights a larger debate about the role of large tech platforms like Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, and whether their size and power impede competition. Amazon is the subject of a European antitrust investigation related to its treatment of independent sellers on its marketplace. Google was fined by the European Commission last year for antitrust violations stemming from its Android operating system.

When the company that runs a platform also competes with businesses that depend on that platform, we face the risk that it could use its power to drive out competition in not one market but dozens, Margrethe Vestager, Europes antitrust chief, said in a speech this week.

Apple said the App Store had created millions of jobs and generated more than $120 billion for developers since its introduction in 2008. It ushered in a new era of mobile computing, allowing companies like Instagram, Uber and others to reach users.

Spotifys app has been downloaded more than 300 million times, according to Apple.

The App Store is a safe, secure platform where users can have faith in the apps they discover and the transactions they make, Apple said. And developers, from first-time engineers to larger companies, can rest assured that everyone is playing by the same set of rules.
TOKYO  A Tokyo court handed down a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence on Friday to the former head of Mt. Gox, a cryptocurrency exchange that helped establish Bitcoin as a household name before spectacularly imploding amid allegations of mismanagement.

Still, Mark Karpeles, the French national who presided over Mt. Goxs rise to become the worlds largest Bitcoin exchange, will not serve additional time if he remains on good behavior.

The verdict ended a more-than-five-year ordeal for Mr. Karpeles, who was found guilty on a charge of falsifying data but innocent of two additional charges of embezzlement and breach of trust. He was arrested in August 2015 and held for almost a year in detention, where he spent months under interrogation by prosecutors who upped the pressure by adding more charges against him.

His sentence was suspended for four years, effectively meaning he will serve no additional jail time as long as he remains on good behavior.
Investigators at the crash site of the doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight have found new evidence that points to another connection to the earlier disaster involving the same Boeing jet.

The evidence, a piece of the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet that crashed in Ethiopia last weekend killing 157 people, suggests that the planes stabilizers were tilted upward, according to two people with knowledge of the recovery operations. At that angle, the stabilizers would have forced down the nose of the jet, a similarity with the Lion Air crash in October.

Although the crash investigations are still in the early phases, the new evidence potentially indicates that the two planes both had problems with a newly installed automated system on the 737 Max jet intended to prevent a stall.

This evidence ultimately contributed to American regulators decision to ground the 737 Max this week, according to the two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Federal Aviation Administration said it had found physical evidence from the Ethiopian crash that, along with satellite tracking data, suggested similarities between the two crashes.
BEIJING  Chinas premier delivered on Friday the clearest acknowledgment yet from a top Chinese official that the countrys economy is slowing and faces a series of difficulties.

Li Keqiang, who as premier is Chinas second-highest official after President Xi Jinping, said at his annual news conference that the answer lay in cutting corporate taxes and deregulation, and not a return to the strategy during previous downturns of printing money and ramping up government spending. However, recently released economic data has suggested that the government is indeed turning to monetary expansion and heavy infrastructure investments in an effort to stabilize growth.

Mr. Li also became on Friday the most senior Chinese official to try to allay foreign worries that Chinese technology companies spy on other countries at Beijings request, saying that this has not happened and will not. He appeared to be addressing concerns that the United States and some of its allies have been raising about Huawei, the Chinese technology giant.

Mr. Li delivered his acknowledgment of the slowdown at an annual meeting with foreign and domestic reporters that the Chinese leadership often uses to outline its priorities to its people and the world. Mr. Li and past premiers have sometimes used the event to offer reassurances that Beijing is tackling problems in an orderly way.
It was only later that he learned his doctor had been fired by the Iowa Clinic and planned to start a urology practice with clinic colleagues. And, under the terms of their contract with their former employer, the doctors were banned for a year from practicing within 35 miles of the clinic, and from recruiting former patients to follow them.

Contracts with so-called restrictive covenants are now common in medicine, although some states limit their use. Noncompete clauses  common in many commercial sectors  aim to stop physicians and other health care professionals from taking patients with them if they move to a competing practice nearby or start their own. But what may be good for business can be bad for patient care  and certainly disquieting for those whose doctors seem to simply disappear.

One survey of nearly 2,000 primary care physicians in five states found that roughly 45 percent were bound by such clauses.

Continuity of care is important, doctors say, especially for patients with ongoing medical issues. Cutting off access to a doctor is different from disrupting someones relationship with a favorite hairstylist or money manager, they say.

When doctors want to move from one practice to another, if theyve got good therapeutic relationships with their patients, youd think that public policy would want them to continue to treat these patients that trust them, said Judy Conti, government affairs director at the National Employment Law Project.
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WASHINGTON  The Trump administration on Friday finalized its plan to loosen Obama-era protections on the habitat of the sage grouse, an imperiled ground-nesting bird that roams across 10 oil-rich Western states.

The plan, which would strip away protections for the bird on nearly nine million acres of land in the West  making it easier for oil and gas companies to drill on that land  was first detailed in a draft proposal published in December.

The sage grouse plan is the latest step in a series of moves by the Trump administration to promote oil and gas drilling on public land, in support of what President Trump has called a policy of American energy dominance. The architect of the plan, David Bernhardt, is a former oil lobbyist who now serves as acting head of the Interior Department.

Mr. Trump has nominated Mr. Bernhardt to formally assume the position of interior secretary.

The plans adopted today show that listening to and working with our neighbors at the state and local levels of government is the key to long-term conservation and to ensuring the viability of local communities across the West, Mr. Bernhardt said in a statement on Friday.
My introduction to Lebanese street food was at an outdoor market in Paris, when I had just moved there in the early days of the 21st century. As I would learn, Lebanese savory treats are common at Parisian markets, a great boon to the hungry shopper.

You get to the market by 10 a.m., when everything is fresh, glistening and appealingly displayed. After perusing the offerings and filling your bag with the produce that will be dinner, you may feel a bit peckish. Then you notice the aroma of little flatbreads wafting from a hot griddle, and you head to the Lebanese stand.

The typical griddle for baking these flatbreads is a superheated iron dome called a saj. The baker rolls out a thin round of soft dough and quickly slaps it against the hot iron.
Ms. Chang and Mr. Mateo met as office mates at the Barbarian Group in Manhattan two months before their get-to-know-you getaway, in the summer of 2012. Ms. Chang, 28, had recently graduated from Cornell and was working as an intern at the marketing agency. Mr. Mateo, 30, was a year into his first job as a designer after graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2011.

Both liked company culture enough to mix business with pleasure.

We had a usual crew of half a dozen people wed go out to lunch with, and then wed go out at night as a group of 10 or 20 people to parties, said Mr. Mateo, a product designer who recently left his job on the central design team at Spotify to accept a design system lead position at Netflix.

Group coffee outings also happened regularly. After Ms. Chang mentioned her love of the salted chocolate chip cookies at the coffee roastery La Colombe, Mr. Mateo, who was attracted to her easy laugh and wavy-haired beauty, made a practice of buying one for her daily, dropping it at her desk.

Ms. Chang didnt assume the treats signaled a crush. I thought we were just friends, she said.

That the cookies were a flirtation device started sinking in when, on a Friday afternoon in August, Mr. Mateo asked Ms. Chang to spend the weekend with him in Avalon, N.J., at his parents beach house. To avoid seeming creepy, he said she should ask a mutual friend, a fellow intern, to come along. She did. But the friend declined, citing concerns about feeling like a third wheel because the pair had obvious chemistry.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb became commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in 2017 with an ambitious plan to reduce cigarette smoking, a habit that kills nearly half a million Americans each year, by shifting smokers to less harmful alternatives like e-cigarettes.

But he was quickly embroiled in an unexpected crisis: the explosion of vaping among millions of middle and high school students, many of whom were getting addicted to nicotine.

Dr. Gottlieb will depart at the end of this month, following his sudden announcement last week that he would resign, with his plans to toughen regulation of both vaping and smoking unfinished and powerful lobbying forces quietly celebrating the exit of a politically canny administrator who aggressively wielded his regulatory powers.

Opponents are already swooping in, making their case to Congress and reaching out to the White House. A coalition of conservative organizations that oppose government intervention in the marketplace has harshly criticized Dr. Gottliebs crackdown on e-cigarettes. Retailers, including convenience store and gas station owners, are on Capitol Hill lobbying against guidelines Dr. Gottlieb proposed on Wednesday to restrict sales of most flavored e-cigarettes to separate adult-only areas and to require age verification of customers.
Have your parents ever talked to you about drugs? What did they say? What questions did they ask? Who initiated the conversation? Were the discussions helpful? Welcomed? Embarrassing? Enlightening?

In How to Talk to Your Kids About Drugs When Everyone Is Doing Them, David Hochman writes:

The assignment was to write a four-page research paper on any biology topic. My son, Sebastian, is a high school freshman, and it was his first real chance to shine. I expected him to pick something like photosynthesis. He went with psychedelic drugs instead. Let me tell you what would have happened if I had made that choice as a ninth-grader: I would have been grounded until graduation. In northeastern Pennsylvania, where I grew up, my mother worked for the county commission on drug and alcohol abuse, and she could literally smell stoned people. The breath of a pothead, she warned, as if hunting dragons, has the odorousness of burned rope. One night she shook me awake after finding a tiny tube of Krazy Glue under the seats of her Buick Skyhawk. Are you sniffing this stuff to get high? she said. I wasnt. I didnt even know that was a thing. I cried. In my moms defense, the narc approach was more common back then. In 1984, when I was in high school, Nancy Reagan first uttered the phrase Just say no after a student asked what to do if friends offered her funny cigarettes. Later, the public ad campaign This Is Your Brain on Drugs made us believe our teenage minds would be fried  sunny side up  if we even thought about weed.

The article continues:

My struggle is to update the proactive messaging for the age of the legal buzz. I dont care that every other billboard in Los Angeles makes casual drug use look as harmless as hailing a Lyft; I dont want my child messing with his still-developing brain and body. I dont want him self-medicating to escape. I definitely dont want him Juuling, snorting, dosing or dabbing while driving. I also dont want to wait until his grades tank, and I catch him gorging on raw cookie dough and Dark Side of the Moon before stepping in. (I know this makes me sound very old-fashioned.) Thats why I created prehab. If rehab is a way to recover from drug addiction, prehab is a program designed (by me, at least) to avert the whole mess in the first place. Its like pulling a Marty McFly with your future party self, pre-empting poor decisions way before youre drunk texting your ex and sleeping through Mondays. So I enrolled Sebastian as the test case.

Eventually the author comes to question his prehab creation:

I made a dad joke about not lighting up, but Sebastian wasnt laughing. He looked at me and said, I actually understand everything youre telling me. If it makes any difference to you, Im not really interested in trying drugs. But that could change someday. I really dont know. For now, can we be done talking about this? It hit me in that moment that Sebastian wasnt the one needing prehab. I was. Id been so focused on finding the formula for guiding him down the right path that I forgot that hes the only one who can make these decisions. My task isnt to steer him around every bong and backyard keg gathering for the rest of his childhood. Its to be there for him, to set basic guidelines. I also want to support him in figuring out what he truly enjoys, what he dreams about for his future, what he needs more of  and less of  from me. Id do anything to help him make the most of this one shot hes got. Above all, prehab is about letting go. I can talk to Sebastian about drugs until the psychedelic cows come home but I cant control his future, and why would I want to? Even if he ends up experimenting, I need to have the faith that hell be fine. Would it have done John Lennons father any good to worry about his kids toking habits? Would I be typing on this Apple computer if Steve Jobs just said no to LSD?

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

 How should parents talk to their children about drugs, alcohol and tobacco? What do you think are the most and least effective ways parents can talk to their children about this issue? Why?

 How have your parents talked to you about drugs? Were these conversations effective or helpful? How open and honest were they? Did your parents take the narc approach Mr. Hochman ascribes to his mother? Or did they try more of the prehab approach Mr. Hochman used with his son?

 Do you feel comfortable turning to your parents with questions about drugs, alcohol and tobacco? Do you think it is easier to talk to parents about drugs now versus when your parents were growing up?

 What conversation do you wish you could have with your parents about drugs?

 What do you think of Mr. Hochmans advice to parents? Do you think parents need to let go and have faith that their children will be fine? Or do they need to provide direct teaching, guidance and rules around drugs?
The following report compiles all significant security incidents confirmed by New York Times reporters throughout Afghanistan from the past seven days. It is necessarily incomplete as many local officials refuse to confirm casualty information. The report includes government claims of insurgent casualty figures, but in most cases these cannot be independently verified by The Times. Similarly, the reports do not include Taliban claims for their attacks on the government unless they can be verified. Both sides routinely inflate casualty totals for their opponents.

At least 74 pro-government forces and 26 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the past week. The deadliest attack took place in Badghis Province, where the Taliban completely wiped out an Afghan army company, killing 16 soldiers and taking 40 others prisoner. Thirteen civilians were killed by American airstrikes in the district of Hesarak in Nangarhar, and six Afghan soldiers were killed in an American airstrike in Oruzgan Province, after Afghan soldiers targeted a joint convoy of Afghan and American forces. Officials later called the incident a mistake between forces.

[Read the Afghan War Casualty Report from previous weeks.]

March 14 Badghis Province: one soldier killed

Dozens of Taliban fighters attacked military outposts in Qades District, killing one soldier and wounding four others. Local authorities claimed that four Taliban fighters were also killed and 11 others were wounded.

March 14 Sar-i-Pul Province: two local police officers killed

The Taliban attacked two local police outposts in the village of Engishka in Sayyad District, killing two local police officers and wounding four others.
At War is a newsletter about the experiences and costs of war. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Friday.

Where is the United States at war? Its a hard question to answer. Inevitably though, at least in the last four years, this sentence has changed little: American troops are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. But with a steady stream of airstrikes, militant deaths, alleged civilian casualties and two American troops killed in Eastern Africa since 2017, another country has since crept onto the list: Somalia.

On Sunday, my colleagues Eric Schmitt and Charlie Savage published a story about the escalating war there against the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Shabab, and how the number of American airstrikes in the country have steadily increased under the Trump administration. In 2018 alone, there were 47 strikes that killed 326 people. And 2019 is already on pace to exceed last years tallies.

And despite documentation that quantifies the Pentagons efforts in Somalia, there is no public record of the C.I.A.s activities in the country, including if it has its own drone program to search for and to kill Shabab militants. But the agency is undoubtedly intertwined with the militarys efforts in the region, according to defense officials, often piggybacking off American outposts and American-backed militias to support their own clandestine activities.
Warning: This article contains some spoilers about Captain Marvel, but no cat puns.

For a breakout star, it was a fairly mundane audition. To cast the part of Goose, an orange tabby who plays a critical role, the makers of Captain Marvel were meeting different cats, including Ursula Brauners Reggie. We walked into a roomful of people, and I brought a big plush bed and set it on the table, Brauner recalled. Reggie hung out on the bed and was as chill as any cat could be, and the filmmakers saw him embody the character then and there. Thats how he got the job.

Captain Marvel earned more than $500 million worldwide in its first week of release, in no small part thanks to Reggie and three fellow felines who steal scenes as the stray who is revealed to be a ferocious alien known as a Flerken. (In the original Marvel comic books, the cat has the Star Wars-esque name of Chewie, but the screenwriters changed it to Goose to go along with the movies Top Gun motif.)

Goose, who got his own character poster even before the movie was released, has been singled out by reviewers (Best of all there is an orange cat, A.O. Scott wrote in The Times), inspired memes and been the subject of an ode. Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, even speculated that Goose could star in shorts on the streaming service being started by Marvels owner, Disney.

[How this movie could solve Marvel Studios woman problem. | Mar-Vell explained.]

Although special effects were involved, the actual animals are onscreen a fair amount, but at first it was going to be just Reggie. After looking at the script and seeing the work required, we all decided it would be good to add a couple more cats to the team, said Brauner, whose company, Animals for Hollywood, provides and trains nonhuman actors for films. In addition to Reggie and another experienced animal actor, Archie (yes, theyre named after Archie Comics characters), Brauner found two more orange tabbies, named Gonzo and Rizzo in a nod to the Muppets, at a shelter.
AUSTIN, Tex.  Surprises abounded at this years South by Southwest film festival, with movies featuring depraved demons, devilish doppelgangers and sadistic senseis all doing despicable things. And yet, one of the most gasp-worthy moments was hearing the tween actor Jacob Tremblay use the F-word in the first five minutes of Good Boys. It wouldnt be the only time in this comedy about a wild day in the life of a few sixth-graders, and it was one of several breakout titles worth knowing about as the film portion of the festival comes to a close on Saturday.

If Im being honest, I am shocked and appalled, Tremblay joked during the post-screening Q.& A., and added referring to his director Gene Stupnitsky, Gene told me this was going to be a PG-rated family movie. He lied.

Image Tremblay, right, with Seth Rogen, one of the producers of Good Boys, at SXSW. Credit... Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images For SXSW

The movie was right at home at a festival that has turned into something of a testing ground for the hit potential of Hollywood comedies. The audience applauded the comic timing of Tremblay and his co-stars, Brady Noon and the scene-stealing Keith L. Williams, and that positive reaction along with a recently released red-band trailer featuring one of the movies producers, Seth Rogen, has fueled social-media interest. Good Boys opens nationwide in August.
[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

Its a classic New York gentrification story with a morality twist. Think Fifty Shades of NIMBY.

On one side, longtime residents of a block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, led by Laurie Miller, who lives in the same narrow house on Quincy Street that she moved into as a child in 1974.

On the other, a queer feminist, Charlotte Taillor, who moved her business next door to Ms. Miller, from a more expensive space in Crown Heights.

And in the middle: Ms. Taillors business.

Now about that business. Its whats known as a kink collective, where Ms. Taillor runs bondage workshops and other fetish events for the B.D.S.M. (bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism) community.
[Update: A man is being questioned in the killing of the Gambino boss.]

While Gene Gotti was in prison in the 1990s, he hatched a plan with a Gambino family associate: They would keep up a strict workout routine at the prison gym, federal agents learned. They had to stay in shape, Mr. Gotti reportedly said, because once they got out, he was going to retake control of the Gambino enterprise.

This week, that exchange took on new significance. Late Wednesday, the acting boss of the Gambino crime family, Francesco Cali, was shot dead outside his Staten Island home, just six months after Mr. Gotti had been released from federal custody.

Police commanders said on Thursday that it was too early in the investigation to determine if Mr. Calis killing was related to Mr. Gottis release, or was mob-related at all. But one avenue of investigation remains the possibility of an internal war among family associates, former law enforcement officials said.

Mr. Cali represented a new chapter in the Gambino familys history. He was part of a Sicilian faction that took over the family in 2011, when Domenico Cefalu rose to be the acting boss. Both Mr. Cefalu and Mr. Cali had tapped networks in Palermo, Sicily, for foot soldiers, and they adopted a quieter approach to their business dealings.
For the first time in decades, a New York Mafia boss was assassinated. One expert said it looked like an inside job.

The murder of the reputed boss, Francesco Cali, on Staten Island on Wednesday night was also a reminder that the five Mafia families of New York are still around.

[Read our main article about the killing: Mr. Cali was a ghost who avoided the limelight.]

For years, New Yorkers rents and food were more expensive because of the unseen taxes levied by the mob, according to Selwyn Raab, a former Times reporter and author of several books about the Mafia and law enforcement.

The Mafia, whether you like it or not, always has been part of the fabric of New York life, he said.

What does this murder say about the mob, and New York?

Mr. Raab explained in an interview, which weve lightly edited and condensed for clarity:

Who was Francesco Cali?

He was a reputed leader of the Gambino crime family. For years, the family was led by John Gotti. His son and later his brother Gene were also influential members. They were flamboyant, and by around 2006, they were gone. [They went to prison.]
About seven months later, Ms. Safieh started getting notices in the mail about paying back the $5,356 loan.

I almost had a heart attack, she said.

For decades, the State Department has funded interest-free travel loans to refugees who, like Ms. Safieh, cannot afford the cost of relocating here. Six months after their arrival, borrowers are expected to start repaying the loans to one of nine private nonprofits, known as resettlement agencies, which are involved in helping refugees start their new lives here. When refugees make their travel plans, they are assigned one of these resettlement agencies through the International Organization for Migration, which administers the travel loans.

The average loan per person is $1,100, and that amount can quickly increase when considering a full family. Meanwhile the resettlement agencies, including World Relief, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the International Rescue Committee, all of which collect the travel loan payments but have nothing to do with granting them to begin with, retain up to 25 percent of the total payments.

According to the most recent data from the State Department, in 2017, refugees made over $66 million in loan repayments. Of that amount, a bit over $14 million went to the resettlement agencies.

Some advocates think that these agencies should not be taking money from those they are trying to help. The nonprofits involved claim that these fees go toward their administration costs and programming, all of which is focused on giving refugees long-term financial security.
On a Sunday morning at Beth Israel Worship Center in Wayne, N.J., a bearded pastor named Jonathan Cahn stood on an elevated platform, gazing over a full house. Stage lights shifted from blue to white as the backing band played a drifting melody. Two men hoisted curled rams horns and let out long blasts.

Some of you have been saying you want to live in biblical times, Mr. Cahn said, pacing behind a lectern. Then he spread his hands wide. Well, you are.

Sitting at the end of a sleepy drive an hour from Manhattan, Beth Israel may look like any common suburban church. But the center has a highly unusual draw. Every weekend, some 1,000 congregants gather for the idiosyncratic teachings of the churchs celebrity pastor, an entrepreneurial doomsday prophet who claims that President Trumps rise to power was foretold in the Bible.

Mr. Cahn is tapping into a belief more popular than may appear.

A recent Fox News poll found one in four Americans believe God wanted Donald Trump to become president. Celebrities like the televangelist Paula White and Franklin Graham have boosted the idea. The presidents own press secretary suggested as much in a January interview. And on the opening day of the Conservative Political Action Conference this month, the millionaire businessman Michael Lindell took to the stage and declared President Trump chosen by God.
After days of pressure from anxious airline customers and concerned members of Congress, President Trump on Wednesday announced the grounding of Boeings 737 Max 8 aircraft  a stark reversal of the Federal Aviation Administrations previous determination that the planes were safe enough to fly despite recent crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. The announcement came well after many other countries had grounded the aircraft.

The F.A.A., citing new data, has said its decision-making was based solely on its evolving understanding of the evidence. But critics have suggested that the delay in joining the international consensus may have been the result, at least in part, of the close relationship that Boeing, a major political force in Washington and a large government contractor, has with American officials.

Boeing receives more federal money than any corporation other than Lockheed Martin, its main competitor in the defense contractor industry. Boeing took in over $23 billion in contracts from the government in the 2017 fiscal year  near its annual average. (Just this fall, the company won a $9.2 billion contract to make a new generation of jets for the Air Force.)

Senator Elizabeth Warren publicly questioned whether the government had put lives at risk to protect Boeings bottom line. She and a bipartisan group of her colleagues requested congressional hearings to investigate.
And on Wednesday, when the F.A.A. joined other nations in grounding the planes, the agency insisted that it was acting because it had obtained new evidence. Daniel Elwell, the agencys acting administrator, defended the pace of its decision-making, telling NPR on Thursday, Were a data-driven organization.  We make safety decisions based on what we know.

There were no crashes between the two decisions , but the difference remains significant. Both regulators had the same information in hand and, for roughly 24 hours, the F.A.A. decided to subject American airline employees and passengers to a greater degree of risk.

The difference in risk tolerance is only part of the story. The Trump administration has openly discouraged the enforcement of a wide range of existing federal regulations. The Wall Street Journal reported the total value of fines imposed on commercial airlines by the F.A.A. in 2018 was 88 percent lower than the total value of fines in 2016. The White House last year proposed to reduce funding and staffing for the F.A.A.s Aviation Safety Office .

Also, nations often are more reluctant to crack down on domestic companies. Mr. Elwell has insisted that the F.A.A. made its decisions solely on the basis of safety. But if safety was the only consideration, then any risk would have warranted action. The F.A.A. is necessarily in the business of balancing the economic benefits of aviation against the safety of passengers. And the economic benefits include Boeings role as a major employer and exporter.

But the calibration of regulation still plays an important role.

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which started the project of creating a single set of European regulations, enshrined a precautionary principle, meaning that government can impose restrictions even when there is not clear evidence of harm. Those in public office have a duty not to wait until their worst fears are realized, Robert Coleman, then the European Commissions director general for health and consumer protection, said in 2002.
To the Editor:

Centrist Democrats Squirm as 20 Rivals Tilt Left (front page, March 10) warns that some Democrats fear that they could lose their chance to defeat President Trump by careening over a liberal cliff . But the article does not cite a single poll showing that voters will rebel against progressive policies. Instead, it simply recites the dire warnings of moderates without giving a shred of evidence to support their fears.

The fact is that many policies dismissed as liberal cliff ideas by the Washington establishment are broadly popular. Recently, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew charges of extremism when they proposed much higher taxes on the rich. Then people did polls and  guess what?  both proposals did very well .

Not only are voters more supportive of progressive policies than moderates imagine, but as political data geeks could tell you, specific policy positions play a limited role in elections. In 1980, Ronald Reagans right-wing policy ideas were far out of the mainstream, but he won, because people were tired of Jimmy Carter. And if Bernie Sanders runs against Donald Trump, voters tired of Mr. Trump will make him president.

Steve Novick

Portland, Ore.

To the Editor:

As a centrist Democrat, I believe that there is only one thing that Democrats ought to prioritize in 2020, and that is the removal of Donald Trump from office. Instead, they are busily crafting and polishing their dreamy policy positions, all of which Mr. Trump will use against them to great effect, particularly in my part of the country  which has already shown a dreary susceptibility to his wretched message.
When we go about mass killing, we go about it furtively. The Bain family of five, shot at dawn by a deranged family member in Dunedin. David Gray, the lone gunman who shot and killed 13 neighbors in Aramoana. They were New Zealand killings, in the New Zealand manner  seething tensions suddenly unleashed, a mad dog gone wrong. They had recognizable national characteristics.

But the mosque killings were something new, something off the chart. This was organized, planned, slaughter on a large scale of the innocent, carried out by a killer or killers with a head full of militant trash  the usual rubbish of white supremacy, with its fear and loathing of immigrants.

But the terrorists werent hitting out at some separate, isolated community. Muslims in New Zealand are part of the fabric of everyday life. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is at her best when she addresses issues of national identity. She noted in her news conference held to announce the tragedy that many of the victims of the shooting were migrants. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home and it is their home, she said. They are us. The terrorists killed New Zealanders.

The attack, I confess, feels imported: the apparent killer who is Australian, the references in what appears to be his so-called manifesto to right-wing provocateurs and white supremacists in America and elsewhere. But it would be false and gross to describe this as some kind of end of innocence or solely a foreign import. Life in New Zealand is lovely, but it also comes with deep social problems brought on by poverty and homelessness, constant race-based tensions and, yes, lingering resentment of migrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Child abuse is a recurring national shame. Violence against women is considered so rife that New Zealand is routinely described as possessing a rape culture. All that and worse in our beautiful archipelago at the end of the world. But at least we seemed out of the terrorist loop.

Turns out we were evidently living in a fools paradise. We were otherwise preoccupied with the pleasures and challenges of everyday life. On the day of the mosque killings, tens of thousands of school kids marched in 40 demonstrations across New Zealand, demanding action on climate change. It was a wonderfully liberating sight, something meaningful and urgent, colorful and good-humored. They carried terrific signs and banners. Social media posted numerous photos from the marches. There was a cracking one of a bearded old geezer called John Geiser, in the North Island town of Masterton, watching the demonstration go by while holding a sign of his own. It read: WELL DONE YOUNG PEOPLE.
For Muslims, Friday Prayer is like Sunday Mass for Christians. Its the day of community prayer. We travel to our local mosques, our religious sanctuary. Our families gather in the early afternoon to pray as a community. Kids run through the halls as the imam recites the Quran in Arabic. We eat together and mingle outside.

This week, as those of us in the United States attend Friday Prayer, the Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, are preparing for funerals.

People around the world are praying for the dead in Christchurch after terrorist attacks at two mosques. The authorities say a 28-year-old Australian walked into two mosques with assault rifles and killed at least 49 people. New Zealands prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, called it an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.

Thoughts and prayers are not enough. These attacks are the latest manifestation of a growing and globalized ideology of white nationalism that must be addressed at its source  which includes the mainstream politicians and media personalities who nurture, promote and excuse it.
This post has been updated.

On Friday, a gunman strapped on a helmet camera , loaded his car with weapons, drove to a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and began shooting at anyone who came into his line of vision. The act of mass terror was broadcast live for the world to watch on social media.

Forty-nine people were killed and more than 40 others were wounded in the attack, which occurred at two different mosques in the city. A suspect, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, was charged with one count of murder, with more charges reportedly expected. Three other people were detained by the police, but one was released hours later.

A 17-minute video of a portion of the attack, which leapt across the internet faster than social media censors could remove it, is one of the most disturbing, high-definition records of a mass-casualty attack of the digital age  a grotesque first-person-shooter documentation of mans capacity for inhumanity.

Videos of attacks are designed to amplify the terror, of course. But what makes this atrocity an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, is the methodical nature with which it was conducted and how it was engineered for maximum virality.
Several years ago, the act ress Leslie Bibb perched next to Conan OBriens desk and riffed about a baby so cute that it drove her crazy. She pantomimed her extreme reaction to the infant by gritting her teeth and clenching her fists.

A social psychologist named Oriana Aragon , who was then teaching at Yale, happened to be watching. In the days that followed, she found herself pondering a subject that doesnt usually receive much attention from the scientific community: cuteness.

Dr. Aragon realized that feelings of tenderness can be so overwhelming that they spill over into a behavior that she calls cute aggression. An example, she told me, is when you see a grandparent pinching a babys cheeks and saying, I want to eat you up. In fact, sometimes baby-talk can sound downright serial-killer-ish if you take it out of context. You might find yourself telling a puppy that you want to squish it  even though, of course, youre doing just the opposite and gently caressing it.

Dr. Aragon and her colleagues at Yale undertook what are probably the worlds first attempts to scientifically prove the existence of cute aggression. In an adorable experiment, she and her research partners handed volunteers bubble wrap, then showed them a parade of images. Dr. Aragon found that people popped more bubbles when looking at, say, a photo of a kitten than of an adult cat  suggesting that the cutest images do seem to prompt the urge to crush or squeeze.

Because the cute-overload feeling lends itself to study, it may help to reveal the parts of our minds devoted to nurturing that have heretofore been hidden.

Katherine Stavropoulos, a neuroscientist and clinical psychologist at the University of California at Riverside, has conducted a study on the neural circuitry that is active during cuteness-overload. She asked volunteers to wear caps outfitted with sensors that measure brain activity, and then showed them images of wee little animals. Her results suggested that cute-aggression involves the reward system in the brain. In other words, it feels good .

But why? Its just a completely open question, Dr. Aragon, who now works at Clemson, told me. Even so, she points out, its reasonable to assume that our extreme reaction to cuteness is evolutions way of making sure that parents do the relentless work of nurturing children. To perpetuate the species, parents must feel driven to hold their babies for hours  and that might explain why the urge to squeeze gets mixed into a cocktail of tender emotions.
This article is part of David Leonhardts newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.

Congressional Republicans offered up two conflicting storylines yesterday, and its worth keeping both in mind.

1) Multiple senators hypocritically supported President Trumps emergency declaration for a border wall.

Thom Tillis of North Carolina was the most blatant. Two weeks ago, he opposed the Trump move as an unacceptable power grab, writing in a Washington Post op-ed: There is no intellectual honesty in now turning around and arguing that theres an imaginary asterisk attached to executive overreach  that its acceptable for my party but not thy party.
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By 1 a.m. Eastern time on Friday, it was clear something awful had happened in New Zealand. What was unclear was just how awful. I read the coverage in The Times, scanned emails from our International Desk and sent a message to my colleagues on The Daily updating them on the situation.

At moments like this, we have to make a difficult decision: Do we know enough, in the middle of a breaking news story (and in the middle of the night), to tell it in a meaningful way on the show?

In this case, we did not.

I set an alarm for just before 6 a.m., when The Daily is published, to check back in on the story.

By then, the scope of the tragedy was evident.

Still, the details remained sketchy. I wrote up what we knew, recorded an update from home (I have a microphone set up inside a closet) and sent it to Chris Wood, a Daily engineer in London who  because of the time difference  makes final changes to the show when the rest of us are asleep back in New York. He quickly updated the end of the episode with the news.
Stretching for several hundred feet along Park Street, the wall (technically two walls  one along the sidewalk, with an identical one terraced above it) marks the beginning of construction on a 109-unit residential development on a three-acre site a short walk from the heart of downtown.

Called Merritt Village, the development will consist of four buildings with 59 rental apartments starting at about $3,500 a month and 50 condominiums starting at around $1.2 million, according to the builder, Arnold Karp, the president of Karp Associates, based in New Canaan, and a developing partner in the project.

Artist renderings promoting the development online appear to show a stacked stone wall along the Park Street perimeter. But the actual structure, which functions as a retaining wall, is concrete. Its face is textured to look like it is constructed of individual pieces, an effect created by a mold when the concrete was poured. It is this manufactured faux-stone look, as the planning commission chairman has called it, that especially irritates critics. In an affluent community that prides itself on appearances, a prominent faux-stone wall appears glaringly out of context to some residents.

Its an embarrassment to New Canaan, which has beautiful fieldstone walls all over town, said Alan Goldberg, an architect who has lived there for decades. There are patterns that repeat every eight feet or so. And its all uniform in color. It should never have happened.

Constance MacDougall, in an email to the Planning and Zoning Commission, called it an insult to the towns colonial tradition, a mind-numbing monochromatic gray cartoon of a wall devoid of any visual element that would give it a measure of compatibility to the landscape on which it sits.
When an architecture firm has been around as long as the 83-year-old Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it may see some of its buildings receive landmark status, and it may also, on occasion, have to see some of its structures knocked down.

Such was the case with the 12-story Skidmore-designed former headquarters of the American Bible Society, at the southern end of the Upper West Side, which the nonprofit organization sold to the developer AvalonBay Communities in 2015 before relocating to Philadelphia.

Still, even when the building in question wasnt universally admired to begin with  a Brutalist structure built in 1966, later compromised by an awkward glass addition on the front  the demolition of a legacy building, as architects call the works their firms have created, comes with a sting.

That haunted us, said Chris Cooper, a partner at the firm. Id be lying if I said it didnt.

It also spurred Skidmore to beat out competing architecture firms for a chance to design the replacement building on the northwest corner of Broadway and West 61st Street: a 32-story, 172-unit condo residence named Park Loggia whose units go on sale this month.
We are seeing more and more people planning ahead, said Mr. Ison of Woodlawn. Seven years ago, he added, 40 percent of people made arrangements ahead of time, or pre-need rather than at need (by which time prices may have increased); last year, 60 percent did.

Antonia Russo pulled it off just in time.

In the summer of 2017, her mother was ailing, which lent urgency to the search for a burial plot for her parents. They had lived in Forest Hills, Queens, for most of their adult lives, but were born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant and remained proud Brooklynites, Ms. Russo said.

So in consultation with her parents, she opted for a spot on the Brooklyn side of the Evergreens Cemetery, which straddles Brooklyn and Queens. Ms. Russo passed up a plot on a grassy knoll under a tree in favor of one bordering Bushwick Avenue, because she felt that her mother, who had always lived on busy streets, would feel more at home. I knew this was where shed be happy, Ms. Russo said.

Two weeks after the papers were signed, her mother passed away.

Cemetery plot location, like all real estate, usually comes down to personal preference, said John O. DArienzo, a funeral home director and the president of the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association. If you take 100 people, 50 people will want to be by the road, so if its cold they can see the stone from the car, he said. The other 50 will want to be in the middle of the section, so everyone doesnt walk all over the grave.

He added: Its like who wants a blue house, who wants a red house.

John Crawford, a retired hotel worker who lives on the Upper West Side, frequents death cafes and attended a recent one at the St. Agnes library branch on Amsterdam Avenue. Mr. Crawford is leaning toward a green burial at the Town Cemetery in Rhinebeck, N.Y., where a natural burial ground opened in 2014 on land that was once part of an estate.

The spot appeals to him in part because of its price: $1,650, which is $400 more than it costs to be buried in the conventional part of the same cemetery, but far less than what most cemeteries in New York City charge.

Mr. Crawford also admires the beautiful forested grounds.

I may not have a country home, he said. But at least I could get buried out there in the country.

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.
Of the 958 species in their sample, 28 percent were not protected under Cites, the researchers found. On average, it took Cites more than 10 years to catch up with the Red Lists assessment that a species risked extinction.

The lag can contribute to the decimation of a species. Spending even just a few years without protection and regulation on trade can lead to large detrimental effects on the wild population of a species, Dr. Frank said. Trade can escalate very quickly.

To bridge the gap between science and policy, Dr. Frank and Dr. Wilcove propose strengthening the exchange of information between Cites officials, member countries and Red List researchers.

But greater awareness will not necessarily hasten new listings, because Cites members consider more than just science when it comes to making decisions, said Julie Lockwood, an ecologist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the research.

Every country is weighing the biological risk with the commercial risk, because people are making money off these species, she said.

To add a species to Cites, one or more governments must submit a detailed proposal in advance of the next major conference of the parties, held every two to three years. Nations attending the conference vote on the proposals, which require a two-thirds majority to pass.
Loewe Celebrates the Craft of Weaving

Bamboo is rhizomatic, meaning that unlike a single-trunked tree, it sends roots and shoots in all directions and can regrow when chopped down. Its a concept that resonates with the sculptor Jiro Yonezawa, who lives on Japans mountainous Kyushu island. There, he weaves bamboo into intricate orbs and swooping formations, using techniques rooted in traditional Japanese basketry. I like that I can cut a piece of bamboo and make whatever I want, and then go back a couple years later and theres another piece to use, says Yonezawa. It has unlimited potential.

His work recently captured the attention of Loewe, the Spanish fashion house that, for this years Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan next month, commissioned Yonezawa and other artists who employ weaving techniques to produce new versions of their creations using locally sourced leather from Spain. Loewes creative director, Jonathan Anderson, has privileged material and craft throughout his six-year tenure at the brand, collaborating with artisans around the world. In Japan, Anderson notes, there is a wonderful tradition of passing certain skills from generation to generation, adding, and there is honor within it.

But reverence for the past does not preclude innovation. The design principle of shin, gyo, so, which translates to formal, semiformal, informal and is applied across Japanese arts to differentiate levels of adherence to tradition, suggests that rules should not only be mastered but also stretched, bent and even broken. That outlook prompted Anderson to trade one age-old material for another. Its about pushing things forward in a new way, he says.

Leather is more delicate than bamboo, and so for one of Yonezawas three pieces for the project  a 44-inch obelisk of woven red-brown leather strips titled Jizo, after the bodhisattva statues said to protect travelers  he had to use an internal armature and take special care not to scratch the surface. That piece will stand alongside works by Shizu Okino and Karen Okino Butzbach, a mother-daughter team based in Berkeley, Calif., whose fanciful interpretation of basketry involves wrapping and tying found stones (Butzbach describes her mother as a rock hound) with elaborate rattan, and now leather, knots. With names like Destiny, Cascade and Twisted Butterfly, the knots transform the stones into elegant talismans. People can feel their energy, says Butzbach. Additionally, the pair has adapted an open-weave Japanese flower basket.
Qualcomm won a legal victory against Apple on Friday when a federal jury in San Diego found that Apple owed the mobile phone chip supplier about $31 million for infringing on three of its patents.

Qualcomm sued Apple last year, accusing it of violating patents related to improving mobile phones battery life.

During an eight-day trial in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, Qualcomm asked the jury to award it unpaid patent royalties of up to $1.41 per iPhone that violated the patents.

The technologies invented by Qualcomm and others are what made it possible for Apple to enter the market and become so successful so quickly, Don Rosenberg, Qualcomms general counsel, said in a statement.
michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: The death toll from a mass shooting targeting Muslims in New Zealand rose from 49 to 50 over the weekend, after officials found another body at the Al Noor Mosque, where most of the deaths occurred. Kevin Roose on why this attack was made by and for the internet. Its Monday, March 18.

archived recording 1

Farid, would you mind just telling us one more time of what happened in the mosque?

archived recording (farid ahmed)

When shooting started, it started from the hallway. So I could hear, so [IMITATING GUNFIRE] Then magazine is finished. Then he refill again and came back again.

archived recording 2

I saw all the plastering coming down from the wall and the ceiling.

archived recording 3

O.K.

archived recording 4

And that was when I knew it was from the gun shot. So immediately 

archived recording 5

When he was shooting at me  and theres a fence here. He was shooting at me. I ducked here and I come here. And I find the gun somewhere here and a dead body here as well.

archived recording 6

I feel now  I repeated the story a lot. But this is a good idea to say that 

michael barbaro

Over the weekend, through dozens of interviews with survivors, a story began to emerge of what happened on Friday inside the mosques in Christchurch.

archived recording 1

Was that your regular mosque or were you visiting that mosque?

archived recording (farid ahmed)

Regular mosque. Yeah.

michael barbaro

The shooting began at the Al Noor Mosque, where Farid Ahmed and his wife, Husna, who had moved to New Zealand from Bangladesh, were attending afternoon prayer.

archived recording (farid ahmed)

The ladies room was on the right-hand side. So all the ladies were there. And my wife is always a leading person for ladies. She had a philosophy. She always used to tell me, I dont want to hold any position. And I want to prove that you dont need to have any position to help people. She was like a magnet. And exactly the same thing happened. The shooting started. She started instructing several ladies and children to get out. And she was screaming, Come this way, hurry up, this and that. You know, she was doing all these things. And then she took many children and ladies into a safe garden. Then she was coming back, checking about me, because I was in the wheelchair.

archived recording

Do you mind me asking why youre in a wheelchair?

archived recording (farid ahmed)

I was run over by a car. He was the drunk driver. And it was 1998 and it happened.

archived recording

Im sorry.

archived recording (farid ahmed)

Its O.K.

archived recording

So she went out of the mosque and then she came back in?

archived recording (farid ahmed)

Yeah. She was coming back. And once she was approaching the gate, then she was shot.

archived recording

She came back into to fetch you?

archived recording (farid ahmed)

Yes. Yes.

michael barbaro

Farid learned hours later that Husna was one of the 42 people police say were killed at the mosque.

archived recording (farid ahmed)

So she was busy with saving lives, you know, forgetting about herself. And thats what she is. She always has been like this.

michael barbaro

Six minutes after firing the first shot, and as police raced toward Al Noor Mosque, the shooter drove to a second mosque, the Linwood Mosque, four miles east.

damien cave

And tell me  Im sorry, what was your name?

abdul aziz

Abdul Aziz.

damien cave

And the mosque that you go to, is it mixed, Pakistani? I mean, that mosque  who was there that day?

abdul aziz

That mosque, we got from every race, from Malaysia, from Philippines, from Afghanistan, from every sort of country.

michael barbaro

My colleague Damien Cave spoke with Abdul Aziz, who was praying at the Linwood Mosque with his four sons when he heard gunshots. Aziz ran toward the shots, grabbing the first thing he could find, a credit card machine, which he flung at the attacker. The shooter dropped a gun, and Aziz picked it up.

abdul aziz

And I pick up the gun and I checked that it had no bullets. And I was screaming to the guy, Come here! Im here. I just wanted to put more focus on me than go inside the masjid. But unfortunately he just got himself to the masjid, and I heard more shooting sound. And I see the shooting inside the masjid.

michael barbaro

Moments later, when the gunman went to his car to retrieve more weapons, Aziz followed him.

abdul aziz

This guy tried to get more gun from his car. When he see me, Im chasing with the gun. He sat on his car. And I just got that gun and throw in his window like an arrow and blast his window. And he thought I probably shot him or something. And the guns come back and just, he drives off.

michael barbaro

Aziz used the gun to shatter the gunmans car window, which many witnesses believe is what prompted him to speed away rather than re-enter the mosque and kill more people.

abdul aziz

Any brother would do the same thing. So if you was there, you would do the same thing.

damien cave

Have you  can I ask you 

michael barbaro

Minutes later, video shows the suspect being pulled by police from his car two and a half miles down the road, where two more guns and homemade explosives were also found.

archived recording (jacinda ardern)

I want to speak specifically about the firearms used in this terrorist act. They were two semi-automatic weapons and two shotguns.

michael barbaro

On Sunday, New Zealands prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said that the suspect, an Australian citizen, would be tried in New Zealand, and that her government would meet today to discuss the countrys gun laws.

archived recording (jacinda ardern)

I can tell you one thing right now. Our gun laws will change.

michael barbaro

Funerals for all 50 victims are expected to be held in the coming days.

archived recording (jacinda ardern)

As the police commissioner confirmed this morning, 50 people have been killed and 34 people remain in Christchurch Hospital, 12 of them in the intensive care unit in critical condition. A 4-year-old girl remains in critical condition at Starship Hospital in Auckland.

michael barbaro

Islamic burial rituals typically require bodies to be buried as soon as possible, and usually within 24 hours. But New Zealand authorities say that the process of identifying the victims and returning them to their families could take several more days.

archived recording (jacinda ardern)

It is the expectation that all bodies will be returned to families by Wednesday. I want to finish by saying that while the nation grapples with a form of grief and anger that we have not experienced before, we are seeking answers.

michael barbaro

Kevin, I want to talk to you about the moments before this mass shooting began. What do you know about those?

kevin roose

Well, what we know comes from a video that was live-streamed on Facebook while this was all happening by the gunman. He taped himself in the car on his way over to the mosque, listening to music, talking. And right before he gets out of the car and goes into the mosque, he pauses and says, Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie. And when I heard that, I just, like, I knew, oh, this is something different than were used to.

michael barbaro

What do you mean? What is PewDiePie, and why does that reference matter?

kevin roose

So PewDiePie is this really popular YouTube personality. He has the most subscribers of anyone on YouTube. Some people think hes offensive. Some people really like him. Hes got this whole fan base. And a few months ago, his fans started sort of spamming this phrase, subscribe to PewDiePie, in an attempt to kind of keep him from being eclipsed by another account that was going to have more followers than him.

michael barbaro

O.K.

kevin roose

So it sort of became this competition, and then it became this joke. And now subscribe to PewDiePie is just kind of like a thing that people say on certain parts of the internet. Its just kind of like a signifier, like, I understand the internet, you understand the internet. This is how were going to signal to each other that we understand the internet.

michael barbaro

O.K. And this is what hes signaling in saying that?

kevin roose

Yeah. So I have that in my head. And then I see all these other signs that something is weirdly kind of internet-y about all of this. Like, theres this post on 8chan, which is kind of like a scummy message board that lots of extremists and weirdos go on. And in the post, the gunman links to the Facebook stream before it happens.

michael barbaro

The Facebook stream that he will record of the massacre itself.

kevin roose

Exactly. And then he pastes a bunch of links to copies of his manifesto. He has a 74-page manifesto that he wrote. And some of this stuff was fairly standard hard-right ideology, very fascist, very white nationalist. Muslims are kind of like the primary target for white nationalists around the world, calling them invaders, saying theyre taking over. You know, this is a sort of classic white nationalist trope. And then there was all this kind of meta-humor, saying that he was radicalized by video games, which is another thing that internet extremists love to sort of troll the media with. Like, you know, he posted previews of his gun on Twitter. The whole thing just kind of felt like it just set this shooting up as, like, almost an internet performance, like it was native to the internet, and it was born out of and aimed into this culture of extremely concentrated internet radicalism.

michael barbaro

But underneath it all is white nationalism, white supremacy, whatever you want to call it, a kind of racism that has always existed. So why does the internets role in this feel especially different to you?

kevin roose

I want to make clear that this is not just a tech story, right. Theres a real core of anti-Muslim violence here, Islamophobia, far-right ideology. Thats all very, very important, and we should focus there. But I think theres this other piece that we really need to start grappling with as a society, which is that theres an entire generation of people who have been exposed to radical extremist politics online, who have been fed a steady diet of this stuff. Its transformed by the tools that the internet provides. So Ive talked to a lot of white nationalists, unfortunately. And when I asked them how they got into this, a lot of them will say, I found a couple of videos on YouTube. And then I found some more videos on YouTube, and it kind of started opening my eyes to this ideology. And pretty soon, youre a white nationalist. And thats different from, historically, how extremism has been born. I mean 

michael barbaro

What do you mean?

kevin roose

You know, if you go to the library and you take out a book about World War II, right as youre about to finish it, the librarian doesnt say, here, heres a copy of Mein Kampf. You might like this. Theres not this kind of algorithmic nudge toward the extremes that really exists on social media and has a demonstrated effect on people.

michael barbaro

Walk me through this algorithmic nudge. I want to make sure I understand what youre referring to.

kevin roose

This is pretty specific to YouTube, but thats where a lot of this stuff happens. So on YouTube theres this recommendations bar. And after a video plays, another one follows it. And historically, the way that this algorithm that chose which video came next worked is it would try to keep you on the site for as long as possible, try to maximize the number of videos you watch, the amount of time you spent, which would maximize the ad revenue. Right. It would maximize lots of things. And so it turned out that what kept people on the site for longer and longer periods of time was gradually moving them toward more extreme content. You start at a video about spaceships, and youd end on something that was questioning whether the moon landing was a hoax. Or youd start at a video about some piece of U.S. history and, you know, five videos later youre at kind of a 9/11 conspiracy theory video. Just these kind of gradual tugs toward the stuff that the algorithm decides is going to keep you hooked. And in a lot of cases, that means making it a little more extreme.

michael barbaro

And whats the white nationalist version of this nudge?

kevin roose

Theres a ton of white nationalism on YouTube. YouTube, from the conversations Ive had with people in this movement, is sort of central to how these ideas spread. Like, you start watching some videos about politics. Maybe theyre about Trump. Then you start watching some videos by sort of more fringey, kind of far-right characters, and all of a sudden you are watching someones video who is espousing open white nationalism. And youre not exactly sure how you got there, but you keep watching. And for some percentage of people, you internalize that.

michael barbaro

So its a kind of computer-driven on-ramp or onboarding.

kevin roose

Yeah. And this has been studied. Like, this is a well-documented phenomenon, and YouTube has done some things to try to fix the algorithm and make it so that its not sending you down these rabbit holes. But its still a pretty observable effect.

michael barbaro

And whats your understanding of why these platforms didnt act years ago to police, to delete these hate-filled videos, this content that through these algorithmic nudges you described directs people further and further towards extremism?

kevin roose

They had no reason to. I mean, they were making a lot of money. They saw their responsibility as providing a platform for free speech. They were very hesitant to kind of seem like they were censoring certain political views. They were committed to free speech. And I think thats kind of the original sin thats baked into all of this. Its like, part of how this was born is this idea that we just provide the platform, and if people signal to us that they like something, well show them more of it. And maybe well show them something that pushes the envelope a little bit more. And were not optimizing for truth. Were not optimizing for things that we think are healthy for people. Were just giving them what they want. And theyre trying to change that now, some of them. Theres a reckoning now where these platforms have come to understand that this is the role that theyve played and that theyre trying to correct it. But theres a lot of people who have already been sucked up into this world, who have been radicalized, and who may not be coming back. Its going to be very, very tricky to slow the thing that has been set into motion. And I dont even know if its possible.

michael barbaro

At this point.

kevin roose

Yeah. These platforms played a pivotal role, have played, are playing a pivotal role in how these extremist groups gather momentum and share their ideas and coalesce into real movements and grow. And, like, thats the part that I dont think theyve completely reckoned with, and I dont think weve completely reckoned with. I think were still sort of coming to terms with the fact that theres this pipeline for extremism. And we know how it runs. We know where it happens. We know whos involved. And we know that sometimes it has these devastating, tragic consequences. What Ive been thinking is just how inevitable this feels.

michael barbaro

What do you mean?

kevin roose

Ive been watching these people in these kind of dark corners of the internet multiplying and hardening and becoming more extreme, and, like, it was inevitable. This is the nightmare. Right? This is the worst possible version of something that could happen and be broadcast on the internet. And its not getting better. And its going to be with us for a long time.

michael barbaro

But it also strikes me that in a way, and in a pretty awful way, this gunman and the way he has approached this massacre is kind of reflecting back how the internet functions. Because Im thinking about him making a video of this attack, which, in a sense, means hes making content that feeds that loop that were discussing, perhaps feeds this algorithm that possibly fed him  that hes basically putting something back into the system.

kevin roose

Yeah. And I saw this happening on these platforms, like, in real time. So 

michael barbaro

You mean on Friday?

kevin roose

Yeah. So if you went onto 8chan, which is the website where all the stuff was posted, the comments below this post were all about, lets save these videos so that we can re-upload them somewhere else 

michael barbaro

Wow.

kevin roose

 in case 8chan gets taken down. Lets spread this. Lets seed this all over the internet. I mean, theres no doubt in my mind that this guy was very aware of how his video and his manifesto would kind of filter through the internet and get refracted and picked up and analyzed. This was a very deliberate act, not only of murder and violence, but also of media creation. I mean, this was, in a way, engineered for internet virality.

michael barbaro

And then it did go viral.

kevin roose

Yes. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, all the platforms, tried to take down the video as soon as it popped up, but it just kept popping back up. Its very hard to contain. So its still out there. I mean, yeah, Im looking at, right now, something posted, you know, six hours ago. Its the video of the shooting, and its still up. And I dont think itll ever fully disappear.

michael barbaro

Kevin, thank you very much.

kevin roose
Trading off trust for profit to build A.I.

When OpenAI was founded three years ago, it had a huge goal: to build artificial intelligence software that was as capable as the human brain. Its founders said that because it was a nonprofit with noble ambitions  it had $1 billion in funding from backers to pay its way  the public could trust it to build that so-called general artificial intelligence.

Only, $1 billion doesnt go far with goals like that. Huge computing resources and big salaries to attract talent burn through cash. Actually, it turns out, some profits might be useful.

So, Wired reported, Open AI announced that it was changing its business model. To keep up with Facebook and Google, it created a OpenAI L.P., a company that can take money from investors that need to return a profit, like venture funds. That will make it easier to raise funds. Down the line, it might monetize some of the technology it develops. But the company decided to cap the returns that investors will see  to $100 for every dollar invested.

One way to think of that figure is that OpenAI deems a 100-times return to be an ethical margin on building a general A.I.  enough to make it a feasible endeavor, but not so much as to tar it with the Big Tech brush. That reasoning clearly holds if you inhabit Silicon Valley. But it will be interesting to see if that profit cap is enough to put everyone at ease.

What the web could look like in 30 years

On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed an idea for linking digital files that his boss, Mike Sendall, called vague but exciting. It ultimately became the World Wide Web, and 30 years later were left with much to love  and hate  about its existence.

At an event at Londons Science Museum on Tuesday to mark the webs passage into its fourth decade, Mr. Berners-Lee was asked what it might look like in another 30 years. Heres what he said:

 Its not, I think, for us to try and guess.

 Look at whats happened over the last 30 years. The web has changed really dramatically, and a lot of that we couldnt have predicted.

 What we can do is we can say what web we want.

 We want a web which is open. We want a web which is royalty-free. We want a web which is discrimination-free.
The Woodstock Music & Arts Festival turns 50 this year and helped define music festivals for the counterculture generation. Its resulting legacy has been mixed  from slickly produced multiday affairs to unmitigated disasters, like the Fyre Festival  but the wildfire-spread of festivals since has led to an increasing number of exciting, smaller-scale events organized each year.

These eight U.S.-based music festivals are notable for their stunning settings, extracurricular programming and highly curated, alternative lineups.

Marfa Myths is a collaboration between Ballroom Marfa, a nonprofit cultural arts space, and the Brooklyn-based record label Mexican Summer. Since it began four years ago, in a West Texas town internationally recognized for its art and culture, Marfa Myths has showcased a diverse roster of under-the-radar talent. Expect the same this year, with acts like Khruangbin and Cass McCombs. And dont miss the art exhibitions around town.

PRO TIP Bring boots, and hydrate! advises Sarah Melendez, the Ballroom Marfa program director. Booking accommodations and meal reservations in advance is a must, too.

April 25-28 in Marfa, Tex. $220 for an all-access pass; tickets available for individual shows $15-$55
Was it worth it?

The celebrities and C.E.O.s arrested in this weeks college bribery scandal were charged with paying up to $1.2 million for guaranteed admission to elite universities. And of course theres a much larger and mostly legal system whereby rich people pull strings, hire consultants and make enormous tax-deductible donations, all in the hopes of improving their childrens college chances.

Yet academic research suggests that these efforts are mostly a waste of money, and that the seized opportunities would have actually helped other students much more.

In 2014, the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published an analysis of the benefits of attending a highly selective college. They found that, after statistically controlling for students SAT scores, economic background and college ambitions, the long-term financial returns are generally indistinguishable from zero. Students who are poised to succeed tend to do so even if they dont get into the Ivy League.

But there was a crucial exception. There were strong benefits for the subset of black and Hispanic students, and for those whose parents had few educational credentials. It turns out that students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges. Elite higher education gives them social capital they didnt already have.
Fifty people were charged this week with taking part in a nationwide scheme to game the process of admission to highly competitive schools. While federal authorities say that this is the largest prosecution of its kind in history, it is far from the first.

Heres a look back at five other times manipulation of the admissions process caused a scandal:

The Time-Zone Quirk

It was an ingenious and audacious idea: pay expert test takers to memorize answers in New York and then phone them to Los Angeles and Chicago, where the tests had not been taken yet. The answers were then carved in code on the sides of pencils being used to take the same tests, the Graduate Management Admission Test, the Graduate Record Exam, and the Test of English as a Foreign Language.

Between 1992 and 1996, several hundred people took advantage of the time differences, paying between $2,000 and $9,000, depending on how high the desired score was. The students were flown or driven to test centers, where they were given pencils with the coded answers. Hundreds of students received high scores and were admitted to graduate schools around the country, prosecutors said.

The mastermind of the scheme, Po Chieng Ma, was sentenced in 1998 to four years in prison.

Columbia University, New York University, Fordham University and Hunter College, all in New York, were among the schools receiving fraudulent scores, the indictment said.
Muslims in cities across the United States walked past heavily armed police officers to attend services Friday, hours after a gunman killed at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand. They pored over news reports with a mixture of grief and disgust, feeling familiar fears of being targeted for their religious beliefs.

Throughout a tense day, law enforcement officials and political leaders assured Muslims that they would be protected as they prepared for Friday Prayer, the very thing the victims had been doing when they died.

[Read our live briefing for the latest updates on the attacks.]

The news trickled out overnight in dread-inducing bulletins as the death toll climbed by the hour. The United States is home to about 3.5 million Muslims, or 1 percent of the nations population. Some said they had stayed up all night, unable to tear themselves away from the coverage, as difficult as it was to take in.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the countrys largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said that Muslims around the world were in mourning and that the attacks were part of a rising intolerance in the United States and abroad.
Beto ORourke, the charismatic Texas Democrat and former member of the House of Representatives, announced his presidential campaign in a video on Thursday. The three-minute clip quickly racked up thousands of shares, with some viewers excited by the prospect of his out-of-nowhere political rise. But others were put off by how his campaign deployed an age-old trope in American political theater  the silent, supportive wife.

Throughout the video, Mr. ORourkes wife, Amy, sat quietly by her husbands side, periodically grasping his hand as he outlined his campaign vision.

She occasionally smiled. And gazed.
WASHINGTON  Rick Gates, the former top Trump campaign adviser who pleaded guilty to financial fraud crimes and lying to investigators, is still talking to federal prosecutors.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, requested for the fifth time on Friday a delay in the sentencing of Mr. Gates, a longtime political consultant who served as the campaigns deputy and was indicted in a scheme related to work he did for a pro-Russian leader of Ukraine.

Mr. Gates continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations, Mr. Muellers prosecutors said in a joint status report.

Because the special counsels office cited other, unspecified inquiries, it was difficult to tell whether the petition for a delay in sentencing gave any indication of when its broader investigation into Russias election interference and possible ties to Trump associates would be complete, a subject of intense speculation.
Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, said after the vote. Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, said he thought Mr. Trumps declaration was unconstitutional.

The president said on Friday that he understood why some Republicans believed he had overreached. Theyre doing what they have to do, and I put no pressure on anybody, Mr. Trump said. I actually said, I could have gotten some of them to come along. I said: I want you to vote your heart. Do what you want to do. Im not putting any pressure.

Ill let them know when theres pressure, O.K.? he added. And I told them that. I said, When I need your vote, Im going to let you know. I didnt need the vote because we all knew it was going to be a veto, and theyre not going to be able to override. Its going to go very quickly.

Mr. Trump has held broad sway over congressional Republicans in his first two years in office. The decision by the dozen Senate Republicans to side with Democrats on an issue central to the presidents agenda was seen as a reclaiming of the role of Congress as a coequal branch of government.

Mr. Trump was undeterred by the Republican opposition and quickly signaled his next step when he tweeted VETO! not long after the vote. The president said on Friday that there was nothing less than an invasion of the United States by migrants, and he added that so many of them had been apprehended that there was nowhere left to hold all of the people that were capturing.

Even if Congress fails to override the veto, the emergency declaration is already drawing court challenges.

A coalition of 20 states, including California and New York, sued last month over Mr. Trumps use of emergency powers, arguing that the president does not have the authority to divert funds for building a wall along the Mexican border because it is Congress that controls spending.
OLD FORGE, Pa.  The news came at 9:41 p.m. Tuesday: Frank Scavo III had lost. Again.

Mr. Scavo, a perennial candidate running for the Pennsylvania Legislature on a platform of ending property taxes, was trounced by a Democratic newcomer, Bridget Malloy Kosierowski, the first woman to represent the Scranton-area district in decades. Initially, Mr. Scavo and about 30 supporters sounded conciliatory at their election night party, praising Ms. Kosierowski for a hard-fought campaign.

But soon, after they downed the last pitcher of light beer, the discussion took a darker turn. Many of Mr. Scavos supporters were upset that he had drawn significant negative attention for his series of bigoted Facebook posts over the past four years, including ones that painted Muslims as infidels and others that promoted conspiracy theories like Pizzagate, the false story that Democrats ran a child sex trafficking operation out of a Washington pizza parlor.

[Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American politics with our newsletter.]

Democrats are rats! yelled Mr. Scavos wife, Caren, a local hair stylist who had started crying. She and others contended that he should have doubled down rather than apologize for the posts, as he did in the closing days of the race.

Im furious, said Laureen Cummings, an Old Forge resident who is also a county commissioner. Our poor president is getting hammered and the same thing happened to Frank.
LAGOS, Nigeria  Officials in Nigeria on Friday began demolishing unstable structures on Lagos Island near the site of a deadly building collapse, displacing residents who had little warning that their homes would be destroyed.

The sound of sledgehammers rang out as construction crews fanned out across the area to begin the slow process of tearing down buildings  some marked with a giant X, indicating that they were unstable. About 100 structures were to be destroyed, officials said, and scores of people were living in them.

Lagos, the most populous city on the African continent, is known for its poor urban planning, and many Lagos Island residents said they believed they had little choice but to live in the buildings  even those that were visibly listing and scheduled for demolition.

The demolition began two days after the collapse of a three-story building housing a preschool, nursery school, apartments and shops. On Friday, a health official told Reuters that 20 people had been killed and dozens more injured. Many of the dead were children.
michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: An economic collapse, a crumbling infrastructure, a contested presidential election  Venezuela was already in crisis. Then the power went out. Its Wednesday, April 10. Nick, tell me the story that you were told about what happened in Venezuela last month.

nicholas casey

So it was a Thursday last month in Maracaibo. And David Ardila, whos a publicist there 

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

 was sitting at his desk when the lights went out.

[music]

michael barbaro

Nick Casey covers Latin America for The Times.

nicholas casey

This wasnt anything that surprised him because the lights were always going out in the city.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

This is a place on the edge of the electric grid in Venezuela, so it was not unusual for the lights to go out for a number of hours. There were rolling blackouts there. Usually by 4:00 p.m., the lights are back on. But then he got a call from his wife, who said there was not just a power outage in Maracaibo, but all over Venezuela. This was something that wasnt usual. This was something no one had really seen or remembered before.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

Were talking about a country of 30 million people, and almost no one has electricity.

michael barbaro

So the power is out across Venezuela.

nicholas casey

Across the entire country. And that means things get very ugly, very fast.

michael barbaro

What had happened to trigger this blackout?

nicholas casey

According to the electricians union, it was a brush fire that took place over some cables that were feeding the country. But you have to ask yourself, if one fire is able to turn off all the power to a country, there must be a bigger problem.

michael barbaro

Right.

nicholas casey

And the problem is that Venezuela is in the middle of an economic collapse. That means that key infrastructure in the country isnt getting built, and whats there isnt getting repaired. On top of this, theres massive political unrest.

archived recording Juan Guaido, the countrys self-proclaimed leader, is calling for his supporters to take to the streets again to step up pressure on President Nicolas Maduro and demand new elections. Maduro has also called on his supporters to rally today. The power struggle between Guaido and Maduro has brought the country to a standstill, and that is a huge electricity 

nicholas casey

There are still two men who say that theyre the president of Venezuela, and Guaido actually has the support of America and 50 other countries, as well. This is extremely unresolved. Donald Trump is saying that Maduro needs to step down and let Guaido be the president.

michael barbaro

So in this moment when the power goes out, to 30 million Venezuelans, its not entirely clear who runs the country or who will be solving the blackout.

nicholas casey

Not at all. And its becoming clear to everybody that Maduro cant do even the most basic thing that a government should be doing, which is keeping the lights on. So these two events arent directly connected to each other, but you suddenly see that one is starting to feed off of the other, which is this discontent that brought Guaido to the forefront in Venezuelan politics is now being doubled by the fact that Maduro cant provide electricity. Its underscoring this question which everybody has asked in Venezuela, which is, if you cant provide power, are you actually providing a state?

[music]

nicholas casey

So I decided to go to Maracaibo, which is Venezuelas second-largest city. Its also at the end of the electric grid. So we knew that this was going to be a place where there was going to be problems, and the problems were going to be very big.

nicholas casey So you can hear the sound of the generator here, which is out of a small truck. And theres basically a line of phones where everybody has plugged in.

nicholas casey

You have to remember that Maracaibo sits on the Caribbean coast. Its a really hot, sweltering city. The old joke in Maracaibo was that its the coldest city in Venezuela, because everybody has air conditioning. But now, there was no air conditioning. And after a few days, things started to come apart.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

People were running out of food, and it started with the looting. There were big crowds of more than a thousand people that suddenly gathered, looking for food. And these crowds first went to the grocery stores. They sacked almost every single supermarket that was in Maracaibo, but then they kept going. They started taking anything that was available. People were suddenly taking furniture. They were taking washers and dryers. They were taking all of these appliances and anything that they could after this massive economic crisis. You can suddenly imagine if you could get your hands on something that was of value and worth a lot, you would go for it. You would take it, especially if theres no state. Theres no one patrolling.

michael barbaro

Theres no one patrolling.

nicholas casey

No one. I talked to many store owners who said that they were waiting for the police to come, and the police didnt come. Part of the reason for that is because the police themselves, their paychecks are worthless. People arent showing up to the jobs. Things are just coming apart this way.

nicholas casey [SPEAKING SPANISH] speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH] nicholas casey [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

I talked to one woman who was selling vegetables out in front of one of the places that got completely torn apart. People were setting fire to the stores.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

And I asked her why they were setting fire, and she said 

nicholas casey [SPEAKING SPANISH] speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

It wasnt actually out of spite. It was because it was dark, and they couldnt see inside the store.

michael barbaro

Burn the store in order to see what you are stealing.

nicholas casey

Burn the store, take as much as you can, and leave it to be burned to the ground, and thats what we saw by the time we were there.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

A lot of these places were just in embers at that point. There were so few places that were remaining, so few pharmacies that were even remaining.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

I ran into one man who had tongue cancer. He was a professor.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

And at that point, you could see his face was completely bulging in tumors that were taking over the sides of his chin, below his jaw, affecting how he could speak.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

He hadnt been treated for weeks, and he told me that he didnt think he had any hope of being able to find medication at that point, because there is nowhere that was going to be able to sell it to him.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

There was so much looting that seemed to be taking place simultaneously across Maracaibo, and then there were firefights that were breaking out between the looters and the owners, as people were trying to break into stores.

michael barbaro

Firefights as in, theres gunfire.

nicholas casey

Gunfire.

^[crowd yelling]

^

nicholas casey

This was just a total anarchy in parts of Maracaibo. Now, these people start to end up in the hospitals. Theyre going to hospitals, at that point, that didnt have any electricity. So how are you going to take care of people with gunshot wounds when theres no electricity?

[music]

nicholas casey

I needed to see what was going on, but you cant get into hospitals in Venezuela if youre a journalist. Many of them are militarized. People have been arrested for going into these hospitals.

michael barbaro

They dont want you to see.

nicholas casey

This is really at the core of what Maduro cant do in this country. This is very sensitive to the government. They cant treat people. So this has even put the hospital staff and the doctors under threat. Theyre afraid to speak. But I was able to find a couple of doctors who were able to talk to me behind closed doors in another facility.

michael barbaro

And here, were actually going to change the voices of these doctors so that their identities are protected and they dont get in trouble for talking to you.

nicholas casey

Right. And these doctors were telling me when I met them that this had been a place where it was already almost impossible to treat patients.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

There was very little water. They were having to wash their hands using bottled water. They were running out of soap. They didnt have medicines that they needed. And then suddenly, they didnt have any electricity.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

One of the doctors I talked to said 

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

The first thing that hit you was the smell.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

There is a stench that is horrific there. And as the people were coming in with injuries from these lootings that were taking place, gunshot wounds, glass wounds because they had broken down the windows, doctors didnt know how to treat them initially. They were trying to treat them. And in some cases, according to one of the medical officials I talked to, people were getting amputations that they didnt necessarily need, because this was the only way that they were going to save this person was doing an amputation, when ordinarily, if youd had everything that you needed, you would have been able to do something else for this person besides take off their arm or their leg.

michael barbaro

This blackout is literally costing people their limbs.

nicholas casey

Yes. And on top of that, even in the morgue, theres no power.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

So the bodies are starting to rot there.

[music]

Thats during the day. But then the night starts to hit, and you have to continue doing work as people are coming in to try to get treated. People were pulling out their cell phones to use the light by their cell phones to try to treat people at that point. This doctor told me that you could hear people screaming.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

But you couldnt tell where the screams were necessarily coming from, because the whole place was dark. At a certain point, a couple of days into this, there was a robbery, when an armed group came in and went to the third floor of one of the hospitals and started to steal from the patients who were there.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

Taking advantage of the fact that you couldnt see anyone in there.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

So one thing that the doctor said was most difficult about this was there was no information on what was going on or when this was going to be over.

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

Finally, the government did come out and say it was an act of sabotage that caused this 

speaker [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

 blaming the U.S. and the opposition for what had happened. But this wasnt something the doctors believed themselves. This was the equivalent of having no information at all still.

michael barbaro

And how, in the governments telling, is the U.S. somehow responsible?

nicholas casey

They said that it was a cybernetic electromagnetic attack that had been launched from the U.S., likely in Houston and Chicago. And that this was an effort by Donald Trump for regime change. Shut down the electricity and you can help the opposition by making Maduro look like he cant run the country.

michael barbaro

And how would that even work?

nicholas casey

There is such technology out there, but he didnt provide any evidence, any pictures, anything showing that thats what had happened. And there are satellite photos showing that there was a brush fire that day.

michael barbaro

And are people buying this story, that the U.S. is behind the blackout?

nicholas casey

Whether you buy it says a lot about how you feel about Maduro. If you follow Maduro, youve probably followed him into a lot of other explanations as well, which largely is based on the idea that the economic crisis of Venezuela has to do with the U.S. and its imperial desires to bring Venezuela down. So of course you see this blackout as probably being their sabotage. But if youre tired of Maduro, if youve been suffering this economic collapse and you think hes the cause for it, then youre not going to believe him for a second. Youre going to see this as one more very strong piece of evidence as to why he needs to go, because he cant keep the power on.

michael barbaro

And I guess its kind of telling that a blackout would be drawn into this political standoff between these two, Guaido and Maduro.

nicholas casey

Everything now is being used as political ammunition. And when you have something that affects 30 million people at the same time, of course thats going to be the center of the political debate. Why arent these lights on now?

[music]

michael barbaro

What ended up happening to the power while you were there? Did it ever come back on?

nicholas casey

There was one neighborhood that we were at that had been without power for eight days at that point. When we got there, people were sitting on their lawns in the middle of the dark drinking coffee. And just when we were about to leave, suddenly, all the lights came back on.

speaker 1 [SPEAKING SPANISH] [LAUGHTER] speaker 2 [SPEAKING SPANISH] speaker 1 [SPEAKING SPANISH]

nicholas casey

And it was just this really magical moment. They were really happy. But when you think about it, if these are the moments of hope that people were having, that the lights are going to come back on, that means its a long way that Venezuela has to go to actually have real moments of hope.

michael barbaro

And how long did the lights stay on? Not too long. We were there and the lights were still on in that neighborhood. But since then, theyve been going on and off throughout Maracaibo. And they just dont know when theyre going to have power and when theyre not. And I think it left not just me, but almost any Venezuelan terrified about what might be coming next. You just saw a level of violence and disregard for society which I dont think Venezuelans had seen on that scale in most of their lifetimes. Whats the next thing thats going to disappear that you couldnt imagine disappearing, and then whats going to happen when thats gone? Nick, thank you very much.

nicholas casey

Thanks, Michael.

michael barbaro

Well be right back.

[music]

michael barbaro

Heres what else you need to know today.

archived recording [CHANTING] archived recording (benjamin netanyahu) [SPEAKING HEBREW]

michael barbaro

On Wednesday morning, Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was poised to win a fourth consecutive term, edging out his biggest rival, Benny Gantz, a former military chief, in a closely watched election.

archived recording (benjamin netanyahu) [SPEAKING HEBREW]

michael barbaro

Despite his apparent lead, the election represented a humbling political test for Netanyahu, a conservative figure whose decade-long record of economic progress and diplomatic victory was overshadowed by high-profile indictments over his alleged abuse of power.

archived recording [CHANTING] The final results may not be known for days until the ballots of soldiers, prisoners, and hospital patients are counted. And  archived recording (william barr) This process is going along very well, and my original timetable of being able to release this by mid-April stands.

michael barbaro

In testimony before the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr said he would deliver the special counsels report to Congress within the next week.

archived recording (william barr) I identified four areas that I feel should be redacted, and I think most people would agree. The first is grand jury information, 6(e) material. The second is information that the intelligence community believes would reveal intelligence sources and methods. The third are information in the report that could interfere with ongoing prosecutions.

michael barbaro

Barr said he would redact passages, but said he would identify the reason for each redaction, an assurance that prompted skepticism from Democratic leaders, like Senator Chuck Schumer 

archived recording Do you trust Barr? Do you trust that these redactions are going to be done in compliance? archived recording (chuck schumer) Look, Ill wait till I see it. But thus far, I dont think Barr has conducted himself in a manner that earns peoples trust. Color me dubious that hes going to be fair, unless he proves otherwise.

michael barbaro
WELLINGTON, New Zealand  They arrived in New Zealand from across the Middle East and Asia, forming a tightly bound community of Muslims whose roots stretch to the mid-19th century. In recent years, migrants came to attend universities, open restaurants or to escape wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

It felt as if everyone knew everyone. Mosques were not for Pakistanis or Somalis or Bangladeshis, but for anyone in town.

So when a gunman stormed two mosques in the city of Christchurch during Friday Prayer, killing 49 people, the news moved quickly through New Zealands nearly 50,000 Muslims and the wider Islamic world.

[Follow our live briefing here.]

Throughout the Middle East, Asia and Oceania, families frantically sought visas so they could race to the bed sides of the injured. And they tried to get someone in New Zealand to answer their calls.
Mr. Duterte insisted, however, that the new list had nothing to do with politics.

Im not really interested in releasing it before or after the elections, Mr. Duterte said. I dont have the slightest intention of hurting anybody, or to cause a certain man who wants to serve the public not to be elected.

Shortly after he took office, he released the first of his drug lists, accusing 150 judges, mayors, policemen and military officers of being involved in the drug trade.

He never explained how he came up with the list, and his aides said that the president had his own sources. Many of those in that original list have been killed  including about a dozen mayors and several vice mayors  usually gunned down either in police encounters or by pro-government vigilantes.

Among those slain was a mayor who had already surrendered, but was gunned down by police officers who raided his jail cell. In July last year, two mayors were gunned down a day apart. One of them, Antonio Halili, of Tanauan City, about 40 miles south of Manila, was killed by a sniper during a flag ceremony.

More than 5,000 people  and perhaps thousands more who have gone unreported  have been killed in Mr. Dutertes drug war. Nearly all of them were killed in similar circumstances, with the police typically saying the person pulled a gun, prompting a fatal gun battle.

Vicente Veloso, a congressman in the central Philippines who was named by the president, said on Friday he would sue the government for including him on the list. He said that Mr. Dutertes list was not thoroughly vetted, and said he welcomed an investigation.

I will go straight to the point: This is politics, Mr. Veloso, a former judge, said over local radio, but stressed he had no quarrel with Mr. Duterte.
The shootings that killed at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday have placed new scrutiny on New Zealands gun laws and sparked a fervent debate about whether they were a factor in the gunmans decision to carry out his attack there.

The man was identified in court papers as Brenton Harrison Tarrant, 28, and officials have said he was an Australian citizen, which has led to comparisons between gun laws in Australia and in New Zealand.

While New Zealands laws governing the purchase of semiautomatic rifles are more restrictive than those in the United States, the country is much freer with firearms than Australia is, allowing most guns to be purchased without requiring them to be tracked.

New Zealand is almost alone with the United States in not registering 96 percent of its firearms  and those are its most common firearms, the ones most used in crimes, said Philip Alpers of GunPolicy.org, a clearinghouse for gun law data worldwide. There are huge gaps in New Zealand law, even if some of its laws are strong.
The gunman appeared to pair the shooting with the typical trolling tactics of the internets most far-right instigators, playing to a community of like-minded supporters online who cheered him on in real time as they watched bodies pile up. And the manifesto states plainly what usually goes unstated by internet trolls: By design, its author wanted to get everyone upset and arguing with each other.

[Follow our live briefing on the Christchurch killings here.]

One of the goals of his bloodshed, he wrote, was to agitate the political enemies of my people into action, to cause them to overextend their own hand and experience the eventual and inevitable backlash as a result. He said he wanted to incite violence, retaliation and further divide.

The manifesto, the harrowing video and what appear to be the gunmans social media posts feature typical white nationalist rhetoric with layers upon layers of irony and meta jokes, making it difficult to parse what is genuine and what he just thought was funny.

The gunman seems to have a significant interest in history  at least, the parts that fit into a white nationalist narrative. On his weapons, he wrote the names of centuries-old military leaders who led battles against largely nonwhite forces, along with the names of men who recently carried out mass shootings of Jews and Muslims.

The manifesto, steeped in anti-Muslim sentiment, refers to nonwhites as invaders who threaten to replace white people. The author says he used guns instead of other weapons because he wanted the United States to tear itself apart arguing over gun laws.

His choice of language, and the specific memes he referred to, suggest a deep connection to the far-right online community. The link to the livestreamed video was first posted to the /pol/ forum of 8chan, a notorious far-right space, where the gunman was hailed as a hero after the shooting.

Some of his references were subtle. As he drove to the mosque, he listened to a song associated with a 1995 Serbian nationalist video, which has recently been co-opted as a racist meme.
The massacre of 49 people in New Zealand on Friday highlights the contagious ways in which extreme right ideology and violence have spread in the 21st century  even to a country that had not experienced a mass shooting for more than two decades, and which is rarely associated with the extreme right.

New Zealand may be thousands of miles from Europe or the United States, but videos of the killer show that he was deeply entrenched in the global far right, a man familiar with the iconography, in-jokes and shibboleths of different extremist groups from across Europe, Australia and North America, as well as a native of the extreme-right ecosystem online.

A manifesto linked to the accused killer, released through his social media account on the morning of the massacre, suggests its author considered himself a disciple and comrade of white supremacist killers. The suspect, identified in court papers as Brenton Harrison Tarrant of Australia, also hailed President Trump, mocking his leadership skills but calling him a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.
The suspects parents were divorced early in his childhood, according to his fathers obituary in The Daily Examiner, of Grafton. Mr. Tarrants mother was not mentioned in the obituary, suggesting she may have been estranged from the father.

According to the obituary, the father competed in 75 triathlon competitions, including grueling Ironman triathlons in both Australia and Hawaii.

A woman with the same name as Mr. Tarrants sister played the drums in local rock bands, according to local news reports.

Just a ordinary White man from a working class, low income family, Mr. Tarrant wrote in his manifesto. I had a regular childhood, without any great issues. I had little interest in education during my schooling, barely achieving a passing grade. I did not attend University as I had no great interest in anything offered in the Universities to study.

It is unclear how he developed an interest in cryptocurrency but he wrote in his manifesto that his profits from investing in the cryptocurrency Bitconnect enabled him to travel.

[Read about the challenges of reporting on a shooting that was set up as almost an internet performance.]

Australian news outlets on Friday published a photograph of him with a tour group near the Samjiyon Grand Monument in North Korea. His manifesto alludes to visits to Poland, Ukraine, Iceland and Argentina as well.
Ms. Ardern said none of those detained had been on security watch lists.

Mr. Bush had earlier urged people not to go to mosques anywhere in New Zealand on Friday. He also urged mosques nationally to close your doors until you hear from us again.

Handcuffed suspect appears in court

In a Christchurch courtroom hearing closed to the public for security reasons, police officers in bulletproof vests brought in the suspect, Brenton Harrison Tarrant. The police said he had been charged with one count of murder but would face additional charges. Mr. Tarrant, 28, short with thinning brown hair, handcuffed and wearing white prison clothing, looked around the courtroom but said nothing as District Court Judge Paul Kellar ordered him held for a further hearing on April 5.

Regional officials have said Mr. Tarrant is an Australian citizen. Court papers listed his New Zealand address as Dunedin City, which is about 280 miles south of Christchurch.

Richard Peters, his court-appointed lawyer, said Mr. Tarrant had indicated he might represent himself in the prosecution. Asked how Mr. Tarrant had reacted to what he is facing, Mr. Peters said, He seemed to be quite aware of where he is and what hes doing.

At the same time the charging document for Mr. Tarrant was handed out to reporters, a second court filing was distributed that said Daniel John Burrough, 18, of Christchurch, had been charged with intent to excite hostility or ill-will. Court officials would not elaborate on how the two cases were related.

In addition to Mr. Tarrant, three other people were arrested in connection with the attacks, although one was apparently released. Few details have been offered about them.

A range of nationalities among the dead and injured

Families are mourning loved ones, and the city of Christchurch is preparing to bury its dead. As news trickles out about the victims of the massacre, their nationalities are beginning to emerge.

Though officials have not released the names of those killed, a list of those missing has been published by the New Zealand Red Cross on its website. It includes people from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Jordan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

At least three people from Bangladesh were killed, and another two from Jordan, according to local news reports. Five people from Pakistan are missing, and several others were injured, officials in Pakistan confirmed. Other foreign ministries around the world said their citizens were caught up in the attack, including three people from Turkey.

Video shows part of the shooting

A 17-minute video posted to Facebook shows part of the attack.

The clip, which appeared to have been taken from a helmet camera worn by the gunman, begins behind the wheel of a car. A man, whose face can occasionally be seen in the rearview mirror, drives through the streets of Christchurch before pulling up in front of Al Noor Mosque, beside the sprawling Hagley Park.

[Read more here about the video, manifesto and social media posts.]
I saw the remark that she made, Mr. Pompeo said of Ms. Choe. We are hopeful that we can continue to have conversations and negotiations.

Mr. Pompeo added that Mr. Kim had made multiple promises during the Hanoi summit meeting to Mr. Trump that he would take steps to wind down his nuclear program. Despite the unpredictable messaging, he said, the administration would continue to take Mr. Kim at his word.

Mr. Bolton, for his part, told reporters at the White House that any suggestion that he and Mr. Pompeo undermined the negotiations were inaccurate, and that he had been in touch with national security officials in South Korea about the remarks.

Weve discussed their reaction and our reaction, Mr. Bolton said. Id like to speak further within the U.S. government before we respond.

The office of South Koreas president, Moon Jae-in, who did much to broker the talks between the North and the United States, said it was closely monitoring the situation. Whatever the situation, our government will try its best to help resume North Korea-U.S. negotiations, it said in a statement.

The breakdown of the Hanoi meeting revealed a wide gap between North Korea and the United States over how to proceed with denuclearization.

North Korea insisted, as it has before, on moving in phases. In Hanoi, Mr. Kim offered to dismantle the plutonium, uranium-enrichment and other facilities at its Yongbyon site, north of Pyongyang, and demanded that Washington in return lift crucial sanctions that have been imposed on the North since 2016.
Earlier this year, a team at the The Times used the data from the Lion Air crash to recreate the scene inside the cockpit, minute by minute, to show how the pilots lost the battle to save the flight.

[Read: In 12 Minutes, Everything Went Wrong]

There is an indirect link between Canadas aerospace industry and Boeings need for the special software in the recently developed Max airliners. Boeing was concerned that its new version of the 737, a plane that first flew in 1967, might stall because it had a new type of jet engine that allowed it to fly farther and faster on less fuel while making less noise.

The trouble was that the new engines were much larger than those of traditional jets and wouldnt fit under the 737s unusually low wings. So on the Max planes, the engines were positioned well ahead of and slightly above the wing, which created the potential for stalls that the software was supposed to cure.

Both Boeing and Airbus initially dismissed the new engines, but Montreals Bombardier bet the future of its aerospace division on them and designed an all-new airliner, the CSeries, around the new technology. But the project, as I wrote in 2015, was hit by delays, cost overruns and a reluctance by carriers to buy from anyone other than Boeing and Airbus.
BRUSSELS  It is hard to overestimate the level of exasperation in Brussels with Britain and its wounded prime minister, Theresa May. The jokes are dark, the anger is palpable and the sense of entrapment in a bad version of Groundhog Day is bitter. The rest of the European Union wants to move on, to focus on the urgent problems of slowing economic growth, youth unemployment, populism, Russia, China and President Trump.

Most look beyond Britain to the multinational elections for a new European Parliament that begin on May 23. More than usual, these will be fought out on national grounds, with populists of the left and right pressing to overturn the European order.

The whole timetable for Brexit has been predicated on getting it done before the elections, to avoid giving populists across the bloc a helpful campaign topic. It is a particular concern to President Emmanuel Macron of France, who is battling to restore his authority in the face of the protests of the gilets jaunes and the far right.

There is real frustration with Britain, but there are also real costs to Europe, said Ian Lesser, director of the German Marshall Fund in Brussels. Both Donald Trump and the Brexit drama have called out many recessed questions in Europe, big-picture questions: What is the core of Europe? What is the periphery? Where is Europe going, whats the consensus around the European project, whats Europes role in the world and what is the quality of European leadership?
PARIS  For months, Lydie and Patrice Maninchedda were met with silence when they pleaded with the French government to repatriate their three grandsons, who were stranded in a Kurdish-controlled camp in northeastern Syria, after their mother had been reported killed.

But that silence came to an end on Friday when an official told them that their grandchildren, ages 1, 3 and 5, were part of a small group of Islamic State militants orphans who had been brought back to France.

We are their only remaining family, and now they are our only reason to live, said Ms. Maninchedda, whose daughter Julie joined the Islamic State in Syria in 2014, and was reported killed in late 2018.

One of my grandchildren has shrapnel wounds on his face, the other has an atrophied leg, they all needed critical care, she added.
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia  During the final debate before Saturdays presidential election in Slovakia, the men were arguing, but the only woman onstage, Zuzana Caputova, looked on calmly.

Stefan Harabin, the former justice minister and a champion of ethnic nationalism, accused Muslim migrants of killing and raping European women in Germany and France and claimed his opponents wanted to destroy Slovak culture.

But Ms. Caputova did not respond to the outrage. In a political climate where stridency is often rewarded and crudeness frequently seen as a marker of authenticity, she has clung to the belief that decency is what voters want most. And it seems to be working.

In an interview the morning after the debate, she said: Even though people might not agree with all my opinions, they can build a bridge of trust to me because I act with civility. Even if I fight, I dont fight the person, but only the actions of the person.
NAHAL OZ, Israel  Benny Gantz, Israels former army chief, is campaigning to lead his country as the clean, moral alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces indictment in a corruption scandal.

But less than a month before the election, Mr. Gantz found himself fielding seamy-sounding questions late Friday about whether he had committed adultery, opened himself up to possible extortion or sandbagged his political allies to advance his own career.

The awkward news appearance here at a kibbutz near the Gaza Strip followed a report on Israeli television that Mr. Gantzs cellphone had been hacked by Iranian intelligence after his entry into politics in December and that personal and professional information had been stolen.

Mr. Gantz retired from the military in 2015, so the issue is not whether classified information might now be in enemy hands, but that he could be vulnerable to blackmail if elected. The hack threatened to set back his bid, which polls have shown has the strongest chance of any opposition politician to depose Mr. Netanyahu. With rumors flying about what might have been harvested from Mr. Gantzs cellphone, his party, the Blue and White, issued a statement saying the stolen data included no security information, no embarrassing videos, and he was never a target of blackmail.
JERUSALEM  Israel and Hamas on Friday worked quickly to de-escalate after a rare instance of rocket fire from Gaza launched against Tel Aviv the night before.

The events underscored that neither side appears to want a broader clash right now, and at the same time, the ever-present chance of a miscalculation setting off the next war.

Thursday night, rockets from Gaza that headed for Tel Aviv seemed to come out of the blue, then disappear almost without a trace. Israel blamed Hamas, which controls Gaza, and retaliated swiftly, with strikes at what it said were Hamas military sites and compounds throughout Gaza.

Hamas denied responsibility for the attacks, but had nonetheless expected such a response and left the sites ahead of time.
South Africa: Amakhosi to help fight TB infections

Governments efforts to halt the spread of Tuberculosis will receive a major shot in the arm in the form of support by Amakhosi, TB Ambassadors and Community Health Workers.

These people will be moving around the rural communities tracing those who may be exposed to TB by carrying out screening and testing.

The teams will also be spreading awareness by educating the communities about the symptoms to look out for while also encouraging communities not to stigmatise those infected.

Government hopes that this joint effort will help the country to trace the missing 160 000 people - that infected with TB but not on treatment.

About a quarter of the 160 000 are in KwaZulu-Natal which also has the greatest TB and HIV burden in the country.

TB remains a global public health challenge and South Africas number one leading cause of natural deaths especially among men, Deputy President David Mabuza said on Friday.

Furthermore, approximately 15-20% of all TB reported cases are children, and it is among the top five underlying causes of death in children under 5 years of age.

Speaking at the launch of the joint TB prevention campaign in Qadi Traditional Council in Inanda, eThekwini the Deputy President said the statistics should not be this high considering that there is a cure available.

TB is killing thousands of our people. In fact, most people who are HIV positive die from TB. Sixty percent of people with HIV also have TB  because their immune systems are weakened by HIV infection. This should not be.

Amakhosi, have an important role to play in the fight against TB, said Deputy President Mabuza, who is also the Chairperson of the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC).

Amakhosi live among the people. Every leader can show by example that they will not only ask people with TB symptoms to get tested and treated.

We call on every leader to lead by example. If you have symptoms go and get tested, get treated and tell those in your environment that you have TB, and you are on treatment, the Deputy President said.

The Deputy President called on Amakhosi to use their influence to encourage all men in every part of the country to get circumcised.

Deputy President Mabuza said this is good for the fight against HIV  which is closely linked to TB infections.

Science has demonstrated that medical circumcision helps to halt the HIV epidemic.

No institution is better placed to help raise awareness, and ensure good health seeking among men, than Amakhosi.

The campaign will be a build-up to the national World TB Day commemoration, which will be held in March in the Eastern Cape.

The World TB Day this year will be commemorated under the theme: Its time! for Religious Leaders, Parliamentarians and Legislators to lead the fight to end TB in South Africa'.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
By Debora Nunes

When the Brazilian presidential elections announced Jair Bolsonaro as the winner, the U.S. media almost immediately started to draw similarities between Brazils new President and Donald Trump, baptizing him as the Trump of the Tropics. They actually seem to share some characteristics, such as high social media presence, anti-minorities speeches (targeting immigrant and LGBT communities, mainly), they are both married to women 24 years younger than themselves, and both definitely share a terrible taste in haircuts and ties. When we try to stretch those similarities for economic and political positions, though, we need a closer look at both economies to understand why Bolsonaros Brazil above everything, God above everyone can sound as nationalist as Trumps Make America Great Again, but that so-called nationalism translates to differenteven oppositepolicies in each country.

One could argue that Trump is only taking credit for good economic results that are the sum of a lucky international environment with lagged effects of some of Obamas policies, but it is true that, after he started working in the White House, the unemployment rates and GPD growth are doing very well. Bolsonaro, though, gave credit to Trump. Even though he repeatedly emphasized that he doesnt know a thing about economics and everything should be decided by his Minister of the Economy, he was very much impressed with what Trump was doing in the United States, so promised to do something similar in Brazil. In his campaign, a number of his supporters used Trump-Bolsonaro T-shirts and reemphasized this view that, somehow, making economic decisions for a country is like a cake recipe that can be cooked in any kitchen; what works in the largest and most powerful economy of the planet should definitely work for a middle-income country with one of the highest inequality levels in the world, where more than 20% of the GPD comes from agricultureand agricultural participation is actually rising, indicating a deep deindustrialization process.

If Im going to do what Trump does is not a very good idea to start with, all signs seem to indicate that what he meant was Im going to do whatever I think that Trump would like me to do, which could be even more harmful for the Brazilian economy. Bolsonaro is pushing the idea that being friends with the US is being great, and the nationalism that he is trying to promote is one in which we dont really care about our cultural and environmental resourcesprobably Brazils greatest richesas long as the north American investors like us a lot.

The nomination of Paulo Guedes as the Minister of the Economy was an important movement to achieve that goal. Guedes got his Economics PhD in the University of Chicago and openly defends the ideas of Milton Friedmanthe Nobel Prize winner, responsible for Chiles unpopular economic plans during Pinochets military dictatorship. Friedman was the only reference in Bolsonaros government plan, which consisted in a slide presentation with little information about concrete economic measures. According to his speeches, the plan is to privatize every state-owned company, including state parks stablished to preserve native rainforest, the social security system, the post office and massive national companies like Petrobras (the Brazilian Petroleum Corporation, ranked #58 in the most recent Global 500). Cutting taxes is also in the agenda, andas opposed to what Trump is doing to Chinathe import taxes are the first target.

If selling the most profitable companies in the country and reducing federal taxes during a deep economic crisis with consecutive primary public deficits doesnt sound very nationalistic, contributing to the fast deforestation process that has accelerated deeply since 2017 is probably even less patriotic. When Bolsonaro was still a congressman, he tried to pass a law forbidding environmental agents to carry guns after he got a fine for fishing in a protected areawhich is very weird coming from a man who loves guns so much that his symbol during the presidential campaign was making little pistols with the fingers, gesturing toward his promise to soften gun laws. Since his election, he already stated that we need to stop the industry of environmental fines, tried to merge the Ministry of the Environment with the Ministry of Agriculture and declared in interviews, speeches and lectures that Brazilian indigenous population needs to get a proper job (12.5% of the countrys territory is occupied by native populations, the majority of them live in preserved areas where intensive farming is forbidden).

But probably the most terrifying anti-environmental position came from Onyx Lorenzoni, the Minister of the Civilian House. On January 25th, only 25 days after Bolsonaros inauguration, a dam in Brumadinho (Minas Gerais, Brazil) collapsed, spreading a toxic mud responsible for 165 confirmed deaths and 160 people still missing, in addition to health effects for the survivors, intoxication of lands and devastation of uncountable crops and farms. The Dam belongs to Vale, a company founded in 1942 as a state enterprise that was sold through auctions in the stock market in 1997, during Fernando Henrique Cardosos government, for R$3.3 billion (at the time, the mineral reserves that belonged to Vale had an estimated value of R$100 billion, which raised big controversies and high suspicious of corruption during the process). This same company was involved in the Mariana dam disaster, which occurred in 2015 and is consider the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian historyaccording to the United Nations report, the mudflow killed more than 11 tons of fish, devastated almost 2.000 hectares of native rainforest and killed 19 people as initial consequences. Official reports from Brazilian environmental authorities before the accidents pointed out that both dams presented risks of collapsing, and the director board decided to ignore them; surprisingly, neither incident was judged yet, and the families affected still didnt receive any compensation from Vale. Even when faced with these terrible disasters and under the alert that, of the 24,092 dams currently operating in Brazil, only 3% of them were inspected in 2017 (there are no data for 2018), Onyx declared that there is no condition of promoting any kind of state intervention [in Vale director board], because that would be a bad sign for the market.

On the other hand, good signs for the market didnt seem to be much of a problem when Bolsonaro announced that he would follow Trump and move the countrys Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. International relation experts agree that, as response to that threat, Egypt cancelled the 2nd Brazil-Egypt Forum of Investment Opportunities and Saudi Arabia announced a reduction in Brazilian chicken imports (the country is the largest buyer of the product, responsible for more than 12% of Brazilian chicken exportations). The Middle East in general responded for a positive trade balance of US$10 billions in 2018, and a possible boycott from the region could have devastating effects for the external accounts. International trade with Israel generated approximately a positive balance of US$1 billion in the same perioda number that will hardly increase considering Israels importing capacity. Following Trumps decision of revisioning the NAFTA agreement, Bolsonaro also announced that the MERCOSUL (the Southern Common Market) needs to be reevaluated; the group was responsible for buying more than 15% of Brazilian total exports in 2018.

If Brazils new nationalist president is not particularly worried about protecting the countrys natural resources, neither about giving public statements that can negatively affect the macroeconomic indexes and international relations at least in the short run, maybe he promotes the Brazilian culture in culinary, arts and folklorelike Trumps attitude of delivering Mc Donalds burger in the White House because its American traditional food, regardless of how cheap, unhealthy and terrible tasting it is. But thats not the case. Bolsonaro closed the Ministry of Culture for good and pushed it into the Ministry of Sports; he also wants to cancel all federal investments in Carnavalone of the most popular parties of the world, that generates massive profits for the service sectorshowed great disrespect for all African-Brazilian manifestations and, as result, bought a fight with Brazilian artists (Caetano Veloso, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Fernanda Montenegro, Wagner Moura and a long list of internationally celebrated performers declared disagreement with his platform). When asked about what his favorite book was, the president couldnt cite any literature piece; instead, he answered A Verdade Sufocada (The Suffocated Truth), a book by Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra which hasnt been translated into English. Ustra was the first military official to be recognized by a civil court as a torturer during the military dictatorship; his torture center was responsible for more than 500 deaths.

If Brazil is known for its great natural resources and diverse culture, this is probably the first time in history that a president dedicated to not caring about any of those is celebrated as a nationalist. For a developing country like Brazil, to put Brazil above everything seems to be synonymous with becoming very close friends with the White House and convincing them that we are nice people, so they should give us some money in the form of international assents, buy our state-owned companies, and buy more of our products. Forget about unemployment, wage distribution, and giving Brazilians decent standards of living; the new face of nationalism cares more about having a Disneyland in Brasilia, with a Brazilian flag next to the U.S. flag, as promised by the Federal District (and already disclaimed by Disney).

Debora Nunes is a graduate student in economics at Colorado State University.

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SELAMAT DATANG DI MESINSLOT. SITUS JUDI CASINO DAN SLOT TERBAIK DI iNDONESIA - Pemeliharaan Terjadwal: Global Gaming pada 2021-02-26 dari 10:00 AM sampai 2031-02-26 10:00 AM (GMT + 7). Selama waktu ini, Global Gaming permainan tidak akan tersedia. Kami memohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan yang mungkin ditimbulkan. - Pemeliharaan Terjadwal: Asia Gaming pada 2021-04-07 dari 1:00 PM sampai 2021-04-08 11:00 PM (GMT + 7). Selama waktu ini, Asia Gaming permainan tidak akan tersedia. Kami memohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan yang mungkin ditimbulkan. - Pemeliharaan Terjadwal: S128 Cockfight pada 2021-02-26 dari 12:00 PM sampai 2031-02-26 12:00 PM (GMT + 7). Selama waktu ini, S128 Cockfight permainan tidak akan tersedia. Kami memohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan yang mungkin ditimbulkan.
No one ever said that ending a romantic relationship was easy, but planning your own kidnapping and subsequent murder just to avoid telling someone its over sounds ridiculous. And yet, one Chinese woman did just that rather than tell her boyfriend she didnt want to be with him anymore.

A 37-year-old woman from Wuhan, in central Chinas Hubei Province, was recently arrested after it was revealed that she had faked her own kidnapping and murder at the hands of her ex-husband in order to avoid having to break up with her current boyfriend, whose financial situation she considered lacking. The woman, surnamed Yu, had been dating her boyfriend, Lin, for a while, but she only learned that he was poor after visiting his home during the Chinese New Year. It was something she apparently just couldnt get over, so she decided to leave him, but fearing that he would get clingy and refuse rejection if she simply told him she wanted to end the relationship, Yu devised a plan to make herself disappear.

Photo: Weibo

On February 21st, shortly after returning from the disappointing visit to Lins home town, Yu disappeared from the couples dormitory at the Huangpi Jiahai Industrial Park, and a few minutes later she called her boyfriend to tell him that she had been kidnapped by her ex-husband.

Come and save me, my ex-husband has kidnapped me. Come quickly! I think Im on the highway already, the 37-year-old woman said before abruptly ending the call.

To make her kidnapping seem more believable, Yu then sent her boyfriend several text messages pretending to be her kidnapper, warning him that she would be killed if he dared call the police. She then followed up with more texts, informing Lin that she had been killed and her body had been thrown in a lake.

Photo: Weibo

Unable to negotiate with the kidnapper, a distressed Lin eventually called the police. After being informed about the situation, local police started investigating surveillance footage in Wuhan and three days ago they were able to track down Yu to a small motel in Wuhans Tenglong district. But when they arrived on the scene officers were shocked to find the alleged victim casually lying on the bed, watching TV.

When questioned by police about her kidnapping, the surprisingly calm woman told them that she had recently found out that her boyfriend was poor, and that she had faked her own kidnapping and murder, hoping that he would just give up and move on with his life.

Yu added that she had initially planned to trick her boyfriend into leaving the dormitory so she could sneak back in, pack her things, and then disappear, but after realizing that Lin had the only key to the place, she devised the kidnapping plan.



According to the Wuhan Evening News, Yu has been detained by police for 10 days, for disrupting social order.
Volkswagen has hired Bridge Public Affairs, the Chattanooga-based firm founded by three aides to former Tennessee Senator Bob Corker.

The German auto giant opened a factory in Chattanooga in 2011. The facility indirectly/directly supports 16,400 jobs and generates more than $75M in annual state and local taxes, according to a study by Ernst & Young.

Bridge PA's Todd Womack, Corker's former chief of staff; Micah Johnson, communications director; and John Goetz, legislative aide, handle US Congressional and regulatory outreach for Volkswagen. Republican Corker did not seek re-election in 2018.

The Securities and Exchange Commission on March 15 accused Volkswagen of "massive fraud" and lying to investors in the ongoing diesel emissions scandal that affected 11M cars.

It seeks to recover "ill-gotten gains."

Volkswagen in a statement accused the SEC of "piling on to extract more from the company."

The carmaker last month unveiled plans to cut 5,000 to 7,000 workers from its global payroll by 2023 as part of its transformation to become more agile and efficient for the electric and digital era.


Sara Latham

Sara Latham, whose resume includes working for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, has been chosen to head up the communications staff for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

Latham, who holds dual citizenship in the US and UK, joins the Royals staff from London-based Freuds, where she was managing director. Before that, she was a senior advisor for Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign.

Previous positions include serving as a special advisor to Baroness Tessa Jowell, Britains secretary of state for culture, media, sport and the Olympics. She also worked in the Clinton White House as deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of scheduling.

Latham takes on her new position as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex establish a new household (i.e. an office and staff headquarters) in their own name. The long-planned move will ensure that permanent support arrangements for The Duke and Duchesss work are in place as they start their family and move to their official residence at Frogmore Cottage, a Buckingham Palace press release stated.

According to a Tweet from ITV's royals producer Lizzie Robinson, the staff led by Latham will form part of the Buckingham Palace communications team, reporting to the queens communications team and press secretary Donal McCabe.
Students from Tullamore today took part in the worldwide climate change protest.

The students from the Sacred Heart School and Colaiste Choilm gathered outside Offaly County Council offices today to join in the Schools Strike for Climate.

The students in Tullamore joined hundreds of thousands of their peers in more than 100 countries worldwide in the protest which is aimed at getting governments across the world to start taking action on climate change before it's too late.

The worldwide protest started in Sweden when one girl, Greta Thunberg, began striking last August. Her protest has since grown into a worldwide movement and she has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Local politicians were on hand to show their support for the strike.

Delighted to meet the Tullamore students who joined the global climate protest today at Aras an Chondae! They had plenty to say and were very interested in the work of the @OireachtasNews Climate Action Committee. #ClimateStrike #ClimateAction pic.twitter.com/fNFWrVLGEo  M Corcoran Kennedy (@MarcellaCK) March 15, 2019

Well done to @shstullamore for organising - Offaly Young People Protest for Climate Change. Government seriously need invest in infrastructure such as electric charging points so it becomes a realistic option for people to purchase electric vehicles in the County. pic.twitter.com/eL47AV4upz  Cllr. John Leahy (@johnleahyRENUA) March 15, 2019
Implications For Wholesale Banks

Wholesale banks need to restructure and find break-out growth solutions to combat weak underlying revenue growth. The optimism from mid-2018 that investment banks had weathered the worst has passed: we expect industry wide revenues to grow at just 1.2% CAGR out to 2021, which will deliver only modest improvements in RoE. The goal should be to starve uneconomic businesses and restructure operating models, whilst shifting resources to growth pockets.

Target legacy to get efficient, leverage tech and data. To restructure and release cost from the core business, we see three broad levers that different banks will need to pull to a lesser or greater degree: tackle service provider costs, exit business lines or creatively capitulate (particularly in flow trading businesses).

The race is on to capture growth pockets. It is decision time for foreign banks in China, as regulatory changes across both the buy-side and sell-side are leading to faster and more accessible revenue growth (4% CAGR out to 2021). Sustained commitment will require significant investments and it will take time to earn a return on these. Corporates clients, and transaction banking particularly, will remain engines for growth, outpacing institutional clients growth rate by 4x out to 2021. Capturing growth will require improved customer propositions and competitive price point as the competitive landscape shift.

The embedded advantages that scale banks  particularly US leaders  enjoy today, will cement their longer-term outperformance. Revenue pressures and the need to invest are mandating cost control, but their strong starting point, both in terms of scale and profitability, gives them the option of both expanding their footprint and defending existing leadership positions. Within this group, the biggest winners will be those that can expand their addressable market through low-marginal cost business models employing new technology. This will require deep pockets and a management team willing to maintain investment levels through the cycle.

Mid-sized global wholesale banks, particularly European banks, need to look at more radical options. Returns on Equity are, on average, half that of their US rivals, and home markets are less profitable and shrinking. These banks will need to free up the investments required to defend their strongest businesses, in many cases the corporate franchise, and to position in growth markets. To do this, they will need to cut deeper in their weaker businesses. And with smaller technology budgets, they will need to make bolder moves on innovation, including considering partnerships, more radical forms of creative capitulation, and options to build greenfield platforms.

Regionally-focused banks rooted in a corporate client base need to innovate to defend. Their profitability remains bound to the (highly varied) economics of their home markets, but their revenues are under threat by the investments being made by others. They need to improve service models to their core group of clients where they have a competitive advantage and reduce their delivery costs. Away from their home markets and client base, many will find it advantageous to look for partnerships and ways to creatively capitulate to scale back commitments.
TDP leaders put under house arrest ahead of AP cabinet meet on capital issue on Friday

Amid rebellion, TDP releases first list of candidates for Andhra assembly polls

India

pti-PTI

Amaravati, Mar 14: The ruling Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh on Thursday night released its first list of 126 candidates for the April 11 assembly election, amid unprecedented protests and rebellion in the party.

Name of Chief Minister and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu and his son Nara Lokesh figured in the list announced by Naidu himself at a late-night press conference.

He called it "Mission 150 Plus", as the party aimed to win at least 150 out of the total 175 seats in the assembly. He said the first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha election, scheduled simultaneously, would be announced Friday.

The TDP chief, who released an audio song for the campaign, said he would kick start the campaign from Srikakulam district on March 16 after worshipping Lord Venkateswara atop the Tirumala Hills.

"We have balanced various equations and selected the candidates. It is now up to the people to bless these candidates as I take the responsibility of their future in my hands," Naidu said.

Despite strong opposition, the TDP re-nominated Assembly Speaker Kodela Sivaprasada Rao from Sattenapalli constituency in Guntur district.

Deputy Chief Minister K E Krishna Murthy and Women Welfare Minister Paritala Sunitha opted out of the contest this time to enable their sons jump into the field. Naidu's son Lokesh too will be fighting his first electoral battle from Mangalagiri constituency in the Amravati capital region.

Like his father, Lokesh chose a constituency that has a predominant backward class population.

Naidu will be contesting the assembly election for the seventh time from Kuppam in his native Chittoor district.

Meanwhile, former Union minister Panabaka Lakshmi and her husband Krishnaiah joined the TDP after midnight. The couple so far served the Congress party.
Five more travellers from 'at risk' countries test COVID-19 positive in Mumbai; nine so far

Omicron 1st case in Maharashtra: What we know about it so, far? 12 facts

Mumbai bridge collapse: BMC orders suspension of two engineers

India

oi-Vikas SV

Mumbai, Mar 15: A day after a bridge collapsed in Mumbai killing six people, the BMC, Mumbai's civic body, suspended two engineers and ordered a full-fledged departmental enquiry against them.

Executive Engineer AR Patil and Assistant Engineer SF Kakulte have been suspended as per reports.

Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation orders suspension for Executive Engineer AR Patil who supervised the structural audit work in 2017-18 and Assistant Engineer SF Kakulte who supervised the repair work in 2013-14. A full-fledged departmental enquiry be carried out against them, reported news agency ANI.

The BMC earlier today called for the structural audit report of the collapsed overbridge in Mumbai, which killed six people on Thursday evening, to be made public, and said that it appears as if the audit was "conducted an in an irresponsible and negligent manner".

The overbridge, located near Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus railway station, collapsed yesterday evening. The bridge was said to be under repair, but was still in use. The collapse took place around 7.30 pm -- the busiest hours of the evening. Even Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis had expressed concern over the fact that the authorities had already conducted a structural audit of the structure and found nothing wrong with it.

A red signal that proved lucky for many who escaped the Mumbai Bridge collapse

"It is apparent that structural audit report has failed to point out an impending failure. In spite of commissioning the report of bridge and spending public money on it, true condition of bridge was not brought out. The structural report should be made public," the the Brihanmumbai Corporation (BMC), Mumbai's civic body, said in its Preliminary Report.

"There is a prima facie reason to believe that the structural audit has been conducted an irresponsible and negligent manner. This tragedy could have been avoided if the structural audit had been done diligently," the reports further said, as per reports.

Politics over Mumbai bridge collapse begins, Congress seeks Goyal's resignation

The Mumbai CST overbridge which collapsed yesterday was audited in 2016 and as per the report, the bridge was in good condition. The bridge was cleared by the audit company which was given the contract to conduct this audit report. The BMC says that the report was submitted by the audit department in 2018 after the beautification drive was completed.
Gen Rawats chopper crashes: Those who were on board

Gen Bipin Rawat, others killed in helicopter crash: IAF's Mi17V5 chopper involved in a few incidents in past

Tamil Nadu copter crash: Lance Naik from Andhra spoke to wife four hours before mishap

Gen Bipin Rawat, wife to be cremated in Delhi on Friday

De-briefing over: What next for Abhinandan Varthaman

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Anuj Cariappa

New Delhi, MAR 15: The IAF and security agencies have completed a nearly two-week-long debriefing of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, who spent around 60 hours in Pakistan after being captured during a dogfight on February 27, officials said.

They said the IAF pilot's medical treatment has also concluded and he will go on sick leave for at least three weeks before resuming duty.

A medical board to be constituted by the IAF will review medical fitness of Varthaman to help the IAF top brass decide whether he can return to fighter cockpit as desired by him, they said.

Varthaman underwent the debriefing sessions by the security agencies as part of a cooling down process.

You hunted the hunter, IAF tells Abhinandan

He was captured by the Pakistani Army on February 27 after his MiG-21 Bison jet was shot down in a dogfight with Pakistani jets during an aerial combat. He downed an F-16 fighter of Pakistan before his plane was hit.

Varthaman was released on the night of March 1 by Pakistan.

In the national capital, the IAF pilot was first taken to the Air Force Central Medical Establishment, a compact and specialised medical evaluation centre for aircrew of all the three services. Later he was brought to the Army's Research and Referral hospital.

After he was captured, Varthaman showed courage and grace in handling the most difficult circumstances for which he was praised by politicians, strategic affairs experts, ex-servicemen, celebrities and people in general.

Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa met Varthaman separately on March 2 during which he apprised them about the mental trauma he was subjected to during his captivity in Pakistan.

Tensions between India and Pakistan escalated after Indian fighters bombed terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed's biggest training camp near Balakot, deep inside Pakistan on February 26.

Pakistan retaliated by attempting to target Indian military installations the next day. However, the IAF thwarted their plans.

The Indian strike on the JeM camp came 12 days after the terror outfit claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a CRPF convoy in Kashmir, killing 40 soldiers.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 6:06 [IST]
Azhar is not missing: India to call out Pakistan at FATF

Why killing of Masood Azhars nephew Fauji Bhai is a major shot in the arm

India was alone against Masood Azhar in 2009, has global support now: Sushma Swaraj dig at Rahul

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Mar 15: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Friday said the leaders who term China's blocking of banning JeM chief Masood Azhar at the UN a "diplomatic failure" must see that India was alone when the move was first made in 2009 under the UPA rule, while it has worldwide support in 2019.

Her remarks came a day after Congress president Rahul Gandhi hit out at Prime Minster Narendra Modi over China's blocking of the UN resolution to designate Azhar a global terrorist, alleging that the PM was "weak" and "scared" of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Taking to Twitter, Swaraj said she wants to apprise the people of the facts regarding the listing of Azhar under the United Nations Sanctions Committee.

'China's UNSC membership your great-grandfather's 'gift': BJP tells Rahul

"The proposal has been mooted four times. In 2009, India under the UPA government was the lone proposer. In 2016, India's proposal was co-sponsored by US, France and UK. In 2017, US, UK and France moved the proposal," she said.

"In 2019, the proposal was moved by US, France and UK and supported by 14 of the 15 UN Security Council members and also co-sponsored by Australia, Bangladesh, Italy and Japan - non-members of the Security Council," she said in a series of tweets.

She asserted that India had secured "unprecedented support" from the international community for listing the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief under the UN Sanctions Committee.

"I have shared these facts with you so that leaders who describe this as our diplomatic failure may see for themselves that in 2009, India was alone. In 2019, India has the worldwide support," the external affairs minister said.

Gandhi had attacked the prime minister and said he has not spoken on China blocking the resolution in the UN Security Council (UNSC).

Slamming the government, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala had said, "Sadly, Modiji's foreign policy has been a series of diplomatic disasters."

As Congress leaders, including Gandhi, had used the Chinese action to take a swipe at Modi, the BJP had hit back, saying they will be "happy" for giving headline news to Pakistani media.

Case filed against Rahul Gandhi for addressing JeM chief as 'Masood Azhar ji'

"Why is Rahul Gandhi in a celebratory mood when the country stands pained with this attitude of China," BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad had said.

On Wednesday, China for the fourth time blocked the bid in the UN Security Council to designate the chief of the Pakistan-based terror group as a "global terrorist" by putting a technical hold on the proposal. The Chinese move was termed "disappointing" by India.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 16:33 [IST]
Jaish-e-Mohammad plotted Pulwama attack from Rawalpindi

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Mar 15: In the evidence provided to Pakistan on the Pulwama attack, India has cited a mobile number that was used to claim responsibility for the attack.

India has prepared a detailed dossier laden with evidence to show that it was the Pakistan sponsored Jaish-e-Mohammad which carried out the attack. Moments after the Pulwama attack, the JeM claimed responsibility for the same through a WhatsApp number 7006250771.

The number belonged to Mohammad Hassan, who is the spokesperson for the JeM.

Spy who passed information to ISI after Pulwama attack arrested

Further, the evidence also details how the JeM used an IP address from a location near Rawalpindi to upload the video of Adil Ahmed Dar, the Pulwama bomber.

Both the video and the official statement by Hassan form part of the evidence that has been shared with Pakistan.

Further, it is also said that the attack was hatched by the outfit's chief, Masood Azhar and his younger brother Abdul Rauf Asghar to avenge the killing of their kin in the Kashmir Valley.

The duo hatched the plot in the aftermath of the killing of Talha Rasheed, Azhar's nephew. He was gunned down by the security forces at Pulwama on November 6 2017. Usman Haider, another son of Azhar's elder brother was killed in an encounter at Tral in October 2018.

In the evidence that India produced to Pakistan, it is said that a massive recruitment driver of local youth was carried out following the death of Azhar's kin. They sought to cash in on the killings and roped in locals into the JeM to carry out the Pulwama attack.

Further, the technical evidence clearly suggests that the entire planning was done in Pakistan. The video that was uploaded in the aftermath of the attack was done from an IP near Rawalpindi. Another clip claiming responsibility for the attack too was done from the same place, evidence also suggests.

Further, the evidence also suggests that the operatives stayed in touch on a Telegram group named the Afzal Guru Squad al-Islam. The same group was used to upload the confessional video of the Pulwama bomber, Adil Ahmed Dar.

Fire does not stop at Pulwama, it will reach, Delhi, Lucknow says Masood Azhar in audio clip

Once the plot was hatched, Abdul Rashid Ghazi was sent into Kashmir by the Jaish-e-Mohammad. He was tasked with training the locals and during the radicalisation sessions, he repeatedly said that the deaths of Rashid and Haider have to be avenged.

While Ghazi imparted the training, the last minute details and the execution of the attack was overseen by one Kamran, a Pakistani national who was killed in an encounter on February 18.

Further India says that the JeM used a Kashmir local for the attack to send out a message that the youth in the Valley were disgruntled. Further, it was also said that Pakistan could have the deniability factor by using a local.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 5:50 [IST]
Justice in a hurry, is also justice denied

India

oi-Madhuri Adnal

By Ekta Kumar

Over hundreds of years we have slowly moved from a life of savagery and barbarism to a state of civilisation, that is marked, amongst many other things, by the evolution of human rights. And one of the most fundamental rights - is the right to life. Why is it then that death penalty still exists? In a modern, progressive society, why do we still allow, and in some cases demand what is sometimes described as 'state sanctioned murder'.

In a democratic country like India, politics often follows the popular mood of the people. And when faced with heinous crimes, the people very often just want revenge. We saw the uproar after the horrific Delhi gang rape case of 2012, it sparked protests across the country with thousands pouring onto the streets demanding the perpetrators be hanged. Under enormous public pressure the government fast-tracked the case and sentenced the guilty to death. We saw a similar outcry after the Unnao and Kathua rape cases too, after which the government passed an ordinance to amend POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act) to provide death penalty for aggravated sexual assault on children.

Law allowing death penalty for rape of children passed by Parliament

Over the last few years there has been a lot of media attention and public focus over sexual crimes against women. It is an emotive issue, and one that is especially relevant in the current context of elections, high number of women voters, gender inequalities and the demand for safety. This might be the reason for the exceptional haste by the trial courts in handing out death sentences especially for sexual offences. There were a record 162 death sentences issued in 2018, the highest ever in nearly two decades. Although the judicial system in India is notoriously slow, when it comes to sexual offences, the courts are moving faster.

As per data from Project 39A (National Law University) the median duration of trial for -

sexual offences : 1 year, 6 months

Versus,

national average : 3 years, 2 months

terror cases : 8 years, 4 months

It took all of 9 days for Umang (name changed) to be convicted and sentenced to death by the trial courts. 'I was beaten in the police lock-up for five days, and taken to court for another five' he said (NLU). Umang is not the only one. There are numerous other instances of trials that barely lasted a few days, without proper legal representation or due procedures. Out of 162 death sentences, Madhya Pradesh tops the list with 22. The state government has devised a reward system for incentivising public prosecutors seeking death penalty and issues strict warnings to those who fail to collect adequate number of points.

Justice Kurien Joseph in a powerful dissenting opinion spoke about the 'arbitrary and freakish' imposition of the death penalty and the worrying role of the 'collective conscience' in sentencing. The phrase 'collective conscience of society' was brought into India's death penalty ambit in the Machhi Singh vs. State of Punjab case. It has been used to impose death penalty when it reflects the will of the people and answer society's 'cry for justice'. However this can set a dangerous precedent as prejudices creep in, especially in the times of 'breaking' television news and all pervasive social media. Does the accused in a well publicised case, that generates an outcry deserve to die because enough people are baying for his blood, while the accused in a lesser known case gets away with lesser punishment? Are trial courts pandering to us. Is the 'collective conscience' weighing in on matters of life and death. Are we as a society deciding their fate?.

Cabinet approves amendment in POCSO Act, death penalty for aggravated sexual assault on minors

Interestingly although there seems to be undue haste by the lower courts in handing out the harshest punishment in our legal system, the Supreme Court has moved in the opposite direction. Out of the 1486 death sentences imposed by the trial courts, only 73 (4.9%) remained on the death row after the appeal in the Supreme Court was decided. Between Nov-Dec 2018 the Supreme Court commuted 11 out of the 12 death sentences to life imprisonment. The only one that remained was the December 16th, 2012 'Nirbhaya' rape case.

Median duration:

Of trial for Sexual offences : 1 year, 6 months

Of High Court confirmation for sexual offences : 6 months

Of Supreme Court confirmation for sexual offences : 2 years, 8 months

The median duration of trial is the shortest for sexual offences in the trial court and High Court stages but the trend is reverse for the Supreme Court. There is an obvious disconnect between the lower courts and the Supreme Court.

When confronted with crime, there is an instinctive desire for revenge. The natural tendency is to is to hurt someone who wrongs us, but an emotional impulse for retribution is not enough to justify capital punishment. 'History is testament to the desire for vengeance' says Raphael Chenuil-Hazan (ECPM), 'but abolition of death penalty is the foundation of human rights'. Public outcry seeks visible, immediate solutions, but it should be upto the courts to be objective and fair while upholding the provisions of the constitution. The discussion around capital punishment cannot be limited to the brutality of the crime. It needs to consider several other parameters, like the socio-economic background, the families, the structural impediments within the criminal justice system and the purpose of capital punishment.

Violence against women is a harsh reality, but an outpouring of collective anguish or anger and populist calls for retribution cannot be the basis for deciding on another human's right to life. We are seeing a curious inversion where the trial courts are quick to hand out capital punishment, but the appellate courts are careful and wary. In these times it is important to remember Mahatma Gandhi who said - "in matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place."

(The author is a Chartered Accountant and an MBA from IIM Calcutta)

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of OneIndia and OneIndia does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 16:14 [IST]
After Pak allows access, India says yet to decide on opening Kartarpur Corridor

Kartarpur corridor: Pakistan seeks limit to just 500 pilgrims a day and special permit to Yatris

India

oi-Vikas SV

New Delhi, Mar 15: India on Friday rued that Pakistan wants a limit of just 500 pilgrims a day on yatris crossing the border to visit shrine Kartarpur sahib and also asked for a special permit to be issued to each pilgrim, news agency ANI reported while quoting government sources.

India on Thursday sought visa-free access from Pakistan for 5,000 pilgrims per day to the historic Sikh shrine in Kartarpur. This was conveyed to the Pakistani delegation at a meeting yesterday to discuss the opening of a planned corridor for pilgrims between Punjab's Gurdaspur district and Kartarpur Sahib across the border.

India has approved state of the art passenger terminal building to handle 5000 pilgrims daily, 15,000 on special occasions. Pakistan has sought to put a limit this to only 500 pilgrims per day, ANI reported quoting government sources.

Pakistan assured visa-free access to Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib, but Pakistan has asked for the requirement of issue of the special permit to each pilgrim. India said that this defeats the purpose of the dedicated corridor.

[Kartarpur corridor talks: India seeks visa-free access 5,000 pilgrims per day]

Pakistan has further reportedly stated that pilgrims must travel in groups of 15 and that no one be allowed to travel on foot.

India has also expressed concern over Pakistan encroaching on lands belonging to Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib. India demanded that land be returned.

"India protested against the impropriety of arbitrarily depriving the Gurudwara (built on land donated by Maharaja Ranjeet Singh ji and other Sikh devotees) of its legal possessions," India reportedly said as per ANI report.

Thursday's meeting was the first meeting between an Indian and a Pakistani delegation since tensions between the two countries spiked after the terror attack in Pulwama, followed by retaliatory air strikes.

During the meeting, India wanted access for both Indians and people of Indian origin to the shrine, located where Sikhism's founder Guru Nanak Dev spent the last years of his life.

The Indian delegation was led by S C L Das, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs. The Pakistani team was headed by Mohammad Faisal, Director General (SA & SAARC) of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 21:24 [IST]
After Pak allows access, India says yet to decide on opening Kartarpur Corridor

Kartarpur corridor: Punjab BJP chief fumes at Pak over new conditions

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Anuj Cariappa

Chandigarh, Mar 15: Punjab BJP chief Shwait Malik Friday lashed out at Pakistan for trying to put restrictions on number of pilgrims visiting the historic Sikh shrine in Kartarpur. India had on Thursday sought visa-free access for 5,000 pilgrims per day to the Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara in Pakistan during a meeting between officials of the two countries.

"Pakistan now seeks to impose too many restrictions on the proposed corridor facility which include capping the number of pilgrims to 500 per day and not allowing movement of devotees on foot and issue of special permits," Malik said in a statement issued here.

[Kartarpur corridor: Pakistan seeks limit to just 500 pilgrims a day and special permit to Yatris]

He said Pakistan should reciprocate to India's efforts of facilitating hassle-free visit of pilgrims to the Sikh shrine.

"Pakistan is oblivious to the fact that Guru Nanak Dev holds universal appeal among the people here and abroad. The government is India has made serious effort to fulfil the long pending aspiration of the pilgrims (by facilitating visit to the shrine) but Pakistan is trying to scuttle this move," alleged Malik, who is a Rajya Sabha MP.

OneIndia News with PTI inputs

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 23:01 [IST]
Kharge to boycott Lokpal meet today, tells PM Modi Opposition can't be 'voiceless'

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Mar 15: Senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge has decided to boycott the Lokpal Selection Committee meeting on Thursday, accusing government of using his "refusal" to attend the Lokpal selection panel meeting as an "excuse" for not appointing the country's first ombudsman.

He has written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi reiterating his objection to invitation extended to him for the selection panel meeting as a "special invitee".

Kharge maintained that he would attend it only after relevant changes are made in the law. He hit out at the Modi government for not amending the Lokpal Act to facilitate participation of the opposition in the Lokpal's selection process.

SC gives Centre 10 days to decide date for meeting of Lokpal Selection Panel

He said, "Since 2014, the government has not made any attempt to amend the relevant provisions of the Lokpal Act to include the Leader of the Single Largest Party in the Opposition to be a member of the Selection Committee."

This comes in the wake of a Supreme Court direction to the Centre on March 7 giving it 10 days to inform it about the possible dates when the selection panel for the appointment of the country's first Lokpal will meet.

Parliament had passed the Lokpal Act in 2013, when the Congress-led UPA government was in power. The law provides for a Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas in states to probe the cases of corruption against public servants.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 14:03 [IST]
Lok Sabha election: BJP thinking of releasing mini manifestoes for all 42 seats in Bengal

India

oi-Shubham Ghosh

Kolkata, March 15: For the BJP, the 2019 Lok Sabha election is a challenge that they are taking seriously on the soil of West Bengal. After its vote-share rocketed to 17 per cent in the 2014 general election in a state where the saffron party remained a fringe force throughout history, the BJP is eyeing to increase it further to challenge the ruling the Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Recently, a number of leaders from the TMC have changed base to join the BJP and the trend has encouraged the saffron brigade. The central leadership has decided to back candidates with winnability, even if such candidates are defectors from opposition camps.

With BSP-SP challenge in UP, BJP set to make major changes

According to local reports, the BJP is even thinking of releasing mini manifestoes for each of the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies besides one central one. The report cited the BJP's internal sources to say that such a recommendation has come from the district committees to the party's state leadership. Work is also on to create WhatsApp groups featuring voters at the booth level so that the achievements of the BJP-led government at the Centre can be boasted about.

The TMC has already released its list of candidates soon after the Election Commission announced the election schedule. As the main challenger of the ruling party, the BJP (though it has just two MPs from the state) is also speeding up to come up with its list.

On Thursday, one of the TMC MLAs Arjun Singh joined the BJP after failing to find a ticket for the upcoming Lok Sabha election. He said he was disillusioned with TMC chief Mamata Banerjee after she sought evidence for the air strikes in Balakot and also taunted the "Ma, Mati, Manush" party as "money, money, money" party.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 15:59 [IST]
'Rapists should be kept in jail permanently," says Hema Malini

Mathura Lok Sabha ticket: BJP workers oppose Hema Malini

India

oi-Hardeep Singh Bedi

New Delhi, March 15: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Lok Sabha MP from Mathura Hema Malini is facing strong opposition from many party workers, who have been demanding the senior leadership not to field the cine star from Mathura.

BJP workers' opposition has also reached up to the Central leadership via the party's internal surveys, say sources.

The BJP workers from Mathura allege that after winning the elections Hema Malini ignored her constituency and party workers.

She had received flak during 2016 Mathura violence in which 24 persons including two senior police officials were killed on June 2, 2016, in an armed conflict between police and squatters at Jawahar Bagh public park in Mathura city.

The violence erupted after police tried to vacate the park as per the court orders. The armed squatters, led by one Ram Vriksh Yadav, fired upon the police and killed two senior police officials. The police then returned fire, killing several squatters.

While the whole nation was watching the horrible scenes of violence on TV screens, Hema Malini tweeted some photographs of her shooting. This led to an uproar on the social media platform and the Congress accused the Mathura MP of being insensitive.

Hema Malini ready to contest again from Mathura, says party has given her a green signal

Reportedly Hema deleted the tweet after being admonished by senior party leadership. She later admitted on camera that she was not aware of the incident as she was busy in shooting.

She was also embroiled in another controversy in July 2015 when a two-year-old child was killed after being hit by her Mercedes car at Dausa in Rajasthan. She had got minor injuries. Later, she provoked fresh outrage when she tweeted to blame the father of the child who was killed in the accident last week. She said the father should have followed traffic rules.

While the father denied violating traffic rules, many on social media expressed anger on his behalf and criticised Hema Malini.

"Hema Malini is one of those BJP MPs who have got negative marks in the party's internal surveys, and may not get party ticket," said sources.

In 2014, she defeated incumbent Jayant Chaudhary of Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) by an impressive margin of 3,30,743 votes.

Informed sources tell One India that UP Power Minister Shrikant Sharma is interested in contesting Lok Sabha election from Mathura.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 5:57 [IST]
As Mamata Banerjee takes swipe at Rahul Gandhi, Cong says such posturing for personal ambition will help BJP

Rahul Gandhi dubs New Zealand Mosque shootings as "despicable act of terrorism"

India

oi-Vikas SV

New Delhi, Mar 15: Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday took to Twitter to condemn mass shooting in two Mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch which left 49 people dead.

Terming the incident as "a despicable act of terrorism", Rahul said the world stands in need of compassion and understanding and not bigotry and hate-filled extremism.

"The New Zealand Shooting is a despicable act of terrorism, that must be condemned unequivocally. The world stands in need of compassion and understanding. Not bigotry and hate-filled extremism. My condolences to the families of the victims. My prayers go out to those who were injured," he said on Twitter.

Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers killed 49 people in New Zealand.

Senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel described the New Zealand incident as a "crime against humanity" as he called for a fight against bigotry and hatred. "What happened in New Zealand is a crime against humanity. It is a dangerous reminder that hatred and bigotry must be fought at every turn. The families of the victims remain in our thoughts & prayers," he said.

[Nine Indians missing in New Zealand Christchurch shooting]

In a letter to PM of New Zealand, PM Modi stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks in New Zealand on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what is being seen as the worst attack on Muslims in a western country. The gunman reportedly fired dozens of bullets at people trying to run away or lying down in huddled groups in corners of the rooms.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 23:46 [IST]
Till when does a father have to take responsibility of his child: SC clarifies

You have 24 hours, SC to Delhi Govt on rising pollution

Air Pollution: You want to ban industries in Pakistan? Court asks UP govt

Supreme Court asks EC to respond to DMK's plea on by-polls in TN in two weeks

India

pti-PTI

New Delhi, Mar 15: The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Election Commission to respond to the DMK's plea seeking directions to the poll panel for holding by-elections in three vacant assembly constituencies in Tamil Nadu.

A bench comprising justices S A Bobde and S A Nazeer asked the EC to file its response within two weeks. The DMK has questioned the poll panel's move to not hold by-elections in Tiruparankundram, Ottapidaram and Aravakurichi.

Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for the DMK, told the bench that it is "bizarre" that the Election Commission is holding by-elections for 18 of 21 vacant assembly constituencies in the state.

The by-elections are slated to be held on April 18 along with the Lok Sabha polls.

Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Satyabrata Sahoo had on March 10 said by-polls are not scheduled for the Tiruparankundram, Ottapidaram and Aravakurichi constituencies as election petitions are pending in the Madras High Court.

The Ottapidaram constituency is represented by disqualified AIADMK MLA Sundararaj, while Aravakurichi is represented by Senthil Balaji, an AIADMK legislator who is now with the DMK. Thiruparankundram legislator A K Bose died last year.
Sheila Dikshit clarifies comment on Manmohan Singh, says it was used out of context

India

oi-Deepika S

New Delhi, Mar 15: Former Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit has clarified that her comments comparing Prime Minister Narendra Modi with his predecessor Manmohan Singh were taken out of context.

Dikshit later tweeted that her comments had been taken out of context by the media. "Here is what I said - it may seem to some people that Modi is stronger on terror but I think this is a poll gimmick more than anything else," she tweeted. She further added that national security has always been a concern and that "Indira ji [Indira Gandhi] has been a strong leader."

After some media reports suggested that Dikshit praised Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party publicly thanked her. "Thank you Sheila Dikshit ji for reiterating what the nation already knows but the Congress party is never ready to admit," BJP National President Amit Shah tweeted.

Sheila Dikshit's firm 'NO' to alliance with AAP

However, Aam Aadmi Party chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal expressed shock at Dikshit's remark. "This is a shocking remark by Sheila Dikshit ji," he tweeted. Kejriwal claimed there is some understanding between the Congress and BJP in Delhi. "The alliance between the Congress and BJP is out in the open today."

In an interview to be aired on CNN News 18, excerpts of which were released on Thursday, Dikshit was asked about the criticism that the UPA government did not do much after the Mumbai terror attack in 2008. To this, she purportedly said: "Manmohan Singh's... yes, I agree with you wasn't as strong or as determined as he [Modi] is perhaps but then there is also the feeling that he is doing all for politics, not that he wants to, not out of the sense of...".

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 11:28 [IST]
Are bank scams being used an excuse to privatise?

Take note of political interference in influencing statistical data

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Anuj Cariappa

New Delhi, Mar 15: P C Mohanan, who resigned from the National Statistical Commission recently said political parties should take note of the concerns raised by 108 economists and social scientists about alleged political interference in influencing statistical data in India.

As many as 108 economists and social scientists from across the world have appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data".

"The message is very timely and relevant in the backdrop of the recent issues and the concerns expressed by these eminent people ... It is important that political parties take notice of this," Mohanan told PTI.

In January, Mohanan had resigned as acting chairman of the Commission along with another member amid reservations over the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation regarding jobs data.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 6:14 [IST]
UP minister says Congress, Pakistan and China do not want strong PM like Modi

India

pti-PTI

Mathura (UP), Mar 15: Uttar Pradesh minister and Mathura legislator Shrikant Sharma has alleged that a few countries and the Opposition were hampering the progress of India.

"Countries like Pakistan and China have virtually entered into an unholy alliance to check the growth of the country," the state power minister said at a public meeting here on Thursday evening.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader alleged that the same motive same was pursued by the Congress and the grand alliance. The Congress, Pakistan and China "does not want a strong" prime minister like Narendra Modi, and, instead, they want a "majboor sarkar (weak government) and not majboot (strong) sarkar", the minister alleged.

[Mathura Lok Sabha ticket: BJP workers oppose Hema Malini]

Sharma claimed that under the leadership of Modi, sincere effort had been done for the first time to nip terrorism in the bud -- through airstrike and surgical strike.

Corruption and terrorism had been the greatest hurdle in the development of the country, the minister said. To counter it, he said, the Modi government developed a system of transferring the amount, meant for various schemes, directly into the accounts of beneficiaries.

PTI
If normalcy to be brought in Kashmir, Article 370 has to be reinstated: Farooq Abdullah

When Kashmiris are being attacked, this Bengali family did something different

India

oi-Shubham Ghosh

Kolkata, March 15: At a time when Kashmiris are being targeted across the nation in the wake of the Pulwama terror attack, something different happened in West Bengal and people were appreciating it.

Afaq Shah is a Kashmiri shawl seller who came to Hind Motor in Hooghly district of Bengal at the age of 20. He got to meet a family by the surname of Adhikari in 2010 and since then, he has grown a bonding with it.

J&K: Suspected terrorists shoot at a NC worker

Today, Shah is so close to the Bengali family that he has become just another member of the family and recently, as the daughter of the Adhikaris - Mimi - got married, Shah and his family received a special invitation, reported Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika.

Shah has grown in a Bengal man now after conducting his trade in the state for almost a decade now. He enjoyed the wedding at the Adhikaris as did his wife Asiya and one-and-half-year-old son Aadi. Speaking about Mim's wedding, Shah told ABP: "She is like my sister".

Kashmiri traders and students were being attacked in various parts of the country after over 40 CRPF personnel were martyred in a suicide terror attack in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir on February 14.

A suicide terrorist rammed his explosive-laden vehicle into the CRPF's convoy, blowing away one of the buses that was carrying the jawans.

Shah also had his share of sour experiences. He told the daily that after the attack, he had gone to a client who owed him money but refused to give it back and called him a Pakistani and abused him.
PM Modi lauds UP govt for the work done for the benefit of sugarcane farmers

Will the Modi factor work this time? What the analysts are saying

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Anuj Cariappa

New Delhi, Mar 15: Claiming that the Narendra Modi factor has not ebbed, political analysts said it would play a decisive role in the coming Lok Sabha elections in Karnataka.

"In 2014, if any state in India that Modi factor has played itself out it has been Karnataka.

Six out of 10 voters had voted for Modi then. Nationally, the number was 3 out of 10. This Lok Sabha election too, Modi factor will play a decisive role," Political scientist Sandeep Shastri said. Apart from Modi factor, JDS-Congress arithmetic and their political chemistry on ground level would play a decisive role in the elections, given the old rivalry between JDS and Congress in Mysuru region, he told PTI.

Mumbai bridge collapse: PM Modi condoles loss of lives, says "Deeply anguished"

"The alliance arithmetic seems to favour Congress and JDS combine, but it has to be seen whether their party workers and supporters accept the alliance at the ground level, especially in old Mysuru region. They have been rivals for the last two decades," he said. Shastri pointed out that the bickerings between the Congress and JDS over the issue of fielding candidates in Mandya seat is one such case.

Asked if BJP would repeat its 2014 performance in Karnataka, Shastri said no party would sweep the elections. The BJP would not repeat its performance of winning 17 seats in 2014 elections. Modi's election has the potential of changing the fortunes of BJP, which was witnessed during last assembly election, Harish Ramaswamy, a political analyst said.

"There is enough data to show that Modi is a big factor in Karnataka. In the last assembly elections, things changed drastically for BJP after Modi started to address the rallies, before that the party was on a sticky wicket," he said. The main reason for BJP's under-performance would be B S Yeddyurappa's leadership, who has been committing "political mistakes," Ramaswamy said.

Arun Jaitley raises 'Modi hai to mumkin hai' slogan in his Agenda 2019

"The latest comments by Yeddyurappa that BJP would win 22 Lok Sabha seats due to Balakot air strike has created lot of problems for the party," he said. Yeddyurappa also "lost" some sheen after his "unsuccessful attempt" to topple the JDS-Congress government, Ramaswamy said.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 6:01 [IST]
Collapse of Kabul will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history: Donald Trump

Thousands of terrorists might have been airlifted out of Kabul: Trump slams Biden

Never in history has withdrawal from war been handled so badly: Trump

Does Melania Trump use body double? President Trump blasts media, calls it deranged

International

oi-Shubham Ghosh

Washington, March 15: A conspiracy theory is often floated in the US about its First Lady Melania Trump using a body double and following a resurgence of interest about it online recently, US President Donald Trump lashed out at it, blaming the "deranged" media.

Trump tweeted over the matter on Wednesday, March 13, saying: "The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that it's actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places."

"They [the media] are only getting more deranged with time!".

The Fake News photoshopped pictures of Melania, then propelled conspiracy theories that its actually not her by my side in Alabama and other places. They are only getting more deranged with time!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2019

The matter came up for discussion on "Fox and Friends", one of the president's favourite morning programmes, according to Associated Press, and the president then vented his anger on Twitter.

US President still optimistic on China trade talks

As per Vox, the conspiracy theory about Melania, known as #FakeMelania, started in 2017. Then, a Twitter user posted a picture of Melania besides Trump speaking the media and claimed: "This is not Melania. To think they would go this far & try & make us think its her on TV is mind blowing."

Melania's spokesperson Stephanie Grisham refuted the theory calling it a "ridiculous non-story".

Talking to CNN in 2017, she said: "Once again, we find ourselves consumed with a ridiculous non-story when we could be talking about the work the first lady is doing on behalf of children, including the opioid crisis that is gripping our nation."

#FakeMelania resurfaced online after the Trumps visited Alabama earlier this month in the wake of a tornado.

While many social media users focused on a single frame of the Trumps mourning in front of white crosses in the state, Trump made it the point of reference saying pictures of his wife were manipulated by the media.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 6:44 [IST]
France freezes assets of chief JeM Masood Azhar

International

oi-Deepika S

Paris, Mar 15: A day after China blocked the UNSC resolution to declare Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, France has decided to freeze the assets of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) founder and leader Masood Azhar, the French government said on Friday.

A joint statement issued by the French interior ministry, finance ministry and foreign ministry has said that it would discuss putting Masood Azhar on a European Union list of people involved in terroris.m.

"We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree," Reuters quoted France statement.

Christchurch Mosque shooting LIVE: 49 dead, NZ police says man in late 20s charged with murder

The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a Jaish suicide bomber killed 40 CRPF soldiers in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama, leading to a flare-up in tensions between India and Pakistan.

Other than Pulwama, Azhar-led JeM has been involved in several terror attacks in India over nearly two decades.

It was responsible for the attack on Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001 in which nine security personnel and officials were killed.

In January, 2016, a heavily armed group of JeM attacked the Pathankot airbase in which seven security personnel were killed. The terror group also carried out the attack on Uri brigade headquarters in September 2016, killing 17 soldiers and injuring 30 others.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 14:26 [IST]
Is China the reason why Pakistan opted to skip Summit for Democracy hosted by Biden?

Masood Azhar: India needs to produce solid evidence, say Chinese experts

International

oi-Shubham Ghosh

Beijing, March 15: China recently blocked India's yet another bid to list Masood Azhar, leader of Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) as a global terrorist - its fourth such move. The JeM claimed responsibility for the suicide terror attack on a CRPF personnel convoy in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama recently that led to soaring tensions between India and Pakistan.

On Thursday, China defended its move of blocking Azhar to be designated a global terrorist, saying it would give time for a "thorough and in-depth assessment" of the case and help the concerned parties to engage in more talks to find a "lasting solution" that is universally accepted.

Masood Azhar ban blocked: Omar Abdullah says Modi surrendered to China

China's state-run Global Times came up with an op-ed on the issue and there in, some experts from the country shared their views and most of them felt India hasn't produced enough evidence against Azhar and that New Delhi was putting pressure on China to support its stand but could not move it.

Liu Zongyi, a senior fellow of Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, and distinguished fellow of the China (Kunming) South Asia & Southeast Asia Institute, said the quest to put Azhar in the list of global terrorist has been a long-lasting dispute between Indian and China and that in 2017, New Delhi's demand was partly behind the Doklam standoff.

"If New Delhi succeeds in having both JeM and its leader blacklisted, Islamabad would be branded as a state sponsor of terrorism and isolated on the international stage. This is what India wants to pursue till the end," Liu said.

"China's technical strategy is to question India's definition of terrorism, which lends itself to deep divisions. There is a lack of consensus to proscribe Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council."

The analyst added that the JeM has been included in the terrorism sanctions list of the Security Council and it doesn't target civilians but the Indian security forces.

"India asks for favours but doesn't pay back"

"India is forcing China to support its bid. But China will not yield to pressure," he said, adding that India always small issues to the large canvas of China-India bilateral ties and asks for favours without paying back.

He also said issues like national security and terrorism have become hot ahead of the general elections in India and conceded that China's stance will earn in a lot of backlash in the Indian media but China could not help it.

China sympathetic to Kashmir attack victims but will not change its stand on Azhar

Long Xingchun, non-resident fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China, said though Beijing was sympathetic towards the victims of the recent attack in Kashmir, yet it will not change its stance towards Azhar.

"If India cannot offer new evidence, China will not change its position. If China does, it will be a repudiation of its previous stance and leave the impression that it was deliberately blocking India's bid in the past. This will have a much wider impact on China's diplomacy," he said.

After China blocks Azhar's listing, UN diplomats say other action may be pursued

"India's latest bid to list Azhar as a terrorist, to a large extent, is to assuage public concern. The recent Kashmir attack has once again ignited public anger against Pakistan, and the Indian government has realized it should at least make some gestures. Meanwhile, the Indian government can divert public attention in the run-up to the elections toward China."

Zhang Jiadong, director of Center for South Asian Studies, Fudan University, also said that India failed to produce updated evidence and hence China was not changing its stance.

He said the two countries should look at the bigger picture and prevent differences over "concrete issues" coming in the way of bilateral relations or else, it will hurt boths' interests, especially India.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 7:16 [IST]
Delhi: Heroin worth Rs 332 crore seized, 10 arrested

New Delhi

oi-Vikas SV

New Delhi, Mar 15: A Special Cell of the Delhi Police on Friday recovered 83 kg of heroin worth Rs 332 crore in the international market. The cops also arrested 10 people in connection with seizing of the contraband substance, said reports.

On Wednesday (March 13), BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sampatiya Uike's son, Satendra, was among the three persons arrested with contraband substance Heroin. Uike is a Rajya Sabha MP from Mandla in Madhya Pradesh. 3.380 grams of Heroin was seized from them.

[Madhya Pradesh: BJP MP's son arrested with Heroin]

Earlier on Wednesday (March 13), police seized huge quantity of heroin and arrested a woman from Nagaon district in Assam. Earlier this month, the Punjab police's Special Task Force (STF) has reportedly seized 97 grams of contraband substance heroin worth Rs 50 lakh.

In January this year, Delhi Police's Special Cell seized 20 kilograms of contraband substance Heroin and arrested six people in connection with it. The value of of the seized narcotic was said to be around Rs 80 crore. In the same month, the Delhi Police's crime branch busted a drug trafficking syndicate that imported drugs online via dark web from the US and other countries, to distribute them in the city.

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Story first published: Friday, March 15, 2019, 23:27 [IST]
Opalesque Industry Update - The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has reprimanded and fined Morgan Stanley Asia Limited (Morgan Stanley) for failing to discharge its obligations as one of the joint sponsors in relation to the listing application of Tianhe Chemicals Group Limited (Tianhe) in 2014. The SFC's investigations revealed that Morgan Stanley had failed to follow the specific guidelines on due diligence interviews under paragraph 17.6 of the Code of Conduct. Involvement of Tianhe in due diligence interviews Morgan Stanley had interviewed ten customers of Tianhe: six of which were interviewed either by telephone or at face-to-face interviews at Tianhe's offices in Jinzhou of Mainland China, and the rest of them were interviewed at the customers' own premises. Morgan Stanley did not have direct contact with Tianhe's customers for the purpose of setting up due diligence interviews or confirming the mode and place of the interviews. On the contrary, Tianhe informed Morgan Stanley that two customers were unable to attend face-to-face interviews and that one customer would not conduct interviews at its business premises. There is no evidence that Morgan Stanley had taken any steps to check with these three customers as to why they were not amenable to be interviewed at their offices. Failure to address red flags in an interview Morgan Stanley had initially requested to interview the largest customer of Tianhe, Customer X, at its office, but eventually accepted Tianhe's explanation that since an anti-corruption campaign in Mainland China was underway, Customer X, a large state-owned enterprise, would normally turn down any third party request to visit its premises. Morgan Stanley then agreed to interview Customer X at Tianhe's office. At the end of the interview, the representative of Customer X refused to produce his identity and business cards and stormed out of the meeting room. He told Morgan Stanley and other parties that he would not have agreed to be interviewed under Customer X's internal procedure, and he only attended the interview to help the family of Tianhe's chief executive officer (CEO). Nonetheless, Morgan Stanley did not conduct any follow up inquiries to ascertain that the person it interviewed was the representative of Customer X and that he had the appropriate authority and knowledge for the interview. Unclear interview questions Tianhe conducted business with its customers through its subsidiary, Jinzhou DPF-TH Chemicals Co. Limited (Jinzhou DPF-TH), based upon the sales documents provided to Morgan Stanley. During the customer interviews, Morgan Stanley asked the interviewees questions in relation to the business between their companies and the "Tianhe Group", instead of Jinzhou DPF-TH. Although the interviewees were also asked a question "which entity of the Tianhe Group and which business department do you mainly contact with", only three out of ten customers interviewed confirmed that they had contact with Jinzhou DPF-TH. However, Morgan Stanley did not follow up with the remaining customers as to which entity of the "Tianhe Group" they had business with. One of the purported top ten customers of Tianhe interviewed by Morgan Stanley informed the SFC that when its representative answered questions about the dealings between the customer and the "Tianhe Group" during the interview, its representative was referring to the dealings with Liaoning Tianhe Fine Chemicals, a private company wholly owned by the family of the CEO of Tianhe but no longer a part of Tianhe's group to be listed at the material times. As both the listed and unlisted chemical businesses of the family of the CEO of Tianhe were named "Tianhe", the SFC considers that it was insufficient for Morgan Stanley to merely refer to the "Tianhe Group" during customer interviews and/or not to request the interviewees to identify the exact Tianhe entity with which their organisations had dealings. SFC reprimands and fines Standard Chartered Securities The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has also reprimanded and fined Standard Chartered Securities (Hong Kong) Limited (Standard Chartered Securities) $59.7 million for failing to discharge its obligations as one of the joint sponsors in relation to the listing application of China Forestry Holdings Company Limited (China Forestry) in 2009 . The SFC's investigations revealed that Standard Chartered Securities had failed to make reasonable due diligence enquiries in relation to several core aspects of China Forestry's business. Failure to verify the existence of China Forestry's forestry assets According to China Forestry's 2009 prospectus, the company and its subsidiaries (Group), a plantation forest operator whose main businesses were the management and sustainable development of forests and the harvesting and sale of logs, owned approximately 171,780 hectares of forests in Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces of Mainland China. In December 2007, Standard Chartered Securities conducted site inspections of the Group's forests in Sichuan and Yunnan in its then capacity as the sole sponsor for China Forestry's listing application. It made the same endeavour in February and May 2008. The SFC's investigations, however, revealed that on such site visits Standard Chartered Securities did not verify the location visited with the location of the Group's forests as stated in the prospectus. Standard Chartered Securities claimed that other professional parties, including lawyers and forestry experts, were involved in some of the site inspections. However, none of them had been instructed to verify the existence of the Group's forests as disclosed in the prospectus. Further, despite the fact that the Group acquired 150,000 hectares of forests in Yunnan in 2008 which accounted for over 90% of its forestry assets, there is no evidence to suggest that Standard Chartered Securities visited the Group's forests in Yunnan after the acquisition or commissioned an assessment of the impact of the earthquake of magnitude 6.0 on the Richter scale that hit Yunnan on 9 July 2009 on the Group's forestry assets. Failure to verify China Forestry's compliance with relevant laws and regulations Standard Chartered Securities relied on written confirmations purportedly issued by the relevant forestry bureaus that China Forestry had provided for them to confirm that the business and logging activities of China Forestry were in compliance with the relevant Mainland Chinese forestry and environmental laws. There is, however, no evidence that Standard Chartered Securities had verified whether the written confirmations were issued by the relevant forestry bureaus and that the information recorded therein was accurate. Inadequate due diligence on insurance coverage for the Group's forestry assets Having sufficient insurance coverage for the Group's forestry assets, which were pivotal to its business operation, was of fundamental importance. Standard Chartered Securities relied on insurance documents provided by China Forestry as evidence of such insurance coverage without independently verifying the authenticity of the insurance documents. Although Standard Chartered Securities claimed that its deal team members and Mainland Chinese lawyers had reviewed the insurance documents, it did not identify a number of issues (for example, an inconsistency between the location of a forest as stated in the insurance document and as stated in the forestry right certificate) that should have called for further inquiries. Inadequate due diligence on China Forestry's customers Over 70% of China Forestry's customers by revenue for the last 18 months during the track record period were located in Yunnan (Note 5). Standard Chartered Securities had planned to conduct face-to-face interviews with some of China Forestry's customers in Yunnan, but subsequently decided to postpone the face-to-face interviews because of the earthquake in Yunnan. Standard Chartered Securities only conducted telephone interviews with these customers in the end. The SFC found that Standard Chartered Securities called the customers on telephone numbers provided by China Forestry without conducting any background searches on the customers to verify their telephone numbers and/or the identities of the individuals interviewed.
Opalesque Industry Update - State Street Corporation announced the latest findings from its Brexometer Index, a quarterly pulse survey of institutional investor sentiment on the economic impact of Brexit. After a slightly more muted response from investors in Q4 2018, investor appetite for holdings of UK assets has polarised during Q1 2019, with an increase in both the number of those looking to increase and decrease their exposure. Investors planning to increase their exposure in the next six months increased to 19 percent - the second highest figure since Q3 2018 at 21 percent. While the proportion of investors looking to decrease their holdings of UK assets rose for the third consecutive quarter to 22 percent. Also the second highest recording since Brexometer began, after a high of 24 percent in Q1 2018. "Brexometer shows that investors are increasingly divided," said Michael Metcalfe, head of Global Macro Strategy at State Street Global Markets. "This would seem to mirror current market conditions, which have lurched from optimism around a deal or delay, to the pessimism surrounding the ability to get a deal done. Reflecting this reality, this quarter shows the proportion of investors expecting to significantly decrease their holdings of UK assets has jumped to a two-year high of 12 percent." With the absence of clarity around Brexit, the number of investors holding a neutral medium-term outlook for global economic growth has increased during Q1, from 28 percent to 37 percent. Conversely, positive sentiment fell to 32 percent, representing the lowest reading since Brexometer begun. The survey also found that while four out of five (80 percent) investors anticipate Brexit having an impact on their operating model, the proportion of those expecting it to have a significant impact increased from 19 percent in Q4 to 22 percent. Other key findings of the latest Brexometer index include: 29% of institutional investors believe asset owners will increase their level of investment risk over the coming three to five years. Yet the number anticipating a decrease has fallen slightly, from a record high of 43% in Q4 to 40% The proportion of investor's in need of greater support with currency overlay strategies rose during Q1, from 9% to 13%. But regulatory reporting issues, such as those required under Solvency II and AIFMD, remain the most in-need service (26%) More than a third (35%) of institutional investors believe their company will use more cross-border fund locations, with Ireland (46%), Luxembourg (36%) and Germany (27%) listed as the most attractive for managers "Sterling remains undervalued while uncertainties regarding Brexit and wider political risk remain," said Bill Street, head of Investments for EMEA at State Street Global Advisors. "Exchange rate movements have been subdued, rallying when a deal appears more likely and falling when uncertainties persist. Market movements in sterling indicate that investors agree that the tail risk of no-deal is low. However, views on the medium-term outcome of the Brexit process are mixed. This presents a market opportunity for those who are confident of the political endgame."
Automotive Brake System Market 2022 | Continental AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, Wabco Holdings, Inc., ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Aisin Seiki Co, Ltd., Knorr-Bremse AG, Akebono Brake Industry Co. Ltd

https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110115031/Automotive-Brake-System-Market

https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110115031/Automotive-Brake-System-Market

https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110115031/Automotive-Brake-System-Market

https://www.researchreportinsights.com/

The global automotive brake system market is anticipated to witnessing a substantial growth due to fresh prospects of the automotive industry in emerging along with developing economies and increased safety concerns by the government. It was stated in the report that the overall growth of the market is expected to reach a market value of above US$ 25 Billion through 2022, exhibiting a strong 5.7% of CAGR throughout 2017-2022.In modern cars mostly two kinds of brakes are used which are drum brakes and disc brakes. Every new car has disc brakes on the front wheels, whereas the rear wheels may possibly use whichever drum or disc brakes. Of these, the disc brakes category has a comparatively bigger share in the overall market during 2017 and will account for a market evaluation of US$14 Billion for the duration of the forecast 2017 to 2022. On the other hand, the expansion rate for the drum brakes segment will be on the climb in the approaching years.Request For Report Sample :In terms of the sales channel, the worldwide market is categorized into aftermarket and OEM. The OEM category reflects a revenue share of about fourth-fifth and will foresee a remarkable 5.5% CAGR for the duration of the assessment, 2017-2022. The aftermarket category is relatively a lot smaller and consists the share of residual revenue in the worldwide market for the duration of the assessment. By, vehicle type, the worldwide market is categorized into premium passenger cars, heavy commercial vehicles, light commercial vehicles, luxury passenger cars, compact passenger cars, and mid-sized passenger cars. Of these, the compact cars will have the benefit of being trouble-free to maneuver together with being undemanding on the wallet at the fuel pump. Therefore, it isnt astounding to acknowledge that compact cars will expand market share for the duration of the assessment. The mid-size car category abides by compact cars on the basis of popularity, however, are yet probable to lose market share. The advanced technologies used in the modern cars are electronic stability control (ESC), anti-lock braking system (ABS), electronic brake-force distribution (EBD) and traction control system (TCS).Request For Discount :Europe to foresee a lucrative market with the highest contribution and the companies in the market are proposed to centralize their efforts on this region with lucrative prospects for a good ROI. With the market in Europe, the companies are trying to center on APEJ or North America, since both the regions will have worldwide market evaluations valuing billions of dollars for the duration of the assessment.The foremost market players active in the worldwide market are Continental AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, Wabco Holdings, Inc., ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Aisin Seiki Co, Ltd., Knorr-Bremse AG, Akebono Brake Industry Co. Ltd., TRW Automotive Holdings Corp., Halla Mando Corp., Brembo S.P.A. and others.Request for Analysis :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 personalized 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 trendsResearch Report Insights (RRI42 Joseph StreetPort carling P0B 1J0Muskoka, Ontario1Phone - +1-631-721-4201Website:Email: sales@researchreportinsights.com
Healthcare Linen Market Opportunity, Development, Trends & Top Companies (Angelica, Aramark, ImageFIRST, Alsco, Unitex Textile, Crothall, Clarus, Cintas, Mission, PARIS, HCSC Healthcare, Faultless etc.)

Healthcare Linen Market

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This research report categorizes the global Healthcare Linen market by top players/brands, region, type and end user. This report also studies the global Healthcare Linen market status, competition landscape, market share, growth rate, future trends, market drivers, opportunities and challenges, sales channels and distributors.Get Sample Copy of This Report atHealthcare Linen Market 2019 Global Industry research report offers you market size, industry growth, share, development trends, product demand, investment plans, business idea and forecasts to 2025. This report highlights exhaustive study of major market along with present and forecast market scenario with useful business decisions.This report studies the global market size of Healthcare Linen in key regions like North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Central & South America and Middle East & Africa, focuses on the consumption of Healthcare Linen in these regions.Healthcare Linen include scrub wear, patient gowns, thermal blankets, hospital sheets, pediatric gowns, pillow cases, towels, surgical linen, and many other hospital supplies.Healthcare Linen plays major role in reducing infection rate, increase patient satisfaction and reduce operational costs for hospitals. Efficient supply and management of linen without any defect and delay becomes good support for hospitals to deliver satisfactory healthcare services to the patients.The classification of Healthcare Linen includes rental & management, external washing and Procurement. Supplying both rental and washing service, rental & management is the main stream of the market, account for 61.21 market share in 2016.Hospitals are the major clients, accounting for 68.78% market share in 2016. With larger investment on the public healthcare, the hospitals will also enjoy a faster growth rate.The market concentration degree is not high, as the top 3 suppliers just account for 21.09% market share. While there are many other small suppliers that can meet the demand of local hospitals and clinics.The global Healthcare Linen market is valued at xx million US$ in 2018 and will reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of xx% during 2019-2025. The objectives of this study are to define, segment, and project the size of the Healthcare Linen market based on company, product type, end user and key regions.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on this report @Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions North America, Europe, Japan, China, and other regions (India, Southeast Asia, Central & South America, Middle East & Africa etc.)Key Companies Analyzed in this Report are: Angelica Aramark ImageFIRST Alsco Unitex Textile Rental Crothall Healthcare Clarus Linen Cintas Mission Global Healthcare Linen Market report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through analytical research, market survey and observations) and secondary research. The report also features a complete focused on qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain, growth aspects, utilization ratio and manufacturing capacity.Market size by ProductRental & ManagementExternal WashingProcurementMarket size by End UserHospitalsClinicsOthersPlace a Direct Order Of this Report @Major Points Covered in Table of Contents:1 Healthcare Linen Market Overview2 Global Healthcare Linen Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Healthcare Linen Production Market Share by Regions4 Global Healthcare Linen Consumption by Regions5 Global Healthcare Linen Production, Revenue, Price Trend by Type6 Global Healthcare Linen Market Analysis by Applications7 Company Profiles and Key Figures in Healthcare Linen Business8 Healthcare Linen Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Marketing Channel, Distributors and Customers10 Market Dynamics11 Global Healthcare Linen Market Forecast12 Research Findings and Conclusion13 Methodology and Data SourceAbout UsOrian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on The World Wide Web. Our reports repository boasts of over 500000+ industry and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We continuously update our repository so as to provide our clients easy access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products. We also specialize in custom research in situations where our syndicate research offerings do not meet the specific requirements of our esteemed clients.Contact UsRuwin MendezVice President  Global Sales & Partner RelationsOrian Research ConsultantsUS: +1 (415) 830-3727 | UK: +44 020 8144-71-27Email: info@orianresearch.com
Swab Market 2018 To Post-Huge Revenue In The Near Future 2018-2026 | Global Eminent Players Puritan Medical Products, Copan Diagnostics, Inc., Sarstedt AG & Co. KG, FI Medical MWE, Cleancross Co., LTD., AdvaCare Systems

Global Swab Market

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Coherent Market Insights released a new market study on 2018-2026 Swab Market with 100+ market data Tables, Pie Chat, Graphs & Figures spread through Pages and easy to understand detailed analysis. At present, the market is developing its presence. The Research report presents a complete assessment of the Market and contains a future trend, current growth factors, attentive opinions, facts, and industry validated market data. Report offering you more creative solutions that combine our deep geographic experience, intimate sector knowledge and clear insights into how to create value in your business. The research study provides estimates for 2018-2026 Swab Market Forecast till 2026*.For In-Depth Review | Get Sample Copy @Swabs are made of absorbent material, which imparts medicinal properties to it. Swab is part of surgery and medicine and it is used in surgical procedures, injuries, at pre injection site and in diagnostic kits to obtain sample. The major role of swab is wound cleansing and disinfection. The antiseptics used in swab are iodine, cetrimide and disinfectant such as alcohol.Key PlayersMajor players operating in the global swab market include Puritan Medical Products, Copan Diagnostics, Inc., Sarstedt AG & Co. KG, FI Medical MWE, Cleancross Co., LTD., AdvaCare Systems, GPC Medical Ltd., Elmex Controls Pvt Ltd., and Citotest Labware Manufacturing Co., Ltd.The global swab market size was valued at US$ 578.6 million in 2017, and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 6.6% over the forecast period (2018  2026).Market DynamicsIncreasing prevalence of accidents and falls causes injuries, which is expected to increase surgical procedures, in turn driving swab market growth. According to World Health Organization (WHO) factsheet in 2018, annually there are around 37.3 million falls, which require medical attention, whereas an estimated 646,000 individuals die annually from falls globally. Moreover, increasing prevalence of cardiovascular disease is expected to propel treatment via surgery, which is expected to boost the market growth. According to the, World Health Organization (WHO) published in 2009, around 3.8 million men and 4.4 million women die annually from coronary heart disease worldwide. Moreover, according to the same source, the mortality for age between 15 to 59 years, was around 1,332, 000 and for above 60 years of age, it was around 5,825, 000.Increasing incidence of surgeries is expected to propel growth of the swab marketSwab is used in for cleaning wounds and disinfecting the pre injection site. High prevalence of chronic diseases is expected to propel demand for surgical procedures, which in turn is expected to drive the market growth. According to the, American College of Cardiology Journal (JACC) in December 2012, an estimated 40% people above aged 25 years are diagnosed with high blood pressure in the U.S., and the number of patients with elevated blood pressure has increased from 600 million in 1980 to a billion in 2008.Increasing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases in North America is expected to bolster the market growthNorth America holds dominant position in the global swab market, owing to high prevalence of cardiovascular disease, which leads to angioplasty and other surgeries. According to the American Heart Association, 2016, cardiovascular diseases accounted for around 17.3 million deaths annually worldwide, whereas an estimated 23.3 million people are expected to die from cardiovascular disease by 2030.Detailed Segmentation:Global Swab Market, By Test Type:BloodUrineSalivaOthersGlobal Swab Market, By Product Type:Alcohol SwabCotton SwabDry SwabGauze SwabKey questions answered in the report:1. What will the market growth rate of market in 20262. What are the key factors driving the global market3. Who are the key manufacturers in market space?4. What are the market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the market?5. What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by types and applications of market?6. What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by regions of industry?Further in the report, the market is examined for Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin. These points are analyzed for companies, types, and regions. In continuation with this data, the sale price is for various types, applications and region is also included. The industry consumption for major regions is given. Additionally, type wise and application wise figures are also provided in this report.Request For Customization of Research Report @In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of 2018-2026 Market are as follows:History Year: 2015-2017Base Year: 2017Estimated Year: 2018Forecast Year 2018 to 2026About 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
Boutique Hotel Market 2019-2025 Global Industry share, Key Players, Size, Demand, Growth Trends, Insights and Forecast | Marriott International, Inc, Hilton, Hyatt Hotels, Four Seasons Holdings Inc., etc.

Boutique Hotel Market

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Boutique Hotel Market 2019 Report analyses the industry status, size, share, trends, growth opportunity, competition landscape and forecast to 2025. This report also provides data on patterns, improvements, target business sectors, limits and advancements. Furthermore, this research report categorizes the market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.Get Sample Copy of this Report@ -Global Boutique Hotel market 2019 research provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Global Boutique Hotel market analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status. Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures are also analysed. This report also states import/export consumption, supply and demand Figures, cost, price, revenue and gross margins.Boutique Hotel Market research report spread across 92 pages with top key manufacturers and list of tables and figures.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on this report @ -Global Boutique Hotel market competition by TOP MANUFACTURERS, with production, price, revenue (value) and each manufacturer including Marriott International, Inc Hilton Starwood Hotels & Resorts(Marriott) Hyatt Hotels Four Seasons Holdings Inc. Shangri-La International Hotel Management Ltd. InterContinental Hotels Group PLC ..This report studies the top producers and consumers, focuses on product capacity, production, value, consumption, market share and growth opportunity in these key regions, covering North America Europe China Japan Southeast Asia IndiaGlobal Boutique Hotel Market providing information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis is also carried out. The Global Boutique Hotel market development trends and marketing channels are analysed. Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed and overall research conclusions offered.With tables and figures helping analyse worldwide Global Boutique Hotel market, this research provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.Order a copy of Global Boutique Hotel Market Report 2019 @ -Market segment by Type, the product can be split into Business Hotel Suite Hotel Airport HotelMarket segment by Application, split into Room F&B SPA OthersThe study objectives of this report are: To analyse global, Boutique Hotel status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. To present the Boutique Hotel development in United States, Europe and China. To strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyse their development plan and strategies. To define, describe and forecast the market by product type, market and key regions.There are 14 Chapters to deeply display the global Boutique Hotel marketChapter 1: To describe Boutique Hotel Market Overview, Introduction, product scope, market opportunities, Application.Chapter 2: To analyse the Top Manufacturers of Boutique Hotel, with sales, capacity, production, revenue, and price of Boutique Hotel, in 2014 and 2019.Chapter 3: Boutique Hotel, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers with capacity, production, share by region, sales, revenue, gross margin and market share in 2014 and 2019.Chapter 4: To show the global market by regions, supply, consumption, with sales, export-import, revenue and market share of Boutique Hotel, for each region, from 2014 Boutique Hotel to 2019.Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 To analyse the market by countries, by type, by application and by manufacturers, with sales, analysis by application, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions.Chapter 10 and 11 To show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, strategy analysis and factor analysis from 2014 Boutique Hotel to 2019.Chapter 12 Boutique Hotel market forecast, by regions, type, with sales and revenue, growth rate, price Forecast from 2019 to 2025 Boutique Hotel.Chapter 13: Connected Boutique Hotel.Chapter 14: To describe Boutique Hotel sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.About Us:Research Reports World is the credible source for gaining the market reports that will provide you with the lead your business needs. At Research Reports World, our objective is providing a platform for many top-notch market research firms worldwide to publish their research reports, as well as helping the decision makers in finding most suitable market research solutions under one roof. Our aim is to provide the best solution that matches the exact customer requirements. This drives us to provide you with custom or syndicated research reports.Contact Us:Name: Mr. Ajay MoreEmail: sales@researchreportsworld.comOrganization: Research Reports WorldPhone: +1 4242530807/+44 203 239 8187
Wearable Payment Market will touch a new level in upcoming year  Key Players involved in the research like Apple, Jawbone, Google, MasterCard, Samsung Electronics, Visa, Alibaba, American Express, Etc.

Wearable Payment

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UpMarketResearch.com adds a new Wearable Payment Market research report for the period of 2019 - 2025 focuses on the major drivers and restraints providing analysis of the market share, segmentation, revenue forecasts and geographic regions of the market.Request Sample Copy Of this Report @Wearable Payment Market research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period.It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the Wearable Payment Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2019  2025.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.The report for Wearable Payment Market analysis & forecast 2019- 2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.For More Information On This Report, Please Visit @Wearable Payment Market Segmentation covers:Region- wise Analysis: North America, Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)Major Players Reported Are:AppleJawboneGoogleMasterCardSamsung ElectronicsVisaAlibabaAmerican ExpressBarclaysBroadcomFitbitGemaltoInfineon TechnologiesInside SecureMediaTekMicrosoftNXP SemiconductorsQualcommPayPalRenesas ElectronicsSonyXiaomiProduct Segment Analysis:Smart WatchesFitness TrackersPayment WristbandsApplication Segment Analysis:OnlineOfflineRead More details Wearable Payment Market Analysis and Forecast 2019- 2025 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market- driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real- time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real- time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase:- To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Wearable Payment Market and its commercial landscape.- Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations.- To understand the future outlook and prospects for Wearable Payment Market analysis and forecast 2019- 2025.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Avail Discount On this Report @Customization of the Report:Up Market Research provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well- defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: Alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United States
Wireless Headphones Market 2019-2025: Recent Trends and Growth Opportunities | Profiling Players Apple, Bose, SAMSUNG, Sennheiser Electronic, Skullcandy, Etc.

Wireless Headphones

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Up Market Research recently introduced new title on 2019 - 2025 Global Wireless Headphones Market Report that provides an in-depth overview of industry and competitive landscape, covering multiple market segments and elaborates market outlook and status to 2025.Request Sample Copy Of this Report @Wireless Headphones Market research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period.It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the Wireless Headphones Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2019  2025.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.The report for Wireless Headphones Market analysis & forecast 2019- 2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.For More Information On This Report, Please Visit @Wireless Headphones Market Segmentation covers:Region- wise Analysis: North America, Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)Major Players Reported Are:AppleBoseSAMSUNGSennheiser ElectronicSkullcandySONYProduct Segment Analysis:In-EarOn-EarOver-EarApplication Segment Analysis:OnlineOfflineRead More details Wireless Headphones Market Analysis and Forecast 2019- 2025 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market- driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real- time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real- time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase:- To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Wireless Headphones Market and its commercial landscape.- Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations.- To understand the future outlook and prospects for Wireless Headphones Market analysis and forecast 2019- 2025.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Avail Discount On this Report @Customization of the Report:Up Market Research provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well- defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: Alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United States
New Study - Substance Abuse Treatment Market Observe Strong Development with Top Players as Pfizer Inc., Alkermes Plc, GlaxoSmithKline Plc., Purdue Pharma LP, Allergan, Mylan Laboratories

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A Broad Analysis of the Substance Abuse Treatment Market Research Report- Forecast To 2023  methodology of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain a deeper insight of the industry performance.Substance Abuse Treatment Market - HighlightsThe Global substance abuse treatment market is expected to grow at an approximate CAGR of 11.6% during forecast period, 20182023.Increasing cases of tobacco smoking is one of the prominent factors driving the substance abuse treatment market. According to the information published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry journal, China is facing an immense public health challenge from tobacco smoking.It is estimated that number of deaths, due to cigarette smoking, will reach 2 million by 2030 and 3 million by 2050.Various other factors such as increasing incidence of drug addiction, technological advancement in the diagnostics industry, rising patient awareness about substance abuse treatment and improvement in treatment rates and healthcare infrastructure are also expected to propel the growth of the market.However, poor treatment compliance in some countries and reluctance of individuals for accessing treatment can hamper the market growth over the forecast period.FREE SAMPLE COPY OF REPORT @Leading Key PlayersSome of the key players in the global substance abuse treatment market are Pfizer Inc., Alkermes Plc, GlaxoSmithKline Plc., Purdue Pharma LP, Allergan, Mylan Laboratories, Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Forest Laboratories, Inc., Accord Healthcare, Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, Apotex, BioCorRx, Cipla, Glenmark, INSYS Therapeutics, LFB Group, Lupin, Opiant Technologies, Sanofi Aventis, Sanquin, Sterinova, Sun Pharmaceuticals, and others.Substance Abuse Treatment Market - SegmentationThe Global substance abuse treatment market is segmented based on abuse type, treatment type, end user, and region.The Global market for substance abuse treatment, by abuse type is segmented into alcohol dependence, tobacco/nicotine addiction, and drug abuse. The drug abuse segment is anticipated to hold the largest market share owing to the increasing addiction of opioid.The market, by treatment type, is segmented into alcohol addiction treatment, tobacco/nicotine addiction treatment, and drug abuse treatment. The alcohol addiction treatment segment is further classified as disulfiram, acamprosate, and naltrexone.The tobacco/nicotine addiction treatment segment is further classified as nicotine replacement treatment, and non-nicotine medication. The nicotine replacement treatment segment includes nicotine patch, nicotine gum, nicotine lozenge, nicotine spray, and nicotine inhaler.The non-nicotine medication segment includes bupropion, and varenicline. The drug abuse treatment segment is further classified as methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone.Based on end user, the market is segmented into outpatient treatment centres, residential treatment centres, and inpatient treatment centres.Detailed Regional AnalysisThe Americas dominated the global market for substance abuse treatment owing to presence of major market players and rising awareness about substance abuse treatment within the region. In recent years, various private and government organizations have launched campaigns and seminar to spread awareness about substance abuse. For instance, in February 2017, the Ad Council and Viacom have launched the LISTEN campaign and a new PSA to address Americas substance abuse crisis.In 2017, it was estimated that Europe stood second in the global substance abuse treatment market. This can be attributed to the rising research and development investments.Asia Pacific was projected to be the fastest growing region in 2017. Factors such as increasing incidences of tobacco addiction and increasing technological advancements within the region are boosting the regional markets of the Asia Pacific region.BROWSE RESEARCH REPORT DETAILS WITH TOC @Some Points form 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 Restrains4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & AssessmentChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis5.1.1 Bargaining Power of SuppliersTOC ContinuedAbout 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
Biomimetic/Bionic Materials Market 2019-2025 Emerging Growth, In Depth Analysis, Current and Future Tremendous Scope| Wright Medical Group, CTS Corporation, CeramTec, NOLIAC A/S

Biomimetic/Bionic Materials

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Overview of Biomimetic/Bionic Materials Market 2019-2025Biomimetic/Bionic Materials Industry report elaborates the Definition, Industry History, present & future Trends, Upstream and Downstream Industry Chain, Technology, Cost Structure, Consumer Preference, Development Prospect, Competition Structure, Relevant Policy, Trade Overview, Segmentation by Applications, Types, and Regions etc.Market Report also provides the information by Product, Market Size & Forecast, Major Companies, Company Overview, Sales Data, Products and Services, Business Analysis, Market Competition, Industry Competition Structure Analysis, Rivalry, Threat of New Entrants, Substitutes, Bargaining Power of Suppliers & Buyers etc.Get Sample Copy of this Report @The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about 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 market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.The following manufacturers are covered: TDK Corporation Wright Medical Group CTS Corporation CeramTec NOLIAC A/S APC International Kyocera Corporation Channel Technologies Advanced Cerametrics LORD CorporationThe study objectives of this report are: To analyze global Biomimetic/Bionic Materials status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. To present the Biomimetic/Bionic Materials 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.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on this report @Segment by Regions United States Europe China Japan South Korea Other RegionsMarket size by Product Structural Protein Polysaccharide Structure Biological Soft Tissue Biocomposite Fibre Biological Mineral OtherMarket size by End User Medicaments Robotics Information Technology Telecommunication Automotive OtherOrder a Copy of Global Biomimetic/Bionic Materials Market Report 2019 @Major Points Covered in Table of Contents:Executive Summary1 Study Coverage2 Executive Summary3 Breakdown Data by Manufacturers4 Breakdown Data by Product5 Breakdown Data by End User6 North America7 Europe8 Asia Pacific9 Central & South America10 Middle East and Africa11 Company Profiles12 Future Forecast13 Market Opportunities, Challenges, Risks and Influences Factors Analysis14 Value Chain and Sales Channels Analysis15 Research Findings and Conclusion16 AppendixAbout Us:Orian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on the World Wide Web. Our reports repository boasts of over 500000+ industry and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We continuously update our repository so as to provide our clients easy access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products.Contact Us:Ruwin MendezVice President  Global Sales & Partner RelationsOrian Research ConsultantsUS +1 (415) 830-3727 | UK +44 020 8144-71-27Email: info@orianresearch.comWebsite:
Global Chemotherapy Market is touted to exhibit a healthy 6.2% CAGR by 2023| Novartis, Pfizer Inc., Eli Lilly & Company, ImClone Systems Inc., GlaxoSmithKline and others

Chemotherapy Market

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This study covers the market dynamics and trends in major countries that are expected to influence the current market scenario and future status of the Global Chemotherapy Market over the forecast periodChemotherapy is excessively used for the treatment of different types of cancer such as lung cancer, bone cancer, blood cancer, etc. The technological advancements in the treatment are further expected to boost the future trajectory of the chemotherapy market.According to the analysis offered by Market Research Future (MRFR), the global chemotherapy market has been presumed to strike a CAGR of 6.2% during the forecast period 2017 to 2023. Chemotherapy is an effective treatment for cancer which infuses drugs into the bloodstream to target specific cancer sites. The growth trajectory of the market is anticipated to be dominated by the rising burden of the disease.Get Sample Copy @Emphasis is placed on research & development for bringing more precision and effectiveness. It is prognosticated to have a favorable impact on the expansion of the chemotherapy market. On the flip side, factors such as the high cost of treatment and poor reimbursement policies remain impediments to the market growth. In addition, the side effects of the treatment such as hair loss, hearing impairment, alopecia, etc. are projected to further hinder the proliferation of the chemotherapy market in the upcoming years.Competitive Dashboard:Some of the key players profiled in this MRFR report are Sanofi (France), Eli Lilly & Company (U.S.), GlaxoSmithKline (U.K.), Novartis (Germany), Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), ImClone Systems Inc. (U.S.), AstraZeneca (U.K), Schering-Plough (U.S.), Bristol-Myers Squibb , Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries (Japan), F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd ( Switzerland), Boehringer Ingelheim (Germany), Merck & Co., Inc. (U.S.), CELGENE CORPORATION (U.S.), Amgen Inc (U.S.), Chemo Espana SL (Spain), Bayer AG (Germany), and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (Japan).Market Segmentation:On the basis of drugs, the global chemotherapy market has been segmented into anti-tumor antibiotics, topoisomerase inhibitors, alkylating agents, antimetabolites, mitotic inhibitors, and others. The alkylating agents segment has been further sub-segmented into mustard gas derivatives, ethylenimines, alkyl sulfonates, hydrazines and triazines, and others. The anti-tumor antibiotics segment is further sub-segmented into anthracyclines and chromomycin. The topoisomerase inhibitors segment has been sub-segmented into Topoisomerase I inhibitors and Topoisomerase II inhibitors.On the basis of indication, the chemotherapy market has been segmented into lymphoma, leukemia, breast cancer, lung cancer, myeloma, ovarian cancer, sarcoma, and others.On the basis of the route of drug administration, the global chemotherapy market has been segmented into oral and intravenous.On the basis of end-user, the chemotherapy market has been segmented into hospitals, research institutes, and others.Regional Analysis:By region, the global chemotherapy market has been segmented into Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. Americas is expected to thrive significantly in the foreseeable future. The rising burden of cancer is poised to dive the expansion of the chemotherapy market in the region over the assessment period. Other factors that are likely to propel the expansion of the regional market are changing lifestyle, advancements in healthcare, rising healthcare expenditure, etc.Europe is projected to witness considerable growth owing to the availability of funds and government support for research & development. Also, Asia Pacific is likely to flourish during the projection period due to rapid developments in the healthcare sector. It is estimated to strike a comparatively higher CAGR across the review period. Meanwhile, the Middle East & Africa resonates growth opportunities owing to the increasing awareness about the disease.Industry News:In May 2018, Advanced Chemotherapy Technologies, North Carolina, has started working on large coin-sized implant for delivering chemo agents into the pancreas.In September 2018, Alan B. Pearson Regional Cancer Center in Lynchburg announced the installation of Dignicap Cooling System that cools down the scalp by 37 degrees for preventing hair loss during chemotherapy.In December 2018, a team of experts is reported to work on the development of dry powder for inhaled chemotherapy. The Belgian spin-off project, InhaTarget Therapeutics, aims at treating lung cancer locally.Browse Complete 100 Pages Premium Research Report Enabled with Respective Tables and Figures @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
DLP Projector Market Analysis and forecast to 2019- 2024: Top manufacturers are- BenQ, Acer, Optoma, NEC, Sharp, Vivitek, Panasonic, Christie, BARCO, Digital Projection, Costar, Viewsonic, ACTO,

DLP Projector Market

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Latest Report on DLP Projector Market deliberates the effect of various Factors influencing the market growth and drivers. Its further sheds light on market overview, key manufacturers, strategic adopted by them, size, latest trends and types, revenue, gross margin with regional analysis and forecast to 2024.The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the DLP Projector industry market by types, applications, players and regions. This report also displays the 2013-2023 production, Consumption, revenue, Gross margin, Cost, Gross, market share, CAGR, and Market influencing factors of the DLP Projector industry in USA, EU, China, India, Japan and other regions.Get Sample Copy of This Report @Key Manufacturers Covered in This Report:BenQ, Acer, Optoma, NEC, Sharp, Vivitek, Panasonic, Christie, BARCO, Digital Projection, Costar, Viewsonic, ACTO,Major Classifications of DLP Projector Market: By Type1-chip DLP Projector, 3-chip DLP Projector,By ApplicationBusiness, Education, Home, Cinema, Large VenueWHAT ARE THE MAIN QUESTIONS ANSWERED IN THIS DLP PROJECTOR MARKET REPORT?- What will both market value and growth rate be in 2019?- What are the key market forecasts?- What is driving this sector?- What are the conditions to market growth?- Who are the main sellers in this market environment?- What are the opportunities in this industry and segment risks faced by the main vendors?- What are the forces and weaknesses of the main vendors?Inquire More or Share Questions if any before the Purchase on this Report @Regional Segmentation Includes:- United States- Europe- China- Japan- South Korea- Other RegionsReasons to Purchase the DLP Projector Market Report:- The report analyses how the shift towards safety will drive the global automotive anti-lock braking system market.- Analyzing various perspectives of the market with the help of Porters five forces analysis.- Study on the product type that is expected to dominate the market.- Study on the regions that are expected to witness fastest growth during the forecast period.- Identify the latest developments, market shares and strategies employed by the major market players.- 3 months analyst support along with the Market Estimate sheet (in excel).Price of Report $ 3500 (SUL)Order Copy of DLP Projector Market Report 2019 @Some Major Points from TOC:1 DLP Projector Market Overview1.1 Product Overview of Methylene Blue1.2 Classification of Methylene Blue1.3 Applications of Methylene Blue1.4 Global DLP Projector Market Regional Analysis1.4.1 USA Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.2 Europe Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.3 Japan Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.4 China Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.5 India Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.6 Southeast Asia Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.7 South America Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.8 South Africa Market Present Situation Analysis1.5 DLP Projector Industry Development Factors Analysis1.5.1 DLP Projector Industry Development Opportunities Analysis1.5.2 DLP Projector Industry Development Challenges Analysis1.6 DLP Projector Consumer Behavior Analysis2 Global DLP Projector Competitions by Players2.1 Global DLP Projector Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Players2.2 Global DLP Projector Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Players (2017-2018)2.3 Global DLP Projector Price (USD/Unit) by Players (2017-2018)2.4 Global DLP Projector Gross Margin by Players (2017-2018)3 Global DLP Projector Competitions by Types3.1 Global DLP Projector Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Types3.2 Global DLP Projector Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Type (2013-2018)3.3 Global DLP Projector Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2013-2018)ContinuedMarket is changing rapidly with the ongoing expansion of the industry. Advancement in the technology has provided today's businesses with multifaceted advantages resulting in daily economic shifts. Thus, it is very important for a company to comprehend the patterns of the market movements in order to strategize better. An efficient strategy offers the companies with a head start in planning and an edge over the competitors. Market Reports World is the credible source for gaining the market reports that will provide you with the lead your business needs.3rd Floor, Silver Spring, Sahyadri farms,Opp Prabhavee Tech Park,Baner - Mhalunge Road, Baner, Pune 411045
Global Protein Supplements Market 2019 Rising Trend Including Key Players Profile like Abbott, General Nutrition Centers, Inc, Glanbia plc, Alticor Inc., MUSCLEPHARM, Vitaco, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Unilever, POST HOLDINGS, INC

Global Protein Supplements Market  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2026

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The forecast length is anticipated to be very sturdy for the Protein Supplements marketplace and the enterprise as well. This report gives a comprehension on all the most recent improvements, item dispatches, joint endeavors, mergers and acquisitions by the few key players and brands of the Protein Supplements advertise. It contains the outline of market definition, orders, and market patterns of the business and Protein Supplements showcase.The record also illustrates the CAGR values for the historic year 2017, the base 12 months 2018 and the forecast for the years 2019-2026. The organization profiles of all the important players in North usa, Europe, Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia and different areas like South usa, and the middle East & Africa are studied with the help of SWOT analysis and Porters five Forces tool.Global Protein Supplements Market By Type (Whey Protein, Soy Protein, Casein Protein, MPC, Egg Protein, Pea Protein Others), Form (RTD, Powder, Protein Bar, Others), Source (Plant, Animal), Distribution Channel (Supermarkets & Hypermarkets, Drug Stores, Online, Convenience Stores, Health & Nutritionist Stores, Others), Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2026Download Free PDF Sample Copy of Report@Global Protein Supplements Market is expected to rise to a projected value of USD 3.93 billion by 2026, from its estimated value of USD 2.46 billion in 2018 growing with a CAGR of 6.05% in the forecast period of 2019-2026. This rise in market value can be attributed to growth in disposable income of individuals.Competitive Analysis: Global Protein Supplements MarketGlobal protein supplements market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of protein supplements market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa.Key Market Competitors: Global Protein Supplements MarketFew of the major competitors currently working in the protein supplements market are Abbott; General Nutrition Centers, Inc.; Glanbia plc; Alticor Inc.; MUSCLEPHARM; Vitaco; GlaxoSmithKline plc; Unilever; POST HOLDINGS, INC.; Makers Nutrition, LLC; Herbalife International of America, Inc.; Nu Skin Enterprises; Shaklee Corporation; USANA Health Sciences, Inc.; Vitacost.com; Suppleform; Forever Living.com, L.L.C.; Garden of Life; Melaleuca Inc.; PepsiCo; New Vitality; Wander AG; AMCO Proteins; QuestNutrition; NOW Foods; Natures Bounty; CytoSport, Inc.; Iovate Health Sciences International Inc.; Transparent Labs and JimStoppani.com.Market Definition: Global Protein Supplements MarketProtein supplements are a type of bodybuilding and nutritional supplement that are used majorly by bodybuilders, and sports athletes to supplement their diet and increase their consumption of protein without increasing their consumption of accompanying carbohydrates and fats. These supplements include higher amounts of proteins in comparison to various other protein sources, if consumed directly.Market Drivers: Growing concerns and awareness regarding health amid rising levels of obesity globally; this factor is expected to act as a driver for the market growth Increasing demand from sports and athletics population which has been a result of growth in adoption of fitness activities globallyMarket Restraints: High cost caused due to the fluctuation of raw material prices along with the availability of cheaper substitutes is expected to restrain the market growth Strict regulatory presence and side-effects associated with the product in certain conditions; this factor is expected to act as a restraint to the market growthSegmentation: Global Protein Supplements Market By Typeo Whey Proteino Soy Proteino Casein Proteino Milk Protein Concentrateo Egg Proteino Pea Proteino Others By Formo Ready-To-Drinko Powdero Protein Baro Others By Sourceo Planto Animal By Distribution Channelo Supermarkets & Hypermarketso Drug Storeso Onlineo Convenience Storeso Health & Nutritionist Storeso OthersInquire Regarding This Report @Key Developments in the Market: In December 2018, Unilever announced that they had agreed to acquire consumer healthcare and nutritional products for the Asia-Pacific regions. This acquisition will help Unilever expand their product offerings in health-food products. In October 2018, PepsiCo announced that they had acquired Health Warrior, Inc. This acquisition will help PepsiCo in expanding their nutritional products capacity and help meet the growing demand for consumer-specific nutritional products.Key Insights in the report: Competitive analysis of key competitors involved in the market Complete analysis of market segmentation and which segments are set to flourish in the forecast period of 2019 to 2026 Market drivers and restraints analysis along with the analysis of the market structureNote: If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com
Global Professional Hair Care Products 2019 Market Key Players  Kao, Loreal, Aveda, Henkel, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, PBI -Analysis And Forecast To 2025

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Professional Hair Care Products Market 2019Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Professional Hair Care Products  Global Market Growth, Opportunities, Analysis Of Top Key Players And Forecast To 2025 To Its Research Database.Description:Beauty and personal care industry includes hair care, skin care, cosmetics, oral care, toiletries, and others. Increasing sophistication among the individuals and growing disposable income has transformed the buying patterns of the consumers. Rising concerns for hair protection has led to the development of a wide range of professional hair care products.The global Professional Hair Care Products market is valued at xx million US$ in 2018 is expected to reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of xx% during 2019-2025.This report focuses on Professional Hair Care Products volume and value at global level, regional level and company level. From a global perspective, this report represents overall Professional Hair Care Products market size by analyzing historical data and future prospect. Regionally, this report focuses on several key regions: North America, Europe, China and Japan.At company level, this report focuses on the production capacity, ex-factory price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer covered in this report.The following manufacturers are covered:KaoLorealAvedaHenkelUnileverProcter & GamblePBIRequest Free Sample Report @Segment by RegionsNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSegment by TypeShampoosConditionersHair serumsHair colorantsHair spraysHair masksSegment by ApplicationSalons and spasOnline or web shopping storesHypermarkets and supermarketsSpecialty storesEnquiry before Buying @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Content:Executive Summary1 Professional Hair Care Products Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Professional Hair Care Products1.2 Professional Hair Care Products Segment by Type1.2.1 Global Professional Hair Care Products Production Growth Rate Comparison by Type (2014-2025)1.2.2 Shampoos1.2.3 Conditioners1.2.4 Hair serums1.2.5 Hair colorants1.2.6 Hair sprays1.2.7 Hair masks1.3 Professional Hair Care Products Segment by Application1.3.1 Professional Hair Care Products Consumption Comparison by Application (2014-2025)1.3.2 Salons and spas1.3.3 Online or web shopping stores1.3.4 Hypermarkets and supermarkets1.3.5 Specialty stores1.4 Global Professional Hair Care Products Market by Region1.4.1 Global Professional Hair Care Products Market Size Region1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2014-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2014-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2014-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2014-2025)1.5 Global Professional Hair Care Products Market Size1.5.1 Global Professional Hair Care Products Revenue (2014-2025)1.5.2 Global Professional Hair Care Products Production (2014-2025)2 Global Professional Hair Care Products Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Professional Hair Care Products Production Market Share by Manufacturers (2014-2019)2.2 Global Professional Hair Care Products Revenue Share by Manufacturers (2014-2019)2.3 Global Professional Hair Care Products Average Price by Manufacturers (2014-2019)2.4 Manufacturers Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites, Area Served, Product Types2.5 Professional Hair Care Products Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Professional Hair Care Products Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Professional Hair Care Products Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion..7 Company Profiles and Key Figures in Professional Hair Care Products Business7.1 Kao7.1.1 Kao Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites and Area Served7.1.2 Professional Hair Care Products Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.1.3 Kao Professional Hair Care Products Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.1.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.2 Loreal7.2.1 Loreal Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites and Area Served7.2.2 Professional Hair Care Products Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.2.3 Loreal Professional Hair Care Products Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.2.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.3 Aveda7.3.1 Aveda Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites and Area Served7.3.2 Professional Hair Care Products Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.3.3 Aveda Professional Hair Care Products Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.3.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.4 Henkel7.4.1 Henkel Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites and Area Served7.4.2 Professional Hair Care Products Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.4.3 Henkel Professional Hair Care Products Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.4.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.5 Unilever7.5.1 Unilever Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites and Area Served7.5.2 Professional Hair Care Products Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.5.3 Unilever Professional Hair Care Products Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.5.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.6 Procter & Gamble7.6.1 Procter & Gamble Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites and Area Served7.6.2 Professional Hair Care Products Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.6.3 Procter & Gamble Professional Hair Care Products Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.6.4 Main Business and Markets Served7.7 PBI7.7.1 PBI Professional Hair Care Products Production Sites and Area Served7.7.2 Professional Hair Care Products Product Introduction, Application and Specification7.7.3 PBI Professional Hair Care Products Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)7.7.4 Main Business and Markets ServedContinued..Buy Now @Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Hardware Reconfigurable Devicesnning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Choroidal Neovascularization Market Overview and Forecast Report 2019| Pfizer Inc., F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Novartis AG, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.

global choroidal neovascularization market

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The research study presented here is a highly detailed and meticulous account of almost all key aspects of the global Choroidal Neovascularization market. It digs deep into market dynamics including growth drivers, challenges, restraints, trends, and opportunities. Market players can use the research study to tighten their grip on the global Choroidal Neovascularization market as they gain a sound understanding of market competition, regional growth, Choroidal Neovascularization market segmentation, and different cost structures. The report provides an accurate market outlook in relation to CAGR, market size by value and volume, and Choroidal Neovascularization market shares. It also provides carefully calculated and validated market figures related but not limited to revenue, production, consumption, gross margin, and price.As part of the global economic outlook, the report brings to light current and future market scenarios of Choroidal Neovascularization that need to be considered when planning business strategies. Furthermore, it analyzes the pricing strategies of manufacturers and gives a thorough breakdown of raw material and other costs. The regional assessment of the global Choroidal Neovascularization market includes a broad evaluation of top markets such as North America, Europe, China, the MEA, and India. All of the segments, be them of the application, product, or geographical category, are analyzed on the basis of vital factors, viz. Choroidal Neovascularization market share, consumption, revenue, volume, market size, and CAGR.Get PDF template of this report:Competition AnalysisBesides a dashboard view of the vendor landscape and important company profiles, the Choroidal Neovascularization market competitive analysis offers an encyclopedic examination of the market structure. The company shares analysis included in this study helps players to improve their business tactics and compete well against leading market participants in Choroidal Neovascularization industry. The intensity map prepared by our analysts helps to get a quick view of the presence of several players in the global Choroidal Neovascularization market. The report also provides a footprint matrix of key players in the global Choroidal Neovascularization market. It dives deep into growth strategies, sales footprint, production footprint, and product and application portfolios of prominent names of the Choroidal Neovascularization industry.Major Players cited in the reportPfizer Inc.F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.Novartis AGRegeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc.Bayer AGQLT Inc.Sanwa Kagaku Kenkyusho Co. Ltd.Promedior Inc.Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc.Gilead Sciences IncGlobal Choroidal Neovascularization Market by ProductIntravenousIntravitrealGlobal Choroidal Neovascularization Market by ApplicationExtreme MyopiaMalignant Myopic DegenerationAge-Related DevelopmentsKey questions answered in the report How was the performance of developing regional markets in the past five years? What are the key features of products attracting high consumer demand in the market? Which factors will be responsible for market growth in the near future? Which application is expected to secure a lions share of the market? What will be the size of the market in terms of value and volume? Which players are expected to dominate the market in the coming years?Opportunity AnalysisThe analysts have studied the macroeconomic and microeconomic factors influencing the growth of the global Choroidal Neovascularization market. In addition, they have offered an all-encompassing evaluation of their ripple effects on the global Choroidal Neovascularization market. The comprehensive opportunity analysis included in the report helps players to secure a strong position and cash in on lucrative prospects in the global Choroidal Neovascularization market. It sheds light on other important factors impacting the growth trajectory and trends of the global Choroidal Neovascularization market.Get Complete Report in your Inbox within 24 hours:Table of ContentsOverview: The first section of the report includes a product overview, scope of the global Choroidal Neovascularization market, production growth rate comparison by type of product, consumption comparison by application, highlights of regional analysis, and Choroidal Neovascularization market size analysis by revenue and production.Market Dynamics: Here, the authors of the report detail market trends, Choroidal Neovascularization market opportunities and challenges, and influence factors, which include political or economic environment changes, price trend of key raw materials, and macroeconomic factors.Global Market Forecast: In this section, the report provides forecast of the global Choroidal Neovascularization market by production, revenue, and their growth rates, production forecast by region, consumption forecast by region, Choroidal Neovascularization market production forecast by type of product, and consumption forecast by the application.Methodology and Data Source: It offers details about our methodology or research approach, including the market breakdown and data triangulation, Choroidal Neovascularization market size estimation, and research program or design. It also includes information about our data sources, including primary and secondary sources, an author list, and a disclaimer.Company Profiles: All of the players profiled in this section are evaluated on the basis of production, Choroidal Neovascularization buisiness gross margin, price, revenue, recent developments, strategies, and other key factors.About Us:QYResearch always pursuits high product quality with the belief that quality is the soul of business. Through years of effort and supports from the huge number of customer supports, QYResearch consulting group has accumulated creative design methods on many high-quality markets investigation and research team with rich experience. Today, QYResearch has become the brand of quality assurance in the consulting industry.ContactQY Research, INC.USA: +1 6262 952 442China: +86 1082 945 717Japan: +81 9038 009 273India: +91 9766 478 224Emails  enquiry@qyresearch.comWeb 
After ten years of Piracy in the Indian Ocean region, is Somali Piracy still a threat?

i.b.s. armed team on-board yacht during a GoA Gulf of Aden transit.

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On 6 November the United Nations (UN) Security Council renewed the authorization for international naval forces to carry out anti-piracy measures off Somalias coast. It is now 10 years since the first resolution was passed in 2008 to respond to piracy and robbery against humanitarian and commercial ships in the region.At the time, piracy was considered a major threat to both local and global peace and security. Since then, and especially since 2013, the number of attacks and hijackings has dropped. Recent incidents have however raised concerns over the long-term sustainability of counter-piracy measures and whether enough is being done on land to increase the resilience of Somali communities and prevent a resurgence of piracy.In the most recent attack on 16 October, four men attempted to board the bulk carrier MV KSL Sydney around 340 nautical miles (630km) off the coast of Mogadishu, opening fire on the ship. The pirates aborted the attack after private security guards on board returned fire. The European Union Naval Force, as part of Operation Atalanta, tracked down and destroyed a whaler ship believed to have been that of the attackers.This is only the second piracy attack off the coast of Somalia reported this year, which is dramatically down from the 160 piracy incidents reported during the height of the problem in 2011.The long-term success of counter-piracy measures depends on a stable and unified Somali state.The attacks failure shows that current counter-piracy tactics on board vessels, prescribed by the latest iteration of Best Management Practices, remain effective at preventing pirates from boarding and capturing vessels. The aim of these best practices is to address the vulnerabilities often exploited by pirates, thereby significantly increasing the risks for pirates.The recent UN secretary-generals report on piracy and armed robbery off Somalias coast attributes the low number of attacks to successful global collaboration and the ongoing work of regional organizations like the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia.The report also cites the continued enforcement measures of international naval forces, and the extensive military, naval and donor support of the international community. Navies, either in coordination with the European Union Naval Force and the Combined Maritime Forces, or deployed outside of them such as South Africas Operation Copper, help disrupt pirate activities.Despite these short-term successes, the international communitys attempts to address the root causes of piracy in Somalia itself, through capacity building initiatives and donor activities, are not yet effective enough.While many of Somalias pirate foot soldiers languish in jail, the kingpins remain at largeThe secretary-generals report lists notable successes in counter-piracy efforts by the Somali government, but says the root causes of piracy still need to be fully addressed. Among them are poverty and a lack of employment opportunities in Somalias coastal communities, as well as a lack of legal, governance and maritime infrastructure.The activities of pirate groups must be understood in the broader context of Somalias ongoing crisis. The crisis has allowed the root causes for the emergence and proliferation of these groups to continue for two reasons.First, competition between political factions in Somalia has left poverty unaddressed. This undermines sustainable development and the creation of economic alternatives. People are drawn to piracy and other illegal activities with the promise of, if not wealth, a stable income.Somalia is mired in a zero-sum internal political struggle, with federal states and groups competing for power and resources in the areas they are able to govern. Political stability in Somalia would allow for economic alternatives to illegal activities.Second, according to the recent report by the Centre for Military Studies from the University of Copenhagen, some of the criminal networks responsible for piracy are still around. While many so-called pirate foot soldiers languish in jail, the kingpins remain at large.Puntland has taken effective counter-piracy measures to drive away pirate groups and secure the coastThe report argues that pirate groups shifted their focus away from piracy towards more profitable illegal activities. For these criminal networks, the defining factor is opportunity and revenue. While navies stationed in the region can increase the risks and costs for pirates, they dont get involved in the prosecution of human trafficking, arms smuggling and other illegal activities. In the absence of criminal justice, the groups continue to profit by other means.A more coherent regional effort to address smuggling would help stop the money flow that fuels these groups. However, situations such as Yemens ongoing war create ungoverned spaces for criminal networks to function and prosper.The conditions needed for long-term solutions to piracy remain absent. At the core of the problem is Somalias dependency on the presence of foreign navies and international support for stability and security. Somalia doesnt have the capacity to handle the issue without foreign help. Comprehensive counter-piracy efforts must keep the pressure on pirate groups while addressing the root causes that enable these networks to emerge.Puntland has been successfully fighting piracy since 2008. Once a centre of pirate activity, the federal state has taken proactive and effective counter-piracy measures  like establishing a maritime police force  to drive away pirate groups and secure the coast. This has driven the network to the nearby autonomous region of Galmudug.Puntlands success story may help shape and define a Somali-owned approach to counter-piracy. But long-term achievements depend on a stable and unified Somali state. As long as the root causes of pirate groups are not addressed, the threat of a resurgence in piracy will hover on the horizon.Source: IFSSIn times of business globalization the activities of criminal and terrorist elements have increased alarmingly.Day-to-day criminality, commercial and serious criminality as well political unrests are much more present than eve before. Especially people in exposed positions, successful companies, enterprises and Governmental authorities are exposed to this threats have a steady growing need of professional private security services. In addition in the past fifteen years, international shipping lines, port facilities and military installations were targeted for possible future attacks against critical infrastructures.To be able to pursue personal business or activities, an increase in personal security / personal protection, corporate security and the safety of employees has become part of a responsible corporate management.For more then two decades, the management and the employees of our company strives to protect our clients against such dangers through a wide range of developed and innovative services e.g. executive protection, maritime security, armed transportation escorts wether military or civil and since now for the fields of Cyber Threats and Cyber Security just to mention only a few services we provide. Innovation is about business and creating services how it should be better done and not how it is done before.Our company is fully funded allowing the necessary capital invested in training, manning, equipping na deploying the best possible security teams anywhere in the world to meet our clients needs. That mind set distinguishes our company management team and employees from its competitors at the commercial security market.We are able to offer our professional security solutions including armed executive protection, armed maritime security, national and international investigation, armed transport security escorts for military and civil clients, services for the onshore and offshore energy industry and further more as well in regions like Africa, Asia, North America, South America, Middle East, Europe and East Europe in addition to Germany in all major metropolis like Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt/a.M., Munich, Bonn, Cologne, Dusseldorf, etc.! In addition up from the 01. of January 2019 we will also operate via our new representative offices in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai) plus in the capital city of Lithuania (Vilnius).We would like to invite you to have a look at the following pages which will inform you briefly about the protective and preventive services offered by our company. The complete service portfolio of our company you will find under "Downloads" where we have arranged our services profile by PDF.Expose for your kind perusal.If you are interested in further information or a personal consultation with our specialists, please use our contact data.The Managementi.b.s.International Operative Services e.K.Ballindamm 3, 20095 HamburgPhone: +494087979850eMail: info@ibs-ops.comWeb:
Deodorant Market Key Players, SWOT Analysis, Dynamics, Drivers, Key Indicators and Forecast to 2025

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QY Research added a new research report to its exhaustive repository. The research report, titled [Global Deodorant Industry Market Research Report 2019], presents an unbiased approach at understanding the market trends and dynamics. Analysts have studied the historical data pertaining to the market and compared it to the current market trends to paint an object picture of the markets trajectory. The report includes SWOT analysis and Porters five forces analysis to give the readers an in-depth assessment of the various factors likely to drive and restrain the overall market.Both the market measurement tools offer evaluation of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It also elucidates the bargaining power of suppliers and buyers. The report studies the ongoing political scenarios that are expected to dictate the pricing and import and export in the global Deodorant market. Furthermore, it also explains the lucrative opportunities present in the overall market that players can focus on to make their mark.Request a Sample of this report at:The following Companies as the Key Players in the Global Deodorant Market Research Report:AvonBeiersdorfColgate-PalmoliveHenkelP&GUnileverAdidasCavinKareChanelChristian DiorChurch & DwightEstee LauderGodrej Consumer ProductsHypermarcasKaoLionL'OrealMcNroePlayboyRaymondRevlonShekofa KishShiseidoTom's of MaineTTK HealthcareVerdan SarlVini GroupYardley of LondonRegions Covered in the Global Deodorant Market:The Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries and Egypt)North America (the United States, Mexico, and Canada)South America (Brazil etc.)Europe (Turkey, Germany, Russia UK, Italy, France, etc.)Asia-Pacific (Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Australia)The scope of the Report:The research report on Deodorant includes segmentation of the market. The global Deodorant market is segmented on the basis of application, services, end users, and region. Each segment includes a detailed explanation of the factors that are likely to drive and restrain it. In addition, the research report also provides an assessment of the emerging trends in the global market that will benefit each segment during the forecast years.Analysts have also studied the competitive landscape present in the global Deodorant market. The chapter on company profiles includes an analysis of the key players operating in the global Deodorant market. It provides vital information about the strategic initiatives about the companies in the market and their outlook for the forecast years.Ask our Expert if You Have a Query at: enquiry@qyresearch.comStrategic Points Covered in TOC:Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product scope, market risk, market overview, and market opportunities of the global Deodorant marketChapter 2: Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the global Deodorant market which consists of its revenue, sales, and price of the productsChapter 3: Displaying the competitive nature among key manufacturers, with market share, revenue, and salesChapter 4: Presenting global Deodorant market by regions, market share and with revenue and sales for the projected periodChapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9: To evaluate the market by segments, by countries and by manufacturers with revenue share and sales by key countries in these various regionsPurchase the Global Deodorant Market Report at:Contact USQY Research, INC.USA: +1 6262 952 442China: +86 1082 945 717Japan: +81 9038 009 273India: +91 9766 478 224Emails  enquiry@qyresearch.comQYResearch, established in 2007, focuses on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, and data base &seminar services. The company owns large basic databases (such as National Bureau of Statistics Database, Customs Import and Export Database, Industry Association Database, etc.), expert resources (including industry experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D in industries of energy, automotive, chemicals, medical ICT consumer goods, etc.), professional survey team (the team members obtained more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years deep expert interview experience), and excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team).Room 2901 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West Road
Global Microcars Market Analysis and Forecast 2019 | Daihatsu, Suzuki Motor, Honda, Hyundai, Maruti et al

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Microcar is a classification which encompasses the smallest automobiles which are only designed to seat two or sometimes even just one person. They are even smaller than traditional city cars or subcompacts whose diminutive size makes them ideal for high-density urban areas where traffic and inaccessible parking spaces are a constant problem.For Sample Copy of Global Microcars Industry Report @Scope of the Report:The Microcars industry is not highly concentrated, there are more than thirty manufacturers in the world, and high-end products mainly come from Japan and Europe. In the world wide, major manufactures mainly are Daihatsu, Fiat, Suzuki Motor and Honda etc.Europe and Asia are the largest consumers of Microcars and are expected to retain the higher growth rate during the next five years due to strong growth in demand. Japan and India have witnessed a major chunk of the production and consumption of Microcars in the Asia Pacific region. Actually, that is why manufacturers have several plants, usually close to aimed demand market.The import and export business of this industry is not frequent. The main reason lies in that many international manufacturers expand their business through building factories or investments in targeted markets. Also, many major players have built up plants in developing countries, like India and Thailand.Microcars Industry 2019 Market Research Report is spread across 138 pages and provides exclusive vital statistics, data, information, trends and competitive landscape details in this niche sector.Inquire more or share questions if any before the purchase on Microcars Industry report @Report Covers Market Segment by Manufacturers: Daihatsu Suzuki Motor Honda Hyundai Maruti Nissan Toyota Motor ..Market Segment by Type, covers: Fuel Cars Electricity Cars Hybrid CarsMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into: Personal Cars Commercial CarsOrder a copy of Global Microcars Industry Report 2019@Due to the advantage on price and practicability, microcars are popular in Japan, Europe and some other developing countries. In future, developing countries will provide a great power to the development of microcars. Whats more, the development of electric vehicle should be another driving factor to the microcars industry.We tend to believe this industry now is close to mature, and the demand increasing degree will show a smooth curve. On product prices, the slow downward trend in recent years will maintain in the future, as competition intensifies, prices gap between different brands will go narrowing. Similarly, there will be fluctuation in gross margin.About UsOrian Research is one of the most comprehensive collections of market intelligence reports on the World Wide Web. Our reports repository boasts of over 500000+ industry and country research reports from over 100 top publishers. We continuously update our repository so as to provide our clients easy access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, and products. We also specialize in custom research in situations where our syndicate research offerings do not meet the specific requirements of our esteemed clients.Contact UsRuwin MendezVice President  Global Sales & Partner RelationsOrian Research ConsultantsUS: +1 (415) 830-3727 | UK: +44 020 8144-71-27Email: info@orianresearch.comWebsite:Follow Us on LinkedIn:
NGS-based RNA-seq Market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 19.7% during 2018 to 2022 | Vital Players are Roche Holding AG, QIAGEN N. V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., PerkinElmer, Inc., BGI, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd.

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NGS-based RNA-seq Market Size and Growth Rate:NGS-based RNA-seq Market was valued at USD 0.89 billion in 2017 and projected to reach USD 2 billion by 2022 growing at a CAGR of 19.7% during the forecast period 2018 to 2022.NGS-based RNA-seq Market Overview:With the introduction of next-generation sequencing technology, demand has increased dramatically worldwide. It is widely used in conventional and non-conventional applications to obtain advanced and complete information at the genomic level. The growing demand for advanced diagnostics based on sequencing has created the demand for new security technologies as a result, devices such as high-performance sequencers and robust portable units have increased significantly.Browse details of 145 number of pages research report developed on NGS-based RNA-seq Market @NGS-based RNA-seq Market Growth Drivers and Restraints:The demand for RNA-seq based on NGS is increasing due to a variety of factors, including technological advances in RNA-based products, the benefits of RNA technology over the microarray, the rapid growth of research as expected, the growing number of grants and a significant demand for precision medicine. The increasing technological advances in the biotechnology also drive demand in the global NGS-based RNA-seq market around the world.Geographic Insights of NGS-based RNA-seq Market:North America is expected to dominate the market due to the presence of key market players and a well-established computer network. In addition, favorable regulatory policies for the use and approval of genetic tests, the growing number of genomic tests approved by the FDA in the USA has increased the demand in this market even more.On the other hand, Asia Pacific should create lucrative opportunities for this market. Increasing government initiatives to provide better public health facilities and investing huge amounts of money in advanced diagnostic approaches are the key factors driving the demand for RNA-seq based on NGS. Around the world, key players are also interested in investing in emerging economies in the Asia-Pacific region. By investing huge sums in this market in the region, they will position themselves better and can develop their activities.Ask Free Sample of the report @Key Market Players of NGS-based RNA-seq Market:The competition among the key players in the market is likely to increase in the coming years with an aim to get a stronger hold in the market. the report focuses on companies like Illumina, Inc., Roche Holding AG, QIAGEN N. V., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., PerkinElmer, Inc., BGI, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, Ltd., Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc., Agilent Technologies, Inc., Macrogen, Inc., and GATC Biotech AG players that are functional in the global NGS-based RNA-seq market.NGS-based RNA-seq Market Key Segmentation:By Technology: Sequencing By Synthesis Ion Semiconductor Sequencing Single-Molecule Real-Time Sequencing Nanopore SequencingBy Product & Service: Sample Preparation Sequencing Platforms and Consumables Sequencing Services Data Analysis, Storage, and ManagementBy Application: Expression Profiling Analysis Small RNA Sequencing De Novo Transcriptome Assembly Variant Calling and Transcriptome EpigeneticsBy End User: Research Centers and Academic & Government Institutes Hospitals & Clinics Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology CompaniesBy Region: North America South America Europe Asia Pacific Middle East and AfricaFor any queries, inquire more @About Us:Research Cosmos is a provider of standard and customized market research, business intelligence and consulting services across more than 100 domains in different industries of the world. We host the trending market reports of the worlds top-notch publishing companies, offering services to a wide range of customers from students to fortune 500 companies and discloses the hidden opportunities in every leading industry of the world.Contact:Kevin StewartGlobal Sales ManagerResearch CosmosBlog:Blog:
Current Market Scenario of Dishwashing Detergent Market: QY Research New Report

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QY Research added a new research report to its exhaustive repository. The research report, titled [Global Dishwashing Detergent Industry Market Research Report 2019], presents an unbiased approach at understanding the market trends and dynamics. Analysts have studied the historical data pertaining to the market and compared it to the current market trends to paint an object picture of the markets trajectory. The report includes SWOT analysis and Porters five forces analysis to give the readers an in-depth assessment of the various factors likely to drive and restrain the overall market.Both the market measurement tools offer evaluation of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It also elucidates the bargaining power of suppliers and buyers. The report studies the ongoing political scenarios that are expected to dictate the pricing and import and export in the global Dishwashing Detergent market. Furthermore, it also explains the lucrative opportunities present in the overall market that players can focus on to make their mark.Request a Sample of this report at:The following Companies as the Key Players in the Global Dishwashing Detergent Market Research Report:Colgate-PalmoliveHenkelP&GReckitt BenckiserUnileverBombrilChurch & DwightGodrej Consumer ProductsGoodmaid ChemicalsKaoMcBrideRohit SurfactantsSC Johnson & SonSeventh GenerationThe Clorox CompanyRegions Covered in the Global Dishwashing Detergent Market:The Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries and Egypt)North America (the United States, Mexico, and Canada)South America (Brazil etc.)Europe (Turkey, Germany, Russia UK, Italy, France, etc.)Asia-Pacific (Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Australia)The scope of the Report:The research report on Dishwashing Detergent includes segmentation of the market. The global Dishwashing Detergent market is segmented on the basis of application, services, end users, and region. Each segment includes a detailed explanation of the factors that are likely to drive and restrain it. In addition, the research report also provides an assessment of the emerging trends in the global market that will benefit each segment during the forecast years.Analysts have also studied the competitive landscape present in the global Dishwashing Detergent market. The chapter on company profiles includes an analysis of the key players operating in the global Dishwashing Detergent market. It provides vital information about the strategic initiatives about the companies in the market and their outlook for the forecast years.Ask our Expert if You Have a Query at: enquiry@qyresearch.comStrategic Points Covered in TOC:Chapter 1: Introduction, market driving force product scope, market risk, market overview, and market opportunities of the global Dishwashing Detergent marketChapter 2: Evaluating the leading manufacturers of the global Dishwashing Detergent market which consists of its revenue, sales, and price of the productsChapter 3: Displaying the competitive nature among key manufacturers, with market share, revenue, and salesChapter 4: Presenting global Dishwashing Detergent market by regions, market share and with revenue and sales for the projected periodChapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9: To evaluate the market by segments, by countries and by manufacturers with revenue share and sales by key countries in these various regionsPurchase the Global Dishwashing Detergent Market Report at:Contact USQY Research, INC.USA: +1 6262 952 442China: +86 1082 945 717Japan: +81 9038 009 273India: +91 9766 478 224Emails  enquiry@qyresearch.comQYResearch, established in 2007, focuses on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, and data base &seminar services. The company owns large basic databases (such as National Bureau of Statistics Database, Customs Import and Export Database, Industry Association Database, etc.), expert resources (including industry experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D in industries of energy, automotive, chemicals, medical ICT consumer goods, etc.), professional survey team (the team members obtained more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years deep expert interview experience), and excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team).Room 2901 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West Road
New Improvised Report on Cloud ERP Market: Know about Trends, Revenue, Challenges and Key Players like Ramco Systems, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sage Software

Cloud ERP

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In this report, The Cloud ERP Market size is expected to grow USD XX million by 2025, at a CAGR of 10% during the forecast period. Cloud ERP is Software as a Service that allows users to access Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software over the Internet. Cloud ERP generally has much lower upfront costs, because computing resources are leased by the month rather than purchased outright and maintained on premises.Informative data about Cloud ERP market has been published by Research N Reports. To make some significant decisions in the businesses primary and secondary exploratory techniques have been used to analyze the data effectively. Different economic attributes of businesses, have been brought into light to give a clear idea about financial budget of several industries. It covers several application segments to understand the applicable areas of IT sector.Request for Sample Copy Of this Report @The major players profiled in this report include: Ramco Systems, Kingdee, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sage SoftwareCompetitive landscape of global companies have been studied to understand the competitive products and services across the globe. For effective global regional outlook analysts of the report examines global regions such as, North America, Latin America, Japan, Asia-Pacific, and India on the basis of productivity, manufacturing base and raw material.It covers different aspects of businesses to boost the performance of the companies. To present data effectively, it uses numerous graphical presentation techniques such as, charts, graphs, pictures and tables.Additionally, it focuses on technological platforms, tools and methodologies, which helps to boost the performance of the industries. It includes prevalence of driving factors that will accelerate the progress of the businesses. In addition to this, some internal and external restraining factors of Cloud ERP Market have been included to know about risks and challenges in front of the businesses. It offers several sales strategies to discover the global opportunities that will open the new platforms to get clients rapidly.Challenges of Cloud ERP:Cloud ERP provides many benefits, but it also creates some management challenges. Admins lose a certain amount of control when an enterprise moves off-site, as providers take on most of the responsibilities. While there are some customization abilities, there are far more with on-premises infrastructure. Admins have to implement new management processes for a cloud-based ERP system, which can create some integration issues.Buyers will get up to 30% discount on this report Click Here:The end users/Applications and product categories analysis:On the basis of product, this report displays the sales volume, revenue (Million USD), product price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into-FinanceMarketingHuman ResourceOn the basis on the end users/Applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major Applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate of Cloud ERP for each application, including-BFSIManufacturingGovernment and Public SectorReasons for Buying this Report:This report provides pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamicsIt provides a forward-looking perspective on different factors driving or restraining market growthIt provides a six-year forecast assessed on the basis of how the market is predicted to growIt helps in understanding the key product segments and their futureIt provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitorsIt helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segmentsIt provides distinctive graphics and exemplified analysis of major market segmentsFor more Information and Enquiry Click Here:If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.About Research N Reports:Research N Reports helps clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. We have successfully guided businesses throughout the world with our market research reports. We are uniquely positioned to lead digital transformations, thus creating greater value for clients by presenting growth opportunities in the global market. Our profound experience provides a clear and confident vision to help clients navigate the future. Research N Reports techniques encompasses both qualitative and quantitative modes to provide customized and highly flexible tailored research studies so that you get information that is just the best-fit to make informed strategic organizational decisions. Research N Reports helps clients decode the future to be more successful and innovative.(Research N Reports)10916, Gold Point Dr, Houston, TX, Pin - 77064,Sunny Denis(Sales Manager),+1-8886316977,sales@researchnreports.com
High-Temperature Prepreg Market Worth US$ 538.0 million in 2024

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Stratview Research announces the launch of a new research report on High-Temperature Prepreg Market. This 249 page extensive report from Stratview Research, studies the High-Temperature Prepreg Market over the trend period of 2013 to 2018 and forecast period of 2019 to 2024. 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 High-Temperature Prepreg Market analysis has been segmented in five ways, keeping in mind the interest of all the stakeholders across the value chain. By Resin Type (BMI Prepreg, Cyanate Ester Prepreg, Polyimide Prepreg, High-Temperature Thermoplastic Prepregs and Others)  BMI and polyimide prepreg will act as the growth engines of the market in the foreseen future. By End-Use Industry Type (Aerospace & Defense, Transportation, and Others)  aerospace & defense is likely to remain the most dominant segment during the forecast period. By Reinforcement Type (Fabric Prepreg and Unidirectional Prepreg)- by Curing Type (Autoclave, Out of Autoclave, and Others)  autoclave curing is projected to maintain its dominance in the market and by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and RoW)  North America is projected to remain the largest market during the forecast periodGo through the detailed TOC:OrGet a free sample:High-Temperature Prepreg Market: HighlightsThe global high-temperature prepreg market is projected to grow at an impressive rate over the next five years to reach US$ 538.0 million in 2024. High-temperature prepreg currently occupies less than 1% of the total prepreg market in terms of both value and volume but is expected to witness a higher growth as compared to the overall prepreg market in the foreseen future. Major prepreg manufacturers are increasingly focusing on high-temperature prepreg in order to gain the leading position in the segment.High temperature prepreg market forecastHigh-temperature prepregs are majorly used in the aerospace & defense and transportation industries. In aerospace & defense, high-temperature prepregs are mainly used in primary and secondary structures so that they can operate at temperatures reaching 350C or above. Increasing penetration of composites in the aerospace & defense and automotive industries is chiefly driving the demand for high-temperature prepregs. Furthermore, increasing use of high-temperature-resistant composites for the construction of structural applications coupled with increasing production rates of the next-generation fighter aircraft such as F-35, substantiates the growth of the market. Additionally, rising demand for fast-curing prepregs for mass-produced vehicles and longer wind blades, and superior performance benefits of high-temperature prepregs assure higher growth of high-temperature prepregs than the overall prepregs market in the coming five years.The aircraft industry is witnessing a gradual change towards the usage of a hotter aircraft engine in order to increase its propulsion rate and performance. This is creating a dire need for high-temperature prepregs in various aero engine applications. Hot air engine duct is one such example, where high-temperature prepregs are gaining a considerable share in order to fulfill the industry demand. A similar trend has been noticed in the automotive industry as well. Engines are getting hotter and the under-the-hood space is getting squeezed in order to make the vehicle more compact. High-temperature prepregs are expected to play a vital role in the automotive industry as well to meet the increasing requirement from various automotive OEMs and tier players.High temperature prepreg market segmentationBased on resin type, the market is segmented as BMI prepreg, cyanate ester prepreg, polyimide prepreg, thermoplastic prepregs, and other prepregs. BMI and polyimide prepreg will act as the growth engines of the market in the foreseen future. BMI resins are extensively used in tooling prepreg applications. Furthermore, it is also gaining traction in military aircraft and commercial aircraft in applications, such as engine, airframe, nacelle, thrust reverser, and duct applications.Polyimide resin is expected to maintain its leading position during the forecast period. Composite parts fabricated using polyimide prepreg can withstand continuous use up to 315C (600F) and intermittent use up to 480C (900F) and exhibit extremely high dimensional stability at elevated temperatures.Based on the end-use industry type, aerospace & defense is likely to remain the most dominant segment during the forecast period. Increasing production rates of high-temperature composite rich fighter aircraft such as F-35, is likely to give impetus to the demand for high-temperature prepregs in the industry. Lockheed Martins F-35 is the best-selling 5th generation fighter aircraft, which incorporates high-temperature composite prepregs substantially. About 35% of the F-35 aircrafts structural weight is composites and about 50% of which is made up of high-temperature prepregs.Based on the curing type, autoclave curing is projected to maintain its dominance in the market over the next five years. Aircraft primary structures, such as wings, fuselages, and empennage components, are mostly fabricated by using composite materials and cured through an autoclave process. High pressure of autoclave ensures good mechanical properties and helps reduce void contents. The out-of-autoclave and other segments are also likely to witness healthy growth rates in the market during the forecast period.In terms of region, North America is projected to remain the largest market during the forecast period, driven by the presence of leading aircraft OEMs, aeroengine manufacturers, tier players, prepreg manufacturers, and raw material suppliers. The USA is the growth engine of the regions market. Lockheed Martin has opened a new manufacturing facility to produce its high-temperature composite rich F-35 aircraft in Pinellas Park, Florida, the USA, to raise the existing production rate. There is a total un-filled order of more than 2,691 F-35 aircraft from 12 countries out of which the USAs inventory objective is 2,456 F-35 aircraft.Europe is projected to remain the second largest market for high-temperature prepregs during the forecast period. Dassault Aviation, BAE Systems, and Airbus Group are some of the key OEMs in the region, which are driving the demand for high-temperature prepregs in the European market.The supply chain of this market comprises fiber manufacturers, resin manufacturers, prepreg machine suppliers, high-temperature prepreg manufacturers, tier players, OEMs, and airlines. The key high-temperature prepreg manufacturers include Solvay S.A., Koninklijke TenCate nv, Hexcel Corporation, Gurit Holding AG, Park Electrochemical Corporation, and Renegade Material Corporation. Development of low-cost high-temperature prepregs with ease of manufacturing process, improvement in performance, and forming strategic alliances are the key strategies adopted by the major players to gain a competitive edge in the 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 trend and forecast analysis Market segment trend and forecast Competitive landscape and dynamics: Market share, Product portfolio, New 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 Chemicals & Materials Industry:Stratview Research is a global market intelligence firm offering a wivde range of services including syndicated market reports, consulting, sourcing intelligence, and customer research.We have a strong experienced team of industry veterans and research analysts with a perfect blend of wisdom, knowledge and attitude. 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Opportunities in the Indian Aerospace Composites Market in Aerospace industry is likely to reach a value of US$ 302.5 million in 2023.  Stratview Research Market Report

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The research studies Opportunities in the Indian Aerospace Composites Market in the trend period of 2012 to 2017 and forecasted period of 2018 to 2023 under given segments - by Opportunity Type (Export Opportunities and Indigenous Opportunities), by Aircraft Type (Civil Aviation, Military Aviation, and Space), by Resin Type (Epoxy Composites, Phenolic Composites, and Others), by Fiber Type (Carbon Fiber Composites, Glass Fiber Composites, and Aramid Fiber Composites), by Application Type (Exterior and Interior), and by Process Type (Hand Layup and Others), Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2018-2023.The study finds  Carbon fiber composites are likely to remain the most dominant and fastest-growing fiber type segment of the market during the forecast period. 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. 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. Civil aviation and military aviation are likely to remain the growth engines of the market in the foreseeable future.Click here to read the detailed description:Go through the TOC:Indian Aerospace Composites Market: HighlightsThe 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 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 revenue pocket 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 input to the entire value chain of BMI Prepreg. The key features of the report are - Market structure: Overview, industry life cycle analysis, supply chain analysis Market environment analysis: Growth drivers and constraints, Porters five forces analysis, SWOT analysis Market trend and forecast analysis Market segment trend and forecast Competitive landscape and dynamics: Market share, product portfolio, product launches, etc. Attractive market segments and associated growth opportunities Emerging trends Strategic growth opportunities for the existing and new players Key success factors.Stratview follows a rigorous process for conducting business research from primary and secondary sources to understand the entire market ecosystem. It has several high value market reports in the Aerospace & defence industry. Please refer to the following link to browse through the reports:Click 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
SD-WAN Market in Managed services to witness 65% CAGR between 2019 to 2025 | Global Players are Aryaka Networks, Barracuda, Cisco, Citrix, Huawei Technologies, Oracle, VMware, ZTE Corporation, Silver Peak, Infovista

SD-WAN Market

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SD-WAN Market in managed services is expected to exhibit lucrative growth from 2019 to 2025. As more enterprises outsource the implementation activities of their respective WAN infrastructures to prominent managed service providers, SD-WAN market is expected to accrue quite some returns from managed services. Indeed, the demand for these services is known to be particularly high in the United States. Apart from reducing the complexities that are associated with in-house WAN deployment, managed services also enable enterprises to significantly lessen their operational costs by outsourcing a sizable number of the network functions to third-party service providers.Request for a sample of this research report @This sector, in the years to come, is anticipated will become even more complex with further diversification, deregulation, consolidation and globalization of the financial industry. Irrefutably, this complexity in the BSFI industry can be effectively addressed only by deploying SD-WAN solutions, which will augment the SD-WAN market share from BFSI applications in the coming years. Of late, the modern banking industry is also remnant of extensive diversification, as is observed by the penetration of some select banks in the domains of core investments, security underwriting, insurance, and portfolio management. With banks and other financial institutions widening their service portfolios, working to evolve as vital entities in the global business landscape, SD-WAN market size from BFSI applications is expected to surge massively, given the humongous demand for these solutions to reduce complexity and costs.Company profiled in this report based on Business overview, Financial data, Product landscape, Strategic outlook & SWOT analysis:1. Aryaka Networks2. Barracuda3. Cisco4. Citrix5. Huawei Technologies6. Oracle7. VMware8. ZTE Corporation9. Silver Peak10. InfovistaWhile IoT solutions are experiencing accelerated adoption across a plethora of industrial sectors, the adoption rate is significantly more prominent in the global manufacturing domain. This is primarily due to the wide use of different sensors & smart devices that help conduct the day-to-day operations at different manufacturing facilities. However, manufacturing firms also require solutions that facilitate unprecedented network visibility for the effective management of these endpoints, which would be driving SD-WAN adoption and fueling the industry growth further.Make an inquiry for buying this report @The penetration of smart IoT devices in varied industry verticals, including retail and consumer goods, telecom, manufacturing, and healthcare has substantially increased security risks and network complexities. SD-WAN solutions play a vital role in this context, given that they help improve network visibility for the management of connected devices for reducing security risks, and address the complexities of the IoT infrastructure.The prevailing AI-enabled SD-WAN solutions would also boost the demand for SD-WAN as machine learning algorithms are broadly utilized for WAN optimization. This would further enable network administrators to analyze WAN traffic and re-route the same, automatically, for the selected connection. The capability of SD-WAN has thus proved useful across a spate of verticals, expanding the application scope of the global SD-WAN market.Moreover, SD-WAN also enables manufacturers to prioritize network traffic & simplify the management of the network to ensure that the applications that are business-critical obtain the connection they require for their timely operation. Furthermore, as the implementation of communication technologies & IoT devices continues to rise throughout the manufacturing industry, the demand for solutions that support proper connectivity throughout the manufacturing facilities, would also depict an increase. Estimates claim that the global SD-WAN market is expected to witness a highly commendable CAGR of 60% over 2019-2025.SD-WAN solutions also provide the companies with improved network visibility, and help in reducing network complexities of managing dynamic workloads. By utilizing SD-WAN solutions, organizations can benefit from cost reduction and secure connections, which in turn will propel the commercialization landscape of SD-WAN market in the years to come.Browse key industry insights spread across 300 pages with 362 market data tables & 31 figures & charts from the report, SD-WAN Market in detail along with the table of contents:Aided by a robust application spectrum and the ubiquitous trend of IoT, the global SD-WAN market is slated to accumulate significant momentum over the forthcoming years. In fact, according to a research report by Global Market Insights, Inc., it is estimated that the global SD-WAN market size would be surpassing the $17 billion renumeration mark by 2025.The SD-WAN market has lately been growing at a significant pace, characterized by the robust adoption of these solutions across a spate of industry verticals, given their ability to help organizations regarding their legacy infrastructure maintenance. The traditional infrastructure of WAN is known to rely extensively on costly hardware appliances for providing connectivity in remote locations. However, organizations have now been able to reduce those expenses by deploying SD-WAN solutions. Moreover, the solutions also assist enterprises in directly connecting remote users and devices to the cloud and ensuring secure connections.Considering the exponential adoption rate of SD-WAN solutions across the industrial sector, it comes as no surprise that the SD-WAN market has been touted to crop up to be one of the most lucrative investment grounds over the forthcoming years. A majority of SD-WAN adoptions across different enterprises are driven by the need of unburdening the organizations of their expensive legacy WAN infrastructures, which heavily rely upon expensive network hardware appliances to facilitate connectivity to numerous remote locations, and considerably reduce these expenses for the companies.Browse Related Reports:About Global Market InsightsGlobal Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact UsArun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog:
Papua New Guinea Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband Market 2019-2030, Upcoming Trends, Challenges and Industry Key Players  Kumul Telikom; (Telikom PNG, PNG DataCo, Bmobile (Vodafone) and Digicel

Papua New Guinea Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband Market 2019-2030

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WiseGuyReports.com Papua New Guinea - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband - Statistics and Analyses report has been added to its Research Database.Scope of the Report:Papua New Guinea would benefit from improved telecoms connectivityWith fixed teledensity having seen little change over the past two decades, progress in PNGs telecommunications has come primarily from mobile networks, where accessibility has expanded from less than 3% population coverage in 2006 to more than 89% today with a combination of 2G, 3G and 4G LTE networks on offer depending on location. 2G still exists in many rural and remote areas, with 3G and 4G LTE centred more on urban areas.Network deployment costs are high in PNG due to the relatively low subscriber base, the impervious terrain, and the high proportion of the population living in rural areas. As a result, fixed telecom infrastructure is almost non-existent outside urban centres, leaving most of the population un-serviced. The existing submarine cable infrastructure is also no longer adequate and Internet services are expensive and slow.By bridging the digital divide between the rural and urban areas, PNG would reap both economic and social benefits.Internet access is expected to improve with the 2018 build-out of a new submarine cable known as the Coral Sea Cable System which will link PNG to the Solomon Islands, with a connecting cable to the Australian (Sydney) landing station. It will provide increased capacity and reliability as well reduce Internet costs for consumers.Free Sample Report @In addition, a MoU was established between Australia and APEC partners in November 2018 which will see the expansion of PNGs Internet backbone.Key developments:In 2018 testing of the Kacific-1 satellite began with a planned launch for 2019.International attention was focused on Papua New Guinea recently when it hosted the 2018 APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit.The government is currently introducing its national strategy: Vision 2050 which is hoped will further address long-term infrastructure requirements; improve general living conditions and maintain economic stability. Papua New Guinea is also being guided by its medium-term plan, The Papua New Guinea Development Strategic Plan.A significant pricing development occurred in Papua New Guinea in September 2018 when the Communication Minister rejected a Retail Service Determination (RSD) recommendation, due to concerns over its social and economic impact.The Coral Sea Cable System is under development.Companies mentioned in this report include:Kumul Telikom; (Telikom PNG, PNG DataCo, Bmobile (Vodafone) and Digicel.Leave a Query @Major Key Points in Table of Content:Key statisticsCountry overviewTelecommunications marketMarket analysisOther key considerationsTelecom sector development targets for 2030Regulatory environmentHistorical overviewRegulatory authorityIndependent Public Business Corporation (IPBC)Telecom sectorliberalisation InterconnectionMobile Termination Rates (MTR)Universal Services Access SIM registration MNP Retail service determination (RSD) Fixed network operators Kumul Telikom Holdings Company Limited Telikom PNG PNG DataCo Telecommunications infrastructure National telecom network National Transmission Network (NTN) International infrastructure Satellite Submarine cables Broadband market Introduction and statistical overview Internet Exchange Point (IXP) Digital media Video streaming/television Major players HiTRON Digicel Play Click TV Mobile market Market analysis Mobile statistics Mobile broadband Mobile infrastructure 3G 4G / LTE Major mobile operators Digicel Kumul Telikom (Bmobile/ Vodafone) Mobile content and applications M-banking and m-payments Related reportsList of TablesContinued...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: Sales@Wiseguyreports.Com Ph: +1-646-845-9349 (Us) Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (Uk)
Medical Biosensors Market growth prospects 2018-2028 : Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., ACON Laboratories, Inc., World Precision Instruments, Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Inc

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Global Medical Biosensors Market: OverviewBiosensors have developed as the most potential diagnostic devices utilized for the identification of an analyte with the assistance of a physiochemical identifier. Albeit customary research center procedures can yield exact estimations, these are amazingly tedious, perplexing, costly, and require pre-treatment of the natural example. Biosensor-based medical gadgets offer swift, on location and constant checking without the requirement preparing samples.Based on technology, the medical biosensors market has been segmented into electrochemical, optical, thermal, piezoelectric and nanmomechanical medical biosensors. Based on applications, the medical biosensors market has been segmented into cardiac care, home diagnostics, pain management, drug discovery, and genomics.This report provides in-depth analysis of the medical biosensors market, focusing on the market opportunities and possible restraints, along with the latest trends driving the market. The report segments the global medical biosensors market based on its application and geography.Order Brochure for more detailed information @Global Medical Biosensors Market: Trends & OpportunitiesWearable biosensors demonstrate promising development over the forthcoming years. Rising ubiquity of diabetes and cardiovascular illnesses alongside interest for moment diagnostics comprehensively is producing most share in the market. Other key factor driving the development incorporate improvement of nanotechnology-based medical biosensors, appeal for purpose of-care gadgets, and open subsidizing for advancement of genomics and proteomics. Furthermore, expanding populace with chronic ailments and dispatch of new medical biosensors in the optical and electrochemical technology segment is fuelling the growth of the global medical biosensors market.Personalized drugs requires biosensor innovation for checking biomarkers. A biomarker is a pointer for a sickness before the occurrence of manifestations. Consequently, the likelihood of wide selection of customized medicines would build up an open door for the development of the medical biosensors market. This is a key trend that is expected to pick up traction and fuel the growth of the global medical biosensors market.Global Medical Biosensors Market: Market PotentialIn July 2018, Nanomedical Diagnostics launched new graphene biosensor named Super Amine-Immobilization Biosensor  SCOOH tok further accelerate the drug discovery development.The progression in the field of nanotechnology, has encouraged the development of cutting edge items like noninvasive biosensors in the market. This holds many potential opportunities for new and existing players in the market.Request TOC for Facts & Tables @Global Medical Biosensors Market: Regional OutlookNorth America held a significant share in the global medical biosensors market attributed to the rising technology advancement in the field of microelectronics and biotechnology. Increasing market penetration of electronic medical records, growing patient awareness levels, enhanced applications in the cardiac care and point of care segment is further going to spur revenue growth in the North America region.Increasing development of disposable biosensors by small or medium sized manufacturers in the Asia Pacific region and shifting interest towards home care is gaining traction in the global market.Global Medical Biosensors Market: Competitive LandscapeSmall companies are implementing progressive approaches along with new technology expansion in new medical biosensors models in medical diagnostics, drug discovery and research laboratories.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Key vendors operating in the global medical biosensors market are Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., ACON Laboratories, Inc., World Precision Instruments, Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Inc., DuPont Biosensor Materials, Pinnacle Technology, Inc., Silicon Kinetics, and Nova Biomedical Corporation.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050
Avocado Oil Market 2019 | Major Key Players: Sesajal, Yasin, Bella Vado, Chosen Foods, Grupo Industrial Batellero, La Tourangelle, Avoolio - Analysis & Forecast 2023

Avocado Oil Market - 2019

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Avocado Oil Market - 2019Wiseguyreports.Com Adds "Avocado Oil -Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecast To 2023" To Its Research DatabaseDescription :Avocado oil is edible oil pressed from the fruit of the avocado. As food oil, it is used as an ingredient in other dishes, and as cooking oil. It is also used for lubrication and in cosmetics, where it is valued for its supposed regenerative and moisturizing properties.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Avocado Oil in global market, especially in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, types and applications.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversSesajalYasinBella VadoChosen FoodsGrupo Industrial BatelleroLa TourangelleAvoolioAhuacatlan Avocado OilMt. Kenya Fresh AvocadosKevalaBio PlaneteHain Celestial GroupDa Gama Avocado OilCate de mi CorazonTron HermanosProteco OilsWestfaliaAconcagua Oil & ExtractOlivadoGrove Avocado OilAvoPureVillage PressKahangi EstateRain AfricaFree Sample Report The report segments the global Avocado Oil market as: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, coversRefined Avocado OilExtra Virgin Avocado OilCrude Avocado OilMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoEdible OilCosmetics & Skin Care ProductsOthersAvailable CustomizationsWith the given market data,Researcher offers customizations according to the companys specific needs. The following customization options are available for the report:Regional and country-level analysis of the Avocado Oil market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Click Here For Complete Report Major Key Points in Table of Content:1 Market Overview1.1 Avocado Oil Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Refined Avocado Oil1.2.2 Extra Virgin Avocado Oil1.2.3 Crude Avocado Oil1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Edible Oil1.3.2 Cosmetics & Skin Care Products1.3.3 Others1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Sesajal2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Sesajal Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Yasin2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Yasin Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Bella Vado2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Bella Vado Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Chosen Foods2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Chosen Foods Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Grupo Industrial Batellero2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Grupo Industrial Batellero Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 La Tourangelle2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 La Tourangelle Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Avoolio2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Avoolio Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Ahuacatlan Avocado Oil2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Ahuacatlan Avocado Oil Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Mt. Kenya Fresh Avocados2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 Mt. Kenya Fresh Avocados Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Kevala2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Avocado Oil Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Kevala Avocado Oil Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)13 Sales Channel, Distributors, Traders and Dealers13.1 Sales Channel13.1.1 Direct Marketing13.1.2 Indirect Marketing13.1.3 Marketing Channel Future Trend13.2 Distributors, Traders and Dealers14 Research Findings and Conclusion15 Appendix15.1 Methodology15.2 Data SourceList of Tables and FiguresContinued For Similar Reports @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.
AI in Games Global Market SWOT Analysis and Opportunities To 2023 | Key Players : Microsoft, Ubisoft, Tencent, EA, Vivendi, Nintendo, Sony, kashbet

AI in Games Market

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  AI in Games Global Market SWOT Analysis and Opportunities To 2023 | Key Players : Microsoft, Ubisoft, Tencent, EA, Vivendi, Nintendo, Sony, kashbet.AI in Games Industry 2019Description:-Artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals. In computer science AI research is defined as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving".Scope of the Report:This report studies the AI in Games 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 AI in Games market by product type and applications/end industries.The global AI in Games 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 Free 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 AI in Games.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 coversMicrosoftUbisoftTencentEAVivendiNintendoSonykashbetKonamiCapcomNeteaseMarket 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, coversType IType IIMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoVideo GamesMobile GamesOtherEnquiry About Report @Table Of Contents  Major Key Points1 AI in Games Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of AI in Games1.2 Classification of AI in Games by Types1.2.1 Global AI in Games Revenue Comparison by Types (2017-2023)1.2.2 Global AI in Games Revenue Market Share by Types in 20171.2.3 Type I1.2.4 Type II1.3 Global AI in Games Market by Application1.3.1 Global AI in Games Market Size and Market Share Comparison by Applications (2013-2023)1.3.2 Video Games1.3.3 Mobile Games1.3.4 Other1.4 Global AI in Games Market by Regions1.4.1 Global AI in Games Market Size (Million USD) Comparison by Regions (2013-2023)1.4.1 North America (USA, Canada and Mexico) AI in Games Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy) AI in Games Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia) AI in Games Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia) AI in Games Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.4.5 Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa) AI in Games Status and Prospect (2013-2023)1.5 Global Market Size of AI in Games (2013-2023)2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Microsoft2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 AI in Games Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Product A2.1.2.2 Product B2.1.3 Microsoft AI in Games Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Ubisoft2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 AI in Games Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Product A2.2.2.2 Product B2.2.3 Ubisoft AI in Games Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Tencent2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 AI in Games Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Product A2.3.2.2 Product B2.3.3 Tencent AI in Games Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 EA2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 AI in Games Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Product A2.4.2.2 Product B2.4.3 EA AI in Games Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Vivendi2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 AI in Games Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Product A2.5.2.2 Product B2.5.3 Vivendi AI in Games Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Nintendo2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 AI in Games Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Product A2.6.2.2 Product B2.6.3 Nintendo AI in Games Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Sony2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 AI in Games Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Product A2.7.2.2 Product B2.7.3 Sony AI in Games Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)ContinuedBuy 1-user PDF @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.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028.
Organ Transplant Immunosuppressant Drugs Market Aims Bigger with Technological Innovations

Organ Transplant Immunosuppressant Drugs Market

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Immunosuppressant is a drug used to suppress immune responses through various mechanisms. It is used in organ transplant to prevent the body from recognizing or attacking the transplanted organ. Immunosuppressant drugs can act by preventing and treating graft-versus-host disease and can minimize destruction of affected tissues in autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. There are two types of immunosuppressant drugs: induction drugs and maintenance drugs. Induction drugs are antirejection medicines that are used during the transplant, whereas maintenance drugs are antirejection medicines intended to use for long term.For In depth Information Get Sample Copy of this Report @Global Organ Transplant Immunosuppressant Drugs Market: DriversIncreasing number of patients that require organ transplants is expected to boost the organ transplant immunosuppressant drugs market. For instance, according to the U.S. Government Information on Organ Donation and Transplantation, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, in 2017, 34770 organ transplants were performed in the U.S. and over 114000 patients were in need for organ transplantation.Moreover, increasing approval for new products is expected to boost the organ transplant immunosuppressant drugs market growth. For instance, in April 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Thymoglobulin (anti-thymocyte globulin (rabbit) produced by Sanofi. Thymoglobulin is intended to use in conjunction with concomitant immunosuppression in the prophylaxis and prevention of acute rejection in patients receiving a kidney transplant.However, decreasing number of organ transplantation due to shortage of organs may hinder growth for the organ transplant immunosuppressant drugs market. For instance, according to National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), in 2015, only 30,973 organ transplants from 15,064 donors were performed in the U.S., while over 121,000 candidates were in need for organ transplantation.Global Organ Transplant Immunosuppressant Drugs Market: Regional AnalysisOn the basis of region, the global organ transplant immunosuppressant drugs market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa.Increasing cases of kidney disorders in the U.S. is expected to propel growth of the organ transplant immunosuppressant drugs market in North America. For instance, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), in 2016, 19,061 kidney transplants were performed in the U.S. compared to 17,878 kidney transplants in 2015. Therefore, the number of kidney transplants increased by 6.6% in 2016.Inquire Here Before Purchase of Research Report @Moreover, increasing number of pipeline studies to develop drugs for organ transplant rejection is expected to contribute to growth of the market. For instance, in November 2018, Temple University, in collaboration with Veloxis Pharmaceuticals, initiated phase 4 clinical trial for Tacrolimus Extended Release Oral Tablet to evaluate dosing strategies for de novo once-daily extended release tacrolimus (LCPT) in kidney transplant recipients. The study is expected to be completed by August 2019.Europe is expected to witness significant growth in the market over the forecast period. The growth is attributed to increasing product launch by key players in this region. For instance, in 2013, Roche Group launched two new highly-sensitive therapeutic drug monitoring tests for immunosuppressant medicines  tacrolimus and cyclosporine worldwide (except U.S.). Therapeutic monitoring for immunosuppressive drugs is a major part of transplant medicine and is crucial for maintaining the health of patients with organ transplantation for longer period.Key player operating in the organ transplant immunosuppressant drugs market include, Astellas Pharma, Genzyme Corporation, Accord Healthcare Ltd., Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Novartis AG, Mylan Laboratories, Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc., Belcher Pharmaceuticals LLC, Leo Pharma As, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Veloxis Pharmaceuticals Inc., Dr. Reddys Laboratories Ltd., Panacea Biotec Ltd., Strides Pharma Global Pte Ltd., and Hoffman La Roche.Global Organ Transplant Immunosuppressant Drugs Market TaxonomyBy Drug ClassCalcineurin InhibitorsAntiproliferative AgentsmTOR Inhibitor (Mammalian Target of Rapamycin)SteroidsImmunosuppressant AntibodiesBy Therapeutic Organ Transplant TypeHeart TransplantKidney TransplantLiver TransplantLung TransplantPancreas TransplantOthersBy Distribution ChannelHospital PharmaciesRetail PharmaciesOnline PharmaciesBy RegionNorth AmericaEuropeAsia PacificLatin AmericaMiddle EastAfricaAlso, Coherent Market Insights has a proprietary database of pipeline biologics and biosimilars, called PHASE-XS. This database provides analytical data in addition to the clinical information of ongoing trials for biologics and biosimilars. An amalgamation of more than 30 parameters, PHASE-XS helps biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to analyze the market trend, competition, and market potential. For more information or to access this database, kindly click on the below link or contact at sales@coherentmarketinsights.comAbout Coherent Market InsightsCoherent 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 UsMr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.com
Global Clinical Dental Market to witness significant growth by the end of 2025 :Top keyplayer are Kalmar Implant Dentistry, FMS Dental Hospitals, Dentim Europe, Tooth & Go Dental Clinic, HD Dental

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Global Clinical Dental Market valued approximately USD XX billion in 2017 is anticipated to grow with a healthy growth rate of more than XX% over the forecast period 2018-2025. The Clinical Dental Market is continuously growing across the world over the coming years. Escalating incidences of dental diseases, rising geriatric population and surging focus on oral hygiene considering both the male and female population, increasing disposable income of the individuals and participation of health reimbursements are the substantial drivers of the market across the globe. Moreover, escalating focus on oral hygiene and technological advancements are the factors which creating numerous opportunity in the market over the upcoming years. However, high costs and lack of technically skilled workforce are the key restraining factors of the market across the world.Request For Free Sample@The regional analysis of Global Clinical Dental Market is considered for the key regions such as Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America and Rest of the World. North America is the leading/significant region across the world in terms of market share owing to versatile inclination of the consumers towards dental treatment. Europe also estimate to grow in the global clinical dental market. Asia-Pacific is also anticipated to exhibit higher growth rate / CAGR over the forecast period 2018-2025 due to increasing popularity in the cosmetic dentistry.The major market player included in this report are: Kalmar Implant Dentistry FMS Dental Hospitals Dentim Europe Tooth & Go Dental Clinic HD DentalThe objective of the study is to define market sizes of different segments & countries in recent years and to forecast the values to the coming eight years. The report is designed to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative aspects of the industry within each of the regions and countries involved in the study. Furthermore, the report also caters the detailed information about the crucial aspects such as driving factors & challenges which will define the future growth of the market. Additionally, the report shall also incorporate available opportunities in micro markets for stakeholders to invest along with the detailed analysis of competitive landscape and product offerings of key players. The detailed segments and sub-segment of the market are explained below:Buy Now@By Type:Chain TypeOthersBy Application:For AdultFor ChildrenOthersBy Regions:North AmericaU.S.CanadaEuropeUKGermanyAsia PacificChinaIndiaJapanLatin AmericaBrazilMexicoRest of the WorldFurthermore, years considered for the study are as follows:Historical year  2015, 2016Base year  2017Forecast period  2018 to 2025Target Audience of the Global Clinical Dental Market in Market Study:Key Consulting Companies & AdvisorsLarge, medium-sized, and small enterprisesVenture capitalistsValue-Added Resellers (VARs)Third-party knowledge providersInvestment bankersInvestorsRead More@About Kenneth ResearchKenneth Research is a reselling agency providing market research solutions in different verticals such as Automotive and Transportation, Chemicals and Materials, Healthcare, Food & Beverage and Consumer Packaged Goods, Semiconductors, Electronics & ICT, Packaging, and Others. Our portfolio includes set of market research insights such as market sizing and market forecasting, market share analysis and key positioning of the players (manufacturers, deals and distributors, etc), understanding the competitive landscape and their business at a ground level and many more. Our research experts deliver the offerings efficiently and effectively within a stipulated time. The market study provided by Kenneth Research helps the Industry veterans/investors to think and to act wisely in their overall strategy formulationContact Us1412 Broadway,21st Floor Suite MA111,New York, NY 10018Name:DavidEmail:sales@kennethresearch.comPhone: +1 313 462 0609
Aircraft Connectors Market Development and Forecast Report 2019 |Amphenol Corporation, TE Connectivity, Carlisle Companies Inc.

Aircraft Connectors Market

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The global Aircraft Connectors market is valued at million US$ in 2018 is expected to reach million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of during 2019-2025.This report focuses on Aircraft Connectors volume and value at global level, regional level and company level. From a global perspective, this report represents overall Aircraft Connectors market size by analyzing historical data and future prospect. Regionally, this report focuses on several key regions: North America, Europe, China and Japan.Get PDF brochure of this report:At company level, this report focuses on the production capacity, ex-factory price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer covered in this report.The following manufacturers are covered:Amphenol CorporationTE ConnectivityCarlisle Companies Inc.Esterline CorporationBel Fuse Inc.Eaton CorporationITT CorporationSmiths Group PLCRadiallRosenberger GroupGet Complete Report in your Inbox within 24 hours ($2900):Segment by RegionsNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSegment by TypeBy ShapeCircularRectangularBy TypePCBFiber OpticHigh PowerHigh SpeedRF ConnectorsOthersSegment by ApplicationCommercialBusiness JetsMilitaryOthersClick to view Tables, Charts, Figures, TOC, and Companies Mentioned in the global GaN Devices market Report:About Us:QYResearch always pursuits high product quality with the belief that quality is the soul of business. Through years of effort and supports from the huge number of customer supports, QYResearch consulting group has accumulated creative design methods on many high-quality markets investigation and research team with rich experience. Today, QYResearch has become a brand of quality assurance in the consulting industry.Contact usQY Research, INC.17890 Castleton, Suite 218,Los Angeles, CA 91748USA: +1 6262 952 442India: +91 9766 478 224Emails: enquiry@qyresearch.comWeb:
Global Bone Wax Market 2023 - Prominent Key Players are Medtronic plc, Baxter International, Medline Industries Inc, ABYRX Inc., Bentley Healthcare Pvt. Ltd

Global Bone Wax Market

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Market Research Future has published a detailed study of Bone Wax Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.5% in 2023 by Size, Share, Statistics, Industry Insights.Market HighlightsBone wax is a mechanical hemostat used in surgeries to stop bleeding. Bone wax does not involve any pharmacological action. It is basically a sterilized mixture of beeswax and it consists of isopropyl palmitate, which is a wax softening agent and is used to stop bleeding from the bone surface. It is used in surgical procedures like orthopedics, thoracic surgery, neurosurgery, dental, oral, traumatology, and jaw surgery. The rising number of surgical procedures is a major booster which drives the global bone wax market. Orthopedic surgeries are increasing due to the rising prevalence of orthopedic diseases, especially osteoporosis and accidental fractures. Also, the rising usage of absorbable bone wax products and the growing geriatric population is also fueling the market growth. According to the Population Reference Bureau in 2016, the number of Americans aged 65 and older is projected to reach 98 million by 2060. On the other hand, stringent government rules for the approval of bone wax and the availability of alternatives for bone wax may hinder the growth of the market during the forecast period.Get a free sample @The global bone wax market is currently dominated by many market players. The prominent market players are engaged in new product launches and strategic partnerships to strengthen its market position. For instance, in February 2016, Wound Management Technologies announced the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its product HemaQuell, which is a resorbable bone wax.Key PlayersSome of the key players in the global bone wax market are ABYRX Inc., Wound Management Technologies Inc., Aesculap Inc., Ethicon Inc., Medtronic plc, Baxter International, Medline Industries Inc., Futura Surgicare Pvt. Ltd., CP Medical Corp., Bentley Healthcare Pvt. Ltd., WNDM Medical Inc., GPC Medical Ltd., and others.SegmentationThe global bone wax market has been segmented into product, material, application, and end user.The market, on the basis of product, has been segmented into absorbable bone wax and non-absorbable bone wax.The market, by material, has been segmented into natural bone wax and synthetic bone wax.The market, by applications, has been segmented into neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery, thoracic surgery, oral surgery, and others.The market, by end-users, has been segmented into hospitals, specialty clinics, ambulatory surgical centers, and others.Regional AnalysisThe market in the Americas is expected to dominate the global bone wax market during the forecast period owing to the increasing awareness among the people regarding bone wax and rising orthopedic surgeries. The European market is expected to be the second-largest due to government funding and support of the healthcare sector, increasing prevalence of bone diseases, and growing number of accident and injuries. According to the Arthritis Research UK in 2016, around 10 million people in the UK had a form of arthritis. Moreover, the market in Asia-Pacific region is anticipated to be the fastest-growing during the assessment period owing to the increasing awareness about surgical procedures requiring bone wax, increasing geriatric population, and rising healthcare expenditure. The market in the Middle East & Africa is likely to account for the smallest share of the global bone wax market due to the slowly growing healthcare infrastructure mainly in the African region.Access Complete @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 Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028
Global Pancreatic Cancer Market High trend Opportunities offers Future Business Growth 2023 with top key players - Celgene Corporation; F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG; Amgen, Inc.; Novartis AG

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The report further sheds light on significant challenges and latest growth strategies adopted by competitors who are a part of the competitive spectrum of this businessGlobal Pancreatic Cancer Market - OverviewPancreatic Cancer is an enlarged tumor caused by malignant cells in the tissues of the pancreas. The pancreas are organ situated behind the stomach. Pancreatic cancer can be caused by smoking, drinking alcohol, radiotherapy in the past, genetic factors, age, inflammation of the pancreas, obesity, and diabetes mellitus. According to Cancer Research UK, 7 out of 10 cases of chronic pancreatitis are due to heavy drinking habits.Feel Free To Ask Free Sample Report:Rising rates in tobacco consumption, increasing cigarette smokers are likely to enhance the growth of pancreatic cancer market. Additionally, rising prevalence of cancer, increase in intake of alcohol, growing obesity rates, and growing awareness pertaining to various treatment options available are propelling the market growth at a global level.However high costs, and the side effects related to the treatment of pancreatic cancer are likely to hamper the growth of pancreatic cancer market.KEY MARKET PLAYERSThere are various market players operating in the global pancreatic cancer market. PharmaCyte Biotech, Inc.; Clovis Oncology; Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.; Merck & Co., Inc.; and Pfizer, Inc.Celgene CorporationFounded in 1980, and headquartered at US, Celgene Corporation is a biopharmaceutical company aimed in the detection and development of treatments for various cancers and inflammatory diseases. Celgene Corporation has its presence all over the world. The firm has focused on various inorganic and organic growth strategies to enhance its services and increase its patient base. For instance in the year 2015, Celgene Corporation received approval from European Commission (EC) for ABRAXANE, a nanotechnology therapy for the treatment of metastatic pancreatic cancer.The firm has been focusing on improving lives of patients with pancreatic cancer. For instance in 2015, Celgene Corporation invested 30% of its revenue on research and development to produce advanced technologies to support patients with pancreatic cancer. By this approval and high research and development expenditure, the firm aims to focus on patient needs and increase its customer base.Novartis AGFounded in 1895, and headquartered in Switzerland, Novartis AG is engaged in the manufacture and development of a wide range of healthcare products. In 2016, Novartis and Pfizer collaborated to form a study on tumors driven by mutations in a gene called KRAS that causes cancer. Additionally, in 2017 Novartis and Perthera partnered to support clinical trials for lung cancer patients. This collaboration and partnership enables the firm to widen its foothold in various geographies.Browse full report@Regional Analysis:Geographically, the pancreatic cancer market is segmented into four key regions: the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.The Americas is further segmented into North America and South America. And North America is segmented into the U.S. and Canada. Globally, the U.S. is the largest market for pancreatic cancer owing to rising prevalence of cancer, increasing consumption of alcohol, increase in per capita R&D spending, along with rise in demand for new and advanced products and techniques.Asia pacific region is expected to be fastest growing region in pancreatic cancer market owing to its growing population and eventually growing patient population. Additionally, increasing healthcare expenditure and growing demand for newer and advanced technologies to treat the growing demand for increasing prevalence of cancer. For instance, US Census Bureau has estimated that by 2050, two third of the worlds older population will reside in Asia.Similarly increasing healthcare spending is likely to grow the demand for pancreatic cancer market. Similarly, according to CMS (Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services) U.S. health care spending increased 4.3 percent to reach USD 3.3 trillion per person in 2016.For instance, according to National cancer institute, in 2016, around 1,685,210 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in the U.S. Similarly, in 2016, U.S. spent over USD 125 billion for cancer care and is expected to spend over USD 156 billion by 2020. According to CDC, around one third of the population is affected with obesity.Europe accounts for the second largest market due to rising incidence of cancer, growth in research and development to produce advanced technologies, increasing funds, government support and increasing healthcare expenditure. For instance according to Eurostat, Germany spend over EUR 321 billion in the year 2014. Similarly, according to cancer research UK, there were around 9, 921 cases of cancer diagnosed in 2015. This high incidence of cancer is likely to enhance the growth of pancreatic cancer market.On the other hand, the Middle East & Africa is expected to witness limited growth due to limited access to the healthcare resources and rising healthcare cost. In the Middle East, the growth of the market is driven by increasing research and development for newer technologies and rising healthcare infrastructure.For More Enquiry @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Automotive Software Market Observer Huge Growth by Leading Key Players: Google, NVIDIA, Bosch, Apple, Microsoft, Luxoft, KPIT, Renesas Electronics, VECTOR Informatik, AImotive,

Automotive Software Market

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Global Automotive Software Market is expected to witness a CAGR of 18.25% in the forecast period in 2019-2026, resulting in a rise of its initial estimated value of USD 18.58 growing to a projected value of USD 71.03 billion by 2026. This rise in market value can be attributed to the innovations and advancementsFor In depth Information Get Free Sample Copy of this Report at :Market News: In June 2018, QNX Software Systems Limited announced that they had launched three new automotive software products that have been safety certified and will help overcome the challenge of complying with the ISO 26262 safety standard. The products, QNX Hypervisor for Safety, QNX Platform for ADAS 2.0, QNX OS for Safety 2.0. In January 2017, QNX Software Systems Limited announced the launch of their most advanced and secure automotive operating system, QNX Software Development Platform 7.0.Automotive Software Market Key Competitors:Renesas Electronics Corporation, Elektrobit, Vector Informatik GmbH, AImotive, Rightware, Wind River Systems Inc., Microsoft, NXP Semiconductors, Airbiquity Inc., Green Hills Software, LUXOFT, KPIT, Sigma Software, Google, NVIDIA Corporation, Robert Bosch GmbH, QNX Software Systems Limited, Autonet Mobile Inc., SafeRide.io and Apple Inc.Automotive Software Market Competitive Analysis:Global automotive software market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of automotive software market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa.Market Definition:Automotive software can be defined as an operating system that is used for the interactions of the user and electronic devices available in the vehicles. With the advent of IoT and smart & connected vehicles, these software have seen their growth rate increased significantly, due to the requirement of an interactive solution between the sensors embedded on the vehicles and users of these vehicles.Speak To Industry Experts, Request For Details Report At:Market Drivers:1. Increased levels of demand for adoption of electronics in the vehicles requiring integration and operating systems for its usage2. Increased levels of connected vehicles due to the prevalence of IoTMarket Restraints:1. Absence of any set standard protocols for the development of products; this factor is expected to act as a restraint to the market growth2. Lack of knowledge and expertise in repairing and maintaining the automotive softwareTable of Contents:1 Scope of the Report2 Executive Summary3 Global Automotive Software Market by Players4 Automotive Software Market by Regions5 Americas6 APAC7 Europe8 Middle East & Africa9 Market Drivers, Challenges and Trends10 Marketing, Distributors and Customer11 Global Automotive Software Market Forecast12 Key Players Analysis Research, Findings and ConclusionToc continued!Report Content 220 Tables And 60 Figures| Get Full TOC Free @Automotive Software Market Segmentation:By Application:- Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) & Safety Systems, Infotainment Systems, Telematics Systems, Body Control & Comfort Systems, Communication Systems, Powertrain Systems,By Vehicle Type:-Passenger Vehicles:- A-Segment, B-Segment, C-Segment, D-Segment, E-Segment, F-Segment,Commercial Vehicles:- Light Commercial Vehicles, Heavy Commercial Vehicles,By Electric Vehicle:- Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV), Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV), Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV),By Geography:- North America South America Europe Asia-Pacific Middle East & AfricaMake Enquiry Before Buying The Report:About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com
Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market 2019 Global Analysis By Key Players  Intertek Group, SGS, Bureau Veritas, TUV-SUD, QIMA

Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market

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Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market 2019Wiseguyreports.Com adds Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2025 To Its Research Database.Report Details:This report provides in depth study of Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.This report studies the Testing, Inspection, and Certification TIC for Apparel/Footwear/Handbags Industries market; it is conducted to ensure quality & safety of textiles.In 2017, the global Testing, Inspection, and Certification TIC for Apparel/Footwear/Handbags Industries market size was 4851.3 million USD and it is expected to reach 7054.1 million USD by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of 4.8% during 2017-2025.Increasing export of Apparel/Footwear/Handbags Industries from developing regions and growth of the technical Apparel/Footwear/Handbags Industries market are some of the factors driving the testing, inspection, and certification (TIC) market. Small to medium sized TIC companies face challenges in terms of receiving accreditation as it requires heavy investment.In 2018, the global Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) market size was 5090 million US$ and it is expected to reach 7020 million US$ by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of 4.7% during 2019-2025.This report focuses on the global Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) status, future forecast, growth opportunity, key market and key players. The study objectives are to present the Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) development in United States, Europe and China.The key players covered in this studyIntertek GroupSGSBureau VeritasTUV-SUDQIMAEurofins ScientificTUV RheinlandHohensteinSTCTestexRequest a Sample Report @Market segment by Type, the product can be split intoChemical TestingPerformance TestingFlammability TestingPackaging TestingOtherMarket segment by Application, split intoApparel IndustryFootwear IndustryHandbags IndustryMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaCentral & South AmericaKey StakeholdersTesting, Inspection and Certification (TIC) ManufacturersTesting, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Distributors/Traders/WholesalersTesting, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Complete Report Details@Major Key Points in Table of Content:1 Report Overview1.1 Study Scope1.2 Key Market Segments1.3 Players Covered1.4 Market Analysis by Type1.4.1 Global Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market Size Growth Rate by Type (2014-2025)1.4.2 Chemical Testing1.4.3 Performance Testing1.4.4 Flammability Testing1.4.5 Packaging Testing1.4.6 Other1.5 Market by Application1.5.1 Global Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market Share by Application (2014-2025)1.5.2 Apparel Industry1.5.3 Footwear Industry1.5.4 Handbags Industry1.6 Study Objectives1.7 Years Considered2 Global Growth Trends2.1 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market Size2.2 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Growth Trends by Regions2.2.1 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market Size by Regions (2014-2025)2.2.2 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Market Share by Regions (2014-2019)2.3 Industry Trends2.3.1 Market Top Trends2.3.2 Market Drivers2.3.3 Market Opportunities.12 International Players Profiles12.1 Intertek Group12.1.1 Intertek Group Company Details12.1.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.1.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.1.4 Intertek Group Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.1.5 Intertek Group Recent Development12.2 SGS12.2.1 SGS Company Details12.2.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.2.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.2.4 SGS Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.2.5 SGS Recent Development12.3 Bureau Veritas12.3.1 Bureau Veritas Company Details12.3.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.3.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.3.4 Bureau Veritas Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.3.5 Bureau Veritas Recent Development12.4 TUV-SUD12.4.1 TUV-SUD Company Details12.4.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.4.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.4.4 TUV-SUD Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.4.5 TUV-SUD Recent Development12.5 QIMA12.5.1 QIMA Company Details12.5.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.5.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.5.4 QIMA Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.5.5 QIMA Recent Development12.6 Eurofins Scientific12.6.1 Eurofins Scientific Company Details12.6.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.6.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.6.4 Eurofins Scientific Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.6.5 Eurofins Scientific Recent Development12.7 TUV Rheinland12.7.1 TUV Rheinland Company Details12.7.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.7.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.7.4 TUV Rheinland Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.7.5 TUV Rheinland Recent Development12.8 Hohenstein12.8.1 Hohenstein Company Details12.8.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.8.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.8.4 Hohenstein Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.8.5 Hohenstein Recent Development12.9 STC12.9.1 STC Company Details12.9.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.9.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.9.4 STC Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.9.5 STC Recent Development12.10 Testex12.10.1 Testex Company Details12.10.2 Company Description and Business Overview12.10.3 Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Introduction12.10.4 Testex Revenue in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) Business (2014-2019)12.10.5 Testex Recent DevelopmentContinued.Contact Us:NORAH TRENTPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Sales@Wiseguyreports.ComPh: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRESS:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India
Key Insights of Global Bone Wax Market Covering Prime Factors and Competitive Outlook till 2023 | ABYRX, Covidien, Ethicon, Futura Surgicare, Bentley Healthcare

Bone Wax Market

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BusinessIndustryReports have new report on Global Bone Wax Market 2019-2023. The report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends. The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.This Report covers the Major Players data, including: shipment, revenue, gross profit, interview record, business distribution etc., these data help the consumer know about the competitors better. This report also covers all the regions and countries of the world, which shows a regional development status, including market size.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Bone wax is a sterile mixture of beeswax that includes a wax-softening agent, such as isopropyl palmitate, used to stop bleeding from bone surfaces. Bone wax is used for mechanical hemostasis in bones during surgical procedures, such as orthopedics, thoracic surgery, neurosurgery, dental, traumatology, and oral and jaw surgery. Increase in number of surgical procedures is a major factor boosting the demand for the bone wax products. The number of surgical procedures has been rising since the past few years.Bone wax can achieve local hemostasis of bone by acting as a mechanical barrier. In addition, the bone wax is used for the mechanical hemostasis in bones in thoracic surgery, neurosurgery, orthopedics and traumatology, dental, oral and jaw surgery. The factors such as increasing number of surgical procedures mainly due to orthopedic diseases and accidental fracture cases, rising geriatric population, and growing use of absorbable bone wax products are expected to fuel the growth of the marketKey Players:1 ABYRX, INC.2 Covidien plc. (Medtronic plc.)3 Ethicon, Inc. (Johnson & Johnson)4 B. Braun Melsungen AG5 Futura Surgicare Pvt Ltd.6 Surgical Specialties Corporation7 Bentley Healthcare Pvt. Ltd. and more..............Purchase this report online with 125 Pages, List of Tables & Figures and in-depth Table of Contents on Global Bone Wax Market Outlook 2019-2023 @The report covers the Segments and sub-segments of the Global Bone Wax Market by:Regions:1 North America Country (United States, Canada)2 Asia Country (China, Japan, India, Korea)3 Europe Country (Germany, UK, France, Italy)Product Types:1 Absorbable Bone Wax2 Non-absorbable Bone WaxIndustry Segmentation:1 Specialty Clinics2 Hospitals3 Ambulatory Surgical CentersGrab Your Report at an Impressive Discount @Key questions answered in the report include:1 What are the key factors driving the Bone Wax market?2 What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the global Bone Wax market?3 What are the challenges to Bone Wax market growth?4 Who are the key vendors in the global Bone Wax market?5 What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global Bone Wax market?6 What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the global Bone Wax market?Table of Content:1 Industry Overview of Bone Wax2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Bone Wax3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Bone Wax4 Global Bone Wax Overall Market Overview5 Bone Wax Regional Market Analysis6 Global 2013-2018E Bone Wax Segment Market Analysis (by Type)7 Global 2013-2018E Bone Wax Segment Market Analysis (by Application)8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Bone Wax9 Development Trend of Analysis of Bone Wax Market10 Bone Wax Marketing Type Analysis11 Consumers Analysis of Bone Wax12 Conclusion of the Global Bone Wax Market Professional Survey Report 2017About us:BusinessindustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Industry ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940
Article 13: fighting the EU meme ban with memes

The EU is close to passing a copyright reform law to update its copyright legislation for the digital age. The final vote on the Copyright Directive is expected to take place in the European Parliament plenary between 25 and 28 March.In many respects, the reforms are necessary to protect the rights of content creators and artists. However, two poorly formulated articles are threatening to have a damaging effect on the freedom of expression online. Article 13 is the key piece for concerns in the proposal. Most importantly, the effect of the new Copyright Directive will not be limited to the EU, which is large enough to affect many websites around the world, says Ruby Gonzalez, Head of Communication at NordVPN.As the decision day in the EU Parliament is approaching, NordVPN joins millions of Europeans in opposing the new law. Since memes are one of the most popular forms of expression, which Article 13 puts at risk, NordVPN invites all internet users to express their opposition through memes. NordVPN promises to award the authors of the most popular entries with free 3-year subscriptions to its service.The EU Parliament will vote on laws that have the potential to chill free speech and creativity on the internet around the world. This is the last chance for the public to express how important the free and open internet is to us, says Ruby Gonzalez, Head of Communication at NordVPN. We support online freedom of speech and expression, and we oppose online censorship. The law should protect the rights of authors, but that should be accomplished without damaging free speech.How to oppose Article 13 with memes:Create a meme about Article 13, expressing how it might affect your life or why youre opposed to it;Upload it to Twitter or Reddit. On Twitter, use the hashtag #NotMyEUdirective and tag @NordVPN. On Reddit, upload it to the sticky thread on the NordVPN subreddit.On March 26th 12:00 PM GMT, 20 best meme authors (10 from Reddit and Twitter each) will be awarded free 3-year NordVPN subscriptions.Public outcry around Article 13 reached a historical peak with almost 5 million Europeans signing a petition against it. Thousands have called, tweeted, and emailed their Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Additionally, several websites are planning to shut down on 21 March  the Internet blackout day. On 23 March, protests will be held all around Europe, with thousands expected to join.NordVPN is a trusted online security solution, used by over 8 million internet users worldwide. It offers double VPN encryption, ad blocking & Onion Over VPN. The product is very user friendly, offers one of the best prices on the market, has over 5,000 servers worldwide and is P2P friendly. For more information: nordvpn.com.NordVPN is a trusted online security solution, used by over 8 million internet users worldwide. It offers double VPN encryption, ad blocking & Onion Over VPN. The product is very user friendly, offers one of the best prices on the market, has over 5,000 servers worldwide and is P2P friendly. For more information: nordvpn.com.NordVPNVia EspanaDelta Bank BuildingPanama City, PanamaLaura TyrellPublic Relations Managerlaura@nordvpnmedia.com
Interior Design Market 2019 Global Analysis By Key Players  Gensler, Gold Mantis, HOK, HBA, Jacobs, Stantecare, IA Interior Architects

Interior Design Market

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Interior Design Market 2019Wiseguyreports.Com adds Interior Design Market Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2025 To Its Research Database.Report Details:This report provides in depth study of Interior Design Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Interior Design Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.Global Interior Design Market: OverviewThe global Interior Design market is estimated to grow at a significant rate, during the forecast period 2018-2025. Interior designers determine the look and feel of inside spaces. They select paint colors, pick appropriate furnishings and influence room layout. Interior design is done to obtain a pleasant and delightful surrounding. The particular designing may also incorporate the exterior areas of the place. Interior design is a comprehensive line of work that involves a wide range of activities like abstract development, space planning, site checking, programming, research, construction administration, and implementation of the design. Increment in global economy, changes in social environment and changes in standard of living among millennials are vital factors expected to encourage the growth of the global Interior Design market in the upcoming period.Interior Design Occurrence- Type analysisOn the basis of Product- type, the Interior Design market has been segmented residential Commercial and Others. Residential dominates the global Interior Design owing to the growth in the income & purchasing power of the consumers and the homeownership rates.Interior Design Application Type analysisOn the basis of application, the global Interior Design market has been segmented into newly decorated and repeated decorated. By application type, Newly decorated will lead market due increment in urbanization and changes in standard of living among consumers.On the basis of region, the Interior Design market has been segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and Latin America. North America dominates the world Interior Design market over the forecast period owing to demographics shifts, working together different religions and different cultures of people, Emerging technologies in interior design. Moreover, growth of the interior design market include technological advancements, rise in the innovations, augmentation in the demand, increased awareness and curiosity among the masses, change in the lifestyle, rise in the standard of living, and rise in the disposable income of the population. Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest growing market throughout the forecast period due to rise in the standard of living, rising taste towards home decor, and augmentation in the population.Request a Sample Report @Global Interior Design Market Competitive LandscapeCompanies, such as, Gensler, Gold Mantis, HOK, HBA, Perkins+Will,, Jacobs, Stantecare , IA Interior Architects, Callison, Nelson, Leo A Daly, SOM, HKS, DB & B, Cannon Design, NBBJ, Perkins Eastman, CCD, AECOM Technology, Wilson Associates, M Moser Associates, SmithGroup , Areen Design Services are the key players in providing Interior Design services. In terms of product offerings, Gensler, Gold Mantis, HOK, HBA, Perkins+Will, Jacobs, Stantec are the major players in the market.Scope of the ReportBy Product Typeu Residentialu Commercialu OthersBy Applicationu Newly Decoratedu Repeated DecoratedIn addition, the report provides analysis of the Interior Design market with respect to the following geographic segments:u North Americao U.S.o Canadau Europeo Germanyo U.K.o Italyo Franceo Rest of Europeu Asia Pacific (APAC)o Chinao Indiao Japano Australiao South Koreao Indonesiao Rest of Asia Pacificu LATAMo Brazilo Argentinao Rest of Latin Americau MEAo Saudi Africao UAEo Egypto Rest of Middle-EastKey StakeholdersInterior Design ManufacturersInterior Design Distributors/Traders/WholesalersInterior Design Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Complete Report Details@Major Key Points in Table of Content:Research Frame work1.1. Research Objective1.2. Market Definition and Scope1.3. Market segmentationResearch methodology2.1. Qualitative Research2.1.1. Primary & Secondary Sources2.2. Quantitative Research2.2.1. Primary & Secondary Sources2.3. Breakdown of Primary Research Respondents, By Region2.3.1. Secondary Research2.3.2. Primary Research2.4. Breakdown of Primary Research Respondents, By Industry Participants2.5. Market Size Estimation2.6. Assumption for the Study2.7. Market Breakdown & Data TriangulationExecutive SummaryGlobal Interior Design Industry Insights4.1. Industry Value Chain analysis4.1.1. Vendor Matrix4.2. Raw Material Analysis4.3. Pricing Analysis4.4. Industry impact and Forces4.4.1. Growth Drivers4.4.2. Industry Challenges4.4.3. opportunities4.5. Technological Landscape4.6. Cost Structure Analysis4.7. Regulatory Framework4.8. Company market share analysis,20174.9. Growth potential analysis,20174.10. Strategic Outlook4.11. Porters analysis4.12. PESTEL analysisContinued.Contact Us:NORAH TRENTPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Sales@Wiseguyreports.ComPh: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRESS:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India
Radiotherapy Market Growth Factors and Global Leading Players are Varian Medical Systems, Elekta, Accuray, Brainlab, C. R. Bard, Inc., IsoRay Medical, Inc., Nordion, Inc., RaySearch Laboratories AB

Radiotherapy Market

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Global Radiotherapy Market, By Therapy (Beam Radiotherapy, Brachytherapy, Systemic Radiotherapy), By Product Type (External Beam Radiotherapy, Internal Radiotherapy Products, Radiotherapy Softwares, Systemic Radiotherapy), By Application (Prostrate Cancer, Breast Cancer, Lung Cancer, Spine Cancer, Liver Cancer, Brain Cancer, Others), Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East & Africa)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Request For Sample Report @Competitive Analysis: Global Radiotherapy MarketSome of the prominent participants operating in this market are globally Varian Medical Systems, Inc., Elekta AB, Accuray, Inc., CIVCO Medical Solutions, Brainlab AG, C. R. Bard, Inc., IsoRay Medical, Inc., Nordion, Inc., RaySearch Laboratories AB, PRECISIS AG, Mevion Medical Systems, Inc., Technicas Radiofiscas S.L., Hitachi, Ltd., Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, ProNova Solutions, LLC, ProTom International, Among othersRadiation therapy sole purpose is to treat tumors by targeting high beam of radiation on the affected region with minimal exposure to surrounding tissues. Modern radiotherapy uses high technology to try to achieve optimal local tumor control whilst minimizing treatment side effects to an acceptably low level. Aspects of the technology used for this goal include: computer systems for three-dimensional treatment planning and simulation, with accurate radiation dose deposition models and facilities for optimization of external radiation beam or brachytherapy source distribution; computer-controlled linear accelerators with dynamic beam collimation systems for external beam treatment or systems such as remote after loading for brachytherapy; and the use of radiation response models to characterize the treatment outcome and to enable the prediction of treatment outcomes for future patients treatments.Global Radiotherapy Market is expected to reach at a CAGR of 7.7% in the forecast period of 2018 to 2025.Opportunities in the Global Radiotherapy Market To strategically profile key players and comprehensively analyze their market position in terms of ranking and core competencies, and detail the competitive landscape for market leaders To describe and forecast the market, in terms of value, for various segments, by region Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East & Africa Comprehensive quantitative analysis of the industry is provided for the period of 2018-2025 to assist stakeholders to capitalize on the prevailing market opportunities. Extensive analysis of the key segments of the industry helps in understanding the trends in types of Radiotherapy Market across Global. To get a comprehensive overview of the Global Radiotherapy Market.Want Full Report? Enquire Here @Segmentation: Global Radiotherapy MarketGlobal radiotherapy market is segmented into three notable segments which are therapy type, product type and application.On the basis of therapy type, Beam Radiotherapy Brachytherapy Systemic RadiotherapyOn August 2016, Accuray announced the CE approval of Radixact Treatment Delivery System, Accuray Precision Treatment Planning System and iDMS Data Management System in Europe.On the basis of product type, External Beam Radiotherapy Internal Radiotherapy Products Radiotherapy Softwares Systemic RadiotherapyOn June 2016, Elekta announces that Elektas Leksell Gamma Knife Icon has been cleared for clinical use by both the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the United States. Icon is the worlds most precise and sophisticated system for radiosurgery treatment of certain brain tumors, vascular malformations and functional disorders.On the basis of application, Prostate Cancer Breast Cancer Lung Cancer Spine Cancer Liver Cancer Brain Cancer OthersOn Sptember 2016, Varian Medical Systems announced the launch of first of its kind 360 Oncology care management platform, the first software system designed to integrate and coordinate key elements of cancer care so patients and their cancer teams can collaborate on achieving the best outcomes.Download Detailed TOC @Table of Contents:1. INTRODUCTION2. MARKET SEGMENTATION3. MARKET OVERVIEW4. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY5. PREMIUM INSIGHTS6. GLOBAL RADIOTHERAPY MARKET, BY THERAPY TYPE7. GLOBAL RADIOTHERAPY MARKET, BY PRODUCT TYPE8. GLOBAL RADIOTHERAPY MARKET, BY INDICATION9. GLOBAL RADIOTHERAPY MARKET, BY GEOGRAPHY10. GLOBAL RADIOTHERAPY MARKET, COMPANY SHARE11. COMPANY PROFILES11.1. VARIAN MEDICAL SYSTEMS, INC.11.1.1. COMPANY OVERVIEW11.1.2. SWOT (STRENGTH, WEAKNESS, OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS)11.1.3. DRIVERS EXPLAINED11.1.3.1. DIVERSE PRODUCT PORTFOLIO:11.1.3.2. STRONG RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CAPABILITIES:11.1.4. WEAKNESSES EXPLAINED11.1.4.1. DEPENDENCE ON LIMITED NUMBER OF SUPPLIERS:11.1.5. OPPURTUNITIES EXPLAINED11.1.5.1. VARIAN COULD EXPAND ITS POSITION WITH IMAGING COMPONENTS BUSINESS SPIN-OFF:11.1.5.2. ACQUISITIONS LIKELY TO ENHANCE VARIANS ONCOLOGY AND IMAGING BUSINESSES:11.1.5.3. EXPANSION IN OPERATIONS IN THE U.S.:11.1.5.4. INCREASING INCIDENCE OF CANCER TO DRIVE GLOBAL RADIATION THERAPY EQUIPMENT MARKET:11.1.6. THREATS EXPLAINED11.1.6.1. INTENSE COMPETITION COULD AFFECT VARIANS MARKET SHARE AND RESULTS OF OPERATION:11.1.6.2. INCREASING MEDICAL COSTS IN CANCER TREATMENT AND CARE: 25911.1.7. REVENUE ANALYSIS11.1.8. PRODUCT PORTFOLIO11.1.9. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS11.1.10. DATA BRIDGE ANALYSIS11.2. ELEKTA AB11.2.1. COMPANY OVERVIEW11.2.2. REVENUE ANALYSIS11.2.3. PRODUCT PORTFOLIO11.2.4. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS11.2.5. DATA BRIDGE ANALYSIS11.3. NANOBIOTIX11.3.1. COMPANY OVERVIEW11.3.2. REVENUE ANALYSIS11.3.3. PRODUCT PORTFOLIO11.3.4. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS11.3.5. DATA BRIDGE ANALYSIS11.4. ACCURAY, INC.11.4.1. COMPANY OVERVIEW11.4.2. REVENUE ANALYSIS11.4.3. PRODUCT PORTFOLIO11.4.4. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS11.5. BRAINLAB AG11.6. ION BEAM APPLICATIONS SA11.7. MEVION MEDICAL SYSTEMS, INC.11.8. ISORAY MEDICAL, INC.11.9. NORDION (CANADA) INC.11.10. RAYSEARCH LABORATORIES AB11.11. PRECISIS AG12. RELATED REPORTSAbout 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.Data Bridge adepts in creating satisfied clients who reckon upon our services and rely on our hard work with certitude. We are content with our glorious 99.9 % client satisfying rate.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com
Steel Slag Market 2025 Global Analysis by Key Players - JFE MINERAL Co., LTD., Tata Steel, Shinko Slag Products Co., Ltd.

Steel Slag

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The Steel Slag Market 2019 Report provides critical data of Production, Supply, Sales, Demand, Market Status and Industry Development Trend by 2025. This Report is a Result of best research material, competitive landscape analysis that will help decision makers to excel based on futuristic chart.Request Sample Copy Of this Report @Steel Slag Market research report delivers a close watch on leading competitors with strategic analysis, micro and macro market trend and scenarios, pricing analysis and a holistic overview of the market situations in the forecast period.It is a professional and a detailed report focusing on primary and secondary drivers, market share, leading segments and geographical analysis. Further, key players, major collaborations, merger & acquisitions along with trending innovation and business policies are reviewed in the report. The report contains basic, secondary and advanced information pertaining to the Steel Slag Market global status and trend, market size, share, growth, trends analysis, segment and forecasts from 2019  2025.The scope of the report extends from market scenarios to comparative pricing between major players, cost and profit of the specified market regions. The numerical data is backed up by statistical tools such as SWOT analysis, BCG matrix, SCOT analysis, PESTLE analysis and so on. The statistics are represented in graphical format for a clear understanding on facts and figures.The generated report is firmly based on primary research, interviews with top executives, news sources and information insiders. Secondary research techniques are implemented for better understanding and clarity for data analysis.The report for Steel Slag Market analysis & forecast 2019- 2025 is segmented into Product Segment, Application Segment & Major players.For More Information on This Report, Please Visit @Steel Slag Market Segmentation covers:Region- wise Analysis: North America, Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Other regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)Major Players Reported Are:Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal CorporationJFE MINERAL Co., LTD.Tata SteelShinko Slag Products Co., Ltd.Product Segment Analysis:Blast Furnace SlagSteelmaking SlagOthersApplication Segment Analysis:Building and ConstructionRailwaysFertilizersRock WoolOthersRead More details Steel Slag Market Analysis and Forecast 2019- 2025 report helps the clients to take business decisions and to understand strategies of major players in the industry. The report also calls for market- driven results deriving feasibility studies for client needs. UpMarketResearch ensures qualified and verifiable aspects of market data operating in the real- time scenario. The analytical studies are conducted ensuring client needs with a thorough understanding of market capacities in the real- time scenario.Key Reasons to Purchase:- To gain insightful analyses of the market and have a comprehensive understanding of the Steel Slag Market and its commercial landscape.- Learn about the market strategies that are being adopted by your competitors and leading organizations.- To understand the future outlook and prospects for Steel Slag Market analysis and forecast 2019- 2025.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Avail Discount On this Report @Customization of the Report:Up Market Research provides free customization of reports as per your need. This report can be personalized to meet your requirements. Get in touch with our sales team, who will guarantee you to get a report that suits your necessities.About UpMarketResearch:The UpMarketResearch () is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well- defined  we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Contact Info:Name: Alex MathewsEmail: Alex@upmarketresearch.comOrganization: UpMarketResearchAddress: 500 East E Street, Ontario, CA 91764, United States.
As Per New Report, Global Hotel Design Market Growing Massively by 2026: Top Key Players- Marriott International, Hilton, Starwood Hotels & Resorts (Marriott), Hyatt Hotels, Four Seasons Holdings, Gettys Group, Rockwell Group

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Hotel Design includes hotel planning, drawing creation, design and development. The concept of Hotel Design is rooted in the tradition of hospitality for travelers dating back to ancient times and the development of various types of hotels in many cultures. There are many kinds of Hotel Designs in the world. Examples of Hotel Design are no-frills, which offers basic amenities at affordable rates, including guest palaces throughout Asia, America, UK. Another types like Country inns, hotel casino resorts, designer and art hotels, hotel-spa resorts, boutique hotels, the hotel offers a refuge, a monastery and an extra bedroom for rent in a typical home. Another type of capsule hotel is offered in Japan as an option for those who need basic necessities during their stay.The report, titled Global Hotel Design Market 2019 provides actionable insights that supplement the growth strategies of market players. This market research report provides growth estimates, forecasts, and an in-depth analysis of all key factors at play in the Global Hotel Design Market.Ask for Sample copy:Top Key Players Included in This Report: Gettys Group, HBA, Rockwell Group, Gensler, Wilson Associates, Leo A Daly, HKS, Pierre-Yves Rochon, ForrestPerkins | Perkins Eastman, Stonehill Taylor Architects, Daroff Design, Marriott International, Hilton, Starwood Hotels & Resorts (Marriott), Hyatt Hotels, Four Seasons Holdings, Shangri-La International Hotel Management, InterContinental Hotels Group, Mandarin Oriental International.Key Questions and Answers Covered in This Report: What will be the market size in 2026 and what will be the growth rate? What are the key market trends? What is driving the Global Hotel Design Market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the major suppliers of Global Hotel Design Market space? What are the key market trends that affect the growth of the Global Hotel Design Market? What are the market opportunities and threats that vendors face in the Global Hotel Design Market?In particular, the report focuses on the competitive landscape of the Global Hotel Design Market and dwells on the influential development policies and plans that will determine the markets trajectory in the forecast period. An analysis of the major players operating in the Hotel Design market is included in the report, segmenting and describing them on the parameters of manufacturing processes and business strategies, information related to product classification, and profit margins regarding the same. The cost dynamics of the Hotel Design market is also examined in detail and, associated to the comprehensive breakdown of the markets competitive landscape, provide a complete indulgent of pricing dynamics in the Hotel Design industry for the readers to understand clearly.Get Discount on this Report:The analytical tools such as investment return and feasibility analyses have also been employed in this research to determine the market attractiveness. The report evaluates the products available in the Global Hotel Design Market on the basis of the production volume, their pricing structure, and the revenue generated by them.The research report analyzes the market hierarchy carrying out a SWOT analysis of the key players operating on the Global Hotel Design 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.If You Have Any Query, Ask Our Experts:Overview of This Report: Global Hotel Design Market Overview Economic Impact on Industry Market Competition by Manufacturers Production, Revenue (Value) by Region Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type Market Analysis by Application Manufacturing Cost Analysis Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders Market Effect Factors Analysis Global Hotel Design Market ForecastAbout QYReports:We at, QYReports, a leading market research report published accommodate more than 4,000 celebrated clients worldwide putting them at advantage in todays competitive world with our understanding of research. Our list of customers includes prestigious Chinese companies, multinational companies, SMEs and private equity firms whom we have helped grow and sustain with our fact-based research. Our business study covers a market size of over 30 industries offering unfailing insights into the analysis to reimagine your business. We specialize in forecasts needed for investing in a new project, to revolutionize your business, to become more customer centric and improve the quality of output.Contact Us:QYReportsJones John(Sales Manager)+(1) 786-292-8164204, Professional Center,7950 NW 53rd Street, Miami, Florida 33166sales@qyreports.com
Flip Chip Technology Market will be Valued at 32.178 Billion USD by 2023 | Top Key Vendors - Amkor Technology, IBM, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Texas Instruments, Global Foundries US

Flip Chip Technology Market

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Marketprognosis.com Publish a New Market Research Report On Global Flip Chip Technology Market 2018 - 2023 which contains global key players survey information and forecast to 2023.Overview of the Global Flip Chip Technology Market:The Global Flip Chip Technology Market was valued at USD 22.683 Billion in 2017, and is expected to reach a value of USD 32.178 Billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 5.64%, over the forecast period (2018 - 2023).The regions considered in the scope of the report include North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.Get a Sample Copy of this Report @Introduced by IBM 30 years ago, flip chip is keeping up with the times and developing new bumping solutions to serve advanced technologies, such as 2.5D and 3D. Flip chip is used for traditional applications, such as laptops, desktops, CPU, GPU, chipsets, etc. The demand for flip chips is expected to rise in mobile and wireless consumer applications, and other high performance applications, such as networks, servers, and data centers. Flip chip market is mainly driven by the emerging internet of things: a network of physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other items that include embedded electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity along with its technological superiority over the traditional wire bond electrical connection makes it the exceptional alternative. The flip-chip market is highly technology-driven and manufacturers are mainly focusing on discovering new technologies for the bumping process, which, in turn, is increasing the demand for raw materials required for manufacturing. However, some of the major restraints associated with the flip chip industry include the huge initial investment required for setting up new manufacturing facility and less available options for customization.Nevertheless, growth in demand for sensors in smartphone industry and increase in application in personal electronic devices, such as personal computers and mobiles, opens new opportunities in the flip chip market. The demand of flip chip is also expected to increase in the coming years due to heavy investments in the research and development by key players, such as TSMC, Ltd, Amkor Technology, Inc., and IBM, which has led to constant improvements in chip quality.Purchase this report online with 109 Pages, Top Key Players Analysis and List of Tables & Figure @Growing economies in this region, such as India and China impact every industry, including semiconductors. The Asia-Pacific flip chip market is expected to grow at a rapid pace, due to rising proliferation of consumer electronics in this region. With the improving economic conditions, increasing disposable income, increasing number of youth population, and rising employment rate, the consumer electronic market is flourishing in this region. Chinas plans to focus on semiconductor sector as a part of 12th five-year plan and strong growth of Taiwans semiconductor and electronics industry will augment the market for Flip chip in this region. With rising internet penetration and various government initiatives, such as smart cities, smart grids and smart transportation, the IoT market is set to explode in this region over the next decade. This will create sufficient demand for the flip chip market.Major Key Players:1 Amkor Technology Inc.2 IBM Corporation3 Intel Corporation4 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited5 Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd6 Texas Instruments Inc.7 Global Foundries U.S. Inc.8 Stats ChipPAC Ltd and MoreAny Query? Ask to our Expert @What Information does this report contain?1 A detailed analysis of regulatory trends, drivers, industry pitfalls, challenges and growth opportunities for participants2 Which are the leading market products, applications & regions and how will they perform by 2023?3 What are the technologies & innovation trends, how will they evolve by 2023?4 Which companies lead the industry, how are they positioned in the market in terms of sustainability, competency, production capacity and strategic outlook?In the end, this report covers data and information on capacity and production overview, production, market share analysis, sales overview, supply, sales, and shortage, import, export and consumption as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin of Flip Chip Technology Market.Table of Contents:1 Introduction2 Research Methodology3 Executive Summary4 Key Inferences5 Market Overview6 Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities and Challenges Analysis (Droc)7 Market Segmentation8 Competitive Landscape9 Key Players10 Future Outlook of the MarketAbout us:We at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:ProgMark Pvt. Ltd.Thane  421501India.sales@marketprognosis.com+1 973 241 5193
The Unipiper  the Rose Citys unicycle-riding, bagpipe-playing embodiment of the Keep Portland Weird ethos  come this summer will add another feather to his Darth Vader cap: grand marshal of the 2019 Oregon Brewers Festival.

At times known as Portlander Brian Kidd, the Unipiper will lead the midday parade to open the 32nd annual festival on Wednesday, July 24. The two-mile procession, the longest to date for the spirited collection of costumed beer enthusiasts and brewery workers, will travel from Ecliptic Brewing in North Portland across the Broadway Bridge to Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

The festival undergoes a couple of changes for 2019. Previously a five-day festival, last year it switched to a four-day run from Thursday through Sunday. This year, it shifts forward a day, running from Wednesday through Saturday, July 24-27, with no Sunday option.

Festival organizers say the Unipiper has been a supporter of the festival for years, playing outside the gates and handing out tokens on his own dime as well as participating in the parade.

He is also a homebrewer, and he embodies the spirit of the festival, they said. Hes collaborated with breweries and had beers named after him, including The Unipiper Hazy IPA by Portland Brewing Co., the UnipIPA and the Uniporter by Rogue Ales.

This year the festival becomes a true Oregon event and will pour only products from in-state. The festival, one of the West Coasts most-popular and longest-running, will feature 101 products from 93 breweries  from nanobreweries to the states largest -- and eight cider houses in 34 Oregon cities, with 85 of the offerings making their debut.

Art Larrance, the festivals director and founder, said only six Oregon breweries were operating in 1988, the first year of the gathering, so organizers invited craft breweries from around the country in an attempt to spread craft beers popularity.

"Today, there are close to 300 breweries in our own state, Larrance said, and we felt it was time to really showcase all the regions that make Oregon one of the most successful craft beer hubs in the world.

The Oregon Brewers Festival this year switches days, running from Wednesday through Saturday, but not on Sunday.

Any questions?

When is the festival? Wednesday, July 24, through Saturday, July 27; gates open 11:30 a.m., taps open noon-9 p.m.

Where is it?

Tom McCall Waterfront Park.

What else is at the festival?

Meet the Brewer tent, Brewer dunk tank, five food booths, and beer-related vendors, games and homebrewing demonstrations.

How much will it set me back?

Entry is free, but a $20 tasting package of a souvenir mug and 10 tokens is required to drink beer or cider. Patrons pay four tokens for a full mug of beer or cider, or one token for a taste. Additional tokens may be purchased for $1 apiece. Mugs and tokens are sold on-site and select locations two weeks before the festival. The festival is cash-only, with ATMs provided.

Is it family and pet friendly?

The festival allows minors all hours of the event when accompanied by a parent; animals are not allowed, unless they apply under the American Disability Act.

What are my transportation options?

The Oregon Brewers Festival encourages patrons to drink responsibly and use a designated driver or transit option. Tri-Met buses and the MAX Light Rail have stops nearby; Uber and Lyft both serve the area; and bike riders can park their ride for free in the Hopworks Urban Brewery secure bike corral.

What dont I know about the festival?

The festival last year had an estimated $20 million impact on the local community. Also, this years festival beneficiary is UCP Oregon, a nonprofit serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities including Cerebral Palsy, Autism, Aspergers Syndrome, Down Syndrome, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, ADD, and others.

Grand marshals John DeBenedetti and Mike Moscarelli of F.H. Steinbart Co., a local homebrewing supplies institution, ride at the head of the opening parade for the 2017 Oregon Brewers Festival.

What breweries are pouring at the festival?

13 Virtues Brewing

Allegory Brewing

Ancestry Brewing

Arch Rock Brewing

Ascendant Beer

Baerlic Brewing Bevel Craft Brewing

Binary Brewing

Boneyard Beer

Breakside Brewery

Buoy Beer

Caldera Brewing

Cascade Brewing

Cascade Lakes Brewing

Coalition Brewing

Coin Toss Brewing

ColdFire Brewing

Collaborator Project

Crux Fermentation Project

Deep Space Brewing

Deluxe Brewing

Deschutes Brewery

Double Mountain Brewery

Ecliptic Brewing

Elk Horn Brewery

Evasion Brewing

Fearless Brewing

Ferment Brewing

Fort George Brewery

Freebridge Brewing

Full Sail Brewing

Funhouse Brews

G-MAN Brewery

Gateway Brewing

Gigantic, Gilgamesh Brewing

Golden Valley Brewery

GoodLife Brewing

Great Notion Brewing

Hopworks Urban Brewery

Immersion Brewing

Kells Brewery

Klamath Basin Brewing

Kobold Brewing

Labrewatory

Laurelwood Brewing

Little Beast Brewing

Lompoc Brewing

Lucky Labrador Brewing

MadCow Brewing

Mazama Brewing

McMenamins Breweries

Migration Brewing

Monkless Belgian Ales

Natian Brewery

Ninkasi Brewing

Oakshire Brewing

Old Market Pub & Brewery

Old Town Brewing

Ordnance Brewing

Oregon City Brewing

Pelican Brewing

pFriem Family Brewers

Porter Brewing

Portland Brewing

Public Coast Brewing

Ram Restaurant & Brewery

RiverBend Brewing

Rock Bottom Brewery

Rogue Ales

Rusty Truck Brewing

Santiam Brewing

Sasquatch Brewing

Scout Beer

Silver Moon Brewing

Stickmen Brewing

StormBreaker Brewing

Sunriver Brewing Terminal Gravity Brewing

Three Creeks Brewing

Three Mugs Brewing

Thunder Island Brewing

Upright Brewing

Vanguard Brewing

Vertigo Brewing

Von Ebert Brewing

Weekend Beer

Widmer Brothers Brewing

Wild Ride Brewing

Wolf Tree Brewery

Worthy Brewing

Xicha Brewing

Zoiglhaus Brewing

What cideries are pouring at the festival?

2 Towns Ciderhouse

Apple Outlaw

Cider Riot

Portland Cider

Reverend Nat's Hard Cider

Swift Cider

Wandering Aengus Ciderworks

WildCraft Cider Works

Lisa Morrison, aka the Beer Goddess, raises a pint to open the 2016 Oregon Brewers Festival. The beer writer and co-owner of Belmont Station served as grand marshal.

Who are the previous grand marshals?

Brian Kidd, the Unipiper, joins an illustrious list of previous grand marshals. Here they are since the parade began opening the festival in 2007:

2007: Tom Potter, Portland mayor

2008: Tom Potter, Portland mayor

2009: Sam Adams, Portland mayor

2010: Sam Adams, Portland mayor

2011: Fred Eckhardt, longtime Portland beer writer

2012: Tom Dalldorf, editor/publisher Celebrator Beer News

2013: John Foyston, former Oregonian/OregonLive beer writer

2014: John Maier/Brett Joyce, Rogue Ales brewmaster/owner

2015: Rob and Kurt Widmer, Widmer Brothers Brewing co-founders

2016: Lisa Morrison, aka the Beer Goddess, beer writer and Belmont Station co-owner

2017: John DeBenedetti and Mike Moscarelli of F.H. Steinbart Co., a local homebrewing supplies institution

2018: Brian and Mike McMenamin, McMenamins co-founders

-- Andre Meunier

More beer coverage:
The Portland metro area will have three high-capacity bus routes ferrying passengers around the region in 2023.

Two of those rapid bus lines will be in Vancouver.

C-Trans board on Tuesday unanimously approved the transit agencys preferred route for its second-high-capacity bus line. The first route, the 6-mile-long Vine along Fourth Plain Boulevard, opened in 2017 and drew more than 1.3 million riders in its second year, up from 1.1 million in year one.

At 10-miles, the second route is longer, and agency leaders say it fills a need along Mill Plain Boulevard, a vital east-west corridor through Washingtons fourth-largest city.

Shawn Donaghy, C-Trans CEO, said the Mill Plain line will deliver on our mission of connecting people to opportunities, supporting economic vitality and enhancing quality of life in this great community.

Were grateful to the board, the Federal Transit Administration and all of our partners as we advance this project and build on the success of The Vine, he said in a statement.

The Federal Transit Administration in February blessed C-Trans proposal, paving the way for the next phase of planning. Once finished in 2023, the route will shuttle 60-foot-long buses from downtown along Mill Plain, terminating at a new transit center near 192nd Avenue. The bus would then return to downtown Vancouver via Evergreen Boulevard.

Chris Selk, a C-Tran spokeswoman, said its unclear if the Mill Plain bus will also be called the Vine.

The board also approved a $4.5 million contract with HDR Engineering to design the route. Construction may start in 2020 or 2021, with buses rolling out by 2023.

The project is expected to cost less than $50 million to complete. The Vine cost $53 million, but that figure included costs of building a new Vancouver Mall Transit Center and expansions at the agencys maintenance facilities to accommodate the 60-foot buses. Standard buses are roughly 40 feet long.

TriMet plans to open its first high-capacity bus route by 2022, a $177 million project along Division Street and into downtown Portland.

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen

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A federal judge this week threw out a mans drug conviction because his defense lawyer failed to warn him that he would face deportation if he pleaded guilty to the crime.

U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon cited ineffective counsel when he tossed Victor Hugo Navarro-Gutierrezs conviction for possession with the intent to distribute methamphetamine. Simon found the conviction violated the Sixth Amendment.

If Navarro-Gutierrez would have known he faced deportation, he would have gone to trial, his current defense lawyer, Michelle Ryan, argued successfully.

Navarro-Gutierrez, now 34, was deported last year to Mexico as the motion to dismiss his conviction and sentence was pending, Ryan said. Hes appealed his deportation to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Hes hoping Simons ruling will reverse his deportation order and allow him to return to the United States, where his father and sister have cancer, Ryan said Thursday.

Navarro-Gutierrezs case, she argued, was a clear violation of a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky that found criminal defense attorneys must advise their noncitizen clients about the deportation risks of a guilty plea. That case extended a criminal defendants right to effective counsel to immigration consequences.

This immigration advice could easily have been ascertained by reading the relevant immigration statute. Mr. Navarro-Gutierrez would have gone to trial but for his counsels failure, Ryan wrote in her motion to dismiss the case.

Agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration arrested Navarro-Gutierrez at his home in Salem on Oct. 18, 2016, after a yearlong wiretap investigation that focused on his brothers drug dealing, according to court records.

On July 24, 2017, Navarro-Gutierrezs then-defense lawyer, David Audet, presented him with the governments proposed plea agreement. The government offered to recommend a low-end sentence and dismiss other drug conspiracy charges if Navarro-Gutierrez waived a grand jury hearing and entered a guilty plea to the drug offense.

Audet recommended his client accept the plea offer, arguing it would allow him to earn credit for any time served and he would avoid a minimum mandatory prison sentence if convicted at trial, according to Ryan.

Audet didnt share that possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine is an aggravated felony that would result in automatic deportation, Ryan wrote.

At the sentencing, Audet assured the judge that Navarro-Gutierrez knew it was possible that his guilty plea could prevent him from obtaining U.S. citizenship and added, We just dont know right now what will be the effect of a guilty plea, but those are possible consequences, according to a court transcript.

On Nov. 2, 2017, Navarro-Gutierrez was sentenced to time served. After the hearing, he was transported to the Columbia County jail, where he was held overnight. The next day, he was returned to the federal courthouse in downtown Portland and turned over to immigration officials, who transported him to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

Navarro-Gutierrez, a native of Mexico, moved to the United States when he was 14 and his father obtained a green card for him, according to court documents. His lawyer described Navarro-Gutierrez as a lawful permanent resident who has lived in the United States since 2000. He has an 11-year-old son who is a U.S. citizen and his fiancee is a U.S. citizen with two children. He has no prior convictions.

As Simon dismissed the drug conviction, Navarro-Gutierrez instead entered a guilty plea to a lesser offense called misprision of a felony, which is knowing about a felony but failing to disclose it to law enforcement. He participated in Tuesdays new plea and sentencing hearing by phone from Mexico and again was sentenced to time served.

The new conviction is a felony but one thats not a deportable offense, according to 9th Circuit case law.

Audet on Thursday declined comment about the judges ruling, saying he hadnt read it yet.

Prosecutors acknowledged that Navarro-Gutierrezs brother, Alfredo Navarro-Gutierrez Jr. , was the main alleged drug trafficker. Federal agents found one occasion during the investigation when Victor Navarro-Gutierrez delivered methamphetamine for his brother, according to prosecutor Kemp Strickland. In June, Alfredo Navarro-Gutierrez was sentenced to four years and three months in prison.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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A Klamath County man was found guilty this week of stealing more than $30,000 in Social Security benefits intended for his elderly mother, who has been missing since March 2010 and is presumed dead.

The benefits were deposited monthly into a joint checking account shared by the son, Theodore Martin Kirk, 64, and his mother, Nadine Kirk. Nearly every month from January 2010 through July 2015, the son would withdraw the entire amount in cash, an investigation revealed. All of the withdrawals occurred in Oregon.

A tip to the Klamath County Sheriffs Office in July 2015 touched off the investigation, led to a missing-person inquiry and uncovered the fraud. The tip came from a community member who grew concerned because she hadnt seen Nadine Kirk. At the time, Nadine Kirk would have been 98 years old, according to prosecutors.

She hasnt been seen or heard from since March 2010, said Assistant U.S. Attorneys Adam E. Delph and Gavin W. Bruce. Her name was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System in August 2015, and theres been no new information on her whereabouts, prosecutors said.

A sheriffs deputy visited the Kirk home in Bonanza after the tip came in and said the son claimed his mother had traveled to California with friends two months earlier, yet the son wouldnt allow the deputy to enter the home to confirm his mother wasnt there, according to the U.S. Attorneys Affice.

A Social Security investigator reviewed Theodore Kirks bank records and found that the last transaction bearing his mothers signature was dated January 2010.

The month after the tip, the Social Security Administration suspended payments to the Kirks joint checking account because the senior Kirk was missing.

In August 2017, investigators searched the Kirk home and recovered a detailed calendar kept by the son. Between 2004 and 2010, he kept a record of a series of strokes his mother suffered, but after 2010, there were no entries about any of the mothers activities, prosecutors said.

The Jackson County Search and Rescue and Canine Team also used three trained cadaver dogs in an attempt to locate Kirks body in August 2017. During the search, two dogs alerted in a specific area, although no body was found at the time, according to court records.

A year later, federal authorities led a second search of the Kirk property after a neighbor reported that she had seen a pile of what she believed was "lime'' on the east side of the mother and sons property. The area matched the same location where the cadaver dogs had alerted earlier.

The cadaver dogs were brought back to the Kirk home last summer. A dog alerted in the same general area, and investigators dug up the property, but found no human remains, according to court records.

Theodore Kirk will be sentenced June 27 in U.S. District Court in Medford. He could face a maximum prison term of 10 years.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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Police in Portland are providing additional patrols to faith centers after at least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at a pair of New Zealand mosques Friday.

Portland police said the extra patrols will take place throughout the city and that they come out of an abundance of caution. Police said they are also connecting with faith leaders to let them know we are here for them and they are supported and loved.

Mayor Ted Wheeler, Portlands police commissioner, also responded to the shootings, expressing support for Muslim people and saying, There are no words for the horror that unfolded.

The Washington County Sheriffs Office said its providing enhanced patrols near places of worship, as well. And the Muslim Educational Trust is hosting an interfaith prayer event for the shooting victims at 2 p.m. Friday in Tigard.

The attacks happened at two New Zealand mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers. One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack.

Police also defused explosive devices in a car. In addition to the dead, health officials said 48 people were being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds.

The countrys prime minister said the shootings were an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence, and that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said.

Read other reactions to the mass shootings:

The Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for Oregon and congressional leaders to take urgent steps to curb far-right extremism after the shootings.

We grieve and stand in solidarity with the Christchurch Muslim community. We are not looking for statements from political leadership at this point. We need to see action.  CAIR-Oregon (@CAIROregon) March 15, 2019

Members of Oregons congressional delegation weighed in.

Todays events are the result of turning a blind eye to racist extremism, bigotry and hatred. It is abhorrent that anyone should live in fear of being attacked in their place of worship. We must always stand together and make sure every community feels safe.  Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) March 15, 2019

I am heartbroken and horrified by the anti-Muslim terror attacks in #Christchurch. This extremist white supremacy is chilling, and we cant let it take hold in our societies. America stands with New Zealand today.  Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) March 15, 2019

I join with people around the world who are grieving for the victims who were gunned down in New Zealand. The attacks on two mosques was a violent act of hatred in a space dedicated to peace. https://t.co/dG9H8HHuTu  Suzanne Bonamici (@RepBonamici) March 15, 2019

As people awake to the appalling & terrifying news out of New Zealand, mass murder fueled by racial hatred & Islamophobia is a jarring reminder that hatred and violence know no national boundaries.



This is why we must take the real scourge of islamophobia seriously.  Earl Blumenauer (@repblumenauer) March 15, 2019

So did governors Kate Brown and Jay Inslee.

Dan and I send our condolences to the people of New Zealand. Everyone should feel safe in their places of worship. We must do more to fight the hatred that fuels these tragedies. Thank you to all our local law enforcement and @ORStatePolice for increasing protection today.  Governor Kate Brown (@OregonGovBrown) March 15, 2019

Our hearts are heavy with sorrow as we mourn those whose lives were taken in New Zealand. We stand in solidarity with the Muslim community worldwide during this terrible time.  Governor Jay Inslee (@GovInslee) March 15, 2019

And President Donald Trump.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

-- Jim Ryan and The Associated Press

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Police officers used a stun gun to no avail during a struggle with a man wanted on a drug warrant and then saw him reach toward a front pants pocket where he carried a pistol before two Vancouver detectives shot and killed him last week, investigators said Friday.

The officers saw that Carlos M. Hunter, 43, had a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun, according to an account compiled from the investigation by the Regional Major Crimes Team.

Investigators recovered the gun at the scene as evidence and found it had been stolen from a Vancouver home in 2017, said a synopsis of the investigation.

Hunter, 43, died during the March 7 traffic stop in the 2500 block of Northeast 78th Street.

The major crimes team, made up of investigators from the Camas and Battleground police departments, gave this account of what happened:

Police got a warrant to search Hunter, his car and his home. He was suspected of selling drugs, investigators said.

Vancouver police prepared a plan, a standard practice, to serve the warrant and shared it with the officers involved. It included information about the suspected offense, information about Hunter -- including that he had been convicted of violent crimes in the past and was known to carry a gun -- as well as a tactical plan, according to the account.

The plan was to serve the warrant when Hunter was outside his duplex, while he was on foot or in a car.

The crime team account also clarified Hunters gang affiliation. An earlier Vancouver police news release said Hunter was a known gang member. His family disputed that.

Crime team investigators said the warrant plan noted that Hunter was stated to be a gang member. The team said it found the plan reference came from personal knowledge of officers on the scene.

On March 7, officers were watching Hunters home when they saw him get in a four-door sedan and drive away, according to the synopsis. Officers followed. Officers turned on the emergency lights of a marked Vancouver police car and stopped Hunter on 78th Street. He was alone in his car.

Two Vancouver police officers initiated the traffic stop and were quickly joined by two other officers on the stakeout, another Vancouver officer and the other from the state Department of Corrections.

Records showed that officers radioed that shots had been fired about five minutes after the traffic stop. There is no video or audio record of the stop or the shooting, the synopsis said, but didnt indicate why.

The officers identified themselves and told Hunter that he would need to get out of his car for the search but Hunter didnt follow the police commands, the team said.

He became increasingly argumentative and placed his hands near his waist where they couldnt be seen. Officers tried to pull him out through the open drivers side door or his car, the team account said.

As Hunter struggled, two police officers and the Corrections Department officer all used their Tasers to try to gain control of him but they were ineffective, according to the synopsis.

At that point, with officers still ordering Hunter to keep his hands where they could be seen, the they saw Hunter quickly reach down near his right front pants pocket and saw a handgun in that pocket, investigators said. One officer shouted to the others that Hunter had a gun.

The officer who had been partially inside Hunters car released his hold on Hunter and jumped back. Officers then saw Hunter stick his hand down and grab the handle of the handgun as he tried to remove it from his pocket, according to the account.

Vancouver Detective Dennis Devlin and Detective Colton Price, who had been standing on opposite sides of Hunters car, fired their guns, striking Hunter in the torso several times. No other shots were fired, investigators said, but they didnt say how many times the two detectives fired or how many bullets hit Hunter.

The investigation is ongoing.

--Tom Hallman Jr.

thallman@oregonian.com; 503 221-9224

@thallmanjr
Whats new for home viewing on Video on Demand and Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and other streaming services.

Viggo Mortensen (left) as Tony Vallelonga and Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley in "Green Book," directed by Peter Farrelly. (Universal Pictures)

Top streams for the week

Viggo Mortensen is an Italian-American bouncer who signs on as driver and bodyguard to African-American jazz musician Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) in his tour through the deep South in "Green Book" (2018, PG-13), the Academy Award winner for best picture, original screenplay and supporting actor Ali. On Cable on Demand, Video on Demand and DVD and at Redbox.

"Triple Frontier" (2019, R) stars Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam and Oscar Isaac as Special Forces soldiers who reunite with their buddies to rob a South American drug lord in the heist thriller from director J.C. Chandor and writer Mark Boal. The Netflix Original thriller streams a week after opening in select theaters.

"Saturday Night Live" veteran Aidy Bryant stars in the comedy "Shrill," a new Hulu Original series that takes on fat-shaming, body image and self-worth with humor. Set in Portland, it's based on the memoir by Lindy West, a former writer and editor at the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger, who developed the series with Bryant. Six episodes streaming on Hulu.

Keira Knightley is "Colette" (2018, R) in the biographical drama about the early years of the great French author from award-winning director Wash Westmoreland. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

This year's Oscar-winning documentary "Free Solo" (2018, PG-13), which chronicles Alex Honnold's ropeless climb up Yosemite National Park's El Capitan wall, is now streaming on Hulu.

International pick: "Shoplifters" (Japan, 2018, R, with subtitles), a warm but complicated drama of a family of outcasts and small-time crooks from filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. On Hulu.

Pay-Per-View/Video on Demand

Also new:

 "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald" (2018, PG-13) with Eddie Redmayne and Johnny Depp.

 "Mortal Engines" (2018, PG-13), based on the steampunk novel by Philip Reeve.

 "Piercing" (2018, R), a horror film with Christopher Abbott and Mia Wasikowska.

All also on DVD and at Redbox.

Available same day as select theaters nationwide is the caper action film "Finding Steve McQueen" (2019, R), based on a real-life heist from the 1970s and starring William Fichtner, Rachael Taylor and Forest Whitaker. Also new:

Survival drama " Iceman " (Germany, 2018, with subtitles) set 5,300 years ago.

Science fiction thriller " Chimera Strain " (2019, R) with Henry Ian Cusick.

Netflix

Idris Elba stars as a down-and-out hip-hop DJ who takes a job as a manny to his celebrity best friend's problem-child daughter in the Netflix Original comedy series "Turn Up Charlie."

"Girl" (Belgium, 2018, not rated, with subtitles), a coming-of-age drama about a teenage transgender ballerina in training (Victor Polster) as she prepares for her transitional surgery, earned four awards at the Cannes Film Festival and a Golden Globe nomination.

Asghar Farhadi's "A Separation" (Iran, 2011, PG-13, not rated, with subtitles) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others" (Germany, 2006, R, with subtitles) both won Oscars in the foreign language film category.

Also new: Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" (2009, PG-13), starring Christopher Plummer and Heath Ledger in his final performance, and the sci-fi horror film "Apollo 18" (2011, PG-13).

True stories: "Social Animals" (2018, not rated) looks at how Instagram has impacted the lives of three American teenagers.

More streaming TV: "Love, Death + Robots: Season 1," from producers Tim Miller and David Fincher, is an anthology of original animated short films for adult audiences. Also new:

More international affairs:

 Crime thriller "Burn Out" (France, 2018, not rated, with subtitles) with Francois Civil as a motorcycle racer-turned-drug runner.

International TV: A grieving husband and father travels to a parallel universe where his family never died in the sci-fi drama "If I Hadn't Met You: Season 1" (Spain, with subtitles). Also new:

Netflix also adds four new shows from the Middle East: social dramas "This Evening: Season 1" (Egypt, with subtitles) and "The Confrontation: Season 1" (Kuwait, with subtitles), crime drama "Disappearance: Season 1" (Kuwait, with subtitles), and romantic drama "Eugenie Nights: Season 1" (Egypt, with subtitles).

Kid stuff: "YooHoo to the Rescue: Season 1" is an animated adventure for young kids. "Robozuna: Season 2" is animated action for adolescents.

Stand-up: "Jimmy Carr: The Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits" presents the Irish comedian in concert in Dublin.

Amazon Prime Video

Vanessa Redgrave is radiant as "Mrs. Dalloway" (1997, PG-13), an aging social matron in 1923 whose mind floats back to a summer day 30 years before as she prepares for an elegant party, in the adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel from filmmaker Marleen Gorris.

Mia Wasikowska is "Madame Bovary" (2015, R) in Sophie Barthes' adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's classic novel.

Cult: Guy Maddin's "Careful" (1992, not rated) is an utterly surreal tale of the repressed residents of a small alpine village who live in virtual silence for fear that the slightest sound could trigger an avalanche. "Rock 'n' Roll High School" (1979, PG) is a teen rebel classic starring The Ramones.

Streaming TV: "Made in Heaven: Season 1" (India, with subtitles) is a romantic drama about two wedding planners who navigate the tensions between modern life and old traditions in Dehli. Also new:

True stories: "Time for Ilhan" (2018, not rated), a documentary on the campaign of

U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minnesota, and "Garbo the Spy" (2009, not rated), about the World War II double agent.

Prime Video and Hulu

Tyler Perry directs Taraji P. Henson in "Acrimony" (2018, R), a thriller about a wronged woman who wants payback from an unfaithful husband (Prime Video and Hulu).

"Middle Men" (2009, R) stars Luke Wilson as a small-time businessman who sees the profit potential in internet porn and ends up in bed with mobsters, con artists and porn stars (Prime Video and Hulu).

Hulu

The Wings of the Dove (1997, R), based on the Henry James novel, stars Helena Bonham Carter as a British society woman who schemes a way for her lover (Linus Roache) to inherit a fortune by romancing a dying American heiress.

"Like Water for Chocolate" (Mexico, 1992, R, with subtitles), based on the novel by Laura Esquivel, is a delirious romantic drama strewn through with magic realism.

HBO Now

The four-part documentary series "The Case Against Adnan Syed" (2019, not rated) looks into the murder case explored in the hit podcast "Serial" and brings it up to date with new developments as the retrial nears. New episodes every Saturday night.

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard save the dinosaurs in "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" (2018, R). Also new is the kid-friendly animated superhero comedy "Teen Titans Go! To the Movies" (2018, PG).

Available on Saturday night is "The First Purge" (2018, R), the prequel to the hit horror franchise.

Other streams

Helen Mirren stars in horror film "Winchester" (2018, PG-13), based on the American legend of a haunted mansion inspired by a true story. Streaming on Showtime Anytime.

Martin Clunes stars as a police detective pursuing a serial killer in "Manhunt," a British crime drama making its American debut streaming on Acorn TV.

"Bastards of Pizzofalcone: Season 1" (Italy, with subtitles), based on the novels by Maurizio de Giovanni, follows a team of misfit police detectives in Naples. New episodes each Tuesday on MHz.

New on disc

"Green Book," "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald," "Mortal Engines," "Piercing," "The Magic Flute."

Now at Redbox

Green Book, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Mortal Engines, London Fields, Vox Lux.
Though Project Runway will show signs of a makeover when the new season premieres Thursday, March 14, one element feels very familiar  theres another Portland-based designer in the competition.

Sonia Kasparian, who went from doing sportswear at Nike to a business creating custom bridal wear and special-event gowns, is the latest Rose City fashion professional to be among the Project Runway hopefuls.

In a phone interview prior to the new season premiere, Kasparian says that based on early seasons of the show, she initially had some doubts about going on Project Runway.

One of the things I was really leery about going into this,  she says, was that in the beginning, the contestants seemed really young, and really catty and petty.

But she had, as she says, a nice surprise in learning that the new season was going to feature designers who are competing at a higher level, theyre professionals, theyre in it to showcase their craft.

At 55, Kasparian is older than many of the designers who have been a Project Runway staple over the years, newbies still figuring out their vision and approach.

In the past, she says, Project Runway had sent out an email about her possibly doing the show. Her feeling then was, that isnt me, its not right for me, its a younger designers game.

A gown created by Portland designer Sonia Kasparian for the "First Impressions" runway show that begins "Project Runway" Season 17. (Photo: Karolina Wojtasik/Bravo)Karolina Wojtasik/Bravo

But for this new season, Kasparian says, they had someone reach out to me, who said that Bravo was getting it back, and had really experienced designers, a really diverse group that had businesses.

With that in mind, Kasparian decided Project Runway sounded like a good way to get national exposure.

Im successful here, and I have people who know my work elsewhere, Kasparian says. But I want to get my brand out to a bigger arena.

Kasparian joins a parade of other Portland and Vancouver-based designers who have competed on Project Runway" including winners Michelle Lesniak and Seth Aaron Henderson, both of whom have also competed on the spinoff show, Project Runway All Stars.

Though Project Runway began its TV run in 2004 on the Bravo cable channel, the show moved over to Lifetime in 2009. Its run on Lifetime ended When Harvey Weinstein, whose production company made the show, was accused of sexual misconduct. Weinsteins company was sold, and Project Runway then returned to the Bravo channel.

Sonia Kasparian, shown with some of her creations, is among the 16 designers competing on Season 17 of "Project Runway." (Photo courtesy of Sonia Kasparian)

But then original host Heidi Klum and mentor Tim Gunn announced they were leaving, to develop a fashion show of their own for Amazon Prime Video.

Season 17 of Project Runway features a new host, model Karlie Kloss, a new mentor in designer (and previous Project Runway winner) Christian Siriano, and joining the returning judge Nina Garcia will be designer Brandon Maxwell and former Teen Vogue editor-in-chief Elaine Welteroth.

In addition to the new faces, Project Runway is rolling out a new runway, workroom, flash sales, fast fashion, plus-size models and other updated touches. Designers are competing to win $250,000 in prize money, a feature in Elle magazine, $50,000 to use for their own design studio, and more.

Kasparian says she knew about the return to Bravo, but didnt hear about Klum and Gunn departing until after she signed on.

You associate Heidi and Tim with the show, Kasparian says. But Id committed myself to it, and then we found out after that who the judges were and who the mentor was going to be, and I was very excited.

Project Runway Season 17 premieres with a 90-minute episode that starts at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 14 on Bravo.

-- Kristi Turnquist

kturnquist@oregonian.com 503-221-8227 @Kristiturnquist

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Defense attorneys Thursday tried to discredit the story of a woman who said she was sexually assaulted in 2012 by two men who are well-known members of Portlands African American community.

On the second day of Charles McGee and Aubre Lamont Dicksons trial, one of their attorneys asked the woman why in the hours before the alleged assault had she met the men for drinks in downtown Portland and told them that a threesome was on her bucket list.

Defense attorney Christine Mascal noted that the woman, Erica Naito-Campbell, had previously said she considered Dickson a friend but didnt know McGee well.

You dont bring up threesomes with someone you just met, or is that who you are? Mascal asked.

Naito-Campbell said she talks about sex casually with many people, that talking about a threesome didnt mean she had any desire to have sex with the men and that she made that clear to them by later pulling McGees hand off her knee repeatedly and rejecting his advances.

Naito-Campbell also repeatedly said she felt safe because her friend, Dickson, would protect her from anything bad happening that evening.

The allegations came to light last year when Naito-Campbell told her story to Willamette Week. McGee, now 33, was running for Multnomah County commissioner and working as CEO of the Black Parent Initiative at the time. Dickson, 44, was a chairman of the Oregon Housing Stability Council and a vice president at KeyBank.

They were indicted three months later on accusations of first-degree unlawful sexual penetration and other crimes. The men resigned or lost their jobs.

Erica Naito-Campbell (left) underwent about 2.5 hours of cross-examination by defense attorney Christine Mascal (right) and then defense attorney Stephen Houze on Thursday, March 14, 2019.

McGee has hired Mascal, a former deputy district attorney with Multnomah County who has years of experience prosecuting defendants accused of some of the areas most heinous sex crimes. Dickson has hired Stephen Houze and Jacob Houze, a father-son attorney team who have gained a reputation for representing some of Portlands most prominent community members in legal trouble.

McGee and Dicksons trial began Wednesday with Naito-Campbell, 38, taking the stand and giving a harrowing account of the night of May 10, 2012.

During cross-examination Thursday, Mascal also asked Naito-Campbell how loudly she told the men no after they arrived at McGees Southeast Portland house and the two men allegedly started to assault her.

You did not raise your voice? Mascal asked.

No, Naito-Campbell responded.

You did not scream out for help? Mascal asked.

No, Naito-Campbell said.

You didnt say, Get the hell off me? Mascal asked.

I said, Dont do this. Please dont do this,' Naito-Campbell said.

Because youre cheating, right? Mascal asked.

Because youre cheating, Naito-Campbell said, referring to both men being married. I was trying to appeal to his better nature because I was afraid.

Afraid of what? Mascal asked.

That it would escalate, that they would hurt me, Naito-Campbell said.

Has he (McGee) ever threatened to hurt you prior to this? Mascal asked.

They were both so much bigger than me and I didnt know where I was, Naito-Campbell said.

Has he ever threatened to hurt you prior to this? Mascal asked again.

No, Naito-Campbell said.

20 Trial of Charles McGee and Aubre Dickson

Mascal also questioned Naito-Campbell on how it was that she says she was able to clamp her hand over her vagina to prevent the men, who were far stronger, from raping her. Naito-Campbell stood by her story that thats what had happened.

Naito-Campbell spent about 2  hours under cross-examination, sometimes crying or gasping at the questions. Mascals questioning was followed by cross-examination from Stephen Houze.

Houze asked why Naito-Campbell didnt take photos of bruises that she said formed on her arms, wrists and legs after the alleged assault. Naito-Campbell had said she told friends about the alleged assault within days, and Houze asked why then wouldnt she send photos of those bruises to them.

My friends didnt need corroboration, and they certainly didnt need to see the horror of bruises on my body, Naito-Campbell said.

They believe you? Houze asked.

Because Im a truthful person, Naito-Campbell said.

The trial is scheduled to continue Friday, with Houze continuing his cross-examination of Naito-Campbell.

-- Aimee Green

agreen@oregonian.com

o_aimee

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In an unusual letter sent last month, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler asked the state architect licensing board to investigate Raphael Goodblatt, an architect he said has harassed and bullied city employees for years.

I ask that you conduct an investigation into the misconduct by Mr. Goodblatt, Wheeler wrote on Feb. 12 to the Oregon State Board of Architect Examiners.

Goodblatt said in an interview Monday that the city has it backwards. He acknowledged he engaged in the conduct the city says he shouldnt have, but said he was provoked into it. I hate to say it, I don't know how better to say it, but this is the city harassing me, he said.

In his letter, Wheeler includes five pages of excerpts of texts, emails or statements Goodblatt made to city development services employees. The excerpts include alleged incidents of name-calling by Goodblatt, including referring to people using crude terms for male and female genitalia, and other unsavory remarks.

Goodblatt doesnt deny he said whats in Wheelers letter. But he claims he only did so because city employees spread negative information about him and harassed his clients.

Everything I did thats on paper Im not going to deny, Goodblatt said. But the things that I say are because of the way Im treated.

He cited three documents as what he said is evidence of city harassment  a 2011 email chain, 2014 letter and 2014 voicemail in which city employees share details of his conduct with others or implore him to stop.

Goodblatt worked in the city development service bureau from 2003 to 2009 but was laid off, according to Wheelers letter. He was subject to a human resources investigation in 2012, the mayors letter said, that found he engaged in discourteous, bullying, disrespectful and menacing behavior towards city employees.

State rules say architects may be disciplined for any conduct that, through professional experience, is not an acceptable standard for architectural practice in Oregon.

Lisa Howard, the architecture board director, said the agency has received Wheelers letter and the board will consider his allegations at its April meeting.

"I'm a big mouth who tells you what I think," Goodblatt said. "Hopefully the board won't punish me too much."

-- Gordon R. Friedman
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Todays stories

HEART TRANSPLANTS: Providence launches a heart transplant program with $75 million from Phil Knight as OHSU announces the restart of its own program. Read more.

ON TRIAL: Defense attorneys ask about a reference to a threesome and try to raise doubts about a womans story of sexual assault by two Portland civic leaders. Read more.

CIVIL RIGHTS: Pro-gun parents say Portland schools violated their civil rights. Read more.

BIKE COMMUTERS: Earl Blumenauer pushes to reinstate a tax benefit for bike commuters. Read more.

TIME CHANGE: Permanent daylight savings in Oregon? Hell yes, says Gov. Kate Brown. Read more.

STATE POLITICS: Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney returns briefly to the Capitol. Read more.

OCCUPY ICE: A judge wont grant a jury trial for the Occupy ICE protesters charged with federal misdemeanors. Read more.

DEAD WOMAN: Authorities ID an 18-year-old woman found dead along a Rainier road. Read more.

ABUSE ALLEGATIONS: A Sherwood piano teacher accused of abusing a student is arrested again. Read more.

WINE PICKS: Two Oregon white wines are among these five picks for value buys. Read more.

JOHN CANZANO: Winning in Las Vegas is more important to Oregon than anyone ... except Oregon State. Read more.

GETTING AROUND: TriMet wants you to combine your bus or MAX trip with Uber and Biketown. Read more.

HOME BUYING: Portland-area home sales slow in February; prices climb. Read more.

PORTLAND POLICE: City commissioners consult with a prominent Black Lives Matter activist on a Portland police contract. Read more.

HOMELESS PEOPLE: A study warns of 156,000 Oregon households at risk of homelessness. Read more.

PORTLAND DESIGNER: Project Runway returns with a new look, new faces and another Portland designer. Read more.

GRAY WOLVES: The U.S. moves to lift the remaining protections on gray wolves. Read more.

GRAND MARSHAL: The Unipiper is named the grand marshal of the 2019 Oregon Brewers Festival. Read more.

Home of the week

REAL ESTATE: Reviving a Rummer: A midcentury modern house is stripped of leaky roof, rotting walls and smelly shag carpeting. Read more.

More news

Day care death not hidden for political reasons, Oregon governor says

Liz Weston: Im a 60-year-old widow and wonder if I can claim Social Security now

Ask Amy: Shes perturbed over his lack of romance on 3-monthiversary and Valentines Day, but what effort did she make?

Dear Abby: Grocery clerks cleavage tattoo has shopper wondering where to look

Carolyn Hax: Yep, you should have thought about how much you loved her before you cheated on her

Find more at oregonlive.com

Todays comics

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Todays obituaries

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Today in history

AROUND THE WORLD: On March 15, 44 B.C., Roman dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of nobles that included Brutus and Cassius.
The Seattle Seahawks offensive line helped produced the NFLs top rushing team during the 2018 season, and the team made moves on Thursday to keep most of the unit intact for 2019.

The Seahawks reportedly re-signed guard D.J. Fluker and the team announced the signing of free agent guard Mike Iupati on Thursday.

The 6-5, 342-pound Fluker indicated his return to the Seahawks on social media.

He reportedly signed a two-year contract worth up to $9 million.

Its finalized. The Seahawks and D.J. Fluker agreed on a two-year deal worth up to $9 million, per sources. Seattle cements the guard spots with the return of Fluker, a mainstay at right guard with nine starts last year, and Thursdays earlier signing of Mike Iupati. https://t.co/4Da9EI98Bf  Herbie Teope (@HerbieTeope) March 14, 2019

Fluker, at right guard, was an important piece to the offensive line that helped the Seahawks average a league-leading 160 rushing yards a game and enabled running back Chris Carson to rush for 1,151 yards in 2018, making him the first Seahawk to run for at least 1,000 yards since Marshawn Lynch in 2014.

Iupati, 31, played for the Arizona Cardinals the past four seasons, starting in 48 games during that span. Iupati earned Pro-Bowl honors four straight years from 2012 to 2015, and was a first-team All-Pro in 2012 and second-team All-Pro in 2015. Iupati is expected to replace J.R. Sweezy at left guard. Sweezy signed a free agent deal with Arizona.

Re-signing Fluker and addition of Iupati appears to have solidified the Seahawks offensive line going into the 2019 season. Duane Brown and Germain Ifedi will be at the tackle positions, with Justin Britt at center.

-- Geoffrey C. Arnold | @geoffreyCarnold
On Aug. 8, 2018, Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw met with Christopher Wray, the Federal Bureau of Investigations director. What was discussed or decided remains a mystery.

Outlaw and Wray were scheduled to spend 35 minutes together that balmy summer day, according to Outlaws public calendar.

The meeting came at a time of increasing tension between the city and federal agencies because the city council appeared increasingly likely to withdraw from the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force. The city ultimately withdrew in February, sparking a rebuke from Renn Cannon, the FBI special agent in charge of the Oregon operations.

But what happened at the August meeting is unclear.

Noting the potential public interest in the meeting, a reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive filed a public records request with the Portland Police Bureau for any documents about it. People have a right to inspect all government documents in Oregon with limited exceptions.

Five months later, city officials have given conflicting accounts of what records do or do not exist.

Police Bureau records supervisor Tammi Weiss first said no documents exist. She then said several photos from the meeting exist, but she did not provide them to the newsroom. She also said neither she nor anyone else asked meeting attendees to comb their email accounts for documents.

A reporter told Weiss he did not believe a meeting between the police chief and FBI director would occur without a paper trail and asked Weiss to search again.

Jenifer Johnston, the senior deputy city attorney for records matters, later responded, saying officials conducted a reasonable search for records. She said The Oregonian/OregonLive would have to pay the city to conduct an email search. The going rate is usually several hundred dollars.

(The reporter also filed requests for documents about four other meetings between Outlaw, FBI officials and Mayor Ted Wheeler; the Police Bureau has produced one page in response.)

On Friday, The Oregonian/OregonLive asked police spokeswoman Terri Wallo-Strauss for information about the meeting location and nature of the discussion between Wray and Outlaw.

Wallo-Strauss responded by asking the newspaper to file a records request. The Oregonian/OregonLive refused because its reporter had not asked for documents, but rather an informal explanation of the meeting.

Well ask that you put in for a public records request for that information, as it will have to be researched, Wallo-Strauss said in an email. I know its frustrating, its just our standardized process.

Wallo-Strauss did not respond to a reporter asking to view the policy requiring submission of records requests for answers to questions.

Beth Anne Steele, spokeswoman for the FBIs Oregon operations, said Friday that Outlaw met Wray during his visit to Portlands FBI field office. The visits included listening sessions where Wray made remarks and took questions from about 50 law enforcement officials, Steele said.

On Tuesday Weiss provided one document related to the meeting: a picture of Lt. Chuck Lovell, the police chiefs senior assistant, and Wray, smiling and shaking hands.

-- Gordon R. Friedman

GFriedman@Oregonian.com
Great Britains withdrawal from the European Union has been a rolling, two-year-long disaster.

The United Kingdoms parliament has now twice rejected deals hammered out by Prime Minister Theresa May and the EU, leaving the possibility later this month of a hard exit, which would have an even rougher impact on the British and EU economies -- possibly even causing market chaos, CNN reports -- than a negotiated one would have.

So what Britain needs now is ... Donald Trump?

Piers Morgan, the British former CNN talk-show host who boasts hes one of the very few people President @realDonald Trump follows on Twitter, has called on Trump to be Britains savior.

I've given this a lot of thought & come to the conclusion that only one person can now sort out this ridiculous Brexit mess: @realDonaldTrump, Morgan tweeted Thursday. He'd take no sh*t from the EU, or Parliament, or anyone. ... Mr. President, my country needs YOU.

I've given this a lot of thought & come to the conclusion that only one person can now sort out this ridiculous Brexit mess: @realDonaldTrump.

He'd take no sh*t from the EU, or Parliament, or anyone.

And he definitely wouldn't lose his voice.

Mr President, my country needs YOU. pic.twitter.com/55zHkUMmvQ  Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) March 14, 2019

Hes not alone in this view. Even though Morgan is often dismissed in Britain as an annoying crank, The Spectator magazines Freddy Gray believes that, in this case, he might be onto something.

Throughout the process, he wrote shortly after Morgans tweet went out, [Trump] has done nothing but offer the British government friendship and a trade deal, but the British government has not responded in kind.

Gray, a former editor at The American Conservative, continued:

For various reasons, the British government has never been able to compute the idea that -- no matter how much people may dislike the 45th president -- he is our friend on Brexit. It could have been useful for Britain to have had a bilateral relationship with his administration, especially in the context of our departure from the EU.

It should have been possible to take advantage of the fact that, for various psychological reasons, Trump sees himself as sun to Brexit moon. But it wasnt. That is a serious diplomatic failure. It shows just how unimaginative and weak-minded Britains political leadership is.

David Frum, a Never Trump conservative and former George W. Bush speechwriter, isnt impressed with this line of thinking. He quickly responded on Twitter.

President Trump has since 2016 urged the UK into a no-deal Brexit with a view to wrecking the European Union and forcing an isolated, vulnerable UK to accede to US trade demands, he wrote. He has hit the UK with steel tariffs. Trump may be @piersmorgans friend, but hes not Britains.

With Morgan tweeting Trump praise and Frum responding, the U.S. president soon weighed in on the Brexit crisis, insisting on Thursday that the current political chaos in Great Britain could have been avoided if only May had listened to him.

I gave the prime minister my ideas on how to negotiate it, said Trump, who voiced support for the Leave campaign before Britain voted for Brexit in 2016. She didnt listen to that, and thats fine. Shes got to do what shes got to do. I think it couldve been negotiated in a different manner, frankly. I hate to see everything being ripped apart right now.

The president indicated that he really doesnt have any hard feelings over Mays refusal to listen to his art of the deal. He said that, once Brexit is sorted out, the U.S. and Britain would make a very big trade deal.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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Facing criticism from political opponents, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown on Thursday reiterated that her office did not direct state officials to hide a 2018 day care death from the public and said she would be fine with an outside investigation.

Browns comments come amid fallout over reporting by The Oregonian/OregonLive, which showed Oregons Early Learning Division did not disclose the death of a 9-month-old boy who stopped breathing at a Eugene day care.

In response to the newsrooms coverage, Oregon House Republicans on Thursday formally requested investigations by the state Attorney General and the U.S. Department of Justice. Republicans questioned if Oregons Democratic governor took steps to conceal the death in August, when opponents were running television ads that branded her weak on child safety.

No child should die in our child care system, Brown responded Thursday during a news conference. Our office did not direct the Early Learning Division to hide this childs death for political purposes.

Brown confirmed Thursday that she learned about the boys death in August but did not remember who informed her. The boy died Aug. 24, just days after Browns re-election campaign demanded TV stations stop airing attack ads that referenced day cares.

The Oregonian/OregonLive reported last week that state regulators did not disclose the boys death. When contacted by the newsroom, a spokeswoman for the Office of Child Care refused to confirm the death for four business days, saying regulators did not have approval from partner agencies.

Federal rules mandate that regulators disclose in aggregate how many children die each year in day care. As of early March, the 2018 death was not listed on Oregons online website.

Brown did not directly answer a question Thursday about whether the Office of Child Care should make changes in how it discloses deaths. But Brown said the states newly created child care website, which lists state actions against licensed providers, has issues. She directed a policy board to review the portal and make suggestions for improvements.

In a letter Thursday to the Early Learning Council, Brown cited inconsistencies in how the state shares information on its website and said she is concerned about the ability of families to access the information they need to make informed day care decisions.

Meanwhile, its not immediately clear if either state or federal attorneys will heed requests from House Republicans to investigate.

Kristina Edmunson, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, a Democrat, said officials are reviewing the request. A federal spokesman didnt respond to a request for comment late Thursday.

Rep. Carl Wilson, the House Republican leader, wrote in letters to both offices Thursday that investigations are needed to restore credibility to the states regulatory efforts.

Among other things, Wilson questioned why the state chose not to disclose the death at Little Big Blessings in Eugene even though officials had previously acknowledged fatalities at other facilities.

Wilson wrote that the failure to disclose the death was at best gross negligence by regulators and at worst a partisan effort by Brown or her staff to sweep this childs death under the rug for political reasons.

The public deserves to know which it is, Wilson wrote, and we cannot know without a thorough and independent investigation into this matter.

Reporter Hillary Borrud contributed to this report.

-- Brad Schmidt

bschmidt@oregonian.com

503-294-7628

@_brad_schmidt
SALEM  After learning that teenage girls assigned by the state to live in a Klamath Falls treatment center didnt have free access to tampons, Oregon House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson was outraged.

Williamson is considering expanding a bill she already had introduced to require free feminine hygiene products in jails, prisons and youth lockup facilities to cover residential programs for foster children and youth whove committed crimes as well.

News of the limited menstruation hygiene options at the Klamath youth treatment program coincides with a movement in Oregon to provide choices to incarcerated women and girls. Last year, the states lone womens prison voluntarily began offering both pads and tampons free of charge.

The situation is absolutely unacceptable, Williamsons spokesman Aaron Fiedler wrote of the Klamath Falls program in a text message this week. (Williamson will) be looking into what they can do with the legislation to make sure this does not happen anywhere else.

House Bill 2515 is currently at the Ways and Means committee, after passing out of the House judiciary committee earlier this month.

The Youth Inspiration Program in Klamath Falls is an addiction and behavioral treatment program for girls who are either in the Oregon Youth Authoritys custody for committing crimes or in the states foster care system. Its operated by the county in a wing of the local juvenile detention facility and is not locked.

Dan Golden, director of the Klamath County Juvenile Department, said the program always provided free sanitary pads but not tampons to girls based on medical advice they received years ago indicating pads are safer than tampons. That changed this week when juvenile defense attorneys and lawyers for children in the foster system started to complain. The girl who raised the issue with her lawyer is in the foster system, meaning she is not in the program as a result of committing a crime.

Until Wednesday, girls could only obtain tampons if they were brought in by a family member, donated by someone else or purchased at a store in the program. Although the store does not operate on a cash basis, the girls have to earn points through good behavior in order to shop there. In addition to hygiene items, it offers art supplies, recreation items, and healthy snacks.

In an interview Thursday, Golden said the juvenile department decided to change its practice after hearing from the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and is now writing a policy to guarantee that both pads and tampons will be available. Golden said there was never an intention on our part to use tampons as a behavioral modification tool.

In an email to Golden on Wednesday, the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Associations legislative director Mary A. Sofia explained why her groups members were concerned about the practice of offering tampons in the store.

This is not a choice that people who do not menstruate must make, and it reads as a form of gender discrimination because it sounds like you provide hygiene items (toothpaste, soap etc.) that likely sufficiently covers the needs of all people who do not menstruate, Sofia wrote.

Sofia pointed out that Williamsons bill seems to be signaling the necessity of providing both tampons and sanitary napkins to people in their care/custody.

The attention didnt come at the best time for the Klamath County Juvenile Department, which is seeking funding from lawmakers to grow the program. Gov. Kate Brown supports the countys request for the state to borrow $12 million to help Klamath County construct a separate building for the Youth Inspiration Program facility that would allow for roughly triple the number of girls, according to her budget proposal.

In an email, Oregon Youth Authority spokeswoman Sarah Evans wrote that the agency has had a long-time practice of providing free tampons, pantyliners and pads to female youth in our correctional and transitional facilities, and we find it unacceptable that our residential programs would not do the same.

Evans said the agency was unaware until this week that the Klamath program was not providing free tampons. Now that we are aware, we are reaching out to all our residential programs to learn what they are doing around this issue, and we will work with them to make sure this doesnt happen again, Evans wrote.

At the Department of Human Services, staff who oversee group and institutional care were in training on Thursday and did not have any comment about whether the agency has a policy on which hygiene products should be provided to girls.

 Hillary Borrud | hborrud@oregonian.com | 503-294-4034 | @hborrud

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ROSEBURG  A move to improve the care of foster children relegated to living in hotels has resulted in 25 percent more children removed from their families being housed in institutions such as former juvenile jails, The Oregonian/OregonLive has found.

The children being sent to cinderblock facilities are often the most traumatized and difficult to care for. Most are teens but the state is looking at expanding institutional programs for children as young as six.

A year ago, Oregon child welfare leaders signed a court settlement promising to stop housing vulnerable foster children in hotels, state offices and juvenile detention centers instead of with families.

State caseworkers had increasingly relied on those makeshift methods as Oregon faced a shortage of foster homes, particularly ones equipped to care for children grappling with trauma, mental health challenges or developmental disabilities.

One year after the settlement, child welfare officials say theyve complied and begun phasing out their use of hotel rooms as temporary homes for children in the states care. On any given day in December, three foster children were spending the night in hotels, compared to 15 in February 2018.

But over the same time period, the state has placed dramatically more children and teens in institutional settings including repurposed juvenile jails. Since July 2018, the state has had around 400 foster children assigned to live in such settings, according to state figures. In September 2016, when two foster children and their advocates sued the state over its use of hotels, the number was close to 300.

Critics question whether former jails are the right place for foster children. And for many, such placements mean moving far from their home communities, switching to unfamiliar and sometimes segregated foster-child-only schools and losing the chance to live in the care of a parent figure instead of a rotation of shift workers.

When news first broke of children staying in hotels in 2016, state officials attributed the phenomenon to a shortage of foster parents.

But Oregon child welfare director Marilyn Jones, who was hired in 2017, now takes the position that recruiting more foster families is not the solution and increased institutional care is necessary.

We dont have  foster families that can meet the high trauma that these children have, Jones told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a Feb. 25 interview. They can be suicidal and homicidal. They can have self-harm or have harmed others.

The Department of Human Services did not respond by Thursday to a request for the minimum age of foster children housed in institutional settings.

In Douglas County, Juvenile Department director Aric Fromdahl says his staffers have done what they can to turn one of the two pods in their detention center  a grey cinderblock building designed as a youth jail with an enclosed exercise yard  into a welcoming space.

Its not the softest building, but we do our best, Fromdahl said during a tour of the facility in January.

For a 15-year-old girl from Multnomah County assigned to the facility last summer, the program in Roseburg, 180 miles from her home, felt both jail-like and remote.

She feels extremely isolated from her family. They are at least three hours away, the girls court-appointed attorney, Lauren Freeman, said during a court hearing in Portland in August. She feels, in essence, incarcerated  I had the same feeling when I was there. It feels as though its a converted jail facility.

After talking with the girl and hearing from lawyers for her mother, the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe in Washington and the Oregon Department of Human Services, Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Katherine Tennyson ultimately ruled the facility was an appropriate place for the girl to remain at that time. The states attorney pointed to an assessment by the Douglas County facilitys staff that it was the correct placement for the girl. Lawyers for her mother and tribe agreed, with the mothers lawyer stating that the mother wanted her daughter in a facility where she would not run away.

Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, who has been a vocal advocate for improving Oregons foster care system, said she doesnt want any foster child to get the message they are being punished or are unworthy of living in a family. Gelser said she has not visited the county juvenile detention centers where the state is sending children in foster care. But if it feels like a jail, I just worry about who were telling these kids that they are  The bottom line is we need to be developing the right places for kids.

Douglas County has housed foster children at other facilities for years. But last summer, Fromdahl said, Douglas County opened half of its juvenile jail to children who are being diverted from hotels in order to help the state comply with the settlement.

Teens from around the state stay at Douglas Countys new River Rock program, including eight from Multnomah County from July through January  one-third of the 25 teenagers in the facility during that time. The 13- through 17-year-olds spent two weeks to more than six months living in the cinderblock group quarters, according to information provided by the county.

In addition to the eight beds in the revamped juvenile detention wing, Douglas County operates a 16-bed facility for girls in Roseburgs former police station and a 16-bed facility for boys in a group home building. Douglas Countys 40 beds for foster children mean it is now Oregons second-largest group care provider for children in the foster system, state records show.

The largest is St. Marys Home for Boys in Beaverton, founded 130 years ago as an orphanage for abandoned and wayward boys, where as many as 42 boys were assigned to live by the state at any given time over the past six months, according to state records.

Multnomah, Klamath and Josephine counties also have residential programs for teenagers from the foster system in repurposed wings of their juvenile jails. Unlike private programs, they are not licensed because under Oregon law the state lacks the authority to regulate county-run care operations. A proposal in the Legislature, Senate Bill 181, would change that. It would hold the county programs to the same standard of child abuse and neglect currently applied to other types of programs. And, by licensing county facilities, it would give the state another tool to force improvements.

Institutionalized Oregon foster children also live in a Grants Pass group home for 12 boys, a psychiatric residential treatment facility and related facilities in Utah, a group home for 14 boys in Salem and scores of other non-home placements.

Nationally, the movement in child welfare is away from caring for children in institutional settings, which research has shown yields poorer outcomes for kids than living with families. It was codified in 2018 in the Family First Prevention Services Act championed by Oregons U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, which aims to provide families with services to help them keep their children at home and reduces states use of low-quality group homes.

In a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive, Wyden said that his law is built around the accepted principle that families are usually best-suited to prevent trauma for children and to reduce the need for foster care.

Family First provides both the structure and funding to focus on those proven prevention strategies and not unnecessary and non-therapeutic institutional care, Wyden said. Oregon has the opportunity to show leadership in this area, and I expect the state will become a full partner in taking advantage of this new law aimed at providing each child a safe, caring, and loving environment.

Gelser, the state senator, leads a work group overseeing states implementation of the federal law. Its about making sure that kids who are vulnerable and have experienced trauma are receiving services in the highest quality, most appropriate and trauma-informed placements that are family-like, Gelser said during a meeting last year. Under Family First, children should only be placed in institutional settings with more than four children when its absolutely necessary and demonstrated by an assessment, Gelser said.

Yet at a September legislative hearing, Jones, the child welfare director, said the hoteling lawsuit highlighted the states need for more institutional placements for foster children.

We are the lowest in the nation in congregate care at 4.5 percent residential or treatment facilities for kids, Jones said, citing a Casey Family Programs comparison using figures from 2016. We have kids with high needs. We dont have the capacity to really serve those high needs for these kids.

As of September, Oregon had placed 5.4 percent of its foster children in group or institutional facilities, according to child welfare data. The national average in 2016 was 12 percent.

Diverting children who might end up in hotels to institutional settings is likely saving the state money. The cost to house a child in a hotel room averages $2,180, according to a child welfare spokesman. Most of the cost is to pay overtime to the two state workers who must stay with the child at all times. State auditors previously estimated that the Department of Human Services the cost was closer to $1,350 per day.

The state pays Douglas County $352 per day for each child who stays at the River Rock intensive behavioral support program, in the repurposed juvenile detention wing. A short-term stabilization program for girls run by the Klamath County Juvenile Department and the St. Marys Home for Boys that offers intensive rehabilitation services both charge $248 per child per day, according to the Department of Human Services. The agency pays $330 per day to four affiliated programs in Utah, including a psychiatric residential treatment center, to care for Oregon children.

In contrast, the state pays $182 per day to a therapeutic foster care program, Oregon Community Programs in Eugene. The rate covers not only payments to the foster families who typically care for a single child, but also the cost of support from agency staff who hold weekly meetings with foster parents, make a weekly plan for each child and are available for foster parents to reach out to 24 hours a day.

In addition to the lower cost, experts including Casey Family Programs say foster parents with extra training and supports, not county programs and other institutional homes, are the best care Oregon can provide to meet the needs of many children traumatized by family drama and separation, showing extreme behaviors or suffering from anxiety or other mental health conditions.

Instead, child welfare officials have been sending an increasing number of children who might otherwise be housed in hotels to institutions including locked out-of-state residential treatment facilities, as OPB reported earlier this year. The number of foster children sent out of state reached 82 last year and at least one of the facilities  Clarinda Academy  has been accused of abuse by whom Disability Rights Washington, according to OPB.

The no-hotels settlement was supposed to get more children and teens whove been removed from their families into the family-like settings that experts and Oregons foster childrens bill of rights say gives them the best chance to flourish. The plaintiffs wanted to minimize the chances that children in the states care would be cut off from their communities, schools and mental health providers.

Moving from one region to another can interrupt or delay mental health care for foster children, who are typically covered by Medicaid. The 15-year-old girl from Multnomah County who was moved to the Douglas County residential facility, for example, was enthusiastically participating in equine therapy before she was moved. Fromdahl, the Douglas County juvenile department director, said there is a roughly month-long delay to arrange healthcare such as therapy appointments once a child arrives in Roseburg because the child must be reassigned from one coordinated care organization, which manages care for Medicaid enrollees, to another.

Douglas County Juvenile Department director Aric Fromdahl, left, and Treatment Manager Sarah Wickersham sit in a wing of the county detention center that has been repurposed as a program for teenagers in foster care.

Teenagers at Douglas Countys highest-level treatment facility, in the detention building, receive two hours of one-on-one counseling per week from staff who have some type of social services bachelors degree. They also participate in a couple hours per week of activities focused on building skills such as anger management and impulse control, which can be led by any program employee if it is designed by counselors, said Treatment Manager Sarah Wickersham. Youth who need alcohol or drug treatment go to appointments at an outpatient program.

Klamath County has taken a similar tack, turning one of its two juvenile detention center pods into a Youth Inspiration Program for girls in the foster system. It serves girls in the Oregon Youth Authoritys custody for committing crimes in the same pod. Douglas and Klamath counties facilities are not locked, but staff monitor the exits and intervene if a child tries to leave. Gov. Kate Brown wants the state to borrow $12 million to help Klamath County construct a separate building for the Youth Inspiration Program facility, according to her budget proposal.

Dan Golden, director of the Klamath County Juvenile Department, said the program has space for nine teenage girls but the governors proposal would allow it to grow to serve 24 girls, with half of the beds available to girls in the foster system. Both foster children and girls in custody for committing crimes receive addiction treatment and daily counseling from a local health care provider, Klamath Basin Behavioral Health.

Golden said many of the girls in the 90-day program have been sex trafficked. So this is a much more secure surrounding to ensure security for these clients and make sure that people arent able to just enter the facility, Golden said. He said that actually happened one time, when a couple of men who had trafficked one of the teens drove down from Portland in an unsuccessful attempt to get her out of the facility.

During the September legislative hearing, Jones, the child welfare director, told lawmakers the state is working to increase the supply of institutional care for foster children of all ages.

We will have an additional 64  beds across the state which will serve our littles, who are kids 5 to 8; our middles, who are 9 to 13; and our children that are  we call them our bigs that are 14 to 20, Jones said.

A wing of Douglas County's juvenile detention center has been repurposed as a program for teenagers in foster care. It is among the programs child welfare leaders are relying on to comply with a legal settlement to phase out the use of hotels to house foster children.

Douglas County plans to help serve those littles with a 25-bed facility now being renovated that will house children ages 6 to 12.

Ana Day, executive director of Oregon Community Programs which coordinates a network of therapeutic foster families in Eugene, said the state needs a range of programs for children including some residential treatment facilities. But she emphasized that many children with serious behavioral issues, including self-harm, can succeed in foster homes when the families have enough support and are able to focus on a single foster child with his or her own room.

The prospect of placing more young children in institutional care is troubling, she said. It should be the absolute exception to have a 6-year-old in residential care, Day said. The challenge, she said, is the truth is theres not enough foster families trained and willing to provide the expert support some very young children need to succeed.

Day pointed out that as Oregon leaders work on adding capacity to the child welfare system, their decisions today will determine the types and quality of care available to children for years to come.

Oregon doesnt have the resources for all of these kids, Day said. And if theyre going to build them, it would be smart to think about how do you build the ones that are right for those kids and not just the ones that are right for today.

 Hillary Borrud | hborrud@oregonian.com | 503-294-4034 | @hborrud

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State Rep. Diego Hernandez, D-Portland, said Friday that he would consider a run for elected office in Portland if community groups called him to the task.

If theres a need for leadership and they ask me to step up I would consider it, Hernandez told The Oregonian/OregonLive. But I havent had that happen.

That remark follows a Nov. 2018 tweet by Hernandez, which set off speculation that he would seek city office. In that tweet, the second-term legislator commented on Mayor Ted Wheelers off-the-cuff statement that he cannot wait for his term to end.

I want to have a mayor who wants to be in the job, even with all the challenges & difficulties, Hernandez tweeted.

The tweet continued: Our next mayor should want this job & should make decisions in a collective and collaborative manner. Perhaps a leader of color should run.

 I want to have a mayor who wants to be in the job, even with all the challenges & difficulties. Our next mayor should want this job & should also make decisions in a collective and collaborative manner. Perhaps a leader of color should run. https://t.co/xxZDObjAtG  Rep. Diego Hernandez, MSW (@diego4oregon) November 15, 2018

On Friday, Hernandez didnt directly say if that leader should be him.

Ive been concentrating on the legislative session and I haven't really decided what Im going to do next, he said, adding that he will decide later this year.

Hernandez has climbed the ladder of Oregons Democratic establishment in just a few short years. He was elected to the Reynolds school board in 2012, appointed to the Oregon Commission on Hispanic Affairs in 2014 and became Oregons youngest state representative in office when he was elected in 2016 at 29-years-old.

As a state representative, hes pushed for liberal priorities including corporate tax increases, renter protections, higher education budgets and racial equity measures. This year his priority bills include a measure to allow people living in Oregon illegally to obtain driver licenses and legislation to require landlords to provide voter registration cards to tenants.

Its unclear which city office Hernandez would run for if he does decide to set his sights on City Hall.

Wheeler and Commissioners Amanda Fritz and Chloe Eudaly are up for re-election in 2020 and candidates must declare themselves by March 2020.

Wheeler has said he is undecided about a re-election campaign. Eudaly has said she will seek office again and has not ruled out a run for mayor. Fritz is debating whether to seek re-election, according to an official with knowledge of her deliberations.

-- Gordon R. Friedman

gfriedman@oregonian.com
A new study from a Portland economic firm says that Oregon has a disproportionately large share of the countrys homeless population -- and many more on the edge.

The report jumped off a study done two years ago in which Portland residents said they were split on whether they thought the growing number of people living on the street was caused by economic forces or individual choices.

The studys authors said Wednesday that they think elected officials and policymakers have spent too much time and money alleviating the symptoms of homelessness and catering to residents who believe homelessness is a choice caused by people who dont seek help for addiction or mental health issues.

Instead, the studys authors, ECONorthwest, and funders, Oregon Community Foundation, called for state and local leaders to focus more on the large number of people who live on the edge of homelessness as well as people who have been homeless for a year or more and struggle to stay in housing.

A lot of the policy solutions are in the space of what I would call the policy of last resort -- which is shelter expansion, said ECONorthwest consultant John Tapogna.

The entire West Coast is in the midst of a homelessness crisis that sees more people forced on to the street each year. Max Williams of the Oregon Community Foundation said that the states largest philanthropic organization wanted more information about what the drivers of this crisis in Oregon is to figure out how to best invest money in stopping it. The foundation and its donor spends about $6 million to $8 million every year in housing and homelessness.

While weve been watching this problem and investing in it in a variety ways for quite some time, what we felt was lacking was clear data, Williams said.

Many of the ideas in the study will be common to nonprofits and local government bodies who work around homelessness issues. However, Williams said that the study provides a more clear-eyed look at quantifying what the challenges are for stemming the flow of people into homelessness by separating people considered to be chronically homeless and those who are homeless because of unexpected situations in their lives.

Here are three big takeaways from the findings:

1. Oregons population makes up only 1.3 percent of the countrys population, yet the states population of people who are considered chronically homeless and not in shelter makes up 5.6 percent of that segment of the national population.

2. There are 156,000 households in Oregon that are on the edge of homelessness. These are people who spend at least 50 percent of their income on rent and run the risk of losing their housing from one unexpected medical bill, a layoff or a car repair.

Tapogna said that his study shows that since the most recent recession, the Portland housing market has not kept up with demand -- creating 63 units of housing for ever 100 families formed -- and thus has placed immense pressure on people on the edge of homelessness.

Tapogna argues those are the people least served by the state and Portlands existing homelessness services framework. He said that he thinks Portland Multnomah Countys Joint Office of Homeless Services is one of the most effective governmental responses to homelessness in the country, but it wont make a dent in people with incomes too low to ward off homelessness.

That is a problem that then requires much more than your Joint Office and the number of very well-functioning and well-armed nonprofits, Tapogna said. This is a broad economic issue. It is an issue that involves the state Legislature, its an issue that involves community planning departments in cities and counties across the state, and it also involves the federal government that is the major provider of subsidies to low-income families.

3. Local and state officials have some solutions for people who struggle the most to stay in housing, according to the study, but not enough analysis is done to figure out how to measure the benefits of those solutions and which tactic works best for which kind of person.

For instance, the study encourages Portland and Multnomah Countys push for more permanent supportive housing -- housing for people with little to no income who also have mental health issues, addiction, criminal records or other obstacles to staying in housing and becoming self-sufficient.

However, Tapogna said that the supportive housing model could use more measurements of who thrives best in that environment, and thus who should be prioritized for it. He also said that the cost savings long-term are not adequately known, among other measures.
Staff for Portland Commissioners Jo Ann Hardesty and Chloe Eudaly met Thursday with national Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson to strategize over the city labor contract with the Portland police officers union, an official in Hardestys office said.

Mckesson, 33, met with the officials as part of his work managing Campaign Zero, a group that reviews police union contracts nationwide and points out what it says are policies that shield officers from accountability for misconduct.

Campaign Zeros analysis of the Portland police contract pointed to what the group says is problematic language that restricts questioning of officers, gives officers undue access to information about investigations of which they are targets, and limits officer discipline and recordkeeping of misconduct.

Daryl Turner, the police union president, declined to comment.

The official in Hardestys office said Mckesson gave a detailed presentation about policing, contracts, accountability and their relationship to violence.

Also present at the meeting were members of the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform, a faith-based group seeking greater police oversight.

Baltimore-based Mckesson wears many hats: Civil rights activist, author, podcast host and one-time mayoral candidate, among other work. He was in Portland on Wednesday for a taping of his podcast, Pod Save the People, for which Hardesty was a guest. Hardestys office asked him to extend his trip to give a briefing on the police contract, the official said.

Mckesson tweeted his take on Thursdays meeting to his more than 1 million Twitter followers, saying he led a talk with activists and advocates to discuss avenues for structural change.

It was incredible to be in a room of such solution-oriented advocates ready to do deep, sustained work. Im pumped! Mckessons tweet said.

We led a worksession today with activists and advocates in Portland today at City Hall to discuss avenues for structural change. It was incredible to be in a room of such solution-oriented advocates ready to do deep, sustained work. Im pumped!  deray (@deray) March 14, 2019

The official in Hardestys office said the commissioner, who has long been an advocate for police reform, will ask Mayor Ted Wheeler to schedule a public briefing led by Mckesson. The official asked not to be named because Hardesty had not authorized the aide to speak on the record.

Wheelers spokeswoman, Eileen Park, said such a briefing would need to be approved by the mayor and commissioners chiefs of staff and no such discussion has taken place. A spokeswoman for Eudaly didnt immediately return a message seeking comment.

The citys contract with the Portland Police Association, the union representing rank-and-file officers, doesnt expire until June 2020. Negotiations on a new contract are all but sure to draw a spotlight to City Hall, given tension between the police and public over officials handling of violent protests and officers shooting people of color or people experiencing mental illness.

-- Gordon R. Friedman

GFriedman@Oregonian.com
Rep. Deborah Boone, D-Cannon Beach, illustrates what lawmakers are able to buy with campaign money in Oregon. She spent thousands of dollars of it on auto repairs, dry cleaning and more.

About 60 percent of Boones campaign money came from corporate interests; individuals and small, unnamed donors accounted for just 4 percent. When a group of residents in her district went to Boone with concerns about a nearby logging operation, they confronted a common reality in Oregon today. They hadnt given her campaign a dime.

READ PART 4 OF POLLUTED BY MONEY
Joel Brandon Wallace, of Reese, was found guilty on all five criminal charges against him, including the first degree premeditated murder of his great-aunt.

Wallace, 34, appeared in court Friday, March 15 before Judge Stephen Carras of the 42nd Circuit Court. After a nine-day trial, a jury found Wallace guilty in the murder of Victoria Kilbourne, 74, a Midland beautician who was reported missing on June 26, 2018.

Her remains were found on June 30 in a shallow grave on Wallace's hunting property near Onaway.

Other charges include homicide-felony murder, unlawful imprisonment, forgery and uttering and publishing.

For the first time in the two weeks of trial, tissues were offered to those in the gallery before the proceedings resumed. Wallace was silent as the foreman read down the list of every charge he was found guilty on, though several of the victim's friends and family members began crying, as quietly as they could.

As a court officer led Wallace out of the room, he could be heard sniffling to hold back tears too.

Wallace will appear in court for sentencing on May 16.

Representing the people in this case was Midland County Prosecuting Attorney J. Dee Brooks. Wallace was represented by attorney Dan Duke. Wallace chose not to testify during the trial.

Fingerprints found on the tape used to bind Kilbourne's hands, feet and mouth were determined to be a match for Wallace by forensic investigator Kenneth Binder of the Michigan State Police, who testified on Wednesday.

In addition to Kilbourne's murder, Wallace was found guilty of forging a $2,000 check in her name, made out to his wife, Roberta Wallace.

Security footage from the Huntington Bank ATM located at a Meijer supermarket in Saginaw -- which Kilbourne and Wallace would often visit to withdraw and deposit money -- confirms Wallace attempted to submit the check shortly after 10 p.m. June 25, 2018 -- after Kilbourne's likely disappearance.

The check had been declared potentially fraudulent by the Huntington Bank security department by 10 a.m. the following Tuesday.

Detective Sgt. George Lehman, a forensic document examiner with the Michigan State Police, testified on Wednesday. Comparing the signature and the denied check with writing samples from Wallace seized under warrant, Lehman concluded that not only was it "highly probable" Wallace had forged the check, Lehman was "virtually certain" of it.

Several people close to Kilbourne testified earlier in the trial that she had mentioned being frustrated with the financial situation Wallace put her in, and potentially was considering "cutting him off" from her finances.

Brooks said the possibility of losing Kilbourne as a source of income may have been motive enough to confront her, and an ensuing argument could have led to her death.

Jason Louchart, a former friend of Wallace, testified in court on March 8 regarding a letter his family had received shortly after Wallace's arrest.

In the letter, Wallace pleaded with Louchart to set up a scenario in which he would record a staged conversation between Louchart's cousin and another friend in which his cousin would pose as Wallace's younger brother Jordan Wallace and "admit" to murdering Kilbourne.

Louchart's fiancee would later turn the letter over to police.

In the letter, Wallace also wrote for the friend playing "Jordan" to talk about pushing Kilbourne's shirt up to give the impression of a sexual assault, which is one detail about the state of Kilbourne's body that had not been released by the time the letter was written.

Brooks argued that the only way Wallace would have known that detail is if he were present for Kilbourne's death.
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (PANA) - The Burkinabe government reacted on Thursday to a report of the Burkinabe Movement for Human and Peoples' Rights (MBDHP) accusing the army of summarily executing individuals in the guise of fighting against terrorism
Nairobi, Kenya (PANA) - Visiting French President Emmanuel Macron decried here Thursday the lack of an internationally binding environment law to hold polluters and violators of the environment to account
Bamako, Mali (PANA)  The trade-union of Malian doctors (SYMEMA) at Mali's Hospital, one of the biggest hospitals in the country, on Thursday declared a two-day strike to demand payment of emoluments due part-time doctors for 20 months, sources told PANA
Tunis, Tunisia (PANA) - The Tunisian foreign ministry has strongly condemned what it termed "the cowardly attacks" on two mosques in New Zealand on Friday, that left many people dead or wounded, said a statement copied to PANA
For 14 years, Helen Oyeyemis imaginative vision and compelling prose have cemented her unparalleled voice in literature. Oyeyemis latest novel, Gingerbread, proves that her writing still remains an unpredictable delight, whisking readers through a fantastical tale with contemporary relevance.

Gingerbread follows Harriet Lee, a single mother living in London with her daughter, Perdita. Harriets world is brimming with tension, including strife with her mother, Margot, but the one constant in her life is a family gingerbread recipe. The recipe is so delicious that she uses it to make friendssome of whom become reliant on her for a gingerbread fix.

But Perdita has celiac disease and cannot eat the gingerbread despite her love for it. After lying about a school trip to go on a mysterious journey, she returns home, prepares a single gingerbread cookie for herself and becomes so violently ill that she goes into a coma. When Perdita wakes up and is well enough to return home, Harriet tells her the story of leaving Harriets childhood home of Druhastrana, which translates from Czech as the other side and is considered a fictional island to the rest of the world.

Its with this fairy tale-like story that Oyeyemi blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Harriets voice is at times incredulous about the saga shes telling, as if commenting on events she can hardly believe herself. But the unifying element among the rapid changes of setting, characters and narrative direction is gingerbread and its power to transform Harriets life.

The recipe was developed to use blighted wheat in a such a delicious way that, should the wheat kill the snacker, they wouldnt be entirely sad about it. If Gingerbread has a moral in the sense of a traditional fairy tale, it might be wrapped up in the fact that a treat could be a harmless snack or a dangerous poisonand that the eater will never know until its too late.

For all the otherworldly turns, however, there are traces of a fascinating immigration narrative that engages with timely issues. Druhastrana is cut off from the world, which has completely forgotten about it, due to a Great Referendum that severed all international relations. Harriet and Margots lives were upended when they became involved in an exploitative capitalist scheme to turn a profit on a beloved family recipe, forcing them to flee to the U.K. Once there, Margot worked multiple jobssome paid under the tableto cobble together a Minimum Frankenwage to make ends meet. These echoes of a recognizable world keep the novel tetheredhowever looselyto firmer ground.

Gingerbreads more fantastical elements dont quite obscure Harriets grim history, but rather package it in a way that avoids emotional highs and lows. Instead of delivering a harrowing tale of struggle and danger, Harriets saga becomes a bizarre story laced with haunting moments that mirror contemporary concerns.

Where Oyeyemis previous novels that riff on fairy tales can be linked to a genre archetype, Gingerbread reads more like multiple fairy tales wrapped up in one. Oyeyemi avoids clean endings and lessons, opting to launch her central characters in a new direction instead. Even the final pages hint at yet another beginning as strange as those that came before. It doesnt quite make sense unless youre willing to meet the book where it isin a surreal, chaotic world where the real and the imagined overlap.

Bridey Heing is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here.
Earlier this month, House Democrats passed a sweeping bill to reform American Democracy, HR1: The For the People Act. This massive, lofty piece of legislation would establish nationwide automatic voter registration, curb gerrymandering by requiring independent commissions, and even require sitting presidents and presidential candidates to release 10 years of tax returns. The bill would also attempt to reduce the influence of big money in politics by requiring dark money groups to disclose their donors.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has unsurprisingly been leading the resistance against this extremely anti-corruption bill, dismissing it as a radical, half-baked socialist proposal, and calling it the Democratic Politician Protection Act. However, attempting to curb dark money influence would not just be a shot at the engine block of conservative causes: Liberal groups also have their hands dirtied by origin-less funding.

Conservative groups have spent approximately $763.2 million in undisclosed funds over the past decade, while liberal groups have spent approximately $235.8 million. However, reflecting a significant disparity in fundraising, Democrats have been raking in the dark money as of late. In the 2018 midterms, liberals received almost double the amount of untraceable cash as conservatives.

HR1 would require dark money groups to reveal their donors, social networks to disclose the backers of political ads, and even attempt to publicly finance campaigns by having the federal government match small-dollar donations. This would be achieved by matching each dollar a candidate raised from small donations of public money for all Congressional and Presidential candidates, capped at $200. This measure would create an incentive to level the playing field between small-dollar donors and wealthy campaign backers.

Unfortunately, Democrats and Republicans alike have long been beholden to big money in politics, blocking meaningful reform and benefitting from weak enforcement by the FEC, Paul S. Ryan of Common Cause told Mother Jones. However, Ryan qualified his statement, pushing back against the idea that HR1 would only throttle Republican dollars: Sen. McConnells not fooling anyone with his self-serving rhetoric. America knows hes only protecting his fat-cat friends.
The white supremacist who targeted two New Zealand mosques in a mass shooting todayresulting in at least 49 deaths of Muslim worshippers, including childrenwas simply an internet troll with guns. That sounds callous, and it minimizes the nature of this particular evil. Nonetheless, that is the core truth of this attack, and in reality it is the most disturbing trait evil can bear: A joke.

Many outlets have reportedaccuratelythat the shooters manifesto was a mix of true beliefs and shitposting (i.e., ironic online inside jokes). But they also report inaccurately that his intention was to confuse people, or make them look like fools. It wasnt. The real motivationwhich he truly might not be all that aware of, himselfis to generate public outrage at the manifestos ridiculous claims, which are sometimes juxtaposed directly with honest hate. Our misplaced outrage is the sole food for his tightly-knit subculture of hateful, white nationalist internet dweebs, and our anger justifies theirs.

Of course, weve always sort of laughed off these online dweebs as impotent, cartoonish losersPepes, basicallywho resort to anonymous message boards precisely because theyre too insecure or scared of shame to espouse these things in public. Or perhaps because they dont really believe them at all.

But they do believe them. And today marks what could be a troubling new trend: Pepe got a gun.

These jokes, of course, arent really jokes. Theyre lies in disguise. And the much bigger danger is, whether we even know it or not, we encounter them everywhere today, from internet message boards to popular social media and, most troubling of aall, right-wing mouthpieces and Donald Trump apologists on cable news. Theres no difference between these groups in tone or rhetorical strategy, and the fact that people laugh out loud or in private as they lie to us about such seriousand sometimes deadlythings should alarm us. Sadly, theres nothing we can do about it other than to abandon these people to themselves. You cant argue with a joke. You can only laugh at it and move on, even if its on you. The problem: The same goes these days for liesyou cant use truth to argue them.

To see what I mean, lets look at where the terrorist was coming from.

First, his motivation couldnt be more clear: The shooters 74-page manifestothe original, published minutes before the attack, has been taken down, and though I wont link out to it here on principle is accessible elsewheremakes clear he carried out the attack against Muslims who, in his words, have invaded the West. Though the shooter was Australian, he had moved to New Zealand to, in his words, live temporarily whilst I planned and trained. Though he specifically targeted these Muslims because they were Muslims, the larger governing factor was that they werein his mindMuslim immigrants (though we can say with near certainly many of the victims were in fact born in New Zealand) who had come to what he saw as his landthat land being a transnational ethnic population of people of European (i.e., white) ethnicity. (However, the shooter himself either isnt aware of or doesnt acknowledge his own ironic dimension: Europeans invaded New Zealand.) The target and venue, therefore, by his own admission, were in a sense more broad and abstract than those Muslims in that specific country. His abstract target was non-Europeans generally, and his venue the West at large.

Its perhaps for this reason that New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern in her press conference todayeven when directly asked about the subjectwouldnt mention white supremacy by name. She used her platform to emphasize New Zealands solidarity, an effort to keep potential fracture points welded shut, but she also didnt mention Muslims, though they were the specific targets. Again, that might have been strategic, but it wasnt smart or moral. Leaders, especially Western leaders, must call out white supremacy as a terrorist threat, the same way they call out jihadist (Islamist/Islamic) terrorists. Ardern, in my view, needed at this specific and urgent time to express her countrys solidarity with its Muslim community, whom no matter what you say about the shooters manifesto can, as targeted victims, feel no other way than surges of both anger and vulnerability of their status. Her all-sides non-response hurts and angers me, and I cant imagine how they must feel at this kind of erasure in the face of such acute tragedy.

That said, the terrorist attack was, at its root, part of a joke.

This doesnt make it any less evil. It makes it more evil: As mentioned above, that joke, at its root, isby virtue of its ironyactually a lie, which itself is part of an even larger governing system of lies. The attacker is part of this system, which has frighteningly more adherents than you might expect. He dwelt on popular white supremacist/white nationalist online message boardsmost specifically 8chanwhere he shitposted memes and shared warped visions of how the world should be with other likeminded users.

For those un- or only vaguely familiar, shitposting is another term for trolling. Basically, these trolls post ironic content intended to either trigger unindoctrinated people they converse with directly or who oppose them in general, eliciting outrage and anger because theyre perceived as not cool enough or smart enough to be in on the joke. Shitposting can also take those arguments to an inescapable hall-of-mirrors of irony that frustratesand, again, angersthe other person or group. In other words, they want you to be mad at their jokes. Its the only way the joke will work.

But, again, the jokes arent jokes. Heres an example: Take for instance the okay sign: Widely understood to at one time have symbolized white supremacy by the WP shape the hands make, that symbol has been transformed in white nationalist online subculture to an ironic device. If you get upset by it, youre ridiculous: Theres no way it means white power lol!

Except it does. The problem is that nowand this is worsewhite nationalist internet chumps in response to public outrage inverted the meaning. The real symbol of white power is their laughter at our anger and self-righteousness about this silly thing. Our anger, to them, justifies and legitimizes their subcultures existence and belief system, and their laughter is insider solidarity, renewed.

Lets look at how the shooter does this.

The shooters manifesto is a mix of his real beliefs aimed at a general audience and these ironic inside jokes aimed at his own subculture. For instance, he includes a 4chan (the white nationalist message board) meme known as Navy Seal Copypasta. For those of you who remember Napoleon Dynamite, its basically making fun of hyper-masculinity born of deep insecurity as exemplified by Uncle Rico. Heres a screen shot from the manifesto:

This is beyond doubt a weird thing to include when youre about to try to kill hundreds of people. But he follows that irony up with this deadly serious passage:

This isnt just a mix of truth and jokes. Its a mix of truth and lies.

The shooter also writes he learned about white nationalism from a video game called Spyro: Year of the Dragon. Heres a picture of Spyro:

This is, obviously, a joke. He adds that the video game Fortnite inspired him to floss on the corpses, which is a reference to a dance in that game. (He actually clarifies in the same segment he in fact was not influenced by video games.)

As he embarks on the attack, he says, absurdly, Subscribe to PewDiePie. PewDiePie is a guy who has the most popular YouTube channel in the world, and has become a sort of flash-point for a debate about whether he uses white nationalist imagery. Heres what one of the shooters subculture message board colleagues made of that joke, in real time:

And as he shot to death dozens of peoplelivestreamed on Facebookthe shooter played music: A song known to white nationalist online insiders as Remove Kebab. Heres an online response to that, in real time:

At the time, of course, others were also dyin.

Perhaps the most widely misunderstood and mis-reported (on both sides) passage is his claim that American conservative troll and Turning Point USA personality Candace Owens radicalized [him] the most. Many naive reporters in the press reprinted this as unvarnished fact without understanding the insider context. But right after making that claim, the shooter writes, The extreme actions [Owens] calls for are too much, even for my tastes.

Obviously Owens doesnt advocate for mass slaughter. However, here we see a blur: she has indeed advocated for ethno-nationalism, and not only that, has done so with the same premise the shooter cites multipleMULTIPLEtimes in his manifesto as his own specific motivation: The birth rate of Muslims.

So here we have the truth: Owens does indeed hold the same hateful general ideology as the shooter. And we also have a joke: She herself is seen by this subculture as sort of a tragic joke, and isnt extreme enough. In order to understand what the shooter means, you also need to understand that both of these things can be true.

This one played out the way he probably wanted it. After all, Owens herself was an object of the troll, and she responded to the shooting with a triggered tweet that included lol.

BUT again, we now see from Owens the same rhetorical device: A simultaneous laugh and lie. She DID create content espousing her views on Islam. Proof above.

The manifesto also applies the truth/joke technique to Trump. The shooter says hes inspired by Donald Trump, as Trump symbolizes white unity. But he adds, as a policy maker and leader? Dear god, no.

Look, heres the hard truth: We see this all the time. ALL THE TIME. We see it in shills who take to TV and Twitter to shamelessly shine Trumps ass, even though they know better. People such as Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan, Matt Whitaker, Matt Schlapp, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or Franklin Graham. Perhaps the most high-profile example outside of Sanders is Kellyanne Conway, who has been repeatedly and credibly alleged to be the source of the material she then goes on-air to call liesto the faces of people she knows know that she is lying.

This is, in short, trolling. Theres a reason these people make you mad: They want you to be mad. They dont care whether youre right about their lies or their true vile beliefs. They know you think theyre vile, so they need to laugh at you to feel better, and your anger at the obvious lies they get away with only serves, in their own view, to legitimize their behavior and justify their continued defense of the otherwise indefensible. For instance, these mainstream conservative voices in the U.S. have called the boiling but rational Democratic outrage at their behavior part of a mob mentality. I mean, its the governing principle of Owens Turning Point USA. They want our anger. It is the only thing they can use to justify their existence.

This maddening rhetoric might be new to us, but its not new. Ironic humor has always been a tool of white supremacism. The neo-nazi Daily Stormer style guide explicitly says, The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not.

Why? Irony affords a layer of deniabilityeven if (and especially if) that deniability is clearly also a lie, theres no way to prove it. The frustration this elicits in a rational audience is delicious to the liar cowering behind that irony. For instance, Trump insulates himself from accusations of lying when he says things like, many people are saying. Its why the press rarely calls Trumps lies lies, instead employing terms such as falsehood or misleading statement or says without evidence. Because you cant prove it. Ha ha!

Trump has also repeatedly called Democrats a mob. Yesterday he baldly threatened the opposition with violence in the form of the military and police, apparently anticipating constitutional steps to remove him from office.

Its not a leap. Its a straight line. Ive always taken comfort in the fact that these trolls seem absolutely harmless, hiding behind computer screens. Its easy to laugh at them, and perhaps we should: Theyre mostly just bumbling idiots, cartoons. Except, of course, for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, who networked with others in similar online hubs before carrying out his attack. And except, of course, for this latest shitheel.

Pepe has a gun. We cant laugh anymore.
In a summary judgment published Thursday, US District Court Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel of the Southern District of California granted four of Apple's requests as outlined below:

Grants Apple's Motion for Summary Adjudication on Count VI of Qualcomm's SACC on Qualcomm's claim for breach of Section 7 of the BCPA; Grants Apple's Motion for Partial Summary Judgement on Count VII of the SACC on the claim for breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing; Grants Apple's Motion for Partial Summary Judgement on the unjust enrichment claim in Count VIII; Grants Apple's Motion for Partial Summary Judgement on Count IX's Request for Declaration that Qualcomm is Release from any Obligation To Make Further Payments Under the BCPA.

Apple is now virtually certain to get an extra $1 billion that Qualcomm withheld in unpaid royalty rebates, but there's billions more at stake. You could read the full "Order on Apple's Motion for Summary Judgement" below and always check out Florian Mueller's legal analysis of this development here. For more of the background of this case you can check out C/Net's report here.

19-03-14 Apple v. Qualcomm ... by Jack Purcher on Scribd

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This has certainly been a very business month for Apple HMD patent applications being published by the U.S. Patent Office. On March 7th Patently Apple was first to report on Apple's HMD with a "Motorized Adjustable Headband System" in addition to a second patent filing covering a "Thermal Regulation System." On March 9th Patently Apple discovered yet another HMD patent filing in Europe by Apple covering a system designed to assist the user avoid "Eye Dazzle."

Yesterday the U.S. Patent Office published yet another HMD patent application by Apple that relates to incorporating multiple face seals on the HMD so as to ensure that exterior light can't interfere with the content that the user is viewing and to provide users with maximum comfort.

Apple notes that most HMD's on the market today use foam material for its seal Yet Apple states that for some face shapes and sizes, the traditional foam structure may be unable to conform to the user's face and thereby unable to , sufficiently block exterior light.

Another negative related to most HMD's on the market today is that in implementations in which engagement of the face seal with the user's face is relied upon to support the head-mounted display, some users may experience uncomfortable areas of high pressure.

Apple's face seal design includes movable structures that conform to the face shape of the user in order to enhance comfort and/or light-blocking, which improves the user experience.

An overview of Apple's HMD face-seal areas are highlighted in yellow by Patently Apple to illustrate where the face seal is from various perspectives.

Apple's patent FIG. 4 below is a front inside view of the head-mounted display showing the face seal #104 and its multiple seal support members #436.

In the illustrated example, the seal support members are independent elements that are incorporated in the face seal.

Apple further notes that the face seal is formed from a resilient compressible material that compresses in response to engagement with the face of the user (#208), and expands when engagement ceases.

Examples of resilient compressible materials that can be used for the face seal include synthetic rubber, closed cell foam materials, and open cell foam materials.

The seal support members (#436) are embedded in or under the resilient compressible material of the face seal to limit the degree of compression of the face seal.

The seal support members are designed to conform to the geometry of the face of the user relative to the housing by moving, such as by rotation around an axis. By conforming to the geometry of the user's face users having various face and head shapes can comfortably use the head-mounted display.

Later Apple mentions that sensors can be incorporated into the face seal and maintain a consistent distance to the user's skin. Sensors could measure skin temperature. Another example could be a sensor to monitor heart rate.

Apple's patent dives deep by providing three examples of how the superior face seal could be constructed with the use of springs, ball joints and hinges engineered to ensure that the fit is snug, comfortable and most importantly, to ensure that no exterior light interferes with the content that the user is focused on. The details are too many to list in this report.

Apple's patent application that was published today by the U.S. Patent Office was originally filed back in Q3 2018. Considering that this is a patent application, the timing of today's highlighted HMD feature to market is unknown at this time.

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Patna: Former Deputy Chief Minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejaswi Yadav, talking to reporters outside Bihar Assembly in Patna on Tuesday mocked his former boss and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar for saying that he could not compromise with corruption and communal people when it was he who got corrupt and communal people into power through the 'back door'.

In an obvious reference to Kumar's decision to break away from the Lalu-led Grand Alliance in Bihar to go back to the Bharatiya Janata Party-led NDA coalition in the state, Yadav, who blames Kumar for his own political setback, asked the Chief Minister to explain who broke away from the secular alliance in favor of communal forces like BJP in Bihar.

Referring to the recent communal incidents in Darbhanga and Bhagalpur, the younger son of Lalu Prasad Yadav said that the recent setback of the NDA candidates at the polling booths in Bihar and other states had made its leaders very nervous forcing them to indulge in violent activities to hide their anger and frustration.

"It were BJP leaders Giriraj Singh and Nityanand Rai who incited people in Darbhanga while Ashwini Kumar Choubey's son was doing the same in Bhagalpur. Nitish Kumar needs to explain why no action has been taken against these people who clearly tried to disrupt communal harmony in Bihar," Yadav asked.

Meanwhile, RJD leaders in the state Assembly chanted anti-Nitish slogans demanding resignations of both Giriraj Singh and Ashwini Kumar Choubey followed by their arrest for fomenting communal unrest in Bihar.
Patna: Vice President of India M Venkaiyah Naidu, speaking at the inauguration of Bihar Diwas at Patna's Gandhi Maidan on Thursday, gave a call for eradication of corruption from the system saying corruption was the biggest enemy of the people of India and the enemy of the nation.

{gallery}newsimages2018/mar/032218_2{/gallery}"The entire country is a victim of corruption. Even former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was known of saying that all the government fund for various social schemes were disbursed among corrupt officials before ever reaching its intended destination. That is why today we are trying to cut down the middle-men and take the money directly to the intended recipient," the senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who was the chief guest this year, said.

Naidu also talked about other social evils like casteism and communalism saying there should be no place for such things in today's society and voters should be extremely careful in choosing their leaders and choose only those who came out strong on moral values and who showed deep respect for all people regardless of their caste or religion.

The Vice President expressed his support for reservation in jobs for women and laws to protect them.

Advocating strengthening of India's education system, Naidu said that though the nation was solidly on the path of development, it was still a shame that 25% of the Indian population still lived below the poverty line and about the same percentage of people were illiterate.

"This is a great challenge for us and we must unite to overcome this bane," he said.

Naidu also said that he was speaking as a citizen of India and not as a member of any political party.
Patna: Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday kicked off this year's version of Bihar Diwas at a lavish function at Patna's Gandhi Maidan where politicians from the ruling NDA sang the praise of Bihar, its glorious history, culture, and Mahatma Gandhi's historical launch of the Satyagraha Movement against the British from what is also known as the land of Buddha and Mahavir.

{gallery}newsimages2018/mar/032218_1{/gallery}Kumar, who relishes speaking at such events that provides him the right opportunity and right platform to tout his success as the Chief Minister while also providing a chance to bash his opponents, listed his many accomplishments since assuming power in 2005 including maintenance of communal harmony in the state and sweeping changes in the rights of women of Bihar.

Urging people to maintain utmost peace and communal harmony during the coming Ramnavami festival, the Chief Minister said that he was aware of the fact that some people were working hard to spread religious hatred in the state for political gains.

"In spite of that, I humbly request you not to give leg to such activities and instead, celebrate Ramnavami in the spirit it was intended to which was with love for all and peace for everyone," he said.

Calling his opponents men of no principle, Kumar said that some people had no principle or conviction and all they know is how to make posts on Twitter. "We don't believe in politics without principles; our principle is development with social justice for all," he said.

The remainder of the time the Chief Minister spent on talking about how he raised the state budget from Rs 6,000 crore in 2005 to Rs. 87,000 crore in 2018 and how he implemented reservation for women in Panchayat elections.

Others to speak on the occasion included Bihar Governor Satya Pal Malik, Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi, and state Education Minister Krishna Nandan Prasad Verma. They also paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi who launched his agitation against the British from Champaran in Bihar.

The opening day was marked with a number of cultural shows including songs and dances performed by artists from across the state. It also featured a laser show that was a huge hit among the audience.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his greeting to the people of Bihar to mark Bihar Diwas saying Bihar's contribution towards the country's progress was 'exemplary and invaluable'.

Bihar Diwas is celebrated each year on March 22 to mark the day the state of Bihar was carved out of the Bengal Presidency by the British in 1912.
A man in western Pennsylvania went to the Beaver County Humane Society earlier this week, looking to re-adopt a dog he had to give up for hardship reasons.

But as TribLive reports, the man made it as far as the parking lot when the Shar-Pei mix viciously attacked him. Indeed, the man was bitten so badly, he was flown by medical helicopter to a Pittsburgh hospital for treatment following the attack Tuesday.

The man is not identified in the story.

However, the humane society post on Facebook asked for prayers for the victim.

In explaining the attack, the Humane Society said the Shar-Pei mix dog, which the man had given up in late November because of hard times, had no prior behavioral problems at the shelter:

While in our care, staff and volunteers had no behavior issues or incidents with the dog, the statement said.

We are taking this incident very seriously and working to investigate what happened to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.

The attack, which occurred outside the shelter as the man was leaving with the seven-year-old dog, remain under investigation.
Green beer will be flowing this weekend and so will crowds along Second Street in Harrisburg.

Next to Thanksgiving Eve, St. Patricks Day is one of the biggest party holidays of the year along the block.

Revelers are expected to celebrate mostly on Saturday at bars and restaurants where they will indulge in Irish food and drink specials and participate in a first-ever Harrisburg St. Patricks Day pub crawl.

Harrisburg police and bar owners said they are prepared for the festivities.

It will be business as usual with extra officers on patrol on Friday and Saturday nights as they are most weekends, said Harrisburg police Capt. Gabriel Olivera. For more than a year some bar owners have been footing the bill for extra officers following an incident where police used pepper spray to control crowds.

Over the years Second Street has had numerous incidents, but not necessarily related to St. Patricks Day. Most recently in February five people were stabbed during what police described as a large fight at Bridges Social Club.

Olivera said the Irish holiday is normally not associated with too many issues, and the celebration will continue on March 23 with the St. Patricks Day Parade.

Bar owners like Ron Kamionka said St. Patricks Day attracts more visitors to the city than a typical weekend. The owner of several city establishments including the new Hops, Vines and Spirits Tasting Room, said the holiday encompasses all age groups, from 21-year-olds who bar hop to the older generation out for a few celebratory pints.

For the most part, its a tame crowd.

St. Patricks Day crowds are very self-regulated. You dont have people who get out of control. They get intoxicated but they are not looking to cause any trouble, Kamionka said.

Saturday night will draw a younger crowd, while Sunday morning a more mature crowd will come out for Sunday breakfasts, brunches and beer, he said.

Last year Kamionkas Bourbon Street Saloon was packed elbow-to-elbow by 9:30 a.m., something he said expects to happen again this year. The doors will open at 9 a.m. March 17 with $2.50 green beer pints all day.

For those who want to bar hop, theres a new addition to the streets festivities this year  a St. Patricks Day bar crawl from noon to 8 p.m. Saturday. Organizer Rob Wright, owner of Urban Craft and Crawl, brought the concept from Philadelphia.

Last year 3,000 people participated in the Philadelphia pub crawl.

In Harrisburg participants will pay $12 in advance and $20 at the door for wristbands granting them free cover charges and access to drink and food specials at designed restaurants such as Bridges Social Club in Harrisburg. The bar crawl is held during the day to avoid security issues and attract business during a traditionally slow bar times, Wright said.

We can flood a bunch of people in the market, and bars that participate are really thankful you brought a thousand people in on a Saturday at noon, he said.

Aroogas Downtown owner Gary Huether, Jr. said the restaurant will participate in the bar crawl to attract more patrons. As a precaution he said internal security will be in place at the corner restaurant all day into Saturday night.

Aroogas St. Patricks Day specials will include a 10 p.m. to midnight happy hour with 22-ounce Coors and Miller Lite green beers for $4.

The only thing that could possibly dampen Irish spirits is the weather.

We will see the streets busier than we have seen throughout the winter, and probably since last fall. If the weather can play it right and not be raining or snowing or too cold, I think it will be the lead-in to spring and the downtown season, he said.

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Pennsylvanias spotted lanternfly quarantine zone has been expanded to include Dauphin County, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture announced today.

The decision to expand the quarantine, which gives the department authority to restrict the movement of commodities within the zone, was made after the department investigated claims of a spotted lanternfly population in Dauphin County and treated the area against the insect.

The quarantine zone was last expanded in November 2017 to include Berks, Bucks, Carbon, Chester, Delaware, Lancaster, Lebanon, Lehigh, Monroe, Montgomery, Northampton, Philadelphia and Schuylkill counties.

The quarantine gives the department the authority to regulate the movement of commodities that may be moving within or leaving the quarantine zone. It restricts the movement of articles that contain any life stages of the spotted lanternfly, including egg masses, nymphs and adults.

All businesses are required to take an online training course designated to help them recognize the spotted lanternfly and prevent its movement, after which they will receive a permit from the department.

(A free business permit webinar will be held from 1-2 p.m. Thursday, March 21. To register for the webinar, visit www.Spottedlanternfly.eventbrite.com.)

As part of the spotted lanternfly quarantine agreement beginning May 1, 2019, the departments Bureau of Plant Industry will begin to perform inspections and verification checks to confirm that businesses are properly permitted. Failure to take the permit exam and educate employees could result in possible penalties and fines.

Whether you are a contractor, farmer, truck driver or business or rail owner, the spotted lanternfly can pose a risk to your business and threaten your bottom line, said department Secretary Russell Redding. It is incumbent on Pennsylvanias business community to obtain a permit so that we can demonstrate our due diligence to trading partners and restrict the movement of this invasive pest to other areas of the commonwealth and other states.

The spotted lanternfly, an invasive planthopper native to Southeast Asia, was first discovered in the U.S. in Berks County in 2014. In addition to spreading into 13 Pennsylvania counties since then, the insect was found in in Frederick County, Virginia, in 2017, and in Hunterdon, Mercer and Warren counties in New Jersey in 2018.

Spotted lanternflies feed on the sap of a plant and when there are high populations of them, they can cause significant damage. They feed on more than 70 species of plants, including important forestry and agricultural crops.

As part of the PA Farm Bill to protect agriculture infrastructure, the Pennsylvania Rapid Response Disaster Readiness Account will provide $5 million in funding to allow for a quick response to agricultural disasters, which includes $3 million to use animal or plant health officials to contain an outbreak or threat, such as the spotted lanternfly. Additionally, the USDA recently dedicated more than $7.5 million in new funding to Pennsylvanias efforts.

The funding builds on work over the past year to eradicate the pest. The department has taken responsibility for suppressing spotted lanternfly populations in the core infestation area, while the USDA has established a perimeter extending 18 miles out from the core area, where they are working to eliminate any infestation.

The non-native, invasive spotted lanternfly passes through four stages of nymph development before becoming the winged adult.

Penn States College of Agricultural Sciences has taken the lead on public outreach through its Cooperative Extension service.

Additionally, the Wolf Administration has been training employees and issuing permits to state vehicles that travel through the quarantine zone.

Redding added that despite the new funding and the work being done through PDAs partnership with Penn State and USDA, it is imperative that Pennsylvania homeowners assist control efforts by obtaining the materials needed to spray and suppress spotted lanternflies on their own properties.

I encourage all Pennsylvania businesses to learn how they can do their part to get permitted, and for communities and homeowners to join us in this fight, he said. This invasive insect is prone to human-assisted movement, so residents need to stay vigilant, check their vehicles and survey their surroundings.

By contacting your local Penn State Extension staff, you can receive tips and information about the latest products available to combat Spotted Lanternfly, such as sprays, sticky bands, and other approved control methods.

Homeowners with questions about treatment, including approved sprays, can learn more through Penn State Extension Spotted Lanternfly webpage.

For more information about the spotted lanternfly, visit the Department of Agricultures Spotted Lanternfly webpage.
The floods of 1936 occurred throughout Pennsylvania March 17-20 and became known as the St. Patricks Day Floods.

The St. Patricks Day floods affected all areas of Pennsylvania - Easton, Williamsport, Bloomsburg, Sunbury, Johnstown and Pittsburgh. More than 100 people in Pennsylvania died and the damage estimate was $300 million.

North Second Street near Kelker Street in Harrisburg during the March 1936 flood. This photo taken by R. N. Good was published in the March 23, 1936, Evening News.

According to the book, Great Floods of Pennsylvania by William H. Shank, The winter of 1935-36 had been one of the most severe that Pennsylvania had seen for years. Huge quantities of snow fell in January and February throughout the state, and prevailing low temperatures preserved it well.

In late February, the cold spell ended, according to the book, "with remarkably warm weather and light rains. This resulted in the rapid melting of two months accumulation of dormant moisture throughout the state, all of which was turned loose on the streams and rivers within a period of about 10 days."

People use boats to get around the lower end of Bridge Street, New Cumberland, during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

An early effect of the warm spell was the thawing of the heavy layers of ice, fifteen to twenty (or more) inches thick, formed on the rivers during the intense cold period. As this ice melted, and as the rivers raised, the ice gorged or jammed at various points, forming temporary dams, with resulting high back-up water. The heavy ice cakes, borne in-shore by the high water, resulted in great damage to properties or communities where the jams occurred.

State Highway Department engineers used two, 1,000-pound charges of dynamite to break up some of the ice gorge at the Juniata River bridge near Amity Hall during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

Dynamite was used to break up an ice gorge that caused the Juniata River to overflow at Amity Hall during the March 1936 flood. Two, 1,000-pound charges were set off by the state Highway Department engineers. Supervising the blast were R. W. Schreck, left, assistant district engineer, and Charles Graham, maintenance superintendent of highways in Dauphin County. The third man is not identified. (Date and source unknown)

Employees of the state Highway Department set off a blast to clear ice to create a channel for the Juniata River to drain near Amity Hall. It was the fifth dynamite charge in three days during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

The author said that on March 7 he and a friend viewed an ice jam north of the bridge at Duncannon. The broken ice on the Juniata River, he said, had formed a dam at the bridge and water was pouring across Route 22 at Amity Hall, joining the Susquehanna River.

People flocked to River Park in Harrisburg to watch the ice break up on the Susquehanna River. This was taken around March 7 just before the 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

Treva Ely of 126 Market St., New Cumberland, is taken from her home by boat by H.A. Holtzman during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

Pennsylvania Department of Highway engineers had dynamited the roadway at Amity Hall to provide a temporary channel and prevent under mining of the entire roadway between Amity Hall and the Clarks Ferry Bridge, he wrote.

People are lined up on the bridges and shore to watch the ice break up in the Susquehanna River. This aerial photo was taken by Samuel W. Kuhnert of Aerial Photographs, Camp Hill, during the March 1936 flood. The photo shows the river in the area of the Walnut Street and Market Street bridges.

That evening, 10 miles of river ice above Harrisburg broke loose and gorged at multiple locations, causing an abrupt rise in the water level, and carrying huge cakes of ice in shore, which did tremendous damage. The town of Dauphin, 8 miles north of Harrisburg, was particularly hard hit. The ice gorge there occurred so suddenly that the townspeople literally ran for their lives to escape the inshore rush of water and ice cakes. Virtually every cottage and home along the river bank was either completely destroyed or badly damaged by the ice.

Residents in the vicinity of a grocery store at Green and Emerald streets in Harrisburg are shown carrying merchandise to dry quarters. The photo ran in the Evening News on March 19, 1936.

In the next week, he wrote, the level of the Susquehanna River at Harrisburg rose and fell. The maximum level on March 13 was 21.7 feet, with flooding in south Harrisburg and some West Shore suburbs.

Flooded sewers and the swollen Paxton Creek inundated a large area of Harrisburg east of the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks on South Tenth Street between Cameron Street and the railroad. One car in the foreground of the picture is almost completely submerged. (Source unknown)

The big flood, however, started on March 17 when the water began a steady and inexorable rise which continued until about 28 percent of the city was under water - 4 to 15 feet deep in some places. The peak of 30.33 feet was finally reached at 6 p.m. March 19, the highest reading to that date ever recorded on the Walnut Street gage at Harrisburg. The official crest, recorded on the Nagle Street gage downstream, was 29.23 feet, he wrote.

Flooding on Green Street, Harrisburg, near Cameron School during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

Because the citys pumping station and island water filtering plant were submerged at 27 feet, he said the city was left with only about a weeks worth of uncontaminated water in its reservoirs.

The underpass on Market Street in Harrisburg was flooded to the railroad bridge during the March 1936 flood of 1936. Looking east from Fifth Street. (Source unknown)

The water began to recede on March 21. Damage was tremendous, he wrote. Gas mains, water supplies, power lines, highways and bridges in the area were left in pitiable conditions. For weeks whole caravans of tank trucks rushed in drinking water supplies to fill the dwindling reservoirs. Water was rationed and boiling was recommended for what little water still remained in the reservoirs. It became almost a criminal offense to take a bath. Most West Shore citizens got typhoid shots.

An aerial shot of Harrisburg during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

In Pittsburgh, it was the worst flood in the citys history. In Pittsburgh alone 45 people died. The water reached flood stage of 25 feet on March 17 then the next day peaked at 46 feet.

Flooding on North Second Street in uptown Harrisburg looking toward Green Street during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)

About 100,000 buildings were destroyed.

Front Street in Wormleysburg during the March 1936 flood. (Source unknown)
A fire in two Carlisle homes left eight people displaced Thursday afternoon, according to fire officials.

Carlisle Fire Department Chief Jeff Snyder said they were dispatched to the 100 block of South Pitt Street around 5:48 p.m., where they found the back of 116 on fire, with damage occurring to 118 as well.

Between the two homes, eight people were displaced, but no people or pets were injured, Snyder said. There were also no firefighter injuries, or complications to fighting the fire. The Red Cross is assisting the displaced families.

Snyder said Carlisle Police and the fire marshal will be investigating the fire. They do not have any preliminary indications of what caused the fire. The fire is going to be investigated by the Carlisle Police Department and the fire marshal.

Snyder said due to the damage to the rear of the building, they will be looking to the exterior of the building for answers.

Several companies from around Cumberland County assisted at the fire, and the flames were knocked down in about 25 minutes.
A Lebanon man was charged with more than 20 sexual abuse offenses for assaults that occurred over two years, the Lebanon County District Attorney announced Friday.

The DAs office said Shawn McCurdy, 47, sexually assaulted a girl, under the age of 13, multiple times between 2009 and 2011.

The incident occurred at a residence on Twigg Avenue, in North Lebanon Township, according to the office.

McCurdy was charged with three counts of felony involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child, aggravate indecent assault of a person younger than 13, aggravated indecent assault of a child and six counts of indecent assault of a person younger than 13. He was charged with two felony counts of corruption of minors and one felony count of endangering the welfare of a child. McCurdy was also charged with three misdemeanor counts of indecent exposure.

McCurdy was arraigned on Thursday and was placed in the Lebanon County Correctional Facility on $250,000 bail.
At the end of the week, Muslims worldwide look forward to taking a break from their obligations to attend midday prayer, a congregational worship that includes a short sermon from the imam.

On Friday, though, the usual outlook of spiritual devotion was replaced by grief and fear as Muslims, along with the rest of the world, followed the developments of the horrific terror attack that claimed 49 lives at two New Zealand mosques.

There is a lot of sadness and a lot of fear in the community, said Muhammad Fayyaz, a former president and now council leader at the Islamic Society of Greater Harrisburg. People are worried about their safety...these kinds of incidents, regardless of who is committing - regardless of their religion or skin color - this is a crime against humanity and it affects all of us. It doesnt matter if it happens in the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Europe or here in the U.S. The loss of human life is very painful.

In the worst mass killing in New Zealands history, a gunman on Friday killed 49 people and wounded more than 40 at two Christchurch mosques, live-streaming online some of the shooting. Authorities condemned the attack as terrorism. The attacker, an Australian man, had published a manifesto denouncing immigrants, calling them invaders.

The attack prompted Muslim mosques and community centers to raise security protocols.

Here in Pennsylvania - and across the country - the Philadelphia chapter of the Council for American-Islamic Relations issued an advisory to mosques and community centers urging leaders to work closely with local law enforcement agencies to increase vigilance and security.

These are real times. Its not just something that happened, said Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu, a visiting imam at the Islamic Community Center of Lancaster and an education director for CAIR-Philadelphia.

Anytime a terrorist attack happens you realize we have as a society failed to respond to dehumanizing messages. Thats true in the case of anti-Semitism, xenophobia and anti-immigrant and anti Muslim rhetoric. We failed to respond as society at large.

Although the attack played out halfway across the world, its aftershock reverberated across the U.S. Muslim community in this country, which has in recent years negotiated an increasingly hostile landscape.

In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, U.S. Muslims were targeted by a slew of hate crimes, some tragically resulting in loss of life. More recently, particularly in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, increasingly divisive political rhetoric and religious intolerance fueled a spike in hate crimes and violence against Muslims.

Although the annual FBI report on hate crimes last year showed that crimes against Muslims had dropped 6 percent from 2016, individuals of the Islamic faith were still the target of nearly 20 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes.

Civil rights advocates generally suggest that those official numbers are vastly under-reported because many victims of crimes choose not to report the crime to law enforcement. In addition, reporting practices by thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide are widely unreliable.

We are going to continue to have cases like this, Tekelioglu said. Its a really sad time..this type of violence and hate is unacceptable in any country. I think people worldwide have a responsibility to stand up and say no.

Fridays terror attack in New Zealand also stirred up fresh memories of grief and pain for members of the Jewish community, who last October gathered in mourning after a mass shooter killed 11 people and wounded six others in a massacre at the Tree of Life Congregation Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Its just awful that someone would feel or a group of people would feel that they can go into a mosque and kill people who are worshipping God. Its just awful. Just awful, said Rabbi Eric Cytryn of Beth El Temple in Harrisburg.

I think every religious leader wants to create an atmosphere of both outside peace and inner spiritual peace in their house of worship so people can feel comfortable thanking God for what they have and showing gratitude for Gods presence in their life. To go into a house of worship during prayer and to feel this is something you should be doing.. people who do this are godless. They are worshipping something foreign. There are many paths to one God and murder is never acceptable.

Cytryn acknowledged that the New Zealand mosque attacks had heightened security alerts across his faith community.

I think this is the kind of moment where you are afraid for Muslims, Christians and Jews that there will be copycats, crazy people who feel they can just do awful things in the name of whatever cause tells them its ok to murder defenseless people in cold blood.

Muslim congregants across the region on Friday persevered in their attendance of midday prayer services but with heavy hearts.

You can identify with Friday prayers. Its something we all do. You go with your family, with the kids, said Atizaz Mansoor, a member of the Islamic Society of Greater Harrisburg. Its not something you ever give thought to - that there is any risk. Its a spiritual time and day. We can all relate. It could have been any mosque, anywhere in the world.

A cardiologist with PinnacleHealth, Mansoor said incidents like the one in New Zealand shatter the lives of millions of people trying to live ordinary lives.

You can readily identify. They are all just us, he said. Everyone is living the same kind of story, the same life. We have families, loved ones, you go to worship, you go to work. People are just trying to live their lives, trying to live a good and loving life and to have that ripped asunder is horrifying to watch.

Fayyaz, the past president of the Islamic Society of Greater Harrisburg, urged everyone to look beyond the glut of hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media.

Definitely its a lack of knowledge, he said. People dont take the time to understand..they tend to believe whatever is coming across social media.

Tekelioglu called on elected officials to commit themselves to opposing hate rhetoric and violence in every form. He said elected officials had to be a part of a systematic approach needed to dismantle hate and violence.

It requires people to be engaged, he said.
Pennsylvania law enforcement officers have increased patrols near local mosques after a pair of terrorist attacks Friday morning in New Zealand killed 49 people at two mosques and left nearly as many injured.

Those bolstered security efforts include the City of Harrisburg, according to local police Capt. Gabriel Olivera.

We do have extra patrols to all the mosques in the city, he said.

And Harrisburg is not alone, with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reporting that Pittsburgh City police also have increased patrols near their mosques.

The City of Pittsburgh will protect all houses of worship and the right to freely and safely practice your religion without fear, Pittsburgh police officials said in a statement, the paper reported.

Mayor @LianneDalziel - the people of Pittsburgh are with you and our brothers & sisters in Christchurch. Wishing you peace on this horrendous day. https://t.co/2nSCh4JF9y  bill peduto (@billpeduto) March 15, 2019

In a Tweet, Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto reached out to the Lianne Dalziel, the mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand, where the mosque shootings took place during morning prayers.

Wishing you peace on this horrendous day, Peduto said.

In October, a gunman carried out a similar attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people while shooting and yelling anti-Semitic slurs.

In Philadelphia, law enforcement officials also have announced increased patrols near mosques, according to KYW News Radio.

And according to the New York times, similar security measures are in place in New York City and other major cities across the country.

According to The Associated Press, three people have been arrested in connection with the New Zealand attacks, and at least one of them has been charged with murder.

The AP report cites New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who reportedly called the shootings a well-planned terrorist attack.

What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities  New Zealand is their home  they are us.  Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) March 15, 2019

Arden also took to Twitter to condemn the attacks.

What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence, she said in the Tweet. It has no place in New Zealand.
On March 28, 1979, Chris Achenbach-Kimmel was a 14-year-old freshman at Cedar Cliff High School in Camp Hill, Cumberland County. Fourteen miles away, on the Susquehanna River, staff at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station were trying to contain the damage from an accident at one of its reactors.

I just remember being in class, and just getting the news, and wondering, what does this mean?

Her 17-year-old boyfriend tried to pick her up from school so they could flee from a threat they couldnt see and didnt understand.

That didnt seem wise, and she stayed at home with her family in Lemoyne, while her father hunkered down in Steelton at the Saab auto dealership he owned.

Her mother kept her and her siblings inside as much as possible. TV news reports echoed through the house as her mother waited for an all clear from authorities.

When President Jimmy Carter visited the nuclear plant a few days after the accident, people started to relax, she said. Still, for weeks her fathers auto service department was full of cars left behind by people who were in no hurry to return for them.

One by one, the national news media left town, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission assured the public that the matter was under control.

For Achenbach-Kimmel, the accident became merely one more high school memory. She graduated in 1982 and went on to a career in occupational therapy.

It wasnt until her thyroid cancer diagnosis in 2010 that she thought again about Three Mile Island.

I think as soon as I got over the initial shock, its like, oh my gosh, I wonder if these two things are related, said Achenbach-Kimmel, now a 54-year-old academic fieldwork coordinator at the Elizabethtown College occupational therapy department.

Her doctor wasnt surprised when Achenbach-Kimmel mentioned TMI.

She said, oh yeah, we see an increased incidence in the area compared to what my colleagues see around the country.

Pennsylvania has had one of the highest thyroid cancer rates in recent years, according to Centers for Disease Control.

For those who grew up in central Pennsylvania, Chriss story is a common one. People blame TMI for their illnesses, and some doctors accept it could have been the case.

Yet, the nuclear industrys position has been that there has been no conclusive link between the accident and adverse health effects.

Thats not to say that there werent any radioactive releases during the accident, but they were at such a low level that they would not be expected to have any sort of ill health effects, said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan.

He noted a 2000 University of Pittsburgh Medical Center study that found the accident didnt cause an increase in cancer mortality among people living within a five-mile radius of the plant.

However, a 2017 Penn State College of Medicine Study suggests that may not have been the case.

Dr. David Goldenberg, a surgeon and thyroid researcher, launched the study after years of hearing his patients bring up the nuclear plant accident.

Although Pennsylvania has the nations highest rate of thyroid cancer, most of that cancer has nothing to do with Three Mile Island, Goldenberg said.

However, thyroid cancer caused by low-level radiation has a different mutational signal than most thyroid cancer, Goldenberg said. He and his colleagues used molecular research that had been pioneered after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to find that genetic marker.

The scientists screened out many thyroid cancer patients, limiting their study to 44 people who were born in counties around Three Mile Island, were present during the accident and were treated at Penn State Hershey Medical Center.

We found a shift, which absolutely can be attributed to exposure to radiation, during the correct time frame of the Three Mile Island accident, he said, adding that this does not prove that TMI caused the cancer. It just shows a correlation.

Goldenberg is quick to point out the studys limitations, emphasizing that hes working on a larger follow-up study. Still, it has put him in the middle of a 40-year-old debate: Did the accident at TMI release more radiation than the government says? Did it harm people?

U.S. President Jimmy Carter on April 1, 1979, in the control room of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa. Standing with Carter are, from left, Harold Denton, director of the U.S. Nuclear Agency; PA. Gov. Dick Thornburgh; Rosalyn Carter; and an unidentified control room employee.AP

For Christine Layman, theres no question  and the Penn State study has given her hope.

Layman was 21 years old when the accident happened, living within five miles of the plant in Conewago Township, York County.

They made me leave, she said. The fire department was riding around in fire trucks and actually told me, please evacuate the area.

Shes faced thyroid disease and cervical cancer, leading to a hysterectomy when she was 34. Her daughter, who was 4 at the time of the accident, also has had cervical cancer, Layman said. She attributes the illnesses to radiation exposure.

The Penn State College of Medicine study says nothing about cervical cancer. However, Layman said the study shows the scientific community that theres more work to be done.

Just from what Im hearing, this study is going to help validate these peoples stories, because they just feel like nobody believes them.

Layman manages a Facebook group of people who attribute their illnesses to the accident, which has more than 3,600 members. She said stories abound of people with cancer, thyroid disorders and other health problems.

Almost two years since the Penn State College of Medicine study, the reaction from nuclear regulators has been disappointing, said Cindy Folkers, a scientist at Beyond Nuclear, which opposes nuclear energy.

Pointing to a recent National Academy of Science conference she attended, Folkers said radiation experts have learned from Three Mile Island: Going forward, there are plans in place to build health registries when a public health disaster occurs.

However, when it comes to TMI, the nuclear industry has ignored what she called biometric evidence from a 1997 study by University of North Carolina Chapel Hill scientist Steven Wing.

That study showed a connection between the accident and lung cancer and leukemia in a plume that traveled from the plant. However, the nuclear energy industry dismissed it because they disagreed with its approach, Folkers said.

This conversation often leads back to a familiar place: Radiation monitors around Three Mile Island after the accident occurred.

Its true that those monitors did read off the charts, said Sheehan at Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However, that doesnt mean high amounts of radiation were released.

The monitors were set at a conservative level, Sheehan said, and when scientists were able to recalculate the releases, they found that people would have been exposed to no more than 100 millirems of radiation  about a sixth of what the average person in the U.S. is exposed to each year.

In Elizabethtown, Achenbach-Kimmel said she recognizes how hard it can be to prove what happened.

She doesnt expect anything from the nuclear industry or the government. Noting that the government has failed to come up with a long-term plan to store its nuclear waste, Achenbach-Kimmel is more worried that humanity didnt learn any lessons from the accident.

When she was attending a thyroid cancer survivors support group, everyone believed the partial meltdown may have had a role. However, she doesnt share the certainty that some people had.

Im going to say that probably the best way to characterize my opinion is the jurys still out, she said.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. PennLive is collaborating with PA Post and WITF on a multimedia, month-long look at the accident, its impact and the future of TMI and the nuclear industry. That includes new documentary television and radio programs, long-form audio stories, photos, and digital videos. The work will include the voices of people affected as well as community events to engage with listeners, readers and viewers.
A claw attached to a piece of heavy machinery reached out and gabbed the wall of a former Carlisle industrial building Friday, pulling and sending it crashing to the ground.

The walls collapse represented the beginning of the demolition of the former Tyco Electronics building, as well as the effort to redevelop the site, which once employed more than 100 workers.

This is a big deal for us today, said Mason McClellan director of real estate development at the Cumberland Area Economic Development Corp. Redeveloping former vacant industrial sites can be very challenging.

The site on the 700 block of Hamilton Street is now owned by Real Estate Collaborative LLC, a subsidiary of the Cumberland Area Economic Development Corp.

Officials said they hope to redevelop the site for retail, office and restaurant use.

Plans call for the construction of three structures  two 30,000-square-foot buildings and one smaller 7,500-square-foot building that likely will be used as a restaurant, McClellan said.

We do not have anyone confirmed yet, he said, explaining that Real Estate Collaborative officials are seeking tenants for those buildings.

Kristen Rowe, the corporations marketing and communications director, said the new development will be called Hanover Commons.

Demolition, Rowe said, is likely to be complete sometime in May and, after that, construction can begin as soon as tenants are found and permits are secured, according to McClellan. McClellan said Real Estate Collaborative officials have been working on this redevelopment effort for about a year.

We are excited to be a part of this investment in this neighborhood and in the borough, said Andrew Notarfrancesco, the collaboratives group chair.

The groups work has received some state funding, said Carol Kilko, deputy secretary of business financing with the state Department of Community & Economic Development. That includes a $1,713,536 loan and a $1,142,358 grant to support redevelopment, as well as another $231,709 grant for environmental remediation.

McClellan said lead paint and asbestos already have been removed from the building.

On Friday, he could not say exactly how much the construction of the new buildings or the entire redevelopment plan will cost because final designs have not yet been drafted.

For years, the site housed a company know as Tyco Electronics, which manufactured electronics used in computers and communications equipment, according to Carlisle Borough officials.

But in 2009, Tyco closed its Hamilton Street plant, putting 117 employees out of work.

It was the second of three manufacturing companies to to pull out of the area during a three-year period from 2008 to 2010

First, International Automotive Components Group closed its car-parts manufacturing plant, leading to the loss of 152 jobs.

And lastly, Carlisle Tire & Wheel relocated to Tennessee, eliminating 340 local employment positions.

All told, the closures resulted in about 50 to 60 acres of vacant industrial space, known as brownfields, Carlisle Borough Manager Matthew Candland said earlier this year.

The former industrial properties, while not adjacent, all are situated in northern Carlisle Borough.

The goal is to bring those sites back to productive use, with housing and business development projects intended to revitalize the boroughs tax base, Candland said. Borough officials call it the Carlisle Urban Redevelopment Plan.

In addition to the the Tyco site, plans exist for the other two brownfields, as well. Those plans have been shared by Cumberland Area Economic Development Corp. officials.

They show that the IAC site, owned by Carlisle Events, will house a hotel, a restaurant and high-end" condos.

The Carlisle Tire & Wheel site, owned by Ohio-based PIRHL LLC, is to house several dozen townhomes and apartments, a 2,000-square-foot community building and a 2-acre park, officials said.

Development is already underway on some of those sites, Candland said previously.

That work is in addition to the Carlisle Connectivity Project, which is intended to improve borough roadways to better accommodate the brownfields redevelopment.

If we did nothing, the redevelopment could totally overwhelm our towns existing roadway network, Candland said in January, when he discussed a road improvement plan that includes the construction of multiple roundabouts.

On Friday, Cumberland County Commissioner Vince DiFilippo talked about the importance of revitalizing the old, vacant industrial sites.

He said county residents overwhelming favor redevelopment to entirely new construction.

Youve probably heard many times that Cumberland County is the fastest growing county in the state, DiFilippo said before speaking about the brownfields. We are taking an old place and repurposing it for many good things.
For Subscribers Older phones may soon cease to operate with 3G network retirement

A number of older cellphones and devices may no longer work after the retirement of 3G networks next year.
Golden Handcuffs

The Secret History of Trumps Women

By Nina Burleigh

Gallery Books. 368 pp. $28

Reviewed by Jackie S. Atkins

This book focuses on Donald Trumps women, the life of luxury, and the cost behind it. The bill is steep, the gossip priceless. Author Nina Burleigh, national politics correspondent for Newsweek, is no Trump fan and has fun dishing out the Fifth Avenue rumors. Its a romp through the bedrooms and beauty parlor gossip of the ladies who lunch.

The phrase golden handshake denotes payment to an executive to keep him or her at a company. Burleigh extends this idea to include payment to the current and past wives, daughters, and liaisons of powerful, rich men. And folks line up to be handcuffed, because  well, because money.

Chapters are devoted to the six most important women in Donald Trumps life: grandmother Elizabeth Christ Trump; mother Mary Ann MacLeod Trump; wives Ivanna, Marla, and Melania; and daughter Ivanka. An epilogue glances at his two sisters, his daughter Tiffany, some female employees, and a few of the women who have accused him of sexual assault. All these are assessed in relation to wealth.

Its almost as though Trumps glittering present were built on purpose to obscure his own origins. Both grandmother and mother were immigrants, the first from Germany and the second from Scotland. Each had trouble at first; each returned to her homeland, then back to America.

Elizabeth Christ Trump was a poor German immigrant when her husband died, leaving her with three children to support in a foreign land. Illiterate, with no knowledge of English or advanced degree, she possessed none of the skills Trump now says he wants to see in merit immigration. A total loser, as a particular family member might say. Yet somehow she managed, from her kitchen, to start a real estate/construction firm Trump now says was begun by his father.

The second uneducated, no-talent immigrant in his life was his mother, Mary Ann MacLeod Trump, a poverty-stricken girl from a dusty fishing village in Scotland. She was fond of putting on airs and watching royal weddings.

Trump seems to dismiss all mention of his grandmother. In official biographies of this self-titled self-made man, little or no mention arises of her contribution to the Trump brand (like starting it). His mothers main legacy? Making him read the Bible, and, after years of serving as a maid in the Carnegie New York household, instilling in him bad taste by gold-leafing everything.

This ambivalent (to put it mildly) relation to immigrant beginnings in a president whose policies have hardly favored immigration continues in two of his marriages. As is well known, Ivanna is Czech and Melania Slovenian. As is also well known, they are denizens of the high life, high fashion, high living. They came here to make it; nothing wrong with that. Their marriages were part of the climb. His project with both has been to turn them into superstars. Ivanna became a businesswoman superstar on almost equal footing. Melanias undeniable glamour, married with her somewhat mysterious EB-1 genius visa, filled the bill, and her frequent unhappy appearance suggests shes trying hard.

The only American-bred was Marla (who called sex with Trump the best she ever had). She got the heave-ho, and a notably parsimonious prenuptial agreement, because, among other things (like frolicking with a lover underneath a lifeguard stand in Florida), she refused to wear high heels with her shorts and pants. Details like these make Burleighs book especially piquant. Stiletto heels figure prominently in Trump world: The women surrounding him wear them in public, and, for all we know (Burleigh tries hard to find out), to bed.

First daughter Ivanka (little Ivanna) is, as it turns out, an enthusiastic and talented capitalist, on board with the Trump program; Trump freely admits she is more acceptable socially than he is. Daughter Tiffany (named after the jewelry store on the first floor of Trump Tower) is comparatively retiring, shunning the spotlight (as grandmother, mother, and Melania have done) and tending to law school.

King Midas saw his demise because everything he touched turned to gold, including his food. Which might explain why Trump women are so thin. Then again, as the Duchess of Windsor said, One can never be too rich or too thin.

Jackie S. Atkins is a retired jockey and current screenwriter living in Cape May.
David Musto, the Ronald O. Perelman Professor in Finance at Wharton, will serve as faculty director of the Stevens Center. Read more

Theres a revolution going on in finance, and it goes by the name of FinTech.

Old-school ways of managing money are under siege by new technologies. Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, crowdfunding, robo-advising, and Big Data all fall under the FinTech  financial technology  umbrella. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is aggressively adding alumni-funded departments where these new technologies can be mastered.

On Thursday, Wharton announced it had received a major gift from 1991 alumnus Ross Stevens, CEO of Stone Ridge Holdings, a New York City-based hedge fund that specializes in high-risk investments. A Wharton spokesperson wouldnt say the actual value of the gift.

The Stevens Center will see its official launch on April 3.

The Stevens donation follows last months $10 million gift from fellow Wharton alumnus Josh Harris, best known as a co-owner of the 76ers. Harris is the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, one of the worlds largest alternative investment firms. The Harris donation will fund the Joshua J. Harris Alternative Investments Program. Both programs will be housed in the yet-unbuilt Tangen Hall at 40th and Sansom Streets, which is currently a Penn parking lot.

David Musto, the Ronald O. Perelman professor of finance, will serve as the faculty director of the Stevens Center.

We hope to hit the ground running as soon as feasible, Musto said from Whartons San Francisco campus. I need to staff up and advertise some job postings so we can ramp up.

The mission of the Stevens Center is to understand the new financial tools. FinTech is more of a process, he said, and not an asset class. Musto calls some of the new tools promising. Others he refers to as very unnerving.

With cryptocurrencies, theres a question of what speed theyll gain wider acceptance, and in which contexts," Musto said. "Crowdfunding started with great fanfare, and now you can go to websites and as a small retail investor put money into a startup, but are people getting ripped off, or is this the future of funding startups?

Robo-advising is gaining ground, he said. The economy is making more and more people become responsible for their own finances and retirement savings, Musto said. Robo-advisors are similar to phone apps that help you allocate your savings. They do the things a financial adviser would do, but its customized.

And then theres Big Data, and all the ways you can use it, he said. Calculating a credit score off someones Facebook page could be very unnerving. But those kinds of things will happen whether you like it or not.

The Stevens Center will draw on faculty from other departments at Wharton and other schools, he said, and also hire new staff. In addition, Musto plans to have executives-in-residence who can work directly with students on site.

At Wharton, we want to be the destination for anyone who is interested in FinTech  whether theyre undergrads or MBAs  anyone who wants to participate in this revolution in finance, he said.
FILE - This June 25, 2018 file photo shows James Gunn at the premiere of "Ant-Man and the Wasp" in Los Angeles. Months after being fired over old tweets, James Gunn has been rehired as director of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Representatives for the Walt Disney Co. and for Gunn on Friday confirmed that Gunn has been reinstated as writer-director of the franchise he has guided from the start. Read more

James Gunn has been quietly reinstated by Disney as writer and director of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, The Times confirmed Friday.

The decision, which was made a few months ago, is an about-face from Disneys decision last July to fire Gunn over years-old social media messages that made light of topics including rape, pedophilia, 9/11 and the Holocaust.

Gunn tweeted his gratitude shortly after the news was first reported by Deadline.

I deeply appreciate Disneys decision and I am excited to continue making films that investigate the ties of love that bind us all, Gunn wrote on Twitter early Friday afternoon. I have been, and continue to be incredibly humbled by your love and support.

Gunn took responsibility for the now-deleted offensive tweets and explained them in a statement at the time.

Many people who have followed my career know when I started, I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo, he wrote, in part, back then. As I have discussed publicly many times, as Ive developed as a person, so has my work and my humor. I used to make a lot of offensive jokes. I dont anymore.

Gunns offensive tweets were unearthed by people on the right after the Guardians director came to the defense of filmmaker Mark Duplass, who himself had been attacked by people on the left for making positive comments about conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.

Despite an outpouring of public support for Gunn, including Guardians actor Dave Bautista, Disney couldnt stomach the situation.

The offensive attitudes and statements discovered on James Twitter feed are indefensible and inconsistent with our studios values, and we have severed our business relationship with him, Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn said in a statement at the time.

After he was fired, Gunn wrote, I understand and accept the business decisions . All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be.

Horn reportedly met with Gunn several times in the aftermath of the firing and was persuaded by how the director handled the situation, according to Deadline.

As the news spread, fans began rejoicing on Twitter and praising Disneys decision to rehire Gunn, who helmed the first two Guardians films.



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Tacos, tequila and guacamole have arrived at the King of Prussia Mall with bartaco, a casual bar-restaurant that sits in between the Neiman Marcus and Macys stores.

bartaco, which officially opens for business Friday, is part of the Del Friscos restaurant group that operates the Barcelona Wine Bar on E. Passyunk Ave. in South Philly. Its the first Pennsylvania location for the bartaco brand, which has outposts in New York, Virginia, Maryland and other states.

The street-food-inspired menu has a coastal vibe, according to representatives, and it includes lots of tacos, like steak, chicken pastor and glazed pork belly, as well as rice bowls, tuna poke and other non-taco options. The restaurants also feature secret menus with additional items. The restaurant also offers plenty of tequila and mixed drinks.

The restaurant will be open only for dinner initially, but plans to add lunch service soon. It opens for dinner at 5 p.m. Friday and will be open seven days a week.
FILE - This Sept. 9, 2016 photo shows Harkness Tower on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Dozens of people were charged Tuesday, March 12, 2019, in a scheme in which wealthy parents allegedly bribed college coaches and other insiders to get their children into some of the nation's most elite schools. (AP Photo/Beth J. Harpaz, File) Read more

The college admissions scam where parents, including celebrity parents, paid money and lied about their childrens qualifications to gain admission into prestigious universities highlights many problems. Some may claim that this is a victimless crime. However, wrongly claiming a disability to gain unfair advantages has far-reaching implications on both the student who makes the false claim and students who classified with legitimate disabilities.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require schools to provide appropriate accommodations and modifications for students with documented disabilities. These may include extra time on exams, quiet areas to take exams, or providing exams in different formats, such as utilizing e-readers. The goal is to provide a level playing field for all students to achieve their maximum potential. There is a process for documenting a disability, and while the system is not perfect, it works for the most part.

Here are three consequences of gaming that system:

It takes resources away from students who need them. Education in this country is built to educate the masses. To ensure this, we must have a system that works for the majority of students to be successful. Resources are allocated to provide students with disabilities the accommodations needed to perform to their potential. When the system is overrun by students utilizing those resources that do not actually need them, it overtaxes the system and takes these much-needed resources away from others.

It delegitimizes the accommodations provided to students who need them. There is a known saying in the field of special education: Fair is not equal and equal is not fair. At times, when students who legitimately need extra time on an exam, or a quiet area due to a documented disability, this may be viewed by some as unfair advantage. There is nothing unfair about providing someone the accommodations they need to be successful in relation to their disability. What is unfair is providing these accommodations to students that do not need them. People participating in this ruse or a system that allows for this only reinforces this stigma.

 READ MORE: Legacy admissions are affirmative action for the rich, and other lessons from the college cheating scandal | Jenice Armstrong

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Parents who lie to help their children actually are hurting them. While elite colleges have extensive admissions processes as a screening tool, many students who are not accepted would have been successful in these institutions. But parents who intentionally lie and use their influence to gain admissions, communicate to their children that they will not be successful without this deception. This sends kids the message that they are not good enough. Additionally, it communicates that the value and worth of the degree from the prestigious university outweighs the value and worth of staying true to oneself.

This scam has brought to light many of the issues surrounding the college admissions process. Parents portraying disabilities of their children to gain unfair influence hurt not only their child but all students with disabilities, as well as all those in education who work so hard to provide accommodations to students who genuinely need them.

Jessica Glass Kendorski, Ph.D., NCSP, BCBA-D, is an associate professor and director of the master of science program in school psychology/applied behavior analysis at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.

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Bryn Mawr College student Claire Mitchell, 20, (left) and Temple University student Stefanie Beard, 21, in front of Independence Hall at 6th and Chestnut Street on Friday morning. Both women were adopted from Huazhou Social Welfare Institution in Southern China and discovered after a 23andMe DNA test that they were related . Read more

When she was growing up in Downingtown, Stefanie Beard wondered whether she might someday locate a blood relative in China, from where she was adopted as a baby.

But she never expected to find one in this country  much less one living 12 miles away.

Thats what happened when Beard, 21, a Temple University junior, submitted a DNA sample to 23andMe. The California-based genetics company soon alerted her to the existence of a biological cousin, Claire Mitchell, a 20-year-old Bryn Mawr College sophomore who also was adopted from China.

Both of our minds are blown, Beard said.

The women soon realized they came not just from the same southern Chinese province but from the same small town, and in fact from the same orphanage, the Huazhou Social Welfare Institution.

Honestly, I couldnt really fathom it at first, and even now it seems pretty unbelievable, Mitchell said.

They wondered: Could their two sets of biological parents, made anonymous by the circumstances that drive Chinese adoption, have known each other?

Beard and Mitchell share 4.96 percent of their DNA, which puts them in the range for cousins, according to 23andMe.

Thats not by accident, said genetic counselor Brianne Kirkpatrick, the founder of Virginia-based Watershed DNA.

Today, about 92,000 Chinese children have been adopted to new homes in this country, a migration that has helped change how Americans define family.

Many adoptees have been searching for blood relations in China, a quest complicated by time, distance, and language. Some birth parents have been found overseas and even a few blood siblings located in the United States.

Now the growth of inexpensive, easily obtainable DNA test kits promises to open the door for broader and more efficient searches in this country. Any adoptive family with a couple of hundred dollars and an internet link can begin to investigate whether an unknown relative might be somewhere in the U.S.

That, the internet, and video technology are helping American families focus what had been guerrilla-style searches in China, where they pursued slim on-the-ground leads or hired searchers to do it for them.

Its a really exciting time, said Millersville University professor Changfu Chang, who has produced and directed trailblazing documentaries on Chinese adoption. Theres a very good chance that before they find the birth parents, theyll find siblings in the West.

Still, quests to find blood relatives can be long and costly, and may ultimately lead to disappointment. Theyve also sparked debate within a China-adoptive community that has long insisted that love, not blood, makes a family. If thats true, then why seek biological ties?

I do not believe adoptees need to make a choice between adoptive family and biological family, said Kristen Ingle, a Florida mother who for more than a decade has helped her adopted daughter and others search in China. [There is] enough love to go around for both. When I talk to my daughter about her birth family, I tell her that we are one family. They happen to live in China and we happen to live across the ocean, but we are one family.

The Chinese birth-planning experiment that spurred an exodus of babies and toddlers commenced in 1980, when a government afraid of famine sought to slow the nations population growth. The one-child policy limited most families to a single offspring, making it a crime to have extra children. Violators could be hit with huge fines or even have their homes knocked down.

One result, in a country that prized sons, was that baby girls by the thousands were secretly abandoned, left outside schools, hospitals, and bus stations, and from there swept into state-run orphanages. By the late 1980s, the orphanages were bursting  and China needed a relief valve.

Beginning in the early 1990s, Americans were allowed to adopt, a few dozen children at first, then rising to nearly 8,000 a year.

Research by Hampshire College scholar Kay Ann Johnson showed that rarely was a first-born daughter abandoned, that in most cases she was a second or third child with one or two older brothers. Johnson also found that surrendering a child was agony for birth parents, that many initially tried to hide their extra daughter or place her with another family in an informal adoption.

In 2015, with Chinas birth ratios badly skewed, the Communist Party announced an end to the one-child policy. Since January 2016, couples have been allowed to have two children.

Today, some Chinese mothers and fathers, less afraid of government retribution, are using such social-media platforms as WeChat, a kind of Chinese Facebook, to try to locate lost daughters in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The founders of a Colorado adoption agency recently launched My Taproot, a search service billed as the first big, internationally coordinated effort to help adoptees find birth families in China.

What few fully recognized was that contacts could be found in this country, too.

We thought, maybe over in China, Beard said.

She was born in 1997 in Huazhou, a town of about 100,000 people, small by Chinese standards. Most of her first year was spent with a foster mother assigned by the orphanage.

At the age of 11 months, she became the second Chinese daughter of Donna and Michael Beard.

Last year, for Christmas, the family decided to get 23andMe tests, joining the profusion of Americans seeking DNA information on their ancestry and health.

Beard had noticed that people often commented on her looks, suggesting she didnt appear to be fully Chinese. She knew that mixed heritage can be common in Guangdong province, near the border of Vietnam.

Indeed, Beard learned she was 13 percent Vietnamese.

Mitchell was born in 1999 and adopted in 2000, becoming the 11-month-old second daughter of a family in Overland Park, Kan.

She longed to make a connection with Chinese relatives.

What stopped me from really immersing myself into thinking about it was just, I dont want to say hopelessness, but it was such a limited, small chance, she said.

Mitchell had submitted a DNA sample to 23andMe four years ago.

A table provided by the company summarizes the average percentage of DNA thats shared in different types of relationships. For instance, siblings may share 50 percent. First cousins once removed share an average of 6.25 percent DNA, and second cousins share 3.13 percent, and Beard and Mitchell fall within that range.

First they exchanged phone numbers, called, and texted, then met in person for Chinese New Year. Since then, theyve gone to dinner and to the movies. When theyre together, laughter comes easily. Both will keep an eye out for additional blood relatives, as they get to know each other.

It was crazy, and like super exciting, Beard said. I totally believe the universe when it speaks to me, because what are the odds?
An explosion caused by Israeli airstrikes is seen on Gaza City early Friday. Israeli warplanes attacked militant targets in the southern Gaza Strip. Read more

JERUSALEM  Israeli warplanes on Friday struck some 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in response to a rare rocket attack on the Israeli metropolis of Tel Aviv. Rocket fire persisted into the morning, setting the stage for additional possible reprisals.

The army said that its targets had included an office complex in Gaza City used to plan and command Hamas militant activities, an underground complex that served as Hamas' main rocket-manufacturing site, and a center used for Hamas drone development.

In Gaza, health officials reported four people wounded, including a husband and wife in the southern town of Rafah. There were no further details. The office building struck by Israel had been used by Hamas' office of prisoner affairs.

The sudden outbreak of violence comes at a sensitive time for both sides, and it appeared that Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers had incentives to end the fighting.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the midst of a tight re-election battle. A tough response would draw international criticism and domestic accusations that he is acting out of political motivations ahead of the April 9 vote. But a restrained response will draw criticism from his fellow hard-line rivals.

Hamas, meanwhile, is coping with its own domestic troubles. Israel and Egypt have maintained a crippling blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over the territory in 2007. The blockade, along with sanctions by the rival Palestinian Authority and Hamas' own mismanagement, have fueled an economic crisis that has driven unemployment over 50 percent.

Shortly before the rocket attack, Hamas police on Thursday violently broke up a rare protest by demonstrators angry about the dire living conditions in Gaza.

The crackdown triggered heavy criticism on social media, raising the possibility that the rocket fire was a diversionary tactic. The organizers of a weekly protest along the Israeli border said they would cancel the demonstration in the wake of the escalation.

The fighting came as Egyptian mediators were trying to extend a cease-fire between the bitter enemies, which last fought a war in 2014. The Egyptians left Gaza late Thursday.

Hamas, which typically claims responsibility for its military actions, denied involvement in the rocket attack on Tel Aviv and even said it had undermined its interests. But Israel's military said it had concluded the group was behind the attack.

"The IDF holds the Hamas terror organization responsible for all events transpiring in the Gaza Strip and emanating from it," the military said in a statement.

The late-night attack Thursday on Tel Aviv, Israel's densely populated commercial and cultural capital, marked a dramatic escalation in hostilities. It was the first time the city had been targeted since a 2014 war between Israel and Gaza militants.

Following the first Israeli airstrikes, several additional rounds of rocket fire were launched into Israel. The military said several rockets were intercepted by its air defense systems, and there were no reports of injuries.

The initial blasts from the Israeli airstrikes in southern Gaza were so powerful that smoke could be seen in Gaza City, 25 kilometers (15 miles) to the north. The Israeli warplanes could be heard roaring through the skies above Gaza City.

Israel and Hamas are bitter enemies and have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza in 2007. Smaller flare-ups have occurred sporadically since Israel and Hamas fought their last war, in 2014.

Despite its denial, Hamas is one of the only groups in Gaza with the means to strike Tel Aviv. A smaller militant group, the Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad, also possesses a large arsenal of rockets, though it too denied involvement.

Smaller Salafi groups inspired by the Islamic State group also operate in Gaza, though it is unclear whether they have powerful rockets capable of striking so deep inside Israel.

Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief Israeli military spokesman, said the army had been caught off guard by Thursday night's rocket barrage and had no advance intelligence.

Israeli Cabinet Minister Naftali Bennett, a hard-line rival of Netanyahu's, called on the prime minister to convene a gathering of his Security Cabinet and demand the army "present a plan to defeat Hamas."

Earlier this week, Israel struck Hamas targets in Gaza in response to rocket fire on southern Israel, near the border. Late Thursday, local media said that Egyptian mediators left the territory.

At the time, Netanyahu issued a warning to Hamas, rejecting suggestions that Israel would be reluctant to take tough action in Gaza ahead of national elections next month.

"I suggest to Hamas, don't count on it," he told his Cabinet. "We will do anything necessary to restore security and quiet to the area adjacent to the Gaza Strip and to the south in general."

Akram reported from Gaza City, Gaza Strip.
People wait outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday. Read more

Mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand have claimed dozens of lives in a terrorist attack on whats being called one of the countrys darkest days.

Three suspects are in custody following the unprecedented event that killed 49 people, many who could be migrants or refugees, in Christchurch, New Zealand.

What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities  New Zealand is their home  they are us.

Here's what we know and what we don't.

What we know

What happened

Reports of the shootings first came in around 1:40 p.m. Friday local time (8:40 p.m. Thursday Philadelphia time), according to CNN. A witness said a gunman began continuously shooting for 10 to 15 minutes.

Forty-nine people were killed, with 41 slain at one mosque and an additional seven killed at a second mosque, according to New Zealand Police. One person died at a hospital. The mosques, the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque, are about three miles apart, the New York Times reports.

Forty-eight people were being treated for injuries at the hospital, police said.

We are unable at this stage to provide details about matters leading up to the attacks, New Zealand police said in a statement. It is very early days and these matters will form part of the investigation.

The attacks at the mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers appeared to have been carefully planned, according to the Associated Press.

I saw dead people everywhere," Len Peneha, a witness, told the AP. "There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said. I dont understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. Its ridiculous.

Suspects

Four people were taken into custody, including three men and a woman, but only three were believed to have been involved in the attacks, according to the Washington Post.

A 28-year-old man, whose name has not yet been released, is charged with murder and due to appear in court Saturday morning, according to police.

These are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand and in fact, have no place in the world, Ardern said at a news conference.

Officials defused explosive devices in a car, according to the AP. Police dont believe there are additional suspects, but an investigation is still active, according to CNN.

Motive

While an exact motive is not clear, a man claiming responsibility for the shootings, who said he is a 28-year-old white Australian and a racist, left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto, according to the AP.

The manifesto discussed immigrants, Muslims, right-wing extremists including Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and conspiracy theories concerning white birth rates as well as white genocide, The Washington Post reported.

New Zealand, like Australia, is home to people from all faiths, cultures and backgrounds, said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. There is absolutely no place in either of our countries for the hatred and intolerance that has bred this extremist, terrorist violence and we condemn it.

In addition to a manifesto, a 17-minute-long video by the apparent gunman were posted on Facebook showing part of the attack, according to the New York Times.

New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooters Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video, Mia Garlick, a Facebook spokesperson, told CNN.

Reaction

Muslims in Philadelphia and around the world mourning, and leaders and others are extending their sympathies to New Zealand as the country investigates the attacks, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan and President Donald Trump.

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques, Trump said on Twitter. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

Later Friday, Trump said he did not consider white nationalism a rising threat.

I dont really. I think its a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, he told reporters at the White House.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations Philadelphia chapter will hold an interfaith vigil Saturday at LOVE Park from 6 to 7 p.m., according to a Facebook event page.

Early information indicates that the attacker used anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric that has become mainstream globally to justify his terrorist act," CAIR-Philadelphia executive director Jacob Bender said in a statement. "We demand all responsible parties take steps to systematically respond to Islamophobia in our society.

Philadelphia and other places are also increasing security around mosques. The Philadelphia Police Department said officers would perform frequent checks on mosques and other places of worship throughout the city in light of the attack.

What we dont know
John Sher, right, a firefighter with the Margate, N.J., City Fire Department is escorted from the FBI office in Linwood, N.J., Friday, March 15, 2019. Authorities say a police officer and three firefighters are among seven people recently charged in a $50 million prescription drug scheme that has already produced nearly two dozen guilty pleas. Read more

Seven people, including three firefighters, a police officer, and an owner of Tonys Baltimore Grill in Atlantic City, were arrested Friday and charged in a $50 million prescription-drug health-benefits scheme that has already snagged dozens of public employees and pharmaceutical representatives at the New Jersey Shore.

The arrests followed the unsealing of a 50-count federal indictment charging William Hickman, 42, of Northfield; his wife, Sara, 42; Ventnor Police Officer Thomas Schallus, 42; brothers and Margate Firefighters John, 37, and Thomas Sher, 46; Camden Firefighter Christopher Broccoli, 47, of West Deptford; and Brian Pugh, 41, of Absecon, identified in the indictment as a businessman.

All were charged with conspiracy to commit health-care fraud and wire fraud, and with individual acts of health-care fraud and wire fraud, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. Pugh and the Hickmans were additionally charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Pugh is co-owner of the popular Atlantic City pizzeria, which he purchased with his father, a longtime employee, in 2017. John and Thomas Sher have a brother, Michael, who also is a Margate firefighter. Michael Sher has already pleaded guilty in the case. A fourth Sher brother is a potential witness in the case, said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Walk.

Hickman, a pharmaceutical representative, was named in a search warrant executed in June 2017 at the office of James Kauffman, an endocrinologist who later killed himself while in prison awaiting trial in the murder of his wife, April.

The search warrant, obtained by The Inquirer, identifies Hickman as a ringleader in the prescription drug scheme. The warrant alleges that Hickman is alleged to have used a shell company, Boardwalk Medical LLC, to solicit the services of Kauffman and other doctors for fraudulent prescriptions for expensive creams, vitamins, and libido medication, and scar ointments.

All seven defendants pleaded not guilty Friday afternoon in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Ann Marie Donio in Camden and were expected to be released on $100,000 bail. A status hearing was set for Thursday.

Donio ordered no contact among the Sher brothers, even at their childrens games, unless one of the parents of the accused, Anne Marie or Dennis Sher, were present.

We go to every game, their mother assured the judge Friday, from the second row as her son John stood by somberly, shackled around the waist like the others. We have 26 grandchildren.

Its a sad day for Margate, said Mayor Mike Becker.

All three firefighters and the Ventnor officer will be suspended pending the outcome of the case. The judge also ordered the defendants not to travel outside New Jersey, disrupting planned vacations by the Hickman family to Clearwater, Fla., and Puerto Rico, over their attorneys objections.

The bail for the Hickmans was required to be secured, and Walk, the assistant U.S. attorney, told the judge the Hickmans had failed to disclose assets totaling $1.4 million.

The probe into the conspiracy also previously snagged an Atlantic City firefighter, a Ventnor firefighter, two doctors, four school employees including two teachers, and 13 pharmaceutical representatives. All have pleaded guilty, but have had their sentencings repeatedly delayed.

Six of those who previously pleaded guilty, including Matthew Tedesco, previously described as being a ringleader, were named in Fridays indictment as unindicted co-conspirators.

The scheme outlined in the search warrant is alleged to have happened from July 2014 to April 2016 and was run with the aid of a now-closed pharmacy in Hammond, La., called Central Rexall Drugs.

Ventnor Police Chief Doug Biagi said Schallus was an interim sergeant with 19 years on the force and pay of $123,700 a year.

He has been suspended without pay, Biagi said and declined to comment further.

Michael Baldassare, attorney for Pugh, said the U.S. attorneys actions Friday smeared his client.

He is a well-respected local businessman, and he is presumed innocent, Baldassare said in a statement. After a two-year, multimillion-dollar failure to find any evidence against the big corporate players, the prosecutors are trying to bully police officers, teachers, and hard-working local business people.

Attorneys Jerome Ballarotto and Joseph Grimes, representing John and Thomas Sher, said their clients were unaware that doctors were getting paid to write the prescriptions they had a role in procuring. They said they had merely been acting as referrers for pharmaceutical representatives to legitimately get fees.

The government has turned this into some giant conspiracy, Ballarotto said.

The evidence will come down to who knew whether or not doctors were getting paid or not to write prescriptions, said Grimes.

Shore towns have been aware for at least two years that many of their public employees had been involved in some way with the scheme, and the towns complied with demands for health insurance records.

Hickmans attorney, Samuel Moulthrop, said in a statement that Hickman is innocent, and we are eager to contest these charges.

Moulthrop said in court that Hickman had been in repeated contact with the U.S. Attorneys Office during the last two years as others in the scheme pleaded guilty.

Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner has said he expects to charge lower-level employees once the federal investigation has been completed.

The indictment describes a now-familiar scheme in which compounding pharmacies were able to charge recurring monthly rates billed to the state health-benefits programs of public employees.

That money was then spread through the organization and down through to the public employees, who were given prescriptions without having been seen by a physician or needing the medication.

The indictment alleges that the ringleaders recruited state and local government and education employees who had the benefits that would pay for the expensive compounded medicines.

The prescriptions were paid for by the state benefits administrator, which billed the state for the amounts paid. The indictment alleges the defendants found the most expensive medications with the highest number of refills to obtain the highest possible insurance reimbursement.

More than $50 million was paid out by the state benefits plan, and the pharmacy paid the Hickmans more than $26 million. A portion of that was paid to Pugh, Schallus, John and Thomas Sher, Broccoli, and other conspirators, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.

The health-care fraud and wire-fraud conspiracy counts carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the value of the property involved in the transaction.

Staff writer Julie Shaw contributed to this article.
Subaru's old North American headquarters in Cherry Hill, New Jersey on Thursday March 14, 2019. Last year, the company moved the corporate headquarters to Camden and put the Cherry Hill property up for sale. Read more

By late spring, the seven-story building in Cherry Hill where Subaru of America based its U.S. operations for more than 30 years will be demolished.

Subaru hopes a cleared property will be more attractive to potential buyers. The site was originally listed for sale last year but the company elected not to accept the offers they received, according to Subaru officials, who did not disclose the asking price for the land.

Since the company relocated its corporate headquarters to Camden last spring, the 16-acre site along Route 70 has sat unused. Subaru still pays local taxes on the property and hired a security firm to patrol the premises.

In February, fencing went up around the complex to begin the demolition  both inside and out.

I kind of equate it to death by paper cut,' " said Keith Metzger, director of Corporate Real Estate & Administration for Subaru of America. It will be a lengthy process of taking the building down.

Subaru says it hopes to be environmentally conscious with the demolition. Subaru expects to recycle 75 percent of the building material, which includes steel, copper, concrete, and glass. Demolition is scheduled to conclude by late spring. After the building is gone, the company will relist the property for sale, according to Metzger.

The plot is currently zoned for highway business," which means office, retail, and hospitality uses can be built on the site, according to Metzger. Sitting on the side of a bustling highway, the property can be seen by tens of thousands of cars driving by daily and is 10 minutes away from Center City Philadelphia.

Cherry Hill Mayor Chuck Cahn said he is confident the property will be bought and put to use because of development already underway on the other side of Route 70. Cahn said he is looking forward to working closely with the next developers and hopes the property will be sold for commercial plans.

We are very open to any type of developer who wishes to reutilize this site for a higher and better use," Cahn said. Cherry Hills a great place to be. Its the hub of South Jersey, certainly the county, and is within four miles of a major metropolitan area."

Cahn said he is optimistic about the future of Cherry Hills development, adding that the parcel is in a prime location for commercial offices.

Anything that fits within the zoning would be appropriate, Cahn said. Were not looking for more apartments, but I think theres been a lot of positive development.

Cahn said residential development at the former Subaru property is not an option because of a floodplain that sits in the back of the plot that would make affordable units far too expensive for developers. The land would also need to be rezoned for residential use, he said.

The state Economic Development Authority awarded Subaru of America $118 million in tax credits to relocate to Camden as part of a revitalization effort under the Grow New Jersey act.
With a New Jersey license to use medical marijuana to ease the side effects of his HIV medications, Jay Lassiter smokes his first legal prescription at his home in Cherry Hill, Tuesday December 18, 2012. He had just driven back from NJ's only medical marijuana dispensary, where he picked up a 3/4 ounce bag. Soon the state could legalize marijuana for recreational use. TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer Read more

Before the year ends, a new cultural landscape could take hold in New Jersey if marijuana is legalized for anyone 21 and over.

New dispensaries would spring up around the state  many more than the six that currently exist and that cater only to medical patients.

Cannabis would also be delivered to customers doorsteps, similar to an Amazon package, according to the latest legalization bill.

Indoor and outdoor consumption lounges would be created, though none would be allowed on college campuses.

Casinos in Atlantic City and hotels could designate 20 percent of their space for guests to use marijuana.

And towns that welcome marijuana businesses could reap financial rewards that come with the potentially multimillion-dollar industry by imposing a tax of up to 3 percent.

It all hinges on whether lawmakers approve a roughly 200-page bill that some say may reach the floor for a historic vote, perhaps as soon as March 25.

Clearly we have rounded a corner. I feel good about it, Sen. Nicholas Scutari, the chief architect of the states Cannabis Regulatory and Expungement Aid Modernization Act, said in an interview Thursday.

The bill has taken a beating, as deals were made and debate raged for two long years. Scutari, a Democrat from Linden, concedes that maybe 10 more votes total between the Assembly and Senate are needed for it to pass, but he remains optimistic.

Many details that were in previous versions, such as how many dispensaries would be permitted to open across the state, are gone.

I cant say whether there will be hundreds or not. How many liquor stores are in New Jersey?" Scutari said. We dont want too many, but we dont want people to not have enough so that they have to go to the black market to get cannabis.

Scutari said such decisions would now be left to a five-member commission.

The Cannabis Regulatory Commission would have broad powers to regulate the new industry and control the medical marijuana program, which now serves more than 42,500 patients. The two would remain separate, with recreational users subject to taxation, and patients exempt.

The commission also would regulate home deliveries  a relatively novel idea among the 10 states that have legalized marijuana. Only certified drivers could drop off cannabis to adult customers, who could purchase only one ounce.

The creation of the commission was a stumbling block that prevented the bill from advancing to the floor during the last six months. Gov. Phil Murphy pledged during his 2017 campaign that he would quickly approve legal weed, but when lawmakers added provisions that would have robbed him of control over the new industry, he withheld his support.

Then, on Tuesday, Murphy, Senate President Stephen Sweeney, and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, all Democrats, announced they had reached a deal on the commissions makeup, and on how much cannabis should be taxed, another sticking point that had stalled the bill.

After months of hard work and thoughtful negotiations, Im thrilled to announce an agreement.  This legislation will establish an industry that brings fairness and economic opportunity to all of our communities, while promoting public safety by ensuring a safe product and allowing law enforcement to focus their resources on serious crimes," Murphy said.

The governor would appoint all five commissioners with recommendations from Sweeney and Coughlin.

In Pennsylvania, a bill to legalize adult-use marijuana has been introduced in the House. More sweeping legislation is expected to be introduced in the Senate in the coming weeks. Supporters say Pennsylvania could lose millions in tax revenue to bordering states that are aggressively pursuing legalization if the state doesnt move on this.

Under the New Jersey bill, cannabis growers would be taxed $42 an ounce. Towns that welcome pot businesses could also tax dispensaries 3 percent; growers, 2 percent; and wholesalers, 1 percent.

Whether that would be enough of an incentive for towns to allow marijuana businesses remains to be seen. Before the tax structure was announced, more than 60 towns passed laws banning the businesses.

Scott Rudder, president of New Jersey Cannabusiness, which represents marijuana businesses, said the taxes and polls that show 62 percent of New Jersey residents approve of legalization should help win over towns.

In Colorado, the first state to legalize, 70 percent of the towns opted out the first year. But last year, there were $1.6 billion in sales. And now more towns want to get back in, he said.

Rudder predicts that the bill will pass and that towns will gradually come around. People just need to be comfortable with it. All of our lives weve been told cannabis is bad.  Its something thats been vilified for the past 81 years, and now were using modern data and research to separate facts from fear, he said.

But Rudder is aware the vote may be close. "For a lot of folks getting to yes takes time.

Its not a partisan issue. Sen. Ronald Rice, a Democrat and chair of the New Jersey Legislative Black Caucus, favors decriminalization but not legalization. Rice has said marijuana is addictive and it could ruin lives.

Sen. Gerald Cardinale, a Republican from Bergen County, has said he will vote no partly because he worries about people who smoke marijuana and drive.

Chris Goldstein, an organizer for NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the bill goes beyond the programs of most other states with legal weed. The proposal says 25 percent of all licenses would go to microbusiness owners.

That is huge. No other state has even proposed to do anything like this, Goldstein said. He said licenses would also be given only to applicants who have lived in New Jersey for two years  a unique requirement.

The bill also would require the commission to award 15 percent of licenses to African Americans and 15 percent to women and disabled veterans.

Bill sponsors included this requirement after legalization advocates complained big businesses could come into the state and exploit the new industry. Advocates also said the provisions would help make up for the discrimination that minorities suffered in the past when they were disproportionately arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana. An ACLU study found black people were arrested three times as often as white people though usage rates were similar.

People convicted of minor marijuana offenses also would have their records swiftly expunged, or erased, under a key section of the bill.

Advocates, policymakers, industry participants have been working for years to get this. The momentum is exciting. Its something everyone is talking about, said Ellie Siegel, CEO of Longview Strategic, a consultant for marijuana businesses. But I dont think all the votes are lined up. But theres a strong push for them to be lined up in the next 10 days.

If the bill passes, the commission would have 12 months to award licenses and launch the program. But Scutari and others predict it could be underway before the year ends. I can see that happening, he said.

David Knowlton, president of the Compassionate Care dispensary in Egg Harbor Township, said state regulators have been pushing the six medical marijuana dispensaries to expand their cultivation centers so they are ready to serve recreational customers as well.

Weve already ramped up because of the increase in medicinal demand," he said. Though there may be some initial shortages when recreational consumers enter the market, he said it should be manageable. We thought this was going to happen, that it was inevitable, and we will be ready for it."
Ayeesha Abdussalaam hugs Rabbi, Leah Berkowitz, during a Jumaa service at the Masjidullah Mosque at the intersection of Washington Lane and Limekiln Avenue in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia March 15, 2019. Jewish attendees mostly from the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia came in solidarity with Muslims and the victims of the terrorist assault on Christchurch Mosques in New Zeland. Read more

Philadelphia police say that no threats to local mosques have been detected following the massacre of 49 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand, but that officers are now visiting each Philadelphia congregation.

Members of the departments Counter Terrorism Operations Unit will stop by all known mosques in the city, said Capt. Sekou Kinebrew, a police spokesperson. Patrol officers will also visit the mosques while officials continue to confer with local, state, and federal law enforcement officials and monitor social media, Kinebrew said.

News of shootings that killed 49 people in Christchurch during Friday prayer services sent a wave of sadness throughout the local Muslim community.

We grieve as one body," officials of Majlis Ash Shura of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, a coalition of imams and mosques that represents local Muslims, said in a statement. The Muslim community would not be deterred from practicing its faith by terrorist groups all over the world that seek the destruction of Islam and oppression of Muslims, the statement said.

One man has been arrested and charged with murder, and three others (two men and one woman) also have been taken into custody in connection with shootings at Al Noor Mosque where 41 people were killed and Linwood mosque where seven were murdered. Another victim died at Christchurch Hospital.

During the massacre, a gunman streamed live video of the attack on Facebook, and a social media post believed to have been posted by one of the attackers contained a link to an 87-page manifesto that included anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim statements. The manifesto also condemned gun control efforts in the United States and cited inspiration from Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot and killed nine people in 2015 at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C.

Local imams say they have increased security at their mosques.

We demand that local, state, and federal agencies take any requests for assistance seriously, make them top priority, and not be dismissive, as weve seen in some cases," a statement from the Majlish Ash Shura leaders said.

Imam Numaan Cheema of Zubaida Foundation in Yardley first heard about the shooting Thursday night when it popped up on his Facebook feed. The shootings were still underway. He immediately began sharing information on social media with fellow imams from Dallas, New York, and San Francisco.

We were hoping it wasnt as tragic as it became, Cheema said. Then, while looking for more information, he happened upon a clip posted from inside one of the mosques during the massacre. He turned it off as fast as his fingers would move, but not before seeing three seconds of horror.

It was a time for families to come together and stand before God, and at that time, many didnt know that would be the last time they would stand, Cheema said.

Imam John Starling of Gracious Center of Learning and Enrichment Activities (GCLEA) in Cherry Hill said he would speak about the tragedy as part of his sermon during Friday services.

I will address it in some way, but if we stop to talk about all tragedies in the world, even just those that affect the Muslim community, wed be preaching every Friday about the same topic, Starling said.

He called the series of recent deadly shootings at houses of worship (including nine dead in Charleston, 11 in Pittsburgh, 26 in Sutherland Springs, Texas, six in Wisconsin, and six in Quebec City) a clear sign that nothing is sacred anymore and that hatred is infiltrating the hearts of many people in the world.

Imam Tahir Wyatt of United Muslim Masjid in South Philadelphia heard about the massacre Thursday night in a social media message from a friend in Africa. Wyatt is in San Diego, where he is delivering a series of lectures.

He called for more law enforcement resources to be dedicated to monitoring right-wing extremists, whom he described as terrified of increasing religious and racial diversity, and who are afraid of becoming a minority.

Cheema said he feels compelled to reach out and educate others about Islam and its followers.

If you have any questions about Islam and Muslims, please reach out. We will be happy to answer, he said, Dont let the hatred or misconceptions boil up inside.
The Bucks County man who has admitted to raping, killing, and dismembering Abington teenager Grace Packer returned to a Doylestown courtroom Friday to plead for his life before a jury that could decide otherwise.

Jacob Sullivan, 46, pleaded guilty to the crimes last month. Now, the jury of six men and six women is tasked with determining whether he will be sentenced to death or life in prison without the possibility of parole. The sentencing proceedings are expected to last as long as two weeks.

Sullivans girlfriend, Sara Packer, 44, Graces mother, also took part in the killing, authorities have said, and is expected to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison after Sullivan is sentenced.

His lawyers, however, made clear on Friday that they planned to make Sara Packer a key part of Sullivans defense.

In a half-hour opening statement, public defender Jack Fagan told jurors to consider what he called Sara Packers controlling nature  in her relationships with her boyfriend and her adopted daughter  when deciding Sullivans sentence.

Sara Packer was the driving factor in the intent, the planning, and the execution of what happened to her daughter, Fagan said.

Fagan described Sullivan as a quiet, shy, almost childlike" man who had a toxic relationship with his own mother and became dependent on Packer after they met online in 2013.

He said that while Sullivan did kidnap, rape, and choke to death Grace, and then dismember and disposed of her body, Sara Packer was the one who pulled the strings. She gave the teen a concoction of drugs, bought the tools used in her murder and dismemberment, lied to police, and picked the site where the teens body was dumped.

Bucks County District Attorney Matthew Weintraub, who is taking the unusual step of personally arguing the case, disagreed with the defense.

The case is not Jacob Sullivan vs. Sara Packer, he said in his opening statement. Packers judgment day is not today.

Weintraub also spoke to the jury for 30 minutes, laying out the gruesome nature of the case and arguing that Sullivan should be sentenced to death because he killed 14-year-old Grace during the commission of five felonies, including rape.

Whats the worst thing you can think of to do to a child? he said. Because, in this case, were going to check off all of those boxes.

He called Graces final 24 hours hell on earth." After Sullivan raped her and left her to die in a hot attic, Grace broke free of the zip ties on her hands and feet, spit out the ball gag in her mouth, and tried to overcome the drugs in her system, Weintraub said. But Sullivan arrived back at the house and choked her to death.

Prosecutors also called witnesses to testify about the investigation into Graces disappearance and murder, and about the state in which she was discovered.

Among them was Cody Blakeslee, who found Graces remains in the Luzerne County woods on Halloween 2016 while hunting with his father.

Her torso and head looked like a [seat-back] cushion from a SUV, Blakeslee said. No eyes. No nose. Mouth wasnt there.

The jury viewed photos of Graces remains, which prosecutors said show how Sullivan viewed her as a disposable child.

"He was her judge, her jury, and her executioner, Weintraub said. He decided, along with Sara Packer, whether she lived or died, and when, and by what means, and he carried out her sentence.

Weintraub told the jurors that if they sentenced Sullivan to death, he would be killed humanely, with far more respect than he showed Grace.

As of March 1, 142 people were on death row in Pennsylvania. The state has not executed someone since House of Horrors murderer Gary Heidnik was killed by lethal injection in 1999.

For Sullivan to receive a death sentence, all 12 jurors must agree. If they cant, Bucks County Judge Diane E. Gibbons will sentence him to life in prison.

When Sullivan and Packer were arrested in January 2017, Weintraub called the crimes depraved and unspeakable.

Sullivan told police he had been planning to kill Grace for years. In July 2016, authorities said, the couple put the plan into action.

They drove Grace from a home they rented in Abington to another they rented outside Quakertown. There, Sullivan attacked the girl, punching her and raping her as Packer watched. Drugged, bound, and gagged, Grace was left to die in the attic. When Sullivan and Packer returned the next day, he suffocated her. The couple stored her body in kitty litter until October, when police arrived at the home to follow up on the investigation. Then they cut up Graces remains in a bathtub, drove to Luzerne County, and dumped them in the woods.

As authorities ramped up their investigation, Sullivan and Packer attempted to commit suicide that December, but survived after a roommate discovered them. It was then that Sullivan told hospital staff he had killed Grace.
Part of the Philadelphia skyline pictured behind the William Penn statue atop City Hall, as seen from the Comcast Technology Center in Center City Philadelphia on Thursday, Jan. 3, 2019. Read more

Having heard arguments in a case that could have national implications, federal judges in Philadelphia are considering whether a local ordinance aimed at closing the wage gap infringes on employers right to free speech.

Attorneys representing the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and the City of Philadelphia on Friday argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit over a law passed in 2017 that prohibits employers in the city from asking a prospective employee about his or her salary history. The law, over which the chamber sued the city, also says employers cant use salary history information to set wages.

Proponents of the Wage Equity Law, which include the city and womens advocates, say it will cut down on gender- and race-based discrimination that contributes to the wage gap. Opponents in the business community, including Comcast Corp., say employers have a First Amendment right to ask about salary history.

Studies suggest women on average make about 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. That gap is even higher for women of color.

Last May, U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg halted the provision in Philadelphias law that prohibits employers from asking about salary history, ruling it violates free-speech guarantees under the First Amendment. But he agreed with the city that the government could bar employers from actually using that salary history to set wages. Both the chamber and the city appealed the decision to the Third Circuit.

Philadelphia was the first city in the country to pass a salary-history ban, following just Massachusetts. After Philadelphias passage, more than a dozen other states and municipalities followed suit. Federal court observers have said those other jurisdictions should watch the Philadelphia case closely  it could ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue Friday was largely whether the city is required to prove the ordinance will actually solve the wage gap problem.

Miguel A. Estrada, an attorney who argued on behalf of the chamber, told a panel of three judges that the city must meet a high threshold of proof that the ordinance works, because its attempting to restrict speech. He said while the chamber agrees that addressing the wage gap is a worthy cause, the city hasnt proved salary history causes discrimination in setting wages.

City Solicitor Marcel S. Pratt said the city doesnt have to. He said while labor experts agree salary history contributes to discrimination in setting wages, there arent long-term data on the efficacy of such a ban because it hadnt been implemented elsewhere when Philadelphia passed its bill. Legislatures try measures based on the evidence, and if something doesnt work, then they tweak it," he said.

Estrada said governments have some leeway in solving problems one step at a time. But he said theres a caveat that when they do that, they cannot do that for reasons related to the suppression of speech.

Pratt added that its simple common sense that the measure would at least cut down on discrimination. The idea is that if women or people of color make less than their male counterparts in their first jobs, that wage gap will only continue over time when future employers use salary histories to set pay.

When youre a woman or a person of color if employers are going to use your private salary history as a basis to pay you, your baseline is going to be lower, he said, and thats precisely because of the wage gap and because your prior salary history is tainted by discrimination.

City Council passed the bill unanimously in December 2016. Under the measure, job applicants who believed the law was violated would have been able to file with the citys Commission on Human Relations, which could then fine the employer $2,000 plus additional damages.

Lori Armstrong Halber, an employment law attorney and partner at Fisher Phillips Philadelphia office, said the case is the first court test of this type of law, so the rest of the country is watching as to how this shakes out. She said that if the Third Circuit decision is appealed, the Supreme Court could decide to take up the case or, she said, could wait until another circuit takes up a similar ban, which could result in a split in the circuits that the high court would be in a position to resolve.

On a broader level, Halber said, the ordinance is part of a wider movement of support for women in a very concerted way that we havent seen before.

There is a lot of movement politically and socially to fix inequities on the basis of gender, she said. But she added: I dont know that it saves this ordinance.
In a courtroom at Philadelphias Criminal Justice Center on Thursday morning, a trial commissioner took the bench opposite an assistant district attorney and a public defender, and waited for the next detainee to appear on screen from the Detention Center, a county jail in Northeast Philadelphia.

Into the plastic seat slid Clifford Hill, 47, who was on probation for a four-year-old drunken-driving conviction but had failed to report to his probation officer since November 2016. The event was a preliminary hearing to determine whether there was cause to believe he had violated the terms of probation, which meant he could be detained in jail until he had a chance to go before a judge who would finally decide the matter in a violation-of-probation hearing.

I was under the impression I was on non-reporting probation, Hill explained. But he had completed a DUI class, submitted paperwork confirming that to his probation officer, and called to follow up. I turned myself in when I learned I had an outstanding warrant on March 7.

Then, even though it was clear he had violated by not reporting, the trial commissioner agreed to let Hill out of jail pending the resolution of his case.

Six months ago, Hill would not have had the opportunity to explain his situation at that preliminary hearing. Instead, the hearing would have been completed outside his presence and behind closed doors, by court staff and paralegals who reviewed the cases on paper only. Detainers were rarely lifted.

But, in a November 2017 letter, Philadelphias chief public defender, Keir Bradford-Grey, warned the court that this nominal hearing process was illegal. It ran afoul, she argued, of a series of Supreme Court cases that enshrined the right of probationers and parolees to a timely preliminary hearing when detained for violating conditions of supervision.

Under new rules, proposed last October and published as formally adopted Wednesday, defendants now have a right to participate in a timely preliminary hearing via videoconference, to be represented by a lawyer and in some cases to confront adverse witnesses (though how that would be arranged is unclear, since no testimony is typically given at the hearings).

Since the hearings began on Dec. 5, 467 people have been released at that first hearing, according to a spokesperson for the First Judicial District. Of those, only 17  or 3.6 percent  failed to appear at their violation-of-probation hearing.

You need to hear from them  thats whats become so clear since we started the hearings, said Dana Bazelon, who has been handling many of the hearings for the District Attorneys Office. Theyll say, I was in custody in Lehigh County and thats why I wasnt reporting. Or, Look, I was in in-patient drug treatment, and heres the paperwork. Seeing people, having hearings, really does make a difference.

Providing true preliminary hearings, she said, also serves other functions besides getting low-risk individuals out of jail faster. It allows earlier referrals to drug-treatment assessments, and ensures people dont languish for an excessive period in jail before going before a judge.

Liam Riley, supervisor of pretrial at the DAs Office, acknowledged that some judges had pushed back, at least initially.

I think judges were concerned that people would get out and not show up for court. Thats not whats happened, Riley said. In some cases, judges have simply scheduled their probation-violation hearings earlier, to preempt the preliminary hearings altogether.

Gabriel Roberts, a court spokesperson, said the feedback has been that this new policy is markedly better than its predecessor.

But other reforms Bradford-Grey urged, like allowing only judges to lodge detainers or preside over preliminary violation hearings, have not materialized. Going forward, probation officers may impose detainers at their discretion, with or without a warrant. And the trial commissioners who run the hearings are not judges or even lawyers, but long-standing courthouse employees.

The Defender Association has entered a standing objection to aspects of the new hearing procedure, including the fact that they are not transcribed or recorded.

A spokesperson for the Defender Association declined to comment.

Defense attorney Paul Messing said whats missing from the rules is what concerns him most: It doesnt really address the problem of detainers being lodged for lower level, nonviolent offenses  contrary to new city policies to reduce the prison population, contrary I think to the positions of all the stakeholders that people shouldnt be incarcerated when theres no reason to do so."

Though its up to judges to draft the rules, he said, It seems to me the rules should contain some sort of presumption that, in a lower level or nonviolent offense, no detainer is to be lodged.
A masked gunman attempting to rob a store in West Philadelphia was fatally shot by the owner Thursday night, police said.

The alleged gunman, an unidentified man in his mid-20s, entered the store at the corner of Wyalusing Avenue and Conestoga Street just before 9 p.m. and tried to rob the 53-year-old store owner, who was in a small booth behind the counter, said Chief Inspector Scott Small.

The store owner got out a pistol and shot the perpetrator in the abdomen, Small said. The incident was recorded by in-store surveillance video.

The gunman then fled outside and fired at least three shots at the owner, who had run outside after him, Small said. The gunman got into a Pontiac sedan and tried to drive away but drove up onto a curb in the 500 block of North 54th Street.

Police found him unconscious in the driver seat, still wearing the mask and with a pistol in his lap, Small said. The officers broke the windows of the Pontiac to get him out and rushed him to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at 11 p.m.

The owner and two employees inside the store were not hurt.
After a tumultuous decade marked by enrollment declines, financial woes, layoffs, constant turnover at the top, allegations of cadet hazing, and other discipline problems, Valley Forge Military Academy and College and its vocal stakeholders thought theyd found a savior when Walter T. Lord took over as president less than a year ago.

Last weeks news of the abrupt and unexpected departure of Lord  a 54-year-old retired Army major general and prominent Valley Forge grad  has roiled alumni and other stakeholders, with some comparing the drama to the 1981 movie Taps, which was filmed on the Radnor Township campus and was centered on a scheme to close a military academy, with students barricading themselves inside to save it.

Many of the alumni and parents whove been venting their anger online and sharing speculation about the reasons behind Lords resignation say they now plan to storm a meeting slated for 9:30 a.m. Saturday at the school to address the turmoil, which has prompted at least two Valley Forge trustees to resign.

I agree with what so many others are saying ... that this is our Taps moment, wrote one cadets parent, in a private online posting shared with The Inquirer. We need to make a stand. More than 2,000 alumni and others have signed a Change.org petition urging more transparency and a resolution from the trustees and to keep Lord in command.

Neither school trustees  including the chairman, John English  nor Lord himself have said much about the retired generals March 8 announcement on Facebook that Ive had a philosophical disagreement with our board chairman and Ive come to realize that a bridge between our perspectives was not reachable.

In a sign of the escalating uproar, English on Sunday wrote to Lord  who said hed offered to stay on through June 30  and terminated him immediately, stating that while initially the presidents departure date had been open-ended, the rising chorus of commentaries about what had happened have created separate issues detrimental to the institution.

On Friday, Lord reposted a message from a year ago on Facebook: When a toxic person can no longer control you, they will try to control how others see you. The information will feel unfair, but stay above it, trusting that other people will eventually see the truth just like you did.

English, whod said initially that Lord had resigned of his own accord because of irreconcilable differences, did not return calls this week seeking comment. And Lord  who shortly before his resignation had written on Twitter, Wisdom is knowing the right path to take. ... Integrity is taking it  also could not be reached.

Everybodys guessing, because the board of trustees doesnt tell anybody anything, said one Valley Forge alumnus, who like others requested anonymity. He said that stakeholders are reeling from the loss of the military academys third leader in four years and that Lord had immediately started righting the ship by increasing enrollment and alumni donations when he arrived last April.

Reality is [that] General Lord is the face of our school [and] a walking billboard of all our school has to offer, another alumnus wrote in the Facebook group, one of many praising the South Philadelphia native. His passion is magnetic and attracts support.

Founded in 1928, Valley Forge Military Academy and College  an all-boys private school for cadets in grades 6-12, and also offering a two-year coed college program  is the only recognized military academy in Pennsylvania. It has produced famous alumni including Iraq War Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger, and Arizona Cardinals all-pro receiver Larry Fitzgerald. Tuition is about $45,000 a year for boarding students and $30,000 for day students.

However, the last decade, an era of struggle generally for military high schools, has been a time of upheaval on the Valley Forge campus. In 2016, a reported annual loss of $300,000 and a dip in enrollment came as the then-president was ousted and 16 staffers laid off. The prior year, according to the Main Line Times, the academys former Title IX compliance officer filed a whistle-blower complaint with the U.S. Department of Education citing violent hazing rituals and allegations that included sexual assault by students.

A number of alumni have said that Lord was on track to resolving many of those problems. In the wake of his departure, many online posters raised questions about whether Valley Forge was again considering admitting non-military students who wouldnt wear uniforms  similar to a failed experiment several years earlier  or whether trustees wish to sell some of its valuable Main Line real estate.

One trustee, Roque Schipilliti, said on Facebook Monday hes quitting the board but remaining as president of the schools alumni association. Another trustee, Maj. Gen. Jessica Garfola Wright, a former undersecretary in the Department of Defense, posted that she quit the day after Lords initial resignation but would have voted against accepting the move and making his departure immediate.

This is our seventh president since I entered the Valley Forge life in 2012, another alumnus said, anonymously. The board of trustees want people who are yes men  General Lord was the most pro-active president Ive seen.
Corey Sutor, 37, a Ventnor, N.J., firefighter, pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in Camden to a $2 million role in the vast prescription drug scheme that exploited public benefits held by Shore firefighters, police officers, and teachers.

Sutor was identified in court as a co-owner of Company 1," which prosecutors said was set up to recruit public employees to submit prescriptions for costly compound drugs like vitamins and scar and fungal creams, and then receive a percentage from a pharmacy filling the prescriptions by mail order.

Those recruited were paid hundreds of dollars per month to reward them, according to the plea agreement read in court by U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler in Camden. The owners of Company 1 split a percentage of the money the pharmacy received from the state health plan.

Sutor, of Egg Harbor Township, agreed to pay more than $2 million in restitution to the state benefit programs defrauded in the scheme, and forfeit $150,398 that represented his personal profit. Sentencing was set for March 12, 2019.

He is the second person identified as an owner of such a company. The probe into the conspiracy has snagged an Atlantic City firefighter, a Margate firefighter, two doctors, four school employees, including two teachers, and 13 pharmaceutical representatives.

Sentencings have been repeatedly delayed as, sources have said, investigators may be moving toward a bigger fish: a pharmaceutical representative who worked with the late James Kauffman, an Atlantic County endocrinologist who hanged himself in prison while awaiting charges in the death of his wife, April, a radio host and veterans advocate.

Prosecutors believe that she was trying to divorce her husband, and that he wanted her killed to protect his assets and to prevent her from revealing a drug ring he was running with members of the Pagan Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. Last week, gang leader Ferdinand Augello was sentenced to 30 years in prison in the murder case and life for leading a drug ring.

In addition, Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner has said he is prepared to move on state charges for lower-level public employees caught up in the scheme. Nobody should be comfortable," Tyner said in May.

Sutors attorney, Robert Wolf of Westmont, declined to comment outside the courtroom.

Ventnor Mayor Beth Holtzman said Sutor had been immediately suspended without pay and the city would move toward termination. She described the situation as just sad and said she knew Sutor to be a jovial, nice young man.

I love my firefighters, Holtzman said. They are a special breed of individuals. They have a brotherhood in the way they work together. Im sure its a sad day in our two firehouses.

People make mistakes," she said. "You pay a consequence.

Kugler ordered Sutor to remove a shotgun from his home and warned him, as he has others who have pleaded guilty in his courtroom, in some cases to as much as a $28 million role, that they come prepared at sentencing to account for the money.

Its a lot of money, he said. I want to know at the time of sentencing how you got the money, what you did with it, and where it is now, Kugler said. What happened to all the cash?
Joshua & Sandra Greenberg hold a scrapbook of their daughter in their Harrisburg home. In 2011, Philadelphia elementary school teacher Ellen Rae Greenberg was found dead of stab wounds in her apartment. The Philadelphia Medical Examiner's Office initially ruled her death a homicide, then changed their ruling to suicide one month later, Friday July 13, 2017. DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer . Read more

Philadelphia officials disagreed about the cause of Ellen Greenbergs death in 2011. The brutal scene was a peculiar one and to this day, her parents continue their search for answers. President Trumps push for border wall funding hit another roadblock Thursday as the Senate overturned his emergency declaration, meaning some GOP senators, including one youre probably familiar with, had to go against him. And we share some positive news this morning: A new section coming to The Inquirer will focus on lifting your spirit.

Reading this online? Sign up here to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning.

 Ray Boyd (@RayBoydDigital, morningnewsletter@philly.com)

Joshua and Sandra Greenbergs world forever changed on a night in 2011 when the phone rang: Something terrible has happened to Ellie. Sandra said their lives turned Weird. Strange. Black," on that night and from that point on, it would only get worse.

Their daughter Ellen was found dead in her Manayunk home with 20 stab wounds. Philadelphia officials disagreed about what happened, changing their determination from suicide, to homicide, and back again.

The peculiarity of the scene led the Greenbergs on a quest that no parent should have to take  one that continues to this day: finding out how their daughter died.

The Senate voted Thursday to overturn President Donald Trumps emergency declaration aimed at securing billions of dollars for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. President Trump threatened a veto and urged Republicans to stay in line, but 12 GOP Senators voted against him.

Among the 12 was Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Writing for The Inquirer, Toomey explained his vote saying he supports Trumps mission to secure the border, but I have serious concerns about his national emergency declaration.

If Trump moves to veto, Congress could vote to overrule, but that would require a vote margin across both chambers that doesnt appear likely.

In response to Phillys overdose death rate, the city and nonprofit organizations have launched free training classes to teach people how to use the opioid-reversal drug naloxone.

Jose Benitez, the executive director of Prevention Point, says the organization launched its classes due to demand from the public. Today, theyre held at multiple locations including Prevention Point Philadelphia and at Free Library branches.

The classes teach people what to do before, during, and after administering naloxone. It also educates students on how to determine whether someone is actually overdosing and not just in a deep high. Benitez hopes that eventually, everyone will receive this training to be able to save a life.

What you need to know today

Through Your Eyes | #OurPhilly

Theres just something about Philly drenched in sunlight. Thanks for sharing, @sniemkiewicz.

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

What the brew-ha-ha over Starbucks is really about is the lack of control over our privately run public spaces. As city officials have spun off downtown parks to private managers  Dilworth, Franklin Square, Sister Cities, the Schuylkill River Trail  the public has been effectively cut out of the decision-making process.  Architecture critic Inga Saffron on the controversy surrounding a new Dilworth Park coffee kiosk.

As the Sixers come down the home stretch of the regular season, every game carries major implications for their playoff position. Based on their remaining schedule, columnist David Murphy predicts a very familiar record and seed.

Theres an aspect of Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortezs Green New Deal to address climate change that is being ignored, writes opinion writer Abraham Gutman  one that could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

What were reading

A Daily Dose of | Benevolence

Alyssa Collier of Doylestown shared her experience with the expensive, often overlooked cost of miscarriage in a February Inquirer story. After reading it, an anonymous Philly-area man reached out and offered to help.
It has been a very challenging year for local journalism. Last week a promising Philadelphia-based news start-up called Spirited Media announced its decision to find a new home for its Billy Penn news site, unable to generate sufficient revenue to continue on its own. I was an early investor in Spirited and know firsthand the talent of its team and leadership. To its credit, The Inquirer took no cheer in the woes of a competitor. The Editorial Board published a deeply empathetic post-mortem titled What we lose when we lose news, about the diminished capacity for watchdog journalism, free expression, and the democratic process that accompanies a hobbled local news industry.

Earlier this year, Digital First Media, a renowned cost-cutter, made a hostile bid for Gannett, Americas largest newspaper chain. This prospective acquisition is especially disturbing here in the Greater Philadelphia region since Gannett owns newspapers in Cherry Hill, Asbury Park, Wilmington, and other local communities. Controlled by Alden Capital, a New York investment firm and once a major shareholder in The Inquirer, Digital First has savagely cut its newsrooms. Inquirer columnist Will Bunch wrote that, if completed, the takeover would implant DFM/Aldens money-siphoning brand of vulture capitalism at 300 newspapers from coast-to-coast.

This tale of revenue challenges and corporate greed is playing out at newspapers across the country just when our democracy needs them most. Once-vital local newspapers may either fold altogether or find their newsgathering capabilities so diminished that they operate as news zombies, published in name only, without depth or impact. Its worth asking if the death of some American newspapers is imminent? Almost certainly, yes. Is their passing inevitable? Absolutely not.

To the contrary, theres reason for great optimism that the business of local news can be reinvented, especially here in Philadelphia, where the First Amendment was penned.

Four years ago, after multiple changes of ownership, The Inquirer was purchased by H.F. Gerry Lenfest and rededicated to the people of Philadelphia. Gerrys core vision was that news should not be run solely as a business. He believed that a great city both needs and deserves a great newspaper. He likened this news enterprise to other civic treasures -- a great orchestra, a renowned art museum, or a world-class hospital or university each supported by both earned revenue and philanthropy. Gerry charged the newspaper not with maximizing profits but with sustaining great journalism in the public interest. He donated the business to a nonprofit organization now called the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, dedicated to supporting sustainable business models for local news in Philadelphia and nationwide.

The Inquirer and the Lenfest Institute have organized ourselves unabashedly as a donor-supported community news enterprise. Philadelphia donors large and small have joined the cause: Entrepreneurs, executives, students, civic leaders, local community foundations, the deans of schools of journalism, and former editors and reporters. These stakeholders have collaborated to fund investments in new investigative news coverage, new technology, improved digital products, and greater diversity in the newsroom, each vital to sustainable local journalism.

The Inquirer has operated under this visionary model for three years. The newspaper is neither out of the woods financially nor ready to declare victory, but we believe we have put in place the building blocks of a sustainable local news operation. Our success will depend on the support of our community, just as our communitys success depends on a robust and free press. This reinvention of the business of local news has begun here in Philadelphia, but we suspect it will spread, as have past innovations in free speech. Our fellow newspaper publisher Ben Franklin said, Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. With the support of this great and generous community, we hope to do both.

Jim Friedlich is the executive director and CEO of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism. @jimfriedlich
In the Mantua section of West Philadelphia is St. Agathas, a massive, shuttered Catholic church. The church is adorned with dark green paint, a no trespassing sign, and a package delivery notice for a priest. It sits in a neighborhood once known as Corktown, a forgotten hub of Irish American life.

I walked to St. Agathas last weekend from Wahoos Tacos & More, a stop on the annual St. Patricks Day bar crawl known as the Erin Express. Wahoos serves Mexican food with Asian and Brazilian influences. Revelers sat at tables outside the University City restaurant eating tacos and drinking Bud Light on a patio full of fluorescent St. Paddys gear and Eagles jerseys.

I first learned of Corktown four years ago from my grandfather, a second-generation immigrant from County Tipperary. But no one at Wahoos had heard of Corktown  and neither had any of the multiple Irish historians and enthusiasts I spoke with. So I went to the neighborhood myself, to answer a question thats burned in my mind ever since I was a kid eating Irish potatoes candy spun from shredded coconut: What is Irish American culture made of?

In the dozen blocks between the taco shop and the church, we can start to trace the path of Irish Philly in 2019.

Irish people didnt come to the United States as a nation but as individual counties. Irish American identity emerged as desperate immigrants banded together under spine-splitting work on docks, canals, and railroads.

The Irish lived in Mantua at least since the 1870s, when St. Agathas was built. While the name Corktown merits a tiny, undated mention in the citys place-names records, the 50-odd blocks tucked beside the Schuylkill have long been on the books as Mantua. Even in its heyday, the name Corktown was known mostly among Irish residents, who lived there with Italians, Jews, Germans, and African Americans. As more black people moved into the area, many fleeing the Jim Crow South, discrimination against the newcomers fueled racial violence, which contributed to a white exodus from West Philadelphia. By the 1960s, most Irish Americans had left the neighborhood for the suburbs.

Tracking down people who grew up in a place called Corktown has become an increasingly bittersweet exercise, as the last generation enters its 80s and 90s. Everyone whos ever told me about the neighborhood is dead now, including my grandfather. Three years ago, I went to visit Richard OMara, who wrote a memoir of his Corktown childhood, The Street Where They Lived. His dementia had progressed so that we couldnt speak, and he passed away a few months later.

Today the Irish Philly community endures in both the city and the suburbs, with more than a dozen Ancient Order of Hibernians chapters in the surrounding counties, local St Patricks Day parades, and Irish dance classes.

Yet some cornerstones of Irish American community are fading. Mayor Jim Kenney  Phillys first Irish American mayor since William Green in the 1980s  may be running for reelection, but Irish Americans, who once headed police and fire departments up and down the East Coast and influenced the fate of the Irish Republic with donations to anti-British resistance movements, are no longer the solid voting bloc that championed JFK. Decades of church and school closures in the Philadelphia area, due in part to declining attendance, have meant losing formerly central spaces of Irish American life.

But Mark Bulik, author of The Sons of Molly Maguire, notes that the radical labor traditions of the coal-country Irish who poured into Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s are alive in Irish Philadelphia today. Breandan Mac Suibhne, a historian of modern Ireland and author of The End of Outrage, agrees that Irish American culture endures as a spirit of resistance.

What abides, among people of Irish descent in the States, is a concern for the underdog, he said. It exists beyond labor activism and organized politics  there is an understanding, shared by many people of Irish descent, that the Irish were discriminated against.

And without Irish American activism during the conflict in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles, there may not have been peace. "They protested at British consulates and they lobbied their congressmen. And that engagement, by Irish America, contributed in no small part to the achievement of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Mac Suibhne said. Every generation reaches back, it seems, to grasp the whisper-thin fishing lines that tie us to the island.

Irish Philly was never defined merely by our churches or proximity to Ireland, or our food (corned beef is barely more Irish American than tacos, by the way  we got it from our Jewish neighbors). We are bonded by values forged in crammed boardinghouses on the edges of cities and coalfields.

In this city of neighborhoods, many are hoods-within-a-hood, like Corktown, and that includes todays University City  the fastest route from Wahoos to St. Agathas is Lancaster Walk, a pathway through Drexels campus that cuts its own lines of sight between school buildings for students, distinct from the city street grid.

The descendants of Irish immigrants to Philadelphia are celebrating with bar crawls and parades this weekend, from Springfield to Lansdale. The search for Corktown has taught me that at its core, heritage is not a food or a place, but an imagined community we build together. Corktown has always been a hometown of the heart and mind, where its spirit remains for the Philly Irish, at least a little longer.

Jess Rohan is an intern on the Power and Policy desk of the Inquirer.
Over a month ago, Bobby Henon, councilman for the 6th District, was charged with conspiracy, bribery, and fraud in a federal indictment that also charged seven others, including IBEW 98 head John Dougherty, for a total of 116 counts. Henon was accused, among other things, of using his Council seat to strong-arm a repair job at the Childrens Hospital at Penn on behalf of IBEW 98, which also pays him a salary.

Last week, the filing deadline for Mays primary election came and went. Bobby Henon has no challenger.

In other cheerful news, three former Traffic Court judges announced last month that they were also throwing their hat into the ring for a Council seat. Not long ago, all three finished serving time in prison on various ticket-fixing charges, a scandal that went so deep that the court itself was eliminated. (At least one has dropped out.)

On the Republican side, party-endorsed mayoral candidate Daphne Goggins dropped out of the race the day before the deadline for nominating petitions. Her fitness for office was a question, especially after she revealed that federal disability payments she has been receiving were related to anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder that emerged after she gave up cocaine in 2005. The Republican Party voted to endorse her twice.

There are stories like these every election season. They are symptoms of a disease not exclusive to Philadelphia, but one we suffer acutely. At its root are two calcified political party machines devoted to their own survival over ensuring vital and healthy political debates and elections.

The Henon example is particularly telling. Henon has proclaimed his innocence and has every right to fight to keep his seat. But no one thought there was a chance to win against the entrenched party machine, which has kept silent on the indictment. No one thought they had a chance against a candidate surrounded by questions and scandal because of the monolithic power of a few party leaders. Thats not democracy. Thats tyranny. And it holds this city back from long-term and meaningful progress.

This season, there is reason for optimism. A high number of candidates for City Council have filed to run. At least 34 candidates have emerged for seven at-large seats, and a similar number for district races. They include young candidates, and candidates devoted to reform and to overcoming the party structure. Voters should pay close attention to these candidates, though the number is daunting.

To help, The Inquirer is partnering with a number of organizations to host a Council Candidate Convention. In mid-April (place and date to be confirmed), all candidates for City Council  both district and at-large  will be invited to meet the public. Committee of Seventy, League of Women Voters, WHYY, Media Mobilizing Project, Young Involved Philadelphia, On the Table Philly, Temple Universitys Master of Public Policy and others are sponsoring this event to give as much exposure as possible to candidates and issues. The Inquirer will be interviewing candidates as part of our endorsement process. If youre interested in the event as a candidate or a voter, email us at 19election@philly.com .
The 2500 block of South Mildred Street in Philadelphia. This one South Philly block saw one of the largest increases in the new property assessments, leaving residents perplexed. Read more

A middle-school student trying to pad the page count of a homework assignment will change the page margins of the document or bump up the size of the type. This week, we learned that in the middle school that is city government, the Office of Property Assessment is that student. Unfortunately for us, the homework assignment is the law.

Property assessments in Philadelphia have been a mess for decades. In 2013, the entire assessments system in Philadelphia was overhauled, creating the Actual Value Initiative. AVI was intended to ensure that the city standardized the assessment and tax collection process so homeowners knew that what they owe was based on a fair process and that the city collected the proper amount of property taxes. The honeymoon phase of AVI was short-lived. Last spring, many homeowners were surprised to see their tax bills go up significantly, which led to public outrage and scrutiny.

Separate analyses by The Inquirer, by a firm hired by City Council, and by the Controllers Office found that the assessments are wrong and some people are paying more than their fair share. City officials pushed back against each one of the analyses. They hired an auditor of their own, who also found problems with the assessment process. In response, OPA decided to temporarily change the way it does assessments.

According to the legislation that created OPA, each year the office needs to publicly release underlying supporting data, documentation, methodology, and any other information used to certify each property. To make things easy, the legislation directed OPA to use the reports of the District of Columbia as a model; D.C. provides exhaustive information to the public about how assessments are conducted.

OPA has never honored that transparency requirement.

Until recently, all OPA had on its website was a couple of short paragraphs of vague information. For example, the site explained that factors such as size and age of property, location, and whether it is used for residence or business are included in the assessment. (This type of opacity is not limited to OPA; it pervades many corners of city government, including City Council.)

In contrast, the D.C. website provides a list of documents by year. For 2019, you will find: a 16-page ratio study, 134-page appraisers reference material, a 15-page data book, and a 38-page market analysis. Similar documents are available going back 18 years. The site also has a Frequently Asked Questions page and a video about the assessment process. In a January City Council hearing, OPA promised to have information on its site by the end of February. February came and went.

This week, OPA added new information to its website. It consists of a five-page overview (plus cover sheet) on trending valuation that OPA is using while it tries to fix its actual methodology -- mass appraisal. Its better than nothing, but its far from what the law requires.

OPA gets a failing grade for handing in its assignment late and incomplete. The problem is that Philadelphia taxpayers are the ones paying for this failure -- in some cases, a higher property tax bill.
Dr. Hamdullah Mohib, Afghan Ambassador to the United States, speaks during a ceremony Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 at the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) compound near Fort Walton Beach, Fla. Mohib was there to help honor more than 40 Green Beret soldiers who received medals ranging from the Bronze Star to the Silver Star for combat operations in Afghanistan during 2017. Read more

Is the White House so eager to quit Afghanistan that it will hand 35 million Afghans over to the Taliban in rushed peace negotiations?

Hamdullah Mohib, the visibly angry Afghan national security adviser, raised this question with U.S. journalists and diplomats last week on a visit to Washington, earning sharp State Department pushback.

Yet it is a question that must be asked, as special U.S. representative Zalmay Khalilzad negotiates a timeline for U.S troop withdrawal directly with Taliban leaders at talks in Qatar. No Afghan officials are present -- because the Taliban refuses to talk to them. The talks, Mohib said, were ''increasing the legitimacy of the Taliban'' and ''decreasing the legitimacy of the Afghan government.

What makes matters worse, Mohib charged, is that Khalilzad and other U.S. diplomats arent fully briefing Afghan leaders, leaving them in the dark about what is really going on in negotiations. Mohib says this is creating fear and uncertainty amongst the Afghan public. It is also undermining morale within the Afghan army.

We are completely being ignored, Mohib told me in an interview. This is a frustration that had to come out.

The Afghan government recognizes that after 17 years of war, many Americans wonder why U.S. troops remain there, and may sympathize with President Donald Trump, who told ABC last month, We got to get out of these endless wars and bring our folks back home.

What the president does not say is that the United States has a long-term interest in Afghanistans future. That interest does not just involve obtaining a promise from Taliban leaders to bar terrorist bases  the apparent quid pro quo for Washingtons providing them a withdrawal timeline.

If a peace accord opens the door to a Taliban takeover (returning women to the burqa and virtual imprisonment), Americas 17-year venture will go down in history as Trumps failure. And, if the Taliban takes over, why should anyone believe its guarantee that the country will never again play host to terrorists? More likely, with more than half the Afghan population opposed to the Taliban, the country would soon revert to all-out civil warfare and chaos, in which terrorists thrive.

So the issue is not so much the talks themselves, but how they are being conducted. Khalilzad claims that the Taliban must eventually agree to a cease-fire and negotiate with the Kabul government as part of any deal. But the Taliban has shown no signs it is willing.

Instead, negotiations have focused on the U.S. withdrawal timeline  and Taliban guarantees to block terrorists.

Yet Trumps public eagerness to withdraw troops signals to Taliban leaders that they are in the drivers seat. Ditto for his sudden decision last year to pull almost all U.S. troops out of Syria, and half the 14,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan  announced without first informing our Syrian Kurdish allies, or our Afghan government allies in Kabul.

No wonder the Kabul government is worried about an American sellout. All the more so when the Taliban is backed by Pakistan, whose intelligence service hosts its leaders and flies them to negotiating sessions. The Pakistanis hope to see their Taliban ally return to political dominance in Kabul as a hedge against India.

Clued in by the Taliban, Pakistani officials appear to know more about what is going on in the talks than do Afghan government leaders. This feeds the bitterness toward Khalilzad displayed by Afghan officials.

By signaling the desire to withdraw, you strengthen the resolve of the enemy and undermine your ally, says the Hudson Institutes Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington who is very familiar with the Afghan issue. He believes the negotiations should first have focused on a cease-fire and reconciliation among Afghans, including the Taliban. Then would come the withdrawal schedule.

To do the reverse, says Haqqani, makes the Taliban feel all theyre discussing is how to ensure an orderly U.S. withdrawal. The Afghan government genuinely perceives that the U.S. priority is how to withdraw quickly rather than maintain the gains of the last 18 years.

And maintaining those gains may require a small but long-running U.S. presence to ensure that Pakistan, and any Taliban party that joins the Afghan government, understand that America retains interest.

No one denies the smarts of the Afghan-born Khalilzad, who previously served as ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq (although Mohib alleged conflicts of interest).

But the lack of transparency about U.S.-Taliban talks, keeping Kabul, and Americans, in the dark, raises serious questions about whether they are merely meant as a cover story for a hasty U.S. pullout. Like the 1970s peace negotiations with Vietnam before America ran for the exits.

The only way to calm those fears is for Khalilzad to be more forthcoming  to Americans and to Kabul.

It is not for us to prescribe American national interests, says Mohib, who is the kind of young, educated Afghan vital for the countrys future.  What we dont accept is to be thrown under the bus.
Ray Gunther, president of the homeowners association, stands on vacant land adjacent to the Centennial Mill retirement community in Voorhees, N.J. A proposal to build a think tank for world peace on the the site has many association members concerned that such a facility could disrupt life in their close-knit neighborhood. Read more

The prospect of living next door to a think tank for peace has many residents of the Centennial Mill retirement community up in arms.

Members of the homeowners association in the 55-and-over Voorhees neighborhood have signed petitions and hired a lawyer. Theyre turning out in large numbers to fight the township zoning code variance sought for a $7 million ashram that has been described as a place for visiting senior scholars to live, study, and seek solutions to racial and religious conflict.

"Your plan was to promote peace and harmony, Centennial Mill resident Frances Lettieri told businessman Paritosh M. Chakrabarti, who wants to build the ashram, during Thursdays Voorhees zoning board meeting.

Contrary to your mission, you have created discord and disharmony.

The irony is painful: What would strike some people as a quiet, benevolent, even prestigious neighborhood amenity is being attacked as a threat to property values and public safety.

Folks in Centennial Mill are afraid that the centers presence on what has long been a seven-acre vacant tract along Centennial Boulevard will disrupt life in the gated, well-kept, and civic-minded community they love. They say the center, however well-intentioned, would generate unwanted vehicular and pedestrian traffic and could become a target of extremist violence.

There has been a substantial rise in hate crimes in this country, [such as] the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings and the Charleston church shootings, Centennial Mill resident Allan Pepper said, testifying before the zoning board at a sometimes tense hearing. Testimony will resume April 11.

The existence of an ashram directly adjacent to the Centennial Mill community will create a significant security and safety concern for residents,"said Pepper.

"The very purpose and mission of the ashram... is certain to inflame and incite members of hate groups.

The ashram is the dream of Chakrabarti, a self-made millionaire who lives in Moorestown and owns PMC Group Inc., a global chemical company with headquarters in Mount Laurel. He said he has been looking since early 2017 for a site in a park-like setting and also near other communities.

Philosophers, scientists, and other scholars who are over 55 and have advanced degrees would apply for free, five-year residencies at the ashram, he said. Each would live in one of the 20 dwellings surrounding a welcome center that would have four guest rooms for visitors as well as a library that would be open to the public.

Although the ashram would not have facilities for large events, it would host small conferences several times a year. Resident scholars would be expected to do research, write, and publish. And while scholars of any faith would be welcome to apply, the ashram will not be a religious institution, said Chakrabarti, 78.

He also said he already has modified parts of his plan in response to concerns from the prospective neighbors. Hell erect a 6-foot fence along the rear of the property, and eliminate vehicular access from the ashram to Matlack Drive, a major Centennial Mill thoroughfare.

I am planning to do similar centers all over the world, and this is the first," Chakrabarti told me before the meeting,

More than 100 people packed the chamber at Voorhees Town Hall for 90 minutes of testimony, much of it polite, some of it heated. Only four of the 17 people who spoke were for the project. And when board attorney Stuart Platt asked for a show of hands by those opposed, and next, by those in favor, of the zoning variance, the contrasting views of whites and nonwhites in the room were dramatically evident.

As for questions about whether some of the scholars or visitors to the ashram might be disreputable or even dangerous, Rakesh Gupta, a trustee of Virtua Hospital in Voorhees, said: There are unfounded fears ... that these people are going to be criminals trespassing on [Centennial Mill] properties. They will be learned, educated, law-abiding people. They are [not going to] trespass and use your pool.

Another speaker, Sangeeta Rashatwar, a Cherry Hill businesswoman who lives in Voorhees, wondered whether people feel that because of the color of my skin, Im not American."

Testifying not long afterward, Ray Gunther, president of the homeowners association, said: Theres no prejudice in this room. I can guarantee that.

And speaking to me earlier in the day, Gunther  a good guy whos recovering from a recent stroke  said he and his neighbors have nothing against the Indian community. We have Indians who live here, a lot of Asians, and Jewish people too. Nobody would ever say anything negative about any ethnic group.

And speaking to me earlier in the day, Gunther  a good guy whos recovering from a recent stroke  said he and his neighbors have nothing against the Indian community. We have Indians who live here, a lot of Asians, and Jewish people too. Nobody would ever say anything negative about any ethnic group.

Chakrabartis cause strikes me as genuine, and having his ashram as a neighbor would be just fine with me. I dont believe building an institution dedicated to resolving human conflict would damage Centennial Mill.

The saddest part of this whole sad business is that the damage has already been done. To all of us.
James Kauffman, center, accused of hiring a hitman to murder his wife in 2012, arrives in Courtroom 5 at the Atlantic County Courthouse on Thursday, Jan. 18. Kauffman was found dead in his prison cell on Friday, Jan. 26. Read more

James Kauffman, the Jersey Shore doctor awaiting trial in the contract murder of his radio host wife, was found dead Friday morning in his jail cell, officials said.

A spokesman for Hudson County, where Kauffman was being held for his protection, said staff making rounds at the county jail found the doctor dead about 9:20 a.m. in what appeared to be a suicide.

Kauffman, 69, had been awaiting trial in Atlantic County on charges of arranging the 2012 murder of his wife, April, to prevent her from exposing an illegal drug distribution ring he allegedly ran with the Pagan Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.

Ed Jacobs, Kauffman's attorney, said that he had spoken to the warden at the Hudson County jail and that he had confirmed Kauffman's death and said it was under investigation.

"The warden tells me there is an investigation and he can't make further comment," he said.

"It's a sad end to a very unhappy story," Jacobs said. "I'm sure the events of the last 5 years have taken their toll on Jim. He's been under enormous stress, the focus of the investigation one way or another. And all the searches and pre-trial detention. I think it all added up."

Kaufmann had been moved to Hudson County for his protection after death threats from his co-defendant, a member of the Pagans.

He apparently committed suicide by a method that would be familiar to a medical professional, sources said. He also left a six-page suicide note.

According to sources, the suicide involved tearing a strip from a bed sheet and twisting it into a very tight garrote that went around his neck.

When his cellmate was out at a court appearance, Kauffman apparently looped the sheet onto the slats of the upper bunk, lay face down on the lower bunk and created "just enough pressure to suffocate him, but it looks like he's sleeping," one source said.

"This was very thought-out," the source said.

"I believe the evidence had mounted and he realized this was his solution."said Patrick D'Arcy, an attorney for April's Kauffman's daughter, Kimberly Pack. "This was his answer."

D'Arcy said that he had spoken with Pack at length but that the 35-year-old was too distraught to make a statement of her own Friday.

"It's a sad day. Her emotions have been on such a roller coaster," D'Arcy said, adding that Pack has a family with young children and "is trying her best to continue to move forward."

Nearly six years after April Kauffman was found shot to death in the bedroom of the couple's home in the Atlantic City suburbs, Kauffman and Shore band guitarist Ferdinand Augello, 61, were charged last month with orchestrating the alleged murder-for-hire plot. Prosecutors said Kauffman and Augello planned the crime for a year, eventually finding their triggerman in Francis Mullholland.

On the morning of May 10, 2012, authorities said, Mullholland was given a gun  and at least $20,000  to carry out the murder.

After James Kauffman had left for work, a handyman found April dead. James Kauffman originally told authorities she had been alive when he left. He had since maintained his innocence.

The following year, Mullholland died of an accidental heroin overdose, prosecutors said.

April Kauffman wanted to divorce James Kauffman, planned to spend his money before the split, and threatened to expose his illegal drug distribution ring, prosecutors said.

At a detention hearing in Superior Court last week, Kauffman's appearance was in marked contrast to how he looked before his arrest, his hair had turned white, his beard was scruffy and his body was hunched over.

Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner dismissed questions about Kauffman's mental state after the hearing, but did note that jail must have been difficult for the affluent and popular endocrinologist, who owned homes in Linwood, N.J., and Arizona.

Kauffman was married to Carole Weintraub of Philadelphia and has children from previous marriages. Funeral arrangements were pending.

Staff writer Erin McCarthy contributed to this article.
The Sheriff's Office is paying $13,000 to place advertisements, including Sheriff Jewell Williams' picture, on the back of 10 SEPTA buses for the first five months of 2019. Read more

Have you been seeing more of Philadelphia Sheriff Jewell Williams these days?

Drive down the street, his face is plastered on SEPTA buses. Open the Daily News one day, at least 16 photos of Williams are in a 16-page annual report inserted in the newspaper.

Seems normal, as Williams is running for a third term in the May 21 Democratic primary, with three challengers.

But the Sheriffs Office, not Williams reelection campaign, is paying for all that. And City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart wants to see the receipts.

Rhynharts office issued a subpoena Monday for records of all expenditures for creating Sheriffs Office annual reports. Williams has until Monday to turn over the records.

Barbara Grant and Luz Cardenas, who run one of three consulting firms working for the office, said the report cost $19,500 for production and distribution. That came from fees the Sheriffs Office collects from the sale of foreclosed homes.

Of 36,000 copies printed, 31,000 were inserted into the Daily News on March 7 and 5,000 are being handed out by the Sheriffs Office.

Williams face also graces the rear ends of 10 SEPTA buses, in ads to recruit 50 new deputies. SEPTA said those ads cost $13,000 and will start coming off the buses in May.

Dan Gross, another communications consultant for the Sheriffs Office, said the bus ads were supposed to come down in mid-January. The civil service exam for those positions is March 23. The money to pay for the ads came from a state fund for law enforcement recruiting, Gross said.

Grant, Cardenas, and Gross, who learned of Rhynharts subpoena from Clout, didnt want to discuss how all this spending could help Williams win reelection. They had no idea if anyone is answering questions for Williams campaign. And the sheriff declined to be interviewed.

Theres an obvious reason for all that. Williams, dogged by sexual-harassment claims, is avoiding the media and not campaigning in traditional ways.

The citys Law Department last month agreed to pay $127,500 to a former employee. Another employees sexual-harassment suit is pending. And in 2011, the Democratic caucus in the Pennsylvania House settled a sexual-harassment suit against Williams  who used to represent the 197th District  for $30,000.

Big Soda goes to war with Local 98

The American Beverage Association, which has spent more than $16 million fighting Philadelphias soda tax, is now weaponizing the Jan. 30 federal indictments of John Johnny Doc Dougherty, leader of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, City Councilman Bobby Henon, and six other union officials.

The ABA, long expected to be a major player in Council races, distributed fliers Monday evening in the Second District, attacking Councilman Kenyatta Johnsons 2016 vote for the tax.

The flier also said this: By not repealing the beverage tax, he is picking corruption over his constituents. The flier claims the indictments of Dougherty and Henon show the tax was for political revenge against Mayor Jim Kenneys opponents, and nothing else.

The indictment makes clear Dougherty was livid about a television commercial that aired once during the 2015 primary for mayor, linking him and Kenney to controversial comments about police brutality. Dougherty blamed a rival union, the Teamsters, and vowed to push for a soda tax as revenge  although Clout last month discovered that a different rival, the Carpenters Union in Philadelphia, really paid for the ad.

Kenney said on the day of the indictments that the tax had nothing to do with revenge for Local 98 and wasnt Doughertys idea.

Mark Nevins, a spokesperson for Johnsons campaign, noted that his Democratic primary challenger, Lauren Vidas, previously served as an ABA lobbyist. He added: Its not exactly a shocker that the same soda CEOs who paid her to protect their bottom line now want to help elect her.

Vidas says she had nothing to do with the flier and would not vote to repeal the soda tax if she wins a seat on Council.

The Oh-vs.-Dubow Show

Just how heated is the debate over Philadelphia property assessments? In a Council hearing Tuesday, Councilman David Oh implied that Finance Director Rob Dubow is a criminal for collecting taxes on the current assessments.

The thing about criminals is they cant seem to understand that they dont have a right to somebody elses money, Oh told Dubow. And theres no greater sinner than the righteous sinner. They always figure theyve got something better to do with your money than you.

Oh has a bill that would nullify the 2019 residential reassessment that raised taxes for thousands of homeowners. The administration suggested there were legal issues with the bill, and Dubow defended the citys assessments as improving every year.

Ohs rant caused Kenney to write him a letter claiming he had never seen a Council member treat a public employee with such disrespect.

Your rhetoric may be acceptable to some on the fringes of political life, including the current inhabitant of the White House, but it has no place in the discourse of our local government.

Matthew Pershe, Ohs legislative aide, said he hoped the mayor didnt mean to distract from issues with the citys property assessments. Oh was simply suggesting that the administrations refusal to fix the assessments is criminal, he said.

Its rather unreasonable to think that Councilman Oh was at any point addressing Rob Dubow personally  except when stating that Dubow has been around too long, Pershe wrote in an email.
Johnny Carson (right) with sidekick Ed McMahon during the final taping of the "Tonight Show" in 1992. Read more

President Donald Trump is nostalgic. Ah, the good old days, he says, when America was great, coal was king, and people still said Merry Christmas. And, the comedians werent so darn mean.

This week, the president has been particularly wistful about that last one, using a couple of early morning tweets to criticize the late-night shows  in particular, their one-sided hatred of him and his administration. On Thursday, Trump went on Twitter to lament the state of evening comedy, and apparently quoted a guest on Fox & Friends talking about the way things used to be.

"The three very weak and untalented late night 'hosts' are 'fighting over table scraps. (Johnny) Carson did a great job, it wasn't political,' " Trump wrote, referring to the late, iconic dean of late-night TV, whose on-air run spanned three decades.

The implication, as many saw it, was that the president thought Carson would never poke fun at Trump. Cue the video of Carson  doing just that.

Comedian Mike Drucker, who writes for the show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, posted footage of Carson in 1989, joking about the short-lived game show Trump Card.

Hes on everything. Hes got his name on buildings, hes got his name on boats, Carson said, before his punchline about Trumps reputation as a hard-driving landlord. And this show, apparently, is a lot like Wheel of Fortune, but instead of Vanna White, Leona Helmsley comes out and flips a homeless person into the street.

As the crowd hooted its approval and Carson continued: "And one of the features each week is called the 'Eviction of the Week.' Trump stands under a tenement window with a bullhorn and yells, 'Come on down!' "

A couple of years later, Carson included Trump in another bit, one that jokingly tied him to the Clinton family.

"Don't worry about Gennifer Flowers," Carson said, referring to a woman who said she had a sexual relationship with Bill Clinton in the 1990s. "She got a new job today as a Donald Trump backup mistress."

The tension between Trump and comedians not named Johnny Carson, especially those who appear on Saturday Night Live, is long-running and mutual.

"They're not, like, talented people," Trump said, of modern-day late-night hosts at a 2018 rally. "Johnny Carson was talented."

On The Late Show in June, host Stephen Colbert responded to that sideswipe.

"He is right, Carson was a legend," Colbert said, before playing more footage of Carson making a Trump joke.

Its not just the presidents gripes that are getting recycled  comedians seem to be reusing their jokes. Johnny Carson would never have done that.
Nick Jacobs, 17, listens to speeches during a global climate strike at City Hall in Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, March 15, 2019. Students from around the Philadelphia region along with people of all ages came together for the global movement. Read more

Students from around the Philadelphia region planned to take part in a global climate strike, with a rally set for City Hall this afternoon.

The students say they are striking because, the science says we have just a few years to transform our energy system, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and prevent the worst effects of climate change.

In Philadelphia, an initial rally was planned starting at noon to 2 p.m. at Love Park at Arch Street. A main rally was scheduled to follow from 3:30 pm- 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, according to the GreenPhilly blog.

Student organizers  backed by groups such as the Sierra Club, 350.org, and Greenpeace  say climate change disproportionately impacts communities of color, disabled communities, and low-income communities. In some cases, students planned to walkout of classes, although it was not immediately clear how many did.

The students say they back the Green New Deal, an ambitious program to combat climate change introduced last month by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and want a transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy.
In the latest Locked on Sixers podcast, Keith Pompey and T Will dissect Joel Embiids shooting statistics. T Will is fed up with Embiid continuing to shoot three-pointers when hes a 29.3 percent shooter from that distance and a beast in the low post. The duo provides the Sixers scoring numbers for each quarter and the reason for those numbers. The two end the podcast by talking about the Sixers turnover woes and Fridays matchup against the Sacramento Kings.
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That takes us to the saga of Caroline Calloway. As hilariously documented by writer Kayleigh Donaldson, Calloway decided to charge $165 for tickets to a touring seminar on how to "Be Yourself." She wouldn't even be present for the first hour, and that was somehow the best part. Calloway raked in at least $30,000, but put out a call for a photographer and videographer who were willing to work for free because, and this is an actual quote, "omfg supplies are EXPENSIVE." When people pointed out how sleazy that was, she made herself out to be a poor, put-upon event planner.

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A week before the tour launched, and long after the tickets were sold, Calloway was still looking for venues. On Day 1 of the tour in New York City, she abruptly cancelled promises of food and handwritten keepsakes. Then she announced that the seminars scheduled for other cities would also be in NYC. Ticketholders would just have to pony up for airfare on short notice. It was painfully obvious that she didn't want to pay to fly to cities she hadn't secured venues in, but her stated reasoning was that everyone told her the NYC venue was "perfect," and she now couldn't imagine holding her workshop anywhere else, which was technically true.

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And the saddest detail of all, somehow, is that she promised every attendee an orchid "crown," then only produced a single flower that people could clip in their hair for selfie ... before returning for the next person to use.

The rest of the non-touring tour shockingly ended up being canceled. It's difficult to tell how much was a scam and how much was born from Calloway's extremely Instagram-friendly attitude of believing that good intentions and the right attitude can accomplish anything right up until any work is involved. But either way, hundreds of hopeful young women were taken advantage of, while Calloway got to write the whole thing off as a proud learning experience. You can't let the haters drag you down with cruel comments like "Hey, maybe learn to plan events?"
Hundreds of Berks County tenants impacted financially by the COVID pandemic need help paying their rent and utilities, and the $52 million the county received in federal funds won't be enough money to help everyone who has applied.
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Beto ORourke launched his campaign with an interesting Iowa strategy. ORourke is campaigning in Iowa counties that Obama won, but Trump flipped.

Garrett Haake of NBC News is with ORourke in Iowa and reported:

He went out of his way to say nice things of all the Democrats running. There is time for sharp elbow later in South Carolina. Look at where hes starting. We are in southeastern Iowa. Hes going to counties thats Obama counties thats flipped to Trump. Hes showing outreach to people across the state in a way that says something about our broader strategy here. Yeah, I think the nice guy part of it is absolutely there. He talked about Donald Trump and he talked about anybody in this field being better than Donald Trump, it is clear that he wants to fight Trump on policies and does not want to get down in the mud with him and hes not going to do that with his fellow Democrats it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Video:

Beto O'Rourke is campaigning in Iowa counties that Obama won, but Trump flipped. pic.twitter.com/L6hcKk5ck4  PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) March 14, 2019

Beto ORourke is following the Obama model

Can a charismatic new face be a change agent candidate that unites the Democratic Party around a positive big message style campaign? There are nearly 20 candidates in the Democratic presidential field, but in terms of policy, there isnt much daylight between any of them. Beto ORourke is interesting because he is a boom or bust candidate.

ORourke could launch and takeoff as Obama did during the 2008 primary, or he could fail to translate the style that he used in Texas into an effective national campaign.

Beto ORourke is trying to follow in Obamas footsteps, and it will be interesting to see if he can pull it off.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

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Top conservative commentator Charlie Sykes tore into the Republican senators who stuck by Donald Trump and voted on Thursday to protect his fake national emergency.

In an interview with MSNBCs Chris Matthews, the conservative commentator said that while it was good that a dozen Republican lawmakers stood up to Trump, its not nearly enough.

This was a very strong rebuke of the president and 12 senators breaking with the president is certainly a beginning of something, Sykes said. But it could have been bigger and should have been bigger.

Video:

Sykes said:

This was a very strong rebuke of the president and 12 senators breaking with the president is certainly a beginning of something. But it could have been bigger and should have been bigger. I think that a lot of senators who understood that this was an easy vote, this was a red line vote and yet they chose to cave in, they chose to go along with the White House rather than the constitution.  Tom Tillis was afraid of a primary. You have Ben Sasse who is up for reelection. You have Ted Cruz who now can no longer be taken seriously as a constitutional conservative. You have a lot of other Republican senators who really held their nose and I think theyre going to pay a price in terms of their reputation for going against what they had said. I mean a lot of these guys are on record, on tape denouncing Obamas use of executive authority and their hypocrisy was really on display and also, quite frankly, their spinelessness was on display as well.

The GOP doesnt deserve any credit

The media takeaway from todays vote on Trumps national emergency seems to be that Republicans are finally standing up to the president after spending the last two years repeatedly letting him get away with anything and everything.

But the American people shouldnt be fooled.

Despite the fact that a dozen Republican senators trying to keep their seats rebuked the president on Thursday, there were still more than three times as many GOPers  41 to be exact  who were happy to bow down to Trump.

Until the Republican Party does the right thing and unanimously stands up to this president  the most unfit and corrupt in history  they deserve no credit.

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By David Lawder

WASHINGTON (Reuters)  U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross insisted on Thursday that the plan by the Republican Trump administration to revive a citizenship question on the 2020 census was aimed at bolstering the Voting Rights Act, prompting ridicule from Democrats.

Critics of the move, now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court, believe including the question will scare immigrants and Latinos into abstaining from the decennial survey, disproportionately under-counting Democratic-leaning states.

Ross testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that gathering accurate data on U.S. citizens outweighed any potential reduction in response rates.

Obtaining complete and accurate information for use in determining citizen age voting populations to enforce the Voting Rights Act is a legitimate government purpose, he said in written comments submitted beforehand.

I determined that the importance of that goal outweighed any potential decrease in self-response rates that may result from people violating their legal duty to respond to the decennial census, he said.

His assertions were mocked by the majority Democrats on the committee, including chairman Elijah Cummings.

I do not know anyone who believes that the Trump administration is interested in enhancing the Voting Rights Act, Cummings said, adding: The administration has done everything in its power to suppress the vote.

A federal judge blocked the question in January and the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month and rule by the end of June. Eighteen states, 15 cities and various civil rights groups are plaintiffs in the case.

Time is of the essence, as the official census forms are due to be printed in the coming months.

The official population count established in the census is used in the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives and the distribution of billions of dollars in federal funds. There has not been a question about citizenship status on the short-form census questionnaire since 1950.

Ross testified that when he got into office in 2017, he began a deep dive into all aspects of the survey, including the resources needed to achieve an accurate accounting of the population. Non-citizens comprise an estimated 7 percent of people living in the United States.

He said the request to add the citizenship question came from the Justice Department and denied it was for political purposes.

Republicans, who lost the House to the Democrats in last years elections, attempted to shut down the hearing with a motion to adjourn but were voted down.

(Additional Reporting and writing by Alexandra Alper; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Sonya Hepinstall)
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Rachel Maddow pointed to a new report in The New York Times published Thursday as further evidence that the so-called Steele dossier  the one that Trump and Republicans keep ridiculing  is an increasingly credible and accurate document.

According to the Times, the dossier alleges that Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev used botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct altering operations against the Democratic Party leadership.'

The report continued, On Thursday, new evidence emerged that indicated that internet service providers owned by Mr. Gubarev appear to have been used to do just that: A report by a former F.B.I. cyberexpert unsealed in a federal court in Miami found evidence that suggests Russian agents used networks operated by Mr. Gubarev to start their hacking operation during the 2016 presidential campaign.

As Maddow said, the nature of the new information is technical, but it also underscores the larger point that the damning Steele dossier has only grown more credible over time, not less.

It has long been fascinating to me that Republicans and the Trump White House have focused on Christopher Steele and the Steele dossier, she said. I mean, honestly, bits and pieces of the dossier keep getting proven true all the time.

Video:

Maddow said:

What this technical report that weve now had unsealed out of that lawsuit, what it suggests is that at least in this part of the dossier, Christopher Steele was right. As The New York Times sums it up tonight, quote, a report by a former FBI cyber expert unsealed in a federal court in Miami finds evidence that suggests Russian agents used networks operated by the guy who sued Buzzfeed, Mr. Gubarev to start their hacking operation during the 2016 presidential campaign. Quote, the report suggestions of a link between Mr. Gubarev and Russian hacking is likely to spur new demands for renewed investigations. It has long been fascinating to me that Republicans and the Trump White House have focused on Christopher Steele and the Steele dossier as if it is embarrassing or bad somehow that that document and his work might have been a predicate for the larger Russia investigation and ultimately the special counsel. I mean, honestly, bits and pieces of the dossier keep getting proven true all the time. Nothing in it has been conclusively disproven at all and I mean, flip through it again sometime. I mean, you know, I dont understand why Republicans and the White House keep drawing peoples attention back to the dossier. Really, you want people to read the dossier? What it says about the Trump campaign and Trump himself is not good and bits and pieces of it keep being proven true.

Republican efforts to smear the Trump-Russia dossier keep backfiring

Republicans have long sought to smear the Steele dossier often based on two flimsy arguments: 1. It has been fully funded by Democrats; and 2. It has been debunked and disproven.

Of course, we know Republicans are wrong on both counts.

We know now that it was a conservative website that first funded the research during the primary campaign that eventually turned into the Steele dossier.

And, as the MSNBC host pointed out on Thursday, the suggestion that the damning document has been debunked is completely ludicrous. As we continue to learn more about the presidents ties to Russia and the 2016 hacking operation, the Steele dossier only gains more credibility.

Donald Trump and Republicans would be smart to heed Rachel Maddows advice and stop drawing attention back to a damning document that only continues to make this president look bad.

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Trump threatened that his supporters could violent if the left keeps on standing up and say no to his wall and agenda.

In an interview with Breitbart, Trump said, Its so terrible whats happening. You know, the left plays a tougher game, its very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they dont play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you, I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump  I have the tough people, but they dont play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad. But the left plays it cuter and tougher.

When Trump is losing, he threatens violence

Trump has a history of threatening violence when he is losing. He did it during the midterm election. The president has also threatened violence against people protesting him, violence against Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and his attorney Rudy Giuliani has threated violence against the American people if Trump is impeached.

All of these situations have one thing in common. Donald Trump was losing. When Trump starts losing he begins to try to scare people into doing things his way with threats of violence. Trump cant handle being investigated, told no, and generally owned by Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats, so he is pretending like he has a gang of thugs at his disposal who will beat the left into compliance.

Trumps tough talk is a sign that he is weak and teetering.

Donald Trump is failing, which is why he is talking tough and trying to pretend like he can bully his way to a success that will never come.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

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After scores of Muslims were murdered in a terrorist attack in New Zealand, Donald Trump mindlessly tweeted out a link to the anti-Muslim Breitbart News website. There was no other comment in the tweet, nor was there an explanation for why the president tweeted the link to Breitbart, a news organization formerly run by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

The shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand left 49 people dead. It was live-streamed on Facebook, and the gunman apparently posted a manifesto on the far-right-friendly 8chan forum and set up other social media accounts to promote the screed ahead of the massacre.

Late last night, after the shooting had been initially reported by the media Trump tweeted out the link to the Breitbart homepage where the lead story at that point was an article highlighting disgraced New York City police commissioner Bernard Keriks claims about special counsel Robert Mueller.

Since Trumps tweet offered no commentary on the link to Breitbarts homepage, millions of people were left scratching their heads. The website often features inflammatory content about Islam and Muslims, and other racist topics. The right-wing site eventually changed its lead story to the Christchurch shooting long after Trump posted his tweet.

Since Donald Trump and Breitbart are known for their support of white supremacists, and their attacks on Muslims, many other Twitter users were appalled at what the president did.

One person tweeted:

I am a New Zealander watching news coverage of a mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch. The person who did this is a white supremacist who was probably influenced by the crap spewed by hate sites like Breitbart. YOU are part of the problem for the rise in hate crime.

I am a New Zealander watching news coverage of a mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch. The person who did this is a white supremacist who was probably influenced by the crap spewed by hate sites like Breitbart. YOU are part of the problem for the rise in hate crime.  Jen Longshaw (@JenLongshaw) March 15, 2019

Another Trump critic tweeted:

Youre just out here plugging Breitbart for no reason whatsoever? Cool. Thats a totally normal, presidential thing to do. Especially in the midst of whats happening in Christchurch. Which is a city in NZ by the way, not a place of worship where you inexplicably sign bibles.

You're just out here plugging Breitbart for no reason whatsoever? Cool. That's a totally normal, presidential thing to do. Especially in the midst of what's happening in Christchurch. Which is a city in NZ by the way, not a place of worship where you inexplicably sign bibles.  Daddy Files (@DaddyFiles) March 15, 2019

And a very appalled person in New York tweeted:

What a predictably disgusting a**hole you are.

Our friends in Christchurch, New Zealand are reeling from a terror attack by a Radical White Terrorist, and AGAIN you say nothing.

Instead, you post the fake news hate rag, Breitbart.

YOU. ARE. FILTH.

What a predictably disgusting asshole you are. Our friends in Christchurch, New Zealand are reeling from a terror attack by a Radical White Terrorist, and AGAIN you say nothing. Instead, you post the fake news hate rag, Breitbart. YOU. ARE. FILTH.  BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) March 15, 2019

One young woman took to social media to express sentiments shared by millions of other people:

No words of condolences?

No words of mourning?

No words of support?

No words of condemning the attack?

Just a useless link to a conspiracy website that has been proven to push lies and right wing extremism.

You make me sick.

No words of condolences?

No words of mourning?

No words of support?

No words of condemning the attack? Just a useless link to a conspiracy website that has been proven to push lies and right wing extremism. You make me sick.  Ida Skibenes  (@ida_skibenes) March 15, 2019

Once again Donald Trump has failed America and the world. At a time when we seek solace and leadership he has fanned the flames of racism and bigotry. The time has come for Donald Trump to be replaced as President of the United States.
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Beto ORourke believes President Donald Trump at the very least attempted to obstruct justice and also attempted to collude with Russia during the 2016 election.

Friday morning on CBS This Morning, in his first TV interview since announcing his bid for the White House a day earlier, the former Texas congressman told host Gayle King  in response to a question about whether Trump should be impeached  that he is certain there are grounds for it.

He said:

Its beyond the shadow of a doubt to me that if there was not collusion, there was at least the effort to collude with a foreign power.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt that if there was not obstruction of justice, there was certainly the effort to obstruct justice. Whether thats firing James Comey, the principal investigator into what happened in 2016, or in the light of day, tweeting to your attorney general as President Trump did to end the Russia investigation.

Still, when King followed up by noting House Speaker Nancy Pelosis recent comments saying that impeaching the president right now is not worth it, ORourke sounded as if he agreed.

How Congress chooses to address those set of facts, and the findings which I believe we are soon to see from the Mueller report, is up to them, he said. I think the American people are going to have a chance to decide at the ballot box in November 2020. And perhaps thats the best way for us to resolve these outstanding questions.

ORourke also addressed the topics of healthcare and taxes:

When asked how he would tackle healthcare and taxes, @BetoORourke says the goal should be universal guaranteed high quality health care and that the wealthiest at a time of historic income inequality should be asked to pay a greater share.

When asked how he would tackle healthcare and taxes, @BetoORourke says "the goal should be universal guaranteed high quality health care" and that the "wealthiest at a time of historic income inequality should be asked to pay a greater share." https://t.co/W62Bk9ycLs pic.twitter.com/uVJenH34Dc  CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) March 15, 2019

Host Gayle King also asked ORourke about his lack of experience, saying, Why shouldnt voters be concerned about voting for you with your lack of experience?

ORourke replied by saying:

Im grateful that ultimately its up to voters. And theyll have a chance to meet with me, question me, listen to me.

I delivered for the people I served. I did things by working with and listening to other people. Im convinced that this is the key for us to meet even greater challenges before us. The only way we do this is by renewing and fixing our democracy and bringing everyone in it.

Beto ORourke Looks Like Hes Ready for Prime Time

Looking casual, in a shirt with an open collar and no tie, Beto ORourke appears to be the opposite of Donald Trump. He is already being criticized from all quarters, within the Democratic Party. But he has a sincerity and passion that comes through loud and clear when he gives interviews and is seen on TV.

Republicans also know that he presents a formidable threat to them, and they are already running ads against him in Iowa.

There is no other Democratic candidate quite like Beto ORourke, and this may be exactly why many primary voters will choose him over all the others next year.
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A group of Republicans hammered Trump after he suggested that the Mueller report should not be released to the public.

Trump tweeted:

So, if there was knowingly & acknowledged to be zero crime when the Special Counsel was appointed, and if the appointment was made based on the Fake Dossier (paid for by Crooked Hillary) and now disgraced Andrew McCabe (he & all stated no crime), then the Special Counsel.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

.should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report. This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win..  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

A called Republicans for the Rule of Law responded to the president in a statement provided to PoliticusUSA:

For the first time, President Trump has called for Special Counsel Robert Mueller not to write a final report on his investigation, as the rules of the Justice Department require. This comes one day after the House of Representatives voted unanimously that the report should be made public. Even the presidents staunchest allies in the House  Reps. Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, Greg Gianforte, Devin Nunes, and Kevin McCarthy  voted for the resolution.

Its too late to remove the cloud of suspicion over the Trump presidency. The only way President Trump can clear his name is for the report to be made public, so the American people can know definitively whether or not there was wrongdoing in the Trump campaign or administration.

If there was wrongdoing, or if there wasnt, every American should want to know the facts from the Mueller Report  including the president.

If Trump is innocent, why is he afraid of the Mueller Report

An innocent president who was unjustly accused of borderline treasonous behavior would welcome a report from a special counsel as an effort to clear his name and the reputation of his campaign. Donald Trump isnt acting like an innocent president. Trump is making an all-out effort to suppress the Mueller report because he already knows what it will contain.

Trump is following the same path that he has used with his tax returns, grades and meetings with Putin. The president is trying to suppress and hide information from the American people.

There is a bipartisan effort to put the country first and demand that Trump release the Mueller report.

This isnt Republican versus Democrat, but the nation against Donald Trump.

For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group.

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A right-wing Australian senator on Friday said Muslim immigrants were the real cause of bloodshed following a shooting at two mosques that killed 49 people in New Zealand. A 28 year-old Australian man was arrested as the primary suspect in the terrorist attack.

I am utterly opposed to any form of violence within our community, and I totally condemn the actions of the gunman, Queensland Sen. Fraser Anning wrote in a statement.

However, whilst this kind of violent vigilantism can never be justified, what it highlights is the growing fear within our community, both in Australia and New Zealand, of the increasing Muslim presence.

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.

Anning, a far-right independent senator from Queensland, said Muslims may have been the victims today; usually they are the perpetrators.

The truth is that Islam is not like any other faith, Anning wrote. It is the religious equivalent of fascism. And just because the followers of this savage belief were not the killers in this instance, does not make them blameless.

The senators remarks come after at least 49 people were killed and more than 40 others seriously injured in New Zealand after at least one gunman opened fire at two mosques in downtown Christchurch.

Arrested Suspect Had Praised Donald Trump

The suspect in the mosques attack has been arrested. He had previously praised Donald Trump in a written manifesto. He also called the U.S. president a symbol of renewed white identity.

The man who claimed to have committed the mass murder left a lengthy anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained his reasoning. Videos and photos on his social media page that appeared to have been taken live during the attack were shared on social media before being taken down.

In the online manifesto, the suspect declared himself to be a 28-year-old Australian radicalized online by right-wing influences amid pages of rhetoric against Muslims and other minorities. He praised not only Donald Trump but also Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison quickly condemned Annings remarks on Twitter.

The remarks by Senator Fraser Anning blaming the murderous attacks by a violent, right-wing, extremist terrorist in New Zealand on immigration are disgusting. Those views have no place in Australia, let alone the Australian Parliament, Morrison wrote.
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A terrorist attack on two crowded mosques during Friday prayers left forty-nine people dead and many more seriously injured in the New Zealand city of Christchurch.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it as one of New Zealands darkest days.

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack." New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks after confirming 40 people have been killed in shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch: https://t.co/SNXtUhGkNu pic.twitter.com/0T9YPa09m0  CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) March 15, 2019

Witnesses spoke of seeing bloodied bodies, with children also believed to be among the dead, and police warned of extremely distressing footage of the incident circulating on the internet.

Police said four people  three men and a woman  had been taken into custody, and that they had found and neutralised a number of IEDS (improvised explosive devices).

A Palestinian man who was in one of the mosques said he saw someone being shot in the head.

I heard three quick shots then after about 10 seconds it started again. It must have been an automatic  no one could pull a trigger that quick, the man, who did not wish to be named, said

According to one witness who joined the fleeing crowd and managed to escape the scene:

Some people were running, covered with blood. Many people were running out of the mosque, screaming, all covered in blood.

Local media reported that the South Island city was placed under lockdown. Police said that armed officers were attending a number of scenes.

This is an evolving incident and we are working to confirm the facts, however we can confirm there have been a number of fatalities, police commissioner Mike Bush said.

Police are responding with its full capability to manage the situation, but the risk environment remains extremely high, Bush said.

New Zealand police said in a tweet that they were aware of extremely distressing footage relating to the incident in Christchurch circulating online.

We would strongly urge that the link not be shared. We are working to have any footage removed.

Prime Minister Ardern called it a well-planned terrorist attack as a heavily armed gunman dressed in military-style clothing opened fire when a large crowd of Muslim worshipers had gathered in the mosque for prayers.

Government counter terrorism forces were activated throughout both New Zealand and Australia. For the first time ever New Zealand has elevated its national security threat level to high.

NOTE: This is a developing story and will be updated.
On Tuesday, March 12, Russias Foreign Ministry issued a note regarding Kyivs decision to terminate the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Russia and Ukraine.

That note listed what Russias TASS state news agency described as a number of Ukraines violations.

The statement accused Kyiv of violating the rights of their own citizens and ruining traditional ties between Russians and Ukrainians under the guise of fighting the aggressor.

The Russian Foreign Ministry added that the court of history will inevitably pass a harsh sentence for them.

Regarding Crimea, the Russian ministry claimed that Kyiv continues denying Crimean citizens the right to freely decide their fate, thus also violating the Friendship Treatys provisions.

[Crimeans] used their right to self-determination, which is guaranteed not only by a bilateral treaty, but also the United Nations Charter and also most fundamental international and legal documents," the statement read.

On March 13, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov likewise said Ukraines decision to withdraw from the Friendship Treaty is like shooting yourself in the foot."

In December 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed into law a bill terminating the Friendship Treaty with Russia. That followed a decree issued last September not to extend the agreement.

The treaty, signed in 1997, obliged Russia and Ukraine to "respect the territorial integrity of each other and confirm the inviolability of current mutual borders.

The accord will officially expire on March 31.

Moscows attempt to portray Ukrainian authorities as manufacturing Russian aggression in order to violate the rights of their own citizens is disingenuous.

Russia clearly violated the treaty with its invasion, occupation and annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014, followed by its use of force to control parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine.

The Russian takeover of Crimea in February 2014 began when Russian special forces, operating without national insignia, seized the Crimean parliament building and raised the Russian flag.

The bloodless invasion by the little green men resulted in Russia taking control of the peninsula.

Igor Strelkov Girkin, a leading self-defense commander in Crimea and later commander of Russia-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukrainian, admitted in a 2015 interview that members of the Crimean parliament were herded into a chamber at gunpoint and forced to support the annexation.

The referendum in Crimea, hastily carried out under Russian military occupation, did not allow for public debate or for political leaders from greater Ukraine to visit the peninsula. And, in accordance with Ukraines constitution, all Ukrainian citizens should have been allowed to vote in the referendum, not only residents of the peninsula.

Further undermining the referendums validity were the two options on the ballot, each of which made it impossible for Crimea to maintain the status quo.

On March 27, the United Nation General Assembly adopted Resolution 68/262, which stated that the referendum, having no validity, cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea or of the city of Sevastopol. The resolution urged all countries not to recognize any alteration of the status of Crimea.

Apart from violating the Friendship Treaty, the Kremlins annexation of Crimea also violated post-Soviet agreements Russia signed ensuring Ukraines sovereignty and borders, including the 1991 Belovezha Accords and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.

In Eastern Ukraine, Polygraph.info reported there was overwhelming evidence of Moscows involvement in the so-called separatist war in the Donbas, launched after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Leaders of the so-called civil war were Russian citizens, the presence of Russian volunteers in the country is well-documented and Russian military technology, never purchased by Ukraine, was found.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled that Moscows actions in both Crimea and eastern Ukraine constitute an international armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

As Polygraph.info previously reported, the ICC used the word crime to describe the conflict in 2016. The war in Donbas has claimed nearly 13,000 lives.

Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister on European and Euroatlantic Integration, Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, recently said that Ukraine did not terminate the treaty earlier so that Kyiv could file suit against Russia on the basis of the violations of the treaty committed by Russia.

"And this means that all these violations, such as the illegal annexation [of Crimea], and the invasion of eastern Ukraine, and this attack and aggression in the Black Sea-Azov region, in the Kerch Strait, all these things are documented and are grounds for us to sue the Russian Federation," the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN cites Klympush-Tsintsadze as saying.

In light of Russias clear and repeated violations of Ukraines territorial integrity, Polygraph.info finds Moscows claim that Kyiv is responsible for the breakdown of bilateral relations to be false.
Florida 2 Algorithm Update

Whats Going On?

On March 12th, Google released what is being referred to as the Florida 2 algorithm update. Website owners are already noticing significant shifts across their keyword rankings. While Googles algorithm updates vary in terms of how often they receive broad notice, the Florida 2 update is one that every marketer needs to be paying close attention to.

Who Was Impacted by the Florida 2 Algorithm Update?

Google makes several broad ranking algorithm updates each year, but only confirms updates that result in widespread impact. Google did confirm Florida 2, and there are SEOs out there already calling it the biggest update [Google has made] in years. Unlike last Augusts Medic Update, Florida 2 isnt targeting a specific niche or vertical, which means the entire search community needs to be paying attention as we try to better understand the changes Google is making to its search algorithm.

While its still too early for our team to pinpoint what exactly is being impacted by Florida 2, were going to keep a very close eye on where things fall out over the next several days (and weeks).

Heres what weve seen so far:

Indiscriminate swings in site traffic & ranking, with some websites reporting zero traffic after the update.

Evidence of traffic increases for site owners who are prioritizing quality content and page speed.

A worldwide impact  this is not a niche specific or region specific update.

Potential adjustments in how Google is interpreting particular search queries.

Backlink quality possibly being a very important factor.

Short term keyword ranking changes (declines in ranking that then back to normal after a few hours).

My Rankings Took a Hit. What Can I Do?

In short? Nothing. But dont panic.

As with any Google algorithm update, websites will see increases or declines in their rankings. There is no quick fix for sites or web pages that experience negative results from the update; dont make the mistake of aggressively changing aspects of your site without fully understanding the broader impact those changes will have. If you are being negatively impacted by Florida 2 (or any other algorithm update), your best bet is continuing to focus on offering the best content you can, as that is what Google always seeks to reward.

For advice on how to produce great content, a good starting point is to review Googles Search Quality Guidelines. For recommendations on copywriting tips and strategies check out the copywriting section of the Portent blog.

Well continue to update this post as we gather more information.

Update: Google officially named the algorithm update March 2019 Core Update. Webmasters of several websites characterize the March 2019 update as more of a rollback, as it appears sites that were negatively impacted by recent algorithm updates are now recovering lost traffic. Google has long held the stance that pages that experience adverse effects from an algorithm update arent inherently flawed, but Google spokespeople on Twitter have noted that this most recent update focuses on benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded.



As with any update, some sites may note drops or gains. Theres nothing wrong with pages that may now perform less well. Instead, its that changes to our systems are benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded.  Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) March 12, 2018

In other words, there are no specific changes you can make to your website to quickly remedy your rankings (other than stop relying on old SEO tricks). It would be best if you continued to focus on creating high-quality content and optimizing for keywords around the users search intent. These are the things that Google rewards, and you can learn more about whats considered high-quality content by reading Googles Search Quality Guidelines. For recommendations on copywriting tips and strategies check out the copywriting section of the Portent blog.
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Guam teacher and deployed Air Force Reserve member Master Sgt. Cynthia Barcinas recently surprised her son Airman 1st Class Hance Barcinas, who is from the Guam Air National Guard.

Master Sgt. Barcinas is assigned to the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing but was able to show up to the 407th Air Expeditionary Group to surprise her son. The 407th AEG joined the 332d Air Expeditionary Wing, and both are operating out of an undisclosed location in support of Operation Inherent Resolve at an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia .
Long banned intermediate-range ballistic missiles may be deployed to Guam according to an unnamed Pentagon official cited by the Associated Press.

Two types of ballistic missiles have been banned for more than 30 years under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Former President Ronald Reagan and then Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the treaty in December 1987. President Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the treaty last month citing Russian violations.

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Once the treaty ends in August, the United States would no longer face any legal constraints on deploying land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 310 to 3,410 miles.

Citing unnamed defense officials who spoke to a small group of reporters at the Pentagon, the AP reported that a cruise missile is expected to be flight-tested in August, while a longer-range ballistic missile is expected to be tested in November, The Hill reported.

An unnamed defense official told the AP: it was possible that the intermediate-range ballistic missile could be deployed on Guam .... which would be close enough to Asia to pose a potential threat to China and Russia.

According to the report, the ballistic missile tests are expected to begin in November but deployment is not likely until 2024, or later.

Reaction

When contacted for comment, Guam Del. Michael San Nicolas said: "subjects of such consequence should be debated and formally expressed by locally elected leadership with public input."

"There are pros and cons that need to be weighed carefully by our people with full transparency," he said.
Long-banned intermediate-range ballistic missiles may be deployed to Guam, according to an unnamed Pentagon official cited by The Associated Press.

Two types of ballistic missiles have been banned for more than 30 years under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the treaty in December 1987. President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the treaty last month, alleging violations by Russia.

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Once the treaty ends in August, the United States no longer will face any legal constraints on deploying land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges from 310 to 3,410 miles.

Citing unnamed defense officials who spoke to a small group of reporters at the Pentagon, the AP reported that a cruise missile is expected to be flight-tested in August, while a longer-range ballistic missile is expected to be tested in November, according to a report from The Hill.

The unnamed defense official told the AP, "It was possible that the intermediate-range ballistic missile could be deployed on Guam ... which would be close enough to Asia to pose a potential threat to China and Russia."

According to the report, the ballistic missile deployment is not likely until 2024 at the earliest.

"Subjects of such consequence should be debated and formally expressed by locally elected leadership with public input," said Del. Michael San Nicolas, when asked for comment.

"There are pros and cons that need to be weighed carefully by our people with full transparency."
Guam teacher Cynthia Barcinas is deployed somewhere in the world as a member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

In the military, she is Master Sgt. Barcinas. On Guam, she teaches schoolchildren from military families.

Within her family, there's also a new airman, her son Airman 1st Class Hance Barcinas, who is in the Guam Air National Guard.

Master Sgt. Barcinas is deployed in an undisclosed location in the Middle East and her son is part of an air expeditionary group headquartered at an undisclosed location in Southwest Asia.

Somehow, the Air Force mom's assignment to the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing allowed her to visit the 407th Air Expeditionary Group, to surprise her son, who is assigned to the 407th AEG. The air expeditionary group is operating in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, which is part of the U.S. military operation against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The happy reunion  which involved big hugs and happy tears  was witnessed by other service members, who were there to capture the moment.

The 332d Air Expeditionary Wing, which is a part of the younger airman's air expeditionary group, was able to capture the moment and shared photos of the family reunion on the wing's Facebook page.
POTTSTOWN  Seventy-four years after his bomber crashed in a Pacific lagoon, the remains of a Pottstown airman who died serving his country have been identified.

U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Carl M. Shaffer, 22, was accounted for on Dec. 20, 2018.

According to a release from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Shaffers B-24J bomber, often called a Liberator, crashed in Tarawa lagoon shortly after takeoff on Jan. 21, 1944.

Shaffer, the radio operator, and the nine other servicemen aboard the aircraft, nicknamed the Galloping Gus, were killed when the plane crashed, exploded and sank in 24 feet of water.

The crew were members of the 38th Bombardment Squadron, 30th Bombardment Group, stationed at Hawkins Field, Betio Island, Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands.

According to the website Pacific Wrecks, Shaffers plane was part of a bombing mission against Japanese forces located on a series of islands in the Kwajalein Atoll. Shaffers plane took off 17 minutes after B-24J Miss Bee Haven which also crashed after take off, although some of those crew members survived.

Water in the fuel is believed to be the cause of both crashes.

The missions target, was a one-square-mile island known as Roi-Namur, located on the northern portion of the Kwajalein Atoll, which is located in the Marshall Islands.

The Japanese target hosted two airfields, a submarine base, communications and weather stations.

On Feb. 2, 1944, 12 days after Shaffers mission, American forces landed at Roi and Namur islands after heavy Naval bombardment and secured the islands in eight hours as part of Operation Flintlock, according to Pacific Wrecks.

The capture of Kwajalein Atoll during Operation Flintlock, which cost 332 American lives, provided American forces with a base of operations that assured the recapture of the Philippines.

Shaffer was born on Feb. 21, 1921, in Pottstown to Herbert Donald Shaffer and Katherine K. Shaffer

He is believed to be a 1940 graduate of Pottstown High School.

According to a Feb. 4, 1943 notice in The Mercury announcing his graduation fro radio school, Shaffers parents lived at 328 N. Charlotte St.

An April 15, 1943 announcement in The Mercury indicated that Shaffer, then at Fort Dix, had secured a marriage license with Helen E. Fox of 769 N. Charlotte St.

A Mercury notice published Monday, Oct. 11, 1943, announced his promotion to sergeant, listed his address as 769 N. Charlotte St., and indicated he was now married to Helen E. Shaffer. The notice also indicated Shaffer had previously served on anti-submarine patrols on the East Coast.

Two days after Operation Flintlock and 14 days after his plane crashed, Shaffers death was announced on the front page of the Feb. 4, 1944 edition of The Mercury, along with the U.S. attack on the Marshall Islands targets which Shaffer and his crew had been ordered to bomb.

According to that article, no details about his death were provided to his wife.

The article indicated he had worked at Bethlehem Steel and had joined the army on Aug. 2, 1942.

It also indicated that on Jan. 31, ten days after Shaffer died, she received three letters from him, dated Jan. 15, 16 and 17,

After the Jan. 21 crash, rescue crews recovered the remains of five individuals.

Three identified sets of remains and two unidentified sets were reportedly interred in a cemetery on Betio Island, one of several cemeteries established on the island after the U.S. seized the island from the Japanese in November 1943, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Following the war, the U.S. Armys 604th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company began recovering remains from scattered cemeteries between 1946 and 1947, consolidating them into a single cemetery called Lone Palm Cemetery.

The remains of the B-24J crew were believed to be among those moved, however Shaffers remains were not identified and he was declared non-recoverable.

In 2017, History Flight Inc., a non-profit organization, through a partnership with DPAA, uncovered a series of coffin burials from the smaller cemetery on Betio Island. They were subsequently sent to the DPAA laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu for analysis.

Scientists from DPAA used dental, anthropological and DNA analysis, as well as circumstantial and material evidence to identify Shaffers remains.

Shaffers name is recorded on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in the Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu, along with others missing from WWII.

A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.

A relative told The Reading Eagle that Shaffers body will be returned home and buried in Highland Memorial Park Cemetery in Pottstown.

Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, more than 400,000 died during the war. Currently there are 72,738 service members (approximately 26,000 are assessed as being possibly-recoverable) still unaccounted for from World War II, according to the DPAA release.
When Morris Dees spoke at the St. Paul Jewish Community Center back in the 1990s, I walked out on him. He was ragging on George H.W. Bush at the time in an absurdly partisan and otherwise unfair manner. Even though he had drawn a relatively large crowd, he saw me leaving and commented on it. He seemed to take pleasure in it. I thought he was a gratingly obvious fraud.

Dees is the co-founder of the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center. The groups name is as misleading as that of the Holy Roman Empire. It is a ridiculously wealthy left-wing hate cult operating in the guise of a civil rights organization. The organization now serves as a handmaiden to forces of the left as they seek to stigmatize honorable conservatives and confine our public discourse to channels and writers or speakers approved by them. Nice work if you can get it (and they get it).

The organization has now unceremoniously canned Dees. The Montgomery Advertiser has a good story on his firing here. I infer from the groups public statement quoted by the Advertiser that Dees was found to have committed some kind of workplace harassment:

As a civil rights organization [sic], the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world, [SPLC president Richard] Cohen said in the emailed statement. When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.

One can also draw inferences from this part of Cohens statement:

Today we announced a number of immediate, concrete next steps were taking, including bringing in an outside organization to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices, to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve  one in which all voices are heard and all staff members are respected[.]

The disgrace of Dees is long overdue but its not enough. The group should follow up by closing its doors and liquidating its assets for distribution to truly charitable organizations, which SPLC is not.

PAUL ADDS: Divorce documents often make for unpleasant reading. Dees are worse than unpleasant.
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and economist Philipp Rosler (Photo: VNA)



The PM thanked Philipp Rosler and the World Economic Forum for organising a dialogue between him and leaders of global groups on the sideline of WEF Davos 2019 in Switzerlands city of Zurich in January.

He briefed the economist on Vietnams socio-economic situation over the years, with sound macro-economic development.

Vietnam has rolled out various institutions and policies to spur national growth and remove difficulties to production and business, he said, adding that the domestic business environment has been improved remarkably.

Currently, the country is home to 26,000 operational foreign direct investment (FDI) projects with total registered capital amounting to nearly USD350 billion. There has also been a notable rise of more and more large investors coming to Vietnam with large-scale projects.

PM Phuc called on Rosler to help Vietnam with startup development, a field which he is particularly interested in, in order to make the countrys startup projects and programmes more effective and practical.

For his part, Rosler congratulated Vietnam on its successful organisation of the second summit between the US and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) in Hanoi last month.

He said international press has covered the event as well as the land and people of Vietnam before, during, and after the meeting, which has demonstrated the countrys increasing role in global politics.

Vietnam has established a new, important position for itself in the worlds political map, he stressed.

Recalling the dialogue between PM Phuc and investors in Zurich, Rosler said international investors were impressed by the role and significant contributions of the PM and Vietnamese delegates to WEF Davos 2019.

He hailed the Vietnamese Governments policies in support of foreign investors in the country, pledging to step up cooperation and support activities through programs and projects under the German House project in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh city.

PM Phuc highly valued the German House projects specific programs and projects, thus contributing to mutual understanding, cultural exchange, and economic cooperation between the people and businesses of Vietnam and Germany./.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is, like al Qaeda and Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR masquerades as a civil rights organization, but is actually a supporter of terrorism, as was demonstrated in the Holy Land Foundation case, where CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator. CAIR is also viciously anti-Israel and anti-Semitic:

CAIR has a long record of anti-Israel activity. Its leadership has accused Israel of being a racist state engaged in genocide and Israel supporters in the U.S. of promoting a culture of hostility towards Islam. Its chapters partner with various anti-Israel groups that seek to isolate and demonize the Jewish State.

***

CAIR also advocates for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel as a challenge against one of the greatest forms of injustice in our time  Apartheid.

***

CAIR senior staff members have often promoted the anti-Semitic canard that an Israeli lobby controls the U.S. government. Executive Director Nihad Awad wrote in Arabic on his Twitter account on October 14, 2014 that the U.S. government would recognize the State of Palestine when America, itself, is free from the influence of the pro-Israel lobby.  Other CAIR leaders have openly compared Israelis to Nazis.

***

CAIR also helped establish and fund InFocus News, an Anaheim, California-based monthly that published anti-Semitic articles and cartoons, as well as content expressing support for terrorist groups.

Much more at the link, but you get the drift. Those bigoted views have been in the news lately because they are espoused by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. So it should be no surprise that on March 23, Omar will headline a fundraiser for CAIRs Los Angeles branch:

CAIR-LA is honored to have Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as the featured speaker for the 4th Annual Valley Banquet.

No doubt Ms. Omar will receive an enthusiastic reception.

CAIR does not admit, of course, that it is a terrorist-supporting organization, and it downplays its relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. But its own self-description exemplifies the whiny victim mentality that Ilhan Omarfor whom coming to America from a refugee camp in Kenya was better than winning the lotteryconsistently displays:

CAIR was founded in 1994 in response to growing anti-Muslim discrimination and Islamophobia across the nation. At that time, American Muslims increasingly found themselves the innocent targets of prejudice and hate, and the need for an organization that could speak to the unique position of Muslims in America became apparent.

Ilhan Omar will fit right in at the CAIR banquet.
A dozen Republicans joined Senate Democrats today to overturn President Trumps declaration of a national emergency at the southwestern border. The vote was 59-41.

Trump promptly declared he would veto Congress action. With only 59 Senate votes against him, the veto will stick.

The 12 Republicans who voted to overturn Trumps declaration are:

Mitt Romney

Susan Collins

Lamar Alexander

Roy Blunt

Mike Lee

Jerry Moran

Lisa Murkowski

Rand Paul

Rob Portman

Marco Rubio

Patrick Toomey

Roger Wicker

I understand the concerns that, presumably, animated these Senators. As Sen. Ben Sasse said last month:

[A]s a Constitutional conservative I dont want a future Democratic President unilaterally rewriting gun laws or climate policy. If we get used to presidents just declaring an emergency any time they cant get what they want from Congress, it will be almost impossible to go back to a Constitutional system of checks and balances. Over the past decades, the legislative branch has given away too much power and the executive branch has taken too much power.

But today, Sasse voted against the resolution. He explained:

We have an obvious crisis at the border  everyone who takes an honest look at the spiking drug and human trafficking numbers knows this  and the President has a legal path to a rapid response under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (NEA).

Sasse added that the NEA is too broad, and he is sponsoring legislation to narrow it. But there is a border crisis and legislation exists that permits the president to address that crisis as he has.

Sen. Tom Cotton made a similar argument:

When hundreds of thousands of foreigners arrive at the southern border and demand entry, thats not migration. Thats an emergency and a threat to our sovereignty. . . . This surge of illegal aliens is swamping law enforcements ability to do its job. Overwhelmed, thats the word we hear so often from agents. Border Patrol Commissioner Kevin McAleenan says, This is clearly both a border security and humanitarian crisis. But the consequences of this crisis stretch far beyond the border, sometimes thousands of miles away. An American-one of 192 every day-dies of a drug overdose. The poison in his veins flowed across the Mexican border. A brave police officer and father, Corporal Ronil Singh of California, is shot dead the day after Christmas. His killer snuck into the country illegally. We have failed to protect our border, as any sovereign nation must, and our people are dying because of it.

Cotton continued:

The president has declared a national emergency because of this crisis. Yet the administrations sensible, long overdue efforts to secure the border have been met only by howls of outrage from the Democratic Party and its media wing. . .The minority leader called the presidents emergency declaration a lawless act that showed naked contempt for the rule of law. Other members of the self-styled Resistance have compared the president to Hitler. Curious, overheated claims, I have to say. To be lawless, after all, one must act outside the law. Yet the presidents critics dont even bother making that case, probably because they dont have much of one to make. The president isnt purporting to invoke his inherent executive powers under Article II of the Constitution. He doesnt even claim to defend his constitutional prerogatives from legislative encroachment. On the contrary, he is only exercising the statutory authority delegated to him by us. By this very body: the United States Congress. More than half of the $8.1 billion the president is using to build the wall and secure the border comes from non-emergency statutes passed by Congress. The remainder comes from an explicit delegation of various powers to the president in the event of a national emergency, just like the one that the president has declared, which we also delegated him the authority to do. I should add that the National Emergencies Act passed nearly unanimously, with only five no votes in the House.

(Emphasis added)

Like Sasse, Cotton is sympathetic to arguments that the National Emergencies Act is too broad and gives the executive branch too much power. But the remedy lies in fixing the Act, not in blocking the president from relying on it. As Cotton put it:

Believe me, Congress has ceded too much power to the executive for more than a century, expanding an administrative state that increasingly deprives our people of a meaningful say in their government. So I invite my Democratic colleagues to reconsider the wisdom of this path. Maybe we can reform the EPA. Perhaps we can require up-or-down votes in Congress to approve big regulations so politicians can show some accountability for once. Im ready for those debates. Believe me, Im ready. But in the meantime, dont pretend we didnt delegate all these powers, or that its lawless for the executive to use laws we passed, just because you deplore him.

(Emphasis added)

Exactly.
Ammo Grrrll happily shares a few thoughts about THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD. She writes:

Ignorance, it has been said, is bliss. In which case you would surely guess that the Democrats and the congressional freshman twit class in particular would be the happiest people in the world. But you would be wrong. No, they are not happy; they are filled with venom, hatred, envy, resentment, and bizarre endless, self-generated rage. How tedious and depressing it must be to live with one of them!

One of the problems with living long (and prospering), is that one has seen it all before. Why, I was but a misguided young lass speaking at an anti-war rally at the University of Minnesota after the 1970 Kent State shootings when a disheveled young man no one had ever seen before on campus rushed the stage, grabbed my microphone, and screamed, Theyre building concentration camps in California! This was when college students were sturdier than todays crop, so there were a few shrieks of alarm and then the kids went back either to studying for finals or trying to score with that long-haired person of either sex next to them.

Ah, yes. Nixon was Hitler. As several have pointed out previously, not too long after that, Reagan was definitely Hitler and, then, at last the loons got a name with an H in it, so they could append itler onto George W. Bushs name. I was by that time, transitioning from a moderate Democrat to a conservative, but even I thought Bushitler was a mind-numbingly stupid and wildly-inaccurate nickname. Especially for what seemed  even when I disagreed with him politically  to be a nice and sincere gentleman, if anything TOO nice and entirely unwilling to defend himself or, by extension, those of us who supported him. And yet Bushitler appeared on hundreds of signs for 8 years.

But, while those previous pikers were kinda sorta Hitlerish, it took the acumen of the ironically-named Joy Behar to suss out the truth that Donald J. Trump was LITERALLY Hitler. No pale orange imitation he but the real deal. Of course, she also said that Trumps collusion with Putin meant we would soon see the Russian flag flying above the Stars and Stripes over the White House, so consistency, or even lucidity, is not her long suit.

But how did the rest of us  especially the JOOZ who voted for him!  miss such obvious similarities between Hitler and Donald J. Trump? When it was clear that:

Hitler killed either several Jews (according to Arab sources) or 6 million Jews (according to the Nazis own meticulous records). Donald J. Trump has killed no one. Ever.

Hitler was a vegetarian  DJT puts ketchup on his steak.

Hitler died a virgin  whatever else happens to DJT, that will not be happening.

No German media outlet dared to criticize Hitler  no American media outlet dares to say a single mumblin positive word about DJT lest they appear to normalize him.

I could go on.

Another endlessly recycled scary scenario is to suggest that whatever Bad Fascist Republican President is in office that he will not leave when he loses the next election or his two legal terms are up. This was suggested most recently by Juan Williams, who I have always said seems like the sweetest person to be wrong about literally EVERYTHING.

The old and still sometimes funny SNL did a skit during Reagans term wherein Nancy had to be hauled kicking and screaming from the White House. It goes without saying that Bushitler was not going to leave. Oopsie. He was unusually gracious in showing the Obama family the ropes in the White House and reportedly he and Michelle remain close friends.

It was political savant and actress Gwyneth Paltrow who gushed to Obama her wish that he could be President for Life, (a la Papa Doc Duvalier, Fidel Castro, or Fatty Un) because  wait for it  he was just so gosh-darned good-looking. Oh, my.

Speaking of actresses, Debra Messing  Mr. AG had to tell me who she was; thats okay, shes never heard of me, either  stirred up a Twitter storm when she baked Vagina Cupcakes for International Womens Day, March 8th, and then had to fall on her sword or rolling pin or whatever because NOT ALL WOMEN HAVE VAGINAS!

Let us not dwell overlong on what the Vagina Cupcakes looked like, complete with sprinkles to represent hair, lest I never eat another cupcake again. (Personally, I might have just gone with the Vagina Donut.) But the point is that she was forced to grovel for the grave sin of failing to pretend that men who havent even gone to the trouble of mutilating themselves can still be women.

She said she meant no offense and intended the treats to be sassy. There will BE no sassy in the New World Order, luv, nor any kind of fun. Remember Afghanistan where you could be punished for kite-flying? (Jerry Seinfeld: evidently the Taliban were afraid someone would discover electricity) (AG: has Venezuela thought of kites?)

And so I repeat my oft-offered mantra: in times like these, it is a revolutionary act to laugh in the face of the lynch mob; happiness is not only a goal, but a weapon. Of course, it is no substitute for an ACTUAL weapon, and I heartily encourage you to own several, but it is a potent weapon nonetheless.

Want to buy some Instant Happiness? Order Max Cossacks terrific new book  Zarahs Fire  off Amazon and curl up in bed with your cat, dog or sweetie. Wait for the book to arrive. Something will probably occur to you while you wait. More happiness! If you are a Prime member, it could be a short wait for the paperback or no wait at all for an e-book.
Rep. Doug Collins continues to release the testimony of key players in the great scandal of the Russia collusion hoax. There has never been anything like it in American politics and now that the House is controlled by the Democrats, House committees are not going to help us understand what happened.

Yesterday Collins released the transcript of disgraced former FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzoks testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on June 28, 2018. Rep. Collins has posted the 312-page transcript here. The transcript is also posted along with the Washington Examiner story here. Because of its length I was unable to upload it to Scrbid.

Rep. Collins has previously released the transcripts of the congressional testimony of Bruce Ohr and Lisa Page. Of these three, I think that Strzok was the most intransigent and the least truthful. Gregg Re extracts one nugget, however, in the FOX News story DOJ reached agreement with Clinton lawyers to block FBI access to Clinton Foundation emails, Strzok says.

Strzok worked as a key player in both the Clinton email investigation and the Russia counterintelligence investigation taking in the Trump campaign. The Clinton email investigation was a phony baloney investigation with a predetermined outcome. The counterintelligence investigation was the real, abusive deal, and it continues today under the authority of Special Counsel Robert Mueller (see transcript page 37).
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 10:48:37

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Research Report Insights (RRI42 Joseph StreetPort carling P0B 1J0Muskoka, Ontario1Phone - +1-631-721-4201Website: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/Email: sales@researchreportinsights.comCEO6317214201http://www.. researchreportinsights.com

Depending upon the heat source assistance, an absorption chiller produce chilled water. Research Report Insights (RRI) has published a report, where it is expected that global market for absorption chillers is likely to witness a significant growth at 6.3% CAGR through the forecast period, 2017-2025. It is also added in the analysis that global market for absorption chillers is predicted to share around US$ 1,300 Mn sales revenue in 2017 and is estimated to account for over US$ 2,050 Mn sales revenue share through 2025.Global Absorption Chillers Market: DynamicsThe published study by RRI has developed comprehensive forecast on the global absorption chiller market. The in-depth analysis has listed a range of factors that are driving the adoption of absorption chiller in the market. Besides, the latest trends, opportunities and restraints are also discussed in the report. Owing to the growing demand for the renewable energy sources, the primary sources are utilizing more efficiently in different connected applications are also rising robustly. These two factors are gearing up the market for growing rapidly in the approaching years. Besides, the solar energy is empowering the absorption chillers for various utilities, which plays as a driver in the market for developing vigorously.Key Segments: Global Absorption Chillers MarketThe global market for absorption chillers has five major segments on the basis of technology, different types of absorber, various applications, different power source and regions. On the basis of technology, the market has segmented in double-stage and single-stage segments. Besides, ammonia and lithium bromide are the further sub-segments that fall in absorber type segment. Based on different power resources, there are three sub-segments, such as water driven, indirect fired and direct fired, in the global market for absorption chillers. The applications of absorption chillers has bifurcated into industrial and non-industrial sub-segments. Furthermore, power, chemicals, petroleum, food & beverages and pulp & paper are the sub-segments in industrial segment. Additionally, the non-industrial segment has residential and commercial sub-segments.Request For Report Sample: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/sample/110114884/Absorption-Chillers-Market On the basis of regions, the global market for absorption chillers has widely segmented into five leading regions that include, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, Middle-East & Africa and Latin America. Among all the regions, Asia Pacific is expected to dominate the market for absorption chillers in terms of huge sales revenue. From this region, the market in China is accounted for CAGR of 7.2%, whereas the Indian market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 7.1% during the forecast period. In 2017, the absorption chillers market in MEA is anticipated to share US$ 289.2 Mn revenue and is also expected to grow at 7.0% CAGR in the coming years.Request For Reprot discount: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/discount/110114884/Absorption-Chillers-Market Key PlayersThe global market for absorption chillers has profiled various companies as the key players in the coming years. The key participants are EAW Energieanlagenbau GmbH, Thermax Inc., Carrier Corporation, Trane Inc., Johnson Controls, Inc., Shuangliang Eco-Energy Systems Co. Ltd., Yazaki Corporation, Broad Air Conditioning Co. Ltd., Robur Corporation, Hyundai Climate Control Co. Ltd. and Kawasaki Thermal Engineering Co. Ltd., among others.Report Analysis: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/rd/110114884/Absorption-Chillers-Market
Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 07:12:01

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Abhishek Budholiya+1-347-918-3531

The function of power steering cooler is to remove the extra heat generated in the steering system due to high steering turning load or frequent usages of steering. In racing car the steering uses frequently, therefore, the steering system got heated, this cooler provides cooling to the steering system and enhance the overall efficiency of the vehicles. Furthermore, Installation of a power steering oil cooler will extend the life of the systems hoses, pump, and seals. A reduction of just 11C can double the life of the power steering, the fluid and all internal parts. This power steering cooler can also be utilized as a fuel cooler. In high performance cars and the steering system temperature reached up to 50 degree centigrade.At this point the engine will start to lose power due to failure of steering seal or pump. Moreover, Australia, Oman, Iraq and others are projected to create more opportunity for the market owing to the high temperature of these countries. Over the last ten to twenty years, major player is using aluminum alloy as material for steering cooler owing to its phenomenal heat dissipating properties. Whilst, in military vehicles, copper or brass material is gaining significant popularity owing to outstanding heat transfer properties. In future perspective, the global automotive power steering cooler market is projected to grow with remarkable growth rate due to increasing heavy vehicle fleet coupled with racing activity of off-road vehicle during the forecast period.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-6784 Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market: DynamicsTowing vehicle is used to tow the car or vehicle from accidental place, increasing number of car accidents is projected to enforcing the global market owing to these types of towing vehicle is required steering cooler for dissipation of heat from the steering System. Moreover, increasing car racing activity, particularly in Europe and North America are anticipated to drive the global market between 2013 and 2028. Moreover, increasing heavy duty vehicle for transporting heavy cargo is also projected to foster the global market over the stipulated time period. Additionally, increasing disposal income of people and also shifting their interest towards extreme off road racing activity is also pumping up the global automotive power steering cooler market throughout the forecast period.Lack of awareness pertaining to place of cooler mounted is anticipated to hinder the global automotive power steering cooler market during the forecast period. Moreover, high maintenance cost is one of the major factor which might hamper the global automotive power steering cooler market by the end of 2028.Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market: SegmentationThe global Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market can segmented on the basis of Vehicle Type:Off-road VehicleTowing Vehicle or carrying heavy loadHeavy Commercial Vehicle (HCV)Light Commercial Vehicle (LCV)Racing CarsOthersThe global Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market can be segmented on the basis of Mounting:Tube Type CoolerTank Type CoolerOthersThe global Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market can be segmented on the basis of Sales Channel:OEMAftermarketAutomotive Power Steering Cooler Market: Regional OutlookNorth America and Europe are anticipated in the largest market for the automotive power steering cooler owing to increasing off-road racing over the forecast period. In South East Asia and Pacific region, particularly Australia is projected to hold relatively higher value share in the regional market owing to increasing off-road desert racing. Latin America is growing with a healthy CAGR over the slated time period owing to the increasing interest of young people for 775 miles long desert racing. China and India are projected to grow with sluggish growth rate owing to in these country motorcycle racing is capturing the eyes of people. Before twenty years Japan was well known for extreme road racing. But people had lost their interest in these types of racing. While in now day, the manufacturer is again ready to launch racing vehicle such as FJ Cruiser's 4-liter V6 engine for racing. This strategic product launching may give positive potential to the market in Japan.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-6784 Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market: Key ParticipantThe key participants of the global Automotive Power Steering Cooler Market are following:POONA SHIMS PRIVATE LIMITEDANAND AutomotiveBorg-Warner Automotive, Inc. (Eaton Corporation)MotospecsJayant GroupThermex Ltd.Plews & EdelmannThermal Dynamics InternationalPWR Advance Cooling TechnologyMinebeaMitsumi Inc.
Backflow Preventers Market

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 07:53:21

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Backflow is an undesirable reversal of the flow of the fluid and the main function of the backflow preventers is to prevent the backflow. Backflow preventer assemblies commonly known as backflow preventers are usually used to protect large water bodies from the contamination or pollution from foreign particle due to backflow. Additionally, another important function of a backflow preventers are to prevent the backflow pressure to damage the equipment and the flanges from excessive stress & strain and ultimately result in the failure of the equipment. The backflow preventers has become one of the most important device in piping and equipment design and engineering as most of the equipment and pipings can be prevented from undesirable breakdowns.The main reason for the flow of fluid in most of pipelines is due to the natural flow created due to the pressure difference between them which can cause damage to the equipment and the related machinery. Hence, to avoid such cases, backflow preventers are installed for the safety of the equipment as well as the pipelines. Additionally, if the water pressure is reduced or falls below the prescribed level owing to leakages, pipeline burst or unexpected surge then creates reduced pressure in the pipeline which allows the water from the storage or from other sources to flow back. The backflow preventers can stop the flow of the water backwards by activating itself.Ease of application and numerous other benefits offered by pipelines/tubes make it a preferred fluid transportation medium among a majority of end use industries, and this in turn acts as a prominent driver for the global backflow preventers market. Backflow preventers boost the operating speed as well as productivity of the plant. Furthermore, with backflow preventers, the stable state of fluids can be maintained regardless of the geography or climate.Request to Sample of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7412 The advent in the material science technology has enabled the manufacturers to develop lightweight backflow preventer assemblies, which considerably increases the transportation efficiency as well as reduces the overall weight. Backflow preventers can be pneumatic, hydraulic, mechanically operated depending upon the requirement. Valves play a significant role in determining the performance of the pipelines and equipment and hence, the growing demand for transportation of fluids through pipelines in the global market will consequently propel the demand for backflow preventers over the forecast period.Backflow Preventers Market: DynamicsThe above mentioned technical applications of a backflow valve is estimated to create several growth opportunities in the industrial and municipal sector for global backflow preventers market. The global backflow preventers market is expected to grow in the upcoming years, owing to the increasing demand for transportation of fluids whether liquid or gas through pipelines and other related systems which requires valves for its operation in the global market. Demand for backflow preventers is prominently growing in the global market, owing to installation of new pipelines as well as repair maintenance of existing ones. Moreover, the increasing demand for backflow preventers is attributed to the growing use of pipelines for the transportation of all types of fluid as well as the equipment used for the storage of these fluids in end use industries such as oil & gas, chemical, automotive, food & beverage, pharmaceutical processing industries, etc. is expected to aid the growth of global backflow preventers market.The most prominent factors accelerating the growth of backflow preventers in the global market include manufacturing, introduction of advanced technology and increasing orders for new equipment & pipelines. New rules and regulations enforced by governments and ruling authorities regarding the safety of the environment, encourage manufacturers to produce environment-friendly and efficient systems, which has subsequently resulted in an increase in the demand for backflow preventers in the global market. High cost of technology and fluctuating prices are acting as key restraints, countering the growth of the global Backflow Preventers market.Backflow Preventers Market: SegmentationThe Backflow Preventers market can be segmented on the basis of product type, material type and end use. The Backflow Preventers market can be segmented on the basis of by product type as:Pressure Vacuum Breaker (PVB)Reduced Pressure Zone (RPZ)Double Check Assembly (DCA)Atmospheric Vacuum Breaker (AVB)The Backflow Preventers market can be segmented on the basis of material type as:Stainless SteelTitaniumAluminumOthersThe Backflow Preventers market can be segmented on the basis of end use as:ResidentialCommercialIndustrialBackflow Preventers Market: Regional OutlookInternational business has become an emerging and distinct area of interest and study in todays era as it crosses national boundaries and gives us the knowledge about the international ways of conduction business. Owing to the emergence of globalization, international trade and finance have become possible, that is helping the emerging as well as the developed nations to enter into trade agreements and make international trade easier among nations. This spectacle is estimated to boost the cross border trade which will in turn fuel the demand for all the end use products such as the backflow preventer assemblies in the global market. Additionally, growing trade between developed and developing economies has led to favorable macro-economic conditions in the global market. The forces affecting international business have led to dramatic growth in international trade and have contributed to a perception that the world has become a smaller and interdependent place.North America and Europe being major manufacturing hubs involving all end use industries can be considered as a key growth factor for global backflow preventers market. Developing nations such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are expected to significantly contribute to the global backflow preventers market during the forecast period. Furthermore, new technologies and inventions in the backflow preventers market will bolster the market growth over the assessment period. Asia-Pacific is estimated to hold a prominent share of the backflow preventers market in the long run. Developing countries, such as India and China are significant players in boosting the demand for transportation of fluids through pipelines, which in turn is supporting growth of the backflow preventers market. Furthermore, automation and up gradation of technology are propelling demand for the global backflow preventers market. Middle East & Africa is also expected to witness an able growth of the backflow preventers market.Request Report for TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7412 Backflow Preventers Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants in the global Backflow Preventers market are:W.W. Grainger, Inc.Watts Water Technologies CompanyShipServ LimitedCONBRACO INDUSTRIESBAVCOFisher Manufacturing.Zurn Industries, LLC.Cooney BrothersAmerican Backflow Products CompanyCimsco, Inc.HydroCowl, Inc.San Antonio Water System.
A digital ad is any ad that is made online. There are several channels where advertisers can place their ads, and it includes tools to manage campaigns for each channel. Each channel supports various types of digital media and placement options to attract potential customers. Each channel has various metrics that advertisers charge. In short, advertisers need to think a lot.

Online Advertising Platform Market

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 21:13:46

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Miami, FloridaSales Manager+(1) 786-292-8164204

With the online advertising platform, you can save time by organizing your digital marketing initiatives in one place. You can manage ad campaigns, generate reports, navigate analytics, and find people who interact with marketing messages. There are hundreds of these services, so it can be difficult to know the best platform for your business. Here is a complete list of the best digital advertising programs.Request Sample Copy for More Insightful Information at: https://www.qyreports.com/request-sample?report-id=106600 Top key player profiled in this report: Facebook, Google, Sizmek, Marin Software, DataXu, BaiDu, WeiBo, Twitter, Tencent, among othersThe online advertising platform market is expected to achieve significant revenue until the end of the forecast period, as stated in this study report. The scope of the report includes extensive evaluations of key stakeholder strategies through market segmentation. Barriers and risk factors, along with important features that contribute to industry growth, are covered in this report. Market size estimates are performed to perform concentration and maturity analysis. Current trends combined with geographic analysis as well as reasons for developing some unique segments have been included in the report. The value and growth trend of the global online advertising platform was announced in 2013-2018.Global Online Advertising Platform Market Segmentation by Product Type: Display Advertising Interstitial Advertising Social Media Advertising OtherGlobal Online Advertising Platform Market Segmentation by Application: Personal Enterprise Government OtherRequest report discount on this premium report@ https://www.qyreports.com/ask-for-discount?report-id=106600 Based on regional perspectives, the global market is divided into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa and Latin America. Markets are categorized by region, application and type. The advent and adoption of large data is expected to lead to a sudden increase in market share during the forecast period or even before the Online Advertising Platform market.Research reports on the Online Advertising Platform market provide a useful understanding of the trends and drivers that are driving this market. The early part of this market is studied comprehensively and discusses the salient features of the market in terms of structure, landscape, demand factors, challenges and very important market performance.Any Query? Ask to our Expert @ https://qyreports.com/enquiry-before-buying?report-id=106600 Table of Content:Global Online Advertising Platform market Research Report 2019-2026Chapter 1: Online Advertising Platform market OverviewChapter 2: Online Advertising Platform market Economic ImpactChapter 3: Competition by ManufacturerChapter 4: Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2019-2026)Chapter 5: Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2019-2026)Chapter 6: Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7: Online Advertising Platform market Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8: Online Advertising Platform market by Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9: Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10: Online Advertising Platform Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11: Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12: Online Advertising Platform Market Forecast (2019-2026)Chapter 13: Appendix
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 07:56:12

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Binary Drivers: IntroductionIntegrating binary drivers into an Operating System (OS) enables operators to use the corresponding hardware devices. Binary drivers mediate the communication between a specific device and the corresponding operating system kernels. These binary drivers are marketed either by the hardware supplier or the operating system developer. Typically, hardware manufacturers and suppliers offer binary drivers for the most popular operating systems in the market.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-8639 Binary Drivers: Market DynamicsThe increasing adoption of automation-enabling software drivers for industrial and commercial computing devices is expected to be the primary factor driving the growth of the global binary drivers market. Developers offer reverse engineering services that enable automation of binary driver porting and development of replacement binary drivers with minimized security vulnerabilities and bugs. This factor is also expected to drive the global binary drivers market during the forecast period. Availability of closed source binary drivers is another factor that is expected to facilitate the growth of the global binary drivers market during the forecast period.However, developers offer binary drivers that are functional only for one or two Operating Systems. This restricts the range of binary driver device support on other operating systems. The restricted device support of binary drivers results in low market visibility of newer operating systems. Such factors are anticipated to challenge the overall growth of the global binary drivers market. Faulty binary drivers having coded bugs is another factor that is anticipated to challenge the overall adoption rate of the global binary drivers market. Operating systems must support a vast range of hardware for them to be viable and widely adopted, and developing binary drivers for other operating system platforms is not considered to be profitable due to the heavy development expenditure. The high development costs incurred by binary drivers are estimated to restrict the growth of the global binary drivers market during the forecast period.Binary Drivers: Market SegmentationWith regards to the type, the global binary drivers market can be segmented into the following,Database Binary DriversExecutable Binary DriversApplication Data Binary DriversMedia Binary DriversConfiguration Binary DriversDocument DriversLibrary DriversEncryption and Compression Binary DriversCurrently, media binary drivers hold the largest market share of the global binary drivers market.With regards to the device class, the global binary drivers market can be segmented into the following,Character DevicesBlock DevicesNetwork InterfacesBinary Drivers: Regional Market OutlookThe binary drivers market in Southeast Asia and others of Asia Pacific region is estimated to register the most attractive growth rate in the global binary drivers market. The ever-rising demand for efficient, bug-free operating system binary drivers in various industrial verticals in developing economies, such as India, is anticipated to enable the Southeast Asia and others of Asia Pacific region register a significant growth rate during the forecast period. The binary drivers market in North America region holds the largest market share of the global binary drivers market, due to the high presence of software solution providers in the region, especially in the Unites States. However, the Western European binary drivers market is estimated to hold the largest market share of the global binary drivers market by the end of the forecast period. Replacement and reverse engineering services offered by binary driver programmers to minimize the marketing of faulty, bug-infused driver files is expected to drive the binary drivers market across all the regions.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-8639 Binary Drivers: Key Market PlayersThe key players in the global binary drivers market include Intel Corporation; Logitech; Microsoft; and NVIDIA Corporation, among other market players. Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation are estimated to hold the largest market share of the global binary drivers market during the forecast period.
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 07:58:21

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Biopotential Sensors Market: IntroductionThe human nervous system utilizes the ebbing and flow of ions in order to communicate. The transportation of ions within nerve fibers can be measured on the skin surface using an electro-chemical sensor, commonly referred to as a surface recording electrode or a biopotential sensor. The primary purpose of the surface recording electrode is to act as a transducer between the electron flow in the copper wire that is integrated in the system and the ionic transport within and along the nerve fiber. Biopotential sensors are incorporated in the process to detect the small electrical signal emitted within the human body. These electrical signals detected by biopotential sensors are conditioned and forwarded to a microprocessor that calculates and stores the data. The microprocessor then commands the health monitoring device to display the data gathered. Such devices with integrated biopotential sensors are procured by users, fitness trainers and medical personnel in order to monitor fitness trend or determine the heath condition of a patient under observation. Some cardiac parameters that can be monitored using biopotential sensors include, R-R intervals and Electrocardiogram (ECG). Biopotential sensors produce ECG waveforms, bioimpedance measurement, and pacemaker edge and heart rate detection, which enable the medical authorities to calculate the patients respiration.Request For Report Sample @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-8640 Manufacturers offer bioimpedance (BioZ) and biopotential AFE (Analog Front-end) solutions for cardiac health monitoring applications. These biopotential sensors facilitate ultra-low power operation, clinical-grade accuracy and enable long battery life when used for fitness applications. Manufacturers are also offering biopotential sensors in smaller wafer-level packages in order to support wearable applications, such as chest straps and wrist-worn fitness devices.Biopotential Sensors Market: DriversIncreasing advancements in life science and healthcare instrumentation are the primary factors driving the growth of the global biopotential sensor market. Availability of high-performance health monitoring devices integrated with efficient biopotential sensors is estimated to provide a boost to the growth of the global biopotential sensor market. Huge investments are being made by scientific research organizations and institutes, and hospitals in order to procure efficient equipment integrated with biopotential sensors. These investments are expected to facilitate a platform for the global biopotential sensor market to grow further. High adoption of biopotential sensors by wearable device manufacturers is also expected to propel the growth of the global biopotential sensor market during the forecast period.Biopotential Sensors Market: SegmentationWith regards to application, the global biopotential sensor market has been segmented into:Fitness ApplicationsChest strapsWrist-worn devicesMedical ApplicationsArrhythmia detection patchesChest strapsRemote patient monitoring systemsECG monitorsOther wearable patient monitorsWith regards to end use, the global biopotential sensor market has been segmented into:Personal fitness trackingMedicalElectrocardiogram measurementsR-R trackingOther medical end usesCurrently, medical applications of biopotential sensors account for a large market share in terms of value, due to the high adoption rate of patient monitoring devices in hospitals, clinics and dispensaries and other biological research institutions. However, fitness applications of biopotential sensors are estimated to record a relatively high growth rate in the global biopotential sensor market during the forecast period. This growth may be attributed to the ever-increasing disposable income and the consequent financial ease with which the population interested in fitness can procure such fitness-centric wearable devices.Biopotential Sensors Market: Regional OutlookHigh presence of manufacturers marketing their biopotential sensors in the North American market is anticipated to act as the primary driver for the biopotential sensor market in the region. Currently, the biopotential sensor market in North America holds a large share. Governments in Southeast Asian and other Asia Pacific economies are making investments in order to facilitate automated medical instrumentation equipment. These investments are anticipated to boost the growth of the biopotential sensor market in the region during the forecast period.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC): https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-8640 Biopotential Sensors Market: Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the key players operating in the biopotential sensor market include Maxim Integrated, OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, Plessey, Omron Corporation, Texas Instruments Incorporated, ON Semiconductor and Analog Devices Inc., among others. Among the key participants, Maxim Integrated holds a relatively high market share in the global biopotential sensor market.
3D Printed Hip And Knee Implants Market

3D Printed Hip And Knee Implants Market

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 14:10:56

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3D printing i.e. additive manufacturing involves a layer by layer process to create physical objects out of digital 3D blueprints. It was mainly used for rapid prototyping in the late 1980s. However, it has now become a next-generation technology which can produce localised, on-demand final products or even spare parts. 3D printing is possible with a range of thermoplastics, metal alloys, ceramics & various foodstuffs. It has seen an application in diverse areas like aerospace, retail, supply chain optimisation, & the medical industry. The 3D printed Hip & Knee Implants Market could dramatically improve both the effectiveness of surgery along with reducing the time taken to recover. It was pioneered by Dr Susannah Clarke and has already been used in hundreds of hip & knee surgeries across the world. It uses CAT scans to create a 3D blueprint of the damaged hip or knee joint to be replaced. Surgeons can then use this to practice the operation on a computer, deciding beforehand where to make incisions or how to realign the bone. The 3D printed hip & knee implant market will help to make replacement surgery much safer & quicker in the long run.3D printed Hip & Knee Implants Market DriversAn ageing population in developed countries & China are expected to be the biggest driver of the 3D printed hip & knee implant market. Millions of people worldwide have to undergo either hip or knee replacement surgery every year. It is not people above 60 years but those between ages 45-54 who have shown the largest increase in percentage terms. This is because of improved implant quality and awareness of how they improve mobility and quality of life. Some of these initial surgeries fail due to contracting infections & patients then have to undergo another surgery to replace the implant. This has a much lower success rate & also causes significant pain & inconvenience. A second driver is that 3D printing is a minimally invasive procedure preferred by patients. Surgeons can rehearse the operation with the help of 3D models beforehand which allows them to make smaller incisions, reduce blood loss & assures an easier recovery. The 3D printed hip & knee implant market helps to reduce costs & inefficiencies as these parts will be an exact fit for an individual patient.Request for Table of Contents @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-2312 3D printed Hip & Knee Implants Market RestraintsWhile the 3D printed hip & knee implant market has a tremendous scope with the pace at which 3D printing is advancing, there are still major challenges faced today. The first one is long term performance. 3D printed parts are inherently weaker than forged parts which are how traditional metal implants are made today. They are stronger than cast parts, but they wear down much faster than forged parts in lab tests. The second main concern is the lack of regulation. At present, more than 70 3D printed devices have been approved by 510(k) of the U.S. FDA Act and this includes medical implants as well. While those drafts have been approved, FDA technical guidance is still some time away. It is an open question how restrictive the guidelines will be once published. And this just pertains to the U.S as there is no governing body or standard worldwide. This means that the 3D printed hip & knee implant market will have to go through separate approvals in each country, increasing the effort and time taken by manufacturers.3D printed Hip & Knee Implants Market Key RegionsThe largest 3D printed hip & knee implant market is the U.S as half of all joint replacements worldwide take place there. China is the fastest growing market. Implants are heavily regulated there as the country currently imports a majority of them. Greater government pressure to manufacture indigenously is encouraging companies to enter the domestic 3D printed hip & knee implant market. The China Food And Drug Administration has also approved 3D printed hip plants for medical use there.3D printed Hip & Knee Implants Market Key Market PlayersSome companies in the 3D printed hip & knee implant market are Medtronic, DePuy, 3D Systems, Embody Orthopaedics & Smith & Nephew.Get Sample Copy of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2312
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 12:46:12

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Dental orthotic devices also called as occlusal splints are specially designed mouth guards for people who have temporomandibular joints (TMJ), or habit of teeth grinding, or who need complete mouth reconstruction. Dental orthotic devices are custom made hence their size and shape vary person to person. Temporomandibular joints (TMJ) disorder is associated with the pain and partial dysfunctioning of the jaw, which makes the person uncomfortable resulting in difficulty in chewing, locking of joints, etc. Dental orthotic devices in TMJ disorder help to stabilize the jaw, improve function muscles around the jaw and protect the teeth from attrition. In people with habit of teeth grinding, dental orthotic devices help to move the jaw while chewing in rhythm as front-to-back or side-to-side, whereas people who need complete mouth reconstruction due to various conditions such as decay or broken teeth or teeth grinding, dental orthotic devices help to hold the teeth in the desired shape and prevent the teeth from any damage due to abnormal muscle movement.Dental Orthotic Devices Market: Drivers and RestraintsAs per the National Health Interview Survey that lasted for around two decades, the self-reported prevalence of TMJ was around 5% of adult population in the U.S. representing a significant share of population, which increased the diagnosis rate and consequently contributed to the growth of the Dental orthotic devices market. Increasing treatment-seeking rate and growing awareness regarding the possible treatment options for teeth grinding and TMJ are expected to fuel the growth of the dental orthotic devices market. As per the National Health Interview Survey the rate with which TMJ is increasing is more than 3.5% per year and as per the National Sleep Foundation around 8.0% of adults grind their teeth during sleep and more than one-third of parents have reported the habit of teeth grinding in children. Increasing incidence of TMJ and teeth grinding is expected to fuel the growth of the dental orthotic devices market. Increasing number of surgeries for complete mouth reconstruction for better functional and aesthetic purpose globally is further expected to fuel the growth of the dental orthotic devices market. Availability of customization in the size and shape of dental orthotic devices further will improve the patient compliance and consequently drive the growth of the market. Whereas, limited awareness regarding the treatment options available for the teeth grinding and lower treatment-seeking rate for jaw pain are factors expected to hamper the growth of the dental orthotic devices market.Request Sample Report@ www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7512 Dental Orthotic Devices Market: SegmentationThe global dental orthotic devices market can be segmented on the basis of product type, distribution channel and geography.Based on the product type, the dental orthotic devices market is segmented as:Stabilization Dental Orthotic DevicesAnterior Repositioning Dental Orthotic DevicesAnterior Bite Plane Dental Orthotic DevicesPosterior Bite Plane Dental Orthotic DevicesOthersBased on the distribution channel, the dental orthotic devices market is segmented as:Hospital PharmaciesRetail PharmaciesDental ClinicsOnline PharmaciesDental Orthotic Devices Market: OverviewGlobally increasing incidence of TMJ and teeth grinding coupled with improving treatment seeking rate are factors expected to contribute to the growth of the dental orthotic devices market. By product type, the anterior reposition dental orthotic devices is expected to be the dominant segment due to their higher adoption among the patients. By distribution channel, the dental clinics expected to be the most lucrative segment in the dental orthotic devices market due to preferred destination of treatment by the patients. Manufacturers are exploring and innovating possibilities of different usage of dental orthotic devices such as recently specific modification in dental orthotic devices helped to improve airflow, while the patient is sleeping resulting to be the treatment for sleep apnea.Dental Orthotic Devices Market: Regional OutlookNorth America is expected to be the most lucrative dental orthotic devices market due to higher treatment-seeking rate. Europe is expected to be second most lucrative dental orthotic devices market due to higher incidence of TMJ and teeth grinding coupled with widespread awareness regarding the treatment options. Latin America dental orthotic devices market is expected to witness steady growth due to improving treatment-seeking rate. Asia-Pacific is regarded as the emerging dental orthotic devices market due to emerging economies such as India and China coupled with improving awareness among general population about the treatment options. MEA is expected to be the least lucrative dental orthotic devices market due to lowest adoption of dental orthotic devices as a treatment option.Request to View TOC @ www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7512 Dental Orthotic Devices Market: Key PlayersExamples of some of the key participants operating in the dental orthotic devicesmarket are Southern Cross Dental, First Lab Direct Ltd, Dentaurum Group, Glidewell Laboratories, Sentinel Mouth Guards, Hizart Dental Laboratory, The Dental Solution Australia, Fotis Dental Laboratory, Space Maintainers Dental Labs, and S4S Dental Laboratory, among others.
The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application and industry.

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For efficient industrial power plant operations, boilers as well as quality of feedwater play a crucial role. As feedwater treatment is essential, indispensability of feedwater treatment chemicals is evident. With an extensive application of boilers in multiple end-user industries, demand for feedwater treatment chemicals market is likely to remain high. On the same lines, manufacturers operating in the feedwater treatment chemicals market are focusing on delivering industry-specific feedwater treatment chemicals solutions that accommodate requirements of location, affordability and service-friendly systems.Dissolved oxygen are biggest threat to the integrity of boilers as they can lead to failure of feedwater lines, boiler tubes, economizers and condensate lines. As feedwater treatment chemicals prevent boilers from such damage, they remain essential in extending longevity of operations of both boiler as well as overall industrial output. With such an imperative function of feedwater treatment chemicals, their demand is set to remain higher, marking good opportunity for the feedwater treatment chemicals market.Get Free Exclusive Sample Copy of This Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=637 A fair trade-off between the investment in feedwater treatment equipment and feedwater treatment chemicals has been observed as installation of efficient equipment can significantly reduce chemical usage, increase cycles of concentration and improve overall plant efficiency. That said, increasing inclination towards adopting feedwater treatment equipment can influence future progress of the feedwater treatment chemicals market.An ongoing research by Fact.MR offers incisive insights on the global feedwater treatment chemicals market. This research report is a comprehensive source of information that delivers value by offering an unbiased and a crystal clear scrutiny on the feedwater treatment chemicals market scenario at a global level. Several insights on key trends, developments and other aspects that impact the growth of the global market for feedwater treatment chemicals have been included in this research report.In companies that use boilers across various industries, an efficient water treatment for boiler feedwater becomes imperative. Feedwater treatment chemicals for boilers can ensure reduced maintenance costs, reduced downtime and reduced boiler failure. The use of feedwater treatment chemicals is expected to increase as they enhance boiler life by reducing corrosion, fouling and scaling of the boiler. Adoption of feedwater treatment chemicals is expected to increase in the coming years, owing to increasing use of boilers across industries such as chemicals, petrochemicals and oil and gas.Treatment and Reuse of Feedwater to Fuel the Sales of Feedwater Treatment ChemicalsSince past years, the declining fresh water resources and abuse of water has caused severe water stress across many regions. To overcome this condition, governments across the globe have been applying stringent rules relating to treatment and reuse of feedwater. In addition, government is highly focused to improve municipal water facilities in urban & rural areas. Such developments for industrial and domestic and municipal water treatment are expected to create high demand for feedwater treatment chemicals over the forecast period.Growing Petrochemical Industry to Spur the Demand for Feedwater Treatment ChemicalsPetrochemical industry has witnessed a steady growth since the past decade which has directly influenced the use of boilers in this sector. The United States petrochemical industry is expected to witness an upsurge with increasing exports as well as production of petrochemicals. This has spurred the use of feedwater treatment chemicals with increasing use of boilers in the manufacturing of petrochemicals.Likewise, Asia Pacific also has reflected an upsurge in the petrochemical sector, with China to be at the forefront. The feedwater treatment market in Asia Pacific is expected to witness significant expansion with the increasing use of corrosion inhibitors, coagulants, flocculants, pH adjusters and biocides in the treatment of feedwater in boilers used in manufacturing of petrochemicals.Ask For Customized Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=637 Innovative Developments by Key Participants to Fuel Growth of Global Feedwater Treatment Chemicals MarketWith growing awareness regarding feedwater treatment for effective functioning of boilers, participants involved in feedwater treatment have been focused on developing advanced technologies to enhance the feedwater treatment process. For instance, advanced organic oxygen scavenger inorganic sulphite formulations developed by SUEZ remove dissolved oxygen that remains post deaeration process. Dissolved oxygen is a major threat to boilers that causes severe pitting of boilers and corrosion. This formulation by SUEZ enhances the reliability of the equipment, reduces costs associated with maintenance and reduces copper and iron levels in feedwater. Awareness regarding such techniques is expected to support the sales of feedwater treatment chemicals in the following years. Other key participants involved in the global feedwater treatment chemicals market include Ovivo, Thermax Chemicals, Ecolab Incorporated, Samco Technologies, Feedwater Ltd., BASF SE, and Dow Chemical Company.Moreover, favourable government initiatives regarding infrastructure development has also influenced the feedwater treatment chemicals market. With infrastructural development in focus, the proliferating use of boilers in industries is expected to push the demand for chemicals used to treat boiler feedwater. For example, state government of California is focusing on energy efficiency projects for which it has invested around US$ 55 Bn. Additionally, California state government has also initiated funding for advanced boiler systems, which is around US$ 4 Mn. Such initiatives is accelerating the adoption of advanced boiler systems, due to which demand for boiler feedwater treatment chemicals is expected to rise in the coming years.A volley of insights on the global market for feedwater treatment chemicals is provided in this research report. The research report on global feedwater treatment chemicals market provides analysis on the past market scenario, the current market know-how and also includes future market insights for a period of nine years (2018-2027). This research report can support the reader in gaining complete market intelligence on the demand and adoption of feedwater treatment chemicals spanning across various industries.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @ https://www.factmr.com/report/637/feedwater-treatment-chemicals-market About Fact.MR Fact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFactMR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@ factmr.com Web: www.factmr.com/ Read Industrial News : http://insiderstribune.com/
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Medical suction pumps are compact and portable. These devices are used in operating rooms, intensive care units, ambulances and other similar settings. Foot suction unit is a suction device that is powered by the user. The foot suction units are cost effective alternatives to the electrical suction units. Foot suction units can be used for a wide variety of functions including removal of secrete and fluids in airways and infected wounds. The foot suction unit is most suited for use in ambulance, clinics including dental clinics and home care.Some of the major advantages of the foot suction unit include portability, no requirement for power supply and easy cleaning. Most foot suction units include a foot paddle attached to a piston pump that creates a vacuum pressure in the jars connected to it, thereby allowing the fluid to drain into the jars. The foot suction unit may have a single or two jars for fluid collection that can be easily disconnected from the system and sterilized. The jars of the foot suction units can be sterilized either by autoclave or by the means of chemical sterilization. The capacity of these jars varies from small capacity of 250 ml up to large capacity of 1 lt. These foot suction units are also attached to a pressure gauge that helps maintain and control a steady vacuum pressure for continuous drainage of the liquid.Request Sample Report@ www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7516 Foot Suction Unit Market: Drivers and Restraints-Foot suction units market is expected to witness the maximum growth in the near future owing to increase in number of ambulances globally. The increased number of road accident cases in the Asia Pacific region is further increasing the demand for emergency services in the region. Low cost and easy portability of foot suction units make it most suitable to be used in emergency medicine. Thus, the increase in demand for emergency medicine may result in the rise in demand for foot suction units. However, the availability of electric suction units that reduces manual errors pose to be a threat to the foot suction units.Foot Suction Unit Market: SegmentationOn the basis of number of jars, foot suction unit market can be segmented as:Single JarDouble JarLarge On the basis of capacity, foot suction unit market can be segmented as:SmallMediumLargeOn the basis of the end user, the foot suction unit market can be segmented as:AmbulanceTrauma centersHospitals & ClinicsAmbulatory Surgical CentersFoot Suction Unit Market: OverviewGlobal foot suction unit market is expected to gain significant growth rate over the forecast period. Foot Suction Unit is expected to witness high demand during the forecast period due to increasing in number of cases in emergency medicine. The increasing number of ambulances worldwide is another major driving factor for the global foot suction unit market. However, the availability of electric powered suction units may hinder the growth of the foot suction units market.Foot Suction Unit Market: Region-wise OutlookIn terms of geography, foot suction unit market has been divided into eight regions including North- America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Asia- Pacific excluding China & Japan (APECJ), China, Japan, Middle-East & Africa and Latin America. North America is the most dominating market for foot suction unit market due to the high per capita expenditure on healthcare and technological advancement. Western European countries such as Germany, France, and the U.K. are top revenue contributing courtiers in Western Europe. The Asia Pacific excluding China and Japan Foot Suction Unit market is expected to expand at the fastest growth rate over the forecast period due to increasing focus on emergency medicines in the region. China is one of the important revenue contributing countries in the global foot suction unit market due to the availability of cost-effective foot suction units and large number of ambulance and emergency medical centers in the region.Request to View TOC @ www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7516 Foot Suction Unit Market: Key Market ParticipantsExample of some of the market players participants in global Foot Suction Unit market identified across the value chain are Specmed, Deepak Healthcare, Narang Medical Limited, Blue Cross, WEINMANN Emergency Medical Technology GmbH, Jiangsu Folee Medical Equipment Co., Ambu A/S, CA-MI, Tenko Corporation Group, among others.
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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / March 14, 2019 /Glenbriar Technologies Inc.(CSE:GTI.X) (the "Company") wishes to announce that it has entered into an arms length agreement to acquire all of the shares of private BC based Eleos Robotics Inc.("Eleos").The agreement contemplates that the Company will issue 100% of the issued and outstanding shares of the Company, at a deemed value of approximately $4.75 million, to the shareholders of Eleos, but only upon certain development milestones being met, which could take up to a year to achieve.In the interim, the Company will fund technology development in the amount of $1 million under a license agreement that will see the Company own an undivided one half of the technology developed.In the event the transactions does not close without any malfeasance on behalf of Eleos, Eleos will receive full ownership of the technology.Arm-lengths finders' fees totalling $10,000 in cash and 200,000 common shares of the Company are payable at closing.The Company is undertaking a private placement of up to $1,500,000 by the sale of units at $0.05, each unit consisting of one common share and one warrant exercisable into one common share at a price of $0.10 in the first year and $0.15 in the second year.This private placement will not close until after the shareholder meeting referred to below, at which time a 2 for 1 share consolidation is expected to be approved.The transaction is subject to exchange approval, further due diligence and shareholder approval at a shareholder meeting to be called for a date in May.The transaction will be considered a Fundamental Change pursuant to the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange, subject to shareholder and CSE review.Trading in the shares of the Company will be halted pending review and approval of the transaction.About EleosEleos plans to design a fully autonomous, eco-friendly, and sustainable weeding technology for growers.Once built, the RoboWeeder is anticipated to be sold fully maintained and monitored remotely.The technology better reflects consumer demand for organic produce and uses cutting-edge technology in robotics and artificial intelligence.There are several patents pending surrounding this technology.Once completed the RoboWeeder is expected to be a technology driven solution to a farm process that is time-consuming, laborious, and expensive and currently has no sustainable alternatives.It proposes to reduces labour and make herbicides obsolete.Unlike pulling or hoeing weeds, it is fully automated, and unlike herbicides, is sustainable and eco-friendly.The RoboWeeder is expected to save time, increase productivity, and is fully organic.RoboWeeder is anticipated to be able to detect, identify, and then eliminate weeds that destroy growers' crops.It is anticipated that it will autonomously patrol crops searching for weeds, and then eliminate them with a high-precision directed microwave.The target goal will be to create a 10-acre "weed-free zone".It is proposed to be self-charging with an autonomous station and be able to operate day and night without supervision.Eleos has an experienced multi-disciplinary, international and multi-cultural business and product development team.They account for decades of experience in machine learning/vision, automation, horticulture, data science, system engineering/robotics, and business development.Pursuant to the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange, trading in the shares of the Company will be halted pending review and approval of this transaction by the exchange.For further information, please contact:Doug Taylor, CEOInvestor RelationsTelephone: 1 (604) 343-2977E-mail: irglenbriartech@ gmail.com Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.Certain statements contained in this release may constitute "forwardlooking statements" or "forward-looking information" (collectively "forward-looking information") as those terms are used in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and similar Canadian laws.These statements relate to future events or future performance.The use of any of the words "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "projected", "estimated", "anticipates" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events.Actual future results may differ materially.In particular, this release contains forward-looking information relating to the business of the Company, financing and certain corporate changes.The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof and the Company is not obligated 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 laws.Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information.The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein.SOURCE: Glenbriar Technologies Inc.
The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application and industry.

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The high purity aluminium market is marked by a handful of leading manufacturers that has sophisticated refining machinery to sustainably produce high purity aluminium. The refining technology of these manufacturers remains competitive in terms of removal of impurities such as Silicon, Iron, and Copper and reducing concentrations of alpha emitters such as Uranium and Thorium.Although aluminium element finds application in multiple industries due to its beneficial alloy properties, recent decades have witnessed the production of high purity aluminium for specific applications. High purity aluminium is highly sought after in the semiconductor industry and other applications such as electrolytic capacitor foils and electronic storage systems. According to the end users requirement specifications, manufacturers in the high purity aluminium market deliver high purity aluminium in different forms such as foil, sheet, plate, pellet, ingots, billets, wires, rods or disks. Manufacturers also deliver high purity aluminium products for research and other commercial applications.Get Free Exclusive Sample Copy of This Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=625 With the higher level of electrical conductance, application of high purity aluminium has intensified in recent years and can be now found in every displays, memory chips, memory drives of smartphones, computers, tablets and LED screens of other devices. Exponentially rising utilization of high purity aluminium in electronics and technical applications is estimated to augur well for the growth of the high purity aluminium market.A new report available with Fact.MR , about the global high purity aluminium market, provides a comprehensive outlook of the industry trends. Sharp-eyed analysis of the changing global needs and consumption of high purity aluminium are few of the prime factors impacting the growth of the market. The recent restrictions enacted by Trumps Administrations on steel and aluminium import in the United States and its predictable influence on the global aluminium market is another important factor considered in the report analysis. With such thorough analysis, the report provides the most credible go-to forecast of the global high purity aluminium market.Derived from bauxite ore, based on purity levels, high purity aluminium finds application in multiple industries. Notable demand for the highly pure material is observed in electronics, chemical and high purity alloy sectors. Purity of high purity aluminium ranges from 99.99% to 99.999% which is also referred to as 4N to 6N. Manufacturing titans use three-layer electrolysis as well as the segregation or the fractional crystallization methods to refine aluminium.Demand from the Electronics Industry to Boost Market GrowthThe electronics industry has witnessed a steady growth in past decade. Currently, the industry is helmed by Asian countries including India, China, and Malaysia. Due to its intrinsic properties, the highly pure metal finds application in the manufacturing of electrolytic capacitor foils, high purity alumina (HPA), the semiconductor industry, photovoltaic cells, TFT LCD applications, decorative uses or for electronic storage systems. Its utilization becomes irreplaceable for the industry as the metal provide high electric and thermal conductance as well as low tensile strength. To address the increasing requirements of high purity aluminium, manufacturers are enhancing their capacities and personnel in metallurgy, application technology, metal purification, as well as trace analysis. As electronic industry significantly penetrates in other end-user industries, demand for stated electronics components is set to rise. Owing to this, the market for high purity aluminium is likely to witness persistent growth in future.Steady Bauxite Extraction & High Purity Aluminium ProductionTop global locations popular for surplus bauxite resources includes Australia, China, Brazil, Indonesia, Guinea, India, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Russia and Republic of Suriname. Individual regional analysis has reported accretive growth of bauxite extraction in the fiscal year 2017 worldwide. For instance, the Mines Ministry of Guinea reported production of 5 million tons of bauxite from one of Guineas largest mines per year from 2019. This represents a threefold increase in bauxite production by 2020 in Western African countries. Although China reported highest bauxite export in 2017, air pollution crackdowns may influence the future alumina and bauxite demand. Amidst this scenario, steady bauxite extraction was witnessed globally and is estimated to rise in future. According to the World Bureau of Metal Statistics, world bauxite production is projected to grow at the rate of 8% annually in 2018 and 2019, and to reach 337 million tons by the end of 2019. In addition, helmed by China, world alumina production and consumption also witnessed a rise in 2017. Thus, stable bauxite extraction and growing high purity aluminium demand is likely to influence the market growth in near future.Ask For Customized Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=625 Key Company Developments in High Purity Aluminium MarketShowa Denko KK (SDK), a leading Japanese chemical engineering firm has enhanced production capacities of high-purity aluminium foil in China in 2017. High purity aluminium foil is one of the most prominent materials of aluminium electrolytic capacitor. The SDK expansion is aimed at responding to the rising demand for aluminum electrolytic capacitors worldwide.Norsk Hydro, a Norwegian aluminium company that operates throughout Brazilian aluminium chain has recently announced reduction in alumina production by 50%. Alunorte which is owned by Norsk Hydro by 92.1% of shares, delivered lesser alumina to Albras due to reported residue leakage. Hence, Albras which is owned by Norsk Hydro by 51% of shares reported significant decline in production.Altech Chemicals Ltd., an Australia-based leading supplier of highly pure alumina (HPA), has applied for manufacturing license application to the Malaysian Investment Development Authority in Malaysia. The company has plans to produce HPA from kaolin clay supplied from Altechs kaolin plant based in Western Australia.To address the rising demand from end-users, industry titans are focusing on enhancing production capacities with respect to delivery of refined, reliable and defined material quality which is a prerequisite to meet intense competition in the global market.Details associated with all the highlighted trends of the high purity aluminium market are included in the report to deliver a clear industry outlook which will help the financial community in making business decisions.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @ https://www.factmr.com/report/625/high-purity-aluminium-market About Fact.MR Fact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFactMR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@ factmr.com Web: www.factmr.com/ Read Industrial News : http://insiderstribune.com/
The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application and industry.

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 15:14:41

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The high purity oxygen market has been witnessing magnificent demand from many industries such as medicine, aviation, chemical manufacture, and agribusiness. Various devices such as semiconductor, LED, medical devices industries, and diverse laboratories exhibit demand for different types of complex mixtures and ultra-high purity (UHP) gases, oxygen being the primary one. This demonstrates the futuristic opportunity for the manufacturers operating in high purity oxygen market. Enduring oxidizing coupled with life-sustaining properties of oxygen makes it one of the highly desirable gases, thereby acting as one of the primary drivers for growth of high purity oxygen market. The purity of oxygen can affect the upshot of a process or precision of a measurement, making it utterly important across multiple industries.High purity oxygen market has been finding extensive applications across hospitals. The governmental mandates pertinent to use of high purity oxygen in operation theatres, ICUs, and wards has opened up remunerative opportunities for key players of high purity oxygen market in to cash in. This is expected to boost the growth facets of high purity oxygen market in the foreseeable future. Moreover, the use of high purity (HP) oxygen has extensive applications in wastewater treatment facilities, in case of situations where the aeration basin reaches its saturation limit in terms of load. In addition, use of high purity oxygen across military applications is also envisioned to add significant impetus to the market growth.Get Free Exclusive Sample Copy of This Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=619 Fact.MR has come up with a new research report on global high purity oxygen market that analyzes driver, restraints, opportunities, and trends influencing growth of the global market. Increasing demand for medical-grade oxygen for emergency medical services is a key factor influencing growth of global high purity oxygen market. This is bound to impact on volume sales of high purity oxygen generator systems. The research report delivers a holistic analysis of global high purity oxygen market for the forecast period 2018-2027.Key companies involved in the production of high purity oxygen have been profiled in the report. Further, analysis regarding product portfolio, key financials such as market sales and share, SWOT analysis as well as key strategies implied to gain competitive advantage has been incorporated in this report.As high purity oxygen has high demand from EMS (Emergency Medical Services), Fire Departments, Ambulance, Small Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Clinics, Veterinary & Animal Hospitals, SCUBA and Dental labs, key companies are shifting their focus on the manufacturing of high purity oxygen generators. The Hi-Techs Medical oxygen plant allows users to create their own high-grade oxygen as per their requirements.Rapid industrialization has, unfortunately, increased the number of pollutants in surroundings and wastewater is one of these pollutants. High purity oxygen generators are cost-effective and safer solution for treatment of wastewater, which is a fueling factor for the growth of global high purity oxygen market. Additionally, the need for high degree of waste treatment has increased the popularity of activated sludge procedure, which can create a high quality effluence at reasonable cost. Owing to improved commercial availability, use of high purity oxygen for aeration of activated sludge has been increased in recent past. Which is further boosting growth of the global high purity oxygen market.Mandatory Oxygen Supply in Hospitals Leading Increasing Adoption of High Purity OxygenDemand for high purity oxygen is witnessing a growth, due to increasing use of oxygen for the treatments of pollutants. Governments of various countries are focusing on adoption of high purity oxygen generators to simplify pollutants treatment procedure. This trend is more pronounced in regions that have increased population and widespread industrialization. With both industrial landscape in India and its population increasing at phenomenal pace, wastewater volume is further increasing at alarming growth. In addition, government of various economies has made it mandatory for all the hospitals to maintain a regular supply of oxygen in operation theatres, ICUs and wards. This is further likely to boost demand for high purity oxygen in foreseeable future.Traditionally, oxygen cylinder were used in aircrafts for longer journey. However, present generation aircrafts have capabilities far in excess to human tolerance. Modern aircraft are capable of flying 6 Hr to 8 Hr with air to air refueling. In a bid to support requirements of these aircrafts key players have come up with on-board oxygen generating system (OBOGS). Utilization of OBOGS in military aircrafts removes logistic tail linked with liquid or gaseous oxygen system. Such innovative systems are likely to increase demand for high purity oxygen generators.Ask For Customized Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=619 Rising Number of Admissions in Hospitals to Propel Demand for High Purity OxygenUsually, increasing prevalence of various diseases require hospitalization, which ultimately needs oxygen mask. Thereby increasing prevalence of diseases will further lead hospitals to adopt high purity oxygen cylinders or generators. Additionally, increasing number of hospitals in emerging economies will witness increased demand for high purity oxygen in near future. Additionally, in order to increase concentration of oxygen in tanks, oxygen concentrators have been introduced, which is a key innovation in the high purity oxygen market. Application of oxygen concentrators is likely to increase volume storage of oxygen cylinder, increasing efficiency of it. This is likely to boost sales of oxygen cylinders in foreseeable future to be utilized in hospitals, small clinics, ambulance and nursing homes.Overall, the research study on high purity oxygen market offers in-depth analysis on the key factors that are likely to shape this landscape for the period 2018-2027. Readers can expect holistic analysis and insights on the strategies adopted by key players in this market. The insights offered in the report can help stakeholders in gaining a holistic perspective on the future of voice evacuation systems market.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @ https://www.factmr.com/report/619/high-purity-oxygen-market About Fact.MR Fact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFactMR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@ factmr.com Web: www.factmr.com/ Read Industrial News : http://insiderstribune.com/
The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application and industry.

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 15:14:42

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The high purity silica market is marked by a handful of leading manufacturers that has sophisticated refining machinery to sustainably produce high purity silica. The refining technology of these manufacturers remains competitive in terms of removal of impurities such as Aluminum, Iron, and Copper and reducing concentrations of alpha emitters such as Uranium and Thorium.Although silica element finds application in multiple industries due to its beneficial alloy properties, recent decades have witnessed the production of high purity silica for specific applications. High purity silica is highly sought after in the semiconductor industry and other applications such as electrolytic capacitor foils and electronic storage systems. According to the end users requirement specifications, manufacturers in the high purity silica market deliver high purity silica in different forms such as foil, sheet, plate, pellet, ingots, billets, wires, rods or disks. Manufacturers also deliver high purity silica products for research and other commercial applications.Get Free Exclusive Sample Copy of This Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=622 With the higher level of electrical conductance, application of high purity silica has intensified in recent years and can be now found in every displays, memory chips, memory drives of smartphones, computers, tablets and LED screens of other devices. Exponentially rising utilization of high purity silica in electronics and technical applications is estimated to augur well for the growth of the high purity silica market.A new research publication by Fact.MR presents incisive insights on the global high purity silica market. The report assesses the historical trends that have shaped this landscape until now, and offers an accurate and unbiased outlook on the likely market scenario for the period 2018-2027.The use of high purity silica in various industries has pushed its demand across regions, depending on the market position of the respective end use industry in the particular region. Moreover, various factors influencing growth of the global high purity silica market have also been covered in this research study. Analysis on key market participants such as Nyacol, Corning, Canadian Metals Inc., Heraeus, Evonik Industries AG, Huber Engineered Materials and Akzo Nobel is also included.Demand for High Purity Silica from Industrial Rubber and Tire Industry GrowingHigh purity silica is gaining rapid acceptance from the industrial rubber and tire industry. It is being largely used to manufacture green tires that differ from conventional tires in terms of higher grip and low rolling resistance. Low rolling resistance offers reduced fuel consumption thus saving money and protecting environment by lowering the CO2 emissions. This has spurred the demand for high purity silica in rubber and tire sector. This factor is also supported by the fact that governments across regions are focusing on reducing the greenhouse emissions by enhancing fuel consumption of vehicles.With the growth in the rubber industry in the United States, the region continues to remain a major consumer of tires as well as a huge producer of synthetic rubber. 2018 is expected to be an opportunistic year for the economy of United States. The demand for tires from the automotive sector in the United States is expected to fuel the use of high purity silica in this region. Albeit a maturity in the US automotive sector, this industry is expected to present potential opportunities for the high purity silica market.In emerging economies, the demand of high purity silica in the automotive sector, for production of green tires is expected to soar at high pace. In 2016, the automobile production (passenger cars) in China was around 24,420,744 units and in 2017 it reached 24,806,687. Likewise, in India, the number of passenger cars in 2017 recorded a volume production of about 3,952,550 from an initial volume of 3,677,605 in 2016. This trend shows that the production of passenger as well as commercial vehicles in these countries is increasing at a steady pace and is expected to continue with this trend in the coming years. This has presented significant opportunity for tire manufacturers to develop green tires, which in turn is expected to trigger the sale of high purity silica in these countries. Moreover, in India, the demand for tires is expected to increase by 7 to 8 percent during 2018-2019 timeline, which is expected to aid the growth of the global high purity silica market.Ask For Customized Report @ https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=622 Growth in Semiconductor Industry to Spur Sales of High Purity SilicaHigh purity silica is used in semiconductor and electronics industry for mechanical planarization or polishing. With the growing use of high purity silica in this field, its demand across regions such as United States and Europe is expected to increase. In 2017, the semiconductor industry witnessed growth owing to high adoption of graphics processing units and e-sports. According to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics, the semiconductor revenue from a global perspective is expected to rise by 7% in 2018. In 2017, the semiconductor revenue in US reflected a value higher than US$ 86 Mn, which is expected to reach US$ 95 Mn with a 10.3% growth. Likewise, in Europe, though the rate of growth remains less as compared to Unite States, the semiconductor revenue is expected to touch a value higher than US$ 39 Mn in 2018. In Asia Pacific, the semiconductor market is expected to witness high growth pace. The semiconductor revenue in this region in 2017 was US$ 247,834 Mn and is estimated to soar at a 6.6% rate to reach US$ 264,097 Mn in 2018. These statistics have shown a considerable expansion of the semiconductor market, which is expected to fuel the growth of the global high purity silica market in the coming years.This research report on global high purity silica market offers in-depth understanding regarding the global market scenario across key regions and also includes forecast analysis for a period of nine years, from 2018 till 2027. It extends support from an actionable intelligence standpoint that the reader can sue to achieve his/her research milestones.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @ https://www.factmr.com/report/622/high-purity-silica-market About Fact.MR Fact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFactMR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@ factmr.com Web: www.factmr.com/ Read Industrial News : http://insiderstribune.com/
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Inherited retinal diseases (IRDs) are genetically heterogeneous disorders which is one of the cause of blindness. There are more than 100 types of inherited retinal diseases and severity varies significantly. Due to inherited nature of these disease there is no cure and hence path to the inherited retinal diseases treatment is not clear. Recently in 2018, gene therapy based inherited retinal diseases treatment was approved by FDA. There are more than 200 DNA which are responsible for this disease further making inherited retinal diseases treatment difficult. Most of children suffering from this disease turn blind within a year after they are born. Around 4 of every 10,000 children born in the UK are diagnosed with some form of inherited retinal disease and the prevalence further increases to 6 per 10,000 in population below aged 16 years. This represent significant amount population though the incidence of the disease seems low, further making inherited retinal diseases treatment important.Inherited Retinal Diseases Treatment Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe increasing prevalence of the inherited retinal diseases expected to drive the growth of inherited retinal diseases treatment market. Increasing awareness and treatment seeking rate expected to fuel the growth of inherited retinal diseases treatment market. Increasing understanding about the inherited retinal diseases treatment options and diagnosis of the disease further expected to enhance the growth of inherited retinal diseases treatment market. Increasing expenditure R& D by the product manufacturing companies in the inherited retinal diseases treatment market expected to increase revenue generation in near future. The manufacturing companies in the inherited retinal diseases treatment market further focusing on the gene mutation specific approach for the developing new products further expected to drive the growth of inherited retinal diseases treatment market. Various manufacturers are engaging in the collaborations, partnerships to carry out clinical trials to further develop inherited retinal diseases treatment options more efficiently.Request Sample Report@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7698 Inherited Retinal Diseases Treatment Market: SegmentationInherited retinal diseases treatment market is segmented based on the treatment type, distribution channel, and regionBy the treatment type Inherited retinal diseases treatment market is segmented as:Gene therapy treatmentSymptomatic treatmentBy distribution channel Inherited retinal diseases treatment market is segmented as:Hospital PharmaciesRetail PharmaciesInherited Retinal Diseases Treatment Market: OverviewGlobally increasing prevalence of the disease expected to contribute to inherited retinal diseases treatment market significantly. By the treatment type inherited retinal diseases treatment market is expected to be dominated by gene therapy treatment. Whereas, by distribution channel inherited retinal diseases treatment market is expected to be dominated by retail pharmacies. The manufacturers in inherited retinal diseases treatment market are highly focusing on the development of new formulation for the inherited retinal diseases treatment.Inherited Retinal Diseases Treatment Market: Regional OutlookThe global inherited retinal diseases treatment market is expected to be dominated by North America due higher treatment seeking rate and higher penetration of inherited retinal diseases treatment options. Europe is expected to be the second most lucrative inherited retinal diseases treatment market due to comparatively higher prevalence of inherited retinal diseases coupled with higher treatment seeking rate. Asia-Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing inherited retinal diseases treatment market due to rapidly increasing awareness about the disease and increasing product penetration in the region. Presence of one of the fastest growing economies such as India and China further expected drive the growth of inherited retinal diseases treatment market in the APAC region. Latin America inherited retinal diseases treatment market is expected to witness steady growth due to increasing diagnosis of the condition in the region. Middle East and Africa is least lucrative inherited retinal diseases treatment market due to low treatment seeking rate, low product penetration, and low diagnosis rate. Overall, global inherited retinal diseases treatment market expected to witness significant growth due to increasing penetration of products and diagnosis.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7698 Inherited Retinal Diseases Treatment Market: Key PlayersSome of the global key participants operating in inherited retinal diseases treatment market are: Spark Therapeutics, Novartis AG, and others
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Microplate washers are used to remove reagents from sample wells such that they can be prepared for the next process. The microplate washer dispenses wash solution into the sample wells. This is done through a series of cycles of buffer dispense and aspiration. Microplate washer follows a series of cycles to ensure that any unbound liquid is thoroughly removed and other bound substances are left within the microplate wells. The microplate washer then removes the wash solution through suction.The microplate washer is composed of a microplate work station that includes a priming tray, reservoir kit, pump module and aspiration head used for dispensing the wash solution. These microplate washers are available as automates and manual microplate washers. The manual microplate washers are designed such that they can be completely controlled by its operator, from filling the reservoir to aspiration. For the manual type of microplate the lab technician or researcher prepares a script for the timing of the activities such as dispensing, waiting, shaking and aspiration. Once the script is prepared the microplate is inserted into the microplate washer for processing. The automatic microplate washer is designed such that it can profile the microplates automatically thereby reducing human errors. The automatic microplate washers can read and interpret the size of the microplate. Some microplate washers require hardware attachments for different types of microplates. Automatic and manual microplate washers are available in two configurations, i.e., plate and strip. The plate type of microplate washer cleanses the whole microplate in a single process, while the strip type of microplate washer cleanses the microplate strip by strip.Request Sample Report@ www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7517 Microplate washers can be used for a number of applications including cell cultures, protein assays, western blots and beads, Enzym-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), as well as for DNA purification processes. The microplate washers available in the market are compatible with microplates up to 384 wells. Up to 5 wash solutions or buffers can be dispensed or attached to the microplate washer and can dispense a range of volumes from 10 microliters to 3 milliliters.Microplate Washer Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe microplate washers market is expected to witness significant growth in the near future owing to increase in number of drug discovery research centers and clinical diagnostics, and high throughput screening application. Other factors that are expected to drive the growth of the market are increased research funding in the biotech & pharmaceutical industry along with the increasing number of service providers through private labs.Microplate Washer Market: SegmentationOn the basis of product type, the microplate washer market can be segmented as:Automated Microplate WashersManual Microplate WashersOn the basis of configuration, the microplate washer market can be segmented as:Plate ConfigurationStrip ConfigurationOn the basis of the end users, the microplate washer market can be segmented as:AcademicsHospitalsPrivate labsResearch InstitutesBiotechnology IndustryPharmaceutical IndustryMicroplate Washer Market: OverviewThe global microplate washer market is expected to gain significant growth rate over the forecast period. The demand for microplate washers is expected to gain traction over the forecast period due to increasing research in the biotechnology & pharmaceutical industries. The increasing number of private labs for research & similar services is also adding to the increased demand for the product worldwide.Microplate Washer Market: Regional OutlookIn terms of geography, the global microplate washer market is segmented into North America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Asia- Pacific excluding China & Japan (APECJ), China, Japan, Middle-East & Africa and Latin America. North America is expected to be the dominant regional market for microplate washers due to the rise in per capita expenditure on healthcare and technological advancement. Germany, France, and the U.K. are expected to the key contributing courtiers in the Western Europe market for microplate washers. The Asia Pacific excluding China and Japan microplate washer market is expected to witness significant growth over the forecast period due to availability of low-cost products in the region. China is expected to be one of the major revenue contributing countries in the global microplate washer market due to the availability of cost-effective microplate washers increased healthcare funding in the region.Request to View TOC @ www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7517 Microplate Washer Market: Key ParticipantsExample of some key participants in the global microplate washer market are BioTek Instruments, Molecular Devices LLC, BD Biosciences, Bio-Rad, Calbiotech, Inc, Hudson Robotics, Inc, Tecan Trading AG, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Titertek-Berthold, among others.
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Microwave ablation devices are the advance medical devices which are used to treat different type of cancer which can also be treated by radiofrequency (RF) ablation devices. Microwave ablation devices are the ultimate option for minimally invasive surgery of soft tissue such as liver, kidney, and lung. The basic components of microwave devices include a generator, power distribution system and antennas. Majority of the component of microwave ablation device is the same as the component of RF ablation device. But microwave ablation device has several benefits over the RF ablation devices. Some of the microwave ablation devices are also compatible with the CT scanner and ultrasound scanner, which provide the option for image-guided surgery. The guided surgery with CT scanner or ultrasound scanner enables the surgeon to identify the ablation target more easily though it allows the appropriate probe placement. This image guide surgery of microwave ablation device has also improved the success rate of the surgery. During the surgery, the needle like antenna is inserted into the tumor. The tip of the antenna emits the electromagnetic radiation, which results the frictional tissue heating and causing the cell death by coagulation necrosis. Majority of the microwave ablation devices available in the market uses 915 MHz generator while few of microwave ablation devices uses 2450 MHz generator.Microwave Ablation Devices Market: Drivers and RestraintsIncreasing incidences of benign and malignant tumor of lung, liver, bone and kidney throughout the globe is the primary factor driving the growth of the microwave ablation devices market. Moreover, the rising number of tumor ablation procedure with the help of image-guided device will also propel the growth of microwave ablation devices market. Additionally, change in the lifestyle of people and unhealthy eating habit along with consumption of alcohol and tobacco is also fueling the number of cancer cases which will ultimately upsurge the growth of microwave ablation devices market. Increasing demand for minimally invasive procedures and technological advancement is also responsible for the robust growth of microwave ablation devices market throughout the forecast period. The high-cost device associated with high risk during microwave ablation procedure may also impact the sale of microwave ablation devices over the next decade. Also, the high preference of surgeon towards RF ablation device over the microwave ablation device may deter the growth of this market.Request Sample Report@ www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7511 Microwave Ablation Devices Market: SegmentationTentatively, the global microwave ablation devices market can be segmented on the basis of component type, application, and end user, and geography.Based on component type, the global Microwave Ablation Devices market is segmented as:GeneratorPower Distribution SystemAccessoriesBased on application, the global Microwave Ablation Devices market is segmented as:OncologyCardiovascularUrologyOrthopedicOthersBased on end user, the global Microwave Ablation Devices market is segmented as:HospitalsAmbulatory Surgical CentersResearch LaboratoriesMicrowave Ablation Devices Market: OverviewMicrowave ablation devices market is expected to show significant growth over the forecast period due to rising incidence of cancer throughout the globe. According to the National Cancer Institute, around 1,685,210 new cases of cancer were diagnosed in the U.S. in 2016. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) data, in 2012, 30-50% of deaths are caused due to cancer can be prevented if the treatment is taken at the early stages. By component type, accessories segment is expected to dominate the microwave ablation device market by revenue due to rising number of tumor ablation procedure. By application, the oncology segment is expected the gain majority of share for microwave ablation devices market by revenue which is then followed by cardiovascular. Among all end users, the hospital segment is expected to dominate the microwave ablation device market whereas ambulatory surgical centers segment is projected to grow at a faster rate.Microwave Ablation Devices Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global microwave ablation devices market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, CIS and Russia, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America is expected to gain maximum market share for microwave ablation devices market in term of revenue owing to increased incidences of cancer. After North America, microwave ablation devices market is followed by Western Europe and Japan due high health infrastructure in these regions. Asia-Pacific excluding Japan region is expected to grow at a faster rate than other regions for microwave ablation devices market due to rising geriatric population in India and China. Middle East and Africa and Latin America for microwave ablation devices market is expected show delayed growth due to lack of availability of skilled healthcare professionals in this region.Request to View TOC @ www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7511 Microwave Ablation Devices Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global Microwave Ablation Devices Market are Medtronic plc, AngioDynamics Inc, Johnson & Johnson Services Inc., MedWaves Inc, and Terumo Corporation.
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Laser therapy is a therapeutic treatment that utilizes concentrated light for medical procedures. In contrast to most light sources, light from a laser is tuned to particular wavelengths. Minimally invasive medical devices have changed surgical procedures by eliminating or shortening hospital stays, speeding recovery times, decreasing the size of incisions and improving overall patient outcomes. There is a consistent increase in the number of minimally invasive procedures. Minimally invasive laser therapy devices are used for various different applications in oncology, dermatology, ENT etc. Minimally invasive laser therapy devices are highly preferred for neonatal patients and is also popular for cosmetic purposes as it least damages the skin. According to the annual plastic surgery procedural statistics, approximately 15.9 million minimally-invasive and surgical cosmetic procedures were performed in 2015 in the United States; giving a 2% increase over 2014.Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market: Drivers and Restraints-Growing popularity of cosmetic procedures; increase in number of laser procedures; growing shift towards minimally invasive surgeries are three major factors that are expected to boost market growth for minimally invasive laser therapy devices during the forecast period. Increased prevalence of skin related disorders like actinic keratosis, warts, acnes and growing awareness on advantages of minimally invasive laser therapy devices over invasive therapy devices are also expected to contribute to the growth of minimally invasive laser therapy devices market during the forecast period. Whereas, high prices associated to these procedures might hinder market growth. Less availability and less awareness on novel technologies related to minimally invasive laser therapy devices also could hamper the market growth for minimally invasive laser therapy devices market during the forecast period.Request Sample Report@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7700 Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market: SegmentationOn the basis of Product type, Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market can be segmented as:Low level Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy DevicesHigh Level Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy DevicesOn the basis of Modality, Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market can be segmented as:Portable Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy DevicesStand-alone Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy DevicesOn the basis of Applications, Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market can be segmented as:DermatologyENTOncologyCosmeticsDentalGastroenterology and EndoscopyCardiovascularOthersOn the basis of end users, Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market can be segmented as:HospitalsClinicsSkin Care Service CentersOphthalmic ClinicsDental ClinicsOthersOn the basis of geography, Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market can be segmented as:North- AmericaEastern EuropeWestern EuropeAsia-Pacific excluding China & JapanChinaJapanMiddle East and AfricaLatin AmericaMinimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market: OverviewThe technological shift of medical procedures and constant exponential development in technologies for medical procedures have profited the market. This has led to surgeries and procedures getting minimally invasive thus, requiring less healing time and imposing lower risk to practitioners and patients alike. Low level minimally invasive laser therapy devices are highly preferred due to less exposure of laser light to the body thus, having less side effects like swelling or redness. Minimally invasive laser therapy devices are highly being used for cosmetic purposes. Number of plastic surgeries performed globally have increased drastically, contributing to the market growth for minimally invasive laser therapy devices. Growing number of healthcare facilities like cosmetic clinics and ophthalmic clinics owing it to increased government support and funding are also extensively contributing to the market growth.Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market: Region-wise OutlookGeography wise, Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices market is divided into eight regions viz. North-America, Asia- Pacific excluding China & Japan, China, Japan, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Middle-East & Africa. North Americas Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices market is expanding because of growing popularity of minimally laser therapy devices and it will remain dominant over the period of forecast due to growing need of treating patients using minimally invasive techniques. Rise in incidence of dermatology, eye and dental related ailments also contributes to the share in the region. Europes Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices market is also expected to grow at a significant rate due to increased healthcare expenditure and increased acceptance of these novel laser techniques. Asia-Pacifics Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices market is anticipated to grow at a decent rate due to low availability of minimally invasive laser therapy devices.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7700 Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices Market: Key Market ParticipantsSome of the market participants in the Global Minimally Invasive Laser Therapy Devices market identified across the value chain include: TE Connectivity, BTL, Boston Scientific Corporation, Medtronic, Wytech Industries, Inc., Norwood Medical, Freudenberg Medical and Cynosure.
The field of dermo-cosmetics is a branch of science that combines cosmetology and dermatology. Simply put, it refers to specialized skin care products produced in consultation with dermatologists to improve the appearance of skin and treat various skin issues. Dermo-cosmetics differ from regular skin care products because they work deeply into the dermis, the second layer of the epidermis. Since the molecules in dermo-cosmetic products are finer, they are better able to penetrate skin cells.

Dermocosmetic Products Market

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The Dermocosmetic Products Market Report is an in-depth study of the state of the industry. This report includes research on marketing and development strategies along with a product portfolio of leading companies. It also includes profiles of leading companies and brands that are leading the market with recent developments, product launches, joint ventures, mergers and criticisms.Request for sample copy @: https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=227547 Top manufacturers of this report includes: Nykaa, Eau Thermale Avene, Bioderma Laboratore Dermatologique, Galderma, Ducray Laboratoires Dermatologiques, La Roche-Posay, Sebapharma, URIAGE, Kanebo, NUXE, Johnson & Johnson, L'Oreal S.A., Procter & Gamble Co, Unilever, La prairie, AmorePacific, Shiseido.This is anticipated to drive the global Dermocosmetic Products market over the forecast period. This research report covers the market landscape and its progress prospects in the near future. After studying key companies, the report focuses on the new entrants contributing to the growth of the Dermocosmetic Products sector. Most companies in the global Dermocosmetic Products market are currently adopting new technological trends in the Dermocosmetic Products sector.Market Segment Split by Type:Dry SkinOily SkinCombination SkinSensitive SkinMarket Segment Split by Application:TonerLotionCreamEnssenceOthersRequest for Discount on this Premium Report@: https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=227547 Dermocosmetic Products market reports include key showcase sections and sub-segments, evolving market patterns and elements, changes in free market activity, market opening quantification through Dermocosmetic Products market forecasts, and current patterns. Competitive knowledge, opportunity mapping for innovative leaps.Main reason for purchasing reports: Describe and forecast the Dermocosmetic Products Market by value, process, product type, and industry. Strategically profile key individuals, comprehensively analyze market position in terms of rankings and core competencies, and elaborate on the competitive landscape of market leaders. Describe markets and forecast by value across different sectors by North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC) and other regions (RoW). Provides detailed information on key drivers (drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges) that affect MID market growth. Market development: Comprehensive information on emerging markets. This report analyzes several trocars markets in different regions. Strategically analyze micro markets in relation to individual growth trends, prospects and contributions to the overall market.Enquiry before Buying @:Table of Contents:Global Dermocosmetic Products Market Research Report 2019-20251: Dermocosmetic Products Market Overview2: Global Economic Impact on Industry3: Dermocosmetic Products Market Competition by Manufacturers4: Global Production, Revenue (Value) by Region5: Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions6: Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type. TOC Continued.
Some of the key players present in global particle size analyzers market are Malvern Panalytical Ltd, Angstrom Advanced Inc., Fritsch GmbH, Fluid Imaging Technologies, Particle Measuring Systems, Shimadzu Corporation, Anton Paar GmbH, HORIBA, Ltd., Hosokawa, Haver & Boecker Ohg, Brookhaven Instruments Corporation among others.

Particle Size Analyzers Market

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Future Market InsightsU.S. Office616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWeb: https://www.futuremarketinsights.comSEO Manager3479183531

Particle size analyzers are instrument used to distribute the sizes in a sample of liquid or solid particulate material where it is measured and reported. Particle size analyzers are important for characterizing wide range of product performance factors. There are various methods to measure the particle size such as some are used for the wide range of samples while some are used for the specific applications. Some industries such as pharmaceuticals, life science and food and beverages uses particle size analyzers to determine the efficiency of the manufacturing process and performance of final product. Dynamic light scattering analyzers are usually used to measure particles in solutions with 0.6nm to 6um range and laser diffraction analyzers are used for particles within the range of 10nm to 3mm. particle size analyzers are used in pharmaceutical industries as smaller the particles larger is their specific surface area which quickly they get dissolved. In medical injection, the size of the particle is determined how easily they passed through or penetrate in the capillaries and blood vessels. Use of particle size analyzers improve the lab productivity, reduce downtime, improve analysis and enhance both product quality and process consistency.Particle Size Analyzers: Market DynamicsRising applications of nanotechnology primarily drive the market of particle size analyzers. Various semiconductors components are manufactured with the help of particle size analyzers. Emergence of different new techniques in determining the size of particles and size distribution is expected to boost the market of particle size analyzers globally. However, stringent regulations and various drawback associated with different technologies for the distribution with particles hinder the growth of the particle size analyzers market.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7120 Particle Size Analyzers: SegmentationThe global Particle Size Analyzers market is segmented by drug type and distribution channel:Particle Size Analyzers market Segmentation by technology typeDynamic Light ScatteringLaser Particle AnalyzersImagingCoulter PrincipleNanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA)OthersParticle Size Analyzers market Segmentation by End UserBiotechnological CompaniesPharmaceutical CompaniesContract Research OrganizationsAcademic Research InstitutesParticle Size Analyzers: OverviewOn the basis of technology, the particle size analyzers is segment into Dynamic Light Scattering,Laser Particle Analyzers, Imaging, Coulter Principle, Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) and others, among which dynamic light scattering accounts for the largest revenue owing to increasing usage of dynamic light scattering technology followed by laser particle analyzers over the forecast period. On the basis of end users, particle size analyzers are segmented into biotechnological companies, pharmaceutical companies, contract research organizations, academic research institutes, among which pharmaceuticals companies accounts for the largest revenue share owing to increase in research and development and production of various drug owing to increase in prevalence of chronic disease.Particle Size Analyzers: Region-wise OutlookOn the basis of geography, global particle size analyzers market is segmented into seven key regions viz. North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. North America is projected to hold largest shares in the global particle size analyzers owing to increasing spending in research and development and presence of large number of key players. Europe particle size analyzers market accounts for the second largest share owing to increasing in academic research and institutes. Asia Pacific region is anticipated to be the fastest growing region in particle size analyzers market owing to increase in investment in the research and development, improvement in healthcare infrastructure. Rapid growth of Asia Pacific particle size analyzers market is owing to the increase outsourcing of pharmaceuticals manufacturing in China and India.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7120 Particle Size Analyzers: Key PlayersSome of the key players present in global particle size analyzers market are Malvern Panalytical Ltd, Angstrom Advanced Inc., Fritsch GmbH, Fluid Imaging Technologies, Particle Measuring Systems, Shimadzu Corporation, Anton Paar GmbH, HORIBA, Ltd., Hosokawa, Haver & Boecker Ohg, Brookhaven Instruments Corporation among others.
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PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 11:53:56

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Research Report Insights (RRI)42 Joseph StreetPort carling P0B 1J0Muskoka, Ontario1Phone - +1-631-721-4201Website: https://www.researchreportinsights.comEmail: sales@researchreportinsights.comT.L6317214201

Evaporative air coolers incorporate evaporative cooling and are used to lower temperatures in the areas where these are installed, thereby finding widespread adoption in both indoor and outdoor applications across the global residential and commercial sector. Over the years, the demand for evaporative air coolers has witnessed a surge owing to several factors. Global warming is one of the main factors fueling growth in demand for evaporative air coolers.This industry is constantly evolving with the advent of new players along with existing established companies foraying into this space. A few years ago, the air cooler market was largely dominated by the unorganised players as spending too much on air coolers wasn't considered necessary.The portable evaporative air cooler market is segmented based on product type, end users, and geography. Based on product type, the market is bifurcated into automatic and semi-automatic. Based on end users, the market is divided into industry, commercial and home. Based on geography, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and LAMEA.Request For Report Sample: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124622/Portable-Evaporative-Air-Cooler-Market Asia and the Middle East have witnessed substantial climate change in the last few years, thereby impacting the lives of people living in these regions. This has increased the demand for air cooling systems in both the commercial as well as the residential sector. There is also a strong awareness of the use of sustainable products in these regions. Evaporative air coolers offer natural and energy saving solutions that are also cost effective. This has resulted in an increased demand especially from the rising middle class in these regions. Several domestic manufacturers operating in the Asian and Middle Eastern markets are slowly expanding their brands in the international market as well, thereby broadening the scope for exports of evaporative air coolers.Air coolers have proved to be one of the superior alternatives to air conditioners (lower life-cycle cost and enhanced flexibility). Rising prosperity and increasing environmental consciousness is likely to generate attractive air cooler market growth over the foreseeable future. The Government of India launched an initiative of 'Make in India' in 2015 that paved the way for air cooler manufacturers to produce their products locally.Request Report For Toc: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/TOC/120124622/Portable-Evaporative-Air-Cooler-Market While this development no doubt gives a major incentive to global as well as in-house air cooler manufacturers, there are many benefits associated with Make in India that can add greater value to the entire business chain. One of the most important factors that have traditionally influenced the countrys evaporative air coolers market has been the value-for-money mindset of the Indian consumer.Key players operating in the market includeSPX Cooling Technologies, Inc., Kelvion Holding GmbH, Baltimore Aircoil Company, Inc., Evapco, Inc., Ebara Refrigeration Equipment & Systems Co. Ltd., Luoyang Longhua Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation Co., Ltd., Xiamen MingguangMachinery Manufacturing Co., Ltd., Lanpec Technologies Ltd-A, Condair Group AG, and Honeywell International Inc.Report Analysis: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124622/Portable-Evaporative-Air-Cooler-Market
Some of the key players in the global posterior chamber lens market are Alcon, Inc., Abbott Medical Optics, Inc, Bausch & Lomb Incorporated, Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, Rayner Intraocular Lenses Limited, Eyekon Medical, Lenstec, HumanOptics AG, STAAR Surgical Company and Hoya Corporation.

Posterior Chamber Lens Market

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 09:07:33

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# 685 Words

Future Market InsightsU.S. Office616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWeb: https://www.futuremarketinsights.comSEO Manager3479183531

The space present in the eye between back side of iris and front side of lens is known as posterior chamber. Posterior chamber lens is a medical device which is implanted inside the eye, mostly after cataract surgery. Cataract is clouding of eye lens which leads to blurry vision. Posterior chamber lens act as either replacement or supportive lens for natural crystalline lens of eye. Mainly cataract, refractive error (ametropia) are conditions affecting eyes which require posterior chamber lenses for clear vision. Posterior chamber lenses are meant to be implanted permanently placed in between iris and lens of eye. Posterior chamber lens correct the refractive errors and blurry vision. Prevalence of blindness due to cataract is very high in developing countries due to unaffordability of surgery. Cataract is second cause of blindness worldwide.Posterior Chamber Lens Market: Drivers and RestraintsCataract is the most common age-related eye condition which leads to blindness if left untreated. Mostly posterior chamber lenses are used to treat cataract. Worlds aging population can act as a driver of posterior chamber lens market. Posterior chamber lens market is further driven by increasing prevalence of refractive error and cataract amongst the global population. In United States only 17.2% population over 40 years of age is suffering from cataract and 5.1% people have aphakia. Reduced incision size, and initiated biomaterial diversification act as driver for posterior chamber lens market. Advancement in surgery methods make it easier to use lenses which enhances growth of posterior chamber lens market. High success rate of implants after surgery with minimum invasive solution is important factor for posterior chamber lens market growth. Rising government initiatives for the eradication of blindness has driven posterior chamber lens market. With posterior chamber lens problem such as risk of secondary cataract have been minimized. Cost of surgery and lack of awareness in developing countries is the major barrier in posterior chamber lens market. Operative complications and post-operative keratitis are some of restraints in Posterior chamber lens market.Posterior Chamber Lens Market: SegmentationThe global posterior chamber lens market is classified on the basis of product type, material type, end user and regionBased on the product type posterior chamber lens market is segmented into following:Monofocal posterior chamber lensMultifocal posterior chamber lensAccommodating posterior chamber lensPhakic posterior chamber lensOthersBased on material type posterior chamber lens market is segmented into following:Polymethyl methacrylateFoldable hydrophilic acrylicHydrophilic AcrylicSiliconCollamerOthersBased on end user posterior chamber lens market is segmented into following:HospitalsAmbulatory Surgery CentersPosterior Chamber Lens Market: OverviewPosterior chamber lens market is expected to grow significantly due to aging population and increasing incidence of cataract and refractive error. Availability of advanced method of surgery for cataract accompanied with new type of lens developed attributing to the growth of posterior chamber lens market. By product type monofocal posterior chamber lens segment is dominating posterior chamber lens market attributing to low cost and high public acceptance. By material type foldable hydrophilic acrylic is the most dominating segment in posterior chamber lens market due to comparatively easier intraoperative handling. By end user type hospitals are dominating segment due to high number of surgeries.Posterior Chamber Lens Market: Regional OverviewOn the basis of regional presence, the global posterior chamber lens market is divided into eight key regions- North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding China & Japan, China, Japan, and the Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the global posterior chamber lens market due aging population and available reimbursements. Asia Pacific posterior chamber lens market is expected show high growth with improving healthcare and emerging economies like India and China. High prevalence and growing awareness about curative treatment in developing countries expected to drive the global posterior chamber lens market.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7043 Posterior Chamber Lens Market: Key playersSome of the key players in the global posterior chamber lens market are Alcon, Inc., Abbott Medical Optics, Inc, Bausch & Lomb Incorporated, Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, Rayner Intraocular Lenses Limited, Eyekon Medical, Lenstec, HumanOptics AG, STAAR Surgical Company and Hoya Corporation.
The key participants in the Pupillometer market mainly include Neuroptics, Inc., Luneau Technology Operations SAS, U.S ophthalmic LLC, and others. Companies are mainly focused on R&D to strengthen product development.

Pupillometer Market

PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 10:16:11

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Future Market InsightsU.S. Office616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWeb: https://www.futuremarketinsights.comSEO Manager3479183531

Pupillometer is the portable instrument used for measuring pupil diameter. It is a handheld device that provides pupillary measurements qualitatively by using light stimulus. Pupillometry is a study of the cognitive functions of the pupil. Pupillometer provides pupillary size before/after the light stimulus, neuro papillary index, the percentage change of pupil and velocity of pupil constriction. Pupillometer is a portable optical scanner that is used to stimulate the eye with light and response is taken as digital images which are analyzed to obtain a measurement of human pupil diameter. Pupillometers are integrated with NPi algorithms that are used to quantify pupillary reactivity. In most of the pupillometers, subjectivity was removed from the qualitative measurement. The individual pupil measurements taken from pupillometer were compared against the standard for determination of deviation. Pupillometers are a non-invasive and safe assessment of pupil and it is used mostly in neurological assessment. Most of the pupillometers are used for pupil monitoring and utilizes infrared lights to stimulate the pupil. They can record pupil diameter with a frequency of 5 to 60 HZ for monocular and binocular registration respectively.Pupillometer Market: Drivers and RestraintsPupillary reflex is an important factor in the prognosis and management of acute brain injury patients. Neurological assessment is a prerequisite for proper management of brain-related disorders, pupillometers play a vital role in understanding neurology by qualitative assessment of pupils. Thus, the demand for pupillometer is increasing due to increasing prevalence of neurological disorders. Along with these, advancement of technologies led to the development of next-generation pupillometer which is way advanced than traditional pupillometry. Traditional pupillometry was subjected to parallax error and leads to inconsistencies and invariability. It results in high variation in the measurement of the pupil diameters. To overcome the variation in the measurement of pupil diameter, manufacturers increased the investments in innovation and developed the automatic infrared pupillometers. Apart from these, raising awareness regarding the role of pupillometers in assessing the neurology qualitative resulted in the high penetration among the end user segment. All these factors fueled the growth of pupillometer market in the past and are expected to do same in near future.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7114 The high cost of pupillometers affected the penetration in emerging countries which has slightly affected the potential growth of the pupillometer market.Pupillometer Market: SegmentationSegmentation based on End UserHospitalsClinicsAmbulatory Surgical CentersPupillometer Market: Market OverviewGlobal Pupillometer market has witnessed a robust growth due to increasing demand for pupillometers in neurological assessment. Even though the cost of the next generation pupillometers is slightly higher than traditional methods, the adoption rate of pupillometers in developed economies is not affected due to the advantages of the instrument. Pupillometer market has a presence of many players which have a huge market share in developed countries operating at the country level. The key players in the pupillometer market are mainly focused on R&D to accelerate the development due to a limited number of innovating companies. The future of Pupillometer market anticipated with double growth rate during the forecast period.Pupillometer Market: Region-Wise OverviewGlobal pupillometer market is segmented into the following regions - North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding China & Japan, China, Japan and the Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific and Europe is high opportunity market and it offers a high pricing flexibility to the manufacturers. Asia Pacific and Europe hold third and second position in the global pupillometers markets. Even though North America is a matured market in pupillometers, it is still holds major market share in the global pupillometer market mainly due to the high penetration. In North America, the USA is dominating the market due to high adoption among end users. Growth in the Middle East and African region is substantially less when compared to the other regions. However, North America would maintain its position in the pupillometer market, though, we are anticipating developed economies such as Australia to have the highest growth rate in Pupillometer market.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7114 Pupillometer Market: Key ParticipantsThe key participants in the Pupillometer market mainly include Neuroptics, Inc., Luneau Technology Operations SAS, U.S ophthalmic LLC, and others. Companies are mainly focused on R&D to strengthen product development.
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 20:13:31

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BOSTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / March 15, 2019 / The Science Center for Marine Fisheries (SCeMFiS) brings together industry and academia to conduct groundbreaking fisheries research, and is the only research center funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) dedicated exclusively to fisheries science. As a result of its research track record, NSF awarded SCeMFiS a "Phase 2" second 5-year grant to continue its work. This funding shows that SCeMFiS met the high expectations of NSF for Phase 2 approval, a feat that not every Phase 1 center accomplishes.Industry members of SCeMFiS will attend this year's Seafood Expo North America and are available to be interviewed.Factors that contributed to NSF's determination that SCeMFiS merited a Phase 2 award included:Successfully undergoing a vigorous 5-year NSF review that included external reviewers;Ongoing solid support from contributing industry member companies and organizations;An extremely high retention rate of contributing members;The exemplary quality of research conducted by SCeMFiS principal investigators.With its newly approved grant, SCeMFiS plans to use the next 5 years to focus on ways to reduce scientific uncertainty in fisheries science; the effects of climate change on fish stocks and fishing communities; resolving issues between fishing and offshore energy interests; and developing sound ecosystem-based fisheries management.Since its founding in 2013, SCeMFiS has been at the forefront of finfish and shellfish research. Working with members of the fishing industry, SCeMFiS scientists have conducted innovative studies, including producing the first age-frequency distributions for ocean quahog, and being one of the only institutions to study species like chub mackerel and longfin squid."The work of our academic partners at SCeMFiS has been vital in improving our understanding of the species we harvest," said Jeff Reichle, CEO of Lund's Fisheries, which was one of the original members of the SCeMFiS Industry Advisory Board. "The more we know about these species, the better we're able to harvest them sustainably." The SCeMFiS industry members attending the Seafood Expo are committed to continuing this scientific partnership. Industry members on the SCeMFiS Industry Advisory Board review, approve, and fund all SCeMFiS projects, which are selected to fill gaps in data and meet the industry's unfilled scientific needs."In the last five years, we've been able to study and improve the understanding of some of the most pressing scientific issues facing the fishing industry," said Center Director Dr. Eric Powell, of the University of Southern Mississippi, one of the academic members of SCeMFiS. "We are looking forward to continue our collaborative partnerships and tackle the scientific questions affecting fishermen the most." SCeMFiS members will be at the following locations at Seafood Expo North America:Lund's Fisheries: Booth 951Sea Watch International: Booth 423The Town Dock: Booth 2133Seafreeze Ltd.: Booth 2407Bumble BeePRESS CONTACTStove Boat Communications202-844-2502john@ stoveboat.com SCeMFiS industry memberswill be available for interviews at the Seafood ExpoAbout SCeMFiSSCeMFiS utilizes academic and fisheries resources to address urgent scientific problems limiting sustainable fisheries. SCeMFiS develops methods, analytical and survey tools, datasets, and analytical approaches to improve sustainability of fisheries and reduce uncertainty in biomass estimates. SCeMFiS university partners, University of Southern Mississippi (lead institution), and Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, are the academic sites. Collaborating scientists who provide specific expertise in finfish, shellfish, and marine mammal research, come from a wide range of academic institutions including Old Dominion University, Rutgers University, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, University of Maryland, and University of Washington.The need for the diverse services that SCeMFiS can provide to industry continues to grow, which has prompted a steady increase in the number of fishing industry partners. These services include immediate access to science expertise for stock assessment issues, rapid response to research priorities, and representation on stock assessment working groups. Targeted research leading to improvements in data collection, survey design, analytical tools, assessment models, and other needs to reduce uncertainty in stock status and improve reference point goals.SOURCE: Science Center for Marine Fisheries
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 12:48:22

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Allergies is the most common reason for sinus problems. Another common cause of sinusitis is that of dry nose. Dry nose leads to congestion, thickened mucus and worsened sinusitis. Some of the common causes for excessive mucus formation in the upper respiratory tract include, allergies, infection and excessive heat leading to dry nose, sinusitis and other similar problems. One of the earliest records for the use of sinus irrigation systems is found in the ancient Hindu practice of Ayurveda. It was customary to perform jala-neti daily for maintain nasal hygiene.Sinus irrigation can effectively relive symptoms of both chronic and acute sinusitis caused by upper respiratory tract infections such as cold and allergic rhinitis. Sinus irrigation systems are used for flushing the nasal cavity to sooth inflamed tissue and remove allergens and mucous. The Neti pot is the most common type of sinus irrigation systems. It relies on gravity and the head position for the rinsing of the sinus cavity. The Neti pot type of sinus irrigation systems have a long spout attached near the bottom with a handle on the other end. A number of squeeze bottle type of sinus irrigation systems are also available. Similarly, bulb syringe type of sinus irrigation systems are available and are popularly used for infants and children. Some of the latest designs of sinus irrigation systems are motorized and are driven either by electricity or may be battery powered.Request Sample Report@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-7684 However there are a number of precautions that is required during the use of sinus irrigation systems. For an instance, the water used for sinus irrigation must be distilled, sterile or boiled. Another important factor that may negatively impact the use of sinus irrigation systems is not properly cleaning the device regularly. Unsafe water and unclean pots and devices may lead to increasing infections and result in worsening the sinusitis symptoms.Sinus Irrigation Systems Market: Drivers and Restraints-Sinus Irrigation Systems market witnessing the maximum growth in near future owing to increase in patient pool globally. The increased number of allergy cases and the rise in flu and common cold are the major drivers for the growth of the sinus irrigation systems. Low cost and easy portability of Sinus Irrigation Systems make it most suitable to be used in homecare settings. The availability of electric units that make it easier to use in clinics as well as home setting further allows the market to have potential growth during the forecast period.Sinus Irrigation Systems Market: SegmentationOn the basis of type of product, Sinus Irrigation Systems market can be segmented as:Manual Sinus Irrigation SystemsNeti PotsSqueeze BottlesBulb SyringesElectric Sinus Irrigation SystemsBattery Powered Sinus Irrigation SystemsOn the basis of the end user, the Sinus Irrigation Systems market can be segmented as:HospitalsENT clinicsHomecare SettingsSinus Irrigation Systems Market: OverviewGlobal Sinus Irrigation Systems market is expected to gain significant growth rate over the forecast period. Sinus Irrigation Systems is expected to gain high demand in forecast periods due to increasing in patient pool. The increasing patient pool worldwide is mainly due to rising cases of allergy related inflammation and sinus issues that is driving the growth of global Sinus Irrigation Systems market. However the risk of infections is high and may overall hinder the growth of the Sinus Irrigation Systems market.Sinus Irrigation Systems Market: Region-wise OutlookIn terms of geography, Sinus Irrigation Systems market has been divided into eight regions including North- America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Asia- Pacific excluding China & Japan (APECJ), China, Japan, Middle-East & Africa and Latin America. North America is the most dominating market for Sinus Irrigation Systems market due to the rise in per capita expenditure on healthcare and technological advancement. Western European countries such as Germany, France, and the U.K. are top revenue contributing courtiers in Western Europe. The Asia Pacific excluding China and Japan Sinus Irrigation Systems market is expected to expand at fastest growth rate over the forecast period due to increasing local players and fast and increasing adoption of sinus irrigation practice. China is the one of the important revenue contributing country in global Sinus Irrigation Systems market due to the availability of cost-effective Sinus Irrigation Systems and large patient pool in the region.Request to View TOC @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-7684 Sinus Irrigation Systems Market: Key Market ParticipantsExample of some market players participants in global Sinus Irrigation Systems market identify across the value chain are Neilmed Pharmaceuticals Inc., Medtronic Plc., Air Liquide Medical Systems, Medstar Co. Ltd., Sinh2ox Health & Care, Heal Force, Bremed Ltd., CHAMMED, RhinoSystem, Inc., WelbuTech, among others.
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 08:34:45

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Social media refers to the activities which integrate web technology, social interaction, and user-generated content. Social media includes blogs, social networks, photo libraries, virtual worlds, location-based services, and video sharing sites. Worldwide agencies use social media internally and externally to share information, support business processes, and connect people to government, according to The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. As for all records management purposes, capturing and maintaining evidence are key capabilities of such solutions.Social Media Records Management Market: Drivers & RestraintsAccording to a survey by Gartner, 39% of all businesses participating said they do not any form of social media tracking or monitoring in the organization. Among the participating B-2-B firms, 51% said they lacked social media tracking policies and processes. In social media records management, agencies are facing the challenges because of the dynamic and collaborative nature of social media such as recordkeeping in a collaborative environment. Also, the content is located in multiple places and the ownership of data relies on a third party.Social Media Records Management Market: SegmentationThe global social media records management market is classified on the basis of region.Social Media Records Management Market: OverviewDue to the increasing amount of content and activities on social media, documentation of the information which is related to a specific organization becomes increasingly relevant. This covers all platforms where multiple users and organizations interact in a social and unstructured manner which includes large platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn among other social networking websites, and social media content and activities on individual forums, blogs, etc. For the preservation of social media activities, software are designed for capturing a number of scattered blogs or other social media content.Request For Table Of Content @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-2300 Social Media Records Management Market: Region wise OverviewGeographically, global Social Media Records Management market is classified into regions viz. North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, Middle East and Africa (MEA). Social media records management is the application of records management principles to unstructured social media content. Social media allows individuals to create, organize, edit, collaborate, comment on, combine, share content, like content, resulting in the creation of Federal records. The Federal Records Act defines Federal records as any material that is recorded, made or received in the course of Federal business, regardless of its form or characteristics, and is worthy of preservation. Social media content which satisfies the requirements of this definition must be managed according to the applicable laws and regulations. In December 2012, North Carolina state government unveiled a social media archiving platform which is the first of its kinds to offer complete public access to archived social media data and metadata. The Social Media Archive displayed Facebook and Twitter posts from or directed at a handful of agencies initially, but eventually the tool expanded to include more than 130 of the states social media websites. Federal agencies and state and municipal government offices are required to store records of communications so that they will be available for future researchers and can be produced in response to Freedom of Information Act.Social Media Records Management Market: Key PlayersThe key players in global social media records management market are Iron Mountain Incorporated, ArchiveSocial, Qumram AG to name a few.Get Sample Copy of Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2300
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PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 12:32:53

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According to a market report published by Future Market Insights on Global Specialty Silica market in its latest report titled Specialty Silica Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012  2016 and Opportunity Assessment, 2016  2026 The long-term outlook on the global Specialty Silica market remains a sound one, with market value of specialty silica expected to increase at a CAGR of 6.9% during the forecast period (2016  2026) embarking upon a market size around 10 Bn in 2026.Speciality silica predominantly consists of silica (SiO2) and is produced in the coarse form of round pebbles and sawed or trimmed blocks or fine powder which is used as a key additive in formulation of several products and components fabricated in a wide range of end use industries such as automotive, electronics, inks, coatings, personal care products and others.The Specialty Silica market has been analysed on the basis of product type and application. Among the product type, the precipitated type of specialty silica has been found to contribute over 60% of the overall sales of specialty silica and is further expected to grow at a significant CAGR in terms of value over the forecast period by 2026. On the basis of application, currently the specialty silica mainly finds its use in fabrication of automotive tyres and other elastomeric products. Furthermore, the plastics segment is expected to be another high growth market for specialty silica during the forecast period, owing to its multitude of uses in product design enabled with superior performance characteristics.Request Sample Report @ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/REP-GB-577 In terms of the Specialty Silica market outlook and analysis by geographical regions, the Asia Pacific region has been identified as the leading segment in terms of current acquired specialty silica market value share and estimated growth in the future period which has been recorded above global average. The demand of specialty silica is considered to arise mainly from China contributing close to 60% of the global specialty silica market. North America, Japan and Europe are also considered to be the prominent regions of growth in the global specialty silica owing to established manufacturing base with automotive OEMs and ancillaries in particular. The other regions are expected to record moderate growth levels of respective markets of specialty silica in the forecast period.The specialty silica market is susceptible to volatile pricing of raw materials which in turn has also influenced the specialty silica manufacturers to adopt alternative value chain, sales process as well as production technologies of specialty silica reducing production overhead costs, optimizing trade margins and enabling profitability. The specialty silica market has also been governed by regulations based on HSE (Health, Safety and Environment) norms so as to produce specific grades/ forms of specialty silica fully complying with mandatory guidelines.Need more information about Report Methodology@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-577 Specialty Silica Market ParticipantsSome of the market participants identified in the Specialty Silica market are Evonik AG, Akzo Nobel N.V., Cabot Corporation, Wacker Chemie, PPG Industries, Ecolab Inc., and Qindao Makall Group. The market participants of specialty silica market have envisioned two key strategies to fortify their footprint in the target specialty silica market by two methods: 1. Consolidation of market footprint and 2. Vertical/ Horizontal Integration to streamline their business operations in a more efficient manner. The former type has been achieved through setting business in untapped specialty silica market through collaborative tie-ups with regional enterprise or increasing product portfolio of specialty silica, increased spending in research and development, strengthening of sales and distribution network; whereas the latter type has involved mergers and acquisitions of small business units. For e.g. Evonik AG expanded its production capacities of specialty silica at its sites in Thailand and Japan during 2013 and 2014 respectively. In another key development, PPG Industries in 2015, announced a partnership with Goodyear Tire & Rubber company for supply of its Agilon specialty performance silica to produced enhanced tyres to increase fuel efficiency of vehicles.
PR-Inside.com: 2019-03-15 12:14:34

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Research Report Insights (RRI)42 Joseph StreetPort carling P0B 1J0Muskoka, Ontario1Phone - +1-631-721-4201Website: https://www.researchreportinsights.comEmail: sales@researchreportinsights.comT.L6317214201

The real-time monitoring and alarm systems reduce complications and enable clinicians to avoid vital sign deviations. Remote patient data accessibility accompanied by reduced clinical decision time is another advantage. The execution of the system enhances the overall care efficiency. Due to the installation of the equipment about 27% reduction in hospital mortality was achieved in 2010 at Sentara Hospital, Virginia as per the Critical Care Journal.Tele-ICU is a network of computerized audio-visual communication that link critical care doctors and nurses (intensivists) to intensive care units (ICUs) in different hospitals regardless of distance. Tele-ICU intensivists give instantaneous services to multiple care centers located in any part the world. Globaltele-intensive care services market is enriched with fruitful information, statistics, and data, which holds the potential to benefit readers. It provides a basic overview of the tele-intensive care services market including definition, classifications, applications, and industry chain structure.The centralization of the massive amount of patient data will aid the interest of healthcare professionals in tele-intensive care services. The decreased hospital stay and the reduced risk of hospital acquired infections (HAIs) are some of the other factors encouraging the adoption of tele-intensive care services.Request For Report Sample: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upsample/120124623/Tele-Intensive-Care-Unit-(ICU)-Market The adoption of tele-intensive care services helps medical practitioners to monitor any important signs in patients and also receive alerts in case of deviations in the set health parameters of a patient. Moreover, the implementation of tele-intensive care services prevents hospital-setting related issues from occurring.Based on components, the tele-ICU market is bifurcated into hardware and software components. Based on products, hardware components are further sub-segmented into computer systems, communication lines, physiological monitors, therapeutic devices, video feeds, and display panels.Request Report For Toc: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/TOC/120124623/Tele-Intensive-Care-Unit-(ICU)-Market Hardware components dominated the segment with over 80.0% share in 2015. The hardware components are utilized in larger volumes and the costs associated with them are high, thereby dominating this segment.The intensivist model facilitates the full-time intensive care specialist to handle the tele- Intensive Care Unit system. This offers efficiency in terms of clinical decisions and avoids complications. The availability of these intensivists over the forecast period is anticipated to rise, propelling the growth of this segment.key vendors of tele-ICU Market Include UPMC Italy, INTELEICU, iMDsoft, INOVA, and Philips. The business and financial overview, recent products and developments, and the strategies implemented by each of the companies are given in reportReport Analysis: https://www.researchreportinsights.com/report/upcomming/120124623/Tele-Intensive-Care-Unit-%28ICU%29-Market
After more than six decades of production, Nigeria still has over 41 billion barrels of crude oil reserves untapped, the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Maikanti Baru, has disclosed.

Nigeria discovered crude oil in 1956 at Oloibiri in the present-day Bayelsa State. Production began a year later in 1957, with the countrys first cargo of crude oil export in February 1958.

Also, Mr Baru said about 319 trillion standard cubic feet of gas is yet to be discovered in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The bulk of the gas could be found in Nigeria, often described by oil industry experts as a gas province with little oil.

The countrys gas reserves are reputed to be ten times as much as oil. The volume of gas so far produced is only in association with oil production.

The NNPC GMD spoke on Wednesday at a special session on Africa, entitled: Foundations for New Investment at the ongoing 19th CERAWeek Conference in Houston, United States.

The NNPC spokesperson, Ndu Ughamadu, sent the presentation to PREMIUM TIMES on Friday.

He said available information showed the African global crude oil and gas outlook remained positive and on the upward trajectory, with the West African sub-region holding the ace in offshore deepwater exploration hotspots.

For instance, Mr Baru said a prolific one billion barrels of crude oil find was recently made at the Owowo field, offshore Nigeria.

He called on foreign investors to take advantage of the countrys potentials and explore the Nigerian Ultra-Deep terrain he described as largely untested.

In Nigeria, NNPC is currently drilling Kolmani River-II Well in the Benue Trough, one of Nigerias several frontier inland Basins, with about 400 billion cubic feet of gas expected to be encountered, he told his audience.

The NNC GMD also used the occasion to make a case for the domestication of oil and gas technologies within the African continent.

It is my belief that domesticating these cutting-edge technologies will develop the capacity of our people, improve our economies and emplace our national oil and gas companies on the path of sustainable growth and development, he said.

According to him, African countries must react positively to the new reality by deploying new policies and stabilize their business environment to attract meaningful investments.

For Nigeria, he said critical to achieving that goal was the passage of the four components of the Petroleum Industry Governance Bill (PIGB).

The new petroleum industry law is expected to usher in new legislation that will not only enhance the investment climate in the country but also change the fortunes of the nations oil and gas business for the better.

Mr Baru informed delegates at the conference that the NNPC was opening up its business environment to ensure transparency and accountability in its dealings with all those interested in doing business in Nigeria.

He also lauded the federal government for its peace initiatives in the Niger Delta communities which he said had seen the country hitting very high oil and gas production figures in recent years.

Ministers and high-level energy executives from Mali, Somalia, Namibia and Uganda were among the panelists at the Special Session.

Organised by IHS Markit, CERAWeek is a global platform on energy trends and public policy where over 4,000 oil and gas experts convene annually to debate the future of oil, natural gas, renewable energy, power and new technologies.
Facebook says it has introduced Gaming Tab Feature, in the main navigation bar, for users to have fun.

Facebooks Vice President, Gaming, Vijaye Raji, said the gaming feature was with the aim of making it easier for people to find and connect around their favourite games, streamers and groups, among others.

Mr Raji said, The gaming tab is part of Facebooks recent design update to provide personalised shortcuts for people to easily access the communities and content they interact with most.

The Facebook Gaming tab is a feed where users can quickly and easily find content that matters most to them, play games, watch gaming videos, as well as connect with gaming groups.

New features in the Facebook Gaming tab expand on the gaming video destination we announced last year.

As we learn from the community, we will test new experiences in the tab, add more types of gaming content and improve our content recommendations over time, he said in a statement on Friday in Lagos.

Mr Raji said Facebook would start rolling out the gaming tab to a small subset of the more than 700 million people who enjoyed gaming on platform each month.

Over time, we will expand access to more gaming enthusiasts. People who dont see the tab in their main navigation bar can find it by going to the Bookmarks menu.

We are also continuing to beta test a standalone Facebook Gaming app on Android, which includes more features than you will find in the Facebook Gaming tab.

We are getting feedback from the gaming community as we consider further roll-out plans.

All of our work on the Facebook Gaming team adds up to helping build the worlds gaming community, a place for everyone to enjoy and experience games together, he said.

(NAN)
Of the 29 governorship elections held last Saturday across Nigeria, seven are yet to be concluded. Six of the seven were formally declared inconclusive elections. The last, Rivers, governed by Nigerias largest opposition party, PDP, has simply been halted with the electoral commission, INEC, unsure of how to proceed.

Perhaps coincidentally, of the six states where elections were declared inconclusive, the PDP was leading in five (Adamawa, Bauchi, Benue, Kano, and Sokoto). Nigerias ruling party, APC, was in the lead in Plateau.

The seeming disadvantage of the PDP in the inconclusive elections has caused leaders of the party to raise eyebrows, accusing the electoral commission of bias.

The National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan, on Monday accused INEC of being overtly partisan and surrendering its independence to the ruling APC by declaring governorship elections in states where the PDP was in clear lead as inconclusive.

Learning From History

Unarguably, the PDP has every reason to be worried. During last years governorship election in Osun State, the PDP was leading the APC until INEC declared the elections inconclusive.

In the first ballot, the PDP candidate, Ademola Adeleke, won majority votes of 254,698 votes while Gboyega Oyetola of the APC came a close second with 254,345 votes.

Mr Adelekes margin of lead, 354 votes was lower than the cancelled votes which were 3,498. Hence the re-run in seven polling units.

Gboyega Oyetola, Governor of Osun State.

By the time supplementary elections were held in the affected seven polling units in the state, the ruling government ensured the militarisation of the process. Journalists and observers were denied access to the crucial polling units while armed thugs determined who voted in some of the units during the supplementary election. The supplementary poll was condemned by virtually all credible local and international observers.

At the end of the supplementary election, the PDPs initial victory had been upturned and the APC candidate, Gboyega Oyetola, was declared the winner of the poll. At the end of the tally of votes, the APC candidate scored a total of 255,505 votes while the PDP candidate scored a total of 255,023 votes.

Although the PDP and its candidate, Ademola Adeleke, are still challenging the APC victory at the election tribunal, the experience in Osun has made the party more warry of inconclusive elections.

INECs Inconsistency

The major reason INEC declared the 2019 governorship election in the six states inconclusive is because the votes cancelled in each of the six states is more than the margin between the leading candidates and the runner-up.

In Adamawa, for instance, PDPs Ahmadu Fintiri got 367,471 votes, while the APCs Jibrila Bindow, the incumbent governor, got 334,995 votes. The margin of 32,476 votes is less than the cancelled votes of 40,988.

INFOGRAPH: PDP & APC VOTES IN STATES INEC DECLARED ELECTIONS INCONCLUSIVE. [Infograph by: George Kaduna]

Dubbed the Margin of Lead Principle, this rule is contained in Sections 26 and 53 of the Electoral Act and paragraph 41(e) and 43(b) of the INEC Regulations and Guidelines.

Therefore, supplementary elections will be held in polling units where elections were cancelled or did not hold.

However, INEC has refused to ensure a total application of this principle across the board.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the electoral commission jettisoned it in Abia where Orji Kalu of the APC was declared the winner of a senatorial election despite that his margin of victory was less than the cancelled vote.

Orji Uzor Kalu

Perhaps coincidentally, the PDP was also the victim in the Abia case and its candidate who was declared runner up to Mr Kalu, Mao Ohuabunwa, has vowed to challenge the victory at the election tribunal.

PDPs cry baseless

The APC, in its reaction to the complaints of the PDP regarding the inconclusive elections, says the opposition partys claims are baseless.

PDP only wants things to be done to favour her own interest. But for us in APC, we always subdue our interest to that of the National, Lanre Issa-Onilu, the APC spokesperson said.

National interests supersedes all other interest. The questions we should be asking now is what does the law say, have INEC complied with the law?

Whether PDP is leading in 10 states or APC leading in five states is irrelevant. If there is no evidence that INEC has broken the law, then where is the cry coming from. PDP should stop asking this country to break the law so that it can achieve its objective.

The APCs stance is perhaps buttressed by the fact that it is not only governorship elections that were declared inconclusive.

After the February 23 national elections, INEC declared seven senatorial elections and 24 federal constituency elections inconclusive across 14 states. The supplementary elections in the affected areas were held on March 9 before eventual winners were declared.

Three Area Council chairmanship elections in Abuja were also declared inconclusive.

The 2019 election is also not the first time INEC will declare elections inconclusive. It did so in five states (Imo, Abia, Taraba, Kogi and Bayelsa states) in 2015.

However, the number of inconclusive elections in 2019 is more than at any other time since 1999.

Inconclusive National Electoral Commission?

The House of Representatives on Wednesday debated the spate of inconclusive elections recorded in the just concluded polls.

The lawmakers urged INEC not to subvert the will of Nigerians by declaring elections inconclusive.

Sunday Karimi (PDP Kogi) who moved the motion said prior to the 2015 governorship election in Kogi, there were very few cases of inconclusive elections and reruns.

He said the frequent cases of inconclusive elections in the last four years had made some Nigerians refer to the electoral umpire as Inconclusive National Electoral Commission.

INEC defends position

Despite the criticisms it has faced on the matter, INEC says it has done no wrong by declaring elections inconclusive.

Inconclusive election is part of our democratic process, INEC national commissioner, Festus Okoye, said on Channels Television Tuesday.

It is just and equitable and have been embedded in our electoral guidelines to make sure that everybody is giving a voice.

It will not be right if for instance a particular candidate who knows he is not strong in one area and goes there to disrupt elections and a supplementary election is not conducted there.

The official also explained how the commission determines an inconclusive election.

If we have over voting in any polling unit in which the number of votes cast is more than the number of registered voters, the results will be cancelled and another poll will take place.

The commission also cancels polls if there are violent disruptions of the process. We are going to redeploy and conclude elections in those areas.

If on account of our own logistics, we are unable to deploy in some areas, it will be unjust to deny the people the right to vote. We will go back, he said.

Mr Okoye earlier explained the commissions helplessness in cases, such as Orji Kalus, where the margin of lead principle is not applied.

He told PREMIUM TIMES the commission was helpless when a winner had already been declared.

He said when results are erroneously declared, the commission cannot exercise discretion, but a victim could approach the court for urgent redress.

INEC must sit up  Experts

Idayat Hassan, the director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CCD), explained that the trend of inconclusive election and inconsistencies of INEC in applying the rule is making Nigerians lose confidence in the electoral process.

The fact is that the political class have perfected this as a craft. Its another rigging mechanism they use to bend wheel in their own favour.

Idayat Hassan, Director Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD)

They always ensure they disrupt elections in oppositions strongholds with the hope INEC will cancel the process in those areas. Its more of an intent for the political class.

You will find out that over 100,000 cancelled votes were cancelled in some of the states. The rerun always favours the candidate with the political might so INEC must be consistent in determining whether or not an election be declared inconclusive, she noted.

Austin Aigbe, a senior programme manager of the CDD, expressed concern on how the reruns would be conducted.

He said candidates who control state security apparatus always have an upper hand of using such machinery to militarise the process during supplementary elections.

We saw that happen in Osun rerun, he said.

While the PDP has made a determination to protest the trend, Rafiq Raji, a political analyst said it might be more important for the party to put in greater resources and efforts towards winning the supplementary elections.

In any case, if it has evidence of wrongdoing, the courts are also at the disposal of its candidates, Mr Raji said.

What is abundantly clear is that the quality of the 2019 elections would have been greatly enhanced had the amended electoral law been assented to by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Now that he has won re-election, Mr Buhari should do the great service of, first, signing the amended electoral bill that was forwarded to him ahead of the 2019 polls, before the end of the current legislative term.
Dominion Anosike, the collation officer of Tafawa Balewa Local Government Area in Bauchi State during last Saturdays governorship election has written to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) asking to be allowed to testify about what led to the cancellation of the results from the local government.

The result from Tafawa Balewa was rejected by the states returning officer, Muhammed Kyari, because it was not recorded on the official return sheet. Mrs Anosike, a lecturer at the federal polytechnic in Bauchi, had explained that thugs snatched the authentic result sheet after they disrupted the collation process at the local government level.

But Mr Kyari argued that Mrs Anosike did not seek his approval as required by INECs guideline before inputting the result in another form; thus he could not accept the result.

In a letter to the chairman of INEC, Mahmood Yakubu, dated March 13, 2019, Mrs Anosike said she was ready to testify to an investigative committee set up by the electoral commission to review what happened during the collation. She, however, said she would be only available to give her testimony in the Abuja as she has been threatened with instant death if she was found in or around Bauchi.

I superintended over the above election in Tafawa Balewa LGA as the Returning Officer and I believe that there will be need for your committee to find out from me what transpired at the collation centre that led to the cancellation of the result by the Resident Electoral Commissioner for Bauchi State, she wrote.

The purpose of this letter to your good offices, is to indicate my desire to appear before the team in another location, preferably Abuja- as doing that in Bauchi State would constitute a threat to my life, as I have already been threatened with instant death, should I be found anywhere in or near Bauchi State.

Mrs Dominion Anosike

Though INEC is yet to officially announce the outcome of its investigation, PREMIUM TIMES has learnt that the commission intends to regenerate the result from the local government using duplicate result sheets from polling units and wards in the area.

INEC has fixed March 23 for supplementary elections in some polling units in Bauchi to conclude the governorship election that was declared inconclusive. Similar supplementary elections are to be held in Adamawa, Benue, Kano, Plateau and Sokoto.

Before the declaration of the Bauchi governorship as inconclusive, the candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party was leading the incumbent APC governor with 469,512 votes to 465,453 votes.
A Nigerian journalist, Ruona Meyer, has called out Olufunke Phillips, the digital manager of Lagos State Governor-elect, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, for being a fugitive after being charged for cocaine possession.

Ms Meyer made the disclosures on Friday morning via posts she made on her Facebook and Twitter pages

Ms Phillips, who is also a popular social and political commentator on social media, has declined to comment on the disclosures.

Ms Phillips (full name: Philip Esther Olufunke) was charged by the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) with illegal possession of 3.14 kilogrammes of cocaine in 2007.

She was arraigned before Justice P.I Ajoku of the Lagos Division of the Federal High Court in 2007 but she, alongside 25 others absconded after being granted bail by the judge.

The case seemed to have been forgotten until she publicly fell out with Ms Meyer, who holds a dual Nigerian-German citizenship, brought it back to the fore.

Ms Meyer is accusing Ms Phillips of intellectual property theft.

Contacted Friday morning, Jonah Achema, the NDLEA spokesperson, requested for Ms Phillips details so he could check their records.

According to Ms Meyer, the two former associates had teamed up to establish The Beverage Space, a website that focuses on alcohol consumption, years ago.

She said she brought Ms. Phillips onboard because she needed a face for the brand since she wasnt based in Nigeria at the time, adding that she solely funded the project.

Ms Meyer, however, said she pulled the plug on the venture after her background checks revealed her partner as a fugitive.

But years later, Ms Phillips began her own website which she renamed The Beverage Room based on the same ideas.

The website is currently being run by Ms Phillips and commands a large following on social media. The group currently boasts over 82,000 followers on Facebook alone.

In a Facebook post on Friday, Ms Meyer explained that she was making a public disclaimer to fully dissociate herself from any from business dealings she had with Ms Phillips in 2015 and 2016.

A Nigerian journalist, Ruona Meyer

I terminated our business dealings in 2016 after I found out @FunkePhillips is facing cocaine smuggling charges (with a 2009 court case); and on 4 July 2011, @ndlea_nigeria listed her as skipping bail, Ms Meyers Facebook post read.

Ms Meyer, an ex- BBC Pidgin journalist, also challenged her erstwhile business partner to take down the website or face her in court.

To back her claims, Ms Meyer also shared receipts of her payments for logo design, website hosting. She also expressed her disapproval of Ms Phillipss continued claims to be the owner of the business.

She explained, I handled the blog, edited written copy, tapped my contacts in Corporate Communications, PR & media in general, to boost our networks. Funke Phillips had no money, so I handled practically all costsincluding domain hosting, calls to contacts, sending proposals for sponsored events planning hangouts, generating content ideas and even doing interviews from Germany with my Nigerian contacts.

Soon, we were about to get into signing partnerships, when my manager in Germany reminded me to do a character check on Funke Phillips. I remembered Id heard some absurd rumours and went online to check.

Drug traffickers on the run.

The report stated that the information that Funke and other alleged drug barons were on the loose was corroborated by then @ndlea_nigeria spokesperson Mitchell Ofoyeju (@mitchelljnr) cc @dg_ndlea.

Ms Meyer also shared Ms Phillips case file number and photo on Facebook on Friday.

During a chat with PREMIUM TIMES, Ms Meyer explained the reason why she decided to publicly dissociate herself from her one-time business partner.

So I am not asking for money, or care what Nigeria does to her or not. After all, she has skipped bail for years and is not exactly hiding.

Drug traffickers on the run.

I care because I am held to a higher standard, personally, family-wise, and as a citizen of Germany. I would be a pariah, unworthy of any semblance of public life if I were ever associated with a drug-smuggling criminal, who also skipped bail. So I have to disclaim it. Publicly too.

Ms Phillips, who is also a popular social and political commentator on Facebook, has however kept mum on the issue. Efforts by this newspaper to get her own side of the story have been unsuccessful as phone calls and text messages to her have been unanswered.

Read the full post by Mrs Meyer below.

============================

Im making this PUBLIC disclaimer to FULLY dissociate myself from business dealings I had with Olufunke Phillips in 2015/2016, which I terminated in 2016, after I found out @FunkePhillips is facing COCAINE smuggling charges (with a 2009 court case); and on 4 July 2011, @ndlea_nigeria listed her as skipping bail. Link here, full screenshots in comments.

In 2015, I originated and conceptualised a blog and event portal on the business of drinking, from a female perspective. I needed a face for it, as I was not based in Nigeria. This is where Funke Phillips came in. I later called it The Beverage Space.

I set up all email, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook accounts, paid a designer to make a logo (seen here for August 2015  mail of her choosing logo), everything. All Funke Phillips had to do was go to events/bars, send in little notes, writings.

I handled the blog, edited written copy, tapped my contacts in Corporate Communications, PR & media in general, to boost our networks. Funke Phillips had no money, so I handled practically all costsincluding domain hosting, calls to contacts, sending proposals for sponsored events planning hangouts, generating content ideas and even doing interviews from Germany with my Nigerian contacts.

We started to make progress in a very short time; I flew into Nigeria, arranged meetings with my contacts, I will not mention them here, as they are private people and I may need their private testimony for court.

But each time I told them Id be working underground, as I was based outside, working on my day job anyway, and so Funke Phillips would be TBS face. She attended some meetings, and was aware.

Soon, we were about to get into signing partnerships, when my manager in Germany reminded me to do a character check on Funke Phillips. I remembered Id heard some absurd rumours, and went online to check

I discovered Funke Phillips was arrested in a Lagos airport with 3.14kgs of cocaine, and skipped bail, prompting then @ndlea_nigeria chairman Ahmadu to list her among wanted drug barons in July 2011. Pics attached as comments

The report states that the information that Funke Phillips and other drug barons were on the loose was corroborated by then @ndlea_nigeria spokesperson Mitchell Ofoyeju (@mitchelljnr) cc @dg_ndlea

I next used my contacts in the courts and prisons to legally crosscheck these facts, and presented the situation to @FunkePhillips, asking her to explain. See her case file number photo also in comments.

In private chats I will reserve for the court, Funke Phillips said she went through a lot to settle the case. I replied that the only way the case could be settled was if she was ACQUITTED, or SERVED TIME, but not so, according to @ndlea_nigeria

In comments are screenshots that show that weeks after @ndlea_nigeria noted her as a drug baron on the lam, Funke Phillips was online, on social media.

I, therefore, asked Funke Phillips for her documents of acquittal. She responded that this was the work of her enemies. With such answers, I told her I could NEVER work with her on any basis; we needed to cut all ties immediately.

Specifically, I told Funke Phillips I would pay off those I had contracted to work for us, handle all the bills, take down everything to do with TBS I wanted NOTHING more to do with a fugitiveeven if Nigeria is mediocre enough to allow people like Funke Phillips with a pending drug case walk the streets freely. This absurdity was not going to be my norm.

I told Funke Phillips that in fact, I did not care what happened in Nigeria. I cared about my career and life in Europe, where even the whiff of an association with criminality is just as bad as criminality.

Therefore, over subsequent communications, particularly through mutual friends, I asked her to make sure she never referred to me as someone she worked with, never referred to or made similarities to TBSto ensure she never used any similar idea or contacts made, so that people would not subconsciously associate me with her, as we had gone far. Funke Phillips agreed. I added she was a fraud and must do right by the law.

HOWEVER I thereafter had major surgery, job moves, and JUST discovered that in fact, shortly after this, Funke Phillips set up THE BEVERAGE ROOM (TBR), using many ideas, & in some instances, even same contacts.

Worse still, when I raised the issue 72 hours ago, contacts have since come to tell me they thought I was still a silent partner at TBR, and that is why they joined online groups, bought t-shirts, went to and had events, etc.

To be clear: I publicly (via social media) tagged Funke Phillips, asking her to pull down TBR, because it is a rip-off of TBS, and she knows why she has to: Intellectual property theft, and the matter of GROSS criminality.

Rather, Funke Phillips and her associate have since said I am doing it because I am jealous and I want to pull her down because I heard she is an aide to Lagos state governor-elect Jide Sanwoolu. FOR THE RECORD: I ALSO JUST HEARD ABOUT THIS LESS THAN 72 HOURS AGO.

So, Funke Phillips, to reiterate what I told you 3 years ago: I DO NOT CARE what Nigeria does to you, or whether this country ignores your criminality and rewards you  after all, you will not be the first fugitive to pop up in government circles in Nigeria.

Because unlike you, I operate under a far different code of integrity and ethics  filial-wise, professionally, and by virtue of being a German citizen.

Based on my dealings in Germany, I cannot be seen to have ever had any associations with someone linked to drugs, even more with someone like you, Funke Phillips, cited as skipping bail and being a fugitive.

THIS is the reason for this public disclaimer, Funke Phillips. This is not about money, so, when I head to court to force a pull-down of TBR, I am more concerned about DISSOCIATION and intellectual property theft.

Because Funke Phillips you simply cannot afford what I would term requisite compensation for my intellectual property. Even if you could, I would never prioritise collecting money from a fraudulent character like you.

Simply because again, I operate under a different set of personal and locational principles. On that note, Funke Phillips should you still refuse to do the needful, and pull down TBR, I will see you in court. Please, try to show up this time.
The Nigerian HIV/AIDs Indicator and Impact Survey (NAIIS) has shown that Akwa Ibom has the highest prevalence rate of HIV in the country.

The result indicates that about 5.5 per cent of the people living with HIV in Nigeria are in Akwa Ibom State, followed by Benue State, which has about 5.3 per cent prevalence rate.

It also states that while the North-West has the lowest prevalence rate at 0.6 per cent, the South-South geopolitical zone has the highest with 3.1 per cent.

Speaking during the announcement of the NAIIS result on Thursday, the Director General of the National Agency for the Control of AIDs (NACA), Sani Aliyu, said about 1.9 million Nigerians are currently living with HIV.

The event was held at the Banquet Hall of the State House in Abuja.

He said the percentage of People Living with HIV (PLHIV) in Nigeria, among the age group of 15-49 years, is 1.4 per cent (1.9 per cent among females and 0.9 per cent among males.)

In his response to the prevalence rate in the state, the minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, said this is not the time to start blaming states.

For the south-south, (it) is Akwa-Ibom that has the highest prevalence, and, for the North Central, it is still Benue State.

But then we should also look at the quality of interventions we have had. Benue has one of the largest interventions programme in the country, so that is also expected to yield results.

It would have been frustrating if with those interventions, we now have 10 per cent in Benue. he said.

He noted that he was quite happy about the downward trend in Benue State.

In his goodwill message, David Young, Charge de Affairs, Embassy of the United States of America, said Beyond the data, the survey has proved the capacity of Nigerians working together in solidarity with one another to rise and resolve challenges regarding the health and well being of their brothers and sisters.

The US government is proud to support Nigeria in conducting the NAIIS survey, he said.

The Country Director, Center for Disease Control Nigeria (CDC), Mahesh Swaminathan said the results will help the government improve it efforts in the fight against the virus.

The encouraging results presented today, along with ongoing monitoring and evaluation data will help the Government of Nigeria to intensify efforts in the fight against HIV/AIDs to achieve epidemic control.

CDC will continue to work alongside our Nigerian brothers and sisters in this fight. he said.
After the March 9 governorship elections across the country, the polls in six states  Adamawa, Bauchi, Benue, Kano, Plateau and Sokoto  were declared inconclusive.

Clause 34 (e) of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Regulation and Guideline for 2019 General Elections stipulates that supplementary elections will be held where the margin of lead between the two leading candidates is not in excess of the total number of registered voters of the Polling Units where elections were not held or were cancelled

In each of the six states the margin of lead between the leading candidates is less than registered voters at the polling units where election was cancelled or postponed for reasons such as overvoting, violence or the failure of smart card readers.

Here, we project how the supplementary election battle in each of the states will be fought and won.

Adamawa

In Adamawa, the margin of lead between the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Ahmadu Fintiri, who scored 367,471 votes and that of his closest rival, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Jibrilla Bindow, who scored 334,995 votes, is 32,476 and less than the number of registered voters in 44 polling units where the election did not hold or was cancelled, which is 40,988.

In order to upstage Mr Fintiri, the APC candidate will require a miracle on the same level as squeezing water out of a rock. What is more, the percentage of voters turnout in last Saturdays election in the state was less than 50 per cent.

For Mr Bindow to upturn Mr Finitiris lead he has to first pray for a turnout of at least 70 per cent. He then has to hope that every single voter who cast his or her vote on the day cast it for him. This appears a mathematical impossibility.

Thus, PREMIUM TIMES can confidently predict that at the end of the supplementary election, Mr Finitiri of the PDP will emerge winner, and would be declared governor-elect of the north-east state.

Bauchi

In Bauchi, the path to deciding who is eventually returned as governor of the state is a still a bit fussy. The result of an entire local government, Tafawa Balewa, was cancelled because the local government collating officer, did not record the result in the right form. The collation of results in the local government was disrupted after thugs snatched the result sheet.

The states returning officer subsequently refused to accept the result because, as he claimed, the collation officer did not get his approval as stipulated in the guideline for the election before documenting the result in another form.

After the collation of 19 local governments out of the 20 in the state, the APC is trailing the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its candidate, Bala Muhammed, with 4,059 votes. The APC scored a total of 465,453 votes against the PDPs 469,512 votes.

According to the results announced at the Tafawa Balewa collation centre, which was rejected by the returning officer, the PDP also has a healthy lead there. It scored 40,010 votes against the APCs 29,862 votes.

PREMIUM TIMES has learnt that INEC intends to regenerate the result for the local government using duplicate result forms from the polling units and ward collation level. If this is done, PDPs lead in the election will increase to 14,207 votes.

Although this still falls short of the 45, 312 votes cancelled in the election but with a turnout rate of 45.4 percent, and the margin of voters scored in the March 9 election by both parties, it is very difficult for the APC to score enough votes in the supplementary election in the state to upstage the PDP. We project Mr Mohammed of the PDP to emerge governor-elect.

Benue

Similarly, in Benue the PDP has an unassailable lead. Although the result of the election was declared inconclusive, the incumbent, Samuel Ortom of the PDP, who scored 410,576 votes has a lead of 81,554 votes over Emmanuel Jime of the APC who scored 329,022 votes.

However, the election was cancelled or could not be held in polling units with a total of 121,019 registered voters. Thus, in line with INECs guideline, the election was declared inconclusive because the margin of lead between the APC and PDP was less than the number of cancelled votes.

Again, here, we believe the election has slipped through Mr Jimes fingers. The voters turnout in last Saturdays election in the state was 33 per cent. If the turnout remains the same, only about 40,000 voters will be out to vote during the supplementary election. This is less than half of the margin of lead. Even if the APC won all the votes to be cast on the day, its number will still fall short of the votes required to defeat the PDP.

Plateau

While the supplementary elections in Adamawa, Bauchi and Benue seem set to go PDP way, the APC has similarly secured comfortable lead in Plateau State. Other things being equal, the incumbent, Simon Lalong, seems ready to clinch a second term in office.

Mr Lalong, who scored 583,255 in last Saturdays election, has a margin of 44,929 over the PDP candidate, Jerry Useni, who scored 538,326.

But the number of cancelled votes being just 49,377, Mr Useni, a former army general, can only wish for close to 100 per cent turnout of voters and with all the voters on the day voting for him. This is a wish similar to passing a camel through the eye of a needle. Mr Lalong will win this one.

Kano

This is where the real contest is. Although the PDP occupies the high ground in this contest, its lead is but just a mound rather than a mountain. In Saturdays gubernatorial election, its candidate, Abba Yusuf scored 1,014,474 votes against the 987,819 votes scored by the incumbent governor and candidate of the APC, Abdullahi Ganduje. That keeps the margin of victory between both top candidates at 26,655 votes.

However, the number of cancelled votes in the state is 128,572 votes, which leaves the rerun wide open for any of the candidates. Another testament to why the supplementary election in the state can swing either way, is that 128,572 cancelled voters are spread across half of the 44 local governments of the state.

Results from last week election revealed that the two parties seesawed in the number of votes garnered. In some local governments the difference between them were as little as a couple of hundred votes. There is no indication that this trend will not continue on March 23, when the supplementary election will be held.

However, the momentum seems to be shifting towards the opposition party, who which was roundly dismissed by analysts following its abysmal showing during the presidential election where it only scored only 21 per cent of the votes cast while the APC scored 79 per cent.

But the ruling party, as it is often the case in Nigeria, will be banking on the oft-mentioned federal might. Apparatuses of the state under the direct control of the government at the centre, such as the police and the military, may act in a manner that favours the incumbent in Kano.

This may however not be exactly true. Insiders at the APC headquarters and the presidency say the party and President Muhammadu Buhari remained irritated by the corruption allegation against Governor Ganduje and are not really enthusiastic about helping him in any way. So this race remains open, and can go either way. Although it is more tilted towards the PDP at this point.

Sokoto

Just like in Kano, Sokoto is another electoral contest that is too close to call at this time. Incumbent Governor Aminu Tambuwal of the PDP scored 489,558 votes while his main challenger, Aliyu Ahmed of the APC scored 489,145 votes, leaving just 3,413 votes between them. According to INEC the number of cancelled votes in the state is 75,4003.

The commission also announced that the votes are spread among 136 polling units in 22 of the 23 local governments in the state.

The results from last weeks elections shows that both parties ran neck-to-neck. But unlike most states, the incumbent was the underdog in this race and the opposition is kicking itself for underestimating him.

Mr Tambuwal, after defecting to the PDP in order to pursue his presidential ambition, lost some of his local support, especially that of the de-facto godfather of Sokoto politics and a former governor of the state, Aliyu Wamakko.

The APC in the state draws most of its support from the influential Mr Wamakko and many analysts did not give the PDP a chance until it managed to secure a respectable portion of the votes during the presidential election.

The supplementary election may, however, offer the APC an opportunity to rouse itself from slumber and re-strategise for a better outing. The race remains too close to call.
President Muhammadu Buhari will not overstep his constitutional boundary on the issue of electing the leadership of the 9th National Assembly.

The Senior Special Assistant to the President on National Assembly Matters (Senate), Ita Enang, stated this in Abuja on Friday.

He was reacting to a question on a News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) report, which quoted Ovie Omo-Agege, the Delta Central senator as saying Buhari will be actively involved in the process.

President Muhammadu Buhari is a man of high principles. His stand on this matter is that each arm of government should function according to what the constitution says.

And that every person in government should do the right thing and that he will not go beyond what the constitution allows him.

He believes that every other arm of government should stick to their constitutional responsibilities, Mr Enang said.

His comments were coming amid reports that some ranking All Progressives Congress (APC) members-elect have begun moves to become principal officers of the Ninth Assembly.

The APC has emerged the majority party in the next Assembly with 65 senators-elect against the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)s 37.

In the House of Representatives, the APC secured 211 seats, while the PDP won 111 slots in the February 23 National Assembly election.

Some APC senators-elect have reportedly advised the Presidency and the partys leadership against sitting on the fence to avoid a repeat of the 2015 mistake leadership tussle in the NASS.

Many believe that Mr Buharis indifference in 2015 led to the emergence of Bukola Saraki as the President of the Senate against the will of the APC.

Mr Saraki later defected to the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which remained a minority party in the outgoing eighth Senate.

Mr Enang also spoke on concerns in some quarters of the over 43 greenhorn senators expected in the Ninth Assembly and its effect on the quality of bills.

The SSA said there was no such thing as greenhorn as far as members of the National Assembly were concerned, adding that he expected the Ninth Assembly to be robust.

Some of them are coming with extra wisdom and knowledge from their different backgrounds. So, we expect a robust legislature. We give them all the respect, we value them, we welcome them, treasure them. The executive respects them across party lines.

For the executive, every senator or member of the House of Representatives, irrespective of their political party, is a legislator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

We want to relate with all of them equally. So, there is no greenhorn. They are simply distinguished senators and honourable members, he said.

(NAN)
The trial of Utitofon Ukpong, a Nigerian blogger in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, has moved from the magistrate to a federal high court in the city.

Mr Ukpong, who publishes a popular blog called Sitipe ke Akwa Ibom, was arrested December last year by the police in Akwa Ibom for allegedly publishing defamatory materials against Godswill Akpabio, a senator from the state.

The blog focuses on the happenings around Akwa Ibom State.

The blogger was detained for two days before he was arraigned before a magistrate. The case later moved to a federal high court, one month after the trial began.

Mr Ukpong, accompanied by his lawyer, Ekemini Udim, was at the federal high court this Friday, but the hearing could not commence because of the absence of the judge, A. Okeke.

A representative of the European Union was at the court to observe the case.

Mr Ukpongs lawyer, Mr Udim, spoke to PREMIUM TIMES at the court premises.

Today was for hearing, he said.

On the adjourned date, the judge insisted that the complainant must be in court to testify, else the matter would be struck off.

Today, we came, but unfortunately we understand the judge is on official assignment outside the state and indisposed for the trial of the matter.

This would be the third time the matter was called in the federal high court since it was moved from the magistrate court.

The bloggers lawyer said he did not understand why the police prosecutor, Japheth Japheth, preferred to file the case at the federal high court, instead of continuing at the magistrate court.

The case was adjourned to April 29.
The Federal Government of Nigeria has condemned the terrorist attack on two places of worship in the city of Christchurch in New Zealand.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, said this in a statement by the Ministrys Spokesperson, George Edokpa, on Friday in Abuja.

Mr Onyeama condemned the attacks which took place during Jumaat Prayers on Friday killing 49 Muslim worshippers and injured many others.

The minister who regretted the barbaric and vicious acts unleashed against innocent worshippers expressed Nigerias sympathies to New Zealand.

Nigeria stands in solidarity with New Zealand in their time of grief and fully supports the prosecution of the perpetrators of this heinous crime to the fullest extent of the law, he said.

He condoled with the government and the people of New Zealand and prayed for God to grant the families of the victims the fortitude to bear the irreparable loss and wished the injured speedy recovery.

(NAN)
The criminal activities in the Gulf of Guinea have been reduced drastically due to the Obangame Express exercise, Obed Ngalabak, the flag officer commanding western naval command has said.

Mr Ngalabak, who spoke during a telephonic press conference on Obangame Express 2019 on Wednesday, said the transnational nature of maritime crime makes it difficult to be tackled by one country.

The conference was jointly held with Eric Conzen, commodore of U.S. military sealift command, Europe and Africa.

I would say that if not for anything, Nigeria has benefitted a lot from this exercise since its inception, because over the years weve had a lot of criminal issues in our waters, ranging from piracy to smuggling and poaching and other maritime criminal activities, said Mr Ngalabak, a rear admiral, who spoke through a representative.

Now in its ninth year, Obangame Express is an annual multinational maritime exercise designed to improve cooperation among the participating nations in order to increase maritime safety and security in the Gulf of Guinea.

This years exercise will bring together 33 countries from the Gulf of Guinea nations, Europe, North and South America, as well as several regional and international organisations.

Mr Ngalabak said the level of cooperation between the Nigerian and the U.S. navy has been encouraging as the latter has helped in the training Nigerian naval personnel in areas such as arresting of vessels, evidence collection, and special forces.

He said the collaboration has also helped establish a good information-sharing platform with other African countries.

He added that more than 50 vessels have been arrested in the past three months as a result of the collaboration.

Today, if there is a criminal activity going on in, maybe Gabonese waters or maybe Togolese waters, it is very easy for us to get information and the vessel of interest is running away from their own waters and so its easy for us to get this information and arrest it.

Mr Ngalabak said in the past, it was difficult for the Francophone and Anglophone counties as well as the Portuguese and other nations to understand one another.

But with this Obangame Express, we now understand ourselves better. So that mutual trust has really established, that once we here in Nigeria, the other countries normally fall in place and well get it done as a team.

So its a very good thing for all the forces.

The majority of the sub-regions economic activities rely on the safe and lawful use of West African coastal waters, according to Mr Conzen.

He said the skillful participation of all the countries reinforces the fact maritime security is a collective effort.

It is my third year travelling down to the Gulf of Guinea from Naples, and every year Im amazed at the collective effort of all participants to continue to successfully increase the scope and complexity of the exercise, said Mr Conzen, who is the exercise director for Obangame Express 2019.

The exercise spans five operational areas and covers more than 2.3 million square kilometres.

Exercise Obangame Express will focus specifically on counter-piracy, energy security, counter-illicit fishing, and counter-illicit trafficking. This year will also feature training and search-and-rescue operations and advanced medical training.

The exercise will include a wide variety for all participating forces, including at-sea ship boardings and queries, air operations, communications drills, and regional information sharing.

Obangame Express is part of a comprehensive strategy by U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa to provide collaborative opportunities among African forces and international partners that address maritime security concerns. The Nigerian Navy is hosting the 2019 exercise from March 14 to 22.

The word Obangame comes from the Fang language of southern Cameroon and other parts of Central Africa. It means togetherness.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has alleged that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has concluded plans to cancel declared results from 14 local governments in Bauchi State.

The party, through its spokesperson, Kola Ologbondiyan, stated this on Friday at a press briefing at the partys secretariat in Abuja.

INEC had on Monday declared the Bauchi State governorship election inconclusive.

From the final results declared, the margin of lead which stood at 4059 is less than cancelled Votes, 45,312, excluding Tafawa Balewa Local government.

The INEC announced March 23 for another fresh election in the affected polling units of Tafawa Balewa LGA.

At the briefing, Mr Ologbondiyan cautioned the leadership of INEC against tampering with the already declared results.

The PDP warns that with the charged atmosphere in Bauchi state and the level of awareness attained by the people of the state, any attempt by anybody to touch the already announced results will attract serious consequences to the conspirators, he said.

He said his party already has full information of plots by certain known top-ranking officials of INEC, who have been bribed with huge sums of money by the All Progressives Congress (APC), to widen the scope of result cancellation beyond Tafawa Balewa to 14 more local government areas and hike the number of cancelled votes from 70,000 to 184,555.

To achieve this, INEC has been instructed by the APC to cancel already declared results in 230 polling units in 15 LGAs, in the state, cause confusion and pave the way for the APC to manipulate the March 23 supplementary elections, he said.

Seeing that our party, the PDP, and our candidate, Senator Bala Mohammed, are inevitably coasting to victory, being that Tafawa Balewa is home to the PDP, the APC is instructing INEC to cancel elections in more local governments where it plans to manipulate the processes and allocate fictitious results for the APC at the March 23 polls.

The PDP stated that such a plot cannot stand, as the people of Bauchi State have fully rallied themselves for a firm resistance.

Our party is already in possession of a leaked document from the Bauchi INEC office, which exposed details of this wicked plot against the people of Bauchi State.

This plot further justifies our stance that even the cancellation of Tafawa Balewa results was orchestrated by the APC and INEC in the ignoble bid to forcefully rob the people of Bauchi state of their choice of the PDP candidate, Senator Bala Mohammed, as their governor.

It is public knowledge that by the results delivered at the polling units, Sen. Bala Mohammed was already leading with over 4,000 votes after results of 19 LGAs were collated and announced.

With Tafawa Balewa LGA, where the PDP scored 40,000 valid votes against the APCs 29,000, it is clear that our party won the election with about 15,000 votes, only for the results of the Tafawa Balewa LGA to be cancelled for no just cause by INEC.

The party called on Nigerians to note that Tafawa Balewa result was cancelled by the state Returning Officer, Mohammed Kyari, whom he said unilaterally ruled that there was no result for the LGA even when the Collation Officer had informed the commission that there was no any incident of cancellation, violence or electoral malpractices at both the polling unit and ward levels.

Ex-minister Bala Mohammed

Though the PDP vehemently rejects the cancellation of Tafawa Balewa, we stand with the people of Bauchi State, in the determination to go to the supplementary election on March 23 and reinforce our candidates victory in Tafawa Balewa LGA.

This is in addition to the resolve to vehemently resist any attempt by INEC to tamper with already declared results in the other 19 local governments of state.

The party urges the INEC fact-finding committee to be guided by the extant rules as established in court rulings that the polling units is a base of elections and that once a declaration has been made at the polling units and return of votes established, INEC no longer has powers to influence the results from such polling units.

The party also called on the APC to accept its defeat not only in Bauchi state but also in Sokoto, Benue, Kano as well as Adamawa states, and end its shenanigans, as such will amount to nought.
Governor Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State has attributed the successes recorded by the All Progressives Congress (APC) during the February 23 and March 9 general elections in the state despite the partys crisis to divine intervention.

Mr Yari disclosed this when he fielded questions from State House correspondents in Abuja on Friday.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the APC was allowed to field candidates for all the elections in the state only a week before the first day of elections (Feb. 23) when a Court of Appeal in Sokoto, Sokoto State, reversed an earlier decision of a lower court, which had banned the party from the elections.

The Zamfara State Collation Officer, Kabir Bala of the Ahmadu Bello (ABU) Zaria, had announced that the APC Presidential candidate, President Buhari, won the February 23 presidential election in the state with 438,682 votes while the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar, scored 125,423 votes.

Mr Bala also disclosed that the APC had won the three senatorial seats and the seven seats in the House of Representatives from the state in the February 23 presidential and parliamentary elections.

He said the APC governorship candidate won the state governorship election with 534,541 to defeat Bello Muhammad Mutawalle of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who got 189,452 while the APC also won all the 24 seats in the Zamfara State House of Assembly.

Mr Yari, who spoke to State House correspondents in Abuja on Friday, said he was happy with the outcome of the elections, saying that it was God that gave this political victory to the APC in the state.

He said: You know the turmoil that Zamfara elections put on Nigeria, disagreements upon disagreements, from the party to court and then to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) which disagreed.

Then, we went back to court and finally under 24 hours, we were cleared and we were back on the ballot box.

Only God has done this and given us the victory.

I am very happy with the outcome of the elections. I also want to appreciate my people, despite the fact that some people felt I was carried away by the activities at the centre, insinuating I abandoned the seat, especially with the security problem, but the people are aware of what the administration has been doing and they appreciate it.

Despite the daily attacks, the security agencies were up and doing and their presence in the state was well appreciated by the people.

They also appreciated the efforts of Mr President which took us to where we are. Like I said only God could have done it.

The governor also disclosed that he had succeeded in reconciling all the aggrieved APC aspirants in the state.

He said his past experience as party chairman in the state, member, House of Representatives and governor for eight years had helped him to restore peace and tranquility within the governing APC in the state.

In my state, there were only seven or eight people contesting for the governorship position and I have said it that if I could preside over primaries where 18 people contested and succeeded, why cant I manage eight, nine or 10 in my state?

I have been on ground since 1999 to date and I know the system and how it works. I have been party secretary, party chairman, House of Representative and a two-term Governor, is with this experience that I was able to manage.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of misunderstanding between the party in the state and the national body but in the end we ended in the court and the court gave the verdict and INEC compiled.

Though, it came late, if you are with the grassroots definitely everything must work well. The people appreciated what we have been doing and when it came to voting, they voted wisely, he added.

MMr Yari, whose tenure as chairman of the Nigeria Governors Forum would expire by May 29, expressed the hope that the forum would remain united and work in tandem with the federal governments agenda.

(NAN)
The Anambra government on Thursday set up a six-member panel to investigate the cause of the accident involving a tanker and other vehicles at the ever-busy Upper Iweka Road in Onitsha.

C-Don Adinuba, the Commissioner for Information and Public Enlightenment, stated this in a statement issued in Awka on Thursday.

Mr Adinuba said that the committee was expected to make recommendations on how to forestall a recurrence and had one week to submit its report.

He said that the panel, headed by the Commissioner for Transport, comprised the Commissioner for Health, Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice and Commandant of the state traffic management agency.

Others included the Sector Commandant of the Federal Road Safety Corps and a representative of the state police command.

The commissioner expressed governments regrets over the incident, while commiserating the families of the victims of the mishap.

He stated, The Anambra State Government has noted with profound sadness the accident which occurred around 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 13, at Upper Iweka Road, Onitsha.

According to him, the accident claimed at least seven persons, leaving 14 others with various degrees of injuries.

He noted that the tanker was ladened with 33,000 litres of kerosene, adding that the casualty figure would have been higher, if government did not ban hawking and street trading in the area.

He said that Governor Willie Obiano had directed that the survivors be given the best medical attention with a promise that government would foot the bill. (NAN)
Governor Adegboyega Oyetola of Osun State on Friday congratulated Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Lagos State Governor-elect and his Ogun State counterpart, Dapo Abiodun, on their victory at the poll.

Mr Oyetola, in a congratulatory message by his media aide, Adeniyi Adeshina, in Osogbo, the state capital said he was confident in their abilities to perform to the expectations of the people.

The governor, who described Messrs Sanwo-Olu and Abiodun as capable hands, said there was no doubt that they would perform excellently in office.

The emergence of Sanwo-Olu will allow the continuation of the purposeful and people-centred administration in Lagos, which Asiwaju Bola Tinubu started in 1999.

The Lagos State Governor-elect has a foundation to build on.

He is no doubt capable of carrying on the banner of making Lagos the Centre of Excellence based on the existing roadmap.

He has a capable Deputy, Dr Obafemi Hamzat, who has equally proved his mettle in the public and private sector in the previous positions he occupied.

Likewise, Ogun is very lucky to have Abiodun as their governor-elect at this time of economic engineering.

He will take Ogun State to the next level.

He excelled in his private business and there is no doubt that he will do well in running Ogun State effectively, Mr Oyetola said.

(NAN)
Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi, on Friday called on members of the Presidential Campaign Organisation, Ekiti State Chapter, and the All Progressives Congress (APC) to ensure total dominance of the party in the state in all future elections.

Mr Fayemi spoke in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital during a meeting to appreciate members of the Ekiti State Council of the PMB/PYO Presidential Campaign Organisation and leaders of the party, for the success of the Presidential, National Assembly and State Assembly elections in the state.

He said the hard work and unity of purpose that earned the party victory during the just-concluded general elections must be sustained, especially ahead of the 2022 governorship election in the state.

A successful outing for the APC in the 2022 governorship election in the state, according to him, would confirm the partys dominance in Ekiti politics.

Mr Fayemi said it would also ensure continuation of good governance that would put the state firmly on the path of irreversible development.

The governor, who lauded the members of the campaign organisation for their dedication and commitment to the success of the party, said the credit for the peaceful conduct of the election in Ekiti State should go to them.

He said the unity of purpose demonstrated by both the council and the party leaders during the elections made the party record an enviable result.

Mr Fayemi said the next task was to ensure that the influence of the rival Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was reduced to the barest minimum.

The governor, who also conveyed the appreciation of President Muhammadu Buhari to the members, later presented letters of appreciation to the council members.

Mr Fayemi said: When we inaugurated the Council, I was very clear the job the council would do in conjunction with the party leadership would produce a report that everyone would be proud of, and that is exactly what the council has done as the results have shown.

I remember I was with Mr President a couple of days ago, to discuss some challenges facing our state, and as soon as he came into the meeting, the very first thing he said was Mr 100 percent.

That credit really goes to the work that we all did, and I think it leads to what happens when we have unity of purpose.

We all started on this journey from different points, but ultimately, we came together, we decided that we needed to give the election all the attention it deserved, and everybody pulled in their weight to ensure that we succeeded.

However, the outcome of the election tells us some things, that we cannot be complacent about this issue.

We still have to work to completely crush the PDP in all our local government areas and state to a point where they are a minute fold rather that a sizeable number that can threaten the consolidation of our gains in the course of next couple of elections.

The only way to guarantee this effort you have all put in this election is to ensure that the 2022 governorship election in Ekiti goes to APC.

Thats the message we have to take from this exercise, we would put in every effort to ensure that this happens.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Mr Fayemi explained that after the heat of election, there was need to focus more on governance.

He said he would soon appoint more people into positions for ease of governance as well as make them more useful for the services of the state.

By now, we would have a respite to now focus on governance, which is really the reason why our people have put us in charge of the state.

Yes, we started that process and we have to invigorate it now; we have to energize by putting more people in positions, so that they can be of service to our party and the state.

As much as our resources can carry us, we must put our people first in the Project Ekiti via empowerment programme or appointments.

Not everybody can get appointments, but everybody can have access to feeling that they are also major contributors to the partys success, he said.

Speaking earlier, the Director General of the Campaign Organisation, Oluomo Segun Osikolu, appreciated Mr Fayemi for giving them opportunity to serve in that capacity.

Mr Osinkolu said the partys successful outing at the polls was as a result of the commitment and hard work of members of the council as well as party leadership.

He commended members of the council for their cooperation in the course of the election.

(NAN)
Last month, the Prime Ministers Office clarified that Netanyahu never said The Poles but just Poles, meaning that he was referring to some, but not all.

Warsaw - a month after a crisis erupted between Israel and Poland over Polish history of the Holocaust, Polish President Andrzej Duda outlined a path on Thursday for how it can be resolved, saying that the first move must be made by Israel.

I expect friendship and respect. On both sides

The side that started the crisis should also finish it, Andrzej Duda told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview at the Presidential Palace. Asked if that would be Israel, he said: Yes. I expect friendship and respect. On both sides.

The diplomatic breakdown began during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus visit to Warsaw last month to participate in a Middle East summit hosted by the United States. After a briefing with reporters, Netanyahu was quoted as saying  including by this paper  that The Poles cooperated with the Nazis to kill Jews during the Holocaust.

I hope that we will be able to solve this through diplomatic channels and goodwill between the two sides, said Polish President on Thursday. Of course, the election campaign is there [in Israel] and the temperature of the campaign is not conducive to solving the crisis now, but we have to remember that there are some things that are more important.

Last month, the Prime Ministers Office clarified that Netanyahu never said The Poles but just Poles, meaning that he was referring to some, but not all.

Nevertheless, Andrzej Duda and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki were not satisfied at the time, and announced that Mateusz Morawiecki would not fly to Israel to attend a gathering of the Visegrad, a group of four eastern European countries  Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic  that took place the following week.

The situation escalated when two days later, newly appointed Foreign Minister Israel Katz went on TV and paraphrased former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, saying: The Poles suckle antisemitism from their mothers milk... No one will tell us how to remember the fallen.

Andrzej Duda explained why his government took such offense from Netanyahus and Katzs comments

I am the president of Poland, and I will never accept Poles being insulted or humiliated or facts being distorted that hurt our dignity, he said. I am an honest person, and that is why I can admit historical facts and I will never try to contradict them. But I will never agree with statements that Poles as a nation participated in the Holocaust or Poland participated in the Holocaust. It humiliates us and hurts us. In my own family, there were people murdered by the Germans, and first and foremost [to say the contrary] waters down what really happened.

Andrzej Duda said that the key word is some whenever referring to Polish collaborators during the Holocaust.

Not Poles as a nation or Poles as a society, as a state or as an institution, he said. Some people is true. There were some people on this occupied territory. Some Poles. Some people who were vile.

When asked about the need for the controversial law that passed last year making accusations of Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes a criminal offense and why not just let historians debate the issue freely, Andrzej Duda said that the entire purpose of the law was to ensure historical accuracy.

It was our will to fight for only the truth to be in the public space. So actually, the whole point was this term that I hate  Polish death camps and Polish concentration camps  to eliminate it from the public space, he said. Unfortunately, if we dont correct it and people come to Poland to see Auschwitz, it becomes natural to them that it was a Polish camp. If we want them to know that it was not, they need to see the historical truth.

While Andrzej Duda said that the crisis between Israel and Poland remains, ties with the Jewish community remain strong

If we look holistically, I can say that it actually took a toll on Israeli-Polish relations but not on Polish-Jewish relations, he said. This is for a simple reason. The words that were said in Israel  first and foremost the words of Minister Katz  were condemned by Jewish organizations like the World Jewish Congress and a lot of others as well as by Polish Jewish organizations and the chief rabbi. We can say that there is no problem between Poland and Jewish people.

Poland, he said, is safer for Jews today than in other parts of Europe. He also dismissed a recent news story in a Polish paper titled How to spot a Jew as sick and intolerable.

Situations such as this publication are absolutely marginal in Poland, he said. Nonetheless each and every one of them deserves condemnation, including the one in question.

Poles and Jews, he continued, have been living on this land together for almost 1,000 years. Who can tell how much Jewish blood is in their veins? Nobody knows, so to talk about how to recognize if someone is Jewish is ridiculous. These are sick people. Just sick. What it depends on is someones upbringing and the traditions and that is how you decide if you are Jewish or not.

The ongoing crisis, he said, ultimately bothers him since I believe that the relations between Israel and Poland are generally good and we consider ourselves to be friends of Israel and we try to make sure Israel feels this relationship on many different international levels starting in the EU and how we vote in the European Parliament and to our position on the United Nations Security Council where we are still a non-permanent member.

And while Poland will not change the controversial Holocaust law, he said that the government would always work to ensure that the Nazi concentration and death camps located in Poland remain intact as a warning for future generations.

We want to preserve it as testament of the Holocaust and the tragedy for future generations, he said. To a certain extent we are depositories of the pain and damage and it is our duty to preserve it for future generations and to conserve it.
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DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "ADAS and Autonomous Driving Industry Chain Report 2018-2019 - Automotive Vision" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Vision sensor, a key sensor for ADAS and autonomous driving was galloping ahead in the past year along with the relentless march of LiDAR and radar technologies.

The automotive camera is just tending to pack network clustering, night vision, inward-looking and 3D capabilities.

Network Clustering

In 2018 Continental AG launched MFC500, its fifth-generation automotive camera with image resolution of 1-to-8 megapixels. Continental projects to mass-produce it in 2020. The camera is interlinked with the environment: by connecting it to the electronic horizon (eHorizon') and Road Database', road information and landmarks can be transmitted to and received from the cloud to locate the vehicle and enable proactive driving.

Bosch third-generation camera with a detection range of 150 meters will go into mass production in 2019. Bosch will also build an automotive camera perception network among its OEM customers worldwide through "Bosch Road Signature" (a crowd-sourced localization service that enables automated vehicles to determine their exact position).

What Bosch and Continental have done is identical with Mobileye's autonomous driving roadmap.

But Mobileye has set about putting its technology into practical use when its peers are still working on development. Mobileye Aftermarket announced a raft of partnerships and collaborations with ride-hailing leaders, municipalities and governmental agencies that will enable the mapping of city streets around the world, including London and New York, through the deployment of Mobileye 8 Connect? in thousands of ride-hailing vehicles. From early 2019 on, the fleets equipped with Mobileye 8 Connect will harvest valuable information on city streets and infrastructure to create high-definition crowd-sourced maps through Mobileye's Road Experience Management (REM) - a critical enabler of full autonomy.

Mobileye has partnered with BMW, Nissan and Volkswagen that collectively had two million cars with EyeQ4 system-on-chips collecting road data in 2018. In Japan, Mobileye collaborated with Zenrin and Nissan on using REM technology to collect data of all highways in the country. Mobileye and its Chinese partners like SAIC, Great Wall Motor and NIO work together to push on REM program.

There is reason to believe that Chinese IT giants will follow suit. Examples include Alibaba striving to develop cooperative vehicle infrastructure system (CVIS), Hikvision that enjoys superiorities in camera field and invests Wuhu Sensorthch Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., a radar firm, and Tus-Holdings Co., Ltd which acquired Suzhou INVO Automotive Electronics Co., Ltd., a developer of ADAS. These players grab some first-mover advantage in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) camera-based network clustering perception system.

Inward-looking: half of vision-based ADAS firms are developing DMS

Driver monitoring systems (DMS) is largely needed by commercial vehicle ADAS and will be a standard configuration for future L3 passenger cars. Half of vision-based ADAS companies are developing DMS, including EyeSight, Shenzhen Autocruis Technology Co., Ltd., Roadefend Vision Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., Whetron Electronics Co., Ltd., Wuhan JIMU Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., Minieye, Beijing Smarter Eye Technology Co., Ltd. and Black Sesame Technologies.

EyeSight, an Israeli start-up founded in 2005, provides driver monitoring, gesture recognition and user perception and analysis technologies. Its software-based automotive sensing solutions need support from infrared (IR) or time of flight (TOF) sensors.

Black Sesame Technologies has developed in-vehicle monitoring systems with capabilities of face recognition-based driver authority authentication, driver fatigue monitoring, bad driving behaviour monitoring and occupant monitoring.

In February 2019 Shanghai Baolong Automotive Corporation released a range of automotive sensor products from dynamic vision sensor, 77G/24G radar, stereo forward-looking system, infrared thermal imager for night vision and diver warning system to face recognition system.

Night Vision

Continental AG rolled out MFC500, a fifth-generation automotive camera capable of night vision.

In 2018 Denso developed a new vision sensor which improves vehicle's night vision by using a solid-state imaging device and unique lenses specifically designed for low-light conditions.

In 2018 Israel-based Foresight unveiled its QuadSight? quad-camera vision system. Using four-camera technology that combines two pairs of stereoscopic infrared and visible-light cameras, the system is designed to achieve near 100% obstacle detection with near zero false alerts in any weather or light conditions (including complete darkness, rain, haze, fog and glare).

3D Trend

3D sensing is now one of the key development orientations of camera technology.

AMS and Sunny Optical announced in November 2017 a joint plan to develop 3D sensing solutions for mobile devices and automotive application.

ZF is developing a kind of three-dimension interior observation system (3D IOS) that can detect occupants in a car and classify them to ascertain their sizes and positions as well as whether the occupant is manipulating the car willingly or monitoring the autonomous driving system.

Magna and Renesas collaborate in fusion of Magna's eyeris? 3D surround-view camera system with the latter's SoC (system-on-a-chip) to develop a more cost-effective 3D surround-view system especially for entry-level and mid-range cars.

Naturally, automotive 3D sensing not only relies on cameras but also takes advantage of either radar or LiDAR for 3D imaging. It is through using radar that Vayyar Imaging brings 3D imaging into a reality.

Vayyar Imaging announced in May 2018 to roll out millimetre wave 3D imaging system used chip. Vayyar's 3D sensor can be utilized for obstacle detection, classification and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The embedded 3D sensor of Vayyar can scan the internal environment inside the car in real time and offer real-time imaging. Alerts will be sent to the drowsy driver through monitoring the vital signs of the occupant inside the car, or the guardian will be warned if the children and pets get off the car.

In 2018, the OEM installations of cameras (inclusive of front view, rear view, side view, interior view, surround view, driving recorder camera, among others.) to passenger car reached 20.584 million units with a year-on-year surge of 14.9%, of which front camera soared 28% YoY, surround-view camera shot up by 30.1% YoY, and stereo camera skyrocketed 170.3% YoY, according to ADAS and Autonomous Driving Industry Chain Report, 2018-2019 - Automotive Vision.

Key Topics Covered

1. Automotive Camera Industry Overview

1.1 Overview of Automotive Camera

1.1.1 Classification of Automotive Camera

1.1.2 Structure of Automotive Camera

1.1.3 Industrial Chain

1.1.4 Global Automotive Camera Module Market Size, 2015-2020E

1.1.5 R&D of Latest Technologies on Automotive Camera

1.2 Automotive Camera Market and Application

1.2.1 Application of Automotive Camera

1.2.2 Camera Installations to New Cars in China, 2017-2018

1.2.3 Camera (by Segmented Product) Installations to New Cars in China, 2017-2018

1.2.4 Monocular Camera Installations to Passenger Cars in China (by Price Range), 2017-2018)

1.2.5 Side-view Camera Installations to Passenger Cars in China (by Price Range), 2017-2018

1.2.6 Rear-view Camera Installations to Passenger Cars in China (by Price Range), 2017-2018

1.2.7 Surround-view Camera Installations to Passenger Cars in China (by Price Range), 2017-2018

1.2.8 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (European Brands I), 2017-2018

1.2.9 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (European Brands II), 2017-2018

1.2.10 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (Japanese and Korean Brands I), 2017-2018

1.2.11 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (Japanese and Korean Brands II), 2017-2018

1.2.12 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (Chinese Brands I), 2017-2018

1.2.13 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (Chinese Brands II), 2017-2018

1.2.14 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (Chinese Brands III), 2017-2018

1.2.15 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (Chinese Brands IV), 2017-2018

1.2.16 Vision Sensor Solutions for Passenger Cars Produced in China (Chinese Brands V), 2017-2018



2. Foreign Automotive Vision Companies

2.1 ONSEMI

2.1.1 Leadership in Image Sensor Market

2.1.2 Automotive Eco-system

2.1.3 ADAS/AD Image Sensors

2.1.4 Cost Analysis of Sensors for Different Levels of AD

2.1.5 Revenue from Automotive Sensor Business

2.1.6 Acquisition of SensL

2.2 Sony

2.2.1 Share of Image Sensor Market

2.2.2 Developments in In-vehicle Image Sensor

2.2.3 Expansion of Image Sensor Manufacturing Capacity

2.2.4 R&D of Image Sensor Technologies under Way

2.3 Mobileye

2.3.1 eyeQ Chip

2.3.2 Partners

2.3.3 EyeQx Product Line

2.3.4 EyeQx Business

2.3.5 EyeQx Product Line Integrated with INTEL System

2.3.6 Core Technology -- REM

2.3.7 Core Technology -- RSS

2.4 MCNEX

2.5 Magna

2.5.1 Vision Product Roadmap

2.5.2 Vision ADAS Products

2.6 Veoneer

2.6.1 Client Distribution and Technical Layout

2.6.2 ADAS Layout

2.6.3 Sensor Layout (Including Vision Sensor)

2.7 Valeo CDA

2.7.1 Automotive Vision and ADAS System

2.7.2 Market Position of Valeo ADAS System

2.7.3 Partners

2.7.4 Park 4U

2.7.5 Park 4U Circuit Diagram

2.7.6 Overall Layout in Autonomous Driving

2.8 Continental Automotive

2.8.1 4th-generation and 5th-generation Cameras

2.8.2 Revenue and Key Clients for Its Sensors

2.9 Bosch

2.9.1 Next-generation High-performance Sensors Developed by Bosch

2.9.2 3rd-generation Cameras of Bosch

2.10 Clarion

2.10.1 Clarion Commercial Vehicle 360 Surround-view System: Surroundeye

2.10.2 Clarion CMOS Camera

2.11 Denso Ten

2.12 Gentex

2.12.1 Automotive Vision Products

2.12.2 Rearview Mirror Camera

2.13 ZF

2.14 Denso

2.14.1 Denso ADAS Products

2.14.2 Denso ADAS Roadmap

2.14.3 Denso Active Safety and Driver Assistance Products

2.14.4 Denso to Develop A New Generation of Vision Sensor

2.15 First Sensor

2.15.1 Cameras and Optical Sensors

2.15.2 Cameras

2.15.3 Camera Product Planning

2.15.4 Optical Sensors

2.15.5 Optical Sensor Product Planning

2.15.6 Major Clients

2.16 Foresight

2.16.1 Foresight Quad-nocular Vision System QuadSight

2.16.2 Foresight Eyes-On and Eye-Net

2.16.3 Foresight Market Overview and Planning

2.17 EyeSight

2.17.1 Technologies

2.17.2 Onboard Products



3. China Automotive Vision Companies

3.1 Sunny Optical Technology

3.1.1 Development History of Automotive Lens

3.1.2 Automotive Lens Sales in 2012-2018

3.1.3 Comparison with Competitors

3.1.4 Latest Trends and Layout

3.2 Smarter Eye

3.2.1 Commercial Vehicle AM Products

3.2.2 OEM Products and Visual Development Platform

3.2.3 Product Manufacturing

3.2.4 Product Applications

3.3 Horizon Robotics

3.3.1 ADAS Product Solution

3.3.2 Autonomous Driving Computing Platform Based on Journey 2.0 Computing Architecture

3.3.3 Autonomous Driving Chip Roadmap

3.3.4 Visual Perception Solution

3.4 Minieye

3.4.1 Anti-collision Warning Products

3.4.2 Technologies

3.4.3 Achievements

3.5 Forward Innovation

3.5.1 Product Roadmap

3.6 INVO

3.6.1 Financing

3.6.2 Major Customers

3.6.3 Visual ADAS Products

3.7 JIMU Intelligent

3.7.1Technical Solutions

3.7.2 Products

3.7.3 Automotive Vision Solutions

3.8 Maxieye

3.8.1 Customers and Product Roadmap

3.8.2 The Second Generation of OEM Front-view Product

3.8.3 Open Image Data, Tools and Protocol Architecture

3.9 Sphyrna Technology

3.10 Roadefend

3.10.1 Core Technology

3.10.2 Driver Status Analysis and Early Warning Equipment RDT401

3.10.3 Forward Active Safety Warning Equipment

3.11 Celepixel Technology

3.11.1 CeleX Dynamic Vision Sensor Technology

3.11.2 CeleX Sensor Fusion Technology

3.11.3 CeleX Vision Sensor

3.12 Tsingtech Microvision

3.13 CalmCar

3.13.1 Profile

3.13.2 CalmCar Vehicle Vision

3.13.3 Partners and Customers

3.14 PixArt Imaging Inc.

3.14.1 Performance

3.14.2 Main Product and Products to Be Developed

3.14.3 PixArt Automotive Image Sensor

3.14.4 PixArt Automotive Gesture Control IC

3.15 Autocruis

3.15.1 ADAS Products

3.15.2 AVM and In-vehicle Monitoring System

3.15.3 Market Positioning

3.15.4 Product Roadmap

3.16 Soterea

3.16.1 Front Anti-collision Warning System with Multi-sensor Fusion

3.16.2 Automatic Emergency Braking System

3.16.3 Intelligent Driving Management Cloud Control Platform

3.16.4 ADAS Product Applications and Accessories

3.17 Black Sesame Technologies

3.17.1 Core Technology

3.17.2 Perception Solution

3.17.3 Perceptual Computing Chip

3.18 Eyemore

3.18.1 Visual Imaging Chip

3.18.2 Autonomous Driving Imaging Vision Technology Solution

3.18.3 Autonomous Driving Imaging Solution and Services

3.19 Whetron Electronics

3.20 O-film Tech

3.20.1 Intelligent Vehicle Business

3.20.2 ADAS Products

3.20.3 Development Plan



4. Automotive Vision Technology Research

4.1 ST In-vehicle Perception Technology Solution

4.1.1 Impact of Fatigue Driving

4.1.2 Driver Distraction

4.1.3 Driver Monitoring Is Required for Autonomous Driving

4.1.4 Driver Monitoring Involves Two Drivers: Human and Machine

4.1.5 Driver Monitoring and Cockpit Monitoring Are Required by Euro NCAP

4.1.6 In-vehicle Camera

4.1.7 Near Infrared Camera System

4.1.8 Near-infrared Illumination

4.1.9 Near-infrared Illumination: Global Shutter

4.1.10 Near-infrared illumination: HDR Global Shutter

4.1.11 Disruptive Global Shutter: Native Linear HDR Sensor

4.1.12 Driver Monitoring: High-Dynamic-HDR Sensor Is Required

4.1.13 ST Automotive 3.2um Global Shutter

4.1.14 ST Automotive 3.2um Global Shutter: Background Removal

4.1.15 ST Pixel-based Background Removal

4.1.16 Pixel-to-Pixel Crosstalk

4.1.17 Low Sensor Crosstalk, Higher MTF

4.1.18 ST Automotive Global Shutter: High MTF

4.1.19 ST Achieves High MTF

4.1.20 In-vehicle 3D Sensing

4.1.21 ST Automotive GS Sensor

4.2 Sharp Distance Sensor (including ToF)

4.2.1 Sharp Distance Sensor

4.2.2 Application of Sharp Distance Measurment Sensor

4.2.3 Principle of Distance Measuring Sensor: Position Sensitive Detector

4.2.4 Application Case (I) of Sharp Distance Measurement Sensor

4.2.5 Application Case (II) of Sharp Distance Measurement Sensor

4.2.6 Applications of Distance Measurement Sensor

4.2.7 Sharp Distance Measurement Sensor Product Line

4.2.8 Distance Measurement Sensor - Analog Output

4.2.9 Distance Measurement Sensor - Digital Output

4.2.10 Sharp ToF sensor

4.2.11 Sharp TOF Sensor Roadmap: Close-range TOF, Long-range TOF, Multi-point TOF

4.2.12 Specifications of GP2AP01VT10F

4.2.13 Comparison between DMS and TOF Sensor

4.3 Sony 3D Sensing Technology

4.3.1 Application of 3D Sensing Technology

4.3.2 3D Sensing Technology: Stereo Vision

4.3.3 3D Sensing Technology: Structured Light

4.3.4 3D Sensing Technology: Time of Flight (ToF)

4.3.5 Difference between Structured Light Technology and ToF Technology

4.3.6 Challenges for Structured Light Technology Solution in Automated Material Handling

4.3.7 Comparison between Current Material Handling Technology Solutions

4.3.8 Sony IMX556 Sensor

4.3.9 Helios ToF 3D Camera

4.3.10 Performance Indicators of LUCID Helios ToF 3D Camera

4.3.11 GigE Vision and GenICam 3D Support

4.3.12 European Machine Vision Association (EMVA)

4.3.13 Comparison between Helios ToF and Kinect2

4.3.14 Master Drawing

4.3.15 Lucid Vision Lab

4.4 Overview of 3D Sensing Technology

4.4.1 What is 3D Sensing Technology?

4.4.2 3D Imaging Module Structure

4.4.3 3D Sensing Solutions

4.4.4 3D Sensing Technology Camps and Smartphone 3D Sensing Ecology

4.4.5 3D Sensing Market Size Forecast

4.4.6 3D Vision Industry Chain

4.4.7 VCSEL Industry Chain

4.4.8 Important 3D Imaging Company: Deptrum

4.4.9 Important 3D Imaging Company: Orbbec

4.4.10 Important 3D Imaging Company: Megvii

4.4.11 ZF and Volvo Develop 3D Sensing Systems

4.4.12 Vayyar Launches 3D Imaging Sensor for the Automotive Market



5. Mobileye's Autonomous Driving Technology and Strategy

5.1 Overview

5.1.1 Achievements in 2018

5.1.2 Mobileye EyeQ? Chip Shipment in 2014-2018

5.1.3 Technical Application

5.1.4 Trinocular Front-view System

5.1.5 New Customers

5.1.6 Euro NCAP Focuses More on ADAS

5.1.7 Strategy: Autonomous Driving and ADAS

5.1.8 Mobileye/Intel Autonomous Driving Integrated Solution

5.1.9 Autonomous Driving Platform and ADAS Product Portfolio

5.2 Visual Recognition

5.2.1 Visual Perception Method

5.2.2 Autonomous Driving Strategy

5.3 Computing Platform

5.3.1 Mobileye EyeQ? SoC Chip Family

5.3.2 Mobileye EyeQ5 Chip to Be Mass-produced in 2021

5.3.3 Cooperation with Aptiv

5.4 Driving Policy and RSS

5.4.1 Basic Issues

5.4.2 RSS Model

5.4.3 Driving Logic

5.4.4 Main Partners of Mobileye RSS Model

5.5 REM-Mobileye Map Technology

5.5.1 REM Process

5.5.2 Mobileye and Nissan Collaborate to Collect HD Map Data of Japan Expressways

5.5.3 Mobileye Completes HD Map Data Collection in Japan

5.5.4 Mobileye Partners with BMW to Collect HD Map Data

5.5.5 Commercial Application of REM

5.5.6 Improvement of L2 Autonomous Driving by REM

5.5.7 Open-EyeQ Ecology

5.5.8 Application of REM in the Automotive Aftermarket

5.5.9 Mobileye Deploys Mobileye 8 Connect? in 8 Core Cities

5.5.10 Mobileye 8 Connect? Collects RSD Data Streams

5.5.11 Mobileye Partners with the UK-based Ordnance Survey to Build Precise Database of UK Roads

5.5.12 Types of Data Being Collected by the UK Project

5.5.13 Data Flow of the UK Project

5.6 Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

5.6.1 Overview of Mobileye's Israel MaaS Project

5.6.2 Multi-layer Collaboration of Mobileye's Israel MaaS Project

5.6.3 Implementation Phases of Mobileye's Israel MaaS Project

5.6.4 Mobileye Cooperates with Beijing Public Transport Group

5.7 Evolution of ADAS: Zero Casualty Goal

5.7.1 Evolution of ADAS

5.7.2 Mobileye's Zero Casualty Goal

5.7.3 Mobileye APB System

Companies Mentioned



Alibaba

AMS

Autocruis

Beijing Smarter Eye Technology Co. Ltd.

Black Sesame Technologies

BMW

Bosch

CalmCar

Celepixel Technology

Clarion

Continental AG

Denso Ten

Eyemore

EyeSight

First Sensor

Foresight

Forward Innovation

Gentex

Great Wall Motor

Horizon Robotics

INVO

JIMU Intelligent

Magna

Maxieye

MCNEX

Minieye

Mobileye

NIO

Nissan

O-film Tech

ONSEMI

PixArt Imaging Inc.

Renesas

Roadefend Vision Technology ( Shanghai ) Co. Ltd.

) Co. Ltd. SAIC

Shanghai Baolong Automotive Corporation

Shenzhen Autocruis Technology Co. Ltd.

Smarter Eye

Sony

Soterea

Sphyrna Technology

Sunny Optical Technology

Suzhou INVO Automotive Electronics Co. Ltd.

Tsingtech Microvision

Tus-Holdings Co. Ltd.

Valeo CDA

Vayyar Imaging

Veoneer

Volkswagen

Whetron Electronics Co. Ltd.

Wuhan JIMU Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd.

Wuhu Sensorthch Intelligent Technology Co. Ltd.

Zenrin

ZF

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NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- American Jewish Committee (AJC) is appalled by the murderous assaults on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. At least 49 worshipers were killed and more than 20 seriously injured in shooting attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque during Friday morning prayers.

"Racist individuals imbued with pure hatred of Muslims have attacked normally peaceful New Zealand," said AJC CEO David Harris. "Our hearts go out to the families of the victims of today's unspeakable crime of mass murder."

Harris added: "We say as loudly as we can: We stand against hate and xenophobia. We stand against racism. We stand against terrorism. We stand for mutual understanding. We stand for mutual respect. We stand for pluralism. We stand for coexistence and outreach."

One of the attackers detained by police, a man in his 20s, has been charged with murder. Portions of the attacks were broadcast live on social media. A manifesto railing against Muslims and immigrants also was issued.

"We in the United States have witnessed horrific attacks on houses of worship, including churches, mosques, and synagogues. No one is fully protected from violent hatemongers," said Harris. "We are truly saddened that this same hatred has emerged so violently in New Zealand. The answer must be unity, solidarity, and linked arms against evil."

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the "terrorist attack" on the mosques "one of New Zealand's darkest days."

SOURCE American Jewish Committee

Related Links

http://www.ajc.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Alaska will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Alaska, 15.7 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 10.9 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 600 lives in Alaska and costs the state $438 million in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Alaska, activities include:

People in Need of Knowledge (PINK) will host an interactive balloon-popping game for students at Nenana City School to educate peers on the dangers of tobacco. Students will also commit to be tobacco-free and to encourage peers and loved ones to quit smoking by constructing and signing a pledge wall. Time: 12 PM. Location: C Street, Nenana. Contact: Maryellen Robinson (907) 347-8091.

On April 12 and April 13, Healthy Voices, Healthy Choices is hosting the 6th annual Father Daughter Ball and the 2nd Annual Mother Son Gala in Anchorage at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. The events will promote a smoke-free environment for youth and all community members. Time: 7 PM. Location: 8800 Heritage Center Drive, Anchorage. Contact: Charlie Daniels (907) 301-2710.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Alaska, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Arizona will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Arizona, 16.1 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 7.1 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 8,300 lives in Arizona and costs the state $2.4 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Arizona, activities include:

On March 16, students from Bullhead Opting Out of Tobacco from the Mohave County Tobacco Use Prevention Program in Fort Mohave will be setting up mock gravestones designed by 5th graders from across the school district that include facts about the dangers of smoking and chewing tobacco. These will be displayed at Bullhead City Middle School. Time: 10:00 AM. Location: 1062 Hancock Road, Fort Mohave. Contact: Antonina Martorano (928) 299-1810.

BOSS members at Arizona State University in Tempe will be at the student pavilion to advocate and petition for a smoke-free campus. They will be educating fellow students about the downsides of tobacco and the benefits of not smoking, gathering signatures, and providing cessation resources. Time: 8:00 AM. Location: 400 East Orange Street. Tempe Contact: Kira Perry (480) 797-2447.

Lake Havasu High School is working to be the first tobacco-free generation. Students from Early Childhood Education FCCLA will be encouraging their peers to sign a petition to request that the city of Lake Havasu raise the tobacco sale age to 21 and to commit to being tobacco-free by signing a pledge wall. Location: 2675 Palo Verde Boulevard South, Lake Havasu. Contact: Cathy Bagby (928) 580-0276.

Students from the Kingman Youth Coalition Beating Up Teen Tobacco will be holding a "Lucky to Be Tobacco/Nicotine Free!" event at American Woodmark in Kingman. They will provide education about the dangers of tobacco and e-cigarettes and ask everyone to 'kick butts.' Time: 8:00 AM. Location: 4475 E. Mohave Airport Drive, Kingman. Contact: Susan Williams (928) 753-0794 ext. 4165.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Arizona, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


BELIZE CITY, Belize, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Blockmason , a leading developer of foundational, base-layer blockchain technologies, and Bitsonic , a leading Korean digital asset exchange, today announced the Token Generation Event ("TGE") for BLINK, the Link utility token. The BLINK TGE will be held on Bitsonic starting on Monday, March 18, 2019.

BLINK is the official utility token powering Blockmason Link, a new blockchain infrastructure-as-a-service that allows app, web and other software developers to use smart contracts and programmatic blockchains like Ethereum, TRON, EOS, GoChain and others in their applications without requiring any blockchain experience. Using Link, a developer can create classic, conventional web-based APIs for any smart contract written on a programmatic blockchain.

"We are excited to partner with Bitsonic, one of the premier digital asset exchanges in Korea, to host our TGE for BLINK," said Michael Chin, Chief Executive Officer of Blockmason. "We're looking forward to making BLINK available to software developers, startups and others interested in the incredible innovations that Link will bring to the blockchain technology space."

Link is viewed as the missing component in blockchain-based app development. With Link, developers and users alike can interact with smart contracts like any other web API. There are no "gas" cryptocurrencies to acquire, browser plugins to install or other unnecessary hurdles. There's also no servers or web infrastructure to maintain or monitor. A developer simply adds the smart contracts they want to use in their app to Link. Once added, they can read from and write to these smart contracts just like any other API.

To learn more about the Link project and BLINK, visit https://blockmason.link .

About Bitsonic

A fast-growing cryptocurrency exchange home to more than 600 different currencies, Bitsonic is attracting attention with innovative new technologies such as fast service of deposit, support of Korean currency deposit and withdrawal, and development of dedicated API (application program interface) which enables users to trade digital assets easier. To learn more about Bitsonic, please visit https://bitsonic.co.kr .

About Blockmason

Blockmason is a world-class developer of blockchain technology, focused on building the foundational base-layer frameworks that support the blockchain revolution. Their first product, the Credit Protocol, provides a standardized, secure and reliable means for recording and permanently storing mutually-confirmed debt or credit obligations on the blockchain. Lndr, the first decentralized mobile app powered by the Credit Protocol, leverages the blockchain to allow friends to quickly record and settle casual debts and IOUs in dozens of currencies. Link, their latest innovation, simplifies development, improves user experience and increases the adoption of decentralized apps. To learn more about Blockmason, Link, the Credit Protocol, Lndr and their other technological developments, visit https://blockmason.io .

Media Contact:

Erik MacKinnon

[email protected]

+18889947298

SOURCE Blockmason

Related Links

https://blockmason.io


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today mourned the deaths of more than 40 worshipers gunned down in terror attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during prayers on Friday, condemned the apparent anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate that motivated the attacks and urged mosques in the United States and worldwide to step up security measures.

A man who claimed responsibility for the attacks left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he said he was a 28-year-old white Australian and a racist. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the attack was carried out "by an extremist right-wing violent terrorist" and media reports indicate that the manifesto posted before the attack includes anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The white supremacist author of the manifesto called himself a supporter of President Donald Trump, who he sees "as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose."

Authorities have detained four people and defused explosive devices following what appeared to be a carefully-planned terror attack.

SEE: Christchurch shootings at two mosques leave 49 dead, Australian arrested in relation to terror attack

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-15/christchurch-shooting-at-mosques-leads-to-multiple-fatalities/10904306

40 Killed in New Zealand Mosque Shootings; 4 Held

https://www.apnews.com/ce9e1d267af149dab40e3e5391254530

In a statement, CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said:

"To God we belong, and to Him is our return. We mourn the heartbreaking killings of men, women and children gathered for prayer in their houses of worship and urge leaders in our nation and worldwide to speak out forcefully against the growing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate that appears to have motivated these white supremacist terrorists. In the wake of this tragedy, we urge mosques, Islamic schools and other community institutions in the United States and around the world to take stepped-up security precautions, particularly during times of communal prayer."

Video of the attacks has been posted online. CAIR is asking that the video not be shared.

"Instead of spreading the hate-filled message of terrorists, we should share messages of love and solidarity with the loved ones of those killed or injured in the attacks," said Awad.

Awad urged President Trump to speak out against the attacks and the white supremacist motive of the terrorists.

CAIR has reported an unprecedented spike in bigotry targeting American Muslims, immigrants and members of other minority groups since the election of Donald Trump as president and has repeatedly expressed concern about Islamophobic, white supremacist and racist Trump administration policies and appointments.

SEE: CAIR Says Trump's Islamophobic 'Prayer Rug' Tweet Designed to Distract from Latest Legal Problems

https://www.cair.com/cair_says_trump_s_islamophobic_prayer_rug_tweet_designed_to_distract_from_latest_legal_problems

The Washington-based civil rights organization is urging mosques and other Islamic institutions to take measures outlined in its "Best Practices for Mosque and Community Safety" booklet. The advice in CAIR's security publication is applicable to all institutions, regardless of organizational mission.

The booklet may be viewed at: https://tinyurl.com/BestSafetyPractices

CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.

La mision de CAIR es proteger las libertades civiles, mejorar la comprension del Islam, promover la justicia, y empoderar a los musulmanes en los Estados Unidos.

CONTACT: CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, 202-999-8292, [email protected]; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, [email protected]

SOURCE Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

Related Links

http://www.cair.com


DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Research Report on Cotton Import in China, 2019-2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

According to research, from 2019 to 2023, the growth rate of China's cotton spinning industry will continue to slow down. However, the domestic demand for cotton textiles will keep rising, and a large number of cotton textiles will be exported as usual because of the price advantage. Therefore, the overall demand for cotton in China is expected to increase gradually from 2019 to 2023.

Restricted by production factors such as land rent and labor costs, cotton output in China can hardly rise and will even fall from 2019 to 2023. Therefore, the import volume of cotton in China will keep rising during this period.

Historical Analysis



According to this analysis, in recent years, the growth rate of China's cotton spinning industry is slowing down and labor costs, land rent and the prices of other production factors are rising in China, which increases the costs of cotton planting and decreases the profits from an area of cotton planting.

Meanwhile, cotton production capacity is being transferred to Xinjiang from other parts of China. In 2018, the cotton planting area in China was about 3,352,000 hectares, increasing by 4.9% YOY. China is about to run out of cotton reserves and face a short supply of cotton. However, the growth of cotton planting area is restricted by land policies such as returning farmland to forest. In particular, because of the rising labor costs of cotton planting, cotton fields in some regions have been turned into fields of other crops.

According to this analysis, the cotton output in China reached about 6.1 million tons in 2018, which increased by 7.8% YOY but was far lower than 7.6 million tons in 2008. The import volume of cotton in China reached 1,574,000 tons in 2018, increasing by 36.2% YOY. The sharp increase in the import volume was mainly attributable to the price advantage of imported cotton.

The Chinese government introduces quota administration for cotton import. It allocates tariff rate quota of 894,000 tons/year as required by the WTO. (The tariff rate on cotton in quota is only 1%, and at least 33% of the quota is reserved for state-owned enterprises.) In Oct. 2018, it provided additional 800,000-ton sliding duty rate quota valid till Feb. 2019. (The tax rates on the cotton imports out of the tariff rate quota but in the sliding duty rate quota are in a floating range below 10%).

The tariff rates on cotton imports out of the tariff rate quota and sliding duty rate quota range from 40% to 125%, depending on the sources and varieties of cotton. Many Chinese enterprises call on the Chinese government to cancel the quota administration for cotton import to cut import taxes. However, some state-owned enterprises firmly oppose the proposal because they benefit greatly from the quota administration. In the next few years, the quota administration will continue to exist in China.

With the escalation of the Sino-U.S. trade war, on Jun. 16, 2018, China's State Council decided to place a 25% tariff on 659 U.S. products worth about USD 50 billion. The decision applied to USD 34 billion of U.S. exports including agricultural products, automobiles and aquatic products from Jul. 6, 2018. The tariff increase immediately affected the export of U.S. cotton to China. Since Jun. 2018, Chinese enterprises have significantly reduced U.S. cotton orders, and Brazil has replaced China as the largest destination of U.S. cotton exports.

Overall, China imported about 500,000 tons of cotton from the U.S. in 2017 while the U.S. exported 3.49 million tons of cotton in 2018. China's cotton imports from the U.S. took up a small proportion of U.S. cotton exports. Therefore, fewer orders from China had a limited impact on the export of U.S. cotton. However, in 2017, the cotton imported from the U.S. accounted for more than 40% of China's cotton imports. In this context, the Sino-U.S. war had a great impact on cotton import in China.

Key Topics



Economic and policy environments of cotton import in China

Analysis of quota administration for cotton import in China

Cotton import in China and major sources of China's cotton imports from 2013 to 2018

and major sources of cotton imports from 2013 to 2018 Analysis of major cotton importers in China

Major driving forces and market opportunities for cotton import in China

Forecast on Cotton Import in China , 2019-2023

List of Topics Covered



1 Overview of the Cotton Industry

1.1 Definition of Cotton

1.2 Classification of Cotton

1.3 Analysis on Industry Chain of Cotton



2 Development Environment of China's Cotton Industry, 2019-2023

2.1 Economic Environment of China's Cotton Industry

2.2 Policy Environment of China's Cotton Industry

2.2.1 China's Quotas for Cotton Imports

2.2.2 China's Import Tariffs on Cotton



3 Analysis on Supply of Cotton in China, 2019-2023

3.1 Analysis on Cotton Planting Area in China

3.2 Analysis on Cotton Output Volume in China



4 Analysis of Demand for Cotton in China

4.1 Analysis on Cotton Consumer Groups in China

4.2 Analysis on Consumption Volume of Cotton in China



5 Analysis of Cotton Import in China

5.1 Analysis of Scale of Cotton Import in China

5.1.1 Import Volume of Cotton in China

5.1.2 Import Value of Cotton in China

5.2 Analysis on Average Import Prices of Cotton in China

5.3 Analysis on China's Reliance on Cotton Imports

5.4 Analysis on Sources of China's Cotton Imports

5.4.1 Comparison of Prices of China's Cotton Imports from Different Sources

5.4.2 China's Cotton Imports from the U.S.

5.4.3 China's Cotton Imports from Australia

5.4.4 China's Cotton Imports from India

5.4.5 China's Cotton Imports from Brazil

5.5 Comparison of Prices of Domestic and Imported Cotton in China

5.5.1 Prices of Domestic Cotton

5.5.2 Prices of Imported Cotton in CNY

5.5.3 Comparison of Prices of Domestic and Imported Cotton



6 Major Cotton Importers in China

6.1 Rankings of Major Cotton Importers in China

6.2 China National Cotton Group Corporation

6.2.1 Enterprise Profile

6.2.2 Operation

6.3 Qingdao Hongchuan Logistics Co. Ltd.

6.3.1 Enterprise Profile

6.3.2 Operation Status

6.4 Chinatex Cotton Import & Export Corp.

6.5 Xinjiang Yinlong International Agricultural Cooperation Co. Ltd.

6.6 Huai'an Xinguo Textile Co. Ltd.

6.7 Weiqiao Textile Company Limited

6.8 Qingdao Sinotra Supply Chain Management Co. Ltd.

6.9 Sunvim Group Co. Ltd.

6.10 ADG Rubber Transaction Center Co. Ltd.

6.11 Lu Thai Textile Co. Ltd.



7 Prospect of Cotton Import in China, 2019-2023

7.1 Factors Influencing Cotton Import in China

7.1.1 Major Driving Forces and Market Opportunities

7.1.2 Threats and Challenges

7.2 Forecast on Cotton Import in China, 2019-2023

7.3 Forecast on Demand for Cotton Imports in China, 2019-2023



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/d96kzv/chinese_cotton?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]



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SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Third party administrator and benefits technology company, Clarity Benefit Solutions, was recently named one of the best places to work in New Jersey by NJBIZ.

NJBIZ and their sister company, Best Companies Group, surveys employees in order to determine their honest feelings about the companies they work for. This data is confidential and used primarily to help organizations improve as well as recognize outstanding organizations who receive exceptionally positive feedback.

When the 2019 data was analyzed, Clarity Benefit Solutions was named one of the top companies to work for in New Jersey. They are among a small, prestigious group of companies who received this honor last week.

Clarity Benefit Solutions is thankful for the hardworking, dedicated employees that have made this honor possible, and their exceptional network of professionals who give their day-to-day operations meaningful purpose.

As a company whose purpose is to simplify the complex world of benefits (and provide a great experience while doing so), this is an honor that Clarity takes very seriously.

"Being selected as one of the best places to work in New Jersey is a tremendous milestone in our company's journey," said Bill Catuzzi, President and Founder of Clarity Benefit Solutions, "This would have never been possible without having the best employees in New Jersey and our Clarity culture that guides and challenges us to be the very best for our associates, customers and community. I'm extremely honored and humbled to be part of this elite group of New Jersey companies."

Bill is not the only Clarity team member who feels this way. "It feels great to be part of such a distinguished group," said Calvin Clark, Director of Sales and Marketing, "At Clarity, we have a great community of sincere and hardworking people from all walks of life. We really try to deliver for each other and our clients. Being recognized as an organization that people are excited to work for and want to be a part of for five, ten, or fifteen plus years is really phenomenal."

Clarity Benefit Solutions, along with the other honorees, will be celebrated at an awards reception and ceremony at the iPlay America Event Center in Freehold this upcoming May.

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

https://claritybenefitsolutions.com


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Connecticut will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Connecticut, 14.7 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 3.5 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 4,900 lives in Connecticut and costs the state $2 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In Connecticut, youth advocates are supporting statewide and local efforts to raise the tobacco sale age to 21. Students from Stratford High School in Stratford will hold an assembly and meet with Mayor Laura Hoydick and the city council to address raising the tobacco sale age to 21. (Time: 11 AM. Location: 245 King Street, Stratford. Contact: Sharon Foran (203) 605-3797.)

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Connecticut, additional activities and events include:

HOSA-Future Health Professionals will host an interactive information session in New Britain to educate community members on the effects of tobacco and e-cigarettes on our youth and how to combat these effects. Time: 5:30 PM. Location: 600 Slater Road, New Britain. Contact: Kerry Ann Rhoden (860) 223-0726.

Students in the After School Program in Oakdale will participate in a variety of educational activities organized by Montville Youth Service Bureau, Montville Youth Action Council, and Montville ALLI to educate youth about the dangers of smoking and e-cigarettes. Activities include a "Breathe Easy" bubble blowing race and a display of household products that contain the same dangerous chemicals as cigarettes. Time: 3 PM. Location: 836 Old Colchester Road, Oakdale. Contact: Kimberly Grant (860) 908-8638.

At DePaolo Middle School in Southington, students will present morning public service announcements and display posters around the school to promote a smoke-free environment. Time: 8 AM. Location: 385 Pleasant Street, Southington. Contact: Trish Kenefick (860) 778-6639.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Connecticut, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Delaware will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Delaware, 13.6 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 6.2 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 1,400 lives in Delaware and costs the state $532 million in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In Delaware, youth advocates are encouraging state lawmakers to pass legislation that would raise the tobacco sale age to 21.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Delaware, activities include:

On March 16, the First State Community Action Agency in Georgetown will host "Airing Out Big Tobacco's Dirty Laundry." The event will include informational sessions, games, experiments and activity stations to highlight the harmful effects of smoking. Time: 10 AM. Location: First State Community Action Agency, 308 North Railroad Avenue, Georgetown. Contact: Dr. Sandi Hagans-Morris (302) 856-7761.

Kick Butts Generation in partnership with Children & Families First in Wilmington will educate students at Bayard Middle School about Big Tobacco and the tactics they use to lure in customers. Students will then take selfies to show they are #NotAReplacement. Time: 10:20 AM. Location: Bayard Middle School, 200 S. Dupont Street, Wilmington. Contact: Raquel Stephens (302) 772-9521.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Delaware, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


CHICAGO, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Larry Goodman, CEO of the Rush University System for Health (RUSH) and Rush University Medical Center will retire in the next several months, the RUSH Board announced today.

Given the magnitude of his current responsibilities and aligned with the organization's strategic vision, Goodman's roles will be assumed by two accomplished leaders.

Dr. Ranga Krishnan , currently dean of Rush Medical College and senior vice president of the Medical Center, will become CEO of the Rush University System for Health.

Dr. Omar Lateef , currently chief medical officer for the System and the Medical Center, and senior vice president of medical affairs for the Medical Center, will become CEO of Rush University Medical Center.

These changes are the culmination of an extensive board-led succession planning and evaluation process over the past 14 months. The CEO Succession Planning Committee of the Board evaluated a diverse pool of highly talented internal and external candidates that could lead RUSH and the Medical Center successfully during a time of dramatic change in health care in the United States.

This thoughtfully planned leadership transition follows the appointment of Rush University's new president, Dr. Sherine Gabriel , in October. Over time, the committee concluded that the potential for growth of both the System and the Medical Center has been and will continue to be significant and that each needs its own leader.

"Dr. Goodman has been a truly transformational leader during his 17-year tenure," said Susan Crown , chairman of the RUSH and Medical Center boards. "He has strengthened our financial footing, elevated clinical excellence, built a renowned health science education program and significantly expanded our reach to patients throughout the Chicago area. His efforts have left an extraordinary mark for which we will be forever grateful."

"It is a testament to Larry's extraordinary leadership that we are now dividing his role among two highly accomplished leaders in their own right," Crown continued. "It is unusual, and runs contrary to common practice, for a single leader to run a university, a flagship hospital, and a health care system with the exceptional skill and vision Dr. Goodman has demonstrated. As we continue to pursue our long-term vision of being nationally recognized for transforming health care, it is clear that Dr. Krishnan and Dr. Lateef are the leaders we need to continue the System and Medical Center transformation.

"We are very fortunate to have this high level of diverse talent within the Rush System, and we are confident that Dr. Krishnan, Dr. Lateef and Dr. Gabriel will continue our visionary leadership and successfully build on our efforts to be a leading and transformative health care institution."

Goodman transformed Rush during 17 years as CEO

Goodman has been CEO of the Medical Center since February 2002, and also served as president of Rush University until Gabriel assumed the role this February. He additionally assumed the role of CEO of RUSH when the System was formed in March of 2017 . He also holds the academic rank of professor of internal medicine, and is the James A. Campbell, MD, Distinguished Service Professor of Rush University.

Under Dr. Goodman's leadership, Rush University Medical Center has been nationally recognized for excellence in patient care, breakthrough research, community engagement and technological innovation, while also increasing financial stability and strength.

Goodman's tenure as CEO has included the $1 billion transformation of the Medical Center's campus on Chicago's West Side; recognition that includes a steady stream of honors for excellence in care from Vizient, U.S. News & World Report and the Leapfrog Group; student enrollment in Rush University more than doubling; a thriving research enterprise that received the highest level of NIH funding in Rush's history last year; and the formation and rapid expansion of the Rush University System for Health.

RUSH includes Rush University Medical Center; Rush University; Rush Oak Park Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois; Rush Copley Medical Center in Aurora, Illinois; their respective subsidiaries and affiliates; and numerous outpatient facilities in the Chicago area.

In just the past three years, the System has added outpatient centers in Chicago's River North and South Loop neighborhoods, and Oak Brook , Illinois. More are planned. The System shares a best in class electronic medical record system, and all have a common commitment to the highest quality and best patient experience.

Read more about these achievements and Goodman's major accomplishments at Rush.

"It has truly been a special honor and a privilege to be a part of the extraordinary transformation at Rush and to serve alongside the Rush community, with a singular focus on improving health," Goodman said. "I came here as a resident in internal medicine in 1976 and met my wife here, so Rush has always been like a family and like home to me."

"I am proud of our many successes together, which is unquestionably due to the great work of so many others, including our wonderful Board. I am grateful to have served in this role. I also always have known that there would come a time for me to step down."

"I approached the Board well over a year ago so they could begin the succession planning process. It has been deliberate and thoughtful, and I'm thrilled for Dr. Krishnan and Dr. Lateef. They will provide the leadership necessary to take the Rush System and Rush University Medical Center to the next level and further ensure the System is positioned to be the model of the future of health care in this country."

Krishnan has pioneered new teaching methods

Dr. Ranga Krishnan joined Rush in October 2015 after 34 years in clinical and leadership roles at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. As the Henry P. Russe, MD, Dean, he transformed Rush Medical College's curriculum to be in the vanguard of medical education, engaging medical students in active, team-based learning . He has redesigned numerous clinical departments to improve efficiency and patient outcomes, and he has led the ongoing development and growth of the Rush University Cancer Center .

Previously, Krishnan helped establish and led Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore, a joint venture between Duke and the National University of Singapore. During Krishnan's eight-year tenure as the school's dean, Duke-NUS developed a new teaching method called Team LEAD (for Learn, Engage, Apply, Develop) that since has been adopted by other universities around the world.

Krishnan is a renowned practitioner and researcher of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, one of three academies that make up the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

"I'm humbled at the opportunity to lead the Rush System at a time of fundamental change in health care and health science education," Krishnan said. "We have incredible opportunities to make a profound impact on the lives of our patients, our students, our employees and our care model while we continue to make Rush a destination for the best medical care in the world and the home of the country's leading health sciences university."

"Drs. Lateef and Gabriel are terrific partners," Krishnan continued. "Together we will work to find solutions that address some of the greatest challenges in U.S. health care today, including the ability to deliver exceptional quality more efficiently and at lower costs within our communities."

"I am also looking forward to partnering with Rush System President Mike Dandorph , who will continue his important System role, to further develop our growth plans and strategy, including partnerships with industry leaders, further defining the System's structure and how we function collaboratively as a System."

"This will be a multi-pronged effort that must involve our medical system, Rush University, businesses and our communities to create a path toward better health equity. With the system we have built together - combining education, research and clinical delivery - the Rush System is in a unique position to innovate patient care and educate and nurture the health care leaders of the future."

Lateef has led clinical excellence to new levels

Dr. Omar Lateef has been Rush University Medical Center's chief medical officer since January 2015 and the Rush System's CMO since June 2018. In these roles, he has helped design, implement, and oversee Rush initiatives related to clinical quality, patient safety and performance improvement.

Reflecting these efforts, in October, Rush University Medical Center was ranked second in the nation among 99 leading academic medical centers in the latest annual quality and accountability study conducted by Vizient Inc., Lateef has conducted groundbreaking work in data analytics, including recent analyses of external quality rankings that have led to changes in ratings methods that have benefited patient care.

Lateef, who joined Rush in 2002, was appointed associate chief medical officer in 2009 and vice chairperson of the Department of Internal Medicine in 2012. He also served as program director for the Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship Program and as director of the medical intensive care unit. A former associate dean of medical sciences at Rush University, Lateef is a professor of medicine and holds the Stuart Levin, MD, Presidential Chair.

"I am excited and honored to lead this incredible institution and the great people who work at Rush University Medical Center," Lateef said. "I first came to the Medical Center for a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care, and I am so grateful for the tremendous opportunities I have been provided to learn and grow as a physician and a leader. I look forward to working with an incredible leadership team and continuing to build upon Dr. Goodman's great accomplishments."

"Dr. Krishnan, Dr. Gabriel, Mike Dandorph and I all believe we have tremendous opportunities to advance the quality, safety and cost savings of medical care in this country, and to do so in a way that is both patient and physician-centered and easy for people to navigate. This goal will require both clinical innovation and the transformative health education and research that Rush University provides. I look forward to working closely with our exceptional leadership team to achieve our vision of the future of health care."

Gabriel is First Rush University President Focused Solely on the University

The appointments of Drs. Krishnan and Lateef follow the appointment last October of Dr. Sherine Gabriel as the first president of Rush University focused solely on the University. (Previously the Medical Center's CEO also served as the University's president.) Given the University's growth under Goodman's leadership and great potential for further growth in a time of anticipated health care worker shortages, it became apparent that the University president was a full-time position.

Dr. Gabriel spent most of her academic career at the Mayo Clinic, which like Rush tightly integrates health science education within an academic health system. She has had a distinguished career as a researcher in rheumatology, a clinical leader, and an education specialist, previously serving as the dean of the Mayo Medical School. She assumed her duties as Rush University's president Feb. 1, 2019.

About Rush University System for Health

Rush is an academic health system whose mission is to improve the health of the people and the diverse communities it serves through the integration of outstanding patient care, education, and research and community partnerships. The Rush System comprises Rush University Medical Center, Rush University, Rush Copley Medical Center and Rush Oak Park Hospital, as well as numerous outpatient care facilities. Rush University, with more than 2,500 students, is a health sciences university that comprises Rush Medical College, the College of Nursing, the College of Health Sciences and the Graduate College.

Formerly known as the Rush System for Health, the Rush University System for Health (RUSH) officially added University to its name this month to properly reflect its identity as an academic health system.

SOURCE Rush University Medical Center

Related Links

http://www.rush.edu


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Florida will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Florida, an alarming 24.8 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 3.6 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 32,300 lives in Florida and costs the state $8.6 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Florida, activities include:

To celebrate Kick Butts Day, members of Never Start will attend the City of Hollywood Commission Meeting to sign an anti-smoking proclamation, and they will announce the official "No Smoking and No Vaping With Love" sign. Time: 1 PM. Location: City Commission Chambers, 2600 Hollywood Boulevard, Room 219. Contact: Leah Olstein (954) 687-5049.

In an effort to promote tobacco-free schools, smoke-free air, and Tobacco 21, students from Citrus High School in Inverness will display chalk outlines of bodies with tobacco point-of-sale facts inside them across the school's campus. Time: 8:30 AM. Location: 600 W. Highland Boulevard, Inverness. Contact: Aspen Welfel (352) 419-9033.

The Students Working Against Tobacco Club at Ronald W. Reagan Senior High School in Miami will engage in a day of activism to educate peers about the dangers of tobacco and e-cigarettes by displaying "Deadly Facts" about the effects of nicotine poisoning and addiction, as well as by constructing and signing a pledge wall. Time: 10:35 AM. Location: 8600 NW 107 Avenue, Doral. Contact: Lucy-Marie Trabanco (305) 608-8263.

The Daytona State College Respiratory Care Program in Daytona Beach will provide smoking cessation materials and will be discussing the dangers of smoking with college students on campus. Time: 1 PM. Location: 1200 International Speedway Boulevard, Daytona Beach. Contact: Sandy Lake (386) 290-5056.

On March 21, in partnership with Drug Free St. Lucie, the St. Lucie County Students Working Against Tobacco Chapter will present their #NotALabRat campaign to attendees of Farfromdruggen, a drug and alcohol prevention resource fair for youth and parents in Fort Pierce, to educate the community about the dangers of Big Tobacco. Time: 10 AM. Location: 2902 Avenue D, Fort Pierce. Contact: Esteban Mendez (772) 301-4395.

On March 23, members of the Students Working Against Tobacco organization in Wauchula will host a cigarette butt cleanup to remove this growing eyesore at Oak Street Park. Time: 10:30 AM. Location: 310 N. 8th Avenue, Wauchula. Contact: Deja Sparkman (863) 837-7888.

On March 27, the Students Working Against Tobacco organization at Royal Palm Beach Community High School in Royal Palm Beach will educate peers on the toll of tobacco and e-cigarettes by creating a display of tobacco statistics and facts on "dots" hung up throughout school. Time: 11 AM. Location: 10600 Okeechobee Boulevard, Royal Palm Beach. Contact: Alisha Maragh (561) 516-9596.

On March 30 and March 31, the Florida Department of Health in Monroe will hand out educational materials to families, youth and military members, as well as free cessation resources, at the 2019 Southernmost Air Show in Key West. Time: 9 AM. Location: Saratoga Avenue, Boca Chica Field, Key West. Contact: Priscilla Bennett (305) 619-2915.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Florida, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Georgia will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Georgia, 8.6 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 12.8 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 11,700 lives in Georgia and costs the state $3.2 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In Atlanta, youth advocates are urging the City Council to pass a smoke-free ordinance that would make all workplaces and public places smoke-free and protect everyone's right to breathe clean air.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Georgia, activities include:

The Clayton County Office of Youth Services will organize a Zombie Walk through downtown Jonesboro to demonstrate tobacco's deadly effects. Students participating in the walk can gather at Lee Street Park beginning at 5 PM for costume, makeup and to decorate posters. Time: 6 PM. Location: Lee Street Park, 155 Lee Street, Jonesboro. Contact: Janee Morris (470) 631-4685.

In Hinesville, Liberty County 4-H will host their annual Kick Butts Day at the Historic Liberty County Courthouse where kids will learn about the damaging effects of tobacco use and pledge to live a tobacco-free lifestyle. Time: 4 PM. Location: 100 Main Street, Hinesville. Contact: Gypsy Tart (912) 876-2133.

Students at Pooler Elementary School will create a powerful visual display to air out tobacco's "dirty laundry" and educate the community about the effects of tobacco use. Location: 308 Holly Avenue, Pooler. Contact: Marla Danis (912) 660-6232.

On March 22, students from the "Be Smart, Don't Start" club at South Forsyth High School in Cumming will be hosting an event, including a poster presentation and interactive games to educate young people in the community about the adverse health effects of nicotine. Time: 5 PM. Location: 1540 Sharon Road, Cumming. Contact: Ritu Kapoor (404) 493-2646.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Georgia, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Hawaii will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Hawaii, an alarming 25.5 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 8.1 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 1,400 lives in Hawaii and costs the state $526 million in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In Hawaii, youth advocates are urging state lawmakers to prohibit the sale of all flavored tobacco products.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Hawaii, activities include:

The Hawai'i Public Health Institute and Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Hawai'i are hosting a march through downtown Honolulu to the State Capitol for a rally. Later in the afternoon, participating students will meet with legislators to advocate for legislation ending the sale of flavored tobacco in Hawai'i. Time: 11 AM march begins at Aloha Tower; rally at 12:30 PM in front of the Capitol; program at 1 PM in Capitol Rotunda. Location: State Capitol, 415 S. Beretania Street, Honolulu. Contact: Scott Stensrud (808) 375-6414.

Youth in Maui County are rallying to speak out against Big Tobacco and e-cigarettes. The Maui, Molokai & Lana'i Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Hawai'i, Hawai'i Public Health Institute and the Blue Zones Project will be holding a rally at the Maui County Building to end the sale of flavored tobacco products in Hawai'i. The Mayor's Office will issue a proclamation in honor of Kick Butts Day and the work of the youth council. Time: 9:45 AM. Location: 200 S. High Street, Wailuku. Contact: Katie Folio (510) 725-0111.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Hawaii, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


"We developed Healium originally so a group of aging Veterans could virtually visit their memorials. After seeing how VR positively impacted their mood, we added a feedback loop that allows the user to see their feelings control virtual worlds. It's a powerful metaphor that our thoughts have power to control things not only in the virtual world but the real world as well." Sarah Hill, CEO, StoryUP the makers of Healium

Two published studies in Frontiers in Psychology and the Journal of Neuroregulation showed Healium reduced moderate anxiety and increased feelings of positivity in as little as four minutes. These mindfulness-in-nature escapes have the option to be powered by EEG and heart rate data from the user's wearables like a smartwatch or meditation headband. Positive or calm memories are empowered to change the environments with either just a mobile device or inside VR goggles.

Healium supports Honor Everywhere, a free VR tour program for aging Veterans who are no longer able to physically travel to see their WWII, Vietnam or Women's Memorial in Washington, DC. People who purchase Healium kits enable free Healium experiences for Veterans on a waiting list for virtual Honor Flights.

"In its 11th year, our pitch event continues to showcase the best technology from around the world, proving our dedication to highlighting today's most forward-thinking innovators," said SXSW Pitch event producer, Chris Valentine.

Each of the category winners at SXSW received $4,000, two badges for next year's SXSW, and exposure to SXSW attendees and investors looking for the latest in cutting-edge technology and innovation. The pitch event this week at SXSW drew a number of global companies with more than 30 percent representing countries outside the US, including the UAE, UK, Singapore, Mexico, Germany, Canada, South Korea, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Japan, Cyprus, Sweden, and Slovenia.

Healium also took home a first place prize in a recent pitch competition at CES, the world's largest trade show. For more information on Healium kits that allow you to grow virtual peace with your feelings, please visit tryhealium.com or email [email protected].

Link to Download Photos: Contact: [email protected] | Tryhealium.com | 573.268.1968 |

SOURCE StoryUP makers of Healium

Related Links

https://www.tryhealium.com


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Idaho will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Idaho, 14.3 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 9.1 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 1,800 lives in Idaho and costs the state $508 million in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Idaho, activities include:

The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes Youth Coalition in Fort Hall will sponsor a table at the Northwestern Native American Youth Conference to spread information about the dangers of tobacco and educate attendees. On March 19, their youth tobacco prevention activist will be presenting at the conference to advocate against tobacco use. Time: 10:45 AM Location: Shoshone-Bannock Hotel, 777 Bannock Trail, Fort Hall. Contact: Randy L'Teton (208) 478-3818.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Idaho, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Indiana will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism organized by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and sponsored in Indiana by Interact for Health. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Indiana, 10.5 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 8.7 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 11,100 lives in Indiana and costs the state $2.9 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In Indiana, youth advocates are urging state lawmakers to raise the state cigarette tax by $2.00 per pack.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Indiana, activities include:

On March 19, the Mulberry Methodist Youth Group will conduct a cigarette butt pick up around the city of Mulberry and participate in tobacco jeopardy. Time: 3:30 PM. Location: ABBA's Place, 112 E. Jackson Street, Mulberry. Contact: Emily Bossung (219) 869-1304.

The Minority Health Coalition of Elkhart County in Elkhart will host a skating event for youth to come together, take a stand against tobacco and pledge to be tobacco-free. Time: 4:30 PM. Location: Holiday Skate Center, 28736 County Road 20, Elkhart. Contact: Velishea Billings (574) 226-5400.

The Healthy Communities of LaPorte County in collaboration with Slicer Support Services at LaPorte High School in La Porte will hang up a multitude of tobacco statistics and figures around the school, have students sign a #BeTheFirst pledge banner and participate in giveaways and carnival games during lunch. Time: 10:40 AM. Location: LaPorte High School, 602 F Street, La Porte. Contact: Sarah Null (219) 380-8642.

The Boys & Girls Club of Boone County in Zionsville will display a banner with truths about Big Tobacco, where youth and parents can dip their hands in glow paint and pledge to be tobacco-free. Time: 4:30 PM. Location: Boys & Girls Club of Boone County-Zionsville Unit, 1575 Mulberry Street, Zionsville. Contact: Glenn Sanford (317) 945-5679.

Students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in Indianapolis will come together to clean up the cigarette butts that litter campus to bring awareness to the pervasiveness of smoking. Time: 11 AM. Location: IUPUI Taylor Courtyard, 420 University Boulevard, Indianapolis. Contact: Seairah Delaney (812) 360-2004.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of Wayne County in Richmond will host a carnival where members can sign a #BeTheFirst pledge banner, participate in activities to learn what is in a cigarette, what tar looks like, and joust out tobacco. Time: 4:00 PM. Location: Boys & Girls Clubs of Wayne County, 1717 S. L Street, Richmond. Contact: Jenny O'Brien (765) 962-6922.

Students from the Kosciusko County Tobacco Free Coalition and the Baker Youth Club in Warsaw will celebrate choosing a tobacco-free lifestyle by taking a #BeTheFirst pledge and participating in a game of Plinko. Time: 3:30 PM. Location: Baker Youth Club, 1401 E. Smith Street, Warsaw. Contact: Heidi Blake (574) 551-5663.

The Dearborn County CASA Youth Ambassadors in Aurora will set up informational booths about the dangers of smoking and the effect of cigarette waste on the environment with local resources, activities and giveaways. Time: 10 AM. Location: Dearborn County Clearinghouse Food Pantry, 411 George Street, Aurora. Contact: Amy Rose (812) 290-1580.

The Youth Rise! Leadership will pick up cigarette butts in Frankfort. The youth will create a display using the picked up butts to show the negative impacts on the community's environment and advocate for a higher tobacco tax and a smoke-free air ordinance. Time: 4 PM. Location: TPA Park, 1 Adrian Marks Drive, Frankfort. Contact: Emily Bossung (219) 869-1304.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Indiana, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Iowa will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Iowa, 9 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 9.9 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 5,100 lives in Iowa and costs the state $1.3 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Iowa, activities include:

Students, teachers, and parents from the Benton Community Schools in Van Horne will commit to be tobacco-free and encourage peers and loved ones to quit smoking by constructing and signing a pledge wall. Time: 8 AM. Location: 600 1st Avenue, Van Horne. Contact: Bridget McWhorter (319) 651-9070.

Members of Family, Career and Community Leaders of America at Waverly-Shell Rock Middle School in Waverly will construct and sign a pledge wall to promote a smoke-free environment. Students will also participate in educational activities throughout the day, including a scavenger hunt and trivia game, to learn about the dangers of smoking. Time: 8 AM. Location: 501 Heritage Way, Waverly. Contact: Kristie Kuhse (319) 240-2095.

High school students at Missouri Valley High School in Missouri Valley will commit to be tobacco-free and encourage their peers and loved ones to quit smoking by constructing and signing a pledge wall. Time: 7:45 AM. Location: 605 Lincoln Highway, Missouri Valley. Contact: Sheila Boudreau-Cruse (402) 616-2692.

On March 22, youth and parents in Hampton will learn about tobacco prevention, participate in several engaging games and activities, and promote a smoke- and vape-free environment during Family Fun Night, hosted by the Hampton-Dumont Community School District. Time: 5 PM. Location: 601 12th Avenue N.E., Hampton. Contact: Ben Rasmussen (515) 570-7056.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Iowa, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


Nowland, a seasoned executive with over 24 years of experience in the financial services industry, has held numerous staff and executive positions in several locations throughout the Southeast. Most recently, he served as the Chief Business Services Officer at VyStar Credit Union, where he helped grow the organization to $8.2 billion in assets serving over 650,000 members across Florida and Georgia.

Prior to joining VyStar, Nowland spent most of his career in key management and executive roles with First Union/Wachovia Bank on the retail and business banking side of the organization. His last role at the bank was Community Bank President for the Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern Tennessee market, where he was responsible for the financial performance of retail and commercial banking. Other roles during his career included: Small Business Banking Manager/Vice President for Georgia; Regional Retail Manager/Vice President (overseeing 11 branches) in Baltimore, Maryland; Regional Sales Manager/Vice President for the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Market (Southern Maryland, Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia); and Senior Financial Specialist in Northern Virginia. Nowland also spent two years during this timeframe as the Vice President of Sales & Marketing for NETSEC, an internet technology company funded by E-Trade, which was ultimately acquired by MCI for $105 million.

"The Board of Directors worked with DDJ Myers to conduct an extensive national search for the right leader to guide Jax Federal Credit Union's next phase of growth. Little did we know, the perfect candidate was right under our nose," said Charles T. McLeod, Jr., Chairman of the Jax Federal Credit Union Board of Directors. "Joe's passion and experience immediately resonated with our Board, and we trust that our members will be just as excited to welcome him to the Jax Federal Credit Union family."

Nowland earned a B.A. in Communications and Public Relations from Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, and an MBA from the University of Tennessee. He is also a Certified Strategic Executive (CSE), Certified Credit Union Enterprise Risk Management Expert (CUERME) and Certified Residential Underwriter (CRU). While attending college in Texas, Nowland served in the U.S. Army Reserves with the 7/6 Cavalry Attack Helicopter Unit.

"I'm honored to be selected as Jax Federal Credit Union's next President and Chief Executive Officer," said Nowland. "Jax Federal Credit Union has done an outstanding job over the years serving its members' needs and making a difference in the community. I look forward to leading an organization with an exceptionally talented team that is focused on making a positive impact on people's lives and the communities the credit union serves."

About Jax Federal Credit Union

Established in 1935, Jax Federal Credit Union serves over 36,500 members across Duval, Clay, St. Johns, Baker and Nassau Counties. Jax Federal Credit Union helps its members meet their financial needs through eight branch locations; a robust mobile and internet banking platform; and access to over 6,800 Shared Branching locations and nearly 30,000 surcharge-free ATMs nationwide. For more information, visit jaxfcu.org .

SOURCE Jax Federal Credit Union

Related Links

http://jaxfcu.org


Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyen Quoc Cuong and delegates (Photo: VNA)





During the talk, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyen Quoc Cuong confirmed that Vietnam attracted foreign investors by its political and economic stability, integration into the world economy via bilateral and multilateral trade agreements and improving workforce quality. Moreover, the Vietnamese Government is making continuous efforts to further improve the investment, cooperation and trade environment.

Appreciating the increasingly developing relationship between Vietnam and South Africa, he noted that the bilateral trade ties were still modest, at USD1 billion per year, compared to Vietnams total goods and service turnover of USD450 billion and South Africas USD230 billion in 2018.

The two countries need to promote cooperation among businesses, he added.

Sindiswa Mququ, Head of South, Central and Southeast Asia under the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), suggested that the two countries should open cooperation space for businesses. They need to promote bilateral trade and narrow the trade gap, she said.

The South African and Vietnamese Governments are willing to make favorable conditions for businesses to promote cooperation, investment and trade through legal foundations.

During the talk, representatives from the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Trade gave an introduction about the countrys strengths in agriculture, services, tourism and textile and garment.

Many South African businesses expressed interest in Vietnams agricultural products and set up channels for promoting cooperation in the upcoming time./.
WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Kentucky will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism organized by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and sponsored in Kentucky by Interact for Health. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Kentucky, 14.1 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 14.3 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 8,900 lives in Kentucky and costs the state $1.9 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Kentucky, activities include:

The Kentucky Public Health Association in Bowling Green will host a campus-wide Cigarette Butt Clean Up Day at Western Kentucky University for students to raise awareness on the effects of tobacco and help kick start an initiative to have a tobacco-free campus. Time: 10 AM. Location: Western Kentucky University, 1906 College Heights Boulevard, Bowling Green. Contact: Mackenzie Pennington (270) 505-5022.

Students from Champions for a Drug-Free Lyon County in Eddyville will hold a tobacco protest where they will create signs with tobacco-related death statistics and display shoes representing those who have died because of tobacco use. Time: 11:30 AM. Location: Lyon County High School, 209 W. Fairview Ave, Eddyville. Contact: Nancye Daniel (270) 625-0995.

At Grant County High School in Florence, youth will sign a pledge wall to be tobacco-free and write to policy makers to advocate for schools in Kentucky to be tobacco free. Time: 10 AM. Location: 7056 Burlington Pike, Florence. Contact: Camille Croweak (859) 907-4534.

Boone County High School students in Florence designed t-shirts and a snapchat filter to draw classmates' attentions to the dangers of tobacco. They will sign a postcard in support of the statewide tobacco-free schools bill and distribute informational brochures. Time: 7 AM. Location: Boone County High School, 7056 Burlington Pike, Florence. Contact: Abby Beausir (859) 835-8809.

Students at Williamstown High School in Williamstown, will wear self-designed Kick Butts Day t-shirts, sign a pledge to be tobacco-free and write postcards to legislators to advocate for tobacco-free schools in Kentucky. Time: 10 AM. Location: 300 Helton Road, Williamstown. Contact: Elizabeth Bishop (513) 289-8585.

On March 27, Monroe County CARES and the CARES Youth Prevention Ambassadors in Tompkinsville are taking a stand against tobacco and its deadly consequences by creating a powerful visual display to air out Big Tobacco's "dirty laundry" at the courthouse. Time: 10 AM. Location: Monroe County Courthouse, 200 N. Main St. Suite D, Tompkinsville. Contact: Kelli Smith (270) 427-1232.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Kentucky, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Louisiana will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Louisiana, 12.2 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 12.3 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 7,200 lives in Louisiana and costs the state $1.9 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In Louisiana, youth advocates are encouraging state lawmakers to pass a smoke-free law that would make all workplaces and public places smoke-free and protect everyone's right to breathe clean air.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Louisiana, activities include:

The Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco-Free Living (TFL) will host an informational panel and discussion in Ruston to educate the community about the effects of tobacco and vaping on youth. Speakers include: Mayor Ronny Walker; Dr. Alexander Billioux, Assistant Secretary of Health for Louisiana's Office of Public Health; TFL director Tonia R. Moore; Alayna P. Tackett from the Oklahoma Tobacco Research Center; and local teenagers from the Next Era Youth Program. Time: 9:30 AM. Location: 1524 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, Ruston. Contact: Liana Narcisse (504) 301-9853.

In Central Louisiana, students from 53 schools in seven school districts are participating in Kick Butts Day activities through funding by a Healthy Behaviors School District Partnership Grant from The Rapides Foundation. At the event in Alexandria, members of the student council at Alexandria Middle Magnet School will show their commitment to being smoke-free by spelling out an anti-tobacco message with cups in a fence and hosting a tombstone and cemetery tour. Time: 11 AM. Location: 122 Maryland Avenue, Alexandria. Contact: Shewanda Powell (318) 218-1848.

Students from Pineville Junior High School in Pineville will participate in a "No Smoking" poster content to educate their peers about the dangers of smoking and encourage a smoke-free environment. Time: 10:45 AM. Location: 501 Edgewood Drive, Pineville. Contact: Melanie Deville (318) 447-7751.

The Healthy Living Club at Montgomery High School in Montgomery will host a Kick Butts Day kickball game to knock out tobacco in the community. Time: 2 PM. Location: 900 Harrison Drive, Montgomery. Contact: Erin Melton (318) 419-7168.

Westgate High School Next Era students will host a clean air picnic during lunch on the school's campus in New Iberia. The picnic will include several games and activities to promote a smoke-free environment. Time: 10:40 AM. Location: 2305 Jefferson Island Road, New Iberia. Contact: Jennifer Kidd (337) 967-0861.

The Healthy Living Club at Peabody Magnet High School in Alexandria will commit to being tobacco-free and encouraging peers and loved ones to quit smoking by constructing and signing a pledge wall and participating in several anti-smoking games. Time: 11:22 AM. Location: 2727 Jones Avenue, Alexandria. Contact: Teri Mayeux (318) 794-2300.

The Living Healthy Club at Avoyelles High School in Moreauville will host a day of informational activities for students to promote a smoke-free campus and community. Activities include airing out Big Tobacco's "dirty laundry" with a powerful visual display and writing facts about the dangers of smoking in chalk. Time: 11 AM. Location: 287 Main Street, Moreauville. Contact: Renee Bell (225) 978-6855.

Youth Summit Students from Natchitoches Junior High in Natchitoches will raise awareness about the dangers of smoking by hosting and participating in several activities, including a cigarette funeral, a relay race, and a balloon race. Time: 9 AM. Location: 1621 Welch Street, Natchitoches. Contact: Velverlon Holden (318) 238-0066.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Louisiana, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Maine will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Maine, 15.8 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 8.7 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 2,400 lives in Maine and costs the state $811 million in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Maine, activities include:

Students from Dawn F. Barnes Elementary School in Caswell will display t-shirts they designed with facts on what they learned about the dangers of tobacco. Time: 12 PM. Location: Dawn F. Barnes Elementary School, 1025 Van Buren Road, Caswell. Contact: Jo-Ellen Kelley (207) 540-4885.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Maine, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


Maxonrow's Global CEO Mark stated, "Blockchain technology has become an influential force in the FinTech industry. Not only is blockchain present in digital financial exchanges, but it's also gradually being adopted by the general public, transportation services and in other areas, creating a more convenient and new way of living. In contrast to countries like Europe or the United States where the blockchain industry is mature, Taiwan has the advantage of being a blockchain-friendly market regarded as Asia's Media Center. For this reason, we can't underestimate the growth potential it has. Maxonrow has chosen Taiwan as its anchor point to enter the Asian market and wishes to collaborate with Taiwan's government authorities and business corporations. Through Maxonrow, governments, businesses, and societies are connected with the real economy through blockchain technology."

Maxonrow has the Right Mix of Secure, Cost-Effective, Efficient and Regulatory Compliant Blockchain Solutions

Security Token Offers or STO is most commonly used in the international blockchain market. Maxonrow came up with an improved solution, the world's first True Asset Issuing, or TAI mechanism. It ensures the True Asset tokens issued by the Maxonrow blockchain are transparent and traceable, fortifying the credibility and reliability of user transactions.

Maxonrow's CEO of the Asia Region Jin said, "The key technical aspect of Maxonrow is its state of the art KYC mechanism. Aside from providing businesses and societies a more transparent and reliable financial transaction method, it can effectively assist governments in digital financial management, resulting in the prevention and elimination of financial crimes from happening."

Maxonrow has landed partnerships with Far Eastern Air Transport, National Taiwan Normal University ASIS POP Research Center, MusicBravo, MU Global Holding Limited, Red Star, TeaCoin, FansDAQ, and Huafu Group. In addition, Maxonrow is working on numerous projects related to the academic sector.

Maxonrow's CEO of Asia Region Jin stated, "When it comes to Maxonrow KYC is not only limited to governments and businesses, we're also seeking to expand to cooperate with society and academic sectors. The agreement with NTNU ASIS POP is to utilize their expertise in industry-academic cooperation in adopting real-world application of Maxonrow KYC Blockchain technology." Director of NTNU ASIS POP Dr. Ho-pu Lee adds, "ASIS POP is proud to be Maxonrow's academic partner. We want to promote Taiwan's music industry by employing blockchain technology that can provide complete assurance of the intellectual property rights of artists. "

Representatives of United Nations Organization Show Their Support

Maxonrow's Global Launch Event will be attended by guests from Taiwan's industrial, political and academic sectors. Also showing support for the event is former WOGC-UNSDGs Vice President Andrey Abramov and Vice Secretary General Muleta Tembo, "Godfather of Chinese Securities" Jing-sheng Guan, former Thailand Minister of Education Wiboon Shamsheun, and many other key figures from around the world.

"This Maxonrow Global Launch provides an opportunity for beginning dialogue and debate with all sectors of society crucial for making the Block chain technology further develop. We look forward to engaging powerfully with the rapidly growing global community of blockchain thought leaders to responsibly apply this transformative technology to achieve profound social impact in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals. So let us join together to ensure that our partnership forged at this Launch, with support of Governments and other actors, brings better lives to those who have been left behind in the current world economy. And to the Maxonrow team, I wish every success in your work which holds so much promise for our future," said Andrey Abramov, Vice President of the World Organization of Governance and Competitiveness.

About Maxonrow

Maxonrow is a safe, secure and regulatory compliant decentralized platform for everyone, everywhere. Through Maxonrow, governments, businesses, and societies are connected with the real economy through blockchain technology.

For more information, please visit: www.mxw.one

SOURCE Maxonrow

Related Links

http://www.mxw.one


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in New Mexico will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In New Mexico, 24.7 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 10.6 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 2,600 lives in New Mexico and costs the state $844 million in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In New Mexico, youth advocates with Rescue  Evolvement are pushing for 24/7 smoke-free schools and ending tobacco sales to minors.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In New Mexico, activities include:

On March 19, youth members of Evolvement at Atrisco Heritage Academy High School in Albuquerque will hang an "In My Lifetime Banner" during the school's health fair and students will record their hopes, dreams, and bucket list ideas on a pledge wall to promote the message that staying healthy and tobacco-free is important to ensure all their dreams come true. Time: 9 AM. Location: 10800 Dennis Chavez Boulevard, Albuquerque. Contact: Ahlivia Mattocks (910) 389-4157.

In collaboration with the Pueblo of Acoma Taxation & Assessments Department, Acoma Behavioral Health Services Department, and the Pueblo of Acoma Education Department, Haak'u Community Academy in Acoma Pueblo will host a guest comedian who will present on tobacco awareness and cessation. Students will also engage in various educational activities to encourage a smoke-free environment. Time: 12:30 PM. Location: 25 Pinsbaari Drive, Acoma. Contact: Dionysia Pasquale (505) 389-5768.

Cuba High School Evolvement youth in Cuba will celebrate Kick Butts Day by committing to be tobacco-free and encouraging peers and loved ones to quit smoking. They will hang an "In My Lifetime Banner," sign a pledge wall, and create photo pledges. Time: 12:24 PM. Location: 50 Country Road 13, Cuba. Contact: Ahlivia Mattocks (910) 389-4157.

Youth members of Evolvement at Tucumcari Middle School in Tucumcari will hang an "In My Lifetime Banner" and record their hopes, dreams, and bucket list ideas throughout the day. Students will also commit to be tobacco-free by constructing and signing a pledge wall and creating photo pledges. Time: 12:15 PM. Location: 1100 S. 7th Street, Tucumcari. Contact: Ahlivia Mattocks (910) 389-4157.

Evolvement youth at V. Sue Cleveland High School in Rio Rancho will record their hopes, dreams and bucket list ideas on an "In My Lifetime Banner." They will also commit to promoting a smoke-free environment by constructing and signing a pledge wall and creating photo pledges. Time: 10:40 AM. Location: 4800 Laban Road N.E., Rio Rancho. Contact: Ahlivia Mattocks (910) 389-4157.

Students in the Evolvement group at Hiroshi Miyamura High School in Gallup will show their commitment to a smoke-free environment by recording their hopes for the future on an "In My Lifetime Banner." They will also construct and sign a pledge wall and create photo pledges. Time: 11:09 AM. Location: 680 Boardman Avenue, Gallup. Contact: Ahlivia Mattocks (910) 389-4157.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in New Mexico, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) marks National Poison Prevention Week (NPPW), March 17-23, 2019, encouraging consumers to "Own It" and focus on poison proofing their homes.

During Poison Prevention Week, CPSC is collaborating with product safety agencies north and south of America's borders to raise awareness about unintentional poisonings. CPSC, Health Canada, and Mexico's Procuraduria Federal del Consumidor (PROFECO), are working together to make North America the safest continent for consumer products.



"Poison Prevention Week is a good opportunity for consumers to take action in completing simple safety steps to protect their families, especially children, from poisoning tragedies," said CPSC Acting Chairman Ann Marie Buerkle. "I thank Health Canada and PROFECO for collaborating with CPSC to help protect children from unintentional poisonings and to save lives."

"Many common products can be poisonous if used, stored or disposed of improperly. Let's all help to prevent poisonings by talking with our families and friends about the dangers posed by chemicals in and around the home," said The Honorable Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Health Canada's Minister of Health. "Ensuring that products containing harmful chemicals are properly used, stored and disposed of is essential to protecting your health and the health of your loved ones."

"It is a duty for everyone to prevent poisoning accidents. PROFECO and its laboratory analyze available products to make sure that potentially toxic products are properly identified and labelled. Precise instructions for safe usage should also be provided to consumers," said Ricardo Sheffield Padilla, Federal Consumer Attorney of PROFECO (Procuraduria Federal del Consumidor) "This effort by the CPSC alongside Health Canada and PROFECO bolsters our commitment to consumers both in Mexico and the North American market as a whole."

Unintentional poison exposures send an estimated average of 85,000 children to emergency departments and cause an average of 31 deaths every year in the United States. More than 90 percent of unintentional poisonings occur in the home.

The good news is child poisoning deaths have decreased by more than 80% since the Poison Prevention Packaging Act (PPPA) went into effect in 1970. The PPPA requires manufacturers to secure certain medicines and hazardous household chemicals in child-resistant packaging.

Follow these safety tips and check out the resources below to help keep your family safe from poison dangers:

Storing medications for convenience in unsecured containers presents a danger to children. Keep medicines closed tightly in their original labeled containers, and place them in a locked box, up high, and out of a child's sight. Fuel-burning products, such as portable generators, furnaces, and cars produce carbon monoxide (CO), a deadly, colorless, and odorless gas. Always operate portable generators outside and away from open doors, windows, and vents. Keep generators at least 20 feet away from the house. Single-load liquid laundry packets are highly concentrated, often colorful, and can look appetizing to children. Store laundry products up high and out of sight of children, and keep them sealed in their original packaging. Coin-size button batteries used in all sorts of electronics--from remotes and gaming controllers--to musical greeting cards, are a danger, if ingested. Do not leave products with accessible button batteries within reach of children, and use tape to help secure a battery compartment that does not have a screw closure. Keep household cleaning products, and other products that are sold in child-resistant packaging, in their original packaging and in a secured location out of reach of children. Always keep the National Poison Help Line Number, 800-222-1222, handy in case of a poison emergency.

To know more about how you can reduce the risk of unintentional poisoning, check out the CPSC's Poison Prevention Safety Education Center (https://go.usa.gov/xEqry). There, you can learn how to identify potential poison risks and take simple steps to prevent child exposure.

About U.S. CPSC:

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death associated with the use of thousands of types of consumer products under the agency's jurisdiction. Deaths, injuries, and property damage from consumer product incidents cost the nation more than $1 trillion annually. CPSC is committed to protecting consumers and families from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical or mechanical hazard. CPSC's work to ensure the safety of consumer products - such as toys, cribs, power tools, cigarette lighters and household chemicals  contributed to a decline in the rate of deaths and injuries associated with consumer products over the past 40 years.

Federal law bars any person from selling products subject to a publicly-announced voluntary recall by a manufacturer or a mandatory recall ordered by the Commission.

For more lifesaving information, follow us on Facebook, Instagram @USCPSC and Twitter @USCPSC or sign up to receive our e-mail alerts. To report a dangerous product or a product-related injury go online to www.SaferProducts.gov or call CPSC's Hotline at 800-638-2772 or teletypewriter at 301-595-7054 for the hearing impaired.

CPSC Consumer Information Hotline

Contact us at this toll-free number if you have questions about a recall:

800-638-2772 (TTY 301-595-7054)

Times: 8 a.m.  5:30 p.m. ET; Messages can be left anytime

Call to get product safety and other agency information and to report unsafe products .

Media Contact

Please use the phone numbers below for all media requests.

Phone: 301-504-7908

Spanish: 301-504-7800

Release Number: 19-084

SOURCE U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission

Related Links

http://www.cpsc.gov


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Pennsylvania will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Pennsylvania, 11.3 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 8.7 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 22,000 lives in Pennsylvania and costs the state $6.4 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Pennsylvania, activities include:

On March 18, students at Titusville Middle School will learn about the dangers of vaping and the impact of secondhand smoke during the lunch periods. Students will receive temporary tattoos to show Big Tobacco they are #NotAReplacement for dying smokers. Time: 11 AM. Location: 415 Water Street, Titusville. Contact: Ashleigh English (814) 657-7263.

Students at Upper Merion Area Middle School will participate in a Speak Out, where they will take part in roundtable discussions designed to encourage them to speak out against tobacco. The event will also include educational displays about e-cigarettes and tobacco, including the "aMAZE-ing Path of Deception, a tobacco pledge wall, and a photo station where they can get their photo taken as they "kick Ciggy Butt." Students Against Destructive Decisions and the CAST Club will help facilitate activities. Time: 3 PM. Location: 450 Keebler Road, King of Prussia. Contact: Susan Shelton (610) 304-5533.

LGBT student leaders at Quakertown High School, with support from the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center will celebrate Kick Butts Day by building a collaborative banner that will be displayed outside the Gay Straight Alliance classroom. Time: 3 PM. Location: 600 Park Avenue, Quakertown. Contact: Annemarie Shankweiler (484) 821-7650.

Students from Hopewell Elementary School in Oxford will celebrate Kick Butts Day with a schoolwide Healthy Lungs Walk. Students and teachers will walk around the track to learn about smoke-free air and healthy exercise. In addition, representatives from the Chester County Health Department will educate students on the dangers of vaping and smoking. Time: 9 AM. Location: 602 Garfield Street, Oxford. Contact: Erika Seaman (610) 283-0247.

On March 22, students, faculty and staff from the Freeland Middle School will celebrate Kick Butts Day with a dodgeball tournament to "knock out" tobacco from the school. Kids will pledge to live tobacco-free and learn about the dangers of tobacco use through educational displays. Time: 12 PM. Location: 400 Alvin Street, Freeland. Contact: Nicole Meckes (570) 956-3378.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Pennsylvania, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in South Dakota will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In South Dakota, 17.3 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 10.1 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 1,300 lives in South Dakota and costs the state $373 million in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In South Dakota, activities include:

Clubs Against Tobacco (CAT) Club members will mark Kick Butts Day at the Boys & Girls Club of Brookings by sharing public service announcements with their peers and committing to being tobacco-free, encouraging loved ones to quit smoking, and signing a pledge wall. Time: 4 PM. Location: 1126 Southland Lane, Brookings. Contact: Matt Sass (605) 692-3333.

White River High School's T.A.T.U. (Teens Against Tobacco Use) group will gather harmful products found in cigarettes as the result of smoking cigarettes, especially e-cigarettes, and showcase them to fellow students at the elementary, middle and high school level. Time: 10 AM. Location: 418 3rd Street, White River. Contact: Joyce Glynn (605) 441-5389.

The Lifeways Counselor and Youth to Youth students at North Middle School will present a range of visual and interactive, anti-tobacco education information for students in the cafeteria during lunches to mark Kick Butts Day and underscore the importance of tobacco-free living. Time: 11 AM. Location: North Middle School Cafeteria, 1501 North Maple Street, Rapid City. Contact: Michele Brink-Gluhosky (605) 484-0887.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in South Dakota, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


SAN DIEGO, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is being issued by Kazerouni Law Group, APC.

Class Counsel Abbas Kazerounian and Joshua Swigart today announced an agreement to resolve a class action pending against U.S. Bank National Association in federal court in Ohio. The lawsuit alleges that U.S. Bank violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by calling cell phones without prior express consent using an automatic telephone dialing system or artificial or prerecorded voice. Under the terms of the settlement, U.S. Bank denies any liability but agreed to fund a $2.67 million settlement to fully resolve the lawsuit without the time and expense of a court proceeding.

The settlement of Guiette v. U.S. Bank National Association has been preliminarily approved by the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Ohio, and is subject to the Court's final approval. The Settlement class consists of persons who received an autodialed call from U.S. Bank to the persons' cellular telephone without their prior express consent or with artificial or prerecorded voice. There are two sub-classes defined as:

Subclass One: includes all users or subscribers to a wireless or cellular service within the United States who used or subscribed to a phone number to which U.S. Bank made or initiated one or more Calls in connection with a Residential Mortgage Loan using any automated dialing technology or artificial or prerecorded voice technology during the Class Period August 7, 2014 through December 31, 2017.

Subclass Two: includes all users or subscribers to a wireless or cellular service within the United States who used or subscribed to a phone number to which U.S. Bank made or initiated one or more Calls in connection with a Home Equity Loan using any automated dialing technology or artificial or prerecorded voice technology during the Class Period February 19, 2015 through December 31, 2017.

The settlement fund, less attorneys' fees, litigation expenses, and costs of notice and claims administration as approved by the Court, will be distributed on a pro rata basis to Settlement Class members who submit claims under procedures implemented by the Court overseeing the settlement.

Most persons included in the Settlement Class can be identified from U.S. Bank's records and will receive mailed notice of the settlement. Individuals who received such calls but cannot be identified from U.S. Bank's records will need to contact the Claims Administrator to determine if they are in the Settlement Class. For more information, please visit www.USbankTCPAsettlement.com.

SOURCE Kazerouni Law Group, APC
LEAWOOD, Kan., March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- ValueHealth, a privately held, nationally trusted surgical healthcare partner, is pleased to announce the hiring of Jennifer Duke as President, Market Development. ValueHealth's technology-enabled platform assists payors and providers in delivering appropriate alternatives to high-cost, fee-for-service surgical care. In her role as President, Market Development, Ms. Duke is responsible for introducing ValueHealth's proprietary technology to providers and payors, as well as expanding the integrated orthopaedic practice model and ambulatory surgery center (ASC) platform for NueHealth, a ValueHealth company. She will assist orthopaedic groups in navigating the transition from the fee-for-service model to value-based care with commercial payors, self-funded employers, and Medicare. Ms. Duke will also work to expand the total joint replacement hyperspecialty platform of ValueHealth company Muve Health from the Greater Philadelphia market into Texas, Illinois, Florida, and the Midwest.

Jennifer Duke

Ms. Duke was previously the owner of Urban MD, a healthcare consultancy providing business development and marketing strategies for emerging healthcare companies in Kansas, Missouri, Arizona, Texas, and California. Under her leadership, Urban MD helped create performance improvement and enterprise value in the orthopaedic space.

Prior to founding Urban MD, Ms. Duke served as the Chief Development Officer of Foundation HealthCare, a $150 million company focused on the development and management of ASCs and surgical hospitals. In that role, she led business development and physician recruitment, forming partnerships with health systems, medical groups, employers, and ACO/IPAs to create same store growth and capture new market share. She successfully recruited qualified physicians and healthcare investors to syndicate physician-owned investment offerings of de novo projects and multiple ancillary expansion projects and joint ventures.

"We are very pleased to have Ms. Duke joining the team," said Dan Tasset, Founder and Vice Chairman of ValueHealth. "She will fill a key role for ValueHealth as we expand our national orthopaedic platform and outpatient initiatives."

John Palumbo, Executive Chairman of ValueHealth, NueHealth, and Muve Health, agreed. "The addition of Ms. Duke to our Business Development team positions us to not only respond to the demands of the industry, but also to aggressively lead the industry in this transition to value-based care with our current and future partners."

About ValueHealth

ValueHealth is a technology-enabled, market-based platform that assists payors and providers in delivering prospective bundled payment arrangements that are an alternative to high-cost, fee-for-service surgical care for their members and patients. ValueHealth's platform affiliates NueHealth , Muve Health , Benefit Management , Healthcare Re , and ValueHealth Transformation Center uniquely position the platform to deliver high-value surgical care for payors, providers and patients. Redefining what it means to be a healthcare network, ValueHealth's Ambulatory Centers of Excellence (ACE) network platform facilitates new levels of accessibilities, alignment, risk readiness and consumer transparency. Learn more at www.valuehealth.com

About NueHealth

Since 1997, NueHealth has partnered with over 10,000 physician investors and 25 health system partners to develop lower-cost sites of service, expanding into more than 150 facilities, including physician-owned surgery centers, surgical hospitals and orthopedic hyper-specialty centers. Today, NueHealth operates in 23 states, positioning our Ambulatory Centers of Excellence (ACE) to be national leaders in the transition to value-based care. For more information, visit www.nuehealth.com .

About Muve Health

Headquartered in Leawood, KS, Muve Health is the nation's premier value-based outpatient total joint replacement provider. Muve's protocol-driven orthopedic program delivers outstanding clinical outcomes at a predictable cost, in an optimized outpatient environment unparalleled in recovery guidance and patient experience. Muve Health is set to expand nationally in 2019 in the Greater Philadelphia region, TX, IL, FL, and the Midwest. Muve's current flagship total joint replacement center is located outside of Austin in Lakeway, TX, where both Muve Lakeway ASC and Muve Lakeway Stay Suites are accredited and certified by The Joint Commission; Muve Lakeway ASC was the first facility in Texas to receive advanced accreditation for total joint surgery from The Joint Commission. Learn more about Muve Health at www.muvehealth.com .

Media Contact:

Allison Chick

913.387.0663

[email protected]

SOURCE ValueHealth
ISNES, Belgium, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- VolitionRx Limited (NYSE AMERICAN: VNRX) ("Volition") today announced that its Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Cameron Reynolds, is scheduled to present at two conferences in the U.S. next week.

During the conferences, Mr. Reynolds will outline Volition's business, clinical, regulatory and operational milestones, as well as the Company's recently announced clinical data and upcoming 2019 milestones.

Details of the conference presentations are as follows:

Conference: ROTH Capital Partners 31st Annual Growth Stock Conference Date: Monday, March 18, 2019 Time: 12:30 p.m. PDT Location: The Ritz-Carlton, Dana Point, CA

Conference: Oppenheimer & Co. 29th Annual Healthcare Conference Date: Wednesday, March 20, 2019 Time: 3:20 p.m. PDT Location: Westin Grand Central, New York, NY

Persons attending any of the above-referenced conferences who would like to schedule a 1-on-1 meeting with Volition management during such conference may do so by contacting Joseph Green of Edison Advisors at [email protected] or Scott Powell, Executive Vice President, at [email protected].

About Volition

Volition is a multi-national life sciences company developing simple, easy to use, cost effective blood tests to help diagnose a range of cancers and other diseases. Early diagnosis has the potential to not only prolong the life of patients, but also to improve their quality of life. The tests are based on the science of NucleosomicsTM, which is the practice of identifying and measuring nucleosomes in the bloodstream or other bodily fluid - an indication that disease is present.

Volition's research and development activities are currently centered in Belgium, with additional offices in London, Texas and Singapore, as the company focuses on bringing its diagnostic products to market.

For more information about Volition, visit Volition's website (http://www.volitionrx.com) or connect with us via:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/volitionrx

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/volitionrx

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VolitionRx/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/VolitionRx

The contents found at Volition's website address, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube are not incorporated by reference into this document and should not be considered part of this document. The addresses for Volition's website, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube are included in this document as inactive textual references only.

Media / Investor Contacts

Safe Harbor Statement

Statements in this press release may be "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, that concern matters that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated or projected in the forward-looking statements. Words such as "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "aims," "targets," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "optimizing," "potential," "goal," "suggests," "could," "would," "should," "may," "will" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements relate to the effectiveness of Volition's blood-based diagnostic tests as well as Volition's ability to develop and successfully commercialize such test platforms for early detection of cancer and other diseases. Volition's actual results may differ materially from those indicated in these forward-looking statements due to numerous risks and uncertainties. For instance, if Volition fails to develop and commercialize diagnostic products, it may be unable to execute its plan of operations. Other risks and uncertainties include Volition's failure to obtain necessary regulatory clearances or approvals to distribute and market future products in the clinical IVD market; a failure by the marketplace to accept the products in Volition's development pipeline or any other diagnostic products Volition might develop; Volition will face fierce competition and Volition's intended products may become obsolete due to the highly competitive nature of the diagnostics market and its rapid technological change; and other risks identified in Volition's most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, as well as other documents that Volition files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections about Volition's business based, in part, on assumptions made by management. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this release, and, except as required by law, Volition does not undertake an obligation to update its forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

Pursuant to the disclosure requirements of the NYSE MKT Company Guide Section 610(b), Volition is reporting that its audited consolidated financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018, included in Volition's Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 13, 2019, contains an audit opinion from its independent registered public accounting firm that includes an explanatory paragraph related to Volition's ability to continue as a going concern. This announcement does not represent any change or amendment to Volition's financial statements or to its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018.

Nucleosomics(TM) and Nu.Q(TM) and their respective logos are trademarks and/or service marks of VolitionRx Limited and its subsidiaries.

SOURCE VolitionRx Ltd

Related Links

http://www.volitionrx.com


DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Airport Passenger Screening Systems Market (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The airport passenger screening systems market is anticipated to register a CAGR of 10% during the forecast period, 2019 and 2024, to reach a market value of USD 5 billion by 2024.

The rising number of terrorist and hostile activities around the world are making countries around the world increase their customs and border security. In this regard, airport security has become a matter of concern, thereby, acting as a driver for airport passenger screening systems.

The number of travelers opting for air travel is increasing at a rapid pace, making it difficult for airports to handle a vast inflow of passengers. Also, an increasing number of passengers means that the security measures that need to be taken should also increase, which demands more investments in passenger screening systems.

Narcotic and chemical trace detectors are easing the way airport security agencies are handling detection. Improvements in technology have made it possible to detect a wide range of substances with greater accuracy, speed, and reliability, than ever before.

Key Market Trends

Advanced Imaging Technology Scanner Segment Expected to have a High Growth Rate during the Forecast Period

Metal detectors dominate the airport passenger screening systems market, as of 2018. Metal detectors are currently the most widely used ones in all airports, across the world. Full body scanners are banned in certain countries, due to privacy issues, which led to the development of advanced imaging technology, which is an advanced body scanner.

Body scanners based on advanced imaging techniques are costly and are currently replacing the full body and metal detectors in several airports. Hence, the advanced imaging technology scanner segment is likely to experience maximum growth during the forecast period.

Asia-Pacific Region to Dominate the Market during the Forecast Period

The North America region held the major share, in terms of revenue, in 2018, due to a large number of airports and related infrastructure in the region.

But during the forecast period, Asia-Pacific is set to experience major growth, mainly due to the modernization of the existing airport facilities and construction of new airports, majorly in India, China, and some countries in Southeast Asia, like Vietnam and Thailand.

Competitive Landscape

The passenger screening systems market is in the process of consolidation, with businesses aligning their products and services to either excel in a particular product type or to become a complete security and detection products manufacturer and service provider.

This market is expected to gain a lot more competitors from the local Asian players, as demand improves in the region and players fall short in production.

India and China have already formed alliances, partnerships, and JVs with MNCs, in order to develop their own screening technologies and standards for equipment, due to the rising threat of terrorism, militant groups, and the toughening movement of known criminals/perpetrators of law.

Topics Covered

1 Introduction

1.1 Study Deliverables

1.2 Study Assumptions

1.3 Scope of the Study

2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

4 Market Dynamics

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Market Drivers

4.3 Market Restraints

4.4 Industry Attractiveness - Porter's Five Forces Analysis

5 Market Segmentation

5.1 Type

5.1.1 Metal Detectors

5.1.2 Full Body Scanners

5.1.3 Advanced Imaging Technology

5.2 Geography

5.2.1 North America

5.2.2 Europe

5.2.3 Asia-Pacific

5.2.4 South America

5.2.5 Middle East & Africa

6 Competitive Landscape

6.1 Market Share Analysis

6.2 Company Profiles

6.2.1 OSI Systems Inc.

6.2.2 Analogic Corporation

6.2.3 C.E.I.A. S.p.A.

6.2.4 Agilent Technologies

6.2.5 Garrett Electronics Inc.

6.2.6 Nuctech Systems Ltd.

6.2.7 Kromek

6.2.8 L-3 Technologies Inc.

6.2.9 Vanderlande Industries B.V.

6.2.10 Leidos

6.2.11 Smiths Group

6.2.12 Autoclear LLC

7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends

For more information about this report visit

https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/hxgp42/airport_passenger?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


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Alabama will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Alabama, 24.5 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 14 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 8,600 lives in Alabama and costs the state $1.9 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Alabama, activities include:

On March 19, students from Spain Park High School in Birmingham will listen to a presentation by the University of Birmingham-Alabama's Youth Tobacco Prevention Program on the dangers of vaping and tobacco use. The students will then spread the message to their peers through social media platforms. Time: 8:15 AM. Location: Spain Park High School, 4700 Jaguar Drive, Birmingham. Contact: Jason Gaston (205) 439-1054.

Students from Red Bay High School in Red Bay will participate in an anti-tobacco rally featuring presentations from state health officials and student-led informational activities. Time: 8:30 AM. Location: Red Bay High School, 800 8th Street E, Red Bay. Contact: Christopher Hargett (256) 398-4910.

Students from Phil Campbell High School in Phil Campbell will participate in a school assembly featuring a guest speaker discussing the dangers of tobacco use. The school will also have a series of anti-tobacco informational activities throughout the school, including posters, a survey on student tobacco use and anti-smoking ribbons for the students to wear. Time: 8:30 AM. Location: Phil Campbell High School, 65 School Avenue, Phil Campbell. Contact: Libby DeVaney (256) 331-2150.

Youth with Decatur Youth Services in Decatur will create displays in prominent locations such as City Hall and the public library to promote awareness of the dangers of e-cigarettes/vaping. They will gather on the busiest intersections in the city with signs to get out their message to community members. Time: 6:30 AM  8:00 AM. Locations: corners of Highway 67 (Beltline Road) and Spring Avenue in front of CVS Pharmacy; Austin High School, 1625 Danville Road SW; the Delano Park entrance on US Highway 31; all locations in Decatur. Contact: Theresa Burrow (256) 318-5714.

Students from Dothan High School in Dothan will hold a Star Wars-themed rally to educate students on the dangers of e-cigarettes. Time: 3:30 PM. Location: Dothan High School, 1236 S. Oates Street, Dothan. Contact: Chris Payne (334) 805-0463.

On March 22, students from Francis Marion School in Marion will participate in an anti-tobacco rally featuring a tobacco scavenger hunt, a blood drive, tobacco information table and tobacco re-enactment skits. Time: 8:00 AM. Location: Francis Marion School, 101 Hubbard Drive, Marion. Contact: Mercedes Lightfoot (205) 609-8560.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Alabama, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


PLANO, Texas, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Alliance Data Systems Corporation (NYSE: ADS), a leading global provider of data-driven marketing and loyalty solutions, today provided an update on its Card Services segment.

In conjunction with the release of the Company's Master Trust Monthly Noteholder's Statement, the Company is releasing similar metrics for the overall total managed portfolio. The Master Trust data represents a subset of the Company's total managed portfolio, and the Company believes the information presented below provides a more complete view of the Card Services segment.



For the month ended February 28, 2019

For the two months ended February 28, 2019

(dollars in thousands) Average receivables $ 16,775,779

$ 17,007,244 Year over year change in average receivables

(5)%



(5)% Net charge-offs $ 88,742

$ 182,906 Net charge-offs as a percentage of average receivables (1)

6.3%



6.5%











Active clients - average receivables (2) $ 16,755,372

$ 16,988,017 Year over year change in active clients - average receivables (2)

11%



12%













(1) Compares to 6.9% for both the month and two months ended February 28, 2018, respectively. (2) Excludes non-strategic clients.



As of February 28, 2019

As of February 28, 2018

(dollars in thousands)

30 days + delinquencies - principal $ 906,409

$ 948,738 Period ended receivables - principal $ 15,974,353

$ 16,886,268 Delinquency rate

5.67%



5.62%















About Alliance Data

Alliance Data (NYSE: ADS) is a leading global provider of data-driven marketing and loyalty solutions serving large, consumer-based industries. The Company creates and deploys customized solutions, enhancing the critical customer marketing experience; the result is measurably changing consumer behavior while driving business growth and profitability for some of today's most recognizable brands. Alliance Data helps its clients create and increase customer loyalty through solutions that engage millions of customers each day across multiple touch points using traditional, digital, mobile and emerging technologies. An S&P 500, FORTUNE 500 and FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For company headquartered in Plano, Texas, Alliance Data consists of three businesses that together employ approximately 20,000 associates at more than 100 locations worldwide.

Alliance Data's card services business is a provider of market-leading private label, co-brand, and business credit card programs. Epsilon is a leading provider of multichannel, data-driven technologies and marketing services, and also includes Conversant, a leader in personalized digital marketing. LoyaltyOne owns and operates the AIR MILES Reward Program, Canada's most recognized loyalty program, and Netherlands-based BrandLoyalty, a global provider of tailor-made loyalty programs for grocers.

Follow Alliance Data on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements give our expectations or forecasts of future events and can generally be identified by the use of words such as "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "intend," "project," "plan," "likely," "may," "should" or other words or phrases of similar import. Similarly, statements that describe our business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions or goals also are forward-looking statements. Examples of forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements we make regarding our expected operating results, future economic conditions including currency exchange rates and the guidance we give with respect to our anticipated financial performance.

We believe that our expectations are based on reasonable assumptions. Forward-looking statements, however, are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the projections, anticipated results or other expectations expressed in this release, and no assurances can be given that our expectations will prove to have been correct. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, factors set forth in the Risk Factors section in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the most recently ended fiscal year, which may be updated in Item 1A of, or elsewhere in, our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q filed for periods subsequent to such Form 10-K.

Our forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made, and we undertake no obligation, other than as required by applicable law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, subsequent events, anticipated or unanticipated circumstances or otherwise.

Contact: Investors/Analysts

Tiffany Louder

Alliance Data

214-494-3048

[email protected]





Media

Annabelle Baxter

Alliance Data

214-494-3818

[email protected]

SOURCE Alliance Data Systems Corporation

Related Links

http://www.alliancedata.com


"This is an exciting starting point for Anthropologie. Our goal is to be a destination for everyone wanting to express their personal style and to feel like their best selves. At launch, we'll offer a great range of options and an exceptional shopping experience. We'll evolve both as we move forward, adding more styles and locations as we learn from customer feedback."  Richa Srivastava, Anthropologie Managing Director, Design

The APlus by Anthropologie collection, comprised of more than 120 styles, offers an only-at-Anthropologie selection for every occasion. Featuring the brand's best-loved labels, like Maeve, Pilcro and the Letterpress and Essentials by Anthropologie, with complements from market partners such as Cloth & Stone and DL1961, APlus by Anthropologie demonstrates the brand's continued commitment to supporting inclusive sizing. Previously, sizing extended from 00P  14P and 00  16, with petites added for Fall 2012.

"It's a joy to see APlus by Anthropologie come to life. We've been working toward this moment for a long time. We approached it in a considered way, taking the time to design a collection that would truly make our customer happy. APlus by Anthropologie is debuting with a vast assortment of styles and product categories  an assortment that we look forward to growing as our customer shares her wants and needs."  Aly Kauffman, Anthropologie Specialty Sizes Buyer

To celebrate the launch, Anthropologie released the short film "Late to The Party" filmed in Mexico City and starring models Ali Tate, Candice Huffine and Paloma Elsesser. APlus by Anthropologie is available online at www.anthropologie.com and in 10 store locations as of March 15; plus sizes will be featured in additional locations later this year. At launch, Anthropologie's size range will be 00P  14P, 00-16 and 16W-26W.

About Anthropologie

Founded in 1992, Anthropologie is an omnichannel lifestyle brand that celebrates fashion, art, culture, design and discovery. Led by Andrew Carnie and Hillary Super, co-presidents of Anthropologie Group, Anthropologie currently operates 226 stores in the U.S., Canada and Europe, as well as a popular catalog and website. The company is part of URBN's portfolio of global consumer brands comprised of Anthropologie, BHLDN, Free People, Terrain, Urban Outfitters and the Food & Beverage division.

SOURCE Anthropologie

Related Links

http://www.anthropologie.com


WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Arkansas will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Arkansas, 13.9 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 13.7 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 5,800 lives in Arkansas and costs the state $1.2 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Arkansas, activities include:

On March 26, the Project Prevent Youth Coalition and Growing Healthy Charleston in Charleston will pick up cigarette butts around their community to bring awareness to the harmful effects of tobacco and advocate for a comprehensive smoke-free workplace ordinance for the town. Time: 12:20 PM. Location: 305 Dale Bumpers Drive, Charleston. Contact: Ashley Curbow (479) 965-6636.

For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Arkansas, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


Official 2019 White House Easter Egg WHHA is the exclusive retailer of the 2019 American-made eggs and is honored to donate a number of eggs to the White House Easter Egg Roll for the second consecutive year. The Eggs are inspired by the rich colors found in the White House State Rooms and gardens: the Green Room, the Blue Room, the Red Room, the Vermeil Room, and the Rose Garden.

Individual eggs, in blue, green, pink, and red, retail for $8.50 each; the vermeil egg retails for $14.95. The full set of five eggs retails for $34.95. Eggs are available for purchase at WHHA's retail stores and online.

Also Available: WHHA is pleased to offer an assortment of new Easter merchandise, including the 4th annual Anna Weatherly Easter egg, classic Easter basket, and tote bag featuring artwork from artist Katherine Barnwell.

Proceeds of WHHA products, including the White House Easter Eggs, support the Association's nonprofit, nonpartisan mission to preserve, protect, and provide public access to the rich history of America's Executive Mansion and educate the public on the history of the White House.

Learn more about the history of the White House Easter Egg Roll here.

About The White House Historical Association

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy envisioned a restored White House that conveyed a sense of history through its decorative and fine arts. In 1961, the White House Historical Association was established to support her vision to preserve and share the Executive Mansion's legacy for generations to come. Supported entirely by private resources, the Association's mission is to assist in the preservation of the state and public rooms, fund acquisitions for the White House permanent collection, and educate the public on the history of the White House. Since its founding, the White House Historical Association has contributed more than $47 million in fulfillment of its mission. To learn more about the White House Historical Association, please visit www.whitehousehistory.org.

SOURCE White House Historical Association

Related Links

http://www.whitehousehistory.org


LOS ANGELES, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Elev8 New Media, a boutique media relations firm that specializes in securing media and press coverage for its client companies in both the traditional and modern media, today announced its participation as a sponsor of the 31st annual ROTH Conference, held at The Ritz Carlton in Dana Point, California on March 17-19th, 2019.

"We are thrilled to participate as a sponsor for ROTH this year. We are dedicated to providing support for all our clients attending the conference. With over 500 attending companies and over 1,000 attendees, ROTH's 31st Annual Growth Stock Conference is poised to be one to remember," commented Ms. Jessica Starman, CEO of Elev8 New Media. "We look forward to witnessing public and private companies continue to innovate within their respected industries."

Elev8 New Media provides media relations to companies across several industries. Elev8 New Media maintains ongoing relationships with journalists, reporters, editors, analysts, and outlets alike to obtain the very best exposure for its clients. The team developments, implements, manages, and constantly monitors our client's media coverage across multiple platforms.

About ROTH Capital Partners, LLC

ROTH Capital Partners, LLC (ROTH), is a relationship-driven investment bank focused on serving emerging growth companies and their investors. As a full-service investment bank, ROTH provides capital raising, M&A advisory, analytical research, trading, market-making services and corporate access. Headquartered in Newport Beach, CA, ROTH is privately-held and employee owned, and maintains offices throughout the U.S. For more information on ROTH, please visit www.roth.com.

About Elev8 New Media

Elev8 New Media is a boutique media relations firm that effectively secures media and press coverage for our client companies by fully utilizing both traditional and modern resources. Elev8 New Media engages the media to help showcase how our clients and their management teams are key opinion leaders and subject matter experts. Elev8 New Media's main objective is to increase clients' media exposure in order to better position the client company and brands within the marketplace, the investment community and the world.

SOURCE Elev8 New Media

Related Links

www.elev8newmedia.com


GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FGL Holdings (NYSE: FG), a leading provider of fixed indexed annuities and life insurance, announced today that it will host its Investment Portfolio Reposition Update for institutional investors and analysts on Friday, April 5, 2019 from 10:00 a.m. to noon ET.

The day's presentations will provide a high level F&G business and investment overview followed by a detailed discussion led by investment management partner, Blackstone, one of the world's leading asset managers.

Key speakers for the event will include

Chris Blunt , President & Chief Executive Officer, FGL Holdings

, President & Chief Executive Officer, FGL Holdings Raj Krishnan , Executive Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, FGL Holdings

, Executive Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, FGL Holdings Bennett Goodman , Senior Managing Director, Blackstone; Co-Founder of GSO Capital Partners

Event information

A slide presentation will be posted to the Investor Relations web site at investors.fglife.bm/investors prior to the start of the event.

The general public is invited to access the F&G event one the following ways:

For internet webcast, visit investors.fglife.bm/investors at least 15 minutes prior to the start of the call to register.

For conference call, dial 800.458.4148 (U.S. callers) or 323.794.2093 (International callers) approximately 10 minutes prior to the start of the call.

A replay of the event via webcast will be available after the call at investors.fglife.bm/investors.

A replay of the event via telephone will be available by dialing 888.203.1112 (U.S. callers) or 719.457.0820 (International callers). The access code is 9120980.

The replay information will be available through April 4, 2020.

About FGL Holdings

FGL Holdings  the F&G family of insurance companies  is committed to helping Americans prepare for and live comfortably in their retirement. Through its subsidiaries, F&G is a leading provider of annuity and life insurance products. FGL Holdings, domiciled in the Cayman Islands, trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FG.

The FGL Holdings family of companies includes

F&G Life Insurance Company, an annuity and life insurance company based in Des Moines, IA

F&G Life Insurance Company of New York , an annuity and life insurance company doing business in New York

, an annuity and life insurance company doing business in F&G Re, a Bermuda -based reinsurer

For more information, please visit fglife.bm.

FGL Holdings Investor and Media Contact Information:

Jon Bayer

[email protected]; [email protected]

515.204.2264

SOURCE FGL Holdings

Related Links

https://www.fglife.com


DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Augmented Reality Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecasts (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global augmented reality market was valued at USD 0.35 billion in 2018, and is expected to register a CAGR of 151.93% over the forecast period (2019-2024).



Huge potential opportunities in biotechnology and healthcare are expected to drive the growth of the augmented reality market over the forecast period.



Augmented reality (AR) achieved product realization slowly, owing to the complex nature of the technology. Microsoft Hololens project started in 2010, took six years for development, and launched the developers' edition in the first quarter of 2016. Magicleap, the secret AR startup, which raised over USD 1.9 billion, is launching a product after seven years of development.



The increasing adoption and availability of cloud have been major drivers for the market studied, as cloud provides the platform and infrastructure to address the scalability limitation of on-premise AR experiences.



The current market scenario has observed a greater focus on creating content and tools with more smartphone compatibility. This is expected to be driven by photorealistic AR, enabled by the combination of software and hardware advances, one of the most significant launches of dedicated AR frameworks in the smartphone operating systems.



Key Market Trends



Hardware Segment to Witness Significant Growth



Most of the companies, like Daqri, Meta, ODG, Vuzix, Optivent, etc., made AR headsets with a focus on enterprise applications for their devices. However, social media giant, Snapchat, which introduced AR to mobile phones through its social media platform, also launched its first version of AR glasses, V1, in 2016. The company was only able to sell about 150,000 pairs and registered a USD 40 million write-off on the hardware business, after ordering 800,00 pairs from a Chinese supplier.



AR devices available currently in the market have controlling systems embedded in the head-mounted devices or as a separate accessory. However, notable developments in the AR glasses, like gesture-controlled and voice assistant-controlled AR devices were launched in 2017.



Lucyd was created by an IP investment firm, Tekcapital, which is developing ergonomic AR glasses based on 13 disruptive AR patents. The Lucyd Lens smart glasses are built on an in-house decentralized blockchain called Lucyd Lab AR, which is powered by the LCD token, which organically drives content creation.



Through this design, the company aims to use community-driven content development to create the AR-driven blockchain with mass appeal. The company plans to introduce the blockchain-based AR smart glasses named Lucyd Lens in Q1 2019.



Going forward, such innovations in hardware, in terms of ergonomics, i.e., reduced size and weight, and making headsets look more like traditional eyewear, are likely to increase the acceptance of AR devices by consumers, in addition to the enterprise users.



North America Region to Witness Significant Growth



The North American segment of the market studied is expected to grow significantly over the forecast period, owing to the presence of a large number of vendors, who are also investing hugely in market innovation, coupled with the dominance of the United States in the global software market.



Globally, the United States is expected to be one of the highly innovative AR markets. Most of the companies advancing in this technology are based in the United States. About 64% of the consumers from the country believe in the positive changes resulting due to the adoption of AR in the workplace. Leading players, like Magic Leap and Microsoft, are actively working on this technology.



Competitive Landscape



The augmented reality market is gaining competitiveness. Many of the companies are increasing their market presence by securing new contracts and by tapping new markets.



Companies, like Vuzix, and Meta, among others, have partnered with fortune 500 companies and other large technology giants, like Caterpillar, Porsche, SAP, among others, to increase the sales of their AR smart glasses.



Key Topics Covered



1 Introduction

1.1 Scope of the Study

1.2 Study Assumptions

1.3 Study Deliverables



2 Research Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Market Dynamics

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Industry Value Chain Analysis

4.3 Industry Attractiveness of Porter's Five Forces Analysis

4.4 Introduction to Market Drivers and Restraints

4.5 Market Drivers

4.5.1 Increasing Applications of Augmented Reality

4.5.2 Demand for Mobile-based Augmented Reality

4.6 Market Restraints

4.6.1 Technical and Regulatory Issues



5 Market Segmentation

5.1 By Type

5.1.1 Hardware

5.1.2 Software

5.2 By End-user Vertical

5.2.1 Gaming

5.2.2 Education

5.2.3 Healthcare

5.2.4 Military and Defense

5.2.5 Automotive

5.2.6 Retail and Marketing

5.2.7 Other End-user Verticals

5.3 Geography

5.3.1 North America

5.3.2 Europe

5.3.3 Asia-Pacific

5.3.4 Rest of the World



6 Competitive Landscape

6.1 Company Profiles

6.1.1 Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.)

6.1.2 Seiko Epson Corporation

6.1.3 Vuzix Corporation

6.1.4 Osterhout Design Group (ODG)

6.1.5 Realwear Inc.

6.1.6 Toshiba Corporation

6.1.7 Daqri LLC

6.1.8 Meta Company

6.1.9 Optinvent S.A.

6.1.10 Atheer Inc.

6.1.11 Blippar.com Limited

6.1.12 Vuforia (PTC Inc.)

6.1.13 Leap Motion Inc.

6.1.14 Wikitude GmbH

6.1.15 Infinity Augmented Reality Inc.



7 Investment Analysis



8 Market Opportunities and Future Trends



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/k9s9xz/global_augmented?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


SAN DIEGO, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson Fistel, LLP announces that it has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all those who purchased or otherwise acquired Diplomat Pharmacy, Inc. ("Diplomat") (NYSE: DPLO) common stock during the period between February 26, 2018 through February 21, 2019, inclusive (the "Class Period"). This action was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, case No. 1:19-cv-01735.

The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 permits any investor who purchased or otherwise acquired Diplomat securities during the Class Period to seek appointment as lead plaintiff. A lead plaintiff acts on behalf of all other class members in directing the litigation. The lead plaintiff can select a law firm of its choice. An investor's ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later April 25, 2019 . If you wish to discuss this action or have any questions concerning this notice or your rights or interests, please contact 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.

The complaint alleges that defendants made false and misleading statements and failed to disclose that: (1) Diplomat had downplayed its success in integrating and growing its PBM business, which included LDI Integrated and National Pharmaceutical, two companies Diplomat had acquired in late 2017; (2) consequently, Diplomat would need to record a non-cash impairment charge upwards of approximately $630 million relating to its PBM business and these 2017 acquisitions; (3) due to the foregoing, Diplomat would withdraw its preliminary 2019 full-year outlook issued less than seven weeks prior; and (4) as a result, defendants' statements about Diplomat's business, operations and prospects were materially false and misleading and lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.

Plaintiff seeks to recover damages on behalf of all those who purchased or otherwise acquired Diplomat securities during the Class Period.

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]

SOURCE Johnson Fistel, LLP

Related Links

http://www.johnsonfistel.com


KELOWNA, BC, March 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Liht Cannabis Corp. (CSE: LIHT) (OTCQX: LIHTF) or the "Company") announces that Ms. Linda Sampson wishes to "temporarily withdraw" from the Board of Directors effective immediately.

Ms. Linda Sampson, co-founder of the Company since 2014, has extensive and valuable knowledge of Liht's business and the cannabis industry as a whole. Her dedication to affect positive change and progress has been instrumental during a time of evolving business models and rapid change in the industry.

Ms. Sampson will focus her skills on critical developments, operations, licensing and continue to guide and support the Company to deliver integrity, service and value to Liht and its shareholders.

Ms. Sampson has nominated an accomplished operations-focused leader in her place - Marcel LeBlanc, as Independent Director and Chairman of the Board of Liht Cannabis Corp.

Mr. Marcel LeBlanc is VP of Operations and co-founder of NorCan Electric Inc. ("NorCan") since 2005. Capturing a significant presence in the unparalleled oil and gas industry of Fort McMurray, NorCan has become one of the leading electrical and instrumentation providers, employing approximately 700 employees.

Mr. LeBlanc has a record of achievement and demonstrated successes, driving multi-million dollar revenue growth by designing and executing operational procedures and methodologies with a focus towards cost control, asset utilization and value creation.

"Mr. LeBlanc will significantly enhance the board by focusing on efficiencies, growth, sustainability, risk management and compliance. He has provided visionary leadership in highly competitive markets. These attributes will be a major benefit to the growth of the Company as we move forward." Linda Sampson

ABOUT LIHT CANNABIS CORP.

www.lihtcannabis.com

Liht Cannabis Corp. is a publicly traded company investing in the medical and recreational cannabis space, since 2014. Liht has rapidly expanded to include cultivation, production and dispensary locations in the key North American states of Washington, Nevada, and California, and are seeking expansion opportunities worldwide.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

twitter.com

facebook.com

STOCK EXCHANGES:

Liht trades in Canada, ticker symbol LIHT on the CSE, in the United States, ticker symbol LIHTF on the OTCQX.

Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider, nor the OTCQX has approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the CSE nor the OTCQX accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

MARIJUANA INDUSTRY INVOLVEMENT:

Canadian listings (CSE) will remain in good standing as long as they provide the disclosure that is rightly required by regulators and complying with applicable licensing requirements and the regulatory framework enacted by the applicable state in which they operate.

Liht owns marijuana licenses in California and Nevada. Marijuana is legal in each state however marijuana remains illegal under US federal law and the approach to enforcement of US federal law against marijuana is subject to change. Shareholders and investors need to be aware that adverse enforcement actions could affect their investments and that Liht's ability to access private and public capital could be affected and or could not be available to support continuing operations.

Liht's business is conducted in a manner consistent with state law and is in compliance with licensing requirements.

Copies of licenses are posted on Liht's website. Liht has internal compliance procedures in place and has compliance focused attorneys engaged in jurisdictions to monitor changes in laws for compliance with US federal and state law on an ongoing basis. These law firms inform any necessary changes to our policies and procedures for compliance in Canada and the US.

FORWARD - LOOKING STATEMENTS:

Certain statements in this release are forward-looking statements, which includes, the expected outcomes of its business, and other matters. Forward-looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Such information can generally be identified by the use of forwarding looking wording such as "may", "expect", "estimate", "anticipate", "intend", "believe" and "continue" or the negative thereof or similar variations. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are based will occur. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve numerous assumptions, known and unknown risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, that contribute to the possibility that the predictions, estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not occur. Forward-looking statement are necessarily based upon a number of factors that, if untrue, could cause the actual results, performances or achievements of the Company to be materially different from future results, performances or achievements express or implied by such statements. These assumptions, risks and uncertainties include, among other things, the state of the economy in general and capital markets in particular, present and future business strategies, the environment in which the Company will operate in the future, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. While such estimates and assumptions are considered reasonable by the management of the Company, they are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive and regulatory uncertainties and risks.

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual events, level of activity, performance or results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: that laws and regulations may become more onerous; the ability of the Company to obtain necessary financing; the economy generally; the future growth, results of operations, performance and business prospectus and opportunities; changes in and the effect of government policies; demand for products; competition; anticipated and unanticipated costs; reliance on management; claims and legal proceedings; conflicts of interest; and market price and volatility of the Common Shares. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions, the loss of key directors, employees, advisors or consultants, technology failures, failure to obtain a license from Health Canada or from other government agencies, failure to develop new and innovative products, failure of counterparties to perform their contractual obligations and fees charged by service providers. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include, litigation, global economic climate, loss of key employees and consultants, additional funding requirements, changes in laws, competition, and failure of counterparties to perform their contractual obligations. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance or events and, accordingly are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements due to the inherent uncertainty of such statements.

The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Additionally, the Company undertakes no obligation to comment on the expectations of, or statements made by, third parties in respect of the matters discussed above. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed, nor approved the contents of this news release.

SOURCE Liht Cannabis Corporation

Related Links

https://lihtcannabis.com/


In the news release, Liht Cannabis Corp. Announces - Linda Sampson Nominates Marcel LeBlanc, VP of NorCan To Hold Her Board Position, issued 14-Mar-2019 by Liht Cannabis Corporation over CNW, we are advised by the company that there is a revision to the end of the first sentence. This sentence should read "...Ms. Linda Sampson wishes to "temporarily withdraw" from the Board of Directors and as Officer of the Company, effective immediately," rather than "...Ms. Linda Sampson wishes to "temporarily withdraw" from the Board of Directors effective immediately." The complete, revised release follows:

Liht Cannabis Corp. Announces - Linda Sampson Nominates Marcel LeBlanc, VP of NorCan To Hold Her Board Position

KELOWNA, BC, March 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Liht Cannabis Corp. (CSE: LIHT) (OTCQX: LIHTF) or the "Company") announces that Ms. Linda Sampson wishes to "temporarily withdraw" from the Board of Directors and as Officer of the Company, effective immediately.

Ms. Linda Sampson, co-founder of the Company since 2014, has extensive and valuable knowledge of Liht's business and the cannabis industry as a whole. Her dedication to affect positive change and progress has been instrumental during a time of evolving business models and rapid change in the industry.

Ms. Sampson will focus her skills on critical developments, operations, licensing and continue to guide and support the Company to deliver integrity, service and value to Liht and its shareholders.

Ms. Sampson has nominated an accomplished operations-focused leader in her place - Marcel LeBlanc, as Independent Director and Chairman of the Board of Liht Cannabis Corp.

Mr. Marcel LeBlanc is VP of Operations and co-founder of NorCan Electric Inc. ("NorCan") since 2005. Capturing a significant presence in the unparalleled oil and gas industry of Fort McMurray, NorCan has become one of the leading electrical and instrumentation providers, employing approximately 700 employees.

Mr. LeBlanc has a record of achievement and demonstrated successes, driving multi-million dollar revenue growth by designing and executing operational procedures and methodologies with a focus towards cost control, asset utilization and value creation.

"Mr. LeBlanc will significantly enhance the board by focusing on efficiencies, growth, sustainability, risk management and compliance. He has provided visionary leadership in highly competitive markets. These attributes will be a major benefit to the growth of the Company as we move forward." Linda Sampson

ABOUT LIHT CANNABIS CORP.

www.lihtcannabis.com

Liht Cannabis Corp. is a publicly traded company investing in the medical and recreational cannabis space, since 2014. Liht has rapidly expanded to include cultivation, production and dispensary locations in the key North American states of Washington, Nevada, and California, and are seeking expansion opportunities worldwide.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

twitter.com

facebook.com

STOCK EXCHANGES:

Liht trades in Canada, ticker symbol LIHT on the CSE, in the United States, ticker symbol LIHTF on the OTCQX.

Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider, nor the OTCQX has approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. Neither the CSE nor the OTCQX accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

MARIJUANA INDUSTRY INVOLVEMENT:

Canadian listings (CSE) will remain in good standing as long as they provide the disclosure that is rightly required by regulators and complying with applicable licensing requirements and the regulatory framework enacted by the applicable state in which they operate.

Liht owns marijuana licenses in California and Nevada. Marijuana is legal in each state however marijuana remains illegal under US federal law and the approach to enforcement of US federal law against marijuana is subject to change. Shareholders and investors need to be aware that adverse enforcement actions could affect their investments and that Liht's ability to access private and public capital could be affected and or could not be available to support continuing operations.

Liht's business is conducted in a manner consistent with state law and is in compliance with licensing requirements.

Copies of licenses are posted on Liht's website. Liht has internal compliance procedures in place and has compliance focused attorneys engaged in jurisdictions to monitor changes in laws for compliance with US federal and state law on an ongoing basis. These law firms inform any necessary changes to our policies and procedures for compliance in Canada and the US.

FORWARD - LOOKING STATEMENTS:

Certain statements in this release are forward-looking statements, which includes, the expected outcomes of its business, and other matters. Forward-looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Such information can generally be identified by the use of forwarding looking wording such as "may", "expect", "estimate", "anticipate", "intend", "believe" and "continue" or the negative thereof or similar variations. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, as there can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which they are based will occur. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve numerous assumptions, known and unknown risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, that contribute to the possibility that the predictions, estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not occur. Forward-looking statement are necessarily based upon a number of factors that, if untrue, could cause the actual results, performances or achievements of the Company to be materially different from future results, performances or achievements express or implied by such statements. These assumptions, risks and uncertainties include, among other things, the state of the economy in general and capital markets in particular, present and future business strategies, the environment in which the Company will operate in the future, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. While such estimates and assumptions are considered reasonable by the management of the Company, they are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive and regulatory uncertainties and risks.

Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual events, level of activity, performance or results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: that laws and regulations may become more onerous; the ability of the Company to obtain necessary financing; the economy generally; the future growth, results of operations, performance and business prospectus and opportunities; changes in and the effect of government policies; demand for products; competition; anticipated and unanticipated costs; reliance on management; claims and legal proceedings; conflicts of interest; and market price and volatility of the Common Shares. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions, the loss of key directors, employees, advisors or consultants, technology failures, failure to obtain a license from Health Canada or from other government agencies, failure to develop new and innovative products, failure of counterparties to perform their contractual obligations and fees charged by service providers. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include, litigation, global economic climate, loss of key employees and consultants, additional funding requirements, changes in laws, competition, and failure of counterparties to perform their contractual obligations. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. Investors are cautioned that forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance or events and, accordingly are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements due to the inherent uncertainty of such statements.

The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Additionally, the Company undertakes no obligation to comment on the expectations of, or statements made by, third parties in respect of the matters discussed above. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed, nor approved the contents of this news release.

SOURCE Liht Cannabis Corporation

Related Links

https://lihtcannabis.com/


STOCKTON, Calif., March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- TRC Healthcare (Therapeutic Research Center or TRC), a leading provider of medication advisory and learning solutions and the author of Pharmacist's Letter, announced today that Duke University Health System (DUHS) has selected Pharmacy Technicians University (PTU) as the online learning platform and standard curriculum for its recently created in-house Pharmacy Technology Training Program. PTU is a one-of-a-kind online training program for pharmacy technicians available in 200 hospitals and used in some of the largest retail pharmacies in the U.S.

DUHS brought its pharmacy technician training in-house in early 2018 to address the growing need for hospital-qualified technicians.

"We evaluated several curricula and online program options for our new Pharmacy Technology Training Program," said Paul W. Bush, PharmD, MBA, FASHP, BCPS, Chief Pharmacy Officer for Duke University Hospital. "When we consider the ease of access and the learning styles of our students, an online, digital program is an effective tool to help us meet the growing need for highly qualified technicians in our health system."

DUHS licenses the Pharmacy Technicians University National Standards Advanced-Level Training Program, a 600-hour program specifically designed for ASHP/ACPE-accreditation that meets both state-wide and national hospital technician training requirements. The National Standards Advanced-Level program offers the most extensive and robust interactive courseware and training videos for medication e-learning and technician training available, and includes experiential training, online didactic training, and simulation training. In addition, PTU is also available in lightweight training packaging to fit organization and state-specific needs, as:

PTU 101  an online-only didactic program

 an online-only didactic program PTU National Standards Entry-Level Training Program  a 400-hour program designed to support the new ASHP/ACPE standard for entry-level technician training.

"TRC is proud to partner with Duke University Heath System to develop, train, and prepare well-rounded and skilled pharmacy technicians using the technician training resources available in Pharmacy Technicians University," said Wes Crews, Chief Executive Officer of TRC Healthcare. "This partnership supports our commitment to advance the pharmacy profession by prioritizing the development of well-prepared and qualified pharmacy technicians."

PTU offers significant cost savings versus brick-and-mortar university and community or technical college programs, which often have less flexibility and limited course variety. TRC's high-quality, evidence-based content also yields an affordable option for multi-location and multi-person pharmacy teams, including regionally or nationally distributed teams that have distinct state regulatory compliance needs. PTU is one of the only online technician training programs that supports or exceeds the requirements for technician training in 50 states, including Washington D.C. 

About TRC Healthcare (Therapeutic Research Center)

TRC is the leading provider of digital medication learning that updates, informs, and educates healthcare providers across the continuum of care. In addition to its highly regarded Pharmacist's Letter , Prescriber's Letter , Pharmacy Technician's Letter, Nurse's Letter and Natural Medicines online resources, TRC provides additional online solutions for hospital and community clinicians that expand on its trusted recommendations, such as drug comparison charts, patient education handouts, FAQs, and tutorials in its web-based products. In addition, TRC provides online continuing education programs for medication learning, competency, and compliance programs, and keeps clinicians and administrators informed via its continuing education (CE) dashboard and CE Organizer. TRC provides the largest catalog of education and advisory services in the industry for pharmacy, delivering nearly 500 course options to help technicians and clinicians. TRC leads the way in the training of new pharmacy technicians with Pharmacy Technicians University (PTU) , the first online accredited, interactive training program of its kind. Nearly 500,000 healthcare professionals rely on TRC's advisory and education service to access concise, unbiased, timely information to improve medication use, prevent medication errors, and improve overall patient care, quality and outcomes.

SOURCE TRC Healthcare

Related Links

http://trchealthcare.com


DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Medical Coding Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global medical coding market is expected to register a CAGR of nearly 9.9% during the forecast period, 2019-2024.

The major factors found propelling the growth of the market include the escalating demand for coding services, rising need for a universal language to reduce frauds and misinterpretations associated with insurance claims, and high demand to streamline hospital billing procedures.

There is a high demand for medical billers and coders in the current job market. Thus, coding-related jobs are expanding, due to the growing landscape of the business side of healthcare, along with their efficiency to automate large amounts of work. Hence, the escalating demand for coding jobs is likely to drive the market studied across the world.

The technological advancements in the healthcare industry and constantly changing classification systems are expected to create potential revenue opportunities for players operating in the target market over the forecast period.

In addition, data security is a major concern for healthcare organizations, and offshore coding companies are also becoming aware of these data security concerns, while understanding that breach in a client's data is likely to result in the loss of business. Thus, leading offshore coding firms are building a secure environment for the coders to work in.

Key Market Trends

International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the Largest Segment by Classification System that is Expected to Grow During the Forecast Period

The international classification of diseases (ICD) segment is expected to register a significant share, in terms of revenue, over the forecast period, owing to the increasing demand for trained medical coders. The need for ICD is increasing across the world, owing to a growing prevalence of diseases. Hence this segment is expected to grow in the future, due to the rising growth of medical coding across the world.

North America Reported the Largest Growth and is Expected to Follow the Same Trend Over the Forecast Period

The North American market is estimated to hold the largest share, in terms of revenue, over the forecast period, owing to technological advancements and improved healthcare infrastructure in various countries in this region. Therefore, the high demand for specialist coders and the presence of a favorable healthcare system are the key factors that are anticipated to drive the market growth.

Competitive Landscape

The number of professional coders is expected to rise significantly during the forecast period, thus boosting the number of companies providing platforms for medical coding professionals. Thus, the market seems to be highly fragmented, due to the presence of many local providers offering a wide array of services.

Topics Covered

1 Introduction

1.1 Study Deliverables

1.2 Study Assumptions

1.3 Scope of the Study

2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

4 Market Dynamics

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Market Drivers

4.2.1 Escalating Demand for Coding Services

4.2.2 Rising Need for a Universal Language to Reduce Frauds and Misinterpretations Associated with Insurance Claims

4.2.3 High Demand to Streamline Hospital Billing Procedures

4.3 Market Restraints

4.3.1 Changing Regulations Related to Medical Coding

4.3.2 Data Security Concerns

4.3.3 Lack of Adequately Equipped IT Professionals

4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis

5 Market Segmentation

5.1 By Classification System

5.1.1 International Classification of Diseases (ICD)

5.1.2 Healthcare Common Procedure Code System (HCPCS)

5.2 By Component

5.2.1 In-house

5.2.2 Outsourced

5.3 By End User

5.3.1 Hospitals

5.3.2 Diagnostic Centers

5.3.3 Other End Users

5.4 Geography

5.4.1 North America

5.4.2 Europe

5.4.3 Asia-Pacific

5.4.4 Middle East & Africa

5.4.5 South America

6 Competitive Landscape

6.1 Company Profiles

6.1.1 3M Company

6.1.2 Aviacode Inc.

6.1.3 Dolbey Systems Inc.

6.1.4 Maxim Health Information Services

6.1.5 Medical Record Associates LLC

6.1.6 Nuance Communications Inc.

6.1.7 Optum Inc.

6.1.8 Oracle Corporation

6.1.9 Parexel International Corporation

6.1.10 Precyse Solutions LLC

7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends

For more information about this report visit

https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/ngv4rd/medical_coding?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


DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Medical Imaging Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The major factors augmenting the growth of the medical imaging market include the rise in the prevalence of chronic diseases, increased adoption of advanced technologies in medical imaging, and rise in the geriatric population.

The burden of chronic diseases is on the rise globally, and medical imaging procedures play a crucial role in the accurate diagnosis of chronic diseases. The increase in the aging population and changes in societal behavior are contributing to a steady increase in these common and costly long-term health problems.

Most of the deaths by chronic diseases are attributable to cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and diabetes. According to WHO, the global burden of chronic diseases is expected to reach 57% by 2020. The most affected would be the emerging markets, as the population growth is anticipated to be most significant in developing areas.

New models for therapy and diagnoses are being developed, which provide precise results, help in early detection of diseases, and help minimize the cost of treating these diseases. With the increasing disposable income, people are becoming capable enough to have access to imaging procedures for early detection of diseases.

Furthermore, the medical imaging field has advanced at a great pace, stimulated by advances in digital and communication technologies. New imaging techniques that reveal greater anatomical details are available in most of the diagnostic labs and hospitals. The aim is to improve access and precision, decrease cost, and make the impact of radiation less harmful.

The trend is shifting from fixed to portable equipment. For example, until recently, size and electricity requirement have hindered the proper use of ultrasound. Today, smaller ultrasound equipment can provide color-flow Doppler imaging, relying on battery power solely.

Key Market Trends

Oncology Segment under Application is Expected to Account for the Largest Market Share during the Forecast Period

Oncology deals with diagnosis and treatment of tumors and cancers, which is one the leading causes of morbidity and mortality. Among both sexes, lung, breast, and colorectal cancers are among the most common cancers in the world with lung cancer alone contributing to more than 13% of the total cases diagnosed.

According to WHO, cancer was responsible for 8.8 million deaths in 2015, including nearly 1 in 6 deaths globally. In addition, one-third of deaths are due to high body mass index, low fruit and vegetable intake, lack of physical activity, tobacco use (includes approximately 22% of cancer deaths), and alcohol use. Additionally, there are several minor side effects, such as nausea, headaches, dry mouth, diarrhea, allergic reaction, and others, as well as some major side effects, such as kidney disease, dementia, and others associated with its use, which can affect the adoption rate, and hence can be a restraining factor in the market.

Medical imaging plays a vital role in interventional oncology (with rising opportunities to diagnose and treat in a targeted and minimally or non-invasive manner) as well as in chemo and radiation therapy. Tools, such as CT, are the highly beneficial and preferred method of imaging for many conditions, including trauma patients. Comparatively, PET is mostly preferred as compared to SPECT, and there are hybrid medical devices also available such as PET/CT or PET/MRI.

North America accounted for the Largest Share in the Global Market

North America is found to hold a major share of the medical imaging market and is expected to show a similar trend over the forecast period, without significant fluctuations. The United States contributes to the major share in the medical imaging market, which can be attributed to the increasing technological advances, higher affordability rates from the population, and the number of diagnostic procedures increasing on a yearly basis.

According to OECD, till 2007, the number of MRI units being available per one million of the population was 25.9. The volume rose to approximately 39 by 2015, reported as of 2017, including 20.3 in ambulatory services and 18.7 in hospitals. MRI diagnostic is a growing field, both in terms of the number of the installed scanner and in the number of scans being performed. Based on the data by OECD, the United States is one of the leaders, second only to Japan, both in terms of availability and utilization.

Hence, with the presence of well-established healthcare facilities, increasing demand for advanced healthcare systems among the aging population, and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, the market is expected to grow in the forecast period.

Competitive Landscape

The market studied is consolidated owing to the presence of a few major players in the market. The market players are focusing on R&D to develop the technologically advanced products in order to reduce the cost and side effects associated with the products. The barriers for the new entrants are high in this industry, and hence few major market players hold the maximum market share.

Topics Covered

1 Introduction

1.1 Study Deliverables

1.2 Study Assumptions

1.3 Scope of the Study

2 Research Methodology

3 Executive Summary

4 Market Dynamics

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Market Drivers

4.2.1 Rise in the Prevalence of Chronic Diseases

4.2.2 Increased Adoption of Advanced Technologies in Medical Imaging

4.2.3 Increase in the Geriatric Population

4.3 Market Restraints

4.3.1 Expensive Procedures and Equipment

4.3.2 Side Effects of Diagnostic Imaging

4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis

5 Market Segmentation

5.1 By Product Type

5.1.1 X-Ray Equipment

5.1.1.1 Stationary

5.1.1.2 Portable

5.1.2 Fluoroscopy

5.1.2.1 Fixed Fluoroscope

5.1.2.2 Mobile Fluoroscope

5.1.3 MRI

5.1.3.1 Closed Systems

5.1.3.2 Open Systems

5.1.4 Ultrasound

5.1.5 Computed Tomography

5.1.6 Other Imaging Modalities

5.2 By Application

5.2.1 Cardiology

5.2.2 Oncology

5.2.3 Neurology

5.2.4 Orthopedics

5.2.5 Gastroenterology

5.2.6 Gynecology

5.2.7 Other Applications

5.3 Geography

5.3.1 North America

5.3.2 Europe

5.3.3 Asia-Pacific

5.3.4 Middle East & Africa

5.3.5 South America

6 Competitive Landscape

6.1 Company Profiles

6.1.1 Canon Medical Systems Corporation

6.1.2 Carestream Health Inc.

6.1.3 Esaote S.p.A

6.1.4 FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation

6.1.5 GE Healthcare

6.1.6 Hitachi Medical Systems

6.1.7 Hologic Corporation

6.1.8 Koninklijke Philips N.V.

6.1.9 Shimadzu Medical

6.1.10 Siemens Healthineers

7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends

For more information about this report visit

https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/ldrk62/medical_imaging?w=5

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470

For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630

For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900



U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

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WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Kids in Michigan will unite against tobacco use on March 20 as they join thousands of young people nationwide to mark Kick Butts Day, an annual day of youth activism sponsored by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. More than 1,000 events are planned across the United States (see below for a list of local events).

This year, kids are focused on kicking Juul, the e-cigarette that has become enormously popular among youth across the country.

While cigarette smoking among high school students nationwide has fallen to 8.1 percent, e-cigarette use among high schoolers rose by an alarming 78 percent in 2018 alone  to 20.8 percent of the student population. In 2018, more than 3.6 million middle and high school students used e-cigarettes. U.S. public health leaders have called youth e-cigarette use an "epidemic" that is addicting a new generation of kids.

In Michigan, 14.8 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes, while 10.5 percent smoke cigarettes. Tobacco use claims 16,200 lives in Michigan and costs the state $4.6 billion in health care bills each year.

On Kick Butts Day, youth and health advocates are calling for strong action to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic. In particular, they are calling on the Food and Drug Administration, states and cities to ban all flavored tobacco products, including e-cigarettes in flavors like cotton candy, gummy bear and mango that tempt kids. Other effective strategies to reduce youth tobacco use include laws raising the tobacco sale age to 21, significant tobacco tax increases, comprehensive smoke-free laws and well-funded tobacco prevention programs.

In Michigan, youth advocates are urging state lawmakers to pass legislation to raise the tobacco sale age to 21. Hillsdale & Branch County Youth Engaged in Prevention will join forces with Teens Against Tobacco Use Grand Rapids at the State Capitol building in Lansing to speak out against tobacco with a focus on raising the tobacco age. They will wear matching t-shirts, display banners on the Capitol steps and present to legislators. Time: 12 PM. Location: Michigan State Capitol Rotunda, 100 N. Capitol Avenue, Lansing. Contact: Kelley Mapes (517) 279-9561 ext.103 or Libby Stern (616) 486-6503.

"This year on Kick Butts Day, we're challenging policy makers at every level to do their part to reverse the youth e-cigarette epidemic and continue driving down youth tobacco use," said Matthew L. Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "We cannot allow e-cigarettes, especially Juul, to addict another generation and reverse the enormous progress we've made in reducing youth tobacco use."

Key facts about e-cigarettes include:

The main cause of the youth e-cigarette epidemic is Juul, which looks like a computer flash drive, is small and easy to hide, delivers a powerful dose of nicotine, and comes in kid-friendly flavors like mango, fruit and mint. According to the manufacturer, each Juul "pod" (cartridge) delivers as much nicotine as a pack of 20 cigarettes.

E-cigarettes pose serious health risks for kids. The U.S. Surgeon General has found that youth use of nicotine in any form  including e-cigarettes  is unsafe, causes addiction and can harm the developing adolescent brain, affecting learning, memory and attention. Studies also show that young people who use e-cigarettes are more likely to become cigarette smokers.

On Kick Butts Day, youth join in creative events including signing pledges to be tobacco-free, learning about the harmful chemicals in tobacco products and organizing rallies at state capitols.

In Michigan, additional events and activities include:

On March 19, Students at Union City High School in Union City will create informative posters that describe the dangers of using tobacco or tobacco-related products. Time: 8 AM. Location: Union City High School, 430 St. Joseph Street, Union City. Contact: Richard Maples (517) 568-3497.

Students at White Cloud High School in White Cloud will create a visual tombstone display on lockers to highlight the deadly effects of cigarettes, decorate the stairs with tobacco statistics and take part in a selfie campaign to show Big Tobacco that teens are "not a replacement" for traditional smokers. Time: 11:45 AM. Location: White Cloud High School, 555 E. Wilcox Avenue, White Cloud. Contact: Caitlin Schucker (231) 206-4616.

Students on the Teen Advisory Council at Arthur Hill High School, in collaboration with Great Lakes Bay Health Centers in Saginaw, will educate their classmates on tobacco's toll by creating a mysterious display of tobacco statistics and facts on "dots" hung throughout the school. Time: 10 AM. Location: 3115 Mackinaw Street, Saginaw. Contact: Rachael Muex (989) 907-2728.

The University of Michigan Smoke-free Ambassadors in Ann Arbor will advocate to keep their campus air clean and their community healthy with their Kick Butts Day event. Ambassadors will chalk sidewalks with information on the harms associated with cigarette and tobacco use and remind students that the university is a "Clean-air Campus." Additionally, students and staff will participate in "Butt Clean-ups" in hot spots around campus. Time: 2 PM. Location: University of Michigan - Central Campus, 500 S. State, Ann Arbor. Contact: Jason Golec (248) 259-0525.

All events will take place March 20 unless otherwise indicated. For a full list of Kick Butts Day activities in Michigan, visit www.kickbuttsday.org/map. Additional information about tobacco, including state-by-state statistics, can be found at www.tobaccofreekids.org.

SOURCE Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

Related Links

http://www.tobaccofreekids.org


PITTSBURGH, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Federated Investors, Inc. today announced that monthly fund composition and performance data for Federated Premier Municipal Income Fund (NYSE: FMN) as of Feb. 28, 2019, is now available in the Products section of FederatedInvestors.com. To order hard copies of this data or to be placed on a mailing list, call 800-245-0242 x5587538, email [email protected] or write to Federated Investors, 1001 Liberty Avenue, Floor 23, Pittsburgh, PA 15222.

Federated Investors, Inc. (NYSE: FII) is a leading global investment manager with $459.9 billion in assets under management as of Dec. 31, 2018. Our investment solutions span 130 equity, fixed-income, alternative/private markets, multi-asset and money market funds and a range of separately managed account strategies. Providing comprehensive investment management to more than 9,500 institutions and intermediaries, our clients include corporations, government entities, insurance companies, foundations and endowments, banks and broker/dealers. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Federated's nearly 1,900 employees include those in New York, Boston, London and several other offices worldwide. In 2018, Federated acquired a majority interest in Hermes Investment Management, which provides world-class active management and stewardship services. For more information, visit FederatedInvestors.com.

###

SOURCE Federated Investors, Inc.

Related Links

http://FederatedInvestors.com


The IB MYP is a curriculum framework designed for student aged 11 to 16, with an emphasis on developing creative and critical thinkers. British School Jakarta will be implementing the MYP as a three-year program, leading into the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE). After completing this path of study, students are well prepared to undertake the world renowned pre-University qualifications, the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) and Career-related Programme (CP).

Centered on connecting students with society through the IB MYP, David is optimistic to consistently empower BSJ students to create change in the future. "It is incumbent on us to move forward, ensuring the school meets the educational needs of future populations. We need to develop the necessary skills, in our students, to nurture and challenge them to be their best, through the cutting edge of this new academic achievement," said Butcher.

The initiative now leads to a new BSJ collaboration with research scientist, Mette Boell from Massachusetts Institute Technology (MIT), who provided training and workshops for staff and students, as part of their Compassionate Learning Systems. The program is led by the world-renowned MIT lecturer Peter Senge, the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning.

"Compassionate Systems represent one way to utilize the cognitive and affective aspects of the learner profile and the approaches to learning skills. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), combined with an understanding of systems and complexity, can establish a cognitive and affective foundation for 'international-mindedness'," said Mette Boell.

Butcher added, "The SEL also aligns with the new #morethanaschool mantra of BSJ, as we emphasise self-involvement to better prepare students competing in this rapidly-changing world."

Founded in 1974, BSJ has educated a community of over 50 nationalities in Indonesia. The school consistently sends its graduating students to the best universities around the world, including, the USA's Ivy league universities and the UK's Russell Group.

Media Contact:

Hariman Chalid

[email protected]

+6221-7451670

http://www.bsj.sch.id/

SOURCE British School Jakarta

Related Links

http://www.bsj.sch.id


ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- On Friday March 15, 2019, shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch has left at least 49 dead and has been declared an act of terrorism. Travel insurance comparison site, Squaremouth, explains what travelers need to know now about coverage related to the shootings.

Canceling your upcoming trip

Travelers may be covered to cancel their upcoming trip to New Zealand if they had a travel insurance policy with Trip Cancellation coverage for terrorism in place prior to March 15, 2019. In order to qualify for this benefit, policies must meet some or all of the following requirements:

The attack must be deemed an act of terrorism by the U.S. government

The attack must be within 7-30 days of a traveler's departure date

The attack must occur within 50-100 miles of a city listed on a traveler's itinerary

Interrupting your current trip

Travelers currently in New Zealand may be covered to cut their trip short and return home early if their policy includes Trip Interruption coverage for terrorism. Trip Interruption can refund prepaid trip costs when a trip is cut short for an unexpected reason, such as a terrorist attack. The benefit can also cover the additional costs a traveler pays to return home early.

Trip Interruption reimburses travelers up to a specified amount, typically based directly off their trip cost. If travelers choose not to insure their trip cost payments, some policies still include a limited benefit amount to return home.

Squaremouth's New Zealand Mosque Shootings Travel Insurance Information Center explains travel insurance coverage for this event, and will be updated as events unfold.

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 travel insurance policies side-by-side. More information can be found at www.squaremouth.com

SOURCE Squaremouth

Related Links

http://www.squaremouth.com


NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Below are experts from the ProfNet network who are available to discuss timely issues in your coverage area.

You can also submit a query to the hundreds of thousands of experts in our network  it's easy and free. Just fill out the query form to get started: http://prn.to/queryform

EXPERT ALERTS

Mobile Healthcare: An App Is Not a Strategy

Canine PTSD

The Brain's Best Tools for Living a Good Life

MEDIA JOBS

OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES

21st Century Hustle: Freelancing in the Fast-Moving Gig Economy

Media Insider: What's Making News This Week

Blog Profiles: Food & Recipe Blogs

EXPERT ALERTS:



Mobile Healthcare: An App Is Not a Strategy

Navya Singh

CEO

wayForward

There's no shortage of mobile health tools for accumulating data -- everything from monitoring your sleep to tracking your moods. But once you're able to quantify your REM sleep or anxiety levels, what then? Without a medical or clinical background, few are competent to evaluate these numbers, let alone determine the most efficacious treatment plan.

Dr. Singh says: "Mobile health technology fosters continuous, more robust, even more accurate data collection. When data-driven, evidence-based health apps are supported by accessible clinical expertise, screening, diagnosis and treatment for mental and behavioral health issues become more precise and effective. Hence, an app in itself is not a strategy  neither is it a viable treatment strategy or a sustainable business strategy for companies looking to lower healthcare costs. Behavioral and mental health is a fundamentally human enterprise. Technology today is helping reach and engage large and underserved segments of the population, but in order for it to be truly effective, it also must be backed by expertise and provide on-demand access to human experts for personalized support and treatment."

ProfNet Profile: http://www.profnetconnect.com/navya/

Website: www.wayforward.io

Contact: Charles Epstein, [email protected]



Canine PTSD

Kristen Maurer

President

Mission K9 Rescue

"Just like with two-legged soldiers, four-legged soldiers can come back with emotional issues. Some of them have been isolated their entire life, and they need to learn how to get along with other dogs and people. They need special rehabilitation. These dogs were drafted into what they did; they didn't choose it. They have selflessly given their lives to protect our soldiers, our first responders, and our citizens, and they deserve a happy retirement."

Maurer is the president of Mission K9 Rescue, an animal welfare group dedicated solely to rescuing, reuniting, rehoming, repairing, and rehabilitating American working dogs. Since 2013, the group has provided a wide array of services to working dogs in an effort to offer them a comfortable and peaceful retirement. Mission K9 focuses on retrieving dogs both from overseas and national shelter situations where they are suffering without proper care or medical attention. Their work has been featured numerous times in the national media, including appearances on "America with Eric Bolling" and "Pitbulls & Parolees."

Online Press Kit: https://missionk9rescue.onlinepresskit247.com

Website: www.MissionK9Rescue.org

Contact: Anita Jakab Kovacs, [email protected]



The Brain's Best Tools for Living a Good Life

Cholet Josue

Physician, Author

"Self-compassion. Emotional intelligence. Critical thinking. If any human being can get these three tools into their brain, they can get the resources they need to live a good life."

Josue is a Bahamian-born Haitian American author and physician seeking a home among the three cultures that have played a role in his life. Born in the Bahamas of Haitian parents who wanted their children to experience their ancestral roots, Josue moved to Haiti with his siblings when he was four years old. There he spent the next 12 years of his life reveling in a simple and decent, if checkered, childhood until he was sent across the Caribbean Sea in a wooden boat to join his mother in South Florida after the death of his father. While still an undocumented immigrant, Cholet earned a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Florida Atlantic University. Then he spent the next six months at the University of Miami law library preparing to represent himself in the trial of his life: the quest to become a legal resident. Josue received his medical degree from Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta and did his residency at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently, Josue practices medicine in the greater Washington, D.C., area with a functional and integrative approach, and draws on his special interest in behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry. He is a member of the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the Maryland Psychiatric Association, the American Neuropsychiatric Association, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Society for Neuroscience. His forthcoming book (spring 2019) is entitled: "Twelve Unending Summers: Memoir of an Immigrant Child."

Online Press Kit: https://choletjosue.onlinepresskit247.com

Website: www.choletkellyjosue.com

Contact: Michelle Tennant, [email protected]

MEDIA JOBS:

Following are links to job listings for staff and freelance writers, editors and producers. You can view these and more job listings on our Job Board: https://www.cisionjobs.com/jobs/united-states/

OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES:

Following are links to other news and resources we think you might find useful. If you have an item you think other reporters would be interested in and would like us to include in a future alert, please drop us a line at [email protected]

21ST CENTURY HUSTLE: FREELANCING IN THE FAST-MOVING GIG ECONOMY. Just last year, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its first freelance economy research in over a decade, finding that 10.7 percent of US workers -- more than 16 million people -- are employed through either contingent jobs or alternative employment. This is the rise of what we now call the gig economy. But freelancing comes with a steep learning curve: https://prn.to/2H4UslN





MEDIA INSIDER: WHAT'S MAKING NEWS THIS WEEK. Media Insider is a weekly roundup of media stories from the week. In this week's edition includes a look at The Atlantic's metered paywall, The New York Times' audio ambitions, Google's ban on political ads, and more: https://prn.to/2XTkxJN





audio ambitions, Google's ban on political ads, and more: https://prn.to/2XTkxJN BLOG PROFILES: FOOD & RECIPE BLOGS. Each week, PR Newswire's Audience Relations team selects an industry/subject and profiles a handful of sites that do a good job with promoting and contributing to the conversation. This week, they look at a food and recipe blogs: https://prn.to/2u7iLHg

PROFNET is an exclusive service of PR Newswire.

To contact ProfNet: [email protected] or 800-776-3638, ext. 1

SOURCE ProfNet

Related Links

http://www.profnet.com


Traditionally, Irish cream was something very special and personal, made by Irish grandmothers using cream from the family farm and containing almost exclusively Irish whiskey. We set out to make an Irish cream just like the one Grandma used to make - more butterfat, more whiskey, creamier and more delicious than anything that has come before it. Every ingredient in Five Farms is authentically Irish, and the product is beautifully presented in a package that honors the long tradition of Irish dairy farming. Five Farms was awarded the Chairman's Trophy at the 2018 Ultimate Spirits Challenge , earning the highest score ever given to an Irish cream liqueur.

Five Farms is now available in 44 states and in Ireland and will have full national US distribution by Fall 2019. The response to the brand has been phenomenal, demonstrating a wide appeal to consumers who appreciate its farm-to-table quality, who value its Irish authenticity, and who simply love the taste, with its notes of caramel and vanilla bean, the delicate sweetness of the cream, and the depth of Irish whiskey flavor.

Five Farms will be the exclusive Irish cream at numerous Irish festivals this summer, including the three largest in the world - Milwaukee Irish Fest , Kansas City Irish Fest , and the Dublin Irish Festival in Ohio. The brand is also promoting a St. Patrick's Day sweepstakes now through April 30, giving away trips for two to Ireland that include roundtrip airfare and a four-night stay at the beautiful Inchydoney Island Lodge & Spa in County Cork. Entry can be made by texting the word "Corky" to 555888 or by visiting https://fivefarmsirishcream.com/sweeps .

Five Farms Irish Cream Liqueur - Imported by Holladay Distillery, Weston, MO. Product of Ireland. 17% Alc./Vol. (34 proof) Contains Caramel Color. Drink Responsibly. Drive Responsibly.

SOURCE Five Farms Irish Cream
PITTSBURGH, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- StarKist Co. today announced it has entered into a settlement agreement with a large group of plaintiffs in the pending antitrust litigation. This settlement agreement resolves antitrust claims of 33 retailers, including Kroger, that were represented in several consolidated complaints. StarKist settled earlier with other plaintiffs including Target, Wal-Mart, and Sam's.

"StarKist is pleased to resolve this matter with our valued customers. This settlement, together with prior ones, resolves a substantial number of the company disputes with the direct action plaintiffs," said Scott Meece, StarKist General Counsel & Sr. Vice President.

"StarKist is committed to being a socially responsible company and we are pleased to resolve this lawsuit with our customers under fair and reasonable terms," said Andrew Choe, President & CEO, StarKist Co. "We will continue to conduct our business with the utmost transparency and integrity, and we hope to resolve the remaining lawsuits with our other customers under similarly fair and mutually beneficial terms."

About StarKist Co.

StarKist Co. provides trusted, healthy, food products in the United States. An industry innovator, StarKist was the first brand to introduce StarKist single-serve pouch products, which include Tuna Creations, Salmon Creations and Chicken Creations. As America's favorite tuna, StarKist represents a tradition of quality, consumer trust and a commitment to sustainability. StarKist's charismatic brand icon, Charlie the Tuna, swam into the hearts of tuna fans in 1961 and is still a fan favorite today. StarKist Co. is a direct wholly owned subsidiary of Dongwon Industries Co., Ltd.

Media Contact:

Michelle Faist

412-323-7457

[email protected]

SOURCE StarKist Co.

Related Links

http://starkist.com


WATERFORD, Conn., March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dominion Energy welcomes today's agreement and appreciates Governor Lamont and his administration's leadership on an issue vital to Connecticut's economy and environment. The contract is for 10 years, 9 million megawatt hours per year, and ensures Millstone Power Station will provide round-the-clock, carbon-free electricity that helps the state fulfill carbon-reduction goals. It also represents significant savings for Connecticut residents and guarantees well-paying jobs and substantial state-and-local economic contributions.

"This is a huge win for Connecticut, the region, and our colleagues at Millstone," said Paul Koonce, President & CEO Power Generation Group. "Not only does this preserve the vast majority of Connecticut's carbon-free electricity, it preserves good jobs for the 1,500 women and men who work at Millstone and keeps 4,000 other residents employed."

This result marks another significant milestone in Dominion Energy's multi-year progression towards a more regulated and long-term contracted earnings profile and the resulting reduction in business risk. The contract represents a modest financial uplift, which results in expected operating EPS levels that are within our existing guidance for 2019 and beyond.

About Dominion Energy

Nearly 7.5 million customers in 18 states energize their homes and businesses with electricity or natural gas from Dominion Energy (NYSE: D), headquartered in Richmond, Va. The company is committed to sustainable, reliable, affordable and safe energy and is one of the nation's largest producers and transporters of energy with about $100 billion of assets providing electric generation, transmission and distribution, as well as natural gas storage, transmission, distribution and import/export services. As one of the nation's leading solar operators, the company intends to reduce its carbon intensity 60 percent by 2030. Through its Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation, as well as EnergyShare and other programs, Dominion Energy contributed nearly $35 million in 2018 to community causes. Please visit www.dominionenergy.com to learn more.

SOURCE Dominion Energy

Related Links

http://www.dominionenergy.com


DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Syndromic Multiplex Diagnostic Markets 2019 to 2023 - Strategies and Trends, Forecasts by Syndrome (Respiratory, Sepsis, GI etc.), by Country, with Market Analysis, Executive Guides and Customization." report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Are targeted tests for specific pathogens going to be obsolete? Will Infectious Disease testing move into the Physician's Office or even the Home?



Syndromic testing is proving itself in the market. Players are reporting double-digit growth. Lowering costs, improving outcomes and even helping in the battle against Anti Microbial Resistance.

Learn about this market including the issues and outlooks. The two key trends of Point of Care Testing and Molecular Diagnostics are merging with spectacular success. It could possibly displace most frontline test protocols AND save money at the same time.

The report forecasts the market size out to 2023. In a special section, the report looks at the numbers on how syndromic molecular diagnostics is replacing traditional panel-based ordering of infectious disease tests.



Topics Covered



i. Market Guides

iA. Situation Analysis

iB. Guide for Executives and Marketing Staff

iC. Guide for Investment Analysts and Management Consultants



1. Introduction and Market Definition

1.1 What are Syndromic Multiplex Tests?

1.2 Syndromic Testing - the quiet revolution in diagnostics

1.2.1 Syndromic Testing - more than Panels.

1.3 Market Definition

1.3.1 Multiplex Market Size

1.3.2 Panel Market Size

1.3.2 Currency

1.3.3 Years

1.4 Methodology

1.4.1 Authors

1.4.2 Sources

1.5 U.S. Medical Market and Clinical Laboratory Testing - Perspective

1.5.1 U.S. Medicare Expenditures for Clinical Testing



2. The Infectious Diseases - Guide to the Pathogens

2.1 HIV - Human Immunodeficiency Virus (AIDS)

2.1.1 Virology

2.1.1.1 Classification

2.1.1.2 Structure and genome

2.1.1.3 Tropism

2.1.1.4 Replication cycle

2.1.1.5 Genetic variability

2.1.2 Diagnosis

2.1.3 Testing

2.1.3.1 Antibody tests

2.1.3.2 Point of Care Tests (POCT)

2.1.3.4 Antigen Tests

2.1.3.5 Nucleic acid-based tests (NAT)

2.1.3.6 Other tests used in HIV treatment

2.2 HBV - Hepatitis B

2.2.1 Virology

2.2.1.1 Genome

2.2.1.2 Pathogenesis

2.2.1.3 Hepatitis B virus replication

2.2.1.4 Serotypes and genotypes

2.2.2 Mechanisms

2.2.3 Diagnosis

2.2.4 Market Opportunity Analysis

2.3 HCV - Hepatitis C

2.3.1 Taxonomy

2.3.2.1 Structure

2.3.2.2 Genome

2.3.3 Molecular biology

2.3.4 Replication

2.3.5 Genotypes

2.3.5.1 Clinical importance

2.3.6 Market Opportunity Analysis

2.4 HPV - Human papillomavirus

2.4.1 Virology

2.4.1.1 E6/E7 proteins

2.4.1.2 Role in cancer

2.4.1.3 E2 research

2.4.1.4 Latency period

2.4.1.5 Clearance

2.4.2 Diagnosis

2.4.2.1 Cervical testing

2.4.2.2 Oral testing

2.4.2.3 Testing men

2.4.2.4 Other testing

2.4.3 Market Opportunity Analysis

2.5 Influenza

2.5.1 Virology

2.5.1.1 Types of virus

2.5.1.2 Influenzavirus A

2.5.1.3 Influenzavirus B

2.5.1.4 Influenzavirus C

2.5.1.5 Structure, properties, and subtype nomenclature

2.5.1.6 Replication

2.5.2 Testing

2.5.2.1 Advantages/Disadvantages of Molecular Assays

2.5.3 Market Opportunity Analysis

2.6 CTGC - Chlamydia/Gonorhea

2.6.1 Gonorrhea

2.6.1.1 Diagnosis

2.6.1.2 Screening

2.6.2 Chlamydia

2.6.2.1 Diagnosis

2.6.2.2 Screening

2.6.3 Testing

2.6.3.1 Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs).

2.6.3.2 Performance of NAAT Tests

2.6.4 Market Opportunity Analysis

2.7 Tuberculosis

2.7.1 Mycobacteria

2.7.2 Diagnosis

2.7.2.1 Active tuberculosis

2.7.2.2 Latent tuberculosis

2.7.3 Epidemiology

2.7.4 Molecular Diagnostic Tests

2.7.5 Market Opportunity Analysis

2.8 MRSA - Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

2.8.1 Diagnosis

2.8.2 FDA Approved Molecular Tests.

2.8.3 Market Opportunity Analysis

2.9 VRE - Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus

2.9.1 FDA Approved MDx Tests for VRE

2.9.2 Market Opportunity Analysis



3. Industry Overview

3.1 Industry Participants

3.1.1 IVD Supplier

3.1.2 Independent lab specialized/esoteric

3.1.3 Independent lab national/regional

3.1.4 Independent lab analytical

3.1.5 Public National/regional lab

3.1.6 Hospital lab

3.1.7 Physician lab

3.1.8 Audit body

3.2 The Clinical Laboratory Market Segments

3.2.1 Traditional Market Segmentation

3.2.2 Laboratory Focus and Segmentation

3.2.3 Segmenting the Syndromic Testing Market

3.3 Industry Structure

3.3.1 Hospital Testing Share

3.3.2 Economies of Scale

3.3.2.1 Hospital vs. Central Lab

3.3.3 Physician Office Labs

3.3.4 Physician's and POCT



4. Market Trends

4.1 Factors Driving Growth

4.1.1 Speed of Diagnosis

4.1.2 Effect of Syndromic Testing on Costs

4.1.3 Point of Care Advantage

4.1.4 Syndrome Testing, Accuracy and Diagnostic Risk

4.1.5 Single Visits

4.1.6 Improvement in Outcomes

4.2 Factors Limiting Growth

4.2.1 Lower Prices

4.2.2 Infectious Disease is Declining But

4.2.3 Wellness Hurts.

4.2.4 Economic Growth improves Living Standards

4.3 Instrumentation and Automation

4.3.1 Instruments Key to Market Share

4.3.2 The Shrinking Machine

4.3.3 Syndrome Testing Moving to Big Instruments?

4.4 Diagnostic Technology Development

4.4.1 Comparing Syndrome and Targeted Testing

4.4.2 The Multiplex Paradigm Shift

4.4.2 The Sepsis Testing Market - Bellwether for Syndromics

4.4.3 The Single Visit and AntiMicrobial Resistance

4.4.4 Syndromics drives POCT adoption

4.4.5 A Big Future for PCR?



5. Syndromic Testing Recent Developments

Recent Developments - Importance and How to Use This Section

Importance of These Developments

How to Use This Section



Akonni Biosystems Submits Multiplex Diagnostics System to FDA

Ador Diagnostic to receive $30M in Funding for 100-Plex PoC

in Funding for 100-Plex PoC SAW Diagnostics Receives Funding for Commercialisation of PoC Platform

QuantuMDx and Molbio announce MoU

Immunexpress Wins $745K Contract for Rapid Sepsis Assay

Contract for Rapid Sepsis Assay Mobidiag Inks European, Middle Eastern Distribution Deals

BIOFIRE FILMARRAY System chosen for Phase 3 clinical trial

bioMerieux launches the BIOFIRE FILMARRAY Pneumonia Panels

XCR Diagnostics and Luminex Enter into License Agreement

Palmetto Final LCD Denies Coverage to Large Respiratory Panels

Karius Test to Be Available in Brazil

Inflammatix HostDx Fever Test able to Rapidly Distinguish Bacterial from Viral Infections

Panagene's STD kit gains Approval

GenePOC's Investment Validated by Medicare Decision

Startup Prominex Raises $4M in Series A1

in Series A1 Alveo Closes Financing to Create Accessible Diagnostics Devices

MBio Diagnostics, Inc. Funding Supports Scaling of PoC Testing Platform

GenePOC launches its GenePOC CDiff test in Canada

Siemens Healthineers completes takeover of Fast Track Diagnostics

Chembio and FIND to Develop Point-of-Care Multiplex Test

Applied BioCode Receives CE Mark for 18-plex Gastrointestinal Pathogen Panel

Rapid Molecular Flu Tests Gain Ground

Cepheid Receives FDA Clearance and CLIA Waiver for Xpert Xpress Flu Test

bioMerieux seeks FDA Clearance of Pneumonia Panel

Mobidiag Announces Release of a Multiplex qPCR Test for Detection of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria

Fast Track Diagnostics Gets CE Mark for Real-Time PCR Detection of High-Risk HPV

SEEGENE develops Multiplex PCR tests in 4 days

Seegene enters the U.S. diagnostic market in collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific

Fusion Genomics Developing All Pathogens Diagnostic.

Anapa Biotech Announces MeltPlex Technology

First multiplex test for tick-borne diseases

ArcherDx, MGH Suing Qiagen Over Anchored Multiplex PCR Technology

Akonni Biosystems Forms Chinese Commercialization Partnership with Righton

Vela Buys Great Basin Scientific

BARDA Awards up to $30M to Cue Health for Influenza, Respiratory Pathogen Test

to Cue Health for Influenza, Respiratory Pathogen Test QIAGEN enters into agreement to acquire STAT-Dx

GA-EMS receives diagnostic device contract

Biocartis & Immunexpress Sign Partnership for Sepsis



6. Profiles of Key Syndromic Testing Companies



Abbott Diagnostics (Alere)

Accelerate Diagnostics

Ador Diagnostics

Akkoni Biosystems

Alveo Technologies

Applied BioCode

Atlas Genetics

Aus Diagnostics

BD Diagnostics

Biocartis

BioFire Diagnostics

bioMerieux

Bio-Rad Laboratories

Bosch Healthcare Solutions GmbH

Cepheid

Curetis

Diagenode Diagnostics

Diasorin

Fusion Genomics

GenePOC Diagnostics

GenMark Dx

Hologic

Inflammatix

Invetech

Janssen Diagnostics

Karius

Lexigene

Luminex

Mbio Diagnostics

Mesa Biotech

Mobidiag

Nanomix

Oxford Nanopore

Panagene

Primerdesign

Prominex

Qiagen (Statdx)

Quantumdx

Roche Molecular Diagnostics

Seegene

Sensovation

Siemens Healthineers (Fast Track Diagnostics)

SkylineDx

T2 Biosystems

Thermo Fisher

Veramarx

XCR Diagnostics



7. Global Market Size

7.1 Syndromic Global Market Size by Country with Charts

7.2 Syndromic Global Market Size by Syndrome with Charts



8. Global Market by Syndrome

8.1 Respiratory Syndrome Market

8.1.1 Respiratory Syndrome Market by Country

8.2 GI-Enteric Syndrome Market

8.2.1 GI-Enteric Market by Country with Chart

8.3 Blood-Sepsis Syndrome Market

8.3.1 Blood-Sepsis Market by Country with Chart

8.4 Meningitis Syndrome Market

8.4.1 Meningitis Market by Country with Chart

8.5 Sexually Transmitted Disease Syndrome Market

8.5.1 Sexually Transmitted Disease Market by Country with Chart

8.6 Other Syndrome Market

8.6.1 Other Market by Country with Chart



9. Panel Testing Market - Volumes and Price Forecast with MDx Share

9.1 Respiratory Panel Market

9.2 GI-Enteric Panel Market

9.3 Blood-Sepsis Panel Market

9.4 Meningitis Panel Market

9.5 Sexually Transmitted Disease Panel Market

9.6 Other Panel Market



Appendices

I. United States Medicare System: 2018 Clinical Laboratory Fees Schedule - National Limit and Midpoint

II. FDA Approved Microbial Tests



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/hrsb5p/syndromic?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]



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Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com


DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Fertilizer Market - Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast (2019 - 2024)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global fertilizer market is expected to value at USD 155.8 billion in 2019, and it is expected to register a CAGR of 3.8% during the forecast period (2019-2024).



In 2018, Asia-Pacific was the largest geographical segment of the market studied and accounted for a share of around 60% of the overall market. The fertilizer industry was heavily challenged in 2016. It was confronted with uneven global nutrient demand, soft economic prospects, depressed crop prices, rising market competition, and volatile energy prices. This combination created high uncertainty in the fertilizer market throughout the year.



Since 2012, a sustained downturn in the world consumption of fertilizer market, coupled with decreasing crop prices, mainly in the United States and Asia-Pacific, has made it difficult to maintain consistent growth. The major technological innovations in the industry, along with growing demand for bio-based and micronutrient fertilizers, are expected to drive the market. However, regulatory and environmental constraints and high production cost are likely to act as drawbacks in the industry.



Key Market Trends



Growing Demand for Micronutrient Fertilizers



Micronutrients are essential for the optimum growth of plants. During 2013, nearly 50% of the cultivated land area worldwide of contained a low concentration of zinc. It was expected by 2018 that this deficiency would reach 65%. Field trials proved that the application of micronutrient fertilizers increased crop yield from 8% to 20% annually.



Yara International is the market leader, in terms of market share, in micronutrient fertilizers. The company plans to make further investments and is investing around USD 330 million in Brazil. It closed its manufacturing facilities in France, due to both strategic and economic considerations. Large companies are focusing on R&D, product launches, and aggressive acquisition strategy. In the past few years, Valagro has been the most active player, in terms of strategic development, in the global micronutrient market.



Asia-Pacific Dominates the Global Market



Asia-Pacific accounts for 60% of the global fertilizer market. South Asia and East Asia are the major fertilizer consumers in Asia. In 2015, Asia's share of global nitrogen consumption was 60%, with China representing approximately half of the said consumption. In Asia, rice is a big nitrogen-consuming crop.



Owing to the growing concern over the current pattern of fertilizer use, with heavy reliance on nitrogenous fertilizer, coupled with poor nutrition management, lack of complementary inputs, declining soil fertility, and weak marketing and distribution systems, have all emerged as major restraints to improve fertilizer effectiveness in the region. These concerns have given way to biofertilizers and micronutrient fertilizers to grow and fuel the fertilizers market in the region.



Competitive Landscape



The global fertilizer market is fragmented, and the top ten players constitute a small share of the global fertilizer market, while the other fertilizer companies constitute for the larger part of the market share, based on overall fertilizer market revenue in 2018.



The company's largest investment has been in the product launch segment, in which, the company introduced as many as 11 new products to the market, in different regions, such as Africa and Latin America in 2017. The development of regional markets and local players in different parts of the world are the major factors for the fragmented nature of the market.



Topics Covered



1 Introduction

1.1 Market Definition

1.2 Key Findings of the Study



2 Research Methodology

2.1 Study Deliverables

2.2 Study Assumptions

2.3 Research Methodology

2.4 Research Phases



3 Executive Summary



4 Market Dynamics

4.1 Drivers

4.1.1 Technological Innovations in the Fertilizer Industry

4.1.2 Growing Demand for Bio-based Fertilizer

4.1.3 Growth in Demand for Micronutrient Fertilizer

4.1.4 Per Capita Arable Land Available for Cultivation is Decreasing, While Demand for Food Keeps Growing

4.2 Restraints

4.2.1 Regulatory and Environmental Constraints

4.2.2 High Production Cost

4.2.3 Low Crop Prices

4.2.4 Low Access to Credit and Constrained Access to Input and Output Markets

4.3 Porter's Five Forces Analysis



5 Market Segmentation

5.1 Type

5.1.1 Nitrogenous

5.1.1.1 Urea

5.1.1.2 Calcium Ammonium Nitrate (CAN)

5.1.1.3 Ammonium Nitrate

5.1.1.4 Ammonium Sulfate

5.1.1.5 Ammonia

5.1.1.6 Other Nitrogenous Fertilizers

5.1.2 Phosphatic

5.1.2.1 Mono-Ammonium Phosphate (MAP)

5.1.2.2 Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP)

5.1.2.3 Triple Superphosphate (TSP)

5.1.2.4 Other Phosphatic Fertilizers

5.1.3 Potassic

5.1.4 Micronutrients

5.1.5 Other Types

5.2 Application

5.2.1 Grains and Cereals

5.2.2 Pulses and Oil Seeds

5.2.3 Fruits and Vegetables

5.2.4 Commercial Crops

5.2.5 Other Applications

5.3 Geography



6 Competitive Landscape

6.1 Most Adopted Strategies

6.2 Most Active Companies

6.3 Market Share Analysis

6.4 Company Profiles

6.4.1 Nutrien Limited

6.4.2 Yara International

6.4.3 The Mosaic Company

6.4.4 CF Industries

6.4.5 Bunge Limited

6.4.6 Syngenta AG

6.4.7 Israel Chemicals Ltd.

6.4.8 Sumitomo Chemical Co. Ltd.

6.4.9 Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperative Limited

6.4.10 Haifa Group

6.4.11 SQM



7 Market Opportunities and Future Trends



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/95hmt2/the_worldwide?w=5

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

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Research and Markets

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[email protected]



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SOURCE Research and Markets

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WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) celebrates Match Day with the thousands of applicants and programs participating in the 2019 Main Residency Match. Medical school students and graduates from the United States and around the world have learned in which U.S. residency programs they will train for the next three to seven years. Match Day is commemorated with ceremonies held around the country for U.S. allopathic medical school seniors who open their Match letters in the company of family, friends, and advisors. Today the NRMP also releases the Advance Data Tables (select tables from the full Match report published in early May), "Match by the Numbers," and Match Day infographic.

Today the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) celebrates Match Day with thousands of physician applicants and programs participating in the 2019 Main Residency Match. Medical school students and graduates from the U.S. and around the world have learned in which U.S. residency programs they will train. A record-high 38,376 applicants submitted program choices for 35,185 positions, the most ever offered in the Match.

"NRMP is delighted to celebrate this transition to residency with thousands of young physicians and to congratulate them on their years of hard work," says Mona M. Signer, NRMP President and CEO. "We wish them success as they begin their careers providing health care to communities across the nation."

NRMP, the American Medical Association (AMA), and the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) will join the Match Day celebration on social media with the #Match2019 hashtag.

Largest Match on Record

The 2019 Main Residency Match is the largest in NRMP history. A record-high 38,376 applicants submitted program choices for 35,185 positions, the most ever offered in the Match. The number of available first-year (PGY-1) positions rose to 32,194, an increase of 1,962 (6.5%) over 2018. The influx of positions is due, in part, to the increased numbers of osteopathic programs that joined the Main Residency Match as a result of the ongoing transition to a single accreditation system for graduate medical education programs.

Program Highlights

Specialty Competitiveness

The results of the Match are closely watched because they can be predictors of future physician workforce supply. There also is significant interest in the competitiveness of specialties, as measured by the percentage of positions filled overall and the percentage filled by senior students in U.S. allopathic medical schools.

Specialties with more than 30 positions that filled all available positions were Integrated Interventional Radiology (categorical and advanced), Otolaryngology, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (categorical), Integrated Plastic Surgery, Surgery (Categorical), and Thoracic Surgery.

Specialties with more than 30 positions that filled more than 90 percent with U.S. allopathic seniors were Integrated Plastic Surgery (91.9%), Neurological Surgery (91.8%), Orthopedic Surgery (91.8%), Otolaryngology (93.9%), and Thoracic Surgery (91.9%).

Specialties with more than 30 positions that filled less than 45 percent with U.S. allopathic seniors were Family Medicine (39.0%), Internal Medicine (categorical) (41.5%), Pathology (33.4%), Pediatrics - Primary (40.0%), and Surgery - Preliminary (23.9).

Primary Care Specialties

Of the 32,194 first-year positions offered in the Match, 15,946 were in the primary care specialties of Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, Internal Medicine  Pediatrics, Internal Medicine  Primary, Pediatrics, and Pediatrics  Primary, a 7.8 percent increase over the number offered in 2018. Of those, 15,355 (96.3%) were filled and 7,272 (45.6%) were filled by U.S. allopathic seniors.

Internal Medicine programs offered 8,116 categorical positions, 574 more than in 2018; 7,892 (97.2%) positions filled, and 3,366 (41.5%) filled with U.S. allopathic seniors. The percentage of Internal Medicine categorical positions filled by U.S. allopathic seniors has declined every year since 2015.

programs offered 8,116 categorical positions, 574 more than in 2018; 7,892 (97.2%) positions filled, and 3,366 (41.5%) filled with U.S. allopathic seniors. The percentage of Internal Medicine categorical positions filled by U.S. allopathic seniors has declined every year since 2015. Family Medicine programs offered 4,107 positions, 478 more than in 2018; 3,827 (93.2%) positions filled, and 1,601 (39.0%) filled with U.S. allopathic seniors. This year was the first year since 2009 that the number of U.S. allopathic seniors matching to Family Medicine has decreased; however, a record number 986 osteopathic students and graduates matched in Family Medicine, accounting for 25.8 percent of all applicants who matched to the specialty.

programs offered 4,107 positions, 478 more than in 2018; 3,827 (93.2%) positions filled, and 1,601 (39.0%) filled with U.S. allopathic seniors. This year was the first year since 2009 that the number of U.S. allopathic seniors matching to Family Medicine has decreased; however, a record number 986 osteopathic students and graduates matched in Family Medicine, accounting for 25.8 percent of all applicants who matched to the specialty. Pediatrics programs offered 2,847 categorial positions, 79 more than in 2018; 2,778 (97.6%) filled, and 1,715 (60.2%) filled with U.S. allopathic seniors. The percentage of U.S. allopathic seniors matching to Pediatrics has declined every year since 2015.

Other Specialty Trends

Emergency Medicine programs offered 2,488 first-year positions, 210 more than in 2018, and filled all but 30. The overall fill rate was 98.8 percent, and 65.0 percent were filled by U.S. allopathic seniors. Since 2015, the number of Emergency Medicine positions has increased by 667, or 36.6 percent.

programs offered 2,488 first-year positions, 210 more than in 2018, and filled all but 30. The overall fill rate was 98.8 percent, and 65.0 percent were filled by U.S. allopathic seniors. Since 2015, the number of Emergency Medicine positions has increased by 667, or 36.6 percent. Psychiatry programs offered 1,740 positions, 184 more than in 2018, and filled all but 20. The overall fill rate was 98.9 percent, and 60.6 percent were filled by U.S. allopathic seniors. Since 2015, the number of Psychiatry positions has increased by 387, or 28.6 percent.

programs offered 1,740 positions, 184 more than in 2018, and filled all but 20. The overall fill rate was 98.9 percent, and 60.6 percent were filled by U.S. allopathic seniors. Since 2015, the number of Psychiatry positions has increased by 387, or 28.6 percent. Radiation-Oncology advanced programs offered 192 positions, 15 more than in 2018, but filled only 163 (84.9%), a sharp drop from prior years when only a handful of positions were unfilled. The number of positions filled by U.S. allopathic seniors declined by 15 percentage points.

advanced programs offered 192 positions, 15 more than in 2018, but filled only 163 (84.9%), a sharp drop from prior years when only a handful of positions were unfilled. The number of positions filled by U.S. allopathic seniors declined by 15 percentage points. Other specialties with at least 30 PGY-1 positions and increasing by more than 50 first-year positions over 2018 were Anesthesiology (84 more positions, a 6.7 percent increase), Obstetrics-Gynecology (59 more positions, a 4.4 percent increase), and Neurology (65 more positions, a 11.8 percent increase) The number of General Surgery (categorical) positions has increased by 208 since 2015 (17.0%), 113 of those added this year. In addition, Transitional Year (PGY-1 only) positions increased for the third year in a row; 1,252 were offered in 2019, an increase of 166 positions over 2018 and a 49.4 percent increase since 2016.

Applicant Highlights

The number of Match registrants was the highest ever at 44,603. The increase was due primarily to students/graduates of U.S. osteopathic medical schools, whose numbers grew by 1,036 (17.1%) over 2018 to 7,090 this year.

The number of U.S. allopathic medical school seniors who submitted program choices was a record high 18,925, an increase of 107 over 2018; 17,763 (93.9%) matched to first-year positions, the highest number ever. The 94 percent PGY-1 match rate for U.S. allopathic seniors has been consistent for many years.

who submitted program choices was a record high 18,925, an increase of 107 over 2018; 17,763 (93.9%) matched to first-year positions, the highest number ever. The 94 percent PGY-1 match rate for U.S. allopathic seniors has been consistent for many years. The number of U.S. osteopathic medical school students and graduates who submitted program choices also was a record high at 6,001, an increase of 1,384 over 2018. Of those 6,001, 5,076 (84.6%) matched to PGY-1 positions, also an all-time high. Since 2015, the number of U.S. osteopathic medical school students and graduates seeking positions has risen by 3,052, a 103 percent increase. That growth has been driven in part by the transition to a single accreditation system. As part of that transition, the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) Match has ended.

who submitted program choices also was a record high at 6,001, an increase of 1,384 over 2018. Of those 6,001, 5,076 (84.6%) matched to PGY-1 positions, also an all-time high. Since 2015, the number of U.S. osteopathic medical school students and graduates seeking positions has risen by 3,052, a 103 percent increase. That growth has been driven in part by the transition to a single accreditation system. As part of that transition, the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) Match has ended. The number of U.S. citizen international medical school students and graduates (IMGs) who submitted program choices was 5,080, an increase of five over 2018; 59 percent (2,997) matched to PGY-1 positions, the highest match rate since 1991.

who submitted program choices was 5,080, an increase of five over 2018; 59 percent (2,997) matched to PGY-1 positions, the highest match rate since 1991. The number of non-U.S. citizen IMGs who participated in the Match declined for the third consecutive year. In 2019, 6,869 IMGs submitted program choices, down 198 from 2018, 415 from 2017, and 501 from 2016. However, 4,028 IMGs (58.6%) matched to first-year positions, which is 2.5 percentage points higher than 2018 and the highest match rate since 1990.

Unmatched Applicants

Applicants who did not match to a residency position participated in the NRMP Match Week Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP) to attempt to obtain an unfilled position. This year,1,652 of the 1,768 unfilled positions were offered during SOAP. SOAP results will be available in the full Match report published in early May.

View the Advance Data Tables, Match by the Numbers, and Match infographic

The Match Process

For applicants, the Main Residency Match process begins in the fall during the final year of medical school, when they apply to the residency programs of their choice. Throughout the fall and early winter, applicants interview with programs. From mid-January to late February, applicants and program directors rank each other in order of preference and submit the preference lists to NRMP, which processes them using a computerized mathematical algorithm to match applicants with programs. Research on the NRMP algorithm was a basis for awarding The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2012.

About NRMP

The National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) is a private, non-profit organization established in 1952 at the request of medical students to provide an orderly and fair mechanism for matching the preferences of applicants for U.S. residency positions with the preferences of residency program directors. In addition to the annual Main Residency Match for almost 44,000 registrants, the NRMP conducts Fellowship Matches for more than 60 subspecialties through its Specialties Matching Service (SMS).

Contact:

Barry Eisenberg

[email protected]

SOURCE National Resident Matching Program

Related Links

http://www.nrmp.org


CALGARY, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Vermilion Energy Inc. ("Vermilion") (TSX,NYSE: VET) is pleased to announce a cash dividend of $0.23 CDN per share payable on April 15, 2019 to all shareholders of record on March 29, 2019. The ex-dividend date for this payment is March 28, 2019. This dividend is an eligible dividend for the purposes of the Income Tax Act (Canada).

About Vermilion

Vermilion is an international energy producer that seeks to create value through the acquisition, exploration, development and optimization of producing properties in North America, Europe and Australia. Our business model emphasizes organic production growth augmented with value-adding acquisitions, along with providing reliable and increasing dividends to investors. Vermilion is targeting growth in production primarily through the exploitation of light oil and liquids-rich natural gas conventional resource plays in Canada and the United States, the exploration and development of high impact natural gas opportunities in the Netherlands and Germany, and through oil drilling and workover programs in France and Australia. Vermilion holds a 20% working interest in the Corrib gas field in Ireland. Vermilion pays a monthly dividend of Canadian $0.23 per share, which provides a current yield of approximately 8.5%.

Vermilion's priorities are health and safety, the environment, and profitability, in that order. Nothing is more important to us than the safety of the public and those who work with us, and the protection of our natural surroundings. We have been recognized as a top decile performer amongst Canadian publicly listed companies in governance practices, as a Climate Leadership level (A-) performer by the CDP, and a Best Workplace in the Great Place to Work Institute's annual rankings in Canada, the Netherlands and Germany. In addition, Vermilion emphasizes strategic community investment in each of our operating areas.

Employees and directors hold approximately 5% of our fully diluted shares, are committed to consistently delivering superior rewards for all stakeholders, and have delivered over 20 years of market outperformance. Vermilion trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol VET.

SOURCE Vermilion Energy Inc.

Related Links

http://www.vermilionenergy.com


Rising millennial income, increasing purchases of diamond jewellery by Chinese brides, and high demand during Chinese Lunar New Year and Singles' Day will drive the China jewellery market this year, according to think-tank Research and Markets.

"We expect another edition full of productive conversations between our exhibitors and buyers who are serious about maximising ROI," says Teddy Tan, Event Manager - China Jewellery Fairs, UBM China (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd.

Mr. Tan encourages buyers to pre-register their visit now at www.shenzhenjewelleryfair.com/en-us/. Highlighting the benefits of online pre-registration, Mr. Tan says, "The early bird not only catches the worm but also skips the long lines at the registration counters at the venue!"

Mr. Tan is enthused about the Fair's features, which have been instrumental in helping establish Shenzhen Jewellery Fair as one of the most awaited jewellery trade platforms in Southern China.

Here are the highlights:

Brand Village

Brand Village enables leading companies to capture the attention of a prominent audience with their innovations and breakthroughs in jewellery materials, manufacturing, technologies and retailing, to name just a few. The ideas showcased by the Fair will inspire jewellery traders to transform and upgrade their own brands and products.

Confirmed exhibitors so far include Korea-based specialist in light luxury jewellery, GEMOPIA, fine jade and collection-grade jade specialist CMOY JADE, and Origin Enterprise Jewelry Limited, which has made a name for itself with its specialty, the Australian opal.

Licensing Area

The Licensing Area is geared towards participants seeking franchising opportunities. The area is a one-stop destination where licensors, licensing agents, licensees, manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors and retailers can connect with each other and explore the franchising business model in the jewellery market.

Confirmed exhibitors include Mover Culture Co., Ltd., which has more than 100 IP (intellectual property) rights in its portfolio, including renowned characters from video games like World of Warcraft, movie franchises MARVEL and Minions and elements in literary works. Also confirmed is JIN (Shanghai) Culture Development Co., Ltd., which has abundant IP resources in the field of visual arts. It is licensed by the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the V&A Museum, and BBC Earth for precious metal and jewellery items in the Greater China market. Zhao cai tong zi, a homegrown comic and animation brand in China, is also participating. The leading animated character 'Zhao cai tong zi', which is a lucky symbol, has been licensed out, producing more than 500 animation derivative products. Enterprises which have been authorised to produce the character include leading consumer brands China Mobile, China Unicom, SWAROVSKI, Jingdong, Alibaba and Arena of Valor.

Wedding Area

Whether the wedding being planned is glamorous or low-key, the Wedding Area is the place to be for traders focused on the bridal jewellery segment. The pavilion features inspiring ideas for all tastes and budgets. Showcasing selections ranging from classic bestsellers to simple and chic pieces currently dominating trends, the Wedding Area opens up crossover business opportunities for participants specialised in this market segment.

Current exhibitors include Breuning, a trusted name since 1927. Breuning is a renowned manufacturer of gold and silver jewellery, and a leading specialist in wedding rings in Europe. Traditional craftsmanship combined with technical know-how has given the company a leading edge in the field. The company possesses machinery and tooling "unparalleled on an international scale," enabling it to produce technically challenging patterns. Marcus Breuning, a third-generation family member, leads the company today. Also confirmed to exhibit in the Wedding Area is Yafu Jewellery, a Shenzhen jewellery company that has established a name for itself over the decades with its proven expertise in wedding jewellery. SHOW DREAM joins the stellar line up with its showcase of a light luxury jewellery brand aimed at young consumers tuned to fashion and trends.

Designer Pavilion

The Designer Pavilion showcases the expertise of local talent who together have contributed to Shenzhen's enviable positioning in the jewellery industry. The pavilion is an effective platform for jewellery traders to develop collaborative opportunities to work with designers and stay up-to-date on the latest trends.

Current exhibitors include Ms. Lin Wenyu from Taiwan; promising young designers Mr. Denzel Kong and Ms. Somous Qin; Mr. Xie Wenbo, an expert in the jewellery industry with 12 years' experience; Mr. Li Wei, who is skilled in integrating Chinese traditional culture in jewellery design; and Ms. Wang Yuqi, who specialises in integrating traditional Chinese patterns into modern design.

Hong Kong Gold & Silver Ornament Workers & Merchants General Union Pavilion

A number of premier jewellery companies from Hong Kong will showcase their outstanding products under the banner of the Hong Kong Gold & Silver Ornament Workers & Merchants General Union.

China Jewellery Market Summit

New product launches through jewellery parades take centre stage during the Summit. Forums and panel discussions featuring experts and professionals from leading jewellery companies and fashion partners will offer participants the latest industry intelligence. Timely topics such as intellectual property (IP) and laboratory diamonds will be discussed.

April 19 is the Summit's specially designated "IP Day", where leading names in IP licensing will be invited to share their insights into IP business opportunities. These names include Mover Culture Co., Ltd., JIN (Shanghai) Culture Development Co., Ltd., and other leading representatives specialised in IP or the jewellery IP industry.

Charity Programme: "Everyone can be a designer"

Continuing its successful collaboration with 3D printing technology specialist iiiMark 3D, and Chinese charity organisation, Aimier, the programme will showcase how the drawings of mentally challenged children are made into jewellery items via 3D printing technology. The programme gives participants and the industry at large an opportunity to contribute to charitable causes. Visitors will also have a chance to customise their own jewellery by submitting their drawings onsite.

"We can't wait to welcome our valued exhibitors and participants over the Fair's four days," says Mr. Tan. "The industry's creativity and talent will shine again through the wide range of quality jewellery, raw materials, and related products and services on offer."

UBM Global Jewellery Events Calendar 2019-2020

Exhibitions Dates Venue Mainland China China International Gold, Jewellery & Gem Fair - Shenzhen 19 - 22 April 2019 Shenzhen Convention & Exhibition Center China International Gold, Jewellery & Gem Fair - Shanghai 28 November - 1 December 2019 Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center Hong Kong region



June Hong Kong Jewellery & Gem Fair 20 - 23 June 2019 Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre Asia's Fashion Jewellery & Accessories Fair - September Edition 16 - 19 September 2019 AsiaWorld-Expo  Hong Kong September Hong Kong Jewellery & Gem Fair 16 - 20 September 2019 18 - 22 September 2019 AsiaWorld-Expo  Hong Kong Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre Asia's Fashion Jewellery & Accessories Fair - March Edition March 2020 AsiaWorld-Expo  Hong Kong Taiwan region Taiwan Jewellery & Gem Fair 15 - 18 November 2019 Taipei World Trade Center Japan Japan Jewellery Fair 28 - 30 August 2019 Tokyo Big Sight Exhibition Center India Kolkata Jewellery & Gem Fair 6 - 8 April 2019 Milan Mela Complex  Kolkata Hyderabad Jewellery, Pearl & Gem Fair 14 - 16 June 2019 HICC, Novotel  Hyderabad Delhi Jewellery & Gem Fair 28 - 30 September 2019 Pragati Maidan  Delhi Chennai Jewellery & Gem Fair 4 - 6 October 2019 Chennai Trade Centre Mumbai Jewellery & Gem Fair 21 - 23 December 2019 Bombay Exhibition Center Chennai Jewellery & Gem Fair 20 - 22 March 2020 Chennai Trade Centre Middle East Jewellery Arabia Bahrain 19 - 23 November 2019 The Bahrain International Exhibition and Convention Centre Turkey Istanbul Jewelry Show I 21 - 24 March 2019 CNR Expo Center  Istanbul Istanbul Jewelry Show II 10 - 13 October 2019 CNR Expo Center  Istanbul

For exhibiting, please contact: Sales Department, Jewellery Fairs, UBM China (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. Tel: (86) 20 8666 0158 Fax: (86) 20 8667 7120 E-mail: [email protected] For visiting, please contact: Visitor Promotion Department, Jewellery Fairs, UBM China (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. Tel: (86) 20 8667 2808 Fax: (86) 20 8667 7120 E-mail: [email protected] http://www.shenzhenjewelleryfair.com/



Notes to Editors:

The China International Gold, Jewellery & Gem Fair - Shenzhen is organised by UBM, which in June 2018 combined with Informa PLC to become a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B Events organiser in the world. Please visit www.ubm.com/asia for more information about our presence in Asia.

SOURCE UBM China (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd

Related Links

http://www.ubm.com/asia


HOLMDEL, N.J., March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Vonage Holdings Corp. (NYSE: VG), a business cloud communications leader, today announced that it appointed Michael J. McConnell as an independent director to the Company's Board of Directors, effective today. Vonage's board will now be comprised of nine directors, eight of whom are independent.

"We welcome Mike McConnell to our Board as we continue to execute on our strategic priorities," said Gary Steele, Chair of the Nomination and Governance Committee.

"The addition of Mike McConnell as an independent director will add extensive operating and leadership experience, as well as keen investor perspectives from Mr. McConnell's multi-decade investment career focused on increasing shareholder value," said Chris Kiper, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Legion Partners Asset Management, LLC ("Legion Partners"). "We appreciate the very constructive relationship we have had with Vonage and the Board, and management's continued efforts to deliver shareholder value."

In connection with today's announcement, Legion Partners has agreed to abide by certain customary standstill provisions and to support Vonage's slate of nominees at the 2019 Annual Meeting. The complete agreement will be included as an exhibit to a Current Report on Form 8-K, which will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

About Michael McConnell

Mr. McConnell, age 53, is a private investor. He has served as a director of SPS Commerce, Inc., a provider of cloud-based supply chain management software, since March 2018, and as a director of Adacel Technologies, a developer of operational air traffic management systems and advanced air traffic control simulation and training solutions, since May 2017. From April 2016 until the company was sold in September 2017, Mr. McConnell served as a director of Guidance Software Inc., a provider of forensic security and risk management applications. Previously he served as a director of Spark Networks, Inc., a global, online dating company, from July 2014 until the company was sold in November 2017, and as a director from 2007 to 2013 of Collectors Universe, Inc., a provider of third-party authentication and grading of high value collectibles, as well as its the Chief Executive Officer from 2009 to 2012. From 1994 to 2007, Mr. McConnell served as a Managing Director of Shamrock Capital Advisors. Over the course of his career, Mr. McConnell has served on numerous other public and private company boards in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. During the past five years, Mr. McConnell served on the following boards in addition to those listed above: Redflex Holdings Limited, Vitacost.com and Best International Limited.

About Vonage

Vonage is redefining business communications, helping enterprises use fully-integrated unified communications, contact center, and programmable communications solutions via Nexmo, the Vonage API Platform, to improve how business gets done. True to our roots as a technology disruptor, we've embraced technology to transform how companies connect, collaborate and communicate to create better business outcomes. Vonage's fully-integrated cloud communications platform built on a microservices-based architecture enables businesses to collaborate more productively and engage their customers more effectively across all channels, including messaging, chat, social media, video and voice.

Vonage Holdings Corp. is headquartered in Holmdel, New Jersey, with offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Israel. Vonage is a registered trademark of Vonage Marketing LLC, owned by Vonage America Inc. For more information, visit www.vonage.com .

(vg-a)

SOURCE Vonage Holdings Corp.

Related Links

http://www.vonage.com


Voting is now open to ALL people who love the coasts. US Harbors' president, Anastasia Fischer, said "There is something magical about harbors. People feel passionately about the ones they love. Instead of having a journalist tell us which harbors are great, we're letting the people and communities who use the coast share their favorites through crowd-sourcing."

Visitors can vote for their favorite harbor at usharbors.com/bestharbor2019 from now until April 14th, 2019. On April 15th, US Harbors will announce the "Best Harbor in the U.S." The winning harbor receives a plaque and U.S. Harbors swag, will be featured on usharbors.com's website, and receive media attention.

*****

US Harbors is a media and data company in Rockland, Maine specializing in "tides, weather, & local knowledge" for people who love the coast. The company has data on 1,278 harbors across 23 coastal states; from the Arctic Circle to the Florida Keys and from Maine to Hawaii. The mission of the company is to promote the sustainability and resilience of coastal communities, both economically and environmentally. The company's primary website, https://usharbors.com , has been helping people make good decisions about their days on and near the water since 2009. The demographic is ages 25-65, 55% male/45% female, with interests in boating, fishing, swimming, and other activities on or near the water. Other common qualities include physically fit and active, outdoor lovers, travelers, and do-it-yourselfers, who like food, cooking, and investing.

SOURCE US Harbors

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DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Flight Tracking System Market to 2027 - Global Analysis and Forecasts by System and End-use" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global flight tracking system market accounted for US$ 342 Mn in 2018 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.6% over the forecast period 2019-2027, to account for US$ 549.7 Mn by 2027.

The demand for flight tracking system is largely influenced by the rise in the deployments by the commercial sector across the globe. The rising number of incidences where planes have got off-radar have proliferated the demands for installations of tracking systems and drive the flight tracking system market.

The normal flight tracking SARPs were applicable in late 2018, these SARPs established the duties of an air operator in regards to the tracking of its aircraft across its zone of operation. Whereas the SARP associated with tracking of aircraft in distress is anticipated to be implied in January 2021. These SARPs focus on the requirements for automatically tracking the flight in distress with respect to its position updates once or more in a minute.

Furthermore, as the ICAO integrated the amendment 39 and annex 6 of normal aircraft tracking in their guidance, they aren't inevitably the same in airspace mandate employed by a civil aviation regulatory agency. The mandate was implacable only by the individual civil aviation agencies having regulatory authority on their corresponding FIRs (Flight Information Regions), just as the CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) in Australia and FAA in the United States are some of the agencies who can enact these mandates. Such mandates augur in the favor of growth of the flight tracking system market.

The exponentially burgeoning working group in the developing region has resulted in increased disposable income and freight traffic. Majority of the rising middle class was witnessed in China and India (as described by the United Nations). Furthermore, as the world continues to recover from previous economic contractions, the demand for air travel is projected to vary widely.

The rise in air travel demand has subsequently resulted in increased production of commercial aircraft, which in response have significantly contributed to the growth of flight tracking system market which would have a significant impact on the flight tracking system market. In addition, the rising trade in South America, Asia, and Africa have also significantly driven the need for enhanced connectivity, owing to this the IATA estimated production of nearly 6,250 new jets valued at US $ 300 Bn to be delivered in coming 20 years. This factor is anticipated to drive the flight tracking system market.

Some of the players present in the flight tracking system market are Honeywell International Inc., Aireon LLC, Rockwell Collins (United Technology Corporation), Garmin, Ltd., Flyht Aerospace Solutions Ltd., Spider Tracks Limited, Skytrac Systems Ltd., and Blue Sky Network. among others.

Topics Covered

1. Introduction

1.1 Scope of the Study

1.2 Report Guidance

2. Key Takeaways

3. Flight Tracking System Market Landscape

3.1 Market Overview

3.2 Market Segmentation

3.2.1 Global Flight Tracking System Market - by System

3.2.2 Global Flight Tracking System Market - by End-User

3.2.3 Global Flight Tracking System Market - by Geography

3.3 Pest Analysis

3.3.1 North America Pest Analysis

3.3.2 Europe Pest Analysis

3.3.3 Asia Pacific Pest Analysis

3.3.4 Middle East & Africa Pest Analysis

3.3.5 South America Pest Analysis

4. Flight Tracking System Market - Key Industry Dynamics

4.1 Key Market Drivers

4.1.1 Rising Flight Traffic To Contribute To Increased Demand For New Aircrafts

4.1.2 Government Initiated Programs and Initiatives To Drive the Overall Growth In Flight Tracking System Market

4.1.3 Liberalization of Aviation System Will Have Noteworthy Impact On Flight Tracking System Market

4.2 Key Market Restraints

4.2.1 Lack of Radar Coverage In Developing Regions

4.2.2 Higher Cost of Implementation

4.3 Key Market Opportunities

4.3.1 Implementation of ICAO Guideline For Abnormal Flight Condition From 2021

4.4 Future Trend

4.4.1 Advanced Technological Capabilities To Enhance the Predictive Analysis Capabilities of the Companies

4.5 Impact Analysis of Drivers & Restraints

5. Flight Tracking System Market - Global Analysis

5.1 Overview

5.2 Global Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027 (US$ Mn)

6. Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027 - System

6.1 Overview

6.2 Flight Tracking System Market Breakdown, by System, 2018 & 2027

6.3 Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (Ads-B) Market

6.4 Future Air Navigation System (Fans) Market

6.5 Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) Market

6.6 Portable Flight Tracking System (Pfts) Market

7. Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027 - End User

7.1 Overview

7.2 Flight Tracking System Market Breakdown, by End User, 2018 & 2027

7.3 Commercial Market

7.4 Military Market

8. Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027 - Geography

8.1 Overview

8.2 North America Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027

8.3 Europe Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027

8.4 APAC Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027

8.5 Middle East & Africa (MEA) Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027

8.6 SAM Flight Tracking System Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027

9. Industry Landscape

9.1 Market Initiative

9.2 Merger and Acquisition

9.3 New Development

10. Competitive Landscape

10.1 Competitive Product Mapping

10.2 Market Positioning - Global Top 5 Players Ranking

11. Company Profiles

11.1 Honeywell International Inc.

11.1.1 Key Facts

11.1.2 Business Description

11.1.3 Products and Services

11.1.4 Financial Overview

11.1.5 SWOT Analysis

11.1.6 Key Developments

11.2 Aireon LLC

11.3 Rockwell Collins (United Technology Corporation)

11.4 Garmin Ltd.

11.5 Flyht Aerospace Solutions Ltd.

11.6 Spider Tracks Limited

11.7 Skytrac Systems Ltd.

11.8 Blue Sky Network LLC

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https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/rt9vh4/worldwide?w=5

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Patriots in the hunt for third gold ball Coming off a 2020 season in which they went 1-5, the 2021 Mission Veterans Patriots football team may have caught some people by surprise by winning seven of their eight District 16-5A Div. II games and claiming a share of the district title. But while there is
Washington, March 15 : The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that all US diplomats remaining in Venezuela have departed the South American country.

Calling the withdrawal "temporary departure," Pompeo said in a statement released by the State Department on Thursday that US diplomats will continue their work from other locations, Xinhua news agency reported.

The US diplomats' exit came after Pompeo announced on Monday night the decision of withdrawing all remaining US personnel from its embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, within this week.

On Tuesday, Venezuelan government ordered American diplomats to leave within 72 hours. The US recognised Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the nation's "interim president" on Jan 23, days after Maduro was inaugurated for a second term as Venezuelan President.

In response to Washington's support for Guaido, Maduro announced that he was severing "diplomatic and political" ties with the US.

The Trump administration recently has kept piling up pressure on Maduro.
Washington, March 15 : Beto O'Rourke, former Democratic congressman from the US state of Texas, has announced that he will run for president in the 2020 election.

"I am running to serve you as the next president," O'Rourke wrote in a tweet on Thursday, adding that the challenges faced by the US "are the greatest in living memory."

In a video embedded in the tweet, the 46-year-old said while his wife sat beside him that he will run a "positive campaign that seeks to bring out the very best from every single one of us, that seeks to unite a very divided country", Xinhua news agency reported.

Having served as a member of the city council of El Paso, a Texas town that borders Mexico, O'Rourke said he will work to ensure that all Americans, irrespective of where they are, "can acknowledge that if immigration is a problem, it's the best possible problem this country can have."

"And we should ensure that there are lawful paths to work, to be with family and to flee persecution," said O'Rourke, who was narrowly defeated when trying to replace Republican Senator Ted Cruz in the November mid-term elections.

El Paso, where two Central American migrant children died in December while trying to enter the US, has been the frontline in a partisan fight over how border security should be tackled.

US President Donald Trump travelled to the town on Feb. 11 to justify his claim that there is a crisis on the US-Mexico border and to pitch for his promised border wall.

In his announcement video made inside his El Paso home, O'Rourke also pledged to lift up the country's rural areas, "work on real justice reform and confront the hard truth of slavery and segregation and suppression," as well as "squarely confront the challenge of climate change before it's too late."

The presidential contender said he will travel the country over the coming days to solicit opinions from the public as to how the challenges he mentioned above should be dealt with. He will launch his kick-off rally in El Paso on March 30.

According to a CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll in December, 28 per cent of the responders had a "very favourable" view of O'Rourke, the CNN reported Thursday. A new poll this month found that number had decreased to 19 per cent, the report said.

O'Rourke, father of three, was a representative in the House from 2013 to 2019, representing Texas's 16th district.
Tokyo, March 15 : Tokyo stocks opened higher on Friday as investors welcomed British parliament's overnight voting to delay the departure date to leave the European Union (EU).

Besides, a weaker yen boosted the exporters' sentiment.

In the opening minutes after the morning bell, the 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average gained 174.67 points, or 0.82 percent, from Thursday to 21,461.69, Xinhua reported.

The broader Topix index of all First Section issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, meanwhile, added 14.03 points, or 0.88 percent, to 1,602.32.

Early gainers comprised mining, real estate and consumer credit-oriented issues.
Wellington, March 15 : An active shooter is at large in Christchurch, New Zealand, after an attack on a mosque in the city on Friday, police said.

Witnesses told the media there were several casualties. Police warned people to avoid the area and all schools and a hospital were put in lockdown.

Eyewitnesses have reported running for their lives to escape the shooter.

Unverified footage purportedly taken by the shooter has emerged, suggesting he filmed as he shot victims.

The sequence of events remain unclear and mostly come via eyewitness reports the BBC.

Witnesses at the Al Noor mosque, located in central Christchurch along Dean Avenue, facing Hagley Park, reported seeing people bleeding on the ground outside the building, but this has not been confirmed by police or officials.

There are also reports that a second mosque in the suburb of Linwood has also been evacuated, the BBC said.

Mohan Ibrahim, who was in the area of the mosque, told the New Zealand Herald: "At first we thought it was an electric shock but then all these people started running. I still have friends inside.

"I have been calling my friends but there are many I haven't heard from. I am scared for my friends lives."

The Herald reports that the gunman is believed to be an Australian who has written a manifesto outlining his intentions. In it, he espouses far-right ideology and anti-immigrant ideology.
London, March 15 : UK MPs have voted in favour of delaying the Brexit process by at least three months, acknowledging that more time was needed to break the deadlock over Britain's departure from the European Union (EU), although a call for a second referendum was decisively rejected.

On Thursday night, the MPs voted 412 votes to 202 to approve of Prime Minister Theresa May's plan to delay Brexit, after the House of Commons earlier this week overwhelmingly rejected her withdrawal agreement by a large margin, for a second time, and then voted to reject a no-deal Brexit, CNN reported.

The votes were the last in a series of vital parliamentary decisions on Brexit over several days, mean that Britain's departure from the EU should not now take place before June 30 and gave May a window to resuscitate her plan.

May will now ask European leaders to grant an extension to Article 50, the mechanism taking the UK out of the EU on March 29.

Unless a delay is approved by all 27 remaining EU leaders, Britain is heading for a chaotic exit on March 29.

The MPs, earlier on Thursday, rejected an attempt to secure another Brexit referendum by 334 votes to 85, the BBC said.

They also rejected a cross-party plan to allow MPs to take control of the Brexit process to hold a series of votes on the next steps, by the narrow margin of two votes.

Meanwhile, most MPs from the ruling Conservative Party voted against delaying Brexit - including seven cabinet members - meaning May had to rely on Labour and other opposition votes to get it through.

But some opposition Labour frontbenchers resigned to defy party orders to abstain on a vote on holding another referendum.

Shadow housing minister Yvonne Fovargue, shadow education minister Emma Lewell-Buck, shadow business minister Justin Madders, Ruth Smeeth, a shadow ministerial aide, and Labour whip Stephanie Peacock, all resigned to oppose one.

Meanwhile May, who has long insisted that the UK will leave the EU on March 29 with or without a withdrawal deal, also voted to delay Brexit.

Downing Street said the government was still preparing for a no-deal Brexit.

May is planning to hold another "meaningful vote" on her withdrawal deal by March 20.

If she wins that vote, she will ask for a one-off extension to Brexit get the necessary legislation through Parliament at an EU summit on March 21 - if not she could ask for a longer extension.

In response to Thursday night's vote, a spokesman for the European Commission said extending Article 50, would need the "unanimous agreement" of 27 EU member states.

And it would be for the leaders of those states "to consider such a request, giving priority to the need to ensure the functioning of the EU institutions and taking into account the reasons for and duration of a possible extension".

European Council President Donald Tusk said that he would appeal to the EU leaders "to be open to a long extension if the UK finds it necessary to rethink its Brexit strategy and build consensus around it".
New York, March 15 : With a rebellion by 12 Republicans, the US Senate has voted against President Donald Trump's national emergency that is criticised by his own party members as a presidential overreach.

Immediately after Thursday's vote in the Senate controlled by his own party, Trump tweeted his threat: "VETO!".

The veto would make the Congressional resolution against the emergency only symbolic as his opponents do not have the two-thirds majority to overturn the first veto of his presidency and he would be able to use the declaration to finance the Mexican border wall for which Congress had refused to allocate funds in the budget.

The House of Representatives had already voted for the resolution last month and it will go to Trump for his promised veto.

Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summing the opposition said: "President Trump's emergency declaration is an unlawful power grab that does violence to the Constitution and fundamentally alters the separation of powers."

Defying Trump's assertion that a vote for the resolution would be supporting "crime and open border Democrats", the 12 Republicans joined Democrats to vote for it for a tally of 59-41 signalling their disenchantment with some of his policies in a highly polarised nation.

Senator Mitt Romney, who had been the Republican Party candidate for President in 2012, said before the vote on the emergency that he was "seriously concerned" about the overreach that could lead to "abuse by future president". He clarified, as did many others, that he was not against increased border security.

In another act of defiance, the Senate had voted to end military support by the Trump administration to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

The setbacks for Trump came while the nation awaits the report of an inquiry into whether his election campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

His campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sentenced on Wednesday to additional prison term on charges relating to his consulting work for a pro-Russian party in Ukraine.

The House voted with near unanimity on Thursday to demand the publication of the Russian inquiry report, which the attorney general is permitted my law to withhold. Some lawmakers fear that he may block the release of sensitive portions of the report.

Unlike in India, a national emergency in the US does not lead to suspension of civil liberties or similar restrictions but is used mostly for finance-related matters or to organise aid in natural disasters. Former President Barack Obama had invoked it about 10 times.

Trump is obsessed with the wall, which he has scaled back to a series of steel slats along some sections of the Mexican border, having made it a signature pledge of his election campaign.

He says it is required to keep out illegal immigrants, human traffickers, criminals and drug smugglers and it has gained urgency with over 7,000 Central Americans who came to the frontier in a convoy earlier this year hoping to crash through and are now camped on the Mexican side.

The nation went through 35 wrenching days of a government shutdown in December and January over the wall when he refused to sign the budget because it lacked funding for it. But finally he caved in to rising opposition and agreed to a budget that reopened the government, while declaring the emergency to allow him to divert $8.6 billion for the project from elsewhere.

Before the vote he told the media: "We are going to have a very strong border very soon... And we're going to have hundreds of miles of wall up fairly soon."

He used the interaction to plug his campaign for immigration reforms that would switch to a merit-based system, potentially helping Indian professionals waiting for as much as a decade for green cards, but it would come at the cost of those seeking to immigrate as relatives of citizens.

He said: "We also have to change the laws. Because whether it's visa lottery (for green cards), whether it's chain migration (by relatives), whether it's catch and release (of illegal immigrants), or anything else, they are horrible, horrible laws."

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis)
San Francisco, March 15 : As Facebook pushes for a more private and encrypted communication across its apps, two of its top executives -- Chief Product Officer Chris Cox and WhatsApp Vice President Chris Daniels -- have quit the company, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

Embroiled in data privacy scandals amid the unabated spread of fake news on its platform, Facebook has lately seen several high-profile exits.

"Cox and I have worked closely together to build our products for more than a decade and I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does," Zuckerberg said in a blog post late Thursday.

In a separate Facebook post, Cox said Facebook is turning a new page in its product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network.

"It's a product vision attuned to the subject matter of today: a modern communications platform that balances expression, safety, security, and privacy.

"This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through," wrote Cox, who was one of the first 15 engineers Facebook hired 13 years back.

Zuckerberg also announced the departure of Chris Daniel, who helped Facebook define the business model for WhatsApp going forward.

"Daniel has also done great work in many roles, including running our business development team, leading Internet.org, which has helped more than 100 million people get access to the Internet," said the Facebook CEO.

Daniel was in India last year where he met IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to discuss ways to sanitise WhatsApp amid several lynching episodes that happened owing to the spread of rumours on the platform.

"Will Cathcart will be the new head of WhatsApp. Most recently, he has done a great job running the Facebook app," Zuckerberg informed.

Fidji Simo will be the new head of the Facebook app.

"The leaders of Facebook (Fidji Simo), Instagram (Adam Mosseri), Messenger (Stan Chudnovsky), and WhatsApp (Will Cathcart) will report directly to me, and our Chief Marketing Officer (Antonio Lucio) will report directly to Sheryl (Sandberg)," Zuckerberg announced.

Last year, Instagram co-founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom quit after reportedly facing issues with Zuckerberg.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, co-founders of WhatsApp, have also quit to pursue other ventures, as Zuckerberg plans to merge all its apps into one unified experience.
Washington, March 15 : Top Pentagon officials have slammed Google, saying its work with China is "indirectly benefiting" the military in that country.

In a report published in The Hill on Thursday, senior defence officials blamed the tech giant of favouring China.

"The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military," General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing there is that indirect benefit," Dunford said.

"And frankly, 'indirect' may not be a full characterisation of the way it really is, it's more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military," he added.

According to CNBC, DunfordaAs comments come "in the wake of the tech giants' decision not to pursue some of the Pentagon's lucrative contracts while considering projects in China".

Acting Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan also blasted Google during the hearing for pulling out of its defence contracts.

Last October, facing President Donald Trump administration's ire over its censored Chine Search engine project, Google CEO Sundar Pichai met Pentagon officials during his trip to Washington and discussed the controversial "Project Maven".

Pichai met "a group of civilian and military leaders mostly from the office of the Under Secretary of Defence for Intelligence the Defence Department directorate that oversees the Artificial Intelligence (AI) drone system known as Project Maven".

After facing backlash over its involvement in the Pentagon project "Maven", Pichai in June emphasised that the company will not work on technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm.

About 4,000 Google employees had signed a petition demanding "a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology".

Following the anger, Google decided not to renew the project with the US Defence Department after it expires in 2019.

US senators were also upset with Google about the tech giant's reported plan to create a censored Chinese version of its search engine.

US Vice President Mike Pence in October called on Google to end its "censored" Chinese Search engine -- the "Dragonfly" project. The company later reportedly shut down the project amid widespread criticism.
New Delhi, March 15 : Amidst the acute financial crisis at BSNL, the Department of Telecom (DoT) has handed over the responsibility of the Finance Director at the cash-strapped PSU to current Director Mobile as well as fixed line, Vivek Banzal divesting the charge from Sujata Ray.

Official sources said Banzal, who is already holding two key charges, has been given the charge of Finance Director and this was effected by the DoT on February 28.

Banzal would now be looking at all the three key wings -- fixed line, mobile and finance at BSNL.

The sources said that the government decides responsibilites and such things were routine and although more realignment of responsibilities were likely to be effected from DoT in BSNL.

Ray is slated to retire in April.

But it is not clear if any new Finance Director would be appointed shortly or Benzal will be given this post as full time given the poor financial health of the PSU, the post is vital. >

Banzal took charge on March first week as Finance Director.

The reasons for the sudden replacement have not been cited but it was seen in the context of the present cash crunch position of BSNL which is expected to linger on given the low tariff regime and BSNL itself not having full range of services like 4G.

Going through its worst financial crisis, BSNL recently failed to pay salaries for the first time in 19 years.

With heightened competition unleashed by Jio with low tariffs, BSNL's revenues have further dried up as it does not have 4G LTE service. Its loss is at Rs 7,999 crore for 2017-18.
Washington, March 15 : Richard Grenell, the US Ambassador to Germany, has been receiving threats including at least one against his life, the media reported on Friday.

In January, he received a letter, which was sent directly to him, asked him to leave Germany or he would be killed, CNN reported.

Signed by the "Society for the New Truth" it was one of several threats that have been sent to the embassy.

Grenell's spokesperson, Joseph Giordono-Scholz told CNN that "we do not publicly discuss security issues and procedures".

Grenell is a controversial figure in his host country, warning the German government against pursuing a gas pipeline to Russia, using Chinese technology and business contracts with Iran.

A former Republican political operative and spokesman to the UN, Grenell has carved an incendiary path since presenting his diplomatic credentials to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in May 2018, clashing with officials, businesses and the media.

Trump's 52-year-old envoy has become such a polarising figure that a large protest against him had been planned for early 2019 in Berlin.
Chennai, March 15 : With the city police booking Sabareesan, son-in-law of M.K. Stalin for allegedly spreading rumours about Deputy Speaker V. Jayaraman in the Pollachi abuse case, the DMK chief's kin too, has shot a legal notice.

Jayaraman had lodged a complaint against Sabareesan for linking him and his family members to the Pollachi sexual abuse-cum-blackmail case.

"I have already sent a legal notice even before the FIR was lodged," Sabareesan told IANS on Friday.

In the notice, Sabareesan has demanded "unconditional apology" for slanderous remarks made against him.

Stalin's son-inlaw has been charged for wantonly giving provocation for creation of riot, forgery for harming reputation, use of forged document as genuine one and for spreading rumours.

On his part, Stalin has sent a legal notice to Jayaraman demanding apology for making slanderous statement against him, the DMK said in a late night statement on Thursday.

Jayaraman has charged the DMK for defaming him and his family.

In the legal notice to Jayaraman, the DMK President said the former had made false allegations in the media that he, his family members and his party are behind the sexual abuse case and are attempting to protect some accused involved in the criminal act which are defamatory.
Mumbai, March 15 : The Election Commission has imposed a blanket ban on the use or live demonstrations of animals during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, delighting animal lovers across the country.

In its Manual on the Model Code of Conduct, the EC has made it absolutely clear (on page 144 of chapter 22.5) that all animals, birds or reptiles of any type cannot be used while canvassing for votes by political parties or their candidates.

The manual states: "The EC has advised the political parties and candidates to refrain from using any animal for election campaign in any manner. Even a party, having reserved symbols depicting an animal should not make live demonstration of that animal in any election campaign of the party/any of its candidates."

Several Indian animal rights groups like PETA India, environmentalists and naturalists have wholeheartedly lauded the EC decision.

"EC and PETA India agree that using animals in election campaigns is unnecessary, archaic and cruel," said PETA CEO M. Valliyate.

He said political parties/candidates must stick to eye-catching and creative campaigns without subjecting the helpless animals to the frightening torture of frenetic crowds, loudspeakers and other campaign-related jamboree.

In the past, Valliyate said the PETA India had written to the EC, all State Election Commissions and political parties, expressing concern over how animals are forced into the middle of screaming crowds during election campaigns and poll rallies.

Even worse, these terrified animals were often beaten, whipped, kicked and terrorised while being paraded through streets and shoved into mobs of wildly shouting and pushing crowds, it pointed out.

The animals were compelled to carry heavy loads, much in excess of their physical capacity, denied sufficient food, water or rest and faced the prospects of severe injuries in the public mayhem.

Ganesh Nayak, Chairman of NGO Animals Matter To Me (AMTM) Mumbai, lauding the EC, told IANS: "Finally, we have become humane towards these silent creatures, who are tormented during the election gimmicks of us humans. The EC must strictly monitor implementation of its orders."

The colourful Indian elections have seen many animals and birds being allotted as symbols by the election authorities for various national state or local elections.

Some of the popular animals include: elephants, tigers, deer, camels, cows, bulls, donkeys, parrots, peacocks, doves, hens, cats, dogs and snakes et al.

The candidates, and occasionally even political parties, go to weird lengths to get the voters to identify with the animals allotted as their poll symbols.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) has an elephant as its symbol while the All India Forward Bloc (AIFB) has a tiger as its mascot, with many major political parties worldwide having animals as their symbols, most notably the US Democratic Party's donkey and the Republican Party's elephant.

In India, there are post-Independence records of a candidate in West Bengal hiring an elephant (his poll symbol) to accompany him on the campaign trail; another who was allotted a tiger, rented a caged tiger and took it around his constituency!

In the 1950s, a candidate allotted a chicken symbol, took a live hen out on the campaign trail but an eagle swooped on it and gobbled it up -- and the wannabe politician lost the polls.

Concurring with the EC, eivnornmentalist Bittu Sahgal said that using live animals "is not just cruelty but displays insensitivity", particularly with young voters.

"Politicians must understand that values have changed and (by using live animals) they would probably lose votes," Sahgal told IANS.

Following PETA India's appeal in 2012, the EC had issued a directive to all political parties and candidates to refrain from using animals during election rallies.

Later, PETA India followed this up and several like Maharashtra, Assam, Mizoram, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have decreed that the use of live animals representing the allotted symbols of political parties/candidates would not be permitted in the election campaign.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@ians.in)
Pyongyang, March 15 : North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may break off denuclearisation talks with the US and resume missile and nuclear testing, a senior official here said on Friday.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Sun-hui told foreign diplomats here that Washington threw away "a golden opportunity" at the Vietnam summit between US President Donald Trump and Kim, the BBC reported.

Choe accused the US of taking a "gangster-like" stance at the February summit which was held to discuss the regime's denuclearisation process. Trump and Kim first met in Singapore last year.

North Korea had earlier offered to dismantle its main Yongbyon nuclear complex. But talks collapsed after Trump refused to lift sanctions unless Pyongyang destroyed all its nuclear sites.

"We have no intention to yield to the US demands in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind," she told reporters in North Korea, according to Russian state Tass news agency.

Choe said that North Korea's demand during the summit was for five key economic sanctions to be lifted, not all sanctions, as Trump said after talks broke down.

"What is clear is that the US has thrown away a golden opportunity this time. I'm not sure why the US came out with this different description. We never asked for the removal of sanctions in their entirety."

Choe said that Kim will make an official announcement on his position regarding future talks with the US soon.

Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated after talks in February that North Korean officials had asked for full sanctions relief.

"It was all about the sanctions. They wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety and we couldn't do that," Trump said that time. "Sometimes you have to walk and this was one of those times."

In Washington this week, the US special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, said that diplomacy was "still very much alive", though he did not say if there had been any negotiations since the summit or outlined any plans for further talks.

At a news conference after the Hanoi summit, Trump said no plans had been made for a third summit, but he expressed optimism about a "good outcome" in the future.
Mumbai, March 15 : Bollywood celebrities including Amitabh Bachchan, Anupam Kher and Hansal Mehta among others have expressed their sadness over the collapse of a portion of an overhead pedestrian bridge outside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus here.

Six people have been reported dead and 32 injured after the footbridge crashed on Thursday evening.

Here's what the celebrities have tweeted to express their sorrow:

Amitabh Bachchan: In grief and in silent prayer! Mumbai city.

Hema Malini: Tragedy, this time in the heart of Mumbai! The foot over bridge at the CST suddenly collapsed... I pray for those who have lost their lives and for those now in hospital for treatment.

Anupam Kher: Deeply saddened to know about the bridge collapse in Mumbai. My thought and prayers are with the bereaved families. May God give them strength to deal with this loss.

Varun Grover: Every such act of negligence by the government should be counted as state-sponsored murder of its citizens. Makes one feel so angry and helpless. We use the local train and these stations daily and it's impossible now to not feel paranoid. Shame. Mumbai bridge collapse.

Hansal Mehta: Now the CST over bridge collapses. This city is collapsing and nobody really cares. This city is no place for human beings.

Aftab Shivdasani: Really sad and tragic news of the Mumbai bridge collapse... Sincere condolences to the families of the deceased and hope the injured recover soon. Wish the authorities would pay more attention to civilian safety. Innocent lives wouldn't be lost Mumbaikar.

Arbaaz Khan: Mumbai bridge collapse... Extremely saddened by the bridge collapse incident at CST. Tragic and unnecessary loss of innocent lives. Prayers with the victims and injured and heartfelt condolences to their families.

Tamannaah Bhatia: Truly saddened to hear about the horrid news of Mumbai bridge collapse. My condolences to the families of the bereaved and wish for a speedy recovery for those injured.
New Delhi, March 15 : Through an ongoing campaign, Sangeet Natak Akademi is looking to tap into the lesser known traditional art forms and practices like songs, dances, crafts, arts and culinary art around festive activities in March-April.

The national academy of music, dance and drama has launched the third phase of its web campaign 'Sanjhi: Mujh Mein Kalakar' which has its main focus on the "folk, traditional, customary social events and ritualistic art forms, woven around the cultural fabric of festivals in the months of March and April", the Akademi said.

The Akademi is looking for "untapped, lesser known, indigenous and traditional art forms and practices" including folk and ritualistic songs and dance; traditional and indigenous craftsmanship; intricate floor designs Kolam, Rangoli or Aipan; traditional culinary art; or a gamut of community festive activities."

To participate, one can upload clear "audio, video or image form (preferably video for authentication) of not more than 2-3 minutes" that captures the art form. This has to be uploaded on www.sangeetnatak.gov.in The portal for upload will be active from March 20 to April 30. In case of any difficulty, the helpline number is 011-23382706, Akademi said.

The campaign aims to provide an innovative scope to India's myriad diversity to converge on a shared platform.

The first two phases of the campaign were around Diwali and harvest festivals across India.
Chennai, March 15 : The DMK-led Secular Front in Tamil Nadu on Friday demanded a High Court monitored CBI probe into the Pollachi serial sexual assault and blackmailing case.

A resolution to this effect was adopted at a meeting of all the alliance partners headed by the DMK here.

It said the High Court should devote special attention as it is done in idol theft cases and ensure that none of the accused were allowed to go scot free.

Alleging that those belonging to the ruling AIADMK were involved in the crime, the resolution claimed that efforts were being made to hide the truth.

"The way Goondas Act was slapped on the four arrested accused, ordering of a CB-CID probe and then issuing a (order) transferring the case to CBI and subsequent steps only showed that efforts are being made to protect the accused," it alleged.

"If justice has to prevail, a High Court monitored probe by the CBI is a must to ensure that all those involved are given stringent punishment," it said.

Alleging that the crime had been on for the last seven years, the resolution also condemned the state government for releasing the name of the victim who had lodged a complaint and said it would prevent other victims from coming forward to lodge their complaints.

"Full justice will be ensured only if all those involved in this heinous crime are arrested and investigated," it said.

The Tamil Nadu government on Thursday issued an order transferring the probe in the case involving sexual assault and blackmailing of several women in Pollachi by a group of people to the CBI.

The order, transferring the case to the CBI, was issued two days after Director General of Police (DGP) T.K. Rajendran ordered a CB-CID probe after the incident created a furore.

The four accused, including mastermind Thirunavukarasu, were detained under the Goondas Act following a direction from Coimbatore District Collector K. Rajamani on recommendations from Coimbatore Rural Superintendent R. Pandiarajan.

The four, Thirunavukkarasu, Sathish, Sabarirajan, Vasanthakumar, all in their 20s, were accused of sexually assaulting many young women in Pollachi over a period of time and filming the act.

The mobile phones seized from the accused had videos of at least 40 women who the accused had allegedly blackmailed for money and sexual favours.

The Thursday order said that DGP Rajendran, on a complaint from a college student on February 24 that she was physically and sexually harassed by a group of men inside a car, cases were registered at Pollachi East Police Station under Sec 354-A, 354-B and 392 of IPC (Central Act XLV of 1860) and Sec 66-E of IT Act, 2000 and Sec 4 of Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act, 1998 (Tamil Nadu Act 44 of 1998) against the four accused who were later arrested and sent to judicial custody.
New Delhi, March 15 : It is a battle to catch mind space through television ahead of the Lok Sabha elections and both the BJP and the Congress have tele-warriors adept at articulating their viewpoint.

The tele-warriors are both a mix of youth and experience and know how to present their points amid the cacophony of voices on news channels.

They promote their leaders and counter each other's "lies and propaganda" through "facts and figures". Tele-warriors do on a daily basis what senior leaders cannot due to their other responsibilities and commitments.

Here are some of the prominent tele-warriors of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP):

Vaibhav Agarwal: Has worked as State Convener in the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) in Uttar Pradesh and state coordinator of 'Friends of BJP'.

He has understanding of the complex ground realities in the political arena. His grandfather was an MLA from Bareilly and a minister in the Uttar Pradesh government.

Charu Pragya: Daughter of Minister of State for Human Resource Development Satya Pal Singh, Pragya is a member of the BJP's youth wing BJYM. She has over 28,000 followers on Twitter. Pragya makes her points cogently. She is also part of several global initiatives involving youth leaders.

Vinit Goenka: An active politician with a firm commitment to the nation, he is passionate about tapping technology to change the way India works. Goenka has expertise in diverse fields including information technology, transportation, infrastructure and agriculture.

He is a member of the Governing Council of Centre for Railway Information System, an organisation under the Ministry of Railways.

He was appointed a member of the IT Task Force in the Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways and Shipping Ministry. In these capacities, he works closely with Union Ministers including Nitin Gadkari and Suresh Prabhu on initiatives to achieve the government's goal of 'Minimum Government Maximum Governance'.

Rohit Chahal: He is national media in-charge and in-charge of Jammu and Kashmir in BJYM.

Gaurav Bhatia: He is the son of late Samajwadi Party (SP) parliamentarian Virendra Bhatia. A lawyer by profession, he was earlier associated with the SP and brings seriousness to a debate. He has twice served as honorary secretary of the Supreme Court Bar Association, and is now an advocate-on-record.

Syed Zafar Islam: A former investment banker, he joined the BJP ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Islam has emerged as a prominent Muslim face of the party on television channels. He is cool and calm during debates.

Amit Malviya: He is chief of the BJP's social media cell and has reinvented himself into a party spokesperson. Having an Information Technology background, he is ready with figures to buttress his points and is also quick-witted.

Niti Jain: A member of the BJYM, she has experience in advertising and copy writing. She is also a social activist with interests in education, women and youth empowerment and theatre.

Sudesh Verma: A journalist by profession, Verma is a serious and calm face from the BJP in television debates. A former news editor of NewsX television channel, he was also a senior political analyst with the British High Commission for three years (2005-2008). He finally joined the party which he used to cover as a journalist.

Sanju Verma: She is co-convener of BJP Mumbai's Intellectual Cell and is an entrepreneur. She has served as an Associate Director with JP Morgan and as an Executive Director with HDFC Securities.

Ashish Sood: He has been associated with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He was made Vice President of the Delhi unit of the BJYM in 2002 and later became the Vice President of the state unit of the BJP.

Neha Joshi: A social activist, she is the daughter of BJP MLA from Uttarakhand, Ganesh Joshi.
New Delhi, March 15 : A Delhi court on Friday allowed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to question corporate lobbyist Deepak Talwar in judicial custody in a case related to the purchase of 43 aircraft by Indian Airlines in 2005.

ED's Special Public Prosecutors D.P. Singh and Nitesh Rana told Special Judge Santosh Snehi Mann that the interrogation of Talwar is necessary to ascertain the money trail.

ED has registered a case related to purchase of aircraft by Indian Airlines from Airbus Industrie, France, in 2005.

Meanwhile, the prosecutors have withdrawn the plea seeking to issue a production warrant against Talwar, who is in judicial custody in another money laundering case related to his suspected role in the irregular seat sharing on Air India's profitable routes with some international airlines.

The ED is also probing various other cases related to money laundering against Talwar who was deported from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on January 30.
Los Angeles, March 15 : Actor Johnny Depp has accused his former wife Amber Heard of domestic abuse.

Depp, who filed a $50 million defamation case against Heard earlier this month, denied Heard's accusations of domestic abuse against him, claiming that she used to abuse him instead, reports nme.com.

In the counter-lawsuit, Depp has accused Heard of being a "perpetrator" of domestic abuse and alleged that she attacked him numerous times, including an incident where Heard "violently" threw a bottle of vodka at him which "severed (his) middle finger on his right hand and shattered the bones, causing him to require surgery".

Heard has also been accused of punching Depp while he was in bed, kicking him on numerous occasions and staging attacks.

Depp's lawsuit calls Heard's allegations of domestic violence against him a "hoax".

"Unaware that members of Mr. Depp's security team were mere feet away, Ms. Heard falsely began yelling, 'Stop hitting me, Johnny'.

"The interaction culminated with Ms. Heard making false allegations that Mr. Depp struck her with a cell phone, hit her and destroyed the penthouse. There were multiple eyewitnesses to this hoax."

Heard recently spoke about the allegations of domstic abuse against Depp in December 18, 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post.

Depp, 55, and Heard, 32, met on the set of 2011's "The Rum Diary" and were married from February 2015 to May 2016.

The actress filed for a domestic violence restraining order against Depp in May 2016 after she accused him of abusing her. Depp denied the claims, and the two settled their divorce out of court in August 2016 for $7 million, which she donated to charity. Both actors signed NDAs barring them from discussing their relationship publicly.
Washington, March 15 : An Indian-origin Uber driver in the US has pleaded guilty to kidnapping a sleeping passenger and driving her over 60 miles from her destination to boost his fare.

Harbir Parmar, 25, pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping and one count of wire fraud in White Plains federal court earlier this week, prosecutors said.

The incident happened on February 21 during which a female passenger in his car riding from Manhattan to her home in White Plains fell asleep - only to awake with "Parmar's hand under her shirt", according to court records cited by the US media.

When the woman tried to call for help, he had grabbed her phone. She woke up only to find herself in Connecticut instead of New York.

Complaining to Uber, she discovered the trip's destination had been changed to Boston, incurring a $1,047 fare, the New York Post reported.

Parmar was arrested in October last year. He will be sentenced in June this year and could face life imprisonment for the kidnapping offence.

He confessed to a series of ride-rigging offences, which had netted him more than $3,600 in bogus charges, officials said.

Manhattan US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement that Parmar had "terrorised" his victim and would be "held accountable".

"In addition, he charged many of his ridesharing customers with fraudulent fees. He admitted his guilt in open court, and will now be held accountable for his brazen crimes."

An Uber spokesman told technology news website The Register: "What's been reported is horrible and something no person should go through.

"As soon as we became aware, we immediately removed this individual's access to the platform."
Patna, March 15 : In a big relief to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the Patna High Court on Friday quashed criminal proceedings initiated against him by a lower court in a 28-year-old murder case, a government lawyer said.

Justice A. Amanullah passed the order on an application moved by Kumar.

Kumar had challenged the proceedings initiated against him by the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM), Barh, who took cognizance of an FIR lodged at the Pandarak police station in Patna district.

In the FIR lodged on November 16, 1991, Kumar, who was then the Samata Party MP from Barh, was named as an accused along with others for the killing of one Sitaram Singh, who was killed during the Lok Sabha elections that year.

The ACJM had initiated criminal proceedings against Kumar in 2009, which was challenged by the Janata Dal (United) leader before the Patna High Court the same year.

The court had reserved the order on the petition on January 31.
Ranchi, March 15 : Denied a place in the Grand Alliance of opposition parties, four Left parties on Friday announced they will contest the Lok Sabha polls together in Jharkhand.

The leaders of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), Marxist Coordination Committee and Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist decided to go for an alliance.

They also decided to support parties willing to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party.

"We have decided to contest from Koderma, Hazaribagh, Rajmahal and Palamau. The CPI will fight from Hazaribagh, the CPI-M from Rajmahal and CPI-ML from Koderma and Palamau," said MCC leader Sushanto Mukherjee.

The Congress, JMM, RJD and JVM-P have in principal agreed contest the Lok Sabha polls together. A formal announcement is yet to take place.
Chandigarh, March 15 : Expressing his disappointment over Pakistan's response to various issues raised by India during the first meeting on the Kartarpur Corridor project, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Friday urged Islamabad to be more "amenable and responsive" to India's demands keeping in view the interests of devotees seeking to visit the historic Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara across the border.

In a statement issued here, the Chief Minister said: "Islamabad's response to India's demands was totally inadequate and the neighbouring country needed to reconsider its stand if the Corridor is to serve its true purpose, in the spirit in which it was decided to be opened."

"The governments of the two countries took a historic decision by agreeing to open the Corridor to mark the 550th birth anniversary of Sri Guru Nanak Dev ji, in November this year," Amarinder said, lauding the fact that the Pulwama attack and the subsequent IAF air strikes were not allowed to scuttle the talks between the two sides on taking the project forward.

"It was good that the two countries remained on track with the project deadlines, but Pakistan needed to go a step further to make the initiative truly meaningful for the pilgrims, particularly the Sikh community, which had been deprived of darshan at the Kartarpur Gurdwara for over 70 years," he added.

"The limitation of 500 pilgrims a day, as proposed by Pakistan, was extremely insufficient to cater to the aspirations of the large number of devotees desirous of darshan at the Gurdwara. And curtailing the visit to a limited number of days in a week would defeat the purpose even further," the Chief Minister said.

Amarinder reiterated his demand for visa-free "khule darshan" at the Gurdwara for Indians of all faiths, from India and overseas, seven days a week.

"Pilgrims should be allowed to go through Kartarpur Corridor for 'khule darshan' at the historic Gurdwara all seven days of the week. Special permits should be good for identity, the visa requirement needs to be waived. Pakistan has to be more responsive on this issue," Amarinder said in a tweet on Friday.

Pointing to the significance of Kartarpur Gurdwara in the life of the first Sikh Guru, who has a massive following among people of all faiths around the world, the Chief Minister said the occasion demanded a more universal approach from Pakistan.

He urged Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan to show statesmanship in the true spirit of the sportsman that he was and ensure that no devotee wanting a darshan at Kartarpur Gurdwara is deprived any more of this momentous opportunity.

"Pakistan should show much more flexibility in this regard as a mark of respect to the Sikh community," he added.

The Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara in Narowal district of Pakistan's Punjab province, located 4.5 km from the border near the Dera Baba Nanak town in Punjab's Gurdaspur district, is significant for the Sikh community as it is here that Sikhism founder Guru Nanak Dev spent 18 years of his life and is his final resting place.

The governments of India and Pakistan are trying to facilitate the travel of pilgrims to offer prayers at the Gurdwara -- a demand made by the Sikhs for the past over 70 years.
Chandigarh, March 15 : The two-day national convention of War Decorated India began at the Manekshaw Auditorium in Chandimandir, the headquarters of the Western Command, near here, on Friday.

"Some living gallantry award winners and relatives of the deceased awardees attended the Convention. Next of kin, relatives of the awardees were felicitated today," a defence spokesman said here.

Among Victoria Cross awardees, the relatives of Late Naib Subedar Nand Singh (Sikh Regiment), Late Subedar Ram Sarup Singh (1 Punjab) and Late Badlu Ram (Cavalry) were felicitated, he said.

Among Param Vir Chakra awardees, relatives of Late Col Hoshiar Singh (Grenadiers) and Late Subedar Joginder Singh (Sikh Regiment) were felicitated.

Among Maha Vir Chakra awardees those felicitated were the relatives of late Brigadier N.S. Sandhu (Dogra), late Brigadier K.S. Chandpuri (Punjab Regiment), late Lt General Gowry Shankar (Signals), late Lt Ved Prakash Trehan (Rajputana Rifles), late Sepoy Anusuya Prasad (Mahar Regiment) and late Porter Mohammed Ismail (Punjab Regiment Civilian Porter) .

Chief of Staff Western Command Lt General P.N. Bali addressed the convention.

"Serving military men draw inspiration from such brave hearts who fought valiantly for the motherland and many of them laid down their lives," Bali said.
BRUSSELS, Feb. 28, 2019 (Xinhua) -- Students hold placards as they attend a climate march in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 28, 2019. A new climate march by schoolchildren and college students was organized across Belgium on Thursday with the participati Image Source: IANS News

Canberra, March 15 : Thousands of schoolchildren across the world, inspired by 16-year-old Swedish environment activist Greta Thunberg who has been nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, abandoned their classrooms on Friday to demand action on climate change as part of a global youth campaign.

The protests in about 100 countries, including India, were a part of a movement started by Thunberg, who protests every Friday outside Sweden's Parliament. Scientists say that tougher measures are needed to cut global warming, the Guardian reported.

In India, several students joined the "Fridays for Future" movement seeking action on climate change. Pictures and videos shared by Greenpeace International on Twitter showed students in Delhi and Gurugram holding placards and posters urging action over climate change.

"We demand clean air, water and soils for our safe future," tweeted Greenpeace, sharing a photograph which shows a row of students in their uniforms holding placards with slogans against air pollution.

The Paris climate agreement of 2017 committed nearly 200 countries to keeping global temperatures "well below" 2.0 Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times and to striving for a maximum of 1.5 Celsius.

At one of the largest protests, in Sydney, the protesters held up banners with slogans such as "The seas are rising and so are we", "You're burning our future" and "There is no planet B".

The students ignored calls from authorities to stay in class.

A leader of the student movement, 15-year-old Vivienne Paduch, led the crowd of protesters in a chance of "the youth are rising, no more compromising".

"We really want everyone to know that the fight for climate justice and the fight for climate action really is a global fight and involves equity for everyone", Paduch said.

Hundreds of school students gathered in Stockholm's central square. Thunberg joined the crowd in the Swedish capital and said: "We have been born into this world and we have to live with this crisis, and our children and our grandchildren.

"We are facing the greatest existential crisis humanity has ever faced. And yet it has been ignored. You who have ignored it know who you are."

In New Zealand, Climate Change Minister James Shaw, who was assaulted on Thursday on his way to Parliament, came out in support for the strikers in Wellington, still sporting a black eye.

In London, thousands of schoolchildren poured into Parliament Square brandishing banners declaring "Coral not coal" and "Stop denying the earth is dying".

The big crowd in central London on its way to Whitehall blocked traffic and chanted slogans.

Hundreds of children converged on the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. Switzerland was another country that saw a large numbers of students striking for several months now, and thousands of students turned out to protest on Friday.

Students across Spain also joined the strike.
Mumbai, March 15 : Bollywood star Akshay Kumar, who features as Havildar Ishar Singh in "Kesari" -- a film on the historical Battle of Saragarhi -- has urged the youth to watch the film as he feels the heroic tale has got lost in the pages of history books.

At an event here on Friday, Akshay said: "It is sad that though the British celebrate Saragarhi Day, remembering the martyrs of the war, but we Indians do not know much about it. It is sad how an incident like this has got lost in the pages of history.

"It is hard to imagine how 21 Sikh soldiers stood strong inside a fort, knowing that 10,000 Afghan soldiers were waiting outside to kill them. Knowing that death is inevitable and continuing the fight requires a lot of bravery. That war was a pure example of that. They fought for our country, for our honour.

"So, I would like to urge all the parents to show the film to their children. Our youngsters should know about our war heroes. This is also an educational film. It is a true incident and based on real characters."

Actress Parineeti Chopra and "Kesari" director Anurag Singh, apart from producer Karan Johar were a part of it. The film is releasing on April 21.
New Delhi, March 15 : Citing an Income Tax raid on a rural development department official and land grabbing charges against a Congress MP, BJP leader Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday said rampant corruption was thriving in Karnataka and 10-20 per per cent commission was being charged from contractors.

He demanded answers from Congress President Rahul Gandhi and Janata Dal (Secular) leader and state Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy.

Addressing a press conference here, Chandrasekhar said the official collected Rs 2 crore from a contractor, which was to be used for the election expenditure of politicians, and added his party would approach the Election Commission (EC).

The Rajya Sabha MP demanded the resignation of Karnataka Rural Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda along with making public the details of all contracts.

"Collection of this amount of cash is not possible unless there is support from the higher-ups. I challenge Rahul Gandhi and Kumaraswamy to come clean on it," he said.

Citing media reports about Congress MP K.H. Muniyappa reportedly acquiring 410 acres of land through illegal means in Kolar, Chandrasekhar said: "Rahul Gandhi owes a legitimate answer to this."

Asked if the party will approach the Election Commission, he said: "Our party will go to the EC."

During the Assembly election campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said the Karnataka government was "10 per cent sarkar", he said.

"Now, it looks like that commission charged by officers is 10-20 per cent now," said Chandrasekhar, who is the BJP's election management co-convener in the state.

He said the Congress wanted to stay in power "in any manner" and "collect money".

"People are aware that the Congress-JD(S) coalition is not bound by any common governance agenda, common economic agenda or a common care for the people of Karnataka. Rather, it is about how to stay in power, collect money and exploit the state and its people leading up to the election," he said.
London, March 15 : More than 371,000 Syrians have been killed since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, a United Kingdom-based war monitor reported on Friday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) was able to document the 371,222 Syrian war dead, saying that the overall death toll may exceed 570,000 dead given the large numbers of foreign fighters involved in the conflict as well as 88,000 prisoners who were tortured to death in detention centres set up by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Of the officially recorded 371,222 dead, around 112,623 were civilians, 21,065 were minors and 13,173 were women, the monitor was cited as saying by Efe news.

The observatory said that 65,187 soldiers died to date fighting on behalf of the Assad regime, out of which an estimated total of 50,484 were of Syrian decent.

An estimated 65,726 non-Syrians died in the fighting. They were mainly from the Arab World but also included Afghans and Iranians belonging to radical armed groups, such as the Islamic State terror organization and the Levant Front, a Syrian rebel group.

The observatory's appraisals did not include the estimated 4,500 kidnapped individuals taken by IS or the estimated 4,700 hostages taken from Assad regime and affiliated forces.

Syria's civil war erupted in 2011 after the government clamped down on popular protests sweeping the region. It claimed the lives of roughly half a million people, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy and Research.

At its height, the IS caliphate stretched across northern and central Iraq and Syria, swallowing up the ancient and densely populated cities of Mosul and Raqqa.

IS is on the brink of territorial defeat and only the hardiest fighters remained in Baghuz, an unremarkable Syrian town on the banks of the Euphrates near the Iraqi border and the so-called caliphate's final outpost in the southeast of the country.

On March 4, more than 200 from the terror organization yielded to international troops who had laid siege to Baghuz, where a final and major offensive was underway.
San Francisco, March 15 : Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has confirmed that it has developed its own proprietary operating systems (OS) and is ready to implement those in case its legal battle with the US leads to a ban on the export of US-made products and services such as Android and Windows.

The world's second-largest handset player by market share currently uses the Android OS for its handsets and Microsoft's Windows for its laptops and tablets.

"Huawei has built its own operating system for smartphones and computers in case it is suddenly blocked from using US software from Microsoft and Google," the CNBC reported on Friday.

Chinese technology giant Huawei filed a lawsuit against the US government last week as a "last resort" to get a federal ban on the use of its products lifted.

The lawsuit, filed in a US District Court in Texas challenges the constitutionality of Section 889 of the 2019 National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA), which was signed by President Donald Trump in August last year.

A Canadian court had earlier ruled that Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou's initial extradition hearing will take place on May 8.

Wanzhou faces fraud charges in the US, where an indictment unveiled in January accused her of deceiving banks into approving transactions that may have violated unilateral US sanctions against Iran.
New Delhi, March 15 : The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on a plea by Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo and former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad seeking bail in multi-million fodder scam cases.

The bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna gave the investigating agency two weeks' time to file its response to the bail plea by the former Chief Minister.

Appearing for Lalu Prasad, senior counsel Kapil Sibal told the court that Yadav had already been in jail for the last 22 months and was not in proper state of health.

A part of his continuing incarceration, following conviction in three fodder scam cases, Prasad has spent in hospital on account of his indifferent health.

Prasad moved the top court against January 10 Jharkhand High Court rejecting his plea for bail.

Prasad was convicted on December 23, 2017 in a case of fraudulent withdrawal from Deoghar treasury in Bihar. He was out on provisional bail in May last year for treatment but surrendered in August after the high court asked him to.

Prasad has been convicted in four fodder scam cases and awarded 14-year jail term.
Ghaziabad, March 15 : Ghaziabad Police on Friday arrested a wanted criminal against whom at least 30 cases were registered.

Police said they got hold of Anoop Mavi following an encounter in the early hours of Friday after a patrolling team received information about his movements.

When police asked him to stop at a check point, he sped away on his motorcycle. However, he was eventually forced to stop due to a hurdle in his way.

After abandoning the motorcycle, he opened fire at the police team. In the retaliatory police firing, Mavi sustained a bullet injury on his right leg following which he was overpowered and nabbed.

While screening his crime record, he was found involved in 30 criminal cases registered in Sahibabad and Delhi police stations.

"The police recovered a pistol and motorcycle from his possession," said Superintendent of Police (City) Shlok Kumar.
Mumbai, March 15 : A day after a portion of the footbridge outside Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus crashed down, a preliminary inquiry has blamed the structural consultants of negligence and recommended police action against them, here on Friday, according to officials.

"There is a prima facie reason to believe that the structural audit has been conducted in an irresponsible and negligent manner. This tragedy could have been avoided if the structural audit had been done diligently," said the probe report, naming Prof. D. D. Desai's Associated Engineering Consultants & Analysts Pvt. Ltd.

The report also said it was apparent that the structural audit was not carried out correctly and major lapses have been observed. It failed to point out an impending failure and despite the public money spent for commissioning the audit, "the true condition of the bridge was not brought out."

The report has also said that D. D. Desai's AECAPL should be immediately struck off the BMC's panel and the Maharashtra government must be informed of the same.
Chennai, March 15 : The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on Friday told the Central government to remove all the videos related to the Pollachi serial sexual assaults from the Internet.

On a PIL filed by an Ilamuhil from Trichy, Justices N. Kirubakaran and S.S. Sundar also directed the Tamil Nadu government to issue a fresh government order transferring the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The earlier order had revealed the name of the victim.

The court also recommended to the state government to take departmental action against the officials who revealed the identity of the victim, observing that other victims would not come forward to lodge complaints fearing similar exposure.

"The cries of the victim is still echoing in our ears," the judges said. "If the identity of the victim is revealed, how will anyone come forward against such atrocities?"

Stating that the incident had sent shock waves across the country, the Bench said: "Let it be an eye-opener. Such incidents should not happen again."

The court also directed the State to advertise that sharing and circulation of such videos was an offence and suggested including a chapter on cyber crimes in schools.

Stating that social media had several advantages and disadvantages, Ilamugil submitted that videos, pictures and audio files relating to sexual offences were being circulated on social media.

Meanwhile, the key accused in the case, Thirunavukkarasu, was remanded in four days police custody for questioning after a petition filed by the CB-CID.
New Delhi, March 15 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday expressed his deep shock and sadness at the "loss of scores of innocent lives" in the heinous terrorist attack at Muslim places of worship in New Zealand's Christchurch.

In a letter to his New Zealand counterpart Jacinda Ardern, he expressed his deepest condolences to the families bereaved in this dastardly attack, offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injured and underscored India's solidarity with the friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time.

Modi stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. Hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies, he said.

At least 49 people were killed when gunmen said to be whites opened indiscriminate fire at two mosques in Christchurch city on Friday in what Prime Minister Ardern said was a terror attack.

Nine Indian nationals/people of Indian origin were said to be missing after the attack, India's High Commissioner Sanjiv Kohli said.
New Delhi, March 15 : In a public interest litigation (PIL) taken up on its own, the Delhi High Court on Friday asked the state government to file a speedy response in the cases of seven undertrials pending in various lower courts.

The order by a bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A.J. Bhambani came on a PIL initiated on five letters sent by the undertrials -- facing trial for cases ranging from murder to drug possession and also under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

The court has posted the next hearing for August 13.

Ujair Ahmed, one of the undertrials who wrote to the court, was arrested in 2013 by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the UAPA. He is lodged in Rohini Jail.

Another undertrial Imran Khan, who is lodged in Tihar Jail, was arrested by the NIA in July 2016. He wrote to the court that there was no progress in his case since the filing of the charge sheet.

Shahjahan, Mohammad Sajid and Sattar are facing trial in a drug possession and trafficking case since 2014. They are lodged in Tihar Jail.

Shahabuddin is facing trial in a 2015 murder case, while the seventh, Shankar is facing trial in a 2014 rape case. He is also lodged in Tihar Jail.
New Delhi, March 15 : With Rahul Gandhi blaming the BJP for the release of Jaish-e-Mohammed founder Masood Azhar during the earlier National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, BJP President Amit Shah on Friday hit back saying before making such "insensitive remarks", the Congress President should think about the mistakes committed by his party and his great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru on China and Kashmir, which he said had "turned into cancer for the country".

The BJP Chief's remarks came after Gandhi, at a public rally in Gandhinagar, asked why Prime Minister Narendra Modi was not telling the nation that it was the earlier National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which had released Azhar -- the man behind the Pulwama suicide bombing.

Shah added that by raising such questions, the Congress President was not just "displaying his insensitivity" but also questioning the wisdom of senior leaders of his own party.

"This debate does not start nor end with the release of Masood Azhar. This list is long, and if discussed, the Congress will look like the guilty party," he wrote in a blog on Friday.

Shah said 10 years before the Kandahar flight hijack incident -- which forced the government to release Azhar in exchange for the safe return of over 170 passengers -- the Congress government released 10 terrorists in exchange for then Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed's daughter Rubaiya Sayeed.

He said while the decision to release Azhar was taken through consensus in an all-party meeting called by Vajpayee, the UPA government in 2010 unilaterally released 25 terrorists as a goodwill gesture to improve relations with Pakistan, including a terrorist who went on to become one of the main handlers of the Pathankot terror attack.

"The Congress, which is today raising questions on a decision taken through consensus during a very sensitive situation, how will it answer the question of why those terrorists were released during its governments?" Shah asked in his post.

The BJP Chief wrote that at a time when Pakistan was under pressure, such questions being raised by the Congress and its President were helping those aiding terror.

"Today, when the world is not only looking at a strong India but is also standing firmly beside it, the Congress with its statements is helping those countries that do not want to see a strong India," he said.

Shah said the Congress policy against terrorism, separatism and Naxalism had always been unsure and senior "Congress leader Sheila Dikshit had herself admitted that Manmohan Singh's policy on terrorism was weaker compared to the strict policies of the Modi government".

He also attacked Nehru for supporting China's case for inclusion in the United Nation's Security Council (UNSC) at India's cost and said the same China was now repeatedly using its position in the Security Council to protect terrorist Masood Azhar by blocking India's bid to designate him as a global terrorist.

"Nehru also made the mistake of taking Kashmir problem to the UN forum. Prior to insensitive comments on terrorism, Rahul Gandhi should consider these two mistakes of his party and Nehru. Both these mistakes have become cancer for the country," Shah said.
New Delhi, March 15 : The Congress on Friday accused the Narendra Modi government of having "slept and snoozed" while fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi set up a diamond business in London after fleeing the country with the support of a firm linked to the Panama Papers.

It asked the government why it could not trace him globe-trotting, despite having the resources of all the probe agencies at its disposal.

"Today is 'World Sleep Day', therefore today the Congress party shall expose how PM Modi i.e 'Desh Ka Chowkidar' and his government slept and snoozed while 'Chhota Modi' i.e Nirav Modi looted crore (of rupees), fled the country, posed with the PM, globe-trotted, opened a new diamond business in London which has a Panama Papers connection," Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said in a press conference here.

"Simple question is - If the Congress party can expose this entire chain of events and trace his trail, why could the CBI, ED, and other investigative agencies of the Modi Government not do the same after 14 months of his escape?

"Is it not a clear-cut case of criminal complacency, complicity and connivance by Modi government with economic offenders like Nirav Modi," he said.

To bolster its point, the party produced a timeline of Nirav Modi's travels to several countries after he fled from India on January 1 and after revocation of his passport by the Indian government on February 23.

The party spokesperson said after his passport was revoked, Modi travelled to six countries: UK, UAE, Hong Kong, France and Germany. He said that the government's reasoning that he was able to travel because his passport was not "physically cancelled" was a "lameduck excuse".

He also raised the point that why was the Red Corner notice against Modi issued only in July, six months after the diamantaire, accused of defaulting on loans worth Rs 26,306 crore, fled the country.

"Is it not a criminal delay?," Khera asked.

He said that the new diamond business Modi has set up in London shares the same address as that of 'Dattani Chartered Accountants'-- a company, he claimed, named in the Panama Papers investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

He said the accountancy firm was linked with 53 entities in all by those papers.

The party claimed that Modi fled the country with as much as 8 million pounds in cash, for he bought an apartment in London for 7.5 million pounds on January 5 -- four days after leaving India.

The party also pointed out how Modi has been able to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in London, where he was spotted on March 9 by a Daily Telegraph reporter, reportedly wearing a 10,000 pound ostrich hide jacket. It was also reported that he lives in a Rs 73 crore house in London and owns an office in upmarket Soho.

Khera said that Modi's London firm, Diamond Holdings, has one officer named Raju Thakorbhai Patel, who owns an accountancy firm in north London.

He claimed that as recently as March 7, Diamond Holdings changed its address to Scottish Provident House, 76/80 College Road, Harrow, HA11BQ, the same as Dattani Chartered Accountants and Balmoral Corporate Services Limited, also named in the Panama Papers.
Patna, March 15 : The Congress will contest 11 out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar, said Bihar Congress campaign committee Chairman Akhilesh Prasad Singh here on Friday.

"The Congress will contest 11 seats in Bihar. The party will send a list of the candidates' names to party President Rahul Gandhi for final approval," Singh told the media after a meeting of the Congress state election committee.

Singh said the "grand alliance" has worked out its seat sharing details and a formal announcement will be made in the next two to three days.

As per the seat sharing formula, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) will contest 17 or 18 seats, the Congress 11 and the remaining seats will be contested by the other allies, including the Left parties.
New Delhi, March 15 : Air India has ferried around 5,000 army and Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) personnel to Srinagar in special night flights in recent weeks as boots on the ground are being strengthened in Jammu and Kashmir after the Pulwama attack.

There are at least three flights every night full of security personnel leaving for Srinagar from New Delhi. Air India is also operating the wide-body 787 Dreamliner from Kolkata to fly soldiers in.

There are now Delhi-Leh-Delhi flights twice a week chartered for Border Security Force (BSF) troopers apart from a separate flight for the army on the same route. Another regular Air India chartered service is going to be added for the army on the Delhi-Leh-Chandigarh route.

Sources said that the Union Home Ministry had requisitioned the aircraft which were pulled out of the normal schedule to operate special night flights to Srinagar.

After the February 14 Pulwama attack, the Centre had come under criticism for not flying the soldiers as road transport made them vulnerable to terror attacks.

As the situation remain tense in Jammu and Kashmir after crackdown on terrorists by security forces post-Pulwama and the prevailing political situation against the backdrop of Supreme Court taking up challenges to the Constitution's Section 35A, the Centre had decided to dispatch 45 additional companies (around 135 personnel) of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), 35 companies of the Border Security Force (BSF) and 10 companies each of the Sashatra Seema Bal (SSB) and the Indo-Tibetan Police Force (ITBP).

The diversion of the fleet has forced Air India to stretch its resources as 17 of its aircraft are already grounded because of technical issues. The domestic aviation circuit is already reeling under the impact of shortage of aircraft.

Even private carriers are running low. Jet Airways has 53 of its aircraft grounded because of various reasons including the ban on operating the Boeing 737-8 Max after the crash in Ethiopia.

Twelve aircraft of Spicejet are grounded and 30 flights of Indigo are impacted because of shortage of pilots.
New Delhi, March 15 : One of the key prongs for the welfare of ex-servicemen -- the Army Group Insurance Fund (AGIF) -- has exposure to toxic IL&FS bonds amounting close to Rs 210 crore. This means that crores worth of insurance premiums, covering all ranks from generals to JCOs and jawans, are at risk of being lost.

Recently, officials of the Indian Army met the new board of the IL&FS seeking a solution of this issue. There are no direct answers on who will pick up the liability.

IANS sent a questionnaire to IL&FS, asking whether the AGIF had any exposure to its bonds and what was the quantum involved.

Chief Communications Officer, IL&FS group, said, "Thanks for reaching out to us. We would like to decline comments on the same."

Similarly, a questionnaire was sent to the Army PRO Lt Col Mohit Vaishnava and he was also spoken to by IANS as well, but he failed to respond to both.

Here is a primer on the AGIF, from the Army's own literature on the subject and a construct of how it is funded.

Under the banner of Soldiers2ndLife, the AGIF explainer is succinct.

Maturity Benefits:

The benefit, which is the accumulation of the saving element of the amount contributed by members along with interest and bonus, is paid on discharge/release of a serviceman. The maturity amount is also paid along with death benefits to the next of kin in case of death of any member. A member can withdraw 50 per cent from the maturity benefit after 15 years of service for the purpose of education/marriage of wards. In addition, a member can withdraw up to 90 per cent of the maturity amount for repair/renovation of house or for the purpose of conveyance during the last two years of service before superannuation.

Insurance:

Insurance benefits to the families of those Army personnel who may die while in service is Rs 50 lakh for officers and Rs 25 lakh for JCOs/OR. The monthly subscription is Rs 5,000 and Rs 2,500 respectively.

Extended Insurance (EI):

The Army Group Insurance Fund Extended Insurance (EI) Scheme provides insurance cover to servicemen after leaving service. It provides Rs 6 lakh for officers and Rs 3 lakh for personnel below officer rank (PBOR) for a period of 26 years after retirement or 75 years of age, whichever is earlier. The amount is received by the family of the ex-serviceman in case of his death. The amount has been recently revised and is now Rs 10 lakh for officers and Rs 5 lakh for PBOR for all those who joined the scheme after January 1, 2014. For those who joined earlier, the amount will remain at the earlier rate of Rs 6 lakh and Rs 3 lakh for officers and PBOR respectively.

Disability Cover:

This concerns an individual who becomes disabled out of service prematurely due to injury or disease. The officers and JCOs/OR with 100 per cent disability will get an amount of Rs 25 lakh and Rs 12.5 lakh respectively. This amount gets proportionately reduced for lower element of disability upto 20 per cent. An ex gratia disability allowance is also granted by AGIF in case a member with 100% disability has been recommended a constant attendant.

AGIF Scholarship Scheme:

AGIF Scholarship Schemes for the sum of Rs 40,000 per annum are provided for wards of officers, JCOs and OR in 12 Army Welfare Educational Institutions (AWES) institutions.

While the Army chose to deny the earlier IANS story on how Army welfare funds may have been deployed in IL&FS bonds, saying, "It is informed that welfare funds of the Indian Army are invested only in nationalised; scheduled banks; PSUs as per existing policy. There is no investment from Army Battle Casualties Welfare Fund and Army Central Welfare Fund in IL&FS bonds as reported. This news article is rebutted for being false, infructuous and mala fide."

IANS has chosen to stick to its report. Here's how Army Group Insurance Fund (AGIF) is infected with this virus.

In its earlier story, now validated, IANS wrote: IANS learns that a few sections of the armed forces, primarily the army, have invested their corpus of funds in the once AAA-rated IL&FS bonds to secure their future. The Indian Army has three specific funds in which fellow countrymen can contribute - Army Welfare Fund Battle Casualties (set up in 2016 after the Siachen avalanche disaster and the Pathankot/Uri incidents), Army Central Welfare Fund and the Paraplegic Rehabilitation Centre Pune - towards the members/families of the armed forces who have made the supreme sacrifice for the nation. It is still not known whether these funds have invested in the virus-laden bonds.

The government does not fund the Army Group Insurance Fund scheme at all. A comparison of insurance cover and duration of cover provided to the generals and the jawans by the AGIF is as follows:

Number of Generals: 350 (approximately)

Monthly premium: Rs 5,000

Annual premium: Rs 60,000

Lt.-Generals insurance cover up to 60 years

COAS insurance cover up to 62 years

Annual contribution Rs 60,000

Total annual contribution by the Generals is: Rs 60,000 multiplied by 350, which amounts to Rs 2 crore and 10 lakh.

Number of Jawans: 13,00,000 (approximately)

Annual contribution: Rs 30,000

Total annual contribution by jawans is: Rs 30,000 multiplied by 13,00,000, which amounts to Rs 3,900 crore.

These figures apply to just one year. The big question is: Who is tracking these funds? There are no answers to who will bear the liability if the huge amounts parked in toxic IL&FS bonds turn to junk. The first step will be taken if the army authorities begin by acknowledging there is a problem at hand.
New Delhi, March 15 : The Supreme Court on Friday sought the Election Commission's response on a plea by 21 opposition parties seeking audit of at least 50 per cent of EVMs with corresponding Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs).

Issuing the notice to the poll panel, the bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Sanjiv Khanna directed the election panel to depute an officer to assist the court on the next hearing of the matter on March 25.

"Matter will be heard on March 25, 2019. The Election Commission of India to be served through the Secretary. The competent authority of the Election Commission of India shall depute a suitable officer to assist the Court on the date fixed i.e. March 25, 2019," the court said in its order.

The plea was filed, among others, by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party, Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party, Farooq Abdullah of the National Conference, Sharad Yadav of the Loktantrik Janata Dal, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Derek O'Brien of the Trinamool Conference and M.K. Stalin of the DMK.

In the plea, they urged the court that 50 per cent of results of EVMs must be matched and cross-checked with VVPATs before the declaration of results in the general elections.

Earlier in February, the opposition parties approached the EC to audit at least 50 per cent of EVMs with corresponding VVPATs in all constituencies during the Lok Sabha polls.

The parties had said there are "serious doubts about the credibility of EVMs and the purity of the entire electoral process" and asked the EC to mandate physical countercheck of paper trail and match it with the electronic vote in at least 50 per cent of all EVMs, if not all.

The 21 opposition party leaders had challenged the Election Commission's decision to verify VVPAT of only one randomly selected booth of a constituency.

Speaking to media persons later, senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that verifying the VVPAT of just one randomly selected booth in a constituency would account for just 0.44 per cent of the votes polled and this would defeat the entire purpose of attaching VVPAT to EVMs for recording votes in printed form.

He described as "ornamental" and without substance the exercise of verifying the votes exercised through EVMs with VVPAT that is undertaken by the election panel at present.

The top court had on January 7 sought the poll panel's response on a PIL by a retired bureaucrat, a former army officer and a former diplomat seeking to increase the cross-verification of the VVPATs with EVMs from the current 10 per cent to 30 per cent for this year's general elections.

In their plea, retired Indian Army Officer and former IAS officer M.G. Devasahayam, former Indian Foreign Service Officer K.P. Fabian and retired banker and All India Bank Officers Confederation General Secretary Thomas Franco Rajendra Dev had described as "manifestly arbitrary, irrational, unreasonable and, inter alia, in violation of Article 14" of the Constitution, the Election Commission's decision to "confine such a cross-verification exercise to a statistically insignificant number of approximately only one polling station in each constituency, regardless of the number of polling stations in such a constituency".

The PIL is still pending.
Jaipur, March 15 : Senior BJP leader Devi Singh Bhati on Friday resigned from the primary membership of the party, annoyed over the ticket for the Lok Sabha elections being given to Bikaner MP Arjun Ram Meghwal.

Bhati, a seven-time BJP MLA from Kolayat Bikaner in Rajasthan, said he had sent his resignation to the party high command.

"I am feeling sad after resigning from the party but I am really hurt about reports that MP and Union Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal is again being given a ticket from Bikaner for the Lok Sabha elections," Bhati said.

"Meghwal has been involved in anti-party activities and I have informed the party about it. The party leaders said they would pursue the matter but nothing has been done. I feel helpless, I preferred to resign, he added.

Bhati has been an MLA from 1980 to 2013 and has worked on many significant portfolios.
Pollachi/Coimbatore : , March 15 (IANS) A court in Coimbatore on Friday permitted the Crime Branch-Crime Investigation Department (CB-CID) to take into custody for four days Thirunavukkarasu, the prime accused in the Pollachi sexual abuse and blackmail case.

With a huge crowd gathered outside the court, Thirunavukkarasu attended the hearing via video conference. The Tamil Nadu government has already transferred the case to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

Four persons -- Thirunavukkarasu, Sathish, Sabarirajan, Vasanthakumar -- all in their 20s, have been accused of sexually assaulting women in Pollachi and filming the act to blackmail them for money or for physical submission for over seven years.

Protests are being held across Tamil Nadu demanding punishment for the culprits.

In Pollachi, about 2,000 people including members of different social organisations formed a human chain asking for a court-monitored probe by the CBI in the case.

The protesting organisations included the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA) and the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) as well as political parties like the Congress, MDMK, MNM and TMMK.

Demonstrations were also reported from Kumbakonam and Chennai.
New Delhi, March 15 : External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Friday hit out at the Congress over its allegation that China blocking the bid to name Masood Azhar as a "global terrorist" was a diplomatic failure of the Narendra Modi government, saying the proposal was mooted four times but India could get worldwide support only in 2019.

She took to Twitter to counter the opposition's charge and said India secured unprecedented support from the international community for listing Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee.

"I wish to apprise you of the facts regarding listing of Masood Azhar under the United Nations Sanctions Committee. The proposal has been mooted four times. In 2009, India under the UPA Government was the lone proposer. In 2016, India's proposal was co-sponsored by USA, France and UK. In 2017, USA, UK and France moved the proposal," she said in a series of tweets.

Swaraj said in 2019, the proposal was moved by the USA, France and UK and supported by 14 of the 15 UN Security Council Members and also co-sponsored by Australia, Bangladesh, Italy and Japan - non members of the Security Council.

"Thus, we have secured an unprecedented support from the international community for listing of Masood Azhar under the UN Sanctions Committee.

"I have shared these facts with you so that leaders who describe this as our diplomatic failure may see for themselves that in 2009, India was alone. In 2019, India has the worldwide support," she said.

The opposition leaders including Congress President Rahul Gandhi had criticised the government after China blocked the naming of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist by the United Nations.

Gandhi had called Prime Minister Narendra Modi "weak" and "scared" of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

"Weak Modi is scared of Xi. Not a word comes out of his mouth when China acts against India. NaMo's China Diplomacy: 1. Swing with Xi in Gujarat 2. Hug Xi in Delhi 3. Bow to Xi in China," Gandhi said on Twitter.

On Wednesday, the UN Sanctions Committee could not come to a decision on naming the JeM chief as a global terrorist after China put the proposal on hold. India expressed its disappointment at the outcome.
New Delhi, March 15 : With little possibility of the two big ticket IBC cases -- Essar Steel and Bhushan Power and Steel -- happening this fiscal, the Department of Financial Services (DFS) will meet the PSU banks on March 18 to review the status of their non-performing assets (NPAs).

The DFS has set an NPA recovery target of Rs 1.8 lakh crore for the public sector banks (PSBs) which has to be achieved by March end.

The meeting will be conducted via video-conferencing, said a banking source, adding that a senior DFS official will review the NPA recovery status of individual banks and the overall target.

Last year, Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar had said that recoveries of about Rs 1.8 lakh crore were assessed by the banks which were from the cases under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) and those outside it.

So far the recovery has been Rs 1.1 lakh crore and the Essar Steel resolution may still happen, the Finance Ministry hopes.

The two key NCLT cases of Essar Steel and Bhushan Power and Steel have not seen a resolution yet. The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) has now asked the Ruias, Essar Steel's previous promoters, to first clear dues of nearly Rs 1.4 lakh crore to consider its bid for Essar Steel.

The Ahmedabad bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has already approved ArcelorMittal's Rs 42,000 crore bid for Essar Steel last week, which has now been challenged by the Ruias. So a decision on Essar Steel resolution is likely to extend beyond this fiscal, the Finance Ministry feels.

The State Bank of India has over Rs 15,000 crore exposure to Essar Steel while the Bank of India and the Punjab National Bank will get Rs 1,800 crore and Rs 2,500 crore, respectively, from the Essar resolution.

"If the resolution does not happen by March-end, the banks will have to make additional provisioning of Rs 10,000 crore," said a source.

The total claims admitted by the financial creditors in Essar Steel and Bhushan Power and Steel, the two big ticket cases in the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) list of 12 stressed accounts, are Rs 49,479 crore and Rs 47,145 crore, respectively.

The Finance Ministry was expecting the resolution of five to six accounts from the RBI's list by March-end. The resolutions achieved so far are that of Bhushan Steel, Electrosteel Steels and Monnet Ispat and Energy.

The 12 large accounts where resolution under the IBC was initiated by the banks mandated by the RBI have claims of Rs 3.50 lakh crore.

According to ratings firm Icra, fresh NPAs in the banking sector are expected to moderate to 1.9 per cent to 2.4 per cent in FY 2019-20 due to an aggressive recovery drive and write-offs by the banks. The public sector banks are expected to turn profitable after four consecutive years of losses.

Sources in the Finance Ministry said that big ticket recoveries were due this month from Essar Steel and Bhushan Power and Steel, which together can fetch over Rs 60,000 crore. And they are just a few among the many.

Icra expects gross NPAs of the banking sector to be Rs 8.3 lakh crore or 7.9 per cent for March 2020, as compared to the estimated 9.2 per cent for March 2019.

However, even with the new bankruptcy law in place, recoveries through the NCLT have not been very large, it said.

But recoveries of around Rs 1.6-Rs 1.7 lakh crore from the accounts referred to the NCLT amount to 75-80 per cent of the recoveries from these accounts, which is higher than the provisions made by these banks.

In 2018, over Rs 80,000 crore was recovered from various corporate debtors under the IBC, according to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

(The writer can be contacted at anjana.d@ians.in)
Srinagar, March 15 : Lieutenant General Ranbir Singh, Northern Command chief, on Friday visited forward locations along the Line of Control (LoC) in the Valley.

A Defence Ministry statement said here on Friday: "Army Commander Lt Gen Ranbir Singh arrived at Srinagar today to review the prevailing security situation. The Army Commander visited units/formations along the LoC and hinterland in North Kashmir.

"He was briefed by the field commanders about the prevailing security situation. The Army Commander complimented the troops for their relentless efforts in thwarting the adversary's designs.

"The Army Commander also lauded the exemplary synergy among all the forces, appreciated the actions taken by the units/formations in ensuring safety and well-being of people residing in vicinity of the LoC."
New Delhi, March 15 : Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders, including Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and MP Sanjay Singh, who staged a sit-in on Friday outside the Election Commission to protest against alleged raids at the party's call centres, called off the sit-in following assurances from the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC).

CEC Sunil Arora assured the AP leaders that a joint meeting of Delhi's Chief Electoral Officer and senior police officials will be held over the issue.

In a series of tweets, Sisodia first said that the police raided a call centre hired by the AAP.

"I am standing outside the Election Commission and waiting to meet the Election Commissioner (EC). I will wait outside the building until the EC is meeting me (sic)."

He also said that the party leaders are sitting outside the office of the EC demanding and hoping for a fair election.

"In a democracy, the Election Commission is the father of all political parties during the elections. At the BJP's behest, the raids are being carried out at the call centres of the AAP. It is necessary to stop the hooliganism of the Delhi Police."

Calling off the protest, Sisodia said the meeting with the CEC was done. "He (CEC) called for a joint meeting of Delhi's Chief Electoral Officer and senior police officials," he said.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, in several tweets, also denounced the Delhi Police.

"The police has raided without any search warrant and is barging into server rooms and interrogating all call centre agents. What is this going on? What is the crime?" Kejriwal asked.

"Police reach another call centre. Asking for server details and our data," he said.

The sit-in of the AAP leaders came hours after a party delegation led by Sisodia and Sanjay Singh met CEC Sunil Arora in the morning alleging that the police were harassing employees of a call centre hired by the party.

Sisodia accused the Delhi Police of being influenced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and working like "goons".

The AAP delegation, including MP Sanjay Singh, party's Lok Sabha candidates Raghav Chadha and Atishi Marlena, urged the CEC to direct the Delhi Police to stop the harassment of call centre employees.

On the complaint of BJP that the AAP was making "misleading" phone calls about the voter list, the Election Commission last month had asked the Delhi Police to probe telephone calls to people claiming their names have been deleted from the electoral rolls. It also directed the police to take action against the people making such calls. An FIR was also filed in this regard.

Sisodia said that the party hired the call centre to make people aware that names had been deleted from the voter list.

"The call centre was not making proxy calls. They were hired by the AAP. We have an agreement with them. Talk to AAP, talk to Arvind Kejriwal, Sanjay Singh, Manish Sisodia, and other party leaders if you have an issue. But instead, they (police) are harassing the people of call centre," he said.

Accusing the BJP of deleting names from the electoral rolls in the city as part of their election strategy, the AAP said it hired a call centre having office in different parts of the city, to ask and inform the voters about the Act.

Singh also wrote to the EC saying the BJP, through the police, is harassing the AAP leaders and the people of Delhi and there is a possibility that the elections would be influenced.

In the two-page letter in Hindi, Singh said the Delhi Police, which comes under the Central government, is harassing the AAP leaders, the people appointed at the call centres hired by the AAP and also the general public.
CHRISTCHURCH, March 15, 2019 (Xinhua) -- Police are seen on a road in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 15, 2019. At least 40 people were killed in mass shootings in two mosques of New Zealand's Christchurch, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Image Source: IANS News

CHRISTCHURCH, March 15, 2019 (Xinhua) Policemen are seen on a road near the scene where the terror attacks occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 16, 2019. At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques of Ne Image Source: IANS News

CHRISTCHURCH, March 15, 2019 (Xinhua) A road sign is seen near the scene where the terror attacks occurred in Christchurch, New Zealand, March 16, 2019. At least 49 people were killed and 48 others wounded in the attacks on two mosques of New Zealand Image Source: IANS News

Hyderabad: Ahmed Iqbal Jehangir, a man from Hyderabad who was critically injured in the horrific massacre at the Al Noor Mosque in New Zealand's Christchurch city. (File Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Hyderabad, March 15 : A man from Hyderabad was critically injured and another was missing in the horrific massacre at one of the two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch city on Friday.

Ahmed Iqbal Jehangir, who was at the Al Noor Mosque for Friday prayers, was injured and taken to hospital, his brother Mohammed Khursheed Jehangir told IANS here.

"My brother was shot in his chest. A video I received shows him lying on a stretcher," Khursheed said.

Ahmed, settled in New Zealand for 15 years, runs a Hyderabadi restaurant near the Al Noor Mosque. His family members were safe.

An anxious Khursheed was waiting for more information from New Zealand. He wants to rush to New Zealand to be with his brother and appealed to the Indian government for help.

Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi has tweeted to Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, urging her to expedite the visa process.

Another man from Hyderabad was also reported missing. Farhaj Ahsan had gone to the same mosque for prayers and was listed missing after the attack by gunmen.

His father Mohammed Sayeeduddin and other family members were worried over Farhaj's well-being.

Owaisi also shared the details of Ahsan's family members with Swaraj and requested her to provide immediate assistance to facilitate their travel to New Zealand.
New Delhi, March 15 : Delhi-based lawyer Rajarajan on Friday moved the Supreme Court seeking "free, fair, impartial investigation" into Pollachi sexual assault case and protection to the victims and their family members.

Rajarajan has demanded that the report of the probe, now being handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation, is submitted to the Supreme Court.

Seeking protection and necessary safeguards for the victims and their immediate family members, the lawyer has sought direction that the trial of the case should be held outside Tamil Nadu.

Rajarajan has also sought initiation of departmental inquiry against Coimbatore Rural Superintendent of police R. Pandiarajan for revealing the identity of the victim.

The Pollachi sexual assault case has rocked the political corridors of Tamil Nadu as opposition's DMK-led Secular Front has demanded a High Court-monitored CBI probe into the case.
Kolkata, March 15 : As many as 926 complaints related to violation of the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) have so far been registered with the Election Commission (EC) in West Bengal, an official said on Friday.

"The complaint redressal system is working well in various districts. The increasing figure indicates that the citizens are giving due importance to this mechanism and it is making our work easy," state's Additional Chief Electoral Officer (ACEO) Sanjay Basu told reporters.

Of the 510 complaints registered on the cVigil app till date, 248 have been resolved, he said.

Basu said 184 complaints have been received on the ECI's National Grievance Services (NGS) Portal, and 146 of those have been addressed.

The citizens' portal of NGS recorded 232 complaints, out of which 199 have been addressed, Basu said.

He added that most complaints are related to defacement and "no serious complaints of intimidation have been received".

On media monitoring for the general and assembly elections, Basu said, "The Electronic Media Monitoring Centre (EMMC) under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting will monitor all English, Hindi and regional channels on the day of polling and a day before. It will furnish a report to the ECI every two hours."

Deputy CEO Amit Jyoti Bhattacharya explained that there is a Media Certification and Monitoring Committee (MCMC) at the district level and an ACEO's committee at the state level.

"This year one social media expert has been included in these committees to monitor all complaints related to the social media," he added.
New Delhi, March 15 : Three persons including a woman were arrested here with 44 kilograms of heroin worth Rs 180 crores in the international market, a police officer said on Friday.

"The kingpin of the syndicate is Shamuta Banu (54), a resident of Assam, while Dhanji Gupta (49) and Dheeraj Kumar (24) of Bihar are her associates in the crime," the official said.

Gupta and Kumar were arrested on Monday night when they reached near south Delhi's Indraprastha Park with 21 kilograms of heroin to supply it to some contacts.

"As per the information given by Gupta and Kumar, police team on Tuesday arrested Banu from Assam," Deputy Commissioner of Police P.S. Kushwah said.

"Interrogation revealed that Banu received crude heroin from her Manipur based contact who procures it from Myanmar," he said.

"Banu and her associates used to turn crude heroin into fine quality by using chemicals in Bihar. She than used to supply it to North India, West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and other states including Delhi with the help of her contacts," Kushwah said.

There is widespread illegal cultivation of opium in the bordering areas of Manipur. Drug manufacturers prepare heroin from opium and supply it to the clients, the investigation revealed.

"The quality, however, of heroin smuggled from Myanmar is much better than the one produced in Manipur and as it is cheaper in cost, it remains in high demand globally including in India," he added.
New Delhi: Thailand Ambassador Chutintorn Gongsakdi during the inauguration of the Namaste Thailand Festival in New Delhi on March 15, 2019. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

New Delhi: Artiestes perform during the inauguration of the Namaste Thailand Festival in New Delhi on March 15, 2019. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

New Delhi, March 15 : The third Namaste Thailand Festival was inaugurated by Thai envoy Chutintorn Gongsakdi, who reiterated peaceful Indo-Thai relations and the need to do more.

The three-day festival was inaugurated at Select Citywalk Mall here, and is celebrating 72 years of bilateral ties between the two countries.

It is organised by the Royal Thai Embassy.

"In terms of bilateral relationship, India has had a good, peaceful relationship with Thailand. But we are still in the early stages. Our trade has had an increase of 30 per cent year on year in 2017 and 2018, which is about 12 billion, but we have much more to achieve.

"What we do have is good people to people cultural relation and we want to build on that foundation and let it deliver political and economic dividends. So that trade and investment is much larger than this. Namaste Thailand Festival is an initiative in that direction," the envoy said in his opening address.

The envoy also mentioned Thai cuisine's popularity in India during a cooking demonstration he did. He cooked the green Thai curry in front of the audience.

The festival brings to the national capital Thai cuisine, arts, dance and a Thai marketplace with lifestyle products.

It ends on Sunday.
Gurugram, March 15 : The crime branch here arrested two highway robbers for looting passengers while offering them a lift on the Delhi-Gurugram expressway and other parts of Delhi.

Rajbeer Deshwal, DCP, Crime Branch, said that the accused used lighters that looked like pistols to threaten passengers and looted valuables and ATM cards.

"We received information about a suspicious gang at DLF building near Cyber City. Subsequently, the Crime Branch unit of Sector 39 headed towards the spot and overpowered the two accused and seized a Vento car," Deshwal said.

During interrogation, the accused admitted using lighters shaped like pistols to threaten passengers. It would also act as a cover in case they were apprehended by police.

The accused have been identified as Sandeep Sharma and Sumit, both residents of Shahibabad in Uttar Pradesh.

"As per their disclosure, the accused would start their journey from their home town in the evening and would look for passengers who were travelling alone. They would offer lift and then rob them of cash, jewellery, mobile phones, ATM cards and pins at 'gunpoint'," Deshwal said.

"The accused also kept pollution masks with them which they would use while withdrawing cash from ATM kiosks to evade being caught on camera," the DCP said.

He added that Sumit is a history sheeter, who was involved in similar crimes in the past, and had served a jail term in Delhi's Tihar jail for 15 months. He was released on bail in January this year.
New Delhi, March 15 : When the nation's attention was focussed on the Balakot air strike, Indian Army in a joint operation with Myanmaerese Army destroyed 10 camps belonging to an insurgent group in Myanmar which had threatened the Kaladan multi-mode transit project.

Operation Sunrise was a mega task in which Arakan army, an insurgent outfit of Kachin Independent Army (KIA) backed by China, was targeted.

Sources said the camps were destroyed inside Myanmar with active support of the Indian Army in an intense operation lasting over 10 days.

The Army provided hardware and equipment to Myanmar for the operation while it mobilised massive forces on the border.

The operation was carried out on inputs that the insurgents were targeting the mega infrastructure project linking Kolkata with Sitwe in Myanmar through sea route. It would have provided another route to reach Mizoram from Kolkata through Sitwe.

The project is expected to be completed by 2020.

Camps of insuregnts all along the India-Myanmar border from Miizoram, Nagaland to Arunachal Pradesh were targeted in one of the biggest operstions of its kind, sources said.
New Delhi, March 15 : The Income Tax Department will keep a strict vigil over the movement of cash at airports following the implementation of the Model Code of Conduct, the Civil Aviation Ministry said on Friday.

As per the security measures for airports announced for the Lok Sabha elections, the operators of all private aircraft and helicopters must declare the contents of the baggage and suitcases carried on the flights to the I-T Department, the chief electoral officers of the states, district election officers and the state police.

"With an aim to keep a strict vigil over the movement of cash through all airports, the Income Tax Department and the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) will be extended all requisite cooperation for checking and surveillance activities. This will be over and above what the CISF is otherwise doing," an official statement said.

As per the directive, the Air Traffic Control (ATC) would share the records of all scheduled commercial flights, private aircraft and helicopters with the chief electoral officers and the district election officers. It would also share the travel plan of chartered aircraft and helicopters as early as possible, preferably half-an-hour in advance.

The state police departments would have to deploy police units to check the flights during the duration of the Model Code of Conduct, as per the direction of the Election Commission.

Apart from the measures to strengthen the security at the regular commercial airports, special measures have been introduced to check flights from uncontrolled, unserved and remote airstrips, aerodromes, helipads and private airstrips.

"Officers of the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) will conduct surprise inspections of these airports to check the compliance of these instructions," it said.
Kolkata, March 15 : The Income Tax Department has deployed over 200 of its officers and employees across West Bengal, Sikkim and Andaman & Nicobar Islands to monitor election expenditure and flow of black money during the Lok Sabha elections, an official said here on Friday.

The department will have dedicated teams for each of the 42 Lok Sabha constituencies in West Bengal which will have a staggered seven-phase polling in the upcoming elections.

"We have formed a team 200 officers and employees to monitor cash movement and flow black money during elections. There will be dedicated teams for all Lok Sabha constituencies in West Bengal," IT investigation wing's Principal Director Ashish Verma said.

IT sleuths have so far seized Rs 3 crore cash mostly from various businessmen in Kolkata, he said.

In line with the instruction of the Election Commission to curb the use of black money during the elections, the department has set up a control room, so that citizen can give them information regarding suspicious cash movement.

It also asked banks to give them information of transactions of "big amount", he said, adding that state and city police have been roped in for cash movement surveillance.

Cash will be seized if the holder fails to tender satisfactory explanation or provide evidences such as ATM withdrawal receipt, the official added.
People fly kites at an open ground to enjoy spring in Lujiang County, China's Anhui Province. (photo: Wang Min/Guangming Picture)

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New Delhi, March 15 : India on Friday welcomed France's decision to freeze the assets of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Masood Azhar.

"We welcome the decision taken by France to sanction Masood Azhar, Chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based & UN proscribed terrorist organisation; and responsible for the Pulwama terrorist attack," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar wrote on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, French Ambassador Alexandre Ziegler tweeted a press statement of the French government, which said, "France has decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code. A joint decree of the Ministries of the Interior, and Economy and Finance was published today in the Official Gazette."

Ziegler tweeted, "Based on this decree, we will raise with our European partners the issue of including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts."

"France has always been and always will be by India's side in the fight against terrorism..."

Pakistan, JeM's base, is under pressure from many countries to act against the terrorist group, which claimed responsibility for the February 14 suicide bombing in Jammu and Kashmir that killed 40 CRPF troopers.

The United Nations has deemed the JeM to be a terrorist organisation since 2001. However, defying global opposition to terrorism, China has repeatedly vetoed sanctions against Azhar. On Wednesday, China once again opposed designating Azhar as an international terrorist.
New Delhi, March 15 : Cash-strapped Jet Airways pilots' union has written to the government, seeking its help in recovering their pending salaries along with the accumulated interest.

Jet Airways currently has 1,900 pilots on its rolls. In a letter written to Minister of Labour and Employment Santosh Gangwar, the National Aviators Guild (NAG), which represents the majority of Jet's pilots, said that all pleas to the Jet management in this regard "have fallen on deaf ears".

In the letter, a copy of which was accessed by IANS, NAG General Secretary Tej Sood, writes, "This situation is leading to extreme tension and frustration amongst our members, hardly an ideal situation for pilots in the cockpit. Monthly EMIs have to be met, school & college fees paid, along with medical bills of ageing parents etc."

The letter urges the Minister to ensure "that Jet Airways pay to the member pilots the arrears of salary (inclusive of all allowances) due to date and pay interest thereon at commercial rate from the date due till realisation and hereinafter pay the full salary (inclusive of all allowances) on the first day of the every month and for any salaries paid after the said due date, pay interest thereon at commercial rate from the date due till realisation".

A copy of the letter was also sent to B.S. Bhullar, Chief of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation.

The airline has defaulted on loans and has delayed payments to its pilots, suppliers and lessors for months. It is in talks with public sector banks for a rescue deal and emergency funds.
Kolkata, March 15 : Bandhan Bank on Friday said it has received "no objection" from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for the proposed merger of Gruh Finance with it.

"...we would like to inform that the Reserve Bank has by its letter dated March 14, 2019 conveyed its no objection for the voluntary amalgamation of Gruh Finance Ltd into and with Bandhan Bank, subject to compliance with the terms and conditions therein," the lender said in a regulatory filing.

In January, the city-headquartered Bandhan Bank said its board of directors had approved merger of the India's leading housing finance company, with a focus on the affordable housing segment, into the bank.

The merger would help the bank to achieve product and geographic diversification while improving penetration in its core customer segment. On the other hand, the housing finance company would get access to a wider distribution network, a larger customer base and low cost deposit base of the bank.

Post-merger, the shareholding of Bandhan Financial Holdings Ltd in the bank would reduce from 82.3 per cent to 61 per cent.

The share exchange ratio accepted by the boards of two entities was 568 equity shares of face value of Rs10 each of Bandhan Bank to be issued for every 1,000 equity shares of face value of Rs.2 each of Gruh.

Shares of Bandhan Bank on Friday closed at Rs 511.05 a piece, down by 0.45 per cent on the BSE.
Hyderabad: Ahmed Iqbal Jehangir, a man from Hyderabad who was critically injured in the horrific massacre at the Al Noor Mosque in New Zealand's Christchurch city. (File Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Hyderabad: Ahmed Iqbal Jehangir, a man from Hyderabad who was critically injured in the horrific massacre at the Al Noor Mosque in New Zealand's Christchurch city. (File Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Hyderabad, March 15 : A man from Hyderabad was critically injured and another was missing in the horrific massacre at one of the two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch city on Friday.

Ahmed Iqbal Jehangir, who was at Al Noor Mosque for Friday prayers, was injured and taken to hospital, his brother Mohammed Khursheed Jehangir told IANS in Hyderabad.

"My brother was shot in his chest. A video I received shows him lying on stretcher," Khursheed said.

Ahmed, settled in New Zealand for 15 years, runs a Hyderabadi food restaurant near Al Noor Mosque. His family members were safe.

An anxious Khursheed was waiting for more information from New Zealand. He wants to rush to New Zealand to be with his brother and appealed to the Indian government for help.

Another man from Hyderabad was also reported missing. Farhaj Ahsan, had gone to the same mosque for prayers and was listed missing after the attack by gunmen.

His father Mohammed Sayeeduddin and other family members were worried over Farhaj's well-being and were waiting for information.

Farhaj, a software engineer, used to regularly offer Friday prayers at Al Noor mosque as he lives in a nearby neighbourhood with his wife and two children.

Like every day, Sayeeduddin rang up his son, unaware of what was going on at the mosque. "We speak to him over phone every day around afternoon and today being Friday I rang him around 8 a.m. but he did not respond," he told IANS.

He then called his daughter-in-law, who informed him that there was an attack at the mosque and she also tried to reach Farhaj over his mobile phone.

She later went to hospital with a picture of her husband and after a long wait, the authorities told her that he is among 19 people missing.

"We are worried about his well-being and waiting for some information from there," said Sayeeduddin, who lives in Nadeem Colony here.

Farhaj had gone to New Zealand 15 years ago and did his MS from Auckland University. He worked for various companies and had recently completely a project for a firm in Christchurch.

Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted to Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj, urging her to provide immediate assistance to the two families to facilitate their travel to New Zealand.
New Delhi, March 16 : The BJP on Friday finally sealed the seat sharing arrangements for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls with sulking ally Apna Dal in Uttar Pradesh.

According to the arrangements, Apna Dal will contest two seats in while its chief Anupriya Patel will contest from Mirzapur.

The second seat to be decided later. A decision in this regard was taken after Patel and her husband Ashish met BJP chief Amit Shah. "With the resolve of the Modi government once again (Phir Ek Baar Modi Sarkar), the BJP and the Apna Dal will fight the Lok Sabha elections in UP together," Shah tweeted.

Anupriya Patel had said on March 13 that the talks between the BJP and the Apna Dal have been positive and a decision on an alliance between the two will be announced soon.

BJP's two allies in Uttar Pradesh -- Apna Dal and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party -- have been airing their grievances with their bigger partner but saffron party leaders had expressed confidence that they will remain in the NDA fold.

Apna Dal, which has significant influence in the OBC in some areas of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, has two MPs and 7 MLAs in Uttar Pradesh.
According to the research report 'Spotlight Logistics: Logistics rental growth - Temporary trend or new reality?' published by Savills, investors appetite will not be negatively affected by the continued yield compression in the Dutch logistics real estate market due to strong rental growth expectations. Savills attributes this expected rental growth

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A High Street office building in Brisbanes inner-city suburb of Toowong has sold to the University of Queensland (UQ).

The University of Queensland (UQ), which has its main campus in the neighbouring suburb of St Lucia, bought the 74 High Street property with vacant possession.

It intends to occupy the office in the future.

With over 4,000 sqm of net lettable area (NLA) the building has a basement car park with space for 43 vehicles.

Set on 1,827 sqm of land is has over 80 sqm of frontage to High Street.

Christian Sandstrom, Matt Barker and Ben McGrath of Knight Frank negotiated the sale of the property following an expressions of interest campaign.

Mr Sandstrom saidm "numerous offers were received at the close of the campaign with particular strong interest from a number of local companies wishing to acquire the property for their own occupation given the cost advantage compared to leasing their premises."

Mr Barker said 74 High Street presented a unique opportunity to purchase a quality office building located in the popular inner western suburb of Toowong.

The area surrounding 74 High Street is continuing to experience valuable development and investment, and has the potential for redevelopment.

It was 100 per cent leased to Allianz Global Assistance, but this tenant moved out in January this year after occupying the building for 15 years.

University of Queensland Property and Facilities Director Steve Dickson said the purchase would help meet the universitys project planning and space requirements during a five-year capital works program at the St Lucia campus.

Its close proximity to St Lucia with good transport links will ensure that it remains a strategic part of our estate planning into the future, he said.
The eight-storey project has been dubbed Quest Robina and Lucia Residences.

It is Quests first move into the Gold Coast market and will include 80 rooms, 37 sqm of ground-floor retail, a two-level basement carpark and 24 residential apartments.

Pellicano acquired the site in 2018 from master developer Robina Land Corporation.

It secured planning approval from Gold Coast City Council in August 2018 and sealed a deal with Quest for a multi-project $182 million deal afterwards.

Quest is classified as the largest and fastest-growing apartment hotel operator in Australasia.





Quest Apartment Hotels General Manager - Growth, James Shields said, Our long-term partnership with Pellicano has facilitated our move into Robina, Gold Coast.

"We see Robina as a key commercial centre for the Gold Coast economy evidenced by low office vacancy, iconic commercial towers and a range of drivers across the health, sporting and retail sectors to support future growth," He concluded
GUEST OBSERVATION

When former Trade Minister Andrew Robb took to the ABCs AM program to sound off about a toxic relationship between Australia and China, he exposed a rippling debate about how to manage an increasingly comlex foreign and security policy challenge.

Long gone are the days of the John Howard formula that Australia did not have to choose between its history, meaning America, and its geography, meaning China. Choices are no longer binary.

While the Robb word toxic may be an exaggeration, stresses in Australia-China relations are such it is clear we have entered a new and more challenging phase.

For a start, China is undergoing what is, arguably, the most testing moment of an economic transformation that began in 1978 at the third plenary of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. This is when Deng Xiaoping re-emerged to initiate one of the more remarkable economic shifts of the modern era.

Apart from a hiatus caused by the Tienanmen uprising in 1989, and an economic soft-landing in the mid-1990s, China has bounded ahead economically, and has seemed unstoppable  until now.

Chinas economy and political system has encountered the sort of difficulties that were inevitable. Put simply, an investment driven  as opposed to consumer-led  model is running its course, piling up massive government and bank debt in the process.

China risks becoming caught in a middle income trap in which a developing country, having enacted the easier reforms, gets stuck in second gear in its effort to push ahead with its economic transformation.

You can only build so many road, bridges, fast trains, airports, ports and housing developments. Many of the latter have become ghost cities.

At this months National Peoples Congress, the annual session of Chinas parliament, Premier Li Keqiang gave what was, by Chinese standards for these sort of cheerleading events, an unusually downbeat assessment of challenges ahead.

China, Li said, faces difficulties of a kind rarely seen in many years.

What is undeniable is that Chinas economy is faltering, its ability to create millions of new jobs annually to employ a restless population is being stretched, and its management of a continuing economic transformation has come under unusual stress. US-China trade tensions are not helping.

In counterpoint to the need for a more dynamic economic environment, its leadership, under President Xi Jinping, is asserting even tighter political controls when it should be giving freer rein to its entrepreneurial class.

This is the central contradiction of a model that has delivered what is the most extraordinary event in world economic history since the industrial revolution. But that model clearly has its limitations compared with those, say, of neighbouring Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

From an Australian perspective, a slowing and, perhaps more to the point, anxious China is not good news. While economists might argue that a slowdown and thus the need for Beijing to stimulate its economy by ramping up infrastructure projects will benefit iron ore and coal exporters, economic pressures more generally should be concerning.

A Chinese regime that feels itself under stress from within and without may prove to be more cantankerous, and unpredictable. Australian policymakers should be mindful of the consequences of China getting through this difficult stage without mishap.

Of course, forests have been felled publishing predictions China would be unable to maintain its remarkable transformation since early glimmers of an opening to the outside world appeared in 1978, two years after Mao Zedongs death.

This brings us back to Andrew Robbs observation about a toxic relationship between Beijing and Canberra. Referring to the shelving of a plan to develop a health precinct in China to match that of the Texas Medical Centre  the worlds largest medical facility  Robb said central government officials had kyboshed the arrangement due to ongoing tensions with Australia.

Australian medical professionals would have helped establish the facility. Robb said Landbridge (the company for which Robb was consulting) was told in no uncertain terms by the seniors officials that unfortunately the relationship between Australia and China had become so toxic that this would be put in the bin.

Leaving aside Robbs own chagrin at losing a lucrative consultancy, what is the fair judgement about the state of Australia-China relations?

And, what of Robbs criticism of sections of the Australian security establishment, notably the Australian Strategic Policy Institute? He accused ASPI, a hothouse of China negativity, of being a mouthpiece of the US security agencies and its defence industry.

Given ASPIs hawkish views on China more generally, Robb has a point.

His assessment is correct that China-Australia relations were off-track when the decision was made to scupper the Landbridge-proposed medical facility. But it is also the true that by the end of last year the relationship had been reset.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne went to China in November for what was described as a cordial exchange. This followed a two-year freeze in relations during which no senior Australian official was welcomed in Beijing.

China had made no secret of its displeasure over speeches delivered over time by both then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and then Foreign Minister Julie Bishop in which they had criticised Beijings expansionist activities in the South China Sea, and, in Bishops case, Chinas political model.

Turnbull compounded the situation when he misappropriated an expression attributed to Mao in proclaiming the Peoples Republic on October 1, 1949. Australia had stood up, Turnbull said, when unveiling laws designed to curb foreign interference in Australian domestic affairs.

Next day, Turnbull made things worse by repeating Maos words in Mandarin in his description of legislation that was clearly aimed at Chinese influence.

So what of Robbs comments? Whatever toxicity existed between Canberra and Beijing seems to have dissipated somewhat. However, real risks remain in management of what is Australias most challenging relationship.

It is no good pretending otherwise. China is not a benign power. It will seek to get away with what it can. It resists abiding by a roadmap for a rules-based international order, as we understand it. It will use cyber technology ruthlessly to advance its interests by dubious means, on occasions. It will disappear foreign nationals of those countries which incur its displeasure. It will invest in agents of influence in the Australian system. This includes universities.

All this requires a level of vigilance on the part of the security agencies, and, possibly, a new White Paper aimed specifically at just how Australia might manage a complex relationship that is likely to become, more, not less, complicated.

Bear in mind one in three export dollars depends on a functioning relationship with China.

This is an unsatisfactory situation, but it is the reality.

On the other hand, no purpose is served by yielding to a Canberra security establishment whose machinations risk chilling a relationship that needs to be warmed up, not cooled down.

Former ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, proffered some good advice this week when he said in a newspaper interview that Australia needed to deepen its engagement with China rather than draw back, since, unlike the US, we are living in a Chinese world.

That, whether we like it or not, is the case.

Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
EXPERT OBSERVER

The long delay of two and a half years by the NSW Government in processing the Central Sydney Planning Strategy does not send a good signal about the states planning system.

The City of Sydney Council, after waiting almost three years for the NSW Department of Planning to put the Central Sydney Planning Strategy on exhibition, is now organising its own exhibition. There is something wrong with our planning system ifthe key council for the Sydney CBD and the state governments planning department are unable to agree on plans for the city since July 2016.

The City of Sydney plan included some positive elements in relation to taller buildings in the city, but the plan was negative in relation to encouraging a mixture of uses in the city that wouldi nclude residential towers.

The City Council as well as putting their plan on exhibition have also released a Draft Guideline for Site Specific Planning Proposals where sites can get additional height and floor space. The sites that get this uplift cannot contain residential or serviced apartment floor space and sites are encourage to be amalgamated. So only employment generating buildings can access the additional floor space. Clearly the City is trying to swing the pendulum away from residential development towards commercial development but most world cities are encouraging a mixture of uses so that they become active over 24 hours and 7 days a week.

The Urban Taskforce supports a mixed-use approach to urban areas as many younger people are preferring an urban cosmopolitan life style where they live close to work. The same work / liveapproach should occur across all of Sydneys urban areas and town centres. Major international cities are building mixed use precincts like Hudson Yards in New York and Battersea Power Station renewal in London. The success of projects like Barangaroo which mixes residential and commercial uses demonstrates that Sydney also wants this type of development.
Audi Gainesville team celebrating their Magna Society Award for Oustanding Dealership. Our staff is dedicated to properly representing the Audi brand, said Brinkmann, and I want to recognize the outstanding Audi Gainesville employees who helped us become a Magna Society Award Winning dealership. Its a team effort, every day.

Audi Gainesville was recognized as one of the most outstanding Audi retailers in the U.S. by earning the 2018 Magna Society Award. For a dealership to earn this distinction, they must exceed benchmarks for both customer service and business performance.

Its exciting to see more of our dealer partners earn a Magna Society award each year, demonstrating a commitment to delivering premium customer service, said Cian OBrien, Chief Operating Officer of Audi of America. The growing strength of the Audi dealer network in the U.S. remains a key factor contributing to the brands performance.

Thomas Brinkmann, General Manager of Audi Gainesville, said, Were pleased to offer one of the most successful luxury automobile brands in the world right here in Gainesville, and to be a part of the 50 years of the Audi brand in the U.S. But most of all, were really happy that our customer-focused approach allowed us to be recognized for delivering an exceptional level of customer service. That translated into strong business performance.

Audi Gainesville was one of only 161 dealers across the country to earn Magna Society award status. By supporting the goals established to provide customers with an exclusive brand experience, Magna Society dealerships demonstrate a commitment above and beyond simply meeting standard business objectives and sales targets.

Our staff is dedicated to properly representing the Audi brand, said Brinkmann, and I want to recognize the outstanding Audi Gainesville employees who helped us become a Magna Society Award Winning dealership. Its a team effort, every day.

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About Audi Gainesville

Audi Gainesville is located at 1920 North Main Street in Gainesville, Florida. The 29,000 square foot state-of-the-art dealership sells and services the full line of Audi automobiles, a brand representing the pinnacle of luxury performance, intuitive technology, and efficient operation to minimize environmental impact.

About Warren Henry Auto Group

Warren Henry Auto Group has been in the automotive business in Florida for more than four decades. Today, the automotive group sells and services brands like Lamborghini, Bugatti, Koenigsegg, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Infiniti, in Miami-Dade & Broward Counties, as well as Audi in Gainesville and Toyota, Ford, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and RAM in Key West, Florida. Warren Henry dealerships employ almost 400 people statewide. A new state-of-the-art headquarters for the Warren Henry Auto Group is currently under construction in North Miami on Biscayne Boulevard at SoLe Mia, a $4 billion, 183-acre multi-purpose master planned development.
BVM (http://www.brazosvalleymarketing.com), the company providing simple, smart SEO solutions designed to help you dominate your industry through positive and organic lead generation, had grown across Texas.

It was just a couple short years ago that I returned to my hometown of Texas to launch BVM, says founder and owner Dustin Ogle. The company was a success right out of the gate, quickly attracting the attention of UpCity, of which we became a certified partner.

Ogle continues, Our rapid growth is completely organic. Not only do we use the same proven methods for our own brand that we provide to our clients, word-of-mouth has been our best advertising. When our clients experience outstanding results, they are quick to tell others. In just under two years we have expanded to eight Texas cities. We couldnt be prouder of our team, and we thank our clients for their continued faith in us.

In addition to SEO services, BVM provides local lead generation and web design.

About BVM:

BVM was founded with the local business owner in Houston and Sugar Land, TX in mind, and helps both those starting out and those already established take their business to the next level through web design, social media marketing, lead generation, unquiet content generation, AdWords, SEO and more.

Contact Details:

Dustin Ogle

BVM

5850 San Felipe Street

Suite 500

Houston, TX 77057

Phone: 979-272-6991

Email: dustin(at)brazosvalleymarketing.com

Source: BVM

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Newer car models are more expensive to repair and are preferred targets for car thieves. For these reasons, they are more expensive to insure. However, there are certain ways to make their insurance price more affordable , said Russell Rabichev, Marketing Director of Internet Marketing Company.

Cheapquotesautoinsurance.com has launched a new blog post that explains how policyholders can obtain affordable car insurance for new car models.

For more info and free online car insurance quotes, please visit: https://cheapquotesautoinsurance.com/how-to-get-affordable-car-insurance-for-new-car-models/

Drivers that are looking for a new vehicle purchase should do a little research and see how much it would cost to keep the new vehicle insured. Increased theft rates and higher costs to repair will make newer car models to cost more to insure.

To lower the price of insurance for new car models, drivers should follow the next tips:



Buy the right vehicle. SUV's, mini-vans, crossovers are cheaper to insure than other car types. These types of cars have a high safety rating and usually come equipped with several safety features like rearview cameras, additional airbags, cruise control, and others.

Install safety devices. In addition to the already installed safety devices found on new vehicles, drivers can also install several aftermarket safety devices like lane departure and forward collision warning systems, blind spot detection systems, proximity sensors, tire pressure monitoring systems. But before installing any of these devices, drivers are recommended to check with their insurers to see which one is approved and to ensure that their policies will decrease.

Enroll in a usage-based program. An increasing number of insurance companies offer this type of insurance programs. Usually, a small telematics device is installed in the policyholders vehicle. This device will monitor the driving habits of a driver and will send real-time data to the insurer. Good drivers will be rewarded by the insurance companies with substantial discounts.

Raise the deductibles. Policyholders can save money if they agree to pay more money out of their pockets in case they are at-fault in a car accident.

Check the online insurance quotes. Drivers are recommended to compare at least three car insurance quotes from different insurance companies, before deciding to purchase an insurance plan.

For additional info, money-saving tips and free car insurance quotes, visit https://cheapquotesautoinsurance.com/

Cheapquotesautoinsurance.com is an online provider of life, home, health, and auto insurance quotes. This website is unique because it does not simply stick to one kind of insurance provider, but brings the clients the best deals from many different online insurance carriers. In this way, clients have access to offers from multiple carriers all in one place: this website. On this site, customers have access to quotes for insurance plans from various agencies, such as local or nationwide agencies, brand names insurance companies, etc.
PUBLIC MEDIA GROUP OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, formed by the merger of KCET and PBS SoCal, today announced a full month of environmental programming to honor Earth Day on each of its stations: PBS SoCal, KCET and Link TV. The innovative organization is committed to educating viewers through unique programming and telling stories that matter with original content that reflects the diversity of our region, and our world.

PBS SoCal has created a special lineup in honor of Earth Day that will run throughout the month of April that includes three episodes of the beloved national program NATURE that allows viewers to explore the splendors and compelling stories of the natural world from all over the globe. The lineup includes an all new multi-platform edition of American Spring Live hosted by acclaimed news anchor Juju Chang. Filmed in real time, the three-night event features ecosystems in iconic locations across America, with a mix of live and pre-taped footage.

KCET continues its environmental commitment to educate audiences about the global issues impacting our planet through special programming. KCETs curated series of documentaries focusing on environmental challenges and solutions, EARTH FOCUS PRESENTS, will air three of the most powerful green documentaries during April with topics that range from ecological responsibility and climatic change to the future of our species. April also marks the debut of KCET and Link TVs acclaimed original environmental investigative series EARTH FOCUS, in partnership with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The new season of EARTH FOCUS examines how communities are transitioning to sustainable resources as global demand increases.

Link TV, the national independent non-commercial satellite television network, aims to engage, educate and activate viewers to become involved in the world. Link TV demonstrates its commitment to the environment by hosting a comprehensive lineup of planet-friendly programming that inspires viewers to take action. In addition to the debut of a new season of EARTH FOCUS and EARTH FOCUS PRESENTS, Link TV will also air new episodes of BIONEERS featuring social and scientific innovators with both practical as well as visionary solutions for the worlds most pressing challenges. And it doesnt stop in April. Starting Wed., May 1 at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT, EARTHRISE, a series from Al Jazeera English, will debut on Link TV, taking an upbeat look at ecological, scientific, technological and design projects around the world, pioneering creative solutions to the environmental challenges we all face.

Earth Month Programming will air as follows (*schedule subject to change):

Tues., Apr. 2 at 9 p.m. PT on KCET; Wed, Apr. 3 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV  EARTH FOCUS PRESENTS: A Rivers Last Chance

Streaming on KCET.org, LinkTV.org, YouTube, Amazon, Roku and Apple TV

One of the most diverse rivers in the United States, the Eel ran dry in 2014 for the first time in history. Once victimized by logging, damming and drought, the Eel faces new challenges from some of Californias favorite commodities: wine and weed. The documentary makes a renewed case for regulation and collaboration in protecting this vital resource.

Wed., Apr. 3 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV  BIONEERS: Rebecca Moore - Earth's Vital Signs

Streaming on LinkTV.org, YouTube, Amazon, Roku and Apple TV

Google Earth Outreach founder and visionary engineer Rebecca Moore maintains that our life-support systems are in critical condition, and only recently has it become possible to monitor the health of Earths life-sustaining resources in a manner both globally consistent and locally relevant. She shows how satellite data, cutting-edge science and powerful cloud computing technology such as Google Earth Engine allow us to achieve an unprecedented understanding of our changing environment and put this data into the hands of those who can take action.

Tues., Apr. 9 at 9 p.m. PT on KCET; Wed. Apr. 10 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV- EARTH FOCUS PRESENTS: Tomorrow

Streaming on KCET.org and LinkTV.org

Tomorrow focuses on the people suggesting solutions and next steps for action. The documentary sets out to showcase alternative and creative ways of viewing agriculture, economics, energy and education. It offers constructive solutions to act on a local level in order to make a difference on a global level.

Wed., Apr. 10 at 8 p.m. PT on PBS SoCal - NATURE: The Egg: Lifes Perfect Invention

Streaming on PBSSoCal.org and on the free PBS App

The egg is perhaps natures most perfect life support system. These remarkable structures nurture new life; protecting it from the outside world while still allowing it to breathe. Eggs are strong enough to withstand the full weight of an incubating parent and weak enough for a hatchling to break free. Step by step as the egg hatches, host David Attenborough reveals the wonder behind these incredible miracles of nature.

Wed., Apr. 10 at 10 p.m. PT on PBS SoCal  OZONE: HOW WE SAVED THE PLANET

Streaming on PBSSoCal.org and on the free PBS App

Learn the forgotten story of the hole in the ozone layer and how the world came together to fix it. The scientists and politicians who persuaded Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to take action reveal how the planetary problem was solved.

Fri., Apr. 12 at 2 p.m. PT on KCET  ENOUGH WHITE TEACUPS

A documentary special about sustainability, the wicked problems that plague the world and how design and invention can be used as an antidote, the program highlights the Danish non-profit, INDEX: Design to Improve Life (INDEX). The film explores their history as an international design competition while showcasing the most innovative INDEX award winners and their future goals.

Tues., Apr. 16 at 9 p.m. PT on KCET; Wed. Apr. 17 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV - EARTH FOCUS PRESENTS: Planetary

Streaming on KCET.org, LinkTV.org, YouTube, Amazon, Roku and Apple TV

A cross-continental cinematic journey explores our cosmic origins and our future as a species. It is a poetic and humbling reminder that now is the time to shift our perspective.

Wed., Apr.17 at 8 p.m. PT on PBS SoCal - NATURE: Big Birds Cant Fly

Streaming on PBSSoCal.org and on the free PBS App

It may seem strange that among the more than 10,000 bird species in the world today is a group that literally cannot fly or sing, and whose wings are more fluff than feather. These are the ratites: the ostrich, emu, rhea, kiwi and cassowary. How and why these birds abandoned flight has puzzled scientists since Darwins time, but DNA and dedicated research are helping to solve these mysteries.

Wed., Apr. 17 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV  BIONEERS: Elizabeth Dwoskin - What We've Learned About Tech Giants

Streaming on LinkTV.org, YouTube, Amazon, Roku and Apple TV

Elizabeth Dwoskin is the Washington Posts Silicon Valley correspondent covering the rise of data-hungry technology companies, online conspiracies, and Russian meddling on social media. She was part of the team that broke over a dozen stories on Russian operatives use of Facebook, Twitter, and Google to influence the 2016 presidential election. She shines a light on our growing awareness of the dark side of Silicon Valley, and how that awareness is reshaping public policy, our understanding of democracy, and the way tech is used and built.

Fri., Apr. 19 at 2 p.m. PT on KCET  THE RELUCTANT RADICAL

This documentary features activist Ken Ward as he confronts his fears and puts himself in the direct path of the fossil fuel industry to combat climate change. The film reveals both the personal costs and the fulfillment that comes from following ones moral calling. The film follows Ken through a series of direct actions, culminating with an action that shuts down all the U.S. tar sands oil pipelines and threatens to put him behind bars for 20 years.

Tues., Apr. 23 at 8:30 p.m. ET/PT on KCET; Weds. April 24 at 9 p.m. on Link TV  EARTH FOCUS  New Season!

Streaming on KCET.org, LinkTV.org, YouTube, Amazon, Roku and Apple TV

Launched in 2007, EARTH FOCUS is the longest-running environmental news magazine on U.S. television providing regional and national audiences with urgent local and global environmental coverage that spotlights issues, impact and possible solutions from a variety of unique perspectives. In production since 2006, EARTH FOCUS features in-depth reports on key issues such as endangered species, climate change, environmental health and sustainable practices.

Wed., Apr. 24 at 9 p.m. PT on PBS SoCal - NOVA: Saving the Dead Sea

Streaming on PBSSoCal.org and on the free PBS App

As the Dead Sea shrinks, engineers prepare a daring solution: connect it with the Red Sea by way of a massive desalination plant. If it works, it could stabilize the legendary lake and ease regional tensions. But will it put the environment at risk?

Wed., Apr. 24 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV  BIONEERS: May Boeve - Climate Change Is Changing the World Now

Streaming on LinkTV.org, YouTube, Amazon, Roku and Apple TV

As Executive Director of 350.org, the groundbreaking grassroots international climate change campaign, May Boeve shares her eagle-eye perspective on the current state of the climate struggle. She illustrates her learnings and strategies moving forward, including ways of learning about and incorporating justice and equity. She illuminates pathways our species must take to keep 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground and radically accelerate the shift to 100% clean energy.

Fri., April 26, 2 p.m. PT on KCET  WATER FROM THE WILDERNESS: HETCH HETCHY TO SAN FRANCISCO

Streaming on KCET.org

This documentary traces the extraordinary history of San Franciscos water system as well as the engineering and delivery of an urban water system in the era of climate change. The 1906 earthquake spurred city fathers to create a public water utility. When the city chose a site in the pristine Hetch Hetchy valley inside Yosemite National Park, an epic battle was led by John Muir.

Mon., Apr. 29 at 8 p.m. PT on PBS SoCal - NATURE: American Spring Live

Streaming on PBSSoCal.org and on the free PBS App

From Yosemite to the Everglades, bear cubs to hummingbirds, hibernation to pollination, spring is coming! This new season triggers extraordinary biological change. Tentative live locations include Californias Sequoia National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore, Floridas Everglades, the Eastern shore of Virginia, a sheep farm in Maine, a black bear den in rural Western Maryland and Texass Bracken Cave and the Gulf Coast.

ABOUT PUBLIC MEDIA GROUP OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

PUBLIC MEDIA GROUP OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA tells stories that matter. We create original programs that reflect the diversity of the region, and share the full schedule of PBS programs that viewers love and trust  delivering a public media service that educates, informs and empowers. Through three content channels  PBS SoCal, KCET and LINK TV  our library of programs is available for streaming on any internet-connected screen, seven Southern California broadcast channels, and one national satellite channel. A donor-supported community institution, PUBLIC MEDIA GROUP OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA hosts hundreds of in-person cultural events, screenings and community conversations to spark the sharing of diverse ideas and perspectives and delivers real social impact through an Early Learning service that prepares our most vulnerable children for school, as well as other special public service initiatives. Find us at pbssocal.org, kcet.org and linktv.org. *
Lincoln Perk coffee house, Lincoln Park, Michigan Were pleased to welcome Owner Rudy Cianfarani, Manager Candice Hildebrandt and their team to the Crimson Cup community. Helping entrepreneurs like Rudy open their own unique independent coffee shops drives our success as an award-winning coffee roaster and coffee shop franchise alternative.

Columbus coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea recently welcomed Lincoln Perk to the group of independent coffee shops, cafes and bakeries it supports in 37 states. The shop at 3461 Fort Street is one of 16 new independent coffee shops that opened in 2018 through Crimson Cups 7 Steps to Success coffee shop franchise alternative program.

Were pleased to welcome Owner Rudy Cianfarani, Manager Candice Hildebrandt and their team to the Crimson Cup community, said Founder and President Greg Ubert. Helping entrepreneurs like Rudy open their own unique independent coffee shops drives our success as an award-winning coffee roaster and coffee shop franchise alternative.

After a 38-year career with MichCon, Cianfarani said he thought it would be fun to open up a coffee shop. Of course, I also wanted to make money! he said.

He and Hildebrandt learned how to open a coffee shop through Crimson Cups 7 Steps to Success coffee franchise alternative program. Based on Uberts book, Seven Steps to Success in the Specialty Coffee Industry, Crimson Cups 7 Steps program has helped hundreds of independent coffee shops in 37 states open and stay and business.

After working through the 7 Steps, Cianfarani said he found Step 6, Focus on Customer Service, most helpful in opening their coffee shop. Make sure you hire trustworthy employees! he said.

Crimson Cup assigns a 7 Steps trainer to guide the coffee shop owner and team through a successful opening. We love working with Jennifer Kerchner because she ran a coffee shop, Cianfarani said. This gives Crimson Cup a leg up on most competitors.

Cianfarani looked for the right location for years. There was nothing here that was in-and-out on the way to the expressway, he said. He developed Lincoln Perk as a drive-thru coffee shop. Four lanes sit on the north side of the former bank building, prepared for the morning rush of java drinkers

Lincoln Perk serves a full menu of hot, iced and frozen espresso drinks  including mochas, lattes and cappuccinos  as well as iced coffee and tea, cold-brewed coffee, hot chocolate, fruit smoothies and other custom drinks. An assortment of fresh baked goods rounds out the menu.

Hildebrandt said local java lovers love the coffee, which is roasted by Crimson Cup. Her favorite drink is the Lincoln Perk Mocha, which melds white chocolate and caramel sauces with espresso.

Crimson Cup coffee has been judged among the best in the nation. The roaster was named 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year by Roast magazine, the flagship publication of the specialty coffee industry. Its Ethiopian Kossa Kebena coffee won a 2017 Good Food Award and was a finalist for a 2019 Good Food Award. Crimson Cup coffees have also brought home trophies and medals from the Americas Best Espresso competition and Golden Bean North America roasting competitions.

Cianfarani shares Crimson Cups focus on coffee and community. Now that were open, we want to be a part of the community, serving local businesses and giving back to local people, he said.

Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea

Columbus, Ohio coffee roaster Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea is Roast magazines 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year. Since 1991, Crimson Cup has roasted sustainably sourced craft coffee in small batches, sold directly to consumers and as wholesale coffee beans. Through its 7 Steps to Success coffee franchise alternative program, the company also teaches entrepreneurs to run successful coffee houses. By developing a coffee shop business plan, prospective entrepreneurs gain insight into how much it costs to open a coffee shop. Crimson Cup coffee is available through more than 350 independent coffee houses, grocers, college and universities, restaurants and food service operations across 37 states, Guam and Bangladesh, as well as the companys own Crimson Cup Coffee Houses. To learn more, visit crimsoncup.com.
D.W. Smith, a history lover with a background in engineering, race car building and driving, and house design and construction living in peaceful retirement just outside of San Antonio, New Mexico, has completed his book My, My: More Rattlesnake Gulch Tales: a collection of short stories exploring human nature, the spirited mischief of children, and rural American life.

My, My is a collection of twenty-seven short stories. These stories are written to entertain the reader and sometimes make a statement. There is everything from bulls, emus, Model A Fords, and traveling rocks to the Devil Made the Kid Do It stories. They are set in New Mexico and Oklahoma, where the author has spent most of his life telling tall tales and lies with a twinkle in his eye. He has a unique sense of humor that will bring a smile to your heart and maybe be a small distraction in this crazy world we live in.

Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, D.W. Smiths book is a collection of entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny short and tall tales depicting the lighter side of life in the American Southwest.

Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchaseMy, My: More Rattlesnake Gulch Tales at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional New York-based, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not overwhelmed with logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and the like. Its roster of accomplished authors and publishing professionals allows writers to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues to focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.


A Life of Impact: an encouraging and motivational read meant to positively share the love of God. A Life of Impact is the creation of published author, Deborah Shisler, a devout Christian since the age of seven, Shisler makes it her life goal to honor and glorify the Lord in all her words and actions. Shisler resides in Phoenix, Arizona with her parents and brother.

Shisler shares One reason I have felt compelled to write this book is simply because I love my dad so much, and I wish to honor him in this way. I could never fully express my gratitude for all that he has taught me, for all the support and encouragement he has given me my whole life, and for the love he has shown me as a father. Another reason extends from the previous notion in that my dad has provided a wonderful example of how loving, caring, and so much more our heavenly Father is.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Deborah Shislers new book was written with the hope that through her words a spark could be started. A small flicker, that may ignite and encourage the reader to see that a relationship with God the Father has all the potential to be just as powerful as the relationship that has formed with our Earthly fathers.

View a synopsis of A Life of Impact on YouTube.

Consumers can purchaseA Life of Impact at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about A Life of Impact, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
Chef Schreibers Salad Nicoise with Ahi Tuna, Liquid Egg, Provencal Olive, Pommes Gaufrette featured on Gout de France menu in AG. I am honored to showcase my French heritage within our southern steakhouse says Chef Schreiber. Being a part of this worldwide event connects me with my home and the recipes I grew up cooking with family.

AG, modern bar and steakhouse, at The Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta is joining the Consulate General of France in Atlanta to host a Gout de France (Good France) dinner March 21-24, 2019. Restaurants around the globe will feature a four-course menu celebrating French talent and culinary expertise.

The hotels Executive Chef Gilles Schreiber from Mutzig, a small town in the region of Alsace, France, has crafted the menu for this exclusive dinner. I am honored to showcase my French heritage within our southern steakhouse says Chef Schreiber. Being a part of this worldwide event connects me with my home and the recipes I grew up cooking with family.

The Gout de France dinner is priced at $99 per guest or $139 per guest including wine pairings. A portion of the proceeds from each dinner will benefit Childrens Miracle Network, part of the hotels Community Footprints initiatives. The Gout de France menu includes:

Salad Nicoise

Ahi Tuna, Liquid Egg, Provencal Olive, Pommes Gaufrette

2014 Michel Gassier Costieres de Nimes, Nostre Pais Blanc, Rhone Valley

Rouget Barbet

Red Mullet, Ratatouille Pearl, Pomme Fondante, Saffron Fumet

2016 Chateau Sainte-Anne Bandol Rose, Provence

Texture de Saint Maure de Touraine

Peach Compote

2017 Seguin Pere et Fils Pouilly Fume, Loire Valley

Clafoutis

Cherries and Berries

2013 Gerard Bertrand Banyuls Vin Doux Naturel, Languedoc-Roussillon

According to the French Consulate, last year 3,500 restaurants participated in Gout de France throughout 152 countries, reaching a total of 300,000 people. AG and Chef Schreiber are delighted to be a part of the 2019 initiative and give back to the local community.

AG is located on the second floor of The Ritz-Carlton, Atlanta in the heart of downtown, open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner as well as Weekend Brunch. Enjoy outdoor dining on the Veranda overlooking Peachtree Street. For reservations and additional information, please call 404.221.6550 or visit ritzcarlton.com/AG. Follow AG on Instagram @AG_restaurant.
E.V. Stephens, a lifelong resident of Chicago, has completed her book Shortcuts: A Valerie Benchik Novel: an action-packed crime story featuring a fearless detective who does not hesitate to put her life on the line for justice.

Stephens writes, Detectives Valerie Benchik and Greg Payton team up on a new case when the first killer Val arrested turns up dead in a Dumpster only weeks after being released from prison on a technicality.

Val supported the relatives of Curtis Sheltons victims throughout his trial, and shes reluctant to dredge up their painful memories even when evidence suggests one of them may have taken revenge. Her behavior forces Payton and others to question her commitment to the case, so the last thing Val needs is a distraction, but she ends up with three. First, her estranged sister, Kelly, returns to Bedford and shares a shocking secret that threatens their relationship and Kellys sobriety. Next, Val gets blindsided by the news that the man who murdered her childhood friend, Annie Fiorello, is being released from prison after a witness recanted his testimony. And then, before she can find solid ground, a rift develops between Val and her BFF Connie Warren after Connie becomes the victim of a crime.

One fateful night, while feeling as though she failed to protect everyone she loves, Val recklessly confronts Annies killer, and when hes found dead, she becomes the prime suspect in her own investigation.

Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, E.V. Stephenss book is a riveting crime novel weaving a complex tale around the personal and professional adventures of the fearless Detective Val Benchik.

Readers who wish to experience this gripping work can purchaseShortcuts: A Valerie Benchik Novel at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional New York-based, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not overwhelmed with logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and the like. Its roster of accomplished authors and publishing professionals allows writers to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues to focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.


Construction industry leaders will be recognized as Top 25 Newsmakers at the prestigious Award of Excellence Gala on March 21, 2019, held for the 54th year by Engineering News-Record (ENR, http://www.enr.com/), the industry-leading information source from BNP Media. The astute leaders, risk takers, clever problem solvers and passionate community servants being honored at the dinner improve the construction industry and benefit the public.

The editors have chosen just one of the 25 to win ENRs Award of Excellencethe subject of the cover story in our upcoming March 18-25 issue. All 25 Newsmakers and the Award of Excellence winner will be celebrated at a black-tie gala on March 21 at a new locationPier 60 at Chelsea Piers, in Manhattan. Joining in the honors that night will be ENRs Best of the Best winning project teams, which were announced this week.

2019s Top 25 Newsmakers are featured on the ENR website at http://www.enr.com/top-25-newsmakers-2018 and include:



John Aho

Kevin Bagnall

Gary H. Baker

Mark Bryant

Kris Caldwell

Joel Cesare

Ginger Evans

Michael Feigin

Gerry Galloway

Frances Halsband

Megan Kreiger

Andres Lepage

Ron Lewis

John Matyasovszky

Ehab Meselhe

Paul Murdoch

Vicki OLeary

Todd Orbus

Gregory Penza

Russell Poppe

Stacy Smedley

Leo Sveikauskas

Carlette Walker

Alla Weinstein

Tracy Young

Sponsors of ENRs 52nd Annual Award of Excellence include CMiC, Figg, Ironworkers International/IMPACT, and supporting sponsors AECOM Tishman, AGC of America, AISC, ASCE, BMO Harris Bank, CMAA, Dodge, Dragados USA, Earthcam, McCarthy, Ornamental Metal Institute of New York, Parsons, the Steel Institute of New York, and Turner.

For more information on attending or sponsoring the ENR Award of Excellence Gala, visit http://www.AOE2019.com.

For more about ENR events, visit http://www.enr.com/events.

About BNP Media: BNP Media is one of the countrys leading business-to-business media companies serving industry professionals across 50+ industries through magazines, custom media, eNewsletters, websites, conferences, events and market research. BNP Media is committed to helping professionals succeed in business by providing superior information. Founded in 1926, BNP Media is a fourth-generation, family-run business headquartered in Troy, Michigan with regional offices around the country. To learn more, visit: http://www.bnpmedia.com/.
The privilege of serving clients & pursuing justice has become a driving force for success, ultimately awarding me membership into the Million Dollar Advocates Forum. To be among such a distinguished group of U.S. lawyers is a top honor that I will continue to value, says Attorney Dwayne L. Brown.

Having earned a stellar reputation for client satisfaction, personal injury attorney Dwayne L. Brown works tirelessly to build a strong, supportive relationship with his clients. As such, his firm has gained national recognition as one that is aggressive and committed to upholding the rights of and seeking justice for injured persons and victims of wrongful death by negligence. Attorney Brown represents plaintiffs in Alabama, Georgia and across the U.S. in lawsuits arising from car accidents, truck accidents, medical malpractice and insurance fraud, as well as assisting injured employees in workers compensation claims.

Dwayne L. Brown is now a member of the exclusive Million Dollar Advocates Forum, a group reserved for top U.S. lawyers that have won million dollar verdicts and settlements. Founded in 1993, the forum upholds strict, objective standards and qualifications. Invitations for membership are sent to attorneys who appear to be qualified. An applicant must demonstrate that he or she has acted as Principal Counsel in one or more cases that have resulted in a final judgment, award or settlement in favor of his or her client in the amount of one million dollars or more. While an attorney may receive a personal invitation, an existing member can also nominate him or her.

The privilege of serving clients and pursuing justice and fairness has become a driving force for success, ultimately awarding me membership into the Million Dollar Advocates Forum. To be among such a distinguished group of U.S. lawyers is a top honor that I will continue to value throughout my career, says Attorney Dwayne L. Brown.

More About Attorney Dwayne L. Brown and the Law Office of Dwayne L. Brown:

Dwayne L. Brown received his law degree from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1994, and was admitted to the practice of law in September 1994. Attorney Brown gained vast knowledge by practicing law for several years with a national plaintiffs law firm before establishing a solo practice in 1998.

Mr. Browns high ethical standards and professional excellence has earned him the Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent Rating in 2017. This elite recognition is based on evaluations from his peers, as well as members of the bar and the judiciary in the United States and Canada.

The Law Office of Dwayne L. Brown is a top personal injury law firm in Atlanta, GA and Montgomery, AL. With an emphasis on quality over quantity, the firm does not take a substantial number of cases. Rather, Attorney Dwayne Brown gives personalized time and attention needed to produce the most favorable outcome possible for each client.

For more information about Attorney Dwayne L. Brown or the services provided at his Atlanta or Montgomery based law offices, please visit https://dlblawfirm.com or call (678) 505-0559.
Firo Fire Kissed Pizza in Georgetown, TX Were really excited to be able to bring our delicious pizza and gelato to the Georgetown community.

Firo Fire Kissed Pizza announced the opening of its third restaurant, located in Georgetown, Texas, on Saturday, March 9. Established in 2014, Firo already has two other successful locations in Lawton, Oklahoma and McKinney, Texas. In honor of the opening, Firo awarded the first 50 guests with membership into a program which allows them to enjoy one free pizza per week for a year.

The Georgetown location opened its doors prior to the grand opening event for a friends and family event, as well as a soft opening to the general public. Guests were able to get a taste of artisan pizza while the staff gained valuable experience serving the community.

Were really excited to be able to bring our delicious pizza and gelato to the Georgetown community. We have fans in North Texas because of our other two locations, and we heard their requests to bring it south  so we did! said founder Matt Jones.

Customers of Firo can choose a pizza from the Signature menu, designed to combine delicious flavors in unique recipes, or they can build their own pizza from an assortment of nearly 30 different toppings. The current customer favorite at the other locations is the Primo, a sweet and savory recipe that combines smoked prosciutto with mozzarella, provolone, fontina and gorgonzola cheeses and is topped with a fig, a balsamic reduction and shaved parmesan. All of the ingredients used at Firo are brought in fresh, including the dough which is house-made. Many ingredients are imported from Italy, including the tomatoes used in the marinara.

The term fire kissed refers to the large brick ovens that bake the pizzas at a temperature of over 500 degrees. This high heat cooks quickly, while creating a delicious combination of a crunchy and chewy crust. The exposed brick oven lends to the overall ambiance of Tuscany, combined with modern and artistic elements throughout the restaurant, giving each location a unique flair.

Guests can visit the newest location of Firo Fire Kissed Pizza at 3702 D B Wood Road, Georgetown.
Alexandra (Alex) Tieu, Head Area Broker at Movoto Real Estate, has been accepted into Forbes Real Estate Council, an invitation-only community for executives in the real estate industry.

Alex was vetted and selected by a review committee based on the depth and diversity of her experience. Criteria for acceptance include a track record of successfully impacting business growth metrics, as well as personal and professional achievements and honors.

We are honored to welcome Alex into the community, said Scott Gerber, founder of Forbes Councils, the collective that includes Forbes Real Estate Business Council. Our mission with Forbes Councils is to bring together proven leaders from every industry, creating a curated, social capital-driven network that helps every member grow professionally and make an even greater impact on the business world.

As an accepted member of the Council, Alex has access to a variety of exclusive opportunities designed to help her reach peak professional influence. She will connect and collaborate with other respected local leaders in a private forum. Alex will also be invited to work with a professional editorial team to share her expert insights in original business articles on Forbes.com, and to contribute to published Q&A panels alongside other experts.

I am so excited about joining the Forbes Real Estate Council and humbled by to opportunity to be a contributor to this incredible community, said Alex Technology is changing every facet of real estate and being able to take a deeper look into these topics on the Forbes platform will be super exciting.

ABOUT FORBES COUNCILS

Forbes Councils is a collective of invitation-only communities created in partnership with Forbes and the expert community builders who founded Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC). In Forbes Councils, exceptional business owners and leaders come together with the people and resources that can help them thrive.

For more information about Forbes Real Estate Business Council, visit forbesrealestatecouncil.com. To learn more about Forbes Councils, visit forbescouncils.com.

About Movoto

Movoto Real Estate is the second largest online real estate brokerage in the US and the only one licensed in all 50 states. With over 100 million people searching for homes annually on Movoto.com and over 30,000 properties sold, Movoto is one of the most influential online real estate platforms in the United States.

Movoto is expanding to click-and-mortar locations in California to provide their customers: home buyers and sellers, agents and brokers with unmatched services and technology solutions. For more information see our news and press resources and real estate market trends. Sell your home with Movoto or search for available homes for sale.
Great Basin Brewing Company hosts Beers & Beasts: Finding Icky, detailing the newest scientific discoveries by German paleontologist Dr. Martin Sander, the release of Hazyosaur Hazy IPA, live music, food, games and more.

Great Basin Brewing Co., Nevadas most award-winning brewery, is joining forces with the National Geographic Society, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, the University of Bonn in Germany and the German Research Foundation to kick off the highly anticipated Beers & Beasts series. They will be revealing their latest findings  rare discoveries of species previously unknown to science as well as challenging our understanding of the prehistoric world.



In recent years, students and professors from the Division of Paleontology of the Steinmann Institute of the University of Bonn, led by Dr. P. Martin Sander, professor of vertebrate paleontology, discovered 10 different species of Ichthyosaurs, some completely unknown in the fossil record. A new discovery of a rare Ophthalmosaurus lends an important clue to the evolution of other species of creatures found throughout the world.



Not to be confused with dinosaurs, Ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles and have been identified as the first large predator to emerge after a major extinction event over 250 million years ago. They also represent Nevadas official state fossil, a species known as Shonosaurus that grew to over 60 feet in length



Founder and brewmaster of Great Basin Brewing Co. and former geologist, Tom Young, possesses a true passion for helping to uncover and preserve these incredible specimens. Paired with his curiosity for Nevadas beasts is his unquenchable love of great beer. To honor and support the hunt to uncover and share these creatures with the rest of the world, Great Basin Brewing Co. has proudly brewed their award-winning Ichthyosaur Icky IPA since 1993.



To truly appreciate the present, we must understand the past, explains Young. As we further discover the incredible journey our planet has taken to become what we call home today.



Great Basin Brewing Co. has supported paleontological expeditions in Nevada for over 12 years. To date the brewery has donated over $35,000 as well as labor and beer, including transporting a newly uncovered 50-foot fossil in their beer truck through the backroads of Nevada to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.



This year, Great Basin Brewing Co. and their partners are honored to host Beers & Beats: Finding Icky, a party and fundraiser to assist the continuing research of Nevadas mysterious creatures, and some of the oldest and largest Ichthyosaurs ever found. The event will be held at the brewerys production facility, Great Basin Taps & Tanks in Reno, NV. Doors open at 5pm. Dr. P. Martin Sander will present the latest findings and reveal the answers to many sought after questions, like why the biggest Ichthyosaurs in the world have been found in Nevada.



In preparation for the event, Dr. Martin explains, I travel the world to study rare fossils and am also rewarded by sampling rare beers. I am excited about the new discovery of the strangest beast of all, Omphalosaurus Nevadanus. It makes this remote site in Nevada one of the most important places in the world to understand these awe-inspiring progressions in the fossil record.



To commemorate the newest discovery, the brewery will also release a new beer, Hazyosaur, a beastly Hazy IPA. There will be food for purchase, as well as entertaining games, like 4-person team Pin-the-Tail on the Ichthyosaur, plenty of prizes and live music. This event is limited to the first 300 people. RSVP on Eventbrite to save your spot and receive a free Great Brewing Basin Co. pint glass. A suggested donation of $10 will be collected at the door to help support upcoming expeditions and the preservation of new fossils. Event details can be found at greatbasinbrewingco.com.



This event kicks-off a five part series of scientific presentations to the community about Nevadas beasts, both big and small, as well as other important discoveries. The other presentations in this series are scheduled throughout the month of April and will be held at Great Basin Taps and Tanks production brewery.



Traveling from afar, highly acclaimed paleontologists, like Dr. Sander, will discuss research ranging from tiny beasts like diatoms, huge dinosaurs and the evolutionary evidence that birds may have developed from dinosaurs. More information on the Beers & Beasts series can be found at http://www.greatbasinbrewingco.com.



Along with Great Basin Brewing Co., sponsors of this expedition include; The University of Bonn, DFG German Research Foundation, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the National Geographic Society, and the German Research Foundation.



Date: March 22, 2019

Location: Great Basin Taps & Tanks 1155 S. Rock Blvd. Reno, Nevada

Time: 5pm-10pm

RSVP Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ichthyosaur-expedition-party-tickets-57738772222



About Great Basin Brewing Co.

Since 1993, Tom Young and his wife Bonda have run a successful restaurant and brewery, now the oldest and most award-winning brewery in Nevada. Great Basin Brewing Co. has become the local place to go for great beer, great food and a great time. To help with the rising demand of local craft beer, Great Basin Brewing Co. opened its second location in Reno in July 2010. Opportunities allowed Great Basin to open the Taps & Tanks location in 2012 as a production facility and taproom. Great Basin is distributing several of its beers in northern Nevada, southern Nevada and northern California, and looking to expand. The company has won numerous medals at the prestigious Great American Beer Festival and the prestigious World Beer Cup.
Dave Pearce, Handy Seafood Handy Seafood has all of the key components, and I look forward to working with the Handy team.

Handy Seafood Incorporated, a family-owned company with 125 years of quality seafood processing, welcomes Dave Pearce as Executive Vice President. In his new role, Pearce joins the executive leadership at Handy Seafood.

Dave is an industry veteran who most recently worked at Tampa Maid Foods where he served as President and CEO. He also served as chairman of the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) in 2017.

Dave is a proven leader with industry experience, and he will be pivotal in accelerating our growth in the future said Todd Conway, Handy Seafoods chief executive officer.

Im thrilled to join the Handy Seafood team as the company celebrates 125 years as a trusted brand, said Dave Pearce. Handy Seafood has all of the key components, and I look forward to working with the Handy team.

Handy Seafood is a family-owned company with over 125 years of quality seafood processing. Products include soft shell crabs, crab meat, crab cakes, seafood specialty items, oysters and grouper. http://www.handyseafood.com
Cover art, "One of Our Robots is Missing," for Writers of the Future 35 You could call the Writers of the Future Contest The American Idol for Writerslong before there ever was an American Idol.

The L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards ceremony, celebrating its 35th anniversary of the internationally-acclaimed Writers of the Future Contest and its companion Illustrators of the Future Contest, will be broadcast on Friday, April 5, 7:30 PM (Pacific), to a worldwide audience via the Internet, it was announced today. Streaming will be live from http://www.writersofthefuture.com where a countdown to the event can currently be seen.

Themed around the book cover art entitled "One of Our Robots Is Missing" painted by award-winning artist Bob Eggleton, the opening act will be performed by EMCirque and a Mars Rover prototype.

The evening ceremony will be held before a packed hall of invited guests, celebrities, and many of speculative fictions most popular writers and illustrators at The Taglyan Complex in Los Angeles, all gathered to find out who will win the Writers of the Future Golden Pen award and a $5,000 check and the Illustrators of the Future Golden Brush award and their $5,000 check.

You could call the Writers of the Future Contest The American Idol for Writerslong before there ever was an American Idol, said USA Today and New York Times best-selling author and Contest judge Kevin J. Anderson (Dune prequels, Saga of Seven Suns, Star Wars). Its amazing to me that a good 60 to 70 percent of the winners go on with successful careers in writing, and several have become best-selling authors themselves.

As the top names in the science fiction and fantasy world, Contest judges will be on hand to present the annual awards to this years writer and illustrator winners as well as the grand prize winner for each Contest. Writer judges who will be attending include Kevin J. Anderson, Doug Beason, Gregory Benford, Orson Scott Card, David Farland, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Todd McCaffrey, Rebecca Moesta, Larry Niven, Jody Lynn Nye, Nnedi Okorafor, Tim Powers, Robert J. Sawyer, and Dean Wesley Smith. Illustrator judges will include Echo and Lazarus Chernik, Bob Eggleton, Larry Elmore, Val Lakey Lindahn, Sergey Poyarkov, and Rob Prior.

This annual gala ceremony for new writers and illustrators of science fiction and fantasy is such a moving experience that we want all speculative fiction fans everywhere and the friends and families of this years winners to witness it, said Joni Labaqui, the Contests director.

Every quarter, three writers and three illustrators are selected by a panel of leading authors and artists of science fiction and fantasy. With no entry fee and judging done on an anonymous basis, the criterion is strictly merit. Beside first time publication, benefits include over $30,000 in cash prizes and royalties, a week-long workshop with top professionals of the genre as well as book signings, radio, and TV interviews organized by the contest administrators to assist the winners in launching their careers.

Please note, this is a live broadcast, so check your time zone for when it will show in your location. You can follow the live countdown to the achievement awards at http://www.writersofthefuture.com.

For more information, on the Contests, go to http://www.writersofthefuture.com.
Author Jada Pasquale Yengkopiong has long been concerned with rising conflict in South Sudan. He was an eyewitness to the Juba Nuer Massacre in 2013. His book The Golgotha: South Sudan 15 December 2013 covered the tribal politics of South Sudan. Now, in his new book, The Terrorists Within: South Sudans Tribal Ascendancy (published by Balboa Press AU), Yengkopiong aims to tell the truth about the Dinka regime who, the author explains, dominate South Sudan through their tribal politics. The book is available for purchase at: https://www.amazon.com/Terrorists-Within-Sudans-Tribal-Ascendancy/dp/150431655X/.

This is a self-inflicted suffering, as the leaders and the masses condone tyranny because of tribal influences, says Yengkopiong. The readers need to know that the war in South Sudan is not a political war, but a tribal war, and the aim is to exert tribal dominance.

Throughout the book, Yengkopiong underscores the growing threat of terrorism within the country, and provides a historical perspective on the genocide occurring at the hands of terrorists in an often-hidden region of the world. The author uncovers what he believes to be the intentions of the Dinka tribal regime, and documents the acts of tribal leadership that has inflicted great suffering on the region. Yengkopiong says South Sudan needs international attention if it is going to survive.

Everyone seems to put their own opinion on what terrorists are, says Yengkopiong. But the reality is that some governments do the exact same things that the terrorists do. In this way, governments can be terrorists too.

The Terrorists Within

By Jada Pasquale Yengkopiong

Softcover | 6 x 9 in | 186 pages | ISBN 9781504316552

E-Book | 186 pages | ISBN 9781504316569

Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author

Jada Pasquale Yengkopiong was born in Juba, South Sudan. He graduated with the General Certificate of Education from the University of London. He joined Makerere High School in Kampala and graduated with a Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education. He was admitted to the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Yengkopiong is asking the people of the world to not ignore the tribal politics of South Sudan. He also asks that those involved in crimes against humanity account for their actions. In this way, he believes peace will prevail in South Sudan for generations.

Balboa Press Australia is a division of Hay House, Inc., a leading provider in publishing products that specialise in self-help and the mind, body and spirit genre. Through an alliance with indie book publishing leader Author Solutions, LLC, authors benefit from the leadership of Hay House Publishing and the speed-to-market advantages of the Author Solutions self-publishing model. For more information or to start publishing today, visit balboapress.com.au/ or call 1800 050 315. For the latest, follow @balboapress on Twitter and Like us at facebook.com/BalboaPress.
The L.L.Bean flagship retail store in Freeport, Maine, located near the outdoor retailer's corporate offices. Improvements in core profitability enabled the company to invest nearly $45 million in employee benefits in 2018.

L.L.Bean announced today both its fiscal 2018 sales results and its intention to pay a performance bonus to its employees. For the fiscal year ending February 24, 2019, L.L.Bean reported annual net revenue of $1.6 billion, up 1% over 2017. Based on these results, the L.L.Bean Board of Directors approved a performance bonus of 5% of annual pay to approximately 5,400 eligible employees, as well as an additional 2% enhancement 401(k) contribution.

The solid company performance comes at a time when the retail industry continues to experience challenges and follows a year in which considerable changes were made at the company. In 2018 the company completed the upgrade of internal legacy technology and warehouse systems which resulted in record setting daily orders processed, the highest on-time delivery and the lowest customer product backlogs in decades. Additionally, changes to the return policy cut fraudulent and abusive returns. L.L.Bean also continued to grow its Be an Outsider marketing campaign that has attracted a notable increase in new buyers.

Measured against corporate goals and expectations, we performed well in a very competitive industry and a very difficult retail economy, said Steve Smith, L.L.Bean President and CEO. We are on a journey towards growing our top line and the improvement to our bottom line is a critical first step. Improved profitability allows us to invest in our business. Today we thank and appreciate the hard work and dedication of our employees, the loyalty of our customers and the quality of our products and services.

The company made significant investments in employee benefits. Improvements in core profitability enabled the company to invest nearly $45 million in employee benefits in 2018 including the discretionary cash bonus, 401(k) contributions and enhancements, expanded paid time off, paid parental leave and eldercare support, and a holiday gift.

The year-end bonus and the enhanced contribution to the 401(k) underscores the ownerships commitment to sharing the companys profits and financial success with those who create them, our employees, said Shawn Gorman, L.L.Beans Executive Chairman of the Board. Our employees are who we are. The Board of Directors and the family are pleased that their efforts and excellence make it possible to reward them with a year-end bonus.

About L.L.Bean

L.L.Bean, Inc. is a leading multichannel merchant of quality outdoor gear and apparel. Founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean, the company began as a one-room operation selling a single product, the Maine Hunting Shoe. L.L.Bean is a family-owned Maine company led by Executive Chairman, Shawn Gorman, the great-grandson of Leon Leonwood Bean; and Stephen Smith, President and CEO. While its business has grown over the years, L.L.Bean continues to uphold the values of its founder, including his dedication to quality, customer service and a love of the outdoors. In the past ten years the company has provided over $30 million to nonprofit organizations. L.L.Bean currently operates 44 stores in 18 states across the United States, along with 28 stores in Japan. The 220,000-sq. ft. L.L.Bean retail store campus in Freeport, ME, is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and welcomes more than 3 million visitors every year. L.L.Bean can be found worldwide at http://www.llbean.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram.


Originally from England, Tony and Lizzie have chosen to make the Los Angeles area their new home.

Youve Got Maids is pleased to announce that we are opening a new house cleaning franchise servicing Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Calabasas, Malibu, Agoura Hills, Westlake Village, and Newbury Park. Youve 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 Los Angeles for many years. Youve Got Maids of Thousand Oaks is owned and operated by new franchisees, Tony and Lizzie Slade.

Tony and Lizzie have a strong interest in the community and has already committed to giving back to the Thousand Oaks area. Tony and Lizzie have 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. Youve 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 Tony and Lizzie, Youve Got Maids is positioned to increase our commitment to this great cause.

Tony and Lizzie recently completed a comprehensive training program at Youve Got Maids corporate headquarters in Charleston, S.C with Founders Frank & Cynthia Berger. Youve Got Maids of Thousand Oaks is now welcoming quotes for service.

Tony and Lizzie come to Youve Got Maids with a wealth of experience in customer service and operational solutions. They are passionate about family, community, and California-living. Originally from England, Tony and Lizzie have chosen to make the Los Angeles area their new home.

Youve 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. Youve 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, Youve Got Maids provides an unbeatable house cleaning service.

Youve 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. Youve 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. Youve Got Maids is a licensed, bonded, and insured company.

Call Tony and Lizzie to improve your lifestyle, to get back those hours you spend cleaning with our weekly or biweekly home cleanings! Youve Got Maids proudly offers a 100% Satisfaction Guarantee with every single cleaning! From coast to coast, Youve Got Maids is growing one exhilarated customer at a time, and much of our business comes through referrals.

For more information about Youve Got Maids, call 805.917.6243, or visit http://www.ThousandOaks.youvegotmaids.com.
Dr. Russell Surasky Opioids (pain relieving medications) hijack the limbic system. They bind directly to receptors rewiring the brain. This reorders the brains survival priorities so that opioid drugs become the primary motivator in life.

In the time it takes you to eat your next meal the opiate epidemic will take a life. Each day, 125 families feel the devastation of losing a loved one to addiction. This year alone more than 50,000 people will lose their lives - more than car accidents and gun related deaths combined. This includes not just illegal drugs but the astounding velocity of deaths due to the consequences of doctor prescribed medications. In fact, three out of four heroin users began their tragic path with a prescription from their doctor.

Dr. Russell Surasky of New York is a brain specialist, double board certified in neurology and addiction medicine  a rare combination. He is currently the medical director of Bridge Back to Life, a multi-center outpatient addiction treatment program. He is also the founder of the Surasky Neurological Center for Addiction in Great Neck, N.Y.

Addiction is a brain disease, Dr. Surasky said. Essentially, it is a tale of 2 brain centers; our rational brain and our limbic system. The limbic system controls basic survival drives such as eating, drinking and mating. It is outside conscious control. Messages from our rational brain cannot restrain it. Opioids (pain relieving medications) hijack the limbic system. They bind directly to receptors rewiring the brain. This reorders the brains survival priorities so that opioid drugs become the primary motivator in life.

Currently, Suboxone and Methadone are the drugs used to treat opiate addiction and do appear to be useful in reducing overdoses. However, Dr. Surasky explains, they too are opiates and cause extreme physical dependency. The brain doesnt have a chance to return to the normal number of opiate receptors and the individual continues to rely on addictive substances to live. The mind continues to create memories in the presence of an opiate. This continues the craving which fuels relapses. Therefore, Suboxone and methadone create a trade-off; a short-term benefit with a long-term consequence. What were left with are countless patients physically dependent on these drugs, who require specialized medical care to detox them off these medicines.

Dr. Surasky has had extraordinary success with a treatment program that he developed which centers around the non-opiate, non-addictive medication Vivitrol, a once-monthly injection that dramatically reduces cravings for opiate drugs. In contrast to Suboxone and Methadone, Vivitrol does not cause physical dependence. If a patient taking Vivitrol was to use opiates, they would not feel high or get sick; nothing would occur. Also, Vivitrol is not a life sentence of medication. Treatment length varies but typically lasts for about 1 year.

Initially, one had to stop using opiates for more than a week and go through severe withdrawal symptoms prior to their first Vivitrol treatment. This is no longer necessary. Dr. Surasky has developed a new protocol, using neurologic-based medications that can immediately eliminate opiate withdrawal symptoms and allow patients to be treated with Vivitrol just a few days after last opiate use.

To further ensure a successful recovery for those receiving Vivitrol, Surasky is pioneering further breakthrough treatment. This treatment has to do with reducing stress on the spinal column, thereby relieving stress to the limbic system in the brain. Research published in the prestigious Journal of Molecular Psychiatry demonstrated that patients in an inpatient drug rehab facility that received physical treatment to reduce stress to their spinal column, had better recovery than all other patients. This study showed conclusively that patients who received this specific spinal treatment had much higher rates of completing the addiction treatment program and lower anxiety levels than the other patients. Dr. Surasky believes that this treatment works because it has a direct impact on the limbic system of the brain itself. Based on this medical study and Dr. Suraskys collaboration with Dr. Raymond Damadian (the inventor of the MRI machine) and Dr. Ian Tremayne (upper cervical specific chiropractor), Dr. Surasky now includes this treatment for his patients. Dr. Surasky states Dr. Damadian and Dr. Tremyane had made these incredible discoveries, but nobody in the neurological community had connected that this treatment could also help people suffering with addiction.

It begins with highly detailed imaging and thermographic analysis of the patients upper cervical spine, the region that protects the brainstem, Dr. Surasky explains. These studies are quick and completely painless.

In many cases these advanced diagnostic studies are showing us that the top bone in the neck (called the Atlas), which connects to the base of the skull, has some degree of misalignment and/or loss of proper motion. This can occur simply due to the spines adaptation to the normal physical stressors of life. Most people are completely unaware when this occurs as there is often no associated pain but it can cause alterations in the flow of cerebrospinal fluid and interfere with the neurological connections between the brain stem and the rest of the body. This condition, called Cranio-cervical syndrome, is particularly important when an individual is recovering from drug or alcohol addiction and can lead to an impediment or delay in the healing of the limbic system.

Most of his patients now undergo x-rays, thermographic testing and MRI of the cranio-cervical junction to evaluate if Cranio-Cervical Syndrome exists. If present, he incorporates gentle painless corrective spinal treatment into their care plan along with Vivitrol.

Dr. Surasky is now a national expert speaker for Alkermes - the pharmaceutical company who manufactures Vivitrol. He is also an expert speaker for the pharmaceutical company USA WorldMeds. Additionally, he educates physicians and the New York criminal justice system about addiction and these new advancements in treatment.

Contact: Dr. Russell Surasky, contact@drsurasky.com, http://www.drsurasky.com
ProMaster, a leading brand in high-quality accessories for still photography and videography, announces the follow-up to their best-selling XC series of tripods. Xtreme Compact Modular (XC-M for short) is a complete reinvention of the popular XC tripod, while maintaining the lauded travel-friendly design. The transverse leg design of these tripods allows the new XC-M 522 tripod to fold down to just over 12 inches for storage and transport. The larger XC-M 525 folds down to an impressive 15 inches.

Each legs angle and length are independently adjustable, allowing the XC-M tripod to properly support a camera on uneven ground. The leg angle locks and twist locks have been reengineered for a better tactile experience and more positive locking. The center column uses a new two-stage design; providing maximum height yet an extremely compact folded length. Any of the three legs can be removed and attached to the center column to be used as a full-size monopod.

Included with each XC-M tripod (and sold separately) is a completely redesigned ball head made from machined, high-grade aluminum. The dual-action design uses separate knobs to adjust the ball tension and the panning control. The tension control knob has an integrated memory lock dial which allows users to set a repeatable tension stop. Each knob has been reengineered for comfort and ease of use; even in temperatures as low as 4 F. Multiple bubble levels allow for precise leveling, and the Arca-Swiss compatible quick release plate includes a strap slot, as well as an improved anti-twist material.

Rounding out the XC-M collection is a variety of accessories that allow photographers to customize their tripod to their needs. Options include:



Extension/Macro Leg Sets can be used to increase the height of the tripod by six to eight inches, or to modify an XC-M into an incredibly strong macro tripod.

All Terrain Feet include sand and snow baskets, plus stainless steel spikes for use on ice, dirt, grass, and more.

Ground Level Adapters allow photographers to get lower and closer to the ground for macro photography and unique perspectives.

The Tilting Column Adapter converts an XC-Ms center column into a multi-position, adjustable boom.

Custom-fit Leg Warmers make handling XC-M tripods more comfortable in cold weather.

The Mini-Dovetail Clamp attaches to the factory-installed Mini-Dovetail plate on the yoke of an XC-M tripod. This allows for quick attachment of photographic accessories via the clamps 3/8-16 threaded port.

The Hipster is a unique system that offers multiple ways of carrying an XC-M tripod.

As impressive as these tripods are right out the box, the modularity is truly breathtaking, said Mike C. Northrup, ProMasters Director of Sales. Each of these tripods can be customized, thanks to the expansive line of accessories that make up the rest of the XC-M series.

Both the XC-M 522 and the XC-M 525 are available in aluminum and carbon fiber. Aluminum models are available in black, silver, yellow, red, orange, and blue. Carbon fiber models are available exclusively in black or silver. A complete list of pricing, specifications, and accessories can be found at http://www.xc-m.promaster.com.

About ProMaster: For more than 59 years, ProMaster has sold products exclusively through independently owned stores. We do so enthusiastically because we are committed to supporting the efforts of locally owned businesses. We know the retailers who sell our products on a first name basis and we help them to share their passion for photography with you by providing an incredible variety of high quality accessories for still cameras, video cameras, and mobile phones. ProMaster products are available in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. For more information on ProMaster, please visit http://www.promaster.com.
Richard DiSammartino, a retired business consultant, amateur photographer, father of eight, and grandfather of twenty-two currently residing in Florida, has completed his book 99 Year Lease: Hong Kong: a finely drawn portrait of a nation in transition by a longtime resident who was present for the historic handover of a coveted territory from a former colonial power to its rightful nation.

In 1898, Great Britain leased the largest part of Hong Kong from China for ninety-nine years and added to the two sections that they held in perpetuity. In 1980, the two countries began negotiations for the return of all of Hong Kong back to China. Great Britain wanted another ninety-nine-year lease. The Peoples Republic of China would only accept the return of all of Hong Kong. In the negotiations that followed, China prevailed, and it was agreed that all of Hong Kong would be returned to China.

Hong Kong and PRC transition teams had to be created in order to plan for the transition. A UN team was also created to mediate any roadblocks. Office space and housing had to be found for all the personnel.

Great Britain felt defeated and demoralized. They wanted to leave a legacy that would last forever before they left. They decided to build the biggest, most modern, most efficient airport ever built as their legacy, even though there were many objections. The biggest drawback was the airport must be completed by June 30, 1997, an impossible task.

Even though a site for the airport still had to be selected and large amounts of money had to be raised and large numbers of labor and materials had to be brought in, British and Hong Kong governments pulled out all the stops, and they would do everything in their power to have the airport completed on time.

Unknown to anyone on the project, a group of wealthy Hong Kong businessmen was against the handover. They planned to do everything in their power to prevent the return of Hong Kong to China, including disrupting the airport project.

Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Richard DiSammartinos book is a riveting tale depicting a historical event and the accompanying resistance, celebration, and intrigue.

Readers who wish to experience this engrossing work can purchase99 Year Lease: Hong Kong at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional New York-based, full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not overwhelmed with logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and the like. Its roster of accomplished authors and publishing professionals allows writers to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues to focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.
6th generation Rigaku MiniFlex benchtop XRD spectrometer Rigaku provides the worlds most complete line of X-ray analytical instruments and will be exhibiting their diverse line of lines of X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and handheld Raman and LIBS instrumentation at the conference together at booth number 3151.

Rigaku Corporation is pleased to announce its attendance at the 70th annual Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy (Pittcon 2019), held Sunday, March 17 through Thursday, March 21, 2019 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA USA.

Pittcon is the worlds leading annual conference and exposition on laboratory science, keeping the scientific community connected to significant ongoing developments and new instrumentation. It attracts attendees from industry, academia and government from over 90 countries worldwide.

Rigaku provides the worlds most complete line of X-ray analytical instruments and will be exhibiting their diverse line of lines of X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and handheld Raman and LIBS instrumentation at the conference together at booth number 3151.

Rigaku will be showing the Rigaku Supermini200 benchtop wavelength dispersive X-ray fluorescence (WDXRF) spectrometer, and the new sixth generation Rigaku MiniFlex benchtop X-ray diffractometer.

The Rigaku Supermini200 analyzer is the world's only high-power (200 W) benchtop sequential WDXRF spectrometer for elemental analysis of oxygen (O) through uranium (U) of almost any material. It uniquely delivers low cost-of-ownership with high resolution and lower limits of detection (LLD).

The MiniFlex benchtop X-ray diffraction instrument is a general-purpose X-ray diffractometer that can perform qualitative and quantitative analysis of polycrystalline materials. The instrument is designed to deliver speed and sensitivity through innovative technology enhancements, such as the HyPix-400 MF 2D hybrid pixel array detector (HPAD) coupled with a 600 W X-ray source and new 8-position automatic sample changer.

Rigaku will also be presenting the Rigaku NEX QC series of low-cost benchtop energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) spectrometers. The NEX QC and NEX QC+ systems are compact elemental analyzers with intuitive icon-driven touch screens interface and built-in printer for easy operation and convenience. The Rigaku NEX QC+ QuantEZ analyzer, engineered for heavy industrial use, runs on Microsoft Windows-based QuantEZ analytical software.

The Rigaku NEX DE series of high-performance, direct excitation EDXRF elemental analyzers will also be featured. The newest addition to the NEX DE series is the Rigaku NEX DE VS direct excitation variable spot EDXRF elemental analyzer. The NEX DE VS analyzer is uniquely suited for small spot analysis applications. It features a high-resolution camera combined with automated collimators, allowing for precise positioning of a sample for the analysis of 1 mm, 3 mm, and 10 mm spot sizes.

Rigaku will feature their latest Raman and laser induced breakdown (LIBS) analyzers, including the Rigaku Progeny and Progeny ResQ1064 nm handheld analyzers, and the Rigaku KT-100S handheld LIBS spectrometer.

In its Pittcon debut, the Rigaku ResQ CQL 1064 nm handheld Raman analyzer is the newest addition to the portfolio of handheld spectroscopic analyzers from Rigaku. Designed for chemical threat identification, the units improved ergonomics, analytical performance and sample presentation enable easier identification of suspicious of powders, liquids, gels and mixtures.

About Rigaku

Since its inception in Japan in 1951, Rigaku has been at the forefront of analytical and industrial instrumentation technology. Rigaku and its subsidiaries form a global group focused on general-purpose analytical instrumentation and the life sciences. With hundreds of major innovations to their credit, Rigaku companies are world leaders in X-ray spectrometry, diffraction, and optics, as well as small molecule and protein crystallography and semiconductor metrology. Today, Rigaku employs over 1,400 people in the manufacturing and support of its analytical equipment, which is used in more than 90 countries around the world supporting research, development, and quality assurance activities. Throughout the world, Rigaku continuously promotes partnerships, dialog, and innovation within the global scientific and industrial communities.

For further information, contact:

Michael Nelson

Rigaku Global Marketing Group

tel: +1. 512-225-1796

michael.nelson@rigaku.com


Platinum sponsor for the event is Cummins Inc. 2019 Chairperson is Jennifer Rumsey, Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, Cummins Inc.

SAE International announces a new location  Indianapolis, Ind.  for its premier commercial vehicle technology event.

COMVEC Technology Connection (COMVEC) will be held Sept. 9-11, 2019 at the JW Marriott Indianapolis Downtown, Indianapolis, Ind.

Platinum sponsor for the event is Cummins Inc. 2019 Chairperson is Jennifer Rumsey, Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, Cummins Inc.

COMVEC is the convening point for the community that develops vehicles and equipment spanning the on-highway, off-highway (agriculture, construction, industrial), ground defense, and mining sectors. Join us in Indianapolis, IN for three days of expert-led panel discussions, peer-to-peer networking, professional development, and a technology-driven exhibit floor.

Featured keynote speakers will include:



Monday, Sept. 9

Rich Freeland, President and Chief Operating Officer, Cummins, Inc.

Tuesday, Sept. 10

Franklin R. Chang Diaz, PhD, Chairman and CEO, AD Astra Rocket Company

Wednesday, Sept. 11

Carla Bailo, President and CEO, Center for Automotive Research

In addition, COMVEC will feature three symposia tracks  the first on Our Society in the Future, the second on Fueling the Future, and the third on Charging the Future.

From the direction of the industry and technologies under development to regulatory impacts and efficiency improvements, COMVEC covers the latest and critical need-to-know information impacting global commercial vehicles today and in the future.

CLICK HERE to learn more about COMVEC, or to register.

Journalists and members of the media can register for Press credentials by contacting pr@sae.org or shawn.andreassi@sae.org.

Cummins Inc. is celebrating its 100th year as a company throughout 2019. Today, Cummins, which is listed as a Fortune 150 company, employs around 62,000 people worldwide and serves customers in nearly every country across the globe. Cummins products range from diesel and natural gas engines to hybrid and electric platforms, as well as engine systems components, controls and related technologies and it continues to develop new advanced products and services.

SAE International is a global association committed to being the ultimate knowledge source for the engineering profession. By engaging nearly 200,000 engineers, technical experts and volunteers, we drive knowledge and expertise across a broad spectrum of industries. We act on two priorities: encouraging a lifetime of learning for mobility engineering professionals and setting the standards for industry engineering. We strive for a better world through the work of our philanthropic SAE Foundation, including programs like A World in Motion and the Collegiate Design Series.

http://www.sae.org
The Franchise Show, presented by Allstate, is pleased to be taking place at the Orange County Convention Center, March 16 & 17, 2019. The Show is the perfect venue for attendees to find their best opportunity to attain prosperity and success by taking the first step to becoming a business owner. Many entrepreneurs dream of starting their own business and every year thousands of Americans consider franchising as a way to make it happen. Visitors have the chance to speak directly with representatives from proven, successful franchises. Full-time franchises and part-time business opportunities are available in Florida. The event plays a critical role in helping people find the business thats right for them.

Franchising gives people the opportunity to start a business without feeling overwhelmed and alone. They have the support system of a company behind them with training, marketing and in most cases a proven brand, said Fred Cox, president, National Event Management, which produces the Franchise Show.

The event features companies that are household names such as Allstate, 7Eleven, Steak n Shake, The UPS Store, Little Caesars and Anago Cleaning. The exhibitors at the show offer a variety of industries from traditional retail stores and restaurants to fitness, home services, education and printing. The Show is also an excellent venue to discover new franchises and business opportunities to take advantage of being involved from the early stages of growth.

The Franchise Show successfully hosts thousands of attendees across North America every year, with the hope of helping each one become their own boss. Its important to be able to meet and speak with representatives from the companies at the event because it gives you a better understanding of the culture of a company and gives you a better indication of whether or not a company complements your specific personality, says Mr. Cox. The opportunity to speak directly with representatives from the hottest franchises as well as industry experts make this event a must attend for anyone considering owning a small business or looking to grow their already established business.

The show is a significant source of information for people looking to open their own business and research franchising in depth. Visitors may attend free daily seminars given by industry experts including lawyers, financial specialists and franchise experts that have information that entrepreneurs need to know to start and grow a business. Seminar topics include: 5 Lessons I Learned in My First Year as a Small Business Owner, Use Your Retirement Funds To Start A Business Tax Deferred & Penalty Free, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Franchising and How to Start Your Own Business  Franchising vs. Small Business Start Up. For a full schedule of free seminars please visit http://www.FloridaFranchiseShow.com.

The Franchise Show

Dates: Saturday, March 16 and Sunday, March 17

Time: Saturday: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sunday: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Location: Orange County Convention Center

9800 International Dr.

Orlando, FL 32819

Admission:

For more info: $8 at the door, 2 for 1 online

http://www.floridafranchiseshow.com

Contact Information



For media accreditation and more information, contact:

Lisa Spodek, Director of Marketing

1-800-891-4859 ext. 225

lspodek@nationalevent.com
Star Ribbon Forever Stamp will be unveiled in a USPS First Day of Issue Ceremony, Thursday, March 22, 2019 at 11 a.m. Get Into Stamp Collecting! The hobby for a lifetime!

The American Stamp Dealers Association, Inc. is hosting it annual Midwest Postage Stamp Show, March 2224, 2019, in Lombard, Illinois. The show will be held at the Holiday Inn Chicago Oakbrook, 17 W 350 22nd Street, Oakbrook Terrace, IL 60181. The doors open daily at 10 a.m. and admission is free. Friday and Saturday the show runs until 5 p.m.; Sunday until 3 p.m. There is something for everyone from the experienced to the non-collector  dealers, specialty collecting groups, and much more. Admission is Free.

What To Do at the Show

Shop Til You Drop  Dealers, from across the nation and around the world, will be buying and selling stamps, covers, postcards, and more. In addition, the United States Postal Service and the United Nations Postal Agency will have booths. Be sure to visit them for the newest issues.

Plan to Attend the First Day of Issue Ceremony  The United States Postal Service will issue the Star Ribbon on Friday, March 22 at 11 a.m. The stamp was designed to meet the needs of business mailers. The artwork features a digital illustration of a star made of red, white and blue ribbon. The white space in the middle of the ribbon creates a second smaller star. The tri-colored ribbon, folded into a patriotic symbol, is intended to evoke the connectedness of the American people. The stamp will be sold in coils of 10,000 and in panes of 20. Greg Breeding was the art director. Aaron Draplin designed the stamp and created the artwork.

Experience a new kind of show auction  Cant come to the show? No problem! Bay will host an EXPO Dealer Auction running the length of the show featuring ASDA eBay dealers  bidding begins March 22 at 8 a.m. PT and ends April 3 at 9 p.m. PT. Visit ebay.com/philately! At the show, check in on the auction at the ASDA Booth.

Buy Stamps from Postal Agencies  The United States Postal Service will have a stamp counter, First Day cancels, and a cancellation area. Visit the United Nations Postal Agency Booth to purchase their newest stamps and other issues.

Get the Special Daily Show Cancel and Cachets  Be sure to visit the ASDA Table to purchase show souvenirs.

Kids, Get Into Collecting  Each child ages 610, who is accompanied by an adult, will receive a free gift.

Got Stamps and Dont Know What To Do with Them?

Take Advantage of the Free Appraisal Service  Bring in those stamps/collections that you have inherited or been storing for years. This free service will put a value on your material and advise you on what to do. The appraisal service will be open for business from 10 a.m.3 p.m. Friday and Saturday and on Sunday, 10 a.m.2 p.m. To participate in this service, check in at the ASDA Booth located at the show entrance.

Discover the Wonderful World of Stamp Collecting

Come to the show, March 2224 at the Holiday Inn Chicago Oakbrook Terrace. Explore the wide, wonderful world of collecting  a hobby for a life time! We look forward to seeing you.

Visit the ASDA on line (http://www.americanstampdealer.com) for all show information.

The American Stamp Dealers Association, Inc., is a professional organization serving stamp collecting and its dealers since 1914.
Over 50 premium tequilas and mezcals are part of the resorts all-inclusive rate from brands like Don Julio, 1800 and Montelobos

The AAA Five Diamond Grand Velas Los Cabos has opened its Tequila Mezcal Bar inclusive of 140 varieties of the spirits, guided tastings and master classes with a top Mexican sommelier. Over 50 premium tequilas and mezcals are part of the resorts all-inclusive rate from brands like Don Julio, 1800 and Montelobos. Five different types of tequila are offered, including blanco (no aging), reposado (aged for 2  12 months), anejo (aged 1  3 years), extra anejo (aged 3+ yrs), and joven (blend of different ages), from both the highlands and lowlands of the spirit making regions. Additionally, some of the most highly regarded and expensive tequilas and mezcals on the market like Clase Azul Ultra, Herradura Seleccion Suprema and Las Garrafas de Oaxaca Xaguar Mezcal are available for purchase.

In addition to guided tequila and mezcal tastings, Tequila Mezcal Bar hosts Mexican wine tastings as well as a three-day certification course led by the resorts master sommelier Don Pedro Poncelis Brambila. With over 30 years of experience, he has been honored as "Best Mexican Sommelier" by the Mexican Association of Sommeliers, where he was founder and former president in 2010-2013 and currently is an honorary member. Don Pedro Poncelis developed the resorts wine list comprised of 50 included wines of sparkling, white, rose and red from the best regions of several grape varieties in addition to a supplemental list of over 200 wines of the world from the very best and most prestigious domaines. Grand Velas Los Cabos has among the top - largest and most valuable - selection of wines in the destination.

Tequila Mezcal Bar was designed by renowned interior designer Melin Castro of Melin Castro Designs. The natural environment is at the forefront of the design as the panoramic ocean view captivates anyone who enters. Marble, granite, walnut woods, crystals and wallpaper in earth colors and warm tones harmonize with the colors of the Sea of Cortez and the hotels abundant purple and fuchsia bougainvillea. A spacious terrace with pocket window walls transforms the space into an extension of the outside. Works of art by Oaxacan artist Rosendo Pinacho characteristic images unite man with animals and the natural world.

For reservations or additional information on Grand Velas Los Cabos, please call 1-888-407-4869 or visit https://loscabos.grandvelas.com/.

About Grand Velas Los Cabos:

The AAA Five Diamond Grand Velas Los Cabos on Mexicos Baja Peninsula offers the next generation of all-inclusive amenities and facilities with dramatic ocean views and unique spaces infusing every area of the resort. Located between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, the beachfront property features 307 ocean view suites, all over 1,180 sq. ft. with private terraces and some personal plunge pools. Duplex wellness suites have designated fitness amenities, a personal Wellness Concierge and healthy food and beverages in suite. Grand Velas Los Cabos features five gourmet restaurants led by top chefs, including two star Michelin chef Sidney Schutte, complemented by an extensive beverage program and wine based features inspired by the proximity to Mexicos fine wine region. A staff ratio of 3 to 1; 16,370 sq. ft. convention center with the capability for 20 breakout rooms; 35,000 sq. ft. Se Spa with 16 treatment rooms and hydrotherapy facility; three pools; and pool and beach concierges are available. Rounding out the list of amenities and services are a Technogym Fitness Center with personal trainers, exercise programs, yoga, Pilates and meditation; recreational activities program; separate teens and kids club facilities and activities program; 24-hour personal concierge service; baby concierge; and 24-hour in-suite service. Opening soon, a gallery of contemporary art will continue the companys commitment to bringing the art, fashion and culture of Mexico to guests. The curved, half-moon design of the hotel catches eyes along the corridor with an iconic grand entrance thats open air, three stories high and over 300 ft. above sea level. All of this beachfront, just 35 minutes from the Los Cabos International Airport which directly services over 40 destinations in the United States, Canada and Latin America. A member of the Virtuoso Hotels & Resorts Program, Grand Velas Los Cabos was built and is operated by Eduardo Vela Ruiz, founder and president of Velas Resorts, with brother Juan Vela, vice president of Velas Resorts, by his side. For reservations or additional information, please call 1-888-407-4869 or visit https://loscabos.grandvelas.com/.


Today, the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy (CRESP) at the University of Delaware (UD) released a case study of the four-year implementation of the Bookworms curriculum at a school district located in rural Southern Delaware. The analysis consistently found that students who were once under-performing the state average are now outperforming the state average three years later. The same results were seen in nearly all subgroups of students including English Language Learners (ELL) and special education.

In 2014, the Bookworms curriculum was introduced as a pilot program in four elementary schools within the school district. The district, which educates approximately 1,760 elementary students, had faced broad challenges such as staff and teacher transitions, funding limitations, and curriculum shortcomings that impeded instruction and student academic achievement.

Overall, CRESP found that when implemented with fidelity, staff and teachers categorized Bookworms as a successful program. Teachers cited both real and anecdotal data to capture the success and impact of the Bookworms program, including among students receiving learning and behavior interventions, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities. Bookworms improved a student's ability to think critically, understand what they read, and write clearlycrucial skills that align with both Common Core standards and the state-mandated assessment.

One of the findings I found most impressive was the increase in the percentage of ELL students meeting the states ELA standard  from less than 15% in 3rd grade to over 40% in 5th grade, said Dr. Sue Giancola, CRESP Associate Director. During the same time, the state average dropped from just under one-quarter of 3rd grade ELL's meeting the ELA standard to less than 15% meeting standard in 5th grade.

In its analysis, CRESP summarized student performance data for three cohorts of students in the pilot schools. These data come from Delawares state-required Smarter Balanced assessment administered annually beginning in grade 3. The two 3rd-5th grade cohorts either met or exceeded the state's average by 5th grade; the 3rd-4th grade cohort had considerably surpassed the state average by the end of 4th grade. The upward trajectory of scores was consistent across not only multiple cohorts, but also multiple demographic groups within those cohorts.

In addition to gains on test scores, CRESP observed overarching gains in the number of students demonstrating academic proficiency. For example, in Cohort 1 only 36.9% of students met state English Language Arts (ELA) standards in 3rd grade; by 5th grade, 61.0% of the students were meeting ELA standards.

For more details and full breakdown of the data, access the full report at http://www.cresp.udel.edu/publication/bookworms-case-study-report

What is Bookworms?

Based on leading literacy research and best practices, the Bookworms curriculum is a reading and writing program that places significant emphasis on grade level reading, differentiated skills instruction, and genre-based writing strategy instruction. In order to maximize daily reading and student engagement, Bookworms incorporates 265 whole books instead of the shorter reading passages that are often found in other curricula. Bookworms is unique in that lesson plans are Open Educational Resources (OER) that can be freely used without charge. The OER nature of the lesson plans makes the adoption of Bookworms affordable, and costs typically used for curriculum acquisition can be re-invested in principal and teacher support.

For more information please visit

openupresources.org/bookworms-k-5-reading-writing-curriculum/

About CRESP

The University of Delaware's Center for Research in Education and Social Policy (CRESP) conducts rigorous research to help policymakers and practitioners in education, community health and human services determine which policies and programs are most promising to improve outcomes for children, youth, adults and families. For more information please visit http://www.cresp.udel.edu
James Perry describes the process of using Utilis data in the field to San Diego councilmember Scott Sherman and others This is an excellent opportunity to showcase how the Utilis method is applied in the field and being in our home town of San Diego makes it so much more meaningful, observed James Perry, Utilis VP of Business Development.

The City of San Diego recently contracted the San Diego based remote-sensing data company, Utilis, to conduct a pilot study survey of the citys drinking water distribution system as part of their innovation exploration program. Over the course of two days Councilmember Scott Sherman (district 7), and representatives from the districts of Council President Pro Tem Bry (district 1), Councilmember Campbell (district 2), Councilmember Kersey (district 5), as well as a representative from U.S. Congressman Scott Peters office (52nd district) joined Utilis and their leak detection partners from Utility Service Associates (USA) as they toured the project study area and observed the satellite leak detection method in action.

This is an excellent opportunity to showcase how the Utilis method is applied in the field and being in our home town of San Diego makes it so much more meaningful, observed James Perry, Utilis VP of Business Development.

Utilis has completed over 200 projects around the world, but this is their first in the City of San Diego. Besides pilots, Utilis offers service contracts that allow a water utility to set-up a schedule to monitor their entire network on an ongoing basis. Utilis uses synthetic aperture radar satellite data along with their proprietary algorithm to specifically identify areas with soil moisture at a depth underground that often signifies drinking water leaks from pipes. This information is provided to water utilities to use along with their current leak detection and repair programs.
Click Here to go to PublishersWeekly.com
Brexit has loomed large over the last three London Book Fairs, the focus of numerous panels and programs. But during the 2019 event, the issue came to a stunning crescendo, with three consecutive votes in the U.K. Parliament over the course of the fairs three days leaving the U.K.s divorce from Europe in a state of chaos.

On Tuesday, March 12, the fairs opening night, MPs overwhelmingly rejected Prime Minister Theresa Mays second proposed Brexit deal. That was followed by a vote on March 13 in which MPs ruled out leaving the E.U. without a new deal in place. And on March 14, MPs voted to seek a delay in leaving the E.U. Nearly three years after May invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, the U.K. is scheduled to exit the E.U. on March 29, deal or no deal. But events this week have left the fate of Brexit uncertain and the U.K. in a political crisis.

Inside the halls of Olympia, authors and publishers voiced their concerns and frustrations, but many said the political uncertainty was not affecting business in a major wayat least not yet. Tom Weldon, CEO of Penguin Random House UK, said that Brexit is a massive issue for publishers in terms of supply chain and logistics issues, but not so much in terms of deal making. However, the uncertainty of Brexit has heightened concerns that U.K. publishers could lose some of their European export market, potentially prompting more agents to seek world English rights deals with American publishers. For U.K. houses at the 2019 fair, that meant looking to lock in contracts rather than waiting to finalize deals later.

In addition, French publisher Heloise dOrmesson, whose eponymous house is owned by Editis, suggested that the prospect of Brexit was in fact fueling interest in her books and translations. It is as if the publishing community in the U.K., which is largely anti-Brexit, is worried that they will become intellectually disconnected from the Continent and are trying to mitigate this by committing to translating more books, she said.

Largely, however, publishers said it was business as usual at the fair. Interviewed in the cacophonous International Rights Center, Jamie Hodder Williams, CEO of Hodder & Stoughton and John Murray, described the general mood of the fair as upbeat and busy. The whole world is talking about Brexit, but it is not affecting business in here, he said, pointing to Holly Millers The Sight of You, which sold for large sums in the U.S. and Germany.

Jade Robertson, international publishing director for Austin Macauley Publishers, neatly summed up the general feeling among many trade publishers at the fair: As far as Brexit is concerned, we are going to deal with it when it actually happens, she said.

Authors speaking at the London Book Fair were less sanguine. Following an appearance at the fairs popular new Podcast Stage, Booker Prizewinning author Ian McEwan said the decision to leave the E.U. is a national tragedy and that his preference is simply to revoke Article 50though he acknowledged that such a move is highly unlikely. I think the Tories are going to look for a new leader, and the Labour Party is in a state, he said. So Im feeling quite pessimistic.

During a program titled Contested Identities; Writing, Writers, and the Brexit Enigma, journalist-turned-novelist James Meek and Caryl Phillips, author of A View of the Empire at Sunset, both criticized the decision to leave the E.U. Meek said he viewed Brexit as an intergenerational issue: Somehow, global free markets were going to replace the empire, and Brexit is the samethe idea that we can swap the E.U. for some magical other place.

Phillips agreed that the folk memory of a British empire was a significant factor driving Brexit supporters. Asked if he had a message for the 52% who voted to leave the E.U., his response was blunt: Grow up.

The chaos of Brexit notwithstanding, for a fourth straight year, publishers arrived in London against a backdrop of stability. There are so many reasons to be excited about the book market in the U.K., said Jacks Thomas, director of the London Book Fair, citing another year of surging sales for audio, growth in nonfiction, and a strong childrens market.

In a release just ahead of the fair, Neilsen Book UK said that the U.K. print market in 2018 grew 3% from the previous year. And like in the U.S., which also saw modest growth in print sales in 2018, that growth was led by political books.

For a second year in a row, digital audio was a hot topic at the fair, with a panel of publishers at a standing-room-only session on the fairs opening morning suggesting that the growth of the format shows no sign of slowing down. For the past six years, weve seen double-digit growth in both dollars and units, said Michele Cobb, executive director of the U.S. Audio Publishers Association, adding that in 2017, dollar growth for audio outstripped unit growth for the first time.

In his opening keynote at Quantum, the fairs preconference, Faber & Faber CEO Stephen Page celebrated the extended period of stability publishers are currently enjoying. And, citing the chaos of Brexit and rising prejudice around the world, Page urged publishers to pay attention not only to their individual bottom lines but also to the vital role that publishers collectively play in the cultural ecosystem.

We need to have the courage to fight for the values we believe in: free speech, respect for ideas and intellectual life, for copyright, for the right of an artist to make a living, and for our local markets, Page said. Yes, there are new tools, new structures, and new opportunities, and theyre very important. But there are eternal truths, too.
According to Nielsen data, EstrellaTV has continued its dominance in two key demos, adults 18-49 and adults 25-54, during prime time. That has outpaced Unimas for six months running, including during February ratings sweeps, as compared to same period last year.EstrellaTV experienced 9% growth in adults 18-49 and grew 6% in the adults 25-54 demo for prime time; in the same period, Univision is down (-13%) in adults 18-49 and (-12%) in adults 25-54. Telemundo is also down in adults 18-49 (-13%) ande adults 25-54 (-11%), and Unimas significantly declined in adults 18-49 (-49%), adults 25-54 (-50%) as compared to same period last year.We are convinced that Hispanic audiences in the US are tired of the obsolete telenovela format and programming that is produced in Latin America, and is repurposed in the US, said Lenard Liberman, CEO at LBI Media , parent company to the EstrellaTV Network. At EstrellaTV, we strive for and are committed to excellence in programming that resonates with Latinos living in the United States.
Global multimedia agency Ruptly has announced plans to launch an Arabic version of its video news agency offering in summer 2019.





Headquartered in Berlin, Ruptly offers news that it says pushes the boundaries of video journalism and expands views, delivered via real-time and archive visual news content to all media using the latest newsgathering technology.It produces readily-edited video packages through video feed, operational facilities and broadcast services through Ruptly Ops, and direct access to global events via live streaming through Ruptly Live. Revealing the latest development with the Arabic at the recent CABSAT content congress in Dubai, Ruptly CEO Dinara Toktosunova said: It will be a fully localised, Arabic website and live platform. It will allow us to be more accessible to our clients in the region and will provide a platform for us to cover more Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) stories.
Testifying before Congress today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford said the Pentagon's proposed 2020 budget will support an enduring presence of U.S. troops in Iraq that's slightly less than the forces that are on the ground right now.

Why it matters: The comments from Marine Gen. Dunford, the US military's top officer, indicate the US plans to let Iraqi forces carry a larger load in the future as they clean up the remnants of the Islamic State (IS), which appears set to morph into an insurgency.
The Trump administration has approved the sale of dozens of new F-16 jet fighters to Taiwan, the first major warplane sale to the island state in nearly 30 years.

The interagency decision, to be announced in the near future, authorized the sale of up to 66 F-16V jet fighters at an estimated cost of $13 billion, according to administration officials familiar with internal discussions.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Afghanistans national security adviser on Thursday blasted the U.S. talks with the Taliban, saying the Trump administration has alienated the Afghan government, legitimized the militant network and is crafting a deal that will never lead to peace.

If we are to make peace, it cannot be just a mere deal out somewhere far away where were not in the loop, Hamdullah Mohib said at a blunt and candid briefing with reporters that prompted a scolding by State Department officials.

Mohib, the former Afghan ambassador to the United States, also took aim at Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. point man negotiating with the Taliban. He suggested that the negotiations conducted by Khalilzad, a veteran American diplomat who was born in Afghanistan, are clouded by Khalilzads political ambitions to lead his native country.

The perception in Afghanistan and people in the government think that perhaps  perhaps  all this talk (with the Taliban) is to create a caretaker government of which he will become the viceroy, Mohib said, adding that Khalilzad had eyes on the Afghan presidency in both 2009 and 2014 when Ghani was elected.

He said more transparency about what the U.S. and the Taliban have discussed would help to quell misinformation and rumors. He said the Afghan government is the last to find out what has transpired at the negotiating table and has resorted to getting information by tracking tweets from the foreign minister in neighboring Pakistan, or brief readouts from U.S. officials involved.

We are told that Ambassador Khalilzad is a great diplomat, Mohib said. Well, Im not sure I buy that because he is ostracizing and alienating a very trusted ally and partner.

We think either Ambassador Khalilzad doesnt know how to negotiate or there are other reasons behind what hes doing. But what hes doing is not getting a deal that would result in peace.

State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino dismissed Mohibs comments. He said David Hale, undersecretary of political affairs, summoned Mohib Thursday afternoon to reject his criticism about the U.S. talks with the Taliban.

Hale underscored the longstanding U.S. assistance and support to Afghanistan, and expressed our commitment to the Afghan governments stability and full participation in the peace process, Palladino said.

He said Khalilzad represents Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and that attacks on Ambassador Khalilzad are attacks on the department and only serve to hinder the bilateral relationship and the peace process.

Mohib insists that the U.S. is keeping the Afghan government in the dark. He said he has no information to share with Afghanistans 350,000 police and soldiers, who have taken heavy casualties from the Taliban. He said in the past five years, 45,000 Afghans have been killed in the fighting  36,000 security forces and 9,000 civilians.

What are they fighting for? How am I supposed to convince them that they are not being sold out? Mohib asked.

As national security adviser, I have no information to share with those who are fighting for Afghanistan on the front line.

The longest session between the U.S. and the Taliban, lasting 13 days, ended this week with both sides citing progress toward ending the 17-year war in Afghanistan, but many questions remain unanswered.

The Taliban are negotiating from a position of strength: They effectively control half the country, and President Donald Trump has made clear he is frustrated with Americas longest war, wants to see a peace deal and is determined to bring at least some U.S. troops home.

The two sides have reached a draft agreement on the withdrawal of U.S. troops  a longtime Taliban demand  and the insurgents have rebuffed U.S. efforts to get them to negotiate with the Kabul government. Khalilzad has said that when the draft agreement about a withdrawal timeline and effective counterterrorism measures is finalized, the Taliban and other Afghans, including the government, will begin intra-Afghan negotiations on a political settlement and comprehensive ceasefire.

Mohib said the Taliban are planning a full-on spring fighting offensive, emboldened by their sit-downs with American negotiators and have no inclination to negotiate with the Afghan government.

There is no reason for them to do so, he said, adding that the legitimacy theyve won from the talks has prompted them to boast that foreign ministers from around the world are seeking to meet with them.

In the talks, the Taliban have said they will prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for launching terror attacks, as it was prior to 9/11. But the insurgents have provided no specifics on what that would entail, and it remains unclear whether they are willing or able to confront other militant groups, some of which are longtime allies.

Our understanding is even if there is a deal, its a bad deal, Mohib said, adding that any Taliban guarantees that Afghan soil will not be used again as a launching pad for terror attacks amounts to having cats guard the milk.

 copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
March 16, 1968 was the Mai Lai Massacre in Vietnam, where American soldiers brutally extinguished a Vietnamese village and contributed to the public turn against the war against communists in the former French colony. Five hundred people died. Thats brutal, but here are the 10 most brutal massacres in world history:

10. Chinese massacre of 1639. Chinese communities had existed all over southeast Asia for centuries, mostly as merchants, but sometimes as scholars too. This had both good and bad effects. One of the bad effects was that Chinas merchant class tended to be wealthier than the locals they provided goods and services to, and every now and again Chinese communities were massacred by indigenous inhabitant. The 1639 massacre in the Philippines was especially brutal, as 17,000 to 22,000 people were slaughtered in a joint Filipino-Spanish venture.

9. Massacre of Praga (Nov. 4, 1794). 20,000 people in Praga, a suburb of Warsaw, were massacred by Russian troops after the latter conquered the city during the KoA?ciuszko Uprising of 1794. For some reason I thought to compare this to the Boston massacre in 1770, where 5 died. There are not a lot of massacres in the Anglo-American world, at least not on the scale that we find elsewhere throughout history.

8. Cyprus massacre (June - September 1570). In June of 1570 the Ottoman Empire laid siege to the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which was controlled politically by Venice, the wealthy city-state on the Italian peninsula (see RealClearHistorys coverage of Venice here [https://www.realclearhistory.com/search/?q=venice]). The Christians on Cyprus held off the Ottomans for about four months, but sheer numbers, as well as disjointed politics in Europe, meant that the inhabitants of Cyprus would eventually be governed from Istanbul (not Constantinople). Cyprus, of course, continues to be split between a Greek (Christian) half and a Turkey (Muslim) half.

7. Chios massacre (March - July 1822). The Ottomans were bad people for a few centuries during the Middle Ages (RealClearHistory has more on the Ottomans here). In 1822, Istanbul massacred 52,000 Greeks on the island of Chios during the Greek War of Independence. The massacre was used deftly by imperial proponents in London, Paris, and Moscow, and further isolated the Ottomans from European diplomacy. As for the inhabitants of Chios, most were apathetic toward the rebellion until the massacre.

6. Massacre of the Rhineland Jews (1096). More of a series of massacres than a single, horrific occurrence, the massacre(s) of the Rhineland Jews in 1096 is considered by some historians to be the first of many pogroms in Germany and France that eventually culminated in the Holocaust some 850 years later. The massacres began with the Peoples Crusade of 1096, which was a Crusade considered to be unofficial because the Pope himself did not sanction it. It is estimated that 12,000 Jews died in the Massacre of the Rhineland Jews.

5. Massacre of the Latins (1182). In the 12th century, Roman Catholics in Constantinople, the capital city of the Roman Empire, were known as Latins and in 1182 they were slaughtered, driven out of the city, or sold into slavery. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have died. The massacre occurred because the vast majority of non-Roman Catholic inhabitants were much poorer than the Latins of the city, due to the latters connections to the wealthy city-states on the Italian peninsula (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, etc.). The massacre also made it harder for the Pope to unify the Christian world, as the split between Catholic and Orthodox sects only became more hardened.

4. Asiatic Vespers (88 BC). One of the more bloodier massacres in history, this one is also the most speculative on the list, if only because it took place so far back in time. The Asiatic Vespers was a coordinated attack throughout Anatolia (in modern-day Turkey) to slaughter all of the Romans living in Asia Minor. The massacres kicked off the first Mithridatic War between Rome and Pontus, a minor kingdom in Anatolia with hegemonic aspirations. All in all, 80,000 to 150,000 people are said to have been massacred by anti-Roman factions..

3. Hamidian massacres (1894-96). 80,000 to 400,000 Armenian Christians are said to have been slaughtered in the Hamidian massacres. The Ottoman Empire was trying to hold its once-vast empire together and had to resort to violence in order to do so. This, of course, only hastened its demise. The Hamidian massacres are less well-known than the Ottoman massacres of Armenians during World War I, probably because they were much less bloody. Armenians were not the only ones to be massacred, either. Christians in the Levant, known as Assyrians, were also slaughtered by the tens of thousands.

2. Yangzhou massacre (1645). The largest massacres in history are found in China, which is no surprise given the large, sedentary populations that arise there. The Yangzhou massacre was perpetrated by Prince Dodo of the Qing dynasty. It is said that the massacre of 800,000 people took place in just ten days, and then the conquering Qing army burned what was left to the ground.

1. Sichuan massacre (1645-46). There is probably space for a 10 Most Brutal Massacres in Chinese History here at RealClearHistory, given the scope of the massacres described in this article. From 1645-1646, one million people are said to have been slaughtered in the Chinese city of Sichuan. Zhang Xianzhong led a peasant revolt that eventually, once Zhangs peasant army conquered Sichuan, depopulated an entire region of China. Zhangs massacres were brutal, but check out the Seven Kill Stele he is supposed to have left in one of the cities he conquered: Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Further thoughts

These are just the recorded massacres in history. For example, the bloodshed that followed the Mongol conquests of peoples in Persia, China, and Mesopotamia are, as of today, incalculable. The Romans were brutal, too. Of course, the definition of massacre can be problematic. While this might seem like an academic point, it doesnt hurt to ask: whats the difference between the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the Holodomor in Ukraine? What makes one a massacre and the other a genocide? The length of time that the murdering took place? The planning involved? Much more works needs to be done.

Put into historical perspective, the Mai Lai massacre is not that bloody, barely a blimp on the radar of innocents throughout history. To put a spin on a dark chapter of humanity, to add a silver lining even, massacres have declined in number over the years and have become much less bloody. The Japanese occupation of the Philippines, or China, doesnt even crack the top 10, and may not even crack the top 20. The removal of the Native Americans from their land in Canada and the United States were rife with massacres, but few were as bloody as those found in the top 10. In fact, they werent even close.

The decline in number of people massacred is something to celebrate, along with the decline in war generally and the decline in absolute poverty. The world is becoming a better place, slowly but surely.
It was a crossroads for modern China. As its de facto leader since 1978, Deng Xiaoping had introduced serious reforms. These had begun to sputter toward the later 1980s. Then came Tiananmen Square and a growing crackdown. Authoritarian politics was overtaking economic liberalism, a constant danger for progress everywhere.

Deng had been only first among equals out of the revolutionary class left to rule China when Mao Zedong died in 1976. One of those was Chen Yun, a master politician who by all accounts was taken to be a clear reformer in the early days of the Communist reign. Chen would come to represent the Marxist counterbalance to what much later reforms would propose, a sign of how much things were changing. Being called the godfather of Chinese central planning, he was a so-called hardliner.

The natural tension wasnt settled in the eighties, as both sides knew that China needed to modernize but worried about where that could all lead. The central point of contention in practical terms were the Special Economic Zones (SEZ). These were initially small parts of the country, specific cities or regions which were declared open for almost free market commerce, including, importantly, foreign investment and participation. Four were originally designated in August 1979, concentrating mostly around the Pearl River Delta.

They had proven fantastically successful, another fourteen of them along Chinas coast added in 1984. While the Chinese economy began to expand and became truly modern, it was, however, localized only around these parts.

Chen Yun was famously, or infamously depending upon your perspective, much in favor of what he called the bird cage economy. The market system should be caged by Maoist belief, else the bird would fly away. But the cage also shouldnt be too small, lest the animal atrophy and suffocate. Some balance above all, but where to set the equilibrium?

Over the next few years after the massacre at Tiananmen Square, it seemed as if the hardliners had won the argument. Dengs SEZs had gone too far, they believed, and though Chen was semi-retired by 1987 he was still active, his followers holding all the chief economic positions. Chinas economic rebirth stalled, a natural consequence to the general crackdown.

In January 1992, Deng, growing tired and restless, left Beijing and his constant squabbles with Chen and the others. He never fully broke with them on governmental matters, a committed Maoist to the end, he just saw Chinas priorities differently. For the Chinese Communists, the choice was really one of survival, how the Revolution might continue in a very different modern era. These were the same questions being asked of other Communist Revolutionaries who were thankfully being extinguished during those very same years.

Departing Chinas capital, its weakened leader headed south first toward Wuhan in central China. Originally Deng had invited Chen to accompany him on what was to be a prolonged journey but his rival refused. Initially, state media made little or no mention of the sojourn. Attention was focused elsewhere, only the Hong Kong press enthusiastically broadcasting Dengs increasingly forceful awakening.

It came to be known as nanxun, or Imperial Tour of the South. While there had been much progress along the eastern coastline, little had touched the vast interior and south where life was still like it was a hundred, two hundred years earlier. Not only was there vast amounts of human economic suffering, the untapped potential was equally as enormous.

At every chance, Deng Xiaoping would say, open up!, or kai fang. Emboldened, as more of China began paying attention, he would put the hardliners on notice. Anyone who did not support reform must step down.

Some did, others fell in line. Economic liberalism was back on track, amplified even. Chen Yun died in 1995 only really having disagreed with Deng Xiaoping about the dimensions of the birds cage. Deng would pass away in 1997, still convinced that true socialism not only could be strengthened by reform, the real goal of economic progress was in fact to strengthen socialism.

The year he died, Dengs theory was enshrined by the 15thCommunist Party Congress. Liberalization would continue, ownership rules pertaining to state-owned firms and local collectives were relaxed, permitting private capitalization (often management buyouts) in the sector. The 16th Party Congress, held in 2002, ratified Jiang Zemins Three Represents philosophy, taking it a step further.

According to Jiang, these were how the Party must represent: advanced social productive forces (economic progress); the progressive course of Chinas advanced culture; and, the fundamental interests of the majority. While Deng had shown the way on the first one, and Mao ruthlessly established a baseline for the second, that last one was tricky. It was also the one every high official worried most about.

Especially given the way in which Jiang rose to become Chinas supreme leader. Though he succeeded Deng Xiaoping he was not meant to be Dengs successor. In fact, Jiang had been little more than mayor of Shanghai. The city was a base of power for the Communists, to be sure, but Jiang had little national support of his own and wasnt really highly regarded certainly not in the role of either reformer or hardliner.

But his middle-of-the-road approach was exactly the qualities that fit the times. There had been protests in Shanghai, too, just like there were in Beijing. Jiang met these forcefully but peacefully; that is, non-violently, closing press offices and destroying publications sympathetic to the protestors.

By contrast, Zhao Ziyang, who was Dengs long-time protege, confidant, and star in the central political circle, openly met with the Chinese activists even after they had been violently suppressed. Zhao told them, we are already old, we do not matter anymore. He had gone too far, even Deng had to disavow the man responsible for carrying out his liberalized vision.

With milquetoast Jiang taking his place, everyone seemed to expect from the new guy nothing more than a caretaker; a temporary technocrat of sorts keeping the seat warm until the internal struggles were more fully resolved leaving a new consensus, and star, to take over.

When Deng finally died in 1997, Jiang and his Shanghai clique set to purging leadership positions of those he mistrusted. These were not Stalinist in the blatant murder of thousands, merely the removal of hundreds perhaps thousands of government officials including many Deng Xiaoping loyalists. Those he couldnt remove, Jiang craftily wooed and courted, displaying surprising political skill. The central positions of power were ceded to his office, so that though the man he replaced may have been first among equals but Jiang Zemin would have no equal.

The order of operation in China is by no accident. The Three Represents are being conducted in the same order they are given: economy, culture, politics. In that sense, the hardliners won the intermediate battle. Out of the global Communist turbulence of the late eighties and early nineties, Chinas would survive almost alone. The very birthplace of Socialist Revolution, the Soviet Empire by contrast, had fallen.

Dreams of a global workers paradise had turned to ashes. It was once believed that a worldwide leftist revolt was inevitable, instead the product of their vision being completely rewritten by harsh reality: economic growth cannot be sacrificed to political idealism. As an economic system, Socialism doesnt even convince Socialists.

Once the Berlin Wall came down and then the Eastern Bloc dismantled from the inside, a wave of freedom touching China itself, authorities with the blessing of both Jiang and Deng, even hardliners like Chun, traveled into the old Soviet Union to figure out what went wrong. They had suspicions, of course, but if Maos Revolution was going to continue it behooved the Chinese Communists to study and nail down the mistakes of Lenins successors.

Like all Socialist paradises, China is not stable politically nor socially. Authorities must act authoritarian, maintaining a tight grip on power. Jiang, the reformer, ironically proved that better than most. The only way to correct this defect is, as the third of the Three Represents, move in the direction of the majority. Or, move the majority in your direction.

Thus, Chinas researchers in the nineties declared the Russians biggest mistake was attempting to reform in all three spheres at the same time (or, more accurately, letting loose of every control). The Soviet Union indeed all the Communist countries in its orbit allowed varying measures of liberalization in economy, culture, and politics. They removed their entire national systems from Chens cage, proving that once let free from repression birds will indeed fly away.

You have to give them a reason to stick around.

The Chinese Communists would do it differently  and therefore survive. Deng Xiaoping was an economic reformer but he was by no means a pluralist. To him, you were a Communist or you were nothing. As noted above, any means for strengthening Chinas economy was in consideration of strengthening Chinas socialist structure. Economic growth was one means, the key means to a political end.

China would grow rich, maintain its cultural identity, and then the majority would enthusiastically welcome Communism with Chinese Characteristics in every one of its forms, dissatisfaction melting away into the prosperous landscape. The people, and not just in China, would come to appreciate and admire the genius of mixing Deng with Chen; both men agreed there had to be a birdcage, and through the efforts of Jiang they would further recognize the technocratic Chinese structure as the best way to decide its proportions.

Socialism would be best by harnessing free markets for its own ends. A wealthy, modern China could therefore maintain its socialist principles in a far more stable political setting.

This has been the driving doctrine behind the countrys efforts for nearly three decades. For a very long time, many believed it was working and working well by voluntary choice. What the Chinese have accomplished in that span is honestly remarkable. Never before in human history has any nation been renovated in such breathtaking fashion at breakneck speed. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of abject, subsistence-level poverty and been given a chance at a true middle-class life.

Then 2008.

At first it had seemed China would survive the Global Financial Crisis with its economy mostly if not fully intact. The second strike in 2011, however, changed everything.

Hu Jinto, who replaced Jiang Zemin in 2002, brought with him his ideas for Chinas harmonious society, the one that would fulfill the mandates of the Three Represents. As the Chinese economy grew and grew in the middle 2000s, the leadership began to believe the time was close for that third, most tricky Represent. But instead, the global economic situation turned everything on its ear.

In 2012, Hu was set to turn over to Xi Jinping. He had previously planned to do so extrapolating economic growth along the same line as in the middle 2000s  China absolutely certain to become wealthy enough to start working on bringing the majority into the political Communist center.

In March 2012, with the economys first stark slowdown emerging, Premier Wen Jiaboa was like Deng pointing to the south of China. Only, in Wukan an open election was held for the first time the year before and the Communist Chairman of the village had been overwhelmingly rejected by voters. Wen would warn of a possible backlash to the backlash:

Mistakes like the Cultural Revolution may happen again. Any government official or party member with a sense of responsibility should recognize this.

Later that same year, just two months before Hu was to be succeeded by Xi, Chinas lame duck leader added:

Economic growth is facing notable downward pressure, some small and medium enterprises are facing a hard time and exporters are facing more difficulties. We have an arduous task of creating jobs for new entrants to the labor force.

China has reached another crossroads, only this one being nothing like the one reached in the early nineties. The same natural tensions are creeping up, only now each are going the wrong way: economic growth or political authority. For more than a quarter century, it had been left as a matter of faith you could have both. Chinese Communists would just open up their markets and this would lead the way to the long-sought harmonious socialist majority. What Marx or Lenin (or Mao) wouldve thought of this transformation, who cares?

When Hu warned about notable downward pressure Chinese Industrial Production was growing by 10%, down substantially from 15% in 2011 the year before. During the worst parts of Chinas experience of the Great Recession IP had averaged at least 8.1% in early 2009. The lowest month at that time came in November 2008, just a 5.4% rate of expansion.

According to the latest figures compiled by Chinas National Bureau of Statistics, Industrial Production during the January-February 2019 period (the first two months of each year are combined to eliminate, mostly, skews due to the weeklong Golden Week New Year holiday) rose by just 5.3% over January-February 2018. It was the worst month(s) since January-February 2002.

By 6-month average, IP is growing by just 5.6%. Thats a tick worse than the lowest point during the 2015-16 downturn, and this one appears to be just getting started. That makes it already the worst in the history of the series (dating back to 1998).

Take away the growth, what happens to the majority? October 2017s 19th Party Congress, the first held exclusively under Xi Jinping, spelled out this very track. Hus harmonious society has been reached earlier than believed, the transformation of China via rapid economic growth completed ahead of schedule. This is what theyd have you believe.

Instead, China has spent the last several years (going back 2014) preparing for what isnt quite so measured. While Western Economists couldnt talk enough about globally synchronized growth, the new Communist leadership ignored the shallow narrative. The 19th Congress instead paved the way for a renewed authoritarian grip. When last February Xi was given an open path for essentially a lifelong term on top, the New York Times wrote:

President Xi Jinpings efforts to indefinitely extend his rule as Chinas leader, announced on Sunday, raised fresh fears in China of a resurgence of strongman politics  and fears abroad of a new era of hostility and gridlock Many have watched warily as Mr. Xi has used his power to imprison scores of dissidents, stifle free speech and tighten oversight of the economy, the worlds second largest.

Many were shocked, mostly the same people who keep saying the global economy was and remains awesome. They are blind to the motivation. Clearly, something is very wrong here. China is going backwards in all three phases.

The implications are profound. When the country last went through such an identity crisis, it was an interesting but fringe global player. An unstable Asian giant now looms, adding to those uncertainties currently plaguing nearly all political regions.

The majority had very modest expectations in 1992 when Deng toured his south. Having transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese since, after watching their neighbors and family members moved off into the glittering modern cities, the hundreds of millions left behind still waiting for their golden ticket might not take kindly to being told, were done.

Again, ask yourself what motivates Xi, why now?

Nearly three decades later, growth all but vanished, the global economy which came to depend upon Chinas first Represent will no longer be able to. The results already show, the world in 2019 going backwards again with the Chinese economy at the forefront of another reverse.

Its hostile each and every way you look at it, the bird cage closing in on more than just Chinas stranded throngs. Economic liberalism isnt very popular these days anywhere. But to many people, theres nothing wrong with the global economy. It cant possibly be better.
As a gay woman who has devoted a large part of my career to advance the cause of LGBTQ equality, I have seen firsthand that advancing civil rights is often a slow and steady process. When I was a young girl, Congresswoman Bella Abzug from my hometown of New York City helped champion the Equality Act of 1974  the first piece of federal legislation in American history to address discrimination based on sexual orientation. And while the LGBTQ community has made undeniable progress over the past 45 years, the spirit of Congresswoman Abzugs bill remains unfulfilled.

That is why I am proud to join advocates in every corner of our nation in applauding the introduction of the Equality Act of 2019, which was introduced this week in Congress by Senators Jeff Merkley, Tammy Baldwin, and Cory Booker, and Representative David Cicilline. Its bold and sweeping  a law that would honor Bella Abzugs legacy by breaking down barriers facing LGBTQ people across our society.

Up until this point, for every major triumph LGBTQ Americans have celebrated, we have suffered many more setbacks and abuses from the forces of discrimination. In the summer of 1995, while serving as political director for the Human Rights Campaign, I personally witnessed Jesse Helms  a notorious crusader against LGBTQ rights  state on the Senate floor that he opposed funding treatments for HIV/AIDS because doing so would support people who engaged in deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct. In 2006, as I worked on the campaign to achieve marriage equality, then-Congressman Mike Pence declared that allowing same-sex couples to wed could cause a collapse in American society. Pence, of course, would later go on to enact a destructive anti-LBGTQ agenda as Governor of Indiana.

To be sure, the cause of LBGTQ equality made tremendous strides during the presidency of Barack Obama  from the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples, to the signing of an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against roughly 28 million Americans based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.

But that doesnt mean intolerance against LGBTQ people has been eliminated. Far from it. These days, the opponents of equality are attempting to relitigate their past prejudice through much subtler practices than the kind of language Jesse Helms used back in 1995.

Today, these activists are trying to exploit and subvert the First Amendment to prevent LGBTQ Americans from being treated with dignity and basic respect. They argue that a doctor may turn away an infant because she has lesbian parents, or that we should turn a blind eye when a transgender woman leaves her long-time job because she is afraid of experiencing discrimination.

It should come as no surprise that the Trump administration has only intensified these kinds of attacks on the LGBTQ community  such as banning transgender Americans from serving in the military, and rescinding guidelines introduced by the Obama administration to safeguard transgender children in our schools. And in a recent action involving a South Carolina-based adoption agency, the Department of Human Service has opened the door for federally-funded organizations to discriminate against religious minorities, single parents, and same-sex couples based under the guise of religious liberty.

Currently, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans depend on a patchwork system of legal defenses that often vary from one state to another. And in the face of a coordinated offensive against LGBTQ people taking place on so many fronts, our country must send a resounding message that discrimination has no place in any segment of our culture.

The Equality Act of 2019 would ensure that receiving equal treatment does not depend on living in the right zip code. It would update a series of major existing federal laws  including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act  to defend the liberties of LGBTQ people and expand protections for all Americans.

Under this legislation, landlords would be barred from denying someone the ability to lease an apartment based solely on sexual orientation, and lenders could no longer deny a mortgage application because of gender identity. The bill would also apply these safeguards toward a wide range of spaces and services Americans use on a daily basis, including department stores, public bathrooms, and transportation services. Furthermore, it would also enhance federal nondiscrimination protections for people of color, women, and people of many different faiths.

It is true that progressive movements have often been largely been halting journeys  whether it was the campaign to give women the vote, or to rid our country of legal segregation. The fight to win equality for the LGBTQ community  one of the defining civil rights movements of our time  has been no exception.

But if we have learned anything from the rise of Trump, it is that we live during a moment in history which demands bold political change. Since the 2018 midterms, the new House of Representatives has already approved several pieces of landmark legislation that advance core progressive values  including a plan to dramatically reform and renew Americas democracy and the first major gun violence prevention bill in decades.

Now, it is time to apply that same approach toward the LGBTQ rights movement. The era of incrementalism in our politics should be over  and passing the Equality Act can serve as a vital step in the beginning of this new age.

Winnie Stachelberg is Executive Vice President for External Affairs at the Center for American Progress.
When President Donald Trump stunned the world last year by agreeing to hold a summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Unthe first-ever meeting between an American president and a North Korean head of stateit felt like a punch in the gut to South Korean conservatives. Hard-liners on North Korea, they were already roiling from corruption scandals that had brought down President Park Geun-hye with massive protests in 2016 and led to the election of President Moon Jae-in.
Reports last week that Berlin refused to ban Huawei from Germanys 5G internet infrastructure appeared to mark a loss for the Trump administrations efforts to combat the growing influence of Chinas tech giant. However, U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell wasted no time in kicking off a new round of the fight. Grenell warned Berlin that the United States might withhold intelligence cooperation from Germany if Huawei isnt banned. German Chancellor Angela Merkels next move will affect not just the transatlantic relationship, but the future of Germanys economy.

The December arrest of Meng Wanzhuo, Huaweis chief financial officer and the daughter of its founder, shone a spotlight on the quiet American diplomatic effort to put a stop to the Chinese companys global ambitions. Huawei is a frontrunner in the race for high-speed 5G internet networks and is under intense scrutiny from the United States. Not only has an alleged violation of Iran sanctions landed Meng in legal peril, Huawei is in court for allegedly stealing information about T-Mobiles robotics. In addition to its legal campaign against Huawei, the United States is discouraging its allies from allowing the company to build 5G networks because of national security concerns stemming from Huaweis close relationship with its home government.

U.S. allies across the Pacific have sprung into action to block Huaweis access to their 5G networks, but the Europeans are dragging their feet. The United Kingdom, whose intelligence services operate a lab to test Huaweis products, claims that it has found little evidence of back doors that would grant access to Chinese intelligence services. What it has found is shoddy coding that introduces vulnerabilities to such an extent that British intelligence admits to only limited assurance that Huawei does not threaten British national security. Despite the risk, the National Cyber Security Centre has not recommended a ban in the United Kingdom.

Germany shows similar reticence to lock out Huawei, which has tried to placate regulators by opening a cybersecurity lab for the Germans that is modeled on the British one. The chancellery plans to require components of future network infrastructure to undergo testing in similar labs before installation.

This may be asking too much of German regulators. It is unclear whether German inspectors can attain certainty about Huaweis activities where the British have not. And the head of Germanys Federal Office for Information Security, the agency that will lead this testing, did not inspire confidence by endorsing a no spy agreement with Beijing that bears a dismaying resemblance to a 2015 U.S.-China agreement that is widely regarded as a failure.

The debate about Huawei is often depicted as pitting economics against national security concerns, but that frame is becoming less helpful as Germany awakens and reacts to the extent of Chinas economic ambitions. German economic minister Peter Altmaier and his French counterpart have called for a new industrial policy to protect strategic high-tech industries from foreign competitors. Their manifesto should engender political support: Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the new leader of Germanys Christian Democrats, said a few days earlier that we certainly need some kind of strategic industrial policy to manage Chinas challenge to Germanys economic and social system. It is difficult to imagine an industrial policy for the high-tech sector that does not include 5G.

The stakes are high because 5G policy is not merely about the esoteric details of making the internet faster. It touches directly on the future of the German auto industry  the heart of its economy. The automotive industry, which directly or indirectly accounts for one out of every seven German jobs, must keep pace in the development of electric and autonomous vehicles for the German economy to successfully adapt to the advent of electric vehicles, which will be challenging enough as it is.

Huaweis entry into Germany will threaten this development. Autonomous vehicles require massive amounts of data exchange, which in turn requires 5G or similar high-speed wireless internet technology. Inserting Huawei into the middle of this exchange will give it access to staggering amounts of information about Germanys self-driving cars as their manufacturers roll them out. Given Huaweis history of intellectual property theft, it is reasonable to assume that the tech giant may find another use for that data. In the near future, German car manufacturers might find themselves competing against Chinese rivals sporting copies of their own technology.

Huaweis entry could threaten not only German national security, but the future of the German manufacturing economy. German monitoring may be enough to forestall a catastrophe. The question is how willing Merkel is to bet on it.

Mike Watson is the Research Associate at Hudson Institute. Before joining Hudson, he worked for Charles Krauthammer. Mike holds a BA in history from the University of Virginia and a MA in Security Policy Studies from George Washington University, where he focused on US foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia. The views expressed are the author's own.
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A trio of student filmmakers celebrate together as Burton School Board member Dan Figueroa looks on Wednesday, March 13 during the Burton Film Fest at Galaxy 9 Theaters in Porterville.
A wide open public discussion about how the Del Mar Fairgrounds should handle gun shows in future years will be impossible after recent legal action, a member of the fairgrounds board told fellow directors Tuesday, March 12.

Directors of the California 22nd District Agricultural Association, which manages the fairgrounds, voted in September to discontinue hosting gun shows at the end of 2018 while they develop a policy on the practice.

Gun shows have occurred on the fairgrounds for several decades. However, the association has come under escalating pressure from anti-gun violence advocates to ban the shows in the wake of repeated incidents nationally of mass shootings and attacks.

In January, the operator of the Crossroads of the West Gun Show, which has run the fairgrounds exhibits for more than three decades, filed a federal lawsuit against the district. The suit alleges the association boards action in discontinuing the shows violates the U.S. Constitutions First Amendment guarantee to free expression.

Association Director Frederick Schenk told fellow board members Tuesday he had intended, along with fellow board Director Lee Haydu, to hold open proceedings including all points of view in leading the effort to devise the new policy.

That large tent approach wont be possible as a result of the legal parameters on public engagement resulting from the lawsuit, Schenk said.

Throughout this year, Director Haydu and I will continue to do our work, he said. But I cannot commit to what we committed to doing, which was having some recommendations to this board before the end of this year.
The opioid epidemic has impacted thousands of lives across the country. At the University of Georgia, professors across various disciplines are studying the national effects of opioid and other drug-related deaths on the states treatment options in local communities and health care policies.
'Indian aviation is having a lesser number of aircraft.'

'Besides the Boeing 737 MAX, you have the A320Neos which Indigo is currently grappling with because of a lack of pilots.'

'This has led to cancellation (of flights) and therefore the prices of air tickets are on the higher side this season although generally in March ticket prices are on the lower side.'

Photograph: Matt Mills McKnight/Reuters

After an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX crashed on March 10 killing all 157 on board, the Boeing 737 MAX has been grounded by all the nations it was in operation, including India.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash was the second crash involving Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in five months.

On October 30, 2018, an Indonesian Lion Air three-month-old Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashed, killing 189 crew and passengers including its Indian pilot Bhavye Suneja.

The grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft -- affecting SpiceJet and the beleaguered Jet Airways in India -- has led to a raft of flight cancellations, airfares heading north and major inconvenience posed to fliers.

Can the crisis be resolved? With the 737 MAX fly again? What should the Indian government do to alleviate the pain for fliers?

"The grounding of these Boeing aircraft will affect global aviation more than the Indian aviation industry," Sankalp Sinha, director of aviation consultant and Indian advisory, research, at Martin Consulting LLC, tells Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf.

How severe is the crisis facing Indian aviation after the DGCA decided to ground Boeing 737 MAX aircraft?

In the long term, whenever a manufacturer releases a new aircraft in the market, these teething troubles are bound to happen. This has happened to other aircraft earlier too.

This (crisis) is something the manufacturer will have to work with (the airlines).

In the long term, it is not going to affect the industry that much.

When an aircraft is grounded for longer duration, the airline will be compensated (by Boeing), and that is the industry norm.

Now, considering the ground reality, SpiceJet has just come out of the red and Jet Airways is going through one of its worst crises right now, but I don't think it will impact Indian aviation as such.

On a global level, you have 330 or so planes flying and a sizeable number of orders are booked by various airlines as a replacement for (old planes). This will impact the delivery schedule and the impact would be global.

How many of these aircraft are in operation in India?

Five are flying with Jet Airways and because of non-payment they are grounded.

As far as flying is concerned, they are only with SpiceJet. Some 8 to 10 were flying till Wednesday (March 13) and are now grounded.

So I think this will be a short term impact and not impact Indian aviation in the long term.

I feel the grounding of these Boeing aircraft will affect global aviation more than the Indian aviation industry.

This grounding is bound to affect flight schedules, and given that Jet is not flying its full fleet, it can lead to an increase in air ticket prices. Should consumers worry?

Aviation is a seasonal business. Out of four quarters in a year, you have two quarters which are busy.

October-December and April-June have the maximum number of flyers in India because it coincides with the holiday season.

And if you see the pricing trend, then ticket prices are always higher in these six months.

The other six months of January-March and July-August you have less volume of traffic and airlines discount ticket prices in this period.

Right now we are in March so ticket prices should be low, but Indian aviation is having a lesser number of aircraft.

Besides the Boeing 737 MAX, you have the A320Neos which Indigo is currently grappling with because of a lack of pilots.

This has led to cancellation (of flights) and therefore the prices of air tickets are on the higher side this season although generally in March ticket prices are on the lower side.

So will air ticket prices rise further because of this crisis?

This would have an impact over the next three months from the April quarter if this (grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft) continues.

We do not know how soon Boeing would have a fix for this. This may impact the April to June quarter.

Airline ticket prices remain high anyways for the April quarter as it is the holiday season.

And this grounding of Boeing aircraft would have a delta effect (external link), but it would not impact completely.

Can one or two accidents decide the fate of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft across the world? Has this ever happened in the history of aviation?

It (Boeing 737) is a very robust and very sturdy aircraft. It has a history of flying right from the 1960s since the base model 737-100.

This 737 fleet was used by ModiLuft, Damania Airways and East-West Airlines.

It was the best-selling aircraft and the only aircraft which comes close to it is the Airbus 320.

This accident won't impact 737 fleets globally, but I think we should wait and watch how quickly Boeing solves this problem after two crashes.

Yes, but the delivery of new aircraft would be impacted as airlines would demand that Boeing rectify this issue before delivery happens.

The delivery of new aircraft would be impacted, but existing aircraft will see growth.

Can you explain in layman's terms what went wrong with the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft?

The issue is primarily during takeoff of the aircraft.

The flight control, if you switch onto auto pilot, the new software was over-riding the controls which are with the pilots especially during takeoff.

Obviously, when new aircraft types are introduced, the pilots need to be adequately trained. They should have to be familiarised with any changes in the aircraft.

That particular exercise Boeing needs to do to get this glitch rectified as soon as possible.

How could this aircraft come in to use before pilots were well-trained? Are they not doing the testing process well?

This particular design is in operation for the last 60 years.

The aircraft type is not in question. What is actually happening is that recent aircraft modifications have happened more in terms of technology intervention. You have better designed engines which give you better performance.

Technology has played a larger role than the airframe design itself. The airframe design has remained the same as in the 1970s. This is more of a technological fix than a fix on the airframe.

Will the grounded aircraft fly again?

The grounded aircraft will fly once Boeing fixes (the problem) and pilots are certified to fly these planes.

It is not a maintenance issue as such, but it is more in terms of technology and software. So it will be a change in software and once that is fixed, the aircraft will fly again.
Market-linked products have been driving the growth of private insurers for some time now. But, the market volatility has forced the companies to re-think their strategies, reports Subrata Panda.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance is focusing more on providing living benefits to its customers than protection to their families after death.

Chief Executive Officer Tarun Chugh said, "We have changed our strategy and moved to life goals."

To industry observers this might seem to be against the sector trend, where many insurance companies have shifted focus from market-linked products to pure-protection products.

Chugh, however, said, "The median age in India is 25. Those who are in their 20s are not looking for life cover."

Market-linked products have been driving the growth of private insurers for some time now.

But, the market volatility has forced the companies to re-think their strategies.

While Bajaj Allianz Life continues to grow at twice the pace at which the insurance industry is growing, this year they had to tone down their growth projections.

"ULIPs have come down in terms of growth. Even mutual funds (MFs) have been hit, and so have the ULIPs," Chugh said.

"So, initially our growth rate for the year was higher. But, because the entire base is not expected to grow as much, we have toned our growth expectations."

With a capital of around Rs 9,500 crore, the company has no plans of listing itself on the bourses.

Till date, three life insurance companies have listed themselves on the exchanges.

Like many other insurers, Bajaj Allianz Life also has exposure to the beleaguered IL&FS group.

The life insurer has already made provisions for 75 per cent of the exposure they have to IL&FS, and that too, in one quarter.

On investments, he says, "We are very careful about investing, and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (Irdai) has very strict norms.

More than 50 per cent of our investments go to government securities."

Not very long ago, the company was heavily depended on the agency channel for the sale of its products.

But, that changed over time.

Now, other channels of distribution contribute 30-40 per cent to their sales.

Bancassurance model -- where an insurance company ties up with banks to sell their products to the banks customers -- contributes 15-18 per cent to their sales.

It has tied up with Dena Bank and Bandhan Bank to further capitalise to sell their products.

On steps being taken to increase their market share in the life insurance space, Chug said, "First thing, is to get the strategy right.

"So, we are focusing on living benefits.

"Then, we are clearly looking at product innovation as a means to reach out to the customer so they are more interested.

"It will put more value on the table."

He added, "Innovative ways of marketing is one of the ways. Plus, there should be more distribution channels."
Jet Airways could be staring at another default of $109 million, which it has to pay by March 28 to the HSBC Bank Middle East as the second tranche of the $140-million loan it had taken in 2014 and for which the Abu Dhabi-headquartered airline stood guarantor. Jet had, on March 11, defaulted on its external commercial borrowings of $31 million, payable to HSBC and guaranteed by Etihad Airways, which owns 24 per cent in Jet. Jet, in a letter to HSBC on March 11, had said it is going through a severe liquidity crunch and is working on a bank-led resolution plan for its revival. The plan, it has told the bank, is in the final stages of seeking regulatory and corporate approvals and, pending these approvals, the company is unable to repay tranche A of $31 million to the bank. Etihad and Jet did not respond to queries. Sources, however, said Etihad has protected its interests (as guarantor) because in the memorandum of understanding between Jet founder Naresh Goyal and it, the firm incorporated a clause under which prior to interim financing Jet had to pledge 15 per cent of its shares in JetPrivilege  the loyalty programme unit  in favour of HSBC as security for the $140-million loan. JetPrivilege, in which Jet has 49.9 per cent (Etihad has 50.1 per cent), according to estimates, has an enterprise value of around Rs 4,000 crore. The airline, which has grounded 59 (nine of them on Tuesday and Wednesday) planes, constituting over 40 per cent of its fleet, needs a fresh infusion of cash immediately. The bank-led interim financing plan envisaged an infusion of Rs 4,000 crore by stakeholders. But the plan that Etihad would put in Rs 750 crore as its share of the financing arrangement by early this week, after which the lenders will put in a matching amount, has been delayed as the final go-ahead is pending from the foreign carrier. The loan deal was signed between Jet and HSBC in January 2014 and restated by an amendment in March the same year. The $140-million loan was drawn by the airline in two tranches on March 5 and March 27, 2014, for five years with bullet repayment obligations at the end of the fifth year. According to a senior banking official representing the lenders, Etihad has not communicated to them its decision as to when it will disburse its share of the interim funding or if it needs more time. Goyal, in a recent communication to Etihad group chief executive officer Tony Douglas, had made it clear the Abu Dhabi-based carrier must infuse Rs 750 crore urgently. Last week, Goyal and Etihad entered into a deal, spelling out the equity contributions of the partners, ownership and board structure. The deal was agreed upon after months of disagreement between the two on shareholding and control issues. As part of the lenders-led resolution plan, Etihad is expected to infuse Rs 1,600-1,900 crore for 24.9 per cent (up from 24 per cent). Lenders, led by SBI, would infuse Rs 1,000 crore for 29.5 per cent and the proposed new investor - National Investment and Infrastructure Fund - would bring in Rs 1,600-1,900 crore for 20 per cent. Goyals ownership would fall from 51 per cent to 17.1 per cent. Surajeet Das Gupta
Happy Birthday, Alia!

Bollywood loves to travel; we've seen proof of it time and time again.

Whether it's work or leisure, these stars know how to work hard and tour harder!

Alia Bhatt, for example, is bitten by the travel bug.

We celebrate her birthday by looking through her lovely travel pictures on Instagram.

New York

Alia Bhatt takes in the Big Apple.

Paris

She finds the street art in Paris irresistible.

Bulgaria

Alia takes a break from the shoot of her superhero film, Brahmastra, in Bulgaria.

Spain

It's a hot day in Spain.

Maldives

Alia cools off with a dip in Maldives.

See more pictures from this family vacation!

Bali

Chillin' at the Rock Bar in Bali.

Bangkok

Alia enjoys Bangkok's night life with her manager, Grishma.

Jammu and Kashmir

Taking a break during her Raazi shoot in Kashmir with bestie Akansha Ranjan.

The girls obviously had a lot of fun.

Chicago

The actress takes a private jet to Chicago, while touring with her superstar pals.

New Jersey

The Dream Team toured New Jersey as well.

Photographs: Kind courtesy Alia Bhatt/Instagram
'If deterrence through India's conventional superiority is to be established now, then India will have to escalate to a point where its greater resources make the difference.'

'This is, to put it mildly, both difficult and dangerous and thus inadvisable,' points out Mihir S Sharma.

IMAGE: Mirage 2000 aircraft were involved in the Balakote air strikes.

Let us objectively consider what we know about the airstrikes launched by the Indian Air Force in the last week of February into Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, in Pakistan proper.

We know that Balakot, the location of the Jaish-e-Mohammed seminary and training camp that was being targeted, is some 80 kilometres from the Line of Control.

We can assume then that the IAF warplanes went some distance into Pakistani-controlled airspace given that, reportedly, Israeli SPICE-2000 pre-guided bombs were used that have a glide range of about 60 km.

To be clear, this represents three significant innovations to India's arsenal of retaliation for attacks by Pakistan-backed jihadists.

First, the use of air power; second, the willingness to enter Pakistani airspace; and third, the willingness to strike in Pakistan proper and not in Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government would be right, thus, to claim that they have shown significantly greater risk tolerance in response to a jihadist provocation than their predecessors.

We should also consider the effects of the Balakot strike.

First, did it achieve its stated military ends? Here we need to examine official statements and independent evidence.

'Sources' have claimed 300 deaths and this was widely reported as fact in the Indian media -- but it is clear that this need not be believed, as it is not an official statement.

The ministry of external affairs has, however, stated that a 'very large number of JeM terrorists, trainers, senior commanders and groups of jihadis who were being trained for fidayeen action were eliminated'.

This does not put a number on the deaths.

More importantly, let us hear what the IAF itself, the most impeccable source in this context, has to say: 'We have evidence to show that whatever we wanted to do and the targets we wanted to destroy, we have done that... it will be premature to give number of casualties.'

This is very careful phrasing.

It does not imply that there were a 'very large' number of deaths.

It does not even imply, interestingly, that the intention was to directly degrade the JeM installation.

It is thus entirely possible, and even logical, to suppose that the strategic intent of the strikes was to demonstrate the three significant innovations mentioned earlier rather than to degrade JeM capabilities.

This would seem to be a sensible conclusion especially given the copious evidence from neutral sources, including foreign intelligence services, that the JeM and other jihadist outfits have moved their main training camps further away from the LoC a decade or more ago.

It is also worth noting that multiple independent sources, such as the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Laboratory and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's International Cyber Policy Centre have released satellite-based research indicating that there was no significant damage to the JeM facility.

Both agree that there are clear impact areas 150 to 200 metres away from the boundaries of the facility.

ASPI points out that, given that 'statistically fewer than 0.2 per cent' of SPICE-2000 bombs 'hit further than 10 metres from the designated strike area', it is likely that the intended target was indeed hit, and the purpose of the mission was to show intent and capability (and not to directly hamper JeM operations).

We now come to the second question about the effects of the Balakot strike.

Does it significantly push the envelope in terms of deterring Pakistani adventurism in Kashmir or elsewhere?

As a reminder, India seeks a method to ensure that sub-conventional war waged by Pakistan can be answered and deterred in a manner that utilises India's conventional superiority -- while staying well below the nuclear threshold.

The problem is that Pakistan's own air force in response to the Balakot raid carried out a major sortie into Indian airspace that led to the shooting down of a MiG-21 and the capture of an Indian pilot.

Thus, as Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, put it in The Atlantic: 'Pakistan's own retaliation serves to reestablish deterrence, by demonstrating it has conventional options of its own short of nuclear weapons.'

From this point of view, therefore, the strikes cannot be called a success.

If deterrence through India's conventional superiority is to be established now, then India will have to escalate to a point where its greater resources make the difference.

This is, to put it mildly, both difficult and dangerous and thus inadvisable.

Given that, objectively, the outcome of the airstrikes can at best be described as of mixed usefulness to India's overall objectives, should they have been carried out? Here we have to examine the cost.

By far the biggest cost was that India was spending its hard-earned reputation for strategic restraint and responsibility, built up over successive governments.

This capital cannot be run down forever, and could have been spent elsewhere.

Why it was instead spent on this particular occasion, with not enough to show for it, is a question that only the prime minister can answer.
Claude Arpi reveals how Wing Commander Jag Mohan Nath won a second Maha Vir Chakra in the 1965 War.

IMAGE: Wing Commander Jag Mohan 'Jaggi' Nath receives his second Maha Vir Chakra for his role in the 1965 War from President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.

The Indian Air Force is in the news for the exploits of the anonymous Mirage-2000 pilots who conducted a raid on a terror camp in Pakistan.

The shooting down and subsequent three-day captivity of Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, who, with his Mig-21 Bison shot down a Pakistani F-16, also got a lot of coverage.

It is perhaps the right time to salute the feats of the first Indian military officer to be twice awarded the Maha Vir Chakra, India's second highest honour for gallantry.

After describing his sorties over Tibet in the first segment of an exclusive interview conducted at his Juhu, north west Mumbai home, Wing Commander Jag Mohan 'Jaggi' Nath describes to Claude Arpi his daylight missions over Pakistan during the 1965 War.

Wing Commander 'Jaggi' Nath reveals the background of the operation which led to his second MVC. Some explanations have been added in italics.

It started after Pakistan had already failed with Operation Gibraltar (external link) in August 1965 in Kashmir (Operation Gibraltar was the codename given to Pakistan's plan to infiltrate into and take control over Kashmir by starting a rebellion against India's rule), then Pakistan decided to start Operation Grand Slam,(external link) (a plan drawn up by the Pakistan army, in May 1965, to attack the vital Akhnur bridge in Jammu. The bridge was not only the lifeline of an entire infantry division posted in Jammu and Kashmir, but could also be used to threaten Jammu, the vital logistical hub for the Indian forces).

IMAGE: Wing Commander Jag Mohan 'Jaggi' Nath with Dr Zakir Hussain, then India's vice-president.

"The Pakistanis were given us a beating; the Indian tanks, though very close to Sialkot, were stopped. After Operation Gibraltar, I used to make daily sorties to see how the Pakistan forces were positioned."

"The cameras we were using were so good we could read the number plates! We could see human beings, like with the U2 cameras (used by the Americans). Our cameras were really high resolution cameras.'

The soon--to-be-90 wing commander digresses for a moment: "Of course, the Americans could use their U2 or the SR71 (The Lockheed SR-71 'Blackbird' is a long-range, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft that was operated by the US air force). Can you imagine it was a plane faster than a bullet? It was an amazing plane."

"We had landed into problems in Akhnur; the Pakistanis tanks were coming in and giving us problems. I knew what was happening because I had daily runs; the problem in our army is that they are restricted by the orders of the government. The army chief (General J N Chaudhuri) had to get clearances (for a move); (in the air force), we did not have these problems."

To explain the issue, Wing Commander Nath shows me a picture of the then air chief -- later the Marshal of the Indian Air Force -- Arjan Singh with his arm around his shoulder. "He told me, 'You are my foster son'. I told him, 'If it was not for you, I would not be alive today'."

Wing Commander Nath refers to an Indian mole at air headquarters in Delhi. "One plane got shot down because of a compromise in security. Pakistan had prior notice of our plane flying over Pakistan on April 10, 1959."

In another interview, the wing commander recounted: 'In the IAF there was a mole, that too at a very senior level in the form of an officer in the Western Air Command who controlled all the flight movements of ours. He'd give Pakistanis all they wanted and that is how when our reconnaissance plane went over Pakistan on the morning of April 10, 1959, the pilot found the PAF Sabres actually waiting and obviously bombed him.

'When we found out, the officer, a Group Captain, was thrown out. This event helped us become tighter and more secretive.'

At that time, Arjan Singh had just taken over as acting Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) of the Western Air Command in Delhi.

IMAGE: Wing Commander Jag Mohan 'Jaggi' Nath with Yashwantrao B Chavan, India's defence minister during the 1965 War.

After having explained why in 1965, he was getting his orders directly from Arjan Singh, the then chief of air staff, Wing Commander Nath returns to the operation. "All the requirements came from the army. Every time something would take place, Arjan Singh would say, 'Send reconnaissance, send reconnaissance'."

"Arjan Singh had given me a code name, 'Professor' and would directly assign to me missions."

"During the 1965 War, like in 1962, the sorties that we did every day gave us the entire picture (of the enemy's forces)."

"Every day, we would get a briefing and do sorties. We had a complete picture how the war was proceeding."

"I had a clear picture of what was going wrong anywhere on any front."

You were providing the information to whom? To B N Mallik, the Intelligence Bureau director, to the air chief?

The information was going directly to the army chief; in 1965, it was General J N Chaudhury.

While the operations were going on, the army chief used to send his requirements to the air force; (for example) how the Pakistanis were moving or if they were not.

It would have been difficult (to take decisions) without knowing what was going on the other side of the border, how the Pakistanis were progressing.

There was no other way to get this information, but from the records of the reconnaissance planes.

Pakistani foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the army chief had planned Operation Gibraltar; (at the beginning) they finished off so many of our Vampires that we had no option but to bring our air force (in the war).

It was the time Nur Khan was brought in. (Air Marshal Malik Nur Khan was the commander-in-chief of the Pakistan air force. During the war with India in 1965, Nur Khan was credited with temporarily turning the tide of the war in Pakistan's favour, at least in the first 24 hours).

Something had to be done.

Army headquarters said: "Let us open a second front in the Southern part, it will draw Pakistani forces from the Akhnur front."

It was amazing; it was decided in the morning to open a new front. The question was from where should the attack start. It is where I came in; to find the weakest point across the border.

The Icchogil canal was like a Maginot Line; it was so well-fortified. Only reconnaissance could help the army to find the place where to counter-attack.

I got a call in the morning, I was in Agra. I was told, "Come immediately, immediately, board the plane and come to Pathankot."

IMAGE: Wing Commander Jag Mohan Nath receives his second Maha Vir Chakra.

In Pathankot, the top brass of the army and air force was there, they said: "We want a reconnaissance from the north, from Lahore and then Sargodha (in Pakistan Punjab), to the south."

Do you understand that I had to operate in day time? I could not do reconnaissance and take pictures at night. I had to fly low to avoid the radar and my target was 15 to 20 miles.

Usually, I used to build up my speed, convert into height, go at 12,000 feet (to take the picture)and was staggering around.

I had 5 to 10 minutes at the most. Later, I would come back (to India).

It was not enough time for the radar to activate anything. For so many years, I did this particular exercise.

But I could not do this for this particular reconnaissance for the second front the army wanted to open.

I told them: "How can I fly for 30, 35 or 40 minutes doing this business?" If I had broken it into small (shorter) sorties, this would be alright, but it was not what I was asked for.

When I finally did it and as I was heading back towards India, I told my navigator, "We go back to India now, we have taken the picture."

I got a warning on my tail radar. The tail radar of the Camberra picks things 15 miles away. You know exactly where the other plane is going to shoot you down.

The navigator said "Sir, I saw a black spot (in the radar)." I told him, "Never mind, if it comes closer, some 5 miles away, call me up."

I thought it would be from this distance that they would launch their missile.

Starfighters needed 5 to 10 seconds to log into the heat source and then shoot its missile. With less time than this, it has no time (to adjust the target).

It means that I have been on the move and not remained steady for more than 10 or 15 seconds.

And suddenly another spot (on the radar), and then another one; total four planes (behind us)!

I don't have any time to think. I improvised, I started barrel rolls. You do loop like this (demonstrates with gesture) it is called a barrel roll.

(A barrel roll is an aerial maneuver in which an airplane makes a complete rotation on both its longitudinal and lateral axes, causing it to follow a helical path, approximately maintaining its original direction. It is sometimes described as a combination of a loop and a roll).

That way I headed towards India.

I was caught by Indian radar. My friend Wing Commander (Krishna) Dandapani (Commanding Officer of the 203 Signal Unit in Amritsar) was not even informed, as the orders had been given to me at such a short notice.

Dandapani was on his toes; he said: 'Five airplanes are coming". He thought they were all Pakistani planes.

Remember that I been in the air for some 30 minutes already. So, Dandapani sees five planes coming and suddenly four going away.

He thought there was still one Pakistani plane. The Pakistani was me.

And then, my navigator tells me: "There is another airplane coming".

I said: "But we are in our country".

So I started doing a curve, I didn't need to do barrel turns; the difference between a fighter plane and a Canberra is the latter can do tighter turns while fighter planes have to do larger turns.

It was difficult to shoot me down while turning. So they missed me and overshot (our plane). At that time, they saw the Indian marking.

They called the airfield and told them: "This airplane is ours, how can we shoot him down?"

The control tower in Pathankot confirmed: "Yes, it is our plane; he has taken off from Pathankot and has to land there". They had just realised.

With all these exercises, I run out of bloody fuel. My gauge said 'zero' and I had no other option but to land in Pathankot.

The air control said: "No, you can't land, there are planes landing in a row from Akhnur (front)."

I said "I will land between two of them".

And as I landed one of my engines copped out.

Can you imagine such a flight!

And the information which came out of it was so vital!

IMAGE: Wing Commander -- then Squadron Leader -- Jag Mohan 'Jaggi' Nath on top of a PR Canberra with various other members of 106 Squadron. Photograph: Kind courtesy Bharat Rakshak.com

The army (authorities) could find a place called Barki to launch a counter-attack (Barki is a village that lies south-east of Lahore near the border with Punjab, India, and is connected with Lahore by the bridge over the Ichogil canal).

Later, the Indian Army withdrew by itself and the Pakistanis reinforced the place.

(The Battle of Burki (or Barki) was fought by Indian infantry and Pakistani armour in the 1965 War. The battle resulted in an Indian victory after the army captured the town on September 11, 1965. After the capture of Burki, the Indian advance continued towards Dograi, a town in the immediate vicinity of Lahore. No attempt was made to capture Lahore.)

But my flight gave them the information exactly where to go.

One particular flight gave them (the Indian Army) so much information.

You were awarded the Maha Vir Chakra for the second time for that?

The first MVC was awarded on January 1, 1962.

Though the war had not started, the reconnaissance had started, and the bar (the second MVC) was granted in September 1965.

I was the first officer of the armed forces to be awarded the MVC twice.

In 1965, General Sparrow got a bar and then four bars were given in 1971. (Major General Rajinder Singh, MVC**, nicknamed 'Sparrow' was awarded the MVC for his role during the War of 1947 and for displaying gallantry in the War of 1965).

I feel two Maha Vir Chakras should be equal to one Param Vir Chakra. It is not a joke to have two MVCs, but the government does not agree.

The Citation for the Bar to the MVC

Sqn Ldr Jag Mohan Nath, Award Date: September 1, 1965

During the Indo-Pak War 1965, Sqn Ldr Nath was again the Flight Commander with the Strategic Photo Reconnaissance Squadron flying the Canberra aircraft.

He led his unit several times over the hostile territory to obtain vital information about the enemy.

The unescorted missions, which were in the nature of reconnaissance, entailed flying long distances over the enemy territory and well-defended airfields and installations during day light.

Sqn Ldr Nath was fully aware of the risk he was running on each of these missions. Still, he chose to undertake the risky missions himself.

It was after great persuasion that he allowed his colleagues to do some risky assignments. The information gathered by him during his missions proved vitally important to Indian air effort.

The missions enabled our Air Force to attack vital enemy targets and this adversely affected enemy's war effort. Sqn Ldr Nath was awarded Bar to Mahavir Chakra for displaying courage, determination and devotion to duty.

Claude Arpi is grateful to Jagan Pillarisetti of www.Bharat-Rakshak.com for his suggestions/clarifications.
France has decided to sanction Pakistan-based terror outfit Jaish-e-Mohammed's chief Masood Azhar "at the national level" and freezing his assets, just two days after China blocked Azhar's listing as a global terrorist at the United Nations Security Council.

For the fourth time in the last ten years, China, on March 13, put a technical hold on a proposal by the United States, the United Kingdom and France, among others, to enlist Pakistan-based Azhar as a global terrorist at the UNSC, despite his outfit carrying out the ghastly Pulwama terror attack on February 14, which killed over 40 CRPF personnel in India's Jammu and Kashmir.

"France has decided to sanction Masood Azhar at the national level by freezing his assets in application of the Monetary and Financial Code. A joint decree of the Ministries of the Interior, and Economy and Finance was published today in the Official Gazette," a release issued by France noted.

"A deadly attack took place in Pulwama on 14th February 2019, claiming over 40 victims from the Indian police forces. The Jaish-e-Mohammed, which the United Nations has deemed to be a terrorist organization since 2001, has claimed responsibility for this attack...France has always been and always will be by Indias side in the fight against terrorism," the statement outlined.

"We will raise this issue with our European partners with a view to including Masood Azhar on the European Union list of persons, groups and entities involved in terrorist acts, based on this decree," the note stated.

China has since defended its technical hold to the UN resolution, saying it needed "more time" as it is "conducting a comprehensive and in-depth review" on the listing request put forth by the countries - a stance that has been widely criticised.

According to sources, more than 10 countries supported as co-sponsors India's bid to designate Azhar as a global terrorist in the United Nations Security Council 1267 list.

India expressed disappointment over the development but vowed to continue to pursue "all available avenues to ensure that terrorist leaders who are involved in heinous attacks on our citizens" are brought to justice.

"We are disappointed by this outcome. This has prevented action by the international community to designate the leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a proscribed and active terrorist organization which has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 14 February 2019," a statement issued by the ministry of external affairs said.

"We are grateful for the efforts of the Member States who moved the designation proposal and the unprecedented number of all other Security Council members as well as non-members who joined as co-sponsors," it added.
IMAGE: Members of the public react in front of the Masjd Al Noor Mosque as they fear for their relatives in Christchurch. Photograph: Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images

An Indian-origin man was injured in the Christchurch terror attacks, his relatives residing in Hyderabad said on Friday.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst

attack on Muslims in a western country.

Khursheed Jahangir, brother of Ahmed Iqbal Jahangir, said his brother was injured during the attack and is currently undergoing treatment at a local hospital in Christchurch.

"He is injured.He is recovering in a hospital now. The latest information we received is that he is undergoing a surgery. We have seen the video. He has been shot in the chest and we are trying to reach Indian embassy people and local helpline numbers," Khursheed Jahangir said.

He said he spoke to All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi for help in reaching out to authorities for a visa and other formalities to go to New Zealand to see his brother.

Khursheed Jahangir said he has visited New Zealand twice and described it as one of the 'safest' places in the world.

Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted requesting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and the Telangana Governments help to enable the family to go to New Zealand.

'I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family,' Owaisi said in a tweet.

'These are Mr.Khursheed's passport details. His brother is serious & his family has little support. I'm only requesting the immediate support of your good offices in expediting his visa process. Hell make all arrangements to travel to NZ by himself,' Owaisi said in another tweet.

Reacting to Owaisi's request, Telangana Rashtra Samiti working president and former minister KT Rama Rao tweeted 'Asad Saab, Will request our NRI department to assist'.

Owaisi, in another tweet, said 'Farhaj Ahsan, a person of Indian origin, was also reported to have gone to the same mosque and is currently missing. His family is in Hyderabad, I request immediate assistance to his family as well. His familys contact details are available with me & Ill share the same with you (sic).'

Farhaj Ahsan's parents could not be reached.

Suresh Kumar, a family friend of Ahmed Iqbal, said in a video footage they could see images of Iqbal, who runs a restaurant in New Zealand, at a mosque when the attack took place.

"Since then we (Iqbal's family in Hyderabad) have been trying to reach him. We could not reach him over phone. His wife is in a state of shock. We have sought the state governments help to send one of the family members to New Zealand," Kumar said.

According to Suresh, Ahmed Iqbal has been living in New Zealand for over a decade and settled there.

He has two children and is said to have permanent residency of that country.

Meanwhile, India's High Commission in New Zealand was ascertaining details about the possibility of Indians being affected in the attacks amidst unconfirmed reports that nine Indian nationals were missing after the shootings.

MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said that India's High Commission in New Zealand is in touch with local authorities for more information.

"Our mission is in touch with local authorities to ascertain more details. It is a sensitive matter and therefore we can't give confirmed numbers/names till we are absolutely certain," he said.

When asked about the unconfirmed reports suggesting that nine Indians are missing after the shootings, a Indian High Commission official in Wellington told PTI over phone that a team of the Indian mission was in contact with the local authorities to find out details about Indians.

The unconfirmed reports emerged after the unverified Twitter account of India's High Commissioner in New Zealand Sanjiv Kohli tweeted that there are nine missing persons of Indian nationality/origin.

'As per updates received from multiple sources there are nine missing persons of Indian nationality/ origin. Official confirmation still awaited. Huge crime against humanity. Our prayers with their families,' according to Kohli's unverified Twitter handle.
Y S Vivekananda Reddy, former minister and younger brother of former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, was Friday found dead at his house in Kadapa district of Andhra Pradesh.

Police initially registered a case under Section 174 Code of Criminal Procedure (unnatural death) when Reddy's body was found by his staff early in the morning.

After post-mortem in the local government hospital, police confirmed the case was altered to Section 302 Indian Penal Code that relates to murder.

The incident sparked a political slugfest between the opposition Yuvajana Shramika Rythu Congress and the ruling Telugu Desam Party with both trading allegations against each other.

Vivekananda Reddy's party, YSR Congress, demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the case even as the Andhra Pradesh government constituted a Special Investigation Team, headed by CID Additional Director General of Police Amit Garg, to probe the death.

YSR Congress president Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy alleged that Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu was responsible for the death of his uncle.

Lashing out at the YSRC chief, Naidu told a press meet later that the slain leaders family appeared 'prima facie guilty' as they not only tried to hide the murder but also destroy vital forensic evidence.

Jagan Mohan Reddy and the YSRC blamed him, his son Lokesh and the TDP only for political gains, Naidu alleged.

"Truth is truth. Nothing can be hidden. They wanted to use a family members murder for political gains. Its a misfortune to have such a leader in politics," Naidu said, hitting out at the YSR Congress chief.

Rejecting Jagan Mohan Reddys demand for a CBI investigation, Naidu said the demand was raised only to get away from the case.

He asserted that only the state police would investigate the case.

Terming the killing as a 'politically mean act', the YSR Congress chief told reporters in Pulivendula after visiting the spot that only a CBI investigation would bring out the truth.

Justice would be done only if a third party probed the case, he said, adding they had no faith in the state police.

He also alleged that the state government was fabricating evidence to portray Vivekananda's death as natural.

"They (government) came out with a letter purportedly written by my uncle, naming a driver (as the culprit). How could a person write a letter while being killed,?" he asked.

This was the third unnatural death in the YS family that has a powerful political hold in Kadapa district.

While the father Y S Raja Reddy was murdered in 1998, the eldest son M Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was killed in a helicopter crash in 2009.

Vivekananda Reddy was a two-time MLA, two-time MP and a one-term MLC. He served as agriculture minister in the N Kiran Kumar Reddy government in united Andhra Pradesh.

The 68-year old YSR Congress leader is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Police said injuries were found on the forehead, head and its back, besides on the hand and thigh.

"We have gathered some clues in the case. We are questioning the former minister's household staff. Some fingerprints were also collected from the scene," Kadapa District Superintendent of Police Rahul Dev Sharma said.

"We have taken the case seriously and are investigating it from all angles," Sharma added.

The chief minister spoke with the DGP R P Thakur and other senior officials, asked them to conduct a thorough probe and not spare the guilty, said a CMO communique.

Naidu recalled Vivekananda's services as a public representative and extended sympathies to the bereaved family.

His death sparked a political row between Telugu Desam Party and YSRC.

"He actively took part in election campaign in Jammalamadugu yesterday. That he died suddenly gives rise to several suspicions. So we want a CBI investigation to bring out the facts," YSRC spokesperson Vasireddy Padma demanded.

State Animal Husbandry Minister C Adinarayana Reddy, who belongs to Jammalamadugu, took objection to YSRCs insinuation and said it has become a habit for the opposition to politicise everything.

"I also want to know the facts behind such a nice person's death. We too want an impartial inquiry, but YSRC leaders should stop mudslinging," he told reporters Amaravati.

Known to be a down-to-earth and genial person,Vivekananda was elected as MLA in 1989 and 1994 from his hometown Pulivendula in Kadapa district.

He was elected to the Lok Sabha from Kadapa constituency in 1999 and 2004 and to the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Council in 2009.

He had differences of opinion with his nephew Jagan Mohan Reddy after the latter quit Congress and established the YSR Congress and chose to stay back with the parent party.

Vivekananda lost the by-election to his sister-in-law, Vijayamma in 2011. Subsequently, the family differences were sorted out and Vivekananda Reddy joined the YSRC.

Two days ago, he was seen at the Lotus Pond residence of Jagan Mohan Reddy in Hyderabad and on Thursday campaigned for the YSRC in Kadapa district.

He was reportedly alone at his residence in Pulivendula on Thursday night.

"There was no response when I went to his house this morning. I called his wife in Hyderabad over phone and she asked me not to disturb him.Later,the cook and other household staff reached the house but they too did not get any response.

"I then went in through a side door and found Vivekananda's body in the bathroom, with blood clots in the bedroom and the bathroom. There were several injuries on his body," Vivekananda's personal assistant M V Krishna Reddy said.

He lodged a complaint with police, based on which the first information report was registered.

YSRC MP V Vijayasai Reddy expressed shock over the former minister's death.

"He was such a humble person who always engaged himself in public service. It is a huge loss to the YSRC and also the state," the MP said in a message.
First time voters say they expect political leaders to focus on "real issues".

Young and restless, anxious and ambitious, first time voters in urban India are going into this election with a clear vision for the country's future and say they expect political leaders to focus on "real issues" such as jobs, women's safety and farmer distress.

They may be disparate in their life goals and choices of career but are one in reflecting the angst of the young and their hopes for a better tomorrow, many of them saying the country's resources and energies must not be spent on things like monuments and statues.

At the cusp of their careers, many youth, from Haryana to Karnataka, also express their apprehensions about expressing themselves freely in public or on social media and want future lawmakers to change the narrative.

According to the Election Commission, 1.5 crore "young voters" in the 18-19 age group will exercise their franchise for the first time in the upcoming elections being held from April 11 to May 19.

One debutant voter is 20-year-old Kanika, an English Honours student at DelhiUniversity's Miranda House.

"As youth, we are all concerned about jobs. The political leaders and lawmakers we elect should work on improving the employment scenario."

"But, more than that, I am concerned about my freedom of speech and expression, especially at a time when hyper-nationalism and jingoism are running high My mother tells me I should not write so freely on social media as it may hamper my job prospects," she said.

Kanika, who belongs to Haryana, is one of the tens of thousands of young middle class women who have stepped out of their homes to study. She lives in a paying guest facility in DU's North Campus and alleges that safety of women is an issue that no political party has really addressed.

"As a woman, I still feel afraid to venture out," she said.

Hundreds of kilometres away, Madhumitha Priyadarshini, pursuing a bachelor's course at the Dayananda Sagar College of Architecture in Bengaluru, has similar concerns and considers women's safety and farmer distress priority issues.

"Every vote is valuable. I know the significance of elections. When I cast my vote, the farmers' issue will be the main deciding factor for me for electing the MP from my region," said the student who belongs to Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

Madhumitha said cases of trolling and backlashes have made her hesitant about expressing her opinions on public issues on social media. "I am always half-afraid... fearful at the thought that there might be repercussions."

Many of these first-timers dream about making it big in life and hope the political leaders they vote for will focus on "real issues" not "unreal ones.

"As a youth, I feel the Statue of Unity was not needed at all, given the poverty in the country and the joblessness. That same Rs 3,000 crore could have been used for other projects that would have benefited the youth and the country," said Utkarsh Choubey, referring to the 182-metre statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat.

The Patna boy who is studying computer science at the RV College of Engineering in Bengaluru said many youngsters like him are "confused".

"We don't feel inspired by any particular party. All parties have their own issues," he said. Many other students echoed his sentiment about "monumental expenditures on monumental statues".

A good job, political stability and peaceful environment are on the wish-list of students from Jammu and Kashmir.

"The socio-economic conditions of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh are different so youths have different aspirations in these three regions. However, creation of well-paying jobs, political stability, and a peaceful, harmonious existence is certainly desirable for all of us," said Jammu girl Shreya Sharma, who is studying in Miranda House.

While many students across the country concurred that the aftermath of the February 14 Pulwama terror attack, in which 40 Central Reserve Police Force soldiers were killed, did weigh heavy on their minds, and had become part of their conversations, many said they were afraid to discuss the issue in public.

The backlash Kashmiri students faced after the incident is also a top of the mind issue.

A Kashmiri student from Pulwama, who studies at a leading university in Delhi, said on condition of anonymity, "We all want peace and harmony, as the youth of Kashmir and of this country. For me, education and healthcare are two main factors, because jobs come only if we are educated and healthy."

According to Bengaluru-resident Bilal Shariff, "Political leaders and lawmakers must focus on real issues instead of using caste and creed planks to trigger emotional frenzy among people to garner votes."

The 19-year-old alleged that the freedom of expression has been "compromised" in many ways today, and the issue of women safety has "not been really addressed" by any political party.

Representation of truth in the media is of concern too, said some first-timers.

"The nexus between knowledge and power has always been there. But the extent of this issue definitely gets intensified during election time," Shreya said.
Climate change is real, and we need, need, need to do something about it.

That's why, on March 15, tens of thousands of students worldwide have decide to skip class to demand that elected officials act on this awful crisis.

The move is inspired by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who since last August has been striking outside the Swedish parliament building. She has been boycotting classes every Friday, demanding that her government step up the fight against climate change. Her message is simple: Strike for climate.

Take a look at the marches across the world.

Students hold placards as they take part in a global protest against climate change in Gurugram, India. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

A demonstrator takes part in a protest against climate change, organised by the YouthStrike4Climate movement, in London, Britain. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

A student holds a placard to support Swedish environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg during a strike from school to demand action on climate change at the town hall square of Duesseldorf, Germany. Photograph: Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

School children hold placards and shout slogans as they participate in a protest outside the Scottish Parliamen in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

A protester demanding action on climate change holds up a sign in Sydney, Australia. Photograph: Swati Pandey/Reuters

Protests in Te Ngakau Civic Square in Wellington, New Zealand. Photograph: Charlotte Greenfield/Reuters

Schoolchildren demonstrate during a climate protest at Torgalmenningen in Bergen, Norway. Photograph: Marit Hommedal/NTB Scanpix/Reuters

A protester in Sydney's Hyde Park holds an ominous sign during the global climate strike, urging politicians to take urgent action on climate change. Photograph: James Gourley/Getty Images

This girl's message couldn't be simpler and easier to understand. Is the world listening though? Photograph: James Gourley/Getty Images

Yang Tzy-Ching, 12, grad 6 student, takes part in the Global Climate Strike to protest climate change and government inaction in front of the Presidential Palace in Taipei, Taiwan. Photograph: Billy HC Kwok/Getty Images

Students protest in Auckland's Aotea Square over climate change in Auckland, New Zealand. Photograph: Phil Walter/Getty Images

The protests are part of a global climate strike inspired by Greta Thunberg. Photograph: Phil Walter/Getty Images
Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said he had asked Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation chief Ajoy Mehta to fix "primary responsibility" for Thursday's foot overbridge collapse by Friday evening.

The deck of a foot overbridge on DN Road connected to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station collapsed on Thursday evening, killing six persons and injuring 31.

Fadnavis was speaking to reporters after meeting the injured in St George's Hospital nearby.

"It is shocking that such an accident can take place even after a structural audit. Primary responsibility will be fixed by this evening. I have asked civic chief (Ajoy Mehta) to find out names of those responsible," Fadnavis said.

"A high level probe into this incident has already been ordered. Those responsible (for the collapse) will be punished," he said.

Earlier in the day, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official had said the FOB was was found to be structurally safe when it was audited in August 2016, soon after a British-era bridge over Savitri River got washed away in monsoon downpour in Mahad in Raigad district.

"During that audit, 354 bridges were checked for their structural soundness. The FOB that collapsed on Thursday was marked C2B. This means it needed minor repairs only. Tenders were floated for the repair but it got held up," the official had said Friday morning.

Fadnavis also said he had ordered a re-visit of all earlier structural audits carried out on such structures.

The Maharashtra CM visited the mishap site post the visit to the hospital.
At least 49 people have been killed in terror attacks at two New Zealand mosques on Friday.

The shootings at Linwood Masjid Mosque and Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch took place during Friday prayers. Describing the horrific attacks, eyewitnesses said that they saw blood and bodies everywhere.

IMAGE: Police cordon off Linwood Avenue near the Linwood Masjid in Christchurch, New Zealand where a gunman opened fire at pedestrians and worshippers. Photograph: Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images

'Our brothers have been shot'

Sabir Hussain was deep in prayer when the leader of his Christchurch mosque halted proceedings: "Our brothers have been shot."

According to a report in Stuff.co.nz, Hussain said when the shooting started, he kept low and went into the wash and storeroom where he saw a man dead outside. He knew he "was not safe", jumped out of the window and hid behind a fence until police arrived.

'He started shooting everyone in the mosque'

Ahmad Al-Mahmoud was at the Al Noor mosque when the gunman stormed inside and opened fire.

Al-Mahmoud, was quoted by Reuters saying, "He had a big gun ... he came and started shooting everyone in the mosque, everywhere. They had to smash the door -- the glass from the window and the door -- to get everyone out.

"We were trying to get everyone to run away from this area. I ran away from the car park, jumping through the back [yard] of houses."

'Saw people drop dead in front of me'

Nour told the New Zealand Herald that the gunman shot multiple worshipers outside before carrying out his rampage inside the mosque where he shot people indiscriminately. "I saw people drop dead in front of me. I was crawling to get away," he said.

IMAGE: A floral tribute is seen on Linwood Avenue near the Linwood Masjid. Mosques across New Zealand have been closed and police are urging people not to attend Friday prayers as a safety precaution. Photograph: Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images

Could hear screaming, crying

A man in a wheelchair, Farid Ahmed spoke to news outlet TVNZ about the shooting at the Al Noor mosque.

Suddenly the shooting started. It started in the main room...I was in the side room, so I didnt see who was shooting but I saw that some people were running out to my room where I was in, I saw some people had blood on their body and some people were limping. It was at the moment I realised things were really serious, he said.

He said that the gunman had done his massacre inside the mosque and that he could hear screaming and crying.

I could hear screaming and crying, I saw some people drop dead, some people were running away, Ahmed said.

Blood was splashing on me

Ramzan Ali, who was inside the Al Noor mosque during the shooting, said he was the last man to come out of the mosque, reported Newshub, a news outlet in New Zealand.

The Sheikh was giving the sermon on Friday prayers and it was 1:42 [pm] and the gun starts shooting and he just came in and he was shooting ad hoc, he said. The guns started... He just came in and was shooting. I actually didnt see him, I was just lying down on the bench thinking if I get up Ill get shot, he recounted.

He said he was the last person to come out of the mosque after the shooting had stopped and that he could see many bodies around him.

"The blood was splashing on me and I thought 'oh my God, what's going to happen to me now? But fortunately I'm alive, Ali said.
IMAGE: Armed police officers stand guard in a perimeter outside Al Noor mosque after Friday's gunmen attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand. Photograph: Edgar Su/Reuters

Expressing 'deep shock' over killings of scores of people in the Christchurch terror attack, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies, and expressed India's solidarity with the people of New Zealand at this difficult time.

In a letter to Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, Modi also stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence, the External Affairs Ministry said in an official release.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's suburb, seen as one of the worst attacks on Muslims in that country.

Observing that according to unofficial reports nine Indians are missing since the attack, a source said that due to certain processes involved, official confirmation about Indian casualties may take a while to come in.

In his letter, Modi offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injured and underscored India's solidarity with the 'friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time'.

Prime Minister has expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch, the release said.

"The prime minister stressed India's strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies," it added.

Modi also expressed his deepest condolences to the bereaved families in the dastardly attack.

Earlier, the MEA said its High Commission is in touch with local authorities for more information and was ascertaining more details about the possibility of Indians being affected by the terror attacks.

"Our mission is in touch with local authorities to ascertain more details. It is a sensitive matter and therefore we can't give confirmed numbers/names till we are absolutely certain," MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

Meanwhile, MP Asaduddin Owaisi, President of All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen Party, said an Indian has been shot at in the incident.

'A video from #ChristChurch shows one Ahmed Jehangir who was shot. His brother Iqbal Jehangir is a resident of Hyderabad and would like to go to NZ for Ahmed's family. I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family,' he said in a tweet.

India's High Commission said that any Indian national affected by the attacks can contact it for assistance.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for those affected.

Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh tweeted,"India stands with New Zealand in this hour of grief & sorrow and offers it's condolences to the bereaved families.The shootout in New Zealand underscores the importance of the global fight to counter Terrorism - the World needs to get together and defeat this demon.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi also condemned the mass shootings and termed it 'a despicable act of terrorism'.

He said the world stands in need of compassion and understanding and not bigotry and hate-filled extremism.

'The New Zealand Shooting is a despicable act of terrorism, that must be condemned unequivocally. The world stands in need of compassion and understanding.

'Not bigotry and hate filled extremism. My condolences to the families of the victims. My prayers go out to those who were injured,' he said on Twitter.

'What happened in New Zealand is a crime against humanity. It is a dangerous reminder that hatred and bigotry must be fought at every turn.

'The families of the victims remain in our thoughts & prayers,' he said.

Condemning the terror attack, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said 'terrorism in any form must be defeated.'

Banerjee said on her official twitter handle, 'Terrorism in any form must be defeated. Humanity is about spreading peace and harmony. Strongly condemn the dastardly terror attack in New Zealand.'

'Condolences to the grieving families and strength to the injured to recover,' she tweeted.
The Tamil Nadu government has ordered an inquiry on how a college here gave its approval for Congress president Rahul Gandhi to interact with its students when the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) for elections is in force.

The top Congress leader, in his interaction with students of the Stella Maris College in Chennai on March 13, promised 33 per cent reservation in government jobs for women and answered several of their questions.

The Director of Collegiate Education, R Sarumathi directed a subordinate official to inquire 'immediately' on the matter and submit a report, official sources told PTI.

In a communique (dated March 14) to the Regional Joint Director, Chennai Zone, the director said in view of the Lok Sabha elections the MCC was in force and under such circumstances, sought to know 'how permission was granted' by the college for the event.

Sources said Stella Maris is one of the 10 government aided colleges in Chennai. Such institutions are not only bound by state norms, but are also expected to follow the MCC.

According to the MCC, displayed in the Election Commission website, 'use of educational institutions, including their grounds (whether government aided, private or government) for political campaigns and rallies is not allowed'.

When contacted, the college authorities declined to say if any inquiry was conducted by collegiate department officials.

The Chief Electoral Officer also did not comment. Tamil Nadu Congress Committee President K S Alagiri dubbed the inquiry move as an act of 'vendetta', by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the Centre through the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam regime in Tamil Nadu unable to tolerate the positive response especially from the youth to the event.

Political leaders taking part in college functions has been in vogue for a long time, he said.

The decision to invite Gandhi was taken a few months ago by the students association of the college.

Rahul Gandhi took part in the event only in his capacity as a Member of Parliament and not as the Congress president, he claimed, adding 'the Model Code of Conduct is not a bar to participate in such events as an MP'.

When Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Satyabrata Sahoo had said there was 'no violation' of the MCC, what right does the Collegiate department have to pursue the matter, he asked.

"If the Tamil Nadu government came forward to take steps against the reputed Stella Maris College, I would like to warn that it will lead to severe consequences," he said.

The Congress leader demanded withdrawal of the official communication tasking an official to probe the matter.

In his interaction with the students, Gandhi had brought up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations about the pricing of the aircraft and the process.

To a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, he had said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied selectively.

"I will be the first person to say it... investigate Robert Vadra, but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.

Vadra is being probed in connection with a money laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district.

Gandhi also questioned whether the Prime Minister could stand in a large audience and answer people's questions.
Intermediary platforms would take down content that violates the code of conduct in 'real time', once they receive a legal notice from the EC officers tasked with looking at content violations, reports Neha Alawadhi.

IMAGE: Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora, flanked by election commissioners Ashok Lavasa, left, and Sushil Chandra, addresses a press conference in Lucknow. Photograph: Nand Kumar/PTI Photo

The Indian industry body representing big technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter will train State Election Commission (SEC) officers as well as work with members who will take down content that is flagged through a legal notice, the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) said.

The EC on Sunday announced the model code of conduct, and said social media platforms had committed to ensure a monitoring mechanism to help check issues that may compromise the election exercise.

It also said it was working with industry body IAMAI to formulate a code of ethics for intermediary online platforms, of which the most notable are social media firms.

"We have had discussions with the EC to train state election officers and help them with their main thrust of bringing new voters to take part in the upcoming general elections," said Subho Ray, president at IAMAI.

He added that intermediary platforms would take down content that violates the code of conduct in 'real time', once they receive a legal notice from the EC officers tasked with looking at content violations.

The Supreme Court in 2015 had read down a Section of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, to say that an intermediary will only take down content if specified by a court order or a notification by the appropriate government or its agency.

In a bid to make this task perhaps easier, the EC had asked for the inclusion of a clause in proposed changes to Indias intermediary IT laws.

The EC had asked that a clause be added to the proposed rules, so they apply to 'violation of any of the provisions of election law or/and directions of the EC, during the period of any election'.

In counter-comments submitted by different stakeholders, several entities disagreed with the ECs demand and said the existing laws were enough to deal with the electoral processes, and do not require a modification in the IT Act.

The proposed changes are yet to be finalised.

Silent period restrictions

In addition, Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora also said that the silent period which kicks in 48 hours before polling, will be applicable to social media platforms as well.

Section 126 of the Representation of the People Act prohibits advertising and campaigning on television and other electronic media during the 'silent period', which is 48 hours before elections in a given area.

"We will enforce silent periods for ads on Google platforms," said a Google spokesperson.

Facebook and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

It is important to make the distinction between advertisements and content posted on social media platforms. While advertisements are paid for, content posted by individual profiles are usually not.

Another issue is that of dealing with content removal at a geographical level.

For example, West Bengal is going to polls in seven phases, and in an online scenario, blocking ads or taking down content at a city or block level is not an easy task.

Hence, content removal based on complaints made by people and requested by the EC in real time is a more feasible method.

Also, while blocking content on websites by geotagging or selectively making content available in a specific geographic location is easier, doing so for mobile apps is a far more complex issue.
Sir Mark Tully on the magic of Indian elections.

A fascinating excerpt from The Great March of Democracy: Seven Decades of India's Elections.

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi rides a tank at Larsen and Toubro's Armoured Systems Complex facility at Hazira, Surat, January 19, 2019. Photograph: Press Information Bureau

Looking back at my coverage of Indian elections, I am reminded of one of the most colourful Indian politicians I have known in my long career here spanning forty years -- the stalwart of Haryana politics, Chaudhary Devi Lal.

During the 1980 general elections, I went to see Chaudhary sahib on the day he and other leaders of the Janata Party were discussing their manifesto. He was obviously in a bad mood so I asked him what the matter was. "I don't like this table work," he growled. "All day sitting around having discussions."

"But the discussions were surely very important," I said. "You were deciding on the manifesto and what should be included in it."

"Fool!" Devi Lal shot back, "I can't tell you how many elections I have fought, but I can assure you I have never read a single manifesto!"

I can't remember how many elections I have covered, but I can say I never read the manifestos that carefully. Some might say that is a terrible admission, but I would reply that I can never remember a time when the voters I met as I travelled around India during election campaigns seemed concerned about manifestos.

They might well have been struck by one or two big-ticket promises like free electricity for farmers, or free mid-day meals for schoolchildren, but they didn't need to read manifestos to take those on board.

Voters, especially in the villages, were interested in working out which candidate would do the most for them, and that seems fair enough to me. Often, a voter would say of a sitting candidate, "I am not going to vote for him because he didn't do my work," or, "that candidate is from my caste so he might help me."

I would travel extensively during election campaigns asking voters their opinions. I always remember two opinions I got on one of my first forays into the countryside in an Uttar Pradesh election.

A labourer repairing a road said to me, "What does it matter who I vote for? Whoever I do choose will put my vote in his stomach."

In a village, whose MLA was the chief minister, dissatisfied voters complained, "If he can't provide us with kerosene during an election campaign when he's seeking our votes, what hope do we have of getting it afterwards if we do vote for him?"

One of the most common complaints I used to hear was about MPs and MLAs who during the election campaign promised to care for their constituencies, but after being elected were not seen until they next came to ask for votes.

After the coverage of the campaign came polling and, of course, the question of rigging.

Photograph: Rediff.com Archives IMAGE: Sir Mark Tully, the legendary journalist.

There was a constituency where I was so confident there would be rigging that I sent the distinguished British psephologist, David Butler, there to witness it. The next day an article appeared in the London Times in which Butler said, in shocked tones, 'I have seen vote-stealing for the first time.'

Rigging is a much less common phenomenon nowadays because of the measures taken by successive chief election commissioners. However, moving police around the country to provide the security the commissioners regard as necessary has made elections much longer, which means it is harder for foreign journalists to keep up the momentum of their coverage.

Elections did demonstrate the extent of the BBC's audience and the trust voters had in its coverage. Saeed Naqvi tells the story of asking an elderly villager in UP which party was the strongest. The villager replied, "Don't ask me now, wait until I have heard the BBC."

On several occasions, I was accosted by angry candidates who wanted to know why the BBC had said their opponent was winning. I had difficulty in convincing them that the BBC did not forecast results of individual constituencies.

What had happened was that the candidates' opponents had tried to boost their claims by invoking the name of the BBC because they knew that it had a widespread reputation for authenticity. The phrase 'authentic news' was often used to describe BBC bulletins.

In the seventies, we, who were involved in the BBC World Service election coverage, had to be cautious to retain our reputation for authenticity. It would have been severely damaged had we forecast the result of an election and got it wrong, which was more than possible, but at the same time we had to give some indication of the way elections were going.

So I, at least, tended to hedge my bets. Time and again, I would be interviewed by those I was interviewing. They would ask, 'Which way do you think the wind is blowing?'

Photograph: Rediff.com Archives IMAGE: Indira Gandhi on the campaign trail.

The only election in which I was able to give a confident answer to that question was the 1977 general election, which was held while the state of Emergency was still in force.

Then, wherever I travelled in northern India, I could feel the gale that would sweep Indira Gandhi out of power blowing. It was amazing how sudden that gale was and how short-lived.

Reporting the next general election, less than three years later, there was no gale sweeping Indira Gandhi back to power, but I did feel a wind blowing in her favour because the split in the Janata Party had left her opponents in disarray.

There is one major change that has taken place over the last twenty years in news and current affairs broadcasting -- improvements in technology.

In the seventies and the eighties, I had to either rely on the telephone or book a line. That involved going to the nearest All India Radio station.

The quality of the telephone call, even when boosted by the best technology available at that time, was often so poor that my dispatches had to be read in the studio rather than broadcast in my voice.

Nowadays, the ubiquitous satellite phone means correspondents can broadcast from anywhere. Mind you, there is a downside to this. Because it is so easy to broadcast live from the location of a story, the television viewer today is forever watching overexcited correspondents dramatising their stories by flapping their hands in all directions, and ad-libbing.

India is changing too. When I first covered elections, India was seen internationally as a land of irredeemable poverty. In television news and current affairs, vultures regularly featured as symbols of this poverty.

I remember once pointing out to a meeting of senior BBC editors that the peacock and not the vulture was the national bird of India. But now the pendulum has swung the other way and the leitmotif of foreign reporting on India is 'the country with the potential to become an economic superpower'. The West is seen as waning and Asia as rising.

India, with its size and its young population, is forecast to be one of the two giants of new Asia, alongside China.

This view of the present and the vision of the future is already influencing the foreign financial press to take a greater interest in all things Indian, including elections.

If, as most economists seem to think is likely, the Indian economy continues to grow at its present rapid rate, then surely the interest of the international media as a whole will grow too.

Elections will hopefully be seen as celebrations of the success of democracy after long years of struggle during which the Western media often wondered whether it would succeed.

Excerpted from The Great March of Democracy: Seven Decades of India's Elections by S Y Quraishi with the kind permission of the publishers, Penguin Random House India.
Who doesnt want 35 acres of Connecticut woods and hills?

Well  maybe the Town of New Milford.

Acreage near Torys Cave might be donated to the town  but the town needs to think about it.

Rather than a valuable resource, some Town Council members worry the gift would be a financial liability.

The land would connect a protected Weantinoge Heritage Land Trust property with the 25 acres donated to the town in 2012, for 170 continuous acres, said Chris Charles, who is representinglandowners Eagle Holdings.

It really is the linchpin to this whole area, Charles said.

The property is valued at $400,000, and he said it has pristine wetlands, as well as a portion of the Blue Trail  a statewide hiking trail. About three acres of it is considered core farmland.

But some Town Council members wondered if the town can take on this property, especially as it grapples with state funding cuts and is trying to sell unused properties it already owns.

During the councils Monday meeting they requested more information on the site.

Councilwoman Katy Francis said the town might not be able to do anything with the property without spending money it doesnt have right now, adding it could be a liability to the town that would require more insurance.

She said the property was very sloped and probably couldnt be developed.

Council members wondered if this property has been on the market and questioned the precedent of waiving the taxes for this half of the year  which the owner is requesting in mid-March.

This is the first time this piece has been listed by itself. The entire property was listed a while ago, but 25 acres were donated to the town in 2012 and 22 acres were sold to be developed into condos once the property was cleaned up, Charles said.

He said the property has some level parts and though initial access to the property isnt easy, they are working with an engineer about fixing that and creating parking.

Charles said the owner wants to donate it to the town, which can determine its best use, while a land trust would focus on preservation.

He said Weantinoge wants the property but was unable to come to terms with the owner.

Your economic development team has an excellent process for reviewing a piece of land and determining whats the best comprehensive plan for something, he said. Thats something the town of New Milford can bring to the table that a land trust cant do.

kkoerting@newstimes.com; 203-731-3345
WINSTED  Fans of local restaurants could be in gastronomical glee this week as two restaurants in the same block are expected to open in the near future.

Its just serendipity, that the two eateries will be close to each other, said Philip Allen, Economic Development Commission chairman.

The proposed restaurant at 562 Main St. will be called Taqueria Jalisco. The applicant is Juan Salizar of SLP Contractors LLC of New Britain. His application was approved by the Planning and Zoning Commission Monday.

They will not be a typical Mexican restaurant, as reported, by the applicant, said Pamela A. Colombie, the land use assistant for the Planning and Community Development Department. The applicant told the commission that the closest restaurant with a similar cuisine is in Avon, Colombie noted.

The second restaurant to be approved by the commission Monday is at 522 Main St. The applicant is Sean P. McGlynn on Winsted. While McGlynn hasnt yet named his restaurant, he has the menu well planned out.

He told the commission that the restaurant will serve appetizers, small entrees and serve beer and wine. McGlynn said it would be a very casual environment with books and games and local artwork, according to the minutes.

The structure at 522 Main St. is the former Garibaldi Society building, Allen said.

Salazar bought the 2,509 square-foot building in September for $78,600, according to property records. It is to the right of the three-story building measuring 3,583 square feet the McGlynn purchased for $130,000 on Jan. 30, property records show.

It is located to the right of F & G Richards Jewelers, a family owned-business that has been in operation for 60 years, according to town records.

Both applications were filed as special permit requests, which allows more stringent regulations to be included in the approval requirements.

The key concern, Colombie, said is the protocol for garbage disposal. Its a big deal, especially on Main Street, she added.

She said Salazar is working out a shared (disposal) agreement with Kent Pizza, which is next door to the proposed restaurant. McGlynn has three options, Colombie said. There can be no garbage on Main Street, she said.

McGlynn may arrange a possible easement to provide room for a garbage truck from an independent hauler to navigate in the additional space, Colombie said, or, he does his own hauling.

Both buildings are mixed-use structures, each with two apartments on the second floor. There are tenants in the building McGlynn bought, Colombie said, but not in Salazars.

The two new businesses will bring attention to the west end of Main Street, which is welcome, Allen said. He said added that McGlynn plans to serve locally made beer and source artisanal vintners and brewers.

Both owners plan to start work immediately, Colombie said, and are working on securing building permits.
China Post issued a commemorative stamp to mark the 40th National Tree Planting Day in Beijing on March. 11, one day ahead of the countrys arbor day. The stamp is the first one in China released to commemorate the National Tree Planting Day. (photo: Hao Qunying/Guangming Picture)

With a face value of 1.2 yuan ($0.19), the commemorative stamp bears the image of a green tree. The trunk of the tree is designed based on a pair of forearms, and the branches are embodied in palms and fingers. The stamp is designed to call for the public to plant trees and improve ecological environment.

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[ Editor: zyq ]
A court in Cambodia on Friday concluded its investigation into two former RFA reporters accused of espionage, ordering their cases to proceed to trial, and prompting a rights group to call for their charges to be dropped.



Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin were taken into custody on Nov. 14, 2017 and charged with illegally collecting information for a foreign source, but released on bail nine months later.



The two journalists have since been placed under court supervision, which bars them from changing their addresses or traveling abroad, and requires them to check in with their local police station once a month.



On Friday, Phnom Penh Municipal Court Investigating Judge Pech Vicheathor wrapped up his examination of the charges facing the two men and ordered their cases sent to trial.



A date for the hearing has not been set.



Speaking to RFAs Khmer Service on Friday, Yeang Sothearin said he was disappointed that the judge did not drop the charges against him and Uon Chhin.



The court has no evidence linking [us] to any actions that could harm national security, he said.



Im not worried at all. If the court carries out justice, it will find me innocent.



Sam Chamroeun, the lawyer representing the two reporters, told RFA that Judge Pech Vicheathor had already made his decision to proceed to trial last month, but only issued the order after receiving a court warrant.



He said that regardless of when the trial takes place, he is ready to defend his clients.



Trial Judge Im Vannak was not available for comment about the cases.



RFA closed its nearly 20-year old bureau in Phnom Penh on Sept. 12, 2017 amid a growing crackdown by Prime Minister Huns ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) on the political opposition, NGOs and independent media ahead of national elections in July last year, in what was seen as a bid to silence criticism of his government. The CPP handily won the ballot, securing all 125 seats in parliament.



Cambodian journalists working for RFA had reported over the years on corruption, illegal logging, and forced evictions, among other stories largely ignored by pro-government media, and authorities had already closed independent radio stations carrying RFA reports, using a pretext of tax and administrative violations.



The arrest of Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin came after a warning from Cambodias Ministries of Information and Interior that any journalists still working for RFA after its office in the capital closed would be treated as spies.



Their release on bail followed condemnation from multiple local and international rights groups over their treatment during detention, and demands that they be freed.



Call for release



On Friday, Am Sam Ath, senior investigator for local rights group Licadho, told RFA that it is extremely rare for court authorities to drop charges against activists, regardless of whether they have evidence linking them to the crimes they are accused of.



He urged the court to speed up the judicial process and bring the case to trial so that the reporters could receive justice.



I hope the court will drop the cases against both of the defendants so that they can have their freedom back, he said.



Even though they are out on bail, they are being watched by the court, meaning they cant make any long trips and have to regularly report to the police.



In January, more than three dozen journalists in Cambodia published an open letter urging the Phnom Penh Municipal Court to drop all charges against Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin, saying the accusations against the two are too severe.



The charges intimidate other reporters who are trying to do their work and will negatively impact the freedom of the press in Cambodia as well, the letter said.



Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Cambodia 142nd out of 180 countries in its 2018 World Press Freedom Index, down from 132nd in 2017, citing the crackdown on independent media in the lead up to last years election.



Reported by RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
The 22nd session of the U.N. Human Rights Council meets in Geneva on Feb. 25, 2013.

Rights activists are increasingly worried that Beijing's influence operations are having a negative impact on the work of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which concludes its 40th session on Friday.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) China director Sophie Richardson warned in an article this week that China is seeking to undermine the mission of the U.N. Human Rights Council from within.

She also cited HRW research in 2017 which reported threats and harassment of U.N. staff involved in human rights evaluation by Chinese officials.

"As we head towards the final phase of [China's U.N. human rights review], ask yourself: What other government threatens #humanrights treaty body experts?" Richardson tweeted on Thursday.

"As an [Human Rights Council] member #China is expected to uphold highest standards," she wrote in another tweet, referencing a report in The New York Times. "Instead it tells people that merely attending an event is a 'hostile act.'"

According to HRW's 2017 article based on a 97-page report: "Chinese officials have at times harassed and intimidated U.N. staff, experts on treaty bodies, and independent experts focusing on specific human rights issues."

The 2014 death in detention of activist Cao Shunli, who was detained on her way to a U.N. human rights event in Geneva, also sent a "chilling" message to Chinese activists who may want to participate in the U.N. human rights process, the article said.

HRW isn't the only human rights organization worried about Chinese influence at the U.N.

Renee Xia, who heads the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) network, reported from a side-event of the Human Rights Council conference in Geneva this week that it was "standing room only."

"Strong show of interest despite #China urging countries not to attend," Xia tweeted.

"The strong attendance was more remarkable esp. after #China officials went to many countries' diplomats at the U.N., Geneva, to threaten them with "serious consequences" if they attended the side events," she wrote in another tweet.

"#Bullying at the UN must stop!" she wrote.



So many restrictions

Wang Dan, a former leader of the 1989 student-led pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square, is also in Geneva this week.

"To tell you the truth, my feelings during my two days here are that China has huge influence at the U.N.," Wang told RFA.

"For example, at one side-event, it wasn't just the Chinese delegation who spoke against [criticisms of Beijing's rights record], but other countries came to speak in support of Chinas position," he said.

Wang said tight controls over public speech also make it less likely that the ruling Chinese Communist Party will have to face criticism of human rights violations coming from within its own borders.

"There are a lot of people online in China, but they are under so many restrictions," he said. "You can't mention the Tiananmen Massacre. You can't mention [late Nobel peace laureate and political prisoner] Liu Xiaobo. You can't say this, you can't say that."

"I don't think that's how you define freedom ... but then the Chinese point to the U.N. charter, which says that all member states must be respected," he said.

Autocratic rule the default

Veteran New York-based rights activist Liu Qing said the work of the council had become "unrecognizable" to him.

"Many of the countries participating in the Human Rights Council are actually the ones that are carrying out the most violations of human rights," Liu told RFA.

"The only purpose of these countries in insinuating themselves into the Human Rights Council is to curb the positive role of the Human Rights Council and make autocratic rule the default setting on the international stage," he said.

Amnesty International blogger Shao Jiang wrote in December 2018 that Beijing is reinterpreting universal human rights as merely the right to survival, freedom to access food, and regards other definitions of human rights as secondary to trade and economic development.

"The Chinese government has appointed government officials as independent experts into the UNs Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, and the U.N. treaty bodies," Shao said.

China has passed human rights reviews twice before this one, while more than 120 countries Beijing's human rights record during the most recent process.

During the recent round, the Chinese government said it accepted most of the 346 human rights recommendations put forward by the council.

The United Nations now reports annually on government reprisals against human rights defenders participating in U.N. human rights efforts, Richardson wrote in an article in The Hill last December.

"China has topped the list of offenders in every report issued," she said.

Reported by Wang Yun for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Myanmar peace negotiators hold an informal meeting with delegates from the Northern Alliance in Kunming, southwestern China's Yunnan Province, Feb. 25, 2019.

The Myanmar government's National Reconciliation and Peace Center (NRPC) has invited eight ethnic groups that have not signed a nationwide cease-fire accord to attend collective peace discussions for the first time, officials whose organizations received invitations said Friday.

The political wings of ethnic armed groups that received invitation letters to the talks scheduled for March 21 include the United Wa State Party (UWSP), Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), Monglas Eastern Shan State Peace and Solidarity Committee (PSC), Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP), Kokangs Myanmar National Truth and Justice Party (MNTJP), Palaung State Liberation Front (PSLF), United League of Arakan (ULA), and Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP).

Myanmars military negotiation team will meet separately with each of the groups on March 22, they said.

The letters, dated March 13 and signed by Zaw Htay, director general of President Win Myints office, requested that each organization send a team with a leader and a member from their respective ethnic armed groups to meet with government negotiators.

Colonel Naw Bu, spokesman of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the armed branch of the KIO and the leading group in the Northern Alliance collation of four ethnic armies that operate in northern Myanmar, said he could not yet confirm the Kachins participation in the talks because the members of the alliance had to first discuss the invitation among themselves.

Khine Thukha, spokesman for the Arakan Army (AA), the armed wing of the ULA which is fighting the Myanmar Army in Rakhine state, said he could not confirm the attendance of AA delegates at the talks because the groups leaders were still discussing the invitation.

The KNPP said it would participate in the negotiations and would discuss topics based on proposals from the government side.

The invitations also said that Myanmars military would discuss the temporary unilateral cease-fire that it declared in December 2018 in five of its command regions to try to kick-start the stalled peace process, when officers met with delegates from the ethnic organizations.

The truce runs through April, but excludes the Western Regional Military Command where government soldiers are battling the AA.

The Myanmar military is also engaged in ongoing conflicts with the KIA and the Shan State Army-North, the armed wing of the SSPP, in northern Shan state.

More talks coming out of this

The ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) government has held periodic peace conferences in a bid to get the remaining ethnic armies to sign the nationwide cease-fire agreement (NCA), which 10 ethnic military groups have already inked.

The civilian-led government under State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi has made the NCA a prerequisite for ethnic armies to participate in periodic peace negotiations, known as the 21st-Century Panglong Conference and the Union Peace Conference, to try to end decades of armed conflict that have stymied the countrys transition to a democratic federal union.

About a dozen ethnic armies have yet to sign the NCA.

The NRPC, chaired by Aung San Suu Kyi, decided to schedule the talks after members of the government peace commission held informal discussions with the KIO, PSLF, MNTJP, and ULA in February in Kunming, capital of southwestern Chinas Yunnan province. Government peace negotiators also met with the KNPP in northern Thailand in March.

The Myanmar military met with the SSPP in February and with the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS) in March for separate talks.

Hla Maung Shwe, an advisor to the government peace commission, said the upcoming session will serve as the governments orientation to the peace process for the NCA non-signatories.

We have traveled to Kunming and explained the process to seven non-signatory groups from the north, he said. We mostly explained the processes for the peace talks after the signing of the NCA.

We are planning to meet the KNPP in a few days, so the government has now invited all [NCA] non-signatory groups to clarify the situation, Hla Maung Shwe said.

RFA could not reach Myanmar military spokesman Brigadier General Zaw Min Tun for comment.

One Myanmar political analyst said he welcomes the peace talks as a rekindling of negotiations that were put on hold after the third round of Union Peace Conference in July 2018. But he cautioned people not to expect too much from next weeks discussions.

It is good to see peace talks at a time of endless armed confrontations and miscommunications, but we shouldnt be expecting too much out of these talks, said political analyst Maung Maung Soe. I expect, at most, there will be more talks coming out of this later.

Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, commander-in-chief of Myanmar's armed forces, attends a ceremony commemorating Martyrs' Day in Yangon, July 19, 2018. Credit: AFP Tatmadaw not ready

International rights groups were far from sanguine about the new round of talks, noting that Myanmars military still has not committed to ending violence in the country.

Over the last several years, its been very disappointing to see how the peace process has essentially failed, said Matthew Smith, chief executive officer of Southeast Asia-based Fortify Rights.

One of the things were most concerned about in the failure of the peace process is the fact that the military has continued to commit human rights violations against civilians while talking about trying to establish peace, and these two things obviously are inconsistent with each other, he said.

Smith also called for more genuine dialogue among stakeholders for the peace process to have a chance to succeed.

When the fighting continues, when the attacks continue, when human rights violations continue, that leads people that are involved in the process to think that its disingenuous, and that harms the overall process, he said.

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, also blamed the Myanmar military for the countrys foundering peace efforts.

It appears that the Tatmadaw [Myanmar military] is not ready to offer any meaningful concessions for the ethnic groups, nor is it prepared to allow for any degree of autonomy for ethnic organizations to operate their own affairs, he said. I dont know why the Burmese government continues to follow the lead of the Burmese military, when its clear that the military often does not want peace.

The militarys positions in terms of the NCA  the failure to deal with basic political issues during peace talks, its unwillingness to restrain its soldiers, its unwillingness to end attacks against civilians, and the way it operates in ethnic minority regions  are the reasons why the peace negotiations have gone nowhere, he said.

Robertson also said the governments working in lockstep with the powerful armed forces has meant that the militarys positions have influenced the administration in a way that has been unhelpful.

Unless the government is prepared to deal with the rights-abusing behavior of the Tatmadaw, its going to be very, very difficult to see any sort of peace, he said.

Two injured in Rakhine skirmish

In violence-ridden Rakhine state, meanwhile, a clash between the Myanmar Army and the AA in Mrauk-U township on Thursday injured two villagers, one of whom was seriously wounded and had to be taken to a hospital in the state capital Sittwe for urgent treatment, said local volunteers who helped the men.

The two men  one from Bu Ywat Ma Hnyo village and the other from Mrauk-U towns Aung Tat ward  were injured during a skirmish near Waitharli village situated along the Yangon-Sittwe Highway, they said.

Twenty-five year-old Maung Soe Win is in critical condition because he was hit above his pubic bone and had to be taken to Sittwe Hospital to have surgery, said Mrauk-U resident Than Tun.

AA spokesman Khine Thukha confirmed that Arakan fighters attacked a government army column near Waitharli village.

Government troops responded by shooting in the direction of Bu Ywat Ma Hnyo village near the ambush site, wounding the two villagers and damaging some houses, area residents said.

RFA could not reach a Myanmar military spokesman for comment.

The Myanmar military has been engaged in deadly clashes with the AA in several Rakhine townships, including Mrauk-U, since hostilities between the two sides reignited in late 2018.

The fighting has left an undetermined number of people dead and displaced more than 12,000, according to estimates by local and official sources in Rakhine state.

Reported by Kyaw Lwin Oo, Min Thein Aung, and Khet Mar for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Workers disinfect passing vehicles in an area having the latest incident of African swine flu outbreak on the outskirts of Beijing, China, Friday, Nov. 23, 2018.

Southeast Asian nations are taking precautions against the spread of African swine fever (ASF), which has been spreading rapidly throughout China since August.

The disease, which is harmless to humans but cant be cured in pigs has crossed over into Vietnam, with 79 ASF outbreaks confirmed in February, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Vietnamese authorities and those in the pork industry are attempting to contain the further spread of the disease, which is reportedly still only limited to 17 provinces in the northern part of the country.

We have implemented [preventative] measures in the villages and set up checkpoints, said a veterinarian official in Hai Hau district, Nam Dinh province, in an interview with RFAs Vietnamese Service.

The official explained several of the other precautions.

Weve done educational [campaigns] for pig raisers, and whenever there are signs of abnormality they have to inform [us]. Weve also done preventative injections for all the pigs in the district and sterilized all their pens, the official said.

The official also said that once slaughtered, the origin of the pigs must be certified.

Pig farmers all over the country are naturally worried about the possible spread of the disease.

The owner of a pig farm in Dong Nai province located in the south learned about the disease spreading in the north through state media, but noted that southern officials have not announced anything.

I myself see that a lot of pork from the north is being transported into the south. This makes me so worried, the farmer said.

But he said he is doing his part to keep ASF at bay, even though it can be expensive.

On my part, I have intensified [our efforts] to sterilize the pens. I have to spend a lot on the sterilization chemicals, and no financial support has been announced. The government is talking a lot, but not [coming up with] feasible measures, the farmer said.

RFA contacted two deputy chiefs of the Central Veterinary Department in Hanoi, but they refused to respond to questions on measures to help pig raisers prevent ASF.

The government has also taken measures to prevent rumors of the disease from spreading on social media.

Two Facebookers in Ca Mau City were summoned Thursday to make a written promise not to write any posts about ASF pork products, which authorities said was had not yet been found in the city.

This happened after another incident on Monday where the Central Internet Information Department fined another Facebooker 20 million dong (about U.S. $860) for posting warnings about ASF. The Facebooker had been ordered to post a correction the previous day.

We burn and bury pig products

Meanwhile in Laos, which also shares a border with China, authorities are also taking precautions against possible outbreaks.

Border authorities in Saravane Province confiscated and destroyed 350 kilograms (772 pounds) of pork and pig intestines imported from Vietnam this week, enforcing a government order issued on Feb. 25.

We burn and bury pig products we seize with white lime power, deep enough so the virus from the pork wont survive, said a border official to RFAs Lao Service.

We should destroy them completely otherwise it [the virus] will come back, the official said.

He also warned the Vietnamese and Lao pig merchants not to try to bring Vietnamese pork into the country again, saying that they would be fined and criminally charged the next time they get caught.

An official from the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry said that even if pork slips past the scrutiny of customs officials, it can still be confiscated by inspectors anywhere in the province, as well as in markets.

The official said he didnt know how long inspections would continue, but said if he received word from his superiors or authorities in the affected countries where ASF is under control, he would stop them.

Pig imports banned

Cambodia, which shares a border with Vietnam, but not China, is also ramping up defenses against the spread of ASF.

Cambodias Ministry of Health and Agriculture has banned large-scale pig imports from neighboring countries and has urged the people not to consume pork.

In an interview with RFAs Khmer Service, government spokesman Phay Siphan said on March 7, When we receive any kind of lead that causes us to suspect it might be swine flu, we get to work right away. The [ministry] is monitoring the situation, he said.

The spokesman was referring to a statement released by the ministry on Feb. 23 which said, People should not eat any sick or dead pigs because they can get diseases.

There was no mention of the overall ASF situation in Cambodia in that statement.

Reported by RFAs Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer Services. Translated by An Nguyen, Sydney Khotpanya, and Samean Yun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
Activist Luu Van Vinh (L) and other members of the Vietnam National Self-Determination Coalition appear in court in Ho Chi Minh City on Oct. 5, 2018.

Vietnam should immediately release six Vietnamese activists and bloggers who are facing lengthy prison sentences for their peaceful opposition, New York-based Human Rights Watch said ahead of their upcoming trials.

Luu Van Vinh, Nguyen Van Duc Do, Nguyen Quoc Hoan, Phan Trung and Tu Cong Nghia are scheduled to appear at a hearing in Ho Chi Minh City on March 18 to appeal prison sentences of between eight and 15 years handed down during an October 2018 trial for their involvement in a political group that authorities deemed to have challenged Vietnams Communist one-party system.

The five had been charged with activities aimed at overthrowing the peoples administration under Article 79 of Vietnams Penal Code, after authorities said their group, the Vietnam National Self-Determination Coalition, had knowingly worked to damage the image and policies of the country's ruling Communist Party.

Separately, Le Minh The, a member of pro-democracy group Hien Phap, will go to trial on March 20 in the Binh Thuy district court in Can Tho.

Police in Binh Thuy arrested him in October 2018 for his posts on Facebook and charged him with abusing the rights to freedom and democracy to infringe upon the interests of the state, the legitimate rights and interests of organizations and individuals under article 331 of the penal code.

In a statement Thursday, Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil Robertson called for pressure on Vietnam to drop the cases against the six and end its persecution of activists peacefully campaigning for democratic rights.

Vietnams deepening rights crackdown is targeting independent political associations and individual activists who dare to demand that the government respect rights and restore democracy, Robertson said.

International donors and trade partners should tell Vietnam that continuing this crackdown will cause problems for the aid and trade deals that Hanoi wants to conclude with North America and the European Union.

At least 142 people have been found guilty for their connection to June 2018 protests over Hanois announcement of controversial laws on special economic zones and cyber security. Many of them have been sentenced to months or years in prison.

Since the cybersecurity law went into effect in January, police have arrested at least three people for dissent after they posted critical comments on Facebook.

Among the governments political prisoners are many rights advocates and bloggers they deem as threats to national security, HRW says.

Robertson said authorities in Vietnam are using draconian provisions of the countrys penal code to suppress peaceful dissent, which has led to a rapid increase in the number of government critics behind bars.

International donors and trade partners should press Hanois leaders to dialogue with dissidents, not turn the country into a giant prison, he said.

Failing health

Human Rights Watchs call to free the six came as the brother of Nguyen Van Duc Do expressed concerns about the activists health as he awaits Mondays appeal in prison.

Speaking to RFAs Vietnamese Service on Friday, Nguyen Van Duc An said another family member had visited Nguyen Van Duc Do two days earlier and found that he was in good spirits, but his health is not very good, without providing further details.

Nguyen, who is serving an 11-year jail term, was reportedly beaten during his original arrest and has suffered further beatings by cellmates during his incarceration.

Nguyen Van Duc An expressed hope that the appeals court would overturn his brothers conviction next week.

My brother is innocent and I hope the next trial will have a different result, he said.

The Vietnam National Self-Determination Coalition had been active in protesting the governments handling of a massive chemical spill in April 2016 that devastated the countrys central coast, leaving fishermen and tourism workers jobless in four central provinces.

Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
A court in Yerevan on Friday has extended by two months the pretrial detention of Robert Kocharian, a lawyer for the former Armenian president said after the court session on March 15.

Aram Orbelian also said he would appeal the decision.

Kocharian was again arrested in December more than four months after being charged with overthrowing the constitutional order during the final weeks of his decade-long rule that ended in April 2008.

He denies the accusations as politically motivated.

Earlier this month, the Special Investigative Service (SIS) asked the court to extend Kocharians arrest for the second time since his rearrest late last year. The court on March 15 granted the request.

Kocharians lawyers have dismissed the SISs case against their client as groundless and politically motivated.

Kocharian is accused of ordering security forces to use force against opposition supporters who protested against alleged fraud in a disputed presidential election in February 2008.

Eight protesters and two policemen were killed when security forces quelled the two days of protests that began on March 1, 2008. The crackdown came after Kocharian declared a three-week state of emergency.

The 64-year-old ex-president says the accusations are part of incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians political "vendetta" waged against him.

Pashinian played a key role in the 2008 protests and spent nearly two years in prison because of that.

He has strongly defended the criminal case against Kocharian and denied orchestrating it.
Belarusian authorities have ordered the expulsion of an Iranian man who has converted to Christianity and is wanted by Tehran for apostasy and alleged murder, despite warnings by international human rights organizations that he would be at risk of torture and the death penalty if sent back.



Mehrdad Jamshidian's health is deteriorating after he suffered a heart attack in July and was returned to a detention center after only three days in a Belarusian hospital.



Jamshidian emigrated to Belarus in 1993 and is married to a Belarusian woman with whom he has three children.



Jamshidian has been without legal status since his Iranian passport expired in 2016, and he did not apply for a new one because of "well-founded fears of persecution in Iran," according to Amnesty International.



His multiple requests for asylum and protection have been all rejected by the Belarusian authorities since 2013, and without a new passport he could not apply for residence in the country.



The Belarusian Department of Citizenship and Migration on March 15 issued an order to deport Jamshidian, who has been kept in detention for the past nine months, back to Iran.

Diana, one of Jamshidians daughters, told RFE/RL that her father has five days to appeal the verdict.



Jamshidian converted to Christianity in 2002 while living in Belarus, a fact that apparently only became known later to the Iranian authorities. Apostasy, the renunciation of Islam, is a crime punishable by death in Iran.



Jamshidian was placed on Interpol's wanted list in 2012 at Tehran's request for allegedly murdering his mother and brother during a visit to Iran, although Amnesty International says he was in Belarus at the time of the murders, and despite his relatives declaring officially that he was not a suspect.



Belarusian authorities, based on the Interpol warrant, arrested him twice, in 2012 and 2013, but did not extradite him eventually because of what they said was insufficient proof from Iran for his expulsion.



However, Belarusian authorities in late 2013 ordered his deportation, resulting in his being detained twice for long periods of time between 2013-2016 before being eventually released due to extenuating circumstances.
Award-winning Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica has been named as an adviser to the Serbian member of Bosnia-Herzegovina's three-person presidency.



The March 14 announcement did not state what the 64-year-old filmmakers duties would be as adviser to President Milorad Dodik, who represents the Balkan country's ethnic Serbs.

Kusturica, who was born in Sarajevo but has not returned since the 1992-95 war, is known to be a close friend of Dodik, a Serbian nationalist. His primary residence is listed as the Serbian town of Drvengrad, a city built for the filming of one of his films, Life Is A Miracle.



They both are avowed supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin.



Kusturica, a two-time Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, has been known for controversial remarks. One of his best-known films, 1995s Underground, was accused by critics of being too pro-Serb.



Bosnia consists of a Serbian entity, a Muslim-Croat entity, and a central government that ties both together in a fragile state.



Dodik was elected in October as the Serbian member of Bosnia's multiethnic three-person presidency. He has called for the breakup of the country and for granting independence to the ethnic Serb entity, Republika Srpska.



After his election, Dodik said he wanted to appoint Kusturica as an adviser.



The U.S. Treasury Department in 2017 imposed sanctions against Dodik -- saying he was actively obstructing efforts to implement the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the war in Bosnia.



The sanctions allowed U.S. authorities to block access by Dodik to any of his property or assets that are under U.S. jurisdiction.

Based on reporting by AFP and Balkan Insight
Investigators piecing together the motivations of the suspected gunman behind New Zealand's worst terrorist attack are poring over the 87-page hate-filled manifesto he published, and the memes, cultural references in his online rantings, and musical allusions contained in the video he took of the deadly incident.

Then there is the multilingual lettering scrawled on his guns, with references to various figures from history, past and more recent: Serbian, Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian. And then there's the Georgian king and Georgian consort from the 12th century.

In all, 49, people were killed and more than 20 wounded in the March 15 attack on two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch. An Australian man who claimed responsibility for the shootings said in a manifesto that he came to New Zealand only to plan and prepare for the attack.

For Georgians, the references are perplexing and worrying.

A spokesman for the country's State Security Service told the Georgian news agency Agenda.ge that the service was cooperating with partners regarding the weapons seized from the gunman.

What appears to link the names together, Georgian or otherwise, is the figures were all participants in major battles or military conflicts with Islamic armies from history: variously called Ottoman, Persian, Seljuk, or Turkish, depending on the era and the author.

David The Builder

One of the two Georgian names is a king known to nearly all Georgian schoolchildren: David IV, or David the Builder. Formally known as Davit Aghmashenebeli in Georgian, he was ruler of the Christian kingdom in the 12th century when it was attacked by the armies of the Seljuk Empire, an empire of various Muslim communities that, at its height, stretched from the Aegean Sea to what is today northern Afghanistan.

At the Battle of Didgori, the Georgian army defeated much larger Seljuk forces in 1121, and led the way for Georgia to expand its own kingdom between the Caspian and Black seas. The victory is called "miraculous" in Georgian, and its literature and culture is littered with references to the event.

The second name was David Soslan, who was a military leader and husband of the Georgian queen at the time, Tamar. He played a key role in leading Georgian forces in battles several decades later, against Islamic forces at Shamkor -- in what is today's Azerbaijan -- and Basian- in what is today's Turkey.

David Soslan is not nearly so well known in Georgian culture, possibly because he wasn't considered as royal as his wife, but also because, according to some sources, he was ethnically Ossetian, another ethnic group living in close proximity to Georgia and Russia.

How the two Georgian leaders became associated with the white nationalism of the New Zealand gunman wasn't immediately clear.

However, in his online manifesto and other writings, the gunman, who identified himself as an Australian called Brenton Tarrant, expresses extreme hatred for Muslims.

Breivik 'Inspiration'

One other obscure name scrawled on Tarrant's guns also caught the attention of online observers trying to figure out his motivations: the name of Pavlo Serhiyovych.

Formally known as Pavlo Lapshyn, he hailed from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, and traveled to England in early 2013 on a temporary work visa, according to a report in the online publication Open Democracy.

Five days after arriving, he stabbed an 82-year-old man named Muhammad Saleem to death as he walked home in Birmingham. Lapshyn later confessed to the crime, telling investigators he killed Saleem because he hated "non-whites."

He also admitted planting bombs at mosques in three towns in central England.

He was sentenced to 40 years in prison in October 2013.

Many more of the names written on Tarrant's guns focus on the history of the Balkans, and conflict, past and present, between Christian and Muslims there.

That includes the legendary Serbian knight Milos Obilic and Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic, who both fought against the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

The names of several other Balkan figures who fought against the Turks over the centuries are also scrawled on Tarrant's weapons.

In his manifesto, Tarrant wrote that he "only really took true inspiration" from Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who killed 77 people in a bomb-and-gun attack around Oslo in 2011.

Before his attack, Breivik published a 1,500-page treatise with hundreds of references to the conflicts in the Balkans.

RFE/RL's Georgian Service contributed to this report.
A 17-minute headcam video of one of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque attacks on March 15 opens with an eerie scene of a man identifying himself as Brenton Tarrant driving to the Al Noor Mosque, where at least 41 people were gunned down.

In the background, the jaunty accordion strains of a Serbian nationalist song form a discordant duet with the robotic voice and unrelenting directions of Tarrant's GPS system.

The song emerged around 1995, during the height of the ethnically fueled wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and left around 130,000 people dead.

Apparently originally titled Karadzic, Lead Your Serbs, the song references wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the so-called Butcher of Bosnia who was convicted by an international tribunal in 2016 of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

"The wolves are coming, beware, Ustashi and Turks," the lyrics to the song run, referring to Croatian nationalist fighters and Bosnian Muslims. "Karadzic, lead your Serbs. Lead your Serbs. Everyone must see that they don't fear anyone."

"In defense of the Serb people...fighting for our beloved freedom, our beloved freedom," the song continues.

Anti-Muslim Slogan

The song's video, which was apparently recorded in 1995 but first posted on the Internet in 2006, has since become popular among radical white nationalists. In it, three men in ethnic Serbian paramilitary uniforms perform the song in a hilly field. The stony visage of accordionist Novislav Djajic in the video has itself become a common meme in nationalist circles under the rubric "Dat Face Soldier."

Djajic was indicted in Germany for participation in genocide in 1997. He was acquitted of the genocide charge but convicted of complicity in 14 murders and sentenced to five years in prison. After his release, he was deported to a third country.

The song's lyrics have been rewritten many times in many languages, always maintaining its militant anti-Muslim line. It often appears under the title Serbia Strong or Remove Kebab, an anti-Muslim slogan that began in Serbia but has been adopted by white supremacists across Europe and around the world.

New Zealand authorities have identified the gunman in custody only as a 28-year-old Australian. But reports confirm that the suspect -- who has been charged with murder as police try to determine if he acted alone -- is the self-described "ethno-nationalist" who live-streamed the attack and published under the name Brenton Tarrant.

Shortly before the attacks, which killed at least 49 people, Tarrant posted a 74-page manifesto in which he states that "more recently I have been working part time as a kebab removalist."

In his live-streamed video of the attack, the slogan "Remove kebab" can be seen painted on one of Tarrant's high-powered rifles. There are also the names of legendary Serbian knight Milos Obilic and Serbian Prince Lazar Hrebeljanovic, who both fought against the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The names of several other Balkan figures who fought against the Turks over the centuries are also scrawled on Tarrant's weapons.

'Islamic Occupiers'

In his manifesto, Tarrant denies being a member of any organizations but says that he "only really took true inspiration" from Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who killed 77 people in a bomb-and-gun attack in and around Oslo in 2011.

Before his attack, Breivik published a 1,500-page treatise with hundreds of references to the conflicts in the Balkans. According to The Economist, "Kosovo" is mentioned in Breivik's screed 143 times, while "Serbia" shows up 341 times, "Bosnia" 343 times, and "Albania" appears 208 times.

Breivik wrote that NATO's bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999 was a major motivation for his attack, saying it was "completely unacceptable" that U.S. and European governments "bombed our Serbian brothers."

Tarrant, in his manifesto, echoes that language, saying the United States must be weakened to prevent another situation where "U.S./NATO forces fought beside muslims [sic] and slaughtered Christian Europeans attempting to remove these Islamic occupiers from Europe."

Tarrant, who describes himself in the manifesto as an "ordinary White man, 28 years old" and an Australian native of "Scottish, Irish, and English stock," goes on to characterize the attack as "anti-immigration, anti-ethnic replacement and anti-cultural replacement."

Tarrant was expected to appear in a Christchurch court on March 16.

The New Zealand Herald described the mosque attacks as the country's worst mass killing since 1943.
The United States, together with the European Union and Canada, imposed new sanctions on March 15 on more than a dozen Russian officials and businesses in response to the country's "continued aggression in Ukraine."



"Today's action targets individuals and entities playing a role in Russia's unjustified attacks on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait, the purported annexation of Crimea, and backing of illegitimate separatist government elections in eastern Ukraine," the U.S. Treasury said in a March 15 statement.



Six officials were targeted, along with six Russian defense companies, and two Russian energy and construction firms operating in Crimea.



The six defense firms operating in Crimea were targeted for misappropriating Ukrainian state assets to provide services to the Russian military during the 2014 annexation, it said.



Four of the six Russian officials targeted by the measure were involved in the attack near the Kerch Strait attack in November off the coast of Crimea, the Treasury said.



Moscow has said the three Ukrainian Navy vessels had illegally entered Russian territorial waters, a claim denied by Kyiv.



"The United States and our transatlantic partners will not allow Russia's continued aggression against Ukraine to go unchecked," said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.



"This joint initiative with our partners in the European Union and Canada reinforces our shared commitment to impose targeted and meaningful sanctions in response to the Kremlins attempts to disregard international norms and undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," he added.



Earlier in Brussels, the European Union added eight Russian officials to its sanctions list for their involvement in the November attack.



The EU sanctions, imposed after Russia seized control of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and began supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine, now includes 170 individuals and 44 entities.

Among the most senior officials added to the EU blacklist on March 15 were Sergei Stankevich, a high-ranking FSB officer in Crimea, his deputy Andrei Shein, as well as Colonel General Aleksandr Dvornikov who is the head of the southern military district of the Russian armed forces.



Three naval commanders and two captains were also sanctioned.



According to several sources who spoke to RFE/RL under condition of anonymity, Admiral Gennady Medvedev, who is the deputy Head of the Border Service of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation  was initially due to be included to the sanctions list with the other eight Russians.

Diplomats said Finland had refused to add him. When approached by RFE/RL, the Finnish permanent representative to the European Union responded: We cannot comment individual position of any member state, neither our own, so we will not comment.



Medvedev has reportedly been involved in border cooperation efforts between Russia and Finland. Plus, he took part in a so-called Arctic forum of coast guards in Finland last year.



The conflict between Ukrainian government forces and Moscow-backed separatists has left some 13,000 people dead since April 2014.

With reporting by Rikard Jozwiak in Brussels, AP, and Reuters
Hundreds of Islamic State (IS) militants and family members surrendered as U.S.-backed Syrian rebel forces moved closer to crushing the militants in their final sliver of territory in the eastern part of the country.

"Around 1,300 terrorists and their families surrendered to our forces today amid our operations against the terrorist Daesh organization," Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), said in a tweet on March 14, using an alternate name for IS.

The SDF, a Kurdish-led rebel force backed by U.S.-led coalition air support, moved closer to its goal of wiping out the last vestiges of the militants' so-called "caliphate" that once sprawled across Syria and neighboring Iraq.

Fighting centered around the village of Baghouz near the Iraqi border.

An AFP reporter said most of the men surrendering appeared to be wounded.

"Those who stayed inside [the camp] are mostly suicide bombers blowing themselves up, which is impeding the advance," said Jiaker Amed, a spokesman for the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), a key element of the SDF.

The SDF said some 3,000 IS members had surrendered since March 10.

The United States and Turkey back differing antigovernment rebel groups in Syria's eight-year civil war, while Russia and Iran support President Bashar al-Assad's government.

The United States is in the process of pulling most of its troops out of Syria, a move that has caused concerns among allied Kurdish fighters.

Based on reporting by AFP, Reuters, and dpa
ASTANA -- Russia has extradited a Kazakh businessman to Astana, where he is wanted on financial-fraud charges that his lawyers say are untrue.

The Kazakh Prosecutor-General's Office said on March 15 that Zhomart Ertaev was being held in pretrial detention in the Kazakh capital.

Moscow police arrested Ertaev in May 2018 at Kazakhstan's request and placed the fugitive oligarch under house arrest.

Ertaev's lawyers have said their client renounced his Kazakh citizenship and asked for political asylum in Russia, arguing he could be killed if returned to Kazakhstan.

According to the Kazakh Prosecutor-General's office, Ertaev is suspected of fraud while working as an adviser to Bank RBK in Kazakhstan that bilked the institution of $80 million.

Earlier in 2009, Ertaev spent nine months in pretrial detention on suspicion of embezzlement, but was released after a court dropped those charges.

He was found guilty, however, on lesser charges of misusing bank funds and violating accounting regulations.

The court ordered his release on the grounds that his nine months in pretrial detention was sufficient punishment.

Russian media have reported that Ertaev is the chairman of Troyka-D Bank in Moscow and an honorary president of Alma Group, an investment company based at the Moskva-Citi business complex in the Russian capital.
The American mother of one of four foreign cyclists killed in a terrorist attack in Tajikistan last year has said she will seek financial compensation from the Central Asian country.



Speaking to RFE/RL in a telephone interview on March 14, Jea Santovasco, the mother of Jay Austin, said she and an official from New Jersey -- her home state -- had met with the Ambassador of Tajikistan to the United States Farhod Salim and informed him about her intention.



Santovasco did not disclose the amount of compensation she was seeking from Tajikistan.



Santovasco said she needed the money to quit her job as a property appraiser to recover from the tragedy and find peace.



Austin was among a group of four cyclists -- including an American woman, a Dutchman, and a Swiss man -- killed on July 29 when attackers plowed into their group on a road and then stabbed some of them. The other three killed were Austin's girlfriend, Lauren Geoghegan, 29, who was also an American national, a Dutchman, and a Swiss man.

Two other foreign cyclists survived the attack, which occurred about 150 kilometers south of the Central Asian country's capital.



Four suspects in the attack were killed by Tajik security forces. A fifth was found guilty of murder in November 2018 and sentenced to life in prison.



Santovasco told RFE/RL that she felt no anger to those who attacked her son and the other cyclists because "they were misguided."



However, she did fault Tajik authorities for failing to save her son, who was reportedly still alive some 30 minutes after the attack.



"Since I have got his autopsy report a couple of weeks ago I just think I will never accept his death. He was stabbed so many times from his face down to his ankles and none of those stab wounds were life threatening, so he did not die immediately," Santovasco said.



Santovasco said she had written a letter to the one surviving attacker, a Tajik national, Husein Abdusamadov, who in November was sentenced to life in prison, although she was unsure whether he ever got it.



"I am the mother of Jay Austin, a remarkable young man you deliberately, brutally murdered. Although I was not ready to say good-bye to my son, you have given him the greatest gift -- to live in peace in eternity. He has not died, only his physical body has." Santovasco wrote in the letter to Abdusamadov.

Written by RFE/RL correspondent Merkhat Sharipzhanov based on reporting by Khiromon Bakoeva of RFE/RL's Tajik Service


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The Kremlin shrugs at the top Chechen legislator's "blood feud" threat against a blogger, while a top human rights activist in Chechnya faces a verdict in a drug-possession trial denounced as a "tragic farce." There was a touch of farce in Moscow, too, where activists said police classified blue balloons held by protesters at a 15,000-strong rally for Internet freedom as "pilotless flying vehicles" and detained the demonstrators handing them out.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Be Afraid

When Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was asked about the Chechen parliament speaker's declaration of a "blood feud" targeting a dissident blogger who is in hiding in Poland, his response was telling: He said there is no such thing as a blood feud in Russian law.

Well, exactly.

Magomed Daudov's threat, and the nonresponse from President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, underscore Chechnya's status as an anomaly in a country often portrayed as being buttoned under Putin's tight control.

Since 2007, when Putin installed Ramzan Kadyrov at age 30, he has run the region in the North Caucasus as his own and played largely by his own rules -- both inside Chechnya and sometimes beyond its borders.

Kadyrov and his allies sometimes call those rules Islamic law, as Daudov did during the March 12 Instagram Live broadcast in which he delivered what its recipient, the blogger Tumso Abdurakhmanov, called a "veiled threat" that "we will find you and kill you, punish you, kill you."

After Abdurakhmanov called Kadyrov a traitor, Daudov declared the blogger "an enemy to me and my brothers." While he said he would not kill Abdurakhmanov, he added: "From now on, when you go to bed, make sure that you lock the door with a key. When you go outside, be vigilant. If you get a kick in the back, know that it's no accident."

One might think that such a warning, coming from the top lawmaker in one of the 83 regions of the Russian Federation, is the kind of thing that might embarrass Putin, who as president is the guarantor of the Russian Constitution. He would never admit being embarrassed about it, though -- as Peskov's noncomment comment made clear -- so it's hard to know and does not really matter.

A Killing Near The Kremlin

But in some ways, it seems like quite the opposite: that the Kremlin uses Chechnya's unofficial special status -- its reputation, steeped in centuries of conflict with the Russian state and furthered by the late author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as a wild place whose people will not knuckle under to authority -- to distance itself from such incidents while doing little or nothing to stop them.

For instance, take the killing of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead on a bridge near the Kremlin on February 27, 2015.

In 2017, five men from Chechnya were sentenced to prison for his murder, but relatives and government critics have voiced suspicion that the culprits will never face justice because an honest investigation could lead too close to Kadyrov or to Putin.

After the killing, Kadyrov deflected attention away from himself -- and from Moscow, the Kremlin, and Putin -- with an Instagram post in which he portrayed the Chechen convicted as the triggerman, Zaur Dadayev, as a pious Muslim who was incensed at the controversial depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The implication being, of course, that the killing was a personal thing, a matter of faith and fiery convictions, and that there was no need to look for a mastermind in Moscow or anywhere else.

Another case that Russian authorities seem to have done their best to keep from bleeding across Chechnya's borders is the trial of human rights activist Oyub Titiyev, the head of the Moscow-based group Memorial's office in Grozny, the Chechen capital, on a marijuana-possession charge he and supporters contend was fabricated.

The case was quite literally kept in Chechnya at the start of last July, in fact: The defense sought to move the trial to Moscow or elsewhere, arguing that he had no chance of acquittal in his home region whose head, Kadyrov, called him a drug addict and a traitor working for an "enemy" organization.

'The Absurdity'

The top court in Chechnya rejected that plea, and Titiyev faces a verdict on March 18, with prosecutors calling for a four-year prison sentence for the 61-year-old father of four.

The overall strategy here is familiar from trials across Russia in the past 20 years: A Kremlin critic, an opposition activist, a business rival is accused of a crime -- often one not directly related to what is widely suspected to be the authorities' real motive for targeting him -- and is put on trial. And convicted.

The prosecution's case in Tityev's trial in some ways resembles others in its core simplicity: a bag of marijuana was found under a floor mat in his car, the state claims; in the case of former Russian Economic Development Minister Aleksei Ulyukayev  now serving an eight-year prison term -- a bag holding $2 million in bribe money was allegedly found in the trunk of his car. l

There are details that set this one apart from some others, though. In his final statement in court before the trial wrapped up on March 7, Titiyev said he was certain he will be convicted and added, "You don't need a law degree to see the absurdity of this case." Rachel Denber, the deputy Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, called it a "tragic farce."

Those details include: Security cameras out of order during a crucial four-hour period on the day Titiyev was arrested; a scrap of human hair -- the only piece of forensic evidence -- stuck to a piece of tape on the bag of marijuana; and a trip back to the scene of the alleged crime to round up witnesses who had not been there at the time, according to the defense.

A key prosecution witness testified that "a man next to him in a taxi van was reading an article about someone who had just been arrested for marijuana possession," Denber wrote. "The witness said he recognized the man in the photo -- Titiyev -- as the man he had seen smoking a joint in the street two months earlier."

'Drones' Detained

There was a strong sense of farce, though perhaps less tragic, at a demonstration against so-called "sovereign Internet" legislation that critics fear is part of an attempt by the state to strengthen control over online discourse and stifle dissent.

Activists said that police classified the blue balloons some were holding as "pilotless flying vehicles" and detained the demonstrators handing them out -- also trying to bundle the balloons into buses.

Several bunches of balloons escaped and sailed up into the sky, but others ended up bumping against the ceiling of a police precinct house, above the heads of detained demonstrators.

The arrest of the balloons added a touch of humor to a serious situation: More than 15,000 packed a street named after Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov for the rally, making it one of the biggest protests in years.

One demonstrator, lawyer Daniil Lipin, even registered his balloon with the relevant authorities as a pilotless flying vehicle in a wry comment on the situation, according to a Facebook post.

Advocates of the "sovereign Internet" legislation have cast it as a measure of protection against the United States and its allies, saying they want to ensure the Russian segment of the web can continue to operate in the event of an attempt by forces abroad to cut the country off.

Critics -- including lawmakers from parties other than the ruling United Russia in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, which gave the bill preliminary approval in February -- contend that its real aim is to give the government the sweeping powers to censor online content and muzzle free speech.

What A Laugh

Other pieces of legislation that are causing concern about the Kremlin's intentions include a pair of bills -- now on Putin's desk after breezing through the Duma and upper house, the Federation Council -- that would enable the authorities to block websites and mete out punishment for "fake news" and material deemed insulting to "society," the state, or state authorities.

Putin's own Presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights -- an advisory body whose advice often goes unheeded -- had urged the upper house to send the bills back, issuing a somber statement warning that they would groundlessly curb the freedom of expression.

Upper-house lawmakers ignored the human rights council, passing both bills by overwhelming margins on March 13. And if the Kremlin human rights council found little to laugh about in the legislation, that was not so for Federation Council chief Valentina Matviyenko.

A YouTube video shows Matviyenko recounting, with a stumbling delivery and a few false starts, what she says is a meme making the rounds among the "very talented, very smart, very creative" Russian people: "Criticize those in power and you violate the law against insulting the authorities, praise them and you violate the 'fake news' law."

Matviyenko and several others present at the meeting of cultural officials then break out in laughter, apparently finding it funny.
U.S. acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has rejected reports that the Pentagon plans to force allies to pay sharply higher costs for the right to host U.S. forces on their territory.

Shanahan on March 14 told the Senate Armed Services Committee that allies did need to pay their fair share of the cost of having U.S. troops in their country, but added that compensation often comes in differing forms -- including providing support for war in places such as Afghanistan.

U.S. news media had reported that President Donald Trump was pushing a "cost-plus-50 percent" formula for countries such as Germany, Japan, Italy, and South Korea, and others to compensate Washington for U.S. troop deployments.

According to the reports, the formula would mean a hosting country would pay the total cost of housing U.S. troops, plus pay a premium of another 50 percent for the privilege of having them on their territory.

But Shanahan told the Senate panel the reports were "erroneous.

"We're not going to run a business and we're not going to run a charity," Shanahan said.

"Payment comes in lots of different forms. At the end of the day, people need to carry their fair share," he said.

"Not everyone can contribute. It is not about 'cost-plus-50 percent.'"

Trump has often criticized NATO allies, Japan, and South Korea for not contributing enough to the costs for keeping U.S. bases in their countries.

Based on reporting by AP, dpa, and AFP
Medical evacuation by Navy after fisherman loses fingers

Ensenada, Baja California  A distress call from a fishing vessel led to the rescue of an injured fisherman off the coast of Baja California.

La Secretaria de Marina-Armada de Mexico (Semar) says that the Coast Guard of the Secretary of the Navy rescued a fisherman who was injured at sea in Ensenada, Baja California.

The base received a distress call of a fisherman who suffered three severed fingers after an accident when maneuvering a support vessel, requiring a medical evacuation.

A Panther helicopter, equipped with an extraction winch, was sent to rescue the fisherman who manned the shrimp vessel Don Antonio Perez XII.

Photo: La Secretaria de Marina-Armada de Mexico

Navy personnel located the boat in the Santa Maria Bay of San Quintin, 149 nautcal miles (275 kilometers) from Ensenada. Once on the aircraft, the mans right hand was bandaged by medical personnel while he was transferred to the Second Naval Region and from there to local hospital.
Uber says reports of their return to Cancun are false

Cancun, Q.R.  Uber says that recent media reports of their returning to Cancun in March are false and that any such information was not provided by authorized Uber personnel.

The company has denied statements about their return to Cancun at the end of March, assuring that the information was not given by authorized personnel of the company. The public statement comes after several state media outlets claimed Uber has returned to operate in Cancun.

In relation to the recent notes published by media in the state of Quintana Roo which states that Uber resumed operations in the state, we confirm that the information is completely false.

While they say that Uber officials have visited the state on several occasions, there is no estimated date for the return to Cancun after aggressive attacks and the change in the states mobility law, a decision they are still waiting on.

In a public statement issued by the company, they said We confirm that the only representative of the company authorized to offer statements to the media is Saul Crespo, the Communication Manager of Uber.

There has been widespread speculation as to the possible return of the ride-service in Cancun, but no official information has been provided.
Kim and Jamie Ollivent

TWO Rotherham Advertiser employees have told of their fear after being caught up in the New Zealand terror attack in which 49 people were shot dead.

Father and daughter Jamie and Kim Ollivent were in the middle of their two-week trip and were staying with relatives in Christchurch when the countrys deadliest shooting broke out.

Advertiser operations director Jamie and sales representative Kim were near to Al-Noor and Linwood city centre mosques when the gunman opened fire  killing 49 people and wounding at least 20 others. Another victim is reported to have died in hospital.

Jamie and Kim were on the opposite side of the park to where the attack happened and were then locked in an art gallery for three hours.

Jamie (62) said: It was quite strange really. We werent meant to be in Christchurch yesterday, but had changed our plans because of the rain. There was a protest about the environment going on and other than that it was quiet. It was so quiet Kim said she thought it must be half day closing.

We went round a corner and two police cars came speeding past, which is unusual here because nothing really happens. We were by an art gallery and they said we had better come inside. We said we didnt know what was going on and they told us there had been a terrorist attack. The mosque was on the other side of the park from where we were, but we could have been a million miles away.

We were locked in the gallery for about three hours and everybody was on their phones and talking about what had happened, just in shock. Eventually, after about three hours, we left through a side door but we shouldnt have done really.

We walked towards the city and there was no-one about at all. We walked for about half a mile to the car park and didnt see anyone. It was really spooky. It was like a ghost town. We drove back to the house where we are staying just outside Christchurch and watched it all on TV. The people we are staying with, her daughters son knows a Muslim lad who was shot, but hes okay apart from injuring his shoulder.

Everyone is in shock. People are really really upset. Its a nice quiet place and you dont expect this to happen here. They had the earthquake in 2011 and they are still rebuilding from that. You just dont expect it to happen.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the shootings as a terrorist attack and one of the countrys darkest hours.

A 28-year-old man has been charged with murder and three more people were in custody, the BBC reported

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described one alleged gunman, who had Australian citizenship, as an extremist, right-wing terrorist.

The shooting was the deadliest in the countrys history.

One gunman live-streamed footage on social media of him firing at men, women and children from close range inside the Al-Noor mosque.
Nicholas Roddis

A CONVICTED terrorist who was banned from keeping guns has been jailed for two years after police officers found an air rifle in his bedroom.

Nicholas Roddis (34), who once planted a fake bomb on a bus in Rotherham, was found guilty of a firearms offence at Sheffield Crown Court today (Thursday) by a jury of seven men and five women following a two-day trial.

Roddis, who has Aspergers Syndrome, kept a Power-Lok Spector SR05  a type of air rifle  in his flat on Gray Close, Eastwood but he claimed it belonged to his mother.

Police discovered the weapon while carrying out a search of his flat last May, along with a machete and two fake guns which Roddis was legally allowed to keep.

Sentencing, Judge David Dixon told Roddis he had a fascination with weapons and the risk of those items was so great that only a jail sentence could be justified.

Roddis was banned from keeping guns after his 2009 conviction for planting a hoax bomb on a bus on Broom Road, Rotherham. He was jailed for seven years for planting the device  which comprised of a bag of sugar, a clock and wires in a plastic bag  on a Maltby to Rotherham service.

At the time, the court heard Roddis had become a follower of Islamic militancy after his parents marriage broke up.
A POLICE officer who donated his bone marrow said he was happy to discover it had been given to a young boy in America.

PC Luke Bugdol (35, pictured), of the Rotherham Neighbourhood Policing team, donated his bone marrow on World Cancer Day last month after signing up with blood cancer charity DKMS (We Delete Blood Cancer).

The stem cells extracted from his donation were flown across the Atlantic for a boy aged under 12.

PC Bugdol has received a food hamper and a card from DKMS thanking him for his donation.

To know it has gone to a little boy in America, it makes me feel great - I feel happy, said PC Bugdol

The fact it had gone to someone who needed it, if they have a better chance of survival, its fantastic.

PC Bugdol said DKMS were expected to send him updates about the boy after six months, nine months, a year and two years, during which time he would be kept anonymous.

After two years is when they potentially release his details so you can make contact yourself, he said.

It would be amazing to know who it is going to and find out a little bit more about them.

It would be nice to meet him one day.

PC Bugdol, of Rotherham, first thought about becoming a bone marrow donor two years ago after he attended an incident with a colleague.

After the incident, they began talking about joining the bone marrow register, and PC Bugdol signed up later that day,

He sent DKMS a mouth swab and, two years later, was told he was a match for someone.

Having gone through the operation, and knowing what it feels like, I would do it again, said PC Bugdol.

I wouldnt think twice.

PC Bugdol said his friends and family were proud of what he had done.

I got lots of people contacting me saying they didnt know anything about it and they couldnt believe I had kept it secret, he said.

PC Bugdol urged others to sign up to the British Bone Marrow Registry through charities such as the Anthony Nolan Trust, which takes donations from people aged 16 to 30, or DKMS, which accommodates those up to 55.

Visit https://www.nhsbt.nhs.uk/british-bone-marrow-registry/how-can-i-help/ for more information.
A LANDLORD criticised Rotherham Borough Council over an extremely serious data breach which saw almost 900 people sent each others private email addresses.

The authority apologised and referred itself to the Information Commissioners Office after a message sent by the selective licensing team leader revealed 897 email addresses.

Sarah Churchill (34), who rents out property in Maltby, compared council HQ Riverside House to inept fictional comedy hotel Fawlty Towers.

She added: I rent property out across the UK and Ive never come across such a stupid mistake.

This is really basic stuff as well, especially for a manager. I really think as a council they can be really stupid at things.

Ive had so many incidents of them being plonkers. Its like Fawlty Towers.

Ms Churchill, who lives in Dorset, said she feared her email address could be sold on for money.

She said the message had been sent out at around 5pm on Monday, when the sender mistakenly copied in personal email addresses instead of blind copying, which hides recipients details.

They are not generic work email addresses that have been copied in, its all personal contacts, said Ms Churchill.

As a landlord and business owner, I am really quite angry this could happen. Exposure to being hacked or being the victim of fraud increases dramatically, she said.

The council had issued an email apology 24 hours later. Matt Finn, community protection manager, said in the email: I am contacting you as we have become aware of a data breach which may have resulted in your email address being shared with other landlords who own or manage privately rented property in Rotherham.

You will have received this email, too. This was an error and is currently under investigation by the council.

We are sorry that this has happened and we will be ensuring this cannot happen again.

At this time we believe the email was sent to 897 people. The information released is only email addresses which is personally identifiable information, but it is not classed as sensitive data.

Ms Churchill said the ICO should carry out an independent investigation over the extremely serious breach.

Tom Smith, RMBC assistant director for community safety and streetscene said: We have immediately apologised to the people affected by this unintentional data breach which should not have happened.

We have also referred this to the ICO and we will ensure we follow any recommendations.

We are committed to ensuring our service users are confident in our effectiveness and accountability.

A spokesman for the ICO confirmed the council had informed it of the incident.
However, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui said that personal relations between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful,. accusing instead Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Mr. Trumps national security adviser for making an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust. The office of South Koreas president, Moon Jae-in said it was closely monitoring the situation sustaining the need to resume North Korea-US. negotiations.



Activity proved at the rocket-launch facility in North Korea

At the summit in Hanoi, President Trump demanded more substantial steps toward denuclearization as North Korea is believed to run at least one other uranium-enrichment plant outside Yongbyon, as well as keeping other elements of its nuclear program in secret locations around the mountainous country. United Nations sanctions currently ban all of the Norths key exports, including coal, and drastically cut back its fuel imports. Mr. Trump has said he would be very disappointed if the North resumed weapons tests. Just in the past hour, I spoke with my South Korean counterpart and weve discussed their reaction and our reaction, but I would like to speak further within US government before we respond, US National Security Advisor John Bolton told reporters on the White House North Lawn Friday.
Massive fire breaks out in Mohali

Mohali, 15th March: The Industrial Area phase 7 of Mohali witnessed a situation of panic today, when a fire broke out in a chemical factory near ESI Hospital. The said factory manufactures paint and thinners, which are highly combustible materials, hence the fire is out of control. 4-5 fire brigades have arrived at the scene and are trying to put off the fire, but the fire seems to be increasing, and out of hand.

Massive fire breaks out in Mohali

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There are reports of calling the Chandigarh Fire Department for help too. The fire started at around 3pm. Due to the presence of chemicals, minor explosions could also be heard in the vicinity. Till the latest reports, there had been no fatalities. More details are awaited.
En ce vendredi de Greve pour le climat, Christian Mukuna nous propose une chanson pour protester contre les plastiques dans la mer. Et il fait ca avant meme d'avoir eu le temps de dire "Coucou mes petites sauterelles", c'est dire qu'il a encore beaucoup d'autres choses a dire:


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Li Zhanshu, executive chairman of the presidium of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC), presides over the second meeting of executive chairpersons of the presidium at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 14, 2019. (Xinhua/Pang Xinglei)

[ Editor: zyq ]
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y.  Scott Clark has been named vice president of operations for Saratoga Regional YMCA, in charge of its five branches including all aspects of membership, programs and childcare.

Clark comes to Saratoga from the YMCA of Greater Kansas City, where he was vice president of operations and oversaw seven full service facilities with an annual budget of more than $15 million.

He was also responsible for leading strategic planning efforts that aligned operations with the YMCAs overall goals in Kansas City.

He has worked within the Y organization for 31 years.

Clark earned a bachelor of science degree with a specialization in commercial recreation management from Michigan State University.

There are a multitude of reasons I am excited to have Scott join the Saratoga Regional YMCA team including 22 years of executive experience with two of the larger Y associations in the country Chief Executive Officer Andrew Bobbitt said. That operational expertise will serve us well as we refine and grow to better serve our communities.

Clarks experience in operations, facilities, membership and health and wellness will play a critical role as the Y expands its membership base to 40,000, he said.

Saratoga Regional YMCA has branches in Corinth, Greenwich, Malta, Saratoga Springs and Wilton.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y.  Visitors to Saratoga Spa State Park will be greeted by two noticeable changes this summer.

Work is getting under way soon on a major renovation to the Administration Building lobby thats being transformed into a visitor center with information about the parks many features, and telling people how to find them.

In another project, outside ramps to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center balcony are getting updated with new downward-facing lighting, replacing existing large globe lights, to make the venue more visitor friendly during performances.

About 2 million people per year use Spa State Park including SPAC events, said Heather Mabee, Saratoga-Capital Region parks commission chair. Weve never really explained who and what we are. Were really looking forward to taking the Administration Buildings front lobby making it into a visitors experience center.

Were going to have a huge map of the whole park so people can see whats going on here. Were also going to have a screen that shows all of the parks different amenities.

Plans also call for a souvenir shop where people may purchase caps, shirts and posters that display a colorful new image of the park.

A reception desk and other furniture have already been cleared out of the lobby, where renovations are slated to begin soon. The project is being done in-house to reduce costs.

Were hoping to have it available for this summer, Mabee said.

Work has already begun on the SPAC ramp project.

Were going to bring them up to code, she said. Right now, for wheelchair accessibility, theyre not at the right level the way they should be. The lighting will also be different. Were going to have downward facing lights on the railings, so you can go in and out while a concerts going on and it wont bother anybody. But you can still see the ramp while youre walking on it.

Now, with the big globes, you cant even see when youre walking at night. Its not as accessible as it will be.

Attendance at state parks across New York increased by more than 5 million people last year.

More people are coming out and enjoying our parks, Mabee said. Last year at Moreau Lake State Park we added new cabins, which was a huge success. Were hoping to do that in more of our parks in our region.

But staffing throughout the system is 20 percent below the required level for optimal park operations, said Alane Ball Chinian, Saratoga-Capital Region commissioner. So managers and other staff must do more with less as attendance keeps increasing.

Moreau Lake has been without a manager since Peter Iskenderian left in January for a new park position in Westchester County. Moreau Lake has the states busiest campground because of its location between Saratoga Springs and Lake George.

Mabee said the managers position is subject to review by Gov. Andrew Cuomos office before it can be filled.

With low staffing levels, contributions from park Friends groups becomes even more important.

For example, commission member Nancy Dwyer said Friends of Moreau Lake State Park has obtained nearly $6,000 grant from the non-profit Parks & Trails New York. Money will be used to build racks for canoes and kayaks, so people dont tie them to trees, which causes tree girdling problems.

Also, Friends of Grant Cottage has received $19,500 to provide critical administrative support with a focus on acquiring and maintaining sustainable income sources for the organization.

An I Love My Park Day is scheduled for Saturday, May 4 when volunteers are encouraged to help with various projects at parks throughout the region and state.

In other action, the Saratoga-Capital Region commission recently published a first-ever Year in Review that highlights improvements made during the past year. These include:

* New $3.2 million welcome center at Grafton Lake State Park in Rensselaer County.

* $2.9 million rehabilitation of Peerless Pool bathhouse complex at Spa State Park. Includes 88.2 kilowatt solar panel system on bathhouse.

* Nearly 7,200 young people made 127 trips to area parks under a Connect Kids program.

* 700 feet of Geyser Trail in Spa State Park improved to accommodate people with disabilities; includes widening, leveling and six-foot long slate bridge.

* Addition of a 130-acre parcel to Moreau Lake State Park.
Rep. Ilhan Omars (D-MN) comment that the influence of the Israeli lobby in Washington pushes lawmakers to take a pledge of allegiance to a foreign country was bad enough.

A watered-down recent House resolution condemning, not Omar, but all hatred was as tepid as denouncing drunk driving.

After heated debate within their caucus, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership released a separate statement: Congresswoman Omars use of anti-Semitic tropes and prejudicial accusations about Israels supporters is deeply offensive. We condemn these remarks and we call upon Congresswoman Omar to immediately apologize for these hurtful comments.

Omar complied, but this is not the first time shes had to walk back controversial comments about Israel.

In 2012, Omar tweeted: Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.

The implication was that Israel and its backers are being manipulated to support the Jewish state. This old anti-Semitic trope will be familiar to anyone with a minimal understanding of the history of the Jewish people and the genocidal goal of their enemies.

Yes, Omar apologized, but not until she got to Congress. This assumes her apology was more political, than sincere. Consider her appeal to Allah. Why would she, or any Muslim, disobey Allah?

Sarah Stern, who heads Endowment for Middle East Truth, which bills itself as a Washington, D.C.,-based think tank and policy center with an unabashedly pro-America and pro-Israel stance, emailed to say, We Jews have learned from our long and painful history that words matter. Violence against Jews does not erupt in a vacuum; and the increasing ease with which anti-Semitic comments are uttered within certain segments of our society is deeply painful and disturbing.

That truth can also be seen in Israel where Palestinian Arafat Irfayia, the prime suspect in the murder of Israeli teenager Ori Ansbacher, was indicted last week World Israel News reports his explanation for stabbing and then raping the girl: Because she was a Jew.

The publication says Irfayia left his home in Hebron with the express intention of killing a Jew.

You have to be taught to hate, as Oscar Hammerstein wrote in the musical South Pacific, and hatred is at the heart of anti-Semitism, most notably in radical Islam. It can only get worse if those who harbor anti-Semitic sentiments  like Omar and her colleague and fellow Muslim, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)  are elected to Congress.

According to The Daily Caller, Maher Abdel-qader, a key fundraiser for Tlaib, shared an anti-Semitic video which described Jews as satanic. The clip included this comment: Research the truth about the Holocaust, and youll definitely start to question what you thought you knew. The videos narrator went on to question whether 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

The Caller writes, Abdel-qader shared the video both on his personal Facebook page and within the group that now includes Tlaib.

Morton A. Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the oldest pro-Israel group in the U.S., told Mark Levin on Levins radio show:  the Democrat party has shown a lack of will to tell the truth of the Arab-Islamist war against Israel. In a recent BDS vote to stop BDS, boycotting Israel, the innocent Israel, half of the Democrats voted against that bill. Virtually every Republican voted for it.  So we have a real problem with the Democratic party.

In a New York Times column last week, Bret Stephens, who is Jewish, wrote: If Pelosi cant muster a powerful and unequivocal resolution condemning anti-Semitism, then Omar will have secured her political future and won a critical battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

At that point, the days when American Jews can live comfortably within the Democratic fold will be numbered.

I wish, but the history of Jewish loyalty to the Democrats is long, which is a mystery since in the end we are again talking about their survival, not just as a Middle East nation, but as a people.

Cal Thomas, Americas most-syndicated columnist, is the author of 10 books
Researchers have been baffled by tropical rainforest diversity for over a century; 650 different tree species can exist in an area covering two football fields, yet similar species never grow next to each other. It seems like it's good to be different than your neighbors, but why?

To grow in a tropical rainforest is to engage in constant warfare. Plants battle for resources, such as sunlight, water and minerals. Similar tree species compete for resources in the same ways, so they may inhibit each other's growth. Plants also battle against herbivore pests. Related trees share the same pests and diseases -- if one gets it, the infestation can spread. Scientists have asked, "What is the primary driver in tropical forest diversity-competition for resources, or herbivore pests?"

For the first time, University of Utah biologists compared the two mechanisms in a single study.

The team analyzed how neighboring trees influence the growth and survival of nine coexisting species of the tree genus Inga in the Panama rainforest. They compared tree traits for resource acquisition, anti-herbivore defenses and the herbivores that live on the plants. They found that neighboring trees were basically the same in terms of acquiring resources, but had very different defenses and herbivores. Indeed, the defensive traits and shared pests impacted growth and survival, while resource acquisition traits had no effect on the plants' success. These findings indicate that anything impacting pest populations, such as climate change or habitat fragmentation, will have an impact on the health of the rainforest.

"Working in these hyper-diverse tropical rainforests makes it abundantly clear just how complex the web of interacting species really is. No species or individual lives in isolation. At all levels within the food chain species are competing with one another for precious resources and contributing a huge amount of their energy to defending themselves from the barrage of enemies they face, said Dale Forrister, doctoral candidate in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah and lead author of the study. "We are excited about this study because it highlights some of the important ways these antagonistic interactions might influence tropical diversity."

This study published on March 14, 2019, in the journal Science.

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It's a jungle out there

The team conducted their analysis over five years within a 50-hectare forest plot in Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The site has growth and survival data for over 423,000 trees from a previous long-term study. The researchers analyzed every individual tree sapling from the focal Inga species and calculated the similarity of their Inga neighbors' traits within a 10-meter "neighborhood." They measured four resource acquisition traits, five anti-herbivore defenses and recorded which herbivores were eating which plants.

Forrister developed a complicated model to determine how neighboring trees influence sapling growth and survival. They found that resource acquisition traits had no effect on survival, while defensive traits and herbivores had a big impact.

There are only so many ways to acquire resources. Defensive traits, however, are nearly endless. Plants and herbivores are in a constant arms race to outsmart each other. Plants develop traits to deter hungry mandibles, and herbivores adapt to deal with the leaf's defenses. The Inga genus has a quiver of anti-herbivore traits, including tiny hairs, nectar cups that attract pugnacious ant protectors, and most notably, leaves filled with poisonous compounds. Each Inga species can make hundreds or sometimes thousands of different toxins.

"People may think of a jungle like it's a giant salad bowl. It should be paradise for pests because they're surrounded by leaves. But plants have an infinite number of defense combinations -- half the weight of a young leaf is poison," said Phyllis Coley, Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Utah, research affiliate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and co-author of the study. "As a consequence of the diversity of defenses, each species of herbivore can only eat a few species of plants that they have adaptations for."

Closely related plants have similar defensive traits, and therefore similar pests. If a plant differs from its neighbor in terms of defenses, their herbivores aren't a threat, Coley continued. "You'll have your own herbivores, but at least you won't have all the critters in the neighborhood eating you."

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Confounding chemical compounds

Plant toxins are the most important weapons for tropical plants, but testing the similarity of each species' chemicals proved problematic. Over five years, the researchers collected leaf samples in the field, dried them in a makeshift desiccator suitcase (no easy feat in 100 percent humidity) and then brought them to the U for analysis. Using high performance liquid chromatography, they separated all of the distinct compounds inside the leaves. However, only 4 percent of the Inga compounds were known to science. So, the team got creative and came up with a new metric. They used a mass spectrometer to determine the chemical structure of each compound, and established that compounds with similar structures were likely affecting herbivores in a similar way.

"Metabolomics, a relatively new field of science, offers scientist a powerful new toolbox for examining the vast amount of chemical diversity that exists out there. Chemicals play a huge role in nature, from defenses to communication they are the medium by which species interact. Being able to quantify this in a meaningful way provides a truly unique perspective," said Forrister.

But do the herbivores "care" about the traits the team was measuring and do Inga species with similar traits share herbivores? To test this, they collected caterpillars that were eating Inga leaves and sequenced their DNA to classify each as species A, species B, etc. They were unable to name the species because most of the caterpillars were new to science. They cataloged which herbivores were eating which plants, correlated the suite of compounds in the plants and inferred which plant species shared herbivore communities.

Both old-school field research and modern techniques were indispensable to this project's success.

"Despite state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, there's no substitute for spending months and months in the rainforest," said Coley. "It took us several years to collect data, and samples of leaves and herbivores. It's hot, humid and buggy, but attempting to understand the diversity of species is a biologist's dream."

The study reveals the significant role of herbivores in driving diversity in tropical ecosystems, with stark implications -- the loss of those populations could have catastrophic consequence on these important habitats.

"If climate change continues to increase the length of the dry season in the Americas, then the dynamics of the herbivore populations will change as well," said Coley. "That could have implications down the road."
An international team of researchers have analyzed ancient DNA from almost 300 individuals from the Iberian Peninsula, spanning more than 12,000 years, in two studies published today in Current Biology and Science. The first study looked at hunter-gatherers and early farmers living in Iberia between 13,000 and 6000 years ago. The second looked at individuals from the region during all time periods over the last 8000 years. Together, the two papers greatly increase our knowledge about the population history of this unique region.

The Iberian Peninsula has long been thought of as an outlier in the population history of Europe, due to its unique climate and position on the far western edge of the continent. During the last Ice Age, Iberia remained relatively warm, allowing plants and animals -- and possibly people -- who were forced to retreat from much of the rest of Europe to continue living there. Similarly, over the last 8000 years, Iberia's geographic location, rugged terrain, position on the Mediterranean coast and proximity to North Africa made it unique in comparison to other parts of Europe in its interactions with other regions. Two new studies, published concurrently in Current Biology and Science, analyze a total of almost 300 individuals who lived from about 13,000 to 400 years ago to give unprecedented clarity on the unique population history of the Iberian Peninsula.

Iberian hunter-gatherers show two ancient Paleolithic lineages

For the paper in Current Biology, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, researchers analyzed 11 hunter-gatherers and Neolithic individuals from Iberia. The oldest newly analyzed individuals are approximately 12,000 years old and were recovered from Balma Guilanya in Spain.

Earlier evidence had shown that, after the end of the last Ice Age, western and central Europe were dominated by hunter-gatherers with ancestry associated with an approximately 14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy. Italy is thought to have been a potential refuge for humans during the last Ice Age, like Iberia. The Villabruna-related ancestry largely replaced earlier ancestry in western and central Europe related to 19,000-15,000-year-old individuals associated with what is known as the Magdalenian cultural complex.

Interestingly, the findings of the current study show that both lineages were present in Iberian individuals dating back as far as 19,000 years ago. "We can confirm the survival of an additional Paleolithic lineage that dates back to the Late Ice Age in Iberia," says Wolfgang Haak of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, senior author of the study. "This confirms the role of the Iberian Peninsula as a refuge during the Last Glacial Maximum, not only for fauna and flora but also for human populations."

This suggests that, far from being replaced by Villabruna-related individuals after the last Ice Age, hunter-gatherers in Iberia in fact already had ancestry from Magdalenian- and Villabruna-related sources. The discovery suggests an early connection between two potential refugia, resulting in a genetic ancestry that survived in later Iberian hunter-gatherers.

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"The hunter-gatherers from the Iberian Peninsula carry a mix of two older types of genetic ancestry: one that dates back to the Last Glacial Maximum and was once maximized in individuals attributed to Magdalenian culture and another one that is found everywhere in western and central Europe and had replaced the Magdalenian lineage during the Early Holocene everywhere except the Iberian Peninsula," explains Vanessa Villalba-Mouco of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, first author of the study.

The researchers hope that ongoing efforts to decipher the genetic structure of late hunter-gatherer groups across Europe will help to even better understand Europe's past and, in particular, the assimilation of a Neolithic way of life brought about by expanding farmers from the Near East during the Holocene.

Ancient DNA from individuals spanning the last 8000 years helps clarify the history and prehistory of the Iberian Peninsula

The paper published in Science focuses on slightly later time periods, and traces the population history of Iberia over the last 8000 years by analyzing ancient DNA from a huge number of individuals. The study, led by Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute and including Haak and Villalba-Mouco, analyzed 271 ancient Iberians from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and historical periods. The large number of individuals allowed the team to make more detailed inferences about each time period than previously possible.

The researchers found that during the transition to a sedentary farming life-style, hunter-gatherers in Iberia contributed subtly to the genetic make-up of newly arriving farmers from the Near East. "We can see that there must have been local mixture as the Iberian farmers also carry this dual signature of hunter-gatherer ancestry unique to Iberia," explains Villalba-Mouco.

Between about 2500-2000 BC, the researchers observed the replacement of 40% of Iberia's ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with ancestry from the Pontic Steppe, a region in what is today Ukraine and Russia. Interestingly, the findings show that in the Iron Age, "Steppe ancestry" had spread not only into Indo-European-speaking regions of Iberia but also into non-Indo-European-speaking ones, such as the region inhabited by the Basque. The researchers' analysis suggests that present-day Basques most closely resemble a typical Iberian Iron Age population, including the influx of "Steppe ancestry," but that they were not affected by subsequent genetic contributions that affected the rest of Iberia. This suggests that Basque speakers were equally affected genetically as other groups by the arrival of Steppe populations, but retained their language in any case. It was only after that time that they became relatively isolated genetically from the rest of the Iberian Peninsula.

Additionally, the researchers looked at historical periods, including times when Greek and later Roman settlements existed in Iberia. The researchers found that beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. They found that Greek and Roman settlements tended to be quite multiethnic, with individuals from the central and eastern Mediterranean and North Africa as well as locals, and that these interactions had lasting demographic as well as cultural impacts.

"Beyond the specific insights about Iberia, this study serves as a model for how a high-resolution ancient DNA transect continuing into historical periods can be used to provide a detailed description of the formation of present-day populations," explains Haak. "We hope that future use of similar strategies will provide equally valuable insights in other regions of the world."
Chronic kidney disease, common in agricultural workers in El Salvador and Nicaragua, was also found in 12 percent of sample of brick makers.

For two decades, Nicaragua and El Salvador have seen increasing mortality from an unusual form of chronic kidney disease (CKD), also called Mesoamerican Nephropathy (MeN). The disease has disproportionately affected sugarcane and other agricultural workers, and appears to be unrelated to traditional kidney disease risk factors such as diabetes.

Now, a new study by researchers from Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Nicaragua adds to the evidence that the CKD epidemic in the region is linked to occupational heat exposure.

The study, published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, found 12.1 percent of a sample of artisanal brick makers in Nicaragua had CKD, and that the disease was particularly common among individuals who worked with the ovens for baking bricks.

"Clinicians in the region have said that sugarcane workers are not the only people affected by this disease, despite the media attention they receive, and we were told by brick makers that oven workers were at greatest risk," says Madeleine Scammell, associate professor of environmental health at BUSPH and one of the study's two senior authors. "It turns out their observations were spot-on."

The researchers gathered data from 224 workers at brickmaking facilities in La Paz Centro, a municipality in northwestern Nicaragua, in February and June of 2016. This sample constituted about 44 percent of the brick makers in La Paz Centro.

The brick makers were all between 18 and 60 years old, had been working in brickmaking for at least a year, and had been working for no more than two hours on the mornings when researchers collected blood and urine samples to estimate kidney function.

The researchers found that 12.1 percent of the brick workers had stage 3 to 5 CKD. Operating the ovens, less education, older age, and having an immediate family member with CKD were all associated with worse kidney function. The biggest risk factors for a decline in kidney function during the study period were drinking less than three liters of water during a working shift and working for more than 48 hours per week.

While the sample only included 32 women, these women were just as likely to work with the ovens as men -- but none of them had CKD. This may be an area for further study, the authors wrote, as is the question of whether CKD runs in families because of genetic factors or because brickmaking -- like agriculture and other industries where CKD is common -- itself runs in families.
Muscle stem cells have to be ready to spring into action at any time: When a muscle becomes injured, for example, during a sports activity, it is their responsibility to develop new muscle cells as quickly as possible. When a muscle grows, because its owner is still growing too or has started to do more sports, the conversion of stem cells is also required.

"At the same time, however, there needs to be a mechanism in the body that prevents an uncontrolled differentiation of stem cells -- because otherwise the supply of these cells in the muscles would be quickly depleted," says Professor Carmen Birchmeier, head of the research group on Developmental Biology / Signal Transduction at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC).

Oscillation was previously only known to occur in brain stem cells

Birchmeier teamed up with colleagues from Berlin, Cologne, London, Paris, and Kyoto on mouse experiments that examined how this mechanism works. The group of researchers has now reported in the journal Genes & Development that the MyoD and Hes1 proteins regulate the differentiation of muscle cells. They are produced in the stem cells in an oscillatory manner -- i.e., there are periodic fluctuations in the number of cells produced.

"This observation, first of all, was astonishing in itself," says Birchmeier, "because no one before us had detected the oscillation of proteins in muscle." Such a phenomenon was previously only observed in stem cells of the brain. The MDC researcher hopes her studies will one day lead to better treatments of muscular dystrophies and of sarcopenia, a syndrome characterized by the progressive loss of muscle mass with advancing age.

Production runs at full tilt every two to three hours

"In our experiments, we started off by connecting the Hes1 and MyoD to proteins to luminescent -- i.e., light-emitting -- proteins so that we could better track their development," explains Dr. Ines Lahmann, the study's lead author and a member of Birchmeier's research group. The team was then able to observe -- in isolated cells, in muscle tissue, and in living animals -- that the Hes1 protein, which is part of the Notch signaling pathway, is produced in an oscillatory manner.

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"Production reaches its peak every two to three hours and then declines again," reports Lahmann, adding that they encountered the same phenomenon in the MyoD protein. "As long as the quantity of MyoD in the stem cells fluctuates periodically, the cells grow and divide, thus renewing themselves," says Lahmann. This, according to her, ensures there is always a sufficient supply of stem cells in the muscle.

Stable protein production is crucial for differentiation

When a muscle stem cell starts to differentiate and develop into a muscle cell, one result is the formation of long muscle fibers. This occurs, for example, when a muscle grows in a young organism or when it tries to repair itself after an injury. "Every time we observed this conversion of cells under the microscope, we had previously noticed that the oscillation had stopped and MyoD was expressed stably -- regardless of whether we were looking at newborn or adult animals," reports Birchmeier.

Her team then proceeded to turn the gene for Hes1 completely off, so that the protein is no longer produced in the stem cells. The researchers also conducted this experiment on both cells and living animals. "The lack of Hes1 led to MyoD no longer being produced in an oscillatory manner, but rather in a stable pattern. All stem cells began to differentiate as a result," says Birchmeier.

The goal is new therapies for muscular disorder patients

"Our experiments show that when it comes to stem cell differentiation and probably many other cellular processes, genes are not simply turned on or off -- and that we are still a long way from understanding all the developments that occur when we use genetic tricks to do exactly that," Birchmeier stressed.

She and her team next want to study why the oscillation of MyoD leads to stem cell differentiation not taking place in the muscles, and why a stable production of the protein is needed to trigger this process. "Once we gain a better understanding of the whole process," says the researcher, "we will be able to better help people with muscular disorders whose natural capacity for muscle regeneration has been impaired."
Making a revolutionary biosensor takes blood, sweat and tears. And saliva, naturally.

University of Cincinnati professor Jason Heikenfeld examined the potential of these and other biofluids to test human health with tiny, portable sensors for the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Heikenfeld develops wearable technology in his Novel Device Lab in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. His lab last year created the world's first continuous-testing device that samples sweat as effectively as blood but in a noninvasive way and over many hours.

"Ultimately, technological advances in wearables are constrained by human biology itself," the study said.

Remarkably, many of the innovations in the field of biosensors and sweat technology were developed in Cincinnati. The first glucose monitor for diabetes was commercialized in the region. The inventor of the the world's first antiperspirant, called Odorono, was a Cincinnati physician named Abraham Murphey.

"We have such a strong history in this field here. It's really fascinating," Heikenfeld said.

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Heikenfeld credits the hard work of his team for his lab's success.

"We have been able to go far and fast here," Heikenfeld said. "We resonate with a certain type of student. As much as we have brilliant faculty at UC, if we didn't have talented students here, this technology wouldn't exist. We would just be talking theoretically about the potential."

In the Nature article, Heikenfeld identified four waves of discovery when it comes to testing human health. First, doctors began drawing and shipping blood to labs in an invasive, time-consuming and labor-intensive process that patients still undergo today.

Starting around the 1980s researchers, including pioneering UC engineering professor Chong Ahn, developed point-of-care lab tests that allowed doctors to get immediate results. Instead of shipping samples to a lab, doctors could test samples themselves using tiny self-contained devices.

"Dr. Ahn has been at the forefront of developing these point-of-care devices," Heikenfeld said.

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Now, Heikenfeld said, we're in the midst of a third wave -- continuous health monitoring with wearable devices like those developed at UC. These provide data over time so doctors can track health trends instead of relying on the snapshot that a single blood test provides.

"That's super powerful because it tells me am I getting better? Am I getting worse?" Heikenfeld said.

Eventually, the field will see devices implanted in the body for long-term diagnosis or monitoring, he said. But first researchers will have to create robust sensors that can provide accurate information over a much longer time frame.

"That's the big challenge," Heikenfeld said. "Sensors are chemically reactive themselves. So they don't last."

After examining the use of saliva, tears and interstitial fluid, Heikenfeld concluded in the Nature article that sweat holds the most promise for noninvasive testing because it provides similar information as blood and its secretion rate can be controlled and measured.

In his Novel Device Lab at UC, Heikenfeld and his students have been creating new sensors on a wearable patch the size of a Band-Aid that stimulates sweat even when a patient is cool and resting. The sensor measures specific analytes over time that doctors can use to determine how the patient is responding to a drug treatment.

The sensors can be tailored to measure anything from drugs to hormones to dehydration, Heikenfeld said.

Last year the lab created the world's first continuous-monitoring sensor that can record the same health information in sweat that doctors for generations have examined in blood. The milestone is remarkable because the continuous sensor allows doctors to track health over time to see whether a patient is getting better or worse. And they can do so in a noninvasive way with a tiny patch applied to the skin that stimulates sweat for up to 24 hours at a time.

"This is the Holy Grail. For the first time, we can show here's the blood data; here's the sweat data -- and they work beautifully together," Heikenfeld said.

Heikenfeld and his students published their latest experimental findings in December in the journal Lab on a Chip. UC's study tracked how test subjects metabolized ethanol. The study concluded that sweat provided virtually the same information as blood to measure a drug's presence in the body.

The latest breakthrough at UC marked the culmination of more than seven years of research, he said.

"For medications, we can use sweat to get an exact measurement of concentrations in the blood," Heikenfeld said. "That's important because once we can measure concentrations of therapeutics in blood, we can look at drug dosing. And that could make current dosing look like something from the Stone Age."

Cincinnati is home to several companies that are turning technologies for drug prescribing, delivery and monitoring into commercial products. The list includes Assurex Health, Enable Injections and Heikenfeld's Eccrine Systems, where he is co-founder and chief science officer.

Study co-author and computational biologist Tongli Zhang said devices like these will help doctors to provide personalized care. Zhang is an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Systems Physiology at the UC College of Medicine.

"You don't give children the same drug dose as adults. Likewise, we can specify a dose based on a patient's weight," Zhang said. "But some patients might have liver or kidney failure. And others might metabolize a drug 10 times faster. So the same dose might be ineffective in some patients and toxic in others."

Zhang said continuous sensors could change treatments in fundamental ways.

"Personalized or individualized medicine is becoming a bigger deal. We realize it's important. If we can understand what's going on in the body, we can tailor the treatment accordingly," he said.

UC is at the forefront of developing new biosensors that Heikenfeld thinks will revolutionize the way we track disease and wellness.

"UC continues to build on our rich regional history in revolutionizing diagnostics through this third wave of continuous biochemical sensing," he said.
On March 13, 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission obtained an order upon consent compelling Christina Marie Daniels of Riverside, California, Kim Bennett of Missoula, Montana, and Valentino Moca of Prescott Valley, Arizona to comply with investigative subpoenas for documents and testimony.

On February 14, 2019, the SEC filed an application in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California seeking an order directing compliance with its investigative subpoenas. According to the SEC's application, the SEC is investigating, among other things, whether certain individuals or entities engaged in the offer and sale of unregistered securities. Based on its ongoing investigation, the SEC has reason to believe that Daniels, Bennett, and Moca, who each purportedly personally invested in the unregistered securities, may have been involved in raising substantial amounts of money from others. In October 2018, the SEC issued subpoenas to Daniels, Bennett, and Moca, seeking the production of documents, including communications with prospective investors, as well as materials shown or provided to prospective investors. The subpoenas also require Daniels, Bennett, and Moca to appear for investigative testimony.

Daniels, Bennett, and Moca each consented to the entry of the order compelling them to produce documents and appear for investigative testimony. The SEC is continuing its fact-finding investigation in this matter and the application does not reflect a determination that anyone has violated the federal securities laws.
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Three Cambodian men were detained at ICE headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday and likely will be deported in the following weeks as the Trump administration looks to crack down on undocumented immigrants with old criminal convictions.

Among the men detained was Hay Hov, 39, of Oakland, a truck driver with an autistic son whose plight was featured in The Chronicle this week. Hov was transferred to the Mesa Verde detention facility in Bakersfield Wednesday night and will meet with Cambodian consular officials in Texas in a few weeks, according to his attorney.

At least eight local Cambodians were asked to report to deportation officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters on Sansome Street, and dozens more are expected to be detained across the United States this month, according to local advocates.

ICE has not responded to questions about the Bay Area cases. Its unclear why only some of the men who reported to ICE in San Francisco were detained. A fourth man, who recently had a kidney transplant, was told to return at the end of the month, advocates said.

I feel like a turkey on Thanksgiving, Hov said Wednesday, minutes before walking into his check-in.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

Outside, about 100 organizers, friends and family rallied in support of the men, spilling into one of the traffic lanes on Sansome Street.

Its the latest round of these deportations, as ICE cracks down on Cambodian refugees who committed crimes years or even decades ago, often as teenagers, that cost them their green cards and put them on a track to deportation.

The United States continues to work with the Government of Cambodia to establish a reliable process for the issuance of travel documents and their acceptance of the prompt, lawful return of Cambodian nationals who are subject to removal from the United States, ICE said.

Supporters of stricter immigration policies say its an obvious and necessary punishment for people who immigrate to the U.S. and commit crimes.

Roeun Pich, 43, fled a refugee camp in Thailand with his family, immigrating to the U.S. in 1985 at age 9. Three of his siblings died of hunger, dehydration and disease during the Khmer Rouge regime, he said. They settled in a poor and violent neighborhood in Oakland, where, Pich said, he was bullied constantly.

At 22, Pich was convicted of a felony after spotting an unoccupied car with the keys inside and taking it for a ride, evading police who pursued him.

I have no connections in Cambodia and I have no family ties there, Pich wrote in an online petition before he was detained.

I was born in the atrocities of the labor camps and therefore deporting me to a country where I was tormented is inhumane and unjust. Cambodia is not my home; here in Oakland with my family, friends and a career in health care is my home.

If hes deported, Pichs wife, Kanley Souet-Pich, will be left to care for the couples five children. Shes afraid theyll lose custody of Pichs eldest daughter from a previous relationship, and shes not sure how shell make ends meet.

Financially, everything is going to fall under me, she said. I dont know if I would have to relocate or if I would have to find a second job.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

The men have asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to pardon their crimes, which could keep them in the country despite their removal orders. But Newsom hasnt publicly commented on the issue and its unclear if hell grant any pardons.

Our office does not typically comment on individual clemency applications, a spokesman said in a statement Thursday. Each case is closely reviewed and evaluated on its own merits.

A U.S. district judge in January issued a temporary restraining order through May that requires ICE to give at least two weeks written notice to anyone scheduled for deportation, which gave attorneys more time than usual to prepare a defense for their clients.

Before Hov was detained, his attorney, Kevin Lo, sought to have his deportation delayed, arguing that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the federal definition of a crime of violence puts him outside ICEs reach for deportation.

Lo said ICE officials hardly weighed his legal arguments before taking Hov into custody.

Hov served a five-year sentence in Soledad state prison after being convicted in 2001 of shooting a man.

Tatiana Sanchez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tatiana.sanchez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TatianaYSanchez
A state appeals court says San Francisco can seek to remove a subcontractor the city blamed for a series of gas leaks in 2015 on a Haight Street construction project that remains unfinished.

The city signed a $13.7 million contract with Ghilotti Bros. Inc. to renovate a stretch of Haight between Laguna and Ashbury streets, repaving the streets, replacing sewers and installing water mains. Ghilotti then subcontracted $7.5 million in excavation and utilities work to Synergy Project Management, which proceeded to break five gas lines in five months, causing leaks that twice shut down construction.

Synergy said it wasnt to blame, noting it had performed similar work safely in many San Francisco projects, and faulting Pacific Gas and Electric Co. for its placement of underground pipes. But city officials demanded Synergys removal. After a fact-finding hearing, the hearing officer said the companys poor and highly dangerous performance justified its replacement.

Most of the Haight Street renovation work was completed, but the installation of water mains has been on hold during a legal dispute about the citys authority to remove the subcontractor.

In separate lawsuits, both Synergy and Ghilotti invoked a state law that allows a local government to hold a hearing on the removal of a subcontractor on the prime contractors request for substitution. They said San Francisco lacked authority to order the hearing because Ghilotti, the prime contractor, had not requested it.

Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn agreed in 2017 but the First District Court of Appeal overruled him Thursday.

Although it is usually the prime contractor that seeks removal of a subcontractor, the law was written broadly enough to allow a city or county to request a change when it has valid reasons to do so, Presiding Justice James Humes said in the 3-0 ruling.

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Allowing only the prime contractor to seek replacement of an errant subcontractor would undermine the (laws) overarching purpose of protecting the public, Humes said. He said Kahn must act on San Franciscos request to remove Synergy.

City Attorney Dennis Herreras office said Friday that the court had recognized the city always has the authority to remove a subcontractor from working on a city project to protect public safety. But Kris Cox, a lawyer for Synergy, said the company would seek review in the state Supreme Court.

The ruling, if it stands, would allow public entities to unfairly meddle in the subcontractors chosen to work on projects, Cox said. We anticipate support from the contracting community.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
Thousands of Bay Area students walked out of schools Friday to protest climate change and many of them marched down Market Street in a noisy, energetic show of youth frustration and determination.

Climate change is not a lie! We wont let our planet die! the young people shouted, amid a sea of signs, banners and a giant beach ball painted to resemble the planet that many protesters said was on life support.

It was all part of an international day of youth protest over the state of the Earth. Similar protests took place across the U.S. and in more than 100 countries.

In San Francisco, about 2,000 students  many with their teachers blessing  and their parents gathered first in front of Rep. Nancy Pelosis office at 7th and Mission streets, then marched to Sen. Dianne Feinsteins office at Market and Post streets before heading for a rally at Union Square. Traffic came to a halt. Some motorists honked, not all in support.

There is no planet B, C, D, Isha Clarke, a student leader of Youth vs. Apocalypse told the crowd. The cycle of destruction ends now.

Handmade signs held aloft by the young marchers stressed the dire consequences of climate change and criticized inaction by adults.

Its not nice to frack Mother Nature, said one sign.

The seas are rising and so are we, said another.

Claudia Ryckebusch, an eighth grader at Denman Middle School in San Francisco, missed her geology class to join the march. She was holding a sign that said, Climate change is real, next to a picture of wilted flowers.

The planet still has to be here after adults arent, Ryckebusch said. Weve got to take care of the planet before its gone forever. I dont want my great-great-grandchildren to live in a sea of trash.

Morgan Swanson, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Bright Works School in San Francisco, said he was marching for my future.

If things dont change, Im going to have to put on a protective suit just to walk outside, he said. I dont want to have to do that.

Jesse Simons marched with his daughter, 8-year-old, Eloise.

Her future is on the line, he said.

Eloise, a second-grader from Park Day School in Oakland, held a sign that said, Everything needs to change and needs to start today.

Things are bad and it affects kids more than adults, Eloise said.

Now Playing: Students walked out of class on Friday to participate in a nationwide protest against what they perceive as a lack of action on the part of politicians to address climate change. Video: Steve Rubenstein

Some marchers signs also called on Feinstein to vote yes to the Green New Deal, a proposal by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., calling on the U.S. to run on 100 percent renewable energy within the next decade.

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.

Feinsteins terse conversation about the Green New Deal with young environmental activists at her office in February went viral as they debated how she, a Democrat, should vote on the proposal. On Friday, activists dropped posters off in front of her office. Some of the young people who faced off with Feinstein in the video were among Fridays marchers.

Clarke was one of them. As the crowd assembled around the stage at the north side of Union Square, she bemoaned adults who tell children to remember their place.

A childs place is at the table where their futures are being discussed, she said, as the crowd roared its approval.

Despite being young, we are literate and capable, said 12-year-old Samantha May Robles of Oakland. If you think you can leave us a messed up climate, youre a fool and youre a murderer.

The marchers in San Francisco and around the world were inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish student activist, who started protesting on her own in September 2018 against what she said were adults inaction on climate change. Students in Paris, New Delhi and New York City left their classrooms Friday to do the same. In some ways, the Friday protest seemed a ramped-up version of Earth Day, which has been taking place for half a century and is set for April 22.

In San Francisco, police officers on bikes, motorcycles and on foot kept watch over the march as it proceeded down Market Street and through the Financial District to Union Square. Streetcars, trollies, buses and cars backed up. Some Muni lines were rerouted, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

A spokeswoman for San Francisco Unified School District said that, as of noon, about 240 students had left class to join the strike, which ended early in the afternoon. Many were from the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and The Academy high schools.

Steve Rubenstein, Ashley McBride and Gwendolyn Wu are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com, ashley.mcbride@sfchronicle.com, gwendolyn.wu@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF @ashleynmcb @gwendolynawu
Marine scientists are investigating the deaths of two gray whales found floating in San Francisco Bay this week.

The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito received a report of a dead whale floating between Tiburon and Angel Island near Raccoon Strait on Sunday morning. The carcass settled near Belvedere Cove later that day. The next morning, officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spotted a second whale floating near the Bay Bridge, said Giancarlo Rulli, a Marine Mammal Center spokesman.

A marine salvage company helped the Corps of Engineers tow the carcasses to Angel Island on Monday afternoon, officials said.

Members of the Marine Mammal Center joined experts with the California Academy of Sciences on Tuesday morning in performing necropsies on the whales at the edge of the surf line at Angel Island State Park, Rulli said.

The first whale, identified as a 1-year-old, 23-foot female, appears to have died from malnutrition. Scientists said the whale had a significant lack of blubber and body fat and didnt have much food in her stomach.

There was no evidence of trauma or infectious disease, officials said in a statement on Thursday.

Rulli said scientists were unable to perform a necropsy on the second whale because of a strong incoming tide. But they determined that the second whale was also a roughly 1-year-old, 23-foot female that was in a moderate state of decomposition and had a decent amount of blubber reserves.

Rulli said scientists tied the second whale to the shore of Angel Island State Park and plan to return soon to complete a full investigation into the circumstances of her death.

In recent years, biologists have observed cases of young gray whales in poor body condition migrating south in the fall from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warmer waters off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, said Dr. Padraig Duignan, chief research pathologist for the Marine Mammal Center.

Duignan said the first whale, which probably died of malnutrition, may not have fed enough during the winter and as a result, lacked the reserves necessary for her to survive the migration.

Gray whales can reach up to 45 feet in length, Marine Mammal Center officials said.

The two whale deaths fall into an abnormally high trend of gray whales entering the San Francisco Bay recently  and staying for longer periods  compared with past years, Marine Mammal Center officials said.

Local experts have historically recorded one or two gray whales passing underneath the Golden Gate Bridge between late winter and early spring, but in the past week alone, officials said they counted five whales entering the bay.

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.

Theres likely a few factors at play here, including food source availability and a relatively sheltered habitat for juvenile whales that are in weaker body condition, said Bill Keener, a whale expert with the Golden Gate Cetacean Research organization.

Duignan said the whale deaths help researchers better understand various environmental threats.

Marine Mammal Center scientists said the most common cause of death of marine mammals theyve investigated is undetermined, but leading causes of death include blunt force trauma from getting hit by passing ships, malnutrition, trauma and entanglement.

The Marine Mammal Center responded to five gray whale strandings in 2018, three of them in the San Francisco Bay.

The public may report sick or injured marine mammals by calling the Marine Mammal Center at 415-289-7325. Officials warn anyone who sees a stranded marine mammal to stay at least 50 feet away.

Lauren Hernandez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LaurenPorFavor
San Franciscans are famous for celebrating beloved institutions after theyre gone. We mourn the pending closure of Lucca Ravioli Co., shake our fists that the Elbo Room and Mission Thrift have been shuttered, and still cant believe Gumps is no more.

But were not so good about patronizing longtime businesses that hang on  we assume theyll always be there. Until theyre not. So today, Ill highlight one: the scrappy Balboa Theatre, which has been showing movies in the Outer Richmond since Feb. 7, 1926, and perseveres in the age of chain multiplexes and Netflix.

I admit I hadnt seen a movie at the two-screen, independent theater in years, but it came to my attention again recently when Chronicle pop culture critic Peter Hartlaub and I were looking for a venue for our next #TotalSF project: screenings of movies filmed in San Francisco.

Whether its riding every Muni line in a day, creating a Halloween Its-It costume or decorating a cable car for the holidays, #TotalSF is about celebrating the fun and whimsy of San Francisco, and the Balboa turned out to be a perfect match.

Well be screening So I Married an Axe Murderer, the Mike Myers comedy set largely in North Beach, at 7:30 p.m. on April 4 at the Balboa. Well record a podcast called Tribute to the Richmond District with special guests from the neighborhood in the lobby beforehand. And there will be a bagpiper, but more on that later. Join us!

Adam Bergeron, owner of the Balboa and the Vogue, is a #TotalSF kind of guy. The 50-year-old Glen Park dad had been a longtime owner of restaurants, bars and music venues, but he hadnt considered owning a movie theater until a very memorable trip in 2011 with his wife to the Balboa to see the entirely forgettable Eddie Murphy flick Tower Heist.

We walked across the street to get back in the car, and I looked back and said, God, wouldnt it be neat to own a theater someday? Bergeron recalled, adding that his wife shrugged and said maybe when they retired.

He Googled the Balboa on a whim and learned owner Gary Meyer was planning to close the theater. It was simply too expensive to run. That was a Wednesday. By Saturday, Bergeron and Meyer had struck a deal.

Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Money is still tight, but Bergeron keeps the Balboa afloat by having fun. When I visited on a recent afternoon, Bergerons niece, Storey Bergeron, was there celebrating her eighth birthday with a screening of Captain Marvel and a vanilla Its-It.

My mom would definitely not let me see The Queen of the Blood! Storey said with a nod to a horror movie poster in the window. The girl with long blond braids and bright-blue glasses said its fun having an uncle who owns a movie theater, adding she visits like three times a month!

Bergeron gets lots of repeat visitors, and not just his family members. The popcorn is delicious, and theres an extensive beer menu. Bergeron secured a beer license after buying the theater and offers a selection of local brews in cans. No bottles.

So it doesnt break in the theater and theres no clank, clank, clank as it rolls to the front of the auditorium, he explained. At this point, were technically a restaurant that shows movies.

Thats just a technicality of the license; other than the Its-Its, the food is pretty standard movie theater fare.

The lobby is filled with artifacts from Playland-at-the-Beach, including a bumper car and a pink ballot box with blue lettering, used to drop votes for Miss Playland-at-the-Beach 1969. Bergeron is an avid collector of San Francisco paraphernalia, including lots of movie posters and photographs.

He and fellow collector Kevin Hunsanger  who lives in the Richmond and until recently was a co-owner of Green Apple Books  have teamed up to scout locations for a new project theyre calling the San Francisco Cultural History Museum.

Itll be filled with local historical memorabilia, and they also envision doing themed pop-ups around the city. Ideally, theyll keep it in the Richmond, but are open to other neighborhoods as long as its a storefront in a busy retail area.

We love the neighborhood culture in San Francisco, and I personally feel thats something thats really been lost, Hunsanger said. All the cafes are now basically off-site workstations. If you dont go to bars, where are you going to have that third place thats not work and not home and talk to somebody you dont know? To me, thats the most important part of this project.

But back to our project  and the bagpiper.

#TotalSF event Chronicle columnist Heather Knight and pop culture critic Peter Hartlaub will screen "So I Married an Axe Murderer" at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 4, at the Balboa Theatre, 3630 Balboa Street. We'll record a podcast in the lobby beforehand. Tickets are available at www.cinemasf.com/balboa See More Collapse

Fans of So I Married an Axe Murderer know bagpipes are a key part of the movie, in which Myers plays both a beat writer and his very Scottish dad.

Theres a scene with a drunk bagpiper who plays the Rod Stewart song Da Ya Think Im Sexy? and then falls over, prompting the famous line, We have a piper down!

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Being the intrepid reporter that I am, I found that drunk piper: Jack Cunningham, an 84-year-old who lives in the Mission.

The native of Scotland left his homeland when he was 22, traveled the world for a few years and settled in San Francisco in 1966. He worked mostly in telecommunications, but also had a longtime piping gig at Edinburgh Castle Pub on Geary Street.

They put word out that they were looking for someone to play in the movie, and I did an audition, he recalled. I think I got the job because I was the only one who could play Da Ya Think Im Sexy? on the bagpipes.

He said the movie annoyed some local pipers, because theyd always be asked to play that song at weddings. I asked if it bugged them because it wasnt traditional.

Not only that, they couldnt play it, he said.

Cunningham himself isnt playing the pipes now because he injured his mouth in a bad fall. But he recommended a former student of his  Lynne Miller, owner of the House of Bagpipes  who has agreed to play at our #TotalSF movie night.

Miller, too, grew up in Scotland and started playing as a kid. So how long has he played?

Well, Im 74 now, so quite a while, he said. My whole life is bagpipes, from early in the morning until sometimes late at night. I make them, I repair them, I teach them, and so I stay really busy.

He said there are more bagpipers in San Francisco than youd think, and theres a growing number of women who play.

See, the city is still a wonderfully whimsical place full of creative people who march to the beat of their own drum  or bagpipe. We hope to see you next month.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf
The Landing, a forthcoming 263-unit complex in San Franciscos Dogpatch neighborhood, is offering new tenants what it calls an exclusive perk: permission to rent their apartments via Airbnb when theyre away.

So much of the tech population in San Francisco is into sharing, whether GetAround, Ubers or Airbnb, said Roman Speron, president of Align Residential, which is developing the complex due to open in May. This will help them put a few dollars away to help with the cost of living.

Many landlords in Airbnbs hometown are hostile toward tourist rentals in private units, saying they have concerns about security and lease violations. The San Francisco Apartment Association, which represents numerous rental owners, backed a regulation for the city to notify landlords when their tenants apply to be Airbnb hosts.

For Airbnb, forging deals with landlords is a welcome bright light as it continues to battle regulators. This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Santa Monicas ban on Airbnb rentals of entire units.

Align is participating in Airbnbs Friendly Buildings Program, in which landlords allow vacation rentals, usually in exchange for a small cut of the proceeds. Airbnb said buildings with tens of thousands of units have enrolled.

But underscoring some of its challenges, two large local landlords that were part of the program wont even discuss it. Veritas Investments, one of the citys largest landlords, enrolled five of its buildings in a pilot program 17 months ago, something that both it and Airbnb touted publicly. But Veritas this week said it pulled out because not many tenants were using it. Equity Residential, which controls hundreds of San Francisco units, also was participating, but declined to comment.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

The Landing will let its tenants pocket all the proceeds on their vacation rentals. Like most San Francisco real estate, its units are pricey, starting at $3,400 for a one-bedroom apartment, $4,800 for two bedrooms, and $6,000 for three bedrooms.

As the city requires, the vacation rentals will be limited to 90 days a year for entire units; tenants can also rent out rooms to travelers with no limit on days. The property will restrict the perk to the first 52 tenants who request it to keep the flow of temporary visitors from becoming disruptive, Speron said.

The Landings smartphone app will help tenants manage the rentals, just as it will help them find people via outside apps to walk their dogs, clean their apartments, wash their cars and fix their bikes.

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
Muslims across the Bay Area stood in solidarity during prayer amid stepped-up security Friday, vowing to continue practicing their religion freely after attacks at two mosques in New Zealand that left 49 people dead.

The massacre was a startling reminder of growing anti-Muslim rhetoric around the world. But local leaders in the community urged people to make a show of strength and go to their mosques on Friday, a holy day in Islam in which Muslims gather for worship during midday prayer.

Its so important that we share a message of strength and unity, said Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Bay Area chapter. Im hopeful that we will not let this act of white supremacist terror intimidate us.

Billoo said many mosques stepped up security in 2012 after a deadly attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and that Bay Area mosques were in touch with police departments Friday to increase patrols.

Were balancing being pragmatic as well as peoples fear, she said. A lot of Muslims are asking, Is it safe to go to the mosque today?

A 28-year-old man was charged with murder in connection to the shootings Friday at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which were partially streamed on Facebook. The suspect also posted a manifesto online that expressed white nationalist, anti-immigrant views, authorities said.

President Trump called the shooting a terrible thing but said he doesnt think white nationalism is a rising threat.

The San Francisco Police Department said officers would increase passing calls to the citys mosques throughout the day. There are no known threats to San Francisco, officials said. Two police officers stopped by the Islamic Society of San Francisco Friday ahead of the mosques midday prayer, greeting and embracing Muslims who trickled in.

#SFPD is following the events in Christchurch, #NewZealand. Officers will be making extra passing calls of #SF Mosques. We work stronger as a team. Please if you #SeeSomethingSaySomething. #SF pic.twitter.com/6s8gtMCcHg  San Francisco Police (@SFPD) March 15, 2019

San Francisco Human Rights Commissioner Hala Hijazi, who is Muslim and worships at the Islamic Societys Darussalam Mosque near Civic Center, couldnt talk about the New Zealand shooting Friday without crying.

I cant say Im shocked anymore, said Hijazi, dressed in black from head to toe. My heart weeps for children that are dealing with this. It weeps for immigrant communities that are defenseless. I weep for women who wear hijab that are attacked regularly. For defenseless people who are just trying to practice their religion in a peaceful manner all over the world.

The mosque filled with several hundred worshipers for its 1:15 p.m. prayer.

Jose Santiago, 51, who converted to Islam seven years ago, made it a point to welcome people at the door.

I wanted to let them know that everything is going to be fine, he said. That no matter what happens, Allah knows best. God knows best.

More for you As mass shooting spreads online, social media users tell tech to do better

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Despite their defiance, many Muslims said theyre aware of the risks and vulnerabilities of worshiping in their local mosques.

Just sitting there, you are very vulnerable, said Ameena Jandali of the Islamic Networks Group, a national nonprofit with offices in Oakland and San Jose. You are literally just a sitting duck. Im sure that will be on peoples mind today.

Michael Pappas, executive director of the San Francisco Interfaith Council, was among several interfaith leaders who attended midday prayer at the Islamic Society Friday.

This happened across the other side of the sea, he said. But its a reflection of the divisiveness here in our nation.

Sanctuaries ought to be places where people feel safe to worship.

Community members will host a candlelight vigil for the victims of the New Zealand shooting at 5:30 p.m. Monday at Santa Clara University.

Tatiana Sanchez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tatiana.sanchez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @tatianaysanchez
After four years and a Michelin star, San Francisco chef Brett Cooper is leaving Aster.

Cooper, who opened the Mission District restaurant with Daniel Patterson in 2015, said his final dinner service will be March 30. The timing just so happens to coincide with Asters anniversary. The restaurant hasnt announced a replacement yet.

As for why hes stepping away, Cooper said he wanted to take time to focus on his family life.

I got married five years ago and that was really the start of thinking about this, Cooper said. My wife got pregnant like three weeks after we opened the restaurant. Having a kid and wanting to be present is something thats important to me. I have responsibilities to the business and staff but I also have responsibilities to my family.

Work-life balance among fine dining chefs is an oft-discussed topic in the industry. How people deal with it varies as much as the situations do. For Cooper, finding balance means moving to Southern California to be closer to his wifes family in Huntington Beach.

Since it opened, Aster has been a showcase for Coopers talent and vision. It was the culmination of a career spanning more than a decade in the Bay Area which included stints in the kitchens of Rubicon, Saison, Coi and as Outerlands in Outer Sunset.

Coopers work over the years helped progress whats now widely identified as modern Northern California cooking. He helped set the stage for Saisons rise to prominence in its early days, and at Outerlands, his rustic, plant-focused approach helped make the neighborhood spot a destination.

Then at Aster, Coopers vegetable-forward menus quickly garnered the business critical acclaim. Due to popular demand, the restaurant expanded its tasting menu last year from four to seven courses.

John Storey / Special to the Chronicle

Cooper said he plans to continue working as a chef in Southern California. Hes weighing options at this point, but the plan moving forward is to find something better suiting his new life, he said.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

When it comes to Aster, Cooper said it was an important chapter in his career and praised Daniel Pattersons guidance. Choosing to leave was a difficult decision, but the timing just made sense, he said

We want to grow our family, Cooper added. Now, Im finding a way to support that vision.

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
Sen. Kamala Harris, asked during a radio interview this week about Gov. Gavin Newsoms decision to halt executions in California, appeared to say she would follow suit nationwide if elected president  an action that would exceed presidential authority over states death penalty laws.

But on Friday, Harris office said her answers to a National Public Radio interviewer, in context, clearly referred only to executions for federal crimes, under a narrower law that a future chief executive could conceivably suspend.

Harris, like most of her rivals for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has long opposed capital punishment. She withstood attacks from police groups for refusing to seek death for the killer of a San Francisco police officer in 2004, when she was the citys district attorney. As California attorney general, however, she successfully defended the states death penalty law in court, saying it was part of her job.

Harris comments to NPR, broadcast Thursday, were interpreted by some news outlets as a promise to declare a nationwide moratorium on executions as president. That was based on an exchange with interviewer Steve Inskeep, who asked her, No one would be executed if you were president of the United States, for any crime? Harris replied, Correct, correct.

Even for treason? he asked. Not in the United States, no, the senator said.

But when Inskeep had raised the subject moments earlier, he began by asking Harris whether there was a federal equivalent to Newsoms moratorium that she would order. Federal executions, of course, are quite rare, Inskeep said  the last one was in 2003.

Yes, I think that there should be, she replied.

A moratorium? he continued.

I do believe that, Harris said.

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Harris press secretary, Meaghan Lynch, said Friday that the question-and-answer sequence made it clear that Harris favored abolishing the death penalty at a federal level. and was not referring to state laws, which are beyond the presidents powers.

Most executions are carried out under state law, and while a states governor can declare a moratorium  which Newsom did on Wednesday, following similar actions by the governors of Colorado, Oregon and Washington  the president cannot suspend state law.

The president has no executive branch power over states, said Stanford law Professor Robert Weisberg, co-director of the schools Criminal Justice Center. He noted that death penalty laws in California and elsewhere have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, and said it might be possible legally  but not politically  for Congress to take action against the state laws.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
WASHINGTON, March 13 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Embassy in Washington D.C. on Wednesday held a celebration marking the 40th anniversary of sister city relationships between Chinese and U.S. cities.

"Sister cities relationship is a major channel for people-to-people exchanges and sub-national cooperation. It is an important driving force for our relations," Minister Xu Xueyuan of the embassy told the event.

"Sister cities cooperation between China and the U.S. has almost developed in tandem with the overall bilateral ties," Xu said.

"Over the past four decades, the number of sister provinces/states and sister cities between us has grown into 277 pairs. Following the principles of friendship, mutual benefit and practical results, the two sides have made great achievement in their trade and economic cooperation as well as people-to-people ties, with the purpose of common development and shared prosperity," Xu said.

Officials of U.S. states, cities, and towns that have sister city ties with their Chinese counterparts joined the celebration, co-hosted by both the Chinese Embassy and Sister Cities International (SCI), a non-profit organization that promotes local-level ties between the United States and other countries.

The establishment of sister city relationships between China and the United States started soon after the two countries established their diplomatic ties in 1979, when central China's Hubei Province and the U.S. State of Ohio, and eastern China's Nanjing city and the U.S. city of St. Louis, forged sister relationships.

The event also celebrated the 40th anniversary of the China-U.S. diplomatic relations, the Chinese embassy said in a statement.

[ Editor: zyq ]
On Jan. 3, Rashida Tlaib, a Detroit Democrat serving her first day in the House of Representatives, provided the new majoritys first answer to Washingtons defining question: Were going to impeach the motherf. Last week, Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat serving her 32nd year in the House and second tour as speaker, offered a very different one: Im not for impeachment, she told the Washington Post. Hes just not worth it.

Though united in their low opinion of the president, the freshman and the speaker had apparently reached opposite conclusions on whether to exercise one of the Houses gravest powers. Tlaibs had the virtue of visceral appeal to the partys liberal base; Pelosis had the virtue of being right.

Thats not to exonerate the president of the high Crimes and Misdemeanors for which the Constitution prescribes impeachment, conviction and removal from office. In fact, Trump stands effectively accused of crimes by federal prosecutors in New York, who have alleged that he orchestrated secret payoffs to his purported paramours in violation of campaign-finance laws.

Special Counsel Robert Muellers team could be close to a conclusion on two more criminal matters: whether Trump collaborated with the Russian governments efforts to get him elected or obstructed the investigation thereof. The obstruction half of the question, even without Muellers report, is hardly a riddle. From firing top Justice Department officials to disparaging investigators and witnesses, Trump has harried the inquiry in broad daylight. Five of his former associates, moreover, have admitted that they hampered investigators by lying to them.

Much of their deception concerned contacts with Russians. While the extent of the collusion and the presidents role in it remain open questions, its clear that top Trump campaign officials met with Kremlin emissaries promising damaging information about Hillary Clinton; that Paul Manafort, Trumps prison-bound former campaign chairman, shared polling data with a suspected Russian intelligence associate; that a ranking campaign official sought information from Russian intermediary WikiLeaks; and that Trumps representatives surreptitiously pursued a Moscow real estate development deep into the presidential campaign.

Given Muellers reputation for reticence, much more about his findings likely remains unknown. House Democrats, meanwhile, are looking beyond the subjects of his inquiry and into the murk of the presidents finances. All these investigations could yet yield facts that meet Pelosis stated standard for changing the impeachment calculus: compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan.

For the time being, though, public opinion is far from that. A recent Monmouth University poll found that 42 percent of Americans support Trumps impeachment and removal  roughly equivalent to the proportion who think hes doing a fine job. Among Republicans, close to 90 percent approve of the presidents performance and oppose impeachment.

That matters because constitutional high crimes and misdemeanors are essentially whatever a majority of the House and (more importantly) two-thirds of the Senate agree they are. While Pelosis House Democrats could impeach Trump with little or no GOP support, a vote to convict and remove him from office would require the assent of at least 20 Republican senators  an unlikely result while 9 of 10 Republican voters support the president.

The founders built the barriers to impeachment high enough that only two of our 45 presidents have been impeached, while none has been convicted and removed from office. Richard Nixon, in the expectation of becoming a historic exception, resigned before he could be impeached. That was after one of three articles of impeachment passed by the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee  an obstruction charge, as it turns out  drew six Republican votes. By the time he resigned, Nixon had the support of only half the countrys Republicans, while a majority of Americans had come to favor impeachment.

Without such a broad, bipartisan mandate, Democrats risk reenacting another chapter in the history of impeachment. Whatever the merits of the case against Bill Clinton, his impeachment unfolded as a partisan exercise that aggravated the countrys divisions and reinvigorated support for the president. Given the evidence of Trumps misdemeanors and the likelihood that it will grow stronger, a Democratic rush to impeach the motherf may be his fondest hope.
Find a vacant lot or empty building. Make sure it has electricity and plumbing connections. Its best if the neighbors are few, distant or sympathetic. That last part, no surprise, is the hardest part in the San Franciscos push to open full-service homeless facilities known as Navigation Centers.

City residents desperately want an answer for an estimated 4,000 drifting, destitute people, often struggling with addiction or mental illness, living on its streets. Finding a solution regularly ranks near the top of surveys of the San Franciscos most pressing problems. But residents are sorely conflicted on where to put treatment facilities. Build it and they will come  just not in my neighborhood.

After a long, frustrating search, city officials are focusing on an Embarcadero parking lot in the shadow of the Bay Bridge for a navigation center. It checks all the boxes: Its in port control, easy to build on, and located in an area with a homeless population. The centers are designed to take in the homeless with their belongings, partners and even pets while providing counseling, treatment and possibly a ride back home. Its a concentrated improvement over shelters that offer an overnight stay and little else.

But the parking lot site is surrounded by apartments whose residents turned out by the hundreds to oppose the idea at a pair of hearings this week.

The magnetizing fear of a homeless influx was on display. There were personal stories of encounters and worries about poor city oversight. Crime, drug use and uncertainty were on everyones mind. Put it elsewhere, not in a settled area favored by tourists and locals.

The arguments are heartfelt and understandable but not enough. Mayor London Breed, the Board of Supervisors and homeless czar Jeff Kositsky need to follow through in placing this navigation center and more of them. And the facilities need to be in other neighborhoods, not just the relative few in the South of Market and Mission where the multiservice centers have sprouted. Theres no pretending that the homeless are only in one edge of the city.

That promise of spreading the burden was brought up by district Supervisor Matt Haney as part of the bargain in backing the Embarcadero homeless location.

Haney and other supervisors representing a southern slice of the city shouldnt have to bear the burden of the homeless housing crisis. Haney also wants to appease worried residents by promising extra security, indoor activities to curb loitering and a possibility of ending the proposed four-year run for a Navigation Center early.

But where to put the next Navigation Center remains the biggest challenge. Theres a long, fanciful list of blank spaces across the city including empty malls, a vacant movie theater, and horse stables in Golden Gate Park. All sound plausible but come with problems that take time, money and, once again, public input before opening up.

The Embarcadero center is on course to open by summer, though more hearings and decisions by the port and city will be needed. That timetable leaves open the chance for negotiation or delays.

If theres a meaningful way to improve the proposal, changes are in order. But the city needs more options in denting the numbers of homeless living in unsafe and inhumane conditions on the streets.

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.
On a sunny day a few years ago, a handful of UC Berkeley students, who were included in a tour of San Quentin State Prison, walked through an outdoor exercise area reserved for prisoners requiring extra security. To their astonishment, they saw convicted murderer Scott Peterson, under guard, doing his workout. A Stanislaus County judge in 2004 had condemned Peterson to die by lethal injection for killing his wife and their unborn child. The tour members gawked while a robust-looking Peterson spoke briefly with the public information officer conducting the tour.

Jessie Lau, a UC Berkeley undergraduate at the time, recalls the moment. I remember everyone (the other inmates) dropping to the ground, and being quiet when he was brought into the courtyard area. As he walked through, he was smirking and had this confident swagger. He was pretty clean/fit, and seemed well taken care of. He seemed like he was enjoying the attention, and took his time, which made the walk seem longer although it must have been just a minute or two.

The close encounter with a supposed-dead-man-walking illustrated a prison truth: One should stay out of prison, but if you have to serve a long sentence, Californias Death Row is not a bad option, compared to the main line in the 35 institutions run by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Thats why Gov. Gavin Newsoms reprieve for the 723 men and 22 women on Death Row is not the news the condemned may want to hear.

Newsom said he would not sign any death warrants while hes in office, and he ordered the removal of some of the execution apparatus from the death chamber. Despite the reprieve on executions, the Death Row housing unit was to remain intact. For the time being, the long-term residents are holding on to the valuable perks the state gives them, privileges that main line inmates wish they had. Consider that on Death Row:

The state gives you lawyers gratis to guide your appeal through the courts. The appeals process of the cases will continue in the courts during the reprieve. Other inmates? They pay out of pocket for legal counsel, or they learn how to write their own writs.

You have privacy. San Quentin cells typically measure 4 feet wide, 7 feet high, and 11 feet long. Death Row inmates however are single-celled; they dont have to share their space, or body odors, with anybody else. Main line inmates are double-celled within this same space allotment, roughly the size of a walk-in closet, along with a toilet and a sink. Two men cannot pass each other without touching. Occasionally a prisoner will kill his cellmate while his cellie sleeps.

Inmates usually dont have to worry about a beating or a stabbing. The main line prison yard can be hazardous to your health, although Death Row housing is no guarantee of safety. Last year, Death Row inmate Jonathan Fajardo, 30, was fatally stabbed in the chest and neck with an inmate-made weapon while he was in a yard complex at the prison. It was the first killing on Condemned Row since 1997.

You are allowed time outside for exercise in special yards. Life is not like the solitary confinement one might find in the Security Housing Unit at other prisons, where inmates stay locked in isolation 23 hours a day.

You have identity. At 10 each morning, visitors to San Quentin entering the Norman castle-like entryway pass through a well-manicured patio landscaped with red Mr. Lincoln roses, while in the distance they can hear the lusty roar of male voices coming from East Block  the formal name for the Death Row housing unit. Its a daily ritual: The Death Row inmates band together in their own separate identity groups and mark their territory on the exercise yard by chanting and shouting.

Clinton Duffy, San Quentins legendary warden who ran the prison beginning in the 1940s, executed 88 men and 2 women during his 12 years at the helm, though he called himself an opponent of capital punishment. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the last governor to sign a death warrant. He approved two executions: Stanley Tookie Williams in 2005 and Clarence Ray Allen in 2006.

Since 2006, more than 50 Death Row inmates have died of other causes, including disease, killings, drug overdose or suicide. The state has been unable to carry out capital punishment in more than a decade because of the lengthy appeals process. Exhausting the appeals for each capital case takes nearly two decades. In addition, a U.S. District Court struck down the states three-drug lethal injection procedure and the states attempt to find a new protocol has stalled.

Nevertheless, San Quentins Death Row population has continued to grow because juries keep sentencing defendants to death, causing Death Row to run out of space.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015 asked for $3.2 million dollars to add another 97 beds to San Quentins Death Row, which holds 715 prisoners.

If the moratorium were to become permanent, then San Quentin would be in for some drastic changes. What would be the rationale for keeping the 700-odd people on Death Row in the single-celled in East Block if they are never to face execution? Would they have their sentences commuted to life without parole? They would then have to be transported to maximum security prisons elsewhere in the state, because San Quentins main line is low security.

The most vocal opposition to Newsoms plan may come from the Death Row inmates themselves.

William J. Drummond teaches a class at UC Berkeley in which students help edit the award-winning San Quentin News, the newspaper of San Quentin State Prison.
The Bechthold Vineyard and its resulting wines do not seem to belong in Lodi. In the northern stretches of the Central Valley, Lodi has a reputation for producing wines of size and heft: Sweet and fortified wines made the region successful through the early and mid-twentieth century, and brawny red blends buoy it today.

Yet here is Bechthold, in the southwestern Lodi sub-AVA of Mokelumne River, a 25-acre standing of ungrafted, dry-farmed, organic Cinsault (pronounced sin-SO) vines planted in 1886. These ancient plants produce red wines that are ethereal and diaphanous, clear refutations of any notion that intensity of color is linked to complexity of flavor  and of any stereotype of Lodi wines.

Bechthold (pronounced BECK-told) is the oldest continuously farmed vineyard in Lodi. It is Lodis only known planting of Cinsault , a red grape from southern France mostly used as a minor component in blends, especially in Provencal rose. Not only that: Bechthold is likely the oldest existing planting of Cinsault in the world. (Frances Cinsault would have been replanted in the early twentieth century after the louse phylloxera wiped out virtually all of the countrys grapevines.)

It seems crazy that, in an era when most California vineyards were planted to hearty, dark-fruited varieties like Zinfandel and Carignan, anyone would have chosen a grape that ekes out a pale, elusive wine, even in a hot year. It seems even crazier that nothing over the last 133 years  neither Prohibition nor the jug wine economy nor the modern preference for rich, ripe wines  compelled anyone to rip out these anomalous vines.

Lodis not known for Pinot Noir, but I consider this to be Lodis version of Pinot Noir, says Michael David Winery owner Kevin Phillips, who farms the Bechthold Vineyard under a long-term lease.

But for most of Bechtholds history, the vineyard hid in plain sight, its grapes blended away into larger-volume wines. Only in the last decade has this terroir begun to receive the recognition it deserves, with a new crop of winemakers from Lodi and beyond, including Birichino, Onesta, Two Shepherds and Fields Family, doing justice to its singular fruit.

I could easily absorb the entire vineyard now, Phillips says. His Michael David Winery, which produces popular brands like Seven Deadly Zins, is large: It farms more than 1,500 acres worth of vines and still has to purchase fruit, so using up Bechtholds measly 25 acres in-house would be an easy call. But the Bechthold fruit is too special to keep all for himself, Phillips says: A lot of these coastal wineries from Napa and Sonoma might not have another Lodi-based wine other than Bechthold.

I continue to sell the fruit, he continues, because I believe its good for Lodi.

Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

Bechtholds story begins with Joseph Spenker, a German immigrant who came to California in the 1850s in a covered wagon hoping for gold. Mining didnt pan out, but he eventually managed to buy a square mile of land in Lodi, where he grew grapes and wheat.

At the center of his property  which remains owned by Spenkers descendants  he planted what he believed to be Black Malvasia, often sold as a table grape. The reality is, back then, there werent a lot of varietal bottlings, says Turley winemaker Tegan Passalacqua, who has made a Bechthold wine since 2008. Lodis signature crop? Another table grape, Flame Tokay.

It would be 117 years before anyone would learn that Bechtholds Black Malvasia was actually Cinsault.

In the early days, El Pinal winery in Stockton took the grapes; later, Gallo moved in, paying a mere pittance for the Black Malvasia. The ranch passed through generations of Spenkers, with the central portion eventually falling under the care of Al Bechthold, who married Spenkers great-granddaughter Wanda Woock in 1977.

So undervalued were these so-called Black Malvasia grapes that, for decades, they werent even being used for commercial wine. From the 70s on, the grapes had been getting packed and shipped to home winemakers on the east coast, Phillips says.

Then in 2003, Kay Bogart, program director at UC Davis viticulture and enology program, took notice of the Bechthold vines when she was visiting the neighboring Jessies Grove Winery, which is owned by Wanda Woock Bechtholds son Greg Burns. The family had been considering ripping out the Black Malvasia; it just wasnt profitable. But Bogart took vine cuttings back to Davis and, with the help of Professor Andy Walker, quickly discovered that it wasnt Black Malvasia at all. This was Cinsault.

It didnt take long before word reached Bonny Doon winemaker Randall Grahm, who had been on the lookout for some Cinsault to flesh out his southern France-style blends. For about five years, Grahm bought almost the entire Bechthold Vineyards haul  which paid considerably more than the east coast home-winemaking kits had.

It was always my favorite vineyard we worked with, says Jillian Johnson, who was Bonny Doons assistant winemaker at the time. Almost every red wine we made at Bonny Doon got a little touch of that Cinsault.

Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

Wherever it appeared, the Bechthold fruit would always add aroma and lift, Johnson says. Its always had this really great texture without being tannic, and its very fruit-forward. In the warmer years I describe the wine as a strawberry rhubarb pie. Now, Johnson makes a Bechthold Cinsault under her own label, Onesta, as does another Bonny Doon alum, John Locke of Birichino.

In 2007, Al Bechthold approached Phillips, who owns a neighboring parcel. He asked if Phillips would take over the farming. Al was about 80, and he was getting tired, Phillips says. I wasnt really in the business of leasing vineyards in that way, but for Al, I decided to do it. (Al Bechthold died in 2014.)

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

But Phillips soon had to get resourceful. The recession hit, and Bonny Doon decided to stop buying Bechthold fruit. Phillips scrambled to find other suitors. Many winemakers, especially those based outside the region, were skeptical: Lodi Cinsault? It took some convincing, but in 2008 Phillips got Napas Turley Wine Cellars to take 5 tons of fruit off his hands.

Everyone at Turley basically made fun of me, because they thought I picked it way too early, says Passalacqua, the Turley winemaker. The destemmed portion of the wine he made tasted unremarkable: simple, fruity, lacking structure. But Passalacqua had an idea. What if he modeled his wine on the great Domaine dAupilhac in southern France, which ferments its old-vine Cinsault grapes with their stems? When Passalacqua employed stem inclusion on the rest of his Bechthold fruit, it turned out beautifully  and unlike anything hed made before.

It was a really different Turley wine, Passalacqua says, in that it wasnt rich or big or high in alcohol. But it became the winery staffs favorite wine to throw back at parties.

Passalacqua, in turn, converted other skeptics. It took two years, but he persuaded Scholium Project winemaker Abe Schoener to come see Bechthold. I thought, I cant make wines from this, Schoener recalls of his first visit. The yields seemed excessive. The berries were really big. Hed seen a couple of other Lodi vineyards that were clearly being farmed for maximum volume, rather than quality; he assumed Bechthold was the same.

Schoener gradually came around. Like Passalacqua, he discovered that Bechthold fruit did not want to make a deeply colored red wine. It needed a gentle extraction and whole-cluster fermentation. It was, Schoener says, more like a white wine vineyard than a red wine vineyard.

Instead of modeling this on the Ridge Mataro from the 1970s  Schoeners original idea; a rustic, muscular type of wine  I realized we should be making a completely different wine that embraces the lightness of the fruit and does not try to achieve density, he says.

The trial and error that Bechthold required of these winemakers shows just how confounding this vineyard is: It turns many widely accepted California-wine axioms on their heads. Whereas low-yielding vines are prized in regions like Napa, Bechtholds vines can throw an astonishing 12 tons per acre without sacrificing one bit of character. While many century-old vineyards are fragile and withering, Bechthold, at 133 years old, is as robust and spry as an Olympic athlete.

Unfortunately it would take a mammoth undertaking to try to replicate it, says Phillips of the vineyard. The vine age, the dry farming, the fact that its on its own rootstock  its more than people could envision in a generation.

Its probably more than Joseph Spenker, that unsuccessful speculator, could have envisioned for multiple generations. The Bechthold Vineyards near-impossible confluence of place, plant and people took a century to reveal itself. Who knows what lies ahead of it?

The notion that vines decline after 100 years is obviously false, Schoener says. These vines are indestructible.
WELLINGTON, New Zealand  A gunman opened fire on two mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, killing multiple people in an afternoon slaughter that in part was broadcast live online after the publication of a white supremacist manifesto.

The police said a significant number of people were killed, shaking a country with little history of mass shooting in what the prime minister called an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.

Some of the shootings in the city of Christchurch were streamed on Facebook, a grim development in terrorism that raised questions about the ability of tech companies to block violent content.

The police said three men and one woman were in custody, but they were unsure whether there were others involved. The countrys police commissioner, Mike Bush, said that a number of explosive devices were found in vehicles stopped by police.

He warned residents of central Christchurch to stay indoors, and the police asked mosques to close.

This is and will be one of New Zealands darkest days, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said at a news conference.

Bush said a mosque near Hagley Park, in the center of the city, and a mosque on Linwood Avenue, also in Christchurch, were attacked.

Shortly before the shooting, someone appearing to be the gunman publicly posted links to a manifesto on Twitter and 8chan, an online forum. The 8chan post included a link to what appeared to be the gunmans Facebook page, where he said he would soon broadcast live video of the attack.

The 17-minute video, which appeared to be recorded on a helmet camera, shows his drive to the mosque, followed by a harrowing nearly two minutes of his firing on the worshipers in the mosque before fleeing the building and running back to his car and swapping weapons.

He then is seen re-entering the mosque and again begins shooting, continuing to methodically move through the mosque. Several victims can be seen in the footage, many lying on top of one another motionless in a corner of the room.

After another few minutes, he leaves again, gets in his vehicle and drives away, talking to himself throughout.

There wasnt even time to aim; there was so many targets, he says at one point.

The New Zealand police said on Twitter they were aware there is extremely distressing footage relating to the incident in Christchurch circulating online and urged people not to share the link. We are working to have any footage removed, the police said.

The video and Twitter posts showed weapons covered in the names of past military generals and men who have recently carried out mass shootings.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

In his manifesto, he identified himself as a 28-year-old man born in Australia. He listed his white nationalist heroes, described what he said motivated him to attack and said he purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States around the Second Amendment.

The website Stuff reported that the police had cleared Cathedral Square, about halfway between the two mosques, where people had gathered at a rally to fight climate change.

While the details of the shooting were still unclear, one purported witness, Mohammad Isam, a Bangladeshi journalist, posted a video of members of Bangladeshs national cricket team who he said escaped the attack.

The video showed several men in the teams jersey walking briskly through a park with the message, Bangladesh team escaped from a mosque near Hagley Park where there were active shooters. They ran back through Hagley Park back to the Oval, referring to the nearby cricket ground.

Reports of the shooting happened as young protesters were gathering in Christchurch and cities around the world to demand action on climate change.

Charlotte Graham-McLay, Austin Ramzy and Daniel Victor are New York Times writers.
Vallejo is losing much more than a post office. Its losing a hidden piece of art thats part 1980s time capsule, part therapy, and part tribute to the people who deliver our mail.

Inside the employee break room of the former main post office building, which will be demolished in the coming days to make way for a parking lot, is an 11-by-20-foot mural created in 1988 by a postal carrier whod just been through a traumatic life event.

It contains a massive eagle, Cindy Crawford, a dog who liked biting postmen, Bill Cosby and most important, hard-working Vallejo post office employees.

The artist, Vic Lorico Bicomong, came to America from the Philippines in 1978, then served in the Air Force supplying fighter planes. Ten years later, as postal carrier in Vallejo, he stopped to help a driver on the side of the freeway in San Francisco. A drunk driver hit Bicomong and put him in a coma. He woke from it a day later, badly bruised and needing crutches to walk.

His postmaster at the time, knowing about his interest in art, suggested he spend his recovery painting a mural in the break room. Bicomong, who hadnt painted much but was a dancer and musician in the Philippines, said yes.

"The mural was like my first big artwork," he said. "That pushed me into being an artist, and thats what Im doing when I retire."

For a couple of hours a day in between his mail route Bicomong and his ailing leg hauled themselves up a scaffold in the break room. Three months later, on his birthday, his work was done.

The murals main message is one of admiration for Bicomongs fellow postal workers, with the words We are what we do emblazoned at the bottom. The giant bald eagle is unmistakable, as are Bay Area landmarks such as the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Each postal worker depicted is someone he knew personally.

But you have to take a closer look to appreciate its full 1980s glory.

Courtesy of Vic Lorico Bicomong

The woman in the cutoff jeans getting her mail at the bottom left of the mural is Americas top supermodel at the time, Cindy Crawford. She has no documented mail-delivery experience, so why was she included? She was the only model popular to me, and she was beautiful, Bicomong said. I just had to put her in there.

The dog next to Crawford resembles Spuds MacKenzie, the bull terrier who starred in several Bud Light ads in the 80s. But Bicomong says its actually a real-life dog who bit the real-life postman depicted in the mural  twice. The postal workers called him Dog Bite because of it. I didnt even know his real name, Bicomong said.

Bicomong regrets the inclusion of Cosby now, considering hes disgraced and in prison. But at the time, Cosby had the No. 1 sitcom in America and was considered the ultimate dad. He was Peak 1988.

There are more 80s Easter eggs in the mural, but you might need a magnifying glass to fine Bo Derek's mail box, Jump St.(as in 21) and Peoples Ct. (as in Wapner).

Bicomong left Vallejo and his mural behind in 1995, when he took a supervisory post-office job in Boston. When he transferred to Sacramento in 2005, he was surprised to find it was still there.

The mural was accidentally rediscovered this year by a Vallejo local, Gary Cullen. He was shooting pictures of the shuttered post office for the Architectural Heritage and Landmarks Commission before it could be razed. It was only after he got inside that he noticed the mural in the break room, which was closed off because of asbestos removal. Cullen later returned and shared pictures of it with a Vallejo Facebook group.

"I'm saddened to see it demolished in the teardown since it does reflect a bit of Vallejo's local history for that time period," Cullen said.

Bicomong said he was sad to hear the news as well. But hes long since expanded his art portfolio.

When he's not working as a post-office supervisor in Sacramento, he's painting and selling his works on his website.

Once all utilities are removed from the post office building on Santa Clara Avenue, it will be demolished sometime in April, the Office of the City Manager said.
Students across the Bay Area walked out of classrooms Friday morning as part of an international effort to demand action on climate change.

The walkout temporarily shut down traffic on Market Street in San Francisco as students and supporters of the Youth Climate Strike crowded onto the thoroughfare carrying signs. The crowd was en route to the San Francisco office for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the federal building, trying to garner her support for the Green New Deal.

"We need action before it's too late, and it's almost too late," said Jazea Smith, an 11th-grade student at Ruth Asawa School for the Arts in San Francisco.

"The politics and economics and everything else that's going on right now  there's no point if our Earth is warming at such accelerated rates that we've never seen before," added Smith.

Students also planned to march past U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein's office on Post Street before a planned rally at Union Square.

READ ALSO: Lots of people support the 'Green New Deal.' So what is it?

Students in Oakland, Berkeley, Sonoma and other parts of the Bay Area also joined in the walkout. In Palo Alto, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) joined a rally, telling the crowd, "What you are doing is part of an extraordinary American tradition, when people rise up and say this is not good and we need to do this," NBC Bay Area reported.

Hundreds of thousands of students participated in the strike worldwide, taking place in more than 100 countries internationally. Students gathered in Paris, New Delhi, Berlin and Madrid, among other cities; in the United States, rallies were also held in the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C. and New York City.

Bay City News and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
With more than 300 landmark buildings, Berkeley loves its architecture. But the City Council is ready to tell the landmark commission today that it went too far when it bestowed the hallowed status on a concrete, flat-roofed Berkeley building loosely linked to Bernard Maybeck.

For only the second time in at least a decade, the council is expected to send a landmark decision back to the panel for further review, based on an appeal by the building's owner and a recommendation by the city's planning director, Dan Marks.

"I'm dumbfounded," said commissioner Carrie Olson. "This is very, very rare. We were proud to landmark the remains of this building, and I'm sad they've taken a little corkscrew to what we've done."

The building, at 1007 University Ave., was originally an addition to the headquarters of the Mobilized Women of Berkeley, a charity that supported U.S. troops and was co-founded by the wife of the prominent architect, whose buildings include the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Maybeck designed the main building, which was damaged in a fire and torn down in 1980.

The architect whose name is on the drawings of 1007 University Ave., however, is Phillip L. Coats, and it was built nine years after Maybeck retired.

The city's landmark commission said Coats was a friend of Maybeck's, and that's close enough to merit protection. The commission voted unanimously in September to grant landmark status to the 1949 structure, citing Maybeck's possible influence as well as the cultural history of the building.

Architectural historians say the building, with its unique glass-and-concrete lattice pattern, unmistakably bears Maybeck's imprint. Maybeck had worked extensively with the contractor and Coats, and would have been involved with this project because he had designed the primary structure and his wife was a leader in the charity.

"I never claimed it was by Maybeck, but he definitely had something to do with it," said Susan Cerny, a preservationist with the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association who submitted the property for landmark status. "It's my feeling that he made suggestions, sketches, gave some ideas. In any case, the building really is unusual."

Because he was retired, Maybeck's insurance might have lapsed and he was unable to put his own name on the drawings, Cerny said.

The building is listed for sale for $1.3 million, with sale pending to a wine import-export business. The owner has no immediate plans to raze the structure, but landmark status would hinder any plans to alter the building.

"I love Maybeck as much as the next guy in town, but there's nothing in the historical record to suggest he was involved in this project," said the owner's architect, David Trachtenberg, who appealed the landmark commission's decision. "In this case the landmark process has been abused."

The owner's attorney, Robert Belzer, put it more bluntly.

"The author of this application was over-zealous ... and intentionally omitted many materials which point to the fact that Maybeck did not have anything to do with the building," he wrote in a letter to the city.

Whether or not the building was designed by Maybeck is a moot point, Olson said. It's a significant structure on its own merits, and plays an important role in Berkeley history, she said.

The Mobilized Women of Berkeley was a pro-military group, an anomaly for peace-loving Berkeley, and the concrete-and-glass construction was a breakthrough in inexpensive, fireproof industrial architecture, she said.

"No one could possibly say whether Maybeck had direct involvement in 1007 University, but undoubtedly he had indirect involvement," she said. "I just want great buildings like this to remain, and leave us with a rich, diverse cityscape."
It takes a visionary to see the possibilities of an ancient ratio, a date in March and all forms of pie (dessert, pizza and otherwise), but Bay Area local Larry Shaw saw the potential in pi.

Shaw, the technical curator at the Exploratorium for 33 years, is known as the first to come up with the connection between the number pi (3.14...) and March 14, now known as Pi Day. As Exploratorium lore would recount, it was at a staff retreat back in 1988 when Shaw first came up with the idea to take the endless 3.14 figure, eventually turning into an internationally celebrated, math- and pie-centric holiday.

"With teaching," Shaw said, "you're looking for any kind of hook you can get  especially with kids."

It also didn't hurt that March 14 is Albert Einstein's birthday, to give the holiday some extra oomph.

The first celebration of Pi Day had a sweet start. At that inaugural holiday, Shaw and his wife, Catherine, hosted a table at the Exploratorium loaded with fruit pies and a tea urn, as the museum recounts on its site  a pairing that was both perfect and became a tradition intertwined with Pi Day ever since.

Shaw, a physicist, remained at the head of Pi Day celebrations while he worked at the Exploratorium, even after he retired and continued to volunteer at the museum. Shaw could often be seen leading a parade of visitors on Pi Day, each given a designated digit of pi, walking at the head of the group wearing his signature red cap with the numbers of pi on it. Shaw would be head of that parade for 38 years, eventually earning the nickname "Prince of Pi" from his co-workers.

ALSO Our favorite slices of pie around the Bay Area

The day has since evolved from its humble, locally-held roots at the Exploration. March 14 became recognized by Congress as National Pi Day as of 2009, and has continued to become more of a cultural phenomenon as the years pass. Pies are known to sell out on March 14, while pizza shops have also gotten in on the act, with many offering discounted slices (generally themed around the 3.14 figure).

For Shaw, the most magical (and best) part of Pi Day was that math became accessible and fun for the average person.

"He loved to help people realize they are capable, and that they can get involved in areas of human thought that they thought were closed to them," Catherine told the Chronicle, after Shaw's death in 2017. "That's what the Exploratorium stands for, too."

Happy Pi Day.

San Francisco Chronicle writer Steve Rubenstein contributed to this story.
A four-month-old puppy lay for four days in a dumpster outside a San Francisco apartment complex, before authorities found the animal. It was severely dehydrated and suffering from a broken leg, which would require amputation, San Francisco Animal Care and Control said Friday.

ALSO: Peninsula woman charged by cow awarded $2.45 million

Authorities arrested 59-year-old Ronald Jones on Thursday after he allegedly dropped the Chihuahua mix from a "significant height down a garbage chute," Animal Care and Control said. Security footage reportedly identified the suspect.

Jones was booked into San Francisco County Jail on $15,000 bail for felony animal abuse and misdemeanor animal abandonment, city records show.

Things are looking up for the three-legged puppy, which authorities named "Rocky." According to Animal Care, the dog will be adopted by one of the case's investigating officers. Rocky is currently recovering in the foster care of an Animal Care and Control staff member.

Read Michelle Robertson's latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfgate.com.

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TOKYO  A Tokyo court handed down a 2-year prison sentence Friday to the former head of Mt. Gox, a cryptocurrency exchange that helped establish bitcoin as a household name before spectacularly imploding amid allegations of mismanagement.

Still, Mark Karpeles, the French national who presided over Mt. Goxs rise to become the worlds largest bitcoin exchange, will not serve additional time if he remains on good behavior.

The verdict ended a more-than-five-year ordeal for Karpeles, who was found guilty on a charge of falsifying data but innocent of two additional charges of embezzlement and breach of trust. He was arrested in August 2015 and held for almost a year in detention, where he spent months under interrogation by prosecutors who upped the pressure by adding additional charges against him.

His sentence was suspended for four years, meaning he will serve no additional jail time as long as he remains on good behavior.

Critics of Japanese justice said that Karpeles experience presented a case study in the systems faults. Prosecutors first enlisted Karpeles to assist in investigating Mt. Goxs loss of 850,000 bitcoins, then valued at around half a billion dollars. Before long, their suspicions shifted to Karpeles himself. Karpeles apologized for weaknesses in the system but denied that he had taken any of his clients assets.

His long detention is a common tactic in Japan, where nearly 99 out of 100 indictments end in conviction  an outcome sometimes obtained through convictions made under duress. In 2017, 88 percent of those who went to trial confessed, according to data maintained by Japans Supreme Court.

That pattern has come under increased scrutiny following the arrest of Carlos Ghosn, then chairman of Nissan, in November; he was held in jail and interviewed continually by prosecutors until this month, when he was granted bail.

Mt. Gox started its life as a trading service for the collectible card game Magic the Gathering before transitioning to cryptocurrency. Karpeles purchased the company from its founder in 2011.

Business exploded after the site was mentioned in an article explaining how to use bitcoin to purchase goods on Silk Road, a sort of eBay for black market goods, especially illegal drugs. At its height, nearly 70 percent of all bitcoin transactions were said to flow through Mt. Goxs servers.

But the company had difficulty handling the demand. Plagued by technical and legal troubles, it declared bankruptcy in early 2014, after it was revealed to have lost track of more than 850,000 bitcoins.

Karpeles maintained his innocence. In July 2017, U.S. prosecutors indicted Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national who they say received and laundered hacked funds from the company. He was arrested in Greece, where he has become the subject of an extradition battle among the United States, Russia and France. Vinniks lawyer has denied the charges.

That indictment, Karpeless lawyer argued, helped established the innocence of his own client, who he said had worked to right the company.

The judgment has closed one chapter in Karpeles story, but the fate of Mt. Gox remains open. The company still controls substantial cryptocurrency assets, with many claims remain outstanding.

Ben Dooley is a New York Times writer.
Written by ACM





*Strasbourg/EU Parliament + CoE/Angelo Marcopolo/- While EU Institutions were fine-tuning and coordinating their work here, on the much needed Protection of "Whistle-Blowers" (like the famous Edward Snowden, etc), the PanEuropean CoE was Launching an Ambitious, Wide and Profound, operation, extending accross many More Countries, in order to Forge concrete, Operational Legal Tools, Starting with a 2 Days-Long Conference, organised, this Same Week in Strasbourg, by CoE's new Rapporteur on Whistle-Blowers, the vice-President of the French National Assembly, MEP Sylvain Waserman, who spoke Today to "Eurofora" on his plans.

----------------------------

+Earlier this week in Strasbourg, on Tuesday, EU Commission's Chief Spokesman, Margarites Schinas, speaking in a Press Conference, together with EU Commission's vice President Katainen, (Comp. Katainen's statements to "Eurofora" on other Topical Issues at: http://www.eurofora.net/newsflashes/news/eucommissionvpresidentonchinaandspace.html), Announced that "the TriaLogue" (between EU Parliament, EU Commission and EU Council) had just reached an "Agreement" on the "High-Level Protection of Whistle-Blowers", following a Proposal initially made by EU Commission's President, Jean-Claude Juncker, on April 2018".(It updated and gave Legal Force to CoE's Committee of Ministers' pioneer and landmark Recommendation on WhistleBlowers' Status, which had been adopted on 2014, i.e. shortly after Snowden's initial revelations on 2013).



++ Shortly afterwards, this Thursday and Friday, at the Nearby CoE, the Rapporteur of the PanEuropean Organisation for Human Rights, Democracy and Rule of Law, vice-President of the French National Assembly, MEP Sylvain Waserman from Strasbourg, Started a Conference with Debates between Legal Experts, Whistle-Blowers, specialized NGOs, Lawers, Judges, etc., and even a Video-Debate with Edward Snowden himelf, scheduled for Tomorrow, working closely Together with the Experienced Head of PACE's Legal Committee's secretariat, Dr. Gunter Schirmer.

UE's 27 or 28 Member States use to Cooperate with CoE's much Wider, 47 Member States' PanEuropean Organisation (including Russia, etc), which, in certain Areas of Legal Instruments "Open" to signature also by 3rd Countries, can Extend even Further, f.ex. in Constitutional Law (via the "Committee of Venice") accross 61 Member States, and/or on "CyberCrime" Topical Issues (via the "Budapest Convention"), where it's also the USA which participate, etc), as well as on Protection of "Private/Personal Data", etc., with a Recent Trend for EU - CoE Cooperation to lean Towards a kind of "Global" impact in the foreseable Future's Horizon, (Comp., f.ex. : ...)

So that it's not unusual in Strasbourg to see often, f.ex. EU's Offices to stand Aside ... f.ex. those of the Holy See, and/or of Japan, (etc)...

----------------------------

- "Eurofora" invited Waserman to present a Highlight of his on-going work, right in the Middle of that CoE's Conference, on Thursday afternoon.

- "There are 2 Aims", vice-President Waserman stressed from the outset :

(A) "The First is to make a Comparative Study of Various Laws in Europe, in order to identify Good Practices, and, therefore, make some Proposals",

(B) "and the Second is to try to identify Indicators, able to qualify the capacity for Democracy, to reply to the need for protection, etc.

Thus, in all our work we have that Double View :

- (1) Identify Good European Practices, and mainly show how the Decisions taken in the CoE have allowed to make Serious Progress.

These Practices, Nowadays, are very Heterogenous, and Need to be Stabilized, in the Rule of Law".

- (2) But also to find Factual Indicators, very Accurate, which allow to Qualify, by each MP, when he returns back to his National Assembly, and has to transpose EU's Directives, or make (legislative) Texts concerning the Protection (of Whistle-Blowers), enabling him to work with an operational Tool", he concluded.

=> So, Tomorrow (Friday), we are going to Formulate concrete Proposals", he anounced. "Particularly during the Last 2 Sessions, where there will be More and More Proposals".

+ "Afterwards, we are going to have a lot of Work to do, in order to make Scenarios on the way to move Forward".

- Concerning the Timeline, "we intend to use the Time available during the Summer, in order to be able, around September, to present proposals to our Collegues", (MEPs in CoE's competent Committee for Legal affairs).

Thus, "I'd be Glad to have the Result Ready, in a Report (adopted by the Committee), during the forthcoming French Presidency of the CoE, (i.e. between May and November 2019), Waserman concluded, for the time being.

(../..)
A camera mounted to his head, the gunman who livestreamed part of his savage attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday began his video by casually making reference to a current internet meme.

He appeared to be steeped in the culture of the extreme-right internet. And in the terrible minutes of video that followed, he proved to be a nonchalant, unrepentant killer.

As of Friday night, the gunman had not been identified by the authorities. But just before the attack began, a man who said he was a 28-year-old from Australia published a link on a right-wing forum to a 74-page manifesto, and another link on the same forum to a personal Facebook page with the video that would soon document the slaughter.

Based on the video, the manifesto and social media posts, a picture has begun to emerge of a man primarily driven by white nationalism and a desire to drive cultural, political and racial wedges between people across the globe. That, he hoped, would stoke discord and, eventually, more violence between races.

It is unclear whether the Facebook user is the man whom the authorities in New Zealand have charged in the shootings that have left at least 49 people dead. They have said only that the suspect is a man in his 20s.

Australias main public broadcaster reported that the Facebook user worked as a personal trainer at a gym in the city of Grafton after finishing school in 2009 until 2011, when he left to travel overseas. Where exactly his travels took him was not immediately known, but the manifestos author wrote that he explored much of Europe in the spring of 2017.

And a man using the same name visited the Gilgit-Baltistan administrative territory of Pakistan in October, people at two hotels there confirmed.

Asghar Khan, the manager of operations at the Serena Hotel there, said the man seemed like a nature-loving traveler. Syed Israr Hussain, owner of the nearby Osho Thang hotel, said he stayed there for two or three days with a group of backpackers.

He was normal and polite during his stay, Hussain said. There was nothing out of the ordinary.

The gunman appeared to pair the shooting with the typical trolling tactics of the internets most far-right instigators, playing to a community of like-minded supporters online who cheered him on in real time as they watched bodies pile up. And the manifesto states plainly what usually goes unstated by internet trolls: By design, its author wanted to get everyone upset and arguing with each other.

One of the goals of his bloodshed, he wrote, was to agitate the political enemies of my people into action, to cause them to overextend their own hand and experience the eventual and inevitable backlash as a result. He said he wanted to incite violence, retaliation and further divide.

The manifesto, the harrowing video and what appear to be the gunmans social media posts feature typical white nationalist rhetoric with layers upon layers of irony and meta jokes, making it difficult to parse what is genuine and what he just thought was funny.

The gunman seems to have a significant interest in history  at least, the parts that fit into a white nationalist narrative. On his weapons, he wrote the names of centuries-old military leaders who led battles against largely nonwhite forces, along with the names of men who recently carried out mass shootings of Jews and Muslims.

The manifesto refers to nonwhites as invaders who threaten to replace white people. The author says he used guns instead of other weapons because he wanted the United States to tear itself apart arguing over gun laws.

His choice of language, and the specific memes he referred to, suggest a deep connection to the far-right online community. The link to the livestreamed video was first posted to the /pol/ forum of 8chan, a notorious far-right space, where the gunman was hailed as a hero after the shooting.

Some of his references were subtle. As he drove to the mosque, he listened to a song associated with a 1995 Serbian nationalist video, which has recently been co-opted as a racist meme.

What might appear to be a bizarre, rambling section of the manifesto was actually a relatively old meme known as Navy Seal Copypasta, a faux rant that is copied and pasted to indicate faux toughness.

On 8chan, he uploaded an image titled screw your optics, a phrase Robert Bowers, the man accused of fatally shooting 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October, was said to have used.

Other references were more mainstream. Subscribe to PewDiePie, the gunmans call at the beginning of the video, is a recent meme, referring to the YouTube star whose real name is Felix Kjellberg  but the gunmans use of the phrase should not necessarily be read as an endorsement. (PewDiePie, a polarizing figure with a populist appeal, said on Twitter that he was absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.)

At times, the manifesto creates dubious associations with cultural figures he knows to be lightning rods for criticism.

He wrote that Candace Owens, a black conservative commentator in the United States, was most responsible for radicalizing him, a claim that seemed intended as a joke.

He called President Donald Trump a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose, but mocked him as a policy maker and leader.

He railed against diversity, praising non diverse nations like China, which he said most closely shared his political and social values.

In a question-and-answer section of the manifesto, he asked himself: Where did he research and develop his beliefs?

The internet, of course, he wrote. You will not find the truth anywhere else.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Team Summary:

The opening Friday practice for the 2019 Australian GP would see both Williams drivers at the bottom of the times with a considerable margin to the cars in front. Now it was the second ninety minute session and the question was whether there would be any improvement. The first time of the session was a 1m:25.634 from Grosjean. The track would become quite busy with both Williams cars running. A 1m:24.984 from Grosjean set on the medium tyre but his team-mate would set a 1m:24.409 while the Williams drivers were again slowest in the order. Both would pit after a six lap runs. Hamilton and Bottas would go quickest with the fastest time now a 1m:23.206 using the medium tyre.



Drivers were now coming out on soft tyres with 55 minutes remaining. Both Williams drivers were still in their pits. But both would return for runs on the soft tyre and would improve their times but not their positions. They would pit after short runs. Quickest now was Bottas with a 1m:22.648 on the soft tyre. A 1m:22.600 from Hamilton with forty minutes remaining in the session. It would not be until just under thirty minutes that the Williams drivers would return on soft tyres but would not improve. Both would pit returning on the medium and hard tyres for their next runs. Fifteen minutes remaining and Hamilton was still quickest from Bottas, Verstappen, Gasly, Vettel and Raikkonen sixth. Both Williams drivers were continue with their longer runs as the session ended. Robert Kubica:

Robert would follow his team-mate out for the session except he is on the hard tyre. Robert would set a 1m:29.941 to be behind his team-mate but he is on the harder tyre. A 1m:28.469 from Robert having completed four laps. Another small improvement with a 1m:28.379 as Robert pitted having completed six laps. Robert would also come back out for a soft tyre run. A 1m:26.655 from Robert seeing him remain 20th. Robert would also pit after a six lap run. Robert was also to come back out on new soft tyres. But after a short run he would pit returning on the hard tyre for what would turn out to be a 13 lap run pitting with the end of the session. Robert in a post session interview would say "We had big problems with general traction in the morning. We have to draw maximum from what we have. This is the only goal. We are not able to fight in qualifying. " George Russell :

George would be the first out for Williams in the session still on the medium tyre. A 1m:28.808 on his first timed lap. He would improve with a 1m:28.389. A 1m:27.718 from George but he would remain 15th. George would also pit after a six lap ruin. He would return with just over 50 minutes remaining using the soft tyre. George would improve with a 1m:26.453 but remained 19th. George would pit after a four lap run. With just under thirty minutes remaining George would return on a new set of soft tyres. George would pit after just a three lap run without any improvement. he would switch to the medium tyre for a further run. He would complete 14 laps prior to the end of the session. In post session interview George would say: "We have a big loss, but we knew we had problems. We count on progress in Bahrain and subsequent races. I believe we have a good base for development and we need to work on the car. It's not as bad as the Times show... "
LOS ANGELES  The mother of 9-year-old Trinity Love Jones, whose body was found in a duffel bag along a trail in Hacienda Heights last week, was extradited Thursday from Texas to California to answer questions about her daughter's slaying.

Taquesta Graham, 28, a former Long Beach resident, is being held without bail on a warrant unrelated to her daughter's death at the Los Angeles County sheriff's Norwalk station.

Graham has not been charged and it is not clear what role, if any, she played in her daughter's death

Graham's boyfriend, Emiel Hunt, 38, is charged with murdering Trinity. Authorities allege Hunt killed the girl on March 1 and dumped her body on the trail. If convicted, Hunt faces up to life in prison.

The girl's remains were found five days later inside a large duffel bag that had been abandoned in light brush a short distance away from the 60 Freeway. Her head and part of her torso were protruding from the bag. Authorities have not said how she was killed.

After the gruesome discovery, Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators sought the public's help to identify the girl and released a sketch of her. An informant, whom police have not identified, told authorities that the sketch of the girl resembled Trinity. The person "expressed concern, but did not know the whereabouts of Trinity or her mother," the Sheriff's Department wrote in a news release.

Investigators looked into Graham and Hunt's criminal histories and began searching for them as possible suspects in the case. Court records show Hunt was convicted of felony child abuse in San Diego County in 2005 and sentenced to 12 years in state prison. Graham has a prior conviction for involvement with a minor in prostitution. The two felony counts carried an allegation of great bodily injury, according to court records.

Detectives at the time still weren't positive about the girl's identity.

On March 8, Hunt and Graham were stopped in Hunt's black Nissan Armada at a Border Patrol checkpoint in Hudspeth County, Texas. Graham was taken into custody on an unrelated warrant, and Hunt was released. After his girlfriend was arrested, Hunt drove back to California.

Detectives arrested Hunt a day later after they found him sleeping in his SUV, which was parked in a lot near San Diego International Airport. Family members met with coroner's investigators on Sunday and formally identified the dead girl as Trinity.

Graham, Hunt and Trinity moved from a family member's home in Long Beach in May 2018. Extended family saw or heard from the couple and the girl on only a few occasions over the last 10 months, and investigators discovered they had been homeless just before the girl's death. They had been sleeping at a motel in Santa Fe Springs or in their car, authorities said.

Barbara Jones, Trinity's grandmother, said the family is filled with rage and called Hunt a "monster."

She questioned how a man with such a criminal history was allowed near her grandchild.



"I want to do to him what he did to her," she said.




The shootings that killed at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday have placed new scrutiny on New Zealands gun laws and sparked a fervent debate about whether they were a factor in the gunmans decision to carry out his attack there.

The police have described the gunman as a man in his late 20s. In a manifesto, in which he listed his white nationalist heroes, he identified himself as a 28-year-old man born in Australia, which has led to comparisons between gun laws in that country and in New Zealand.

While New Zealands laws governing the purchase of semi-automatic rifles are more restrictive than those in the United States, the country is much freer with firearms than Australia is, allowing most guns to be purchased without requiring them to be tracked.

New Zealand is almost alone with the United States in not registering 96 percent of its firearms  and those are its most common firearms, the ones most used in crimes, said Philip Alpers of GunPolicy.org, a clearinghouse for gun law data worldwide. There are huge gaps in New Zealand law, even if some of its laws are strong.

It is not yet clear what kinds of guns were used in the terrorist attack, which occurred in central Christchurch, but authorities have said that a number of firearms were recovered from the scenes of the shootings.

If he went to New Zealand to commit these crimes, Alpers said, one can assume that the ease of obtaining these firearms may have been a factor in his decision to commit the crime in Christchurch.

In the years since a gunman killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996, Australia has embarked on one of the worlds most expansive efforts to rid a society of gun violence. Officials significantly strengthened gun laws, severely restricted semi-automatic weapons and engaged in a buyback program that took more than 650,000 firearms off the streets.

The gun laws in New Zealand are more layered and do not fit easily into a pro- or anti-gun rubric.

Semi-automatic rifles and handguns, for example, require special licenses; a person can only buy one semi-automatic weapon at a time.

The police will look very askance at you if you want four or five of them, Alpers said. It gets harder and harder if you want more and more.

Still, Alpers said, it is possible to obtain a large cache of weapons  either by acting alone or if more than one person is purchasing.

As the law stands now, any person age 16 or older with an entry-level firearm license can keep any number of common rifles and shotguns without an official record of those guns being kept.

Most of the guns in circulation can be sold on the internet or through ads in newspapers, and the most popular types of firearms can lawfully change hands in private homes or even hotel parking lots with no requirement that a record of the transaction be kept.

Still, the country has generally been safe from gun massacres. Its last mass shooting, which left 13 people dead, was in 1990  and it led to tighter rules around semi-automatic weapons.

Police officers do not generally carry firearms, and murders are rare; in fact the death toll from Fridays terrorist attack is roughly equivalent to the number of murders that occur in the country each year. The annual tally of gun homicides specifically is even lower.

New Zealanders are by and large safe users of firearms, and that has led everybody to relax, Alpers said. Its led New Zealanders to think they dont have a problem.

At the same time, however, New Zealands gun culture is significant and deeply ingrained. Like the United States, Australia and Canada, New Zealands frontier history has led to a proliferation of guns used for sport, for protecting wide open spaces from animals, and for dealing with problems like wounded cattle.

Of the 3.9 million New Zealanders of gun licensing age, 238,000  6 percent  have a firearm license, according to GunPolicy.org.

After Fridays shootings, Alpers said, lawmakers will likely consider making guns less easy to obtain.

This will certainly change things in New Zealand, he said. I cant think of a country thats more likely to change its gun laws after something like this.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
TRAVELZOO - Online Travel Company with 28 million members to broadcast from Limerick on the lead up to St. Patricks Day

In the run up to St Patricks Day, US Broadcaster Gabe Saglie, and a film crew from Travelzoo, are in King Johns Castle, Limerick today at 12 noon (Friday 15th March) interviewing a number of local tourism businesses for television segments set to air on US Networks ABC, FOX, NBC, CNN and CBS.Gabe Saglie is Senior Editor for Travelzoo and a respected travel contributor for dozens of TV news programs and national shows in the US. His week-long visit to Ireland, is supported by Failte Ireland, in partnership with Tourism Ireland. Shannon Heritage has facilitated this visit and filming arrangements for the live broadcast in Limerick for Travelzoo.As part of his broadcast Mr Saglie will also film a live broadcast for Travelzoo, one of the worlds largest online travel platforms, promoting the very best travel deals to 28 million members located in North America, Europe and Asia. The live broadcast will be shared via facebook.com/Travelzoo, Travelzoos Facebook page, which has a following of 3.4 million.Failte Ireland is encouraging local people to come and take part in the broadcast in the courtyard at King Johns Castle from 11.30am where presenter Gabe Saglie will interview locals for live TV from 12 noon to 4pm.During the broadcast there will be a number of local producers and tourism trade taking part in the live broadcast with Mr Saglie including the Grand Marshal for Limericks St Patricks Day parade, Dr Norah Patten, who is in the running to be Irelands first astronaut together with: Una Heaton, curator at Frank McCourt Museum; Maurice Gilbert, owner of Ballyhoura Apple Farm; 14-year old entrepreneur, Evan Quaid, whose candles are sold in Shannon Airport Duty Free; Brian Collopy, one of the top guides at Lough Gur; Helen Enright from Foynes Flying Boat Museum where Irish coffee was invented and; Peter Ward from Limerick Milk Market who will have some tastings of some traditional Limerick Ham for Gabe to sample.Liam Campbell, International Publicity Manager with Failte Ireland welcomed Travelzoo to Ireland and commented:North Americans are among the biggest spenders during their stay here in Ireland, so we welcome the opportunity to showcase what Limerick has to offer via this live broadcast with top US producer Gabe Saglie. This broadcast will spread the word on our many attractions in Limerick and the Wild Atlantic Way. Ireland is certainly an ideal fit for the American market and our history, culture, landscapes and pace of life continue to be a big draw for US visitors.Senior Editor with Travelzoo, Gabe Saglie, commented:Ireland is consistently one of the most searched-for international destinations on the Travelzoo website, so it is exciting for us to share the magic of Limerick with the world through another one of our exclusive Facebook LIVE broadcasts.This is my 8th consecutive year covering St. Patrick's week throughout Ireland, and promoting travel to and throughout this beautiful country! I am super excited to return to Limerick for our exclusive Facebook Live event from King John's Castle, a gorgeous emblem of Limerick's medieval heritage. Tapping some of Limerick's fascinating personalities, along with its history and sweeping visuals, we are thrilled to present this charming year-round destination to travelers around the globe!Niall Gibbons, CEO of Tourism Ireland, saidWe were delighted to invite Travelzoos senior editor Gabe Saglie to visit Ireland this week, to broadcast live to millions of prospective visitors across the United States. Were particularly pleased that hes visiting and showcasing King Johns Castle, providing more compelling reasons why Americans should put Limerick and the Mid-West on their vacation wish-list for 2019. The live footage and pre-recorded segments of the visit will be made available to numerous TV networks right across the US. In 2018, we welcomed 2 million North American visitors to Ireland and we continue to work hard with our tourism industry partners, to stimulate further growth from this important market in 2019. Broadcasts like this provide an invaluable showcase for Limerick and Ireland at an important time for travel decision-making.Talking about the impact of the visit, Niall OCallaghan, Managing Director, Shannon Heritage, who operate the King Johns Castle visitor attraction said:We are delighted that Travelzoo have chosen Limerick and King Johns Castle for this major broadcast. I would like to congratulate Failte Ireland and Tourism Ireland for securing this prestigious TV and social media opportunity to allow us showcase a flavour of the best of what Limerick has to offer to millions of US TV and social media viewers.Laura Ryan, Head of Marketing & Communications with Limerick City and County Council said:Having the American TV crew here is a fantastic opportunity to get international exposure for Limerick across the United States. Its all very exciting particularly as we get to launch our new international Limerick brand later this year. The 2019 Limerick St Patricks Festival will be without doubt one of the largest ever held in Limerick with a carnival atmosphere promised for the weekend which begins with a not-to-be missed fireworks display on Saturday evening.This year we have done a huge amount of promotion of our three-day St Patricks Festival. The weathers looking up and with a huge number of family friendly events on the programme, theres nowhere else to be this weekend, so why not wrap up warm and soak up the unique atmosphere of Limerick during the festival as there is so much to do and see.

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RENO, Nev.  Jordan Aaron was the president of a Carson City sushi restaurant who once ran for justice of the peace in Arizona.

Antonio Pastini was the brash ex-Chicago cop who befriended a brothel mogul and spun yarns of a bare-knuckled youth in the Windy City that read like a cross between "Goodfellas" and "The Outsiders."

They were one and the same person.

He used two names and two Social Security numbers. He kept different driver's licenses and bank accounts under the two names, an ex-wife alleged. The ex-wife  one of four  said in court filings that he kept multiple identities to hide money, and she hinted that he had "trouble with the law."

But he might have lived out his days simply as Tony Pastini, the garrulous retired cop, had his twin-engine Cessna not plummeted 7,800 feet on Feb. 3 into an Orange County, Calif., suburb, killing him and four people who were on the ground.

From the smoldering wreckage, investigators plucked a police badge belonging to Retired Chicago Patrolman #15599. That discovery would help unravel the threads of a life story Pastini spent three decades crafting. The 75-year-old, it turned out, had never been a Chicago cop, though it appeared he wished he had been.

"Tony ... loved cops," said Jeff Partyka, a retired Reno police sergeant who frequented a deli Pastini ran in the 1990s. "They didn't just gravitate to his restaurant because of the cop thing. He was always friendly and respectful, and he actually did have pretty decent food."

It could take 18 months  or more  for federal investigators to probe the cause of the fatal crash. They will likely scrutinize the pilot's medical condition and examine the three-day period preceding the crash, looking for fatigue and other "high-stress events," said Peter Knudson, a National Transportation Safety Board spokesman.

Only in rare circumstances, such as when suicide is suspected, will the NTSB dig into a pilot's backstory, said Barry Schiff, a longtime pilot and aviation safety consultant.

"There are a lot of weird people out there flying airplanes," he said. "It doesn't mean it has anything to do with how they fly."

In a report, the NTSB said that, on the afternoon of Feb. 3, an air traffic controller warned Pastini on takeoff from Fullerton Municipal Airport that he was headed into bad weather.

If he ignored the warning, it was not the first time he had bucked conventions in the air.

On a January morning in 1977, Pastini was flying from Las Vegas to Long Beach when the weather turned icy. Clouds and fog made it difficult to fly by sight alone. Rather than turning back or changing his route, he falsely told air traffic control he was instrument-rated and finished the flight. A judge called his indifference to airspace rules "a potential threat to himself, his passenger and other users of the system" and suspended his license for 120 days.

Three years later, his plane was found behind on inspections, carrying an expired temporary registration and leaking fluid from a brake. He lost his license for 30 days.

Richard Wittry, the attorney for the Federal Aviation Administration who prosecuted Pastini for the earlier incident, said the offense showed "he had a cavalier attitude toward his responsibility as a pilot in command of his private aircraft."

"He told air traffic a vital fact that wasn't true," Wittry, now 84, said in an interview. "He knows he's not instrument-rated. That's bad news. That's an accident bound to happen."

For years, Pastini's restaurants were favored by cops. He enjoyed being known as one of them, both for the camaraderie it inspired with Nevada police and the boost it delivered to his businesses, said Marc Picker, his former attorney.

He gave discounts to police officers who brought their families to eat. He held fundraisers for cops who'd been mailed letter bombs, shot by stickup men and killed in training accidents. A wall of his Reno deli was covered in police patches.

After he died and federal investigators identified him as a former Chicago cop, the Chicago Police Department, the police union and an association of retired officers declared that no one named Antonio Pastini was ever a city police officer. That applied to two other names Pastini also had used, they said. The badge he was carrying when he died had been reported missing in 1978.

Pastini's nephew, Gary Willis, insisted that his uncle "truly was a police officer" and that he had had "perfectly legitimate reasons" to change his name. He would not say what those reasons were, beyond suggesting his uncle wanted to start life anew after leaving police work.

"When law enforcement officers leave that lifestyle, they want to leave it behind," he said. "They're done with that life. That may be the reason for the change of names."

But when Pastini opened a string of delis in Nevada in the early 1990s, he openly touted a law enforcement background. He told the Reno Gazette-Journal he had retired in 1986 at the rank of "detective sergeant" after a 17-year career with the Chicago police.

He regaled reporters with a life story of straddling "both sides of the law, as a criminal and as a cop," as the Reno paper wrote in 1997. He recalled a boyhood of battling the neighborhood Germans and running with "a greased little group of thugs."

He told reporters he was a Marine who had been stationed in Japan  a claim the Marines dispute.

As a businessman, Pastini sued a columnist for saying the beef hot dogs he sold were made of pork. He wrote fuming letters to newspapers that dared to publish failed health inspections of his delis.

"He was a talker  told it like it was," Partyka said. "He didn't give a rat's ass what people thought of him."

In the early 1990s, Pastini met Dennis Hof, a businessman who owned legal brothels in Nevada. This was years before Hof found celebrity on an HBO show about his bordellos and before his campaign for a state Assembly seat, which he won last year posthumously.

On occasion, Pastini flew women who worked at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Hof's brothel near Carson City, as well as the Bunny Ranch's maintenance man, said Zack Hames, Hof's executive assistant.

In a video from Hof's 72nd birthday in October, he called Pastini "my pilot."

"The greatest guy, love this guy," Hof said. "A Chicago cop."

Antonio Peter Pastini was born Jordan Albert Isaacson in the mid-1940s. Born in Illinois, he was drawn to California in his early 20s by "the itch for exploration," said Willis, his nephew.

At 22, he suffered a motorcycle accident so bizarre it was reported by the Signal newspaper in Santa Clarita. He staggered onto the porch of an elderly woman, clutching his chest and "gushing" blood.

"He spurted out a tale that he had been riding his motorcycle with friends when someone threw a beer can at him," the newspaper reported.

By the 1970s, he was running gas stations, tow trucks and a stereo company. He was also piloting small planes. Richard Yorty, his partner in the stereo company, recalled taking weekday jaunts to Las Vegas.

"We used to take off about noon, fly out to Vegas and come back round 5 or 6," said Yorty, now 64.

Civil petitions for name changes that Pastini filed in Arizona and California courts offer little explanation for why he changed names. When he legally became Jordan "Ike" Aaron in 1981, he told an Arizona court that he already went by the name in California. The following year, he ran for justice of the peace in Bullhead City using that name, the Arizona Republic reported at the time. When he changed it to Antonio Peter Pastini in 2008, he wrote in a petition that he was already using the name professionally.

During a 2001 divorce, Pastini's fourth wife alleged that he had driver's licenses and bank accounts under multiple names.

In a court filing, his ex-wife included a W-2 form from Pastini's sushi restaurant that showed both Jordan Aaron and Antonio Pastini drawing a wage in 2000 with different Social Security numbers. Jordan Aaron was listed in incorporation records as president, Antonio Pastini as CEO.

Pastini could not get a liquor license in his name because he "had some trouble with the law," the ex-wife's attorney said in another filing. A criminal assessment, done when he changed his name in 2008, showed he was arrested but not charged in 1989 for "cheating" in Nevada.

The Los Angeles Times requested records of enforcement actions taken against Antonio Pastini, Jordan Aaron and Jordan Isaacson from the Nevada Gaming Control Board, which regulates gambling in the state. The board said it had records for the three names but that they were confidential under Nevada law.

The only person who knows the whole story, it seems, climbed into his Cessna 414A at Fullerton Municipal Airport the afternoon of Feb. 3, bound for Minden-Tahoe Airport in Nevada. Five minutes later, Pastini's plane burst through the clouds over Yorba Linda, barreling nose-first toward the ground, according to witnesses. Its tail and left wing were shorn off as the pilot tried to pull the plane out of the dive.

A wing that held a fuel tank struck a home where six people had gathered to watch the Super Bowl. Two escaped with serious burns. The other four were killed: Roy Lee Anderson and Dahlia Marlies Leber Anderson, a couple who brought an elderly neighbor his paper every morning and helped with upkeep; and Stacie Norene Leber and Donald Paul Elliott, relatives of the Andersons who were visiting that Sunday afternoon.

Willis, Pastini's nephew, said the crash was "simply a tragic accident."

His uncle, he said, loved taking flight "like a biker loves the freedom of the road. It was just him and the sky, man."





(c)2019 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
SACRAMENTO, Calif.  When authorities arrested Joseph James DeAngelo last April, they said the suspected Golden State Killer had never before been on their radar as a suspect.

But DeAngelo, a former police officer, had been arrested 22 years earlier and held in the Sacramento County Jail for 3 1/2 hours on unrelated charges before being released and sent on his way, The Sacramento Bee has learned.

DeAngelo, who was 50 at the time, was arrested in a sting operation on April 16, 1996, that targeted individuals with outstanding warrants and notified them that they had won free Super Bowl tickets they could pick up at an office in Sacramento. DeAngelo was one of the suspects who responded, and ended up jailed on allegations he had held up a gas station.

At the time, officials say, they would have had no way of knowing that one of the nation's most sought-after criminal suspects was in their grasp. No DNA samples were routinely taken during bookings back then, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about the arrest, a Sacramento sheriff's spokesman said.

"We had no way of knowing at the time who we actually had in our jail because the evidence wasn't there, the technology wasn't there," Sgt. Shaun Hampton said Friday. "I don't think there's any way we could have known; there was no way for us to identify this person by him simply being in our jail for a few hours."

DeAngelo, now 73 and being held without bail in the same jail downtown, faces 13 murder counts and 13 counts related to sexual assaults that authorities say were committed by a serial murderer and rapist who terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s before dropping from sight.

He was arrested outside his Citrus Heights home last April after Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert's office tied decades-old DNA samples from the crime scenes to DeAngelo, a former Auburn police officer, Navy veteran and truck mechanic.

At the time, DeAngelo's only known brush with the law came in 1979, when he was fired from his job with the Auburn Police Department after he was charged with shoplifting a hammer and a can of dog repellent from a Citrus Heights drug store.

But newly unearthed court records from Placer County Superior Court and an interview with DeAngelo's attorney at the time detail the nearly comical series of events that led to his 1996 arrest.

The court records, originally sought by The Bee on April 30 following DeAngelo's arrest, were recently located and provided Friday.

The records stem from a $1 million civil suit DeAngelo filed in 1996 against the owner of a Sacramento-area gas station over what he considered his false arrest.

The incident involving the gas station occurred July 28, 1995, as DeAngelo was trying to fill his tank and prepay at the pump. Court documents say the pump malfunctioned before he had pumped the entire amount he paid for, and he went inside the store seeking a refund.

"When he attempted to inform the clerk that the pump was not working and asked for his change for the gas not pumped, the clerk became uncooperative, apparently not able to speak English well enough to understand plaintiff," a Feb. 20, 1998, settlement conference statement in the court file states. "Plaintiff left the premises peacefully and subsequently the clerk called police and reported plaintiff as an attempted robber.

"Some eight months later plaintiff was arrested by police in a sting operation where letters were sent informing plaintiff and others that they had (won) a prize. Plaintiff was required to bail and hire an attorney. Eventually, the case was dismissed and the court entered an order finding plaintiff factually innocent and sealed the records."

William Wright, the attorney who subsequently filed the suit on DeAngelo's behalf against the clerk and the gas station owner, said in an interview Friday that he remembered "Joe" as a "nice guy" but that "he was very upset about this gas station business."

"What they did was, they contacted several people  I don't know how he got on the list  and told them they had won free Super Bowl tickets and got them down there in this auditorium," Wright said. "And the cops busted all of them because they had either warrants or were wanted."

DeAngelo was booked into the Sacramento County Jail, but at the time the sheriff's department was not routinely collecting DNA samples from people facing arrest.

A few years later, the department began collecting DNA from fresh felony arrests, but routine statewide collection of DNA did not begin until after the 2004 passage of Proposition 69, an initiative bankrolled by Bruce Harrington, whose brother and sister-in-law were killed by the Golden State Killer in 1986.

The measure he pushed now requires law enforcement to collect DNA from anyone convicted of a felony and add it to a statewide database.

DeAngelo's lawsuit alleged negligence and false imprisonment and sought punitive damages of $1 million for "willful, wanton, malicious and oppressive" conduct. The court file indicates the case was settled and dismissed in March 1998, but Wright said Friday he could not remember the details of the settlement.

He added that he had not known DeAngelo before representing him in the case and that he had not realized until called by The Bee Friday that his former client was the suspected Golden State Killer, also known as the East Area Rapist.

"I'd seen the guy TV, but I never made the connection," Wright said. "He was very pleasant when he was talking to me."



(c)2019 The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, Calif.)

Visit The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, Calif.) at www.sacbee.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
A group that distributes federal grant money for emergency training programs voted on Thursday to shift nearly $5 million away from Alameda County in the wake of a vote by its Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Sheriff Gregory Ahern said.



The county board voted 3-2 on Tuesday to re-affirm its decision two weeks ago to make sweeping changes to the sheriff's controversial "Urban Shield" law enforcement training program, which critics allege is overly militaristic.



Ahern warned the board on Tuesday and two weeks ago that the changes likely would cause the county to lose most of the $5.5 million it was slated to receive from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for the program.



He said that's because the county's agreement with federal authorities requires the teaching of skills to fight terrorism, including SWAT training.



In a phone interview, Ahern said his fears were realized at a meeting in Dublin on Thursday of the Bay Area Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI), which is made up of 12 Northern California counties.



Ahern said the group's board voted only to award Alameda County $800,000 for various emergency management programs and reallocate $4.7 million to other Bay Area counties for emergency training.



Ahern said, "I'm heartbroken" because he started Urban Shield in 2007 to train his agency and other law enforcement agencies in responding to emergencies and acts of terrorism.



Critics say Urban Shield, which has been held over four days every fall and attracted law enforcement agencies from across the country and the world, should focus more on training for earthquakes and other natural disasters.



Ahern said, "This terrible action (the vote by the Board of Supervisors) puts our community at risk because the training program keep us up to date" on emergency equipment and training.



In its votes two weeks ago and on Tuesday, the board approved most of the 63 recommendations made by an ad hoc committee it appointed a year ago to review Urban Shield.



Among the approved changes are eliminating military-type SWAT teams and competition from the annual training exercises, eliminating its weapons expo and vendor show component, getting rid of the "Urban Shield" label and evaluating law enforcement participants' compliance with their departments' use-of-force policies.



Sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly said the vote by the UASI board effectively ends Urban Shield.





Copyright  2019 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 police are on alert and Muslim leaders in the Bay Area are denouncing the terror attacks that left 49 people dead and more wounded in New Zealand.



"We mourn the heartbreaking killings of men, women and children gathered for prayer in their houses of worship," said Ammad Wajahat Rafiqi, a civil rights and legal coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Bay Area office in Santa Clara.



Rafiqi also asked for support from other leaders.



"...(We) urge leaders in our nation and worldwide to speak out forcefully against the growing anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate that appears to have motivated growing white supremacist attacks against vulnerable communities such as Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and African-Americans," he said.



A gunman opened fire at two different mosques in New Zealand during prayers on Friday, killing 49 people. Many more were wounded.



Authorities also found explosives attached to a vehicle, according to national media reports. A suspect has been arrested.



In the United States, authorities were posted outside mosques. San Francisco police officers are doing extra passing calls around mosques in the city, according to spokesman Joseph Tomlinson.



"It's a precautionary measure," Tomlinson said. "We want to at least be aware."



Rafiqi also suggested Muslim organizations step up their own security following the attacks.



"In the wake of this tragedy, we urge mosques, Islamic schools and other community institutions in the United States and around the world to take stepped-up security precautions, particularly during times of communal prayer," he said.



Rafiqi said community leaders are expected to hold vigils for the victims this weekend in the East Bay, Peninsula and San Francisco. Details on those events weren't yet available Friday morning.





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Law enforcement officials in Contra Costa County have arrested an Antioch man in connection with several crimes related to illegally selling a firearm.



Chaz Montgomery, 25, was arrested on suspicion of being a felon in possession of a firearm, illegal possession of ammunition, unlicensed sale of a firearm and violation of probation, according to the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office.



Earlier this month, the Contra Costa County Anti-Violence Support Effort Team launched an investigation into a person who was allegedly illegally selling a pistol on the street.



On Tuesday, the suspect, identified as Montgomery, attempted to sell a pistol to an undercover agent, according to the sheriff's office.



Montgomery was arrested without incident, and during a search of his vehicle, agents found a .44 caliber revolver with ammunition.



Investigators said it appears the revolver was purchased in another state and brought into California.









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OAKLAND (BCN)



A church volunteer was sentenced Friday to 35 years to life in state prison for fatally shooting his cousin outside a fast food restaurant in East Oakland in 2017.



James Charles Amos, 58, was convicted of first-degree murder on Jan. 24 for killing 60-year-old Jeffery Duckett Sr. outside the Jack-In-The-Box restaurant in the 2400 block of International Boulevard just before 6 p.m. on Oct. 3, 2017.



The restaurant is next to the Agnes Memorial Church, where Amos tutored kids, ran a food bank and drove a disabled pastor around in a van.



Oakland police said Duckett was shot as he walked out of the restaurant by a suspect, later identified as Amos, and died at the scene.



Amos fled in a van and wasn't arrested until March 5, 2018, when authorities found him in Michigan.



Officer Omar Daza-Quiroz wrote in a probable cause statement that Amos was identified as the suspect in the shooting by witnesses and family members and by friends of Duckett who watched video surveillance camera footage of the shooting.



Daza-Quiroz said one witness told police that he got a call from Amos in which Amos said "he had killed the victim (Duckett) and wished to turn himself in."



Alameda County prosecutor Danielle Hilton said the motive for the fatal shooting wasn't made clear during Amos' trial but Duckett's family members have said they think he was killed out of jealousy.



Defense attorney Mark McGoldrick told jurors in his closing argument that Amos should be found not guilty because witnesses' identifications of him as the shooter were flawed.



In addition to murder, Amos was convicted of shooting from a motor vehicle and being an ex-felon in possession of a gun, as he was convicted in 1989 of being an ex-felon in possession of a firearm in Alameda County.



Duckett's family runs the Duckett Memorial Church in Oakland.



According to Duckett's online obituary, he was born in San Francisco, graduated from Castlemont High School in Oakland, was a member of Local 6 of the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union and spent most of his life driving company trucks and making deliveries.



The obituary also said Duckett enjoyed playing pool and riding his motorcycle and was a member of a motorcycle club.



Alisha Anderson, one of Duckett's 13 children, said at the sentencing hearing, which was packed with Duckett's family members and friends, that he taught her important life skills and "loved everyone and treasured them like Jesus."



Anderson said, "My heart is heavy with grief" and Amos' sentencing is "a time to celebrate true justice for my father."



McGoldrick asked Alameda County Superior Court Judge Trina Thompson not to sentence Amos to the maximum term possible, saying, "He had a rather extraordinary life of charity in the community the last seven or eight years."



But Hilton said that although Amos did some good things in the community "he's unpredictable" and reverted to his criminal past when he shot Duckett.



Hilton said Amos used the same van he used to drive the church pastor around to get to and from the shooting scene and "shot into a restaurant with innocent people within it" in broad daylight.



The sentence that Thompson imposed wasn't the maximum possible but was longer than McGoldrick had requested.





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A 19-year-old man who died in a head-on crash on state Highway 1 in unincorporated Castroville on Wednesday evening has been identified by the Monterey County Sheriff's Office as Lloyd Orozco.



The crash was reported at 6:43 p.m. Wednesday on Highway 1 just north of state Highway 183.



Orozco, a resident of Castroville, was traveling north on the highway when, for a reason still under investigation, he allowed his white Honda Civic to go into the southbound lane where it hit a Toyota Camry head-on, according to the California Highway Patrol.



He was taken to Natividad Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. A 56-year-old Watsonville woman driving the Toyota and her passenger also went to the hospital with moderate injuries, CHP officials said.



Drugs and alcohol do not appear to be factors in the collision, according to the CHP.









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SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)



The cities of San Francisco and Oakland have asked a federal appeals court to reinstate their lawsuits seeking to make five oil companies pay for sea walls and other protections from rising seas.



In a brief filed on Wednesday, the two cities asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to overturn a decision in which U.S. District Judge William Alsup dismissed their public nuisance lawsuits last year.



The two cities also want the appeals court to send the lawsuits back to San Francisco Superior Court and Alameda County Superior Court, where they were originally filed in 2017.



They claim San Ramon-based Chevron Corp. and four other companies created a public nuisance by producing and promoting oil and natural gas fuels while knowing that they lead to global warming and sea level rise.



A hearing on the appeal has not yet been scheduled. The oil companies' reply is due to be filed by April 12.



The cities' lawyers allege in their brief, "Defendants have known for decades that the continued burning of fossil fuels would increase global temperatures and cause devastating impacts on coastal communities like Oakland and San Francisco.



"Yet they continued to wrongfully promote the increased, unrestricted use of their products," the attorneys wrote.



In addition to Chevron, the companies sued are Exxon Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips, BP PLC, and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. The firms are the world's five largest investor-owned, as opposed to government-owned, oil companies.



At a hearing last year, a Chevron lawyer said the company agrees with the scientific consensus that climate change is real and is primarily caused by human activity, but said the problem is "a global issue that requires global debate and engagement."



The two cities say in their appeal that they are seeking narrow and specific local remedies, such as payment for the cost of sea walls and fortified storm water systems.





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OAKLAND (BCN)



The owners of several Bay Area sushi boat restaurants have pleaded guilty to tax crimes, United States Attorney David Anderson announced Thursday.



Man Young Kim, 64, and Kyong Ja Kim, 58, both of Dublin pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the Untied States, prosecutors said.



According to the plea agreement, the defendants admitted they failed to report on federal income tax returns the cash received from sales at their restaurants Sushi Boat Oakridge, Sushi Boat Valley Fair and Sushi Boat Westgate.



Prosecutors said the Kims admitted to not depositing some of the cash from sales and instead used the money to pay employee wages and purchase other personal and non-business items.



They provided the accountant who prepared their tax returns with only corporate bank account records and not an accounting of cash sales, and they did not pay employment taxes on cash wages paid to employees.



The total loss to the government was $1.2 million, prosecutors said.



The Kims face a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 plus restitution.









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The Presidio Trust has received a proposal to rehabilitate historic Fort Winfield Scott, a 30-acre site at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge.



The proposal, which can be found on the Presidio Trust website, will transform Fort Winfield Scott into a "Campus for Change" addressing the significant environmental and social needs of the changing community.



The organizations that joined together to submit the proposal are the World Economic Forum, Equity Community Builders, Epicenter for Climate Solutions, OpenAI, Lela Goren Group, and The We Company.



The Presidio Trust Board of Directors will evaluate the proposal. The board sought a project that would bring the historic buildings back to life for the public good, model environmental sustainability, and create opportunities for the public to enjoy the fort's history and natural beauty.



There will be two public meetings on the proposal.



The first will be the Presidio Trust board meeting on Wednesday, April 24, 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., at the Golden Gate Club. The organizations will present the proposal and the board will hear public comment.



The second will be the board's meeting on Thursday, May 23, 5:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. at the Golden Gate Club. The proposal will be discussed, and the board will hear public comment. The board is expected to make a decision at the meeting.



Fort Winfield Scott, named for the most prominent U.S. Army officer of the 19th century, was initially established as an independent post for the Coast Artillery Corps. Located within the Presidio Army post, Fort Winfield Scott functioned separately with its own commander until after World War II.



For half a century, it served as headquarters for the defense of the Bay Area's coastline. Constructed between 1909 and 1912, the Fort Scott barracks feature the earliest example of the Mission Revival architectural style at the Presidio.





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A man who was fatally shot by Alameda County sheriff's deputies after he allegedly escalated a routine shoplifting call at a thrift store near San Leandro into a life-threatening situation had 11 prior felony convictions, a sheriff's spokesman said on Thursday.



Charles Ballard, 41, of San Leandro, also was on felony probation and had a warrant out for his arrest, sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Ray Kelly said.



Two deputies responded to the Thrift Town store at 16160 E. 14th St. in unincorporated Ashland near San Leandro at about 4:40 p.m. on Wednesday after store employees reported a minor theft, Kelly said.



The deputies made "a very low-key contact" with Ballard because it was a relatively low-priority call, according to Kelly.



Ballard was outside his BMW SUV when the deputies contacted him but then he got inside, put his car into reverse and accelerated at a high rate of speed, pinning the two deputies in an open door and dragging them at least 20 feet, Kelly said.



The two deputies, a male and a female, then fired at Ballard because he was using his SUV as a weapon and their lives were in danger, according to Kelly.



Ballard then put his SUV in forward and aimed his car toward a third deputy, Kelly said.



That deputy, a male, also fired at Ballard and the three deputies fired about a total of 24 shots, according to Kelly.



Ballard suffered gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene despite attempts to save his life, Kelly said.



According to Kelly, a woman who was a passenger in Ballard's SUV also was hit by a bullet and was taken to a hospital to be treated for her injuries. She is expected to survive.



The female deputy who was dragged by the SUV suffered "significant injuries" to her knee and ankle and was hospitalized and might not return to active duty for a long time, Kelly said.



The male deputy who was dragged was treated for a shoulder injury at a hospital and released, according to Kelly.



The third deputy wasn't injured, nor was a dog that was inside Ballard's SUV.



Kelly said the crimes for which Ballard was convicted include grand theft auto, resisting arrest and evading arrest. He said investigators found methamphetamine on him after the shooting on Wednesday.



Kelly said footage from body cameras worn by the deputies will be important in investigating the shooting and described the footage as "very compelling and disturbing."



Kelly said, "We're grateful none of our deputies were killed."



He said the investigation into the shooting will look at why Ballard escalated the situation, including the possibility that he had recently offended again.





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SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)



Hundreds of Bay Area students walked out of school and on to the streets Friday morning to demand urgent action on climate change.



San Francisco's Market Street was filled with hundreds of middle and high school students marching as part of the global Youth Climate Strike, calling for politicians to take immediate measures to stave off climate change.



"We need action before it's too late, and it's almost too late," said Jazea Smith, an 11th-grade student at Ruth Asawa School for the Arts in San Francisco.



The students rallied in front of the San Francisco offices of U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, calling on both to support the Green New Deal introduced by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-NY.



Feinstein drew attention in a viral video last month where she was seen rejecting a group of youth activists who demanded support of the bill.



"The politics and economics and everything else that's going on right now - there's no point if our Earth is warming at such accelerated rates that we've never seen before," said Smith.





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SAN JOSE (BCN)



A 24-year-old man suspected of killing a San Jose woman in her home last month made his initial appearance in Santa Clara County Superior Court Thursday to face a murder charge and may face a life sentence without parole.



Carlos Eduardo Arevalo Carranza was arrested Monday in connection to the Feb. 28 murder of Bambi Larson, a 59-year-old mother and South San Jose resident.



Police have not yet determined whether the two knew each other, but said Arevalo Carranza, an undocumented felon with a long criminal record, was seen on surveillance footage stalking her house before and after her death.



Arevalo Carranza is charged with one count of first-degree murder and two special circumstances of burglary and mayhem. During Thursday's brief hearing, a plea hearing was scheduled for May 17, and is being represented by the Santa Clara County Public Defender's Office a Spanish interpreter.



The case drew outcry from public officials in San Jose and Santa Clara County after police reported Tuesday that Arevalo Carranza had been released from jail in California six times despite being under a detainer request from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In Santa Clara County alone, he had been released twice without officials notifying ICE.



"We understand this case has started an emotional dialogue regarding immigration policy. The court will consider factual questions of guilt or innocence, and immigration policy, while important, should rightfully be taken up in another venue," Deputy Public Defender Charles Hendrickson said in a statement.



Chief Assistant District Attorney Jay Boyarsky refused to comment on the political implications of the case, saying "there is a time and place for politics and policy."



He instead expressed deep condolences for Larson's family, and said prosecutors will do their utmost to ensure Arevalo Carranza receives a maximum sentence.



"He is going to spend the rest of his life in prison so that he can never hurt anyone again," Boyarsky said outside the courthouse. "Our office will hold him fully accountable for this brutal murder so that he can die in prison."



Deputy District Attorney Luis Ramos will prosecute the case, and said the two special circumstances in the case make Arevalo Carranza eligible for life without parole and the death penalty. In light of Gov. Gavin Newsom placing a moratorium on capital punishment Wednesday, Arevalo Carranza faces a life sentence if convicted.



Larson's family thanked San Jose police in a statement, and said they would not be making any specific comments due to the ongoing investigation.



"We thank the community for their support, thoughts and prayers and ask for privacy as we grieve the loss of Bambi."



Larson attended San Jose State University and the University of California at Santa Cruz and was a manager at medical testing company Roche Sequencing Solutions in San Jose.



Court documents say a concerned coworker called Larson's son at about 1:30 p.m. on Feb. 28 and drove to her house after Larson failed to turn up at work. The son responded to the address and entered her home to find a brutal scene, with his mother in her bedroom bleeding. He then walked outside the house and called police.



Officers found Larson dead inside the home suffering from extensive and deep wounds to her neck, torso and abdomen. They later recovered surveillance footage showing the suspect walking around the neighborhood and leaving the house after the murder. Police said Larson's son told them that she lived alone.



Arevalo Carranza was first arrested on an unrelated drug violation Monday at Foxworthy and Pearl avenues, but he was cited and released. DNA evidence obtained in the investigation later connected him to the murder, and he was again taken into custody.



Officers found him in possession of a 7-inch folding knife, Larson's Kindle tablet and cellphone, along with boots that matched bloody footprints leading out of her home.



Police have not yet released information about a possible motive and an investigation into Larson's death is ongoing. Arrevalo Carrazco will remain in Santa Clara County Jail without bail as the case continues.





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Eastcountytoday.net

Three homes were destroyed in a fire that started Thursday evening in unincorporated Contra Costa County, a battalion chief said.



Firefighters were called at 5:50 p.m. by someone who said a house in the 2700 block of Taylor Road was on fire with flames coming out of all the windows, Battalion Chief Ross Macumber, with the East Contra Costa Fire Protection District, said.



En route, firefighters saw a large column of smoke and arrived to find three single-family homes on Bethel Island on fire.



Macumber said crews immediately called for a second alarm.





As of 8 p.m. all forward progress had been stopped, Macumber said, and crews had contained the blaze to the three homes.



No one was injured and everyone has been accounted for. At least two people were displaced by the fire.



Macumber didn't know the cause of the blaze. Firefighters were still putting water of the homes, he said.




SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)



Thousands of Bay Area students joined a global youth strike on Friday to demand leaders take action on climate change.



San Francisco's Market Street was filled with middle and high school students from around the region who were marching instead of attending classes.



"We are in a climate crisis," said Isha Clarke of Youth Vs Apocalypse, one of the student activist groups that organized the march, at a rally in San Francisco's Union Square. "There is no room for denial or fear."



The students rallied in front of the San Francisco offices of U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, calling on both to support the Green New Deal introduced by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-NY.



The marchers attached post-it notes on the front of each office's building with comments including, "Don't ruin our planet!" and, "Our climate is changing, why aren't you?"



Feinstein drew attention in a viral video last month where she was seen rejecting a group of youth activists who demanded support of the bill. Her office did not respond to a request for comment on the strike.



"We have 12 years to save this planet - the only planet that we have," Clarke told the crowd, referring to an October report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which said that "rapid and far-reaching transitions' must be made by 2030 to avoid worst effects of global warming.



Globally, the Youth Climate Strike included hundreds of similar strikes planned in an estimated 75 countries. In the U.S., organizers are calling for Congress to adopt the Green New Deal and declare a national emergency of climate change.



"We need action before it's too late, and it's almost too late," said Jazea Smith, an 11th-grade student at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. "The politics and economics and everything else that's going on right now - there's no point if our Earth is warming at such accelerated rates that we've never seen before."





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Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Do Thang Hai made the statement at the working session with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation in Hanoi on March 14.

The Vietnamese official also affirmed that, the relationship between Vietnam and Russia is of special significance and receives great attention from senior leaders of both countries.

Deputy Minister Hai said that, after the effectiveness of the Vietnam-Eurasian Economic Union Free Trade Agreement (VN-EAEU FTA) in 2016, the bilateral trade between Vietnam and Russia has seen positive growth.

Notably, the bilateral trade revenue in 2018 increased by 28.63% compared to 2017 and Russia's exports to Vietnam reached US$2.1 billion in 2018, up 53.38% over the previous year.

Vietnam and Russia have witnessed strong trade growth at an average of 30% per year since the signing of the trade deal.

Russia also ranked 24th among 129th countries and territories investing in Vietnam in 2018, with 123 projects worth a total of US$932 million. Vietnam also has 22 projects in Russia, with a total investment of nearly US$3 billion.

President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation Sergey Katyrin said that more and more Russian enterprises have shown their interest in Vietnam. With a system of more than 180 branches of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry across the country, Russia always creates favourable conditions for enterprises to seek business opportunities and support them to participate in exhibitions in Vietnam to promote their products and strengths.

Deputy Minister Hai and President Sergey Katyrin agreed that there remains large room for boosting bilateral trade between the two countries to match the potential and fine relationship of both sides.

Thus, the Ministry of Industry and Trade will implement more trade promotion activities in the Russian market in 2019 while helping enterprises take advantage of the VN-EAEU FTA.


Spark New Zealandwelcomes the NZ Government announcement on renewal of existing mobile spectrum rights.It will renew all the rights held by mobile network operators in the 2100 MHz spectrum band and most of the rights held by mobile network operators 1800 MHz spectrum band.The Government is holding aside a portion of existing rights in the 1800 MHz spectrum band for potential use by emergency services.The current rights Spark and other mobile network operators hold in these spectrum bands are due to expire in 2021.Shares in Spark New Zealandare trading 0.57 per cent lower to $3.48.
Vista Credit Partners has led a $175m recapitalization for Meltwater, a San Francisco-based provider of media intelligence solutions.

The company will use the funds to further invest in products.

Led by Founder and CEO Jorn Lyseggen, Meltwater provides more than 30,000 companies around the world with solutions to monitor traditional and social media to gain insights on relevant trends and conversations across the media landscape.

The company, which has 2,000 employees in 55 offices spread throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America, also operates the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), a nonprofit organization devoted to nurturing future generations of entrepreneurs.

FinSMEs

15/03/2019
People in search of photos of the stunning wildflower super bloom found themselves in a much less Instagrammable situation this week when they got their cars stuck in mud on the plains of Central California.

It's happened to at least four cars this week along various roads on the Carrizo Plains in San Luis Obispo County, the California Highway Patrol told the San Luis Obispo Tribune on Thursday.

WOW: Butterflies swarming SoCal expected to reach NorCal any day now

CHP helicopters were reportedly used to help locate the stranded travellers, and the CHP then helped enlist tow trucks to drag the cars to safety.

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Land Management warned people that the roads in the area were treacherous and muddy because of recent rainfall.

"As of 3/7, rain showers continue to make roads impassable in the Carrizo Plain National Monument. Please follow road warning signs to avoid getting vehicles stuck in the mud," the Bureau wrote on Twitter Tuesday.

MORE: Thousands overwhelm California town to see super bloom

Officials say the unpaved portions of the roads around the National Monument can take weeks to dry out after they become saturated with rain.

"You think it's dry and then all of a sudden your car is stuck," said Carrizo Plain National Monument Manager Johna Hurl in an interview with the Tribune. "Please if you see a red sign, even if it looks fine, don't go down it because it will not be fine."

Such warnings are going unheeded by some travelers. On Friday, the Bureau issued another warning that Panorama and Simmler Roads were "impassable."

"Vehicles are getting stuck, please follow warning signs and respect private property," they wrote. "This is a remote area with limited towing services, no fuel, food or water nearby."

But the flowers are a powerful lure. The Bureau said that as of Friday, hillside daisies, goldfields and baby blue eyes are all blooming on the Carrizo Plain.

ALSO: Where to see the super bloom in California

Steady rains and warm temperatures have contributed to the second California super bloom to take place in two years, an unusual occurrence, the Associated Press reported last week. Once every ten years is a more typical frequency for the floral phenomenon.

Some have speculated that the rise of social media has made Californians' appetite for photos of the flowers even more intense. On the eastern edge of Lake Elsinore, an explosion of poppies has led to bumper-to-bumper traffic on nearby Interstate 15, along with a surge in other traffic-related issues.

"We've had a huge influx of people," Jonathan Reinig, the natural resources manager for Riverside County Parks, told SFGATE last week. "The county says it's their most accident-y time of year."
Attention "Brady Bunch" fans! As you've no doubt heard, HGTV has purchased the Studio City, CA, home that was used for exterior shots in the original show. Now, the network plans to renovate both the exterior and interior, to match the backdrops we all came to know and love, in a new reality show slated to air in September, "A Very Brady Renovation."

Yet apparently, finding those iconic furnishings that played a supporting role for the family's shenanigans is proving to be a real needle-in-a-haystack huntand HGTV needs your help! So start sifting through your attic, basement, local flea market, eBay, and otherwise to find these hidden gems. The Very Brady Scavenger Hunt is on!

Many of these 1970s items are very rare and hard to find, Abbi McCollum, vice president of convergence and social media for HGTV, explained in a press release. Weve seen an incredible response from 'Brady Bunch' fans across social media since we first announced the series. Now, we need their help to get the renovation of the house just right.

While HGTV has provided a full list of what it's looking for, here's a sampling that is sure to inspire a TV flashback or two:

The avocado-and-cream flowered sofa that was the seat of many a family conference

The credenza under the staircase and the horse statue on top of it

Gregs old-fashioned attic radio

Alice's matchy-matchy bedroom furniture suite

Those fish trivets that were hung on the kitchen wall by the green refrigeratorand the green refrigerator itself

The stainless-steel double wall oven

The stuffed giraffe in the girls' bedroom

A vertical, trapezoid shaped curio cabinet

The handles on the front door

Where to look for 'Brady Bunch' furnishings

If you want to get involved in this treasure hunt, or are just interested in scoring a few iconic '70s pieces for your own (fill in the blank) Bunch House, we have a few ideas on where to start looking (that is, once you've exhausted digging through the junk collection in your parents' garage).

Los Angeles interior designer, blogger, and collector Colette Coco Shelton of Cococozy.com loves using vintage pieces in her designs, and this Brady scavenger hunt is right up her alley.

"My first stop to find the items they are looking for would be a flea market," she says. "Each month here in Southern California, for example, there is either the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, or the Long Beach Flea Market, where there are so many California classic retro items for sale from different vendors. I feel like I've seen the bedroom set, the credenza, the starburst clock, and more there."

Southern Californians may have the edge in terms of finding these items. "Since the show was shot here in the '70s," Shelton continues, "the likelihood is that the items were sourced locally and not necessarily one of a kind."

Which means they may be lying around awaiting stardom if only the right fan spots them.



Watch: Saturday Night Fever House in NY Boogies Back Onto the Market With a Price Cut



But what if you don't live in Southern California? Fear notyou still have a chance.

"Another resource, of course, is online," advises Shelton, mentioning sites like Chairish.com, 1stDibscom, Ebay, Etsy, and EBTH.com (or Everything But The House), where vintage items can be searched out and then bid on or bought outright.

Shelton thinks that the sofa will probably be the hardest piece to find, since it might have been custom-made, but she recommends that you not give up. The '70s are an era that hasn't yet been completely picked over for furniture and accessories by designers and collectors.

"This is a super fun challenge," says Shelton. "I can't wait to see how it turns out!"

Where these Brady furnishings will end up

OK, then. Once you've located the perfect items for the Brady home, just what are you supposed to do with them? What are HGTV's plans for them? Will you be paid? Will HGTV cover shipping? Those details are not clear right now, but all will be revealed in due course to those who've got the goods.

"Fans who own vintage furniture and decor items true to the original TV series are encouraged to contact HGTV via social media for a chance to see the special items featured in the series," according to the HGTV press release. Fans are asked to post a photo or video of the item on HGTVs Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter using the #verybradyreno hashtag. A quick glance at those links reveals that they are also good places to check and see what other people have already located.

And the nationwide scavenger hunt begins.

The post The 'Brady Bunch' Home Renovation Needs Your Help! Check Your Attic appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
Daniel Sober just wasn't himself that day.

The 44-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested for allegedly driving under the influence after police pulled him over Saturday in Butler County.

According to WTAE in Pittsburgh, which cited court documents, Middlesex Township police stopped Sober after they noticed a suspicious vehicle while on an unrelated call and followed it. While talking to Sober, officers noticed the smell of alcohol on his breath.

Sober was given a breath test, and the device showed his blood-alcohol level was 0.194, more than twice the legal limit in Pennsylvania, police said.

With his arrest, Sober joins other ironically named suspects who have run afoul of the law in recent years, such as:
JERUSALEM  Israel and Hamas on Friday worked quickly to de-escalate after a rare instance of rocket fire from Gaza launched against Tel Aviv the night before.

The events underscored that neither side appears to want a broader clash right now, and at the same time, the ever-present chance of a miscalculation setting off the next war.

Thursday night, rockets from Gaza that headed for Tel Aviv seemed to come out of the blue, then disappear almost without a trace. Israel blamed Hamas, which controls Gaza, and retaliated swiftly, with strikes at what it said were Hamas military sites and compounds throughout Gaza.

Hamas denied responsibility for the attacks, but had nonetheless expected such a response and left the sites ahead of time.

By Friday morning, Israeli military officials said that operatives had launched the rockets from a Hamas launcher by mistake. The officials would not elaborate.

About 10 hours after the flare-up began, a fragile calm appeared to have been restored.

Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israel Police, said remains of one rocket were found Friday in an open area south of Tel Aviv.

There were no details about the other rocket, which could have fallen into the sea or exploded midair.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad are the only groups in Gaza known to possess rockets with a range capable of reaching Tel Aviv.

A spokesman for Islamic Jihad, Dawoud Shehab, said that Egyptian officials had been making contact with the militant groups in Gaza throughout the night to restore the Egyptian-brokered truce that ended the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas.

The Egyptians are effective mediators up to a point, said Michael Herzog, an Israel-based fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has participated in past Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

They can restore calm when the two sides have a basic interest in a cease-fire, he said, but they cannot do the magic when one party does not.

Herzog said the Israeli militarys claim of a mistaken launch was reasonable since Hamas did not usually start off a round of hostilities by firing directly at Tel Aviv.

In most cases, he said, Hamas would begin firing on areas closer to Gaza and then, depending on the Israeli response, build up to targeting the densely populated commercial hub of central Israels coastal plain.

In what appeared to be a further effort to tamp down tensions, Hamas and the other militant factions in Gaza announced Friday morning that they were canceling that afternoons protest along the fence that divides the Palestinian territory from Israel.

The organizing committee described the postponement  the first in almost a year  as an exceptional move in the public interest as they prepare for what they hope will be a million-strong demonstration on March 30, the anniversary of the start of the often-violent protests, in which scores of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire.

Gaza is already suffering an acute economic crisis, and Qatari assistance that was promised for six months is due to expire in April. Youths demonstrated in the streets in Gaza for a second day Friday against the daily hardships of life in the territory.

Hamas understands that another major round of hostilities would have a devastating impact on the Gaza Strip, Herzog said.

Isabel Kershner is a New York Times writer.
LONDON  In a stalemate over Brexit, British politicians have chosen to delay it.

After weeks of political gridlock, Parliament voted Thursday to seek to postpone the countrys departure from the European Union, a move that will likely avert a chaotic withdrawal on the scheduled exit date of March 29.

With Brexit due in 15 days and no divorce deal yet approved, the House of Commons voted 413-202 to ask the bloc to put off Britains exit until at least June 30. The official result was initially announced as 412-202, but was later amended to 413 in the official voting list.

The vote gives Prime Minister Theresa May some breathing space, but is still humbling for a leader who has spent two years telling Britons they were leaving the bloc on March 29.

Power to approve or reject the extension lies with the EU, which has signaled that it will only allow a delay if Britain either approves a divorce deal or makes a fundamental shift in its approach to Brexit. In a historic irony, almost three years after Britain voted to leave the EU, its future is now in the blocs hands.

May is likely to ask EU leaders for an extension at a March 21-22 summit of the bloc in Brussels.

The European Commission said the bloc would consider any request, taking into account the reasons for and duration of a possible extension.

May was forced to consider a Brexit delay after lawmakers twice rejected her EU divorce deal and also ruled out, in principle, leaving the bloc without an agreement. Withdrawing without a deal could mean major disruptions for businesses and people in the U.K. and the 27 remaining countries.

By law, Britain will leave the EU on March 29, with or without a deal, unless it cancels Brexit or secures a delay.

Thursday could have been worse for May. Lawmakers rejected an attempt to strip her of control over the Brexit agenda. They defeated by the narrowest of margins  314-312  an opposition attempt let Parliament choose an alternative to Mays rejected divorce deal and force the government to negotiate it with the EU.

Lawmakers also voted against holding a second Brexit referendum  at least for now.

By a decisive 334-85 vote, they defeated a motion that called for another vote by the public on whether to stay in the EU or leave. Campaigners for a new referendum are divided over whether the time is right to push for a second Brexit vote.

Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka are Associated Press writers.
HEJERE, Ethiopia  Analysis of the flight recorders of the crashed Ethiopian Airlines plane has begun, the airline said Friday, and the New York Times reported that the pilot requested permission in a panicky voice to return shortly after takeoff as the plane dipped up and down and appeared to gain startling speed.

President Trump in a phone call with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed praised the state-owned airline as a strong institution and affirmed U.S. support after Sundays plane crash killed 157 people, Abiys office said. The two shared condolences in a rare public outreach by Trump to an African leader.

Forensic DNA work began in identifying remains, and Muslim families held prayers for the dead, anxious to have something to bury as soon as possible. The dead came from 35 countries.

The New York Times report cited a person who reviewed air traffic communications from the flight as saying controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by hundreds of feet.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return to the Addis Ababa airport. But the plane crashed minutes later.

French authorities now have the planes flight data and voice recorders for analysis. They have said it was unclear whether data could be retrieved.

The United States and many other countries have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8 as the U.S.-based company faces the challenge of proving the jets are safe to fly amid suspicions that faulty software might have contributed to two crashes that killed 346 people in less than six months.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said regulators had new data from satellite-based tracking that showed the movements of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were similar to those of Lion Air Flight 610, which crashed off Indonesia in October, killing 189 people.

Both planes flew with erratic altitude changes that could indicate the pilots struggled to control the aircraft. Both crews tried to return to the airport.

Boeing said it supports the grounding of its planes as a precautionary step, while reiterating full confidence in their safety. Engineers are making changes to the system designed to prevent an aerodynamic stall if sensors detect that the jets nose is pointed too high and its speed is too slow.

Investigators looking into the Indonesian crash are examining whether the software automatically pushed the planes nose down repeatedly, and whether the Lion Air pilots knew how to solve that problem.

At the rural crash site outside Addis Ababa, searchers picked through the debris. Members of Israels ZAKA emergency response team were granted access for forensic work.

Elias Meseret and Mulugeta Ayene are Associated Press writers.
PYONGYANG, North Korea  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will soon decide whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain his moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, a senior North Korean official said Friday, adding that the U.S. threw away a golden opportunity at the recent summit between their leaders.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, addressing a meeting of diplomats and foreign media in Pyongyang, said the North was deeply disappointed by the failure of the two sides to reach any agreements at the Hanoi summit between Kim and President Trump.
ALGIERS, Algeria  With Algerian flags on their backs, people of all ages marched Friday through Algerias capital and other cities amid heavy security for what could be decisive protests against longtime leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

The crowds packing leafy boulevards throughout central Algiers appeared bigger than a week ago, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demand an end to Bouteflikas 20-year rule.

Chanting Bouteflika, Get Out and other slogans, diverse groups converged on three public plazas that have become focal points for an exceptional, month-long public uprising against the countrys shadowy leadership.

Algerians have barely seen Bouteflika in public since he suffered a 2013 stroke, and many are angry at a power structure widely seen as corrupt. Millions struggle to make ends meet despite the countrys gas wealth.

The warm spring sun seemed to encourage the protesters, who were so numerous that it was difficult to move on some streets in Algiers. Algerian media reported protests in several other cities around Africas biggest country.

Riot police vans lined side streets of Algiers and surveillance helicopters circled overhead.

A group of young women delighted in taking selfies with smiling police officers. Shops along the march routes turned a brisk profit selling Algerian flags and pizza or honey-filled pastries. The diverse crowd included women with and without headscarves, and fathers carrying children on their shoulders.

The protesters want to send a mass message that they are rejecting Bouteflikas attempt this week to defuse Algerias political crisis.

Bouteflika ceded to protesters demands that he abandon plans for a fifth term, and promised reforms addressing concerns of frustrated, struggling youth. But he also canceled the April 18 presidential election, a move that critics fear could allow him to cling to power.

Police surrounding the Algiers central post office appeared largely unarmed, and their plastic riot shields rested on the ground or in vans nearby. That could be a message from Algerian authorities  known for their heavy-handed security posture  that they want to avoid unrest or provoking public anger.

So far the protest movement has been calm, with just a few incidents of violence on the sidelines. But the specter of past violence haunts many Algerians, notably a civil war in the 1990s between Islamic insurgents and security forces that left some 200,000 dead.

Aomar Ouali is an Associated Press writer.
WASHINGTON  The United States will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court personnel who try to investigate or prosecute alleged abuses committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan or elsewhere, and may do the same with those who seeking action against Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday.

The Hague-based court, the first global tribunal for war crimes, said it would continue to operate undeterred by the U.S. action.

Pompeo made good on a threat delivered last September by President Trumps national security adviser, John Bolton. The U.S. had already moved against some employees of The Hague-based court, Pompeo said, but he declined to say how many or what cases they may have been investigating.

We are determined to protect the American and allied military and civilian personnel from living in fear of unjust prosecution for actions taken to defend our great nation, Pompeo said.

He said any wrongdoing committed by American personnel would be dealt with in U.S. military and criminal courts.

The visa restrictions would apply to any ICC employee who takes or has taken action to request or further such an investigation, Pompeo said.

These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis, without allies consent, he said.

The ICC prosecutor has a pending request to look into possible war crimes in Afghanistan that may involve Americans. The Palestinians have also asked the court to bring cases against Israel.

The court has been hobbled by refusal of the U.S., Russia, China and other major nations to join. Others have quit, including Burundi and the Philippines.

Matthew Lee is an Associated Press writer.
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Ontario employers can speak candidly about former employees' weaknesses when providing job references, as long as the dominant motive for the reference is not malicious, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) recently indicated. The SCC declined to review a lower court's finding that a plaintiff failed to prove her former manager defamed her by giving her a negative reference that led to revocation of a job offer.



The plaintiff sought to prove her former manager was liable for defamation after the manager's negative job reference led to the job offer revocation. After the Court of Appeal for Ontario (OCA) upheld the lower court's decision, which did not find the manager liable, the plaintiff tried to appeal to the SCC. But the SCC declined to hear her appeal.

The lower court found that when providing the reference, the manager had stated that:

There was a lot of conflict between the plaintiff, her supervisor and other employees.

The plaintiff did not take directions well.

The plaintiff did not handle stress well.

The manager would not rehire the plaintiff for certain types of positions.

The plaintiff did prove the elements of defamation summarized in Papp v. Stokes (Sup Ct J (Ont.) 2017 ONSC 2357 (2017-04-18)). The court concluded that the manager's words were specifically about the employee, were communicated to the person who contacted him for the reference and lowered the employee's reputation in the eyes of a reasonable person.

Nonetheless, the lower court agreed with the manager that he was protected because his remarks were made in the context of an employment reference. The court noted that "The social policy underpinning the protection of employment references in this manner is clear: an employer must be able to give a job reference with candor as to the strengths and weaknesses of an employee, without fear of being sued in defamation for doing so. Without this protection, references would either not be given, or would be given with such edited content as to render them at best unhelpful or at worst misleading to a prospective employer."

Someone would lose the protection, however, if the plaintiff could prove that the defendant's dominant motive for the defamatory statements was malice. The court concluded that since the evidence did not establish malice, the plaintiff had not defeated the manager's defense of qualified privilege.

Kanak v. Riggin (Sup Ct J (Ont.), 2017 ONSC 2837 (2017-05-18), upheld by the OCA, 2018 ONCA 345 (2018-03-09), leave to appeal to the SCC denied, 2019 CanLII 1628 (2019-01-17)).

[SHRM members-only toolkit: Introduction to the Global Human Resources Discipline]

Professional Pointer: Employers that speak candidly about the weaknesses of an employee when providing a reference risk the possibility that a disgruntled former employee will sue them for defamation. An employer should not mislead a prospective employer when providing a reference, but instead should be practical and should exercise a measure of caution.

Rhonda B. Levy and Monty Verlint are attorneys with Littler in Toronto.
Assets of the erstwhile South Korean global automobiles giant, Daewoo Motors India Ltd., which were taken over in 2008 by a newly-formed Pan India Motors, would again go under the hammer on April 11 and DRT Mumbai aims to recover around Rs 2,250 crore from the auction.

Significantly, the auction comes more than 15 years after the company shut its Indian operations in 2003-04.

According to a recent notification issued by the Debt Recovery Tribunal's (DRT) Mumbai, the online auction will be held in two lots. The Lot-1 of the e-auction would include the 204-acre of land at Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh, which would also include the structures, furnitures and so on, for which the minimum reserve price has been set at Rs 528.61 crore.

In addition, the successful bidder would be required to clear out pending dues of the Uttar Pradesh State Industrial Corporation's dues, estimated to be around Rs 66.58 crore.

In Lot-2, "all other properties on the same (204 acres) plot of land" would be put up for sale, with a minimum reserve price of Rs 83.01 crore.

People who have worked with Argentum Motors said that the auctions might be separately held for the land and the equipments installed.

Industry sources said Delhi-based auctioneer, C1 India has been assigned for the task. Despite repeated attempts, the company declined to comment on the developments and has not replied to an email questionnaire sent by IANS on the auction details.

An activist of the Daewoo Motors employees union, Ravinder Kumar, said there were seven lenders to the company including ICICI Bank, IDBI, Yes Bank and State Bank of India, and others.

This is not the first time that Daewoo Motors India's assets have gone up for sale. The previous auction process by DRT Mumbai started in 2006 culminating with a company named Pan India Motors taking over the assets.

The shareholders of Pan India Motors included FirstRand Bank, a South African banking major, D. E. Shaw, a global investment and technology development company, infrastructure lending major IL&FS (interestingly it is also cash strapped now), Ajay Singh, the co-founder and Chairman of SpiceJet and B.V.R. Subbu, the former President of Hyundai India.

Ravinder Kumar told IANS that the new company took over the Indian assets of the bankrupt South Korean company for around Rs 765 crore under a condition that it would turnaround the company and continue with the automobile business.

"There were higher bidders but the court gave it to Argentum as it was the only company which said it would restructure or restart the business of automobile and the workers also said whosoever comes he should retain them and start the factory. So Argentum got it," he said.

Argentum Motors was the operating company while Pan India Motors was the holding company, said another former employee of that company.

The promoters initially planned to manufacture automotive components and then gradually produce electric vehicles (EV). They also started as per the plan and made an EV model in tie-up with Reva and a French company.

Industry sources said that although the company had started with a primary target of manufacturing automobile and components, some of the promoters including IL&FS later reportedly wanted to use the company's property to earn revenue which eventually led to differences among the promoters.

B.V. R. Subbu who left Hyundai Motors to start Argentum was the first one who parted ways and sources said he was averse to the idea of diverting the company's objective. He did not remain a shareholder after 2010.

When contacted, Subbu refused to comment on the reasons behind his departure, but said: "When Pan India bid for it, our strategy was to start the power generation business, use the resultant cash flows to refurbish the components capacities, and then develop EVs. The EV developed at the plant was displayed at the Paris Motor Show. But things didn't quite pan out eventually..."

The company also had tie ups with General Motors (GM) and manufactured components for the American company, but later GM withdrew from the partnership owing to some accounting differences, people in the know said.

The employees of the company have so far not received their dues and according to Ravinder Kumar the salary dues stand at around Rs 250 crore.

The workers had moved both the Delhi High Court and the Bombay High Court but they did not receive any compensation.

However, in a favourable order, the Bombay High Court had declared the employees as the primary creditors, bringing them at par with the banks, Kumar said.

Kumar, who currently runs his independent property business, hopes that when the outstandings are recovered after the auction in April, "even the employees would get their pending dues".

Read More News:

Microsoft releases refreshed 'Skype for Web' on Chrome, Edge browsers
Google has released the first beta version of Android's next major update "Q" on Pixel phones with developer-focused tools as well as compatibility features for foldable phones.



"In Android Q, we've made more enhancements to protect our users. The operating system (OS) would give users more control over when apps could get location. Users would also be able to control apps' access to the Photos, Videos and Audio collections via new run-time permissions," Dave Burke, Vice President of Engineering at Google, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.



Google has added several sharing shortcuts to Android Q to facilitate easy and one-tap content sharing.



"When a user wants to share content like a photo with someone in another app Android Q will make it quicker and easier with Sharing Shortcuts, which let users jump directly into another app to share content," Burke said.



The first beta of Android Q also comes with improvements in the Settings panel, peer-to-peer and Internet connectivity along with better permissions, privacy and security features.



Additionally, the search engine giant also seems to have focused on camera, media and graphic advancements in Android Q.



"Starting in Android Q, apps can request a Dynamic Depth image which consists of a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) metadata, making it possible for you to offer specialised blurs and bokeh options in your app. You can even use the data to create 3D images or support Augmented Reality (AR)- photography use-cases in the future," Bruke added.



Google is also making Dynamic Depth an open format for the ecosystem and working with device maker partners to make it available across devices running Android Q and later, the post noted.



Newer features of Android Q are most likely be revealed at the Google IO 2019 event in May.

Read More News:

Microsoft releases refreshed 'Skype for Web' on Chrome, Edge browsers



Medtech firm wins Qualcomm challenge for start-ups
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Video footage of mob boss Francesco (Franky Boy) Calis fatal encounter shows the reputed Gambino head turn his back on his killer, providing the assassin the opening to pull out a handgun and unleash a barrage of bullets, a law enforcement source told the Advance.

However, the assailant is not able to be identified from the footage, taken from a home on the block, the source said.

Police have said the killer slammed into 53-year-old Calis Cadillac SUV with enough force that the mobsters car rocks significantly, perhaps in an attempt to lure him out of his Hilltop Terrace home.

The force of impact knocked off Calis license plate.

Cali exits the home and has an approximately one-minute conversation with the killer, NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea told reporters on Thursday.

The surveillance footage shows the killer hand Cali the license plate and shake his hand, the source said.

Cali then turns his back on the individual and walks toward his car.

Thats when the assassin pulls out a handgun, clutches the firearm with both hands and fires 12 rounds, sources said. Cali was struck six times in the torso, according to police.

In an attempt to shield himself from the bullets, Cali fled to the rear of his personal vehicle and was trying to get underneath the truck, Shea said on Thursday.

Detectives could be seen loading the white SUV onto a tow truck with visible handprints on its rear driver side.

Crime scene investigators load a car that appears to have been checked for fingerprints onto a flatbed truck in the Staten Island borough of New York, Thursday, March 14, 2019. Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali was found with multiple gunshot wounds at his red-brick colonial-style house on Staten Island on Wednesday night and was pronounced dead at a hospital. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig) APAP

Cali was pronounced dead at Staten Island University Hospital in Ocean Breeze, the first mob boss in New York City to be assassinated since Paul Castellano, also a borough resident, was gunned down in 1985.

Authorities on Friday continued to investigate the motive for the slaying.

Among the possibilities are a sanctioned mob hit, the work of a rogue mobster or mobsters, or a dispute or random act of violence that has nothing to do with the Mafia.

Shea told reporters Thursday detectives were looking at numerous suspected mob shootings and developments in recent months for possible connections, including the recent release from prison of Gene Gotti, the brother of notorious Gambino don John Gotti, and its implications for the family.

Cali was gunned down just steps from his home and in close proximity to his wife and kids  which some experts say flies in the face of the code of conduct for the Mafia.

Basically, this hit screams 'statement maker. Regardless of whether or not this was inner-family related, or external, it was brazen and probably intended to make some sort of statement, said organized crime historian and author Christian Cipollini.

Investigators also are working in cooperation with international authorities, based on Calis past dealings with the Sicilian mafia.

He was once described as an ambassador between the Gambino family and Sicilian Mafia in Italy, Cipollini said. All the busts and recent events, it definitely makes one wonder if theres connection, even if loosely.

Cali was said to have strong ties to the Sicilian Mafia, and experts suggested his ascension to the top spot about four years ago was part of an attempt by the Gambinos to lower their high-profile image created by former godfather John Gotti.

The U.S. Probation Department referenced some of those ties to high-ranking Gambino crime family members when it petitioned the court in 2009 to modify the conditions of Calis supervised release in connection to an extortion case at the failed NASCAR site in Bloomfield.

His uncle through marriage, John Gambino, was a Gambino captain and served on the familys ruling panel, said Probation.

Both John Gambino and Cali had very strong ties to Sicily, allowing Gambino to effectively negotiate the crime familys Sicilian and American factions, Probation said.

Another uncle, Joseph Gambino, was a long-standing member and solider in the family and was, like his brother, John, a convicted felon, said Probation.

Meanwhile, Calis brother-in-law, Pietro (Tall Pete) Inzerillo, was a well-documented solider in the Gambino family, Probation wrote.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- New York City public specialized high school admissions offers have been delayed this year, forcing anxious students to wait until mid-March before finding out if they have been accepted to the school of their choice.

The letters typically go out within the first two weeks of March, but the Department of Education (DOE) stated the offers wont be sent until next week, due to a lawsuit challenging the agencys and Mayor Bill de Blasios efforts to increase diversity in the citys eight specialized high schools.

Weve provided updates to families over the past several weeks, and let them know today that theyll receive their offers early next week, said DOE spokesman Doug Cohen.

A TOUGH SPOT FOR SOME PARENTS

The delay in offer letters is adding stress to an already tense time, especially for those parents who were required to put down a deposit to ensure a seat for their child at a private or Catholic high school.

Rosanna Doherty said she has already paid two deposits totaling $1,000-- one non-refundable deposit of $350, and a refundable deposit of $650 -- to secure a seat for her son, Thomas, at Xavier High School, a Catholic Jesuit school in Manhattan.

Her son, who goes to Bernstein Intermediate School (I.S. 7), Huguenot, is still waiting to learn if he gained admission to Staten Island Technical High School.

He knows hes going somewhere, but he would prefer to stay in Staten Island because the commute is less, but he does like the school in Manhattan, said Doherty. Hes just anxious about finding out which one to go to, because it would be a much different commute.

REASON FOR DELAY

The city announced last year an expansion of its Discovery Program -- which aims to increase diversity by offering admission to high-need students who score just below the entrance exam score cutoff if they complete a summer program.

The plan aims to have 20 percent of seats at each specialized high school reserved for students in the Discovery Program by 2020.

That two-year expansion, which would allow more students in the program to be accepted into specialized high schools, went into effect for the 2019-2020 school year, according to the DOE.

But the admissions delays occurred after some parents and community organizations filed suit to halt the changes in the admissions process.

Despite the lawsuit, a judge ruled last month that the city could move forward with the changes.

Its unfortunate that the lawsuit challenging our plan to make the specialized high schools stronger and more diverse affected the timing of offer letters to 75,000 families, said Cohen.

However, Staten Island parents are still worried about the results of their high school offers, specifically because of the admissions changes to the specialized high schools.

Doherty said that while her son studied and prepared for six months for the specialized high school entrance exam, hes worried he wont get into Staten Island Tech.

Its been on our minds for months as parents, especially those looking into specialized high schools, said a parent, who requested anonymity. It creates a lot of tension because our kids prepped for this test. Theyre bright kids and its like adding an extra layer of complication to this whole thing.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Someone choked the very life out of Johynita Jordan, 69, whose bruised and lifeless body was found inside a home in Stapleton.

Jordan was reported missing from her home in Clifton on Jan. 18, nine days before her body was discovered around noon on Jan. 27 inside an apartment on Van Duzer Street.

The cause of death was compression of neck and the manner of death was homicide, according to a statement from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

Although no arrests have yet been made in Jordans death, according to law enforcement sources, the prime suspect is Linden Beaton.

The 31-year-old man already has been charged in connection with the brutal beating of another woman in Clifton.

NYPD officials told the Advance on Thursday that charges are pending against Beaton, who lives on the 200 block of Park Hill Avenue, in the death of Jordan.

From the start we believed the man we had arrested for the first incident was responsible, said NYPD Chief of Detective Dermot Shea at a press conference Thursday in Manhattan. We believe we have a good, strong case.

On Jan. 25, Beaton was arrested in the assault of Beatrice Kaliku, 57, of Clifton, who was on her way to a prayer meeting at the time of the attack.
CITY HALL -- Mayor Bill de Blasio says in theory, his and the governors congestion pricing plan should not force outer borough commuters to pay a toll twice, but said ultimately that decision will need to be made by the state Legislature.

The mayor and Gov. Andrew Cuomos congestion pricing plan calls for electronic tolling devices to be installed around the perimeter of the Central Business District (CBD) at streets south of 61st St. in Manhattan, not including the FDR Drive.

The electronic tolling system will account for tolls previously paid by drivers coming into Manhattan from designated crossings and tolls would fluctuate and discounts would be given during off-peak hour travel.

The governors office previously told the Advance that bridges and tunnels that feed directly into the CBD area are likely to receive a credit, however, crossings outside of that district, including the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, will likely not.

The mayor said Friday that the vision of the plan he and the governor put forward would be that anytime you pay a toll that it would be discounted from wherever you come from to get to the central business district in Manhattan.

But he said Albany would have the final say.

COMMUTERS CONCERN

On Friday, a Staten Island commuter called into the Brian Lehrer Show to ask the mayor whether the current $7.26 fee to drive over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge back to Staten Island would be rolled into the congestion pricing fee.

If you go over Verrazzano, if you go through the Battery Tunnel, whatever it may be, now that said, the ultimate decision makers here of course are the state Legislature, state Senate, state Assembly, has to agree to the specifics of this package and then Im sure it will be a lot of work after the vote to work out a lot of details but the vision here is not to ask people to pay twice, but to take whatever they put into their previous toll for that ride and discount it over the cost of going into the central part of Manhattan, the mayor said.

Before the congestion pricing plan takes effect, it will have to be approved by the state Legislature. The governors office said the fee credits are still subject to negotiations.

But not all local representatives both on Staten Island and in the outer boroughs are thrilled by the joint congestion pricing plan and have slammed it for not giving a discount to commuters coming from outside of the CBD.

Last month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board voted to maintain the base fare for New York Citys subways, buses and paratransit at $2.75, while eliminating the 5 percent bonus value received with the purchase of multiple trips.

Part of that plan included the cash toll for the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge will increasing from $17 to $19 and the E-ZPass rate increasing from $11.52 to $12.24.

The Staten Island Resident E-ZPass (three or more trips per month) rate will increase from $6.48 to $6.88. The Staten Island Resident E-ZPass (two or more trips per month) rate will increase from $6.84 to $7.26.

In order for the effective toll for Staten Island residents to remain at $5.50, the Staten Island Resident Rebate Program will need an additional $6 million in state funding. Without additional funding, the effective toll for Staten Island residents will increase to $5.90.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Fighting fires is a dangerous job.

And a city firefighter, allegedly injured early on New Years Day when he fell from a ladder while battling a blaze in a vacant Tompkinsville home, maintains the buildings unsealed and unguarded condition made his job even more hazardous.

John DiCarlo has sued 79 Monroe LLC, identified in court papers as the owner of 79 Monroe Ave., alleging he was injured due to the owners carelessness, negligence and recklessness.

DiCarlo was among the firefighters who responded to the raging two-alarm blaze at about 6:08 a.m., according to a civil complaint and Advance reports.

Heavy flames had spread throughout the two-story dwelling, a Fire Department spokesman told the Advance then.

The blaze was finally brought under control just over two hours later at 8:18 a.m., the spokesman said.

The fire was incendiary in nature, alleges the complaint.

The building, across the street from PS 16, has since been razed.

Two unidentified firefighters suffered minor injuries while battling the fire, the Advance reported, citing an FDNY spokesman.

The complaint does not say how DiCarlo fell from the ladder, where the ladder was located and who owned it.

The firefighters injuries are not specified, although they are alleged to be serious.

The complaint alleges the building was vacant, unsealed and unguarded.

The owner violated various ordinances, including the city Administrative Code regarding required building maintenance and the sealing off of dangerous structures, the complaint maintains.

The owner also flouted city and state fire odes with respect to building safety, safeguarding vacant premises and prohibiting the accumulation of combustible waste materials, contends the complaint.

Filed in state Supreme Court, St. George, the suit seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Court papers dont state DiCarlos age or place of residence.

Lawyers for DiCarlo and 79 Monroe LLC did not immediately respond to phone calls seeking comment on the suit.

DiCarlo is the second first responder to sue a homeowner in the past two months for injuries allegedly suffered on their premises.

In late January, Police Officer Gareth Echevarria sued the owners of a New Springville home, alleging he was hurt when an emotionally disturbed person pushed him down their stairs last summer.

Echevarria contends the homeowners were negligent for failing to supervise and control the alleged emotionally disturbed person and for not warning Echevarria and his fellow officers of that individuals dangerous propensities.

The case is pending in state Supreme Court, St. George.
Shira Stoll, a multimedia specialist for the Advance/SILive.com, is the filmmaker behind the Where Life Leads You documentary and the Staten Island Holocaust Survivor Series.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Ilona Schwartz called out for her loved ones, 74 years after they were killed.

Taken from her village in Hungary, her brother, Mendu, and her sister, Rose, were the only people of her nine-person family to survive the Holocaust.

Anybody could bring back my family? she asked. Its very shameful what they did to us.

The injustices that happened during the Holocaust -- the persecutions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and others -- will never be reversed. But we can listen and learn from the stories of the survivors to try to prevent it from happening again.

I first met Ilona on March 20, 2018 in her Willowbrook home. After she saw her friend Shirley Gottesmans story in the Staten Island Advance, she requested to be a part of the project. I interviewed her a few days later.

She spoke of her happy childhood with her six siblings, who frequently helped her parents, David and Gizella Weisz, with their fruit business in Zemplenagard, Hungary.

The day after Passover in April 1944, they were taken from their home and sent to the Satoraljaujhely ghetto, and later to Auschwitz. As soon as they arrived, the family was separated.

My mother has a black dress and red and white polka dots in it, she recalled. And thats in front of me how long I live. I see the dress.

Her mother was looking back at her as they moved into separate lines. They didnt know it would be the last time they saw each other. Three days later, she discovered that her mother was sent to the crematorium and was killed, along with her father, one of her brothers, two of her sisters and her sisters children.

There wasnt a day that we didnt cry, she remembered.

Six months after her arrival in Auschwitz, Schwartz was sent to sort out clothing for the Germans. As she opened up one of the packages, she couldnt believe her eyes. It was her mothers polka dotted dress.

You werent allowed to cry, she said, but she screamed, not even fearing for her life.

Shortly after, Schwartz was sent to Bergen-Belsen where she worked in the kitchen. She would frequently steal food for the other girls in her barrack.

She was liberated in April 1945, but her liberation memories are not as happy as one would expect.

She had no parents and no home.

Schwartz stayed in Bergen-Belsen, which became a Displaced Persons Camp, for six months after liberation until she learned that two of her brothers were alive. As she was traveling back home to see them, her brother, Yossi, died.

In April 1946, Schwartz married her husband, Peter Schwartz. They had one daughter, Eva, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2013. Schwartz never fully recovered from the loss of her daughter, she said, often reverting back to speaking in Hungarian.

Schwartz sadly passed away in December 2018, at the age of 94, but her story lives on. She is survived by her three grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

We invite you to watch and share her video story.
(Island Government is a periodic roundup of Staten Island political and civic events.)

CITY HALL -- The New York City Council this week passed legislation from Councilman Joe Borellis (R-South Shore) that puts greater restrictions on how the citys public schools test lead in its drinking water.

The passage of the bill comes after he and Minority Leader Steven Matteo (R-Mid Island) have pressed the Department of Education to end a practice known as flushing where faucets are run to clear out contaminants from the water before testing.

Borellis legislation will ban the practice of flushing to ensure the DOE can no longer potentially compromise any test results.

It is a fundamental expectation of parents that their children be provided with a safe environment at our public schools, and goes without saying that the water from which they drink should be clean and the integrity of the required testing should not be compromised for the sake of political expediency, said Borelli.

From the moment we were made aware of the presence of elevated levels of lead in the drinking water at Staten Islands public schools, Minority Leader Matteo and I have been committed to making sure the DOE has protocols in place to conduct accurate and transparent testing, in line with federal guidelines for safe drinking water, and without manipulation from DOE officials.

FALL INTRODUCES HATE CRIME REPORTING BILL

Assemblyman Charles Fall (D-North Shore) has introduced legislation that would increase the penalty of reporting hate crimes against a person based on race, country of origin, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

The legislation follows the FBIs release of 2017 hate crime statistics which found a 17 percent increase in hate crime incidents since 2016. In 2017 there were 8,493 victims and 6,307 known offenders, and in 2016 there were 7,509 victims and 5,727 known offenders, according to the data.

Falls legislation aims to deter people from falsely reporting hate crimes and to add an act to section 240.55 of the penal law which states that a person is guilty of falsely reporting an incident in the second degree when, knowing the information reported, conveyed or circulated to be false or baseless, to any agency dealing with public safety or emergencies. Falsely reporting an incident in the second degree is a class E felony.

We all know the moral of the story for the Boy Who Cried Wolf. In todays climate we cannot take the chance for a false report of a hate crime to supersede a true report, Fall said. Individuals who feel it necessary to act on these dishonest impulses to claim attention, notoriety or fame should be prosecuted to the fullest degree.

CONGRESSMAN ROSE BACKS NET NEUTRALITY PROTECTIONS

Congressman Max Rose (D-Staten Island/South Brooklyn) is supporting efforts to to restore net neutrality protections for consumers and prevent internet providers from blocking or limiting internet access.

Rose is the co-sponsor the Save the Internet Act that would codify the net neutrality principles into law that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) originally adopted in 2015. It would also enact three net neutrality provisions including -- no blocking, no throttling and no paid prioritization as well as allow the FCC to prohibit unjust and unreasonable practices.

The fight over net neutrality is a prime example of everything thats wrong with Washingtonthe American people are united in support of net neutrality, yet corporations and their lobbyists spent millions badgering the FCC to allow worse service for customers. To no ones surprise, the American people lost. Rose said. Its time for Congress take action to restore these critical protections, because internet access is too vital to nearly every aspect of our daily lives to be trusting telecom lobbyists and special interests to do the right thing.

MALLIOTAKIS SLAMS ALBANY BACKING 3-YEAR EXTENSION OF MAYORAL CONTROL OF NYC SCHOOLS

Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-East Shore) is slamming the state legislatures backing of a three-year extension of mayoral control of the New York City public school system.

Malliotakis plans to introduce a bill that would require the senate and assembly Education Committees to conduct public hearings 30 days before votes by the legislature to extend mayoral control in the five boroughs.

It is unconscionable that we would extend Mayor de Blasios control of public schools without getting answers on major issues like the $750 million failed Renewal Schools fiasco, the planned changes to specialized schools, the destruction of school discipline, the DOEs costly contracts with vendors and high-priced consultants, and lavish executive travel. Taxpayers deserve to know why, with a $32 billion budget, teachers lack supplies and some kids are still being taught in trailers. New York state is set to give the city another $11 billion for education and we have a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers and a moral one to our children to ensure that the money is being spent properly. Gov. Cuomo and the lawmakers who support extending mayoral control without hearings are complicit in the deterioration of our public school system, said Malliotakis.

CUSICK HELPS SECURE FUNDING FOR ISLAND PROGRAMS IN UPCOMING STATE BUDGET

Assemblyman Michael Cusick (D-Staten Island) together with his colleagues in Albany passed a budget resolution that will invest in a number of programs and services for Staten Island ahead of the final budget due April 1.

The Assemblys $175.6 billion plan includes $28.4 billion for education, an increase of $1.6 billion over last year. The plan increases funding for schools that serve children with disabilities, including 4410 and 853 schools.

It also includes a $691.9 million restoration in Medicaid funding and support for healthcare workers who serve New Yorkers.

A $40 million pot has also been proposed for infrastructure projects statewide, which potentially includes changes to the Staten Island Expressway.

New York is home to the best teachers, doctors, care-givers, and support staff, Cusick said. These people deserve our reappear and support and I believe the Assembly budget proposal will be beneficial for them.

While were a long way from a final budget, Im happy to see the progress weve made this year, he continued. I will continue to carry water for Staten Island throughout the next several weeks of negotiations.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  New York City schools are going meatless every Monday. Only vegetarian meals will be served in school cafeterias.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza and others say that not only is a vegetarian meal healthier, but that Meatless Mondays will help in the battle against climate change.

Hmm.

Im not against non-meat meals. We should all eat more vegetables and fruit. Going meatless once in a while could be a very positive thing, especially when you think about all the growth hormones and other crap that commercially produced meat is pumped full of. And when you think of the often appalling conditions that bred-to-eat animals are raised in.

Eating too much meat has implications for your heart and other aspects of your health.

But eliminating meat alone isnt guaranteed ticket to health, particularly when you look at what the city could put in its place in school lunches.

Pizza could be on the menu. And pasta. Grilled cheese too. And peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

Since when is any of this health food?

The pizza crust and sauce are likely full of carbohydrates (sugar) and salt.

Pasta is loaded with carbohydrates. Its one of those foods that you generally have to kiss goodbye when youre looking to lose serious weight and improve your health. Pizza too, by the way.

The bread thats part of the grilled cheese sandwich, if its white bread, could be packed with carbs and added sugars. And is that real cheese on that sandwich, or is it processed, cheese-flavored food product?

And a PBJ? On white bread? Please.

Even a vegan taco could be trouble if its wrapped in a carb-heavy tortilla.

And isnt cheese of any kind an animal product? Is that truly vegetarian?

De Blasio and Carranza had lunch in a public school to announce the new initiative. De Blasio raved about the grilled cheese and barbecue beans he was served. Hate to be a killjoy, but whats in the flavoring that gives the beans that BBQ taste? Could be a lot of salt and sugar.

Fat, sugar and salt are the stuff that were programmed to like. Just look at how fast food meals are built: Meat item. Fries loaded with salt. Big cup of soda. The food industry is rivaled only by social media companies and cigarette makers when it comes to legally profiting from addictive behavior.

Im not an expert. But having lost a decent amount of weight years ago and having kept most of it off, Ive become a firm believer that sugar is worse for my health and waistline than fat. Its largely sugar and carbohydrates that have driven obesity rates through the roof in recent decades, particularly among children.

So if the city is going to remove meat from school meals and say its better for kids, they should make sure that theyre not substituting things that might also be unhealthy. And too much sugar, in both its obvious and disguised forms, is not good for kids. It can start a lifetime addiction to sugar and carbs thats awfully hard to break.

And if de Blasio really wants to reduce the citys carbon footprint, he should take fewer trips by car from Manhattan to his gym in Brooklyn. He should stop jetting off to Iowa, South Carolina and anywhere else chasing his presidential pipe dream.

That would help.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  Hundreds may have paid their respects at the wake of Paul Castellano, the last Staten Island mob boss to be assassinated, but his funeral was a humble affair.

Several days after the Todt Hill resident and Godfather was gunned down outside a Manhattan steakhouse on Dec. 16, 1985, in a plot orchestrated by the infamous John Gotti, he was quietly laid to rest in a secret grave at Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp, according to Advance archives.

Then-Cardinal John OConnor, the head of the New York Archdiocese, decided not to allow a public funeral for the man who headed the Gambino family, considered at the time the nations most powerful crime organization.

His death is on the minds of many this week due to the parallels it draws to the murder of Francesco (Franky Boy) Cali, also a Staten Island resident and reputed Gambino boss, who was gunned down outside his Hilltop Terrace home Wednesday night. There have been no arrests in that case and authorities are still working to determine whether the motive was mob related.

For Castellanos burial, a 20-car procession traveled to the Richmond Road cemetery, far from the reporters and photographers who had dogged the family since the shocking slaying that captivated the nation.

The late Rev. Vincent Clyne, former pastor of St. Anns R.C. Church in Dongan Hills, was asked to say prayers at the grave, according to Advance archives.

A private mass was held for the family after the burial at Blessed Sacrament R.C. Church in West Brighton.

The cardinals decision to deny Castellano a public funeral was made after a great deal of prayer, Rev. Peter Finn told the Advance at the time.

Holding such a mass was ruled out because of the notoriety of his death and his alleged  and I underline the word alleged  connection to the organized crime syndicate," he said.

In no way do we wish to deny compassion to the family, Father Finn continued. Were sorry for any pain this could cause them.

Were not judging the state of his soul, but we were concerned about the way (a public mass) would appear to the public, he added.

Just several weeks prior, a formal mass was held for Aniello Dellacroce, reputed to have been second in command in the Gambino crime family.

The former Grasmere resident died Dec. 2 after a long battle with cancer.

About 100 people attended the mass in St. Patricks Old Cathedral in Manhattans Little Italy.

In the eulogy, the priest told the audience All of us are sinners and all of us need Gods mercy and compassion. Very few of us will be ready to meet God and have the ecstasy of possessing God.

Outside the church before the mass an Advance photographer was physically escorted from the scene.
On Feb. 27, the U.S. Supreme Court entertained oral arguments in a high-profile case involving the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. At issue in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association is the constitutionality of the Bladensburg Cross, a nearly 40-foot tall concrete and stone memorial erected between 1919 and 1925 by the American Legion and a committee of mothers whose sons were killed in World War I.

The Celtic-style Latin cross stood without complaint for 87 years until the American Humanist Society filed a lawsuit in 2012 claiming that its existence on public land violates the Establishment Clause. On Oct. 17, 2017, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed, ordering that the monument either be razed or altered in such a way as to remove its religious symbolism. The American Legion thereafter successfully petitioned the Supreme Court to hear its appeal from that order.

The American Legion's symbol appears at the intersection of the cross's horizontal and vertical arms, with the words "VALOR," "ENDURANCE," "COURAGE," and "DEVOTION," inscribed on its base. A large plaque on the pedestal declares that the monument is "DEDICATED TO THE HEROES OF PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY, MARYLAND WHO LOST THEIR LIVES IN THE GREAT WAR FOR THE LIBERTY OF THE WORLD". The names of the 49 local men who died in the war also appear on the plaque.

The committee designed the memorial in the shape of a cross to reflect the cross-shaped grave markers under which their sons had been buried in American cemeteries overseas. This sentiment is consistent with the fact that crosses had become a strong cultural image of fallen serviceman in the aftermath of WWI.

Secular commemorations

Although the Bladensburg Cross was originally constructed at the end of National Defense Highway, itself a WWI memorial, increasing traffic and expanding roadways resulted in its winding up in the median of an intersection. In 1961, safety concerns led the American Legion to convey the land to the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission which, in turn, has provided basic grounds-keeping and illumination. The memorial has been used by the Bladensburg community for over 90 years strictly for commemorative events. Further underscoring its purpose as secular rather than religious, several other commemorative monuments have since been erected around it to honor veterans of other wars. In fact, the area is now known as "Veterans Memorial Park".

The transcript of the oral arguments before the Supreme Court is available on the court's website and strongly suggests that at least six Justices will vote to save the Bladensburg Cross. The only Justices certain to dissent are Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, while Justice Elena Kagan appears to be on the fence. The Justices generally telegraph their feelings about cases by the questions they ask. In this case, those feelings for the most part were readily discernible.

The governing precedent for Establishment Clause cases was enunciated by the Supreme Court in its 1971 ruling in Lemon v. Kurtzman. To pass constitutional muster, a challenged statute or other government action must have a secular purpose; its primary effect cannot be to advance or inhibit religion; and it must not result in an excessive government entanglement with religion. It should be noted that the Lemon test is itself controversial, with many courts opining that its difficult to understand and even more difficult to apply.

Rulings impact

Sotomayor, who was overtly hostile to saving the cross, asserted that it is so fundamental to Christianity that faithful Christians would recoil at the idea that it could have a secular purpose. Nonetheless, as several other members of the court pointed out, it did, indeed, have a secular purpose when it was erected, and that secular purpose has been demonstrably reiterated time and again since. A majority of the justices also seemed concerned about the consequences of a ruling against the cross for the many similar, but smaller crosses around the country, including one at Gettysburg dating back to 1888.

Chief Justice John Roberts noted that totem poles can have a spiritual meaning for Native Americans, and wondered aloud whether they, too, would have to be removed from federal property. Similarly, Justice Alito asked whether a Star of David could be erected by a town in memory of those killed at a synagogue.

Justice Stephen Breyer probably hit on the ultimate outcome of the case when he suggested that the Bladensburg Cross and similar existing structures be allowed to stand, but that closer scrutiny be given to any such monuments constructed in the future. A narrow ruling of that nature would preserve existing crosses and similar religious symbols constructed for essentially secular purposes while making it clear that they should be avoided going forward in an increasingly diverse America.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Dozens of Staten Island community members came together Friday to stand in solidarity with New Zealand after 49 people were killed and dozens injured in a mass shooting while worshipping at two Mosques in Christchurch.

Authorities said the attack was carried out by an immigrant-hating white nationalist who live-streamed the horrifying attack on Facebook.

One suspect was arrested and charged with murder, and two other suspects were taken into custody and questioned to determine their role in the attacks, the Associated Press reported.

Organized by Assemblyman Charles Fall (D-North Shore), the unity meeting of community members and inter-faith leaders was held at the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center at 307 Victory Boulevard.

Our community is alive and engaged, and when I say community, I mean the community of Staten Island, said Imam Tahir Kukiqi during an opening prayer.

Assemblyman Fall said he understands the fear and worry that Muslims on Staten Island and around the world are experiencing, but as a Muslim, he said the fear will not stop him from worshiping on Fridays.

Hatred towards one community is hatred towards all communities. Were coming together to send a message that if somebody sends any kind of hatred towards one community, its hatred towards all communities, Fall said.

ISLAND POLICE ON ALERT

Staten Island Borough Commander Kenneth Corey said resources have been deployed at all houses of worship, adding that there is no specific threat at this time.

Cops were not stationed outside of the mosque early Friday morning, but were present during the afternoons meeting. NYPD officers were also stationed outside of a mosque on Burgher Avenue in New Dorp.

NYPD Commissioner James P. ONeill issued a statement earlier, and said the department continues to work closely with state, federal, and international law enforcement partners.

To the Muslim community here in New York: We stand with you always, and we will remain vigilant in keeping you safe -- and making sure you feel safe, too. The people we serve, in every neighborhood, must always be free from fear and have the immutable right to worship and live in peace, ONeill said.

He said the NYPD doesnt see a connection between the New Zealand tragedy and New York City, though there will be increased patrols and high-visibility counterterrorism presence at locations around the city.

We have to stop telegraphing hate. We all want to live, work and worship in peace, said Councilwoman Debi Rose (D-North Shore).

Representatives from Rep. Max Roses (D-Staten Island/South Brooklyn), District Attorney Michael E. McMahon and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringers offices, and other community faith leaders were also in attendance.

We will continue to stay united, Fall said.

An interfaith vigil will be held at the Albanian Cultural Center Friday night at 7 p.m.

--Associated Press material was used in this report.
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Chile has found another use for dams that hold the liquid waste from massive copper-mining operations: power generation.

Calling it the first project of its kind in the world, Anglo American has installed 256 photovoltaic panels at the tailings dam for its Los Bronces complex in Chile. The panels are floating atop the sometimes-toxic ground minerals and effluents blasted out of rocks dug up at the mine.

Anglo American has installed 256 photovoltaic panels at the tailings dam for its Los Bronces complex in Chile. Credit:Bloomberg

The pilot project was expected to generate 150,000 kilowatt-hours a year and help power the operations there, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

While it's not much electricity in the grand scheme of things, Chile Mining Minister Baldo Prokurica hailed the solar project as yet another example of how the country - the world's largest copper producer - is leading the way in improving how miners treat waste.
We do need some of these systems in the aeroplanes to assist the pilot. But they must be fully cognisant of their existence and their use and they must know how to override them." That system - the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) - is designed to prevent a "stall", in which a plane would lose lift, by forcing the plane's nose downward if it is flying at too steep an angle. The Lion Air crash investigation has been centred on whether incorrect sensor data triggered the MCAS system, when it was not needed, and if the pilots knew how to disengage it. Boeing did not tell airlines about the new system prompting fury from pilots groups - particularly in the US, where the carriers American Airlines, Southwest and United have been operating dozens of the new jet.

It has emerged that at least two American pilots reported the MCAS system unexpectedly engaging mid-flight, and that Boeing had promised after the Lion Air crash to fix the system quickly. Boeing says pilots should know how to override a jet's autopilot whether they know about the MCAS or not. Diamond says that in marketing the MAX to airlines, Boeing presented it as a simple update of its popular 737 series, requiring minimal additional training for pilots who already fly 737s - only a few hours of ground training. That was wildly successful. The MAX became the fastest-selling jet in history with about 4600 planes worth about $US550 billion ($775 billion) currently on order.

The FAA has now ordered Boeing to change the MCAS' design and update its training guide to include expensive and time-consuming simulator training. Loading Keith Tonkin knows first-hand what can happen when a new computer program is installed on an aircraft from his time flying F-111 fighter jets for the RAAF from 1996 to 2000. He was one of the first pilots to train on an upgraded model that swapped analogue with digital flight control computers and recalls "pretty interesting" situations in the sky he had to recover from when the new system took over. "Luckily, we did," says Tonkin, who is now an aviation safety expert and managing director of the consultancy Aviation Projects.

"The solution is to go away and work out what the problem was, and then go and tell everyone." That learning process is normal when introducing new flight systems, he says. It is unclear to what extent the crashes could have been prevented with better pilot training or knowledge of how the aircraft operates. The Lion Air investigation crash is still underway, and the Ethiopian probe has only just begun, with the black box flight data and pilot voice recorders arriving in Paris for analysis on Friday. So it is unclear to what extent, if at all, the crashes could have been prevented with better pilot training or knowledge of how the aircraft operates.

Ethiopian Airlines flight 302's pilot had 8000 hours of flying experience but its co-pilot had only 200 hours - which is not enough experience to do that job in the US. "Theres a difference in pilot capabilities around the world so perhaps the aircraft are becoming too sophisticated for their operators," says Tonkin. Foreign investigators examine wreckage at the scene where the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed. Credit:AP "Perhaps it was a glitch in the flight control law, or perhaps it was a lack of understanding in how they worked and how to recover from the situation. "Thats been happening throughout the years when flight control has been more and more automated through a computer rather than just [coming] direct from the pilots hands through a cable to the flight control surfaces.

Prior to last Sunday's disaster, there were about 350 MAX 8 aircraft operating around the globe, but only two airlines flying them into Australia - Singapore's SilkAir and Fiji Airways. Loading SilkAir promptly grounded its planes, and Fiji Airways was given no choice after the Australian regulator stepped in. It's not clear when they will resume service, with the global MAX grounding expected to last at least to the end of April. The jet could eventually become a more familiar sight in our skies though, as Virgin Australia has 40 MAX aircraft on order to start replacing its domestic fleet. The first two were due to arrive in November and December. Virgin has assured the public it will not introduce any of those aircraft to its fleet "unless we are completely satisfied with its safety" - flagging the possibility of pushing back its order.

Reassessing the order - estimated to be worth around $2.6 billion, including a discount for buying in bulk - was already expected to be a priority for Virgin's new chief executive Paul Scurrah when he takes over the airline on March 25, given the airline's string of heavy financial losses. The order had promised outstanding fuel and efficiency savings but that equation has now already changed due to the more onerous pilot training that will be required. If Virgin formally pushed back the order, it would come with financial penalties, while cancelling it outright would be even more expensive for Virgin than a delay. This is going to be a very good aeroplane, but they've had a very significant hiccup. Marcus Diamond Boeing said on Friday it had stopped making deliveries of the new aircraft, but production was continuing apace. That includes wingtips made at a factory in Melbourne.
The cryptocurrency boom appears to be alive and well for Binance, the world's largest digital-asset exchange by trading volume.

One of the hottest coins right now is the Malta-based exchange's eponymous token, Binance Coin, which has more than tripled in value in the last three months to around $US15. The surge comes as the broader digital-asset market is little changed in the wake of last year's collapse that saw the prices of many rivals tumble by more than 90 per cent.

Binance CEO Zhao Changpeng. Credit:Bloomberg

The coin's outperformance is the latest twist in the dramatic rise of Zhao Changpeng, who co-founded the exchange during the 2017 crypto boom and had run-ins with authorities in Japan and Hong Kong before eventually decamping to the European island nation.

"This is the best executing team in crypto," said Tushar Jain, managing partner at hedge fund Multicoin Capital Management in Austin, Texas. "We expect to hold them for the foreseeable future."
Harley Hickey travelled for 10 hours from Walgett to join an estimated 20,000 students who skipped school on Friday to gather at Sydney's Town Hall and call for political action on climate change.

The Sydney turnout was part of 150,000 striking students across Australia and hundreds of thousands more around the world, organisers said.

Harley, 13, who is in year 7, said many people in his community are relying on donated drinking water as the river system dries up.

About 20,000 students skipped school on Friday to call for action on climate change at Sydney Town Hall. Credit:Janie Barrett

"You can't live on donated water forever and we're running out and I don't think the government's doing anything," Harley said.
The Berejiklian government has developed secret plans to lift the height of Warragamba Dam more than publicly announced to take into account the impact of climate change, the Herald understands.

Officially, Infrastructure NSW has been working on a project that would raise the dam wall of Sydney's main reservoir by 14 metres to 144.5 metres, flooding as much as 5000 hectares of the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.

The Warragamba Dam is proposed to be lifted by 14 metres but construction is understood to provide for a future raising to 17 metres. Credit:Edwina Pickles

However, a document seen by the Herald shows construction would involve building 17-metre-high abutments that would permit a later raising with minimal additional work.

The difference between the "operational raise" of 14 metres and the higher "structural" one was to cater for the impact of greater frequency of flooding because of climate change, it said.
New options, new problems Another screening option has become available to women over the past few years: non-invasive prenatal screening (NIPS). NIPS can provide a more accurate and earlier result, at 10 weeks, about the likelihood of the foetus having Down syndrome. It is still only available privately and costs around $500. An application from the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia and Roche Diagnostics Australia Pty Ltd for the inclusion of NIPS on the Medical Benefits Schedule (MBS) is currently sitting with the federal Medical Services Advisory Committee (MSAC) for consideration. MSAC will make a recommendation to the minister for health about whether access to NIPS should be publicly funded and in what circumstances. A robotic genomic testing machine at work in California. Credit:New York Times Despite a consultation period where the views of health professionals and organisations such as Down Syndrome Australia have been put forward, there has been little public debate about this possible change. Significantly, there is no commitment that womens choices about wanted pregnancies will be supported with accurate information about Down syndrome, information beyond the chromosome count.

The marketing material offered by test providers gives scant detail about what a life with Down syndrome might be like, but the message is clear: a positive result for trisomy 21 is undesirable. As Charlotte Fien, a woman with Down syndrome, recently observed when she addressed the United Nations: "They think the world will be better without people like me." But the future is brighter than ever before for people with Down syndrome. Many are fully included in mainstream education, attend university, hold down jobs, live independently and find love. In 2011, research led by Dr Brian Skotko, medical geneticist and co-director of the Down Syndrome Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, found 99 per cent of participants with Down syndrome were happy with their lives. Advancing technology means that health problems like heart conditions, affecting about half of all babies born with Down syndrome, can be corrected soon after birth. And Down syndrome is just the beginning. What would it mean if a genetic test were made available for autism? Do we really want to live in a world where difference is eradicated? The lesson of a Post-it note A few months ago when I was sorting through a drawer at home I found a Post-it note inside the case holding Gretas ultrasound DVD. Scrawled in my handwriting were two sets of numbers. It took me a second to realise what I was looking at. These were the first trimester screening results which I had jotted down when the call had come through from the ultrasound practice.

Next to these numbers, I had written three words the receptionist had said when she told me the results. I cringed as I read them: "Fantastic. Low Risk." I passed the yellow note to my normally unflappable partner. He flinched, passed it straight back to me and said: "Throw it out." Elizabeth Callinan and Brett Murphy with their children Greta, Rory and Jasper. Credit:Eddie Jim I wanted to keep it. It is a reminder of how far I have come. How much I have learnt. It is also a reminder to go easy on others. I have been immersed in the world of Down syndrome for more than a year. I am familiar with the language - and why some is likely to offend. Im still not sure of the best response to the commen, "They are always so happy, arent they?" But I was on the other side not that long ago. This Post-it note is evidence that things can be different, understanding can grow and change is possible. Like me, most women navigating prenatal screening have no close connection to a person with Down syndrome. They dont know what an additional 21st chromosome really means. They just know it is to be screened out. When their results come back "low risk", they breathe a sigh of relief and carry on with their lives. But what about when they receive a result indicating a higher likelihood of Down syndrome? Are presumptions being made in consulting rooms about whether a life is worth living? Down Syndrome Australia CEO Dr Ellen Skladzien has been advocating for a national education program for GPs as well as access to genetic counselling for parents who receive a high-chance result from prenatal screening. She says: "There is an urgent need to ensure families have access to balanced information about what it is really like to have a child with Down syndrome. It is unethical to conduct screening programs without access to appropriate information and counselling."

I wonder what the wider use of non-invasive prenatal testing and other genetic technologies means for our acceptance of and understanding of difference  those differences that are the subject of screening and those that are not? And can we really call it choice, this hard-won right, if women are left to make decisions about continuing pregnancies based on incomplete and inaccurate information? Dr Ellen Skladzien, second from right, of Down Syndrome Australia with members of the Down Syndrome Advisory Network in Sydney. Credit:Leticia Hodson The business of screening For-profit genetic testing companies are big business and growing. One such company, Genea, was sold in August 2018 to a Hong Kong consortium for a reported $300 million. Pathology companies heavily market their screening services to pregnant women. How are they ensuring that the decisions women make based on their screening results are supported by accurate and balanced information? As Dr Elizabeth Oliver, a GP in NSW, wrote in an October 2018 article:

I am not diminishing the unimaginable challenge of raising a child with a disability, or moving one iota from a woman's right to choose. My concern is that the net with which we detect "problems" is thrown wider each year, with a view to generating profit, and seemingly without our notice. No matter where one stands on this issue, can we at least agree that it is serious? Not long after Olivers article was published, New Scientist magazine reported that the company Genomic Prediction had developed a genetic screen to assess the "risk" of low intelligence in IVF embryos. The company is in talks with several IVF clinics in the US with a view to providing this service to customers. The firms co-founder, Professor Stephen Hsu, said: "I think people are going to demand that. If we dont do it, some other company will." A look at Hsu's Twitter account casts an interesting light on this remark. In his pinned tweet, Hsu as a teenage graduate stands shoulder-to-shoulder with world-famous physicist Richard Feynman, who among many other achievements was a key member of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb - a classic case of "if we dont do it, someone else will". The Twitter account of physicist and Genomic Prediction co-founder Stephen Hsu shows Hsu at his graduation with world-famous theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. Credit:Twitter In an interview the month prior to this announcement, Hsu responded to the question of whether society was ready for new genetic technology, saying: "Everyone would be better off because the medical resources will be allocated much more efficiently in the future than they are today."
He called for a "long-overdue root-and-branch reform of the system" and shift in focus to public health and safety rather than suspicious deaths, which are already investigated by the police. "The foundations of the current structure of the coronial system were laid down in 1901. In that year, steam engines  operating at 8 per cent efficiency  were high tech," he said. "Although some of the work of coroners relates to unsolved homicides and suspicious deaths, recent thinking about coroners emphasises their roles in enhancing public health and safety." Former deputy state coroner Hugh Dillon has called for a "long-overdue root-and-branch reform of the system". Credit:Sahlan Hayes Victoria has already trodden this path, with two waves of reforms in the 1980s and the early 2000s. Now, one of the explicit statutory purposes of the Coroners Court of Victoria is to "contribute to the reduction of the number of preventable deaths" through its findings and recommendations. One of the striking and little-known aspects of the NSW coronial system is that the state does not have a standalone, specialist coroner's court, as already exists in every other state but Tasmania. Instead, it uses a "hybrid" model, under the control of the Local Court, where six full-time coroners are employed in Sydney, and country and regional magistrates act as ad hoc coroners across the rest of the state. Dillon has previously said this is a "recipe for mediocre service". "While the current team of full-time coroners based at Lidcombe is an excellent group  possibly the best team NSW has ever had  our system as a whole is not designed for purpose," he said.

Dillon said recent inquiries aimed at trends rather than individual cases, such as the drug-related deaths of "doctor-shopping" patients and the recently announced inquest into deaths at music festivals, "tend to be the exception rather than the rule", especially in country areas. Loading Victorian barrister Dr Ian Freckelton, QC, a leading expert on coronial law, said the hybrid model in NSW "fails to recognise the unique nature and demands of the coroner's jurisdiction" and is "somewhat anachronistic now". He said there was "considerable governmental support" in Victoria for the Coroners Court, a stand-alone, specialist court in Melbourne. In 2008, when a new Coroners Act was passed giving the court an explicit mandate to prevent deaths, the government also established a Coroners Prevention Unit  the first of its kind in Australia  to assist the court to perform that function. The specialist unit supports coroners by providing advice on a range of issues, including "the frequency of previous similar deaths in Victoria, common risk factors ... [and] interventions that are proven or suspected to reduce the incidence of similar deaths", a court spokesperson said.

Freckelton said the unit assisted coroners to "contextualise individual cases in a broader system". The Victorian court is also assisted by the independent Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, which provides expert scientific and medical services underpinning the court's investigations. Freckelton said the Victorian system had "a number of features which can usefully be adapted" in NSW. Court resourcing was another fundamental issue, and "the funding of a larger number of coroners per capita is constructive". "The workload of the jurisdiction is very high and if it's to be done well it's time-consuming, meaning there need to be sufficient coroners and support staff to assist them," he said. Latest figures from the Productivity Commission show NSW's recurrent expenditure on coronial services was $6.6 million in 2017-18, compared to $16.7 million in Victoria and $11.3 million in Queensland. Victoria has 11 full-time coronial positions and Queensland has seven; there are six in NSW.

Dr Marc Trabsky, senior lecturer at La Trobe Law School and deputy director of the university's Centre for Health Law and Society, said "Victoria is held up as a model jurisdiction in Australia". The Coroners Court of Victoria is assisted by the independent Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Credit:AAP He said the Coroners Court of Victoria and the institute, which has close ties to Monash University, work closely together and had shown a "capacity to handle mass deaths during the 2009 [Black Saturday] bushfires". Both were called on to go to the Netherlands to assist in the disaster victim identification process after the MH17 plane crash in 2014 and were "the port of call for the repatriation of the Australians who died tragically in that disaster". David Ranson, deputy director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and its head of forensic services, said "the point that I often make is that death investigation is a political process".
In my vocabulary, the word "strike" is synonymous with "unions" and "Labor". Was the student "strike" germinated totally within the student body, or do the students live and learn in a "guided democracy", with suggestions from some of their socialist teachers? Is this a political stunt? We do have two elections looming. - Tim Wynn Jones, Homebush I find it incongruous for the political class to claim that students are being used as pawns. Political representatives of all alignments have for decades been used as pawns by mining, gambling, alcohol and other self-interest lobby groups. The students are acting on their collective conscience and desire for a future on this planet. The only negative is that it has had to come to this, kids trying to get adults to act responsibly. Talk about the kettle and the pot. - Vincent Cleary, Cremorne I am heartened that school kids defied the politicians' silly advice. It's their future and it's a sadly depleted environment they will inherit; urgent change is required. It's the policies of past and present governments largely to blame for our plight. - Roger Johnson, New Lambton Heights

We have far more to fear from apathy on climate change than any strike. The students give me real hope for our future. - Anne Garvan, Chatswood West And people complain about the youth of today is self-interested. Self-interest: politicians have it down to a fine art. - Deirdree Wallwork, Beecroft It's right to be rational on Pell Waleed Aly's column on George Pell was one of the best I've ever read ("Why justice isn't left to victims", March 15). I think that the "outrage culture" so prevalent in recent years demeans us all. Aly reminds us that anger, especially collective anger, "should not be our only moral resource". And that true justice should not be a matter of seeking vengeance but in applying a punishment that preserves the dignity of us all.

We are, none of us, perfect. Denying compassion and dignity to others makes us less than we should be: fully human. - Jen Hacker, Ettalong Beach Revenge is a real, but somewhat primitive, response to wrongdoing but as we strive for a rational and enlightened future this response needs to be examined. Judge Kidd went a good way in this cause and we hope his judgment resonates and endures. - Richard Hambly, Potts Point Aly has hit the nail on the head. Justice is a balancing act of competing interests, such as punishment fitting the crime and recognising any mitigating factors relevant to the wrongdoer. One aspect was overlooked. Judge Kidd expressly mentioned that Pell maintained his innocence and that he has a right to do so. This may have been a reference to the upcoming appeal, which is critical in our system to ensure that justice is done. - Michael Blissenden, Dural

Our culture offers far too many incitements to judge and punish, and not nearly enough invitations to understand and forgive. - Michael Hinchey, New Lambton How wonderful a world we would live in if we all considered others before our own selfish need to judge and sentence so readily. Chief Judge Peter Kidd simply got it right. - Trish Lee, Castle Hill Brexit mess has nation in turmoil It's like they can't decide which foot they want to shoot ("Muppet! Traitor! Spineless! Insults fly as MPs kick the Brexit can. Again", March 15). - Richard Murnane, Hornsby

The problem with the Brexit referendum is that during the previous campaign fallacious information was spread by both sides, that real evaluation of the financial and commercial consequences of leaving the EEC was almost completely lacking, and that generous financial donations were accepted from extremely dubious sources (Letters, March 15). This surely makes makes a second referendum not merely desirable but necessary in the interests of clearing up the mess created by the unreliable result of the first. - Derek Parker, Mosman For those who claim holding a second Brexit referendum would be undemocratic I would point out that ancient Athens, the cradle of Western democracy, had no such qualms. In 427 BCE the city of Mytilene revolted and the citizens of Athens voted to put all the males of the city to death. The next day cooler heads prevailed and a second vote was taken which rescinded the first vote. A galley carrying the rescission raced to Mytilene arriving just in time to stop the massacre. A lesson for Brexit perhaps? - Tony De Lyall, Bulli Not everybody voted on that fateful day. It should be compulsory voting to achieve the true outcome. - Branco Gaica, Redfern

Premier risks defeat over stadium I've lost count of the number of elections in NSW when a vote for either major party made little or no difference but this time the government has given voters one clear reason to kick them out ("Demolition ramps up on eve of last-ditch appeal", March 15). That, of course, is the stadium obsession. It is nigh on impossible to understand why the Premier would run the risk of election defeat by insisting on spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a project that benefits so few. - Alan Lees, Lane Cove Good on you Premier, let's get that stadium demolition far enough underway that it makes it impractical to reverse the decision after the election . It's reminiscent of Queensland politics of the 1970s where the demolition bulldozers turned up at midnight, away from prying eyes and protesters. - John Mizon, Collaroy

The Morrison tax cuts and the Berejiklian stadium demolition are similarly motivated: vandalism of the respective budgets for federal and state Labor, so that the anticipated Labor governments will have less money with which to manage the two economies. The Premier wants Michael Daley to inherit a larger bill to restore Allianz Stadium, just when the stamp duty take is in decline due to a slump in property sales. - Kim Woo, Mascot Money from misery The Morrison government seems to believe that asylum seekers shouldn't try to come to Australia but that, if they do, then we have a duty to make sure that private providers of services can benefit handsomely from their detention ("Milking millions from Manus", March 15) . - Norm Neill, Darlinghurst Expensive workhorse

Farmers have voiced their concern about Labor's proposed "luxury car" tax ("Daley nurses wound over blunder", March 15). Could a work ute cost in excess of $100,000? - John Temple, Rose Bay Degree of dependence In UTS academic In Jenna Price's article on the possibility of university admission scams existing in Australia there's a giant, lumbering elephant in the room that's unmentioned ("We're not immune to uni admission scams", March 15) . Education services have become Australia's third largest export behind coal and iron ore. The government is now chronically dependent on the revenue created by full-fee paying foreign students. I shudder to think what effect that might be having on the opportunities for Australian children. - Tim Egan, Mosman Franchise probe too late Another great investigative report by Adele Ferguson ("Jig is up for shameful, out of control $170b industry", March 15). My concern at all these recent investigations, such as this one into the franchising industry, is that they are occurring so late in the destruction process that has occurred to people's lives. This franchising problem has been around for years.

The agonising process to now get the government to do something has been repeated over recent years. But what have our political leaders been doing to keep watch on the operations of the various parts of our economy and their impacts on our community? - Robert Mulas, Corlette Silence is golden Someone might remind Malcolm Turnbull of the adage "a still tongue in a wise head" ("Premier hurt by 'idiocy': Turnbull", March 15). Many notable comments have been made on Turnbull's poor judgment. As a political has-been, issuing 11th hour hypocritical claims that "idiocy and ideology in the energy debate" will damage the Berejiklian election campaign, might do more damage to the sinking ship of climate and energy policy vandals. - Robyn Dalziell, Kellyville Easy water target

The Australia Institute's latest report is yet another bashing of an industry significantly struggling through drought, while masquerading as an attempt to save the river (" 'River debt' spells parched future for basin", March 15). The current cotton crop is being grown using water primarily carried over from the high rainfall year in 2016, bore water, or dryland. There have been zero new water allocations in the northern NSW catchments and our crop will be half the usual size. The Institute's claim the Barwon-Darling River owes irrigators some 635 gigalitres, because it has a credit of that on the Murray-Darling Basin Cap Register, is wrong. In the 25 years since the cap was put in place, Barwon-Darling water users have extracted 635 gigalitres less water than would have been allowed if water reform had stopped with the introduction of the cap. The report also fails to acknowledge three key points: every river valley in the basin is in cap credit; total cumulative cap credits across the basin are 19,242 gigalitres (at 2017), proving water reform is working; cap credit accounting is to become obsolete, with accounting soon aligning against the basin plan's sustainable diversion limits  not because the cap register system is broken, but because it is appropriate to reset the benchmark at the much tougher levels set by the plan. Bashing the cotton industry with a clumsy manipulation of data to suit an entrenched agenda won't save the river from this crippling drought. - Michael Murray, Cotton Australia General Manager Out of this world

I'm currently recording a podcast to expound my theory that it was little green aliens who actually killed Kennedy and kidnapped Harold Holt, who is now residing on planet Zeebrox. I look forward to Pete Evans' endorsement ("Paleo chef endorses anti-vaxxer US podcast", March 15). - Matt Petersen, Randwick Nod as bad as a wink Note to election organisers and political reporters: try to interview talking heads without several nodding heads in the background. Not only is it distracting, it makes the noddies look not very smart. - Don Leayr, Albury As we consider our votes at the coming elections, trying to balance the good with the bad of the policies offered by various parties, could the politicians please desist from considering a victory as a mandate for each and every one of those policies in the terms to come?

Only a referendum could give them that. - Kathleen Chivers, Vincentia Banks keep the change So much for the banks' promised culture change. Something about leopard can't change its spots ("ASIC attacks bank attitudes to regulations", March 15). - Steve Ngeow,Chatswood Postscript "I am pleased my letter on the ever expanding boundaries of the Inner West entered a second week," boasted Dale Bailey, of Five Dock aka Mid-Western Sydney. "Is this a record? So Sydney  just mention real estate." And indeed the letters kept coming, blossoming into musings about the gradation of Mount Lewis near Punchbowl and couples with matching names. Love them we did but not wanting to turn the columns into the Pepsi to Column 8's Coke, we called a halt. "Having grown up there, I can assure you Castle Cove has both a castle and a cove," offered Stephen Manns, of Woollahra (yes, it's hard to give em up cold).
After she tweeted that she would chop off the Prime Minister's head, you're not likely to see Becky Lucas on Twitter. Ever again.

But the rising comedian, who has opened for US TV stalwart Conan O'Brien and who will be in Brisbane this week for the Brisbane Comedy Festival, says the tweet was a joke.

Each of Becky Lucas experiences, from the lows to the highs, has shaped her, her shows and her comedic style.

A joke that landed her a permanent ban from the social media platform.

I tweeted at Scott Morrison that I was going to chop his head off as a joke and Twitter seemed to think that was a threat," Lucas said.
South Africa: Communications Minister lauds technology of the future

Communications Minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams has lauded a pioneering middle ear transplant at Steve Biko Academic Hospital this week that resulted in a 35-year-old man regaining his hearing.

As South Africa we are very proud of Professor [Mashudu] Tshifularos achievement, Ndabeni Abrahams told SAnews on Friday.

The procedure, which involved the use of 3D-printed middle ear bones, was developed by Professor Tshifularo and his team at the University of Pretoria.

The ground-breaking procedure on the man, who had lost his hearing in a car accident, may be the answer to conductive hearing loss. The condition is caused by congenital birth defects, infection, trauma or metabolic diseases.

[The procedure] is one of a kind and as a country we feel like we can build more by identifying our own opportunities in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, said the Minister.

Ndabeni-Abrahams on Friday, together with multinational company Nokia, hosted a Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) Innovation Day at the companys offices in Centurion.

The event saw government officials and young people who are beneficiaries of the TechnoGirl programme being exposed to technological innovations that improve the quality of learning, conservation and fashion, among others.

The Minister is the ambassador of TechnoGirl, the job-shadowing programme for girls. The programme is biased towards careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

She said the Professors achievement is evidence of how technology can assist communities.

We say 4IR is the way to go, she said.

Earlier in the day the Minister interacted with young people who were impressed with the way that technology is changing the world.

She urged learners to pursue careers within STEM.

The Minister also tried her hand at one of the demonstrations on site. The demonstration showed how technology can be utilised on online clothing platforms where by the application can take virtual measurements of person without one having to leave the comfort of home.

The connected retail application, among other things, measures waist circumference which it then uses to allocate the right size of clothing that a consumer wants to buy, thereby revolutionising the way the world shops.

Another application on display at the Nokia premises is that of how technology is used in animal conservation efforts. The technology uses 360/degree video analysis in real time to protect humans and animals in nature reserves.

This demonstration made use of the Rietvlei Nature Reserve in Pretoria.

Filmmaker Relobogile Maifadi who is doing a one-year learnership at the Leadership in Motion (LIMA) academy located in Eersterust, was impressed at how innovation is changing the world.

The experience here was wonderful because we learned about technologys innovative ways and how its constantly evolving and growing at a fast pace. We were also exposed to how we can use technology to work effectively and t produce content of a benefit to other people as well, said Maifadi.

The departments partnership with LIMA seeks to empower students at the Pretoria township film academy started by actor Thato Molamu, with relevant 4IR skills for the creative sector professional. SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2019-03-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
They include the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Public Security, Defence, Information and Communications; the Government office; the People Committees of Hanoi, Hai Phong, Hai Duong, Lang Son, and Quang Ninh; and the National Convention Centre.

On the occasion, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc sent complement letters to the Vietnam News Agency, Radio The Voice of Vietnam and the Vietnam Television for their efforts in popularising these important diplomatic events.

Speaking at the event, Head of the Party Central Committees Commission for Communication and Education Vo Van Thuong said information related to the summit, the second of its kind, and the visits by DPRK and US leaders to Vietnam was richly reflected in a variety of ways, meeting the requirement at home and abroad for information.

He appreciated the spirit and working attitude of domestic news agencies, saying that the event offered a good chance for them to collect valuable lessons and learn from experience of foreign news agencies.

In his speech at the conference, Prime Minister Phuc praised outstanding efforts of leaders and staff of the above-mentioned ministries, sectors and localities, affirming that great endeavour of relevant agencies, organisations, localities and individuals brought about the success of the organization work for the summit and the reception for the leaders.

The success helps Vietnam improve its position, he said, adding that it also affirmed the countrys huge contributions to the common work of the region and the world.

This was a good preparation for Vietnams candidacy for a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council in the 2020-2021 tenure, and helped strengthen confidence of overseas Vietnamese abroad in the leadership of the Party and State, the PM stressed.

He also highly valued a number of units for their initiatives in organising the related events.

He asked sectors and localities to fully tap opportunities brought by the events to boost socio-economic development, promote the image of Vietnams nation and people and tourism potential, and attract investment.
Mountaineer Neill Johanson was guiding a group marking the centenary of Gallipoli to Everest base camp when, quite literally, the earth shook.

The Sydney architect said: "We had just finished commemorating that event when the whole world changed.

Neill Johanson with pupils from the remote Garma school.

"You see it in movies. All the birds and horses go crazy and across the valley I could see this 6500-metre mountain range starting to sway like jelly. You could see the shockwave move through the range. The building that we had just come out of started to fall apart and the track that we had been walking on collapsed.

"We finally made our way to Lukla over a few days, which is where you fly out of, and that was the morgue. That was a very confronting and desperate place to be."
Leaders from around the world condemned Friday's brutal terror attack in Christchurch that left 49 people dead and dozens more injured.

Australian man Brenton Tarrant, 28, has been taken into custody as a key suspect in the attack at two Mosques in central Christchurch and appeared in court on Saturday morning.

'Home grown love for all': Locals lay flowers near the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch on Saturday morning. Credit:Jason South

Tarrant live-streamed himself shooting indiscriminately at worshippers just after 1.30 New Zealand time.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison named the incident as right-wing terrorism and said his thoughts and prayers were with the Muslim communities in Australia and New Zealand.
This was disclosed in the Legislative Assembly yesterday by the Minister for Education (Mr. Bloomfield) when he gave formal notice of legislation to establish the university.

Victorias proposed second university will be called the Monash University, in honor of the late General Sir John Monash.

Sir John Monash arrives by train in Sydney for unveiling of Cenotaph on February 21, 1929 Credit:National Library of Australia

Mr. Bloomfield will give the second reading introduction of the bill in the Assembly today.

He disclosed yesterday that the name Monash had been first suggested, to his knowledge, by a correspondent in The Age some months ago.

Australian Prime Minister, W.M. Hughes and General Sir John Monash on the Western Front, WWI. Credit:Australian War Memorial

[The correspondent was Dr. R. G Gillis, of Curral Rd, Elsternwick, whose letter was published on December 14. Dr. Gillis is a chemist with the defence standards laboratories, Department of Supply. In his letter he said he and Dr. J. M. Swan, of the C.S.I.R.O had jointly suggested in 1956 that the name Monash should be given to the then proposed university of technology]

Sir John Monash, who was commander of the Australian Army in France at the end of the First World War, was Chancellor of the University of Melbourne from 1923 until his death in 1931.
A man accused of murdering Perth mother Rebecca Delalande  who has not been seen since 2001  has had his application for bail dismissed.

Chris Blennerhassett, 45, was charged late last year with the murder of Ms Delalande, whose remains have not been found.

Police put out a call for information last year about Rebecca Delalande. Credit:WA Police

Mr Blennerhassett was charged just several days after police and Ms Delalande's mother launched a fresh appeal for information about her disappearance.

Police have previously said Ms Delalande was last seen at a home on Fortunella Grove in Seville Grove on November 5, 2001.
I'm the same as Jana pretty much, I've gone to bed wondering about death and when I'm going to die because I've been scared of climate change. Kate Thompson and Lily Rice. Credit:Cameron Myles Perth university students Kate Thompson and Lily Rice, both 19, said they were inspired by the children who had turned out to the march. This is a ridiculous issue that nothing is being done about, Ms Thompson said. It just makes me so, so angry. We're both from Margaret River, so we're both from the country down south and we see the effects pretty much instantly.

Ms Rice said she was proud of the turn-out to the event. Because we're from Margaret River, there's not many opportunities to be heard and make a difference. Whereas here, rocking up, it feels so good to be able to show a tiny change and just show you support it, she said. Eight-year-old Mieke and her seven-year-old brother Nate came along to the march with their father, and Mieke said she had spent a lot of time working on her signs and colouring them in. Meike and her brother Nate. Credit:Cameron Myles [My sign] took maybe a day to make, and this one took just one day or something, she said, pointing to her brothers sign.

I thought of it myself, but dad helped me. I wanted to come today because I wanted to save the planet. Ursula, 10, also attended the march with her father Tim. Dad's found a message about it and he asked me if I wanted to come and I said yes, she said. She said her father had also helped her with her sign. One of the event organisers, Year 11 student Daniele Parker, said that her interest had been piqued after she saw a poster about climate change.

But she had never been taught anything about the issue in high school, so she started to do her own research, reading news articles online. Climate change is a dire issue that needs to be acted on now, she said. Ursula, 10, and her dad Tim. Credit:Cameron Myles It will decide the course of the future. Its very crazy to organise [events like this] but there is strength in numbers.

My parents have their concerns and I understand that, but they are proud that I am taking matters into my own hands and making my own decisions. She said what worried her most about climate change was the injustice of it. People live on islands that wont exist by 2030, she said. And who is to blame for that? Australia already has concerns about taking refugees. Where will these people live?

Most adults in our schools are under strict restrictions not to even speak to us about this stuff. We have to make these decisions and research on our own ... the adults we know cant even give us advice. Ill be marked truant and I will no longer have a good standing at school. Ill have to catch up on ATAR assessments. But its 100 per cent worth it. Later in the day, students staged a sit-in on the corner of the Esplanade and Williams Street, close by to the Australasian Oil & Gas Exhibition & Conference that is currently under way at the Perth Convention Centre. It is the final day of the conference, and WA Greens senator Jordon Steele-john said it was important the industry took notice of the massive turn-out.

It sends a message that enough is enough, he said. Young people have had it with politicians who are willing to send our future to the highest fossil fuel bidder. They demand courage and conviction from their political leaders and that's why they're here today. The fundamental spineless of the McGowan government in relation to the EPA decision was shocking, and I have low expectations for the McGowan government in that regard. They can't even bring themselves to recognise the reality that if you're going to dig this stuff up then you should at least have a plan to offset it, let alone the actual fact that you can't dig it up in the first place. They've got to get their act together and if they don't these young people will not give them any peace until they do.
UPDATE A man has died in hospital overnight after being stabbed in Claremont on Tuesday afternoon.

Police have charged a 46-year-old woman over the incident.

A woman has been charged over the incident, which left the 57-year-old victim in a critical condition in a Perth hospital.

Police on Saturday announced the man had died on Friday night, and said the 46-year-old woman's initial charge of intent to do grievous bodily harm may be reviewed pending the outcome of a Homicide Squad investigation.

As first reported by WAtoday on Wednesday, the man was found at a house on Mount Street, Claremont about 4pm on Tuesday afternoon.
There was a constant line of people who needed to stand and wait until they could talk to the triage nurse. It was 12 people deep at its worst, and six at its best. But this was not bad in comparison to the previous week. The line often went out the hospital's front door with patients standing outside on the path. People waiting outside until they could wait inside. About 20 or so others were left sitting in the room, they had already been seen by one of the two triage nurses rostered on. Too sick to stand A wait in line often takes 40 minutes. This is bullshit! Were all sick and cant stand here waiting to see a doctor, one man yelled, saying he had recently had brain surgery and needed help with his tumour which he said felt like it was falling out of his nose.

Im in pain, were all in pain and we cant sit down because well lose our spot in the line Patient The distressed middle-aged man was now standing third in line. He was flanked by several frail elderly people, one in a wheelchair and another using a walking stick, struggling to stand or even sit, they were in so much pain. One lady was leaning over a walker and another over a nearby chair just so they wouldnt lose their place in the queue. Im in pain, were all in pain and we cant sit down because well lose our spot in the line, the man explained. Why are there only two windows open?

Im going to have to wait three hours. I already went to a doctor and was told to come to hospital so here I am. Ive just had a tumour removed a week ago, and see this (pointing to his head), its hanging out of my nose. Ambulance ramping at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital on Monday. At one point there were eight parked outside ED. Credit:Lauren Pilat A young nurse approached the man as he stood in line trying to calm him down, asking him to lower his voice. Within minutes at least five additional nurses and four security guards were on-hand. The staffs quick action is understandable, with a recent increase in violence and aggression towards the hospitals ED staff. Im not going to hurt you or anyone, Im not mad at you, Im ashamed of the system, the man explained, emotional at the situation he found himself in.

This is the best hospital in Perth and look at it, were all going to have to wait for ages. Its not on, we all pay our taxes. Why cant you put another staff member on? Within about 10 minutes the man was taken to the second waiting room in a wheelchair by a nurse. Is anyone waiting to see a doctor?

The mans outburst came after a female staff member addressed the people waiting in line by asking the somewhat absurd question: Is anyone waiting to see a doctor? The staff member went on to consult with an elderly lady in a wheelchair at the front of the line, saying she was unable to take her through yet as they were too busy. The elderly woman was forced to discuss her personal health concerns with the doctor in front of other waiting patients. The same happened with several other patients; one a 78-year-old man who had to share his graphic health issues after a recent surgery in detail with a doctor who told him there was not enough beds.

When the elderly man was eventually taken through to the department, his wife was told she couldnt come with him and would have to stay in the waiting room. There was no room for family who wished to support their unwell loved one. Patients caring for patients At one stage a woman entered the room shaking with tears streaming down her face from pain, confused about who to see and what to do. While she cried silent tears, the loud cries of another woman echoed around the room as her carer attempted to calm her. A patient sitting down nursing her own wounded forearm assisted the woman shaking uncontrollably and walked her from the back of the line to the nurses window to get someones attention. A male nurse saw to the convulsing woman before asking her to have a seat and wait for him to return. In the meantime a male patient left the back of the line to sit with the woman and console her. The nurse eventually returned and escorted the woman through to the department.

Meanwhile, an ambulance officer and several nurses were waiting with patients who had nobody with them for support. Waiting room medicine - no privacy here On several occasions nurses came out to assist patients, saying the hospital was at capacity and there was no room in the ED. Instead they were forced to consult with people in the waiting room. On four separate occasions in the space of two-and-a-half hours nurses brought out a trolley with a blood pressure machine and thermometer, testing patients levels as they sat there. One elderly patient in a wheelchair was given panadol while waiting to be taken in to the department to relieve her pain. The nurse said shed have to administer the medicine in the waiting room because she was unable to give an estimated wait time of when shed see a doctor.

At SCGH waiting room medicine has become common practice. Staff are reluctant to be responsible for triage under such stressful conditions, scared of being blamed if something goes wrong while they are struggling to cope with the overcrowding. The staffs concerns come after a death in the hospitals waiting room two years ago was linked to inadequate staffing levels and ramping, as revealed by Dr Allely earlier this week. Four Hour Rule On the waiting room wall on Monday, under the Four Hour Rule poster - a government policy designed to ensure patients do not wait too long for treatment - is a sign showing the hospital met the rule 64 per cent of the time in the week ending March 3.
Smokers will need to make sure their glasses are clean by Monday as a raft of new regulations come into force including changes to the allowable size of cigarette and tobacco price boards to no larger than an A4 sheet of paper.

The tough new amendments to the Tobacco Products Control Act 2006, announced in September last year, were gazetted on Monday and come into effect after the weekend.

Smokers will have to squint to figure out the price of cigarettes under new laws.

Changes to the signage include the smaller price boards and updated graphic health warnings to be displayed next to where tobacco information is displayed.

Smoking will also be banned within five metres of a public entrance to an enclosed public place, and within 10 metres of air conditioning intakes. The fine is $1000.
Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has warned the "idiocy" of a renewed fight over coal-fired power among federal MPs is damaging the chances of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian as she fights the knife-edge state election.

Several NSW ministers, including the leader and deputy leader of the Nationals, also blamed ongoing instability in Canberra for undermining the state campaign at a critical time.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull says Canberra is damaging the NSW government. Credit:Janie Barrett

Mr Turnbull said it was "obvious" ongoing distractions and infighting within the Coalition - such as fresh talk of challenge to Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack's leadership of the Nationals - was hurting the Liberal government's hopes of holding power at the poll in just nine days.

"You havent worked out how damaging it is? Clearly all of the distraction from the feds is unhelpful. Thats obvious," he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Bondi Junction.
An Australian citizen has been detained as the key suspect in a deadly terrorist assault Prime Minister Scott Morrison has condemned as a "vicious, murderous attack" on people of faith.

Mr Morrison revealed an investigation has been launched after security agencies told him the man believed to be behind the storming of mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch was an Australian-born citizen.

"We are outraged and we stand here and condemn absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing violent terrorist who has taken the lives, stolen lives, in a vicious, murderous attack that has claimed so many New Zealanders," Mr Morrison said from Kirribilli House in Sydney.

More than 40 people inside and outside the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburbs have been killed. New Zealand police have taken four people into custody.
High-profile Liberal MP Craig Laundy says he will leave the "very unusual" world of federal politics behind to spend more time with his family as he becomes the seventh minister or former minister to jump ship from the Morrison government.

Mr Laundy, a staunch ally of ousted prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, said his family had faced a number of challenges over the past year and it was time to focus on their needs.

Former workplace minister Craig Laundy has confirmed he will quit politics at the federal election. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

His decision creates a vacancy in the marginal seat of Reid, one of a number of vulnerable Coalition-held electorates in NSW, and puts pressure on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to find a suitable candidate in a short period of time.

"The reality of modern politics is that, more often than not, a member of Parliament has to put their constituents ahead of their family - something I've done over the past six years," Mr Laundy told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Jerusalem: The Israeli military has returned fire in the Gaza strip, after being hit by rockets aimed at Tel Aviv overnight.

It launched air strikes on "terror sites" in Khan Younis, about 25 kilometres south of Gaza City, early on Friday.

Warplanes could be heard flying overhead and smoke from the explosions could be seen in the distance.

The army said it was targeting "terror sites" in a statement. It gave no further details.
A manifesto allegedly written by the suspect in the Christchurch mosque attack that left 49 people dead and scores more injured claimed inspiration from Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik and suggested that the pair had been in "brief contact".

Breivik, who killed 77 people on July 22, 2011 in a bomb attack in Oslo and a mass shooting at a summer camp for children, is currently serving a 21-year sentence in a prison near the city of Skien.

The manifesto posted online by Australian man Brendan Tarrant moments before the Christchurch shooting contains many references to online culture. Many of the claims in the manifesto are uncorroborated and some appear to be designed to mislead.

Speaking to the Norwegian newspaper VG, Breivik's lawyer ystein Storrvik said that his client has very little access to the outside world and he found it hard to believe that the two could have been in contact. "In practice, Breivik is cut off from the outside world," Storrvik said.
London: British counter terror police have stepped up "reassurance patrols" around mosques in London, in the wake of the Christchurch terror attack that killed 49 people and shocked the world.

As Britain woke up to the news, members of the Royal Family, led by the Queen and political leaders issued heartfelt condolences. The House of Commons held a minute's silence.

Police officers patrol the area outside Finsbury Park Mosque in London following the Christchurch mosque attacks, as worshipers begin to arrive for the Friday prayer service. Credit:AP

At least 49 people died after an Australian far-right extremist opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch. A man in his late 20s appeared in court on Saturday morning. He was charged with one count of murder and remanded in custody until April 5.

Mosques in New Zealand remained closed after the attack.
PHILIPSBURG:---Twenty-nine students from sixteen local primary schools and two schools from Anguilla participated in the 2018 Scotiabank and Rotary-Rotaract Spelling Bee. The Rotary Club of St. Maarten-Mid Isle invited two persons from each school that participated in the Spelling Bee to their meeting on Tuesday, March 12th at Wasabi Charlie to receive their wish list items. Each school that participated was asked to submit a wish list of three items that their prospective school needed.

Joining Mid Isle at their meeting were representatives from The Seventh Day Adventist School, Asha Stevens Hillside Christian School, The Ruby Labega, Oranje Primary School, Dr. M. Luther King Jr School, M.G. De Weever School, Sister Regina School, The St Dominic Primary School, St. Joseph School, MAC John A. Gumbs Campus School and MAC Maillard Campus. Unfortunately, the Leonald Conner school and the schools from Anguilla were unable to attend. Their items will be presented at a later date.

Items on the wish list included Smart TVs, Letter cutter, heavy duty stapler, laminating machine, arts and craft materials, speaker, printer/scanner/copier, playground equipment, copy paper, bulletin boards, toner, picnic tables, art easels, an outdoor water cooler, projectors, radio, standing fans, tablets, digital camera and air fryer.

Chairlady of the 2018 Scotiabank and Rotary-Rotaract Spelling Bee Grace Linger said that it was a pleasure hosting the Spelling Bee last year and that she is looking forward to the Spelling Bee in October this year. She also informed the schools, that she will not be the chair for this year but that she will fully support the new chair, who will take over.

After the presentation, New Generations Director Jon Hart was introduced as the Chairman for the 2019 Spelling Bee. He informed the gathering that the 2019 spelling bee will be held on October 20th, 27th and November 3rd, 2019 and once again due to popular demand: the tutorials will be held prior to the spelling Bee.

The objective of this Spelling Bee was to improve literacy and enhance the students educational experience. Once again with Scotiabanks commitment, Mid Isle was able to bring off another successful Spelling Bee.

President Denise Antrobus said it takes a team to pull off an event like this and went on to thank Scotiabank the main sponsor, all Mid Isle Rotarians, Rotaractors, Interactors, all sponsors, donors, participants, teachers, family, friends and supporters without whom this Spelling Bee would not have been as successful as it was. We look forward to your support for the 2019 Spelling Bee.

The Rotary Club of St. Maarten-Mid Isle meets Tuesday at 7pm at Pineapple Pete in Simpson Bay. For more information please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or visit our face book page Rotary Club of St. Maarten-Mid Isle.
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.
4 smart ways to use security to power the business of the future

In the new era of work, our relationship with the workplace is defined by flexibility and mobility. Employees are working across the home, office, and blended spaces more than ever before, as well as working varied hours to suit the modern work schedule. This new hybrid workforce model holds the potential for more diverse talent and better productivity, but it also comes with its challenges  one being how to ensure security, health, and safety in the workplace. Strong and smart security ecosystem While nearly one-third of companies report that theyve implemented a hybrid model, according to a recent survey by STANLEY Security, many still have much to do to prepare their office for the future. Building a strong  and smart  security ecosystem is crucial in preparing for the future. As such, businesses should consider technologies that help protect their people, as well as safeguard their assets, optimise their operations, and secure their network. 1)Protect your people Implementation of a security ecosystem combines health, safety, and security hardware and software solutions seamlessly Nearly 60% of mid-market and enterprise businesses across the UK and US report that the health and safety of their employees and customers are a primary concern when implementing modern and hybrid working models. This begs the question: How can businesses create a safe and healthy work environment when 59% are planning to bring employees back on-site in some capacity within the next 18 months? The answer lies, in part, in the implementation of a security ecosystem that combines various health, safety, and security hardware and software solutions seamlessly. Integrating platform Nearly half (46%) of business decision-makers say they are interested in adopting an integrated platform such as this. This means integrating traditional and digital security solutions, then leveraging the data and insights they produce to further enhance the workplace experience. Take this example: With employees and visitors moving in and out of the office at different times, a business may lack oversight of occupancy or density levels, people flow, workspace scheduling, visitor check-in processes, and more. However, with visitor management, access control, and other building/business systems integrated, employees can reserve a workspace for a specific date and time and be granted access to the building. Leveraging AI and machine learning Visitors can pre-register, answer a health screening questionnaire, and receive a mobile credential before arriving. Once the visitor arrives on-site, the system can alert the respective department  all without the close contact typically required for traditional visitor check-in processes. When layering artificial intelligence and machine learning on top of the data, a business may identify trends in people flow and opportunities to optimise congested areas. They may also see that certain rooms within the building get more use than others and leverage these insights to manage their space more effectively. All of this is powered by a security ecosystem that can help a business better protect its people while realising other benefits in the process. 2) Safeguard your assets Businesses are concerned about the security of their assets when it comes to the hybrid workforce model Even more, businesses are concerned about the security of their assets when it comes to the hybrid workforce model. About 72% of leaders say this is, in fact, their primary concern with the hybrid approach. This figure isnt surprising when you consider the impact of the pandemic, which left many businesses closed either temporarily or permanently, with few people allowed on-site to manage facility operations. As a result of the pandemic, we saw tech adoption accelerate at an astonishing rate  simply because businesses had to implement cloud and remote technologies to survive during a time when buildings were closed indefinitely. Remote management and visibility This was particularly true for security solutions, such as cloud video surveillance and cloud access control solutions like wireless IoT-connected locks. Nine out of 10 businesses (91%) report that they have already implemented cloud security technology; of those, nearly half (48%) stated that this was due to the pandemic. These technologies allow for remote management and provide visibility into business operations at the same time. In a retail setting, for example, cloud video surveillance allows businesses to identify and track not only criminal activity, but also foot traffic patterns, peak operating hours, staff shortages, and more. Loss prevention strategy When integrated with the retailers point-of-sale (POS) system, businesses can gain greater insights into their traffic counts, end cap effectiveness, loyalty card activity, and a variety of POS exceptions, such as high-dollar transactions, repeated transactions, excessive returns, employee discounts, and more. For retailers especially, a security ecosystem means a more efficient loss prevention strategy that helps safeguard assets and profits. 3) Optimise your operations The future of work is still very much a work in progress, but one thing is clear: Businesses are looking for ways to increase efficiencies, drive cost savings, and, ultimately, optimise their operations  especially now with the challenges posed by price inflation. A relatively untapped opportunity for businesses to achieve these goals lies within their security infrastructure. Security technology and solutions gather incredibly rich data which, when unlocked, can help businesses understand how their buildings are being used, when the busiest times are, where there are highly trafficked areas, and more. Leveraging cloud video surveillance systems, businesses could identify emerging staff training needs Cloud video surveillance systems For example, by leveraging the insights produced by cloud video surveillance systems, businesses could identify emerging staff training needs, which could ultimately result in improved employee satisfaction and reduced attrition. However, much of this data sits untouched within the infrastructure, leaving businesses unaware of the opportunities in front of them. 44% of businesses that currently use a cloud security system for its primary use say they want to know how else this technology can be utilised, and an additional 20% arent even aware that it could be used in other ways. AI and analytics The interest in adoption is promising for the office of the future, especially when we see that the majority of businesses (78%) would consider using AI and analytics technologies to optimise their operations, helping their business to operate more effectively and efficiently. The increase in adoption of cloud technology  paired with the rise in interest in AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics  could make it possible for businesses to uncover invaluable insights from their security infrastructure and leverage them to adapt and build business resilience. 4) Secure your network Advanced technology help businesses improve their cybersecurity, making it harder for hackers to gain entry With cyber threats becoming more prevalent, businesses are increasingly looking to secure their networks and protect their data. More than half (54%) of those surveyed expressed interest in using AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to secure their network by identifying and eliminating cybersecurity threats. Advanced and automated technology can help businesses improve their cybersecurity, making it harder for hackers to gain entry to the larger corporate network. Modern cybersecurity tools that use AI and machine learning can detect anomalies in network traffic or alert and act on suspicious behaviour. Cybersecurity software For example, if an IoT device suddenly begins broadcasting and establishing connections with multiple devices, cybersecurity software could detect this abnormal behaviour, send an alert, and suspend traffic or quarantine an endpoint immediately  saving precious time during a potential breach. A single data breach could result in widespread distrust from workers and customers, potentially leading to decreased business as well as litigation issues. As such, businesses need to take action to update and strengthen their defences so that they can avoid downtime and continue to operate with peace of mind. Prepare your business for the future Businesses will continue to look for more ways to extract value out of their existing infrastructure, including their security technology. For many, the tools to do so are already in place, its just a matter of unlocking the insights with a security ecosystem. With such an ecosystem  one that helps protect a business people, assets, and network, while optimising operations  companies can better safeguard the future of their workspaces and usher in the new era of work with confidence.
Georgetown, SC (29440)

Today

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. High 66F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable.
HELSINKI  The Chang'e-4 lander and Yutu-2 have powered down for a third lunar nighttime on the far side of the moon, with the rover reaching its design lifetime.

The 140-kilogram Yutu-2 rover entered a sleep state at 12:16 a.m. Eastern Wednesday, according to the China Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP), having reached a total drive distance of 163 meters across three lunar days in Von Karman crater.

Yutu-2 has now reached its design lifetime of three months, having been deployed onto the surface of the moon shortly after the Chang'e-4 lunar far side landing on Jan. 2.

Related: Chang'e 4 in Pictures: China on the Moon's Far Side

The first Yutu rover, which set down on Mare Imbrium on the near side of the moon as part of the Chang'e-3 mission launched in December 2013, managed to rove just 114 meters before a short circuit during its second lunar day left it unable to move. The rover continued to function while stationary until mid-2016.

With all systems and payloads operating well, the Yutu-2 team will continue roving and science data collection on lunar day 4 of the Chang'e-4 mission, according to a CLEP announcement (link in Chinese).

Yutu-2 added 43 meters to its overall drive distance in its third day of activities, continuing a path to the northwest of the landing site, which was recently named 'Statio Tianhe' by the International Astronomical Union.

The rover just covered seven meters between waking for lunar day 3 on Feb. 28 and Mar. 3, during which time it navigated carefully toward a 20 centimeter diameter rock in order to analyze the specimen with an infrared and visible light spectrometer to determine its origin.

Yutu-2 then powered down between Mar. 3 and Mar. 10 as a precaution against potential issues related to high direct solar radiation, such as overheating, with the sun high in the sky over the landing site in the 115-mile-wide (186 kilometers) Von Karman crater within the South Pole-Aitken Basin.

The Chang'e-4 lander likewise entered dormant status a few minutes ahead of the rover. Both spacecraft are expected to resume activities sometime after sunrise over the landing site late Mar. 28.

During the first lunar night the lander returned data indicating the temperature had plummeted to minus 190 Celsius (minus 310 Fahrenheit). Both spacecraft close solar arrays and are protected by radioisotope heater units.

Relay satellite activity

As the far side of the moon never faces the Earth, communication and data transmission between ground stations and the Chang'e-4 spacecraft has been facilitated by a relay satellite stationed in a halo orbit around the second Earth-moon Lagrange point.

The Queqiao ('Magpie bridge') satellite earlier this month turned on a low frequency astronomy payload, the Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer, for the first time. NCLE will gradually deploy its three five-meter-long antennae to make observations of the solar system and, potentially, signals from the cosmic 'dark ages'.

A laser ranging test involving an observatory in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan is expected to be carried out in March, targeting a laser retroreflector aboard the Queqiao satellite.
Update: The launch was delayed due to technical issues; today's launch window extends to 9:05 p.m. EDT (0105 GMT on March 16).

The U.S. Air Force will launch its newest communications satellite for American military forces today (March 15) and you can watch the action live.

A United Launch Alliance Delta IV medium rocket will launch the new WGS-10 military satellite from a pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Florida's Space Coast. Liftoff is scheduled for 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT).

You can watch the launch live here, courtesy of a ULA webcast. You can also follow the launch directly via ULA here. ULA's webcast will begin at 6:49 p.m. EDT (2249 GMT).

Related: The Latest Military Space News and Launches

The WGS-10 advanced communications satellite for the U.S. military's Wideband Global SATCOM constellation is seen during launch preparation activities. (Image credit: United Launch Alliance)

WGS-10 is the latest entry in the Air Force's Wideband Global SATCOM communications network, a constellation of military satellites designed to serve American soldiers around the world.

"WGS provides communication connectivity across all mission areas, including air, land and naval warfare," Air Force officials said in a statement. The system is controlled from the U.S. Air Force's 4th Space Operations Squadron at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, the added, and"delivers reliable and secure communications services worldwide 24 hours a day, seven days a week as a vital military asset to the U.S. and Allied forces."

Launch Photos: Delta IV Launches WGS-9 Satellite for U.S. Military

The first WGS satellite launched in 2007. WGS-9, the most recent satellite to join the network, launched in 2017. The satellites have an estimated cost of about $340 million each, according to Via Satellite.

"WGS-10's launch is another giant step for military communications," said Steven Hayden, the U.S. government's WGS program manager. "I am very proud to be a member of this team, and Im looking forward to a successful launch."

ULA initially planned to launch today's mission on Wednesday (March 13), but postponed the flight two days to allow extra checks on the Delta IV medium launch vehicle.

Visit Space.com today at 6:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT) for live coverage of the WGS-10 satellite launch.
WASHINGTON  NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine's surprise announcement March 13 that NASA is considering moving Exploration Mission 1 off of the Space Launch System took many in the industry by surprise, but some have reacted by defending the use of the SLS.

Bridenstine, testifying before the Senate Commerce Committee, said the agency was looking at using a pair of commercial launch vehicles, likely provided by SpaceX and/or United Launch Alliance, to launch the Orion spacecraft and an upper stage that would propel the uncrewed spacecraft to the moon. A decision on the feasibility for doing so could come in the next few weeks, he said.

Bridenstine said the study was prompted by continued delays in the development of the SLS, which NASA no longer expects to be ready for launch by the middle of 2020 as previously planned. The goal would be to fly the EM-1 mission on those commercial vehicles by June of 2020, he said, while continuing to develop SLS for EM-2 and later missions.

Related: NASA May Use Private Rocket, Not SLS, for Orion Moon Trip

Senators at the hearing made little reaction to the plan, other than a comment by the committee's chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) that he'd "sure like to keep us on schedule." Later in the day, though, the Senate's most influential advocate for the SLS weighed in against a plan to shift EM-1 off that rocket.

"While I agree that the delay in the SLS launch schedule is unacceptable, I firmly believe that SLS should launch the Orion," Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) said in a statement to SpaceNews.

Shelby is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and his state is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, which is NASA's lead center for SLS development. He noted in a March 6 speech at a Space Transportation Association luncheon here that he has "more than a passing interest in what NASA does" and "a little parochial interest, too."

The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, an industry group whose members include companies involved in development of both SLS and Orion, also defended the use of the SLS for Orion missions. "No launch vehicle other than the SLS can enable the launch of a fully-outfitted Orion, including the [service module], to the moon," it said in a March 14 statement. "As a result, the Administrator noted that this approach would require at least two launches of heavy-lift vehicles."

The group added that it "is also clear that this approach would require additional funding, since the idea is to undertake both this mission and to continue development of the SLS apace." Bridenstine, in his Senate testimony, offered no estimate of the cost of this alternative approach to EM-1 but said it "might require some help from the Congress."

The announcement, which took many in the industry by surprise, overtook other debates about NASA exploration plans and SLS funding. At the same time as the Senate held its hearing, the House Science Committee was holding its own hearing on the future of American space exploration that featured several former government officials.

"Getting SLS and Orion on track for Exploration Mission 1 and 2 is critical to the long-term viability of these programs, as they are the systems that will push us farther into the cosmos," said Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), ranking member of the committee, in his opening remarks.

Lucas later asked one of the witnesses, former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, about development of more powerful versions of the SLS and plans in the administration's fiscal year 2020 budget proposal, released March 11, to defer work on the Block 1B version of the SLS with its more powerful Exploration Upper Stage. Whitson said it would be better for NASA launch vehicle experts to answer those questions.

Lucas argued that without larger boosters NASA would need a "piecemeal" approach to exploration, with more launches of smaller vehicles, which Whitson agreed carried some risk. "There's a lot of risk with multiple missions," answered Whitson.

The future of the SLS also came up later March 13 during the Apollo 50+50 symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An industry panel was asked it was "still worthwhile" to develop the SLS given its schedule and cost problems and the availability of commercial alternatives. The panel's moderator noted that audience members submitted several questions about the SLS to the panel, although it wasn't clear if they were prompted by news of Bridenstine's testimony earlier in the day.

Panelists largely defended the SLS. "To me it's not clear there is a commercial alternative" to SLS, said Keoki Jackson, chief technology officer of Lockheed Martin.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a supporter of the SLS, said that Orion should launch on the SLS and not alternative commercial vehicles as NASA is now considering. (Image credit: American Association for Cancer Research)

Larry James, deputy director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, noted the potential use of SLS for other missions. "It opens up the outer planets for exploration," he said. "From a science perspective, you open up a whole new domain of rapid exploration of the outer planets with the SLS."

James didn't note that the administration's budget proposal for 2020 proposed moving the Europa Clipper mission, one such outer planets mission that had been planning to use the SLS, to a commercial launch vehicle, citing a savings of more than $700 million.

An exception came from Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, a company with its own ambitions to develop heavy-lift launch vehicles. "You build a bespoke government system if you have sufficient bespoke government missions," he said. "If there's enough demand there for SLS, then you should go build SLS. If not, you should do what you do on anything else: you go rely on the commercial alternatives available."
GREENWICH  Private equity firm L Catterton announced this week that it would sell its CorePower Yoga fitness-studio chain to San Francisco-based private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Since partnering with Greenwich-based L Catterton in 2013, CorePower Yoga has expanded from 80 studios in 12 states to more than 200 in 23 states and significantly expanded its programming, according to L Catterton officials. There are no locations in Connecticut; the nearest centers are in Manhattan.

We are proud of the success and growth that CorePower Yoga has achieved over the past five years, Marc Magliacano, a managing partner of L Cattertons Flagship Buyout Fund, said in a statement.

L Catterton has invested in a number of fitness companies, including Peloton, Classpass, and Equinox; Bodytech, one of the largest fitness-club operators in Latin America; and Wills Group, a provider of membership-based fitness facilities and services in China.

Among recent transactions, L Catterton announced last December the acquisition of Cholula, a producer and distributor of Mexican-made hot sauce.

The deal would allow Cholula to become a truly standalone enterprise and continue realizing its potential to become a powerful and enduring global brand, L Catterton officials said in a statement. They also cited the growth of the hot-sauce category and the brands popularity with millennial and Hispanic consumers.

Introduced into the U.S. in 1989, Cholulas hot sauce now comes in six varieties.

L Catterton describes itself as the worlds largest consumer-focused private equity firm.

Headquartered at 599 W. Putnam Ave., the firm manages more than $15 billion of equity capital and employs a team of more than 150.

Since 1989, the firm has made more than 200 investments in consumer brands. Its current and former packaged-goods investments include The Honest Co., Kettle Brands, Zarbees, Home Chef, Ainsworth Pet Nutrition, Plum Organics, Odwalla, Beanitos, Ferrara Candy Company and Sweet Leaf Tea.

pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; twitter: @paulschott
STAMFORD  Developer Building and Land Technology has filed applications with the city to build another two buildings in the South Ends Harbor Point.

The buildings, each with 180 units in a 15-story outcrop above a multi-story base, are proposed for two roughly 1.3-acre vacant blocks on the southernmost edge of the neighborhood on either side of Harbor Point Road, where it hits Pacific Street and Dyke Lane.

BLTs application as proposed may have an uphill battle, though the city has already granted a general approval when it approved Harbor Point for buildings of that size on those blocks.

The developer again plans to use foam-like facade material that it has on nearly all its other South End buildings, which Zoning Board members increasingly decry and the Land Use Bureau has targeted in new urban design guidelines.

The material, exterior insulation and finish system or EIFS, so bothers some that state Rep. David Michel, D-146, even introduced a bill this legislative session to ban the substance in Connecticut.

Its used for cheap development, Michel said. Its plastic pollution.

Zoning Board Chair David Stein has called for builders to use varying materials, getting away from EIFS and steel.

Ted Ferrarone, BLTs chief operating officer, said in an email that the company uses EIFS because its one of the best products available for building facades.

EIFS is energy efficient, durable and attractive. EIFS allows for a wide degree of variety both in colors and patterns, he wrote. Over the years, EIFS has been approved on projects throughout the city by the Zoning Board. What the board has mentioned to us is that they are looking for additional variety for building facades. For our part, we are confident that we can accomplish this through the use of EIFS and look forward to presenting to the Zoning Board.

While the exterior could provide friction in the approval process, it is what is inside the buildings  or whats absent  that will likely prove more contentious.

BLT seeks a buyout of a city mandate that builders make 10 percent all units in large complexes affordable, for those making half of the areas median income.

In recent months, the Zoning Board has been less accepting of such buyouts  forcing builders to include at least some of the mandated units. In these two buildings, BLT would be required to install 36 units.

Ferrarone said BLT would like to send its buyout to the nonprofit Housing Development Fund, which started a program with another BLT buyout to help low-income South End residents buy homes.

The South End Neighborhood Revitalization Zone rallied against the first buyout plan that created HDFs program.

No hearings are yet set, but BLTs plans will be discussed by Zoning Board members at their Monday evening meeting on the Government Centers fourth floor.

barry.lytton@stamfordadvocate.com; 203-964-2263; @bglytton
NORWALK  Chills and then numbness.

That was what Aamir Kadri described feeling after hearing the news out of New Zealand that at least 49 people were killed at two mosques in the country in a terrorist attack.

Regardless of whats happening and whats going on and so far, you unfortunately become numb because this has become normal place and commonplace, said Kadri, a board member at the Al-Madany Islamic Center in Norwalk.

The attacks in New Zealand spurred many into action in Norwalk and Stamford, thousands of miles away from where they were committed.

We had sent out a message  everyone be cognizant, try to be extra vigilant, Kadri said, adding they encouraged members to walk in groups to Friday prayer services. You never know. Its unfortunate to say that, you honestly never know.

To try to make sure the community felt as safe as possible, Mayor Harry Rilling said in a statement that the Norwalk Police Department would have an increased presence around the Islamic Center and other places of worship throughout the city on Friday.

I spoke with the imam of the Al-Madany Islamic Center this morning to reassure him that Norwalk is a city that welcomes all people and beliefs, Rilling said.

The situation was similar in Stamford, where police stepped up security at the citys mosques.

We stand with the Muslim community in Stamford and are actively communicating with the leaders of all the mosques here in Stamford, wrote Stamford Police Capt. Diedrich Hohn in a Facebook post. We have added security at Stamfords mosques and increased patrols at all of Stamfords houses of worship.

Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said police are in touch with Muslim community leaders, and although there were no threats, police added patrols to gathering places.

Were in touch with a number of those locations and want to re-assure them and let them know we have their safety in mind, he said.

Maher Hussein, president of the board of the Islamic Cultural Center on Washington Boulevard, said attendance for the Friday service at the Stamford mosque was much less than usual.

Instead of the typical 300 congregants, he said only about 200 showed up.

Families are scared, said Hussein, who added that the shooting in New Zealand shocked him and brought him to tears. A lot of people stayed home.

Hussein said this isnt the first time the mosque has asked for extra protection. He requested extra security around the time President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning the entry of immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.

On Friday, Muslims across the state said they were mourning the loss of the innocent lives taken.

The senseless murder of men, women, and children gathered for Friday worship prayer services (Jumuah Prayer) in New Zealand leaves us here in the States without words, Tark Aouadi, executive director of the Connecticut Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement. Our hearts and prayers are with those grieving families. This atrocity stands as a strong reminder that we must stand vigilant against hate and bigotry in all its forms.

Rilling said that he was heartbroken over the attacks.

I woke up this morning heartbroken to the news of the horrific terror attack in New Zealand, the Norwalk mayor said. No one should be unsafe or feel intimidated because of their religion. Violence, hatred, and intolerance have no place in the world. I offer my condolences to the victims, their families, and to all of the people of New Zealand.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations also called for national action to push back against growing Islamophobia, white supremacy and anti-immigrant bigotry in America and around the world.

Leaders from the Jewish community of Upper Fairfield County sent a letter to their Muslim sisters and brothers, offering unity and compassion.

Our Jewish community stands with all peace-loving people, regardless of by what name  if any  they call our common creator. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us for any reason, knowing that we are always by your side, the letter read. It was signed by over 20 Jewish leaders, including Rabbi Ita Paskind of Congregation Beth El-Norwalk and Rabbi Yeshoshua Hecht of Beth Israel of Westport/Norwalk.

The Cornerstone Community Church in Norwalk offered its hearts and thoughts for the people of New Zealand and all mosques throughout the world.

The nonpartisan volunteer group, Love All Project - Norwalk, also offered its support for the Muslim community on Facebook.

Our hearts are with Christchurch and our entire Muslim community. We love and support you, the statement read.

In Norwalk, Kadri said that the mosque would be hosting a special burial service for the deceased after their Friday afternoon worship prayer services. He called on members of all faiths and backgrounds to communicate with each other to break the hatred and intolerance.

Just talk to people, interact communicate  a lot of ignorance is the fear of the unknown, Kadri said. Our mosque at Norwalk is open to everyone.

Staff writers Ignacio Laguarda and Barry Lytton contributed to this report.

kelly.kultys@hearstmediact.com
he popular Christmas tradition features 16 nativity scenes telling the birth of the King of Kings across five different Long Beach churches.
B ritish defence contractor QinetiQ won a contract on Friday worth up to $164 million (124 million) with the US military to develop portable reconnaissance robots which can be carried in backpacks.

The company, which makes a similar robot called the Dragon Runner (pictured inset), will build prototypes for a new range of machine weighing less than 25 pounds.

They will be used for clearing buildings, caves and other tight spots where hand-to-hand combat is likely, according to army specifications.

The seven-year contract, awarded to the firms subsidiary QinetiQ North America, will start with an initial two-year development phase worth $20 million.

Jeff Yorsz, president of the division, said building ground robots for the army had been a driving passion for the company for decades.

The firm fought off competition from US-based Endeavor Robotics, which had developed a robot called Scorpion for the army tender competition.
T he horrific mass killings at two New Zealand mosques were all the more shocking for taking place in a small, friendly country with apparently impeccable liberal credentials. The countrys innocence was destroyed by the attack on worshippers gathered for Friday prayer in two mosques in Christchurch. In a grisly contemporary touch a gunman live-streamed footage of his rampage to Facebook, filmed with a head-mounted camera and it is to the good that Facebook is already trying to remove all those images. He had already published a lengthy manifesto , making clear that he was a white supremacist and, incidentally, an Australian citizen; it seems that he may not have acted alone.

The New Zealand premier, Jacinda Ardern, has rightly described the massacre as one of New Zealands darkest days . She made clear that it can only be described as a terrorist attack. The last catastrophe to afflict the city was the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, in which 185 people died. At least that was an act of nature. This new, man-made horror is a telling reminder that no country or community can be complacent about extremist terrorism  and there is no other word for the attack  coming from the far-Right. Even in an exemplary democracy, racist ideology, which in the age of social media truly is without borders, can poison minds and infect political discourse on the margins. It is sobering that even in this liberal society, extremists can demonise whole communities, in this case, Muslims; we must never forget that extremist talk costs lives.

One of the most alarming features of this tragedy is that the perpetrator may not have been previously known to police and he was not on the radar of the intelligence services. What precautions can a country such as New Zealand take against the possibility of random attacks?

There is, as our home affairs editor Martin Bentham, writes elsewhere, an increasing terrorist risk posed by Right-wing extremists , who are being targeted to significant degree by the Prevent strategy. They may not replicate the organised global terrorist network of Islamist extremists associated with Islamic State or al Qaeda but in some cases they coalesce in organisations such as National Action and so give scope for monitoring by the intelligence services.

London extends the utmost sympathy to New Zealand and to Christchurch  many of its citizens live and work here, to the enrichment of us all. We are confident that New Zealand will come together all the more emphatically in the face of the individuals that seek to divide it. For our part, the tragedy is a sobering reminder of the need for perpetual vigilance against extremist terrorism.

Public inquiries work

Public inquiries are often expensive, take a long time and are mired in controversy. But this week we have been reminded of why they are worth it. The Saville inquiry into the killings on Bloody Sunday was repeatedly attacked as a colossal waste of money, yet its report was widely applauded. It brought some closure for the community in Derry/Londonderry, prompted a landmark prime ministerial apology and as we heard yesterday, has opened the door to a prosecution for murder.
Y ouve got to feel for Alex. When his dad died in 2012, he took over the family business  a bustling cafe near Victoria station that had been loved by the local community for decades. Learning the ropes and running a company for the first time wasnt easy. Alex worked 80-hour weeks and did everything he could to keep his head above water.

After a few years, things were looking up. Revenues were increasing, customers were happy, and Alex felt he was doing justice to his fathers memory. But then Chancellor Philip Hammond intervened. In 2017 he introduced a massive increase in business rates, the tax you pay for having a physical premises like a shop, pub or office.

Almost overnight, the annual rates bill for Alexs cafe shot up from 7,000 to 12,000  and would soon hit 20,000.

That made the difference between turning a small profit and losing money  so he was forced to close the cafe for good, an unbearably painful decision that meant he and his staff were all out of a job. As Alex recalls: When I told my employees we had to shut down, I cried. I felt Id let them all down.

The truth is that he had done everything right  but the wrong government policy had destroyed his family firm, and put his team out of work.

Rohan Silva

The shuttered cafe is only a 10-minute walk from the House of Commons, where Hammond delivered his Spring Statement this week, outlining the Governments latest economic plans. It was a chance for the Chancellor to undo the damage hes done to small businesses such as Alexs  but incredibly, he did absolutely nothing.

Make no mistake, Hammond has made life so much harder for business owners in the capital  a shocking state of affairs at a time when he really should be doing everything in his power to support entrepreneurs amid all the Brexit chaos.

Take business rates, for example. According to the Federation of Small Business (FSB), Hammonds huge tax increase means the average small company in London now has to find 33,000 a year simply to cover its rates bill. Thats a back-breaking sum on top of paying for salaries, rent, corporation tax and all other running costs.

This flawed policy has hit the South-East especially hard, with many companies seeing their rates double in a single year. As a result, independent restaurants like Alexs are now shutting at the fastest rate for decades, while London has seen the largest number of shop closures of any UK region.

At the very least, the Chancellor should have announced this week that hed be reversing the tax hike, given the terrible damage its doing. At best, he should be replacing business rates with a fairer system altogether. After all, it would be hard to imagine a more iniquitous tax if you tried. With business rates, youre hit with the same bill whether youre a start-up with no customers or a wealthy corporation with billions in the bank. All that matters is the building youre in. No wonder the FSB calls it a regressive tax that hits firms before theyve made their first penny in turnover, let alone a profit.

Whats more, because you only pay business rates if you have a physical premises, digital companies often pay nothing at all. Thats a monstrous disadvantage for high-street stores in the battle against online retailers. As the British Retail Consortium rightly says, business rates are no longer fit for purpose in the 21st Century  while Waterstones boss James Daunt makes the valid point that this outdated tax is hollowing out our high streets.

"Almost overnight the annual rates bill for the cafe shot up from 7,000 to 12,000. Alex was forced to close it"

Under duress last year, Hammond gave local councils some cash to dish out to selected small companies to put towards their business rates bills. This has made a bad situation even worse  with entrepreneurs now having to waste time lobbying local politicians to access support, with grants handed out on a discretionary (and often opaque) basis to favoured firms.

Its a bureaucratic quagmire  exactly the opposite of what a dynamic economy should be about. But the Chancellors thumping great tax rise isnt the only Treasury policy making life unbearably hard for Londons small businesses right now.

Poorly implemented plans to make tax digital are costing companies thousands of pounds to become compliant. Big increases in the amount firms have to pay towards pension contributions are making it more expensive to employ people. And pointless tinkering with policies such as the successful angel investment tax breaks have stifled the funding that start-ups need.

The list goes on, adding up to a perfect storm of additional costs and pressures weighing down on small businesses across the capital. Actually, what were facing here is more like a perfect storm drain, relentlessly sucking companies under. But as we saw this week, Hammond is carrying on regardless, presiding over easily the most anti-small business agenda of any Chancellor since the Seventies.

Unfortunately theres no end in sight. In recent decades the two main political parties have tried to outbid one another with ambitious policies to support entrepreneurship, which is obviously a smart move if you want to spur job creation and economic growth. Its also a healthy check against the tendency of Whitehall civil servants to propose policies that benefit large corporations at the expense of micro-enterprises.

But with Jeremy Corbyn pulling the Labour Party ever further to the Left, Hammond clearly calculates theres no political cost to squeezing the life out of Londons small businesses.
T he Chancellor made strong commitments in his Spring Statement to the future of the British technology sector, with plans to embrace the technologies of the future and equip British workers to use them.

However, another immediate challenge that the Government must tackle is the continued brain drain of British technical expertise. Estimates suggest that just one in seven AI and machine-learning specialists from the UKs top institutions have joined British start-ups.

Recent reports have highlighted the significant pressure academics are under to give up their research posts for roles with the global tech giants. Its clear more must be done to retain our key talent, if we are to benefit from these emerging technologies.

Martin Linstrom

IPsoft

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear Martin

Youre right  of particular worry is how some of Londons best brains are being tempted to take up posts at tech corporations as they stare into a funding abyss amid uncertainty about whether their EU research grants will dry up.

Academia needs stability as well as money to continue projects which can last for many years.

Imperials machine learning expert Professor Maja Pantic, who invented a revolutionary robot for autistic children, works three days a week as research director at Samsungs Cambridge AI centre, where she receives triple her university salary, can afford to pay staff and has access to more super-powered computers.

Young Continental coders I speak to are also on edge about their post-Brexit future here.

But its not all doom. One of Londons top founders told me yesterday she was arranging more work visas for international developers, attracted by our mix of cultures and industries.

Mark Blunden, Technology Correspondent

We must adapt to customs of EU deal

The Brexit options are now perfectly clear for all to see. We either agree to a customs union or we remain. The negotiated deal is in reality a customs union in all but name and the ERG know this because avoiding the backstop will require a trade deal that will look and feel like a customs union, and if triggered the backstop is a customs union.

The EU will not agree to a deal that puts the integrity of the single market at risk or a deal that could lead to a hard border; the only deal is therefore a customs union and no-deal is not an option. Of course we all know that a customs union will split the Conservative Party, but MPs should have thought about this before calling for a referendum.

Mark Sinclair

Nothing is more admirable than changing your mind when you realise youve been wrong in matters of great weight and prestige. Lead the flow on the right side, dont struggle in the opposite direction.

Ulf Larsson

I was told diesel wasnt a dirty word

Further to the possible expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone, I feel very badly let down by the powers that be. A few years ago I bought a car that was diesel hybrid. This was after a lot of thought, and the clincher was the governments recommendation that it was best for the environment.

However, it does not qualify for exemption. I dont mind it for central London but the possible expansion to the North-South Circular would be very expensive as I ferry my very elderly parents around this boundary. One does try to be a good citizen but its getting harder.

Keerti Kanani

Stop selling off social rent homes

We are in the midst of a serious housing crisis: 277,000 people are homeless, 1,157,044 households are currently on the housing waiting list.

We need to house people in the low number of social rented homes we have left. Instead, social rented housing is being flogged off at London auctions. There is already a feeling that housing associations have junked their social mission. Stopping the sale of social rented homes would be one way to show this isnt the case.

Matt Western MP

Chair, Parliamentary Campaign for Council Housing

Caledonian Sleeper is a dream, keep this train on the tracks

Thank you to Ayesha Hazarika for her compliments to the staff on the Caledonian Sleeper train from Dundee [Trust the train to get you on the right track, March 13]. I and my son and daughter are regular and enthusiastic users of the sleeper.
B arcelonas Champions League quarter-final tie against Manchester United evokes fond memories for the Catalan club - and also Lionel Messi.

The Blaugrana beat the Old Trafford outfit in the 2009 and 2011 finals, with Messi on target in Rome as Pep Guardiolas side completed the treble - and again at Wembley - in what was probably the peak for that tremendous team.

United and Barca also met in the semi-finals in 2007-08, when Sir Alex Fergusons side came out on top en route to winning the trophy.

There were also two memorable meetings  both 3-3 draws  in the group stages in 1998-99.

The Reds won the Champions League that season at Camp Nou, wrapping up the treble, and this tie sees manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer return  20 years later  to the scene of that triumph and his dramatic late winner against Bayern Munich.

Getty Images

It is Barca aiming to win the treble this time, though. Ernesto Valverdes are seven points clear in La Liga and face Valencia in the final of the Copa del Rey. The Catalans are also determined to bring back the Champions League after exiting at the quarter-final stage in each of the last three seasons.

And even though Solskjaer has led United to 14 wins in 18 games in all competitions since taking over from Jose Mourinho, Barcelona will be big favourites to advance to the semi-finals.

The Catalans hopes, as usual, will rest upon the shoulders of Messi and the Argentine attacker looks to have that bit between his teeth in the continental competition this term, having promised the Camp Nou crowd in August that the team would do everything to win the trophy.

Messi scored two and assisted two more in the 5-1 thrashing of Lyon on Wednesday night and will be looking for a first goal at Old Trafford, having missed out in 2008.

Man Utd via Getty Images

Another Barca player who will relish the occasion will be Luis Suarez. The Uruguayans Liverpool past means he will receive a hostile reception at Old Trafford, where the striker will be searching for his first Champions League goal away from home since 2015.

Barcelona will be expected to advance and if they do, the Blaugrana will meet either Liverpool or Porto in the last four, with Jurgen Klopps men the big favourites to progress from that tie.

Champions League quarter-final draw: Who did the English sides get?

"We're happy," said Barca's director of institutional relations, Guillermo Amor. "We have to approach the tie in the best conditions and with the greatest of optimism. United are a good team and one of the greats in Europe. We will go to Manchester and look for a good result to bring back for the second leg."

REUTERS

That will be played at Camp Nou after the order was switched to avoid a clash with Manchester City's game against Tottenham, which is perhaps more good news for Barcelona.

It is not an easy route for Valverde's side, but they will be happy to have avoided both City and Juventus, until the final anyway, with a possible showpiece against either of those teams ahead in Madrid on June 1st.

TODO: define component type apester
T housands of students around the world are set to march through towns and cities today to protest against climate change.

The Youth Strike 4 Climate in the UK follows action taken by 15,000 students in February calling on the Government to take stringent action on climate change.

They are inspired by Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old climate activist campaigning for changes to environmental policy in Sweden.

When and where is the Youth Strike 4 Climate taking place?

Today, an estimated total of 64 towns and cities across the UK will see demonstrations from school and university students.

But the demonstrations will not be limited to the UK, with students all over the world pledging to walk out of classes to fight for their cause.

What is the Youth Strike 4 Climate hoping to achieve?

The young activists have said they are driven by an alarming lack of Government leadership on climate action in previous decades.

Noga Levy-Rapoport, a 17-year-old pupil from Hammersmith, walked out of school in February.

Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in February / Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire

Speaking to Future London, she said the experience had been life-changing.

I thought: This is important in terms of a show of solidarity and sending a signal. We are here to make our voices heard and we are not going to stop until you listen to us.

As the next demonstration approaches, Noga is predicting a much higher turnout.

Noga at the Youth Strike 4 Climate in London in February / Noga Levy-Rapoport

Im getting a massive response and the feedback from the strike was so positive, she said, adding nearly all of my schoolmates are likely to attend.

Noga described air pollution as incredibly concerning and so worrying to see, citing the thousands of deaths every year which are linked in some way to filthy air.

A report from the University of Chicago last year showed that humans around the world are losing two years of life expectancy on average every single year because of air pollution.

To combat air pollution and global warming, Noga would like to see the UK Government implement a climate change plan that mirrors the Green New Deal put forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US.

I think [Ocasio-Cortez] is a great role model and an example to follow, she said.

Rosie Smart-Knight, who turns 18 the day after the strike, organised a demonstration in Truro in February after hearing about the action from a friend.

Rosie led strike action in Truro in February / Rosie Smart-Knight

I wasnt expecting many people to turn up but I was blown away by the amount of people who cared.

Climate Change Protest at Parliament Square - In pictures 1 /32 Climate Change Protest at Parliament Square - In pictures A climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster, London PA Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster PA Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire Young demonstrators hold placards whilst standing on a statue of war-time Prime Minsiter Winston Churchill AFP/Getty Images Schoolchildren take part in a student climate march in Parliament Square Getty Images Police officers talk to protestor as students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement take part in a climate change protest on Parliament Square, Westminster PA Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square PA A climate change protest in Westminster, London Alex Lentati Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster, PA Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement outside the gates of Downing Street during a climate change protest PA Three year old Violet Wicks from London during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster, London. PA People take part in a "youth strike for climate change" demonstration in London. Reuters Students from Graveney School, Tooting join the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster, London. PA Schoolchildren take part in a student climate march Getty Images Banners at a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster, PA Schoolchildren take part in a student climate march Getty Images A girl looks on as people take part in a "youth strike for climate change" demonstration in London Reuters People take part in a "youth strike for climate change" demonstration in London Reuters Schoolchildren take part in a student climate march in Parliament Square Getty Images Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster PA Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Parliament Square in Westminster PA Protesters at a Youth Strike 4 Climate demonstration outside Shire Hall in Cambridge PA Students from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement during a climate change protest on Canterbury high street in Kent PA Schoolchildren take part in a student climate march in Briighton Getty Images Getty Images AFP/Getty Images PA PA PA PA PA PA

There were so many young children there who understood what was going on. It was quite heart breaking how many understood what was at stake.

After the strike in February, Rosie said she felt hopeful at the positive feedback she had received from people who had attended.

This Friday, Rosie will be joining young activists in London to protest against climate change.

She said the issue of filthy air in cities like London is disgusting, and can be linked to a staggering number of deaths each year.
Review at a glance









W riter-director David Robert Mitchell made It Follows, one of the most inventive horror movies of the past decade, but critics hate LA-set mystery Under the Silver Lake.

The script is stuffed with conspiracy theories about pop culture and the rich and famous. The weirdest of all the whimsical scenes concerns Kurt Cobains Fender Mustang and the origin of rebel yells. No legendary guitars were harmed in the making of this movie. Self-styled iconoclasts, however, may be wounded by the implication that punk is not only dead but never existed.

Our protagonist is comic-book-reading slacker Sam (Andrew Garfield), who enjoys spanking his monkey and decoding Wheel of Fortune (he suspects presenter Vanna White is sending him messages via her darting eyes). Naturally, his paranoia goes into overdrive when his nice neighbour Sarah (Riley Keough) disappears.

A crucial twist: Sam isnt that nice. Hes a lech, with anger issues. When his car is graffitied by kids he punches one of the miscreants and crushes egg into his face (blood and yolk blur vividly). Later, Sam slags off the homeless, claiming theyre party-pooping bullies. Sam, in other words, is the kind of sleuth you rarely meet: a cute but slimy nerd who under pressure kicks down.

Disappearing act: Riley Keough as Sarah

Whether in rumpled sweat pants or butt naked, Garfield has never looked more sleepily skittish (like Anthony Perkins, with a dash of Roger Federer and Stan Laurel). Funny, warm and chilling, his performance is awesome. Its unfair to accuse the film of sexism.

rue, it features acres of female flesh, and you feel for the actress who has to prance around wearing nothing but an owl mask. Cut! But Mitchells take on misogyny has cumulative power and his most important female characters  Sarah and Sams mum  are intriguing.

Mitchell  using gorgeously extravagant camera moves and an orgasmically lush score  pays homage to Old Hollywood and is equally indebted to the work of Richard Linklater, David Lynch and the Coen brothers. As well as Nathanael Wests novel The Day of the Locust. That said, you dont need to be a literature or cinema buff to go with the flow.

All thats required is a sceptical bent. Dont trust the critics (or me). Only you can decide if this is a puzzle worth solving.
A J Tracey, Four Tet and Peggy Gou are among the latest acts to join this year's Glastonbury line-up.

More than 100 acts have joined the bill for the Worthy Farm festival as part of the Silver Hayes area line-up.

Lady Leshurr, Daniel Avery, Maverick Sabre and others will appear in the area, which is spread across six stages: Sonic, Gully-Blues, Pussy Parlure, Wow, BBC Music Introducing and a brand new "micro venue", No Average Groove.

The news was announced by Glastonbury boss Emily Eavis. You can check out the entire new line-up in her tweet below.

It comes after the Cure and the Killers were announced as the latest festival headliners, with Janet Jackson also joining the bill.

The two bands will take to the Pyramid Stage alongside Stormzy, who was announced as the first headliner back in November of last year, for the first festival since 2017.

Kylie Minogue, who confirmed rumours of an appearance in December, will take the 'Legends' slot on Sunday, though this year's four-day festival looks to have its fair share of legends playing, with the likes of Lauryn Hill and Wu-Tang Clan set to perform.

Other acts on the line-up include George Ezra, Liam Gallagher, Miley Cyrus, Vampire Weekend, Two Door Cinema Club, Bastille, Christine and the Queens, Hozier, Sigrid, Years & Years, and Janelle Monae.

The festival returns to Worthy Farm in Somerset from June 26-30, with tickets originally selling out in just under 40 minutes. Any cancelled tickets will go back on sale on April 28.

The Cure will headline the festival for the fourth time, having topped the bill in 1986, 1990 and 1995. Coldplay are the only other act to have headlined the event four times.

The Killers last performed at the event with a 'secret set' on the John Peel stage in 2017.
Worldwide climate protection demonstration : 2,000 expected for Fridays for Future in Bonn

Bonn Showing a sign of global unity, young climate activists will demonstrate for the first time worldwide on Friday, in a united showing of their initiative "Fridays for Future". 1,660 rallies are planned in 105 countries.

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For weeks now, school and university students have been taking to the streets on Fridays to show their support for climate protection. But this Friday is different because for the first time, the young people who make up Fridays for Future are demonstrating worldwide. 1,660 demonstrations are planned in 105 countries - 200 of them in Germany.

In Cologne and Bonn, local organizers have registered demonstrations with the police, estimating around 2,000 participants. "Because it is an international strike day, I hope that there will be a very large number this time," says 15-year-old Noah Rosenbrock, a member of the Bonn organization team. "It is important that we send a signal worldwide and that young people take to the streets for climate protection".

The young activists planned to gather on Munsterplatz in Bonn at 9 a.m. and march through Friedensplatz and Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz, then returning to the start where a closing rally is planned for around 3 p.m. In Cologne, the demonstration begins at 9 a.m. at the square in front of the central train station, proceeding to the Alter Markt.

Reminder of compulsory school attendance

NRW Prime Minister Armin Laschet (CDU) and Minister of Education Yvonne Gebauer (FDP) have shown little understanding for the protests taking place during school hours and have insisted on compulsory school attendance. Responding to an inquiry from GA on Thursday, both the district government and the ministry stated that "participation in student strikes during school hours must not come at the expense of school attendance and is therefore inadmissible".

An exception would be if a school officially plans a field trip and moves the lessons to an "out-of-school learning location", for example the demonstration. But a violation of compulsory schooling could have repercussions and any unexcused absence is documented on student report cards.

Noah Rosenbrock, who attends high school in Rheinbach, is not afraid. "Sometimes you have to break the rules to achieve something," he says. He replies to critics who criticize that it's all about skipping school, and says that in their spare time they've thought a lot about climate protection and dealt with it intensively. After the final rally, the Bonn team will offer several workshops on the subject - from "Climate Change for Beginners" to microplastics, regional products, air travel and global warming.

"The young generation is right"

At the federal level, there have been different opinions voiced in recent weeks. Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) backed the protests earlier this month and praised the students for their efforts. Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD) told the newspaper "Bild am Sonntag" that she liked "the fact that this supposedly apolitical generation finds its voice and goes out onto the streets". In the same newspaper, FDP leader Christian Lindner spoke in contrast, questioning students knowledge on the subject and saying: "This is for professionals."

Meanwhile, more than 12,000 scientists from Germany, Austria and Switzerland backed the young climate protectors. "We are the professionals and we say: the young generation is right", said Volker Quaschning from the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.
M ost of us havent looked through a history textbook since school days.

We pick up tidbits of interesting information from various documentaries or the odd tome of historical fiction but, lets be honest, there is a lot we never learned.

With centuries and continents worth of stories to choose from, where do you start? How about easing yourself in by going to a play?

Some of these may be a little squiffy on the details, but look at this as a place to start. A great historical show will give you the spark to do a bit of post-theatre research and find out more.

Hamilton

As Brits, we dont learn a great deal about the American founding fathers in school. Nothing so quickly and thoroughly educates us on the subject as Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Mirandas musical traces the life of Alexander Hamilton from his arrival in New York as a young, scrappy and hungry student, through triumph and scandal, to his death and legacy. You'll leave the theatre with a whole lot more knowledge than you went in with.

Palace Theatre

Fiddler on the Roof

Johan Persson

Many people will know the iconic songs of Fiddler on the Roof, even without knowing where they came from  think If I Were a Rich Man, Matchmaker and Sunrise, Sunset. Its also a tale about Russian-Jewish life at the start of the 20th century. Take out all of the songs and the play is a very real account of what happened to the Ashkenazi Jews of eastern Europe, many of whom ended up in the UK after being displaced or fleeing under threat of violence.

March 21-June 15, Playhouse Theatre

Six

If you havent studied the Tudors since primary school, Henry VIIIs wives might not be much more to you than divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. But in Six, Aragon, Boleyn, Seymour, Cleves, Howard and Parr are taking back their story. Despite not being *strictly* historically accurate  they team up and become pop stars  the musical does tell you a lot of facts about their lives that might have slipped your memory.

Until January 2020, Arts Theatre

Emilia

Helen Murray

Another case of a womans story being hidden behind their male peers, Emilia Bassano is stepping out of Shakespeares shadow. Often reduced to being called his muse, Bassano was herself an educator, proto-feminist, socialist and the first woman to have a book of original poetry published in England. Morgan Lloyd Malcolms play, which has three women playing Emilia at different ages, fills in some of the gaps in her remarkable life.

March 21-June 15, Vaudeville Theatre

The Lehman Trilogy

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 triggered the biggest financial crisis in history. How did it happen? Stefano Massinis play goes back over 163 years of family history, with Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles playing all the characters. Starting in 1844, when a young man arrives from Bavaria dreaming of a new life in New York, Sam Mendess production traverses three generations from nineteenth-century Alabama, through the Great Depression and ending in modern Wall Street.

May 11-August 3, Piccadilly Theatre

Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain

Beheading, mutiny and witch hunts  Horrible Histories returns with the most gruesome bits of British past. The fourth installment in the Barmy Britain series takes audiences back to the ruthless Romans, the terrible teeth of Queen Elizabeth I and the rather disgusting work of the Victorian night soil men, who removed all of Londons excrement.

August 1-31, Apollo Theatre

Les Miserables

Johan Persson

The musical, based on Victor Hugos novel, does what it says on the tin: its miserable. While not completely historically accurate, it is drawn from his own encounters in Paris. Jean Valjean was based on a stranger Hugo saw arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, while Fantine was inspired by a prostitute he saved from arrest. The story itself is of the Paris Uprising in 1832, which was triggered by the death of General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, a friend to the poor and downtrodden. As a crowd gathered to accompany the hearse, riots broke out that sparked a full rebellion. Hugo was in the midst of the action and took shelter from gunfire behind the barricades.

Queens Theatre

The Rubenstein Kiss

Set in the height of the Cold War, The Rubenstein Kiss is based on the story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple accused of passing US atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Despite protesting innocence to the last and campaigns for their release, they were executed by electric chair. James Phillipss play is about the Rubensteins, a Jewish couple whose communist idealism leads to their world being torn apart.
O ver the past 128 years, San Miguel has built an enduring legacy. These four Legacy Makers are making marks in different life-affirming ways  whether planting amazing wildflowers in unexpected urban areas, making works of art from discarded objects and lace, or changing the way women consider adventurous activity.

The Wild Planter

Ecologist Richard Scott / Jody Daunton

Andy Warhol said land is the best art, says Richard Scott, director of the National Wildflower Centre. It aims to reverse ecological decline and bring wildflowers back into the UKs living culture.

Richard works in deprived areas and preaches creative conservation  the craft of making change and passing on skills. Theres a danger in people thinking that there is some green-fingered magic to doing all this, he adds. Its important to remove that mysticism. We want to make it accessible. Sowing seeds is the simplest thing in the world.

The Lace-Maker

Lace-maker Marian Nunez / Gianfranco Tripodo

My obsession is lace. My friends think Im crazy! Marian Nunez laughs.

Marian worked in advertising, but returned to coastal Spain to follow her passion for traditional craft. She now teaches lace-making and spends up to nine months creating her own unique lace sculptures, she says, which draw on ancient skills with a modern twist: I experiment. My inspiration comes from Pop Art, comics, music and graffiti. The sea and boats are also part of my influence.

The Thought-Provoking Artist

Sculptor Michelle Reader / Francesca Jones

Innovative sculptor Michelle Reader literally moulds exhibits from rubbish, creating large, beautiful pieces that provoke debate about how and why we throw things away.

Michelle has toured UK shopping centres, making a figure sculpture at each, using materials found on site. She runs educational workshops for all ages alongside her exhibitions. I love creating things that connect with people, she says. I want people to consider where it comes from and why it is considered waste when it can be a resource. We need to get people thinking about the quantity of waste we produce, and how to cut down or reuse it.

The Community Leader

LoverHerWild founder Bex Band / Nicholas JR White

Two years ago, schoolteacher Bex Band decided to do something very different. I decided to trek the length of Israel, she says. I couldnt get the idea out my head.

The 1,000km yomp transformed her life: I fell in love with the simplicity of having that headspace.

Back in the UK, she saw how male-dominated and competitive outdoors courses could be and spotted an opportunity. Love Her Wild, a community for ordinary women who want to do extraordinary things, was born. One woman who took part in an expedition has now rowed the Pacific!

Discover the full San Miguel Rich List and find inspiration on how to live a richer life at standard.co.uk/richlist
N on-morning people get a bad rep. Often dismissed as lazy, life can be tough for a late riser.

While early birds are busy whizzing up a green juice, unloading the dishwasher and catching a yoga class before work, we have to cram all of life's admin into the evenings.

In the name of World Sleep Day, Adrian Williams, professor of sleep medicine, has the answer to some of our slumber-related questions.

Can you become a morning person?

The word circadian rhythm derives from the Latin "circa diem" (meaning around the day), and it refers to the body's biological processes which are subject to a roughly 24-hour cycle, the main pacemaker for which is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which sits at the base of the brain, Williams explains. These processes include the sleep/wake cycle; temperature which drops at night; cortisol levels, which are elevated in the morning to prepare us for our day; urine production, which is reduced at night; as well as melatonin production, which is secreted at night to signal to the rest of body that it is night time.

Circadian rhythms are predominantly determined by our genes, he says, which means it's difficult to change your sleep pattern permanently and become a morning person for example. The same goes for how much sleep you need, while the likes of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and former US president Donald Trump claim they get by on just four hours of kip a night, much of this is also genetically determined, he adds, so its not worth fighting. Ensure youre getting sufficient amounts of rest each night - as a general rule of thumb, most experts recommend between seven and eight hours a night.

To wannabe early birds, you can influence your body clock using exposure to light. Morning light is the establishing factor in determining circadian rhythms, he says. So the earlier youre exposed to light, the more likely youll feel sleepy earlier and go to be earlier that evening. Adopting methods such as waking up at the same time each morning  including on weekends  and avoiding using the snooze button entirely by placing your phone or alarm across the room can help to adjust your routine (even if it is only temporary).

How is a lack of sleep linked to weight gain?

Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to a number of serious health problems, including heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Not getting enough sleep (less than six hours) has been associated with weight gain because of changes in the hormones which control appetite, Williams explains.

The hormones leptin (which reduces appetite) and ghrelin (which increases it) both change in the direction of increasing appetite when we dont sleep enough. There is a measurable effect, studies are quite clear that appetite changes based on those hormones, and even preference for food changes to fat and carbohydrate as opposed to protein. The increase in calories may only be 100 calories a day or less but many pounds over a year," he says.

Simple sleep hygiene hacks

Getting enough sleep  and ensuring that it's of a decent quality  can boost your productivity and alertness during the day and adopting some basic sleep hygiene principles may help to improve the quality of your sleep.

Williams sleep hygiene rules include: avoiding caffeine after 2pm, avoiding spicy food, ensuring you have a sleeping environment that's cool, dark and quiet and avoiding blue light in the evening.
A former Foreign Office official may face jail for stealing more than 2,000 of public funds using her government-issued credit card.

Laura Perry, 36, made a string of cash withdrawals using the card, which was given to her for expenses in her role as assistant officer on the Foreign Offices Lebanon and Jordan desk.

When quizzed by investigators, Perry claimed she is not good at managing her money and insisted she had accidentally mixed up the government card with her own personal banking card.

But at the start of her trial at Southwark crown court this week, she pleaded guilty to stealing 2,223 from the Foreign Office in March 2017.

Perry denied a further allegation that she had defrauded the department by spending almost 20,000 on online gambling, and was cleared of that by the jury after blaming her ex-boyfriend for the missing money.

She told jurors he had access to the credit card and a SkyBet.com account in her name and often took her money for gambling.
A fugitive playboy wanted for the murder of a London student 11 years ago has asked to meet lawyers from her family, it has been revealed.

Farouk Abdulhak, who police want to question over the rape and murder of Martine Vik Magnussen, is in hiding in Yemen where he fled after the killing.

He is the only suspect in the death of the 23-year-old Norwegian, whose body was found partly hidden under rubble in the basement of flats in Great Portland Street on March 16, 2008.

She was last seen with Abdulhak  whose father is billionaire sugar magnate Shaher Abdulhak  as the pair left a nightclub in Mayfair in the early hours of March 14. They both studied at the private Regents Business School.

Wanted: Farouk Abdulhak on CCTV in 2008 with Martine Vik Magnusse / PA

Miss Magnussens father, Odd Petter Magnussen, today said the request for a meeting was a milestone in the fight for justice. He told the Standard: It is a new initiative and it gives some hope. The interesting thing is that the initiative comes from Yemen and not from here and that is new. I am positive about this but there are some doubts still and we do not know what will happen.

The development emerged on the 11th anniversary of his daughters death. A post-mortem examination gave the cause as compression to the neck.

Wanted: Farouk Abdulhak / EPA

Abdulhak, who is now married with two children, is understood to have requested a meeting through a leader of the Houthis, who are fighting a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Mr Magnussen said there could be two possible reasons for the request: pressure from Abdulhaks elderly father, or his own desire to escape the war. He said: It must be difficult to live there and he must be having an awful time considering his wealthy background. He is a relatively young man and he knows he is going to be a fugitive for the rest of his life.

Scotland Yard are this week posting in Arabic on social media asking those who know Abdulhak to encourage him to return to the UK. There is no extradition treaty with Yemen.
A 42-year-old man who allegedly set his ex-wife on fire in front of an art school in Italy has been arrested after a 24-hour police manhunt.

Ciro Russo, from Naples, is accused of attacking Marie Antonietta Rositani, also 42, in the southern coastal city of Reggio Calabria.

Ms Rositani was trying to move her Citroen car when she was apparently accosted and sprayed with an inflammable liquid at about 8.40am on Tuesday.

Russo then allegedly set her alight in the street, before running away from the scene.

Several students watched the attack unfold near the Instituto Statale DArte A. Frangipane on Via Franipane Alfonso.

Ms Rositani, who is in a critical condition, was taken to hospital after suffering from widespread burns across her body.

She was later transferred to a specialist burns unit in the port city, Brindisi by the Italian Air Force, according to Italian newspaper, Gazzetta Del Sud.

Russos dark grey Hyundai car was located by investigators in the city centre but the suspect was nowhere to be found and it was assumed he had returned home to Naples.

Police finally tracked down and arrested Russo in a pizza restaurant in Reggio Calabari on Thursday.

The 42 year-old had been living under house arrest in Naples, but escaped and travelled to the port city in Puglia with the aim of attacking his former wife.
S cotland Yard has said police will step up patrols around London mosques in the wake of the New Zealand terror attacks that left 49 people dead.

Neil Basu, national policing lead for counter terrorism said: Today we will be stepping up reassurance patrols around mosques and increasing engagement with communities of all faiths, giving advice on how people and places can protect themselves.

He added that the force was closely monitoring the events in New Zealand.

Senior counter-terrorism officer Neil Basu / PA

Our international network of UK counter terrorism officers will be ready to support our counterparts in New Zealand in responding to and investigating this appalling attack, Mr Basu said.

We stand together with all our communities and partners here in the UK and overseas, and will continue to work with them to counter the threat no matter where it comes from.

Police stand outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand. / AP

Together with our intelligence partners we continually monitor the varied threats we face, including to and around places of worship and specific communities across the country, to ensure we have the most appropriate protective security measures in place to keep people safe.

At least 20 others were seriously injured in the attacks, one of which was live streamed on Facebook.
H undreds of students gathered in Westminster today as part of global strikes across the world demanding that politicians take urgent action on climate change.

Young people have already taken to the streets in places including New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Nepal, India and European cities as part of an expected 2,000 events in more than 120 countries.

Students gathered in Parliament Square, London, with placards that read: "By the time we're in charge it will be too late", "we want you to panic" and "the greatest threat to the planet is the belief someone else will save it".

They chanted "this is what democracy looks like" while primary school children, who were at the protest with their parents and holding handmade placards, shouted "climate change, boo!"

Parliament Square, London: Climate Change Protest - In pictures 1 /40 Parliament Square, London: Climate Change Protest - In pictures Students take part in a global school strike for climate change in Parliament Square today PA AFP/Getty Images Neil Hall/EPA EPA Reuters PA AFP/Getty Images PA AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images PA PA AFP/Getty Images PA PA PA EPA EPA AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images EPA EPA EPA Reuters PA Reuters Reuters Reuters PA PA

One student climbed very close to the top of the 25-metre high Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace.

Metropolitan police said in a statement that there had been no arrests in relation to the incident.

The force said: "The protest remains peaceful; however officers remind those involved to be respectful of other people's property and the need of Londoners to go about their business in some of the busiest areas of the capital.

"Climbing on statues and vehicles is dangerous. Those doing so run the risk of seriously injuring themselves, as well as potentially committing offences such as criminal damage"

One twitter user said there were eight police vans and "dozens of officers" patrolling the protest.

Students skip school and head to Parliament Square to urge action on climate change. / Reuters

Walkouts are taking place in more than 100 towns and cities in the UK, driven by what students say is "an alarming lack of government leadership on climate action".

The global day of action, known as Youth Strike 4 Climate, has been inspired by teenager Greta Thunberg, who protests every Friday outside Sweden's parliament to urge leaders to tackle climate change.

AFP/Getty Images

Students in the UK are demanding the Government declare a climate emergency and take active steps to tackle the problem, communicate the severity of the ecological crisis to the public and reform the curriculum to make it an educational priority.

They also want recognition that young people have the biggest stake in the future, to be involved in policy making, and for the voting age to be lowered to 16.

Their calls come in the wake of a UN report last year which warned that limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, beyond which climate impacts become increasingly severe, requires unprecedented action.

Joe Crabtree, 15, from south-west London, who is missing GCSE mocks for the protest in Parliament Square, said: "I'm here today to send a clear message to Government that I'm fed up with inaction on climate change.

"I think they're not doing enough to curb the problem that is climate change, leaving it to the side like us with homework, hoping it will get done, but it's not being dealt with."

Long-term, he said he backed the kind of "green new deal" to create low carbon jobs being proposed by Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US.

PA

"In the short-term, I think it's very important for them (politicians) to declare a climate emergency, stop investing in fossil fuels and turn to renewable energy, and decarbonise the economy".

Anna Taylor, 17, from north London, co-founder of the UK Student Climate Network and one of the organisers of the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement, said the Government was failing to recognise the severity of the crisis.

"We're here because we feel betrayed and we don't feel we can trust them to protect our future, which is why we're having to go on strike to make our voices heard, and let them know that unless they change something we will keep striking until they consider our demands.

"They're failing to make environmental reform and environmental policy a priority, they focusing on economic policy and Brexit and failing to address the climate crisis facing us."

She added: "Young people feel empowered by other young people, this is very much a student-led movement.

"It's something we all feel very passionate about, because it's personal to us, it's about our future.

"This is a broad movement and we are all striking in solidarity. "

16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg. / REUTERS

The A-level student said her teachers were very supportive of the strike and though they were a bit concerned about her missing lessons, they recognised the importance of the issue to her generation.

Organisers have said they expect attendances to be larger than the first UK strike on February 15, which saw thousands of students defy headteachers and politicians to ditch lessons for demonstrations.

United Nations climate change chief Patricia Espinosa said: "What we're seeing is a clear message from youth throughout the world that nations must significantly increase their efforts to address climate change.

"Given the urgency the world faces, it's vital nations come up with more ambitious plans both this year and in 2020 as stated in the Paris Agreement.
O ne of central Londons last live music venues is facing a heartbreaking closure within weeks, its founders warned today.

The Social in Fitzrovia, which has helped launch the careers of Adele and Florence + The Machine , says it needs to raise 95,000 in the next fortnight to stay open after a cocktail bar chain launched a bid to take over the site.

Music industry figures including electronic music duo The Chemical Brothers and Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis have backed the venues crowdfunding campaign ahead of its 20th anniversary later this year.

Ms Eavis said it would be a disaster for the West End if the venue shut, while Ed Simons, one half of the Chemical Brothers, added: Its one of the last remaining independent social, dancing, live music venues left in London. Developers want it for something less vital.

Robin Turner, who co-founded the club in 1999 with three friends including one of Glastonburys artist bookers, Nick Dewey, said its closure would be heartbreaking.

He told the Standard: After us it will just be the 100 Club, Ronnie Scotts and the Borderline doing any live music in all of central London.

Fatboy Slim performing at The Social / Nigel Howard

Mr Turner added: We need to buy a controlling share of the lease on the venue. The deadline to raise 95,000 for it is in two weeks [March 27].

A crowdfunding page to secure the clubs future had by last night raised more than 28,000, after being set up on Wednesday.

A statement on the page says: The 20th anniversary should be a point of celebration; not for a quick, tearful goodbye before the wrecking ball arrives.

Ellie Rowsell of Wolf Alice / Dave Benett

Mr Turner said Florence + The Machine, Lily Allen and Adele played the venue before they became famous.

The Chemical Brothers played opening night and the clubs stage has also been graced by the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Vampire Weekend, Laura Marling and Wolf Alice.

If the campaign succeeds, he said they would look to refurbish the club, originally designed by renowned architect Sir David Adjaye.

Mr Turner said the cocktail bar chain wants to acquire a controlling share in the lease from current leaseholder The Breakfast Group.

But Breakfast Group co-founder Eric Yu said: There is nobody prouder than myself of my association with this amazing bar in Little Portland Street.

However, with the increase in property and other running costs we find ourselves in the very difficult situation where there are another 10 years to run on the lease with a bar that after 20 years needs refreshing and new impetus.
A security guard at the Tate Modern is suing the gallery for more than 1 million after he slipped in a puddle and fell down a steep flight of steel steps.

Fiaz-Ur-Rehman Butt, 54, claims he was left virtually housebound after the accident in August 2014.

He returned to work but says even seated tasks left him in pain and he was finally forced to quit his job in January 2016.

Mr Butt is suing the trustees of the Tate, which accepts it is to blame for the fall but disputes the level of compensation being sought.

Our case is that here is a person who before the accident was a hard-working gentleman who worked as a security guard,

Mr Butts lawyer Melanie Neale told Central London county court. But he now finds himself unable to work, he is looked after by carers and is no longer able to enjoy life.

Miss Neale said the guard, employed by security firm Wilson James while working at the Tate, ended up on his bottom in the fall. She said his injuries meant he now struggles with acute back and bladder problems and chronic pain in his legs which means he rarely leaves home.

Perry Hill, representing the Tate, said a report by a surgeon could not identify any evidence that Mr Butt had suffered a significant spinal injury. He added: His own medical experts pose serious questions about whether his claim has any physical cause.

Mr Hill said the gallery had left no stone unturned in investigating the cause of his disability.

Judge Janet Lambert told a pre-trial hearing that Mr Butts credibility is plainly in issue, adding that the judge at a full trial to be held later will consider medical opinions to determine the cause of his disability.
U p to a dozen ministers threatened a mass walkout from Theresa Mays government to save one Cabinet minister being forced to walk the plank, it has emerged.

The mutiny happened when chief whip Julian Smith asked Justice Secretary David Gauke to fall on his sword for missing a vote. He was one of four Cabinet members who did not vote in a Commons division on ruling out a no-deal Brexit on Wednesday night.

His abstention, along with Cabinet colleagues Amber Rudd, Greg Clark and David Mundell, came after a day of confusion over whether a free vote would be allowed.

Other ministers who did not vote included business minister Claire Perry, Solicitor General Robert Buckland, Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt, defence minister Tobias Ellwood, health minister Stephen Hammond, business minister Richard Harrington, and culture minister Margot James.

Brexit: What happens next?

Next morning there was uproar among members of the European Research Group who demanded ministers be fired and complained Mrs May had lost her authority.

Mr Smith then contacted Mr Gauke and Mr Harrington and asked both to resign.

Mr Gauke said he was willing to go but repeated it could trigger other resignations. Soundings among ministers then suggested between eight and a dozen would have quit.

The fiasco happened after Mrs May was forced to grant a free vote on a Government motion to stop Britain crashing out on March 29 while leaving no-deal on the table for any other date.

MPs vote to delay Brexit beyond March 29

It was amended by MPs to rule out no-deal at any time, prompting Mrs May to cancel that free vote at the last minute. One minister was allegedly given the all-clear to abstain by a whip who advised him to go down the pub, while others who did not vote blamed confusion.

There was another fiasco last night when Mrs May granted another free vote and watched half of Tory MPs vote against a motion tabled by her to postpone Brexit. Mr Smith abstained, and Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay voted against despite speaking in favour.

In Cabinet yesterday, Mrs May rebuked ministers who did not vote in the no-deal division while Mr Smith reportedly walked out after a discussion about the breakdown in discipline.

Meanwhile, Mrs May made a huge concession that Parliament will take charge of Brexit on March 25 if she fails to get a majority for her deal, it emerged today. She scraped through by just two votes last night to stop MPs taking control until after she has a third attempt at getting her deal through.
T heresa May has made a huge concession that Parliament will take charge of Brexit on March 25 if she fails to get a majority for her twice-rejected deal, it emerged today.

The Prime Minister scraped through a nailbiting vote by just two votes last night to stop MPs taking control until after she has a third attempt at getting her deal through.

It means a cross-party group of MPs now have a cast-iron date from which they will be able to debate and vote on alternatives to her blueprint, such as a Norway-style pro-business Brexit that would keep full access to the EU market of 500 million consumers.

Former minister Nick Boles told the Standard: The debate we wanted to hold on the 20th will now take place on the 25th following a last-minute concession by Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay at the end of yesterdays debate.

He said the cross-party group would force the Governments hand if necessary: Either the Government will bring it forward on the 25th or we will amend the motion to make sure it happens later in the week.

Last nights vote was 314 to 312 against an amendment tabled by Labours Hilary Benn for MPs to hold multiple choice votes on Plan Bs. It could have gone the other way but for the late promise given by Mr Barclay to Mr Benn. Mrs Mays de facto deputy David Lidington said that if MPs choose a different Brexit plan in the indicative votes it will mean a much longer postponement of Brexit.

Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January 1 /33 Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January Pro-EU and pro-Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A man holds a 'Stop Brexit' sign aboard a campaign bus travelling down Whitehall in Westminster, London PA Pro-Brexit demonstrators chant slogans outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Anti-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter vapes electronic cigarette in front of a group of remain supporters AP Pro-Brexit protestors dressed as suffragettes demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Images An anti-brexit supporter holds banners in London AP Pro and anti Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP A campaigner dressed as Charlie Chaplin walks by the Houses of Parliament PA A leave supporter holds banners at the parliament gates AP Pro-Brexit, left and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP Pro-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter holds banners in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London AP Police officers stand near Pro-Brexit and Anti-Brexit posters outside the Houses of Parliament, in Westminster, London Reuters Leave supporters hold placards in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London, AP A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Leave supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in Londo AP Leave and remain supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in London AP Pro-Brexit activists hold placards and wave flags as they demonstrate opposite the Houses of Parliament in London AFP/Getty Images A remain supporter, left and a leave supporter, center, discuss during demonstrations in London AP Pro-Brexit protesters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images v Reuters Anti-Brexit protesters demonstrate on a double decker bus outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images

Those are the indications which the Brussels institutions of the EU, the Commission, and the Council Secretariat and certain member states have been giving to us, he said.

Guy Verhofstadt, the senior MEP who co-ordinates for the European Parliament at talks, made clear an extension would be allowed only if a fresh deal was properly backed by Parliament.

Instead of permanent votes against a solution, we finally need a majority from London for something, so that an extension makes any sense at all, he said. Some Brussels reports suggest a second referendum might even be demanded by the EU in return for a long extension.

Countdown to Brexit: 14 days until Britain leaves the EU

Former attorney general Dominic Grieve told Talk Radio: The only thing that can happen is if the Government tries to create the conditions in which we can have a free and open debate.

Mrs May is planning to stage a third meaningful vote on her Brexit deal next Tuesday or Wednesday, giving her just enough time to ask EU leaders to grant a short extension to Article 50 at a summit starting on Thursday. Her deal was thrown out by 149 votes this week and by a record 230 votes in January.

Mrs May finally admitted yesterday she needs a Brexit delay to get vital laws passed in time  something the Standard revealed in January.
D avid Steel has been suspended from the Liberal Democrats over remarks he made to a child abuse inquiry about the late MP Sir Cyril Smith.

Lord Steel, a former Liberal leader, said he in 1979 asked Smith about claims he abused boys at a Rochdale hostel in the 1960s.

Party officials have decided he should face a formal investigation.

The move comes after Lord Steel, a former Scottish Parliament presiding officer, gave evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) on Wednesday.

The party had already announced they have started disciplinary proceedings against him, after he told the probe a conversation with Smith left him "assuming" the allegations were correct, but the party did not investigate them.

The decision followed a meeting of senior figures within the Scottish party on Thursday evening.

In a subsequent statement, the Scottish Liberal Democrats said: "Following the evidence concerning Cyril Smith given by Lord Steel to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse on 13th March 2019, the office bearers of the Scottish Liberal Democrats have met and agreed that an investigation is needed.

"The party membership of Lord Steel has been suspended pending the outcome of that investigation. That work will now commence.

"It is important that everyone in the party, and in wider society, understands the importance of vigilance and safeguarding to protect people from abuse, and that everyone has confidence in the seriousness with which we take it.

"We appreciate the difficult work that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is doing on behalf of the victims and survivors of abuse, and the country as a whole."

At the inquiry Lord Steel denied he had been "hiding his head in the sand" over the child abuse allegations made against the former Rochdale MP.

Lord Steel said he asked the late politician in 1979 about claims that he abused boys at a Rochdale hostel, and found they dated back to Smith's time as a Labour councillor in the 1960s.

He told the inquiry he came away from the conversation with Smith "assuming" he had committed the offences, because he did not deny them.

Lord Steel recalled Smith had told him police had investigated the claims and taken no action.

The IICSA heard no formal inquiry was then held by the Liberal Party into the claims.

On the suggestion that no action was taken then because Lord Steel did not want to get involved in a nasty confrontation with Smith, he told the hearing: "I wouldn't have been hiding my head in the sand.

"These allegations all related to a period some years before he was even an MP and before he was even a member of the party, therefore it did not seem to me that I had any position in the matter at all."

Smith, who was an MP for Rochdale between 1972 and 1992, is accused of sexually abusing a number of boys.

Allegations against him found a greater public spotlight after he died in 2010.

Lord Steel's conversation with Smith was prompted by a story in Private Eye.

It came after the Rochdale Alternative Press published a story in 1979 saying police had investigated Smith over allegations of abuse against teenagers at the Cambridge House hostel in the town.

Lord Steel told the inquiry: "He accepted the story was correct. Obviously I disapproved but as far as I was concerned it was past history."

In a statement released before he was suspended on Thursday, Lord Steel said he wanted to "clarify what happened in 1979 when I asked Cyril Smith about the report in Private Eye".

He added: "As I told the inquiry yesterday, I did not have that report with me when I tackled him, nor did we discuss the details in it.

"He admitted to me that the report was correct, in that he had been investigated by the police at the time and no action taken against him.

"I had already told the inquiry in writing that in my opinion he had been abusing his position in Rochdale Council (that is to gain access to council-run children's homes), but that had been properly a matter for the police and the council, and not for me, as he was neither an MP nor even a member of the Liberal Party at the time.

"I was in no position to re-open the investigation."

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable said the decision to suspend Lord Steel was taken by the party in Scotland "quickly, properly and in an orderly way".

He told BBC's Newsnight: "There was very serious concern about what he said, serious allegations, they have got to be investigated."

Richard Scorer, a specialist abuse lawyer at Slater and Gordon, who is acting on behalf of some victims at the inquiry, said: "My clients will welcome the news that Steel is finally being made to face the consequences of his inaction.
L abour Leave MPs are being warned they risk a hard Brexit if they back Theresa Mays deal so it squeaks through the Commons and she is then replaced by a Tory Right-winger.

Six Labour MPs voted with the Government last night to block an amendment  tabled by Hilary Benn, chairman of the Commons Brexit committee, and Tory grandee Sir Oliver Letwin  which would have allowed Parliament to take greater control of Brexit.

It lost by 314 to 312 with Vauxhall MP Kate Hoey, Caroline Flint, John Mann, Sir Kevin Barron, Ronnie Campbell and Graham Stringer siding with the Conservatives. Former culture secretary Ben Bradshaw expressed his anger on Twitter, stressing: We lost by 2.

A number of Labour MPs are considering whether to support Mrs May if she gets back for her plan from the Democratic Unionist Party and enough Tory Eurosceptics to be close to getting a majority at the third attempt.

Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January 1 /33 Brexit: Leave and Remain supporters gather in London on 29 January Pro-EU and pro-Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A man holds a 'Stop Brexit' sign aboard a campaign bus travelling down Whitehall in Westminster, London PA Pro-Brexit demonstrators chant slogans outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters Anti-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter vapes electronic cigarette in front of a group of remain supporters AP Pro-Brexit protestors dressed as suffragettes demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament Getty Images An anti-brexit supporter holds banners in London AP Pro and anti Brexit protestors discuss the vote and ongoing political processes as they demonstrate near to the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP A campaigner dressed as Charlie Chaplin walks by the Houses of Parliament PA A leave supporter holds banners at the parliament gates AP Pro-Brexit, left and anti-Brexit protesters hold banners in London AP Pro-Brexit demonstrators protest outside the Houses of Parliament Reuters A leave supporter holds banners in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London AP Police officers stand near Pro-Brexit and Anti-Brexit posters outside the Houses of Parliament, in Westminster, London Reuters Leave supporters hold placards in front of remain supporters during demonstrations in London, AP A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images A pro-Brexit protestor sets fire to a roll of toilet paper decorated with the EU flag as she demonstrates near the Houses of Parliament Getty Images Leave supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in Londo AP Leave and remain supporters hold placards as they take part in demonstrations near the parliament in London AP Pro-Brexit activists hold placards and wave flags as they demonstrate opposite the Houses of Parliament in London AFP/Getty Images A remain supporter, left and a leave supporter, center, discuss during demonstrations in London AP Pro-Brexit protesters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images v Reuters Anti-Brexit protesters demonstrate on a double decker bus outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster Getty Images

But they are being warned that if she wins, the Tories may replace her with a hardline Eurosceptic MP to negotiate a future trade partnership with the EU.

Shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner said: They know she will be evicted from No 10  and a new more Right-wing replacement will be left negotiating the real Brexit deal  supporting a bad Brexit withdrawal agreement under Theresa May could make them responsible for a final trade agreement under her successor which would entrench division and inequality in our country for decades.

Countdown to Brexit: 14 days until Britain leaves the EU
T he sole survivor of the Ben Nevis avalanche disaster has paid tribute to his fellow three climbers, saying: you will forever be in my heart.

Swiss national Mathieu Biselx, 30, was swept up in the snow slide on the UKs highest peak with three other members of the group from the Swiss Alpine Club of Sion.

The four climbers were caught by the deluge of snow and ice on Tuesday, triggering a massive rescue operation in treacherous weather conditions.

Mr Biselx, who has been recovering from leg injuries at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, said in a Facebook post: "Raph, Cedric and Adrien, thank you for your friendship.

"Have a good trip to your new mountains.

"Thank you for all you have done for our community, and for your inspiration. You are going to be missed.

"Thank you for having come so far with me. My thoughts are with your families. We are all there for you.

"You will be forever in my heart."

Two of the avalanche victims were French, aged 41 and 32, and the third was a Swiss 43-year-old.

The men's mountaineering club said in a statement: "The Swiss Alpine Club is deeply saddened by the terrible news of the three members of the Sion Monte Rosa branch who died on Ben Nevis on Tuesday.

"We send all our sympathy and our most sincere condolences to the families and those close to those who died.

Police vehicle waits at the Nevis Range Mountain Resort with Ben Nevis after an avalanche killed three climbers. / PA

"Our thoughts are with Mathieu who survived the avalanche and who lost his three climbing companions."

Mr Biselx said his companions were experienced climbers who took advice from local guides.

He said they had been given two routes to take on the mountain, and upon reaching the second route in the afternoon they saw there had already been an avalanche.

They had barely reached the area when they were swept away.

Mr Biselx, who has a young daughter, said he was "amazingly lucky".

He told Valais newspaper Le Nouvelliste: "We weren't very high up and suddenly we heard a noise. We looked round and two seconds later we were carried away by heavy, compact snow.

"When I regained consciousness only my head and an arm were sticking out of the snow."

He described his companions as "wonderful" people who were also fathers.

Three fatal accidents occured on Ben Nevis in recent months / Getty Images

The men were recovered by members of the Lochaber and Glencoe Mountain Rescue teams with assistance from volunteer rescuers training in the area.

It is the third fatal accident on 1,345m Ben Nevis in recent months.

On January 1, a 21-year-old Bristol University student from Germany died after falling from a ridge.

In December, Patrick Boothroyd, 21, from West Yorkshire, died after falling in the Tower Gully area.
P eople across the world have gathered to condemn the attack on two mosques in New Zealand which killed at least 49 people and injured dozens more.

Gunmen targeted worshippers in Christchurch during Friday prayer, inciting anger around the globe.

Hundreds of thousands came together in response to the mass shooting in countries like Pakistan, Australia, Bangladesh, France and the UK.

Muslim communities held up placards in Karachi with the words: #NewZealandAttack: We condemn attack on mosque.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /28 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

In Bangladesh, demonstrators shouted slogans outside the Baitul Mukkaram National Mosque in Dhaka.

Others protesting in Istanbul held up signs which read in Turkish Say Stop to Global Terror."

In London, Jeremy Corbyn paid a visit to Finsbury Park Mosque, whilst families gathered outside the New Zealand Embassy to show their support with the message: #turntolove

Speaking outside the East London Mosque, mayor Sadiq Khan said: The best solidarity is showing that our diversity is a strength.

Eyewitness describes the scene in New Zealand following the shooting at a mosque

He added: We may be more than 11,000 miles away from Christchurch in New Zealand, but we feel the ripples of hatred, we feel the ripples of fear, we feel the ripples of sorrow for our brothers and sisters in Christchurch.

Its really important we demonstrate from London that as far as we are concerned our diversity is a strength not a weakness, we dont simply tolerate it, we embrace it.

It is the case thought that there are Muslims in London who will be feeling vulnerable, feeling scared, feeling frightened because they are Muslims.

I want to reassure all Muslims and everyone going to a place of worship today and over the course of the next few days you will be seeing increased policing.

Its really important we as a city dont allow this terrorist to cower us to change the way we lead our lives.

The thoughts and prayers of every decent Londoner are with those in Christchurch in New Zealand who have lost their lives, we stand in solidarity with the people of Christchurch.

The UKs biggest mosque, the Baitul Futuh Mosque in south London, organised a silent prayer ceremony after the Friday player to pay tribute to the victims in New Zealand.

Worshipers pray outside the Great Mosque of Paris during the Friday Muslim prayer, in Paris. / EPA

Farhad Ahmed, a young Imam for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community told the Evening Standard: Following the Friday prayers we are holding a silent prayer that we are doing for the victims and their families.

The whole community is doing a short address to share our condolences with the victims.

We have to keep in mind that no matter what happens, one persons action or a group of individuals actions, cannot divide a whole group of religious affiliations.

What is quite important is that we use this to express our sympathy to these people and express our unity at this time.

It has happened in New Zealand but we are all a global community. We are definitely living in a global village, we take their pain and speak out for the need for unity.

Mr Ahmed also expressed the importance of sharing peaceful messages during this time, and highlighting the positivity in our community.
A merican Conservative activist Candace Owens has been condemned for using a laughing emoji in a tweet about the New Zealand mosque massacre after the attacker named her as an influence in his manifesto.

A gunman murdered 49 people and wounded dozens in the terror attack at two mosques in the city of Christchurch. The suspect has been named as 28-year-old Australian man Brenton Tarrant.

In a warped 74-page manifesto published online, he names right-wing personalities as inspiration for carrying out the shooting.

He cites Ms Owens as the person who influenced me above all.

Forty-nine killed in Christchurch mosque shootings, New Zealand PM says

Ms Owens was quick to dismiss the claims, posting LOL! on Twitter alongside a laughing face emoji.

She added: FACT: Ive never created any content espousing my views on the 2nd Amendment or Islam.

'The Left pretending I inspired a mosque massacre in...New Zealand because I believe black America can do it without government hand outs is the reachiest reach of all reaches!! LOL!'

Twitter users condemned her for trivialising the mass shooting.

One wrote: Is it really appropriate for you to be tweeting things like this right now? Seriously?

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /37 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

What the f*** are you laughing about, added another. Another suggested: Maybe a little less laughing considering the death toll?

One Twitter user described her response as disgustingly callous while another suggested she should show some grace or dignity... or compassion..."

Some also share tweets Ms Owens has previously posted which warned Europe will fall and become a Muslim majority by 2050 and telling European countries to defend your culture.

In his manifesto, the attacker describes anti-immigrant motives, saying the victims were a "large group of invaders" who he says "seek to occupy my peoples lands and ethnically replace my own people (sic)".
U S President Donald Trump has issued a veto over a measure from Congress revoking his declaration of a national emergency at the US-Mexico border.

Mr Trump made the first veto of his presidency and overruled Congress to protect his emergency declaration for border wall funding.

Congress will now need a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override the president.

Mr Trump has made it clear he is not through fighting to build the border wall between Mexico and America, as was promised in his campaign.

He said the situation on the southern border is a tremendous national emergency and said our immigration system is stretched beyond the breaking point.

Mr Trump in the Oval Office / EPA

Speaking on Friday, Mr Trump added: Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution, and I have the duty to veto it.

A dozen defecting Republicans joined Senate Democrats in approving the joint resolution on Thursday, which capped a week of confrontation with the White House as both parties in Congress strained to exert their power in new ways.

Donald Trump speaks following the signing of his veto / AFP/Getty Images

It is unlikely that Congress will have the two-thirds majority required to override Mr Trump's veto, though House Democrats have suggested they would try nonetheless.

Mr Trump wants to use the emergency order to divert billions of federal dollars earmarked for defence spending towards the southern border wall.

It still faces several legal challenges from Democratic state attorneys general and environmental groups who argue the emergency declaration was unconstitutional.

Those cases could block Mr Trump from diverting extra money to barrier construction for months or longer.

American Civil Liberties Union, which filed one of the cases, said the veto is meaningless - like the declaration in the first place.

Executive Director Anthony Romero said: Congress has rejected the President's declaration, and now the courts will be the ultimate arbiter of its legality.
D onald Trump announced he will make a trip to the Republic of Ireland this year.

At a White House press conference with Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar the US president confirmed he would travel to the country he called a special place.

Mr Trump said that he and Mr Varadkar had become fast friends after the meeting in Washington DC in celebration of St Patricks Day.

The president's previous planned visit to the Republic of Ireland in November was cancelled for scheduling reasons.

Highlights of Leo Varadkar's trip to Washington

Mr Trump said: Ill be coming at some point this year. I missed it last time but I would have loved to have been there. Its a special place.

Later, the taoiseach presented the US president with a traditional bowl of shamrock in a ceremony dating back to the 1950s.

Speaking during the ceremony, Mr Varadkar said he could see the successes of Trumps campaign to make America great again.

He said: I believe the greatness of America is about more than economic prowess and military might.

AFP/Getty Images

It is rooted in the things that make us love America, your people, your values, a new nation conceived by liberty. The land of the brave and free.

Mr Varadkar also thanked the president and congress for the new visa program, allowing a limited number of Irish citizens to work in the US each year.

During the press conference, Mr Trump addressed the Brexit deadlock, calling the Irish border issue, one of the most complex points.

Im surprised at how badly it has all gone from a standpoint of negotiations but I gave the prime minister my ideas of how to negotiate it.

Leo Varadkar: Trump and I discussed our 'very different views' on Brexit

It is rooted in the things that make us love America, your people, your values, a new nation conceived by liberty. The land of the brave and free.

She didnt listen to that and thats fine but it could have been negotiated in a different manner.

Earlier on Thursday, the Taoiseach met with US Vice-President Mike Pence, where he said he is judged by his political actions not his sexual orientation.

Mr Pence has been criticised in the past for his conservative views on LGBT rights, and there was much focus on their first meeting when the vice-president invited Mr Varadkar and his partner, Matt Barrett to visit him.
T he pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines flight asked to return back to the airport in a panicked voice three minutes after take-off, according to reports.

Break break, request back to home, the captain told air traffic controllers, a person who reviewed air traffic communications told the New York Times.

It comes as the investigation into the Boeing 737 disaster got under way on Friday, with investigators in France examining the plane's black boxes.

The New York Times said captain Yared Getachew initially reported a "flight control" problem in a calm voice before asking to return in panicked tones three minutes into the flight.

One of the two black box recorders of the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX / AFP/Getty Images

French authorities have the flight data and cockpit voice recorders, although Ethiopia is formally leading the investigation and US experts are in Paris and Addis Ababa too.

The Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed soon after take-off from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board.

Rescuers work at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines flight crash / AP

It initially flew below the minimum safe height for its climb, then once at higher altitude was oscillating up and down by hundreds of feet, all at abnormally fast speed, the Times said.

It then disappeared from radar over a military zone and lost contact with controllers five minutes after take-off.

Ethiopian Airlines plane crash 1 /30 Ethiopian Airlines plane crash People walk past a part of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS People walk past a part of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS People walk past a part of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS A passenger safety instruction card is seen at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS Cabin serviettes are seen at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS A civilian takes a photograph of the wreckage at the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS Rescuers search through wreckage at the scene of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after takeoff at Hejere near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, some 50 km (31 miles) south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia AP A man inspecting what is believed to be wreckage at the crash site of an Ethiopia Airlines aircraft near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A Nairobi-bound Boeing 737 crashed six minutes after an early-morning takeoff from Addis Ababa on March 10, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew on board, Ethiopian Airlines said as world leaders offered condolences to distraught next-of-kin. People holding passports from 32 countries and the UN were on board the plane which ploughed into a field just 60 kilometres (37 miles) southeast of Addis Ababa, the carrier's CEO Tewolde GebreMariam told journalists in the capital, lamenting this "very sad and tragic day." AFP/Getty Images Red cross team work amid debris at the crash site of Ethiopia Airlines near Bishoftu, a town some 60 kilometres southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. AFP/Getty Images Rescuers search through the wreckage of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after takeoff at the scene at Hejere near Bishoftu, or Debre Zeit, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia. AP A general view shows the scene of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS An Ethiopian Airports Enterprise fire engine drives to the scene of the Flight ET 302 plane crash, near the town of Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. REUTERS A relative reacts as he leaves the information centre following the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 plane crash, at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi, Kenya. REUTERS A woman reacts as she waits for the updated flight information of Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302, where her fiance was onboard at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi, Kenya. REUTERS Family members of the victims involved in a plane crash react at Addis Ababa international airport. AP A family member of a victim involved in a plane crash talks on a mobile phone at Addis Ababa international airport Sunday. AP Relatives of the victims involved in a plane crash board a bus at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, Kenya. AP A Djiboutian national Hiba (L) is comforted by a relative as she waits for details of her loved one that was on board the flight Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi, Kenya. EPA Passenger Ahmed Khalid (L), who missed his Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 while connecting from Dubai, is received by his father Khalid Bzambur (R) at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi, Kenya. REUTERS Airport staff install a help desk for the crashed Ethiopia airlines flight at the inernational arrival of the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya. AFP/Getty Images Relatives of the victims involved in a plane crash board a bus at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, Kenya. AP Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde Gebremariam holds a press briefing at the headquarters of Ethiopian Airlines in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. AP Passengers wait outside the Bole International airport Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. AP

It is the second such calamity involving Boeing's flagship new model.

The Ethiopian Airlines crash comes after a Lion Air jet came down off Indonesia in October with 189 people on board. In both cases, pilots asked to return minutes into the flight.

"It looks like the Lion Air, because the flight only lasted for six minutes," Ethiopian Airlines Chief Executive Tewolde Gebremariam told state Chinese state news agency Xinhua on Friday.

"There is clear similarity between our crash and the Lion Air crash."

The Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 that crashed shortly after take-off on Sunday / AP

Regulators have grounded the 737 MAX globally as parallels between the twin disasters have frightened travellers worldwide and wiped billions of dollars off Boeing stock.

US authorities say information from the wreckage and data on its flight path show some similarities.

Two sources said investigators retrieved a piece of a stabiliser, which moves the nose up and down, set in an unusual position - similar to that of the Lion Air plane that crashed in Indonesia.

"Looking at the crash site photos, the aircraft appears to have nose-dived," Paul Gichinga, former head of the Kenya Airline Pilots Association, told Reuters.
T oday's massacre in New Zealand might be wildly out of keeping with its reputation as a safe and peaceful country, but it fits, regrettably, into a worldwide pattern of increasing far-Right terrorism.

This trend was highlighted in last years Global Terrorism Index by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace. It warned that the threat of far-Right political terrorism is on the rise and cited statistics showing a significant increase in attacks and fatalities over the preceding years.

This year New Yorks Anti-Defamation League concluded that every terrorist murder in the US in 2018 had a link to far-Right extremism. The total was at least 50 attacks  up 35 per cent on the year before.

America has long had an unfortunate reputation for producing far-Right extremists, but alarm bells are ringing more loudly in Britain too.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /28 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

The worst incidents have been the terrorist attack outside Finsbury Park mosque in 2017, in which one man was murdered and others were injured, and the killing of MP Jo Cox a year earlier. MI5 and police have also foiled four other far-Right attacks since 2017.

The emergence of the far-Right terror group National Action, which has been banned, and figures showing a 36 per cent leap in the number of suspected far-Right sympathisers referred to the Governments Prevent de-radicalisation scheme in 2017-18 also illustrate the growing problem.

Forty-nine killed in Christchurch mosque shootings, New Zealand PM says

The countrys top counter-terrorism officer, Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, recently said that although his officers were having to pay very close attention to the problem, it remained a relatively small threat.

But several dangers lie ahead. One is the risk of copycat attacks, another is the threat of retaliatory Islamist violence and a spiral of radicalisation in which hostile ideologies feed off resentments to inspire further attacks.
T he gunman in the mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand live streamed one of the attacks online and published an 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto.

The footage of the terror attack lasted more than 16 minutes and was later deleted from Facebook after it was shared on the social networking site.

A suspect in the shootings at two mosques in Christchurch has been named in media reports as 28-year-old Australian man Brenton Tarrant.

At the beginning of the live stream, a man can be heard saying lets get this party started, as he starts his car and begins driving to the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch dressed in combat gear.

Timeline of the New Zealand mosque shootings

He pauses and says: "Remember lads, subscribe to PewDiePie." The controversial YouTuber said he is "sickened" that he was mentioned by the shooter.

Footage from the live-stream showed the shooters weapon before he attacked the mosque. / AP

As he pulls up outside the mosque, the music changes to the traditional marching song of the British military, the British Grenadiers.

In a 74-page manifesto published online, the man describes anti-immigrant motives, saying the victims were a "large group of invaders" who he says "seek to occupy my peoples lands and ethnically replace my own people (sic)".

The manifesto cited "white genocide", a term typically used by racist groups to refer to immigration and the growth of minority populations, as his motivation.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /37 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

It also cited multiple child grooming cases in Northern England and references white nationalist stories and issues promoted online. It also names right-wing personalities as inspiration for carrying out the shooting.

The manifesto also lists a series of questions and answers, and opens with one asking: "Who are you?"

The answer says: "Just a ordinary White man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to a working class, low income family.

"My parents are of Scottish, Irish and English stock. I had a regular childhood, without any great issues. I had little interest in education during my schooling, barely achieving a passing grade."

He adds: "I am just a regular White man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people."

He describes himself as "a private and mostly introverted person" and admits he is racist, adding that he is an "Eco-fascist by nature".

He said New Zealand was not the original choice for an attack, saying he only came to the country temporarily to plan and train.

On his planning for the attack, he wrote: "I begun planning an attack roughly two years in advance and an attack at the location in Christchurch three months in advance."

Answering whether he supports Brexit, he wrote: "Yes, though not for an official policy made. The truth is that eventually people must face the fact that it wasn't a damn thing to do with the economy.

"That it was the British people firing back at mass immigration, cultural displacement and globalism, and that's a great and wonderful thing."

On whether or not he is a supporter of US president Donald Trump, he wrote: "As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policy maker and leader? Dear god no."

He said he was not a member of any organisation, but had donated to and interacted with many nationalist groups, though he acted alone and no group ordered the attack.

Authorities have said they are working to have the footage removed from the Internet.

Forty-nine people are said to have died in the two massacres and 20 were seriously injured.

New Zealand police said they have taken into custody three men and one woman over the shootings. One man has been charged with murder and will appear in court on Saturday.

Police have refused to name the shooter.
V ideo footage appears to show the moment brave police officers made an arrest after a terror attack at two New Zealand mosques.

A video posted on YouTube by witness Nathan Cambus shows two armed police officers approaching a car that has been pushed off the busy road by their police car.

Pointing their guns at the passenger side, the footage then shows them dragging a person out onto the street.

The attack was livestreamed on Facebook. / AP

The officers then appear to handcuff the person. Four people have been arrested by police in connection with attack. The shooting suspect has been named in reports as 28-year-old Australian man Brenton Tennant.

The shooting at one of the mosques was broadcast live on Facebook. The shooter left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack.

The three other people arrested were two men and a woman.

One suspect has been charged with murder.

New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said the attacks marked one of New Zealand's "darkest days".

She said the events represented "an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence," and that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /37 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

While there was no reason to believe there were any more suspects, Ms Ardern said the national security threat level was being raised from low to high, the second-highest level.

Police said the investigation had extended 240 miles to the south, where homes in Dunedin were evacuated around a "location of interest." A police statement gave no further detail of how it might be linked to the attacks.
F orty-nine people have been killed in New Zealand following mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister has called one of the countrys darkest days.

A gunman broadcast online live footage of the attack on one mosque in the city of Christchurch, mirroring the carnage played out in video games, after publishing a "manifesto" in which he denounced immigrants..

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the events in Christchurch represented "an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence" and acknowledged many of those affected may be migrants and refugees.

Forty-eight others are injured including children. 20 of them are in a serious condition.

The gunman livestreamed the attack on Facebook. / AP

"It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack," Ms Ardern said.

A 28-year-old white Australian man has claimed responsibility for the attack. The suspect has been named in media reports as Brenton Tarrant.

Three men and a woman are in custody after the shootings, which shocked people across the nation of five million people. One suspect has been charged with murder.

While there was no reason to believe there were more suspects, Ms Ardern said the national security threat level was being raised to the second-highest level.

Footage from the live-stream showed the shooters weapon before he attacked the mosque. / AP

Heres a timeline of what we know so far:

1.45pm (local time): Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter a Christchurch city mosque in Hagley Park with an automatic weapon.

2.11pm: Police confirm they are attending an evolving situation. A witness reported hearing dozens of gunshots and saw what she thought was three people on the ground.

Local media report a shooting had occurred in a second mosque four miles away.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /28 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

2.17pm: A number of schools are locked down in Christchurch as people begin to emerge from the mosque covered in blood.

2.54pm: Police Commissioner Mike Bush said the situation is serious and evolving and involves and active shooter as he urges people to stay off the streets and remain indoors.

Police respond to mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch. / AP

3.20pm: Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel said she is shocked beyond words at the events.

4pm: Police commissioner Mike Bush confirms one person is in custody but warns the people of Christchurch there may be others who pose a risk to their safety.

4.10pm: Mrs Arden calls the act an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence and one of New Zealands darkest days.

Paramedics respond to one of two mass shootings in Christchurch. / Reuters

5.30pm: Police said they have taken into custody three men and one woman over the shootings at the two mosques. One of the suspects was charged with murder.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said police have defused a number of improvised explosive devices found on vehicles after the mosque shootings.

A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for his actions. He said he considered it a terrorist attack. The man also live streamed the attack over Facebook.

6pm: Police said they are not aware of other suspects beyond the four who have been arrested after two mosque shootings but they can't be certain.

7pm: Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed that one of the four people taken into custody in New Zealand's mosque shootings was a 28-year-old white Australian who went to New Zealand only to plan and train for the attack.

7.30pm: Ms Arden confirmed their had been 40 casualties and another 20 people had been seriously injured in the attacks.

The number of fatalities was later said to be as many as 49. As many as 41 people died at one mosque and seven at another, one person died in hospital.
A far-right Australian senator has sparked outrage after saying the New Zealand mosque shootings highlight growing fears over an increasing Muslim presence.

Forty-nine people have been killed, with dozens wounded, after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch. One of the attacks was live streamed on Facebook.

Immediately after the massacre on Friday, Fraser Anning, who has represented Queensland in the Australian Senate since 2017, said in a series of tweets: Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?

The real cause of bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program that allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /28 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

Todays shootings in Christchurch highlight the growing fears within our community both in Australia and New Zealand over the increasing Muslim presence.

Mr Anning, who has previously called for a final solution to immigration  language echoing that of Nazi Germany  added today is not an excuse to forget the countless lives lost to Islamic terrorist attacks.

Police commissioner confirms 49 dead in NZ mosque shooting

Most of the tweets have since been deleted, but appeared in a separate statement in which Mr Anning condemned the shootings.

His comments on Twitter prompted thousands of outraged responses. Tom Coates said: You mean on a day when a white nationalist kills Muslims the Muslims are to blame? You should lose your job for this statement. Its appalling.

Witnesses tell of horror as shooter opens fire inside mosque

Another user, named Maddy, said: In the cesspit that is the far right, you reach new depths.

I try to have empathy for everyone, but you've convinced me that you are entirely undeserving of love.
W itnesses of the Christchurch mosque shootings have shared their horror at the attacks which saw 49 people killed on Friday.

One man, who lives next door to the Masjid Al Noor mosque - one of two in the city which were targeted - said: I saw dead people everywhere.

Another man, Mohan Ibrahim, was one of 200 people inside the same mosque. He said there was "10 to 15 minutes of continuous shooting".

Mr Ibrahim told Sky News: "We were in to pray. It's such a big mosque in the Christchurch area. I heard suddenly a sound I thought may be a short circuit. The shooter was coming from the main door. I realised it was a gun shooting.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /28 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

"He was coming towards the main area of the mosque. I managed to get out.

"It was like 10 to 15 minutes of continuous shooting. The dead people were inside and outside. The shooter was inside and then he came out. He was changing his gun.

Police attempt to clear people from outside a mosque in central Christchurch / Mark Baker/AP

"I heard later on two of my friends were in the hospital. I know one lady who has passed away.

"I am in a sense of shock. I am so scared. Now I do not know what will happen."

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He added: "I don't feel safe now. I cannot forget the sound of shooting and scenery I saw with my eyes.

"Innocent people have just died."

People gather near the scene of the shootings on Friday / Tessa Burrows/AFP/Getty Images

Len Peneha, the neighbour who has lived next to the mosque for five years, said on Friday he saw a man dressed in black enter. He then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

He saw the gunman flee before emergency services arrived, at which point he entered to try and help.

Police officers guard the area close to the Masjid al Noor mosque / Tessa Burrows/AFP/Getty Images

"I saw dead people everywhere, he said. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque.

It's unbelievable nutty. I don't understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. It's ridiculous.

Police commissioner confirms 49 dead in NZ mosque shooting

Mr Peneha said he helped five people recover in his home. He said one was slightly injured.

He continued: I've lived next door to this mosque for about five years and the people are great, they're very friendly. I just don't understand it."

He said the gunman was white and was wearing a helmet with a device on top, giving him a military-style appearance.

Another man, named Nour, told local paper the Star that he crawled to safety amid the carnage.

First he shot people outside. Then he came in the front, he said.
A 71-year-old man has been named as the first victim of the New Zealand terror attack by his family, according to reports.

Haji Daoud Nabi was killed while trying to save another person's life during the mass shooting in Christchurch on Friday.

Mr Nabi's son Omar told reporters his father was killed in the attack, which claimed the lives of at least 49 people.

The 43-year-old was told his father had thrown himself in front of another worshipper before being shot. He told NBC News that his father helped refugees start their new lives in New Zealand.

Omar Nabi speaks to the media about losing his father Haji Daoud in the mosque attacks / REUTERS

Omar, who missed Friday prayers due to work, said: "Whether youre from Palestine, Iraq, Syria  hes been the first person to hold his hand up."

Fears are also growing for a missing three-year-old boy as families appeal for information on relatives after the attacks.

Abdi Ibrahim told New Zealand news site Stuff that he was at the Deans Ave mosque with his father and three-year-old brother Mucad Ibrahim when the shooting started.

Mucad has not been seen since the shooting, his brother said.

It comes as initial reports from several governments suggest several of those killed or wounded were from the Middle East or South Asia.

The live-streamed terror attack killed at least 49 people and wounded 48 as they gathered for weekly prayers in Christchurch.

A 28-year-old man has been charged with murder and appeared in Christchurch District Court on Saturday, police said.

People gathering at mosques around the world after New Zealand attack 1 /24 People gathering at mosques around the world after New Zealand attack Bangladeshi Muslims protest after two mosques have been attacked in New Zealand following Friday prayers, in Dhaka. AFP/Getty Images Female Kashmiri supporters shout slogans during a protest march in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir. EPA People gather at a vigil for Christchurch shootings victims at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney, Australia. Tayyab Hameed via Reuters UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn pays a visit to Finsbury Park Mosque in north London. PA Kashmiri Muslims shout slogans as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq (unseen), delivers a sermon inside Jamia Masjid mosque in Srinagar. AFP/Getty Images Bangladeshi Muslims offer Friday prayers after protesting in Dhaka. AFP/Getty Images Kashmiri supporters of Mirwaiz assembled after the culmination of congregational Friday prayers outside Jamia Masjid, Kashmir's main mosque. EPA Worshipers leave the Great Mosque after the Friday Muslim prayer in Paris. EPA A paramilitary soldier stands guard during Muslims Friday congregational prayers as security has been intensified in Quetta, Pakistan. EPA Muslims shout slogan as they condemn Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand, after Friday prayers at the Baitul Mukarram National Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Reuters Turkish people hold placards reading 'say stop to global terror' and ' the crusader barbarity in New Zealand' and shout slogans during a demonstration. EPA Palestinian Muslim worshipers take part in the Friday noon prayer next to the Gold Gate or Gate of Mercy inside the Al-Aqsa mosques compound in Jerusalem's Old City. AFP/Getty Images A demonstrator hangs banners from multi-faith group 'Turn to Love' during a vigil at New Zealand House in London. AP Bangladeshi activists shout slogans during a protest in front of Baitul Mukkaram National Mosque. AP Worshipers pray for victims and families during an evening vigil a the Lakemba Mosque in Wakemba, New South Wales, Australia. AP A young demonstrator holds a banner from multi-faith group 'Turn to Love' during a vigil at New Zealand House in London. AP A demonstrator holding a placard that reads in Turkish: 'Say 'Stop' to Global Terror' in Istanbul. AP Pakistanis protest to condemn the New Zealand mosque shooting in Karachi, Pakistan. AP

Bangladesh's honourary consul in Auckland, Shafiqur Rahman Bhuiyan, has said that "so far" three Bangladeshis were among those killed and four or five others were wounded, including two left in critical condition.

"One leg of an injured needed to be amputated while another suffered bullet injuries in his chest," Rahman Bhuiyan said. He declined to identify the dead or wounded.

People take part in a vigil at the New Zealand War Memorial on Hyde Park Corner following the mosque attacks in Christchurch / PA

Two Jordanians were among those killed, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Petra news service.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Sufian Qudah had earlier said that a Jordanian man was killed and eight others were wounded.

Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said four Pakistanis were wounded and Ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal tweeted that five other Pakistani citizens are missing after Friday's attacks.

Malaysia said two of its citizens were hospitalised, and the Saudi Embassy in Wellington said two Saudis were wounded.

Worshippers pray for victims and families of the Christchurch shootings in Australia / AP

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at least three Turkish citizens were wounded in the attacks in New Zealand and that he has spoken to one of them.

Two Indonesians, a father and son, were also among those shot and wounded, Foreign Ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir said.

Mr Nasir said the father is being treated at an intensive care unit and his son is in another ward at the same hospital. He declined to identify them.

The man's wife, Alta Marie, posted on Facebook that her husband and their son are both alive, but wounded.

Mrs Marie said that both were shot in the attack Friday at Christchurch's Linwood Islamic center.

"My husband was shot in multiple places and has a drain in his lung," she wrote on Facebook.
A woman wept as she described how she told a wounded mans wife over the phone that he had been shot and watched another person die during the horrific Christchurch shooting.

Jill Keats was driving in the area when she saw people running and heard sounds she thought were firecrackers, before she realised the fleeing group were being shot at.

She stopped her car in shock and two men fell to the ground either side during the atrocity in New Zealand.

The New Zealander opened her car doors and pulled the man around to the back of her car for protection and compressed his wounds, with the help of another witness.

Timeline of the New Zealand mosque shootings

We could hear the ambulance but they couldnt get to us, she told BBC news.

The guy we helped was trying to ring his wife. I said to her, your husbands been shot at the mosque go to the hospital and wait for him.

As that happened she saw another man, who she had not been able to get to, pass away.

People gathering at mosques around the world after New Zealand attack 1 /18 People gathering at mosques around the world after New Zealand attack Bangladeshi Muslims protest after two mosques have been attacked in New Zealand following Friday prayers, in Dhaka. AFP/Getty Images Female Kashmiri supporters shout slogans during a protest march in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir. EPA People gather at a vigil for Christchurch shootings victims at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney, Australia. Tayyab Hameed via Reuters UK opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn pays a visit to Finsbury Park Mosque in north London. PA Kashmiri Muslims shout slogans as Mirwaiz Umar Farooq (unseen), delivers a sermon inside Jamia Masjid mosque in Srinagar. AFP/Getty Images Bangladeshi Muslims offer Friday prayers after protesting in Dhaka. AFP/Getty Images Kashmiri supporters of Mirwaiz assembled after the culmination of congregational Friday prayers outside Jamia Masjid, Kashmir's main mosque. EPA Worshipers leave the Great Mosque after the Friday Muslim prayer in Paris. EPA A paramilitary soldier stands guard during Muslims Friday congregational prayers as security has been intensified in Quetta, Pakistan. EPA Muslims shout slogan as they condemn Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand, after Friday prayers at the Baitul Mukarram National Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Reuters Turkish people hold placards reading 'say stop to global terror' and ' the crusader barbarity in New Zealand' and shout slogans during a demonstration. EPA Palestinian Muslim worshipers take part in the Friday noon prayer next to the Gold Gate or Gate of Mercy inside the Al-Aqsa mosques compound in Jerusalem's Old City. AFP/Getty Images A demonstrator hangs banners from multi-faith group 'Turn to Love' during a vigil at New Zealand House in London. AP Bangladeshi activists shout slogans during a protest in front of Baitul Mukkaram National Mosque. AP Worshipers pray for victims and families during an evening vigil a the Lakemba Mosque in Wakemba, New South Wales, Australia. AP A young demonstrator holds a banner from multi-faith group 'Turn to Love' during a vigil at New Zealand House in London. AP A demonstrator holding a placard that reads in Turkish: 'Say 'Stop' to Global Terror' in Istanbul. AP Pakistanis protest to condemn the New Zealand mosque shooting in Karachi, Pakistan. AP

In the meantime the poor guy across the road passed away and my cars still down there.

Im 66, I never thought in my life Id have to see something like this, not in New Zealand, she said.

During the ordeal, a bullet also flew over her car as she narrowly avoided becoming a victim herself.

At least 49 people have died after the gun attacks on two mosques.

New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures 1 /28 New Zealand: Christchurch shootings - In pictures An armed police officer watches as a man is taken by ambulance staff from a mosque in central Christchurch AP An image taken from the alleged shooter's video AP An emotional man wearing a traditional Maori bone carving necklace speaks on a mobile phone near one of the mosques AP Photo/Mark Baker A forensic official works at the Masjid al Noor mosque after a shooting incident in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images An image grab from TV New Zealand of armed New Zealand special forces arriving outside the mosque following a shooting in Christchurch AFP/Getty Images Armed police officers outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Grieving members of the public sit on a curb following a shooting resulting in multiple fatalies and injuries at the Masjid Al Noor in Deans Avenue in Christchurch, New Zealand EPA Ambulance staff take a man from outside one of the mosques in central Christchurch AP Police are seen in front of Christchurch Hospital during a lockdown Getty Images A man rests on the ground as he speaks on his mobile phone across the road from one of the mosques AP Armed police patrol outside one of the mosques AP A man makes a phone call next to car with shattered windows near one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand Getty Images An injured person is put into an ambulance following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police keep watch at a park across the road from one of the mosques in central Christchurch, New Zealand AP Armed police push back members of the public following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters An armed police officer following a shooting at the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch Reuters Police stand outside the Linwood Islamic Centre AP A police officer is seen running after the initial reports that several shots had been fired Reuters Reuters Ambulances race towards one of the mosques AFP/Getty Images Police cordon off Strickland Street where a car bomb was found Getty Images Police Commissioner Mike Bush speaks to media during a press conference at Royal Society Te Aparangi in Wellington Getty Images Police block the road near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Ambulances and police outside the Masjid Al Noor mosque EPA Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison speaking at Kirribilli House in Sydney, Australia Getty Images A police officer talks on her phone at a roadblock near the Linwood Islamic Centre AP Armed police maintain a presence outside the Masijd Ayesha Mosque in Manurewa, Auckland, as part of the security response Getty Images

Forty-eight other people are being treated for gunshot wounds including children, officials said. Police have charged a man with murder, while two other men and a woman remain in custody.
N orth Korea today threatened to suspend nuclear talks with America and restart missile tests.

Vice foreign minister Choe Son-hui accused President Donald Trump of wasting a golden opportunity for peace following the collapse of last months summit in Hanoi with leader Kim Jong-un.

She told reporters in Pyongyang that the regime has no intention of making any more concessions until the US changes its political calculation and abandons its gangster-like stand which she said has created an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust.

The US has thrown away a golden opportunity this time, she added.

She questioned the claim made by Mr Trump immediately after the talks ended that the North Koreans were demanding that all sanctions against the country were lifted before they would agree to further dismantle their nuclear programme.

She said they wanted lifted only measures that were directly affecting the civilian economy, adding: We never asked for the removal of sanctions in their entirety.

Ms Choe said North Koreas leader and his delegation were bemused by eccentric US negotiations in Hanoi. North Korea had offered to dismantle its main Yongbyon nuclear complex, but Mr Trump reportedly insisted all of its nuclear sites must be destroyed.

On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission said, For what reason do we have to make this train trip again?  she said. I want to make it clear that the gangster-like stand of the US will eventually put the situation in danger.

We have neither the intention to compromise with the US in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation. This time we understood very clearly the United States has a very different calculation to ours.

Ms Choe said she expected Kim to clarify his position with an impending official announcement about his relationship with Washington.

The minister criticised the tough stance of some members of Mr Trumps diplomatic team, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton.

But she insisted there was still a warm friendship between Mr Trump and Kim, adding that their chemistry is mysteriously wonderful.

Mr Trump has conceded there are no plans for a third summit  the first was held in Singapore last summer  but claims he is still confident of a good outcome. Mr Bolton said last week that Mr Trump is open to more talks but also warned of tougher sanctions if the North did not denuclearise.
N ew Zealand mosque shootings leave several dead

Several people have been killed in mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the gun attacks in Christchurch as extraordinary and unprecedented."

A nationwide warning was issued with officials urging all mosques in the country to close as a precaution amid a police major operation.

Three men and one woman were in custody, police commissioner Mike Bush said.

Follow the latest updates on this developing story at standard.co.uk.

EU renew warnings over Brexit delay

EU leaders have renewed their warnings that Brussels will not agree a delay to Brexit unless the UK suggests a way out of the deadlock.

Guy Verhofstadt, European Parliaments Brexit co-ordinator, said under no circumstances would there be an extension in the dark.

It comes after Britains MPs overwhelmingly backed delaying Brexit beyond March 29 in a landmark vote yesterday evening.

One Direction stars sister, 18, found dead

Louis Tomlinsons sister Felicite has been found dead aged 18 at her home after suffering a suspected heart attack, it emerged this morning.

The Instagram star and aspiring fashion designer reportedly collapsed at her apartment in Earls Court, west London, on Wednesday.

Her death is being treated as "unexplained.

Senate Republicans revolt over border emergency

Donald Trump has been dealt a major blow as rebelling Republicans helped pass a vote to reject his national emergency declaration over the border wall.

The Republican-run Senate approved a proposal to revoke the proclamation by 59 to 41 in a stinging rebuke for the president last night.

Mr Trump quickly responded in a tweet minutes after the vote, saying he would VETO! the move.

It comes after the House of Representatives backed the measure last month.

Sussexs get own royal household

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are to have their own household to take forward their growing roles as senior members of the royal family.

Meghan and Harry's new household will be based at Buckingham Palace and is likely to be created following the birth of their first baby, expected in April.

The move will see Harry and the Duke of Cambridge formally split their backroom staff and may signal a shift in the direction of their public works.

On this day...

1824: Work on John Rennie's London Bridge began.

1909: "The world's most beautiful store" opened in London's Oxford Street. It was named after its American owner, Harry Gordon Selfridge.

1929: In Chicago, boogie-woogie pioneer Clarence 'Pinetop' Smith was killed as he sat at his piano, by a gunman's bullet not intended for him. He was 24.

1932: The New BBC Dance Orchestra made its radio debut under the direction of Henry Hall.

1933: Hitler proclaimed the Third Reich, which he said would endure for a thousand years.

1937: America's first central blood bank was set up.

1945: Album charts were first published in America, by Billboard, with the King Cole Trio number one.

1956: My Fair Lady opened on Broadway starring Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. The title was adapted from the Cockney pronunciation of "Mayfair".

1968: Foreign Secretary George Brown quit as he accused Prime Minister Harold Wilson of running the Cabinet in a dictatorial fashion.
C hris Hemsworth had a Lady and the Tramp moment with a quokka as he fed the cute creature a treat from his mouth.

The Australian actor befriended the animal on Rottnest Island, off the coast of Perth, as he paid a visit with his wife Elsa Pataky.

Hemsworth, who lives in Brisbane with his family, posted a video of himself with a twig in his mouth before a quokka took it from him. Arent you going to share? he jokingly asked before pretending to kiss the furry critter.

He captioned the post: Spent 3 weeks crawling around the dirt, studying the Quokkas movements, mimicking their language and eventually gained their trust and was accepted as one of them, I now go by the name Quokkachris.

He also posted a handful of selfies with the smiling animal as he allowed his wife Pataky in for a snap.

Got my first quokka selfie this week at @rottnestislandwa, he captioned the post. Epic little creatures are all over the island just cruisin through the day doin their thing. Get there and check it out!

Fans were predictably bowled over by the images as they jokingly branded Hemsworth the quokka whisperer while others warned him to be careful to not get scratched.

One commented: Wishing to be a Quokka right now.

Another posted: Wuoaaaaaaa that's unbelievable and cuuuuute.

A third wrote: Chris, youre hilarious! Cutest video ever!

In pictures: Chris Hemsworth 1 /16 In pictures: Chris Hemsworth Happy couple Chris Hemsworth and his pregnant wife Elsa Pataky Jason Kempin/Getty Images Oscar news Chris and Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs announce the nominees at the 86th Academy Awards Nominations event Kevin Winter/Getty Images Behind the scenes Chris is interviewed after his Oscars announcement Kevin Winter/Getty Images Super hero Natalie Portman as Jane Foster and Chris as Thor (2011) Fresh-faced Chris as Kim Hyde om Home and Away (2006) Channel 5 Perfect pair Chris and Elsa Pataky at the Rush premiere in Rome Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images Rough and ready A less preened look for A Perfect Getaway (2009) Allstar High School hit Chris tries his hand at horror in The Cabin in the Woods (2012) Saving the universe It's Thor to the rescue in Avengers Assemble (2012) Protective Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) with Kristen Stewart as Snow White and Chris as Eric Phwoar Thor! Chris suits his armour so well All action Red Dawn (2012) wit Dean Morgan AP Photo/Film District

Hemsworth tagged his posts with the quokka selfie  a hashtag Instagram has added to a list of animals thought to be under threat from selfies.

Clicking on the hashtag brings up a warning which reads: Protect Wildlife on Instagram. Animal abuse and the sale of endangered animals or their parts is not allowed on Instagram. You are searching for a hashtag that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behaviour to animals or the environment.
I t was Billie Piper who had the idea for her boyfriend Johnny Lloyds album cover. We were lying in bed on a Sunday, he says. I told Bill that I was going to shoot the cover for my album against my favourite tree in Regents Park. She said thats the worst idea shed ever heard. He grins, amused at the actresss brutal honesty.

She told me the album is about my life so lets shoot that. I called my friend who is an amazing photographer, he came over in less than 20 minutes, shot it in three frames on a Polaroid and it was done.

The photo shows Lloyd sitting on a white duvet with Piper by his side, cradling her pregnant stomach with one hand and wearing just a lime-green sarong and a black bra with cherries over the nipples.

Did he feel protective of her appearing on it? No. I wanted to have something that would sum up my life before my daughter arrived  nothing did that more than this photo. Our friends encouraged us, saying it was so romantic. We just went to the Diane Arbus exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and it made us reflect on the image; feeling glad that we did it.

Cover star: A pregnant Billie Piper on the front of Johnny Lloyd's debut album / Johnny Lloyd

Baby Tallulah is now nine weeks old, waking her father up at 4am. He says she is the reason he is so tired, apologising and then showing off the photograph of her that he has as his phone background. Shes a smiley baby, with her mothers large eyes.

Its cool for Tallulah that shes technically been on an album cover already, he laughs. Shes beaten the Nevermind baby [on Nirvanas 1991 LP]. Although I dont know if Next Episode Starts In 15 Seconds will sell as many copies.

Lloyd, aged 33, always hoped he would have children and glows when he talks about his daughter. Piper, aged 36, already has two sons, Winston, 10, and Eugene, six, with her ex-husband Laurence Fox.

Piper and Lloyd met at the Boogaloo pub on Archway Road in 2016. She was going through a marriage break-up that Fox has called horrendous and expensive; he had just left his band, Tribes.

Was it love at first sight? Yeah, he says. It was a big romance. If you meet somebody like that it blows you over. This was who I wanted to be with. Every day she inspires me. He is bashful when I bring up marriage but he has a signet ring that she bought him in Kentish Town on his finger, along with one from his nan and one from his mum: all the ladies, he laughs.

When Lloyd was growing up in Wrexham, Piper was travelling the world as a teenage popstar. Did he have a crush back then? All my friends fancied her when she was a popstar, as they constantly remind me. Her songs were great, as I always tell her. Meanwhile, his mother knows her from Doctor Who and he is hoping to sit down and get into it at some point, Doctor Who is the big one that she is recognised for.

I cannot stress enough how talented I think she is, he continues, with  to paraphrase Bridget Jones  what is, lets face it, a bit of a crush now. I was a bit lost before but seeing what she can achieve in a day, the amount of meetings she takes and how she moves her life forward inspires me to work harder. She doesnt wait and see if things happen, she goes out and gets them. Thats why shes so successful.

Piper worked throughout her pregnancy, shooting Rare Beasts, her directorial debut film. Did she have morning sickness? Yeah, she powered through. She was flying to Spain and back six months pregnant and editing it days before she gave birth.

Romance: Johnny Lloyd with girlfriend Billie Piper / GC Images

Its awe-inspiring. Shes ambitious, we both are. When you have kids you see the windows of opportunity  you only have a certain amount of time to get things done. Bill wants to leave something behind artistically. She has worked for a lot of people and she wants to do her own thing. She had a film in her for a long time and I can see her going on to make lots of movies.

While Piper was working on Rare Beasts, Lloyd started trying out new album material. When she heard it, Piper asked him to do the music for the movie. Bill is so easy to work with and knows exactly what she wants, which helped us zero in for the music. When she heard my album she suggested I do the music for the film. He has form  he scored the music for upcoming Rolling Stones movie, The Quiet One.

Does seeing him work make Piper miss the music business? No, he states. She has a trauma response to the music industry.

This album is a comeback for Lloyd. He moved to London aged 18 with an internship at Barclays bank and dreams of being in a band. His mother, a dentist, and father, a management consultant, had a Spanish guitar in the house when he was growing up and encouraged him to write his own music. At 16 he bought an electric guitar and it was a game changer  playing electric guitar was the most exciting thing you could do. He met his Tribes bandmates in Camden. They were nominated for an NME Award and supported Pixies.

Pixies were a highlight, says Lloyd. Frank Black heard our demo tape and invited us to play the Troxy. We had only played three pub shows at that point then suddenly it was like 4,000. They were personable, it was a dry backstage so we had a tea and talked about which eight-track recorder Id made the demos on.

When he turned 30, Lloyd wanted a different pace of life. He took some time off to work out what made him happy. It was then that he met Piper, and started writing music again: I played at the Brits and realised I missed performing, he says. Lloyd will tour this album and is planning to go to Glastonbury but he is organising it so he isnt away from his family for long periods of time.

When Piper got pregnant, he cut back on alcohol. I thought this was a good time not to have a load of beers. Everybody in the music industry has drunk heavily at some point  you arrive in the dressing room and theres 24 beers and a bottle of whisky. It creeps up on you. Im not going to be able to make good music on a hangover, only a few people can do that. His last drink was a pint with his dad to toast Tallulah.

As soon as I saw Tallulahs face I was like, this is the most incredible thing and it puts everything else into perspective  like self-pursuit and career narcissism. Hes a hands-on dad, swift with the nappies from day one because we went to NCT classes, with a load of sh*t-scared dads fretting and learning to change nappies. Russell Brand saying he hasnt changed nappies is, in Lloyds opinion, bloody awful.

Billie Piper's career in pictures 1 /12 Billie Piper's career in pictures Billie Piper's career in pictures Yerma at the Young Vic saw Piper award the best actress award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards Billie Piper's career in pictures Great Britain was a comedy at the National Theatre inspired by the phone hacking scandal Johan Persson Billie Piper's career in pictures The Effect by Lucy Prebble saw Piper shortlisted for an Evening Standard Theatre Award for best actress in 2013 Rex Features Billie Piper's career in pictures Piper starred as a pregnant security guard in Reasons to Be Pretty by Neil LaBute at the Almeida Rex Features Billie Piper's career in pictures Piper's first stage appearance was in Treats, where she starred alongside Laurence Fox. The pair were married for nine years Steve Waters Billie Piper's career in pictures Piper took the role of Belle du Jour in the TV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, scripted by Lucy Prebble Tiger Aspect Billie Piper's career in pictures A BBC adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Ruby in the Smoke saw Piper take the lead role of Sally Lockhart BBC Billie Piper's career in pictures Piper stars as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park Company Pictures Billie Piper's career in pictures Piper starred as Doctor Who's sidekick Rose Tyler when the series relaunched BBC

Since he started going out with Piper, Lloyds taste in films has changed: Billies a film buff. Ive started watching Woody Allen when before I only watched action movies. I love it.

Shes introduced him to the theatre. Theyve been to the Pinter at the Pinter Theatre and he saw her in Yerma eight times. I used to hate going to the theatre, before I saw that. Does he get jealous seeing her in sex scenes? I dont want to talk about that.

In return, Lloyd takes Piper to more gigs than she went to before (and they have a shared addiction to listening to The 1975 more than is healthy).

Cuts to music education and venues being converted into flats make him angry. Rock and roll is just as important as going to the Hayward and I dont think that is represented by the Arts Council, he says. I wouldnt know what to do now if I was 19 and wanted to make it in music, there are so few opportunities to play. Thats why you get more bedroom producers making pop music because it is easier to work at home.

The couple took Tallulah to Brussels at the weekend and talk a lot about Brexit. Its a miserable prospect. We have overcome so many things together, why would we make a barrier? I hope there will be a second referendum but who knows what the result would be. It splits my family and overshadows a lot. Id love to hear more about the NHS.

Hes glad he broke into the music scene before all this happened and to be having a second chance now: Im incredibly lucky to be back in a position where anyone is listening.
These policies are necessary to create favourable conditions for Vietnamese people to work and live in Japan, the PM told Chibas Governor Kensaku Morita in Hanoi on March 14.

PM Phuc welcomed Moritas visit to Vietnam, the second within five months, saying it demonstrates the governors special attention to and sentiments towards the Vietnamese land and people.

Lauding the socio-economic achievements Chiba has recorded, the leader expressed his hope to continue to welcome Morita in order to discuss cooperation opportunities between Chiba and Vietnamese businesses and localities in the time ahead.

PM Phuc said he believes that the governor will make further contributions to promoting Japans role as Vietnams leading important economic partner, especially in the supply of official development assistance (ODA), investment, and trade.

In response, Morita shared his hosts views on the fruitful and comprehensive development of the Vietnam-Japan relations.

Vietnam holds great potential in high-quality human resources, he said, adding that Vietnamese nationals make up the largest foreign community living and working in Chiba.

Morita said that the Vietnamese are hardworking in both employment and studies, noting his hope that there would be more people from Vietnam coming to work in the prefecture.

Chiba is also building and fine-tuning policies in an effort to attract more Vietnamese labourers to the locality, he said.
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The traffic was blocked on Friday for approximately 15 minutes on Lascar Catargiu Boulevard to Romana Square and on KiselRoad, eff from Architect Ioan Mincu Street towards the Victoriei Square, after several drivers stopped their cars around 15:00hrs, joining the protest called "Romania wants motorways #sieu (#metoo)."

According to the Traffic Brigade, the traffic resumed around 15:20hrs.

"'Romania wants motorways #sieu' is a campaign initiated by Suceava businessman Stefan Manolachi. By mobilising a team of 17 men, Manolachi built one meter of highway in Suceava, in just one day. Subsequently, the businessman announced that on 15 March, as of 15:00hrs, he will stop the activity of his entire restaurant chain, for 15 minutes, in order to protest against the lack of motorways in Moldavia and around the country. Furthermore, he challenged other businessmen around the country to follow his example.
Minister-delegate for European Affairs George Ciamba had a meeting with European Chief Negotiator on Brexit Michel Barnier on Thursday, the two analyzing the current state of the Brexit process 15 days before the expected date of Britain's withdrawal from the EU, following the latest developments marked by the negative outcome of the British Parliament vote on the Withdrawal Agreement.

Read also: European Chief Negotiator Barnier says Brexit has no added value, being a lose-lose situation

"The Minister-delegate for European Affairs has brought to the attention of the chief negotiator of the European Union the importance of ensuring the rights of the Romanian citizens in the United Kingdom, in the context of a no-deal Brexit. The Romanian official informed that this is a priority for the Romanian Government. He mentioned that the Executive in Bucharest takes care that the rights of British citizens in Romania are respected," a statement released by the Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE) informs.

The two dignitaries have stressed that the European Union has made every possible effort to conclude the Withdrawal Agreement in time, stating that at this moment it awaits concrete proposals from the Government and Parliament of the United Kingdom on the plans it is considering to overcome the current deadlock. The two officials reiterated the EU's common position that the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement is the only possible agreement and the best tool to limit the impact of the Brexit process.

Minister-delegate George Ciamba specified that the risk of a no-deal disorderly withdrawal of the UK from the EU on March 29 is increasingly higher, even though none of the parties wants it to materialize.

In this respect, the Romanian official has shown that it is essential to move forward in an accelerated manner with regard to the adoption of all contingency measures by the European Union, but also by the Member States, to ensure that they are prepared for any scenario.

The Minister-delegate specified that a possible extension of the withdrawal deadline can be taken into account by the European Council following an official request from the British Government.

"The Romanian dignitary assured the chief negotiator of Romania's full support at this final stage of the Brexit process, especially from the perspective of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Michel Barnier also appreciated the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU as one of the best, welcoming the results obtained in a short time," MAE points out.

AGERPRES .
President Klaus Iohannis criticized on Friday that the 2019 state budget law was not re-examined by Parliament, reaching unchanged for promulgation, and accused the Social Democratic Party (PSD) of ill will.

"PSD has failed the last test of responsibility. The state budget law which we sent to Parliament for the correction of the serious errors in its content, has reached the promulgation unchanged. One day - that's how long PSD has allocated in to Parliament for the re-examination of such an important bill for the country. It is not only a serious lack of seriousness, PSD's refusal to amend a budget that will obviously generate negative effects in the economy, unfortunately, felt by the citizens is indeed an instance of ill will. I would have liked to promulgate a good budget for Romania and for Romanians. It was not meant to be," the head of state said at the Cotroceni Presidential Palace.

He stated that PSD did not take into account his remarks, from a "purely political logic".

According to him, there will be no hospitals and motorways but higher prices, new taxes and dues, deficits and economic imbalances.

"PSD is the only culprit for delaying Romania's progress. It is in vain that PSD is trying to find scapegoats when the budget was actually delayed too much because the Government approved it and sent it to Parliament for debates with a three month delay over the deadline provided for by law. Most of PSD members, interested in crony politics and fights against Justice demonstrate a serious lack of responsibility regarding Romania's public finances and economic situation," Iohannis said.

In his opinion, OUG 114 shows that the government is a "toxic one for the economic and financial stability of Romania and for the well-being of the population, which each day fares the final costs of PSD incompetence and imposture."

"The experiments of so-called PSD visionaries threaten the future of some vital economic sectors for Romania. They have concocted a nice budget that looks good on paper, but based on the promise that certain leaks will be filled at the budget rectification. The most vulnerable categories are cynically mentioned in populist speeches, but political decisions show that PSD is not at all interested in what happens to these people," said Iohannis.

He said that all PSD governing over the last two years is a "big black hole for the Romanian economy and for the Romanian society".

"The PSD governing has failed!", concluded the head of state.

President Klaus Iohannis signed on Friday the decree on the promulgation of the 2019 State Budget Law.
Prime Minister Viorica Dancila met on Friday in Prague with President of the Czech Republic Senate Jaroslav Kubera. During the meeting the PM underscored the efficiency of the Romanian-Czech partnership and the concrete progresses recorded in strengthening the economic relations.

The meeting took place within the official visit that Prime Minister Dancila pays to the Czech Republic.

On this occasion, PM Viorica Dancila highlighted the efficiency and solidarity of the Romanian-Czech partnership and endorsed the opportunity to increase the frequency of the high-level contacts, but also of the parliamentary committees between the legislative bodies of Romania and the Czech Republic, according to a Gov't press release sent to AGERPRES.

The Romanian official mentioned the concrete progresses recorded in strengthening the Romanian-Czech economic relations and she especially referred to the volume of bilateral trade in 2018, which represents a record in relation to the previous years.

Prime Minister Dancila highlighted the importance of putting in some sustained efforts to strengthen the ties between the business circles of Romania and the Czech Republic, and showed the need to extend bilateral sectoral cooperation.

Moreover, the PM mentioned what are Bucharest's expectations regarding the participation of the Czech Republic Senate's representatives in the events, manifestations at parliamentary level within the Romanian Presidency at the EU Council.

PM Dancila also referred to Romania's Presidency at the EU Council, highlighting the legislative projects that are close to completion or at an advanced negotiation stage at the level of the Council of the European Parliament.

She underscored the necessity of a strong and unitary Europe in all its dimensions - political, economic, social - without discriminations among its members on regional, economic-financial and social policies criteria. At the same time, Dancila defined the 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework as one of the key files of the Romanian Presidency at the EU Council, the Government release showed.
Romania's Prime Minister Viorica Dancila on Friday had a meeting with Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic Radek Vondracek to discuss boosting bilateral parliamentary dialogue, increasing investments and the Czech Republic supporting Romania's accession to the border-free Schengen area.

According to a press statement released by the Romanian Government, the meeting took place during on Dancila's official visit to the Czech Republic.

Dancila mentioned the good relationships between Romania and the Czech Republic based on common historical landmarks and on similar or convergent external actions.

The Romanian dignitary advocated for an intensification of the bilateral parliamentary dialogue at both high level and at the level of the working commissions and encouraged the participation of officials from the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic in the parliamentary actions organised under Romania's presidency of the EU Council.

She pointed to an increase in bilateral trade, as well as of the Czech investment in Romania. She underscored the need to inform the Romanian business communities about the opportunities offered by the Czech market as well as to develop sectoral co-operation between Romania and the Czech Republic.

Dancila mentioned a rapid pace at which the Romanian Presidency of the EU Council started and is being unfolded, as well as the beneficial impact of the efforts regarding negotiations over active legislative files.

She pointed out that the Romanian presidency of the Council of the EU supports the idea of inclusive development of the European Union that entails overcoming the East-West and North-South divisions, old/new member states divisions, designed to create a unitary space of competitiveness and cohesion across the whole Union. At the same time, she called the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021-2027 one of the key files of the Romanian presidency of the Council of the European Union.

The Czech high-ranking official reaffirmed the Czech Republic's support for Romania's accession to the Schengen area.

The two officials voiced interest in co-operation in various regional formats, with Vondracek mentioning to the point the Visegrad format, and Dancila mentioning the Romania-Bulgaria-Greece-Republic of Serbia quadrilateral co-operation format.

Prime Minister Viorica Dancila is paying an official visit to Prague, the Czech Republic, today at the invitation of his Czech counterpart. The schedule of the visit includes meetings with high-ranking Czech officials - Prime Minister Andrej Babis, Chamber of Deputies Speaker Radek Vondracek and Senate Chairman Jaroslav Kubera.
Romania's Prime Minister Viorica Dancila said on Friday that the European Union and the EU Council presidency are ready for "any scenario" related to Brexit.

"As you know, there is a European summit next week that will discuss the matter. From the point of view of the EU, from the point of view of the rotating presidency, we are ready for any scenario. As you can see, the situation in the UK has to be clarified. An extension is being considered until before the election to the European Parliament, because if election time is exceeded, there must also be a competition in the UK for the MEP seats in the European Parliament again. I have seen that there is the scenario of a new referendum in the UK; it is important what they decided as well as what is going to be decided at the European Council meeting next week in Brussels; once again, we are ready for any scenario. As far as we are concerned, we would like an orderly exit of the UK from the European Union, if that is decided," Dancila told a joint news conference with Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis in Prague, asked to comment on the latest developments in Brexit, according to footage posted on Youtube by the Romanian Government.

Prime Minister Viorica Dancila is on an official visit to the Czech Republic on Friday.
Romania's President Klaus Iohannis on Friday welcomed visiting Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Croatia Marija Pejcinovic Buric to discuss political dialogue, economic co-operation and the state of play in the Romanian speaking communities of Croatia and the Croatian minority in Romania.

According to a press statement released by the Presidential Administration, also addressed were items on the bilateral, European and regional agendas.

The two officials highlighted the excellent level of the bilateral political dialogue, marked by an intense schedule of meetings at all levels.

Iohannis underscored the importance of consolidation and economic co-operation enabling the development potential of the two countries to be achieved.

The bridging role between the two countries of the Romanian-speaking communities of Croatia and the Croatian minority in Romania was highlighted, with Buric hailing the treatment extended to the Croatian minority in Romania.

Iohannis also underscored the importance of continuing close Romanian-Croatian co-ordination in terms of both countries holding for the first time the presidency of the Council of the European Union within the same troika, alongside Finland. He mentioned that Romania has so far achieved good results in holding the presidency of Council of the European Union.

At the same time, the two officials voiced concern over the United Kingdom's withdrawal process from the European Union, amidst the result of the UK's House of Commons vote to reject UK's withdrawal agreement for a second time.

Iohannis reiterated Romania's support, including at the helm of the EU Council, for an orderly withdrawal of the United Kingdom, and for foundations being laid for a future relationship as close as possible between the European Union and the United Kingdom.

Iohannis and Buric also highlighted the two nations' excellent co-operation in promoting the Three Seas Initiative, which aims among its main objectives to increase cohesion at the level of the European Union.

They voiced confidence in the informal European summit in Sibiu on May 9 being a good opportunity to convey a message of unity, pro-European commitment and to design a positive perspective for the future of the European Union, according to the Presidential Administration.
Social Democratic Party (PSD) national leader Liviu Dragnea on Friday nominated Minister of European Funds Rovana Plumb to top the party's list of candidates in the election to the European Parliament.

"In 2015 I was convicted in the court of first instance of the great corruption for having asked 7.4 million Romanians to come to the referendum to oust [former president] Basescu. I resigned, and I later learned that I had been betrayed, to be the victim or, I guess, the scape goat. I got over it, and then I, like you, found that (...) one actually ran away. He is worse than a communist political police officer, an we'll keep on talking. (...) Many colleagues have come to me to run for the interim party's presidency not against but alongside Rovana [Plumb]. I did it and I won. Some of one colleagues, one that is no longer among us, for example, said that he was waiting that day for Rovana to get punished - he run against me and lost. What did I do on the same day? I took your by your hand and got out for a news conference. We are also today alike - she has been sold out repeatedly by people she had helped, people who are no longer among us - they are alive - but they are no longer among us in the party. I do not know where the National Executive Committee will decide to place Rovana Plumb on the list of the MEP candidates. But I will recommend her to top the list. And, after the European election, I would ask Prime Minister Dancila to recommend Mrs Rovana Plumb for another position as well," Dragnea told an election convention of the PSD Dambovita chapter in Targoviste.

He also spoke of another former PSD minister, Senator Titus Corlatean, who "did a very good job" in the Government and would deserve to return to office.
Development of a cooperation and scientific research network in the disability field and the increase in accessibility of persons with disabilities were among the topics approached at the informal meeting of ministers in charge with the disability field in the European Union states, reads a release of the Labour Ministry and Social Justice on Friday sent to AGERPRES.

The high level meeting was organised by the Ministry for European Affairs in France in collaboration with Romania, a state holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, and gathered around the same table decision making factors from the member states (ministers, ambassadors, the European Commission and representative organisations) to debate the situation of the more than 80 million Europeans with disabilities and the existing solutions to speed-up the social inclusion process in their case.

The head of the National Authority for People with Disabilities, Adrian Chiotan, and the Labour Minister's counselor, Mihai Tomescu, participated in the informal meeting of ministers in charge with the disabilities field in the EU states.

"The main topics discusses had to do with the development of a cooperation and scientific research network in the disability field and the increase in accessibility of persons with disabilities and the development of assistive technologies," reads the same release.

At the informal meeting in Paris they signed a joint statement, by which they reaffirmed the member states' commitment to protect and promote the rights of persons with disabilities, the strengthening of the information exchanges in what concerns research, strategies and policies in the disability field, as well as for removing all barriers the persons with disabilities encounter in society.

Beyond the common commitment, the statement in Paris also represents a will for strengthening cooperation in the disability field, in order to develop new work opportunities, education and social integration for persons with disabilities.

Moreover, the joint statement in Paris will be the foundation for the next European Strategy for Persons with Disabilities (post 2020), a strategic document to replace the European Strategy for Persons with Disabilities 2010-2020.
It was quite amazing to watch reports from Syria this week by US news channel CNN. American bombing of a remaining redoubt of the ISIS terror group near Baghouz on the border with Iraq was presented as some kind of heroic final onslaught against the terror group.

The inversion of reality is a staggering case study in propaganda and perception management under the guise of free media.

CNN broadcast on-the-ground reports from its correspondent Ben Wedeman in Syrias Deir ez-Zor province. In the background were evident signs, according to the channels video footage, that the US air force was dropping white phosphorus incendiary munitions in support of the offensive against militants.

Indiscriminate use of white phosphorus bombs is arguably a war crime. Yet the US media openly reported this as if it was a legitimate war operation in order to defeat terrorism.

Nothing in the CNN reportage suggested anything illegal about the US military campaign. On the contrary, the events were presented as a valorous attempt to defeat ISIS.

There are several reasons why this latest US military operation in eastern Syria is disturbing, not least because of mounting civilian deaths as a result of American air strikes.

For a start, American military presence in Syria is a gross violation of international law. The US has no legal mandate to be in that country, operating their since 2015, either as ground forces or warplanes.

Secondly, it is well-documented that Washington has been covertly funneling military aid to various anti-government militia, including terrorist groups like ISIS, in a bid to overthrow the Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad. This has been conducted as part of an eight-year covert war sponsored by Washington and its allies for illegal regime change against the sovereign government in Damascus.

President Trump has given orders for US forces to withdraw from Syria. He says its time to bring our boys home. As if our boys have performed a noble duty there. The fact is American forces in Syria constitute a war crime. They shouldnt even be there.

So, belated US media reports of American forces bearing down on the remnants of ISIS in eastern Syria are, to say the least, a little anomalous, given the systematic support that Washington has been covertly plying to assorted jihadist terror groups for the purpose of regime change. That is an entirely criminal aggression against Syria.

But the latest operation in eastern Syria is particularly hard to take. It has been the Syrian army along with Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah forces that largely liberated Syria from the scourge of foreign-backed Islamist terror groups. The war in Syria has been won against the US and its malign criminal partners, not, as American media would have us believe, due to Washingtons heroic efforts.

Western news media have lately focused on a small pocket of ISIS hold-outs in eastern Syria as if the US is the liberator of the Arab country  a country which Washington and its NATO allies have infiltrated with jihadists for criminal regime change.

CNNs coverage this week was especially perverse. Ben Wedeman and his team were showing US military dropping banned white phosphorus incendiaries on civilian areas of eastern Syria in the name of fighting terrorism.

CNNs reportage was without the slightest hint that such military actions amount to gross war crimes. The entire US military presence in Syria is an even bigger violation of international law. The normalization of such violations and war crimes by the US media in real time is an illustration of how such supposed news channels are nothing but a propaganda arm for Washingtons imperialist warmongering.

The banal normalization by US news media of what should be viewed as enormous war crimes is something to behold, if not to be nauseated by.

American forces in Syria have killed thousands of civilians. Their latest operations to liberate the eastern region from jihadists that they infiltrated with in the first place has caused, this week alone, dozens of civilian deaths from US air strikes. This is a gruesome reminder of the horror that US air strikes inflicted on the Syrian city of Raqqa which was flattened in 2017 by American bombardment.

The charnel house that Syria has been turned into is a direct consequence of American regime-change machinations. And yet US media report a microcosm of the horror in terms suggesting that the American forces are somehow liberators. How grotesque.

Such an obscene distortion is partly why Washington is allowed to continue its criminal wars in other parts of the world. It is because of US media whitewashing war crimes in real time. And CNN has the shameless audacity to call its war propaganda journalism.
Its false because it is definitely untrue, and thats not merely because America has a higher percentage of its residents in prison than does any other nation on this planet, but also because the only scientific studies that have been done of the matter show  they prove scientifically  that the US is a dictatorship by its very wealthiest residents, against all the rest of the population. Traditionally, thats called an aristocracy, not a democracy, but ever since Mussolini in the 1920s, it came to be called fascism, which is the successor to feudalism and thus is merely the modernized form of feudalism. What used to be called by such terms as monarchy or aristocracy is thus now called fascism but the leopard is the same regardless of what it is labeled, and what it really is a dictatorship. Mussolini sometimes instead called fascism corporationism and it certainly is todays United States Government, even if some people choose to call it democracy. Its what the US Government has been scientifically proven to be: dictatorship, by the richest few (the controlling owners of the international corporations), against the entire public.

But even worse than being only false, calling the US a democracy is also itself extremely dangerous to the entire world, and here is why:

Every time that the US perpetrates a coup (such as its trying now to do against Venezuela) or a military invasion (such as it did to Iraq 2003 and Libya 2011 and Syria 2012- and to Yemen 2015-, and many others) the US regime and its propagandists call it an action for humanitarian purposes, and for regime-change to bring democracy and human rights to that country, and its always lies, which wouldnt even be believed by anyone who knows that the US itself is actually a dictatorship, which it is. So, the lie of calling the US a democracy is actually okaying a lying dictatorship by using, for it, the term democracy, which this particular dictatorship chooses to refer to itself, for PR purposes.

Calling the US a democracy is to support this government that the entire world (in the only polls that have been done of the matter) recognizes to be the most aggressive and dangerous regime on Earth. To smear the good name of democracy that way, by calling the worlds most rapacious Government a democracy, is to assist in corroding that high term of praise, democracy, and turning it instead into an insult, which applies to what is actually the globally recognized most aggressive and dangerous nation on this planet.

The United States of America used to be a limited democracy, but now its no longer even that, and to call it a democracy at all is not only false, but it encourages the worlds most dangerous and harmful regime and sets it as a model for other nations. To encourage evil by lying to say its not that but is instead good, is itself evil, or else rabidly ignorant and deceived; but, in any case, it is a very wrong thing to do.

On March 7th the liberal US billionaire who owns Bloomberg News was so much opposed to the over-the-top, far too overtly fascist, billionaires who now control the country, so that Bloomberg News headlined Pence Asked Merkel to Provoke Russia by Sending Warships to Crimea, and their reporters opened:

The US leaned on German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month to conduct a naval maneuver in Russias backyard aimed at provoking President Vladimir Putin, according to three people familiar with the talks. At a Feb. 16 meeting at the Munich Security Conference, US Vice President Mike Pence urged Merkel to send German warships through a narrow channel between the Crimean peninsula and mainland Russia to show Putin that Western powers wont surrender their access to those waters, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The German leader refused, they said.

On March 8th, RT (a reliably truthful news-site that the US regime calls fake news because it reports truths the US rulers dont want the public to know) headlined "Caving in to the US? Brussels kills its own money laundering blacklist after Washington criticism" and reported that the US regime objected to the EUs European Commission including in its proposed list of 11 additional money-laundering centers four US territories, after which the Council of the European Union, which consists of the ministers representing all 28 EU members, justified its decision to reject the document with the arguments that seemed strikingly similar to those employed by the US Treasury. Page 11 of the European Commissions 36-page detailed explanation of its proposed list said: Based on the review of additional information sources, the Commission's analysis has concluded that 11 additional jurisdictions present strategic deficiencies for the purposes of Article 9 of Directive (EU) 2015/849. Those jurisdictions are the following: Afghanistan, American Samoa, Guam, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Panama, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, US Virgin Islands, Samoa. The objective of the additions was to make more difficult the laundering of proceeds from crime. A legal advisory from a law firm representing US international corporations explained that The US Treasury Department has objected to the inclusion of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands on the grounds that the European Commission did not follow the methodology used by FATF in developing its own list of high-risk third countries, and that FATF standards apply to all US territories.

Supposedly, the methodology of FATF was more transparent than that set forth in the European Commissions 36-page detailed explanation of its proposed 11 additions. The European Council arrived at its rejection of the 11 additions to the list on the grounds that The consultation ended on 28 February 2019, with the required majority of delegations having declared their intention to object to the delegated act in question, in particular on the basis that the act was not established in a sufficiently transparent way. The European Council thus accepted without question the US regimes undocumented allegation that the US regimes chosen methodology is more transparent than the European Commissions is. In a press release, the European Council justified its decision on the grounds that it cannot support the current proposal that was not established in a transparent and resilient process that actively incentivises affected countries to take decisive action while also respecting their right to be heard. In short: BS. How can either the US regime, or the one in the EU, reasonably claim to be transparent? Its ridiculous. Thats merely a relationship between the imperial nation and its vassal-states. Theyre all dictatorships, theyre a hierarchy of dictatorships. But only the US dictatorship has been scientifically proven.

Anyone who opposes Americas dictatorship of the world will call the US regime what it is: a dictatorship. This cat is now out of the bag and roaming wildly, almost everywhere, trying now even for Venezuela, the Kerch Strait and the South China Sea. (Calling the South China Sea and Kerch Strait disputed waters is like calling the surrounding waters of the US disputed waters; but only the international bully-regime is deliberately trying to provoke other nations in order to get them to buckle to its international dictatorship  which is the US regime, which regime Obama had called the one indispensable nation, meaning that all others are dispensable. Its clearly not only Trump thats the problem. Its the regime, which is the dictatorship, and it outlasts any particular ruler.)

The US is no democracy. It clearly is a dictatorship, by its richest. To call that a democracy, is to insult democracy itself. Maybe Americas actual rulers would therefore like that.
Total deaths for 2018 were about 1,600 with 80 percent of them suffered by the several hundred thousand armed men in the country. These men belong to the LNA (Libyan National Army), militias or Islamic terror groups. Libya remains a fairly low-level conflict. While there are many factions the largest one is the LNA, which comprises about a third of the organized armed personnel in the country. The LNA also includes some allied militias but the most reliable units are those organized along military lines (brigades, battalions and so on). Most of these armed men are operating as a local defense unit and supporting themselves via extortion or voluntary support from a clan or tribal organization. Casualties come from feuds between militias (usually over territory and/or access to resources) and fighting against Islamic terrorists or militias that are interfering with national resources (mainly oil). The area with the most casualties (30 percent) was the coastal city of Derna where local militias inside the city (and more mercenary or Islamic terrorist groups south of the city) have been fighting each other and the LNA all year. About half the casualties were from half a dozen hot spots in the desert south where groups fought (and ultimately lose to the LNA) for control of oil or border control (smuggling routes). One reason for the success of the LNA is that it has become widely known that when the LNA moves in there is a lot less violence and general chaos. The LNA is the only armed group in the country that can do this on a large scale.

All this violence is largely the result of there being no national government since the 2011 revolution. For the last three years there have been two rival governments. The GNA (Government of National Accord) has since late 2018 become more amenable to working with the LNA and its commander Khalifa Hiftar. The GNA leader and Hiftar last met in late February. These talks were apparently successful as the two agreed to work together to hold national elections and plan to meet again in late March. Currently, Hiftar forces control two-thirds of the country including most of the coastal areas (except Tripoli and the coastline west of the city to the Tunisian border). The GNA has occupied and pacified most of the oil production, refining and export facilities. The most recent achievement was to pacify the Fezzan region in southwest Libya. Now it has been noticed that many prominent militia leaders in Tripoli are leaving the country with their families. The LNA is expected to move into Tripoli at the request of the GNA government there. The UN, which played a major role in creating the GNA (and deciding that LNA was a threat to Libya despite most Libyans believing otherwise) is also making peace with the LNA.

This willingness to cooperate with a longtime rival became visible when GNA leader Fayez al Sarraj spoke with Hiftar in November 2018 when both were at the Libya conference in Italy. While many GNA backers want nothing to do with Hiftar (seeing him as another potential dictator) a growing number of Libyans and regional leaders recognize that Hiftar and his LNA are the only force in Libya that has consistently (for over five years) worked to unify the country rather than plunder it. Hiftar has been the most important element of the other Libya government, the HoR (House of Representatives). The LNA is useful to the GNA in Tripoli because the city is controlled by numerous militias, some of them led by Islamic radicals, who see the LNA as the end of their independence and barely acknowledge the GNA. Most Libyans, and especially most residents of Tripoli would like the LNA to come in and pacify the place and Sarraj seems to now accept this as a possibility he could possibly live with. Hiftar has delayed doing that until he could get Sarraj and the GNA on his side. Hiftar also left the November Italian conference because he refused to negotiate with Islamic radical leaders who still control some major private armies in Libya. Hiftar's refusal to negotiate with Islamic terrorist or Islamic radical groups is seen by many as the key to his success. But the UN and many European countries still back negotiating with the Islamic radicals. Sarraj has come around to Hiftar's approach but, unlike Hiftar, Sarraj does not have much military clout to deal with the Islamic militias in Tripoli and other towns and cities in western Libya.

The LNA has controlled most of the Libyan coast since mid-2018 but has found that maintaining security in the coastal towns and cities is time consuming and requires a lot of manpower. In the east Derna was the last major coastal city to have a major Islamic terrorist and rogue militia problem and while the LNA has eliminated major opposition there are still less visible outlaws in Derna who continue to shoot back when cornered. ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) is now reduced to a few hundred members and survives as bandits away from the coast and continue to carry out the occasional suicide attack in the cities. Most of the violence (and casualties) in the coastal cities is the result of occasional armed clashes between rival militias. Normally the militias are not looking for a fight, just ways to make money and survive. But these militias are heavily armed and that keeps the atmosphere tense, and occasionally very dangerous, wherever they operate. This continued violence in many population centers has delayed elections to form a national government and those elections that were supposed to take place this year are more likely to occur in 2020.

March 13, 2019: In the southwest, the Sharara oil fields are back in production and by the end of the month will be at their normal peak production of 300,000 BPD (barrels per day). For three months (since early December 2018) the Sharara oil fields had been shut down most of the time by local tribal militia and oilfield guards who have been demanding higher pay and a share of the income earned by oil produced at Sharara. This is the largest source of oil and gas field in Libya and the frequent target of attacks for no other reason because it has always been a place where there was stuff to steal. Sharara is located about 700 kilometers south of Tripoli in the Murzuq Desert. Total Libya oil production is 1.25 million BPD and Sharara accounts for a quarter of that. Another major oilfield in that area, el Feel, produces 90,000 BPD and together with Sharara accounts for a third of national production. LNA forces finally took control of Sharara by the first week of March. At the same time, other LNA units are moving towards the Niger border, long an area controlled by rival tribal militias and beset by tribal feuds.

March 12, 2019: In the east (Benghazi) someone fired six small rockets into a residential neighborhood. Six people were wounded and no one took credit for the attack.

March 11, 2019: In the south, across the border in Chad, local officials reported that 400 UFDD Chad rebels, who had been serving as mercenaries in Libya, had surrendered. The LNA, with the help of French airstrikes, had been chasing these mercenaries back into Chad for a month. Chad reported that the original UFDD force had at least a thousand men but most had been killed or captured in Libya.

Benghazi and Misrata are having their wireless service upgraded to LTE speed. This was already done in Tripoli by late 2018. This is another example of how life goes on in most of Libya despite the lack of a national government.

March 10, 2019: In Sirte (a coastal city 500 kilometers east of Tripoli and 560 kilometers west of Benghazi), LNA forces continue to battle militias and Islamic terror groups south of the city.

March 9, 2019: In Tripoli, the airport was closed for a few hours because a quadcopter had been seen in the air near the runway. Meanwhile, an American State Department approved airport security firm, Culmen International, has been hired by Libya to upgrade the gate security at its three main airports so international flights may go to more foreign cities.

March 7, 2019: The UN has been trying to keep track of civilian losses to the continued fighting in Libya. They found that eight civilians had been killed and 13 wounded during January. The previous two months (November and December) saw 13 dead and 21 wounded.

March 6, 2019: The HoR government in the east has, since 2014, sold $23 billion in bonds to the eastern branch of the Central Bank to obtain enough cash to pay all of its government employees. That cash was in the form of local currency (dinars) printed in Russia. This unofficial financing will cause problems for a united Libya which will be held responsible for this debt and others (as yet unpublicized) like it.

March 5, 2019: Foreign ministers from Algeria and Tunisia met with their Egyptian counterpart in Egypt to discuss what is going on in Libya. All three agreed that they, and the UN, should support the LNA effort to unify the country. This comes after it became obvious that the GNA leader was backing the LNA as well. Less visibly this show of unity was also meant to ensure that Qatar and Turkey, who had been providing support for some Islamic terror groups in Libya, would halt such support.

March 4, 2019: In the southwest, the Sharara oil fields were declared free of unauthorized armed groups and the foreign firms that manage operations were able to resume work. During the three months of violence, there was little damage done to oil facilities or the workforce. But because of the threats, the foreign firms shut down operations and forced the National Oil Company to invoke the force majeure clause in their contracts. Force majeure is a legal step indicating that circumstances beyond its control cancel existing agreements until the crisis passes. This was previously used to protect Libya from being sued for damages by companies that had bought oil that was now not going to be delivered because outlaw militias had taken control of oil facilities. This means the buyers will end up spending more to buy the oil they need on the open oil market, rather than pay a lower negotiated price. Theres a price for using force majeure, and that is lower prices for your oil in the future until you restore faith in your ability to fulfill your contracts. With the end of force majeure, oil exports from Sharara are expected within a week. The three months of intermittent shutdowns in were worst in January, which saw overall oil and gas revenues fall 30 percent (from the previous month) to $1.6 billion.

February 26, 2019: In Abu Dhabi GNA leader Fayez al Sarraj and LNA commander Khalifa Hiftar met to discuss a future together.
TICKERS: III, NCM

Source: Streetwise Reports (3/15/19)

A CIBC report discussed the pros and cons of the transaction.



In a March 12 research note, CIBC analyst Oscar Cabrera reported that Imperial Metals Corp. (III:TSX) agreed to sell 70% of its flagship Red Chris mine in British Columbia to Newcrest Mining Ltd. (NCM:ASX) for US$806.5 million. On that news, CIBC upgraded its rating to Neutral from Underperformer and more than quadrupled its target price to CA$3.50 per share from CA$0.60 on Imperial. The asset stake sale is due to close in Q3/19.

Cabrera highlighted that with this transaction, Imperial avoids a liquidity problem. The company has $718 million in debt maturities coming due in Q1/19, but with the Red Chris deal closing in Q3/19, will not have to pay them until then. In addition, cash flow over the next two years from Imperial's other mines will likely be limited. They are Mount Polley, which is going on care and maintenance in Q3/19 until Q1/22, and Huckleberry, which is planned for a restart in 2020.

Also, longer term, Imperial's shareholders should benefit from Newcrest applying its expertise with the Cadia gold-copper mine in Australia to turning around Red Chris' current operations and developing its underground resource, Cabrera indicated. "We estimate Red Chris' current open-pit mine plan (i.e.), reserves, accounts for about 27% of total Measured and Indicated resources of 5,521 thousand tons of copper equivalent, with about 30% from an underground resource that remains open in various directions, according to Imperial Metals," he added.

The one downside of the deal, noted Cabrera, is that with it, most of Red Chris' resource upside potential gets transferred to Newcrest's shareholders.

[NLINSERT]

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Disclosures from CIBC, Imperial Metals Corp., March 12, 2019

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Important Disclosure Footnotes for Imperial Metals Corporation (III)

 CIBC World Markets Inc. expects to receive or intends to seek compensation for investment banking services from Imperial Metals Corporation in the next 3 months.

Newcrest Mining Ltd. (NCM-AUS): CIBC World Markets Inc. expects to receive or intends to seek compensation for investment banking services from this company in the next 3 months.
TICKERS: PKG; PTNYF; PT0

Source: Clive Maund for Streetwise Reports (3/15/19)

Technical analyst Clive Maund discusses both the fundamentals and technicals for this company that just signed a cannabis distribution agreement with a Vancouver-based retailer.



We have big news out on one of our stocks, ParcelPal Technology Inc. (PKG:CSE; PTNYF:OTC.MKTS; PT0:FSE) . This is a most promising stock that we first looked at in some detail on 15th February . The company announced just yesterday that it has signed a cannabis distribution agreement with Kiaro , a Vancouver based cannabis retailer. This accords with the company's business expansion strategy for Canada as set out on the map from the company presentation shown below.



And that's Canadathe company also plans to expand into the U.S., and with respect to this we have additional good news out a couple of days ago from one of ParcelPal's important business partners, Choom Holdings. The news relating to Kiaro linked above builds on an earlier similar agreement with Choom Holdings made last Fall. This is going to be big business because a lot of customers are not going to want to go down to a store, especially for this kind of productthey are going to want home delivery, and before the advent of ParcelPal cannabis delivery was expensive and antiquated, with it sometimes taking more than a week for product to arrive. ParcelPal delivers within the hour, unless you live out in the boonies. Choom is expanding rapidly and just a couple of days ago its stock surged on news that it is entering the U.S. market with an agreement with a New Jersey retailer.

This is big news for ParcelPal because Choom has, it is believed, an exclusive agreement for delivery of its products by ParcelPal, whose business model suits Choom perfectly, as it wants its products delivered efficiently, quickly and safely to its customers. Here it is worth pointing out that ParcelPal is in discussion with some of the heavyweights in the business like Aphria, Canopy Growth Corp and Organigram (it is not known specifically which companies) who are likely to select ParcelPal to deliver their products for the same reasons as Choom, although they are obviously on a much larger scale. Here's what happened to Choom's stock on the news that it is expanding into New Jersey.



As if all this wasn't enough, ParcelPal appointed respected and influential Brian Storseth as chairman of the board of the company on 27th February. Storseth was a figure in the Canadian Parliament.

Now to review the latest charts for ParcelPal: the annotated charts below tell the story, but there are two main points to note. The first is that the 3-year chart shows that ParcelPal has a marked tendency to spike dramatically. The second is that the 6-month chart shows that it is now in position to do just that, with a Cup & Handle base having now completed and the bullish volume pattern and rising accumulation line suggesting that breakout is now imminent. So we stay long and ParcelPal looks a stronger buy than ever here. ParcelPal trades in reasonable volumes on the U.S. OTC market.



ParcelPal Technology website.

ParcelPal Technology Inc, PKG.CSX, PTNYF on OTC, closed at C$0.31, $0.227 on 13th March 19.

Clive Maund has been president of www.clivemaund.com, a successful resource sector website, since its inception in 2003. He has 30 years' experience in technical analysis and has worked for banks, commodity brokers and stockbrokers in the City of London. He holds a Diploma in Technical Analysis from the UK Society of Technical Analysts.

[NLINSERT]

Disclosure:

1) Clive Maund: 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 has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. CliveMaund.com 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 billboard 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 ParcelPal. 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 ParcelPal Technologies, a company mentioned in this article.

Charts provided by the author.

CliveMaund.com Disclosure:

The above represents the opinion and analysis of Mr Maund, based on data available to him, at the time of writing. Mr. Maund's opinions are his own, and are not a recommendation or an offer to buy or sell securities. Mr. Maund is an independent analyst who receives no compensation of any kind from any groups, individuals or corporations mentioned in his reports. As trading and investing in any financial markets may involve serious risk of loss, Mr. Maund recommends that you consult with a qualified investment advisor, one licensed by appropriate regulatory agencies in your legal jurisdiction and do your own due diligence and research when making any kind of a transaction with financial ramifications. Although a qualified and experienced stock market analyst, Clive Maund is not a Registered Securities Advisor. Therefore Mr. Maund's opinions on the market and stocks can only be construed as a solicitation to buy and sell securities when they are subject to the prior approval and endorsement of a Registered Securities Advisor operating in accordance with the appropriate regulations in your area of jurisdiction.
Awhina House staff are appealing to businesses and individuals to sponsor 12 rooms in their house for homeless women in the Tauranga area.

The initiative was introduced by staff members following the local artwork donations, where one piece of artwork of a bird features in each of the 12 rooms.

Awhina House co-founder Angela Wallace says the initiative will have a great impact on the women staying in the rooms.

What we want is to give local businesses and individuals the opportunity to donate to support one room for a year.

Everyone that passes through that room will be under their care and what they pay will cover the expenses of that room.

The kaupapa behind it is the women will come here, become independent and move into independent housing.

Angela says they have totaled a cost of $4000 per room as a donation, which will cover all of the women that stay in the room over a year.

Expenses will cover the accommodation costs, power, bedding, a hot shower and all the things that makes a home a home when theyre sleeping rough.

The Awhina House staff are aiming women to stay in the room for around 12 weeks, however, Angela says there is no set time limit.

A woman will come in here, she will engage with her support workers, she would be supported around her independence and 12 weeks is the ideal time we would like that to happen. But if it takes longer than that, it takes as long as it takes.

And if its quicker than that, then thats amazing. We are going to be doing everything we can to support that woman into independent housing.

While the women are staying at Awhina House, they are working with staff members to assist in their journey to transition into independent housing.

Our staff members will be working really closely with the women. We will have two support workers and a house parent who will walk alongside the women, help the house to run smoothly and to be a role model for everyone here.

We provide social work, connecting them with services in the community, we will have a regular nursing clinic in Awhina House where anyone with health concerns can talk privately with a nurse that comes in, there will be different workshops depending on what they need and are interested in.

There will be some fun stuff too, as well as the hard work to move forward.

Fellow co-founder and Chairperson of Awhina House Tania Lewis Rickard organised the artwork project, where local artists donated a piece to hang in each room.

Tania says each piece of art is a native bird which signifies taking flight.

The theme is Ka Rere Ana and its meant to encourage women on their journey out of whatever situation they are in, and whatever form of poverty. There will be varying reasons why they are in their situation, and for some there are some really complex issues as well.

Tania says the artwork will serve as a visual stimulator and she told the artists to paint their own bird that was meaningful to them.

The bird means to escape, to be lead, to arise, to take flight into their journey.

Its all about happiness and hope.

Each artist had to choose a native bird and it was up to them how they interpreted that, thinking about those women.

Angela says sponsoring a room will have a personal touch, as sponsors can choose the room they wish to pay for.

People can choose which room they want to sponsor. We can engage with people that are interested, and show them the different artworks and say hey, Im sponsoring the Kotare room, an artwork by Nick Eggleston.

These women are coming from sleeping in the car, sleeping in a garage to a room which has a bed of their own, and a warm room with people around them to support them, so this is going to be transformational for women.

For sponsors to come on board, it means that they are part of the transformation of each womans life who will go through their room.

It will be so cool to know people are sponsoring women in that room for a whole year.

To get in contact with Awhina House to sponsor a room, click here to join the Facebook group or email communityangelstga@gmail.com
You need to choose your words carefully when you are the best debaters in the Bay.

Mount Maunganui Colleges senior debating team took out top honours at the recent Bay of Plenty Regional Debating Competition, and The Weekend Sun caught up with them to find out what it takes to win an argument.

Year 13 students Louis Donovan, Jonathan Tomlinson and Samuel Taylor are all keen fans of politics, and they like nothing better than a lively debate with their peers and teachers.

We have some lively discussions, Jonathan says, not so much at home but amongst our peer groups. We have some of our best debates and discussions with teachers as well. We talk it out with them.

But what about when the conversation turns to more unfamiliar subjects?

We debate some quite random things, Louis says.

Last weekend we started off with education and then gangs. The one we most disliked was when we had to argue to ban all contact sports.

You have got what you might say are not the most sporty kids debating about rugby, but then the next one was on politics, so finally we had something we could relate to.

With Louis and Samuel now making up two-thirds of the Bay of Plenty team that will contest the national finals in Wellington at the end of May, and with Jonathan on the reserves bench, it is time to get serious.

Not a huge amount of preparation went into the regional contest, but things have stepped up a notch since then.

Samuel and Louis will head north next weekend to spend time with their two coaches  a pair of Auckland lawyers.

We have four weekends of debating against other teams and against senior professionals, says Louis. Itll be baptism by fire, but it should be fun. Lots of preparation goes into it.

Their English teacher, Nick Lyon, is pretty proud of his charges and says it bodes well for the next generation coming through.

He said they have a lot of Year 9 students who have taken an interest in debating, so there should be a strong team for the next few years at least.
According to the citys private swimming pool owners, its an unadulterated revenue grab.

The authorities, on the other hand, cite compliance and safety.

Either way, it sent a swathe of Tauranga pool owners onto social media to demand answers from Tauranga City Council. They were all stroppy  totally up in arms, as one lawyer put it.

A pool registration fee of $134.20, inclusive of GST, was to be applied to all existing and any new swimming pools installed in the future. Its calculated the new pool registration demand would have generated a sum of almost $355,000 from Taurangas 2638 pool owners. They were livid, and their passions spilled onto Facebook.

Lets fight this blatant revenue gathering, was a theme of many comments. TCC is trying to scratch whatever money it can out of ratepayers, said another. What an absolute load of sh*t, was a more irritate and colourful response.

What next? Registering the 2nd external exit of a house? Its time for people to revolt. Their outrage was palpable.

But just as they were igniting, the argument may have been defused. The pool owners may have won after all.

As The Weekend Sun was going to print on Friday, it appeared Tauranga City Council was back-tracking. A proposal to abandon the fee, even after demands had been posted to pool owners, has been added to the agenda for a full meeting of the council next week.

What Tauranga City Council originally planned  and what had fired up residential pool owners  was a one-off charge to cover the cost of establishing and maintaining a register, understood to be new, to conform to a recent law change called The Building (Pools Amendment) Act 2016.

This cost would otherwise have to be paid for by all ratepayers, including those people who do not own pools, say councils environmental protection manager, Andrew McMath.

The one-off fee was a solution to meet the costs of researching and establishing a register of all properties within the city that had a swimming pool.

This includes identifying properties that have pools and those the council didnt know about. The $134.20 fee was arrived at after looking at the cost of preparing the register, and spreading that cost across all the known pool owners within the city.

Council has obligations for ensuring the safety of the public around pools, and the register was considered necessary for ensuring regular inspections were conducted to ensure residents safety.

The displeasure of pool owners, however, didnt stop online.

This week a formal letter written by lawyer Kirsten Murfitt was expected to be delivered to council on behalf of around 200 pool-owning signatories.

It protests the registration fee and the excessive inspection fee of $157.30 for the three yearly fence inspection.

While the $134.20 registration demand probably wasnt a lot of money, Kirsten told The Weekend Sun that existing pool owners, through the building consent process for their pools, have probably paid this. They are already on a register, she says. Why do they have to pay a new fee, for something that already exists? Thats why people are irked, and why theyre getting stroppy.

In the letter, pool owners say the council has been maintaining a register of residential pools for at least 32 years. So why, they ask, was there a need for another register and why should they pay again?

The owners said the council issues building consents for swimming pools and that is deemed notification of the existence of a swimming pool. The council has used that notification for the purposes of the residential swimming pool register.

Without the existence of a register, how would council inspectors have known which properties to visit to undertake inspections?

All registered pool owners received a council demand, and without the existence of a register, how would council have known where to send their own letters?

The council letter also stated the one-off registration fee will be applied to all existing swimming pools recorded on councils residential swimming pool register.

This, the owners say, is an undeniable confirmation from the council that it had an existing residential swimming pool register.

Not correct, says the council. We must identify all private pools in Tauranga, including those we may not have a record of, says Andrew McMath.

This requires us to undertake many activities, including reviewing all building and resource consents, looking at Geographic Information System photographs, and site visits to check that pools are still located on properties.

We are transferring to a new data management system, as the existing one is not sufficient to manage our regulatory requirements.

One irate registered pool owner spoke with nine other councils in relation to registration fees for existing pools in their districts. None made a charge to be on a new register.

The council generally aims to recover costs from users, rather than expect all ratepayers to cover such costs, adds Andrew. Other councils may or may not have a similar policy.

The council have to transfer information into the new register. In addition, the one-off fee will ensure that the new register is compatible with councils many electronic systems, now and in the future, says Andrew.

In other words, the fee is paying for all future work on upgrades and compatibility for this register.

That leaves the $157.30 triennial pool inspection, which Kirsten Murfitt personally doesnt have a problem with. I have a pool, so yeah - do it. But its quite expensive, she says.

The Weekend Sun was told by one owner that the inspectors walk in, take a look at the pool and walk away, taking 15-to-20 minutes maximum.

Even if they only inspected two pools an hour, the charge out rate is over $300, says Kirsten. That seems like a lot for an inspector who is being paid $25 an hour if hes lucky.

The Weekend Sun understand it takes the inspection team the entire three-year inspection cycle to see all swimming pools in the city.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has described today's shooting in Christchurch as a "terrorist attack".

I have now had the opportunity to be fully briefed with the details of the unprecedented events that took place in Christchurch this afternoon."

Addressing the nation from the Beehive tonight, Jacinda says "it is with extreme sadness that I tell you that as at 7pm tonight, we believe that 40 people have lost their lives in this act of extreme violence.

"10 have died at Linwood Avenue Mosque, 3 of which were outside the mosque itself."

A further 30 have been killed at Deans Avenue Mosque.

There are also more than 20 seriously injured who are currently in Christchurch A&E.

"It is clear that this can only be described as a terrorist attack," says Jacinda.

"From what we know, it does appear to have been well planned. Two explosive devices attached to suspects vehicles have been found and they have been disarmed.

"There are currently four individuals who have been apprehended but three are connected to this attack and are currently in custody, one of which has publicly stated that they were Australian born.

"These are people who I would describe as having extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand and in fact have no place in the world.

"While we do not have any reason to believe at this stage that there are other suspects, we are not assuming that at this stage. The joint intelligence group has been deployed and police are putting all of their resources into this situation," says Jacinda.

"The defence force are currently transporting additional police staff to the region.

"Our national security threat level has been lifted from low, to high. This I want to assure people is to ensure that all our agencies are responding in the most appropriate way. That includes at our borders.

"Air New Zealand has cancelled all turbo prop flights out of Christchurch tonight and will review the situation in the morning. Jet services both domestically and internationally are continuing to operate.

"There is heightened security, so we can assure people of their safety and the police are working hard to ensure people are able to move around their city safely.

"I have spoken this evening to the mayor of Christchurch and I intend to speak this evening to the imam, but I also want to send a message to those directly affected.

"In fact, I am sure right now New Zealand would like me to share a message on their behalf too.

"Our thoughts and our prayers are with those who have been impacted today. Christchurch was their home. For many, this may not have been the place they were born, in fact for many, New Zealand was their choice.

"The place they actively came to, and committed to. The place they were raising their families. Where they were parts of communities that they loved and who loved them in return. It was a place that many came to for its safety. A place where they were free to practice their culture and their religion," says Jacinda.

"For those of you who are watching at home tonight, and questioning how this could have happened here.

"We, New Zealand, we were not a target because we are a safe harbour for those who hate.

"We were not chosen for this act of violence because we condone racism, because we are an enclave for extremism.

"We were chosen for the very fact that we are none of those things.

"Because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion. A home for those who share our values. Refuge for those who needs it. And those values will not and cannot be shaken by this attack.

"We are a proud nation of more than 200 ethnicities, 160 languages. And amongst that diversity we share common values. And the one that we place the currency on right now is our compassion and support for the community of those directly affected by this tragedy.

"And secondly, the strongest possible condemnation of the ideology of the people who did this.

"You may have chosen us  we utterly reject and condemn you."
New Zealand Police are continuing to make enquiries after yesterdays tragic events in Christchurch.

As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stated yesterday, this has been designated a terrorist attack.

Forty nine people have lost their lives and 42 are being treated for injuries.

Two of those injured are critical and includes a four-year-old child who is being transported to Starship Hospital this morning.

Commissioner Mike Bush says 41 people were killed at the Deans Avenue mosque, and seven at the Linwood Avenue mosque.

One has since died in hospital.

Our thoughts go out to those who have been affected by this unprecedented event.

A 28-year-old man will appear in Christchurch District Court today charged with murder.

Two other remain in custody.

Mike says their investigations are in the early stages and they will be looking closely to build a picture of any of the individuals involved and all of their activities prior to this horrific event.

There is no guarantee the risk is limited to Canterbury and we need all New Zealanders to be extra vigilant.

Our message to you is simple: if you see something suspicious, say something  call 111 immediately.

Police is aware there are distressing materials related to this event circulating widely online.

We would urge anyone who has been affected by seeing these materials to seek appropriate support.

Mike says he would also like to remind the public that it is an offence to distribute an objectionable publication and that is punishable by imprisonment.

Once again I want to reassure the public that a large police presence remains in the city for the time being.

There will be a heightened police presence at community events today for safety and reassurance.

Dozens of officers continue to be deployed into the region today, and polices Eagle helicopter has flown to Christchurch to assist those on the ground.

Police and the wider government will be working with leaders and members of the Islamic Community to provide assistance, reassurance and support.

Deputy Commissioner of Maori and Ethnic Services Wally Haumaha has travelled to Christchurch alongside 15 ethnic liaison officers to support the community.

These specialists will work alongside local staff to support the families and help repatriate them with their loved ones in a way that is consistent with Muslim beliefs, while taking into account these circumstances and obligations to the coroner.

I also plan to fly to Christchurch this morning, says Mike.

Again, I want to offer my sincere condolences to those affected, on behalf of New Zealand Police.
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A Jamaican citizen pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to commit mail and wire fraud following a phone scam that targeted senior citizens, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of New York.

Sanjay Burton, also known as Michael Pearl, 34, of Jamaica, West Indies, conspired with others in the phone scam from September 2011 to May 2014, U.S. Attorney Grant C. Jaquith said in a news released issued Thursday.

Burton admitted he would place calls from Jamaica to U.S. senior citizens advising them they had won large cash prizes in a sweepstakes, lottery, or other event, officials said. Burton would then tell the victims they first had to pay taxes or fees in order collect the winnings.

In August 2012, Burton admitted he contacted a victim in Oneida County, telling her shed won a $250,000 prize but needed to pay taxes and fees on the winnings, officials said. The victim over the next year wired nearly $108,000 to Burton directly or to a third party acting on his behalf. The woman never got the prize, which didnt exist, officials said.

Burton was charged via indictment in 2014, and extradited to the U.S. in November 2018.

Burton faces up to 20 years in prison, post-release supervision of up to three years, and a fine of up to $250,000. He is scheduled to be sentenced July 15.

This case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the New York State Police, and the U. S. Marshals Service, and is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Katherine A. King.
The diplomat made the statement while hosting an informal meeting with Argentinian agencies and organisations, as well as friends in the native country who have close bonds with Vietnam, in Buenos Aires on March 14, in order to pay tribute to their contributions to the friendship and the acceleration of relations between the two countries.

Dung emphasised that a series of important events in bilateral ties were successfully held in recent times, including activities marking 45 years of Vietnam-Argentina diplomatic relations (October 25, 1973-2018), the Vietnamese Film Week and the Vietnam Day in Buenos Aires, and the sixth session of the Vietnam-Argentina Intergovernmental Committee.

These events are vivid evidence of the increasingly strengthened and expanded ties between the two nations, he stated.

Furthermore, as a diplomatic agency concurrently accredited to Uruguay, the Vietnamese Embassy in Argentina also promoted many practical activities to tighten the Vietnam-Uruguay cohesive relations ties in 2018 as they marked 25 years of bilateral diplomatic ties, including the successful organisation of the first meeting of the Vietnam-Uruguay Joint Committee on Economic, Trade and Investment Cooperation, Dung said.

Vietnamese Ambassador to Argentina Dang Xuan Dung speaks at the meeting. (Photo: VN+)

The ambassador voiced his belief that he would continue to receive enthusiastic support and close cooperation from the authorities and friends in the native country in order to continue facilitating the Vietnam-Argentina relations in a more pragmatic and comprehensive manner, as well as promoting ties with the two concurrently accredited countries in the region, Uruguay and Paraguay.

The representative of Argentinas Foreign Ministry highly appreciated the development of relations between the two countries in recent times, affirming that Vietnam is one of Argentinas most important trade partners in Asia.

The Argentinian side emphasised its commitment to promoting and gradually elevating the cooperation with Vietnam in both bilateral and multilateral issues.
ITHACA, NY -Two Ithaca police officers saved the life of a suicidal woman hanging over the top railing at a parking garage in Ithaca Thursday evening, Ithaca police said.

Officers Carl Hubbard and Julian Byrd were first on the scene to the Cayuga Street parking garage when the call came in at 6:24 p.m. Thursday, Ithaca police said. The pair sprinted up the stairs to the top level, where the woman was hanging backwards over the railing headfirst, said Jamie Williamson, spokesperson for the Ithaca police department.

The woman was starting to lose her balance when the officers were able to pull her back up, police said.

The woman was distraught over a family issue, and was subsequently taken to the hospital, police said.

Ithaca Police Chief Pete Tyler commended the pair for quick thinking, courage and team work.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A Syracuse man drove a stolen SUV during a deadly drive-by shooting last month in Syracuse, prosecutors said.

But it does not appear the man - Dennis J. Rice Jr. , 19 - fired the shots that killed Juanita Schley while she and a man were sitting in a car on the citys South Side on Feb. 18, prosecutors said.

Rice was charged this week with murdering Schley, 34. He also stands accused of attempting to kill the man and setting fire to the vehicle he used during the attack.

Investigators do not believe Rice was the gunman during the double shooting, prosecutors said Friday morning during Rices bail hearing in Onondaga County Court. He and other unknown suspects worked together to kill Schley, the Syracuse Police Department said in a felony complaint filed in court.

It is not clear what led to the shooting or if the suspects knew the victims. Police could not immediately be reached for comment.

Schley and a man were sitting in the car parked in the 2000 block of South Salina Street around 7:45 p.m. when the unprovoked attack started, police said in the complaint. Gunshots were fired at close range, hitting Schley and the man.

Rice drove his co-defendants to the shooting, prosecutors said, while another suspect shot the victims. The shooter was not identified by authorities or in court papers.

A bullet hit Schleys left arm and traveled into her chest, police said. The Syracuse woman was pronounced dead at Upstate University Hospital.

The man was also shot in his left arm. He survived.

The Feb. 18 crime spree started when Rice stole an SUV in the 500 block of Wolf Street on the citys North Side, prosecutors said. He then drove the 2009 Chevrolet Traverse to the 400 block of North McBride Street, where gunshots were fired at a group of people around 5:30 p.m., prosecutors said. No one was hurt.

About two hours later, Schley was shot to death on South Salina Street.

After the deadly shooting, Rice drove the stolen SUV about 1 mile away to 618 1/2 W. Newell St., police said in the felony complaint. He then parked the vehicle in a secluded spot, police said, and set the SUV on fire.

Rice has been charged with:

Second-degree murder

Two counts of attempted murder

Unauthorized use of a motor vehicle

Fourth-degree grand larceny

Third-degree arson

Tampering with physical evidence

Violating parole

Last August, Rice was sentenced to serve one to three years in prison after he was convicted of attempted third-degree robbery and fourth-degree criminal possession of stolen property in Onondaga County, state prison records show. He was released from the Willard Drug Treatment Campus onto parole in December.

Rice remains in the Onondaga County Justice Center. His bail was set at $500,000 cash or a $1 million bond.

A mugshot of Rice has not been released.
The first trailer for Crypto hit the internet this week, highlighting the bitcoin craze with a look at cybercrime in the age of cryptocurrency.

Fear is the ultimate currency, the new movies tagline says.

Kurt Russell (Escape From New York), Alexis Bledel (Gilmore Girls), Luke Hemsworth (older brother of Thor star Chris Hemsworth and The Hunger Games actor Liam Hemsworth) and Beau Knapp (Southpaw) star in the new thriller filmed in Upstate New York. Russell plays a struggling potato farmer as a young agent investigates a tangled web of corruption and fraud in New York.

According to Inverse, the majority of scenes are filmed in the Hudson Valley due to state film tax credits and an ideal shooting location in a small, undisclosed town.

Crypto was filmed 95 percent upstate, producer Jordan Yale Levine told the publication, but we did shoot a couple of days in NYC. When were shooting in the city you can see the skyline, but people arent as familiar with upstate, which is beautiful and aesthetically gorgeous. We have a potato farm, which is where Kurt Russell works. You would never imagine this is Upstate NY.

Slate and Mashable were quick to criticize the trailers hacking scenes and director John Stalberg Jr.'s attempts to visually represent cryptocurrency with screenshots of zeroes and ones. However, Russell and Bledel -- a longtime movie star and an Emmy-winning actress -- add acting chops to balance out its flaws.

Crypto hits select theaters and Video on Demand April 12.
Electric violinist, YouTube force, and dancer Lindsey Stirling will take the stage in Syracuse for the first time since 2015.

Stirling will perform at Chevy Court at 8 p.m. on Friday, August 23 with her debut performance at the 2019 Great New York State Fair.

"Lindsey Stirlings wonderful music defies simple labels, but her dedication to music and dance during her shows is second to none. This will be one of the highlights of our season and fans of any kind of music should be here for this one-of-a-kind show, said Fair Director Troy Waffner.

In 2015 Forbes placed Lindsey at #4 on its yearly YouTube artists list with over 10 million subscribers and 2 billion-plus views on YouTube, making her the highest-ranked female. Stirling has received the Billboard Music Award for Top Dance/Electronic Album and was #1 Classical Album on Billboards 2015 Year-End charts.

Stirlings performances often incorporate dance while she plays, especially in her videos. She was also the runner-up on Season 25 of ABCs hit show Dancing with the Stars with her partner Mark Ballas.

This is the fifth Chevy Court concert to be announced. More NYS Fair performers will be announced in the coming months.

2019 Chevy Court lineup at the New York State Fair:

And at the 2019 New York Experience Stage:

The 2019 New York State Fair runs from Aug. 21 to Sept. 2.
Over 2,400 people made it inside the Marriott Syracuse Downtown on Sunday, March 10 to celebrate 5-year-old, Brooklyn Danger Halls prom - a bucket list wish for a young girl with a terminal cancer prognosis.

We had friends and family travel from all over the world to celebrate with us. From what I heard, there were guests who waited two hours in the cold and never made it to the ballroom! Brooklyns mother, Meghan Hall, said this week in an email to Syracuse.com. And you know what? Not one person complained about the wait.

7 A Prom for Danger Girl at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown

There was such a large turnout for the prom that the Syracuse Police Department had to come to help with crowd control, according to Hall. Many patrons came just to donate. Those that did make it in were greeted with a 5-year-olds dream dance party - featuring Disney Princesses, a candy bar and cupcakes.

Brooklyn was pretty tired that day, but she was in awe that so many princes and princesses came to have a dance party. Every woman wearing a dress was a princess, said Hall. She told my husband and I that it was a magical day. She was especially delighted to see there were cupcakes and donuts!

In September 2017, Brooklyn was diagnosed with anaplastic ependymoma - a rare cancer that forms tumors in the central nervous system of the brain and on the spinal cord. Last May, Brooklyn was deemed cancer free, but in December - a week before Christmas - the family was told the cancer was back and received a terminal prognosis.

Now that I've had some time to absorb and process... I could never fully explain what yesterday meant to my family and... Posted by Meghan Hall on Monday, March 11, 2019

In the following months, the Hall family was determined to cross off as many bucket list items for Brooklyn - including her very own prom. The concept caught the attention of thousands of well-wishers across Central New York, including vendors who donated their time and talent to make the event a success.

This journey has lead us to some incredible people who all worked very hard to make this day unforgettable. My favorite moment at the prom was when the Disney Princesses followed me down to our hotel room, gathered around the bed, and helped me to wake Brooklyn up from her nap, said Hall. They then escorted us back to the ballroom where Brooklyn and I had our first dance together. Followed by her dance with her daddy. These were moments we will take with us.
Since 2006, the auto technology class at East Syracuse Minoa High School has annually built a car thats raffled, as a means of raising funds to pay for the next years build project.

The cars have included four (Cobra) kit cars, one street rod, two pickups, two Camaros, one Firebird, one Buick, one Mustang, and one Chevelle.

This year, the 14th car, is a new direction for the juniors and seniors who participate in the school year-long build. It's a 1955 Ford Thunderbird, a classic two-seater which was Ford's initial foray into the sporty car market.

The "T-Bird," as it quickly became known, was two years behind Chevrolet's introduction of the Corvette. The first Corvette made its debut in the Motorama display at the 1953 New York Auto Show. While the auto show Corvette was a suggestion of sorts by Chevrolet, the public quickly clamored for a production car, which resulted in 300 built that year.

No one, or company was more interested in the public's reaction than Ford, which immediately went to work on its own two-seater and had the car ready for 1955. The '55 Bird rolled into showrooms for $2,944, $170 more than a '55 Corvette.

The rest is history; the Corvette went on to great success and has been in production since 1953. The Thunderbird survived for three years as a two-seater, then became a four-seater for several years, then it was also a four-door sport sedan and finally a roadster again.

In total, the Thunderbird was in production from 1955 until 1997 when it was discontinued. But in an attempt to capture a wave of nostalgia, the T-Bird returned as a two-seat roadster in 2002, but was discontinued again in 2005.

Ryan Beckley, who chairs technology education at ESM, said the stars aligned for this year's build when the '55 Bird was donated to the program by Stan Neu, a former resident of Manlius, N.Y., who, along with his wife, Diane, was moving to Florida.

Ryan explained that Stan had a few cars, and the process of elimination meant the T-Bird wasn't making the Florida trip.

The good thing is none of Ryan's classes had tackled a Thunderbird, and the better thing is the car had been driven only 73,095 miles and was in storage since 1974. That's not to say it was a cream puff, because it wasn't. It was used and sorry looking, but now it's a sparkling example of Ford's greatest attempt at capturing the sport car market.

Ryan allows his students to pick the color of the car, and the favored color this year is Thunderbird Blue. Thunderbird Blue, which looks green, was one of three colors initially offered on the '55 T-Bird. The other two were Raven Black.

Later in the production run Snowshoe White and Goldenrod Yellow were added while Cameo Coral, Tropical Rose and Pinetree Green Metallic, were special order colors.

The ESM classes of young men and women have the rebuild well underway, and the finished car will be on display at the 20th annual Syracuse Nationals, July 19-21, at the New York State Fairgrounds. Later in the day on the 21st, the winner of the car will be selected.

1955 Ford Thunderbird

Cost when new: $2,944

Average cost today: $46,200

Wheelbase: 102 inches

Length: 175.3 inches

Weight: 2,980 pounds

Production: 16,155

Engine: 291.6 cubic inch, 193-horsepower V-8

Transmissions: Three speed manual or three speed Ford-O-Matic

ESM Raffle

Drawing: Sunday July 21

Ticket cost: One for $10; three for $25; 15 for $100

Information: (315) 427-5811 or (315) 427-5811 or www.spartangarage.org

Cars ESM classes have built since 2006
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Many Syracuse cops will be noticeably absent during the citys annual St. Patricks Day celebration this weekend.

Officers in the Syracuse Police Department are refusing to march in the annual St. Patricks Parade on Saturday, citing tensions with the newly hired chief, Kenton Buckner.

Its the most outwardly visible sign yet of discord between new department brass and the rank-and-file, and a public display of the challenges an out-of-town chief faces as he tries to overhaul an institution notoriously averse to change.

In an email to officers earlier this week, obtained by syracuse.com, Buckner said he was aware of officers plans not to march. He urged them to reconsider.

The parade is not solely about people marching in the parade, he wrote. It is more about the people who arrive early to get a good spot and cheer on the participants. With this in mind, we should never intentionally do anything to lead the public to believe that we do not appreciate their support. Disagreements within the police department should never impact our relationship with the public. We will never agree upon everything, but we can all agree the public deserves our best.

Jeff Piedmonte, president of the Syracuse Police Benevolent Association, said this isnt a union decision and he hesitated to call it a boycott. But he said there will be few officers marching with department officials tomorrow. Those present will mostly be chiefs and the departments ceremonial unit, which carries the flags.

Unlike past years, the union is not participating in the parade, nor is it organizing officer involvement or doing things like providing green ties or orange boutonnieres.

Piedmonte said officers are frustrated by the chiefs words and actions so far on the job. He declined to get into specific complaints, saying he didnt want to publicly air the dispute.

Its an individual decision by the officers of whether theyd like to march or not, Piedmonte said. "Theres an overall belief that the chief lacks respect for the officers here and has since hes gotten here. And its gotten worse. Its why officers are refusing to work it and officers are ordered to work it, and thats never happened.

Typically, between 75 and 100 officers march in the parade. Another 50 officers work security, blocking streets, handling crowd control and policing a busy bar scene in Armory Square.

Officers usually volunteer for Parade Day duty. Its a cushy gig on a big party day and many cops have been working the same corners for years, so theyve gotten to know the people who come there.

This year, for the first time, the department had to assign officers to duty on Saturday, since few volunteered, according to Piedmonte. The standard parade day shifts will still be staffed, albeit reluctantly.

Buckner declined to comment on officers who decided not to march, but said he recognizes the importance of the event and hopes for a good turnout.

Mayor Ben Walsh named Buckner his police chief last December after a yearlong search. Many in the department had hoped the job would go to Joe Cecile, who has remained on as 1st deputy chief. Buckner was formerly chief of police in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Buckners appointment marked the first time in 25 years someone was picked to lead from outside the department. The last external chief was James T. Foody, who was appointed by former mayor Roy Bernardi in 1994 and resigned abruptly in 1999. Foody came to the job from the Oswego County District Attorneys office and was a retired state trooper.

Buckner appears to have been steeling himself for this kind of fight since he got here. In several public forums, hes mentioned the possibility of a no confidence vote from the union. Hes said he will do what he believes is right, no matter who is upset about it.

If you want to be popular, this is not the profession to be in, he told a community group last month.

Buckner took over a department short-handed for cops, generous with overtime hours and often criticized for being lax on officer discipline. He promised to evaluate the departments officers and its policies right off the bat.

Hes been reluctant to detail his overall plan for restructuring the department to reporters, saying he will announce his department-wide changes once theyve been implemented and communicated to staff. He expects that to happen in the coming months.

But some of his public remarks have resonated poorly with officers.

At a Thursday Morning Roundtable meeting last month, Buckner acknowledged that there are some bad officers in the department who will receive additional training and discipline. He then added that some officers are simply rotten to the core and arent fit to wear the uniform. That comment appeared in at least one media account from the forum, which was widely circulated among officers.

His full remarks likened the department to a family, and he said 95 to 99 percent of his officers are good officers that he wanted to protect from the apples that should not be in that barrel.

There are some people who are rotten to the core, that were going to say, You know what? You cant wear our uniform and badge anymore. Youve lost the privilege to be here and its a privilege to work for our city and on our police force. " Buckner told the group of community leaders and residents. Some of thats going to make me unpopular.
Starting April 1, it will be illegal to sell smoke detectors with removable, replaceable batteries in New York state.

The law was adopted in 2016 but it gave retailers three years to comply.

The law requires that battery-powered smoke detectors sold in the state must come with batteries that last at least 10 years and cannot be removed. Lawmakers said the mandate aims to reduce the number of people hurt or killed in fires.

Syracuse Fire Chief Michael Monds said the law will be great for residents.

Once you put this 10-year smoke detector up, its going to be there for 10 years, he said. When youre sleeping, its ready to work.

Over half of the deadly fires in the United States between 2012 and 2016 happened in homes that didnt have smoke alarms or had detectors that werent working, according to the National Fire Protection Association. Many of the homes had detectors with disconnected or missing batteries.

A Syracuse man this week was killed in a fire in a home without working smoke alarms, according to the Syracuse Fire Department.

Firefighters battling a house fire found James D. Sauta unconscious Monday on the second floor of his Shuart Avenue home. Sauta, 58, died of his injures.

Residents with working smoke alarms in their homes are more than twice as likely to survive a blaze as residents in houses without functioning detectors, according to the fire association.

Smoke detectors are one of the best things you can do to save somebody in a fire, one of the best things you can do for your family," Monds said.

New Yorkers dont necessarily have to rush to the store next month to buy new detectors: The law doesnt require homeowners to replace their old smoke alarms. Retail businesses that ordered detectors powered by removable batteries before the April 1 deadline can keep selling the smoke alarms until they run out of them.

Prices for the 10-year smoke detectors can be purchased for about $16 to $21 for a single detector; detectors with regular batteries can sell for as little as $5 each.

Many of the 10-year smoke alarms have a feature that keeps the alarm quiet when it senses shower steam or smoke from cooking. And when the detector reaches the end of its decade-long life, an alarm sounds.

In Syracuse, firefighters are working to ensure a lack of money doesnt prevent residents from having reliable smoke detectors.

Monds said the Syracuse Fire Department has given out over 2,300 smoke detectors during the last few years. He encouraged any resident who cant afford a smoke alarm or rents an apartment without a detector to call the departments Fire Prevention Bureau at (315) 448-4777.
To the Editor:

There is currently a problem with the funding formula for New York state education funding for the Auburn school district and others in New York state. The Auburn Enlarged City School District is currently receiving approximately $7,160 per pupil in Foundation Aid. That is the least of all school districts in Cayuga County, with the average Foundation Aid per pupil being just over $9,000. That results in a funding shortfall of over $7 million for the district, which has led to Auburn having to cut 18 percent of its staff and close buildings to make up for the shortfall. Foundation Aid is issued based on a per pupil formula and used for daily operating expenses such as payroll, supplies, and utilities. Auburns Foundation Aid is being calculated using outdated 2003 data that classified the school district as average need, when Auburn has been a high needs district since 2008.

The lack of foundation aid hurts students by forcing larger class sizes due to fewer teachers, and it results in fewer investments to add technology to the classroom. The careers of the future will be centered around technology, and a lack of funding for technology puts students at a disadvantage in college and in the workforce. This is why we would appreciate Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Sen. Robert Antonacci supporting equitable funding for all districts in New York state.

Zachary Moore

Auburn
WASHINGTON  The U.S. Air Force has decided to expand its squadron of MQ-9 Reaper drones based at the home of the 174th Attack Wing at Syracuses Hancock Field.

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson approved sending an extra four aircraft, two mobile ground control stations and new training equipment to the New York Air National Guard base.

The new drones and equipment are expected to arrive as early as this month, according to U.S. Rep. John Katko, whose office was informed of the decision by Air Force officials on Thursday.

Air Force officials told Katko that the new aircraft and equipment will allow the base to almost double the number of Reaper drone pilots and sensor operators trained at Hancock Field from 45 to 85 per year.

The Air Force will spend $23.7 million combined for the upgrades at Hancock Field and March Air Reserve Base in California, which also will receive four new aircraft and mobile ground control stations.

The 174th Attack Wing uses the Hancock Field base north of Syracuse to remotely pilot MQ-9 Reaper drones on combat and surveillance missions over Afghanistan.

The Air National Guard base was the first in the nation to operate Reaper drones, and the first to receive permission to take off and land at a commercial airport, Syracuse Hancock International Airport.

The base also serves as an Air Force maintenance and training facility for drone crews. Those crews maintain a squadron of eight Reaper drones at Hancock Field.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Theres a new bar coming to downtown Syracuse, but unless you look closely, you might walk right by.

Thats because The Fitz, named after jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald, is themed like a Prohibition-era speakeasy, a basement-level bar with soft lighting, tin ceilings and live 1920s music played on a baby grand piano during the week and live quartets on the weekend.

The Fitz will be joined by Clementine, a grab-and-go lunch counter, and Oh My Darling, a full-service restaurant offering lunch, dinner and weekend brunch, on the lower floors of the Whitney Lofts project in downtown Syracuse, 321 S. Salina St., located in what was the Whitney Department Store and before that, the Park Brannock Shoe Store, birthplace of the Brannock Device.

Oh My Darling will have a soft opening with select appetizers and cocktails, including a 1911 Established bloody mary booth, during the St. Patricks Day Parade Saturday. The restaurant will serve a limited brunch and dinner menu on Sunday before celebrating its grand opening on Monday, March 18.

Clementine will also be open for business Saturday. The Fitz is expected to open by the end of next week.

26 Oh My Darling and Clementine open in Syracuse

Ryan and Leigh Ann Benz, the team behind the three establishments and partners in the whole Whitney Lofts project, are both Syracuse natives who moved back to Central New York last summer after living the last seven years in New York City.

We feel like theres kind of a renaissance downtown, Leigh Ann Benz said. We wanted to be part of that community that wants Syracuse to become better.

Since 2013, the couple has run Lee Lees Forest, a womens boutique at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. Some of the home goods carried at Lee Lees will also be sold at Clementine. Both Ryan, 35, and Leigh Ann, 31, have experience in the restaurant industry, but this will be their first time running the show.

They said theyll lean on Culinary Institute of America-trained chef Jayden White and general manager Anna Fecco, who has more than 30 years of restaurant experience.

The names for Oh My Darling and Clementine were a play on Syracuse Orange, but with a softer, more playful edgea vibe the Benzes hope to extend to the rest of the South Salina Street corridor.

Ryan Benz said the construction of The Fitz is inspired by the neighboring Landmark Theatre, a venue that holds special meaning for the Benzesit was the site of their wedding. They hope to turn Oh My Darling and The Fitz into the go-to pre-and post-show spots for Landmark guests.

The menu at Oh My Darling is contemporary, with a few local flourishes, such as the Syracuse Poutine ($9), a dish of salt potatoes topped with gravy and cheese curds.

The Darling Burger ($16), a Pat LaFrieda beef patty topped with a fried goat cheese croquette and onion jam and served with truffle fries, is a specialty of the house. Offerings like lamb sliders, seared scallops and hot honey-dipped chicken with macaroni and cheese round out the lunch and dinner menu, which also features a number of gluten-free and vegan offerings.

The couples son, Oliver, born not long before the couple moved back to Syracuse, lends his name to the childrens menu.

The 110-seat restaurant, open daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., will also serve a brunch menu on weekends that includes dishes like bacon praline pancakes, banana bread French toast and a variety of eggs Benedict.

We want people to come and spend time in the space because its so comforting, homey and warm, Ryan Benz said.

Clementine, open 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekends, is designed for breakfast and grab-and-go lunches, with a selection of prepared wraps and baguette sandwiches ($9), salads ($10 to $12) and coffee and espresso drinks made with Brooklyn Roasting Company coffee.

The Fitz will open daily at 4:30 p.m. and close at midnight during the week and 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. The bar is closed on Sunday and Monday.

"Syracuse has made a lot of improvementswere so honored to be part of that, Ryan Benz said. We hope this restaurant is our contribution.

Jacob Pucci finds the best in food, dining and culture across Upstate New York. Contact him at (315) 282-8611, or by email at jpucci@syracuse.com.
Sheffield, Mass.  The husband of an attorney with an Albany law firm killed his wife and three children before killing himself earlier this week, authorities said Thursday.

The bodies of 41-year-old Justine Wilbur and her husband, Luke Karpinski, also 41, were found Wednesday morning at their home in Sheffield, Massachusetts, along with the bodies of their children, 7-year-old twins and a 3-year-old. Authorities found the bodies after a fire at the home, located about an hour from Albany, according to the Times Union in Albany.

Investigators believe Karpinski killed Wilbur and their children before setting the home on fire and killing himself, according to the Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts. Authorities have not disclosed a weapon used in the killings or the cause of death.

Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington also would not say whether the victims were dead before the fire started or how it was set, according to the Eagle.

Wilbur worked as a senior associate at the Hoffman Warnick law firm in Albany, the Times Union said. Before becoming an attorney, she worked as a scientist and managed a drug discovery team that focused on cancer research.

Karpinski was a federal chemical patent investigator.

Investigators are still combing the scene in Massachusetts and looking for clues, according to the Times Union.

The children were students in the Southern Berkshire Regional School District, according to WNYT in Albany.

Wilbur's law firm issued a statement on the incident.

Justine was smart, knowledgeable, dedicated and hardworking, the statement said, according to WNYT. She was a devoted mother to her wonderful children and a true friend to everyone in our firm.

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598
NEW YORK (AP)  A case featuring sensational claims that followers of an Upstate New York self-help organization were forced to become sex slaves took a new turn on Wednesday with one key defendant pleading guilty and another being hit with child pornography charges.

Nancy Salzman, who once ran the group NXIVM, told a judge in federal court in Brooklyn that she teamed up with self-styled spiritual leader Keith Raniere, because she wanted to help people improve their lives. But she admitted that she later lost her way when she joined efforts to spy on perceived enemies seeking to expose the Albany-based group as a cross between a pyramid scheme and a cult.

"It has taken some time and soul searching to come to this place," said Salzman, choking back tears. "I accept that some of what I did was not just wrong, but criminal. ... If I could go back and do it all over again, I would. But I can't."

About two hours after the guilty plea, prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Raniere accusing him of twice inducing a 15-year-old girl to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing one or more visual depictions of such conduct in 2005.

In a statement on Wednesday, defense attorney Marc Agnifilo denied the new allegations and questioned the timing with his client nearing trial on other charges.

The new charges "serve only to taint the jury pool," Agnifilo said. "If the charges were legitimate, they would have brought them a year ago."

Salzman, a registered nurse who was known as "Prefect" within NXIVM, was involved in stealing identities of the group's critics and hacking into their email accounts from 2003 to 2008, prosecutors said. They also alleged that she conspired to doctor videotapes showing her teaching NXIVM's lessons before the tapes were turned over to plaintiffs in a New Jersey lawsuit against the group.

The plea comes about six weeks before Raniere's trial, expected to detail allegations that a master-slave society within NXIVM brainwashed women into having unwanted sex with him and had them branded with his initials in initiation ceremonies. Among those also charged along with Raniere are Salzman's daughter as well as Seagram liquor fortune heiress Clare Bronfman and actress Allison Mack, best known for playing a teenage friend of Superman on the "Smallville" TV series. They have all denied the charges.

Salzman apparently won't testify for the government: There was no agreement to cooperate as part of the guilty plea to a conspiracy charge that carries an estimated maximum term of 41 months in prison under sentencing guidelines.

Raniere, 58, was arrested in Mexico in 2018 and is being held without bail in Brooklyn on sex-trafficking charges. At the time of his capture, Mack was living with him at a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta, according to court papers.

An NXIVM bio of Salzman posted on the internet says she was a consultant to New York state and major corporations "until she met Keith Raniere and discovered an approach to personal growth that yielded powerful and permanent results."

Sentencing for Salzman was set for July 10.
Bottom line: In its bid to become a $100 million business, Turtle Beach has decided to buy out PC accessory maker Roccat. The headset giant wants to further its hold in the PC headset market as well as expand into the equally lucrative mouse/keyboard sector.

Gaming headset maker Turtle Beach announced Thursday it is purchasing PC peripheral company Roccat for $19.3 million in cash, stock, and earn-out payments.

German company Roccat primarily produces gaming accessories including mice, keyboards, and even headsets. Turtle Beach is not looking to buy out the competition, but instead, add additional products to its lineup.

The San Diego-based company is currently looking to expand its footprint in the lucrative PC gaming market. Since Roccat is already a strong brand in Germany and Asia, adding its mice, keyboards, and a secondary line of headsets to its stable will help Turtle Beach achieve its goal especially in those territories. It will also oversee distribution of the Roccat brand in the US and other parts of Europe.

This is a dynamic and strategically important deal for Turtle Beach, said CEO Jurgen Stark. We are adding a complementary portfolio of PC gaming mice and keyboards, a skilled PC accessories team, and a highly synergistic distribution footprint.

The $19.3 million price point breaks down to $14.8 million in cash (net of working capital adjustment), $1 million in stock or cash (company option), and approximately $3.4 million in earn-out payments. The acquisition is expected to be completed by Q2 2019 and will add approximately $20-$24 million to Turtle Beachs 2019 revenue. Moreover, the company expects Roccat products to contribute an additional $30 million in 2020. In turn, the merger is expected to significantly boost TB share prices starting in 2020.

Turtle Beach does not plan on rebranding Roccat products, but rather use its existing name and reputation to expand itself into a $100 million gaming accessory company.

Roccat accelerates our expansion into the roughly $1.6 billion PC gaming headset market, as well as directly enables us to address the roughly $1.3 billion PC gaming keyboard and mice market, Stark continued.

Roccat is also excited about better serving the console market through TBs existing presence. Turtle Beach is already well-known for high-end headsets for Xbox and PlayStation. Roccats CEO Rene Korte believes it can tap that market further than it has with TBs help.

We've long admired how Turtle Beach's pioneering headsets have elevated gaming, and it is an honor to join forces and bring our great products to more gamers, said Korte. I have no doubt that combining Roccat's strength in the PC peripherals market with Turtle Beach's 45 years of experience, impressive technology, console dominance, and strong brand will bring even more victories to gamers around the world.
In brief: The battle between the US government and Huawei is showing no signs of abating. But should the situation get worse, the Chinese tech giant is prepared to use its own proprietary operating systems in its many mobile products.

The US has long accused Huawei of spying at the behest of the Chinese government, but tension between the two has reached new highs since the start of 2018, culminating in the recent arrest of CFO Meng Wanzhouthe daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei.

A next possible step by the US could be banning American companies from doing business with Huawei. The same punishment was handed out to ZTE last year over sanctions violations. In the few months before the trade ban was lifted, the company was affected so badly that it ceased major operating activities.

Should Huawei face the same ban, it will at least be more prepared. The firm has been working on an operating system that could replace Android since 2012 when the US opened an investigation into both ZTE and itself, according to the South China Morning Post. We heard more about this OS in 2016.

We have prepared our own operating system, if it turns out we can no longer use these systems [Android], we will be ready and have our plan B, said Huawei mobile chief Richard Yu Chengdong, in an interview with German publication Die Welt.

Banning Huawei from using Android and Windows sounds extreme, but with the US asking its allies not to use the companys 5G equipment and even threatening to withhold intel from Germany if it does so, such a move isnt out of the question.

While Huawei uses its own Kirin processors in most of its phones, a ban on American products would have big repercussions for its laptop line, which, in addition to using Windows, relies on processors from Intel.

For its part, Huawei says it hopes to avoid this worst-case scenario. "We fully support our partners' operating systems -- we love them and our customers love them. Android and Windows will always remain our first choices," said a spokesperson.
DNA testing company FamilyTreeDNA will now grant users the right to block law enforcement agencies from accessing their genetic data.

The company decided to make the changes after it had received disapproval for allowing the FBI to access its database without customers' consent.

FamilyTreeDNA Working With Law Enforcement

Last January, it was reported that FamilyTreeDNA changed its terms of service to allow law enforcement agencies to use their services to identify suspected criminals.

What the agencies would do is create accounts on the company's website using genetic data from unsolved violent criminal cases. The agencies would then try to search for possible DNA matches from the site's vast genealogy database in an effort to crack those cases.

The cooperation between FamilyTreeDNA and the FBI marked the first time a private company has approved to voluntarily permit law enforcement agencies to gain access to its database. This move raised privacy concerns and received widespread criticism from customers, prompting the DNA testing company to make changes to its terms and conditions.

Preventing Access To Genetic Data

Law enforcement agencies are now required to create profiles under a "special process" in order to gain access to FamilyTreeDNA's genetic database, the company said in an e-mail summarizing the new changes to its terms of service.

"If you do not wish to be matched with these designated law enforcement registered users, you have the ability to opt out by adjusting your Matching Preferences, which now includes an option to opt-out of Law Enforcement Matching." said the company.

"User accounts created prior to March 12th, 2019 that are flagged as an EU account have been opted out of Law Enforcement Matching but may choose to opt-in," it added.

Cracking Cases With Genetic Genealogy

Thanks to genetic genealogy and DNA database technology, law enforcement agencies have successfully cracked a number of violent criminal cases, years or even decades after the crimes were committed.

Using FamilyTreeDNA's database, police in California managed to identify a suspect for the 1998 brutal rape of a 31-year-old woman and a 9-year-old girl. The suspect, named Kevin Konther, was just arrested back in January.

Another violent case that was also solved using FamilyTreeDNA's database was that of James Neal in California. Thanks to FamilyTreeDNA, police managed to identify James Neal as a suspect for the abduction and murder of 11-year-old school girl, Linda O'Keefe, back in 1977.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Danish researchers have developed a new program that produces a genderless voice fit for those who want to give their digital assistants a gender-neutral voice.

Q is billed as the world's first genderless voice, developed by advertising firm Virtue Nordic in collaboration with Copenhagen Pride. Both organizations wanted to create gender-neutral voice technology to help promote inclusivity in the workplace.

Julie Carpenter, a researcher at California State Polytechnic University, who served as an adviser to the project Q team, discussed the philosophy behind the program.

"Q adds to a global discussion about who is designing gendered technology, why those choices are made, and how people feed into expectations about things like trustworthiness, intelligence, and reliability of a technology based on cultural biases rooted in their belief system about groups of people," Carpenter said.

"Q is a step forward in true innovation because it forces a critical examination of these belief systems."

The Creation Of Q

The developers started out by recording five distinct voices that do not necessarily fit male or female binaries. They then moved the recordings into a gender-neutral range using voice modulation software.

To test the voice samples, the project Q team conducted a test involving over 4,600 people. Participants were asked to determine whether the voice that they would hear was more male or female.

Based on the answers, the researchers would then tweak the modulation of the voices and tested them again until they were able to create genderless voice.

The team hopes that it could one day build an artificial intelligence (AI) framework for Q so that the genderless voice can be used with digital assistant technologies.

Gendered Voice Assistants

Most voice assistants available, such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, are generally presented as female. Despite this, users can choose to have a male voice for Siri and Google Assistant.

Alexa is the exception since Amazon has yet to provide a similar option. While it can speak with a British accent or even in German, Alexa still currently cannot speak in a male voice.

Carpenter noted how some users prefer one-gendered voice over another, depending on what they use a voice assistant for.

Some people prefer a female voice for an AI assistant that is more supportive or meant to help someone, while others prefer a male voice for more authoritative roles.

However, she argued that there is really no reason for a voice to be gendered.

Q makes it possible for users to have more options for their digital assistants, even if it is as simple making their voices genderless. This can be important to those who do not want to conform to certain gender stereotypes.

"I think it's really important to have representation for trans people when it comes to not only AI, but voices in general," said Ask Stig Kistvad, a trans man who took part in the project by lending his voice.

"It's a new thing in the last three to five years, that trans people are actually represented in popular culture."

Kistvad said it is only natural for some technology developers to eventually embrace trans people as well.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Scientists from all over the world have issued a call for a global moratorium against gene editing designed to modify inheritable traits in humans babies.

The call for a moratorium was in direct response to the controversial experiment conducted by He Jiankui. The Chinese scientist admitted in November that he used CRISPR to modify the genes of twin girls in China to protect them from becoming infected with the HIV virus in the future.

Temporary Freeze Of Germline-Editing Experiments

The 18 signatories, each has been involved in the study or application of gene editing, are hoping for the total ban on editing the human germline  sperm, eggs, and embryos  until an international framework has been agreed upon.

"To begin with, there should be a fixed period during which no clinical uses of germline editing whatsoever are allowed," the open letter read. "As well as allowing for discussions about the technical, scientific, medical, societal, ethical and moral issues that must be considered before germline editing is permitted, this period would provide time to establish an international framework."

The call for a moratorium, published on Wednesday, March 13, on the journal Nature, include Feng Zhang and Emmanuelle Charpentier, two of the primary inventors of the CRISPR system.

The effort was supported by the National Institute of Health's Francis Collins. In an interview with The Washington Post, he stated that the U.S. government shares the same sentiment.

"What we're talking about here is one of the most fundamental moments of decision about the application of science to something of enormous societal consequence," he stated. "Are we going to cross the line toward redesigning ourselves?"

Stricter Regulations

However, one name is noticeably missing from the signatories: Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley. She is a gene-editing pioneer whose work led to the development of CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology.

Doudna has been outspoken about the dangers of gene-editing. In 2015, she and a group of biologists called for a similar moratorium on gene editing only to be ignored by He.

She said that she will continue working with national academies in the United States and the United Kingdom to introduce regulations that will ban the modification of genes to give a baby inheritable traits until scientific, technical, and ethical issues have been discussed and addressed.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A New Jersey father's birthday was particularly special this year because his two sons decided to prank him. Instead of sending him a card or buying an expensive gift, the two men decided to rent a billboard urging the public to greet their dad on his special day.

Birthday Gift Dilemma

Mike and Chris Ferry did not initially know what to give to their dad, who is also named Chris, on his 62nd birthday. The two live in Florida, so they have to be creative since their father lives in another state.

The younger Chris recently purchased a billboard outside Atlantic City for his addiction recovery center, so he thought they could get one for their dad as well.

Mike and Chris rented a billboard for $2,000. It read "Wish My Dad Happy Birthday - Love, Your Sons," and included their dad's photo and phone number.

15,000 Calls And Texts From Well-Wishers

The two sons thought people in the local area and friends would send their birthday wishes. They did not expect so many people to reach out to their dad.

The older Chris will be celebrating his 62nd birthday on March 16, but since the billboard went up on March 6, he already received more than 15,000 messages from all over the world.

Strangers from as far away as Kenya, Luxembourg, and the Philippines sent him birthday greetings. He also received birthday wishes from Caritas Island, a little island in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

The first stranger to greet him, however, is a guy named Nick who greeted him happy birthday via a text message.

Heartwarming Experience

Receiving thousands of voicemails and messages can be overwhelming. Despite being inundated with birthday greetings and having to record a new voicemail to thank well-wishers, the birthday celebrator said that prank had been more heartwarming than annoying.

"I'm getting things like, 'My father's birthday was March 16. He passed away. I'm contacting you in memory of him," Chris said. "It's a cool story, and I'm right in the middle of it, so I love it."

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Not to be outdone by Samsung and Huawei, Google is apparently developing its own foldable smartphone, as well, if this newly uncovered patent is anything to go by.

Recently filed, the application sees a foldable display technology that's similar to the panels seen on the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X.

The filing was first spotted by Patently Mobile, and it describes a method for constructing an OLED panel that can be bent repeatedly and used in a "modern computing device."

Google Doesn't Make Its Phones

While this certainly looks exciting, The Verge notes that Google itself doesn't actually manufacture smartphones. Similar to Apple, Google outsources manufacturing of the Pixel 3 to Foxconn, and both HTC and LG handled manufacturing duties on 2017's Pixel 2 handsets.

Does that mean this is one of those patents that exist just for the sake of legally preempting similar technologies that come after? In other words, did Google file this patent without the intention of releasing a foldable phone anytime soon? Well, it's tricky. Google could very well release its answer to the Galaxy Fold  but it would likely outsource its manufacturing to a third-party rather than producing it itself.

Z-Fold Display

In any case, the patent does show a promising take on foldability: the screen is referred to as a "Z-fold display," which imagines a display that could bend in two different places without breaking.

It's not clear why Google would ever release a phone like the one described in the patent. The Galaxy Fold and Mate X are two completely different approaches to foldability; the former folds inward, while the latter stretches outward. These devices are still in the process of being accepted by the broader tech landscape, so needless to say the jury is still out on which kind of foldable display is best. The Z-fold presents an intriguing new orientation, and it'll be surprising if Google ever releases such a product.

The endurance of foldable phones is still a question on everyone's mind. After all, these things costs a fortune, so one would expect them to last after repeated folds. Samsung's Galaxy Fold is rated to survive "hundreds of thousands" of folds, but at the end of the day, it's still a plastic screen. Gorilla is apparently making a foldable glass display, which it hopes could be durable than plastic ones.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Mohammed Al Rawi, the award-winning chief information officer for the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation District, is moving to a new role.Al Rawi will become the first CIO of the county Public Defenders Office on March 25, overseeing the strategic planning, development, modernization and ongoing analysis of IT, IT governance, data management and the Client Case Management System (CCMS), according to Rebecca Friedman, Media Services director for Information Technology Services in the countys Internal Services Department.Al Rawi will lead the development and the implementation of technology infrastructure supporting the departments 1,100-employee workforce, which includes more than 700 attorneys and numerous paralegals, investigators, psychiatric social workers and administrative and support staff.In a statement issued through Friedman, Al Rawi said: The Los Angeles County Public Defender's Office is the first Public Defender agency in the nation. Innovation, therefore, is a part of its DNA. I am looking forward to bringing innovative technologies to support its 700 mission-driven attorneys with providing legal representation to those who cannot afford their own lawyers. Al Rawi was named one ofs 2018 Top 25 Doers, Dreamers, & Drivers , honoring his work in bringing innovative solutions to digitize and automate business processes and solve complex, life-saving business challenges, Friedman noted.In his two years as Parks and Rec CIO, Al Rawi worked to update and upgrade the IT infrastructure of Los Angeles Countys parks, trails, forests and other facilities. Among other things, he brought in technology that helps lifeguards detect and prevent drownings in the countys swimming pools ; and other tech that uses Wi-Fi in county parks and forests to attract and safeguard hikers and adventure-seekers.Before joining Parks and Rec in 2016, Al Rawi led establishment of the countys first consolidated, robust and cost-efficient data center while serving as deputy for technology and innovation for County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.Before joining the county, Al Rawi was technical director for thenews bureau in Baghdad, overseeing IT operations for dozens of journalists covering the Iraq war and its aftermath. In 2006, Al Rawi was awarded the Best Staff  Los Angeles Times Editorial Awards.Al Rawi earned his bachelors degree in computer science summa cum laude from California State University, Los Angeles.
Within hours of the news reports about the Friday massacre of at least 49 worshipers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the diverse faith groups of Baton Rouge came together to support the Muslim community in its time of grief.

The Rev. Robin McCullough-Bade, executive director of the Interfaith Federation of Greater Baton Rouge, said she has been receiving calls from individuals asking how they can support the Muslim community.

I would expect people of faith in Baton Rouge will be offering their prayers and support this weekend, she said. Whether its tonight at the synagogue, or at Catholic churches Sunday morning.

New Zealand mass shootings: At least 49 killed in shootings at two mosques; one man arrested CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP)  At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers 

McCullough-Bade also noted that in times like these, faith leaders should take the lead from our Muslim brothers and sisters about how to appropriately mourn.

In a statement, Bishop Michael Duca of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge sent a similar message of solidarity for both the victims of the attack and the larger Muslim community.

I call on the Catholics of the Diocese of Baton Rouge to offer prayers for the victims of this attack, their families and the Muslim communities, Duca wrote.

At Masjid Al-Rahman mosque, the Rev. Fred Smith of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church joined Imam Waiel Shihadeh to speak to the 500 congregants at Friday services.

Can't see video below? Click here.

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Smith said he was asked by Perry Perkins of the community group Together Baton Rouge to speak at the mosque to let congregants know that Christians share their concern and sorrow.

Even though our worship comes from a different perspective, its important for us to recognize the value of inclusion  the value of universal love  which is what is a part of our Christian faith, Smith said.

Imam Shihadeh emphasized that Islam is based on peace, forgiveness and to love each other, no matter the faith.

This crime is against any religion, he added.

Rabbi Peretz Kazen of Chabad of Baton Rouge also responded with his own outpouring of support, months after the deadly mass shooting targeting the Jewish community in Pittsburgh.

+3 After Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, hundreds grieve together in Baton Rouge Hundreds gathered Monday evening in Baton Rouge to grieve and show their support following Saturday's mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue 

Kazen said that with every kind word and positive thought, people can bring a little bit of godliness into the world.

And if we do it for the sake of those whose lives were snuffed out yesterday, we resurrect something of the divine spark that was their life, in a small but deeply significant way, he said. It's the least we can do for them.
Thousands of Louisiana homeowners who have been blocked from receiving flood recovery assistance because of the "duplication of benefits" trap may finally be able to qualify for aid in the coming months, after the states two U.S. senators acted on the issue Thursday.

U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, R-Madisonville, and U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, met with U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in the Vice Presidents Office to try to address the hang-ups that have prevented people whose homes flooded in 2016 from tapping into federal assistance if they sought SBA loans.

Im tired of screwing with this, Kennedy told reporters after the meeting.

But he said the meeting with Carson was productive and he now expects that the next step in the process will come by the end of April. The issue faces one final hurdle within the Trump administration before homeowners will be able to receive recovery dollars, so its unclear when residents will be able to access the funds.

Louisiana received more than $1.7 billion from Congress to aid recovery from the 2016 floods that affected thousands of families. The bulk of the money, about $1.3 billion, has been designated to go toward homeowner rebuilding assistance, but a federal rule has restricted homeowners who received Small Business Administration loans from reaping the full benefits of the program.

Louisiana flood victims 're-victimized by bureaucracy'; federal shutdown delays work on SBA issue A month-long shutdown of the federal government likely further delayed recovery grants to homeowners trying to get back on track after the 201

Members of the Louisiana delegation spearheaded efforts last fall to eliminate the requirement that SBA loans count against Restore Louisiana grants, but months later HUD hasn't yet released federal guidance required for the state to begin distributing money to newly-eligible homeowners.

President Donald Trump signed those changes in the federal Stafford Act into law in October.

An estimated 6,000 Louisiana residents who took out or applied for loans from SBA could be affected by the change.

One Denham Springs couple, fed up with the delays, has sued the Trump administration on Monday over the issue.

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As in previous disasters, affected homeowners who sought SBA loans have been unable to tap into grant dollars that duplicated whatever loan amount they were deemed eligible to receive  even if they never accepted the loan money.

For example, a homeowner with an estimated $25,000 in damage who qualified for a $20,000 SBA loan would only be eligible for $5,000 in grant money, which doesnt have to be repaid. Meanwhile, a homeowner who took on the same value of damage  $25,000  but didnt apply for a loan could potentially receive for the full $25,000 grant if all other qualifications were met. In many cases, SBA loan awards were larger than the value of total damage, leaving homeowners without an opportunity for any grant assistance.

Denham Springs couple sues HUD over 'duplication of benefit' trap for '16 flood recovery A Denham Springs couple whose home flooded in August 2016 sued the Trump administration on Monday, seeking to have a federal judge declare tha

The rift has continued to impact communities as they struggle to recover from the August 2016 floods in the Baton Rouge area and other parts of southern Louisiana and the March 2016 floods in north Louisiana. Officials have repeatedly said that the duplication of benefits issue has created the biggest problems for homeowners and spawned the most complaints about the states efforts to rebuild.

After HUDs ruling is issued next month, the Office of Management and Budget will also have to act. Kennedy and Cassidy expect to meet with OMB acting director Russell Vought the week of March 25 to expedite the process.

If we cant work this out, then by God thats why we have a president of the United States, Kennedy said.

Cassidy and Kennedy recently resorted to a parliamentary tactic to try to get the federal government's attention to the issue by holding up the Trump administrations HUD nominees.

Sens. Cassidy, Kennedy use 'holds' to force administration guidance on duplication of benefits Louisiana's two senators have resorted to a parliamentary tactic attempting to force the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development t

Cassidy said he told Carson Thursday that the hold would be lifted if HUD acts.

Louisiana families are still waiting to put their lives back together, and theyve waited far too long, he said. I made this clear to Secretary Carson, and emphasized how deeply this mess has hurt Louisiana homeowners."
In response to the Advocate Editorial Boards opinion column entitled, Do Louisiana senators value the Constitution? If yes, nix Trump's wall
Views of the I-12 bridges over Tangipahoa River in Robert that flooded in the Great Flood of 2016,
It's often said that having a lot of enemies must mean you're doing something right. Ben Quilty discovered long ago that the price of fame for an artist is the undying enmity of a large proportion of one's peers. This hasn't put the brakes on his glorious ascent but neither has it left him unscarred. If Quilty is currently one of the annointed saints of contemporary Australian art he's a good match for St. Sebastian, the human target.

He now wishes he'd never agreed to pose with the barbed wire crown for that photo in Good Weekend. It was pushing the envelope a little too far. There are probably lots of things he regrets, but this is counterbalanced by a self-confidence and conviction that has made him one of the few living Australian artists whose name rings a bell with the general public.

Installation view: Quilty featuring Pancreatitis (Kenny), The Last Supper (Bottom Feeder) and Farewell virginity by Ben Quilty at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Credit:Grant Hancock

Quilty's fan club is even stronger among collectors and curators. The survey show, Quilty, has just been launched at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and will travel on to the state galleries of Queensland and NSW. This is a rare honour nowadays, when most retrospectives are single-venue affairs.

It's even more remarkable that Quilty is being feted by the AGNSW at the age of 46 when such stalwarts as Charles Blackman or Robert Dickerson both died without a retrospective in their home city. To further complicate matters Quilty is having the show while he is a trustee of the AGNSW, which is a breach of the usual protocols.
The universe began in something known as Te Po, typically described "as a period of chaos or darkness or a kind of night". The darkness is both literal and metaphorical, a grand catch-all dualism that issued forth in elaborate and powerful chants, many of them expounding on the procreational fecundity of a world of "abundance in multitude". The result was a cosmic genealogy where rocks and fish, corals and trees were part of a family tree.

His methods did not yield historical dates as we understand them. And it eclipsed the significance of the oral nature of Polynesian traditions that were, in Thompson's terms, "densely poetic, elliptical, evocative and occasionally obscure". Voyaging stories, however, there were aplenty, even if they were propelled by winds in magic bags or talking stars. In this part of her book Thompson is allowing us to appreciate the resonances of a Polynesian Cosmos that defined itself without writing.

Fornander collected 2000 years of genealogies, customs, legends, place names, numerals and mythological traditions from all over the Pacific and found ways of connecting them to Indian, Iranian and European traditions. He posited different waves of migration from the north-west.

Thompson is especially interesting on ethnographic pioneers such as the Swedish-born sailor Abraham Fornander, whose great work on The Polynesian Race, its Origins and Migrations and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People was published (1878-85) at a time of population collapse, of "death coming in like a tide", as Robert Louis Stevenson put it.

Still, lies and misdemeanours, guesses and hypothesis, speculations and proofs, big theories and successful demonstrations  all pertaining to the mapping of the Pacific, the movements of people into it, their material and linguistic communalities  are the breadfruit of this instructive book.

Yet I only wish Thompson had laid out more of the Polynesian world: we get a short chapter on poetic schemas, chants and prayers and so on, but little of depth about the scores of Pacific languages and their kinships, including the identifiable Oceanic language family once reflected upon in the 19th century. Here it makes an appearance, only to vanish under the waves, like the continents the islands were once thought to be.

What will delight many readers is the focus on navigational themes. Essentially, this is the marvellous story of the population of the Pacific islands being settled by canoes navigated by men who could read the stars and the currents, the swells and the passage of birds because the maps in their mind could compete with what Europeans had to offer. The celebrated case in point was the techne of Tupaia, who sailed with Cook after he had finished his affair with Venus on Tahiti. Tupaia drew a now famous chart that suggested a knowledge of islands over a vast expanse. It was not "accurate" but its schema implied much.

Beyond Tupai's map, from where did the islander people mainly come? Cook thought Taiwan, a notion buried until recently. Out of the dark forests of New Guinea? What is the difference between the Micronesian and Melanesian people? From South America, bringing the potato with them? If so, how did they manage the prevailing West winds?

The Kon Tiki expedition demonstrated, we once thought, that the Polynesians relied on the currents, not the wind: they drifted rather than sailed, or if they sailed they progressed across the islands by accident. It was some years before modern sailing experience gave other answers, rebutting the scepticism of Andrew Sharp's Ancient Voyages of Polynesia in favour of the real-life enactments by the anthropologist Thomas Gladwin and the sailor David Lewis  both their writings and voyages involving an intimacy with islander navigators.

The sea world of Sea People comes through in all of the above. The reader gets soaked. Thompson's larger task is also to saturate us with the knowledge of what our sciences tell us of prehistory. This includes the latest claims of radio-carbon dating, as well as what can be said of the new frontier of DNA, dependent as it is on the possession of skulls dug from ground still of sovereign value to ancestors. Her DNA chapter is less up to date than it might be, but it presses cross-cultural questions that involve issues of ownership of facts as well as skulls. The nagging question in the Pacific domain is who is to speak for whom, when? In all cultures, it seems, possessiveness contaminates claims to knowledge, even that which emanates from laboratories.
Let's pretend today is sunny. Better than sunny  glorious. Writing this column a week in advance, how would I know? I can't guarantee clouds or rain events, but let's imagine the sky as duco-blue and you say, "What a.!" What a what? That's the question. Beautiful day? A peach? A corker? A trimmer? Maybe this weather gives you all the feels. Perhaps it's smokin'? Bitchin'? The jam? The cat's pyjamas? Or the surplus of Vitamin D, minus the swelter, is a belter, a gem, a bobby-dazzler? Because you are what you speak, when the dust settles. Just like fashion, or agendas, or shared experiences, your vocab is a generational yardstick  just as yardstick (the word) is a yardstick. Writer Douglas Coupland attributes the phrase Generation X to Billy Idol. Credit:Dallas Kilponen And that's a drag, as Baby Boomers call annoyances, the slang a wayward spore of hippiedom, synonymous with dullsville, which nobody says anymore. Gen-Xers might prefer to label this whole pigeonholing a bummer, while Gen-Y might dub the irritation a yawn, or hohum, followed by the Z-gang who'd tag this paragraph as tl;dr. Roughly speaking, because these X, Y, Z and every other box is a con game. Next time you declare some behaviour as millennial, consider the prejudice you exhibit. Imagine that lazy broadside narrating your behaviour: "Power-walking is so boomer." Or: "Typical Y-gen, glued to YouTube." The bias worsens when forged into lens, a distorted view of anyone by virtue of their age, before the relevant specimen can act or speak.

Language is a glimpse of the problem. When delighted, there seems a finite choice for any given speaker, at least in the minds of a partial jury. By dint of age, boomers can only respond with gee or gosh, wow or bugger me. Next rung up, the X-brigade can pick brilliant, amazing or elated variations of the F-word. Followed by Y's wicked, or sweet, or righteous, or Z's squee. Claptrap. (As you'd expect a 50-something to say.) Because nobody deserves this stereotyping. Let nanas yell fabbo at will, I reckon, just as teens can plump for blimey. Why not? Age may prefigure certain trappings, as well as natural limitations, but that's no reason we can't trespass the imaginary boundaries. Question being: who drew the boundaries in the first place? True to my late boomer status, I need a scapegoat. And truer to human experience, the backstory is complicated. Generation X  the phrase  is deemed by many as the lexical trigger, the demographic shorthand for people born between 1965 and 1979, the initiative inspiring the boxes to follow. Canadian writer, Douglas Coupland is commonly attributed as the phrase's coiner, thanks to his 1991 bookl, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. But Coupland claims he heard the phrase from William Broad, alias rocker Billy Idol. While other scholars accuse Charles Hamlett and Jane Deverson, the co-authors of a sociological paperback called Generation X, back in 1964  a suite of interviews with scooter-riding Boomer-teens. Confused? That's my point. The labels are confusing. Worse, they're arbitrary and reductive, as precise as daydreaming. Along came X, whenever that was, and soon every other infant was confined to an invisible crib. Marketing strategists continue to sell the divisions, in league with film and TV producers, from boomer to Z. At least we can be grateful the alphabet has sputtered, lending us the impetus to put the custom to bed.
The parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann say a Netflix documentary about their daughter's case could "hinder the search".

Madeleine, 3, went missing while she and her family were on holiday in Portugal in 2007. The UK investigation into what happened to her remains open. Her parents have vowed to never to stop searching for their daughter.

A photo of Madeleine McCann when she was three years old released by the McCann family in 2007. Credit:AP

The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, a true crime doco in the same vein as Netflix hits Making a Murderer and Abducted in Plain Sight, is tipped to land in the UK on Friday, and claims to include testimony from more than 40 "experts" close to the 12-year-old case.

The documentary is likely to claim that Madeleine was abducted and kept alive to be trafficked out of Portugal, according to British tabloid The Sun.
He was known within his childhood town of Grafton as someone who was dedicated to fitness and ran free athletic programs for children. But on Friday, Brenton Tarrant became known as an alleged mass killer.

The 28-year-old, who attended Grafton High School before getting his qualifications in fitness, listened to 17th-century British military music before allegedly opening fire on two mosques in New Zealands south island in a meticulously-planned attack. Forty-nine people were killed.

Alleged Christchurch terror attack shooter Brenton Tarrant grew up in Grafton, NSW.

Mr Tarrant is expected to appear in court in New Zealand on Saturday after police apprehended a car he was travelling in shortly after the attacks.

In online posts, Mr Tarrant described himself as "just a ordinary white man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to a working class, low income family".
Motorists will see 500 intelligent traffic lights, new smart motorways and digital parking signs installed under an ambitious $695 million congestion busting package from the NSW government.

In the Liberals marginal seat of East Hills on Friday, Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced her government, if re-elected, would ease congestion using cutting edge technology.

The Premier has announced traffic lights will get upgraded across the state. Credit:Ben Grubb

This program will take pressure off families, whether going to work or dropping kids off at school, that you know relief is coming your way, she said in the seat which the Liberals hold by a 0.4 per cent margin.

Ms Berejiklian said the government would spend $400 million to install intelligent traffic lights at 500 intersections that can read the flow of traffic and reduce the number of stops by 15 per cent in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong.
Queensland police will increase their presence near mosques and other religious buildings for the next two days to protect worshippers, but there has been no immediate threat to the state.

The move comes after Friday's horrific Christchurch shooting, which saw 49 Muslim worshippers shot dead in what was believed to be an ideologically inspired terror attack.

Commissioner Ian Stewart said Queensland police would increase their presence at mosques in the state after the Christchurch attack. Credit:Dave Hunt/AAP

Police Commissioner Ian Stewart said police had contacted multi-faith and multicultural communities in Queensland following the attack on Friday.

(We want to) reassure them that we are here for them, that we will do everything we can to ensure their safety, even though we know there is no credible threat at this point in time here in Queensland, he said.
A Melbourne man who instigated the fatal bashing of an Airbnb guest had previously served jail time in Norway for assaulting a housemate.

Jason Colton, 42, and two other men have pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Ramis Jonuzi, killing him after a minor dispute arose over a $210 unpaid accommodation bill in October 2017.

Ramis Jonuzi, 33, was killed after a rental dispute in Brighton East.

Colton played a leading role in the three-on-one assault at the Brighton East home, putting Mr Jonuzi in a choke hold and punching him in the head until he was unconscious.

Prosecutor Mark Gibson, SC, said Colton became unnecessarily involved after there was a "minor" dispute between another housemate, Craig Levy, and Mr Jonuzi.
Work has commenced on the repair of rail lines, but the record deluge has caused such extensive line washaways and damage to bridges that many towns are still isolated, and it may be weeks before normal services can be restored to several centers. Port Fairys Trials Two amphibious ducks which had raced through the night from Melbourne, were cheered as they waded through the flooded streets of Port Fairy today, bringing cases of butter and eggs, sides of bacon, tinned meat, yeast for bread and tobacco. Water floods onto Bank Street, Port Fairy. Credit:Port Fairy Historical Society These were the first supplies that had reached Port Fairy for days.

The Minister for Public Works (Mr. Kennelly), in the leading duck, saw the devastation caused by the flood waters. He saw soaked mattresses, pillows and blankets draped over fences, and this afternoon sent an urgent appeal to Melbourne for hundreds of double and single bed mattresses, blankets and pillows. The Minister was accompanied by departmental officials and a representative of The Age. Port Fairy's fishing fleet and pier took heaving damage in the flooding. Credit:The Age Archives Throughout the Western district the flood waters are subsiding rapidly. There was bright sunshine today. Army ducks are playing a vital and intrepid part in reaching isolated areas. Port Fairy, for example, is at present cut off by road and rail from the rest of Victoria, and only the ducks could have reached it. The morning Mr. Kennelly and his party had a taste of their worth when they travelled through fields feet deep in mud and then ploughed through the yellow lake, enlarged by the overflowing waters of the Moyne River.

In parts the journey was rough, when the ducks swayed and plunged, feeling for firm ground beneath the miniature ocean. But once they were seaborne the going was easy. These splendid aquatic transports were cheered as they approached the outskirts of East Port Fairy, where many are still half submerged. The desolation of the scene had to be seen to be believed, but it is a pointed commentary on the spirit of Australian country people that, although their feet are in mud and ruin, they can still laugh, despite their trials. Minister on Scene When Mr. Kennelly reached the borough chambers, on dry land, he acted quickly. He met the mayor (Cr. A. Hill) and the other councilors, and arranged for the distribution of food to retailers. He was asked a dozen times if the ducks had brought in any beer, and answered No. There has been no beer here for days.

Jack and Teddy Talbot, who along with their father, had a narrow escape when a bridge collapsed. Credit:The Age Archives Mr. Kennelly authorised the mayor to issue chits on retailers to families in distress. He also promised to make a full report to the Government on his return to Melbourne today on flood damage. This afternoon he told fisherman that steps would be taken immediately to rebuild their wharf, which was swept away in the flood. Lucky Escape The ducks brought into Port Fairy Mr. Douglas Talbot, of Rosebrook, and his two sons  Jack, 12 years, and Ted, 9 years  who had an amazing escape from death on Sunday when the steel and wood bridge at Rosebrook collapsed.
Their position was given away by water running from two taps and an open gate.

Barefoot, dusty and exhausted, William Roberts and Ronald Morris are guarded by Victoria police. Credit:The Age Archives

Escapees William Glandville Roberts, 22, and Ronald William Morris, 23, were discovered and captured at gunpoint on top of a 14-ft haystack on a dairy farm near Stanhope late yesterday.

First published in The Age on March 21, 1964

When police arrested the pair shortly after 5 p.m. yesterday, it was the end of a five-week chase which developed into one of the biggest manhunts in the history of the Victorian police force.

They were led barefooted and weary to a waiting police car and taken back to Rushworth, the headquarters for the search, 10 miles away.

Dairy farmer Ross Murray, of Koombahla, Stanhope, triggered the speedy sequence of events which led to their recapture when he noticed water running from two taps on his property yesterday afternoon.

He was sure he had not left the taps running.

Nearby a gate was open  it should have been closed.
A siege is unfolding in Melbourne's north on Friday morning.

Heavily armed police are on the scene in Darebin Road, Northcote, The Age was told.

A Victoria Police spokeswoman would only describe it as an "ongoing operation".

Traffic diversions are in place on Darebin Road between Wales Street and St David Street.
There was a time when Dudley Marrows and Wolf Stiebler were intent on killing each other and destroying everything the other represented. When the hot fury of their shoot-out was done, however, Marrows saved Stieblers life. Wolf Stiebler, left, who commanded a German U-boat, tries on an Akubra in the company of Dudley Marrows, right, during a visit to Australia. Neither would know the other for 40 years, though all along they were joined by a coincidence that remains eerie to tell. And in their old age, they became friends. It all started in 1943, at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Britain was hanging on grimly in its war with Germany, hungry for food, weapons, fuel and reinforcements, surviving only because convoys of ships steamed supplies across the Atlantic from America. Hitler wanted those supply lines smashed, and sent wolf packs of submarines, his U-boats, to blow the ships to damnation. The Battle of the Atlantic lasted from the start of the war in 1939 to the end in 1945, and thousands of Allied merchant ships and 175 warships were lost. The outcome of this long battle, however, was effectively determined in 1943, when Britain and its Allies mounted a furious campaign, sinking about 100 German U-boats in five months. The German blockade was ineffective from that point on. Meanwhile, Melbourne-born Dudley Marrows had joined the Royal Australian Air Force No. 461 Squadron, based in England, piloting anti-submarine Sunderland flying boats.

On July 30, 1943, three German U-boats were detected sailing outbound on the Bay of Biscay, off the west coast of southern France and northern Spain. Dudley Marrows with a model of a Sunderland flying boat, similar to the aircraft he captained during World War II. Flight Lieutenant Marrows, on a gruelling 14-hour patrol, joined the attack. Harassed by a Luftwaffe fighter plane and fire from the U-boats, several Allied attackers were forced to retreat, and two bombers were heavily damaged and had to limp away. Marrows hung on and brought his Sunderland so low it skimmed the waves, heading directly for one of the submarines, U-461.

At the last second, he released seven depth charges, pulled up and just made it over the conning tower of U-461. The U-boat broke up and began sinking. An account of the sinking of U-boat 461 published in November 1943. Credit:Australian Women's Weekly When we flew back to verify that we had sunk it, you could see these poor blokes, about 15 of them, struggling in the water," Marrows told an interviewer many years later. "That turns you around to saying, 'OK, theyre human', so we dropped a dinghy for them. "Not a single one of our crew of 12 disagreed, which I think is good to say.

The brass of Britain's RAF disagreed, reprimanding Marrows for jettisoning a raft which was supposed to save the Sunderlands crew if it was shot down. Indeed, it turned out Marrows plane had been hit by a shell during the attack, blowing a chunk out of a wing spar. Half an hour later, while trying to destroy another U-boat, the Sunderland was again hit, this time knocking out electrical systems and starting a fire. One of the crew, Flying Officer A.T. Jensen, told his parents of the adventure in a letter home. Within the letter was this: The survivors from our kill (who were picked up by the corvettes) said their sub was U461, and as our boat is 'U' of 461 squadron, it seems an amazing coincidence. The flying boat 461-U had sunk the German submarine U-461.

A month later, Marrows and his crew were shot down over the Atlantic. Three of their life rafts were shredded by shrapnel. They survived, crammed into their one remaining raft. Forty years later, Dudley Marrows' wife Silvia attended a reunion in Germany of Sunderland and U-boat crew members. A German woman approached her. Dudley Marrows with his medals, including (top) the French Legion of Honour. Credit:Louise Barker "Please thank your husband for giving me the many happy years of marriage I have had," she said. Her husband was Wolf Stiebler, captain of the submarine U-461, who had lived because of the raft dropped by 461-U.
Police have charged a man over a shooting in Perth's south-east after a siege and in the wake of a three-day manhunt.

Hari Darsan Ganeshan, 28, is due to face court on Saturday charged over the incident on Tuesday which sent the area surrounding Wingrove Road in Langford into lockdown.

Police will allege between midday and 1pm, the 29-year-old victim went to the Wingrove Road home to speak to the man, and while there was shot in the stomach.

Police were searching for Mr Ganeshan in the days following the incident and put out a warning to the public not to approach the man if they spotted him.
At 1.40pm local time, a man who identified himself as Brenton Tarrant burst into a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and possibly another, shooting and killing upwards of dozens of panicked and huddled Muslim worshippers at point-blank range shortly before Friday prayers began, laughing insanely as he carried out what can only be described as IS-level violence.

We know this much because the Australian gunman live-streamed his grotesque terrorist attack to his Facebook account.

What we do know about Tarrant, however, at least based on his social media accounts, is his profile reads as the sum total of every counter-terrorism practitioner's and academic's fear, one that law-enforcement agencies throughout the Western hemisphere have long warned to be the No. 1 terror threat: right-wing extremism.

More specifically, Tarrant represents the dangerous convergence between broken white men and extreme right-wing media, bearing in mind that 100 per cent of all terrorist attacks carried out on US soil in 2018 were carried out by right-wing extremists, with the Southern Poverty Law Centre crediting a toxic combination of political polarisation, anti-immigrant sentiment and modern technologies that help spread propaganda online.
After years spent trying to recapture the imagination (and money) of Australian consumers, Sony Mobile appears to have thrown in the towel.

Though the company hasn't made any public announcements, it's now become clear that no new Xperia devices are coming to the local market despite being made available overseas, and even previously released Sony phones will become increasingly difficult to find.

Global Sony Mobile president Mitsuya Kishida holds the new Xperia 1. Like the last two Xperia flagships, it will not make it to Australia.

It doesn't particularly come as a surprise, at least not to me. I haven't received a press release about a Sony phone since April last year. Since then, the company has released two flagship phones internationally  the Xperia XZ2 Premium and XZ3  but neither have made it to Australia.

At MWC, the world's biggest technology convention for all things mobile, earlier this month, representatives from virtually all the major mobile brands reached out to offer assets and details about their new phones, but I heard nothing about the just-announced Xperia 1.
Washington: The doomed Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed on Sunday was in trouble almost immediately after takeoff as it lurched up and down by hundreds of metres at a time, the New York Times reported, citing a person who reviewed the jet's air traffic communications.

The captain of the Boeing 737 Max 8 asked in a panicky voice to turn back only three minutes into the flight as the plane accelerated to abnormal speeds, the newspaper reported.

All contact with Flight 302 was lost five minutes after takeoff and even before the captain's radio message, controllers knew he had an emergency, according to the newspaper.

The March 10 crash, the second involving Boeing's 737 Max in less than five months, triggered a wave of groundings for the plane by airlines and regulators around the world and US authorities finally followed them on Wednesday.
A Turkish court has convicted an Australian-born Islamic State militant of belonging to a terror group and sentenced him to more than seven years in prison.

Neil Prakash, a former rapper from Melbourne, has been in a Turkish prison since 2016 when he was arrested near the Syrian border for attempting to cross into Turkey with fake documents.

Neil Prakash, who is also known as Abu Khalid al-Cambodi.

Turkish prosecutors said the 27-year-old had illegally crossed into Syria in 2013, where he joined IS.

He had featured in IS videos, been linked to several attack plans in Australia and has urged lone wolf attacks against the United States.
That leaves just one major piece of the 2020 puzzle missing: Biden. Electable, not left-wing The 76-year old has been wary, in part because of fear about putting his family into the spotlight. Biden's son, Beau, died in 2015 and his widow later formed a romantic relationship with one of Biden's other sons, who has since divorced his wife. But the growing consensus in Washington is that Biden will run and that he is the favourite to win the Democratic nomination. A Monmouth University poll released this week found that 28 per cent of Democratic primary voters want Biden to be the partys nominee - more than any other single candidate.

Hes definitely the front-runner, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake tells The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. A lot of people want him to run not just because he would be a great president but because he is by far the most likely to beat Donald Trump. That is Democrats number one priority. Polls show Democrats most want the party's 2020 candidate to be "electable" rather than someone who shares their values. Biden is the guy who can win back the votes of white Catholic men in the heartland. Veteran Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf Bidens appearance at the firefighters convention in Washington underscored why Democrats find his candidacy so appealing. While firefighters have traditionally voted Democratic, just 27 per cent of the unions members reported voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now here they were begging Biden to run.

The message was clear: here is the candidate who can win back Trump voters and deliver Democrats victory in 2020. This is a guy that can bring civility back into the arena, firefighters union president Harold Schaitberger, a longtime friend of Biden, told reporters after the speech. And its somebody who can speak to what I believe is the electorate thats going to decide the next election. Blue collar kudos It wont be enough for Democrats to win more votes than Trump in 2020; indeed, Clinton easily won the popular vote in 2016 but lost the electoral college. The key to victory will be winning back swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Florida.

Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic strategist, thinks that Biden has the best chance of any Democrat to win these states. Biden is the guy who can win back the votes of white Catholic men in the heartland, he says. Asked to name Bidens strengths, Lake says: His stature, his blue-collar roots and sensibilities, his foreign policy experience, his willingness to stand up to bullies, his experience on economic issues. He can appeal to swing voters and still mobilise the base. Biden gestures while speaking during the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Legislative Conference in Washington. Credit:Bloomberg The latest Monmouth University poll found Biden had a net favourability rating among Democrats of plus-63, higher than any other candidate. He polls particularly well among older voters and those who describe themselves as moderate or conservative.

Biden, who was born in Pennsylvania and grew up poor, has an obvious appeal to white working class voters. But, having spent eight years as Barack Obamas vice president, he is also popular among African Americans. (Obama and Bidens close friendship sparked a multitude of bromance memes.) Having previously spent almost four decades in the Senate, Biden is far more experienced than top rivals like Kamala Harris, who has only been a senator for two years. The backlash begins Yet even before declaring his candidacy, Biden has faced an intense backlash from progressives who believe he represents the party's past rather than its future.

If Biden were successful in 2020 he would be 78 years old at his inauguration, making him the oldest first-term president in US history. Loading The March edition of Harpers Magazine features a damning 5600-word cover story on what it calls Bidens disastrous legacy. The piece argues Biden is the champion of yesterdays sordid compromises, citing his past positions on abortion (he once argued Roe v Wade went too far), racial segregation (he opposed the busing of black children into white school districts), criminal justice (he authored a famous tough-on-crime bill that helped lead to mass incarceration) and foreign policy (he supported the Iraq War). The piece also chronicles Biden's close relationship with Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who was one of the most fierce civil rights opponents in Congress.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie explored similar terrain this week in a piece entitled "The Trouble with Biden". "Biden could lead Democrats to victory over Trump, but his political style might affirm the assumptions behind Trumpism, Bouie argued. "The outward signs of our political dysfunction would be gone, but the disease would still remain." Strom Thurmond turning 95 in 1997. Credit:AP The disconnect between Biden's old-fashioned style and that of the Democratic Party's left was evident last month when, in passing, he described Vice President Mike Pence as "a decent guy". Actress Cynthia Nixon, who last year ran for governor of New York, said it was tone-deaf to describe the country's "most anti-LGBT elected leader" as decent.

"Youre right Cynthia there is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ rights, and that includes the vice president," Biden responded on Twitter. These criticisms come despite Biden having a solidly pro-abortion rights record as a senator and publicly supporting same-sex marriage before Obama. 'Better off dead' Political tribalism has reached such heights in the US that 20 per cent of Democrats - around 12.6 million voters - think the country would be better off if large numbers of Republicans died. Polls show a similar percentage believe violence would be justified if their party loses the next election. In this heated environment, Bidens folksy manner and belief in bipartisanship can seem out-of-step with modern politics. So can his more moderate policy positions.
Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi Motors Announce Intention to Create a New Alliance Operating Board







- Jean-Dominique Senard will act as chairman of this new operating board of the Alliance, with the CEOs of Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi Motors also joining the board.

- The new Alliance operating board will drive the operational cooperation between Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi Motors and look for new ways to generate value for its respective shareholders and employees.

TOKYO, Mar, 13 2019; In order to continue to strengthen the Alliance as well as lay the foundations of its future successes, Jean-Dominique Senard, Hiroto Saikawa, Thierry Bollore and Osamu Masuko are announcing the intention to create an Alliance operating board for Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi Motors.

The new Alliance Board will be the sole body overseeing the operations and governance in the Alliance among Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi, in lieu of RNBV and NMBV. As such, it will be the face and primary driver of the Alliance's "New Start".

To lay the foundations of the new development stage of the Alliance, the new board will be composed of the Chairman of Renault, who will also act as Chairman of the new Alliance operating board, and the CEOs of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi Motors; the operating decisions taken by the Alliance Board will be consensus-based, furthering the Alliance's "win-win" approach.

The new board intends to meet every month in Paris or Tokyo and will regularly update stakeholders on its key value initiatives and achievements. The Alliance operating board will ask for the creation of specific projects to make recommendations for and drive the execution of new ways to create incremental value of the three auto companies.

As the 20th anniversary of the Alliance approaches, the boards of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi Motors would like to recognize the strong contribution the Alliance has made to the performance of all three companies, and their partners. The definitive agreements will be signed in conjunction with the anniversary of the Alliance.

The creation of the new Alliance operating board is designed to help Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi Motors become what they can be together - the top organization in the rapidly changing and highly competitive global auto market.

Through the commitment and loyalty of the employees of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi Motors, and a highly constructive cooperation with Daimler, the Alliance operating board will look to continue delivering total win-win for all those involved.

For the MOU agreed by all three parties, visit: https://www.mitsubishi-motors.com/content/dam/com/pressrelease_en/2019/03/20190312-01.pdf

About Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi

Groupe Renault, Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. and Mitsubishi Motors represent the world's largest automotive alliance. It is the longest-lasting and most productive cross-cultural partnership in the auto industry. Together, the partners sold more than 10.7 million vehicles in nearly 200 countries in 2018. The member companies are focused on collaboration and maximizing synergies to boost competitiveness. They have strategic collaborations with other automotive groups, including Germany's Daimler and China's Dongfeng. This strategic alliance is the industry leader in zero-emission vehicles and is developing the latest advanced technologies, with plans to offer autonomous drive, connectivity features and mobility services on a wide range of affordable vehicles.
BMW Group Reorganizes Management Board Divisions.

BMW company bundles Mini, Roll-Royce sales with BMW marque

Munich March 15, 2019; The BMW Group is reorganizing its Board of Management to create a new leaner, future-oriented structure. From 1 April 2019, the BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce automotive brands will be part of a new central Sales Division. It will be headed by Pieter Nota, Member of the BMW AG Board of Management responsible until now for Sales and Brand BMW, Aftersales BMW Group. Nota will also remain responsible for additional functions including brand and product management and aftersales. Meanwhile, BMW Motorrad will become part of the Development Division under Management Board member Klaus Frohlich.

We are restructuring our divisions to give us the best possible foundation for the future. It sends out a clear signal that our organisation is lean and efficient throughout the company, said Harald Kruger, Chairman of the BMW AG Board of Management, speaking in Munich on Friday.

Peter Schwarzenbauer, responsible for MINI, Rolls-Royce, BMW Motorrad, Customer Engagement and Digital Business Innovation BMW Group until the end of the first quarter of 2019, will remain a Member of the BMW AG Board of Management until October. During this period he will promote the companys strategical focus on electromobility. Mr. Schwarzenbauer will then leave the company at his own request when he turns 60.
Residents of the Piney area lobbed dozens of detailed questions at a Manitoba Health administrator sent to clarify the unique international accord governing health care delivery in the municipality, and learned how much the province expects to save by scaling back the agreement.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/3/2019 (1001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Residents of the Piney area lobbed dozens of detailed questions at a Manitoba Health administrator sent to clarify the unique international accord governing health care delivery in the municipality, and learned how much the province expects to save by scaling back the agreement.

About 75 area residents attended the Piney Community Centre on Monday night for the first of two town hall meetings.

Curt Peters, acting director of Manitoba Healths insured benefits branch, fielded questions following a presentation on Manitobas Health Services Insurance Act, which allows the provincial government to contract third parties to provide health care services. Several senior Southern Health officials were also on hand.

"Were not here to shoot the messenger," Reeve Wayne Anderson reminded the crowd at the outset of the meeting.

By and large, the evening proceeded smoothly, with Peters responding to a variety of questions left unanswered by a one-page mailbox flyer distributed last summer, when the 20-year-old working agreement between Manitoba Health and Altru Health System, which operates clinics in Warroad and Roseau, Minn., was revised.

Specialist care was excluded as of Aug. 1, but emergency, hospital, and primary care coverage, including inter-facility ambulance transports, continue for those living in the municipality for at least half the year.

For months, Piney council pressed the province to clarify the full implications of the changes, and there were hopes Health Minister Cameron Friesen would attend the town halls, organized in December.

Friesens spokesperson said the minister had another engagement to attend Monday evening.

Peters said regional infrastructure changes, strides in medical technology, and service expansions south of the border prompted the province to review the accord.

Diverting specialist care to Manitoba will save the province an anticipated $1 million annually, versus the $4.2 million it spent in the 2016-17 fiscal year to care for about 870 patients.

The Manitoba government continues to pay 85 percent of Altrus customary rates for insured services, Peters said.

A U.S. ground ambulance ride costs four to five times that of a Manitoba transport, added Scott Noble, Southern Healths regional director of emergency medical services.

Anderson told The Carillon it was the first time Piney council heard "actual figures" on the agreement, whose full text has never been made public, despite being the only one of its kind in Manitoba.

Taking questions from the audience, Peters acknowledged the transition to the new agreement hasnt been without hiccups. He promised to publish a pamphlet with detailed answers to commonly asked questions within a "couple of months."

One resident asked Peters why that pamphlet wasnt created last summer.

"Its my fault," he replied.

"The devils in the details," Anderson said after the meeting, making it crucial for the province to provide clear, comprehensive information so residents can make quick, informed decisions in an emergency.

The reeve noted two hours of discussion proved the inadequacy of last summers flyer.

"That one-page handout did nothing for the people here."

Anderson also questioned the wisdom of eliminating U.S. specialist care, saying hes concerned Piney seniors wont make the trek to Winnipeg or Steinbach for specialist services not offered in Vita.

"Were only talking like 800-some people here. Theyve saved millions of dollars by not building a hospital in this corner. Spend a few of those savings."

Questions from residents zeroed in on the agreements definition of specialist care, noting some family doctors in Roseau can perform minor elective surgeries. Peters said all surgeries must be done in Manitoba to qualify for coverage.

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"You can go down there and you can get anything done, but that doesnt mean that the provincial health plan will pay for anything," he cautioned.

Calling diagnostic services "a sticky area," Peters said exploratory scans like x-rays are covered if ordered by a family physician, but not covered if intended for a specialist, such as most MRI and CT scans.

Many locals noted the changes to the agreement now subject them to Manitobas diagnostic wait times, and require them to drive longer distances to see a specialist.

Those with a Roseau family doctor must now also find a Manitoba family doctor to write them prescriptions recognized in Manitoba, a licensing issue Peters said is up to the College of Pharmacists of Manitoba to resolve.

La Verendrye MLA Dennis Smook, who said he "wasnt privy" to the governments decision to scale back the agreement, pledged to relay prescription and other concerns to the health minister.

A second public meeting scheduled for last night in Sprague was cancelled due to road and weather conditions. It has been rescheduled for March 21 beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the Sprague Community Hall.
At the launching ceremony on March 13, Vietnamese Ambassador to France and Andorra Nguyen Thiep handed over the decision of Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh to appoint Olivier Montel Monteret as the honorary consul of Vietnam in Andorra.

Thiep highlighted the significance of the inauguration of the office, saying that it marks a new important step in bilateral relations, enabling Vietnam and Andorra to further expand multifaceted cooperation in the coming time.

Previously, Ambassador Nguyen Thiep presented his credentials to Co-Monarch of Andorra, Archbishop of Urgell Joan-Enric Vives Sicilia, and paid a courtesy visit to Minister of Foreign Affairs Maria Ubach.

At a reception for Thiep later, both Sicilia and Ubach said they are impressed by Vietnams new position in the region and the world, especially its rapid economic growth in the last five years.

They said Andorra and Vietnam hold much potential to promote bilateral cooperation in tourism and investment, and increase mutual support at international forums such as the United Nations, the Francophone community.

Ubach informed the Vietnamese diplomat of Andorras recent economic reform, saying that the European country is loosening regulations to attract more foreign investment, especially building tax policies to conform to principles of the European Union.

The Andorran leaders wished Thiep a successful working tenure, thereby making practical contributions to further deepening the bilateral relations.

For his part, Thiep asserted that Vietnam wants to maintain and expand cooperation with Andorra by backing each other at multilateral forums, exchanging visits at all levels and signing cooperation agreements on investment protection, double taxation avoidance, and tourism development.

He thanked Andorra for its support for Vietnamese candidates in international organisations, especially the UN.

Vietnam and Andorra established diplomatic ties in 2007. Vietnam is one of the three Asian countries that have opened an honorary consulate office in Andorra after the Republic of Korea and the Philippines.
NEW YORK, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Conagra Brands, Inc. (Conagra or the Company) (NYSE: CAG) and certain of its officers and directors. The class action, filed in United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, and indexed under 19-cv-01805, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons and entities, other than Defendants and their affiliates, who purchased, or otherwise acquired, Conagra common stock from June 27, 2018 through December 19, 2018, inclusive (the Class Period), seeking to pursue remedies under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the Exchange Act). The Exchange Act claims allege that certain defendants engaged in a fraudulent scheme to artificially inflate the Companys stock price.



The action is also brought on behalf of all persons or entities who purchased shares of Conagras common stock pursuant and/or traceable to the Companys false and/or misleading registration statement, prospectus and prospectus supplement (the Offering Documents) issued in connection with the Companys secondary public offering commenced on or about October 9, 2018, for the sale of approximately 16.3 million shares of Conagra common stock (the SPO), at $35.25 per share, seeking to pursue remedies under the Securities Act of 1933 (the Securities Act).

If you are a shareholder who purchased Conagra securities between June 27, 2018, and December 19, 2018, you have until April 23, 2019, to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll-free, Ext. 9980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased.

[Click here to join this class action]

Conagra manufactures and markets packaged foods for retail consumers, restaurants and institutions. The Company has a portfolio of well-known food brands including Reddi-wip, Hunts, Healthy Choice, Slim Jim and Orville Redenbachers. Conagra is based in Chicago, Illinois.

In January 2013, Conagra acquired Ralcorp Holdings, Inc., a manufacturer of private branded food, for $6.8 billion including debt. After trying and failing to address executional shortfalls and customer service issues, Conagra divested its Private Brands business in February 2016 to TreeHouse Foods for $2.7 billion, recognizing a substantial loss.

Less than two years later, Conagra was again acquiring another large publicly traded food service company. On June 27, 2018, Conagra announced the acquisition of Pinnacle in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $10.9 billion (the Transaction).

At the time of the Transaction and throughout the Class Period, Conagra represented the merger as a combination of two growing portfolios and a no brainer of a deal that would enhance Conagras multi-year transformation plan and expand its presence and capabilities in its most strategic categories, including frozen foods and snacks. Conagra highlighted their due diligence of the deal, the similar cultures and work ethics of the two companies, and the tremendous synergies of the deal. Specifically, Defendants represented that the Company was acquiring a portfolio of complementary, leading brands as the Pinnacle team has done an absolutely phenomenal job driving innovation and growth here, and that meant a lot to us. In addition, Defendants represented that the Company had a proven track record of executing strategic transactions and will be able to implement a smooth integration process, as weve been very clear-eyed from the beginning of the Transaction.

The Complaint alleges that in Conagras Offering Documents and throughout the Class Period, Defendants failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Companys financial well-being, including the troubled acquisition of Pinnacle Foods, Inc. (Pinnacle). As a result of Defendants wrongful acts, false and misleading statements and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Companys common stock, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages.

On or about October 9, 2018, in order to partially finance the pending acquisition of Pinnacle, Defendants effectuated a secondary public offering of 16,312,057 shares of common stock, priced at $35.25 per share. In connection with the SPO, Defendants issued the materially false and/or misleading Offering Documents. The Company received net proceeds of approximately $612 million after underwriters exercised their option of an additional 1,631,206 shares of Conagra common stock.

Unbeknownst to shareholders, however, Conagra and its management were aware or recklessly disregarded that the Transaction would not result in the sort of benefits that Defendants had publicly represented. Just a few weeks after the closing of the merger, on December 20, 2018, Conagra stunned the market by releasing its third quarter 2018 results, as well as an update on the performance of the newly merged company, which revealed that Pinnacles performance had been much worse than Defendants had previously represented. In addition, Defendants revealed that Pinnacles three leading brands had suffered sales and distribution losses in 2018 and accounted for the vast majority of Pinnacles current challenges due to self-inflicted subpar innovation and executional missteps.

As a result of the disclosure, on December 20, 2018, Conagras stock price fell $4.81 per share to $24.28, or nearly 17%, wiping out over $2.3 billion in Conagras market capitalization. On the next trading day, Conagras stock declined an additional $2.13 per share, or approximately 8.8%. In fact, in three trading sessions, Conagra stock declined $8.13, or nearly 28%, to close at $20.96 on December 24, 2018.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

rswilloughby@pomlaw.com

888-476-6529 ext. 9980
11-Year-Old in Custody After Double Shooting in New Hampshire

An 11-year-old is in custody after two people were shot at a home in New Hampshire on March 15, according to reports.

First responders in Alton answered a call at about 7:40 a.m., reported the New Hampshire Union Leader. Belknap County Attorney Andrew Livernois told the news website that at least one of the shootings was fatal.

Police are blocking off multiple roads in Alton, NH. State police have only said that they responded to a critical incident we are waiting to learn more details. #wbz pic.twitter.com/QUW7PsKeTN  Anna Meiler (@AnnaMeiler) March 15, 2019

Alton Fire Rescue leaving Dobbins Way. Road still blocked off by police. #wbz pic.twitter.com/ik3alRQnpO  Anna Meiler (@AnnaMeiler) March 15, 2019

Sources said a suspect has been apprehended following a frantic search involving the Alton police and the New Hampshire State Police that initially closed off the street, reported the news website. According to WMUR, the suspect was taken into custody at around 9 a.m.

In a tweet, the New Hampshire State Police said they were assisting the local police in a critical incident, which ended before 10 a.m.

The critical incident in Alton, NH has come to a conclusion. Please refer to @NH_DOJ for further information. Thank you to all involved. #NHSP  NHSP (@NH_StatePolice) March 15, 2019

Alton Central School Principal John MacArthur posted a statement on March 15, saying they were aware of the shooting and confirmed that there was no threat to the school. They said as a precautionary measure they had activated a secure campus.

Nobody is permitted in or out of the building until we are given an all clear, MacArthur said.

Good Morning Alton Families,This is John MacArthur, Principal of Alton Central School.We have received information  Alton Central School  2019315

New Hampshire Attorney General Gordon MacDonald confirmed in a statement that the public was not in danger and the investigation is in the early stages and ongoing.

NH AG NEWS RELEASE: Alton, New Hampshire Incident pic.twitter.com/8pv5q7DyEm  NH DOJ (@NH_DOJ) March 15, 2019

No further details have been released.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
FILE PHOTO: The ticker symbol and logo for Goldman Sachs is displayed on a screen on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., December 18, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Abu Dhabi State Investor Mubadala Halts Business With Goldman Sachs Amid 1MDB Lawsuit

DUBAI/ABU DHABIAbu Dhabi state investor Mubadala has suspended new business dealings with Goldman Sachs since its subsidiary filed a lawsuit in November against the U.S. bank and others to recover losses suffered through its dealings with Malaysian state fund 1MDB.

We have suspended any activities with Goldman Sachs pending outcome of the litigation, Brian Lott, spokesman of Mubadala Investment Co., said in response to questions from Reuters.

The only exceptions are engagements signed prior to the litigation, which will continue as per contractual terms, he said.

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Mubadala, which manages over $225 billion in assets, holds stakes in some of Abu Dhabis biggest companies as well as stakes in global firms such as Spanish energy firm Cepsa and Austrias OMV.

For Goldman Sachs, the suspension of new business with Mubadala comes at a bad time as Abu Dhabi is embarking on a privatization spree that raises the prospect of several big deals in the offering for investment banks.

Over the last few years, Goldman has ranked among the top banks for takeover advice in Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich capital of the United Arab Emirates.

The suspension of business follows a civil legal action filed by International Petroleum Investment Co. (IPIC) in New York in November against Goldman and others, alleging they played a role in trying to corrupt former executives of IPIC and its subsidiary Aabar Investments, and mislead IPIC and Aabar, aiming to further the business of Goldman and 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB). IPIC merged with Mubadala in 2017,

Goldman Sachs has said that it will contest the claim vigorously.

Three banking sources told Reuters that Goldman Sachs was not being invited to potential advisory business from Mubadala, until the litigation was resolved, with one saying that the state fund had imposed an informal boycott on the investment bank.

Wells Fargo Securities analyst Mike Mayo said ongoing headline risk is to be expected for Goldman Sachs and the loss of some business is already baked into its models.

Does this take a big bite of the franchise? It doesnt look that way right now, he said. Anyone owning Goldman stock at this point should be prepared for more fall out from 1MDB.

He estimates losses related to the scandal could be as a high as $5 billion. Goldman has not given hard guidance around how much the scandal could cost but the bank has said it could be underreserved by as much as $1.9 billion.

Goldman Sachs business in Abu Dhabi in recent years included advising a government steering committee that oversaw a merger between Aldar Properties and Sorouh Real Estate in 2013. The bank also worked on a merger valuation plan for the Abu Dhabi and Dubai bourses, in 2014, which was shelved as terms could not be agreed.

Abu Dhabis privatization program has already seen the sale of stakes in its national oil company to international partners, as well as corporate mergers including banks.

Goldman Sachs advised Abu Dhabi National Oil Company on the stake of its refining unit, sources said.

The deal, announced in January saw Italys Eni and Austrias OMV agree to pay a combined $5.8 billion to take a stake in the refining business and establish a new trading operation owned by the three partners.

Malaysias 1MDB is the subject of corruption and money-laundering investigations in at least six countries.

An estimated $4.5 billion was misappropriated from 1MDB by high-level officials of the fund and their associates between 2009 and 2014, the U.S. Justice Department has alleged.

By Hadeel Al Sayegh & Stanley Carvalho
Democratic Progressive Party lawmaker Lo Chih Cheng poses with copies of Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po newspapers after a news conference in Taipei, Taiwan on Jan. 18, 2019. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

Activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan Closely Monitored and Harassed as China Fears Separatist Collusion

HONG KONG/TAIPEIAs Beijing grows wary of pro-independence groups seeking to forge closer ties in Hong Kong and Taiwan, activists say they are coming under increased surveillance and harassment from pro-China media outlets and unofficial operatives.

Visits to Taiwan in January by several Hong Kong activists including Tony Chung generated heavy coverage by two pro-China newspapers, including detailed reports of their movements and meetings.

The coverage prompted Taiwan to investigate the activities of the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao newspapers on national security grounds.

The government found that the papers committed unlawful acts, including invasive surveillance, and spread fake news. Officials said journalists from those papers would be banned from traveling to Taiwan for up to three years if the media outlets did not provide a reasonable explanation for their activities there.

A Reuters examination of both papers articles show that at least 25 people linked to anti-China and independence causes have been the subject of intense coverage, including covert photography and the reporting of personal details, in Taiwan during the past three years.

Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Such papers, which typically take a pro-Beijing stance, would be expected to pay close attention to activists pursuing causes that upset the Chinese regime.

But activists say their coverage stretches into the realm of harassment, including surveillance on overseas trips, and publishing details of their private lives, including homes, work and daily movements.

Its obvious that theres intervention from outside forces with an aim to intimidate people, Taiwans Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Chiu Chui-cheng told Reuters, referring to the coverage from the pro-China papers.

The coverage raised concerns about the activities of Chinese and Hong Kong intelligence operatives on the island, Chiu added, including people working for pro-China media outlets.

Activists have also been physically attacked during trips to Taiwan.

In July 2018, two Taiwanese were convicted of assaulting Hong Kong activists meeting with independence advocates in Taiwan. Three Hong Kong men were later named in Taiwanese media coverage as helping facilitate the attack.

I was followed until I almost left the airport, Andy Chan, one of the Hong Kong activists, said of his time in Taiwan. There are operatives for China everywhere.

Beijing Worried

China considers Hong Kong and Taiwan to be inalienable parts of its territory, and has branded pro-independence activists on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as separatists.

In an annual report to the U.S. Congress, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission noted in November that since president Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016, Beijing has feared collusion between separatist forces in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Beijing is trying everything in its power to prevent this, said a security source in the Taiwan government, who declined to be named given the sensitivity of the issue.

The source and a second Taiwanese security official involved in national security say China has been quietly ramping up the number of intelligence operatives in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Wu Jieh-min, a Taiwan scholar who has researched civil movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, says he was barred from entering Hong Kong for an academic conference in late 2016.

Beijing is very worried about the exchange of ideas. If the ideas of civil society are not hindered, their power will be greatly enhanced, said Wu, a research fellow with the government-backed Academia Sinica.

Wu noted that mass, protracted protests in Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2014 that railed against Chinese interference were a catalyst for deepening activist ties on both sides.

Chinas Taiwan Affairs Office and main representative body in Hong Kong, the Liaison Office, did not respond to requests for comment.

The Wen Wei Po has also paid close attention to foreigners in contact with Hong Kong activists.

In December, Wen Wei Pao reporters and photographers covered the daily activities of Kevin Carrico, an Australia-based political scientist, during a visit to Hong Kong in which he met with independence advocates, and featured him on the front page.

I was a little creeped out by the fact that the article discussed my presentation. There were only 15 people there, he said of a private meeting in the basement of a Hong Kong building.

He said there had been a real escalation of Beijings political operations in Hong Kong.

Hotel Attack

Activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan describe an increase in unknown individuals shadowing their meetings and events, sometimes taking photographs or recording their conversations.

In some cases activists have been attacked, and the assailants identified.

Two Taiwanese, Zhang Xiuye and Jhang Jhih-min, were found guilty last July of a 2016 assault on two Hong Kong independence activists, Andy Chan and Jason Chow, at a Taipei hotel.

Zhang and Jhang were convicted of defamation and fined T$6,000 ($195) and T$8,000 ($260) respectively; Jhang was also found guilty of intimidating and endangering the safety of Chan.

Zhang and Jhang were among at least eight people who beat Chan and Chow and called them China traitors at the Caesar Park Hotel, according to Taipei court documents.

Chan told Reuters he was at the hotel to meet with Ouyang Jin, a journalist with a little-known Hong Kong publication called Pacific Magazine.

Zhang is a senior member of the Chinese Concentric Patriotism Party, which advocates unification of China and Taiwan, according to the groups website.

($1 = 7.8484 Hong Kong dollars)

($1 = 30.7550 Taiwan dollars)

By James Pomfret & Yimou Lee
An American Airlines airplane takes off from an airport in a file photograph. (Luke MacGregor/Reuters)

American Airlines Halts Flights to Caracas, Maracaibo in Venezuela

The American Airlines Group said on March 15, it has temporarily suspended its operations into Caracas and Maracaibo after its pilots union urged its workers to deny trips to Venezuela in the wake of a travel advisory issued by the U.S. State Department.

The department cited civil unrest, poor health, and arbitrary arrest and detention of U.S. citizens in Venezuela for issuing the advisory on March 12.

A number of airlines have stopped their flights to the South American country because of security concerns and disputes over money they say the Venezuelan government owes them.

Our corporate security team has a collaborative partnership with all of our union leaders and we will continue to do so to evaluate the situation in Venezuela, the airline said in a statement, adding that American will not operate to countries it does not consider safe.

Do not accept any trips to Venezuela, Allied Pilots Association President Captain Dan Carey, told pilots in a letter seen by Reuters.

Until further notice, if you are scheduled, assigned, or reassigned a pairing into Venezuela, refuse the assignment and call chief pilots, the association, which represents about 15,000 American Airlines pilots, said in a note to its members on Thursday.

President Bassani Responds to APAs Statement on Venezuela https://t.co/dZCzRT7XGR  APFA (@APFAunity) March 15, 2019

United Airlines ended its flights to Venezuela in 2017.

The decision is supported by the Association of Professional Flight Attendants that represents Americans 25,000 flight attendants.

Of course without the pilots, the flights not operating, Lori Bassani, APFAs president told CNBC.

Venezuela plunged into a deep political crisis in January when Juan Guaido, head of the opposition-controlled Congress, invoked the constitution to assume an interim presidency, arguing Nicolas Maduros 2018 re-election was not legitimate.

The move has put Venezuela at the heart of a geopolitical tussle, with the United States leading most Western nations in recognizing Guaido as the legitimate head of state.

All U.S. diplomats left the country on Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

Do not travel to Venezuela due to crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure, and arbitrary arrest and detention of U.S. citizens, the State Department said in a travel advisory on March 12.

Today, Special Representative Elliott Abrams provided an update on the situation in #Venezuela. #EstamosUnidosVE pic.twitter.com/FBPhSFOl3j  Department of State (@StateDept) March 15, 2019

Shares of the airline were down almost 1 percent at $31.88 in afternoon trading.

American Airlines pilots union is telling its members to refuse flying to Venezuela, potentially ending the last route to the country by a major U.S. carrier: https://t.co/sEfFWbL9BI  Patricia Laya (@PattyLaya) March 15, 2019

American Airlines pilots union has told its members not fly to Venezuela after the State Department pulled its diplomatic staff from the country. American is the last major U.S. airline to sell flights to Caracas and Maracaibo. (via @lesliejosephs) https://t.co/FIJmIA4EQR  J.R. Reed (@JRReed) March 15, 2019

The Epoch Times reporter Venus Upadhayaya contributed to this report.
NEW YORK, March 14, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Diplomat Pharmacy, Inc. (Diplomat or the Company) (NYSE: DPLO) and certain of its officers and directors. The class action, filed in United States District Court, Central District of California, and indexed under 19-cv-01642, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons and entities, other than Defendants and their affiliates, who acquired Diplomat securities between February 26, 2018 through February 21, 2019, both dates inclusive (the Class Period), seeking to recover damages caused by Defendants violations of the federal securities laws and to pursue remedies under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the Exchange Act) and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder, against the Company and certain of its top officials.



If you are a shareholder who purchased Diplomat securities between February 26, 2018, and February 21, 2019, you have until April 25, 2019, to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll-free, Ext. 9980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased.

[Click here to join this class action]

Diplomat operates as an independent specialty pharmacy in the United States. Diplomat stocks, dispenses, and distributes prescriptions for various biotechnology and specialty pharmaceutical manufacturers. It also provides specialty infusion pharmacy, patient care coordination, clinical, compliance and persistency program, patient financial assistance, specialty pharmacy training/consulting, benefits investigation, prior authorization, risk evaluation and medication strategy, retail specialty, and hub services, as well as clinical and administrative support services to hospitals and health systems.

In late 2017, the Company entered the pharmacy benefit management (PBM) business through its December 2017 acquisition of LDI Holding Company, LLC, doing business as LDI Integrated Pharmacy Services (LDI Integrated), and its November 2017 acquisition of Pharmaceutical Technologies, Inc., doing business as National Pharmaceutical Services (National Pharmaceutical).

Diplomats PBM segment purports to provide[] services designed to help [its] customers reduce the cost and manage the complexity of their prescription drug programs. On April 30, 2018, Diplomat launched a new brand, CastiaRx, which united its specialty pharmacy capabilities with its PBM capabilities of LDI Integrated and National Pharmaceutical to serve as a specialty benefit manager.

The complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements, as well as failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Companys business, operations, and prospects. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Diplomat had downplayed its success in integrating and growing its PBM business, which included LDI Integrated and National Pharmaceutical, two companies Diplomat had acquired in late 2017; (2) consequently, Diplomat would need to record a non-cash impairment charge upwards of approximately $630 million relating to its PBM business and these 2017 acquisitions; (3) due to the foregoing, Diplomat would withdraw its preliminary 2019 full-year outlook issued less than seven weeks prior; and (4) as a result, defendants statements about Diplomats business, operations and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.

On February 22, 2019, Diplomat filed a Form 8-K with the SEC, announcing it was postponing the release of its Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018, due to a recent determination that it would need to record a non-cash impairment charge upwards of approximately $630 million relating to 2017 acquisitions for its PBM business. Diplomat also disclosed that it was withdrawing its preliminary 2019 full-year outlook provided in January.

On this news, shares of Diplomat fell $7.59, or over 56%, to close at $5.87 per share on February 22, 2019.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

rswilloughby@pomlaw.com

888-476-6529 ext. 9980




A police officer is seen after reports that several shots had been fired at a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. (TVNZ/via REUTERS TV)

Armed Bystander Chased and Fired At Christchurch Mosque Shooter

An armed congregation member chased after and fired twice at the gunman who slaughtered 49 people at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on March 15, the New Zealand Herald reported.

The manidentified only as a well-known area resident and a Muslimleft the scene of the Linwood mosque when gunfire broke out before returning with a firearm to engage the gunman.

He reportedly fired two rounds at the shooter as he sped off in a getaway vehicle.

They were in a silver Subaru, the man told police.

The armed congregant reportedly told the authorities he was firing in self defense.

At least 49 people were killed in multiple shootings at two Christchurch mosques.

The Linwood mosque shooting claimed at least seven lives while a second shooting, at the Al Noor mosque, resulted in at least 41 dead.

Police also found and defused explosive devices attached to a vehicle outside of one of the mosques.

At least 48 people, some in critical condition, were being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds, authorities said.

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said of Fridays carnage.

She pronounced it one of New Zealands darkest days.

Murder Charges

Authorities have announced murder charges against a man suspected of being the gunman in New Zealands worst mass shooting in history.

Police said a total of three people had been arrested in connection with the incident but did not identify those taken into custody and gave no details except to say that none of them had been on any watch list. They did not immediately say whether the same person was responsible for both shootings.

Authorities said the murder suspect would appear in Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed one of the suspects was an Australian national.

I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody I have been advised is an Australian-born citizen, Morrison told reporters in Sydney on Friday.

A man who seemed to claim responsibility for the shootings, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, an Australian citizen, allegedly left a 74-page manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack, although police have not confirmed he is the shooter.

An Epoch Times reporter has viewed the document.

Tarrant described himself as an eco-fascist in his writings. I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist, he wrote.

It remains unclear whether the other two people arrested will be charged with any crimes.

Mass Murder Livestreamed

The gunman live-streamed part of his attack on the Al Noor mosque, creating a sickening 17-minute video that has been widely distributed on social media, CNN reported.

Police are aware there is extremely distressing footage relating to the incident in Christchurch circulating online. We would strongly urge that the link not be shared. We are working to have any footage removed, wrote New Zealand police on Twitter.

Meanwhile, tech companies such as Facebook were working to take down the video, Fox News reported. A spokeswoman for Facebook New Zealand, Mia Garlick, said that such videos were quickly taken down.

New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we removed both the shooters Facebook account and the video. Were also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as were aware, she told CNN.

YouTube also issued a statement about the matter.

Shocking, violent and graphic content has no place on our platforms, and is removed as soon as we become aware of it, read the statement from the Google-owned video sharing company. As with any major tragedy, we will work cooperatively with the authorities.

Condolences

World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks.

President Donald Trump sent warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand.

He wrote in a tweet, 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

The White House also condemned the attack.

The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealands head of state, said in a message to the country she was deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders, she said in her message.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack with horror and profound sadness.

The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life, he wrote.

All mosques in New Zealand had been asked to shut their doors and armed guards posted at them, police said, adding they were not actively looking for any other identified suspects.

With additional reporting by Reuters and The Associated Press.
Australian Jihadi Bride Demands to Be Allowed Home so Her Children Dont Need to Suffer

A woman believed to have fled Australia to join ISIS five years ago, has demanded to be allowed to return home, saying her daughter needs urgent medical attention, according to ABC.

She is thought to be 24-year-old woman Zehra Duman from Melbourne, who made headlines in 2014 when she travelled to Syria to become a jihadi bride.

The woman, who is currently at Al Hawl refugee camp in Syria, refused to confirm her identity but has demanded to be allowed home with her 6-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son, who she said are unwell.

Zehra Duman spoke to The Feeds Elise Potaka from Raqqa at the height of the so-called Islamic State. Now the interview is being made public for the first time.https://t.co/GB4W8EvCDB@MiaMBloom @rcallimachi @lizzypearson pic.twitter.com/5VPs26Xrmq  Jasmine Opperman (@Jasminechic00) March 8, 2019

I want to go back to my country. I think everybodys asking for that because Im an Australian citizen, she told an American humanitarian worker in a video interview obtained by ABC.

The kids dont need to suffer. My kids have a right to be treated like normal kids, the woman said, while adding that she understood the move could anger Australians.

Scores of jihadi brides have been left scattered and displaced after ISIS was defeated last year, and many now remain in Syrian refugee camps.

Thread: 1) For a little background on Zehra Duman, she reportedly left Australia for Syria in late 2014. She was raised in Melbourne in what has been described as a relatively moderate Muslim household to parents of Turkish descent. pic.twitter.com/cQPw50mWWh  Jacob Michelson (@JacobCMichelson) March 14, 2019

The 24-year-old said she had been attempting to leave ISIS for two years, but didnt have the money to do so and feared she would be killed if she were caught.

Its very dangerous to leave like that. If you get caught from one side or the other side, it can put you into a lot of trouble, she explained.

Nobody understands that you cannot leave that place without money, and no money is allowed to be sent in, so youre kind of left in a hole.

She said unless she returns to Australia, her daughters life is in danger.

Both of my kids are sick. [My daughter is] very malnourished, shes  very skinny. I have no money, Im not allowed to have money, they dont give us food here and they dont let us contact our families.

My daughter needs milk and I dont have money to buy her milk. I dont know what to do now, the 24-year-old said.

It is believed the womans story matches that of Duman, who at 19 travelled to Raqqa, the ISIS Syrian capital, to wed Australian fighter Mahmoud Abdullatif, according to ABC.

It comes as Dumans mother told SBS Dateline her daughter had sent her a message from Al Hawl refugee camp in Syria.

Although Abdullatif reportedly died in January 2015, it is believed Duman continued stayed loyal to ISIS by posting images from a Twitter account showing a number of women wielding guns under an ISIS flag, reported MailOnline.

6.) In true ISIS fashion, Tara sickenly became a grandmother after her daughter Zaynab, age 14, gave birth to her first child  reportedly fathered by her fathers best friend, Mohamed Elomar from southwest Sydney pic.twitter.com/KUrB16MfGt  Jacob Michelson (@JacobCMichelson) March 14, 2019

US + Australia, how does it feel that all 5 of us were born n raised in your lands, & now here thirsty for ur blood? Duman tweeted.

Our husbands die in frontlines but that doesnt stop women in the west from sending their husbands to kill kuffar. Attack: UK AUS & US, another tweet reads.

The womans pleas for help were met with backlash from Australias Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who said she would face the full force of the law, if she were to return home, according to Australian Associated Press.

He added that those who go overseas to join up with terrorists must take responsibility.

The great tragedy is how children get caught up in the crimes against Australia of their parents.

Im not going to put any Australian at risk to try to extract people from those situations, he told reporters.

I dont have the same sympathy for the parents who have taken them to fight in a war zoneespecially to fight on the ISIS side. You make your bed, youve got to lie in it,  opposition leader Bill Shorten added.

The news follows the reported death of British ISIS bride Shamina Begums newborn son last week, after her citizenship was revoked by Home Secretary Sajid Javid in February.

U.S. President Donald Trump has called on several countries to take back their ISIS terrorists captured in Syria, according to AAP.

The United States is asking Britain, France, Germany, and other European allies to take back over 800 ISIS fighters that we captured in Syria and put them on trial.

The caliphate is ready to fall. The alternative is not a good one in that we will be forced to release them, he said in a tweet last month.

With reporting by Australian Associated Press
California Jury Awards $29 Million in Baby Powder Cancer Case

OAKLAND, Calif.Johnson & Johnson must pay $29 million to a woman who claimed its baby powder gave her terminal cancer, a California jury ruled on March 13.

A Superior Court jury in Oakland found the worlds largest health care company mainly liable for Teresa Leavitts mesothelioma. The verdict said that the baby powder was a substantial contributing factor in her illness.

Jury awards $29 million to California woman who claimed Johnson & Johnson baby powder caused cancer. https://t.co/0e4pkgv6wG pic.twitter.com/RdEWV3yBcw  ABC News (@ABC) March 15, 2019

Her suit is one of many that link cancers to asbestos in Johnson & Johnsons talc-based products and contend that the company concealed the health risk for decades.

Requests for comment from the New Jersey-based comment were not immediately answered.

Johnson & Johnson is facing some 13,000 similar lawsuits around the country.

The company has insisted that its talc-based products are demonstrably safe but it has lost a string of court cases.

Last year, a Los Angeles jury awarded $25.7 million to a woman who blamed her cancer on the powder.

A jury in Missouri last year awarded $4.69 million to 22 women.

Johnson & Johnsons stock price dropped nearly 2 percent after hours on Wednesday before recovering to close at $139.41.

Johnson and Johnson found guilty of peddling cancer-causing baby powder.

These phoren brands will now dump these even more in India and other countries. Toxic modernity causes cancer from J&J to #HUL.https://t.co/z37jeFXcnP  Sankrant Sanu  (@sankrant) March 14, 2019

Chinese-Made Audi Owners Say Asphalt Damper Used in Audi Caused Them to Contract Leukemia

Six Chinese consumers exposed that a big automaker in China uses toxic materials in auto parts. Many have contracted leukemia and two people have died as a result. Chinas auto industry insiders reveal that using toxic materials in cars are very common in China.

Two families of the victims publicized a signed article on March 9th, saying that six people they know of who bought Audi have contracted leukemia and two of these six people have already died. All these Audi cars were made by FAW-Volkswagen Automotive. They believe the use of toxic material in Chinese-made Audi is the cause of leukemia.

FAW-Volkswagen rolled out Chinese-made Audi Q5 in 2010 and it soon became very popular in the domestic market. However, in 2013, China Central Television (CCTV) revealed in a special program The Strange Odor in Luxury Cars that one of the odor sources in Audi is asphalt, used as damping material in Audi produced from FAW-Wolkswagen.

FAW-Volkswagen Automobile is a joint venture between FAW Group and Volkswagen Group which manufactures Audi and Volkswagen passenger cars for sale in China. It is headquartered in Changchun, Jilin Province in northeast China, where it has two auto assembly plants.

Asphalt can release toxic gases such as benzene and benzopyrene. Prolonged exposure to these toxic gases is detrimental to the human body. Drivers and passengers may develop rhinitis, skin diseases, lung diseases, etc. Pregnant women may suffer from fetal deformity or miscarriage. The accumulation of the toxic effects may eventually lead to cancers, such as leukemia and lung cancer.

More Audi Owners Identified Themselves as Victims

One of the victims Ms. Lin told Radio Free Asia on March 10 that, after the article was published on Chinas social media on March 9, it was viewed more than 400,000 times in one day. Many people contacted her to tell her that they too have contracted leukemia after they purchased Audi made by FAW-Wolkswagen.

I bought an Audi A4 in May 2015, and I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia M2 in January 2018. It was found that formaldehyde and benzene in my Audi car have seriously exceeded acceptable levels. FAW-Volkswagen previously admitted that one batch of cars have health problems, my car belongs to this batch, Ms. Lin said. I later identified five other victims through the Internet, all of them had contracted acute leukemia and had been driving an Audi with strong odor. When I published the article yesterday, more and more victims have contacted me. All are leukemia patients. The imported Audis dont have any problems. All these victims have a domestic made Audi. One of them smashed the car and pulled out 20-30 pounds of asphalt.

Many Chinese Auto Companies Use Asphalt Dampers

Back in March 2013, Chinese media 21st Century reported that, according to an auto repair professional who had over ten years of work experience, many domestic car models use asphalt dampers, as this was a common practice for a large number of Chinese automakers.

In addition, a salesperson of a damping material supplier who chose to remain anonymous told 21st Century that his company, one of the largest manufacturers of damping materials for automobiles in China, has a production capacity of 20,000 tons of asphalt dampers per year.

According to experts in the automotive industry, in developed countries, automotive dampers are usually made from polymer resins or rubber. Neither of these two types of material will emit poisonous gases.

National Standard Is Missing

The 21st Century report also pointed out there are two main reasons as to why Chinese-made Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz use asphalt instead of resin. First, there is no national standard regarding auto parts and accessories. Second, the use of asphalt can help reduce production cost.

Zhou Guangya, a senior engineer at China National Heavy Duty Truck Group, said that in the case of an ordinary sedan, asphalt dampers would cost about $.74 to $10.4 (50 yuan to 70 yuan), if the dampers are made from non-toxic materials, the cost would be $14.9 to $29.8 (150 yuan to 200 yuan) higher.

In 2012, the total sales of cars of Beijing Benz, BMW Brilliance and FAW Audi were about 650,000. Using only asphalt damping sheets, the total profit of the project will increase by 97 million yuan to 130 million yuan a year.

Mr. Qin, an auto industry employee, explained to Radio Free Asia that when a state-owned auto company established a joint venture with a foreign company, only core components such as engines are imported from foreign countries. It is very common for Chinese carmakers to use inferior materials in less important auto parts and vehicle decorations, as there is no mandatory national standard. Vehicles imported from Europe, America, and Japan do not have these problems.

Victims Seeking Justice To No Avail

Fang Shuai is one of the two victims who passed away from leukemia. His wife told Radio Free Asia that Fang bought an Audi Q5 in December 2014 and was diagnosed with leukemia in 2016. Although he had gone through bone marrow transplant surgery, he still passed away. He was only 40 years old.

Fangs wife is the only one who filed a lawsuit in Beijing against FAW-Volkswagen so far. The court has been very hostile to her. She tried to seek help from Chinese media, but was chased away.

Fangs wife believes the difficulty of the lawsuit lies in the fact that FAW-Volkswagen is a state-owned enterprise.

For example, I have been to Phoenix TVs mainland China division. I cant even get in, she said, I went to the front desk and explained that I want to provide a news clue with regard to so and so, the receptionist immediately turned hostile and chased me out.

The Epoch Times reporter Olivia Li controbuted to this report
Caregiver Who Refused Lewd Offer From Elderly Man Is Accused of Theft

An 89-year-old man handed over both cash and gold to his former housekeeper in an attempt to gain extra, private services from her. She accepted his gift, but disappeared the following day, leading him to report her to the police, according to a report from the Taizhou Evening News on March 10.

The police later became involved to resolve the dispute.

The man, given the false name Chen Ping, lives alone in Zhejiang Province, China. His wife passed away long ago, and his daughter and son both married and moved away with their families to find work.

Chen had very little money in his old age, and invested what he did have in gold.

Since Chen was not wealthy and his family lived far away, he needed a caregiver to help him when he got sick. His family helped to hire a caregiver, Feng Qing, also a false name.

Feng, 49, came from a neighboring county. She worked as a caregiver after her divorce. Most of her money was spent on her childs education and Chinese social security fees. She was left with almost nothing for herself by the end of each month.

Feng worked as Chens caregiver for four years while he recovered from an illness. Once Chen became healthy again, his family thanked Feng for her services, and she had to find new work. However, during that time, Chen developed an affinity for Feng.

According to the report, Feng told the police that Chen expressed his affection for her, and that hed like to have a relationship with her as well.

However, Feng refused him at that time and she returned to her home. Yet after arriving in her hometown, she was unable to find any work. Though she already led a frugal life, her money was soon spent. At this time, she remembered Chens offer.

Feng made her way back to Chens house, and stayed there for four days. On the evening of Feb. 13, one day before Valentines Day, Chen said he wanted to give Feng a precious gift.

The gift was the money he had saved, and the gold he had invested in. The cash total was 200 yuan ($30) and gold worth 7000 yuan ($1000). For Feng to travel to Chens house from her own town, the cab fare was 110 yuan ($16).

Chen bought the gold by saving money on food expenses for several years. It was the most valuable thing that he owned.

However, a condition was attached to this gift of cash and gold. Chen asked Feng: Will you be my friend? In this case, those words are tacitly asking Feng to be his lover.

Feng was shocked by this request, but she did not outwardly refuse him. Furthermore, she accepted his gift. Chen believed that this meant she agreed to his request. However, the following morning, Feng left his house with the valuables, without a word.

Chen then called the police on Valentines Day, saying he had been robbed. The police arrived, and saw no sign of break-in. They suspected that Chen had become senile in his later years, asking him if he forgot where he placed his gold and money.

Thats when Chen began suggesting that his former caregiver had spent the night, and that she must have taken them.

The police then began their search for Feng, who they found at the end of February, according to the report. At that time, Feng said the money and gold were gifts. Feng and Chen were brought in for interrogation.

According to the report, Feng told the police that other than the significant age gap and Chen already being so old, she had another reason for lacking interest in him.

When I was his caregiver, I had an income, Feng said, according to the Taizhou Evening News. If I marry him, then I have to take care of him for free. She also said that she couldnt find work in Chens area.

Eventually, Chen was found out. The officers criticized his behavior, and Feng returned both the gold and cash to him.

Feng was very upset, feeling wronged for what happened to her, according to the report. After she calmed down, she went back to her home by taxi.
Century City Mall in LA Evacuated Amid Reports of Gunman

Officials in Los Angeles said the Westfield Century City mall was evacuated on March 15 after reports of a man with a gun.

We are on lockdown sitting quietly waiting for more information, said Giselle Abcarian, who was at the Zara store, reported the Los Angeles Times. We saw a bunch of people running and panicked, so we ran to the closest safe place.

Former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum said he was also inside the mall.

The Westfield Century City mall has been evacuated following reports of a man with a gun inside, but police have not confirmed that any shots were fired. Nothing has been confirmed, Officer Jeff Lee said. Were trying to resolve the situation. https://t.co/66G2QW7CAC  Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 15, 2019

Im in Los Angeles to film an interview with @billmaher tonight. Stopped by the mall to pick something up and a reported active shooter situation ensued. Im currently in a secure location, he wrote.

Los Angeles Police Officer Jeff Lee told the Los Angeles Times that police responded to a call about a gunman at around 12:40 p.m. local time.

Lee told the newspaper that the reports of a gunman were not confirmed.

The #WestfieldCenturyCitymall evacuated after a report of a man with a gun! #LAPD is going through the mall now. No reports of shots fired or injuries . More @ABC7 at 3. pic.twitter.com/zDMnkOsEs2  Sid Garcia (@abc7sid) March 15, 2019

There were also reports that a man attempted to set a package on fire inside the Amazon store in the mall, according to the Times.

The LAPD bomb squad responded to the scene to inspect the suspicious package, while shoppers were allowed to evacuate. Authorities have not yet announced any suspects.

The incident comes just hours after a mass shooting in New Zealand that killed dozens of people.

LAPD West LA Division is responding to calls of an Active Shooter at the Century City Mall. We have officers on scene who are clearing the location, but at this time we have NO evidence of a shooting or victims.  LAPD HQ (@LAPDHQ) March 15, 2019

Violent Crime Up

In September 2018, the FBI said Americans committed fewer violent and property crimes across the United States in 2017, according to statistics. The violent crime rateincluding offenses such as murder, robbery, and aggravated assaultdropped by almost 1 percent and is still about 4 percent above the 2014 rate. The murder rate dropped by 0.7 percent.

There were more than 1.2 million violent crimes reported to [the FBI] nationwide in 2017. There was a 0.7 percent decrease in murders and a 4 percent decrease in robberies from 2016 to 2017. Aggravated assaults increased 1 percent in 2017. The FBI began collecting data solely on an updated rape definition last year, and 135,755 rapes were reported to law enforcement in 2017, the agency said.

Police are responding to a report of a man with a gun at the Westfield City Century mall. At this time, police have no evidence of a shooting or victims. http://4.nbcla.com/mMM8oXA  NBC LA  2019315

Of the estimated 17,284 murders in 2017, more than half occurred in larger citieswith populations of more than 100,000.

There are fewer than 300 such cities in the United States, and while they account for less than 30 percent of the countrys population, many of them contribute far beyond their share to national crime rates and have done so for years, even decades.

While the national murder rate inched down to 5.3 per 100,000 residents, it spiked by 15 percent in Philadelphia, to a rate of more than 20 per 100,000 residents. Columbus, Ohio, saw a massive 54 percent murder rate increase, reaching nearly 16.3 per 100,000 residents.

BREAKING: Police are responding to reports of a man with a gun at the Westfield Century City mall. We're working to gather more information. http://bit.ly/2FfFwz6  Fox 11 Los Angeles  2019315

The murder rate in St. Louis rose by more than 10 percent and reached 66 per 100,000 residentsthe highest among larger cities.

Baltimores murder rate rose by nearly 8.5 percent, reaching some 56 per 100,000 residents.
China Challenges US and Allies On All Fronts, Experts Tell Senate

WASHINGTONThe United States must strengthen its military presence in Asia and encourage allies to join it in confronting China economically and militarily as it grows as a competitor and threat to its neighbors and U.S. security interests. This was the message from U.S. senators and China experts appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 13.

Committee chairman Jim Risch (R-Idaho) opened the hearing by declaring China is seeking to be the preeminent power in Asia, but its ambitions are broader. It is building naval bases in Africa, stealing the intellectual property of Western companies, subsidizing its companies overseas to gain economic and political leverage, and threatening military conflict with its neighbors. He did not see military conflict between China and the United States as inevitable, but stated that the relationship must be rebalanced.

Former Senator Jim Talent (R-Mo.) and Commissioner of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission warned that China was unlikely to abandon either its hegemonic goals or the means it has used to achieve them, unless and until costs and consequences are imposed. He called China a serious threat to the peace of the region, the security and legitimate interests of the United States and its allies.

Dr. Oriana Mastro, assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University, emphasized that China, while building strength militarily, had actually devoted more effort and resources to political and economic tools. She advised a program of institution building that will shape norms in [the United States] favor and fill the gapsthat China has been able to exploit.

Talent elaborated that the most immediate action that the United States could take to reassure and attract allies would be rebuilding the armed forces to the point where we can increase our forward presence in the regionthat will be a sign of our commitment that will assure them that were capable of deterring actual Chinese aggression.

Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) raised concern about Confucius Institutes, a Chinese program that 100 US universities were partnering with but that he saw as posing a threat to academic freedom. He also noted that there were 1,000 Confucius Institutes in the United States at the K-12 level.

Talent and Mastro agreed that the Institutes were causing scholars to self-censor to retain Chinese research funding and were an example of China combining covert operations with public diplomacy. Mastro did not see a need for banning them, but advised constraints including universities insisting on their own choices of instructors and addressing the lack of reciprocity with China in not permitting similar U.S. programs. Portman noted that as of this summer, we will have nopresence [in instructing U.S. values or history] in China.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) cited a report that the Chinese telecom firm Huawei had its equipment incorporated in a rural Montana network near U.S. nuclear missile installations there. Talent responded that the problem of network infiltration was only going to worsen with the advent of 5G technology, that China has reconnoitered [our systems] through cyber.
A view of the U.S. District Courthouse as closing arguments are expected in former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's trial on bank and tax fraud charges stemming, in Alexandria, Virginia, on Aug. 15, 2018. (REUTERS/Chris Wattie)

Collusion? Yes, Between the Prosecutors

Commentary

Collusion? How about collusion between special counsel Robert Mueller and New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance? Their goal: to make Paul Manafort pardon-proof.

Should President Donald Trump decide to pardon Manafortwho served for several months as his campaign chairmanfor federal crimes, the prosecutors will have ensured that Manafort will still face a prison term in the New York state criminal justice system.

The president has the authority to pardon individuals convicted in U.S. federal courts or to commute their sentence. But he doesnt have the authority to pardon those convicted in non-federal courts, such as New York state courts.

Federal prosecutors can assume the mantle of white knights, defending the populace from evildoers, enforcing rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and maintaining the faith of Americans in their criminal justice system.

Or, just as easilyperhaps more easilythey can take on the role of oppressors, using the federal criminal justice system to silence opposition, to restrain dissent, to enforce the powers of those in command. The changing of roles is an easy one, a subtle transformation that can go almost unnoticed.

Overcharging

The most frequent example of an abuse of authority by federal prosecutors is the use of overcharging, a routine practice in the Southern District of New York, and one that has been used by special counsel Mueller in virtually all his cases.

This is how it works: An individual targeted for prosecution can be charged with one crime, one that he or she perhaps did indeed commit, and face a possible five-year prison sentence if federal sentencing guidelines are followed. Or, to make matters simpler and less burdensome for the prosecutor, the individual can be charged with additional crimes in which he or she might have been only tenuously involvedcrimes that can be justified only by stretching the statutory language to the breaking point.

Now, the individual faces a potential for 25 or more years in prison. The net result is a quick plea bargain to the original count, a five-year sentence, with little work on the prosecutions part. Federal prosecutors have a better than 95 percent conviction rate. The arm-twisting is seductively easy.

This has resulted in a longstanding underlying tension between the FBI and prosecutors in the Department of Justice (DOJ): an uneasy working relationship burdened by mutual distrust and often-conflicting goals. FBI agentsfield agentsseek to uncover the truth, to find those truly culpable, and to build cases that allow for appropriate punishment (notwithstanding recent abuses by FBI executives in the bureaus headquarters in Washington).

Prosecutors in the DOJ, who are often the children of privilege and graduates of exclusive universities performing their two or three years of public service before moving onto high-paying jobs in elite white-shoe law firms, are looking, generally, for statisticsthat is, easy wins, playing the role of tough guys for a few years before returning to a life of ease.

With little in the way of street sense or real-world experience, its easy for them to be tough on the bad guys. FBI special agents, who usually serve for the entirety of their careers and who risk their lives, know better.

Political Prosecution

Arrests ordered by Muellers office for Manafort and Roger Stone further highlight the potential for abuse and intimidation, the application of the overwhelming force of the state in order to set an example for others who may be tempted to stray from mainstream politically acceptable beliefs and systems. Both were accused of committing routine white-collar crimes, activities that often go unnoticed, unpunished, or are only marginally enforced with token sentences.

Here the two subjects had committed aggravating acts, which in the eyes of prosecutors merited additional charges and enhanced penalties: Stone and Manafort had the temerity to be associated with the campaign of the heretic Trump.

Suddenly, progressives who have never been heard to criticize a judges sentence of a convicted felon other than to decry its severity, now condemn Judge T.S. Ellis of the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia, for sentencing Manafort to only four years (47 months, to be precise) in prison.

This for a nonviolent crime by a hitherto never criminally convicted individual who is 69 years old. And spurious comparisons to the sentence given former congressman William Jefferson on Nov. 13, 2009, who was convicted of accepting bribes$90,000 of the cash being recovered from his refrigerator freezerare inappropriate.

Jefferson was an elected public official, entrusted by the American citizenry, who in his capacity as a servant of the people must be held to a higher standard. And having betrayed the public trust, he must be harshly treated as a deterrent to others tempted to commit similar acts.

Manafort, on the other hand, is a businessman, elected by no one, and entrusted with no special confidence, who committed transgressions that, however inappropriate they may have been, werent violations of the public trust.

Furthermore, to suggest that the disparity in sentences was influenced by the race of the two defendants is a specious attempt to insert race into a scenario where it truly doesnt belongand simply reveals the racist agenda of those making such claims.

Manafort will celebrate his birthday on April 1, when he will turn 70. Following sentencing earlier this month by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington federal court, he is now facing 81 months of federal time.

On the same day as the sentencing, New York District Attorney Vance announced the filing against Manafort of mortgage fraud charges; the timing of the announcement is so blatantly political as to invite criticism. There was not even an attempt, a pretense, by Vance to project the illusion of independent action by a parallel jurisdiction. Had the charges been brought a few weeks earlier or later, he could have made at least a show of acting on his own.

But the timing was such as to create maximum effect, indicating even to the most casual observer collusion between special counsel Muellers office and the non-federal (New York) state prosecutor. It can hardly be a coincidence, reminiscent as it is of the timing of the twin convictions of Manafort and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen on Aug. 22, 2018, engineered, no doubt, to create an impression of momentum.

Double Jeopardy

One thing is certain. Manafort will have learned his lesson about the value of entering a guilty plea with a view towards plea negotiations and a reduced sentence. As to the charges he now faces in New York City, he has no choice but to go to trial. Any plea agreement offered by Vances office will no doubt include significant jail time, and as I wrote earlier, the state conviction would be beyond the reach of a presidential pardon.

Manaforts best hope is for a presidential pardon regarding the federal convictions, and a courtroom victory in New York. MSNBC journalist Julia Ainsley commented on March 13 that the additional prison time imposed by Judge Berman and the announcement of the charges filed by Vance are each a big victory for Mueller.

One might ask why an indictment for mortgage fraud, unrelated to the president, and certainly unrelated to charges of Russian collusion, should prove a victory for the special counsel.

New York had hitherto applied the doctrine of equitable double jeopardy, meaning that if someone has been prosecuted and convicted in a different forum, such as federal court, for the same overlapping fact patterns, then the individual wouldnt be re-tried in a state court.

This has been a way for the state to enforce a constitutional principle protecting individuals from double jeopardythat is, from being prosecuted twice for the same charges. This principle is considered so fundamental to fairness that the Founding Fathers incorporated it as the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.

Vance has now set aside this important constitutional protection for apparently political ends: to make Manafort pardon-proof. By this decision, Vance has set aside an important protection and set a precedent that can be used against others in the future.

Following in the footsteps of Mueller, Vance is eroding the rights of all for the sake of pursuing convictions of unpopular and sometimes unsympathetic individuals. Few are the voices raised in protest. But once the precedent has been established, all will be vulnerable, whether popular or not.

Epoch Times contributor Marc Ruskin is a 27-year veteran of the FBI, an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the author of The Pretender: My Life Undercover for the FBI. He served on the legislative staff of U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, New York.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Beto O'Rourke is pictured with his old friend Carrie Campbell during the weekend of the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York in this 1997 handout photo obtained by Reuters on Feb. 22, 2019. (Danny Dulai/Reuters)

Democrat 2020 Candidate Beto ORourke Wrote Fiction Piece About Running His Car Over Children

Democratic presidential candidate Beto ORourke wrote a short story about running over two children because they were happy and this happiness was mine by right.

The revelation surfaced as part of a 3,300-word profile on ORourke published by Reuters on March 15.

One day, as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street. They were happy, happy to be free from their troubles, ORourke wrote. This happiness was mine by right. I had earned it in my dreams.

As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood, and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two. I was so fascinated for a moment, that when after I had stopped my vehicle, I just sat in a daze, sweet visions filling my head.

The eerie fictional story sheds additional context on ORourkes drunk driving arrest in the 1990s.

Reuters published the profile one day after ORourke officially announce his run for the White House. The profile also revealed that ORourke belonged to a major hacking group that posted tools people can use to break into computers running Windows systems.

In another fiction piece, ORourke converses with a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi who maintained that Hitler was misunderstood and didnt personally want Jews killed. ORourke and a Jewish friend questioned the man about his theories and let him ramble on about Jews and African-Americansan attempt to let him hang himself with his own words.

We were trying to see what made him think the horrible things that he did, he wrote in the file.

ORourke joined a crowded Democratic field on March 14. He announced his candidacy in an internet video and positioned climate change as an existential crisis that needs to be immediately confronted.

Like most of the other Democrats who have announced their candidacies, ORourke is embracing socialist Medicare for All and Green New Deal policies. But while most have publicly distanced themselves from socialism, ORourke refused to denounce the ideology, even under repeated questioning by the BBC.

Democratic socialists Sen. Ben Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) sponsored the Medicare for All bill and the Green New Deal resolution in Congress. Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist group in the United States, and Communist Party USA are fervently backing both the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.

In another article ORourke wrote as a teen, he mused how the world would work without money. After changing the system, including the government, ORourke foresaw the end of starvation and class distinctions.

To achieve a money-less society (or have a society where money is heavily de-emphasized) a lot of things would have to change, including government as we know it. This is where the anti-money group and the disciples of Anarchy meet, ORourke wrote under his pseudonym, Psychedelic Warlord.

I fear we will always have a system of government, one way or another, so we would have to use other means other than totally toppling the government (I dont think the masses would support such a radical move at this time), he continued.

The Cult of the Dead Cow

While a teenager, ORourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview with Reuters, he belonged to the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history.

Members of the hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, have protected his secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability.

Now, in a series of interviews, CDC members have acknowledged ORourke as one of their own. In all, more than a dozen members of the group agreed to be named for the first time in a book about the hacking group by this reporter that is scheduled to be published in June by Public Affairs. ORourke was interviewed early in his run for the Senate.

There is no indication that ORourke himself ever engaged in the edgiest sorts of hacking activity  breaking into computers or writing code that enabled others to do so. Still, its unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money.

During the 1980s ORourke connected with another young hacker in the more conservative Texas city of Lubbock who ran a bulletin board called Demon Roach Underground. Known online as Swamp Rat, Kevin Wheeler had recently moved from a university town in Ohio and was having problems adjusting to life in Texas.

Wheeler and a friend named the Cult of the Dead Cow after an eerie hangout, a shut-down Lubbock slaughterhouse  the unappealing hind part of Texas iconic cattle industry. Most CDC members kept control of their own bulletin boards while referring visitors to one anothers and distributing the CDCs own branded essays, called text files or t-files.

At the time, people connected to bulletin boards by dialing in to the phone lines through a modem. Heavy use of long-distance modem calls could add up to hundreds of dollars a month. Savvy teens learned techniques for getting around the charges, such as using other peoples phone-company credit card numbers and five-digit calling codes to place free calls.

ORourke didnt say what techniques he used. Like thousands of others, though, he said he pilfered long-distance service so I wouldnt run up the phone bill.

Under Texas law, stealing long-distance service worth less than $1,500 is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine. More than that is a felony, and could result in jail time. It is unclear whether ORourke topped that threshold. In any event, the state bars prosecution of the offense for those under 17, as ORourke was for most of his active time in the group, and the statute of limitations is five years. Two Cult of the Dead Cow contemporaries in Texas who were caught misusing calling cards as minors got off with warnings.

ORourke handed off control of his own bulletin board when he moved east for boarding school, and he said he stopped participating on the hidden CDC board after he enrolled at Columbia University at age 18.

When he was a teen, ORourke also frequented sites that offered cracked software. The bulletin boards were a great way to get cracked games, ORourke said, adding that he later realized his habit wasnt morally defensible and stopped.

Using pirated software violates copyright laws, attorneys say, but in practice, software companies have rarely sued young people over it. When they do go after someone, it is typically an employer with workers using multiple unlicensed copies. Software providers are more interested in those who break the protections and spread their wares.

CDC wasnt of that ilk. Although some CDC essays gave programming and hacking instructions, in the late 1980s, the group was more about writing than it was about breaking into computer systems.

But its focus on creative expression didnt mean there were no grounds for controversy. Like many an underground newspaper, the Cult of the Dead Cow avidly pursued it.

A CDC member who joined in the early 1990s had previously used real instructions for making a pipe bomb to joke about shedding pounds by losing limbs. Three teenagers in Montreal found the file, and one lost two fingers after he tried to follow the formula, prompting outrage.

Rather than remove similar posts and hide the groups history, the CDC warned readers not to take the files literally and added a disclaimer that survives on its current web page: Warning: This site may contain explicit descriptions of or advocate one or more of the following: adultery, murder, morbid violence, bad grammar, deviant sexual conduct in violent contexts, or the consumption of alcohol and illegal drugs.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Entrepreneur and 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang speaks during a campaign stop at the train depot in Jefferson, Iowa, on Feb. 1, 2019. (Joshua Lott/AFP/Getty Images)

Democrat 2020 Candidate: Americans May Soon Massacre Fellow Asian Citizens

Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang said that Americans are one generation away from committing massacres against fellow citizen of Asian descent.

While Democratic politicians often use racially divisive language to garner votes and attention, Yangs suggestion is novel because Asians are rarely cast as victims in Democratic politics.

Personally, I said to a group at Harvard, I think were one generation away from falling into the same camps as the Jews who were attacked in the synagogue in Pittsburgh like just a couple months ago, Young said at an event on Dec. 13 last year.

Like were probably one generation away from Americans shooting up a bunch of Asians saying like, you know, damn the Chinese because theres a giant cold war even more with China.

Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang: Were one generation away from falling into the same camps as the Jews who were attacked in the synagoguewere probably one generation away from Americans shooting up a bunch of Asians. pic.twitter.com/szAJKo4UJT  Samantha Sullivan (@SamElizabethan) March 14, 2019

Yang is running on a platform of universal basic income. Under his plan, the government would hand every American between the ages of 18 and 64 a $1,000 welfare check every month. Yang sees this as the only solution to a crisis he believes will be caused by the automation of labor practices.

Yang made the remarks about Americans massacring fellow Asian citizens at an event titled A Glance at US Politics From Asian Americans hosted by Yuan Media, a Maryland-based Chinese media company with ties to Beijing. Yang told the audience, without supporting evidence, that demographic shifts in the United States over the next three decades will cause the increasingly insecure white majority to become more and more hostile.

So now that Im running for president like Ive learned more about the Asian-American place in society and one thing that scares the heck out of me is that this country is heading towards becoming a majority-minority by 2045, thats 27 years from now, Yang said. And so theres a very happy notion in some quarters that the country will just become more tolerant as it gets more diverse.

Unfortunately, that is not really the way things play out if you look at historical examples. There are very very few examples in human history of a dominant racial ethnic group giving up its dominance over time. That actually is not normal, Yang continued.

Yangs universal basic income proposal would cost $2 trillion per year, roughly half of the annual U.S. budget. The presidential hopeful would tax tech companies to foot the bill. But the $2 trillion price tag of his proposal is dwarfed by some of the other policies he embraces.

Similar to several more prominent Democrats, Yang supports the socialist Green New Deal and Medicare for All policies backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Communist Party USA. Under the ambitious goal of completely ridding the United States of fossil fuels, the Green New Deal proposes taking all gas-engine cars off the road in favor of electric vehicles and retrofitting or replacing every building in America. By one estimate, the Green New Deal would cost $650,000 per household over 10 years.

Yang said that Asians will become the target of mass killings by fellow Americans because of the rivalry between the United States and China.

And so if you look at whats happening right now in this country, you can see an increasingly insecure white majority becoming more and more hostiletruly. And who is going to be the boogeyman of the next 10 to 20 years? Whos going to be the great rival to the United States in the eyes of Americans in society? Yang asked the audience, apparently receiving no answer. China, thats right.

And so what do you think the attitude is going to be over time for the shrinking insecure white majority thats losing their jobs for lets say Chinese Americans or Asian Americans? Yang asked, again receiving no response.

Like were probably one generation away from Americans shooting up a bunch of Asians saying like, you know, Damn the Chinese because theres a giant cold war even more with China.
FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY - MARCH 07: Office buildings, including the corporate headquarters of Deutsche Bank, stand in the financial district in the city center on March 7, 2019 in Frankfurt, Germany. Some finance-related companies have been moving offices from London to Frankfurt due to uncertainties over Brexit. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)

Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank Unions United in Opposition to Merger

As Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG move closer to a deal, employee representatives at both lenders are lining up against a merger, saying the risks of a tie-up would outweigh the advantages.

Uwe Tschaege, Commerzbanks deputy supervisory-board chairman and head of the banks works council, closed ranks with union colleagues from Deutsche Bank, saying in an email March 14 that their positions are identical.

Earlier this week, Jan Duscheck and Stephan Szukalski, two key labor representatives on Deutsche Banks highest oversight body, publicly opposed a merger, saying a combination would fail to achieve the goal of strengthening the bank while resulting in massive staff cuts. As many as 30,000 positions could be at risk if a deal were agreed, according to people familiar with the matter.

While Tschaege said that Commerzbank management hasnt communicated with worker representatives on the issue, the spate of comments are the latest indication that talks behind the scenes are advancing.

After struggling for years to boost profitability and stem a prolonged decline in revenue, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are edging closer to a merger as they run out of time to show restructuring efforts are paying off, according to people familiar with the matter. Finance Minister Olaf Scholz suggested March 10 that the government is serving as a  companion to the discussions.

We reject a merger, as a deal would make the combined bank even more susceptible to a hostile takeover from abroad and would not create a national champion, Duscheck said. Szukalski, head of German banking union DBV, called the combination of Germanys largest-listed lender economic nonsense.

Employee representatives are powerful forces in German companies, generally making up half the seats on supervisory boards, which hire and fire senior executives and sign off on major strategic decisions. Theyre not isolated in their skepticism. Representatives of two large Deutsche Bank shareholders have expressed doubts about a combination, while financial regulators are also wary.

Still, a deal does have backing from the German Finance Ministry. Scholz and Joerg Kukies, a former Goldman Sachs banker who serves as his deputy, have been pushing a deal to support the small- and mid-sized companies that are the backbone of the countrys export-led economy, people familiar with the matter have said previously.

By Steven Arons & Nicholas Comfort
English German

April 9, 2019 confirmed as date of the Annual General Meeting

Ulrich W. Suter is not standing for re-election

All other current members of the Board of Directors are standing for re-election

Board of Directors proposes to elect Thierry Vanlancker and Victor Balli to the Board of Directors

Vote on 10.8% gross dividend increase to CHF 2.05 per share

The Board of Directors of Sika AG has confirmed April 9, 2019 as the date of the 2019 Annual General Meeting. With the exception of Ulrich W. Suter all current members of the Board of Directors are standing for re-election. The Board of Directors proposes that Thierry Vanlancker and Victor Balli be elected to the Board of Directors.

Furthermore the Board of Directors will be proposing a 10.8% increase in gross dividend to CHF 2.05 per share to the shareholders.

COMPLETE AGENDA

The complete agenda containing the Board of Directors' proposals on all items will be published in the Swiss Official Gazette of Commerce as well as on the website of Sika AG on March 15, 2019 and will be sent to shareholders on the same date.

The Annual General Meeting will take place at the Waldmannhalle in Baar. Start: 4.00 p.m., doors open: 3.00 p.m.

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 motor vehicle industry. Sika has subsidiaries in 101 countries around the world and manufactures in over 200 factories. Its more than 20,000 employees generated annual sales of CHF 7.09 billion in 2018.

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Sam Brownback, U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom, gives a speech during the opening ceremony of A Civil Society Dialogue on Securing Religious Freedom in the Indo-Pacific Region held in Taipei on March 11, 2019. (Chen Po-chou/The Epoch Times)

During Forum, Taiwan Officials Tread Carefully Around Subject of Beijings Religious Persecution

In Taipeis Howard Plaza, U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom Sam Brownback presented his keynote speech at the Indo-Pacific Religious Freedom Forum on March 11. He emphasized that Taiwan is a friend and partner of the United States in promoting democracy and religious freedom. Taiwans President Tsai Ing-wen attended the opening ceremony and stressed the significance of tolerance and mutual acceptance. She noted that Taiwan is a beacon of religious freedom in the Asia region.

The Chairman of Taiwan Democracy Foundation, Su Jia-Chyuan, highlighted that March 10 marks the 60th anniversary of the 1959 Tibet Uprising, which the Chinese regime called riots. It was reported that China has barred foreign travelers from Tibet during this sensitive period until April 1. According to the International Campaign for Tibet, by December 2018, at least 155 Tibetans have self-immolated since Feb. 27, 2009 to strongly protest the Chinese communist regimes harsh suppression of Tibetan Buddhism and brutal persecution of Tibetan monks.

Brownback expressed his concerns on the Vietnam governments regulations over religious affairs. Vietnams National Assembly passed the Law on Belief and Religion in November 2016, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2018. According to this law, the Vietnamese government regulates legal procedures and conditions regarding peoples beliefs. So, local faith groups that are not registered with the government would not be recognized, and religious activities need approval from the Vietnamese authorities.

Regarding the U.S. Department of States annual report on Countries of Particular Concerns (CPC) for religious persecution, Brownback specifically criticized the religious persecution in Burma of Christians and Rohingya Muslims. For sure, the focus of his speech was on China. There were several survivors from different persecuted religious groups who participatd in the forum, including Dawa Tsering, the Dalai Lamas representative at the Office of Tibet in Taipei, as well as Rushan Abbas, the leader at the Campaigns for Uyghurs. Brownback recognized these survivors and also mentioned Rev. John Sanqiang Cao, who was detained by Chinese authorities since March 5, 2017 and then sentenced on March 2018 to seven years in prison. He mentioned again about the brutal persecution of Falun Gong which has lasted for two decades in China, while Falun Gong practitioners can enjoy the freedom to do meditation exercises across public parks in Taiwan.

Taiwan is the second stop for Brownbacks Asia trip this time. He had given a strong speech about all ongoing major religious persecutions committed by the Chinese communist regime on March 8 at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. However, on March 9, the Office of the Special Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China expressed strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition to Brownbacks remarks, blaming him for using religious issues to interfere in Chinas internal affairs. Brownback responded to this blanket denial at a press conference in Taiwan. He said China should specifically answer the questions: Where are the missing individuals in the Uyghur transformation camps? Why cant Chinese people buy Bibles online? Why did the Chinese regime close down some churches and temples recently?

Taiwans Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hsu Szu-chien, cited a recent speech by the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Taiwan is also a democratic success story, a reliable partner, and a force for good in the world. However, it remains to be seen whether the force for good is strong enough in Taiwan when confronting religious persecutions in mainland China.

Comparing to the straightforward criticism of China from Brownback, neither Deputy Minister Hsu nor President Tsai specifically called out China when they addressed authoritarian governments suppressing religions in their speeches. When Su Jia-Chyuan talked about the 60th anniversary of the 1959 Tibet Uprising, he did not mention China. Most of the forums held during the two-day event were closed-door discussions and panel sessions without media presence.

Brownback is expected to meet with Lee Ching-yu, the wife of jailed Taiwanese human rights advocate Lee Ming-che, during his stay in Taipei. Lee was arrested by the Chinese communist regime on March 2017 and then sentenced to five years in prison on November 2017, charged with subversion of state power. The rescue effort has been ongoing for two years.

In addition, Chiang Yung-Shin, a Taiwanese national who works as a foreign company executive in Thailand, is facing trial in Thailand for leasing a house as the office for Sound of Hope Radio Network, which broadcasts uncensored news into China. The Thai police who arrested Chiang told him that they were under pressure from the Chinese regime.

Brownback also accepted an interview with Radio Taiwan International to experience talking with a mainland Chinese audience via shortwave broadcast. In a meeting with the press after the radio show, he was asked about the challenges of dealing with the Chinese regime over religious persecutions. He said that his strength comes from watching the glowing faces of victims who survived religious persecutions and he believes that peoples faiths would grow stronger amid adversity.

While this conference is called the Indo-Pacific Religious Freedom Forum by the U.S. government, Taiwan calls this forum A Civil Society Dialogue on Securing Religious Freedom in the Indo-Pacific Region. The Taiwan version of the title appears to emphasize that the dialogue is among civil society groups, as if the Taiwan government is merely supporting an effort from civil society groups, rather than acting as a driving force.

Well, one thing is clear: this regional conference is surely different from the ministerial-level international religious freedom summit that the U.S. Department of State hosted last year.

As One China, Different Interpretations has been a policy for decades to maintain the status quo regarding the question of Taiwans sovereignty, are we now seeing a version of One Forum, Different Interpretations? It is tricky to avoid upsetting the Chinese communist regime while trying to maintain peace at the same time.

Dr. Xiaoxu Sean Lin is a former U.S. Army officer with expertise on infectious diseases, surveillance and global public health. He was the co-founder and former executive vice president of Sound of Hope Radio Network, and hosted talk shows on Chinas current affairs on New Tang Dynasty TV. Currently, he is the founder and general manager of WQER-LP Radio Station. He is also a frequent news analyst and commentator for Sound of Hope Radio Network, with a focus on global public health, national security and foreign relations related to Asian affairs.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
A Ford logo on the grill of a car on display at the Pittsburgh Auto Show on Feb. 15, 2018. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

Ford to Cut More Than 5,000 Jobs in Germany, Others in UK

BERLIN, GermanyU.S. automaker Ford plans to cut more than 5,000 jobs in Germany and will reduce its workforce in Britain as well as it seeks to return to profit in Europe, the company said on Friday.

Ford has offered voluntary redundancy programs for employees in Germany and Britain, it said in a statement.

This is part of a turnaround plan announced by the carmaker in January that would involve thousands of job cuts, looking at plant closures and discontinuing loss-making vehicle lines.

Through these programs and other initiatives, Ford of Germany expects to reduce its headcount in excess of 5,000 jobs, including temporary staff, the company said.

The total number of positions affected in Britain is still to be determined, it added.

Ford also announced it would streamline its lineup by improving or exiting less profitable vehicle lines.

Ford Europe has been losing money for years and pressure to restructure its operations has increased since arch-rival General Motors raised profits by selling its European Opel and Vauxhall brands to Frances Peugeot.

Fords turnaround plan is aimed at achieving a 6 percent operating margin in Europe.

By Thomas Seythal
Former Chinese Naval Officer Recounts How He Procured Aircraft Technology for Regime

One evening in mid-May 1997, a Russian-made helicopter flew over the border of Laos and China. Yao Cheng, a 37-year-old lieutenant colonel of the Chinese naval command center, sat next to the pilot, quietly watching the scenery below.

Outside the window, the lush tropical jungle was surrounded by deep blue mountains. The setting sun illuminated the treetops. A grand palace, hidden in the woods, radiated an alluring light. Yao had never seen such beautiful scene before, nor would he ever again.

The Russian Kamov Ka-28 helicopter was the worlds most advanced anti-submarine helicopter at the time, and Yao had just procured one from Laos. The Chinese navy would reverse-engineer the chopper and copy the technology.

Yao was thrilled at the thought of the copied helicopter one day flying alongside a Chinese guided-missile destroyer. But what he never anticipated was that after he completed the top-secret mission to obtain the helicopter, he wouldnt receive any form of an award from the Chinese regime. Instead, Jiang Zemin, then-general secretary and head of the Chinese Communist Party, personally ordered that Yao be arrested. In 1998, Yao was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The Mission

Yao, whose former name was Tan Chunsheng, now lives in Los Angeles. In an extended interview with the Chinese-language Epoch Times, he told the story of how he came to procure high-tech military technology for the Chinese regime, only to be punished for it.

In 1993, the Chinese navy established the 933 office to prepare funds to purchase two guided-missile destroyers and 24 Kamov Ka-28 helicopters from Russia. Yao worked in this office.

This Kamov-28 helicopter was unique in the world. The price quoted by Russia was $6.5 million, Yao said.

The Russian helicopter was far more advanced than the one China was producing at the time.

The Kamov Ka-28 was smaller in size but more powerful. In those days, two helicopters were usually needed to attack a submarine, one equipped with sonar and magnetic exploration to search for the submarine, the other with a torpedo to attack, which was very inefficient. The Kamov Ka-28 was capable of both searching and attacking at the same time.

So the navy prepared to purchase the Kamov Ka-28 from Russia. However, two years of negotiations were unsuccessful. In 1996, Taiwan held its first democratic elections for president and Lee Teng-hui won. Russia knew the Chinese regime would be upset about the islandwhich it claims sovereignty overelecting its own leader, and would seek to bulk up its military for a potential invasion. Russia took the opportunity to raise the helicopter price to $13.5 million.

At this time, the navy and state-owned manufacturer Harbin Aircraft Manufacturing Corp. (HAMC, now known as Harbin Aircraft Industry Group, or Hafei) wanted to resort to stealing technology, a well-known tactic. Yao said that from his observations working in the military, all weapons technology for Chinas national defense were obtained from foreign companies and then copied.

The task of stealing the plane fell to Yao. He had graduated from Chinas Naval Aeronautical Engineering Institute in 1982 and quickly rose through the ranks to the Naval Air Force command center. He was highly valued by the naval commander, Shi Yunsheng.

For this mission, they gave me another identity, Yao said. He was sent to Harbin City, posing as a senior engineer in the helicopter division of HAMC. He was assigned to partner with a special agent in the Ministry of State Security, Chinas chief intelligence agency, who had been a spy in Russia.

Diving Into Laos

According to Chinese intelligence, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, several Kamov Ka-28s were left in Asia. There were two such aircraft in Laos, so Yao and his partner decided to go there. However, the helicopters, which were left in the open, had fallen into disrepair. Yao and his partner needed to get a newer model.

The Ministry of State Security provided information that the daughter of the Laos National Assembly presidentwho was the countrys third-most-powerful figurewas studying at the Shanghai International Studies University. In order to establish connections with her, Yao and his companion waited at the Kunming Airport during the universitys holiday week in January 1997.

When they saw that she didnt have a pen to fill out a travel form, Yao walked up and handed one to her. After boarding the plane, Yao and his partner sat by the woman and started chatting with her.

They introduced themselves as rich Chinese businessmen visiting Laos to find business opportunities. When they asked her to help provide translation services, she didnt agree right away. But after offering $100 as compensationequivalent to about a months salary for a Lao officialshe relented.

With the womans assistance, Yao visited key institutions such as the Lao Ministry of National Defense, Air Force, and the State Council. We brought $300,000 with us, and every day, we would eat, drink, dance, and entertain [Lao officials], he said.

Eventually, they negotiated the price with the Lao military to buy an almost-expended Kamov Ka-28 for $1.5 million. The Lao authorities were happy to get rid of an old model, while earning money from the sale.

Aftermath: Punished by Factional Politics

Yao arranged for four pilots from HAMC to arrive in Laos and learn to fly the helicopter within a week. They took the plane to the ChinaLaos border and prepared to sneak it into China.

This mission was top secret. There werent many people who knew. We had not gone through normal customs formalities, nor had we given flight forecasts to China airports, Yao said.

After evading detection on radar by flying at low altitude, and arriving at the Jinghong Airport in Xishuangbanna prefecture in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, local armed police surrounded them, thinking they were enemies. Since the border police officers hadnt seen such an aircraft before, they immediately notified their superiors.

The person in charge of the local military region took a telephone number that Yao gave to assure them that he was authorized by the government. The phone line went directly to Liu Zhuoming, the second son of Liu Huaqingthe director of the Naval Equipment Certification Center and a vice chairman in the Central Military Commission, which is the highest agency in charge of military affairs. Liu Zhuoming confirmed that the operation was a naval project, and the police released Yao and his partner.

However, unfortunately for Yao, the one who was on duty at the Central Military Commission (CMC) that day was Liu Huaqings adversary, Zhang Wannian.

At that time, the CMC had four vice chairmen: Liu Huaqing, Zhang Wannian, Zhang Zheng, and Chi Haotian. Zhang Wannian, who wanted to drag Liu Huaqing down, overheard about the naval project.

He said, Who did it? Yao recalled. He said, This is such a big naval project. Why did you not report it to the CMC?'

Zhang Wannian immediately reported the incident to then-CMC Chairman and Party leader Jiang Zemin and accused Liu Huaqing of orchestrating the incident.

At the time, no one in the navy could admit to the theft. Liu Huaqing insisted that he didnt know, nor did his son. They thus framed Yao as being the sole person responsible; he carried out the mission alone, they insisted.

During this period, Russian intelligence also learned from Laos that China had just purchased a Kamov Ka-28 at a low price. Russia was furious and threatened to interrupt the arms trade between China and Russia, which frightened the Party leadership. Because of the NATO arms embargo on China, the Chinese regime could only purchase weapons from Russia. If Russia didnt sell to China, what would the regime do? Therefore, Liu Huaqing went to Russia and assured officials there that the Kamov Ka-28 incident was all the doing of a small-time naval officer.

Party leader Jiang personally instructed that such a big case must be thoroughly clarified, that is, he agreed to accept Lius story about Yaos crime. Jiangs instructions were sent down, and Yao was soon arrested. Yao had done all this work to steal the helicopter for the Party-state, but in the end, he became the victim of a political fight.

Who gave the $1.5 million to Laos? Who gave me a series of fake documents? Yao asked.

In August 1997, Yao was placed into the General Political Detention Center in Guangying District, near the Beijing airport. Nine months later, he was sent to the Hefei City Prison in Anhui Province. In 2003, after Jiang was forced to step down, Yao was released from prison before his term was up. By this time, the Kamov Ka-28 helicopter technology had already been copied and was in use by the Chinese military.

Five years after Yaos mission, China began buying the helicopters from Russia. Yao said that he spent more than five years in prison. Though he was loyal to the Party, he was still punished and his future was destroyed.

After decades of my military career, everything is lostpolitically, economically, andfrom this standpointmy reputation. My former comrades-in-arms look down on me because I was in jail, Yao said.

Correction: The author misstated the year of Lee Teng-huis election as president of Taiwan, which was 1996, not 1995; in 1995, however, there were tensions between the PRC and Taiwan over Lees appearance and speech at Cornell University.
ICE Deputy Director Tom Homan speaks at the National Press Club at an event hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies, on June 5, 2018. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Former ICE Chief: Senate Vote a Morale-Killer for Border Patrol and ICE

WASHINGTONTom Homan, former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hit out at the 12 Republican senators who voted to terminate President Donald Trumps national border emergency on March 14.

Its a morale-killer for the Border Patrol and for ICE, Homan told The Epoch Times. I dont think these 12 senators understand how important border security is to this country. They say they support border security, but their talk is talk, they need to walk the walk.

He challenged the 12 senators to wear the uniform and stand on that border for a week, then come back and say a walls not needed.

The 12 Republicans that joined all 47 Democrats to pass the measure are Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-Miss.), and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Homan said Republicans in both the House and Senate have failed the president for the last two years.

So once again, the presidents got to go out on his own. Hes going to veto thiswhich he should do, he said.

Trump has said he would 100 percent veto the resolution, which could then only be overridden by a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress.

Trump declared the national emergency on Feb. 15, the same day that he signed a spending bill in which Congress failed to approve the full $5.7 billion he was requesting for more border wall. Instead, Congress approved just less than $1.4 billion.

Through the national emergency, Trump could free up more than $8 billion in funding from other sources, such as the Department of Defense and the U.S. Treasury to allocate to around 700 miles of border fencing.

The migrants broke through the fence and were repelled with pepper spray smoke pellets. #MigrantCaravan pic.twitter.com/pC8dDFRfOy  The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) November 25, 2018

Homan said he keeps going back to the national emergency that former President Barack Obama declared on swine flu in 2009, when just over 12,000 people died.

Over 70,000 people have died from drug overdoses, from fentanyl coming across that southern border. So if 12,000 is a national emergency, why isnt 70,000? Homan said. More than 71,500 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2017, with at least 68 percent of those deaths attributed to opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the past six months, Border Patrol apprehensions on the southern border have reached twice what they were in all of fiscal year 2017. In February alone, 66,000 people were apprehended crossing the border illegally, with another 10,000 presenting without documentation at ports of entry.

At the current pace, we are on track to encounter close to one million illegal aliens at our southern border this year, Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen told the House Homeland Security Committee on March 6.

Homan said the current numbers of illegal border crossers are outrageous.

The Democratic leadership in the House, didnt want to support the border wall at all, the border barrier. So the president is doing what he can to secure our nation, Homan said. Hes doing his job to try to protect the American people, so if that means hes got to go against Congress [then] God bless him for it.
FILE PHOTO: The logo of U.S. conglomerate General Electric is pictured at the company's site of its energy branch in Belfort, France, February 5, 2019. REUTERS/Vincent Kessler/File Photo

GE Expects Rebound After Tough Reset Year in 2019; Shares Climb

General Electric Co promised on March 14 that its earnings would improve in 2020 and beyond after a difficult, reset year in 2019, sending shares higher in midday trading.

Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp said GE will invest $2.5 billion in a restructuring that will yield returns after 2019.

This is what constitutes a reset, Culp said on a conference call, using a word many analysts said they wanted to hear.

The U.S. conglomerate said 2019 adjusted profit would fall below analyst estimates of 70 cents a share, and it could lose as much as $2 billion in cash from its industrial businesses, putting a number on a warning it issued last week.

GE shares surged nearly 3 percent to $10.30 in midday trading, after dropping as much as 4 percent in premarket activity shortly after the forecast was released. GE bonds rose slightly.

The company did not warn about a potential hit to its jet engine division from the recent global grounding of Boeing Co 737 MAX aircraft, following the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight on March 10 that cost 157 lives.

GE and partner Safran SA of France make the engine that powers all of Boeings 737 MAX planes.

Culp reiterated his priorities of trimming debt and improving the performance of GEs industrial businesses, especially the ailing power-plant division.

GE expects free cash flow at power to remain negative in 2020 before turning positive in 2021. Investors are looking closely at GEs cash and earnings after the company lost nearly $23 billion last year.

Adjusted free cash flow for all industrial business should be between break-even and negative $2 billion, before turning positive in 2020, Culp said.

That outlook is arguably better than expected, said Deane Dray, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

But GE left an unusual amount of wiggle room by including an unspecified amount of contingency money to cover hard-to-predict costs, such as when it will conclude big asset sales and how its power unit will perform.

JPMorgan analyst Stephen Tusa voiced concern that the gap between GEs cash flow and earnings forecasts was the widest he has seen, which likely will mean analysts profit estimates are too high.

GE predicted 2019 profits of 50 cents to 60 cents a share.

By Alwyn Scott & Sanjana Shivdas
Armed police following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. (Reuters/SNPA/Martin Hunter)

Hero Tackled Christchurch Mosque Shooter and Grabbed His Gun

A survivor of the shooting at one of the mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on March 15 has described how his friend risked his life to tackle the gunman and wrestle away his weapon.

Syed Mazharuddin told the New Zealand Herald he witnessed the attack.

There was screaming around and I tried to take cover, he said.

Mazharuddin told the Herald that barely had he managed to take cover when the gunman made his way through the main entrance door of the Linwood mosque.

The mosque in the neighborhood of Linwood was the second location targeted by the gunman in Fridays mass shooting spree that left at least 49 dead.

He Just Started Shooting at Them

Mazharuddin said as soon as the gunman entered the mosque, he started firing wildly.

Just around the entrance door there were elderly people sitting there praying and he just started shooting at them.

He said at one point one of his acquaintances tried to tackle the shooter, who was dressed in body armor.

The young guy who usually takes care of the mosque  he saw an opportunity and pounced on [the gunman] and took his gun, Mazharuddin said.

The hero tried to chase and he couldnt find the trigger in the gun  he ran behind him but there were people waiting for him in the car and he fled.

Armed Congregant Fired on Gunman

An armed congregant chased after and fired twice at the gunman, the New Zealand Herald reported.

The manidentified only as a well-known area resident and a Muslimleft the scene of the Linwood mosque when gunfire broke out before returning with a firearm to engage the gunman.

He reportedly fired two rounds at the shooter as he sped off in a getaway vehicle.

They were in a silver Subaru, the man told police.

The armed congregation member reportedly told the authorities he was firing in self defense.

Witness Len Peneha told The Associated Press he saw the gunman enter the mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door to the mosque, said after the gunman drove away, he went into the mosque to try and help.

I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said. Its unbelievably nutty. I dont understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. Its ridiculous.

One of New Zealands Darkest Days

At least 49 people were killed in multiple shootings at two Christchurch mosques.

The Linwood mosque shooting claimed at least seven lives while a second shooting, at the Al Noor mosque, resulted in at least 41 dead.

Police also found and defused explosive devices attached to a vehicle outside of one of the mosques.

At least 48 people, some in critical condition, were being treated at Christchurch Hospital for gunshot wounds, authorities said.

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said of Fridays carnage.

She said it was one of New Zealands darkest days.

Murder Charges

Authorities have announced murder charges against the man suspected of being the gunman in New Zealands worst mass shooting in history.

Police said a total of three people had been arrested in connection with the incident but did not identify those taken into custody and gave no details except to say that none of them had been on any watch list. They have not said whether the same person was responsible for both shootings.

Authorities said the murder suspect would appear in Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed one of the suspects was an Australian national.

I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody I have been advised is an Australian-born citizen, Morrison told reporters in Sydney on Friday.

A man who seemed to claim responsibility for the shootings, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, an Australian citizen, allegedly left a 74-page manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack, although police have not confirmed he is the shooter.

An Epoch Times reporter has viewed the document.

Tarrant described himself as an eco-fascist in his writings. I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist, he wrote.

He also apparently wrote that the country with values closest to his own is communist China.

The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the Peoples Republic of China, read the manifesto purportedly written by Tarrant.

It remains unclear whether the other two people arrested will be charged with any crimes.

Condolences

World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks.

President Donald Trump sent warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand.

He wrote in a tweet that 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019

The White House also condemned the attack.

The United States strongly condemns the attack in Christchurch. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families. We stand in solidarity with the people of New Zealand and their government against this vicious act of hate, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealands head of state, said in a message to the country she was deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders, she said in her message.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack with horror and profound sadness.

The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life, he wrote.

All mosques in New Zealand had been asked to shut their doors and armed guards posted at them, police said, adding they were not actively looking for any other identified suspects.

With additional reporting by Reuters and The Associated Press.
Indiana Man Finds Burglar Crushed by 900-Pound Safe in His Home

Police said an Indiana man found an intruder dead in his hometrapped under his familys 900-pound safe.

Officials at the Marion Police Department said in a statement that George Hollingsworth found the body of the would-be burglar on Wednesday, March 13, lying underneath an antique floor safe.

Hollingsworth made the grisly discovery a day after he first reported the break-in to police.

My mind couldnt comprehend it. This cant be real. Its like some strange tale, the man told Fox59.

Im Thinking  Hes Dead

The homeowner was checking his propertylocated about 70 miles north of Indianapolisto determine what had been stolen after the robbery and was cleaning the clutter in his garage. Thats when Hollingsworth discovered his safewhich was suspended by a floor jackhad been knocked over.

Upon further inspection Mr. Hollingsworth found a body lying underneath the safe, the police said.

I came in and told my wife, I think weve got a dead body out there. She thought I was kidding, said Hollingsworth, according to Fox59.

The mans wife called 911.

The officer walked in and said, Buddy. Hey buddy,' said Hollingsworth. Im thinking hes dead. Come on now.

The fire department had to be called to lift the safe and remove the mans body, according to the police.

Hollingsworth said even if the burglar had succeeded in stealing the massive safe, it would have been pointless.

Theres nothing in it. Its empty. Its just one my dad had, he said. What a horrible way to die, he added, according to Fox59.

The identity of the deceased man has not been released, pending notification of family members, the Indianapolis Star reported.

79-Year-Old Woman Fends Off Burglar With a Pistol

A 79-year-old Georgia woman was recorded in a dramatic midnight 911 call as she tackled a 20-year-old burglar.

When deputies arrived at the house in Jackson County, Georgia, on Feb. 12, they found a burglar cowering in the closet.

He was later identified as Hans Edward Rogers, charged with burglary and home invasion, according to county jail records.

The homeowner heard someone trying to get in a window and went to her back door to look out, at which time a black male was standing there.

In the recording of the dispatch call, obtained later by WXIA, the woman can be heard repeatedly challenging what she initially thought were two invaders in her home.

Theyre trying to get in the back door, the woman tells the dispatcher about 30 seconds into the call. Hurry. Hurry. Please.

The 911 dispatcher asks her where she is in the house.

Im in the kitchen, and Im watching the door that they were trying to get in. Ooh, theyre breaking glass, she said.

The burglar cowered in a closet until deputies arrived to arrest him  a 20-year-old man subdued by a 79-year-old woman.  9NEWS (KUSA)  2019220

Then she can be heard shouting, Okay, come on! I got something for you!

As the 911 dispatcher tries to discourage her from confronting any attackers, the sound of a gunshot is heard.

According to WXIA, she had fired a pistol outside in the direction of the burglar, who then ran round to another door, and broke in.

As the dispatcher continues to reassure her that law enforcement is on the way, the woman said that she can hear the intruder upstairs, ransacking the rooms and apparently talking.

She waits for another two minutes in the kitchen, then her voice can be heard shouting Im waitin on ya, come on! When you come down those stairs Im gonna blow your damn brains out!

Seconds later, she can be heard whispering, Im just scared, Maam  Please hurry. Please hurry.

Please, please dear God. Lord have mercy  please

Around seven minutes into the call, the woman can be heard shouting upstairs, then a shot is heard. Come on punk! she shouts.  Come on down if youre serious!

Maam, are you shootin at him again? the 911 dispatcher asks.

Yes, maam, she answers.

Around eight minutes into the call, law enforcement entered the building and took the suspect into custody without incident.

Woman fires shots at burglar breaking into her home, police say https://t.co/9SRP32JoTI pic.twitter.com/PjsqF2A0Rd  11Alive News (@11AliveNews) February 13, 2019

Rogers was booked into the Jackson County Jail and was held without bond.

He faced charges of felony first-degree burglary and felony home invasion, and a misdemeanor charge of criminal trespass.

Epoch Times staff reporter Simon Veazey contributed to this report.
Smoke and flame are seen during an Israeli air strike in Gaza March 15, 2019. (Reuters/Mohammed Salem)

Israel Bombs Hamas Facilities in Gaza After Rockets Fired at Tel Aviv

Israel says their military aircraft have bombed Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip on Friday, March 15, hours after two rockets were launched from the Palestinian enclave towards the city of Tel Aviv in the first such attack since a 2014 war.

The air strikes hit four buildings used by the dominant Islamist groups security forces, which Hamas had evacuated as a precaution of escalating tensions. There has been no word of casualties.

The Israeli military said its planes targeted terror sites in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

On Thursday night, sirens howled in Tel AvivIsraels densely populated commercial capitalset off by what the military said were two incoming, longer-range rockets from Gaza.

The Israel Defense Forces later confirmed that neither of the two rockets caused any damage and there were no casualites, adding that the rockets had landed in the sea or not in any built-up areas.

Hamas has denied responsibility for the attack, which it said took place as its leaders met Egyptian delegates about efforts to secure a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

A statement by the Hamas armed wing said it was not responsible for the firing of the rockets tonight toward the enemy. The Hamas administration vowed to take measures against those behind the salvo, which it described as violating the factional and national consensus governing Gaza.

Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, two smaller Gaza armed factions, also denied responsibility.

Israeli analysts speculated that Palestinian militants opposed to any deal between Hamas and Israel were behind the launchings.

Shelters Prepared

Israel is still trying to determine who fired the rockets. We dont know who carried it out, military spokesman Brigadier-General Ronen Manelis told Israel Radio, adding: The Hamas organization is the main organization in the Strip. It is responsible for what happens within the Strip and what emanates from it.

Residents in Tel Aviv have been encouraged to stick to their usual daily routines. Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai told Channel 10 news that the public air raid shelters across the city have been opened as a protective measure.

About 40 minutes after the alarm, traffic was flowing normally on Tel Avivs main highway.

Netanyahu, who doubles as Israels defense minister, conferred with his military and security staff, to decide the aircraft bombing response to the rockets. According to Israels Channel 10 news, anonymous military officials had said that the rockets had been identified as Iranian-made Fajr rockets.

Tensions have been high for the past year along the Israel-Gaza frontier since violent protests were organized near Israels border fence.

The Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
Committee chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) speaks during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, on March 12, 2019. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Lindsey Graham Pledges FISA Abuse Hearings

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham pledged March 14 that he will hold hearings to get to the bottom of whether the FBI misled surveillance court judges by using the Steele dossier to obtain spy warrants against a former Trump campaign adviser.

I promise, everybody in the country, that in the Senate, were going to have hearings about the FISA process, Graham said at a Heritage Foundation event.

Graham, a Republican, has focused on how the FBI handled the dossier, which was written by Christopher Steele, a former British spy who investigated President Donald Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC.

The FBI relied heavily on Steeles dossier to obtain four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide.

In the dossier, Steele alleged that Page met with Kremlin insiders during the 2016 campaign. Steele also accused Page of working with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to conspire with Russians.

Page has vehemently denied the claims, saying that he did not meet with the two Kremlin insiders Steele claims he met.

Graham and other Republicans have argued that the FBI failed to disclose Steeles political motivations to the FISA judges. The FISA applications noted that Steele was working on behalf of someone who opposed Trumps candidacy, but they did not identify the Clinton campaign and DNC as the former British spys clients.

Steele, a former MI6 official, was hired by Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that was hired by the Clinton campaign and DNCs law firm, Perkins Coie.

Did the court adequately know the source of the document? Without the document, could you have gotten the warrant? Graham asked rhetorically at Thursdays event.

This is a very big deal, he added.

Republicans have also pointed to congressional testimony from Bruce Ohr, the Justice Department official who served as Steeles back channel to the FBI. Ohr told lawmakers in an Aug. 28, 2018 interview that Steele told him in September 2016, a month before the first FISA was granted, that he was desperate that Trump not win the election.

Ohr said that he told FBI and Justice Department officials about Steeles remarks, but Republicans have noted that those remarks are not included in the Page FISA applications.

Were going to get to the bottom of that the best we can. And well do other stuff, too, said Graham.

Follow Chuck on Twitter
English Danish

Company announcement no 06-19

15 March 2019





As announced in company announcement no 02-19, North Media has launched a share buy-back programme with Danske Bank as lead manager. This programme will expire no later than 30 September 2019.

In continuation thereof, North Media states that Danske Bank has provided information that, at 14 March 2019, Danske Bank has acquired 395,000 shares in North Media at an average share price of DKK 38.93 per share and a total price of DKK 15,377,000.

The acquisition by Danske Bank is equivalent to 1.97% of the North Medias share capital. Consequently, North Medias holding of treasury shares at 14 March 2019 accounts for 7.45% of the share capital.





This document is an unofficial translation of the Danish original. In the event of any inconsistencies, the Danish version shall apply.
Actress Lori Loughlin poses with her daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli (L), at the 2019 "An Unforgettable Evening" in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

Lori Loughlins Daughter Dropped by TRESemme

Actress Lori Loughlins daughter has been dropped by another company that advertises on her popular social media accounts as the fallout from a college-admission bribery case continues.

Hair products company TRESemme said in a statement Thursday that it is no longer working with Olivia Jade Giannulli.

Giannulli, a 19-year-old student at the University of Southern California, had promoted TRESemme products on her social-media accounts, which include a popular YouTube channel.

Her father is fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, and her parents are among 50 people arrested in a nationwide college admissions bribery scandal.

Prosecutors allege the couple paid $500,000 to have their two daughters labeled as crew-team recruits at the University of Southern California, even though neither is a rower.

Earlier in the day, the cosmetics company Sephora made the same move.

Paris-based Sephora says in a statement that after reviewing the developments, the company has ended its partnership with Giannulli effective immediately.

Lori Loughlin Loses Starring Roles on Hallmark Channel

The Hallmark Channel cut ties Thursday with favored star Lori Loughlin, a day after her arrest in a college admissions scam put the family-friendly network and extended Hallmark brand in uncomfortable proximity to a headline-grabbing scandal.

We are saddened by the recent allegations surrounding the college admissions process, Hallmark Cards Inc., parent company of the Crown Media Family Networks umbrella group that includes the Hallmark Channel, said in a statement.

We are no longer working with Lori Loughlin and have stopped development of all productions with the actress for Crown Media channels, the statement said.

The company initially took a wait-and-see approach after a federal investigation of the scam involving more than 30 parents, many of them prominent, was revealed Tuesday.

Loughlins career and the Hallmark Channel were deeply intertwined. Shes been among its so-called Christmas queens who topline a slate of popular holiday movies, and also starred in the ongoing Garage Sale Mysteries movies and the series When Calls the Heart.

Its a feel-good, family values-type channel, and obviously scandal is the opposite of that, said Atlanta-based market strategist Laura Ries.

There was more at stake than image. When Calls the Heart tapes in Canada, and a judge ordered Loughlins passport to be surrendered in December after grudgingly allowing her to cross the border for work until then.

Loughlin has not yet entered a plea in the case, and her attorney declined comment Wednesday after her first appearance in a Los Angeles federal court. Loughlins publicist declined comment Thursday on Hallmarks decision to drop her.

The actress isnt exclusive to Hallmark. Shes reprised her role as Aunt Becky for Netflixs Fuller House reboot of the popular series that originated in 1987 on ABC. But the sitcom represents a fraction of the streamers flood of programs, while Loughlin has occupied an increasing amount of Hallmark real estate since she starred in Meet My Mom in 2010.
(L-R) Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Ireland, President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence pose for a photo during the Shamrock Bowl Presentation with Prime Minister of Ireland Leo Varadkar on March 14, 2019 at the White House in Washington, DC. (Tom Brenner/Getty Images)

Melania Stuns in Green and Blue Dress During St. Patricks Day Celebration at White House

First lady Melania Trump definitely turned heads March 14 when she stepped out in a colorful green and blue dress at the White House for a St. Patricks Day celebration.

From left: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of Ireland, President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence pose for a photo during the Shamrock Bowl Presentation with Prime Minister of Ireland Leo Varadkar on March 14, 2019 at the White House in Washington, DC. (Tom Brenner/Getty Images)

The first lady looked just as striking as ever in the 3/4 length sleeve mint green, white and blue pattern dress that had buttons down the front and hit just below her knees as she joined President Donald Trump for the presentation of the Shamrock Bowl from the Prime Minister of Ireland, Leo Varadkar.

President Donald J. Trump and first lady Melania Trump pose with a bowl of Shamrocks presented by Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland at the White House on March 14, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

She completed the terrific look with loose hair, a matching belt and mint green high heels. To say she stunned the room would be an understatement.

President Donald J. Trump, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland, first lady Melania Trump and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence attend the Shamrock Bowl Presentation at the White House on March 14, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images)

While the pictures do show off the dress, video shared on Twitter does FLOTUS look even more justice. Check it out.

President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump participate in the Shamrock Bowl presentation. #StPattysDay https://t.co/WzJkIqTpr4  Circa (@Circa) March 14, 2019

The first lady always looks terrific no matter what the occasion, which has been documented numerous times. Check out some of her most unforgettable looks here.
Murder Charges Against Suspect in New Zealand Mass Shooting as Death Toll Reaches 49

Authorities in New Zealand have brought murder charges against a man suspected of being the gunman in the countrys worst mass shooting in which 49 people were killed and more than 20 wounded.

New Zealand Police said three people were in custody and one had been charged with murder on March 15 following the shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch during Friday prayers.

Authorities said the suspect would appear in Christchurch District Court on Saturday morning. Two others remain in custody.

A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, an Australian citizen, left a 74-page manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for the attack, although police have not confirmed he is the shooter.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed one of the suspects was an Australian national.

I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody I have been advised is an Australian-born citizen, Morrison told reporters in Sydney on Friday.

Evacuations Ordered

New Zealand Police provided an update on the investigation, announcing that evacuations had been ordered at a residence in the city of Dunedin.

Police are currently in attendance at a property of Somerville Street, Dunedin, the New Zealand force said on Twitter. Dunedin is a city near the southern tip of New Zealand, around 225 miles from Christchurch.

This is a location of interest in relation to the serious firearms incident in Christchurch today, the police wrote on Twitter. Evacuations of properties in the immediate area have taken place as a precaution.

1/2 Police are currently in attendance at a property on

Somerville Street, Dunedin. This is a location of interest in relation to the

serious firearms incident in Christchurch today. Evacuations of properties in the immediate area have taken place

as a precaution.  New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) March 15, 2019

Two explosives had been found earlier in the vehicle the gunman was driving.

There were a number of explosive devices attached to vehicles that have been rendered safe by defence forces  that cuts to the seriousness of the situation, said Police Commissioner Mike Bush in a press conference.

Announcing the murder charges Friday, Bush did not say whether the same shooter was believed to be responsible for both attacks.

The other two individuals detained are a man and a woman, according to authorities.

None of those in custody had been on any watch list.

It doesnt get any more serious, Bush said. The attackers were apprehended by local police staff. There have been some absolute acts of bravery.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the national security threat level was being raised to the second-highest level.

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, Ardern said, call this one of New Zealands darkest days.

All mosques in New Zealand had been asked to shut their doors and armed guards posted at them, police said, adding they were not actively looking for any other identified suspects.

What happened?

A gunman broadcast live footage on Facebook of the attack on one of the mosques, showing him driving to the scene, entering the building and shooting people at random.

Witnesses described the shooter as dressed in a bulletproof vest and a helmet as he opened fire at the Masjid Al Noor mosque at 1:40 p.m. local time, where there could have been as many as 300 people praying.

He had a big gun  he came and started shooting everyone in the mosque, everywhere, said witness Ahmad Al-Mahmoud, according to Reuters. He said he and others escaped by breaking through a glass door.

Video footagenot corroborated independently for authenticityshows worshippers, possibly dead or wounded, laying huddled on the floor. After spending more than two minutes inside the mosque spraying people with bullets, the gunman then walks outside to the street, where he shoots at people on the sidewalk.

Childrens screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get another rifle.

The gunman then walks back into the mosque, where there are at least two dozen people lying on the ground. After walking back outside and shooting a woman there, he gets back in his car and drives away. The video then cuts out.

Witness Len Peneha told The Associated Press he saw the gunman enter the mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door to the mosque, said after the gunman drove away, he went into the mosque to try and help.

I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said. Its unbelievably nutty. I dont understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. Its ridiculous.

There was a second shooting at a mosque in the neighborhood of Linwood that resulted in the deaths of at least seven people.

Police later announced 41 people had been killed at the Al Noor mosque, seven at the Linwood Masjid Mosque, and one died at the hospital.

Hospitals said children were among the victims.

Whats known about the suspect?

Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant is believed to be the key suspect in the Christchurch mosque mass shootings.

Tarrant worked as a personal trainer at Big River Gym in the northern New South Wales city of Grafton, Australia, according to Australias ABC news.

Gym manager Tracey Gray confirmed the man who filmed the attack and streamed it online was Tarrant.

I honestly cant believe that somebody I have probably had daily dealings with and had shared conversations and interacted with would be capable of something to this extreme, Gray told the news outlet.

Shortly before the attack began, an anonymous post on the discussion site, 8chan, said the writer was going to carry out an attack against the invaders and included links to a Facebook live stream, in which the shooting appeared, and a manifesto.

The 74-page manifesto, titled The Great Replacement and allegedly authored by Tarrant, cited white genocide as his motivation.

Tarrant described himself as an eco-fascist in his writings. I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist, he wrote.

A Twitter account with the handle @brentontarrant posted on Wednesday images of a rifle and other military gear decorated with names and messages connected to white nationalism. What looked like the same weapons appeared in the livestream of the mosque attack on Friday.

In the manifesto, Tarrant describes himself as just an ordinary white man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to a working class, low-income family.

He also says he carried out the attack to avenge thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders.

With additional reporting by Reuters and The Associated Press.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is seen on a screen as delegates look on during the third plenary session of the National People's Congress at The Great Hall Of The People on March 12, 2019 in Beijing, China. The annual Two Sessions gathering of Communist Party officials and delegates lays out a road map for the governments year ahead, including economic growth targets, diplomacy and military spending. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Netizens Criticize Beijings Political Meetings

The Chinese Communist Partys annual Two Sessions, or Lianghui, meetings are still underway, when the rubber-stamp legislature and its advisory body formally approves laws and agendas that the Party leadership has already established.

Despite the heavy censorship during this politically sensitive time, a number of online articles mocking the meetings have been widely circulating. One such article has captured many netizens attention with the title, The representatives themselves are problems, how can we expect them to solve problems?

The article began with a series of questions:Has the food safety problem been solved? Has the burden of medical costs for common people been reduced? Have the problems in education been solved? Has the issue of senior care been addressed?

It went on to say that more food and drug safety scandals have erupted in recent years, while the population ages rapidly, leading to a series of social problems.

The author raised the question of whether the delegates to the National Peoples Congressso-called representativescould truly tackle these issues. Chinese state media portray the Two Sessions meetings as a time for delegates to discuss regulations and laws.

But the author concludes that they cannot solve the countrys problems because they are the problems themselves.

They are the root cause of this deformed society. Think about it. How did they come about? Are they elected by the people? No. Do they meet the peoples expectations? No. They are all carefully selected from different levels and appointed by local bosses, the article said.

They have common traits: they are obedient, docile, know how to sing praises, kiss up to others, and understand the mindset of top level officials. They can bow and kowtow anytime, the article concluded.

The blunt and honest assessment of Chinas rubber-stamp legislature drew approval from netizens.

In addition, a post featuring a photo of Shen Jilan, a 89-year-old woman who has been a delegation to the National Peoples Congress since 1953, went viral. Shen is known for never missing a session since 1953. She has also never cast a no vote to any proposal in the past 65 years.

The text accompanying Shens picture read: She voted yes to the proposals of The Great Leap Forward [a political campaign that caused widespread famine]the Cultural Revolution, the decisions to crack down on Liu Shaoqi [top official who was later purged by Party leader Mao Zedong] and Deng Xiaoping [also purged under Mao].

Then in later years, she voted yes to the proposals of negating the Great Leap Forward, negating the Cultural Revolution, redressing Liu and Deng. The whole purpose of her life is to say yes to the Partys policies.
Central American caravan migrants walk along a roadside in Huixtla, Mexico, on their way to the United States on Jan. 20, 2019. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

New Group of Almost 400 Migrants Arrives South of US Border

A group of about 400 mostly Central American migrants has arrived via train in Mexicali, Mexicoacross the border from Calexico, Californiaand has been transported by buses to local shelters, Mexican media reported.

The group, which arrived March 6, is made up of 223 men, 96 women, and 38 children, many of whom are unaccompanied minors. Most of them are planning to go west to Tijuana, although resources there are so scarce that only 200 more people can be accommodated, said Gustavo Magallanes Cortes, the director of migrant affairs for Mexicos Migrant Care government program.

While the Mexican government hasnt provided resources to take care of the migrants, the National Institute of Migration, a federal agency, provided bus transportation to two shelters in the city, Francisco Vega, the governor of Baja California, said in an interview with La Cronica.

The Hijo Prodigo shelter is expecting to run out of food in three days, shelter manager Mario Nunez said.

The new group caught up with the roughly 200 other migrants who arrived in the border city earlier in the week. So far, there are about 800 migrants in Mexicali; a total of 1,000 were expected by the end of the week, according to reports.

Some migrants said they want to submit themselves to the United States and ask for help, because they either know people in the United States or have family that will receive them, Araceli Aviles, the manager at Alfa y Omega shelter in Mexicali, said.

Cortes said the group was accompanied by open-borders organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), who he said has been helping the migrants make decisions about their travels, according to Zeta Tijuana.

While Pueblo Sin Fronteras has denied being behind the formation, organization, or promotion of the caravans, Mexican Interior Secretary Olga Sanchez Cordero, at a meeting in Washington on Feb. 28, said that individuals from Pueblo Sin Fronteras are among those the Mexican government has identified in promoting and organizing the caravans.

Sanchez Cordero implied that some who promote caravans may be involved in human smuggling. She also said the new Mexican government under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is seeking to have a safe border and break down the huge business of human smuggling by regulating immigration in the country.

We want to regulate immigration in our nation, I believe this is a sovereign right of Mexico to have organized migration, she said.

This fiscal year, Border Patrol has apprehended almost 268,000 people at the southwest border, including more than 66,000 in February, according to Customs and Border Protection data. In January, the number was 48,000. The numbers are on target to surpass 640,000 for the fiscal year.

President Donald Trump has continued to speak about the importance of the border wall, now in the process of construction, to help end the crisis of illegal border crossings that has been worsened by the migrant caravans.

We are apprehending record numbers of illegal immigrantsbut we need the Wall to help our great Border Patrol Agents! he said in a tweet on March 8.

The United States has for years given Central American countries aid in the hopes of stemming immigration. In December 2018, the United States and Mexico announced a bilateral assistance program aimed at curbing Central American migration.

The United States pledged $10.6 billion, while Mexico said it would contribute $25 billion to develop southern Mexico over the next five years.
New Mexico Compound Suspects Face New Conspiracy Charges

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.Five extended family members who had been living on a remote New Mexico compound where a 3-year-old boy died before it was raided have been indicted on terrorism-related charges that accuse them of conspiring to attack U.S. law enforcement officers, military members and government employees, authorities said Thursday.

The superseding indictment against the suspects, who have been in federal custody since August on firearms charges, came six months after authorities first descended on their squalid compound near Amalia, just south of the Colorado state line.

A search for a missing Georgia boythe son of suspect Siraj Ibn Wahhajhad led law enforcement to the site on the high-desert where they found the childs remains as well as 11 hungry children living in filth.

Authorities also have accused Wahhaj and others of transporting weapons across state lines to New Mexico, and training children at a firing range on the property to carry out school shootings and other attacks that never occurred.

The suspects attorneys have disputed the allegations, saying they are based on the uncorroborated statements of children.

The defendants in this case allegedly were preparing for deadly attacks and their targets included law enforcement and military personnel, the very people who are committed to protecting all of us, Michael McGarrity, director of the FBIs Counterterrorism Division, said in a statement Thursday.

All the suspects, except Wahhaj, also have been charged with participating in the kidnapping of Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj, the boy who died after prosecutors say he had been denied medication for seizures. Jany Leveille, a leader of the group, believed medication suppressed Muslim beliefs, authorities said.

Because authorities say the 2017 abduction ultimately resulted in the boys death, the kidnapping count against Leveille, Hujrah Wahhaj, Subhana Wahhaj and Lucas Morton carries a potential sentence of life in prison or the death penalty should prosecutors win a conviction against them and decide to pursue the maximum punishment in the case.

The father has not been charged with kidnapping because of federal statutes that generally only allow for charging parents with abducting their own children in international cases.

The results of an autopsy for the boy whose remains were found at the compound property are still pending.

Defense attorneys said they were awaiting more information on the new charges before providing further comment.

We still dont have all the documents from the government regarding this case, said Amy Sirignano, who represents Morton.

She said in an email sent on behalf of the defense that their clients would plead not guilty at an arraignment scheduled for next Thursday.

The suspects remain jailed after a federal judge ruled in September that they could not be freed on bail as they await trial.

Federal authorities said Siraj Ibn Wahhaj and Leveille, who lived as a couple at the compound, had performed daily, hours-long prayer rituals over Wahhajs young son in the days leading to his deatheven as he cried and foamed at the mouth.

An FBI agent also said in federal court that Leveilles two teenage sons had described how she expected the dead child to be resurrected as Jesus and provide instruction to get rid of corrupt institutions that involve teachers, law enforcement and banks.

A prior federal grand jury indictment on firearms and conspiracy charges against the group stemmed from accusations that Leveille, who is originally from Haiti, had been living in the country illegally and that the others had conspired to provide her with firearms and ammunition.

By Mary Hudetz
An injured person is loaded into an ambulance following a shooting at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. (Martin Hunter/Reuters)

New Zealand Mosque Shooters Manifesto Apparently Posted Online, Admires Communist China

'The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the Peoples Republic of China'

The New Zealand mosque shooting suspect apparently wrote that the country with values closest to his own is communist China.

The nation with the closest political and social values to my own is the Peoples Republic of China, read the manifesto purportedly written by suspect Brenton Tarrant, who is accused of shooting 49 people in Christchurch. An Epoch Times reporter has viewed the documents.

The author also described himself as an eco-fascist and mostly agree with Oswald Mosley, a British politician who became the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Some purportedly far-right individuals have expressed their support for Mosley in places like 8chan and 4chans /pol/.

NBC News reported that the 74-page manifesto, called The Great Replacement, was uploaded online before the attacks unfolded.

The author also wrote that China [is] set to be the worlds most dominant nation in this century (sic), adding that its because the country is lacking diversity.

Were/are you a supporter of Donald Trump? the author of the manifesto also wrote. As a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure. As a policymaker and leader? Dear god no.

Sir Oswald Mosley is the person from history closest to my own beliefs, the author also said, adding that they dont have much antipathy toward Jews.

Were/are you an anti-semite? asks the author to themselves. No. A jew living in israel is no enemy of mine, so long as they do not seek to subvert or harm my people.

According to The Associated Press, the manifesto that was purportedly penned by Tarrant is similar to the one written by Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik.

Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish National Defense College told AP the New Zealand shooter is against mass immigration and has to some extent the same themes as Breivik, who posted a 1,500-page manifesto online before carrying out the 2011 attacks.

Breiviks lawyer, Oeystein Storrvik, was quoted by AP as saying that his client has very limited contacts with the surrounding world so it seems very unlikely that he has had contact with Tarrant or anyone else.

Ranstorp said that the New Zealand shooter said he wanted to leave prison after 27 years, likening himself to former South African President Nelson Mandela and said he would get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet another narcissistic right-wing extremist terrorist who has a distorted fantasy world, Ranstorp wrote, AP reported.

More Details

A person involved with the attacks also appeared to post regularly to the /pol/  Politically Incorrect forum on 8chan, Reuters reported.

About 1:30 p.m. (0030 GMT) on Friday, the anonymous user told the group I will carry out and attack against the invaders, and will even livestream the attack via Facebook; approving responses to the post included Nazi images and memes.

The post featured a link to the same 74-page manifesto that said he was motivated by white genocide, a term white supremacists use to describe immigration and the growth of minority populations. It also linked to a Facebook page for a user called brenton.tarrant.9, where the attack was livestreamed.

Nolwenn Bervas, lead terrorism analyst at the Risk Advisory Group, explained to Reuters: The amount of information and propaganda linked to the far-right, far-left or jihadism is extensive and accessible.

One of the Christchurch perpetrators posted his manifesto online before the attack where he wrote that he received/researched/developed his beliefs on the Internet, adding You will not find the truth anywhere else, he said.

He cited people like Dylan Roof or Anders Breivik as inspirations, who also researched and developed their beliefs online, Bervas said.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. (Mark Baker/AP Photo)

49 People Killed in New Zealand Mosque Shootings; 4 Held

Mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers killed 49 people on what the prime minister called one of New Zealands darkest days, as authorities detained four people and defused explosive devices in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called the events on March 15, one of New Zealands darkest days.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the national security threat level has been lifted from low to high after deadly shootings at two mosques.

Forty people were killed in Fridays attack and four people were taken into custody, including one Australian. Ardern said none had been on any terror watch list.

The security threat level is now at the second-highest level. She said authorities had no reason to believe there were more suspects, but we are not assuming that at this stage.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said police have defused a number of improvised explosive devices found on vehicles after the mosque shootings.

A man who claimed responsibility for the shootings left a 74-page anti-immigrant manifesto in which he explained who he was and his reasoning for his actions. He said he considered it a terrorist attack.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all the families affected by the shooting in New Zealand, its actually disgusting the world we live in.  iLackskills (@ilackskills) March 15, 2019

Witnesses of NZ Shooting Fled Amid Bodies

People who were inside a Christchurch mosque when a gunman opened fire have described seeing others around them dying and injured as they fled the terrifying scene.

Syed Ahmed was among those worshipping at a mosque on the New Zealand citys Linwood Avenue on March 15 when he says a man wearing a black motorcycle helmet and camouflage clothing begin shooting from outside.

This is what it meant to be Prime Minister! ????#NewZealand PM is informed and responsive on #NewZealandMosqueShooting stand strong with people of the country! Assures! Consoles! Our PM (Prachar Mantri) busy in documentery film shooting at the time of #PulwamaTerrorAttack

Think https://t.co/sbbgnXfcDM  SJM     (@SJmaniharzada) March 15, 2019

The shooter was shouting something which Ahmed couldnt hear over the sound of screams, before he crawled into a storeroom to get away.

Sabir Hussain told Stuff he was praying at the same mosque when he heard the imam (leader of the mosque) say our brothers have been shot.

My Heart goes out to all the Victims in the New Zealand Mosque Shooting. DO NOT watch or support the 17 min video circulating online and report it if you see it. My Prayers are with you ????????  LostPodFiles (@LostPodFiles) March 15, 2019

He went into the washroom where he saw a man dead outside, prompting him to jump out a window and hide behind a fence until police arrived.

The Linwood Avenue mosque is one of two which have subject to a shooting, with another taking place at a mosque on Deans Avenue.

Len Peneha, who lives next door to the latter, told the Associated Press he saw a man dressed in black enter the mosque at about 1.45pm.

He then heard dozens of shots as people ran out in terror and went into the mosque to help.

I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said.

Bloody hell That New Zealand mosque shooting video is disturbing. pic.twitter.com/5EjdBY07KS  Sthembiso Lebuso (@Mbiizozo) March 15, 2019

One person has been taken into custody and police are unsure whether others are involved.

We are dealing with a very serious and tragic series of events in the Christchurch-Canterbury area, police chief Mike Bush said.

The Associated Press contributed to this article
49 Killed in Terrorist Attack: They Have No Place in New Zealand for Mosque Shooters

At least 49 people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of worshippers attending Friday prayers on what the prime minister called one of New Zealands darkest days.

New Zealand will not harbour anyone responsible for firing weapons at South Island mosques, the countrys prime minister has said on March 15.

Jacinda Ardern from the left-leaning New Zealand Labour Party has made a stern warning to those responsible for mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques.

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, she told a media conference.

New Zealand Police Commissioner Mike Bush said the death toll has increased to 49.

Bush told a news conference that a man has been charged with murder and will appear in court tomorrow. He would not say whether the same shooter was responsible for both attacks.

Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison also tweeted: I condemn the violent, extremist, right-wing terrorist attack that has stolen the lives of so many innocent New Zealanders as they went about their peaceful practice of worship at their mosques in Christchurch today.

Read More Making Sense of the Political Spectrum

Earlier in the day, Ardern had said: They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home, they are us.

The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not, they have no place in New Zealand.

The person who has committed this violent act has no place here. To those in Christchurch; I encourage you to stay inside and follow the instructions of @nzpolice. The Police Commissioner will be making a public statement at 5pm. I will update everyone again later this evening.  Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) March 15, 2019

It is clear that this is one of New Zealands darkest days, she said, adding victims of the attack should have been safe to exercise their freedom of belief. Where they should have been in a safe environment and they have not been today.

What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities  New Zealand is their home  they are us.  Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) March 15, 2019

New Zealand Police confirmed three men and one woman are behind bars and will be questioned on their suspected involvement in the deadly attacks.

It doesnt get any more serious, Police Commissioner Mike Bush said. The attackers were apprehended by local police staff. There has been some absolute acts of bravery.

Police are unaware of other people who may be involved but cannot rule out there are other accomplices at-large.

Bush advised the general public to postpone visiting any mosque within New Zealand until the police investigation has ended and it is safe again.

It is a very serious and grave situation, he said.

Australian citizen Brenton Tarrant, 28, has been identified as the key suspect and a 74-page manifesto posted to a message board website, entitled The Great Replacement, which was allegedly authored by him.

Police believe the document contains evidence Tarrant planned to carry out the deadly shootings at Christchurch mosques to avenge the deaths of thousands in Europe.

In the manifesto, Tarrant describes himself as just an ordinary white man, 28 years old. Born in Australia to a working class, low-income family. He also explains he carried out the attack to avenge thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders.

5/6 Ambulance, Fire and Emergency NZ, and wider https://t.co/OwDOISklCS this stage we will not be discussing the offenders possible motivations or the causes of this incident. We have asked all mosques nationally to shut their doors, and advise that people refrain from visiting  New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) March 15, 2019

At the first shooting a gunman opened fire at the Masjid Al Noor mosque at 1:40pm local time, where a witness claimed there could have been as many as 300 people praying.

The mosque along with the second mosque in the Linwood neighbourhood have been closed for investigation. Police previously confirmed all of the citys schools and council buildings had been placed into lock down, and urged everyone in the downtown area to stay indoors as reinforcements flood the area.

The prime minister said she understood how staying inside means some families are separated but urged people to stay in lock down until police say otherwise.

Police have since lifted the lock down on schools and thanked the public their their co-operation.

6/6  these premises until further notice.The lock down of schools through Christchurch has been lifted.We thank the public for their ongoing cooperation.We would like to reassure members of the public that there is a large Police presence in the city.  New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) March 15, 2019

With additional reporting by The Australian Associated Press.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to media during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. (Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

NZ Lifts Terror Alert From Low to High, Probing Shooters Australian Links

Australian and New Zealand police and intelligence agencies are working closely on the Christchurch mosque shooting investigation.

Police and intelligence agencies are seeking to shed light on an Australian man arrested in New Zealand over the Christchurch mosque shootings.

Brenton Tarrant, originally from the northern NSW town of Grafton, was one of four people arrested over the shooting attacks at two mosques in the South Island city, which left at least 49 dead and more than 20 seriously injured.

In a 74-page manifesto detailing his motivations, Tarrant described himself as an eco-fascist in his writings. I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist, he wrote. The manifesto was posted to an online message board shortly before the horrific mosque massacre.

Nazism, Fascism, and Socialism Are All Rooted In Communism https://t.co/gOFkD9Sk2c  The Epoch Times (@EpochTimes) June 4, 2018

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was briefed by agency chiefs on Friday, March 15, and is expected to receive further briefings over the weekend on what he described as the vicious and callous, right-wing extremist attack.

I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody, I have been advised, is an Australian-born citizen, he told reporters in Sydney, without naming the man.

Obviously that element of the investigation Australian authorities are involved in.

Morrison said he was being kept abreast of developments in New Zealand, as federal and state police along with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation investigated.

I want to assure all Australians that the immediate responses that are required to ensure the security and safety of Australians have already been actioned, he said.

Australias terrorism alert level has not been lifted but New Zealands was lifted from low to high. Morrison said he had heard nothing to suggest any Australians were killed or injured in the shooting.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declined to reveal the nationalities of three other people taken into custody but confirmed they were not on any security watch list.

Two bombs attached to suspects vehicles were successfully disarmed.

The Australian National Imams Council condemned the attack and called on political leaders to do more to counter Islamaphobia.

The Australian Ahmadiyya Muslim Community also released a public statement strongly condemns the horrific terror attack on two Mosques in Christchurch on Friday.

This was a deliberate and targeted attack on innocent worshippers on the most Holy day for Muslims. It demonstrates that terror has no religion and knows no bounds.

The Ahmadiyya Community is the only Islamic organisation to endorse a separation of mosque and state.

I. H. Kauser, national president of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Australia and Grand Imam, also released a statement.

This is indeed a very sad day for all, he said. It is critical that at this time we all remain united against hatred, division and bigotry. All extremists share a common goal to divide our community and spread fear and we must make sure they are not successful.

I urge all to remain calm and continue attending their local Mosques. We must not bow down to the terrorists.

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.

By Paul Osborne

Additional reporting by Epoch Times Staff
English French

Premium income of 14.3 billion, up +4.0%

Marked increase in premium income for property and casualty insurance (+2.7%) and for life and health insurance (+5.3%)

Continued growth in France (+4.4%) and outside France (+1.6%)

Very sharp growth in net income (+54%) to 450 million

Economic operating income of 298 million

Realised capital gains following the sale of the Window building in La Defense

A Solvency 2 ratio of 167%

Equity of 8.9 billion

Mutual insurance certificate outstandings of 540 million at 31 December 2018

Above all, the high point of 2018 will remain the remutualisation of the governing body, which gives back to our Group its original coherence. On the economic level, the year ends with a very sharp increase in our net income in spite of an unfavourable second half of the year both in terms of claims experience and financial market. stated Jean-Yves Dages, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Groupama Assurances Mutuelles.

We posted a 4% increase in premium income testifying to the vitality of the Group and its commercial networks. Our insurance operating income remained stable despite a net claim experience above our expectations, both in terms of climate-related events and severe losses. Those figures reflect the strength of the Groups operating fundamentals helped by our dedication to the quality of service to our members and customers. added Thierry Martel, CEO of Groupama Assurances Mutuelles.

Paris, 15 March 2019  The Board of Directors of Groupama Assurances Mutuelles met on 14 March 2019, under the chairmanship of Jean-Yves Dages, and approved the Groups combined financial statements and the consolidated accounts of Groupama Assurances Mutuelles for fiscal year 2018.

The Groups combined financial statements include all business of the Group as a whole (i.e. the activity of the regional mutuals and of the subsidiaries consolidated within Groupama Assurances Mutuelles). The consolidated accounts of Groupama Assurances Mutuelles include the business activity of all subsidiaries as well as internal reinsurance (around 35% of the premium income of the regional mutuals ceded to Groupama Assurances Mutuelles).

The analysis below focuses on the combined scope. The key figures of the consolidated scope are presented in the notes.

Increased activity in all business lines

At 31 December 2018, Groupamas combined premium income stood at 14.3 billion, a +4.0% increase from 31 December 2017.

Business activity was up for property and casualty insurance (+2.7%), where the Group generated 7.4 billion in premium income at 31 December 2018, and for life and health insurance (+5.3%), for which premium income reached 6.7 billion.

Groupamas combined premium income at 31 December 2018

in millions of euros 31/12/2018 Like-for-like change (%) Property and casualty insurance 7,389 +2.7% Life and health insurance 6,706 +5.3% Financial businesses 169 +15.1% GROUP TOTAL 14,263 +4.0%

In France

Insurance premium income in France at 31 December 2018 amounted to 11.6 billion, up +4.4% compared with 31 December 2017.

In property and casualty insurance, premium income totalled 5,621 million at 31 December 2018, up +2.0%. Insurance for individuals and professionals increased +2.2% over the period to 3,357 million, driven by the growth of the home insurance (+3.2% to 1,082 million), motor insurance (+2.0% to 1,567 million), and professional risks (+1.7% to 455 million) segments. The Group is pursuing its commercial growth in its main markets and posted growth in its home portfolio (+26,000 policies). The growth in agricultural business (+0.8%) and the assistance activity (+19.1%) also contributed to the increase in property and casualty insurance premium income.

In life and health insurance, premium income amounted to 5,936 million, up +6.8% compared with 31 December 2017. Group premium income for life and capitalisation in France rose +7.9% in a market up +4% at the end of December 2018 (source: FFA). This change was mainly driven by the growth in individual unit-linked savings/pensions (+11.3%), the growth in contracts in euros being lower (+1.0%), and by the exceptional growth of the group retirement branch (+64.3%). In health insurance, premium income grew +5.9% compared with the previous period, supported by strong development in group health (+13.5%) and the consolidation of individual health (+1.3%).

International

The Group is present in 9 countries around the world, mainly in Europe. It has growth opportunities in China, a country in which it ranks second among foreign non-life insurers with 300 million in premium income[1]. In 2018, international activity rose +1.6% to 2.5 billion at 31 December 2018.

In property and casualty insurance, premium income was up +4.9% from the previous period at 1,768 million at 31 December 2018. This growth is mainly linked to the good performance of motor insurance in all the subsidiaries (+6.3%) and of home insurance (+4.5%) mainly in Hungary and Italy.

In life and health insurance, the 770 million in premium income was down -5.3% from 2017, with contrasting changes between the segments. The individual retirement savings activity was down -12.6%, particularly in Italy, as a result of the end of an agreement with a major partner and the subsidiarys strategy to limit inflows in euros in accordance with the Groups guidelines. Meanwhile, group insurance surged +12.2%, following on the strong growth in the group retirement (+30.7%) and the group health (+24.6%) segments, mainly in Greece and Italy.



Financial businesses

The Groups premium income was 169 million, including 164 million from Groupama Asset Management and 5 million from Groupama Epargne Salariale.

Groupama Asset Managements outstanding assets amounted to 99.4 billion at 31 December 2018, taking into account the development of third-party asset management, particularly in Italy and Spain.

[1] On a basis of 100% of the premium income of Groupama Avic China, an equity-method entity in Groupamas combined financial statements





Strong increase in net income

The groups net income was up significantly by 54% to 450 million at 31 December 2018 versus 292 million at 31 December 2017.

It included total economic operating income of 298 million at 31 December 2018 compared with 349 million at 31 December 2017.

Economic operating income from insurance was 354 million in 2018.

In life and health insurance, economic operating income reached 282 million in 2018, up 20 million from 2017. This increase was mainly due to the improvement of the technical margin in France in health insurance.

Economic operating income in property and casualty insurance totalled 72 million in 2018 compared with 102 million in 2017. The non-life net combined ratio was 99.3% at 31 December 2018, up +0.4 points from 2017, masking an improvement in the ratio in France of

-0.2 points to 98.6%. 2018 was marked by an increase in the cost of severe claims and a decrease in climate claims after a 2017 affected by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in the West Indies.

The operating expense ratio improved by -0.3 points to 27.7%.

The economic operating profit from banking and financial activities amounted to +34 million at 31 December 2018, and the Groups holding activity posted an economic operating loss of -89 million, including less tax consolidation income in 2018 compared with 2017.

Net income also includes non-recurring realised capital gains for a total of 351 million as of 31 December 2018, notably as a result of the sale of the Window building in La Defense.





A solid balance sheet



The groups equity totalled 8.9 billion at 31 December 2018. In particular, it includes the mutual insurance certificates issued by Groupama since the end of 2015 for 540 million, including 104 million collected in 2018.

Following the successful 500 million issue of subordinated instruments in September 2018, subordinated debt recognised as equity and subordinated debt not recognised as equity totalled 2.7 billion at 31 December 2018 compared with 2.2 billion at 31 December 2017.

At 31 December 2018, insurance investments stood at 85.2 billion versus 87.2 billion at 31 December 2017. The Groups unrealised capital gains reached 8.0 billion at 31 December 2018, including 5.2 billion from the bond portfolio, 0.6 billion from the equity portfolio, and 2.2 billion from property.

On 29 October 2018, Fitch Ratings confirmed the A- Insurer Financial Strength (IFS) ratings of Groupama Assurances Mutuelles and its subsidiaries and raised the outlook associated with these ratings to Positive.

At 31 December 2018, the Solvency 2 ratio was 297%. Groupama calculates its Group Solvency 2 ratio including the transitional measure on technical reserves authorised by the ACPR. Without the transitional measure on technical reserves, the solvency ratio is 167%.





Group Communications Department

Press contacts : Analyst and investor contacts: Guillaume Fregni  + 33 (0)1 44 56 28 56

guillaume.fregni@groupama.com

Josephine Leblanc  +33 (0)1 44 56 32 37

josephine.leblanc@groupama.com



Yvette Baudron - +33 (0)1 44 56 72 53

yvette.baudron@groupama.com

Valerie Buffard  +33 (0)1 44 56 74 54

valerie.buffard@groupama.com





* * *

Groupama financial information on the accounts closed at 31/12/2018 includes:

This press release, which is available on the groupama.com website,

Groupamas combined financial statements at 31/12/2018, which will be posted on the www.groupama.com website on 21 March 2019 for the French version and 25 April 2019 for the English version.

Groupama Assurances Mutuelles registration document, which will be filed with the AMF on 25 April 2019 and posted on the groupama.com website on 26 April 2019.

Get all the latest news about Groupama

on its website: www.groupama.com

and on Twitter: @GroupeGroupama





Appendix 1:

Key figures for Groupama  combined financial statements

A. Premium income

2017 2018 2018/2017 Reported premium income Pro forma premium income* Reported premium income Change **  million as % > FRANCE 11,066 11,066 11,556 +4.4% Life and health insurance 5,543 5,555 5,936 +6.8% Property and casualty insurance 5,523 5,511 5,621 +2.0% > INTERNATIONAL & Overseas 2,605 2,498 2,537 +1.6% Life and health insurance 840 813 770 -5.3% Property and casualty insurance 1,765 1,685 1,768 +4.9% TOTAL INSURANCE 13,672 13,564 14,094 +3.9% FINANCIAL BUSINESSES 147 147 169 +15.1% TOTAL 13,819 13,711 14,263 +4.0%

* Based on comparable data

** change on a like-for-like exchange rate and consolidation basis

B. Economic operating income*

 million 2017 2018 2018/2017 change Insurance  France 280 311 +31 Insurance  International 84 43 -41 Financial businesses 32 34 +2 Holding companies -46 -89 -43 TOTAL 349 298 -51

* Economic operating income : equals net income adjusted for realised capital gains and losses, long-term impairment provision allocations and write-backs, and unrealised capital gains and losses on financial assets recognised at fair value (all such items are net of profit sharing and corporate income tax). Also adjusted are non-recurring items net of corporate income tax, impairment of value of business in force, impairment of goodwill (net of corporate income tax), and external financing expenses.

C.Net income

2017 2018 2018/2017 change  million Economic operating income 349 298 -51 Net realised capital gains* 208 351 +143 Net income from discontinued business activities 136 -2 -138 Long-term impairment losses on financial instruments* -7 -7 0 Gains and losses on financial assets and derivatives recognised at fair value* 40 -25 -65 Financing expenses -57 -57 0 Goodwill impairment -58 0 +58 Other expenses and income -318 -109 +209 Net income 292 450 +158

* amounts net of profit sharing and corporate tax

Contribution of businesses to combined net income

 million 2017 2018 Insurance and services  France 163 389 Insurance - international subsidiaries 91 24 Financial and banking businesses -3 -24 Holding and other 41 61 Net income 292 450

D. Balance sheet

 million 2017 2018 Equity, group share * 8,912 8,884 Subordinated instruments 2,235 2,732 - classified as equity instruments 1,099 1,099 - classified as Financing debt 1,136 1,633 Gross unrealised capital gains 10,394 8,030 Total balance sheet 98,957 96,833

* including perpetual subordinated debt recognised as equity instruments

E. Main ratios

2017 2018 Non-life net combined ratio 98.9% 99.3% Debt-to-equity ratio* 25.9% 28.4% Solvency 2 ratio** 315% 297% Solvency 2 ratio (without transitional measure) 174% 167%

* ratio calculated using the method applied by our rating agency

** incorporating the transitional measure on technical reserves in accordance with the regulatory provisions





Appendix 2: Key figures for Groupama Assurances Mutuelles

Consolidated financial statements

A/ Premium income

2017 2018 2018/2017 Reported premium income Pro forma premium income* Reported premium income Change **  million as % > FRANCE 7,548 7,548 7,939 +5.2% Life and health insurance 4,200 4,211 4,548 +8.0% Property and casualty insurance 3,349 3,337 3,391 +1.6% > INTERNATIONAL & Overseas 2,605 2,498 2,537 +1.6% Life and health insurance 840 813 770 -5.3% Property and casualty insurance 1,765 1,685 1,768 +4.9% TOTAL INSURANCE 10,154 10,046 10,477 +4.3% FINANCIAL BUSINESSES 150 150 173 +15.2% TOTAL 10,304 10,196 10,650 +4.4%

* Based on comparable data

** change on a like-for-like exchange rate and consolidation basis

B/ Economic operating income*

 million 2017 2018 2018/2017 change Insurance  France 125 194 +69 Insurance  International 84 43 -41 Financial businesses 32 34 +2 Holding companies -45 -89 -44 Economic operating income* 196 182 -14

* Economic operating income : equals net income adjusted for realised capital gains and losses, long-term impairment provision allocations and write-backs, and unrealised capital gains and losses on financial assets recognised at fair value (all such items are net of profit sharing and corporate income tax). Also adjusted are non-recurring items net of corporate income tax, impairment of value of business in force, impairment of goodwill (net of corporate income tax), and external financing expenses.

C/ Net income

 million 2017 2018 2018/2017 change Economic operating income 196 182 -14 Net realised capital gains* 135 287 +152 Net income from discontinued business activities 136 -2 -138 Long-term impairment losses on financial instruments* -8 -3 +5 Gains and losses on financial assets and derivatives recognised at fair value* 29 -2 -31 Financing expenses -57 -57 0 Goodwill impairment -58 0 +58 Other expenses and income -286 -86 +200 Net income 87 319 +232

* amounts net of profit sharing and corporate tax

Contribution of business activities to consolidated net income

 million 2017 2018 Insurance and services  France -43 255 International insurance 91 24 Financial and banking businesses -3 -24 Groupama Assurances Mutuelles, holding and other 42 64 Net income 87 319

D/ Balance sheet

 million 2017 2018 Equity, group share* 5,257 5,274 Subordinated instruments 2,235 2,732 - classified as equity instruments 1,099 1,099 - classified as Financing debt 1,136 1,633 Gross unrealised capital gains 9,285 7,279 Total balance sheet 90,645 88,506

* including perpetual subordinated debt recognised as equity instruments

Attachment
Ocasio-Cortez Belittles Prayer After New Zealand Mass Shooting

Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) questioned the thoughts and prayers commonly used to offer comfort to victims in her response to New Zelands mass shooting where 49 people were killed.

Video footage widely circulated on social media, apparently taken by a gunman and posted online live as the attack unfolded, showed him driving to a mosque, entering it, and shooting randomly at people inside. Health authorities said an additional 48 people were being treated for gunshot wounds, including young children.

The alleged mastermind of the shooting described himself as an eco-fascist in his writings. I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist, he wrote, according to reports of his manifesto.

Ocasio-Cortez was quick to belittle the power of prayer in her initial reaction to the shootingthe worst ever mass killing in New Zealand and the worst mass shooting since 1990.

At 1st I thought of saying, Imagine being told your house of faith isnt safe anymore. But I couldnt say imagine Because of Charleston. Pittsburgh. Sutherland Springs. she wrote on Twitter. What good are your thoughts & prayers when they dont even keep the pews safe?

At 1st I thought of saying, Imagine being told your house of faith isnt safe anymore. But I couldnt say imagine. Because of Charleston.

Pittsburgh.

Sutherland Springs. What good are your thoughts & prayers when they dont even keep the pews safe?pic.twitter.com/2mSw0azDN8  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 15, 2019

In a follow-up post in her thread, Ocasio-Cortez attempted to clarify her comments, stating that the Thoughts and prayers she mentioned was a reference to the National Rifle Association (NRA) use of the phrase to deflect conversation from policy change. She also clarified that it was not a jab at New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who she had linked to in her post.

The congresswomans response drew condemnation from some who called her comments insensitive in the aftermath of the brutal shooting.

This is incredibly insensitive to my Muslim brothers and sisters who were slain in cold blood while they were literally praying because they want to be closer to their creator and they want to become better people, the Washington Examiners Siraj Hashmi wrote.

this is incredibly insensitive to my muslim brothers and sisters who were slain in cold blood while they were literally praying because they want to be closer to their creator and they want to become better people. https://t.co/uq9VzofTsN  siraj hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) March 15, 2019

If one of your first 1000 thoughts after a horrific mass shooting is to go dunk on a person, a religious belief or an organization on Twitter, you should delete your account, author Tim Young said on Twiter. If one of your first 1000 thoughts after a horrific mass shooting is to go dunk on a person, a religious belief or an organization on Twitter, you should delete your account.  Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) March 15, 2019 The mass shooting raised New Zelands security threat level to the highest Ardern said, adding that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack. Police said three people were in custody including one man in his late 20s who had been charged with murder. He will appear in court on March 16. Maybe hold off attacking the beliefs of others in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, especially when it was people of faith who suffered? said writer Susan Wright. Maybe hold off attacking the beliefs of others in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy, especially when it was people of faith who suffered?  Susan_Wright [Insufficiently Partisan] (@SweetieWalker) March 15, 2019 NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch also responded to the congresswomans claims of the NRAs usage of thoughts and prayers. Pretty sure thoughts and prayers isnt anyones phrase, and prayer especially (which you mocked earlier after what happened in a house of prayer?) is a real action, a petition to, a conversation with, Godin this case, to request protection, comfort for those suffering, Loesch wrote. Pretty sure thoughts and prayers isnt anyones phrase, and prayer especially (which you mocked earlier after what happened in a house of prayer?) is a real action, a petition to, a conversation with, God  in this case, to request protection, comfort for those suffering.  Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 15, 2019 One man who said he was at the Al Noor mosque told media the gunman was white, blond, and wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. The man burst into the mosque as worshippers were kneeling for prayers. President Donald Trump called the shooting a horrible massacre and said the United States stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all! My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques. 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2019 Reuters contributed to this report.
The cycle repeats, intermittently interrupted by vacation time. But were not particularly good about taking vacations. The Society for Human Resource Management found that while employees who take more vacation are happier and more productive, the average worker took only 17 days off in 2017.

Another recent survey found that the average U.S. employee takes only half of their allotted vacation time. Moreover, in todays 24/7 always-on work culture, vacation often means merely working off-site.

When vacation is done right, it results in many benefits.

 Stress Reduction: The American Psychological Association found that vacations reduce stress by removing people from the activities and environments that they associate with stress and anxiety.

 Cardiovascular Health: A study found that men who are at risk for heart disease who skip vacations for five consecutive years were 30 percent more likely to suffer heart attacks than those who took at least a week off each year.

 Increased Productivity: Studies by Ernst & Young and Boston Consulting Group concluded that those who take more vacations tend to be significantly more productive at work.

 Sleep: Studies have shown that frequent vacations can improve sleep by interrupting the patternssuch as late nights at the officethat lead to poor sleeping habits.

Beyond the health and wellness benefits, vacation is simply fun. Its an opportunity to step out of the everyday grind and have interesting new experiences (particularly of the first moment variety).

Treat Your Weekend as a Vacation

Rather than waiting all year for a two-week vacation to roll around, why not realize these benefits during the two-day vacation thats waiting for you every weekend?

In our experience, there are two distinctly different types of weekends. The first type you stumble into with little thought. When you ask the family on Saturday morning what they want to do this weekend, the reply is often shrugged shoulders. Time is spent online looking for events and activities, and before you know it, everyone defaults into the same old routine.

The second variety is one you look forward to with excited anticipation. Its fun, fulfilling, and adventurous. Theres structure because youve planned ahead, but also room for spontaneity. The days are interesting and often leave you tired but satisfiedjust like on a vacation.

Its not always possible, because of course, we all have obligations that get in the way, but approaching the weekend as if it was a vacation can help break up monotony and routine, and make life happier and more fulfilling.

A group of researchers recently put this hypothesis to a test. They conducted a study with 400 participants in which they asked one group to treat a weekend as a vacation and the other to treat it like a regular weekend.

The results were clearthose who treated the weekend as if it was a vacation were significantly happier when Monday arrived than those that didnt.

The researchers found that while the two groups of people engaged in different activities, the bigger impact came from a shift in mindset among the vacationers. They were more mindful of and attentive to the present moment throughout their weekends activities.

Plan More Microadventures

One of the most important things to keep in mind if youre looking to get more out of your weekend is to keep things simple. You dont need to create grandiose, time-consuming, and expensive plans to get the benefits.

Author, speaker, and world traveler Alastair Humphreys is a big proponent of microadventures, which he describes as something different, something excitingbut cheap, simple, short, and on your doorstep.

Hike a new trail. Camp in the backyard. Bike instead of driving. A cookout on the beach. With a bit of forethought, these activities can be easily fit into a typical weekend and will pay happiness dividends all week long.

Jay Harrington is an author, lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, and runs a northern Michigan-inspired lifestyle brand called Life and Whim. He lives with his wife and three young girls in a small town and writes about living a purposeful, outdoor-oriented life.
Investigators works at the scene of a fatal fire in Sheffield, Mass., on March 14, 2019. (Heather Bellow/The Berkshire Eagle via AP)

Prosecutor: 5 Found Dead After House Fire in Murder-Suicide

SHEFFIELD, Mass.A father of three appears to have killed his wife and his children, then taken his own life and set fire to the family home in rural western Massachusetts, the areas top prosecutor said.

Luke Karpinski and Justine Wilbur, both 41, along with their 7-year-old twins and a 3-year-old child, were found dead in their Sheffield home after the fire was extinguished on Wednesday morning, March 13.

A father of three appears to have killed his wife and his children, then taken his own life and set fire to the family home in rural western Massachusetts, the areas top prosecutor said. https://t.co/iQykC21kkw  Hub Tweets (@HubTwit) March 15, 2019

We are investigating this matter as a murder-suicide. At this time, the evidence indicates that Luke Karpinski was the assailant, Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington said Thursday.

Wilburs body was found on the first floor of the year-old home. Karpinski and the children were found on the second floor.

The investigation is ongoing, and Harrington did not disclose how the victims died or a possible motive. The state medical examiners office is conducting autopsies.

Karpinski and Wilbur were high school sweethearts who started dating their senior year at Wahconah Regional High School in nearby Dalton, family members told The Berkshire Eagle.

They were both attorneys who lived in Virginia before moving back to Massachusetts.

Wilbur was a patent attorney who worked in the Albany, New York, office of Hoffman Warnick and had worked on patents for cancer treatment, nanotechnology, and advanced materials, the firm said in a statement.

Justine was smart, knowledgeable, dedicated and hardworking. She was a devoted mother to her wonderful children, and a true friend to everyone in our firm, the statement said.

Karpinski was a federal chemical patent examiner who worked from home, Justine Wilburs sister said.

The deaths were the second tragedy to hit the town of about 3,200 residents about 120 miles west of Boston in less than a week. Samya Stumo, 24, who died in the Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday, grew up in Sheffield.

Mom Killed, Husband Jumps From Bridge in Apparent New Jersey Murder-Suicide: Reports

A New Jersey mother was found murdered in her home on Feb. 4, and on the same day, her husband jumped from a bridge to his death in an apparent murder-suicide, said officials.

Kenneth Bartones body was found in the Raritan River, and his car was parked on the Thomas Edison Memorial Bridge, reported the Asbury Park Press.

His wife, Denise Bartone, was killed earlier in the couples home in Freehold, New Jersey, while their three children were inside, said the Monmouth County Prosecutors Office in the report.

The girls werent injured in the incident, and theyre now staying with family members.

Officials are investigating the case as a murder-suicide, but many details arent clear. There was no suicide note, said Christopher Swendeman, a spokesman for the prosecutions office, the Park Press reported.

Also unclear is how Denise Bartone was killed or who killed her. They also didnt reveal who found her body, said officials.

BREAKINGAuthorities are investigating a suspicious death at a Freehold Township home. Reports suggest that the incident is believed to be part of a murder-suicide.  The Asbury Park Press  201924

She was the former chairwoman of the Freehold Township Education Foundation, said the Park Press.

Before her death, she worked at Rutgers University as a marketing specialist, a university spokesperson told the news outlet.

Kenneth Bartone, meanwhile, previously worked for Morris Plains-based Allied Signal as a scientist.

Ed Coughlin, a neighbor, said police swarmed the home on Koster Drive at around 7:30 a.m. on Feb. 4. He said the family, who he didnt know well, moved to the area about a decade ago.

Wave hi and bye, that kind of thing, he said.

Neighbor Amy Kurczeski said shes upset, adding, Its a quiet community.

The Bartones appeared to be a normal family, she continued.

County forensics inspectors confer with police on Koster Drive @AsburyParkPress pic.twitter.com/tMuxww6ALI  Alex N. Gecan (@GeeksterTweets) February 4, 2019

A third neighbor, Lenny Davidowitz, said hes never seen anything like this since he moved to the neighborhood in 1977.

Im extremely upset, he said. I never ever expected this in this area.

My thoughts and prayers are with the Bartone girls and their extended family, Neal Dickstein, superintendent of Freehold Township schools, said. Freehold Township is an amazing community, and I know that we will join together to support this family however possible.

Local officials are asking anyone with information about the deaths to come forward by contacting Detective Andrea Tozzi of the Monmouth County Prosecutors Office at 1-800-733-7443 or Freehold Township Police Detective James Burdge at 732-462-7908.

Police activity at suspicious death investigation in Freehold @AsburyParkPress pic.twitter.com/3AOHuavPv0  Alex N. Gecan (@GeeksterTweets) February 4, 2019

A vehicle registered to the family was discovered parked on the Thomas Edison Memorial Bridge in Woodbridge early this morning, the prosecutors office told Patch.com. Kenneth Bartone, the husband of the victim, was found floating in the Raritan River this afternoon, dead of an apparent suicide. We do not believe there is any further danger to the public.

Officials said the public is not in any danger, Pix11 reported.

Other details about the deaths are not clear.

A GoFundMe for their family was set up.

Suicide Hotlines

In Australia, the suicide prevention telephone hotline at Lifeline is 13 11 14. You can also visit the Lifeline website at lifeline.org.au. Youth can contact the Kids Helpline by phoning 1800 551 800 or visiting headspace.org.au/yarn-safe

If you are in an emergency in the U.S. or Canada, please call 911. You can phone the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 1 800 273 8255. Youth can call the Kids Help Phone on 1800 668 6868.

The Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this article.
Illustration of a victim being forcibly injected with psychiatric drugs. Psychiatric abuse as a method of persecution is common in China, particularly against Falun Dafa adherents. (Minghui.org)

Psychiatric Torture and the Unspeakable Suffering It Causes

Editors note: The Epoch Times is publishing a number of articles exposing the use of torture by the Chinese regime against the groups it targets, and the suffering and harm it causes to those subjected to it.

Psychiatric torture is one of the more terrifying methods the Chinese regime uses to rein in those classed as seriously interfering with public order and who disrupt social stability. Falun Dafa practitioners, political dissidents, and citizens who dare to protest government policies frequently have these labels slapped on them to justify confining them in psychiatric hospitals.

The number of mental hospitals was increased across the country after the persecution campaign against Falun Dafa practitioners began in 1999. In September 2004, the Ministry of Public Security issued a public notice requiring provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities to set up psychiatric hospitals as soon as possible if they didnt have them already.

As of March 2014, Minghui.organ online clearinghouse for first-hand information about the persecution of Falun Dafahad published 7,700 articles about Falun Dafa practitioners being persecuted in psychiatric hospitals. However, these statistics are believed to understate the true numbers greatly due to the difficulty of investigating and obtaining information from China.

In these facilities and other detention centres, authorities forcibly administer psychiatric drugs to Falun Dafa practitioners to destroy their will and force them to transform (abandon the practice).

This approach is clearly laid out in an internal Party document that states Falun Dafa practitioners must undergo a medical treatment method, and involve drugs when necessary and use medical methods and clinical experimental guidelines to achieve scientific transformation.

Other groups targeted by the regime are also subjected to such torture, such as democracy activists and Uighur Muslims.

Members of persecuted groups report having been used as guinea pigs and falling into prolonged periods of hallucinations after being injected with unknown psychiatric drugs. Others have suffered severe damage to their central nervous system from the injections. Yet othersmentally healthy when forced into the hospital for political reasonsbecame deranged or even died after being treated there.

The following seven cases shed light on the immense suffering caused by this heinous practice, which has been condemned by the World Psychiatric Association and other such organizations.

7 Cases of Psychiatric Torture

Injected With Unknown Drugs, Man Dies in Extreme Pain

In July 2004, Chang Yongfu, a 44-year-old Falun Dafa practitioner, was taken to a psychiatric hospital in Harbin City where he was forcibly injected with drugs. Two years later, after he was allowed to go home, he was mentally disoriented, his face and nose were swollen, and he could hardly see. He couldnt sleep at night and yelled incoherently. After he regained his senses somewhat, he told his family hed been injected with unknown medication at the hospital, which caused pain throughout his entire body. Later, his nose became more and more swollen and bled constantly. He also lost his eyesight.

When Chang died on January 18, 2007, his ears and eyes were bleeding, and his nose and mouth were filled with blood.

Mood-Altering Drugs Have Taken Their Toll

After being labelled by the police as mentally ill, elderly pro-democracy activist Qiao Zhongling has been shuttled between three separate psychiatric hospitals in Shanghai over the past nine years. Qiao, 74, was deemed a counter-revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution period and later joined the democracy movement.

According to his former psychiatrist Ma Jinchun, who now lives in the United States, Qiaos health has greatly deteriorated due to the force-feeding of psychiatric drugs. Mood-altering drugs have taken their toll on Qiao Zhongling, causing his hands and mouth to shake constantly, Ma said. He also suffers from high cholesterol, memory loss, and other symptoms. His situation is very bad.

She struggled as if she were being driven out of her mind

Zhang Fuzhen was a Falun Gong practitioner from Shandong Province. In 2001, she was arrested and sent to a brainwashing centre. Sun Fuxiang, who was assigned to monitor Zhang, witnessed what happened to her before she died.

The police stripped Ms. Zhang of her clothes and shaved her head, Sun recounted. They tortured and insulted her. She was tied spread eagle on a bed. She had to relieve herself on the bed. Then they injected some unknown, poisonous drug into her. Right away she was in unbearable pain. She struggled as if she were being driven out of her mind, and she died in absolute agony.

Man Forcibly Injected With Drugs 7 Times, Incurs Brain Damage

Wang Weihe, a Falun Dafa practitioner from Shandong Province, was taken by police to a psychiatric hospital in 2000. At that hospital, a drug that is only supposed to be administered once a month was often forced on Falun Dafa practitioners daily. Upon being injected it can cause immediate fainting.

One day, a doctor kicked Wang to the ground and then tied him to an iron bed. After torturing him for a while, the doctor gave him an injection, then beat him again for another while. This process was repeated for 11 hours, with Wang receiving a total of seven injections. As a result, Wang lapsed into a vegetative state, constantly drooled, and could no longer take care of himself.

24-Year-Old Woman Goes Blind, Deaf From Unknown Drugs

Falun Dafa practitioner Wang Yujie was arrested in March 2010 and detained in a forced labour camp for a year before being transferred to a brainwashing centre in Wuhan City.

Right before she was released, she was injected with unknown drugs. At home, Wang started foaming at the mouth and vomiting severely. She couldnt eat or even drink water. Her whole body hurt so much that she cried continuously. She became blind, then deaf, and her hands became deformed. After four months of agony, she passed away in September 2011 at the age of 24.

Psychological and Physical Torture, Drugs, Poison

Uyghur Muslim Gulbakhar Jalilova spent 15-months interned in an all-female camp in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi before she was released last September.

During that time, she saw people who were forced to ingest unknown medicine daily and were injected with a substance every month that numbs your emotions. The injection makes you feel like you have no memory. You dont miss your family, you dont feel like you want to get out. You feel nothingits a very strange feeling, she said.

She witnessed one woman fall to the floor after eating poisoned food. There were bubbles and foam coming out of the ladys mouth  she was paralyzed, she said. She also saw a detainee put to sleep  she was killed by injection. She just died like that in front of me.

They injected me with some sort of drug

On April 13, 2007, Falun Dafa practitioner Wei Fengju was released from a forced labour camp in Changchun City where she had been tortured physically and mentally. She was so skinny and weak that she could barely eat anything and couldnt take care of herself. A month after her discharge she began to have severe diarrhea, she ached all over, and her weight dropped drastically. She also had vision problems and mental confusion. She passed away in July of that year. She once told her family, I cannot be healed. They (the guards in the labour camp) injected me with some sort of drug.

Source: Minghui.org, The Epoch Times, NTD Television
Illustration of a victim handcuffed to a bed under a glaring light that is never turned off. (Minghui.org)

Psychological Torture: Worst Scars Are in the Mind

Editors note: The Epoch Times is publishing a number of articles exposing the use of torture by the Chinese regime against the groups it targets, and the suffering and harm it causes to those subjected to it.

A doctor with the International Committee of the Red Cross who has visited numerous detention centres around the world says psychological torture can have extremely negative effects.

Torture during interrogation often includes methods that do not physically assault the body or cause actual physical painand yet entail severe psychological pain and suffering and profoundly disrupt the senses and personality, Dr. Hernan Reyes wrote in an article titled The Worst Scars Are in The Mind: Psychological Torture.

According to Amnesty International, sleep deprivation and solitary confinement are two methods of psychological torture commonly used in China, but there are many more, including threats against family members, periods of intense grilling, and instilling fear.

Victims include those from the Tibetan and Uyghur ethnic minorities suspected of separatism, human rights lawyers, political dissidents, Falun Dafa adherents, democracy activists, and members of underground churches.

China has a huge system of re-education centres, commonly called brainwashing centres. Possibly the biggest such centrewhich has been described as a concentration camp by rights groupsis the one in the Xinjiang region, where at least a million Uyghurs and other Muslim groups are held and subjected to psychological indoctrination, including being forced to attend political re-education lessons and sing political songs.

According to the U.K.s Independent, Muslims have been forced to denounce Islam and swear loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. A hearing of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China last July was told that detainees are often kept in isolation without food and water and prevented from sleeping, as well as interrogated about their religious practices and about having made trips abroad.

A report by the International Campaign for Tibet found that the level of violence directed at Tibetan political prisoners is frequently extreme and results in Tibetans being left not only with permanent physical injuries but also with serious psychological trauma. A 2018 report by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy found that since 2012, monks and nuns expelled from various temples and monasteries have been held in re-education centres for weeks or months without any access to due legal process.

For years, Christians in China have faced ongoing psychological pressure as a whole due to authorities arresting pastors, shutting down churches and congregations, burning bibles, and removing crosses from churches.

In the latest development, Mission Network News reports that there are plans afoot to rewrite parts of the Bible to make it more compatible with the state ideology. According to The Christian Post, authorities are also pressuring up to 20,000 underground house churches to either close or join the state-sanctioned church as Beijing seeks to tighten control over religious groups.

Use of brainwashing centres to incarcerate Falun Dafa adherents is particularly widespread in China. According to human rights watchers, ever since the Chinese regime announced in 2013 that it is abolishing the forced labour camp system, brain washing centres have become the main facilities to persecute Falun Dafa practitioners. In these centres, adherents are subjected to constant verbal abuse and threats, as well as physical torture. They are also often force-fed or injected with drugs that damage the nervous system to try to force them to give up their belief.
Ambulance staff take a man from outside a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019. (Mark Baker/AP Photo)

Second Mosque Shooting in New Zealand Reported, One in Custody

New Zealand media are reporting that a second shooting has occurred in another mosque in the city of Christchurch.

Earlier Friday afternoon, police had urged people to stay indoors as authorities responded to two shootings in Christchurch.

One shooting was reported at the Masjid Al Noor mosque on Deans Ave, Christchurch.

Witness Len Peneha says he saw a man dressed in black enter the Masjid Al Noor mosque and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

He says he also saw the gunman flee before emergency services arrived. Peneha says he went into the mosque to try and help, I saw dead people everywhere. Other witnesses have said that many people have been killed in the shooting. #Breaking: Just in  Alleged video of the shooter being rammed by the police of #NewZealand after the shootings at the Al-Noor mosque and another, in the #Christchurch Terror attack. pic.twitter.com/6w5ze3qufX  Sotiri Dimpinoudis (@sotiridi) March 15, 2019 The second shooting was reported at the Linwood Mosque in Christchurch. New Zealand news website Stuff reported that a witness to the shooting at the Linwood mosque Syed Ahmed told media they saw a man wearing a black motorcycle helmet and camouflage clothing. The shooter also appeared to be carrying a black assault rifle with white writing like that which was seen in the video from the first shooting. Ahmed said he thought at least eight people in the mosque had been shot, including two of his friends. Police have urged people not to share the footage that the shooter posted of the shooting. Police are aware there is extremely distressing footage relating to the incident in Christchurch circulating online. We would strongly urge that the link not be shared. We are working to have any footage removed.  New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) March 15, 2019 Janine Richmond, a practice manager at the Linwood Dental Centre, said she had heard about 20 shots come from Linwood mosque at around 1:45 p.m., Stuff.co.nz reported. It remains unclear how many people may have been killed and how many have been injured. Police have confirmed that one suspect is currently in custody, but that they believe that there may be other offenders after the shootings. 1/5 Police is responding to a very serious and tragic incident involving an active shooter in central Christchurch. One person is in custody, however Police believe there may be other offenders. This is an evolving incident and we are working to confirm the facts  New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) March 15, 2019 Police have not described the scale of the Friday shooting but urged people in central Christchurch to stay indoors. UPDATE  SERIOUS FIREARMS INCIDENT IN CENTRAL  New Zealand Police  2019314 New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke to the media after news of the two shootings broke. She told the media, What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand.Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communitiesNew Zealand is their homethey are us. The person who has committed this violent act has no place here. The person who has committed this violent act has no place here. To those in Christchurch; I encourage you to stay inside and follow the instructions of @nzpolice. The Police Commissioner will be making a public statement at 5pm. I will update everyone again later this evening.  Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) March 15, 2019 More to come. BREAKING: A gunman entered a mosque and began shooting with an automatic weapon in New Zealands city of Christchurch. For more on the active shooter situation: https://t.co/nGyALTPYhg https://t.co/ETUGfMcHDV  Al Jazeera News (@AJENews) March 15, 2019 With reporting by The Associated Press From NTD News
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) talks to reporters during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol Nov. 1, 2017 in Washington. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Sen. Lindsey Graham Calls for a Special Counsel to Investigate FBI, DOJ

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) took to the Senate Floor on March 14 to call for the appointment of a new special counsel to investigate possible misconduct by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI.

Graham made the remarks in response to a Democrat-backed resolution that passed in the House unanimously earlier in the day, which calls for any final report in special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation to be made public. The South Carolina senator said the resolution should be amended before it is considered in the Senate.

He summarized his proposed changes in a tweet on March 14, requesting that the House-passed Mueller resolution should be amended to include [the] appointment of a Special Counsel to:

*) Investigate alleged misconduct around the handling of the Clinton email investigation.

*) Investigate the abuse of the FISA warrant process against Mr. Carter Page.

House-passed Mueller resolution should be amended to include

appointment of a Special Counsel to: *) Investigate alleged misconduct around the handling of the Clinton email investigation. *) Investigate the abuse of the FISA warrant process against Mr. Carter Page.  Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 14, 2019

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant allows for some of the most invasive surveillance methods on someone suspected of spying with or for a foreign government.

Was there two systems of justice in 2016? One for the Democratic candidate and one for the Republican candidate? Graham said during his Senate address. Where the Republican candidates campaign had a FISA warrant issued against someone associated with it based on a document that was known to be unreliable [and] politically charged on four different occasions.

He continued, This should bother every American and rather than me telling you whether it happened or not why dont we appoint a Mueller-like figure to look at how the Clinton email investigation ended up the way it did and what the tarmac meeting was all about between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton.

We let Mueller look at ALL THINGS Trump related to collusion & more. Somebody needs to look at what happened on the other side, find out if the FBI & DOJ had 2 systems  1 supporting person they wanted to win, 1 out to get the person they wanted to lose.https://t.co/D8jVE0e5XZ  Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 14, 2019

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) objected to the proposed amendments and the bill did not get a vote.

This is not the first time Graham has requested a new special counsel investigation into the two federal agencies. He made similar remarks multiple times last year calling for an investigation into all things related to Hillary Clinton.

In an interview with Fox News on March 13, Graham said there were two questions that needed to be answered in an investigation.

There are two questions that I think the public deserves an answer to: Did they short-circuit the Clinton e-mail investigation because they wanted her to win, and they knew if they charged her she might lose? Did they start the Russian investigation against Trump as an insurance policy in case he did win? Those are the two questions that Ill try to get you answers to, Graham said.

He continued, the point is, the Congress, menot gonna happen in the Housewere going to call them all before the committee. Did they try to invoke the 25th Amendment to take the president down? Did they get a warrant against an American citizen using information they know was flawed. Did they tank the Clinton email investigation because they were afraid if they indicted her she would lose an election they wanted her to win? Youre going to get answers to that, the best I can give them to you.

At a Heritage Foundation event on March 14, Graham pledged that he will hold hearings to find out whether the FBI misled surveillance court judges by using the unverified Steele dossier to obtain FISA warrants against Carter Page. The dossier was written by British former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

I promise, everybody in the country, that in the Senate, were going to have hearings about the FISA process, Graham said.
SALT LAKE CITYKeith McCann is a catastrophe insurance adjuster, so work took him to San Francisco last year because of the fires. While he was there, he saw a brilliantly colored poster, and knew he had to see Shen Yun Performing Arts.

He called his daughter in Salt Lake City, hoping she could fly out to the Bay Area to attend a performance with him, but she has small children and it was much too short notice. So when the father and daughter saw that Shen Yun would tour to Salt Lake City, they got the tickets.

McCann was in Santa Barbara, once again for work, but the very afternoon of the performance, he flew back to Salt Lake City so they could attend the performance together.

Its spiritually uplifting and I feel that I have been spiritually uplifted this evening, McCann said at the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Theater on March 14.

McCann said it was moving on every level and the performance lived up to every expectation he had.

The choreographers were able to convey human emotions through the dance choreography. I felt what they were feeling, watching them perform, McCann said.

The perfect example, the last performance, it spoke out about society today, and how I think were loosing focus and whats important. It touched me. It was very meaningful for me. We think these thoughts, and then we see them presented on stage, and its beautiful, presentation of these dancers, and it causes one to reflect on whats important in life, he said.

Shen Yun is the worlds foremost classical Chinese dance company, and it was formed by artists in New York with the goal of reviving traditional Chinese culture.

McCann has spent some time living in China, and has a great love for the Chinese people. That was part of what drew him to see Shen Yun, and it was touching to see this culture brought back to life in a performance that actually cannot be shown in China today.

Shen Yun openly showed the goodness of people, McCann said, but in China today it is more of a private thing, because the people are aware of the Chinese regimes oppression. People are guarded about their thoughts and actions, because no one wants to get in trouble.

In this presentation tonight, it showed what the Chinese people might be like if they werent in such a restrictive environment, McCann said. It makes me want to find a way to get society to be more open.

He hoped perhaps Shen Yuns performances could inspire change in China as well.

I think if given a chance, the Chinese people will embrace much of what was displayed tonight, or presented tonight in these dances, in these presentations, he said. They just need a chance.

What McCann experienced himself was a theme of family, and eternal progression.

I believe that a divine being sent us here on Earth because it would give us an opportunity to gaining wisdom, to learn to be obedient, and to develop faith, he said. And so much of the Chinese philosophy that was expressed tonight, I hold dear. I didnt find opposition to anything that I believed in my life, and whats created my moral environment. And so it was an inspiring evening.

With reporting by NTD Television.

The Epoch Times considers Shen Yun Performing Arts the significant cultural event of our time and has covered audience reactions since the companys inception in 2006.
Former Texas Congressman and Democratic party Presidential Beto O'Rourke speaks to a crowd during a campaign stop in Muscatine, Iowa on March 14, 2019. (Stephen Maturen/AFP/Getty Images)

Texas Democratic Party Leader Cant Name One Beto Accomplishment

Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa refused to name a single accomplishment made by presidential candidate Beto ORourke, in an appearance on Fox News on March 14.

The host, Ed Henry, repeatedly pressed Hinojosa to give an example of an accomplishment by ORourke, a former congressman who announced his bid for the presidency earlier that day.

What would you say is Beto ORourkes top accomplishment that he brings to the table? Henry asked.

I think what Beto ORourke has done, particularly in the last senatorial campaign that he ran in 2018, is  show the people of Texas and now the people of America what it means to be an honest politician, an honest person who is going to talk about things that are important to families all across this country. You dont always see that, Hinojosa answered.

Pardon me, but Nancy Pelosi was asked today about his biggest accomplishment and she could not really name one, even though he served in the House for a brief time admittedly, Henry followed up. But you are telling me he is an honest politician, thats his biggest accomplishment?

Hinojosa then pointed out that Republicans controlled the House of Representatives during the entirety of ORourkes six years in office.

Sir, but did he create a job somewhere? Did he create a product? What has he accomplished? It is an honest question, Henry pressed. Im not even talking about Congress. What has he gotten done in his life, sir? Has he created a job?

Your question is meaningless, Hinojosa concluded.

ORourke announced his candidacy in an internet video on March 14 and began campaigning in Iowa. In the announcement video, he positioned climate change as an existential threat and suggested that Americas economy and democracy are in a crisis.

I am running to serve you as the next president. The challenges we face are the greatest in living memory. No one person can meet them on their own. Only this country can do that, and only if we build a movement that includes all of us. Say youre in: https://t.co/EKLdkVET2u pic.twitter.com/lainXyvG2n  Beto ORourke (@BetoORourke) March 14, 2019

ORourke is embracing the socialist Medicare for All and Green New Deal plans, which, by some estimates, would triple the tax burden on American taxpayers. He repeatedly refused to disavow socialism in a profile aired by the BBC last year.

In Iowa on March 14, ORourke discussed packing the Supreme Court with Democrats, said that the people drafting climate change proposals are akin to D-Day soldiers and lamented that Americans who live in rural areas dont have access to Tinder, a popular dating app.

ORourke is one of 15 Democrats who has announced a 2020 bid. In an average of early polls tallied by Real Clear Politics, he trails former vice president Joe Biden by almost 24 points. Biden has not announced his candidacy but is widely expected to do so.

ORourke gained national attention running a long-shot bid for the U.S. Senate in Texas against Sen. Ted Cruz (R). ORourke lost the election but has worked to remain in the public eye, including doing an interview with Oprah Winfrey.

In February he staged a rally in El Paso to compete with the one held by President Donald Trump nearby on the same day. The crowd watching Trumps speech dwarfed the one gathered for ORourke, earning a jab from Trump.

He challenged us, Trump, the presumed GOP candidate for 2020, said. So we have lets say, 35,000 people, tonight. And he has 200 people, 300 people. Not too good.

That may be the end of his presidential bid, the president added.
Flowers bloom at the Carrizo Plain National Monument in California in 2017. (Bob Wick/Bureau of Land Management)

Thousands Swarm to Catch Glimpse of Californias Rare Super Bloom

Thousands of visitors are making their way to the hills of Lake Elsinore to catch a glimpse of the rare California super bloom, as the Southern region sees its second bloom of wildflowers in two years.

The past few weeks have seen Californian hills blanketed in a stunning display of eye-popping orange California poppies after an unusually rainy winter, Los Angeles Times reported.

Steady rain showers since December have transformed the once drought-stricken canyons into a burst of deep orange and purple wildflowers, attracting swarms of people, keen to photograph its beauty.

Its better than going to Disneyland, Riverside County Habitat Conservation Agency patrol officer Randy Solis told Los Angeles Times, while enjoying the blooms at the Temescal Mountains.

A super bloom is a phenomenon, which only occurs after a perfect mix of heavy rainfall and appropriate temperatures, and the burst of wildflowers usually only graces California once a decade, according to Conde Nast Traveler.

The #superbloom is causing a super traffic jam on 15 freeway as visitors want a close-up look of the orange poppies filling the hillsides in Walker Canyon in #lakeelsinore #wildflowers pic.twitter.com/IckZHjyxKd  Gina Ferazzi (@GinaFerazzi) March 10, 2019

Hiker Anjelica Sloan from Seattle was at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park with her partner Megan, who hadnt seen a super bloom since she was a young child.

The contrast between the mountains and the shadows and the flowers is just remarkable, she told the New York Times.

Southern Californias last super bloom was in 2017 following years of drought, and naturally, the explosion of wildflowers has attracted nature lovers.

But Solis is concerned the wildflowers are being damaged in exchange for the perfect photograph.

Many of the vivid orange flowers are being trampled on, plucked as souvenirs, and photographers are balancing their camera tripods on the flower beds, Los Angeles Times reported.

The Super Bloom aint playin.  pic.twitter.com/4V26Mgixzm  Trisha Smith (@smithalynnn) March 7, 2019

Look at those people. Theyre stepping all over the poppies. The people are niceexcept when theyre fighting about poppies, Solis continued.

Visitors are scowling among themselves to be wary of stepping on the delicate flowers, which have attracted so many nature lovers, that additional parking lots have opened around Walker Canyon to ease traffic.

Around 1,000 visitors have been making their way to Walker Canyon daily to catch a glimpse of the spectacular super bloom, according to Kim Cousins, president of the Lake Elsinore Chamber of Commerce.

But unlike 2017s super bloom, winter rainfall has been more scattered this year, meaning the wildflowers are likely to stay until April and they arent blooming in a single area at the same time, Anza-Borrego Desert State Parks official Dennis Stephen told Los Angeles Times.

Prior to 2017, there wasnt the social media experience. We were not quite as prepared. We just want everyone to enjoy the flowers. To do so with large crowds always requires a lot of patience, he said.

The blossoming hills of California have also attracted another type of visitorthe orange and black painted lady butterflies from Mexico, who have arrived to feast and lay eggs on the wildflowers, reported CNN.

This is the biggest outbreak since 2005, said Art Shapiro, a University of California-Davis professor and expert on the migration of butterflies.
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LOS ANGELES, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The worldwide alkylated naphthalene markets worth is forecasted to exceed over USD 152.3 million by 2026 and the industry is anticipated to market a CAGR of 5.4% through the forecast years.

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Extension in the worldwide alkylated naphthalene market is credited to factors, for example, increment sought after for alkylated naphthalene in gear oil and automotive engine applications. Alkylated naphthalene is utilized to supplant some extent of synthetic base oil in the ointment plans. It gives prevalent thermal and thermo-oxidative stability of the lubricant formulation. This improves the general timeframe of realistic usability and performance of lubricants. The alkylated naphthalene market in Asia Pacific is extending at a huge pace because of the expansion sought after for alkylated naphthalene in gear oil and automotive engine applications

Food grade alkylated naphthalene is generally used to produce lubricants that are utilized in nourishment handling plants. Nourishment grade alkylated naphthalene is basic for applications where there is an opportunity of coincidental food contact. Expanding utilization of prepared nourishment over the globe is driving the food handling. This, thusly, is driving demand for the alkylated naphthalene. This, in turn, the standard grade alkylated naphthalene segment represented noteworthy offer of the worldwide alkylated naphthalene market in 2017 because of better expense than execution proportion offered by these products.

Numerous economic factors, for example, over-production of crude oil, slowdown in the demand for oil from China, changes in vitality arrangement of nations cause variances in oil costs. Since crude oil is a circuitous raw material utilized in the generation of alkylated naphthalene, the value change is reflected in alkylated naphthalene costs. These elements have made unpredictability in costs of and demand for alkylated naphthalene. Instability of raw material costs limits the generation of and demand for alkylated naphthalene.

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The global alkylated naphthalene market has been classified into Grade, Viscosity Index, Application, and region. Based on grade, the global alkylated naphthalene market is segregated into standard and food. On the basis of viscosity index, the market is segregated into 2265 SUS, 6590 SUS, 90115 SUS and Above 115 SUS. On the basis of application, the market is segregated into automotive engine & gear oils, hydraulic fluids, heat transfer oils, compressor oils, paper machine oils, industrial lubes & greases and others. On the basis of region, the global alkylated naphthalene market is bifurcated into North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific.

As far as volume, North America and Europe are driving region of the alkylated naphthalene market. In terms of value, the market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to grow at a generous pace amid the estimate time frame, pursued Latin America and Middle East and Africa. The market in Latin America is assessed to grow impressively inferable from the ascent sought after for lubricants in the vehicle business and increment popular for these chemical compressor oil applications. As far as nation, the market in India, Canada, South Korea, and Mexico is foreseen to extend at a critical pace because of the ascent popular for oils in different end-use ventures, for example, manufacturing, automotive, and mining amid the figure time frame.

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Key players profiled in the alkylated naphthalene industry incorporate ExxonMobil Corporation, King Industries Inc., and NACO Corporation. These players participate in long haul contracts, geographical extension, and improvement and launch of new product. For example, in June 2018, ExxonMobil Corporation procured PT Federal Karyatama (FKT), an Indonesia-based ointment producer, which is a noteworthy maker of cruiser oils on the planet. The securing is relied upon to help ExxonMobil fortify its situation in the ointment oils industry in Indonesia. Furthermore, in June 2018, ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics Inc. reported a leap forward in joint research on advanced biofuels including the change of a green growth strain. This is required to twofold biofuel oil content without altogether hindering the strain.

The topmost companies in the worldwide alkylated naphthalene market are Shanghai NACO Lubrication Co., Ltd., ExxonMobil Corporation, King Industries Inc., Quaker Chemical Corporation, NACO Corporation, Huntsman Corporation, Kao Corporation, NOVITAS CHEM SOLUTIONS, LLC., Nease Co. LLC., Akzo Nobel N.V., and GEO Specialty Chemicals, Inc.

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Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan testifies before a House Financial Services Committee hearing titled: "Holding Megabanks Accountable: An Examination of Wells Fargo's Pattern of Consumer Abuses" in Washington, U.S. March 12, 2019. REUTERS/Erin Scott

Wells Fargo CEO Gets 5 Percent Pay Raise

Wells Fargo & Co gave Chief Executive Tim Sloan a 5 percent pay raise for 2018, the bank said on March 13.

Sloans base salary remained flat at $2.4 million, he earned $14 million stock awards and the board awarded him a $2 million bonus based on the banks financial performance and other factors, according to a company filing.

In 2017, Sloan did not receive a bonus and his total compensation was $17.4 million.

Wells Fargo released compensation details one day after Sloan appeared before the House Financial Services Committee to show to lawmakers that the bank has reformed since 2016 revelations that it created millions of unauthorized customer accounts.

At March 12 hearing, Sloan was peppered with bipartisan criticism for four hours but he navigated a hostile committee without a major stumble.

His pay rise may draw further scrutiny from lawmakers, including Representative Maxine Waters and progressive firebrand Senator Elizabeth Warren, who have called for Sloan to step down. During the hearing, committee chair Waters criticized regulators including the U.S. Federal Reserve, saying they had not been tough enough on the countrys fourth-largest lender.

Wells Fargo is currently prohibited from growing in size after the Federal Reserve issued an unprecedented asset cap on it in February, citing widespread consumer abuses and compliance breakdowns.

The Federal Reserve does not approve pay packages. We expect boards of directors to hold management accountable, said a Fed spokesperson in an emailed statement when asked about Wells Fargos latest executive compensation numbers.

The revelation three years ago that Wells Fargo created millions of fake customer accounts prompted regulatory probes into mortgage foreclosures, auto insurance sales, and its wealth management businesses, resulting in billions of dollars in fines.

During 2018, Wells Fargo shares tumbled 22 percent as the bank continued to rack up fines and disclose new issues.

Earlier this year, Bank of America Corp said that CEO Brian Moynihans annual compensation rose 15 percent to $27 million, Morgan Stanley said CEO James Gormans overall pay rose 7 percent to $29 million, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. said CEO Jamie Dimons compensation rose 5 percent to $31 million, according to regulatory filings.

By Imani Moise & Pete Schroeder
Ying Zhu (R) speaks about her ordeal in China at a press conference in Montreal on June 22, 2001, soon after she returned to Canada. Over 20 media outlets were represented at the press conference. (The Epoch Times)

Woman Kidnapped, Abused by Police While Visiting China

Editors note: The Epoch Times is publishing a number of articles exposing the use of torture by the Chinese regime against the groups it targets, and the suffering and harm it causes to those subjected to it.

It is known that Michael Kovrig, a Canadian detained in China in apparent retaliation to the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, has been subjected to long hours of interrogation and kept in rooms with the light on 24 hours a day, which amounts to sleep deprivation. Such mental pressure is just one tactic in the wide range of psychological torture methods used in Chinas prison system, often with devastating effects. Following is the experience of Chinese-Canadian Ying Zhu, who was subjected to 33 days of continuous psychological torture in China.

Kidnapped, interrogated, threatened, and mentally abused is how Chinese-Canadian Ying Zhu describes her treatment at the hands of the authorities after she arrived in China from Montreal to visit her parents in May 2001. Her mother had undergone two heart surgeries and Zhu very much wanted to see her.

It was Zhus first visit to China since immigrating to Canada in 1997; at the time she was a permanent resident. But upon her arrival at a train station in Guangzhou City she was immediately detained and grilled by people from the Ministry of National Security. She was then taken to another location and interrogated and pressured for more than 30 days.

I was not allowed to step out of the door for the entire 33 days. I was not allowed to contact anybody or make a phone call. I was totally isolated from the outside world, said Zhu, an adherent of Falun Dafa, a meditation practice also called Falun Gong.

Meanwhile, her parents had been expecting her and had no idea where she was. The local authorities told them they didnt know.

Zhu was monitored by 12 people, both male and female, around the clock in shifts of three at a timeeven when she slept and used the toilet; the bathroom had no door.

I could not sleep with three people watching me and with the 120-watt light bulb on 24 hours a day. They never turned it off, she said.

Every one of my movements, temperaments, expressions, and emotions were recorded and filed. I felt very tense and nervous. Using the washroom was humiliating and difficult as they were in the room. My health began to deteriorate and my internal system became chaotic. I knew they were trying to break me.

Every day, three people other than those monitoring her came to interrogate her. They not only tried to persuade her to give up practicing Falun Dafa, but they also asked detailed questions about every person in her address book.

Coercing adherents to quit Falun Dafa is a key part of the Chinese Communist Partys campaign of persecution against the practice, launched by then-Party leader Jiang Zemin in 1999.

Veiled Threat from Psychology Professor

Zhu also received two visits by a man claiming to be a psychology professor who told her he had forced many Falun Gong prisoners of conscience to quit practicing. He said many were sent to mental hospitals to receive psychiatric treatment. He also told her that it was easy in China to create false allegations and accusations, noting that a famous marshal in the Peoples Liberation Army had been framed and sent to prison, where he died.

I started to worry that they would send me to a mental hospital, because I had no intention of giving up Falun Dafa, she said.

I knew he was trying to intimidate me, but I was still frightened. I knew clearly what he said was a reality in China. Many innocent people have been falsely accused and severely persecuted due to various reasons in the past 50 years of communist rule. I worried that if I died here, no one would ever know how I disappeared or what had happened to me.

Thanks to a strong, concerted rescue campaign back in Canadawhich was even mentioned to Zhu by one of the guardsshe was finally released after 33 days, but was then kept under surveillance at her parents home.

Before returning to Canada, Zhu was asked to promise in writing not to engage in activities in Canada that go against Chinese government and promise to report any related activity to government officials, but she refused. She was also threatened that her life and studies in Canada could be in danger if she spoke about what happened when she was detained.
In a survey of more than 3,000 new mothers in Oklahoma and Texas, 7 percent said they had used electronic vapor products, including e-cigarettes, around the time of their pregnancy; 1.4 percent used them during pregnancy.

Nearly half of users said they thought e-cigarettes would help them quit smoking or would be safer than traditional cigarettes, the study team reports in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Its important for people to know that e-cigarettes are not safe to use during pregnancy and that nicotine is harmful to fetal development and infant outcomes, said lead study author Martha Kapaya of the CDCs Division of Reproductive Health in Atlanta, Georgia.

Among those who used e-cigarettes in this study, a substantial portion used them in an attempt to quit smoking cigarettes, suggesting a possible lack of awareness of, or access to, scientifically proven strategies, she told Reuters Health by email.

Kapaya and colleagues analyzed state-level pregnancy risk data from 2015, when Oklahoma and Texas asked survey participants about their use of electronic vapor products before, during, and immediately after pregnancy. Among the 3,277 women included in the analysis, 83 percent had never used the devices.

Overall, about 10 percent of women said they had used e-cigarettes, but not within the three months before becoming pregnant. About 7 percent had used the devices in the three months before pregnancy, and 2 percent had used them in the six months since delivering their baby.

While only about 600 women said they had smoked traditional cigarettes in the two years prior to pregnancy, these made up the majority of women who used e-vapor products around or during pregnancy.

Among those who used vapor products during the last three months of pregnancy, 38 percent used e-cigarettes with nicotine, 35 percent used vapor products without nicotine, and 26 percent were unsure about the nicotine content.

The research is unequivocal on how nicotine impacts the developing fetus and placental barrier, and some studies show that the concentrations can be even greater for the baby than for the mother, said Nick Wagner of Boston University, who wasnt involved in the study.

Nicotine exposure early in development can cause damage at the cellular level, he said in a phone interview. During the third trimester, its associated with low birth weight, which has been linked to asthma, social and, emotional problems, and attention deficit disorder.

These numbers are sobering since the use is likely higher today, said Cindy McEvoy of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, who also wasnt involved in the study.

In addition, smoking during pregnancy varies by state, so these numbers are likely higher in states such as Kentucky where smoking during pregnancy tends to be higher, she told Reuters Health by email.

Among women in the study who used e-vapor products close to or during pregnancy, 54 percent said curiosity was the reason. Forty-five percent believed the products would help them quit or reduce cigarette smoking and the same proportion thought the devices would reduce harm to the mother compared to smoking, while 41 percent looked for the ability to get products without nicotine.

There needs to be more consistent messaging between healthcare providers and their patients, said Allison Kurti of the University of Vermont in Burlington, who wasnt involved in the study but has researched smoking cessation during pregnancy.

Only about 50 percent of providers report screening patients for any type of non-combustible tobacco use, she said in an email. Asking women about their use might signal an interest in quitting smoking and an openness to using other quit methods.

By Carolyn Crist

From Reuters
Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg Felix Kjellberg from one of Youtube's largest channels, "Pewdiepie," signs copies of his new book at Barnes & Noble Union Square in New York City on Oct. 29, 2015. (John Lamparski/Getty Images)

YouTuber PewDiePie Responds to NZ Mass Shooter Who Name-Droppped Him

One of YouTubes largest channels, Pewdiepie responded on March 15 to his name being dropped during a live stream apparently recorded by the gunman in New Zealands worst-ever mass shooting event, which left 49 people dead.

Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellbergthe Swedish YouTuber behind Pewdiepiesaid he felt appalled after reports detailed how a gunman allegedly said subscribe to PewDiePie during a live stream that showed the gunman driving to a mosque, entering it, and shooting randomly at people inside.

The footage was widely circulated on social media.

Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch. I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person, he wrote. My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families, and everyone affected by this tragedy.

Just heard news of the devastating reports from New Zealand Christchurch.

I feel absolutely sickened having my name uttered by this person.

My heart and thoughts go out to the victims, families and everyone affected by this tragedy.   (@pewdiepie) March 15, 2019

Health authorities said an additional 48 people were being treated for gunshot wounds, including young children. The attack was the worst mass shooting New Zealand has seen since 1990. Police Commissioner Mike Bush says the death toll rose to 49 in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch.

The alleged mastermind of the shooting described himself as an eco-fascist in his writings. I was a communist, then an anarchist and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist, he wrote, according to reports of his manifesto.

Other YouTubers expressed their support for Kjellberg who currently sits on 89.5 million subscribers. Gaming channel Markiplier run by YouTuber Mark Fischbach stressed that Kjellberg had no links to the gunman.

You had nothing to do with this. Full stop. The shooter, who should be forgotten to the ass-end of history, is only trying to create division, Fischbach wrote in response to Kjellbergs original post. Anyone that believes or spreads the message that you were associated with this in any way is doing exactly what the shooter wants.

You had nothing to do with this. Full stop. The shooter, who should be forgotten to the ass-end of history, is only trying to create division. Anyone that believes or spreads the message that you were associated with this in any way is doing exactly what the shooter wants.  Markiplier (@markiplier) March 15, 2019

Another YouTuber Roomie (real name Joel Berghult) lambasted other outlets for reportedly placing the blame on Pewdiepie, rather than the shooter.

I saw some news outlets trying to pin part of the blame on you  the whole situation is absolutely horrific, and trying to simplify deeper societal problems and use you as a scapegoat will only lead us further from addressing the real problems, he wrote in response to Kjellberg on Twitter.

I saw some news outlets trying to pin part of the blame on you  the whole situation is absolutely horrific, and trying to simplify deeper societal problems and use you as a scapegoat will only lead us further from addressing the real problems  Roomie (@roomieofficial) March 15, 2019

In the manifesto, Brenton Tarrant, who is one of four suspects now in custody, credited conservative speaker Candace Owens for spurring his radical beginnings.

He allegedly wrote, Each time she spoke, I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes, according to Business Insider.

Owens, also the communications director for Turning Point USA, rejected any connection to the New Zealand shooter.

What happened last night in Christchurch, New Zealand, is a tragedy and I echo the sentiment of all Americans, in wishing love and healing for all those impacted, she said in a statement.

This is the statement I issued to all inquiring media members earlier today. I truly have no further statement beyond this point. pic.twitter.com/Ji67okjGwL  Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 15, 2019

She continued: That said, any insinuation that black conservatism in the United States has somehow inspired radical Islamophobic white supremacy terror overseas is pointedly absurd. People on both sides of the political aisleespecially the victimsdeserve a more honest conversation.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the shootings at the two mosques appear to have been a well-planned terrorist attack.

One man who said he was at the Al Noor mosque told media the gunman was white, blond, and wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest. The man burst into the mosque as worshippers were kneeling for prayers.
BRIDGEPORT  An Orchard Street woman who police say was briefly kidnapped Friday morning by her estranged boyfriend had been working with police to get him arrested in connection with a previous incident.

Police Chief Armando Perez said the woman was kidnapped by the man at gunpoint on Monday, in front of her children.

Thankfully, no one was hurt, Perez said.

The suspects identity and the charges were not immediately available Friday afternoon. Police said they were working with the ex-girlfriend and were also in the process of getting an arrest warrant for the suspect for an earlier incident.

According to a statement from police, the woman was allegedly forced into a vehicle by an estranged boyfriend and taken from the scene while dropping a child off at Madison school Friday morning. Reports indicate it happened around 8 a.m.

Witnesses immediately contacted police and detectives and school resource officers worked together to gather information and locate the victim and offender, police said.

Bridgeport police were prepared to initiate a Silver Alert for the victim when the suspects vehicle was found by Norwalk police and Connecticut State Police on Interstate 95 in Norwalk, headed south.

The offender was taken into custody without incident in Stamford and the victim was found unharmed in the vehicle, police said. The offender is known to detectives and we were working with the victim to obtain an arrest warrant for an earlier incident, prior to today's events.

Stamford Police Capt. Richard Conklin said Stamford police and other agencies joined the chase as it continued down I-95 until hitting some traffic. Conklin said the driver pulled over near Exit 6 on the citys West Side after realizing escape was futile in I-95 traffic.

For once, traffic was a blessing, Conklin said.

Initially, local police thought the car might have been headed to West Haven or possibly Ansonia. Both departments were alerted.

Ansonia Police Lt. Patrick Lynch confirmed that Bridgeport Police contacted his department to search for a car. Officers were assigned to assist in the Ansonia portion of the investigation.

The investigation remains active.

Staff writer Barry Lytton contributed to this story.
When Jamie Baum decided to form Short Stories, a slightly smaller jazz ensemble than her Jamie Baum Sextet+, she did so, not so much to streamline her sound, but to expand upon it.

I decided to form Short Stories, because I was finding that the compositions and arrangements I was writing for my Septet+ were becoming longer and more involved, said the acclaimed jazz flutist. I wanted the length of the improvisations to be balanced with the length of the composed material. I was also interested in balancing the colors of the various instruments and their improvisations with the overall arch of both the compositions themselves and the arch of a performance or recording.

Baum appears in the Wilton Librarys Hot & Cool: Jazz at the Brubeck Room series and will be sharing those balances, colors and improvisations with her Short Stories band mates at 4 p.m. Sunday, March 17.

Although Short Stories was conceived in 2014, its first performance was during the Winter Jazzfest in New York City in January of 2016. The group eventually settled into a quartet with rotating guests. The line-up for Sundays show features Baum on flutes, Luis Perdomo on piano, Joe Martin on bass, Jeff Hirschfield on drums, and special guest Gregoire Maret on harmonica. The Wilton Library is at 137 Old Ridgefield Road, in downtown Wilton.

Jamie Baums eloquent and versatile compositions match the virtuosity she brings to her musicianship and the leadership she brings to her live performances and recordings. The flutist explained that her composing style is a process that embraces adjustment and modification. Once I have created the composition, I may adjust the key to fit the register of the flute or alto flute, or may give the melody to the harmonica and take a harmony line that is lower to fit the alto flute, she said. In the case of the Septet+, I may decide to give the melody to another instrument and play an inner line myself.

Baums many awards and recognitions include a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and nine nominations by the Jazz Journalists Association for Flutist of the Year. Sundays concert will mark a return visit for the bandleader and composer, who, in her last appearance at the Wilton Library jazz series, brought the larger group, the Jamie Baum Septet+. That was in 2016, just before she and the band went into the studio to record Bridges. That album has since made the "short list" for "Best New Release" in the 2018 JazzTimes Readers Poll, and Baum also made the "short list" for "Best Flute" in both the 2018 JazzTimes Readers Poll and the 2018 JazzTimes Critics Poll.

She has toured throughout the U.S. and in over 35 countries, and her global experiences, particularly in South Asia, have had an impact on her own music.

Before my extensive opportunities to travel in South Asia, my focus was both playing in the modern jazz style and for the Septet, taking influences from modern classical composers to expand my compositions, she said. While I had always been interested in other styles of music and often played in Latin and Brazilian bands, my travels to South Asia, collaborations with musicians there, and being introduced to great artist in those cultures really took me in a different direction for the music I was writing.

Baum is based in New York City but grew up in Fairfield. My grandparents lived in Bridgeport, and for the first half of my Dads career as a doctor, he practiced in Bridgeport and later moved his office to Fairfield. I was very lucky that my parents took me to all sorts of concerts at a very young age. I was lucky to have seen icons like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Miles Davis.

Baum is also on the faculty teaching private lessons at Manhattan School of Music, The New School University and Jazz at Lincoln Center's Middle School Jazz Academy. I enjoy teaching because it is both great to share what I have learned and to be inspired by my students, she said. Visit: jamiebaum.com

Mike Horyczuns Sound Surfing column appears every Saturday in The Norwalk Hour. Mike can be reached at: news2mh@gmail.com.
Dublin, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Healthcare IoT Market by Component, Application, and by End User - Global Forecast to 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The global healthcare IoT market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 29.9% to reach $322.2 billion by 2025.

The factors such as increasing number of digital health initiatives from governments across the globe, the increasing need to reduce the cost of healthcare, rising focus on patient-centric care delivery, and increasing penetration of smartphones and high-speed networking and connectivity solutions in emerging countries are expected to contribute to the growth of the global healthcare IoT technologies market during the forecast period.

Furthermore, technological advancements in the medical device industry driving entry of advanced connected medical devices in the market are also expected to drive greater adoption of IoT technologies among different end users, thereby contributing to the growth of this market.



Telemedicine accounts for the largest application market for healthcare IoT. As healthcare systems across the globe are aiming to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery and minimize the cost of healthcare by reducing the hospital stays, the demand for telemedicine solutions is expected to grow in the coming years.



An in-depth analysis of the geographic scenario of the industry provides detailed qualitative and quantitative insights about the five major geographies (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa) along with the coverage of major countries in each region. North America accounted for the largest share of the healthcare IoT technologies market in 2018.

However, during the forecast period the APAC market is expected to register the fastest CAGR. The growth in this geographic market is primarily attributed to the growing smartphone penetration, widening internet connectivity and high-speed networks, need to manage growing burden of chronic diseases on healthcare providers, and government efforts to improve the accessibility of healthcare services to remote locations.



The major players operating in the healthcare IoT technologies (IoT platforms and connectivity technologies) market include Cisco Systems Inc. (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.), IBM Corporation (U.S.), SAP SE (Germany), Qualcomm Life, Inc. (U.S.), and Honeywell Life Care Solutions (U.S.); whereas, the leading players offering IoT-enabled medical devices include GE Healthcare (US), Siemens Healthineers (Germany), Medtronic (US), Philips (Netherlands), Honeywell Life Care Solutions (US), Boston Scientific (US), Johnson & Johnson (US), BIOTRONIK Germany), Omron (Japan), AgaMatrix (US), STANLEY Healthcare (US), AliveCor (US), iHealth Lab (US), and Welch Allyn (US).

Key Topics Covered



1 Introduction

1.1. Market Definition

1.2. Market Ecosystem

1.3. Currency and Limitations

1.3.1. Currency

1.3.2. Limitations

1.4. Key Stakeholders



2 Research Methodology

2.1. Research Process

2.1.1. Secondary Research

2.1.2. Primary Research

2.1.3. Market Size Estimation



3 Executive Summary

3.1. Introduction

3.2. Market Dynamics

3.3. Product Market Analysis

3.4. Application Market Analysis

3.5. End User Market Analysis

3.6. Regional Market Analysis

3.7. Competitive Analysis



4 Market Overview

4.1. Overview

4.2. Drivers

4.2.1. Need for Cost-Containment in Healthcare Delivery

4.2.2. Increasing Focus on Patient-Centric Care Delivery

4.2.3. Growing Smartphone Penetration and Increasing Adoption of High-Speed Networking Technologies

4.2.4. Digital Health Initiatives across the Globe

4.3. Restraints

4.3.1. High Cost of IoT Infrastructure Deployment and Cost of Ownership

4.3.2. Dearth of IT Professionals across Healthcare Organizations

4.4. Opportunities

4.4.1. Growing Focus on Telehealth Technologies

4.5. Challenges

4.5.1. Data Security Concerns

4.5.2. Issues Related to Data Management and Interoperability



5 Industry Overview

5.1. Healthcare IoT Ecosystem

5.1.1. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)

5.1.2. Connectivity Solution Providers

5.1.3. Medical Device Manufacturers

5.1.4. Systems and Software Vendors

5.1.5. System Integrators and Service Providers

5.1.6. End Users

5.2. Regulatory Assessment

5.2.1. Regulations and Approval Guidelines

5.2.2. Testing and Certification



6 Global Healthcare IoT Market, by Component

6.1. Overview

6.2. Medical Devices

6.2.1. Medical Devices Market, by Type of Device

6.2.1.1. Stationary Medical Devices

6.2.1.2. Implantable Medical Devices

6.2.1.3. Wearable Medical Devices

6.2.1.4. Other IoT Medical Devices

6.2.2. Medical Devices Market, by Product

6.2.2.1. Imaging Systems

6.2.2.2. Vital Signs Monitoring Devices

6.2.2.3. Implantable Cardiac Devices

6.2.2.4. Patient Monitors

6.2.2.5. Respiratory Devices

6.2.2.6. Infusion Pumps

6.2.2.7. Anaesthesia Machines

6.2.2.8. Neurological Devices

6.2.2.9. Hearing Devices

6.2.2.10. Fetal Monitoring Devices

6.2.2.11. Ventilators

6.2.2.12. Other IoT Enabled Medical Devices

6.3. Systems and Software

6.4. Connectivity Technologies

6.5. Support Services



7 Global Healthcare IoT Market, by Application

7.1. Overview

7.2. Telemedicine

7.3. Clinical Operations and Workflow Management

7.4. Medication Management

7.5. Inpatient Monitoring

7.6. Connected Imaging

7.7. Other Applications



8 Global Healthcare IoT Market, by End-user

8.1. Overview

8.2. Hospitals & Clinics

8.3. Home Care & Long-Term Care Settings

8.4. Other End Users



9 Healthcare IoT Market, by Geography

9.1. Overview

9.2. North America

9.3. Europe

9.4. Asia-Pacific

9.5. Latin America

9.6. Middle East & Africa



10 Competitive Outlook

10.1. Market Ranking

10.2. Competitive Situation & Trends

10.2.1. Acquisitions and Mergers (2017-2018)

10.2.2. Partnerships and Collaborations (2017-2019)

10.2.3. Product Launches (2016-2019)

10.2.4. Approvals (2017-2018)

10.2.5. Other Developments (2016-2019)



11 Company Profiles

11.1. Medical Device Manufacturers

11.1.1 Medtronic

11.1.2 GE Healthcare

11.1.3 Philips Healthcare (Philips)

11.1.4 Siemens AG

11.1.5 Abbott Laboratories

11.1.6 Boston Scientific

11.1.7 Honeywell Life Care Solutions

11.2. Technology Providers

11.2.1 Intel Corporation

11.2.2 International Business Machines Corporation

11.2.3 Microsoft Corporation

11.2.4 Cisco Systems Inc.

11.2.5 SAP SE



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/d4l4pq/global_healthcare?w=12

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.
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MONTREAL, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Welcome Hall Mission, in collaboration with Les Anges de la Rue, Cegep de Maisonneuve and Votre Hygieniste Dentaire, is proud to host Journee de reve where men and women who are experiencing homelessness can be pampered for a few hours. This special event will provide an extraordinary experience for those living the daily reality of the streets.



During this event, students will offer their services in dental and nursing care. Participants will also be treated to massage therapy, aesthetics, hairstyling, and even receive manicures, pedicures and makeup application. A photographer and a caricaturist will be on site to capture the experience, while musical artists will perform in the background. Welcome Hall Missions intervention workers will be available to provide advice and assistance to interested visitors. Even pets have been taken into consideration as their masters can benefit from a consultation on animal health. Food and clothing will be distributed at the end of the day.

WHAT: Opportunity to interview and take pictures during Journee de reve WHEN: Friday March 15th from 1:30 pm to 5 pm WHO: Sam Watts, President and CEO of Welcome Hall Mission Fannie Leblanc, spokesperson for Les Anges de la Rue and Votre Hygieniste Dentaire Vicky Potrzebowski, professor at Cegep de Maisonneuve Many different professionals who will offer free services for men and women experiencing homelessness WHERE: Macaulay Pavilion, 1490 St-Antoine West in Montreal

About Welcome Hall Mission



Established in 1892, Welcome Hall Mission has become the largest doorway to help for Montrealers in need. Many programs are available to support the homeless, young single mothers, families, children and youth. Welcome Hall Mission gives them hope through concrete actions and effective solutions to help them improve their lives and reintegrate into society.

To follow Welcome Hall Mission:

Web site: welcomehallmission.com

Facebook: facebook.com/MissionBonAccueil

YouTube: youtube.com/user/whmba

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/2528106?trk=tyah

Twitter: twitter.com/whmba

For more information or to schedule an interview, please contact:

Sophie Allard, APR

AH!COM

514-499-3030, ext. 771

514-808-9474

sa@ahcom.ca
SPRINGFIELD  A four-year effort by lawmakers and advocates to raise the minimum age to purchase tobacco products in Illinois appears nearly complete now that legislation approved by both chambers heads to Gov. J.B. Pritzkers desk.

The Senate successfully passed the measure Thursday by a mostly party-line vote. It received the backing of only one Republican. Pritzker has not said definitively whether he will sign Tobacco 21, which changes the age to buy products containing nicotine  including cigarettes, e-cigarettes, vapes and chewing tobacco, among others  from 18 to 21.

In an emailed statement, his spokeswoman said Pritzker looks forward to reviewing the legislation.

But supporters of the initiative are optimistic the Democratic governor will sign the bill into law, unlike former Gov. Bruce Rauner, who vetoed a similar measure last year.

Thankfully, weve got a new governor and a new chance to right past wrongs and make Illinois a healthier state, Senate President John Cullerton, a Chicago Democrat and ardent supporter of the legislation, said in a press release.

If Pritzker signs the bill, Illinois would be the eighth state in the nation, and the first state in the Midwest, to have such a law on the books.

Cullerton was on the floor of the House when that chamber approved the Tobacco 21 legislation with bipartisan support Tuesday. The final tally in the House was 82 to 31.

And House sponsor Camille Lilly, a Democratic representative from Chicago, was on the floor of the Senate Thursday watching as her Senate colleague, Julie Morrison, secured enough Democratic votes to successfully pass the bill there.

Morrison, from Deerfield, is the sponsor of the initiative in her chamber.

Senator Morrison did a wonderful job staying the course, going along with the different strategies and getting it done, Lilly said. It takes all of us. Thats what makes it difficult, but this is an amazing process.

Opponents made the same two arguments they have in committee hearings and in the House. First, that if 18 is old enough to get married, vote in a political election, open a bank account and join the military, it should be old enough to purchase and smoke a cigarette.

Morrison pointed out the U.S. Department of Defense is going tobacco free by 2020 and a national group of hundreds of retired senior military officers, called Mission: Readiness, supports this Tobacco 21 bill out of concern for the readiness of new recruits for the Armed Forces.

I think this speaks volumes about what the military would, in fact, want for its members, Morrison said.

Detractors also take issue with the removal of language from current law enacting penalties for minors caught with tobacco products. Presently, minors risk the prospect of taking a smokers education or youth diversion program with their parents as well as the possibility of fines or community service.

Right now, to say that these kids who are getting their cigarettes from other kids are now going to be allowed to do that freely and without any punishment is a real problem, Republican Sen. Steve McClure, from Springfield, said during debate.

Kathy Drea, the American Lung Associations senior director for advocacy, said there is absolutely no research demonstrating penalties reduce the smoking rates among teenagers.

Its as simple as that, she said.

Lilly said the Senates vote Thursday was exciting and encouraging to watch, and the fact that the measure passed both chambers this session is unsurprising  Illinois society wanted a change.

When things get out of hand or are no longer tolerable, the people speak and we as legislators come to bring that message and advocate  thats what we did today, she said. I get to have this be part of my history. I believe this is one of those bills that saves lives.

The legislation is House Bill 345. The final vote in the Senate Thursday was 39 to 16.

Reach reporter Rebecca Anzel at ranzel@capitolnewsillinois.com
Legislation raising the minimum age to buy tobacco products is on its way to the governor for consideration after passing the state Senate 39-16 Thursday  just two days after it successfully passed out of the House.

The legislation sponsored by Sen. Julie Morrison, a Deerfield Democrat, raises the age to buy products containing nicotine  such as cigarettes, e-cigarettes, vapes and chewing tobacco, to name a few  from 18 to 21.

Theres been a lot of pent-up support in the Senate to get this bill passed and Ive been sitting on my hands waiting to get it done, she said.

The Illinois constitution mandates measures be read by title on three different days in each house. This bill was able to move so quickly through the legislative process because when it was approved by the House on Tuesday, the Senates gatekeeper committee voted to move it straight to the floor, according to a member of Morrisons staff. That was its first reading.

On Wednesday, it was read into the record for the second time, queuing it up for a vote during Thursdays session.

It also helped, Morrison and her staff member added, that the House measure is nearly identical to the one she proposed and got approved by a Senate committee in February.

While Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker has not said conclusively whether he would sign the bill, his spokeswoman said in an email that he looks forward to reviewing the legislation.

Senate President John Cullerton, a Chicago Democrat, said at a news conference in February that Pritzker would approve the measure if both chambers passed it.

Cullerton was in the House on Tuesday, looking on as Chicago Rep. Camille Lilly secured a victory in leading her chamber to support her Tobacco 21 bill. The final vote was 82 to 31.

He is a long-time supporter of the measure, once joking during a news conference that he was tempted to take the role of leader on the issue from Morrison.

Thats an encouraging, bipartisan vote that puts us one step closer to finally enacting this important public health protection, he said in a written statement after the Houses vote.

This is the fourth time in as many years the initiative was introduced in the General Assembly, where historically it succeeds in the Senate and fails in the House.

It made it to former Gov. Bruce Rauners desk in the previous session, but he refused to sign the bill, and only the Senate was able to muster enough votes to overturn his veto.

Lilly, her colleagues and advocates tried a different approach this session, moving the Tobacco 21 bill in the House first where, Lilly said, she has more people to deal with.

She secured more Republican support than in the previous session, including that of Minority Leader Jim Durkin of Western Springs. During debate Tuesday, he said that while he has been fighting it for most of my career, he was switching his stance in part because of research into the epidemic of smoking.

Opponents generally have made the argument that if 18 is old enough to vote for a political representative, serve on a jury, get married or draw up a will, it should be old enough to buy and smoke a cigarette.

Detractors also fault the bill for removing penalties in current law for minors caught with tobacco products. Presently, they face the possibility of taking a smokers education or youth diversion program with their parents for a first offense, and fines or community service for subsequent violations.

.

The legislation is House Bill 345.
HAMILTON, Bermuda, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Teekay Corporation (Teekay or the Company) (NYSE:TK) announced today the following changes to its Board of Directors, which are expected to be effective at the Companys Annual General Meeting (AGM) on June 10, 2019:



C. Sean Day, Chairman Emeritus and Director, Tore Sandvold, Director, and Peter S. Janson, Director, are retiring from the Board after a combined 50 years with the Companys Board. Mr. Day will remain as a Director of Teekay GP LLC (the general partner of Teekay LNG Partners LP).



William (Bill) P. Utt will be stepping down from his role as Chairman and Director of the Company and as a Director of Teekay GP LLC, but will remain as Chairman and Director of Teekay Offshore GP LLC (the general partner of Teekay Offshore Partners LP).



The Board has selected current Teekay director, David Schellenberg, to take over as Teekays Chairman from Mr. Utt in June 2019. Mr. Schellenberg has also been nominated to stand for election to join Teekay Tankers Board effective at Teekay Tankers AGM on June 12, 2019.



The Board has appointed Kenneth Hvid, Teekays President and Chief Executive Officer, to fill the vacancy on the Board that will be created upon the retirement of Mr. Day.



In addition, Peter Antturi has been nominated to stand for election at the Companys AGM to join the Companys Board.

With these changes, the Company will be reducing the size of its Board of Directors from nine members currently to seven members.



We have been privileged to have Sean, Tore and Peter as members of the Teekay Board and they have been instrumental in Teekays transformation from primarily an owner of ships in the cyclical spot tanker business into a diversified marine midstream company, including the establishment of our three Daughter Companies, commented Kenneth Hvid, Teekays President and Chief Executive Officer. We have also been fortunate to have Bills leadership and guidance as Teekays Chairman over the past two years and we are pleased that Teekay Offshore will continue to benefit from Bills extensive offshore expertise. On behalf of the Teekay Board, I would like to thank Sean, Tore, Peter and Bill for their significant contributions to the Company over their tenures.

Since joining the Teekay Board in 2017, David has brought significant financial and operational leadership to the Companys Board and I look forward to continuing to work closely with him in his new role as Chairman, commented Mr. Hvid. In addition, I look forward to welcoming Peter to the Teekay Board and working with him in the future.

David Schellenberg

Mr. Schellenberg brings over 25 years of financial and operating leadership experience. Mr. Schellenberg is currently a Managing Director and Principal with Highland West Capital, a private equity firm in Vancouver, Canada. Prior to that, Mr. Schellenberg was with Conair Group and its subsidiary Cascade Aerospace, specialty aviation and aerospace business, from 2000 to 2013 and was President and CEO from 2007 to 2013. Mr. Schellenberg also acted as a Managing Director in the Corporate Office of the Jim Pattison Group, Canadas second largest private company, from 1991 to 2000. Mr. Schellenberg is a member of the Young Presidents Organization and holds an MBA and is a Fellow of the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada (FCPA, FCA).

Peter Antturi

Mr. Antturi brings 34 years of financial and operational experience in the shipping industry. Mr. Antturi serves as an executive officer and director of Teekays largest shareholder, Resolute Investments, Ltd. (Resolute) and other subsidiaries and affiliates of Kattegat Limited, a parent company of Resolute. Mr. Antturi is also an executive officer and owner of Anglemont Financial Services Ltd., a joint venture with Kattegat Limited that provides financial services to Kattegat Limited and its subsidiaries. Mr. Antturi previously worked with Teekay from 1991 through 2005, serving as President of Teekays shuttle tankers division and as Teekays Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Controller and in other finance and accounting positions. Prior to joining Teekay, Mr. Antturi held various accounting and finance roles in the shipping industry since 1985.

About Teekay

Teekay Corporation operates in the marine midstream space through its ownership of the general partner and a portion of the outstanding limited partner interests in Teekay LNG Partners L.P. (NYSE:TGP) and an interest in the general partner and a portion of the outstanding limited partner interests in Teekay Offshore Partners L.P. (NYSE:TOO). The general partners own all of the outstanding incentive distribution rights of these entities. In addition, Teekay has a controlling ownership interest in Teekay Tankers Ltd. (NYSE:TNK) and directly owns a fleet of vessels. The combined Teekay entities manage and operate total assets under management of approximately $17 billion, comprised of approximately 220 liquefied gas, offshore, and conventional tanker assets. With offices in 14 countries and approximately 8,300 seagoing and shore-based employees, Teekay provides a comprehensive set of marine services to the world's leading oil and gas companies.

Teekays common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TK.

For Investor Relations enquiries contact:

Ryan Hamilton

Tel: +1 (604) 844-6654

Website: www.teekay.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements (as defined in Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended) which reflect managements current views with respect to certain future events and performance, including the expected Board of Directors changes described in the release and the timing thereof. The following factors are among those that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, and that should be considered in evaluating any such statement, including the continued availability of director nominees to serve as directors and the results of the shareholder vote at the Companys AGM in June 2019. Teekay expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in Teekays expectations with respect thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based.
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Linkedin Paul Spoonley (The Conversation)  Fri, March 15, 2019 17:58 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8227cbc 2 Opinion Christchurch,mosque-attack,white-supremacist,New-Zealand,shooting,killing Free

Tonight, New Zealand police continue to respond to events following shootings at two mosques in central Christchurch. The national security threat level has been lifted to high. Mosques across New Zealand have been closed and police are asking people to refrain from visiting.

So far, 49 people have been killed. According to media reports, 41 people were fatally shot at the Masjid Al Noor mosque on Deans Avenue; others died at a second mosque nearby.

Four people, three men and a woman, have been taken into custody in connection with the shootings. One man in his late 20s has been charged with murder.

In the hours after the attacks, New Zealands Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern made it clear this was a terrorist attack of extraordinary and unprecedented violence that had no place in New Zealand.

She said extremist views were not welcome and contrary to New Zealand values, and did not reflect New Zealand as a nation.

It is one of New Zealands darkest days. Many of the people affected by this act of extreme violence will be from our refugee and migrant communities. New Zealand is their home. They are us.

She is right. Public opinion surveys such as the Asia New Zealand Foundation annual surveys of attitudes tend to show that a majority of New Zealanders are in favor of diversity and see immigration, in this case from Asia, as providing various benefits for the country.

But extremist politics, including the extreme nationalist and white supremacist politics that appear to be at the core of this attack on Muslims, have been part of our community for a long time.

History of white supremacy

I completed research in the UK on the National Front and British National Party in the late 1970s. When I returned to New Zealand, I was told explicitly, including by authorities that were charged with monitoring extremism, that we did not have similar groups here. But it did not take me long to discover quite the opposite.

Through the 1980s, I looked at more than 70 local groups that met the definition of being extreme right wing. The city that hosted many of these groups was Christchurch.

They were a mixture of skinhead, neo-nazi and extreme nationalist groups. Some were traditional in their ideology, with a strong underpinning of anti-Semitism and a belief in the supremacy of the British race. Others inverted the arguments of Maori nationalism to argue for separatism to keep the white race pure.

And yes, there was violence. The 1989 shooting of an innocent bystander, Wayne Motz, in Christchurch by a skinhead who then walked to a local police kiosk and shot himself. The pictures of the internment showed his friends giving nazi salutes. In separate incidents, a Korean backpacker and a gay man were killed for ideological reasons.

Things have changed. The 1990s provided the internet and then social media. And events such as the September 11 terror attacks shifted the focus  anti-Semitism was now supplemented by Islamophobia.

Hate speech online

The earthquakes and subsequent rebuild have significantly transformed the ethnic demography of Christchurch and made it much more multicultural  and more positive about that diversity. It is ironic that the this terrorism should take place in this city, despite its history of earlier far right extremism.

We tend not to think too much about the presence of racist and white supremacist groups, until there is some public incident like the desecration of Jewish graves or a march of black-shirted men (they are mostly men) asserting their right to be white. Perhaps, we are comfortable in thinking, as the prime minister has said, they are not part of our nation.

Last year, as part of a project to look at hate speech, I looked at what some New Zealanders were saying online. It did not take long to discover the presence of hateful and anti-Muslim comments. It would be wrong to characterize these views and comments as widespread, but New Zealand was certainly not exempt from Islamophobia.

Every so often, it surfaced, such as in the attack on a Muslim woman in a Huntly carpark.

An end to collective innocence

It became even more obvious during 2018. The Canadian YouTuber, Stefan Molyneux, sparked a public debate (along with Lauren Southern) about his right to free speech. Much of the public comment seemed to either overlook or condone his extreme views on what he regards as the threat posed by Islam.

And then there was the public protest in favor of free speech that occurred at the same time, and the signs warning us about the arrival of Sharia law or Free Tommy signs. The latter refers to Tommy Robinson, a long-time activist (cf English Defense League leader) who was sentenced to prison - and then released on appeal - for contempt of court, essentially by targeting Muslims before the courts.

There is plenty of evidence of local Islamophobic views, especially online. There are, and have been for a long time, individuals and groups who hold white supremacist views. They tend to threaten violence; seldom have they acted on those views. There is also a naivety amongst New Zealanders, including the media, about the need to be tolerant towards the intolerant.

There is not necessarily a direct causation between the presence of Islamophobia and what has happened in Christchurch. But this attack must end our collective innocence.

No matter the size of these extremist communities, they always represent a threat to our collective well-being. Social cohesion and mutual respect need to be asserted and continually worked on.

Paul Spoonley, Pro Vice-Chancellor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey University

This article is republished from The Conversation. Read the original article.
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Linkedin Azis Anwar Fachrudin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019

Muslims should not have been startled by Nahdlatul Ulamas (NU) recent call for an end to addressing non-Muslims as kafir (infidels). This opinion, arising from NUs Bahtsul Masail (forum for religious problems) at its recent national conference in West Java, is not new. However, it is significantly important for the current religious state of affairs in Indonesia.

Many Muslims disapproved or even condemned NUs appeal; yet, it does not concern the word kafir in its theological meaning, but rather its use in todays social and national life. The accusation that NU wants to amend the Quran, which uses the word in many places, is simply a display of ignorance.

What NU was reviewing was the medieval fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) discourse that recognized the category of kafir dhimmi, i.e. non-Muslims living in an Islamic state and entitled to the states obligatory protection in exchange for loyalty and payment of the specific per capita tax called jizya.
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Linkedin Duncan Graham (The Jakarta Post) Malang, East Java  Fri, March 15, 2019 08:59 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8203536 1 Books #literature,#book,#history,#Indonesia,#Islam,#historical,#bookreview,#author,#George-Quinn,#Wali-Sanga,#Walisongo,#Java Free

The stories are usually wildly unhistorical but also dramatic, wacky, poignant, funny, kitschy, uplifting, invariably fantastic yet often revelatory and profoundly true. Few of them are single-track narratives.

Confused? Dont expect Western reason to put everything into logical order. For Bandit Saints of Java is about the marriage of the new authority of Indonesia with the age-old authority of Java.

The media label expert is over-used. An exception is George Quinn, 75, author of the opening statement from his latest book.

He studied at Gadjah Mada University, speaks Indonesian and Javanese, and ran Southeast Asian studies at Australias premier university. He first visited in 1966 and is married to Emmy Oey from Central Java.

Despite his experiences and knowledge Quinn remains bewildered, like wide-eyed students on first encountering the ancient archipelago.

This humility -- coupled with humor-laced prose -- snares even the most casual browser. He is from a near-extinct species, the lesser-jargon academic.

This is the most entertaining book in English on the mystery and magic, the batik-like pattern of contradictions of this nation since Elizabeth Pisanis Indonesia Etc. (2014).

The bandit saints are the Wali Sanga, also known as Walisongo, the nine probably Arab traders from India who brought Islam to Java in the 15th century.

How did they oust the existing faiths of Buddhism and Hinduism, also from India? The rout was incomplete, the earlier gods, heroes, villains, clowns and ogres of the shadow theater still cram the imagination.

One explanation is that the newcomers, unlike Protestant missionaries, accepted existing religions and adapted. Sunan (Honorable) Kalijaga used wayang kulit performances to show the Islamic reality behind the ancient Hindu stories, so persuading them to embrace the new faith.

Another version is that Java converted because King Brawijaya married an Indochinese Muslim princess who whispered about her faith while they were making love. Less romantic is the suggestion that Hindu worship had become elitist and complex while Islam was simpler and accessible to the masses.

In other tales, many little known till now, the Nimble Nine changed the course of the Brantas River, shifted shape, leapt across barriers super-hero fashion, and like all sages, prophesized.

The Brantas did shift after a volcanic explosion, so facts morphed into fiction.

Then theres the toddler-demon tuyul, and a menagerie of wraiths still spooking millions, as newsstand pulp mags and sinetron (TV soapies) plots prove. Superstition sells.

Quinn re-tells the folklore with wit, which he suspects may offend the more pious. His prose never plods as it would if he kept a straight face at his keyboard.

Take the chapter on the 2010 clumsy attempt by big business and the state to demolish the grave of Mbah Priok in the heart of the North Jakarta container terminal. It is a case study of religion being manipulated as clerics and ministers perform Olympic standard gymnastics of unreason seeking solutions.

Another hilarious section recalls the strife caused when it was discovered that many mosques were not oriented towards Mecca, but Christian Ethiopia.

The open upsurge of Islam, from the benign wearing of headscarves to stirring extremism, worries many. Yet Quinn remains hopeful that the worlds most populous Islamic nation, though officially secular, could become the new Andalus. (At the turn of the first millennium, the Muslim-ruled Spanish state was an educational, cultural and scientific center famous throughout Europe.)

The few foreigners who venture beyond Bali usually follow the Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Borobudur and Mount Bromo circuit. Fears of encountering extremists or offending protocols deter straying.

Over years of visiting venerated places, the author reports only one challenge, at Surabayas Ampel mosque, which was rapidly reversed.

Although he is not a Muslim, Quinns intimacy with Islam and Javanese culture are useful insurances. The less knowledgeable, who stay respectful and curious, seldom encounter anything more oppressive than demands for selfies.

Westerners will better understand Indonesia through seeing the Wali Sangas real or mythologized tombs (Sunan Bonang has four) and other holy places. Many were sacred long before the arrival of Islam. Some are believed to be protected by Javan tigers, though now extinct. Weird? Absolutely.

The sites draw millions despite ancestor worship being forbidden by the austere Saudi-funded Wahhabism that has penetrated Indonesia.

Quinn claims compelling evidence that the ancient practice of saint veneration and local pilgrimage is booming. So is the income garnered by canny local authorities charging fees to pray.

For those keen to erase their ignorance the website www.saintsofjava.net gives directions to some sites.

Almost every page of Bandit Saints carries a memorable line: Tradition is a suspect territory that is ripe for invasion; The squint-eyed wariness of Javas peasantry and the aloofness of patrician mystics.

I felt -- as I always do -- a powerful affection for the aural ambience of Islam. It is a very public, very melodic ambience, as comforting and as beautiful [yes [] beautiful, even when wrenched out of shape by screeching predawn loudspeakers] as Islamic architecture, dress, food, etiquette, calligraphy and decoration.

And who can resist a chapter with the sub-head: A gay saint, pushy women and Islam? Yet this is a scholarship, not The Daily Mail.

Bandit Saints probably couldnt be published in Indonesian lest it generates confected outrage, particularly in an election year. It is available in mainstream bookshops.

As an outsider, New Zealand-born Quinn does not suffer the anxiety Indonesians breathe every day in the air of public rhetoric.

As a result we are enriched, inspired to visit and fortified by this pilgrims findings: In the tangled Sherwood of Javas cultural interior they (the Wali Sanga) wait in ambush, a stubborn challenge to the well-armed soldiers of fundamentalism. (ste)

Bandit Saints of Java

By George Quinn

Monsoon Books, Leicestershire; 2019

432 pages
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Linkedin Sara Hussein (Agence France-Presse) Tokyo, Japan  Fri, March 15, 2019 09:03 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8203e6e 2 Health breast-cancer,cancer,research,Science Free

For breast cancer survivors, the risk of tumors returning casts a long shadow, with recurrence possible up to two decades after a diagnosis. But new research could help identify and treat those most in danger.

Doctors have traditionally relied on factors such as the size and grade of a tumor at diagnosis, lymph node involvement and a patient's age to determine their risk of relapse.

But the rate at which breast cancer recurs, and why it does so, remains "poorly understood", according to the study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

In a bid to change that, the researchers turned to data from over 3,000 breast cancer patients diagnosed in the United Kingdom and Canada between 1977 and 2005.

Nearly 2,000 of the cases included molecular data about the cancers that provided the researchers with detailed information about the tumors.

The data was used to develop a computer model that identified four sub-groups with "exceedingly high risk of late distant relapse," said senior author Christina Curtis, assistant professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University.

"These are the patients that remain in jeopardy of experiencing a relapse after their initial diagnosis," she told AFP.

The study found that around 25 percent of women with the most commonly diagnosed form of breast cancer have a 42-55 percent risk of seeing their cancer return within two decades.

"These are the women who seem to be cured but then present with systemic disease many years later," Curtis said in a press release issued by Stanford University.

"Until now, there has been no good way to identify this subset of women who might benefit from ongoing screening or treatment."

The study also opens up potential new avenues for additional treatment of breast cancer patients by identifying gene alterations in each of the four at-risk sub-groups.

These alterations or mutations result in problems in signalling that can cause unwanted cell growth. And that in turn can fuel the formation of tumors or their progression.

"Many of these genomic driver alterations can potentially be therapeutically targeted, suggesting the possibility of new treatment options, though this will need to be evaluated in the context of clinical trials," Curtis told AFP.

The study also reveals when and where in the body breast cancers might metastasize and found a group of patients with so-called triple-negative tumors whose cancers are unlikely to return after five years.

"This information can be used to refine risk estimates and improve follow-up and stratification of patients with breast cancer -- for example by determining which patients might benefit from longer or different types of treatment," Curtis said.

Read also: No need for chemo in many breast and lung cancers, major studies show

Better treatments

The researchers cautioned that their data set includes cases from decades ago, meaning that patients were not then able to access more recently developed and approved treatments.

Some of those treatments have significantly improved the survival rates for patients with particular types of breast cancer.

But the findings should still significantly help doctors more accurately predict which of their patients are most at risk of seeing their cancer return.

The team has even developed an online "breast cancer recurrence predictor" tool for doctors, using their model.

Curtis said the researchers are now pursuing a clinical trial for treatment options that would target the genomic defects in patients most at risk of cancer recurrence.
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Linkedin Devina Heriyanto (The Jakarta Post) London  Fri, March 15, 2019 18:00 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee82282f8 1 Books Emte,#LondonBookFair,London-Book-Fair,translation,#books,National-Book-Committee,Literature Free

Indonesia closes its participation at the 2019 London Book Fair with 23 translation rights sold on the spot. Various publishers from 12 countries have expressed interest in a further 408 book titles.

On the first day, 12 titles by Asta Ilmu Publishing were sold to Singapore Asia Publication to be distributed to Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, India and South Africa. On the second day, eight titles by Mizan were sold to a UK publisher and one title from Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia (KPG) was sold to a Portuguese publisher. On the last day, two titles by Rumah Pensil were sold to Sapasar Literary Agency to be distributed in Malaysia.

Indonesia is the market focus country for this years book fair, held on March 12-14 at Olympia Hall, London. The national organizing committee has set the target of 50 sales for this year.

Since the establishment of the National Book Committee in 2015, more than 1,200 Indonesian titles have been sold to international publishers.

Read also: Indonesians struggle to promote books abroad

Five distributors from the UK, Europe and US have agreed to distribute Indonesian books that are already in English to the UK, US, European Union, Australia and India. Amazon UK also bought the distribution rights for the award-winning Battle of Surabaya animation movie.

Twenty-three publishers showcased their books at the Indonesian pavilion, which in form resembled ripples -- the theme of the Indonesian participation this year. Books are able to create ripples to other content-based industries, as embodied in the logo and production design of the national stand for the fair.

Publishers and visitors meet at the ground level of the Indonesian pavilion at the 2019 London Book Fair. (JP/Devina Heriyanto)

Designed by Andro Kaliandi and Fauzia Evanindya for architecture and design firm FFFAAARRR, Indonesias national booth was split into two sections. The 400-square-meter ground floor accommodated book publishers while the smaller upper floor named Spice Cafe exhibited other intellectual property products from 10 companies as well as showcasing Indonesian cuisine.

Aside from books, Indonesia also promoted other content such as art, food, comics and board games through a series of cultural events. While the book fair itself was aimed more at people in the publishing industry, cultural programs were held in the Greater London area for those who wished to know more about Indonesia.

Artist Muhammad "Emte" Taufiq draws on the walls at the Indonesian pavilion at the 2019 London Book Fair. His paintings were inspired by Indonesia's seas. (JP/Devina Heriyanto)

For three days, artist Muhammad Emte Taufiq conducted a live-drawing session in the Indonesian pavilion at Olympia Hall. At the end of the fair, the white walls were adorned by blue-black murals showing the richness and diversity of Indonesias oceans.

I adopted the theme of 17,000 islands of imagination for my drawing, said Emte, Indonesia is known for its oceans and I wanted to show the beauty of our seas. I also believe that knowledge is like the ocean, deep and vast with many parts still unknown. I think only science and books can help us unearth this knowledge and make sense of the world. (kes)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 14:36 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee821e38c 4 Art & Culture gamelan,bali,dance,culture,rome,Italy,tourism,travel Free

The Bali Puspa Sari Gamelan Group has returned to Italy after 20 years.

Supervised by the Indonesian Embassy in Rome, the group consists of Italians and Indonesians living in the city who have a similar mission of promoting Indonesian culture through Balinese gamelan and dances.

Following an inauguration ceremony led by Indonesian Ambassador to Italy Esti Andayani, a cultural event titled Gamelan Puspa Sari 2.0 was held on March 11 at the embassy, featuring performances of Tabuh Gilakand Ramayana by 18 young musicians that included Indonesian and Italian students as well as Indonesians residing in the country.

Daniele Zapatore, a doctoral student of etnomusicology at La Sapienza University in Rome who studied Bali cultural art in Indonesia last year, served as music arranger for the event and initiator for the group's comeback.

Read also: West Sumatran chocolate promoted in Italy

Indonesian I Ketut Yuni Paccioti, who has been living in Italy for 30 years, contributed to the event by performing the margapati dance.

As reported by kompas.com, around 150 guests were invited to the event, most of them young Italians.

"It's a very interesting event; makes me want to study Indonesia even more," said high school student Ludovica.

"I want to design clothes using Indonesian fabric and showcase them at Rome Fashion Week in July," said Camilla, a student at KOEFIA fashion school. (kes)
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Linkedin Mekhla Raina (Reuters)  Fri, March 15, 2019 10:24 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8206396 2 Science & Tech Facebook,social-media Free

Facebook Inc said on Thursday it had restored service to its main app and Instagram, after the world's largest social network suffered a major outage that frustrated users across the globe for about 24 hours.

The company also said it was considering whether to refund advertisers for lost exposure due to the problems, which internet outage trackers showed affected users in Europe, Japan, North and South America.

"Yesterday, a server configuration issue made it difficult for people to access our apps and services. We are 100 percent back up and running and apologize for any inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson said.

"We are still investigating the overall impact of this issue, including the possibility of refunds for advertisers."

Facebook takes tens of millions of dollars of advertising revenue every day.

Read also: Facebook weighs refunding advertisers as system outage persists

Media reports earlier said millions of users were affected, and thousands took to Twitter on Wednesday and Thursday to complain under the hashtag #facebookdown.

DownDetector website - one of the internet's most used sources of numbers on outages - showed the number of complaints had peaked at more than 12,000, gradually falling to about 180 as of 11 a.m. ET on Thursday.

The BBC and a handful of other media outlets said it was the platform's longest ever outage. Reuters was not immediately able to verify those claims and the company declined to comment beyond the statement on resumption of services.

Facebook's shares fell nearly 2 percent in morning trading on Thursday.

Investigation

Separately, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that U.S. federal prosecutors were conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with more than 150 technology companies such as Amazon.com Inc and Apple Inc.

Facebook is facing a slew of lawsuits and regulatory inquiries over its privacy practices, including ongoing investigations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and two state agencies in New York.

A spokesman for the social network said the company was cooperating with investigators in multiple federal probes, without addressing the grand jury inquiry specifically.
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Linkedin Belinda Goldsmith (Reuters) Edinburg, Scotland  Fri, March 15, 2019 21:09 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee822c22e 2 People George-Clooney,Amal-Clooney,Women,LGBT,movement,Celebrities,minority-groups,journalist,children,justice Free

Celebrity couple George and Amal Clooney said on Thursday they wanted to use their star power to push for justice globally for women, children, LGBT+ people, religious minorities and journalists.

The 57-year-old Hollywood actor said some countries were using courts to do "really rotten things" and it was important to "shine a light" on where this was happening.

The couple's Clooney Foundation for Justice, set up in 2016, plans to this year launch, TrialWatch, a project to monitor trials and create an index to track which countries are using courtrooms to oppress minorities and government critics.

Amal Clooney, an international human rights lawyer, said it was important to expose injustices and the countries using courts to target vulnerable people, human rights defenders and press freedom.

"We now have the highest number of journalists in jail in the world since records began," she told a charity gala organised by the People's Postcode Lottery in Edinburgh.

The Clooneys, who married in 2014, said they were both committed to using their fame to raise awareness about human rights abuses and corruption.

Amal Clooney, 41, said her job was less glamorous than it might seem as it mainly involved piling through vast amounts of paperwork but their fame could be used to their advantage.

"It helps when we want to engage governments to act or business leaders," said the British-Lebanese lawyer.

Read also: Clooney foundation launches global effort to monitor court trials

Her actor husband also played down the glamour of fame, joking about being the father of one-year-old twins, but acknowledged that he had always been determined to use the public spotlight to do good.

"I didn't grow up wealthy," he said.

"If you end up getting lucky, you should share that luck."

The Clooneys were in Scotland to collect an award from the People's Postcode Lottery for their humanitarian work.

Britain's People's Postcode Lottery is one of several charity lotteries set up in Europe since 1989 by the Netherlands-based social enterprise Novamedia.

The lottery awards cash prizes and also donates about 32 percent of sales to charity, which has totaled more than 400 million pounds ($530 million) since 2005.

The organization has given money to some of George Clooney's other charities and has also made a grant to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters.
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse)  Sat, March 16, 2019 01:07 1000 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee822eb9b 2 Science & Tech Google,Pi-Day,Emma-Haruka-Iwao,world-record Free

In honor of Pi Day on Thursday, March 14, Google announced that the company's own Emma Haruka Iwao has surpassed the world record pi computation by nearly nine trillion digits.

In 2016, Peter Trueb set the world record for the greatest number of digits of pi ever calculated by generating 22.4 trillion digits. This year, however, after 121 days starting in September and ending in January, according to Alexander J. Yee, Google's Emma Haruka Iwao successfully passed the previous record by calculating 31.4 trillion digits of pi, more specifically and amusingly, 31,415,926,535,897 digits.

31.4 trillion: the number of  digits calculated.



Congratulations to @Yuryu, who set the new world record, calculating almost 9 trillion more digits than the previous world record using Compute Engine VM clusters  https://t.co/j9Hwh4r1YL #PiDay pic.twitter.com/OzwYaXCjYL  Google Cloud Platform (@GCPcloud) March 14, 2019

This feat was accomplished using y-cruncher and the Chudnovsky formula, the same program and algorithm that allowed Trueb and various other mathematicians to compute the previous world record calculations.

Read also: Perludem, Google launch new website to inform Indonesian voters

I'm on the news / BBC News - Woman breaks pi world record https://t.co/4S0w2h6vZT  Emma Haruka Iwao (@Yuryu) March 14, 2019

The last 97 digits of the calculation are as follows and are completely unique to the rest of the trillions and trillions of digits in the computation:

6394399712 5311093276 9814355656 1840037499 3573460992

1433955296 8972122477 1577728930 8427323262 4739940

Naturally, not more than a few hundred digits are necessary for most applications but, as Google said, "That isn't stopping anyone." Calculating the digits of pi is a method of testing supercomputers, as well as a way for mathematicians simply to engage in some friendly competition.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES



TORONTO, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- African Gold Group. (TSX-V: AGG) (AGG or the Company) announces its intention to seek the necessary approvals to consolidate its common shares.

The Company has called a special meeting of common shareholders (the Meeting) for April 4, 2019 at 10:00 a.m. (Toronto time). The Meeting will be held at the Companys head office at 65 Queen Street West, 8th floor boardroom, Toronto, Ontario M5H 2M5. AGG shareholders will be asked to consider and approve a share consolidation (the Consolidation) on the basis of one new common share of the Company (each, a New Share) for up to every 7.5 existing common shares of the Company (each, an Existing Share), or such lower number of Existing Shares as may be determined by the Board of Directors of AGG and as may be required to obtain approval of the Consolidation from the TSX Venture Exchange.

The principal effects of the Consolidation will be that the number of Shares of the Company issued and outstanding will be reduced from 359,582,671 Existing Shares as of the date hereof to approximately 47,944,356 New Shares, assuming a consolidation ratio of 7.5 to 1.

The expected benefits of the Consolidation include improved trading liquidity from lower transaction costs, great investor interest as well as reduced future dilution from the ability to raise additional capital at a higher price per Share. Additional benefits of the Consolidation, as well as the procedure for implementing the Consolidation and the full text resolution approving the Consolidation may be found in the Companys management information circular dated March 5, 2019 (the Circular) that is being mailed to shareholders and may be found under the Companys profile on SEDAR. The Consolidation remains subject to shareholder approval and acceptance by the TSX Venture Exchange.

About African Gold Group

African Gold Group is a Canadian listed exploration and development company on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSX V:AGG) with its focus on developing a gold platform in West Africa. Its two principal assets are the Kobada Project in Mali and the gold project located in Madougou, Burkina Faso.

For more information:

Andrew Cheatle

Chief Executive Officer

(416) 861 2267

andrew.cheatle@africangoldgroup.com

Cautionary statements

This press release contains forwardlooking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forwardlooking information includes, but is not limited to, statements regarding the Consolidation. Generally, forwardlooking 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 statements that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. Forwardlooking 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 AGG to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forwardlooking information, including but not limited to: receipt of necessary approvals; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; future prices of mineral prices; accidents, labour disputes and shortages and other risks of the mining industry. Although AGG 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 forwardlooking information. AGG does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.

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.




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Linkedin Emma Batha (Reuters) London, United Kingdom  Fri, March 15, 2019 18:01 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8228763 2 Entertainment James-Bond,aston-martin,electric-car,film,media,Britain,Daniel-Craig Free

Famous for his high speed car chases, James Bond is hardly an obvious tree hugger. But the world's best known spy has apparently gone green, with British media reporting on Thursday that he is switching to an electric Aston Martin.

The suave secret agent, played by Daniel Craig, will be taking to the wheel of the luxury car company's new 250,000 British pound ($330,000) Rapide E, its first electric car, in the 25th Bond movie, the reports said.

James Bond going electric in next film with Aston Martin Rapide E: https://t.co/8LsRkUo8xo pic.twitter.com/lBZTPw2Tiu  Autoblog (@therealautoblog) March 15, 2019

Aston Martin confirmed it was manufacturing a limited edition of 155 models of the car, but refused to say whether '007' would be driving one in the film due out next year.

Britain's Sun newspaper reported that the decision was spearheaded by the film's director Cary Joji Fukunaga, quoting an insider who described him as a "total tree-hugger".

"Everybody is afraid of Bond getting labelled 'too PC' (politically correct), but they all felt the time was right to put him in a zero emission vehicle," the insider was quoted as saying.

American Fukunaga replaced British director Danny Boyle, who pulled out of the movie last year due to "creative differences".

Read also: 'James Bond 25' sets new 2020 target

Craig will be playing Bond for a fifth time in the as yet untitled movie. It is expected to be his last stint as the secret agent created by author Ian Fleming in 1953.

Powered by an 800-volt battery system, the Rapide E is expected to have a top speed of 155mph (250 kph) with a 0-60mph acceleration time of under 4 seconds, according to Aston Martin.

But there is one snag - Bond may have to find somewhere to plug in after 200 miles.

Global automakers are planning a $300 billion surge in spending on electric vehicle technology over the next five to 10 years, according to a Reuters analysis.

The growth is driven largely by environmental concerns and government policy, and supported by rapid technological advances that have improved battery cost, range and charging time.
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Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 17:06 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8224afd 1 Art & Culture Reinventing-Eve,ISA-Art-Advisory,art-exhibition Free

March 8 and April 21 are special days for women in Indonesia, as they commemorate International Womens Day and Kartini Day, respectively. The latter celebrates the day R. A. Kartini was born. Named a national heroine, R. A. Kartini is known for her role in womens rights and education.

Held to coincide with both dates, the exhibition Reinventing Eve features works of 14 Southeast Asian and Australian artists from March 13 to 17 at 1Park Avenue in South Jakarta.

Arahmaiani's 'Silent Rainbow VIII' (left) and 'Silent Rainbow VII' (right). (JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

The event is presented by PT Intiland Development Tbk and curated by Jakarta-based art consultancy ISA Art Advisory, which is part of Indonesian Luxury, an online marketplace for furniture, artwork, architecture and property. The idea came up last year, [when] we held Kartini Day event, so this is the second year were really promoting women artists, said Deborah Iskandar, founder of Indonesian Luxury, during the opening of the exhibition on Wednesday.

Iskandar said women were underrepresented, especially in the art scene. They had other responsibilities that may take them out of the art world. A lot of women were not allowed to pursue formal education as well, especially when related to art. If you talk to the artists, theres a common thread  its about their identity, both as an artist and what they want to project in the art world, she said.

Four artists attend the press conference of the 'Reinventing Eve' exhibition on Wednesday at 1Park Avenue in South Jakarta: Melissa Tan (left to right), Ines Katamso, Rega Ayundya and Ella Wijt. (JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Visitors can marvel at paintings, photography and installations from different artists including Arahmaiani, Ella Wijt, Ines Katamso, Melissa Tan, Mella Jaarsma, Natisa Jones and Rega Ayundya. Their diversity in characteristics and style gives the exhibition an exceptional touch.

Ella Wijts Painting by 6 Kids of BUMIDUNIA, for instance, explores layers of personalities she has. People like to say I have a lot of personalities, because I can hang out with different people, so I thought why not make a panting where I could change personalities. Thats why its very crowded  theres a part of me thats messy or keen to create objects, said Ella at the same occasion, adding that it was part of a large project titled Bumi Dunia.

Read also: Women's March in Jakarta to be held in April after elections

The Jakarta-born artist often incorporates her personal belongings into the paintings. I want to tell people that every object is meaningful and has value, said Ella, adding that she had also been influenced by symbols taken from the bible.

When it comes to gender representation in the art industry, Ella said, Im actually happy if people dont know whether [a painting] was [made] by a woman or not, because to me, defining a person as a woman artist is already discrimination. Artist is just artist."

'Arches and Gateways: 7 Iris' by Melissa Tan (JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Unlike Ella, Singaporean artist Melissa Tan works with metal in the three-dimensional Arches and Gateways: 7 Iris. Actually comprising four artworks, Arches and Getaways maps positions of asteroids that are named after liminal goddesses: 7 Iris, 100 Hecate, 26 Proserpina and 78 Diana.

To create the work, she had her friends teach her several design software programs, including Rhino and Autocad. I always want to do something that I cant do very easily. I think thats how I push myself, by learning different software. When I feel uncomfortable, thats when I know Im growing, said the creator of the Arc of Uncertainties (Installation) -1862 Apollo at the Facebook Offices in Singapore.

'Fragments of Sobriquet' by Rega Ayundya, featured at 'Reinventing Eve' exhibition (JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Meanwhile, Indonesian artist Rega Ayundya shows through Fragments of Sobriquet that detailed and repetitive patterns can have their own beauty. Commenting on the 2017 artwork, she said the drawing process was a form of meditation for her. The challenge is not to get bored because its repetitive, said Rega. But its like meditation inspired by a Sufism approach, where its believed that something that is performed repetitively will give power to both the audience and the performer.

Another artist, Ines Katamso, merges painting with weaving accents in her works, one of which is called Volonte  Willingly. The French-Indonesian artist also combines geometric shapes with organic elements, block colors and plants as she is always surrounded by plants in her home in Bali.

In her artwork, French-Indonesian artist Ines Katamso often combines geometric shapes with organic elements, block colors and plants, as she is always surrounded by plants in her home in Bali. (JP/Ni Nyoman Wira)

Its about how were able to hide ourselves from reality, because sometimes reality is too difficult. Painting is what I do, so I can build a new world where I feel better than in reality, while weaving means two parts become one identity, said Ines, adding that her paintings also displayed a contrast that symbolized how to find ourselves between our reality and consciousness. (mut)
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Linkedin Fadli (The Jakarta Post) Batam, Riau Islands  Fri, March 15, 2019 11:37 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee820f303 1 People lighthouse,lighthouse-keeper,Riau-Islands Free

Having been a lighthouse keeper on some of Indonesias most remote islands for the last 33 years, solitude is no stranger to Heriyanto.

Solitude is my true friend, the 57-year-old man told The Jakarta Post at his current assignment location on Putri Island in Nongsa district, Batam, over the weekend.

Putri Island is one of the countrys outermost islands, directly facing Malaysia and Singapore. Its lighthouse was built in 1996 by the Transportation Ministry.

Following in his father's footsteps, Heriyanto began his career as a lighthouse keeper on Mangkai Island in Natuna, Riau Islands, in 1986 with a junior high school diploma. He is now the lighthouses head and will retire in September.

Mangkai Island, which faces the South China Sea, was previously uninhabited. Its lighthouse is located on top of a hill that is so high that, the first time Heriyanto tried to reach his post, he had to take three breaks before arriving at the top. His first task was to tend to the lighthouses lighting tools and the tower itself.

It remains the most memorable place for me, as it was my first assignment that led to numerous experiences, including the first time I met a ghost, he said. But fear had no use there. I had to endure everything.

Lighthouse keeper Heriyanto stands in front of his post on Putri Island. (JP/Fadli)

In total, Heriyanto has lived on 24 remote islands as a lighthouse keeper. His first salary was Rp 25,000 (US$1.75) per month. Now, he receives Rp 3 million plus an additional Rp 4 million performance allowance.

All goes directly to my wife and kids, he said, adding that he and his family lived separately as it would be difficult for him to raise a family and send his children to schools on remote islands.

Heriyantos three daughters live in Tanjungpinang, Riau, with his wife. He goes home every three months, taking turns manning the lighthouse with his colleagues.

A lighthouse usually had three to five officers, he said, but the number had decreased over time.

Now, there are only the two of us here. Not that many people wish to work in a lighthouse, he said.

Perhaps they have gotten used to the solitude, or perhaps it is in their nature to work in an isolated place where interactions are kept to a minimum. Heriyanto said that, on uninhabited islands, the keepers would stay in separate large houses assigned to them, often equipped with farming fields to keep them occupied during leisure time.

After all, he said, Our main job is to make sure the lighthouse works accordingly.

All lighthouse keepers are also required to be able to recognize any kind of flag or light signaled by a ship. As such, the top deck of the lighthouse tower is off limits to all visitors for security reasons.

Lights of the Putri Island lighthouse are on from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. every day. The lights emitting from the tower are unique, acting as a distinct code for the island and informing ships where they are.

Every ship is equipped with lighthouse codes, so when they see one, they know where theyre at, Heriyanto said.

Along with the improving technology, diesel fuel had been replaced by solar cells to power the light in the tower. The lighthouse can also guide any nearby ship to its rightful course.

It can signal in three languages  Indonesian, Japanese and English  to ships that are off course, Heriyanto said.

Read also: 2,000 foreign cruise passengers arrive in Bintan, Riau

A lighthouse keepers life

A solitary life is something Heriyanto is accustomed to. He remembered that the farthest place he ever worked at was on Saint Petrus Island on the border of Kalimantan. It would take him 22 hours by boat to reach the island.

The lighthouse was built in the Dutch [colonial] era and is located in the middle of nowhere. There was only silence everywhere I went, and thats something I had to enjoy, he said.

According to Heriyanto, falling ill was a problem as most lighthouse keepers tended to rely on traditional medicines. Rescue ships usually came after three days, he said.

To kill time, keepers make friends with amateur radio operators using communication radios. There is no cellphone signal in the area, so we turn to radios, he said.

Though they are located far from everywhere, lighthouse keepers are able to cast votes during elections with the help of local poll administrators (KPPS) who make trips to remote islands by boat.

The only time I didnt vote was when I was working on Saint Petrus Island, because it was a 22-hour trip there, he recalled.

Nearing his retirement, Heriyanto said he hoped for a salary increase for lighthouse keepers, if not for this generation then for the next.

We face enormous challenges every day, he said. (swa/wng)
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Linkedin Lynda Ibrahim (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 14:42 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee821e743 4 Lifestyle animal-abuse,urban,society,sexual-abuse,women-empowerment,Women-Empowerment-and-Child-Protection,orang-utan,hunting Free

Like, oh my God. Just when I thought I could pen a lighthearted column about that darling ginger cat named Goose, my own country folk began slinging mud, which I simply could not ignore.

First off, who would shoot an animal 74 times? Even if you were savagely attacked by a grizzly bear a la the scene with Leonardo Di Caprio in The Revenant, taking 74 shots would mean you had time to reload your weapon in the midst of the attack. This means you were never in that much danger in the first place, not to mention that the animal in question here was not a grizzly bear but a regular-sized orangutan with a baby in tow, which ended up dying of malnutrition since its mom could not go looking for food.

Attempting to kill an endangered species is already legally wrong and morally repugnant. Taking 74 shots is such soulless overkill that the culprit loses any claims to humanity. Even grizzly bears would only maul the perceived threat enough to subdue it  they wouldn't lunge at it 74 times just because they could. Whoever shot this orangutan is lower than an animal. If caught, I'd rather feed them alive to hungry bears than start a legal proceeding paid by our tax money.

The second serving of lowliness came from a man, hailed by many as a cleric, who was so hell-bent on rejecting a proposed bill on domestic violence that he, using the most graphic of language and gestures that one could possibly demonstrate on national television, described and supported marital rape.

He cowardly ducked behind religion whenever his debate opponent, an activist for gender equality, tried to explain how wives were individuals with feelings and not dull properties. Toward the end of what quickly became a shouting match, he dared question the activist's religion, even though the said activist was a Muslim woman in a hijab.

Those of you who spend a considerable amount of time watching shows on Animal Planet and Discovery Channel will know even animals do a mating dance in which it is usually the male that tries to attract the female. Even animals understand that it takes a willingness of both parties for a mating session to take place.

There is patriarchy, then there is patriarchy so unapologetic and vulgar that you seriously question the media that keeps giving this offender a spotlight and the women who still flock to his sermons. Forget brain-eating zombies  the most dangerous outbreak at hand is the massive loss of logic and sanity, often on behalf of misconstrued piety.

The same can be said about a group of women who were caught on camera canvassing and spreading hoaxes on how the incumbent would endorse premarital sex and eliminate religion from schools.

How is that even possible in a country that puts One God as the first tenet of the state ideology and actually boasts a full-fledged Religious Affairs Ministry?

How twisted can one be before concocting such lies and how daft can one be before falling for these lies?

Why do I feel that the gazelle versus the lions in the African Sahara is somehow more honest and follows better logic? Who are the animals here?

And then there is the one that takes the cake. I wished I hadn't read the news, but I did.

A legislative candidate, who by the way earns a living as a Quran reading instructor and mosque leader, was apprehended for having molested his 17-year-old child for years.

His own flesh and blood.

Back to nature documentaries, only animals would fornicate with their own offspring  and even then only after the offspring has come of age.

The pervert has since run away, as he is clearly not man enough to face the hands of law. This time, I hope the police capture and legally process him, because I cannot wait for the karma that awaits him behind bars. We all know what fellow inmates tend to do to imprisoned rapists, but only God knows what they might do to a man convicted for violating his own child.

For all the religious symbols proliferating in every corner of this country, as a nation, we're not getting any nobler.

We're getting lower.

Some of us, as these weeks show, are getting on par with animals, if not lower. And while some of you may try to gloss over these travesties, the rest of us with a shred of humanity left will be here hanging our heads in collective shame.

Lynda Ibrahim is a Jakarta-based writer with a penchant for purple, pussycats and pop culture.
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Linkedin Bambang Muryanto (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 15:38 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee822194e 1 Art & Culture exhibition,rape,sexual-abuse,Yogyakarta,Performance Free

Ela Mutiara anxiously lies in bed, frequently turning from side to side. At one point she wakes and sits up; her eyes empty as she stares into space. She then changes her clothes, finds food to eat and goes back to sleep.

This routine goes on and on every day. Sometimes, Ela can be found throwing all her clothes onto the floor, then sits down crying her heart out -- only a metronome keeps her company with its haunting ticking sound.

"Ela portrays a woman who was raped by her uncle. I've met with the survivor and she was highly depressed," choreographer Ayu Permata Sari told The Jakarta Post on March 8.

The aforementioned scene was Ayu's works that was showcased at a visual art exhibition titled KAMI Bu-Ta (We are not animals) at the Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association (PKBI)'s Lentera Sahaja Youth Center Gallery in Yogyakarta. It runs until March 23.

The exhibition, which is held to celebrate International Women's Day, also features work that was showcased at the 2017 Jogja National Museum, as well as documentation photos of works by Ari Kusuma and installation art.

In Ayu's 90-minute play, she dances alongside Pebri Irawan.

In the last scene, the audience sees Pebri Irawan sitting on red fabric with a red curtain in the background designed by Anwar, which symbolizes sexual abuse. (JP/Bambang Muryanto)

"The KAMI Bu-Ta dance was inspired by the experience of a girl who was raped by her stepfather until she feels more animal than human," said Ayu.

Read also: Victim blaming obvious no-no. What about victim protection?

The girl was raped between the ages of 10 and 16. Her stepfather raped her anytime he wanted, and had done so on the dining table, in the living room or bathroom.

The exhibition concept is uniquely divided into five scenes. The first scene features three documentation photos of KAMI Bu-Ta art performance that portrays the victim being gagged, her hands bound and being physically abused. The photos narrate how the victim is unable to scream or become a witness to her terrible ordeal.

The second scene portrays the victim's daily activities, which only revolve around eating, taking a shower and sleeping.

In the third scene, the viewers are invited to see the collaborative installation works of Ayu and Anwar Sugiharto in the form of a marionette.

"This artwork portrays how victims of sexual assault are always drawn to their past due to trauma," said Ayu.

In the fourth scene, Ayu and Anwar's collaborative work features three people donning the hijab who sing children's song titled "Balonku Ada Lima" (I Have Five Balloons) while holding four red, orange, pink and black balloons.

These balloons, said Ayu, were our daily reality on various sexual abuse acts such as catcalling. However, amid the darkness of sexual abuse symbolized by a black balloon, a white one appears to represent how hope is always there to help us rise again.

In the last scene, the audience sees Pebri Irawan sitting on red fabric with a red curtain in the background designed by Anwar, which symbolizes sexual abuse. Around 2 meters above Pebri's head, seven candles are lit and installed in a tilted position. Pebri was always in pain whenever the hot candle wax fell on his face.

"This is my interpretation of candles. Candles are like the police, government and doctors who, if not in the right position, can hurt victims of sexual abuse," said Pebri.

The police who made rapists marry their victims, said Ayu, were an example of a solved case that was hurtful to the victims of sexual abuse. And many such cases are against the interest of the victims.

Ela, who played the victim, said she felt sad when portraying the role. When she slept on the bed, she felt afraid and no longer had the will to live.

"I cried during our first show," she added.

Ela Mutiara portrays a rape victim during the 90-minute play. (JP/Bambang Muryanto)

During the opening KAMI Bu-Ta exhibition, Ayu's performance was showcased twice. Until the end of the exhibition, viewers can only watch documentation photos, installation works and properties of KAMI Bu-Tas first show.

According to the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), the number of cases involving sexual violence in Indonesia continues to grow. By late last year, it recorded up to 348,446 cases in 2017, an increase of 25,522 from 2017.

Ironically, the majority of the cases, or 71 percent, happened in private settings such as the victim's home. And the perpetrators are always close family such as a birth father or uncle.

Ayu is hopeful that the exhibition would help open visitors' perspectives on sexual violence cases.

"Hopefully, they can realize how hurtful it is for the victims of sexual violence," she added. (kes)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 07:30 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81ff37a 1 City Bekasi,waste-management,villagers,compensation Free

Protesting residents of Burangkeng village in Bekasi, West Java, have closed access to a nearby waste disposal (TPA) site for 10 days, demanding the local administration pay stench money compensation.

They have demanded that the regency pay each family in the village Rp 270,000 (US$18.90) per family per month, the same amount received by the residents of neighboring Taman Rahayu village.

Burangkeng village secretary Ali Gunawan said the situation of the villagers was similar to that of those living near Bantargebang dumpsite, where residents receive compensation from the TPA owner, the Jakarta administration.

Jakarta pays compensation to Bekasi City, Sumur Batu subdistrict, Bantargebang subdistrict, Cikiwul subdistrict and Ciketing Udik subdistrict. Why cant Bekasi regency pay compensation to residents of Setu district in Burangkeng village? Ali said.

He warned that Burangkeng residents would forcibly close Burangkeng TPA if the administration failed to provide the compensation money to them.

Hundreds of protesting Burangkeng residents have blocked access to the TPA since March 4, causing trash to pile up nearby.

Besides demanding the stench money, the residents also demand that water canals be built in the village and that improvements be made to the dumpsites road and maintenance. (ami)
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Linkedin Stefanno Reinard Sulaiman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 07:45 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81ffb6e 1 Business LPG,LPG-canisters,LPG-price,subsidy,energy,energy-and-mineral-resources-ministry,poverty,poverty-alleviation,Gadjah-Mada-University Free

The problems surrounding the subsidized liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) seem to have no end.

One critical issue is in ensuring that the subsidized LPG ends up only in the hands of eligible beneficiaries: the poor. At present, even the wealthy can easily purchase the 3-kilogram canisters of subsidized LPG at discounted prices through online marketplaces.

The government has come up with a solution: Replace the indirect LPG subsidy with a direct subsidy.

Unfortunately, the people must wait at least another year, pending trials of the direct subsidy scheme, as well as the presidential election on April 17.

Ruddy Gobel, the head of communications and partnership of the National Team for Accelerated Poverty Reduction (TNP2K), said the direct subsidy of LPG would be trialed in seven municipalities and regencies for completion in June.

The trials are to be conducted in the municipalities of Bukittinggi in West Sumatra, Tomohon in North Sulawesi, North Jakarta in Jakarta, and Kediri City in East Java, as well as the regencies of Bogor in West Java, Tangerang regency in Banten and Gunung Kidul in Yogyakarta.

After the trials, we will [draft] the regulations. The final decision on whether to implement this [scheme] or not will be up to the Energy and Mineral Resources Minister, and likely the President himself, Ruddy told The Jakarta Post recently.

We cannot assure that nationwide implementation will be done this year, but if we can kick it off this year, the government could save more than Rp 50 trillion [US$3.49 billion] in the state budget from [misdistribution]," he said.

Established in 2010, the TNP2K involves almost all ministries and is chaired by the Vice President. It is responsible for selecting eligible beneficiaries with the Social Affairs Ministry and for conducting trials of the direct subsidy scheme.

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry is leading the new subsidy scheme.

Ruddy said preparations for trialing the direct subsidy scheme had started in December 2018, with the first trial to commence in April and the second trial in early May. The trials would involve 14,193 households.

Right now, we are still registering [the beneficiaries], he said.

The direct subsidy that will replace the indirect subsidy of 3 kg LPG canisters is to involve the use of biometric authentication like facial and fingerprint recognition. Facial recognition was critical, said Ruddy.

The TNP2K has three possible methods for implementing the direct subsidy: e-vouchers sent as text messages, biometric authentication and a combination of electronic identity (e-ID) cards and biometric authentication.

Ruddy said the President wanted the new scheme to operate under a low budget, so it would not require the production of a special card like the Family Hope Program (PKH) card or the Smart Indonesia Card (KIP).

We will decide which method is the most efficient. The nationwide implementation could use only one of the three methods or a combination, he said.

Once the direct subsidy scheme was implemented, the LPG would be sold at a market price of around Rp 30,000 per 3 kg canister, with a discounted price for beneficiaries after sellers have authenticated their identities.

If the biometric method was used, said Ruddy, beneficiaries would only need to be authenticated by the LPG agent to receive the special discounted price.

If the e-voucher or e-ID card methods were used, beneficiaries only needed to present their voucher or card to the sellers to receive the discounted price.

"[Beneficiaries] only need to pay the discounted price, explained Ruddy.

Muhammad Rizwi, the director for oil and gas business development at the energy ministry, said the implementation of the new subsidy scheme would also depend on the April election.

We will wait at least until after the elections [...] for the political climate to stabilize. Because we dont know [who will win the presidential election], he said, adding that the ministry would still push for the new scheme no matter who was elected.

Rizwi expected that the full implementation of the scheme would only be possible in 2020, given the political uncertainty. This year, the government would focus on the trials and only allocate a budget for the scheme next year.

The ministrys data estimates that 26 million households are eligible for the direct LPG subsidy. The final figure could be higher, as this does not include other beneficiaries like micro businesses and fishermen.

In its preliminary discussion, the ministry has already reached a decision on the direct subsidy scheme  albeit an unofficial one  that a single household will be eligible for three 3 kg canisters of LPG per month. Meanwhile, micro businesses will be eligible for nine 3 kg canisters per month and fishermen will be eligible for 10 canisters per month.

Alleviating the misdistribution of the indirect LPG subsidy is vital to reducing LPG imports. The current national demand of LPG is 6.5 million metric tons, of which 70 percent is imported, with projections indicating steady growth of consumption.

Energy experts believe the direct subsidy scheme could help curb the distribution problem. However, they said obstacles remained in implementing the scheme nationally.

Fabby Tumiwa, the executive director of local energy watchdog Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR), said the government must ensure the availability of 3 kg canisters of LPG in all regions.

If the government target [is to distribute] the 3 kg LPG only for poor people, then availability and the peoples access to the LPG must not be an issue, he told the Post.

The government also has to ensure that only the designated agents that have data [on beneficiaries] are allowed to sell the 3 kg LPG, said Fabby.

Energy economist Fahmy Radhi of Gadjah Mada University said that non-beneficiaries could potentially cut into 10 percent of the subsidy, as was the case with the rice for the poor (raskin) subsidy program.
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Linkedin Norman Harsono (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 06:43 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee81fe956 1 Business exports,Trade,furniture,furniture-fair,craft,trade-balance,trade-barriers,European-Union Free

The Indonesian Furniture and Craft Association (HIMKI) expects to boost furniture and wooden craft exports from US$2.5 billion in 2018 to $2.9 billion this year through its annual four-day International Furniture Expo.

In his speech at the opening of the expo on Monday, HIMKI chairman Soenoto said the expos sales target was $1.1 billion, comprised of on-the-spot sales ($300 million) and follow-up sales ($800 million).

But Soenoto actually opened his keynote by stressing the need to drive forward Indonesias entire manufacturing sector to boost nationwide exports by selling value-added products.

Indonesia is rich in natural resources, he said, But if you have kale, dont just sell kale, sell salad. Thats the added value.

His words resonated with those of economists Faisal Basri and Gatot Arya Putra, who wrote in a 2016 report titled Escaping the middle income trap in Indonesia that Indonesias poor manufacturing sector would block it from becoming a high-income country.

In fact, according to the report, Indonesias chance of attaining high-income status is only 3 percent at current growth rates.

The only way to escape the low and middle income trap is by strengthening the industrial sector. Thus the role of the national leadership, in this case the President, is vital, the report said.

Responding to the pressing need for manufacturing growth, President Joko Jokowi Widodo and the Industry Ministry launched last year the Making Indonesia 4.0 roadmap that emphasizes growth in five select industries: automotive, chemicals, electronics, textiles and food and beverage.

The five industries, which exclude furniture, contributed at least 60 percent to national exports, employment and the manufacturing sectors contribution to gross domestic product.

We will continue to focus on these five sectors this year, Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto told the Jakarta Post on Monday.

However, HIMKI secretary general Abdul Sobur criticized the minister for not focusing enough on the furniture and crafts industry despite its strong competitive edge with rattan furniture, the base material of which is almost exclusively produced in Indonesia.

He urged the government to, for example, provide the industry with subsidies for technology and market guarantees instead of direct financing.

He also claimed the government-mandated timber legality assurance system (SVLK) was hurting downstream competitiveness even though the SVLK was necessary for exports to the European Union and United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, Adhi Lukman, chairman of the Indonesian Food & Beverage Association (GAPMMI), expressed disappointment with his industrys performance.

Food and beverage exports, which make up almost a quarter of annual exports, decreased 6.3 percent from $31.8 billion in 2017 to $29.9 billion in 2018, according to Industry Ministry data.

There are actually a lot of smaller countries out there that could become our new export destinations, but were hampered by their high tariffs, he said during an event last month.

A case in point, he said were certain African countries that charged tariffs of up to 30 percent on Indonesian products and thus, the government should escalate efforts to reduce such barriers through trade agreements.

In this vein, Indonesia signed a trade deal with Australia last week and plans to conclude eleven more agreements this year including with the EU and South Korea.

Ade Sudrajat, chairman of the Indonesian Textiles Association (API), said he looked forward to the ratification of the recently signed Indonesia-Australia trade deal, and expected it to increase textile exports to Australia.

The deal will improve our competitiveness. In the future, Indonesia [instead of China] will dominate the Australian textile market, he said as recently reported by media outlets.

Indonesia's worldwide textile imports increased from $12.54 billion in 2017 to $13.5 billion last year with the association optimistic that it can achieve higher growth this year.

Minister Airlangga noted on Monday that the deal with Australia would also benefit HIMKI because furniture was already Indonesias second-most profitable export to Australia with $214.9 million in sales last year.
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Linkedin Karina M. Tehusijarana (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, March 17, 2019 11:26 999 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8201955 1 Politics Maruf-Amin,Jokowi,2019-elections,Presidential-Debate,Sandiaga-Uno Free

Senior Muslim cleric and non-active Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) chairman Maruf Amin is set to face off with former Jakarta deputy governor Sandiaga Uno on Sunday in the first and only vice presidential candidate debate.



Ma'ruf's performance in the first debate, when he was paired with President Joko Jokowi Widodo, was less than inspiring, as he spoke the least of the four debaters.



A moment when he refrained from adding to a response from Jokowi, saying only "I have nothing to add", went viral, drawing some ridicule but also some sympathy.



Polls have also shown that Maruf has not had any significant effect on Jokowis electability, which has hovered around 53 to 58 percent since the beginning of 2018, prior to the announcement of Maruf as his running mate.



Jokowi-Maruf campaign officials defended Ma'ruf's performance saying that he was purposely cast in a "supporting role" to let Jokowi take the spotlight.



"This is a presidential election, so we need to focus on the true candidate," Jokowi campaign team chairman Erick Thohir said recently, adding that Ma'ruf contributed an answer to a question on terrorism because he had experience dealing with the issue as the head of the MUI.



Jokowi campaign political communications director Usman Kansong said that being on stage alone would give Maruf more freedom to communicate his ideas.



In the first debate, Pak Maruf was positioned as the second person, Usman told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. In the upcoming debate, he will not have to share the screen time and will be able to share his expertise.



Usman also said he was not worried about unfavorable comparisons between Maruf, who celebrated his 76th birthday on Monday, and Sandiagas youthful image.



In fact, we want to [highlight] his persona as a senior person, a cleric and a kiai [teacher], he said. We want him to keep wearing his sarung, not change into jeans.



He added that he was confident Maruf would show on Sunday that he was being underestimated.



Pak Jokowi was underestimated in 2014, people thought he would perform badly in the debates compared to Prabowo. But in the end, he did well and won the election, he said. Pak Maruf will do the same.



Usman also denied that Maruf had no effect on Jokowis electability.



Maybe other pollsters have not been able to capture it, but our internal polling shows that Pak Maruf has helped us gain significant ground in Banten and West Java, which Pak Jokowi lost in 2014, he said.



The Prabowo Subianto-Sandiaga campaign, meanwhile, has sought to counter the perception that Maruf is just a kindly old cleric.



The truth is Pak Maruf has been in politics since the 70s, Prabowo campaign spokesperson Andre Rosiade said in a discussion about the debate in Central Jakarta on Thursday.



Pak Maruf Amin will come to the debate not as a cleric, but as a politician who has served in Jakartas Regional Legislative Council (DPRD) and the House of Representatives. He is a master politician.



Andre pointed to the fact that Maruf got the nod as Jokowis running mate ahead of former Constitutional Court chief justice Mahfud MD, who was considered a lock for the position, as further proof of the clerics political savvy.



Analysts have said the debate has the potential to be exciting, given that the two candidates will face off for the first time, unlike Jokowi and Prabowo, who had gone head-to-head before in 2014.



The two vice presidential candidates are both novices at this level, so this creates more enthusiasm among voters, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) political analyst Siti Zuhro said on Thursday. The juxtaposition between the two candidates also makes it interesting.



I think that while Maruf didnt speak up much, his answer in the first debate was very good and logical, Paramadina University political communications expert Hendri Satrio told the Post. If Maruf can pull off a surprise, it might have a large impact on Jokowis electability. He should not be underestimated.
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Linkedin A. Muh. Ibnu Aqil (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 08:02 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee82006d5 2 City commuter-line,sexual-harassment,Education,commuter Free

What is catcalling? Is whistling a form of sexual harassment? asked a commuter at Sudirman Station in Central Jakarta.

A nearby officer answered: Catcalling is a form of sexual harassment, because whistling, shouting and comments on someones physical appearance in public are not compliments, the officer said.

The officer is among 16 PT Kereta Commuter Indonesia (KCI) officers who went around the station educating commuters on sexual harassment on Tuesday. They explained the different types of sexual harassment, how to prevent them and whom to report to if someone is sexually harassed.

One commuter, Sonya, 26, said she always felt uneasy inside the commuter train when it was packed, as one never knew the intention of passengers touching others: Perhaps they wanted to pickpocket or sexually harass other passengers.

I am glad that there is this kind of education, especially since I am a woman and commute regularly on the commuter line. I only just learned that catcalling is [a form of] sexual harassment and heard that there are more than 30 cases of it. Now I know how to prevent it, Sonya said on Tuesday, kompas.com reported.

Similarly, 22-year-old Refia appreciated the effort. Now I know many kinds of sexual harassment, not just physical but also verbal. I will use this knowledge to protect myself, Refia said.

The National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) recorded 406,178 cases of violence against women in 2018, a 14 percent increase from the previous year. Only 364 of the cases occurred in public.

KCI recorded 34 cases of sexual harassment inside commuter line trains and stations, in 20 of which the victims were willing to report the incidents to the authorities.

Meanwhile, in 2017, with 25 cases of sexual violence recorded, none of the victims were willing to go proceed with their cases and just let them rest.

KCI was assisted by Komnas Perempuan and the perEMPUan Community to educate commuters on sexual harassment, in commemoration of International Womens Day, which fell on March 8.

We do this to educate commuter line users on types of sexual harassments, how to prevent them and how to protect yourself and others against falling victim, KCI spokeswoman Eva Chairunnisa explained.

Eva said commuters, whether women or men, should be on the lookout for sexual harassment, both verbal and nonverbal. Verbal sexual harassment included catcalling, such as whistling, lewd comments or conversation and jokes aimed at making someone else uncomfortable. Nonverbal sexual harassment included staring, touching, kissing or other physical activities done without consent, she added.

Rika Rosvianti, founder of the perEMPUan Community, warned that sexual harassment in public could hinder gender equality.

Adult women and girls that are in danger of being sexually harassed on their commute would not be able to avail themselves of their citizen rights to education, health or work, let alone reach their full potential, Rika said.

Rika said commuters should also take preventive action to avoid being sexually harassed.

[Commuters] should be aware of their surroundings [to notice] possible victims or perpetrators of sexual harassment nearby and should report any suspicious activity to a nearby officer, Rika told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

She said commuters should also avoid falling asleep during their commute, keep in touch with their friends and family and not be so focused on handphones that they let their guard down.

KCI and perEMPUan have prepared a series of four short videos on sexual harassment to be played at every commuter train TV screen at least for a month, with three more video series coming soon, Rika said.

Komnas Perempuan commissioner Mariana Amiruddin said the pervasive culture of disrespect of women and normalized sexual harassment let perpetrators get away without repercussions, because there was a lack of laws to restrain them.

That is why the sexual violence bill [RUU-PKS] must be passed, so that our culture can change to protect victims of sexual harassment and punish perpetrators, Mariana said.
The two sides reached the deals after the talks between Vietnamese Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung and Cambodian Minister of Posts and Telecommunications Tram Iv Tek in Phnom Penh on March 14.

During his working visit to Cambodia from March 13-16, Hung informed the Cambodian minister about the development of Vietnams information and communications technology (ICT) sector.

According to the Vietnamese minister, Vietnam is focusing on developing logistics to promote e-commerce and telecoms infrastructure as foundations for digital economic development; testing 5G mobile network; developing e-Government and smart cities; monitoring cyberspace and ensuring cyber security for government agencies and key information infrastructure facilities; and developing a digital ecosystem.

For his part, Tram Iv Tek said as part of efforts to promote Cambodia's quadrangle development strategy, the government has paid attention to promoting high-speed internet connectivity, developing e-Government from central to grassroots levels and opening postal services to communes.

In the recent past, Cambodia's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) has issued several documents and decrees on ICT management, he said, expressing his hope that Vietnam will help his country develop postal services and support Cambodia in building infrastructure to prevent cyber attacks.

Following the talks, representatives from the two ministries and enterprises of the two countries signed a cooperation plan between Vietnams Ministry of Information and Communications and the MPT, a deal between Vietnams Information Security Department and Cambodias ICT Department and a pact on digital signatures between Vietnams BKAV Group and the MPT.

Under the agreements, the Vietnamese side will enhance postal cooperation with Cambodia by opening post offices at border gates to develop cross-border and express mail delivery services and postal financial services.

The two sides will continue negotiations on division of frequency use for new generation broadband mobile communication systems; research and deploy network transfer to keep numbers; and television digitalisation.

Vietnam will help Cambodia build a cyber security monitoring centre and provide three full scholarships worth US$27,000 each for Cambodian students to pursue study at the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology.

Hung asked the MPT to continue supporting Vietnamese IT enterprises as Viettel, VNPT, FPT and VNPost to invest and do business in Cambodia, especially in IT projects in state and government agencies.

Also on March 14, Minister Hung paid a courtesy visit to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.
NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- Life On Earth, Inc. (OTCQB: LFER) announces today that their flagship brand Just Chill is being distributed and sold in well-known and notable retailers such as 7-Eleven, Valero and Chevron convenience stores located in the following counties of Northern California; San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Santa Benito and Monterey counties.



These five counties are near the Companys Gilroy, CA distribution center, and are part of the brands continued expansion into additional direct-store-distribution retail channels. Just Chill is also sold in other states through wholesalers and distributors such as KeHE, UNFI and DPI.

The management team of Life On Earth, Inc. attended the Natural Products Expo West, held the week of March 7th - 9th in Anaheim, California. The Company showcased several of their brands and had an opportunity to meet with several retail partners as it explores additional partnerships to reach more consumers.



Historically, our Just Chill brand has been primarily sold in the grocery and supermarket channel. Because we have a direct distribution platform in Northern California, weve been able to see in real-time how well our Just Chill brand has been performing in the convenience channels. It was helpful to attend the show with this data to show the potential new DSD (Direct Store Distribution) partners that we spoke with, and of course were happy to show that to any other potential partners who may have an interest in working with us, said Fernando Oswaldo Leonzo, CEO of Life On Earth, Inc.

The Companys President, John Romagosa also added, Based on the early feedback from the recent show, weve begun the process of increasing production inventories with the help of our supply chain partners to meet the anticipated demand from new customers as well as existing customers.

About Life On Earth, Inc.

Life on Earth, Inc. is a lifestyle beverage company focused on growing its portfolio of brands in the all-natural, innovative, healthier and better for you beverage market. The Company sells its products throughout the United States with third-party distributors, wholesalers and retailers, as well as through two of its own distribution subsidiaries in Northern California and the NYC Metro area.

The Company owns, markets and distributes four proprietary beverage brands, including:

Just Chill   www.drinkjustchill.com

 Victorias Kitchen - www.drinkvictoriaskitchen.com

Gran Nevada Mio - www.lifeonearthinc.com/pages/grannevadamio

For more information, please visit our corporate website - www.lifeonearthinc.com

Investors and corporate inquiries, please contact: info@lifeonearthinc.com | (646) 844- 9897

Safe Harbor Act

Forward-Looking Statements: This release contains statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements appear in a number of places in this release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of Life on Earth, Inc. its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) financing plans; (ii) trends affecting its financial condition or results of operations; (iii) growth strategy and operating strategy. The words may, would, will, expect, estimate, can, believe, potential and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements including those relating to the Companys financing being adequate for the Company to place its products in retail stores, execute its acquisition strategy, and to launch its growth and expansion plans, among others, are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Life on Earth, Inc.s ability to control, and actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. No information in this press release should be construed in any way whatsoever as an indication of Life on Earth, Inc.s future revenues, financial performance or stock price. More information about the potential factors that could affect the business and financial results is and will be included in Life on Earth, Inc.s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov.




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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 11:16 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8207f02 4 Business Alipay,WeChat,cooperation,local-banks,obstacle Free

While illegal transactions using Chinese digital payment instruments like AliPay and WeChat are rampant among Chinese tourists in Bali, the wish of the foreign e-wallets to legally operate in the country face obstacles as they need to go through the lengthy process of securing local partners.

A number of major state-owned lenders like PT Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) and PT Bank Negara Indonesia (BNI), as well as CIMB Niaga and Bank Central Asia (BCA), have expressed interest in cooperating with e-wallet providers, but the road to realizing their respective projects has not been smooth.

BRI consumer director Handayani said the lender had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with AliPay in late 2018.

It is a product with a new format that is different from Visa Card, MasterCard and JBS, she said as quoted by kontan.co.id, adding that if the agreement with AliPay was settled, transactions with AliPay could be implemented through BRIs electronic data capture (EDC) using QR technology.

She explained that during a transaction, Chinas currency, renminbi, would be converted into rupiah, but BRI would get the funds in renminbi from AliPay.

We have to truly understand the settlement process and resolutions to any disputes so that we will not suffer any losses. We hope to implement [AliPay] sometime in 2019, she said.

Meanwhile, BCA president director Jahja Setiaatmadja said BCA wanted to cooperate with either AliPay or WeChat. He hoped to start the collaboration in September this year.

CIMB Niaga consumer director Lani Darmawan said the lender had completed a piloting project for a cooperation agreement and had submitted a request with Bank Indonesia. She said the target was to launch the collaboration in the first half of 2019.

But we have to wait for a permit from the regulator, she said on Wednesday.

Transactions with AliPay and WeChat has reportedly been rampant among Chinese tourists in Bali, but existing regulations state that they are illegal.

Chinese e-wallet providers are advised to cooperate with local banks to make their business legal in Indonesia. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (Asia News Network)  Fri, March 15, 2019 23:23 1000 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee822e720 2 World #NewZealand,#TerrorAttack,Southeast-Asia,victims,NewZealand,mosque-attack Free

At least forty-nine people were killed and dozens injured in shootings at two mosques in New Zealands second-largest city of Christchurch on Friday (March 15) in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said was a well-planned terror attack, forcing the government to place the country on its highest security threat level, the Straits Times reported.

Police said all mosques in the country have been asked to close their doors. Christchurch was also initially placed under lockdown.

Ms Ardern said Friday was one of New Zealands darkest days.

This can only be described as a terrorist attack, Ms Ardern said at here televised press conference on Friday. From what we know, it does appear to have been well planned.

Two explosive devices attached to suspect vehicles have now been found and they have been disarmed, she added.

We have lifted our threat level from low to high. We have tightened our response from our agencies at the border, at the airports. In fact, at every level, we have a heightened response.

She said three people in police custody held extremist views, but had not been on any police watchlist. While we do not have anything to believe at this stage that there were any other suspects, we are not assuming that at this stage.

Police commissioner Mike Bush says the number of people killed has increased to 49  the authorities had said earlier put the toll at 40.

A man in his late 20s has been charged with murder and will appear in court tomorrow. Mr Bush declined to identify the man.

Indonesia

Six Indonesians were praying at Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, when a gunman opened fire on worshipers on Friday, the Indonesian Foreign Ministry has said.

Three Indonesian men were able to escape the shooting, but the whereabouts of the other three remain unknown, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said in Jakarta on Friday, according to The Jakarta Post.

The minister has been coordinating with Indonesian Ambassador to New Zealand Tantowi Yahya to monitor the situation.

A team from the embassy has been dispatched to Christchurch to seek information on our people who happened to be in the mosque, particularly the three who still cannot be contacted,  she said.

She added that the shooting occurred at 13:40 local time when Muslim men were performing Friday prayers at the mosque.

Indonesian religious organizations have called on the people of Indonesia, which is home to the worlds largest Muslim population, to avoid provocation and refrain from sharing online footage of terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The government must ensure that the terrorism incidents in New Zealand do not [create tensions] in Indonesia and weaken national unity, the deputy chairman of Muhammadiyahs law and human rights division, Maneger Nasution, said.

The PGI asked Indonesians not to share videos of the shootings, saying that doing so would only help the terrorists.

We hope that Indonesians, wherever they are, are not provoked by the videos and photos that are meant to spread terror, PGI spokesperson Irma Riana Simanjuntak said.

Whoever the shooters are, they are the enemies of religions and humanity. They deserve to be severely punished. Local authorities should investigate the perpetrators behind the attacks, Maneger said.

Malaysia

Two Malaysians were injured in the mosque massacre in New Zealand and are being treated in hospital, confirms the Foreign Ministry, while local media reports one is still missing, according to the Star Online.

The Malaysian High Commission in Wellington confirmed that the injured Malaysians were undergoing treatment in hospital.

The official Facebook account of the Malaysian High Commissioner to New Zealand carried a post advising Malaysians living in New Zealand, especially Christchurch, to check whether any of their family members or friends had been injured in the shootings.

Bangladesh

Three persons of Bangladesh origin have been confirmed dead so far and four others injured in the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand today. Shafiqur Rahman, consul general of Bangladesh, told The Daily Star over phone that apart from the casualties, several other Bangladeshis are missing.

The deceased were identified as Dr Abdus Samad, his wife (unnamed as of yet), and another Hosne Ara Farid, Consul General Rahman said.

Bangladesh High Commission directly and through the consul in Auckland disseminated message to Bangladeshis and diaspora living in New Zealand and Christchurch to remain calm, be indoor, avoid places of congregation and to obey the instructions of law enforcers.

Islamaphobia

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan said, in a statement, after the attacks that they may be due to increased Islamaphobia around the world.

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9/11 where Islam & 1.3 billion Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim, Khan said. This has been done deliberately to also demonise legitimate Muslim political struggles.

Khan added that the attacks reaffirms what we have always maintained: that terrorism does not have a religion. Prayers go to the victims and their families.

First Mass Shooting Since 1990

There hasnt been a mass shooting in New Zealand since 1990, when a man killed 13 people, including two six-year-olds, after a dispute with his neighbour in the seaside town of Aramoana, the New York Times said.

That shooting led to tightened gun laws, including restrictions on military style semi-automatic weapons, according to the report.

Gun owners must be licensed, a process that includes a review of criminal activity and mental health, attendance at a safety programme, an explanation of how the gun would be used, a residence visit to ensure secure storage, and testimonials from relatives and friends.

Homicides are rare in New Zealand, and gun deaths even rarer. There were 35 homicides countrywide in 2017.

Since 2007, gun homicides have been in the single digits each year except 2009, when there were 11.

But there are plenty of guns. There were 1.2 million registered firearms in a country of 4.6 million people in 2017, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss non-profit.
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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 12:00 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee821127c 1 National PPP,graft,corruption,KPK,Romahurmuziy Free

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has reportedly arrested the leader of an Islamist party on corruption charges in East Java.

East Java Police spokesperson Frans Barung Mangera confirmed that the antigraft commission had arrested United Development Party (PPP) chairman M. Romahurmuziy during a raid.

The PPP chairman [was arrested] at the Religious Affairs Ministrys regional office in Sidoarjo, Frans told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

The party chairman was reportedly questioned at the East Java Police headquarters after the raid.

The KPK has yet to provide official confirmation of the arrest.

The reported arrest took place only weeks before the April presidential and legislative elections. The PPP is part of an alliance of parties supporting incumbent candidate President Joko Jokowi Widodo.
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Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 18:10 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee82288db 1 Business GMF,business,overseas,expansion Free

Aircraft maintenance company PT Garuda Maintenance Facility (GMF) Aero Asia sees huge potential in markets outside Indonesia to grow its maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) business.

GMF Aero Asia president director Iwan Joeniarto said recently that the company was targeting new markets like India, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Russia as well as countries in the Middle East.

India presented a great opportunity for GMF to expand because the company already had many clients from the country, Iwan said, adding that countries in the Middle East also offered lucrative markets for the subsidiary of national flag carrier Garuda Indonesia.

We plan to collaborate with local partners [in the Middle East] to establish maintenance facilities there, he said.

Iwan said GMF targeted countries like Japan and South Korea as they had enjoyed rapid growth in the aviation industry, but lacked MRO facilities. He added that GMF was also eyeing Vietnam and the Philippines as new markets.

For instance in Vietnam, the aviation industry is growing very fast. Orders for aircraft are very high, but are not balanced with enough MRO facilities, he said, adding that Russia also lacked MRO facilities.

GMF Aero Asia offers aircraft maintenance services including base maintenance, engineering, line maintenance, cabin maintenance, engine maintenance and much more.

The company recorded US$470 million in revenue in 2018, up from $439.3 million in 2017. This year, GMF eyes $500 million in revenue. (bbn)
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Linkedin Riska Rahman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 17:15 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8224daa 1 Business Google,payment,rupiah,Advertisement Free

Google Indonesia has enabled its clients to pay for advertisements in rupiah to assist those with Indonesian billing addresses.

We have changed our policy to automatically charge our clients with Indonesian billing addresses in rupiah instead of US dollar, Google Indonesia managing director Randy Jusuf said on Friday, adding that Googles team would bill its clients themselves as part of its effort to provide a better service.

Communications manager Jason Tedjasukmana added that the new billing policy would be applicable to all kinds of advertisements on the platform, including on YouTube. He said the company had effectively implemented its new policy this year following requests from its clients.

Communications and Information Minister Rudiantara lauded Google Indonesias efforts to charge people in rupiah as it would make it easier for local advertisers as they would not have to convert their payments into another currency.

Bank Indonesia has promoted the use of rupiah for transactions in Indonesia since 2015 to help stabilize the exchange rate of the local currency.

He also expressed appreciation for Google setting up an office in Indonesia because aside from making the company more compliant with tax regulations, it was beneficial to advertisers as they could gain better and easier access to customer services.

The minister expressed hope more platforms would follow in Googles footsteps. I hope more companies bill their clients in rupiah like Google in the future, he said. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 13:17 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee82131b6 4 Business PTFI,shares,Papuan-administrations,BUMD,establishment Free

The government has told the administrations of Papua province and Mimika regency to establish a region-owned enterprise (BUMD) to hold the 10 percent combined shares they were allotted through the divestment of copper and gold miner PT Freeport Indonesia (PTFI).

Mining, strategic industry and media affairs undersecretary Fajar Harry Sampurno of the State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) Ministry said the BUMD was expected to be established this year.

It will be better if it is [established] in the first half [of 2019], Fajar said as quoted by kontan.co.id on Thursday.

Read also: A guide to understanding the Freeport divestment deal

Under the initial agreement, the Papuan people were allotted 10 percent shares from the 51 percent PTFI divestment package, with 3 percent shares to be distributed to Papua province and 7 percent shares to Mimika regency.

However, as the two regional administrations had not reached an agreement on the shares allocation, state mining holding company Indonesia Asahan Aluminium (Inalum) was still holding onto the 10 percent shares, Fajar said.

He added that the Finance Ministry and Home Ministry were assisting the Papua and Mimika administrations in resolve their differences.

Inalum now controls 51.23 percent shares in PTFI, following the closure of the US$3.85 billion divestment deal on Dec. 21, 2018 between the government and PTFI parent company Freeport-McMoRan. (bbn)
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Linkedin Rachmadea Aisyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 12:06 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8212374 1 Business trade-balance,surplus,February,2019,BPS,Statistics-Indonesia Free

Indonesia's trade balance is showing signs of recovery as the country recorded a US$329.5 million surplus in February, thanks to a steep drop in imports.

The figure marks a turnaround from a trade deficit of $1.06 billion booked in January, Statistics Indonesia (BPS) reported on Friday.

Exports actually declined by 10.03 percent month-to-month (mtm) to $12.53 billion in February, driven by a 9.85 percent mtm decline in non-oil and gas exports to $11.44 billion and an 11.85 percent decline in oil and gas exports to $1.09 billion.

However, imports dropped much more, falling by 18.61 percent mtm to $12.2 billion, thanks to a 20.14 percent mtm decline in non-oil and gas imports to $10.6 billion and a 6.28 percent mtm decline in oil and gas imports to $1.55 billion.

BPS head Suhariyanto said declines were recorded in all import categories. Consumer goods imports had dropped by 18.77 percent mtm, followed by imports of raw and auxiliary materials and capital goods at 7.6 percent mtm and 2.32 percent mtm, respectively.

"Based on the trade balance [pattern] since 2017, monthly exports always go down in February because there are fewer days in the calendar [which affects productivity]," Suhariyanto told a press briefing. "Nevertheless, the decline in imports likely [reflects] a positive performance from the government's commitment to control imports through its policies."

He warned, however, that this year would not go easy on the country's trade balance, especially with external factors such as a global slowdown in growth as well as the trade war between the United States and China, Indonesia's top two trade partners.

"This surplus is good news as it influences economic growth in the first quarter," said Suhariyanto. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 16:33 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8222867 4 Business startup,unicorn,decacorns,Go-Jek,Tokopedia Free

The Indonesian E-Commerce Association (idEA) projects the country will have two decacorns -- start-ups valued at more than US$10 billion -- and more unicorns this year, as indicated by the rapid growth of several start-ups.

IdEA chairman Ignatius Untung said on Friday that ride-hailing company Go-Jek had already achieved the status, and that e-commerce platform Tokopedia was expected to follow.

Ignatius said Go-Jek became a decacorn after receiving several capital injections, including the latest from diversified business group PT Astra International. He added that Tokopedia was currently valued at around $7 billion.

So Tokopedia has the potential to become a decacorn. But I am not sure if this will be this year or next year, Ignatius said as quoted by kontan.co.id.

Regarding the birth of more unicorns, Ignatius said that while he could not name the companies, they included a digital wallet (e-wallet) company, an online travel agency (OTA) and a healthcare start-up.

Go-Jek is one of four Indonesian start-ups that were valued at over $1 billion last year, along with Tokopedia, Traveloka and Bukalapak.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said earlier that Indonesia was considered as an advanced country in Southeast Asia, because it was the birthplace of four of seven unicorns in the region. (bbn)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 14:21 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee821e36c 1 World #shooting,shootings,New-Zealand,Christchurch,#Christchurch Free

Indonesia has condemned an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, during Friday prayers, which has reportedly left multiple people dead.

Authorities in New Zealand have urged residents to remain cautious.

"Indonesia strongly condemns the shooting, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday. "The government and the people of Indonesia convey our deep condolences to the victims and their families.

The Indonesian Embassy in Wellington, which is located around 440 kilometers from Christchurch, has sent a team to the coastal city to monitor further developments and coordinate with local authorities, hospitals, as well as Indonesian student organizations in Christchurch to ensure the safety of its citizens in New Zealand.

The Foreign Ministry has a record of 330 Indonesians living in Christchurch, 134 of whom are students.

The embassy has set up hotline numbers, +64211 950980 and +6422 3812065, for those who seek information or any consular assistance following the incident.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the incident, which has forced the city of Christchurch into lockdown as police launched a massive manhunt, as "one of New Zealand's darkest days", AFP reported.

Police said four people  three men and a woman  had been taken into custody, and that they had found and neutralized a number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Meanwhile, local media have reported that at least nine people were dead, according to AFP. (ipa)
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Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 16:59 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8223c96 1 World #shooting,shooting-incident,New-Zealand,Christchurch,#Christchurch Free

An Indonesian citizen and his son were injured in a Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand on Friday, the Foreign Ministry has said.

The father is being taken care of at the intensive care unit and the son is in the general ward at the Christchurch Public Hospital, Foreign Ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir said on Friday in Jakarta.

The Indonesian Embassy in Wellington told The Jakarta Post that they received information that the two were shot by a gunman at the Linwood mosque.

The embassy is intensively coordinating with local authorities, hospitals and Indonesian communities in Christchurch, Arrmanatha said.

As many as 330 Indonesians live in Christchurch, 134 of whom are students, according to ministry data.

The embassy sent a team to Christchurch to monitor further developments and set up hotline numbers, +64211950980 and +64223812065, that can be contacted by those who seek information or any consular assistance.

Attacks on two crowded mosques  Linwood and Al-Noor  during Friday prayers in New Zealands coastal city have left at least 49 people dead, AFP reported.

Previously, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said there were six Indonesians praying at the Al-Noor mosque when a gunman opened fire on worshipers  three of whom managed to flee to safety while the whereabouts of the three others were unknown. (ipa)
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Global 7500 business jet recognized as Grand Laureate winner at the 2019 AvWeek Laureate Awards in the Business Aviation category

Aircraft continues to make history following its extraordinary 8,152 NM flight , the longest mission ever flown by a purpose-built business jet

With its unrivaled cabin comfort, long-range capabilities and signature smooth ride, the Global 7500 aircraft defines a new category of business jets

MONTREAL, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bombardier today announced it has been selected by Aviation Week & Space Technology as the Grand Laureate winner of the 62nd Annual Laureate Awards in the Business Aviation category, honouring extraordinary achievements in the global aerospace arena. The winners of the 2019 Laureate Awards were honoured on March 14, 2019 during a ceremony at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.

"We are honoured the Global 7500 business jet has been recognized with this prestigious award, said Michel Ouellette, Senior Vice President, Program Management and Engineering, Bombardier Business Aircraft. These awards have a long history of distinguishing the very best in the industry and we are thrilled to win this important recognition. No other aircraft can compare and Bombardier is proud to bring the most revolutionary and high-performing business aircraft to the market, all the while providing customers with the best business jet experience in the world.

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Headquartered in Montreal, Canada, Bombardier has production and engineering sites in 28 countries across the segments of Transportation, Business Aircraft, Commercial Aircraft and Aerostructures and Engineering Services. Bombardier shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (BBD). In the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018, Bombardier posted revenues of $16.2 billion. News and information are available at bombardier.com or follow us on Twitter @Bombardier .

Notes to Editors

Visit the Bombardier Business Aircraft website for more information on our industry-leading products and services.

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Bombardier, Global 7500 and Nuage are registered or unregistered trademarks of Bombardier Inc. or its subsidiaries.
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Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 19:52 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee822aa33 1 National PGI,Muhammadiyah,NewZealand,terror-attack,mosque-attack,NU Free

Indonesian religious organizations have called on the people of Indonesia, which is home to the world's largest Muslim population, to avoid provocation and refrain from sharing online footage of terrorist attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Muhammadiyah and the Indonesian Communion of Churches (PGI) condemned the mosque shootings, which left 49 people dead.

The groups also called on the Indonesian government to prevent tensions from escalating as a result of the shootings.

The government must ensure that the terrorism incidents in New Zealand do not [create tensions] in Indonesia and weaken national unity, the deputy chairman of Muhammadiyahs law and human rights division, Maneger Nasution, said.

The PGI asked Indonesians not to share videos of the shootings, saying that doing so would only help the terrorists.

We hope that Indonesians, wherever they are, are not provoked by the videos and photos that are meant to spread terror, PGI spokesperson Irma Riana Simanjuntak said.

Footage believed to have been taken by the shooter, identified as Australian Brenton Tarrant, was live-streamed and has been circulating online. The video shows him entering a mosque and methodically killing the people inside. Worshippers, possibly dead or wounded, lay huddled on the floor of the mosque, the video shows.

Whoever the shooters are, they are the enemies of religions and humanity. They deserve to be severely punished. Local authorities should investigate the perpetrators behind the attacks, Maneger said.

NU executive Robikin Emhas, meanwhile, called on authorities in New Zealand to investigate the incidents thoroughly.

We expect that the authorities can immediately restore the situation so that the people can feel safe again, he said.
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Linkedin News Desk (Reuters) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 13:24 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee821a2d6 2 World #NewZealand,#Christchurch,#shooting,#ShootingIncidents,#mosque,#mosque-attack,New-Zealand,Christchurch,shooting,shooting-incident,mosque,mosque-attack Free

Political and Islamic leaders across Asia expressed their disgust at the deadly shooting at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday as some revealed their citizens had been caught up in the bloodshed.

The timing of the shootings in the city of Christchurch, during Friday prayers, and the posting on social media of what appeared to be live, point-of-view video footage of the assault by a gunman added to the distress of many.

"Indonesia strongly condemns this shooting act, especially at a place of worship while a Friday prayer was ongoing," Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said in a statement.

She was earlier cited by media as saying six Indonesians had been inside the mosque when the attack occurred, with three managing to escape and three unaccounted for.

Indonesia's ambassador to New Zealand, Tantowi Yahya, told Reuters inquiries were being made as to whether Indonesians were caught up in the attack. There are 331 Indonesians in Christchurch, including 134 students, the foreign ministry said.

Read also: Six Indonesians inside attacked New Zealand mosque: Foreign Ministry:

In Muslim-majority Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the biggest party in its ruling coalition, said one Malaysian had been wounded in the attack he described as a "black tragedy facing humanity and universal peace".

"I am deeply saddened by this uncivilized act, which goes against humanistic values and took the lives of civilians," he said in a statement.

"We extend our deepest sympathies and condolences to the families of the victims and the people of New Zealand."

Read also: A Malaysian is hurt, another may have been killed in Christchurch:

New Zealand authorities confirmed "multiple" deaths but they did not say how many or identify any victims.

New Zealand media reported "dozens" of dead.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman condemned what he called a "racist and fascist" attack.

"This attack shows the point which hostility to Islam and enmity to Muslims has reached," Ibrahim Kalin wrote on Twitter.

"We have seen many times Islamophobic discourse against Islam and Muslims turning into a perverse and murderous ideology. The world must raise its voice against such discourse and must say stop to Islamophobic fascist terrorism," he said.

The founder of India's All India Muslim Personal Board, a non-government body of scholars, Kamal Faruqui, said the attack was "highly condemnable".

"An anti-Muslim virus is spreading across the world," he told Reuters.

"People of all religions should be very worried."

Afghanistan's ambassador to Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, Wahidullah Waissi, said on Twitter three Afghans had been wounded.

"My thoughts are with the family of Afghan origin who've been shot and killed at this heinous incident."

Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal condemned the incident on social media, using the hashtag #pakistanagainstterror.

Ordinary people expressed their horror online about a widely disseminated video of a man apparently indiscriminately shooting people inside a mosque with an assault rifle.

The video has yet to be confirmed by authorities as being posted by a shooter involved in the attack.

"Feeling very sick, that person is brainless and a savage," said one Indonesian twitter user who identified himself as Farhan Adhitama.

New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said many of those caught up in the shootings may have been migrants and refugees.

"They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand," she said.
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Medan  Fri, March 15 2019

Police in Langkat regency, North Sumatra, are investigating a case that claims 23 students of a madrasah (Islamic school) in Serapuh ABC village, Padang Tualang district, have been raped.

The suspected rapist has been identified as Dedi Suwandi, 40, who is also a civil servant. The police have arrested him.

We have detained the perpetrator, Langkat Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Doddy Hermawan said Wednesday evening.

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Linkedin Azis Anwar Fachrudin (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta  Fri, March 15 2019

Muslims should not have been startled by Nahdlatul Ulamas (NU) recent call for an end to addressing non-Muslims as kafir (infidels). This opinion, arising from NUs Bahtsul Masail (forum for religious problems) at its recent national conference in West Java, is not new. However, it is significantly important for the current religious state of affairs in Indonesia.

Many Muslims disapproved or even condemned NUs appeal; yet, it does not concern the word kafir in its theological meaning, but rather its use in todays social and national life. The accusation that NU wants to amend the Quran, which uses the word in many places, is simply a display of ignorance.

What NU was reviewing was the medieval fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) discourse that recognized the category of kafir dhimmi, i.e. non-Muslims living in an Islamic state and entitled to the states obligatory protection in exchange for loyalty and payment of the specific per capita tax called jizya.

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Linkedin News Desk (Reuters) Sydney, Australia  Fri, March 15, 2019 13:21 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee82190fb 2 Longform #NewZealand,#ShootingRampage,Australian,suspect,NewZealand,mosque-attack Free

One of four people detained in New Zealand after mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch is Australian, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday.

"I can confirm that the individual who was taken into custody I have been advised is an Australian-born citizen," he told reporters in Sydney.

"As family members with our New Zealand cousins today, we grieve, we are shocked, we are appalled, we are outraged, and we stand here and condemn absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist."

New Zealand media have reported that between nine and 27 people were killed in the shootings.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 13:25 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee821ab90 1 National forest-fires,land-and-forest-fires,Riau,Dumai,Chevron,haze,environment Free

The Dumai Police in Riau have named four suspects in separate forest and land fires that have blanketed the city with haze.

Three of the suspects were arrested in West Dumai district, while the other one was arrested in Medang Kampai district, Dumai Police chief Adj. Sr. Comr. Restika Nainggolan said on Thursday as quoted by kompas.com.

He added the police had handed over one of the cases to prosecutors, although the police chief did not specify which suspect. Meanwhile, the investigators were still investigating the other three cases.

All four are suspected of clearing land by burning it. The fire spread to other areas, Restika said.

In January and February, the Dumai Police established 22 locations as crime scenes for land and forest fires. The remaining 18 cases are still under the initial investigation phase.

The police are also investigating a wildfire case that occurred on land owned by PT Chevron Dumai, the local subsidiary of United States-based oil company Chevron. Investigators have questioned two companys security guards in the matter.

Dumai is among the worst-affected cities in Riau that battled wildfires between January and February. According to the Riau Disaster Mitigation Agency, around 133 hectares of land were burned between January and March. The fires sent haze across Dumai, affecting residents and their daily activities.

A joint taskforce comprising police and military personnel, the Manggala Agni fire brigade and residents worked to extinguish the fires. Their attempts were finally aided by increasing rainfall in the area. (kuk)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 17:55 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee822700a 1 World Jokowi-administration,Jokowi,mosque-attack,terrorism,New-Zealand Free

President Joko Jokowi Widodo has condemned shooting incidents at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that have left at least 49 people dead.

Indonesia strongly condemns these acts of violence. I also convey my deepest condolences to the victims of the acts, Jokowi said in North Sumatra on Friday.

The President said he had received reports about the incidents from Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi and that the government was still gathering information about them.

He called on Indonesian citizens in New Zealand be more cautious moving forward.

The Foreign Ministry reported that an Indonesian citizen and his son were injured in one of the shootings.

The father is being taken care of at the intensive care unit and the son is in the general ward at the Christchurch Public Hospital, Foreign Ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir said on Friday in Jakarta.

The Indonesian Embassy in Wellington told The Jakarta Post that they received information that the two were shot by a gunman at the Linwood mosque.

Earlier on Friday, Minister Retno said there were six Indonesians praying at the Al-Noor mosque, which was also attacked by the gunman. Three of them managed to flee to safety while the whereabouts of the three others were unknown.

As many as 330 Indonesians live in Christchurch, 134 of whom are students, according to ministry data.

The embassy sent a team to Christchurch to monitor further developments and set up hotline numbers, +64211950980 and +64223812065, that can be contacted by those who seek information or any consular assistance.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has described the shooting incidents as "a terrorist attack".
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Linkedin News Desk (Agence France-Presse) London, United Kingdom  Fri, March 15, 2019 19:37 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8229ec9 2 World #NewZealand,#massacre,Queen-Elizabeth,condolences,mosque-attack,New-Zealand Free

Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand's head of state, said she was "deeply saddened" by the attacks on two mosques on Friday which left 49 people dead.

"I have been deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch... At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders," she said in a message.

"Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives," she said, paying tribute to emergency workers and volunteers providing support to the injured.

Queen Elizabeth, 92, the world's oldest and longest-serving living monarch, is queen of 15 other realms besides Britain, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

She last visited New Zealand in 2002 as part of celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of her accession to the throne.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 11:53 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee820fd1f 1 World Christchurch,shooting,mosque-attack,New-Zealand Free

An Indonesian who lives not far from Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a shooting had taken place on Friday morning, said residents in the city were told to stay at home because "the shooter is feared still at large".

Agi Safitri told The Jakarta Post on Friday at 10:46 a.m. Jakarta time that she could hear the sound of helicopters flying over the neighborhood.

"Due to the ongoing serious firearms incident in Central Christchurch, police would like to remind all parents and caregivers that schools across the city remain in lockdown," the New Zealand Police said on its Twitter account.

1/4 Due to the ongoing serious firearms incident in Central Christchurch Police would like to remind all parents and caregivers that schools across the city remain in lock down.There is no timeframe at this stage for when the lock down will be lifted. The children are being...  New Zealand Police (@nzpolice) March 15, 2019

One alleged shooter has been arrested, but New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said as quoted by AFP that there may be "other offenders" involved in the shootings.

"This is one of New Zealand's darkest days," Ardern said. "Clearly what has happened here is an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence."

New Zealand's Police commissioner, Mike Bush, was quoted by Reuters as saying that multiple fatalities occurred at two mosques, where at least one gunman had opened fire on worshippers.

Witnesses described seeing a man dressed in a military-style, camouflage outfit and carrying an automatic rifle randomly shooting people in Al Noor mosque.

Police have one person in custody, but they were not sure if others were involved, Reuters reported.

Bush urged people to stay away from mosques for the time being. (evi)
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Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, March 15, 2019 12:54 1001 dcc1aefb9780f102b77c720ee8212b2a 1 World New-Zealand,shooting,Retno-Marsudi,Foreign-Ministry,Indonesians,mosque,mosque-attack Free

Six Indonesians were praying at Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, when a gunman opened fire on worshipers on Friday, the Foreign Ministry has said.

Dozens are believed dead, according to news reports.

Three Indonesian men were able to escape the shooting, but the whereabouts of the other three remain unknown, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said in Jakarta on Friday.

The minister has been coordinating with Indonesian Ambassador to New Zealand Tantowi Yahya to monitor the situation.

"A team from the embassy has been dispatched to Christchurch to seek information on our people who happened to be in the mosque, particularly the three who still cannot be contacted, " she said.

She added that the shooting occurred at 13:40 local time when Muslim men were performing Friday prayers at the mosque.

"In the meantime, we have yet to receive any information on the identity of the perpetrators, as well as their motives," she said.

According to Retno, there are 330 Indonesians living in Christchurch, 130 of whom are students.

An attack on two crowded mosques during Friday prayers left multiple people dead, police said as quoted by AFP, on what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described as "one of New Zealand's darkest days".

Witnesses spoke of seeing bloodied bodies, with children also believed to be among the dead, and police warned of "extremely distressing footage" of the incident circulating on the internet.

Police said four people  three men and a woman  had been taken into custody, and that they had found and neutralized a number of improved explosive devices (IEDs).
English Norwegian

Reference is made to the stock exchange notice by Aqua Bio Technology ASA (the Company") published on 7 January 2019 and 12 February 2019 regarding, inter alia, a private placement (the "Private Placement") and a repair issue following the Private Placement (the "Subsequent Offering"). Reference is further made to the general meeting`s resolution to authorise the board to resolve the share capital increase pertaining to the Subsequent Offering, as published on 7 January 2019. On 11 February 2019, the board resolved a conditional share capital increase pertaining to the Subsequent Offering pursuant to the above-mentioned authorisation.

The share capital increase pertaining to the Subsequent Offering has now been registered with the Norwegian Register of Business Enterprises. The new share capital is NOK 29,397,235 divided on 11,758,894 shares, each with a par value of NOK 2.50. The new shares will be listed as of today under ticker "ABT".

Reference is further made to the general meeting`s resolution on 7 January 2019 to issue Warrants in the Subsequent Offering, and to the prospectus published by the Company on 14 February 2019 (the "Prospectus").

The subscribers in the Subsequent Offering has received one (1) warrant ("Warrant") per share actually subscribed for and allocated in the Subsequent Offering. The Company has issued 120,896 Warrants to the investors in the Subsequent Offering. These will be listed on Oslo Axess under ticker "ABT S". Reference is made to the stock exchange notice published on 14 February 2019 for further information concerning the Warrants.

Information about the Warrants is also available in the Prospectus, which can be found at www.aquabiotechnology.com .

For further information, please call Arvid Lindberg, Head of sales and marketing, telephone +47 9824 5410 or arvid@aquabiotech.no .

Aqua Bio Technology (ABT) is developing and commercializing sustainable biotechnology for use in skin care products. ABT's cosmetics ingredients are highly effective and they provide the cosmetics industry with natural alternatives to traditional ingredients. ABT is also marketing and distributing natural skin care products developed by partners towards consumers and professional users. Aqua Bio Technology is listed on the Axess market of the Oslo Stock Exchange.

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.




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Linkedin A. Muh. Ibnu Aqil (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, March 16 2019

We care: Students hold a discussion during their protest for the #FridayForFuture global movement in front of City Hall in Central Jakarta on Friday. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)

Amar Fadillah, 18, stands in front of City Hall carrying various signs made by himself and 10 of his friends with messages on the environment and climate change. The 11 of them staged a protest on Friday urging the city administration to take more real action against climate change.

One poster translates to You squat here yet you make [Earth] sick. Are humans that vile?

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Hours after Medison delivers stinging rebuke of Knights lack of vision and execution, Knights lawyers and accountants deliver onerous data demands to Medison on specious grounds



Knights expensive tactic will not deter Medison from seeking to create value for all Knight shareholders

Medisons comprehensive plan for Knight  Creating Value At Knight Therapeutics  is available at www.NewDayForKnight.com

PETACH TIKVA, Israel, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Medison Biotech Ltd. (Medison), which together with its affiliates owns more than 10.4 million shares, or 7.3% of Knight Therapeutics, Inc. (TSX:GUD) (Knight or the Company) today released correspondence it received from Knights lawyers and accountants.



The correspondence was delivered to Medison just hours after Knights second largest shareholder offered a comprehensive alternative strategy for the Company and Knight announced weak annual financial results. Knight is suddenly demanding tens of thousands of pages from Medison within 10 days so that Knights accountants can perform a review of [Medisons] policies, procedures, accounting and additional data analysis. In the three-year relationship between Knight and Medison, this is the first such request Knight has ever made.



The unprecedented request comes only days after Medison delivered extensive financial and accounting information relating to Medisons operations and performance in 2018 to enable Knight to complete its own financial statements. Knight filed its 2018 Annual Information Form yesterday, incorporating the financial data Medison previously provided.



We will not be bullied by Knight and Jonathan Goodman, said Meir Jakobsohn, Chief Executive Officer of Medison Pharma and a Board member of Knight. This substantial and utterly unfounded data request is nothing more than an expensive proxy-fight tactic to harass us for daring to point out that Knight has not created value for its shareholders and lacks a coherent strategy for doing so.



We are grateful for the support expressed by our fellow Knight shareholders. Understandably, after yet another lost year, there is great discontent, continued Mr. Jakobsohn. Perhaps Knight should put as much money and time into developing and executing a business plan as it apparently is willing to spend on trying to intimidate us. This latest action reveals the lengths to which the Board and CEO will go to preserve the status-quo. It is clearly time for a New Day at Knight.



The complete correspondence delivered by Knights lawyers and accountants, along with Medisons comprehensive plan for Knight are available at www.NewDayForKnight.com .

Medison has engaged Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP and Goodmans LLP as legal advisors.

About Medison

Medison is one of the world's largest commercial partners of leading global biotech companies. Backed by three generations of experience in the healthcare industry since 1937, Medison is uniquely qualified to provide the complete spectrum of integrated services for international companies looking to enter or expand their presence in Israeli and selected ROW markets. Medison runs Medison Ventures, a corporate venture arm with a dedicated research and evaluation team boasting deep scientific and commercial backgrounds. Medison Ventures operates a scouting program to cater to its partners and is an active investor in life science projects around drug development and digital health.

Additional information can be found at www.medison.co.il .

Forward Looking Statement

This news release and the recommended Strategy and Plan to Create Shareholder Value referenced herein contain forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including, without limitation, Medisons and Knights respective priorities, plans and strategies. All statements and information, other than statements of historical fact, included herein are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding activities, events or developments that Medison expects or anticipates may occur in the future. These forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking words such as may, will, expect, intend, plan, estimate, anticipate, believe or continue or similar words and expressions or the negative thereof. There can be no assurance that the plans, intentions or expectations upon which these forward-looking statements are based will occur or, even if they do occur, will result in the performance, events or results expected. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements contained herein, which are not a guarantee of performance, events or results and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual performance, events or results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors include: changes in Knights strategies, plans or prospects; general economic, industry, business, regulatory and market conditions; actions of Knight and its competitors; conditions in the pharmaceutical industry; risks relating to government regulation and changes thereto, including in respect of the regulations concerning board composition, proxy solicitation and shareholder meetings; the state of the economy including general economic conditions globally and economic conditions in the jurisdictions in which Knight operates; the unpredictability and volatility of Knights share price; and dilution and future sales of securities of the Company. These factors should not be construed as exhaustive. Certain forward-looking statements contained herein may be considered to be future-oriented financial information or a financial outlook for the purposes of applicable Canadian securities laws. Future oriented financial information and financial outlook contained herein about prospective financial performance, financial position or cash flows are based on assumptions about future events, including economic conditions and proposed courses of action, based on the applicable management teams assessment of the relevant information available to them at the applicable time, and to become available in the future. In particular, the information contains projected operational information for future periods which are based on a number of material assumptions and factors. The actual results of the applicable operations for any period could vary from the amounts set forth in these projections, and such variations may be material. Further, there is no assurance or guarantee with respect to the prices at which any securities of Knight will trade, and such securities may not trade at prices that may be implied herein. See above for a discussion of the risks that could cause actual results to vary from such forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including those risks and uncertainties detailed in the continuous disclosure and other filings of Knight, copies of which are available on the System for Electronic Document Analysis (SEDAR) at www.sedar.com. We urge you to carefully consider those risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. Unless expressly stated otherwise, the forward-looking statements included herein are made as of the date of this news release and Medison disclaims any obligation to publicly update such forward-looking statements, except as required by applicable law.

For more information:

Investors

www.NewDayForKnight.com

Shorecrest Group

Christine Carson

647-931-7396

Media

Longview Communications & Public Affairs

Joel Shaffer

416-649-8006

Peter Block

416-649-8008
This Sunday is St. Patricks Day - how are you planning to celebrate?

This proud Irish cultural and religious celebration is held every year on March 17th to commemorate Saint Patrick, the foremost patron saint of Ireland. On this day, many revelers wear green for good luck and, according to Irish folklore, to hide from leprechauns and their mischievous deeds. Green is also the color of clover, Trifolium repens, a plant coveted by St. Patrick himself. A rare variation of the common three-leaf clover is the "lucky" one found with four leaves - about one in every five-thousand.

Whatever you do this weekend - whether its hunting for four-leaf clovers, attending a festive parade, or hosting a celebratory meal of corned beef and cabbage, we have many ideas to make this holiday special! Just download the MarthaStewart.TV App to view St. Patricks Day-themed programs on your computer, on your phone, on your tablet, and on your streaming device. To subscribe and save, use promo code GREEN19.

There's no better way to encourage the arrival of spring than to go green! Enjoy the photos and watch this video to preview some of our most festive St. Patricks Day crafts, cocktails, and foods.
GOLDENDALE, Wash., March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Auscrete Corporation (OTCQB: ASCK) (the Company), which custom designs specialty Concrete Affordable Housing and Manufacturers of Building Products, today announced that its common shares have been approved for trading on the OTCQB Marketplace (OTCQB) under the symbol ASCK effective as of the open of trading yesterday.



The listing of our common stock to the OTCQB Exchange is an exciting milestone for Auscrete Corporation, said John Sprovieri, President of Auscrete. While ASCK has been a fully reporting company since its inception, and we always hold ourselves to the highest regulatory and compliance standards, we believe that the broader exposure afforded by the OTCQB will raise our visibility within the investment community and assist in increasing the liquidity of our common stock. In addition, we believe that trading on this established public market will help to generate exposure of our Company among institutional investors.

Mr. Sprovieri added, even though 2018 turned out to be a somewhat disappointing year with a financing contract being scarcely supported, we came up short on total financing and had to look elsewhere. We were able to initiate the first steps with the minimal financing we received and expect to break ground in a few weeks for construction of our new Production Building on our land in Goldendale, WA.

About Auscrete Corporation

Auscrete is a manufacturer of concrete-based building materials for construction of affordable housing. We are developers of specialty hybrid concrete insulated building components that are energy efficient, super strong and require very low maintenance.

Lee Odom, the IR Director, was quoted as saying, this uplist will definitely change the zip code for the Company, this looks to make for an exciting year ahead for ASCK as the housing market is critically in need of our products. Studies continuously show low cost housing to be one of the scarcest & most over-looked commodities on the globe today.

Mr. Odom also added, Auscrete Corporation provides building materials to contractors and developers, for the construction of their thermally efficient and structurally superior 'Affordable Housing.'

Uptick Newswire will interview ASCKs President on the Stock Day Podcast next week to discuss the Future Direction and Projections for Auscrete.

This interview will be available for listeners Tuesday, March 19th at 9:00 am ET. Please visit Uptick Newswires website https://upticknewswire.com/ to hear the entire interview.

About Uptick Newswire and the "Stock Day" Podcast

Founded in 2013, Uptick Newswire is the fastest growing media outlet for Nano-Cap and Micro-Cap companies. It educates investors while simultaneously working with penny stock and OTC companies, providing transparency and clarification of under-valued, under-sold Micro-Cap stocks of the market. Uptick provides companies with customized solutions to their news distribution in both national and international media outlets. Uptick is the sole producer of its "Stock Day" Podcast, which is the number one radio show of its kind in America. The Uptick Network "Stock Day" Podcast is an extension of Uptick Newswire, which recently launched its Video Interview Studio located in Phoenix, Arizona.

Investors Hangout is a proud sponsor of "Stock Day," and Uptick Newswire encourages listeners to visit the company's message board at https://investorshangout.com/ .

Uptick Newswire

602-441-3474

For more continuous updates follow the AuscreteBlog.com .

CONTACT: For more information,

Please contact:

Investor Relations

Lee@auscretehomes.com

305-853-8404

www.auscretehomes.com

SAFE HARBOR

Safe Harbor statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: Certain statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by their use of forward-looking terminology such as may, expect, intend, estimate, anticipate, believe and continue (or the negative forms thereof) or similar terminology. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results or those implied by such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and that actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Auscrete Corporation assumes no obligation and has no intention of updating these forward-looking statements, and it has no obligation to update or correct information prepared by third parties that is not paid for by Auscrete Corporation. Investors are encouraged to review Auscrete Corporations public filings on SEC.gov and otcmarkets.com, including its unaudited and audited financial statements and its OTC markets filings, which contain general business information about the companys operations, results of operations and risks associated with the company and its operations.
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- MediXall Group Inc., (OTCQB: MDXL), a technology and innovation-driven organization structured to bring effective change to the U.S. Healthcare Industry, is pleased to announce today the expansion of its strategic advisory board with the appointment of clinical pharmacist and scientific liaison Ellis A. Ellis. Dr. Ellis distinguished career includes work with the Department Health Services (DHS) Medi-Cal Drug Formulary, compliance consultant, process efficiency expert and published author of original research related to drug to drug interactions. As an Advisor, Dr. Ellis will provide guidance and support on strategic initiatives as the company accelerates business growth, expands its services, and strives to increase market share.



Were thrilled to have Dr. Ellis join our Advisory Board, said Michael Swartz, President of MediXall. His illustrious 30-year career in pharmacy and hospital management will be a valuable resource for our team as we continue to expand our prescription drug benefits and streamline efficiency with our platform overall. To take advantage of the opportunity we have with MediXall Rx, we have named Henry Solano the project lead.

For more than a decade Dr. Ellis has served as a clinical pharmacist for Orange County Global Medical Center. In this role, hes performed initial dosing and adjustments for antibiotics, performed clinical interventions and has been a consultant for physicians regarding medication formulary selection, renal dosing adjustments, side effects, and the monitoring and dose adjustments for all antibiotics, H2, low molecular weight heparin (LMWH), heparin, and Coumadin. In addition, Dr. Ellis is a senior supervising pharmacist for technicians and power of attorney for the ordering of Schedule II narcotics. His extensive experience in pharmaceuticals has provided continuous support while developing and launching the MediXallRx Prescription Discount program. The MediXall Rx Savings Card is accepted nationwide and savings of up to 75 percent can be applied to prescription medications.

Dr. Ellis, who is licensed in Arizona, California, and Florida, was previously the lead scientific liaison on several products included in the Department Health Services (DHS) Medi-Cal Drug Formulary. He coordinated the development and promulgation of DHS policies. For the administration and reimbursement of drug-related programs and services, he analyzed legislation, made recommendations, prepared cost containment proposals, and served as a consultant for critical issues with DHS.



"The MediXall platform fills a void in the healthcare industry by providing consumers and providers with price transparency and ease of use for everything from scheduling appointments to filling prescriptions, said Dr. Ellis A. Ellis. Im pleased to join its board, where I plan to lend my expertise on all matters, especially those related to prescription drugs, dosing, and compliance.

Additional accomplishments include: lead advisor to hospitals, in which he developed quality assurance pharmacy programs; consulting pharmacist for Skilled Nurses Facilities; publication and instruction on formulary antibiotic algorithm; published paper on drug to drug interactions in Title 22 facilities; centralized eight hospital healthcare systems for LTC pharmacy organization; served as an expert witness to Long Beach and Los Angeles District Attorneys Offices; and achieved an estimated cost saving to a hospital organization of $500,000 year over year. Dr. Ellis is a member of the American Health System Pharmacist Association.

As a member of the board, Dr. Ellis will work closely with the MediXall leadership team to consult on business strategy and sales, marketing, and product plans; as well as provide guidance on the implementation of the MediXallRx Discount program. With the launch of the MediXallRx Discount Program, MediXall.com provides a powerful, free tool to search and compare prescription drug prices, which can differ greatly between competing pharmacies. The program and MediXallRx Saving Card offer consumers immediate savings on both generic and brand prescription medications.

For more information, please visit www.medixallgroup.com or call (954) 440-4678.

About MediXall.com: Medixall.com is a new generation healthcare marketplace platform designed to address the growing need of self-pay and high deductible consumers for greater transparency and price competition in their healthcare costs. With MediXall, consumers now have the option to search for doctors or dentists and book appointments based on cost, distance, ratings, and availability at the click of a button. By delivering a solution that better connects consumers with high-quality healthcare providers and wellness services, MediXall.com enables healthcare providers to engage consumers with a level of price transparency and digital convenience that they have come to expect in every other aspect of their lives. In this era of rapidly increasing deductibles and healthcare costs, the cloud-based platform is designed to be transformational and disruptive to traditional methods of medical care and provisioning of medical services to the consumer. For more information, please visit www.medixallgroup.com or call (954) 440-4678.

About MediXall Group, Inc.: MediXall Group is a technology and innovation-driven organization purposefully designed and structured to bring effective change to the U.S. healthcare industry that is actively trading on the OTCQB under the symbol MDXL. The Company believes its revolutionary approach will help drive much-needed change that it envisions is needed in the current healthcare system. The mission of the MediXall Group is to revolutionize the medical industry by improving communication; providing better technology and support services; and enabling more efficient, cost-effective healthcare for the consumer. By approaching the healthcare ecosystem as a whole, MediXall creates, invests and incubates companies that embody its mission statement.
So, according to The New York Times, Rep. Ilhan Omars anti-Semitic slur that its all about the Benjamins has a point.

Thats what one of the countrys most powerful and liberal newspapers  perhaps the most powerful  implied as it examined the freshman Democrats ugly characterization of so-called Jewish/Israeli power over Washington.

Under the headline, Concerns Raised Over Power Wielded by a Pro-Israel Lobbying Giant, the paper devoted more than a half page to a story which generally concluded by implication that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is too powerful. It was written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

Indeed, Stolberg writes with journalistic objectivity that AIPACs money does have an outsize influence. She doesnt explain, however, how she reached this conclusion. Nor does she define how much AIPAC power is acceptable.

First, there is nothing new in the analysis; it has been beaten to death over the years, but apparently The Times felt it necessary to rehash the charges in view of Omars anti-Semitism (for which she has apologized.) While Omar recognized her bigotry, The Times apparently has not.

(However, shortly after apologizing, Omar, from Minnesotas Fifth District, complained about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country, an anti-Semitic trope leveled against Jews for decades.)

Consider: Stolberg quotes Brian Baird, a former Democratic congressman from Washington State, as stating: If one dares to criticize Israel or dares to criticize AIPAC, one gets branded as anti-Semitic. Now, theres a refrain we never heard before.

Second, and most important, as always, the story deals in generalities. It gives no examples of abuse of power; indeed, the only examples cited involve instances when AIPAC lost in pursuing its political objectives: The nuclear agreement with Iran and how half of Senate Democrats voted against a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) bill that AIPAC supported.

To prove the power of AIPAC, Stolberg reached back to 1982  some 36 years  and cited the defeat of Illinois Congressman Paul Findley, who at the time supported PLO Leader Yassar Arafat. The paper also reported, that two years later, AIPAC worked to unseat Illinois Senator Charles H. Percy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who favored the sale of sophisticated military planes (AWACS) to Saudi Arabia.

These examples raise two questions: Might there have been other factors in the defeat of Findley and Percy, and doesnt every special interest group work to oust public officials who dont share their interests and objectives? Isnt that what all political action committees (PACS) do?

In her story, Stolberg asks: has AIPAC warped the policy debate over Israel so dramatically that dissenting voices are not even allowed to be heard?

The question, of course, negates the entire point of the story in which she raises alarm bells about AIPAC. Since the story quotes several critics of AIPAC and the headline warns of concerns about the organization and its power, the answer has to be that AIPAC has not been able to stifle condemnation. The story actually is a prime example that AIPAC has not been very successful in silencing critics; it certainly has not been successful as it pertains to The Times.

Then we have the photo of Steven Fiske, identified as a long-time AIPAC activist, which accompanied the story. Fiske is quoted as characterizing Omans comment as anti-Semitic and the photo shows him praying with a talit (a prayer shawl) and tefillin (two small leather boxes that contain verses from the Torah and are worn on the head and on one arm and are held in place by leather straps.)

This was a political story; it had nothing to do with religion. Is there a message there? If The Times had no other photo, Fiske surely could have taken a selfie and emailed it to the paper. We are confident he would have been delighted to do so. Deadlines or time constraints were not an issue.

The Times, of course, has been a critic of Israel for decades. There surely are no shortages of issues on which Israel can be criticized. The paper does not have to manufacture news angles to support its political position. (Coincidentally, in its March issue, Commentary magazine publishes a long piece on The Times anti-Israel, slanted and distorted news cover of Israel in 2018.)

If the editors feel that they needed additional fodder to chastise the Jewish state, than they might, at least, consider doing so without giving anti-Semitism credibility.

To use an anti-Semitic slur go argue that AIPAC may be too strong politically is reprehensible and indefensible. We can be quite confident that The Times would not use a racist comment to analyze the political might of the NAACP.

It is not unfair to demand and expect higher journalistic standards from such a powerful media institution.

Berl Falbaum, a West Bloomfield resident is a veteran journalist and author.
After two months, British man remains barricaded in Phuket Town condo

PHUKET: After two months barricaded in a Phuket Town condo amid an extended dispute with the landlord, Australian-born British national David Maclean, 50, from Brisbane, remains locked in the apartment despite police previously assuring that action would be taken when his immigration permit to stay in the country expired on Feb 21.

Friday 15 March 2019, 12:00PM

Australian-born Brit, David Maclean, 50, from Brisbane, is seen leaning out of a window at the condo on Feb 2. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Mr Maclean has not left the condo, located at the Supalai Park at Phuket City complex on Nakorn Rd, since Jan 14 amid a dispute with the landlady over paying the rent. Repeated attempts by police and representatives from the British embassy to convince Mr Maclean to at least open the door have failed. (See story here.)

The situation escalated on Feb 2 when police became concerned that Mr Maclean might jump from the balcony of the ninth-floor condo, prompting Phuket Governor Phakaphong Tavipatana to arrive at the scene along with high-ranking Phuket City Police officers to assess the situation.

At a meeting of the officials involved at the condo tower it was later agreed to wait for Mr Macleans permit to stay to expire on Feb 21, after which officers will the legal authority to enter the condo by force. (See story here.)

Capt Ekkachai Siri of the Phuket Tourist Police confirmed to The Phuket News yesterday (Mar 14) that Mr Maclean remains in the condo, and that his permit to stay has expired.

However, Capt Ekkachai also said yesterday that officers still had yet to come up with a plan to have Mr Maclean vacate the property as police have decided to not enter the property by force.

We are concerned about him. We have tried many ways before, but without success. I have no plan yet because I am afraid that he might hurt himself or jump, Capt Ekkachai said.

We need to get him out soon, but I have to talk with other police about it, he added..

Meanwhile, Phuket Immigration Chief Col Kathathorn Kumthieng yesterday confirmed that his office was ready to take action.

This case now involves a foreigner staying in the Kingdom of Thailand whose permit to stay has expired.

It is a criminal offense, which every police officer must enforce by arresting the suspect. They can perform any such arrests as soon as they learn of where the suspect is staying.
Australian family escapes serious injury after Phuket tour van suffers blowout

Phuket: An Australian family escaped serious injury after a minivan they were travelling in crashed into a power pole and two parked motorbikes in Kamala yesterday afternoon (Mar 14).

accidentstransporttourismpolicepatong

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Friday 15 March 2019, 12:20PM

The front right tyre exploded causing the van driver to lose control. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The minivan hit two motorbikes parked on the footpath. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The front right tyre exploded causing the van driver to lose control. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The minivan hit a power pole on the central reservation before veering onto the footpath. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The minivan hit two motorbikes parked on the footpath. Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The accident happened on the road between Kamala and Patong (Route 4030). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

The accident happened on the road between Kamala and Patong (Route 4030). Photo: Eakkapop Thongtub

Police were notified of the accident at approximately 4pm.

Capt Jarut Lampan of Thalang Police, who was on duty at the time, arrived at the scene near the post office in Kamala on route 4030.

Capt Jarut said, When I arrived, I found the driver of the van, Akphong Abdul, waiting at the scene. The van was missing a wheel and was badly damaged at the front.

Near the van, there were two damaged motorbikes lying on the ground, Capt Jarut noted.

Mr Akphong explained that earlier that day, he had driven 48-year-old Australian tourist Mary Hagiliassis and her 15-year old son and seven-year-old daughter to an elephant excursion in Cherng Talay from their hotel in Patong.

On the drive back, the front right tyre exploded and came off, causing the van to veer onto the central reservation, hitting a power pole before veering back onto the road and into two motorbikes parked on the footpath.

The three tourists escaped with minor injuries as did the driver.

Capt Jarut noted that he had the van moved to Kamala Police Station for inspection before travelling to Patong Hospital to check on the tourists who were taken there for treatment.

I took Mr Akphong to the station to test his urine for drugs. Initial results did not detect any drugs. Will continue to investigate. he added.

It was not made clear whether the van driver was tested for alcohol.
Flights to North suspended due to pollution

CHIANG MAI: Bangkok Airways has announced the suspension of its morning flights between Chiang Mai and Mae Hong Son until at least Saturday (Mar 20) as haze continues to plague northern provinces.

pollution

By Bangkok Post

Friday 15 March 2019, 08:47AM

A firefighter tackles a blaze in a forest near Lampangs Muang district. Photo: Bangkok Post

According to the airline, two morning flights between the two provinces  PG351 to Mae Hong Son that was due to depart on 9.20am, and PG352 to Chiang Mai scheduled for 10.35am  were cancelled on yesterday.

The suspension was deemed necessary as both airports were shrouded by thick haze which reduced visibility to two kilometres.

The aircraft used to service the route, an ATR-72, requires a minimum visibility of 6km to be able to take off and land safely.

The airline said 10 morning flights have been cancelled over the past five days, and the suspensions will continue until tomorrow because of the poor visibility.

In Mae Hong Son Thursday, the level of PM 2.5 pollutants hovered at around 96 microgrammes per cubic metre (g/m)  almost double the safe threshold of 50 g/m.

Authorities said that 279 forest fires had been detected in Mae Hong Son between Jan 1 and March 12, as opposed to 141 during the same period last year.

Officers and civilians have been working to create buffer zones to prevent fires from spreading, officials said.

Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon visited Chiang Mai to follow up on efforts being undertaken to reduce haze in the North.

The major cause was forest burning, said Gen Prawit. Ways must be sought to make sure there will be no forest burning in the future.

At the time of writing, Chiang Mai was still rated the worlds most polluted city, with the situation worsening.

Read original story here.
NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via CannabisNewsWire  CannabisNewsAudio announces the Audio Press Release (APR) titled Smart Investment Leads to Big Opportunities in Growing Cannabis Market, featuring SinglePoint Inc. (OTCQB: SING).



To hear the CannabisNewsAudio version, visit: http://cnw.fm/dZbK7

To read the full editorial, visit: http://nnw.fm/ib8GI

SinglePoints most recent investment has been in TorusMed , a company developing new ways to optimize CBD output from hemp and therefore increase the profitability of this part of the cannabis sector. With hemp on the verge of a new boom thanks to the Farm Bill, SinglePoint has used its understanding of the market to invest in a company that appears to offer great potential to make the most of this moment.

Moves like this can put a company in a strong position heading into what looks to be a big year for cannabis. [This year] will be a banner year for SinglePoint, said SinglePoint CEO Greg Lambrecht . We are equipped with the proper funding, partners and opportunities to be firing on all cylinders. We as a team expect to position SingleSeed and SinglePoint as market leads in the CBD market while continuing to enable the founders of the companies we have acquired to grow their businesses. We are well diversified and have large opportunities across many emerging markets that should enable us to be successful into 2019 and beyond.

About SinglePoint, Inc.

SinglePoint, Inc. is a technology and investment company with a focus on acquiring companies that will benefit from the injection of growth capital and technology integration. The company portfolio includes mobile payments, ancillary cannabis services and blockchain solutions. Through acquisitions into horizontal markets, SinglePoint is building its portfolio by acquiring an interest in undervalued companies, thereby providing a rich, diversified holding base. Through SingleSeed, the company is providing products and services to the cannabis industry. For more information, visit the companys website at www.SinglePoint.com.

About CannabisNewsWire (CNW)

CannabisNewsWire (CNW) is a specialized information service that (1) aggregates cannabis news, (2) provides CannabisNewsBreaks that quickly updates investors in the space, (3) enhances corporate press releases, (4) helps companies with distribution and optimization of social media, and (5) delivers comprehensive corporate communication solutions. CNW is uniquely positioned in the cannabis market with a strong team of journalists and writers who can help private and public companies reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public through our ever-growing dissemination network of more than 5,000 key syndication outlets. CNW is bringing unparalleled visibility, recognition and content to the cannabis industry.

For more information please visit https://www.CannabisNewsWire.com

Please see full terms of use and disclaimers on the CannabisNewsWire website applicable to all content provided by CNW, wherever published or re-published: http://CNW.fm/Disclaimer

Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain as they are based on current expectations and assumptions concerning future events or future performance of the company. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are only predictions and speak only as of the date hereof. In evaluating such statements, prospective investors should review carefully various risks and uncertainties identified in this release and matters set in the company's SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.

Corporate Communications:
SPECIAL REPORT: PM orders probe into Phuket Kata condo project

PHUKET: Lt Gen Kittisak Boonsuk, Deputy Director of the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) Operations Coordination Center 4, led a team of military officers from Bangkok to Phuket yesterday (Mar 14) to inspect the construction of The Peaks Residence project on the hillside overlooking Kata Noi Beach.

propertylandcrimetourism

By Waranya Prompinpiras

Friday 15 March 2019, 05:18PM

The officials appraise the rising construction on land that has already been deemed as protected forest reserve, but with the claim now under appeal at the Supreme Administrative Court. Photo: Waranya Prompinpiras

Sombat Atiset explains his understanding of the project to Lt Gen Kittisak Boonsuk at The Peaks Residence at Kata Noi yesterday (Mar 14). Photo: Waranya Prompinpiras

The project is currently in dispute with the Supreme Administrative Court hearing an appeal by the project developer, Kata Beach Co Ltd, which claims the NorSor 3 Kor land deed presented as evidence of ownership of the land is valid.

The appeal follows the Regional Administrative Court in Nakhon Sri Thammarat ruling in Aug 2017 that the NorSor 3 Kor is invalid  and that land itself was protected forest land.

We came here because there has been a complaint that The Peaks project is illegal construction. The Prime Minister ordered us to come to investigate the facts, Gen Kittisak told a meeting held at the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Phuket office (DDPM-Phuket) headquarters located at the Provincial Hall complex yesterday morning, before making a site inspection of the project in the afternoon.

Our examination is to focus on the legal aspects of the case, which so far is not clear. We need more details from inspecting the area, from which we will learn more than the details presented in the complaint, he said.

Construction of The Peaks project can continue for now, as the law permits, but we will investigate additional conditions that may see the construction project suspended, he added.

Gen Kittisak also recognised the impact on people who have already bought units in the project if Kata Beach Co Ltd loses its appeal.

Regarding the impact on customers who bought a condominium in the project, the Phuket District Chief has agreed with us that he will talk to the owner of The Peaks project about how to manage it if the Supreme Administrative Court decides to cancel the projects construction permit, he said.

Regarding the impact on the environment in the area, before issuing a construction permit for the project, the Karon Municipality made an agreement with the owner of The Peaks project that if any part of the project breached the law the owner of The Peaks project agreed to restore the environment back to its original state, Gen Kittisak added.

But before all this, we have to wait for the decision of the Supreme Administrative Court, the general said.

Repeated calls by The Phuket News to the only contact number featured on The Peaks Residence official website (see here) have gone answered, but one agent who sold units in the project told The Phuket News today (Mar 15) that the entire project had already sold out.

However, the agent, who asked not to be named, was not willing to divulge any further details.

No materials presented yesterday gave any indication of the total current value of the project, though reports in the Thai media have estimated the sales volume at more than B2 billion.

BUILDING PERMIT

Suttichai Bunyadsil, an expert architect with the Public Works Division at Karon Municipality, which issued the building permit for the project, told The Phuket News, We issued a construction permit by considering the documents submitted with the application. The documents included evidence of land ownership, construction drawings and the EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) report.

The EIA must be approved by committee involving all departments. If the EIA is not certified, we will not approve a construction permit, and The Peaks project has all the documents.

The Peaks project submitted a construction permit request at the end of 2017 and they received a construction permit on Feb 19, 2018, Mr Sittichai said.

When The Peaks project requested permission for construction, at that time we did not know that the Administrative Court had ordered for the land deed to be revoked.

Because The Peaks project provided the complete documents as specified by the Building Control Act, we checked the documents and we issued a construction permit, he said.

We learned that the Administrative Court ordered to revoke the NorSor 3 Kor only after someone complained to the Phuket Governor on Mar 7, 2018, and we therefore issued a letter to suspend construction of The Peaks Residence project on Mar 12, 2018.

But the owner of the project said that the ruling of the Administrative Court had not yet been completed and that they could continue to use the land.

The project owner submitted a letter to Karon Municipality on April 2, 2018 requesting the use of the land in accordance with the law as the case had not ended. We allowed them to continue on Apr 10, 2018, Mr Suttichai explained.

After that building permit expired Feb 18 this year, Karon Municipality issued a new permit to allow construction to continue.

We renewed the permit because according to the Building Control Act, when a permit expires and the holder submits a request for a renewal, they can continue construction  except when the construction is not same as defined in the building permit, only then can we suspend construction.

We checked at The Peaks project again and the construction was the same as they had applied for, and the owner of The Peaks project explained that the Administrative Court still had yet to hand down its decision. Until then, they can continue to use the land, he said.

MINIMUM CAPITAL

Another aspect of one complaint was that Kata Beach Co Ltd had registered capital of only B1 million, Mr Sittichai explained yesterday.

So the concern was that the company would not be held responsible if something happens, he said.

We told the owner of the project about the complaint, and the owner agreed that if that should happen they would dismantle the whole project and plant new trees to replace those cut down to make space for the project, he said.

They also agreed to pay a B3 million deposit to Karon Municipality in case that money needed to be used to make any corrections to the project, he said.

But now we have to wait for the decision of the Supreme Administrative Court. Whatever the court decides, we must do that, he assured.

HAPPY TO OBLIGE

Following the site inspection by Gen Kittisak and his team, Taweechai Leesai, lawyer for The Peaks Residence, explained to reporters that his team were not informed in advance of Gen Kittisaks visit and that they did not have the correct documents to present to him yesterday.

We didnt know Gen Kittisak was coming to inspect the project, we therefore could only explain to him our position in words.

But if he wants documents related to the construction of the project, we are happy to clarify everything, he said.

We know that the construction of this project is of interest, and we are happy to answer questions, Mr Taweechai said.

LOCAL OBJECTIONS

Also present yesterday was Sombat Atiset, President of the Katathani Hotels Group and founder of the Local Love Foundation, which filed the formal complaint against the project.

Of note, the Katathani Phuket Beach Resort, the mainstay of the Mr Sombats family-run Katathani Hotels Group, is located along the Kata Noi beachfront, downhill from where the The Peaks Residence is under construction.

The Local Love Foundation was born from me and about 50-60 villagers. Our group has taken care of the environment (in the Kata area) together with the community for over 10 years, Mr Sombat told The Phuket News.

Our goal is to preserve the Kata Noi area as a tourist attraction, to create sustainable tourism and create careers for people in the area.

Together, we clean the beach, and we make sure that no polluted water flows down into the bay. We see that the environment is the most important factor for tourism, therefore we have to love and help, he said.

We are worried that the environment will be damaged after The Peaks Residence project is completed because the project has more than 400 units. It will have to use a lot of water, and will generate more than 600 cubic metres of wastewater per day, Mr Sombat said.

Where will the wastewater go, especially in the dry season? The wastewater will flood the beach water (with contaminants). The Peaks project is being managed, but we worry that it is not being managed well enough, and wastewater may end up spoiling the beach or flowing into ponds the villagers depend on, he added.

LAND GRAB

Mr Sombat also highlighted the fundamental issue of the legal status of the land on which the The Peaks Residence is literally being built on.

They cannot build in that area because of the slope is too steep and it is still a protected forest reserve. How can this project be built? he posed.

Mr Sombat explained that the Local Love Foundation began its campaign against construction of The Peaks Residence in March 2017 after asking about the EIA for the project.

During a protest at Kata Noi on Feb 22, Mr Sombat explained that the area is under the protection of Forest Protection Unit at PorKor 2 (Phuket), Forest Resource Management Office of Special Operations Unit 43, Forest Management and Control Forest Protection and Fire Control of Royal Forest Department.

He also explained that the project is being built on land claimed under NorSor 3 Kor No. 1863.

But the NorSor 3 Kor was issued in 2012, and even in that year no NorSor 3 Kor could be legally issued for that land, he said.

The Regional Administrative Court in Nakhon Sri Thammarat on August 31, 2017 ordered for NorSor 3 Kor No. 1863 to be revoked and for the land to be returned to the people, but still construction continues without fear of the law, Mr Sombat said at the gathering.

Speaking yesterday, Mr Sombat explained that he had filed the complaint with ISOC.

I went to office of Internal Security Operations Command in Bangkok on Mar 4 and today (Mar 14) Lt Gen Kittisak has come to Phuket to inspect the construction of The Peaks Residence project, he said.

I feel good that the military has come to see the area because the military does not have a vested interest and can be a middleman (in resolving the problems), he added.

Some people think that I am protesting the project because of a conflict in business. I confirm that this is not true. I have never been interested in that land and (before) I had know idea who the owner of The Peaks project was, Mr Sombat said.

CONSUMER FOCUS

Wanchat Chunhatanom, a senior prosecutor at the Phuket Public Prosecutors office, which operates under the Office of the Attorney General, noted the importance of first checking the legal status of the NorSor 3 Kor claim to the land, but also called for leading officials to talk about the project.

We must give fairness to both parties, the people who filed the complaint and the project owner, and we must admit that the highest court has not yet delivered its judgment.

At the same time, we must take care of consumers who have bought units in the project. I urge Gen Kittisak to not wait and to call the project owner to talk, because I believe that the project owner would like to speak in detail (about the project), he said.

Mr Wanchat, as the provincial prosecutor assigned to the case, highlighted his role in the proceedings.

First, we must make sure whether the NorSor 3 Kor is legal or not, and we must check the legality of the construction permit issued by Karon Municipality, because it was issued on the basis of the NorSor 3 Kor, he said.

Another aspect Mr Wanchat is to investigate is what form of legal ownership buyers were told they would have over their units.

All condo unit ownership deeds must be based on the land being issued a Chanote title. If the land for the project has not been issued a Chanote, then project must be registered as a hotel or other accommodation building (with only occupancy rights agreements issued to unit 'owners'), he said.

The project owner must inform consumers of the full facts, he said. We must inform the Phuket Governor, who is the chairman of the committee that oversees the Phuket office of the Consumer Protection Board, to call the owner of The Peaks Residence project and check whether or not they revealed all the facts to buyers.

We must be fair to them if they did explain that the deed for the project was only a NorSor 3 Kor and that its legal status was still under review  and buyers still chose to buy units in the project.

But if this was not made clear, then we have to talk to them in detail about this later, he said.
Day County burglary suspect is in custody

The suspect has been linked to a string of burglaries around Enemy Swim.
NORRISTOWN  A judge ordered a Bridgeport woman to report to jail next month on charges she conspired with an Upper Merion man in the kidnapping and robbery of another man.

Destiny Alston, 21, of the 1000 block of Ford Street, was sentenced in Montgomery County Court to 5-to-23-months in the county jail after she pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit robbery and conspiracy to commit kidnapping in connection with an October 2017 incident in Upper Merion.

Judge Todd D. Eisenberg ordered Alston to report to the jail on April 3 to begin serving her sentence. Alston, who was represented by defense lawyer Nicholas Reifsnyder, is eligible for the jails work release program during her incarceration.

Eisenberg said Alston also must complete five years probation following parole, meaning she will be under court supervision for about seven years.

Alstons co-defendant, Juakeim K. Bates, 21, of the 600 block of East Summit Street, Upper Merion, was sentenced last month to 45-to-90-months in a state correctional facility, to be followed by two years probation, after he pleaded guilty to charges of robbery, conspiracy to kidnap and possession with intent to deliver a controlled substance in connection with the incident.

Bates took part in the kidnapping and robbery reportedly because he believed the victim owed him money, authorities said.

An investigation began about 9:15 a.m. Oct. 15, 2017, when Upper Merion police responded to Paoli Hospital at the request of Tredyffrin Township police who found a man in their township who had reported being robbed at gunpoint in Upper Merion.

The man subsequently told police he was picked up by Alston about 8 a.m. that day and she drove him to Swedeland Park in Upper Merion for the purpose of smoking marijuana before she drove him to work, according to the criminal complaint.

The victim stated that while at the park, Bates entered the rear passenger seat of the car and pointed a handgun at him.

According to (the victim), Bates believed that (the victim) owed him money, Upper Merion Detective Michael Laverty wrote in the arrest affidavit. (The victim) stated that he tried to grab the gun from Bates, who pulled it away from him and then hit him over the head with it, causing him to bleed.

The victim told detectives that Bates ordered him to turn over all his belongings, including a cellphone, wallet, and book bag.

Alston then drove to a residential area in Tredyffrin Township, Chester County, where Bates ordered the victim at gunpoint to remove his clothes down to his underwear and socks and to get out of the vehicle. After being dropped off at that location, the victim was able to get help from an area resident and police were contacted, court papers indicate.

As a result of the injuries sustained when he was hit on the head with a gun, (the victim) was transported to Paoli Hospital for emergency medical treatment, Laverty wrote in court papers.

When detectives spoke with Alston, she confirmed that an altercation between the victim and Bates took place in her vehicle. Alston also confirmed that Bates took the victims belongings and forced him to remove his clothes and ordered him to get out of the vehicle.

Alston allegedly admitted that there was a gun involved in the altercation and that immediately after the victim exited her vehicle she drove Bates back to his King of Prussia area residence.

Detectives said they uncovered text message communications between Alston and Bates that showed the robbery was both planned and carried out by Alston and Bates working together.

When police searched Bates home they found several jars containing a large amount of marijuana, drug packaging materials, digital scales, nearly $3,000 cash and a handgun, according to the criminal complaint.

Alston also pleaded guilty to a charge of driving under the influence of a controlled substance in connection with an unrelated June 1, 2018, incident during which authorities alleged she drove her vehicle in Cheltenham while under the influence of marijuana. The judge sentenced Alston to 72 hours to six months in jail on the DUI charge.
WASHINGTON, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Aviation Week Network has announced the Grand Laureate winners for the 62nd Annual Laureate Awards, honoring extraordinary achievements in the global aerospace arena. They were selected from a total of 30 winners of the 2019 Laureate Awards and were announced last night at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, where all of the laureates were honored.



The Grand Laureates represent winners who embody the spirit of exploration, innovation and vision that will inspire others to strive for broad-reaching progress in aviation, aerospace and defense, said Aviation Week & Space Technology Editor-in-Chief Joe Anselmo. Categories included Business Aviation, Commercial Aviation, Defense and Space.

In addition, Aviation Week & Space Technology bestowed two Philip J. Klass Awards for Lifetime Achievement and four cadets and midshipmen from U.S. military academies were recognized as Tomorrows Leaders, honoring young men and women who have chosen career paths in the armed forces.

The Grand Laureate winners are:

COMMERCIAL AVIATION

Platform: Embraer E-Jet E2

Though it looks similar to Embraers original E-Jet series, the manufacturers E2 airliner family is substantially a new design, with major advances in aerodynamics, propulsion, avionics, flight controls and cabin defining a new benchmark for crossover jets.



DEFENSE

Operations: Royal Netherlands Air Force/Multinational Multi-Role Tanker Transport Fleet

Addressing an acute shortage of tanker aircraft in Europe, the Royal Netherlands Air Force is leading the creation of a multinational fleet of eight Airbus A330 MRTT tanker/transports to improve the interoperability and boost the capability of European air forces.



SPACE

Launchers: Rocket Lab Electron

First to dive into the potentially fast-growing market for dedicated smallsat launches, privately owned Rocket Lab has entered commercial service with its innovative two-stage Electron rocket, which features battery power, 3D-printed engines and composite structures.

BUSINESS AVIATION

Platform: Bombardier Global 7500

Certified in 2018, the Global 7500 sets a new standard for business jets, with a four-section cabin, full-size kitchen and dedicated crew suite; advanced fly-by-wire and flight deck technology; and a 7,700-nm. rangeenough to fly New York-Hong Kong or Singapore-San Francisco.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

Paul Allen

With a lifelong passion for aviation, Paul Allen was the first of the technology barons to spend part of his fortune backing technology to enable less costly and more frequent access to space. In addition to funding the X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne, precursor to a new generation of commercial human-rated spacecraft, Allen funded development of the Stratolaunch air-launched space transport system.

Tom Enders

As CEO of Airbus, Tom Enders has transformed the European aerospace giant from a cross-national conglomerate to an integrated company and made crucial product decisions across its commercial, defense and space units, including the successful launch of the A320neo family. His move to take control of Bombardiers C Series program has changed the structure of the commercial aircraft industry.

About Aviation Week Network

Aviation Week Network, an Informa business, is the largest multimedia information and services provider for the global aviation, aerospace, and defense industries, serving 1.7 million professionals around the world. Industry professionals rely on Aviation Week Network to help them understand the market, make decisions, predict trends, and connect with people and business opportunities. Customers include the world's leading aerospace manufacturers and suppliers, airlines, airports, business aviation operators, militaries, governments and other organizations that serve this worldwide marketplace. Aviation Week Networks portfolio delivers award-winning journalism, data, intelligence and analytical resources, world-class tradeshows and conferences, and results-driven marketing services and advertising. principle

About Informa Exhibitions

Aviation Week Network is part of Informa Exhibitions, the global exhibitions division of Informa PLC, enables communities across the globe to engage, experience and do business by providing them with powerful platforms to connect across key regions and market verticals. Industry insight, coupled with an innovative and customer first approach, provides Informa Exhibitions customers and partners with the opportunity to create business advantage and access markets, both digitally and face-to-face, 365 days of the year.
Topic: In Honor of National Womens History Month, residents at Wellington at Hersheys Mill in West Chester were asked to identify an individual who has helped mold them into the woman they are today.

Jacqueline Nemec: The greatest influence on my life was my father. He was an early proponent of equality for women. From day one of my life he encouraged me to be a doctor, despite the fact that only 8% of physicians at that time were female. He was also an advocate of flying during the early 1930s. With this in mind, I was named Jacqueline after Jacqueline Cochran, an aviatrix, who won a national air race for woman at that time. I am forever grateful to my father for his unending love, support and encouragement. Always believing that women can accomplish anything they put their minds too.

Rosemary Tucker: I feel I was influenced by many teachers in school, but no one taught me like my dad. He was proud when I was just a little girl receiving merit cards at Our lady of Lourdes. I was the oldest of five children. I had three younger sisters and one brother who was the middle child, but I was always the apple of my fathers eye. As a seven-year-old child he taught me to swim in the bay in Ocean City, NJ. He loved swimming and I too, enjoyed it frequently. Surprisingly in college it was a requirement to graduate. In high school, I went to a large girls high school called West Catholic. My father played the violin and owned a very good one. He inspired me to sign up for violin lessons. In the city of Philadelphia, they had a large combined orchestra which I participated in as an upper classman. We performed at the academy of music in Philadelphia. As a senior in high school I applied to Immaculata and was accepted. My father took me to the campus to register for fall classes. He was a big influence in my life. Always being there for lifes important moments and Inspiring me to become the woman I am today. I was so fortunate to have him as my dad.

Josephine Pellicano: There were two women in my life that helped me become the person I have tried to be. Neither gave me the route to fame and fortune, but they did give me the tools on how to live and love. Sr. Ellen Frawley- a cenacle nun, my retreat leader. My educated teacher who taught me and helped me to grow, to understand and live in my faith.

My mother  the uneducated teacher who by word and example helped me to live my life in faith and how to love. She taught me how to live in this world as a wife, mom and as a person. Both women by example, taught me to be strong, be honest, be yourself and so much more. Reminding me that the world is not about us, but happiness is available to all of us. My mothers greatest gift, how to love, love unconditionally, love with understanding and to give of yourself and give of your love.

Two women, who lived two different lives and who lived as they taught, by word and example.

Joan Conway: I must say out of all the people Ive met throughout my life; my family has been most influential in making me the woman I am today. Starting from my childhood years growing up on a dairy farm in Massachusetts, my father encouraged me to work on the farm to instill a good work ethic within me. This same work ethic which I passed along to my own three children; All whom have made me proud by graduating from college and becoming top professionals within the field of pharmacology. As lifes challenges began my children are there being my right hand. For them I am thankful and can truly say I love unconditionally. Not just for being my children, but for also making a positive impact on the world. Watching them has helped made me be my best!
JSEP is the combination of 3 Japanese shoe brands: Oriental/Matsumoto, Miyagi Kogyo, and Kiten

Ahead of the free-trade-agreement with EU, which is expected to be in place already in February, Japanese brands are introduced to the European market (with Brexit its still uncertain what happens in England with this, well see, but the super trunk is held before).Jsep, Japan Shoes Export Platform, are introducing Oriental/Matsumoto, Miyagi Kogyo, and Kiten. They also attended last year and made a big impression. Make sure to really take the chance and study these up-close, if you happen to visit this years event.

Heres a quick summary of all three brands.

Oriental/Matsumotomakes very well-made shoes on well-balanced lasts, with elegant narrow waists and ever so slightly tapered heels. Matsumoto only uses high-grade European leathers from Annonay and Weinheimer. Price starts around 530/600.

The shoes ofMiyagi Kogyois often compared to Edward Green, with similar, traditional last shapes and with a similar sole treatment. They also have a nice burnished toe. Kogyos shoes cost somewhere at 415/470.

The last brand is a bit different, its Kiten who makes more casual shoes. They are made with a Bologna construction, a sort of moccasin type, which makes really comfortable shoes, and since they have full rubber outsoles cemented on it doesnt leak any water. A good compromise between comfort and durability. Price around 265/300.

The London Super Trunk Show 2019 will be held atShowcase.coon Saturday, March 23th, 2019

To read more about the London Super Trunk Show 2019, please clickHERE
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In nearly 100 million flights by U.S. airlines over the past decade, there has been a single fatality. Other than most landings and takeoffs, the planes have largely been flying themselves.

But the recent crashes of Boeing 737 Max 8 jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia have raised questions about the downside of all that automation.

Pilots now spend more time learning these automated systems than practising hands-on flying, so newer pilots are less comfortable with taking manual control when the computer steers them wrong, according to interviews with a dozen pilots and pilot instructors at major airlines and aviation universities around the world.

The automation in the aircraft, whether its a Boeing or an Airbus, has lulled us into a sense of security and safety, said Kevin Hiatt, a former Delta Air Lines pilot who later ran flight safety for JetBlue. Pilots now rely on autopilot so often, they become a systems operator rather than a stick-and-rudder pilot.

As a result, he said, they may not exactly know or recognize quickly enough what is happening to the aircraft, and by the time they figure it out, it may be too late.

In October, a Lion Air jet crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 people. Investigators now think the pilots struggled to control the Boeing aircraft after its automated systems malfunctioned, in part because they didnt fully understand how the automation worked. The authorities are investigating what caused Sundays crash of the same model jet in Ethiopia, in which 157 people died.

While automation has contributed to the airline industrys stellar safety record in recent years, it has also been a factor in many of the crashes that have still occurred around the world. A 2011 study by a federal task force found that in about 60 per cent of 46 recent accidents, pilots had trouble manually flying the plane or handling the automated controls. Complicated automation systems can also confuse pilots and potentially cause them to take action they shouldnt, pilots said.

President Donald Trump weighed in Tuesday, posting on Twitter that airplanes have become too technologically complex and that he wants great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!

Overdependence on automation has been an issue for decades. A 1997 American Airlines pilot-training video warned that the problem was well-known among pilots. In 2013, a federal task force concluded in a 267-page report that pilots relied too often on automation and should be required to improve their manual flying skills. That same year, investigators found that the pilots over-relied on automation in the 2013 crash of an Asiana Airlines jet in San Francisco that left three dead.

In recent years, the Federal Aviation Administration has advised airlines to encourage pilots to fly manually when appropriate, among other policies intended to improve manual skills.

A specific focus of our efforts has been ensuring that our pilots have the manual handling skills and confidence to take control of the aircraft if the automation does not perform as expected, an FAA spokesman said in an email.

Yet the agency moves slowly. This week, the FAA finally began enforcing a rule it announced about six years ago requiring pilots to practise in simulators how to handle stalls, a situation in which a plane loses lift. The rule was enacted in response to a 2009 crash.

In 2016, the Transportation Departments Office of Inspector General issued a report that found the FAA had not ensured that airlines adequately trained pilots in hands-on flying or on how to monitor a plane on autopilot. The report also found the agency did not track how often pilots flew manually.

A decade ago, Chesley Sullenberger landed a US Airways jet with 155 people aboard in the Hudson River. That represents to many pilots the sort of manual intervention that is sometimes necessary.

Hopefully, well do something before we begin to have a litany of recent fatal accidents, Sullenberger said in a recent interview. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen next year. I cant say. But I think its inevitable if we continue down this path.

The issue has become more acute in recent years as aircraft have become more automated and a global pilot shortage has forced carriers to fill their cockpits with less experienced pilots, particularly in emerging markets. At the same time, the stream of military aviators that the big carriers have long relied on is dwindling.

The most seasoned pilots are aging out of the profession  they are required to retire at age 65 in the United States  and many said their successors might not know how to handle the unexpected.

Theres nothing wrong with the millennials; theyre really sharp and hungry for the information, said Shem Malmquist, a Boeing 777 captain and visiting professor at the Florida Institute of Technologys College of Aeronautics. Were not exposing them  were not giving them the chance to get the information.

Karlene Petitt, an international airline pilot who wrote a PhD dissertation about pilot training at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said the new training regimen was producing less well-rounded pilots.

They can punch the buttons, but will they be able to fly that airplane when it breaks? she asked.

Sullenberger noted that flight schools, where much of the manual training takes place, were limited because some insurers restricted how much flying students could do in poor visibility.

They may have never flown in a cloud before, he said.

Kit Darby, a former United Airlines captain and Boeing flight instructor who now trains pilots at another large carrier, said training for passenger pilots remained exhaustive and still focused on manual skills, including 1,500 hours of flight time and nearly 30 days in simulators. The bigger problem, he said, is the degradation of those skills once pilots get into the cockpit of an advanced passenger jet and begin to rely on autopilot.

Many airlines encourage pilots to avoid automation when they can, he said, and annual reviews still test their manual skills. When its a beautiful day, we want you to turn the automation off, he said.

Darby and others said airlines in emerging markets were especially reliant on automation. Darby, who is also a career consultant for young pilots, said those markets had more acute pilot shortages, forcing carriers to rely on automation to cover up some of their aviators lack of experience. In the Ethiopian Airlines crash this week, one of the pilots had just 200 hours of flight time, less than a seventh of the time the FAA generally requires to fly a passenger plane.

After the 2013 Asiana crash, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the carrier emphasized the full use of all automation and did not encourage manual flight. If the airline allowed pilots to fly manually more often, the pilot most likely would have prevented the crash, the agency said.

Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines captain and a spokesman for the airlines pilots union, said Boeing and Airbus had encouraged that sort of reliance on automation by pitching their planes to carriers as capable of being flown by lesser-trained pilots.

Weve seen insidious marketing of aircraft to accommodate less experienced and perhaps a lower grade of pilot, he said.

Boeing and Airbus did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Not all pilots are as worried. Some said the advances in safety from automation outweighed any added risks.

The data is there that weve got a good system, said David Williams, a former FAA inspector. The reduction of training is overridden by the advances in the equipment.
Jeff Bezos isnt coming to Long Island City anymore, but the future of small-batch coffee roasting may already be taking root there.

About a mile north of the site that Amazon.com Inc. abandoned for its proposed New York City campus, a tiny coffee roasting co-op is welcoming anyone from cafe owners to hip consumers wanting to prepare their own green beans. Regalias model, which lets customers rent time at its roasting machines, is attracting a wave of trendy Americans looking to ditch the traditional brands that have long dominated the coffee scene in favour of specialty beans and a more artisan cup of joe.

The visions and the goals of the coffee roasters and the visions and goals of a cafe or bakery owner didnt always align, said Paolo Maliksi, one of the owners of Regalia. We are here to make sure that anyone can come in and roast for whatever reason.

Maliksi and other small-batch roasters are at the forefront of a trend that has spilled over from the beer industry. Much like the boom in craft breweries, more and more coffee shops are now roasting their own beans. The shift away from mass-produced coffee lets discerning cafe owners tell caffeinated customers exactly where their beans came from  something sustainability-minded clientele increasingly care about.

The trend toward self-roasting is good news for the millennial cafe-goer concerned about where food comes from, and who isnt deterred by prices that can be more than double that of a drip coffee at Starbucks Corp. A sign of a more plugged-in consumer, its helping reshape North Americas coffee industry, where Folgers and Maxwell House once ruled.

The rise of self-roasting has been helped by online commerce and social media, which allow newcomers to establish their brands and give roasters an outlet to connect with customers.

Rabobank says roasting shops alone arent yet a major threat to Big Coffee, but as young consumers move away from traditional brands, thats forcing the old guard to adapt. JM Smucker Co., for example, has rolled out a new line of coffee called 1850 intended to attract younger drinkers who wouldnt think to pick up a pound of sister brand Folgers. Last month, Maxwell House-owner Kraft Heinz Co. took a $15.4-billion (U.S.) writedown on assets in a stunning acknowledgment that changing consumer tastes have destroyed the value of some of the companys most iconic products.

If this eventually scales up and it takes over more grocery stores, it could be a bigger risk to a large industrial roaster, said James Watson, a beverages analyst at Rabobank. Big brands like Maxwell House are stagnating, Euromonitor data show, and in general theres a move towards smaller batches, more specialty coffee and roasting to match that, he said.

While big brands may be squirming, the shift to small-batch roasting is a boon for the makers of roasting machines, especially as models have grown smaller and cheaper. Bellwether Coffee makes a roaster thats the size of a standard fridge, 70 per cent smaller than typical models.

At Regalia, where the main coffee roasting machine is affectionately called Big Mama, a cafe roasting 1,000 pounds a week can save more than $200,000 a year by buying and roasting green beans, instead of purchasing roasted ones, the co-op estimates.

Some of the top coffee traders are also adapting their business models to supply the exotic origins and micro lots these specialized shops need. Buyers are looking for smaller batches than traditional 60-kilogram bags and some beans  usually those used in competitions  are so expensive that they are transported by plane, instead of the 20-foot containers that dominate the global coffee trade.

The equipment has become more available, more accessible, said Rich Futrell, who oversees sales in the U.S. Midwest for Genuine Origin, a unit of coffee trader Volcafe, which operates an Amazon-like website for specialty roasters and ships its beans in 30-kilogram cartons delivered via UPS.

Graphic design, information and knowledge have become more accessible, but green coffee is still traded the way its been traded for a long, long time, he said.

One way traders are pulling off the gear shift is through M&A. Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, the worlds largest coffee trader, bought a majority stake in Atlas Coffee Importers in Seattle and Olam International acquired East African coffee specialist Schluter SA. Sucafina, another coffee trader, invested in specialty coffee merchant 32cup.

It absolutely opens the doors for new ways of doing business, said Cory Bush, managing director of 32cup. Smaller specialty roasters are forcing importers and traders to become more responsive. When people are buying smaller quantities of anything, I think they expect to buy them in the same way they buy stuff from Amazon or their online grocers. We are having to find new platforms and new approaches to sell to people the way they want to be sold to.

To be sure, specialty coffee is a niche industry and there are still no precise figures on what percentage of the global market it accounts for. Still, Americans report drinking more and more gourmet coffee. A survey carried out by the National Coffee Association earlier this year showed that gourmets share of all coffee consumed reached a record 61 per cent in 2019.

At Regalia, which opens to the public for a few hours every weekend, a filtered cup of coffee might go for anywhere from a few dollars to $10 a pop, depending on what was roasted recently.

Thats a lot for a coffee in the slightly grittier part of Long Island City, which is more known for the warehouses that house and clean the citys halal meat carts than for the glass highrise apartment towers shooting up in other parts of the neighbourhood. But its not insurmountable.

You can buy a good cup of coffee for $3 and a great cup of coffee for $5; we are not talking about the difference between buying a Honda Civic and a Ferrari, 32cups Bush said. Choosing the better option is not going to fundamentally change your household economics.

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Investigators continued to search for what caused the crash of a Boeing Co. 737 Max on March 10 in Ethiopia, killing 157 people. A device found in the wreckage provided an early clue and work decoding the black boxes from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 began in France.

Meanwhile, airlines across the globe struggled to adjust their schedules and assess the financial impact, now that the aircraft has been grounded. U.S. regulators arent expected to let flights resume until Boeing completes a software update, which could take at least six weeks to finalize.

Key Developments:

A U.S. lawmaker vowed to investigate the Maxs certification

Boeing rose after AFP reported on software upgrade timing

Work began in France on the black boxesAir Canada suspended its financial forecasts

Here are the latest developments (times are for New York):

U.S. Congressional Probe (3:17 p.m.)

Rep. Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he would investigate to make sure that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is carrying out its critical safety mission in the wake of the agencys decision to ground the Max. I continue to have serious concerns about key decisions made in the FAAs certification of the 737 Max, and what was, and was not, disclosed to pilots, DeFazio said in a statement.

Read more:

New data on Boeing 737 Max 8 crossed the threshold in decision to ground planes, Garneau says

The Canadian victims of the Ethiopian Airlines disaster

Whats the trouble with Boeing 737 Max planes? Heres what we know

Black Box Work Begins (1:19 p.m.)

Frances aviation-safety agency, the Bureau dEnquetes et dAnalyses, began technical work on the flight data recorder with an Ethiopian investigative team. Boeing, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and FAA also are helping analyze the so-called black boxes.

Shares Jump on Software Report (11:12 a.m.)

Boeing shares reversed earlier losses after Agence France-Presse reported, citing unnamed sources, that the plane maker plans to roll out a software upgrade for 737 Max stall prevention in about 10 days. Boeing reaffirmed in an email that the upgrade will be rolled out in the coming weeks, confirming a Reuters report. The shares rose 1.2 per cent to $377.87 at 11:48 a.m. in New York.

Air Canada Suspends Forecast (7 a.m.)

Air Canada suspended its outlook for the first quarter and full year, citing the grounding and Boeings suspension of deliveries. The airlines shares fell 2.3 per cent to C$31.16 at 9:37 a.m. in Toronto. The Montreal-based carrier said it is continuing to develop a contingency plan and will provide updates.Earlier:

Wreckage Piece Offers Clue

A jackscrew found in the wreckage of ET302 indicated that the jet was configured to dive, based on a preliminary review, according to a person familiar with the investigation. The evidence helped persuade U.S. regulators to ground the model, the person said. The device is used to set the trim that raises and lowers a planes nose.

Trouble Began Shortly After Takeoff

The captain of the doomed jetliner faced an emergency almost immediately after takeoff from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, requesting permission to return after three minutes as the aircraft accelerated to abnormal speed, the New York Times reported, citing a person who reviewed air traffic communications.

Boeing Pauses Deliveries

Boeing halted deliveries of the jetliner because of restrictions imposed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. We continue to build the 737 Max while were assessing how the situation  including any potential capacity constraints  will impact our production, company spokesman Chaz Bickers said.

U.S. Grounding to Last Into April

The jets could remain grounded in the U.S. at least through April, lawmakers said after being briefed by aviation regulators. Flights wont resume until the planes receive updated flight-control software that Boeing and the FAA are racing to finalize, according to two congressmen. That process could take six weeks or more depending on additional training needed for pilots.

Flight Data Recorder

The first photo of the Ethiopian Airlines flight data recorder showed external damage from the impact of the crash. Technical work on the so-called black boxes will begin March 15, Frances BEA said on Twitter.

Fares Surge

Average airfares in India soared 65 per cent on major routes after the grounding of the 737 Max, shrinking capacity in the worlds fastest-growing aviation market. Carriers have previously been luring first-time flyers with ultracheap fares.

Garuda Trims Orders

Garuda Indonesia plans to further reduce its orders for 737 Max jets after the crash. The Indonesian flag carrier initially planned to slash its Max orders to 20 planes from 49 outstanding before the October disaster involving Lion Air flight 610. Now the airline plans to cut even more, President Director I Gusti Ngurah Askhara Danadiputra, told reporters in Jakarta.

Airbus China Talks

Xi Jinping will discuss a major order of Airbus SE planes with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, when the Chinese president visits Paris this month, a French official said Thursday. There are positive signals regarding the contract, the official said. Macron and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed are also discussing a new contract as part of a fleet renewal at Ethiopian Airlines, the official said.

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CALGARYAs concerns mount over the Boeing 737 Max 8, the plane involved in a fatal crash in Ethiopia this weekend, some would-be passengers are rethinking their travel plans.

A 737 Max 8 was involved in a horrific crash outside of Addis Ababa on Sunday morning, which killed all 149 passengers and eight crew members aboard  the second in just five months. Last October, 189 passengers and crew died after a 737 Max 8 flight operated by Lion Air crashed into the Java Sea.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the entire European Union as well as China, India, Turkey, and numerous other countries have either grounded the Max 8s or prohibited them from flying in their airspace. Several airlines voluntarily grounded them out of caution.

But the federal government has not banned their use in Canadian airspace, and Air Canada and WestJet continue to fly the planes despite growing worries from a flight attendants union and some passengers.

The safety of passengers and crews must be the absolute priority, Wesley Lesosky, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees component representing roughly 8,500 Air Canada and Rouge flight attendants, said in a statement.

The union is asking Air Canada at minimum to allow crew members who arent comfortable flying on the 737 Max 8 to switch assignments, according to the statement. Air Canada has 24 such aircraft in its fleet and has previously said it will continue to operate them based on whats currently known about Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash.

Read more:

Forcing passengers to fly on Boeing 737 Max 8 unethical, passenger advocate says

Ottawa exempts Boeing 737 Max jets from standards meant to minimize passenger injuries

Share your thoughts

Ottawa considers all potential actions as it weighs safety of Boeing 737 Max aircraft

But CUPE Local 4070, which represents 3,300 of WestJets workers, isnt worried.

At present, we believe that going to work on any of WestJets 121 Boeing 737 jets is safe, read a statement from CUPE Local 4070s executive on Tuesday afternoon.

In a statement, WestJet, which has 13 Max 8 aircraft in its fleet, said it reassures our guests and employees that we will continue to fly with their safety and best interests at the forefront.

Neither airline is waiving rebooking fees for passengers who arent keen on flying on a Max 8, but a handful of passengers are nonetheless reconsidering their travel plans.

Jake Reilly, a sales representative from Knoxville, Tenn., has a WestJet flight booked home from Calgary in May. When he found out the Ethiopian Airlines crash was the second one involving a Boeing 737 Max 8, he said he immediately checked his flight and found out he was scheduled to fly on the aircraft.

Im not somebody that has a fear of flying or anything, but when you have, you know, the same aircraft thats now gone down twice ... it does kind of make you think that there could be an issue, said Reilly.

He said hes now eyeing the news for more information before he decides whether to make other arrangements for his trip.

Will that aircraft go down? Probably not. I understand that, he said. But at the same time, is it worth three hours and 40 minutes of anxiety? Probably not.

One prospective passenger is even considering driving to her destination rather than flying on a Boeing 737 Max 8. Elizabeth Booth, a writer based in Calgary, is due to fly to Palm Springs on Friday with her two children to visit her parents. She saw the news about Sundays crash, but didnt begin to question flying on the same aircraft until Tuesday morning. By then, more than a dozen countries, including Britain, had banned 737 Max 8s from their airspace until further notice.

She asked her husband to check if they were scheduled to fly on a 737 Max 8. Turns out, they are.

As I was listening to the news roll in and more countries were grounding that particular aircraft, I just started feeling a little bit nervous about it, Booth said.

Booth is a frequent flyer and said she wouldnt have been as worried if she was travelling on her own, but feels differently because her kids will be with her.

However, Air Canada has refused to waive rebooking fees to switch from the 737 Max 8, she said, and an alternate route through Los Angeles would be too expensive. Shes considering driving with her family to Palm Springs from Calgary instead. Whenever her family visits her parents, Booth explained, her husband tends to drive so he can go hiking in Utah and Arizona for several days. They meet up in Palm Springs, and then all drive home together.

We do have that option of driving, she said. It would change his hiking plans, but because I really am pretty wary about this aircraft, we might just all bomb down there together in the car.

Federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau previously told reporters in Montreal that Canada hadnt grounded the Max-8 as other countries have because it isnt clear why the crash happened in the first place. Ethiopian investigators, assisted by aviation experts from the United States, continue to dig into its potential causes.

However, on Tuesday, Garneau said in a tweet that hed cancelled all meetings and public appearances that day to meet with my civil aviation expert panel.

All evidence is being evaluated in real time and were considering all potential actions, the post read.

If the cause of the crash is discovered and a solution, such as a software update, identified, Reilly said that might make him feel reassured enough to step on the plane.

Depending on what caused them, that could potentially change my mind, make me feel more at ease, he said.

Despite the inconvenience, Booth said she doesnt hold anything against Air Canada or WestJet for not waiving booking fees for passengers flying on their 737 Max 8s. She understands this isnt a typical policy and suspects both airlines are absolutely scrambling in light of groundings by European countries. But she does want to see the Canadian government act.

I would like to see the government make a decision just simply because I think the airlines are in a bit of a tight spot, she said. Obviously, it costs a lot of money to start cancelling flights, and I feel like if the government does ground these planes, then at least Ill have the option of getting my money back for my flight.

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The vaquita, one of the last specimens of the most endangered marine mammal in the world, was trapped in a net inside the Vaquita Refuge attesting that illegal gillnets are the biggest threat to the tiny cetacean.

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SAN FELIPE, Mexico, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On the morning of March 12th, 2019 Sea Shepherd ships M/V Farley Mowat and M/V Sharpie were on routine patrol in the Vaquita Refuge searching for illegal gillnets when they found a target. At that moment, net removal was not a possibility due to sea and weather conditions.

As per usual procedure, the Sea Shepherd crew recorded the location and returned to remove the illegal fishing gear when sea state allowed. The crew of Sea Shepherds M/V Farley Mowat started removing the illegal gillnet at 3 pm. Wildlife was trapped in the net, and as the crew was pulling it in they found an unidentified white animal. Some assumed it to be a totoaba fish.

The totoaba fish is the target species for the illegal gillnets that threaten the vaquita porpoise with imminent extinction. The two animals are of a very similar size, endemic to the Upper Gulf of California, and critically endangered. Their size and habitat likeness make the gillnets set to catch the totoaba the perfect death trap for the last vaquitas on earth. Totoabas are being caught to supply a lucrative black market of their swim bladders, which are sold as medicinal soup in Asia. The endangered fish is killed for less than 5% of its body. The rest is then discarded and left to rot.

The unidentified animal was clearly dead, as the crew was reeling the net into the Sea Shepherd ship it fell off and into the ocean. The Sea Shepherd drone was launched in an attempt to identify the species before it floated away. The animal was too decomposed, and the fluke and head were missing, but crew believed it looked like a vaquita porpoise. Captain Octavio Carranza then deployed the small boat team and Sea Shepherd scientist Laura Sanchez in a further effort to identify the animal.

The state of decomposition of the body of the cetacean was too advanced for us to be able to identify it, said scientist Laura Sanchez. The absence of the cranium further hampered the situation, she finished.

After sending preliminary photographs to marine mammal experts and Sea Shepherd scientific advisers, it was determined that morphology and length matched the body of a vaquita porpoise. Genetic analysis is needed to confirm identity of species.

Sea Shepherd transported the possible vaquita corpse to San Felipe, where it was given to government authorities for identification.

Sea Shepherd is working in close cooperation with Mexican governmental agencies such as the Environmental Secretariat (SEMARNAT), Navy (SEMAR), Fisheries Department (CONAPESCA), Federal Attorneys Office for Environmental Protection (PROFEPA), and the National Commission of Protected Areas (CONANP) to ensure urgent measures are undertaken to protect the vaquita.

Recently there have been rumors spread in the Upper Gulf of California area that gillnets are not a threat to vaquitas and other cetaceans, inciting demands to the Mexican government.

Sea Shepherd has been present in the Upper Gulf of California since 2015 as part of Operation Milagro. In that time, the crew has documented the entanglement of 36 marine mammals trapped in illegal gillnets. Nine of them were cetaceans, only one of which was able to be saved  a juvenile humpback whale in early 2016.

Although Sea Shepherd has found several dead vaquitas confirmed by scientists to have been killed from entanglement, this is the first time one has been discovered still trapped in a gillnet.

If there were any reservations about totoaba gillnets being a great danger for vaquitas and other cetaceans, despite ample proof in the past, this event should definitely leave no room for doubt, said Sea Shepherd Director of Marine Operations Locky Maclean.

Notes to media

Sea Shepherd has been present in the Upper Gulf of California since 2015 as part of Operation Milagro, a campaign to protect the most endangered marine mammal on Earth  Mexicos vaquita porpoise. Less than 22 vaquitas remain alive. The main threat to the tiny cetacean is illegal totoaba gillnet fishing.

The totoaba fish is another endangered species endemic to the Gulf of California and is poached for the trade of its swim bladder in Asian black markets. Totoaba bladders are known as aquatic cocaine due to their high value. It is believed that a totoaba bladder can be worth up to USD 100,000.

Sea Shepherd has removed more than 800 pieces of illegal fishing gear from the Upper Gulf of California, totaling over 180,000 meters. The removal of these nets has directly saved the lives of over 3400 animals.

Sea Shepherds gillnet retrieval operations remain the single most effective means of protecting the critically endangered vaquita porpoise from extinction. Sea Shepherd operates inside the Federally Protected and UNESCO recognized Vaquita Marine Refuge. In this limited area, the use of gillnets is prohibited due to overlap with the reduced habitat of the threatened vaquita porpoise.

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Photographs Credit: Sea Shepherd EMAIL: carolina@seashepherd.org to request non-watermarked photos.

Video Credit: Clancy Walker/ Sea Shepherd

ABOUT SEA SHEPHERD CONSERVATION SOCIETY: Established in 1977, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) is an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization. Our mission is to end the destruction of habitat and slaughter of wildlife in the worlds oceans in order to conserve and protect ecosystems and species. Visit www.seashepherd.org

For media inquiries please reach Carolina Castro at carolina@seashepherd.org or call 212-220-2302 ext. 2

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at

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CALGARYThe rumour mill is churning with the news that the runner-up in the 2017 United Conservative Party leadership race is staging a comeback on the eve of Albertas election.

The rumour that former Wildrose Party leader Brian Jean is mulling a takeover of the Freedom Conservative Party, founded by former UCP MLA Derek Fildebrandt in July 2018, even reached the ears of former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. He tweeted Thursday that conservatives win when we are united, referring to fears that Jean would split the conservative vote between the UCP and the FCP in the 2019 provincial election.

Personal ambition and fighting old battles must take a back seat to the best interests of our province, wrote Harper, who supported Kenneys leadership bid. Jason Kenney received an overwhelming mandate from Albertas conservatives to lead us into the next election.

Calgary city councillor Joe Magliocca said that Jean called him Monday night to say hes going to be leader of the Freedom Conservatives, offering Magliocca a chance to join as a candidate.

Read more:

What we know so far: Timeline of the United Conservative kamikaze campaign investigation

Derek Fildebrandt brands new Freedom Conservative Party as a political vehicle for Alberta patriots

Former Alberta politician Brian Jean gets last laugh with baby announcement

He knows how popular I am in my area and it would be a good stepping stone, maybe have a press conference in Calgary. I dont know what hes thinking of doing, he said.

The Ward 2 councillor has known Jean for years, but he declined his offer over concerns about splitting conservative support in Alberta.

Absolutely 100 per cent, I hope he doesnt do it, Magliocca said. Please, please, Brian, Joe Magliocca says, Do not do it.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, leader of the centre-right Saskatchewan Party, tweeted a similar sentiment, saying a divided conservative movement will lead to an NDP victory. United we win, divided we lose, he said.

Jean swiftly cast doubt on the gossip Thursday, tweeting, Wow. I too have heard crazy rumours about something coming Friday but NONE of it involves me.

The UCP was formed in July 2017 when the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties merged. Kenney and Jean both vied for the leadership of the UCP, with Kenneythe former leader of the PC partybeating out Jean, the former Wildrose leader. The Freedom Conservative Party came on the scene in July 2018, with Fildebrandt describing members as Alberta patriots who wanted a stronger Alberta, with less Ottawa.

Jean retired from politics after losing the UCP leadership race to Kenney. The rumours about Jeans return come amid revelations that the provinces election commissioner is investigating allegations that former UCP leadership candidate Jeff Callaway ran a kamikaze campaign to help Kenney defeat Jean.

At a press conference in Canmore on Thursday, Kenney said Magliocca called him after reportedly speaking with Jean, and Kenney has no reason to believe that Joe made that up.

He dismissed a possible comeback by Jean as nothing more than political games from a disappointed former Wildrose leader.

Its been clear for some time that (Jean) has had a hard time coming to terms with the decision made by grassroots conservatives in our leadership election, Kenney said. But it now appears that hes also having a hard time accepting the decision ... of uniting into one big party.

Jean was a Member of Parliament representing Athabasca and Fort McMurray-Athabasca ridings from 2004 to 2014. In late 2014, he helped revive the Wildrose Party following the defection of nine members, including then-leader Danielle Smith, to the Progressive Conservatives.

He ran for the leadership of the Wildrose Party, but lost his youngest son Michael to lymphoma while campaigning. Ten days later, he won the leadership race and, under his guidance, the party grew in popularity and ended the 2015 provincial election with 21 seats in the Alberta legislature.

Fildebrandt endorsed Jean during his successful leadership bid for the Wildrose Party and served under him during the 2015 election, even stepping in as party leader following Michaels death.

But when the PCs and Wildrose parties merged, Fildebrandt ended up backing Kenneys leadership bid.

On Thursday, Kenney warned of splitting the vote between two conservative parties, much like it was in the 2015 election when the NDP defeated the Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose to form the government.

I think there is no support for the idea of going back into a vote split, of dividing the recently united free-enterprise movement in Alberta politics, Kenney said.

We were on a stage with Brian (Jean) when he committed to run for the UCP in this election, when he endorsed the 95 per cent vote for unity, Kenney said referring to the aftermath of the 2017 UCP leadership race. I would just ask him to reflect on those facts and respect the democratic decisions that our members have made.

Fildebrandt, the Strathmore-Brooks MLA, left the UCP in 2017 to sit as an independent after he was accused of renting his taxpayer-funded apartment on Airbnb and double-expensing some meals. He was also found guilty of hitting a neighbours vehicle and leaving the scene, and pleaded guilty to unlawful possession of wildlife after he shot a deer on private property.

While Kenney said last year that Fildebrandt wouldnt be allowed back into the party, Fildebrandt said hed be willing to work with a UCP minority government to create the most conservative and Alberta-first government possible at the FCP launch last July.

But Jean is hardly a fan of the UCP. In a recent guest column for the Edmonton Journal, he expressed concerns about the partys financial plans for the province, going so far as to claim Kenney is as fiscally irresponsible as the NDP.

At the FCPs launch in July, Fildebrandt vowed that, if elected, the party would take back direct control over CPP, EI, tax collection, the Firearms Act, and immigration. They would also launch a referendum to renegotiate Albertas constitutional relationship with the Canadian government.

With files from Trevor Howell and The Canadian Press

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EDMONTONA hearing set for Friday morning where the far-right website Rebel Media was expected to fight a $5,500 fine for breaking Albertas political advertising laws was postponed.

A last-minute adjournment was filed before the Friday morning appearance was supposed to occur. No new hearing date has been set.

According to a letter sent by the commissioner and posted to the Rebels website last month, a billboard put up along Highway 2 near Innisfail, Alta., with the message 40% of Grade 9 students failed provincial exams  Alberta can do better than David Eggen (Albertas minister of education) www.FireEggen.ca counts as a political advertisement.

Under the Election Finances and Contributions Disclosure Act, anyone who spends more than $1,000 on political advertising must register as a third party advertiser.

The letter says Rebel Media was not registered as a third party advertiser when they put up the billboard in November, which is reported to have cost $2,730.

The Rebel calls itself as a fearless news source and platform for activism but has consistently faced criticism for aligning itself with extreme views and far-right stances on political issues.

Fred Kozak, a lawyer representing Rebel Media, told Star Edmonton in January that they received the commissioners letter and said they wanted to see the information used to arrive at the decision.

We think the legislation was intended to give us an opportunity to express our perspective and we didnt really have that opportunity, Kozak told Star Edmonton during an interview.

The investigation stemmed from a complaint made by Elections Alberta, said to the commissioners letter.

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Netflix has put a warning card on the controversial Belgian film Girl, which landed on the streaming service Friday in markets including Canada, and created a resource website for its viewers.

Directed and co-written by Lukas Dhont, the Golden Globe-nominated drama has already screened at several film festivals and upset some critics with the way it depicts a 15-year-old transgender girl pursing her dream of being a ballerina while preparing for sexual reassignment surgery.

Viewers who click on the film on Netflix will first see a viewer discretion is advised card that says the film covers sensitive issues, and includes some sexual content, graphic nudity, and an act of self-harm.

The card also mentions www.girlmovie.info, which contains information about The Trevor Project, a 24-hour, toll-free confidential suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth in the U.S.

Also on the site is a link to TrevorSpace, an international community for young LGBTQ people, as well as the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD and a video featuring Dhont and Nora Monsecour, a trans female dancer from Belgium whose life inspired Girl.

The actions portrayed in this work of fiction are extremely dangerous and should not be attempted, says the site.

Genital mutilation, hormone overdose, and acting against trans-competent medical advice are life-threatening behaviours likely to make gender-affirming surgeries impossible. Safe options and transgender resources exist if you or a loved one wish to medically transition. If you are considering self-harm or suicide, support is available. You are not alone.

Netflix says it worked on the site with GLAAD and The Trevor Project and other LGBTQ-focused organizations.

The site is similar to the one the streaming service created for its teen drama series 13 Reasons Why, which tackles the subject of suicide.

Belgian actor Victor Polster stars as the protagonist in Girl, who visits medical doctors and undergoes hormone therapy while training in the competitive world of dance. The film won several top awards at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera dOr award for best first feature film.

Some film critics have expressed concern that the film is told from the perspective of a cisgender filmmaker with a cisgender actor playing the lead. They also take issue with the way the story was handled, noting it contains several graphic scenes focusing on the characters genitalia and a harrowing part involving self-mutilation.

The film has the potential to be very dangerous for a young trans person in any country who might stumble upon this and think that somehow that is a route to take to get the body that theyve always felt they should have had in the first place, Trevell Anderson, the Los Angeles-based director of culture and entertainment for Out magazine, said in a recent phone interview.

One thing the film does is it contextualizes the trans experience as being one that is purely physical and one that is purely medical. It oversimplifies the experience of being trans and doesnt take into account the psychological state of being that trans is as well.

Anderson, who identifies as gender nonconforming, noted many trans people worldwide are required to go through therapy and have medical professionals sign off on their mental state in order for gender confirmation surgery to take place.

Being trans is about so much more than just our bodies, its about more than just our genitalia, and the film did not and does not represent that aspect of being trans, said Anderson, who saw the film at a screening in L.A.

Mathew Rodriguez, a staff writer at Into magazine in Los Angeles, said he was also upset with the emphasis on the physical aspects of the character, noting the self-harm scene made him angry.

I think that we dont necessarily need to see violence against trans bodies in that gratuitous kind of voyeuristic way on camera right now. Thats not necessary, and especially written and directed by someone who has not had the trans experience, it feels exploitative, said Rodriguez, whose review of Girl last October called the film another example of trans trauma porn.

When someone talks about, Oh, this film wasnt about trans, it was about adolescence  using a trans story to tell a story about adolescence that you want to resonate with or that you want to make universal, feels a little exploitative to me.

Dhont was unavailable for comment, Netflix said Thursday, but he recently told the British daily newspaper The Guardian that he consulted Monsecour on the films script and edits. He also said he and the films critics have the same cause.

I dont want to be against them, I want to be together and pushing forwards, Dhont said.

Rodriguez said hed like to see more investment in amplifying trans narratives that are by trans people, directed by trans people, starring trans people, not cis people who are made to play trans parts.

Every major role in this film, when you talk about lead actor, director, script writer  at every turn where trans people could have been involved they were not, and thats the tragedy.
Beto ORourkes hands are running for president.

If youre familiar with the Texas politico, you already know he appears to be powered by Dexedrine, Red Bull, triple espressos and a deranged voice in his head that keeps shouting, THEY WILL KILL YOU IF YOU STOP MOVING.

Between the marching and the jumping on tables, between the full-body spasms and the shoulder dancing that produces enough kinetic energy to power Fiji, ORourke is more exhausting to watch than a Cirque du Soleil troupe in a war zone.

I bet if you snuck into his kitchen right now, youd find pancakes stuck to the ceiling from years of overzealous flipping: CHILDREN, BREAKFAST IS READY! OH (BLEEP). You know why he doesnt wear a fitness tracker? It would explode. If this dude were a puppeteer, marionettes would form a union to protest unsafe working conditions. You know how he changes a light bulb? He stands under the fixture, raises his arm and spins it around so frantically, it creates enough centrifugal force to unscrew the old one and levitate the new one into position.

Then he lectures the new bulb about climate change.

Twelve years, Light Bulb! Thats all we got! Shine responsibly!

This former punk rocker is a swirling human vortex. He is a can of human Febreze, spraying out rapid-fire bursts of aromatic centrist idealism in speeches, as his arms flail and nearby supporters flinch, certain theyre about to get punched in the face.

His hands never stop moving. He is his own ASL interpreter.

He makes the Duracell Bunny look like a three-toed sloth.

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After ORourke threw his hat into the 2020 race on Thursday  the only surprise was that he didnt pantomime throwing an actual hat into an actual ring  even Donald Trump was taken aback by the manic body language.

I think hes got a lot of hand movement, Trump told reporters, looking genuinely scared. Ive never seen so much hand movement. I said, Is he crazy or is that just the way he acts?

Remember the source. Trump shakes the hands of world leaders like he is tugging on a rescue rope after tumbling overboard from a Disney cruise ship. When Trumps mouth revs into overdrive, his right hand basically flashes non-stop gang signals to the faithful. His thumb and index finger form a recurring OK. Like an umpire motioning safe, hes mastered the horizontal slash. If you mute the TV when Trump is yapping, he looks like he is playing Rock, Paper, Scissors against an octopus.

But you know what? Trump is 100 per cent right about ORourke.

Betos hands are way crazier than Donalds hands.

Betos hands may well induce a panic attack across the free world.

Did you watch ORourkes announcement video? His second sentence was, This is a defining moment of truth for this country and for every single one of us.

By the time he finished that line, his hands had air-punched like 164 times. Watch it again and focus on his wifes face. At first, Amy is beaming with an ear-to-ear smile. Then, as the couch they are sitting on begins to shudder like a Ford F-150 on a gravel road, her smile morphs into something closer to motion sickness.

There is no doubt Betos hands have now clawed their way into popular culture.

The Daily Show ran a bit about them on Thursday. Jimmy Fallon spoofed ORourkes video with a segment in which he played the newly minted presidential candidate, gesticulating like a lunatic and saying things such as: Im sort of like if a compassionate head-nod turned into a person, When I eat salads, I thank every individual leaf for its sacrifice and Im like if your friends hot dad had the energy of a Golden Retriever.

But this new-found fixation on Betos hands should give the rest of him pause.

For the Democrats, who now have a pool of presidential candidates larger than the total number of people whove auditioned for American Idol, anything that can take oxygen away from Trump is not a bad thing.

So Betos hands could be a secret weapon  for his party.

But for ORourke himself, his hands are a harbinger of doom.

Trump is an evil genius. And by calling attention to Betos hands this week, what he did was create a powerful distraction. He made it impossible to hear what ORourke is saying because now we cant look away from his crazy hands.

So if ORourke is serious about dethroning Trump, he needs to calm down.

Maybe he should invest in a straitjacket. Maybe he should hire a physical therapist to tamp down on the urge to look like an MMA fighter. Maybe he should keep his hands in his back pockets, as on the new cover of Vanity Fair.

Maybe he should ask a zookeeper to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart.

But right now, Betos hands are a messaging liability.

Those hands are becoming his story.

And in doing so, they will help get Donald Trump re-elected.
OTTAWACanada is restricting the finances of another 129 people, companies and organizations over Russias treatment of Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the additional sanctions today, calling the measures a response to the ongoing occupation of Crimea and the Russian arrests of Ukrainian sailors in the Black Sea last November.

Those arrests came in a naval confrontation in the Kerch Strait, an import marine link for southern Ukraine that runs past the Crimean Peninsula. The Russians planted a freighter across the narrow strait, asserted it was Russian territorial water and seized two Ukrainian gunboats and a tug. They took 24 sailors into custody.

Canada and its allies are unwavering in our support for Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity, Freeland said in a statement. Russias provocations in the Kerch Strait and its illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Crimea will not go unchecked.

Canadas most prominent new targets are Igor Sechin, a former deputy prime minister and current chairman of Russians state oil company, and Vladimir Yakunin, a former president of the state-owned Russian railway system. The list also includes a former Russian justice minister and envoy of President Vladimir Putin, mid-ranking public officials, and industrial concerns such as aircraft corporations and a shipyard.

Several of them had already been targeted by sanctions from the United States and the European Union.

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The restrictions freeze any assets the targets have under Canadian jurisdiction and forbid Canadians and anyone in Canada to do business with those named on the list. The Canadian government has also tightly limited dealings with the Russian financial and oil sectors.

Global Affairs Canada says the number of people and entities sanctioned over Russias aggression toward Ukraine has now reached 429.

The relationship between Ukraine and Russia has grown ever more tense since protests drove Ukraines Russian-backed president Viktor Yanukovych from office in 2014.

Russia responded by occupying Crimea and helping separatists in eastern Ukrainian provinces close to the Russian border begin a violent rebellion.

The new sanctions list includes figures in the separatist governments set up in those provinces.

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QUEBECA little more than two years after their own community came under attack, Muslims in Quebec City said they were in shock over the mass shootings at two New Zealand mosques Friday that claimed at least 49 lives.

Their horror was echoed by members of other Muslim communities across the country as they offered condolences to the grieving families and spoke out against extremism.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned as absolutely appalling the attack on worshippers attending Friday prayers in Christchurch.

Hate has no place anywhere, Trudeau said in a statement. We must all confront Islamophobia and work to create a world in which all people  no matter their faith, where they live, or where they were born  can feel safe and secure.

Boufeldja Benabdallah, the head of the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre, said a feeling of indescribable pain was apparent in his own community. He extended condolences to the New Zealand victims and expressed concern for families in Quebec City being forced to relive the Jan. 29, 2017 attack that left six men dead.

Im convinced they are feeling a terrible pain. Imagine the children of those families here in Quebec who are hearing it on the radio and will watch their mothers cry and ask, Why are you crying?  Benabdallah said.

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The mothers will remember the 29th, when they ran to get husbands who were killed by Alexandre Bissonnette.

Benabdallah added that amid the mourning, it is time for people to speak out against extremism and for lawmakers to legislate against it.

We must get back to work once again to explain, to tell these extremists of all stripes who politicize religion, like extremists who use race as a basis for discrimination, that we must change, Benabdallah said. The world cannot continue like this.

During a vigil in Toronto, federal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen said its important for people around the world to say no to hatred.

We have to work every single day to eradicate this hatred in our midst, Hussen told the crowd at Nathan Phillips Square, many of whom carried signs bearing slogans such as United Against Islamophobia.

And we have to tell those who peddle in this kind of hatred  whether they be ordinary citizens or whether they be politicians  that this is the logical extension of that hatred.

Police in many cities across the country said they were stepping up patrols around places of worship on Friday and communicating with local Muslim communities about their security concerns.

We will have a heightened police presence in the community, focusing on places of worship  especially mosques. We have done this to ensure the city is as safe and secure as possible, said Const. Allyson Douglas-Cook, a Toronto police spokeswoman.

In Halifax, Imam Abdallah Yousri of the Umma Mosque said no special precautions were being taken, but he confirmed that the site, with a capacity of 2,000, already has a good security system.

We will have discussions about that to see how we can enhance our security systems to make sure this kind of thing doesnt happen in the future, he said in an interview.

He said some members called to see whether prayers would go ahead as scheduled on Friday, and he assured them the mosque would be open. Its always a special day on Fridays, he said. We pray every Friday.

Rabia Khedr, executive director of the Muslim Council of Peel, said the early news about Christchurch immediately brought to mind the Quebec City shooting.

I didnt sleep all night, Khedr said. I cannot believe the number of people that have been killed, the number of people that have been injured.

She said an attack on Muslims in a Western nation hits harder.

When it hits a Muslim majority country we feel sad, we feel sorrow, however that feeling is a little different in a western democracy where we are minorities, she said. Because its pure and utter hatred. Its Islamophobia in its ugliest form.

The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, based in Calgary, also spoke out against the attack.

This is nothing but terrorism against Muslims. This is nothing but hate against Muslims. This is nothing but Islamophobia, Imam Syed Soharwardy said in a statement.

Trudeau said Canadians join New Zealanders and Muslim communities around the world in grieving and condemning the attack and work to act against violent extremism.

Far too often, Muslims suffer unimaginable loss and pain in the places where they should feel safest, Trudeau said. Canada remembers too well the sorrow we felt when a senseless attack on the Centre Culturel Islamique de Quebec in Ste-Foy claimed the lives of many innocent people gathered in prayer.

Mohamed Labidi, a past president of the Quebec City mosque, told reporters Friday he regretted that humanity had not learned its lesson after the attack on his community.

A fellow mosque member said the question remains why these attacks continue to happen.

The reaction is the same as what we experienced already, said Alpha Barry. We have been affected, our population is affected and we keeping asking why? Why is this happening every day?

Parliament lowered the flag on Centre Block to half-mast in honour of the victims  a move followed in other provinces and cities. Vigils were also planned in various Canadian cities in memory of the victims.

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appears to have been a carefully planned racist attack in New Zealand.

There are unconfirmed reports that the shooter was influenced by Bissonnette, the former Universite Laval student convicted of killing six worshippers in 2017.

A now-deleted Twitter account that is believed to be linked to the accused shooter shows what appear to be three assault-rifle magazines, one of which has Bissonnettes name on it.

Aymen Derbali, a survivor of the Quebec City attack who was left paralyzed, said he was devastated when he saw video of the New Zealand attack.

Certainly for me, when I saw the video this morning, it brought back what we experienced here, he said outside the mosque.

The hardest thing is that he was inspired by what happened here. He had the killer at the mosque here as an idol. It was written on his weapons.

Bissonnette was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for 40 years, but the Crown and his lawyers both recently announced they are appealing the sentence.

Through his lawyers, Bissonnette, who is seeking a reduction of his sentence, issued a statement Friday saying he was very affected that his name was linked to the New Zealand attack. His lawyers said in the statement that Bissonnettes decision to appeal wasnt meant to minimize his actions.
MONTREALA human wave of chanting, sign-waving protesters made their way downtown from the base of Montreals Mount Royal on Friday as they joined a series of student-led marches around the world demanding that government take action on climate change.

A beating drum signalled the beginning of the march, which spanned several city blocks as thousands of students and other protesters denounced what they see as governments failure to take action to stop an impending climate crisis.

Earlier Friday, students formed human chains around six Montreal high schools, forcing the cancellation of morning classes.

The protesters are demanding stronger government action on climate change, including a law to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Organizers said that under current commitments, the temperature could rise twice that much by 2020.

Although individual actions are crucial, the fact is that collective and institutional decisions must be taken to reflect the seriousness of the situation, read a statement by a group of university organizers.

While the student population is investing in education that is costly in money and time, in precarious conditions accentuated by indebtedness, unpaid internships and a culture of competitive performance, climate change is increasingly threatening the future for which they struggle.

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The group said 150,000 students were on strike, representing 120 student associations.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna praised the young Canadians participating in the marches and encouraged them to continue taking action for a more sustainable future.

They know climate change is real, and that the cost of inaction is enormous, she said in a statement.

Quebec Premier Francois Legault also said he was encouraged by the message being sent by Quebecs youth. We all live on the same planet, and its an effort we have to do together, he said.

Other climate marches took place in cities including Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Regina and Vancouver, as well as in close to 100 countries around the world.

High school students protested outside of Ontarios legislature in Toronto on Friday afternoon, demanding the government take action to address climate change.

Leilani Rocha, an 18-year-old student from St. Marys High School in Pickering, Ont., said shes concerned that no level of government is taking the impacts of climate change seriously.

This is an emergency, she said. We need extreme change and to actually take action right now.

Rocha said she hopes the collective protests across the country send a message that youth are ready to make sacrifices in their lives to improve the environment.

We cant take our cars everywhere, she said. Sometimes we may need to take the bus or walk or bike. Were OK with that ... but the government needs to realize, because were OK with that, they need to make legal change.

Read more about:
OTTAWAConservative Leader Andrew Scheer issued a second statement after facing a storm of criticism for failing to mention the terrorist attack in Christchurch was perpetrated against Muslims during Friday prayer.

Other leaders, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Premier Doug Ford all made specific mention to the victims being Muslim or at prayer in a mosque.

But Scheers initial statement suggested it was freedom under attack.

Freedom has come under attack in New Zealand as peaceful worshippers are targeted in a despicable act of evil. All people must be able to practice their faith freely without fear, Scheer wrote Thursday night, adding there are no words strong enough to condemn this kind of vile hatred.

The statement was widely criticized on social media and by anti-racism advocates, who pointed to the Conservative partys past policies  such as the proposed niqab ban and the barbaric practices tip line  as well as Scheers failing to specifically mention the terrorist attack clearly targeted Muslims.

After receiving media requests to respond to that criticism, Scheers office issued a second statement of condolences that was much more specific.

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Houses of worship, like the two mosques attacked last night, should be places where all people can meet freely and without fear, a quote attributed to Scheer read.

We stand with our Muslim brothers and sisters to ensure that they remain this way. We must condemn, in the strongest terms possible, the type of extreme and vile hatred that motivated this despicable act of evil.

Bernie Farber, the head of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, pointed out that it took 15 hours of criticism before Scheer updated his statement.

I dont want to sound at all political, because the Canadian AntiHate Network is not (political). What we do is we concentrate and we look at  what are the ingredients where hate can develop, and terrorism can develop, Farber told the Star.

When he puts out a statement that wont even acknowledge that the people murdered in New Zealand were New Zealand Muslims, when he speaks to a crowd that has a large number of racist and bigots and anti-immigration individuals (at a recent yellow vest protest on Parliament Hill) and says not a word? Thats what lets hatred grow.

Details about the Christchurch terrorists suspected motivations were available almost immediately, through a number of posts on 8chan, an online message board used by racists and bigots.

A manifesto attributed to the shooter referenced a number of white supremacist and neo-Nazi tropes. Pictures believed to be of the terrorists rifles and ammunition show common far-right ideas and names of killers, including Alexandre Bissonnette, the Quebec City man who killed six Muslim men while at evening prayers in 2017.

Scheer faced similar criticism last month for addressing a protest outside Parliament Hill that was also addressed by white nationalist Faith Goldy, a former television personality.

The United We Roll protest convoy was initially associated with the Canadian version of the yellow vest protest movement  which mixes anger over economic challenges facing the oil and gas sector with outright Islamophobia. Organizers downplayed the association after facing media scrutiny.

Read more about:
As a doctoral student and teaching assistant at York University, Alexandria Petit-Thorne got involved with her union for two reasons: to fight for stable jobs in academia, and to put pressure on her employer to create a fund for sexual violence survivors on campus.

But during a contentious five months of striking and picketing in 2018, she was allegedly subjected to an overt pattern of sexual harassment by the chairperson of her own unions local unit  which lacked a formal policy to deal with her complaints and utterly and manifestly failed to address it, according to a claim filed with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario.

At the heart of her HRTO application is how unions  whose mission is to advocate for safe and healthy workplaces  deal with problems like harassment within their own ranks. Petit-Thorne sees solving that challenge as central to the labour movements values.

The point of a union is to protect its members from systemic abuse and exploitation, she said in an interview. This is systemic abuse. If the union is not going to protect us from this, then its not serving its purpose.

In an emailed response to the Star, a spokesperson for CUPEs national office said the union takes matters of harassment very seriously.

To that end, we provide our local unions with a variety of tools and resources to address these issues with both their employer and within their local union, such as our Stop Harassment guide for locals.

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She was grabbed, endured sexual taunts and followed into the washroom. The WSIB says this wasnt workplace harassment

The statement said all locals were encouraged to adopt the unions code of conduct embedded in its constitution, which sets out standards of behaviour for members.

If possible, a member may attempt to deal directly with the person alleged to have engaged in behaviour contrary to the Code, by asking him/her to stop such behaviour, the constitution says.

If the alleged perpetrator is a union staffer and asking them to stop doesnt work, the member may bring forward a complaint that will be dealt with according to the applicable staff collective agreement, it adds.

Petit-Thornes HRTO application says that policy is manifestly inappropriate for complaints about sexual harassment or violence, and that CUPE and her local 3903, which represents teaching assistants, were aware of a long-standing internal culture of gender and sex discrimination.

Her claim alleges she experienced months of harassment at the hands of CUPE 3903 chairperson Devin Lefebvre starting last June, when union members were engaged in a contentious strike with York University. Precarious jobs and demands to create a sexual violence survivors fund at York were among the key issues in the labour dispute.

The harassment, her application says, took the form of sexual advances from the chairperson, unwanted sexual comments, verbal harassment, comments about her sexual orientation, discussing sexual relations and sexual fantasies, pressure to engage with him sexually, and spreading sexually charged rumours about her to other union members.

Examples included a Facebook post where Petit-Thorne, who is working toward her PhD in social anthropology, was mockingly equated with Monica Lewinsky by other CUPE 3903 members, the application says.

Despite requests to stop the behaviour and numerous attempts to reconcile with Lefebvre, the cycle of unwanted behaviour repeated itself over and over again between June and November 2018, according to the claim. But when Petit-Thorne finally raised the issue with her local in October, the union failed to take meaningful or adequate steps to address these systemic problems, the HRTO application says.

They have conducted no investigation. They have provided no resolution or redress to the application, nor any sanction against Mr. Lefebvre, the application says.

Instead, the alleged perpetrator was allowed to direct the locals response to her union complaint and actively participate in decision-making about it, according to the HRTO claim.

Lefebvre did not respond to the Stars requests for comment. CUPE and local 3903 are named as the respondents in the HRTO application.

Petit-Thorne first sought to address the issues through the locals equity officer who suggested her concerns be brought to the locals executive committee, according to the application. But the alleged perpetrator did not recuse himself from the subsequent meeting on the topic, despite the clear conflict of interest, the claim says.

Initially, the executive did arrive at a resolution that satisfied Petit-Thorne: the chairperson agreed he would not contact her directly, would attend anti-sexual violence training, and would issue an apology, according to the application. But shortly after, the claim says, Lefebvre said he had been advised not to apologize unless she signed a general release of liability.

Petit-Thornes complaint was subsequently discussed in detail at two union meetings, including a Dec. 6 general membership gathering where she was publicly named as the complainant. The general membership was then invited to openly debate details of the allegations, the application says.

Members were permitted to rise and express their views on the complaint. While some supported the applicant, others suggested that she should be held accountable for sexually provocative behaviour, the HRTO submission says.

Present at the December meeting was York doctoral student Mandi Gray, who in 2015 filed sexual assault charges against then-CUPE 3903 executive member Mustafa Ururyar. Ururyar was convicted in 2016. But the high-profile verdict  praised by some for tackling persistent myths about rape  was later overturned on appeal by a Superior Court judge for being incomprehensible and failing to adequately explain the reasoning for the conviction.

In an interview with the Star, Gray said she had not met Petit-Thorne prior to Dec. 6, but had heard of the harassment complaint. She decided to attend because she felt her own experiences closely mirrored Petit-Thornes: she had met Ururyar at a union meeting during a contentious strike period where solidarity manifested itself as overlooking sexual violence, she says.

Gray describes what she saw at the December meeting as disgusting and absolutely traumatizing.

When I arrived they opened it up to the floor and had everybody just air their personal grievances about her, she recalls. It communicated to me very clearly that nothing has changed. It just reaffirmed the local hasnt shifted in terms of the culture of sexual violence and protecting perpetrators.

The agenda for the December meeting include a statement from the executive to members that acknowledged its failure to develop a process that allows members to feel safe and supported in bringing forward complaints.

But the statement also said Lefebvre would not be making an apology at that time, adding he had expressed his intent to do so at some time in the future.

In an email correspondence with Petit-Thorne seen by the Star, Lefebvre acknowledged making a series of mistakes for which he took full responsibility and wanted to apologize for.

But if Im being honest, I need your help. I need to better understand what your experience has been. And Alex, I desperately want to understand, the email says.

Ultimately, a non-confidence motion on Lefebvres leadership passed at the December meeting but he did not resign, according to the application. The executive said members should circulate a petition calling for a binding vote on whether he should remain chairperson. This process, known as recall, was enshrined in local 3903s bylaws.

The executive did not take any steps of its own to remove Lefebvre, the application says.

Then, less than a month later, the unions national office invalidated the recall provisions of CUPE 3903s bylaws. The HRTO application says Petit-Thorne was subsequently told by the locals equity officer that they could not assist members in complaints against each other, but only in grievances against York University.

Petit-Thorne reported her allegations to the universitys Centre for Sexual Violence, Response, Support and Education after she lost confidence in the unions willingness to intervene, she says. In February, York appointed an external investigator to look into Lefebvres alleged behaviour toward her, according to her application.

In a statement to the Star, York spokesperson Yanni Dagonas said the university could not discuss complaints brought forward for privacy reasons.

I can say that we are committed to strengthening measures that support survivors and provide the safest possible environment for our community members, Dagonas said.

Across Canada, unions have vocally pushed for government legislation and employer protections for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. In Ontario, for example, more than 10 unions  including CUPE  signed a 2016 pledge to make domestic and sexual violence protections a priority in their contract negotiations with employers. The Ontario Federation of Labour was also part of a coalition that successfully pushed the province to improve paid sexual and domestic violence leave provisions for all workers.

But how unions deal with internal sexual harassment and assault claims is also attracting attention. Gray says unions need to find a way to institute robust policies to deal with sexual harassment  or risk alienating existing or future members.

This is a systemic level issue. How many people are you pushing out by allowing this behaviour to continue? Who are you prioritizing in this movement?

While CUPEs constitution does contain a trial procedure for complaints, the HRTO application says it places the burden on victims to publicly bring forward, prosecute and prove that the accused has breached the (unions) bylaws, before a trial committee of the union.

And while the unions constitution contains an Equality Statement that demands mutual respect, co-operation, and understanding between members, the application says it has failed to develop or apply appropriate policies and procedures to promote equality for its members and in particular for victims of sexual assault or harassment.

We walked the line for five months for a sexual violence survivors fund, Petit-Thorne says. So its just kind of insulting that you would not have any kind of process of addressing sexual violence within the union, especially when we know that its prevalent.

Ive been told that Im causing harm in the community by bringing this to light, that Im hurting the union, she added. Which is so painful because Ive put my blood sweat and tears into this union and Im a proud unionist.

A key demand of the HRTO application is that the union create proper procedures to deal with sexual harassment complaints by members, including the retention of an independent third party to oversee the implementation of policies and mandatory training.

The application, which could be resolved either through mediation or a full hearing, also seeks a total of $400,000 in damages for discrimination, psychological and emotional distress, and loss of academic and career advancement. Petit-Thorne says being on campus now prompts panic attacks and that the impact of her experience has completely derailed her day-to-day life.

This was an opportunity for (the union) executive to say, we dont tolerate sexual violence regardless of who the alleged perpetrator is. And in practice, what they have done is send a strong message loud and clear that if you come forward you are going to be degraded, you are going to be humiliated, you are going to have your character assassinated, you are not going to be believed, she said.

I cant in good conscience just let that slide.
Torontonians gathered in Nathan Phillips Square Friday evening to honour the victims of the deadly New Zealand mosque attacks that left dozens dead and have heightened concern about Islamophobic sentiment around the world.

Hundreds of people stood in a cold drizzling rain outside city hall holding signs that read United Against Islamophobia and Our Hearts Are With New Zealand.

Among those in the crowd was Ushna Nadeem, 23, who said that, while the massacre took place on the other side of the world, for GTA Muslims like her, it hit close to home, especially because the attacker struck during Friday prayers.

Friday prayer is such a big deal for Muslims around the world, she said.

The thought of someone going there to peacefully pray (and being attacked), its just heartbreaking.

She said she was worried that the New Zealand attack was fueled by anti-Muslim sentiment that is spreading across the world, including in Canada and the United States.

With Islamophobia spreading worldwide, its not just a New Zealand problem; its a world problem. So if it can happen all the way in New Zealand, it can easily happen here, she said.

Mubdi Rahman, 34, said the attack was particularly painful because it occurred during Friday prayers. He noted that the word peace is common in the prayers worshippers would have been reciting before the gunman opened fire.

He noted that a gunman attacked Muslims at a Quebec City mosque two years ago, and worried that such violence could be repeated.

But he said he was encouraged by the solidarity shown with the community by other Canadians.

Im overwhelmed by the support that people have been showing. Thats the thing thats been the silver lining in all of this. Sadly, this has happened many times and will likely happen again, but people still keep on coming out to support the community, he said.

Merle Metalin, 61, and Krikor Ajemian, 52, were standing in the crowd both wearing black-and-white New Zealand hats. The couple said they had just returned from their honeymoon in New Zealand, and, although neither is Muslim, they wanted to show support for the Islamic community, both in Canada and abroad.

We had to. Islamophobia is a horrible thing. People should judge on peoples actions, not on how they dress or what their faith is, Metalin said.

Representatives from all three levels of government addressed the crowd, including Ahmed Hussen, Liberal MP for York South  Weston and Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. He said the New Zealand murders were only the latest in a disturbing line of hateful attacks that have included an assault on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh last year, and the massacre of Black Christians at a church in South Carolina in 2015.

We have to do our best to make sure that we fight that hatred, we fight that intolerance, we move beyond these vigils and thoughts and prayers, although theyre very important, but to also call this hatred out. Call it out in our communities, in our societies, in our families, in our friendships, in our workplaces. We can never, ever normalize this hatred, he said.

The rally was organized by several groups including the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, Faith in the City, TorontoMuslims.com, and the Muslim Youth Fellowship.

The organizers said in a press release that the murders in Christchurch had deeply shocked our communities here in Toronto.

No one should ever feel threatened while being a place of prayer, and as a community our hearts, our thoughts are with those in New Zealand.

Mayor John Tory was out of town and unable to attend the vigil, but in a statement released by his office, he expressed solidarity with the citys Muslim residents.

I want each and every member of our citys Muslim community to know that your city supports you, your city is dedicated to protecting you, and your city respects and embraces you  just as Toronto embraces people of all faiths and backgrounds, it said.

I promise you that for as long as I am Mayor, I will stand up for the Muslim community and speak out against Islamophobia and all hatred and any violence that it (Islamophobia) gives rise to.

The massacres at two mosques in Christchurch, a city of less than 400,000 residents, killed at least 49 people and injured scores of others. Police have arrested four people, including the suspected gunman, who is believed to be a 28-year-old avowed anti-immigrant racist who fired indiscriminately at worshippers while he live-streamed his attack on social media.

Vigils were held elsewhere in the GTA on Friday to remember the victims of the horrific mass shootings .

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama`at Canada at 10610 Jane St. in York Region hosted a special prayer vigil at its Friday afternoon service at 1:15 p.m.

The University of Toronto Scarboroughs student union hosted support space and a vigil on Friday starting at 1:30 p.m. where they were to light 49 candles to honour the lives taken.

The imam leading Friday prayers at Baitul Islam Mosque in Vaughan condemned the utter cruelty of the shootings of Muslim worshipers in New Zealand that left 49 dead and at least 40 others injured Friday.

Lal Khan Malik, national president of Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat Canada, was leading the Friday prayers for throngs of worshipers filling the mosque. Soon after finishing the Friday prayers, the worshipers performed the janazah or funeral prayer for the victims.

Malik expressed his disbelief of how the suspect, 28-year-old Brenton Tarrant, who is now charged with killing 49 people, streamed footage live on social media before and during the massacre.

[His] hatred was so deep, not only he was committing that crime, he wanted to share his pride with the whole world that what he was doing was right, Malik said.

The suspect, a personal trainer born in Australia, had a rifle covered in white-supremacist graffiti. New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist attack targeting two mosques in central Christchurch during Friday prayers as an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.

Such a heinous and utterly inhumane attack must be condemned with the strongest possible terms, Malik said.

Its a tragedy that Muslims have lost their lives while joining together in worship.

When asked about any security measures the mosque should take, Malik said we can only take this to such (a) distance.

Unless the hatred in our hearts is eliminated, this would continue, he said. People would find ways to break security, find ways to commit their crime whatever precaution we take.

The real solution lies in changing hatred with love.

Safwan Choudhry, a spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat in Canada, said, The Ahmadiyya community is deeply shocked and horrified. We condemn these attacks to the strongest possible terms.

Choudhry said the ideology of any hate group, be it made up of white supremacists or not, is simply to divide people.

He warned that hate crimes are on the rise.

We want to send a clear message to those people, if you look around at this mosque, today is Friday, the holiest of the week [for Muslims], but people are still coming in defiance.

This mosque will be filled up full just like it is in any Friday, he said.

According to Choudhry, the Ahmadiya Muslim community is one of the largest in Canada, with mosques in every major city, from Newfoundland to British Columbia. The mosque, Baitul Islam, is also run by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat (AMJ) in Canada.

Deb Schulte, an MP for King-Vaughan, was at the mosque to show her solidarity with the community.

When asked about challenges she could face as a politician representing a multicultural riding, she said it all boils down to learning what motivates these people to be extremists and dwell in so much hate.

We cant just keep pushing this under the rug; it is becoming a problem in Canada, as well as other places in the world, and we need to address it, she said.

Schulte said open dialogue and conversations between Canadians hailing from different backgrounds is important. She praised one initiative by the Ahamadiya community in Vaughan when they invited people for dinner.

I had the pleasure of bringing a senior to one of their homes. She was an Italian, Roman Catholic senior. She was stunned with how much similarity there is between the religions, she said. She had all these images through media and what people say, which had no relation to the truth. So her world was opened up.

The parliamentarian said that Canada needs to keep opening up these conversations, so people can see that there is nothing to fear.

For those who have questions and are curious, the mosque is open to the public, Choudhry said.

We invite anyone and everyone to come and see what happens in a mosque. Come and talk to us!

News of the horrific events overseas did not dissuade Muslims in downtown Toronto from visiting various area mosques for prayer.

At Masjid Omar Bin Khatab on Parliament St., things were calm and fairly routine, as worshippers came and went, keeping with the Muslim obligation of praying five times per day.

Inside the modest prayer hall, Abdulah Nur, 56, was busy tidying up in preparation for the hundreds of people he anticipated to flock to the mosque throughout the day.

Nuri said hes resigned to the fact that the world is becoming a more divisive place, where differing ideologies can spark senseless acts of violence.

Though saddened by what transpired overseas, he felt safe attending prayers and performing his duties at his mosque.

Im not scared, because we should not have fear about whats going on, he said. First, I show love. When this happens our faith increase.

At the Madinah Masjid Mosque, on Danforth Ave., Perwaiz Qureshi, 55, was reading the Quran in a corner of the grand prayer hall.

This is my faith and I have to come out and pray, no matter what, he said.

He said he hopes people here refrain from taking one individuals action to paint any race or group with the same brush.

Toronto is a safe multicultural city, Qureshi said. Here we try to love each other. In Islam, they teach you to be humble and welcoming.

Qureshi said hes proud to live in Canada, because he feels safe and doesnt live with fear as a Muslim.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims is advising mosques and Muslim institutions around the country to review security measures before Fridays worship services.

Toronto police said they are actively monitoring for potential threats in the city.

Const. Allyson Douglas-Cook said police have made no definitive moves to enhance their presence or security at mosques or other Muslim institutions. She said police are keeping tabs on both international and local developments.

The Toronto Police Service continuously monitors security issues within the city of Toronto and around the world, police said in an emailed statement.

In response, we make the appropriate adjustments to our plans in order to mitigate the potential risks to public safety.

Minister of Public Safety Ralph Goodale tweeted that Canadas threat level remains unchanged at medium. 

Everybody has the right to practise their faith + culture without fear, Goodale tweeted. Canada is closely following the appalling terrorist attack in New Zealand. Our 5-Eyes ally can count on Canadas support + solidarity. Our prayers are w/ victims and gratitude w/ all the 1st Responders.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned as the attack in New Zealand as absolutely appalling.

Hate has no place anywhere, Trudeau said in a statement. We must all confront Islamophobia and work to create a world in which all people  no matter their faith, where they live, or where they were born  can feel safe and secure.

Read more:

In solidarity with New Zealand mosques, Vancouvers Al-Jamia Mosque to hold prayer vigil tonight

Muslim communities in Edmonton and Calgary ask Albertans to grieve together to overcome hate in wake of New Zealand mosque shootings

New Zealand shooting shows how YouTube and Facebook spread hate and violent images  yet again

 with files from Dina Al-Shibeeb of the Vaughan Citizen and YorkRegion.com, and from Claire Floody of the Star

Stefanie Marotta is a breaking news reporter, working out of the Stars radio room in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: @StefanieMarotta
CHARLOTTE, N.C., March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LPL Financial LLC , a leading retail investment advisory firm and independent broker-dealer, today announced that John Mara and Shaun Feldeisen CFP CLU have joined Bleakley Financial Group (Bleakley), which is supported by Private Advisor Group (PAG), an Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction (OSJ). PAG is aligned with LPL Financials broker-dealer and corporate and hybrid registered investment advisor platforms. Mara and Feldeisen reported that they managed approximately $200 million of client brokerage, advisory and retirement plan assets*. The financial advisors join from Northwestern Mutual Investment Services.



With a collective 30 years of experience, the Boston-based financial advisors deliver private wealth management services with the support of team members Jonathan Caplan, Mousami Pandey, Uli Akbarova and Emily Moncton. They decided to affiliate with Bleakley and LPL to address the evolving needs of their business. We had to evaluate the service offering we were able to provide and compare that against our goal of being the best advisors possible for each of our clients, Mara said. We realized that as the business has expanded, so had the needs of our clients. By partnering with Bleakley and affiliating with PAG and LPL, we have greater flexibility and a broader set of resources to positively impact the financial lives of our valued clients.

Feldeisen continued, Our partnership provides more options, allowing us to execute on our commitment to our clients with access to market-leading resources and scalability that address the growing needs of our firm.

Bleakley has been affiliated with LPL since 2015 and with this new team, the firm opens its seventh location in just over a year. As we continue to expand the presence of our firm into new regional markets, we have focused exclusively on attracting high-caliber advisors that align with our core values around client service. John and Shaun are the epitome of that and we are thrilled that theyre a part of our team, said Vince Nauheimer, managing director of business development at Bleakley. We value our partnerships with PAG and LPL, which has helped to position our business for organic growth.

We extend a warm welcome to John and Shaun, and also congratulate Bleakley on their continued growth, said Rich Steinmeier, LPL Financial managing director and divisional president, Business Development. To the advisors, Bleakley and PAG, our commitment to their success is across business models and enduring throughout the entire lifecycle of their businesses. We want to add value not only today, but as the industry evolves and advisors and investors needs change. We will do that by providing the flexibility and market-leading capabilities that give them the leverage and support they need, when they need it, to be able to take their business even further. We look forward to a long-term relationship with John and Shaun as well as all the teams they have behind them through this partnership.

Read about other firms that recently joined LPL in the LPL Financial News and Media section of LPL.com.

About LPL Financial

LPL Financial ( https://www.lpl.com ) is a leader in the retail financial advice market and the nations largest independent broker-dealer**. We serve independent financial advisors and financial institutions, providing them with the technology, research, clearing and compliance services, and practice management programs they need to create and grow thriving practices. LPL enables them to provide objective guidance to millions of American families seeking wealth management, retirement planning, financial planning and asset management solutions.

Securities offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC.

Bleakley Financial Group provides investment advice through Private Advisor Group LLC a registered investment advisor and separate entity from LPL Financial.

*Based on prior business and represents assets that would have been custodied at LPL Financial, rather than third-party custodians. Reported assets and client numbers have not been independently and fully verified by LPL Financial.

**Based on total revenues, Financial Planning magazine June 1996-2018

LPL Financial and Bleakley Financial Group are separate entities.

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Provinces across Canada  including Ontario  have begun warning plastic surgeons and their patients about textured breast implants and their link to a rare form of cancer.

In a March 5 notice to surgeons and breast cancer reconstruction specialists, Cancer Care Ontario warned that textured implants  devices coated with a light sandpaper-like exterior  have been tied to breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma (BIA-ALCL).

Citing a 2017 study and recent media publications regarding these implants, the agency advises that women who have had the implants for more than a year and who experience swelling or fluid buildup should be tested for BIA-ALCL.

Were certainly aware of the increased risk for women who have got textured implants, said Dr. Frances Wright, a Toronto surgeon and a lead with Cancer Care Ontarios Surgical Oncology Program.

We have been in contact with our plastic surgery content experts to determine what our best approach is to provide guidance to clinicians who have treated patients with textured implants.

Spokespersons for the health departments in Quebec and Nova Scotia say women with textured implants will be contacted and other provinces have urged physicians to monitor and inform patients.

These actions are part of a global shift in how governments view these popular breast implants after news organizations around the globe, including the Star, published a joint investigation into medical devices in November with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Read more:

Breast implant recipients say doctors gloss over risks

Biocell breast implants at centre of biggest controversy in plastic surgery

Health Canada introduces new safeguards against faulty medical devices

A Toronto Star/CBC/Radio-Canada series exposing lax oversight of medical devices in this country reported for the first time that Biocell implants by manufacturer Allergan have been quietly blacklisted by a growing number of Canadian plastic surgeons who have noticed high rates of health issues, including BIA-ALCL. Some called for the devices to be removed from the market.

All cases reported in Canada have been associated with Allergan Biocell textured implants, the Cancer Care Ontario warning reads. Biocell implants remain on the market and inside millions of women across the continent.

This is the biggest controversy in plastic surgery, Dr. Frank Lista, a prominent Toronto plastic surgeon, told the Star in the fall.

The companies have a lot of money invested in the development and propagation of these implants. And there are surgeons who have staked their reputations on the advantages of these implants.

Allergan said in a statement that patient safety is the companys highest priority and the safety of its breast implants is supported by extensive preclinical device testing, more than a decade of worldwide clinical use, as well as a large number of peer-reviewed and published studies.

The company said it supports Health Canada and other international regulators in their reviews of the rare cancer associated with breast implants.

Breast implant patients should consult their health care professional if they are experiencing unusual changes to their breasts, including breast pain, sudden swelling, or a lump, an Allergan spokesperson said.

A Toronto Star review of the medical literature found many of those studies authored by researchers who are paid consultants for the industry  an issue that has triggered conflict-of-interest allegations from medical associations and physicians.

Following the Toronto Star/CBC/Radio-Canada investigation, Health Canada announced sweeping reforms to its regulation of the medical device industry. And last month, the agency announced it will be updating its safety review of BIA-ALCL after receiving information of 22 confirmed cases and another 22 suspected cases. Previously it had said no further inquiry was required.

Allergan said the spike in Canadian cases of BIA-ALCL are believed to be caused by an increased awareness among doctors, and there has been no new clinical evidence concerning the safety of textured breast implants.

In a statement last week, Health Canada said it is now working with international partners to gather information that will inform any regulatory actions. The safety review is expected to be completed in the spring of this year, it says.

Canadian women with textured implants who spoke with the Star received a letter from a Health Canada director general in the past week saying the agency wishes to hold a breast implant safety meeting with patient advocates later this month.

Health Canada confirmed Tuesday it is planning to meet with several women who wrote to the department about breast implants as part of its review.

In December, a month after the investigation was published, Brazil  the worlds second largest breast implant market  suspended Allergan textured implants.

Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned American doctors about the association between textured implants and BIA-ALCL. The agency is also holding hearings on breast implant safety later this month.

Also last month, Frances health regulator called for a ban of textured breast implants. Allergan had suspended sales of its textured implants in Europe in late December after the devices safety certification, known as a CE mark, was not renewed by a French regulatory authority. The company said at the time that it stands behind the safety of its products.

Provincial health ministries and cancer agencies across Canada are also urging vigilance as they await clear guidance from Health Canada, a survey of provinces has found.

In early March, the Quebec ministry of health announced that it has asked the provinces hospitals and clinics to contact all patients who received textured breast implants since 1995 and warn them of a potential risk of BIA-ALCL. A spokesperson said by contacting the estimated 15,000 patients directly, the minister is taking an additional step to ensure that women with textured implants are aware of the situation, know if they are affected by it, and know the symptoms to watch for.

In Nova Scotia, a spokesperson said the provinces health authority is gathering details on how many women received textured implants, adding its believed use has been limited.

The Nova Scotia Health Authority will followup with patients who are identified as having this device, if any, the spokesperson said.

In New Brunswick, the department of health is reviewing Health Canadas safety alert and communicating with the regional health agencies where these surgeries are performed in relation to messaging for women with textured breast implants, a spokesperson said.

A spokesperson said Newfoundland and Labradors department of health would expect regional health authorities to use health records to identify any potentially affected patients, inform their respective physicians, so the physicians can then in turn notify their patients.

A statement from Alberta Health says: We encourage anyone with concerns or symptoms to call their family physician or plastic surgeon. Saskatchewans Ministry of Health said in a statement that plastic surgeons in the province are working directly with patients so that they can make informed choices about their options and risks.

In Manitoba, the government says plastic surgeons are aware of this issue and have received information on what to look for and how to care for these patients. They share that information with their patients to provide details of any potential risks associated with the specific breast implant.

B.C. Cancer said it is aware of an increase in reports of Canadian cases of BIA-ALCL and has included a Vancouver-based plastic surgeon in its discussion on the topic.

In Ontario, Cancer Care Ontario said in a statement to the Star last week that it is now working with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to co-ordinate next steps to ensure patients are receiving the best evidence-informed care while it awaits updates from Health Canada.

Health officials from Prince Edward Island did not answer questions about its response to the emerging safety concerns.
The muddled response by U.S. regulators and the Trump administration to the safety risks of the Boeing 737 Max is raising fresh doubt about the international airworthiness not only of a jetliner  but also of American leadership.

Across the globe, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for decades represented the gold standard for air safety  a regulator whose decisions, particularly on American-made aircraft, boosted the confidence of plane travelers in New York, Miami and Los Angeles as well as London, Rio de Janeiro and Beijing.

Yet since Sundays Ethiopian Airlines crash shortly after takeoff  the second 737 Max to go down in less than five months  foreign observers have watched Washingtons handling of the crisis with mounting alarm. Critics at home and abroad are blaming, at best, erratic decision-making and, at worst, domestic commercial interests, for what many of them decry as a flawed U.S. reaction.

Protection of passengers is what the FAA is there for. Beyond any consideration, its safety, safety, safety. And traditionally, the FAA has been the best in the world, said Elmar Giemulla, a professor of aviation law at the Berlin University of Technology in Germany. But now, this has been spoiled.

After Sundays crash, the FAA defended the 737 Max until reversing course on Wednesday, two days after China led a host of nations in grounding the jetliners. U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, fired off rambling tweets about newfangled planes before preempting his own regulators and announcing the U.S. decision to finally ground the aircraft based on new evidence that showed similarities between Sundays crash in Africa and that of another 737 Max crash in Indonesia last October.

The outcome, critics say, has undermined American credibility as the pacesetter for global aircraft standards, while potentially ushering in a new era in which international regulators  particularly those in China and Europe  assert growing clout. The global response now stands in contrast to 2013, when foreign aviation authorities largely followed the U.S. lead in dealing with a rash of battery problems that led to the temporary grounding of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Read more:

New data on Boeing 737 Max 8 crossed the threshold in decision to ground planes, Garneau says

Trump orders the grounding of Boeing 737 Max jets after crash

Whats the trouble with Boeing 737 Max planes? Heres what we know

This time, the FAA just looked idiotic, said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general of the U.S. Transportation Department. Noting that Ethiopia has decided to send black boxes recovered from Sundays crash to France rather than the United States for analysis, she added, There is no way this doesnt erode confidence in American aviation regulation and American leadership.

Giemulla said the delays in Washington have reinforced fears that the Trump administration is compromising the work of government agencies and experts in deference to the wishes of big companies such as Boeing.

It fits the impression that the world outside the U.S. has of Donald Trump. And the suspicion, of course, is that he has ordered the FAA to deviate from its main task, he said.

For some, the events of this week harked back to the international distrust of American financial regulators that surfaced after a toxic meltdown on Wall Street sparked the global financial crisis a decade ago. Yet it also fueled further concern over what critics call the recklessness of a Trump era driven by edicts via Twitter, impromptu trade wars and the on-again, off-again detente with North Korea.

In the aftermath of the crash, global experts marveled at what they called a sudden rebellion in an area Washington once dominated: global aviation.

The Americans may feel, and not without justification, that they have the greatest insight into the Boeing aircraft, said Sandy Morris, an aerospace analyst at Jefferies International in London. But this is a case when others in the world decided that they wanted to bring the risk of another accident down to zero. What youve seen here is a rebellion.

Perhaps nowhere was U.S. leadership on aviation safety being questioned more than in China, the first country to ground the 737 Max  an unprecedented move for a government that long followed cues from American authorities.

A top Chinese regulator said his agency made its decision because the FAA and Boeing had not provided China with satisfactory answers about the airplanes software and safety issues after the first 737 Max crash  of Lion Air Flight 610 in Indonesia that killed all 189 passengers and crew.

Li Jian, deputy director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), suggested that the FAA was reluctant to take strong measures against the 737 Max.

They have had difficulty making a decision, so we took the lead, Li told reporters on Monday.

Chinas move triggered a cascade of other countries, including Britain, Canada and members of the European Union, to follow suit within 48 hours, effectively isolating the FAA before Trump ordered the planes temporarily grounded as well.

Chinese officials probably welcomed the opportunity to establish their leadership credentials at an inflection point in the countrys aviation history, analysts said. Chinas civil aviation market is expected to eclipse that of the United States in three years, while its first homegrown passenger jet, the C919 narrow-body model that is designed to compete with the 737 Max, is also expected to take to the skies by the mid-2020s, at least in China.

As China grows, as its aviation grows both as a market and manufacturer, as its products and technology develop, its obviously the intention of the Chinese government to take on more and more global leadership, said Guo Yufeng, chief executive of the Q&A Consulting firm in Guangzhou.

In Europe, several aviation officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the process by which jets are grounded, said they traditionally look to the FAA for guidance on U.S.-built planes.

And for days, they stuck to that, opting not to take action in the face of mounting pressure to do so. As recently as Tuesday morning, regulators in some nations in Europe issued statements standing by the U.S. decision to keep the 737 Max flying.

But within hours, European officials made a different determination, prompted in part by new satellite information suggesting similarities between the crash on Sunday and the Lion Air flight that went down October  evidence the United States would not act on until later in the day on Wednesday.

Aviation safety is our number one priority & the EU is taking every step to ensure the safety of passengers, wrote the top E.U. official in charge of transportation, Violeta Bulc, on Twitter.

The outcry of international criticism was not universal  few, for example, in Japan and South Korea appeared to challenge U.S. management of the crisis. But from Canada to China to the Middle East, a social media storm erupted over the erosion of American credibility.

Smart friends of mine have pointed out the reactions to 737 MAX might be inflection point for US hegemony, tweeted Canadian scholar Stephen Saideman. China says no to MAX, FAA says dont worry, EU closes airspace. So much for US leadership.

In Brazil, the controversy surrounding the 737 Max even before Sundays crash was not so much a rejection of U.S. leadership as an attempt to function in its absence. When the Max models were first introduced, for instance, Brazil ignored an FAA report that did not require additional pilot training for the aircrafts software, instead determining that such training was in fact needed.

On March 11, Indias civil aviation regulator first announced that any pilot flying the 737 Max must have a minimum of 1,000 hours of experience and reserved the right to impose other restrictions based on information received from the FAA and Boeing.

But as other countries grounded the planes entirely, Indias aviation regulator  which eventually grounded the aircraft Tuesday night  faced a growing chorus of criticism for its own delayed reaction. Critics there said the fact that the FAA was even slower to react undermined its role as a decider in such crises.

We all live by their rules, said Neelam Mathews, a veteran aviation journalist based in New Delhi. Its very disappointing the way the FAA reacted.

By Wednesday, the last major holdout  besides the United States  was Canada.

As other countries grounded the planes, Ottawa stood with Washington. Canadian Transport minister Marc Garneau on Tuesday said the country would keep flying the 737 Max.

That changed Wednesday morning. With domestic pressure growing, Garneau and Canada switched course, just hours ahead of Trump, citing new evidence from satellites and other sources.

Canadian reporters pressed him on whether the U.S. had pressured Canada to keep the planes in the air. He said it had not.

Hours later, when America First had already become America Last, Trump announced the United States was also grounding the planes.

Were doing it almost as a simultaneous thing. Because we were coordinating with Canada. We were giving them information, they were giving us information, and we very much work in conjunction with Canada, he said.

Read more about:
NEW YORKFrancesco Cali, the reputed boss of the Gambino crime family, was fatally shot outside his Staten Island home Wednesday night, a senior police official said.

Cali, 53, was shot six times, the official said. The police said they received a report about the shooting in the Todt Hill section of Staten Island around 9:20 p.m. There was also a report of a blue pickup truck leaving the scene around that time.

Cali was pronounced dead at Staten Island University Hospital.

A 58-year-old neighbour who gave only his first name, Salvatore, said that he heard a burst of gunshots shortly after 9 p.m.

I just heard the pow-pow-pow-pow-pow, he said.

He said he rushed to his window but could not see anything. He said the shots were all the same volume, as if fired from the same gun.

Two other neighbours who declined to give their names corroborated Salvatores descriptions.

The Gambino family was once the nations largest and most influential organized crime group, but several of its leaders were convicted in the 1990s of crimes that included murder and racketeering.

The family was led at the time by the showy crime boss John J. Gotti, who frequented expensive restaurants and nightclubs with a crew of bodyguards. He took power in the family by arranging for the murder of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, in 1985, in front of the Sparks Steak House in Manhattan.

Gotti was convicted of racketeering and murder in 1992 and died of cancer in prison in 2002, at the age of 61. In 2013, his son, former Gambino boss John A. Gotti, was stabbed in the stomach in Syosset, N.Y. He survived.

Calis assassination came on the same day that Joseph Cammarano Jr., the reputed acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, was acquitted at trial, and about a week after Carmine Persico, a longtime boss of the Colombo crime family, died in prison at age 85.

While it has been decades since a mafia boss was killed in New York, lower-level members have been attacked or killed in recent years.

In October, Sylvester Zottola, 71, a reputed associate of the Bonanno crime family was shot and killed as he waited in his SUV to pick up an order at the drive-through window of a McDonalds in the Bronx.

Just three months earlier, Zottolas son, Salvatore Zottola, was ambushed by a gunman and left for dead on a leafy street outside his familys Bronx compound. He survived.

The Todt Hill neighbourhood is known for its mafia history. Castellano, who was the last Gambino boss to be assassinated, owned a home on Benedict Rd. A home on nearby Longfellow Rd. served as the filming location of the Corleone compound in The Godfather.

Since the 1990s, the fortunes of the citys five traditional mafia clans have been on the decline. Federal and state authorities increased their focus on the mobs control of certain industries and unions beginning in the 1980s and improved their use of racketeering laws to loosen the mafias control. And since eight mob leaders were convicted in 1986 in a federal racketeering trial of operating a commission that ruled the mafia in the United States, mafia leaders have avoided the spotlight in fear of coming to the attention of federal and state prosecutors.

By early Thursday on Staten Island, the police had strung yellow tape across the street leading to Calis home, a large red-brick, two-storey colonial style house whose front door stood open.

Prashant Ranyal, 39, who lives in the neighbourhood, said he was shaken by the killing.

Whenever you see nice areas you feel like its peaceful, he added. When something like this happens you definitely have a second thought about it.

Salvatore, the other neighbour, said he had lived in his house for 12 years and did not know any of his neighbours, which struck him as unusual.

Nobody talks to nobody around here; its crazy, he said. People kind of keep to themselves. They like their privacy.

He described the street where the shooting happened as quiet and full of old homes.

Dead street, he said. Dead quiet all the time.
BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIADuring the final debate before Saturdays presidential election in Slovakia, the men were arguing, but the only woman onstage, Zuzana Caputova, looked on calmly.

Stefan Harabin, the former justice minister and a champion of ethnic nationalism, accused Muslim migrants of killing and raping European women in Germany and France and claimed his opponents wanted to destroy Slovak culture.

But Caputova did not respond to the outrage. In a political climate where stridency is often rewarded and crudeness frequently seen as a marker of authenticity, she has clung to the belief that decency is what voters want most. And it seems to be working.

In an interview the morning after the debate, she said: Even though people might not agree with all my opinions, they can build a bridge of trust to me because I act with civility. Even if I fight, I dont fight the person, but only the actions of the person.

The latest polls show Caputova with a commanding lead over all her rivals: The field has been winnowed from about a dozen candidates to five, including an avowed neo-Nazi, Marian Kotleba. If Caputova becomes the first woman to lead this nation of 5.4 million people, she will have done so against all odds and conventional political wisdom.

For Slovakia, this election will determine whether we follow the path toward some form of illiberal democracy, said Aneta Vilagi, a political scientist at Comenius University in Bratislava. Or it could be an exceptional moment both for this country and in the region, the first big victory for a candidate promoting liberal democracy in the last four years.

Caputova, 45, a campaigning lawyer who had never run for office and was barely registering among voters before the first debates six weeks ago, has emerged from virtual obscurity to become the front-runner as the deputy of a new party, Progressive Slovakia.

Beyond Slovakia, Caputovas unlikely rise and broad support in this deeply conservative country has given hope to opposition leaders in other countries, who sense that a backlash against populists may be brewing.

From Bucharest, the Romanian capital, to Bratislava, the Slovak capital, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in the past year to voice frustration with governments led by self-styled populists and ethnic nationalists. But channelling that energy into the voting booth has proved more challenging.

That may soon be tested in a number of countries. In Poland, where a fierce battle is raging over the countrys future with national elections scheduled in October, support in major cities for the governing Law and Justice party has plummeted, with voters choosing opposition politicians in most local elections last year.

That opposition has deepened since the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, was fatally stabbed onstage during a charity event. He was widely viewed as a champion of a pluralistic Poland, and many saw the attack as evidence of the toxic political climate in the country.

In Slovakia, it was the murders of a young investigative reporter, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancee that galvanized the public. Kuciak was killed, the authorities said, because of his work investigating corruption that linked organized crime with political leaders and an effort to steal funds provided to the nation by the European Union.

On Thursday, the police charged a prominent businessman, Marian Kocner, with having ordered the killing.

The murders, and the governments response, led to the largest protests in the country since the Velvet Revolution in 1989 in what was then Czechoslovakia. Juraj Seliga, 28, one of the organizers of the demonstrations, said it was a defining moment for the country.

People realized they have the power; they can hold people accountable, he said. But they have to show up.

Caputova said the events in Slovakia had inspired her to enter the race. People are feeling frustrated and disappointed and are yearning for change. Some candidates have chosen to exploit this fear. But for me, using the emotions of hatred and fear is destructive.

Vilagi said that even before the murders, many Slovaks had been nervous about the countrys direction. People were asking, What is going on in Hungary? What is going on in Poland? she said. And it started to become more and more clear that the same thing could happen here. There was a real growing fear that our democracy could be at risk.

Vilagi said that Robert Fico, the prime minister at the time and now the leader of the governing party, Direction  Social Democracy, or SMER, which has dominated politics for the past a decade, was not a populist in an ideological sense. But he used the tools of the populists, she said.

Martin Slosiarik, one of Slovakias leading pollsters, said the message that Fico had spent years championing  condemning migrants and bureaucrats in Brussels while promoting a range of conspiracy theories  has had an effect.

We see more and more people, frustrated by the system, turning to radical ideas, Slosiarik said.

Harabin, the former justice minister, for instance, has condemned NATO, relishes bashing Brussels and has made gay men and lesbians frequent targets of scorn.

In Slovakia, as more evidence surfaced that populist rhetoric may have been a cover for corruption, public anger swelled. After Kuciak was killed and anger exploded into the streets, Fico was forced to step down as prime minister, and support for SMER collapsed.

Slosiarik said that he had never witnessed such a drastic drop in such a short time.

In the last poll before Election Day  taken on March 1  the governing partys candidate, Maros Sefcovic, finished second but trailed Caputova by more than 30 points: 16.7 per cent to 52.9 per cent. Harabin polled in third place, with just over 11 per cent.

Under the Slovak system, outright victory is difficult in the first round of voting, and Caputova is expected to face either Sefcovic or Harabin in a runoff in two weeks. If it is Harabin, observers expect a brutal battle.

In an earlier debate, Harabin condemned Caputova as a representative of ultraliberalism, LGBT, gender ideology who would destroy families and is a lover of migration who would accept foreign armies in Slovakia.

I will never allow that as president, he thundered.

Caputova responded with restraint, refusing to attack him personally. We are facing a crisis in trust, she said. As faith in politicians and the institutions of the state continues to be eroded, she said, populists and extremists are gaining ground.

The best tool to restore trust, Caputova said, was authenticity  even if it meant risking votes.

She leads in the polls despite not shying away from positions long considered poisonous, including support for gay rights. For 14 years, she had waged an often-lonely battle against the expansion of a toxic landfill in Pezinok, a small town outside Bratislava. Eventually, she prevailed and is now sometimes referred to as the Erin Brockovich of Slovakia.

But she has also been the subject of strong-arm tactics and often-vile abuse, with threats so serious that she has had to hire security.

Caputova recalled having coffee with Kocner, the businessman charged with ordering the murder of the Slovak journalist and whose interests was tied up in one of her environmental cases a few years ago.

He asked me if I was afraid of him, she recalled. I was in fighting mode then. So I said no. But it was one of the quickest cups of coffee I have ever had, she said, laughing.

He then asked me under what conditions I would stop, she added. I said there was no way I would stop. It was just too important.
ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIAA new piece of evidence found by investigators on the ground here suggests the Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed Sunday may have had a problem with a new flight-control system also suspected in the crash of a Lion Air flight in October.

It is the second piece of information suggesting similarities between the two crashes involving Boeing 737 Max 8 jets.

Investigators found a device known as a jackscrew in the wreckage. The jackscrew, used to set the trim that raises and lowers the planes nose, indicates the jet was configured to dive, according to John Cox, a former pilot and an airline-safety consultant with the Washington-based aviation-safety consulting firm Safety Operating Systems.

Cox, formerly the top safety official for the Air Line Pilots Association, said he was privately briefed on the evidence Thursday by people familiar with the investigation.

All we can say definitely is that the trim was in a position similar to the position found on the Lion Air airplane and it would cause the nose to go down, he said. This will be consistent with a nose-down flight path, which they think is likely with the Ethiopian airplane.

It points to one central link, Cox said. We need the data from the flight data recorders. We need it as quickly as possible. . . . The faster that we get that information, it will let everyone know what needs to be done. We dont know in fact if these accidents are related. There are some similarities.

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Daniel Elwell, acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, cited newly refined satellite tracking data and evidence recovered from the wreckage site as factors in his decision to ground the jets Wednesday. That data also showed similarities to the Lion Air flight. Cox said he believes the jackscrew is the new evidence Elwell was citing.

Meanwhile, French aviation experts began work Friday on the planes heavily damaged data and voice recorders.

Officials with Frances Bureau dEnquetes et dAnalyses, which has extensive experience analyzing crashes in Europe, said that work to retrieve information from the flight data recorder of the Boeing 737 Max 8 has begun in coordination with the Ethiopian investigation team.

President Trump spoke by telephone with Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Friday to again express his condolences and underscore the United States commitment to work with Ethiopian and international civil aviation authorities on the investigation. Eight Americans were among the 157 killed in the crash.

The focus now, however, is on the two black boxes that arrived in France on Thursday. Germany had earlier turned down the opportunity to examine the recorders.

The data extracted from the recorders will be used to reconstruct the six-minute flight before the plane crashed in a farm field about 40 miles from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 passengers and crew members. That data includes the voice communication of the pilots and the readings of the various sensors.

Officials from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which sent three investigators, the FAA, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and Boeing also are assisting in the probe.

Experts say it typically takes almost a month to provide a comprehensive analysis of the data in the recorders, but at least some early information could be available within 24 to 48 hours.

Former NTSB chairman Christopher Hart, who also is a pilot, said the jackscrew, combined with data gathered from the planes black box, could give investigators a sense of the planes flying position before the crash.

By knowing the stabilizer and elevator position they know what kind of forces the plane was experiencing in the moment, he said.

In a preliminary investigation, the crash of a Lion Air Max 8 plane into the Java Sea on Oct. 29 was attributed to a faulty sensor causing an automated system to push the nose of the plane down. The possibility that the same scenario occurred in Ethiopia has prompted precautionary groundings of the plane all over the world. In all, more than 300 people have died in the two crashes involving the Max 8 jet.

Preliminary flight data showed the Ethiopian Airlines plane in trouble almost immediately and struggling to gain altitude in the high thin air above the Addis Ababa airport. The plane descended and then sharply ascended, while moving at speeds far in excess of normal.

Within minutes the pilot radioed the control tower reporting flight control problems and was given clearance to return.

In a description of the exchange reported by the New York Times, Capt. Yared Getachew sounded panicked as he requested permission to return to the airport, shortly before losing contact.

Even amid the worldwide grounding of more than 370 of its 737 Max jets, officials at Boeing continued to maintain the planes are safe to fly. The Chicago-based aviation giant has stopped delivery of the planes, a spokesman said Thursday, but their production continues.

In the case of the Lion Air crash in Indonesia, faulty information from the angle-of-attack sensor convinced the automated system that the plane was going to stall and pushed its nose down while the pilots wrestled to pull the aircraft up. The result was an erratic flight path in which the plane descended and ascended repeatedly before plunging into the Java Sea, killing all 189 passengers and crew aboard.

The data from the recorders in Ethiopia could help determine whether the potential links between the two crashes are real and related to this automated feature on the craft  hundreds of which were flown around the world until China decided to ground them Monday and other countries followed suit.

The recorders are required on all flights  all over the world  and are built to withstand fire, heavy impact and intense water pressure.

The Ethiopian Airlines devices were discovered soon after the crash, leading some U.S. officials to hope the insights they contain will quickly help determine more about what caused the jet to crash shortly after it left Addis Ababa bound for Nairobi.

While Ethiopian investigators have the ability to download information from black boxes, they lacked the tools to do so in this case, given the extensive damage, according to the FAA.

Experts were not surprised the Ethiopians opted to send the flight recorders to France rather than the United States, saying such a move was not unprecedented.

Many times foreign countries just have a good relation with a certain other country, said Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB investigator and FAA safety manager. It is closer to fly the recorders to Europe than it is to the United States. From a technical standpoint, the United States would have been the best place to have it because all your technical experts are in the United States. But in past investigations, foreign countries would not opt to send to the U.S., because they were the ones who built the airplane
Fridays slaughter in two New Zealand mosques played out as a dystopian reality show delivered by some of Americas biggest technology companies. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter all had roles in publicizing the violence and, by extension, the hate-filled ideology behind it.

These companies  some of the richest, most technologically advanced in the world  failed to rapidly quell the spread of troubling content as it metastasized across platforms, bringing horrific images to internet users worldwide.

The alleged shooter, a heavily armed man authorities have not yet named, also released a 74-page manifesto denouncing Muslims and immigrants that spread widely online. He left behind a social media trail on Twitter and Facebook that amounted to footnotes to his manifesto. Over the two days before the shooting he posted about 60 of the same links across different platforms, nearly half of which were to YouTube videos that were still active late Friday.

The horror began Friday morning in New Zealand, as the alleged shooter used Facebook to livestream his assault on Al Noor Mosque, one of two Christchurch mosques that he attacked and the scene of most of the 49 fatalities. Many hours later  long after the man and other suspects had been arrested  some internet users still were uploading and re-uploading the video to YouTube and other online services. A search of keywords related to the event, such as New Zealand, surfaced a long list of videos, many of which were lengthy and uncensored views of the massacre.

The almost instantaneous spread of online images from Fridays shooting underscored how deeply entwined social media platforms have become, with savvy users moving content back and forth across platforms faster than the platforms themselves can react. It also was a reminder of the repeated inability of YouTube, the worlds biggest video site, to detect and remove some types of violent content, even though it has for years automatically flagged nudity and copyrighted music.

The rapid and wide-scale dissemination of this hateful content  live-streamed on Facebook, uploaded on YouTube and amplified on Reddit  shows how easily the largest platforms can still be misused, said Sen. Mark Warner. It is ever clearer that YouTube, in particular, has yet to grapple with the role it has played in facilitating radicalization and recruitment.

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Policy experts say U.S. regulators and Congress are ill-equipped to intervene in the problem, but technology companies have become uncharacteristically vulnerable in Washington. A growing number of policy-makers from both parties have raised the prospect of new privacy laws, fines and even breakups of past tech mergers. How regulation would prevent the posting of such content was not immediately clear, however.

Public and political scrutiny is growing over YouTube in particular. It has sparked a succession of controversies in recent years for spreading hateful online conspiracies, violent terrorist recruiting videos and a wide range of inappropriate content reaching children, including suicide instructions spliced into kids videos.

Tech companies have a content-moderation problem that is fundamentally beyond the scale that they know how to deal with, said Becca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford University and the think tank Data & Society. The financial incentives are in play to keep content first and monetization first.

The New Zealand massacre video, which appeared to have been recorded with a GoPro helmet camera, was discussed even before it began on the fringe message board 8chan, an anonymous forum known for its politically extreme and often hateful commentary. Users on the site followed the attack in real time, cheering or expressing horror.

They also traded links to the alleged shooters hate-filled postings and to copies of his videos on various sites, while encouraging each other to download the clips before they were taken offline. By Friday afternoon, short clips of the footage had been edited to include footage of YouTube personalities superimposed as if they were live-streaming a video game.

The first-person shooting video spread particularly widely on YouTube as the people uploading it outraced website moderators ability to delete the clips. Some of the videos were named after quotes from the shooter, such as, Lets get this party started.

YouTube tweeted Friday morning: Our hearts are broken over todays terrible tragedy in New Zealand. Please know we are working vigilantly to remove any violent footage. Twitter said that the company suspended the account of one of the suspects and is working to remove the video from its network, both of which violate its policies.

On message boards such as Reddit, people posted links to the videos, which would then sometimes get deleted, only for others to post new links to alternative mirror sites, beginning the cycle anew.

Reddit, one of Americas most popular websites, on Friday banned forums named gore and watchpeopledie, where the videos had been reposted for users to narrate and comment on in real time. A moderator on the watchpeopledie forum had defended keeping the video online because it offered unfiltered reality. The 7-year-old forum had more than 300,000 subscribers as of the time of the New Zealand shooting.

Reddit said in a statement that it was actively monitoring the situation in Christchurch, New Zealand. Any content containing links to the video stream are being removed in accordance with our sitewide policy.

When a shooting video gets uploaded to social media sites, review teams often use that video to create a marked copy, known as a hash, that they can use to build an automatic blacklist for when it gets posted again. The years-old algorithmic technique, first popularized as a tactic to combat the spread of child pornography, has now been used to automatically flag copyrighted material, porn and other content that violates the social-media sites rules.

But such algorithms remain limited, experts say. Those uploading videos can sidestep the rules by altering the clips in small ways, such as attaching a watermark, distorting the music, or skewing the videos size, editing or speed. Several of the shooting videos reposted to YouTube appeared to have those alterations, though it was unclear whether those changes contributed to their remaining online.

Fridays massacre in New Zealand marked the third time that Facebook has been used to broadcast video of a murder. In 2015, a gunman uploaded smartphone video that showed him shooting two television journalists from a station in Roanoke, Virginia. In 2017, a gunman posted video of his fatal shooting of a bystander in Cleveland, then went on Facebook Live to talk about the killing.

Shock videos  especially with graphic first-person footage  is where reality television meets violent gaming culture meets attention-amplification algorithms, said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. The modern internet has been designed engagement-first, and this works in opposition to quickly halting the spread of harmful material and ideas  especially for sensational ultra violent terrorism footage.

Facebook and YouTube have said artificial-intelligence algorithms will help them patrol the onslaught of content posted on their platforms every minute and that early successes have helped crack down on explicit video and terrorist propaganda. Both companies in recent years also have made major new investments in human and automated systems for detecting and removing problematic content, together hiring tens of thousands of new employees to help.

New Zealand Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the live stream commenced, and we quickly removed both the shooters Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video, said Mia Garlick, a Facebook spokeswoman. Were also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as were aware. We will continue working directly with New Zealand Police as their response and investigation continues.

The company said it removed the original video of the New Zealand shooting within an hour, but duplicates were quickly reposted on Facebook and other platforms.

Live video has been one of the biggest drivers of growth for Silicon Valley. In 2016, when Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced an expansion of live video, he said it was to support whatever the most personal and emotional and raw and visceral ways people want to communicate are as time goes on.

But live video has also attracted bad actors who want to use the full force of that technical infrastructure to propel violent videos and hate speech around the world.

With live-streaming, the potential for profit and notoriety (is) astronomical, and that can incentivize certain types of behaviour, said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard Universitys Shorenstein Center. The point isnt to gain attention to the violence; the point is to gain attention to the ideology.

The companies, she said, have little motive to police content because fast and easy sharing helps boost users, views and advertising revenue. But content moderation also is expensive and carries with it the potential for politicization, including recent claims by some conservatives and liberals that their posts are being unfairly suppressed.

The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs said Friday that people who share video of the mosque shooting online are likely to be committing an offence because the video is likely to be objectionable content under New Zealand law.

The content of the video is disturbing and will be harmful for people to see. This is a very real tragedy with real victims and we strongly encourage people to not share or view the video, the agency said in a statement.

The department said it is working with social media platforms to remove the clips and urged the public to report objectionable content if they come across it. The agency acknowledged the issue of autoplay on social media and on the websites of traditional news outlets, in which people may see disturbing content without choosing to do so.

We are aware that people may have unsuspectingly viewed the video on social media platforms thinking it is a media article, so please be vigilant of images that yourself and those around you are viewing, particularly our young people.

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TOKYONorth Korea is considering suspending denuclearization talks with the United States unless Washington changes its stance after the breakdown of a summit meeting in Hanoi between U.S. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a senior North Korean official said Friday.

Kim is set to make an official announcement soon on whether to continue diplomatic talks and maintain the countrys moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui told foreign diplomats and journalists in Pyongyang, the Associated Press reported.

But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration hopes to continue talks with North Korea. She left open the possibility that negotiations will continue, for sure, he told reporters Friday, referring to Choe. Its the administrations desire that we continue to have conversations around this.

The threat to suspend talks comes after evidence surfaced that North Korea has rebuilt a satellite rocket launch pad and amid speculation it might be preparing a rocket launch, a move that would seen as very provocative in Washington.

Choe said that North Korea was deeply disappointed by the breakdown of the talks in Hanoi and said the United States had missed a golden opportunity there, though she still described the relations between Trump and Kim as mysteriously wonderful.

She said Pyongyang now has no intention of compromising or continuing talks unless the United States changes its political calculation, and takes measures that are commensurate with the steps North Korea has already taken, such as the 15-month moratorium on launches and tests, AP reported.

On our way back to the homeland, our chairman of the state affairs commission said. For what reason do we have to make this train trip again? she said, referring to Kim.

I want to make it clear that the gangsterlike stand of the U.S. will eventually put the situation in danger, she added. We have neither the intention to compromise with the U.S. in any form nor much less the desire or plan to conduct this kind of negotiation.

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At the summit, Kim offered a partial shutdown of the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center, where a large part of North Koreas fissile material is produced, in return for lifting almost all the meaningful economic sanctions on his country, U.S. officials say.

Trump rejected that deal on the grounds that it would allow Pyongyang to continue producing weapons of mass destruction, effectively financed by the lifting of sanctions. Globally, there was widespread agreement that North Korea was offering too little and demanding too much.

But Trumps counter-offer was also widely seen as unrealistic. He tried to convince Kim to go big, and surrender his entire arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in return for a bright future economically.

Choe, who attended the Hanoi summit, said Kim was puzzled by what she called the eccentric negotiation position of the United States, but she said the North Korean leader still had a good relationship with Trump.

Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful, she said,while accusing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton of creating an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust.

She said even though the North Korean people, military and munitions industry officials had sent Kim thousands of petitions to never give up the nuclear program, he went to Hanoi to build trust and carry out mutually agreed commitments step by step, AP reported.

What is clear is that the U.S. has thrown away a golden opportunity this time, Choe said. This time we understood very clearly that the United States has a very different calculation to ours.

She said it was entirely up to Kim whether to continue the launch and test moratorium, and said she expects he will clarify his position within a short period of time, AP reported.

Satellite images released last week showed North Korea has completed reconstruction of a rocket launch pad and rocket engine testing station at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, with work beginning even before the Feb. 27-28 Hanoi summit.

Activity was also seen at a site in Sanumdong, just outside Pyongyang, that is North Koreas primary developer of ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles. The work led some experts to conclude that the launch of a space rocket was being planned  although that does not mean it will go ahead.

Trump said last week he was a little disappointed at reports of the rebuilding work at Sohae, but added that time will tell if diplomacy will be successful.

Many experts see signs of a hardening of the U.S. stance post-Hanoi, with Bolton taking a leading role in the media ruling out any sanctions relief until North Korea fully denuclearizes and even threatening to ramp up sanctions.

U.S. envoy Stephen Biegun has also ruled out doing denuclearization incrementally, although he insisted on Monday that diplomacy was still very much alive.

John Delury, an expert on East Asia at Seouls Yonsei University, said Choes comments could be seen as a response to Boltons threat to ramp up sanctions, and didnt mean the door to dialogue was closed.

This is each side reminding each other whats at stake, he said.

Delury took heart from the fact that there was no name-calling or insults, while noting that Choe also took pains to praise Kims relationship with Trump. A lot of this is rhetoric or posturing, but both sides have been careful not to fling mud, he said.

Nevertheless, the deterioration in relations has been a major blow to South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has staked his reputation on closer ties with North Korea. His office said it would not be daunted in this effort Friday.

In any circumstance, our government will make efforts to resume negotiations between North Korea and the United States, Yoon Do-han, a presidential spokesman, said in a statement.

Han Jung-woo, a deputy spokesman, said the government was watching events closely. The current situation cannot be judged solely on Vice Minister Choes remarks, he said.

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COPENHAGENThe manifesto that the presumed New Zealand shooter published is shorter and more sloppy than the one written by a Norwegian right-wing extremist who killed 77 people in 2011, but expresses similar sentiments, a Swedish terror expert said Friday.

Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish National Defence College says the shooter is against mass immigration and has to some extend the same themes as (Anders Behring) Breivik, who posted his 1,500-page manifesto online before carrying out his deadly attacks.

Ranstorp told Swedish radio Friday that the New Zealand shooter, who killed at least 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch on Friday, claims to have been in contact with Breiviks sympathizers.

On July 22, 2011, Breivik killed eight people with a car bomb in Oslo and then opened fire at an island summer camp run by the left-wing Labor Partys youth wing, killing 69. He is serving a 21-year prison sentence.

Breiviks lawyer, Oeystein Storrvik, told Norways VG newspaper that his client has very limited contacts with the surrounding world so it seems very unlikely that he has had contact. Storrvik was not immediately available for comment.

Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the shooters manifesto unfortunately gives associations to a situation in Norway that she described as one of the worst in our time.

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On Twitter, Ranstorp noted that the New Zealand shooter claimed he would leave prison after 27 years and likened himself to late South African President Nelson Mandela, saying he would get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet another narcissistic right-wing extremist terrorist who has a distorted fantasy world, Ranstorp wrote.
WASHINGTONWith his first veto Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump defied Congress bipartisan rejection of his declared national emergency at the southern border and insisted on his power to circumvent the legislative branch and direct billions of dollars for a wall there.

Defiant despite what was a remarkable rebuke from congressional Republicans as well as Democrats, Trump signed his veto before television cameras in the Oval Office, flanked by law officers and the parents of victims of crime and drug addiction. While Congress likely cant muster the votes to override his veto, the emergency declaration still faces challenges in federal court as an executive power grab.

Critics have called his declaration a violation of Congress constitutional powers, but Trump condemned the resolution, terming it dangerous and reckless.

He told reporters, Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution and I have the duty to veto it.

The president had quickly signalled his action moments after the Senates vote Thursday when he tweeted simply VETO! Both the Republican-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House, which initiated the resolution to terminate the emergency declaration, had approved it by majorities that fell short of the two-thirds margin needed to override a presidential veto.

Even so, Senate passage was by a significant 59-41 margin because of the defection of 12 Republicans who withstood pressure from the White House. Thirteen Republicans supported the resolution in the House two weeks ago.

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In sending the resolution to Trump, Congress for the third time in the week took action standing up to him, a rare break after two years in which Republicans deference to the president left him largely unchallenged by the legislative branch.

Despite another veto threat, the Senate on Wednesday passed a resolution to end U.S. support for the war in Yemen led by Saudi Arabia. And the House unanimously voted to demand release of any report from the special counsel thats been investigating Russias election interference, Trump and his associates. Also, Trumps proposed federal budget for fiscal 2020 got a cool reception Monday on Capitol Hill.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has blocked measures Trump opposes in the past, but he was unable to prevent a Senate vote to end the presidents national emergency because a vote was required by the 1976 law on presidential declarations of emergency.

Trumps first veto comes after just over two months of split control of Congress, following Democrats capture of a House majority in the midterm election, and there could be more vetoes to come.

President George W. Bush, who governed for his first six years with a Republican-controlled Congress, went his entire first term without a veto. In his second term, he issued 12, most after Democrats took over Congress for his final two years.

Bushs first veto was for the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act in 2005, which religious and anti-abortion conservatives opposed because it lifted funding restrictions for research using embryos. That issue also divided Republicans because more moderate members favoured such research to enable medical advances.

Bushs successor, President Barack Obama, also issued 12 vetoes over his two terms, 10 in his final two years when Republicans had taken control of both houses of Congress.

Before the Senate vote, Trump had worked to limit Republican defections, tweeting a vote for todays resolution by Republican Senators is a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats!

Some Republicans whod expressed opposition to Trumps declaration, calling it an executive usurpation of Congress constitutional power of the purse, ultimately caved. None did so more dramatically than Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whod said he was standing on principle and had gone so far as to write a column for The Washington Post on his opposition.

Yet ultimately, under fire from Trump supporters in his state, and worried about a conservative challenger next year when he faces reelection, Tillis voted against the resolution. The only Republican up for reelection next year who defied Trump was Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

Trump declared a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico frontier Feb. 15, after failing to pressure Congress into authorizing $5.7 billion (U.S.) for a physical barrier along the border. In December and January, hed forced a 35-day government shutdown, the longest ever, by refusing to sign a government-funding bill unless Congress included the wall money.

Forced to retreat and reopen the government, Trump then declared a national emergency so he could assume power to redirect funds Congress has approved for other purposes toward the construction of a 370-kilometre segment of the wall.

In announcing the declaration in the Rose Garden last month, Trump admitted that he was using it to bypass Congress, and implied there was no emergency. I didnt need to do this, but Id rather do it much faster, Trump said.

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The B-52. The F-15. The Jumbo Jet. The Dreamliner. A century-plus of innovation after risk-taking innovation turned the tiny shop founded by William Boeing in 1916 into the flying colossus we know today.

And every one of these signature aircraft, built in America and flown around the planet, sent aloft by a workforce of more than 153,000 men and women, together with some 20,000 suppliers.

Americas single-largest exporter suddenly finds itself with half a trillion reasons to worry, after a second calamitous air crash in five months involving its most in-demand aircraft, the 737 Max, leaves Boeing in crisis.

Self-crashing planes, automated to oblivion, is the deepening suspicion that led aviation authorities around the world to ground this latest incarnation of the 737, historys most heavily used commercial jetliner.

And by Wednesday, as neighbourly Canada joined the ban, a reluctant American president, the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and Boeing itself  historically, the leaders of the aviation world  were forced to follow, days late and dollars short.

As the fallout spreads beyond the primary victims  those who perished in the two crashes, including Sundays disaster in Ethiopia, which killed all 157 people on board, including 18 Canadians  its starting to burn Boeings reputation as the pre-eminent font of American know-how.

Read more:

Airlines study 737 Max math with leased jets at $250,000 a month

Boeings lawsuit risks soar around second 737 Max 8 crash

Boeing Max 8 hit trouble right away, pilots tense radio messages show

Each day on the ground is costing the company dearly, in both cash and confidence, as it scrambles for a faith-restoring fix. The week saw Boeing shed some $29 billion in market capitalization  but even that pales against a staggering $600 billion worth of advance orders the company has already booked for the currently air-unworthy 737 Max. And another $100 million in future orders the company anticipates if and when the Trump administration resolves its continuing trade dispute with China, which accounts for a quarter of Boeings exports.

Three weeks was the hopeful estimate offered by U.S. officials on Thursday as they outlined Boeings efforts to rapidly rewrite stall-prevention software suspected in at least one of the two crashes, the Lion Air 737 Max 8 that crashed in October, killing 189 people.

But by Friday, Boeing raised hopes higher still, with one company source telling AFP news agency the software upgrade will be ready for roll out within 10 days. It remains unclear how quickly the promised fix will translate into regulatory approval for the resumption of regular service.

The crisis has awakened deeper questions about the threat posed by the sheer ubiquity of automation in modern-era cockpits, many of which now are capable of flight without any human hands in the equation.

As science journalist and private pilot Jeff Wise wrote Thursday in the New York Times, flight emergencies of any sort require a response from pilots sharpened by constant practice. Ironically, by turning over the mundane stick-and-rudder aspects of flying to computer automation, pilots are deprived of the opportunity to continually practice. This leaves them without the mental automation that might save them in a crisis, Wise wrote.

One piece of crucial context: thanks in part to automation, air travel today is statistically 10 times safer than it was in the 1970s, when aircraft like the accident-prone DC-10 bore the brunt of public fears.

Aviation experts point to other examples, like the dramatic declassified footage from 2016 of an unconscious U.S. air force pilot flying an F-16 to his presumed doom  only to be saved from certain death by the aircrafts Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System.

Perhaps it will happen as quickly as Boeing promises. Betting against the company, history shows, has rarely if ever been profitable.

But regardless of how and when the company emerges from the crisis, both Boeing and its regulatory counterparts at the FAA now are expected to face questions in Congress about the nature of the relationship, which many regard as too cosy. Leading the charge will be the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Adding a layer of convolution to Boeings substantial woes was President Donald Trump, who publicly praised and defended the company  only to then privately disparage the 737 Max  before taking it upon himself to announce the grounding.

What was unique about the sequence of events that ended with Trumps order was the role of the FAA. From the go-to regulator, the first and most important voice in air safety, the agency now was last to act, after every other global regulator had spoken.

Though there was no apparent choice, Trump insisted, in announcing the grounding, We didnt have to make this decision today. We could have delayed it. We maybe didnt have to make it at all. But I felt it was important, both psychologically and in a lot of other ways.

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Vietnamese Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung and Singaporean Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing co-chaired the event in Singapore on March 13.

The two ministers agreed that aside from the six prior areas of cooperation, Vietnam and Singapore will add innovation and technology as the seventh field of collaboration as a priority in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0).

The Singaporean side suggested reforming cooperation in education and training associated with technology. Specifically, Singapore will provide 50-100 scholarships for outstanding Vietnamese students to study at its leading technology universities.

Vietnam asked Singapore to join efforts to implement new initiatives in the agreement on economic connectivity and encourage Singaporean businesses to put forth new cooperation proposals and increase investment in Vietnam.

Earlier, on March 12, at a conference in Singapore, Minister Dung introduced the National Innovation Centre (NIC) and called for investment in Industry 4.0 projects.

He said the centre is expected to push the transformation of Vietnams economic growth, prioritising the spheres of smart factory, digital economy, cyber security, urban area, and environmental technology.

At the conference, the ministrys Department of Science, Education, Natural Resources, and Environment signed a memorandum of understanding with the Singapore Manufacturing Federation (SMF) to enhance business and project opportunities in high-tech parks with SMF member companies and businesses to promote innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems in Vietnam.
Highlights:



DMG releases an API for Walletscore, enabling automated BTC wallet risk lookups. ETH is expected early Q2 2019





DMG has partnered with SPIRIT Blockchain, a Swiss-Canadian blockchain technology company, to market and sell DMGs analytics software (Walletscore and Blockseer) for anti-money laundering and forensics





DMG chose SPIRIT as a reseller based on its expertise and extensive reach into the European financial services industry





DMG is now offering Walletscore as the industrys most accessible way to assess the risk of transacting with another bitcoin wallet with a choice of manual input (no charge) or automated API calls

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc. (TSX-V: DMGI) (DMGGF:OTC US) (FRANKFURT:6AX) (DMG or the Company), a diversified blockchain technology company, announced that it has released its API for Walletscore and has partnered with SPIRIT Blockchain Capital Inc. ("SPIRIT Blockchain") to sell DMGs crypto analytics software for forensics and anti-money laundering (AML). SPIRIT Blockchain delivers blockchain technology and applications to enterprise and government clients, including blockchain transaction oversight and forensics. SPIRIT Blockchain intends to sell DMGs Walletscore and Blockseer software products to leading financial institutions, government regulators, exchanges, law enforcement agencies, and service providers in Switzerland and throughout Europe.

DMG CEO Dan Reitzik stated, The release of the Walletscore API enables exchanges, financial institutions, online casinos, and others to very quickly determine the AML risk of transacting with their existing and new customers. The timing of the release is ideal as Switzerland has been a global leader for nurturing cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, so it made sense to partner with a company that deeply understands the local market. SPIRIT Blockchain brings cryptocurrency expertise and more, as it also has deep relationships with the traditional financial services industry.

SPIRIT Blockchain CEO, Erich Perroulaz stated, "We are excited to be working with DMG Blockchain Solutions. DMG develops and supports high-quality solutions in the digital asset and cryptocurrency industry with its Walletscore and Blockseer products. Through our partnership with DMG, we are able to provide European institutions, financial firms and merchants access to a variety of timely solutions. DMG products deliver AML, KYC, forensic tracking and data analytics capabilities, all of which bring further value to SPIRIT Blockchains portfolio and clients. These products have the potential to solve many KYC and AML issues as well as help law enforcement keep up with criminal activity.

In addition, DMG announced that its AI-powered risk assessment tool, Walletscore, is now offered as the industrys most accessible way to assess the risk of transacting with another wallet, available via either GUI or API, to combat money laundering and fraud. Simply enter a wallet address at www.dmgblockchain.com/walletscore and instantly receive a full graphical report of its risk rating (ranging from "Negligible Risk" to "Highest Risk") as well as a view of all of the nearby wallets with which it has transacted and their respective categories (e.g. "dark market", "mixer", "heist"). The graphical report is free, and API access is available as a subscription. This is available for BTC currently, and support for ETH is expected to be available in early Q2 2019.

DMG CTO, Danny Yang stated, Walletscore applies the most advanced data science to unravel the Bitcoin blockchain. While Walletscore looks deceptively simple, under the hood is a powerful machine learning engine whose creation is the result of thousands of hours of development. Going forward, DMG intends to further push the state-of-the-art in data science along with adding new graph intelligence automation techniques that will enable it to quickly support many additional blockchains, including Ethereum, along with ERC-20 tokens.

-------------------------------------------------

About DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc.

DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc. is a diversified blockchain technology company that manages, operates and develops end-to-end solutions to monetize the blockchain ecosystem. DMG, with its Blockseer division located in Silicon Valley, intends to be the global leader in industrial scale crypto mine hosting  Mining as a Service (MaaS), crypto mining, blockchain forensics/analytics, and blockchain platform development.

For more information on DMG Blockchain Solutions, please visit: www.dmgblockchain.com

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Daniel Reitzik, CEO & Director

For further information, please contact:

DMG Blockchain Solutions Inc.

Investor Relations: John Martin

Toll Free: 1-888-702-0258

Email: investors@dmgblockchain.com

Web: www.dmgblockchain.com

Direct: 778-868-6470

About SPIRIT Blockchain Capital Inc.

SPIRIT Blockchain Capital Inc. is a Canadian-Swiss based Financial Services Company providing traditional investors exposure to Digital Assets and the Blockchain Ecosystem. The company operating with the primary goal of creating value through income streams and capital appreciation. The Companys strategy provides exposure to this emerging asset class through a managed risk and value approach.

For more information on SPIRIT Blockchain, please visit: www.spiritblockchain.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains forward-looking information based on current expectations. Statements about the Companys plans and intentions, other potential transactions, WalletScore and the addition of ETH, acquisition of customers, product development, events, courses of action, and the potential of the Companys technology and operations, among others, are all forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Such information can generally be identified by the use of forwarding looking wording such as may, expect, estimate, anticipate, intend, believe and continue or the negative thereof or similar variations. 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, including but not limited to, business, economic and capital market conditions; the ability to manage operating expenses, which may adversely affect the Companys financial condition; the ability to remain competitive as other better financed competitors develop and release competitive products; regulatory uncertainties; access to equipment; market conditions and the demand and pricing for products; the demand and pricing of bitcoins; security threats, including a loss/theft of DMGs bitcoins; DMGs relationships with its customers, distributors and business partners; the inability to add more power to DMGs facilities; DMGs ability to successfully define, design and release new products in a timely manner that meet customers needs; the ability to attract, retain and motivate qualified personnel; competition in the industry; the impact of technology changes on the products and industry; failure to develop new and innovative products; the ability to successfully maintain and enforce our intellectual property rights and defend third-party claims of infringement of their intellectual property rights; the impact of intellectual property litigation that could materially and adversely affect the business; the ability to manage working capital; and the dependence on key personnel. DMG may not actually achieve its plans, projections, or expectations. Such statements and information are based on numerous assumptions regarding present and future business strategies and the environment in which the Company will operate in the future, including the demand for its products, the ability to successfully develop software, that there will be no regulation or law that will prevent the Company from operating its business, anticipated costs, the ability to achieve goals and the price of bitcoin. Given these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

The securities of DMG are considered highly speculative due to the nature of DMGs business.

Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include, failure to obtain regulatory approval, the continued availability of capital and financing, equipment failures, lack of supply of equipment, power and infrastructure, failure to obtain any permits required to operate the business, the impact of technology changes on the industry, competition, security threats including stolen bitcoins from DMG or its customers, consumer sentiment towards DMGs products, services and blockchain technology generally, failure to develop new and innovative products, litigation, increase in operating costs, increase in equipment and labor costs, failure of counterparties to perform their contractual obligations, government regulations, loss of key employees and consultants, and general economic, market or business conditions. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information.

The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any intention and assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Additionally, the Company undertakes no obligation to comment on the expectations of, or statements made by, third parties in respect of the matters discussed above.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service 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.
JOHANNESBURG - The United Nations humanitarian office says a tropical cyclone has cut communications and electricity in a major city in central Mozambique after making landfall overnight.

A statement on Friday says Tropical Cyclone Idai brought torrential rains to Beira and nearby provinces.

It warns that destruction of health centres, schools and crops in the low-lying region is highly likely.

An assessment team is expected to arrive in Beira later Friday.

The World Vision aid group says more than 500,000 people in Sofala province, where Beira is located, have no electricity. It says the cyclone tore off some roofs and caused part of the Munhava municipal stadium to collapse.

Neighbouring Zimbabwe is bracing for the cyclones effects even as its power is expected to dim while it continues inland.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - The Latest on Ethiopian Airlines crash (all times local):

8:55 p.m.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has laid a wreath in memory of the 157 victims of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, including the many staff members and partners who support the world bodys work.

Several hundred diplomats and staff members joined him in paying silent tribute Friday. The victims came from 35 countries and included at least 21 U.N. staffers from different agencies.

Guterres said they were a mirror of the United Nations ... each on an individual mission, but at the same time together, representing our larger quest  doing their part, in solidarity with all of us, to build a better world.

___

7:40 p.m.

Ethiopias prime minister says President Donald Trump in a phone call has hailed Ethiopian Airlines as a strong institution and affirmed the provision of technical support after Sundays plane crash.

The office of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in a Twitter post says the two leaders shared condolences for the crash victims. Americans and Ethiopians were among the 157 people killed in the crash.

The post also says Trump expressed support for the holistic reforms that have been taking place in Ethiopia over the past months. Abiy took office a year ago and quickly launched a series of whirlwind political and economic changes.

Trump has had little public contact with African leaders. Ethiopia has long been a key regional security ally for the U.S. in East Africa.

___

12:45 p.m.

Iran says it has banned from its airspace Boeing 737 Max 8 planes alongside other nations.

The transportation ministry announced the ban on Friday. The decision comes after two fatal crashes involving the model in the past six months.

An Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed Sunday and killed all 157 people aboard. A previous crash involving the Boeing model killed 189 people in Indonesia last year.

Iran has no Boeing 737 Max 8 planes due to decades-long U.S. sanctions on the country.

___

11:05 a.m.

Ethiopian Airlines says the investigation in France has begun into the flight data and voice recorders of the plane that crashed on Sunday, killing all 157 on board.

The airline says in a Twitter post that an Ethiopian delegation led by the chief investigator of its accident investigation bureau has arrived at the facilities of the French air accident investigation authority.

The French agency has said it was unclear whether the data could be retrieved. It shared a photo of the data recorder, which appeared intact though the edge appeared somewhat mangled.

___

10:30 a.m.

The pilot of the Ethiopian Airlines plane that crashed requested permission in a panicky voice to return to the airport shortly after takeoff, The New York Times reports.

Fridays report cites a person who reviewed air traffic communications from Sundays flight saying controllers noticed the plane was moving up and down by hundreds of feet, with its speed appearing unusually fast.

An airline spokesman has said the pilot was given permission to return. But the plane crashed minutes later outside Addis Ababa, killing all 157 on board.

French authorities now have the planes flight data and voice recorders for analysis.

In Ethiopia, officials have started taking DNA samples from victims family members to assist in identifying remains.

Countries including the United States have grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8.
MEXICO CITY - The Mexican army says it has freed 34 Central American migrants who had been kidnapped in the northern state of Tamaulipas, across from Texas.

The Defence Department said Thursday in a statement that the migrants had been held at a property in the municipality of Altamira and were located by patrols. Twenty-five were Hondurans, eight were from Guatemala and one from El Salvador.

It was a different group from the at least 19 people who were abducted from a bus in the state on March 7 and whose whereabouts remain unknown.

Tamaulipas is generally the shortest route toward the United States for Central American migrants heading north.

It also has high rates of violence and other crime, and gangs are known to prey on migrants including kidnapping them for ransom.
SAO PAULO - Brazilian authorities on Friday arrested a suspect linked to a school shooting that left seven people dead, but later allowed him to return home.

Sao Paulos Court of Justice said Friday that the teenager was let go after prosecutors took his testimony. Police have not revealed his name.

The Sao Paulo state prosecutors office said he could still be taken into custody if new investigations revealed his involvement in the shooting.

Five students, a teacher and a school administrator were killed Wednesday at Raul Brasil state school in the city of Suzano, on the outskirts of Brazils largest city. One of the shooters also killed his uncle shortly before carrying out the massacre.

Nine others were wounded, including seven who were still hospitalized Thursday.

Attackers Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17, and Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25, are also dead.
CARACAS, Venezuela - Darkness has yet to lift for 72-year-old Elizabeth Guzman and thousands of her poor neighbours in a forgotten corner of Venezuelas capital that was barely getting by even before the lights went out over a week ago.

As the sun sets each day, Guzman lights a homemade oil lamp and holds it in one hand as she navigates the stairs and narrow passages up to the windowless room that she calls her little cave.

Ive never seen a crisis like this. Its the first time, said Guzman, who is malnourished and frail. It makes me so sad.

Venezuelas power grid crashed on March 7, throwing almost all of the oil-rich nations 30 million residents into chaos. Many struggled to find cellphone signals to call loved ones, the Caracas metro ground to a halt, hospital services collapsed, and massive looting was reported across the country.

President Nicolas Maduro blamed the blackouts on a U.S.-led cyberattack targeting the Guri Dam, the main engine of Venezuelas power grid. U.S. officials and Juan Guaido countered that the allegation is absurd and that the socialist government had looted public coffers for years, causing key infrastructure to collapse.

While power eventually surged back to life across most of Venezuela, residents in the hillside Caracas slum of Santa Cruz of the East say they are losing hope theyll ever have lights again.

As a result of a second explosion at a substation near the slum, manhole covers were blown into the air, flames burst into the night sky, and charred electrical machinery smouldered for days.

Irritated residents have been left to see the darkness as a symbol of their misery.

Guzman, whose health troubles and age prevent her from working as a housekeeper, says she moved to Santa Cruz of the East from a nearby neighbourhood last year after her home of 43 years burned in an electrical fire.

Now, each time she lights her oil lamp, she fears a terrifying repeat of the day when she lost nearly everything.

On a recent evening, Guzman held up a candle to illuminate pictures of her two sons and grandchildren.

She had already unplugged her microwave, toaster oven and television in case a surprise power surge sparked another fire.

Ill sincerely tell you that I have no hope this will ever get fixed, she said, managing to smile. Never.

Guzmans meagre government pension equals $6 a month, which enables her to pay rent equivalent to 66 cents.

But affording food is a daily struggle. Her weight dropped from 143 pounds (65 kilograms) to below 100 pounds (45 kilograms) in the last two years, and she said her doctor diagnosed her as malnourished. She also lives with painful hernias and cant afford pills needed to control her hypertension, causing her to sometimes slip into depression.

As day turned to night, singing poured out from the nearby House of Mercy Church, where fading sunlight had turned the figures of members into silhouettes.

Other residents held up flashlights as two men lugged drums of water up several twisting flights of stairs to a house.

Do you see how the poor people live? said Charles Belisario, adding that he and his wife would use the water to bathe and clean.

Belisario, 49, said hes able to survive better than most of his neighbours because his daughter sends money she earns from working in medical research in New Jersey.

In the distance, two modern high-rises glowed with lights.

Dilia Rosa Gelis, 74, said she holds firm to her faith, but was struggling with the harsh reality.

Her daughter had gone to bed without eating, which gives her headaches, Gelis said the following morning.

If God created us, why does he make us suffer? she wondered aloud, wiping tears from her eyes.

Guzman, like Gelis, also asked hard questions.

She said she had tuned out the political debate over whether political newcomer Guaido has what it takes to oust Maduro.

Instead, she said, she is focused on meeting her basic needs.

We dont have water. We dont have lights, she said. How am I supposed to see in this cave where I live? Im desperate.

___

Follow Scott Smith on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ScottSmithAP
CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALANDAt least 49 people were shot to death at two mosques during midday prayers Friday  most if not all of them gunned down by an immigrant-hating white supremacist who apparently used a helmet-mounted camera to broadcast live video of the slaughter on Facebook.

One man was arrested and charged with murder. Brenton Harrison Tarrant appeared in court Saturday morning amid strict security and showed no emotion when the judge read him one murder charge. The judge said it was reasonable to assume more such charges would follow.

Two other armed suspects were arrested while police tried to determine what role, if any, they played in the cold-blooded attack that stunned New Zealand, a country so peaceful that police officers rarely carry guns.

It was by far the deadliest shooting in modern New Zealand history.

It is clear that this can now only be described as a terrorist attack, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, noting that many of the victims could be migrants or refugees.

She pronounced it one of New Zealands darkest days.

Tarrant, who police say carried out at least one of the shootings, posted a jumbled, 74-page manifesto on social media in which he identified himself as a 28-year-old Australian and white supremacist who was out to avenge attacks in Europe perpetrated by Muslims.

Read more:

An extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence: Mass shootings at New Zealand mosques kill 49, one man charged

Facebook, YouTube blindsided by New Zealand mosque shooters live video that left 49 people dead

New Zealand mosque shooters rifles bore white-supremacist references

The gunman also livestreamed in graphic detail 17 minutes of his rampage at Al Noor Mosque, where, armed with at least two assault rifles and a shotgun, he sprayed worshippers with bullets over and over, killing at least 41 people. Several more people were killed in an attack on a second mosque in the city a short time later.

At least 48 people were wounded, some critically. Police also defused explosive devices in a car.

Police did not say whether the same person was responsible for both shootings. They gave no details about those arrested except to say that none had been on any watch list. During the Saturday morning hearing, a man who was not in court was charged with using writings to incite hatred against a race or ethnicity, but it was not clear if his case was related to Tarrants.

Tarrants relatives in the Australian town of Grafton, in New South Wales, contacted police after learning of the shooting and were helping with the investigation, local authorities said. Tarrant has spent little time in Australia in the past four years and only had minor traffic infractions on his record.

On Saturday, outside one of the two mosques, 32-year-old Ash Mohammed pushed through police barricades in hopes of finding out what happened to his father and two brothers, whose cellphones rang unanswered. An officer stopped him.

We just want to know if they are dead or alive, Mohammed told the officer.

In the aftermath, the countrys threat level was raised from low to high, police warned Muslims against going to a mosque anywhere in New Zealand, and the national airline cancelled several flights in and out of Christchurch, a city of nearly 400,000.

World leaders condemned the violence and offered condolences, with President Donald Trump tweeting, We stand in solidarity with New Zealand. Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan and other Islamic leaders pointed to the bloodbath and other such attacks as evidence of rising hostility toward Muslims since 9-11.

New Zealand, with a population of 5 million, has relatively loose gun laws and an estimated 1.5 million firearms, or roughly one for every three people. But it has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the world. In 2015, it had just eight gun homicides.

Before Fridays attack, New Zealands deadliest shooting in modern history took place in 1990 in the small town of Aramoana, where a gunman killed 13 people following a dispute with a neighbour.

On Saturday, the prime minister said the primary perpetrator in the shootings was a licensed gun owner and legally acquired the five guns used. Ardern said the countrys gun laws will change as a result of the carnage, but she did not specify how.

New Zealand is also generally considered to be welcoming to migrants and refugees. On Saturday, people across the country were reaching out to Muslims in their communities on social media to volunteer acts of kindness  offering rides to the grocery store or volunteering to walk with them if they felt unsafe. In other forums, people discussed Muslim food restrictions as they prepared to drop off meals for those affected.

The prime minister said the attack reflected extremist views that have absolutely no place in New Zealand.

Immigrants have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home, Ardern said. They are us.

At the White House, Trump called the bloodshed a terrible thing but rejected any suggestion the white nationalist movement is a rising threat around the world, saying it is a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.

Tarrant, in his rambling manifesto, deemed Trump a symbol of renewed white identity.

At the Al Noor mosque, witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black and wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top enter the house of worship and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running out in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in his driveway and fled. Peneha then went into the mosque to help the victims.

I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque, he said. I dont understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. Its ridiculous.

Facebook, Twitter and Google scrambled to take down the gunmans video, which was widely available on social media for hours after the bloodbath.

In the video, the killer spends more than two minutes inside the mosque spraying terrified worshippers with gunfire. He then walks outside, where he shoots at people on the sidewalk. Childrens screams can be heard in the distance as he returns to his car to get another rifle. He walks back into the mosque, where there are at least two dozen people lying on the ground.

After going back outside and shooting a woman there, he gets back in his car, where a song can be heard blasting. The singer bellows, I am the god of hellfire! and the gunman drives off before police even arrive.

The second attack took place at the Linwood mosque about 5 kilometres (3 miles) away. Mark Nichols told the New Zealand Herald that he heard about five gunshots and that a worshipper returned fire with a rifle or shotgun.

The footage showed the killer was carrying a shotgun and two fully automatic military assault rifles, with an extra magazine taped to one of the weapons so that he could reload quickly. He also had more assault weapons in the trunk of his car, along with what appeared to be explosives.

His manifesto was a welter of often politically contradictory views, touching on many of the most combustible issues of the day, among them the Second Amendment right to own guns, Muslim immigration, terrorist attacks and the wealthiest 1 per cent.

He portrayed himself as a racist and a fascist and raged against non-Westerners, but said China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values.

The gunman said he was not a member of any organization, acted alone and chose New Zealand to show that even the most remote parts of the world are not free of mass immigration.

Last year, New Zealands prime minister announced that the country would boost its annual refugee quota from 1,000 to 1,500 in 2020. Ardern, whose party campaigned on a promise to take in more refugees, called it the right thing to do.

Christchurch, sometimes called the Garden City, has been rebuilding since an earthquake in 2011 killed 185 people and destroyed many downtown buildings.
NICOSIA, Cyprus - Cyprus finance minister said Friday hell leave the post hes held since 2013 by the end of the year, insisting that the findings of an inquiry that partly blamed him for the demise of one of the countrys banks had no bearing on his decision.

Georgiades said it was time for him to move on after nearly seven years at the post and defended himself against the inquirys findings which he called both mistaken and unfair.

He said he still has the full backing of Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades amid opposition party calls for his dismissal and that under his stewardship, the Cypriot economy has rebounded strongly.

Anastasiades said the inquiry had no real grounds to apportion blame to Georgiades for billions in bad loans that accumulated at the Co-operative Bank over the decades before his government came to power.

Georgiades, 46, was appointed to steer the Cypriot economy in the immediate aftermath of a multibillion-euro rescue deal that Cyprus was forced to accept after a banking crisis nearly bankrupted the country.

The inquiry faulted senior executives for bad judgment, inaction and ineptitude in dealing with the Co-ops bad loan portfolio and pointed to Georgiades heavy burden of responsibility for not firing executives and for the banks mistaken course in efforts to have it return to private hands.

The government became the Co-operative banks majority stakeholder with a 1.5 billion-euro ($1.7 billion) bailout as part of the 2013 rescue deal.

Georgiades said selling off a bank that was once venerated for helping generations of Cypriots build homes and set up businesses ultimately became obligatory because of its bad loan burden.
BERLIN - A group of European nations is urging Russia not to abandon a nuclear weapons treaty with the United States.

Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are also calling for new arms control agreements to address the rising power of China and other nations.

The U.S. gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty a month ago, citing Russian violations.

The European countries opened an arms control conference in Berlin on Friday urging Moscow to return to complete and verifiable compliance to save the treaty.

But German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says its also time for broader treaties, as nuclear weapons proliferate to countries such as China, North Korea, India and Pakistan.

He says treaties also need to address new technologies, such as drones and cyberattacks.
BUDAPEST, Hungary - Hungarians want strong new leaders for Europe and a fresh start to halt the continents decline amid Muslim immigration, Hungarys populist prime minister said Friday as he looked ahead to Mays European Parliament elections.

Were the ones who want a strong Europe, strong nation-states and strong new leaders at Europes fore, Viktor Orban told a crowd gathered at the National Museum for commemorations of Hungarys 1848 revolution against the Habsburgs. We want a fresh start to stop Europes decline, to put an end to the fever dreams about a United States of Europe and to let Europe again belong to the Europeans.

Orban also took pride his countrys role in stopping the migrant invasion of the continent, when Hungary built fences on its southern borders in late 2015 to divert the migrant flow.

We wish for the veil to fall from the eyes of the people of Europe, so they can see and understand that without Christian culture there will be no free life in Europe, said Orban, who sees Muslim immigrants as threats to Europes lifestyle. Without defending our Christian culture, we will lose Europe and Europe will no longer belong to Europeans.

Despite his fiery speech, Orban toned down his message from previous speeches on the commemoration day. He once compared EU officials to Soviet troops, and this year he did not mention by name some of his favourite targets of recent years, like European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Hungarian-American financier George Soros.

On Wednesday, Europes main centre-right group, the European Peoples Party, will debate the possible suspension or expulsion of Orbans ruling Fidesz party, requested for now by 13 of the EPPs 49 parties.

After years of quarrels, some EPP members say Orban  who returned to power in 2010 and has become a role model for Europes far-right for his anti-immigration, anti-European Union rhetoric and autocratic style  has strayed too far from Christian Democratic values.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki also spoke at Fridays commemoration, highlighting centuries of Polish-Hungarian friendship. Orban said last week that he would seek to form an alliance with Polands ruling Law and Justice party, helmed by his ally Jaroslaw Kaczynski, if Fidesz is ousted from the EPP.
NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Denmark-based Vilacto Bio Inc. (OTC QB:VIBI) is happy to announce that the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has informed the Company that its patent application for LACTOACTIVE will be issued in near future.



The Company has already filed and received patents covering LACTOACTIVE in the US, Europe and Hong Kong. The Canadian patent, when issued, is expected to give the company greater scope to continue developing the LACTOACTIVE compound and bolster its international IP ownership position.

The patent applications in Canada also cover the Companys new compound, LACTOACTIVE iTHER, a LACTOACTIVE variant that offers potent immune-system enhancement with a potential for treating a wide range of diseases. LACTOACTIVE iTHER is expected to generate new revenue streams in addition to the companys LACTOACTIVE-based therapeutic skincare range.

Vilacto Bio now is in a stronger position than ever to leverage the potential of LACTOACTIVE, said Vilacto Bio CEO Gert Anderson.

The main active component of LACTOACTIVE and LACTOACTIVE iTHER is colostrum, a natural substance that Vilacto Bio has refined and processed into a potent nanoparticle concentrate. In NPDDS form, the compound can be applied in deeper layers of the skin and, when injected, can penetrate cell walls to act directly on cytoplasm. The product is currently in the development stage and has not been approved for use by the FDA or any foreign agency.

About Vilacto Bio Inc.:

Vilacto Bio Inc. (OTC QB:VIBI), is a biotech company that has developed the now fully patented Lactoactive (Lactoactive molecule) that in numerous studies has demonstrated above average effect treating conditions such as inflammatory diseases, diabetes, psoriasis, skin aging, and skin issues in different levels. We aim to further develop our Lactoactive molecule for the purpose of increasing the quality of our retail and medical skin cream products as well as licensing out our Lactoactive molecule for the pharmaceutical industry.

Forward-Looking Statements & Disclaimers:

The information in this Press Release includes certain "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provisions of Federal Securities Laws, as that term is defined in section 27a of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and section 21e of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Statements in this document, which are not purely historical, are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Investors are cautioned that such statements are based upon assumptions that in the future may prove not to have been accurate and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties, including the future financial performance of the Company. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in its forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations or any of its forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements that speak only as of the date of this release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events, or circumstances after the date of this release except as required by law.

Vilacto Bio Inc.

The Seagram Building

375 Park Avenue, Suite 2607

New York City, NY 10152

Gert Andersen

Phone: +1 646-893-7895

info@vilactobio.com

www.vilactobio.com
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia - Slovakia could get its first woman president as voters elect a new head of state on Saturday.

The leading contenders are Zuzana Caputova, an environmental activist who is in favour of gay rights and opposes a ban on abortion in this conservative Roman Catholic country, and Maros Sefcovic, an establishment figure who is the European Commission Vice-President.

In all, 13 candidates are vying to become the countrys fifth head of state since Slovakia gained independence in 1993 after Czechoslovakia split in two.

Andrej Kiska, a successful businessman-turned-philanthropist, is not standing for a second five-year term in the largely ceremonial post.

His term in office was marked by clashes with former prime minister Robert Fico, considered a populist leader.

Kiska supported the huge street protests that led to the fall of Ficos coalition government amid a political crisis triggered by the slayings last year of an investigative reporter and his fiancee. The reporter, Jan Kuciak, was investigating possible widespread government corruption and Italian mob influence.

If no single candidate wins a majority on Saturday, a runoff will be held on March 30 in this central European nation of 5.4 million people.

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WHATS AT STAKE

The president has the power to pick the prime minister, appoint constitutional Court judges and veto laws. Parliament can override the veto with a simple majority, however. The government, led by the prime minister, possesses most executive powers.

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THE FAVORITES

Zuzana Caputova

Caputova, a 45-year-old lawyer, is a rising star of Slovak politics. She became known for leading a successful fight against a toxic waste dump in her home town of Pezinok near the capital of Bratislava, for which she received an international environmental prize in 2016. She was also part of a campaign in 2017 that led to the annulment of pardons granted by former authoritarian prime minister Vladimir Meciar. She is deputy chairman of Progressive Slovakia, a non-parliamentary party that supported the massive street protests after Kuciaks death.

Maros Sefcovic

A career diplomat, 52-year-old Sefcovic was a member of the Communist Party before the anti-Communist 1989 Velvet Revolution. Sefcovic accepted an offer to stand from Ficos left-wing Smer-Social Democracy party, a dominant political group in Slovakia in recent years whose reputation has been tarnished by corruption scandals.

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OTHER NOTABLE CANDIDATES

Stefan Harabin

A former justice minister and chief judge of the Supreme Court, 61-year-old Harabin was a close ally of Meciar, whose rule in the 1990s was marred by repeated flouting of the law. A populist, Harabin exploits the fear of migration and presents himself as a guardian of traditional conservative values. As a vocal opponent of the sanctions against Russia for its actions against Ukraine, Harabin is a favourite candidate of pro-Russian media.

Marian Kotleba, 42

The 42-year-old heads the neo-Nazi Peoples Party Our Slovakia, which has 14 lawmakers in the 150-seat Slovak Parliament. Kotleba and his party speak admiringly of Slovakias time as a Nazi puppet state during World War II. Party members use Nazi salutes and consider NATO a terror group. They want Slovakia to leave the military alliance and the European Union.

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WHATS AHEAD

Caputova and Sefcovic are predicted by polls to be the two candidates to advance to a runoff. But the last polls allowed were published two weeks before Saturdays ballot. Analysts say theres a room for a surprise result, particularly for Harabin who was running third in the polls.
BERLIN - The Latest on global climate protests by students (all times local):

4 a.m.

Police say 16 people have been arrested for blocking traffic during a climate protest in front of New York Citys American Museum of Natural History.

The protesters face charges of disorderly conduct stemming from Fridays die-in at the museum. The protest was one of several around New York City as thousands of high school students walked out of class.

One student protesting in front of City Hall carried a sign that said: Im not showing up for school because adults arent showing up for climate.

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Activist Greta Thunberg, foreground, participates in a climate protest, in central Stockholm Sweden, Friday, March 15, 2019. Students worldwide skipped classes Friday to take to the streets to protest their governments' failure to take sufficient action against global warming.















































1 a.m.

Thousands of New York City students waged climate protests at locations including Columbus Circle, City Hall, the American Museum of Natural History and a football field at the Bronx High School of Science.

A police spokesman said there were arrests but he did not know how many.

Fridays protests were part of a global mobilization against climate change by students who want governments to do more to combat it.

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10 p.m.

A 13-year-old co-co-ordinator of the New York City climate protest that culminated in a die-in at the steps of the American Museum of Natural History says she is pleased with the number of demonstrators but a big turnout isnt the point.

Alexandria Villasenor says students will continue to strike, march and engage in civil disobedience but wont be successful until world leaders take some action. The protest Friday was part of a global effort mounted by students in more than 100 countries.

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7 p.m.

Hundreds of teenagers and young children holding their parents hands are marching through downtown San Francisco to demand action against climate change.

The group of about 1,000 is heading to Sen. Dianne Feinsteins office and chanting Climate change is not a lie, we wont let our planet die! The march was part of global protests mobilized by students.

Before the march, the young demonstrators held a rally outside House Speaker Nancy Pelosis San Francisco office to demand she co-sponsor the Green New Deal bill.

The bill spearheaded by Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, and Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, seeks to transform the U.S. economy to combat climate change and create thousands of jobs in renewable energy.

Outside Pelosis office, the group wrote Love our mother earth. She gives us everything, The climate is changing, why arent we? and other messages on colorful sticky paper notes they posted on the building before they started marching.

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6:40 p.m.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was inspired by the student climate strikers to call a special summit in September to deal with what he called the climate emergency.

My generation has failed to respond properly to the dramatic challenge of climate change, Guterres wrote in an opinion piece in The Guardian. This is deeply felt by young people. No wonder they are angry.

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6 p.m.

Hundreds of students and others milled in front of the U.S. Capitol, holding signs saying I Want You To Panic, Time is Ticking and Its Our Future.

Borders, languages and religions do not separate us, eight-year-old Havana Chapman-Edwards, who calls herself the tiny diplomat, said at the Capitol. Today we are telling the truth and we do not take no for an answer.

Chapman-Edwards and other speakers in Washington spoke while standing behind a banner that read We dont want to die.

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2:35 p.m.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen has praised those who showed up at the climate change demonstration in Copenhagen, where thousands of students demanded more government action to fight global warming.

Loekke Rasmussen, who joined the protest, tweeted Friday we must listen to the youth. Especially when theyre right: the climate must be one of our top priorities.

Hope all these bright young people will be back in school on Monday  well need great scientists to help solve the climate issues in the future #fridaysforfuture, he wrote in English.

The protests around the world Friday were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside Swedens parliament last year.

Elsewhere, some 30,000 demonstrators gathered in Brussels and thousands more braved wind and rain in cities across Belgium to demand more action against global warming. Some grandparents joined the protesters, who carried huge banners with messages like Running out of slogans ... Do something.

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12 p.m.

About 50 students have protested in South Africas capital, Pretoria, chanting Theres No Planet B. One protester held a sign reading Youll Miss The Rains Down in Africa.

Experts say Africa, with its population of more than 1 billion people, is expected to be hardest hit by global warming even though it contributes least to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

The rally was part of protests by students demanding more action against climate change in over 100 countries.

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11 a.m.

In Berlin, police said as many as 20,000 climate change protesters, most of them students, gathered in a downtown square, waving signs reading March now or swim later and Climate Protection Report Card: F.

They marched Friday through the German capitals government quarter, stopping in front of Chancellor Angela Merkels office. The rally was part of protests by students demanding more action against climate change in over 100 countries.

Environmental groups and experts have criticized German government plans to continue using coal and natural gas for decades to come.

Vokler Quaschning, one of more than 23,000 German-speaking scientists to sign a letter of support this week for the students, said Germany should stop using all fossil fuels by 2040. This would give less-advanced nations a bit more time to wean themselves off coal, gas and oil while still meeting the Paris goal globally.

He says this is going to require radical measures and there isnt the slightest sign of that happening yet.

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10 a.m.

Thousands of students are marching in rainy Warsaw and other Polish cities to demand a ban on burning coal, a major source of carbon dioxide.

The march Friday was part of protests by students around the world demanding more action against climate change in over 100 countries.

Some in Warsaw wore face masks as they carried banners that read Todays Air Smells Like the Planets Last Days and Make Love, Not CO2.

Elsewhere in Europe, police in Vienna said about 10,000 students demonstrated in the Austrian capital, while in Switzerland a similar number protested in the western city of Lausanne. In Helsinki, 3,000 students rallied in front of Finlands Parliament sporting signs such as: Dinosaurs thought they had time too!

Thousands of students also marched through Madrid and more than 50 other Spanish cities, for Spain is vulnerable to rising sea levels and rapid desertification.

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9 a.m.

Now or Never read the signs brandished by enthusiastic teenagers thronging cobblestoned streets around the domed Pantheon building, which rises above the Left Bank in Paris. Several thousand students gathered peacefully around the landmark.

Some of the students criticized President Emmanuel Macron, who sees himself as the guarantor of the Paris climate accord but is criticized by activists for being too business-friendly and not ambitious enough in efforts to reduce French greenhouse gas emissions.

Fridays rallies by students around the world were one of the biggest international actions yet to demand more government action to fight climate change. Protests were underway or planned in more than 100 countries.

The co-ordinated school strikes, were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year.

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8 a.m.

In Indias capital of New Delhi, schoolchildren are protesting inaction on climate change and rising air pollution levels that often far exceed World Health Organization limits.

Fridays rallies by students around the world were one of the biggest international actions yet to demand more government action to fight climate change. Protests were underway or planned in cities in more than 100 countries, including in cities as diverse as Hong Kong, Paris, Warsaw, Wellington, New Zealand and Oulu, Finland.

The co-ordinated school strikes, were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year.

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5 a.m.

From the South Pacific to the edge of the Arctic Circle, students mobilized by word of mouth and social media are skipping class to protest what they believe are their governments failure to take tough action against global warming.

The co-ordinated school strikes, were inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year.

Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students lifetime.

Fridays rallies were one of the biggest international actions yet. Protests were underway or planned in cities in more than 100 countries, including Hong Kong; New Delhi; Wellington, New Zealand; and Oulu, Finland.

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For more stories by The Associated Press on climate change, go to https://apnews.com/Climate
JERUSALEM - The Latest on Israel-Gaza (all times local):

2:50 a.m.

The Israeli military has concluded that the militant Hamas group of Gaza fired two rockets toward the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv.

In a statement early Friday, the army said we can confirm that Hamas carried out the rocket attack.

The attack Thursday night was the first time that Tel Aviv has been targeted since a 2014 war. It caused no casualties.

Earlier, Hamas and many smaller Palestinian groups strongly denied responsibility.

Israeli retaliatory airstrikes continued through early Friday while sirens warning of incoming projectiles from Gaza sounded in southern Israel.

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1:40 a.m.

The Israeli military is reporting air-raid sirens in southern Israel, signalling new rocket fire out of the Gaza Strip.

The apparent rocket fire came in response to Israeli airstrikes, launched after an early rocket attack on Tel Aviv.

The armys announcement early Friday gave no further details.

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1:30 a.m.

The Israeli military says it has begun attacking sites in the Gaza Strip in response to a rocket attack on Tel Aviv.

The attacks were taking place in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, about 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of Gaza City.

The warplanes could be heard flying overhead in Gaza City, where smoke from the explosions could be seen in the distance.

In a statement early Friday, the army said it was targeting terror sites. It gave no further details.

Palestinian media said a Hamas naval base had been targeted.

There were no immediate reports of injuries.

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Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired two rockets toward Tel Aviv late Thursday, the Israeli military said, marking a significant escalation that raised the likelihood of a harsh Israeli reprisal.

The rocket barrage triggered air raid sirens across the city, which is Israels densely populated commercial and cultural capital.

No damage or injuries were reported. But it marked the first time that Tel Aviv, some 80 kilometres (50 miles) north of Gaza, has been targeted by rocket fire since a 2014 war with Gaza militants.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rushed to the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and was conferring with senior army officials about a response.

In Gaza, there was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the Israeli armys chief spokesman, said officials had no prior warning of the attack and were trying to determine who fired the rockets. Israel holds Gazas Hamas rulers responsible for all fire out of the territory.

Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai said he had ordered the city to open public air raid shelters as a protective measure. But he said there were no special instructions and encouraged residents to stick to their daily routines.

Continue life as usual, he told Channel 10 TV. Be calm, but be alert.

Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamic militant group that seeks Israels destruction. Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since Hamas sized control of Gaza in 2007. Hamas possesses a big arsenal of rockets and missiles, but it has sought to contain violence with Israel since the last war in 2014.

Hamas denied responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, saying the rockets were launched when the groups military wing was meeting with Egyptian mediators to try to strengthen a cease-fire between Gaza militants and Israel.

In an unusual step that indicated Hamas was attempting to prevent further escalation, the Hamas Interior Ministry said the rocket fire went against the national consensus and promised to take action against the perpetuators.
JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus leading challenger in his heated race for re-election is trying to play down an embarrassing phone hacking scandal that has erupted just as the ex-general is sliding in opinion polls.

Benny Gantzs campaign confirmed late Thursday that the former military chief, who has been campaigning on his security credentials in a bid to end Netanyahus decade-long rule, was the target of an Iranian hacking attack several months ago.

It was not clear what information Israels archenemy had obtained from Gantzs smartphone. His campaign said the security lapse occurred months before he entered politics and suggested the leak was a politically-motivated attempt to embarrass him ahead of April 9 elections.

The revelation splashed across the internet, sending his new Blue and White party reeling. Gantz convened a surprise press conference Friday from Israels southern border, where he tried to divert attention to recent violence involving Gaza militants. Gantz has pointed to his leading role in the 2014 Gaza war as proof of his toughness.

Were fighting for our home and our struggle for democracy and ethics here, Gantz said, chiding reporters who asked about the hacking. The phone is not the story..I ask you all to be serious enough to deal with whats important.

Gantz provided few details about how he was hacked or what type of information might have fallen into the hands of Iranian intelligence. He attempted to play down the scandal as merely unethical prying.

But the scandal is unlikely to disappear. In a front-page analysis Friday, Amos Harel, a commentator for the Haaretz daily, argued that news of the breach could have far-reaching consequences, sending Gantzs party to unforeseen lows.

After Gantzs maiden political speech and merger with another centrist party, his campaign surged in popularity. Opinion polls showed his alliance gaining against Netanyahus Likud party, especially after Israels attorney general recommended that the prime minister be indicted on corruption charges. But more recent polling indicates waning enthusiasm for Blue and White, with Likud holding steady.
TEHRAN, Iran - Iran says it has banned from its airspace Boeing 737 Max 8 planes alongside other nations.

A statement released Friday by the transportation ministry announced the ban.

The decision comes following two fatal crashes involving the model in the past year.

A Boeing Max plane owned by the Ethiopian Airliner crashed last week and killed all 157 people aboard. A previous crash involving the model killed 189 people in Indonesia five months before.

Iran itself has no Boeing 737 Max 8 planes due to decades-long U.S. sanctions on the country.
OUTSIDE BAGHOUZ, Syria - The three Islamic State fighters emerged from the groups last bastion in eastern Syria on Friday acting as though they wanted to surrender, but when they reached the U.S.-backed forces that have them surrounded they blew themselves up, killing six people.

The attacks underscored the struggles faced by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces as they try to flush the extremists out of a tent camp in eastern Syria built over a labyrinth of caves and tunnels  all that remains of a self-declared caliphate that once sprawled across large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq.

SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali tweeted that the six killed were among dozens of civilians fleeing the IS-held area in the village of Baghouz, on the east bank of the Euphrates River. He said several other people were wounded, including three SDF fighters. The attacks took place at or near a crossing point where evacuees are searched.

Thousands of civilians have left the IS-held area in recent weeks and some fighters have surrendered. But the extremists are still putting up fierce resistance, and the SDF says it has slowed its operations out of concern for civilians and scores of prisoners held by the militants.

Fridays attacks underscore how risky the operations are, and how it can be difficult for forces to tell civilians from combatants.

An SDF official who goes by his nom de guerre, Ciyager Amed, said IS militants are still holding some 300 prisoners, both civilians and SDF fighters, adding that their fate is unknown.

The military campaign to uproot the militants from the eastern banks of the Euphrates River began in September, pushing them down toward this last corner in Baghouz, near the Iraqi border. The military operation has been halted several times since Feb. 12 as the SDF said a large number of civilians and hostages were holed up in the IS-held territory.

This week, the SDF resumed its final push before reducing pressure due to strong resistance from the extremists and the surrender of hundreds of IS fighters and family members.

Amed said there are no negotiations underway to secure the prisoners release.

An SDF statement said hundreds of IS fighters and their families surrendered Thursday. Bali, the SDF spokesman, tweeted that a new group of IS fighters surrendered Friday, without giving further details. No one knows how many hard-core fighters, including foreigners, are still inside.

SDF commanders have stopped speculating when the battle may finally be over. Already some 25,000 people have left Baghouz, thousands more than were originally believed inside. Commanders say they dont know how many more may still be left, hiding in tunnels beneath the war-scarred village.

On Friday the situation was mostly quiet as aircraft flew over the area controlled by IS.

The capture of the last pocket still held by IS fighters in Baghouz would mark the end of a devastating four-year global campaign to end the extremist groups hold on territory in Syria and Iraq  a self-declared caliphate that at the height of the groups power in 2014 sprawled across nearly a third of both countries.

Also Friday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights marked the eighth anniversary of the conflict by reporting that more than 570,000 people have been killed since Mar. 15, 2011. The conflict began with pro-democracy protests and escalated into a civil war after a fierce government crackdown and the rise of an insurgency.

Six million people have fled the country while a similar number are internally displaced.

The Observatory said it has documented 371,222 deaths by name, including 112,623 civilians. The civilians include 21,065 children and teenagers as well as 13,173 women.

The dead also include 67,000 rebels and army defectors as well as 115,000 government troops and pro-government fighters. Also killed during the conflict were some 66,000 militants, including al-Qaida-linked fighters and members of the Islamic State group.

The Observatory estimates that 105,000 people died while in government jails, mostly under torture.
ANKARA, Turkey - The Latest on global reaction to the deadly shootings in two mosques in New Zealand (all times local):

3:20 p.m.

Irans foreign minister says bigotry in Western countries has led to the attacks on Muslims in New Zealand.

In a Friday tweet Mohammad Javad Zarif said: Impunity in Western democracies to promote bigotry leads to this.

Zarif also said the prejudice led to Israeli thugs entering a mosque in Palestine to insult Muslims.

The Iranian foreign minister criticized the West for defending demonization of Muslims as freedom of expression and demanded its end.

Police keep watch at a park across the road from a a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand, Friday, March 15, 2019. Multiple people were killed in mass shootings at two mosques full of people attending Friday prayers, as New Zealand police warned people to stay indoors as they tried to determine if more than one gunman was involved.







Earlier on Friday, Iran condemned the attack on two mosques in the city of Christchurch, and asked its government to bring those who carried out the racist, inhumane and barbaric attack to justice.

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3:15 p.m.

Indonesias president Joko has condemned the violence that took place in two mosques in New Zealands Christchurch city in which at least 49 people died.

Indonesia strongly condemns this kind of violence, Joko Widodo told reporters during a working visit to Indonesias North Sumatra province, I also express deep condolences to the victims of the attacks.

Widodo said that he had been told of the attacks by Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi and his government is still gathering information. He urged Indonesian citizens in New Zealand to increase their vigilance.

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3 p.m.

Hungarys president has sent a telegram to New Zealands governor-general expressing all Hungarians condolences to the families and friends of the victims in the ruthless attack against the two Christchurch mosques.

President Janos Ader said he was deeply shocked by the news and wished the injured a speedy and full recovery.

Ader said that in these difficult hours, we all express our sympathies with those who mourn their loved ones lost in this pointless terror attack.

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2:55 p.m.

U.S. President Donald Trump is expressing warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques.

Trump tweeted Friday as the White House issued a statement condemning the attacks at two mosques in the city of Christchurch that left at least 49 people dead.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders described the attack as a vicious act of hate. She says the U.S. stands in solidarity with the people of New Zealand.

New Zealand police said at least 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city. More than 20 were seriously wounded. Muslim leaders say the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent anti-Islam sentiment.

Trump tweeted that innocent people have so senselessly died and added: The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

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2:40 p.m.

Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has sent a message to her New Zealand counterpart, Jacinda Ardern, expressing her deep shock and condemnation of the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch.

Hasinas press wing said the prime minister reached out to Ardern on Friday.

An international cricket match between New Zealand and Bangladesh has been cancelled after players from the visiting team narrowly avoided a mass shooting at one of the mosques.

Bangladeshs cricket board president says the team is safe in a locked hotel in Christchurch.

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2:40 p.m.

Pope Francis is denouncing the senseless acts of violence in the Christchurch mosque shootings and is praying for the Muslim community and all New Zealanders.

In a telegram of condolences Friday, Francis offered his solidarity and prayers to the injured and those who are mourning lost loved ones, and noted that it was a particularly difficult time for security and emergency personnel.

He said he was deeply saddened to learn of the injury and loss of life cause by the senseless acts of violence at two mosques in Christchurch, and he assures all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his heartfelt solidarity in the wake of these attacks.

The message sent by the Vatican secretary of state ended by saying: Commending those who have died to the loving mercy of Almighty God, Pope Francis invokes the divine blessings of comfort and strength upon the nation.

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2:35 p.m.

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte has sent his condolences to the victims of the mosque attacks in New Zealand that left 49 dead.

Conte on Friday called the attacks dreadful, noting that the victims were hit while they were in a place of prayer. All forms of intolerance, hatred and violence are inacceptable.

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2:30 p.m.

Irans foreign ministry has condemned the attack on two mosques in New Zealand.

Iranian state TV Friday said a spokesman of the ministry, Bahram Ghasemi, condemned the shootings as a terrorist attack.

Irans ambassador to New Zealand, Jalaleddin Namini, told Iranian state TV that there were no Iranian nationals among those killed or wounded. However, Namini said he is still waiting for a confirmed list of the victims.

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2:25 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has sent a telegram to the prime minister of New Zealand, expressing her condolences after the attack on two mosques in Christchurch.

It is a perfidious attack on worshippers and their houses of prayer, Merkel said Friday. The attack on Muslim citizens is also an attack on New Zealands democracy and its open and tolerant society. We share these values and thus also the horror of the New Zealanders.

Merkel says she sends her condolences to the relatives of the victims and is wishing the wounded speedy recoveries.

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2:20 p.m.

Queen Elizabeth II has expressed her condolences to the people of New Zealand following the attacks on mosques in Christchurch.

The monarch sent a message to the governor general of New Zealand, saying she was saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch today. Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives.

The monarch paid tribute to the emergency services and volunteers offering support to the wounded.

She says at this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders.

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2:15 p.m.

The grand imam of Egypts Al-Azhar, the revered 1,000-year-old seat of Sunni learning, has condemned the mosque attacks in New Zealand, warning of the grave consequences of hate speech.

Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb said in a statement that todays shooting sounds the alarm about the importance of not tolerating racist groups adding that the attack reflects the grave consequences of hate speech, xenophobia, and the spread of Islamophobia.

He called for more efforts in promoting the principles of tolerance among different religions and cultures, and expressed condolences to the victims families.

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2:10 p.m.

Officials from the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and the Islamic militant group Hamas have sharply condemned the attacks on two mosques in New Zealand.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat says he extends his prayers and tears to the families of the victims. Erekat denounced the use of religion for political ends on Twitter Friday, recalling past attacks targeting places of worship, including Israeli settler Baruch Goldsteins massacre of Palestinian worshippers at the Ibrahimi Mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron, and the assault on a Pittsburgh synagogue last year.

Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, called the carnage in New Zealand a heinous crime against worshippers in their mosques.

Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem said the attack confirmed that terrorism knows no religion...its the result of incitement against Islam and Muslims.

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2:10 p.m.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says irresponsible politicians and media organs that encourage xenophobia, Islamophobic tendencies and hate speech against Muslims are as much responsible for the attacks on two mosques in New Zealand as the despicable assailants.

Speaking at a joint news conference with European Union officials in Brussels, Cavusoglu also said Friday that two Turkish citizens, identified as Mustafa Boztas and Zekeriya Tuyan, were hurt in the attack but were not in life-threatening conditions.

Turkish authorities were still trying to obtain information about a third Turkish citizen, he said.

Cavusoglu said: The EU and European countries should not consider attacks and hate speech against Muslims and our religion as freedom of expression and democracy and should take precautions.

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2:05 p.m.

The worlds largest organization representing Muslim nations has condemned the attack on mosques in New Zealand that killed at least 49 people.

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement Friday the attack served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia.

Al-Othaimeen called on New Zealand to provide more protection to the Muslim communities living in the country.

He also offered his condolences for those affected by the mass shooting.

The OIC is based in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.

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2:05 p.m.

The prime minister of Norway, which saw 77 people killed in a far-right attack eight years ago, has expressed solidarity with New Zealand after deadly attacks on two mosques.

Erna Solberg told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that although it is across the globe, this is a strong reminder of how important it is for all of us to help bring down tensions, work against extremism, and that we show solidarity with each other when something like that happens.

In July 2011, confessed Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people. Like the presumed New Zealand attacker, he posted a manifesto online before the attacks.

This looks like it is a terrorist attack from the extreme right against immigrants and refugees, Solberg said, adding it is a reminder that we have to fight extremism in all forms.

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1:10 p.m.

Gulf Arab states are condemning an attack on mosques in New Zealand that killed at least 49 people.

Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates all offered their sympathies Friday over the attack.

Saudi Arabia said one of its citizens was lightly wounded in the attack, but survived.

Dubais ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, tweeted his condolences, noting that on a day of peace like Friday and at a place of worship like the mosque, we witnessed the most heinous crime of religious hatred.

Noon prayers on a Friday are an integral part of Islamic life, a day when all practicing Muslims join congregations to listen to a sermon.

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1 p.m.

Japans top government spokesman has offered his condolences to the victims of mosque attacks in New Zealand and says Japan stands by the people of that country.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, in a regular news conference Friday, expressed heartfelt condolences to the shooting victims and their families, while extending sympathy for the injured.

Suga expressed solidarity with the people of New Zealand.

Japans Foreign Ministry issued an emergency safety advisory to Japanese nationals in the area, urging them to stay indoors and follow instructions from the local authorities.

The ministry also advised the Japanese in Christchurch to closely monitor local news to secure your own safety.

So far no Japanese have been affected by the attacks

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12:55 p.m.

Malaysias government has slammed the attack on two mosques in New Zealand as an act of terror.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said he regretted the incident and urged the New Zealand government to do its best to arrest these terrorists.

The foreign ministry said two Malaysians were wounded and have been hospitalized.

Malaysia condemns in the strongest terms this senseless act of terror on innocent civilians and hopes that those responsible for this barbaric crime be brought to justice, the ministry said in a statement.

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12:25 p.m.

Swedens Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom has tweeted that she was shocked by the attack in Christchurch, saying we condemn terrorism in all forms.

Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen also commented that extremism has again shown its ugly face.

Denmarks Jewish community, which was targeted in a February 2015 attack where a guard was shot and killed, also expressed shock at the news of the New Zealand attack.

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12:20 p.m.

France is increasing security measures at mosques and other religious sites after the deadly attack against two mosques in New Zealand.

French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner tweeted Friday that he ordered regional prefects to send patrols and reinforce surveillance of places of worship as a precaution.

French President Emmanuel Macron, also in a tweet, denounced the odious crimes against the mosques in New Zealand and said that France will work with international partners to fight terrorism.

The rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris condemned the attack in Christchurch, which left at least 49 dead.

France is home to western Europes largest Muslim community. While French Muslim and Jewish sites are sporadically targeted by vandals, France has not seen a major attack on mosques of the kind that targeted New Zealand.

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12:15 p.m.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has expressed solidarity with the people of New Zealand following attacks on worshippers attending prayers at two Christchurch mosques.

Khan, said in a statement Friday that the news is heartbreaking.

He says: London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack. London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy.

Khan sought to reassure Muslim communities in London following the attacks, saying that the Metropolitan Police would be visible outside mosques.

London mosques have been targeted in the past. One man died and several others were injured in 2017 when Darren Osborne drove a van into people leaving evening prayers. Prosecutors say Osborne was motivated by a hatred of Muslims and been radicalized by far-right propaganda he found online.

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12:10 p.m.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says hes shocked at the terrible attacks that killed dozens of worshippers attending Friday prayers in two mosques of New Zealands capital, Christchurch.

In a tweet sent on Friday, Sanchez sent condolences to the victims, its families and the government of New Zealand.

We emphatically condemn violence and the lack of reason of fanatics and extremists who want to break our societies, Sanchez has written.

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12:05 p.m.

Germanys foreign minister says the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch are a brutal crime that touches people of all religions around the world.

In two tweets, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Friday Germanys sympathies were with the friends and families of the victims of the attack.

He says the horrific terrorist attack in Christchurch targeted peacefully praying Muslims  if people are murdered solely because of their religion, that is an attack on all of us.

Maas says we stand at the side of the victims. Stay strong New Zealand!

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12:05 p.m.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is calling on Western nations to rapidly take measures to curb rising racism against Islam and Muslims, saying new attacks such as the mass shootings in New Zealand would otherwise be inevitable.

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister on Friday, Erdogan renewed his condemnation of the attack on two mosques in Christchurch.

Erdogan said: It is clear that the understanding that the murderer  who also targeted our country, our people and my person  represented, has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer. It was an apparent reference to reports that a suspect had left behind a 74-page manifesto that also threatened Turks.

Erdogan continued: I call on Western countries especially to rapidly take measures against this dangerous turn that threatens the whole of humanity.

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11:35 a.m.

Pakistans prime minister has condemned attacks on two mosques in New Zealand, saying he blames rising Islamophobia.

Imran Khan wrote Friday on Twitter that terrorism does not have a religion.

He added: I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9-11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim.

Pakistani officials say there are no Pakistani citizens among the dead.

Pakistan has witnessed several attacks on places of worship in the past decade, especially targeting its minority Shiite community.

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen also tweeted her condolences.

Tsai said: Im utterly saddened by the mass shooting in Christchurch, #NewZealand. My thoughts go to the victims & their families.

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10:50 a.m.

A top diplomat in the United Arab Emirates is offering his condolences over an attack on mosques in New Zealand that killed at least 40 people.

Anwar Gargash, the UAEs minister of state for foreign affairs, tweeted heartfelt condolences to New Zealand on Friday.

Gargash wrote: Our collective work against violence & hate must continue with renewed vigour. Our thoughts & prayers are with the families of the victims.

The UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula, is home to expatriate workers from Australia and New Zealand. The country is a staunch Western ally.

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10:25 a.m.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has condemned the attacks on mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch calling it the latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.

Tweeting in English and Turkish on Friday, Erdogan said: On behalf of my country, I offer my condolences to the Islamic world and the people of New Zealand, who have been targeted by this deplorable act.

He also wished a speedy recovery to the wounded.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said 40 people were killed in the attack on two mosques.

Turkeys private NTV news channel quoted Turkish embassy officials as saying there are no Turkish citizens among the dead.
KILIS, Turkey - A Turkish court on Friday convicted an Australian-born Islamic State militant of belonging to a terror group and sentenced him to more than seven years in prison.

Neil Prakash, a former rapper from Melbourne, has been in a Turkish prison since 2016 when he was arrested near the Syrian border for attempting to cross into Turkey with fake documents. Turkish prosecutors said the 27-year-old had illegally crossed into Syria in 2013 where he joined IS.

He had featured in IS videos, been linked to several attack plans in Australia and has urged lone wolf attacks against the United States.

Delivering its verdict on Friday, the Criminal Court in the southern city of Kilis found Prakash guilty of IS membership and sentenced him to seven years and six months in prison. The court said he could be released in two-and-a-half years under Turkish law, however. The court rejected a request for his release pending the outcome of an appeal.

Prakash did not attend the hearing in person but took part in the proceedings through a teleconference system.

I used to be a member of Daesh but I am no longer, he said, referencing another widely used term for IS.

He insisted that he was forced to feature in IS videos and photographs and that they were filmed against his will.

Prakashs lawyer argued that his client had travelled to Syria to learn about Islam and to help people, and never intended to aid a terror organization, according to court papers.

Australia has stripped Prakash, who has Fijian and Cambodian parents, of his citizenship for extremist links.

It also wants Turkey to extradite Prakash, who faces allegations of inciting a terror plot in his home state of Victoria.

He faces a potential life sentence if convicted in Australia of terrorism offences.

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BRUSSELS - World leaders expressed condolences and condemnation Friday following the deadly attacks on mosques in New Zealand, while Muslim leaders said the mass shooting was evidence of a rising tide of violent Islamophobia.

In a tweet, U.S. President Donald Trump sent warmest sympathy and best wishes to the people of New Zealand.

He wrote that 49 innocent people have so senselessly died, with so many more seriously injured. The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the attacks the latest example of rising racism and Islamophobia.

New Zealand police said at least 49 people were killed Friday at two mosques in the picturesque South Island city of Christchurch. More than 20 were seriously wounded in what Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called a terrorist attack.

One man was arrested and charged with murder in what appeared to be a carefully planned racist attack. Police also defused explosive devices in a car. Two other people were being held in custody and police were trying to determine how they might be involved.

Speaking at the funeral of a former minister, Erdogan said the Islamophobia that motivated the attacks has rapidly started to take over Western communities like a cancer.

Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan echoed those sentiments.

I blame these increasing terror attacks on the current Islamophobia post-9-11 where Islam & 1.3 bn Muslims have collectively been blamed for any act of terror by a Muslim, he tweeted.

The secretary-general of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Youssef al-Othaimeen, said in a statement that the attack served as a further warning on the obvious dangers of hate, intolerance, and Islamophobia.

Queen Elizabeth II, who is New Zealands head of state, said in a message to the country she was deeply saddened by the appalling events in Christchurch and sent condolences to families and friends of victims. The queen also paid tribute to emergency services and volunteers supporting the injured.

At this tragic time, my thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders, she said in her message.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker tweeted that he learned of the attack with horror and profound sadness.

The European Union will always stand with #NewZealand and against those who heinously want to destroy our societies and our way of life, he wrote.

In France, home to western Europes largest Muslim community, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner ordered regional authorities to bolster security at mosques as a precaution.

Londons mayor, Sadiq Khan, said the citys Metropolitan Police force would be visible outside mosques.

London stands with the people of Christchurch in the face of this horrific terror attack, he said. London will always celebrate the diversity that some seek to destroy.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said New York City is providing extra security for Muslim community centres and mosques. He said he wants the citys Muslims to know that New Yorkers truly embrace them and have their backs.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians are appalled by the attack and said they remember all too well the sorrow after a Canadian man shot dead six Muslim men in a Quebec mosque in 2017.

Far too often, Muslims suffer unimaginable loss and pain in the places where they should feel safest, Trudeau said in a statement. To move forward as a world, we need to recognize diversity as a source of strength, and not a threat.

Indonesias President Joko Widodo condemned the attacks, in which an Indonesian father and son were among those wounded. Indonesian Muslim leaders expressed anger at the shooting rampage while urging Muslims to show restraint.

Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said bigotry in Western countries contributed to the attacks on Muslims in New Zealand. In a Friday tweet, he also criticized the West for defending demonization of Muslims as freedom of expression.

Afghanistans Taliban movement  Islamic militants who carry out near-daily attacks on Afghan security forces  also condemned the shooting rampage, calling it an unforgivable crime.

Taliban spokesman Qari Mohammad Yusuf called on the New Zealand government to investigate the root cause of such terrorism and hand a hefty punishment to the attackers.

Lebanons Hezbollah militant group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Western countries, condemned the policy of hatred that the United States is feeding around the world instead of prevailing religious values that call for forgiveness.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks a brazen act of terror. His office said on Twitter that Israel mourns the murder of innocent worshippers, condemns the assault and sends its condolences to bereaved families.

Jordans King Abdullah II tweeted that the heinous massacre against Muslims praying in peace in New Zealand is an appalling terrorist crime. It unites us against extremism, hatred and terrorism, which knows no religion. Jordans Foreign Ministry confirmed that one Jordanian was killed and five wounded in the attack.

A telegram of condolences sent by the Vatican on behalf of Pope Francis said he was deeply saddened to learn of the injury and loss of life caused by the senseless acts of violence in Christchurch. He assured all New Zealanders, and in particular the Muslim community, of his heartfelt solidarity.
ANKARA, Turkey - The war of words between Turkey and Israel continued Friday when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rebuked the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for suggesting that Istanbul  formerly Constantinople  was under Turkish occupation.

The Turkish and Israeli leaders have been trading barbs this week, with Netanyahu calling Erdogan a dictator and criticizing the imprisonment of scores of journalists in Turkey. Erdogan brandished the Israeli leader a thief and a tyrant in reference to corruption allegations and Israeli policies toward Palestinians.

Netanyahus son, Yair Netanyahu, jumped into the fray, tweeting this week that Istanbul is actually a city called Constantinople! The capital of the Byzantine empire and centre of orthodox Christianity for more than a thousand years before Turkish occupation!

Erdogan hit back at Yair Netanyahu calling him immoral at an election rally.

You occupied the whole of Palestine! he said. If the world is looking for a country that oppresses, its Israel. If they are searching for a terror state that too is Israel.

Israel and Turkey were once close allies, but diplomatic relations between the two have soured in the past decade. Under Erdogan, Turkey has become a vocal critic of Israeli policies dealing with Palestinians, sparking frequent verbal feuds with Netanyahu.

Interviewed on Turkeys Haberturk television on Thursday, Erdogan said Benjamin Netanyahu was walking around with this stain of corruption. Erdogan also accused Israel of jailing 10,000 Palestinian women and children and of disrespecting holy sites in Jerusalem.

The latest exchange of words started Tuesday when Erdogans spokesman called Netanyahu a racist for saying Israel was the nation-state only of the Jewish people.

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AVENTURA, Fla., March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via OTC PR WIRE -- South Florida fintech company CLIC Technology, Inc. (OTC Pink: CLCI) (also known as "the Company"), announced today that it would be adding e-commerce software by Open Cart to its suite of innovative tools that would allow merchants to quickly process cryptocurrency into local cash via the Company's proprietary payment platform.

According to Open Cart, over 342,000 established and aspiring entrepreneurs use the customizable PHP-based online store management system to manage multiple online stores from a single back-end. The popular tool is a leader in a global, retail e-commerce software market that was valued at $4.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $7.7 billion by the end of 2024.

"Speed and simplicity are two core corporate principals at CLIC Technology because we feel strongly that very little time or work should be wasted between consumers and merchants," said CLIC Technology CEO Roman Bond. "That's why we are so happy to be connecting audiences eager to explore the cryptocurrency markets with Open Cart. Like Open Cart, we believe that software should be simple to install and run, straight out of the box."

The new, cutting-edge crypto-payment platform won't come with the financial obstacles of chargebacks and high fees. It's described as a seamless, behind the scenes process that easily converts customer cryptocurrency sales into local currency in less than 24 hours.

"With now over $135 billion of spendable money currently existing in crypto accounts worldwide, there's very little reason to keep businesses from seizing the promise of cryptocurrency to pay for everyday goods and services securely," added Roman Bond. "A revolution that expands consumer purchasing power is almost here, and CLIC is ready with the innovative tools to serve it."

About CLIC Technology, Inc.:

The Company, a "Financial Technology" company, is the developer and marketer of new, cutting-edge blockchain products and services. It has created a revolutionary "crypto-payment gateway system" that allows consumers to use cryptocurrency to make routine purchases online and that enables merchants to accept crypto payments and receive immediate settlements in traditional fiat currencies. Market introduction of the new crypto-payment gateway system and related services is planned to occur in a phased rollout in the United States and other major markets in the coming months.

Safe Harbor Act: Forward-Looking Statements are included within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategy, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, including words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and similar expressions are forward-looking statements and involve risks, uncertainties, and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. We are under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.




WASHINGTONTime and again  when U.S. President Donald Trump stood by Saudi Arabia after the killing of a Virginia-based journalist, when it looked as if he might intervene in the special counsels Russia investigation and when he threatened to declare a national emergency to pay for his border wall  lawmakers on Capitol Hill warned him not to push them too far.

This week, in a remarkable series of bipartisan rebukes to the president, Congress pushed back.

On Wednesday, with seven Republicans breaking ranks, the Senate joined the Democrat-led House in voting to end U.S. military aid to Saudi Arabias war in Yemen in protest over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post. On Thursday morning, the House voted unanimously on a non-binding resolution to make public the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller.

And on Thursday afternoon, 12 Republican senators abandoned the president to pass legislation, already adopted by the House, that would block Trump from declaring a national emergency to build his border wall  an act of defiance that he has vowed to overturn with the first veto of his presidency.

Were saying today, No, we do not acquiesce to this, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said after voting to block the emergency declaration. We do not agree that the president should be able to come in and go against the express intention of the Congress when it comes to these appropriated funds for his wall.

The series of votes vividly demonstrated a new-found willingness to stand up to the president among some of his Republican allies on Capitol Hill. And they underscored a deep frustration in Congress about the presidents supposed scorn for a coequal branch of government.

Read more:

Senate slaps down Trump border emergency; Republicans defect

In 420-0 vote, House says Mueller report should be public

U.S. report faults Saudi Arabia in killing of journalist

We have an issue that has been litigated and adjudicated through Congress. I mean, what was more litigated than this very question? We had a government shutdown for crying out loud, said Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., referring to funding for the border wall, which Trump is trying to secure with an emergency declaration that would circumvent Congress.

Its about separation of powers, Toomey said. Its about respecting the principles of the Constitution.

For some Republicans, particularly those who have typically voted in lock step with the president, the votes were a moment of soul searching during a harried week before recess, when most lawmakers were looking forward to getting out of town. The Yemen vote was an exceedingly rare invocation of the 1973 War Powers Act, passed after the Vietnam War to restrain the presidents authority to use military force.

We dont often have great votes about great questions around here about separation of powers, said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., adding, I dont think you can overstate how important it is that for the first time in the history of the country, the full Congress voted to tell the president that we cant be in a war.

Trump made it clear he would fight the bipartisan challenges to his authority.

He feels good, said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close ally of Trump who talked to the president shortly after the vote. He said, My veto will be sustained? I said, Yeah, overwhelmingly. He feels like his commitment to build the wall is moving forward.

But the rare coalition of Democrats and Republicans could bolster legal challenges to the emergency declaration that could tie up wall funding indefinitely. And the mere act of defying Trump foreshadows potential new difficulty for the president as he seeks to push his agenda through a Democrat-controlled House and a less pliant Republican-controlled Senate.

There are moments where you see a partisan rebuke of the president by Congress, said William G. Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and author of Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action. They are really pretty infrequent, and when you do observe them it speaks to real tumult in the party.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, said he hoped the votes this week are green shoots: Republicans, out of courage, out of principle and maybe out of principle or maybe exasperation, are beginning to constrain the president when he goes too far.

Most Republicans cast their votes as a matter of conscience, and some Republicans who fashion themselves constitutional conservatives, such as Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, tied themselves in knots explaining how vexed they were to side with the president. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the first Republicans to declare his support for overturning the emergency declaration, faced a huge backlash from conservatives and flipped his vote at the last second.

House Republicans, who joined Democrats in voting to call for Muellers report to be made public, insist there was no tumult.

But Democrats saw it as an important declaration of principle. Congress is finally asserting its authority under the Constitution  with enthusiasm, said Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla., who spent eight years in the executive branch as health secretary to President Bill Clinton.

The rejection of Trumps national emergency declaration could also give ammunition to a half-dozen legal cases challenging the presidents exercise of that power under the 1976 National Emergencies Act, said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who led the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush.

Some judges may count that as evidence of congressional intent, Goldsmith said, though he added that he disagreed with that view.

Dror Ladin, a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said Congress action would help convince federal judges that the president was acting illegally to fund his wall.

This vote reinforces that the president has no right to that money, Ladin said.

But as a political matter, Trump could use the congressional votes to his advantage on the 2020 campaign trail, portraying himself once again as the outsider candidate battling an unpopular Congress and the establishment in Washington.

Congress has for decades been what Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, calls a constitutional weakling  excessively deferential to the president. But there have been moments in history where the legislative branch seeks to assert its power and relevance, particularly with respect to the military and foreign engagement.

That happened in the 1970s with the passage of the War Powers Act, which gave Congress the ability to compel the removal of military forces absent a formal declaration of war. Congress exerted its authority in 1991 and again in 2002, when it authorized the president to use military force in the run-up to both wars in Iraq.

In 2005, amid a public uproar over the torture of detainees, Congress tightened anti-torture laws to ban the infliction of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment on prisoners  including those held overseas by the CIA  over the objections of Bush.

Now the fight over wall funding may incite yet another round of congressional muscle-flexing. A number of Republicans are pushing legislation to claw back the powers that Congress gave the president in the National Emergencies Act, which Trump invoked to declare an emergency along the southwestern border.

The Senates waking up a little bit to our responsibilities, said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.

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ATLANTA - Former Georgia U.S. Rep. John Linder has been accused of improperly spending tens of thousands of dollars of leftover campaign donations on personal expenses.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Thursday that a campaign finance watchdog group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission this week. The Campaign Legal Centers complaint accuses Linder of illegally using the money on salaries for his children, phone and internet bills and a trip to Alaska.

The Republican represented a suburban Atlanta district from 1993 to 2011.

The complaint says that after leaving Congress, Linder kept his campaign committee operating for three years and paid his daughter $51,000 for consulting.

Linder says he wasnt using the money for personal reasons.

President Donald Trump last week nominated Linder to be U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The position requires Senate confirmation.

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Information from: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, http://www.ajc.com
WASHINGTON - The son of a dual U.S.-Saudi citizen who has been detained in Saudi Arabia met Thursday with members of Congress as he seeks help to secure his fathers release.

Ahmed Fitaihi says his father, Walid, has been beaten, electrocuted and subjected to other forms of torture and allowed little contact with his family during 16 months in custody.

Walid Fitaihi was a Boston-area physician before he returned in 2006 to his native Saudi Arabia, where he helped found a hospital built by his family and became a popular motivational speaker on television. In November 2017, Fitaihi was one of about 200 prominent Saudis detained in a mass roundup and held prisoner in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The Saudi government described the mass arrests as a crackdown on corruption; critics, however, decried it as a move to consolidate power by Prince Mohammed bin Salman and claimed the detainees were being tortured.

His family says they have not been told if he is facing any charges.

Im sure you can see how confusing it is to see this man, being dragged, and beaten and electrocuted, this doesnt make any sense at all, the son said at a news conference in Washington organized by Human Rights Watch. Hes dedicated his entire life to making peoples lives better.

Fitaihi spoke alongside a brother of Lujain Alhathloul, a womens rights activist who has been in custody since May and went on trial this week.

Her brother, Walid al-Hathloul, said she has been subjected to electrocution and threatened with rape. I am desperate to save my sisters life, he said.

The Saudi Embassy said in response that the kingdom prohibits torture and that authorities are investigating the allegations of mistreatment of the prisoners.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia takes any allegations of ill-treatment of defendants awaiting trial or prisoners serving their sentences very seriously, it said in a statement.

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This version corrects the sentence in the 5th paragraph by restoring the dropped word not.
FRANKFORT, Ky. - Kentuckys education commissioner wants the name of every teacher who used a sick day to force 10 school districts to close so educators could protest at the state legislature.

At least 10 Kentucky school districts were forced to close several times since Feb. 28 after so many teachers used their sick days that officials could not find enough substitutes to cover classes.

Jefferson County Public Schools, one of the countrys largest districts with more than 98,000 students, has closed six times in two weeks as hundreds of teachers packed the state capitol to protest several proposals that impacted the pension system and education funding.

The protests are part of a wave of teacher activism across the country that began last year in West Virginia and quickly spread to other states, including Oklahoma and Arizona. This year, teachers in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, went on strike.

Kentucky teachers did not go on strike. But they used their sick days to close schools in protest of several education bills. They included a proposal to change who manages the teachers pension fund as well as legislation that would have indirectly supported private schools with tax credits for scholarship funds.

On Thursday, Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis sent letters to 10 school districts, asking for the names of every teacher who used a sick day on the days the districts were forced to close. He also wanted copies of all affidavits and doctors notes.

The Kentucky Department of Education takes the closing of schools very seriously, Lewis said. While it is important that administrators, teachers and students make their voices heard about issues related to public education policy, advocacy should under no circumstances be putting a stop to learning for entire communities.

Emilie Blanton, an English teacher at Southern High School in Jefferson County, said she did not use a sick day, but came to the Capitol to protest because the district was closed.

I think its an intimidation tactic, she said. It just goes to show that they are going to try to silence the sick out movement as best as they can.

Its unclear what state education officials could do with the information. A news release from the Kentucky Department of Education notes state law allows the commissioner access to records of all teachers and has authority to report mismanagement, violation of law, or misconduct to the Kentucky Board of Education.

The Kentucky Education Association, which represents 43,000 educators across the state, said in a news release that superintendents could discipline teachers who used sick days to come to the state capitol to exercise their First Amendment rights.

It is our hope that they wont, the association said in a news release. Making educators  who are all citizens of this Commonwealth  choose between keeping their livelihood and exercising their constitutional rights is despicable.
BILLINGS, Mont. - The Trump administration on Friday finalized changes to sweeping federal land use plans for the West, easing restrictions on energy companies and other industries in a way officials said would still protect a struggling bird species.

The changes by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will guide future efforts to conserve greater sage grouse, ground-dwelling birds that range across portions of 11 Western states.

Environmentalists said the widely-anticipated move will undermine protections for the chicken-sized grouse. It would allow more oil and gas drilling, mining and other activities that can disrupt grouse breeding grounds.

But the changes secured key backing from Democratic and Republican governors in affected states, bolstering the administrations position that revisions were needed to plans crafted under former President Barack Obama.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement that the changes marked a shift away from planning toward active conservation and landscape management.

The birds are known for an elaborate mating ritual in which males fan their tails and puff out yellow air sacs in their chests as they strut around breeding grounds known as leks. Their numbers have plummeted due to energy development, disease and other factors.

Opponents are expected to challenge the changes in court. Brian Rutledge with the Audubon Society said the revisions will make it harder to stop the long-term decline of sage grouse by giving oil and gas companies access to crucial grouse habitat.

Its a free for all, based on prioritizing fossil fuel extraction over any other use of the federal landscape, Rutledge said.

The chairman of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, Arizona Democrat Rep. Raul Grijalva, said the changes would benefit former clients of acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. Bernhardt worked as an oil and gas industry lobbyist before joining the Trump administration.

Grijalva in a statement called the administrations decision a smash-and-grab-job on our environment.

U.S. Bureau of Land Management acting Director Brian Steed told The Associated Press the changes address concerns aired by state officials that previous policies governing millions of acres of federal land were too restrictive.

Those policies had been memorialized in a 2015 partnership between Western states and the federal government, but officials from several states had since sought changes.

Steed said the broad revisions to the Obama-era plans were meant to move beyond what he called a one-size-fits-all approach under the old rules. He said they give more flexibility to land managers and states concerned about balancing economic development with protections for the bird.

Our intent was not to throw out the plans, but to make them better respond to the needs on the ground, Steed said. Were doing that in a very careful way to ensure that the birds protections are still in effect.

Sage grouse once numbered in the millions but the most recent estimates from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service places the population at between 200,000 and 500,000.

The 2015 plans capped years of negotiations and were intended to prevent the bird from being designated a threatened or endangered species. That status could have brought severe limitations on grazing, energy development and other activities across the birds range, which covers some 270,000 square miles (700,000 square kilometres).

Under President Donald Trump, Interior Department officials have vowed to lift obstacles to drilling. Grouse protections have long been viewed by the energy industry as an obstacle to development.

The new plans were expected to remove the most protective habitat designations for about 13,000 square miles (34,000 square kilometres) of public land. Those areas, considered essential to the species survival, were a centerpiece of the Obama policy.

The Trump administration also would drop some requirements to prioritize leasing for oil and gas outside sage grouse habitat and allow for more waivers for drilling.

In Wyoming, one of the most important remaining strongholds for the species, Republican Gov. Mark Gordon said the changes would help economic development while conserving grouse.

Utah Republican Gov. Gary Herbert said the BLMs new approach will really complement what were already doing. Thats good news for how we manage sage grouse population in the state of Utah.

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Associated Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst in Salt Lake City, Utah, contributed to this story.

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Follow Matthew Brown at https://twitter.com/matthewbrownap
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The man suspected of being a notorious California serial killer who eluded capture for decades had been arrested by Sacramento police in the 1990s, years before he was connected to the killings, a newspaper reported Friday.

Joseph DeAngelo, now in jail as the suspected Golden State Killer, was arrested in a 1996 sting operation on allegations he had held up a gas station, the Sacramento Bee reported . Sacramento police had promised Super Bowl tickets to people facing outstanding warrants to lure them, and DeAngelo responded.

DeAngelo spent several hours in jail but the gas station charges were later dismissed. The Bee obtained court records linked to a $1 million civil lawsuit he filed against the gas station owner that outline details of the arrest.

It would be 22 years before police would arrest DeAngelo again, this time linking him to at least 13 murders and more than 50 rapes across California in the 1970s and 80s. Hes been awaiting trial on 26 charges in the same Sacramento jail since last April and has not entered a plea.

The case of the so-called Golden State Killer and East Area Rapist eluded investigators for decades; the suspects last known killing occurred in 1986. Investigators zeroed in last year on DeAngelo by using DNA and genealogy websites.

Sacramento Police Sgt. Shaun Hampton said police would not have had any way of knowing in the 1990s that DeAngelo was allegedly linked to the crimes. The department was not routinely collecting DNA samples at the time.

The evidence wasnt there, the technology wasnt there, he said. I dont think theres any way we could have known, there was no way for us to identify this person by him simply being in our jail for a few hours.

DeAngelo had prepaid for gas at a station when the pump malfunctioned, prompting him to go inside to seek a refund. The clerk did not understand him and reported him as an attempted robber, according to court records from a 1998 settlement conference in his civil lawsuit. Records didnt show the terms of the settlement.

William Wright, DeAngelos attorney at the time, said he remembered DeAngelo as a nice guy who was upset about what happened at the gas station. He did not realize his client from 22 years earlier was the Golden State Killer until contacted by the newspaper.

Id seen the guy TV, but I never made the connection, Wright said. He was very pleasant when he was talking to me.
BOSTON - A Vancouver businessman pleaded not guilty Friday to paying $200,000 to have someone take a college entrance exam in place of his two sons, and his attorneys said he looks forward to contesting the charges in court.

David Sidoo appeared in federal court in Boston and was released on a $1.5 million secured bond.

Sidoo, who also played in the Canadian Football League, is one of 50 people charged in a sweeping college admissions cheating scam announced by Boston authorities this week.

At least nine athletic coaches at elite universities and 33 parents, many of them prominent in law, finance, fashion, the food and beverage industry and other fields, have been charged, including Hollywood stars Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.

Authorities say the parents paid an admissions consultant to rig standardized test scores and bribe college coaches and other insiders to get their children into selective schools.

The consultant, William Rick Singer, pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges in federal court Tuesday in Boston. Singers attorney told reporters that he plans to co-operate fully with prosecutors.

The former sailing coach at Stanford University also pleaded guilty this week to accepting bribes to help get students into school by pretending they were athletic recruits.

Prosecutors say Sidoo paid someone to pose as his sons to get them higher scores on the SATs. Hes also accused of hiring someone to take a Canadian high school graduation exam in place of his older son.

Sidoo is charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud. The judge restricted his travel to the U.S. and Canada.

He will be returning to his home in Canada and asks people not rush to judgment, his lawyers said in a statement.

Advantage Lithium, a lithium exploration and development company, said this week that Sidoo has taken a temporary leave of absence from his role as president.

East West Petroleum Corp. also said Sidoo is no longer president and CEO of the company, but remains a director.
NEWARK, N.J. - A convicted appointee of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has joined his co-defendants appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bill Baroni filed a notice Friday.

Baroni and former Christie aide Bridget Kelly were convicted in 2016 in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal, an alleged plot to cause traffic jams to punish a mayor who wouldnt endorse Christies re-election.

Christie wasnt charged.

An appeals court threw out some of Baronis and Kellys convictions last fall but upheld the bulk of the charges.

Baroni was subsequently resentenced to 18 months in prison. Kelly is to be resentenced next month.

Baronis court filing included a brief on behalf of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and former newspaper publisher Conrad Black.

Both men had fraud convictions reversed by the Supreme Court.
WASHINGTON - Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and key co-operator in the special counsels Russia probe, is not ready to be sentenced because he continues to help with several ongoing investigations, prosecutors said in a court filing Friday.

Gates is a central figure in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of Russian election interference and possible co-ordination with the Trump campaign. But he is also helping federal authorities in New York who are looking into Trumps inaugural committee as well as lobbying on behalf of foreign interests by prominent Washington insiders.

The joint filing by Muellers office and Gates attorneys comes amid signs the Russia investigation is winding down. But its unclear if Fridays delay is an indication that Mueller may submit his confidential report soon or if its related to the status of the other investigations.

The filing asked for another 60 days to update U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on whether Gates can proceed to sentencing. The judge granted the request later Friday.

Gates pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy and false statement charges related to Ukrainian lobbying and political consulting he carried out with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison.

Gates helped the government in obtaining a trial conviction of Manafort last year. Prosecutors have noted that he continues to provide information about Manaforts time on the Trump campaign, though neither man has been charged with any crimes related to Russian election interference.

Still, Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who led the Manafort case, told a federal judge earlier this year that a meeting Gates attended with Manafort in August 2016 went to the heart of the Russia investigation. The meeting at the Grand Havana Room cigar club in New York was with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort associate who the FBI says has ties to Russian intelligence.

Prosecutors have not revealed exactly what piqued their interest in the meeting, though court papers show it involved a discussion of a possible Russia-Ukraine peace plan.

Separately, federal prosecutors in New York are investigating the Presidential Inaugural Committee, where Gates served in a senior role. Investigators are looking into whether foreigners illegally contributed to the committee, which raised $107 million for Trumps inaugural events, and how that money was spent.

The same office is also investigating lobbying for Ukraine in which Gates was involved.

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Read APs coverage of the Russia probe: https://apnews.com/TrumpInvestigations

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Follow Chad Day on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChadSDay
MADISON, Wis. - A federal appeals court ruled Friday that a law giving clergy tax-free housing allowances is constitutional, overturning a ruling in Wisconsin that said it was an unconstitutional benefit and delivering a huge win to religious leaders who had fought to keep the substantial benefit.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation has been waging legal battles against the tax break for a decade. Several religious organizations intervened in the case, saying that the survival of many congregations depended on keeping the housing allowance. A group of more than 5,000 pastors signed on to an Alliance Defending Freedom letter supporting the exemption.

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its Friday ruling that the effect of the 1954 law is neither to endorse nor to inhibit religion, and it does not cause excessive government entanglement. The court noted that Congress has been providing federal tax exemptions for religious organizations as far back as 1802.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-founder and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said the group was weighing whether to ask the full 7th Circuit to review the case or take it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Its a blow, Gaylor said.

U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman Kelly Laco called the ruling a win for the religious protections enshrined in the Constitution. The Justice Department was defending Treasury Department Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who was named in the lawsuit.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty intervened in the case on behalf of Embassy Church located on the south side of Chicago and several other congregations.

This ruling is a victory not just for my church but for the needy south side Chicago community we serve  our youth, our single mothers, our homeless, our addicted, and our victims of gang violence, Embassys pastor Chris Butler said in a statement. I am grateful that I can continue serving them and living side by side with them to make our neighbourhood a safer, more peaceful place.

Becket said in a statement that Butlers church cant afford to pay him a full salary, so the housing allowance makes it possible for him to afford to live near his church.

Under the federal law passed in 1954, a minister of the gospel doesnt pay income taxes on compensation that is designated part of a housing allowance. The Freedom From Religion Foundation, headquartered in Madison, argued that the law discriminates against secular employees.

The benefit saves clergy, including non-Christian religious leaders, about $800 million a year in taxes.

Under the law, housing allowances paid as part of clergy salary can be subtracted from their taxable income. The Freedom from Religion Foundation argued that a clergy member can use the untaxed income to purchase a home, and then, in a practice known as double dipping, deduct interest paid on the mortgage and property taxes.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled in 2017 that the exemption provides an unconstitutional benefit to religious persons and no one else, violating the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The three appeals court judges who upheld the benefit as constitutional were William Bauer, Daniel Manion and Michael Brennan. Bauer was appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford. Manion was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan and Brennan was appointed by Republican President Donald Trump.

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Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sbauerAP
Rockville, MD, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to a new study of Fact.MR, sales of lithium-ion battery pack will exceed 151 Mn units in 2019, up from 131 Mn units in 2018. Development of safe and reliable battery packs, in line with the surging power requirements from multiple applications is for to complement growth of lithium-ion battery pack market.

The study states that, growing palpability of disruptive technologies, smart grid storage, electric vehicles, data centers, and others, is providing an impetus to growth of the lithium-ion battery pack market . Additionally, rising dependency on electrochemical energy storage is fuelling investments in lithium-ion battery packs, as lithium ion battery is emerging as the ideal choice for electrochemical energy-storage.

Soaring sales of plug-in and electric vehicles is one among the key factors spurring adoption of lithium-ion battery packs, as lithium-ion batteries have become the battery of choice among automakers worldwide. Multiple advantages of a lithium-ion battery pack, such as high energy & power density, is making it outsell the conventional lead-acid variants, says the Fact.MR report.

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Lithium cobalt oxide to continue as the top-selling lithium-ion battery pack variant, with global sales estimated to surpass 67 Mn units. Skyrocketing demand for portable electronic devices is foreseen to fuel demand for lithium cobalt oxide types, as most of the lithium-ion battery packs used in portable applications are cobalt-based.

The report opines that, the cylindrical cell type continues to be highly favored as compared to prismatic or pouch types, with global demand estimated to surpass 51 Mn units in 2019. Cylindrical packaging continues to be the widely-used for lithium-ion battery packs, on account of advantages such as superlative mechanical stability and ease of manufacture.

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According to the report, Asia Pacific excluding Japan will continue to be the largest market for lithium-ion battery pack, as the APEJ hosts a large number of prominent battery OEMs. China, South Korea, and India are foreseen to be highly lucrative countries for the manufacturers of lithium-ion battery packs in terms of healthy expansion.

North America is likely to emerge as the fastest-growing market for lithium-ion battery pack, with opportunities brimming for the manufacturers across the key countries, including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. The buoyancy of North America lithium-ion battery pack market can also be ascribed to incessant penetration of plug-in & electric vehicles and steady demand for consumer electronics.

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RALEIGH, N.C. - Republicans are heading for a lively and rapid-fire faceoff to decide wholl represent the GOP in a new North Carolina congressional election mandated after a ballot-rigging scandal blocked the former Republican candidates presumed victory in November.

Ten Republicans filed by Fridays deadline to run for their partys nomination in the 9th Congressional District special election. They include the sponsor of a 2016 state law limiting LGBT rights, the anointed choice of last years GOP candidate, a Fayetteville medical products sales manager, two suburban Charlotte real estate agents and a former Marine who served on the county board that includes Charlotte.

They have two months to raise money and campaign while Dan McCready, the Democrat who seemed to narrowly lose Novembers election before it was voided, can meet with supporters and donors without a primary contest. He raised $487,000 at the end of 2018 while the result was in doubt.

With no other contests serving as a weather vane of political opinion, the election should draw tons of money and visits from presidential candidates looking for a platform, Western Carolina University political scientist Chris Cooper said.

I think this is going to be a nationally prominent story, said Cooper, predicting the interest level could match the big-money 2017 Georgia race between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel. I think well have probably relatively low voter turnout ... but the media environment is so nationalized now that I think were all looking for signs.

The district that has been in GOP hands since 1963 and President Donald Trump won it by 12 percentage points in 2016. Republican Mark Harris seemed in November to have won by 905 votes out of almost 278,000 cast. But that was before investigators found a political operative working for Harris collected an unknown number of mail-in ballots, making them vulnerable to being changed or discarded.

The bi-partisan state elections board last month unanimously declared the election tainted and ordered another.

Harris isnt running again. The incumbent he beat in last years primary, Robert Pittenger, also ruled out running in the district which stretches from suburban Charlotte to suburban Fayetteville along the South Carolina border.

If none of the Republicans win more than 30 per cent of the votes in May, a GOP runoff primary would be Sept. 10 and the general election Nov. 5. If there is a clear Republican winner, he or she would meet McCready and candidates of the Green and Libertarian parties on Sept. 10.

Harris urged his supporters to back Union County Commissioner Stony Rushing, who like the former Baptist pastor is staunchly anti-abortion. Rushing, 47, said his conviction comes in part from the fact that his mother gave birth to him despite being just 16.

The firing range owner and licensed gun seller said hes had grass-roots contact with thousands of people across the district who have taken his hunter safety and concealed-carry courses.

The best-known Republican candidate is probably state Sen. Dan Bishop of Charlotte, the architect of one of the most controversial laws in recent state history. House Bill 2 repealed a Charlotte ordinance expanding LGBT rights and prevented similar anti-discrimination rules anywhere else in the state. A 2017 Associated Press analysis found the law will cost the state more than $3.76 billion over several years.

The law was partly repealed, but local governments cant regulate private employment or public accommodations until late next year.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo cited that partial repeal when barring swimmers attending state universities from lodging in North Carolina during a collegiate championship next week in Greensboro. Cuomo said banning nonessential state-funded travel to North Carolina remains because the state continues discrimination against the LGBT community.

Bishop said his HB2 advocacy proved hell tell voters where he stands despite pushback.

I think the people of North Carolina, they put that controversy behind them and theyre ready to move on, Bishop said after filing as a candidate Thursday. It did the state no good to have that controversy, but its an exhausted issue. And as I said, everyone understands where I stand. But were on to a new campaign and new issues.

A late entry was Chris Anglin, who had been a registered Democrat until shortly before he entered last years race for a state Supreme Court seat as a Republican. He split GOP votes with the Republican incumbent and helped a Democrat get elected.

Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the NC Values Coalition, said her conservative lobbying organization hasnt decided who to endorse. Still, she said social conservatives are motivated to vote because their votes were thrown out, even though its unclear whether there were enough tainted ballots to swing the race last year.

Last years narrow race in a district that favours Republicans suggests GOP voters need to rally behind a candidate who can appeal equally in the districts suburbs and rural hamlets, Republican strategist Patrick Sebastian said.

Most of the Republicans in this race are fairly conservative but I dont think all of them can win against McCready, whos going to have a mountain of money behind him, Sebastian said. So we have to nominate somebody that has a little bit of crossover appeal (to Democrats) but also can stop McCready from taking soft Republican voters. He clearly did that in 2018.

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Follow Emery P. Dalesio on Twitter at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/emery%20dalesio.
Was it worth it?

The celebrities and CEOs arrested in this weeks college bribery scandal were charged with paying up to $1.2 million (U.S.) for guaranteed admission to elite universities. And of course theres a much larger and mostly legal system whereby rich people pull strings, hire consultants and make enormous tax-deductible donations, all in the hopes of improving their childrens college chances.

Yet academic research suggests that these efforts are mostly a waste of money and that the seized opportunities would have actually helped other students much more.

In 2014, the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger published an analysis of the benefits of attending a highly selective college. They found that, after statistically controlling for students SAT scores, economic background and college ambitions, the long-term financial returns are generally indistinguishable from zero. Students who are poised to succeed tend to do so even if they dont get into the Ivy League.

But there was a crucial exception. There were strong benefits for the subset of black and Hispanic students and for those whose parents had few educational credentials. It turns out that students who come from less privileged backgrounds benefit greatly from selective colleges. Elite higher education gives them social capital they didnt already have.

In other words, Lori Loughlins daughter Olivia Jade Giannulli, who is attending the University of Southern California, would have probably been fine attending Arizona State University. (Arizona State is a thriving public research university that Giannullis father is reported to have cited on FBI wiretaps as the unthinkable destination he would pay bribes to avoid.) When youre a 19-year-old YouTube star who spends spring break on a billionaires yacht, life tends to work out.

Read more:

Students file lawsuit against colleges in rich and famous bribery scandal

Bribery scandal exposes sports side door to admissions

TV stars and coaches charged in college bribery scheme

But if the charges against them are proved, Giannullis parents would have taken something their daughter didnt need from someone for whom it might have been life-changing.

There are some important caveats to Dale and Kruegers research. This kind of analysis isnt devised to detect certain narrow pathways to elite professions that run through a handful of top colleges. Supreme Court clerks, for instance, tend to hail from a small number of highly selective universities. There is still a pipeline to Wall Street and management consulting that traverses a long-established network of private high schools feeding into top colleges.

But if youre the kind of student who needs to pay someone to take the SAT for you or to photoshop your face onto the body of a varsity water polo player, youre probably not Supreme Court material.

At the same time, research from the Equality of Opportunity Project found that while many kinds of colleges can help students move to the top 20 percent of the income distribution from the bottom 20 percent, moving to the top 1 percent from the bottom 20 percent almost always requires a highly selective institution. If youre at all concerned about economic mobility, this underscores the waste of unfairly displacing qualified low-income students from top colleges and universities.

Selectivity may also matter more in other parts of the higher education universe. A 2009 study from economist Mark Hoekstra found that white men who attended a flagship public research university earned 20 percent more over time than similar white male students who attended less selective colleges.

Not all students at selective colleges have the same experience. Soon-to-be-released research from economists Douglas Webber, Ben Ost and Weixiang Pan found that students who majored in high-demand fields such as engineering at less selective public universities earned more than similar students who chose other majors at more selective universities.

Economists Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman found that students who accepted a scholarship to attend a public university with lower graduation rates than alternatives were themselves less likely to graduate.

In general, there are strong correlations between the resources colleges have and the success of students who attend them. So it seems nothing about the admissions scandal should dissuade parents and students from trying to find a good college to attend.

More than anything, the scandal shows how much elite higher education has become entangled in structures of prestige, status and anxiety among the upper class. It is in some ways a case of one percenters lusting after the privileges of 1-10th of one percenters  possibly risking infamy and prison to buy something that, the evidence suggests, provides little value for their privileged offspring.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush said a fellow Republican should challenge President Trump for the GOP nomination next year, though he acknowledged the difficulties in defeating a sitting president.

I think someone should run, just because Republicans ought to be given a choice, Bush said in an interview on CNNs The Axe Files scheduled to air Saturday, according to excerpts released by the network.

Bush, who fell short to Trump in his bid for the 2016 nomination, said defeating Trump will be difficult for any candidate, in part because Trump has a strong, loyal base.

But to have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative I think is important, he told host David Axelrod. And our country needs to have competing ideologies . . . that are dynamic, that focus on the world were in and the world were moving toward rather than revert back to a nostalgic time.

In January, Bush introduced Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, R, at Hogans second inauguration, saying he was at the top of the list of leaders that I admire, and that the governor embodies the strong independent leadership America needs now.

Hogan has not ruled out a 2020 challenge to Trump and is planning an April visit to New Hampshire, the first presidential primary state.

Read more:

Potential challenger to Trump will head to NH next month

Maryland Gov. Hogan: Never say never to Trump challenge

Gov. Hogan: No Trump primary challenge without major shift

According to CNN, Bush didnt say whether hes spoken to Hogan about a potential run.

William Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, announced last month that he would form an exploratory committee to challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020.

Read more about:
OMAHA, Neb. - Flooding in the central U.S. on Friday swamped small towns, forced some residents along waterways to evacuate, threatened to temporarily close a nuclear power plant and shut down stretches of a major river and an interstate highway, foreshadowing a difficult spring flooding season.

The high water, prompted by a massive late-winter storm, pushed some waterways to record levels in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa and Minnesota. The flooding was the worst in nearly a decade in places, though the situation was expected to improve quickly in many places over the weekend, according to Mike Gillispie, National Weather Service hydrologist in Sioux Falls.

But in eastern Nebraska, flooding worsened Friday and remained a big concern in the lower Missouri River region  which is a major source for the Mississippi River  with the weather service issuing warnings of high water along the river and its tributaries from southeastern South Dakota to St. Louis in Missouri.

About 45 miles northwest of Omaha, the town of North Bend  home to nearly 1,200 along the banks of the Platte River  emergency workers used boats to evacuate residents. Also Friday afternoon, officials asked residents of Valley, home to nearly 1,900 people just west of Omaha, to evacuate. Within hours of that request, anyone left in the city found all access in and out cut off by floodwaters from the Elkhorn River.

Officials in eastern Nebraska said more than 2,600 people living along the Missouri, Platte and Elkhorn rivers there had been urged to evacuate, as waters breached levees in several rural spots.

Things are moving and changing at a rapid pace, Douglas County Commissioner Mary Ann Borgeson said Friday at a news conference. We need you to follow instructions and evacuate when we say you need to evacuate.

President Donald Trump on Friday tweeted that he had spoken to Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts about the flooding. The president also praised first responders and emergency response teams for doing a great job dealing with flooding, high winds and road closures.

Rising waters on the Missouri River also led Iowa officials on Friday to shut down much of Interstate 29 from the Missouri state line north about 85 miles (137 kilometres) to about Missouri Valley, Iowa. The closure was reminiscent of historic flooding along the river in 2011 that saw segments of the interstate in western Iowa washed away. Officials on Friday said the river is expected to crest well below what was seen in 2011.

Wisconsins governor declared a state of emergency Friday as flooding worsened, and Iowas governor expanded an emergency proclamation issued a day earlier.

The U.S. Coast Guard shut down all traffic on the Missouri River from about 50 miles (80.5 kilometres) south of Omaha, Nebraska, downstream to St. Joseph, Missouri on Friday, a stretch of about 70 miles (112.7 kilometres).

The Coast Guard and Corps also requested all river vessel operators create as little wake as possible between St. Joseph downstream to Kansas City to minimize levee damage.

The restrictions came as the river reached moderate flood stage at nearly 32 feet on Friday at Omaha, where its expected to crest at nearly 34 feet on Monday, according to the National Weather Service. The river is expected to crest at St. Joseph on Tuesday at just over 30 feet. Major flood stage at St. Joseph is 27 feet.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages the river, drastically increased releases from Gavins Point Dam in southeastern South Dakota due to limited storage capacity behind the dam for the excess runoff. The releases are expected to worsen flooding downstream, though the agency was helping with levee monitoring and other flood response measures, and it stopped releases from Fort Randall Dam upstream from Gavins Point.

The swollen Missouri threatened a nuclear power plant in southeastern Nebraska. The Nebraska Public Power District said it was likely the Cooper Nuclear Station about 59 miles (95.5 kilometres) south of Omaha would be shut down early Saturday.

Officials are confident that the flooding around the plant presents no danger to the public, power district spokesman Mark Becker said.

The storm also significantly increased spring flood worries in the Red River Valley in the Upper Midwest, where the neighbouring cities of Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota, experienced a record flood 10 years ago.

The two cities have implemented several measures such as home buyouts and levees since then. They could be tested this year. The National Weather Service in an updated outlook Friday said significant snowmelt flooding is likely in the valley. The chance the river will reach major flood stage in Fargo increased from 50 per cent last week to 90 per cent.

The midweek storm crippled parts of Colorado and Wyoming with blizzard conditions . Thousands of homes and businesses were still without power Friday in Colorado, mostly in the Denver area, although crews worked throughout the day to restore electricity.

The storm also spawned at least three tornadoes in Michigan and Indiana on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. There are no immediate reports of any injuries, but homes and trees were damaged and power was knocked out to thousands. Flooding, hail and strong winds also were reported in parts of the two states. The weather service recorded a 60 mph (97 kph) wind gust at Indianapolis International Airport.

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For the latest developments in this story: https://apnews.com/99c572c0cfa643a28bacccb0f31fb4d4

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Contributing to this report were Associated Press reporters Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Dan Elliott in Longmont, Colorado; David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa; Bob Moen and Mead Gruver in Cheyenne, Wyoming; Gretchen Ehlke in Milwaukee and Nelson Lampe in Omaha, Nebraska.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A Missouri lawmaker whos introduced measures that would force adults to own handguns and young adults to own AR-15 semi-automatic rifles said hes trying to make the point that mandates are bad and doesnt actually want to require gun ownership.

The other side of the aisle loves mandates, so Im trying to get them to make an argument against mandates, Republican state Rep. Andrew McDaniel, of the rural Bootheel community of Deering, said in a telephone interview.

The legislation comes amid a session in which a top aide to a Missouri state senator was arrested after a loaded gun fell to the floor during a fight at a Jefferson City bar. Two state House members also were involved in an incident at another Jefferson City bar that left one of them with a black eye. The incidents occurred after a House committee heard debate on legislation that would allow concealed weapons in public places that currently ban guns.

From alcohol-fueled bar fights, to advancing legislation that would allow anyone to carry a concealed weapon anywhere from bars to daycares, to mandating gun ownership with a tax subsidy for gun manufacturers, the Missouri GOP rarely wastes an opportunity to embarrass themselves or our state, the Missouri Democratic Party said in a written statement. Republicans should regroup during the spring legislative break and come back ready to do real work that moves Missouri forward.

The bills from McDaniel, a former deputy sheriff in Pemiscot County, would offer tax credits for people purchasing firearms. One bill would require any adult who is legally allowed to legally can possess firearms to do so. The other bill would require everyone who is 18 to 35 years old to have an AR-15. Under federal law, people must be at least 21 to buy handguns from a licensed dealer and at least 18 to buy a rifle.

McDaniel said people need to be able to protect themselves, particularly in rural areas where a single deputy may be patrolling a large geographic area. McDaniel said the legislation points out the absurdity of the opposite side, and their proposals to add more requirements and barriers for law-abiding citizens. He said he decided, Lets get back at them.

He said no outside group is helping him with the legislation. The National Rifle Association didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

No hearings on either of the bills are scheduled, and McDaniel said that of course the legislation wouldnt pass as is. He says if anything moves forward, he would focus on tax credits and strip out the other elements.

I would never try to mandate anyone do anything against their will, he added.
ARCADIA, Calif. - Investigators with a prosecutors office have been assigned to help look into 22 recent horse deaths at Santa Anita, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorneys office said Friday.

The investigators will work with the California Horse Racing Board as it probes the deaths, said district attorneys spokesman Greg Risling said.

He declined to say what sparked his offices involvement and when the decision was made.

The most recent horse death happened Thursday, when a 3-year-old filly broke down just past the finish line after a half-mile workout. That marked the 22nd death at the track since the winter meet began Dec. 26.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has been calling on the district attorneys office to investigate since March 1 and protested outside the prosecutors office following Thursdays death.

PETA said in a statement that it began campaigning against cruelty in horse racing in 2008, when a horse broke both front legs after crossing the finish line at the Kentucky Derby.

Eleven years of broken bones and thousands upon thousands of thoroughbred deaths have finally resulted in a criminal investigation into trainers, Kathy Guillermo, PETAs senior vice-president, said in a statement. The DAs office is doing the right thing.

Santa Anita spokesman Mike Willman said in a statement that the track welcomes the district attorneys sincere interest in solving these very serious issues that weve experienced over the past two months.

He also pointed to an announcement Thursday by the tracks owner, The Stronach Group, that Santa Anita will ban the use of medication and whips on racing days, making it the first racetrack in the nation to impose such restrictions.

The owner of Los Alamitos Race Course said late Friday that he will continue to allow the use of Lasix, an anti-bleeding medication, at the Orange County track where thoroughbreds and quarterhorses run.

I believe that the continued use of Lasix is in the best interest of the horses and as such is a major contributor to the safety of the industrys human and equine athlete, track owner Ed Allred said. I shudder to think of the consequences to racehorses and their riders if Lasix was banned.

Allred breeds and owns quarterhorses.

He said Los Alamitos will review the reforms suggested by The Stronach Group with owners, trainers, jockeys, regulators and other track operators.

Obviously everyone is interested in making those reforms that will contribute in making the sport of racing better for everyone, including the wagering public, Allred said.

Los Alamitos hosts eight weeks of thoroughbred racing a year, while running quarterhorses year-round.

Since 2015, the track has had a zero-tolerance policy against Clenbuterol, Albuterol, Zilpaterol and similar B2-agonists and conducts hair testing prior to major quarterhorse stakes races.

PETA is calling on all tracks in the U.S. to stop the abuse and carnage and enact the changes made by Santa Anita racetrack  or get out of the business.

Meanwhile Rep. Judy Chu, D-California, whose district includes the racetrack, said Friday that she was outraged by the horse deaths and that the track should be closed until we know the horses are safe.

She said she was calling on the House Energy and Commerce Committee to investigate and hold a hearing on the treatment of horses at Santa Anita and other racetracks.

Santa Anitas changes came after a bill, the Horseracing Integrity Act of 2019, was introduced in Congress on Thursday by Rep. Paul Tonko (D-New York), and Rep. Andy Barr (R-Kentucky).

The bill would create a private, independent authority to develop and administer a nationwide anti-doping and medication control program for the sport.
WASHINGTON - U.S. regulators charged Volkswagen and former CEO Martin Winterkorn with defrauding investors during its massive diesel emissions scandal.

The charges from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission come two years after the German automaker settled with the U.S. over criminal and civil charges, as the company tries to distance itself from one if its darkest eras.

The SEC said that between April 2014 and May 2015, Volkswagen issued more than $13 billion in bonds and asset-backed securities in U.S. markets when senior executives knew that more than 500,000 vehicles in the country grossly exceeded legal vehicle emissions limits.

Volkswagen made false and misleading statements to investors and underwriters about vehicle quality, environmental compliance, and the companys financial standing, which gave Volkswagen a financial benefit when it issued securities at more attractive rates for the company, according to the SEC.

Volkswagen hid its decade-long emissions scheme while it was selling billions of dollars of its bonds to investors at inflated prices, said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SECs enforcement division.

In September 2015 Volkswagen installed software on more than 475,000 cars that enabled them to cheat on emissions tests, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The software reduced nitrogen oxide emissions when the cars were placed on a test machine but allowed higher emissions and improved engine performance during normal driving.

In 2016 the Justice Department sued Volkswagen over the emissions-cheating software and the Federal Trade Commission sued the company, saying it made false claims in commercials promoting its Clean Diesel vehicles as environmentally friendly.

Winterkorn resigned saying he took responsibility for the fraud, but insisted he personally did nothing wrong.

Volkswagen said Friday that the SEC is simply repeating unproven claims about Winterkorn.

Regrettably, more than two years after Volkswagen entered into landmark, multibillion-dollar settlements in the United States with the Department of Justice, almost every state and nearly 600,000 consumers, the SEC is now piling on to try to extract more from the company, the company said in a prepared release.

The company has paid some $20 billion in fines and civil settlements. It has also pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the United States and several managers, including Winterkorn, were charged there.

The surprise charges from the SEC arrive as the German company attempts to distance itself from the scandal. On Tuesday the automaker said that it planned to ramp up production of electric vehicles over the next ten years, to 22 million, and reduce its carbon footprint over vehicle life cycles by 30 per cent.

Volkswagens pivot to electric vehicles comes as it seeks to comply with new limits on carbon dioxide emissions in Europe, and a push by China for more low-emission vehicles.

The SECs complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, charges Volkswagen AG, its subsidiaries Volkswagen Group of America Finance, LLC and VW Credit, Inc., and Winterkorn with violating the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws.

The SEC seeks permanent injunctions, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest and civil penalties. It also wants to bar Winterkorn from holding any corporate officer or director positions.
AUSTIN, Texas - Lawmakers looking to shrink Texas prison population and costs are considering a bill that would allow some people convicted of committing serious crimes as minors to apply for parole in half the time theyre currently allowed.

The bill sponsored by Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody, of El Paso, would allow people convicted of capital murder or other first-degree felonies committed when they were under 18 to be eligible for parole after serving half of their sentences or 20 years, whichever is shorter. Those convicted of committing capital murder as minors, for example, would be eligible to apply for parole after serving 20 years instead of the current 40 years.

During a public hearing Wednesday, some relatives of people killed during last years mass shooting at Santa Fe High School near Houston spoke out against the legislation, saying it could allow the student accused of carrying out the attack to apply for his release after just 20 years if hes convicted of capital murder and his sentences run concurrently.

Rosie Stone, whose son Chris Stone was among the 10 people killed in the attack, asked lawmakers to exclude mass shooters if they pass the bill.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted his support for the victims families on Thursday, writing, I support this: No parole for mass shooters in Texas.

Moody told The Associated Press on Thursday that he has promised the families he will change the wording of the bill to exclude mass shooters.

This bill certainly deals with eligibility, it doesnt require the parole board to parole anyone, Moody said. I certainly dont think that individual would ever be paroled, but I am very aware of the concerns and fears of these families.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis is accused of carrying out the school attack, which also left 13 people wounded. He was 17 years old at the time, but is now 18.

Texas overall inmate population exploded during the 1990s, growing from roughly 50,000 in 1990 to about 158,000 in 2000, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C.-based research non-profit.

A state budget crunch and proposals to build even more prisons helped launch bipartisan criminal justice reform measures in 2007. Those have allowed the state to close several lockups in recent years and dramatically reduce its incarceration costs.

Marc Levin, vice-president for criminal justice policy at the Texas Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank , said Moodys bill strikes a balance between justice and mercy and would build on other recent changes lawmakers have made within the states criminal justice system.

Because we have strengthened programs in prison and supervision on parole, it does make policymakers willing to explore this, Levin said.

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Follow Clarice Silber on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClariceSilber
RALEIGH, N.C. - The Latest on a new election in the unresolved North Carolina congressional race (all times local):

5:15 p.m.

Republicans are heading for a lively faceoff to decide wholl represent the GOP in a new North Carolina congressional election mandated after a ballot-rigging scandal blocked the former Republican candidates narrow November win.

Ten Republicans filed by Fridays deadline to run in the 9th Congressional District primary in May. Democrat Dan McCready drew no primary challenger.

The Republican candidates include the state senator who sponsored a 2016 state law limiting LGBT rights and the anointed choice of last years GOP candidate.

Also filing was a Raleigh attorney who was a registered Democrat until shortly before he entered last years race for a state Supreme Court seat as a Republican.

If none of the Republicans win more than 30 per cent of the votes in May, a GOP runoff primary would be Sept. 10.

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7:15 a.m.

A conservative soldier in the nations culture wars leads the Republican field for a new North Carolina congressional election, needed because of earlier ballot misdeeds.

Three candidates have entered the Republican primary in North Carolinas 9th congressional district ahead of Fridays deadline.

A new election was ordered after evidence that a political operative working for GOP candidate Mark Harris collected and potentially altered mail-in ballots last year. Harris seemingly narrow victory over Democrat Dan McCready in November was scrapped.

Harris isnt running again. McCready is.

Among the Republicans, state Sen. Dan Bishop of Charlotte is thought to have the deepest pockets. He sponsored HB2, the 2016 state law limiting LGBT rights that prompted businesses, entertainers and others to boycott the state.

Harris backs Stony Rushing, who is staunchly anti-abortion.
MIAMI - The Latest on a police officer accused of shooting and wounding a severely mans caretaker (all times local):

5 p.m.

A jury is deadlocked on three charges against a Florida police officer accused of shooting and wounding a severely autistic mans caretaker. The officer was acquitted on one misdemeanour count.

The Miami Herald reports that the six-person jury found North Miami police officer Jonathan Aledda not guilty Friday on a misdemeanour count of culpable negligence. A second negligence charge and two attempted manslaughter counts resulted in a hung jury.

The jury foreperson said the vote was 5-1 to acquit Aledda of the other charges. Prosecutors must decide whether to retry Aledda on those counts.

Aledda testified this week that he thought Arnaldo Rios Soto had a gun and was holding his caretaker, Charles Kinsey, hostage. It turned out Rios was holding a toy truck. Aledda insisted he never heard another message on police radio that it wasnt a gun.

Prosecutors say Rios had left his nearby group home and sat down in the road to play with his toy. A motorist called 911, saying the man was holding what may be a gun and appeared suicidal. Kinsey was trying to coax him back into the home when police arrived and surrounded them.

____

12:30 p.m.

The fate of a police officer accused of shooting and wounding a severely autistic mans caretaker is now in the hands of a Miami jury.

North Miami police officer Jonathan Aledda is accused of attempted manslaughter. He testified this week that he thought Arnaldo Rios Soto had a gun and was holding his caretaker, Charles Kinsey, hostage. It turned out Rios was holding a toy truck. Aledda insisted he never heard another message on police radio that it wasnt a gun.

The Miami Herald reports the six-person jury got the case Thursday night. Miami-Dade Chief Assistant State Attorney Don Horn told jurors that Aleddas gunshots were not a misfire but intentional, as he tried to kill Rios but wounded Kinsey.

Defence attorney Douglas Hartman blamed faulty radios and poor supervision.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

TORONTO, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canada House Wellness Group Inc. (CSE: CHV) (Canada House or the Company) is pleased to announce that it is oversubscribed in its previously announced unit financing (the Offering). The Company is considering its options and will communicate with subscribers in due course. The Closing of the Offering is expected to occur on or about March 20, 2019.

The net proceeds of the Offering will be used to provide clinic expansion capital for Canada House Clinics; acquisition and developments costs for the Companys Vegreville and Pickering facilities and M&A activities which would expand the Companys production capacity domestically and internationally; and support of Canada House Clinics new client acquisition program implementation, and for general working capital purposes.

Canada House Wellness Group Inc.

Canada House is an experienced, integrated medical cannabis company providing patient-specific cannabinoid therapy products and services through its clinics and licensed producer. Canada House is the parent company of Canada House Clinics Inc., Knalysis Technologies and Abba Medix Corp. For more information, please visit www.canadahouse.ca or www.sedar.com.

For further information, please contact:

Boom Capital Markets

Steve Low

647-620-5101

steve@boomcapitalmarkets.com

Canada House Wellness Group Inc.

Chris Churchill-Smith, CEO

514-313-0102

chris.smith@canadahouse.ca

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information. This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements that relate to, among other things, the Companys clinic, production and technology businesses, its future plans, the Companys markets, objectives, goals, strategies, intentions, beliefs, expectations and estimates, and can generally be identified by the use of words such as may, will, could, should, would, likely, possible, expect, intend, estimate, anticipate, believe, plan, objective and continue (or the negative thereof) and words and expressions of similar import. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, such statements involve risks and uncertainties, and undue reliance should not be placed on such statements. Certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. Material assumptions used to develop forward-looking information in this news release include, among other things, the regulations related to cannabis use under the Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations and the act respecting cannabis and to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the Criminal Code and other Acts, passed by the Canadian Federal government, making cannabis legal for recreational use by October 17, 2018; Company liquidity and capital resources, including the availability of additional capital resources to fund its activities; level of competition; the ability to adapt products and services to the changing market; the ability to attract and retain key executives; and the ability to execute strategic plans. Additional information about material factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations and about material factors or assumptions applied in making forward-looking statements may be found in the Companys most recent annual and interim Managements Discussion and Analysis under Risk and Uncertainties as well as in other public disclosure documents filed with Canadian securities regulatory authorities. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the forward-looking statements contained in this document, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

Neither the CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
MISSOULA, Mont. - The Latest on a Montana trooper shot (all times local):

5:40 p.m.

Montana prosecutors say one of the four victims in two shootings in the Missoula area has died.

Missoula County Chief Deputy Attorney Jason Marks says in court documents filed Friday that Shelley Hayes was killed in the first shooting Thursday night by 29-year-old Johnathan Bertsch.

The documents say Hayes and friend Casey Blanchard were picked up by Blanchards mother Julie at a Missoula bar.

Julie Blanchard told investigators they stopped when a Cadillac Escalade flashed its lights at them. Her son got out to see if the driver needed help when shots from an AR-15 style rifle were fired.

All three were shot. Hayes was killed.

Prosecutors say Bertsch was the driver. They say he shot and critically wounded a Montana Highway Patrol trooper investigating the first shooting about 1 1/2 hours later.

Bertsch has been charged with deliberate homicide and attempted deliberate homicide.

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1:45 p.m.

A critically injured Montana Highway Patrol trooper is being flown to Salt Lake City for treatment.

The Missoulian reports a motorcade escorted the vehicle carrying 35-year-old Wade Palmer Friday from a Missoula hospital to the airport.

Highway patrol officials say Palmer was investigating a shooting that injured three people late Thursday night when he was shot in nearby Evaro.

Police arrested 29-year-old Johnathan Bertsch after a manhunt.

Dozens of law enforcement vehicles from different agencies crowded the hospitals parking lot Friday morning as officers gathered to pay their respects.

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said in a statement that he was heartbroken to hear of Palmers condition, and Attorney General Tim Fox planned to fly to Utah to meet the trooper and his family.

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10:05 a.m.

Authorities say a Montana Highway Patrol trooper is in critical condition after being shot while investigating an earlier shooting in Missoula.

Highway Patrol officials said in a statement Friday another trooper found the wounded 35-year-old Wade Palmer in his patrol car outside a bar in Evaro early Friday.

Patrol officials say Palmer was investigating a vehicle that matched the description of one that had been involved in the late Thursday shooting that injured two men and a woman.

Authorities launched a manhunt that lasted through the night before arresting 29-year-old Johnathan Bertsch before dawn.

Patrol officials say Palmer has been a trooper since 2012. He has a wife and two children, and he won the law enforcement agencys highest honour, the Medal of Valor, in 2015.

9:15 a.m.

Authorities say a Montana Highway Patrol trooper and three other people have been shot and injured in two separate shootings that were related.

The Missoula County sheriffs office says the man suspected of wounding the trooper and the others was arrested early Friday near the small community of Evaro, where the trooper was shot.

The trooper was among law enforcement officers searching for a man suspected of shooting and injuring two men and a woman in their vehicle late Thursday in Missoula.

The search for the shooters vehicle moved northwest of Missoula. Officials said the trooper was shot at a bar in Evaro.

Sheriffs spokeswoman Brenda Bassett did not identify the injured and declined comment on their injuries.

The suspect was identified as 29-year-old Johnathan Bertsch.
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump and his national security team had an hourlong, classified meeting on Afghanistan on Friday, a day after a top Afghan official openly complained that the Trump administration was keeping his government in the dark about its negotiations with the Taliban.

The meeting in the secure room at the Pentagon called the tank included Vice-President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Trumps national security adviser John Bolton, among others. The session was a classified briefing about Afghanistan, according to a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the subject of the private briefing.

The Pentagon has been developing plans to withdraw up to half of the 14,000 troops still in Afghanistan. Patrick Shanahan, acting secretary of defence, said he has no orders to reduce the U.S. troop presence, although officials say that is at the top of the Talibans list of demands in exploratory peace negotiations.

U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad, the administrations main negotiator with the Taliban, recently concluded a 13-day session with leaders of the insurgent group to find a way to end the 17-year war.

Khalilzad said the two sides reached two draft agreements covering the withdrawal of U.S. troops and guarantees that Afghanistan would not revert to a haven for terrorists. But he was unable to persuade the Taliban to launch talks with the Afghan government.

The two sides seem to be in agreement about the withdrawal of American forces, but divided over the timeline and whether a residual force would remain.

Taliban officials have told The Associated Press that the insurgents want a full withdrawal within three to five months, but that U.S. officials say it will take 18 months to two years. The Americans are likely to insist on a residual U.S. force to guard the American embassy and other diplomatic facilities, and may press for a counterterrorism force as well.

Afghanistans national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib visited Washington on Thursday to publicly complain that the Trump administration has alienated the Afghan government, legitimized the militant network and is crafting a deal that will never lead to peace. His blunt remarks prompted a scolding from State Department officials.

Mohib, the former Afghan ambassador to the United States, said talks about withdrawing troops should be conducted with the Afghan government, which has a bilateral security agreement with the U.S. He also suggested that the negotiations conducted by Khalilzad, a veteran American diplomat who was born in Afghanistan, are clouded by Khalilzads political ambitions to lead his native country.

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Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to delete erroneous reference to Dunford attending the meeting.
RICHMOND, Va. - Virginia State Police are taking their search for new recruits to the movies.

A 30-second promotional video is set to begin playing Friday at movie theatres in Virginia and four other states: New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

State police are actively hiring for the 131st basic session scheduled to begin early next year. The agency currently has about 200 vacancies, 10 per cent of its sworn force of about 2,000.

State police and other law enforcement agencies have been struggling to attract enough recruits over the past few years, Spokeswoman Corinne Geller said. State police have tried various recruitment techniques, including using social media.

The challenge is to get more creative in our recruitment, Geller said. With this video showing at movie theatres, we can reach a whole broad spectrum of people.

The recruitment efforts have seen some results over the past year. The department welcomed 80 new troopers last month after their graduation from the training academy. The academy is now preparing for another 79 new recruits to arrive next week to begin their training.

The promotional video shows Virginia state troopers performing in the field, including chasing a car with sirens blaring, running with a police dog and marching in formation. The words meaningful, rewarding, valour, service and pride appear on the screen.

A group of troopers are shown at the end, saying, We are Virginia State Police.

The video will be shown at theatres through Aug. 1.
HONOLULU - W.S. Merwin, a prolific and versatile poetry master who evolved through a wide range of styles as he celebrated nature, condemned war and industrialism and reached for the elusive past, died Friday. He was 91.

A Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, Merwin completed more than 20 books, from early works inspired by myths and legends to fiery protests against environmental destruction and the conflict in Vietnam to late meditations on age and time.

He wrote rhymes and blank verse, a brief report on the month of January and a book-length story in verse about colonialism and the birth of modern Hawaii. Like his hero, Henry David Thoreau, he was inspired equally by reverence for the planet and anger against injustice.

He died in his sleep at his home on the Hawaiian island of Maui, according to publisher Copper Canyon Press and the Merwin Conservancy, which the poet founded.

He is an artist with a very clear spiritual profile, and intellectual and moral consistency, which encompasses both his work and his life, fellow poet Edward Hirsch once said of him.

Merwin received virtually every honour a poet could ask for  more, it turned out, than he desired.

Citing the Vietnam War, he declined a Pulitzer in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders, saying that he was too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel.

He also rejected membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (now the American Academy of Arts and Letters), but changed his mind five years later, in 1977.

Among other awards he accepted: a National Book Award for Migration in 2005, a Pulitzer in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, and such lifetime achievement honours as the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize and a gold medal from the arts academy. He was chosen the countrys poet laureate in 2010 and served a single one-year term.

The changes in his work were no more dramatic than the changes in his life, which spanned continents and religious faiths. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was raised in the urban East during the Great Depression, spent years as a young man in France, Mexico, Spain and England and lived his final decades as a Buddhist in a solar-powered house he designed on an old pineapple plantation, surrounded by a rain forest, on the northeast coast of Maui.

There was something incomplete about the world of streets and sidewalks and cement, he told the Paris Review in 1986. I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jersey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground was really under there.

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City in 1927. He soon moved to Union City, New Jersey, living for years on a street now called W.S. Merwin Way, then to Scranton, Pennsylvania.

In a long, autobiographical poem, Testimony, he remembered his father as a weary, disappointed man, subsisting on pinched salaries and travelling sick with some nameless illuminating ill. His mother was orphaned early in life and grieved again when her baby, a boy she meant to name after her father, died when he had scarcely wakened.

In a household as grim as an abandoned parking lot, the way out was pointed by words, which seemed to float around Merwin like magic bubbles. He would try to memorize scripture he heard his father recite and fairy tales his mother toll him. By age 13, he was already composing hymns.

He received a scholarship from Princeton University, becoming the first family member to attend college, and began meeting some of the great poets of the present and future. Galway Kinnell was a classmate at Princeton, and John Berryman a teacher.

After graduating, he lived in Spain and tutored the son of Robert Graves. In London, he became close with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and was torn by the collapse of their marriage. Merwins then-wife, Dido Merwin, would allege that Plath had a crush on him.

In Washington, D.C., when he was 18, Merwin had a memorable encounter with Ezra Pound, whom he visited at a psychiatric hospital. Pound urged Merwin to write 75 lines a day (advice he did not follow), warned him he didnt have enough experience to write great poetry and advised him to learn another language as a way of better mastering English. Merwin would translate more than 20 books by other poets, from languages ranging from Sanskrit to Swedish.

Merwins promise was obvious. His first collection, A Mask for Janus, was selected by W.H. Auden for the coveted Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and was published in 1952. Throughout the 1950s, he wrote poems and plays, including a verse production of Rumpelstiltskin.

Times spent in Boston with Robert Lowell convinced him to concentrate on poetry, and by the end of the decade, he was regarded as a highly talented artist immersed in Old English literature, his verse likened by The New York Times to a broad river flowing through peaceful land.

Peace  the flow of the natural world  was a cause he actively defended. Near the end of World War II, he spent seven months under psychiatric care because he refused to undergo any duties that might lead to violence, which he had feared since the days his father would beat him.

By the early 1960s, he was marching against nuclear weapons and throwing off the rules of grammar as if they were a suit and tie, inspired by his growing sense that punctuation alluded to an assumed allegiance to the rational protocol of written language.

Meanwhile, Vietnam and urbanization darkened his vision. I/can hear the blood crawling over the plains, he wrote in The Child. In The Crust, the downfall of a tree is a metaphor for the severing of civilization:

and with the tree

went all the lives in it

that slept in it ate in it

met in it believed in it

Merwin examined his own mind in Plane and found it infinitely divided and hopeless/like a stockyard seen from above. His poem Presidents was a roll call of dishonour, for the president of shame, the president of lies and the president of loyalty, who recommends blindness to the blind. In Sunset After Rain, he concluded that The darkness is cold/because the stars do not believe in each other.

In the 1970s, he settled permanently in Hawaii and studied under the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. Divorced years earlier from Dorothy Jeanne Ferry and from Dido Milroy, he married his third wife, Paula Schwartz, in a Buddhist ceremony in 1983. Paula died in 2017.

Merwins work became sparer, rooted in the Hawaiian landscape and his personal past  how its often forgotten, how its never understood at the moment its lived, how words themselves were imperfect bridges to lost time.

___

Italie reported from New York.
Near as I can tell, people have been complaining about the new math for roughly as long as there has been math.

The common-sense critics of ancient Greece, for example, resisted representing zero as a number, because, duh, everyone knows nothing cant be something.

The numerals we use today were introduced to Europe by at least 1202, but didnt replace the Is and Vs of Roman numerals in common use there until the invention of the printing press roughly CCLXXX years later. You imagine some stern dad of the time staring at his kids homework and shaking his head at the absurdity of the need to line digits up in columns representing factors of 10 that reflect the logic of the decimal system.

In my day, we learned to sum DXXVI plus LVIII in our heads

This was true when I was growing up when my aunts and uncles complained that the system of long division I was learning was ridiculous. It remains true today, when everyone is convinced the discovery math their kid is learning is convoluted bafflegab producing a generation of innumerate fools.

That last bit, it seems to me, was behind the announcement of changes to the math curriculum by provincial Minister of Education Lisa Thompson on Friday. There were, what seem to me at first read, to be encouraging elements among the changes, to be sure: more funding for math learning, extra help for schools specifically struggling, more emphasis on training in math for teachers. Given that our students performance in math shows some struggles by international standards, these are understandable enough steps.

Read more:

Ford government announces hikes to high school class sizes, but no changes to kindergarten

Group worries kids with other disabilities forgotten amid autism crisis

Premier Doug Ford says education is going back to the basics

But that all was the fine print to a back to basics pledge that will, as my colleague Kristin Rushowy reports, emphasize fundamental concepts and skills and discourage discovery math. If youre unfamiliar, discovery math is a term not really used in our school system but embraced by critics for teaching students a variety of ways to attack a problem and think through how numbers work.

You can see genuinely amusing videos online, such as one comparing the time it takes for a teacher to explain one approach to multiplying two-digit numbers to doing it the old-fashioned way, then brewing a coffee, and drinking it.

The thing is, that convoluted-seeming explanation of a relatively simple problem is meant to show kids how and why multiplication works the way it does, and to break down the numbers and problems into groups of problems that are easy to solve. Its another way of understanding those numbers and the equation, which may help some students who grasp it do even much more difficult problems quickly in their heads. The teacher isnt teaching them to calculate  thats easy. Shes teaching them what the math means. It isnt a substitute for traditional times tables (which my kids, in Toronto publicly-funded schools, have been memorizing the past few years) and methods, but a supplement to them.

Looking at these approaches  especially as presented in the text books my kids bring home  I admit sometimes my gab is as baffled by the words on the page as much as the next guys. This can be frustrating when youre trying to help with homework.

Have your say

I am convinced that this is actually what fuels a lot of complaints about math curricula through the ages. Mom or dad staring at their kids homework and saying, I dont get it.

And then thinking, Wait, this is Grade 5. I passed Grade 5. If I dont get it, the problem must be with the math, not with me and then channelling their bewildered frustration into a sense of anger.

Personally, Ive learned to try to resist the impulse. Instead, I want to lean into it a bit. Because I want my kids to be smarter than I am, so maybe its actually a good thing if I dont understand their homework. You know, as long as they understand it.

Maybe I come to this more quickly than some other parents because theres a lot of my childrens homework I dont understand, because its written in French, which is a language I have very little facility with. That I cannot function or understand one of Canadas official languages has been a source of regret for me. I wanted my kids not to feel that regret, and to have the opportunities and expanded perspective a second language offers. Which is why I enrolled them in a French immersion program.

All of which means I often get to feel stupid when I try to help them with their homework, because they need to translate it for me before I can even tell whats going on. But thats a good thing.

I know that the things I already know and am good at are things they can learn from me, if Im concerned theyre missing them in school. Its the things I dont know, like French, that I hope they can get from school.

French, and calculus. My expectation is that some of the math concepts that seem silly or strange or convoluted to me (why the heck dont they just put the numbers in a column and add?) will eventually make them better at math than I am. I have nothing against the basics or the fundamentals that Thompson and her government love so much. I just hope they get more than that too  the stuff the inquiry-based systems and striving for automaticity (which is learning to do things easily in your head) of the new math are supposed to teach.

Im not opposed to changing the system. I hope the new resources and emphasis helps. I think they should keep adjusting the system to make it better, and addressing problems that show up in student performance.

Its just that they dont have to dumb it down to make it understandable to me. If I look at my kids math homework and it looks like a foreign language, that could be a good thing, not a problem.
Changes to Ontarios autism program need to be put on hold and the system redesigned to better serve children and be more cost-effective, experts and parents said at a press conference Thursday.

They also said girls and children living in rural areas will lose out on the bulk of the provincial funding under the new plan  which is based on age and provides more money to families with younger children  because they are typically diagnosed later, said Mike Moffatt, a father of two children on the autism spectrum who is also an economist and professor at Westerns Ivey Business School.

Girls get diagnosed significantly later than boys  even when they have the same symptoms, he told reporters at Queens Park.

Girls will receive substantially less funding than boys simply because they are girls.

In rural areas, Moffatt added, there are less existing health services  they are going to get less money from the program because they are not living in downtown Toronto or Ottawa.

Read more:

Parents rally against Ford governments autism changes

Ford government to boost school funding to deal with influx of students with autism

Group worries kids with other disabilities forgotten amid autism crisis

The changes, which come into effect April 1, are meant to clear a 23,000-waitlist and distribute funding to more families, Children, Community and Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod has said.

However, that means the thousands of families currently receiving services could see drastic cutbacks.

Families will be eligible for up to $20,000 a year for each child under 6, to a lifetime maximum of $140,000, and can be used for a number of different services of their choosing. Children older than that can access up to $5,000 a year up to age 18, to a lifetime maximum of $55,000.

For children with intense needs, therapy can cost up to $80,000 a year. Funds are allocated based on income, with higher-income earners ineligible.

Our reforms to the Ontario Autism Program were developed with a belief that all families of children with autism deserve support from their Ontario government, a spokesperson for MacLeod said Thursday.

Three out of four children with autism were not accessing service when the PCs took office, said Kitchener South-Hespeler MPP Amy Fee, a mother of two with autism and a former advocate.

We had to get them something, and that is why we went forward with this plan to try and make sure every child ... gets some help from the provincial government, she said Wednesday at an event in Cambridge with Premier Doug Ford.

But critics have said the plan should be based on need, not age or family income, and is not nearly enough to cover the type of intensive therapy some children require.

This is done correctly in many jurisdictions, for a fraction of the cost, said behavioural therapist Louis Busch, pointing to U.S. states where services are provided directly on the need of each individual, assessed by qualified clinicians and followed-up by an auditing process that ensures quality, and value-for-money.

(In Missouri, where health insurance companies must cover autism services, families can claim up to the equivalent of about $61,000 Cdn per year for a child, with the annual average being less than $6,700.)

He also warned that as many as 1,500 jobs will be lost across the province because service providers are dealing with uncertainty under the new program.

Laura Kirby-McIntosh of the Ontario Autism Coalition said it isnt ever too late for a government to press pause.

School boards are expecting an influx of about 1,000 students with autism into schools as families lose funding and turn to local schools for help. Boards across the province have expressed concerns about having enough money and resources to support them.
A provincial politician has been kicked out of the Progressive Conservative caucus days after he alleged he was being penalized for butting heads with the premiers inner circle.

A letter written by the Tory caucus chair and provided to media says Randy Hillier has been permanently expelled following a review of his behaviour before and after his suspension last month.

In the letter, Daryl Kramp says Premier Doug Ford was disappointed that Hillier continued to escalate the situation in public and appeared unwilling to be a team player.

Fords office did not immediately respond when asked whether the decision was a response to Hilliers statements earlier this week that he had been suspended over long-standing tensions with the premiers top advisers.

Hillier, who represents an eastern Ontario riding, claimed to reveal the real reason for his suspension in a letter to party members. He did not immediately respond to request for comment Friday.

The premier has said the veteran politician was suspended for comments he made as parents of children with autism packed the legislatures galleries in protest of the governments recent funding changes.

Some of the parents said that Hillier said yada yada yada to them near the end of question period, but Hillier maintains the remarks were directed at the Opposition New Democrats.

Hillier said in his letter that he challenged the rationale for his suspension and was presented with a list of what he called questionable and childish issues, including complaints that he didnt clap enough in the House and wasnt sufficiently sharing government posts on social media.

It has become abundantly clear that the motivations involved were far more complicated, resulting in discussions and negotiations regarding my return to caucus becoming stalled, he said in the letter. The sticking point is both the substantive matters of conscience and local representation, and the trivial clapping, retweeting and cheerleading.

The premier said earlier this week that he would talk to Hillier about the matter but declined to elaborate further.

Party members in Hilliers riding had launched a petition calling for him to be reinstated in caucus.

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VANCOUVERA Vancouver businessman and philanthropist caught in a U.S. college-admissions scam appeared in a Boston court Friday and pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud.

David Sidoo, a former CFL player turned businessman, was arrested by U.S. authorities in San Jose, California on March 8. The indictment against him alleged he paid $200,000 to an unnamed person flown from Tampa to Vancouver to take college entrance exams for Sidoos two sons or replaced the students responses with those of the test taker. Sidoo allegedly submitted the fraudulently obtained scores to colleges and universities in Massachusetts.

The charges have not been proven in court.

He looks forward to fully contesting the charges in a well-respected court and not in the media, read a statement released on Friday from Sidoos lawyers.

Sidoo was released on a $1.5-million bond and planned to return home to Canada, according to his lawyers. They asked the public not to rush to judgment.

The charges against Sidoo were part of a U.S. federal investigation dubbed Operation Varsity Blues into parents and coaches accused of cheating to get students into elite U.S. colleges. Fifty people were charged, including 33 parents and nine athletic coaches, although the U.S. Attorneys Office noted many students were unaware their parents had arranged to cheat on their behalf.

Read more:

Editorial | Cheating parents teach their kids all the wrong lessons

Education consultant warns of sketchy services in B.C. amid U.S. college admissions scandal

Actors Lori Loughlin, Felicity Huffman among dozens charged in college entrance bribery scheme

The allegations range from bribing coaches and university administrators to designate children as athletic recruits, making it easier for them to get into a college, to paying proxies to take entrance exams in order to get higher scores on the SAT or ACT tests.

On Thursday, Vancouver-based East West Petroleum Corp. announced Sidoo had stepped down as president and CEO, while Vancouver-based mineral exploration company Advantage Lithium Corp. said Sidoo had taken a temporary leave of absence as president.

Mr. Sidoo has decided it would be in the best interests of the company to take a leave of absence from his executive role in the company, said the East West press release. The subject matter of the legal proceedings is unrelated to company activities or business and Mr. Sidoo remains as a director of the company.

The federal investigation put a host of rich and famous parents in the spotlight for allegations they bought their way into colleges for their kids.

Actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin were also charged. At a brief court appearance Wednesday, a judge allowed Loughlin to be released on $1-million bond and travel to the Vancouver area to work, but otherwise imposed strict travel restrictions. Loughlins lawyer declined to comment outside the courtroom.

That was before Crown Media, which owns Hallmark Channel, announced Friday it was cutting ties with Loughlin and stopping production on all projects involving the actress, including Garage Sale Mysteries, some of which shoot in Vancouver.

With files from the Canadian Press

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CHICAGO, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Newberry Library is delighted to announce the appointment of Daniel Greene as its next President and Librarian.



Greene, who has served as Exhibitions Curator and Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) since 2014 and Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University since 2013, will join the Newberry August 19. At that time, he will succeed David Spadafora, who has led the Newberry as President and Librarian since 2005. Spadafora announced his retirement last June, after which the Board of Trustees set in place a rigorous search process for his successor.

An accomplished scholar devoted to the public humanities, Danny will propel the Newberry forward with both innovative thinking and a commitment to the mission that has sustained us as an institution over the past 132 years, said David Hilliard, Chair of the Newberry Board of Trustees. Dannys profoundly important work with the Holocaust Memorial Museum is consonant with our own institutional priorities, and we look forward to seeing him further the Newberrys mission to promote the humanities and forge connections among scholars and between scholars and the public.

In 2018, Greene curated Americans and the Holocaust, a groundbreaking exhibition examining the major cultural forcesisolationism, xenophobia, racism, and antisemitismthat influenced Americans responses to Nazism in the 1930s and 40s. Through Greenes extensive research and vivid storytelling, the exhibition immersed visitors in a harrowing chapter in American history while illuminating the complex and painful reality of widespread ambivalence toward victims of the Holocaust.

Extending the exhibitions themes beyond the USHMM galleries, Greene has helped develop educational programming, public events, and web resources for various audiences. He is currently curating a traveling version of the show scheduled to visit 50 libraries across the United States between 2020 and 2022, in partnership with the American Library Association. These efforts reflect Greenes integrative approach to engaging students, teachers, scholars, and lifelong learners across platforms and using history as a lens for understanding the present.

Prior to his arrival at USHMM, Greene spent several years on staff at the Newberry, serving as Director of the librarys Scholl Center for American History and Culture and then as Vice President for Research and Academic Programs. In these previous roles at the Newberry, Greene oversaw its fellowships program, developed digital resources for scholars and teachers, and curated Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North, a major 2013 exhibition in partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art.

It is a privilege to return to the Newberry, a world-renowned institution whose ideals related to truth, access, and historical inquiry align so closely with my own, said Daniel Greene. I look forward to building upon the Newberrys success while seeking to expand its role as a hub of learning and discovery for all.

Greene is the author of The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity, which was awarded the Saul Viener Prize by the American Jewish Historical Society. He is also the co-editor and co-author of Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North, the companion text to the exhibition he curated at the Newberry.

Greene earned his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and his BA from Wesleyan University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Greene will inherit the leadership of an institution that has just completed its second comprehensive fundraising campaign this decade, as well as a major renovation of its first floor.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/be13d7a7-e873-493f-a98b-0180e675a014
SPRINGFIELD  A bill making its way through the Illinois Senate would prevent any presidential or vice-presidential candidate from appearing on state election ballots if they do not release their previous five years of tax return documents.

The Executive Committee passed state Sen. Tony Munozs Senate Bill 145 on a 13-4 partisan-line vote Wednesday after a brief discussion as to whether the bill runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution.

For Sen. Dale Righter, a Mattoon Republican, the answer was obvious.

In my 22 years in the General Assembly, this might be the most clearly unconstitutional legislative proposal I have ever voted on, he said.

But Jeff Radue, of the progressive advocacy group Indivisible Chicago, read from a statement made by Harvard Constitutional law scholar Lawrence Tribe, who said the mandated release of tax returns would not be unconstitutional.

Upon questioning from Righter, however, Radue said the statement was not made in relation to Senate Bill 145, but on the question of mandated tax return release in general.

Radue said Tribe did a review of similar measures in California and Washington, but bills in those states and others are still making their way through the legislative process.

Righter cited two Supreme Court cases, Term Limits v. Thornton and Cook v. Gralike, which he believes set a precedent of unconstitutionality for ballot qualification measures.

According to the nonprofit, nonpartisan political website Ballotpedia, the Cook v. Gralike decision prohibited Missouri from placing warnings on ballots for candidates that did not support term limits. The Thornton decision invalidated an Arkansas law that denied ballot access to any congressional candidate that had already served three terms. The latter ruling said states cannot impose qualifications for prospective members of Congress that are stricter than those specified in the Constitution.

Righter also pointed out the Illinois bill would not require the release of tax returns from any of the states constitutional officers or other elected officials.

Since a vice presidential candidate is not chosen prior to primary filing, Radue said the bill contains mechanisms to mandate release of the documents prior to the general election.

The documents would be released to the Illinois secretary of states office and posted to the offices website. Social security numbers, addresses and telephone numbers would be redacted.

A similar bill passed out of the Illinois Senate in 2017, but it died in the House during the previous legislative session. That bill was carried by former state Sen. Daniel Biss, of Evanston, and it passed with 32 votes in favor.

Notably, then-Sen. Kwame Raoul, who is now the state attorney general, voted in favor of the measure. Raouls office would be in charge of defending the measure if it passes the House, is signed by the governor and faces a court challenge.

On Wednesday, Raouls office said it has not yet taken a position on Senate Bill 145.

Reach reporter Jerry Nowicki at Jnowicki@capitolnewsillinois.com
Some of the country's most powerful state attorneys general are signaling they're willing to take action against Facebook, Google and other tech giants, warning that the companies have grown too big and powerful - and that Washington has been too slow to respond.

For many of these top law enforcement officials, the fear is that Silicon Valley has amassed too much personal information about web users and harnessed it in a way that's jeopardized people's privacy and undermined competition, often without much oversight.

"I think what we've found is that big tech has become too big, and that while we may have been asleep at the wheel, they were able to consolidate a tremendous amount of power," Jeff Landry, the Republican attorney general of Louisiana, said in an interview.

Federal regulators have the primary responsibility for keeping watch over Silicon Valley - they can break up monopolies, for example, and penalize companies for privacy abuses. But some state officials feel that Washington bears some of the blame for the tech industry's string of scandals in the first place. Lawmakers in Congress long have struggled to adopt a national law targeting tech giants' data-collection practices, while federal agencies have allowed many of the headline-grabbing mishaps at Facebook and Google to go unpunished.

In response, states like Arizona and Mississippi now are taking aim at Google for the way it collects and monetizes web users' data. The District of Columbia, meanwhile, is challenging Facebook's business practices in court. And there are "numerous bipartisan discussions" among Democrats and Republicans about other areas where attorneys general can coordinate their attention on big tech, Landry said.

"We are in a moment where the federal government's level of effectiveness and engagement on a range of issues, on technology, consumer protection and privacy, is limited," added Phil Weiser, the Democratic attorney general of Colorado. Absent federal intervention, he said, "states in general or state AGs are able to act."

Asked about the criticisms, Will Castleberry, Facebook's vice president of state and local public policy, said the social giant has had "productive conversations" with state AGs. "Many officials have approached us in a constructive manner, focused on solutions that ensure all companies are protecting people's information, and we look forward to working with them," he added in a statement.

Google declined comment for this story.

The appetite for action seemed apparent last week, when state officials gathered in Washington for a series of events including an annual forum with the National Association of Attorneys General, where Landry is president. Concerns about the tech industry's privacy practices were on full display, while a few miles away, the District of Columbia appeared in court to argue that Facebook had deceived its users about its approach to collecting and monetizing their data. The lawsuit stems from Facebook's entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that improperly accessed data about roughly 87 million of the social-site's users without their knowledge or permission.

Federal watchdogs have been probing the matter for nearly a year, and they could soon bring a historic fine. But D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine opted not to wait for his federal counterparts, and he filed his case in December, which Facebook has sought to dismiss on grounds that D.C. lacks jurisdiction. Both sides are set to air their next round of arguments in front of a D.C. Superior Court judge on March 22. A slew of additional states, including New York and Pennsylvania, are proceeding with Facebook probes of their own.

Other state attorneys general have set their sights on Google, fearing the search, advertising and mobile giant knows too much about consumers -- and can easily squash its competitors. Some states' calls for stronger antitrust enforcement stand in stark contrast with Washington, where federal regulators investigated Google but ultimately decided in 2013 against breaking apart the company.

The latest to take aim was Arizona's GOP attorney general, Mark Brnovich, who began investigating the tech giant's data-collection practices in 2018. Last week, Brnovich reaffirmed his concerns with Google's use of location data gleaned from Android smartphones during a private event for fellow Republican attorneys general, according to a person who attended the gathering but asked not to be identified because it was off record. Brnovich also raised new questions about Google's search practices, particularly the company's approach to surfacing results to queries about local businesses, the person said.

Asked Thursday if the states needed to open an antitrust probe of Google, Brnovich replied: "Maybe," adding: "I think there are a lot of us in the AG world that are collecting information, trying to get documents, and trying to get to the bottom of whether that's a reasonable step or a reasonable option." He said he could not comment on any open investigations.

Google's challenges could span far beyond Arizona. Before becoming Minnesota's attorney general, Democrat Keith Ellison argued in Congress for the federal government to embark on an antitrust probe of the tech giant. Ellison's office declined comment for this story. In Missouri, meanwhile, the state embarked on a wide-ranging antitrust and privacy investigation into Google under former Attorney General Josh Hawley, who left the office for the U.S. Senate in January. A spokesman for his successor declined to say if it's still under way.

Louisiana's Landry slammed Google last week for being "more and more manipulative" with its search results. And in Mississippi, Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood has sued the company for its handling of students' data. For years, the two sides have warred repeatedly, with Google at one point suggesting that the Democratic attorney general had wrongly targeted the company with the aid of its foes in the movie industry. In an interview, Hood faulted Google for trying to "send a message to other states that we will sue you."

"You cannot allow this power to accumulate in the hands of this few people," Hood said. "At some point, there's going to have to be a reckoning for it."

In these and other probes, state attorneys general are powerful in their own right: They can leverage local laws to fine companies for their misdeeds, and in some cases, their rules are tougher than what the federal government has at its disposal -- especially in California under a landmark privacy statute adopted in 2018.

But they often band together to take aim at common targets, and at their most effective, state attorneys general can prod the federal government to do the same. The tech industry learned that lesson firsthand two decades ago, when state attorneys general helped drive a landmark U.S. antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft -- and sought later to block a settlement out of concern the federal government had been too soft on the company.

The most recent wave of activity began in September, when the Justice Department asked attorneys general to discuss the power of Facebook, Google and online platforms. The session in Washington had been designed to probe claims that some tech companies censor conservatives -- a concern Democrats don't share -- but the conversation proved far more wide ranging, with Mississippi's Hood and others weighing whether to partner in a formal way to study big tech companies.

Roughly six months after that DOJ summit, Xavier Beccera, the Democratic attorney general of California, said their early talks were "perceived as something worthwhile." He acknowledged in an interview there's been "increased discussions among the state AGs" about the privacy challenges and other troubles posed by some of the tech industry's biggest players.

Beccera added: "I think everyone's trying to get a handle on what we can do."
ALTON  Senior Services Plus CEO Jonathan Becker issued a statement this week in response to ongoing litigation involving the death of a 90-year-old Godfrey woman after police say she was neglected by her son.

Jennifer Fish, on behalf of the estate of Maria L. Stiles, has named Larry D. Parker, 70, of the 3200 block of Morkel Drive, in the suit. In addition to the civil suit, Parker faces criminal charges of abuse or neglect of an elder person resulting in death.

On Dec. 20, 2016, Stiles was admitted to OSF St. Anthonys hospital under suspicion of elder abuse, the suit states. She had been seen since 2013 by the nurses association and by in-home care aids under a contract with Senior Services Plus. The contract was for a home health care aide to visit one house each day, seven days a week.

SSP is named in the suit along with Robings Manor, of Brighton, and Southwestern Illinois Visiting Nurse Association.

The nine-count suit is seeking at least $50,000 in each count.

Becker issued the following response on behalf of SSP:

On March 7, 2019, an article was published on the Alton Telegraphs website citing a recent lawsuit filed in which Senior Services Plus, Inc. is named a defendant. The death of Maria Stiles was a tragedy. Senior Services Plus, Inc. is and has been fully cooperating with officials in the case and our agency takes the health and safety of our clients and all seniors seriously as well as our obligation to report concerns of potential abuse and neglect.

SSP was contacted regarding the provision of services at the home. The conditions of the residence and client were found to be unsuitable by SSP staff and a report was immediately issued to Adult Protective Services. SSP vehemently denies any wrongdoing in this matter. SSP will continue to report these cases and work with authorities to pursue perpetrators of such crimes to the fullest extent of the law.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating the spike in injuries related to the use of electric scooters. The devices, the latest fad in transportation, have become ubiquitous on U.S. streets and sidewalks.

The CDC is working in collaboration with the Austin Public Health Department in "developing and evaluating methods to find and count the number of injuries related to dockless electric scooters," a CDC spokeswoman said.

The investigation, the first from the CDC into scootermania injuries, comes after spreading reports of injuries and deaths related to scooters in cities from Washington to Los Angeles and Dallas; it also follows recent news of scooter failures and breakdowns.

The devices, which became wildly popular soon after entering U.S. markets a year ago, are now in dozens of cities nationwide and have led to a new category of injuries in U.S. emergency rooms. Cases of broken noses, wrists and shoulders, along with facial lacerations and fractures have been reported since last summer.

"This is kind of like a disease outbreak investigation - the disease in this case being injuries associated with dockless electric scooters," said Jeff Taylor, manager of the Epidemiology and Disease Surveillance Unit with Austin Public Health, who is overseeing the study with the CDC.

"As we were seeing more scooters, we were hearing more and more from emergency medical services about accidents and injuries," he said. "We were also hearing from hospitals about injuries. Ultimately we are doing the study to better understand how we can prevent the injuries from happening."

The CDC and the Austin health officials are examining severe injuries that occurred in Austin in a two-month period last fall, interviewing hundreds of injured riders and analyzing medical charts.

Scooter companies Bird, Spin and Lime say they support the CDC study. The companies have said safety is a top priority and they encourage users to take precautions such as avoid wearing headphones or carrying anything in their hands while riding. Bird, Lime and Skip have basic safety information on their apps and labels on their scooters, as well as training instructions. Bird requires users to upload a driver's license to confirm they are at least 18 years old. Some of the companies say they provide free helmets.

"Safety needs to be more than a priority for scooter companies. It needs to be the underpinning of the entire program," Spin said in a statement. "We are working diligently to formalize rigorous operational procedures, fortify our hardware, enforce rules around usage and parking, and educate the public on safe riding and driving behavior. We plan to do all of this enforcement and education in close partnership with cities and universities, who must also do their part to ensure streets are well maintained and that vulnerable street users are protected from collision with cars and trucks."

Lime, one of the world's largest scooter companies, last month urged riders to take precautions while operating its scooters citing a technical "bug" that can cause "sudden excessive braking during use." Last year the company also pulled scooters out of California after discovering that a number of them may have been carrying batteries with the potential to catch fire.

"At Lime, the safety of our riders and the community is our number one priority," Lime said in a statement. "We appreciate the CDC's leadership on this very important issue, and we look forward to working with the industry, medical community and regulators to create a meaningful ecosystem for this new and evolving technology."

Paul Steely White, director of safety policy and advocacy at Bird said the company is encouraged that the CDC is examining the growing impact of e-scooters on mobility within cities.

"Data from tens of millions of shared e-scooter rides indicate that e-scooters and bicycles have similar risks and vulnerabilities," he said. "Bird continues, along with our Global Safety Advisory Board, to advance policies that enhance the safety of those riding e-scooters and advocate for more protected bike lanes in our communities. It is beyond reproach that American cities must shift away from cars, and redesigning streets to protect those who choose bikes, e-scooters, and other micro-mobility options is what we need to keep our commuters safe."

So far, Taylor said, data show many perceptions about scooter injuries are just plain inaccurate, including that a leading cause of injury is collision with cars.

"There may have been a perception that accidents with other motor vehicles where a primary cause of the injuries, but I don't think we have found that. Some people say these accidents primarily occur at night when it's dark, but we didn't find that. They occur at all times of the day," Taylor said. "Some people wonder whether people had been under the influence of alcohol and we are not going to find that."

The report will issue recommendations as early as this spring, Taylor said. Among the recommendations, he said, are the use of helmets. The findings reveal a significant rate of head injuries and only a 2 percent rate of helmet usage in the sample studied, he said. The recommendations will also discourage pairs of riders on a single scooter, which he said leads to not only distractions, but also a lack of balance and more likelihood of a crash. He said it also would recommend women wearing on heels switch to flats when riding.

The CDC provided four epidemiologist to assist in the data gathering and analysis of the Austin study of the "microbility vehicles."
15.03.2019: Borregaard ASA ("Borregaard", OSE ticker: BRG)

Reference is made to the stock exchange notice of 1 March 2019 where Borregaard announced the intent to repurchase up to 300,000 of its outstanding common stock.

Borregaard has today purchased 15,000 own shares through broker at an average price of NOK 85.87 per share.

After this transaction Borregaard holds a total of 313,910 own shares, representing 0.31% of total shares outstanding.

Contact:

Lotte Kvinlaug, Investor Relations Officer, +47 922 86 909

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to Section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.
NACIMIENTO DE LOS NEGROS, Mexico - Their ancestors were African-Americans who escaped from the United States to Mexico in the 19th century, fleeing the slave trade for a desert village at the base of the Sierra Madre mountains. They were called the Mascogos, roughly 60 black families who spoke and prayed in English as they hid from the white men who wanted to put them back in shackles.

That was six generations ago. Since then, their English vocabulary has dissipated, replaced by the Spanish of Northern Mexico. Droughts destroyed their farms. Drug cartels have inched closer to their village, whose name translates literally as "Birth of the Blacks."

Now members of this community of 300 are heading back to the United States. It's another vector in a history of migration, sometimes voluntary, sometimes forced, from slave ships across the Atlantic to the cross-border scramble for 21st-century jobs.

At a time of unprecedented debate over immigration, and the current surge in border crossings, the history of the Mascogos reflects the long view on human migration, the way a community can be pushed and pulled across borders over centuries, eventually returning to the place from which they fled.

Their relationship with the United States is fraught, but their reason for returning - both legally and illegally - is not unique: They're looking for work. Dramatic droughts have desiccated the corn and bean farms of Mexico's northern Coahuila state. More than half the village's livestock have died. Where there are agriculture jobs, they pay just a few dollars a day. New factory jobs in Mexico are hours away, and don't pay much more.

"There's one thing we all know now," Juana Vazquez, 50, said in Spanish. "If you want work, you cross the border."

This week, Vazquez was packing her bags for West Texas, where she's been hired to clean a ranch house in the town of Fort Stockton. She has received a temporary work visa. She expects to earn about $10 per hour.

Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans receive temporary work visas in the United States every year. Thousands more cross the border illegally in search of jobs. But for Vazquez and the other Mascogos traveling to the United States, those decisions come with a complicated subtext: How does it feel to return voluntarily to the country where your ancestors were enslaved?

"That was a different time," Vazquez said. "Yes, it makes us sad, but it's over. There is work in the United States, and I have no problem crossing the border to do it."

Other Mascogos have made deals with their children: They can work in the United States, but they must not settle there. That's the agreement that one of Vazquez's cousins, Julio Cesar Salazar, made with his five kids, two of whom are now in the United States.

"Over and over, I tell them, you don't abandon this place," he said. "You can work there, but this is your place."

Vazquez, like the rest of the Mascogos, grew up vaguely aware of her community's circuitous trajectory through history. The village celebrated Juneteenth, the holiday on June 19 that commemorates the abolition of slavery in the United States. Women wore dresses that had changed little from the Antebellum South. Her grandmother, Lucia Vazquez Valdez, still sings hymns in English; she attached her family's American name, Payne, to her Mexican one.

But even if Vazquez wanted to forget the history of the Mascogos or her connection to the group, it would be nearly impossible. Her dark brown skin and her hair are rare features in this part of Mexico. When she travels outside Nacimiento, people call her la negrita - the little black one. They look at her quizzically and ask: Where do you come from?

"I tell them, "There are black people in northern Mexico!"

- - -

The Mascogos descend from slaves who escaped from plantations in the American South during the 17th and 18th centuries. They fled first to Florida, which was then owned by the Spanish, who generally allowed escaped slaves to live as free men and women. Some lived alongside members of the Seminole tribe and eventually became known as Black Seminoles - or, in Spanish, Mascogos.

The United States took control of Florida in 1821. Nine years later, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced native tribes in the Southeast, including the Mascogos, along the Trail of Tears, to Oklahoma.

That move made them once again vulnerable to Southern slaveholders. So in July 1850, 309 Mascogos escaped to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished decades earlier, crossing the border near what is now Eagle Pass, Texas.

They settled in Nacimiento, in the state of Coahuila. But many returned to work as "Indian Scouts" for the United States, defending military installations in Texas from other tribes. In exchange, the Mascogos were offered land and citizenship in America, a pledge that apparently dissolved at the end of the 19th century.

For much of the 20th century, the Mascogos lived and farmed in Nacimiento, a two-hour drive from Eagle Pass. But by the 1990s, it had become increasingly clear that the job prospects in the United States were better.

"For a lot of the Mascogos, they don't look to the United States as a place where they were enslaved, but as a place they were able to escape as free people, a place they can now freely choose to return to. It's a narrative of resilience and strength," said Rocio Gil, who is completing her PhD dissertation on the group at the City University of New York.

Some got tourist visas and overstayed them. Others took the short swim across the Rio Grande.

Starting in 1999, Servando Cervantes crossed the border illegally once a year to work on farms. Eventually, he says, he secured permanent residence.

He thought about what it meant to return to a country that had enslaved his ancestors. He didn't see the choice as a moral dilemma - it was strictly economic.

"I'm not going to blame a child for the sins of his father," he said.

He's back living in Nacimiento now. He says he lost his green card and was deported a few years ago, after being arrested for fighting in a bar. Now he watches as neighbors leave the village, one by one, to join what has become a torrent of migration.

Some are farmworkers who save up to $2,000 to pay smugglers to get them over the border. Some are students at John Horse Secondary School, named after the Mascogo who led the group to Mexico in 1850.

Enrique Salazar, a 17-year-old senior in a New York Yankees shirt, said: "As soon as I get the chance to go to the U.S., I'm out of here. I care about the culture of our tribe, but I also need to make some money."

- - -

A neighboring tribe with historic ties to the United States and Mexico, the Kickapoo, has been granted citizenship in both countries. The Mascogos have made several attempts, but so far have not been recognized by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. A feud with the Seminoles, who argue that "Black Seminoles" aren't genuine members of the tribe, has made their chances of securing U.S. citizenship unlikely.

That has left Mascogos to weigh the same options as many in Northern Mexico: Wait for a visa, or take your chances with the river.

People here estimate that roughly half the village has moved to the United States, leaving an eerie quiet over the few paved streets. Half-built houses stand unfinished, awaiting more remittances. There are pickups with Texas license plates, lawn mowers purchased at Home Depot, clotheslines with Walmart T-shirts.

"This place is emptying out," said Evangelina Barnes, 50, a Mascogo who was born in Nacimiento but now lives in San Antonio.

This week, Barnes was one of several Mascogos back from the United States for a visit.

Corina Harington, 45, was a small child in the 1980s when her father took their family from Nacimiento across the border to San Antonio. She's lived there since, now as a U.S. citizen. Last week, she was back in the village with her cousin, Dina Rodriguez, also a Mascogo, who lives in Lubbock, Texas.

"I understand why they want to migrate," Harrington said. "I love this place, but the fact is, there's really not much here. This is not an easy place to make a living anymore."

During their visit, Harrington and Rodriguez sat down with Lucia Vazquez Valdez, the oldest living Mascogo.

At 86, Valdez is blind and has difficulty hearing. She remembers little of the English her parents and grandparents spoke fluently. But, like magic, she can sing the English words to the hymns and gospels her ancestors once sang.

This week, Rodriguez and Harrington sang with her, recording videos on their phones. When Vazquez Valdez sang, her voice was louder and more assertive than when she spoke, as if she was channeling an entire chorus.

"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done," she intoned in unaccented English.

"That's something we'll share back in Texas," Harrington said.
Mercy Corps is aleading global organization powered by the belief that a better world ispossible. In disaster, in hardship, in more than 40 countries around the world,we partner to put bold solutions into action  helping people triumph overadversity and build stronger communities from within, now, and for thefuture.We help people overcome povertyand conflict. Working with communities, we leverage local logic to help peopletransform their lives. To grow more food, earn higher incomes and ultimatelyadvocate for their needs. We see global challenges as an invitation to pioneerinnovative, sustainable solutions. During our 34-year history, our work hasimproved more than 170 million lives in more than 115 countries around theworld.
Oxfam is aninternational confederation of 17 affiliates networked together in more than 90countries committed to ridding the world of poverty and injustice. To achievethis, we support local projects in developing countries, we lobby governmentsand companies to take into account the interests of the poorest people and wecampaign to involve citizens in our work. We implement our programs by workingwith local NGO partners and civil society organizations and engaging withprivate sector and governments. Oxfam employs over 6,000 people worldwide inmore than 90 countries. In Uganda, our program is anchored on three broadthemes deliberately focused on Womens Rights: Resilient Livelihoods,Governance and Accountability and Humanitarian Preparedness and Response.
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Providence Resources P.l.c. (the Company)

Notification of Interest in Share Capital

Providence Resources P.l.c. have been informed by The Capital Group Companies, Inc. on 15 March 2019 that with effect from 13 March 2019;

The Capital Group Companies, Inc. now holds 23,735,000 ordinary shares of 0.10 each in the capital of the Company representing 3.97% of the issued ordinary share capital.

Tony OReilly

Director

15 March 2019

End
The Office of theUnited Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on December 14,1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. UNHCRs mandate under the Statuteof the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is to leadand co-ordinate action for international protection to refugees; seek permanentsolutions for the problems of refugees and safeguard refugee rights andwell-being. UNHCR has an additional mandate concerning issues of statelessness,as it is given a designated role under Article 11 of the 1961 Convention on theReduction of Statelessness.
"Oh wait, is she crying?" the photographer almost gives out of squeal of surprise. Just seconds ago, 58-year-old Rita was a picture of conviviality. Grinning from ear to ear, generously baring her yellowing white teeth and pink gums, the chimpanzee seemed like she was eager to shake hands with her new visitors. Sitting behind an iron cage at Delhi's National Zoological Park, Rita is suddenly quiet, one of her translucent grey eyes watering.

Was the earlier greeting a "fear grin", an expression of submissive wariness in front of complete strangers? Or was she thankful for new faces? Her caretaker Vinod is the only human she sees daily, after all. And the ageing ape hardly ventures out of her white-and-grey housing complex into the green expanse outside, a thickly wooded enclosure, over 2,000 square metres wide, encompassing a shallow moat and a hillock studded with a decaying Mughal-era monument.

Vinod, who has known Rita for the last one and a half years, says we have caught her in a good mood today. He playfully calls out her name, pats her cheek and quickly administers dexorange syrup, an oral supplement for iron deficiency. Vijay does not think Rita has suddenly switched from warm and friendly to distant and forlorn. "It's just a chemical or allergic reaction in the eye," he assures before shutting off the iron gates to let her nap before coming back to serve lunch. Five'o clock everyday is the last he sees of Rita, leaving behind three jugs of water in her cage with the lights, fans and cooler on. No one really knows how she spends her time once the shutters come down. She is the last survivor in her house, bereft of company.

Rita is special. She is the oldest chimpanzee in India now. Some say she is probably the oldest in Asia too. Chimpanzees in captivity generally live longer (between 50 to 60 years) than those in the wild (up to 40 years). Rita's hermit-like presence in the precincts evokes smiles, praise and some version of protective concern. She is obedient and non-fussy and has seen a lot, her caregivers say. Her 2017 birthday was celebrated for the first time with much fanfare. Thanks to Rita, the Delhi zoorecently embroiled in a controversy over under-reporting of animal deathsfound a place in the Limca Book of Records on March 14 for housing India's oldest chimpanzee. For Rita, though, it is hardly an enviable honour.

A chimpanzee, by disposition, is highly social, much more than a gorilla and orangutan. Even the information plaque outside Rita's enclosure reads, "Chimpanzees are social and intelligent primates living in groups of 15-20." But Rita has been trudging a long and lonely road with quiet grace.

Rita came to Delhi on February 27, 1964 from an Amsterdam zoo as a four-year-old. No one knows the details of her biological parents, record-keeping was not quite thorough back then. Soon, she found three young companions in 1971. But by 1974, she had already seen one of them die and one more sent to a zoo in Kerala. London zoological society gifted two chimps in 1974. One of them was Max. A robust adult male, Max would turn out to be Rita's one true mate. She had four children with Max, from 1977 through 1981. All four died almost within days of being born.

No cause was mentioned for the first death. In the second, the mother would not let go of her newborn child or let anyone come near to inspect. Only the decomposed body of the child could be recovered. Born December 16, 1978; Dead December 28, 1978, the records say. "Carcass decomposed as mother did not give after death of the second child. The third one, which died of ulcerative colitis, survived the longest: eight months. The fourth one died in three days due to hemorrhagic enteritis. Soon, perhaps on doctor's recommendation, Max was dispatched to the Jaipur zoo for another male named Gogo. But Rita and Gogo could never really hit it off. The mid-1980s would see two more chimps from Japan, three-year-old Ruby and four-year-old Rustom, come to Delhi.

By 1990, Rita and Gogo are packed off to Chhatbir zoo in Punjab for lack of any chimpanzees there. Gogo dies in Punjab.

Meanwhile, Ruby and Rustom in Delhi never had children in Delhi. Rustom was your typical alpha male, very domineering and aggressive. He would sometimes throw stones at visitors, and zoo authorities had to install an extra layer of protection around his enclosure. When two more male chimpsMorris and Monnywere brought in from Germany, Rustom would beat them up, too. Thankfully for Ruby, Monny and Morris, Rustom was exchanged for Rita from the Punjab zoo in 2006. Rita was back to homeground with three compatible friends for company. An old hand at the Delhi zoo says Rita was the happiest when Monny and Morris were around. She took great care of them like they were her own children.

But when Monny died in 2014 due to tuberculosis, Rita did not eat for four days. She practically stopped coming out of her cage and became a recluse.

Our closest evolutionary cousins, chimps are supposed to share an almost 99 per cent DNA match with humans. Frans De Waal, famous Dutch primatologist and author of books like Chimpanzee Politics, The Age of Empathy and Our Inner Ape, has sought to prove that morality in humans would not have been possible without the "emotional building blocks" seen amongst chimpanzees. English primatologist Jane Goodall has even proposed that chimpanzees are spiritually inclined. Subhankar Chakraborty, former biologist at the National Institute of Advance Studies in Bengaluru, says, " If a social animal has been separated or kept under solitary confinement, then it induces a tremendous amount of social and psychological stress on them on a daily basis. And therefore, they start to self-deteriorate." The assistant veterinary officer at the zoo, Dr Vikas Kumar, says Rita has no illness even at this age, "She is just dull and weak due to old age".



Vinod says Rita, unlike Rustom and Max, never acquired any bad habits. He found Rustom to be the most complicated of the lot. Much more than Max who would smoke, he says, and throw faeces and stones when he perceived threat. "Rita obediently drinks her milk and returns the empty jug when I ask her for it. She even hands me her blanket for cleaning during the winters," Vinod fondly attests to Rita's good conduct. But she stays inside her cage, unseen by the curious visitors. She may come out, says Vinod, if it rains in the morning.
Nearly 1.98 lakh BSNL and MTNL employees would breathe easy on Friday as their unpaid salaries were taken up for clearance by the telecom PSUs, department of telecom officials said. A day earlier, about Rs 500 crore was released by the government in the wake of a salary crisis.

The payment of salary for the month of February 2019 got affected after the BSNL management took a decision in January to pay salary to all staffers depending on the revenue receipts of a telecom circle. Deficits in revenue collections occurred in circles of north and west India, where BSNL is on a back foot after strong inroads made by Reliance Jio in mobile data services.



BSNL employees in Kerala, however, did not have to face the delay in their salary payment. Kerala is among the most profitable circle of BSNL and has witnessed an increase in operating profit this year, before calculating depreciation of assets in its books.



Earlier, the telecom PSU had announced that it would pay salaries for March onwards on a regular basis. There will be no more problems about salary payment as BSNL's own revenues would start to flow in from March onwards. I was told by them that Rs 850 crore is the amount earmarked for salary payment, of which Rs 322 crore will be used to clear past dues, said Manoj Sinha, Union telecom minister on Friday.



After this, there will be no more employee dues," Sinha told reporters. In fact, if everything goes as planned with BSNLs cash flow, employees are likely to receive their March salaries on time by March 30.



The minister said that pending dues of Rs 171 crore of MTNL was also released by the Department of Telecom. Both BSNL and MTNL work on various projects of department of telecommunications and have dues running to about Rs 6,000 crore for BSNL and Rs 500 crore for MTNL, according to Sanchar Nigam Executive Union (SNEU), BSNL officers union.



There are deliberate attempts by the government to stall BSNL's progress. This is also achieved by blocking our payments by DoT, said Aftab Ahmed Khan, president, SNEA. Khan explained that BSNLs receivables due from DoT are: Rs 2,350 crore on BWA spectrum refund interest, Rs 2,100 crore on excess pension contribution paid to DoT by BSNL from employee salaries and other receivables from DoT.



"This in turn will benefit the private operators especially Reliance Jio to capture the entire telecom market," he adds. During a meeting of the All Unions and Associations of BSNL (AUAB) with the BSNL management last week, the unions were assured that salaries would be paid by March 20. To improve sentiments, unions have interacted with each other individually and also with the BSNL management, which they claim hastened the due payment process.



BSNL officials said that the company had already received its letter of support from the DoT, which will enable it to ask for funds from banks to the tune of Rs 3,500 crore to aid it with a rollout of 4G data services.



The Modi administration had been going slow with tackling troubles that have been brewing with the employees of the national telecom operators. BSNL and MTNL employees have been protesting for a year over allocation of 4G spectrum to BSNL, revision of their pensions and seeking refunds from DoT on excess contribution charged from BSNL on account of GPF contributions for over two years.



Sinha and others in the government including outgoing telecom secretary Aruna Sundararajan had met representives of the All Employees Union of BSNL (AEUB) twice last year assuring them resolution of their demands.



After the last meeting in December 2018, unions were assured by Sinha that all their demands would be considered by the government, and stopped the unions from announcing a major strike.



But since his assurances, very little has come in terms of fulfilling those promises to BSNL employees. We are now focusing our energy on convening a protest march on April 5, in which more than 10,000 employees of BSNL would march to Sanchar Bhavan and push for our pending demands. The excess payment of GPF contributions of employees alone stand at Rs 4,000 crore, said Prahlad Rai, general secretary, AIBSNLEA.



At a time when all telecom companies are under heavy debts ranging from Rs 1 lakh crore to Rs 2 lakhs crore, BSNLs net debt amounted to only Rs 13,000 crore. The telecom PSU is also assessed to have Rs 2 lakh crore of land and other assets.



Unions are now seeking government intervention comes to aid BSNL. Top management of Reliance Jio had earlier openly identified BSNL and not any other private telecom operator as their main competitor.



When other private operators providing 4G services faced portability of numbers in millions, BSNL providing only 2G and 3G services did not have a single customers porting to Jio service. Government should rescue BSNL and not Reliance. They should allow us the letter of comfort essential to loan funds from the bank for network expansion and bettering other services and push for a revival package for BSNL, said an office bearer of the left-backed BSNLEU, one of the largest unions of BSNL employees, without wanting to be named.



BSNL is an incipiently sick company (in net loss for 3 years) and seeks further equity infusion from the government. Earlier, an IIM-Ahmedabad study initiated by the government had proposed to revive the telecom PSU and termed it as essential to keep private telecom operators in check. Telecom users in India enjoy among the lowest data rates in the world while charges paid for spectrum by telcos in the country are among the highest.


Touched by the compassion of the nurses who tended to her...
Us, director Jordan Peele's much awaited follow-up to his critically-acclaimed horror-thriller Get Out, is all set to release in India on March 29.

Get Out, Peele's directorial debut, won him the best original screenplay Oscar for tackling racial themes and early reviews of Us, about a family haunted by its doppelgangers, suggest that the new film also breaks ground in the horror genre.

Set in present day, Us features Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide Wilson, a woman returning to her beachside childhood home with her husband, Gabe and their two children for an idyllic summer getaway but things start going awry as they are confronted by their doppelgangers. "The idea for this movie came from a deep-seated fear in doppelganger. I love doppelganger mythologies and the movies that have dealt with them, and I wanted to make my offering to that pantheon of evil-double films.

"I was drawn to this idea that we are our own worst enemy. That's something we all know intrinsically, but it's a truth we tend to bury. We blame the outsider, we blame the other. In this movie, the monster has our faces," Peele said in a statement.

Peele has produced the film via his Monkeypaw Productions alongside Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, and Monkeypaws Ian Cooper. Universal Pictures International India is releasing the film in the country.

The film also stars Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Evan Alex, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Madison Curry, Cali Sheldon and Noelle Sheldon.
Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad Friday addressed a rally with BSP founder Kanshi Ram's sister and announced that he will contest the Lok Sabha elections against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Varanasi seat, a move that is likely to upset the SP-BSP alliance in Uttar Pradesh.

The Bhim Army, which has been trying to mobilise dalits in Uttar Pradesh, also told PTI that it will field a candidate against Union minister Smriti Irani and "wherever there's a need of a strong nominee against the BJP".

At the rally organised to mark the 85th birth anniversary of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) founder Kanshi Ram, Chandrashekhar said he would ensure that PM Modi is not re-elected to the Lok Sabha from Varanasi.

"I will challenge Narendra Modi in Varanasi... to protect the Constitution and the rights of dalits. I do not want to become an MP or MLA. Had that been the case, I would have chosen a reserved seat," he said.

"After the prime minister came to know that we are going to challenge him in Varanasi, he started washing the feet of sanitation workers in Allahabad," the Bhim Army chief said.

The BJP is yet to announce the constituency from where Modi will contest the upcoming election.

Chandrashekhar alleged that the Narendra Modi government's decision to give 10 per cent quota to the general category poor is an attack on the Constitution and is aimed at serving the BJP's interests.

Recalling that Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav's comment in Parliament that Modi should become prime minister again, he asked Akhilesh Yadav to answer if his party will protect the rights of Dalits if they voted for it.

The dalit leader also said the SP-BSP alliance should "send (Kanshi Ram's sister) Swarn Kaur to Parliament".

Bhim Army Vice President Manjeet Nautiyal told PTI that they will field a candidate against Irani and "also on the seats where the SP-BSP alliance is not strong enough to defeat the BJP".

Asked if the dalit group will support the Congress, he said the Rahul Gandhi-led party did not fight for dalits for the last 70 years. "The Congress and the BJP are two sides of the same coin".

In what is being seen as a dalit outreach move, Congress general secretary for eastern UP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Wednesday met Chandrashekhar at a Meerut hospital.

Until now, the Bhim Army had been saying that it won't contest elections. It had welcomed the SP-BSP alliance in the state and said it would support anyone who's ready to take on the BJP and fight for dalit rights.

The Chandrashekhar-led group shot to limelight during the May 2017 clashes between Dalits and upper caste Thakurs in Saharanpur.

Chandrashekhar was arrested after the clashes. Though he was granted bail by the Allahabad High Court, the UP Police arrested him under the stringent National Security Act. He was released in September 2018 after 16 months in jail.
Paris, Amsterdam, March 15, 2019

Press release

Deferral of conversions between CDIs and stapled shares in respect of upcoming interim dividend

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield ("URW") has previously announced that Thursday March 28, 2019, will be the record date for the purpose of determining CHESS Depositary Interest ("CDI") holders' entitlements for the upcoming interim dividend to be paid to CDI holders on Friday April 12, 2019. The dividend is in respect of stapled shares underlying the CDIs, and Thursday March 28, 2019, is also the dividend record date for stapled shareholders.

URW has sought and been granted waivers from ASX of ASX Settlement Operating Rules 13.9.4 and 13.9.9 to allow URW to defer, and not to process, conversions between its stapled share and CDI registers during the period commencing on and including the fourth business day before the dividend record date (ie. commencing on Friday March 22, 2019) and ending on and including the dividend record date (ie. ending on Thursday March 28, 2019).

The waivers will prevent the potential for a person to inappropriately gain access to a dividend and also provide time for pre-deferral conversion requests to be successfully matched and completed prior to the dividend record date, in each case having regard to the cross-border conversion processes and/or timing considerations in Europe and Australia.

For further information, please contact:

Investor Relations

Samuel Warwood

Maarten Otte

+33 1 76 77 58 02

Maarten.otte@urw.com

Media Relations

Tiphaine Bannelier-Suderie

+33 1 76 77 57 94

Tiphaine.Bannelier-Suderie@urw.com





About Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is the premier global developer and operator of flagship shopping destinations, with a portfolio valued at 65.2 Bn as at December 31, 2018, of which 87% in retail, 6% in offices, 5% in convention & exhibition venues and 2% in services. Currently, the Group owns and operates 92 shopping centres, including 55 flagships in the most dynamic cities in Europe and the United States. Its centres welcome 1.2 billion visits per year. Present on 2 continents and in 12 countries, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield provides a unique platform for retailers and brand events, and offers an exceptional and constantly renewed experience for customers.

With the support of its 3,700 professionals and an unparalleled track-record and know-how, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield is ideally positioned to generate superior value and develop world-class projects. The Group has a development pipeline of 11.9 Bn.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield distinguishes itself by its Better Places 2030 agenda, that sets its ambition to create better places that respect the highest environmental standards and contribute to better cities.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield stapled shares are listed on Euronext Amsterdam and Euronext Paris (Euronext ticker: URW), with a secondary listing in Australia through Chess Depositary Interests. The Group benefits from an A rating from Standard & Poor's and from an A2 rating from Moody's.

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The Union home ministry is livid and wants Pakistan to come clean on its intent on the Kartarpur corridor. Home ministry sources said Pakistan has made several back door changes to the proposed plan, which clearly demonstrates that it is not interested in providing easy access for Indian pilgrims to Kartarpur Sahib.

Even as India and Pakistan decided to iron out differences on the modalities, a major point of contention was Pakistans move to restrict the duration of the agreement to two years. This caveat from Pakistan has come despite India making it clear that it is executing long lasting and comprehensive facilities at the border, the first phase of which has already begun at a cost of Rs 190 crore.

On Thursday, at the first joint meeting at Attari, delegations from both sides discussed the differences. Sources in MHA said not Pakistan restricted entry to only Indian passport holders, leaving out the large population of Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) cardholders who are devotees. It has also brought through the back door an entry fee, along with special permits, which is an outrageous step and defeats the very purpose of the corridor.

This meant that even the small number of 700 pilgrims being allowed by Pakistan on specific visiting days will need to pay a fees and require special permits.

Sources said while India has made all efforts to fulfil the long-standing aspirations of Indian devotees, Pakistan has once again indulged in double speak and delivered nothing as compared to the tall claims it made.

What has also irked the ministry is the rampant encroachment of land of the Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib, by the Pakistan government under the pretext of building the corridor. A strong demand has been made by the Indian side for the restoration of these lands to the holy gurudwara keeping in mind the sentiments of the Indian people.
Reshma Patel, the female face of Patidar agitation in Gujarat, resigned from the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday, alleging that the ruling party had become a marketing company.

Reshma, a former close aide of Patidar stir leader Hardik Patel, had quit the Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti following differences within and joined the BJP ahead of 2017 assembly elections. The party quickly made her its media panelist.

Talking to THE WEEK, Reshma said that she would contest Lok Sabha elections from Porbandar. Sources close to her confirmed that she has approached the Nationalist Congress Party for ticket.

Reshma said if she does not get a party symbol, she would contest as an independent.

If I contest as an independent, I will also contest the by-election to Manavadar assembly seat, which falls under Porbandar Lok Sabha constituency, she said. The 33-year-old leader said that she chose to contest from Porbandar as that was the place where she had spent her childhood and carried out social activities.

In a letter to the Gujarat president of the BJP, Reshma alleged that the party has become nothing but a marketing company and they were taught to misguide the masses by marketing wrong policies and wrong schemes.

Reshma also alleged that the autocratic behaviour of the party leaders has compelled the party workers to toil. She said that she wanted to work for the people and for a positive change in the society.

The Patidar leader also said that she resigned from the BJP as she couldn't remain a mute spectator to the injustice. She said that she did not want to be party to the autocratic nature of its functioning.

In the BJP, women are left only for fetching votes by going home to home, Reshma alleged, adding that in the last assembly elections, hardly 13 women were given tickets. My fight is also against that, she said.

She further alleged that the state government did not fulfill several promises, including giving jobs to the kin of those who died during the Patidar stir in 2015.

Reshma's resignation came two days after Hardik Patel joined the Congress in Ahmedabad in presence of party chief Rahul Gandhi and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi.
A day after Tom Vadakkan, a former close aide of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, resigned from the Congress and joined the BJP, party president Rahul Gandhi sought to downplay his exit saying he was not a big leader.

"Vadakkan? No no.. he is not a big leader," Rahul responded to media at Raipur airport when asked about it.

Vadakkan, a senior leader from Kerala, joined the BJP on Thursday in protest against the Congress party's stand over India's Balakot operation.

Vadakkan, who joined the saffron party in the presence of Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and later met its president Amit Shah, said the Congress had questioned the integrity of the armed forces.

"The attack by Pakistani terrorists on our land and the reaction by my party was sad indeed. It hurt me deeply when the integrity of armed forces was questioned. That is precisely the reason why I am here. It is not about ideology but about patriotism," he said.

With inputs from PTI
United States Vice President Mike Pence is known for his conservative views. His strong views on same-sex marriages have always put him at odds with many international leaders who support LGBTQ rights. In Pence's opinion, "Societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family."

So it must have been an odd sight when Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, an openly gay leader, brought his boyfriend Mathew Barrett to breakfast with the vice president.

A video on Twitter showed an awkward interaction between Barrett and Pence as the Irish couple arrive at Pence's residence at the Naval Observatory. As the car which dropped the PM and his significant other at the doorstep pulls away, we see Pence and his wife Karen Pence interacting with Varadkar and Barrett. After both couples address each other, Varadkar is seen moving to the left, forcing Pence to talk to Barrett alone. Then the couples pose for photographs for the media with Barrett standing beside Pence.

Though the conversation is inaudible, The Irish Times reports Varadkar eventually told Pence that hes proud to lead a country where hes judged on his policies, not on his sexual orientation or skin tone, reportedly adding that We are, after all, all Gods children.

This was the Irish Prime Minister's second visit to the US and during his previous visit, he said, the VP and his wife had invited him and his partner to their "home in the future". "Last year you and Karen said that my partner, Matthew, would be welcome to join us, and we're both really honored to accept the invitation this year," Varadkar said during the Friends of Ireland breakfast.

Varadkar told the gathering about the changes he has seen in his own country. "I lived in a country where, if I'd tried to be myself at the time, it would have ended up breaking laws," he said.

"But today, that is all changed. I stand here, leader of my country, flawed and human, but judged by my political actions, and not by my sexual orientation, my skin tone, gender or religious beliefs."

Pence has been widely criticised for his staunch conservative views and opposition to same-sex marriage. He was also attacked for the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy which prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service.

His entire career he has adopted anti-LGBTQ policies and was especially hard on the community during his tenure as the governor of Indiana.
TRACY, Calif., March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- You are invited to join the celebration as Tracy Hills, the Bay Areas Newest Master-Planned community in the rolling foothills of southwest Tracy will be hosting a special Preview Opening on Saturday, March 16th from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.



Enjoy festive music, sample delicious cuisine from on-site food trucks, participate in kid-friendly activities, and preview floor plans and architectural renderings from award-winning home builders Lennar, Meritage Homes and Shea Homes. The first phase at Tracy Hills will eventually include a total of approximately 1,100 homes in eight unique villages.

Meritage Homes will have decorated model homes to tour for Vantage at Tracy Hills, which includes 4 floorplans offering 4 to 5 bedrooms and 3 to 3.5 baths in approximately 2,155 to 2,648 square feet.

Shea Homes will have a Sales Information trailer on site with floor plans and architectural renderings as well as hard hat tours for Vente at Tracy Hills. Vente will feature 3 single-level and two-story floorplans, 3 to 6 bedrooms and 2.5 to 3.5 baths in approximately 2,522 to 3,451 square feet.

Lennar will also have a Sales Information trailer on site with floor plans and architectural renderings for four different villages within Tracy Hills: Amber, Larimar, Opal and Pearl. These four villages will feature a total of 16 single-level and two-story floorplans with 4 to 5 bedrooms and 2 to 4.5 baths in approximately 2,173 to 3,599 square feet.

Food lovers will certainly appreciate the variety offered by Steel Smokin BBQ, Street Steam Bunz, Haley McNicolls Celtic-American Eatery, and izzyAs Frozen Ice Cream Custard. This family-friendly event will also feature face painters, balloon artists and a walk-around magician to entertain younger attendees. Plus, since no party is complete without music, home shoppers will enjoy bands playing classic jazz and New Orleans-style Dixieland tunes, as well as traditional Kentucky bluegrass.

In addition, home shoppers can learn more about this smart, WiFi-connected, approx. 5,411-acre community with approx. 45 acres devoted to neighborhood parks including one dog park, 30 acres of community parks, and a community clubhouse and pool. Approximately 42 acres will be devoted exclusively towards several new school sites within the Jefferson School District, including the future K-8 Corral Hollow Elementary School in this first phase.

Nature lovers will appreciate an extensive network of walking trails connecting the villages, 180 acres of open space, and over 3,500 acres devoted to habitat preserve. Even with a location so close to nature, Tracy Hills will be conveniently located within 3 miles to the Altamont Commuter Express (ACE) station, offering connections to major employment hubs and job centers in the Tri-Valley and Silicon Valley areas.

Integral Communities creates new opportunities from underutilized or undeveloped parcels of land through value-added land planning. Integral's focus, strategy and expertise create and provide excellent value- added ownership and development opportunities for the company and its partners. This unique philosophy and ethic keeps Integral among the leading diversified real estate development companies in the West. Integral is headquartered in Newport Beach, CA, with regional offices in Encinitas, CA and Danville, CA. For more information regarding Integral Communities and its master-planned communities, apartment communities, infill and mixed-use developments, please visit www.integralcommunities.com .

Tracy Hills is located adjacent to Interstate 580 and Corral Hollow Road in Tracy, California. For directions and more information about the Tracy Hills Preview Opening, visit http://www.TracyHillsLife.com .

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/40013dfb-c680-4cda-b639-2ba3c1786e7d

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9d02b031-7bf3-4161-919d-9d076823dc7e
PF litigations expected to come down after SC ruling: RPFC

Kolkata, Mar 15 (PTI) Provident Fund deduction related

litigations with the EPFO is likely to reduce after the

Supreme Court ruling that special allowance paid by an

employer is part of basic wages for EPF dues computation.

The apex court in its judgement has ruled that special

allowance is part of the basic wages for computing the

employees provident fund (EPF). The employer as well as the

employee pay 12 per cent of basic wages each towards

contribution for social security scheme run by the Employees'

Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO).

"The order just upheld the existing sections of the

EPF Act. After this ruling, it is expected that litigations

related to deductions toward provident fund will be reduced,"

RPFC Navendu Rai said on the sidelines of a seminar organised

by the ICC on the EPF Act.

The apex court decision came when it was dealing with

a question on whether special allowances paid by an

establishment to its employees would fall within the

expression "basic wages" under the provision of the Employees'

Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provisions Act, 1952 for

computation of deduction towards provident fund.

Meanwhile, the Provident Fund (PF) balance transferred

from one's ex-employer will become an automated process as the

EPFO is doing away with the manual process in place now,

Additional CPFC EPFO, S K Sangma said. PTI BSM

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Allahabad Bank looking at raising capital next fiscal

(Eds: with minor edits in para one)

Kolkata, Mar 15 (PTI) City-based Allahabad Bank, which

had recently come out of the prompt and corrective action

(PCA) after RBI removed it from the weak bank watch list in

February, is looking at ways to raise capital in the next

financial year, an official said.

The bank would be weighing the options of dilution of

stake in the general insurance joint venture Universal Sompo

and sell off non-core assets like properties in places like

Mumbai, MD and CEO of Allahabad Bank S S Mallikarjuna Rao told

reporters here on Friday.

"Allahabad Bank has come out of the PCA. It is only the

starting point", Rao said, adding that this had happened due

to infusion of capital by the government as some conditions

relating to net NPA and CRAR were breached", he said.

Rao said that net NPA of the bank had fallen below six

per cent, adding that recovery would be the mainstay for

further lowering of NPA.

"Expecting that the bank would book profits in 2019, the

capital infusion by the government was for meeting regulatory

requirements. However, some growth capital is also needed but

we are not worried about that", Rao said.

As per SEBI requirement, there was still headroom for

the government to dilute stake in the bank, Rao said.

He said that the bank was having 12 properties which

were identified, adding that the bank was targeting to raise

Rs 250 crore to Rs 300 crore by selling the non-core assets,

like properties.

Allahabad Bank and others like Indian Overseas Bank,

Karnataka Bank and Dabur which had formed the non-life

insurance company Universal Sompo had already appointed a

consultant for the valuation of the JV.

"Efforts will continue to get capital out of Universal

Sompo and also from selling off non-core assets like

properties", Rao said.

On the whole, he said that the bank would be looking at

raising Rs 500 crore probably in the next fiscal by way of

Universal Sompo stake dilution and sale of non-core assets.

Chairman of Universal Sompo O N Singh said that the

insurance JV stated with an initial capital of Rs 150 crore

and was making profits.

The JV launched a co-branded health insurance product

exclusively for Allahabad Bank customers.

Singh said that the exclusive co-branded product would

help Allahabad Bank to raise its savings accounts deposit

base. PTI dc

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Cos allowed to pass on volume benefit to consumers for GST cut

Kolkata, Mar 15 (PTI) The National Anti-Profiteering

Authority (NAA) Friday said companies are free to offer

volume benefit or price reduction to consumers, in the wake of

rationalisation of GST rates.

To evaluate cases of GST benefits, the NAA has decided

to look into three yardsticks - proportionate grammage

increase (volume) in products, timeline of the passing on the

benefit, and additional benefits offered by a firm.

NAA (GST) Chairman B N Sharma said this on the

sidelines of a session by the Merchants' Chamber of Commerce

and Industry here.

Citing an example, he said, passing on price benefits

to consumers for goods sold in small sachets might not be

feasible and practical.

Sharma, however, did not explain whether the same can

be replicated in products of higher volume-packs or in sectors

other than FMCG.

He declined to take media queries.

"Allowing volume benefit will have a dual advantage to

companies. This will help achieve higher turnover and

profits," said Dipankar Chatterji, partner of chartered

accountancy firm L B Jha.

Sharma also said companies have to pass on GST

benefits in all the SKUs.

Meanwhile, in case of realty sector, the NAA was

waiting for the March 19 GST Council meeting which is

expected to come out with greater clarity about implementing

the GST benefits it announced earlier. PTI BSM

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Azerbaijan seeks trade, investment exchanges with West Bengal

Kolkata, Mar 16 (PTI) Azerbaijan, located in the south

Caucasus region of Eurasia, is keen to establish trade and

investment exchanges with West Bengal.

Ambassador of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Ashraf

Shikhaliyev, said the dynamics has shifted all of the sudden

to the eastern coast of India starting from West Bengal.

Though a small country, Azerbaijan has a huge

potential, he said at a session organised by BNCCI here on

Friday.

The envoy said language would not be a hurdle as

English was spoken in Azerbaijan to some extent.

Some of the sectors which had good potential for

exchanges were information and communication, transport,

petrochemical and chemicals, hospitality, tourism, agriculture

and food processing.

Shikhaliyev said Azerbaijan would also be a suitable

destination for MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing,

Exhibitions) tourism for Indian companies as it had the

potential to bring it back to India.

Filming in Azerbaijan was also a feasible area as cost

of shooting was much lower than Europe and the country was

blessed with mountains, forests and the sea.

Direct flight from Baku, capital do Azerbaijan, to New

Delhi would start shortly, he said. PTI dc

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Mumbai, Mar 15 (PTI) Extending its winning run to the fifth session, BSE benchmark Sensex rallied 269 points to close above 38,000-mark amid soaring foreign fund inflows, strengthening rupee and positive global cues.

After rallying nearly 500 points in afternoon trade, benchmark BSE Sensex settled 269.43 points, or 0.71 per cent, higher at 38,024.32.

The broader NSE Nifty closed 83.60 points, or 0.74 per cent, up at 11,426.85.

Kotak Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack, ending 4.31 per cent higher.

PowerGrid, TCS, ICICI Bank, SBI, HCL Tech, NTPC, Infosys, Bajaj Finance, HDFC duo, ONGC, Vedanta and IndusInd Bank too rose up to 2.84 per cent.

On the other hand, HUL, Yes Bank, ITC, Bharti Airtel, RIL, Sun Pharma and Axis Bank fell up to 2.16 per cent.

Sectorally, the BSE power, bankex, teck, oil and gas, IT and finance indices gained the most, rising up to 1.94 per cent; while BSE telecom, FMCG and energy indices fell up to 1.79 per cent.

The BSE-30 index gained by around 3.5 per cent in the past week. Rally in the Indian markets was led by strong foreign institutional investors (FII), buying on account of reduction in geopolitical risks and opinion polls suggesting a likely return of the NDA government in the upcoming general elections, said Sanjeev Zarbade, Vice President- PCG Research, Kotak Securities.

On a net basis, FIIs bought shares worth a net of Rs 1,482.99 crore on Thursday, while domestic institutional investors (DIIs) were net sellers to the tune of Rs 817.77 crore, provisional data available with the BSE showed.

Strengthening gains, the rupee appreciated 5 paise to 69.09 against the US dollar intra-day.

Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.56 per cent, Korea's Kospi was up 0.95 per cent, Shanghai Composite Index rallied 1.04 per cent, and Japan's Nikkei ended 0.77 per cent higher.

Similarly, in the Eurozone, Frankfurt's DAX gained 0.27 per cent. Paris CAC 40 rose 0.44 per cent and London's FTSE was up 0.54 per cent in early deals.

Global crude benchmark Brent crude futures rose 0.43 per cent to USD 67.52 per barrel. PTI ANS

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New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Friday said the trust between the government and the business community has been eroded as they have been made to feel the wrath of coercive agencies.

Addressing the 'Hindu BusinessLine Changemaker Awards' function here, he said this "hostile" atmosphere will not just sap the confidence of Indian businessmen but will also create doubts in the minds of foreign governments and businessmen.

"Of late, many negative perceptions have been manufactured about business leaders. The business community, big and small, has been made to feel the wrath of coercive agencies. A hostile narrative has been built; this will sap not only the confidence of our own business leaders it will also create doubts in the mind of foreign governments and business leaders.

"Honest businessman and genuine entrepreneur must never be allowed to feel harassed by the petty revenue officials. Unfortunately, trust between the government and the business stands eroded," the senior Congress leader said.

Singh noted that no change is permanent and the country has remained alive to the need for change and has progressed and prospered whenever "we have recognised and promoted change".

"Societies grow and progress when creativity is encouraged to challenge the status quo," he said.

The former prime minister also talked about the economic reforms that he ushered in 1991, saying "our nation faced a difficult choice then". He, however, noted that even though much had been achieved before 1991 in this land of poverty and deprivation, "but still much more had to be done -- and, done differently".

"We are a young nation but an old society. This old society reflects the strength of our ancient civilization and its traditions. Since ancient days we experienced a collective strength and confidence when we remained alive to the need for change; we progressed and prospered whenever we could recognise and promote change, and we moved forward when the society and the administration facilitated the work of the potential change-makers," he said. PTI DIP/SKC SMN
New York, Mar 15 (AFP) Boeing in the next 10 days will roll out an upgrade to the MCAS stall prevention system for 737 MAX aircraft that have had two deadly accidents in recent months, two industry sources told AFP.

The system was implicated in the crash of a 737 MAX 8 in Indonesia in October but the sources cautioned that the cause of the fatal Ethiopia Airlines accident last weekend has not yet been determined.

The software fix, which was already underway prior to the latest incident, will only take about two hours to install, said the sources, who asked not to be identified.

The MAX aircraft have been grounded worldwide in the wake of Sunday's crash near Addis Ababa that killed 157 passengers and crew, and Boeing has halted deliveries of its top-selling model.

The black boxes from the Ethiopian aircraft, which was only a few months old and crashed a few minutes after takeoff, are being analyzed by the French authorities to try to determine the cause of the accident.

The Lion Air 737 MAX 8 crashed last October also just minutes after takeoff, killing 189 people. The initial investigation indicated it was due to a malfunction on the stall prevention system, a new feature on the MAX planes.

Several American pilots also reported issues with the MCAS and the Federal Aviation Administration said it ordered Boeing to issue a fix by April.

The aerospace giant held a conference call on Thursday with at least three carriers using the 737 MAX and gave them the fix, one source said, and the other airlines will get it early next week.

Contacted by AFP, Boeing declined to comment.

Boeing would like to start installing the patch in about 10 days, both sources said.

However, there is a question of logistics involving where the planes go for the installation.

American Airlines, which operates two dozen 737 MAX 8 aircraft, has chosen to update the software itself, one source told AFP.

Neither source was able to specify the cost of the upgrade, but one analyst estimated it would cost about $2 million for each plane for a total of less than $1 billion for the 371 planes in use currently. (AFP)



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Mumbai, Mar 15 (PTI) Shilpa Shetty believes rejections made her stronger and played a huge part in her success.

The actor-reality show judge said she faced a tough time in making her footing in the film industry, but that never stopped her from working hard.

"I always felt I am doing the right work. I am hard working. I hide under sofa when I see my old films. Back then in films I had blonde hair, used to wear blue lenses and red lipstick. I wonder how I got opportunities.

"I think it was all destiny. There is no successful person who hasn't faced failure. The more you get rejected you rise and give your best," Shilpa said during a session at the 20th FICCI Frames.

Shilpa, who started her Bollywood journey with "Baazigar", said the success of the Shah Rukh Khan-starrern did not help her much in getting good roles.

"I did not feel people were accepting me as an actor. Maybe I wasn't that good actor. Even after doing films like 'Phir Milenge' and 'Dhadkan', I never got an award. I felt rejected and bad.

"But I kept working hard. There was hunger in my belly... I feel if not for those rejections I wouldn't have lasted so long," she added.

Shilpa said her winning stint in international reality show "Big Brother" played an important role in her career.

"'Big Brother' was a beautiful moment...When I was offered 'Big Brother' I had no clue about the show. There was certain sense of rejection that I felt to cut away from here and do something away from the country.

"They were paying me well and I was like let's try. I was prepared to be rejected there also. But every week I got stronger. First time I won something and I was shocked. I feel there is poetic justice and I believe in it," she said.

Shilpa said she now feels content with whatever she has achieved in her life.

"I have completed 25 years and I feel the kind of love I am getting today is more as compared to then when I was actively working in films. I don't remember how I became an actress I have forgotten that journey. I feel we are born for a purpose."

After taking a sabbatical from films, Shilpa shifted her focus towards imparting knowledge on health and wellness.

"I am focusing on it. I am aware that maybe 40 per cent people cuss me and I am okay as there are some who wait for me to share things about health and wellness."

The 43-year-old actor, however, is willing to make a comeback to movies.

"I love acting. If I hadn't done TV then maybe I would have done films. After I had my son I consciously decided to be with him and so I did not do films. If I had to do a film then I had to be away for a longer period of time from my son so I did not want to do that.

"TV is gratifying. With TV I am able to connect and entertain. Due to TV, I like the fact that people like me as Shilpa Shetty and not some character of a film. The power of small screen is big as biggest of stars come to TV to promote their film," she said. PTI KKP SHD

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Mumbai, Mar 15 (PTI) Actor Vivek Oberoi-starrer biographical drama on Prime Minister Narendra Modi will release countrywide on April 12.

The film, titled "PM Narendra Modi", is being directed by Omung Kumar, who has movies such as "Mary Kom" and "Sarbjit" to his credit.

The project, which started shooting in late January in Gujarat, is currently completing its last leg in Mumbai, the film's makers said in a statement.

The film was also shot in Uttarakhand. Vital parts of the movie chronicling Modi's early life and political journey were filmed in state's Uttarkashi district, at places like Ganga ghat, Kalp Kedar Mandir and the suspension bridge connecting Dharali bazar and Mukhba village.

"'PM Narendra Modi' the film will traverse the journey of Narendra Damodardas Modi from his humble beginnings to his years as Gujarat Chief Minister onto his landmark win at the 2014 election and finally being nominated as the Prime Minister of India," Kumar said.

Producer Sandip Ssingh said, "This is a very special film and a story that needs to be told. I hope this story of faith inspires the audiences. We are excited and happy to release the story of 1.3 billion people."

The film's poster was launched in 27 languages in January and featured Vivek, dressed in a yellow kurta with tricolour in the backdrop.

Darshan Kumaar, Boman Irani, Manoj Joshi, Prashant Narayanan, Zarina Wahab and Barkha Bisht Sengupta also feature in the film. PTI RB SHD

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Addressing the 63rd session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York on March 13, the minister highlighted Vietnams efforts towards achieving the goal, despite the challenges that Vietnam and many other UN members are facing, such as expanding rich-poor gaps, aging populations and climate change.

Dung expressed his support for key issues on the agenda of the session, which he said demonstrate the harmonious combination of the International Human Rights Convention, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women as well as the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

He said that, after 25 years of implementing the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, giant steps have been made in gender equality as well as women and childrens empowerment.

The CSW has become a leading forum on gender equality and a source of ideas, strategy and directions to improve gender equality for UN members, he said.

The integration and empowerment of women has brought significant positive impacts to each country, said Minister Dung, citing reports that show success in reducing income and non-income inequality through progressive policies in economics and society.

Inclusive growth and sustainable development is something all member countries are aiming for, he stated.

The minister affirmed the stance of Vietnam and many other UN members in considering ensuring social welfare as the leading goal in national development.

He underscored four key pillars in the field, including policies to promote sustainable employment and reduce poverty for women and girls, social insurance policies, social support policies and policies ensuring basic social services.

At the session, the Vietnamese official highlighted several of Vietnams achievements in reducing gender inequality, noting that 71.2% of Vietnamese women are engaged in the workforce. The Vietnamese Government has committed to putting aside 2.6% of the GDP for social support policies for disadvantageous groups, including women and girls. A survey conducted by Mastercard stated that the ratio of women business owners in Vietnam is 31.3%, ranking sixth among 57 surveyed countries. Vietnam is also among the leading countries in the index of womens opportunities and economic engagement.

He proposed that the review of 25 years of implementing the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action seek suitable recommendations at national, regional and global levels.

Stressing the need for stronger investment in social welfare, education, poverty reduction, economic empowerment and climate change response, the minister called on UN members to spend an adequate part of their GDP on social welfare services.

He cited research showing that for every 2% of GDP spent on the services, the number of jobs will increase by roughly 2.4-6.1%.

The 63rd session of the CSW is underway in New York until March 22 with the participation of more than 100 vice presidents, deputy prime ministers and ministers from countries around the world, along with representatives from multilateral and non-governmental organisations.
Not for distribution to United States newswire services or for dissemination in the United States

TORONTO, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PIMCO Canada Corp. (PIMCO Canada) today announced the March 2019 cash distributions for the ETF series (ETF Series) of the PIMCO Canada mutual funds that distribute monthly (Funds). Unitholders of record of the ETF Series, at the close of business on March 22, 2019, will receive per-unit cash distribution payable on March 29, 2019.

Details of the per-unit cash distribution amount are as follows:

Fund Name Ticker Cash Distribution per Unit PIMCO Monthly Income Fund (Canada) PMIF $ 0.05531 PIMCO Monthly Income Fund (Canada) US$ PMIF.U US$ 0.04256 PIMCO Investment Grade Credit Fund (Canada) IGCF $ 0.05879 PIMCO Global Short Maturity Fund (Canada) PMNT $ 0.01467 PIMCO Low Duration Monthly Income Fund (Canada) PLDI $ 0.02280

The Manager, PIMCO Canada administers and manages the PIMCO Canada ETFs, and retains Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC, (PIMCO), to provide sub-advisory services to the Funds.

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 Funds. The forward-looking statements are not historical facts but reflect the Funds, PIMCO Canadas 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 Funds, 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 Funds, 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.

Commissions, management fees and expenses all may be associated with an investment in the ETF Series Units. Please read the prospectus and ETF Facts carefully before investing. The ETF Series Units are not guaranteed, their value may change frequently and past performance may not be repeated.

For a summary of the risks of an investment in the fund, please see the specific risks of mutual funds section of the prospectus. Units of ETF Series trade like stocks, fluctuate in market value and may trade at a discount to their net asset value, which may increase risk of loss. Distributions are not guaranteed and are subject to change and/or elimination.

The products and services provided by PIMCO Canada may only be available in certain provinces or territories of Canada and only through dealers authorized for that purpose. PIMCO Canada has retained PIMCO LLC as sub-adviser. PIMCO Canada will remain responsible for any loss that arises out of the failure of its sub-adviser.

Contact:

Agnes Crane

PIMCO  Media Relations

Phone: +212 597.1054

Email: agnes.crane@pimco.com
Christchurch, Mar 15 (AFP) Multiple people were killed and several injured Friday when a gunman opened fire at a crowded mosque during afternoon prayers in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand media reported.

Local media reported up to six people were dead, and the South Island city was placed in lockdown as police hunted for an "active shooter".

"A serious and evolving situation is occurring in Christchurch with an active shooter," police said in a statement. (AFP)

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Washington, Mar 15 (PTI) In a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump, a dozen Republican senators broke party ranks and sided with Democrats to terminate the US President's declaration of a national emergency on America's border with Mexico.

In a 59-41 vote, 12 Republicans joined every Senate Democrat on Thursday in a rare move to block the president's effort to divert billions in funding to build his long-promised border wall without congressional approval.

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives last month backed the measure.

The Republicans joined Democrats in voting down the emergency, arguing that the president had exceeded his powers in trying to build a border wall over Congress' objections, the New York Times reported.

Following the vote, President Trump tweeted, "VETO!"

Trump slammed the vote, calling it a "Democrat-inspired Resolution".

"I look forward to VETOING the just passed Democrat inspired Resolution which would OPEN BORDERS while increasing Crime, Drugs, and Trafficking in our Country," he said in a tweet.

"I thank all of the Strong Republicans who voted to support Border Security and our desperately needed WALL!" Trump said.

Congress needs a two-thirds majority of both chambers to override a presidential veto, which is viewed as unlikely in this case.

"Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway," said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee.

Trump had sought to frame the vote publicly as not only a declaration of support for his border security policies but as a sign of personal loyalty, the report said.

"It's pure and simple: It's a vote for border security; it's a vote for no crime," Trump told reporters before the vote, which he declared on Thursday morning on Twitter to be "a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats!".

But he could not overcome concerns among Republican senators about the legality of redirecting USD 3.6 billion from military construction projects toward the border wall, even after Congress explicitly rejected the funding request.

"I believe the use of emergency powers in this circumstance violates the Constitution," said Senator Jerry Moran, Republican from Kansas, in a statement.

"This continues our country down the path of all powerful executive  something those who wrote the Constitution were fearful of," Moran was quoted as saying.

The Republican senators who stood by Trump insisted that there was an immigration crisis at the southern border and that the order was well within the jurisdiction of the National Emergencies Act, which gives presidents wide-ranging latitude to declare a national emergency.

The vote came a day after the Senate rebuked president Trump on foreign policy by approving a bill to end US support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

Trump declared a national emergency last month after signing a funding agreement that did not include the money he requested to build a wall.

His signature ended a 35-day partial shutdown of the federal government, which was triggered by a showdown after Congress refused to appropriate the USD 5.7 billion he requested to start construction at the border.

In his annual budget proposal, which Trump sent to Congress this week, the president asked for USD 8.6 billion in funding for his wall, far more than he had previously requested.

A wall along the US-Mexico border was one of Trump's signature campaign promises. PTI MRJ MRJ
Sydney, Mar 15 (AFP) The gunman who killed numerous worshippers in a New Zealand mosque on Friday was a right-wing extremist with Australian citizenship, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.

Morrison said the shooting in Christchurch was carried out by "an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist" who was an Australian-born citizen.

He declined to provide further details, saying the investigation was being led by New Zealand authorities. (AFP) MRJ

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Berlin, Mar 15 (AP) A group of European nations is urging Russia not to abandon a nuclear weapons treaty with the United States.

Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are also calling for new arms control agreements to address the rising power of China and other nations.

The US gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty a month ago, citing Russian violations.

The European countries opened an arms control conference in Berlin on Friday urging Moscow "to return to complete and verifiable compliance" to save the treaty.

But German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas says it's also time for broader treaties, as nuclear weapons proliferate to countries such as China, North Korea, India and Pakistan.

He says treaties also need to address new technologies, such as drones and cyberattacks. (AP)

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Christchurch, Mar 15 (AP) National carrier Air New Zealand has canceled at least 17 flights in and out of Christchurch, saying it couldn't screen customers and their baggage following deadly shootings at two mosques.

The airline said some smaller planes travelling on regional routes were canceled while larger jet planes would continue landing and taking off due to security screening processes already in place.

Typically, passengers on smaller turboprop aircraft traveling to or from Christchurch don't go through security screening and are able to walk right onto the plane.

Air New Zealand said the safety of its customers and employees was paramount and apologized for the inconvenience.

Police say at least 49 people were killed in the shootings during Friday prayers at the mosques. (AP) PMS

PMS
Wellington, Mar 15 (PTI) India's High Commission in New Zealand on Friday said that any Indian national affected by the attacks on two Christchurch mosques can contact the mission for assistance.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for providing assistance.

"We are shocked to hear about the shooting in Christchurch. Any Indians needing assistance should contact us at 021803899 or 021850033," the Twitter account of the Indian High Commission in New Zealand said.

"Our prayers go out to everyone who is affected. Help us spread the word. Stay safe!!" it said.

There was no immediate reports of any Indian affected in the incident.

Approximately 200,000 Indian and Indian-origin people live in New Zealand. There are over 30,000 Indian students in the country, according to the Indian High Commission's data on its website. PTI CPS AKJ CPS

CPS
Christchurch, Mar 15 (AFP) An Australian gunman whose assaults on two New Zealand mosques Friday left at least 49 people dead, published a racist manifesto on Twitter before livestreaming his rampage.

The New Zealand government said it could be illegal to share the video, which showed the gunman repeatedly shooting at worshippers from close range.

The Facebook Live video, taken with a camera that appeared to be mounted on the gunman's body, shows a clean-shaven, Caucasian man with short hair driving to the Masjid al Noor mosque in central Christchurch.

He enters the building and fires repeatedly at worshippers as he moves from room to room.

AFP determined the video was genuine through a digital investigation that included matching screenshots of the mosque taken from the gunman's footage with images available online showing the same areas.

The "manifesto" detailing motivations for the attack was posted on Friday morning onto a Twitter account with the same name and profile image as the Facebook page that streamed the attack.

In the video, the shooter parks his car next to the mosque and gets out of the vehicle with a rifle. He slowly goes to the boot of his car and retrieves another firearm.

He then walks into the compound of the mosque and fires at a person standing near the doorway before dropping the rifle and shooting repeatedly with the second weapon as he moves inside.

The gunman fires dozens of bullets at people trying to run away or lying down in huddled groups in corners of the rooms.

In the excerpt of the video viewed by AFP, which did not appear to be the full clip, he can be seen changing cartridges three times in just under two minutes.

The framing of the video, which shows only the gunman's hands holding the gun as he shoots and reloads, is eerily similar to the style of a first-person shooter video game.

AFP is not publishing the footage.

In the 74-page manifesto entitled "The Great Replacement", the gunman details his intention to attack Muslims.

The title of the document has the same name as a conspiracy theory originating in France that believes European populations are being displaced in their homelands by immigrant groups with higher birth rates.

The gunman identified himself as an Australia-born, 28-year-old white male from a low-income, working-class family.

He said that key points in his radicalisation were the defeat of the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen in 2017 elections, and the death of 11-year-old Ebba Akerlund in the 2017 Stockholm truck attack.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday confirmed the attacker at the Masjid al Noor mosque was an Australian.

"We stand here and condemn, absolutely the attack that occurred today by an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist," Morrison said.

New Zealand authorities said that three people had been arrested, but their identities were not made public. They later announced one man, aged in his late 20s, had been charged with murder and would appear in court on Saturday.

The gunman spoke only occasionally while in the car, with what sounded like an Australian accent. Satellite navigational audio could also be heard in the video as he drove to the mosque.

Distinctive writing on his weapons was seen in the footage as well as images posted on the Twitter account.

Scrawled in English and several Eastern European languages were the names of numerous historical military figures -- many of them Europeans involved in fighting the Ottoman forces in the 15th and 16th centuries. A few took part in the Crusades, centuries earlier.

The Facebook account that posted the video was no longer available shortly after the shooting. The Twitter account of the same name was quickly suspended.

"Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video," Facebook said in a tweet.

"We're also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we're aware." A spokesman for New Zealand's interior ministry said the video is likely to be classified as objectionable content under local law, and could be illegal to share.

"The content of the video is disturbing and will be harmful for people to see," he said. "This is a very real tragedy with real victims and we strongly encourage people to not share or view the video." (AFP) PMS

PMS
Pawar demands white paper on bridges, seeks fresh audit

Mumbai, Mar 15 (PTI) NCP chief Sharad Pawar Friday

demanded a white paper on the condition of all the bridges in

the megapolis.

His demand comes a day after six persons were killed

and 31 others injured when a section of the foot overbridge

near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) in south

Mumbai collapsed.

Talking to reporters here, Pawar also expressed

concerns over the "frequent mishaps" taking place in the city.

"A number of bridges, including the Eastern Express

Highway, need immediate attention. The Public Works Department

(PWD), the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the

Railways need to carry out fresh audits of all the bridges and

then they should be made public so that people know the

condition of the bridges they are using," he said.

"There is a need for inspection of all foot

overbridges (FOBs) and road overbridges (ROBs) and a white

paper should be published on it," he said.

Pawar also demanded that the big ticket

Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project be scrapped.

"There is no point spending millions of dollars on the

bullet train, when 11 to 15 railway passengers are dying in

railway mishaps in Mumbai daily. Instead, this huge money

should be spent on strengthening the suburban railway services

as almost one crore passengers travel by trains in the

metropolis daily," he said.

"The Centre and the state should take this issue

seriously to save the lives of commuters," the NCP chief

added.

"We must never forget that Mumbai is the financial

capital of the country and its population is on the rise.

Therefore, such incidents mar the city's growth prospects," he

further said.

Maharashtra Congress president Ashok Chavan and Leader

of Opposition in Maharashtra Legislative Council Dhananjay

Munde held the government responsible for the incident.

"The government is insensitive. The state ignored my

demand of audit of FOBs," Chavan said.

He demanded immediate sacking of BMC Commissioner and

Mayor.

Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam accused BMC Chief

Ajoy Mehta of "criminal negligence" and demanded his removal.

"Such incidents are increasing in Mumbai. Despite the

deaths of innocent Mumbaikars no action is taken by Chief

Minister Devendra Fadnavis against the guilty. People have to

bear the brunt of the criminal negligence of the civic chief,"

he said. PTI APM

NP NP
EC deploys first batch of central forces in West Bengal

Kolkata, Mar 15 (PTI) The Election Commission (EC) on

Friday deployed seven companies of central para-military

forces in as many districts of West Bengal, ahead of the

seven-phase Lok Sabha elections beginning April 11.

Three more companies will also move in by late this

evening for their deployment in South 24-Parganas district and

Kolkata, Additional Chief Electoral Officer Sanjay Basu said.

The seven companies have been deployed in the

districts of North Dinajpur, Malda, Murshidabad, Birbhum, East

Midnapore, West Midnapore and North 24-Parganas.

Personnel of these 10 companies of the BSF would carry

out route marches in "certain vulnerable pockets" to instill

confidence among the voters.

However, the number of vulnerable pockets, which are

decided on several factors including past incidents of

violence, is still being assessed, Basu said.

He said state Chief Electoral Officer Aariz Aftab and

state government officials Friday reviewed poll preparedness

through video conference.

The EC has already completed checking of EVMs in 11

out of 23 districts in the state, Basu said adding that the

availability of the polling personnel was sufficient.

Deputy Election Commissioner Sudeep Jain will meet

representatives of all recognised political parties of the

state on Saturday.

Jain will also hold a meeting with district election

officers, superintendents of police and police commissioners

to review the poll-preparedness.

He will also meet other central government officials

for election purpose.

Basu said the EC's 'cVIGIL' app, through which

voters can lodge any poll-related complaints to the EC, has so

far registered 510 complaints of violation of model code of

conduct in the state and they were being looked into.

The complaints received from the portals of the ECI

and Citizens at National Grievance Services (NGS) are 184 and

232 respectively and they were mainly on defacement issues.

"Most of these complaints are resolved," Basu said.

PTI AKB

NN NN
Kolkata, Mar 15 (PTI) Following are PTI's top stories

from the eastern region at 4.30 pm.

STORIES ON THE WIRE:

CAL 3 OD-RAHUL

Farmers committing suicides everyday as Modi govt not

keeping promise: Rahul

Bargarh: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday

claimed that the country was witnessing farmer suicides

everyday as the Modi government had failed to fulfil its

promise of mitigating their plight.

CAL 4 AS-AGP-BJP

AGP, BJP won't speak on Citizenship Bill during

campaigning: NEDA convenor

Guwahati: The AGP, which returned to the NDA fold on

Wednesday, and the BJP will not speak on the contentious

Citizenship Bill while campaigning for the upcoming Lok Sabha

polls in Assam, NEDA convenor Himanta Biswa Sarma said on

Friday.

CES 1 WB-POL-TMC PROFILE

West Bengal firmly under belt, Mamata eyes Delhi

centre stage

Kolkata: As she led thousands of hungry, half-clad and

angry farmers on the dusty streets of Singur and Nandigram

over a decade ago, defying the mighty Communist regime of West

Bengal, little did she know she was on the threshold of

scripting history.

CES 2 AR-POLL-PORTERS

Porters still indispensable part of elections in

Arunachal

Itanagar: A remnant of the British Raj, Auxiliary

Labour Corps (ALCs) or porters are still indispensable in

Arunachal Pradesh, especially during elections, for carrying

poll materials and transporting EVMs to remote polling

stations in the mountainous state.

CES 3 MZ-ASSEMBLY-VILLAGE

Illegal Bangladeshi entrants set up 16 villages in

Mizoram

Aizawl: Illegal immigrants from neighbouring

Bangladesh have set up 16 villages in South Mizoram's Lunglei

district, the Assembly was informed Friday.

CES 4 WB-TMC DHARNA

TMC's 48-hour dharna begins, BJP terms it 'drama'

Kolkata: The ruling Trinamool Congress Friday began

its 48-hour-long sit-in against the BJP's alleged attempt to

malign West Bengal by urging the ECI to declare all booths in

the state as "super sensitive".

CES 5 POLL-TRIPURA-REVIEW

Dy election commissioner to visit Tripura Sunday

Agartala: Deputy Election Commissioner Sudip Jain

would visit Tripura on Sunday to review poll-preparedness,

state Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Sriram Taranikanti said

Friday. PTI

RG RG
CALGARY, Alberta, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arkadia Capital Corp. (TSXV:AKC.H) (the "Company") announces the following:



On January 4, 2019, the Alberta Securities Commission issued a cease trade order against the Company for failure to file its audited annual financial statements and management's discussion and analysis for the financial year ended August 31, 2018.

Ryan Danard, Edward J. Kalthoff, and Dennis Nerland, QC have resigned as directors of the Company.

Messrs. Danard and Nerland have resigned as officers of the Company.

Adam Rock has been appointed as a director and the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Corporate Secretary of the Company.

The Company wishes to thank Messrs. Danard, Kalthoff, and Nerland for their service and wishes them well in their future endeavors.

Mr. Rock is a partner of Nerland Lindsey LLP, a law firm, where he specializes in corporate and securities matters. He holds a law degree from the University of Toronto and is called to the bar in the Province of Alberta.

Arkadia Capital Corp.

The Company is a CPC (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange). It does not carry on any business other than the identification and evaluation of assets or businesses with a view to a potential Qualifying Transaction (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange).

Contact Information

Adam Rock

(403) 299-9600

arock@nerlandlindsey.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.
(Eds: Updating with Rahul Gandhi's remarks)

New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of "trying stop the truth" about his "criminal failure" on employment from becoming public after over 100 economists and social scientists expressed concerns over "political interference" in statistical data in the country.

Gandhi's attack came a day after 108 economists and social scientists Thursday called for restoration of "institutional independence" and integrity of statistical organisations.

"NoMo trying to stop the truth about his criminal failure on employment from becoming public," Gandhi tweeted, tagging a media report on the appeal made by the economists and social scientists.

The appeal came against the backdrop of controversy over revision of gross domestic product (GDP) numbers and withholding employment data by the NSSO.

Earlier in the day, Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala also hit out at the Modi government over the issue.

"Nobody has hurt India's global reputation & credibility more than Modi government. 108 global economists and social scientists are concerned and you should be too!" he said in a tweet.

Surjewala urged people to vote out a party which, he alleged, "hides its massive failures by statistical jugglery and excel sheet management!"

The economists and social scientists appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency "to suppress uncomfortable data" and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

The signatories include Rakesh Basant (IIM-A), James Boyce (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US), Emily Breza (Harvard University, US), Satish Deshpande (Delhi University), Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia, Canada), R Ramakumar (TISS, Mumbai), Hema Swaminathan (IIM-B) and Rohit Azad (JNU). PTI ASK ASK NSD

NSD
New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) A delegation of Congress leaders Friday approached the Election Commission and sought its intervention in removing hoardings projecting achievements of the Narendra Modi government, claiming it as a violation of the model code of conduct.

"It has come to our notice that hoardings and advertisements featuring the prime minister and projecting his government's achievements are being displayed at public places and most notably petrol pump stations across the country despite the announcement of the schedule of the Lok Sabha elections.

"The said display is not only in violation of the model code of conduct but also represent misuse of public funds and official machinery for campaign purposes," the memorandum submitted by the party leaders said.

The Congress demanded that the Election Commission issue directions for immediate removal of all such hoardings and also seek a compliance report in the matter. PTI GJS GJS TDS

TDS
New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) Disgruntled AAP MLA Alka Lamba has said if the Congress approaches her to join the party then she will consider the offer.

She also said there is a possibility of formation of an alliance between the Congress and the AAP in Delhi in a couple of days.

"This is the time to join the nationwide movement against the BJP and if the Congress approaches me then I will consider the offer and not deny it," Lamba said.

"I gave two decades to the Congress. The Congress is doing good and this is the time to join the movement against the BJP," she said.

Lamba hit a rough patch with the AAP over its decision to pass a resolution to revoke former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's Bharat Ratna. She had raised objections to the party's resolution.

Last month, she alleged that the party leadership was "weakening" her and said she is being accused of attempting to switch over to the Congress.

In December, Lamba said in a tweet that the AAP had asked her to support the resolution, which she refused. She then added that now she is ready to face any punishment because of her actions.

Lamba won the Chandni Chowk assembly seat in the 2013 Delhi polls. Before joining the AAP, Lamba was part of the Congress women's wing. PTI PR UZM KJ
New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge has again rejected the government's offer to attend a meeting of the Lokpal selection panel, saying there is no provision for a special invitee attending the meet.

The meeting slated on Friday evening would be boycotted by Kharge the seventh time since February 2018.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Congress leader alleged that the government has not made any attempt to amend the relevant provisions of the Lokpal Act to include the leader of the single largest party in the opposition as a member of the selection committee.

"Since there is no provision under section 4 of the Lokpal Act, 2013, for a special invitee to be a part of the Selection Committee or attend these meetings, I am once again forced to respectfully decline this invitation," he said in his letter.

Kharge, as a leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, was earlier invited to attend the selection panel meetings six times and he has rejected the offers on the same grounds each time.

He also alleged that the government and its ministers have repeatedly used his refusal to attend the meetings as a special invitee as an "excuse for not appointing a Lokpal over the last five years".

"However, the fact remains that whatever tardy progress the government has made has only been under pressure from the Supreme Court," Kharge said.

Alleging that "excluding the opposition", this process is being "vitiated", the Congress leader said, "I would like to caution the government that anyone selected through this one-sided process may decline to accept this position." PRI SKC NSD

NSD
New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) In a significant development, France, which had made a fresh bid at the UN to get Masood Azhar banned, has decided to impose financial sanctions on the JeM chief, asserting that it has always been by India's side in the fight against terrorism.

France along with the US and the UK had moved a proposal in the UN Security Council to designate the Pakistan-based terror group Jaish-e-Mohammed chief as a "global terrorist".

However, the bid was blocked by China which put a technical hold on the proposal.

"A deadly attack took place in Pulwama on February 14, 2019, claiming over 40 victims from the Indian police forces. The Jaish-e-Mohammed, which the United Nations has deemed to be a terrorist organisation since 2001, has claimed responsibility for this attack," said a joint statement by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, the French Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the French Ministry of the Interior.

"France has always been and always will be by India's side in the fight against terrorism," it said. PTI ASK PYK NSD
Srinagar, Mar 15 (PTI) A 40-year-old man was forcibly taken away from his home and shot dead by terrorists in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, police said Friday.

"Manzoor Ahmad Lone was shot dead by the terrorists late on Thursday night at Gulzarpora in Awantipora area of Pulwama, " a police spokesman said.

He said initial investigation revealed that Lone was forcibly taken away by terrorists from his home in Dogripora and shot dead at nearby Gulzarpora.

This was the third attack on civilians in south Kashmir in the past two days.

A National Conference worker was shot at and injured in Bijbehara area of Anantnag district on Thursday while an army deserter was shot dead on Wednesday in Pulwama district. PTI MIJ ABH

ABH
Jaipur, Mar 15 (PTI) With the Congress about to announce its first list of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, speculation about electoral debut of Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot's son Vaibhav Gehlot is gaining ground.

Vaibhav Gehlot, currently a state unit general secretary, is likely to be fielded from his home turf Jodhpur or Jalore-Sirohi Lok Sabha constituency as the respective district Congress committees have received proposals supporting his candidature, party insiders said.

Another favourable seat could be the Tonk-Swai Madhopur parliamentary constituency from where Vaibhav Gehlot's name was floated during the 2009 Lok Sabha election.

If Ashok Gehlot's statement made at a recent public meeting in Sirohi is anything to go by, Vaibhav can be fielded from Jalore-Sirohi seat.

During his visit to Sirohi, the chief minister had said, "I know that Vaibhav's name is doing the rounds. It was my wish five years ago that he contests from Jalore-Sirohi. But he could not get a ticket due to some reason... We had campaigned and I had also come to Jalore."

However, Ashok Gehlot went on to clarify that the final decision on ticket distribution would be taken by the Congress high command.

"We are loyal soldiers of the Congress. If Rahul Gandhi picks some other candidate, then you see Vaibhav Gehlot in him," he had said.

Later, at a press conference, the chief minister said if it was in his hands, he would have given Vaibhav Gehlot the opportunity to contest elections 10 years ago.

Ashok Gehlot had said, "He is a party worker, ask him from where he will contest and ask the party where it will field him from."

At one time, even Rajasthan Congress chief and deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot appeared to support Vaibhav Gehlot's candidature.

Earlier in January, Pilot had said, "Vaibhav Gehlot is active in the party for a long time. He may not have got the opportunity (to contest elections) due to some reasons in the past. But it will be our endeavour that candidates like him get a chance to come forward. The party's focus is on youths and there will be an effort to give them a chance."

However, on March 5, he said the Congress was of the opinion that it would be better to find candidates other than sitting MPs, MLAs, those who lost elections in the past and family members of party leaders.

Choice of party workers and people and winnability of candidates would be considered, he had said.

Polling will be held in Rajasthan in two phases on April 29 and May 6. PTI AG DIV

DIV
New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) The Enforcement Directorate (ED) Friday said it has busted an illegal foreign currency transaction racket with the seizure of Indian and foreign currencies worth Rs 1.83 crore from a Jaipur-based currency operator.

"Harish Bhatija of Harish Forex (P) Ltd., Jaipur is authorised by the RBI for legal purchase and sale of foreign currency, but in the garb of this authorisation, the owner was running a racket of illegal collection of foreign currency," the agency said in a statement.

It said sleuths of the agency's Jaipur zonal unit detected that illegally collected or acquired foreign currencies were being "sent to other cities like Ahmedabad, Mumbai among others by Bhatija with the help of his employee Kamal Bhandari".

It was detected, the agency said, that the courier used to take such illegally collected foreign currencies to various cities using public bus or train.

Bhandari was apprehended Thursday in Jaipur with currencies of 11 countries, including USD and Euro, worth Rs 60 lakh and subsequently the office and residence of Bhatija were searched that led to the recovery of foreign currencies worth Rs 33 lakh and Indian currency of Rs 90 lakh.

The total value of the currencies seized is Rs 1.83 crore and a case under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FMA) has been filed, it said.

"Incriminating documents and electronic devices reflecting illegal dealings in foreign exchange were also recovered and seized during the course of searches," the agency said. PTI NES SMN
Jammu, Mar 15 (PTI) An Army porter was injured by a stray bullet fired from across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district on Friday, officials said.

According to them, Pakistani troops fired a few shots targeting Indian posts in Kalal area of Nowshera sector in the early hours Friday and one of the stray bullets hit a porter.

The injured, Surjeet Kumar, was immediately taken to hospital for treatment, they said.

Barring this incident, there was no report of ceasefire violation from anywhere along the LoC since Wednesday afternoon, an official said.

There has been a spurt in cross-border skirmishes after India's preemptive air strike on a Jaish-e-Mohammad terror camp in Pakistan's Balakot on February 26 following the February 14 Pulwama terror attack in which 40 CRPF personnel were killed.

Four civilians, including three members of a family, were killed and several others injured as Pakistan targeted dozens of villages in over 100 incidents of ceasefire violations along the LoC in the state, especially in the twin districts of Poonch and Rajouri, since then. PTI TAS NSD

NSD
New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday hit out at the Congress for "not showing courage" after the terror attack in Mumbai in 2011, and lauded the NDA government for retaliating after the Pulwama blast which claimed the lives of 40 CRPF men.

Addressing a meeting of lawyers at the Delhi BJP office here, Prasad praised Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his "positive approach and willpower".

"At the time of 2011 Mumbai attack, the army was ready for action but the Congress leaders had no courage to take retaliatory action but after Pulwama attack our government not only gave a befitting reply through an air strike but also withdrew the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status from Pakistan and imposed 200 per cent custom duties on its goods," Prasad said.

Meanwhile, the Lok Sabha in-charge of Delhi unit of BJP Nirmala Sitharaman and co-in-charge Jaibhan Pawaiya interacted with party leaders and workers on Friday and sought their feedback from different constituencies in Delhi, said a senior party leader. PTI VIT VIT IND

IND
English French

Paris, France and Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, March 15, 2019  NANOBIOTIX (Euronext: NANO  ISIN: FR0011341205  the Company), a clinical-stage nanomedicine company pioneering new approaches to the treatment of cancer, today announced its unaudited1 consolidated results for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018:



Major milestones achieved during the year: Positive Phase II/III results for NBTXR3 in patients with locally advanced Soft Tissue Sarcoma demonstrating clinical meaningful benefits versus standard of care Positive clinical update from Phase I Head and Neck and Phase I/II Liver cancers trials presented at major congresses Completion of Phase I dose escalation in Head and Neck cancers Engaged major preclinical collaborations with highly respected U.S. cancer centers including the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Providence Cancer Institute and Weill Cornell Medicine

Consolidated cash available of 36.2M at December 31, 2018 Strengthened by the payment of a 16M first tranche pursuant to a 40M non-dilutive financing agreement established with the European Investment Bank in 2018

Expenses in R&D proceeding as expected according to clinical development plan



Philippe Mauberna, Chief Financial Officer of Nanobiotix said: 2018 has been a major year for Nanobiotix, we made significant progress in the financial and clinical plan of the company. R&D expenses are linked to our development plan and the hiring of experts in key positions. We are delighted by the positive results in Soft Tissue Sarcoma Phase II/III and the encouraging update from Head and Neck and Liver cancers Phase I/II trials. Indeed, the support of the European Investment Bank strengthens our balance sheet, which allows us to move forward with our 2019 upcoming key milestones.

The unaudited1 consolidated financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2018 were approved by the executive board and reviewed by the supervisory board of the Company on March 15, 2019.

Consolidated Income statement (unaudited)1

K 2018 2017 Total revenue and other income 3,479 3,722 Sales

Services

Other sales

Licences







Other revenues

Research Tax Credit

Subsidies

Other 116

109

7

-







3,363

3,251

90

22



252

229

23

-







3,470

3,259

154

57 Research & Development (R&D) costs (incl. Share-based payments) (20,893 ) (17,733 ) Selling, General and Administrative (SG&A) costs (incl. Share-based payments) (12,653 ) (11,254 ) Operating loss (30,066 ) (25,267 ) Financial loss (277 ) (876 ) Income tax - - Net loss for the period (30,345 ) (26,143 )

Financial Review (unaudited)1

Total Revenue in 2018 amounted to 3.5M vs. 3.7M in 2017, mainly due to:

Revenues related to services provided mainly by the Company to its partner, PharmaEngine, pursuant to a commercial agreement, amounted to 116K in 2018 (vs. 252K in 2017); and

Other revenues of 3,363K in 2018 (vs. 3,469K in 2017) mainly related to the Research Tax Credit (Credit dImpot Recherche - CIR).

Total Operating expenses reached 33.5M in 2018 vs. 29.0M in 2017:

R&D expenses (including share-based payments) in 2018 amounted to 20.9M (vs. 17.7M in 2017); the variance comes from an increase in operations (opening of the new production site, launch and extension of new studies) as well as the addition of highly-qualified staff;

SG&A costs (including share-based payments) in 2018 were 12.7M (vs. 11.3M in 2017).

Total headcount on a consolidated basis reached 102 as of December 31, 2018 vs. 85 as of December 31, 2017, in line with the Companys growth.

Net loss after tax amounts to 30.3M as of December 31, 2018 (vs. 26.1M loss as of December 31, 2017).

Cash available at December 31, 2018 amounted to 36.2M.

-------------------------------------

Nanobiotix activities and achievements in 2018

Clinical

Positive Phase II/III results for NBTXR3 in patients with locally advanced Soft Tissue Sarcoma demonstrated clinical meaningful benefits versus standard of care

Nanobiotix announced positive results from its Phase II/III clinical trial of NBTXR3 in patients with locally advanced soft tissue sarcoma. The trial achieved its primary endpoint with a pathological complete response rate. It also achieved its secondary endpoint in operability. NBTXR3 demonstrated clinical meaningful benefits for such patients versus standard of care. The data also showed that NBTXR3 was well tolerated. The randomized trial validated the first-in-class mode of action of NBTXR3.

These positive results were presented by Dr. Sylvie Bonvalot at the ESMO and ASTRO annual conferences.

Positive Update on Head and Neck cancers Phase I trial showing potential impact for survival

Nanobiotix provided an update on the Head and Neck Phase I Trial with NBTXR3 data presented at ImmunoRad 2018. The Phase I Trial focus on elderly and frail patients ineligible for cisplatin or intolerant to cetuximab. The data show the potential impact on survival in this patient population.

Encouraging Data from Phase I/II Liver cancers trial

Nanobiotix presented initial promising data from Phase I/II Liver trial evaluating NBTXR3 in liver cancers, including primary (Hepatocellular, HCC) and liver metastasis from other tumors at the American Society of Clinical Gastrointestinal annual meeting (ASCO GI). These positive results show that NBTXR3 was well tolerated with no adverse event related to NBTXR3 and no dose-limiting toxicity.

Collaboration in preclinical research

Collaboration with the Providence Cancer Institute

Nanobiotix partnered with the Providence Cancer Institute to run immunotherapeutic preclinical research in pancreatic cancer. This collaboration will provide essential preclinical data on the ability of NBTXR3 activated by radiotherapy to induce an antitumoral immune response.

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Nanobiotix have an agreement in pre-clinical research

Nanobiotix and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have an agreement to run immunotherapeutic pre-clinical research in lung cancer. The main objectives of this project, with one of the worlds leading oncology research centers, is to provide preclinical data using NBTXR3 activated by radiotherapy plus anti PD-1 Nivolumab (murine version of Opdivo).

Partnering with Weill Cornell Medicine on pre-clinical studies

Nanobiotix and Weill Cornell Medicine partnered to perform pre-clinical studies to evaluate the impact of NBTXR3 on cGAS-STING pathway in mammary cancers. The main objective is to study the impact of NBTXR3 activated by radiotherapy on cGAS-STING, a key component of the anti-tumor immune response. Data generated from this collaboration could provide support for the assertion that NBTXR3 activated by radiotherapy can increase the anti-tumor immune response compared to radiotherapy alone.

Preclinical data showing NBTXR3 can activate cGAS-STING pathway

Nanobiotix presented preclinical data showing NBTXR3 nanoparticles can activate the cGAS-STING pathway at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). These observations support the rationale for using NBTXR3 with radiation therapy in combination with immunotherapeutic agents and/or STING agonist to transform tumors into an in-situ cancer vaccine.

Financial events

Launch of a 40M non-dilutive financing agreement with the European Investment Bank

Nanobiotix announced in July 2018, the launching of a non-dilutive financing agreement with the European Investment Bank to boost its research, development and innovation activities. This agreement will allow the Company to borrow up to 40M through loans before July 26, 2020 subject to achieving a set of agreed performance criteria.

In October 2018, Nanobiotix received the first tranche disbursement of 16M. The proceeds will be used to speed up development of lead product NBTXR3 in Head and Neck cancers and to support the European go-to-market strategy.

Selection to the Euronext Tech 40

This honor recognizes the best performing Tech SMEs listed on Euronext markets. An independent group of European experts annually selects 40 great companies on the basis of their business, financial and stock market performance.

Events 2019

Large-scale collaboration on NBTXR3 with the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

In January 2019, Nanobiotix and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center announced a large-scale comprehensive clinical collaboration on NBTXR3. The collaboration will initially support nine new Phase I/II clinical trials with NBTXR3 for use in treating six cancer types  head and neck, pancreatic, thoracic, lung, gastrointestinal and genitourinary cancers  and will involve around 340 patients. Most of the trials are expected to be launched in 2019. Nanobiotix will finance at least approximately $11M, a portion of which has been paid as of the start of the collaboration, with additional amounts payable during development and upon specified regulatory milestone.

Announced plans to conduct registered public offering in the US

In January 2019, Nanobiotix announced that it plans to conduct a registered public offering of its ordinary shares, including the form of American Depositary Shares (ADSs) in the United States. Nanobiotix submitted a confidential draft registration statement on Form F-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Second tranche disbursement from the European Investment Bank

In March 2019, Nanobiotix received the second tranche of disbursement of 14M from the European Investment Bank. This payment was granted because of the companys achievement on two criteria: determination of the recommended dose at 22% of the tumor volume for head and neck cancers treatment following the end of Phase I clinical trial with NBTXR3 and positive evaluation of the clinical benefit/risk ratio of NBTXR3 in soft tissue sarcomas Phase II/III by the clinical expert mandated by the French medical device notified body, GMED.

2019 Perspectives

This year, Nanobiotix expects to receive its CE mark for NBTXR3 for the treatment of Soft Tissue Sarcoma, which would improve access to the product for cancer patients.

In parallel, clinical development should advance with the publication of data in several cancer types.

Newsflow (anticipated)

2019  European market approval/CE mark for the treatment of Soft Tissue Sarcoma cancer

1H2019 -- Preclinical data regarding immuno-oncology using NBTXR3 in combination with checkpoint inhibitors

1H2019 -- FDA feedback on NBTXR3 clinical plan in Head and Neck cancers

2H2019  Presentation of final Head & Neck Phase I dose escalation results

2H2019 -- Potential early results in immuno-oncology with anti-PD-1 study

Multiple launches of clinical trials within MD Anderson collaboration

Additional news on other clinical trials and preclinical programs

Additional news on plans to conduct registered public offering in the United States

Development Plan



-Ends-

Next financial press release: revenue for Q1 2019 on April 30, 2019

Nanobiotix Annual General Meeting will be held on April 11, 2019 at 2:30 pm Pullman Bercy  Saumur Champigny  1 rue de Libourne 75012 Paris, France.

About NANOBIOTIX: www.nanobiotix.com

Incorporated in 2003, Nanobiotix is a leading, clinical-stage nanomedicine company pioneering new approaches to significantly change patient outcomes by bringing nanophysics to the heart of the cell.

The Nanobiotix philosophy is rooted in designing pioneering, physical-based approaches to bring highly effective and generalized solutions to address unmet medical needs and challenges.

Nanobiotixs first-in-class, proprietary lead technology, NanoXray, aims to expand radiotherapy benefits for millions of cancer patients. Nanobiotixs Immuno-Oncology program has the potential to bring a new dimension to cancer immunotherapies.

Nanobiotix is listed on the regulated market of Euronext in Paris (Euronext: NANO / ISIN: FR0011341205; Bloomberg: NANO: FP). The Companys headquarters are in Paris, France, with a U.S. affiliate in Cambridge, MA, and European affiliates in Spain and Germany.

Contacts

Nanobiotix



Sarah Gaubert

Director, Communication & Public Affairs

+33 (0)1 40 26 07 55

sarah.gaubert@nanobiotix.com /

contact@nanobiotix.com







Noel Kurdi

Director, Investor Relations

+1 (646) 241-4400

noel.kurdi@nanobiotix.com / investors@nanobiotix.com



Ricky Bhajun

Investor Relations Europe

+33 (0)1 79 97 29 99

ricky.bhajun@nanobiotix.com / investors@nanobiotix.com Media Relations



France - Springbok Consultants

Marina Rosoff

+33 (0)6 71 58 00 34

marina@springbok.fr



US  RooneyPartners

Marion Janic

+1 (212) 223-4017

mjanic@rooneyco.com

Disclaimer

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements concerning Nanobiotix and its business. Such forward-looking statements are based on assumptions that Nanobiotix considers to be reasonable. However, there can be no assurance that the estimates contained in such forwardlooking statements will be verified, which estimates are subject to numerous risks including the risks set forth in the reference document of Nanobiotix filed with the French Financial Markets Authority (Autorite des Marches Financiers) under number D.17-0470 on April 28, 2017 as well as in its 2017 annual financial report filed with the French Financial Markets Authority on March 29, 2018 (a copy of which is available on www.nanobiotix.com) and to the development of economic conditions, financial markets and the markets in which Nanobiotix operates. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are also subject to risks not yet known to Nanobiotix or not currently considered material by Nanobiotix. The occurrence of all or part of such risks could cause actual results, financial conditions, performance or achievements of Nanobiotix to be materially different from such forward-looking statements. This press release and the information that it contains do not constitute an offer to sell or subscribe for, or a solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for, Nanobiotix shares in any country. At the moment NBTXR3 does not bear a CE mark and is not permitted to be placed on the market or put into service until NBTXR3 has obtained a CE mark.







1 The Companys statutory auditors have completed their audit work on the 2018 financial statements and expect to issue their audit report on March 20th, 2019.

Attachment
Heroin worth Rs 40 lakh seized; one arrested

Kolkata, Mar 15 (PTI) The Kolkata Police (KP) has

seized 700 gm heroin worth Rs 40 lakh from the city's Chitpur

area and arrested a person for possessing the contraband, a

senior police officer said Friday.

The person, identified as Adut Sheikh, is a resident

of Sagardighi in Murshidabad district.

He was intercepted near Dum Dum Road under the

jurisdiction of Chitpur police station on Thursday night when

he was waiting for someone.

The heroin was seized from his backpack, the police

officer said.

"The market value of the material is around Rs 35-40

lakh. The accused did not reveal much during interrogation. It

seems that accused is a delivery man. He will be produced

before the city's NDPS court Friday," the police officer said.

The Kolkata Police had arrested a drug dealer and her

associate from Pragati Maidan police station area last week.

Asked whether Adut was a part of the same gang, the

police officer said that he may have links to the racket. PTI

SCH

SBN SBN
CPI leader Raja requests Soren to include CPI in proposed

Mahagathbandhan

Ranchi, Mar 15 (PTI) Senior CPI leader D Raja Friday

met Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) working president Hemant

Soren and urged him to make the CPI a part of the proposed

Mahagathbandhan and allot Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat to it.

According to a press statement issued by the JMM, Raja

requested the JMM leader to make the CPI a part of the

proposed Mahagathbandhan and give the left party Hazaribagh

Lok Sabha seat, which is going for poll on May 6.

Raja met Soren in New Delhi.

Soren said, "JMM wants the Left parties in Jharkhand

to be a part of the Mahagathbandhan. But the Left parties

should leave their claim on Koderma seat so that the matter

could be discussed with Congress president Rahul Gandhi."

The former Jharkhand chief minister said, "The JMM is

committed to defeat the BJP by taking the same ideological

parties in the alliance. The JMM is ready to ally, and now the

decision is for the Left parties."

Rajas request comes two days after the Left parties

decided to contest three of the 14 Lok Sabha seats in the

state.

The CPI(M) Jharkhand unit secretary G K Bakshi, had

told reporters in Dhanbad on March 13 that the Left Front has

decided to contest three seats---CPI(M) from Rajmahal (ST),

CPI from Hazaribagh and CPI (ML-Liberation) from Kodarma.

The proposed grand alliance comprising Congress, JMM,

Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) and RJD, has not yet

officially announced candidates for the 14 Lok Sabha seats in

Jharkhand. PTI PVR

RG RG
Bhopal, Mar 15 (PTI) An activist of the SIMI, a banned outfit, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Friday by a special NIA court here on multiple counts, including for killing an Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) constable and injuring two other police officials in 2011, the prosecution said.

The activist, identified only as Farhat, was convicted and sentenced by special NIA judge Girish Dixit, district prosecution office media in-charge Yogesh Tiwari said.

Farhat and another accused Zakir, both activists of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), were accused of killing ATS constable Shivpratap and injuring two other policemen on June 3, 2011 in Ratlam, Tiwari said.

Both the assailants were caught on the spot and a pistol was seized from one of them, he added.

A case was registered against them under IPC sections 302 (murder) and 307 (attempt to murder), Tiwari said.

He said the case was later transferred to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in Bhopal for trial as the firing on the policemen was treated as a "terror attack".

The trial was conducted through video-conferencing, Tiwari said.

Zakir was among the eight SIMI activists who were killed by the police after they escaped from the high-security Bhopal Central Jail in 2016, he added.

After taking into account the evidence submitted by the prosecution, the court awarded life imprisonment to Farhat for killing Shivpratap and also imposed a fine of Rs 2,000 on him, Tiwari said.

Farhat was also sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to murder constable Jitendra and sub-inspector Manish Dube, he said, adding that a total fine of Rs 4,000 was imposed on him.

Farhat was awarded another life imprisonment under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, Tiwari said.

The third accused in the case, Nizamuddin, was acquitted by the court for lack of evidence, he added. PTI CORR MAS RSY RC
(Eds: Adding courts observations, JD(U)s statement)

Patna, Mar 15 (PTI) The Patna High Court Friday quashed criminal proceedings initiated against Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar by a lower court in a three-decades-old murder case, holding that "the prosecution is mala fide,

untenable and solely intended to harass the petitioner".

Justice A Amanullah passed the order on an application moved by Kumar, who heads the Janata Dal (United).

The proceedings were initiated in 2009, 18 years after an FIR was lodged at the Pandarak police station in connection with the killing of one Sita Ram Singh, who died in violence at a polling booth in the Barh Lok Sabha constituency where bypoll was underway and Kumar was the candidate of the Janata Dal.

An FIR was lodged by Singh's brother Raja Ram Singh on November 16, 1991, wherein he had named Kumar alongside don-turned-politicians Dilip Singh and Dularchand Yadav and their associates who were believed to be close to the Janata Dal.

Upon learning that his name had figured in the FIR, Kumar filed an application before the investigating officer that at the time of the incident, he was with the District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police of Nalanda district and not present when the attack took place.

Police submitted its final report two years later wherein "no evidence" was found with regard to the involvement of Kumar and 15 years afterwards, the ACJM on August 05, 2008 accepted the final report and issued NBWs against those accused who were prima facie found to be involved in the incident.

One Ashok Singh, who was injured in the firing but not the informant in the case, filed a "protest-cum-complaint petition" on January 20, 2009 before the ACJM court which "again took cognizance" against Kumar vide order dated July 20, 2009.

Appearing on behalf of the chief minister, senior Supreme Court lawyer Surendra Singh had argued that Kumar had occupied the post in "late 2005, and thus, due to political rivalry, such petition was filed to damage him personally and politically".

In his more than 100 pages long order, Justice Amanullah appear to concur with the petitioners counsel and remarked "the court has no hesitation to record a finding that the protest-cum-complaint petition itself was frivolous, mala fide, frivolous, mischievous, without any basis and in fact totally false and fabricated".

"The court inescapably finds that the prosecution is mala fide, untenable and solely intended to harass the petitioner," Justice Amanullah added as a parting note.

Hailing the judgement, JD(U) national general secretary and Chief Spokesman K C Tyagi issued a statement, "The decision proves that Nitish Kumar represents the moral ethos of Indian politics."

It comes as a relief to the chief minister with the opposition parties, especially the Rashtriya Janata Dal, targeting him over his name figuring in the murder case. PTI CORR NAC RG KJ

KJ
New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) The judiciary will protect the freedom of press, The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim said on Friday, minutes after the Supreme Court stayed the Meghalaya High Court judgment in a contempt case against her and the publisher of the daily.

The case relates to an article published by the paper on the perks and facilities for retired judges and their families.

The apex court also stayed the operation of the judgment by which the high court had imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh each on Mukhim and publisher Shoba Chaudhuri.

Accompanied by her lawyer Vrinda Grover, Mukhim told PTI, "The Supreme Court has stayed and suspended the judgment passed by the Meghalaya High Court on March 8, 2019. I have full faith that judiciary will protect the freedom of press."

The high court had also said that if the two persons failed to deposit the fine, they will have to undergo six months simple imprisonment and the newspaper will be banned.

A Supreme Court bench, headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi, also issued notice to the high court registrar on the appeal filed by the editor and the publisher of the newspaper.

The high court had on March 8 sentenced the editor and the publisher to sit in the corner of the court room till the rising of the court in the contempt case. PTI RKS LLP LLP

NSD
(Eds: Correcting judge's name in para 2)

New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) The Delhi High Court initiated a PIL on Friday on letters sent by undertrials lodged in the jails here seeking a speedy disposal of their cases, which were pending in the lower courts for years.

A bench of Chief Justice Rajendra Menon and Justice A J Bhambhani issued notice to the Delhi government and sought its response on the plea by August 13.

The court initiated the public interest litigation (PIL) on its own by taking cognisance of five letters sent by seven undertrials facing trial for cases ranging from murder to drug possession and also under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

Ujair Ahmed, one of the undertrials who wrote to the court, was arrested in 2013 by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for various offences under the UAPA and is lodged in the Rohini jail here for over five years.

However, the case was yet to be put on charge, he has said in his letter, while claiming that he was falsely implicated in it.

Another undertrial, Imran Khan, who is lodged in Tihar Jail here since July 2016, when he was arrested by the NIA for offences under the UAPA, has said in his letter that the chargesheet in his case was filed in July 2016, but since then, there has been no progress.

Shahjahan, Mohammad Sajid and Sattar, lodged in Tihar Jail, are facing a drug possession and trafficking case lodged against them in 2014. They have written in their letter that the matter is pending trial in the lower court, which has till date examined only eight of the 26 witnesses.

They have also sought a speedy trial in their case.

Shahbuddin, an accused in a 2015 murder case and currently lodged in Tihar Jail, has prayed for a speedy trial of his case, in which the lower court has examined only eight of the 20 witnesses till date.

A similar plea has been made by Shankar, accused in a 2014 rape case, who is also lodged in Tihar Jail. He has contended that the trial court has examined only nine of the 17 witnesses in the case till date. PTI HMP SKV RC
\R Kota (Rajasthan) Mar 15 (PTI) A 30-year-old man was sentenced to life imprisonment by a POCSO court for sodomising a 12-year-old boy in a village in Kota district, an official said Friday.

Munesh, a resident of Takarwara village, was given life in jail by judge Girish Agarwal on Thursday, Special Public Prosecutor Kamalkant Sharma said.

A fine of Rs 70,000 was also imposed on the convict.

Munesh on June 9, 2017 had lured the boy to an isolated place near Jhadol village and sexually harassed him.

Upon reaching home, the boy narrated the ordeal to his parents who then filed a complaint and an FIR was registered under various sections of the IPC and the POCSO Act, Sharma said.

Statements of at least 13 witnesses were recorded during the trial, the public prosecutor said. PTI CORR MAZ GVS
(Eds: Adding details relating to Robert Vadra)

New Delhi, Mar 15 (PTI) The Delhi High Court Friday directed ED to clarify the status of purported Red Corner Notice (RCN) issued against arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari, who has sought the quashing of a money laundering case against him.

While ED submitted in an affidavit that Bhandari was a fugitive, proclaimed absconder and evading the process of law, his counsel said the probe agency has concealed information from the court which last July quashed an order declaring his client as a proclaimed offender.

Justice Mukta Gupta asked Enforcement Directorate to file an affidavit clarifying the facts, its stand and the status of the RCN. The court listed the matter for further hearing on April 1.

Bhandari and his wife Sonia Bhandari have move separate pleas seeking quashing of the money laundering case lodged against them by ED in February 2017.

Bhandari, who is also an accused in a 2016 case under the Official Secrets Act relating to the recovery of confidential documents of the Ministry of Defence from his residence during an Income Tax raid in 2016, was declared a proclaimed offender by a trial court here in January last year.

He is also facing prosecution under provisions of the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015.

During the probe, ED had found that he helped Robert Vadra, brother-in-law of Congress President Rahul Gandhi, in purchasing a property in the United Kingdom.

ED has lodged a money laundering case against Vadra and his close aide Manoj Arora accusing them of acquiring the London property in an illegal manner.

The case is before Special Judge Arvind Kumar in Patiala House Courts here which has granted anticipatory bail to Vadra. The court had asked him to cooperate in the investigation by the ED where he appeared several times for being quizzed.

In an affidavit filed in response to Bhandari's plea for quashing the case under Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the high court, ED has said: "It is relevant to note that when the petitioner fled India, there already existed a Look Out Circular (LOC) against him as his presence was needed by various law enforcement agencies."

It added that because of the existence of LOC, Bhandari could not have travelled by air or sea and, therefore, he is believed to have fled by road through Indo-nepal Border.

"...a RCN has been issued by the Interpol declaring the petitioner as a fugitive wanted for prosecution," ED said in the affidavit filed through central government standing counsel Amit Mahajan. The RCN was issued on October 16, 2017.

ED raised the preliminary objection on Bhandari's petition and urged the court to first decide whether a person against whom RCN is issued, a declared absconder and evading process of law here, can be allowed to invoke the jurisdiction of the court.

Can such a person have the luxury of wasting the time of constitutional courts when large number of law abiding citizens are waiting justice, it said.

Bhandari, in an affidavit notarised in London, claimed that the ED's response was "motivated" and "based on incorrect and misleading information" and ought to be rejected by the court.

His counsel annexed media reports with the affidavit showing that the purported RCN issued against him was not in existence and in any case the documents enclosed by the agency showed they cannot be used in any proceedings.

The high court, in its July 2018 decision, set aside the order declaring Bhandari a proclaimed offender in the OSA case as he was not an accused under the IPC. PTI SKV HMP UK RKS SA
SC lists opposition leaders' plea on counting of VVPAT slips for Mar 25, asks EC to depute officer to assist court. PTI MNL LLP LLP MIN

MIN
Madurai, Mar 15 (PTI) The Madras High Court on Friday directed the authorities concerned to take steps to delete all video clips on social media relating to sexual harassment of women by a gang in Coimbatore district which had allegedly used them to blackmail the victims.

A division bench of justices N Kirubakaran and S S Sundar, which gave the direction on a petition by Ilamukhil seeking deletion of all the video clips of the victims,

observed that the release of such videos on social media had taken a toll on the mental well being of the victims and their relatives.

It also recommended introduction of a chapter on the 'good and evils' of the internet and other social networking sites in textbooks in educational institutions.

The court directed the police to maintain vigil to prevent recurrence of such incidents.

The petitioner alleged that the names of the victims had found a place in the government order issued by the Tamil Nadu government facilitating the CBI to take over the case involving the sexual harassment of a 19-year-old woman by the gang.

The petitioner sought a direction to the authorities concerned to delete the names of the victims of sexual assault from the social media.

Meanwhile, a court in Coimbatore on Friday granted four days custody of Thirunavukkarasu, the key accused in the sexual harassment case, to CB-CID.

The accused was produced before Chief Judicial Magistrate S Nagarajan through videoconferencing as police apprehended violence.

After assigning the case pertaining to the sexual harassment of a 19-year-old woman by the gang in Coimbatore district to CB-CID on March 12, the government had issued an order for a CBI probe in the wake of allegations that several other women had been assaulted.

The four-member gang had on February 12 allegedly tried to strip the woman inside a car near Pollachi, over 500 km from here, recorded the act and blackmailed her using the visuals.

The victim, who managed to free herself, lodged a complaint with the police on February 24.

The case assumed political overtones since a local functionary of ruling AIADMK allegedly attacked the victim's brother.

The four accused in sexual harassment case --Sabarirajan, Thirunavakkarasu, Sathish and Vasanthkumar -- are under judicial custody and were booked under various sections of the IPC, Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Harassment of Women Act and the Goondas Act. PTI SSN NVM ROH RT
ATHENS, Greece, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TEN, Ltd (TEN or the Company) (NYSE:TNP) today announced new charters for two LNG carriers, the Neo Energy and the Maria Energy to significant international energy concerns for an aggregate period of 36 months. The total gross revenues from these two fixtures, over the duration of the respective contacts, is expected at about $60 million.



LNG is on top of the agenda for TENs diversified energy fleet. With two vessels fixed on accretive medium-term charters, the Company is examining further expansion in the sector, Mr. George Saroglou, COO of TEN commented. TENs model provides its clients with a broad range of vessel types, ranging from crude and product tankers to gas carriers. At the same time this diversity allows TEN to choose the best investment opportunities for growth, Mr. Saroglou concluded.

ABOUT TSAKOS ENERGY NAVIGATION

TEN, founded in 1993 and celebrating this year 26 years as a public company, is one of the first and most established public shipping companies in the world. TENs diversified energy fleet currently consists of 68 double-hull vessels, including two aframax and two suezmax tankers under construction, constituting a mix of crude tankers, product tankers and LNG carriers, totalling 7.5 million dwt. Of the proforma fleet today, 48 vessels trade in crude, 15 in products, three are shuttle tankers and two are LNG carriers.

ABOUT FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted by such forward-looking statements. TEN undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

For further information please contact:

Company

Tsakos Energy Navigation Ltd.

George Saroglou

COO

+30210 94 07 710

gsaroglou@tenn.gr
Actress Sumalatha seeks support of S M Krishna for candidacy

from Mandya

Bengaluru, Mar 15 (PTI) Sumalatha Ambareesh, wife of late

actor-turned-politician, who is likely to contest asan

independent from Mandya in the Lok Sabha polls, Friday met

senior BJP leader and former Karnataka Chief Minster S M

Krishna here and sought his support.

Krishna, a prominent Vokkaliga leader from Mandyasaid he

would discuss with the party leadership on supporting her in

the polls.

On her part,Sumalatha said she would reveal her decision

on contesting the polls and her plan of action by March 18.

"Sumalatha informed me about contesting the pollsfrom

Mandya. I will also speak to the BJP leadership,"Krishna said.

Speaking to reporters, he said the BJP would take a

decision by March 18 on whether to field a candidate from

Mandya or support Sumalatha by not fielding a candidate.

Conceding that there is a demand within the BJP to field

a candidate from Mandya, he said "After taking a total view...

also looking into the decision thatSumalatha will take on

March 18, BJP will take a decision."

On him supporting Sumalatha if the party's decision was

otherwise, he said "S M Krishna is not different from BJP as

he is part of it."

With Congress ruling out fielding Sumalatha for the

Mandya Lok Sabha seat, saying it would go to it's coalition

partner JD(S), clamour is growing within the BJP to induct her

into the party and field her as the candidate.

A section within the BJP believe that if Sumalatha joins

the party and is fielded as a candidate in Mandya, it would

help the saffron party, which doesn't have much presence in

the Vokkaliga bastion.

Sumalatha's late husband Ambareesh had contested and won

from Mandya in the past.

However, according to top BJP sources, instead of

inducting her, the party may support her as an independentso

that she can continue to bank on the support of disgruntled

Congress leaders in Mandya, who are upset about their party's

decision to cede the seat to JD(S).

"Her winning is more important now...so support of those

disgruntled with the Congress will be an added advantage,which

she may lose out by joining the BJP," party sources said.

Speaking to reporters,Sumalatha said she had come toseek

the blessings of Krishna, with whom her family shared a good

bonding and updated him about the current situation in Mandya.

Stating that she has not met any BJP leaders, the actress

said she planned to meet all senior leaders and seek their

blessings.

"No one (from BJP) has officially told me that they will

extend their support, but in the situation that I'm in, Iwill

welcome everyone's support,"she said in response to a question

on BJP extending her support as an independent candidate.

Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy's son Nikhil Kumaraswamy

is the coalition candidate from Mandya.

According to the seat sharing arrangement reached by the

coalition partners, Mandya has gone to the JD(S). PTI KSU RA

APR

APR APR
Indian-origin man injured in NZ mosque shootings

Hyderabad, Mar 15 (PTI) An Indian-origin man was injured

in the Christchurch terror attacks, his relatives residing in

Hyderabad said Friday.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the

Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque

in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst

attack on Muslims in a western country.

Khursheed Jahangir, brother of Ahmed Iqbal Jahangir,

said his brother was injured during the attack and is

currently undergoing treatment at a local hospital in

Christchurch.

"He is injured.He is recovering in a hospital now.

The latest information we received is that he is undergoing a

surgery. We have seen the video.

He has been shot in the chest and we are trying to

reach Indian embassy people and local helpline numbers,"

Khursheed Jahangir said.

He said he spoke to AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi

for help in reaching out to authorities for a visa and other

formalities to go to New Zealand to see his brother.

Khursheed Jahangir said he has visited New Zealand

twice and described it as one of the "safest" places in the

world.

Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted requesting External Affairs

Minister Sushma Swaraj and the Telangana Governments help to

enable the family to go to New Zealand.

"I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia

@SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed

family," Owaisi said in a tweet.

"These are Mr.Khursheed's passport details.

His brother is serious & his family has little

support. I'm only requesting the immediate support of your

good offices in expediting his visa process.

Hell make all arrangements to travel to NZ by

himself," Owaisi said in another tweet.

Reacting to Owaisis request, TRS working President

and former minister KT Rama Rao tweeted "Asad Saab, Will

request our NRI department to assist."

Owaisi, in another tweet, said "Farhaj Ahsan, a

person of Indian origin, was also reported to have gone to the

same mosque and is currently missing.

His family is in Hyderabad, I request immediate

assistance to his family as well.

His familys contact details are available with me &

Ill share the same with you."

Farhaj Ahsan's parents could not be reached.

Suresh Kumar, a family friend of Ahmed Iqbal, said in

a video footage they could see images of Iqbal, who runs a

restaurant in New Zealand, at a mosque when the attack took

place.

"Since then we (Iqbal's family in Hyderabad) have

been trying to reach him. We could not reach him over phone.

His wife is in a state of shock.

We have sought the state governments help to send

one of the family members to New Zealand," Kumar said.

According to Suresh, Ahmed Iqbal has been living in

New Zealand for over a decade and settled there.

He has two children and is said to have permanent

residency of that country.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born

citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in

Sydney, describing him as "an extremist, right-wing, violent

terrorist".PTI GDK BN

BN BN
Poll code violation: TN orders inquiry on Rahul's interaction

with students

(Eds: Adds reaction of State Congress chief)

Chennai, Mar 15 (PTI) The Tamil Nadu government has

ordered an inquiry on how a college here gave its approval for

Congress President Rahul Gandhi to interact with its students

when the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) for elections is in

force.

The top Congress leader, in his interaction with

students of the Stella Maris College here on March 13,

promised 33 per cent reservation in government jobs for women

and answered several of their questions.

The Director of Collegiate Education, R Sarumathi

directed a subordinate official to inquire "immediately" on

the matter and submit a report, official sources told PTI.

In a communique (dated March 14) to the Regional Joint

Director, Chennai Zone, the director said in view of the Lok

Sabha elections the MCC was in force and under such

circumstances, sought to know "how permission was granted" by

the college for the event.

Sources said Stella Maris is one of the 10 government

aided colleges in Chennai. Such institutions are not only

bound by State norms, but are also expected to follow the MCC.

According to the MCC, displayed in the Election

Commission website, "use of educational institutions,

including their grounds (whether government aided, private or

government) for political campaigns and rallies is not

allowed."

When contacted, the college authorities declined to

say if any inquiry was conducted by collegiate department

officials.

The Chief Electoral Officer also did not comment.

Tamil Nadu Congress Committee President K S Alagiri

dubbed the inquiry move as an act of "vendetta," by the

BJP-led government at the Centre through the AIADMK regime in

Tamil Nadu unable to tolerate the positive response especially

from the youth to the event.

Political leaders taking part in college functions has

been in vogue for a long time, he said.

The decision to invite Gandhi was taken a few months ago

by the students association of the college.

Rahul Gandhi took part in the event only in his capacity

as a Member of Parliament and not as the Congress president,

he claimed, adding "the Model Code of Conduct is not a bar to

participate in such events as an MP."

When Tamil Nadu Chief Electoral Officer Satyabrata Sahoo

had said there was "no violation" of the MCC, what right does

the Collegiate department have to pursue the matter, he asked.

"If the Tamil Nadu government came forward to take steps

against the reputed Stella Maris College, I would like to warn

that it will lead to severe consequences," he said.

The Congress leader demanded withdrawal of the official

communication tasking an official to probe the matter.

In his interaction with the students, Gandhi had brought

up the issue of the Rafale deal and reiterated his allegations

about the pricing of the aircraft and the process.

To a question on his brother-in-law Robert Vadra, he had

said the law must apply to everybody and not be applied

selectively.

"I will be the first person to say it... investigate

Robert Vadra, but also investigate Prime Minister Narendra

Modi," he said.

Vadra is being probed in connection with a money

laundering case related to purchase of assets abroad and a

land case in Rajasthan's Bikaner district.

Gandhi also questioned whether the Prime Minister could

stand in a large audience and answer people's questions. PTI

VGN APR BN

BN BN
CHARIHO: Charihos girls and boys soccer teams both won Division II titles in dramatic fashion. The girls won in penalty kicks and the boys in the final two minutes of double overtime. The football team reached the D-III title game, as did the field hockey team. The girls volleyball team played in the D-II semifinals. Erin vonHousen was All-State in girls cross country.

STONINGTON: Stoningtons boys soccer team earned its second straight Class M state title, closing the season with 21 straight victories. The field hockey team lost in the Class S title game.

WESTERLY: Westerlys girls volleyball team reached the Division III semifinals, losing to eventual champion Scituate. The football team played in the D-II semifinals. The girls soccer team reached the D-III semifinals. Jake Serra and Kaya West were All-State in cross country.

WHEELER: Wheeler boys and girls soccer teams qualified for the Class S state tournament.

Vote

View Results
Miami, FL, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Baptist Health South Florida, the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in the region, and Belmont Village Senior Living, a nationally recognized seniors housing provider, announced today that they created a venture to develop, own and operate senior living communities in South Florida. The venture is launching with the creation of a community close to the Shops at Merrick Park in downtown Coral Gables.

Our aim with this partnership is nothing short of reinventing wellness and quality of life for seniors in South Florida, said Patricia Will, Belmont Village Founder and CEO. Thanks to the richness of experience each team brings, we have the potential to change the paradigm for lifestyle and care for the extraordinary elderly population in this region.

The area initially targeted by the partnership will include Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties.

At Baptist Health, we have a deep commitment to serve the South Florida community, said Brian E. Keeley, President and CEO for Baptist Health South Florida. Partnering with Belmont Village is a natural fit as both our organizations share the same dedication to providing high-quality compassionate care.

The Coral Gables project will be located at 250 Bird Road, bounded by Aurora Street, Altara Avenue and Salzedo Street. Construction is projected to start mid-2020 and to be complete within two years of commencement.

Belmont Village will manage development and operation of Belmont Village Coral Gables, which will offer Independent Living, Assisted Living and Memory Care. This project, the companys first with Baptist Health South Florida, will be Belmont Villages second community in the region. Belmont Village Fort Lauderdale is currently under construction at 1031 Seminole Drive and projected to open Fall 2019.

About Baptist Health South Florida

Baptist Health South Florida is the largest healthcare organization in the region, with 10 hospitals (Baptist Hospital, Baptist Childrens Hospital, Bethesda Hospital East, Bethesda Hospital West, Doctors Hospital, Fishermens Community Hospital, Homestead Hospital, Mariners Hospital, South Miami Hospital and West Kendall Baptist Hospital), more than 40 physician practices, 50 outpatient and urgent care facilities, Baptist Health Medical Group, Baptist Health Quality Network and internationally renowned centers of excellence spanning across Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. A not-for-profit organization supported by philanthropy and committed to our faith-based charitable mission of medical excellence, Baptist Health has more than 19,500 employees and more than 3,000 affiliated physicians. Baptist Health South Florida has been recognized by Fortune as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in America and by Ethisphere as one of the Worlds Most Ethical Companies. For more information, visit http://BaptistHealth.net/newsroom and connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/BaptistHealthSF and on Twitter and Instagram @BaptistHealthSF.

About Belmont Village Senior Living

Belmont Village Senior Living is a fully integrated developer, owner and operator of high quality seniors housing communities. The company is a premier provider of independent living, assisted living and award-winning memory care in major market areas. Currently Belmont Village has 29 operating properties, comprising approximately 4,000 units, in seven states and Mexico City. Projects under construction and projected to open in 2019 include Belmont Village Lincoln Park in Chicago and Belmont Village Fort Lauderdale. Belmont Village communities are acclaimed for their high safety standards, attractive locations and distinctive architecture; each building is custom designed to complement and enhance its surrounding community. Belmont Village provides residents with innovative programs and services that are backed by best in class research and best practices, as well as around the clock support from highly trained staff members. In 2018, Belmont Village was certified as a Great Place to Work and ranked 15th on FORTUNE Magazines Top 50 Best Workplaces in Aging Services list. For more information, please visit www.belmontvillage.com.

CONTACTS:

Baptist Health South Florida

Georgi Pipkin

(786)527-9524

GeorgiP@baptisthealth.net

Belmont Village Senior Living

Amy Self

(713) 446-3401

aself@belmontvillage.com
One of the UK's largest property listing sites says it is banning adverts that prohibit prospective tenants on housing benefit.

Zoopla, which lists around 927,000 homes in the UK, will ban 'no DSS' wording in rental adverts over the next few weeks.

DSS refers to the now-defunct Department for Social Security, which was replaced by the Department for Work and Pensions in 2001.

Last November, analysis of 86,000 letting agent listings on Zoopla by the National Housing Federation and homeless charity Shelter found over 10 per cent contained the words 'no DSS' or 'no housing benefit'.

The property platform will introduce certain steps in April, which include amending its terms and conditions to specifically prohibit the inclusion of such restrictions on the website.

It will also remove the reference from listings uploaded to its website and from search fields in its cloud-based software products.

Zoopla said the measures are in support of the National Landlords Association and Residential Landlords Association, who have both recommended the industry drops the practice.

Last November, analysis of 86,000 letting agent listings on Zoopla by the National Housing Federation and homeless charity Shelter found over 10 per cent contained the words 'no DSS' or 'no housing benefit'.

Around 889,000 households receive housing benefit to help pay their rent, out of a total of 4.5 million households living in private rental accommodation.

At the start of March, Housing Minister Heather Wheeler announced plans to look at such adverts, warning that if the private rental sector was unwilling to take action then the government would 'explore all options to remove this practice'.

According to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, about half of landlords say they would not be willing to let a property to tenants on housing benefit.

Charlie Bryant, managing director of Zoopla, said: 'All tenants who are looking to rent a property deserve the chance to be fully assessed for their suitability and matched to a home that suits both their and the landlord's circumstances.

'We proactively sought the views of our largest lettings-focused agents to ensure the above measures were undertaken on a collaborative basis and received significant support in respect of our proposed additional measures.'

Chris Town, vice chair of the RLA, welcomed Zoopla's decision saying: 'Landlords should not refuse someone solely because they are on benefits, and should consider prospective tenants on a case by case basis.

But with growing numbers of benefit claimants now reliant on the private rented sector we need to do more to give tenants and landlords greater confidence in the benefits system.

Polly Neate, chief executive at Shelter, said: 'It's fantastic to see Zoopla leading the portal pack by scrapping 'no DSS' adverts from its website.

'For far too long, perfectly good tenants have been barred from renting a home simply because they receive housing benefit - but changes like these show the tide is turning and DSS discrimination will not be tolerated.

'If a leading name like Zoopla can play its part in treating customers fairly, on a case-by-case basis, then others can too.'

A spokesperson for rival website Rightmove said: 'We know that currently there are restrictions placed on some landlords which means they are unable to let their property to someone receiving benefit, and where this is the case, the Competition and Markets Authority state that they should include this as information in their advertising.

'As part of our submission to the Work and Pensions Committee weve asked the government to provide clearer guidance to letting agents around this important issue.

'Once clearer guidance is issued from the government we will immediately communicate this new guidance to all of our letting agent customers.'
Much blame is going to be placed at the door of vulture investor Coltrane and hedge fund Farringdon for pushing Interserve into administration.

Certainly, minority and private investors who are being wiped out will feel embittered that secretive and unaccountable shareholders sealed the contractors fate.

Interserve is the author of its own demise. Instead of focusing on careful management of public outsourcing and construction projects, it developed grandiose ambitions and headed off in all directions.

Interserve is the author of its own demise, says Alex Brummer

Fatally, among other things, it invested in an energy-from-waste business which gobbled up hundreds of millions of pounds.

In 2017 the group parted company with chief executive Adrian Ringrose, who took home more than 6million in his last five years.

This period largely was overseen by then chairman Lord Blackwell, who stepped down in 2016.

It might have been thought that after all of this turmoil new chief executive Debbie White would have had the good sense to show some prudence. Instead, she collected 525,900 for four months work in 2017, including a 125 per cent bonus. Audit firms EY and Deloitte, brought in at different times to advise, failed to stem the rot.

For a long time under the Blair-Brown governments, outsourcing looked like a licence to print money. But when the Tory-led coalition clamped down on spending after the 2008/09 financial crisis, profit margins on new contracts were squeezed.

In a repeat of the Carillion experience, Interserve had little choice but to take on ever more contracts to support cash flow. If one didnt know better, one might unkindly suggest this amounted to no more than a Ponzi scheme.

With existing shareholders locked out as a result of Fridays extraordinary general meeting, the bankers HSBC and RBS, and hedge fund Angelo Gordon, now seize control. Interserve has informed the 68,000 employees (45,000 in the UK) that it will be business as usual.

But that assumes the bankers and hedge funds wont seek to cut costs, offload uneconomic contracts and carve the enterprise up as soon as possible. Banks and hedge funds are not by nature long-term investors.

For the country to lose one outsourcer might have been an accident, but losing two is careless. The least the Government should do is set up an independent inquiry into an imploding sector.

Pain from the collapse of an outsourcer is shared by shareholders and taxpayers alike.

Dastardly diesel

When the US sinks its teeth into overseas companies the pain never ends, as BP could testify. In taking on Volkswagen, the US has found an easy target.

So far, the diesel scandal has cost the car maker an estimated $25billion (19.2billion) in fines and compensation. Now the Securities & Exchange Commission is charging VW and former chief executive Martin Winterkorn with a massive fraud over the issue of bonds in 2014/15 valued at $13billion.

Now the Securities & Exchange Commission is charging VW and former chief executive Martin Winterkorn with a massive fraud over the issue of bonds in 2014/15

It is alleged that VW knew that more than half a million cars on American roads exceeded emission limits when it issued the bonds, but covered it up.

Reputational damage to Volkswagen wont be helped by careless language from current chief executive Herbert Diess. He evoked the car makers Nazi history by using a unfortunate German phrase, very similar to that posted over the iron gates to Auschwitz.

VW wants to become a pioneer in electric cars and is promising 70 electric models by 2028. But there are still questions as to how green electric cars will prove. Their batteries rely on precious metals and, if sold in sufficient numbers, they could put pressure on power grids burning fossil fuels.

In the Brexit debate, politicians have treated whingeing motor manufacturers poisoning the air with diesel as industrial royalty. There has been no serious attempt to challenge them over pollution. Feeble.

Cash cows

Pity the poor bosses at Britains most global bank, HSBC. As recently as 2016 these devoted bankers could look forward to a retirement cushioned by a payment of 50 per cent of base salary in lieu of pension contributions. This was slashed to a mere 30 per cent after investors objected. Governance is being tightened again and the pensions allowance slashed to 10 per cent.

No such hardship for Antonio Horta- Osorio at Lloyds. His cash in lieu of pension is still too high at 33 per cent after a haircut from 46 per cent. That wont please dissenting investors.
Medical cannabis was legalised in November in what was hailed as a landmark moment  in theory, at least.

In practice, strict guidelines and doctors lack of experience in prescribing cannabis treatments  reported to have therapeutic effects such as pain relief and alleviating cancer-related symptoms  mean few patients have so far benefited from the change in the law.

Even so, interest in the burgeoning cannabis market is rising and 2019 is likely to be a watershed year when British retail investors can start buying so-called pot stocks.

Marijuana: The industry is about to go mainstream

Whether they will prove a profitable investment, or all go up in smoke, is another question.

Individual shareholders have sparse choice when it comes to investing in the cannabis sector.

FTSE 100-listed Associated British Foods subsidiary British Sugar grows cannabis plants in Norfolk for drug maker GW Pharmaceuticals, which is based in Cambridge.

There are three cannabis-focused investment funds on challenger stock exchange Nex  Sativa Investments, High Growth Capital and Ananda Developments.

But the industry is about to go mainstream after a number of companies making medicinal cannabis products recently said they are planning to join the London Stock Exchange.

Jacana, which grows medical-use cannabis in Jamaica, said in February it is considering a stock market float on AIM later this year.

European Cannabis Holdings, which helped to secure the arrival of the first legal shipment of marijuana in Britain earlier this year, and Emmac Life Sciences, which will produce and supply medicinal cannabis, are also planning listings.

It is highly unlikely that the drug will be legalised for recreational use in the UK any time soon

Spinnaker Opportunities, a cash shell company on the main market, last month said it was planning a reverse takeover of medicinal cannabis oils and vapour producer Kanabo. If it completes as expected by the summer, it could be the first of its kind on the main market.

Nick Davis, chief executive of law firm Memery Crystal, which is advising a number of cannabis companies on London floats and fundraisings, said he knows of another four companies looking to list on the London Stock Exchange this year. One is eyeing the main market while the other three are targeting AIM.

Davis said: I think this will be the year that there are a significant number of listings  though its predicated on no change to regulation here.

Id be surprised if there werent a dozen companies across AIM and the main market by the year-end.

Tristan Gervais, the London-based head of European medical cannabis investment banking for Canaccord Genuity, said: There has been significant interest from the medical cannabis sector in pursuing stock market listings in Europe.

A lot of companies from all over the world are looking to raise capital in London and there is huge appetite from a wide range of investors to match this.

The stock market in Canada, which in October became the second country after Uruguay to legalise recreational cannabis, is awash with cannabis stocks, with almost 20 companies listing on Toronto exchanges in 2017 and 2018 alone.

Home Secretary Sajid Javids move to legalise the drug in certain circumstances late last year followed high-profile campaigns around two young boys, Alfie Dingley and Billy Caldwell, who galvanised public opinion when it was revealed that the cannabis oil used to treat their seizures had been denied to them.

Cannabis oil can be used to treat seizures

So as a result, does the London market face a similar prospect to Canadas? Memery Crystals Davis said it will be more measured in the UK. And experts warn that investors should proceed with caution as it could turn out to be another market fad.

Russ Mould, investment director at broker AJ Bell, said: Things that go up like a rocket have a bad habit of coming down like a stick. Just ask those investors who were chasing crypto-currencies 18 months ago.

It is highly unlikely that the drug will be legalised for recreational use in the UK any time soon, especially with studies finding that teenagers who smoke cannabis are more likely to develop mental health issues, and that it can affect users memory and concentration.

Mould said: It is still a divisive investment. The deciding factor could rest on whether the positives surrounding medicinal uses of cannabis can start to outweigh the perceived negatives around recreational use and the impact that has on society.
Two foreign hedge funds pushed Interserve into administration  and left 16,500 small shareholders with nothing.

In a humiliating blow to the Government contractors chief executive Debbie White and chairman Glyn Barker, investors rejected a rescue package that would have slashed their stake in the company to just 5 per cent and handed the other 95 per cent to Interserves lenders.

The rebellion was led by New York-based hedge fund Coltrane Asset Management, the largest investor with a 27 per cent stake, and Dutch fund Farringdon, which held about 6 per cent.

Interserve's rescue was rejected by 59 per cent to 41 per cent

The Mail understands that if ballots from the two hedge funds were removed, 95 per cent of the vote was cast in favour of the companys plan, known as a debt-for-equity swap.

But investors holding 44 per cent of Interserves shares did not vote at all  meaning the rescue was rejected by 59 per cent to 41 per cent. It means shares held by an army of 16,500 small investors are wiped out.

Last night Interserve said it had completed a pre-pack administration within hours of the vote that handed control to its lenders, including Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, and hedge funds such as Cerberus. It insists that operations will continue as normal on Monday morning.

Mark Bentley, a director at retail investor group Sharesoc and a small shareholder in Interserve, said: What the hell did the major shareholders think they were doing by not supporting the resolution?

Its a case of turkeys voting for Christmas  those shareholders who havent voted, or voted down, have now lost everything.

The deal  a second bailout in a year  would have cut Interserves crippling 631million debt pile and kept it publicly listed.

Interserves market value has plunged from more than 1billion in 2014 to less than 20million

But it was opposed by Coltrane. The US group put forward its own proposal, which would have left shareholders with a bigger stake and axed the companys entire board except for White.

Interserve  which employs 68,000 people worldwide, around 45,000 of which are in the UK  questioned the viability of Coltranes plan.

The contractor provides services such as operating army bases abroad, building roads and bridges and cleaning schools.

It began running into financial difficulties in 2016, when a rapid expansion and a disastrous move into the energy-from-waste sector began to send its debt spiralling.

It agreed a bailout with lenders in early 2018 in a bid to cut debt, but in December it announced it was in discussions for a second rescue package.

Interserves market value has plunged from more than 1billion in 2014, when its share price was close to 500p per share, to less than 20million by the time its stock was delisted, when it was worth just 6.3p per share.
Fraudsters are increasingly targeting businesses with fake invoices in order to scam them out of cash, data suggests.

One in seven small-to-medium sized firms in Britain has fallen victim to an invoice scam in the last 12 months, Barclays says.

With businesses likely to have numerous staff working in accounts along with a healthy bank balance, they are in the crosshairs of fraudsters.

Essentially, invoice scams attempt to trick companies into paying out on what looks like a legitimate bill addressed to them.

Invocie scam Only a quarter of employees processing an invoice double-checked with a colleague before making a payment

More than a quarter - 28 per cent - of reported invoice scams resulted in losses of more than 5,000, according to the high street bank.

Criminals tend to get hold of genuine business invoice details, including payment details, and pose as legitimate business suppliers to take payment from an unknowing business owners or their employees.

These staff members believe they are paying a genuine invoice and then willingly transfer company money directly to the criminals.

Ian Rand, chief executive of Barclays business banking, said: 'Fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated with the methods they use to target Britain's hard-working SMEs and unfortunately, we know that impersonation fraud and invoice scams are on the rise.'

The bank's figures also reveal that hotspots for scams include the West Midlands, the South West, the East and London.

Statistics reveal that many scams could be easily avoidable - only a quarter of employees processing an invoice double-checked with a colleague before making a payment.

Meanwhile, a similar number said they were scammed because they trusted the email address it was sent from.

The bank highlighted that the impact of such scams on businesses and individuals is considerable, with nearly one in five SME leaders admitting they have had to cover the full cost of a scam.

Ian Rand says fraudsters have become more sophisticated with invoice scams and many are fooled into paying them

Despite this, due to lack of time, only 19 per cent say they conduct invoice training for all staff to help them spot a fake invoice.

Often scam victims find it difficult retrieving the money or getting their banks to reverse the transaction as transfers are often conducted instantaneously.

Banks have been hesitant to award refunds as they claim those who transferred the money to a fraudulent account acted negligently.

But banking fraud victims who lose cash to push payment scams may soon be able to get their money back if their bank subscribes to a new code this year, which has been published by the Authorised Push Payment Scams Steering Group.

This new rule could also pave the way for business owners to get their money back too.

When asked if there are ways that SMEs can get their money back from the bank, a Barclays spokesperson responded: 'We take each specific case of fraud or scam very seriously and will continue to look at customer issues on a case by case basis.

'We are invested in helping people arm themselves with the knowledge and the tools to stop scams from happening in the first place, which is why we are issuing warnings like this.

'We have no higher priority than the protection of our customers' funds and have invested significantly in fraud and scam prevention initiatives.

'Alongside our prevention work we also help arm the public with information and tools to spot and stop fraud and scams, including major TV advertising.'

The spokesperson adds that once the scam is realised it is vital that it gets reported to the bank as soon as possible either by contacting the fraud department or visiting a local branch.

'When a customer is tricked into paying their money to a criminal, the bank has no way of intervening in advance, and therefore we urge people to check payment details very carefully and to call the company in advance of large payments if they are in any doubt.'

Rand adds: 'We want to arm businesses with as much information as possible on common scams so that they can avoid falling prey to fraudsters.

'Our network of over 1,500 relationship managers are delivering advice clinics to SMEs across the country  arming them with valuable information on all aspects of business resilience, including digital safety.'
Dalmac Energy Inc. provides well stimulation and fluid management services to the oil and natural gas industries in Alberta, Canada. The company engages in oilfield servicing, fluid hauling, chemical sales, rig moving, and tank rental activities. It offers various oil field services through pressure/pumper trucks, which deliver and inject methanol into lines and wells; hot oilers used to heat oil to dissolve wax build-up in wells and facilities that restrict the flow of oil and gas; and tank trucks used in conjunction with the hot oilers and pressure units, as well as for hauling oil and water to and from wells and facilities. The company also provides vacuum truck services to steam and wash facilities, transfer liquids and solids, and clean up spills; and beds, pickers, and tractor services to move service rigs and tester's equipment. In addition, it supplies glycol and methanol products to the energy sector. The company has approximately 229 units of rolling stock equipment consisting of tank, combo-vac, pressure, hot oiler, acid flush, steamer, picker, and winch trucks, as well as 250 items of oilfield rank rental and rig matting equipment. Dalmac Energy Inc. was founded in 1955 and is headquartered in Edmonton, Canada.

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Surge Energy Inc. explores for, develops, and produces oil and gas in western Canada. The company holds interest in the Greater Sawn Lake assets located in Northern Alberta; Valhalla/Wembley property located in northwestern Alberta; Sparky assets located between Provost and Wainwright in eastern Alberta and western Saskatchewan; and Shaunavon properties located to the southwest of Swift Current, Saskatchewan. It holds an average working interest of approximately 83% in approximately 109,941 net developed acres and approximately 92% in approximately 152,344 net undeveloped acres in Greater Sawn area; approximately 70% in approximately 16,032 net developed acres and approximately 74% in approximately 8,208 net undeveloped acres in Valhalla area; and approximately 76% in approximately 80,213 net developed acres and 96% in approximately 58,598 net undeveloped acres in Sparky area; and approximately 61% in approximately 88,178 net developed acres and approximately 39% in approximately 10,483 net undeveloped acres in Edmonton and other minor areas. As of December 31, 2020, it held interests in 316 net oil and 13 net gas wells in Greater Sawn area; 56 net oil and 4 net gas wells in Valhalla area; 466 net oil and 10 net gas wells in Sparky area; 176 net oil wells, as well as an average working interest of approximately 100% in approximately 23,409 net developed acres and 13,698 net undeveloped acres in the Shaunavon properties; and 28 net oil wells and 7 net gas wells in Edmonton and other minor areas. The company was formerly known as Zapata Energy Corporation and changed its name to Surge Energy Inc. in June 2010. Surge Energy Inc. was incorporated in 1998 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

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French English

Montrouge, 15 March 2019

Credit Agricole CIB sells a 4.9% stake in BSF to a Ripplewood led consortium

Today, Credit Agricole Corporate & Investment Bank S.A. (Credit Agricole CIB) announces the sale of a 4.9% equity stake in Banque Saudi Fransi (BSF) at a price of 31.50 Saudi Riyals per share, for a total consideration of approximately 1.86 billion Saudi Riyals, equivalent to approximately 440 million euros.

3.0% equity stake is being sold to RAM Holdings I Ltd, an investment vehicle controlled by Ripplewood Advisors LLC ("Ripplewood"), the US based investment holding company

1.9% equity stake is being sold to Riyadh-based Olayan Saudi Investment Company



Credit Agricole CIB is thereby reducing its shareholding in BSF to 10.0%. Completion of the sale transactions is expected within the coming weeks subject, notably, to regulatory approvals.

As part of the sale, Ripplewood is also being granted the right to acquire, from Credit Agricole CIB, an additional equity stake of 6.0% in BSF, such right being exercisable before end of December 2019, at a price of 30.00 Saudi Riyals per share, for a total consideration of approximately 2.17 billion Saudi Riyals, which is approximately 510 million euros ("Warrant").

For Credit Agricole, which has been active in Saudi Arabia since 1949 and associated with BSF since its creation in 1977,supporting its successful and profitable growth over several decades, this disposal is aligned with its strategy to reduce the weight of its non-controlling stakes.

The Warrant will generate an accounting loss of circa 100 million euros, depending of BSF share price at the time of issuance. The value of the Warrant will be adjusted quarterly up to its maturity date on a mark to market basis. These adjustments will be offset by the evolution of the value of the underlying equity stake, accounted through reserves according to IFRS 9. In case the Warrant is not exercised, then the initial accounting loss will be reversed through the profit and loss account.

Assuming both sales are completed and Ripplewood exercises the right to acquire, from Credit Agricole CIB, the additional equity stake of 6.0%, the disposal of the 10.9% stake in BSF will have a positive effect in excess of 15 basis points on the fully-loaded CET1 ratio of Credit Agricole S.A. and of over 10 basis points on the fully-loaded CET1 ratio of Credit Agricole Group compared to the situation as of 31.12.2018, being understood that the abovementioned potential accounting losses are included in the computation of those effects.

Speaking on Credit Agricole's commitment to Saudi Arabia, Jacques Ripoll, Chief Executive Officer of Credit Agricole CIB stated: "Credit Agricole CIB remains highly confident in Saudi Arabia's economic perspectives, in the wake of Vision 2030, and plans to further develop its direct presence and extend its activities in the country".

CREDIT AGRICOLE PRESS CONTACT

Charlotte de Chavagnac + 33 1 57 72 11 17 charlotte.dechavagnac@credit-agricole-sa.fr

Olivier Tassain + 33 1 43 23 25 41 olivier.tassain@credit-agricole-sa.fr

Find our press release on: www.credit-agricole.com - www.creditagricole.info
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.

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NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Levi & Korsinsky announces it has commenced an investigation of Mobile TeleSystems PJSC (MTS or the Company) (NYSE: MBT) concerning possible violations of federal securities laws.



The investigation concerns whether the Company issued false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose information pertinent to investors. On November 20, 2018, MTS filed a Form 6-K disclosing it had set aside about $840 million as possible liability concerning investigations by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice. Then on March 6, 2019, the SEC announced that MTS will pay $100 million to resolve SEC charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) to win business in Uzbekistan. To obtain additional information, go to:

https://www.zlk.com/pslra-1/mobile-telesystems-pjsc-loss-form

or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at jlevi@levikorsinsky.com or by telephone at (212) 363-7500, toll-free: (877) 363-5972.

Levi & Korsinsky is a national firm with offices in New York, California, Connecticut and Washington D.C. The firms attorneys have extensive expertise in prosecuting securities litigation involving financial fraud, representing investors throughout the nation in securities and shareholder lawsuits. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

CONTACT:

Levi & Korsinsky, LLP

Joseph E. Levi, Esq.

55 Broadway, 10th Floor

New York, NY 10006

Tel: (212) 363-7500

Toll Free: (877) 363-5972

Fax: (212) 363-7171

www.zlk.com
LANSDALE  Over 100 members of the North Penn Mosque, and more than a dozen special guests, heard a unified message at Friday prayers.

While mosques in New Zealand reel from attacks that killed dozens of congregants, leaders of the North Penn community vowed to work together to ensure the same can never happen here.

What the killers have tried to do, we are doing just the opposite. We are human beings, we bond with each other, we work with each other, said Shams Huda, outreach director for the Mosque.

All these people have come to show their sympathy, and their support for us, and quite a few of them have come without asking, because they feel that this mosque is also their place of worship, he said.

As of press time Friday, reports indicated that more than 40 congregants had been killed in attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

At Friday afternoon prayers at the North Penn Mosque, Imams Abu Rashed and Marzan Khan urged the congregation to keep the victims in their prayers, while voicing their strong condemnation of the attack.

Around 50 Muslims were murdered in their mosque, by a shooter. It is not acceptable in Islam to kill, or to have hatred in our hearts. Islam always teaches us to have love, amongst family, spouse, neighbors, community, said Khan.

Islam teaches us, not to kill, but to have mercy, blessings, and love for your brother and sister. Allah says, If someone kills one person, it is as if he killed all mankind. If someone saves one persons life, it is as if he saved all mankind. This killing is not acceptable in Islam, at all, Khan said.

As he spoke, congregants sat, kneeled, then stood in time with the prayers, with the solemn ceremony only occasionally interrupted by chatter from kids in an adjacent play room, and an accidental ringtone voicing the call to prayer.

Once the normal prayers concluded, several guest speakers shared their sympathy and support with the mosque members, starting with Lansdale Police Chief Michael Trail.

Im here for two reasons: one, Im here to express to you my condolences, and my sadness, and my profound, just, disbelief for what is happening in this world, Trail said.

And to reiterate to you the commitment of myself, Lansdale Borough as a community, and the police department, to protect and dignify every individual, every group, that wants to come live, play, and work here in Lansdale. We are an inclusive community. We support one another, he said.

Outside the mosque, red and blue lights flashed silently, as several Lansdale police officers kept watch, just in case.

The events early this morning in New Zealand signify to me how we have to come together more often, and work together more often, and more tirelessly, to eradicate hate, discrimination, and the things that affect all of us. Im here to pledge my support to you, Trail said.

If there are any issues, or any concerns, with any member of the mosque, I would implore you, however slight, however non-consequential you think it may be  if its something that alarms you, the Lansdale Police Department wants to know about it, he said.

Trail also broke news when addressing the congregation: at 10 a.m. on April 26, the department will take part in a presentation on security at houses of worship. The presentation will be held at Trinity Lutheran Church, 1000 W. Main St., and will cover building security, disaster response, shooter situations, evacuations, sheltering in place and more, with all local religious leaders invited to attend.

Its not for Islam, or Catholicism, or Judaism, or anything. Its about all of our faiths, and the security threats that are confronted by many of us. Were going to work together try to and provide security for our community, he said.

Anyone interested in attending is asked to contact police Sgt. Rich Bubnis at rbubnis@lansdalepd.org or (215) 368-1801.

As the two imams led the prayers, mosque members passed around collection jars raising funds for maintenance and upkeep of the current mosque, and outfitting of a recently purchased building nearby that will act as an educational center for women and children, which mosque members hope to have open by fall.

Jason Bonder, Associate Rabbi with Congregation Beth Or in Maple Glen, told the congregation he was honored to share in their prayers.

Im honored to stand here and say to you that there is so much more that united us, than divides us. Im honored to help remind us of our shared sacred texts, which tell us that all of us are created in the image of the Merciful One, he said.

Bonder added that he was also a little bit embarrassed to say that the last time he met with mosque members was roughly six months ago, when they shared their sympathies after an attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh, and asked mosque members to make time to build stronger relationships in better days ahead.

I want to see you, my neighbors, my brothers, not when cowardly extremists decide that we should get together and mourn together, he said.

This life of ours is too beautiful to live on the agenda of a hate-filled group. I want to see you, my neighbors, my brothers, when we, friends and neighbors who are pursuers of peace, when we decide to meet, for good reasons, Bonder said.

As he spoke, Bonder held up his cellphone, and asked mosque members to schedule dates to have coffee and chat, not to discuss the horrors of the world, but the joys of the world.

InshAllah, Beezrat hashem, God willing, we will meet, to talk about what life should be about. Not the cowardly acts of thugs that walked into a house of worship in New Zealand, but to talk about the good things, he said.

The mosque also heard from Charles Quann, Senior Pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Spring House, who called in to voice his sympathy and invite the mosque members to Sunday services there.

We, as family of God, have to stand together with one another. So we stand together with you, we value each one of you, Quann said.

Hopefully a few of you can come on Sunday. Lift up the people who experienced this horrible ordeal in prayer, and let you know that you have a Christian congregation standing side by side with you. Our prayers are with you.

After the prayer service and remarks ended, Trail and about a dozen members of the synagogue shook hands and set dates to continue meeting with the mosque and its members, while others reflected on what they had heard, and how they felt.

Its sad what happened, but then for us to get together, that may be something good, said Mukhtar Ahmadi of North Wales.

Its We, the people, you know? This country is founded on We, the people. And when you put all these divisions, and all these kinds of things, it kind of takes We, the people out of the equation. We, the people, by the people, for the people  thats what were about.
HOUSTON, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Targa Resources Partners LP (Targa Resources Partners or the Partnership) (NYSE: NGLS PR A) announced its monthly distribution on the Partnerships 9.00% Series A Fixed-to-Floating Rate Cumulative Redeemable Perpetual Preferred Units ("Series A Preferred Units") for March 2019.



Targa Resources Partners LP announced today that the board of directors of its general partner has declared a monthly cash distribution of 18.75 per Series A Preferred Unit, or $2.25 per Series A Preferred Unit on an annualized basis, for March 2019. This cash distribution will be paid April 15, 2019 on all outstanding Series A Preferred Units to holders of record as of the close of business on March 29, 2019.

About Targa Resources Partners LP

Targa Resources Partners LP is a Delaware limited partnership formed in October 2006 by its parent, Targa Resources Corp. (TRC or the Company), to own, operate, acquire and develop a diversified portfolio of complementary midstream energy assets. On February 17, 2016 TRC completed the acquisition of all outstanding common units of the Partnership. Targa Resources Corp. is a leading provider of midstream services and is one of the largest independent midstream energy companies in North America. TRC owns, operates, acquires, and develops a diversified portfolio of complementary midstream energy assets. The Company is primarily engaged in the business of: gathering, compressing, treating, processing, and selling natural gas; storing, fractionating, treating, transporting, and selling NGLs and NGL products, including services to LPG exporters; gathering, storing, and terminaling crude oil; storing, terminaling, and selling refined petroleum products.

The principal executive offices of Targa Resources Partners LP are located at 811 Louisiana, Suite 2100, Houston, TX 77002 and their telephone number is 713-584-1000.

For more information, please visit our website at www.targaresources.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this release are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, included in this release that address activities, events or developments that the Partnership expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements rely on a number of assumptions concerning future events and are subject to a number of uncertainties, factors and risks, many of which are outside the Partnerships control, which could cause results to differ materially from those expected by management of the Partnership. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, weather, political, economic and market conditions, including a decline in the price and market demand for natural gas, natural gas liquids and crude oil, the timing and success of business development efforts; and other uncertainties. These and other applicable uncertainties, factors and risks are described more fully in the Partnership's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. The Partnership does not undertake an obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This release is intended to be a qualified notice under Treasury Regulation Section 1.1446-4(b). Brokers and nominees should treat one hundred percent (100.0%) of Targa Resources Partners LPs distributions to foreign investors as being attributable to income that is effectively connected with a United States trade or business. Accordingly, Targa Resources Partners LPs distributions to foreign investors are subject to federal income tax withholding at the highest applicable effective tax rate.

Contact the Company's investor relations department by email at InvestorRelations@targaresources.com or by phone at (713) 584-1133.

Sanjay Lad

Director - Investor Relations

Jennifer Kneale

Chief Financial Officer
New York

The Chinese electronics giant Huawei pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges accusing it of plotting to violate Iran trade sanctions, a case that has complicated the China-U.S. trade dispute and cast a harsh light on the daughter of the company's founder.

Lawyers for the No. 2 smartphone maker entered the plea in federal court in Brooklyn. It came two weeks after Huawei pleaded not guilty to separate federal charges filed in Seattle accusing the company of stealing technology from T-Mobile.

Both cases have heightened tensions over U.S accusations that China is using predatory tactics to turn Chinese companies into leaders in tech fields such as communications, robotics and electric vehicles.

If convicted, Huawei could face fines, forfeiture and other financial penalties.

The hearing Thursday lasted only a few minutes, and the lawyers left court without speaking to reporters.

U.S. authorities announced the Brooklyn indictment in late January. It charges the company and two affiliates with bank fraud, conspiracy to violate sanctions, conspiracy to commit money laundering and other counts.

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Prosecutors allege Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Huawei's founder, was in on the scheme in her role as chief financial officer. She made a presentation in 2013 to a banking executive in which she "repeatedly lied" about the relationship Huawei and a shadowy Iranian company called Skycom, prosecutors said.

Wanzhou was arrested in Canada and is awaiting extradition to the United States. She denies the allegations.

Skycom is also named in the indictment. But it was not represented at Thursday's arraignment, prompting U.S. Magistrate Judge Ramon Reyes to ask prosecutors, "What's the deal with Skycom?" Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kessler said the U.S. government was still trying to make contact with the company.

In the Seattle case, prosecutors accuse Huawei of engaging in a scheme to steal the technology behind a robotic device that Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile used to test smartphones, according to the charges.
When it comes to speaking on music and the brain, Ewan McNay speaks in long, fast, almost breathless paragraphs replete with neuroscientific terminology.

But if you ask him directly what he'll be saying in an upcoming talk at the Guilderland Public Library, his message boils down to a single, simple imperative.

"What I'm going to tell everybody," says the UAlbany professor and authority on brain function, "is they should go play music."

McNay was invited to speak by the organizers of the Bach Cello Suites Workshop, where he'll be addressing participants of the weeklong summer immersion at The College of Saint Rose. The subject then will be the effects of Bach on the brain. The subject this time is the effects of music generally. And there are many.

Before unpacking them, I should note what I've admitted here before, and that's my parallel life as a humble but happy fiddler. I am by no stretch a virtuoso. I hit lots of wrong notes. But what McNay plans to tell his listeners on Wednesday is more or less what I've been saying for decades to anyone who'll listen: Go. Play. Music.

Doesn't matter what instrument you play, which genres you dabble in, how skilled or unskilled you are  it's among the most rewarding, sanity-inducing activities you could possibly engage in. And, it turns out, it's good for your brain.

First, memory.

"For folks who practice intensely, either professionals or dedicated amateurs, there's an increase in their working memory  not just with regards to music, but across domains," McNay says. If someone rattles off a series of digits, a musician will remember them better than a non-musician. "The connectivity between brain regions is enhanced. There are a couple of ways you see that. It's most dramatic when you put someone in a scanner."

But before you slide them in, consider this: "All the methods that we use in humans for looking at functional brain activity are basically measures of metabolism"  that is, they determine which parts of the brain are using more glucose in any given moment. If you scan a musician's brain while they're listening to music  or, even better, playing it  you'll see a deeper activation in more areas of the brain.

How many parts? "The answer is lots," McNay says. With lots of cross-pollination: Simply reading a piece of sheet music instantly activates the auditory cortex inside the temporal lobe. "Even if you're not conscious of hearing it," he says, "your brain is hearing it. That is not true for non-musicians."

Asked whether he plays an instrument himself, McNay quips: "You could ask my teacher." But yes. The piano. "I wouldn't describe it as playing. I would say I attempt to play the piano." Lately, he says, "I'm playing some Chopin, I'm playing some Billy Joel, I'm playing a Beatles duet with my son."

Playing music with others is, he confirms, a form of communication. Here he mentions mirror neurons, the brain cells that fire when you're taking an action or observing someone else taking an equivalent action  whether it's playing the cello or shooting hoops. In musicians, music activates the brain's motor programs: Just as writing something out is more effective than simply reading it, playing music puts a big dent on your brain.

In general, musicians process languages faster. It's not that they can necessarily learn them faster; but for the tongues in which they're already conversant, they're more adept at comprehension. They're better at pattern recognition, too. Like a chess master faced with an unfamiliar board, they can look at a new piece of music and grasp it more quickly  assuming it all makes melodic sense. If it doesn't, if it's just random notational gobbledygook, forget it.

And another thing. A weird thing.

"For a musician that is playing an instrument," McNay says, "that instrument  in a fairly literal sense  becomes part of themselves." The phenomenon was demonstrated in the "rubber hand" experiment of the early 2000s, when subjects began to feel ownership of artificial arms after scientists stroked them in the same direction, at the same time, as their actual body parts.

It all happens in the right parietal cortex. "That's where we integrate all the different sensory streams"  including sight, sound and a sense of our bodies in space. And that's where self-image is constructed.

For anyone who's played music with intensity and dedication, the instrument is built into the self: Something touching the cello is perceived as something touching the cellist. The same is true of competitive fencers  "when they pick up a sword," McNay says, "that sword becomes part of their body."

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As he explains all of this, I flash back to my mother. A concert violinist, she always spoke of her instrument as her other voice  as a natural, expressive extension of herself. As far as her brain was concerned, it was. I am not the musician my mother was, so I can't say the same of her violin in my hands. I don't practice nearly as much. I also have minimal grounding in music theory, having absorbed most of its complexities subconsciously.

But my ear knows what's going on. My left hand knows what's going on. They speak to each other, bypassing my utterly clueless conscious brain. When I solo on a jazz tune, I can't tell you what I'm doing, but I do it.

When I describe this to McNay, he assures me I'm not a crackpot. "That's absolutely true." It is? "Oh, it's totally true. It's way true. You can actually illustrate this really easily."

Basically, all of us have a limited capacity for conscious attention. Stuff gets relegated to the unconscious, but that doesn't mean it doesn't register at all. "Your brain is aware on an unconscious level," McNay says. And muscle memory has a mind of its own. Think of it this way: If you consciously tried to flex every muscle involved in walking, you'd fall over. "You trust that your muscles know what to do."

That said, you do need to stay focused while making music  that's the beauty of it. No multitasking allowed. "This, again, is a question of attention. You could play music without paying attention  you could suck, but you could do it. Likewise, you could ski without paying attention, but you'd crash."

More Information If you go "Music and the Mind: The lifelong benefits of music for the brain," with Ewan McNay Where: Guilderland Public Library at 2228 Western Ave. When: 7 p.m. Wednesday Admission: Free Info: bachchellosuitesworkshop.com Contact Amy Biancolli at 518-454-5439 or abiancolli@timesunion.com or visit the arts blog at http://blog.timesunion.com/localarts See More Collapse

If I love playing music with friends because it empties my mind of its everyday aggravations, I'm not alone. "You haven't got the brain capacity to think about your mother-in-law or your mortgage or the leak in the roof," he says. So I'm fiddling while Rome burns. "Basically, yes."

One thing playing music won't do for you: "It doesn't stop you from getting fat," McNay says. "You've got to go to the gym as well." But that's good for the brain, too.

In short: Playing music "has a bunch of benefits. It decreases your reaction time. ... It increases your memory ability in regards to aging, in many ways. It probably does improve your ability to communicate  if only because you recognize and process speech faster. And it's fun," McNay says. "It's fun."

Enough of this. Go play music.

abiancolli@timesunion.com  518-454-5439  @AmyBiancolli
Three families murdered in three years. All within 50 miles of Albany. All committed by husbands and fathers who also took their own lives.

The horrific discovery of Luke Karpinski, Justine Wilbur and their three young children at a Sheffield, Mass., home Wednesday thrust the rare but disturbing phenomenon known as family annihilation  in which a family member kills an intimate partner, their children and then, often, themselves  back into the local spotlight.

That's because the Capital Region has now had three such cases in as many years, and their details are disturbingly similar. A patriarch kills his wife, his child or children, and then himself. In two of the cases, the husband set fire to the family home before taking his own life. In all three, there was no apparent motive.

"We'd like to come up with a why, but for all our digging, we've come up empty on why somebody would do this to themselves and their family," said David Bush, the police chief in Ballston Spa, where 46-year-old Steven Jones shot his wife, Jennifer, 12-year-old daughter, Emma, and then himself just before Christmas last year.

Bush said Friday that investigators are still waiting for electronic evidence to be analyzed in the case, but that so far their investigation has yielded nothing by way of a motive  no known domestic strife, no mental health problems.

"Nothing to indicate any trouble," he said.

In 2016, Colonie police officer Israel Roman shot and killed his wife, Deborah, and his 10-year-old son, Nathan, with his service weapon before setting his house ablaze and killing himself. The case was closed after a year without any motive identified. State Police said Friday they still don't know what caused Roman to snap.

But criminology and psychology experts say there's always a why.

It may not make sense to the average person, but in cases where depression has been escalating, or an impulsive decision can be carried out quickly due to access to guns, it all makes sense, said Christina Lane, an associate professor of criminal justice at the College of Saint Rose in Albany.

"It's an atrocity to think that any parent, any person in a caregiving situation could do this," she said. "But there are many reasons why."

The vast majority of family massacres are committed by white men in their 30s and 40s, experts say. A 2013 study which analyzed three decades of family annihilations in England found that 81 percent of the men attempted suicide after the act, and also identified four categories of annihilators: self-righteous, disappointed, anomic and paranoid.

The self-righteous annihilator blames his crimes on the mother, whom he blames for the breakdown of the family. For these men, their breadwinner status is central to their idea of family, the study's authors noted.

The disappointed annihilator believes his family has let him down or has done something to undermine his idea of ideal family life, such as a betrayal of religious or cultural customs.

The anomic killer sees the family as intertwined with his own identity and a symbol of his own economic success. If that success is threatened, he believes the family is no longer serving its function.

Paranoid annihilators perceive an external threat to the family, usually from social services or the legal system, which the father fears may take his children away in the event of his estrangement from their mother.

"The man in our society is viewed as the protector, as someone who's supposed to provide security," said Lane. "If they feel they're failing, they view what they're doing as a good act. I can't provide for you, your lives will be horrible, I'm doing you a favor."

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Other case studies have found differing circumstances leading up to these murders.

In some circumstances, for example, the event appears to come out of nowhere. It surprises those who knew the perpetrator and the family. There were no previous domestic incidents known to police. No known mental health troubles. In these cases, criminologists say, the perpetrator typically had a high-profile or well-paying job and probably put a lot of effort into maintaining an image of idyllic family life.

Karpinski and Wilbur both worked as patent attorneys. Jones worked as an engineer for GlobalFoundries. Roman was a decorated police officer.

In other circumstances, the perpetrator is known to police, often for domestic incidents, and sometimes to mental health and substance abuse counselors.

This does not mean that domestic violence did not feature in the lives of the image-obsessed perpetrators.

A 12-city study by Jacquelyn Campbell of Johns Hopkins University, for example, found that intimate partner violence had previously occurred in 70 percent of murder-suicide cases. Yet only 25 percent of prior domestic violence appeared in arrest records. Much of the prior domestic violence was uncovered through interviews with family and friends of the murder victims.

Guns are also significant risk factors in these cases, studies have found, as they can be used impulsively and more efficiently than other weapons.

"On average, 1,200 Americans die in a murder-suicide each year. Nine-tenths of them are from a gun," said Lane. "I'm not saying I advocate for gun control, but access to firearms and seeing those firearms as a way out is a factor here."

While guns were used in both the Israel Roman and Steven Jones cases, Massachusetts authorities declined to say at a news conference Thursday exactly how the Karpinski-Wilbur family died.

The bodies were sent to Boston for autopsies, and an investigation is ongoing.
ALBANY -Amsterdam Mayor Michael Villa came to the Capitol on Thursday with an expensive wish list.

The first-term Republican is hoping for help closing an unexpected budget hole in excess of $8 million, as well as ensuring that pledged state funds for repairing a one-mile stretch of road through the heart of the city is available as planned. He met with Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara, a Rotterdam Democrat, and previously met with Sen. George Amedore, a Rotterdam Republican.

Without support from the state, Villa has said Amsterdam residents could be facing the "real possibility" of a double-digit property tax increase.

The most probable source of relief is legislative action in Albany - following a "home rule" request from Amsterdam's government - that would allow the city to borrow money to close its operating deficit. That would likely require an increase in local taxes, but would allow city officials to avoid the most severe spending cuts and tax increases.

"Then we could have a plan to begin to pay back the money starting with this (year's city) budget," Villa said.

Following that path would require the city's budget to be reviewed annually by the state comptroller's office, which would make recommendations for officials to consider before final enactment.

Amsterdam is also making a bid to secure additional aid in the state budget, which is scheduled to be completed in about two weeks. Speaking about the city's state representatives, Villa said, "Anything else that they're able to do certainly would be appreciated."

He stressed that the city's financial situation is due to "bad management by former administrations" and not the fault of state government. Much of the blame is attributed to past accounting practices, as well as the city controller's post remaining vacant for nearly a year.

The fiscal challenges of the city were concealed, in part, by a past failure to submit financial data to the state comptroller's office for its fiscal monitoring system. A report on the city's bleak situation is expected soon from the comptroller.

Thursday's visit to Albany also touched on the planned Church Street reconstruction, which had moved forward after Santabarbara and Amedore secured separate grants totaling $1.9 million for the project.

While the Assembly funding is in place, Villa said they're still waiting on the Senate's commitment to come through. "For the city to act on this, we need both streams available," he said.

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Amedore spokeswoman Eileen Miller said the money is just waiting for approval from the state Division of Budget. "It's moving its way though the process," she said.

One recent bright spot for Amsterdam came last fall, when it was identified as the winner of a $10 million downtown revitalization grant from the state. A special city committee winnowed down its list of potential funding recipients to 20 on Wednesday, and a finalized list is expected to be submitted to state officials later this month.

The first item on the list is the construction of an overpass that would link a new pedestrian bridge to the downtown community. The project has an estimated $5.3 million price tag, and would utilize $3.3 million in downtown revitalization funding.

The list also includes $1 million for a downtown entry gateway and $2.5 million toward construction of a new recreation center and renovations to a community center.

The state selection of projects is scheduled for this summer.

David.Lombardo@timesunion.com - 518.454.5427 - @poozer87
Bethlehem

Town police on Thursday arrested a Bethlehem High School teacher, Michael E. Fredette, 63, of Glenmont, on a misdemeanor stalking charge, police said Friday.

Fredette, who school officials said was on leave from the district, was arrested for stalking a 19-year-old after he had been advised to cease all contact with the teen, said police. There was no indication as of Friday that any incidents took place at the school or previously when the person was still a student there.

Authorities allege that Fredette engaged in an ongoing course of conduct involving contact with the victim, turning up at the person's home and workplace and sending items to the person.

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Police ask that anyone with information about the case call them at 518-439-9973.

School officials added that anyone wishing to discuss the matter with them can call 518-439-7098.
ALBANY - If U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conduct a raid in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has made sure the state is ready to react.

Cuomo on Thursday announced the line-up of at least 15 immigration attorneys on his statewide rapid response program that will provide emergency legal services to immigrants targeted by ICE.

"While the federal government continues to threaten our immigrant communities, New York will not stop fighting to protect the rights of new Americans," Cuomo said in a press release. "With this new program and expanded opportunity centers, we are ensuring vulnerable immigrants who are unfairly targeted by ICE have the legal assistance and services they need to achieve their full potential in New York."

The list includes the Prisoner's Legal Services office in Albany that will receive $325,000 for two attorneys. They can use the funds to hire new attorneys or use staff for the project. Their work will bolster the roster of immigration attorneys in the region to help respond to what the governor called "an increasing number of detained asylum seekers relocated there."

Although the amount of immigrants detained at the Albany County jail spiked this past summer, with an influx of more than 300 transferred from the U.S.-Mexico border, numbers have dwindled as asylum-seekers have been transferred to a federal detention center near Buffalo to wait out their cases. The jail also boards a steady trickle of immigrants arrested locally.

The Capital Region attorneys will join at least 15 others across the state. After announcing the program in December, the providers were chosen through a competitive bidding process.

In addition to urgent legal help, providers will directly represent separated and unaccompanied children, conduct Know Your Rights trainings in hard-to-reach areas such as rural farming regions, and give other non-legal support services to families facing deportation.

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Cuomo also selected 21 Opportunity Centers to deliver education, guidance and other services to immigrants in their neighborhoods, including the Southern Tier for the first time. The program will augment funding for the U.S. Committee for Citizenship and Immigrants office in Albany, a refugee resettlement agency that serves immigrants at the community level.

That office will keep offering legal consultations and community workshops but will add a citizenship class for immigrants, Director Jill Peckenpaugh said. There is currently no wait list. The program highlights that the organization known for resettling refugees also offers services for long-term immigrants on the path to citizenship.

"Citizenship is just one of those key steps for refugees as they integrate with the local community," Peckenpaugh said. "They're already contributing economically and socially, but citizenship is a key piece and refugees are all on the path to citizenship from the day they arrive."
COLONIE - Zubair Ahmed had barely slept, staying up into the early morning hours Friday, closely following news reports about shootings at two mosques in New Zealand.

Ahmed, who is the president of the Muslim Community Center of the Capital District, watched as the death toll continued to rise until it reached 49 people.

His heart ached for the people lost, as he went to make a call that he said has happened far too often. He called the police asking them to provide patrols to be stationed outside the Colonie mosque.

"We want to make sure people feel safe and comfortable," Ahmed said. "No one should have to be living in a world of fear of being killed when you go to worship."

Although the New Zealand shooting happened on the other side of the world, the atmosphere was somber and security was heightened locally as hundreds of people gathered at the Muslim Community Center of the Capital District Friday afternoon for prayer.

"As Muslims we are one nation, one people," Imam Nayef Patel said. "We feel the pain felt by others in New Zealand."

An Albany County sheriff's cruiser was stationed outside the mosque as Colonie police patrolled the streets surrounding it.

Albany police also had officers routinely check mosques and places of worship in the city as a result of the New Zealand shooting, police spokesman Officer Steve Smith said.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo also directed State Police to increase patrols around mosques and houses of worship across the state.

"At a time of great division, we will stand up to hate in all its forms and do everything in our power to protect the safety and well-being of all New Yorkers," Cuomo said.

Ahmed, 36, said growing up he couldn't remember any sort of police presence at the mosque, but now it seems to be more and more common.

"It's discouraging to have to have a place of peace of worship have a guard or police officer in front," Mark Weitzman, an expert on anti-Semitism and extremism said. "Usually those places want to send a message of welcoming and openness and when you see a guard there is a message of fear and worry."

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Weitzman, who will be delivering a lecture on "The New Face of Extremism" at the College of Saint Rose on Monday said places of worship, sadly, have become "prime targets" for mass shootings.

"These people died just because they were in a mosque," Patel said.

As people walked into the Muslim Community Center, Ahmed greeted them. Some told him they couldn't sleep either after hearing the news of the shooting.

Ahmed took the opportunity to remind people that if they ever see something suspicious to say something.

Akbar Khan, the president of the Pakistan Association f of New York Capital District echoed this in a message to the Muslim Community on Friday where he condemned the attacks, expressed sorrow for the victims and reminded people that if they hadn't yet taken an "active shooter class" that they should.

"Today is very somber, and I think a lot of people in our community are thinking about their own families" Ahmed said. "The people killed each had a life. They each had families that they will never see again. They had kids that they will never see again. It needs to stop."
NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP announces that a federal securities class action lawsuit has been filed against Spectrum Brands Legacy, Inc. f/k/a Spectrum Brands Holdings, Inc. (Spectrum or the Company) (NYSE: SPB) in the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin on behalf of those who purchased or acquired the securities of Spectrum between June 14, 2016 through April 25, 2018, inclusive (the Class Period).



Investors who purchased shares of Spectrum Brands Legacy, Inc. are urged to contact the firm immediately at classmember@whafh.com or (800) 575-0735 or (212) 545-4774. You may obtain additional information concerning the action on our website www.whafh.com .

If you have incurred losses in the shares of Spectrum Brands Legacy, Inc., you may, no later than May 6, 2019, request that the Court appoint you lead plaintiff of the proposed class. Please contact Wolf Haldenstein to learn more about your rights as an investor in Spectrum Brands Legacy, Inc.

## Follow the firm and learn about newly filed cases on Twitter and Facebook. ##

The Complaint alleges that Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that:

Spectrum was facing operational issues with the development of its Ohio and Kansas facilities;



these issues were negatively impacting production, shipping levels, and sales; and



as a result of the foregoing, the Companys financial statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

On April 26, 2018, Spectrum issued a press release announcing the Companys financial and operating results for the fiscal quarter ended April 1, 2018. For the quarter, Spectrum reported net income of $0.8 million, or $0.02 per diluted share, compared to net income of $39.9 million, or $0.68 per diluted share for the comparable period in the prior year. The same day, Spectrum also announced that Andreas R. Rouve had stepped down as Spectrums Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Director and that David M. Maura had been named CEO, effectively immediately.

Following this news, Spectrums stock price fell $20.50 per share, or roughly 22.10%, to close at $72.22 per share on April 26, 2018.

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 action or have any questions regarding your rights and interests in this case, 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.

Contact:

Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP

Kevin Cooper, Esq.

Gregory Stone, Director of Case and Financial Analysis

Email: gstone@whafh.com , kcooper@whafh.com or classmember@whafh.com

Tel: (800) 575-0735 or (212) 545-4774

Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome.
Christchurch, New Zealand

Many people were killed in a mass shooting at a mosque in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on Friday, a witness said.

Police have not yet described the scale of the shooting but urged people in central Christchurch to stay indoors.

And New Zealand media reported a shooting at a second mosque in a Christchurch suburb.

Witness Len Peneha said he saw a man dressed in black enter the Masjid Al Noor mosque in central Christchurch at about 1:45 p.m. and then heard dozens of shots, followed by people running from the mosque in terror.

Peneha, who lives next door to the mosque, said the gunman ran out of the mosque, dropped what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon in Peneha's driveway, and fled.

Peneha said he then went into the mosque to try and help.

"I saw dead people everywhere. There were three in the hallway, at the door leading into the mosque, and people inside the mosque," he said. "It's unbelievable nutty. I don't understand how anyone could do this to these people, to anyone. It's ridiculous."

He said he helped about five people recover in his home. He said one was slightly injured.

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"I've lived next door to this mosque for about five years and the people are great, they're very friendly," he said. "I just don't understand it."

He said the gunman was white and was wearing a helmet with some kind of device on top, giving him a military-type appearance.

The New Zealand Herald reported there was a second shooting at the Linwood Masjid Mosque.

Mark Nichols told the Herald he heard about five gunshots and that a Friday attendee returned fire with a rifle or shotgun. Nichols said he saw two injured people being carried out on stretchers past his automotive shop and that both people appeared to be alive.

New Zealand historically has had only a handful of mass shootings events.
Washington

One of the key prosecutors in the special counsel's investigation into Russian election interference is leaving the team soon, the Justice Department said Thursday.

The prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, who helped lead the cases against the former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, "will be concluding his detail to the Special Counsel's Office in the near future," Peter Carr, the special counsel's spokesman, said.

Weissmann has been in talks with New York University Law School about a job, but has not officially taken a role at the school.

"Andrew has been involved with NYU Law in the past, and we have been talking with him about returning to the law school following his current commitments," Michael Orey, the public affairs director at the law school, said in a statement.

Weissmann's decision to leave has been closely scrutinized for clues about what it says about the apparent conclusion of the special counsel's work.

Already the investigation into whether or not prosecutors found that President Donald Trump or any member of his inner circle worked with Russia to interfere in the election or obstruct the investigation  and speculation about when it will end and what its findings will reveal  has consumed the city, and is the focus of cable news reports, book deals and conversations at bars, restaurants and parties.

Weissmann's departure also comes as his cases against Manafort and Gates are drawing to a close. Manafort was sentenced Wednesday in the second of two cases brought against him, and faces a total of up to 7 1/2 years in prison. More charges against Manafort were filed Thursday by the Manhattan district attorney; Weissmann is not involved in that case.

Officials inside the Justice Department are preparing for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to deliver his confidential report on the investigation's findings to William Barr, the attorney general, according to multiple people inside the department who have been briefed on the planning.

Barr will then summarize those findings and present them to Congress.

Democratic lawmakers have vowed to obtain Mueller's full report, no matter what Barr presents to them, guaranteeing that the submission of the report will not end debate over the Mueller inquiry and its findings.

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Weissmann, 60, has been considered a key player on Mueller's team and one of its most aggressive prosecutors.

A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, Weissman previously worked as general counsel at the FBI while Mueller was the director.

He gained a reputation as one of the most relentless prosecutors in the case against Enron, the energy company implicated in a widespread accounting fraud.

Not only did he secure indictments of the company's top officers, Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, he also charged the wife of the company's chief financial officer with tax fraud and won a case against Enron's accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, which helped lead to the firm's demise.

The Supreme Court eventually overturned the decision in the Arthur Andersen case.

He helped construct the cases against Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, and Gates, who was Manafort's business partner and later deputy on the Trump campaign.
Keokuk, Iowa

Beto O'Rourke, the 46-year-old former Texas congressman whose near-miss Senate run last year propelled him to Democratic stardom, announced Thursday that he was running for president, betting that a broad message of national unity and generational change will lift him above a slate of committed progressives offering big-ticket policy ideas.

His decision jolts an early election season already stuffed with contenders, adding to the mix a relentless campaigner with a small-dollar fundraising army, the performative instincts of a former punk rocker and a pro-immigrant vision to counteract President Donald Trump's.

Yet O'Rourke also comes to the 2020 race with few notable legislative accomplishments after three terms in the House representing El Paso. And in a primary so far defined by bedrock policy positions, like the economic agendas of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, O'Rourke enters without a signature proposal that might serve as the ideological anchor of his bid.

"This moment of peril produces perhaps the greatest moment of promise for this country and for everyone inside it," O'Rourke said in a video announcing his candidacy, released hours before a three-day tour of Iowa began Thursday morning.

Shortly after 8 a.m. Thursday, O'Rourke stepped into a coffee shop on Main Street in Keokuk and began introducing himself to a state he had never visited before.

"Hey, nice to meet you. Beto O'Rourke," he said, squeezing between news cameras and caffeine-seekers. "Good morning, good morning to you," he said to people in this southeastern Iowa town  a county where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 16 percentage points in 2016 but where former President Barack Obama won four years earlier.

Soon, he was standing on a chair taking questions, perched between paintings of flowers and musical instruments. "This is democracy," he said.

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O'Rourke was planning to spend much of the next three days in similar communities across eastern Iowa, the historically Democratic part of the state where so many voters swung to Trump three years ago.

His Democratic rivals quickly sent notice, however, that they were not going to let his long-anticipated launch go unimpeded: former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro released a list of 30 new endorsements from Texas, including one state lawmaker from O'Rourke's hometown, and Sen. Kamala Harris emailed a fundraising appeal noting O'Rourke's entry into the race  and the historic diversity in the field, which she represents.

Unlike many of his 14 Democratic rivals for the nomination, O'Rourke has spent little time until recently even considering a White House run.
ALBANY  A Ravena man was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison for distributing child pornography through an encrypted messaging application on his phone, federal authorities said.

Derek Boprey, 32, must also have 30 years of supervised release, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI.
The Connecticut Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the firearms industry Thursday, clearing the way for a lawsuit to move forward against the companies that manufactured and sold the semi-automatic rifle used by the gunman in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The ruling allows the lawsuit brought by victims' relatives to potentially go to trial, which could force gun companies to turn over internal communications they fiercely fought to keep private and provide a revealing glimpse into how the industry operates.

The court agreed with the lower court judge's decision to dismiss claims that directly challenged the federal law shielding the gun companies from litigation but found the case can move forward based on a state law regarding unfair trade practices.

The ruling validates the strategy lawyers for the victims' families used as they sought to find a route around the protections in federal law that guard gun companies from litigation when their products are used to commit a crime.

The lawsuit argued that the AR-15-style Bushmaster used in the 2012 attack had been marketed as a weapon of war, invoking the violence of combat and using slogans like "Consider your man card reissued."

Such messages reflected, according to the lawsuit, a deliberate effort to appeal to troubled young men like Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who charged into the elementary school and killed 26 people, including 20 first-graders, in a spray of gunfire.

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In the lawsuit, the families pushed to broaden the scope to include the manufacturer, Remington, which was named along with a wholesaler and a local retailer in the suit.

"Remington may never have known Adam Lanza, but they had been courting him for years," Joshua D. Koskoff, one of the lawyers representing the families, told the panel of judges during oral arguments in the case in 2017.

The weapon used by Lanza had been legally purchased by his mother, Nancy Lanza, whom he also killed.

Lawyers representing the gun companies argued the claims raised in the lawsuit were specifically the kind that law inoculated them against. They said agreeing with the families' arguments would require amending the law or ignoring how it had been applied in the past.
Troy

Ever wonder where all that school spending goes? Parents, students and taxpayers in Troy, Schenectady and several other Capital Region districts can get a detailed idea about expenditures with the release this week of the state Budget Divisions School Funding Transparency site. It allows the public to see and compare funding on a school-to-school basis for 76 districts.

Eventually, cost comparisons for schools within all 674 of the states districts will be online at the site at https://openbudget.ny.gov/sft/sft-vis.html.

The data release, however, isnt without controversy. Senate Democrats, like much of the education establishment in New York, continue to oppose the mandated reporting and are calling for its abolition as part of this years budget negotiations.

That may be a negotiating tactic, but either way, the site represents an evolution in the continuum of data being released about the states schools.

Almost a generation ago, the state required New York schools to begin releasing standardized student test score data, which allowed people to compare districts and individual schools. That was in response to worries that the U.S. was lagging other countries in academic achievement and that learning standards needed to be elevated.

Now, as New York retains its tops-in-the-nation status for per pupil spending and taxes, and amid concerns about costs nationwide, theres a push for spending transparency as well as academic achievement.

In addition to the release of these reports, which was pushed through by Gov. Andrew Cuomo a year ago, the federal Department of Education is mandating similar data releases. Those reports will be administered by the state Education Department and should be available in 2020.

Some educators say the two reports are duplicative while others note that there are significant differences.

And the opposition to the state version continues.

We opposed the adoption of the building-based budget reports as part of the budget last year, and support the Senates proposal to repeal the requirement included in their legislative budget proposal this year, state School Boards Association spokesman Al Marlin said in an email.

Others noted that complying with the new state requirement placed yet another paperwork burden on school business managers.

Cuomo, though, said that a more granular look at where school dollars are allocated can help ensure that more money is sent to the neediest schools.

"When we understand where the money actually goes, we can begin to address funding inequalities and ensure every child gets the best shot at a quality education," he said in a prepared statement about the new data.

Some of the money does appear to go to schools with lots of needy students. At Troys School 2, in a largely poor neighborhood with lots of disadvantaged kids, the district spent $24,174 per pupil.

Thats more than the high school, with an expense of $21,486 per pupil.

We spent the most on the high needs schools, said Adam Hotaling, Troys assistant superintendent for business. The higher cost could reflect a number of programs and grants, both federal and state, that aim to provide extra help for kids.

But Troy may be the exception, according to an analysis by The Education Trust - NY, which follows educational equity issues. The nonprofit found that Troy was just one of two districts that budgeted 20 percent more for their highest needs schools than their lowest needs schools.

School Resource Findings1 by rkarlin on Scribd

The data also provides a glimpse at how one of any schools major expense  personnel plays out.

One of the categories, for instance is the per-pupil cost of teacher salaries in a given school building.

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In Troys Carroll Hill elementary, that works out to $5,827 in salary per student, compared to $4,397 in the high school.

Why the difference? More than likely, that has to do with longevity, said Hotaling.

In almost all public school districts, teachers union contracts call for regular longevity raises, in addition to contractual pay hikes. So that would suggest that Carroll Hill has an older, or more senior, higher-paid teaching staff overall than in the high school.

The data also reflects differences between districts.

Schenectady High spends $19,147 per student and its teacher salaries run $7,953 per pupil. That compares with a cost of $14,742 per student at Martin Luther King elementary and a teaching cost of $5,868 per pupil.

Salaries for other workers and benefit costs also are listed on a per-pupil basis.

More for you New York's school spending battle begins in earnest

The first version of the website includes schools that get more than half of their funding from the state. In addition to Schenectady and Troy, Capital Region schools on the current list include Broadalbin-Perth, Cohoes, Hudson Falls, Amsterdam and Gloversville.

While this site looks at budgeted items, the federal requirement will list actual expenditures after budgets are set.

rkarlin@timesunion.com  518-454-5758  @RickKarlinTU






Albany

Think Globally, Act Locally, is an old saying but the high school students and others who gathered in front of the state Capitol on Friday were taking it to heart.

They had walked out of school to participate in an international youth climate strike, inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg who, starting in August, skipped school on Fridays and sat outside the Swedish Parliament demanding legislation to combat climate change.

Thunbergs efforts caught on in social media worldwide. She has since been nominated for a Nobel Prize and her strike was replicated Friday around the globe from Italy to India to Israel to the U.S. with thousands of students leaving class to call for action on climate change.

Its a global movement, said Audrea Din, a Schalmont High School senior who organized Fridays version of the strike at Albanys West Capitol Park after learning that no one else had put together a walkout. She reached out to other students in the region and quickly raised the approximately $1,000 required for a permit.

The park, which has on occasion been filled to capacity, often with union-organized demonstrations, was relatively empty until a group of some 200 Albany High School students showed up chanting eco-slogans as they marched down Washington Avenue. Eventually, students from other Capital Region schools arrived including Bethlehem, Guilderland, Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake, Saratoga Springs, Shenendehowa, South Colonie, the Albany Free School and Queensbury.

Thunberg has said she was inspired by the U.S. student protests against gun violence in the wake of the high shooting in Parkland, Fla. And while Fridays climate gathering in Albany didnt have the sheer numbers seen during those events, students said they were just as worried about their safety and their futures in the face of climate disruptions and global warming.

We want to have kids, said Albany High student Alex Savoie. We want to know that this earth is substantial enough for our children.

Walking out of school to stage a protest could also be a way to send a signal to the political class, added Albany High classmate Carlos Morocho. Most politicians out there, they dont listen to students, he said.

The demonstrators were in a festive mood, despite the windy damp weather that suggested global warming wasnt a 365-day proposition. Students chanted Hey hey, ho ho, climate change has got to go, and This is what democracy looks like.

Some of the speakers bashed corporations like Exxon, and sellers of disposable plastic drink bottles as well as rampant consumerism. Others held up signs proclaiming No Fossil Fuels in My Future, and 6th Mass Extinction, Were Next.

Some demonstrators tossed a pink Frisbee back and forth near the back of the crowd.

Up near the parks west side, where the speakers were, a couple of older demonstrators held up a red Industrial Workers of the World, banner.

Students are more amenable to the union message these days, as well as environmental causes, remarked Greg Giorgio, of Altamont, one of the people holding a banner. He said activists with the relatively obscure IWW union, who used to be known as Wobblies, have an environmentally friendly platform.

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We definitely know that theres a Trump effect but younger people seem to be seeing the forest through the trees, he said.

Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy urged the demonstrators to keep up their activism. Just being here shows you care and that means something, the Albany Democrat and former city school board member said. We need your brain power as well as your enthusiasm.

Noting that many of the demonstrators may not be old enough to vote, Joseph Raiti, a sophomore at American University, urged the crowd to look toward the next election cycle when many would be of voting age. Research the candidates who represent us in 2020, he said. Call your town, county and city representatives.

Even though students were out of class for the protest, school officials sounded OK with the idea.

When the young demonstrators left Albany High, Savoie said Our principal was outside telling us to be safe.

rkarlin@timesunion.com  518-454-5758  @RickKarlinTU
Dan Freedman

WASHINGTON, D.C.  Dan Freedman of Hearst Newspapers, whose coverage of the nation's capital appears regularly in the Times Union, has been honored with the 2018 David Lynch Memorial Regional Reporting Award.

Freedman, who writes for the Times Union as well as the Connecticut Post and its sibling papers, and Sam Brodey, a former MinnPost reporter now working for the Daily Beast, won the prize for stories on sexual harassment in the congressional delegations they cover.
OTTAWA, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Orezone Gold Corporation (TSXV:ORE) (Orezone or the Company) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Louis Archambeault as VP Corporate Development and Strategy and Mr. Ryan Goodman as VP Legal & Administration.



Mr. Archambeault has over 15 years of capital markets and finance experience, and has been involved with the Company as a consultant since July 2018. Prior to joining Orezone, Mr. Archambeault was the Director of Corporate Development for Goldcorp Inc. Before that, he spent several years in the CIBC Mining Investment Banking Group and prior to that, he worked as a mining engineering consultant at AMEC. Mr. Archambeault holds a Masters degree in Mining Engineering from McGill University.

Mr. Goodman has over 16 years of experience working with mining companies in various stages of growth and development, and specializes in such areas as financings, M&A and corporate governance. Most recently, Mr. Goodman was the VP Legal Affairs of Aura Minerals Inc. for the past 7 years. Previous to Aura Minerals, Mr. Goodman practiced law with a large Canadian multinational law firm with a focus on securities and mining. Mr. Goodman holds a J.D. from the University of Manitoba.

The Company also announces the departure of Mr. Tim Miller as Chief Operating Officer and the planned departure, after a short transition period, of Joe McCoy as VP Administration.

Patrick Downey, the Companys President and CEO commented, I am excited to have Louis and Ryan join the Orezone team. Their diverse skill sets and experiences in the mining sector and capital markets will assist the Company in the continued development and financing of the Bombore mine. The Company also wishes to thank both Tim and Joe for their long service and contributions made to the Company over the last several years, and wishes them well in their future endeavours. With the move of the Companys corporate office to Vancouver, and Tim and Joe located in Miami and Ottawa respectively, this is a natural transition. Tim has also expressed the need to dedicate more time to his other business interests.

The Company has started the process of recruiting an experienced site-based Project Manager for the development and construction of the Bombore gold project and will not be replacing the COO role vacated by Mr. Miller.

About Orezone Gold Corporation

Orezone is a Canadian company with a successful gold discovery track record and recent mine development experience in Burkina Faso, West Africa. The Company owns a 90% interest in Bombore, a fully permitted, low cost, development stage gold project in Burkina Faso, situated 85 km east of the capital city of Ouagadougou, adjacent to an international highway.

For further information please contact Orezone at +1 (778) 945-8977 or visit the Companys website at www.orezone.com.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
[March 15, 2019] Frost & Sullivan: Communication Test Equipment market in Asia-Pacific observes growth following innovation and rising demand

SINGAPORE, March 15, 2019 /CNW/ -- Increasing innovation, government initiatives, and rising demand in the market prompt Asia-Pacific to become a lucrative region for communication test vendors. The test equipment market in Asia-Pacific is expected to observe growth at a CAGR of 3.5% from 2017 to 2022. Frost & Sullivan projected the market revenue growth to reach up to US$1,273.8 million by 2022 from US$1,073.3 million in 2017. The primary driver for the growth is escalating demand across several vertical markets such as service providers, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and more. For further information on this analysis, please visit http://frost.ly/3ad "The Asia-Pacific region offers higher growth rate of most communication test equipment vendors compared to other regions they operate in," commented Ms. Divya Saiprasad, Principal Consultant at Frost & Sullivan. "This is mainly due to government ambitions and strong investments in communication infrastructure in Asia-Pacific," she explained. Frost & Sullivan's recent study Asia-Pacific Communication Test Equipment Market, Forecast to 2022 highlights the demand for communication test equipment market in APAC is fueled by advancements in infrastructure build-outs by developing countries and the growing adoption of smartphones and cloud technology. "Several product launches with sizable improvements in sensitivity, resolution, sped and throughput are populating the market due to increased demand," added Saiprasad.



Vendors are looking at mergers and acquisitions to increase their combined strengths in terms of product and services portfolio to lead the market. Keysight, after its inquisition of Ixia is the leader in terms of market share and surpasses Rhode & Schwarz, which was previously in the pole position. In the study, Frost & Sullivan enumerate growth opportunities and call to action for companies to leverage on the market growth.

5G  there are immense opportunity for testing applications that cater to the 5G spectrum

 there are immense opportunity for testing applications that cater to the 5G spectrum Network Function Virtualization (NFV)  companies must identify the various end-user groups that can benefit from NVFs

 companies must identify the various end-user groups that can benefit from NVFs Internet of Things (IoT)  vendors needs to innovate new products that cater to a diverse level of applications and end-user concerns

 vendors needs to innovate new products that cater to a diverse level of applications and end-user concerns Security and Integrity  opportunities emerge for companies to develop a more proactive and practical testing approach towards security testing

 opportunities emerge for companies to develop a more proactive and practical testing approach towards security testing Wireless Technology  developed countries such as Japan and Singapore will bring in more demand hence companies need to strategize to address this demand Smart cities, smart manufacturing plants, and smart grid are a few trends that are set to drive the demand for various test equipment. 5G is the new telecom revolution and the development/deployment of mobile 5G networks and its applications is attracting increased investments in telecom infrastructure and innovative applications. About Frost & Sullivan For over five decades, Frost & Sullivan has become world-renowned for its role in helping investors, corporate leaders and governments navigate economic changes and identify disruptive technologies, Mega Trends, new business models and companies to action, resulting in a continuous flow of growth opportunities to drive future success. Contact us: Start the discussion. Contact: Zuzana Zukarnain

Corporate Communications  Asia Pacific

P: + 607 560 3683

F: + 607 509 0705

E: [email protected] http://ww2.frost.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/frost--sullivan-communication-test-equipment-market-in-asia-pacific-observes-growth-following-innovation-and-rising-demand-300813061.html SOURCE Frost & Sullivan

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[March 15, 2019] Government of Canada supports University of Saskatchewan's "Women in STEM" speaker series featuring astronaut Dr. Roberta Bondar

Federal government investment to help increase women's role in STEM SASKATOON, March 15, 2019 /CNW/ - Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) related jobs are essential to expanding an innovation economy and participation of women, both at educational institutions and in the workforce. Today, the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada, announced a $30,000 investment to support two "Women In STEM" speaking events through the Centre for the Study of Science and Innovation Policy (CSIP) at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (JSGS). The latest Women in Science (WinS) Speaker Series features Dr. Roberta Bondar, Canada's first female astronaut and the world's first neurologist in space. This CSIP-led initiative encourages women and other underrepresented groups to participate in STEM fields at all stages of education and career development. Dr. Bondar's talk will take place on Tuesday, March 26 at 7:00 p.m. at Convocation Hall at the University of Saskatchewan. This event is presented in collaboration with the university's Whelen Lecture. Dr. Bondar's lecture is taking place as Canada launches Exploration, Imagination, Innovation: A New Space Strategy for Canada. The strategy aims to leverage Canadian STEM strengths in areas like robotics, artificial intelligence and biomedical technologies. It includes participation in the Lunar Gateway project to build a space station in orbit around the moon. Quote

"Building a strong and innovative Canadian economy includes encouraging diverse groups, including young women, to pursue interests and careers in STEM fields. As Canada also embarks on a new space strategy that includes going to the moon, it is crucial that all Canadians have opportunities to participate in the future economy on Earth and beyond."

- The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, and Minister Responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada "To be the university the world needs, the University of Saskatchewan is committed to a culture of inclusion and collaborative innovation across our diverse community, with particular focus on women and Indigenous peoples in underrepresented STEM fields. Through this seminar series and by highlighting the success of outstanding female role models, our students will be inspired to pursue research and STEM careers."

- Karen Chad, Vice-President Research, University of Saskatchewan "CSIP's Women in Science (WinS) Speaker Series showcases the real contributions made by female scientists in Canada and the outstanding impact these women are having on policy development, national dialogue, economic growth and prosperity. Through these forums, we can inspire the next generation of female innovators and leaders, increase awareness of cultural biases and barriers, and profile career opportunities to increase the representation of women in STEM fields."

- Peggy Schmeiser, WinS Project Leader and Associate Director, Centre for the Study of Science and Innovation Policy, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan Quick Facts The University of Regina and the University of Saskatchewan jointly established the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School (JSGS) of Public Policy in 2007, a leading policy school for graduate students and public servants.

and the jointly established the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School (JSGS) of Public Policy in 2007, a leading policy school for graduate students and public servants. The Centre for the Study of Science and Innovation Policy was founded at JSGS to bridge the divide between science and innovation, and related policy and governance considerations.

Less than 30 per cent of those in STEM-related occupations in Saskatchewan are women (2016 Census).

are women (2016 Census). On February 28, 2019 , the Government of Canada announced an investment of $1.9 billion over 24 years for the next generation of smart, AI-powered space robotics for the U.S.-led Lunar Gateway.

, the Government of announced an investment of over 24 years for the next generation of smart, AI-powered space robotics for the U.S.-led Lunar Gateway. On March 6, 2019 , the Government of Canada announced a new Space Strategy that describes how Canada's space industry will be positioned to take full advantage of the growing global space economy and support innovative Canadian space firms. Additional Links Exploration, Imagination, Innovation: A New Space Strategy for Canada

Centre for the Study of Science and Innovation Policy, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy Stay Connected Follow us on Twitter: @WD_Canada, @ISED_CA, @usask, @UofS_Innovates

WD Homepage

WD Toll-Free Number: 1-888-338-WEST (9378)

TTY (telecommunications device for the hearing impaired): 1-877-303-3388







IF THERE IS A DISCREPANCY BETWEEN ANY PRINTED VERSION AND THE ELECTRONIC VERSION OF THIS NEWS RELEASE, THE ELECTRONIC VERSION WILL PREVAIL.

SOURCE Western Economic Diversification Canada

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[March 15, 2019] Protective to Host 2019 Company Update Meeting

Protective Life Corporation ("Protective"), a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Dai-ichi Life Holdings, Inc. (TSE:8750, "Dai-ichi"), will host a Company Update webcast on April 2, 2019, from 8 to 9:30 a.m. CT, providing information about Protective's 2018 financial results, current business strategy, and 2019 outlook. Led by the Company's senior management, the event is intended for professional investors, bankers, and other interested parties and will be held via a live audio webcast. The live audio webcast of the presentation will be available at Protective.com in the Financial Information sction. Please access the website approximately fifteen minutes prior to the webcast to register, download any necessary software, and access the presentation materials.



A recording of the presentation will be available approximately 24 hours after the conclusion of the live event and can be found in the Financial Information section of Protective's website through May 7, 2019. ABOUT PROTECTIVE

Protective Life Corporation provides financial services through the production, distribution and administration of insurance and investment products throughout the U.S. The company traces its roots to the corporation's flagship company, Protective Life Insurance Company - founded in 1907. Throughout its more than 110-year history, Protective's growth and success can be largely attributed to its ongoing commitment to serving people and doing the right thing - for its employees, distributors, and most importantly, its customers. The company's home office is located in Birmingham, Alabama, and its 3,000+ employees are located in offices across the United States. As of December 31, 2018, the Company had assets of approximately $90 billion. Protective Life Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dai-ichi Life Holdings, Inc. (TSE:8750). For more information about Protective, please visit www.Protective.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005210/en/

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[March 15, 2019] Residents in rural PEI to benefit from expanded high speed, broadband Internet coverage

TRACADIE CROSS, PEI, March 15, 2019 /CNW/ - The availability of high-speed Internet infrastructure in rural communities is critical for economic development and access to essential resources and public services. The Governments of Canada and Prince Edward Island are investing in broadband infrastructure that will make it easier for Islanders to connect with people across the province and the world, supporting sustained economic growth for years to come. The Honourable Bernadette Jordan, Minister of Rural and Economic Development, and the Honourable H. Wade MacLauchlan, Premier of Prince Edward Island, today announced the expansion and improvement of internet service across the province. This project will deliver high-speed broadband Internet services to almost 30,000 residents across PEI, through a combination of fibre and fixed wireless technologies. It will significantly increase the quality of services with a stable and faster broadband experience. Once complete, this project will create new potential for innovation and economic development, helping business owners connect with new markets, allowing for better access to services, and providing students with the ability to broaden their studies. The Government of Canada is contributing more than $33.1 million through the Rural and Northern Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada infrastructure plan. The Province of Prince Edward Island will provide over $3.5 million, while Bell Canada and Xplornet together will provide more than $37 million. Funding will only be disbursed to Bell Canada and Xplornet as performance and construction based milestones are met, and this will be closely monitored by the province. Quotes "Broadband Internet service is key for the prosperity of rural Canadian communities. This project will allow Islanders to be better connected to friends, family, and businesses, as well as have better access to online services and tools. By providing better broadband connections, we are increasing the potential for economic growth and diversification in small and rural comunities, and enhancing quality of life."



The Honourable Bernadette Jordan, Minister of Rural and Economic Development "Investing in PEI's broadband services will help improve quality of life of all Islanders, and provide greater economic opportunities for residents and business. Working with our partners we are providing our communities with the best internet connection in Canada."

The Honourable Lawrence A. MacAulay, Minister of Veterans Affairs, and Member of Parliament for Cardigan "This is historic news for rural Islanders who for many years now have sought access to fast, reliable internet. This project will provide rural businesses with a better ability to compete on national and international stages, and will improve quality of life for residents, families and especially students. Once complete this project will make PEI the national leader in terms of province-wide Internet and will allow our province to meet the CRTC benchmark for speed by 2021." Honourable H. Wade MacLauchlan, Premier of Prince Edward Island "At Xplornet, we are proud to serve rural Canadians. 5G technology is not just about urban Canada  we believe strongly that 5G can enable amazing broadband services wherever Canadians choose to live. We are looking forward to bringing 5G hybrid fibre wireless technology to Islanders and are grateful to both Governments for their continued support for rural broadband." Allison Lenehan, President and CEO of Xplornet "As the largest investor in communications infrastructure in Prince Edward Island and throughout Atlantic Canada, Bell is proud to provide Islanders with expanded access to Canada's most advanced broadband network and to the economic, community and social development opportunities that high-speed Internet access enables." Glen LeBlanc, Vice Chair, Atlantic, Bell Canada Quick facts Through the Investing in Canada infrastructure plan, the Government of Canada is investing more than $180 billion over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and Canada's rural and northern communities.

infrastructure plan, the Government of Canada is investing more than over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and Canada's rural and northern communities. $25.3 billion of this funding is supporting social infrastructure in Canadian communities.

of this funding is supporting social infrastructure in Canadian communities. These investments complement the Atlantic Growth Strategy, a federal-provincial action plan aimed at stimulating economic growth in the region through five priority areas:

Skilled workforce/Immigration;



Innovation;



Clean growth and climate change;



Trade and investment;



Infrastructure. Associated links Investing in Canada: Canada's Long-Term Infrastructure Plan: http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/icp-publication-pic-eng.html Investing in Canada plan project map: http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/map Federal infrastructure investments in Prince Edward Island: http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/map-carte/pe-eng.html Atlantic Growth Strategy: http://www.acoa-apeca.gc.ca/ags-sca/Eng/atlantic-growth.html Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

Web: Infrastructure Canada SOURCE Infrastructure Canada

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[March 15, 2019] SmartAction to Showcase Top-Rated AI-powered Virtual Agent Solution at Enterprise Connect 2019

EL SEGUNDO, Calif., March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SmartAction, the #1 AI-powered virtual agent solution for contact centers, will demonstrate its omnichannel cloud-based self-service solution at Enterprise Connect this March. Enterprise Connect will be held from March 18 to March 21 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Contact center leaders should visit Booth #1102 to discover SmartAction's LIFE LESS HARD obsession that puts the effortless Customer Experience (CX) above all else. SmartAction is helping contact centers offer AI self-service to automate conversations live agents handle today, starting in voice where ROI is the greatest, then scaling the same solution to chat and text for a seamless omnichannel experience. "Today's contact center leaders know that Customer Experience is the top initiative in their organization and are unwilling to sacrifice even an ounce of it to autoate more. With industry research pointing to voice self-service as the preferred method of communication for customers now and in the future, SmartAction is helping contact centers make a near frictionless transition to AI automation," said Tom Lewis, CEO SmartAction.



About SmartAction

SmartAction was founded as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research company in 2002 and is now the leading provider of AI-powered virtual agents for customer service. SmartAction uses proprietary conversational AI to automate conversations that used to be handled by call center agents over phone, chat, and text. SmartAction has nearly two decades of development in AI, machine learning, and natural language processing/understanding (NLP/NLU) to mimic live agent behavior across hundreds of call types and chats in every industry. SmartAction was recognized by Deloitte as a Tech Fast 500 recipient in 2016, Gartner "Cool Vendor" in 2017, and "The Leader in AI-enhanced Self-service" by Frost & Sullivan in 2018. Media Contact:

Charlie Schrier

[email protected]

310-776-9200

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smartaction-to-showcase-top-rated-ai-powered-virtual-agent-solution-at-enterprise-connect-2019-300812906.html SOURCE SmartAction

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Speaking at the ministrys regular press conference on March 14, spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang said that over the past days, Vietnams authorised agencies have conducted various citizen protection measures to ensure fairness, as well as legitimate rights and interests for Huong.

On March 12, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh talked over the phone with Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah to discuss several issues, including the trial of Huong.

A day later, Minister of Justice Le Thanh Long sent a letter to Attorney General of Malaysia Tommy Thomas. The following day, Deputy Foreign Minister Nguyen Quoc Dung met Malaysian Ambassador to Vietnam Zamruni Khalid to ask the Malaysian court to ensure the fair trial and release Huong, said Hang.

She also shared that Vietnamese Ambassador to Malaysia Le Quy Quynh attended the March 14 trial to provide support for Huong if necessary, and visited her after the trial.

The spokeswoman affirmed that soon after the incident occurred, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs directed related agencies to meet Huong and her family, as well as finding lawyers and witnesses as regulated by the host countrys laws and international practices.

The Vietnamese side has also mentioned the case during meetings at all levels, even the most senior levels, with the Malaysian side, she added.
English Icelandic

The Annual General Meeting of Arion Bank will be held at the Banks headquarters at Borgartun 19, 105 Reykjavik on 20 March 2019 at 4:00 p.m.

One item on the agenda is the election of the Board of Directors. Deadline for notifications of candidacy was at 4:00 p.m. on 15 March 2019. Two member of the Nomination Committee will also be appointed.

Eva Cederbalk, Chairman of the Board, and Mans Hoglund do not intend to stand for re-election to the Board of Directors.

The following candidates have announced they wish to stand for election to the Board of Directors of Arion Bank and the Nomination Committee proposes that they be elected to the Banks Board of Directors:

Benedikt Gislason

Brynjolfur Bjarnason

Herdis Drofn Fjeldsted

Liv Fiksdahl

Paul Richard Horner

Renier Lemmens

Steinunn Kristin Thordardottir

Alternates:

Olafur Orn Svansson

Sigurbjorg Asta Jonsdottir

rostur Rikharsson

According to the Articles of Association of Arion Bank, the Board of Directors shall be comprised of five to eight members. The Nomination Committee has examined the nominations received and has assessed whether the candidates are dependent or independent of the Bank. The Committee also proposes that Brynjolfur Bjarnason be elected as Chairman of the Board and that Herdis Drofn Fjeldsted be elected as Vice Chairman. The report of the Nomination Committee is attached and information on the candidates will be available on the Banks website no later than 4:00 p.m. on 18 March.

The following candidates announced they wish to stand for election to the Nomination Committee of Arion Bank:

Christopher Felix Johannes Guth

Sam Taylor

The Board of Directors of Arion Bank will assess whether the candidates for the Nomination Committee are dependent or independent of the Bank. The Board's assessment and further information on the candidates will be available on the Banks website no later than 4:00 p.m. on 18 March.

Eva Cederbalk, Chairman of the Board of Arion Bank:

"When I joined the Board one of the key objectives was to bring Arion Bank to market and that was done successfully last summer when the Bank was listed both in Iceland and Sweden. I am very proud to have been part of that important journey. This was a complex and demanding process with a lot of hard work from all involved, the Banks management and Board. Taking this into consideration, as well as other personal and professional constraints such as time and travel, I decided not to seek re-election as board member and Chairman of the Board of Arion Bank and informed the Nomination Committee accordingly.

For further information on the Annual General Meeting of Arion Bank please visit the Bank's website or contact Sture Stolen, head of Arion Banks Investor Relations, at ir@arionbanki.is , or Theodor Fridbertsson, at Investor Relations, at theodor.fridbertsson@arionbanki.is, tel. +354 444 6760.

This is information that Arion Bank hf. is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact persons set out above.

Attachment
[March 15, 2019] Technologie Demtroys will be able to increase its competitiveness and enter the American market

The Government of Canada grants a $285,000 repayable contribution to the Eastern Townships company SHERBROOKE, QC, March 15, 2019 /CNW Telbec/ - Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions (CED) Technologie Demtroys, a growing high-tech company, is a leader in heating-cost savings for the multi-residential market. To sustain the company's growth, a repayable contribution of $285,000 from Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions has been awarded to it. Technologie Demtroys has used this financial assistance to develop its product portfolio to maintain its cutting-edge product offering and to embark upon its expansion into the American market. The funding was announced today by the Honourable Marie-Claude-Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. Specifically, the Government of Canada's assistance has enabled Technologie Demtroys to increase its innovation capacity and obtain certification for the American market, increase its promotional activities, and pay consulting fees for the development and marketing of its product. Founded in 2010, Technologie Demtroys operates in the information technology and energy-efficiency microelectronics industry. The company, which is highly innovative and has enjoyed continuous expansion, manufactures a heating control system for multi-residential buildings. The system offers a solution to the problem of overheating in residential buildings by automatically adjusting the heating capacity to the external temperature, making it possible to save up to 40% in heating costs. It has been installed in over 10,000 apartmentsin Canada and the company's clients include some of the biggest managers of private and social-housing buildings in the country.



The Government of Canada is committed to supporting innovative Canadian companies. Innovation is a true economic driver and the key to success, because it generates growth that benefits companies and communities. This is why we are ensuring that companies can count on appropriate resources to create and market innovative products. Quotes

"The Government of Canada has created an ambitious approach to support innovative companies that invest in the development of new markets. I am proud of our support of Technologie Demtroys, a successful company that looks to the future and is making its mark well beyond our region." The Honourable Marie-Claude-Bibeau, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food "By helping companies like Technologie Demtroys invest in the development of new technologies that will increase profitability, and in marketing strategies that will introduce them to new markets, the Government of Canada is honouring its commitments to drive expansion, innovation and exports." The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister responsible for CED "Ever since the launch of Technologie Demtroys, we have benefitted from the support of CED through two financial contributions: one for our launch and another to accelerate innovation and marketing abroad. This assistance has truly been vital to the company's development and we view it in terms of a financial partner that has changed our entire way of doing things." Jean-Sebastien Cyr, President and founder, Technologie Demtroys Quick facts Today's announcement was made on behalf of the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister responsible for the Innovation, Science and Economic Development portfolio, which is made up of 17 federal departments and agencies, including CED and the other five regional development agencies.

The funding was awarded through CED's Quebec Economic Development Program. To find out more about CED and its priorities, see the 2018-2019 Departmental Plan or visit www.dec-ced.gc.ca.

For 50 years now, the Government of Canada has been actively participating in regional economic development in Quebec : half a century of concrete action targeting the growth of Quebec's regions and businesses. Stay connected Follow CED on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube Follow Technologie Demtroys on Facebook, LinkedIn SOURCE Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions

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[March 15, 2019] UnitedHealthcare and Optum Take Action to Support People Affected by Flooding in Iowa

UnitedHealthcare and Optum, the health benefits and services companies of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), are taking action to help people affected by recent flooding across parts of Iowa. Support includes assisting health plan participants who may need to make alternate arrangements to access care and early prescription refills, as well as offering a free emotional-support line to help people who might be affected. Help Finding a Network Care Provider, Early Refills: Plan participants who need help finding a care provider in the UnitedHealthcare network or obtaining early prescription refills can call customer care at the number located on the back of their medical ID cards.

Plan participants who need help finding a care provider in the UnitedHealthcare network or obtaining early prescription refills can call customer care at the number located on the back of their medical ID cards. For plan participants who may have misplaced their medical ID cards, call 866-633-2446, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. (in the local time zone), Monday through Friday. People enrolled in Medicaid, employer-sponsored and individual health plans (except Medicare) who have a smartphone can download the free Health4Me app , which provides instant access to their ID card, network care providers, their personal health benefits and more. The Health4Me app is available as a free download at the Apple (News - Alert) iTunes App Store and the Android (News - Alert) arket on Google Play.

call 866-633-2446, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. (in the local time zone), Monday through Friday. People enrolled in Medicaid, employer-sponsored and individual health plans (except Medicare) who have a smartphone can download the free , which provides instant access to their ID card, network care providers, their personal health benefits and more. The Health4Me app is available as a free download at the Apple (News - Alert) iTunes App Store and the Android (News - Alert) arket on Google Play. Free Help Line: Optum, a leading health and behavioral health services company, is offering a free emotional-support help line.



Along with the toll-free help line, emotional-support resources and information are available online at www.liveandworkwell.com.

About UnitedHealth Group UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) is a diversified health care company dedicated to helping people live healthier lives and helping to make the health system work better for everyone. UnitedHealth Group offers a broad spectrum of products and services through two distinct platforms: UnitedHealthcare, which provides health care coverage and benefits services; and Optum, which provides information and technology-enabled health services. For more information, visit UnitedHealth Group at www.unitedhealthgroup.com or follow @UnitedHealthGrp on Twitter (News - Alert). Click here to subscribe to Mobile Alerts for UnitedHealth Group. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005076/en/

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[March 14, 2019] Medicalbit Foundation Co., Ltd. To Make ASCA Tokens Public

The Medicalbit Foundation, which is currently undergoing an initial virtual currency coin offering (ICO) in Estonia, has decided to make its ASCA tokens publicly available as the first step in the Asclepius Network project. The goal of Asclepius Network is to make leading-edge medical treatment available to all peoples of the world, and Japan has been chosen for the first location in Asia to expand business.

The project's mission is to accumulate the world's cutting-edge medical treatment knowledge and medical records within a blockchain system. This would form a mechanism that would enable anyone in the world to receive the benefits of leading-edge medical treatments anywhere in the world. To further that end, the project is forming a network of leading-edge medical researchers from Japan, as well as from Europe and the United States.

In practical terms, the project is engaged in the development of next-generation electronic medical records as well as the development of smart device apps to gather existing medical records. At this point, the project has already been approved for six patents in Japan.

Plans call for the establishment of blood and cancer screening facilities in 2019, using state of the art technologies from Japan, in conjunction with major diagnostic centers that are already involved in health screenings for millions of persons annually within China, as well as with the major hospital groups that manage dozens of hospitals within China.

In addition, proof-of-concept testing has already begun for a service to deliver Japanese pharmaceuticals to patients suffering from chronic illnesses.

This effort withi China is initially estimated, based on preliminary calculations made with project partners, to reach an annual scope ranging from several tens of billions of yen to several hundreds of billions of yen.



Furthermore, a monetary fund has been established to allow participation within the sustainable development goals project set forth by the United Nations as a means to realize the project's ideal of offering the benefits of leading-edge medical treatment to the peoples of the world. Plans call for the fund to be used predominantly for fields that include the free provision of treatment to areas of the world currently beyond the reach of such treatment. Participation in the Asclepius Network project for these efforts will require ASCA tokens, and the project seeks investors and business partners interested in bringing leading-edge medical treatment to all the peoples of the world.

Description of Offering: Thursday, March 21st, 10:00 AM JST

Offering Trader: TopForce

URL: www.top-force.com/ Moving forward, plans call for global development based on joint work with partners in the countries of Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, and India, following a model similar to that used for China. There will also be incremental increases to the number of offering traders from April of 2019 onward. ICO Implementation Company: MEDICALBIT FOUNDATION OU

Harju maakond, Tallinn, Kesklinna linnaosa, Narva mnt 5, 10117 MBC URL: https://www.medicalbit.ee/

ASCA URL: https://www.asclepius.network/

Project Management Company: Japan Medical Solutions Co., Ltd.

9F Nihonbashi Ningyocho Ishii Building, 3-1-17 Ningyo-cho Nihonbashi, Chiyoda Ward, Tokyo

JPM URL: http://www.jpmedsn.com/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190314005032/en/

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[March 14, 2019] Jade Global is a Silver Sponsor at the Oracle Modern Business Experience; the Newest Oracle Conference to Highlight Finance, HR and Supply Chain With Oracle Cloud!

Jade Global, leading enterprise technology partner for Oracle (News - Alert) Cloud integration, consulting & IT outsourcing, will be sponsoring and presenting at the Oracle Modern Business Experience (Oracle MBX) from March 19th-21st at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. The conference is Oracle's inaugural and largest-ever event dedicated to finance, human resources and supply chain professionals. It is a fusion of previous years' Modern Finance Experience, Oracle HCM World, and Modern Supply Chain Experience Conferences. Jade Global will be located at Kiosk LOM-08 in the Logistics and Order Management section of the Exhibition showcase. Jade's subject matter experts plan to exhibit content-rich demos and engage in discussions surrounding Jade Global's extensive portfolio of Oracle services and solutions including Oracle Financials, Revenue Management, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Resource Planning both on Cloud and on-premise. Karan Yaramada, Jade Global CEO, is looking forward to the new opportunity at Oracle MBX. "We are excited to be a silver partner for Oracle Modern Business Experience this year. As cloud migration accelerates, it is a great opportunity for us to share our journey and experience in migrating to Oracle Cloud including Finance, HCM, and Supply Chain, all at one place," stated Karan. At Jade Global's kiosk, visitos can learn about Oracle Cloud solutions for manufacturing, planning, order management and pricing strategy. Jade Global's experts will be at Kiosk LOM-08 speaking about SOA Cloud for B2B, EDI integrations, and the future of the supply chain and finance markets. Jade Global's Director of Supply Chain, ERP Practice Head, and Business Development executives are available to meet with at Oracle MBX.



Jade Global's VP Enterprise Applications, Raja Sekhar is presenting at Oracle MBX. His talk will cover the lessons learned and pitfalls during various customer implementations in Oracle Cloud. Those who attend Raja's session can expect to leave with a better understanding of how to create the right balance between velocity and perfection to drive digital transformation. Attend Jade Global's Theatre Session

Cloud 360 Journey of Cloud Implementation - Beyond the Obvious! [THT2466]

Thursday | March 21, 2019 | 1:20 PM | MBX Theater 2 (Exhibit Hall - Supply Chain) About Jade Global Jade Global is an Oracle Platinum Cloud Select Partner and member of the Oracle Cloud Excellence Implementer (CEI) Program. They have been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in North America by Inc. 5000. Jade is headquartered in San Jose, California with U.S. offices in Philadelphia, San Diego and Los Angeles. Learn more at www.jadeglobal.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190314005944/en/

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[March 14, 2019]

NASA Astronauts Hague and Koch Arrive Safely at Space Station with Crewmate Ovchinin

WASHINGTON, March 14, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Three crew members have arrived safely at the International Space Station, following a successful launch and docking of their Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft Thursday.

The Soyuz spacecraft carrying Nick Hague and Christina Koch of NASA and Alexey Ovchinin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos launched at 3:14 p.m. EDT (12:14 a.m. Friday Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Hague, Koch and Ovchinin docked to the space station's Rassvet module at 9:01 p.m. after a four-orbit, six-hour journey, and are scheduled to open the hatch and be welcomed aboard the orbiting laboratory at approximately 11:10 p.m. Their mission, Expedition 59, officially began at the time of docking.

The arrival of Hague, Koch and Ovchinin restores the station's crew complement to six. They have joined Anne McClain of NASA, David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency and Expedition 59 Commander Oleg Kononenko of Roscosmos.

The crew members will spend more than six months conducting about 250 science investigations in fields such as biology, Earth science, human research, physical sciences, and technology development. Seventy-five of the investigations are new and have never been performed in space. ome of the investigations are sponsored by the U.S. National Laboratory on the space station, which Congress designated in 2005 to maximize its use for improving quality of life on Earth.







Highlights of upcoming investigations include devices that mimic the structure and function of human organs, free-flying robots, and an instrument to measure Earth's distribution of carbon dioxide.

Three resupply spacecraft - a Russian Progress, Northrop Grumman Cygnus and SpaceX Dragon - are scheduled to arrive with science to support those investigations and additional supplies for the crew.

Hague, Koch, McClain and Saint Jacques soon will begin final preparations to venture outside the station's Quest airlock for three planned spacewalks. On March 22 and 29, pairs of spacewalkers will replace nickel-hydrogen batteries with newer, more powerful lithium-ion batteries for power channels on one pair of the station's solar arrays. On April 8, spacewalkers will lay out jumper cables between the Unity module and the midpoint of the station's backbone to establish a redundant power path to the Canadian-built robotic arm, known as Canadarm2, and enhance computer network capabilities. The March 29 spacewalk with McClain and Koch is scheduled to be the first-ever spacewalk with all-female spacewalkers. As with all spacewalks, crew member assignments are subject to change due to real-time operations.

The crew also is scheduled to be onboard during test flights of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which will return human spaceflight launches for space station missions to U.S. soil.

McClain, Saint-Jacques and Kononenko are scheduled to remain aboard the station until June, while Hague, Koch and Ovchinin are set to return to Earth early this fall.

Hague and Ovchinin now have completed a journey to the station that initially was planned for Oct. 11, when a booster separation problem with their Soyuz rocket's first stage triggered an abort two minutes after launch, resulting in a safe return to Earth. They were reassigned to fly again after McClain, Kononenko and Saint-Jacques launched for Expedition 58 in early December. This is Ovchinin's third flight into space, the second for Hague and the first for Koch. NASA selected all three astronauts in the Expedition 59 crew in the 2013 astronaut class.

For more than 18 years, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the station, advancing scientific knowledge and demonstrating new technologies, making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth that will enable long-duration human and robotic exploration into deep space, including the Moon and Mars. A global endeavor, 236 people from 18 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory that has hosted more than 2,500 investigations from researchers in 106 countries. Investigations conducted on the International Space Station impact the daily lives of people on Earth and prepare the way for humans to venture farther into space.

Follow Koch, Hague and McClain on their space mission at:

https://twitter.com/Astro_Christina

https://twitter.com/AstroHague

https://twitter.com/AstroAnnimal

Get breaking news, images and features from the space station on social media at:

https://instagram.com/iss

and

https://www.twitter.com/Space_Station

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasa-astronauts-hague-and-koch-arrive-safely-at-space-station-with-crewmate-ovchinin-300813014.html

SOURCE NASA
[March 14, 2019] Goodwin Celebrates Ten-Year Anniversary of its Hong Kong Office and Asia Practice

Global law firm Goodwin celebrated the ten-year anniversary of its operations in Asia with a gala reception for clients and business partners yesterday evening at The American Club Hong Kong. More than a hundred representatives from prominent firms attended the celebration. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190314005948/en/ Chairman David Hashmall, partner Stuart Cable, who oversaw Goodwin's strategic expansion in Asia, and Hong Kong office chair Yash Rana at the ten-year anniversary celebration of Goodwin's Hong Kong office. (Photo: Business Wire) Established in late 2008, Goodwin's Hong Kong office is now home to nearly 30 lawyers and staff. The lawyers in the office cover transactions across Asia, and have worked on some of the largest and most innovative transactions in the region. The comprehensive Asia practice covers Goodwin's key industry verticals of private equity, technology, life sciences, financial services and real estate. "Goodwin in Hong Kong has a particular expertise in advising investors and entrepreneurs in a technology and innovation driven economy," said Daid Hashmall, Goodwin's Chairman. "This unique value proposition allows us to punch above our weight and continues to drive our success in the Asia-Pacific region and globally."



Yash Rana, Chair of Goodwin's Hong Kong office, said: "We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to our clients for their support, trust and recognition of our counsel, expertise and practice philosophy. As we reach this ten-year milestone, we look forward to continuing to provide innovative solutions that meet our clients' diverse needs." Over the past several years, private equity partners Douglas Freeman, Victor Chen, Bosco Yiu and Daniel Lindsey joined the firm in Hong Kong, and private investment funds partner Greg Barclay relocated to the Hong Kong office from London.

View a short video about Goodwin's history in Hong Kong by clicking here. About Goodwin At Goodwin, we partner with our clients to practice law with integrity, ingenuity, agility and ambition. Our 1,000-plus lawyers across the United States, Europe and Asia excel at complex transactions, high-stakes litigation and world-class advisory services in the technology, life sciences, real estate, private equity, and financial industries. Our unique combination of deep experience serving both the innovators and investors in a rapidly-changing, technology-driven economy sets us apart. To learn more, visit us at www.goodwinlaw.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190314005948/en/

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[March 15, 2019] Halo Labs Announces Repricing of Convertible Debenture Units and An Increase in The Expected Size of The Offering

Halo Labs Inc. ("Halo" or the "Company") (NEO: HALO, OTC: AGEEF, Germany: A9KN) announces that it has agreed to amend the terms of its previously announced "best efforts" offering (the "Offering") of convertible debenture units (the "Convertible Debenture Units") to lower the conversion price at which the convertible debentures are convertible into common shares of the Company (the "Debenture Shares") from $0.70 per Debenture Share to $0.65 per Debenture Share. Canaccord Genuity Corp. will act as the lead agent and sole bookrunner on behalf of a syndicate of agents, including Gravitas Securities Inc., Clarus Securities Inc., Cormark Securities Inc. and PI Financial Corp. (collectively, the "Agents") in respect of the Offering. In addition, the Company has been advised by the Agents that they have received expressions of interest from investors exceeding the $10 million that was referenced in the Company's preliminary short form prospectus dated March 6, 2019 (the "Preliminary Prospectus") and that the total size of the Offering, including the exchange of the Outstanding Debt (as defined in the Preliminary Prospectus), may be increased to approximately $15 million. The Convertible Debenture Units will be offered by way of a final short form prospectus (the "Prospectus"). A preliminary prospectus in respect of the Offering has been filed in all of the provinces of Canada, excluding Quebec, pursuant to National Instrument 44-101 - Short Form Prospectus Distributions. The preliminary prospectus contains important information relating to the Offering and is still subject to completion or amendment. For more information, potential investors should read the preliminary prospectus which is available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. There will not be any sale or any acceptance of an offer to buy the Convertible Debenture Units until a receipt for the Prospectus has been issued. The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Offering for leasehold improvements at the Company's facilities, the purchase of extraction equipment, for strategic acquisition opportunities and for general working capital purposes. The Offering is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary regulatory and stock exchange approvals, including the approval of the NEO Aequitas Exchange, and the entering into of an agency agreement by the Company and the Agents. The securities being offered in connection with the Offering 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 U.S. state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an available exemption from the registration requirement of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable U.S. state securities laws. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of, the securities being offered in connection with the Offering in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.



ABOUT HALO Halo is a cannabis extraction company that develops and manufactures quality cannabis oils and concentrates, which are the fastest growing segments in the cannabis industry. Halo has expertise in all major cannabis manufacturing processes, leveraging proprietary processes and products, and has produced over 3.0M grams of oils and concentrates since inception. The forward-thinking company is led by a strong management team with deep industry knowledge and blue-chip experience. The Company is currently operating in California, Nevada and Oregon as well as Lesotho Africa through a strategic partnership. With a consumer-centric focus, Halo will continue to market innovative branded and private label products across multiple product categories.

For further information regarding Halo, see Halo's disclosure documents on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information and Statements This press release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and may also contain statements that may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking information and forward-looking statements are not representative of historical facts or information or current condition, but instead represent only Halo's beliefs regarding future events, plans or objectives, many of which, by their nature, are inherently uncertain and outside of Halo's control. Generally, such forward-looking information or forward-looking statements 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 may contain statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be taken", "will continue", "will occur" or "will be achieved". The forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained herein may include, but is not limited to, information concerning the completion of the Offering, the approval of the NEO Aequitas Exchange of the Offering, the receipt of any additional regulatory approvals required to complete the Offering, the number of Convertible Debenture Units to be sold by the Company, the exchange of the Outstanding Debt and the expected use of the proceeds from the Offering. By identifying such information and statements in this manner, Halo is alerting the reader that such information and statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Halo to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such information and statements. In addition, in connection with the forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained in this press release, Halo has made certain assumptions. Among others, the key factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking information and statements are the following: delays in obtaining the necessary approvals from the NEO Aequitas Exchange; delays in obtaining approvals from securities regulators; adverse changes in applicable laws; changes in general economic, business and political conditions, including changes in the financial markets and the other risks disclosed in the most recent annual information form and the Preliminary Prospectus (including the documents incorporated by reference therein). Should one or more of these risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information or statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein as intended, planned, anticipated, believed, estimated or expected. Although Halo believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing, and the expectations contained in, the forward-looking information and statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information and statements, and no assurance or guarantee can be given that such forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information and statements. Key assumptions used herein are that there will be no unexpected delays regarding approvals from the NEO Aequitas Exchange or other regulatory authorities, the Offering will be completed on the terms and within the timeline expected and no unexpected costs or events will occur requiring a change to the use of net proceeds. The forward-looking information and forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date of this press release, and Halo does not undertake to update any forward-looking information and/or forward-looking statements that are contained or referenced herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. All subsequent written and oral forward-looking information and statements attributable to Halo or persons acting on its behalf is expressly qualified in its entirety by this notice. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190314005957/en/

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[March 15, 2019] Africa's Boomplay Announces Licensing Deal With Warner Music

LAGOS, Nigeria, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Boomplay, the largest music streaming and download service in Africa, has signed a direct licensing agreement with Warner Music to bring the record company's diverse global roster of music to the region. The terms of the partnership allow Boomplay to distribute Warner Music's extensive catalogue of more than one million songs to its community of listeners in ten countries; Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. The deal will provide Warner Music's artists with direct access and exposure to Boomplay's millions of users in the region, while bringing Boomplay one step closer to its goal of bringing all music from around the world to Africa. Joe He, CEO of Boomplay, says: "Major deals with internationally recognized partners such as Warner Music continue to push us closer to our aim of building the largest and the most reliale online music distribution platform in Africa. We want every music lover in the region to be able to access any song or video, anytime and wherever they are. We are looking forward to a successful partnership and business continuation with WMG in what are truly exciting times for the African Music Industry."



Alfonso Perez-Soto, EVP, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Warner Music, adds: "We're happy to partner with Boomplay to bring our amazing artists' music to millions of listeners across Africa. The streaming service already has tremendous reach across the continent, yet they continue to expand exponentially. It's an opportunity that can't be missed for our artists to make a whole new legion of fans."

Perez-Soto continued: "I'd like to thank Warner Music's Charlie White, Marc Latilla and Reni Adadevoh for their unstinting support in helping pull this deal together and get it over the line." In the past year, Boomplay has been on the crest of a wave, announcing landmark deals with global major labels, acquiring millions of new users monthly and releasing an iOS version in December 2018. With major labels coming on board, Boomplay is now in a strong position to further improve its service offerings and defend its leading position in Africa. Boomplay, which has more than 42 million users as of February 2019, boasts an expansive catalogue consisting of five million songs and thousands of videos from local and international acts. About Boomplay Boomplay (formally known as Boom Player) is a music and video streaming & download service developed and owned by Transsnet Music Limited. Boomplay's vision is to build the largest and most reliable digital music ecosystem for artists and content creators in Africa. The Boomplay app which won the "Best African App" at the 2017 "AppsAfrica Awards" has over 42 million users as of February, 2019. It is currently the biggest and fastest growing music app in Africa with a catalogue of 5 million songs and videos which is still growing day by day. Users can stream songs and videos online free of charge, subscribe to one of the daily, weekly or monthly plans to save songs and videos to play whilst offline or purchase content to download. The service is currently available on Android, iOS and Web. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836225/Boomplay_Warner_Music.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836226/Boomplay_CEO.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/836227/EVP_Warner_Music.jpg

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[March 15, 2019] HKTaxi becomes the first taxi-hailing partner of Google Maps in Hong Kong

HONG KONG, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Local taxi hailing app HKTaxi now allows passengers and visitors to preview fare estimates and to request a ride on Google Maps with just a click. After entering a pickup location and destination in Google Maps, riders can now estimate the fare precisely before hailing a taxi. The fare estimation provided by HKTaxi is based on the estimated trip time and distance from origin to destination. The function provides an one-stop navigation and taxi hailing service which enables users to request for a ride via HKTaxi after estimating the taxi fare on Google Maps. Users can easily check the traffic condition on Google Maps, which the color codes of green, orange and red show the speed of traffic onthe road. Users can then plan their rides and discuss with taxi drivers on route options.



Kay Lui, co-founder of HKTaxi, said, "As an innovative company, HKTaxi is delighted to work with Google Maps for bringing a better service for taxi riders and tourists. Through HKTaxi, which is the first and the most popular taxi-hailing app in Hong Kong, we are making taxis more accessible to users." As the most popular taxi-hailing app in Hong Kong, HKTaxi has been pioneering different services, such as launching an English version for foreigners to connect with local drivers, introducing electronic payment for taxi industry, and earning Taxi Dollars as cash rebate for every taxi ride etc. In 2018 HKTaxi was elected in the top 20 of Google Play's User's Choice App, showing how much Hong Kongers love HKTaxi.

About HKTaxi HKTaxi was founded in July 2013. Its app allows passengers in Hong Kong to get a taxi in an easy, snappy, and convenient manner. The app creates a platform that promotes quality rides through its driver accountability mechanism and 24/7 customer hotline. To date, HKTaxi has more than 60,000 registered drivers and has served more than 30 million orders. Having more than 1.4 million downloads, it is the most popular taxi-hailing app in Hong Kong and is available for free on Google Play Store and Apple App Store. SOURCE HKTaxi

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[March 15, 2019] Epos Now Partners With TableUp to Bring Low Cost, Convenient Online Ordering to Customers

ORLANDO, Florida, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Cloud-based POS provider Epos Now has announced a partnership with restaurant software provider TableUp, an all-in-one solution for restaurants of all sizes that offers a personalised and convenient experience to both establishments and their customers. Through Epos Now's partnership with TableUp, their 30,000+ hospitality POS customers can now use the integration to streamline and grow their operations with best-in-class custom online ordering solutions that: Cut out the hidden commission fees of other online ordering companies.

Provide tailored experiences through branded iOS and Android apps.

Integrate seamlessly with Epos Now and TableUp's loyalty module.

Capture guest data for marketing purposes.

Optimize front-of-house operations. Joining forces to offer streamlined online ordering and next-level point of sale, Epos Now and TableUp will unlock significant new revenue channels for restaurants at a low cost. "Our team is excited to partner with Epos Now and to bring low cost, seamless Online Ordering to their customrs," states says Matt Zibell, CEO of TableUp. "The integration allows restaurants to provide Online Ordering without absorbing or passing along the high costs associated with other similar solutions."



With TableUp integrated directly into Epos Now point of sale systems, restaurants instantly receive the benefits of a user-friendly online version of their menu, compatible with any desktop or mobile browser. Guests can order online for pickup or dine-in, while their preferences and data are stored for future customer outreach, marketing and promotions. Recognizing the many online ordering options available to restaurants, TableUp won't charge a hefty commission fee or display their menu or information on third-party websites that dilute brands. Instead, TableUp empowers restaurants to offer dine-in, takeout, and delivery through an online ordering system that can be completely customized to match the voice and brand of any size restaurant, for a fraction of the cost of other online ordering services.

Epos Now's mission is to integrate the latest smart technology to make life easier for business owners and help them drive success, which aligns perfectly with the TableUp model for empowering restaurants of all kinds to take their daily operations, online presence and marketing efforts to the next level. Epos Now CEO Jacyn Heavens is optimistic about the growth the partnership brings to the software company's clientbase: "TableUp offers our customer base a seamless online ordering platform to greatly increase their reach and access to a wider audience. In an industry where 69% of consumers order online with mobile devices a fully integrated solution is fundamental to success and growth." About Epos Now Launched in 2011, Epos Now is a cloud-based software provider, specialising in the design and manufacture of electronic point of sale. It was founded on a belief that all businesses and entrepreneurs should be able to leverage the power of both cloud computing and modern technology to power their businesses. Epos Now helps to improve both the lives of our customers and their businesses.

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CALGARY, Alberta, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jason Kenneys proposed Open for Business Act should really be called the Im Delivering Anti-Worker Rules for My Rich Friends and Donors Act, says the president of Albertas largest worker advocacy group.



If there was ever any doubt about whose side Jason Kenney is really on, it has been removed, says Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, who is attending a convention of retail workers in Calgary today.

What Kenney released today wasnt a blueprint for the economy; it was a wish list for employers who want to keep wages low and workers subservient to employers, both in the workplace and in the political arena. In short, its about re-establishing the dominance of the rich, entitled fat cats who think they own this province and who still cant believe or accept that Albertans showed them the door in 2015.

McGowan says Alberta needs strong action from government to support the economy and help create good jobs for Albertans. But he says Kenneys proposed approach would make things worse, not better.

If you want to get the right cure for whats ailing our economy, you need the right diagnosis. But Kenneys diagnosis is way off base and his prescriptions will make the economy sicker, not healthier.

McGowan says the real problem facing Alberta today is that the global oil and gas economy is in the midst of a profound transformation  one that has serious implications for investment and jobs in oil-producing jurisdictions like Alberta.

This transformation has three dimensions: it starts with the fracking boom in the United States which has lowered global oil prices and turned our biggest customer into our biggest competitor; it continues with the massive wave of automation that is allowing companies to produce more oil and gas with fewer workers; and it culminates in the move away from fossil fuels that is picking up steam around the world.

Kenney tries to blame everything on Rachel Notley. But the truth is that the unfolding energy transformation has driven down investment and job creation in all oil-producing jurisdictions around the world. When Kenney argues the contrary, hes stretching the truth to the breaking point, as he so often does, says McGowan.

In the face of these massive and unprecedented changes, McGowan says Alberta needs to diversify both within and beyond the oil and gas sector. We also need to build resilience in our citizens and businesses by investing in infrastructure and public services like education and health care.

Were facing some of the biggest economic challenges in our provinces history. But instead of addressing those challenges, Jason Kenney wants to use the crisis as a pretext to suppress wages and weaken the employment and safety rights of workers, along with their political power. Its a shameful example of misdirection and political opportunism, says McGowan.

McGowan also says American-style attacks on wages and unions will shrink the economy when it is already struggling.

Kenneys fixation on weakening unions and helping employers keep wages low is a tired right-wing strategy that even traditionally conservative organizations like the OECD, World Bank and Citi Bank are starting to oppose. Consumer spending drives 60 percent of our economy, so wage suppression strategies like the ones championed by Kenney are the opposite of helpful when it comes to supporting economic growth and job creation.

McGowan concludes with the following: Make no mistake, the plan that Kenney outlined today isnt about strengthening the economy: its about strengthening the hand of the wealthy fat cats who he serves. Its also a misguided plan, that would kick our workers theyre already down. Its a plan that working Albertans should soundly reject on election day.

Media Contact:

Gil McGowan, President, Alberta Federation of Labour

780-218-9888
[March 15, 2019] Federal Judge Denies JELD-WEN's Motions To Overturn Landmark Antitrust Verdict; In Amended Judgment Court Says That JELD-WEN Must Extend Supply Agreement With Steves & Sons If Appeal Not Completed By September 2021

On March 13, 2019, Judge Robert E. Payne of the federal district court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied motions by JELD-WEN, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. (NYSE: JELD), to overturn a landmark antitrust verdict against JELD-WEN and in favor of Steves & Sons, Inc. (www.StevesDoors.com). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005082/en/ A jury previously found that JELD-WEN's acquisition of its former competitor, CraftMaster (CMI), violated federal antitrust law by substantially reducing competition in the U.S. market for interior molded doorskins, and the jury awarded Steves $58.6 million in antitrust damages-automatically trebled to $175.8 million. The jury also found that JELD-WEN breached a Supply Agreement it had entered into with Steves. In rejecting JELD-WEN's attempts to set aside the jury's verdict, Judge Payne explained that "a review of the record shows that the evidence amply supported both the antitrust verdict and the breach of contract verdict," that "every element of those claims was proved by a preponderance of the evidence" and that the "jury rightly returned a verdict in favor of Steves." The Court also issued an Amended Final Judgment that reiterates that, in order to restore competition in the market for interior molded doorskins, JELD-WEN will be required to sell its doorskin plant in Towanda, Pennsylvania, which it acquired as part of its acquisition of CMI. After the plant is sold, the new owner of the plant will be required to enter into a three-year Supply Agreement with Steves. The Amended Final Judgment also contains important provisions that will protect competition and Steves during any appeal by JELD-WEN. If JELD-WEN's appeal extends past September 10, 2021-the date the Supply Agreement between Steves and JELD-WEN is slated to expire-the Supply Agreement shall automatically "be extended for one year beyond the conclusion of the appeal." Stevs also has the right to request a longer extension during the appeal. During any appeal, JELD-WEN is required to "maintain the status quo at the Towanda facility."



The Court has appointed a Special Master, the Honorable Lawrence F. Stengel, Retired Chief Judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, to supervise the divestiture of Towanda and JELD-WEN's compliance with the Amended Final Judgment. "The Judge's Amended Final Judgment makes clear that, during any appeals process, Steves will continue to receive doorskins from JELD-WEN under its existing contract," said Marvin Pipkin, attorney for Steves & Sons. "In lieu of receiving a significant portion of the jury's damages award, Steves sought the divestiture by JELD-WEN of the unlawfully acquired Towanda plant, which can build well over 20 million doorskins per year," he said. "For Steves, the stewardship of their company, and restoring competition and choice in the marketplace were infinitely more important than electing a significant cash award."

Edward G. Steves, CEO of Steves & Sons, said, "Once again, our company has been vindicated in court. The jury decisively and unanimously agreed with Steves. Now the Court, in very clear terms, has rejected JELD-WEN's arguments and has upheld the jury's verdict. We are confident that the Court of Appeals will agree with Steves as well. We are moving forward at full speed." Sam Bell Steves II, President of Steves & Sons, said, "Our dedication to quality for more than 150 years has resulted in great, long-term partners who know they can rely on that quality and our reputation." Doorskins are a critical component used in manufacturing interior molded doors, which is the primary business of Steves & Sons, a sixth-generation family-owned company founded in 1866 and based in San Antonio, with other facilities in Richmond, VA and Lebanon, TN. The company employs some 1,100 people. JELD-WEN is a multi-billion-dollar company which is one of the largest door manufacturers in the world. The company makes doorskins for its own door sales and also sells doorskins to other door manufacturers like Steves. The Judge's Amended Final Judgment concludes a series of events beginning with the unanimous jury decision on Steves' antitrust and breach of contract claims. Steves then sought an order of divestiture that would require JELD-WEN to sell the doorskin plant in Towanda in order to restore competition in the doorskin marketplace for independent door manufacturers such as Steves. In a lengthy, detailed opinion issued October 5, 2018, Judge Payne substantially agreed with Steves, noting that after JELD-WEN's acquisition of CMI, "JELD-WEN felt free to disregard existing contract obligations respecting pricing and began to engage in bullying tactics to get increased prices even if that would kill off some of the Independents who were its customers." JELD-WEN's anticompetitive conduct was described by the Judge as "evasive, sharp, and deceptive" and as "general bullying conduct toward Steves," making judicial intervention necessary to restore competition in the marketplace. The Judge's opinion said the Court would order JELD-WEN to sell the Towanda facility in order to restore the competition that JELD-WEN had destroyed with its illegal merger. Judge Payne, in his initial Final Judgment of December 14, 2018, detailed what the divestiture of the Towanda plant would entail and how it would be conducted - under Court supervision. He noted, "Without the divestiture and the related conduct remedies . . Steves will suffer irreparable injury." About Steves & Sons With interior and exterior door plants in San Antonio, and interior door plants in Richmond, Virginia and Lebanon, Tennessee, Steves & Sons employs more than 1,100 associates. The company continues to build its business and reputation among builders and homeowners across the country with continued emphasis on quality materials, new technology and efficient distribution. (www.StevesDoors.com) View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005082/en/

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[March 15, 2019] Innoviti Ties-Up Rs. 80 Cr. Through Innovative Debt Instruments to Expand its Rapidly Growing Business

BENGALURU, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Innoviti has tied-up Rs. 80 Cr. (approximately USD 12M ) through a combination of debt, venture debt and asset financing to further fuel its rapidly growing business. The current round was led by Trifecta Capital and a clutch of other NBFCs.

) through a combination of debt, venture debt and asset financing to further fuel its rapidly growing business. The current round was led by Trifecta Capital and a clutch of other NBFCs. This fund raise follows on the heels of previous rounds of Series A ( June 2015 ) and Series B ( July 2017 ) equity financing, where Innoviti had raised US$23M from existing marquee investors including the Singapore -based SBI FMO Emerging Asia Financial Sector Fund (the "SBI-FMO Fund" jointly setup by SBI Holdings Group of Japan and FMO of Netherlands ), Bessemer Venture Partners and Catamaran.

) and Series B ( ) equity financing, where Innoviti had raised from existing marquee investors including the -based SBI FMO Emerging Asia Financial Sector Fund (the "SBI-FMO Fund" jointly setup by SBI Holdings Group of and FMO of ), Bessemer Venture Partners and Catamaran. Innoviti has grown 2.5X in volumes since last round of funding, clocking USD 5 Bn of annual processing volume. Its throughput per terminal at USD 9000 per month is 3X of national average and 2X of any other payment solution provider, putting Innoviti in a leadership position on processing throughput/terminal/month. This is a vindication of Innoviti's obsessive focus on delivering transaction processing reliability and deep integration with client business operations, through high-quality payment software and automated service processes.

of annual processing volume. Its throughput per terminal at per month is 3X of national average and 2X of any other payment solution provider, putting Innoviti in a leadership position on processing throughput/terminal/month. This is a vindication of Innoviti's obsessive focus on delivering transaction processing reliability and deep integration with client business operations, through high-quality payment software and automated service processes. Innoviti's Enterprise business, where it powers payments for large enterprises through its advanced patented uniPAY Next technology platform, has turned cash positive in Jan 2019. The current debt raise would be used to fuel this further. The company is also now linking its payments and lending platform to put together solutions for supply chain cash flow management.

The current round of debt funding will support Innoviti's sustained focus on driving not just more transactions per terminal, but also qualitatively richer transactions per terminal. Specific uses will include business expansion needs like purchase of infrastructure - including servers, terminals and other product development capital expenses. Leading payments company, Innoviti Payment Solutions today announced financing of Rs. 80 Crores (~ USD 12 million) to further its vision of digitally organizing the flow of money for businesses across the retail supply chain. The current round was led by Trifecta Capital and a clutch of other NBFCs. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/715351/Innoviti_Logo.jpg )

Less than 10% of India's retail payments are currently digital, creating a market opportunity of more than $500 Bn annually. Relentless growth in payments has however brought forth the need for dramatic improvements in the speed and reliability of payments platforms. At the same time the opportunity that payment pipes provide to cloud enable offline retail and then deliver services through these pipes is large. Innoviti's goal is to lay the best possible pipes, deeply integrate them with merchant operations to enrich the data flowing through the pipes and then create use cases from insights gathered from the data to deliver payment, lending and marketing services to the merchants and their consumers.



This obsessive focus on assuring payment transaction speed and reliability for its customer base has helped Innoviti to more than double its revenue run-rate in past 9 months while increasing gross margin to over 70%, the highest in this industry. With annualized payment processing of 5Bn dollars, it now processes nearly 5% of all offline POS-based digital transaction volumes in India. At nearly Rs.6 Lac transaction volume per terminal, Innoviti terminals typically process nearly 3X of national average. Innoviti's payment platforms serve a marquee client base of merchants including Reliance Retail, Titan, Landmark Group, INOX, Indigo, Walmart and several others. Leading banks such as HDFC, ICICI, Axis, SBI, Standard Chartered, Kotak and Citibank use the platform to access customers for processing their payments and distributing to them loans.

"A rapidly growing Indian economy with fledgling infrastructure needs a different approach to delivery of payment solutions. An approach that first focusses on making every transaction happen, and happen fast. Innoviti with its deep technology expertise has built possibly the best payments platform in the country for doing this. Its throughput per terminal per month at USD 9000, 3X of national average, is testimony to this. With our Enterprise business turning cash positive we have blended our fund raise strategy with debt, that we believe will help in delivering superior returns to all stakeholders," - said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti. "We have been impressed with the thoughtfulness and patience that Innoviti has brought to the enterprise payments business. It is a good example of a company which has kept ears close to the customer and led by product innovation while being capital efficient. We are very excited to partner with Rajeev in this phase of growth where our structured debt solution can help the company get to its goals faster and in a more capital friendly manner," - said Mr. Aakash Goel, Partner, Trifecta Capital. About Innoviti Payment Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore, India Innoviti Payment Solutions runs a payment platform that has a unique ability to add intelligence to traditional payment channels, enhancing their value. Merchants, brands and financial service providers use these intelligent payment channels to reduce cost and drive sales of their products. Innoviti processes over Rs. 30,000 Cr. of payment transactions, about 5% of all offline merchant payment transactions in India. This also includes Rs. 1,500 Cr. of transactions involving distribution of loans to consumers and small businesses. The company has raised a total of US$ 35 million of funding till date from marquee investors such as Catamaran Ventures, SBI-FMO fund, Bessemer Venture Partners and Trifecta Capital. For more information, please visit - www.innoviti.com. About Trifecta Trifecta Capital works closely with companies to create customized venture debt financing solutions to cater to various use cases including working capital financing, capex funding, acquisition financing and special situations. Trifecta Capital also leverages its' investor network to create meaningful collaboration opportunities for its portfolio companies. Investing actively from Fund I and II, it is the largest Venture Debt Fund in the country. Trifecta Capital is backed by India's leading Banks, Insurance Companies, Endowments, DFIs and Family Offices. Since 2015, it has supported over forty companies including three Unicorns. Investee companies include PaperBoat, Rivigo, Big Basket, Urban Ladder, UrbanClap, Box8, Livspace, Cure.Fit, CarDekho, Pharmeasy, IdeaForge and several other market leading companies. For more information, please visit www.trifectacapital.in Media Contact:

Sarath Chandra Nerella

[email protected]

+91-77953-48478

Senior Marketing Manager

Innoviti Payment Solutions Pvt. Ltd.





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[March 15, 2019] Digitizing Education: Deakin University Launches Cloud Campus in India

NEW DELHI, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Deakin University, Australia launched Deakin Cloud in India on Monday, March 11, 2019, an online system that facilitates working professionals to undertake online courses with the university. Since its inception, Deakin Cloud has built an online community of 60,000 students in Australia and a few other countries. The Cloud Campus connects students to a host of world class lecturers, and peers. In India, students of Deakin Cloud will be eligible for a bursary of AUD 2000. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/713572/DeakinUniversityLogo.jpg )

Aimed at working professionals, Deakin Cloud in India offers a unique feature that gives students the opportunity to pursue a graduate certification shorter duration (12 months), which requires them to finish 4 credits, at almost 1/4th the cost of pursuing the course at Deakin University's physical campus. A student who is enrolled under a part-time course at Cloud Campus is required to study only 2 units per trimester. Students are also provided with access to DeakinSync, a personalized online learning portal, wherein they can interact and collaborate with peers to share notes and other resources. DeakinSync provides students with high quality audio visual class material, and live streamed or downloadable classes or seminars. At the launch of Deakin Cloud in India, Professor Jane den Hollander AO, Vice-Chancellor & President, Deakin University, stated: "Deakin Cloud is the university's effort to provide education to people whose commitments keep them from pursuing a full-time degree. Indian professionals and students will have the flexibility to work while finishing their higher education. They can enrol into any one of the courses that are on offer, and stud online with a convenient schedule shaped around their commitments. Online study at Deakin University's Cloud Campus will enable students to take exams from locations throughout the world."



Ms. Ravneet Pawha, CEO (South Asia) and Deputy Vice President (Global Engagement), Deakin University, shared, "Digital transformation in higher education has been a key topic of discussion in India in the past few years. Deakin Cloud provides students with the opportunity to study online, work together and collaborate with classmates on various platforms like Skype and Google Drive. Graduate certificate courses in Hospital Management Administration, Humanitarian Aid & Entrepreneurship will be the key highlights of the July intake. Admissions will also start for Graduate Certificate Program in Humanitarian Aid, and Entrepreneurship courses. Further, we also plan to add courses in Sports, IT and Cyber Security in the coming months." The highlight of Deakin Cloud is that the lecturers are regularly in touch with students and support them through class materials and feedbacks. In addition, Library and IT support are available around the clock for ease of studying. "Deakin Cloud has been designed in a way that helps students to access educational material for their course at any time from any location around the world. Students have also been provided with free access to various communication software through Deakin Software library. We have a Programming Help Hub that operates five days a week - with two evening sessions. Students can connect with someone at the hub via Deakin's Blackboard Collaborate (online seminars) to ask technical questions," Deakin University's Chief Digital Officer, William D. Confalonieri added.

With highly engaging interactive and audio-visual content along with seamless collaboration with faculty members, mentors and peers, Deakin Cloud is giving students across the globe an opportunity to study at Deakin University, Australia. Through Deakin Cloud, the University aims to lead the digital transformation of academic institutions in India. The Deakin Cloud programs in India was announced at the inaugural of Deakin's 25 years of Engagement in India celebrations at New Delhi. As part of the silver jubilee, the university hosted an array of events that will set the tone for the University's Vision: 2025 from March 11 - 15, 2019. Events were held in New Delhi and Chennai in association with the Australian Trade and Investment Commission - Austrade, to advance key engagement activities in this week-long celebration. About Deakin University Established in 1974, Deakin University successfully combines excellence in teaching, research and effective partnerships with industry and government to deliver high quality courses and undertake research that makes a difference to the domestic and international communities it serves. Deakin's South Asia operations commenced in 1994 at New Delhi, India, making it one of the first overseas education provider to set operations in this region. Here, Deakin engages with the government, industry and the academia to share its vibrant culture of education and research. For more information, visit: http://www.deakin.edu.au/ . Media Contact:

Malavika Varma

[email protected]

+91-987-393-7781

Deakin University



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[March 15, 2019] ADM Invests in Further Global Growth of Natural Citrus Offerings with Acquisition of the Ziegler Group

Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE: ADM) announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire the Ziegler Group, a leading European provider of natural citrus flavor ingredients. The agreement comes shortly after ADM completed its addition of U.S.-based citrus flavor provider Florida Chemical. "Ziegler is highly respected as a cutting-edge leader in citrus, and we're excited to welcome their outstanding leadership and talent to ADM," said Vince Macciocchi, president of ADM's Nutrition business. "The combination of Ziegler and Florida Chemical will immediately position ADM for growth as a global leader in natural citrus ingredients, with a complete range of innovative citrus solutions and systems for food, beverage and fragrance customers." Founded in 1963, Ziegler uses proprietary cold concentration technologies to produce natural high-quality citrus oils, extracts, concentrates and compounds for flavor, food, and beverage industry customers, focusing on Europe, the U.S. and Japan. The company is privately held and headquartered in Aufsess, in southern Germany. "We are delighted that we found a strong home at ADM where both our business and our people can grow," said Gunter Ziegler. "The integration of more than 50 years of citrus expertise into the ADM group will secure our top priority: successful long-term growth for our business and our employees. Our family members will be staying with the company to help ensure a smooth transition. We're excited to join ADM and strongly believe that the combination of our technology and citrus capabilities, coupled with the portfolio of ingredients and global rech of ADM, will accelerate growth opportunities while creating benefits for our customers."



"Citrus is one of the fastest-growing, highest-demand flavors for food and beverages, which is why the creation of a global citrus platform offering a complete product line for our customers is such an important capability for our growth strategy," Macciocchi continued. "We're continuing the most ambitious portfolio transformation in our company's long history, and as we build the world's leading nutrition company, the beneficiaries will be our customers and our shareholders." The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close in the second quarter of 2019.

Forward-Looking Statements Some of the above statements constitute forward-looking statements. ADM's filings with the SEC (News - Alert) provide detailed information on such statements and risks, and should be consulted along with this release. To the extent permitted under applicable law, ADM assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. About ADM Nutrition ADM is a world-leading nutrition company with the widest range of specialty ingredients, blends, systems and experience. We move customers from concept to launch faster with sustainable, differentiated products that address their evolving needs. ADM helps our customers create consumer-preferred nutritional solutions through our on-trend and customizable portfolio of natural flavors and colors; an unmatched range of plant-based proteins; industry-leading, science-backed bioactives; as well as specialty ingredients such as hydrocolloids, lecithin, Omega-3 solutions, probiotics, polyols, texturants, soluble fibers and much more. Our talented team also provides consumer insights and intelligence; sensory expertise; culinary creativity; and full product-development services. About ADM For more than a century, the people of Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE: ADM) have transformed crops into products that serve the vital needs of a growing world. At the end of 2018, we were one of the world's largest agricultural processors and food ingredient providers, with approximately 32,000 employees serving customers in more than 170 countries. With a global value chain that includes approximately 450 crop procurement locations, 270 food and feed ingredient manufacturing facilities, 46 innovation centers and the world's premier crop transportation network, we connect the harvest to the home, making products for food, animal feed, industrial and energy uses. Learn more at www.adm.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005193/en/

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[March 15, 2019] Advanced Practices Council Announces Research Advisory Board

MOUNT LAUREL, N.J., March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Advanced Practices Council (APC), an exclusive CIO and senior IT leadership program of SIM (formerly the Society for Information Management), announced the formation of the Research Advisory Board for 2019, comprised of six world-renowned technology professors and researchers. The Advisory Board will provide strategic counsel to APC members and extend their reach to the best thinking and practices world-wide. Several Board members will participate in the upcoming June APC meeting in Cambridge, Mass., along with professors from the Harvard Business School and local technology leaders. "We are honored to include these renowned innovation leaders as part of our team," stated Madeline Weiss, Director of the Advanced Practices Council. "Their insights, research, and far-reaching networks will help members exploit competitive opportunities for their companies." Members of the Advanced Practices Council's Research Advisory Board are: Dr. Richard Watson , Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy at Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia

, Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy at Terry College of Business at the Dr. Michael Goul , Associate Dean and Professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University

, Associate Dean and Professor at the W. P. of Business at Dr. Vijay Gurbaxani , Taco Bell Professor of Information Systms and Computer Science and Director of the Center for Digital Transformation at UCI Paul Merage School of Business

, Taco Bell Professor of Information Systms and Computer Science and Director of the Center for Digital Transformation at UCI Paul Merage School of Business Dr. Gabriele Piccoli , Chair of Information Sciences, Professor and Undergraduate Honors Advisor at Stephenson Department of Entrepreneurship and Information Systems in the E.J. Ourso College of Business

, Chair of Information Sciences, Professor and Undergraduate Honors Advisor at Stephenson Department of Entrepreneurship and Information Systems in the E.J. Ourso College of Business Dr. Michael Wade , Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD, Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation and Director of the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation

, Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD, Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation and Director of the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation Dr. George Westerman , Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management and Principal Research Scientist, Workforce Learning, MIT Jameel World Education Laboratory



www.AdvancedPracticesCouncil.org or call Madeline Weiss , Director of the Advanced Practices Council, at 301-299-8062. About the Advanced Practices Council (APC)

The Advanced Practices Council was founded in 1991 by Harvard Business School Professor Warren McFarlan and the leadership of SIM, a global association of over 5,000 IT leaders. The Advanced Practices Council is an exclusive research, collaboration and networking membership program for leading senior IT executives across industries. Members learn from world-class researchers and practitioners through on-site meetings, sponsored reports, and electronic collaboration. For more information: www.AdvancedPracticesCouncil.org.

Contact:

Madeline Weiss

Director, Advanced Practices Council

Tel: 301-299-8062

Email: [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/advanced-practices-council-announces-research-advisory-board-300812490.html SOURCE Advanced Practices Council (APC)

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[March 15, 2019] AdColony Receives TAG Certified Against Fraud Recertification, Continues Commitment To Fight In-App Ad Fraud

LOS ANGELES, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AdColony, the mobile performance marketplace, announced today that the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) has awarded the company a 2019 Certified Against Fraud seal. For the second year in a row , AdColony is part of a group of media and advertising companies that have met the stringent requirements designed to protect advertisers, publishers, technology providers and consumers from digital ad fraud.

Digital ad fraud has been a hot button topic in our industry for years, and despite concerted efforts by many players who sit at different levels of the supply chain, it continues to be a problem in 2019, said Jude OConnor, AdColonys General Manager of North America Brand. This is an ongoing fight, but one that we want to be a part of. Our renewed TAG certification shows our continued commitment to the cause. Fear of fraud is the number one issue among advertisers when it comes to in-app advertising, with 52 percent saying fraud is a real concern, Forrester recently found . During the second half of 2018, in-app advertising experienced 25 percent fewer fraudulent attempts than mobile web advertising, according to a Protected Media study, demonstrating in-app environments are already inherently safer. In the United States, companies using TAG-certified channels have seen an 83 percent reduction in invalid traffic rates compared to the broader industry average. In Europe, the drop is even more dramatic -- 94 percent reduction, from an industry average of 8.99 percent to just 0.53 percent, according to TAGs latest fraud benchmark study for European markets . As the role of AdColonys offices in that region become more important and the company seeks to more deeply serve the EMEA market, it will leverage its TAG-certified status to provide certainty to those advertisers and publishers.



We are looking forward to working with the Trustworthy Accountability Group and its partners to support these critical brand safety and transparency initiatives throughout Europe and additional markets that need it most, said Volkan Bicer, AdColonys EMEA and LATAM Brand. To meet the guidelines determined by TAG, AdColony brought in an unbiased, third-party auditor to examine its technology and internal processes. BPA Worldwide concluded that the advertising marketplace not only met, but in fact exceeded expectations.

As a compliance partner, AdColony has access to various anti-fraud tools, such as the Payment ID System, which creates a chain of custody for digital advertising transactions, an additional security step to ensure that payments go to legitimate digital ad partners. TAG also publishes a monthly Data Center IP List, which gives AdColony the ability to enable data center IP threat filtering to remove invalid traffic sources across all of its monetizable transactions. Moving into 2019 and beyond, we continue to embrace these tools to fight fraud, noted Andrzej Dzius, AdColonys Chief Technology Officer. We are looking forward to implementing larger industry technology, such as the IABs open measurement SDK and the upcoming Ads.txt Specification for in-app environments, previously only available for web. With it, publishers have significantly more control over their inventory. It will also help block malicious actors from selling counterfeit inventory across the ecosystem. The fake clicks generated from bots, along with other forms of fraud such as domain spoofing and reselling of unauthorized inventory, cost the digital advertising industry an estimated $20 billion per year, but could go up to $50 billion by 2025 . Recent examples include the Drainerbot scheme discovered by Oracle and 3ve uncovered by White Ops. The discovery and dismantling of these incidents make it clear that the fight continues. In addition to its TAG certification, AdColony has embraced anti-fraud and transparency certifications from other leading independent bodies like MOAT, IAS and DoubleVerify , as part of its ongoing responsibility to provide the best solutions and highest degree of transparency possible for both advertising and publishing partners. About TAG

Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is a first-of-its-kind cross-industry accountability program to create transparency in the business relationships and transactions that undergird the digital ad industry while continuing to enable innovation. A joint marketing-media industry program, TAG was created with a focus on four core areas: eliminating fraudulent digital advertising traffic, combating malware, fighting ad-supported Internet piracy to promote brand integrity, and promoting brand safety through greater transparency. About AdColony

AdColony is one of the largest mobile advertising platforms in the world with a reach of more than 1.5 billion users globally. With a mission to elevate the state of mobile advertising by focusing on the highest quality consumer experiences that deliver outcomes for brands and publishers on todays most popular apps, AdColony is trusted by Fortune 500 brands and over 85% of the worlds top grossing mobile publishers. Known for our exclusive Instant-Play HD video technology, proprietary rich media formats, our global performance advertising business and programmatic marketplace, and our extensive ad SDK footprint in the top apps worldwide, we are passionate about helping brands connect with consumers at scale on the most important screen in their lives. A fully-owned subsidiary of Otello Corporation, AdColony is a global organization with over 20 offices worldwide. Media Contact:

Alexis Roberts

Blast PR for AdColony



805-886-8511

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[March 15, 2019] Vilacto Bio Canada Patent LACTOACTIVE Granted

NEW YORK, March 15, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Denmark-based Vilacto Bio Inc. (OTC QB:VIBI) is happy to announce that the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has informed the Company that its patent application for LACTOACTIVE will be issued in near future.

The Company has already filed and received patents covering LACTOACTIVE in the US, Europe and Hong Kong. The Canadian patent, when issued, is expected to give the company greater scope to continue developing the LACTOACTIVE compound and bolster its international IP ownership position. The patent applications in Canada also cover the Companys new compound, LACTOACTIVE iTHER, a LACTOACTIVE variant that offers potent immune-system enhancement with a potential for treating a wide range of diseases. LACTOACTIVE iTHER is expected to generate new revenue streams in addition to the companys LACTOACTIVE-based therapeutic skincare range. Vilacto Bio now is in a stronger position than ever to leverage the potential of LACTOACTIVE, said Vilacto Bio CEO Gert Anderson. The main active component of LACTOACTIVE and LACTOACTIVE iTHER is colostrum, a natural substance that Vilacto Bio has refined and processed into a potent nanoparticle concenrate. In NPDDS form, the compound can be applied in deeper layers of the skin and, when injected, can penetrate cell walls to act directly on cytoplasm. The product is currently in the development stage and has not been approved for use by the FDA or any foreign agency.



About Vilacto Bio Inc.:

Vilacto Bio Inc. (OTC QB:VIBI), is a biotech company that has developed the now fully patented Lactoactive (Lactoactive molecule) that in numerous studies has demonstrated above average effect treating conditions such as inflammatory diseases, diabetes, psoriasis, skin aging, and skin issues in different levels. We aim to further develop our Lactoactive molecule for the purpose of increasing the quality of our retail and medical skin cream products as well as licensing out our Lactoactive molecule for the pharmaceutical industry. Forward-Looking Statements & Disclaimers:

The information in this Press Release includes certain "forward-looking" statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provisions of Federal Securities Laws, as that term is defined in section 27a of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and section 21e of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Statements in this document, which are not purely historical, are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Investors are cautioned that such statements are based upon assumptions that in the future may prove not to have been accurate and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties, including the future financial performance of the Company. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in its forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations or any of its forward-looking statements will prove to be correct. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements that speak only as of the date of this release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events, or circumstances after the date of this release except as required by law.

Vilacto Bio Inc.

The Seagram Building

375 Park Avenue, Suite 2607

New York City, NY 10152 Gert Andersen

Phone: +1 646-893-7895

[email protected]

www.vilactobio.com

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[March 15, 2019] Wipro Launches Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Solutions Powered by Amazon Web Services

Wipro (News - Alert) Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced the availability of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions on Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS). Wipro's AI-enabled, on-demand solutions on AWS will govern critical supply chain processes, and drive enhanced operational efficiency, productivity and superior customer experience for enterprise clients. As part of this collaboration, Wipro's solutions such as Wipro HOLMES Machine Learning for Accounts Payable Auditor, Wipro HOLMES E-KYC and Wipro HOLMES Machine Learning for Contract solutions will be powered by AWS. Clients will benefit from the combined strengths of the AI and automation platform - Wipro HOLMES and AWS AI and ML services. In addition, clients will be able to access Wipro HOLMES E-KYC Controller Extractor and Wipro HOLMES E-KYC Financials Extractor on AWS Marketplace for Machine Learning. Wipro is a Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN). "At AWS, our mission is to put machine learning in the hands of every developer. With AWS Marketplace, you can navigate, discover and deploy the ML models needed to build intelligent applications to fuel innovation. The AI and ML solutions leveraging Wipro HOLMES and AWS SageMaker help customers in applying AI to procurement, supply chain, compliance and other domains," said Garth Fort, Director, AWS Marketplace, Amazon Web Services, Inc. Wipro has implemented its Wipro HOLMES Machine Learning for Accounts Payable Auditor solution, powered by AWS, for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA). The slution audits vendor payment transactions to proactively detect process anomalies, identify outliers and prevent payment leakage in the company's procure to pay process.



Pierre Lanthier, Director of Innovation and Transformation, The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA) said, "GTAA has embarked on a transformation journey with Wipro to achieve operational efficiencies and improve traveler experience. As part of this endeavor and given increasing business complexity, we were looking to apply innovative thinking in our procure to pay process. The Wipro HOLMES artificial intelligence and automation platform along with AWS have helped us adopt a preventive and proactive strategy to mitigate rising operational and compliance risks in our procure to pay process." Rohit Adlakha, Vice President and Global Head - Wipro HOLMES and Automation Ecosystem, Wipro Limited said, "We have leveraged the Wipro HOLMES AI and Automation platform and AWS AI and ML services to build several outcome-driven solutions. In addition, we have published some of our machine learning models on AWS Marketplace for Machine Learnings. Our relationship with AWS allows us to leverage the combined might of Wipro HOLMES and AWS to solve complex business problems for our clients in areas such as procure to pay, contract management, and customer onboarding, across industry sectors."

Wipro's AI and Automation platform, Wipro HOLMES represents Wipro's integrated automation capabilities across infrastructure, applications and business process services, delivered through a comprehensive blend of tasks, processes, and cognitive technologies. These capabilities have been deployed for over 350 clients across industries. About Wipro Limited Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. A company recognized globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship, we have over 175,000 dedicated employees serving clients across six continents. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future. Forward-looking and Cautionary Statements Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in our earnings, revenue and profits, our ability to generate and manage growth, intense competition in IT services, our ability to maintain our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which we make strategic investments, withdrawal of fiscal governmental incentives, political instability, war, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property, and general economic conditions affecting our business and industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. We may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190315005268/en/

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[March 15, 2019] Diabetes Care 2019: Global Intelligence Center Database (2012-2023)

DUBLIN, March 15, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Diabetes Care Intelligence Center 2012-2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The Diabetes Care Intelligence Center (IC) is a global intelligence database on diabetes drugs & devices, which offers data on 25 major countries. It covers 13 years of comparable data, including 5-year forecasts incorporating value, volume sales, and price and price per-capita expenditure. The Intelligence Centre enhances your understanding of the diabetes drugs industry, along with economic factors impacting diabetes drug usage, such as diabetes population, Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetic population, and obesity, which provide you with actionable business insights. Market Scope Diabetes drugs & devices market data, volume and value analytics with growth trends (2012-2023)

Branded & generic drugs and devices' sales data from 2012-2023

Segment, sub-segment & company devices' sales data from 2012-2023

Additional information includes - diabetic population levels, diabetes prevalence, Diabetes Type 1 population, Diabetes Type 2 population, and per-capita expenditure. The Diabetes Care Intelligence Center provides exhaustive coverage (countries covered account for more than 80% of the overall spending on diabetes). Covering and tracking of over 18,000 data points of the diabetes drugs industry, which covers various categories, segments, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), and brands. It also covers more than 8,000 data points of the diabetes care device market, which encompass various categories, segments, sub-segments and company share analysis. Market Overview The global diabetes care market is expected to grow because of the growing diabetes population levels and increasing diabetes expenditure in established, as well as pharma emerging countries. Global Rise in Diabetic Population There has been a tremendous increase in the global diabetic population levels over the past decade. Several reports and surveys documented a drastic increase in the diabetic population levels, based on the changing lifestyles and habits.

Extensive urbanization in various parts of the globe is considered to be the primary cause of obesity, health deterioration, physical inactivity, etc. Owing to these factors the prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has increased significantly.

It is estimated that out of the total 415 million people suffering from diabetes worldwide, 46% of this demographic is those with undiagnosed diabetes.

The growing diabetic population levels act as a driver for insulin monitoring devices, such as glucometers, CGMs, etc. In developed countries, close to 90% of Type 1 Diabetic patients use glucometers. It is expected that during the forecast period close to 50% of Type 2 Diabetic patients will use a glucometer. The United States Leads the Diabetes Drugs & Devices Market In 2017, the US diabetes drugs market held he largest market share in North America , due to the presence of a high-quality healthcare system and increasing prevalence of diabetes in the region.

, due to the presence of a high-quality healthcare system and increasing prevalence of diabetes in the region. In the Asia-Pacific region, China and India have been identified as potential emerging markets, due to the rising diabetic population levels.



Diabetes Drug Categories Insulin

Basal Insulin or Long-acting Insulin

Bolus Insulin or Fast-acting Insulin

Pre-mixed Insulin or Combination Insulin

Traditional Human Insulins

Traditional Human Insulin Biosimilars

Insulin Glargine Biosimilars

Non-Insulin Injectable

GLP-1 Agonist Market

Amylin Analogue

Oral Anti-diabetics Drugs

Dopamine-D2 Receptor Agonist

Meglitinide

Alpha-Glucosidase Inhibitors

SGLT2 Inhibitors

Biguanides

Sulfonylureas

DPP-4 Inhibitors

Combination Drugs

Insulin Combinations

Oral Combinations

Diabetes Device Categories

Management Devices

Insulin-delivery Devices

Insulin Syringes

Cartridges in Reusable Pens

Disposable Pens

Jet Injectors

Insulin Pump

Insulin Pump Devices

Insulin Pump Reservoirs

Infusion Sets

Monitoring Devices

Self-monitoring Blood Glucose Devices (SMBG) By Component

Glucometer Devices

Test Strips

Lancets

By End-user

Hospital

Glucometer Devices

Test Strips

Lancets

Personal

Glucometer Devices

Test Strips

Lancets

Continuous Glucose Monitoring Devices (CGM)

CGM durables (Receivers and Transmitters)

Sensors Reasons to Purchase this Dashboard More Granular: Covers more categories, segments and brands' information at country- and global-levels compared to other market intelligence providers

Analyzing the outlook of the market with recent market data, historical data and market forecast

Ease of Comparability: Analytics are based on a standardized definition across the globe to facilitate better comparability of market data

View the market in different ways among categories and geography to understand where actual opportunities lie

Market segmentation including quantitative research, incorporating the impact of economic and non-economic aspects

Regional- and country-level data integrating the demand and supply forces which are influencing the growth of the market

Market value (in USD million) and volume data for each segment and sub-segment

Understanding of the market based on value and volume changes, intra category competition.

Dedicated analyst support for research queries and training

Continuous yearly amendment of the database with significant changes updated based on scenarios Countries Covered United States

Canada

France

Germany

Italy

Spain

United Kingdom

Russia

Mexico

Brazil

Japan

South Korea

China

India

Australia

Vietnam

Malaysia

Indonesia

Philippines

Thailand

Saudi Arabia

Iran

Egypt

Oman

South Africa List of Topics Covered



1. Introduction

1.1 Key Deliverables of the Study

1.2 Market Definition



2. Research Approach and Methodology

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Research Designs

2.3 Study Phases

2.3.1 Internal Sources Evaluation

2.3.2 Research Process

2.3.3 Modeling & Triangulation

2.3.4 Data Finalization

2.3.5 Expert Validation



3. Market Segmentation

3.1 By Drug

3.1.1 Oral Anti-diabetic drugs

3.1.2 Insulin

3.1.3 Non-Insulin Injectable Drugs

3.1.4 Combination Drugs

3.2 By Device

3.2.1 Monitoring Devices

3.2.2 Management Devices

3.3 Geography

3.3.1 North America

3.3.2 Europe

3.3.3 Latin America

3.3.4 Asia-Pacific

3.3.5 Middle East & Africa



4. Market Indicators

4.1 Type-1 Diabetes Population (2012-2023)

4.2 Type-2 Diabetes Population (2012-2023)



5. Company Share Analysis



Companies Mentioned

Abbott Diabetes Care

Acon

Agamatrix Inc.

Arkray

Ascensia Diabetes Care

Astellas

AstraZeneca

Bionime Corporation

Boehringer Ingelheim

Bristol Myers Squibb

Dexcom

Eli Lilly

Janssen Pharmaceuticals

Johnson & Johnson

Medisana

Medtronic

Merck and Co.

Novartis

Novo Nordisk

Pfizer

Roche

Rossmax

Sanofi

Takeda

Trivida For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/6c8vtc/diabetes_care?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 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/diabetes-care-2019-global-intelligence-center-database-2012-2023-300813098.html SOURCE Research and Markets

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Call it Schrodinger's Fortune: A U.S. District Court judge decided on Thursday that Qualcomm owes Apple nearly $1 billion in rebate payments, Reuters reports. But Qualcomm won't be expected to write a check unless it loses the case when it heads to trial in April.

This is just the latest development in a years-long dispute between Apple and Qualcomm regarding the use of certain modem technologies in the iPhone. Apple kicked things off with $1 billion lawsuits in the U.S. and China in 2017. Since then, the companies have repeatedly butted heads in and out of court.

It's hard to believe the arrangement between Qualcomm and Apple was established in the first place. Apple suppliers had to pay Qualcomm to use its technologies in the iPhone. Qualcomm was then supposed to reimburse Apple for the fees, provided the company didn't complain to regulators or attack Qualcomm in court.

Qualcomm said Apple violated that agreement by telling other companies to complain to regulators about similar arrangements. It also claimed that Apple made "false and misleading" statements during a Korean Fair Trade Commission investigation into Qualcomm.

The company also doesn't plan to pay Apple the $1 billion in rebate payments even if it loses the case. Qualcomm executive vice president and general counsel Don Rosenberg said in a statement to Reuters: Apple has already offset the payment at issue under the agreement against royalties that were owed to Qualcomm."

Rosenberg was referring to Apple's decision to halt royalty payments in April 2017. Qualcomm has already accounted for the withheld payments in its financial statements, so Rosenberg essentially said the $1 billion it's lost from lack of payments should count as the $1 billion it would pay if it lost this case.

Still, the decision supports Apple, at least in this particular case. The companies will continue to fight it out in court rooms around the world; there's no end in sight for this dispute.
KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) - U.S. Marshals have arrested a Blue Springs, Missouri homicide suspect in KC. Tayvion Nelson was charged in Jackson County, Missouri on Sept. 26 of last year with second-degree murder, first-degree robbery, first-degree burglary, and two counts of armed criminal action. The charges stemmed from an Oct.
Kansas lawmakers condemn NY law strengthening abortion rights | The Wichita Eagle The Kansas Legislature is approving a resolution condemning a New York state law that strengthens abortion rights. Rep. Elizabeth Bishop, sharing the story of her own abortion, urged lawmakers to oppose the resolution.

Here's more deets on a Kansas effort to call out NYC abortion practices and a word about real life experience that might or might not convince partisan hacks on both sides of the aisle. Read more:
Petition supports KCK archdiocese's decision to deny enrollment of gay couple's child A decision by the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas, to deny enrollment to the kindergarten child of gay parents has prompted thousands of people to sign dueling petitions. A recent online petition supporting the archdiocese's decision has received more 7,000 signatures.

Culture war push back values religious liberty over complaints that Catholics were once again targeting a youngster. Here's the round-up of a social media debate postscript that was mostly pushed out of the spotlight after the neighborhood fight proved too complicated for MSM to cover. Credit to channel 9 for this info highlight:
Ferraris high-revving V-12 is one of the companys treasures and, by the looks of things, we wont wave goodbye to this behemoth yet although other manufacturers are constantly looking at ways to downsize their engines. Mercedes-Benz, for instance, unveiled at the 2019 Geneva Auto Show the S65 AMG Final Edition , the last S Class to be powered by a V-12, while BMWs M760Li XDrive is on its last legs too. So were glad Ferrari wont budge so easy with the wind of change blowing in its face.

If all that was stopping you from liking the ludicrous 2013 Ferrari LaFerrari was the fact that its 6.3-liter V-12 engine was paired with an electric motor, Ferraris latest plans will appease to you greatly. The house of Maranello announced that it will stick to building V-12-engined cars in the future but they wont feature a hybrid drivetrain as the LaFerrari did.

The 2013 Ferrari LaFerrari Wasnt the Kick-Starter of a Dynasty of Hypercars After All

When Ferrari unveiled the replacement of the Enzo the world gasped. Not because its name, LaFerrari, translates to The Ferrari in English. Nor was it because of its dramatic appearance. It was because it cranks out 951 horsepower and only 790 of them come from the midship-mounted 6.3-liter, naturally aspirated, V-12. The other 161 horsepower comes from an F1-style kinetic energy recovery system (KERS) with a battery pack and an electric motor. The combined torque amounts to 664 pound-feet while the ICE gorgeously revs all the way up to 9,000 rpm to give you all that oomph.

However, some people ignored that and only focused on the mild hybridization aspect of the LaFerrari and couldn't stop wondering if this spelled the end of traditional Ferraris.

Was this it? Was Ferrari moving fast towards an eco-friendly future? Well, as were finding out four years after the end of the LaFerraris production, this isnt the case at all.

Top Gear recently talked to Michael Leiters, Ferraris Technical Director, who gave a little bit of insight on Ferraris plans for the near and mid-term future. We already know that were bound to get four more Prancing Horses beside the F8 Tributo before 2019 wraps up, and the news that the V-12 engine is part of Ferraris future is very exciting indeed.

"A naturally aspirated V12 engine is not a downsized engine, and for me, it doesnt make sense as a hybrid. We will fight for the V12, of course," Leiters said.

"We will do everything we can to keep it as it is core to our brand. But a real hybridization of the V12? I dont see it. The LaFerrari was hybridization for performance," the technical director pointed out.

He detailed his vision talking to Road & Track during the 2019 Geneva Auto Show when he underlined that "if were doing a V-12, Im not thinking about hybridization. Its a contradiction. Maybe we would get a little reduction in consumption with a hybrid, but it doesnt make sense. To get the full potential of a hybrid, we need to downsize the engine."

Also, if Leiters keeps his position, the V-12s on future Ferraris wont be turbocharged either. If only for his dedication to keeping the V-12 unadulterated, lets hope that Leiters wont be hung out to dry any time soon. But this doesnt mean Leiters isnt focused on bringing in hybridization. After all, Ferrari aims to have a 60% hybridized lineup by 2022 when the Purosangue Crossover will drop. By then, 15 new models will have been introduced, and weve already seen a few of them in the form of the F8 Tributo and the two open-top beauties that are the Monza SP1 and the Monza SP2, the first models to feature under the Icona umbrella.

The reason Ferrari is pushing for hybridization isnt simply for the sake of the ever-stricter emission laws, although they play a part in the puzzle too. Leiters explained the current of affairs by saying that "one of the key targets for Ferrari is to always increase the specific power output of the engine [currently 710bhp  just like the 720S  which is 50bhp more than the 488], but maintain the direct response characteristics of a naturally-aspirated engine. The problem now resides with the turbocharging technology as it is today. "We have a certain maneuver to measure turbo lag, Leiters said. Going along in third gear at 2,000rpm, we hit full throttle and measure when we have 80 to 90% of full torque. If its not achieved in less than a second, it fails. As were at that limit, we will have to think of electrification of this powertrain in order to increase the power output in the future.

Now, for the whole package to be as efficient as possible, you need a small engine or, to put it in other words, with fewer cylinders.

Basically, you can't make a V-12 efficient enough by adding a KERS system and electric motors for the whole shebang to be worth doing.

Point in case: the hybrid Ferrari that will be here in about three months time should be powered by a V-8 engine, and then theres the upcoming FWD V-6 platform and the midship V-6 unit also on the pipeline.

In fact, Auto Blog quotes CAR Magazine whos guessing that the hybrid supercar were all waiting for will, in fact, be the reborn Dino with a V-6 behind the seats, although weve been hearing more rumors about the model being a V-8. According to the British outlet, "the 2.9-liter, twin-turbocharged V-6 works up 610 horsepower and 443 pound-feet of torque by itself. Given plug-in hybrid assistance and an e-motor between the engine and transmission, the numbers grow to 723 horsepower and almost 800 torques." CAR Magazine places the debut of the new V-6-engined model in May, almost at the same time as the V-8 which doesnt really add up as Im sure Ferrari wouldnt want its own new products to be battling each other for the headlines. It would be bad for business.

Whats interesting is that of both the Stelvio Quadrifoglio and the Giulia Quadrifoglio were co-engineered with Ferrari and are assembled at Maranello. They feature 2.6-liter, twin-turbocharged V-6s capable of 503 horsepower at 6,500 rpm and 440 pound-feet of torque at 5,500 rpm. The newly-launched Racing Edition models come with 10 extra ponies added to the output of both the Giulia and the high-riding Stelvio.

Ferraris Current V-12 Offering

Its always nice to try to predict whats going to happen and to try to dissect fact from fiction when diving deep in the waters around the rumor mill. But, before Ferrari actually shows us its new hybrid cars and its next V-12 beast, lets look at the current V-12 Ferraris that you can buy if you can afford to. First off, the 2016 GTC4Lusso, a grand tourer ready to take on long journeys.

The Lusso, replacement of the equally spacious FF, is fitted with a 6.2-liter, naturally aspirated V-12 that sends power to all four wheels through a dual-clutch seven-speed automatic gearbox.

Theres also a V-8-engined GTC4Lusso T version thats RWD only. But the standard Lusso is the cool one because the V-12 churns out 680 horsepower and 514 pound-feet of torque or 78 horsepower more than the T which, however, makes up when it comes to torque as it puts out 47 more pound-feet. The V-12 Lusso is also quicker to 60 mph by 0.1 seconds compared to the turbocharged model, needing only 3.4 seconds to complete the task. And this is in spite of the fact that, at 4,250 pounds, the V-12 Lusso is 100 pounds heavier than the V-8 Lusso. At the end of the day, though, both cost about $300,000 so youll have to swap in about 13 specced-out 2019 Toyota Corollas in exchange for one GTC4Lusso.

Now, if you really want to leave a trail in the asphalt as you go by, you need to get Ferraris other V-12 car, the 812 Superfast. Normally, Id automatically hate a car named Superfast but, in Ferraris case, this name is rooted in the companys history and, what is more, the 812 is genuinely super fast!

Powered by a monstrous 6.5-liter, V-12 mill that's 75% new in comparison to the 6.3-liter unit that powered the now-retired F12 Berlinetta.

What the avalanche of new bits means? Well, the 812 Superfast brings to the table 789 horsepower (59 more than the F12) and 530 pound-feet and, with no turbos for Leiters to worry about, theres no fuss in the delivery. Or, actually, there is because this car likes to spin its tires a lot and you have to get all the way to the 8,500 rpm redline to be able to say youve lived a full life. But its not only about brute force, although its all that force that helps the 812 accelerate from naught to 60 mph in 2.8 seconds - with the automatic transmission doing its thing too. The 812 Superfast features an aluminum chassis with carbon fiber parts (but weight is 3,900 pounds dry) and benefits from the F12 TdFs rear-wheel steering and electric power steering which the TdF didnt have. You could argue the power steering takes away a bit of the feeling but, hey, remember the days of the SLR and its no-feel carbon ceramic brakes?

What matters is that the 812 Superfast with its 211 mph top speed is such a barnstormer that we're wondering where Ferrari will go on from here.

Its the same thing were asking ourselves after seeing the 488 Pista. I mean, just think about this: the LaFerrari Ive talked about in the opening paragraph of this article put out 951 horsepower and 715 pound-feet of torque but is barely 0.3 seconds quicker to 60 mph. A car that cost in 2013 $1.5 million and that was ultra-hard to get even if you had that sort of money because only 499 (+1) were made and you had to be hand-picked by Ferrari for the chance of owning one. Meanwhile, the 812 Superfast is a more spacious front-mid-engined grand tourer and costs only $315,000. Yes, its not a bargain in the real world but, among the super-rich, it is - especially when LaFerraris trade hands nowadays for $3.2 million.

And to think that Ferraris first V-12, the 1.5-liter unit designed by Gioacchino Colombo for the 125S, offered just 118 horsepower at 6,800 rpm fed by three Webber carburetors. Im sure the great Colombo & Co. couldnt even begin to imagine the kind of Brave New World were living in now, 71 years on...

Further reading

Read our full review on the 2014 Ferrari LaFerrari.

Read our full review on the 2018 Ferrari 812 Superfast.

Read our full review on the 2014 Ferrari F12 TRS.

Ferraris Last All-Natural V-12-Powered Supercar Will Take Its Bow In Geneva

Source: Top Gear
editorial@tribune.com

Neha Saini

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, March 14

Mohan Luthra, a London-based Punjabi artiste opened an exhibition of series of art work titled Eyes Wide Shut, that displays over 14 paintings and 12 sculptures. The series will be exhibited in Amritsar and Delhi over the next two years opening with the first exhibition being held in his hometown, Amritsar.

Based in London for the past many years, Luthras works invariably influenced by exposure to West retains a strong Eastern flavour infused with a freedom unconstrained. His work, as confessed by the artiste, arises from what he finds exciting or something that moves him. The current series of paintings and sculptures were conceived, and rough figures were developed, during my visit to India in the wake of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt, and the Delhi protests, following the brutal rape of a young woman, and the ongoing parallel debates about what not to wear in both Europe and India, he says.

The paintings have been developed over the years in response to different events and issues. Other sculpture works such as The Intimacy Challenge, The Thinkers Despair and The Diminished America, that shows a despair Statue of Liberty hiding her face, down on her knees, are observations on universal issues. These sculptures are mostly semi-figurative and symbolic initially creating small pieces in clay and then enlarging them in fiberglass, requiring painstaking work to get the desired reflection of the concept, and the feelings behind it.

The paintings have been completed using a range of mediumswatercolour, acrylics, oil, digital or mixed mediums.
editorial@tribune.com

New Delhi, March 14

Reliance Infrastructure Ltd today said it will sell its entire stake in Delhi-Agra Toll Roadway to Singapore-based Cube Highways for Rs 3,600 crore, following which the Anil Ambani-led companys debt will be reduced by 25% to less than Rs 5,000 crore.

Reliance Infrastructure (RInfra) has entered into a pact with Cube Highways in this regard.

Cube Highways and Infrastructure III Pte Ltd is a Singapore-based company formed by global infrastructure fund  I Squared Capital and a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

The transaction is in line with Reliance Infrastructures strategic plan of monetising non-core business and focus on major growth areas like engineering & construction (E&C) business. RInfra today announced the signing of Definitive Binding Agreement with Cube Highways and Infrastructure III Pte Ltd for the sale of its 100% stake in Delhi-Agra (DA) Toll Road Private Limited, the company said.

The total deal enterprise value is over Rs 3,600 crore. In addition, NHAI claims of Rs 1,200 crore to be filed by DA Toll Road Pvt Ltd will flow directly to Reliance Infrastructure, the company added.

RInfra said, it will utilise the proceeds of this transaction entirely to reduce its debt. The transaction is subject to all requisite permissions and approvals, it added. PTI
editorial@tribune.com

New Delhi, March 14

The Supreme Court today asked former Ranbaxy promoters Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh to apprise it how they propose to comply with the Rs 3,500-crore arbitral award passed against them by a Singapore tribunal.

A Bench headed by Chief Justice Ranjan Googi asked the Singh brothers, who were present in the court, to consult their financial and legal advisers and give a concrete plan on how they will comply with the tribunals order.

It is not about individual honour but it doesnt look good for the countrys honour. You were the flag bearers of the pharma industry and it doesnt look good that you are appearing in court, the Bench also comprising justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna said.

The Bench asked the Singh brothers to appear before it on March 28 and submit the plan, saying hopefully it will be the last time you are appearing in the court.

The SC was hearing the plea of Japanese firm Daiichi Sankyo which is seeking to recover Rs 3,500 crore, awarded to it by a Singapore tribunal in its case against Malvinder and Shivinder Singh.

The Japanese firm, which has filed the contempt plea against the Singh brothers in the apex court, has said it was promised some shares of Fortis Healthcare by them.

The apex court had earlier refused to pass any interim order on pleas relating to the sale of controlling stakes of Fortis Healthcare to Malaysian IHH Healthcare Berhad.

Daiichi had bought Ranbaxy in 2008. Later, it had moved the Singapore arbitration tribunal alleging that the Singh brothers had concealed information that Ranbaxy was facing probe by the US Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Justice, while selling its shares.

Daiichi had to enter into a settlement agreement with the US Department of Justice, agreeing to pay $500 million penalty to resolve potential, civil and criminal liability.  PTI

SEBI directs Religare to recall loans worth over Rs 2,300 crore
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Panchkula, March 14

Members of the Panchkula Bar Association (PBA) struck work in the local courts today in protest against the alleged misbehaviour by a Judge against a lawyer, causing harassment to litigants.

The association, which was demanding the transfer of the Judge, did not allow the courts to function, causing harassment to the litigants, who had come from far-off places. Even the high-profile Samjhauta blast case, in which 68 persons, mostly Pakistanis, had lost their lives, had to be deferred to March 18 as the protesting lawyers did not allow the NIA counsel as well as counsel for the Pakistani witnesses to enter the court.

The Judge had allegedly directed one of the lawyers to go out when the latter was talking to his client in the courtroom.

Advocate Umesh Kumar Mahour, president of the PBA, said they had struck work today in protest against the misbehaviour by the Judge. He said they would hold a meeting with the District and Sessions Judge tomorrow to resolve the issue. He said they did not want the court work to be affected as it caused unnecessary harassment to the litigants.

Mahour said they were hopeful that the matter would be resolved as the delivery of justice was the main aim of both judges as well as lawyers. He said the next course of action would be decided after the meeting tomorrow.

One of the litigants, who had come from Ambala, said on condition of anonymity that his case was pending in the court for the past over two years. He said such strikes not only delayed cases but also caused mental harassment to litigants, besides leading to a financial loss for them.

Association wants Judge transferred

The Panchkula Bar Association, which was demanding the transfer of the Judge, did not allow the courts to function, causing harassment to the litigants, who had come from far-off places. Even the high-profile Samjhauta blast case, in which 68 persons, mostly Pakistanis, had lost their lives, had to be deferred to March 18 as the protesting lawyers did not allow the NIA counsel as well as counsel for the Pakistani witnesses to enter the court.
editorial@tribune.com

Sandeep Rana

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 14

In a blow to about 700 staff members employed under the National Health Mission (NHM), UT, the Health Department, in a strange move, has asked them to get themselves registered with outsourcing companies against available posts.

Several employees, including doctors and Class IV workers, have been working on a contract basis under the government for the past 10-15 years. There is resentment among the NHM staff over the move which, they say, is a ploy to bring them under private players and sack them gradually.

A circular issued by the department reads, All staff working under the NHM are hereby directed to get themselves registered with the service providers concerned of the Health Department and the Government Medical College and Hospital, Sector 32, for adjustment against posts on an outsourcing basis as per availability.

The department has given a category-wise list of nine service providers. I have been working for the past about 15 years under the NHM. How can they suddenly ask us to get registered with outsourcing firms against available posts? It is like not owning your baby, lamented one of the disgruntled staff members.

They are trying to intimidate us through such circulars as we had earlier demanded equal pay, equal work. After such circulars, many of us will have to leave our jobs. We do not want to get exploited further under private companies, said a lab technician.

Dr G Diwan, Director, Health Services, UT, however, claimed, It is not mandatory and is just an option. At present, they are not getting the DC rates, we wanted that through outsourcing, they at least get these. If they think by staying under the NHM their services are going to get regularised as in some states, it is not going to happen here as it is a stopgap arrangement. In states, 40 per cent funding is by states and 60 per cent by the Centre. In the UT, 100 per cent funding is by the Centre. States may get regularistion done through a legislation, which is not possible here.

Doctors, pharmacists, nursing staff, data entry operators, lab technicians, dental technicians and others under the NHM are working in the city dispensaries and hospitals, including the GMCH-32, the GMSH-16 and the civil hospitals of Sector 22, 45 and Mani Majra. They said they were feeling threatened and were worried about the future of their kids now.
editorial@tribune.com

Naina Mishra

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 14

A high-powered committee chaired by Education Secretary BL Sharma approved reimbursement rates payable to private schools for three consecutive years, starting from session 2015-16, here on Thursday.

For the financial year 2015-16, an amount of Rs 1,767.39 per child expenditure has been decided. For 2016-17 and 2017-19, per child expenditure of Rs 2,197.32 and Rs 2,348.38 has been set up, respectively.

Previously, a partial rate of Rs 750 was decided for session 2015-16. BL Sharma said, Only per child cost expenditure has been approved. We shall have to seek the concurrence of the Finance Department for the same.

Under Section 12(1) (c) of Right to Education (RTE) Act, the private schools are required to reserve 25 per cent seats for children belonging to economically weaker sections (EWS)/disadvantaged groups (DG) and provide free and compulsory elementary education up till its completion.

These schools are reimbursed expenditure so incurred by them to the extent of per child expenditure incurred by the state or the actual amount charged from the child, whichever is less.

As private schools are required to reserve 15 per cent seats for children belonging to the economically weaker section under the Land Allotment Scheme of the UT, the Education Department gives reimbursement over and above the 15 per cent only out of the total 25 per cent seat reservation as mandated under the RTE.

The Education Department gives reimbursement for 10 per cent reservation owing to a clause in the RTE that says, If schools are already under obligation to provide free education to a specified number of children on account of it having received any land, building, equipment or other facilities, either free of cost or at a concessional rate, such school shall not be entitled to reimbursement to the extent of such obligation.

How is reimbursement amount calculated?

The per child expenditure is being calculated by taking into account the expenditure incurred by the Education Department, including expenses such as salary and wages, office expenses, electricity, water, stationery, and miscellaneous.

The expenditure is divided by the total number of students (up to Class XII) and then multiplied by the number of students at the elementary level. After schools claim the reimbursement amount, the department decides the amount to be paid, based on whichever is lesser  amount claimed by school or amount decided by the department.
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 14

Just about four months after the Punjab and Haryana High Court took suo motu cognisance of nuisance created by loud amplified music emanating from marriage palaces and private farmhouses around Chandigarh in the states of Punjab and Haryana, the Bench today ordered the setting up of a committee.

Comprising senior advocates and law officers from both states and the Union Territory of Chandigarh, the committee, headed by senior advocate ML Sarin, will examine the problem of noise pollution. Sarin has already been appointed amicus curiae or the friend of the court in the matter. The other committee members include senior advocates Reeta Kohli and Akshay Bhan. Law officers from Haryana and Punjab Deepak Balyan and Sheerish Gupta, along with UT senior standing counsel Pankaj Jain, will also be a part of the panel, which will submit its report after examining the issue.

The directions by the Division Bench of Chief Justice Krishna Murari and Justice Arun Palli came during the hearing of a suo motu or court-on-its-own motion case. The High Court had earlier directed the matter to be treated as a public interest litigation for framing of guidelines, particularly in view of the impending wedding season.

In his note, Justice GS Sandhawalia of the High Court had asserted that the Chandigarh Police, only recently, expressed its helplessness on account of the fact that it had no writ or control over the amplified music emanating from villages around the city, despite several complaints from residents, helplessly exposed to loud music.

Justice Sandhawalia had added: The issue arises that who will guard the guardians and whether such elected representatives/officers are beyond control and have total disregard for other citizens of the country and residents of the village, including residents of Chandigarh itself, and the wildlife, which is sensitive to such loud noise, and seeks refuge in the sanctuaries which are shrinking on account of human greed.

The HC was told that noise from the citys vicinity during marriage celebrations could be heard in northern sectors and the matter had been taken up by the police with their counterparts in Nayagaon.

Farmhouses, Marriage palaces to blame?

The committee, headed by senior advocate ML Sarin, will examine the problem of noise pollution emanating from marriage palaces and farmhouses. Sarin has already been appointed amicus curiae or the friend of the court in the matter.
Poonam Khetrapal Singh

Poonam Khetrapal Singh

Regional Director, South-East Asia office, World Health Organisation

UNSAFE food causes a staggering range of diseases, from diarrhoea to cancer and hepatitis. Food containing harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites or chemicals is a major threat to public health, both globally and in the World Health Organisations (WHOs) South-East Asia region. Every year, an estimated 4.2 lakh people die worldwide due to food-borne diseases, with the region accounting for a disproportionate share  about 1.75 lakh.

Tackling the problem is more important than ever before. The globalised nature of modern food chains, alongside emerging hazards such as anti-microbial resistance and climate change, makes the threat of food-borne diseases increasingly acute. Even as food-borne diseases can harm public health at the national and international levels, their occurrence can also compromise development, trade, nutrition and food security. Informal food production at the community level poses an ongoing challenge, with basic hygiene, adulteration and falsification being the key concerns.

Countries in the WHO region, which includes India, Bangladesh and Nepal, have been active in addressing the issue. Since 2015, seven of the regions 11 nations have conducted in-depth assessment of their food-borne disease surveillance and response capacity. All have strengthened their national codex structure  the standards and guidelines created by the Codex Alimentarius Commission to promote food safety and protect consumers, especially in the context of international trade. With the support of the WHO and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), simulation exercises have been carried out to test region-wide coordination and communication, with the International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) anchoring the proceedings.

As a show of commitment, more than 30 representatives from nine of the regions countries have attended (or will attend) WHO-supported conferences on the future of food safety in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) in February and Geneva (Switzerland) in April. Each event will have a significant impact on a range of food safety-related issues (both globally and in the region), from dealing with present challenges to aligning food safety strategies across sectors and borders.

Immediate action is both possible and necessary. As outlined in the Regions Flagship Priorities and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, respectively, emergency preparedness must be scaled up and safe and healthy food made accessible to all. To achieve both, several high-impact interventions should be made.

First, food safety management and regulation frameworks should be strengthened. To do this, multi-sectoral action that involves all stakeholders  from food business operators, both formal and informal, to consumers, academics, scientists and the media  is crucial. By actively engaging each of these groups, food safety authorities have the best chance of achieving the integrated management of food supply chains and ensuring any weaknesses are addressed as a matter of priority. Importantly, all stakeholders must know their responsibilities and the standards and regulations to which they are accountable.

Second, a risk-based approach to monitoring food safety should be developed and implemented in each of the regions countries. To that end, monitoring compliance with food safety and quality regulations should begin at the primary production level, with strong partnerships forged between inspection officials and primary producers to identify potential risks and find ways to mitigate them. This collaborative approach, which should begin at the primary producer and end at the point of sale, is the best way to enhance buy-in among all stakeholders. It is also the best way to ensure compliance.

Third, food-borne disease surveillance should be strengthened across the region. The first step towards securing food safety is knowing when, where, why and how food-borne hazards and resulting illnesses occur. To make that happen, member States in the region should fully implement the strategies outlined in the WHOs manual on strengthening the surveillance of and response to food-borne diseases. That includes the integrated surveillance of anti-microbial resistance in food-borne bacteria. In addition, there is strong potential to increase engagement with the International Network of Food Safety Authorities (INFOSAN) via its communication platforms, as well as to enhance coordination between national INFOSAN and IHR focal points.

And fourth, investing in all aspects of food safety should be better prioritised. Advocacy is crucial to ensure high-level leaders understand that investing in food safety protects and promotes public health as well as sustainable development more broadly. This is especially the case as rapid changes in food production techniques occur, new technologies are adopted, and anti-microbial resistance and climate change emerge as significant hazards. Substantial, well-thought-out investments (for example in developing food safety legislation and policy, enhancing risk-based inspections and compliance enforcement, or improving laboratory services), are crucial to strengthening and accelerating region-wide progress.

At the regional and global levels, WHO, FAO and the World Organisation for Animal Health have established a tripartite coordination mechanism to support food safety activities. WHO will continue to help the regions member States reduce food-related illness and death and diminish the risk of national and transnational food-borne disease outbreaks. Like the process of producing food itself, securing food safety is both a science and an art. Each must be mastered, and safe and healthy food made accessible to all, all the time.
Arati R Jerath

Arati R Jerath

Political Commentator

Two regional leaders, Odisha CM Naveen Patnaik and his Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee, recently walked the talk on the contentious issue of womens reservation in Parliament. Patnaik announced a 33 per cent quota for women in the BJDs list of candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections while Mamata upped it to 41 per cent for her Trinamool Congress.

Clearly, both have woken up and smelt the coffee. Women are an important political constituency and their aspirations cannot be ignored. Their increased visibility in all spheres, especially in queues outside voting booths, is a cry for empowerment. For far too long, political parties have been fobbing them off with promises of a few grams of gold and a pressure cooker or a free gas cylinder to replace the unhealthy wood stove. Its time to stop offering crumbs and give women a greater say in decision making at the very top. Its time to push more women into Parliament and state Assemblies.

Consider the sweeping changes in the countrys polity after seven decades of adult franchise. Women used to be silent observers on the margins of elections. No more. Their rate of participation in voting has shot up. Although in absolute terms, more men vote than women, the surge in turnout for the latter has been consistently higher. It was just 46.63 per cent in 1962. In 2014, it rose to 65.63 per cent. The difference in voter turnout between men and women was 16.7 per cent in 1962. In 2014, the gap narrowed to a mere 1.8 per cent. And in 16 of the 29 states, more women voted than men.

Yet, consider their representation in politics. While the 73rd constitutional amendment passed in 1993 ensured that 33 per cent seats in panchayats and other local bodies were reserved for women, there are no such quotas in state Assemblies and Parliament. Consequently, their numbers in the higher echelons of the political superstructure remain pathetically low.

In 2009, the number of women in the Lok Sabha crossed 10 per cent of the House strength for the first time. In the current Lok Sabha, this number saw a marginal rise, to 12.15 per cent. The Association for Democratic Reforms found that Bihar, and till recently Rajasthan, had the highest percentage of women in their Assemblies. At 14 per cent, the figure is laughable.

Theres a clear and unhealthy mismatch in the gap that has opened up over the decades between womens participation as voters and their underrepresentation in macro-level decision-making bodies such as Parliament or even within political parties themselves. Although both national parties had promised to push more women into organisational posts (BJP had even announced 33 per cent reservation for women in the party), neither have kept their word.

Compare the gross political underrepresentation of women to their performance as political representatives. According to a study by United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, Assembly constituencies represented by women showed a higher economic growth rate than those that had male MLAs. The study went through data from 4,265 Assembly constituencies over two decades.

And look what it found. Not only do women raise the economic performance of their constituencies by 1.8 percentage points a year, but also they complete infrastructure projects on time, are less likely to have criminal charges against them, are slightly younger than their male counterparts and are less likely to be corrupt. Now, arent those excellent reasons to demand more women MPs and MLAs?

UN studies have also found that women political representatives tend to take up core developmental issues such as health, sanitation, education, safe drinking water and womens safety much more than their male peers.

Unfortunately, politics has become so competitive that parties opt for the easier route to victory by prioritising the winnability index of a candidate over merit. Winnability boils down to muscle and money power, which puts women at a disadvantage when nomination lists are finalised.

It is interesting that while Patnaik announced a 33 per cent quota for the Lok Sabha, he hesitated to extend it to the Assembly elections taking place simultaneously. Perhaps the winnability factor weighed heavy. Parliamentary polls are usually not as tightly contested as Assembly elections where men have the edge.

Patnaiks critics have accused him of playing the woman card as an excuse to change unwanted MPs. But lets not lose sight of the message written into his gambit. His move is an acknowledgement of the heft women have come to acquire because of rising and enthusiastic participation in elections. The response of other parties to the announcements is telling. Most have been indifferent, including the Congress. The BJP slammed Patnaik on the plea that hes omitted the Assembly elections from his decision.

This is such distressing hypocrisy, especially from the two political biggies, BJP and Congress. Ever since the reservation Bill for women was introduced in 1996, most parties have been promising to have it passed. In fact, the BJP and Congress wrote it into their manifestoes in every election. But it remains a broken promise, government after government, with no ruling party showing the political resolve to bite the bullet and see the contentious Bill through.

Quotas may not be the best form of affirmative action. But if they can assure gender parity in political representation to fulfil the aspirations of half of the population, they are the way forward. The lapsed womens reservation Bill may be an idea whose time has finally come.
Marylanders who don't identify as either male or female could decline to identify a gender on their driver's licenses starting in October under a bill the General Assembly approved Wednesday.Instead of "M" for male or "F" for female, Marylanders who identify as "nonbinary" could have an "X" displayed on their IDs.The House of Delegates voted 91-47 to pass a bill the Senate approved last month.Gov. Larry Hogan has not weighed in on the legislation. The governor has the option to sign or veto any bill, or let it become law without his signature.When asked the governor's position on the bill, spokeswoman Amelia Chasse said the governor "will consider any legislation that reaches his desk."If the bill does become law, Maryland would join California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon and the District of Columbia in allowing a designation for unspecified gender on licenses and ID cards. Residents of 11 countries can choose nonbinary or gender-neutral designations on their passports, which are accepted by U.S. authorities.Advocates for those who don't identify as male or female say those people should not have to choose a gender on legal documents. The Intersex and Genderqueer Recognition Project and other groups are pushing for legislation around the country "that recognizes that sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation have endless variations," and said that all of those variations should be respected.Maryland already allows residents to change the gender listed on their driver's license or ID.The legislation approved Wednesday takes that a step further and prohibits the Motor Vehicle Administration from denying an application because the sex selected by an applicant doesn't match the one displayed on another document.The bill would also bar the MVA from requiring applicants to provide proof of sex or gender.
rchopra@tribunemail.com

Washington, March 15

An Indian man in the US has pleaded guilty to the charges of running a fake marriage racket through which he helped illegal immigrants, mostly Indians, to get married to American citizens, and helping them stay in the country.

The man identified as 47-year-old Ravi Babu Kolla, who was residing in Floridas Panama city, has been detained.

His sentencing hearing is scheduled for May 22 at the US Courthouse in Tallahassee.

His co-conspirator Krystal Cloud, 40, was sentenced to two years of imprisonment for marriage and visa fraud conspiracy after he pleaded guilty on December 28, 2018. She is a US citizen.

Between February 2017 and August 2018, Kolla operated an immigration marriage fraud business in Bay County that recruited US citizens to marry Indian foreign nationals to gain immigration benefits, prosecutors said on Thursday.

An investigation identified over 80 fraudulent marriages that were performed in Alabama as part of Kollas scheme, the Department of Justice said.

After entering a fraudulent marriage in October 2017, Cloud began recruiting US citizens to marry Indian nationals.

She directly recruited or participated in the recruitment of 10 or more US citizens from Panama city and rural Calhoun and Jackson Counties, the prosecutors alleged.

Kolla faces a maximum of five years in prison for conspiracy to commit marriage and visa frauds and a maximum of 20 years in prison for money laundering conspiracy. PTI
shriaya.dutt@tribuneindia.com

Wellington, March 15

India's High Commission in New Zealand on Friday said that any Indian national affected by the attacks on two Christchurch mosques can contact the mission for assistance.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the city's outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Expressing shock over the incident, the mission tweeted two contact numbers 021803899 and 021850033 for providing assistance.

"We are shocked to hear about the shooting in Christchurch. Any Indians needing assistance should contact us at 021803899 or 021850033," the Twitter account of the Indian High Commission in New Zealand said.

"Our prayers go out to everyone who is affected. Help us spread the word. Stay safe!!" it said.

There was no immediate report of any Indian affected in the incident.

Approximately 200,000 Indian and Indian-origin people live in New Zealand. There are over 30,000 Indian students in the country, according to the Indian High Commission's data on its website.  PTI
rchopra@tribunemail.com

New York, March 15

An Indian-origin man working as a driver for ride-sharing company Uber in the US has pleaded guilty to kidnapping a sleeping passenger and driving her more than 60 miles from her destination to boost his fare.

Harbir Parmar, 25, of New York pleaded guilty in White Plains federal court to kidnapping and wire fraud.

He was arrested in October last year. Parmar pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, and one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He will be sentenced in June.

US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said Parmar took advantage of a vulnerable woman who utilised a ridesharing service by kidnapping and terrorising her.

In addition, he charged many of his ridesharing customers with fraudulent fees, he said adding that Parmar would now be held accountable for his brazen crimes.

According to the indictment and statements made during the plea proceedings, Parmar, who worked as a driver for Uber, picked up the woman passenger in February 2018 travelling from Manhattan to White Plains in upstate New York.

After the woman fell asleep in the backseat of the vehicle, Parmar changed her destination in Ubers mobile application to an address in Boston, Massachusetts, and proceeded to drive towards that location.

When the passenger woke up, the vehicle was in Connecticut. She asked Parmar that she be taken to White Plains or to the police station, but he refused. He instead dropped her off on the side of highway in Connecticut. The woman went to a nearby convenience store where she sought assistance.

In addition, from December 2016 through February 2018, Parmar sent false information about the destinations of Ubers customers through its mobile application on several occasions.

At times, he also sent false information about the application of a cleaning fee to be applied to the accounts of the companys customers.

In these instances, Uber customers filed complaints about being overcharged for their rides. These instances have resulted in thousands of dollars in improper charges to the accounts of Ubers customers. PTI
sanjiv@tribunemail.com

The logical follow-up to the IAF strikes on a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) training base for terrorists in Balakot should have been action against its chief Masood Azhar. But the Indian delegation met with a setback when an hour before the deadline, China filed an objection at the UN Security Council against his listing as an international terrorist. This was classical Chinese statecraft of trying to preserve its options while holding out the possibility of entering into a quid pro quo if India was really determined on indicting Masood. All through the run-up to the UNSC meet, Indian diplomats had championed the belief that indicting was a done deal and that the world had lined up behind India in its hour of grief and mortification.

Listing under UNSC Resolution 1267 (also the al-Qaeda/Islamic State resolution) has rarely been contentious. Osamas son was listed last month on the mere suspicion of being the new al-Qaeda chief. Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed, accused of a greater horror in Mumbai, was listed barely a year after the 2008 attacks. China did not throw a spanner in either case. We may well be encountering a Naya Beijing under President-for-life Xi Jinping  a China that has forsaken the intimacy of transactional arrangements for cynical, hard-headed pursuit of its narrow national interests.

But China must realise that its overbearing approach is helping set up a grid of disaffected neighbours. Yet, its attitude cannot obscure the inability of the Indian state to leverage its domestic market to extract foreign policy gains. Both Pakistan and China profit little from honouring the sentiments of the Indian citizen. This is in contrast to the deals India promises to encourage the US, France and the UK to stand by it. Both Pakistan and China have remained persistent thorns for the Modi government in contrast to 2008, when Hafiz Saeed was listed because both were on the same page. India needs to recognise the geopolitical muddle in the region and act accordingly, instead of hoping for made-for-TV moments on every occasion.
editorial@tribune.com

Ravinder Saini

Tribune News Service

Mahendragarh, March 14

Taking suo motu cognisance of a report published in The Tribune about the commercial use of groundwater by stone crushing units here in violation of guidelines, the Haryana Human Right Commission (HHRC) has sought a report from the Mahendragarh DC and the Central Ground Water Board, Union Ministry of Water Resources.

The HHRC chairperson, Justice SK Mittal (retd), and its members  Justice KC Puri and Deep Bhatia  have renotified the case for July 17.

The extraction of groundwater for the commercial purpose is illegal in Narnaul and Nangal Choudhry blocks, which have declared as dark zones because of the depleting water table.

The violation of came to light when a team of the groundwater cell with the Agriculture Department conducted a survey to find out the source of water being used by the stone crushing units.

The cell not only sealed 18 tubewells installed in the stone crushing units at Jainpur, Gangutana, Bakhrija, Karota and Faizabad villages, but put on notice farmers who sold groundwater to the units by extracting it through their tubewells meant for agricultural purpose.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Parveen Arora

The Karnal parliamentary constituency, comprising Karnal and Panipat districts, has a trend of electing candidates who do not belong to any of these two districts. Of the 11 MPs elected in 17 parliamentary elections held in Karnal since 1952, only Madho Ram Sharma, Mohinder Singh and ID Swami belonged to Karnal. The remaining eight were outsiders.

The outsiders elected as MPs from Karnal include Virender Kumar Satyawadi (1952), Subhadra Joshi (1957), Swami Rameshwranand (1962), Bhagwat Dayal Sharma (1977), Chiranji Lal Sharma (1980, 1984, 1989 and 1991), Bhajan Lal (1998), Arvind Sharma (2004 and 2009) and Ashwani Kumar Chopra (2014).

But in the coming elections, the choice of an outsider may spoil the chances of parties as the voters here have a common complaint against various political parties in this regard. Residents often complain about the inaccessibility of their sitting MP Ashwani Chopra and allege that he has not even visited all the villages in his constituency.

Our MP remained out of our reach in his five-year tenure. We are happy with the works being done by the PM, but the absence of Chopra from the field has disappointed us, said Mahinder Singh, a resident of Baldi village.

The MP has even failed to provide basic amenities in our village, which lacks roads, sanitation and cleanliness. Our village is just 1 km away from the district headquarters, but it comes under Indri Assembly segment that is around 24 km from our village. We had raised this issue on several occasions, but to no avail, he added.

Public representatives should be from among the people so that residents could approach him/her easily, said Amit Kumar, a resident of Panipat. The past of the constituency shows that most political parties have preferred to field parachutes candidates, ignoring the local ones, he added.

Residents praised the 10 per cent quota to the economically weaker section, but criticised the Union Government for fixing Rs 6,000 as assured income. It is a meagre amount for a small and marginal farmer that does not even cover the expenses of pesticides and fertilisers, said Charan Singh, another resident of Baldi village.

The 10 per cent quota will help in getting jobs for youths of economically weaker section, said Raman Mehla, a resident of Baldi village.

Voters hailed the transparent recruitment of Group-D candidates by the state government, but criticised the Centre for not generating enough jobs for them.

The state government has made transparent recruitment of candidates, but the Centre has failed to provide jobs to the youth, said Gurmeet Singh, a resident of Salaru village.

Ashok Kumar, another resident of Salaru village, said, I am a shopkeeper and am happy with the working of the PM. But all political parties should give ticket to local residents, he said.

As per the data available, Punjabi voters (Arora Khatri Punjabi, Sikh and Jat Sikh) are in majority, followed by Jat, Brahmin, Harijan, Ror, Balmiki and others. Before the previous election, this seat was known as Brahmin seat.

In the past few elections with the exception of the last one, Brahmin candidates, be it Arvind Sharma, ID Swami, Bhagwat Dayal Sharma or Chiranji Lal, have won from this seat. The BJP played the Punjabi card in the last elections and gave ticket to Chopra.

Key players

| Congress | BJP | INLD | JJP | AAP | Independents

ASSEMBLY SEGMENTS

The Karnal constituency comprises Karnal and Panipat districts and has nine Assembly segments. Of these eight (Karnal, Indri, Nilokheri, Gharaunda, Assandh, Panipat Urban, Panipat Rural and Israna) are with the BJP, while Samalkha is with an Independent who later extended support to the BJP.

Total voters

18,50,816

Male

9,89,881

Female

8,60,935
editorial@tribune.com

Pratibha Chauhan

Tribune News Service

Shimla, March 14

The delay in finalisation of ticket for the Lok Sabha elections is proving a headache for the two political parties with some of the contenders already having gone into the campaign mode which could result in chances of undercutting at the later stages.

One such contender is Ashray Sharma, son of Power Minister Anil Sharma and grandson of former Telecommunication Minister Sukh Ram, who even before finalization of ticket, has embarked on campaigning at Kinnaur. He visited Kinnaur tribal district today as it is part of the Mandi Lok Sabha segment and interacted with party workers and leaders.

As far as the Congress is concerned, Abhishek Rana, son of Sujanpur Congress MLA Rajinder Rana, too has been in the field for the past many days for campaigning. He has applied for the party ticket though the final decision will be taken by the Central Election Committee. His father too has been campaigning for his son.

Though both the BJP and the Congress have taken feedback about the best possible candidates through surveys and also from senior leadership, it could take some time before the names of the candidates are finalized.

The fact that Himachal will go to the polls in the last phase on May 23, the central election committees of both the BJP and the Congress could finalize the names at a later stage. After having staked claim for the party ticket from his grandfather and fathers traditional Lok Sabha Mandi seat, Ashray Sharma has already campaigned in Mandi district. Ashrey and his father, Anil Sharma had joined the BJP in December 2017 before the Assembly polls. Sukh Ram too had demanded that the ticket be given to his grandson but no final decision has been take so far. My name has been sent by the state BJP core committee to the high command, so I am very much in the race for the ticket, he said at Reckong Peo today. He said his grandfather shared a close bond with the people of Kinnaur and he too would like to serve the people of the tribal area.

State BJP president Satpal Singh Satti said the party has yet to finalise the names of candidates for the four Lok Sabha segments. Our senior party leaders have spoken to Ashray not to start campaign till the candidate is finalized as it sends a wrong signal, said Satti. He added that though every party worker has the right to stake claim for the party ticket a final word on who has to be fielded is from the party high command. This kind of campaigning by the contenders even before the ticket is finalized could lead to factionalism in the party.
editorial@tribune.com

Ravinder Sood

PALAMPUR, March 14

The State Pollution Control Board and the Environment Department on Thursday served show-cause notices on Himachal Pradesh Agriculture University (HPAU) and the CSIR, Palampur, on the issue of large-scale dumping of plastic in a water channel passing through the university.

The Executive Engineer, PCB, said action had been initiated following a news report appearing in The Tribune with pictures pertaining to large-scale dumping of plastic waste in the water channel passing through the university and the CSIR.

The official said he along with his team personally visited the spot and witnessed dumping of tonnes of plastic in the water channel passing through the university, resulting in pollution, contamination of water bodies, affecting a large chunk of university land and filling its check dams. He termed it a serious matter and assured strict action against the culprits. He said the matter was under investigation and the PCB was seeking the help of panchayats and local residents. He said plastic was not dumped in a day or month, it was being dumped for the past one or two years, but the agriculture university and the CSIR remained unconcerned with the situation and allowed the the dumping of plastic in the water channel.

He said despite the fact the university was directly affected because of large- scale pollution, it remained a mute spectator and ignored even the letters written to the university authorities by junior officials.

He said both HPAU and CSIR should have brought the matter to the notice of the PCB or the SDM, Palampur, so that dumping could have been checked. He said the PCB came to know only when The Tribune highlighted the issue last week.

Vivek Chauhan, BDO, Panchrukhi, said when the matter was brought to his notice by local environmentalists he visited the site where tonnes of garbage was seen flowing in a water channel. He directed the Banuri panchayat to lodge a complaint at the Palampur police station. However, the police are yet to start investigations.

He said he had also met the Vice-Chancellor and the Registrar in this regard and sought action against the culprits. Chauhan said action should be taken against the culprits and police should registered a case under the provisions of PCB laws.

Authorities remained mute spectators
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Solan, March 14

Congress state in-charge Rajni Patil exposed the alleged failures of the Central Government during the partys Jan Chetna campaign at Chandi in the Doon constituency and Panjera in the Nalagarh constituency on Thursday.

She alleged that the Central Government had failed on all fronts and their poll promises had proved to be a sham.The aspirations of the youth had been defeated as they failed to get the promised two crore jobs in the five-year term of the BJP government. Rajni claimed that the people would give a befitting reply to the BJP in the ensuing Lok Sabha poll.

Patil said demonetisation and the GST had severally hit the economy of the country and lakhs of jobs had been lost. The Modi government has done little to bring back blackmoney deposited in the foreign banks and has merely fooled the people over this issue. Even the key problem of terrorism has failed to be curtailed, she alleged.

She claimed that the Congress was receiving an overwhelming support of the masses and they would win all four Lok Sabha seats in the state. Rajni, while talking about the local issues, said the much-needed export duty on imported apples had not been imposed and this had affected the orchardists of the state. Even the promised ST status to the trans-Giri area of Sirmaur had not been granted by the Union Government despite promising it to the people in the last Lok Sabha poll. She said the Congress, if voted to power, would provide a minimum income scheme to the people. She also assured that they would provide reservation to women.

She further alleged that the LPG price that was around Rs 350 during the tenure of the Congress had now increased to Rs 1,000. Fuel prices had also reached an all-time high, though the price of crude oil had almost halved during the NDA regime. The rising prices of the essential commodities had hit the common man hard.

Congress co-in-charge Gurkirat Singh Kotli and Solan MLA DR Shandil were also present.
editorial@tribune.com

Arun Joshi

China has played its old game yet again by blocking the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhars designation as international terrorist at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) last night, stonewalling a determined bid by other global powers to strike at the faces of the profile of propagators and perpetrators of terrorism.

This has renewed the world-known fact that China would go to any extent to shield its strategic ally and friend Pakistan from anyone naming and shaming it for the terrorism that it promotes to bleed India via Kashmir.

The resolution of naming Masood as international terrorist could not go ahead because of Chinas obstinacy. It has increased Indias difficulties in Kashmir immeasurably.

Masood Azhars group with an all-out support of the Pakistan army and ISI has been quite aggressive and lethal in the Valley in the recent months. The February 14 Pulwama attack that left 40 CRPF personnel dead brought spotlight on its designs becoming more and more murderous.

But the Pulwama attack cannot be counted as the last despite the security forces having achieved a stupendous success in their operations against militants, and in particular against the JeM. Since February 14, the security forces have eliminated 14 Jaish militants in different operations.

Ground reports suggest that there are many others who, like Adil Adil Ahmad Dar, the suicide bomber of Pulwama, are learning the art of violent death and killing many whom they deem as their targets.

Security experts view this development at the UNSC where a determined bid by the P-3 - the United States of America, the UK and France - to get Masood Azhar in the hall of shame of the international terrorists was stonewalled by China on technical grounds as nothing new, but in the given situation can infuse new and dangerous make-up in the Valley. The P-3 had maintained the same stand earlier too and China had blocked it, Gurbachan Jagat, former Governor of Manipur, who during his tenure as the J&K police chief for nearly four years had handled many a crisis, observed when asked about the fall-out of the latest move at the UNSC and Chinas role in it.

However, with this development (at the UNSC), there could be a psychological impact where the militancy sympathisers will see rising China-Pakistan bonhomie adding to the symbolism of the face of Pakistani militancy in Kashmir that Masood Azhar represents, Jagat said.

There are a few other facts that should not be lost sight of  Masood Azhar is the Jaish chief and he says and complies with what he is told by the Pakistani establishment. He is a name to the terror-designs of Pakistan that wants to increase militancy and violence in Kashmir to the extent that India talks to Islamabad to talk to it.

Since India is not talking to Pakistan, the groups like the Jaish would raise the bar of their acts.

It is here where the oratory and demagoguery of Masood Azhar helps Pakistan in its violence-oriented designs in Kashmir. The security forces are preparing for the fall out of the latest development at the UNSC. They fear more attacks and more violence in Kashmir.
Stacey Abrams met Thursday with former Vice President Joe Biden in Washington to discuss her next political step -- and presumably his, too. The sit-down between the Democrats came as each are weighing 2020 bids that could intersect.Biden would become one of the leading candidates for president if he enters the race, while Abrams is weighing a bid for U.S. Senate, a rematch for governor -- and has raised the possibility of her own White House bid.The meeting brought together two candidates representing sharply contrasting approaches and ideologies.The 76-year-old Biden is a veteran Washington lawmaker and well-connected politico comfortable in the party's establishment. Abrams, 45, is an unapologetic liberal with little national experience and a soaring profile that heightened even after her defeat.The news of the meeting triggered a wave of speculation that their political fortunes could intertwine next year. Biden, who is nearing his decision to run for president, would seem likely to select a running mate who brings gender, geographic and racial balance to the ticket.It's the latest in a string of meetings between Abrams and White House contenders. She's huddled with Sen. Cory Booker in Newark, grabbed lunch with Sen. Kamala Harris in Washington and dined with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Atlanta. Before her Biden meeting on Thursday, she had breakfast with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.Like other high-profile Democrats, Biden endorsed Abrams during last year's run for governor, and scheduled a trip to campaign with her in Georgia before later canceling it.Abrams' narrow November loss to Gov. Brian Kemp has only burnished her political celebrity, and she's set an April deadline to decide whether to challenge Sen. David Perdue next year, prepare for a 2022 rematch against Kemp or take another step.She's long wanted to be Georgia governor, but she's being heavily recruited by Senate Democrats to run against Perdue, a first-term Republican with deep ties to President Donald Trump.More recently, some of her allies say her thinking has expanded to include positioning herself as a potential vice presidential running-mate, something that wouldn't be open to her if she was running for U.S. Senate. If that doesn't come through, then she would presumably prep to run for governor in 2022.As for a presidential bid, she hasn't begun the process of lining up endorsements, hiring droves of operatives and launching flirtation tours in early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire. But neither has Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who on Thursday announced his White House bid.Abrams has little incentive to rule out any of her options -- White House, Senate or governor -- too early. She's in the middle of a nationwide tour to promote her book and the intrigue helps heighten attention.She told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week that she's "in a privileged opportunity to make a difference" but that she's looking for the best chance to make a concrete difference."I am going to run for something. And I will tell you in April. But everything is on the table. I'm not being coy," she said. "This is hard. When you spend two years focusing on one thing it's not easy to turn to something else."
editorial@tribune.com

Ravi S Singh

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 14

Jammu and Kashmir has run into a huge arrears of dues towards the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), putting the public-sector undertaking in a tailspin with regard to the early recovery of the amount.

The states accumulated arrears over the past many months have shot up to whopping Rs 967 crore.

We are in touch with the states authorities for the recovery, a NHPC senior official told The Tribune on Thursday, adding that outstanding dues involving a huge sum has affected the NHPCs developmental goals.

As per norms, a window of two-month credit-line is available to a state to clear up the dues.

The defaulting states will have to pay a penal interest of 18 per cent on the outstanding dues. However, the worry is that the overall due amount gets inflated by the month.

The official said the state seemed to have run into some kind of a financial problem in the last about five months.

Jammu and Kashmir is the second state after Uttar Pradesh with arrears totting up to more than Rs 1,000 crore, making it a defaulter.

The NHPC at present runs eight projects in Jammu and Kashmir. The state gets free-of-cost 13 per cent (including one per cent in the name of local area development plan) out of the total production of power from each of the project as they are located there.

However, in order to meet its consumption, the state purchases power worth Rs 150 crore annually from the NHPC.

The PSU has plans to expand its production capacity in future. The cumulative generation from all power stations for the current financial years stands at 23,057 MUs and is expected to surpass the previous record of 23,404 MUs.

Current projects

The NHPC at present runs eight projects in Jammu and Kashmir. The state gets free-of-cost 13 per cent (including one per cent in the name of local area development plan) out of the total production of power from each of the projects as they are located there.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Srinagar/Anantnag, March 14

A block president of National Conference was shot at and injured by unidentified gunmen in Bijbehara area of south Kashmirs Anantnag district on Thursday, on a day the NC chose not to send a delegation to meet special observers of the Election Commission of India, who arrived on a three-day visit to assess if the ground situation was conducive to holding Assembly polls along with those for the Lok Sabha.

The injured 60-year-old Muhammad Ismail Wani of Dupathyar village was shifted to a Srinagar hospital. He has been shot in the abdomen, a health official said. Police sources said Wani was targeted while he was in his apple orchard.

The three-member EC panel  former IAS officers Noor Mohammad and Vinod Zutshi and former DG of CRPF AS Gill  also held discussions with officials of the civil administration. They are likely to undertake a similar exercise in Jammu.

Among the delegations that met the EC team were those from the Congress, BJP, PDP, JD(U), BSP and the Peoples Conference. Former legislator Er Rasheed (AIP) met the observers too.

We had nothing to add..Our party had already made its viewpoint clear, while reiterating the demand for simultaneous elections, NC leaders said.

Former CM Mehbooba Mufti too sought simultaneous polls in view of the difficulties being faced by people, the continued arrests and harassment. The Congress said the decision to put the Assembly elections on hold was wrong.  TNS
editorial@tribune.com

Arteev Sharma

Tribune News Service

Jammu, March 14

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) core group, headed by former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, will meet here next week to discuss and finalise the names of its candidates for two parliamentary seats  Jammu-Poonch and Kathua-Udhampur-Doda  of the region.

Sources said Mehbooba would interact with leaders of all 37 Assembly seats in Jammu province before finalising the names of the candidates. The core group meeting is likely to take place on March 18 and March 19.

Leaders of all 37 Assembly seats have been asked to attend the meetings called by the core group. The PDP wants to take suggestions of all on board before finalising the candidates for two seats, which are currently held by the BJP, said sources.

Sources said the names of three senior leaders  former minister Choudhary Zulfikar Ali, former PDP vice-president Hamid Choudhary and Abdul Qayoom Dar  were doing rounds in the party circles for the Jammu-Poonch seat, which goes to poll on April 11, while MLC Firdous Ahmad Tak was the front-runner for Kathua-Udhampur-Doda seat, which will witness voting on April 18.

For the Jammu-Poonch parliamentary seat, former minister Choudhary Zulfikar Ali is the front-runner, said sources.

The party candidate from the Jammu-Poonch seat in 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Yashpal Sharma, who stood third by securing 1,68,554 votes, is learnt to have shown reluctance to contest the poll, added sources.

Meanwhile, Zulfikar said: I am a soldier of the party and will abide by any decision taken. He has called out a meeting of party workers in Jammu on Friday to chalk out the strategy for upcoming elections.

Pertinently, the National Conference has accused the PDP and BJP of having a clandestine bonhomie ahead of Lok Sabha elections.

The party stated: The duo is still in alliance and working hand in glove to influence the elections by deceit and deception. The PDP is brightening the BJP prospect in two parliamentary constituencies.

Party to take suggestions
shriaya.dutt@tribuneindia.com

Jammu, March 15

No fresh traffic will be allowed to move on the Jammu-Srinagar highway on Friday unless all stranded traffic is cleared, an official said.

Stranded vehicles have been allowed to move from Jammu to Srinagar at this point, he added.

Frequent landslides and shooting stones have considerably narrowed down the highway at many places, especially in the Ramban-Ramsoo sector.

Traffic jams have been holding up travellers for hours. This has prompted the authorities to carry out the particular measures on the nearly 300-km long highway.

Closures of the strategic highway have resulted in shortages of essential commodities in the Kashmir Valley during the winter season.  IANS
pardeepdhull@gmail.com

New Delhi, March 15

The ED moved a Delhi court on Friday, seeking its nod to quiz separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelanis son-in-law Altaf Shah, alias Altaf Fantoosh, in connection with a terror-funding case involving Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) chief and 26/11 Mumbai terror attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed.

The central agency also sought to question Zahoor Watali, an influential businessman and allegedly a friend of Pakistani leaders and Kashmiri separatists, and Naval Kishore Kapoor, a UAE-based businessman.

Special Public Prosecutor Nitesh Rana, who is representing the agency pro bono (without charging any money), told the court that the accused were required for interrogation and recording of their statement to proceed further in the investigation.

The court will hear the matter on March 19.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed the case on the basis of an FIR lodged by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) accusing Saeed and others, including Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin, of conspiring to wage war against the government and fomenting trouble in the Kashmir valley.

Fantoosh, Watali and Kapoor were arrested by the NIA in the terror-funding case and are currently lodged in Tihar Jail here.

The NIA had earlier filed a chargesheet against the accused, including Salahuddin, in the case.

The agency has charged Pakistan-based terrorists Saeed and Salahuddin, besides 10 others, with criminal conspiracy, sedition and under the stringent provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

The agency has charged the Hurriyat leaders with acting under the overall guidance of and instructions from Saeed, Salahuddin and their Pakistani handlers. They have been accused of plotting strategies to launch violent protests. PTI
vinaymishra188@gmail.com

Superstar Aamir Khan on Thursday announced that his next project is an official adaptation of Tom Hanks classic Forrest Gump. Aamir shared the news on the occasion of his 54th birthday that the Hindi adaptation will be titled Lal Singh Chaddha, which he will co-produce with Viacom18 Motion Pictures. The film will be directed by Secret Superstar-fame Advait Chandan.

My next film is finalised; it is called Lal Singh Chaddha. It is being made by Viacom18 Motion Pictures and Aamir Khan Productions together. It will be directed by Advait Chandan. It is an adaptation of Hollywood film Forrest Gump. We have bought the rights from Paramount... I am playing the lead role of Lal Singh, Aamir said.

Forrest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis, released in 1994 and went on to win six Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actor for Hanks. The film, based on Winston Grooms 1986 novel of the same name, follows Forrest Gump, a dim-witted man from Alabama, who witnesses and unwittingly influences several historical events in 20th century USA. The actor said the makers are yet to lock the cast for the film.

We have started the prep work on the film. The shoot will start from October. I will be prepping for six months. I have to lose weight. I will be losing 20 kgs. I have to be lean and slim, he added.

The makers of the film have not yet decided the release date for the film, but are planning a 2020 outing. I have always loved Forrest Gump as a script. It is a wonderful story about this character. It is a life affirming story. It is a feel good film. It is a film for the whole family, Aamir said.

The actor also revealed he would be sporting a turban for some part of the film.  PTI
shriaya.dutt@tribuneindia.com

Tribune Web Desk

Chandigarh, March 15

Actress Alia Bhatt turned 26 on Friday, and she celebrated it with her favourite people.

Pictures of the celebration shows Alia smiling ear-to-ear in a black floral printed dress Her rumoured boyfriend and Brahmastra co-actor Ranbir Kapoor wished her at sharp 12. Ranbir arrived at the party with director Ayan Mukherji.

Alias besties Masaba Gupta, Akansha and Anushka Ranjan, filmmaker Karan Johar, sister Pooja Bhatt and parents Soni Razdan and Mahesh Bhatt were seen celebrating with her. Alia cut two cakes.

Alias bestfriend Masaba shared a picture and wrote: You were pure magic since we were babies... and you continue to be pure magic... Happy birthday, Alu.

Soni also shared a picture with Alia on Instagram.

She wrote: Happy Happy Birthday sweet Alia ... your light is shining brighter each day ... wish you all the light love and the bestest best of the rest in you life. Keep shining. Love you.

Alias father, Mahesh Bhatt shared another picture with his daughter: Sunshine mixed with a bit of magic. Happy Birthday Alia.

Some memories do not wither with time. Happy birthday Alia .  @aliaa08 pic.twitter.com/qq9mSIUmje  Mahesh Bhatt (@MaheshNBhatt) 15 March 2019

On the work front, Alia will next be seen in Abhishek Varmans Kalank with Varun Dhawan, Madhuri Dixit, Sanjay Dutt, Sonakshi Sinha and Aditya Roy Kapur.

The movie is scheduled to release on April 17, 2019.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

New Delhi, March 14

Central drug inspectors have cracked down on unlicensed orthopaedic implant units across India and sealed 29 found violating safety standards.

Five traders are also being proceeded against for producing orthopaedic implants with non-medical grade quality raw material and in unhygienic conditions.

The Intelligence Cell at the Central Drug Standards Control Authority, constituted in March 2018, cleared the raids after information with respect to violations under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act.

The cell received information that several unlicensed manufacturing activities are being carried out. Our officers physically verified the activities. In all, 45 manufacturers were identified for raids  eight in Maharashtra, six each in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh and 25 in Delhi. We formed 37 inspection teams with 125 officers and conducted inspections across all 45 locations in four states on March 11. Of these, 29 firms and five traders were found manufacturing or selling orthopaedic implants without licences, Drug Controller General of India S Eswara Reddy told The Tribune.  TNS
gspannu7@gmail.com

Ravi S Singh

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 15

Laying speculations to rest, Bhim Army head and Dalit leader Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan said here on Friday that he will contest from Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and announced support to SP-BSP-RLD in the remaining 79 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state.

Significantly, while announcing support to the alliance he said he should not be held responsible if the elected MPs of alliances partners prove to be turn-coats by switching sides to BJP post-elections.

I will contest from Varanasi against Modi and not allow him to win the election, Azad said while addressing a Bahujan Hunkar Rally.

I am fighting to save the Constitution. I am not afraid of going to jail. Modi is anti-Dalit. I will prove that winning election in Varanasi will not be easy for him, he added.

His earlier stand was that he would pit himself against Modi if the alliance did not put up a strong candidate against him.

Azad was detained by Uttar Pradesh Police last Tuesday at Deoband for taking out a motorcycle procession without permission after Model Code of Conduct came into effect. He fell sick during the detention and was admitted to a hospital in Meerut.

He became the centre of attention after Priyanka Gandhi Vadra called on him at the hospital.

Azad urged Dalits across the country to ensure BJPs electoral defeat.

He cited, among others, violence against the community in Saharanpur to support his argument that the Modi government was against it.

With regard his support to SP-BSP-RLD, he simultaneously cautioned Scheduled Castes to verify the sincerity to the cause of the BSP.

Do not hold me responsible if their MPs and leaders change their stand to support the BJP after the elections, he said.

Hitting out at those who question his sincerity towards the downtrodden, he said his credentials were well established.

His utterances assume significance in the context of reported voices from within Mayawati-headed BSP raising doubts on him.

He questioned Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadavs sincerity towards the SCs.

Patron of the party Mulayam Singh Yadav has publicly expressed desire of Modis return as prime minister in the election, and still he has been nominated to contest elections, he added.

He opposed the Centres decision to give 10 per cent reservation to upper castes in education institutions on economic basis.

A resolution was passed which demanded among others Bharat Ratna to Dalit leaders, including Kanshi Ram.

Participants from various parts of the country attended the rally.

Sharad Yadav also addressed the rally. Other highlight was presence of Kanshi Rams sister Swaran Kaur on the podium with Azad.
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 14

With the poll season just about getting underway, initial burst of attack by the BJP provides an insight into the aggressive tactics the ruling coalition has decided to adopt against its opponents, especially Congress.

The manner in which the government attempted to turn the tables on the Congress for raising questions about the efficacy of the Wuhan Summit in the light of Chinas stance in the Masood Azhar case is suggestive in itself.

On the national plane, BJP is making Congress its principal opponent, directing its attack on to the party while seeking to remind the country of decisions taken during earlier regimes of the Congress starting from Jawaharlal Nehru.

The campaigning is yet to begin but the BJP is utilising the opportunity to create an atmosphere of inability of the electorate to blunt missives of the Congress leadership, especially Rahul Gandhi, who is taking recourse to social media to attack the BJP-led government. The Congress at best appears reacting to the agenda set by the BJP.

On the other hand, since the declaration of poll schedule, PM Narendra Modi preferred to wish the electors urging them to take part in the festival of democracy and complimenting millennials who would vote for the first time and sending messages to political leaders across the spectrum to encourage people to come out in numbers to vote.

Adding to this battle of perception is migration of political leaders from various parties to the BJP while the Congress biggest catch till date is Hardik Patel in Gujarat. In electoral season, such movements create a buzz and a momentum of its own.

While the larger opposition unity appears in tatters, the Congress arrangement in states where they have been working together with parties like the Janata Dal (Secular) or RJD and even NCP remains a slow work in progress.

The BSPs statement that it would not align with the Congress in any state is more of a setback to the grand old party than to unity of opposition that is compounded by the lack of clarity on how to deal with the AAP in Delhi.
Civil rights groups in California want police and sheriff's departments to stop sending license plate scanner information to a national private database, saying new public documents show federal immigration agents are using the system in breach of sanctuary state and city laws.The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which obtained the documents as part of an open records lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is calling on lawmakers to request a statewide audit to review the data-sharing practices.The collection of more than 1,000 pages of contracts, emails, manuals and other materials shows some California law enforcement departments have granted ICE unfettered access to the personal data of drivers and that federal officials are using it to track and locate immigrants in the country illegally who might not have criminal records and could be protected under the state's sanctuary and privacy policies."We believe there has been a clear violation of the law and are calling for a proper investigation," ACLU staff lawyer Vasudha Talla said. "The documents show a rogue [federal immigration] agency, and it has added mass surveillance to its toolbox."The case is the latest to raise concern among Democratic lawmakers and privacy groups, who say California's laws are failing to limit the amount of personal data that federal immigration agents can use as the Trump administration has sought to ramp up deportations. Police, sheriffs and ICE agents argue that sharing information and collaboration is vital to criminal investigations.The documents obtained by the ACLU provide the deepest look yet into the database run by Vigilant Solutions, one of the largest suppliers of data analysis software and equipment for police and sheriff's departments across the country. They show more than 9,000 ICE agents nationwide have access to the Vigilant system through a $6.1-million contract with Thomson Reuters Special Services that was signed in December 2017 and runs through September 2020.ICE officials in the agency's criminal investigations branch and its civil enforcement division -- including agents in sanctuary cities such as San Francisco and San Jose -- have access to the database, which agents began using last February.Called the Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network, it hosts information collected from license plate readers by local law enforcement agencies and commercial sources, including insurance, towing and parking companies. The cameras can be installed atop police cars, road signs or bridges, function at high speeds and capture photographs of passing license plates, creating a detailed roadmap of the time, date and locations a person has traveled.The information can be stored for years, according to Vigilant.The documents released Wednesday list more than 80 local law enforcement agencies nationwide that have granted ICE ongoing access to the database, including police in Union City near San Francisco, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department and the Merced Police Department.Emails also show an ICE agent asking a La Habra police officer to run searches at an Orange County fusion center, where multiple law enforcement agencies work investigations."Will you please run AZ plate...?" the detective asked in an email. "I am only able to pull from commercial databases for now."It is unclear how many people ICE searched in the system have criminal records. But ACLU lawyers said ICE's queries and privacy guidelines, which allow civil immigration enforcement officers to search the database for information up to five years old, show the agency circumvented internal privacy rules under the contract with Vigilant Solutions and state laws.California's "sanctuary state" law, which went into effect last year, prevents local police and sheriff's departments from sharing information about the people they arrest, question and detain with federal law enforcement and immigration agencies unless a suspect has a prior criminal conviction from a list of more than 800 felony and misdemeanor crimes.Another state law signed in 2015 requires law enforcement agencies across the state to maintain public privacy policies and usage guidelines on license plate readers and to keep reports on their use.Calls and emails to Viglant, La Habra police and Orange County fusion center were not returned.Matthew Bourke, a spokesman with ICE, said the agency limited the number of agents who could use the database and did not track or locate people not tied to a criminal or civil immigration investigation. He said users underwent training offered by the agency and the vendor and could be disciplined if they used the system in an inappropriate manner."ICE does not take enforcement action against any individual based solely on the information obtained [the database]," he added. "ICE personnel check the information against other investigative information, including information from government systems, before taking any action against the individual."Talla said the records revealed how law enforcement agencies in sanctuary cities and counties, which also limit collaboration between local government and federal immigration agencies, have little control over the information they share into the private database."If it doesn't want to share with ICE, it might share with some other third parties that might give it to ICE," Talla said.The case comes amid broader battles in the California Legislature this year over a far-reaching consumer privacy law, the right of people to control their information and the role of tech companies in facilitating Trump's immigration policies.State legislators, city leaders and privacy advocates have sought to expand laws limiting the amount of personal information that flows to the federal government, saying Trump's calls for more deportations and vetting initiatives target the public data of Muslim Americans, ethnic minorities and immigrants in the country illegally who pose no threat to the public.Legislation introduced last month by Assemblyman Rob Bonta (D-Alameda) would prohibit cities and counties across the state from entering into new contracts with any company that sells, mines or analyzes personal information for ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection.In Southern California, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) said she is working with Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra and Gov. Gavin Newsom to investigate claims that federal immigration agents might have been able to locate immigrants in the country illegally by searching a state government driver's license database, even though they had no criminal history.
editorial@tribune.com

New Delhi, March 14

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) told a Delhi court today that it has no objection if Rajeev Saxena, an alleged middleman, is allowed to turn approver in the AgustaWestland money-laundering case.

Special Judge Arvind Kumar reserved for March 25 the order on whether to allow him to turn approver and become a witness in the case.

EDs Special Public Prosecutors DP Singh and NK Matta submitted that Saxenas turning approver would be useful for the agency in the case. The court had granted bail to Saxena on a plea moved by his lawyer Shivani Luthra, after the agency did not oppose the application.

We are supporting Saxenas plea to become a witness. He has shown inclination since the beginning to help in the investigation. He deserves the pardon as sought by him. We vehemently support his plea because it will help us in the case, ED advocate Samvedna Verma told the court.

Saxena had recorded his statement during in-chamber proceedings on March 6 after which the court sent copies of his statement to the special judge hearing the case.  PTI
editorial@tribune.com

Washington, March 14

Responsible member-states of the Security Council may be forced to take other actions if China continues to block moves to designate Pakistan-based JeM chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, diplomats at the UNs principal organ have warned.

The senior diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity to give a sense of the frustration of other members of the Security Council after China on Wednesday put a technical hold on the proposal to designate Azhar as a global terrorist. China has blocked four bids in 10 years to get Azhar, a blue-eyed boy of Pakistans spy agency ISI, listed as UN-designated global terrorist.

Azhar masterminded many audacious attacks on India, including the 2001 Parliament strike and the recent Pulwama carnage in February. The proposal to designate Azhar under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council was moved by France, the UK and the US on February 27, days after a JeM suicide bomber killed 40 CRPF soldiers in J&Ks Pulwama.

If China continues to block this designation, responsible member-states may be forced to pursue other actions at the Security Council. It shouldnt have to come to that, a Security Council diplomat said in an unusual tough warning to China, a close ally of Pakistan.

India has expressed disappointment over Chinas decision but said it would pursue all available avenues to bring to justice terrorist leaders involved in attacks on Indians.

This is the fourth time that China has placed a hold on this listing. China should not prevent the Committee from doing the job the Security Council has entrusted it to do, another Security Council diplomat said.

Chinas move to hold the listing is inconsistent with its own stated goals of combating terrorism and furthering regional stability in South Asia, said the diplomat, requesting not to be named as the deliberations of the 1267 Al Qaeda UN Sanctions Committee are confidential, thus preventing member-countries from talking about it in public.

The case for designating Azhar  the leader of a group the UN already calls an Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organisation  is undeniable, the diplomat said.  PTI

Cong, BJP spar over Chinas Azhar move

PM Modi scared of Chinese prez: Rahul

Weak Modi is scared of (Chinese President) Xi. Not a word comes out of his mouth when China acts against India. NoMos China diplomacy: 1. Swing with Xi in Gujarat. 2. Hug Xi in Delhi. 3. Bow to Xi in China  Rahul Gandhi, Congress president

Why Cong president celebrating: Prasad

Why is Rahul Gandhi in a celebratory mood when the country stands pained with this attitude of China. Rahul Gandhis tweets must be headline news in Pakistan and will be circulated in JeM office with much merry.  Ravi Shankar Prasad, senior BJP leader
pardeepdhull@gmail.com

Tribune News Service

Hyderabad, March 15

An Indian-origin man was injured in the Christchurch terror attacks, his relatives residing in Hyderabad said on Friday.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the citys outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Khursheed Jahangir said his brother Ahmed Iqbal Jahangir was injured during the attack and is currently undergoing treatment at a local hospital in Christchurch.

He is injured. He is recovering in a hospital now. The latest information we received is that he is undergoing a surgery. We have seen the video.

"He has been shot in the chest and we are trying to reach Indian embassy people and local helpline numbers, Khursheed Jahangir said.

He said he spoke to AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi for help in reaching out to authorities for a visa and other formalities to go to New Zealand to see his brother.

Khursheed Jahangir said he has visited New Zealand twice and described it as one of the safest places in the world.

Asaduddin Owaisi tweeted requesting External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and the Telangana Governments help to enable the family to go to New Zealand.

I request @KTRTRS @TelanganaCMO @MEAIndia @SushmaSwaraj to make necessary arrangements for the Khursheed family, Owaisi said in a tweet.

These are Mr.Khursheeds passport details.

His brother is serious & his family has little support. Im only requesting the immediate support of your good offices in expediting his visa process.

Hell make all arrangements to travel to NZ by himself, Owaisi said in another tweet.

Reacting to Owaisis request, TRS working President and former minister KT Rama Rao tweeted Asad Saab, Will request our NRI department to assist.

Owaisi, in another tweet, said Farhaj Ahsan, a person of Indian origin, was also reported to have gone to the same mosque and is currently missing.

His family is in Hyderabad, I request immediate assistance to his family as well.

His familys contact details are available with me & Ill share the same with you.

Farhaj Ahsans parents could not be reached.

Suresh Kumar, a family friend of Ahmed Iqbal, said in a video footage they could see images of Iqbal, who runs a restaurant in New Zealand, at a mosque when the attack took place.

Since then we (Iqbals family in Hyderabad) have been trying to reach him. We could not reach him over phone.

His wife is in a state of shock.

We have sought the state governments help to send one of the family members to New Zealand, Kumar said.

According to Suresh, Ahmed Iqbal has been living in New Zealand for over a decade and settled there.

He has two children and is said to have permanent residency of that country.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist. With PTI
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Washington, March 14

Neomi Rao, a prominent Indian-American lawyer, has been confirmed for a powerful federal judgeship by the US Senate after she came under scrutiny for her past writings on sexual assaults.

Rao, 45, was confirmed for the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most powerful Benches in the country, by 53-46 votes on Wednesday in the Senate, which was basically on party lines. She will replace controversial Brett Kavanaugh who endured a bitter confirmation battle last year after US President Donald Trump named him to the US Supreme Court.

At present, Rao serves as the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs of the Office of Management and Budget.

Her confirmation came amidst stiff resistance from the Opposition Democratic lawmakers and even some Republicans. There was a nationwide campaign against Rao by rights groups.

She faced fierce questioning not just for her work in the Trump administration, but for commentary she wrote decades ago as a Yale University student suggesting women should change their behaviour to avoid date rape. Rao apologised last month for her previous writing.  PTI

woman power
rchopra@tribunemail.com

New Delhi, March 15

Nobody had hurt Indias global reputation and credibility more than the Modi government, the Congress alleged on Friday after over 100 economists and social scientists expressed concerns over political interference in statistical data in the country.

As many as 108 economists and social scientists on Thursday called for restoration of institutional independence and integrity of statistical organisations.

Their appeal came against the backdrop of controversy over revision of gross domestic product (GDP) numbers and withholding employment data by the NSSO.

Nobody has hurt Indias global reputation & credibility more than Modi government. 108 global economists and social scientists are concerned and you should be too! Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said in a tweet.

He urged people to vote out a party which, he alleged, hides its massive failures by statistical jugglery and excel sheet management!

The economists and social scientists have appealed to all professional economists, statisticians and independent researchers to come together to raise their voice against the tendency to suppress uncomfortable data and impress upon the government to restore access and integrity to public statistics and re-establish institutional independence.

The signatories include Rakesh Basant (IIM-A), James Boyce (University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US), Emily Breza (Harvard University, US), Satish Deshpande (Delhi University), Patrick Francois (University of British Columbia, Canada), R Ramakumar (TISS, Mumbai), Hema Swaminathan (IIM-B) and Rohit Azad (JNU). PTI
pardeepdhull@gmail.com

Tribune News Service



New Delhi, March 15

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed his deep shock and sadness at the loss of scores of innocent lives in the heinous terrorist attack at the places of worship in Christchurch today.



In a letter addressed to Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, he expressed his deepest condolences to the families bereaved in this dastardly attack, offered heartfelt prayers for the speedy recovery of the injured and underscored Indias solidarity with the friendly people of New Zealand at this difficult time.



The Prime Minister stressed Indias strong condemnation of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, and of all those who support such acts of violence. He stressed that hatred and violence have no place in diverse and democratic societies.
rchopra@tribunemail.com

New Delhi, March 15

The Supreme Court on Friday stayed the Meghalaya High Court judgment convicting The Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim and publisher Shoba Chaudhuri in a contempt case.

The high court had also imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh each on them and said if they failed to deposit the amount, they would have to undergo six months simple imprisonment and the paper would be banned.

The case relates to an article published by the paper on the perks and facilities for retired judges and their families.

A Supreme Court bench, comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices Deepak Gupta and Sanjiv Khanna, also issued notice to the high court registrar on the appeal filed by the editor and the publisher of the newspaper.

While pronouncing the judgment in the contempt case, the high court on March 8 had asked both of them to serve the sentence by sitting in the corner of the court room till the rising of the court.

Immediately after the high court order was stayed, Mukhim told PTI, The Supreme Court has stayed and suspended the judgment passed by the Meghalaya High Court on March 8. I have full faith that judiciary will protect the freedom of the press.

In her December 10, 2018 article titled When judges judge for themselves, Mukhim sought to draw parallels between the order by Justice SR Sen on perks for retired judges and an order passed by two former judges of the high court in 2016 before their retirement.

The order by the two judges demanding special category security was quashed by the Supreme Court.

Mukhim and Chaudhuri were asked to show cause as to why contempt proceedings should not be initiated against the newspaper for publishing the article.

In his showcause notice, Justice Sen had said that the media is not to dictate what the court should do.

It is really shocking that the publisher and editor of the said newspaper without knowing the law or background of the case are making comments which are definitely derogatory to a judge who is handling the case as well as the entire fraternity of the judges, Justice Sen had said. PTI
editorial@tribune.com

Manas Dasgupta

Ahmedabad, March 14

Veteran BJP leader LK Advani is likely to be dropped from the BJP list of candidates from Gujarat this time.

Sources said Advani, who represented the Gujarat capital city seat of Gandhinagar for the last six terms, would be approached by the party leaders to voluntarily drop his claim for re-nomination on grounds of advanced age.

In the event of dropping Advani, the BJP is contemplating to field its national president Amit Shah, currently a member of the Rajya Sabha, for the Gandhinagar seat. Shah is likely to contest if PM Narendra Modi preferred to re-contest only from the Varanasi seat in UP, and not a second seat in Gujarat, as he did in 2014 when he also contested from Vadodara. The party believes that the presence of either Modi or Shah in one of the seats in Gujarat would be important to achieve its Mission 26 goal to retain all the 26 seats it won in the state last time.

Besides Advani, the BJP is all set to drop about one-third of the sitting members to introduce new faces in their places. Bollywood actor Paresh Raval, who was elected from Ahmedabad (East) in 2014, is also believed to be among the sitting members to be dropped as his performance in the last five years was claimed to be less than satisfactory. The BJP, which today began the process of taking sense of the party workers in each constituency over the choice of the candidates, however, claimed that Raval himself had expressed reluctance to contest again.

In addition, Vithhal Radariya, the Porbandar MP, is unlikely to contest on health grounds and former ministers Mansukh Vasava and Haribhai Chaudhary are also likely to be dropped.

In Congress, while Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti convener Hardik Patels name is believed to have figured as the lone name for Jamnagar in the list being prepared by the state leadership for final approval by the party high command, at least seven sitting party members of the state Assembly are also reported to be vying for ticket to contest the LS elections. Former MP Soma Patel for Surendranagar and Lalit Vasoya for Porbandar are considered to be among the most probable choices.

Despite Congress chief Rahul Gandhis optimism that Hardik was certain to win, his contesting the elections is still hanging in balance due to a court order pronouncing him guilty of rioting and arson and sentencing him and two others to two-year jail each. Though the verdict of the Visnagar court was stayed by the HC, it had not given a stay on the conviction without which Hardik would not be allowed to contest the elections.

Hardik had approached the HC for a stay on the conviction to enable him to file his nomination but when the matter came up before Justice RP Dholariyas Bench, the judge recused stating not before me. At the request of Hardiks advocate, he directed the registry to consider the issue urgently and put the matter before another judge by tomorrow.
ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM

Sandeep Dikshit

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 14

The US is once again pushing ahead with its long-stalled plan for a lucrative business deal with India for setting up six nuclear power plants. The latest thrust came during a visit to Washington of an Indian delegation led by Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale when the US State Department ensured that the subject remained in the top half of the agenda.

It was in 2005 that India promised six nuclear plants each to the US, France and Russia in exchange for ending Indias isolation from mainstream nuclear trade after its 1974 nuclear tests.

Since then, only the Russian project is up and running while the French are grappling with land acquisition headaches in the backyard of Shiv Sena in Maharashtra.

The Americans were allotted the more conducive Andhra Pradesh but their plans went into a tailspin due to a series of disagreements capped by Toshiba-Westinghouse filing for bankruptcy.

However, there are two obstacles to tide over before Westinghouse can hope to get into the business end. Like the French company Areva, Westinghouse too has to demonstrate that it is operating a plant of the same design it intends setting up in India. As a source put it, Any forward movement will depend on the operation of reference plant of a similar design in the US. That is still some years away. The second is that the plant will have to produce electricity at reasonable rates. Russia has stolen a march on both the counts.

Westinghouse has top-level US backing. A year back, US Energy Secretary said Westinghouse was lean and mean and ready to get to work on India projects. But till the cost-effectiveness of the AP plant is established, the deal will represent the untapped potential of Indo-US ties.

Hanging fire
Description

GIS - 15 March, 2019: Mauritius will host from 20 to 21 March 2019 the 3rd edition of the Pension Funds and Alternative Investments Africa Conference (PIAfrica 2019) which will bring together senior executives from Pension Funds with regulators, asset managers, financial advisors, and other stakeholders from Africa, to engage in meaningful discussions on the way forward for the sector. The conference, which will be supported by the Economic Development Board, will be held at Hilton Mauritius Resort in Flic en Flac. Mauritius will host from 20 to 21 March 2019 the 3edition of the Pension Funds and Alternative Investments Africa Conference

Deliberating under theme The Search for Returns in a Global Low Return Environment, participating Pension Funds will share their views on the current investment climate, the strategies to overcome existing challenges and the opportunities available to savvy investors. The conference will highlight key trends and future industry issues , while offering ample opportunities for participants to network and engage in one-to-one meetings.

Delegates will have the opportunity to take part in interactive panel discussions with Government and private pension funds from across Africa and will play a role in unlocking institutional investment to close the infrastructure funding gap in Africa. They will also interact with decision-makers and asset managers in charge of billion-dollar portfolios seeking investment opportunities offering reliable returns while having the opportunity to showcase their projects and funds including alternative assets such as infrastructure, real estate and private equity to pension funds.

The presentations and panel discussions will be focused on: The search for returns in a low global return environment; Regulatory developments in Africa  South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Namibia, Botswana, Morocco, Egypt; Preserving and growing capital by insulating investments against market stress; Mega funds; and Benchmarking and performance insights.

Africa Pension Funds

Pension funds in Africa, which represent a large part of the Africas assets, are estimated to be valued at $ 29 billion, with up to 30% growth a year.

Traditionally bound by Regulations to invest in local fixed-income bonds, recent years have seen African governments easing Pension Funds access to other asset classes and offshore investing.

However, with the low return environment that is being experienced globally, a completely new world is unfolding for Pension Funds that will require more adaptive investment, risk management and analysis.
gspannu7@gmail.com

New Delhi, March 15

The CBI on Friday told the Supreme Court that Congress ex-leader Sajjan Kumars plea challenging the life term awarded to him by the Delhi High Court in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case should be dismissed.

The probe agency, in its reply on Sajjan Kumars plea seeking bail, said he has a large political clout and is capable of influencing or terrorising witnesses in the case pending against him.

The Bench posted the matter for March 25.  PTI
editorial@tribune.com

Amritsar, March 14

AAPs Patiala (rural) unit president was shot at by unidentified assailants in Tarn Taran district on Thursday while he was trying to prevent them from kidnapping a girl, the police said.

The injured, Chetan Singh, belongs to Rurki Kalan in Samana. The victim, a Harike resident, said she had come to the town to get her Aadhaar card issued.

A car bearing registration number PB-10 B 7474 blocked my way. Its occupants tried to abduct me when Chetan Singh, who was standing near the crossing, came to my rescue. The accused got panicky and shot at him, the girl said.

Chetan Singh was admitted to Patti Civil Hospital from where he was referred to Amritsar. The accused are Jagga Singh, Sandip Singh, Jatinder Singh and Manna of Harike. Their two accomplices are yet to be identified.  TNS
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, March 14

Finance Minister Manpreet Badal today attributed the reports of Bathinda MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal shifting to Ferozepur Lok Sabha seat to the fact that the SAD is out of power and her victory margin had dipped drastically in the last elections.

Talking to mediapersons here, Manpreet said, When the SAD was in power, everyone from a patwari to the chief secretary and from a police inspector to the DGP was helping them. Despite that she could defeat me by just around 19,000 votes in 2014. Now, there is no one to help them out.

On the possibility of his candidature from Bathinda, he said, We will cross the bridge when we reach there. The matter of ticket distribution is with the screening committee. He, however, added that one had to abide by the party orders. Earlier he had stated that neither he nor anyone from his family was keen to contest from Bathinda.

On alleged distribution of liquor at a SAD rally in Tarn Taran, the minister said, An individual is in politics to serve the country and to earn the respect for his family by doing good work. During their rule, the Badals faced allegations of sacrilege, corruption, sheltering drug smugglers and maladministration. When one is not getting respect he should bid adieu to politics.

Wont contest if Harsimrat shifts seat: Khaira

Jalandhar: Punjab Ekta Party leader Sukhpal Khaira on Thursday said he would not contest LS polls if Bathinda MP and Union Minister Harsimrat Badal moved from her home constituency to Ferozepur. I will contest only if Harsimrat is in fray from Bathinda. If she runs away, I will not follow her to Ferozepur. She will be labelled as a loser even before the polls and our purpose will be solved, he said. TNS

Tells Sukhbir to share biz mantra

When asked whether the government will probe the wealth amassed by the SAD chief, Manpreet said, He (Sukhbir) has earned so much money. We both are from the same family, but I have only four buses and he has got 200. Besides, he also has five-star hotels. The inference here is that either he has got his education from a foreign university or he has some business mantra, which he should share with the people of Punjab so that they also become rich. He said government agencies like the I-T Department and ED were there to look into the matter, if needed, but the government was certainly not going for a witch-hunt.
rchopra@tribunemail.com

GS Paul

Tribune News Service

Attari, March 14

Amid simmering tensions, officials from India and Pakistan held their maiden meeting here today to discuss modalities and the draft agreement on the Kartarpur Sahib corridor that will allow devotees access to the Sikh shrine in Narowal, across the border.

The Indian delegation was led by SCL Das, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs. The Pakistan delegation was headed by Dr Mohammad Faisal, DG (SA and SAARC), Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

After the meeting, a joint statement was issued which said the two sides had mutually agreed to work towards expeditiously operationalising the corridor.

The next round of talks will be held at Wagah on April 2. These will be preceded by a meeting of technical experts on March 18 at Zero Point to remove flaws, if any, and finalise the logistics.

The Pakistani officials were told to ensure that places of pilgrimage were not misused for propagating anti-India sentiments and the corridor was not used to push in infiltrators.

Das said though the focus remained on facilitating hassle-free access to the shrine, the Pakistani delegates were told that talks and terror cannot go hand in hand and that this meeting should not be seen as a resumption of bilateral dialogue.

The meeting was held exactly a month after the February 14 Pulwama attack. Deepak Mittal, MEA Joint Secretary, said: We emphasised that no activity could be allowed which was against the spirit with which the pilgrims would be going to Gurdwara Kartarpur Sahib. They assured us they would not let their soil be misutilised.

Nidhi Khare, Joint Secretary, MHA, said the prime objective was completion of the first phase by September 2019 and visa-free entry. The Indian officials demanded that the pilgrims be also allowed to travel by foot. Passport as the sole identification document was tentatively agreed upon, she said.

Indias Demand

On number of pilgrims daily

Asked for 5,000 pilgrims to begin with and on special occasions, take the number of people to 15,000

Timing and period

Asked for keeping the corridor open from dawn to dusk on all 365 days in a year

Who all can be allowed

Asked for allowing all resident Indian citizens and also Overseas Citizens of India (OCI) card holders

Encroachment of land around Gurdwara

Registered strong objection over rampant encroachment of land around the gurdwara and asked for its early restoration. The land was donated to the gurdwara by Maharaja Ranjit Singh and other eminent Sikh devotees over a period of time

Pakistans Response

On number of pilgrims daily

Wanted to restrict the number of pilgrims to 500 every day and was silent on the issue of special occasions

Timing and period

Wanted to limit the pilgrims visit only to visiting days and indicated that it should be done for three to four days a week

Who all can be allowed

Initially agreed to allow only Sikh pilgrims, but when persuaded agreed to allow Indian citizens only

Encroachment of land around Gurdwara
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 14

As the Punjab Congress leadership is busy discussing the potential candidates, OBC leaders today accused the party of ignoring them while allocating ticket for the parliamentary elections.

After holding a meeting here, party leaders from Ramgarhia, Gujjar and Saini communities decided to hold a show of strength at Anandpur Sahib in the coming days to send across their message to the party leadership, apart from meeting senior leaders in Delhi.

Leaders RP Singh, Rajpal Singh, Gursewak Cheema, Inderjit Singh Basarke and Surjit Singh Siota said despite the OBC vote share being close to 30 per cent, the party had been ignoring them despite their loyalty. At least three seats should be given to the OBCs in Punjab, they said, while addressing a press conference.

Rajpal Singh pointed out that the Jats were getting more seats, despite their vote bank being largely inclined towards the Akalis. Instead of bringing parachute candidates, local leaders should be fielded from Anandpur Sahib and other seats, said RP Singh.

Charanjit Singh Channi was the last leader from the OBC community who was given the ticket in 1999. The seats are distributed among the Jat, Hindu and SC leaders, said Soita.
rchopra@tribunemail.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 15

Expressing disappointment at Pakistans response to the various issues raised by India during the first meeting on the Kartarpur Corridor, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Friday urged Islamabad to be more amenable and responsive to Indias demands, keeping in view the interests of the devotees seeking to pay obeisance at the historic gurdwara across the border.

In a statement issued here, the Chief Minister said Islamabads response to Indias demands is totally inadequate and the neighbouring country needed to reconsider its stand if the corridor is to serve its true purpose, in the spirit in which it was decided to be opened.

The governments of the two countries took a historic decision by agreeing to open the corridor to mark the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, in November this year, Amarinder said, lauding the fact that the Pulwama attack and the subsequent IAF airstrikes were not allowed to scuttle the talks between the two sides on taking the project forward.

It was good that the two countries remained on track with the project deadlines, but Pakistan needed to go a step further to make the initiative truly meaningful for the pilgrims, particularly the Sikh community, which had been deprived of darshan at the Kartarpur gurdwara for over 70 years, he added.

The limitation of 500 pilgrims a day, as proposed by Pakistan, is extremely insufficient to cater to the aspirations of the large number of devotees desirous of darshan at the gurdwara, said the Chief Minister. And curtailing the visit to a limited number of days in a week would defeat the purpose even further, he added.

Pakistans response to Indias demands on Kartarpur Corridor is totally inadequate. The Corridor wont serve its true purpose with such limitations. Sikhs have been deprived of Kartarpur gurdwara darshan for 70 years, need to allow more people every day, including from overseas, he tweeted.

Amarinder reiterated his demand for visa-free khule darshan at the gurdwara for Indians of all faiths, from India and overseas, seven days a week. Pilgrims should be allowed to go through Kartarpur Corridor for khule darshan at the historic gurdwara all 7 days a week. Special permits should be good for identity, the visa requirement needs to be waived. Pakistan has to be more responsive on this issue, he further tweeted.
sanjiv@tribunemail.com

ON another point Mr Ironside got his rebuff from Pandit Malaviya. He said in his speech that in Calcutta he had discussed the matter with Indian friends and they were of opinion that for the sake of the people of Bengal and the saner portion of the community the Bill must be pushed through. Pandit Malaviya enquired who these Indian friends, what their credentials were and why they did not come forward to express the views publicly. His reply was:-They dare not. In that case, said Pandit Malaviya, their opinions are not worth having.
uttara@tribuneindia.com

London, March 15

Brexit-supporting lawmakers have rejected an additional legal opinion by Britains top government lawyer on Prime Minister Theresa Mays divorce deal assurances, The Telegraph reported.

Attorney General Geoffrey Cox had attempted to win over Brexit-supporting lawmakers with additional legal advice, the newspaper reported.

His original opinion published on Tuesday that the legal risk remained that Britain might be unable to get out of the backstop helped convince Brexit-supporting lawmakers to oppose the deal.

But in additional advice, Cox stated that Britain will be able to break out of the Irish backstop if it is having a socially destabilising effect on Northern Ireland, which would be considered a fundamental change of circumstances, the newspaper said.

A so-called star chamber of eurosceptic Conservative lawyers, which includes Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) deputy leader Nigel Dodds, produced a five-page analysis of the advice and concluded that it is erroneous and badly misconceived.

In the legal advice, Cox said the Vienna convention enables the UK to break off the backstop in the event that there has been an unforeseen and fundamental change of circumstances.

It is in my view clear and undoubted in those exceptional circumstances that international law provides the right to terminate the Withdrawal Agreement, Cox said.

If that were to happen, it would no doubt offer to continue to observe the unexhausted obligations in connection, for example, with citizens rights.

Brexiteers rejected the advice.

Saying they are exceptional does not make them so in the eyes of international law, their lawyers said.

Hungary undoubtedly thought there was something exceptional about the collapse of Soviet tyranny and the liquidation of the other State Party with which Hungary had concluded the treaty in question. But that was not enough. Reuters
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

London, March 14

British lawmakers voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to seek a delay in Britain's exit from the European Union, setting the stage for Prime Minister Theresa May to renew efforts to get her divorce deal approved by parliament next week.

Lawmakers approved by 412 votes to 202 a motion setting out the option to ask the EU for a short delay if parliament can agree on a Brexit deal by March 20  or a longer delay if no deal can be agreed in time.

The vote makes it likely that the March 29 departure date set down in law, which May has repeatedly emphasised, is likely to be missed, although it is unclear by how long. The short delay envisaged in the motion could last until June 30, but the longer extension is not currently time-limited.

It would require unanimous approval from the other 27 EU members, whose leaders meet in a summit next Thursday. May hopes the threat of a long delay will push Brexit supporters in her Conservative Party and members of the Democratic Unionists, the small Northern Irish party that props up her minority government in parliament, to back her deal at the third attempt.

A new vote on May's deal is likely next week, when those lawmakers must decide whether to back a deal they feel does not offer a clean break from the EU, or reject it and accept that Brexit could be watered down or even thwarted by a long delay.

Her spokesman said ministers had agreed to redouble their resolve to secure a deal.

Earlier on Thursday, lawmakers voted by 334 to 85 against a second referendum on EU membership. Few opposition lawmakers backed the measure and even campaigners for a Peoples Vote said the time was not yet right for parliament to vote on it.

The government narrowly averted an attempt by lawmakers to seize the agenda on March 20 with the aim of forcing a discussion of alternative Brexit options  possibly limiting Mays options when she takes her case for delay to the EU.

Thursday's vote does not mean a delay is guaranteed; EU consent is needed, and the default date for Britain to leave if there is no agreement is still March 29. Mays spokesman said the government was still making preparations for a no-deal exit.

Her authority hit an all-time low this week after a series of parliamentary defeats and rebellions. But she has made clear her deal remains her priority, despite twice being overwhelmingly rejected, in January and again on Tuesday.

Mays spokesman said earlier on Thursday that she would put that deal, struck after two-and-a-half years of talks with the EU, to another vote if it was felt that it were worthwhile.  Reuters

She didnt follow my advice

"Im surprised at how badly its all gone from the standpoint of a negotiation. I gave her (May) ideas on how to negotiate it she didnt listen to that. Shes got to do what shes got to do. But I think it could have been negotiated in a different manner." Donald Trump, US President
uttara@tribuneindia.com

Christchurch, March 15

Facebook on Friday said it removed both the shooters' accounts and a live streaming video after they opened fire at two mosques in New Zealand's Christchurch city, causing "multiple fatalities".

"Police alerted us to a video on Facebook shortly after the livestream commenced and we quickly removed both the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video.

"We're also removing any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as soon as we're aware," said Mia Garlick from Facebook's New Zealand office in a statement.

"We will continue working directly with New Zealand Police as their response and investigation continues," Facebook added.

The New Zealand police arrested four people, three men and a woman, after the shooting. The shootings took place at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Masjid, The New Zealand Herald reported. IANS
Description

GIS - 15 March, 2019: A series of activities with the aim of raising awareness on the rights of consumers are being held from 15 to 17 March 2019 by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Consumer Protection to mark World Consumer Rights Day, observed on 15 March every year. The aim is to highlight the importance of observing and enforcing consumer rights. A series of activities with the aim of raising awareness on the rights of consumers are being held from 15 to 17 March 2019 by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Consumer Protection to mark

Activities are focusing on this years theme Trusted Smart Products and the basic rights of consumers. During the three days, officers of the Consumer Affairs Unit (CAU) of the Ministry will be present at main hypermarkets/ supermarkets across the country to sensitise the public on the theme and the basic Rights of Consumers. Flyers will also be distributed and queries of the public will be answered by the officers. Moreover, talks, presentations and group discussions on the theme will be broadcast on television and radio channels.

The campaign also includes the display of the eight basic Consumer Rights on electronic boards.

About the theme

The chosen theme this year highlights what consumers want and need from a connected world and how important it is to put them at the heart of the development of these digital and smart products and services.

According to Consumers International, there are currently 23.1 billion smart products in the world, three times of the worlds population. Smart technology brings many opportunities for consumers in the way they interact with smart products and services. The theme seeks to shed light on the significant causes for concern such as lack of security and privacy and who to be blamed for the misuse and abuse of these facilities.
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Dhaka, March 14

Bangladesh's jailed former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia on Thursday filed a plea in the Supreme Court, challenging a High Court verdict that enhanced her punishment to 10 years imprisonment from five years in a corruption case.

In the petition, Zia, 73, prayed to the SC to suspend her punishment and grant her bail in the Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case. The Appellate Division is yet to fix any date for hearing the petition.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party chief is serving a 10-year term in a special structure of the old Dhaka Central Jail. Her party suffered a miserable defeat in the December 30 elections bagging only six seats in 300-seat Parliament. The ex-premier's conviction on a charge of moral turpitude debarred her from contesting the polls.

The lower court sentenced Zia to five years in jail in the case, but the High Court passed an order doubling the jail term in the case (and) therefore we filed the appeal seeking stay order on effectiveness of her punishment and her bail, Zias lawyer Kaisar Kamal said. He claimed that the HC unfairly, unjustly and unreasonably enhanced Zia's punishment while she did not commit any corruption.  PTI
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

London, March 14

Indians are among the largest group of professionals set to benefit from a new UK government plan to remove any limit on the number of PhD-level work visas to be granted.

UK Chancellor Philip Hammond on Wednesday announced in a Budget update, referred to as the annual Spring Statement, that from later this year, all such highly-qualified roles will be exempt from any cap on the numbers that can apply and come to work in Britain.

[A] key pillar of our plan is backing Britain to remain at the forefront of the technology revolution that is transforming our economy. And to support that ambition, from this autumn we will completely exempt PhD-level roles from the visa caps, Hammond said.

From Autumn 2019, PhD-level occupations will be exempt from the Tier 2 (General) cap, and at the same time the government will update the immigration rules on 180-day absences so that researchers conducting fieldwork overseas are not penalised if they apply to settle in the UK, he said.

According to the most recent UK Home Office data, Indians marked the largest increase in the grant of tier 2 visas last year, up by 6 per cent at 3,023 more visas compared to the previous year.

The UK governments latest PhD-level visa exemption was welcomed by UK universities, who are key employers of international researchers. This is fantastic news for Indian researchers who would like to work in the UK, and for UK universities  who thrive on bringing together a diversity of brilliant minds from around the world," said Vivienne Stern, Director of Universities UK International, the main representative body for UK higher education institutions.  PTI
gspannu7@gmail.com

London, March 15

Scotland Yard on Friday said officers will be undertaking extra patrols around mosques in the UK in the wake of the terror attacks on New Zealand mosques in which 49 people have been killed.

The Metropolitan Police is monitoring the situation since the mass shootings at Christchurch and remained on standby to offer support to its counterparts in New Zealand, Scotland Yards Indian-origin National Policing Lead for Counter-Terrorism Neil Basu said.

We will be stepping up reassurance patrols around mosques and increasing engagement with communities of all faiths, giving advice on how people and places can protect themselves, the UKs senior-most counter-terrorism official said.

Our international network of UK counter-terrorism officers will be ready to support our counterparts in New Zealand in responding to and investigating this appalling attack, said Met Police Assistant Commissioner Basu.

Expressing his condolences to all those affected in the attack, Basu said his team stands together with the Muslim communities and all other communities as well as partners in the UK and overseas to work with them to counter the threat no matter where it comes from.

Together with our intelligence partners, we continually monitor the varied threats we face, including to and around places of worship and specific communities across the country, to ensure we have the most appropriate protective security measures in place to keep people safe, he said.

Basus statement came as it emerged that senior counter-terrorism experts and security services personnel are set to hold talks with UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid on how mosques in the UK can best be protected.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who described the attacks as heartbreaking, reiterated that there would be highly visible policing around mosques today, as well as armed response officers, as Londoners go to pray.

Queen Elizabeth II and British Prime Minister Theresa May led condolences from the UK following the deadliest terror attack in New Zealands history.

The Queen said her thoughts and prayers are with all New Zealanders at this tragic time.

She said: Prince Philip and I send our condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives. I also pay tribute to the emergency services and volunteers who are providing support to those who have been injured.

Other members of Britains royal family also offered their condolences, with Princes William and Harry and their wives, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle, issuing a joint message describing the attack as senseless.

They ended the message with the Maori words Kia Kaha, meaning stay strong.

On behalf of the UK, my deepest condolences to the people of New Zealand after the horrifying terrorist attack in Christchurch. My thoughts are with all of those affected by this sickening act of violence, said May.

MPs observed a minutes silence in the House of Commons and flags over Downing Street are flying at half-mast as a sign of mourning.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the attack as one of the nations darkest days.

At least 49 worshippers were killed in attacks on the Al Noor Mosque in central Christchurch and the Linwood Mosque in the citys outer suburb, in what appeared to be the worst attack on Muslims in a western country.

Witnesses said victims were shot at close range, with women and children believed to be among those killed.

The gunman at one mosque was an Australian-born citizen, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in Sydney, describing him as an extremist, right-wing, violent terrorist.  PTI
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Washington, March 14

The US Senate has dealt a stinging bipartisan rebuke to Donald Trumps foreign policy and his alliance with Riyadh, voting to end support for the bloody Saudi-led war effort in Yemen.

Lawmakers in the Republican-controlled chamber approved on Wednesday a historic curtailment of presidential war powers that directs Trump to remove US Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting the Republic of Yemen within 30 days. The Senate vote was 54 to 46, with seven Republicans defying the President and aligning with Democrats.

The White House has threatened a veto, calling the measure flawed and saying it would harm bilateral ties in the region and hurt Washingtons ability to fight extremism. But its full passage would set a historic marker. It would be the first measure passed by Congress to invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution to directly curtail a President's use of military powers.

We begin the process of reclaiming our constitutional power by ending US involvement in a war that has not been authorised by Congress and is unconstitutional, Senator Bernie Sanders said.  PTI
vermaajay1968@gmail.com

Washington, March 14

The Trump administration used an annual human rights report to call out Saudi Arabia on Wednesday over the October killing of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The State Department annual global human rights report said The Washington Post columnist was killed by agents of the kingdom, a close US partner, while he was inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. It drew no conclusion as to who was responsible, despite the belief of intelligence agencies and lawmakers that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder.

The report noted Saudis Public Prosecutors Office indicted 11 suspects and said 10 persons were under probe but has not released more information. At years end the PPO had not named the suspects nor the roles allegedly played by them in the killing nor had they provided a detailed explanation of the direction and progress of the investigation, it said. The report said the murder was one of several instances in which the government or its agents engaged in arbitrary or unlawful killings and contributed to an environment of impunity in the country.

It also cited other human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, including arrest of 20 womens activists, executions for nonviolent offences, forced disappearances and torture of prisoners.  AP

Saudis reject call for international probe

Saudi Arabia on Thursday reiterated its rejection of calls for an international, independent investigation into the Khashoggi murder, insisting it was well equipped to bring the perpetrators to justice. The head of a Saudi delegation, Bandar Al-Aiban, speaking before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva stressed though that any calls to internationalise the probe amount to interference in our domestic affairs.
Farleymania erupted in Scarborough yesterday as Progressive Democratic Patriots (PDP) deputy leader Farley Chavez Augustine was sworn in as Tobago House of Assembly (THA) Chief Secretary.

Supporters came out early in the capital wearing their PDP T-shirts and waving flags, as they sang, Farley, Farley, Farley! and mobbed him when he arrived at the Assembly with his fiancee, Takyana Nedd.
Automobiles are unloaded from a cargo carrier at a port in Lingang in Pudong New Area, Shanghai. [Photo/Xinhua]

The nation's first free trade zone will be enlarged to promote the next stage of the country's opening-up process.

The planned addition of a new area to the China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone is aimed at promoting a higher level of opening-up to the outside world rather than just a simple expansion in geographical size, according to a top official from Shanghai.

The new area will become a special economic function zone, with stronger market influence and international competitiveness via institutional innovation and functional reconstruction, said Li Qiang, Party secretary of Shanghai.

"It will work as an important carrier for China to become deeply integrated with economic globalization," he said at a plenary meeting of the Shanghai delegation attending the ongoing session of the National People's Congress, the top legislative body, in Beijing on March 6.

The zonethe first in Chinawas established in 2013, and initially covered 28.78 square kilometers. It was expanded to 120 sq km in late 2014.

In his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the China International Import Expo in Shanghai in November, President Xi Jinping said the FTZ would be enlarged again.

Xi also announced two other major tasks for the cityto launch a science and technology innovation board on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in tandem with an experimental registration-based system for initial public offerings, and to promote higher-quality growth and the integration of the Yangtze River Delta as a national strategy.

Li said making the announcements during such a special occasion as the opening ceremony of the inaugural CIIE indicated the nation's commitment to the promotion of a new round of reform and opening-up.

"It again demonstrated the clear attitude and firm determination that China will not close its doors to the world and that reform steps will never stop," he said at the ongoing two sessionsthe annual meetings of the NPC and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the top political advisory body.

He also praised the deliberations about the draft law on foreign investment: "The law, if passed, will be conducive to the establishment of a stable, transparent, predictable and fair business environment, which will offer a legal guarantee for Shanghai to push forward the expansion of the free trade zone, construction of which will start soon."

Speaking at the city's annual legislative meeting in January, Ying Yong, mayor of Shanghai, said the FTZ will be comparable with other zones across the globe, offering the most competitive policies and putting forward attractive opening-up policies and systems.

Hang Yingwei, an NPC deputy and head of the government of Pudong New Area, where the Shanghai FTZ is located, said the zone's new area will push forward innovation in terms of offshore trade and an experimental "white list" system, featuring companies and entities that will receive preferential treatment.

"The FTZ's new area will focus on the development of the offshore economy, the innovation economy, the headquarters economy (growth based on attracting the headquarters of large companies) and the digital economy," Hang said on the sidelines of the NPC session.

As an example, he cited the China headquarters of Volvo Construction Equipment in Shanghai, which was the first company to complete the domestic settlement of offshore trade with the separation of flows of orders, goods and capital.

The China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone has become a test bed for new economic policies. [Photo/Xinhua]

"Such a breakthrough in offshore trade helps us to further explore practices to increase the growth of our international business," Hang said.

Statistics from the Information Office of the Shanghai Municipal Government show that in the five years since the FTZ was established, the total import and export volume has reached 6 trillion yuan ($900 billion), with realized foreign investment of more than $22 billion and 57,000 registered businesses.

More important, the zone has become a test bed for new economic policies. A total of 127 systematic innovations that were first implemented in the Shanghai FTZ have been promoted nationwide in the past five years. One such innovation, the negative list systemwhich defines sectors in which foreign entities are not allowed to investwas initially introduced by the zone to manage foreign capital. Last year, it was expanded nationwide.

In addition, the zone's deepened reforms, aimed at facilitating efficient customs clearance, reduced entry and exit times in bonded areas by 78.5 percent and 31.7 percent respectively, compared with the national average. The move has been hailed as a benchmark for the rest of the country to emulate.

Meanwhile, a report by the World Bank in October showed that China's business environment rose to a global ranking of 46 last year, up from 78 in 2017.

Tariff policy

National lawmakers and political advisers have also suggested a zero-tariff policy to better promote free trade.

Xu Juehui, an NPC deputy and deputy Party head and managing director of Shanghai Port International Cruise Terminal Development, said tariffs at many FTZs across the globe are zero or almost zero. However, the current tariff policy at the Shanghai FTZ means it echoes the duties imposed on specific goods overseas, so there are no advantages to attract trade and logistics resources from other countries.

"Based on the principle of trade reciprocity, I suggest promoting a zero-tariff policy in the new area of the Shanghai FTZ," Xu said.

Jiang Ying, a CPPCC member and deputy CEO of Deloitte China, suggested that optimization of the tax system in the Shanghai FTZ should begin with fields related to the headquarters economy, the trade in goods and services, and finance and capital markets, which would demonstrate the zone's forward-looking approach.

Denis Simon, executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University in Jiangsu province, said Shanghai has been seeking to strengthen its role as an innovation hub, and the expansion of the city's FTZ would be an opportune time for this to happen.

"By freeing up the local economy from pre-existing constraints on capital flows and having an improved climate for the development and protection of intellectual property rights, the FTZ can serve as an important catalyst for driving indigenous innovation," he said.

Moreover, if the zone can attract ample high-end talent, it may serve as a magnet to attract foreign research and development centers to the area, according to Simon.

He added that the presence of local and multinational companies engaged in R&D and knowledge commercialization could create a new set of agglomeration dynamicscost savingsto drive a great technological leap in Shanghai.

"The new, more-open business environment fostered by the FTZ can energize the economic and technological drivers needed to help Shanghai play more of a leadership role in China's overall technological development," he said.
Stanford Computational Policy Lab Released Data on Millions of U.S. Traffic Stops

Three Takeaways from Open Data Day 2019

San Antonio, Texas, Passes New Cross-Agency Data-Sharing Agreement

U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has introduced legislation called the Digital Service Act, which would state and local government agencies federal support for investing in tech and modernization efforts.Another facet of the legislation is that it would also boost the United States Digital Service (USDS), a federal agency that helps improve how government uses technology. If it comes to pass, the Digital Service Act would direct $50 million of funding to the USDS, plus $15 million to seed grants for state and local government digital services. Those grants would require that 50 percent of the money be spent on hiring talent rather than procuring technology. Grantees would also have to report their results at the end of the two-year period, and the USDS would be required to report to Congress on the grants bi-annually.In a press release announcing the legislation , Harris received support from Code for America  a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that supports the government's use of tech to better serve citizens  and the Center for Democracy and Technology, another nonprofit that promotes democracy and associated values by shaping policy with a focus on individuals.Americans deserve a government that works for them and that just plain works, Harris said in the press release. We must do more to empower our state and local governments to tap into the power of technology to provide seamless, cost-effective services for the 21st century. The Digital Service Act will help harness top talent for the government, save taxpayer dollars, and put the power of technology to work on behalf of the American people.Earlier this year, Harris declared that she would seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency. In that context, it should be noted that this is perhaps the most high-profile move of any candidate in the race as it pertains to state and local governments using technology. While government technology has not traditionally been an issue that has interested national voters, its potential for efficiency and tangible change may catch the attention of an electorate this year among demographics that have shown increased interest in government.The Stanford Computational Policy Lab, which uses tech to tackle issues related to criminal justice among other things, has released the results of a five-year effort to collect data on hundreds of millions of traffic stops in the United States.These datasets are now available for interested parties such as the media, elected officials and, of course, civic technologists. In addition to the actual data sets, the researchers have also released an analysis of racial disparities within the stops. The project, dubbed the Stanford Open Policing Project , looked at nearly 100 million traffic stops that took place between 2011 and 2017 among 21 state agencies, including those in some of the most populous states in the country  states like California, Illinois, New York and Texas. The study also looked at data from 29 police departments at the municipal level, including major jurisdictions such as San Francisco, Philadelphia and New Orleans.On a typical day in the United States, police officers make more than 50,000 traffic stops, researchers wrote on the projects website. Our team is gathering, analyzing, and releasing records from millions of traffic stops by law enforcement agencies across the country. Our goal is to help researchers, journalists and policymakers investigate and improve interactions between police and the public.As the site also notes, before this research effort there was no comprehensive national repository of data that detailed interactions between law enforcement officers and the public. The site enables relatively easy exploration of the results, aided by tutorials. The analysis code also used by researchers can be found on the site.Finally, the developers noted that this is more of a beginning than an end. Well be regularly updating the repository, they wrote, and were collecting more information every day.Open Data Day 2019 has come and gone, and now some of those at the forefront of the nations civic tech efforts have shared lessons from this years event.In a medium post appropriately titled  Three Takeaways from Open Data Day 2019 , Code for America Developer Tom Dooner laid out some of the key lessons he noticed in the context of this years events.Open Data Day is essentially a time in which civic tech groups, government innovation outfits and others in the space host community events aimed at promoting open data. Dooners piece starts out by noting there are now 73 Code for America brigades  which are localized civic tech groups  spread throughout the country working together to solve shared community challenges.By learning about events in Tampa, San Francisco, Charlotte and other locales, Dooner noted that the three clearest lessons that emerged were: everyone can learn from big cities, open data is thriving and community is key.The first point is one often bandied about in government tech spaces, as many note that the size of cities make them into nigh perfect use cases for agile tech work. That work, if successful, can then be replicated elsewhere, be it in other jurisdictions or at the state and federal levels.If NYC has the resources to try many different prototypes, Dooner wrote, keeping up with what they most successfully accomplish might help you advocate for your smaller jurisdiction to do the same.As far as the point about open data thriving, Dooner noted that the brigades are by and large, shifting to focus on delivery-driven government, but that at the same time open data remains a cornerstone of their efforts. Finally, Dooner wrote about the importance of strong civic tech communities that can pull people with new skill sets into the fold.While all of these points cited concrete examples of things Dooner noticed in 2019, at this point in civic techs lifespan those three things could also be looked at as pillars for the work moving forward.San Antonio has passed a new enterprise agreement to streamline and share data across city departments.Craig Hopkins, the citys chief information officer, announced the agreement at the recent 20-20 Cities meeting in San Antonio, which was organized by Cities Today. The departments involved are housing, transportation, water, electricity, the river authority and Bexar County. The individual groups wont give up rights to their data, but they will have simpler channels to store it in places where it can be accessed by participants.The agreement contains processes for handling and sharing the data that allows privacy protections and other security measures to remain in place. Hopkins also noted that this model could potentially be used in other cities, even those that dont have direct oversight of all agencies and utilities.
It is your duty as Prime Minister and Minister of Health to provide whats best for your citizens. The jabs have been provided and are still available to all who want it. But what about those who do not want it?
(TNS) - Some Southcentral Alaska homeowners with earthquake-rocked foundations, tilting walls and mounting repair bills after the 7.1 Nov. 30 earthquake say theyve received far less disaster relief than they were led to expect and are now bracing for financial uncertainty.As of Monday, FEMA had paid nearly $6 million in disaster aid to about 2,600 households. Thats out of 5,200 cases that FEMA reviewed. A typical aid amount falls between $2,000 and $6,000, according to FEMA officials and interviews with homeowners.Thats far short of the maximum of nearly $35,000 that some homeowners with serious damage say they expected.Earthquake insurance is relatively uncommon in Alaska. FEMA, which rarely responds to earthquake disasters, says the aid will only cover minimal repairs to make a home safe, sanitary and functional. That includes a structurally sound exterior and interior, including the ceiling and floors, a March 1 fact sheet said.A half-dozen homeowners interviewed by theall reported serious structural damage. City engineers gave each a yellow tag, which means a home needs repairs before it can be lived in long-term.The homeowners described the experience of applying for aid as confusing. Several said they were grateful for the public money theyve received, but had expected to receive maximum aid from both FEMA and the state  and now appear unlikely to get either. Some now face bankruptcy or foreclosure.Its also been hard to know why award amounts have varied, homeowners say.With a sunken foundation and tilted floors, Sand Lake resident Ryan Manzek thought he would qualify for the maximum federal and state disaster relief. His contractors estimate shows well over $200,000 in damage.After two appeals, Manzek has received $6,000 in FEMA aid. He has since been told his only option was to apply for a loan from the Small Business Administration. If Manzek doesnt apply for a loan, or refuses it, he will no longer be eligible for a separate pool of up to $18,000 in disaster relief through the state of Alaska.They gave so much hope, Manzek said in an interview. The state gave so much hope of $52,000.FEMA officials say its rare nationally for the maximum amount to be awarded, which has led in other places to complaints of reverse sticker shock. The average amount of aid is in line with other major national disasters, including Hurricane Harvey in Texas and the Paradise wildfire in California, officials said. The agency has emphasized more recently that the government program only gets people back on their feet and is not a substitute for earthquake insurance.Just five homeowners have received the full amount so far, according to Jack Heesch, a spokesman for FEMA in Alaska.You probably lost your house, to get the max grant, Heesch said.he program also isnt meant to make getting a payout easy. A 1988 federal disaster relief law put strict rules in place to prevent fraudulent or improper payouts of taxpayer money.Heesch said he would encourage homeowners to exhaust their appeals with FEMA. But appeals take time and energy that some say they dont have.One particularly tenacious homeowner, after weeks of emails to officials, substantially boosted her award. Helen Sharratt, whose Eagle River home experienced a collapsed chimney flue, foundation damage and a broken sewer line, initially received about $2,100 and spent several weeks sending emails to government officials and elected representatives to complain. Sharratt said she wasnt asking FEMA to restore her home to its original state but estimated $60,000 in immediate safety issues.On Tuesday, an additional $27,353 from FEMA popped up in Sharratts bank account. It came without a detailed explanation, and it wasnt clear who made the decision, Sharratt said.Sharratt said her training as a lawyer and persistence may have worked in her favor. She said it appeared others were also deserving of the higher award.Im concerned with everyone who isnt pushing as hard as I am, Sharratt said.Heesch, the FEMA spokesman in Anchorage, said appeals can reveal issues an inspector missed.As of early March, building inspectors with the city of Anchorage had completed about 2,700 free structural assessments. Fewer than 1,000 remained. The inspectors have been posting colored tags  indicating the level of damage  on homes.Nearly three-quarters of those inspected have been green-tagged, or declared safe to occupy, according to Don Hickel, the citys lead structural inspector.Some 682 buildings, however, had been yellow-tagged, restricting use. An additional 71 buildings had been red-tagged and legally declared unsafe.A yellow tag, which Manzek and Sharratt were both given, means the home is habitable in the short term, Hickel said.But ... its not for long-term habitation. Youre going to have to repair it.The FEMA disaster response team has been in Alaska since early February and was running disaster centers and conducting inspections in Anchorage, Wasilla and the Kenai Peninsula. The agency contracts with private companies for inspections.One of FEMAs disaster recovery centers is tucked away in a once-bustling mall in Midtown, near a La-Z-Boy furniture gallery. On a Wednesday in late February, people were walking in, picking up referral sheets and visiting a series of booths.Of roughly 200 FEMA employees deployed in Alaska to respond to the earthquake, Heesch, the FEMA public affairs officer, is one of the very few that lives in Anchorage. His home, near Valley of the Moon Park, sustained minimal damage in the quake, he said.He said he preaches earthquake and flood insurance but doesnt own policies for either, for the same reason as a lot of other people: Its too damned expensive, and Im willing to run the risk.Heesch said his agency tries to manage expectations about the grant program. FEMA inspectors are trained to look for what the agency will help cover, he said.Living in the home, Heesch said, is a big indicator the homeowner is not eligible for a large payout.If your house is still safe and habitable, then we cant help it, Heesch said. Were not insurance people.FEMA covers basic facilities needed for a home to be habitable, including a toilet, roof, windows and doors, according to the March 1 fact sheet. The main questions are whether the doors are locked and the water, heater, electricity and hot water are all on, Heesch said.As an example, Heesch said, FEMA wont pay to fix a front door that wont open. Its a different story if the door doesnt lock, he said, because that creates a safety problem.Heesch said he could not explain the specific criteria FEMA inspectors use to assess damage. In interviews, homeowners described inspectors with tablets who checked off a series of boxes.Theres no hard and fast, Heesch said. In the end, its the opinion of the inspector whether he thinks a sunken foundation is safe or unsafe.For homeowners with repair bills that exceed FEMA help, the U.S. Small Business Administration comes in. The federal organization, also known as the SBA, offers low-interest loans of up to $200,000 for homeowners and $2 million for businesses.Of about 900 individual households that applied for the SBA loan, 284 have been approved, totaling nearly $15 million. Others are turned away because of credit, income or other factors. Thousands more were referred to FEMA but had yet to fill out an application.For businesses, the SBA has so far approved 13 loans from 60 applications, totaling $1.2 million.A disaster assistance program run through the state of Alaska, meanwhile, has been effectively put on hold. In the first two months after the earthquake, the program was heavily advertised. The state paid $314,000 to 24 households that reported major damage.The payments stopped Jan. 29, after President Donald Trump declared a major disaster declaration for Southcentral Alaska. Now the state is waiting for homeowners to exhaust the federal options first, said Jeremy Zidek, spokesman for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.Homeowners with earthquake damage must apply for a loan with the Small Business Association and be turned down before being found eligible for state aid, Zidek said.We realize people dont want loans, but that is how our plan works here in Alaska, Zidek said. The aim is to not pay twice for the same service, he said.The process of navigating dual disaster aid programs at different levels of government has sown confusion among earthquake victims. Multiple homeowners reported that state inspectors told them early on they would be recommended for the maximum state aid of about $18,000, only to be referred to FEMA, given a few thousand dollars and then directed to a loan.Homeowners also felt FEMAs standards for safe and habitable were open to interpretation.Sharratt, in Eagle River, said she was incredulous at an email from a state official. The email said the grant money aimed to help survivors make their homes livable while looking for other funds.That is exactly what most of us who have proven we have substantial structural damage to our damaged foundations and collapsed, gaping walls were led to expect, Sharratt wrote in an emailed response, which she provided to theOthers said the FEMA inspections did not appear to be experienced in assessing earthquake damage.Leslie Dickson bought her duplex near Lake Hood more than a decade ago. It was built in 1982 and backs up to a bog. The foundation sank in the earthquake and her sewer line broke. She got a yellow tag, and now has a few inches separating columns in the house from the floor and blankets and cardboard boxes keeping the cold air out of the garage.Her first FEMA inspector was from Florida. According to Dickson, the inspector carried a tablet with a checklist, and kept referring to the storm. Dickson was awarded $2,400, which she planned to appeal.In Sand Lake, 72-year-old Patti Bogan got about $12,000 from FEMA. Thats less than half of what it cost to fix a sewer line that broke in the earthquake, Bogan said. She and her partner live on a fixed income and are also confronting costs associated with a sunken foundation.Eugene Cho, 31, stayed with his brother after the quake but moved back into his Jewel Lake home after a series of break-ins in empty homes in his neighborhood. About a dozen homes were hit with very similar damage, particularly sunken foundations, Cho said.An engineer gave Cho a yellow tag and wrote in a report that it wasnt safe to live in his house long-term without repairs.Then, a few weeks later, FEMA told him he wasnt eligible for aid because he was living in the home.Nearby, Mandy Robisons house sank unevenly and is slanted. Her family did get FEMA aid, though it amounted to less than 5 percent of the estimated damage, Robison said. Like Cho, Robison and her husband decided to move back in despite a yellow tag and safety concerns. They have a child and pets, Robison said. The couple is working on their first appeal.Robison applied for an SBA loan last month, but was told it might only cover half the estimated damage.Cho and Robison in Jewel Lake, and Manzek and Bogan in Sand Lake, have been helping organize neighbors. There are now Facebook groups, email chains and Nextdoor threads. A Sand Lake block party was even in the works. Cho and Robison, along with their neighbors, pushed for their street damage to be put on the city road bond in the upcoming Anchorage election.Weve all come together a lot since the earthquake, Robison said. Its a crappy situation to bring us all together ... but were all very good friends now.In an email chain with other homeowners this week, Sharratt  the homeowner who successfully boosted her award  said her appeal letter quoted FEMAs eligibility definitions. Then she just kept fighting, she said.2019 the Alaska Dispatch News (Anchorage, Alaska)Visit the Alaska Dispatch News (Anchorage, Alaska) at www.adn.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
SCHODACK, N.Y.  On March 13, State Police in Schodack arrested a Cohoes woman accused of stealing thousands of dollars from a coworker.

On March 7, Troopers received a complaint from a coworker of Rachell Guilboards, who stated she had used his debit card without his permission to withdraw more than $2,500 from his bank account.

A subsequent investigation revealed that Guilboard had used the victims debit card on multiple occasions at ATM machines. The victim became suspicious when he says he saw Guilboard returning his debit card to his work truck.

Guilboard, 22, was charged with first-degree identity theft and fourth-degree grand larceny.

Guilboard was arraigned in Schodack Town Court and released to Rensselaer County Probation. She is due back in court on April, 3.
- The resolve to build the wall to protect the country from al-Shabab attacks was approved by the National Security Advisory Committee (NSAC) in 2015

- A total of KSh 8 billion was allocated to set up a fortified 700 kilometre wall on the Kenya-Somalia border

- Parliament established that already, KSh 3.3 billion had been spent to put up a 10 kilometre barbed wire fence

Parliament on Wednesday, March 13, unraveled shocking details of how the government under the Ministry of Interior and Co-ordination had spent KSh 3.3 billion to just put up a 10 kilometre barbed wire fence on the Kenya-Somalia border.

A security fence project on the border aimed at protecting the country against al-Shaabab militants was turned into a cash cow where legislators accused some powerful individuals of taking advantage of raising cases of insecurity to reap money from the project.

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READ ALSO: DPP Haji reveals Kikuyu, not Kalenjin community, has highest number of people implicated in graft cases

Parliamentary committee report showed KSh 3.3 billion was spent to put up 10km barbed wire fence along Kenya-Somalia border

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Woman reveals how she met her soulmate after making first move, advises ladies to do the same

According to Standard, despite the government splashing colossal amounts of money on the 10 kilometre stretch, construction workers from the National Youth Service (NYS) had gone without pay.

The report tabled in Parliament on Wednesday indicated the project was initially under the Ministry of Interior before it was transferred to the Ministry of Defence following a presidential directive

It further showed that before handing over to Defence, Interior had already spent KSh 3.3 billion out of the total KSh 8 billion allocated for the entire project that would cover a 700 kilometre stretch

Before handing over of the project to the Ministry of Defence, the ministry had expended a total of KSh 3, 380, 353, 960.52 as tabulated below, stated the report.

READ ALSO: Jubilee governor says Uhuru was wrong to work with Raila after treasonable swearing in

The breakdown of how the KSh 3.3 billion was spent each financial year was stipulated as follows; KSh 887 million (2014-2015 ), KSh 306 million (2015-2016 ) and KSh 578 million (2016-2017).

This, however, only amounts to KSh 1.7 billion, raising eyebrows on how the remaining KSh 1.6 billion was spent.

Initial estimates by the Ministry of Defence put the total cost of the project at KSh 8 billion.

The money was to be spent on three sections of the project covering the 700 kilometer stretch..

READ ALSO: Uhuru Kenyatta drives French President Emmanuel Macron around State House

The three sections were Northern part (KSh 3.5 billion) covering 160 kilometers, Southern part (KSh 2.6 billion) covering 105 kilometers, and Central (KSh 1.8 billion) meant to cover the remaining 445 kilometers.

Legislators led by Majority leader Aden Duale asked the Director of Public Prosecution Noordin Haji to launch investigations into the matter and bring to book those behind misappropriation of the money.

I have no problem with the wall, but you cannot use the threat of insecurity to steal and plunder money. The aim of this project was to eat money,

The chair of the committee must bring a recommendation to this report to say that there is no value for money and that Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) and DCI must investigate," said Duale

READ ALSO: Jubilee governor says Uhuru was wrong to work with Raila after treasonable swearing in

Minority leader John Mbadi questioned the reason behind building the wall saying the project was unnecessary and a waste of resources

You are not going to solve this problem by building a wall. That is too mechanical. It looks like the Egyptian pyramids, It cannot work in modern Kenya," said Mbadi.

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Atwoli's Prayer for Kenya I Tuko TV

Source: Tuko News
Always Kenya has finally bowed to pressure and addressed allegations saying their pads contain dangerous substances which have adverse side effects.

According to the company that produces sanitary towels, their pads are tested on various women therefore making them safe.

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READ ALSO: Woman reveals how she met her soulmate after making first move, advises ladies to do the same

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In a Twitter statement seen by TUKO.co.ke, the organisation assured women each of its product undergoes rigorous measures to assure the sanitary towels are of perfect quality.

According to Always, their products in Kenya are the same as the others across the world.

READ ALSO: Nigerian man in trouble after being caught with heap of used sanitary pads, ritual items

"All our products go through very rigorous regulatory tests and are also tested with real women to ensure that they are safe for use," the company said.

"The needs of our women and girls in Kenya are our number one priority, and we recognize that our consumers have evolving needs which is why we introduced our new product Always Soft which has a softer and more comfortable feel on skin," the company added.

Kenyans had launched a Twitter hashtag dubbed #myAlwaysexperience aimed at calling out the company and its products for distributing sanitary towels that put the lives of women at risk.

According to moat ladies, the company also misleads and misinforms its users by claiming the pads are safe and efficient to use.

Most Kenyans complained of developing irritating itches and rashes right after wearing the pads.

Others explained their pain as a burning sensation that could only be relieved by applying petroleum jelly on their private parts.

Most netizens were annoyed by the fact that their complaints went unheard and unanswered over the years despite airing their views on social media and tagging Always.

Others swore never to use the products again and sympathised with ladies who cannot afford to purchase other brands of sanitary towels.

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The Kenyan Man With No Penis |Tuko TV.

Source: Tuko Breaking News Latest
- Oil marketers said they had imported over 60 million litres of jet fuel which they believed was still in the KPC's system

- They were, however, informed only about 10 million litres of the costly fuel was left in stock

- 51 million litres of the jet fuel had gone missing, prompting the oil companies to write to KPC demanding explanation

- Meanwhile, the DCI is still in the process of unraveling the previous fuel spillage scandal in which 21 million of fuel valued at KSh 2 billion also disappeared

Even before the dust has settled on the KSh 2 billion fuel spillage chaos that erupted at Kenya Pipeline Company in December 2018, a fresh and much bigger theft scandal has exploded at the same graft-ridden state corporation.

Some 51 million litres of jet fuel estimated to be worth KSh 5 billion is said have mysteriously vanished from the stocks and nobody at KPC appeares to have ready answers on who siphoned the expensive commodity.

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READ ALSO: Kenya Pipeline MD quits after mysterious disappearance of fuel worth KSh 2 billion

About 51 million litres of jet fuel estimated to be worth KSh 5 billion allegedly disappeared from Kenya Pipeline Company's systems under mysterious circumstances. Photo: Standard.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Top Kenya Pipeline official's home raided by EACC over KSh 647 million tender

TUKO.co.ke understands oil marketers who previously locked horns with KPC over alleged spillage of 21 million litres have already penned another fiery letter to the corporation's bosses demanding to know where 51 million litres of their jet fuel went.

According to a report by Daily Nation, the marketers expected 61 million litres of the imported jet fuel to be in stock, but all that is left is a paltry 10.5 million litres, which means they have to import more fuel to address a looming acute shortage in the country.

The variance of our jet stocks requires an explanation from KPC. We had already imported this stock and discharged it into the KPC system and the same confirmed in your records, the furious oil marketers said in the letter addressed to the Acting MD, Hudson Andambi.

READ ALSO: Stolen NCPB KSh 1.9 billion meant for 2022 presidential campaigns - ODM

The jet fuel is needed to keep the aircraft flying, and this explains why Kenya Airports Authority (KAA), upon learning of the fuel crisis at KPC, also reportedly wrote a letter notifying pilots about the fuel crisis so they can make other arrangements.

The latest crisis comes a few months after the now former KPC boss, Joe Sang, dramatically reigned amid allegations that more than 20 million litres of fuel valued at over KSh 2 billion could not be accounted for.

Sang, whose term was to expire in April 2019, tendered his resignation letter on December 4, 2018, as probe into the alleged massive losses at the state corporation kicked off.

Kenya Pipeline Managing Director Joe Sang handed over his resignation letter on December 4, 2018, stating he would not be renewing his term which was expected to end in April 2019.Photo: Nation.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Ruto na marafiki zake ni wapayukaji tu, mimi na DCI sio vibaraka wa Uhuru  DPP Haji

The fuel spillage issue caused serious friction between KPC and major oil companies in the country.

Kenya Pipeline, which holds fuel on behalf of the local oil companies, claimed the fuel had spilled in the fields over the last two years and that some of it was lost through theft.

The oil companies in October 2018 wrote a letter to KPC demanding an independent forensic audit on the oil stock statements and loss records.

The KPC board resolved to invite the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) and independent audit firm to investigate the mysterious disappearance of millions of litres of fuel.

"The Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) through their joint company, Supplycor Kenya Limited, to conduct a forensic audit of stock positions which should be completed by December 31, 2018," the board stated.

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Source: Tuko Kenya
- The new prices will be effective from Friday, March 15

- The increase came barely a month after the regulatory body announced a drop in prices of fuel products

- This was attributed to increased in average landed cost of imported Super Petrol by 3.71%

Kenyans will have to spend more on fuel products after the Energy and Regulatory Commission (ERC) announced an increase in prices for super petrol, diesel and kerosene effective from Friday, March 15.

According to the ERC, the prices of the three crucial commodities increased by KSh 1.26, KSh 0.65 and KSh 2.96 per litre respectively for super petrol, diesel and kerosene in that order.

READ ALSO: Petrol, diesel, kerosene prices drop to KSh 100 and below in latest ERC monthly review

Misery for Kenyans as prices for super petrol, diesel, kerosene go up in latest ERC review

Source: UGC

READ ALSO:City Hall impounds 100 rogue matatus over illegal parking

TUKO.co.ke established the changes in this months prices were caused by an increase in the average landed cost of imported super petrol by 3.71%

In February, ERC announced a drop in the fuel products that saw petrol drop from KSh 104.21 to KSh 100.09 while diesel dropped from KSh 102.24 to KSh 95.96 and kerosene from KSh 101.70 to KSh 96.50.

This month (March), super petrol, diesel and kerosene will retail now at KSh 101.35, KSh 96.61 and KSh 99. 46 respectively in Nairobi starting midnight.

In Mombasa, the same will retail at KSh KSh 98.72, KSh 93.99 and KSh 96.83 in that order.

In Kisumu, petrol will retail at KSh 102.88, diesel at KSh 98.32 and kerosene at KSh 101.16

READ ALSO: Raila Odinga's daughter impressed after Coast man boldly asks for her hand in marriage

The commission warned retailers who would sell the products at higher prices than the prescribed prices of dire consequences.

Kenyans were also urged to report cases of exploitation to the commission.

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Atwoli's Prayer for Kenya I Tuko TV

Source: Tuko.co.ke
- A young girl identified as Success has since gone viral for her display of annoyance after being sent home from school

- She was sent home for not paying school fees and explained that she preferred being flogged to going home

- Nigerian celebs were touched by her outspokenness and a few of them promised to sponsor her education till university level

In most Nigerian schools, fee defaulters are usually sent home after being flogged and many wonder on the effectiveness of this form of punishment.

A young school girl in Warri, Delta state, named Success, gained the attention of Nigerians after she was spotted being outspoken about the perceived injustice.

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READ ALSO: Nigerian celebrity sponsors young girl who was sent home over fees, vowed to deal with school

Nigerian celebs react to video of young school girl who was sent home for non-payment of fees

READ ALSO: Uhuru Kenyatta's tight hug with former CNN anchor Zain Varjee lights up the internet

The little girl had been sent home from school for not paying her fees and she complained about the punishment.

Success even revealed she would rather be flogged rather than be sent home and since the video went viral on Instagram, a number of Nigerians have reacted out in various ways.

Many people found the girls action funny while others were saddened that she would be denied an education over her parents inability to pay her fees.

READ ALSO: Bungoma: Wanafunzi 58 wa shule ya Misikhu wakwama Kisumu baada ya basi lao kutwaliwa

Some Nigerian celebrities were also moved by Success' plight and took to social media to react.

Toke Makinwa took to her Twitter page to explain that no one should be humiliated in that manner for wanting a better life.

"I am so sick to my stomach watching this. No child should be put under pressure, no child should be humiliated and made to suffer for wanting a better life," she said.

Instagram comedian and politician, Jollof, took it a notch higher by promising to grant Success scholarship to university level.

"Please who can locate this child for me ? I will give her scholarship till she graduates from university Please anyone with useful information should contact me," he said

Another comedian, Ayo Makun, who had successfully reached the child revealed the minor reminded him of another young boy, Taju, whose life improved after Nigerian celebs came to his aid.

He also advised Nigerians to help little kids around them in similar situations.

See more reactions from known personalities below:

This is wonderful. We are hopeful that little Success will get the education she needs.

Do you have a life-changing story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

The Kenyan Man With No Penis | TUKO TV

Source: Tuko Breaking News
Privacy concerns

City denies ACLU claims

(TNS)  Dozens of law enforcement agencies nationwide  including some Valley agencies  are sharing license plate information with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of an operation targeting undocumented immigrants, according to documents released by the American Civil Liberties Union.The documents , obtained by the ACLU of Northern California through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, spark questions about whether the cooperation of the agencies with ICE violates state laws.The Tulare Police Department, Merced Police Department, Stanislaus County Sheriffs Department, Manteca Police Department and the San Luis Obispo Sheriffs Office are among the 80 agencies nationwide who have agreed to share information with ICE, the documents show.But at least one of the law enforcement agencies in the Central Valley said its not sharing such data with ICE.Vasudha Talla, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, said the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get documents from ICE in March 2018. But after the federal immigration agency failed to respond, the organization filed a lawsuit in May 2018.Talla said the ACLU became concerned about ICEs access to license plate information, and it believed it was important to litigate to get the records in a timely fashion.The records unveiled the large number of ICE agents that have access to such data, the list of law enforcement agencies sharing information with ICE and internal emails of an officer in Orange County informally sharing information with federal immigration agents, she said.California has laws prohibiting sharing of these types of data, she said. It is an invasion of privacy of all Central Valley residents.ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke, in a lengthy statement, confirmed the agency in December 2017 started a contract to obtain access to the commercial license plate reader database. He said the agency uses data from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations, like most law enforcement agencies.In March 2015, ICE developed a privacy impact assessment for the use of the technology, in order ensure the requirements with privacy and civil liberties were met. The assessment was updated in December 2017, prior to the agency accessing the database.ICE does not use the [license plate reader] data service to locate or track individuals who have no connection to ICE investigatory or enforcement activities, he said.The data that is collected and shared provides intimate details about an individual, Talla said.In addition to ICE being able to obtain the information from local law enforcement agencies, federal immigration agents also have access to a massive license plate reader information database through a private contract, according to the ACLU.More than 9,000 ICE agents have access to a vast automated license plate reader database run by a company called Vigilant Solutions.ICE has access to more than 5 billion scans of license plate locations through Vigilants database.ICEs contract to have access to the data began Dec. 21, 2017, and runs through Sept. 30, 2020 for an estimated cost of nearly $6.1 million, records show.License plate reader information cameras that capture information can be throughout communities, mounted on road signs, on patrol vehicles, parking lots and bridges. Over time, aggregated data can establish patterns of a persons life.Talla said this type of surveillance raises privacy concerns and theres a huge amount of civil liberty-related issues with the practice.The surveillance can reveal down to the minute where you are at any given time, Talla said. We think this is all happening under the radar, she said.Sgt. Joe Ahuna, with the Manteca Police Department, said his agency is not sharing license plate data with ICE.After receiving inquiries from media, Ahuna said, he spoke with Vigilant and discovered that ICE, by default, was listed as an agency the Manteca Police Department would share information with on the system.However, he said the city doesnt have license plate reader equipment in the community, and therefore, its not collecting nor sharing such information with ICE.Nothing has been submitted from us to be shared with anybody, he said. Because we are not collecting or transmitting any data, I dont think anybody was paying attention from the list.Ahuna said on Wednesday ICE was removed from the list after the issue was brought to the departments attention.This is obviously a very concerning issue for everybody in the state, he said.Matt Machado, with the Tulare Police Department, said his department would have to read the records and contact Vigilant in order to answer questions.Merced City Manager Steve Carrigan, in a statement to, said officials were reviewing information they received in a letter from the ACLU on Wednesday.Our review of the information will be done following our current policies and procedures, he said. We look forward to meeting with ACLU representatives to discuss this matter further once we have completed our review.Tony Cipolla, spokesman for the San Luis Obispo County Sheriffs Office, said the sheriffs office has never shared license plate reader information with ICE. The sheriffs office, he said, currently has one license plate reader in use for the purpose of stopping drug smuggling and human trafficking in the county.We are currently suspending the use of that system until further consultation with County Counsel regarding the legality of data collected and shared from license plate readers, he said in a statement toTalla said the ACLU is calling for an end to the surveillance, and for an investigation into compliance of Senate Bill 34, which deals with automated license plate recognition systems, and Senate Bill 54, the states Sanctuary Law The ACLU believes the practice violates both laws, but even more specifically, SB 34, Talla said. We are calling for the local agencies in California... to stop sharing the data with ICE, she said.Officials in Stanislaus didnt return calls seeking comment Wednesday.
F1 authorities are looking to add a new team or two to the grid for 2021.

Recently, FIA president Jean Todt said he would "love" to see a full grid of 12 teams, and Liberty Media is actively devising a new Concorde Agreement that would allow it.

It follows the recent trend for the big teams in F1 - Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull - to link up with smaller competitors that effectively become 'B' teams.

Renault is opposed to the trend.

"It's already a challenge for a team like us to compete against the top three teams who have 30 to 40 per cent more resources than us," said boss Cyril Abiteboul.

"But if they are now capable of combining their resources with other teams, or getting the benefit of synergies within the scope of a budget cap, that's a problem for us."

He also said it's a problem for at least "two other teams" in particular, obviously referring to struggling independent outfits McLaren and Williams.

"It's a serious topic because maybe we are now saying 'We have three top teams and that will be it'. And anyone joining will have to accept they will not be in a position to be competitive," said Abiteboul.

With their 'B' teams shaping and adding up, Ferrari (Alfa Romeo and Haas), Mercedes (Racing Point) and Red Bull-Honda (Toro Rosso) therefore don't see the need for new teams in F1.

"I think we are in a decent place right now for formula one," said Mercedes' Toto Wolff in Melbourne.

Red Bull's Christian Horner agrees: "I always go quality over quantity.

"I think we've got ten teams that are in pretty decent health at the moment. I think none of those teams that came in a few years ago are still here today.

"I think we've got a good balance at the moment. I would prefer that we look after what we've got and have good quality and a closer grid than just inviting more entries for the sake of filling the grid and there being more cars to lap," Horner added.

(GMM)
The following is a release by the Elections and Boundaries Commission on the recount request
By Jeff Murphy, March 14, 2019





WARRENSBURG, MO  One of the nations most popular sources for students to seek information that will help them in deciding which college or university best suits their education goals, U.S. News & World Report has ranked the University of Central Missouri among 2020 Best Graduate Schools for a part-time Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree.



The rankings were released this week by U.S. News & World Report in its online edition. A reflection of the commitment of the faculty and staff in UCMs Adrian and Margaret Harmon College of Business and Professional Studies, the rankings are based on data collected from 287 MBA programs out of 323 such programs nationwide that are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB). UCM was ranked 197th. To view the complete rankings, visit www.usnews.com.



U.S. News & World Report notes that part-time business programs play a vital role for working people who cant go to school full time for family or financial reasons. U.S. News part-time MBA rankings are based on five factors. These assessment criteria and their weight in the overall scoring process are as follows:

Average peer assessment score (50 percent).

Average GMAT score and average GRE quantitative verbal and analytical writing scores of part-time MBA students who entered in fall 2018 (15 percent).

Average grade point average of part-time MBA students entering in fall 2018 (12.5 percent).

Number of years of work experience of part-time MBA students entering in fall 2018, with more experience scoring higher in the rankings (10 percent).

Percentage of the business schools fall 2018 total full-time and part-time MBA enrollment that is in the part-time MBA program, with a higher percentage that is part-time scoring higher in the rankings (12.5 percent).

Part-time programs had to have at least 20 students enrolled part time to qualify for the rankings.



Information released by U.S. News & World Report follows in January that listed UCM as having a Best Online MBA program. In that report, UCM climbed from being unranked two years ago to 126th in the nation.



Ginger Killian, MBA director in the Harmon College, stressed the work of Harmon College faculty as a key factor in making these two lists. Harmon College leadership and MBA faculty have worked to make program revisions that have led to innovative concentrations that combine quality, flexibility and affordability to meet the needs of tomorrows employers while preparing students for managerial roles in business and industry.



Learn more about UCMs MBA opportunities by visiting www.ucmo.edu/mba. Also call Killian at 660-543-8192 or email mba@ucmo.edu to learn more.
Russian occupation forces launched four attacks on positions of Ukrainian troops in the Joint Forces Operation (JFO) area in eastern Ukraine over the past day.

In the zone of action of tactical force East, the enemy used heavy machine guns to fire on Ukrainian positions in the area of Bohdanivka (41km south-west of Donetsk). In the zone of action of tactical force North, Russian-led forces used small arms to fire on Ukrainian defenders near Travneve (51km north-east of Donetsk); anti-tank grenade launchers and heavy machine guns  outside Luhanske (59km north-east of Donetsk), 82mm mortars  outside Katerynivka (64km west of Luhansk), the JFO Headquarters press centre reports on Facebook.

No casualties among Ukrainian troops were reported.

According to the intelligence, one invader was killed in the past day. The enemys infantry fighting vehicle BMP-1 was also destroyed.

Today, the enemy has not opened fire yet.

The Joint Forces reliably control the enemy on the contact line, adhering to the ceasefire agreements.

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A trio of cheese quesadillas, with house-fermented hot sauce in the background. Photo: Melissa Hom

Only a few weeks after leaving Metta, the pyromaniacal chef Norberto Piattoni has resurfaced  at a bar in Red Hook. The former Francis Mallmann co-conspirator has traded in his grill fanaticism for the taquero trade, which hes plying at the two-week-old San Pedro Inn. Having taken over the former home of the wild and wildly loved Bait & Tackle, you could say San Pedro Inns owners want to fill the neighborhoods Bait & Tackle-sized hole  but the bar is much more than that.

The San Pedro Inn came out of a bar conceived for a massive installation called Grand Ole Opera at the nearby Pioneer Works. I had this idea to build this bar inside of it as a piece of this art show, says Gabriel Florenz, one of San Pedros owners and Pioneer Works founding artistic director. So he tapped his friend and Other Times Vintage owner Jason Grunwald, who, Florenz says, had this project that was like this underground roadhouse. That project  a motorcycle clubhouse that became a sort of after-hours spot, Grunwald says  inspired the installations bar. With Deth Killers of Bushwicks Greg Minnig, Grunwald created a biker bar and plastered the walls with  as Hyperallergic wrote  a lifetimes supply of leftover junk. The success of the project made Florenz and Grunwald think, why not just do it for real?

Having only been open for a couple of weeks now, the San Pedro Inn already gives a convincing illusion of being long lived-in and draws an eclectic, neighborly crowd. Walking in feels like stepping into a roadhouse, and the space is more tavern than dive  in part because of the wide and handsome mahogany bar that first catches your eye. Theres also just much more thats deliberate in the design than at many kindred establishments; the owners didnt want to open just another bar with brick walls and old family photos.

Check out that bar. Photo: Melissa Hom

Jason, you know, is an expert in kind of refinishing and furniture design and just scavenging like a maniac, Florenz says. Grunwald ripped the mahogany bar out of a 200-year-old house in Bushwick, he says, and designed around it . They built their own booths, brought in bar stools from the 50s, took out three layers of plywood to get to the original floors, added in a few psychedelic-looking skulls, and created a sort of ceiling mosaic of tin from five different houses. On the wall across from the bar, theres a patchwork of images like an old photo of the Harlem Globetrotters and an owners manual for the 1990 Honda Prelude.

These are all pieces I picked up over the years, from the clubhouse, and mashed together and made like a quilt of American society, says Grunwald, who calls it a sort of living wall. Its like a collection of memories and things that inspire us.

The bar, Florenz and Grunwald say, is very much a work in progress. Theyll add more psychedelic skulls to the elevated back area, which theyll also decorate with motorcycles and a living wall of succulents. That area will also be used for music from Thursdays through Saturdays. Its a project thats always moving and shifting, Florenz says. Its a living sculpture  This psychedelic mix of culture.

Just as the design is more thought-out than at your above-average neighborhood tavern, so is the food. Piattoni, to refresh your memory, worked for Mallmann for four years and also spent time at San Franciscos now-closed Bar Tartine. He has a pedigree, in other words, but the cooking isnt complicated. Posted above the kitchen window in the back, the menu includes three kinds of tostadas, four tacos, a cheese quesadilla, salsa with chips, and tamales.

The sour cabbage and sour cream tostada. Photo: Melissa Hom

Norbertos just been trying to evoke this very simple, very specific style of Mexican food, says Florenz, who partially grew up in San Miguel de Allende. The chef, though, couldnt help but add a few fermented flourishes from his own playbook. Take the tomato salsa, which is classic except for the addition of some fermented tomato, or the sour cabbage and sour cream tostada.

Like the cooking, the drinks are without pomp. Along with a few wines, there are 8 beers on tap and 20 cans and bottles, with an emphasis on super-drinkable pilsners. The cocktails are all $10 standards like margaritas, and theyre still working on those. Piattoni will help with fresh juices, and Florenz wants to serve a from-scratch michelada that the chef has made.

Our bar manager is like, You guys told me its going to be a dive bar, but its evolving into a cocktail bar, Grunwald says. Its like we want to add this, add this. Its all with the clientele. Were trying to do the best of both worlds.

Right now, there are carnitas, carne asada, lengua, and roasted mushroom tacos. Photo: Melissa Hom

A margarita. Photo: Melissa Hom

Trippy skulls. Photo: Melissa Hom

San Pedro Inn, 320 Van Brunt St., nr. Pioneer St.; 718-576-3916
The Latvian airline AirBaltic will resume flights on the route Riga-Odesa-Riga from March 31, Vice Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze wrote on Facebook.

"Latvian airline AirBaltic from March 31 will resume flights on the route Riga-Odesa-Riga. The conference on the renewal of the route was held on March 13," she wrote.

According to her, the Latvian side reported that flights will be carried out initially four times a week and then the service will grow to seven flights a week.

Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze also noted that the Riga-Odesa-Riga flights are seasonal but it is planned to make them year-round.

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Luxembourg is one of the promising trade partners of Ukraine.

First Deputy Prime Minister  Minister of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine Stepan Kubiv said this during a meeting with Minister of Agriculture, Viticulture and Rural Development of Luxembourg Romain Schneider in the framework of his working visit to Luxembourg on March 14, the Government portal reported.

The parties discussed the development of promising areas of cooperation between the two countries, in particular, the agribusiness.

"Luxembourg is one of the promising trade partners of Ukraine. In 2018, trade turnover between the countries increased by 28% to USD 89.58 million. Luxembourg is also among the top 10 European largest investors in Ukraine. For the first 10 months of 2018, Luxembourg invested USD 489.29 million to the Ukrainian economy," Kubiv stressed.

He emphasized the importance of concluding the Intergovernmental Agreement on Economic Cooperation designed to develop bilateral cooperation and to implement important strategic projects between the countries.

"This agreement should become an important component for the creation of the Ukraine-Luxembourg Mixed Commission for Trade, Economic and Financial Cooperation within the framework of which issues related to intensification of bilateral cooperation in many directions will be considered," Kubiv said.

The deputy prime minister outlined the agricultural sector as a promising one, where Ukraine is one of the world leaders in the export of agricultural products, and is therefore interested in expanding trade opportunities.

"According to the priorities set by President Petro Poroshenko, the development of agro-industrial complex is a promising area of bilateral cooperation between Ukraine and Luxembourg. In this context, Ukraine is interested in exporting grain and leguminous crops to Luxembourg," Kubiv stated.
The United States Intelligence Community (IC) will help strengthen the ability of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraines Defense Ministry to counteract Russias armed aggression.

Relevant agreements were reached during the official visit of the Chief of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, Colonel General Vasyl Burba to Washington, D.C., the press service of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine reported.

According to the results of the meeting, a number of agreements regarding cooperation and assistance of the American side in strengthening capabilities of the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine to counter Russias armed aggression was reached.

During the negotiations with Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Robert Ashley, the leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency and the high officials of the U.S. Intelligence Community, Colonel General Vasyl Burba put emphasis on Russias aggressive and provocative actions in the occupied territories of Ukraine and in the region of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

In the course of the meeting, the chief of the Defence Intelligence of Ukraine discussed with the American colleagues irrefutable evidence of further intentions of the Russian Federation to destabilize situation in Ukraine, European countries and other regions of the world.

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Hungary's blocking the European integration aspirations of Ukraine prevents the holding of a series of important meetings with its EU partners at the official level, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said.

She said at a press briefing in Uzhgorod on Thursday, March 14, that Hungary would not stop blackmailing Ukraine even after it fulfills the recommendations of the Venice Commission, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"Now we see Hungary blocking a high level of dialogue between Ukraine and its European partners in NATO. It does not allow us to hold a series of official meetings. At the same time, we are grateful to all the partners in the Alliance that they find out how to organize these meetings in another way - either with Georgia in an official format or not in an official format. This testifies to how much the Alliance values political dialogue with Ukraine," Klympush-Tsintsadze said.

At the same time, she noted that Ukraine would like to hear fewer blackmailing statements from the Hungarian side as Ukraine has undertaken to comply with all the recommendations of the Venice Commission.

"We are working with our parliamentarians in order to comply with these conditions, in particular, to extend the implementation period of the law on education until 2023," she added.

Klympush-Tsintsadze also said that she had no clear conviction that after the state fulfills the conditions of the Venice Commission, Hungary would stop its pressure on Ukraine.

On September 25, 2018, President Petro Poroshenko signed the law on education, certain clauses of which, in particular, Article 7 regarding the language of instruction in Ukraine, aroused concern in a number of countries. Poroshenko instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Science to hold consultations on this law with European partners, including the Council of Europe.

On September 28, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin submitted Article 7 of the law on education for consideration by the Venice Commission.

On October 12, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) during a debate adopted a resolution on the Ukrainian law on education. The Ukrainian authorities, in particular, were urged to heed the remarks of the Venice Commission and think about a "more flexible model" of bilingual education, taking into account the interests of those who belong to indigenous peoples and national minorities.

The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine agreed with the Venice Commission's opinion on the language article of the education law. It considers it balanced and constructive, is ready to contribute to detailing Article 7 in the law on general secondary education, and also agrees with the recommendation to extend the transition period for implementation.

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Ukraine marks the Ukrainian Volunteer Fighter Day on March 14.

The date was introduced by the Verkhovna Rada in early 2017 to honor the courage and heroism of the defenders of Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, contribute to the further strengthening of patriotic spirit in society, strengthen public attention and care for volunteer groups, and support public initiatives.

The date was chosen not accidentally. On March 14, 2014, the first volunteer fighters left Independence Square in Kyiv for the training base in Novi Petrivtsi. The contribution of the first wave of volunteer fighters at the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine can hardly be overestimated, since at that time not all professional servicemen were ready to defend their homeland. Volunteer battalions helped conduct mobilization and prepare a professional replacement for volunteer fighters.

In late 2013 and early 2014, thousands of ordinary Ukrainian citizens, abandoning their own affairs - education, work, business and families  were the first to take to the country's squares, protesting against the anti-state policy of the then top government of the country, and then resisted with arms in their hands to the Russian army. In the spring of 2014, there was a record-breaking turnout at Ukrainian military recruitment offices. People came there without waiting for a summons. Others - men and women, self-organized into battalions and left for the east of the country. Volunteer fighters, their courage, dedication to national interests and genuine patriotism helped mobilize forces in the rear and supply the army with weapons. Ukrainian volunteer fighters became the pride of the Ukrainian people and at the same time the headache of the Kremlin's assassins. In total, nearly 40 volunteer battalions participated in the military conflict in the east of the country. The overwhelming majority of them later turned into military units of law enforcement agencies.

The phenomenon of volunteer fighters has long been characteristic of Ukrainians. One of the first such examples was Zaporozhian Sich - a paramilitary structure of volunteer battalions, which defended Ukraine for centuries.
Ukraine and Finland are launching a joint four-year project to support the reform of the New Ukrainian School.

The presentation of the project titled "Learning Together" took place as part of the Day of Finnish Education in Kyiv on March 15, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

"First of all, what unites us with Finnish education is values. We want and have already laid in the foundation of reform the interest and support of every child. We proceed from the fact that every child has a sense of dignity, potential that can be developed. And we have to find a way to support every child. [...] Our colleagues, Finnish experts, are united with us in this goal. There's a big four-year project that we are starting today, and Finland is investing its own resources in this project because it believes that we stand on this position of values," Ukraine's Education and Science Minister Lilia Hrinevych said at the presentation of the project.

The project is funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and implemented by FCG International in cooperation with the University of Helsinki. The project is aimed at improving the quality of education and public perception of Ukrainian education.

In particular, support will be provided to improve the skills of teachers under the curriculum "New Ukrainian School." Assistance will also be provided to educational institutions in working out modern curricula. The project foresees the joint development of a new communication strategy of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine for raising awareness of the general public about the concept of the New Ukrainian School. Support will also be provided in developing modern teaching materials, including for pupils with special needs, developing school leadership, and working out standards for school leadership.

The project is implemented as part of an agreement between Ukraine and Finland, which was ratified in 2018. The document envisages EUR 6 million as gratuitous assistance for the implementation of the priorities of the New Ukrainian School. Separately, EUR 2 million has been earmarked by the European Union for teaching Ukrainian as a foreign language for students - representatives of national linguistic minorities.

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Vienna - A coalition of UN Member States, UN entities and leading human rights experts meeting at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs launched today, a landmark set of international legal standards to transform and reshape global responses to the world drug problem.

The International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy introduces a comprehensive catalogue of human rights standards. Grounded in decades of evidence, they are a guide for governments to develop human rights compliant drug policies, covering the spectrum of cultivation to consumption. Harnessing the universal nature of human rights, the document covers a range of policy areas from development to criminal justice to public health.

The guidelines come at an important moment when high-level government representatives are convening at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs to shape a new global strategy on drugs. Under the mounting weight of evidence that shows the systemic failures of the dominant punitive paradigm, including widespread human rights violations, governments are facing growing calls to shift course.

Drug control policies intersect with much of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the pledge by Member States to leave no one behind. Approaches that violate human rights and fail to curb the illicit drug trade are leaving a trail of human suffering, said Mandeep Dhaliwal, Director of UNDPs HIV, Health and Development Group. For countries who are ready to place human dignity and sustainable development at the heart of their drug control policy, these guidelines offer valuable guidance to promote more effective and humane drug control policy.

Seeking to promote the rule of law, the guidelines feature recommendations across the administration of justicefrom discriminatory policing practices, to arbitrary arrest and detention, to decriminalisation of drugs for personal usethe guidelines articulate the global state of human rights law in relation to drug policy, which includes ending the death penalty for drug-related offenses.

At least 25 national governments  from Argentina to South Africa  have scrapped criminal penalties for possession of drugs for personal, non-medical use, either in law or practice, setting an example for others to follow. The United Nations system has jointly called for decriminalization as an alternative to conviction and punishment in appropriate cases.

Punishment and exclusion have been instrumental to the war on drugs said Judy Chang, Executive Director of the International Network of People who Use Drugs. The time has come to privilege human dignity over social isolation and champion human rights, putting an end to the shameful legacy of mass incarceration.

Beyond moving away from a punitive approach to drugs, the Guidelines make clear that a human rights approach is critical in improving peoples enjoyment of the right to health, to live free from torture, and to an adequate standard of living. In accordance with their right to health obligations States should ensure the availability and accessibility of harm reduction services which should be adequately funded, appropriate for the needs of vulnerable groups and be respectful of human dignity.

99% of people who inject drugs do not have adequate access to harm reduction services and are left behind in progress against HIV, said Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS. More than 12% of people who inject drugs are living with HIV and over half have hepatitis C. The only way to advance progress is to put people at the centre, not drugs.

The Guidelines highlight the importance of protecting the rights of farming communities  especially women  to arable land. Consistent with international standards, they suggest governments temporarily permit the cultivation of illicit drug crops when necessary to allow for smooth transitions to more sustainable livelihoods. Thailands success in supporting opium famers to transition to alternative livelihoods is one such example.

Human rights should not just inform critiques of the response to drugs worldwide, they should also be the main drivers of its reform, underpinning checks and balances to break cycles of abuse said Julie Hannah, Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, University of Essex Fighting inequality and injustice is a more effective way of addressing the global drug problem than prisons and police.

The Guidelines will support member states, multilateral organisations and civil society to integrate the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into national and global policymaking.

For media enquiries please contact:

UNDP | Sangita Khadka | tel. +1 212 906 5043 | Sangita.khadka@undp.org

UNAIDS | Sophie Barton-Knott | tel. +41 22 791 4237 | bartonknotts@unaids.org

UNDP

UNDP partners with people at all levels of society to help build nations that can withstand crisis, and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone. On the ground in nearly 170 countries and territories, we offer global perspective and local insight to help empower lives and build resilient nations. www.undp.org.

UNAIDS

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) leads and inspires the world to achieve its shared vision of zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths. UNAIDS unites the efforts of 11 UN organizationsUNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP, UNFPA, UNODC, UN Women, ILO, UNESCO, WHO and the World Bankand works closely with global and national partners towards ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. http://www.unaids.org
As prepared for delivery.

It is a great privilege to be able to share the United Nations perspective on the Business and Human Rights agenda with this esteemed group of participants from government, business, the UN System, National Human Rights Institutions and civil society.

With the universal adoption of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals, the international community provided the guidance and means to measure progress towards address some of todays most pressing global challenges - including poverty, inequality, and climate change.

Given that the South Asia region accounts for one quarter of worlds population and is home to highest number of poor and chronologically hungry people, global progress on the SDGs depend to a large extent on their achievements made in South Asia.

The 2030 Agenda also provides governments, civil society actors, development practitioners and the private sector an opportunity to work together towards common aims.

We can each play a valuable part through leveraging our distinct roles, responsibilities and capacities.

The Crucial Role of the Private Sector in Development

UNDP, and the UN System as a whole, is working more closely with the private sector than ever before as it plays a crucial, and often under-played role in development.

We are working hard to build new coalitions, seek out new kinds of financing and bring in a new level of sophistication to our offer as a global development partner.

We are looking to companies, investors, start-ups, and populations including youth to help us build networks, help countries enhance capacity and leverage new technologies and platforms in order to try and solve our planets toughest challenges.

The United Nations keenly recognizes that the private sector accelerates sustainable development through its considerable expertise, resources, and production methods.

The private sector develops life-saving medicines, creates meaningful jobs, and helps ensure that the nutritional needs of so many are met.

However, we also recognize that some firms may attempt to take shortcuts, break regulations, or put societys interests aside in the competitive pursuit of profitability. These firms are acting against our common interests.

When businesses do not respect human rights in their operations, they reverse sustainable development gains.

On the other hand, when businesses advance human rights considerations throughout their operations, businesses move the needle on inequality, decent work, and environmental stewardship.

When global supply chains are mobilized to end trafficking, child labour, and discrimination in hiring and promotion, they ensure that no one is left behind.

The Private Sector and the Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals provide a transformative framework to bring together various stakeholders to end poverty and hunger, reduce inequalities and build a sustainable world.

If businesses drive respect for human rights across their operations and value chains, they can induce positive changes in the lives of millions of people that are also directly linked to the 17 SDGs.

Some businesses around the work are even incorporating the SDGs into their business plans. For example, one Swedish company created a programme for internal engagement to encourage their employees to be engaged in the SDGs and commit to be active around one specific SDG in order to make a difference.

When businesses take this approach, the importance of the goals is expressed, and awareness will turn into impact that can make a positive difference. That could be an example for business in the region and indeed around the world to gain inspiration from.

Governments have taken initiatives to measure progress such as the SDG India Index launched by Niti Aayog and the Accord and Alliance for safety in Bangladesh.

What is clear is that the UN needs to engage the private sector in even greater measure to ensure that we achieve the SDGs in this region, and globally.

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights provides a very clear direction and a framework with which to achieve the SDGs.

The Guiding Principles provided the first global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse impacts on human rights linked to business activity. They continue to provide the internationally accepted framework for enhancing standards and practice regarding business and human rights.

Like the SDGs, the Guiding Principles provide an easy-to-follow blueprint for governments and businesses to follow. The protect, respect and remedy framework, at the heart of the Guiding Principles, is in fact recognized as a means of implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

We call on these firms not merely to engage with the Guiding Principles, but to lead their respective industries and encourage sector-wide transformation.

We ask them to serve as an example to their peers.

We ask corporate boards to look beyond Corporate Social Responsibility-as-usual and align management incentives, lobbying efforts, and research budgets, towards ending abuses in business operations and achieving sustainable development.

We must recognise that the private sector does in fact do great work on Corporate Social Responsibility. However, this work cannot replace the private sectors obligation to respect human rights under the Guiding Principles as they are they are the most authoritative global framework on sustainable business conduct.

I am grateful that many companies are eager to take-up the principles, making constructive changes and creating positive impact for both their own business and wider society; including some companies that are represented here today in this room.

In South Asia and indeed across the entire world, the embrace of the Guiding Principles is now gaining encouraging momentum. More and more states are embarking on the adoption of National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights as part of the State responsibility to disseminate and implement the Guiding Principles.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Government of India for the launching of the Zero Draft of their National Action Plan on Business and Human Rights.

UNDP is proud to be supporting Thailand, which will be the first country in Asia to finalize a National Action Plan.

Indonesia that has just embarked in a similar process with technical assistance from our Bangkok and Jakarta Offices. [I understand the government of Malaysia, which is represented today by the Minister of Laws, is here to consider the same. We are grateful for your attendance, your excellency.]

I encourage representatives of all countries present today to follow the example set by countries like India, Thailand and Indonesia and embrace the Business and Human Rights Agenda as a means towards sustainable development. We are here to assist as necessary to ensure the strongest outcomes, led by the specific requirements and nuances in each country.

In this regard, UNDP is lending its expertise to advance the implementation of the Guiding Principles by designing policy tools and frameworks, including supporting the formulation and implementation of National Action Plans and facilitating participatory decision-making processes.

We are working in close cooperation with other UN actors and we are privileged to be working in partnership with the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, the custodian of the Guiding Principles.

We are also working with States to enable and promote corporate human rights due diligence, pushing policy coherence, and supporting efforts to strengthen the capacity of National Human Rights Institutions to fulfil their important oversight role.

UNDP is also providing technical assistance to businesses in their efforts to conduct human rights impact assessments, amongst a range of other related initiatives.

Closing

In closing, I would like to express my gratitude for that to Prof Surya Deva, the Chairperson of the Working Group present here today as co-organizer of this event.

I would also like to acknowledge the presence of representatives of ILO, IOM, UN Women, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNICEF who are working in the field alongside UNDP experts to work on the implementation of the Business and Human Rights Agenda in seven countries in Asia.

We recently celebrated the 70th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the UNs development arm, UNDP holds fast to the promise of the Universal Declaration, the UN Charter, and other foundational documents on human rights, including the eight ILO fundamental conventions.

We remain mindful that business respect for all human rights is the fundamental basis upon which our engagement with the private sector takes place.

In tandem with this understanding, The Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are the worlds most authoritative global framework on sustainable business conduct.

We are also united in our understanding that we must rapidly and effectively join forces to fully address gender inequality, entrenched poverty, forced labour practices, displacement, pollution, and climate change.

Sustainable development is a global challenge but it is a great positive that reports strongly indicate that the South Asia region has made substantive progress on achieving a number of SDGs.

What is true is that we will need a bold, cooperative and dynamic approach that involves in equal parts - the private sector, civil society, and governments.

Today, the 150 participants here today are sending a very important and powerful message that a joint agenda has been agreed. Collective, bold action on business and human rights is not only the right way forward  it is the only way forward.
UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie speaks with Syrian children at Za'atari camp in Jordan, January 2018.  UNHCR/Ivor Prickett

Geneva, 14 March  Violence and destruction in Syria continue to inflict suffering on millions of Syrian people, warned the UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie today, marking the eighth anniversary of the Syrian conflict. Half of Syrias population has been forcefully displaced since the start of the crisis in March 2011. More than 5.6 million Syrians live as refugees across the region. Millions more are internally displaced.

Special Envoy Jolie said:

My thoughts are with the Syrian people as we mark yet another year of devastating conflict. In particular, I think of the millions of Syrians struggling as refugees in the region and beyond, all the families displaced inside the country, and all those who have endured injury, trauma, hunger and the loss of family members.

Millions of Syrians have played no part in the war but live with its terrible consequences. It is impossible to describe the resilience and dignity of the Syrian families I have met. Every Syrian refugee I have spent time with over the last eight years, young and old, has spoken of longing for peace in Syria so that they can safely return home. Some have already started going back  internally displaced families and, to a lesser extent, refugees. It is critical that returns are driven by refugees themselves, based on informed decisions, and not by politics. Talking to refugees and placing their perspectives and concerns at the centre of future return planning is vital  it is a question of rights.

In the meantime, the gap between what Syrian refugees and IDPs need to survive, and the humanitarian assistance available to them, is growing by the day. There are Syrians inside the country who are trying to rebuild their lives around the rubble, without the necessary support. Millions of Syrian refugee families are living beneath the poverty line, and wake each day not knowing if they will find food or medicine for their children, and struggling with debt accumulated during eight years of exile.

Women and girls face additional burdens, including severely limited work opportunities and sexual and gender-based violence, such as forced and early marriage, sexual abuse and exploitation, and domestic violence. The host countries  Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt  have done so much to help refugees, but they are in severe need of financing to enable them to continue to support millions of refugees and assist their local populations in coping with the economic and social pressures.

While the conflict continues and until Syrians are able to return to their homes, the least we can do is to try to meet these urgent humanitarian needs: to minimize as much as we can the human suffering, and to try to mitigate some of the damage caused by these eight lost years of senseless conflict. This is the bare minimum that we can do for a people who deserve so much more: the right to live in peace and security and dignity in their country.
Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images

Events to check out this weekend, March 14 to March 17.

1. Stuff your pie hole.

Happy Pi day! You dont need to be a fan of 3.14 (plus some other numbers) to reap its bounty of rewards. This afternoon the Museum of Mathematics is free from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. for you to fulfill all your numerical desires, but if youre more about the other kind of pie, theres deals for you too. At Four at Twenty Blackbirds in Gowanus, score three slices for $14 and at Butter + Scotch in Crown Heights, all slices will cost you a mere $3.14. Or just pick a spot off our Absolute Best Pie list, and go crazy.

2. Get into Cuban hip-hop.

They may now be based in France, but Havana will always have the heart of Grammy-winning Cuban rap trio Orishas, who perform at Stage 48 tonight. If you want to dress the part, the show is being co-presented by Cubavera, a Latin mens RTW brand. No word on whether you can buy clothing at the show but they do sell it at like, Macys.

3. Interact with some worldly women.

A cohort of Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, Gretchen Bender was a pioneer of new media, with contemporary impact and not enough recognition in her lifetime. So Much Deathless, the posthumous retrospective of her life and work presented by Red Bull Arts, spans video, sculpture, computer graphics, photography, performance, set design, and new media installation, and runs through July 28th. And at the Apollo Theater through Sunday is the WOW: Women of the World Festival, with a comedy show tonight featuring JoJo Collins, Calise Hawkins, Barbara Carlyle, a talk by Suze Orman on Saturday, music, panels and much more.

4. See some jazz, then plan a trip to see some more jazz.

This weekend it will be 100 years of Nat King Cole, and you can celebrate on Friday at Jazz at Lincoln Center, with the Johnny ONeal Quartet, in a centennial bash that will be as smooth as it is jubilant. And if the idea of jazz in a tropical land appeals to you, think about planning a trip to St. Lucia this May, where Jazz at Lincoln Center will be programming the first inaugural St. Lucia Jazz Festival, with artists including Christian McBride, Ledisi, Gregory Porter, Dianne Reeves, Catherine Russell, Somi, and more. Fun in the sun never sounded so good.

5. Get in Harmony with spring.

Its almost the first day of spring with more opportunities to harmonize with nature. But first, get in tune with yourself with the new Harmony Massage from Haven Spa. Combining sound therapy, Ayurvedic massage, and aromatherapy, the treatment uses tuning forks, to restore your sense of balance and harmony, should it happen to be out of whack. For more wellness suggestions check out this years Best of New York, Health and Self section.

6. Combine your love of beer and pastries. And wrestling.

You know whats delightful? Carbs. This weekend you can have a bunch of them, beginning from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m at Brookfield Place, for the final round of Best Brews of New York statewide competition. And Saturday you can combine your love of baked goods and beer at the inaugural Pastrytown event, from the Other Half Brewing Company, at Industry City in Sunset Park. Sample beers infused with sweet and savory flavors like the Cookie Kooks Imperial Stout from Other Half, brewed in collaboration with the Swedish brewer Omnipollo and inspired by your favorite breakfast cereals, plus peanut butter. Plu,s 30 breweries including Grimm, Evil Twin and more. Food from vendors including Bien Cuit, Cool Haus, Four & Twenty Blackbirds, Milk Bar, and Supermoon Bakehouse will be available and, possibly the best part, the NY Wrestling Connection will be there to entertain with facebusters and legdrops on your downtime between samples. And who knows, maybe theyll let you join in.

7. Immerse yourself.

You ever hear the soundtrack to a movie and thought: I wish I could be in that? This Friday at Carnegie Hall the New York Pops delivers, with a program of songs from the silver screen like Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz, Moon River from Breakfast at Tiffanys, The Rainbow Connection from The Muppet Movie, and Footloose from, well, Footloose. Theyll be joined by vocalists including Ashley Park from Broadways Mean Girls and Storm Large from Pink Martini. And over at FIT beginning Friday you can get into the VR-verse with The Future is Immersive, an art exhibition highlighting how virtual reality and augmented reality is used in creating fine art experiences for pediatric patients at Montefiore Medical Center. Fun, educational, and helpful!

8. Have some wagyu, whiskey and wine, baby.

Its been quite the week and you know what? You deserve some pampering, courtesy of the Wagyu, Whiskey, and Wine event on Friday at CUT by Wolfgang Puck, at the Four Seasons downtown. The three flavors will combine in a menu including items like whiskey-aged Japanese beef and cabernet-braised beef cheeks, and other things way too decadent to print here. Pricing is 5 courses for $165, with extra for beverage pairings. Reservations are open from 5:30 to 9 p.m.

9. Treat yourself to a Sunday Roast.

Calling all Anglophiles, this Sunday NoMad Bar reprises its Sunday pop-up series, this time as a Sunday Roast, inspired by classic Irish and English pubs. Nodding to their friends across the pond, the three-course prix-fixe features riffs on Brit fare like potted trout, roasted leg of lamb with Yorkshire pudding, and Banoffee pie, washed down with Guinness or perhaps a Gibson with a London dry gin. Reservations are $75, with supplements of black truffle and foie gras available.

10. Look for shamrocks.

St. Patricks Day is Sunday but you can start tonight, with a free annual irish heritage concert at St. Patricks Cathedral, with the St. Patricks Cathedral Choir and Mick Moloney & Friends, starting at 7 p.m. On Friday all around town the Irish Arts Center (IAC) will distribute free books by celebrated Irish and Irish American authors plus this year, by Asian American writers. Pop-up stations span all five boroughs. On Sunday, the Poetry Society throws a St. Paddys Day Drag Ball, setting burlesque and poetry readings in a bordello (costumes encouraged), and youre probably pretty well-versed in locating an Irish Pub but how about food specials? On Sunday, Boulton & Watt will be offering corned beef hash fully loaded for $16 as part of its St Patricks Day brunch special, and Brooklyn Cider House goes all in with an all-day St. Patricks Day brunch. Dont forget to wear green unless, of course, being pinched is your thing.
It is with great sadness that I have heard the news of the horrific attacks against two mosques which took place today in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 49 people are believed to have been killed. I offer my sincerest condolences to the families and friends of the victims and to the people of New Zealand. I share my solidarity with them in their grief and sorrow.

While many uncertainties remain, it appears that this act of terror was motivated by hatred and fear of others, and that among those killed are refugees and migrants. This is deeply shocking. At a time of growing hostility towards diversity, the humanity the authorities and people of New Zealand have shown in their response is truly laudable.

My colleagues and I at UNHCR stand by New Zealand  a country which has generously given refuge to people fleeing conflict and persecution, and whose citizens warmly welcomed them into their towns and cities.
Students are walking out of classrooms in over 100 countries to protest climate inaction on this day.

Young people in Kyiv have joined the Global Climate Strike campaign on March 15.

In Kyiv, young protesters have gathered outside the building of the Cabinet of Ministers, the Ukrainian media outlet Hromadske reported.

Read alsoParliament adopts Ukraine's Environmental Strategy until 2030

Activists are demanding increased energy efficiency and the transition to renewable energy.

Earlier, pupils and students in Australia did not come to classes and staged large-scale protests. Thousands of teens in Australia are on strike due to global warming.

Protests are expected in over 30 countries on Friday, March 15.

According to CNN, during the Global Climate Strike, students are walking out of classrooms in over 100 countries to protest climate inaction. They say their governments have failed future generations by not cutting emissions and curbing global warming.

The idea of the strike belongs to a 16-year-old activist from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, who in August last year began to skip school on Fridays to draw attention to the problem of climate change.
The group has been linked to violence and public disorder, the Embassy stressed.

The United States Embassy in Ukraine on Friday, March 15, released a "Demonstration Alert" regarding the upcoming rally of National Corps activists set to be held at Kyiv's Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) March 16.

"On Saturday, March 16, a Ukrainian nationalist group plans to demonstrate at Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square (also known as Independence Square), located on Khreschatyk Street near the city center. This group has been linked to violence and public disorder, including clashes with police. Large crowds are expected in the area," the alert reads.

It is recommended to avoid crowds and demonstrations, follow local law enforcement instructions, and monitor local media for updates.

Earlier, the National Corps Movement announced a rally in Kyiv to protest against corruption in the country's defense industry.

The rally is set to start at 16:00 Kyiv time, according to the Organization's website.

Read alsoInterior Ministry denies connection with National Corps Party

As UNIAN reported earlier, police and far-right demonstrators clashed outside the presidential administration building in the Ukrainian capital and in at least one other city. The far-right activists gathered in Kyiv on March 9 to call for arrests of figures linked to an alleged military corruption scandal.

Two police officers and a national guard were injured in the clash.

On the same day, police said 22 officers were hurt in clashes in the city of Cherkasy, about 150 km southeast of Kyiv, where Poroshenko went to speak at a rally

On March 10, the police reported the arrest of two suspects in the organization of clashes in Cherkasy.

On March 14, the U.S. Department of State called the National Corps and C14 "hate groups".
Saakashvili says his e-ticket to Kyiv shown in the media is not fake.

Leader of the Movement of New Forces Party in Ukraine, ex-Governor of Ukraine's Odesa region and ex-President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili has confirmed his plans to return to Ukraine.

"When the incumbent president [Petro Poroshenko] was elected, he had a slogan 'President from the first round.' Now the people of Ukraine have a slogan 'Away with the president from the first round.' When he is defeated in the first round, I will arrive at Kyiv the next day. I am convinced no border guards will perform the illegal orders he gave regarding the ban of my return to Ukraine," Saakashvili told the Pravo Na Vladu TV panel show, the TSN news service reported.

Read alsoUkraine border guards remind Saakashvili of entry ban until 2021 following "comeback" statement

Saakashvili says his e-ticket to Kyiv shown in the media is not fake.

"I am returning to Ukraine because this is my legal right after the [Ukrainian] courts pinned a falsified case on me. [Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy] Lutsenko called me an FSB agent. Well, I am an agent who did not run away and wanted to be tried. I want to defend my rights. I have no political ambitions in Ukraine," he added.

As UNIAN reported earlier, at the end of July 2017, Poroshenko signed a decree on terminating Saakashvili's Ukrainian citizenship he had been granted earlier before he took up the top post at Odesa State Regional Administration.

According to Anton Gerashchenko, a member of the Council of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Saakashvili was deprived of citizenship after it was proved he had provided inaccurate information while applying for it, in particular, in terms of his criminal record back in Georgia.

On September 10, 2017, Saakashvili, earlier deprived of Ukrainian citizenship, managed to cross into Ukraine at the Shehyni checkpoint. A crowd of the politician's supporters broke through the cordons of the Ukrainian law enforcers, took Saakashvili and a number of MPs and public figures accompanying Saakashvili in a tight ring, and literally forced the group's entry to the territory of Ukraine evading standard border control routine.

According to Anton Gerashchenko, Saakashvili was accompanied by Members of Parliament Yulia Tymoshenko, Serhiy Vlasenko, Yury Derevianko, Pavlo Kostenko, Dmytro Dobrodomov, and former SBU chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko.

Poroshenko said that the border guards during penetration of the state border by Saakashvili along with his entourage had full right to use weapons, but did not allow to "spark fire sought by populist politicians."

On December 5, law enforcers detained Saakashvili in Kyiv but later the same day his supporters managed to get him released from a convoy vehicle.

On December 11, a district court in Kyiv refused to satisfy the prosecution's petition to order a two-month house arrest. The Kyiv Court of Appeal four times postponed the consideration of the appeal against the said court decision.

The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine put Saakashvili on the wanted list on charges of assisting members of criminal organizations and concealing their criminal activities (Part 2 of Article 256).

According to Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, Saakashvili organized protests to seize state power in Ukraine and assist members of the criminal gang of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and businessman Serhiy Kurchenko in halting their criminal prosecution.

On February 12, 2018, Saakashvili was transferred to Poland under the readmission procedure.
The two first deputies will serve in accordance with their focus area.

First Deputy Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Service Serhiy Semochko will co-chair the agency until a new chief has been appointed by the president of Ukraine.

"We have two first deputies: Andrii Alieksieienko and Serhiy Semochko  they are authorized to serve as chairmen of the service in their respective areas until the relevant presidential decree appointing the chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Service has been issued," the agency's press service told UNIAN.

It is reported the two first deputies will serve in accordance with their focus area.

Read alsoRelatives of Ukraine's foreign intel official have Russian citizenship, SBU confirms

As UNIAN reported earlier, investigative journalists established facts that may prove Semochko's ties with Russia via his family members and the "aggressor state might have paid this official for information from him." Nashi Groshi journalists found evidence that Semochko owns real estate worth over UAH 200 million (US$7.4 million), while his family members, namely his common-law wife and her daughter, have Russian citizenship and run a business in Russian-occupied Crimea. What is more, while Semochko was in office, counterintelligence officers demanded bribes from pharmaceutical companies.

A pretrial investigation was launched on the basis of the facts and an investigator requested access to mobile billing records of the suspect, who is charged with treason, and his relatives.

On October 3, 2018, the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) opened a criminal case under Part 3 of Article 368-2 (illegal enrichment) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

On December 16, 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he would decide on Semochko's dismissal after the counterintelligence department of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine completed its investigation.

On January 24, 2019, the then head of Ukraine's Foreign Intelligence Service Yehor Bozhok told a Ukrainian media outlet that Semochko was denied access to state secrets.

On March 14, 2019, Poroshenko dismissed Bozhok from the post he had held since September 2017.
Volodin also proposed that the issue of the "responsibility" of Ukraine and the European Union for the social and economic situation in Crimea should be considered.

Chairman of Russia's State Duma Viacheslav Volodin says Ukraine's "annexation" of Crimea lasted for 25 years and it should pay "compensation" to Russia.

Speaking in occupied Crimea, which he visited on the fifth anniversary of the occupation of the Ukrainian peninsula by Russia, he said "Ukraine treated Crimea very, very dishonestly, the fundamental rights of citizens were violated: the right to language, the right to education in their native language, the economy of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol was destroyed, in fact, it was the annexation," the press service of the lower house of the Russian parliament told UNIAN.

Read alsoEU adds eight Russian officials to sanctions list

"In this regard, based on the voiced proposal, let us instruct our profile committees together with the profile committees of the Crimea State Council to study this issue, analyze, calculate how much the Crimea economy lost due to this destructive policy of Ukraine, which was imposed here, how much people lost, what rights were violated, and through our parliamentary structures, European structures, we will oblige Ukraine to compensate for what Crimea has lost over these 25 years," he said.

Volodin also proposed that the issue of the EU's responsibility for the social and economic situation of Crimea be considered, taking into account the EU's support of Ukraine.

"As for money, it's necessary to calculate how much Ukraine owes, and since the European Union still supports it, what debts will be shared by the European Union," he said.

UNIAN memo. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in March 2014 after its troops had occupied the peninsula. An illegal referendum was held for Crimeans to decide on accession to Russia. De-facto Crimean authorities reported that allegedly 96.77% of the Crimean population had voted for joining Russia. On March 18, 2014, the so-called agreement on the accession of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to Russia was signed in the Kremlin. The West did not recognize the annexation in response to which sanctions against Russia were introduced. Ukraine's parliament voted to designate February 20, 2014, as the official date when the temporary occupation of Crimea began.
Tymchuk says a terrorist attack cannot be ruled out, which could become a pretext for a full-fledged Russian invasion of the Ukrainian territory.

On March 31, the day Ukrainians are set to vote in the presidential election, a major provocation involving violence is being plotted in the occupied Donetsk, according to Dmytro Tymchuk, who is a Ukrainian MP and coordinator of the Information Resistance OSINT Group.

"Organizers of a mega provocation codename 'Order of Judas' believe the rally will attract up to 100,000 peaceful participants. The event is generously sponsored by Russian taxpayers. They plan to 'grant' a so-called Order to Poroshenko. To forge it, they've been collecting fragments of shells which the 'Junta has been launching on Donbas civilians," Tymchuk said, according to the Dilova Stolytsia news outlet.

The OSINT expert says occupation authorities seek to drive 100,000 people to Lenin Square in Donetsk, despite the fact that the location is physically unable to accommodate such a huge number of people.

Read alsoEuropean Parliament: Russias disinformation campaigns main source of disinformation in Europe

People will be massively brought by buses. Numerous Russian propagandists will be drawing the picture of an even more massive crowd. There is even a scheme for placing groups from certain towns across the square. During the rally, they plan to tell 'international journalists' from Russia about the 'genocide against Donbas residents' carried out by [Ukrainian President Petro] Poroshenko and to symbolically 'grant' him an 'Order of Judas'. The launch of 100,000 balloons painted in Russian flagf colors will be the climax of the event," the expert explained.

According to Tymchuk, it is likely that during the mass rally on March 31, provocations will take place.

"For example, there could be an explosion with a large number of victims, colorfully documented by Russian propagandists and later presented as 'Poroshenko deciding to punish the defiant people of Donbas', all to divert attention from the election results and start rigging," Tymchuk said.

Provocations could become a pretext for a full-fledged Russian invasion of the territory of Ukraine, he stressed.
The list has been sent to the Central Election Commission of Ukraine.

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has selected 24 Russian representatives for the Ukrainian election observation mission.

Read alsoEx-Foreign Minister Axworthy to lead Canada's election observation mission to Ukraine  media

"ODIHR has just sent to the Central Election Commission of Ukraine the list of the names offered by OSCE participating states to take part as short-term observers for the ODIHR election observation mission for the presidential election in Ukraine. The names of 24 people nominated as observers by the Russian Federation are included in the list," ODIHR Spokesperson Thomas Rymer informed the Russian news agency TASS on Friday.

As UNIAN reported earlier, the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, on February 7, 2019, passed bill No. 9524 on amendments to certain laws on observing the electoral process in Ukraine that bans citizens of the Russian Federation from being recruited as election observers for the presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in Ukraine.

On February 26, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko enacted a law that bans citizens of the Russian Federation from being hired as election observers for the presidential, parliamentary, and local elections in Ukraine.
The U.S. action targets individuals and entities playing a role in Russias unjustified attacks on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait, the purported annexation of Crimea, and backing of illegitimate Nov 11 elections in eastern Ukraine's Donbas, according to the U.S. Treasury.

The U.S. Department of the Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Friday, March 15, designated six Russian individuals and eight entities in response to Russias continued and ongoing aggression in Ukraine, including in the Kerch Strait.

The U.S. action targets individuals and entities playing a role in Russias unjustified attacks on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait, the purported annexation of Crimea, and backing of illegitimate Nov 11 elections in eastern Ukraine's Donbas, according to the U.S. Treasury.

In turn, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland has announced sanctions on 114 individuals and 15 entities, under the Special Economic Measures Act.

These sanctions are "in response to Russias military actions against three Ukrainian vessels and the capture of Ukrainian sailors in the Black Sea in November 2018" and "coordinated with the European Union and the United States," underscoring "continued transatlantic unity in responding to Russias aggressive actions in Ukraine and its violation of international law."

Canada is also sanctioning a number of individuals and entities responsible for the illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Crimea and the destabilization of eastern Ukraine.

Read alsoEU adds eight Russian officials to sanctions list

The United States and our transatlantic partners will not allow Russias continued aggression against Ukraine to go unchecked. This joint initiative with our partners in the European Union and Canada reinforces our shared commitment to impose targeted and meaningful sanctions in response to the Kremlins attempts to disregard international norms and undermine Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity, said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin.

The international community is strongly aligned against Russias naval attacks in the Kerch Straight, purported annexation of Crimea, and support for the illegitimate separatist-conducted elections in eastern Ukraine, the statement reads.

New companies on the U.S. sanctions list are the following: Yaroslavsky Shipbuilding Plant, Zelenodolsk Shipyard Plant named after A.M. Gorky, AO Kontsern Okeanpribor (Okeanpribor), PAO Zvezda (Zvezda), AO Zavod Fiolent (Fiolent), GUP RK KTB Sudokompozit (Sudokompozit), LLC SK Consol-Stroi LTD, and LLC Novye Proekty.

OFAC also designated the following individuals: Gennadiy Medvedev, the Deputy Director of the Border Guard Service of Russias Federal Security Service; Sergey Stankevich, the Head of the Border Directorate of Russias Federal Security Service; and Andrey Shein, the Deputy Head of the Border Directorate and Head of the Coast Guard Unit of Russias Federal Security Service; and Ruslan Romashkin, the Head of the Service Command Point of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation for the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol.

Among sanctioned individuals there is also Aleksey Alekseevich Naydenko, a Deputy Chair of the Central Election Commission of the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic, and Vladimir Yurievich Vysotsky, who is a Secretary of Central Election Commission of the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic.
Ukraine is calling on Russia to fully implement Minsk Agreements.

Ukraine proposes to include the issue of Crimea de-occupation in the Minsk negotiation process, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Serhiy Kyslytsya said, speaking at the Arria-formula meeting on the Russian occupation of Crimea on Friday, March 15.

Addressing foreign delegations whose representatives had earlier referred to Minsk Agreements while talking about Crimea, Kyslytsya said that, ironically, it would be great if the issue of Crimea de-occupation were part of the Minsk discussions, which, unfortunately, is not the case.

Read alsoU.S., Canada introduce sanctions over Russian aggression in Ukraine, including in Kerch Strait

He has called on colleagues next time they will be talking about Minsk Agreements, to use the opportunity to include the issue of the occupied Crimea into the Minsk negotiation process.
There were no Ukrainian army casualties.

Russian-led forces mounted four attacks on Ukrainian troops in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, in the past 24 hours.

Read alsoRussia pulling in troops to occupied territories in Luhansk region  Joint Forces Commander (Video)

"No Ukrainian army casualties were reported in the past day. According to intelligence reports, one invader was wounded," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation said in an update on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on March 15, 2019.

What is more, Ukrainian troops destroyed an enemy infantry fighting vehicle.

During the period under review, the Russian occupation forces opened fire from 82mm mortars, tripod-mounted man-portable antitank guns, heavy machine guns and small arms to attack the Ukrainian positions near the villages of Bohdanivka, Travneve, Luhanske, and Katerynivka.

"Since Friday midnight, Russian-led forces haven't attacked Ukrainian positions yet," the report said.
Cargo 200 is a code name for casualties for transportation in the Russian military.

Officer of the 53rd separate mechanized brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Anatoliy Shtefan has revealed identities of two members of the Russian-led forces who have been eliminated in Donbas lately.

Read alsoAnother member of Russian-led forces eliminated in Luhansk region (Photo)

"On March 13, 2019, one more mercenary, Aleksandr Kamenev, aka 'Hooligan' from the village of Novo-Oleksandrivka, Luhansk region, joined the notorious '[Cargo] 200 Brigade,'" the Ukrainain officer said.

Cargo 200 is a code name for casualties for transportation in the Russian military.

Kamenev was born on June 1, 1991. The terrorist was on the database of the Ukrainian Myrotvorets (Peacemaker) website, which features individuals who pose a threat to Ukraine's security.

Shtefan also said another terrorist, a young woman born on June 25, 1991, had been eliminated in Donbas.

"On March 1, 2019, another mercenary aka Kira was killed in Donbas. Details are being verified," he said.

When commenting on Donbas militants' TV, she used to pledge to "shoot off Ukrainians."

The officer shared her photos but did not reveal her full identity.
It means the UK may not now leave on March 29 as previously planned.

MPs have voted by 412 to 202 for Prime Minister Theresa May to ask the EU for a delay to Brexit.

It means the UK may not now leave on March 29 as previously planned, the BBC reported.

Mrs. May says Brexit could be delayed by three months, to June 30, if MPs back her withdrawal deal in a vote next week.

Read alsoUK Parliament votes to reject no-deal Brexit

If they reject her deal again then she says she will seek a longer extension  but any delay has to be agreed by the 27 other EU member states.

A spokesman for the European Commission said extending Article 50, the mechanism taking the UK out of the EU on March 29, would need the "unanimous agreement" of all states.

And it would be for the leaders of those states "to consider such a request, giving priority to the need to ensure the functioning of the EU institutions and taking into account the reasons for and duration of a possible extension".

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was "in constant contact with all leaders," the spokesman added.

MPs earlier rejected an attempt to secure another Brexit referendum by 334 votes to 85.

And they also rejected a cross-party plan to allow MPs to take control of the Brexit process to hold a series of votes on the next steps by the narrow margin of two votes.

Following the votes, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn reiterated his support for a further referendum after earlier ordering his MPs not to vote for one.

He said: "Today I reiterate my conviction that a deal can be agreed based on our alternative plan that can command support across the House.

"I also reiterate our support for a People's Vote  not as a political point-scoring exercise but as a realistic option to break the deadlock."

Labour abstained when MPs voted on the referendum proposal, tabled by Independent Group MP Sarah Wollaston, arguing that now was not the right time to push for a public vote.

Labour's plan to delay Brexit to allow Parliamentary time for MPs to "find a majority for a different approach" was defeated by 318 to 302 votes.
It would be relatively simple for Moscow to execute a land grab in a remote Arctic enclave or on a small island, like Sweden's Gotland.

Leader of the Movement of New Forces Party in Ukraine, ex-Governor of Ukraine's Odesa region and ex-President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili says that Finland or Sweden is Russia's most likely target in the near future.

"Russia's most likely target in the near future is either Finland or Sweden; although both are members of the EU, they are not members of NATO," Saakashvili said in the article titled: "Russia's Next Land Grab Won't Be in an Ex-Soviet State. It Will Be in Europe," posted by Foreign Policy on March 15.

"By attacking a non-NATO country, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin does not risk a proportional response in accordance with Article 5. But by targeting a European country, he can expect to reap the rewards of public approval at home from voters who are desperate for a victory. This is a simple cost-benefit analysis that Putin has conducted, openly, many times before. Each investment of Russian force has paid dividends. Finland and Sweden meet both requirements," he said.

Saakashvili says he does not expect Russian tanks to roll into Helsinki or Stockholm unopposed. "But it would be relatively simple for Moscow to execute a land grab in a remote Arctic enclave or on a small island, like Sweden's Gotland, considering the strategic capabilities Russia has built on its northern flank. After all, who would go to war over a frozen Baltic island or piece of Finland's tundra? NATO wouldn't, but Putin wouldbecause the stakes are higher for him."

Read alsoSaakashvili confirms his plans to return to Ukraine

Saakashvili says that Putin certainly views the small Baltic countries.

"It is not a question of whether he will attack, but where. Some point to Belarus, but Putin stands to gain little through a show of force in a country that most Russians already consider an integral part of Russia. Others predict that the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania will be the next target. Putin certainly views the small Baltic countries as a threat; after all, they are functioning democracies on Russia's border. But, for now, the Baltics are probably safe, for two reasons," he said.

"First, the next frontier of Russian aggression is unlikely to be a NATO ally. The inconsistent responses of the West to Moscow's various land grabs have only emboldened Putin, but he is not quite bold enough to risk triggering NATO's Article 5  which could lead to all-out conventional war against a U.S.-led alliance. Putin understands when he is outmatched. If that weren't the case, he would not have survived this long," he said.

"Second, Putin's next adventure will likely be outside the former Soviet Union. The West has grudgingly accepted his neoimperialist ambitions in the region. Further incursions into Ukraine, Georgia, or other non-NATO Soviet successor states would be deja vu all over again, which would do little to bolster Putin's position."
BEIJING, March 14 (Xinhua) -- Farmer Zhao Huijie, spiced with humor when speaking at panel discussions at the second session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC), China's national legislature, has a clearer vision for the development of her village.

The 48-year-old woman from north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has fought for fortune for her fellow villagers after she became the village Party chief in 2009, and now for the interest of more people in rural China now that she is a deputy to the NPC.

At the ongoing second session of the 13th NPC, Zhao submitted a suggestion on pollution control in animal husbandry and farming in rural areas.

"Random disposal of livestock waste has not only damaged the rural environment, but also polluted groundwater," she said, advising the government to fund major livestock farms in harmless waste treatment.

She also suggested the government to subsidize farmers to use degradable plastic films to protect the environment.

Unlike legislators in the West who make a career of politics, NPC deputies are from all walks of life and work part-time. Of the nearly 3,000 national lawmakers, more than 15 percent are workers and farmers.

Zhao, an ethnic Manchu, is also one of the 400-plus ethnic minority deputies.

URBAN WOMAN'S RURAL LIFE

Born into a worker's family, Zhao worked at a gold mine in the city of Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, where she got married in 1991.

"He was four years older than me. I think it was a perfect match considering I am talkative, while he is quiet," Zhao said of her husband.

Their daughter was born in 1992. In the same year, the gold mine went bankrupt, forcing the couple back to her husband's home in Xiaomiaozi Village.

Located between two mountains with a river traversing through, Xiaomiaozi was known for its poverty back then. Shabby houses, bumpy roads and barren farmland formed the major landscape, and the only crop villagers grew was corn.

To make ends meet, Zhao's husband found a job in town, and she rented a small plot of farmland at home.

She had to learn how to farm from scratch, including driving a horse to plow in the field. When she was farming, she had to place her baby on the field ridge.

"I didn't want to depend on my parents after getting married. If the other villagers could get used to the country life here, how could I not?" she said.

In 1995, she started teaching at the village elementary school. Four years later, she was assigned to take charge of family planning and women's work in the village.

"I was familiar with every household -- newborn babies, young brides marrying into our village, and the elderly," Zhao said.

In 2009, she was elected unanimously as the village Party chief.

As soon as she took office, Zhao was asked to attend "a meeting" in the township.

"It turned out to be a training for Party chiefs of backward villages. That was shameful," she said, determined to change the situation.

NEW ROAD, NEW LIFE

The first thing she decided to work on was to build a concrete road, as she found corn buyers were reluctant to come due to the bumpy roads. Higher transport costs even dragged down corn prices in the village.

For more than a year, Zhao visited door to door to persuade villagers to relocate to give way to the road. She talked so much that she was diagnosed with sphagitis, and had to undergo a surgery.

"I liked singing in the past, but after the surgery, I could never hold a high note," she said.

After the road project was completed, Zhao had a bridge built, ending the days when villagers had to trek in waters to cross the river.

In 2013, when Zhao engaged herself in the bridge project, she broke her left arm and knee in a road accident.

"After work, I was riding my motorcycle in the dark when a donkey rushed on to the road. I was thrown away along with the vehicle," she said.

Instead of lying in bed, Zhao insisted going to the construction site on crutches, touching the villagers and drawing more and more followers.

Li Yongbo, a villager who used to work in Beijing, was persuaded home and led the farmers to grow traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) such as balloon flower root, which secures three times the income of corn.

According to Li, the sandy soil, big day-and-night temperature difference and easy access to irrigation made the village an ideal place for TCM plantation.

The village has expanded the TCM plantation areas to more than 200 hectares now, producing more than 4,000 tonnes of TCM every year. A TCM processing workshop has been established, further doubling the income from mere TCM plantation.

The per capita income of the village reached 14,000 yuan (2,087 U.S. dollars) in 2018, 10,000 yuan more than the levels of 2010.

"As villagers get rich and spend more, my tiny store now can bring me more than 100,000 yuan of profit every year," grocery runner You Junguang said.

Last year, Zhao was elected as a deputy to the 13th NPC. She suggested utilizing private investment in rural development.

"To my delight, the Ministry of Finance replied to me, accepting my suggestion and pledging to encourage private investors to contribute to revitalizing the rural areas."

Zhao said they had registered "Xiaomiaozi Village" as a brand, and were talking to a tourism company on cooperation to entice tourists with the village's Manchu and Mongolian ethnic cultures, as well as its beautiful landscape.

After graduating from college, Zhao's daughter found a teaching job in Changsha City in central China in 2014. Her son is studying in a senior high school in Chifeng City. Zhao is too busy to visit them.

"I feel guilty because I have rarely taken care of my kids. But I hope I can set an example for them by trying my best to do everything, be it vital or trivial, and making positive contribution to the society," she said.
March 15 2019

An A-listed office building in the heart of Glasgows Merchant City is to be transformed into a hotel following the approval of conversion plans put forward by Core Associates.



This would see The Jacobean Building present a ground floor bar/restaurant to Virginia Street with the upper floors transformed into a hotel, retaining period features and introducing disabled access in the process.



Central to this approach will be the creation of a new stair and lift core offering step free access to all floors from a rear courtyard by way of a new extension with a lift lobby located within the existing footprint to allow the core to be set back.



In a statement Core wrote: The bedrooms and en-suites are generously sized and respectful to the existing fenestration on both the front and rear elevations. The proposed layouts indicate fifteen bedrooms as being the most feasible maximum number to provide the quality and layouts that best align with the character of this unique building.



Access via the pend from Virginia Street into the rear courtyard provides an opportunity to create something akin to the quality and character of the adjacent Virginia Court development in this space.



The new extension will be clad in curtain wall glazing and zinc.
Deputy US Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette has held talks with Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian senior government officials at a ministerial and investment forum in the southern US state of Texas, during which they discussed energy cooperation and uniform natural gas market in the region

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th March, 2019) Deputy US Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette has held talks with Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian senior government officials at a ministerial and investment forum in the southern US state of Texas, during which they discussed energy cooperation and uniform natural gas market in the region.

"On Thursday, March 14, 2019 key officials from the U.S., Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, including Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, Minister of Energy Kadri Simson of Estonia, State Secretary Eriks Egilitis of Latvia, and Minister of Energy Zygimantas Vaiciunas of Lithuania, met on the sidelines of the 1st Ministerial of the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation (P-TEC) in Houston, Texas," the department said in a press release.

During the meeting, the ministers addressed the expansion of energy cooperation between Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the United States, cybersecurity issues and the establishment of a uniform natural gas market in the region, among other topics, the press release said.

"The Ministers agreed on the importance of close cooperation under the umbrella of P-TEC in the form of a 3+1 Forum. This Forum of cooperation will provide an opportunity to test innovative ideas related to energy markets that could present unique opportunities for the broader European energy network, particularly in the area of natural gas and LNG [liquefied natural gas]," the press release added.

The four energy ministers also agreed to hold their next meeting as soon as possible before the end of the year.

The United States, which did not start exporting its LNG until only a few years ago, is already striving to be included into the top three leading liquefied natural gas producers in the world by the end of 2019. Washington now seeks to expand its export opportunities in Europe and opposes the construction of new gas pipelines in the region by one of the key gas suppliers to Europe Russia.
Austria is considering the possibility of reopening of its embassy in Damascus, Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl said on Thursday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th March, 2019) Austria is considering the possibility of reopening of its embassy in Damascus , Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl said on Thursday.

"The reopening of the embassy is an important step, though now we have the ambassador in Lebanon, who sometimes travels to Damascus. We think about that [reopening of the embassy] but everything depends on political conditions in Damascus," Kneissl said at a press conference.

The minister added that Austria expects Syrian President Bashar Assad to take action in relations to prisoners, in particular women, as well as over respect for human rights.

Soon after the beginning of the civil war in Syria back in 2011, dozens of countries closed their embassies in Damascus, with some of them temporarily withdrawn to Beirut. In December 2018, the United Arab Emirates became the first Gulf country to reopen its embassy in the Syrian capital. Immediately afterward, Bahrain announced that it would restore its diplomatic mission in Damascus.
Burundi expects to start exporting a significant portion of the tea and coffee that it produces to Russia, simultaneously exploring the potential that improved economic relations between both countries hold, representatives of the African country's coffee and tea authorities told Sputnik on Friday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th March, 2019) Burundi expects to start exporting a significant portion of the tea and coffee that it produces to Russia , simultaneously exploring the potential that improved economic relations between both countries hold, representatives of the African country's coffee and tea authorities told Sputnik on Friday.

A delegation from the coffee and tea authorities is on a visit to Russia between Tuesday and Sunday, to make initial contacts with interested parties in Russia and to provide Russian consumers with a taste of the products that they seek to bring into the country.

Russia To Receive Majority Of Burundi's Tea

Leopold Nahawenimana, the administrative and financial director with the Burundi Tea Authority, told Sputnik that Burundi will divert more than half of the tea it produces for direct sales to Russia.

"The market of Burundi - now we have the market of Mombasa [tea auction in Kenya], which has 75 percent and we are searching how to modify this percentage for direct sales and we are going to divert some volume for Russia and we are planning to moving from 75 percent to 20 percent and 55 percent will be direct sales especially in Russia," Nahawenimana said.

According to the Ethical Tea Partnership, tea is Burundi's second most exported commodity after coffee and is vital for the economy.

Nahawenimana added that the state of diplomatic relations between the two countries, and the potential to reach a wide market has made Russia a good trade partner for Burundi.

"We have chosen the Russian market because first of all Russia is a good country. We have considered the diplomacy between Burundi and Russia, and Russia is a country which has many people. That is why the tea of Burundi can find a market here," Nahawenimana said.

Nahawenimana stated that the Tea Authority relied on the support of Burundi's embassy in Russia to facilitate a smooth entrance of the country's products onto the Russian market.

According to Nahawenimana the tea that will be supplied from these factories will be both green and black - with the authority hoping to export one type of green tea and four categories of black tea to Russia.

The Burundi Tea Authority manages five factories, from which the country will provide the tea sold to Russia. The factories are located in the provinces of Teza, Rwegura, Tora, Ijenda and Buhoro, where the appropriate conditions of high rainfall are observed.

Burundi's Coffee Will Flood Russian Market

Jeremie Ndikumana, the chief of the economic and promotion service at the regulatory authority of the Burundi Coffee Sector, told Sputnik that the country was willing to divert as much of its coffee to Russia as necessary due to excess supplies still in the country.

"We have a quantity of coffee that is unsold, that is still in Burundi - so if Russia wants to take all the [coffee produced] in Burundi, it is welcome," Ndikumana said.

Ndikumana stated that initially the Coffee Authority would focus on exhibiting Burundi's coffee to acquaint the Russian market with it.

"About the promotional activities that we plan to do - it is just to exhibit. Normally we do exhibitions of coffee around the world and now since we have a positive relationship between Burundi and Russia, we plan to penetrate Russia with coffee," Ndikumana said.

The ambassador of Burundi to Russia, Edouard Bizimana, told Sputnik that the first exhibition in which the country's Coffee and Tea Authorities would exhibit and distribute their products would take place in September.

Ndikumana added that after limited success in exhibitions in the United States, Burundi would use additional efforts to reach Russian consumers and distributors.

Burundi plans to export Arabica Bourbon to Russia, of the "highest quality," according to Ndikumana. The coffee is grown on plantations located at a height of 1,900 meters. This includes the provinces of Ngozi, Kirimiro and Imbo - a region surrounding the Lake Tanganyika.

Tea, Coffee Are First Steps For Trade

Bizimana stated that coffee and tea were only the first of Burundi's products that the country sought to bring to Russia.

"It's a first step and I think apart from tea and coffee there are also other products that will be interesting for Russia... Coffee and tea, we are assisting on this produce because they are less perishable than fresh fruits because a container may take three months to reach Russia," Bizimana said.

Bizimana added that the positive development of relations between Russia and Burundi, specifically modifications to the visa regime would result in an increase in business contacts that could be made between the two countries.

"Last time we signed the agreement of visa exemptions for people who travel on diplomatic and service passports... This helps people to move freely and I think what we emphasize on now is to try to eliminate all kinds of barriers that may exist to allow the movements of goods to flow easily," Bizimana said.

According to the ambassador, the economic relations between Burundi and Russia had only been established in the last three years, but they exhibited a positive growth trajectory.

Previously in an interview with Sputnik, Bizimana remarked that Burundi sought economic relations with Russia to be escalated to the high level of political cooperation between the countries.
Canada pledged over 50 million Canadian dollars (about $37 million) in aid to Syria and its neighbors on Thursday, while Austria has said it would give nine million euros (about $10 million) to help with the countries' reconstruction efforts

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th March, 2019) Canada pledged over 50 million Canadian Dollars (about $37 million ) in aid to Syria and its neighbors on Thursday, while Austria has said it would give nine million Euros (about $10 million ) to help with the countries' reconstruction efforts.

The United Nations urged the international community on Wednesday to recognize the humanitarian crisis is still looming over Syria and its neighbors and asked nations to support the millions of displaced Syrian refugees with financial assistance. With 11.7 million people needing emergency assistance, according to UN numbers, the organization has asked for $3.3 billion for the response inside Syria and $5.5 billion for refugees in the region.

"On behalf of the Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister of International Development and Minister for Women and Gender Equality, Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced $50.

35 million in support to address humanitarian needs in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq," the Canadian government said on its website.

Austria also decided to allocate its funds for reconstruction and demining efforts in Syria.

"Austria's aid will amount to 9 million euros, part of which will be directed to the demining efforts in the country, which we would like to focus our attention on. We will also provide aid to neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Lebanon," Karin Kneissl, the Austrian foreign minister, told reporters on the sidelines of a "Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region" conference in Brussels, co-chaired by the United Nations and the European Union.

Syria is in the process of recovering from a years-long military conflict that ravaged the country and displaced millions. The international community is now in the process of assisting Syria's reconstruction and resettlement.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry on Friday described the statements made by the participants of a joint European Union-UN pledging conference as "hypocritical," accusing the EU countries of supporting terrorists in the conflict-torn country

DAMASCUS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th March, 2019) The Syrian Foreign Ministry on Friday described the statements made by the participants of a joint European Union-UN pledging conference as "hypocritical," accusing the EU countries of supporting terrorists in the conflict-torn country.

The third conference on "Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region," hosted by the European Union and co-chaired by the United Nations, took place in Brussels earlier this week. Participants from 57 countries pledged to provide a record $6.97 billion to support Syrians in need. Damascus condemned the conference, to which Syrian government officials were not invited.

"Hypocrisy in speeches of a number of officials from a number of countries that participated in the conference causes irony and anger as they are shedding tears for the Syrians, while, in fact, they are responsible, first of all, for the bloodshed among the Syrian people by providing unlimited support for terrorist groups and supporting a multidimensional war, including economic, which affects the lives of the Syrians," the statement, obtained by Sputnik, read.

The ministry added the EU sanctions that "target" the Syrian nationals made it hard to trust any of the European Union's statements on providing assistance to Syria.

Damascus also condemned the attempts to politicize the delivery of humanitarian assistance to Syria, stressing that its authorities can "create a blossoming future" without the support of the countries that participated in the Brussels conference.

The EU sanctions concerning the situation in Syria have been in place since December 2011. They target more than 270 individuals and 72 entities by a travel ban or an asset freeze.
The Nicaraguan government and representatives from the opposition Civic Alliance agreed to renew peace talks on March 14, local media reported on Thursday, citing a press statement that the two sides jointly released

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th March, 2019) The Nicaraguan government and representatives from the opposition Civic Alliance agreed to renew peace talks on March 14, local media reported on Thursday, citing a press statement that the two sides jointly released.

"The participants of the discussion had an intense exchange of various opinions and the Civic Alliance expressed their readiness to return to the negotiating table," the statement said as quoted by Venezuelan news agency Telesur.

It was also mentioned that sides had negotiated the release of a number of people who were arrested, according to the opposition, on political grounds, scheduled for March 15.

In late February, the Nicaraguan government and opposition agreed to resume long-stalled talks on resolving the country's political crisis.

A week later the two sides agreed on a 16-point road map that set out the negotiation procedures. However, on Sunday, opposition walked out of the talks, calling on President Daniel Ortega to release all political prisoners before talks could resume.

Nicaragua has been in a political crisis since April 2018 when people took to the streets to protest unpopular social security reforms announced by Ortega. Despite the president canceling the reforms a few days later, protests ensued with people redirecting their discontent at Ortega. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 317 people were killed in approximately three months following the protests' outbreak. The Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry maintains that the number is 198.
(@FahadShabbir)

Harlem Desir, the media freedom representative with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), called on the Moldovan authorities on Thursday to facilitate foreign journalists' travel between OSCE member states

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th March, 2019) Harlem Desir, the media freedom representative with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), called on the Moldovan authorities on Thursday to facilitate foreign journalists' travel between OSCE member states.

According to media reports, the Moldovan Border Police detained two Greek investigative journalists at the country's main airport on Wednesday. The journalists were released 30 minutes later after being questioned about the reasons for their visit to Moldova.

"Following reported refusal of entry to two Greek journalists to #Moldova on 13 March.

I again call on #Moldova authorities to facilitate travel of foreign journalists from one #OSCE country to another," Desir wrote on Twitter.

The Greek journalists were investigating a trafficking pedophile network allegedly based in Moldova, which came into spotlight when Nikos Georgiadis, an aide to Greek opposition leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was found guilty of child abuse. Georgiadis served as EU high level policy adviser to the deputy prime minister of Moldova when he committed the crimes.
Moscow strongly condemns the upcoming march of Waffen-SS legionnaires in Latvia's capital and believes that the event desecrates the memory of those who fought the Nazis, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th March, 2019) Moscow strongly condemns the upcoming march of Waffen-SS legionnaires in Latvia's capital and believes that the event desecrates the memory of those who fought the Nazis, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday.

Marches commemorating deceased members of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen SS are held annually in Riga on March 16.

"On March 16, a regular march of former Waffen-SS legionnaires and their followers among local right-wing and neo-Nazi organizations will take place in Riga. We consider this event to be another cynical incident of glorifying the Nazis and desecrating the memory of millions of people who fought against the Brown Plague," the ministry said.

The Waffen-SS, as well as other Nazi organizations, such as the Gestapo, SD and SA, were outlawed following the Nuremberg trials.
(@FahadShabbir)

Chief of the Russian Defense Ministry's Main Directorate for Military Cooperation, Maj. Gen. Alexander Kshimovsky, held a meeting on Thursday with the head of the Norwegian Defense Ministry's Department of Security Policy, Henning Vaglum, to discuss the situation in Syria and the cooperation between the two ministries, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th March, 2019) Chief of the Russian Defense Ministry's Main Directorate for Military Cooperation, Maj. Gen. Alexander Kshimovsky, held a meeting on Thursday with the head of the Norwegian Defense Ministry's Department of Security Policy, Henning Vaglum, to discuss the situation in Syria and the cooperation between the two ministries, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The meeting was held in the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

"The agenda included issues related to the Russian and the Norwegian armed forces' activities in the northern regions; bilateral military relations, including measures to prevent incidents; and the prospects for creation of a channel for communication between the two countries' defense ministries.

Apart from that, the sides have discussed the situation in Syria," the statement read.

Kshimovsky and Vaglum have agreed to continue contacts, the ministry added.

"Agreement has been reached to continue contacts in such format to discuss pressing security matters and the military relations between Russia and Norway," the statement read.

The Russian Defense Ministry praised the talks as constructive.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

The Russian diaspora in Syria, represented by several thousand citizens, has experienced all the hardship of the Syrian crisis, which will soon exceed the eight-year milestone

DAMASCUS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th March, 2019) The Russian diaspora in Syria , represented by several thousand citizens, has experienced all the hardship of the Syrian crisis, which will soon exceed the eight-year milestone.

Representatives of the Russian diaspora told Sputnik about their most vivid memories of the war years and shared their thoughts on whether the crisis in the country is approaching the end.

There are several customers walking along the narrow aisles and choosing Syrian-made goods at a small store in the evening.

Because of the sanctions that were imposed on Syria, there are practically no products from abroad, and if there are some, then the prices are sky-high and the locals cannot afford them.

Products that are familiar to Russians are also nowhere to be found. The seller at the register heard the Russian language and suddenly also starts speaking Russian.

"There are no buckwheat and herring," he said as these products are the staples of the Russian cuisine.

The counterman switches to Arabic and explains that before the beginning of the conflict there were stores near the Russian Embassy with goods that Russians really liked.

"Because of the conflict, all these stores have been closed, but maybe someday they will be opened again," he said with a sight.

This is only one of the consequences of the protracted Syrian crisis. The bridge near the embassy was reopened for traffic only this year, while numerous checkpoints where each vehicle was searched are gradually disappearing.

However, the checkpoints at the entrances to the city are still in place, and the enhanced security of key facilities continues to exist. The guards armed with weapons on the streets of Damascus are still a norm for the residents. Nevertheless, security measures are justified: only in January, a mined car blew up, literally, 300 meters from the Russian Embassy.

At the same time, the streets were empty a year ago during the evenings, including near the embassy, which was regularly subjected to mortar attacks by terrorists.

Irina, who has been living in Damascus for more than 30 years, said that she had not left Syria during the conflict because of her Syrian husband, even though he did not mind her possible departure. A significant role was played by the fact that a plane was ready to evacuate the Russians at any time.

The situation worsened around 2014, when militants took control of the areas near the house of the pair.

"We could see everything from our balcony - the explosions all around, how the houses were burning down," Irina said.

At some point, she had to memorize the lineage of prophet Muhammad.

"Because you could go to a store or somewhere else, and suddenly a car stops you and they ask: who was the mother of prophet Muhammad? What was her name? And you need to answer immediately, without thinking twice: Aminah," the woman explained.

Even now, a few years later, she remembers this information by heart.

The terrorists, who were proud of their pseudo-religion, could ask about the Names of the prophet's wives, there were 16 of them, or about the number of children.

"You needed to answer immediately and then they would let you go. If you made some mistakes then this was the end," Irina says.

However, she noted that despite the difficult times, the diaspora had gathered for meetings and discussed latest events.

"Many people left. Some wives left and their husbands stayed," the woman said.

Irina remembered that it was difficult to leave the city, as almost all the routes were under control of militants.

"Only one road from Damascus was opened, the one through the Maaloula monastery," she said.

The woman noted that in 2011 some people believed that the war would bypass Damascus.

"The war is still going on, there are still these attacks in Homs, Aleppo, villages are being attacked, blown up. The war is not over yet, so we cannot say that the life is calm and there is no war. Everyone is alarmed, waiting that something else might happen, everyone feels the pressure," Irina stressed.

Actress Natalya Karesli, who has been living in Damascus for many years, said that "the war was scary not due to particular incidents, but in general, first of all, because of human losses, when someone is killed, while someone ceases to exist for you, revealing their true face at a difficult time."

Karesli shared notes from her diary, which she had been writing during the war. According to her diary, in January 2012, a young doctor told her how they had brought to the hospital wounded soldiers, policemen, civilians, who were attacked by militants.

Once a man looking dirty came to the emergency room, he was holding a plastic bag in his hands. The man was in a state of shock and could not explain who he was and why he came.

"They took the bag from him and opened it. There was a severed head. Shouting, screaming ... The man, who had come, regained consciousness because of all these noises. It turned out that the bus in which he was going from one suburb to another was stopped by armed bandits. All passengers were killed, one head was cut off, put into the bag and given to the only person who was left alive. They told him to go to Damascus. An act of intimidation," Karesli wrote.

When asked about whether it is possible to say with confidence if the war was coming to an end, Karesli noted that "this is a place on earth where the temperature temporarily goes down by a few degrees."

According to Alexandra, teacher of Russian, the key to survival during the war was "not losing optimism."

"It is scary when people go to work and school and do not know whether they will return home safe and sound," Alexandra said, recalling the years of violent clashes.

She noted that Russia had come to the rescue "at the most critical time" as the Russian Aerospace Forces began their operation in September 2015, when Damascus was almost completely surrounded.
Iran fully meets its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, while the United States tries to block its implementation, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Friday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th March, 2019) Iran fully meets its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, while the United States tries to block its implementation, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Friday.

"Iran strictly complies with all relevant requirements [under the JCPOA], this is regularly confirmed by the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency]. Nuclear activities in this country are under the constant control of the agency and are an example of transparency," Zakharova said at a briefing.

According to Zakharova, Iran fully implements the agreement in terms of its pledge to convert an uranium enrichment facility in Fordow into a facility that produces stable isotopes. Russian nuclear energy experts have lent their assistance on this particular project, Zakharova added.

The spokeswoman underlined that US actions aimed at preventing the implementation of the nuclear deal were a source of concern for all parties to the agreement.

US-Iranian relations deteriorated in May when US President Donald Trump announced his country's decision to withdraw from the JCPOA and reimpose its sanctions on Tehran that had been lifted when the agreement was signed in 2015. The first package of restrictions came into force in August, followed by a second in November.

In the wake of this decision, the other parties to the JCPOA China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union expressed their commitment to the accord and began working to create tools to bypass the sanctions.
WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 16th March, 2019) US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDAS) of State for Energy Resources Kent Logsdon is set to travel to Belgium and Germany on Sunday for a week long-trip to address energy security concerns in the region, the Department of State said in a press release.

"Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Kent D. Logsdon will travel to Brussels and Berlin from March 17 to 21, 2019," the release said on Friday. "Throughout his trip, PDAS Logsdon will highlight the importance of a strong, growing, integrated, diversified, and resilient global energy market that promotes transatlantic energy security for the United States, its allies, and partners."

In Brussels, Logsdon will participate in the NATO North Atlantic Council on Energy Security meeting, the release said.

In Berlin, Logsdon will participate in the US-Germany Bilateral Energy Security Dialogue and conduct a series of bilateral meetings with German government officials, the release added.

The United States has repeatedly called on the European Union and on Germany to give up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that is set to bring Russian natural gas to Germany across the Baltic Sea while bypassing Ukraine.

German officials have argued, however, that the construction had advanced too far to stop now.

Apart from Germany and Russia, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will pass through the territorial waters of Denmark, Sweden and Finland. All countries save for Denmark have granted permissions for the pipeline and Nord Stream 2 AG CFO Paul Corcoran expressed hope the Danish section will be built by the end of 2019.

US diplomats have urged the European Union to revise its Third Energy Package's Gas Directive to apply it to Nord Stream 2, which is led by Russian gas giant Gazprom. The provision seeks to separate gas production from sales to prevent monopolies in the European energy market.

Russian President Vladimir Putin previously accused the United States of trying to force Russia out of the European energy market to sell more liquefied natural gas to Europe. Both Russia and Germany have argued the pipeline is a purely commercial project.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th March, 2019) Provision of weapons by the West and money by the Gulf states to groups fighting against the Syrian government prolonged the war in the middle Eastern country, ex-UK Ambassador to Damascus, Peter Ford, told Sputnik on the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the conflict, adding that even when the violence was over, the West's war on Syria would continue by other means.

March 15 marks the anniversary of the beginning of anti-government protests in Syria in 2011, which subsequently turned into violent clashes between various opposition groups and the security forces. The conflict was further aggravated by the activities of various terrorist groups, including the Islamic State (ISIS, terror group banned in Russia) on the Syrian territory. According to the UN estimates, around 500,000 people have been killed since the violence broke out.

"Without a shadow of a doubt, if the West and the Gulf countries had not given such massive support to what were, in effect, proxy jihadi armies, the [Syrian President Bashar] Assad government could have contained the conflict, just as the 1980 conflict with the Muslim Brothers was contained ... The provision of weapons by the West and money by the Gulf prevented that happening and prolonged the agony ... The military conflict, meaning essentially Idlib, may be over within two years but the Western war on Syria will simply continue by other means, notably economic war, information warfare and law-fare," Ford said on Thursday.

If the West and the Arab Gulf states had stayed outside the conflict, it would have ended "inside a year," saving hundreds of thousands of lives, Ford pointed out.

The administration of ex-US President Barack Obama and its allies behaved with extraordinary irresponsibility in funneling huge amounts of weapons and other resources to what were clearly ultra-violent Islamist extremist terrorist groups, Ford recalled.

"It was criminally negligent for the US to supply weapons and training to often bloodthirsty jihadis. The US simply prioritized removing Assad over all other considerations, including the fight against al-Qaeda [terror group banned in Russia] and ISIS," Ford argued.

The administration of US President Donald Trump, who succeeded Obama, had finally decided to stop the US "train and equip" program in Syria because the officials saw it was feeding Islamist extremists, not discouraging them, Ford explained.

"I think they probably realized belatedly that not only was the program not working in terms of defeating Assad but it was also backfiring in terms of encouraging extremism.

Ford foresaw that the current military conflict was likely to finally end within the next year or two. However, he also cautioned that the United States and its allies would continue their efforts to try and destabilize and topple the Damascus government by other means.

Ford was the UK's ambassador in Syria and Bahrain before joining the United Nations to work on refugee issues. He is the co-chairman of the British Syrian Society.
Spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova pointed on Friday to the absurdity of the fact that the West was collecting millions of dollars in aid for the Syrian people while at the same time refusing to lift harmful unilateral sanctions imposed on Damascus

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th March, 2019) Spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova pointed on Friday to the absurdity of the fact that the West was collecting millions of Dollars in aid for the Syrian people while at the same time refusing to lift harmful unilateral sanctions imposed on Damascus

On Thursday, Brussels hosted the third Conference on Supporting the Future of Syria and the Region, during which donors pledged to provide almost $7 billion to help Syrians inside and outside the country over the course of this year, while another $2.37 billion were promised for the year 2020 and beyond.

"It is perfectly absurd to, on the one hand, collect money, millions of dollars in aid for Syria and Syrians, talk about the dire situation [they live in], organize non-governmental funds, transfer huge sums into these funds and structures; and on the other hand, introduce .

.. sanctions. These are two perfectly contradictory things," the spokeswoman said.

Zakharova added that Russia had used the conference to open the eyes of the international community to the harmful effects of unilateral sanctions, which only aggravate the humanitarian situation in the Arab country.

The latest Western sanctions were imposed on Damascus by the European Union and the United States in 2011, after the beginning of the nation's civil war, in response to human rights violations allegedly committed by Syrian authorities. The restrictions included travel bans; the freezing of assets belonging both to designated individuals and the Syrian central bank; investment, export and transaction restrictions; among other measures.
The combined pathway -if the mpMRI is positive  the patient undergoes a systematic +targeted biopsy, and if the mpMRI is negative  the patient undergoes only a systematic biopsy. The MRI pathway  if the mpMRI is positive  the patient undergoes a targeted biopsy and if the mpMRI is negative, the patient undergoes no biopsy.

Barcelona, Spain (UroToday.com) Dr. Rouviere presented the imaging specialists perspective on MRI use in prostate cancer. According to the European Association of Urology (EAU) guidelines prostate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) was originally recommended after a negative prostate biopsy before a repeat biopsy (2015). Later, mpMRI was recommended before a confirmatory biopsy in candidates for active surveillance (2016), and recently it has been recommended before a first set of biopsy, in biopsy naive men (2019).There are two possible clinical pathways :It is important to understand the added value of the systematic biopsy. There are two relevant multicenter prospective trials  the MRI-FIRSTand the 4M trial. Additionally, there is a very pertinent Cochrane Meta-analysis. The diagnosis of clinically significant cancers (>=Gleason grade group 2) in these trials for biopsy-naive men are shown in figure 1. These results show that systematic biopsies retain substantial added value in biopsy naive patients and cannot be omitted at this point for these specific population. However, a systematic biopsy might be omitted in case of repeat biopsy.Figure 1  Results of important trials in biopsy naive patients, ISUP >=2 cancers:Many times, the systematic biopsies are negative and are responsible for the over-detection of indolent cancers. MpMRI specificity is low and a substantial part of PIRADS 3 and 4 lesions are benign. It is important to ask if it is possible to better predict the patients who need a (systematic or targeted) biopsy?The negative predictive value of mpMRI is good in most studies,but it decreases when the pre-test risk of disease increases (figure 2).This means that if the risk of clinically significant disease is high, the results of the mpMRI cannot be trusted. In contrast, the positive predictive value of mpMRI increases as the pre-test risk of disease increases (figure 3).This means that a moderately positive mpMRI (PIRADS 3 or 4) in a low-risk patient, might not need a biopsy at all. In the near future, risk calculators combining clinical data, mpMRI findings, and biomarkers will be used to decide who needs to be biopsied. Hopefully, this approach will reduce the number of biopsies and the over-detection of ISUP grade 1 cancers (Gleason grade group 1), while maintaining, or even improving the detection of clinically significant prostate cancer.Figure 2  Negative predictive value of mpMRI:Figure 3  Positive predictive value of mpMRI:Dr. Rouviere continued and stated that the accuracy of the targeted method is not optimal, despite MRI/US fusion. It is needed to improve this accuracy, or at least assess the minimal number of targeted cores to be taken depending on the size of the mpMRI lesion, its position, and the prostate volume. Obtaining only 1-2 cores form a suspicious mpMRI lesion is not sufficient, and a saturation biopsy of mpMRI suspicious prostate areas may be necessary.The last topic discussed was the reproducibility of mpMRI interoperation. Despite the use of the PIRADS version 2 scoring system, inter-reader reproducibility is moderate at best. The are some initiatives to try and improve mpMRI interpretation. These include a certification process for radiologists  ESUR/EAU initiative, and using a quantitative mpMRI, which means replacing subjective assessment of PIRADS categories by quantitative MRI parameters. Using computer-assisted diagnosis systems will also improve mpMRI interpretation, and this will continue to evolve in the near future.In conclusion, mpMRI is currently recommended before any prostate biopsy. Dr. Rouviere predicts that risk stratification will be used to decide who may deserve a biopsy after mpMRI. Additionally, the role of systematic biopsy will gradually decrease over time and it will remain necessary to obtain a substantial number of targeted cores from each lesion, to take into account the imprecision of the MRI/US fusion methods. Lastly, certification of radiologists and the use of quantitative mpMRI will improve the reproducibility of interpretation.Presented by: Olivier Rouviere, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Urinary and Vascular Imaging, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Lyon, Lyon, FranceWritten by: Hanan Goldberg, MD, Urologic Oncology Fellow (SUO), University of Toronto, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre @GoldbergHanan at the 34th European Association of Urology (EAU 2019) #EAU19 conference in Barcelona, Spain, March 15-19, 2019. References:1. Rouviere O et al. Use of prostate systematic and targeted biopsy on the basis of multiparametric MRI in biopsy-naive patients (MRI-FIRST): a prospective, multicentre, paired diagnostic study. Lancet Oncol. 2019 Jan;20(1):100-109. doi: 10.1016/S1470-2045(18)30569-2. Epub 2018 Nov 21. 2. Van der Leest et al. Head-to-head Comparison of Transrectal Ultrasound-guided Prostate Biopsy Versus Multiparametric Prostate Resonance Imaging with Subsequent Magnetic Resonance-guided Biopsy in Biopsy-naive Men with Elevated Prostate-specific Antigen: A Large Prospective Multicenter Clinical Study. European Urology. Volume 75, Issue 4, April 2019, Pages 570-5783. Droost FJH, et al. Cochrane database of systematic reviews 20194. Moldovan PC et al. What Is the Negative Predictive Value of Multiparametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Excluding Prostate Cancer at Biopsy? A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis from the European Association of Urology Prostate Cancer Guidelines Panel. Eur Urol. 2017 Aug;72(2):250-266. doi: 10.1016/j.eururo.2017.02.026. Epub 2017 Mar 21.5. Rouviere O et al. The current role of prostate multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging Diagn Interv Imaging 2018
Barcelona, Spain (UroToday.com) As a prostate cancer patient himself, Mr. Dowling gave his perspective on the disease. Mr. John Dowling is the former Chairman of MAC  Men Against Cancer, an Irish-based patient support group for men with prostate and testicular cancer. In addition, he is the Secretary of Europe UOMO, which supports national organizations to deliver prostate cancer services in an effective manner and in line with national priorities. The organization works for prostate cancer patients in Europe under one umbrella and strives for better treatment, care and quality of life for all prostate cancer patients.His talk focused on some important epidemiological data coming from Europe and some points to consider when treating these patients. He first showed the percentage of men that are aware of prostate cancer risks and PSA testing. According to this data, less than 50% of men in Europe were aware of the risk of this cancer and that PSA testing even exists (Figure 1). Next, he showed data regarding health care professionals promoting PSA testing, and only 50% were in-fact doing so (figure 2). Figure 3 demonstrates the rate of men diagnosed with prostate cancer that had been treated within a month, showing that only 19% of the diagnosed men meet this threshold. Lastly, figure 4 shows the percentage of low-risk prostate cancer patients that were offered active surveillance in Europe, culminating to a total of 64%.Figure 1  Data from Europe regarding men that are aware of prostate cancer risks and PSA testing:Figure 2  Data from Europe regarding health care professional that are promoting PSA testing:Figure 3  Data from Europe demonstrating the percentage of men with prostate cancer treated within one month of diagnosis:Figure 4  Data from Europe regarding the rates of active surveillance that was offered to low-risk prostate cancer patients:Next, Mr. Dowling discussed the important topic of adverse effects resulting from the treatment of prostate cancer. He showed a graph (Figure 5) demonstrating the correlation between side effects and quality of life. This graph clearly shows that as the stage of the disease increase, the adverse effect occurring after treatment are worse, and the patients quality of life decreases. It is therefore important to diagnose and subsequently treat cancer as early as possible before the disease progresses. Mr. Dowling also mentioned that urologists should focus more on the preoperative explanation of the effect of surgery on the sexual function and what can be done in this matter following surgery, as this needs to improve.Mr. Dowling concluded his talk and stated that it is time for a revised strategy that should include increasing awareness of prostate cancer and PSA screening among men at risk and make sure patients are diagnosed and treated in multidisciplinary centers.Figure 5  The correlation between side effects, quality of life, and disease stage and treatment:Presented by: John Dowling, Secretary, Europa Uomo, The European Prostate Cancer Coalition, Dublin, IrelandWritten by: Hanan Goldberg, MD, Urologic Oncology Fellow (SUO), University of Toronto, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre @GoldbergHanan at the 34th European Association of Urology (EAU 2019) #EAU19 conference in Barcelona, Spain, March 15-19, 2019.
Finnish party leaders were asked by the public broadcasting company whether they support the notion of raising the value-added tax on meat products, not dissimilarly to those on harmful products such as alcohol and tobacco.

A QUESTION about climate change, food production and taxation stirred up emotions during an election debate organised on Thursday by YLE.

I think that a value-added tax based on sustainable development is the only right way to steer consumption [] in the right direction, commented Antti Rinne, the chairperson of the Social Democrats.

He was then asked where the tax should be levied. On the price of the product, of course, he replied, prompting another follow-up question. On meat, for example. Im talking now about beef fillets imported from Brazil. Well also have to take care of emissions from meat production in Finland.

His statement provoked a flurry of comments from the other party leaders, forcing the discussion moderator to step in.

Sari Essayah, the chairperson of the Christian Democrats, said the statement was a wet towel in the face of Finnish agriculture. Prime Minister Juha Sipila (Centre), in turn, declared that such taxes are out of the question.

Li Andersson, the chairperson of the Left Alliance, estimated that the value-added tax should ideally take into consideration the carbon footprints of all food products. It could mean that the price of meat is proportionally higher because of its larger carbon footprint, but it should also lower the prices of some other food products, she said.

Thats the steering effect, remarked Rinne.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Source: Uusi Suomi
The Ministry of Transport and Communications on Thursday revealed that decisions on founding two of the five subsidiaries of the special-purpose company will be made by the next government.

THE CARETAKER GOVERNMENT of Prime Minister Juha Sipila (Centre) will be unable to move forward with a plan to set up Pohjolan Rautatiet, a special-purpose company founded recently to promote the development of railway infrastructure in Finland.

This became evident after the issue was discussed by Minister of Transport and Communications Anne Berner (Centre) and Chancellor of Justice Tuomas Poysti on 14 March, a ministry spokesperson said in a press release.

Poysti has ruled that the ministry can establish a subsidiary to manage rolling stock, another to manage railway-related real estate and a third to promote Rail Baltica, a railway project linking Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. It can also continue its preparatory work on promoting the development of high-speed rail links between Helsinki and Turku, and Helsinki and Tampere.

The shareholders agreements for the last two subsidiaries, however, will require an approval from the next government.

Poysti has previously stated that the limits of the caretaker governments powers will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

He told Uusi Suomi on Thursday that decisions with wide-ranging societal impacts, such as the establishment of subsidiaries to promote the development of the two high-speed rail links, cannot be made by a caretaker government.

He also drew attention to his earlier a statement on the role of the caretaker government.

A caretaker government can be deemed fit to deal with necessary, routine-like current affairs and urgent issues the resolution of which cannot be left to the next government. A caretaker government cannot carry out the government programme. Caretaker ministries are similarly required to forgo new or broad political initiatives that could affect the operational preconditions of the new government, he noted in a statement issued on 5 March.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Source: Uusi Suomi
A Requiem Mass presided over by the Metropolitan Archbishop of Addis Ababa, Cardinal Berhaneyesus Souraphiel, CM and concelebrated by several Bishops and priests in Ethiopia has been held for the 157 victims of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302.

Makeda Yohannes  Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The Boeing 737 Max 8 plane bound for Nairobi, Kenya went down last Sunday morning near Bishoftu, southeast of Addis Ababa killing all passengers and crew.

Thursdays Requiem Mass was held at the Holy Saviour Parish in Addis Ababa and was organised by the Ethiopian Catholic Church and the International Catholic Community in Addis Ababa.

157 White Roses, 157 Candles for each life

On the occasion, a bouquet of 157 white roses was prepared, and 157 candles were lit to represent every victim of the accident. The parents and family of Mrs Ama Teklemariam, a Catholic who was a crew member on ET 302, were also present at the Mass.

Apostolic Nuncio conveys Pope Francis divine blessings of consolation

Archbishop Luigi Bianco, the Apostolic Nuncio to Ethiopia and Djibouti and Special Delegate to Somalia, read out Pope Francis message of condolences as well as assurances of prayers. In the message, the Holy Father prayed for all the deceased and invoked divine blessings of consolation for all bereaved families.

Tragedy has brought the world together in grief says Ethiopian Airlines

Speaking at the end of the Requiem Mass, Mr Fikire Degef, who attended the event on behalf of Ethiopian Airlines CEO Mr Tewolde GebreMariam, noted that the victims had brought the world together in grief, shock and above all in prayer. He assured that Ethiopian Airlines would do its best to support the families of the victims get closure.

We at Ethiopian Airlines pray that they may rest in peace. We will work hard to accompany the families of the victims through this difficult time, he said.

UN Economic Commission for Africa prays for victims and for families

Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Dr Vera Songwe for her part thanked the Catholic Church in bringing together families, friends and colleagues of the victims and the international community in Addis Ababa to pray together. She added that such a tragedy reminds us of our mortality and that we have limited time on this earth to do good in the world.

A tragedy like this reminds us of our mortality and encourages us to do better with our time on earth, she said.

Kenyas Ambassador to Ethiopia Ms Catherine Mwangi also thanked the Church for gathering the congregation to pray for the departed. She said that coming face to face with families of the departed underscored the immensity of the tragedy.

Let us pray that God may grant those who lost friends and family the grace to make meaning of their lives without their loved ones, prayed the Ambassador.

Cardinal Berhaneyesus says we should make each day count

Before the final Blessing, Cardinal Berhaneyesus, CM, concluded the Requiem Mass by saying such a tragedy should remind us that we should live every day as though it was the last day of our lives.

We should always be ready  always for the coming of our Lord. We should decide to drop all that is bad in this world and chose only what is good. We should ... live in harmony witnessing the Gospel in our lives, he said.

The Cardinal also called on all to unite in prayer for the souls of the departed and for the consolation of the bereaved families. He further prayed for Ethiopian Airlines management and staff that God would grant them the grace to continue their services with the usual success.
Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Archbishop emeritus of Mechelin-Brussels, died Thursday in Belgium, age 85.

By Vatican News

In a telegram sent to Cardinal Jozef De Kesel, Danneels successor as Archbishop of Mechelin-Brussels, Pope Francis said he learned with sadness of Cardinal Danneels death, and expressed condolences to all those affected by this loss.

Pope Francis described Cardinal Daneels as a zealous pastor who served the Church with dedication, not only in his diocese, but also at the national level as president of the Conference of Bishops of Belgium, while being a member of various Roman dicasteries.

The Holy Father also noted Cardinal Danneels active participation in various Synods of Bishops, including the Synods on the Family, to which he was appointed by Pope Francis himself.

Cardinal Danneels has been called to God at this time of purification and of walking toward the Resurrection of the Lord, the Pope said in his telegram. I ask Christ, victor over evil and death, to welcome him in His peace and joy.

BIOGRAPHY OF CARDINAL GODFRIED DANEELS

Cardinal Godfried Danneels, Archbishop emeritus of Mechelen-Brussel (Malines-Bruxelles), Military Ordinary for Belgium, was born on 4 June 1933 in Kanegem, diocese of Bruges, in Eastern Flanders.

After his secondary studies at the College of St. Joseph in Tielt, he earned a licentiate in theology at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Louvain in 1954, and in 1961, a doctorate at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome. Meanwhile, on 17 August 1957, he was ordained a priest, and in 1959, he became spiritual director of the major seminary of Bruges. Ten years later he became professor of theology at the Flemish Catholic University of Louvain and on 4 November 1977 he was named Bishop of Antwerp by Paul VI. He was consecrated on 18 December 1977 and in the two years that he headed the diocese, he dedicated much of his time to the spiritual direction of the priests and to pastoral leadership, working assiduously toward increased collaboration between priests and laity.

In 1978 John Paul II designated him President Delegate, together with Cardinal Willebrands, of the Special Synod for the Netherlands. During the Synod of Bishops on the role of the Christian family in the Contemporary World (1980), in which he represented his bishops conference, he was elected by a wide majority as a member of the General Secretariat of the same Synod. Thereafter, he participated in numerous synods of bishops: VI Ordinary General Assembly on reconciliation and penance (1983); II Extraordinary General Assembly, 20 years after Vatican Council II, as relator (1985); VII Ordinary General Assembly on the laity (1987); VIII Ordinary General Assembly on the formation of priests (1990); I Special Assembly for Europe (1991); IX Ordinary General Assembly on consecrated life (1994); II Special Assembly for Europe (1999): X Ordinary General Assembly on the bishop (2001); XI Ordinary General Assembly on the eucharist (2005); and, XII Ordinary General Assembly on the Word of God (2008).

He participated in the III Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops (October 2014) on The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization and in the XIV Ordinary General Assembly on The Vocation and Mission of the Family in the Church and Contemporary World (October 2015).

On 19 December 1979, he was named Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussel by John Paul II, succeeding Cardinal Suenens.

Cardinal Danneels served as the Military Ordinary for Belgium and President of the Belgian Bishops' Conference (1980 - 2009).

Archbishop emeritus of Mechelen-Brussel (Malines-Bruxelles), 18 January 2010.

He participated in the conclave of April 2005, which elected Pope Benedict XVI and in the conclave of March 2013, which elected Pope Francis.

Created and proclaimed Cardinal by St. John Paul II in the consistory of 2 February 1983, of the Title of St. Anastasia.
Syrians returning to rebuild their homes with fears of a lost generation.

Eight years of war in Syria have led millions of Syrians into hunger and poverty. War has displaced and forced them to find shelter where possible. Many are now trying to return to their homes but find their homes uninhabitable.

Amal Jaham fled Homs 7 years ago. Her husband is injured and 2 daughters are ill. On her return a month ago she was saddened to see her destroyed home and expressed her inability to repair it.

46 year old Om Hani and her 7 kids work in fields in rural Daraa. Her husband is dead. They fled the fighting in Deir Ezzor, some 400 KM away and are now living in a tent without electricity next to a highway. Her sorrow at the moment is that her children cannot attend school and are forced to work at a very young age.

According to Marwa Awad, the spokesperson for World Food Programme, WFP delivers food assistance to over 3 million people. They also help with nutritional needs and guide with livelihood projects.

This video, produced by the World Food Programme, brings you images of the current situation of Homs, Daraa, Aleppo and Kisweh.
Labor intensive sectors continue to be the growth drivers for Vietnams economic development. However, as the world moves towards Industry 4.0, the government has to introduce significant reforms across all the main sectors of the economy, to increase the productivity, skills, and quality of labor to remain competitive.

Labor productivity

Since 2008, labor productivity in Vietnam has increased by 22.5 percent. In accordance with 2017 prices, productivity is estimated to be VND 93.2 million per worker (US$4,159), an increase of VND 10 million compared to 2016.

Not relative to economic growth

Productivity has not grown relative to the economic growth in Vietnam. In accordance with 2010 prices, the average annual productivity growth rate between 2011 and 2017 was 4.7 percent, while the growth in investment capital was higher at nine percent. In the same period, the economy grew from US$105 billion to US$220 billion. This discrepancy shows that the economy depends on other non-labor factors as well, in addition to productivity.

Wages vs productivity

The gap between the growth in economy and productivity has led to an increase in wages, faster than the productivity growth. From 2004 to 2015, the average wage increased by 6.67 percent, while labor productivity only grew by 4.96 percent.

Wage growth with respect to productivity has increased the highest for FDI firms, while for private firms they have stayed at almost the same levels. For state-owned enterprises, the growth in wages was below the productivity growth.

Industries with slow productivity growth such as mining, post and telecommunications, and transportation, have seen wages grow faster than productivity. For the utility sector, the wage growth has been much slower, while for manufacturing industries, trade, and construction, they have stayed at almost the same levels.

Effect of wages outgrowing productivity

If the wage growth continues to outgrow productivity, firms will see reduced profits, which would compel them to reduce hiring or shift their businesses to other competitive countries. Growth in wages, need to be at par with productivity if Vietnam wants to remain competitive.

Historically, increase in minimum wages have led to an increase in average wages, reduced profits, and lower employment, especially for FDI and private firms. Labor-intensive sectors usually move towards automation, while capital-intensive sectors reduce investments in machinery.

Sectors

From 2008 to 2016, the sectors with high labor productivity were mining, production and distribution of electricity and gas, finance, insurance, technological activities, real estate, and water supply.

During the same period, labor productivity was low for the processing and manufacturing industries and lowest for the agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sector.

Average Salaries

According to Vietnams General Statistics Office, the average monthly salary in 2017 was VND 6.6 million (US$290), up 9.3 percent compared to 2016. This was higher than the growth in the regional minimum wages in 2017, which was 7.3 percent.

In 2017, monthly average salaries for FDI and private firms grew by 13.5 and 3.3 percent respectively, compared to 2016, to VND 6.7 million (US$293) and VND 5.6 million (US$246) respectively.

Cities with the highest average salaries

According to a study by VietnamWorks, a recruitment company in Vietnam, below are the highest average salaries in Vietnam.

Cities/Provinces Average monthly salary (US$) Ho Chi Minh City 456 Da Nang 452 Binh Duong 444 Bac Ninh 421 Hanoi 407

Labor supply

The number of employed laborers in Vietnam increased from 53.3 million in 2016 to 53.7 million in 2017. Employed laborers in agriculture, forestry, fishery decreased from 22.3 million in 2016 to 21.6 million in 2017, while industry and construction saw an increase from 13.2 million in 2016 to 13.8 million in 2017. Services also witnessed a growth from 17.8 million in 2016 to 18.3 million in 2017.

Workforce between the ages of 15 and 39 years currently accounts for nearly half of the total labor force in Vietnam. The share of trained workers within working age in 2017 was estimated at 21.5 percent, higher than 20.6 percent in 2016.

Urban areas accounted for around 32 percent of the employed laborers, while the rest were employed in the rural areas. Male employees accounted for slightly more than half of the Vietnamese workforce.

In 2017, unemployment in the working age group stood at 2.24 percent, of which rates for urban and rural were 3.18 and 1.78 percent respectively. Underemployment of working age workers stood at 1.63 percent, of which rates for urban and rural areas were 0.85 and 2.07 percent.

Labor force distribution

According to the governments Q4 2017 labor force survey, 67.8 percent of the labor force reside in the rural areas. The Red River Delta and North Central along with the South Central Coast account for the largest share in the labor force at 21.7 and 21.6 percent respectively. Mekong River Delta and Southeast follow at 18.9 and 17.1 percent respectively.

The average national labor force participation stood at 76.9 percent. Highest rates are in the Northern Midlands and Mountains and the Central Highlands at 84.9 and 83.3 percent respectively. Areas with lowest participation rates were the Red River Delta and Southeast.

Sector-wise, majority of the labor force in agriculture, forestry, and fishery reside in the Northern Midlands and Mountains, Central Highlands, and the Mekong River Delta. As for the industry and construction sector, the majority reside in the Southeast (Ho Chi Minh City) and the Red River Delta (Hanoi). In addition, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, and Mekong River Delta account for the majority of the labor force in services.

Challenges

The major challenges facing the labor market in Vietnam include lack of skilled labor, the impact of industry 4.0, and the need for labor reforms due to the upcoming free trade agreements.

Lack of skilled labor

FDI firms continue to struggle in hiring skilled labor in Vietnam. According to the 2018 Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI), which assesses countries in terms of their ability to attract, develop, and retain talent, Vietnam ranks 87th amongst 119 countries. Major challenges include the lack of technology infrastructure, R&D spending, vocational, and technical skills.

Lack of skilled labor will slow down the economic transition from labor-intensive industries to high-tech goods, which will reduce Vietnams competitiveness. Currently, around 40 percent of FDI firms in Vietnam find it difficult to recruit skilled employees.

The government has taken steps to increase vocational and technical training in order to meet the requirements of the labor market. In March 2018, the government introduced Decree No. 49/2018/ND-CP that provides for the accreditation of vocational education. As of February 2018, there are more than 1,900 vocational training centers across Vietnam, including 395 colleges and 545 vocational schools, which offer programs in tourism, beauty services, IT, construction, fashion, garment and textiles, pharmaceuticals, precision mechanics and hotel management. The government aims to provide vocational training to 2.2 million people in 2018.

Effect of industry 4.0

Global businesses are fast moving towards Industry 4.0, and if the Vietnamese government does not take steps to enhance human capital, it will have a significant impact on the economy. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), 86 percent of textile and footwear industries workers in Vietnam are at risk of losing their jobs due to technology. Majority of the unemployment will be seen amongst the workforce just entering the market.

Hence, the government has to introduce reforms in education and industrial training to bring it more in line with current industry demands. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF)s Readiness for the Future of Production Report 2018, Vietnam was ranked among those that are not currently ready for Industry 4.0. It ranked 90th in technology and innovation and 70th in human capital, among 100 countries.

FTA commitments

Once the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVNFTA) comes into effect, labor costs are predicted to go higher. These agreements are beneficial as it improves market access for Vietnamese exporters. However, the government needs to focus on labor reforms, technical skills, and corporate governance to fully realize the benefits of the agreement.

Labor rights are amongst the key provisions in both the upcoming agreements. They require members to adopt and maintain the rights as set out in the 1998 ILO Declaration in their laws, institutions, and practices. Although Vietnam has taken few steps to meet the requirements through institutional and legal reforms, more needs to done in terms of enforcement.
George Stinney mugshot, 1944. (State of South Carolina)

Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames.

Geroge Stinney Jr., third from left, is seen in this 1944 newspaper photo entering South Carolinas death house at the state prison in Columbia. (Jimmy Price/Columbia Record)

George Stinney Jr.s fingerprints from 1944 are kept at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. (Michael Pronzato/Post and Courier)

People from across the country wrote letters to Governor Olin D. Johnston regarding George Stinney Jr.s death sentence in 1944. Most of them sought mercy on the childs behalf. Courtesy the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. (Michael Pronzato/Post and Courier)

70 years, 5 months, 29 days later

Amie Ruffner, the sister of George Stinney, is seen with her family during January, 2014 hearing in South Carolina to vacate the murder conviction of her brother, who was executed at age 14 for the murders of two white girls in 1944. They took my brother away and I never saw my mother laugh again, said Amie Ruffner. I would love his name to be cleared.(Randall Hill/Reuters)

George Stinney Jr. became the youngest person to be executed in the U.S in the 20th century when he was sent to the electric chair in 1944, but more than 70 years after his death his conviction has been overturned.On the afternoon of March 23, 1944, Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7, failed to return home. The next morning searchers, George Stinney Sr. among them, discovered the girls bodies lying in a water-filled ditch. Both girls skulls were crushed and one of the girls bicycles lay on top of their bodies.According to an article reported by the wire services on March 24, 1944, and published widely, with the mistake of the boys name preserved, the sheriff announced the arrest and said that George Junius had confessed and led officers to a hidden piece of iron. Both girls had suffered blunt force trauma to the face and head.Reports differed as to what kind of weapon had been used. According to a report by the medical examiner, these wounds had been inflicted by a blunt instrument with a round head, about the size of a hammer. Both girls skulls were punctured. The medical examiner reported no evidence of sexual assault to the younger girl, though the genitalia of the older girl were slightly bruised.After a short investigation, police took George Stinney Jr. and his brother John into custody. They released John, but a few hours later, Stinney confessed to murdering the girls. The sawmill fired Stinney Sr. and the family had to move and rarely saw George Jr. again because his incarceration was 50 miles away.A mere 10 days later, the State tried Stinney for the girls murders. Records indicate 1,000 people crammed the courthouse. Black people were not allowed inside.The jury was all-white and the trial concluded that same day with Judge P.H. Stoll presiding. The court had appointed Charles Plowden as Stinneys counsel. Plowden was a tax commissioner campaigning for a Statehouse seat.Solicitor Frank McLeod represented the State. He presented evidence from law enforcement that Spinney confessed to the crime. While law enforcement testified that a confession occurred, no written confession exists in the record today. Nothing remains from documentary evidence indicating whether the court admitted a murder weapon, bloody clothes or other demonstrative evidence.Plowden called no witnesses, did not cross examine, and never filed an appeal. No one challenged the sheriffs recollection of the confession. The jury deliberated 10 minutes and found Stinney guilty.The same day Judge P.H. Stoll sentenced Stinney to death by electrocution. The entire process had lasted two-hours. No appeals were filed and no stays of execution requested.The day before the scheduled execution, the NAACP protested to Governor Olin D Johnston. The execution proceeded.On June 16, 1944, Stinney became the youngest person to die in the electric chair and the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. Standing 5 feet 1 inch (155 cm) tall and weighing just over 90 pounds (40 kg), the straps dont fit and an electrode was too big for his leg. His feet could not touch the floor.According to writer Joy James, as the first 2,400-volt surge of electricity hit Stinney, the mask covering his face slipped off, revealing his wide-open, tearful eyes and saliva coming from his mouth.His family buried his burned body in an unmarked grave hoping the anonymity would allow him to rest in peace.On December 17, 2014 South Carolina Circuit Judge Carmen T. Mullen vacated Stinneys murder conviction. Judge Mullen called it a great and fundamental injustice.Mullen did not rule that the conviction of Mr. Stinney for the murder of two white girls was wrong on the merits. She did find, however, that the prosecution had failed in numerous ways to safeguard Swinneys constitutional rights from the time police took him into custody until his death by electrocution.The all-white jury could not be considered a jury of the teenagers peers, Judge Mullen ruled, and Stinneys court-appointed attorney did little to nothing to defend him. Stinneys confession was most likely coerced and unreliable, Mullen added , due to the power differential between his position as a 14-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.Family members of both Betty Binnicker and Mary Thames expressed disappointment at the courts ruling. They said that, although they acknowledge Stinneys execution at the age of 14 is controversial, they never doubted the boys guilt.Frankie Bailey Dyches, Betty June Binnickers niece, disagreed. I believe that he confessed, said Dyches , who was born after the 1944 killings. He was tried, found guilty by the laws of 1944, which are completely different now  it cant be compared  and I think that it needs to be left as is.The niece of Betty Binnicker claimed she and her family have extensively researched the case, and argues that people who [just] read these articles in the newspaper dont know the truth. Binnickers niece alleges that, in the early 1990s, a police officer who had arrested Stinney had contacted her and said: Dont you ever believe that boy didnt kill your aunt. These family members said that the claims of a deathbed confession from an individual confessing to the girls murders have never been substantiated.The Conservative Headlines site has stated, Make no mistake: George Stinney Jr was 100% guilty. The white Marxists, the media, and black power groups are perfectly comfortable pretending like he is innocent to advance their political agenda. They are completely comfortable spitting on the graves of two little dead girls. To advance the cause of the far-left, murderous thugs are converted into saints and innocent victims into criminals.In June 2014, the A.N.D. erected a marked grave.
Vietnamese vendors can now sell their goods on the Alibaba platform

Cross-border e-commerce platform Fado Vietnam and its Chinese partner Alibaba signed a co-operation agreement yesterday (March 14) in Ho Chi Minh City to launch a new trading channel supporting Vietnamese firms, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Accordingly, Vietnamese firms will be able to promote their products to 260 million purchasing companies from 240 countries and territories through the Alibaba e-commerce platform.

General director of Fado Vietnam Pham Dat said the collaboration will bring great values to Vietnamese SMEs as exports play an important role in the countrys economy. In the coming time, Fado hopes to support businesses to raise their online sales as well as facilitate their trading activities worldwide.

According to the 2018 report on e-commerce in Vietnam, up to 32 per cent of Vietnamese SMEs have established co-operation deals with foreign partners through online platforms. By joining the B2B e-commerce platform, exporting firms will be able to access global consumers with lower costs of trade promotion activities.

In Dats opinion, the shortcoming of Vietnamese firms is that everyone understands Industry 4.0 and e-commerce business, but do not know how to do startups and do not put all their determination into business. Moreover, human resources of production firms only have experience with traditional commerce, but lack knowledge about foreign trade and have poor foreign language skills. Thereby, it is very difficult for a traditional firm to develop e-commerce capabilities.

The co-operation between Alibaba and Fado is a good opportunity and channel for Vietnamese SMEs to promote their products over the world.

Fado became Alibabas authorised partner in Vietnam since late 2018 to help Vietnamese companies introduce their products through the website, including the countrys staples in such sectors as footwear, handicraft, and industry.
This is the third seminar about consumer credit organised by VIR.

VIR editor-in-chief Le Trong Minh addressing the seminar on consumer credit

"Black credit raises a great deal of concern due to its bad consequences. While illegal forms of consumer credit are not new, the explosion of these criminal activities and the violations of laws causing social instability poses the question: what should be done to repel black credit?" asked Le Trong Minh, editor-in-chief of Vietnam Investment Review (VIR) in his opening speech.

VIR's editor-in-chief welcomed Dang Tuyet Dung, Visa's country manager for Vietnam and Laos

According to Minh, as consumer finance grows strongly in Vietnams 95 million market, there is no simple answer  but a way has to be found.

Many leading experts in the fields of economics, law, finance, banking, and consumer credit gathered for the seminar

Many solutions have been proposed to promote legal consumer credit lines and increase opportunities and accessibility for people to drive the market onto a safer, more manageable pathway and ultimately repel black credit.

The topic will be deeply discussed by consultants, experts, and state managers at the conference.
Two men carry suitcases containing the flight recorders from the Ethiopian jet into the French air accident investigation authority in Le Bourget, north of Paris. (Source: AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

PARIS: French investigators were examining the black boxes from the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft that crashed in Ethiopia on Thursday (Mar 14), as the ban on the model went worldwide after President Donald Trump added the US to countries that have grounded the aircraft.

France's BEA air safety agency confirmed it has received the recorders from the plane that crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa on Sunday, killing all 157 people aboard.

BEA investigators will try to retrieve information from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, which were damaged in the disaster.

Thousands of kilometres away, distraught families were demanding answers as they visited the deep black crater where the plane smashed into a field outside the capital, disintegrating on impact.

The plane was less than four months old when it went down just six minutes into its flight to Nairobi.

Ethiopian Airlines, Africa's largest carrier, sent the boxes to France because it does not have the equipment to analyse the data.

The information that black boxes contain helps explain 90 per cent of all crashes, according to aviation experts.

On Wednesday, US authorities said new evidence showed similarities between the Ethiopia crash and that of a Lion Air flight in Indonesia in October that claimed the lives of 189 people.

The Federal Aviation Administration said findings from the crash site near Addis and "newly refined satellite data" warranted "further investigation of the possibility of a shared cause for the two incidents".

SAFETY OF 'PARAMOUNT CONCERN'

An FAA emergency order grounded 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 aircraft until further notice, effectively taking the aircraft out of the skies globally.

The move came after a growing number of airlines and countries had already decided not to fly the planes or ban them from their airspace until it was ascertained there are no safety issues.

Taiwan has also grounded the Boeing 737 Max. On Thursday, Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) issued a directive suspending all commercial flight operations of Boeing 737-8 and 737-9 planes.

Trump told reporters the "safety of the American people and all peoples is our paramount concern".

FAA acting chief Daniel Elwell said the agency has been "working tirelessly" to find the cause of the accident but faced delays because of the damage to the flight data recorders.

The new information shows "the track of that airplane was close enough to the track of the Lion Air flight ... to warrant the grounding of the airplanes so we could get more information from the black boxes and determine if there's a link between the two, and if there is, find a fix to that link," Elwell said on CNBC.

Boeing's shares have sunk 10 per cent since Sunday's crash, wiping more than US$20 billion off the company's market value.

Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg said he supported the US decision "out of an abundance of caution" but had "full confidence" in the safety of the plane.

The company continues its efforts "to understand the cause of the accidents in partnership with the investigators, deploy safety enhancements and help ensure this does not happen again," he said in a statement.

The MAX series is Boeing's fastest-selling model, but it is still relatively new with fewer than 500 in service.

There are 74 registered in the United States and 387 in use worldwide with 59 carriers, according to the FAA.

PILOTS CONCERNS

The accounts of the recent crashes were echoed in concerns registered by US pilots on how the MAX 8 behaves.

At least four American pilots made reports following the Lion Air crash, all complaining the aircraft suddenly pitched downwards shortly after takeoff, according to documents reviewed by AFP on the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a voluntary incident database maintained by NASA.

In two anonymous reports on flights just after the Lion Air disaster, pilots disconnected the autopilot and corrected the plane's trajectory.

One said the flight crew reviewed the incident "at length ... but can't think of any reason the aircraft would pitch nose-down so aggressively."

It was unclear if US transport authorities review the database or investigate the incidents. However, the FAA said this week it had mandated that Boeing update its flight software and training on the aircraft.

Questions about the Lion Air crash have honed in on an automated stall prevention system, the MCAS, designed to automatically point the plane's nose downwards if it is in danger of stalling.

According to the flight data recorder, the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610 struggled to control the aircraft as the MCAS repeatedly pushed the nose down following takeoff.

The Ethiopian Airlines pilots reported similar difficulties before their aircraft plunged to the ground as they tried to return to the airport.

Boeing was criticised after the Lion Air crash for allegedly failing to adequately inform 737 pilots about the functioning of the stall prevention system.

Ethiopian Airlines CEO Tewolde GebreMariam said on Sunday the flight's captain Yared Mulugeta Getachew, 29, was an experienced aviator with more than 8,000 flight hours.

BEA said any information about the investigation would come from Ethiopian Airlines, which itself tweeted that it would only communicate through social media and its website.

Andrew Hunter, a defence industry expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that while Boeing and the FAA had good track records on addressing safety concerns, sometimes the combination of automated systems and humans did not work smoothly.

"It is hard to get a system to work seamlessly with human beings," he told AFP.

"The fact the system was fighting the pilot was not an unintended consequence," because it should counteract a pilot error and correcting this is "challenging".

The Ethiopian Airlines plane was less than four months old when it went down six minutes into its flight to Nairobi.
The Ben Thanh  Suoi Tien metro line in HCM City is expected to be operational by the end of next year.-VNS Photo Tien Luc

Nguyen Thien Nhan, Secretary of the city Party Committee, visited the construction site including Ben Thanh Terminal and Phuoc Long and Ba Son stations.

Some 63 per cent of the 19.7km route has been completed so far, and 80 per cent is expected to be completed this year.

Costing more than VND47 trillion (more than US$2.1 billion), it will have a 17.1km elevated section and 2.6km underground section and 14 stations, 11 of them elevated and 3 underground.

Nhan said MAUR should learn from other countriesexperience in building metros.

Bui Xuan Cuong, head of MAUR, said 1,425 workers and engineers are working to complete the line.

City authorities are also focused on acquiring land for the metro line No 2 between Ben Thanh Market and Tham Luong Bus Terminal (in District 12). Tenders have been invited for the construction, which is scheduled to begin in 2020.

The city has given priority to the first two metro routes, Cuong said.

According to the deputy chairman of the municipal Peoples Committee Tran Vinh Tuyen, relevant agencies have approved the compensation to be paid for lands for the second line.

He urged district authorities to speed up land clearance so that construction could begin on schedule.

The citys transport infrastructure master plan envisages building220km of urban railway at a cost of nearly $250 billion.
Dominic Barton, global managing partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company

Talent Wins is the result of hundreds of conversations with business and government leaders from around the world who believe the competitive advantage for organisations will lie in how they recruit, develop, and deploy talent.

Leaders at talent-driven companies are as focused on their people as they are on strategy and finance. They make talent considerations an integral part of every major strategic decision and ensure that their own focus on talent is woven into the fabric of the entire company, said Barton.

In Vietnam, Barton discussed his perspectives on the countrys dynamic market  one that will enable local organisations and their workforce to become more fluid in adapting to the agile and technologically-driven environment of the 21st century.

Companies in Vietnam must realise that managing talent is incremental. Alignment at the top; continuous effort to develop talent; a commitment to link talent and strategy; creation of an agile corporate structure  all these, when built one upon the other, will trigger a multiplier effect that can exponentially increase value to the organisation and the economy, said Barton.

At an exclusive gathering today with senior leaders from the countrys leading companies, Barton, who has spent decades helping top business leaders define and execute their strategies, discussed trends in Vietnams digital transformation and the need for companies to focus on talent to remain competitive.

Rapid advances in digital technologies will change the nature of our work  people will need to perform activities that are complementary to the work that machines do. This will have to go hand-in-hand with a concerted reskilling effort which McKinseys research has found could affect up to 4.4 million people in Vietnam by 2030. Businesses and governments alike will need to rise to the challenge and take advantage of the opportunities, prioritising embedding new digital skills to support a workforce transition of this scale, said Barton.

McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm deeply committed to helping institutions in the private, public, and social sectors achieve lasting success. For over eight decades, the firms primary objective has been to serve as clients' most trusted external advisor. With consultants in more than 100 offices in 60 countries, across industries and functions, the company brings unparalleled expertise to clients anywhere in the world. McKinsey & Company work closely with teams at all levels of an organisation to shape winning strategies, mobilise for change, build capabilities, and drive successful execution.
NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said security concerns over the rule of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei in 5G development should be taken seriously. (Photo: AFP/WANG ZHAO)

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the 29-member alliance has begun internal consultations on Huawei, which the US says poses a "threat" to Europe.

The US and several other Western nations have shut Huawei out of tenders for the development of super-fast fifth-generation, or 5G, networks, because of the company's close ties to the Chinese government.

"Some NATO allies have expressed their concerns over Huawei and their role in providing 5G infrastructure. NATO takes these concerns very seriously," Stoltenberg told reporters.

"We are now consulting closely on this issue including on the security aspects on investments in 5G networks."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday that Berlin would consult Washington over using Huawei technology after reports of US threats to scale back intelligence cooperation.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the US ambassador had warned Berlin that Washington could cut intelligence and other information exchanges if Huawei technology was built into Germany's 5G telecoms infrastructure.

The Chinese telecoms behemoth has strenuously denied allegations its equipment could be used for espionage.

US General Curtis Scaparrotti, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, outlined concerns about Huawei to US lawmakers on Wednesday.

"We're concerned about their telecommunications backbone being compromised in the sense that, particularly with 5G, the bandwidth capability and ability to pull data is incredible," he told the House Armed Services Committee.

If Huawei technology is used in defence communications systems, the US military would no longer communicate with them, Scaparrotti said.

Next-generation 5G systems will bring near-instantaneous connectivity that can enable futuristic technologies such as self-driving cars.

Stoltenberg said creating 5G networks was a trade and economic issue but also had security implications.

"That's the reason why we will continue to consult, continue to assess and look into whether NATO has a role to play in addressing the securty aspects related to this kind of infrastcture," he said.

NATO has been stepping up its defences against cyber warfare in recent years as the domain takes on an increasingly vital role in modern conflict.
Visitors from Vietnam and other countries in the region visited Hortex Vietnam 2019, which was held at the Saigon Exhibition and Convention Centre on March 13-15

Vietnam, with a population of some 95 million people, is a huge emerging market for the horticulture and floriculture industry. The countrys exports of fruits and vegetables have enjoyed strong growth in the past years, with an average rate of 26.5 per cent a year.

A significant milestone for the Vietnamese fruits and vegetables industry has been witnessed in 2018 when its export turnover reached a record high of $3.8 billion, up 8.8 per cent compared to 2017, calculated by the General Customs Department. Furthermore, Vietnam has the potential to become one of the worlds largest flower exporters according to experts.

To explore the opportunities in the market, nearly 200 local and international exhibitors gathered at the second International Exhibition & Conference for Horticultural and Floricultural Production and Processing Technology in Vietnam (Hortex Vietnam) in Ho Chi Minh City.

While many suppliers start to see the opportunities in the Vietnamese market, it is not a straightforward road. While suppliers of fertiliser, foil coverage, and hydroponic growing systems do good business, challenges remain in the industry. In Vietnam, there are many growers and greenhouses to be found and there is a will to develop for sure, but since labour is available broadly and capital not so much, the market is in an early stage of development when it comes to automation.

Still, there is one thing exhibitors agree about: Vietnam is offering opportunities and so do surrounding countries. The question is not if, but when these opportunities develop into business for automation suppliers as well.

Hortex Vietnam enables participants to meet key decision-makers, strengthen valuable contacts with customers and partners, and explore the potential of an exciting growth market.

Le Van Duc, deputy director general of the Department of Crop Production under the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, said that Hortex Vietnam 2019 is a practical and effective event to accompany the development of Vietnams vegetable-flower-fruit manufacturing and processing industry.
Kevin Loebbaka, managing director and president of UAC speaking at the meeting

Deputy Chairman of the Danang People's Committee Ho Ky Minh has just chaired a meeting where the departments and agencies reporting and reviewing the preparation of inaugurating some key projects of the city on the occasion of the 44th liberation anniversary of Danang (March 29, 1975  March 29, 2019), one of which is the project of UAC.

UAC is the world's leading manufacturer of aircraft components for airlines such as Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Bombardier, and their related supply chains.

UAC has a 51-year history of operating in this field, often offering long-term contracts for: Boeing 787, 777, 767 and 737; Airbus A350, A330, A320, A220, and ATR; Embraer E195; and Bombardier CRJ aircraft. This is also one of the three world-leading corporations in supplying special aluminium for aircraft production.

In Danang, UAC plans to produce 4,000 of the 5 million aircraft details for exportation to North America and Europe.

With the facility in Danang, UAC expects to reach the export value of $25 million in 2021, raising to $85 million by 2022 and creating an export value of over $180 million per year after 2026.

When the facility comes into operation, UAC Group will provide jobs for 1,200 highly skilled workers in the field of mechanics, electricity, and automation in Danang and surrounding areas, while simultaneously developing the production chains of industries with the attraction of over 2,000 other workers.
Building on the strong Southeast Asia momentum, the E. Town Central space marks WeWork's first stronghold in Ho Chi Minh City

On the heels of opening its first location in the Philippines in February in Manila, WeWork E. Town Central adds to the companys rapidly growing presence in Southeast Asia. With the location of a Grade A and Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) Gold standard certified building, WeWork will welcome over 1,000 members to the community across four floors (22nd to 25th).

With Vietnams rapid economic growth in Southeast Asia, we see immense business potential for WeWork to contribute to this vibrant economy. Our spaces in cities across the region have also proven to be a springboard that enables creator communities to flourish, said Turochas T Fuad, managing director of WeWork Southeast Asia. As companies look towards us in helping them to accelerate their growth in the local ecosystem, we remain deeply committed to strengthening the local ecosystem that sets the stage for fostering greater innovations here in Vietnam.

Grounded in WeWorks mission of supporting its members, WeWork is also growing in tandem with them and is here to connect people through intelligent design by fostering community and opportunities. WeWork welcomes members ranging from global enterprises to organisations with a presence in Vietnam such as Christinas, a fully-integrated online-to-offline travel company; UrbanFox, an omnichannel logistics and channel management solutions brand as a subsidiary of Singapores conglomerate Keppel Corporation; and Vingroup Ventures, a Vingroup company .

As we are gearing up to seize opportunities offered by e-commerce in Southeast Asia, we were looking for an agile space that allows us to continuously optimise and innovate as we scale in Vietnam. Confident that our team will thrive in this dynamic environment, being plugged into WeWorks global network allows us to tap into cross-market opportunities that will help us accelerate faster towards our goals, said Alex Danh, HR assistant manager of UrbanFox.

On the same note, Linh Thai, CEO of Vingroup Ventures said that, As we are building our team, we recognise the important role that a community plays in building a firm foundation for growth. With WeWork, we really enjoy the open collaboration spaces. Partnering with WeWork gives us the flexibility to concentrate on scaling our dynamic growth, without worrying about real estate needs and costs."

As a company of action, WeWork is committed to amplifying the impact by bringing people together. Just eight years ago, WeWork sprouted from one location in Soho, New York City and fast forward to today where the company is now the largest private occupier of space in London, Washington, D.C., and Manhattan.

There are currently 400,000 members in the WeWork community, across 425 locations, 100 cities, and 27 countries. In its mission of humanising the ecosystem, WeWork also incubated more than 1,000 startups in 33 cities with WeWork Labs, scaled Flatiron School to four new cities, and opened Access Labs to expand opportunity to coding education.

Research by the leading real estate consultancy HR&A also showed that WeWork can help generate as much as 29 per cent in rent premiums for building owners, where in select buildings that are sold after WeWork moved in, there was a 50-120 per cent increase in sale price. Leveraging its global footprint and member base, WeWork looks forward to reimagining, reshaping, and re-humanising the architecture of our space, our buildings, and our cities to support and encourage human connection and creativity.
Vietnam has become an attractive destination for PE funds

With high economic growth and a stable political environment, Vietnam has become an attractive destination for private equity (PE) funds. In addition to some well-established Vietnam-based PE firms, such as Mekong Capital, VinaCapital, and Vietnam Investments Group, there are a growing number of offshore PE firms looking for investment opportunities in Vietnam.

What is a private equity fund?

PE firms invest in private companies, or engage in buyouts of public companies, sometimes resulting in the delisting of public equities. The holding period by PE firms is usually 3-7 years, after which they will divest from the investee companies to realise profit. PE firms, therefore, are different from strategic investors who target long-term investment in companies that can create synergy with their existing businesses.

What are the most common types of PE funds in Vietnam?

In Vietnam, the most common types include growth-oriented funds that invest into companies with high growth potential or distressed PE funds that invest in companies that have financial distress and need support in terms of capital and corporate governance to restructure and turn around. Most PE funds in Vietnam only invest a minority holding, with the common deal size between $5-50 million.

In addition, Venture Capital funds that target investments in tech startups and young companies have been operating in Vietnam for quite a long time, but there has been a growing interest recently. Some of the famous Venture Capital funds include IDG Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, and DFJ VinaCapital.

Other than these common types of PE strategies, Vietnam has also witnessed the rise of buyout funds  funds that invest controlling interest in larger and more mature businesses.

How PE firms can create value for their portfolio companies?

The common strategy of PE firms is to exit the investment after the investment period (3-7 years) and realise investment returns. The short investment period and other strict investment conditions raised doubts among private companies as to whether PE funds could bring sustainable value to their business. After the failures of Ba Huan-VinaCapital or The KAfe-Cassia Investments, many people viewed PE firms as focusing on taking advantage of businesses or trying to take control of the companies from their owners to benefit themselves, instead of adding value to the businesses. This understanding is incorrect. In fact, in many of the cases, PE firms made significant contributions to the success of businesses.

By contributing capital to private companies  usually young and small businesses that have little or no access to capital from traditional channels  PE funds can provide financial support for businesses to quickly scale up.

Additionally, PE firms contribute to the improvement of corporate governance and operations. To add or even create value to the investee companies, PE firms bring in industry experts and talent and provide advice in terms of corporate governance, strategy, digital transformation, branding, and marketing. Moreover, with a large network and relationships, PE firms also support the investee companies to approach customers, partners or acquire talent. As one recent example, the participation of Mekong Capital has helped Mobile World become the retail empire it is today.

What to know before calling for investment from PE funds

Being professional financial investors, PE firms often set out strict investment conditions and requirements to manage downside risks. Therefore, there are some key aspects that private companies should be aware of before starting their fundraising process with PE funds:

 Ownership and business structure: Vietnamese private companies often have a scattered ownership structure or unplanned business structure. Therefore, to make it easy and attractive for investment, it is recommended that private companies should review their ownership and business structure to make it investor-friendly.

 Corporate governance: While corporate governance is not necessarily an advantage for private companies, an enthusiastic and capable management team and a transparent financial reporting system with reliable financial information would be a big advantage and will have a positive impact on the investment decision as well as investment value.

 Risk and return requirements: PE firms often have a high return requirement to compensate for the high risk of investing in private companies. According to a survey on PE activities in Vietnam conducted by Grant Thornton in 2018, most investment funds require a rate of return of over 20 per cent or even over 25 per cent, while strategic investors only require a rate of return between 12-18 per cent. The higher return requirement by PE investors would translate into a lower valuation and price.

 Basis of valuation: For companies that generate stable cash flows or profit, the common method of valuation is to use the EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation) multiple of comparable companies or comparable transactions. For startup companies, especially technology companies with little or no track record of profit, the common valuation multiple is Price to Sales, or more creatively, operation ratios such as Price to Orders, Price to Users

It is a common practice that these figures would be subject to normalisation adjustments (for EBITDA or sales) or subject to due diligence results. In our experience, if the due diligence results are much too different from the original data, it could be a key deal breaker. Therefore, companies should be able to estimate these adjustments in advance to avoid surprises at closing.

 Investment structure: In order to protect their benefits, PE funds in Vietnam normally structure the investments in the form of equity investment plus a put option to guarantee a certain rate of return; or in the form of convertible loans; or a combination of both. With these strategies, PE funds can put into the agreements terms to protect their interests, like collateral, conversion price, earn-outs or anti-dilution provisions, which may be quite complicated. The owners of private companies need to have a certain level of knowledge and experience to be able to understand and negotiate or to engage professional advisers.

In conclusion, raising capital from PE funds is a complex process. It is advisable that business owners should understand your own needs and capabilities, as well as understand the requirements of your buyers. Only then would the deal be a success.

Grant Thornton Vietnam is a leading international auditing and consulting firm that provides a complete range of services including audit, tax, advisory and outsourcing services. We have had more than 20 year experience in supporting businesses and investors to complete deals.

By Nguyen Thi Hong Nhung - Advisory Services Manager  Grant Thornton (Vietnam) Company Limited
The Cambodian government on Friday rejected the findings of a US State Department of State report on the state of human rights in the country.

In its annual country report on Cambodia, the State Department said rights issues over the past year included unlawful and arbitrary killings carried out by the government or on its behalf, forced disappearances, torture, political prisoners, pervasive electronic media surveillance, censorship, corruption and the use of forced labor, among others.

But Chin Malin, justice spokesman, said the situation was not as bad as what the international community stated in their report, which was politically motivated.

Based on my study of that report, their conclusion did not rely on every angle of the human rights situation at all, he added.

The report highlighted the crackdown on political dissent ahead of last years general election, including the use of the judiciary to dissolve the countrys main opposition party and jailing of its leader, Kem Sokha.

Malin added we dont count it as rights abuses, referring to the findings of the report. We consider it following the law, which any government does.

But we will study the report and find out which points are constructive.

Am Sam Ath, an investigator with Licadho, a local rights group, said the denials by the government were unsurprising, adding that the findings were similar to those contained in recent EU statements on the situation.

A number of incidents so far this year, including the shooting of protesters in Preah Sihanouk province in January and the blocking of Womens Day marchers this month, support rights groups claims that the government continues to violate human rights, civil society groups have said.
With the hope of being granted asylum, members of the LGBTQI community have been arriving at the United States border. They came along with various caravans of undocumented immigrants from Central America. After being detained and released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, one group of 15 transgender women from Honduras told Voice of America reporter Gesell Tobias the special reasons why they left their country and the challenges they faced.
On the day of a critical vote by British lawmakers to delay departure from the European Union, U.S. President Donald Trump again waded into the contentious debate on Brexit. He promised a very large trade deal with the UK- and threatened the European Union on trade. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
((PKG)) PAN AFRICAN FILM AND ARTS FESTIVAL

((Banner: Pan African Art))

((Reporter/Camera: Elizabeth Lee))

((Map: Los Angeles, California))

((Henry Baba Osageyfo Colby, Jewelry Artist))

Were featuring New Guinea boar. Were featuring amber from North Africa, Tunisia, Moracco and Mali. I never think of us as African American. I think of us as Africans in America.

((NATS))

((Ayuko Babu, Executive Director, Pan African Film and Arts Festival))

As a result of the slave trade and colonization, African people are spread all over the planet. So, we get a chance through this festival, get a chance to know each other.

((NATS))

((Ayuko Babu, Executive Director, Pan African Film and Arts Festival))

So, film, sculpture, fine art, jewelry, is all a reflection of the energy that we produce and it stimulates one or the other.

Theres very little public space that explains the Pan African experience. We think its important. L.A. is a cosmopolitan international city and in order to have a cosmopolitan international city, you have to have a cosmopolitan international film, especially this is the center of the film business. So, we feel its important to have these films here, the art show in the mall once a year to showcase and stimulate folks to come by and experience it.

((Courtesy: Next Page Productions))

((Movie NATS: Ma, I dont want to marry now.))

((End Courtesy))

((Stephanie Linus, Nigerian Actress / Filmmaker))

So, I use the tool of filmmaking to bring attention to them, to get people to know about their problems, to get people to know the consequences that happen when you make those kinds of decisions and, you know, force them to have conversation about this.

((Courtesy: Next Page Productions))

((Movie NATS: You are too young to understand. You are young and this is the right time.))

((Stephanie Linus, Nigerian Actress / Filmmaker))

Im happy that people have taken proactive action because we screened the movie in Gambia and a month later, the government banned child marriage in Gambia.

((Movie NAT POP))

((Courtesy: Next Page Productions))

((Ayuko Babu, Executive Director, Pan African Film and Arts Festival))

So, we know theres profound things happening around the black world and so this is a way to amplify that make people pay attention. So, theres an important component to educate people so that they will be able to make better choices and

((Courtesy: Next Page Productions))

influence the elected officials to make the decisions that we feel are important.

((Movie NAT POP: I want to be a girl again.))

((End Courtesy))




Tens of thousands of Australian and New Zealand school children have skipped classes for a global day of action on climate change. In New South Wales, opposition politicians have encouraged students to take part, insisting the world is at a "real crossroads.

Australias School Strike 4 Climate movement wants the nation to commit to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 and to ban a giant India-owned coal mine in Queensland.

Rallies in Australia and New Zealand were part of a global day of action across almost 100 countries. The movement was inspired by Greta Thunberg, a teenager from Sweden, who last year skipped school to protest with a hand-painted banner outside the Swedish parliament.

Strikes were planned at 60 towns and cities across Australia and New Zealand.

Protesters say they are frustrated with the apparent inability of adults to take action to prevent catastrophic climate change, and that they fear for their futures.

Australia has just recorded its hottest summer since records began.

In the nations most populous state, New South Wales, opposition leader Michael Daley has urged students to skip classes to join climate change rallies.

They are inheriting from us a world that is at best precarious. They do not have a microphone but they do have a democratic right to assembly. They do have a right to protest. I support these young people and their action. [I] think there is a real opportunity for young people to realize their own personal power, Daley said.

New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian said Daleys support for striking students was grossly irresponsible.

Other conservative critics said the children were victims of "politically correct teaching" and the campaign was a ploy to weaponize children for political purposes.

Education officials said all students at government schools were expected to be in class and could face disciplinary action if they attended Fridays rallies.

In New Zealand, a rally by school children in Christchurch was called off following mass shootings at two city mosques that killed dozens of people.
Two American B-52 bombers flew over the South China Sea on a training mission Wednesday for the second time in 10 days, acts that Beijing considers provocative. Chinese officials resent any challenge to their hold over hundreds of the seas tiny islets, which other countries claim, too.

But China appears, at least for now, to be done adding positions in the sea thats claimed in whole or in part by five other governments, maritime scholars agree. They say a seven-year effort to reclaim land for building on once uninhabitable atolls and reefs paused indefinitely two years ago because Beijing had reached the level of control it wanted over the waterway.

The Chinese basically feel that they have finished what they called the first stage of land reclamation in the South China Sea, said Yun Sun, East Asia Program senior associate with the Stimson Center think tank in Washington.

Indefinite pause

Island building that started around 2010 led to the construction of aircraft hangars, radar systems and facilities to support fishing and oil exploration. Civilian populations live on a few islets. China controls the whole 130-island Paracel chain and seven major features in the Spratly archipelago.

Chinese contractors created 3,200 acres of reclaimed land on the seas reefs and atolls to help develop them, according to a Pentagon estimate in 2016.

If the end goal is de facto control of the waterways and air space, then perhaps the number of features that China currently occupies are enough to achieve that end goal, said Jonathan Spangler, director of the South China Sea Think Tank in Taipei.

Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam claim all or parts of the sea, which stretches from Hong Kong to the island of Borneo. Those governments prize the 3.5 million-square-kilometer waterway for its fisheries, shipping lanes and energy reserves under the seabed.

The other countries, all militarily weaker, resented Chinas landfill work and follow-up militarization, especially when projects overlapped their own exclusive maritime economic zones. Their opposition has prompted the U.S. government to periodically send naval ships and aircraft through the area. Washington does not have a territorial claim but says the sea should be open to everyone.

Chinas most recent significant dredging or landfill work took place on two Paracel islands in early to mid-2017, said Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative under Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Most larger-scale building had wrapped up in 2015, Poling said.

Political will

China might restart reclamation or take over more islands after settling the year-old Sino-U.S. trade dispute, Sun said. Chinese consider trade talks a priority for now, she said, and dont want to take action that would anger Washington. While trade talks are going on, she said, China might just strengthen existing maritime claims.

The first stage is completed, so I think its more a question of political will to move forward with reclamation at this point, she said.

Beijing will avoid taking over more islets controlled by other countries, Sun added, because it wants to strengthen relations with Asian governments as a counter to U.S. influence in the sea.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which includes states that oppose Chinese maritime sovereignty claims, is talking with China now through 2021 about a code of conduct that would head off mishaps between ships.

China hasnt occupied any new features since 1994, though it took effective control of Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines after a tense standoff in 2012, setting off a four-year political spat. Since 2016, China has offered aid and investment to the Philippines, helping to ease friction.

China probably wont proactively occupy new features unless it feels pushed by a foreign government, Spangler said. Chinese officials cite historic documents to back their claim to about 90 percent of the sea.

The government is now in a phase of deployment of assets to the islands it holds, Poling said.

I think there is a false assumption that not much is happening in the South China Sea, because there arent many clashes or incidents on the same scale, but China is continuing to fill in infrastructure on the islands at a fair clip and its already got the ability I think to use those islands, said Euan Graham, executive director with La Trobe Asia, a unit of La Trobe University in Australia.

They have all the infrastructure in terms of fuel, hangar space for combat aircraft, Graham said.
Brazils Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corruption cases involving illegal campaign donations should be handled by electoral courts, a move that some prosecutors warned could hurt their groundbreaking crusade against graft.

Six justices on the nations top court cast votes in favor of sending to electoral courts all cases involving politicians who use money gained through corruption or money laundering for campaigns, rather than having them heard by federal criminal courts. Five justices opposed the decision.

Prominent federal prosecutors warned that could unwind the five years of work carried out during the landmark Car Wash corruption investigation, which has sent scores of powerful politicians and businessmen to jail in the worlds biggest graft probe of its kind.

Many illegal campaign donations

Many of the Car Wash convictions, including that of imprisoned former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, involved illegal campaign donations as an aspect of the case. Prosecutors argue that could open the door for Lula and other convicts to ask the top court to annul their sentences and send their cases to dedicated electoral courts.

For those who have committed these crimes, this will really be a prize, Deltan Dallagnol, the lead prosecutor overseeing the Car Wash investigation, said in a written statement.

Defense lawyers for these people will argue their crime was related to illegal campaign financing ... to move the case to electoral courts and lessen the chances of a successful investigation and serious punishment.

Senator Olimpio Gomes, a strong ally of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected on an anti-corruption platform, tweeted just after the decision that he had already introduced a bill to reverse it. The bill would guarantee the fight against organized crime, corruption and impunity, he said.

Others backed the majority in the Supreme Court ruling, saying their argument adhered to the Brazilian constitution.

Not prepared

Brazils unique electoral justice system is made up of a rotating cast of state and federal judges that handle an array of campaign disputes surrounding local, state and national elections every two years.

Critics argue that makes them less prepared than federal criminal courts to address the countrys political graft schemes uncovered in recent years.

Justice Minister Sergio Moro, who before taking his government post was the federal judge who spearheaded the Car Wash trials and sent Lula to jail, said Wednesday that the Supreme Court sending the cases to an electoral court would be a blow for the countrys push against impunity.

Electoral courts ... are not prepared to judge more complex crimes, such as money laundering and corruption, Moro said.

Carlos Melo, a political scientist with Sao Paulo business school Insper, agreed with Moros assessment of the electoral courts. However, he said the constitution clearly states that crimes connected to illegal campaign financing must be judged by electoral courts.

Will this hurt the Car Wash investigation? Sure, it is a blow. But the prosecutors have ridden a wave of wins, jailed powerful figures like Lula, and there is the sense they want to have everything go their way, Melo said.

If Brazilians want to make prosecutors work easier, they will have to find other ways, he said.

It is now up to Brazilian society to pressure lawmakers and demand changes to the law, he said. Or they can demand that the electoral courts are strengthened so they can deal with these types of cases.
European Union leaders are warning that their Brexit patience is wearing thin and, with just two weeks to go before Britain is scheduled to leave the EU, theyre poised to grant more time for the country to do so  but likely with tough conditions attached.

The conditions may include Britain holding another Brexit referendum, if the extension needed eventually is a lengthy one, warn EU officials  despite the fact the Britains House of Commons voted Thursday against a re-run plebiscite, at least in the foreseeable future.

Britains embattled prime minister, Theresa May, will ask the EUs 27 other national leaders on March 21 to delay Brexit until at least the end of June.

She hopes by that time to have won backing for her contentious Brexit withdrawal agreement, which has been rejected overwhelmingly by the British parliament twice, and is planning Tuesday to seek yet again House of Commons approval for a deal she spent a better part of two years negotiating in fraught and tetchy talks with the EU.

Even if shes successful, Britain would need extra time to complete the necessary legislation to exit the bloc.

But few observers believe shell get the doubly-defeated deal approved by a deadlocked British parliament  that is if the house speaker allows her to bring the deal back for another try.

Under parliamentary rules a government is not meant to bring back a measure repeatedly.

It is likely the last throw of the Brexit dice for the embattled British leader, whos been scorched by humiliation and has all but lost control of her government and ruling Conservative party, admit some her of aides. Her critics say shes in office but not in power, and up to 14 would-be Conservative contenders are already maneuvering to replace the broken prime minister.

With parliament this week saying it does not want to leave with Mays deal but that it also doesnt want to exit the bloc without a deal, Brexit has come to a grinding halt, prompting the exasperation of EU leaders, who in some ways are as trapped as British lawmakers and fervently want to see an end to the draining Brexit process.

But the EUs national leaders are equally worried about Britain exiting without a deal, which would cause significant economic harm to parts of the bloc, especially to Ireland, France, Belgium and The Netherlands.

European Council President Donald Tusk Thursday said his preference was for a long delay of a year or even more and is urging EU leaders to consider that on the grounds Britain is far from a consensus on any Brexit plan and needs considerable time to shape one.

EU national leaders must unanimously approve any extension, which they will formally consider on Thursday (March 21) at a summit in Brussels. If May prevails and cudgels the British parliament into endorsing her deal, a short technical extension to allow time for Britain to complete the legislation needed to exit is unlikely to prove a problem, EU officials told VOA.

And EU national leaders are publicly indicating as much, too.

Polands foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, told reporters maybe we will have to meet the needs of the British authorities and the public and extend that period a little bit, maybe a little more time is needed for reflection.

Italian and Spanish officials have also indicated they wont block a short technical extension.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar also said the EU needs to be open to any British request and listen attentively and be generous in our response.

He added an extension reduces the likelihood of a cliff-edge, no-deal Brexit on March 29.

But a lengthy extension will be more challenging, say EU officials.

EU leaders will want a clear strategy outlining what purpose the extension will serve and will want to know what would materially change  an indication that a second referendum or an election would be held or of a forthcoming change of prime minister would satisfy that requirement.

Although the EU-27 now has the upper hand, analysts say, Brussels will need to be careful not to back Theresa May into a corner. A large part of Mays party wants to bolt without a deal, eager to break free entirely of the Continent. In the long run Britain would be better off, hardline Brexiters argue, despite the immediate massive economic shock that would involve.

Brexiters fear a lengthy extension, worried that it will be used by pro-EU Remainers to sabotage Britain ever leaving. Remainers want a long delay to try to steer Britain in a gentler direction, ending with the country still closely aligned with the EU although not a member of its political institutions.

A further complexity with a lengthy extension is what to do with Britain when it comes to the European elections in May. If Britain is still an EU member it needs to field candidates for the European Parliament and centrist European politicians fear that will result in more anti-EU British members of the European Parliament being elected.

Luxembourgs finance minister, Pierre Gramegna, doesnt relish that prospect, saying Thursday it is unthinkable Britain would be allowed to delay its exit beyond the European elections.
China used the closing of its annual top-level political meetings, or Two Sessions, to send positive signals about its commitment to resolve trade tensions with Washington and push forward economic reforms.

Premier Li Keqiang also flatly denied U.S. warnings about the security risk Chinese tech giant Huawei poses, stating that Beijing will never ask companies to spy on other countries.

The Huawei dispute, tech rivalry and tit-for-tat tariffs in the trade war are all part of a perfect storm of tensions brewing between Beijing and Washington, tensions the two countries are trying to manage and address.

Huawei concerns

Speaking with journalists at his annual press conference Friday, following the close of the National Peoples Congress, Premier Li addressed the nagging question of concerns that Chinas authoritarian government would use Huawei to spy on other countries.

The United States has led a global charge in warning about the risks the company has posed. Washington has blocked Huawei from participating in the roll out of next generation (5G) mobile networks in America and urged other countries to follow suit.

As countries from Asia to Europe evaluate their position on the company, Li said Chinas government has never asked and will not ask Chinese companies to spy in the future.

This is not consistent with Chinese law and is not how China behaves, he said.

Trade talks

Li said that while frictions exist and will continue between Washington and Beijing, shared interests between the two countries far outweigh their differences.

China and the United States as two large economies have become closely entwined through years of growing their relationship and years of cooperation, Li said. It is neither realistic nor possible to decouple these two economies.

Li said China would follow through on its reform pledges, including the implementation of regulations for a new foreign investment law. He added that China is also considering revising its intellectual property law. The Foreign Investment Law was passed Friday during the NPCs closing session.

Analysts have said the law helps to address some key concerns trade negotiators are grappling with, such as equal market access and forced technology transfers. But how it will be implemented is key.

Li said that China will honor its commitments to continue pushing ahead with opening up and reform. He also said he was confident U.S.-China relations would keep moving forward and voiced hope that negotiators could achieve results in their trade talks.

Shortly before Lis press conference, the official state-run Xinhua news agency released a brief on the talks and a telephone conversation between Chinas top trade negotiator, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The two sides have made further concrete progress on the text of the trade agreement, Xinhua said. It did not elaborate.

Still, as U.S. China trade talks push on, there continues to be mixed signals about the likelihood of a possible positive outcome.

The Xinhua report and Lis remarks are a positive uptick. Earlier this month, a hike in tariffs was put on hold because of promising progress, but U.S. officials have recently noted that major issues remain. It is also unclear if the two countries leaders may soon meet.

President Donald Trump and Chinas leader Xi Jinping were originally expected to meet at the end of March to sign an anticipated deal, but now that has reportedly been pushed back to sometime in April.

Getting to a final agreement will not be easy and the question of enforcement and follow up will be key. The talks and tensions stretch far beyond trade and tariffs.

Now both China and the United States need to come up with a strategy, consider how to coexist harmoniously with each other for a long time, and form a new world order and that is not easy, noted Han Jialiang, an independent scholar in Australia.
A top Chinese diplomat claimed Friday that detention centers for Muslims in China's western province of Xinjiang are "campuses, not camps" and said they are eventually going to be closed as a "training program" for ethnic Uighurs is downsized.

At the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Executive Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng reiterated China's insistence that the detention centers are designed to provide training and fight regional terrorism. He also claimed that officials from around the world, including from the U.N., had visited the region and that the detention centers in Xinjiang are "actually boarding schools or campuses, not camps" as reported by critics.

The U.S. State Department said this week that China has "significantly intensified" a campaign of mass detentions of minority Uighurs over the last year, with between 800,000 and 2 million people from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region interned in camps. The centers have drawn condemnation from across the world.

Le told reporters he had recently visited some Uighur centers in Xinjiang  and played ping pong and ate halal food there. He didn't specify when the detention centers would be closed, other than telling reporters later that would happen "at the appropriate time."

He also took aim at a U.S.-led event in Geneva on Xinjiang  calling that "unacceptable" interference in Chinese sovereignty.

Human Rights Council

The envoy's comments came as China was responding to more than 200 recommendations by other countries on ways that Beijing could improve human rights as part of a Human Rights Council process known as the Universal Periodic Review.

All U.N. member states undergo such screening, generally every four to five years. Le said China had accepted 82 percent of the recommendations presented during the review last November. The council formally adopted the review of China without a vote Friday.

The United States, historically one of the few countries to confront China over its human rights records, pulled out of the 47-country Geneva-based U.N. body last year, alleging it has an anti-Israeli bias and other shortcomings.

Norway's ambassador in Geneva voiced the most criticism among diplomats at the council on Friday. Hans Brattskar said Norway regretted that China did not accept any recommendations related to the Uighur detention situation in Xinjiang.
The victims

Forty-nine people were killed Friday in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called "an extraordinary act of violence."



"Our gun laws will change," Ardern promised in a news conference Saturday morning, local time. She said the shooter had five guns, two semi-automatic, all legally obtained.

Young children were among the 48 people wounded in the attack and were being treated for gunshot wounds. Forty-one people were killed at Al Noor Mosque and seven people were killed at Linwood Mosque, a 10-minute drive away. One person died later at a hospital.

The suspects

Three people were in custody. Ardern said none had been on security watch lists.

A man suspected in at least one of the shootings appeared briefly in court Saturday. Brenton Tarrant, 28, was led by two armed guards into the court in Christchurch, where a judge read one charge of murder to him.



After the suspect left the court, the judge said that while "there is one charge of murder brought at the moment, it is reasonable to assume that there will be others."

Television New Zealand identified Tarrant as being from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia.



Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed Tarrant was an Australian citizen and described the suspect as an "extremist right-wing violent terrorist."

Tarrant worked as a personal trainer, according to the Australian Broadcasting Co. Tracy Gray, manager of a gym where Tarrant was employed, said he began traveling overseas in 2011, going to Europe and Asia, including North Korea. A photo published online by ABC shows Tarrant in Pakistan in 2018.

The attack

The gunman live-streamed the assault on Facebook from a head-mounted camera, and the footage showed how victims were killed inside one of the mosques. The shooter broadcast the footage live after publishing a manifesto in which he called immigrants "invaders."

The manifesto said the shooter picked New Zealand for his attack to show that "nowhere in the world was safe."

In a news conference Saturday morning, Ardern said Tarrants onslaught was cut short when he was apprehended.

It was his intention to continue his attack, the prime minister said.

Mosques closed, security tight

Ardern called the shooting a "terrorist attack," and authorities advised all mosques in Christchurch to shut down until further notice.

Police were on high alert in Christchurch and elsewhere. The prime minister asked residents of Christchurch to stay home if possible Saturday.

Reaction in US

New Zealand's ambassador to the United States, Rosemary Banks, told VOA that she grew up in Christchurch. She said she was "shocked and saddened by this abhorrent act."

U.S. President Donald Trump extended condolences on Twitter to New Zealanders and said, "The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do."

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen later said U.S. authorities were monitoring the situation and that "attacks on peaceful people in their place of worship are abhorrent and will not be tolerated. The department strongly stands with those of all faiths as they seek to worship in peace."

Global response

The attack was condemned around the globe, with leaders from Pakistan, Turkey, Britain, Germany, Israel, Jordan, Japan and the European Union all sending their condolences and offering support to New Zealand.

The victims of Friday's shooting included immigrants from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Violent crime rare in New Zealand

Mass shootings, and violent crime in general, are rare in New Zealand, a country of nearly 5 million people. Until Friday, the country's worst mass shooting occurred in 1990 when a lone gunman killed 13 people in the small town of Aramoana.
The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a nationally known nonprofit that monitors hate organizations, said Thursday it had fired co-founder Morris Dees, who once won a lawsuit that bankrupted a leading Ku Klux Klan group.

A statement by Richard Cohen, the president of the law center, said Dees' employment had been terminated, but it did not give a specific reason.

"As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world. When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action," it said.

Reached by telephone, Dees said the matter involved a personnel issue but did not elaborate. He said he wished the center well.

"I think the Southern Poverty Law Center is a very fine group and I devoted nearly 50 years of my life to it and I'm proud of its work," Dees said.

"About being fired, all I can say is it wasn't my decision and I wish the center the best."

Dees, 82, co-founded the Montgomery-based law center with a partner in 1971 as a watchdog for minorities and the underprivileged. A decade later he won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was murdered by KKK members in Mobile.

The office of the SPLC was firebombed in 1983, and three Klansmen were later arrested and pleaded guilty. In 2017, tax records show, the organization had some $450 million in assets. It operates in a high-security building near the church where the Rev. Martin Luther Jr. first served as a pastor.

The law center is best known for tracking groups it considers hate organizations and is a frequent target of conservative and far-right critics.

Dees said he had not overseen the daily operations of the center for several years. A spokesman for the SPLC said Dees had transferred to an emeritus role and came into the office occasionally.

In a statement about Dees' ouster, the SPLC said it was "deeply committed to having a workplace that reflects the values it espouses  truth, justice, equity and inclusion, and we believe the steps we have taken today reaffirm that commitment."

Dees' biography appeared to have been removed from the organization's website.

The SPLC said an outside group will review its workplace practices.
Venezuelas opposition leader said at a rally Thursday in capital Caracas that Russia and China do not back President Nicolas Maduro.

Self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido said that those two countries are simply following their business interest in Venezuela.

Although most Western countries, including the United States, have recognized Guaido as Venezuelas legitimate president, Russia and China have expressed support for Maduro.

They (President Nicolas Maduros government) are isolated, they cannot solve the problems they have created, they have no international ally. It is not true that Russia and China are with them, thats a great fallacy. Nobody is with them. They (Russia and China) are very clear on where their interests lie and that is valid, I understand it perfectly. What they must also understand, as all countries do, that the only thing that protects citizens is the rule of law.

The oil rich country has received more than $50 billion from China in the past 10 years through oil-for-loan agreements. Russia as well has signed billion-dollar deals for joint ventures on oil production.

Maduro is refusing to relinquish power despite shortages of food, water and electricity and has said he is the victim of a coup plot by the United States.

The U.S. increased its pressure on Venezuela earlier this month, imposing sanctions on six high-ranking security officials as well as revoking the visas of dozens of other high officials, in addition to previous sanctions.
An international human rights organization has turned down a request by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that Ecuador, which has sheltered him for more than six years at its embassy in London, ease the conditions it has imposed on his residence there.

A spokeswoman for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is linked to the Organization of American States, said the group rejected Assange's complaint.

Assange's lawyer Jennifer Robinson had no immediate comment.

Assange took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy in 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a sexual assault investigation. That probe was later dropped, but Assange fears he could be extradited to face charges in the United States, where federal prosecutors are investigating WikiLeaks.

He says Ecuador is seeking to end his asylum and has put pressure on him to leave by requiring him to pay for his medical bills and phone calls, as well as clean up after his pet cat.

He had sought the support of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in his case against Ecuador. While the commission did not back Assange, it said it reminded Ecuador of international law that no state should deport, return or extradite someone to another country where that person might face human rights abuses.

A friend who regularly visits Assange says he privately complains that Ecuador's government recently replaced Embassy diplomats sympathetic to Assange with officials who are much less friendly.

Last year, U.S. federal prosecutors in the state of Virginia mistakenly made public a document saying that Assange had been secretly indicted. Officials have since declined to confirm or deny he has been charged.

U.S. federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, have maintained a long-running grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. One source said it includes a probe into leaks of Central Intelligence Agency documents to the WikiLeaks website.

Earlier this month, a federal judge in Alexandria ordered former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be jailed for contempt after she refused to testify about WikiLeaks before the grand jury.
Editor's note: We want you to know what's happening, and why and how it could impact your life, family or business, so we created a weekly digest of the top original immigration, migration and refugee reporting from across VOA. Questions? Tips? Comments? Email the VOA immigration team: ImmigrationUnit@voanews.com.



New Zealand attack targets Muslim community



The suspected gunman in an attack on New Zealand's Muslim community this week was a white supremacist who opposed immigrant "invaders," according to his online writings. The brutality echoed violence carried out against houses of worship in the United States in recent years, including the rampage on a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, in which the gunman also espoused the extremist ideology.



Ethiopian Airlines crash kills 'champion for social justice'



Cedric Asiavugwa was months away from graduating from one of the top U.S. law schools when the Ethiopian Airlines flight he was on crashed Sunday . His university lauded his dedication to asylum-seekers and children and remembered him as "consistently dedicated to the underprivileged in his home country" of Kenya.



Remains of the caliphate



Makeshift refugee camps in Syria are receiving thousands of women and children fleeing the last areas held by Islamic State extremists. Tents are leaking. Children are dying. "There were bombs and war in there, but we were happy," one IS widow told VOA's Heather Murdock. Watch video from the camp here.



Failed CAR peace accord sparks refugee flow to Cameroon



One health center is treating twice the number of usual patients, as refugees anticipate escalating violence amid a political letdown.



Trump administration wants more space for detained immigrants



President Donald Trump's immigration demands for 2020 include $8.6 billion for the border wall. They also include thousands more detention beds, an issue that became a sticking point in the ongoing budget friction between the White House and members of Congress. An Illinois town recently approved a new private immigration detention facility, and the Department of Homeland Security is trying to open more in Detroit, Mich., and St. Paul, Minn.
Shahed Amanullah, a Muslim American tech entrepreneur from Northern Virginia, says it was hard to sleep after watching a video of a right-wing extremist open fire at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.

"It was the picture we've all had in our heads for years. And it became real," Amanullah said of the 17-minute video, apparently recorded by the attacker as he walked room to room, shooting at worshippers.

A 28-year-old Australian man has been arrested and charged with the attack, which left 49 people dead. Authorities described the man as an "extremist, right-wing violent terrorist."

In a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto posted online, the alleged gunman encouraged more attacks on Muslims worldwide and said he hoped the violence would worsen political divisions in the United States.

As Muslim Americans attended prayer services across the country Friday, many worried about "copycat" incidents, especially now that potential attackers have a video demonstration and training manual, said Amanullah.

"Muslims at prayer are uniquely vulnerable. They're literally lined up with their backs toward you. You couldn't get more vulnerable than that," Amanullah said.

U.S. reassures Muslim-Americans

In a statement, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was "doing all it can to protect the homeland from violent extremists."

"While we are not aware of any current, credible or active threat domestically, nor of any current information regarding obvious ties between the perpetrators in New Zealand and anyone in the U.S., the department is cognizant of the potential concerns members of Muslim American communities may have as they gather at today's congregational prayers," the DHS statement said.

"Communities with concerns should contact their local law enforcement agency, whom we are committed to supporting as they protect local mosques and reassure local community members," the statement added.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the U.S. "strongly condemns" the "vicious act of hate." On Twitter, President Donald Trump slammed what he called the "horrible massacre," but did not directly refer to white supremacists or terrorist activity against Muslims.

Rising anti-Islam bigotry

For some Muslim American organizations, those comments were not enough, especially amid what they see as an intensifying wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric during Trump's tenure.

At a Friday press conference, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called for "national action to challenge growing Islamophobia, white supremacy and anti-immigrant bigotry."

"CAIR has reported an unprecedented spike in bigotry targeting American Muslims, immigrants and members of other minority groups since the election of Donald Trump as president and has repeatedly expressed concern about Islamophobic, white supremacist and racist Trump administration policies and appointments," the organization said.

White House officials strongly deny any link between Trump and Islamophobic incidents, noting the president has repeatedly condemned hatred and violence in all forms.

But as a presidential candidate, Trump called for the "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on."

Though Trump eventually backed down from that proposal, he later surrounded himself with several senior advisers who had explicitly embraced anti-Islam views. Those advisers include former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who once tweeted that "Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL," and former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who has said the U.S. is the "wrong place" for "sharia-compliant" Muslims.

Underestimating white nationalist violence?

The White House has also been accused of underestimating the threat posed by white nationalists and other right-wing extremists.

Asked Friday whether white nationalism was a growing threat, Trump replied "not really," and suggested that such groups are small in number.

Comments like that are problematic for analysts such as Daniel Byman of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, who said in an online post that the U.S. and other Western governments should begin to prioritize white nationalist and other forms of right-wing terrorism.

"The Trump administration has cut programs focusing on right-wing groups even amid a growing threat," Byman said. "Given the recent decline in jihadi violence in the United States, transferring some resources [to deal with white nationalist violence] is appropriate."

Trump has instead preferred to point out the threat caused by "radical Islamic terrorism"  a phrase he makes a point of repeating. That has pleased many conservatives, including Trump's Republican allies in Congress, who accused former President Barack Obama of not doing enough to prevent acts by Muslim extremists.

That political climate is helping to create a scary moment for many American Muslims. But Amanullah said he wouldn't be scared away from attending Friday prayers.

"I have a great deal of faith in my fellow Americans," he said. "The one thing that's super important to people is setting aside a few minutes on Fridays to push the world away. And we can't have that stolen from us."
Former Malawian president Joyce Banda, the country's first female leader, has withdrawn from the May presidential election to support the main opposition candidate, Lazarus Chakwera.

Ackson Kalaile Banda, spokesperson for Joyce Banda's People's Party, said the group decided to work with the Malawi Congress Party, or MCP, because they realized no opposition candidate can win the May election alone.

Joyce Banda became the country's first female president in 2012, after then-president Bingu wa Mutharika died following a cardiac arrest.

However, her term was marred by a corruption scandal known as Cashgate in which over $32 million was siphoned out of government coffers.

More than 70 suspects, including business persons and top Banda administration officials, were arrested.

Foreign donors suspended contributions toward the country's budget, and Banda lost the 2014 election to the late president's brother, current President Peter Mutharika.

Eisenhower Mkaka, the secretary general of the MCP, told VOA that the new deal with Banda's party is a major boost toward a Chakwera victory.

"Dr. Joyce Banda still commands some support," Mkaka said. "And her pulling out of the race means that those who were behind her will rally behind Chakwera."

Political analyst Vincent Kondowe says Chakwera would do better without Banda.

"Because Joyce Banda is burden that MCP will have to explain in as far as the Cashgate is concerned," Kondowe said. "And furthermore, here is a candidate who lost elections when she was an incumbent. That should tell you a story about her political acumen."

But Mkaka disagrees, noting that Banda has never been prosecuted for any role in Cashgate.
Irans Supreme Leader ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Thursday told member of the countrys Assembly of Experts not to be at each other's throats over this or that convention or agreement.

Khamenei was most probably referring to international anti-money laundering and anti-corruption conventions demanded by the international watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a multilateral agency based in Paris.

FATF has asked Iran to amend its laws to ensure adequate financial standards, which President Hassan Rouhanis government and the parliament have agreed to, but the conservatives close to Khamenei have blocked two of the proposed bills.

Irans hard-line leader told his audience, When a certain convention or agreement is being discussed in the county, supporters and opponents should express their points of views, and the two sides should not accuse each other of camaraderie with the enemy and inflame conflict with one another.

Khameneis remark about the bills comes one day after the Assembly of Experts warned about the strategic danger of accession to the conventions. Until now, Khamenei has not revealed his own position about the FATF demands, but all his conservative allies have rallied against them. The Assembly is also controlled by Khamenei.

The constitutional role of the institution is to choose the Supreme Leader and supervise his work, but the Assembly has turned into a body praising Khamenei and echoing all his statement.

During his remarks Khamenei repeatedly told his followers to separate their ranks from those of the enemy, adding that one should not accuse anyone who opposes him of supporting the enemies.

Khameneis conservative supporters often attack other politicians or rights activists by accusations of spying and collaborating with Islamic Republics enemies. Irans Supreme Leader often uses the term enemy to mean the United States and to an extent Israel.

Despite his call not to label people as collaborators, he said that those who question Islamic Republics role in the Middle East in fact are helping the enemy. He claimed that the enemy is afraid of Iran in the region.

The U.S., Israel and to an extent Western Europe have expressed concern over Irans interventionist foreign policy in regional counties, such as Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan.

Speaking about U.S. sanctions, Khamenei said that while the United States talks about implementing the strongest sanctions, if we mobilize maximum resources, we will inflict the heaviest defeat on America in that countrys history.

Iran's leaders often use the rhetoric of mobilizing resources and relying on domestic talent to defy tough challenges, which they have largely created with their own foreign and domestic policies.

Khamenei's favorite "Resistance Economy" is one slogan aimed at making the country self-sufficient, but in fact the country's economy has gone into a tailspin since the re-introduction of U.S. sanctions in 2018.

Khamenei also spoke about enemys influence on cyberspace and on the countrys culture. This is also a favorite theme for the supreme leader and his conservative followers.
Some 200,000 people in Malawi have been displaced by floods that have affected half of the countrys 28 districts. The government has recorded at least 56 deaths and over 500 injuries, as of Wednesday. Forecasters have warned that more rain is on the way.

Many of those affected are in evacuation camps because of floods that have destroyed their houses, damaged roads, washed away bridges and killed livestock.

Weather experts say the flooding was a result of a tropical cyclone that blew in from neighboring Mozambique.

MacDonald Clemence, one of the victims, said it was at midnight while he was fast asleep when he was awakened by the sound of something falling down with a thud. He immediately woke others and found that it was a wall of their house, and immediately sought refuge at a chiefs house until the following morning when they were told to stay at camp set up in Nsanje.

The roaring water which entered his house swallowed almost everything he had, but he managed to escape with his two children.

He said they are now hoping to receive food and blankets, and arrange a place in the upper land where to resettle.

Malawi President Peter Mutharika has declared the 14 affected districts disaster areas and issued an urgent appeal for help.

But the delivery of relief items that have started to trickle in is being hampered by flooded roads.

Francis Kadzokoya, a disaster risk management officer, said many relief items might have to be delivered by air.

Probably we would want to call upon our mother department to help us with a helicopter so that we should be airlifting some of the relief items to the camps which cannot be accessed by the road, said Kadzokoya.

Meanwhile, community health workers have been deployed in the camps to treat those in need of medical care and advise people on practices that help prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Bram Makawi, a senior disease control surveillance officer in the Ministry of Health, said efforts are underway to prevent ailments like malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea and eye infections.

Similar floods in southern Malawi four years ago killed 276 people and displaced 230,000 others.

Kadzokoya said the government is now planning to start relocating people from flood-prone areas to higher ground.

I think we would actually do away with the aftermath of these serious disasters like the one we experienced in 2015, and even these we have just experienced in March 2019.

However, forecasters have warned of another week of steady rain starting March 14 in parts of southern and northern Malawi. The rains are likely to cause more flooding.
VOA Extremism Watch Desks Sirwan Kajjo and VOA Turkish, Urdu and Kurdish services contributed to this report.

The anti-Muslim attacks on the tiny island nation of New Zealand caught the local population by surprise.

This is something that is completely out of the blue, said Chelsea Daniels of Newstalk BZ, a radio station based in Auckland.

We hear of these kinds of extremists over the ditch in Australia, popping up now and again. But weve experienced really nothing like this here in New Zealand, which is why people are so shocked, she told VOA in a phone interview.

She said overseas events may have sparked the desire of the suspect  identified in news reports as Brenton Tarrant from Grafton, New South Wales, Australia  to mount this attack, but he has acted alone in planning this.

Christchurch, where the attacks occurred, has a small Muslim community of about 1,000 people. Overall, Muslims make up roughly 1 percent of New Zealands population of 5 million.

I was at work when I learned about the shootings, said Mohammed Basharati, a Kurdish Muslim from Iran who lives in Christchurch. I immediately thought it was an act of Islamic extremists, because you would never expect these types of hate crimes to happen in New Zealand.

Barashati added that since moving to New Zealand nearly two decades ago, he has not experienced any kind of discrimination" because of his religion.

We condemn violence and hatred of any sort and join the rest of New Zealand in deep sorrow for those affected by these awful events, New Zealands Human Rights Commission said in a statement following the attacks.

We stand beside Christchurch and Muslim New Zealanders in peace, solidarity and humanity, the statement added.

There is no place for hate in New Zealand. We urge Kiwis to stand together in unity, the commission said, adding that New Zealand is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world and we welcome those of all religions and backgrounds.

Ramazan Boztash, whose 20-year-old son Mustafa was at Al Noor Mosque, spoke to VOA by phone while his son was awaiting surgery for a bullet that penetrated his right hamstring and spleen. Mustafa's condition was not critical, so doctors were caring for more seriously wounded people first.

New Zealand is a secure country," Boztash said. "We have never seen such an incident taking place here before."

Boztash, who is Turkish, said an attacker like the shooter on Friday is rare in his adopted country. "Occasionally you see bad souls with racist intent here and there, he conceded. But he said he believes the number is small.

I have been here for 19 years," he said. "A few people are trying to stain this country.

Helping the families

Kalimullah, who uses only one name, is president of the Pakistan Association of Canterbury, New Zealand. He said members of the local Pakistani community are mobilizing to track down friends and family following the attacks.

"There are no official details issued from authorities. There are a few people missing so people are coming to hospitals to seek information regarding their friends and family," he said.

But Kalimullah added that members of the community will not be rattled by the mosque attacks.

"They say they are determined," he said, "and incidents like this cannot halt our daily life."

Reaction in US

In the United States, Muslims mourned the deaths of those killed in the attacks and expressed concerns about the rise of Islamophobia in the West.



In a suburb of Washington, the imam of the Dar-Al-Hijra mosque, Naeem Mohammad Baid, said that "what happened in Christchurch has impacted our community" and that the saddest part of the attack was that "someone would come in with such a hate" when people are praying.



He told VOA that Islamophobia was on the rise in our society, as well as xenophobia and anti-Semitism. "There are people who, for their own political reasons, are funding this kind of hate and violence," he said.



The Turkish ambassador to the United States, Serdar Kilic, told VOA that the response from Western leaders to the attack had not been strong enough.



"First and foremost, leaders of Western countries should declare this as an attack committed by a white supremacist Christian. By no means does he represent the Christian faith, but this is his personality," he said. Kilic added that just as every attack by Islamic State is described as "Islamic terror," leaders in the West "should say that although [the attacker] doesn't represent Christianity, this is what has happened."



The president of Diyanet Center of America Mosque in Lanham, Md., Fatih Kanca, told VOA that "the current situation requires all Muslims to unite and fight against the perception that tries to show Islam and violence side by side."



Kanca said the moment the attack in New Zealand took place, local police "contacted us to ask what they could do for us." He said police officers attended prayers on Friday "to say that they are with us."



Police Chief Hank Stawinski in Prince George's County, Md., told those attending Friday prayers, "I was profoundly saddened last night when I heard of these events," and he said he joined the mosque's imam in "praying for peace."


Thousands of students walked out of class across New Zealand on Friday, kicking off a global student strike against government inaction on climate change.

"Climate change is worse than Voldemort," read one student's handmade sign, referring to the evil wizard in the hugely popular Harry Potter books and films.

"I bet dinosaurs thought they had time too," read another sign, as students and parents marched on parliament house in the capital Wellington.

Student protests were held in 30 towns and cities across New Zealand and are planned for capitals and cities across Australia, Europe and the United States later Friday.

The marches are part of a worldwide student strike movement, which started in August 2018 when 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg began protesting outside her parliament on school days. Norwegian lawmakers have nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize.

"The government just needs to change some things, which is why if we go on strike on a school day then they'll notice and they might actually do something about it," said 14-year-old New Zealand student Inese, who did not want her surname made public.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has pledged NZ$100 million ($68 million) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, supports the student strikes, saying teenagers should not wait until they are old enough to vote to use their voice.

Ardern's support of the students contrasts with politicians in Australia and Britain who have rebuked them for cutting class.

"For action on issues that they think is important, they should do that after school or on weekends," Australia's Minister for Education Dan Tehan told reporters ahead of protests in Melbourne.

Wellington parent Alex, who marched beside his 11-year-old son, disagreed. "It's a much better day of education ... this is the greatest issue of our time," he said.

Scientists say the burning of fossil fuels such as coal releases greenhouse gases that trap heat and lift global temperatures, causing more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.

At the 2015 Paris climate conference, countries pledged to work to limit the rise to 2 degrees Celsius (35 Fahrenheit), a step that will require a radical reduction in the use of coal and fossil fuels.
Syria's war entered its ninth year on Friday, with fresh violence forcing thousands to flee from separate assaults on the last bastions of Islamic State and rebel-held territories.

Here are nine facts about the war, which grew out of popular protests against President Bashar al-Assad and has laid waste to swaths of Syria, creating the world's largest refugee crisis:

 More than 5.6 million Syrian refugees have fled to Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, and 6.6 million have been displaced within its borders.

 About 11.7 million people need emergency aid in Syria, many of them children.

 The war has killed an estimated half a million people.

 2018 was the deadliest year for Syrian children, with 1,106 killed in the fighting. That's just the verified deaths; the true figure is likely much higher.

 Up to 250,000 Syrians may go home this year as Assad controls most of Syria and the front lines appear stable for now between government territory and two big enclaves in the north and east outside Damascus's control.

 About 2 million children in Syria are out of school.

 As Islamic State has lost ground to U.S.-backed forces in eastern Syria, militants and their families have streamed out to al-Hol camp, which holds 67,000 people in "dire conditions," 90 percent of them women and children.

 More than 3,500 children from more than 30 countries, whose families have real or suspected links to the Islamic State, are living in harsh conditions in camps in northeast Syria.

 Of these, about 2,000 children are younger than 5.

Sources: Reuters, Thomson Reuters Foundation, U.N. children's agency, United Nations refugee agency, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, International Rescue Committee.
North Korea says Pyongyang has no intention of giving in to Washingtons demands and Kim Jong Un would be making a statement soon on the possibility of further talks.

Reports also indicate Kim may reconsider ending the more than yearlong ban on missile tests that have been in place.

In a report from the Associated Press, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, who briefed reporters and diplomats in Pyongyang Friday, said Washington threw away a golden opportunity when Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump failed to reach a deal during their second summit, held in Hanoi in late February.

President Trump said he walked away from the negotiating table because of different positions on what would be required for North Korea to receive sanction relief.

President Trump said during a press conference that Pyongyang requested all sanctions be lifted in exchange for its continued moratorium on missile and nuclear tests, as well as the decommissioning of its Yongbyon test facility.

North Korea claimed it had only requested a partial lifting of the sanctions.

The Associated Press also reported Choe claimed, Personal relations between the two supreme leaders are still good and the chemistry is mysteriously wonderful.

In a statement, the South Korean presidential Blue House said, It is not reliable to judge the current situation only by remarks of Choe Son Hui. We closely monitor the situation. The government will put every effort to resume the North Korean - U.S. talks.

Threats of more sanctions

Earlier this week, Moon Chung-in, South Korean Special Adviser to the President for Foreign Affairs and National Security, told reporters that increasing sanctions wasnt an appropriate course of action if North Korea didnt denuclearize.

Moons remark was in response to a statement by U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton on Fox Business Network last week.

Theyre not going to get relief from the crushing economic sanctions that have been imposed on them. Well look at ramping those sanctions up in fact, Bolton said.

It is undesirable for the U.S. to impose additional sanctions if North Korea has not made an explicit provocation, Moon said, Extra sanction requires supporting reasons to justify, and without legit cause, it will prevent from two side talking.

Moon urged Pyongyang and Washington to continue their dialog and make likely proposals to facilitate denuclearization.

In addition, Moon said, The role of South Korea in this situation, or the role of President Moon [Jae-in] is not a mediator but facilitator, because a mediator should be an interest-free party, but South Korea is also involved in this problem.

Last ditch effort?

In a statement following the State Assembly election last week, Kim may still be trying to salvage dialog with the United States, experts told VOA following the release of a statement that stressed the need for the improvement of the economy and peoples daily lives.

Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University, says Kim Jong Uns message may be an indication the North Korean leader was indirectly expressing a willingness to continue talking to U.S. President Trump if Washington took action to bridge the gap between the two sides.

At this time, they (North Korea) are willing to reform and become more open, which requires sanctions being lifted, but they also need to show their willingness to denuclearize and are urging the U.S. president to take action, he said.

The Asian Forum Japans Senior Fellow, Jonathan Berkshire Miller, said that following the humiliating summit in Hanoi, Kim used his address to reiterate to the international community that North Korea wasnt looking to have all sanctions dating back to 2009 removed, but the sanctions that have been the most impactful.

Miller explains those are the sanctions that came after 2016 and have effectively cut off North Korea, their supplies for coal, copper, crude oil, those are the ones that basically North Korea wanted relief [from].

Sohae launch facility

Between Feb. 16 and March 2, the Washington-based 38 North, a North Korea project of the Henry L. Stimson Center, detected structures on the launch pad at the Tongchang-ri launch site, also known as Sohae, had been rebuilt, although now it appeared activity had ceased.

Recent commercial satellite imagery of the Sohae Satellite Launching Station (Tongchang-ri) shows no changes to the launch pad or engine test stand between March 8 and March 13, according to a post on the 38 North website.

The site further explained, In imagery from March 8, the construction observed over the past few weeks seemed to have been completed and the two facilities had been cleared of debris. At the launch pad, the rail-mounted transfer/processing structure had been moved to the edge of the pad and the environmental cover had been closed around the gantry tower. In imagery from March 13, the transfer structure remains in the same position and the environmental cover still conceals the gantry tower.

Kim Yong-hyun said the activity at Sohae may have been a ploy by North Korea to change the bargaining dynamics between Pyongyang and Washington.

Seouls Korea Times newspaper quotes South Koreas Ministry of National Defense expressing uncertainty if the activity at the Sohae facility signaled a true intention to carry out a launch.

[Kim Jong Un] pretended to play the Tongchang-ri card, but never intended to fire a missile to place pressure on the United States, Kim Yong-hyun said.

Miller also characterized the developments at Sohae as a way for North Korea to place additional pressure on Washington leading up to the summit to signal that the talks are a fragile process, but that approach didnt yield the results Pyongyang had hoped for.

The activity at Sohae doesnt necessarily really surprise me, Miller said.

Miller asserts that since activity was taking place before the Hanoi summit, it was not being conducted as a reactionary tool from no deal being struck in Hanoi.

I dont think that really falls in the line of the way that the North Koreans approach things. I mean, theyre actually very rational, very calculated, he said.

Lee Ju-hyun contributed to this report.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan said Friday that peace in Afghanistan is "around the corner," citing ongoing negotiations between the United States and Taliban insurgents.

Islamabad is credited for arranging Washington's direct dialogue with the Taliban that U.S. officials say has "made real strides" in recent days.

"Negotiations have been initiated with the Taliban. God willing, our brothers in Afghanistan would live together in peace in coming days," Khan told a big public gathering in northwestern Bajaur tribal district on the Afghan border.

Without elaborating further, Khan asserted the peace process would result in stability, trade and economic prosperity for the region, and particularly for Afghanistan to enable the war-shattered country stand on its own feet.

"A good government will be established in Afghanistan, a government where all Afghans will be represented. The war will end and peace will be established there," Khan said.

U.S. and Taliban officials concluded their latest round of discussions last Tuesday in Qatar, saying they have reached a preliminary draft agreement toward resolving the 18-year-old Afghan war.

The issues in focus are the withdrawal of U.S.-led foreign troops in Afghanistan in return for Taliban guarantees that Afghan soil would not be allowed to become a hub for international terrorists.

A final understanding would then lead to intra-Afghan peace talks and a comprehensive cease-fire, according Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. chief negotiator.

'Strategic depth'

Pakistan has long been accused of covertly backing and sheltering leaders of the Taliban insurgency under its policy of retaining a so-called "strategic depth" in Afghanistan to contain growing influence of arch rival India there.

But officials in Islamabad insist the country has long abandoned the policy of supporting a single group in the neighboring country and says "peace in Afghanistan is now Pakistan's strategic depth."

Pakistani officials say facilitation of U.S.-Taliban talks and ongoing construction of a robust fence on the country's traditionally porous 2,600-kilometer (1,600 miles) Afghan border also are a manifestation of Islamabad's resolve toward promoting regional peace and stability.

Fence means we are looking for our national security and not the strategic depth any more, senior government officials maintained while speaking to VOA in background interviews.

Pakistani officials acknowledge Taliban insurgents still use Afghan refugee populations in the country, especially those located near the border, as hideouts. Authorities say they are reluctant to mobilize security forces to search for the militants in the camps where tens of thousands of displaced families have been living for years under the protection of the United Nations. Pakistan says it is is committed to upholding its international undertakings.

Islamabad says it hopes that when peace returns to Afghanistan, the refugee families would be able to go back to their side of the border, effectively ending the security challenge posed by the makeshift camps.
South Sudan's main rebel group is calling on President Salva Kiir to provide funds to implement last year's peace agreement and is demanding that Sudan and Uganda apply pressure on Kiir to cough up the money.



The government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM-IO) signed the deal to end South Sudan's civil war on Sept. 12 in Addis Ababa.



The deputy chairman of the SPLM-IO, Henry Odwar, said the parties are far behind schedule in carrying out key parts of the agreement, such as integrating rebel forces into the national army.

He accused Kiir of not providing money for committees tasked with implementing the deal.



"We all banked [our hopes] that, you know, the money will come from our oil, and we produce oil  over 120,000 barrels per day. We find it very difficult [to believe] the government when they say they don't have money,'' Odwar said Wednesday on VOA's South Sudan in Focus.

Kiir has said his government does not have enough money to implement the peace deal.



Kiir, Pope to meet

On Friday, Kiir was headed to Vatican City for a meeting with Pope Francis. Kiir's spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny, said the president would brief the pope on the status of the peace deal. He said the Kiir administration hoped the pope would publicly encourage more international donors to support implementation of the peace agreement.

Ateny said Pope Francis had previously appealed to South Sudan's warring parties to end to the conflict and was keenly aware of the efforts to make peace a reality in the country.



"This is a very crucial opportunity," he said. " ... [I]t will avail the president the opportunity to talk to the pope and seek the pope's influence on this, to influence donors to support, because there is not any other way South Sudan would return to normalcy without the implementation of the agreement we have." 

Think tank doubts



A report released this week by the International Crisis Group expressed doubt that the former warring parties would meet a May 12 deadline for creating a government of national unity.



"The accord, brokered by Sudan's Omar al-Bashir and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, is not a finished product and requires revision, a reality that mediators are not yet ready to admit. Additional political deals are necessary on two crucial matters  unifying a national army and resolving bitter disagreements over local boundaries and administration inside South Sudan,'' the report said.



Uganda and Sudan signed as the guarantors of the peace agreement, and Odwar said the two countries should honor their pledges to monitor the deal.



"Now that we are pointing fingers at the government for not coming up with the funds, we would like Sudan, Uganda [and] the neighboring countries of the [regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development bloc] to bring pressure to bear on Salva Kiir so that he can bring money for implementing this peace," Odwar said.



Unauthorized dealings



Odwar, who is also the deputy chairman of the National Pre-Transitional Committee (NPTC), a body tasked with overseeing and coordinating the peace process, accused the government of spending money wastefully.

South Sudan in Focus obtained copies of letters written in October and signed by Tut Gatluak Manime, NPTC chairman of a presidential adviser on security, authorizing the NPTC secretary to prepare contracts for $94.5 million to purchase 1,000 Toyota V-8 vehicles and another $42.5 million to buy of 50,000 tons of sorghum.

Last year, the NPTC also requested the governor of the Bank of South Sudan to release an estimated 9 million South Sudanese pounds to renovate a home that belonged to the late South Sudanese liberation hero John Garang.



Odwar said he saw the letter and discussed it with Kiir, who promised to investigate.



"I asked Tut, I said this is [not] going to be good for your name, neither is it going to be good for South Sudan because people will look at it that we are squandering money that would have put in good use," he said.



Odwar said the request to the bank governor was canceled but the money was allocated anyway.



VOA made several attempts to speak with Manime for comment, but was told he was in Egypt on an official tour.



The deputy rebel chief said his group was participating in the peace deal to bring change to South Sudan.



'This government, the status quo, continues and that is why we want this peace. We want the participation of the opposition to make sure that we check on the government,'' Odwar said.

Winnie Cirino contributed to this report.
Slovakia could get its first woman president as voters elect a new head of state on Saturday.

The leading contenders are Zuzana Caputova, an environmental activist who is in favor of gay rights and opposes a ban on abortion in this conservative Roman Catholic country, and Maros Sefcovic, an establishment figure who is the European Commission Vice-President.

In all, 13 candidates are vying to become the country's fifth head of state since Slovakia gained independence in 1993 after Czechoslovakia split in two.

Andrej Kiska, a successful businessman-turned-philanthropist, is not standing for a second five-year term in the largely ceremonial post.

His term in office was marked by clashes with former prime minister Robert Fico, considered a populist leader.

Kiska supported the huge street protests that led to the fall of Fico's coalition government amid a political crisis triggered by the slayings last year of an investigative reporter and his fiancee. The reporter, Jan Kuciak, was investigating possible widespread government corruption and Italian mob influence.

If no single candidate wins a majority on Saturday, a runoff will be held on March 30 in this central European nation of 5.4 million people.

Whats at stake

The president has the power to pick the prime minister, appoint Constitutional Court judges and veto laws. Parliament can override the veto with a simple majority, however. The government, led by the prime minister, possesses most executive powers.

The favorites

Zuzana Caputova

Caputova, a 45-year-old lawyer, is a rising star of Slovak politics. She became known for leading a successful fight against a toxic waste dump in her home town of Pezinok near the capital of Bratislava, for which she received an international environmental prize in 2016. She was also part of a campaign in 2017 that led to the annulment of pardons granted by former authoritarian prime minister Vladimir Meciar. She is deputy chairman of Progressive Slovakia, a non-parliamentary party that supported the massive street protests after Kuciak's death.

Maros Sefcovic

A career diplomat, 52-year-old Sefcovic was a member of the Communist Party before the anti-Communist 1989 Velvet Revolution. Sefcovic accepted an offer to stand from Fico's left-wing Smer-Social Democracy party, a dominant political group in Slovakia in recent years whose reputation has been tarnished by corruption scandals.

Other notable candidates

Stefan Harabin

A former justice minister and chief judge of the Supreme Court, 61-year-old Harabin was a close ally of Meciar, whose rule in the 1990s was marred by repeated flouting of the law. A populist, Harabin exploits the fear of migration and presents himself as a guardian of traditional conservative values. As a vocal opponent of the sanctions against Russia for its actions against Ukraine, Harabin is a favorite candidate of pro-Russian media.

Marian Kotleba

The 42-year-old heads the neo-Nazi People's Party Our Slovakia, which has 14 lawmakers in the 150-seat Slovak Parliament. Kotleba and his party speak admiringly of Slovakia's time as a Nazi puppet state during World War II. Party members use Nazi salutes and consider NATO a terror group. They want Slovakia to leave the military alliance and the European Union.

Whats ahead

Caputova and Sefcovic are predicted by polls to be the two candidates to advance to a runoff. But the last polls allowed were published two weeks before Saturday's ballot. Analysts say there's a room for a surprise result, particularly for Harabin who was running third in the polls.
A summit to seal a trade deal between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will not happen at the end of March as previously discussed because more work is needed in U.S.-China negotiations, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday.

Mnuchin, speaking to reporters following a U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing, said both sides were "working in good faith" to try to reach a deal "as quickly as possible."

"There's still a lot of work to do, but we're very comfortable with where we are," Mnuchin said. "I don't think there's anything significantly different on the currency issue from where we were last time."

Since Trump delayed a threatened March 1 tariff hike on Chinese goods following a late February round of talks, no new face-to-face meetings have been scheduled in the negotiations.

But Trump and other administration officials have since sought to portray the talks as still making progress.

"We're doing very well with China talks," Trump told reporters Thursday at the White House as he sat down to meet Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar. "We're getting what we have to get, and I think we're getting it relatively quickly."

At another White House event later Thursday, Trump said: "Probably one way or the other we're going to know over the next three or four weeks." He added that China had been "very responsible and very reasonable."

Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that Xi may be reluctant to come to the U.S. president's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida without an agreement in hand after seeing Trump end a separate summit in Vietnam with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un without a peace deal. But he said he was in no rush to complete a trade deal with China.

Tit-for-tat battle

Washington and Beijing have been locked in a tit-for-tat tariff battle as U.S. officials press China for an end to practices and policies it argues have given Chinese firms unfair advantages, including subsidizing of industry, limits on access for foreign companies and alleged theft of intellectual property.

At a separate hearing in the House of Representatives on Thursday, Mnuchin said he expected elements of the discussions to be resolved in the near future, as the two sides pore over a 150-page document they are working on.

The United States and China have slapped import duties on each other's products that have cost the world's two largest economies billions of dollars, roiled markets and disrupted manufacturing supply chains.

"As to whether or not we'll strike a final deal, that I would never want to say," Trump said Thursday. "If it's not a deal that's a great deal for us, we're not going to make it."

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters there "were rumblings" about a possible meeting late next month.
Several U.S. officials have touted U.S.-Taliban talks as the best chance in decades to bring peace to Afghanistan, but key Afghan officials' comments suggest the talks are instead widening a rift between Washington and Kabul.

The most pointed criticism has come from Afghan National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib, who while in Washington for meetings Wednesday and Thursday slammed the U.S. strategy as a glorified surrender.

"If this is a recipe for peace, we don't know what is a recipe for war," Mohib, the former Afghan ambassador to Washington, told reporters Thursday, adding that the process was "ostracizing and alienating" the Afghan people.



"We don't have the kind of transparency that we should have," he said. "The last people to find out are us."



Khalilzad assailed

Mohib saved his most pointed criticism for the chief U.S. negotiator, special representative Zalmay Khalilzad, accusing him of putting his personal ambitions ahead of the need for peace.



"The reason he is delegitimizing the Afghan government and weakening it, and at the same time elevating the Taliban, can only have one approach," he said. "Perhaps all this talk is to create a caretaker government of which he will become the viceroy. We are only saying this because that is the perception."

Khalilzad wrapped up 16 days of talks with the Taliban in Qatar on Tuesday.



"Despite ups and downs, we kept things on track and made real strides," he said at the time.



At first, reaction from Kabul seemed to be positive.



"We hope to witness a long-term comprehensive cease-fire with the Taliban, and hope that direct negotiations of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the Taliban begin soon," tweeted Haroon Chakhansuri, spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.



Some analysts believe the change in tone may have more to do with Ghani's political frustrations at home. With his term ending in May, they say he may be worried he and his allies could soon become irrelevant.

Others believe Ghani and Mohib have a legitimate gripe as they watch Washington pursue what they see as a face-saving agreement.



"The State Department moved ahead with the talks out of desperation, even though its own ally wasn't a party to them," Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told VOA.



Excluding government in Kabul "is what the Taliban wanted all along," he added. "The rift between the U.S. and the Afghan government caused by these talks was entirely predictable."



The State Department on Thursday reacted strongly to the accusations against Khalilzad and said Mohib had been brought in for a meeting "to communicate the United States government's displeasure."



"Mr. Mohib's comments are inaccurate and unhelpful," a State Department official said on the condition of anonymity.

'No lack of coordination'



Later, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino told reporters Khalilzad has been in regular contact with Ghani and has traveled to Kabul for in-person consultations.



"We don't believe that the comments that were made warrant a public response," he said, adding, "There is no lack of coordination" between Washington and Kabul.



There have been persistent rumors that Khalilzad, who was born in Afghanistan but earned his doctorate in the U.S. and rose to the rank of ambassador at the State Department, was interested in seeking the Afghan presidency. He has been widely praised by the White House and Pentagon officials.



"We support the ongoing negotiations  the best window for peace there in 40 years," acting U.S. Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan told lawmakers Thursday.



Khalilzad's efforts have also earned the praise of Afghan opposition officials.



Former Afghan National Security Adviser Haneef Atmar used Twitter to call his successor's criticisms "misguided & against our national interests."

Mohib, however, expressed concern that the U.S.'s willingness to exclude the current government while engaging directly with the Taliban would risk hard-earned gains.



"You cannot get a cat to guard your milk," Mohib told an audience in Washington. "The Taliban and terrorism is one DNA."



"There are millions of people that the U.S. has invested in, in Afghanistan, that would be completely sidelined and thrown under the bus if this current approach is pursued," he said.

VOA's Nike Ching and Ayaz Gul contributed to this report.
U.S. President Donald Trump has issued the first veto of his presidency, overriding a congressional measure and protecting his national security declaration to fund a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

"Congress has the freedom to pass this resolution and I have the duty to veto it," Trump said Friday in the Oval Office.

Surrounded by law enforcement officials as well as parents of children killed by people who were illegally in the United States, Trump called the congressional action "dangerous" and "reckless."

On Thursday, Congress formally rejected Trump's national emergency declaration to fund border wall construction, as the Senate voted 59 to 41 to disapprove the executive action.

A dozen Republicans joined with Senate Democrats to back the resolution.

The House had passed the measure weeks earlier, largely along party lines.

Back to Congress

Trump's veto sends the issue back to Congress, where it is unlikely that there will be enough support to override the veto. Two-thirds majorities in both the House and Senate are needed to overcome a presidential veto.

Earlier this year, a politically divided Congress provided limited funds to erect new fencing along small sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, an outlay Trump deemed inadequate.

The president then declared a national emergency, allowing him to redirect federal funds for the wall, which the White House said would come from mostly military accounts.

The president has argued the situation at the border is a crisis that warrants such an emergency declaration, and has said the United States is facing an invasion of people trying to enter the country illegally.

Bypass Congress

Democrats have largely opposed building a wall on the southern border.

Republicans who voted against Trump's national security declaration said that while they supported increasing security on the southern border, they did not support Trump's attempt to bypass Congress.

Congress has not funded Trump's border wall requests during the more than two years he has been in office, including during the first two years when Republicans were in control of both houses of Congress.
President Donald Trump and his national security team had an hourlong, classified meeting on Afghanistan on Friday, a day after a top Afghan official openly complained that the Trump administration was keeping his government in the dark about its negotiations with the Taliban.



The meeting at the Pentagon included Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Trump's national security adviser, John Bolton, among others. The session was a classified briefing about Afghanistan, according to a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the subject of the private briefing.



The Pentagon has been developing plans to withdraw up to half of the 14,000 troops still in Afghanistan. Patrick Shanahan, acting secretary of defense, said he has no orders to reduce the U.S. troop presence, although officials say that is at the top of the Taliban's list of demands in exploratory peace negotiations.



U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad, the administration's main negotiator with the Taliban, recently concluded a 13-day session with leaders of the insurgent group to try to find a way to end the 17-year war.



Draft accords

Khalilzad said the two sides reached two ``draft agreements'' covering the withdrawal of U.S. troops and guarantees that Afghanistan would not revert to a haven for terrorists. But he was unable to persuade the Taliban to launch talks with the Afghan government.



The two sides seem to be in agreement about the withdrawal of American forces, but divided over the timeline and whether a residual force would remain.



Taliban officials have told The Associated Press that the insurgents want a full withdrawal within three to five months, but that U.S. officials say it will take 18 months to two years. The Americans are likely to insist on a residual U.S. force to guard the American Embassy and other diplomatic facilities, and may press for a counterterrorism force as well.



Afghan National Security Adviser Hamdullah Mohib visited Washington on Thursday to publicly complain that the Trump administration has alienated the Afghan government, legitimized the militant network and is crafting a deal that will never lead to peace. His blunt remarks prompted a scolding from State Department officials.



Mohib, the former Afghan ambassador to the United States, said talks about withdrawing troops should be conducted with the Afghan government, which has a bilateral security agreement with the U.S. He also suggested that the negotiations conducted by Khalilzad, a veteran American diplomat who was born in Afghanistan, are clouded by Khalilzad's political ambitions to lead his native country.
The United Nations held a memorial ceremony honoring the lives of 21 U.N. staff members who died Sunday when an Ethiopian Airlines plane crashed shortly after leaving Addis Ababa.

Michael Moller, the director-general of the U.N. office in Geneva, spoke with sadness and pride Friday about the passion, dedication and expertise of the young professionals and seasoned officials who were among the 157 victims of the crash.

The U.N. staff members aboard the plane were headed to a major U.N. environment conference in Nairobi.

"They were people like Michael Ryan from the World Food Program, who fought the Ebola outbreak, helped Rohingya refugees, helped in countless other places," Moller said. "I was touched by what his mother said on Irish television about him: 'He tried to do the best for others. He was,' she said, 'our hero.' And that is, I believe, true for every one of our colleagues. They are all our heroes."

Prisca Chaoui, who spoke on behalf of the U.N. staff, called the tragedy one of the most serious to have befallen the United Nations.

"The 21 staff members who were taken away from us without the time to bid farewell to their loved ones or to their colleagues belonged to 12 specialized agencies and to one peacekeeping mission. Every day, we learn a little more about them and discover what extraordinary women and men they were," Chaoui said through an interpreter.

Previous tragedies

Tragedy has struck the U.N. family before. In 2003, a terrorist attack on the U.N. office in Baghdad killed 22 staff members. In 2007, 17 staff members died in an attack in Algiers. In 2011, an air crash in the Democratic Republic of the Congo killed 33 people, many of them from the U.N. staff.

Chaoui said it was important to celebrate the lives of these colleagues and to recognize the heavy price some people pay to serve the United Nations and its ideals.
Asia was 12 when Islamic State militants separated her from her mother and held her for two days. They told her and other young Yazidi girls to get onto a bus.

"They said we were going to the mountains to be set free," she said. "But instead they took us and ruined our lives." As a "wife" to two different militants over the next five years, Asia was forced into grueling slave labor, beaten and raped.

Asia lives in a refugee camp, but she came to her hometown of Kocho on Friday to witness the first exhumation of mass graves from the IS atrocities that killed and enslaved thousands of Yazidi people beginning in August 2014. Thousands more remain missing.

Asia's nightmare ended only a few days ago, when her captor surrendered to Syrian forces in Baghuz, the last sliver of IS's self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria.

But while she was enslaved, her sister, 3, and her two infant brothers were slain, she said.

Most of the roughly 400,000 Yazidi people in Iraq are still displaced, living in crowded camps and scattered around the world. Authorities hope to identify the bodies of people in dozens of mass graves in Iraq, so their remains can be buried by their families.

As Asia told her story, two other local women joined the conversation.

"Are you all right?" one woman asked. "Did you see other girls from Kocho in Syria?"

"What about the boys? Did you see any of them?" added the other.

"I saw some of our girls," she replied. "But I'm sorry. I didn't see any of the boys."

Crisis continues

Asia said that on the same bus that carried her into five years of slavery was another young woman, named Nadia Murad.

IS killed Murad's six brothers, her brothers' children and her mother, and then sold her into sexual slavery. After she escaped, she publicly campaigned to end mass rape in war and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize last year.

As the United Nations prepared for the first exhumation Friday, Murad spoke to families from her hometown and Iraqi leaders who were all in Kocho for the event.

The crisis for the Yazidi people continues, she said.

"Our bodies have reached a point where we cannot stand any more pain," Murad said. Many areas once densely populated with Yazidi families are still virtually abandoned, lacking security and basic services like running water and electricity.

Besides the poverty that has engulfed their community since IS militants gained and later lost control of vast parts of Iraq and Syria, the current political climate in Iraq also is keeping families displaced, she said. Both the Kurdistan Regional Government, a semi-autonomous government based in Irbil, and the federal government in Baghdad claim the right to control certain portions of Iraq. The back and forth has stymied attempts to develop local governments.

"When our governments did not protect us, we were an easy target for IS," Murad said. "I hope they will find a solution for the disputed areas."

Solace?

The United Nations has called the crimes against the Yazidi people a genocide, and activists say they hope the exhumation will help identify the missing, locate the dead and assist attempts to prosecute IS leaders in international courts.

As Fadia Abdullah waited for the events to begin, she said one of her brothers was buried in a mass grave, and another was missing. She recently heard that her 14-year-old nephew was still alive, being held as a slave by militants in Baghuz.

She cannot go back to her house in Kocho, and a tent number in a camp is her only contact information. As many women and some men sobbed, she sat stoically, listening to U.N. and government officials pledge to find her loved ones' bodies.

"It could be a relief," she said, as if it were a question. "We will never be content until we see the bodies and bury them ourselves."
The United States, in coordination with the European Union and Canada, Friday slapped new sanctions on more than a dozen officials and businesses in response to Russia's "continued aggression in Ukraine."

Six Russian officials, six defense firms and two energy and construction firms were targeted, either over the seizure of Ukrainian vessels in the Kerch Straight, or for their activities in Russian-annexed Crimea or separatist eastern Ukraine, a U.S. Treasury statement said.

"The United States and our transatlantic partners will not allow Russia's continued aggression against Ukraine to go unchecked," Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was quoted as saying.

The U.S. sanctions freeze all property and interests in property belonging to the designated individuals and entities, and prohibit U.S. persons from transacting with them.

Four of the individuals are border guard or coast guard officials, singled out for their role in a November 25, 2018 naval confrontation, in which Russian ships fired on and seized three Ukrainian vessels in the narrow Kerch Strait the two countries share.

The four were targeted jointly with the EU and Canada according to the State Department.

Twenty-four Ukrainian crew members were detained in the naval incident.

"We call upon Russia to immediately return to Ukraine the seized vessels and detained crewmembers, and keep the Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov open to ships transiting to and from Ukrainian ports," added State Department spokesman Robert Palladino in a statement.

"We also call on Russia to respect Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, including its territorial waters."

The United States additionally imposed sanctions on two Ukrainian separatists  Aleksey Naydenko and Vladimir Vysotsky  involved in organizing November elections in the breakaway east, which Washington says were a "sham."

The six defense firms were targeted over their operations in Russian-annexed Crimea, where the United States says several "misappropriated Ukrainian state assets to provide services to the Russian military."

Among them are Russian shipbuilding giant Zelenodolsk, the hydroacoustic equipment producer Okeanpribor, a diesel engine supplier to the Russian military, Zvezda, and an electronic parts supplier to the military, Fiolent.
When Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 plummeted to earth Sunday, killing all 149 passengers and eight crew members, the captain, Yared Getachew, was en route from his adopted home, Ethiopia, to his country of birth, Kenya.

Although he was the youngest captain at the airline, 29-year-old Yared had completed the route between the East African nations capitals many times.

A veteran pilot with more than 8,000 hours of flight time and more than 10 years of experience, Yared is being remembered not only as an accomplished flyer but also a special child.

Yareds father, Dr. Getachew Tesema, a surgeon, told VOAs Amharic service his son was an A student, a swimmer so strong that classmates nicknamed him Mr. Fish and a young man engaged to be married.

He was hard working and respected everyone, old or young, Getachew said. People loved him and respected him, and he was a blessing in so many ways. He was very close to me.

The fifth of six children, Yared was born in Kenya in 1989. His mother, Rayan Shapi, is also a doctor and is Kenyan.

Yared excelled in school and returned to Ethiopia for college, later becoming a pilot for the largest airline in Africa and completing additional training in the United States.

I convinced him to go to Ethiopia for education instead of South Africa. I brought him here. I have other children, but I thought he would bring change to Ethiopia, Getachew said.

Authorities have launched an investigation into the cause of the crash, and details are emerging about the final moments of the aircraft, which fell to earth just six minutes after takeoff. Flight tracker information shows the Boeing 737 MAX-8 jets vertical speed was unstable, and Yared had radioed air traffic control to request a return to Bole International Airport just after taking off.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing smoke from the rear of the aircraft before it crashed, according to the Associated Press.

I just hope that they would have one stone to commemorate him, for history or for the next generation, Getachew said. Not only for him, but everybody who was lost. Something in their memory where their names are carved. Thats my only wish. I lost a son whom I loved.

As the world seeks answers about the second deadly Boeing 737 MAX-8 crash in less than six months, Yareds father has yet to reconcile life without his son.

My brain is numb, Getachew said. There isnt anybody in the family that could repress how good he is. He was a special generation, a special being.
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Ethiopian families are continuing to mourn their loved ones killed Sunday in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302. Thirty-four-year-old Abdulahi Ibrahim was one of the 32 Kenyans who perished in the Nairobi-bound flight. Rael Ombuor reports.
Children whose families fled conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo now face a new fight for survival. UNICEF estimates two hundred and sixty thousand of them face malnutrition. As civilians return to their homes and overburden local health care facilities, that number is likely to rise.
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